The latest blockbuster of 2024 is this disappointing fifth entry in the so-called MonsterVerse franchise, owned by Legendary Pictures. About half of the film contain actors, while half of it is computer-generated – the likely brief future of cinema before AI takes over completely. In the battle for credibility between monsters and actors, the actors here come off decidedly worse.

In his final years Michael Powell mooted the possibility of a Bartók trilogy. He wanted to add to the growing popularity of his work on Bluebeard’s Castle, the deepest of one-act operas, an idea he had previously rejected of filming the lurid "pantomime" The Miraculous Mandarin and, as third instalment, not the earlier ballet The Wooden Prince but a film about the composer’s time in America and his return, after death, to Hungary.

I know, I was there. Well, not in Edinburgh in 1985, but in Liverpool in 1981, and the pull of London and the push from home, was just as strong for me back then as it is for Eck in John McKay’s comedy Dead Dad Dog.

After the pantos, the movies (epic, camp and animated) and the television series, is there anything new to be mined in the story of Robin Hood? Probably not, as this messy, misjudged show takes that hope and fires an arrow through its heart.

Life's journey is a challenge, and then some, for Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), the beleaguered Odysseus/Job  (you choose!) equivalent figure at the savage heart of Ari Aster's new film Beau is Afraid. But imagine surviving unimaginable ordeals on the long road of existence only to be met at the end by the Broadway legend Patti LuPone?

As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London.

“He won’t get far on hot air and fantasy,” Jonathan Pryce’s cruel bureaucrat huffs, as Baron Munchausen (John Neville) bests besieged city walls in a balloon sewn from a half-ton of knickers. “I hope this movie expands people’s ideas of what is possible,” Terry Gilliam countered of this symptomatic creation, based on the absurdly tall tales of the titular, fictional 18th century nobleman.

Hovering way, way above us, three aptly named high fairies, in voluminous chiffon, open a show that may not be airy in the metaphorical sense, but invites us to cast our eyes upwards continually – no bad thing to do in the bleak midwinter of 2022. But does the show, delayed after one Covid cancellation after another on its spluttering debut 12 months ago, soar as a new show should? Give or take the odd clunky landing, it does.

Just about the three toughest tricks to pull off in the theatre are making a musical, making a family show and making characters so charming that even the most cynical in the house are pulling for the little guy (or not so little in this case). So if it takes the armature of a blockbuster Hollywood movie to buttress the production, who cares?

Lisa has lost an hour in a (somewhat contrived) temporal glitch. As a consequence, her world is always sliding off-kilter, not quite making sense, things floating in and out of memory. A watchmaker (himself somewhat loosely tethered to reality) tells her that she needs to get it back as a lost hour wields great power and can fall into the wrong hands. Lisa embraces her quest and travels to the strange land of Dissocia.