The story’s insistent ambiguities ought to make it seductively complex, but it never quite shakes off a stuck-in-the-mud vibe.

It’s all patently ridiculous - and surprisingly watchable.

If the action in Wonder Woman comes less frequently than you might expect, it’s also thrillingly designed and staged, with a surging sense of real people, from all sorts of backgrounds, swept up in the wider conflict’s churns and jolts.

It tends to be flat, misjudged, and a bit of a nightmare, but it’s too frivolously knocked-off to give lasting annoyance.

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

Amalric transcends mere dishevelment here: in some scenes which flash back to the start of his relationship with Sylvia, the former Bond villain looks like a pile of leaves with a coat thrown on top. [Cannes Version]

It’s not an experience to relish, exactly, but it’s still one that’s fully capable of blowing you away.

It’s a fantasy not of sexual satisfaction but sexual accomplishment, and perhaps no director other than Ozon would have the imagination and panache to carry it off.

The director’s game is level, and typically mischievous, but lacks something - and it’s not just the vicious sting at the end of, say, Hidden.

The script, co-written by Zvyagintsev and his regular collaborator Oleg Negin, scrupulously extends to each of its characters the dignity of complexity, and both excellent leads repay the favour tenfold, investing what could have easily been petit-bourgeois caricatures – the preening shrew, the oafish office drone – with riveting sincerity and nuance.

Loznitsa’s construction of this world apart – which is, of course, a grotesque allegory for Russia itself – is as immersive as it is unnerving.

Campillo has mounted a methodical tribute to this era of activism which successfully balances everything on its plate: what’s brought to the table is a filling meal from a good chef, only lacking the genius of inspired presentation.

A fantastically dreary and flatulent anti-war satire.

When Good Time’s good, it’s properly electric, and the star turn goes off like an illegal firework.

When absurdism feels this wrong, you know it’s being done right.

It’s every inch a group achievement, and the film’s best scenes are its ensemble ones: prayers before bedtime, musical recitals, meals by candlelight.

The film doesn’t stint on emotional complexity, but it might be Baumbach’s most accessible to date.

Haynes’s vision of two New Yorks, a half-century apart, is a marvel of nested detail, never overbearing, and interested in things rusted and forgotten rather than shiny and new.

Everything about Baywatch the movie is big, brash and bombastic.

Almost every last breath of The Journey is extraordinarily badly written, from the various contrivances that bring the two men together without supervision, to the verbal sabre-clashing that ensues.

There are only so many ways Foxx can hobble around with a stab wound and pick up multiple cellphones before the very sight of him gets silly: after a while, it’s like watching fatigued takes of the same scene over and over again.

Visually, narratively, every creative choice forks off down the most obvious route.

With just a scattering of stumbles, Unlocked could have conceivably ended up as a romp whose flaws and idiosyncrasies gave it character. But there’s only so much character a film can take.

It’s addictive fantasy, satisfyingly snappy even in its absurdity, and something no Chastain fan can afford to miss.

Frantz is the work of a rascal, but a rascal in an unusually reflective frame of mind. Even with its mysteries solved, you can’t help but keep turning it over.

It’s impossible not to come out wishing it were better.

A variously lukewarm and lugubrious melodrama adapted from a 2008 novel by Sebastian Barry.

Wind River confirms the director as a rising talent who can be trusted to beat his own enticing path through inhospitable ground.

The gonzo-Wagnerian backstory the franchise subsequently built up hasn’t been sufficiently pruned – and with so many characters to juggle, the story feels less like a coherent chain of events than a bundle of obligatory subplots.

Okja is plenty of fun, and smart around the edges, but the girl-and-her-pig stuff can drag, and it feels like it’s pressing for resonance more than properly achieving it.

Scott’s Alien: Covenant is a mad scientist film – arguably, one of the maddest. It’s grandiose, exhilarating, vertiginously cynical and symphonically perverse.

For fans of Barratt, Boosh and mock-heroic Britcoms, it’ll mostly hit the spot.

Ritchie’s film...is so misshapen and inert, your imagination and memory never come close to being sparked by it. Just sticking with the plot soaks up every ounce of concentration you have.

It’s the kind of handsome, rousing, rigorous entertainment you can’t help but play along with.

Beatty’s casting of Collins and Ehrenreich is inspired: it’s easy to imagine both of these beautiful young things thriving in the Hollywood of the 1950s and 60s, in much the same way Beatty himself did.

There’s something glib, and occasionally maddening, about the film’s use of loveable fauna in peril to sentimentalise and sweeten what is, after all, an account of real human bravery in the face of an endlessly horrifying historical event.

Throughout, Quillévéré keeps asking her cast for the impossible, and gets it.

Pugh is mesmerising.

That sense of gooey euphoria runs through everything that’s good in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.

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

Director Justin Lin has become the man to give this franchise legs: the start and finish here, defying every imaginable law of physics, are series highs.

It’s an odd sensation to watch a Fast & Furious film and find yourself wishing the special effects lived up to the writing, but – well, here we are.

Ahmed anchors a film that's more successful in style than in logic.

Jenny Lecoat’s script admits to being a fictionalised version of Louisa Gould’s heroic martyrdom, but it’s one with an unfortunate air of unreality.

With Caine, Freeman and Arkin, you know what you’re going to get. In Going in Style, it’s all you get.

Yamada makes a point of contrasting the agonising complexity of high-school life with the clean simplicity of the moments that really count: hushed conversations on a bridge in springtime, a shared roller-coaster ride under empty blue skies.

Often the film resorts to that unforgivable cheat move of having the supporting cast laugh at its leads’ antics on screen, in the hope of prompting us to do likewise. Instead I found myself curling over in such a paralysing cringe, my body had to be rolled out of the cinema afterwards like a dented bicycle wheel.

Under-eights may thrill to this, or they may, in years to come, confuse it with their first LSD trip. Just don’t say you weren’t warned.

The last scenes aren’t just bungled, they’re hideously sentimental – insults to both viewer intelligence and the touted gravity of the subject matter.

There are moments which directly recreate Oshii’s best scenes, with real sets and actors performing a balletic kind of stunt-karaoke. But the story is far more graspable – more streamlined – and the gracenotes, action-free, tend to be the highlights.

So many shivery night-time clinches in Moscow fill Despite the Falling Snow’s modest runtime, you wonder what proportion of the budget went on that ever-whirring snow machine.

Taken on its entertainingly trashy terms, Espinosa’s film does most of the things you want from it quite well, at least until a gotcha ending which doesn’t getcha.

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.

The movie rattles with provocations.

There’s little chemistry and less comic frisson, thanks in part to the weird seams of pettiness and condescension running through the script.

Serving as an allegory on post- and antenatal depression, Prevenge is a kaleidoscope of violence and humour, a tense tale that wickedly extracts laughs through the banality of its suburban setting.

The mechanisms at work in Baby Driver, while calibrated with hair’s-breadth precision, are nothing new. Here’s what is: the sheer glee with which the film prods around in its own clockwork to show you what spins what.

Song to Song was formerly known as Weightless, which would have suited its drifting, twirling rhythms. At least its new title doesn’t invite an en-masse sigh of: “well, quite”.

The Matrix wants its green-and-black colour scheme back. Cape Fear wants its toxic male combat back. You may well want your money back.

Sheer novelty powers this confrontational curio, up to a point. But the nastiness cuts both ways.

It’s the music that makes it particularly special, and appreciating that is entirely the point of the live-action remake.

A large part of the enjoyment comes down to the sheer earth-shaking lunacy of Kong’s daily grind, even before the human intruders are factored in.

Patriots Day is stirring, well-acted, moving and built with conviction and flair. But a film about such a senseless attack shouldn’t be scared, now and then, to make a little less sense.

When A Cure for Wellness goes full wacko, it certainly doesn’t worry about questions of taste. But it hasn’t worried about questions of logic, duration, or novelty, either.

It has a vigorous sense of entertainment value and a cast relishing every moment.

These characters get ghastly fast. It’s the pace and panic of modernity Moverman grasps best as morally corrosive forces: the soft ping of iPhone email alerts never letting us be, and consciences wiped clean as quickly as the next news cycle whips around.

Logan is a film for people, like me, who thought the only good bit of X-Men: Apocalypse was Michael Fassbender crying in the woods, and left the cinema wishing that had been the whole thing. It’s something no-one could have expected: a creatively risky superhero movie. And it deserves to pay off.

As a writer, Kaurismäki has a precious knack for jokes that work beautifully in any language.

It’s eye-opening, well acted and darkly entertaining.

Chapter 2 does its job entirely ably, without exactly doing much overtime.

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

Directed with what you might call resounding competence by Theodore Melfi, Hidden Figures isn’t pushing the cinematic boat out in any new directions, but it steers its prescribed course nimbly and nicely.

A film as transporting, profound and staggering in its emotional power as anything I’ve seen in the cinema in years.

The awkward middle course charted by new director James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Cards) and his cast is unsatisfying in terms of head, heart and, well, elsewhere. It’s an alleged 18-rated, adults-only filth-fest that behaves like a flustered PG.

The great coup Washington delivers, beyond framing his co-star’s virtuous anguish so well, is the risky, brilliant, and frequently alienating performance he gives as Troy.

Somehow, this celebration of early resistance to the Nazis, with its overbearing sentimentalism and lacquered, Oscar-hungry sheen, manages to trace the familiar contours of countless other dramas set in the period. Subtle this film is not.

The movie’s invigorating discourse on sin, lust and love is propelled by a kind of Dionysian glee which keeps it airborne almost constantly.

While it never achieves, or even reaches for, The Lego Movie’s unexpected profundity and emotional bite, in purely logistical terms, The Lego Batman Movie is a thing of wonder. There are around four (great) films’ worth of action and jokes here, crammed into a story so streamlined it might have been assembled in the Lockheed wind tunnel.

Hush and patience are simply not in Anderson’s vocabulary. He bombards you as if terrified of encroaching tedium, and the set pieces trip each other up in their sheer haste.

Christine, which asks a top-notch Rebecca Hall to play out the last days of Chubbuck’s life, dares us to hope that it’s somehow about a different Christine Chubbuck – one who made it out the other side of her own tragedy.

Denial certainly isn’t great cinema – it gets stuffy and repetitive, and Lipstadt’s frustration at not being allowed to testify herself isn’t the burning issue it ought to be. Still, it’s textbook advocacy, and a teaching tool of genuine value.

This really is a film in which the creative thinking seemed to start and stop at ‘wouldn’t it be funny if a pig wore a leotard’, and any attempt to inject its aspartame bonhomie with some kind of greater significance feels like trying to push an uncooked sausage through Kevlar.

McConaughey cranks his performance up to 11, as if to compensate for the lack of wattage found in Patrick Massett and John Zinman’s script.

The film’s secret superhero is Maisie Williams as Lucy.

Who knows what it’ll look like down the line as a record of its own premiere – the live-streaming may well have been its oxygen. But we did watch the boundaries crumble outright between live performance and real, on-the-hoof film-making, to amply entertaining effect.

Like the original, T2 is happy enough spending time with its characters whatever they get up to. Very little that happens in the film seems to affect where it’s going, and the few things that do feel dashed off, almost as an afterthought. It’s also littered with callbacks to the first film – some as stirring as they are subtle, others exasperatingly cute.

while every detail matters, they don’t all point towards a kick-yourself climactic revelation. All you have to do is climb aboard, keep checking your blind spots, and enjoy the rackety ride.

The movie wastes chance after chance to pull together a satisfying action sequence, or give us anything to look at that’s not lame, spatially confusing, and badly lit.

Pérez relies on his cast to do what they can with sketchily written roles, and also to pull off that dodgiest of acting tasks, speaking English with a pronounced German accent – something the stars curiously manage with much more shading and conviction than the mostly Teutonic supporting cast.

The movie is immaculately dressed, but there’s a mannequin blandness lurking beneath: it’s all logistics, no guts.

Lonergan is so precise with his actors, the sense of place, and the level control of tone that you feel him methodically striving here to avoid false notes.

Jackie, the English-language debut from the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows you the past in a hall of shattered mirrors – fractured and unsettling, with every surface sharp enough to draw blood.

As much as you may find yourself rooting for the film, it’s too blandly directed by Chris Wedge (Ice Age) to repay the favour with anything out of the ordinary.

As a directing assignment, it at least proves that The Imitation Game was no fluke: Morten Tyldum can make glossily sexless, space-cadet guff out of whatever half-baked script you throw at him. The attempts at humour are wince-inducing.

Hamburg’s always reaching for poo-based humour in his more desperate moments.

There’s a Spielbergian showmanship to Bayona’s films, wedded to an unabashed emotionalism, and this one reaches for you down in the gut.

Assassin’s Creed is leaps and bounds ahead of kitchen-sink-hurling flapdoodle like X-Men Apocalypse – it’s only the second-worst Fassbender star vehicle of 2016 – but it never allows him a sober moment, as that film did in a hushed Polish forest, where his talent, as opposed to his biceps, gets a stern workout.

More skilful docs get away with more ingenious cheats than this, which doggedly insists that Aisholpan is proving herself to everyone, and dangles proofs it doesn’t even need.