The most effective scenes in Flamin’ Hot prod gently at how disharmonious the relationship between the man on the floor and the man in the boardroom can be.

It’s a devilishly smart and self-aware take on the current trend for Eighties horror homage, lovingly adapted from Grady Hendrix’s 2016 novel of the same name.

If there are no other pleasures to Wicked Little Letters beyond the tome’s worth of expletives launched by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, then so be it. That’s plenty enough to sustain this witty, joyously written piece of forgotten history, scripted by comedian Jonny Sweet.

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.

This is exactly your mother’s Mean Girls – just repackaged with a bunch of TikTok cameos and some of Fey’s B-tier jokes.

The Equalizer 3 is about as good as the first film – it neatly counterbalances Fuqua’s baroque, blood-and-guts action with Washington’s ability to command attention while sitting perfectly still.

This 1950s Hollywood examination of mental illness won an Oscar for Joanne Woodward, who plays a frumpy housewife, a sultry seductress and an urban sophisticate, giving a virtuoso performance which manages to compensate for Nunnally Johnson's flat direction. [25 Jun 1999, p.21]

The movie consists of a series of chases and fights linked by ever more improbable plot twists. The action is often very inventively staged. James Mangold, who has taken over directing duties from Steven Spielberg, sets a breakneck tempo.

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.

Elemental overcomplicates itself. It’s a straightforward romcom that’s also about culture clashes. And the systemic racism in city infrastructures. And the expectations immigrant parents place on their children.

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.

The film’s distractingly scattered in its attempt to capture the full breadth and width of its social commentary. In fact, it’s so stuffed with tangentially related ideas that even its timeline feels confusing and difficult to follow, signalled only by the erratic changes in McKay’s hair colour.

There are measured performances here by both Russell and Plemons, two unfailingly talented actors, and a host of well-crafted practical effects that explain why producer and horror veteran Guillermo del Toro would take such an interest in the project. But all the trickery in the world can’t conceal how inauthentic Antlers feels at heart.

It’s Road House by name, but certainly not by nature.

Space Jam is nothing if not a product made by men who gauge a film's success by how many soft toys it spawns.

This is an audacious project and one which, for all its flaws, has much to commend it.

Of course, Ragnarok’s distinctive humour is carried over, and there’s a blissfully dumb running joke about a pair of giant, heavy metal-screaming goats. But, really, it’s the heart that matters here.

It's not that Paperback Hero is a duff film, exactly. Just a little flimsy, a trifle slight, a mite schematic. The story turns dog-eared midway through. [03 Sep 1999, p.19]

It’s fitfully moving – a monologue in which Finch recalls witnessing the worst of human behaviour and doing nothing about it is powerful – but there’s often a sense of a darker, less gentle film aching to get out from beneath the sop.

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

There’s nothing all that special about The Rise of Gru, but it runs like a well-oiled machine.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

Hocus Pocus 2 doesn’t hit the extremes that made the original a critical flop, but such an enduring rewatch. It’s less menacing. It lacks the exquisite cuteness exuded by a middle-grade Thora Birch. There are zero talking cats. But that’s unlikely to matter much to most audiences.

While the calibre of star voices here is superb, it seems odd to centre the entire film around Johnson and Hart. So much of their chemistry in Jumanji or Central Intelligence was rooted in odd-couple physical comedy – a guy who’s always cracking jokes about his own short stature versus the closest we have to a living demi-god.

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.

No, there are no dinosaur cameos, but this 10th lap – now with added Brie Larson – is relentlessly fun.

It’s a handsome adaptation, albeit with an unnecessary bit of literary celebrity dragged alongside it.

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.

Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work.

Most unwary cinema-goers who see The Magic Flute will vow never to cross the threshold of an opera house as long as they live.

Ambulance is a purely aesthetic beast, made for those who like their films to look like they’ve been edited by someone in the middle of a panic attack.

The Boogeyman is conventional horror, comfortably elevated – the same old monster in a shiny, new hat.

This is slippery, subversive storytelling that’s very hard to get any firm grasp on – but that is one of its main pleasures.

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

Blighted by development problems and a star whose downward spiral has been widely dissected by all, this superhero blockbuster emerges just as confused as predicted.

There’s enough warmth to Guerrero’s script, co-written with Shane McKenzie and Perry Blackshear, to paper over the odd rickety effect or wooden performance.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye has done right by its subject, but only at the cost of shrinking down her world.

The tone here aims for a vague combination of time-travelling romps like Back to the Future and Flight of the Navigator plus time-travelling weepies like Forever Young and The Lake House. It wears both those tones unconvincingly, like a serial killer in a skin suit.

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.

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

Beast represents the apex of low-expectation cinema.

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.

The film has a tendency to circle around the same jokes like a dog chasing its own tail (the film reminds us that they like to do this, too).

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

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.

Clooney and his screenwriter, Mark L Smith, tell their story with rousing traditionalism, reinforced by Alexandre Desplat’s idealist score, but little more.

There’s a surprising amount to enjoy here, with director William Brent Bell (behind The Boy franchise, with its equally ludicrous premise centered on a haunted doll), making the smart decision to turn the unintentional camp of Orphan into intentional camp, alongside adding a dose of satire about the corruptive pressures of the nuclear family.

Cocaine Bear is a film worthy of its title, and perfectly constructed to feel like the kind of cult horror movie you’d find on a dusty VHS tape somewhere in a stoner’s basement. It’s bloody and grotesque, at times quite dark, but also surprisingly endearing.

Jason Schwartzman, as “weatherman and amateur magician” Lucretius Flickerman, lands some surprisingly good one-liners. Their performances hint at the true narcissism of Panem – something you’ll struggle to find in any of the limp, neutered romantics of The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

The Railway Children Return is part-sequel, part-remake, with a carefully selected smattering of callbacks for the fans.

Mendes’s script, his first as a solo writer, deals with a sort of formless empathy – what it’s like to witness injustice and feel very, very bad about it. But it lacks necessary self-interrogation. There’s no real sense of purpose beyond the soothing of a privileged viewer’s guilt. The emotions are too thin, a set of codes to interpret rather than anything raw or real.

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.

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 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.

Emancipation never feels as if it’s truthfully telling the story behind the photograph. Or how one man’s pain became emblematic of an entire nation’s evil.

With nothing to revamp, Lilo & Stitch instead creates brand new problems for itself.

It’s only regrettable that the film itself didn’t heed one of cinema’s most important lessons – when you put Nicolas Cage in a movie, it’s guaranteed no one will care about anything other than Nicolas Cage.

The Tender Bar is uneventful. But its performances have such an easy, lived-in quality that it wouldn’t be fair to call it inauthentic – just a little rosy in its outlook, perhaps.

Lyne can laugh at these people because he holds little respect for them, and there’s a general sense of revulsion directed here towards the rich and reckless. His camera navigates queasily through the film like he’s capturing a natural disaster in action.

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.

The budget’s been upped considerably. Hollywood’s own Andy Serkis and Cynthia Erivo have been air-lifted in for support. And it’s fun, in the patently ridiculous way these sorts of zhuzhed-up thrillers tend to be.

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 film is perfectly adequate. Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 murder mystery is texturally conventional, even if he’s made his own adjustments to the cast of suspects.

The irony of Eternals is that, despite its characters explicitly tussling with their own lack of humanity, Zhao has delivered one of the most emotionally grounded entries in the entire franchise. She puts into full view the kind of moral quandaries that Marvel’s only ever really danced around in the past – the cost of individual life, or whether humanity is even worth saving in the first place.

Run Rabbit Run is certainly fluent in the visual language of eerie, effective horror. Its metaphors, though, are all mumbled.

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

The aggressive air-humping of its past films is replaced by ballet and interpretive dance in this sanitised final instalment.

Most of Silent Night’s pleasures are to be found in the strength of its cast – Knightley, whose comic talent is frequently underused, can turn on a kind manic perkiness that’s as endearing as it is absolutely terrifying. It’s a smile that says, yes, if I ever were to murder you, they’d never find the body.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody strips Houston of her messy, beautiful humanity. All it offers instead is a product to market.

And I hate to ask for this, in a world where an excess of lore has been the downfall of so many projects, but Day Shift lacks any sense of context to what exactly this vampire hunter union is or does.

In an era in which many of Lopez’s romcom peers – namely the Witherspoons and the Bullocks – have pivoted to dark dramas, it’s lovely to see her still banging the drum for a genre that’s never earned the respect it’s deserved. Then again, she knows what that feels like.

Sometimes “happily ever after” isn’t a cop out, or an outdated, romantic notion that marriage solves everything. Sometimes it’s just the best time to stop the story.

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

While Marvel’s been busy flooding us with endless, exhaustive content, DaCosta’s movie offers us the one thing that made this franchise work in the first place – heroes we actually want to root for.

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.

A Good Person has a tendency to approach moral complexity as a checklist.

There is something nostalgic about Rebirth. And yet that cosy feeling is achieved primarily through composer Alexandre Desplat’s targeted deployment of John Williams’s original theme, and through the way Koepp and Edwards lightly pay homage to certain, familiar sequences (there’s a scene of a kid dodging between aisles here, too, just like with the raptors in the kitchen).

What’s most disheartening about it all is how predictable Disney’s choices have become. With Snow White, they’ve finessed their formula – do the bare minimum to make a film, then simply slap a bunch of cutesy CGI animals all over it and hope no one notices.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken fails to see its own potential – it’s never quite sharp enough to work as a parody, nor sincere enough to make its adolescent insecurities relatable.

When it comes to “The Friends”, there’s some great comic timing – Iannucci, Tevlin, and Metcalfe are particular stand-outs – but it’s hard to shake how frequently these jokes are written at their expense.

There are major moments of pain and betrayal that should feel like a punch but remain curiously ineffective. Sussex’s wonderful secret beaches and pockets of drizzly suburbia somehow seem strangely anonymous here. And Ron Nyswaner’s script is full of lines of clunking portent.

It’s a joy to watch Julia Roberts and George Clooney fall in love. It’s an even greater joy to watch them bicker.

You People carries the unresolved, disjointed tension of a sitcom that’s been stretched to the two-hour mark.

Blonde is not a bad film because it is degrading, exploitative and misogynist, even though it is all of those things. It’s bad because it’s boring, pleased with itself and doesn’t have a clue what it’s trying to say.

An unspectacular but solid, ensemble (anti-) war movie, considered moderately progressive in its day for the way it describes the war in the Pacific from both sides. [19 Jun 2010, p.26]

In Sing 2’s defence, the film is at least enthusiastic about its own overabundance, and the new celebrity voice additions – Halsey’s mollycoddled, rich-girl wolf or Letitia Wright’s street-dancing lynx – fit nicely into the mix.

There’s something oddly satisfying about the way McKay's film lets us laugh at our own doom.

Everywhere looks so slick and empty that it’s impossible to differentiate any scene from your standard luxury hotel ad.

The Miracle Club certainly seeks to capture a feeling of “home” – but it’s not entirely clear for whom.

Pitt’s funny here – there’s a precise comic timing to the way he shoves a venomous snake down a toilet bowl – but Bullet Train feels so try-hard in its quirky theatrics that it’s a little like watching a kid repeatedly calling for their mother’s attention before they cartwheel into a brick wall.

The thing is, there is a great film in here fighting to get out, but it’s drowned out by manic plotting, self-indulgence, and a thickly laid-on, twee message about love and art.

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.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a love story written in blood, sweat and the slime of half-eaten brains.

A dated but still serviceable Cold War thriller about a US nuclear sub racing the Russians to the North Pole to retrieve some film from a downed Soviet satellite. [19 Jun 2010, p.26]

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.