Some of the jokes here are so bad they may be legally actionabubble, even prosecutabubble, and will cause toes to curl on the feet of the hitherto unembarrassabubble. There are scenes now seared upon my memory through sheer force of murderous un-funniness which I fear may prove to be unscrubbabubble.

A flabby, directionless disappointment, which only occasionally raises the heart-rate.

Like the earlier Divergent films, Allegiant is studded with enticing science-fiction ideas, but it keeps such a poker-straight face while presenting them, you often can’t help but crack up.

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.

The longer we spend inside Freddy’s, the duller it gets.

It’s an entirely calamitous turkey, riddled with plot holes and bewilderingly miscast, which steals ideas from films as diverse as The Fly, Avatar, Soylent Green and Prometheus before fumbling every last one of them, and looks as if it was shot in a show home for £99.

The awkward middle course charted by new director James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Cards) and his cast is unsatisfying in terms of head, heart and, well, elsewhere. It’s an alleged 18-rated, adults-only filth-fest that behaves like a flustered PG.

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.

Despite the Smith family’s association with Scientology, which unmistakably informs this tale’s belief system (“Fear is a Choice”), as well as its shaky attempts at mythic patterning, it is in no way the laughable shambles that John Travolta’s infamous "Battlefield Earth" was.

The plot is an incomprehensible tangle of dead ends and recaps.

The apocalypse, in its effect on Cassie, mainly takes the form of a been-there, done-that checklist of Young Adult story tropes, and none of these are very scary or original, or bode very well.

Amenábar is no stranger to psychologically vivid thrillers with ghostly overtones, but Regression feels depressingly like journeyman work.

Transformers has ambition and attitude in its pores, and spectacle to spare. Bay shoots cars like they’re women, and people like they’re cars, and tosses around metal like it’s made from thin air. The film wasn’t meant to make you think, but it does. For better or worse, it’s cinema.

This isn’t just lazy, it’s borderline nonsensical. Resurgence inflates the scale of the alien threat to such a preposterous degree – the mothership takes up roughly an eighth of the Earth’s total surface – that the queues of honking traffic and rooftop helicopter rescues we’re supposed to invest in can’t help but feel like microscopic trifles.

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.

The only realistic way to fix Cats would be to spay it, or simply pretend it never happened. Because it's an all-time - a rare and star-spangled calamity.

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

This film, with its endless copying of Assassin’s Creed camera angles and state-of-the-art bullseyes, is an ugly machine, tiring to the eye, monotonously scored, and also weirdly regressive on quite a few levels.

Essentially – astonishingly – the Tom and Jerry sections of Tom & Jerry are a sideshow, used to punctuate the human scheming and blundering around Preeta and Ben’s forthcoming nuptials.

The samurai code of Transporting has been ditched, the budget slashed, the product placement upped through the roof. And it’s the first of a threatened trilogy.

Connoisseurs of the accidentally ludicrous will find much to laugh at here.... But scares and intrigue are both in miserably short supply.

Mawkishness, gay panic, and lazy jokes make Vince Vaughn's workplace comedy considerably less fun than work itself.

In place of Bay’s provocative humour and unparalleled eye for destructive spectacle are brain-numbing quantities of strong language, action scenes that look as if they were edited with a knife and fork, and a blasé attitude towards violence that renders every shootout pointless, since the bad guys are invariably mown down in seconds while the heroes saunter off with barely a scratch.

This is a film in which one of the more emotionally detailed performances is given by a product-placement Audi.

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.

It has all the charm and personality of a dented traffic cone and features perhaps the single most tin-eared screenplay – in which Papa Smurf is kidnapped by the villainous wizard Gargamel, and Smurfette leads a globe-trotting mission to free him – that I have ever encountered in my two decades as a critic.

It’s just a product that behaves like one – which is a pity, since studio animation is now bolder and more dynamic than it has been for years. Not hellish – but pretty purr-gatorial.

A pound-store Tarantino with the sadism dialled up and the wit switched off, Roth has the very basics of a stomach-clenching suspense sequence down pat. It’s just that the film never provides any rationale for why you’d want to submit to it.