The Nicolas Cage aficionado carries two hopes into each of the 59-year-old actor’s new films. The first – not often met, truth be told – is that it will be good. And the second, failing that, is that it will be mad. Alas, this thin and lumpy western is neither.

As you’d expect from Rodriguez, it has a decent number of pow-wow fight scenes, and sure loves to watch machinery being ripped to shreds. But it's all uncomfortably close to the gruesome Flesh Fair from Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, revamped as an ain’t-it-cool demolition derby with a charm-and-conscience bypass.

Iñárritu has cooked up a personal epic of the most exhaustingly swaggery type, man-spread across three hours of screen time during which flashes of genuine, startling brilliance occasionally manage to push their way through the strenuously zany macho-visionary fug.

A little of the new Spider-Man went an exhilaratingly long way in Captain America: Civil War last year. But a lot of him goes almost nowhere in this slack and spiritless solo escapade, spun off from an initially intriguing premise that deflates around you with a low whine as you watch, like a punctured bouncy castle.

This expensive-looking follow-up, which tells the story of Simba’s father’s own coming-to-power, sheepishly papers over all of the now-unfashionable concepts on which its forerunner was built.

A midnight-movie, exploitation-savvy version of this film, with Spencer chewing up the scenery like nobody’s business, might feasibly have been a camp classic. But this is Tate Taylor’s version: too nervous to thrill, too daft to upset anyone, and constantly policing how much fun it lets Spencer have.

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo don’t come close to defying gravity in this bloated, beige screen adaptation of the Wizard of Oz prequel.

Piggy presumably aims to test our sympathies, but just forfeits them entirely, in the service of a facile plot and a heroine even the film itself can’t seem to stand.

[A] minor and distinctly unchilling fare.

There’s a kernel of philosophical intrigue in The Assessment, encased in a sleek shell of dystopian science fiction, and unfortunately flung a million miles away from audience engagement.

If you’ve seen Eastwood’s Gran Torino or Nicolas Cage in The Weather Man, you’ll know the sort of cranky redemption arc we’re eventually in for here, but this is the flat-packed, self-assembly-kit version – more likely to exacerbate a mild depression than warm the cockles.

This is pure filmmaking-by-paycheque: you can virtually hear the clock card machine crunching at the start of every scene, as cast and crew punch in dutifully for another shift.

]Herzog's] film has the distinction, and also the disadvantage, of being probably the least severe Herzog has yet made: it’s pretty and watchable, with Kidman trying her heartfelt best, but it can’t make its Gertrude Bell, as lover, cultural pioneer and feminist icon, add up to more than a series of voguish poster-girl poses.

Banderas is good value, playing the role a few shades more seriously than it deserves, while first-time director Richard Hughes deploys much fizzing neon and halogen to strike a convincingly sleazy tone. But even at 90 minutes the plot feels padded, and it’s all so preeningly sordid.

So many shivery night-time clinches in Moscow fill Despite the Falling Snow’s modest runtime, you wonder what proportion of the budget went on that ever-whirring snow machine.

Oscillates between the jolting and the absurd, bottoming out with a nonsensical coda.

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

The film’s more nothingy than noxious: Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) directs with vanishingly little of the snap he had back in the day.

Morris gives it the old college try, but Rumsfeld is too smooth an operator to let anything slip.

The pristine setting never meshes with Jones’s efforts to give emotional reality to his army of characters, who cannot escape their tropes: leader, hero, warrior woman, mystic.

Almodóvar has always been the sole screenwriter of his films – but perhaps in this case, keeping an English assistant in a nearby antechamber might have been a wise move.

The second leg of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien, is mostly stalling for time: two or three truly great sequences tangled up in long beards and longer pit-stops.

The macho showmanship of director Fyodor Bondarchuk, wedded to such a facile script, turns this undeniably impressive megaproduction into a behemoth you mainly want to cower from.

Would The Do-Over be a spectacular triumph if it’s two stars had played the material relatively straight? Probably not. But the terrible jokes wouldn’t have got in the way of all that plot.

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.

Washington – Man on Simmer – keeps himself awake with a few fun, staccato line deliveries. But the flurries of pointlessly sadistic violence are jaggedly dispensed, botching the build-up.

The baseline for these things should be a little higher than ‘doesn’t retroactively sour you on its predecessor’. Even today – never mind in another 36 years – it’s hard to imagine anyone with the option of watching the source plumping for thi

I admire its courage and the always welcome presence of Harry Andrews (as Earnshaw), Judy Cornwell (as Nellie), Pamela Browne, Rosalie Crutchley. But I can't forgive its dullness. I don't have to believe in Wuthering Heights, I simply ask to be transported by it. [13 Jun 1971, p.14]