Tara Brady

Two directors and four credited screenwriters signed off on a lazy screenplay that a starry cast and an Oscar-winner can do little to enliven.

If you found yourself internally screaming for Ryan Reynolds to shut the hell up during Deadpool, then the relentless, zany narration of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn will likely send you gibbering and ruined towards the emergency exit after, oh, 23 seconds.

Heartfelt performances from such terrific actors as Keri Russell and Scott Haze fail to turn this hotchpotch of competing themes into cohesive drama.

Conveniently set against the fraught contemporary environs of Yale University’s philosophy department, After the Hunt offers a dull retread of the PC-gone-mad arguments that have dominated the culture wars since the 1990s.

We’ll say one thing for Boss Baby 2: its untidy, unpredictable, and unmannerly form does, indeed, evoke the exhausting, mucky business of baby tending, albeit with nothing like the familial rewards.

The details and atmospherics are diverting. The blindingly obvious plot twist is less impressive.

Sorkin has said that he’s not a particular fan of I Love Lucy’s brand of slapstick and Being the Ricardos goes out of its snooty way to avoid anything as vulgar as Lucille Ball’s comedy, save for a very brief glimpse of the famous grape-stomping scene. The film’s obsession with process means we’re never getting to drink the wine.

What once felt coolly stylised now seems mannered, even silly. The cufflinks gleam from the heritage cosplay: the razor has dulled.

The kind of kids who hide behind the couch during Scooby-Doo may well feel emboldened by the fuzzy feelings, silly quips and toothless villains. But it all feels rather pointless for the non-meek community.

The beats ought to form a more compelling narrative than they do.

Frustratingly, there are some good jokes and ideas buried in the aesthetically displeasing Scoob!.

A good-looking waste, but a waste nonetheless.

Maintaining a giddy tone through murder and mayhem is a tricky business, even if the Coen brothers can, on occasion, make it look easy. Maggie Moores(s) is way off the pace, however.

It seems churlish to complain that a film about a global serial killer is unnecessarily brutal and nasty. But between blackmail victims splatting on the pavements of Piccadilly Circus to bodies frozen under snowy lakes, Luther: The Fallen Sun is as distasteful as it is silly.

The dynamic between Bowser and his son, and the Frozen-like sisterhood between Peach and Rosalina, are jettisoned as quickly as they are introduced. Subplots remain half-formed. New additions – especially Glen Powell’s inexplicably underused Fox McCloud – barely register. The abrupt conclusion feels like an abandonment. At least it’s short.

It remains something to see, interestingly atrocious, misfiring on the grandest scale, and often best watched through the fingers. Megaflopolis might be a better name for it.

To add to the viewer’s distress, the picture is as deafeningly loud as it is tiresomely provocative.

Baumbach’s characteristically barbed wit too often makes way for self-indulgence and sentimentality. Ruminations on fame as a hollow, unfulfilling enterprise have all the depth of a disposable contact lens.

Adapted from a section of Pál Závada’s 2014 novel, from the first wintry opening shot in which hunters hack away at a dead deer, Natural Light is a chilly, unknowable film, one that repeatedly evokes brutality and the more desolate tableaux found in Andrei Tarkovsky’s work to deadening effect.

Potentially interesting religious and philosophical dimensions – novenas in the dashboard, Jesus on the telly, the notion that the ghost evidences an afterlife – are swiftly discarded by this wholly redundant reboot.