The film isn’t a write-off – well-handled, it could have had the sober dramatic voltage of Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters, which relates a now-familiar story of corporate malfeasance in a different place and time. The problems are of style, focus and intent.

The trouble is that Jackson can’t make it mean very much: when every life on Middle Earth is seemingly at stake, few individually grab our attention.

Better than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but not by an awful lot, and vastly less entertaining than Marvel’s current Captain America smash, it’s also curiously more sadistic, and seemingly less bothered about large-scale human fallout, than this once-spirited series used to be. Apocalypse isn’t quite the end of the world for X-Men fans, but it might be the end of the line.

It feels like a Blazing Saddles gag writ large – no bad thing – and the jab of Mel Brooks humour it provides feels considerably more inspired than the hackneyed split screens, freeze frames and wobbly zooms which are regularly deployed in the rest of the film for winking grindhouse cred.

The sheer half-heartedness of the whole exercise, though, may still catch you unawares.

The problem isn't a lack of weight, but of lightness. It's stuck with lead feet for a historical caper and serves no other worthwhile purpose.

Unlike certain past ventures of Knightley’s, there’s little or no sense of us being given a Big Performance, and she’s often rather moving as a result.

Perhaps the unexpected ascendancy of Trump is simply no laughing matter – there are precious few zingers hitting home on this occasion. Or maybe what’s demanded by Moore’s one-man leviathan hunting is a less rusty set of harpoons.

Despite a spirited score and a few other redeeming features, The Reckoning is too clumsy, overlong and generally miscalculated to add up to an intelligent commentary on misogyny, or a satisfying riposte to it

Every punchline is followed by a quiet pause for audience laughter, the lengths of which might kindly be described as optimistic.

This jumbled sequel, which was also directed by Carlos Saldanha, loses most of what made the first film such an infectious entertainment.

There are cameos from James Franco, Stephen Dorff, a comically moustachioed David Schwimmer and an unrecognisably hirsute Chris Evans as various lowlifes. A pity, then, that nothing else in Ariel Vromen’s movie is remotely on Shannon’s level, from the plodding, Scorsese-clone script to the needlessly lifeless editing and cinematography.

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.

The last thing you want to feel about the end of the world is that you’ve seen it all before.

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.

The 3D photography is shallow and muddy, although a David Attenborough voiceover helps sustain interest.

The film is way too much like a never-give-up Saga commercial for its own good.

This second Fisherman’s Friends is not without its moments, but the aftertaste calls for a strong menthol lozenge.

If Sandler can’t find it in himself to be verbally or physically entertaining on set, you start to wonder why he’s there in the first place, although his hollow stare in a number of scenes suggests he may be pondering the same thing.

These catacombs are just an echo chamber into which any rubbish can be pumped, and while this gives carte blanche to production designer Louise Marzaroli, the relentless flow of subterranean non-sequitur becomes at least as trying as the whirling, jerky non-cinematography.

It’s the “rom” that’s the killing shortfall. But I must admit, Bros put me in such a sour mood that its “com” got sabotaged into the bargain. It’s distinctly smug about pitching itself as a landmark, while being really more of a setback, and a pretty low bar for the next one to surmount.

The issue here isn’t the moment-to-moment loopiness. It’s that the film’s cumulative unmanageableness soon starts to look like a put-on – Aster seems much more interested in pushing the limits of his audience, rather than his own.

Some of the action sequences are OK, the cast decent – but this convoluted action-adventure's poor attention to detail is its undoing.

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 film contains deeply felt work by Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Kirby, but it’s an otherwise drab, simplistic, mechanical thing that wears its workings right on the surface.

Director Jake Schreier (Robot and Frank) deserves some credit for the spark and timing of his ensemble – the supporting cast, especially Abrams and Smith, come close to winning you over, but they can’t disguise the mechanical, one-sided insights where this story’s centre should be.

While a certain amount of drama is found in these revealing scenes, it is somewhat dis­sipated in the romantic relations between Leia and Solo....The dialogue given to the lovers is laughable, and their performances match it. So what is presumably intended as a great romantic finale comes to little, which might equally be said of the film as a whole....The appeal, perhaps, will be strongest to the young.

As a straight-up redemptive sob story with no other purpose, it cooks the books.

What you see in Dom Hemingway is exactly what you end up getting. It’s filthy, it’s shouty, it’s embarrassing, and you mainly want it to go away.

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

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.

Grandage’s feature debut, the literary biopic Genius, was an all-star dud; this is colourless, miscast, adrift. He hasn’t yet found cinematic lift-off: the camera gazes endlessly into the soupy sea off Peacehaven, as if it were a Magic Eye picture hiding the drama of a Turner painting inside. Amid the drab ruin of these lives in the 1990s, and their equally cheerless salad days, rare sparks of life succumb to a great deal of mopey regret.

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.

Dialogue aside, the craftsmanship is unimpeachable, and Gray takes a timeless approach to pacing and camerawork: even the sunlight is sepia-tinted. But the grand themes of loyalty and ambition never catch fire, and the film’s few truly memorable moments are invariably its smallest.

It’s not bad so much as lightly feeble – and Pegg acquits himself respectably in a lead role that, for a change, chimes well to his best comic persona: the beta male under alpha pressure.

The racing scenes are its one hope of reclaiming your attention, but there aren’t nearly enough of them to justify such a killing duration.

It’s another flick through a familiar and by-now bulging scrapbook, but it leaves you craving less – and more.

The trouble begins with a seasick lurching between fantasy and reality, it’s redoubled by subject matter that can’t support that, and it hits a whole arpeggio of duff notes with the casting.

It’s a nostalgic exercise in burnishing the Stallone brand, with the star on screen half the time in new interviews, between a slew of clips and outtakes.

Kevin Hart just about gets by. but Netflix's heist thriller falls down thanks to its terrible CGI, nonsensical plot and mismatched casting.

There’s half an argument that this schlocky lowlife caper energises its director’s visual imagination more than we’ve seen lately – hey, at least he’s trying something – but it’s not a juggling feat he can keep up all day.

Despite the clumsy writing and production design, Thirlby and Hurt acquit themselves perfectly well, and Jürgen Prochnow makes an enjoyably ripe appearance as a former Nazi who unwittingly helps direct Ari towards his target.

So what’s to dislike here? Hardly anything – it’s finding things actively to like that poses more of a problem.

Writer-director James Gunn finds moments of inspiration in this sequel, but the plot is a mess, the film irritable and frazzled.

Meg 2, by design, is a completely anonymous bag of lukewarm McDonalds – it’s hard to be mad at it, but only because nothing in it stands out enough to get mad at.

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.

The more you scrutinise the society Roth and these screenwriters have created, the more it seems a chintzily self-designed dystopia whose rules and entire infrastructure are pure cardboard.

A terrific, despair-drenched final scene is the viewer’s reward for staying the course: pitilessly cruel, spare and shivery, it’s got everything the rest of this strangely stiff and synthetic film lacks.

There’s nothing you could call an actual emotion in store, just an awful lot of face-pulling.

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.

Hyena doesn’t stint on creating a grubbily repellent universe, but it never gives us one solid reason to stick around.

The more tangled the plot becomes, the more hackneyed Skjoldbaerg’s tactics get.

Your hope, gradually dashed, is for The Seagull to convey more of a sense of human loss than this faintly so-whattish drama about a dead bird.

Henson is a natural at this kind of broad comedy, and throws herself into the goofy-cringe set-pieces with enough energy to elicit giggles, if not outright guffaws. The result rarely looks like something anyone might want, male or otherwise, but it passes the time, just about.

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.

Truth or Dare is the kind of film that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but its initially appealing premise – what if a demon possessed a drinking game? – quickly falls to pieces under its own self-generated confusions.

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

Teenage idealism curdling into cult-like insanity is a punchy, timely subject. But it’s hard to discern what Hauser and her regular co-writer Géraldine Bajard actually want to do with it, or how much sympathy their film has for Miss Novak’s follower-victims.

The problem isn’t that this unusual combination of genres doesn’t click. It’s that the jokes are so stale, the performances so broad, and the plot so greased up with improbable short cuts, that Audrey’s journey feels less like a voyage of self-discovery than a coach tour of the form’s dustiest landmarks.

Even in the realm of scrappy British underdog comedy, there is a clear line between endearingly ramshackle and downright slipshod. Fisherman’s Friends blithely crosses it, never to return, from the moment it chugs out of port.

Exuding more uncertainty than discipline, this wackadoo horror-thriller from German writer-director Tilman Singer can’t decide if wearing a smirk will see it through a sloppily developed plot, which keeps promising more than it delivers.

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.

Much as it would be nice to report that the film lived up to its director’s triumphant return, it’s unfortunately a swaggering chore: watching it feels like competing in a sort of art-house cinema Krypton Factor, with a barrage of interpretative dance interludes, unflinching full-frontal male nudity, pulverisingly bleak mise-en-scene, and writhing mental collapse.

The whole is rather less than its constituent parts – which didn’t really fit together in the first place.

[Aniston's] the one element keeping this unexceptional dramedy halfway watchable.

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.

As beautiful as some of the landscapes are, and as brilliant as Spall is in repose, there is only so much sitting on a bus looking wistful that one actor can do. Other than Spall’s steady gaze and some mood-book photography, The Last Bus has little to recommend it.

Watchable though the One Good Cop formula has oft proven, it’s shot through here with unearned self-regard – and turns acrid fast.

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

Visually, it’s one great shrug, but to get by with a throwaway murder plot this routine, the zingers at least must zing. They rarely do. There’s something turgid and defeated about it.

With better pacing and jokes, the film could have been a goof-off exercise to satisfy the midnight-madness crowd.

It has the feel of a clockwork musical toy that’s been tinkered with and shaken to life over and over – it cranks out a tune, all right, but the feeling of labour behind it dampens the magic.

Dylan and Penn do share a few lovely scenes . . . . In such moments, the project suddenly and charmingly perks up. The rest of the time, ‘flag’ is about right.

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

Admirable cause, amateurish film.

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”.

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.

While his ambitious conceit hangs together over two hours of loudly-declaimed meta-metatheatricality, my word, does it feel like an unholy slog.

It’s hardly fascinating. It doesn’t offer new facts about the Princess’s life. And it certainly doesn’t explain her complexity or contradictions.

Bizarre quantities of action simply don’t connect to anything at all.

Fuqua’s film is lacking much of an intelligible plot other than “tough hombre rights wrongs in ways pushing the boundaries of a 15 rating”.

The script shuffles romantic complications around in a sub-Clueless manner, but it badly lacks a killer idea, unless bored teenage lesbians repeatedly punching each other (and then the opposing boys’ football team) is everything you could possibly want from a lowbrow comedy.

While the Black magic of old was a great fit for Iron Man 3 – the writer-director’s last venture into franchise territory – it turns The Predator into a shrill, murky, retrograde bore, whose handful of punchy ideas get lost in the cracks of its terminally haywire plot.

Muppet film number eight is a resounding disappointment: it’s uneven and often grating, with only a few moments of authentic delight, and almost none of the sticky-sweet, toast-and-honey crunch of its vastly enjoyable 2011 forerunner.

Seydoux is coolly enthralling throughout: her mask-like face, often streaked with a single, strategic tear, mirrors the fundamental blankness of her line of work. Thanks to her performance, France is never less than intriguing. But it’s also extremely hard to get along with – a broadcast-news parable whose sense of purpose keeps fuzzing in and out.

In terms of representation, you couldn’t ask for more. And that’s just as well, because in terms of entertainment, you could barely get less.

The longer we spend inside Freddy’s, the duller it gets.

The movie achieves a take-it-or-leave-it watchability without being much to look at, and as a nominal thrill ride, it’s underpowered.

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.

The trouble with Dean Israelite’s film is that it’s far more excited about the shallow possibilities of cheating the fourth dimension than the infinitely scarier ones of messing it all up.

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

The Nicolas Cage aficionado carries two hopes into each of the 59-year-old actor’s new films. The first – not often met, truth be told – is that it will be good. And the second, failing that, is that it will be mad. Alas, this thin and lumpy western is neither.

As you’d expect from Rodriguez, it has a decent number of pow-wow fight scenes, and sure loves to watch machinery being ripped to shreds. But it's all uncomfortably close to the gruesome Flesh Fair from Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, revamped as an ain’t-it-cool demolition derby with a charm-and-conscience bypass.

Iñárritu has cooked up a personal epic of the most exhaustingly swaggery type, man-spread across three hours of screen time during which flashes of genuine, startling brilliance occasionally manage to push their way through the strenuously zany macho-visionary fug.

A little of the new Spider-Man went an exhilaratingly long way in Captain America: Civil War last year. But a lot of him goes almost nowhere in this slack and spiritless solo escapade, spun off from an initially intriguing premise that deflates around you with a low whine as you watch, like a punctured bouncy castle.

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.

A midnight-movie, exploitation-savvy version of this film, with Spencer chewing up the scenery like nobody’s business, might feasibly have been a camp classic. But this is Tate Taylor’s version: too nervous to thrill, too daft to upset anyone, and constantly policing how much fun it lets Spencer have.

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