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.