There’s gentle manipulation, and then there’s having your arms manacled to a freight train of weepy catharsis, which is roughly the experience awaiting viewers of Me Before You.

There’s little here to keep us up at night – or from forgetting all about it by tomorrow.

It's decent but not deep fare, connecting most with the theme of alcoholism as a different kind of tempting but terrible abyss.

The secret weapon, though, is dimpled star Ben Wang, the 25-year-old lead in the Disney+ series American Born Chinese.

The one thing there’s no accounting for in The Accountant is taste.

To watch it is to be waterboarded by joy. In terms of both visual dazzle and invention and sheer comedic stamina and pep, it handily surpasses the original Trolls from 2016, which itself set an impressive new standard for films based on novelty keyrings and pencil toppers.

Woodley is the teen angst poster girl de nos jours, but this performance is subtler and richer than any other she’s given to date.

Rather than do something freshly cinematic with Saint Laurent’s precise, elegant creations, the film is content to exhibit them.

This starfighter-recruit blockbuster is refreshingly idea-driven.

The film is torn between the conflicting instincts of sassy playing to the gallery and sanctified mush.

Only a film as big as Africa could have done Adichie’s novel full justice; the treatment it gets here, equally honourable and hurried, reduces it to Nigerian soap with BAFTA-level acting.

It is rubbish, and whereas Taylor’s playing can sometimes redeem utter nonsense, it doesn’t quite manage it here.

The Gentlemen is a valiant, often raucous bid to drag the tried-and-true old Ritchie formula into the present, and while the result feels like he got about as far as 2005 – with lip-service acknowledgements of grime music and YouTube – for the purposes of this film, it’s close enough.

Give the film this much: it’s egalitarian in its imbecility.

With its meathead sensibility, Day Shift is always most comfortable hacking and slashing. These set-tos can be reasonably tasty, but everything else? Way more seasoning, please.

There’s no question The Rewrite is underpinned by the same story mechanisms it draws attention to... But there are moments here when sunlight breaks through the shtick.

Watchable though the One Good Cop formula has oft proven, it’s shot through here with unearned self-regard – and turns acrid fast.

Lovelace tells a difficult story creditably, yet its period detail has the effect of distancing the story, and its heroine remains an enigma.

Take one high-concept format, two big stars and lots of songs... this romcom isn’t perfect, but you can’t help rooting for the main couple.

Oswald’s brother Robert, played by James Badge Dale, is the film’s only rational human being, and Dale makes you wish Landesman had written the entire film from his angle.

The all-round exertion is immense, but the experience is a bizarre ordeal.

Adams almost makes it work through sheer force of musical-comedy will: her mimicry of “classic wicked stepmother poses” is a scream, and despite the thin material, she never looks less than fully, beamingly engaged. Even so, it’s hard not to wish she’d just stuck with her happily ever after first time around.

Much as it would be nice to report that the film lived up to its director’s triumphant return, it’s unfortunately a swaggering chore: watching it feels like competing in a sort of art-house cinema Krypton Factor, with a barrage of interpretative dance interludes, unflinching full-frontal male nudity, pulverisingly bleak mise-en-scene, and writhing mental collapse.

With better pacing and jokes, the film could have been a goof-off exercise to satisfy the midnight-madness crowd.

Abbott, almost invariably good (we’ll forgive Kraven the Hunter), is perfect here: he gives us a guy striving too hard to be a great dad, unlike Blake’s own father, and neglecting the husband side of the equation.

As a low-stress package tour of will-they-won’t-they romance highlights, it does the trick.

In the end it amounts to not much, but in the moment I laughed a lot.

Pike’s preposterous accent is as close as the film ever comes to acknowledging its own premise’s inherent corniness.