IT'S another busy week at the cinema, with the release of the highly anticipated sequel to a $1bn box office hit and an intense thriller about the impact of the financial crisis.

Meanwhile, for those inclined to enjoy superhero carnage or offbeat comedy, there's still plenty to enjoy.

Here's the best and the worst of this week at the cinema.

New releases

Alice Through the Looking Glass (Cert:PG, 113 mins)

Released in 2010, Tim Burton's descent down the rabbit hole of Alice In Wonderland was a triumph of eye-popping style and weirdness over substance.

Audiences didn't care about flimsy narrative and his quixotic journey of self-discovery became the second highest grossing film that year behind Toy Story 3, with box office takings in excess of one billion US dollars.

That's more than one billion compelling reasons for a sequel and, lo and behold, James Bobin replaces Burton at the helm for the madcap time-travelling adventure, Alice Through The Looking Glass.

Like its predecessor, the sequel spares no expense with the visuals, inducing eye strain, motion sickness and perhaps even the odd headache in 3D and Imax.

The paucity of characterisation is even more pronounced in this second helping, tethering much of the nonsense to Johnny Depp's wide-eyed theatrics as the Mad Hatter.

Money Monster (Cert:15, 99 mins)

Money talks - and it says exceedingly ugly things - in Jodie Foster's tense hostage thriller, which unfolds largely in real time during a live television broadcast.

Anchored by strong performances from George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Derbyshire-born rising star Jack O'Connell, Money Monster overcomes some preposterous plot twists and a noticeable lull in the middle act to keep us on the edge of our seats.

Money Monster is a cautionary tale about the get-rich-quick mentality of a modern society that blindly trusts in technology to deliver rewards at the tap of an app.

Clooney and Roberts generate molten screen chemistry, even though she is just a voice in his ear for the majority of the film, and O'Connell maintains his accent as events escalate out of his nervous captor's control.

Still in cinemas

X-Men: Apocalypse (Cert:12A, 147 mins)

The theme of this year's superhero movie is the horror of collateral damage and the need for those with special powers to control them. Unfortunately, no one told Bryan Singer that before he made X-Men: Apocalypse.

Apocalypse is, as its title suggests, a bloated shrine to death and destruction without so much as a shred of personality across its enormous ensemble of super-powered characters.

Some of that action is moderately entertaining and there are a few of the comedic bright spots that were so conspicuous by their absence in Batman v Superman, but there's the nagging sense that it all feels a bit out of date.

Apocalypse is the kind of superhero movie that would have cleaned up a decade ago, but now it looks destined to be buried beneath its own mountains of rubble and dust.

A Hologram for the King (Cert:15, 98 mins)

Tom Hanks is one of the most likeable performers to ever grace a cinema screen. With that in mind, his casting as an outwardly optimistic businessman on the hunt for a lucrative business deal in Saudi Arabia probably seemed like a no-brainer.

A Hologram for the King, though, is a film that has no idea where to pitch itself tonally and, as a result, it is crushed under the weight of its oddball stylings.

Hanks does solidly enough with his amiable leading role, but the meandering asides and strange sequences that litter the script often leave him staggering aimlessly around in search of plot, believability and meaning.

A third act romance plotline emerges out of nowhere and the pay-off to the central story is deeply unsatisfying but, above all else, it's difficult to work out what exactly it is that this film thought it was going to achieve.