The Nun II, unlike Malignant or M3GAN, is unfortunately tethered to seven previous films of demonic activity, and suffers for it. There are too many established rules to follow. You can almost feel the film squirming around in those restraints, trying its best to claw at something new without violating any preexisting evil nun lore.

Beast represents the apex of low-expectation cinema.

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.

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

All those technical triumphs only complicate what feels like an unanswerable question: how can a film look this good, feel so moving, and still come up lacking?

It’s when the film veers into more serious territory that it becomes unstuck.

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.

True, grief is universal – but To Olivia never embraces the fact that stories draw their power from specificity. It’s what makes them feel real.

The real selling point is a romance so dorky, sweet, and likeable that, well, maybe only Taylor Swift could have written it.

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.

A great actor shouldn’t only be judged on what they can do with a masterful script, but also on how they can take a lesser work and still let it soar. Anthony Hopkins has achieved this with grace in One Life, a somewhat thin, reductively sentimental retelling of the life of British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, which its star has empowered with raw, much-needed complexity.

Ferrari drives determinedly in an uncertain direction.

Boxing Licorice Pizza inside the realm of juvenile memory more often feels like an excuse than a conceit.

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.

As Jodi, Kazan gives the film’s standout performance, delicate and affecting, and when we’re in her company, the stakes of the investigation feel gravest.

[Harris's] loud, rough, energetic tale of 'girlz n the hood' is low on polish and production values but certainly drawn from life.

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.

No one involved in Murder Mystery 2 seems to have worked with any real sense of direction, since the film is more than happy to let Sandler and Aniston take the steering wheel. There’s an easy chemistry to the pair.

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.

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers sees fit to both indulge in nostalgia – largely through Ellie’s wide-eyed adoration of the old show – and poke fun at it.

Unfortunately, the further away from Tatum and Bullock you get, the more the film struggles.

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.

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

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

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.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget may not quite rise to its predecessor’s level, but if this is the closest Aardman ever comes to selling out then, well, there’s still hope for animation’s future.

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.

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