This film has an audience, certainly, but it feels very derivative.

There is no accumulation of drama or tension or intellectual revelation and the setpiece shootout is ultimately valueless. What exactly is it saying that we didn’t know already? The wait for Aster to recover his directorial form goes on.

The movie has a high gloss and sheen, like something by Nancy Meyers, which creates a diverting disconnect, yet it flinches from the recognisable, tragicomic reality of a bad marriage.

Without firm grounding in reality, Him can only skid, hopelessly, into the realm of kabuki theater and make a muddle of its football critique.

Halyna Hutchins is the movie’s saving grace. Without her work, it wouldn’t be worth a look at all.

The sheer pointlessness of everything that happens subtracts the oxygen and even Fanning’s imperishable star quality can’t save it.

It’s not as if some b-plot threads are left dangling but instead, the entire film is left shoddily unfinished.

It’s all too clumsily calculated to deliver the raucous two-drinks-in blast it so desperately wants us to have and in a year that’s already given us better, bolder B-movie examples than usual (Sam Raimi’s Send Help and monkey-gone-mad horror Primate), it creaks that much louder. It is film-making far too in love with itself to care if you love it too.

Everything here is out of the top drawer of production value: but it never really comes to passionate life.

Bertolucci has recently called himserf "an amateur Buddhist". But he is still very much a professional filmmaker and these two sides of him don't always match up. [08 May 1994, p.27]

In many ways this fairly nondescript film is the perfect vehicle for potentially dystopian tech: it’s under the radar, inauspicious and not likely to find itself widely watched.

The estimable cast all do their utmost but the overall effect is frustratingly implausible.

Nothing can distract us from a script that just doesn’t work, family dynamics we don’t believe, jokes we don’t laugh at and characters we don’t care about. Oh. What. Fun. is anything but.

The younger Day-Lewis shows promise as a film-maker – Anemone certainly looks serious, the correct scowls and swirling skies and wordless, eerie montages to suggest weighty themes, big emotions and ominous suspense. The tools to back up that style with emotional punches that land like the real ones of the brothers – best believe they tussle it out, because of course – are not yet refined, but in this father-son duo, at least, I have faith.

The house is just there and the characters waft through it. Gray admirers might prefer Gray Matters, Marco Antonio Orsini’s documentary on the subject.

The film is a derivative, if well intentioned, piece of fan fiction.

Sirāt is a path to nowhere, an improvised spectacle in the Sahara; it is very impressive in the opening 10 minutes but valueless as it proceeds, and a pointless mirage of unearned emotion.

This frankly odd film is misjudged and naive about the implications of its Holocaust theme. Its bland, TV-movie tone of sentimentality fails to accommodate the existential nightmare of the main plot strand, or indeed the subordinate question of when and whether to put your elderly parent in a care home.

There are noble intentions to Good Fortune, in ways related to both the resurrection of the big-screen comedy and its of-the-moment through-line about the increasingly untenable class divide in America, but also not a lot of laughs, the idea of its existence more appealing than the experience of watching it.

At least the makeup and the gore effects are competently executed, making the ensemble look like blood smeared meat-puppets on a rampage.

As ever, Perry – who takes top billing once more as this film’s writer, director and executive producer – engages with many ideas, but none that he seems to fully understand. That includes Black women, whom he does a tremendous disservice to once again.

This top-notch cast gives it their considerable all, but to my taste the syrup content was in the end too high.

It doesn’t, in fact, quite fall into place.

It plays as pseudo-feminist horror for viewers who don’t really like women, or, for that matter, men. Or people of any gender. It’s all curdled but not in an especially interesting way, although there is no denying that Thorne has a basic charisma that holds the screen, and Ryan Phillippe is well cast as a grouchy cop whose agenda doesn’t mesh with Clare’s.

It might work if Rita was a more appealing protagonist, capable of wringing out gallows humour or personal tragedy from her predicament.

Much less convincing are the shots involving a malevolent maine coon that attacks a drug dealer and turns into a blur of fake cat and visual effects. But the moment is so gloriously cheesy and ridiculous that on its own it almost makes this something worth paying for.

It’s all boringly plain sailing until it suddenly isn’t and the film takes a turn from romcom into something more dramatic.

Visually ravishing though it is, Scarlet is a hefty disappointment from director Mamoru Hosoda, a leading light from whom we expect more than an incoherent and overbearing fantasy.