Lacking the freshness of the original trilogy or the meticulous, insidious tone of Fincher’s film, Spider’s Web mostly feels like a holding action to ensure that more sequels can be made in the future. That timidity flies in the face of this series’ inherent edginess.

Mistress Of Evil invests heavily in inundating our eyeballs with relentless enchantment, which unfortunately translates into largely dreary CG renderings of pixies, sentient trees and other woodland critters

Marc Forster’s meandering, slow-burning tale has elements that might have attracted Polanski or Almodovar but eventually settles for a psychological thriller that is a little too enigmatic for its own good.

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

A Dog’s Journey is certainly manipulative - humans aren’t safe here either, with a significant cancer side-plot. At times, it even seems obsessed by death. Yet there’s something oddly cathartic about sobbing your way through this film, with its mash-up of Buddhism and All-American values.

Even Arterton at smouldering full wattage can do little to hold together a picture in which the chemistry between the two leads is non-existent and many of the directorial choices are decidedly odd.

This adaptation of the Delia Owens bestseller proves to be an unconvincing, melodramatic affair that only occasionally locates the story’s mournful heart.

Polanski and the supremely genre-savvy Assayas know exactly what they’re doing, and whenever you think you’ve seen it all before, you realise they’re actually doing something else entirely – the film is an expertly navigated maze of misdirection.

The paradox is that in modernising Berlin Alexanderplatz, Qurbani has created an ambitious but also stridently melodramatic moral parable that seems oddly dated.

The Aftermath works best when looking at the bewildered people who have been left behind, literally, to pick up the pieces. The savage loss of family members still reverberates through empty rooms and ruined landscapes.

This high-concept feature tries so hard to charm that it becomes an exercise in wading through sickly sweet treacle.

A film that, after its initial promise, descends, at times, into TV-historical-drama mannerisms.

In Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back To Black, Winehouse’s brief, brilliant life is essentially pared down to a tale of poisoned romance.

Rather than being thought-provoking or streamlined, instead Dark Phoenix is a frustratingly anticlimactic, familiar tale of misunderstood mutants.

The New Mutants’ greatest failing is that, even as a spinoff, its drama is puny and its spectacle nonexistent.

While director Justin Lin’s thriller-inflected approach is periodically absorbing, the scattered structure and episodic nature of the plot works against him as it slides towards an overly sentimental conclusion.

Slavishly obeying the rules of a would-be franchise starter — including crafting an open-ended finale that leaves room for sequels — Snake Eyes features plenty of martial-arts mayhem but very little actual excitement.

We’re lucky that moralists like Ponsoldt and Eggers have a sense of humor.

Despite the pyrotechnics of McAvoy’s performances and Willis’s grounded conviction, there’s just not enough here past the high concept of “what if real people were superheroes?”.

Some heartfelt performances and an adorable dog aren’t quite enough to combat the sentimentality and contrivances that follow.

The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent director Tom Gormican once again latches on to a meta-movie idea with great comic potential, but this limp satire of vain actors, deluded filmmakers and shamelessly recycled IP quickly starts to sputter.

For all its attempts at inventive excess – and at slightly more sophisticated humour - this scattershot gross-out comedy ends up producing chuckles rather than real laughs.

Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista are a likeable pair that deserve better than Stuber, a strained action-comedy with a clever premise but maddeningly uninspired execution.

The second installment of the Divergent series shows some symptoms of middle chapter-itis but in the end makes the most of a strong returning cast led by Shailene Woodley, slick direction from Robert Schwentke, impressive effects and a closely guarded plot twist.

The awkwardly executed English-language Loving Pablo is a brash but ultimately anonymous, sub-Scorsesean number from Spain’s Fernando Leon de Aranoa.

What stands out in relief from the film’s flat characters and pedestrian storytelling is its dramatic core: the killing machine that death row had become in South Africa by the end of the 1980s, with 164 executions taking place in Pretoria Central Prison in the year in which Shepherds And Butchers is set, 1987.

Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson brings some stylishness to the killings, but I Know What You Did Last Summer’s lack of compelling characters robs the story of its juiciest hook: these brutal slayings are cosmic comeuppance for their duplicity.

The picture’s just-a-lark tone, emphasised by the quick turnaround from script to final product, proves to be a double-edged sword: Locked Down feels like a fleetingly fun experiment that would have benefited from more time.