The Sheep Detectives is a profoundly odd viewing experience – entirely pleasant, lightly funny and easily absorbed, yet every so often you find yourself thinking hang on a minute, I am watching a flock of sheep investigate a murder, and feel like you are having a stroke.

Is Mother Mary a comment on modern stardom? Or the study of an intense, broken relationship? Or is it just an excuse for two hours of sculptural close-ups and artfully creepy tableaux? As you watch, you find yourself continually grabbing at meaning but, like a ghost, your fingers slip straight through.

It’s smart and watchable in a miniseries sort of way, and sets the current war in Ukraine in an instructive wider context – while Dano is ideally cast as the unreadable vizier serenely pulling strings behind the scenes. But it’s also overlong.

It has a weird, half-finished vibe, with a lumpy, repetitive structure, a bizarre colour palette that resembles an exploding Tango Ice Blast machine, and too many scenes that wear on well beyond their natural usefulness.

The performances are great, the rise-to-fame story gripping, and the music and choreography are making my skin tingle. I can’t wait to see how they’re going to deal with the trickier stuff.” But then you do wait. And wait. And then the credits roll, and you’re left waiting still.

It’s testament to just how bad the original Super Mario Bros Movie was that this sequel can be a noticeable improvement in every respect – animation, storytelling, humour, vocal performances, you name it – while still comfortably qualifying as absolute rubbish.

Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) likes his black comedies of discomfort to make us squirm, as does producer Ari Aster. But this film is skimpier on insight than the best work either has done, and Daniel Pemberton’s poignant flute score deserves to be in a more mature film.

It isn’t especially funny, and I’m not even sure that it’s meant to be.

It’s stylish, yes, it has verve and swagger and real love for the time and the place. But this is Tommy Shelby and the Peaky Blinders playing their greatest hits on what feels a little like a farewell tour. Those peaks just aren’t as razor-sharp as they used to be.

A wildly arresting performance from Buckley is not enough to save this generic and uninspired adaptation.

The film has bite without a lot of nuance.

The film gropes around for novel gimmicks – is the killer’s identity being deepfaked this time? – and tries to placate its fanbase with a few moments of gratuitously icky, mean-spirited gore. And goodness, it plods.

The Moment is an alienating, glitchy mockumentary imagining something that never happened.

The film mechanically ticks by, while showing no evidence of a soul.

The film has been put together like a machine to rattle you. It does that. I didn’t care for anyone on screen at all, and can’t say I’ll ever be tempted to watch it again, but here it is, for the delectation of a niche market.

Send Help is a strained disappointment from Raimi, who proved in Drag Me to Hell that he could sock an original concept to us and go sensationally OTT. Motivation was always on the money in that one; here it goes berserk, and not in a fun way.

The History of Sound has fashioned a deliberate non-epic from wispy material, keeping such a tight lid on sentiment, it’s like an obstinate clamshell with its secrets. Expectations need recalibrating beforehand so as not to feel lightly underwhelmed.

It’s a watchable national identity crisis in microcosm.

As a low-stress package tour of will-they-won’t-they romance highlights, it does the trick.

Part Heat, part Miami Vice, this sinewy thriller keeps motives hidden as a police unit weighs duty against dirty money.

Blue might be the warmest colour elsewhere, but here it’s just a bit tepid.

We are never distracted for long from the gaping sadness of the man and Hawke is brilliant at portraying that despair.

It has a perky winsomeness: there are jokes, not all of them morbid, about being dead. There are tear-jerking scenes that require a viewer to surrender. I struggled to do so. Funnily enough, Eternity drags.

It all comes across as one-sided, which makes the whole thing play like a PR video rather than a genuine examination of her premiership.

If the film had been tightened to two hours of Crowe and Shannon ruthlessly going at it, we might have been mesmerised.

Dramatic things keep happening in the love lives of its two central couples, yet handily for Gen-Z viewers who like their protagonists morally spotless, none is responsible for any of it. It sometimes feels as if you’re watching a couple of hours of incredibly bad luck.

It’s far less endearing than we’re presumably meant to think.

Human moments are few, and overwhelmingly feature Christy’s fellow fighter Lisa Holewyne, a rival-turned-rock tenderly played by Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian. The relationship between Sweeney and O’Brian might be the gentlest, most unassuming part of the film – but it’s what stays with you.

Imagine Arabian Nights, filtered through a Sofia-Coppola-esque feminist sensibility, but spiced up with camp. That gets you some of the way into 100 Nights of Hero, a British indie romp based on a graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg. It has saucy wit –especially up to the hour mark.

As a way of capturing the horrors of that night, the spareness of the film-making is powerful. But in terms of giving us the full picture, it falls short.

What a relief, then, that this isn’t terrible – though to get the best out of it, you may wish to convince yourself that it’s going to be.

The all-round exertion is immense, but the experience is a bizarre ordeal.

It’s a film that feels emotionally half-fulfilled, never quite grabbing or devastating in the way you’d hope.

It’s not a peak for the doughty franchise so much as a reverential goodbye. Jollity is also served, when it’s not straining for misplaced importance.

It’s callous and conscience-free, the work of an auteur in the mood to flex his style chops while saying literally nothing.

Perhaps La Grazia is enjoyed best as a more optimistic B-side to either Il Divo or Loro, Sorrentino’s lewd and scurrilous biopics of the former Italian prime ministers Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi – both of which, incidentally, were also played by Servillo. But I know which ones I’d rather put on for fun.

It’s an engaging, sometimes touching, slightly narrow depiction of a great filmmaker in the winter of his career who’s intent on somehow recapturing the spring of it.

The evidence is inconclusive, and by the final credits we’re back where we started – confused about Smollett’s guilt or innocence, but aware that somebody on camera has to be lying through their teeth.

As an occasional source of broad and undemanding chuckles, the film doubtless serves its purpose. But the mystery itself unfolds with such plodding expediency that there’s little suspense to speak of.

These complications want to spin off into fluffy absurdity. Instead they thicken into treacle. It’s a mistake to have Lohan and Curtis mainly interact as new characters, because the emotional core between their old pair gets dislodged – though it certainly helps that Butters is such a splendid, grounding co-star both before and after the switcheroo.

The recommendation might be stronger if the mortifying moments for Craig didn’t make me, personally, want to cower rather than laugh.

Just when it’s threatening to pay off, it ends, with an experimental cliffhanger, not Levy’s idea. It reminds us – by simply not working – that abrupt, unresolved endings are the hardest kind to earn.

Whatever kinship Depp may feel with this tortured, misunderstood, and regularly blotto artist is expressed, unfortunately, as a string of gruelling clichés.

If production problems didn’t thwart Maclean and crew from making a proper fist of all this, the editing took its eye off the ball.

Will it enrapture its target audience regardless? It should certainly keep them occupied for a couple of hours, though perhaps more with nodding recognition rather than delight.

The secret weapon, though, is dimpled star Ben Wang, the 25-year-old lead in the Disney+ series American Born Chinese.

It makes genuinely important points about homelessness, and the middle-class horror of ever crossing that line. But the script, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, She Said) is a surprising letdown.

Nouvelle Vague stylishly captures and celebrates a certain approach to making cinema – reactive, incautious, free-range – but leaves you wishing there was a little more of it in the film you just saw.

After the novelistic strengths of First Cow and Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt turns in something here that’s more like a short story – unhurried, pleasurable, and low key.

Lilo & Stitch has been tamed into one of those naughty-pet family comedies that used to roll off studio production lines with thud-thudding regularity, until the form fell out of fashion somewhere around 1994.

Eighty minutes ought to be a tight frame for this sort of hokum, which takes no effort to watch, but the only thing that escalates is how silly it is.

There’s a kernel of philosophical intrigue in The Assessment, encased in a sleek shell of dystopian science fiction, and unfortunately flung a million miles away from audience engagement.

The latest Marvel title is just dollop upon dollop of dourness, leaving its stars no space to show us what they might bring to the franchise.

The plotting meanders its way to the very brink of incoherence, but as the scenes tick past, the vague sense of a many-tendrilled mystery being solved does gradually descend.

The film carries itself like a bright and mischievous character study in the style of Nicole Holofcener, but is ultimately just a dog weepie with airs.

Coogan, like Tom, weathers this relatively unscathed. But Federico Jusid’s tango-inflected score just won’t stop plucking our heart-strings, as if keen to reassure us that we’ll make it through one of the darkest periods in South America’s history without the mood souring.

It only truly comes alive when the music takes centre stage.

Companionable as he always is, the way this flaunts Statham’s star power leaves a lot to be desired. He’s a totem of meathead carnage, barely sustains a scratch, and doesn’t get nearly enough moments of the deadpan bemusement he excels at best.

These poor players have all hand-picked their roles, and are resolved to strut and fret as convincingly as they can, right up until the curtain plummets.

Novocaine may not be based on any pre-existing IP – no comic book or game, say. But that’s not much to crow about, because few flights of the imagination have lately felt lower in altitude.

Director Cave stages some nicely gripping scenes of suspense, toggling between camp and grit as nimbly as the swoony soundtrack, which occasionally cuts out for comic effect.

[Burton] never thought acting was a manly profession, and seemed to be involved in a tug-of-war against himself, tangled up by his roots. To have half explored these themes, as Evans’ film does, means we’re left wanting more, but there’s a pleasing ache to the experience as a platonic love story.

The headline draw remains the headline draw – and sometimes it’s enough for two lead actors to animate, complicate and enrich a project by lending it all the mysterious gravity you could ask for.

Nothing about the plot or craft astounds, but the qualities above are all far rarer in studio movies these days than they should be, which makes The Amateur remarkable – in its own stonily workmanlike way.

Drop is ludicrous. OK, so are all films in which a taunting psychopath calls the shots, but this one takes the biscuit because of the so-not-cutting-edge tech element.

The placid, open-ended charm of its video game source material is nowhere to be found in this grindingly generic brand extension.

There’s little here to keep us up at night – or from forgetting all about it by tomorrow.

Think of it as a slightly self-nobbling version of Enchanted, the wondrous (and original) Disney blockbuster that both sent up and celebrated the Disney princess musical tradition in 2007.

The Alto Knights certainly has the off-screen pedigree you’d hope for. Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino) wrote the script, named after an infamous Manhattan social club. But the circuitous shaping feels off, a problem Barry Levinson’s direction is too flaccid to fix.

It wants to become a cat-and-mouse game between the leads, but the leaky script dampens any real hope of suspense.

One swaggering brawl plays out to a certain synth version of Beethoven’s 9th, suggesting that Love’s fanboy devotion to A Clockwork Orange might override having fully understood it. But who knows?

The long-term consequences are depressing, but also low on dramatic tension and life.

It’s an absorbing but disappointingly tasteful watch.

To everyone’s complaints that Longlegs’ plot turned daft, I can only shrug: it was easily assured enough to sustain a deadly undertow, while dancing about with a diabolical sense of mischief. I also point them to The Monkey as Exhibit A for what misfiring daftness looks like.

A thrill-free thriller.

With its single, ultimately blood-soaked day to cover, this wants to be a pressure-cooker thriller, but something’s a little off with the settings.

So much of the film’s (notably slight) running time is squandered on filler – a subplot involving bickering henchmen consumes around a third of the film – that it’s never able to hit its grindhouse stride.

It’s all lightly reminiscent of Bride Wars, the cat-fighty 2009 farce with Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson doing very unfeminist things to ringfence their perfect day. You’re Cordially Invited has a little more heart than that: it hits an average yet amiable stride.

It’s a breezy watch with nothing insightful to impart about the group or their impact on society. But it is guided by the implicit understanding that any project about the Beatles will inevitably find an audience – and that is an itch it undeniably scratches.

It is vivaciously, even triumphantly, OK. If there was an Oscar for Most Adequate Picture, we’d be gearing up for a sweep.

Ken Loach-style didactic social realism is all well and good, but Loan Ranger looks as if it was shot on a block of processed cheese and written with a bucket and mop.

The film is torn between the conflicting instincts of sassy playing to the gallery and sanctified mush.

This expensive-looking follow-up, which tells the story of Simba’s father’s own coming-to-power, sheepishly papers over all of the now-unfashionable concepts on which its forerunner was built.

The set-up is grabby and effectively alarming, even if it lends itself to more nail-biting stress than actual suspense.

Lopez is particularly good at this stuff, giving another of the messy lioness performances at which she’s excelled in the past.

While Bill Skarsgård only fitfully impresses as Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’s chilling remake, Lily-Rose Depp proves she’s one to watch.

It only really springs to life when the Beatles themselves are on screen. It feels as if there is a better film inside this one, struggling to get out. Maybe it is the Maysles original.

While the animation itself doesn’t quite match the dazzle of its inspirations, it’s energetic and bright, and springy with wit.

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo don’t come close to defying gravity in this bloated, beige screen adaptation of the Wizard of Oz prequel.

Beneath the charming sparkly wrap, there’s just more of the same underneath: an endless round of pass-the-parcel that never actually coughs up a gift.

This whole story pimps out Yuletide as a strictly mercantile fixture, with a sham veneer of goodwill merely sweetening the transaction.

The result is an empty film about emptiness, and therefore doubly depressing.

It’s all impeccably pleasant, just a tiny bit bland.

Arrogance may be the Achilles’ heel of all Grant’s baddies, including this one, but a tip-toeing aversion to risk makes Heretic end with a whimper.

A jazz-loving kid from a musical family, Williams has been breathing music since he could talk and, though open and forthcoming as he recalled his enduring career, he was clearly happiest when talking about the nuts and bolts of his craft.

None of this quite counts as stop-the-presses stuff in the present day, but it’s enough to make this a sharp debut, with a shivery undertow.

Fortunately, the writing’s sentimental and/or smirky longueurs are remedied by the animation itself, whose cosy charm has a distinctly British sensibility – from the architecture to the landscape and even the colour palettes, everything is satisfyingly just right.

The film brings us down, as well as letting itself down somewhat – a late scuffle in a peat bog is poorly motivated, the ending too vague. But the jangling escalations of the first half still mark Andrews out as a name to watch.