This solid roster of acting talent can’t do much about how frankly uninteresting and unfunny The Toxic Avenger is most of the time. As satire or spoof of both superhero movies and scary movies it is abysmally obsolete, and on its own terms as horror-comedy it achieves neither scares nor laughs.

This is a vacuum-sealed package of fan-orthodoxy that never takes off. The euphoria and uplift aren’t there.

Watching all the tried-and-tested elements fail to coalesce just makes us nostalgic for the classics instead. Let us all wish Disney can find that magic again.

The pair never convincingly hate or even mildly dislike each other, there’s no bite there, it’s more like watching a happy couple playfully rag on each other for an audience and we’re never given enough of a reason as to why they wouldn’t be together from the outset.

The dogs give the film a touch of class, but as a whole this is forgettable.

While Hall’s script might keep us at a remove, her direction takes us closer to something that feels more real, managing to conjure the specific thrill of travelling from the airport to the city at night, the hum of possibility increasing with every mile and finding ways to make what could have felt like a static location come alive, putting us in the car right next to her characters.

It’s a silly horror that’s not as good, or as bad, as you’d hoped: neither funny enough nor ever properly scary. That said, there are some cheerfully gory bits and a smattering of decent culture clash gags.

In some ways, Horizon reminded me of Costner’s 2003 western Open Range, but that had a much more interesting performance from Costner and first-rate support from Robert Duvall and Michael Gambon. The acting here is far less impressive, and less directed. There isn’t much on the horizon here.

It’s a Wonderful Knife is diverting enough to start with, as the plot clicks efficiently into motion with the requisite stabbings and impalings. Unfortunately, there’s not enough fuel in the engine – the characters don’t have quite enough to do, we can’t care quite enough about them, and the world-building is nearly-but-not-quite convincing.

The film’s best decision is to cast the great Ralph Ineson as an ambiguous local figure of note. With his basso profundo rumble of a voice and air of rough-hewn potency, he’s always a striking figure on stage and screen.

To its credit, Lisa Frankenstein wears its inspirations on its black lace sleeves, never feigning true originality but there’s only so much looking back we can handle without things being pushed at least a little bit forward. In bringing a subgenre back from the dead, Cody and Williams could have used a little more life.

The rhetoric here is slippery as a Pentecostal snake bathed in holy snake oil, to the point where you almost have to admire the film-makers’ tenacity – especially when it comes to swirly-whirly visual effects showing near-abstract pearly gates and deities presenting themselves as rays of luminosity, like celestial lightbulbs.

It looks like an interesting experiment, but there is something fundamentally inert here.

Laurent, to her credit as director, is less interested in how a shootout can work as an aphrodisiac, and more invested in how it would affect a female friendship.

The yuletide drama takes a more-the-merrier approach to the trading-places trope, offering a smorgasbord of stock characters for couch-bound viewers to relate to.

The script works efficiently and everyone involved sells it hard; there are continuous closeup cutaways to that cute and gurgling baby who never cries no matter what happens. But the sheer robotic sheen of the film in the end works against it.

The movie starts out very serious and shocking and concludes on a note of pure farce, though I have to say Chastain’s performance has a clenched restraint which is marginally more convincing than Hathaway’s operatic but callow displays of hurt and entitlement.

There are one or two laughs here and an attempt at a queer romance, but no real signs of life.

The Tower is a hellish vision of isolation that must surely have been dreamed up during the pandemic lockdown; it made me want to switch on The Road for a bit of light entertainment. Not easy to recommend, this.

Thanks to the sorry state of the action comedy genre as is, Role Play isn’t a total loss but it’s still much too far from a win.

Perhaps Control will gain cult status – or inspire a remake. But Spacey’s eerily detached, jaded presence does not do much for his putative comeback.

For every bright spot in The Shift, and every moment where it has value as a cultural curio or object of camp intrigue, you unfortunately have to sit through a fair amount of blathering on about Kevin’s mission.

The script is mostly tasteless, a buffet of blandness. Instantly forgettable.

It’s a very small mercy, given what he’s working with, but director Jim O’Hanlon is at least able to competently conjure enough Christmas spirit for the film to visually feel of the season, evocative enough to pierce through for those of us who’ve made the journey from London to the sticks for the holidays.

The execution is dire, with cliche-riddled dialogue as cheesy as a packet of Kraft Singles, stodgy pacing, poorly developed characters and shonky acting.

It feels like a short that was expanded without enough thought for how it might work as a whole movie and by the end, even that curiosity has faded too.

There is a strenuous earnestness here, which is made to coexist with entirely artificial romcom dialogue of a kind not spoken by real human beings.

It’s a hurricane of slapstick (some of it in fact very funny) and age-appropriate energetic fight scenes, but lacks the sweetness and charm of the franchise at its best.