A young Dutch couple holiday in the south of France. Low on gas, they stop at a rest station along the motorway, happy and in love. The woman leaves the man with the car and heads inside to buy refreshments. He waits. She does not return. Increasingly anxious, the man petitions passersby, scours the vicinity, telephones the police. Overnight he sleeps in the car and hopes she will come back to him. He is fretful. Desperate. He does not find…

Bradley Cooper is out of gin. This is the urgent crisis that sets A Star is Born in motion: a terrible thirst. In the back of a limousine, facing a 90-minute commute from the rock concert he’s just performed to the next stop on the tour, alt-country star Jackson Maine finishes the last of the minibar bottles and decides he needs one for the road. He asks his driver to pull over beside a neon-lit dive. Over a double straight-up…

Something I’ve learned writing about the cinema professionally for a number of years is that there are bad movies and bad times at the movies, and the latter are considerably worse. Bad movies can be laugh riots, howlers, like shoddy horror pictures or inane science-fiction, to be indulged in or cackled through or suffered with glee. Bad movies are often likeable, or somehow charming, or else might endear themselves to you with personality or ambition, like, say, Southland Tales or…