A glossy package. Not quite enough inside.

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.

Destin Daniel Cretton, director of Just Mercy and Short Term 12, continues Marvel’s reasonably successful practices of unlikely hires from the indie sector. The dialogue is snappy. The action has real kinetic clatter. What a strange industry this has become.

The miracle is that most of it sticks. Kane is a fine craftsman.

The interaction between these fine actors – John David Washington, the director’s brother, continues his rise – keeps the production tasty even as, in later stages, it gives into something like desperation.

Arriving as part of the recent vogue for historical lesbian romances, The World to Come is better than Ammonite and rather more carnal than the chilly Carol, if not nearly as swooning as Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, nor as fascinating as Fastvold’s own writing.

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

If the first film didn’t exist, the current Mean Girls would impress as a modestly clever variation on common tropes. As it is, the current picture will remain a footnote to earlier triumphs.

It is hard to gripe at a movie that sends one out in such buoyant mood. Job just about achieved.

Bloodlines, after that first-class opening section, isn’t quite so clever in its constructions as were the earlier episodes. There is more reliance on out-of-nowhere splatter than on amusingly inevitable disaster.

Khan, like her documentarist heroine, clearly seeks to offer a balanced take on arranged marriage – opening non-Muslim viewers up to their own prejudices while admitting the restrictions. That balance proves, however, difficult to sustain in a genre that relies on a desperate, final rush to the airport (or whatever) as soul mates admit their attraction.

There are decent jokes all the way through, but, even at a groaning 145 minutes, the film feels overstuffed.

None of these bits fit together. Each is tolerably entertaining on its own terms.

Brash, noisy and colourful, Space Jam should appeal to young basketball and cartoon fans alike.

Freed from the pretensions of his DC projects and working with the Netflix charge card, Snyder has a ball proving that trash can triumph on the largest stage if played with elan and enthusiasm.

Full marks for character and setting. Less enthusiastic hurrahs for narrative arc.

This is the kind of post-Goonies family-oriented schmaltz that plays very well on Netflix (see all of Stranger Things, a show sometimes directed by Levy) and not so well in cinemas.

For all the richness of the tales told, So This Is Christmas remains an enormously peculiar project.

As directed by Sophie Hyde, who made the recent Irish film Animals, the picture never fully collapses beneath its own compromises. Credit for that must go to Thompson and McCormack. You get a sense of actors from different generations relishing the opportunity to tug at the ragged screenplay like handsome dogs squabbling over an old blanket.

It takes a while for Winocour’s gentle drama to consolidate into a satisfying detective story as Mia pieces together the events of that fateful evening. The denouement is dramatically convenient but undeniably moving.

A classy film that doesn’t entirely make sense.

Last Dance is frightfully indulgent, but, this being Soderbergh, it is also studded with delightful outbreaks of invention.

Sandler’s performance, Jan Houllevigue’s post-Soviet production designs and Max Richter’s soaring score enliven a handsome if dreary drama. The pacing, alas, is painfully slow, and every character save the spider is underwritten.

Like all the director’s films, it never allows a boring shot when an unusual one is possible. It has compelling momentum. It features charismatic actors. What a shame it is so tonally chaotic.

What we have here is something like a supervillain origin story, with Cohn spelling out almost every negative trait that now defines the former president. That makes for momentum, but the approach – supposing a man is made by other men alone – is also inherently trivial and reductive.

The seat-of-the-pants grit of the first film seems as distant as kitchen-sink verite.

Here is an interesting, beautifully acted if somewhat underpowered drama about the connections between the public and the personal in the life of a Ukrainian gymnast during the Maidan disturbances of 2014.