Robbie Collin

What a relief, then, that this isn’t terrible – though to get the best out of it, you may wish to convince yourself that it’s going to be.

There’s a subtle, astute parable here about the media’s role in the shaping and streamlining of public morality – happily wrapped in a romp.

The first full run-through of the crisis, in the White House Situation Room, is perhaps a little dry. But as things replay from various angles, the steady build-up of context effectively compounds the tension, and soon we’re every bit as lost as President Elba, desperately searching for clarity in a chain of events that necessarily precludes it.

The Smashing Machine is a crunchily satisfying fight movie that innovates subtly.

The free-range majesty and fine-grained, muddy-fingernailed detail of Fastvold’s film, though, is entirely its own thing: like Ann, I was left wobbly and breathless by its grandeur and nerve.

Over two and a half hours, the pop-gothic intensity can get a little much – at times I felt like a fire extinguisher was going off in my face – but you wouldn’t necessarily want to lose any of it.

It’s tense, absurd, desperate and daft, all at once: seldom have so many contradictory tones been so gainfully employed.

It’s a film that prowls around with blood in its nostrils, watching us as intently as we watch it, and waiting for just the right moment to strike.

As a filmmaker, Baumbach is sharp enough to call out the clichés of his trade, but also generous enough to put them to good use anyway.

Stone and Plemons prove ideal co-conspirators, with carefully balanced performances that have them taking turns as hero and villain without ever quite annihilating our sympathies or winning them outright.

Perhaps La Grazia is enjoyed best as a more optimistic B-side to either Il Divo or Loro, Sorrentino’s lewd and scurrilous biopics of the former Italian prime ministers Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi – both of which, incidentally, were also played by Servillo. But I know which ones I’d rather put on for fun.

It’s an engaging, sometimes touching, slightly narrow depiction of a great filmmaker in the winter of his career who’s intent on somehow recapturing the spring of it.

As an occasional source of broad and undemanding chuckles, the film doubtless serves its purpose. But the mystery itself unfolds with such plodding expediency that there’s little suspense to speak of.

With a fresh joke in almost every line of the script, even if only one in five worked, you’d still be laughing more or less continuously through to the credits – and for me, at least, the hit rate was often considerably higher than that.

There’s no bold genre reinvention afoot in this reboot, and its thwart-the-baddies plot remains bound to familiar equations, though at least now the equations actually balance.

It has all the charm and personality of a dented traffic cone and features perhaps the single most tin-eared screenplay – in which Papa Smurf is kidnapped by the villainous wizard Gargamel, and Smurfette leads a globe-trotting mission to free him – that I have ever encountered in my two decades as a critic.

Indeed, in a genre infamous for feints and teases, Gunn’s kitchen-sink approach feels refreshingly generous, and his excitement for the character shines through.

The craft is exemplary – it’s easily the best-looking, best-sounding film since the first. But it takes a deep, personal love of the medium for a director to deliver such crunchy impact, thrills, spills and euphoric highs while treading anew in footsteps as craterous (and muddy) as they come. If it’s not the blockbuster of the summer, I’ll be amazed.

Its loopy verve is reassuringly human.

This follow-up doesn’t re-take the temperature of British society one generation on so much as vivisect its twitching remains.

It’s a film which understands the pleasure of seeing familiar roads driven with consummate expertise. The F does stand for formula, after all.

Will it enrapture its target audience regardless? It should certainly keep them occupied for a couple of hours, though perhaps more with nodding recognition rather than delight.

Inglesby wittily repurposes such modern plot-wreckers as mobile phone tracking and instant messaging into real dramatic assets, while as a director, Pearce is a savvy stylist who knows exactly when to rein things in: imagine Jacques Audiard with a cricket conscience perched on his shoulder whose only job is to say “steady on”.

Nouvelle Vague stylishly captures and celebrates a certain approach to making cinema – reactive, incautious, free-range – but leaves you wishing there was a little more of it in the film you just saw.

In place of classic thriller techniques and mechanisms are a beige aesthetic, limp dialogue and glib let’s-just-vibe-with-it attitude that only grow more maddening as things progress.

This tremendous follow-up to Trier’s 2021 international breakthrough hit The Worst Person in the World flows with a ravishing freeness through the many complex strictures it builds for itself: layered family psychologies; behaviours and secrets that recur and reform across generations; the therapeutic value of art to its makers.

Cannes has had its share of opening-night turkeys over the past decade or so (2014’s Grace of Monaco was a memorable one), but for sheer unabating feebleness this must take the biscuit.

Lilo & Stitch has been tamed into one of those naughty-pet family comedies that used to roll off studio production lines with thud-thudding regularity, until the form fell out of fashion somewhere around 1994.