The idea is that Chickie’s experiences will challenge his simplistic view of the conflict, but Farrelly frames his jaunt as a glorified gap year, with various atrocities repackaged as opportunities for personal growth. Napalm

Southpaw asks both too much of Gyllenhaal and not enough – he’s being forced to build a whole character out of scraps, sawdust, and horrendous clichés.

That the film winds up cramped, underwhelming and strangely thwarted is hard to square with all the effort up on screen – or perhaps it just feels too much like effort.

On all fronts, you wish that Dear Evan Hansen had nothing to do with Evan Hansen.

Converting dyed-in-the-wool Appalachian pessimism into honest, bootstrappy uplift is not a task you envy Howard or his cast, as the running time slips away and no concrete point materialises. Elegy is four years late and doomed.

While Gyllenhaal thrusts himself into the role with energy, you can sense his awareness that his acting has to carry the whole shebang, like a chef in the kitchen doing every last job. He’s entertaining, but guilty, like The Guilty, of throwing nuance in the bin.

There are snatches of crude enjoyment to be had, if you venture in with basement-level expectations, and manage to ignore some dire third act CGI. Roth’s fetish for gloating nastiness in his other work makes it hard to decry the mutilation of whatever his original vision might have been. For once, he’s at the receiving end of a rusty blade, instead of wielding it

For all its sporadic wackiness and wonder, on balance Aquaman still comes out a bore. But they’ve given it a heroic shake.

The problem with this latest entry in Disney’s ever-expanding range of recycled classics isn’t that it hews too close to the studio’s original animated masterpiece, but that its many departures only muddle the original’s nursery-rhyme simplicity and neuter its famous sustained emotional wallop.

Shallowness permeates all the characterisations, giving it a bland, marshmallowy centre.

Slaloming between Hoffman’s testimony at DeLorean’s trial and the caper that got both men there for no obvious reason beyond it being the way these things are usually done, the film obediently pads through the shaggy-dog motions.

Maggie Carey, the writer and director, has plenty to say about life on the cusp of womanhood, but never quite works out a way to make her points without getting her characters to recite them verbatim.

For all the solid efforts of the cast, it’s still one of those biopics with a totally canned story arc and as many head-slapping moments as intentional laughs.

Despite its ambitious goal of transposing a dystopian classic to the modern “Young Adult” genre, Voyagers is ultimately about as effective as a leaky space-suit.

With a tighter plot and slightly more knowing craftsmanship, this might have worked, but Swedish director Mikael Hafström (1408, The Rite) isn’t really the man to poke fun with any sophistication at his stars’ well-established personas.

There are snatches of fun to be had early on, before the teasing gimmickry about reality and fakery expires. But the second half is just a slavish rehash of all the series’ best-known tropes. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, crossing through this looking glass, we may simply wind up less and less curious.

The themes of mob justice and socialised misogyny could have hit a little harder if they’d been explored rather than simply harped on about.

There’s some commendable trippiness towards the end, but for the most part Godzilla Smooch Kong is all too ready to fall back on delivering the bare minimum promised by its title. It’s giant monsters fighting, the thing constantly shrugs: what else do you want? Ideally a bit more than this.

Maguire tries hard, and has a good stab at Fischer’s twitchy rage, but can’t bring much freshness or specificity to anything else.

The film is such a crackpot tangle that it is even hard to fathom what a successful version might have looked like.

Whatever kinship Depp may feel with this tortured, misunderstood, and regularly blotto artist is expressed, unfortunately, as a string of gruelling clichés.

It all comes across as one-sided, which makes the whole thing play like a PR video rather than a genuine examination of her premiership.

To everyone’s complaints that Longlegs’ plot turned daft, I can only shrug: it was easily assured enough to sustain a deadly undertow, while dancing about with a diabolical sense of mischief. I also point them to The Monkey as Exhibit A for what misfiring daftness looks like.

Just when it’s threatening to pay off, it ends, with an experimental cliffhanger, not Levy’s idea. It reminds us – by simply not working – that abrupt, unresolved endings are the hardest kind to earn.

If it weren’t for the stifling earnestness about patriarchal dogma, you could mistake it for M. Night Shyalaman’s The Village given some kind of vague off-Broadway workshopping, and regurgitated minus the twist.

There are those who find Žižek a delight; but well before the two-hour mark, one feels he has delighted us long enough.

It has a perky winsomeness: there are jokes, not all of them morbid, about being dead. There are tear-jerking scenes that require a viewer to surrender. I struggled to do so. Funnily enough, Eternity drags.

A wildly arresting performance from Buckley is not enough to save this generic and uninspired adaptation.