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.