Human moments are few, and overwhelmingly feature Christy’s fellow fighter Lisa Holewyne, a rival-turned-rock tenderly played by Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian. The relationship between Sweeney and O’Brian might be the gentlest, most unassuming part of the film – but it’s what stays with you.

When the culprit is revealed to the audience after an hour or so, and the film attempts to dig into the psychology behind their reign of terror, it quickly finds itself out of its depth.

Director Christopher Landon, a veteran of the Paranormal Activity series, keeps the energy levels so peppy and the twists coming so unflaggingly, you barely have time to lodge any complaints.

The existential crises of music industry hotshots in Los Angeles might struggle to mark it out, to say the least, as a film for our moment. At the same time, it’s a refuge – a balmy vision of cloudless blue skies, rooftop martinis on someone else’s tab, and a few soulful jamming sessions in a recording studio no one’s using. You could disappear into Nisha Ganatra’s film for a couple of hours and easily forget where the evening went.

The songs put Wicked to shame in every way. They cluster neatly around entwined themes: spreading your wings versus the tug of homesickness; finding your path but daring also to lose it. With a running time that brings us briskly ashore, the film is a grand voyage in miniature – a taster epic. Further feasts, if you stay seated for the end credits, are thrillingly promised.

The generational rewrite has been deftly done, with enough timeliness braided in to make it feel freshly relevant, but all the gags fans want to hear again left reverently intact.

Washington – Man on Simmer – keeps himself awake with a few fun, staccato line deliveries. But the flurries of pointlessly sadistic violence are jaggedly dispensed, botching the build-up.

Your hope, gradually dashed, is for The Seagull to convey more of a sense of human loss than this faintly so-whattish drama about a dead bird.

While a certain amount of drama is found in these revealing scenes, it is somewhat dis­sipated in the romantic relations between Leia and Solo....The dialogue given to the lovers is laughable, and their performances match it. So what is presumably intended as a great romantic finale comes to little, which might equally be said of the film as a whole....The appeal, perhaps, will be strongest to the young.

That it largely succeeds says much for writer-director Turturro’s sly, subtle skills.

The film hinges on the bond between dad and daughter and on the expressive face of Fanning, as we see her shift from a sort of nervous adoration of the unpredictable, if loving, Joe, to something more steely and independent.

Of course it’s lightweight, bordering on disposable.... But it’s also genuinely warm-spirited, with three lovable central performances from Gadon, Powley and Reynor

It ultimately feels like a counterfeit of priceless treasure: the shape and the gleam of it might be superficially convincing for a bit, but the shabbier craftsmanship gets all the more glaring the longer you look.

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

It’s the Pixar film that has to remind its audience what a Pixar film is.

Stanfield’s dropout charisma can cushion a role fine, but can’t make this one very interesting.

What The Gorge does supply is a novel science-fiction premise and some captivating bursts of suspense.

Bizarre quantities of action simply don’t connect to anything at all.

Holiff assembled this memoir from his father’s papers and audio diary, although the portrait of Cash that emerges is that of a pill-popping religious nut, and there is next to no insight into his music or creative process.

There’s something glib, and occasionally maddening, about the film’s use of loveable fauna in peril to sentimentalise and sweeten what is, after all, an account of real human bravery in the face of an endlessly horrifying historical event.

Dupieux elevates it by seeding entire swaying crops of confusion: we can never be entirely sure where scenes end and the mess of making them begins.

If there’s a chink in your emotional armour, there’s simply no resisting what this film has to offer.

What a relief, then, that this isn’t terrible – though to get the best out of it, you may wish to convince yourself that it’s going to be.

Director/co-writer Babak Anvari made a startling debut with Under the Shadow (2015), but like his follow-up, Wounds (2019), this is a shakier pot-boiler – diverting, provocative in spots, a little head-scratchy in plot terms. The secret weapon is Ascott, an actor you itch to see cast in more films

Director Joe (Gremlins) Dante delivers some terrific spine-tingling chills on the way towards a disappointingly overblown climax.

It’s a pleasing if minor piece of work, like a semi-precious stone that you’d still keep.

This is otherwise rough-hewn, hard-bitten entertainment – with an irresistible puppyish grin on its face.

Encounter is bugged-out science fiction paranoia, stylish and sinewy, with an opening sequence that may have you bolting for the door, or at least the remote control.