None hold a candle to the main event: pulverising verbal jousts between two stars who can toggle between serious and silly like few others. Watching them cajole, manipulate and savage each other is effervescent bloodsport: you want neither to win, or the fun will stop.

Over two and a half hours, the pop-gothic intensity can get a little much – at times I felt like a fire extinguisher was going off in my face – but you wouldn’t necessarily want to lose any of it.

It’s tense, absurd, desperate and daft, all at once: seldom have so many contradictory tones been so gainfully employed.

It’s a film that prowls around with blood in its nostrils, watching us as intently as we watch it, and waiting for just the right moment to strike.

As a filmmaker, Baumbach is sharp enough to call out the clichés of his trade, but also generous enough to put them to good use anyway.

Stone and Plemons prove ideal co-conspirators, with carefully balanced performances that have them taking turns as hero and villain without ever quite annihilating our sympathies or winning them outright.

Perhaps La Grazia is enjoyed best as a more optimistic B-side to either Il Divo or Loro, Sorrentino’s lewd and scurrilous biopics of the former Italian prime ministers Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi – both of which, incidentally, were also played by Servillo. But I know which ones I’d rather put on for fun.

It’s an engaging, sometimes touching, slightly narrow depiction of a great filmmaker in the winter of his career who’s intent on somehow recapturing the spring of it.

The evidence is inconclusive, and by the final credits we’re back where we started – confused about Smollett’s guilt or innocence, but aware that somebody on camera has to be lying through their teeth.

As an occasional source of broad and undemanding chuckles, the film doubtless serves its purpose. But the mystery itself unfolds with such plodding expediency that there’s little suspense to speak of.

Weapons manages to keep its powder dry – a feat of crafty editing by Joe Murphy – for a knockout finale that’s twisted, hilarious and savage, all at once.

These complications want to spin off into fluffy absurdity. Instead they thicken into treacle. It’s a mistake to have Lohan and Curtis mainly interact as new characters, because the emotional core between their old pair gets dislodged – though it certainly helps that Butters is such a splendid, grounding co-star both before and after the switcheroo.

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.

With a fresh joke in almost every line of the script, even if only one in five worked, you’d still be laughing more or less continuously through to the credits – and for me, at least, the hit rate was often considerably higher than that.

It’s the opposite of a gateway horror for the trepidatious. It beckons in the brave.

Anyone interested in animation needs to pay attention to what these films are doing. The writing formula may be crude, but the whiz-bang aesthetic is sensational.

There’s no bold genre reinvention afoot in this reboot, and its thwart-the-baddies plot remains bound to familiar equations, though at least now the equations actually balance.

The recommendation might be stronger if the mortifying moments for Craig didn’t make me, personally, want to cower rather than laugh.

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.

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.

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

Indeed, in a genre infamous for feints and teases, Gunn’s kitchen-sink approach feels refreshingly generous, and his excitement for the character shines through.

The craft is exemplary – it’s easily the best-looking, best-sounding film since the first. But it takes a deep, personal love of the medium for a director to deliver such crunchy impact, thrills, spills and euphoric highs while treading anew in footsteps as craterous (and muddy) as they come. If it’s not the blockbuster of the summer, I’ll be amazed.

The Gold Rush is a flawless example of Charlie Chaplin's masterly fusion of comedy and tragedy. [20 Apr 2024, p.23]

Its loopy verve is reassuringly human.

This follow-up doesn’t re-take the temperature of British society one generation on so much as vivisect its twitching remains.

It’s a film which understands the pleasure of seeing familiar roads driven with consummate expertise. The F does stand for formula, after all.

If production problems didn’t thwart Maclean and crew from making a proper fist of all this, the editing took its eye off the ball.