This awkward, misjudged, occasionally sexy film has seeds of a radical, fresh story and flashes of directorial brilliance but is hobbled throughout by the confounding decision to write her 26-year-old main character as either insensitively neuro-divergent or more sheltered child than adult.

Hall, always a joy to watch, shows yet another, more subdued, side of her prodigious craft. But the film fails to build real suspense, and the scary scenes feel rote and often inelegant, like ticking off a college-horror-movie shot list.

Everything about this robotically made movie looks derivative and contrived; the videogame aesthetic is dull and the quirky high concept plays like a pound-shop knockoff of Inside Out and Soul.

It has the feeling of a short film stretched beyond its limit, with all that early tension dissipating, and while there’s certainly something jolting about the gonzo violence in the finale, it’s otherwise ineffectual.

Nanny, as a whole, packs a rather toothless punch. It feels loosely assembled – chock-full of original ideas, intriguing imagery and plot devices, many of which either oddly wind up as loose ends or get resolved in a hurry.

A pacifist parable taking a brave stand against nothing, totally removed from the sociocultural landscape of today’s Sweden, it sounds out like one of Caroline’s screams into the howling Scandinavian wind – impassioned, futile, heard by no one.

There’s never really enough for the underserved trio of actors to sink their teeth into, although they all manage to coast comfortably enough.

Dario Argento’s return to directing after a 10-year absence has its moments of macabre and melodramatic invention.

When a writer-director of some undeniable talent throws so much at the wall, it’s inevitable that elements will stick and in Vengeance, there’s just about enough to make us curious to see what happens when Novak learns to tighten his focus. Vengeance is less the film we need right now and more the one he thinks we do but hopefully next time, he’ll figure out how to make something we want instead.

There are stabs of the same fear and revelation that made The Beast so fascinating, but this is in the main unfocused and undisciplined, and the isolation of each character merely drains the film of oxygen.

The film stands or falls by its claims to deadpan comedy – but this is heavy-handed and unsatisfying.

This is a glossy piece of Netflix content, but it relies very heavily on NBA fan buy-in for the drama fully to work; there is a continuous series of recognition jolts provided by the stars and legends playing themselves.

A regular beat of tension and release plays out as people get saved only to face new dangers, following the template of disaster films since the beginning of cinema, but it’s done well here. The visual effects are impressive, especially the water, which is so notoriously hard to animate.

This could have been a good premise, but the basic idea of the pandemic and bubbling up itself now feels spurious and dated, and there just aren’t enough funny lines to carry this film through its punishing 126-minute running time.

The sequel alternately treads water and splashes around frantically in search of an identity. Never settling on whether he wants his film to be Alien, Jaws, Jurassic Park or Sharknado, Wheatley serves up a bouillabaisse of all four.

Amid all this dross there is a charming scene in where a young couple, played by Natalie Burn and Michael Sirow, banter and giggle: their screen chemistry is like something out of a Richard Linklater movie. What a shame one of the characters gets murdered not long after.

Writer-director Brendan Muldowney is better at contriving striking images of horror, filmed with umbral gloom by cinematographer Tom Comerford, than at the character and story stuff.

Ticket to Paradise may well do great business to those looking for some escapist fun, and that’s entirely understandable. But I found the wacky double-act of George and Julia slightly hard work.

It never really feels like we’re on a journey anywhere we haven’t been before, with Spellbound far too bewitched with the past to create any of its own magic.

Not to be a Scrooge, but the occasional eye-gouge with a tree-topper star or string-light garotte only lends a frosty air of resourcefulness to a film with coal for brains.

There are moments in Along for the Ride . . . where the magic that cements a teen film seems within reach. For a few seconds here or there, you can feel it. The rest of it just passes by like the tide.

This pious work is clearly designed to send believers into a state of ecstasy, but it may be a bit of a slog for the secular.

Tonally, it’s all over the place, that aforementioned sap curdled together with Wilson’s trademark crudeness, an R-rated comedy that wants to be both sweet and salty, a balance it never manages to perfect.

There are also good bits in this based-on-a-true-story drama, including the aforementioned performances and a commitment to theology so sincere it’s not afraid to bore an audience with lots of pin-head-fine debates about Godhood. If Gibson weren’t part of the package it might be possible to like it more.

The movie is fundamentally silly, with tiringly shallow characterisation and broad streaks of crime-drama intrigue, which only underline the fact that not a single word of it is really believable.

[Toby Meakins] doesn’t quite take enough advantage of his reality-shifting game sequences (the Englund voice cameo serves to remind us just how wild Wes Craven made those nightmares way back when) but it’s a cut above the average Netflix genre guff.

Even before the dramatic left turn, all the way over the cliff and into flames, this ho-hum road trip comedy drama was already hard to like, an unspecific sitcom of eye-rolls and finger-wagging.

Nine Bullets is unfocused to the point where you might want to scream with frustration.