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.

The whole package is so sleekly watchable, if risk-averse to a fault, that I can’t recall a recent time at the cinema where I learned more by thinking less.

It would be near-impossible to love Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women more than Greta Gerwig does.

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.

Watchable though the One Good Cop formula has oft proven, it’s shot through here with unearned self-regard – and turns acrid fast.

For all its feints and innovations, Frozen II knows its audience inside out, and wants to ensure every last subdivision leaves feeling both seen and satisfied. That’s obviously good business. But it’s also generous, deeply charming filmmaking.

The film is nearly two hours long and passes in what feels like 45 seconds. It is wildly entertaining and blaringly ridiculous, and I want to watch it every night for a week.

The film’s nothing if not an argument-starter, with plenty of hot provocations – especially about the bargains underpinning black excellence – to toss out. They’re like firecrackers, though. You come out rattled, but half-certain you’ve been toyed with.

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.

Midway will never be mistaken for a classic, and even box office success for the $100 independent production looks dicey. Stretches of the film work beautifully, though, and the sinking feeling for Japan’s forces is painted with sympathy, not schadenfreude.

The film’s twists, alas, fall into one of two categories – the obvious and the tasteless – and the side-orders of gruesome violence feel like they’ve been delivered to quite the wrong table.

Even those familiar with King’s 2013 follow-up of the same name, more of an absorbing dark fantasy than a horror novel, won’t be prepared for the alchemy of elements cooked up here.

The cop thriller Black and Blue is just the ticket for Naomie Harris, if she wants to prove she can shoulder a suspenseful action flick by looking sharp, acting credibly nervy, and keeping us squarely on her side.

It’s a pleasure to see Hamilton and Schwarzenegger back in action as leathery veterans, though the script shunts the cast onto some unexpectedly topical terrain, including a heroic escape from a US-Mexico border prison camp, with detainees’ cages flung open in triumph. Yet it’s Davis’s brusque and androgynous Grace who turns out to be Dark Fate’s most stonily compelling asset.

It is the most arrhythmia-inducingly tense film I have seen in years: by the end, I felt as if I’d spent the last two hours being dangled by my ankles over a crocodile pit.

Though it coasts on some wildly uneven star charisma, there’s nothing particularly objectionable about Double Tap, finally. It’s fine? It’s just a time-killer we didn’t much need, a decade after we hardly needed the first one.

It gives you plenty to look at, even if you could say it’s been Avatarred and feathered to within an inch of its life. It’s the big, echoing hole in the middle – insert story, any story – that no one has figured out how to plug.

Robert De Niro is sensational in Scorsese's history-making mob masterpiece.

El Camino didn’t need to exist – but for fans who craved extra Jesse Pinkman in their lives, it hits the spot.

Those wonky de-aging effects and distracting frame-rate serve as trip-wires too. But what ultimately hobbles Gemini Man, more than all of that, is its refusal to buy into its own ludicrousness. It’s a slab of silliness that commits a terrible error: it takes itself seriously.

The 22-year-old Van Patten is a more than capable solo lead: the breakout star of Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, she has an invaluable knack for making her characters’ worst traits their most compelling features.

If Blackbird shows us anything it’s that no matter how carefully we plan, life resists perfection, right up to the end.

We know that this cast can produce magic together, and that this director can inject pace into unlikely topics. It’s just this one that seems to have feet of clay.

Beyond its waspish wit, a dastardly roll-call of suspects and Daniel Craig’s dapper efforts as our presiding sleuth, the film gives nothing away until the bitter end, thanks to a head-spinning tricksiness of plotting that even Agatha Christie might have conceded was rather ingenious.

As satire it’s a dismal dereliction of duty; as comedy, a one-note joke that wears out fast.

The hesitancy of the storytelling, with its comforting lulls and odd delays, is a funny sort of boon.

It’s staged, scored and cut together with an aggressively deadening quality, numbing your senses to the very impact it intends.

This is a sober, stiff-collared procedural, handsomely shot but also oddly bloodless until the more conventional paranoid-thriller rhythms of its final act kick in.