Rex Reed

Remakes are odious, even when they’re nothing more than harmless television takeoffs on successful feature films, but The Roses is an especially egregious waste of time and talent because it takes itself so seriously.

The actors are fine, but the roles they are forced to play are so deadly they might as well have stayed home reading screenplays for better films.

In their seventh slog around the forbidden tropical island that author Michael Crichton originally created, the prehistoric monsters are noisier, the people they terrorize are prettier, and the screams are louder than ever. Otherwise, it’s business as usual.

To pass the time and justify the film’s nearly two-hour length, director Elliott Lester and screenwriter Chris Kelley concentrate on loading everyone with enough oddball characteristics to convince jaded viewers who hate Westerns that they are watching something unique.

Part of the problem with Close to You is Hillary Baack, who plays Katherine. Miscast and inexperienced, she is not up to Page’s standards and mumbles so incoherently that whole scenes clumsily pass by without clarity.

The love affair part of the film is so wholesomely family-oriented that it’s about as sexy as an algebra book. There isn’t even one single kiss. Fortunately, the action sequences are nothing bland or dull, adding up to a whale of entertainment.

At a sorry time when most movies are about nothing, Fly Me to the Moon, a rom-com set in the chaos and cross purposes of the heroic Apollo 11 moon landing, deserves attention because even though it is a sad, silly, over-produced disappointment, at least it’s about something. Not very much, I’m afraid, but something.

Daddio is a dreary two-hander with the look, feel and sound of one hand clapping.

Like just about everything else these days that passes itself off as a movie, Bleeding Love moves too slow for its own good and hobbles its way to an inconclusive and unsatisfactory ending.

It’s one damned thing after another in Suncoast, a leaden, melodramatic soap opera with forced comedic elements inserted to drag out the playing time.

The result is a colossal bore that is never passionate, exciting, sexy or entertaining, with an ill-fated titled performance by Joaquin Phoenix that borders on catatonic.

It’s been years since either Meg Ryan or David Duchovny appeared in a feature film, but now that they’re back, co-starring in a two-hander called What Happens Later, it’s fairly obvious that neither has forgotten anything about charm or how to keep a mediocre movie alive. They’re still appealing. This film is not.

Based on her one-dimensional book Elvis and Me, the movie is a superficial chronicle of minutiae in the life of a naive girl, blinded by phony illusions of glamour, longing for affection from a child-man who never grew up, and trapped behind closed doors of toxic fame from Hollywood to Graceland. In the darkness beyond the klieg lights, it wasn’t much of a life—and it’s not much of a movie, either.

Written and directed with muscle and grit by Kitty Green, The Royal Hotel is loaded with grim ambiance, and there is even some suspense, mainly while the viewer waits to see if anything will ever happen.

The movie needs more of that charisma and fewer cigarette butts to make Golda a woman as memorable on the screen as she was in real life.

The point finally arrives when you realize an initially interesting plot ceases to make much sense, the screenplay by Christopher Salmanpour is nothing more than a series of elaborate red herrings, and director Nimród Antal has nothing to do but increase the noise level and blow up as much of downtown Berlin as legally possible.

A feel-good fairy tale that collapses under the weight of its own silliness, Red, White and Royal Blue is a gay rom-com that dazzles visually but defies all attempts at anything resembling plausibility.

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, whose debut film Seventeen showed great promise, this maudlin soap opera is a disappointment, despite a strong performance by the extraordinarily gifted veteran actor Brian Cox. He makes every moment he’s on the screen throb with understated honesty, but Prisoner’s Daughter doesn’t boast much of anything else worth remembering.

This one is certainly different. That doesn’t mean it’s good. It’s just different.

Despite its visual appeal, its concentrated star performance by Emma Mackey and the dedicated obsession of Australian actress Frances O’Connor, making her debut as a writer-director, it gets almost everything wrong and seems more like a work of fiction than a believable biopic.

Liam Neeson is the dullest denizen of this particularly unctuous Hollywood After Dark. As Marlowe, he uncovers the usual blackmail, grand larceny, homicide and other crimes corrupting the klieg light rays of Southern California, without much energy or wit.

With terrific Appalachian ambience and moments of carefully constructed action, Devil’s Peak is not a terrible movie, but in the bigger picture, it’s not a particularly memorable one, either. It just lies there on the table, like day-old grits.

Talky, labored and lost in mediocrity, Maybe I Do is another sad example of what happens to seasoned pros when they hang around long enough to end up in material that is regrettably beneath them.

Watching the misguided artistry at work in Empire of Light, it’s hard to fathom just what attracted so many top-tier talents to a project of such torpor.

The Whale has moments that touch the heart and passages that engage the mind, but the insufferable parallels it constantly draws between Charlie’s obesity and Moby Dick, Charlie’s favorite book, may have worked better in the stage play by Samuel D. Hunter than they do in his screen adaptation, where they merely ring false and drag the pace to a crawl.

Causeway is a disappointment, but the thing you take home is Jennifer Lawrence’s nuanced performance as she shows every shifting emotion and contrast in the life of a woman soldier searching for definition who doesn’t feel at ease in either world—war or peace.

Brief moments of light shine through the darkness, but mostly it’s a disappointing study of the confusing time we live in now. It’s a noble experiment that wears itself out fast, then drags out the running time until the idea of Covid-19 fades in the rearview mirror and we’re left facing even more problems than we started out with.

From his debut feature in 2001, the brilliant and sobering domestic drama In the Bedroom, with Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson, his work has been sporadic but his films have been astonishing, heartbreaking and unforgettable. Not this one.