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

In a story that could have offered a parade of vivid character roles, only Foy and Glen really register: a kindly park ranger (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) deserved more screen time, while the various surly faces on the Manhattan carriage-toting scene are only thinly defined.

Stevenson has configured her tale as female body-horror fit for a dissertation, without giving it much of a spine: while slick, the set pieces are few, far between, and over too fast.

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.

But the idea that Raimi’s signature touch amounts to rewarming old flourishes from his work over the last four decades is a wildly embarrassing and juvenile way to think about filmmaking: what you actually get here is the Marvel house style with Raimi flavouring sprinkled on top, and anything that feels outrageous only does so in the context of the franchise’s fussily restrictive rule set.

In spirit, it’s all very Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But in execution, it’s far closer to Meet the Parents with a heavy dose of identity politics.

Cinema-goers desperately need a fresh, unusual and franchise-free blockbuster to rally behind, but Jupiter Ascending isn’t it.

This is exasperatingly thin stuff from Loach and Laverty, who have in the past built far more textured narratives, peopled by far richer characters, even while maintaining the fierce, politicised charge they aim for here.

The effects have a pleasingly retro patina, but the action itself is drab, the jokes scarce, while the town itself is both entirely characterless and oddly deserted, giving the impression that nothing’s really at stake. It’s just what we were warned about all those years ago: something weird that don’t look good.

Heard, who certainly has the requisite physical allure for the part, puts in a decent enough turn as the enigmatic Six but, like her on-screen character, can seemingly do the nothing to prevent the brutal murder, either of herself, or of Amis’s bestseller.

So if the sex is such a ball, what’s wrong with Love? The answer, unfortunately, is absolutely everything else, of which there’s more than you might initially expect.

We’d give the lazy set-up a pass if sufficiently fun things started happening off the back of it.

It is two and a half hours of self-reflexive torture porn with an entire McDonald’s warehouse of chips on its shoulder, and a handful of genuinely provocative ideas which, exasperatingly, go nowhere much.

While the leads get it together somewhat in the final stretch, it can’t be the hardest job to access these teary-bonding emotions opposite an actual loved one.

It’s not that the film is particularly loathsome, or that Blart is an overweeningly horrible character. What rankles is that he’s barely anything at all; a stereotype of a stereotype; a half-remembered punchline; a stomach with a moustache and wheels. As you watch the film, it’s already forgotten.

Well-informed, enlightening writing on Tolkien’s life and creative process is hardly scarce. But his genius stems from his scholarship, which doesn’t obviously lend itself to cinema, even with Derek Jacobi on hand as a professor-cum-mentor fruitily declaiming in Gothic as he potters around the quad.

It is rubbish, and whereas Taylor’s playing can sometimes redeem utter nonsense, it doesn’t quite manage it here.

Every shot is sluiced in flat grey light – the action scenes look like gravel in a food processor – while the dialogue is all botched quips and clichés (“Did somebody order backup?” one Transformer smarms while cocking a rocket launcher), and the human characters timidly written nobodies.

As last dances go, it’s the Macarena in film form.

The film succumbs to being undiluted tripe.

The general ineptitude is more likely to make you cackle in disbelief.

If you don’t actually want to make a film out of a Roald Dahl book, this critic’s advice is: don’t.

Venom can be quite a lively watch, both as a reminder of why Hollywood stopped making superhero films like this, and also for the occasional glimpse of the off-the-wall, star-driven freak-out that might have been.... But in terms of basic entertainment, let alone as the foundation of a franchise, it is miserably shaky stuff.

Other than sniggering about what an outré stereotype they’ve served up, it’s hard to see how Lee and Copley can justify this performance, which is quite the worst of the year, and sends the whole final act of their movie straight to oblivion.

It’s a series of pointless, boorish skits about two unrepentant lotharios.

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.

It’s a misguided enterprise all round, and while it’s perfectly possible to applaud everything the film wants to say, you find yourself cringing at the ways it’s saying it.

MacFarlane’s making no effort to push the envelope, which is something of a relief, but nor is he winning anyone around to his increasingly desperate stylings as a nerd-turned-bully.

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.

This series' sixth film has a daft plot, groans with lousy action and makes the poor old dinosaurs humiliatingly surplus to requirements.

Tom Gormican, the writer and director, mostly uses overlapping dialogue in place of actual jokes, although occasionally he stretches to toilet humour.

I snorted with genuine laughter, hard, at this film’s closing notion of what being a comedy even is.

As dismal to contemplate as it is persistently horrendous to even look at, there aren’t enough Patrick Stewart-voiced emojis in the world to express what an ugly, artless exercise this is.

The result is cinema you don’t watch so much as absent-mindedly scroll through, wondering when an idea or an image worth clicking on will finally show up.

As filmmaking, it’s as mindless as Hollywood’s worst.

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.

All in all, it’s a new low in a mini-franchise comprised almost entirely of new lows: Venom, Morbius, and now this.

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.

In cinematic confession, no number of Hail Marys could make amends for this.

American Assassin seems to have a certain target audience in mind, and it’s probably not one you’d want to be considered a part of.

Where the film completely falls down is in director Joshua Michael Stern’s disastrous decision to cast Ashton Kutcher in the central role.

Ana de Armas stars as a new, lethally dull trainee assassin, Keanu Reeves makes an emergency cameo, and the film is an absolute stinker.

This would-be-frothy date flick is a sub-"Meet the Fockers" dog’s dinner.

You can sense what Dahan’s aiming at: by introducing the spectre of Hitch early on, he lays out Grace’s existence as a kind of lived-in Hitchcock thriller... But the acting is so heightened, and the script so thoroughly awful, that Dahan’s idea – his big and seemingly only one – can’t begin to stick.

The action is slapstick-driven, yet the set-pieces are all so transparently bogus – with fourth-rate CGI and actors’ digital doubles flopping about the place like haunted marionettes – that they play as insulting rather than outrageous.

The level of psychological nuance in Desch’s script, not to mention feminist enlightenment, makes EL James look like Virginia Woolf.

Connoisseurs of the accidentally ludicrous will find much to laugh at here.... But scares and intrigue are both in miserably short supply.

The film never tries to do anything other than look good, and is hellishly ugly even so.

A psychotically unfunny art-heist romp.

Seventh Son would hardly be the first film to use "strong female characters" as a means of waving its misogyny under the radar, but it’s seldom carried off as depressingly as this.

Transcendence is the worst, most portentous, and certainly the silliest big-budget science fiction film since the 2008 Keanu Reeves remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

A shambolic film populated by some of the most aggressively charmless characters ever seen in a blockbuster.

A second instalment of the Oz origin movie is bloated and boring despite new songs for both Elphaba and Glinda.

Disasters: well, they said it. The new film from Dennis Dugan is a frighteningly inept stab at a romantic comedy in the Nancy Meyers style.

No child deserves to be subjected to this kind of blaringly witless branding bombardment; as for adults, I felt like I was being beaten around the head with the Argos catalogue.

As a motor-mouthing smart-ass, the 58-year-old Pitt is badly miscast – every detail here seems tailored to Ryan Reynolds, director David Leitch’s Deadpool collaborator – while the film's bulging cast and bloated running time recalls those all-star capers of the 1960s: imagine It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World crossed with a migraine. For the sake of all that’s holy, take the bus.

So, what happens in Grown Ups 2? Almost absolutely nothing.

How can it be possible that nine years have passed since the previous instalment, yet every facet of this one feels so woefully first-draft? Expend4bles: wh4t a lo4d of cr4p.

The film is close to parody – not of anything Potter’s ever done, but of male artists and their obsessive end-of-life regrets. If you’d told me it was a shelved adaptation of late Philip Roth done by Alejandro González Iñárritu in Birdman (or Biutiful) mode, I’d have believed it in a shot.

It’s not the most hideous of premises, particularly in early, ultimately fruitless, moments that suggest Patrick could be some sort of four-legged genie. But the film struggles to congeal, falling back on laboured gags set up with mechanical lack-of-ease.

The level of not very funny things this entails, even by the standards of barely-awaited sequels to lowbrow Yuletide comedies, is kind of impressive.

Zemeckis can’t let go of his ghastly conviction that everything has to be heart-tugging schmaltz. Alan Silvestri’s ruinously sickly score is his main accomplice.

While the del Toro Hellboys were postmodern Frankenstein fables, shining with pathos, fun and fairy-tale allure, this unsolicited reboot is ugly, obnoxious and yowlingly witless, with nothing to say for itself that doesn’t start with the letter F.

There is a noxious undead pong emanating from this latest entry in the 1980s franchise, which is now being necromantically sustained through force of sheer commercial desperation, and nothing else.

Antebellum doesn’t so much concertina the past and the present as do a leering jig back and forth, then blow you a callous raspberry instead.

A pound-store Tarantino with the sadism dialled up and the wit switched off, Roth has the very basics of a stomach-clenching suspense sequence down pat. It’s just that the film never provides any rationale for why you’d want to submit to it.

If every last joke in it wasn’t built on the premise that anyone who isn’t a straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class male isn’t intrinsically laughable, it might have made for lively comedy.

Essentially – astonishingly – the Tom and Jerry sections of Tom & Jerry are a sideshow, used to punctuate the human scheming and blundering around Preeta and Ben’s forthcoming nuptials.

Baby Invasion, which premiered at Venice tonight, may be the stupidest film I have ever seen. And I use the word “may” only because I’m not entirely sure this thing actually is a film in the first place.

Let’s blame Fellowes before Shakespeare – one of them built this house, the other has just walked right through it in his filthiest garden clogs.

The film thinks fame alone is a substitute for wit or charm, and might just as well have outsourced every last role to a hologram.

While the plot’s endless lurches and jinks are designed to hold you in a constant state of pleasurable bafflement, the cumulative effect is desensitisation: no single thread holds long enough to give you anything to cheer for or believe in.

The film has about five sets and they never feel like they connect together, but this is less an attempt at disorienting the viewer than simply cutting corners; the grisly, overdone lighting, meanwhile, makes you want to hide behind your fingers for all the wrong reasons.

The whole thing is stupefyingly unfunny and un-tense, and doesn’t end so much as just give up and grind to a halt.

The film has zero finesse even by Ritchie’s standards, but if star ratings were calculated on body count alone, give it hundreds.

Almost everything these two say to one other is so wince-worthy you want to crawl under your seat, scuttle along the whole row if possible, and make for the nearest fire exit.

This film, with its endless copying of Assassin’s Creed camera angles and state-of-the-art bullseyes, is an ugly machine, tiring to the eye, monotonously scored, and also weirdly regressive on quite a few levels.

Theoretically, getting to see Peña and Skarsgård goof around with these leading roles is the film’s headline draw; but the script is so misguidedly pleased with itself, all you’re doing is watching two amiable stars mug strenuously and try their best.

A film so frivolous and twee I felt as if my brain were leaking out of my nostrils as I watched.

Jack Thorne's screenplay has all the emotional nuance of a Sudoku puzzle; directed by French romcom veteran Pascal Chaumeil (Heartbreaker), it's bouncy and vacuous enough to feel like a light comedy from the planet Neptune.

Geostorm’s disasters are just barrages of drab, anonymous digi-porridge, with a very occasional unhinged flourish thrown in, such as a stadium that’s struck by lightning and immediately explodes.

I still can’t quite believe it exists, though I may yet find myself shouting about it on the street.

It’s staged, scored and cut together with an aggressively deadening quality, numbing your senses to the very impact it intends.

As satire it’s a dismal dereliction of duty; as comedy, a one-note joke that wears out fast.

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.

In place of classic thriller techniques and mechanisms are a beige aesthetic, limp dialogue and glib let’s-just-vibe-with-it attitude that only grow more maddening as things progress.

This film’s two hours feel like four.

In short, it’s a bum trip and then some. Kechiche has always been an admirer of the female posterior, but here he shifts styles into what could be called gluteus maximalism, filling the screen with frantically gyrating hindquarters for literal hours on end.

The film’s glib disregard for collateral murder runs to farcical extremes.

Somehow, this new animated adaptation of the video game is even worse than the abominable 1993 live-action. Even the CGI is second-rate.

In a golden period for both animation and children’s filmmaking, here is a head-splitting reminder of just how bad those two things can get.

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

Fans of Cage and Cusack, previously paired as unlikely allies in Con Air (1997), may be looking forward to a bit of deranged actorly combat once Hansen is cornered in the interrogation room, but it’s here that this hopeless flick comes up especially short.

This is the problem with being held hostage in the worst studio comedy of the year: for cast and audience alike, there’s little to do but wait for it to stop.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard simply doesn’t put in the effort, with the result that almost every aspect of the film proves wildly irritating, from its central odd couple to the dubious green-screen work that regularly has them pulling nonchalant faces in front of exploding buildings.

Last orders can’t come soon enough for the whole parade of supervillains, superheroes, or however they’re now choosing to identify. This is rock bottom.

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.

Substance-wise, there might be enough going on here to sustain a five-minute short.