No film has made me ache more for the reopening of cinemas in May than this trashily sublime, visual-effects-driven blare-a-thon, in which a king-sized gorilla and a radioactive lizard settle their differences over the smoking remains of a city or two.

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.

Even those familiar with King’s 2013 follow-up of the same name, more of an absorbing dark fantasy than a horror novel, won’t be prepared for the alchemy of elements cooked up here.

It’s sweet-natured and amusing, with a story to captivate kids; yet the script has enough witty touches to keep adults laughing too.

The result is a film that does perfectly respectable justice to Lomax's ordeal, without ever making a strong case for itself as independently stirring art.

This really is a film in which the creative thinking seemed to start and stop at ‘wouldn’t it be funny if a pig wore a leotard’, and any attempt to inject its aspartame bonhomie with some kind of greater significance feels like trying to push an uncooked sausage through Kevlar.

Fast becoming one of the most reliable character actors we’ve got, Strong gives a quietly heroic rendition of Landau which bolsters White’s performance beautifully.

[A] mildly engaging print-the-legend documentary.

The film’s secret isn’t much of a secret at all. It just remembers why Neeson was such an oddly inspired choice for a grimy revenge thriller back in 2008 and does its best to repeat the trick.

It's a comeback you root for, then, even while it’s wobbling and occasionally falling in the mud. But goodwill gets it home.

Perhaps this meeting of suspicious minds really was an unsung crux of modern American history, but Elvis & Nixon feels like a trifle about a trifle.

There’s something ever-so-chic, a touch too manicured about the film’s despondency, and only rare moments land to touch us, especially. But it’s a gentle, genial watch.

While you can’t imagine the film ever making it to Cannes under anything other than its own steam, the jaunt proves to be a surprisingly worthwhile one.

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.

Against serene and haunting backdrops, the animation itself has a raucous energy that’s constantly thrilling, and leans into the children’s vulnerability as well as their high spirits.

The Forgiven concentrates on awful people doing awful things they’ll pay for unless they can avoid it, but as morality play it’s stuck in a rut, with an ending that just seems to have stumped McDonagh – it dissipates.

Using home movies and other footage, Kopple provides a discomfiting portrait of a family’s deep-seated dysfunction.

Two decades after dinosaurs ruled the Earth’s cinemas, are we still capable of putting our phones away for two hours and being honestly amazed by them, without a glaze of cynicism or irony to keep us stuck? Trevorrow, his cast and crew would clearly like to think so. And in light of their efforts, you’d have to grinningly agree.

Carlyle shoots the story with a propulsive, page-turning energy that’s enjoyably at odds with the Glasgow backdrop, which is dilapidated to the point of timelessness.

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.

The Banishment may lack the surprise factor of The Return but it's more mature and less wedded to virtuosic technique.

Billed as a “survival thriller” and starring a weirdly underutilised Angelina Jolie, this is a musty amalgam of fire-fighting action flick, John-Grisham-esque conspiracy hokum and outdoorsy bonding adventure. All it lacks is a web search using Ask Jeeves.

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

An unfashionably male art film of Nietzsche-quoting, Tarkovsky-adjacent bent that’s ghoulish, baffling and rather brave.

A part of me found Todd Phillips’s radical rethinking of the Batman villain Joker thrillingly uncompromising and hair-raisingly timely. Another thinks it should be locked in a strongbox then dropped in the ocean and never released.

It serves as a handsome homage while persuasively making the case as its own discrete entity.

The dancing and photography are striking, and the acting’s perfectly fine. But the sum of it all is a moony inertia, lacking any awakening spark of life.

Bono may be his own worst enemy in the one-man show Stories of Surrender, but only just. His second worst is Blonde director Andrew Dominik, who has turned it into a more excruciating film than you might even have surmised.