It looks great, and Cronin is a gifted stylist. But, as with his debut The Hole in the Ground, there’s too much slavish imitation and homage here. His greatest accomplishment is the downtime family scenes. They throb with easy realism. He should dump horror and do drama instead.

The twists are many and some predictable, but the mood here is mostly, and unapologetically, guilty-pleasure hokum.

The film, despite themes of empowerment, is really a strange cinematic palimpsest. Scratch the glossy feminist makeover to reveal underneath a still smirking, leering, chauvinistic pig.

So why two stars? Because it’s inoffensive and criticising it feels like punching down. And because Martin Clunes, playing a grouchy landlord, is really quite good.

It’s more funny peculiar than funny ha ha and, alas, doesn’t always work.

There are some mildly diverting moments, and it’s pleasing to see Ed Harris emerge later on in a significant set piece. Like everything else in this ill-judged effort, his appearance is a wasted opportunity.

The Colleen Hoover school of social realism is back — and this time it’s more idiotic than ever.

There’s lots of fun here, some of the one-liners are exquisite and the helter-skelter finale is delightfully overstuffed. Frustratingly, it’s still second-grade Pixar.

Worst of all, and quite baffling for a film that was directed and cowritten by the franchise creator, Kevin Williamson, this isn’t even about articulate teens deconstructing horror films any more. There are a handful of limp references to AI deepfakes but otherwise all the sharp culture awareness, and certainly all the irony, has been removed. It’s as if nobody realised that a Scream movie without the irony is just a bad horror movie. Roll on Scream 8?

This is all good fun but at about the midway mark (see the chunky running time) it begins to lose its vitality, ceasing to be a new Heat and becoming more of a reheat.

Yes, there is no person or inanimate object safe in a film where Fennell’s main directorial note to Elordi seems to have been, “Great, but can you also lick it?”

Sadly, the mockumentary Zamiri’s film most resembles — at times, eerily so — is Spice World: The Movie. No, really. Same manic energy. Same faux crises. Same shouty one-note line delivery.

With Bader and Blyth on quietly charismatic form throughout, [Haley's] made a film that is eminently slick, consistently palatable and instantly forgettable. The perfect Netflix product.

Skarsgard and Reinsve are excellent as two damaged people who are only able to open up when they’re working, but you yearn for the film itself to open up. It’s an intriguing premise, stylishly executed but sometimes lacking a bit of heart.

It’s difficult to convey just how little dramatic urgency there is in a film that’s effectively a computer-generated diorama, one that’s filled with fantastical flora and fauna and mystical beings who are all dressed up with nowhere to go.

You know that your comedy is in crisis when you’ve substituted actual jokes for the grating rhythms of an oompah band. Still, Pfeiffer remains charismatic till the end. She deserved better.

The screaming and shouting eventually detract from the drama, although perhaps Panahi is making a point about the hysteria of Iran’s rulers. He is certainly making a point about the traumatising effects of their cruelty, with which he is intimately familiar.

Eternity might have worked if the three leads conveyed anything beyond jaded inertia in each other’s company. They are supposed to be consumed by a love so passionate it propels them into adventures beyond the grave. They look, instead, as if they could barely get out of their trailers.

Majors plays the central character, Killian Maddox, with subtlety and sensitivity.

Mackey is fine but wasted, and still clearly anticipating a role to top her astounding Emily from 2022. The political messaging, meanwhile, is grimly bromidic.

The narrative arrives in clumsy self-contained chunks that don’t always gel.

Despite the game involvement of actors as fine as Damian Lewis, Katherine Waterston, Thomasin McKenzie and Anna Maxwell Martin, this Downton Abbey spoof is often aggressively unfunny.

Returning to the screen after a long absence, Lawrence manages such profound levels of eye-rolling pissed-offness that it’s difficult not to take it as a sign of the actress pushing back on the suffocating levels of adoration she has been subjected to.

My two stars are for [Pike] alone. She’s an utter hoot in every scene, part Miranda Priestly, part Hannibal Lecter, and it’s an unsettling testament to her power as a performer that she tilts the sympathy axis of the entire movie towards her.

Flawed to its core but never less than riveting

There’s only one thing worse than being trapped in a theatre watching a badly staged play: being trapped in a cinema watching a badly adapted stage play. And so it is, frequently, with this Ibsen update that’s pulled in too many directions at once by its ambitious director, Nia DaCosta, and the producer-star Tessa Thompson.

It’s mostly a dirge, but the younger Day-Lewis has an artful eye and his indecently talented dad is clearly crying out for better material.

In the end Good Fortune is perhaps too ambitious, and indulges in too much sermonising, especially when Gabriel also joins the human workforce and, like Jeff, experiences financial hardship. Reeves is good value as the clueless angel but an unfortunate sense of repetition sets in.

Fall is an instinctive visual storyteller, the two leads have a winning chemistry, and the location shooting in Istanbul is vivid and authentic. Just a shame the film is less so.

It’s always compelling, and a powerful first feature.

It’s all too obvious that The Smashing Machine has been conceived, among other things, as another Safdie-branded career boost for a pair of charming, charismatic actors who could do with a dash of Oscar magic. It’s just a shame that their film is a fugazi.

It could be seen as a cynical capitalist move by the best businesswoman in the game. And it definitely is — at least partly.

It just coasts, with breathtaking laziness, on the power of nostalgia, and it seemingly hopes that the sight of our beloved trio gathered together, mostly on chairs and improvising badly, will be enough in itself.

Far too much time is spent with the tedious off-camera histrionics of the brattish co-star Shia LaBeouf, and the admission that Figgis was hand-chosen (“invited”) by Coppola for the documentary renders it slightly toothless.

The film, alas, and it pains me to say it, is not very good. It’s overwhelmingly, unfortunately, self-serious, and thus accidentally very Monty Python. There’s little dramatic tension and the music is close to agony.

It doesn’t hang together as well as its predecessor, Drive-Away Dolls, it still offers some throwaway wickedness.

The poster might as well read “come see Orlando Bloom get put through the wringer”. It’s awesome on some level but it’s not much else.

In short, Yorgos, move on.

It’s not going to rock everyone’s world and neither is it a patch on Carol. But it’s competent, sometimes clever, film-making with ideas and lots of heart.

The film, written by Julian Fellowes on autopilot and directed by Simon Curtis (in a trance?), climaxes with a scene that is simultaneously grossly saccharine and deeply cynical.

It’s not quite vintage Jarmusch (for that see Night on Earth and Broken Flowers), but it is light and compassionate.

It’s unashamedly derivative but also entertaining. Butler and Kravitz are charming together and dripping with chemistry.

The earnestness slowly becomes suffocating, and Grandmother’s endless lessons grating. Yes, nature is the ultimate healer. And?

It is not the greatest Frankenstein ever. It’s not even an especially good one. It’s just, in the end, serviceable.

The supporting character interactions can be creaky and stiff, as if the director Benjamin Caron was so convinced of Kirby’s prowess that he presumed she could carry the film, flaws and all. And she almost does. Almost.

Like the original movie, this isn’t super funny, unless burping, farting and people being hit in the groin with golf balls is your thing.

It’s when they return to Earth-828 that the film reverts to type: enervating action, platitudinous script, predictable ending.

It doesn’t help that the director, Polly Steele (The Mountain Within Me), has seemingly chosen to fill the narrative longueurs with endless drone shots of the Irish countryside. Pretty, yes. But they can only offer so much damage limitation.

There are glimmers of intrigue, as well as quirks and curios.

The entire film is like this. Random and unfocused. Bit of this. Bit of that. Lots of charm. See how you go. There are great lines hidden in the mulch, mostly delivered by Fellows.

It works. Peake is that good. Isaacs is also that good. And the subject is compelling and timely.

The film hovers uneasily in a narrative grey zone, post-audition yet pre-show, and repeatedly castigates social media and reality TV for turning a generation of human beings into vacuous, camera-ready twits.

There’s an unashamedly “enthusiastic” cross-promotional quality to the film, like a two-and-a-half-hour Formula 1 commercial, that never quite gels with its hoary central story.

Nothing here resonates and its slavish adherence to recent Pixar formula is ultimately deadening. Yes, Elio, you are unique and wonderful. Your flaw is your gift. Now, please, can we all go home!

All this is window dressing that might have been less conspicuous had the film been in the possession of a thundering narrative core. Yet the debut writer-director Laura Piani relies so heavily on hopeless Bridget Jones clichés — lots of pratfalls — that the surrounding locale eventually takes centre stage.

There’s very little narrative sense here and even less psychological realism.

It’s loud and diverting and very young children are sure to be entertained. But it’s also utterly dead, right down to its hollow, greedy, cash-grabbing core.

It’s a decent film about an underexplored subject and adequately acted by a cast of inexperienced unknowns, but nothing we haven’t seen before from the determinedly low-key Dardennes.

This being Reichardt, white-knuckle thrills were unlikely to be on the menu either, but you would have hoped for something to engage with beyond a vague hum of disappointment.

A sensual reframing of a story that must still be raw for Simón, 38, the film doesn’t quite match the subtlety and originality of Summer 1993. It’s a satisfying enough addition to the saga, though, and a fillip for the Galician tourist board.

It has its moments, mostly in the initial set-up. And Armstrong still lands a few zingers.

The last act has a disappointing inevitability, with little of the transcendent emotion of the first hour.

The writer-director Runar Runarsson makes a virtue out of this narrative simplicity, however, and delivers the equivalent of sweetly moving “slow” cinema, where we get to luxuriate in the characters for long, long, sometimes wordless takes, and to find in the exemplary performance of the relatively new and untested Hall a heartbreaking expression of hidden grief.

This Indiana Jones knock-off is staggeringly slapdash.

There’s little dramatic jeopardy here and certainly no danger. Instead, by the closing credits Cécile has barely changed, and the musical around her has barely registered. Sorry, the film with songs in it.

Sometimes, a couple of scenes can make all the difference.

His legal ambitions are thus stymied at every turn by missed appointments and disinterested power players, resulting in glacial narrative pacing and a miserably predictable outcome. It is, at best, vaguely Kafka-esque but also, for the viewer, quite the trial.

On the positive side, Threapleton, the daughter of Kate Winslet, is sensational. Quietly commanding, but always glowing with charisma, she is the discovery here.

Personally, I gorged myself silly on the esoteric references, and appreciated profoundly the way that this ersatz Belmondo, just like the real thing, rubs his lower lip. But I’m not convinced that everyone else will.

You can’t lie in a close-up, which is lucky for Stewart. Because her lead actress, on camera throughout, expresses the kind of deeply moving primal agony and preternatural resilience that never once feels false, and ultimately compensates for the ostentatious nonsense around her.

It’s an ambitious contemporary western shot last year yet set in the summer of 2020, and ostensibly aims, in almost every scene, to analyse and ridicule the political obsessions and digital neuroses that dominated that moment. And, well, it’s quite the mess.

It’s sloppily directed by David Ayer (Sabotage) with a depressing lack of urgency and a sense that everything here has been done better, more efficiently and with more emotional engagement before.

The Uninvited is similarly haphazard and, even by the film’s shamefully saccharine finale, has little to say other than “life is short, and making movies sucks.

The most memorable aspect is also the best memorial to Hutchins’s skills — the on-screen composition of beautiful, open landscapes, captured in daytime and dusk, and at night the flickering of fire illuminating Baldwin and McDermott’s faces as they talk.

[Hitchcock] has managed to breathe some life into it. He has not made it credible--that would be expecting too much--but he has at least made it seem far less ridiculous than one could possibly have expected. [12 Oct 1927]

Fans are calling this the Brothers Grimm meets The Substance but it’s better than that sounds. And certainly harder to watch.

A witty premise and a muscular cast are cruelly betrayed by this flaccid Tinseltown satire that features Robert De Niro delivering one of the most wretchedly cartoonish performances of his career.

Evans is a film-maker with an instinctive understanding of frame space (The Raid is a joyful camera ballet), but he seems constrained here. As a screenwriter he leaves no cliché unloved.

Yes, it’s ostensibly sweet and inoffensive. But it’s so inoffensive that it’s almost, well, offensive.

The film is so dewy-eyed about the process that made him a star, it overlooks the more devilish bits of the bargain. In truth all biopics ought to have some aspects of a cautionary tale: there but for the grace of God go we.

Unburdened by narrative logic, there is a joie de vivre in the way Davis, 59, throws men over her shoulder, elbows them in the face and sprays them with machine-gun fire.

It would be funny if it weren’t so dull and so strangely played by Malek, an actor who seemingly believes that a complex internal life is best illustrated by hyperactive facial muscles and the blinkless stare of a sullen zombie.

It is highly likely that Macdonald is making explicit connections between the US military industrial complex and the system of consumer-based capitalism that supposedly dulls the masses and funds the wars. But, sheesh, does it have to be such a drag?

We are simply beaten into bored submission — yes, we get it, he’s maaaaaaad! There are also glaring plot holes and contrivances aplenty. By the closing-reel murder it’s almost impossible to care.

It’s left to Leonidas, in the only substantial female part, to steal the show. She plays Dani with an easygoing naturalism that bestows some much needed soul upon the project and suggests that Love might yet have a glittering future ahead in women-centred melodramas. If only he could ditch the swaggering.

One of the most committed performances of Ethan Hawke’s career is cruelly undercut by some ridiculous “shrinking” tricks in this biopic about the Broadway songwriter Lorenz Hart.

If you want to soak in what amounts to a concert film with an origin story, Becoming Led Zeppelin is sonically impressive and visually arresting.

Thatcher’s performance is mostly a marvel. She’s instantly sympathetic, the most deliberately “human” being in the film, and yet the genius of her characterisation as a robot is in the way she slightly over-enunciates her dialogue and walks with the odd shuffle of a Thunderbirds marionette.

The problem with this is that it howls at everything and nothing, while also using the kind of conspiracy theorising about sinister global cabals that’s more suited to foam-flecked podcasters and Elders of Zion loonies.

It remains ludicrous to the end but it’s never anything less than entertaining.

Still, Norton’s great. It should’ve really been the Pete Seeger story.

The film is fun for a while, and it’s certainly the most commercial project that the experimental Canadian director Guy Maddin (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) has delivered. But it’s also pretty tedious and not half as smart as it might have been. Plus it’s very lazy, and smug.

The film ends far too neatly and with a speedy pass over the failures, but there is much here to savour.

The movie treads narrative water for the entirety of its running time.

It looks nice and, at best, it’s tapping some vague sexual anxiety about marriage-wrecking shaggers with big moustaches. But really ...

The music is from the TikTok stars Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, who bring some verve and serious Frozen-esque power to the standout track Beyond (chorus: “Can I go beyoooooooond?!!!!!”). It’s just a shame that the surrounding film, unlike Moana, never really finds its way.

The film is peppered with alarmingly dull and horribly written sequences featuring water-treading conversations about democracy, power and the dream of Rome. In short, no, we are not entertained.

Well, the bad news is that Paddington in Peru isn’t as good as Paddington 2. The good news is that Wilson has made an entertaining and endearing yarn that is worth 106 minutes of your time.