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.

Love Lies Bleeding bottles that hot, feverish, salvatory desire, only to shake it like soda pop and then ping off the cap.

In The Idea of You, it’s actually fun to buy into the fantasy.

If the film results in stunt performers gaining a little more respect from the public, that’s the ideal. If it merely reminds them how likeable Gosling is, that’s good, too.

The Scargiver is at least basic enough to feel relatively inoffensive; the first film’s uncomfortably vague deployment of racist and sexual violence has been reduced to a single reference to the empire’s hatred of “ethnic impurity” (never to be picked up again).

We’re never told what this conflict is about, who might be oppressed, or what freedoms have been stolen away. All we’re given is violence.

It’s the most gripping sports movie in years.

Back to Black is a fitfully enjoyable little package that will do wonders for the careers of Abela and O’Connell. But unlike Winehouse’s oeuvre, it’s not worth taking seriously. It’s just too afraid of the dark.

The film is also bold and clear cut about the way women’s bodies are made into objects of both reverence and shame – but its pièce de résistance is the shot of a vagina during birth, an entirely natural part of human existence that, in America, caused such a fuss that The First Omen was nearly slapped with an extreme NC-17 certificate. What a way to prove this film’s point.

There’s an odd timidity here that borders on self-denial.

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

Frozen Empire is a notable improvement on Afterlife – funny, silly, and a little scary, with its pockets full of hand-built doodahs and the occasional excursion into the realm of pseudo-mythology and parapsychology.

This black comedy about the travails of the teenage Rita (a marvellously taciturn Barbara Osika) captures beautifully the awkward ugliness of adolescence before a brutal final punch. [11 Aug 2001, p.8]

It’s hard to imagine what anyone could get out of Damsel that isn’t already liberally covered by Brown’s other projects. There’s a sweetness to Stranger Things’s Eleven, and a wit to Enola, that offer the actor a hell of a lot more to do than Damsel’s mean-mugging to camera.

Good comedies, of course, can make the tragic feel bittersweet, but Ricky Stanicky bungles its tone to the point that the whole affair comes across a little depressing. It’s like watching a bedraggled widower perform close-up magic at his spouse’s funeral.

Together, both actors rise above the most blatant of Memory’s manipulations.

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.

Part Two is as grand as it is intimate, and while Hans Zimmer’s score once again blasts your eardrums into submission, and the theatre seats rumble with every cresting sand worm, it’s the choice moments of silence that really leave their mark.

Madame Web is fiction and has seemingly passed on the opportunity to make itself exciting – instead offering a two-hour prelude to a 30-second trailer for a sequel that will never happen.

A moving, sentimental work that also chills to the bone, powered by the inevitability of tragedy when familial loyalty becomes tethered to self-destruction.

Marley, as played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, is presented as a centrifugal force in Jamaican art, culture and political thought, but the film also threatens to flatten him into just another tortured male genius.

To reduce the film simply to its outlook on race ignores both its content and its message, as some of its most rewarding elements follow Monk back to his family, for a funny, touching portrait of a man attempting to fine-tune his relationship with the world.

The Zone of Interest . . . issues a warning from just outside the walls of Auschwitz, spreading its soul-sickness across each frame.

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

In Andrew Haigh’s melancholy ghost story, where real ghosts are out-haunted by words left unsaid, Scott, an actor of fierce intelligence, channels shrewdness into tragedy for the greatest performance of his career.

Belo and Birch, and their star Jodie Comer, breathe life and fire into the mothers typically left stagnant on the apocalypse’s sidelines.

It’s lovely, if a little practised. Yet, the real gutting here comes courtesy of the film’s miniature thesis on grief, and how privilege determines the channels of its pain.