One yearns in vain for some acknowledgment that the creation being celebrated is nothing more than a bag of squashed organic matter coated in a modestly spicy mulch.

Too drippy and half-cocked to bother defending.

When film-makers aren’t asking people to read their films as westerns they are asking for them to be read as Greek tragedies. For all the commitment of the actors and brooding ambience of the film-making, Bring Them Down can’t quite sustain that comparison.

The film is merely a component part of a larger machine (the trilogy) that plugs into an even larger mechanism (the Star Wars universe). It has no more use or appeal when examined in isolation than would a sparkplug or a distributor cap.

Barrera is a reliable and veteran Final Girl, but even she can’t save the film from collapsing under the weight of its own silliness. Fun for a while.

This underpowered, $100-million-budgeted space oddity was originally intended for streaming. And it shows.

Coogler and his team have pulled together a functional time-passer in difficult circumstances. As before, the costumes are a gorgeous exercise in Afrofuturist chic. The music neatly works ethnic elements in with triumphant orchestral swirls. And the actors are consistently strong.

We like that someone is allowing Chloé Zhao, recent Oscar-winner for Nomadland, enough money to build her own solar system. But the sluggishness and drabness is unforgivable.

Astaire’s dancing and Audrey’s charm sweeten a bitter pill. But unearthing this vicious artefact is not unlike exhibiting a medieval chastity belt.

The closest thing to a decent joke comes (I think) in a closing reference, at one or two removes, to a popular television show of the early 1970s. This bewildering exercise’s only other notable achievement is to make Willy’s Wonderland seem an underappreciated masterpiece. It really wasn’t.

Collet-Serra, who directed The Shallows and the Liam Neeson thrillers Unknown, Non-Stop, and The Commuter, keeps up a lively pace. That, and the capable cast, ensure that Jungle Cruise passes the time, much like the old-fashioned, uneventful ride that inspired it.

The Cut is ultimately too broad, cliched and preposterous to take the belt. Still, it was brave to go where it went.

Too many bad ideas are juggled in too small a space.

Trashy stories need plots and character development, too.

Only a monster could object to the delightful pairing of Byrne and HBC (whose accent isn’t too bad). Get them back together in a better film as soon as possible.

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.

Two directors and four credited screenwriters signed off on a lazy screenplay that a starry cast and an Oscar-winner can do little to enliven.

Hoover fans will know that, early on, a catastrophe looks to upset the order. Nothing in the film-making suggests, however, this dilemma will not be tidied away by the time of senior prom. Who would want to live in so dull a fantasy?

If you want to avoid cliche and overworked influence you have come to the wrong place.

No doubt millions will be have no difficulty ferreting out the emotional core and propelling The Way of Water to box office success. But the indulgence of it all causes one to yearn for the raw, propulsive action of Cameron’s first two Terminator movies.

Oh, well. Perhaps the best response to junk food is junk cinema.

For all that flash and bash, it does feel as if we spend a lot of time staring at Chris Pratt looking worried and a Rebecca Ferguson increasingly bored of sounding increasingly boring. Too much dialogue plays like a conversation with an automated phone service only marginally more animated than the one that fails to direct you to customer services.

If you found yourself internally screaming for Ryan Reynolds to shut the hell up during Deadpool, then the relentless, zany narration of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn will likely send you gibbering and ruined towards the emergency exit after, oh, 23 seconds.

Extraction 2, again co-produced by the Russo brothers of Avengers fame, is unlikely to be mistaken for anything other than barely recycled snuff trash. But there is a chutzpah to the action that defies complete dismissal.

It would be nice to say that Judi Dench, inevitably the headmistress, elevates the project, but even she can’t get gas back into the plummeting Zeppelin (wrong war, I know).

Heartfelt performances from such terrific actors as Keri Russell and Scott Haze fail to turn this hotchpotch of competing themes into cohesive drama.

Steven Levenson’s book is all about normalising common mental health issues. But the film also reduces the dead character to a cypher and lets the protagonist off the hook too easily.

The film’s failure is a shame. The straight romantic movie deserves to thrive and African-American talent deserves an opportunity to play out its stories in the mainstream. But The Photograph is too nice, too leisurely and too lacking in friction. Oh, for more of the briefly glimpsed satire that, in scenes set in the 1980s, sees Mae’s mom competing for a job against an unending line of banal, primped, Upper East Side princesses. That’s what we’re looking for.

Every scene, like the effusions of the worst social-media bore, dares different bits of the audience to get righteously furious. Few will be minded to bother.

That first (third) act functions effectively as a bewitching enigmatic short that gets away with its downbeat denouement. The audience can fill the gaps in whatever enigmatic way they see fit. Unfortunately the movie continues backwards into increasingly mawkish territory.

The film is not a dead loss. The sheer chaos of the thing is welcome in an age when big-budget films travel along too-straight lines. Raimi is allowed a few moments of characteristic invention. But nothing here suggests there is much room to manoeuvre within the Marvel straitjacket. A disappointment.

We’ll say one thing for Boss Baby 2: its untidy, unpredictable, and unmannerly form does, indeed, evoke the exhausting, mucky business of baby tending, albeit with nothing like the familial rewards.

The details and atmospherics are diverting. The blindingly obvious plot twist is less impressive.

Had we seen none of Cumberbatch’s earlier troubled intellectuals, we might embrace his performance with enthusiasm. But there are a few too many familiar manoeuvres for comfort in a performance that treads water throughout.

Nobody without a spear through their head could sincerely describe Willy’s Wonderland as a good film, but it is trash with a commendable pedigree.

Nobody can doubt the filmmakers’ diligence. The interviewees seem like serious-minded people. But, as has been the case for close to 60 years, we are left with a jumble of loosely connected discrepancies that will do little to persuade those who expect everyday existence to be just that chaotic.

Sorkin has said that he’s not a particular fan of I Love Lucy’s brand of slapstick and Being the Ricardos goes out of its snooty way to avoid anything as vulgar as Lucille Ball’s comedy, save for a very brief glimpse of the famous grape-stomping scene. The film’s obsession with process means we’re never getting to drink the wine.

Like the Whitney film, One Love suffers greatly from a looming whiff of authorisation.

No great blame attaches to Emilia Jones or Nicholas Braun. Both leads do their best with a screenplay that doesn’t allow the creaks in meaning that made the story such a sensation.

A well-meaning, but dramatically inert biopic.

Drive-Away Dolls is no disaster. Matt Damon has fun as a hypocritical politician in a last act that cannot be faulted for chutzpah. But nobody will mistake this yellow-pack Coen flick for the real thing.

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

The kind of kids who hide behind the couch during Scooby-Doo may well feel emboldened by the fuzzy feelings, silly quips and toothless villains. But it all feels rather pointless for the non-meek community.

The beats ought to form a more compelling narrative than they do.

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

The main thread of the script is efficient enough, but the loosely connected subplot concerning a terminally ill acquaintance strains the boundaries of good taste past breaking point.

The downside to all this is that it reminds us that video games tend to manage cleaner storytelling than the makers of Bad Boys: Ride or Die do. The film plays as a muddle of set pieces – some impressive, most unintelligible – that fail to form any kind of coherent line. One almost longs for Bay’s return. His satanic mayhem at least had a consistency to it.

In short, domestic viewers in search of outrage may find themselves a tad disappointed.

The film is sometimes too sleazy, but it is, more often, not sleazy enough.

Frustratingly, there are some good jokes and ideas buried in the aesthetically displeasing Scoob!.

Yet, through sheer insistence, Erivo and Grande, who deserve the bump in status they’ve received, almost pull it back together with a closing duet that makes a virtue of emotional incontinence.

Most ruinously, there is too much Jared and not enough Matt. No harm to Leto, who wears less makeup as a vampire here than he did as a human in House of Gucci, but he appears to be taking the silly role absurdly seriously. It’s not Willy Loman, dude.

Project X never encounters anything you could call a plot: the party starts off badly, gets wilder and ends in total calamity. An unhealthy strain of misogyny runs through the dialogue, and the film- makers' unquestioning acceptance of high-school one-upmanship fairly turns the stomach. But the film does have a certain impure purity to it.

There is some spirited work from a consistently fine cast. DeVito cannot fail to be funny. Stanfield delivers a performance more suited to a less-compromised film. Even they cannot save this fatally compromised farrago from sinking into the swamp.

A good-looking waste, but a waste nonetheless.

Maintaining a giddy tone through murder and mayhem is a tricky business, even if the Coen brothers can, on occasion, make it look easy. Maggie Moores(s) is way off the pace, however.

There is nothing much to actively dislike here. Reynolds, a hugely experienced editor who won an Emmy for directing the superb documentary The Farthest, keeps the energy high and allows her fine cast to exercise all muscles. But Joyride feels like old-fashioned stuff.

Rarely in the history of cinema has so much tortured exposition failed so completely to explain such an undistinguished plot. It is like trying to pick up the story through overheard conversations with nearby drinkers who have just emerged from a screening. Stop telling us stuff and do something!

It seems churlish to complain that a film about a global serial killer is unnecessarily brutal and nasty. But between blackmail victims splatting on the pavements of Piccadilly Circus to bodies frozen under snowy lakes, Luther: The Fallen Sun is as distasteful as it is silly.

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.

No sensitive person watching Anemone could fail to be intrigued about where Ronan Day-Lewis will go next. This grandiose, inventively operatic project is no ordinary film. But it is not quite a good film either. Too monotonous. Too self-regarding. Showy to the point of meretriciousness.

It remains something to see, interestingly atrocious, misfiring on the grandest scale, and often best watched through the fingers. Megaflopolis might be a better name for it.

To add to the viewer’s distress, the picture is as deafeningly loud as it is tiresomely provocative.

There is nothing special about the animation. The lead characters are reasonably easy on the eye, but too many of the secondary players look like human beings with animal heads crudely jammed on unwelcoming shoulders.

The wan characters never find the profane spark we know they would have possessed. One longs for the late Maeve Binchy to give the thing a vigorous shake. She knew how to make such people live.

Sadly, the thing is so chaotically exhausting it proves beyond the talented actors’ saving. It plays like the last 20 minutes of a much-better action film stretched out to the length of a biblical epic.

The only distinguishing feature of this exhilaratingly bad film is its apparent close association with London’s tourism authorities.

Baumbach’s characteristically barbed wit too often makes way for self-indulgence and sentimentality. Ruminations on fame as a hollow, unfulfilling enterprise have all the depth of a disposable contact lens.

Unfortunately the characterisation is so thin and the dialogue so clunky that the thing plays more like one of those 1960s surf horrors – Cannibal Martians at Wipeout Cove – that invited drive-in audiences to speculate about which beach denizen deserved to get eaten first (usually a hard question to answer).

Adapted from a section of Pál Závada’s 2014 novel, from the first wintry opening shot in which hunters hack away at a dead deer, Natural Light is a chilly, unknowable film, one that repeatedly evokes brutality and the more desolate tableaux found in Andrei Tarkovsky’s work to deadening effect.

One of the more enjoyable dreadful films of the season.

Potentially interesting religious and philosophical dimensions – novenas in the dashboard, Jesus on the telly, the notion that the ghost evidences an afterlife – are swiftly discarded by this wholly redundant reboot.

Bruce Beresford's film of William Boyd's first novel, A Good Man In Africa, intermittently hints at the comic absurdity with which the book reputedly abounds. However, even though Boyd himself adapted his novel for the screen, only those hints survive in this heavy handed, shapeless movie.

It is better to create original action roles for women than to lazily alter the gender of already familiar characters. But there is no other reason for this humdrum film to exist.

The most distracting flaws are rooted in the problematic re-creation of animated material in “live-action” cinema. The permanent magic-hour lighting is hard to look at.

Watch and wonder how the cheery original could have spawned such a catastrophe.

For all that good work by a strong cast, the word that hangs over this overlong film is sluggish.

The book may not show its age, but this adaptation feels more ancient than the oceans.

The quality of the staff only sets the viewer wondering why they all signed up for this. And that’s before the late, sigh-making twist. It’ll do well enough for fans of 1990s artefacts.

Rarely has anything looked simultaneously so spectacular and so monotonous. It’s like being drowned to drunken death in a lake of curaçao.

There is little character, no visible emotion, just endless show-offy technical competence.

Too often this feels like a project that insists on delivering poor facsimiles of iconic scenes.

Lightyear may well feature the studio’s best opening gambit since Wall-E and Up, but the film quickly falls into, well, adequacy.

The grand casting gambit of pitching De Niro against De Niro proves an unnecessary distraction. Curiously bloodless in every respect.

A quiet character study pivoting around mum sex and elder care, it’s not the director’s best work but it’s streets ahead of this recent misfire.

The misused music and hollow visuals set the tone for a vacuous film that frequently feels like an overstyled catalogue shoot.

The chronological leaping around to pop tunes by Taylor Swift, Boygenius and Billie Eilish is the most interesting thing about Brett Haley’s sunny, saccharine film. The rest is flimsy.

The loud bangs and snarky zingers that powered their Marvel films towards box-office billions are fine for superheroes but not, it transpires, for a big-hearted teenage heroine and her robot chums.

Despite valiant efforts from Stephen James and Michael Kelly – playing an ill-defined hoodlum and a procurer, respectively – Lynette’s low-income hinterland feels strained and inauthentic.

Sadly, the unfunny, unexciting Violent Night fails to deliver on its substantial promise.

The pretty pictures and silhouetted, sanitised sex will do well enough for Bridgerton fans, but the material has strayed so far from the source, one wonders why they kept the title.

Through it all the technical work remains of the highest quality. It seems a shame that Stuart Craig and Neil Lamont’s lavish production design and Colleen Atwood’s gorgeous costumes – both leaning into unreal golden-era Hollywood – are wasted on such an emotionally unengaging slog.

Adults and smarter kids will enjoy the digs at the pomposity of professional saints. Everyone else can laugh at the genuinely funny talking guinea pig.

Nobody could deny that Dominik layers sympathy on Monroe, but the reduction of her life to a catalogue of torments betrays the complicated, intelligent and — God forbid this were acknowledged — funny person we knew her to be. Defining her solely by misery feels like more postmortem abuse.

Black Water Abyss is mostly composed of actors breathing heavily in studio tanks while torches bounce off dampened sets. The characters are dull, the tension poorly maintained and the outbreaks of violence deeply confusing.

As with its frantic copyright-countdown predecessor, Venom 2 is, by any metric, a bad movie. But, gosh darnit, it’s going to be the baddest bad movie of the year.

In Lana Wachowski’s defence, much of Resurrections does play like a sincere conversation with herself. She and her sister invented this extraordinary world, and they have the right to analyse and deconstruct it. But she is a victim of her own early success.

Unfortunately, the longer the thing goes on the less it ceases to be good honest rubbish and the more it expects us to care about the stupid, stupid plot. Console junkies will find themselves involuntarily hammering an imagined X button in the hope of getting back to the gameplay. No good. You’re stuck with this wacko BS.