This tale, more mechanical than human, is finally beyond [Bier's] skillset: it required ruthless tinkering, not the softly-softly approach.

In practice, the interplay between events old and new is equal parts tedious and indecipherable, with the characters talking about parallel timelines like studio executives thrashing out a franchise in a boardroom.

The film frustrates because it’s frictionless, almost completely devoid of credible conflict, and generally keen to sail through as a testament to everlasting love at its most altruistic.

A garbled mélange of arbitrary, unsatisfying action and token remorse.

You suspect Sorkin relishes the clash between Ball’s fundamentally fatuous show and the razor-smartness of his take on it. And it is smart. It just isn’t much else.

The Instigators is little more than a stacked cast list on an Apple budget, waiting for a good script to materialise.

Beneath the charming sparkly wrap, there’s just more of the same underneath: an endless round of pass-the-parcel that never actually coughs up a gift.

Any film that hands Sofia Boutella a katana can’t be dismissed as an entirely fruitless exercise. It’s the Algerian actress and dancer, rather than Cage, who proves to be Ghostland’s greatest asset. And when your damsel is evidently capable of dealing with her own distress, thank you very much, the rescue mission can’t help but feel a touch redundant.

Wild Card, which keeps giving the Stath too much mannered hard-boiled dialogue for his own good, is a promising blend of components that don’t quite end up gelling.

Drag is what it is, and drag is what it does.

It’s never outright bad – not unforgivably so – but comes off muted, diffuse and generally half-baked.

Faulkner’s book, an oblique and complex tale of the American South’s festering decline, hasn’t so much been reworked for cinema as simply dumped on the screen in handfuls, and the result is a swirling mess.

This first half of Snyder’s diptych (the second is due in the spring) is more of a loosely doodled mood board than a functioning film – a series of pulpy tableaux that mostly sound fun in isolation, but become numbingly dull when run side by side.

At a glance, A Boy Called Christmas looks delightful enough, with its snowy landscapes, cosy knitwear, and scenes of Jim Broadbent larking around in a periwig and frock coat. But beneath its Paddington-meets-Potter storybook exterior, its bloodstream runs with purest gloop.

Survivor is about as silly as cinema can get, an explosives-packed thriller for those of you who found The Expendables just a little too understated.

The Humbling, which was directed by Barry Levinson (Good Morning, Vietnam, Rain Man) and based on a novel by Philip Roth, is such inept, shuffling nonsense that an apter title might have been The Bumbling.

It’s a hectic, sour and muddled film – a flailing counterfeit of satire that keeps slipping on its own banana skin supply, and never remotely gets to grips with what it thinks it’s sending up.

Leto throws himself into the role with a steely commitment that would be easier to understand if the film surrounding him weren’t so thuddingly generic.

High-speed antics have never felt this slow.

It tends to be flat, misjudged, and a bit of a nightmare, but it’s too frivolously knocked-off to give lasting annoyance.

In a story that could have offered a parade of vivid character roles, only Foy and Glen really register: a kindly park ranger (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) deserved more screen time, while the various surly faces on the Manhattan carriage-toting scene are only thinly defined.

Stevenson has configured her tale as female body-horror fit for a dissertation, without giving it much of a spine: while slick, the set pieces are few, far between, and over too fast.

Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) likes his black comedies of discomfort to make us squirm, as does producer Ari Aster. But this film is skimpier on insight than the best work either has done, and Daniel Pemberton’s poignant flute score deserves to be in a more mature film.

But the idea that Raimi’s signature touch amounts to rewarming old flourishes from his work over the last four decades is a wildly embarrassing and juvenile way to think about filmmaking: what you actually get here is the Marvel house style with Raimi flavouring sprinkled on top, and anything that feels outrageous only does so in the context of the franchise’s fussily restrictive rule set.

In spirit, it’s all very Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But in execution, it’s far closer to Meet the Parents with a heavy dose of identity politics.

Cinema-goers desperately need a fresh, unusual and franchise-free blockbuster to rally behind, but Jupiter Ascending isn’t it.

This is exasperatingly thin stuff from Loach and Laverty, who have in the past built far more textured narratives, peopled by far richer characters, even while maintaining the fierce, politicised charge they aim for here.

The effects have a pleasingly retro patina, but the action itself is drab, the jokes scarce, while the town itself is both entirely characterless and oddly deserted, giving the impression that nothing’s really at stake. It’s just what we were warned about all those years ago: something weird that don’t look good.