Searching for fresh inspiration, an artistically blocked painter, investigates the urban legend concerning the hook-handed murderer of the title that long prevailed among the once-deprived area’s residents (including Colman Domingo). What begins, under the direction of Nia DaCosta, who co-wrote the script with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld, as an uneasy blend of slasher film and social commentary degenerates, by its conclusion, into a fantasy of racial revenge wholly at odds with Gospel values.

Non-conformity and self-realisation are the main items on the agenda of the droll comic adventure Free Guy (20th Century). By John Mulderig.

Nearly everything about The Suicide Squad (Warner Bros), writer-director James Gunn’s DC Comics-based follow-up to 2016’s Suicide Squad, is intentionally over-the-top.

In 1916 Brazil, an intrepid British researcher (Emily Blunt) forms an unlikely alliance with a fast-talking Amazon River steamboat captain (Dwayne Johnson) and aided by her brother (Jack Whitehall), they set off in quest of a mystical tree the healing flowers of which she believes will revolutionize medicine. By John Mulderig/CNS.

There’s a strained tone to Space Jam: A New Legacy (Warner Bros), director Malcolm D Lee’s sequel to the 1996 sports comedy. LeBron James plays himself this time out, as Michael Jordan did a quarter of a century ago.

As an addition to the Marvel Comics cinematic universe, the origin story ‘Black Widow’ (Disney) provides the expected elements of large-scale special effects and intrepid derring-do.

Nondenominational religious flourishes and an emphasis on the value of family offset occasionally intense showdowns and some unsavoury vocabulary in F9: The Fast Saga (Universal).

“Impossible” is taken off the table in Manifest when an aircraft harbouring 191 souls bound for New York mysteriously disappears before re-emerging five-and-a-half years later.

An inspirational story of making the right decisions in life, taking responsibility, forgiveness, and the importance of both having and being a father. After years of searching for his father, a young man, on the run from the law, finds his way into the life of a secluded old man in the woods. As the days go by and secrets about their past are revealed, they realize they may not have been looking for each other but they were brought together for a reason. By Sister Hosea Rupprecht, CNS.

Adults who want nothing more than to watch two gifted actresses camp it up will likely be satisfied with director Craig Gillespie’s glossy romp Cruella. Parents on the lookout for safe family fare, not so much.