For audiences craving shoot-‘em-up carnage, the sequel contains an abundance of explosions, car crashes and kill shots, although the strained air of hip irreverence soon turns suffocatingly stale.

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.

It’s an understatement to say that The King’s Man has a weird, unsettling, tone.

Mothers will do anything for their children, but this film’s simplistic brand of horror never makes that devotion compelling or frightening.

Deliberately off-putting, Hosking’s latest tests the audience’s patience with frustratingly unfunny scenarios and an array of nasty, angry characters doing unpleasant things.

Though it sometimes recalls the irresistibly energetic, genre-bending feel of Lee’s best films – Do The Right Thing in particular – it lacks the assurance and unifying thrust that made those features work so well.

A parade of gaudy CGI and strained whimsy, Alice Through The Looking Glass proves even more manic and grating than its 2010 predecessor.

Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but Domino dishes it up as a sloppy mess of warmed-over clichés. Instead of his old high style and kinky violence, director Brian De Palma delivers only crude thrills and ugly stereotypes, a soggy bag of junk-food snacks.

Come to Daddy starts out like a nasty drama, ends up as a gruesomely gory, coldly comic revenge thriller – and desperately loses its way somewhere in-between.

While it’s important to have seen Canto Uno in order to savour Intermezzo, this film in itself doesn’t seem remotely essential.

While we can quibble about the underused lead or the meandering plot, Fifty Shades Freed ultimately authors its own most stinging rebuke, closing on an extended montage highlighting major moments and turning points from the trilogy. Tellingly, none of them come from this film.

There’s a thin, and very jagged, line between the radical mosaic approach to editing and narrative of a film like Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and the impressionistic jigsaw vagueness of Woodshock, which simply seems reluctant to commit itself to mere coherence, as if that simply were too unchic.

Its emphasis on teambuilding makes The Thousand Faces of Dunjia play like a wuxia riff on Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) but its blend of spectacle and humour isn’t nearly as successful.

Although Reese Witherspoon and Sofía Vergara do have their fleetingly amusing moments, this road-trip buddy comedy feels like it rolled off the cliché assembly line, offering wan laughs and familiar setups.

The shock value of the dialogue – and it is staggeringly rude at times – is neutered by a rambling lack of narrative drive and, ultimately, a sentimental justification that feels disingenuous.

Despite the tantalising set up, Immaculate is a dull, predictable affair, composed of far too many inconsequential jump scares in lieu of sturdy storytelling.

Goodbye Christopher Robin doesn’t just lack authenticity, it appears to scorn it.

Like many films designed to double as opening chapters in ongoing screen sagas, The Fifth Wave always feels padded, its focus on establishing a springboard for future sequels rather than satisfactorily exploring its own narrative.

While there’s a sense that Korine is fully at peace with a lack of meaning in his work, it’s doubtful that he was aiming to be boring.

The film is adrenalised but familiar, sporting a sarcastic sense of humour in an attempt to mitigate what’s so threadbare about the premise and increasingly over-the-top fight sequences.

No doubt the world needs more paeans to tolerance, but movies as ineffectual as The Best Of Enemies feel profoundly inadequate to the task.

For all its deft style and sympathetic characters, there’s still something missing in We,The Animals. In its efforts to evoke a young boy’s inner-world, it falls short of fully capturing his emotional reality. Jonah’s story should be heartbreaking, but when we see images of him flying over the forest, it’s just picturesque and lyrical.

Even propaganda also needs to have some spark; Ram Setu is a damp squib.

Modi’s ramshackle romanticism never remotely convinces, and – given that it’s about artists who suffered for their radical modernism – it feels terribly dated, stylistically and in content.

Although the follow-up to the 2023 original boasts colourful animation, too often this Illumination production mistakes visual and narrative busyness for genuine excitement. As a result the film, based on the venerable Nintendo property, suffers from strained humour and cluttered action sequences — issues that will hardly discourage young audiences from coming out in droves.

The film is mostly unmoving, neither the romance nor the social consciousness succeeding in stirring our emotions. Even worse, Penn lets the plight of displaced Africans slip into the background, resulting in yet another well-meaning film that wants to address planetary ills by concentrating our attention on the good-looking outsiders who come in to save the day.

Despite meticulous visuals and a strong central performance by Mark Rylance, the film feels dramatically ponderous and emotionally inert.

Instead of intriguing ambiguity, this updated version – which had a long and bumpy development – offers only maddening confusion...With false endings within false endings, it’s the sort of movie whose final fade-out will leave audiences groaning in frustration.