Drag is what it is, and drag is what it does.

Mawkishness is kept at bay by the lightness of touch in Ashby's direction and Gordon and Cort's wonderful performances. Only the most miserable cynic could resist its unique charm and ultimate hopefulness.

Middleweight, non-intelligence-insulting fare right to the core, Bleed For This keeps you squarely in your seat, but barely once excites you enough to leap up out of it.

Unashamedly rousing and immaculately crafted, The Swimmers is up there with Creed as a sports drama with more at stake than individual glory – a global-humanist purview to which it ascends without getting the slightest bit preachy.

With the best will in the world, Metz drags us through a labyrinth of intrigue but messes up the crumb trail. We’re left disorientated, and underwhelmed.

As a scratchy string quartet for the four actors, it continues to work surprisingly well – you might hand it back with a B+ in that department. But as a storytelling assignment, it droops little by little into the C zone.

The one inspired idea here is what happens to the minions when they’re injected with serum by the film’s mystery baddie, and this is enough to give us at least a reel’s worth of anarchic pleasure.

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

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.

It's all wickedly tendentious mischief, but when it's this gloriously funny, the points score themselves.

The demented brilliance of Miike’s film lies in the director’s ability to craft ideas that are simultaneously sublime and ridiculous.

Levy ultimately wants to yank the heart-strings more than poke the grey matter. And as Free Guy breaks free from his programming and explores the world on its own terms, the film has lots to say about loyalty, friendship and love.

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.

Una is a sparse, icy film fighting a little too hard against the fact that it used to be a play.

There’s lots to enjoy in this aviation disaster thriller slash tropical shoot-em-up, with its uproariously blunt title high on the list.

This adaptation of Leonard Wibberley's novel, and sequel to The Mouse That Roared satirises the space war, Cold War and politics to varied effect. [07 Dec 2013, p.40]

It’s hard to decide whether Annabelle: Creation gains or loses points for this immensely daft set of developments, but surprisingly little damage is done to the business of turning up the scare dial.

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.

It knows its audience and doesn’t waste time. It also heightens the fun with elaborate practical effects, rather than blitzing us with eye-tiring CGI any more than it must.

Think of Destroyer as film noir with the brightness turned up. Karyn Kusama’s Los Angeles-set thriller has the bleary, beer-dank air of an overlong house party at which the host has just snapped on the lights: fun’s done folks, now check out the mess.

On Chesil Beach is a non-disaster, essentially, until it falls off a cliff.

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

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.

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.

Its salvaged parts combine into an internally incongruous but crazily unique whole.

Admirable cause, amateurish film.

For all Neville's undoubted slickness and poise as a filmmaker, Under The Influence displays a fundamental lack of curiosity about the cackling enigma at its heart.

It’s the blockbuster of the summer.