Land will give you a craving to be in the great outdoors, maybe before it’s even over.

The Alto Knights certainly has the off-screen pedigree you’d hope for. Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino) wrote the script, named after an infamous Manhattan social club. But the circuitous shaping feels off, a problem Barry Levinson’s direction is too flaccid to fix.

With the best will in the world, Metz drags us through a labyrinth of intrigue but messes up the crumb trail. We’re left disorientated, and underwhelmed.

The film’s slightly feeble and teenage ideas about what counts as transgressive quickly drain these outpourings of their capacity to shock.

Like most aspects of the film’s mythology, the whole Bright business feels like the non-brainwave of a random plot generator – a will-this-do device Landis barely integrates into his wider story. As a choice for the film’s title, it’s singular, but silly.

It offers a selection of sweaty, string-vesty, bulgy-bare-armsy scenes from the life of the real-life submarine commander Salvatore Todaro, played here by Pierfranceso Favino. It isn’t dreadful.

Allen has worked wonders in the past with superficially similar moral tales, but this one’s a sketchy rehash.

Dark Glasses is mainly just flat, but it could definitely have done without this all-round disgrace of a dog performance – quite enough to have Uggy from The Artist shielding his peepers with a front paw.

It has a weird, half-finished vibe, with a lumpy, repetitive structure, a bizarre colour palette that resembles an exploding Tango Ice Blast machine, and too many scenes that wear on well beyond their natural usefulness.

A lot of the blame for this misfire must fall on novice Brazilian director Afonso Poyart, whose crackpot editing and fondness for irrelevant zooming don’t so much turn this film’s screws as loosen them unrecoverably.

Despite his free and easy camerawork, which generates some lovely moments between Ian and Sofi, Cahill's narrative jolts along in fits and starts.

Based on the Colleen Hoover bestseller, this vacuous film splices abuse and glossy courtship in the big city – to deeply dubious effect.

Shallowly entertaining but the opposite of insightful, this film repeatedly hails the clever USP that Beanie Babies were understuffed on purpose, so they could be “posed” better. As a piece of malleable, threadbare, plasticky content with a plum destiny as digital landfill, their biopic is certainly in a position to know.

Nyad’s theme of women pulling together just about lands – thanks chiefly to Foster. But following the recipe of human interest this slavishly is a fast track to not being very interesting at all.

Intertwining, Altman-esque social tapestries are all well and good, but the connections between characters should ideally run a little deeper than having them occasionally stroll past each other in the street.

Gibson wisecracks with a weary panache, and the tech credits are sharp: production designer Bernardo Trujillo and director of photography Benoît Debie make El Pueblito look almost as disreputable as their leading man’s pebbledashed phizog.

The film has so little to say about forbidden love, and gives its stars so little dramatic sinew to flex, that it already feels like a footnote in the genre.

Director and co-writer Nick Stagliano tries to wax serious about the business of killing, but the trouble is, he hasn’t written any characters who scan as real people.

It’s stylish, yes, it has verve and swagger and real love for the time and the place. But this is Tommy Shelby and the Peaky Blinders playing their greatest hits on what feels a little like a farewell tour. Those peaks just aren’t as razor-sharp as they used to be.

The first Enola Holmes was colourful, spirited – and made for cinemas, though it was fast-tracked onto streaming during Covid. The sequel, however, has the silty pall of content: scenes often look dreary and move more drearily still; you’d swear in the fight scenes the actors are just taking it in turns to be hit. Elementary? Not really – just basic.

As an occasional source of broad and undemanding chuckles, the film doubtless serves its purpose. But the mystery itself unfolds with such plodding expediency that there’s little suspense to speak of.

What’s surprising about Minions is that it squanders these yellow oddballs’ new-found freedom.

Dramatic things keep happening in the love lives of its two central couples, yet handily for Gen-Z viewers who like their protagonists morally spotless, none is responsible for any of it. It sometimes feels as if you’re watching a couple of hours of incredibly bad luck.

On a visual level, the film’s reportage is as tabloidy as its argument, and much more wilfully unpleasant.

Will it enrapture its target audience regardless? It should certainly keep them occupied for a couple of hours, though perhaps more with nodding recognition rather than delight.

The movie subverts expectations, and not in a good way, by seeming in a dither about its own identity. The romance is by the by, the comedy as sparse as can be. We’re left with a curious non-film about the pitfalls of higher education assessment. Odd.

Mortal Engines has been thoroughly storyboarded, make no mistake. But here lies the rub – lift-off, personality, and plainly put, direction, aren’t there. All the pieces of the movie slide mechanically into place and wait – and wait – for some spark of soul to turn up and animate them.

This is at the very least a beautifully designed failure, marrying crepuscular photography with faultless art direction, and blessed by a gorgeous, otherworldly score by Augustin Viard, a specialist in the ondes Martenot. It looks and sounds so darkly inviting – but sends you home unsated.