Branagh exploits a star-packed cast to distract us in all directions. The trouble is, it sometimes feels like a dozen actors signed on, then drew lots to see who was playing whom.

The film is unquestionably a curio for converts rather than the meatier exploration it will leave many sceptics (including this one) hankering after, but it leaves you with plenty to chew on – along with that Satanic cadence echoing in your bones.

Irons’s Hardy steals this film away from its ostensible hero, in part because pulling the shutters down makes him that much harder to know.

Only when it reaches for all-out camp does this script truly tickle the pleasure receptors.

Against the Ice is very square, very straight, and just naggingly average in all departments.

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

The film has been put together like a machine to rattle you. It does that. I didn’t care for anyone on screen at all, and can’t say I’ll ever be tempted to watch it again, but here it is, for the delectation of a niche market.

Runner Runner starts off with a solid draw, then folds on the flop.

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.

What keeps it on its feet is the snappy direction of Jeremiah Zagar, a Philly native who shows off his home town with unmistakable pride, and has a lot of vivid strategies for what the camera’s doing (there are more time-hopping match cuts than I could count) or which song to put on top.

The third Night at the Museum film starts strongly, with its heart in the past... It’s an exciting opening, and perhaps too exciting for the film’s own good. It’s hard not to be disappointed when the plot moves back to the present and settles into the time-honoured formula of digitised creatures running riot and famous people in fancy dress doing shtick.

This psychological thriller is far from Alfred Hitchcock's finest, but it is held together by strong leads. [13 Jun 2015, p.36]

Fanaticism – even in one so young and theoretically still savable – is a uniquely bad match for the brothers’ methods.

There are no depths to which The Meg won’t sink. But as trashy cinema goes, it all feels a little too well behaved.

More than the sets or spectacle, Vikander pulls you into her picture, as if we’ve signed up for a special edition of the game where Lara Croft has only one life to spare, one go to get it right. It’s not rocket science, just an elementary way to make us sit up and care.

Laika may not be conquering the world with this outing. But if every studio’s three-star films were as bounteous with the eye candy, we’d be in clover.

Sagging at times, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind feels as though it might have played better as a mid-length short film, with subplots pruned back.

Smartly cast and gluing that career ever-more-diligently back together, LaBeouf gets under the McEnroe skin with twitchy gusto.

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

The film could have done with a richer sense of what Milly and Jess really see in each other. It’s as if Barrymore and Collette have been flung into this relationship unprepared, and must hustle to suggest there’s much of a history.

It’s preposterous, but I dare you not to smile at the high-kicking silliness on offer, or the sweetly old-fashioned undertones: as the inevitable final showdown looms, loyalty, hard work and fair play are just as important to the dancers as strutting their stuff.

The Family Fang, based on a book of the same name by Kevin Wilson, looks on paper like your typical, middleweight, dysfunctional-family angst-fest. But it’s rather better, and considerably more eccentric, than you might expect.

The film passes the time with breezy good cheer and the odd well-wrangled cringe, but fades from memory in much the same way. There’s just nothing about this guy that gives you cause to remember him.

It might have been a classic stoner comedy if far-out outweighed the gross-out.

Age of Uprising falls awkwardly (but not altogether unappealingly) into the gap between art film and horse opera.

It is a drama in which, like the constituent parts of a Michelin-star-wannabe dish, every component feels painstakingly tweezered into place.

It is an outrageously ambitious and intermittently staggering piece of work, though it completely lacks the kind of discipline or focus that might have made its themes or images really stick.

Maoz’s control of tone is meticulous and his technique swaggeringly assured, making Foxtrot a film that works best in the spine-prickling moment.