Ironically, the film is too concerned with the abstract business of genius to give enough space to the gifted folks on screen.

This remains a shamelessly minor work without a single fresh idea in its head.

The gags are plentiful. Old pals are still upright. But the sense of a finger wagging throughout can’t help but temper some of the fun.

Unfortunately, the film takes too long to get to a destination – a festering hive of human corruption – that’s inevitable given the first 20 minutes of boozing, humping and double dealing. The dialogue feels inauthentic. The decadence is forced. Nothing about this is very much fun. Mr Barry Lyndon need not beware.

It’s an improvement on the 2022 movie, but Tom and Jerry have become supporting players in their own film, pushed aside for an assortment of flimsily sketched newcomers who absorb most of the screen time.

Though the final act regains some manic energy with ambitious, large-scale action, the composer Michael Abels’s relentless strings, overly extended gunplay and an unkillable creature become exhausting. And that’s before we are promised a sequel. It’s fun. But make the fun stop.

The film ultimately amounts to not much more than an empty distraction of the old school. That is not altogether a bad thing. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away we were happy with that on a rainy afternoon.

The film is very much about male discomfort with tenderness, and Keoghan neatly communicates his internal conflicts in a mature performance. Keough continues to make her case for being one of the era’s great chameleons.

The camera dutifully records esteemed actors – including one Corrie veteran, as it happens – talking in beautifully appointed rooms, but it seldom finds the cinematic spark that might elevate the drama beyond a polished theatrical exercise.

At its best, The Devil Wears Prada 2 engages saltily with the social and economic changes that have set in since the 2006 original. One yearns for a little more of Miranda’s amusingly half-hearted attempts to accommodate woke restrictions on her acidic put-downs.

Backed by the kind of production budget normally reserved for resurrected dinosaurs running amok in a theme park, this long-gestating biopic of Michael Jackson offers two solid hours of cosplay karaoke.

Mostly the film is a showcase for Jude Law’s increasingly impressive late-career metamorphosis. The actor, who has spent recent years successfully probing wounded masculinities (The Young Pope, Firebrand), brings a strikingly controlled energy to his portrayal of Vladimir Putin as a lofty and weaponised civil servant.

The film exists to give Lopez an opportunity to bring the house down. She does that, but it’s not quite enough.

Not atypically for a portmanteau picture, this surprise winner from last year’s Venice film festival is intermittently arresting and wildly uneven.

The screenplay blows it at the close with an absurdly clunky flashback that ties up every loose end with improbable neatness, but this remains a decent class of red-meat actioner for a now underserved audience.

The dynamic between Bowser and his son, and the Frozen-like sisterhood between Peach and Rosalina, are jettisoned as quickly as they are introduced. Subplots remain half-formed. New additions – especially Glen Powell’s inexplicably underused Fox McCloud – barely register. The abrupt conclusion feels like an abandonment. At least it’s short.

The film attempts both an in-depth portrait of the late author and a scattershot meditation on the persistence of his ideas.

The Bard’s most famous creation may be many things, but Scarlet’s earnest moralising about empathy and collective responsibility feels more like Polonius’s vibe.

What once felt coolly stylised now seems mannered, even silly. The cufflinks gleam from the heritage cosplay: the razor has dulled.

All sincerely intended. All a bit rickety. Still, The Bride! does just about get by on suave style and committed performances.

What follows is a reasonably ingenious meld of new-generational tomfoolery and the unearthing of ancient characters whose identities we shan’t spoil. There is little original here, but, as has always been the case in this treatise on repeated tropes, that is precisely the point. They can have that get-out clause on me.

Sadly, the film’s sardonic edge is dulled by a reliance on stereotypical depictions of philistine self-interest.

We don’t demand hard realism from such a project, but a little more edge would have been nice. Solid, middlebrow entertainment, nonetheless.

The problem – and it is no small one – rests with the leads. Elordi is fine as an unthinking hunk of abusive resentment. But the script cannot make sense of this Cathy as someone of Robbie’s age. At least one sarky crack confirms the character is no longer supposed to be a teenager (or anything close), but the dialogue does not satisfactorily retune Cathy to a woman in her 30s.

For all its craft and atmosphere, this is folk horror that makes the ears twitch yet rarely raises goosebumps.

This remains a sincerely felt piece of entertainment that, unusually for current mainstream cinema, treats the audience and its characters like adults. Worth indulging.

The problem here is not insight but narrative stagnation. Too often H Is for Hawk confuses slowness with contemplation, repeating emotional beats and trumpeting parallels between Helen and Mabel.

The film never attains the Shakespearean-sized tragedy of the Korean director’s Decision to Leave or the bludgeoning impact of OldBoy.