Time and again, the film corrals their characters into situations it lacks the emotional delicacy to get them through unscathed – not least a weirdly frenzied sex scene which begins with so much off-screen grunting and puffing I assumed it must be the set-up to a joke, and the camera was about to pan across to the pair shifting furniture.

So much of the film’s (notably slight) running time is squandered on filler – a subplot involving bickering henchmen consumes around a third of the film – that it’s never able to hit its grindhouse stride.

As a masterclass in having as little fun as possible with an irresistible premise, JT LeRoy is a hard act to beat.

The film’s wobbles begin at this stage and spread unstoppably through the last hour. It’s one of those steep-tumbling disappointments where almost every scene feels like an additional step in the wrong direction.

Bird Box begins with considerable promise but is soon revealed to have feathers for brains.

Nick Cassavetes (John Q, The Notebook) has never delivered a picture that entirely knows what its tone is, and a manic uncertainty duly sucks the fun away.

Norris and his director of photography Rob Hardy have shot it with stylish confidence, but Mark O’Rowe’s script (adapted from Daniel Clay’s novel) feels cramped and over-schematic.

The film settles into a Forrest Gumpian groove that doesn’t glorify the human spirit so much as sap it.

Here and elsewhere, you sense the film knows more than it’s prepared to share, which gives it the queasy sheen of a PR exercise.

When it’s in-flight entertainment this winter, no one will necessarily moan, but it plays like a soothing feature-length trailer for your first cocktail on the beach.

Get Hard just gets increasingly hard to put up with, full stop.

What Halloween Kills lacks in ideas it partially makes up for in gruesomely authentic slasher texture. From cinematography to editing, casting to oozy prosthetic gore, Green and his crew have recreated the feel of the Carpenter original with an almost academic diligence, particularly in an extended 1970s-set opening flashback.

With Caine, Freeman and Arkin, you know what you’re going to get. In Going in Style, it’s all you get.

Hush and patience are simply not in Anderson’s vocabulary. He bombards you as if terrified of encroaching tedium, and the set pieces trip each other up in their sheer haste.

The result is a film with the depth and decorative value of an inspirational fridge magnet – yet there is a certain degree of fun to be had in hearing Costner monologuing about tapeworm and then picturing him in the voiceover booth, possibly with his head in his hands.

In trying to pretend a blip was a seismic revolution, the film winds up distinctly strained, and more depressing than it quite knows.

Turturro deserves four stars – but the rest of Moretti’s saggy melodrama is scarcely half as good.

Blair Witch styles itself as a love-letter, but it’s pure transcription.

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

Though pristinely faithful to Maynard's book, it blurs inexorably into Nicholas Sparks.

Sasquatch Sunset barely gets started – though it does have remarkable prosthetics and some lovely sunsets.

DisneyToon Studios have borrowed so much from Pixar here, and yet they seem to have learned almost nothing.

Dad’s Army bleakly suggests that even the best source material in the world can only take you so far.

Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, the two-man writer-director team, are swinging at serious targets here... But their point soon wears itself out, and what remains is schlock with airs and tired black humour.

Flexing some of that Jean Valjean resolve, but with a payload of untrammelled, Wolverine-like rage behind it, Jackman comes closest to shouldering the movie, without ever seriously threatening to make it work.

McCarthy keeps dragging the film away from thriller and procedural territory and back to this blossoming domestic setup – but while Damon and the kid share some cute scenes, it simply isn’t that interesting, and all the would-be colour (see: Virginie’s acting career) adds nothing but extraneous detail.

Being funny with Dark Age clichés shouldn’t be a challenge, even if you have to trudge off-script and simply cover yourself in mud. The cast of Seize Them!, a plucky shoestring Britcom about a peasant revolution, unfortunately face an uphill battle.

Perhaps the hope was that Marvel’s 26th film might rattle the franchise out of its comfort zone. But the franchise is nothing but comfort zone, which renders its latest entry an instant white elephant.