William Bibbiani

It’s neither funny nor exciting enough to obscure what a miasma of unfocused randomness it is, even though the cast is clearly trying to make something out of all this half-baked material.

It takes extremely familiar plot points and plays them straight, adding nothing new except the premise - a white American joining the Yakuza - which ultimately has very little to do with how the story unfolds. The film might be a functional crime drama but it’s an incredibly unremarkable one.

Death Wish takes the serious topic of vigilante violence and reduces it to melodramatic hero worship, and it’s not even particularly good at that. The action is forgettable and the plot barely holds together.

Red Sparrow is too disturbing and brutal to be popcorn entertainment, and by trying to make the uncomfortable storylines and interminable torture sequences palatable for the audience, it completely undermines its ability to operate as a serious drama.

It takes real intelligence to make the best dumb jokes. Game Night has plenty of both, combining skilled filmmaking and ridiculous gags in equal measure, and letting the seriousness and silliness play off of each other for maximum effect.

Fifty Shades Freed concludes the trilogy as it began, with a romance you can’t believe in, endless montages of affluence, lousy dialogue, weak plotting, and - admittedly - a heck of a lot of sex.