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.

The first Enola Holmes was colourful, spirited – and made for cinemas, though it was fast-tracked onto streaming during Covid. The sequel, however, has the silty pall of content: scenes often look dreary and move more drearily still; you’d swear in the fight scenes the actors are just taking it in turns to be hit. Elementary? Not really – just basic.

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.

What’s surprising about Minions is that it squanders these yellow oddballs’ new-found freedom.

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.

On a visual level, the film’s reportage is as tabloidy as its argument, and much more wilfully unpleasant.

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 movie subverts expectations, and not in a good way, by seeming in a dither about its own identity. The romance is by the by, the comedy as sparse as can be. We’re left with a curious non-film about the pitfalls of higher education assessment. Odd.

Mortal Engines has been thoroughly storyboarded, make no mistake. But here lies the rub – lift-off, personality, and plainly put, direction, aren’t there. All the pieces of the movie slide mechanically into place and wait – and wait – for some spark of soul to turn up and animate them.

This is at the very least a beautifully designed failure, marrying crepuscular photography with faultless art direction, and blessed by a gorgeous, otherworldly score by Augustin Viard, a specialist in the ondes Martenot. It looks and sounds so darkly inviting – but sends you home unsated.

It’s a bungled business, making obvious errors of staging.

Forty-three years on, the Cassandra Crossing has aged as only a terrible Seventies movie can. And yet, with its killer virus plot, it has suddenly acquired a horribly relevancy. Four-decades old and creaky even at the time, this five-star clunker nonetheless feels ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.

Cherry might represent a drastic shift in scale, tone and subject matter for its directors and leading man alike, but there’s a blockbuster-sized gap where its point should be.

The main disappointment, other than female characters who only exist to be disposed of, comes from recognising the kernel of something unusual buried in the film’s marrow.

As things go on, Cross’s plot doesn’t so much thicken as coagulate into nonsense. Serkis’s evil plans don’t always make much sense, even when factoring in the whole murderous psychopath thing, while the grislier imagery is often too poseur-ish to unnerve.

The picture is slight to the point of translucence.

It’s less an adaptation than a recapitulation.

It’s the kind of format that works as long as the characters aren’t all completely unbearable – which is, alas, not the case here.

The conceit of a film as a warning from the future is a promising one, but 2073 feels more like political signalling for the present.

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.

Michôd’s film consciously plays like an outback western, peppered with jagged and unpredictable outbursts of hard brutality. But it could do with losing control a little more often – and with establishing the dangers of its dog-eat-dog world more precisely.

Neither clever nor stupid enough to work.

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

This supernatural thriller has a wild conceit about a time-bending beach, and every creaky device to hand gets thrown in to keep it going.

Puig’s story is trivialised by slickness, and the tragic ending barely registers.

Historical epics are rarely light on their feet, but The King sets new standards in the field of galumphing: the film moves like a rhinoceros through porridge.

CODA is way too busy playing things cute.

This movie starts from a premise so sociologically batty it’s hard to take any of its subsequent terrors seriously, which means tension doesn’t so much fly out the window as fail to even get up the driveway.

The whole thing unspools at such an unremittingly earnest pitch that it leaves you groping under your seat for a ventilator.

But the only sense of wonder the film instils is this: if we have to wait so long between movie musicals, who on earth thought it would be a good idea to wait for this one?

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

The Hunger Games prequel plunges us back into the futuristic empire of Panem – but fails to live up to the first films of the franchise.

The film doesn’t look like the future, or the past’s idea of the future, or anything other than a venal cash grab.

The movie sorely needs a tighter edit, and direction from Apatow that isn't so slapdash and sitcommy.

The movie isn’t awful, just sapping and strained.

Having your heart in the right place isn’t much use, if you’ve forgotten your head somewhere up Sugarloaf Mountain.

There is something utterly perplexing about this British comedy, in which three middle-aged women go on an Interrailing trip with the daughter of a recently departed friend: it’s as if the cast and crew were planning to make a musical, then got to the set and decided they couldn’t be bothered.

It bombards you with overwritten monologues and try-hard music cues in an attempt to drown out its dramatic shortcomings.

Smith makes Nicky too obviously insincere, with a grating, gloomy edge – which means he never suckers you in, and the fun dries up before it ever starts.

A flabby, directionless disappointment, which only occasionally raises the heart-rate.

It’s an egghead exercise, both scrambled and undercooked.

The film goes for broke with such a careening lack of inhibition, it definitely ends up in the fun zone.

The previous X-Men film, First Class, was secure enough in its own skin to embrace its comic side. Mangold’s picture affects a pubescent snarl instead: that’s the difference between comic and daft.

It all feels grindingly perfunctory – gloopy with jargon and lore, and with no concessions made to newcomers, the film feels less like a worthwhile film in its own right than an invitation to existing fans to buy a ticket, just to see how things turned out.

It’s a sad waste, not a wilful one – a misfire you wish was better in virtually every shot.

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.

Everything Disney needed to revive the franchise after its seven-year absence from cinemas is in here. The problem is there is only around 20 minutes of it, and much of the rest is hopeless.

All his usual strengths fail him in a different culture here, perhaps because the veneer of venal cynicism that ought to be the film’s top layer is so easy to scratch through. Digging for the pathos hardly takes us long, especially with one of the director’s most cloying scores handing over a shovel.

The moment-to-moment incoherence of Dashcam makes it maddeningly hard to figure out what’s happening – the “WTF?”s that appear in the chat-box might just as well be our own. There’s a certain delirious energy to it.

The oddity, and pretty much sole selling point here, is Phillips, a delightful stalwart of British telly for years, fronting a coy Australian sex comedy of almost dogged, determined mediocrity. Writer-director Renée Webster is at least to be credited with grasping her star’s flummoxed appeal in a rare leading role.

It’s hard to extend much credit for the subject matter when it’s exploited for a “wild ride” that isn’t even wild, hawking a true story that isn’t even true.

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.

One hopes the golden age isn’t quite over yet, although as Moxie galumphs from one glib, soulless scene to the next, it’s hard not to fear the worst.

With its meathead sensibility, Day Shift is always most comfortable hacking and slashing. These set-tos can be reasonably tasty, but everything else? Way more seasoning, please.

There’s nowhere near enough horror, threat or intrigue to last the course.

It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment at which The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook’s deviously kinky period thriller, shifts from being a lascivious slice of art-house delirium to a gruelling, dislikable contraption which meretriciously sells out its source material. But that’s what happens.

The conclusion the directors reach could have come from any of the other Spears films

Had Roupenian stretched out Margot’s ordeal into the turgid novella it hereby becomes, we’d never have heard of Cat Person in the first place.

There’s an unmistakeable timidity to director Leigh Janiak and Phil Graziadei’s screenplay: it feels odd to watch an 18-rated horror that feels as if it’s going out of its way not to offend.

There’s a leaden-footedness to the direction, too. Where Burton’s camera lurched and crashed, Williams’s has a habit of hanging back sheepishly, fluffing visual gags and sapping scenes of the unhinged energy they need.

Constructed to fool the viewer with layer upon layer of lame cheats and moth-eaten devices, the film has nothing on its mind but sinking you gently into an in-flight stupor.

This is the trouble with nihilism as a foundation for horror: it can’t quicken the pulse, drum up scares, or elicit any fruitful response from the viewer at all. Being impressed with a whole lot of nothing doesn’t mean we are.

No major blockbuster in years has been this incoherently structured, this seemingly uninterested in telling a story with clarity and purpose.

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of its cast, the film just isn’t that good.

Robbie lights up her scenes with the much more special effect of raw personality.

Stuffed with so many strenuous editing ideas you suspect the influence of something illegal, Demolition is mainly casting about for a point, when it doesn’t feel like a wrecking ball aimed squarely at itself.

There’s gentle manipulation, and then there’s having your arms manacled to a freight train of weepy catharsis, which is roughly the experience awaiting viewers of Me Before You.

Kenneth Branagh returns as Poirot, but, rather than jazz things up, the film's many Danny-Boyle-esque stylings are a constant distraction.

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.

The problem with Sausage Party is that, for all the silliness, it so desperately wants to be taken seriously. What should have been a shamelessly filthy stoner movie has been watered down with ill-judged, undergraduate musings on religion, philosophy and race.

Spurlock himself is nowhere to be seen, perhaps because the man in charge of this film is plainly Cowell himself, whose influence hangs over the picture like the smell of a leaky bin bag.

It’s not simply that its various comedic scenarios aren’t funny (though they aren’t); or that all of its would-be snappy one-liners drop on the floor like wet socks (though they do), or that the timing is so off that it feels like the film was edited with a spork. It’s that nobody on screen, Lawrence included, seems remotely invested in the exercise in the first place.

The film’s family-saga pretensions and bombastically overdone characterisation keep hobbling its better elements.

There’s enjoyment to be had watching McKellen, 86, gamely pecking away at the role, snacking on morsels in every scene. If only he’d been given a fuller feast.

A thrill-free thriller.

The Boys in the Boat is autopilot Clooney – a pleasant, coddling watch almost ruthlessly shorn of depth or subtext.

The school isn’t specific enough and the horror isn’t weird enough: on both fronts, it’s so broad it could practically be a Norfolk waterway.

It ultimately feels like a counterfeit of priceless treasure: the shape and the gleam of it might be superficially convincing for a bit, but the shabbier craftsmanship gets all the more glaring the longer you look.

It’s not enough for Loach and Laverty to have their hearts so reliably in the right place. The Old Oak is sluggishly predictable in plot, but also sharply unsatisfying at the end.

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.

Those wonky de-aging effects and distracting frame-rate serve as trip-wires too. But what ultimately hobbles Gemini Man, more than all of that, is its refusal to buy into its own ludicrousness. It’s a slab of silliness that commits a terrible error: it takes itself seriously.

For a franchise in need of refreshment, it’s anything but a quantum leap.

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.

Raucous but fatally confused, openly pilfering its central themes from Gilliam’s own 1985 masterpiece Brazil, but with no idea how to develop them.

It’s not all bad: no film with this cast could ever fail entirely. Staunton makes you root for Sandra even at her worst, and Imrie offers an impish, joyous counterbalance to her pursed-lip disapproval.

When the culprit is revealed to the audience after an hour or so, and the film attempts to dig into the psychology behind their reign of terror, it quickly finds itself out of its depth.

A Wolf of Wall Street-like treatment of this story could have been a scream – and the details are more than bizarre, crass and damning enough to have supported it. But cheeks aside, this is flat, colourless stuff.

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

Amid the bungles, Collins is a bright spark.

Though it coasts on some wildly uneven star charisma, there’s nothing particularly objectionable about Double Tap, finally. It’s fine? It’s just a time-killer we didn’t much need, a decade after we hardly needed the first one.

The Shrouds has potential to be morbidly hilarious, deeply twisted and strange, or rather moving: the fact that it only feints in those directions, while prioritising several less fruitful ones, makes it the steepest disappointment of Cronenberg’s late career.

This film pretends to be cleaning house chez Mr Strangler, when it’s just pushing dust around.

Nighy and Mortimer have just a couple of scenes together, but they’re easily the film’s best: both actors sink gratifyingly into the nuances of this incipient friendship, bond over books you actually believe they’ve read, and give the film its best hope of doing Fitzgerald justice.

Rather than embracing the jangling song-and-dance numbers that made the live version box-office catnip, Eastwood sheepishly tidies them into the background, treating the project instead like a standard music-industry biopic.

It could have been one more late-career hurrah by Fonda and her fellow screen greats. Instead, 80 For Brady flubs the touchdown.

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

As 2017’s gripping and confidently philosophical Life proved, it’s possible to weave an original action movie from the smelly-people-trapped-in-space cliche. Yet The Cloverfield Paradox’s take on the genre is ham-fisted, with deafening bursts of exposition strewn between endless, talky, tedium.

It’s more often than not something of a slog, its insights shrug-worthy and its tone jarring in its shifts from candy-coloured whimsy to weepy dramatics.