Grandage’s feature debut, the literary biopic Genius, was an all-star dud; this is colourless, miscast, adrift. He hasn’t yet found cinematic lift-off: the camera gazes endlessly into the soupy sea off Peacehaven, as if it were a Magic Eye picture hiding the drama of a Turner painting inside. Amid the drab ruin of these lives in the 1990s, and their equally cheerless salad days, rare sparks of life succumb to a great deal of mopey regret.

Perhaps La Grazia is enjoyed best as a more optimistic B-side to either Il Divo or Loro, Sorrentino’s lewd and scurrilous biopics of the former Italian prime ministers Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi – both of which, incidentally, were also played by Servillo. But I know which ones I’d rather put on for fun.

Dialogue aside, the craftsmanship is unimpeachable, and Gray takes a timeless approach to pacing and camerawork: even the sunlight is sepia-tinted. But the grand themes of loyalty and ambition never catch fire, and the film’s few truly memorable moments are invariably its smallest.

It’s not bad so much as lightly feeble – and Pegg acquits himself respectably in a lead role that, for a change, chimes well to his best comic persona: the beta male under alpha pressure.

The racing scenes are its one hope of reclaiming your attention, but there aren’t nearly enough of them to justify such a killing duration.

It’s another flick through a familiar and by-now bulging scrapbook, but it leaves you craving less – and more.

The trouble begins with a seasick lurching between fantasy and reality, it’s redoubled by subject matter that can’t support that, and it hits a whole arpeggio of duff notes with the casting.

It’s a nostalgic exercise in burnishing the Stallone brand, with the star on screen half the time in new interviews, between a slew of clips and outtakes.

Kevin Hart just about gets by. but Netflix's heist thriller falls down thanks to its terrible CGI, nonsensical plot and mismatched casting.

There’s half an argument that this schlocky lowlife caper energises its director’s visual imagination more than we’ve seen lately – hey, at least he’s trying something – but it’s not a juggling feat he can keep up all day.

Despite the clumsy writing and production design, Thirlby and Hurt acquit themselves perfectly well, and Jürgen Prochnow makes an enjoyably ripe appearance as a former Nazi who unwittingly helps direct Ari towards his target.

So what’s to dislike here? Hardly anything – it’s finding things actively to like that poses more of a problem.

Writer-director James Gunn finds moments of inspiration in this sequel, but the plot is a mess, the film irritable and frazzled.

Meg 2, by design, is a completely anonymous bag of lukewarm McDonalds – it’s hard to be mad at it, but only because nothing in it stands out enough to get mad at.

Novocaine may not be based on any pre-existing IP – no comic book or game, say. But that’s not much to crow about, because few flights of the imagination have lately felt lower in altitude.

The more you scrutinise the society Roth and these screenwriters have created, the more it seems a chintzily self-designed dystopia whose rules and entire infrastructure are pure cardboard.

A terrific, despair-drenched final scene is the viewer’s reward for staying the course: pitilessly cruel, spare and shivery, it’s got everything the rest of this strangely stiff and synthetic film lacks.

There’s nothing you could call an actual emotion in store, just an awful lot of face-pulling.

These poor players have all hand-picked their roles, and are resolved to strut and fret as convincingly as they can, right up until the curtain plummets.

Hyena doesn’t stint on creating a grubbily repellent universe, but it never gives us one solid reason to stick around.

The more tangled the plot becomes, the more hackneyed Skjoldbaerg’s tactics get.

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.

Henson is a natural at this kind of broad comedy, and throws herself into the goofy-cringe set-pieces with enough energy to elicit giggles, if not outright guffaws. The result rarely looks like something anyone might want, male or otherwise, but it passes the time, just about.

Companionable as he always is, the way this flaunts Statham’s star power leaves a lot to be desired. He’s a totem of meathead carnage, barely sustains a scratch, and doesn’t get nearly enough moments of the deadpan bemusement he excels at best.

Truth or Dare is the kind of film that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but its initially appealing premise – what if a demon possessed a drinking game? – quickly falls to pieces under its own self-generated confusions.

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

Teenage idealism curdling into cult-like insanity is a punchy, timely subject. But it’s hard to discern what Hauser and her regular co-writer Géraldine Bajard actually want to do with it, or how much sympathy their film has for Miss Novak’s follower-victims.

The problem isn’t that this unusual combination of genres doesn’t click. It’s that the jokes are so stale, the performances so broad, and the plot so greased up with improbable short cuts, that Audrey’s journey feels less like a voyage of self-discovery than a coach tour of the form’s dustiest landmarks.