The writer-directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg really have no idea how to fill the gaps between deaths and even at 92 minutes, we’re left with something that feels so much longer.

What sweetness and charm Prom Dates does muster is thanks to Lester alone, whose comic timing is sharp and whose performance of a girl growing comfortable in her sexuality over one crazy night actually conjures the sense of a real person.

As a whole, it’s not exactly a masterpiece, but amiable and funny in a way that’s much harder to achieve than it looks.

I can think of few documentaries that are more honest, self-scrutinising and revelatory about ageing, familial love and its limits, and the whole tragicomic process of dying.

Without the garish excess, the script is rote and rickety, a ride to the wild side that’s all out of gas.

It’s all a fizzy, funny, convincingly romantic delight, a tribute to the craft of making big movies with big stunts that is heartfelt in its appreciation without taking itself too seriously.

With Hathaway at its centre, The Idea of You is on far surer footing, in small moments almost threatening to be something far greater but settling into being perfectly acceptable instead, a plane movie par excellence.

Despite quality performances from both leading lads, Land of Bad won’t exactly knock anyone’s socks off.

The Animal Kingdom seems squeamish about going for the jugular in the way a proper genre movie would.

While the core conceit is sort of cute, Razooli really can’t direct actors who aren’t already seasoned with prior experience.

The successes are in large part owed to Merced’s sensitive, grounded performance, her open face able to pass amusement, anxiety, self-loathing vitriol, panic attack and relief like quicksand. Her performance alone can absorb the film’s rougher edges, vaguer lines and dramatic whiffs, especially when assisted by a strikingly natural Cree.

There’s a mega-helping of daftness, silliness and goofiness in this wacky British comedy of Ye Olden Medieval Dayes from screenwriter Andy Riley and director Curtis Vowell.

ISS does deliver one knock-out terrific death in space: a screwdriver to the neck, perfect little bubbles of blood floating prettily away in zero gravity.

Violence and tragedy is where the story is naturally heading, and this trajectory is plain in every scene and every shot: a world where aggression must either be violently and dangerously resisted or accepted.

The film makes cogent, sweeping sense of the record for perhaps the most illuminative, swift and damning case against the institution of policing – the real fourth estate, as one subject puts it – of the many investigations conducted in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. But there’s a dryness to its procedure.

There’s bits and pieces of entertaining stuff here, a few sharp lines and a gonzo final shootout, but the overall tone of cliche is a bit wearing, correctly signalled in the title, which appears to misremember the phrase “saints and scholars”.

Rebel Moon almost certainly didn’t need to be two multiple-cut movies. It probably could have gotten by as zero. But as a playground for Snyder’s favorite bits of speed-ramping, shallow-focusing and pulp thievery, it’s harmless, sometimes pleasingly weird fun.

As the plotting falls apart and the wheels truly come off, there’s nothing that strong direction and a work-hard cast can do to keep Abigail from sucking. There’s a lot of blood here but very little else.

It is a good idea and there are good moments in the film, especially at the very beginning when Anna and Aleks have a bizarre encounter with the old woman herself, Rita Concannon, strikingly played by Olwen Fouéré. But then things begin to slide. There are however some resonant ideas here.

As another one of the director’s mid-budget, mid-level crowd-pleasers, it mostly works – well-made enough to distract in the moment but not quite enough to last in the many after, unlikely to catapult him to the top or sink him to the bottom.

Sometimes it feels like a cross between a film studies lecture and what happens when you leave YouTube to keep autoplaying while the all-powerful algorithm suggests more and more content.

Moment by moment, line by line and scene by scene, Challengers delivers sexiness and laughs, intrigue and resentment, and Guadagnino’s signature is there in the intensity, the closeups and the music stabs.

This is a watchable, if somewhat stagey film, and these jump-scare visions, leaping out of the ambassador’s tormented subconscious, might have worked better in the theatre.

Even the fantastical elements don’t make that much sense, magic with rules that are loose and undefined, leaving us with an eye-roll of an ending we can see from a mile away.

Don’t Tell Mom is a justifiably sweet feat that makes latchkey kids across the generations feel seen. Refreshingly, it represents real growth for an industry that would much rather be left to its own devices.

This unbearably cute joint selfie of a movie is gruesomely indulgent and entitled from the first; it allows Ewan McGregor little or no opportunity to show his natural wit and flair and there is oddly no real chemistry between him and his co-star.

Civil War works on the level of intellectual exercise: a film clear-eyed on the horrors of war and trauma in which journalists are the unsentimental heroes, and which relies on the audience to supply their own assumptions of American politics rather than spoon-feed reality. But the distance makes for an at times frustrating watch – stimulating on the level of adrenaline, not emotions.

Back to Black is essentially a gentle, forgiving film and there are other, tougher, bleaker ways to put Winehouse’s life on screen – but Abela conveys her tenderness, and perhaps most poignantly of all her youth, so tellingly at odds with that tough image and eerily mature voice.