All the fire and lifeblood of this idea has been sucked out and we are left with something bland.

Its wild nature won’t be to everyone’s taste, but that’s sort of the point. It’s not a film that cares if you find these women charming or likable – it just cares that you believe them.

The combination of WTF casting and glaring technical limitation proves so distracting you can barely focus on the script’s new intel.

There’s clearly a more nuanced drama to be made from this story but given the scale, there’s still a lot here to praise.

Sometimes the shagginess of the film can make it feel a bit slight and at times it does work better as a concentrated character study, but it’s such a joy to spend this time with McCarthy, drunkenly scheming and grumbling, that it’s hard to complain.

There’s something so constructed and suffocating about watching a tried and tested formula not working, the over-sentimental string-pulling on show for all to see.

It would be difficult to invest in if not for its two main stars who work hard to elevate the overly engineered plot, filling in the emotional gaps left by the haphazard script.

Gilroy avoids the ghoulish extremes of Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals and offers up a believably pretentious battleground. He’s as invested in crafting a fully fleshed art world as he is in creating a full-on horror film and while the two often blend well, at other times, his concoction is far less effective.

The second Lego Movie is even better than the original: a sophisticated new adventure that gives us a new look at how the universality of the Lego universe was more gendered than we thought.

It’s a movie that rescues the tired zombie trope – without insisting on metaphor or satire.

If gym buff Henry Cavill really is quitting the role in the movies, as has been rumoured, the film-makers could do worse than to follow the direction here, opening a vacancy for a skinny, long-haired Superman with an earnest hipstery vibe that screams Adam Driver.

The Breaker Upperers is Sami and Van Beek’s show through and through. The film coasts off the energy and rapport of this affable pair, whose smart-mouthed performances are full of pep and fizz. What they lack in wit they compensate for with sheer likability.

A truly terrible Working Girl knock-off.

As a drama, it’s frustratingly insubstantial, failing to provide enough of an emotional centre or a convincing payoff.

Kidman fearlessly commits to the filth of it all, whether it’s drunkenly fighting off her daughter’s sleazy boyfriend or jerking off a bed-ridden informant, but her radical transformation and some timeframe trickery can’t mask a plot that feels rather empty.

Nadia is shown always surrounded by crowds, almost crushed by them. But her utter loneliness is heartbreaking.

The job itself is bafflingly dull.

Each assassination sequence is so ridiculously protracted and inefficiently constructed that it would make a good running gag if the violence wasn’t the one thing the film seemed to take seriously.

The cinema calendar is chockablock with faulty efforts built around perfectly serviceable ideas, but realized without a modicum of distinction. Serenity offers the less-common inverse: a magnificently terrible idea, executed to perfection.

Too measured and sedate for a post-apocalyptic thriller, yet too barren for a Christopher Nolan-style space and time travel epic, IO appears most akin to The Martian in that it focuses primarily on one person’s grit and resourcefulness to endure and grow plants in an unforgiving place.

There is something visionary in this film.

There is humanity and complexity in this welcome movie, as well as muscular power and unreconciled anger.

Like so many of Shyamalan’s adventures, Glass starts strongly and fizzles, a dramatic droop which is initially camouflaged by the escalating grandiosity of visual rhetoric, something febrile and high-concept that is visionary in everything except having vision.

There are moments of crushing emotional weight but as the film progresses, they start to carry less power.

It is a finely constructed drama, avoiding stuffiness without slipping into camp territory and while diehard historians might disapprove, everyone else will be supremely entertained.

This extraordinary story has unfortunately been turned into a handsomely produced but laborious, drawn-out and dramatically inert movie.

For good or ill, the film does not directly engage with Ginsburg’s views on contemporary feminism and sexual harassment and what is sometimes derisively called identity politics.

An extended and good-looking essay, it serves as a sharp reminder to pay attention to politics and to remember that the personal and the local are political. If you like thinking about that sort of thing, and you care about whether your democracy means anything, this film might make you get up and take some action.

There’s an authenticity underpinning the portrayal of events in The Front Runner that lifts it above the less-than-groundbreaking set-up.

This is a highly enjoyable and bracing piece of work from Wash Westmoreland.

Fyre allows you to marvel, and to feel – how spectacular the hubris, how gross the unfairness – while reminding that whether you bought a ticket or not, you were the audience the whole time.

An evolutionary marvel, Reeves has figured out how to adapt to the hostile environment of mediocrity, and here he takes to the gobbledygook and gaps in logic like a genetically altered fish to water. When the guy’s good, he’s great, and when he’s bad, he’s still serviceable.

The whole affair is misjudged and sickly sweet.

West of Sunshine’s rough, down-at-heel Aussie vibe prompts one to set it alongside other recent bawlers and brawlers, such as Kriv Stenders’ Boxing Day or David Michod’s Animal Kingdom. But Raftopoulos is altogether more protective of his characters, shielding them from full-blown horror, clearly wishing them well even as they stumble and fall, and his film works best in tenderly framing a burgeoning father-son friendship.

The Venerable W does not explicitly debate the existence of evil as such, but it certainly argues that nationalism, ignorance, arrogance, dogmatic religion and fear are its constituent elements. This is a sombre, pessimistic but necessary film.

All Is True is sentimental, theatrical, likable – and unfashionable.

Just as in the book, the memorable part of this story is its ripe black-comic business.

Despite the panache with which the dance sequences are presented, it is frustratingly inert dramatically.

The remarkable career of artist and photographer Mark Hogancamp has been turned into an elaborate and misjudged movie of baffling pass-agg ickiness and pointlessness.

Peter Jackson has created a visually staggering thought experiment; an immersive deep-dive into what it was like for ordinary British soldiers on the western front.

Bale brilliantly captures the former vice-president’s bland magnificence.

I admire it for its craftsmanship and technique, like a machine for creating nostalgia.

Wilson is just, frankly, dull. He is not allowed to develop an interesting character and he suffers from the obvious comparison with Loki, Thor’s adopted brother played with relish by Tom Hiddleston as a velvety-voiced villain. But then Momoa’s good-ol’-boy characterisation of Aquaman itself only goes so far. This is a film that never quite comes up for air.

It’s a gentle, charming study of loneliness.

While Knight and team duck origin-story slavishness that has dogged so much recent franchise work, they succeed in reviving the playful Saturday-morning-serial spirit of the original 80s Transformers.

Too often the film loudly announces its noble intentions with slogans instead of dialogue.

This film floats, but, like a synchro-swimmer doing the “egg beater” leg movement, it needs a fair bit of strenuous activity to keep it upright.

There are some lively things about Mortal Engines, and the performances are game enough. Yet in all its effortful steampunkiness, Mortal Engines isn’t a film which is particularly exciting or funny, and the idea of the “traction city” is a stylistic and visual design tic that you just have to take or leave.

A more unforgiving approach might have been more interesting.

Dead in a Week is striving for a weirdly sentimental kind of black-comic farce, and it doesn’t work.

Plotkin’s relentless button-pushing, coupled to the script’s cringe-inducing yooftalk, instead mark Hell Fest as unmistakably the work of middle-aged execs trying to jab suggestible teenagers back into cinemas.

There’s something so fluid, almost nebulous, about its construction that a chasm starts to open up where you would expect to find some kind of unifying thesis.

It really is very strange, with every idea, every scene, every moment lavishly garnished with floridly serious, mannered language. A little of it goes a long way.

The Judge is a thoughtful, sympathetic study.

Even narratively, the new film is a dud.

Wardle tells a compelling story of the three happy boys who became three unhappy men, their faces shining with a kind of ecstasy in their youth, then muted with sadness and bewilderment in middle age.

Wang’s film is a vital excavation of history in danger of being eroded away.

No songs at all now, and not much fun.

It’s the kind of seemingly effortless success that makes producing a good superhero movie look easy: find a likable hero and a colorful villain, hire someone who knows how to write a punch line, and for Stan Lee’s sake, keep it fun.

The incessant and eerily unsatirical product placement is enough to give you a migraine: especially the complacent Disney cross-promotion.

Between the atrocious green-screen work, the blatant stock footage helicopter shots of city skylines and painfully obvious Toronto-for-America locations, you would be forgiven for thinking this movie was made in 1992.

This bloated, featureless, CGI-heavy movie is not so much stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, as stealing from Guy Ritchie, Batman, Two-Face and a few others – and not giving back all that much to the audience.

There’s a delicate intimacy between the characters that feels raw and authentic and like Coogler, Caple Jr’s indie beginnings seem to steer him toward filling a big film with small moments.

This is a heart-stoppingly suspenseful story. Conroy is a superb commentator on war and all its cruelties and absurdities.

It’s a thoughtful, honest and touching work, especially for women who love women, and also love canals.

At two hours, the film feels a little long, but this is a heartfelt and human drama with the texture of truth and characters to care about.

It has that rare and unmistakable look of an event movie that was huge fun to assemble. Whether you’re watching in Hindi, Tamil or Telugu – or reliant on English subtitles – much of that enjoyment does translate.

If the historical epic exists as a delivery system for swords-and-shields clashes, panoramas of rolling natural vistas and gruff inspirational speeches to those about to die, then Mackenzie has done his job and then some. But his prior films have set the bar a bit higher than that, and this straightforward, unchallenged take on macho valour doesn’t quite reach it.

Assassination Nation has got some gross-out chutzpah, and the surreal marching band scene over the final credits is inspired.

This is a fun film constructed in a smart way: an anti-high art picture that happily prioritises embellishing legend over recreating life.

The script’s twists are a little predictable and some might query the way the Jewish characters are essentially noble ciphers. But, given the rise of the far right in Hungary at the moment, this is a timely tussle with a nation’s collective sense of shame.

This film induces a grisly shiver, like a slug dropped down the back of your neck, and there are some amazing images. But I wondered if it was finally unfinished and anticlimactic.

The big treat is seeing Jett herself talk and watching her still-strong bond with producer and best friend Kenny Laguna: two leather-clad old mates, constantly bickering but inseparable.

Miraculously, Möller turns a handful of phone conversations into a nerve shredder.

This tricksy, exasperating and strangely unenlightening film, with its pointless fictional narrator played by Alan Cumming, purports to tell the story of Orson Welles’s mysterious “lost” masterpiece, The Other Side of the Wind. But in jokily trying to imitate the jabbering chaos of this film’s production history, it fails to give a clear, informative account.

Hosoda’s delicate, painterly style is perfect for capturing Kun’s evanescent imaginary haven – and conveying the message about the moral courage needed to leave it.

This is a watchable, if blandly celebratory and unchallenging portrait of a massive rock institution.

More bah-humbuggery – which is a rational response to the wall-to-wall Christmas jumpers – and less zany antics here would have done the job better.

This documentary by Morgan Neville reveals that he really was just what he seemed to be at first innocent sight: a kind-hearted, square but saintly man who genuinely loved and understood children.

JK Rowling’s creative imagination is as fertile as ever, and newcomers Law and Johnny Depp impress, but the second film in the series is bogged down by franchise detail.

These are brilliant impersonations, the kind that can only be achieved by exceptionally intelligent actors; the superb technique of both is matched by their obvious love for the originals.

There is something deeply crass about this facetious nonsense, and everyone involved in this film might want to reflect that Nazi medical experimentation during the second world war did in fact happen, under circumstances other than these. It was a very real thing, not just a death-metal horror movie gag.

I have to admit to being helplessly enchanted – or suckered – for the most part. There’s wit here and The Nutcracker will take you from zero to Christmas jumper in the opening sequence. What’s missing is the melancholy darkness of ETA Hoffmann’s story. Instead, schmaltz-merchant director Lasse Hallström tugs at the heartstrings and ladles on the syrup.

It’s watchable enough but let down by a strange lack of interest in presenting Salander as anything but an engine to propel a plot. More female action heroes is by no means a bad thing but forcing Salander into Bond’s shoes feels like a misstep, her intellect and survivalism suited to far more interesting pursuits.

Bohemian Rhapsody honours Mercury the showman but never really gets to Mercury the person.

Toning down his usual act in a manner that suggests he’s finally read his reviews, Butler gives it handfuls of dramatic ballast, but this vessel has been badly compromised: any interest seeps out by the frame.

The whole film is like an incomplete fragment, intriguing if frustrating.

The danger of the whole thing collapsing under the weight of its own convolutedness is ever present. That it doesn’t is due to the power of Moore’s closing argument.

Entirely riveting. It made me nostalgic for the BBC’s Young Scientists of the Year programme, which ran from 1966 to 1981. Can’t we revive it?

This is an entirely ridiculous shaggy-dog story, a comedy salted with strangeness and seasoned with surreality.

The problem lies not strictly with what’s on screen – which on its own, reduced terms is basically watchable and not unlikable – but in what’s been elided or forgotten about in the rush to duplicate the original’s surprise success: any sustained wit or personality.

People will want to make their own minds up about the film, but for me there is something worryingly crass and naive in it.

This is mass-market entertainment with a radical bent, a loudspeaker blast of a teen movie.

The habitual calm and gentleness of Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s film-making here has a sharp edge and an overtly political point – as well as a flourish of violent destruction and despair that blindsided me.

Been So Long has a sweet-natured openness. It balances the tough realities of life in the city with the buoyant possibilities of romance isn’t easy, and succeeds a lot of the time. Michaela Coel is tremendous in the leading role.

An interesting and worthwhile drama.

The conceit is nicely done, and the film’s unexpectedly heartfelt message about empathy and looking at the world through someone else’s eyes just about makes up for its bland animation, smart-arsed script and generic clappy-blah songs.

If you’re looking for world building, you’re come to the right place. Yet its architects prove keener to flytip this secondhand imagery than they are to sort through it.