The cartoonish closing battles make it clear that, not for the first time, Gunn is striving for high trash, but what he achieves here is low garbage. Utterly charmless. Devoid of humanity. As funny as toothache.

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

Branagh’s decent performance and Christie’s indestructible reputation may just be enough to see the film through to a modest profit and, later, decent figures on Disney+. But A Haunting in Venice feels like a misguided experimental sprig from an already compromised operation.

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

Mickey 17, adapted from a novel by Edward Ashton, feels like a rickety compromise bolted together from incompatible parts.

As the implausible romance gives way to boardroom shenanigans, House of Gucci grinds to a dramatic halt with still more than an hour of run time to go. There’s nothing luxe about the shoddy stitching and sackcloth.

None of these skits congeals into anything like a plot.

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.

While The Brave mostly holds the attention and is accompanied by a stirring Iggy Pop score, it squanders its strong dramatic premise in a naive and disjointed screenplay. [14 May 1997, p.12]

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?

For all its cleverness it remains a dubious exercise...If none of this strikes you as very funny, even in the blackest of comedy, just wait for the rape scene later in the movie - not only is this not remotely funny, it is simply repulsive and indefensible whatever the context...Ultimately shallow and unconvincing and the result is a movie that is even more acutely disturbing than it was meant to be. [12 March 1993, p.11]

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.

You would get more sparks from rubbing a wet flannel with a wetter rock. But try it anyway. It could hardly be more tedious than waiting for Freelance to crawl to its predictable denouement.

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

Oh no. The sequel to M3gan is absolutely t3rribl3.

Almost entirely plotless, it consists mostly of the characters pointing guns and wracking their brains for the next terrible line. Yet they had enough money to pay Willis whatever he asks to sit in two different chairs for a few hours (and he may charge by the chair). Nothing adds up.

It’s not quite as bad as the awful trailer threatened. Just dull, bland and pointless.

For all its gimcrack incoherence, Madame Web – which would be nothing without Johnson’s charm – is a darn sight less pompous and up itself than the overstuffed Disney content.

No good impression emerges of the former Slovenian model. No bad impression emerges either. Ratner’s film achieves, rather, a sort of passive distance – as you might get by pointing a camera, for close to two hours, at a waterfall or a wheat field.

Nobody looks to have helped Affleck get to grips with the author’s signature sociopath and, rather than appearing coldly ruthless, this cuboid-headed anti-hero comes across as a bored man queuing for an uninteresting clerical formality.

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

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.

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

All involved deserve better.

An early contender for turkey of the year.

Embarrassingly for a film that actually features a star of Pulp Fiction, Killing Field is still harbouring an undignified passion for early Tarantino.

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.

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.

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.

One for Hellraiser completists only. Assuming there are any left.

The director of shockers such as Requiem for a Dream and Mother! has had his mainstream moments, but he has never before been quite so at home to tawdry soap opera.

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.

Every pratfall, including the naked ones, is joyless and witlessly timed.

As ever, all these thumping stereotypes would matter less if there was some chemistry between the two leads. Page has sufficient charisma to skirt through the absurdity unscathed. In contrast, Bailey seems dazzled and bemused – neither crafty enough nor ingenuous enough to make sense of the central deceit.