Virtually laugh-free, so-so looking with a seriously drippy musical number, it feels like a film slipped into cinemas over summer to sucker parents desperate to do something, anything, to fill a couple of hours.

It is a tremendously engaging story which does something that very few movies do: mention money. Something very palpable is at stake, the jeopardy is real and it’s a question of survival.

It’s so punishingly dull to watch, filled with dry, perfunctory dialogue from Stacey Menear’s consistently uninventive script and shot without even a glimmer of style, that even at a brisk 86 minutes, it feels like unending torture.

How Herbig fails to capitalise on the sheer physical terror of their flight – the balloon’s basket is more a flimsily strung boxing ring – makes you wish someone like Werner Herzog had mounted this mad escapade for real.

Sometimes the casting and staging work well, sometimes not so well.

The result is a bit corny, a bit cheesy and you might feel self-conscious going, “Aww …” at creatures that are not real dogs but laptop fabrications. But it’s a robust and old-fashioned entertainment with some real storytelling bite.

Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield can’t save this dreary Valentine’s drama that lacks fizzle and emotional stakes.

Like its fast-moving, attention-deficient hero, this just feels like a rush job.

Untouchable: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein (BBC Two), directed by Ursula MacFarlane, is a film of halting testimonies, long pauses, lips pressed tightly together and eyes filling with tears.

It’s ultimately a miracle that despite the tortured production process, Dolittle can most generously be described as passable for young, undiscerning viewers. It won’t charm or amuse you particularly but it’s not a catastrophe, the highest praise I can muster.

The ambition of Horse Girl ultimately gets the better of it, turning what could be a dark but insightful depiction on signs missed in a mental health crisis into an agreement on one’s madness – a game of what’s real, and what’s not, that feels unsettling to play.

To All the Boys: PS I Still Love You doesn’t quite match its predecessor for heart fizzing romance – the first film dealt sensitively with loss and grief – but it’s just as entertaining and charming anchored by a supremely likable central performance from Condor.

The hits comes thick and fast, tightly arranged and slickly performed, but this lineup of well-preserved mostly male musicians gives the show the bland atmosphere of a celebrity tribute band.

It needed bigger laughs and more of the big, ironic comedy that Erskine can clearly deliver.

It’s full of plot holes but compulsively watchable for the first hour, before the whole thing falls to pieces as Mortimer chucks in a load of well-worn horror-movie tropes.

This film is a blitz of bad taste, a cornucopia of crass, and it is weirdly diverting – more than you might expect, given the frosty way Suicide Squad was received critically – and engagingly crazy. Watching it feels cheerfully excessive and unwholesome, like smoking a cigarette and eating a chocolate bar at the same time.

It’s a bruising movie, being sold on the promise that it’s “scary as hell”, a quote that I worry will mislead expectant horror fans. The scariest thing about The Lodge is how human it all is.

It’s a difficult, often quite brutal, viewing experience, as it needs to be given the subject matter, not only because of the fractured storytelling but because of the devastating lead performance from Hopkins.

Hauser is the star and he keeps the film on track: poignant, lonely and vulnerable – maintaining the tricky balance of laugh-at and laugh-with.

It’s a given that Hanks will nab at least a best supporting actor nomination but it would be all too easy to forget his co-star. The cynic-becomes-a-believer arc is age old but it unfolds here without cliche thanks to an emotionally intelligent script from Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, but mainly because of a marvelous, prickly turn from Rhys.

Queen and Slim doesn’t entirely work. The credibility factor isn’t too high sometimes and there are big set pieces that don’t gel. . . . Yet this is a punchy, watchable film.

Beanpole is moving, disturbing, overwhelming.

Chung’s nuanced portrait of a family figuring out their place in the world is both small and somehow rather grand.

The story is a real-life political chess game with the makings of a gripping race-against-the-clock thriller; but here it drags out into sluggish, dull and unconvincing melodrama.

The rapport between Law and Lively allows the movie both to relax and pick up the pace. Morano puts together good fight scenes, robust stunt work and tasty car chases. It’s destined to be viewed on a million long-haul flights, but it works perfectly well as a thriller.

The Last Thing He Wanted is a thing that no one wanted.

It’s elegantly constructed and precisely composed, with Durkin painstakingly recreating an era without falling into nostalgic overload. But it’s also a drama about a family that keeps us at a distance for the most part.

It’s all so human and messy and it’s refreshing to see a director that doesn’t shy away from such complexity with Colangelo crafting a film that’s every bit as nuanced as the subject at hand.

It is a frustrating filmgoing experience, but still one worthy of your time for the acting alone.

Wendy is undoubtedly self-assured and in-your-face, and the gorgeous location photography certainly has an impact. But it’s wrecked by chapters so lengthy they become simply excruciating.

There’s a lived-in chemistry that’s missing from the pairing and the film’s great many awkward moments between them don’t feel quite as cutting or as uncomfortable as they should. It’s a dark comedy that feels too light.

There’s a lot here to digest, a bitter cocktail with many confounding flavours and its abrasiveness will prove tough-going for some, especially those in search of a more polite and familiarly structured literary biopic. But for those willing to sink into the depths with Shirley, it’s a delicious journey down.

There’s a whiff of familiarity haunting almost every scene and while it would have been rewarding to see Cooke and O’Conner take a few chances or add some more emotional depth, it’s a satisfying enough watch, best viewed with little investment and low expectations.

The Twitter-to-screen adaptation of Zola is as scrappy and imperfect as the original story but just as likable. There’s something unusually compelling about what Bravo does with the material that makes up for its missteps.

The result is as long and as lavish an advert as has ever been produced for the Chinese emergency services. It’s just you might reasonably want your films a little more stirring and challenging, and not quite so obviously rubber-stamped.

This film makes explicit the implied sexuality in the original, which isn’t necessarily a wrong thing to do at all, but everything is very ham-fisted and crass.

Forget about chilling to the bone, The Grudge barely drops below room temperature.

It’s brand management dressed up as insight and while it’s not not entertaining, it’s certainly far from particularly revealing, playing more like a PR exercise then a festival-worthy feature.

It’s amiable, but the real action thrills and the chemistry between the leads isn’t there.

There’s a puppyish charm here.

This is a film in touch with modernity, but I wonder if the livestreamers were quite as apolitical as this film makes them appear. And I was unsure about Zhu’s decision to correct all the images from colour to black-and-white, an arthouse-ification that the film didn’t need.

A powerful, personal piece of work.

There are big scenes, big performances, big emotions here, and audiences will have to recalibrate their antennae for these, especially for the stunning shock that arrives around halfway through. The waves of emotion can get very high, yet they bring exaltation with them.

Like Your Name, it’s thrillingly beautiful: Tokyo is animated in hyperreal intricacy, every dazzling detail dialled up to 11, but it’s less of a heartbreaker.

It’s comedy-drama that is not funny enough to count as a comedy and not plausible enough to count as a drama. You’re going to need a very sweet tooth for it – sweeter than the one I have.

Pamela B Green’s hectic, garrulous, fascinating documentary recovers the story of French film-maker Alice Guy-Blaché.

While Bad Boys for Life has a completely asinine story, generic action, predictable plot beats, moronic dialogue and truly reprehensible politics, I still had a good time.

Too many scenes of sub-vaudeville witchy cavorting suggest Kramer hasn’t completely mastered her own poetic register. But it is bracing to watch her reach for the stylised impact needed to carry her ideas about social identity; exactly the kind of the expressive messiness this wing of the post-#MeToo film industry should be engaging in if the old order isn’t going to reimpose itself.

Her photographs are like very bad dreams and simply looking for any period of time at dead bodies is a very strange experience.

Often moving but also disquieting and even intermittently funny, this drama unfurls a spiritual parable that is uniquely Polish but accessible to all.

Scalpello’s film is livelier pulp than the absence of advance fanfare would suggest.

[A] good-natured and well-intentioned film.

The film never quite rings true.

It’s a cinema of pure energy and grungy voltage, and the Safdies make it look very easy. This will be the year’s most exciting film. You can take that to the bank.

Frustratingly, Lowenstein doesn’t let the musician’s talent speak for itself.

There are kernels of something interesting here: an interracial best friendship and business partnership in today’s America, or navigating best friendship on the cusp of middle age, or maintaining the ethics of your business and passion under the growth mandate of capitalism. It would take thought, and jokes constructed with a motivation other than how to include the word coochie. It would take an understanding that women want to see sex and their bodies talked about filthily on screen, but are smart enough to know that’s not always enough.

What frustrates me most about Underwater is just how very little it brings to the table. It’s a solid, competently directed regurgitation of an oft-told tale that never manages to justify its own existence

A little of the personality has been lost in adapting Shaun’s world for sci-fi (the Wallace and Gromit movie Curse of the Were-Rabbit pulled off horror with a little more finesse). It’s a minor quibble; Shaun is by no means past his prime.

The whole thing is shot and lit in that dull flat way that is mandatory for Hollywood family comedies, and the script is mainly dull, though I concede Key has some nice lines as he gets cross with Brynn’s sarcastic attitude.

There is such artistry and audacity in this new film by the 30-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a hallucinatory experience whose sinuous camera movements take you on a long journey into memory and fear and a night full of dreams.

I can’t help thinking Gillan’s superpower as a writer and performer might actually be comedy. Still, always a compelling screen presence, she’s now a film-maker to watch.

There are no insights to be had – and no laughs.

If you’re going to do a send-off this huge, there are a lot of goodbyes to say, and a lot of loose ends to tie up. The fact that The Rise of Skywalker manages most of them and within a vaguely coherent story is something of an achievement in itself.

Oldman delivers his lines with a strange lethargy and tonelessness, as if – just before speaking – he has just realised that income tax will have to be deducted from his fee.

Ritchie has made an entertaining return to his mockney roots.

It’s warbling warbling warbling piffle.

Given that a fair amount of creative licence has been exercised here, it is strange that Bruce Lee has such a small part to play.

It’s a film that ostentatiously concerns itself with contemporary, zeitgeisty issues such as digital culture and the internet, and whether this is undermining the world of reading and books. But strip out the strained speechifying on that subject and it could have been made at any time in the last 40 years.

As with so many family animations right now, I felt that the script stays on the safe side, with fewer smart lines and ironic gags than I might have wished for, but this is a good-natured entertainment.

Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela is an absorbing and disturbing spectacle, a sensory film about the climate crisis, and it begins with what might be the soundtrack to the end of the world – a persistent tinkling, crackling, trickling.

For pure gonzo outrageousness and steroidal silliness, this action spectacular made for Netflix by Michael Bay has a certain amusement factor and thumpingly unsubtle oomph.

With Hewlett Jr often chronicling events in cool monochrome, shooting in close proximity if not exactly total intimacy, this snappy scrapbook tips the hat to the infectious creativity of Albarn’s travelling circus.

Lauren Greenfield’s film about the Philippines’ former first lady Imelda Marcos reveals a grotesquely self-pitying, wholly unrepentant and very rich woman.

It’s an unwieldy and messy thing, drearily directed and boringly written, taking its agenda seriously yet not providing a robust enough framework to surround it.

Honey Boy is a fluent, heartfelt, tightly structured and well acted personal story.

To say The Cave would break anyone’s heart feels flimsy. Like Ballour, it has a purpose: to focus the world’s attention on the suffering of Syrian people.

What gives Jumanji its likability is that it has the emphases and comedy beats of an animation, but also the performance technique of live action – and the occasional reshuffling of avatars and players lets the actors show off a little bit further. Jumanji’s next level is rather satisfying.

So Long, My Son is a piercingly, profoundly moving picture that peels and exposes the senses.

It is a strange film in some ways, speckled with powerful, insightful moments but also with some strained acting, pulled punches and fudged attitudes, unable to decide if its heroines are compromised through having been loyal Fox staffers.

Disappointingly, it is a borderline dopey, sentimental children’s adventure mostly without the wit and spark that converted grownups and kids to the Lego films.

The story has a moderate charm, but is less baroque and ambitious than many Japanese animations.

What we have is a straightforward murder mystery, but it is told with gusto and humour.

1917 is Mendes’s most purely ambitious and passionate picture since his misunderstood and under-appreciated Jarhead of 2005. It’s bold, thrilling film-making.

This is such a beguiling, generous film from Gerwig. There is a lot of love in it.

What keeps the film going is simply the factual chaotic bizarreness of what is happening: an improvised deal on Iran-Contra levels of crookedness. Sudeikis is authentically bland and slippery.

Despite the film’s obvious interest, it is a bit conceited and stately, a little like Wim Wenders’ movie about Pope Francis, though without the sycophancy.

Boseman carries off the drama with flair and style.

It’s a film with something to say but it’s not all that good at saying it.