Ford v Ferrari’s narrative and emotional beats feel assembled in a factory-floor kind of way. The characters are stock, the story’s ups and downs are easily telegraphed, and the inoffensive but not particularly inventive dialogue is spat up as if the actors were eager to move onto the next thing.

This familiar and formulaic holiday tale has its pleasures, unless your name is Ebenezer – and in the end, even he was mollified.

Ewan McGregor does a solid job as Danny, still shining (i.e. reading minds and performing other freaky feats of the head) after all these years, and Rebecca Ferguson is having a great deal of fun as his new nemesis, driving across the country sucking souls and finding new and inventive ways of wearing chapeaus.

Sachs manages this day in the life without cumbersome exposition thanks to the texture of this casting, all while keeping the disparate concerns of three generations moving.

As Playing With Fire progressed, it became increasingly clear that the target audience was not respected. This was made by people who seem to think kids are stupid.

Midway is a choppy bore, its main source of intrigue centred around whatever New Jersey-ese accent British actor Ed Skrein is attempting as dive bomber Richard Best.

It is glorious.

What should have been the trickiest parts of this enterprise – elucidating the warm relationship between Essrog (Norton) and Minna (Bruce Willis), and Essrog’s Tourette syndrome – Norton handles with aplomb. The rest is a murky mess, unnecessarily dense and confusing for two hours, and then in the last 20 minutes, way too obvious.

Not everyone is equal, though, if we’re being honest. Synonyms are words that mean similar but ultimately different things. At one point, students in the class are asked to stand individually and recite sections of La Marseillaise. Who knew the chorus of the French anthem contains the bracing nationalist lyrics, “Let us march! Let us march! So that impure blood irrigates our fields!”?

A subtext of the film is a focus on classical music, as if to ask how humans can be capable of both intense beauty and ruthless inhumanity.

Ultimately Dark Fate is nothing more than a run-duck-and-repeat production – an extraordinarily familiar, if efficiently made, exercise in Terminatorology. If the franchise pattern holds, it’ll be back.

There is such a thing as being too reverential, and too many scenes – including one where a roomful of white abolitionists applaud Tubman – insist on Tubman’s greatness, instead of letting us discover it.

A one-two punch that marks a step forward in Taylor’s brand of stylish and heightened thriller films.

It’s lovely film to look at, Springsteen confronting his past and demons in the prettiest, gently tuneful barn-and-big-sky way imaginable.

Double Tap tries to emulate the exact feelings of its predecessor, but the stakes aren’t anywhere close to high enough to warrant any real touching moments.

Maleficent 2: Mistress of Evil is a misfire, despite its wonderful title, which feels plucked straight from an Elvira movie.

Fortunately, Greener Grass is as enticing as it is bizarre, and even if you don’t immediately find yourself frolicking amidst its braces-wearing populace, give it time: you’ll eventually be lured in by their take on suburban normal.

The movie – a messy and frequently bloody blend of Shakespeare’s Henriad plays, but devoid of their language, scope and, well, drama – is forgettable.

But then, just as quickly, Jesse is back in the present-day trying to build an escape route to a new life. Without Walter, he is just another manchild with a gun and a pile of money in a garbage bag. Sometimes, the past is the past and it really is dead.

The film’s writing is unambitious; there’s little to cause adults to smile knowingly.

Listen carefully, and you can almost hear the enjoyably comic and nasty tone Harpoon was likely going for – before it drowned in a flood of unwatchable idiots.

Viewers less charmed by spectacle may find the story lacking and as a result, Gemini Man can feel like the best-case scenario of watching someone else play a video game.

Campbell is tasked with carrying much of the film’s action and dialogue -- including two seemingly rambling but actually profound monologues delivered to unseen audiences in a nondescript bar -- and easily commands the screen.

Unfortunately, the new film Matthias & Maxime arrives lacking much of the emotional urgency of the Dolan who once captured the international art-house crowd, feeling provincial in more ways than one.

One of the worst movies of the year.

Sorta-kinda based on the true story of astronaut Lisa Nowak, Noah Hawley’s directorial debut may have started out as a feminist-forward film decrying the fact that women have to work five times as hard to succeed in the workplace, but it ends up being a movie whose message boils down to, “Ladies be crazy.”

The film is also peppered with animation, mid-century kitsch and a touch of whimsy, making Sometimes Always Never seem more like an intimate stage production than an exercise in cinematic self-seriousness.