It’s less startling than it was when the first Sin City was released in 2005, maybe even quaint, like a black-light Jimi Hendrix poster from the ’60s.

The interactions between these adventurers, with their varied imperatives and world-views, are compelling and funny – all the more so for being set against such a dramatically blanked-out backdrop.

21 years later, in the wake of "The Hunger Games", "Divergent" and "The Lego Movie," another movie about a kid rebelling against socially imposed “sameness” is a case of the same old, same old.

Despite being sumptuously shot and competently assembled, it provides no real insight into the tortured mind of its subject or the creative process in general.

Is The Trip to Italy the second Godfather of comedies, or a retread? Neither, exactly. The concept is no longer fresh, but the scenery on the Amalfi and Sorrento coasts is more transporting, and their convertible Mini Cooper is a more amusing vehicle. Finally, the fact that the only singalong CD for the drive is Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill is an unexpected master stroke.

The latest iteration of Sylvester Stallone’s aging warrior franchise, The Expendables 3, is proof that sometimes even your low expectations can be far too high.

Elena is at once a portrait, an autobiography and a history of family trauma.

Land Ho! is both loose (shot over 18 days, with an improv quality to the acting) and overcalculated in its series of encounters, small revelations and life-affirming beats. The movie is pleasant and mostly forgettable, except for the character of Mitch.

Calvary is an unsettling concoction, abstract and brutal, morally serious and too ghastly in its flippancy to be simply comedy. When you stop gasping at the shocks and jokes, there’s a profundity here, in the struggle to find the balance between outrage and forgiveness.

If TMNT the franchise is going to reach the same lofty heights of blockbuster-dom, it still needs to find its own inner hero.

There could be a fascinating and illuminating movie in this.

One distraction is that everything feels smothered in an extra helping of déjà vu sauce: another movie featuring a middle-aged misanthrope with a dewy younger woman; another film with stage magic as a theme.

When Anita Hill took her seat before an all-white Senate committee in 1991, the optics said nearly as much about the systemic dynamics of race, gender and power in American politics as any of the specifics of the case at hand.

Where the film fails is in its fizzled, melodramatic ending. The problem is that Brown the man had no resolution – no third act.

At once cluttered and cavernous, hysterical and static, romantic and cynical, The Zero Theorem works most effectively moment by moment and in the details.

Too loud, too long and too busy but – here’s the good part – also wonderfully silly.

A Master Builder really doesn’t work, hampered by odd casting, theatrical performances and a reductive interpretation of Ibsen’s play.

It’s a story where sex and being over 60 aren’t treated as mutual exclusives, which is pretty great in its own way.

Lucy, you may have twigged, is named after our 3.2-million-year-old hominid ancestor.

Although the film and the actors keep on looking good, this solemn, soppy, fantasy has nothing to say about science or faith.

Like a book we want to keep reading, despite the compression of pages telling us the end is near, it’s hard not to want A Most Wanted Man to go on forever, if only to spend time in the company of Hoffman – one of the great actors of his, or any, generation.

Without “spoiling” it, it’s a film that at least opens up a possibility for change, instead of providing another rote reshuffling of power from the Black Hats back to the White Hats.

A sweet and sloppy jumble of fantasy, sentimentality, comedy and soul-searching that feels like a sitcom that never got past the pilot stage.

The most important question is one that should be answered before setting foot in the theatre, and it is this: How badly do you want to see Cameron Diaz’s butt? If your answer is so very badly, or even pretty darn bad, then by all means, buy a ticket.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with kid-friendly Fire & Rescue – the movie offers enough jokes and glitzy animation to capture its target audience as well as a few witty puns for their accompanying adult – it just doesn’t introduce any new ideas or compelling characters, traits that we’ve come to expect from high-level animated films.

Soulless and idiotic and abysmally scripted as it is, Anarchy, like its predecessor, feels mournfully relevant.

Linklater’s film is very much its own hybrid creature. While the dramatic scaffolding is lightly drawn, it becomes apparent that Linklater has organized his material along certain themes, most notably that of the passage of time and the dream life of childhood.

When it came to describing what was happening to him, Ebert was forthright, clear-eyed and admirably free of neurosis and self-pity.