The Beasts is a strange film in many ways, difficult to pin down tonally or generically, but it leaves a trail of unease in the mind.

Not only is it as derivative as chatbot-written free verse, it’s also not even pleasant to look at. Walk like an Egyptian very quickly away from the multiplex.

A shiver of disquiet runs right through it.

This is lightweight, forgettable stuff.

The film feels over-determined and self-satisfied.

It has the ruminative lightness, almost weightlessness, the watercolour delicacy and reticence of the emotions, the sense of the uncanny, the insistent play of erotic possibility and that Murakami keynote: a cat.

Memories of Murder actually inspired a solution to its case; perhaps The Night of the 12th could do the same. Either way, it’s a brutally engrossing drama.

The script does a solid job of making it an accessible world to those not already steeped in it although Goldstein and Daley, writing alongside Michael Gilio, are less effective with the film’s many attempts at comedy.

For me it never gets to grips with the real issue for Pornhub, OnlyFans or indeed Facebook: are these sites publishers or platforms? If they derive profit from the content they host, then should they be responsible for it, or not?

The “more is more” approach (hallucinations, orgies, pissing, stabbing, shooting, splitting, piercing etc) is attention-securing in the moment but oddly forgettable after, like waking up from a nightmare you can’t remember. Infinity Pool is too hectic to truly haunt.

If the plot is a little sketchy, the action, conversely, is drum tight.

Somehow it doesn’t all come together, delivering neither the stab of actual fear nor the satisfaction of real, plausible psychological insight.

James’s sleek telling excels at intertwining the personal and the political with illuminating detail.

That sweaty, close-to-a-nervous breakdown tense feeling of being trapped is nowhere in the film. And where the script goes in its pulpy nasty final twist felt to me like a disturbingly misogynist move.

Despite the uneven execution, Condor’s Nest has just enough bite.

Braff puts us through a gruelling “relapse” montage as Allison hits the pills again after an illusory breakthrough and then a “recovery” montage as she gets it together. And the film’s single valuable lesson – the one about not looking at your phone while driving – is all but forgotten.

Abraham Lincoln's second term, with its momentous choices, has been brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg as a fascinatingly theatrical contest of rhetoric and strategy.

It sure as hell got under mine. Jonathan Glazer's sci-fi horror is loosely adapted, or atmospherically distilled, by Walter Campbell from the 2000 novel by Michel Faber. The result is visually stunning and deeply disturbing: very freaky, very scary, and very erotic. It also comes with a dog whistle of absurdist humour that I suspect has been inaudible for some American reviewers on the international festival circuit so far.

It’s heartfelt and sweetly earnest, but humdrum and disappointingly unmagical. The animation doesn’t help: characters speak with blank paralysed faces as if they’ve had botched Botox.

Tetris finds its fun in the details of contracts and the specifics of deal-making, realising that even when it’s not on a screen in your hands, it’s all one big game.

A director like Jonathan Demme or David Fincher would have gone for the jugular on this kind of material, but writer-director Matt Ruskin seems a little squeamish and keeps everything on the right side of contemporary taste. The chill of fear is missing.

This new Shazam film is cordial, with a puppyish good nature and an awareness of its own silliness.

There’s a little bit of fun and interest along the way and Lange has some fun with her eccentric persona, but this feels under-energised.

Those who appreciated the original for its brutal, sinewy agility have another thing coming: a lumbering, stultifying gargantua of a film willing to kill everything except its darlings.

It’s not quite the toxic disaster it’s being treated as but 65 is nowhere near the giddy lark it should have been, crash-landing somewhere in the middle instead.

There is something winning in this calm, walking-pace drama – and the landscape is amazing.

The standout star is the passionate and fierce Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a Korean-American musician for whom music was an escape from racism and sexism.

The awful truth is that this is a generic derivative horror script.