This is a mildly distracting guilty pleasure romp that is undone by its own casting crisis.

This is the quintessential Trump-era film, where difficult truths are met with bold-faced mendacity and where the director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) and the screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator) have met the challenges of the Jackson story by simply drowning it in quasi-Christian, yes, bullshit.

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.

In a project that took a full year to edit, with unfettered access to the Orwell estate’s entire archive, Peck proves impossibly adept at layering in seemingly disparate clips, quotes and footage without ever once losing sight of his central message. Much like Orwell, in fact, it’s the clarity of his polemic that impresses most.

The film is torturous to sit through and, for me, provoked periods of actual physical discomfort. I had to stab myself repeatedly in the hand with a pen to distract from the howling distress. It’s that bad, and that offensive.

A nuptial apocalypse has rarely been explored with such dark intelligence and mordant wit as in this often piercing and cringe-out-loud dramedy starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya.

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.

It is a fascinating, often moving exploration of Japanese family life in the traumatised, bomb-blasted aftermath of the Second World War.

Boon’s already considerable charisma is somehow magnified by Tommy’s incarceration and Graham and Riseborough prove yet again that they can find humanity in even the most disturbing characters. Please let this not be their last joint project.

Halfway through Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (Netflix) I thought, yes, these toxic young men are awful but are we actually learning anything new?

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.

Ryan Gosling on charisma overdrive and buckets of deadpan irreverence are enough to power this otherwise familiar sci-fi story to the highest possible entertainment orbit.

No, it’s not subtle. The rock soundtrack thumps along with propulsive vigour (cue original tracks from Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC and Amy Taylor from Amyl and the Sniffers), the screen pulses with stylish slow-mo from the director Tom Harper (Heart of Stone), while the top-tier acting duo of Murphy and Keoghan bring some unexpected poignancy to an otherwise familiar Oedipal clash.

This is intellectually specious and ethically dubious. You can’t simply hide bad art underneath political messaging. Yes, we need movies, urgently, that fully address Epstein, Pelicot and all the male monsters of the world, and this week’s brilliant Sound of Falling, from the German female director Mascha Schilinski, arguably does that in spades. But slapping the phrase “Me too” onto a sloppy, ham-fisted vanity project doesn’t cut it.

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?

The sidewinding rhythm of the film will probably throw some, but that’s all the more reason to see it in the theatre: a lot goes on beneath the surface, the lack of signposting has a cumulative power, and the ending is a beauty, mixing heartbreak, hope and the boy, Fernando, who has been patiently waiting for his father all along.

There’s a hint of repetition in the mid-section and a schmaltzy third act courtroom scene. But all flaws are overcome by Aramayo’s technically precise and heart-rending turn. It’s astonishing.

This is a celebration of the King doing what he did best, and loving every second.

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.

It’s a testament to Nayyef’s ingenuous performance and the mesmerising sense of place that the film is always compelling and sometimes bleakly funny, although there are no happy endings.

Ultimately this protagonist looks to nature and to Mabel in an admirable attempt to reconcile the ubiquity of death, the brevity of life and the urgent, though possibly pointless, search for meaning.