There is something queasy about mining such fresh real-life trauma for popcorn entertainment.

A charmless, CGI-heavy spectacle, Red One falls into an ill-considered audience no man’s land: it’s too intense for little kids (we get to visit Krampus in what appears to be a yuletide S&M dungeon) and too bland to attract teens and genre fans.

Footage of recent concerts and meet and greets is included to showcase both her imperious glamour and how far she’s come, yet we never really get a sense of where she’s been, let alone My Life’s musical and cultural context.

The film is a bore. It's supposed to show how the Beatles work, but it doesn't. Shot without any design, clumsily edited, uninformative and naive, it would have destroyed a lesser group.

I’m a huge fan of Cornish’s 2011 debut Attack the Block, but this film isn’t nearly as energetic or enjoyably wacky as its predecessor. In fairness, it’s pitched at a considerably younger audience, but at two hours it drags; less patient children may struggle.

For all its nudge-wink movie-history nods and self-conscious carnivals of bodily fluids and glamorous excess, Babylon is exhaustingly unexciting fare – hysterical rather than historical, derivative rather than inventive.

Probably, the intention was to make explicit the connections between Theo’s past and present, but there’s not enough detail or characterisation for this structural intervention to work. Without those connecting narrative bones, the result is all flab and no flavour.

The respective charms of Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum receive a rigorous workout during the course of this caffeinated, overeager adventure romp – to the point where significant signs of wear and tear begin to appear.

This has the brash swagger of The Wolf of Wall Street, but the labyrinthine intricacies of the case may present something of a challenge to anyone not well versed in stock market manipulation.

It should be stressed that the problem doesn’t lie with Ackie necessarily, but rather with a leaden, by-numbers screenplay from Anthony McCarten, who brings to this film the same box-ticking approach he employed with Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody.

This is not, by any standard, entertainment. It is, from time to time, almost too agonising to watch: but at least, in its unrelenting, occasionally powerful way, it shows how sex and violence can sometimes, in their capacity for degradation, be brothers under the crawly skin.

As a genre exercise, the film starts promisingly enough, contrasting claustrophobic, dimly lit interiors with atmospheric wides of the landscape composed like moody paintings. Worthington-Cox is compelling, by turns twitchy, tentative, stoic and bold. Still, something isn’t clicking.

Something slightly disingenuous, perhaps, about the glib anti-corporate message of the film jars. The appeal of the original came from its purity and simplicity. This overcomplicated onslaught of manufactured magic could never really compete.

A quality cast tackle the script’s various twists and turns with aplomb. But the tale itself feels cumbersome and over-furnished, listing under the weight of its bolt-on subplots and endless reams of dialogue.

Unfortunately, the second half is over-reliant on flashy disaster set pieces, blazing towards a predictable, melodramatic conclusion.

The clear lines of the elegant 2D animation are not matched by the mythic muddle of the storytelling, an exposition-heavy slog of warring factions, convoluted webs of enchantment and a deadly, wolf-borne pandemic for good measure.

Debicki (The Tale, Widows) is wonderful as Woolf, a wry and solemn observer, but the rest of the film is all too literal.

The film works better as a comedy than a horror, skewering its ignorant US tourists, and better still as a spiteful relationship drama.

Unlike the steely resilience in the face of disaster of Robert Redford’s character in All Is Lost, watching Crowhurst slowly crack is the cinema equivalent of filling your pockets with pebbles and chucking yourself into the Solent.

This contemporary adaptation of The Turn of the Screw takes the ornate enigma of Henry James’s gothic novella and whittles it down into something rather more flat and conventional.

Characters and storylines appear to have been chosen at random by a Woody Allen meme generator.

The performances are so deadpan (or undeadpan perhaps) that most of the cast seem to be flatlining even before the zombies start chewing chunks out of their faces.

Unfortunately, Perry drenches the tale with his trademark syrupy ineptitude, creating a gloopy, turgid plodder.

Unfortunately the smarts, the sass and the wit of the original MIB is MIA.

The film’s main asset is Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror: his performance, with its velvet-soft line deliveries and unfathomable, boundless rage, is the magnetic core of this incoherent effects-dump of a movie.

Fans will no doubt find the film fascinating, if a little dispiriting: it may be like eavesdropping on your parents, only to discover that they’re on the brink of divorce.

It’s clearly a passion project for Page, so why then does his performance feel so lifeless and inert?

Mostly, the soundtrack is an unhummable mess of warbled exposition.

The aspect that’s traditionally elevated Pixar animations, the dizzy wit and inventiveness of the screenplay, is missing from this dispiriting trudge through outer space, via some box-ticking messaging along the way.

For all the energetic hurling around of heavy machinery, the movie feels inert and lazy.

It’s a diverting enough way to pass a couple of hours, I suppose, although you’ll need a high tolerance for montage sequences and for the alarmingly priapic personal-space-invading exertions of Mike and his boys.

The film is called Misbehaviour, but a timid script belies mischief of any sort.

This is film-making that feels rather dated and, unlike its resourceful protagonist, curiously risk averse.

Harris has a good ear for teenage dialogue. But her heroine, who addresses us directly through the camera, is a pain in the neck. She is to assertiveness-training what Schwarzenegger is to body-building. [01 Aug 1993, p.48]

Unfortunately, Scott is the most persuasive element in a film that is atmospherically photographed by Marcel Zyskind but let down by a clueless screenplay which borders, at times, on the risible.

Another sloppy helping of migrant family cliches, served up with the same loving forcefulness as grandma’s moussaka

The performances create anthropological distance, not human empathy.

Unfortunately, kind of a drag.

Clooney and Roberts try their best but they’re finally not much more than decoration themselves, the filmic equivalent of plastic figurines on a cake.

This picture is impressively designed but low on scares.

The film feels thin, drab and ultimately unable to harness the collective power of its otherwise talented cast.

The special effects seem shoddy and unfinished and the screenplay struggles to keep up with its own twists and turns.

The tone veers haphazardly from tense, high-stakes cat-and-mouse chase to ill-judged satire.

Michael talks about himself with candour, and the archive footage is extensive. But the choice of interviewees, including a tittering Ricky Gervais honking out off-key witticisms, James Corden and Liam Gallagher, seems a bit random.

It’s a wasted opportunity. Brie is clearly a gifted comic actress who deserves better material than this.

There is little satisfaction to be found in the picture’s messily uninhibited climax.

From his cheesy narration (“Nothing is more addictive than the past,” Nick solemnly opines) to the movie’s double-crossing femme fatale and nocturnal, neon-lit setting, the director has great fun playing with genre tropes, but it’s unclear whether she’s going for heightened camp.

The film shares far too many tropes with other YA sci-fi properties – The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent – to make a mark in the unforgiving post-apocalyptic wasteland of the adolescent market. That said, the casting is strong.

Lucy in the Sky is low on real insight and feels like a psychology column in a supermarket tabloid.

This should amuse the younger members of the family, but it's unlikely to offer much more to parents than a couple of hours' respite.

It’s amiable enough, but this broad French comedy is not distinctive enough for the arthouse crowd, and too Gallic for the mainstream.

A lumbering, humourless, tech-driven damp squib of a movie, this long-awaited (or dreaded?) sequel to one of the highest grossing films of all time builds upon the mighty flaws of its predecessor, delivering a patience-testing fantasy dirge that is longer, uglier and (amazingly) even more clumsily scripted than its predecessor, blending trite characterisation with sub-Roger Dean 70s album-cover designs and thunderously underwhelming action sequences. In water.

The decision to turn the film into a procedural with a redemptive ending feels like an attempt to grasp at justice, but it’s harrowing to watch all the same, yet offering little context and few fresh insights.

There is a slightly panicky desperation to the cacophonous production design, and a sense of trying to distract from a plot as thin as spun sugar.

Unlike movies such as Black Panther and Shang-Chi, which functioned as self-contained entities, this film requires an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel minutiae and world-class cross-referencing skills to fully work. And who, outside the diehard fanbase, has the bandwidth for that level of commitment?

There are films that are so thunderously stupid they bypass guilty-pleasure status and end up as a danger to themselves and all around them. Bullet Train falls into the latter camp. It’s so imbecilic, you wouldn’t trust it to cross the road unsupervised, let alone negotiate Japan’s Shinkansen high-speed rail network.

The wildly uneven wedding clash comedy You’re Cordially Invited is certainly in the vicinity of terrible on numerous occasions.

Clearly, it’s intended as a vehicle for Wilson, who is credited as co-producer, but it’s Hathaway who steals the show.

This unwillingness to divulge anything truly intimate, combined with the film’s jumbled chronology, gives the whole thing a thin, Wikipedia-ish feel. Jett says she wants to offer her fans “a primal release”. A pity, then, that this film about her is so repressed.

Guy Ritchie’s latest gangster comedy presents itself as a harmless romp, but behind its wink-wink-nudge-nudge humour is a bitter and dated worldview.

It’s Statham’s movie – a brisk, slick, ultra-violent action onslaught that yet again demonstrates his ability to redeem just about any old tosh.

Perhaps aware of the limitations of the screenplay, director F Gary Gray deploys an irritating arsenal of flashy camera moves and sleight-of-hand edits, but these only serve to emphasise the emptiness of the spectacle.

There are moments when Abela disappears and Winehouse bursts on to the screen, like a magic eye picture blinked fleetingly into focus. But the film is wildly uneven and prone to catastrophic misjudgments – in that at least it’s true to Winehouse’s spirit.

There’s an edge of panicky desperation to the film-making – the lurching, swooping cameras; the skittish editing; the arcing lens flare. It all seems a little too eager to distract from the fact that top-hatted, frock-coated, mutton-chopped chaps burbling on about the relative advantages of the alternating current versus direct current system does not, in fact, make for electrifying drama.

This is a grimly efficient IP cash-in that defuses any potential scares with a hot-pink colour palette and a bunch of oddly specific and distracting product placements.

The picture, by Mexican director Alejandro Monteverde, is an earnest and well-intentioned attempt to engage with a very real and harrowing issue. It’s also a thunderously crass and manipulative movie that is hampered by erratic pacing, pantomime bad guys and an overfondness for shots of Caviezel weeping God-fearing, manly tears.

It’s not unfunny, but one joke can’t sustain the entire movie.

This sluggish US remake trades the generous charm of Sy’s affable screen presence for the niggling irritation of Kevin Hart. Everything that was already wrong with the original film – its sentimentality, its simplicity – is magnified.

The music they create together is emblematic of the central problem. It’s sterile, manufactured and utterly fake production-line pop masquerading as some kind of indie rock spotify sensation.

A handsome period piece, shot in striking black and white, A Forgotten Man tackles an intriguing theme, but it’s a little too airless and inert in approach to bring this murky corner of European history to life.

The film can’t resist revelling in a conservative conclusion outside Buckingham Palace, with a victory banner fluttering against a smattering of St George’s flags.

It’s a fun premise, but Lowe’s follow-up to her deliciously nasty 2016 debut, Prevenge, is disappointingly underpowered and slapdash.

Playing out to the histrionic squalling of a country-infused score, this is film-making that aims to smite its audience into submission.

A film so grating that you long for the sweet release of amnesia.

For all the real-estate machinations and nefarious scheming, there are too many inert scenes that drain the energy from this already plodding story.

The only notable development is just how rapidly a satirical skewering of genre formulas can become thuddingly formulaic.

Enthusiastic mugging and gurning from the cast can’t hide a feeble, flailing screenplay that clings to its single idea like a lifebelt.

The scares are sad, puny little things. Even Jamie Lee Curtis seems to have lost the will to fight. It’s time that Myers and his mouldy old mask were laid to rest. Let’s hope nobody decides to disinter him yet again.

The smug asides plastered on screen, and the hyperactive inserts of nature documentary footage do nothing to raise the film’s real-life stakes.

The tone flits between revenge thriller and against-the-elements survival movie, but commits to neither.

The film can’t square the fact that its protagonists are the victims of sexism and yet perpetuate it by sheer virtue of working for a rightwing news channel.

The relatively scant highlights include the film’s sunset pastels, shoals of fish in penguin waiter uniforms, a homage to Atlantis (the Las Vegas one) and a plot point involving the power of the Macarena.

It’s visually striking, and at times somewhat overwhelming. Expect numerous sword-based battles, ogres, dragons, ancient curses, distractingly voluptuous supporting characters and, of course, slime.

It’s fair to say that this amiable but almost farcically uneventful adaptation of the 2005 memoir by JR Moehringer is also postcard-thin in its plotting and insight.

Todd Stephens’s film is an amiable little story, and Kier is clearly enjoying himself immensely, but this is as wafting and insubstantial as Patrick’s chiffon scarf.

This one almost makes it, but a boggy script slows it down.

A film that erases itself so thoroughly from your memory, it’s almost as if Pitt and Clooney had performed one of their bespoke clean-up services on your brain.

The film has a boisterous energy, but it’s puerile, phoney and frequently rather cringe.

Kobi Libii’s film is far too diffident and polite in its approach to leave much of a mark in the conversation about race and representation in US culture.

It’s a wildly uneven mess.

It’s a chipper, self-consciously adorable romp that will no doubt delight existing fans of the television series. It is, however, laser-targeted at the youngest audience members.

For all its big-hitting visual ambition, philosophical window dressing and pick-and-mix literary references, this is a work of screaming emptiness.

It’s almost worth watching just for the way that Cage delivers the word “testicle”: it sounds as though all the syllables got caught in a combine harvester and then had to be reassembled, with the accents and emphases in the wrong places. It is, like much of the film, utterly barmy.

It’s trite and predictable stuff: the laughs are forced; the pathos is over-stewed.

Tiresome stuff.

In an improvement on the film’s predecessor, director Andy Serkis dispenses with detailed explanations and instead amps up the humour, leaning into the goofy, flirtatious dynamic between Venom and Brock.

With its drab, overpowering score, this tedious drama is nearly as gruelling as the trek up Scotland’s Suilven.

The attempts at authentic stoner dialogue soon become tedious, with too little plot or character development grounding the inanity (Hill’s self-written script also features an eyebrow-raising overuse of the N-word).