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.