The Shallows is diverting escapism one wishes could have cut a little deeper.

Because the characters are so thinly drawn and the drama so unconvincingly developed, the third-act operatics don’t dazzle the way they should, leaving Run very much stuck in place.

Despite its Chinese setting and characters, the movie doesn’t feel appreciably different from so many other previous tales of lost young people who learn friendship through a pet or extra-terrestrial, and the story’s broad humour and pedestrian plotting don’t add much to this perfunctory fable.

Chung’s desire to add a touch of realism runs counter to what is, essentially, a low-nutrition entertainment about massive storms wreaking havoc on small towns and scooping up anything in their path. The more Twisters aims for gravitas, the more hot air it generates.

This is a film that often feels more assembled than directed, crucially lacking the sheer verve that would enable it to transcend the influences that it proudly wears on its dusty sleeve.

For all its originality, the film fails to leave much of an impression.

For all its directorial mastery, this austere cine-symposium feels like an artistic blind alley, and one that recklessly presumes an audience of committed chin-strokers with a preternatural attention span.

It’s a familiar watch and a pallid reminder of better days we’ve had with the director.

Wittrock and Chao have such a spark that it’s disappointing that Long Weekend is ultimately one more picture about how an amazing woman helps a nice but ordinary guy turn his life around. Chao’s lively performance — not to mention the audience — deserves better.

An amiable, average-at-best caper-like quest remains just that, even with recognisable talent, and even more so when its combination of elements is clearly stretched.

In the film’s favour, it is not afraid of telling bitter truths about violence, hatred and death.

Despite some clever moments and a similar commitment to gloriously over-the-top violence, the follow-up lacks the inspiration and sheer fun that defined the original.

It could just all have benefited from a more delicate touch.

Roland and Vanessa simply aren’t sufficiently compelling to provoke us to fill in the blanks. Pitt brings his usual weathered charm, and Jolie Pitt makes her character’s all-consuming melancholy occasionally ravishing, but there’s not enough depth underneath.

Fitfully-entertaining, the film says many things in many different ways about one subject – the de-sensitising effect of the have-it-all media age on young people. Prolonged exposure to it will certainly reawaken the senses, although not in a way that’s always welcome.

This tender, gently funny depiction of female friendship benefits from nicely committed work from lead actresses Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore plus distinctive locations in London and Yorkshire, but suffers from unconvincing moments and struggles to convert diverse story elements into an especially compelling whole.

Unfortunately, Howard fails to modulate this wickedness and, at over two hours, the picture becomes monotonous and unwieldy. Indeed, the malicious proceedings lose their power to unnerve, to diminishing returns.

There’s no question that director Liesl Tommy and star Jennifer Hudson have approached this project with reverence, hoping to highlight the late singer’s importance both as a cultural figure and a symbol of her era. But the cliches that usually attend such biopics — specifically, the need to simplify an individual’s demons and traumas into easily digestible dramatic beats — are especially frustrating here, leaving this overly earnest picture lacking the vibrancy of its dynamic subject.

Boxily framed, the film tries out several visual looks, wandering tonally through its own aesthetic maze.

Daliland dials up the actorly pyrotechnics, but it’s all spectacle without insight, failing to lay a foundation for why this long-running marriage, despite its volatility, endured.

Doubling down on the giddily ridiculous tone of its predecessor, Now You See Me 2 is diverting, but the film’s rampant, cheeky cleverness — its ‘can you guess what’s going on?” coyness — ultimately proves tiresome.

Director Jay Roach’s adaptation proves too broad and tonally erratic. In the process, he undermines game work from Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as a husband and wife who can still sometimes see past their animosity to remember the love that once seemed indomitable.

Swedish director Jonatan Etzler, making his English-language debut, cannot keep this daring story plausible enough to offer meaningful insights into our broken education system.

A soft-edged, stolid blend of gorgeous geographical authenticity with a global-facing English-speaking cast whose accents range from Joe Cole’s Brit to co-producer, co-writer and leading man Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s mid-Atlantic purr.

In between the nudity and four-letter words, the film looks seriously at grief, arrested development and economic inequality, and there’s a sweet rapport between the two leads. A series of irritating plot twists and a predictable trajectory ultimately undercut Lawrence’s bravely brash portrait of a woman going nowhere fast.

With its black and white characterisation, the film approaches its complex theme in a way which may seem a little too simplistic to be fully satisfying.

Three Floors is not a bad melodrama per se, but has none of the needle-sharp emotional intensity of The Son’s Room (2001).

Stone’s mixture of paranoid thriller, political commentary and romantic drama keeps Snowden feeling busy without ever being particularly engrossing or enlightening. Frustratingly, Snowden remains a ghost in the machine.