Radiating a sickly ambience, The Last Assassins is happily far more granular visually speaking.

Had the film been contained by its clever premise - the Minions must fight to preserve their place in Hollywood – it might have achieved the crystalline simplicity that is a hallmark of good children’s films. But aiming to both lead the Minions in a newer, smarter direction and appease the gibberish-fest expectations set by the franchise, Coffin bites off more than he can chew.

The ultimate irony of Strung is that it’s just another industry exercise in ignoring your gut in favor of playing it safe – and on that score, alas, it sings.

Though composed of a huge volume of material, Daher’s documentary does not overwhelm, maintaining instead a remarkable rhythm that fluidly moves between calm, exuberance and disorder.

I found a few moments here lightly amusing . . . but it’s largely, disappointingly short on real laughs, a panicked maximalism to its bawdiness replacing anything more smart and thought through.

Seeing a Jackass movie with a crowd is still a kick, and Knoxville’s still got it. And by “it”, I mean the willingness to get into the ring with a furious bull, and then go back when he doesn’t quite get the shot he wants.

Supergirl isn’t a perfect movie by any means, but there are moments when you’ll believe this franchise can fly.

The overblown finale unites the family therapy and gorehound strands, as the demonic hunter does his atavistic worst – while everyone else competes to sacrifice themselves for each other (and vocalises their need to do so). It’s like the Scary Movie franchise did a splatterhouse Last of the Mohicans skit.

In many ways it’s a shrewd sketch of the ways that real life, in all its embarrassment and banality, does not respectfully stop for bad news.

The combustible mix of lowlife cynicism and high art provide enough energy and enjoyment to power the first two-thirds of this long film. But in the end it flags, and it’s as if the outrageous black comedy has to be paid for with solemn romantic fantasy. But what a performance from Butler.

In trying to scratch our itch for the old while also recognising the new, McKendrick settles for something stale.

Nothing in Girls Like Girls exists beyond individual feeling, and there are no larger institutions to speak of, not even a school. It all leaves the film stranded in an unsatisfying place: intensely personal yet emotionally unearned, politically gestural yet totally vacant of politics. Kiyoko has made a film obsessed with being seen. It never once learns how to look.

A couple of its good-looking actors give performances with frozen, startled expressions, like they’ve been kidnapped from the set of an advert for luxury five-star holidays.

For a slow – and often ponderously uneventful – film, the ending also feels strangely rushed, decisions and reveals not explored enough for them to really land in the way that’s clearly intended (there’s a potentially more satisfying psychological thriller using the same ingredients). There’s really impressive craft here though.

It’s almost incredible to think that the Toy Story series is more than 30 years old, a central plank of the Pixar animation golden age. But now it is played out and IP exhaustion has set in.

As a formal experiment, Dry Leaf has its own conviction and self-possession and there is a deliberate, if opaque artistry here: one shot shows us a dry leaf under Irakli’s car-tyres, another gives us wet leaves in a waterfall. The soft-edged, pixelated look is, however, interesting and surprisingly watchable, bringing a kind of painterly effect.

Overall this is a frustrating and rather precious piece of work.

The film has a clever dodge for avoiding the inevitable silly moment when the aliens are revealed but, in a few too many scenes, this is a bit more snore than awe.

Black-belt performances from Claire Foy and Richard E Grant put some vim and vigour into this haranguingly one-note and unidirectional period romp of the raucously bewigged and be-poxed 18th century.

Every movie the Wayans come across has essentially the same function: an easily recognizable bathroom wall where they can scrawl insults about who’s a slut, who’s secretly gay and who deserves to get abruptly hit by a car.

The romcom is a genre I will forever root for, despite it being stuck in a cruelly long flop era, and while Office Romance does have a tad more gloss than Netflix’s many junkier alternatives, the magic is still missing. Like the office at its centre, it’s too sleek and corporate to melt us – all work and no play

Here is a niche drama about one of the most important chapters in the history of experimental jazz. It is however watchable, well acted and avoids the music-movie cliches – though I could have done without the fourth-wall-breaking lectures about the nature of jazz improvisation.

You can feel the struggle of trying to cram everything in and even at an unforgivably bloated 143 minutes, it’s both busy and hollow.

There are times when the writing and staging lay it on a little thick, though Beast never becomes too heavy-handed or on-the-nose, marking a significant step up for Atkins after his cheesy, Byron Bay-set 2022 drama Bosch & Rockit.

Director Eric Appel has worked on plenty of funny TV series, yet in place of slick professionalism, this movie feels Scotch-taped together.

Despite a few sparky face-offs between the actors, Pressure feels destined for a less notable fate: to cause plenty of armchair naps once it hits streaming.

The tension is capably managed and Magimel is a gargoyle of menace.

There is archival interest and historic drama in what Lennon has to say – and especially for me in his generous, open-minded comments about newer bands such as the B-52s and the Clash. But this is a disappointment.

The Dreamed Adventure is clearly the work of a director with a fluent, distinctive film-making language, but what she is trying to tell us is elusive.

One for the fans … but some nostalgic entertainment here.

There is much that is valuable and interesting in this movie, although it is a little predictable in what it has to say and how it says it, though Campagne and Macchia give committed performances as secret lovers in the shadow of war.

The Man I Love is an honestly intended and conceived movie, but that faintly baffling and strenuous lead performance sits uncomfortably.

The only mildly jolting sequence is the cold open, setting up a previous haunting with two friends, something the marketing team was clearly aware of, having essentially shown it in full in the first teaser trailer. It’s downhill from there, as we’re stuck with an anonymously written couple we struggle to root for as they face off with an antagonist we struggle to understand.

The results prove middling at best, not on any level dealing the knockout blow that religious conversion practice deserves; nor is it ever the campy scream the set-up might have licensed.

Finding Emily shares DNA with Richard Curtis’s comedies – the same warm heart and charm, plus levels of cheesiness that some may find cringe. In the end I found it impossible to hate, though one or two performances felt a bit lacking in comic flair.

A sweet, odd diversion – more eccentric, maybe, than Travolta intended.

While every actor gets to make a brash and indelible impression, their characters can feel frustratingly limited.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film is a bafflingly unsatisfying and unconvincing muddle of ideas and moods.

The movie does set up potential for a continuing movie franchise. Mostly, though, Jack Ryan: Ghost War feels like a sad state of affairs for the world’s dads (and dads at heart), who deserve to see airport-novel espionage brought to less chintzy life.

Co-writer and director Shea Wageman earns some points for weirdness.

It’s a gripping story – though perhaps those involved have told it so many times over the years, they’ve lost their sense of excitement; this may well be for aviation fans only.

The climax is all airborne dragons and fireworks; the fact it makes little sense doesn’t matter because it’s all about sensationalism, stimulating the amygdala with bright colours and noise to the point of overload.

This one, sadly, is flawed by that perennial problem of how to end a story with a great premise.

There is something stolid and at times monotonous about the way this is presented to the audience – as ever with Nemes, the force of gravity is increased, making everything 20% heavier and denser. And Barábas’s performance is frankly actorly rather than real in his incessant frown of righteous resentment. It’s a minor movie from this always interesting film-maker.

I confess that, for me, this movie doesn’t have the impact of his comparably modernist Parallel Mothers, but Almodóvar’s sensual, playful, melancholy films are always food for thought and feeling.

The film is watchable and barrels along capably enough, but perhaps there isn’t enough of the humanity, humour and extravagant space melodrama which has made and continues to make Star Wars lovable.

At all events, [Nemes] undoubtedly brings impeccable craftsmanship, and the performances and production design are strong.

This is a very glib and unsatisfying drama, whose essential naivety becomes apparent when the lead character is forced to confront the crisis in her life.

Ultimately, the film does not compellingly deliver a blazing truth about its various relationships – but neither does it intriguingly withhold any such truth from us.

It’s tender and sometimes beautifully made, but also contrived and occasionally features some too-good-to-be-true caring characters. Frankly, it’s rather precious.

It’s a riff or theme-variation on Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love – with a twist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window – doggedly spinning a spider’s web out of itself. The result is intricate, elaborate, though a little nebulous.

Butterfly Jam is contrived, tonally uncertain, implausible and frankly plain silly in its underpowered kind of magic-unrealism, with some clunky secondhand Mean Streets mob-fraternal dialogue and pedantic ethnic-foodie cred, and elliptically positioning key scenes off camera for no obviously satisfying reason.

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a hectic, garrulous, breezily agreeable comedy of midlife emotional upheaval, unencumbered by any serious or permanent concern about any of the passion and heartache that it briefly encounters. It’s also a movie that declines to allow its characters to be changed in any way by the excitements and disappointments that life has to throw at them.

It is efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will probably make older viewers want to unplug and retreat into an 18th-century novel.

There are a couple of decent plot twists and reveals, but not enough to stop you from checking out until the next bit with the whale comes up.

It’s entertaining and bizarre chaos, anchored by Odenkirk’s hangdog air of gloomy resignation to the violent mess which he has to clean up.

The film’s absurdity and antique dramatic style never quite come to life.

This docu-portrait verges on corporate promo at times, though there are a couple of telling vignettes in the second half.

Still fully in possession of every marble at the ripe old age of 100, Sichel reflects to camera on his middle-of-the-action view of events during the cold war, and a little tea gets spilled along the way, but not so much that he’s likely to get in any trouble for revealing state secrets. Still, he’s unabashedly critical of some CIA operations, such as the plots to destabilise leftist regimes including that of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala.

Instead of letting the visuals do the talking, the voiceover steps in to verbalise the characters’ feelings, and the need to provide multiple backstories through flashback veers into over-exposition. Still, Departures remains a highly thoughtful exploration of love and identity, and an excellent showcase for northern talents on film.

It can be a bit soppy, sometimes resembling Sunday-night TV comfort food, but this big-hearted picture wins you over, and there are certainly some marvellous panoramic shots of the Highlands.

Where it’s lacking in psychological bite, Wardriver’s demi-monde is convincingly venal in general terms. Thomas lends it enough fast-driving attack and romanticised ferment that it might just pass in the darkness for a Michael Mann film.

Held together by Molina’s typically commanding voiceover, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a simple, heart-first drama of broken people trying to put themselves back together.

The cherry on top of this admittedly weird cocktail is a strong streak of genuine sensuality – if it’s your first encounter with tentacle sex on screen, you might be surprised how appealing Heimann and his cast have managed to make it seem.

This hectic fantasia struggles to plumb deeper depths.

It is an amusing and gruesome premise, which writer-director Damian McCarthy stretches out into a convoluted, bizarre extended narrative.

The film sags during the subtler moments of the setlist, which is a problem when half of it is composed of ballads performed at a mic stand or while lying on the floor. I will freely admit to not being particularly fond of Cameron’s recent work, but I couldn’t help wishing for a Na’vi to swoop from the rafters on a tetrapod to liven things up.

The coming-of-age parts of the film centred on Frances work a little better, but for all that, and despite Lithgow and Colman’s commitment, this is very uncertain.

It’s cheerful and watchable, if a relentlessly on-brand fan promo, corporately policed and controlled, using vintage archive photos and video rather than closeup talking-head footage of the band now.

It all has the distinctly cheap whiff of something that should have gone direct to the small screen – hammy acting, stilted dialogue, chintzy effects, tinny score, Halloween costumes – but without the raucous fun that should come with it.

For all its cack-handedness, there’s some effort here to grapple with issues around institutional and personal guilt and the wrongs done to young people that might turn them into smirking, giggling serial killers … or mass murderers, depending on how you define the term.

The off-brand, bought down the market quality of Skydance animation is initially less of a problem here without the poorly realised humans of Luck and Spellbound to distract but there’s still no immersion or sweep to the world being created, just bright colours which might be enough for some toddlers.

This is good-natured, buoyant entertainment. It’s wearing well.

Opera director Damiano Michieletto makes his underpowered cinema debut here, and the whole film, with its lifeless staging, uninteresting performances and laughably naive ending can only be described as the school of Salieri.

Amid this farrago, the political critique comes over more like accidental backspatter than meaningful statement.

The film scoots smartly past the death and brings us briskly on to the entertaining business of sheep-oriented crime detection. It’s all very silly, although, as with Babe, I have to confess to agnosticism about digital talking animals, even if the technology here is next-level. It’s an entertaining tale of ovine law enforcement.

The whole affair feels slick but soulless, with no personality or – despite the lush settings – any real sense of place.

Antoine Fuqua’s demi-biopic of Michael Jackson gives you the chimp, the llama, the giraffe … but not the elephant in the living room. It’s like a 127-minute trailer montage assembling every music-movie cliche you can think of: the producers’ astonishment in the recording studio, the tour bus, the billboard chart ascent, the meeting with the uncool corporate execs in their offices.

Roommates might not rival the fizzy, formative teen films it both references (Clueless) and often directly cribs from (Mean Girls) but it still belongs in a different league to what we’re mostly served right now. Could someone possibly tell that to Netflix?

As this film’s producer-star, Angelina Jolie shows honesty and courage in tackling a story that so closely mirrors her own experience of having a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer. But sadly, the film itself feels specious and shallow, insisting with bland and weirdly humourless confidence on the glamorous importance of the fashion world in which it is set.

For all that this film is about the revolutionary and disruptive business of art, it takes a pretty un-subversive view of art and artists, compatible with the museum gift shop. But I have to admit, it’s executed with brio and comic gusto – the “past” sections, anyway – and Lindon’s performance has charm.

Balls Up is juvenile entertainment, handled by professionals.

Blades of the Guardians offers a duly impressive spectacle, chock-full of epic set-pieces that lean more on physical effects than CGI, and of course lashings of exquisitely choreographed fight scenes mostly using – as the title suggests – swords.

It is another highly sympathetic performance from O’Connor, who converts the British reticence of his earlier roles into Dusty’s strength and quiet vulnerability.

The Blue Trail is a generic mashup: it partly has the bittersweet tone of many films about defiant old people, and partly it has something far more subversive and disquieting. The mix of tones is interesting, like chewing cake and cheese at the same time.

Cronin, an Irish film-maker who has made just two films to date (The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise), is an undeniable visual talent but his Mummy is also absurdly, watch-checkingly overlong (134 minutes is an unacceptable length for a genre film as thin as this), tonally unsure and, fatally, not all that scary. It’s also, for something so clearly attributed to just one person, a film so deeply influenced by the work of many, many others. It might not feel like a Mummy movie you’ve seen before but it’ll feel like a great deal else.

It’s hard to outline what makes this work interesting without spoiling it, but let’s just say that as a satire it has helicopter parenting, sinister medical innovation to extend lifespan, and our obsession with youth and beauty in its sights. It’s a shame the final chapters don’t quite coalesce these fertile themes in more satisfactory fashion, and the film just ties everything up with some cursory violence.

Lowery’s film can dazzle. But to quote one of the director’s clear references, many will spot his inspirations all too well.

It might perhaps have been more ruthless. The movie ends on a bit of a flat note too, with personal growth where you might have hoped for a murder, or at the very least a public humiliation. Still the performances are unfailingly entertaining.

You, Me & Tuscany is a perfectly wholesome and harmless meet-cute that starts by asking: “What if the Little Mermaid had a Lady and the Tramp-style hookup with the season one heart-throb from Bridgerton, spaghetti and all?”

It sometimes seems as if each Jude film is almost to be viewed once only; if you press play again, or go to the cinema to see it a second time, there will be only a blank screen, as if Jude and his ragged company have folded their tents and vanished.

It all adds up to a serviceable horror that at times feels like a B-movie without the fun, containing scenes that could almost work as a spoof.

While there’s something engaging in how the film takes us to a place so, literally, far from where we started, how we get there is not as entertaining or propulsive as it should be with anonymously staged action, easy-to-spot twists and a crucial lack of suspense.

Sonomura was the action director for three Baby Assassins features, which might explain that this, his third gig as a main director, feels more weighted towards scenes that showcase fisticuffs and fancy fight choreography rather than character development and emotional nuance.

There are one or two interesting moments: including an intriguing discussion of the idea that Tinder is anti-love and in fact just promotes addiction to the app, which is inimical to actually finding a long-term partner. But really this is a very tiring and mediocre film.

The script steadily goes about its mission of freeing its characters from all forms of oppression – but it’s generous and unpatronising too.

This is a serious and worthwhile film, though one that tells you what you know already, and yet somehow perhaps doesn’t tell you enough.

Tonally pitched between a bloodbath and bath time, a boyish strain of immaturity is the dominant creative force for Sokolov, at times amusingly but more often in commonplace, enervating ways.