ALSO SHOWING

Cars 3 Pilgrimage

Cert: G; Now showing It’s unlikely that this will be the only review to drop this pun, but the biggest feeling we are left with by this third Cars instalment is one of being down this road before.

Mind you, the runt of Pixar’s critical litter is a hulking heavyweight when it comes to merchandise sales — apparently $10bn over the first two outings — so it was hardly likely that the formula would be tampered with.

Having established the template — race car Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) takes the scenic route to proving his metal in a big race — franchise director and Pixar grandee John Lasseter steps aside and installs Brian Fee as caretaker to ensure just enough gets done to secure another billion lunchbox sales.

For those over the age of seven, there will be lots and lots of questions (indeed many remaining unanswered from the previous films). Why are the mountains shaped like cars? If a pick-up truck can drink in a bar, why are the tractors mooing in a field like cows? And how has a studio so concerned with intellect and lofty entertainment standards allowed this deadeyed, lazily penned product advert to blot their cred copybooks for a third time?

If you must accompany the little ones, you will at least have Lou, the now-obligatory excellent Pixar animated short, to savour. In six gorgeous minutes, it achieves levels of heart, humour and invention that the main event can only dream of. Cert: 18; Now showing It’s a little known fact but Spider-Man can speak Irish. So far it’s only confirmed for the most recent Spider-Man, Tom Holland, who gives evidence of this skill in Pilgrimage ,an unrelentingly, unapologetically dark religious road movie set in Ireland in the 13th century. It’s a brave, well-cast, violent film about power and religion and the justifications made for them.

In 1209 Brother Geraldus (Stanley Weber) arrives at a remote Irish monastery home to The Relic, a rock used in the stoning of a Catholic martyr. He wants this stone delivered to Rome and enlists some of the monks to help him on his holy road trip. Brothers Ciaran (John Lynch), Cathal (Hugh O’Conor), Rua (Ruaidhri Conroy) and The Novice, Diarmuid (Holland) who has a special bond with The Mute (Jon Bernthal) a foreigner loyal and silent since being found adrift in a currach. It is, however, a perilous journey between threats from Ireland’s tribes and the Norman invaders whose leader (Richard Armitage) would quite like The Relic for his own purposes.

The film is written by Jamie Harrigan and directed by Brendan Muldowney who are uncompromising in their vision. The weather is grey, the forests gloomy and menacing, the violence raw. They raise comparisons between superstition and religion, zeal and power tripping, all through Irish, English and French. The casting is excellent which mostly makes up for a story that feels a little thin.