While Marcellus, an ageing octopus feeling stifled in his imprisonment, is meant to act as a spiritual mirror to Tova, the film ultimately isn’t all that interested in the more delicate work of making peace with what can’t be brought back.

It’s a bit much, to be frank. But at the time, the all-hands-aboard desire to take so absurd a premise and insist it be about something offers its Midsomer Murders-lite world a sense of weight and substance. The melodrama helps land the comedy. And there’s some real charm to be found here.

Rebuilding, instead, is a lovely rendering of what feels like half a story. It’s not the action its title promises, but the preceding moment of retreat to lick one’s wounds.

You, Me, & Tuscany is its own micro-miracle, a pure romcom where its protagonist isn’t jaded by romance, has no impulse to deconstruct the modern relationship, and isn’t forced through any preliminary Hinge date humiliation ritual. Here, all we need are two very charming and attractive people – Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page – and the soft, undulating hills of the Italian countryside.

Where in the public consciousness is the line drawn between thief and Robin Hood? Van Sant may ask the question, but his vision’s too narrow to answer it.

It’s not a matter of vengeance against the elite but survival. And Weaving bellows and grunts like a wounded creature trying to get the boot off their back.

The only problem with They Will Kill You is that it’s confused iconography with substance. It operates under the assumption that if it creates enough of a mystique around its protagonist – and there’s every trick in the book here, to the point it feels as if someone’s playing paddle ball with the camera – then everything else will fall neatly in line.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie offers very little to audiences, young or old, who don’t already know these characters and spaces like the back of their hand. But, hey, if you take a tequila shot every time something explodes, you’ll have a great drinking game on your hands.

Ultimately this is an expensive Netflix documentary that’s provided maximum exposure to individuals who consider any kind of attention a win. It leaves a bitter, nasty taste in the mouth.

How to Make a Killing is too timid to either defend his actions or to render him genuinely unlikeable, leaving Becket as nothing but a formless pile of dough.

When the real shock occurs, it doesn’t feel cosmic so much as deliberate manipulation by a filmmaker’s hand. The rhythm feels off.

What’s worked before works here just as well. Tommy Shelby persists.

There’s a playfulness there, and a real burst of imaginative thinking, but Gyllenhaal has regrettably pulled a Frankenstein herself. All those ideas, yet they haven’t quite stitched up together to make a beautiful corpse.

Franco provides a platform for his two leads, Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, to give blisteringly intense performances. But the film would surely have benefitted from a little more nuance and delicacy.

This warped satire is ultimately neither as shocking nor as funny as you initially hope it’s going to be.

As Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die gets weirder and weirder, it only further provides the evidence of its own thesis.

It’s small in scope and may prove relatively minor in Cooper’s filmography. But, still, the intentions of Is This Thing On? feel worthy. Here’s a filmmaker fully invested in what divides the personal from the creative, and willing to look at it from all angles.

With Fraser as her figurehead, it’s certainly a work of broad and deep compassion. But there are self-imposed limitations that you’d wish Hikari and her co-writer Stephen Blahut would cross, if not purely out of curiosity.

Affleck and Damon, at least, try to pump a little crotchety humanity into their characters. But any hope of suspense, any genuine mystery over who (if anyone) is on the path of betrayal, is swiftly dashed by how poorly defined these suspects are.

The problem with this brand of Hollywood tale is that, by excessively romanticising their subjects, they diminish their humanity.

Paul Feig nods to ‘Rebecca’ and ‘Vertigo’ in this pulpy adaptation of the Freida McFadden bestseller, which has a secret weapon in the form of a quite brilliant Amanda Seyfried.

Fire and Ash, I’m sure, will find its place in the canon. But that doesn’t excuse its flaws.

I guess we should at least be thankful we’ve been spared the monstrosity of a CGI-rendered Judy Garland as Dorothy (that said, there is some extremely disconcerting use of de-ageing tech elsewhere). But, as those witches might say, one good deed hardly changes things for the better.

Day-Lewis, reliably, commands the whole piece, with that twinkle in his eye that spells either mischief or the inciting spark of an inferno.

While it pleads for us to reckon with the ugliest of truths, it shuts the curtains before its own reckoning is done.

The eerie prescience of Stephen King’s dystopian source material – written in 1972 and set, of all years, in 2025 – has been wiped from this bland reboot, which also seems to know it’s miscast its leading man.

Deliver Me from Nowhere’s Springsteen is untouchable and untethered – little more than a bundle of hurt feelings floating aimlessly across the Garden State.

Netflix’s The Woman in Cabin 10 is Agatha Christie for the age of mindless scrolling. It’s a murder mystery that only works if you’re not really paying attention, and are happy in the fact the characters on screen aren’t really either.

What lends Dead of Winter its evocative chill is the way all three women here – kidnapper, kidnapped, and rescuer – are left with nothing but themselves to rely on. There’s no one out here to care for or support them, turning survival into a daily matter of physical and psychological endurance.

Swiped is far more interested in convincing us that Bumble’s earned its feminist credentials than in exploring what being a “feminist company” actually means when there are billions of dollars on the table.

Kogonada neither wrote nor edited A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, and so we’re largely lacking in the sophistication department, or the soft musicality he’s been able to construct in his earlier films.

Then again, could a film in which a band of elder statesmen consider a loose collection of half-baked thoughts to be art itself be a satire of how some music legends like to conduct themselves? Maybe. But then you’d think under those circumstances I’d be laughing more.

Steve is a thoughtful, impassioned film in practice. Yet it’s deliberately made itself secondary to its source material.

While Honey Don’t! prods at something new and quite poignant, an idea about how survivors see themselves and that loaded word “victimhood”, it ultimately struggles to make much sense out of itself and its oddball cast.

This is about as graceful and fitting an endnote as you could hope for.

In what could easily have been a banana skin of a role, Law is surprisingly sure-footed. The British star has clearly studied his subject closely. He captures the Russian president with metronomic precision – his mannerisms, his cunning, his smirks and scowls.

The Toxic Avenger is funny and charming, with a joke rate as consistent as this year’s The Naked Gun, and snappy editing that mimics the Edgar Wright brand of genre parody.

For all Del Toro’s formal mastery, this Frankenstein is ultimately short of the voltage needed really to bring it to life.

Whatever the genre, Aronofsky tends to oscillate between two modes: the savagely harrowing or the savagely sentimental. And it’s all there in Caught Stealing, but at such a low simmer that the film feels almost vacant.

No matter how enticing the prospect may sound on paper, and even with the efforts of director Chris Columbus (of Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire fame), the whole affair is so flimsy you’ll lose nothing from watching it on an iPad while cooking dinner.

The talent of tomorrow has to play second fiddle to a generation’s inability to let go of the past. And that’s something a quick body swap can’t solve.

So much time in The Legend of Ochi is spent traversing these beautiful landscapes looking for something to grab onto – a thought or an emotion – but there’s nothing really here other than the simple conflict between nature and the men quick to whip out their shotguns when faced with the unknown.

The Bad Guys 2 has just enough wit and spirit that you can take your kids to see it without feeling like you’re doing a disservice to their intellectual development.

In fact, all the ingredients are perfectly lined up here, and, in the right combinations, and with the pure wonderment of Michael Giacchino’s score, The Fantastic Four: First Steps does shimmer with a kind of wide-eyed idealism. And that’s lovely.

While director Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda can certainly shoot cars as well as they can planes – it’s all plumes of smoke from the tyres and the bone-rattling rumble of starting engines – F1 represents the spiritually bone-dry, abrasive inverse to all of Maverick’s giddy pleasures.

Even if 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer, Boyle’s still a largely compelling filmmaker, and the film separates itself from the first instalment by offering something distinctly more sentimental and mythic than before.

All that’s really changed is that How to Train Your Dragon is now distinctly less charming and less playful than before, with even its pièce de résistance Toothless losing some of the cute factor (he looks real mean when he growls).

It does, in its DNA, certainly feel like a part of the Wickiverse, even if Reeves’s inevitable cameo feels forced. And while it doesn’t add much depth to the world, it at least gives credence to the amusing suggestion that these films do, in fact, take place in an alternate dimension where every person on the planet is a professional assassin.

There’s little effort to make us understand the failed systems that led them to this point, or the new normalcy they’re forced to adjust to – indeed, any of the more subtle, complex facets of this story.

Hermanus gestures towards a sweeping story and in the process loses the pulse of the material that is there. As the window dressing is lavishly built up, the love story itself slips away.

Alpha has some tremendous moments, but the movie is undermined by its own dense and impenetrable storytelling style. It would surely have worked far better as an immersive installation piece than as a two hour feature.

This is a film that’s fun to complain about.

If everything seems familiar from countless other crime dramas, at least the film is very slickly and creatively directed by Lee.

There is simply no one for Lawrence to bounce off and no structure against which to craft an emotional trajectory. She is dancing on her own.

Another Simple Favour has no aspirations beyond being a quick morsel. And a morsel it is.

What is meaningful, I suppose, is that you never once stop thinking about Hutchins while watching Rust, nor the shoddy work environment that led to her death. . . But this is a very hollow, very dark victory.

The Surfer is what you might call a slow-burn Cage. There’s the manic, hollering prize at the end (and even a line of dialogue worthy of a future meme), but also plenty of the actor’s more undervalued speciality – the expression of gargantuan helplessness, the look of a fish who’s been thrown to land and left to die

Coogan doesn’t quite have the earnestness (and perhaps no actor would have the earnestness) to sell the scenes in which Tom monologues to the penguin about his political apathy or the inevitable tragic backstory that made him who he is.

The bigger crisis at the heart of the film is its inability to justify why we should have come back here in the first place.

We’ve seen all this before, but at least The Amateur finds its own way to get the job done.

There’s a through line, buried in here somewhere, about how it’s harder to be creative, easier to destroy. Unfortunately, A Minecraft Movie proves its own point. Creativity took too much effort. Easier to destroy the spirit of the video game instead.

Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.

Holland, with its floral wallpapers and porcelain figurines, and scenes that consistently end with a flare of violins, gestures aggressively towards kitsch. But Sodorski’s story is plain, dry melodrama. There’s not a lick of the camp, the satirical, or the demented in sight.

Pileggi’s screenplay and Levinson’s scattershot direction, like De Niro, make little out of the clash of ideologies at the film’s centre. What could be biblical, feels passionless.

There’s not much about Opus, really, that fully convinces.

It’s a busy catalogue of gruesome absurdities that’s more consciously surrealist than the Final Destination series’s Mouse Trap-style executions, akin instead to the bizarro corpses crowding the afterlife’s waiting room in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), with a splash of Peter Jackson’s early, gore-splattered horror-comedies.

The Texan auteur’s new film – his 22nd, and the first of two due for release in this year alone – boasts a fine, quirky and courageous performance from Ethan Hawke, but it’s a stagey affair which at times becomes very stilted.

The idea that it serves a film like September 5 to tell its story through an apolitical lens isn’t just wrong: it’s laughable.

The latest Marvel blockbuster – starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford – has drawn backlash from all political corners. But a film this bland and flavourless doesn’t warrant such handwringing.

Whannell has the right idea. Wolf Man just needed a little more time in the lab.

All emotions here are predetermined. The point is that we’ve simply been given licence to feel.

The Oscar-winner behind ‘Moonlight’ and ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ can barely be found in this dreary and anonymous bit of franchise mining.

Despite the drip-fed reminders of contemporary history (the Cuban Missile Crisis! the Kennedy assassination! Weren’t the Sixties wild, man!), A Complete Unknown struggles to fully engage with Dylan’s relationship to that intersection between politics and music.

Conclave turns ritual into the hysteria of a murder mystery, the tension of a political conspiracy, the pressurised force of a criminal heist.

Moana 2 would have made for a very nice television series – as it was originally meant to be. But as a reskinned theatrical sequel to one of Disney Animation’s biggest hits, it’s a little harder to justify.

When its conclusions end up so tidy and emotionally pat, you can’t but wonder what it’d be like if Nightbitch were actually allowed to run free.

Audiard’s efforts don’t always pay off, and in Emilia Pérez they come across as impassioned but featherweight.

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande showcase phenomenal vocal ability in this adaptation of the blockbuster musical, but they’re let down by a film that is aggressively overlit and shot like a TV advert.

Really, all you can do is take what joy you can from Paddington in Peru, because its pleasures are rarer but still sweet.

It’s hard to say how these films will be remembered in the grand scheme of comic book history, but, with The Last Dance, we can at least be reminded that sometimes they actually managed to have fun with these things.

The takeaway from Woman of the Hour is that this is not the story of an individual evil, but mass complicity from a society that allowed Alcala to continue his reign of terror far longer than it should’ve.

The Apprentice’s most effective takedown of Donald Trump is how unremarkable it makes him seem. This may render Ali Abbasi’s portrait of the early days of the former president and current presidential candidate a little monotonous, but it makes its point succinctly.

The Substance doesn’t quite gel as it should, but it’s potent.

The Critic – adapted by Notes on a Scandal’s Patrick Marber from a novel by former Independent film critic Anthony Quinn – is, ultimately, a story about power. I wouldn’t expect relatability in this case, but I do expect substance. Here, it’s largely absent.

It lacks the intimate and the specific. But, hell, Starve Acre does end with one of the oddest, most off-putting images you’ll see at the cinema this year.

Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s impassioned and atmospheric direction really takes hold.

You could claw together some brilliant short films from the best sequences here, but this 36-years-in-the-making follow-up should make us all question Tim Burton’s modern storytelling sense.

For a film that’s so explicit in how it tackles trauma, it makes for a frustrating experience.

What’s frustrating about Romulus is to see that the reaction to unpopular ideas wasn’t to come up with more, but to simply recycle the old ones as nostalgia.

It Ends with Us is capable of poignancy. Yet it’s also entirely ill-equipped to square such sensitive material up against scenes of diamanté boots being sensually rolled down, an out-of place but very funny Jenny Slate rocking up in a string of Carrie Bradshaw-worthy outfits, or Lively simply revelling in that deep, half-laughing voice that made her an icon of casual cool on TV’s Gossip Girl. This film’s good intentions feel misplaced.

Hugh Jackman’s return as Wolverine is appropriately intense – but shortchanged by the fact that the character went through the exact same emotional beats in 2017’s ‘Logan’.

While the newer Bad Boys films have delicately sidestepped the contemporary conversations around law enforcement, Axel F seems happy to offer up its protagonist as a figurehead for the active endorsement of police misconduct. I’d argue you could just let Harold Faltermeyer’s earworm of a theme song drown out that noise – but, alas, for a certain generation, that’s also been ruined by the crazy frog on the invisible motorcycle.

Young Woman and the Sea is pure Hollywood fluff – but it’s hearty, wholesome fluff, of a kind that makes immediate sense once Jerry Bruckheimer’s name pops up in the credits as a producer.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die has learned a few valuable lessons from the Fast & Furious franchise – dumb and loud, executed with right enthusiasm, can feel like a warm hug.

Ultimately, this isn’t the car crash it could have been. It is, though, deeply flawed and very eccentric.

It’s intended to be disarmingly sincere – yet the director-writer-actor is so single-mindedly intent on delivering “wonder” that what he’s ended up with isn’t so much a film but a series of emotional cues. It’s the same experience, really, as sitting down to watch an hour-and-a-half video loop of dogs being adopted.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a patchwork quilt of familiar notions.

At times, it plays more like a sitcom than a story about the legacy of the death camps. Thankfully, it still provides probing insight into everything from casual antisemitism to the plague of historical forgetfulness.