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.

None hold a candle to the main event: pulverising verbal jousts between two stars who can toggle between serious and silly like few others. Watching them cajole, manipulate and savage each other is effervescent bloodsport: you want neither to win, or the fun will stop.

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.

For all its flashes of ingenuity, The Voices is secretly more scared than scary, lacking the truly disturbing ambition to get real.

In its present form – hyperactive, dopey, and hammered into shape like a Hollywood sitcom – it’s a passable school holiday jaunt.

The plotting meanders its way to the very brink of incoherence, but as the scenes tick past, the vague sense of a many-tendrilled mystery being solved does gradually descend.

A vastly enjoyable theatrical banquet, if perhaps not a profound one, is served up in a bit of a rush here, as if they can't wait to get the next sitting in. But you certainly don't come away feeling hungry.

Skarsgård’s ripe performance, with its wicked childishness and sarcastic self-pity, remains an asset Muschietti knows how to use. But the Losers are a mixed bag, convincing less well as a unit than they did as children.

When the film gets up to speed it remains dependable fun, but the steering’s spongy, the acceleration sluggish. The journey continues, but the saga is running out of road.

Hunting Bourne is more than ever a business now, with a bottom line to worry about, a crowd to please, and presumably hasty deadlines to meet. It’s not that there’s no pause for thought in this still-good-fun episode. There’s just not enough thought in the pauses.

Frears’ film is all nostalgia and inertia – a tale ablaze with historical import and contemporary resonance, reduced to commemorative biscuit tin proportions.

This film pretends to be cleaning house chez Mr Strangler, when it’s just pushing dust around.

Nerve zips along, looks really smashing and has the mental wiring of a hyperactive squirrel. You may well risk it anyway.

It has a perky winsomeness: there are jokes, not all of them morbid, about being dead. There are tear-jerking scenes that require a viewer to surrender. I struggled to do so. Funnily enough, Eternity drags.

That tension niggles away within The Highwaymen, a sporadically stodgy, dour production which often seems painfully aware that the really fun stuff is happening out of shot. But then Costner and Harrelson get to talking, the light lands on their features just so, and the film casts its own curmudgeonly spell.

Like most comedy sequels, it’s also content to dig out the same old punchbowl and dilute the dregs.

Where this documentary gets it right is in refusing to act as PR for the man – it allows him to to give his side of events, but also his victims’ and the others deeply wounded by his actions. It films his frailty and flaws as well as his genius. Does he deserve to be absolved? Like Galliano’s explanation, there’s no clear answer.

Rather than bionically enhancing all its characters, a better movie might have found ways to celebrate their sloth and slime.

Sisters is entertaining as far as it goes, but it only occasionally feels like it’s going far enough.

Quantum of Solace offers next to no solace, if we mean respite, but in plunging its hero into a revenge-displacement grudge mission, it has the compensation of a rock-solid dramatic idea, and the intelligence to run and run with it.

It’s a project driven by ideas but made for a mass-market audience, which are always welcome in principle. The problem here is the good ideas are all extremely familiar, and the handful of new ones aren’t much to write home about.

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

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.

By the time the credits rolled on River, I wanted to throw myself into the nearest one.

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

Is Mother Mary a comment on modern stardom? Or the study of an intense, broken relationship? Or is it just an excuse for two hours of sculptural close-ups and artfully creepy tableaux? As you watch, you find yourself continually grabbing at meaning but, like a ghost, your fingers slip straight through.

Even when the film feels like a circuitous, effortful mess, it’s often an intentional one – and for everything in the film that doesn’t quite connect, that element of self-portraiture, with the artist as sap, strikes a wistful chord.

This Tex-Mex drama about a retired rodeo star on a mercy mission has an intermittent dawdling charm. It’s also slack and featherbrained – and set in the late 1970s, but you can barely tell.