The result is an empty film about emptiness, and therefore doubly depressing.

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

The film is almost all build-up, though any mounting sense of excitement is dispelled by the monotonously downbeat tone and the cast’s conspicuous lack of chemistry. Nobody looks like they’re having fun, and the gloom is infectious.

You can’t help but wonder if some important people in boardrooms watched the last two Expendables films and, between sips of mineral water, diligently noted all the ways in which the third might be made slicker and more polished, without realising the franchise’s doughy unslickness was the wellspring of its charm.

The film’s major blunder – it’s got plenty of competition – is mistaking Kate Winslet for Rita Hayworth.

Assassin’s Creed is leaps and bounds ahead of kitchen-sink-hurling flapdoodle like X-Men Apocalypse – it’s only the second-worst Fassbender star vehicle of 2016 – but it never allows him a sober moment, as that film did in a hushed Polish forest, where his talent, as opposed to his biceps, gets a stern workout.

It wants to become a cat-and-mouse game between the leads, but the leaky script dampens any real hope of suspense.

The much-vaunted fresh perspective on a notorious figure turns out to have been so much sweet talk.

It’s the opposite of what a Borat film should feel like: business as usual.

It’s a film whose final shape feels dwindled by compromise – not unappealing, but stymied, like a luxury jet which spends two hours taxiing on the runway.

Too hectic to be scary, and with a plot that’s regularly bogged down in optimistic franchise-building spadework, The House with a Clock in Its Walls never quite grasps what made its inspirations tick.

The film sounds actively embarrassed by what it’s trying to pitch, and reverse-engineers its sci-fi elements to fit the default disaster template Emmerich could apply in his sleep. We’re promised the Moon, but sold a lemon.

I’m So Excited! is vertiginously disappointing in the way only bad films from great filmmakers can be.

It’s just a big blue blur – too anodyne to elicit more than heavy sighs, too full of Smurfs not to recommend solely to the under-eights.

This cast of national institutions make fools of themselves with a lack of vanity that’s theoretically fun, but there’s playing to the gallery, and then there’s clambering up there to wiggle your bits at them.

Your ass is constantly braced in readiness and hope, but it remains un-kicked.

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.

McConaughey cranks his performance up to 11, as if to compensate for the lack of wattage found in Patrick Massett and John Zinman’s script.

The film’s twists, alas, fall into one of two categories – the obvious and the tasteless – and the side-orders of gruesome violence feel like they’ve been delivered to quite the wrong table.

It’s just chilly and uninvolving.

Jones conjured intimacy on the surface of the moon, but in the crowded streets of futuristic Berlin, there’s no real feeling.

Van Sant wanted to study a man drowning in sorrow and guide him towards the light. But the guidance he gets is fake, forced, and unbearably tricksy, a kind of suicide rehab with gotcha devices.

The film is very loud, and festooned with the sort of comic violence far more disturbing than anything in an 18-rated movie.

While Swinton and Elba make smooth work of the fairy-tale-toned dialogue, they simply lack the chemistry to make their tryst convince as romance. And the fantasy flashbacks too often sink into chintz.

The latest Marvel title is just dollop upon dollop of dourness, leaving its stars no space to show us what they might bring to the franchise.

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.

This tale of epiphanies and religious schooling at a tiny monastery in the 1940s has a woozy, episodic lyricism all Thornton’s own. It’s also fuzzy and unfulfilled, groping for its images without ever precisely knowing what it needs them to say.

Dean Parisot, who made the delightful Galaxy Quest, has a funnier sensibility than the first movie’s director, Robert Schwentke, but he’s still defeated by a script that’s over-complicated and under-sophisticated.