Assiduously replicating its predecessor’s strengths and weaknesses, the one thing it risks is that a three-word summary – Hindi Forrest Gump – would tell you all you ever needed to know about it.

The script and direction by prolific low-budget film-maker James Cullen Bressack do spring a few mild surprises and minor twists to spice things up. That doesn’t quite make up for the tackiness elsewhere.

The performance styles of Behrens and Hoya are quite different – Hoya is more opaque – but this is a pointed, candid drama.

An adrenaline-pumping action fest that is ironic in many respects, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash swerves towards the mystical and the spiritual in the latter half, becoming a earnest and potent critique on the trappings of masculinity.

It’s a deeply uncomfortable film but also weirdly gripping.

It looks and feels like an exceptional student film...Choppy editing and erratic time-shifts tend to undercut rather than enhance the character Ryan has magicked up. [5 May 2006, p.8]

We didn’t need a Predator prequel (have we ever really needed any prequel?) but Prey is a nimble beast, far nimbler than it could have been and while it’s not quite enough to make us crave more from a franchise that’s already given us too much, it’s enough to justify the journey way back.

The saving grace here should be the win for the Filipino community, commanding a big-screen moment with a cast of undervalued Asian stars. But they’re all short-changed by a hypocritical sense of heritage and pride.

It has a stubborn, almost literary feel for character that accumulates a baleful momentum by the time the finale hits.

There will always be room for a good, breezy romcom, and the set-up of an Indian wedding is ripe for one. As churn-able Netflix content goes, Wedding Season is on the better end of the spectrum.

It’s another film to leave you sighing over New York’s lost 70s heyday of gritty reality and creativity and danger.

A film that tries to empathise with everybody runs the risk of pleasing no one, and no doubt there will be viewers enraged by this or that detail or unspoken perspective, but the ambition is nevertheless pretty impressive and on the whole well executed.

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 rattles strenuously on and on and on with unexciting and uninterestingly choreographed fights, cameos which briefly pep up the interest and placeholder non-lines where the funny material should have gone.

Whodunnits require so many moving parts to be expertly placed and played with, and, ultimately, the script isn’t as sleek as it needs to be with a board as ambitious as this. The game is a fun one, but you might feel a little cheated once it’s over.

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.

The ending chorus of conclusions wraps up a bit too neatly, though that doesn’t invalidate the enjoyably deranged ride before.

Not Okay is like many “internet movies” before it – approaching uncanny valley, somewhat obvious, just a little off — but this unsettling darkness makes it a solid entry into the canon of just-okay social media films.

True to its animated predecessors, Super-Pets pulls off what other superhero entries have struggled to summon from the CGI universe: lighthearted fun and self-aware humor woven with real evergreen themes – the fear of change, learning to love friends through transitions, trusting that love will remain through the seasons.

Every actor involved sells it hard and it’s good natured, but the unbelievability factor is just too high.

This family could be blown into pieces. And yet an irrepressible defiance and comic energy bubbles under every scene.

They really were amazing personalities: almost like children, although they came to be depressed that their work was not inspiring governments to work on evacuation protocols.

There’s perhaps not enough new material to justify a re-release, but as a whole it’s still great, and a reminder of just what a class act Michael was.

Veteran French director Jean-Jacques Annaud serves up some high-octane film-making with this old-fashioned disaster movie, composed in a docu-realist style, about the catastrophic fire that engulfed Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral in 2019.

Traucki manipulates the suspense competently enough, but this film mostly depends on tedious jump-scares for its effect, and has a few too many scenes where someone looks around in terror at the water with a worried expression.

Juggling palace politics, magical animals and medical ethics, The Deer King can’t get over major pacing problems: the emotional moments are not given enough time to land, as the plot rushes to its next world-building intrigue.

The film really comes alive when it simply lets Donna be the star of the show. From her spontaneous dancing in the streets to a moving reunion with her sister, her warmth and vivacity towards others distils the essence of LGBTQ+ solidarity.

A very touching and insightful film.