After a strong opening drag, there’s the feeling that the film doesn’t really have anything more to say, its revelations seeming fairly paltry in the scheme of things.

If the spectacle of a film high-fiving itself from across the decades makes you feel physically nauseous, and one that opts for minor variations on a tried-and-tested formula over doing and saying something, anything even vaguely interesting, then hop into your busted blue Chevy Nova, hightail it past the Beverly Hills city limits and never look back.

Misguided, wandering, and searching for a purpose, Sophie spends the remainder of the film looking for answers. The dénouement, however, is not fulfilling for her or the audience, sacrificing a potential emotional breakthrough for the story’s weak undercurrent of a quest for love.

It’s a fairly standard-issue sequel which pads out its thin-to-invisible storyline with a number of self-consciously garish animated interludes all in varying styles.

Peter’s unflappable, occasionally unbelievable heroism is placed front and centre, and it’s nearly always at the expense of making Emancipation a richer and more varied experience as a piece of cinema.

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.

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 had the potential of creating a memorable Satanic conjurer. Instead, we get mere glimpses of an overgrown Wednesday Addams look-alike. Hardly demonic business.

Refusing to take itself too seriously, this spirited contemporary period piece captures some of the insanity that was brat summer – but crucially reminds us there’s something to be said for knowing when to leave the party.

Most remarkable about Deep Water is the fact that beyond being a sexy and gruesome thriller, it is also an absolute riot.

While Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page have both delivered respectable performances previously, there’s no spark between the pair and too often it feels as though lines are simply being recited rather than emotions being explored.

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.

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.”

Although he’s no stranger to IP-based films (his last two were adaptations) Trap is a reminder that Shyamalan is one of the few A-List directors who still seems dedicated to original storytelling, and even when the scripts don’t quite fully deliver on their elaborate premises, his knack for creating interesting characters and casting the right actors to play them picks up the slack.

The soulless, offensively pedestrian Death on the Nile offers not even pleasure of the ‘so bad it’s good’ variety. It’s simply a waste of everyone’s time, cast, crew and audience alike.

What’s interesting about Eternals is how genuinely down to earth most of it is, rejecting the time-honoured duality of the flashy superhero who also has to contend with the banality of domestic life. This is more like reality, in that it is about coming to terms with smallness and impotence in the face of so much cosmic sprawl.

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.

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.

The smart, keenly observed and undoubtedly thorny power play of After the Hunt make it an arresting psychodrama, confronting our willingness to swallow our own suffering in the name of self-preservation as well as what we owe to ourselves and each other in an imperfect, cheerfully cutthroat society.

Perhaps diehard football fans will have a little more fun with the premise, but the stars have to do some heavy lifting, and as charming as they are together, one can’t help but wonder if this is the best we can do for actresses of their calibre.

It’s a truly forgettable slab of action filmmaking with little respect for its audience’s intelligence or even their time, and one has to hope Ayer and co don’t make good on their threat of producing more.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Although World Tour hits some of the right notes, the familiar abstract quirkiness occasionally makes it feel like a cover version of the first film. And, crucially, there’s no song even remotely close to Timberlake’s soundtrack hit ‘Can’t Stop the Feeling’.

There’s a sense that Smyth’s writing only works in fits and starts, and all the fractured elements don’t ever quite fit together.

Its emotional power and zany charm linger in the mind much longer than its obvious failings.

Whether you laugh with or at Marry Me, the odds are you will laugh. So that’s a win.

It’s a sweet film that hits all of its modest targets and works largely because it avoids vapid pop culture references and ironic humour that would be out of date within a month of release.

Short yet elliptical and haunting, and keeping its secrets, this is an assured calling card announcing Godwin’s arrival in the horror family.

It’s more of a soundtrack album of a movie, a sequel crying out for a stage production to give little girls and lethargic parents a rare night off: something to sing about.

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.

Salomé is not an imaginative director, apparently content to sit back and watch Huppert command the film with little regard for the rest of his cast and crew.

Like close-up magic, the Now You See Me films function best when you soak in the vibe rather than get close enough to unpick any machinations of magic trickery.

In showing a working-class Black girl confront a classist, racist establishment, this is also of course a political film, offering an allegorical display of both the claustrophobic power structures in which we live and strive, and the possibility of smashing it to build something better.

Pugh’s greatest tribulation of all is delivering the tin-eared dialogue torn between the emotional sadism it heaps onto its protagonist and the adulation it lavishes on the actress playing her.

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.

The leads, at least, give individual scenes a little character.

If you’re being generous, you might chalk this up as being increments above some of Statham’s more overtly schlocky outings, but if anything, it offers up less of what you want if you’re going to see a Jason Statham movie.

It’s such a lovely set-up, you wish the filmmakers had attempted to do a little more with it.

Undoubtedly the film means well, but its cliche, entirely predictable plot and uninspired message mean there’s not much to take away – it feels like a relic from a bygone era, and given Farrelly’s previous form, all feels a little insincere.

Emotional equality and the equilibrium of platonic friendship soon give way to factionalism and suggestions that two of three may peel off to form a couple. The film playfully wrong-foots the viewer as to who the two end up being.

Clooney and Roberts remain masters of a dying art, mustering the flustered charisma that makes them appear both perfect and mortal, the same paradox we observe in our spouses and lovers. It’s a pity to see them settle like this, accepting less than they deserve, but it’s rough out there.

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

What’s most exciting about Dominik’s vision is that it pieces together the most famous images of Monroe to create a collage that pays homage to her ultimate unknowability.

It all feels a little toothless.

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.

Like the hyper-aerodynamic train slipping through the night, the fight passages that should be the film’s saving grace come out textureless and frictionless.

It’s not a bad movie, and it lives up to the standards that it sets itself, but it is as throwaway as a killer Tamagotchi.

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.

It’s a song and dance we’ve seen before, with both Powell and Qualley operating on cruise control.

If you’re able to make peace with the faecal smears on the wall painted by a cackling Olivier winner known for her physical performances, The Front Room is an entertaining, morbidly funny slice of perverse B-movie exploitation horror.

It’s too early to declare Horizon a success, a disaster, or even a noble failure, though this first instalment makes it clear audiences traveling west with Costner should prepare for a lengthy trek.

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.

To the film’s credit there’s a dedication to figuring out some impressive practical effects work in this clash of two worlds, but this is sadly undermined by the actual composition of the action sequences, which swing between feeling inert or overly busy.

While the break-neck pacing effectively creates a chaotic feeling, it eventually takes away from the film’s harrowing effects. Nevertheless, even the most hardened horror fan is likely to feel a chill up their spine during the film.

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.

The brevity of the source material is thinly stretched into a two-hour runtime, padded out with tedious subplots and a new, excruciating ending which undermines the initial point of its creation.

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.

A winning adaptation that never condescends its audience.

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.

Ultimately, the wonderful family movie in here that’s screaming to get out is hopelessly trapped in Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

With this film, we get little hints of the Cronin of yore, but there’s also so much dire exposition and necessary genre static in the background that his imprint is less discernible (and enjoyable) than you’d hope it would be.

It’s crazy and colourful enough while it lasts, but the fleeting diversions on offer from Sonic’s first big-screen outing pass too quickly to leave much of a footprint in the memory.

It’s maybe disingenuous to say this, but the shift in tone and quality is so extreme that it feels as if Green has been let off his leash a little and allowed to make something far more in tune with the insightful, intimate, sensitive dramas upon which he made his name.

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

There’s a joke where people say, “This film’s plot could’ve been written on the back of a napkin!” Yet for Sonic 2, a napkin seems like the equivalent of multi-volumed antiquarian tome, as there is so little of substance to this depressingly rote endeavour.

Where this film excels is in the basics – it doesn’t take any risks and just choses to do the simple things well.

Once you get used to some of its perplexing choices, there’s fun to be had here. De Niro has delicious chemistry with himself, which becomes more amusing when imagining how he would have been performing these duologues to an empty void.

It’s hard to imagine that any Take That fan would rather listen to badly autotuned covers of their favourite songs than the original recordings. Just hope that someday soon this will all be someone else’s (bad) dream.

Much like the candy whose corporate slogan features as one of the most prominent aspects of the script, Shazam! Fury of the Gods is a film with close-to-zero nutritional value.

An insulting parade of tedium.

The always great Farrell attempts to imbue his doomed gambler with a sliver of naïveté́ as he stumbles towards the story’s foregone conclusion, but there is little that can be done to compensate for this feeling of inevitability.

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.

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.

Everything about the film is undercooked and lazy, and one is led to hope that this franchise is put back in the deep freeze for a very long time.

Doing his part to keep his father’s work alive and relevant, Gorō Miyazaki steers the Ghibli ship even further away than Yonebayashi dared, resulting in the studio’s most cheerily radical film to date.

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.

Evoking the strange combination of brutal British realism and light fantasy of Jacqueline Wilson’s iconic young adult novels (particularly Double Act), it’s a promising debut for Labed, who moves between the uncanny and the tender with ease.

Logan’s no stranger to horror, having co-written the bleakly riveting Alien Covenant, but based off They/Them, you’d be excused for thinking he held nothing but contempt and dismissal for the genre.

Maybe not quite enough to warm a sceptic’s heart, but certainly a pleasant enough outing for your nan.

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.

Crowe is pleasingly game, affecting a questionable Italian accent and bearing a striking resemblance to Orson Welles as he cuts about on his scooter, and Amorth – who was the subject of a 2017 documentary by William Friedkin – is undoubtedly a fascinating character worthy of a schlocky B-movie outing. But the stilted script takes a long time to deliver on its scintillating premise, and Avery can’t seem to strike a balance between the absurd and the disturbing, with the elaborate climax coming too late to really have an impact.

It looks like Hammer has returned from the dead.

It might sell tickets, but only because people recognise the name. Any interest in artistry is all but dead and gone in the age of the IP blockbuster.

It’s engrossing and purposefully strange, and the images of this climate-change-ravaged world of dried lakes and barren grasslands are bewitching and terrifyingly plausible. But when the inevitable twist comes, it makes about as much sense as using a fundraising model Bob Geldof threw together in the 80s to stave off the 4th horseman of the apocalypse.

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

It’s a biographical film where, to ask “why?” in regard to Marley’s sometimes obscurely-motivated actions would risk placing him in an ambiguous light. And so we instead trot through a series of highly manicured and stage-managed Wiki hit points and pause every few minutes for a musical interlude.

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.

Operating on a grander scale, Kogonada still retains his singular, warm sensibility – and if you can succumb to the film’s heart-on-its-sleeve sentimentality, it’s a journey worth taking.

As much as the party line insists this film is a celebration of Amy’s musical genius, it is as salacious and cruel as any tabloid cutting from the noughties – only invested in the bloody ballet pump left in the street, not the complexities of living a very public life with addiction.

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.

In the face of creative genocide (if that’s not too harsh a term for it), we should neither be making nor seeing movies like Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

What we have is a completely fumbled, cobbled-together movie-esque collage of unwatchably fuzzy CGI in which ten thousand percent more effort has been put into making floaty underwater hair look authentic than it has to the script, story, characters, drama, attaining a sense of basic logic, meaning, etc… So no, it will not do.

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.

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.