The final impression is of a thesis only partially expanded into satisfactory dramedy, but, thanks to casting in depth and good writing on a line-by-line basis, Irresistible never feels like a chore.

The film does a good job of dragging us from the darkest valleys of tragedy towards the gently sunlit uplands.

Both actors are ill-served by a script that carps on about finding your moment or some such. Can’t a hedgehog go on a quest to find a magic master emerald without this constant haranguing?

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

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.

A classy film that doesn’t entirely make sense.

It is unfortunate that two directors and a screenwriter (Matthew Fogel) felt the need to shoehorn in an extended family and – groan – Oedipal crisis for both Mario and Donkey Kong. Despite this misstep, the film belts along with an assault of candy colours and a commendable command of canonical detail.

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

Working on a small budget, writer-director Alison Locke puts the confinement of one location in service of her claustrophobic script. A promising first feature.

The pacing can be too stately, but an impressive ensemble working through a surfeit of good ideas compensates for the lack of jump scares.

One of the more enjoyable dreadful films of the season.

Trashy stories need plots and character development, too.

The reverence for the past here does nobody any favours. It is as if a 1984 kids’ film tried to get them interested in the collected lore and backstory of Abbott and Costello. We all need to move on.

A paternoster of strong scenes and strong performances serve only to highlight pedestrian writing elsewhere.

In common with My Neighbour Totoro, there is no menace here, only strange fun aimed squarely at younger viewers.

Even if such a proposition didn’t quite work out it would surely be the right sort of failure. Maybe a gloriously camp Jailhouse Rock. As it happens, we have ended up with a drab affair that never gets properly started.

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

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.

Cartoonishly colourful cinematography brings emerald-tinted sparkle to Killruddery House, Lough Tay, the Cliffs of Moher and other tourist traps. What else? It’s professionally assembled? Everyone has nice hair?

If comes together nicely in a moving denouement that almost makes sense of the fantastic clutter. Often touching. Often infuriating.

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.

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.

With the best will in the world, this is thin stuff. The dialogue is written in the awkward, stilted style of a radio play – first-person pronouns dropped in a fashion that never really happens in everyday speech – and the confrontations are too often clunkily contrived.

Playwright Florian Zeller’s third instalment – and second film – in a cycle that includes The Father is a muscular, devastating drama that ought to have featured more prominently in the protracted “awards conversation”.

The moon is square and the action is so daft that it makes the Sonic the Hedgehog sequence feel like the work of Ingmar Bergman.

Afterlife is fine. It passes the time. But somewhere between the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man recycled as hundreds of Tribble-alike menaces and Muncher, a fatter variant of Slimer, one finds oneself wishing that studios might use their vast resources for something more than the repackaging of old rope.

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.

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

Screamboat is no classic, but it knows its audience.

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

Wells Tower’s screenplay creates a compelling, compromised hero in Eliza, one matched by Blunt’s charm and commitment. But the film is ultimately torn between raucous satire and social conscience.

Despite a scene that can only be described as “robust wereman and werewoman sex”, Gabriele Mainetti’s bouncy, carnivalesque alternate history is closer in tone to Hellboy than throwaway Syfy-channel Naziploitation.

After the so-so Kingsman: The Secret Service and the unendurable Kingsman: The Golden Circle, one might reasonably assume that Matthew Vaughn had nowhere else to go with the secret agent pastiche. This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink prequel deflates such pessimism in disreputably enjoyable fashion.

For all the cast’s best efforts, however, Foe never seems more than a theoretical exercise, a sketch for an uncompleted project.

Based on an acclaimed documentary, the film looks to be asking us to fill in the many gaps in its Swiss-cheese narrative.

Will Gluck, who presided over the disastrous 2014 adaptation of Annie and the misfiring comedies Friends with Benefits and Easy A, makes for a competent presence in the director’s chair. It’s the human stars, however, who truly shine.

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.

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

The big narrative rug-pull isn’t quite as smooth as it ought to be, but there’s plenty to admire here, including Monáe’s expressive eyes, Pedro Luque Briozzo’s unsettling camerawork, and a thrillingly vicious turn by Jena Malone.

Daisy Edgar-Jones does her best, but no actor could make sense of the insanely compromised protagonist.

This messy romantic phantasmagoria is a hinterland for no one: a musical without musical numbers, a romcom without comedy. Sincerity saves it from collapse.

Sure, you will learn more – and hear more of the original recordings – in Asif Kapadia’s great documentary Amy, but Taylor-Johnson does a decent job of making a tight drama from the same tragic yarn.

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

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

Some loyalists do still give a fig. They will still get something from the volume and the visual clutter. Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Even the most dedicated will, however, surely baulk at one of the stupidest final shots in the history of cinema. That surely doesn’t count as a spoiler.

With its cheap action and garish visuals, it’s then that we enter yet another genre altogether: action-figure commercial.

Viewing the entire film as it finally arrives to video on demand, one remains staggered that sentient human beings who walk upright and use cutlery believed this was a respectable use of their valuable time.

Edebiri works hard, but her notebook-clutching Nancy Drew asks dimwitted questions, even after the guests start to “disappear”.

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).

Cracknell’s romp is, despite what the purists say, a perfectly pleasant variation of a text that could endure worse, but it feels stranded between two competing approaches. An honourable effort for all the bellyaching.

Astonishingly, Black Adam does seem to have once had ambitions to say something big and important about the world. But any parallel with current unhappiness is drawn and then quickly dropped like the truly scalding potato it is.

This dull-witted, soundstage-bound Christmas romance has festive trimmings and a clockwork plot.

Neeson is, of course, perfectly capable of chewing through the quips while carrying the city’s sins on his broad shoulders. But he needs more help from a rigid script to make sense of a character that seems defined by archetype alone.

It is made with respect. It has educational value. But the film-makers, working with a modest budget, have made sure to include much head-splitting action.

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

The sins and injustices of the outside world find terrible expression in St Pio of Pietrelcina’s body and imperfect expression in Ferrara’s 22nd feature.

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.

At times, Here Today feels like looking at a tableau vivant or courtly fool antics. No matter: Crystal is still the jester to beat.

A film that turns the savagery of apartheid into a crisis of conscience for one relatively privileged white boy. Worse yet, it suggests that his crisis is a matter of urgent concern for countless South African blacks. [9 Oct 1992, p.11]

Expect head-scratching, some non-sequiturs and lots of quirks and Bliss will mostly entertain and consistently baffle.

The attempts to get us interested in fictional NFT art are no more successful than the international cabal of idiots’ efforts to draw us to the real thing. For all that, there is a sort of honest energy to Lift that deserves just a sliver of respect.

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.

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.

As in Green’s latter two Halloween films, we sense a desperate attempt to cut together random footage that stubbornly resists any such amalgamation. One is ultimately left wondering what exactly has been retained from the original project.

For all that structural uncertainty, Ella McCay is difficult to dislike. It’s old-fashioned and undeniably heartfelt. There’s a compelling sweetness in its rooting for good public service, and a refreshing optimism that feels almost radical in 2025.

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.

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.

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

The only noteworthy achievement of Jurassic Park Dominion is to render the dinosaurs mundane and superfluous.

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.

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.

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.

DeVine gets away with a barn-door broadness that, nodding to the Jerry Lewis tendency, chimes with a film that works a surprising amount of explicit violence into its hectic slapstick.

Co-written with Blomkamp’s District 9 collaborator Terri Tatchell, the film has agreeably creepy blurred ideas about the human experience and the simulated experience. And it’s never dull.

LeBron has charm to burn, even if his performance is unlikely to keep Denzel awake at night. It’s a shame this messy film can’t keep pace with his likability or mad skills.

The storytelling is routine. It warrants neither its hard-core disciples nor its worst enemies. Ignore the dishonest huffing and puffing.

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

And yet. Howard is so irrepressibly charming that Argylle proves hard to wholly resist. Her inherent warmth and charm add interesting balance to the violence she ultimately gets to inflict on circling maniacs. One must also grudgingly acknowledge Vaughn’s dedication to an epic mayhem that strives towards a blend of Bollywood, Hong Kong action and Golden Age musical.

Laurent Tangy’s slick cinematography adds to the sense that we’re watching a luxe commercial. But for what? It’s impossible to figure out who this empty film is for or why it exists in the first place.

Exasperating viewing for fans and certain to baffle newcomers, it’s a curious, imaginative thing, but who exactly is it for?

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.

The movie doesn’t quite stop mid-sentence, but it comes as close as any film I’ve seen. That can’t be it. Can it? ... A total waste of time.

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.

With little of Crockett’s original charm remaining, the audience is left with a generic entertainment struggling to find a reason to exist beyond the need for more “content”. As soon seen as forgotten.

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.

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

Time moves so slowly one begins to fear it may turn backwards and return us to the far distant opening credits.

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.

North shows all the signs of being one of those movies that get "straightened out" in post production, with any life they have being squeezed out in the process. [29 Jul 1994, p.9]

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?

The real issue is the distracting and disturbing “digital fur technology”. Every time Cats settles into an admittedly avant-garde shape, an ear twitches or a tail flicks and you’re back thinking about how ghastly the actual cats look.

So Three Days is no great shakes, but it is rarely embarrassing either.

Cinemas are finally open; it’s hard to think of a worse way to mark the occasion.

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

The thing is unremittingly dull and bland (not to mention cold, apparently). If it is good for anything it is good for providing deserved paid holidays to venerable older actors and their long johns.

There are plenty of reasons to yell at The Starling. The pile-up of dreary sub-country songs eventually takes on the quality of something the CIA would have played outside General Noriega’s compound.

Look elsewhere for virtual methadone to hold you over until the real stuff gets back in the supply chain. Just awful.

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!