With the filmmakers almost palpably high-fiving between these takes, it’s no surprise they wind up with a star performance that has to count as one of this star’s most strenuous. Treated as this zoo exhibit, he isn’t unleashed to express himself creatively. He’s caged.

For all its world-building sprawl, The Way of Water is a horizon-narrowing experience – the sad sight of a great filmmaker reversing up a creative cul-de-sac.

Only Nyong’o and Winston Duke, whose avuncular mountain tribe chief M’Baku makes a welcome return, actually feel like human beings. Elsewhere it’s drainingly apparent we’re just watching the nth round of chess pieces being rearranged. Like Namor with his dinky ankle-wings, this franchise has become super-heroically adept at treading water.

Schrader is a million miles from the potent anguish of First Reformed, the 2017 film that won him an Oscar; rather, this nearly rivals his 2013 erotic thriller The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan, for bewildering tedium.

It’s the film that’s hell – and a very dull, desperate hell at that, as if these dungeon masters have realised we aren’t sufficiently scared by the main event, and try throwing the kitchen sink at us, almost literally.

Some of us saw a while ago that turning Avatar into a franchise would prove to be a creative cul-de-sac. Having reached the top of the street three years ago, Cameron spends all of Fire and Ash trying to turn his enormous articulated lorry around. The back-up beeper is beeping, the spinning yellow lights are spinning, and he’s just knocked over his third wheelie bin. I do hope he eventually gets out.

In practical terms, this just means he’s Iron Man with a spray-paint job. The film’s draggy middle act has to confine Jaime in Victoria’s secret lab, or there would be nothing for the non-superpowered rest of his family to do: at long last, he’s pitted against the grievance-harbouring Indestructible Man (Raoul Trujillo) in one of those climactic clashes we know all too well, which is just a slam-bam VFX-off.

The more calculated Vaughn’s films are to appeal to his surprisingly rabid fan-base, the more they seem custom-built to repel everyone else.

For perhaps the first time in the studio’s canon, every idea in this ‘origin story’ of the Toy Story astronaut feels woefully half-baked.

The movie doesn’t have a funny bone in its body, clomping from one unoriginal set piece to the next with a head-scratching lack of urgency.

The amatory mechanisms here are so basic they make 1970’s Love Story look like Wuthering Heights, but at least Love Story had the courage to wring every last drop of pathos from its tragic-romance premise.

Ana de Armas stars as a new, lethally dull trainee assassin, Keanu Reeves makes an emergency cameo, and the film is an absolute stinker.

Bono may be his own worst enemy in the one-man show Stories of Surrender, but only just. His second worst is Blonde director Andrew Dominik, who has turned it into a more excruciating film than you might even have surmised.

Even when the duo commandeer a luggage cart and trundle around these shiny corridors getting sozzled, we remain prisoners in their departure lounge of the damned.

By the time the credits rolled on River, I wanted to throw myself into the nearest one.

As satire it’s a dismal dereliction of duty; as comedy, a one-note joke that wears out fast.

A second instalment of the Oz origin movie is bloated and boring despite new songs for both Elphaba and Glinda.

The film is so myopically gripped by the idea of Marvel as endlessly fascinating corporate soap opera that in five years time, you wonder if it will make any sense at all.

A fantastically dreary and flatulent anti-war satire.

The film has zero finesse even by Ritchie’s standards, but if star ratings were calculated on body count alone, give it hundreds.

There’s almost nothing the film does well, but that doesn’t stop it donning a winner’s smirk while it copies every 1980s science fiction smash you’ve ever seen.

Usually, a spoof franchise would only feel this exhausted by the second or third sequel, so I suppose Fackham Hall deserves points for efficiency at least.

It’s a grinding disappointment all round, though at least now we know that what bears famously do in the woods can extend to their film work.

I snorted with genuine laughter, hard, at this film’s closing notion of what being a comedy even is.

You sense that Washington and Zendaya do both believe in the material, and they certainly throw themselves at it with gusto, but their best moments here are invariably the ones in which they’ve not been given anything to say.

Cuban Fury belongs to an older, unfunnier time. Please let’s not go back.

We are encouraged to find these people stupidly brutal or comedic without being given the slightest idea as to why they might be that way.

It is rubbish, and whereas Taylor’s playing can sometimes redeem utter nonsense, it doesn’t quite manage it here.

Oswald’s brother Robert, played by James Badge Dale, is the film’s only rational human being, and Dale makes you wish Landesman had written the entire film from his angle.

Pike’s preposterous accent is as close as the film ever comes to acknowledging its own premise’s inherent corniness.

The shortest of the films yet is also the most interminable, a knot of nightmares that groans with the series' now-trademark VFX sloppiness.

Theoretically, getting to see Peña and Skarsgård goof around with these leading roles is the film’s headline draw; but the script is so misguidedly pleased with itself, all you’re doing is watching two amiable stars mug strenuously and try their best.

Sending up the Eurovision Song Contest is like flattening Salisbury Plain: one quick look at the thing should be enough to reassure you that the job took care of itself long ago. Nevertheless, Will Ferrell has decided to give it a shot, and the result is this pulverisingly unfunny and vacuous two-hour gauntlet run of non-tertainment.

It’s a catastrophically bad movie whose aggressive dullness and dumbness can best be reproduced by picking up a brick and slamming it against one’s forehead for two hours.

As a motor-mouthing smart-ass, the 58-year-old Pitt is badly miscast – every detail here seems tailored to Ryan Reynolds, director David Leitch’s Deadpool collaborator – while the film's bulging cast and bloated running time recalls those all-star capers of the 1960s: imagine It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World crossed with a migraine. For the sake of all that’s holy, take the bus.

Other than sniggering about what an outré stereotype they’ve served up, it’s hard to see how Lee and Copley can justify this performance, which is quite the worst of the year, and sends the whole final act of their movie straight to oblivion.

A shambolic film populated by some of the most aggressively charmless characters ever seen in a blockbuster.

If every last joke in it wasn’t built on the premise that anyone who isn’t a straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class male isn’t intrinsically laughable, it might have made for lively comedy.

The thrill of the games is matched fleetingly here at best, because it feels like a simulator being put through a simulator, and not all the effects are up to snuff. Script-wise, we don’t just get Formula One, but formulae two through infinity.

If you don’t actually want to make a film out of a Roald Dahl book, this critic’s advice is: don’t.

Like the muddled plotting, risible climax and wearisomely foul-mouthed script, Jolt’s budgetary shortcomings might have been endurable if its action scenes passed muster. Alas, they’re barely community theatre standard.

It’s a misguided enterprise all round, and while it’s perfectly possible to applaud everything the film wants to say, you find yourself cringing at the ways it’s saying it.

Incoming director Michael Dougherty (Krampus) is the one in this unenviable hot-seat, but he can’t competently handle a budget this huge when it’s being poured over an assignment this vague.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard simply doesn’t put in the effort, with the result that almost every aspect of the film proves wildly irritating, from its central odd couple to the dubious green-screen work that regularly has them pulling nonchalant faces in front of exploding buildings.

Somehow, this new animated adaptation of the video game is even worse than the abominable 1993 live-action. Even the CGI is second-rate.

In place of classic thriller techniques and mechanisms are a beige aesthetic, limp dialogue and glib let’s-just-vibe-with-it attitude that only grow more maddening as things progress.

There is a noxious undead pong emanating from this latest entry in the 1980s franchise, which is now being necromantically sustained through force of sheer commercial desperation, and nothing else.

A lot gets packed in here, none of it good.

Rather than being any particular person’s bright idea for a girlboss fantasy revenge caper, this lousy romp was obviously hatched by an algorithm, and might just as well have been directed by AI.

Halloween is fast approaching and Netflix has very generously stitched together a chilling Frankenstein’s monster of a rom-com sure to keep audiences awake all night in a cold sweat.

American Assassin seems to have a certain target audience in mind, and it’s probably not one you’d want to be considered a part of.

There was barely a scene in Dogman that didn’t have me yelping in disbelief.

It feels like a sheepish feature-length retraction of the franchise to date. It’s consistently embarrassing to watch, and features plot holes so yawningly vast they have a kind of Grand Canyon-like splendour: part of you wants to hang around to see what they look like at sunset.

It’s just all too supremely silly to worry about in the least.

The ugly and incomprehensible big finish we get appears to have been shot by the Hunchback of Notre Dame and edited by a monkey wearing oven gloves, and if there’s a single clear shot of the Dinozords in action in there, I must have missed it.

MacFarlane’s making no effort to push the envelope, which is something of a relief, but nor is he winning anyone around to his increasingly desperate stylings as a nerd-turned-bully.

This crazily overlong and tiresome follow-up...doesn’t seem to have the first idea what to do with itself – not least when it comes to its much-vaunted all-star cast, the majority of whom are barely even in it.

After a while, it’s as if Thomas’s self-loathing begins to rub off on the script, which keeps undercutting should-be-resonant moments with smirking references to other films.

To call the film “repellent” would do it too much credit. The combat itself (sorry, kombat) is so clumsily shot and edited that the fights have no discernible dramatic shape or flow, while the fatalities are rendered in bland, businesslike computer graphics that have you yearning for the honest, artisanal gloop-by-the-bucket of a Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street.

Where the film completely falls down is in director Joshua Michael Stern’s disastrous decision to cast Ashton Kutcher in the central role.

The pacing seems intentionally designed to break your spirits, with a climactic set-piece that rages on forever, despite being comprised of nothing but shouting and torpedos. It makes Crimson Tide looks like a masterclass in international relations.

Antebellum doesn’t so much concertina the past and the present as do a leering jig back and forth, then blow you a callous raspberry instead.

Though A Family Affair shoots for laughs, it ends up in an uncanny valley of spooky sex and dead-on-arrival jokes.

Nothing in this feeble psychological thriller rings true for a moment, though its unhinged machinations feel as pedestrian as soap opera in execution.

It’s a series of pointless, boorish skits about two unrepentant lotharios.

Superheroes do progressive politics these days as a matter of course, and here it just feels like shtick – a box to be dutifully checked, rather than a theme to be meaningfully explored.

Seinfeld’s affable mugging is no compensation for putting us through a glorified pitch session anyone sane would have nipped in the bud.

This film’s two hours feel like four.

Every shot is sluiced in flat grey light – the action scenes look like gravel in a food processor – while the dialogue is all botched quips and clichés (“Did somebody order backup?” one Transformer smarms while cocking a rocket launcher), and the human characters timidly written nobodies.

Transcendence is the worst, most portentous, and certainly the silliest big-budget science fiction film since the 2008 Keanu Reeves remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The film never tries to do anything other than look good, and is hellishly ugly even so.

While the plot’s endless lurches and jinks are designed to hold you in a constant state of pleasurable bafflement, the cumulative effect is desensitisation: no single thread holds long enough to give you anything to cheer for or believe in.

A film so frivolous and twee I felt as if my brain were leaking out of my nostrils as I watched.

From blundered opening to risible conclusion, it’s a wall-to-wall fiasco.

The result is cinema you don’t watch so much as absent-mindedly scroll through, wondering when an idea or an image worth clicking on will finally show up.

It’s less a film than a compound disaster scenario for comedy: to say I didn’t laugh once is to understate the sheer volume and vehemence of not-laughing I was doing during each of its 106 agonising minutes.

The film is close to parody – not of anything Potter’s ever done, but of male artists and their obsessive end-of-life regrets. If you’d told me it was a shelved adaptation of late Philip Roth done by Alejandro González Iñárritu in Birdman (or Biutiful) mode, I’d have believed it in a shot.

As last dances go, it’s the Macarena in film form.

In cinematic confession, no number of Hail Marys could make amends for this.

Cannes has had its share of opening-night turkeys over the past decade or so (2014’s Grace of Monaco was a memorable one), but for sheer unabating feebleness this must take the biscuit.

Let’s blame Fellowes before Shakespeare – one of them built this house, the other has just walked right through it in his filthiest garden clogs.

This is the problem with being held hostage in the worst studio comedy of the year: for cast and audience alike, there’s little to do but wait for it to stop.

Zemeckis can’t let go of his ghastly conviction that everything has to be heart-tugging schmaltz. Alan Silvestri’s ruinously sickly score is his main accomplice.

The film succumbs to being undiluted tripe.

Director David Gordon Green fails to whip up even a fraction of the original 1973 chiller's menace in this sloppy, CGI-heavy farrago.

Many good actors here are weirdly bad.

Robert Zemeckis, who should be well above this, imprints a bit of personality on this nightmare exactly twice.

No Escape is a film you’d want to recoil from taking seriously, so it’s almost a relief that its bungled execution makes this actively impossible.

The level of not very funny things this entails, even by the standards of barely-awaited sequels to lowbrow Yuletide comedies, is kind of impressive.

I mean, it’s really dumb: steroidally dumb, dumb not in a charming, laughter-provoking way but just in a clunking, vulgar, relentless, random smutty jokes about handjobs way.

This series' sixth film has a daft plot, groans with lousy action and makes the poor old dinosaurs humiliatingly surplus to requirements.

In a memorably bad summer for children’s films, this, surely, is as low as things can sink.

As trash pleasures go, Serenity’s too ploddingly stretched and lacking in plot curlicues to reach nirvana, but it’s capable of making a whole audience giggle at its wonderfully pretentious gracenotes.

Fans of Cage and Cusack, previously paired as unlikely allies in Con Air (1997), may be looking forward to a bit of deranged actorly combat once Hansen is cornered in the interrogation room, but it’s here that this hopeless flick comes up especially short.

Baby Invasion, which premiered at Venice tonight, may be the stupidest film I have ever seen. And I use the word “may” only because I’m not entirely sure this thing actually is a film in the first place.

Tom Gormican, the writer and director, mostly uses overlapping dialogue in place of actual jokes, although occasionally he stretches to toilet humour.

Substance-wise, there might be enough going on here to sustain a five-minute short.

It’s bizarre, unsettling and yet – in the filmmaking equivalent of turning wine to water – bracingly dull to boot.