It is three parts The Mighty Boosh to two parts The Goon Show, which, when mixed with the quite astonishing lack of wit and finesse seen here, makes for pure cinematic strychnine.

Oswald’s brother Robert, played by James Badge Dale, is the film’s only rational human being, and Dale makes you wish Landesman had written the entire film from his angle.

The Voice’s vengeful motives are ridiculous, and the audience is captive to the special dullness only a suspenseless potboiler can provide.

The switch from male to female leads has been done with so little apparent regard for how it might actually affect the plot that entire tracts of the film, including its finale, now land like poorly tossed pancakes.

Bad scripting, bad plotting, terrible joke formulation, and not a single character actually having a hangover until part-way through the end credits. What kind of a Hangover movie is this?

Usually, a spoof franchise would only feel this exhausted by the second or third sequel, so I suppose Fackham Hall deserves points for efficiency at least.

The talking heads offer little but platitudes and clichés, while the endless racing footage is dry in the extreme. Here is a life not sugar-coated by cinema so much as rolled in powdered alum.

The more calculated Vaughn’s films are to appeal to his surprisingly rabid fan-base, the more they seem custom-built to repel everyone else.

What distinguishes the film from last year’s backpacking adventure, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, apart from its lobotomised worldview and charred, corroded soul, are Hector’s philosophical musings – “people who are afraid of death are afraid of life,” is one – that pop up on screen in a handwritten font whenever a lesson has been learnt.

The film makes no attempt to grapple with the American school shooting as a nihilistic cultural phenomenon.

Though A Family Affair shoots for laughs, it ends up in an uncanny valley of spooky sex and dead-on-arrival jokes.

By the time the credits rolled on River, I wanted to throw myself into the nearest one.

The irresistible comic elegance of the premise – a remarried widower is tormented by the ghost of his first wife – is lost in a mass of pointless embellishments and tinkerings.

Much of the film is unintentionally hilarious.

It’s a catastrophically bad movie whose aggressive dullness and dumbness can best be reproduced by picking up a brick and slamming it against one’s forehead for two hours.

The movie doesn’t have a funny bone in its body, clomping from one unoriginal set piece to the next with a head-scratching lack of urgency.

For all its world-building sprawl, The Way of Water is a horizon-narrowing experience – the sad sight of a great filmmaker reversing up a creative cul-de-sac.

In practical terms, this just means he’s Iron Man with a spray-paint job. The film’s draggy middle act has to confine Jaime in Victoria’s secret lab, or there would be nothing for the non-superpowered rest of his family to do: at long last, he’s pitted against the grievance-harbouring Indestructible Man (Raoul Trujillo) in one of those climactic clashes we know all too well, which is just a slam-bam VFX-off.

For perhaps the first time in the studio’s canon, every idea in this ‘origin story’ of the Toy Story astronaut feels woefully half-baked.

It is silly, shoddy and features far too much of rapper-turned-leading man Ice Cube staring at a computer screen while looking as if he’s working through a reasonably urgent digestive ailment. Like a heat-ray in reverse, it leeches all the fun out of what should be an epic tale of alien invasion.

This crazily overlong and tiresome follow-up...doesn’t seem to have the first idea what to do with itself – not least when it comes to its much-vaunted all-star cast, the majority of whom are barely even in it.

Cannes has had its share of opening-night turkeys over the past decade or so (2014’s Grace of Monaco was a memorable one), but for sheer unabating feebleness this must take the biscuit.

Nothing in this feeble psychological thriller rings true for a moment, though its unhinged machinations feel as pedestrian as soap opera in execution.

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

It’s Mamma Mia!, minus ABBA. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

None of it works: the inexplicable alchemy between co-stars that can seduce the audience even in an indifferent rom-com doesn't arise between Thurman and Morgan.

It is like watching British cinema undergo a deathbed hallucination.

There may well be a worse film released this year than this unwatchable British black comedy, although it sets a terrifyingly low benchmark.