The clunky script feels like it’s been re-drafted and re-drafted to the point of incomprehension – blowing any chance of conveying a message. However well-meaning, it makes for a surprisingly dull watch. That said, my five-and-three-quarter-year-old (and clearly a few other younger people in the cinema) were a bit scared by some of the dicier moments of action-adventure peril.

At a baggy, over-stretched two hours, its welcome is close to being overstayed, but there’s just about enough charm to keep Disenchanted from living up to its title.

It’s pretty much a laugh-free film to make you appreciate the work of Nancy Meyers or Richard Curtis; their films may look easy or corny but they have something this doesn’t, a kind of buoyancy or a way of alchemising all the luxury tourist incidentals into something entertaining.

It’s amiable entertainment, and Hamm may well develop in the character if this becomes a franchise.

Christmas With You could hardly be a more generic title, and the 90-minute bundle of anodyne cheer lives up to its vanilla promise.

Clara Sola is superbly filmed and composed with a very humid sense of atmosphere, and Araya’s performance is a miracle of sympathy and candour.

Thanks to the breezy chemistry between its largely Inuit cast, Slash/Back has an endearing charm that is hard to resist. From a first-time film-maker, this is a fresh, entertaining update on well-worn tropes.

The Menu might not nail some of the more substantial courses but it’ll do as a light snack.

It seems almost frivolous to note this, but the hyper high-definition cinematography is both beautiful in a savage way and adds immediacy to the viewing experience.

Like Panahi’s recent films This Is Not a Film and Taxi Tehran, this is powerful because of its control, subtlety and diplomatic finesse.

A film like Falling for Christmas doesn’t try or need to break the mold, it doesn’t even need to be that good, it just needs to be low-level competent and as these films go, it’s just about passable enough for those who tend to start getting excited about the festive period at least two months early.

An absorbing and nourishing documentary.

The decision to make the film a musical is a genuine head-scratcher, one that’s never justified or even mildly explained given that the two leads are not natural singers and so throughout the lunges into song feel awkward at best.

Director Lorenzo Vigas, who collaborated on the script with Paula Markovitch and Laura Santullo, adeptly manoeuvres things so that the film slides effortlessly from mystery to criminal story to quasi-Greek tragedy, changing registers with subtle alterations of tone. The landscape – vast, desiccated, menacing – is practically a character in its own right, full of inscrutable secrets like Hatzín’s own deadpan face.

Bar Fight! wants to be the best night out of your life, but – mistaking dodgy drunken acting for ambience – it feels pretty ersatz throughout, like one of those pseudo-Irish bars that has bought in all its decor.

As with the last film, there are bold extravagant gestures of spectacle, while Wright, Coel, Bassett, Gurira and Thorne all supply fierce performances; each of them ups the onscreen voltage simply by appearing.

This is a painful, important film, made more urgent in light of China’s tightening of religious freedoms and human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Muslims.

It all remains refreshingly and unusually old-fashioned. A gentle film aimed at the younger end of young audiences that will also find the approval of those that much older.

Keshishian, as in Truth or Dare, works in moments which complicates Gomez’s angelic image: being short with a too-glib interviewer, refusing to listen to a friend, reacting poorly to genuine concern. My Mind & Me is strongest, and bravest, in moments like this, illustrating Gomez’s humanity through universal capacities we don’t want recorded.

As for Radcliffe, he doesn’t seem to have a funny bone in his body, but then it’s difficult to tell considering the preponderance of unfunniness in this script.

White’s decision to focus on human emotion comes at the expense of some loftier concepts bound up in the story.

Unimprovably brisk at 91 minutes, Watcher is not messing around – and probably won’t hang around long in cinemas with starry awards fare in the offing. But a few more of these nifty diversions, and the multiplexes might once again be a viable night out.

Sissy is a deranged pleasure to watch, though a strong stomach and an appreciation of genre protocols is highly recommended.

Some shocking twists go off like well-timed bombs in the back half of the film, somewhat compensating for what is, in all honesty, a bit of a slog.

A film about the danger of believing without questioning that turns us into full-throated believers in whatever Lelio and Pugh can do.

When focused, this film truly sings, but it takes its time and tests your patience to land on the right notes.

If narrative clarity is obviously not top of Uzeyman and Williams’ priorities, the film always looks amazing: fluorescent dream sequences, glitchy cyberpunk overlays, wild character designs (from costume designer Cedric Mizero and makeup artist Tanya Melendez).

Something in the Dirt is so high on its own conceptual supply that it doesn’t invest quite enough in the pair’s deteriorating relationship, and consequently starts to drag. But it wrings a mini-cosmos out of next to nothing, its delicately transcendent visuals – courtesy of Moorhead’s photography background – constantly signposting some higher truth just around the next corner.

Hounded’s take is caricatural enough to neuter much sense of actual threat and stop it from being the Brit multicultural answer to Deliverance it sometimes feels like it’s stretching for.

There’s more of the same in Enola Holmes 2, an equally boisterous romp that’s equally as hard to remember once it’s over but one that should keep its many fans engaged enough to warrant further sequels.

Luxuriating in a wealth of archival material that encompasses radio and TV interviews, privately recorded conversations from reel-to-reel tapes (Armstrong could swear like a sailor), and good old-fashioned newspaper clippings (remember them?), this documentary about the great Louis Armstrong is a real keeper.

It’s difficult to fault a film for being over-ambitious given the low-effort nature of so many genre films but the sheer, two-joints-in bizarreness of Run Sweetheart Run needed a surer hand to guide us through. As it is, that run to the finish line ends up feeling like a crawl.

This is a wonderfully sympathetic, deeply felt and tenderly funny family drama with a novelistic attention to details and episodes – a little like Alfonso Cuáron’s Roma, about growing up in a similar era in Mexico City. Cámara thoroughly inhabits the figure of Gómez: unselfconsciously inspiring and lovable.

Terrifier 2 is not for everyone, but this tasteless wonder meets nauseating expectations.

The treasure in this story is not a sunk vessel, as the interviews with its more literal-minded subjects might suggest, but a sense of justice and equilibrium that has been denied to a people that have been passing down their trauma from one generation to the next.

In contrast to lesser horrors that attempt to be socially conscious, Piggy is much more specific and detailed in how it builds moods and atmosphere, especially the gossipy dynamics that run rampant in a tight-knit community.

Vesper plays like a cult film waiting to be discovered. It adeptly fuses a compelling YA-friendly story about a teenage girl’s survival in a hostile environment with dense, thoughtful world-building, the sort required to draw in nerdy-minded viewers. That savvy combination creates a narrative that breathes and expands, like one of the freaky mycelium-like life forms that populate the story.

The Good Nurse remains a good, if not ultimately great, attempt to tell the story of a very bad person.

Here is a terribly meagre experience from writer-director Rodrigo García, a silly, pointless movie which never delivers on its promises of drama and comedy and contains not a single funny or believable moment. As a filmic meal, it is pretty much entirely without nutritional or calorific value.

The stinging tragedy of being gay at the wrong time in history is something that will always prove ripe for emotive, painful drama but director Michael Grandage struggles to pull our heart-strings, an easy target easily missed.

The Stranger avoids both neat explanations and contrived ambiguity, when narrative pieces are shuffling around to confuse audiences.

This is a dark reminder that even childbirth, that most universal human experience, can be clouded by sectarianism and suspicion.

As this narrative advances out of the YA-industrial complex and into the harsher environment of general scrutiny, however, a whole curriculum’s worth of faults become visible to an audience not so readily pandered to, who want for more than worn-out teen-lit tropes to fill some inner content maw.

Droll, witty, and proportioned like the proverbial outdoor brick-built convenience, Johnson is well placed to realise the superhero movie’s potential as surrealist action comedy. It’s a shame that all these other DC-ensemble heroes crowding into the action are frankly not really in his class, although Viola Davis’s brief cameo as Task Force X chief Amanda Waller brings the menace.

The film is expertly bolted together from archive newsreels, snippets of classic war movies and interviews with surviving airmen.

Sadly, this fatally self-conscious and self-aware movie fizzles out– a process that seems to start with the opening credits.

Stingily is relaxed and amiable, but in acting terms there may be nothing else there and the film doesn’t develop in any interesting direction.

Brainwashed is a bracing blast of critical rigour, taking a clear, cool look at the unexamined assumptions behind what we see on the screen.

She Said delivers on the dopamine hits of a journalism movie: proficient pace (the film runs just over two hours but feels shorter), tactile work, the thrill of pavement pounded into revelation.

The will-they-won’t-they succeed in carrying out the poisoning plot makes for pretty flat drama, and for a film about people who have suffered so much, this really fails to make us care about the characters.

It can’t end well. In fact, it ends badly. In every sense. The mystery of Myers has long since become deflated and inert, and when he is unmasked, the camera can’t quite be bothered to show us his pointless old face (unlike the unhelmeting of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, which did at least show us what the great villain looked like). The only thing that’s scary is the thought of how long this has all been going on.

Imagine Game of Thrones crossed with Gladiator and you’ll have something like this entertainingly old fashioned action movie with epic levels of throat slashing, spectacular scenery and a fair bit of camp.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a substantial, serious work, acted with urgency and focus and with battlefield scenes whose digital fabrications are expertly melded into the action. It never fails to do justice to its subject matter, though is perhaps conscious of its own classic status.

The film’s good-natured warmth wins the day, just.

Emily is a sensitive and passionate portrait of the author.

Aided by its physical clout, Summit Fever does hit a kind of rhythm near the end – but last year’s The Summit of the Gods is a more substantial look at this kind of obsession.

Shaunak Sen’s documentary is a complex, thoughtful, quietly beautiful film about the ecosystem and human community.

Rosaline . . . understands what makes a good adaptation: a sense of humor at least on par with if not exceeding the original, lighthearted lines with serious delivery, crackling romantic chemistry. And in the case of Rosaline, an unmissable lead in Kaitlyn Dever as a lovelorn medieval schemer left on read.

While Mrs Harris Goes to Paris is far lighter fare and at times so light that it threatens to drift away, Manville is determined to keep it grounded, a deft balance of dramatic heft and comic levity that not many other actors could employ quite so seamlessly.

Some Like It Rare is a tasty treat for herbivores and carnivores alike.

It doesn’t always work, and at times it really really doesn’t, but it feels confident and unfettered in a way that so many horror films don’t these days.

There are pieces of Luckiest Girl Alive that seem interested in a life splintered by trauma, in the relief of unburdening, the hunger for certainty over what happened, the thrill of playing on cultural expectations for women. But the story it ultimately tells is an empty, self-serving fantasy.

Although the whole concept is quite daft, Winter’s energetic and committed performance adds a bit of heft without ever forfeiting the comedy entirely.

It’s solidly acted by Martell and Sutherland, although the latter seems as desperate as we are to let loose and have a bit more fun, and has a confident sense of place as King adaptations often do but it’s all rather unforgivably dull, a call to be swiftly ignored.

This is a bracing guide to a brilliant individual who declined to conform.

Matilda is a tangy bit of entertainment, served up with gusto.

After Blue is a preposterous film, easy to ridicule. But it’s surely already halfway to cult classic status – destined to play midnight slots, watched by students smuggling bottles of red wine into the cinema under their coats.

This is rich and valuable testament to Chilean courage.

This feels like something LaBute wrote in an afternoon on the notes app on his smartphone while thinking about something else.

The Woman King is a sturdy, rousing piece of studio entertainment, that makes both the new feel old and the old feel new.

It is as noble an execution of tragic historical record as one could hope for within the limits of a biopic – neither confirmation of doubters nor enough justification to relive it.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism could perhaps do with one or two genuine scares. But for anyone old enough to remember Tiffany and advice columns in teenage girls’ magazines, this is going to deliver a pleasing shot of nostalgia.

Like many fan favourite follow-ups, Hocus Pocus 2 is stuck, trapped somewhere between different times, audiences and tones, trying to do so much yet, in this instance, achieving so very little.

As a war movie written by a soldier this material feels oddly lacking in authenticity and authority. And yet it’s a noble attempt to honour the resilience of Ukrainians and the courage of ordinary people like Voronin, fighting for freedom.

Retrofitting medieval Noh as a world of guitar gods and cavorting dancers, Inu-oh has its two disabled lead characters make a psychedelic plea in favour of slipping loose from dominant narratives, told in a fecund patchwork of styles by Yuasa that asserts its own outsider credentials.

There is something weirdly heavy and foggy in Amsterdam that feels like it’s working against the lightness and nimbleness needed for a caper. It’s the reality of the history, which the movie makes explicit in the closing credits.

Viewers may be split on the question of exactly how satisfying it all is in the end. The performances are strong.

This is such a vivid, lovable triple-decker performance from Milonoff, Kauhanen and Leino.

The movie is a shard of comic and cosmic spite, and the image of the malign smile carries force.

The school is no more dysfunctional than any other institution and a lot more intelligent and self-questioning than many. A very engaging film.

Everything about this film is genuinely absorbing. The performances are restrained. The locations, many of them seemingly on the Perry Studios lot, are lush. The musical numbers are decadent . . . The storytelling is efficient, the scenes well-paced, the command of social and racial politics ironclad.

The sheer existence of Lou might be a step in the right direction for women over 50 in action movies, but it’s a misstep everywhere else.

The strength of the writing is in portraying Bunny’s reality, allowing us to wonder – like the social workers – whether she really is a reliable parent. This is thoughtful film-making, though I didn’t quite buy into the explosion of drama at the end.

There’s a feminist undercurrent in You Won’t Be Alone, its observations of the patriarchy emerging in ways totally germane to the experience. An odd kind of eroticism also emerges: neither sensual nor entirely gross, and certainly not from the male gaze. Sometimes the film doesn’t even feel like it’s from a human gaze.

The action of After Yang, bizarre and exotic as it is, meditates on what it is to be human and how that may in the future be modified, but it also addresses loss in the present day: our anguished and futile human instinct that death must surely be fixable.

Neither slicing under the genre’s surface, nor dicing the heritage well, this reboot is more an unseemly act of IP cannibalism.

This is a portrait of Monroe that accentuates her suffering and anguish, canonising her into a feminist saint who died for our scopophilic sins, that we might feast on her beauty and talent. Maybe it’s not an opera but a kind of religious ritual for the modern age, visiting the stations of the crosses Monroe bore, the Passion of the Marilyn.

As hard as Cuoco and Davidson try at chemistry – and Cuoco, at least, seems to be really trying – this umpteenth spin on the Groundhog Day time loop is more irksome than endearing, cutesy than actually cute, a downward spiral of uncomfortably performed neuroticism that devolves into a borderline indefensible ending.

Sobel’s direction feels a little lesser when compared with his leading lady, relying on dream sequences to push us to the edge, never getting anywhere close to the iciness of the original or finding anything distinctive enough to separate the aesthetic of his take.

Parker clearly has ideas he’s aiming at, but lets his target slip in the fog of war.

This documentary is a spirited rebuke to the “sellout” narrative which has been allowed to grow up around his career, and a paean of praise to his commitment, talent and heroism.

Khan’s script is one of competency rather than creativity: a sound structure, a propulsive pace and a learned awareness of genre conventions but dialogue that often feels a little first draft, a little placeholder-heavy, zingers not really zinging quite as they should.

There’s an extraordinary story to be told here. It’s just a shame it had to be told in such an ordinary way.

It is a gentle, heartfelt relationship drama about – and for – intelligent adults.

Perhaps Schrader will indeed defiantly return to his accustomed theme for his next film – and this brilliant, restless director might well make it work. Sadly, this one doesn’t.

Training its crosshair on the ingrained prejudice of the military and the question of how well-meaning white allies can best support its undoing, the film compensates for relatively middling action set pieces with a stolid maturity.

This watchable, undemanding drama rolls along capably, enlivened by unmistakably Bennettian gags and drolleries which come along every minute or so.

It’s a chilling little film, avoiding maximalism at every turn, a bold debut from Nighy (whose only real slip-up is a score that can feel dull and uninspired) and a difficult reminder of a difficult experience. The chill will linger for a while.