Romantic comedies are meant to be cringe-y and based on morally questionable conundrums, but James and Latif’s individual charms and dynamic is undone by the way their characters’ choices make them feel lost in a way that is completely unrelatable.

That emotional core is missing in Twisters, even with a few stabs at highlighting the human cost of America’s inadequate tornado warning and damage mitigation systems.

Cordelia is a film of two halves and, unfortunately, only one of them is good.

Kingdom certainly has its moments, but the rougher, darker edges of predecessors Dawn, Rise and War have been smoothed out, leaving us with an over-long, relatively low-stakes instalment sorely lacking in originality.

The story is not particularly forthright in articulating its themes and ideas, and while that may work in the slow-burn pages of a novel, it just feels contrived and manipulative up there on the screen.

It contains an effervescent combination of haste, impassioned nostalgia, and genuine affection between cast and crew. Going full method is to be commended, but the result is a back-slapping sesh that forgets its satirical intentions somewhere along the way.

It’s well meaning and all done with the best of intentions, but it doesn’t really say or do much more than the BBC documentary did nearly 40 years ago.

Allergic to the ponderous brand of overdetermined ‘metaphorror’ currently in vogue, Cregger possesses a showman’s instincts, his energies primarily invested in pound-for-pound entertainment value. Maybe that’s why the subject at hand feels so perfunctory, the broad feminist stance filling out the vacant space in otherwise unrelated macro- and micro-scaled tricks of structuring.

Beyond the creative stunt choreography, Novocaine doesn’t leave much of an impression full stop, and its saccharine ending relegates it to a category of films with intriguing premises that end up ultimately forgettable.

What could have been a charming odd couple film about a supernatural break-up is tonally mismatched, not quite a comedy, not quite a horror, not quite a crime caper, not quite a romance.

The film is not without intrigue as the situation is so bizarre and terrifying that it often appears more like a work of fiction.

While it’s a decently entertaining exploration of an interesting figure’s life, there is not much of substance to say regarding the treatment of female artists or the lasting legacy of the Surrealist movement.

This is now the fourth action film that the Russo Brothers have directed, and unfortunately they don’t seem to be getting any better at it. Aside from two hand-to-hand combat scenes, the fights are a dimly-lit mess of quick cuts and bullets flying.

The desire to create a web of characters as complexly mapped as the LA road network is to the film’s detriment; much like a good heist crew, you’ve got to know when the cut the dead weight.

In order to fill the measly 96-minute run time, there are many flashbacks, both from Maya’s perspective and from the killers as children, arguably making them ​‘strangers’ no longer. These flashbacks repeatedly hamper the film, knocking the thrill out of its pace and entertainment.

The direction leaves much to be desired too; when the film veers into horror territory, with frequent off-screen kills and often incoherent action, it offers little of the original’s gripping tension.

There was room to do something ridiculous here – it bears repeating: this is a film about a killer whistle. Why is it taking itself so seriously?

Despite the heavy metaphors and emotionally weighted hauntings, there’s nothing new here – it’s all painfully dull and familiar horror territory.

What saves the film from the sum­mer dol­drums is the typ­i­cal­ly stel­lar work by direc­tor Gareth Edwards, who, despite the qual­i­ty of the mate­ri­als he’s been giv­en to work with, proves once more that he’s one of the most inter­est­ing and orig­i­nal artists in Hol­ly­wood when it comes to cre­at­ing CG set pieces.

Carmen Emmi’s fraught debut Plainclothes has the makings of a steamy, provocative thriller, but seems disinterested in meaningfully grappling with the implications of its premise.

It’s all very stupid, if only sometimes in an amusing way.

Halle Bailey is fantastic as Ariel, and Daveed Diggs delightful as Sebastian the crab, but it’s still a late-stage capitalism slog.

The film not only rejects any criticisms – and there are many! – of the first film, but doubles down on them, delivering an even more hokily disjointed narrative, ramping up the sentimental cut-aways of human/animal camaraderie, and ramming unearned, broad-brush emotion down the viewer’s throat like so much salty popcorn.

It’s undemanding, dramatically inert and, although class is very much on its agenda, one-dimensional in its depiction of the golfing establishment’s stuffy elitism.

There’s a lot going on, then, but the three stories don’t really mesh to significant effect, though what does bind them is that the menfolk are stuck in their ways, rightly but mostly wrongly, and the stoic women have to make the best of it.

Instead of a complicated protagonist at the centre of an atmospheric thriller Edgar-Jones seems trapped in an ill-advised antebellum-themed Taylor Swift music video, exacerbated further by Swift’s dulcet tones heard over the end credits.

Malek’s icy performance does little to endear the viewer to Charlie, while his ultra-tactile relationship with his wife – presented in gauzy flashbacks – never feels entirely authentic.

Pugh has precious little to do as Alice, who is less a character and more a series of strung-together cliches, but her hardest challenge is performing opposite the vacant Harry Styles, whose acting is so stiff and self-conscious it’s impossible to take him seriously, much less believe this is a character capable of the things eventually revealed in the film’s comically predictable twist.

Less productively, more trendily, Çatak’s film becomes a chain-reaction melodrama: acted by self-serious types, scored by tightly wound strings, dependent on characters saying the wrong things and leaving the right ones unsaid with jaws firmly, sardonically clenched.

Even the magnetic likes of Jackman, Dern and Kirby are wasted here, to the extent that by the time The Son reaches its miserable, cloying foregone conclusion, it’s a relief to be free of the uninspired direction and paint-by-numbers interrogation of a subject that deserves much more depth.

Rather than critiquing practices it purports to condemn, The Other Lamb becomes party to the evils it depicts.

As a feature, it all feels very rushed and dramatically inert, with the outcome of Abe’s predicament visible from many, many miles off.

There’s not enough here to sustain even a slim sub-90 minute runtime, and Collet-Serra seems lost when tasked with a project that provides little opportunity for dynamic action sequences or wild plot twists.

The film’s creative gore alone cannot paper over the ultimate flimsiness of Blichfeldt’s concept, which amounts to an adolescent scrawl of fairytale satire, somehow less interesting and transgressive than Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ which predates it by 46 years.

What’s sad about the film is that the feather-light comic tone seems to preclude any deeper insight into what are, on paper, a set of potentially fascinating and psychologically deep characters.

While a fair majority of the scenes and set-ups lack for deeper resonance, there’s a surface-level sheen that does deliver some superficial thrills.

It’s a film lacking originality, but also heart – it’s hard to root for a couple when you really don’t care if they end up together or not. There are a couple of funny lines in the script, but running at just under two hours, Bros drags on, lacking the effervescence that has cemented many a rom-com’s in pop culture history.

To add insult to injury, just when things are finally about to get nasty, a character effectively sits us down for a tedious exposition dump that explains the whats, whys and hows of it all. It’s this very lack of trust in its viewers that comes as the film’s most upsetting development.

This story about growing up amid the onset of The Troubles should be more emotionally and politically potent than it is. Instead, it’s a careful, uncontroversial (and thereby unremarkable) film that fails to exert any lasting impact after the credits roll.

At a time when the tech industry is continually attempting to force AI down our throats, there’s something cloying about a film so nakedly insistent that a robot can replace a human being it portrays almost all the humans in the story as self-serving and villainous.

In spite of its trite predictability and overlong running time, it’s clearly a loving tribute with its heart in the right place, but the source material was perhaps treated with so much respect that the portrayal of the relationship fails to generate any heat or emotional intensity.

The Bride! doesn’t have a single original thought worth pursuing. The fact that this film appears so shrilly convinced of its radical praxis speaks to a bizarre disconnection from reality.

Menkes is in such a rush to get through the history of cinema to point a finger of blame at everyone except herself, ending with her own films as examples of a negation of the gaze. Nobody’s perfect.

Since the 1980s, Nintendo has built its reputation on gleeful, ingenious entertainment that delights in design. Conversely, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is empty-calorie, time-filling amusement for the school holidays. In other words, a licence to print money.

To the End isn’t unentertaining – Albarn in particular was born to be a silly gremlin in front of a camera – but it never adequately justifies its existence even as brand maintenance.

The Substance’s presentation is as shallow as the very thing it’s critiquing. There’s no compassion, and certainly no catharsis – just more hagsploitation and a sense of déjà vu.

The stans themselves are not massively interesting, and the film is happy to frame them as whimsically eccentric nerds rather than anything more psychologically problematic (which would confirm to a truer definition of the term ​“stan”.)

On paper, it’s Hosada’s usual tunes blown up on a grander scale. In practice, the results are an overstuffed yet simplistic mess.

Vanderbilt seems to have his intentions in the right place, but the delivery has all the substance of Crowe’s prosthetic belly.

The brash message of the film may amount to little more than ​“smash the system”, but it’s a message that Wright has ignored in a film that sorely lacks for imagination and edge.

Sebastian gradually transforms into something more substantial when reaching towards a point about the cross-generational relaying of queer histories, but ultimately is too preoccupied with constructing a shallow character study to delve into more nuanced terrain.

Death of a Unicorn relies heavily on a mythical gimmick and the comedic prowess of its cast, and yet gives neither actor or equine enough material to gallop with.

There’s a few decent performances in the mix (the kids especially), and Cumberbatch goes all-in (and then some) on the concept, but otherwise this flails as saccharine self-help cinema without any real sense of authentic human behaviour.

In Next Goal Wins, Taika Waititi depicts Samoans the same way he depicted Hitler in Jojo Rabbit: as absolutely adorable.

With no substance and no style to be found, all that is left in Wicked: For Good is two actresses, doing more than just belting their hearts out by giving genuinely compelling performances.

This time around it’s the same characters, the same gags, the same minions, the same wacky yet bland animation style, yet all with massively diminishing returns.

Singer aims for the bleak, gritty texture standard to the genre, and winds up closer to the result of an anonymous recommendation generated by the algorithmic tags of “Bleak, Gritty.”

The heavy reliance on CGI is noticeable, particularly because the work is quite ugly (the area from which Barry is able to access the past is a jagged kaleidoscopic eyesore) and while the film benefits from not having a sludgy abundance of fight scenes, the ones it does feature are still largely indistinguishable from any other film.

What we have is a generic addition to an already oversaturated genre – one that doesn’t even have the sense to make use of Statham’s often underutilised comedic talents.

The scenes of Jennifer’s childhood are endless montages, with repetitive blown-out happy-families memories and blatant Terrence Malick ripoffs of the same hand caressing the same strands of wheat from several different angles, and the whole thing is tied together with pretentious and solecistic voiceover delivered by Dylan Penn and surely written by her father as they laboured to salvage the movie in the edit.

While the Quantum Realm felt strange and unique in earlier, briefer views, here it quickly falls in line with much of Marvel’s recent CGI output: splashy but nondescript, all psychedelic purple clouds and gargantuan, brutalist military buildings that homogenize every location in a universe of seemingly infinite possibility.

There’s something inherently unsatisfying about the film’s ambling structure, as the first hour flies by and nothing of great import has really happened.

The highlight of the film comes right at the end where we see some archive footage of Golda interacting with some of her supporters, and it’s never a good sign in these endeavours when reality is so much more electrifying and vital than the fiction.

The result is a visual headache, overcrowding every frame with colour, texture and patterns, rather than building to some carefully orchestrated tension.

With the emotional stakes having been spelled out in giant, razor-sharp claw marks, all that’s left to do is squirm at Blake’s slow, agonising change and wait for the inevitable to happen.

The film is not wanting for alluring, dramatic situations, but the filmmakers seem at best haplessly blind and at worst blithely dismissive of their potential.

The overriding feeling you glean from Honey Don’t! is that it’s an example of two formidable filmmakers working in a register that almost punkishly rejects the intricacy and breathtaking formal panache of their past work.

It’s a rare, backwards looking misfire for this director who has always been at the vanguard of cinematic innovation. The care and attention that has gone into the making of this film is undeniable, though at times it feels misplaced and others overwrought.

Beyond occasionally marvelling at the lively work of the puppeteers, there’s not a lot to hold on to in The Mandalorian & Grogu, not even the supposed father and son connection between its marquee characters.

This low-on-dialogue, low-on-action, high-on-atmosphere feat is deeply cinematic, yet begs the questions: is there anything new to be said about World War Two, and is Nagy’s effort enough to stand out in this terribly overcrowded genre? The answer, alas, is no.

There is pain worth immortalising in the stories of the past, and endless sadness found in a lonely woman’s quiet existence. Yet Mothering Sunday fails to look beyond what the outside world can see, in order to really excavate a truth to be remembered once the holiday has passed.

While it would be unfair to suggest Hausner is condoning Novak’s actions, there is a sort of nihilistic glibness about the film which leaves a sour taste.

Despite its laid back tone and a committed performance from Erivo, the film lacks for surprise and innovation, slowly edging towards a revelatory climax that only the most narrow-sighted of viewers would not have seen coming from a million miles off.

While It Ends With Us and Regretting You contained at least some decent acting and production value, Reminders of Him is a grim dose of misery and trauma porn punctuated by a terrible lead performance and an undeniable conservative sheen.

Unfortunately, the cast is saddled with a half-baked script, which underdelivers on its promise of a queer, female fight club by seeming to forget that’s a crucial element of the story.

The few sin­cere inter­ac­tions between this cen­tral trio are the sole high­lights of the film, as Fel­lows’ com­e­dy tal­ents are wast­ed in a flim­sy script.

Where Thor: Ragnarok was unpredictable and unruly in the most thrilling way, Love and Thunder by contrast feels safe and formulaic. Waititi is too preoccupied with trying to land the same jokes, and he burdens the film with a wishy-washy love story which even by the MCU’s low standards feels shallow and perfunctory.

At various points, the film seems to be on the verge of something riveting.

The result is a teen movie with an identity crisis.

Perhaps the demand for super low-stakes, “turn your brain off” studio comedies where the only point is cathartic laughter will one day return. It brings this writer no joy to report that No Hard Feelings isn’t the film to usher in that era.

The images within the film are too general and familiar – there is nothing new about what Johansson is attempting in her directorial debut, which leads one to wonder why she bothered making it at all. It’s not a disastrous film – in fact, it’s quite inoffensive. But this glaring niceness reflects a crucial lack of ambition, and that seems more egregious than taking a big swing.

Fantastic Machine makes for a decent A-level crash-course in media history, before you graduate to Kirsten Johnson’s far superior Cameraperson.

The filmmaker draws some arresting audiovisual cues into the patchwork of images, but the film lacks some of the goofy wit of British documentarian Adam Curtis, whose own provocative essays at least offer some element of surprise (even when they don’t work themselves).

The Housemaid lacks the guile to transform its flaws into future camp classic material – it feels like a sign of the times: a film which holds the audience’s hand at every turn while gesturing at the very real issue of domestic violence, yet keeping things just light and sexy enough that no one will be bummed out this holiday season.

Far from converting viewers, this merely cashes in on their backward-looking nostalgia, without moving forward to anything better, or even half as good.

This is a film of half-measures, lacking ambition in a way that is at least mildly more entertaining than its predecessor, but that’s down to the pleasures of songs written half a century ago rather than any talent Phillips has to offer as a filmmaker. Send in the clowns indeed.

What begins as a genuinely entertaining and well-pitched dramedy quickly becomes ridiculous and out of touch.

It’s a hot-waxed shrine to its subject, an official version which drips with hollow trivia and is happy to namecheck that thing it knows you like rather than reveal something that you didn’t.

Arbitrary continuity errors, heavy-handed symbolism, an agonisingly laborious pace and shallow characterisation leave a sour taste in the mouth, especially as the payoff is not gruesome enough to justify the means that get us there.

While there’s certainly fun to be had watching a cute penguin (named Juan-Salvador) waddling around the school, chugging sprats and mimicking his master, the film never amounts to more than a piece of superficial fluff.

A general lack of detail ends up meaning that a lot of the film’s emotion and ideas are stated directly, whether through Murphy’s jittery (and at times quite contrived) performance, or via a voiceover device.

This is French-British rising star Mackey’s first screen role in French, and she’s charismatic enough to make future French-language features centred on her seem enticing. That said, as engaging as she is, her casting simultaneously embodies the sloppiness of the film as a whole.

It’s a hard film to despise, and it works perfectly well as a supercharged Movie of the Week for the Hallmark Channel, but the lack of attention to detail and nuance mean that much of the film comes off as maudlin fluff rather than lightly philosophical tearjerker.

It’s a strange, disjointed film that lacks a clear structure and a satisfying denouement, even if O’Neill excels at channelling her prior years in the emotional doldrums via her stern, seen-it-all-before manner.

MaXXXine is the weakest chapter in this throwback horror saga as West just cannot seem to decide what film it is he’s making. And by the time he does, he sadly opts for the most boring and narratively underwhelming one.

Though not beyond salvaging as The Carpenter’s Son offers some moments of biblical horror, including an Hieronymus Bosch-like depiction of hell, it doesn’t succeed in pushing past mild discomfort. There is still not enough to drag it down into truly blasphemous depths.

Unfortunately, Disco Boy is afflicted with the curse of trying to pack too much (in terms of both style and substance) into its 92-minute runtime, rendering it incapable of saying much at all.

Failing to capture the wit or intelligence of Christie, See How They Run instead relies on tired stereotypes about women and gay men, and in an ensemble full of talented actors, there’s barely a compelling performance to be found.