Roger Moore

Like the pod Holloway is trapped in, the movie’s mostly just adrift — limited power, with time running out. Not fast enough, it turns out.

A melodramatic, overreaching and sometimes just inaccurate script by Nic Cage’s go-to screenwriters undermines director Mario Van Peebles’ World War II epic.

Wilson, letting the strain show the way a hundred other funny folks expected to “save” a flimsy comedy built around them have before her, has never seemed more out of her depth.

Stripping this to a film with fewer characters, maybe playing up the best actors giving the best performances — McGinley, Lindo, Shwayze and PenaVega stand out — would have helped.

If you’re going to commit to a blasphemous stoner comedy mocking the New Testament prophesy of the coming Rapture, you’d better go all in. Because halfway isn’t funny.

Sure, it’s mercifully free of the Sandler hangers-on that were a staple of his succession of increasingly awful Hollywood comedies. But one almost wishes somebody with at least a little experience landing a laugh was featured in the supporting cast.

There’s no suspense in the tale, even in its “big finish.” “Tragic” was never in the cards, as this con man got away with his stunt. But this could have been dark and funny. It isn’t.

Director Kevin Lewis powers through this thing (the odd mispronounced “blown” line makes it into the film) as if he knows the script is crap and that his leading lady’s not the best at registering shock, fear or fury and there’s no point in looking for a better take. But Cage, dyed hair, beard and boots, brings home the B-movie bacon, as usual. It’s just seriously undercooked this time out.

It’s a load of horrific hooey.

Action beats involving a river the distraught father tries to cross, heedless of the danger, and a frozen lake are impressive. It’s just that whatever they spent the money on — Donnie Yen, effects and location shooting — it wasn’t on a compelling or even all that competent script.

The laughs are few and far between and the “heart,” so important to a good rom-com, is left out altogether.

Cage and Dafoe never give less than their best, Cook is not bad, though the women aren’t allowed to make any impression at all, and Schrader’s acting just makes one wish he’d called in a favor and gotten a real actor to be The Greek.

The script runs out of fresh ideas and novel ways to challenge the dueling dancers quickly, and soon trips over its own tropes.

It’s topical and never terrible. But Just Say Goodbye plays as if a word was left out of end of the title — “Already.”

It works, here and there, and Polaha is perfectly believable as an ex-jock and ex-jerk who lets a little child lead him out of the darkness.

A gimmicky, obscurant and clumsy style of storytelling spoils what could have been gripping story.

It’s the execution that lets this dog down. Not enough funny lines and even the cheap, dirty laughs are in short supply.

Miller’s film, based on an A.S. Byatt short story, is long and feels incomplete, weighty without much psychological or intellectual heft, colorful but rarely dazzling and never whimsical enough.

The story is off, the heart is missing and the laughs aren’t there.

The executions and worst of the violence is kept off camera. The acting varies from passable to rote, wooden recitation. And there’s a hint of humor.

“Personal” picture or whatever larger objective Rehemeier was aiming for, he’s made a very long and not that funny comedy connected by disjointed and generally unoriginal scenes rather than a coherent narrative.

The film may be commenting on the cushy way the rich and famous coped with Covid. But it’s insufferable at depicting insufferability.

The production design — digital backdrops augmenting vast living rooms and a library, even — is impressive. It’s rare that production design ever rescues a movie from a script that’s gone down the rabbit hole of ridiculous that Tau does.

The whole affair is just nuts, staggeringly irresponsible.

It’s too bad the script lacks the sight gags or one-liners that could have made this good looking picture more animated.

Peixota has made a spacey film that is almost neutral on its subject, a soft-spoken pastel-colored meditation on Scientology that never wrestles it into the larger thesis of the psychology of “belief” he might have been aiming for.

There isn’t enough that plays as all that funny in this version of the comic satire Groom cooked up.

Counterfeiters rarely builds up suspense, and Hirschberg the actor doesn’t register the panic that Bridger must be feeling as the walls close in. Decent sequences are followed with clumsy, amateurish ones — the worst stoned come-on scene in recent memory.

A solid if occasionally silly B-picture of the sort that JCVD used to make, before “JCVD” suggested there might be more to him than mere “Muscles from Brussels.”

As crass as it is, I’ve seen worse.

It’s not the worst time travel tale ever, but it does earn the most dismissive assessement you can give a movie in this genre. It’s not worth your time.

No matter how gorgeous Synchronicity looks, it can’t keep you from feeling this was an opportunity missed.

The effects, the gory makeup and what-not, are first rate, and the means of dispatching zombies creative, here and there.

Whatever promise there is in this well-worn existentialist premise starts to dissipate once the first guy meets the second, and the attention steadily fades the more characters in search of an exit — or a GPS fix — that they meet on their journey.

This one just never seems to end, and when the illogical end arrives, a laughably dumb coda is layered on top of it.

Echoes of War needs prettier visuals and bigger ideas, because the dialogue is too formulaic and the violence to come is entirely too predictable to hold our interest for 100 minutes.

The performances are perfectly serviceable, but building this thing around a passive, pathological liar, a literal “love the one you’re with” butterfly, might be the most quaint thing about it. It’s more maddening than “motivated,” more eye-rolling than funny.

The players are fine, but the mopey pace and somewhat generic “twists” to the plot make A Stage of Twilight — whose title promises a literariness the script never lives up to — something of a well-intentioned slog.

It’s all quite predictable — save for the sinister use of the music of Missing Persons — and a trifle bland. But the depictions of password-access mayhem are chillingly real, and Brosnan gets across the helplessness that many his age, all over the world, feel at the new tech and the new rules — no rules at all — threatening his ruin.

The dull, exhausted toy ad that the TV commercials prophesied came true.

Secret Obsession never looks like anything more than the quick, cheap and under-developed hack job that it is.

The direction is solid, punchy. Yet the picture isn’t so much plotted as given a time frame to squeeze a lot of fistfights into. The pranks are ancient, the girl characters barely given a function and the laughs few and far between.

It’s an occasionally cute, strained attempt at twee that never quite comes together or comes off.

I’ve always appreciated the humor in these films, but by the time things go wholly over the top for the finale this time, the joking has run its course.

An exploitation picture built on redneck cliches and big city liberal outrage, it's not all bad. But it is a pretty unpleasant wallow in the obvious.

Taken at face value, Agent Zero isn’t bad, but it is heartless. The stakes are low, and we never really fear for our heroine as she seems invulnerable, if not exactly invincible. With this one, you come for the fights, sniping and shootouts and not much else.

There’s virtually nothing to this short, thin yet (barely) feature-length dramedy. A few funny lines wither in the dark and minutes upon minutes of screen time burn off space imagery and Jobe pondering the nature of it in his addled head.

Carrey doesn’t deliver any sizzle in this role. Csokas chews him right out of their scenes, and the always soulful Gainsbourg (“Nymphomaniac,” “Antichrist”) lets us think we’re looking right into her horrific past, even if this dull, obvious “mystery” doesn’t seem worthy of any of their talents.

Ardor, in the end, has little ardor, or originality or magic about it. It’s just a mundane C-movie action picture that tries to pass itself off as something deeper.

Whatever brownie points Tillman scored with "Notorious", Faster is that wake-up call that he's no John Woo.

It's a modestly effective but jaw-droppingly violent picture.

The movie’s a wash, and worse — too slow, not particularly well-acted or scripted. But there’s a little something to it, so no quick write-off here.

Standard issue spy stuff, a surprise or two, a shootout or three. Nothing you should pay money to see in a theater.

It’s no surprise that a Child of Mamet should have a clever way with a line and wicked sense of when to drop some tasty profanity. But Two-Bit Waltz is amateur theatrics committed to celluloid, a cast of “adorable” eccentrics performing scenes with the precious, remedial chapter titles.

The plot and characters really do make you wonder if the writer-director has experienced the real world, and not just the world as seen in “The Sting” or “Tin Cup” or “The Flim-Flam Man.”

The production design is cool, the cutting and staging are sharp. But the movie that comes out of all that doesn’t play. So maybe I’ll give the record a listen.

There aren’t more than a couple of laughs mixed in with a couple of legitimately sweet interludes in Fantasy Football, when all’s said and done. But everybody involved puts a cheerful face on things and makes this kids’ film endurable, if not quite passable entertainment.

This movie staggers along. So many of its sins could be minimized by an unsentimental slashing of establishing shots and establishing scenes, a thinning out of that dead-zone in the middle and a vigorous pass at the nervy but too drawn-out finale.

The science fiction is solid. The melodrama has you wondering how much longer we have to spend with this unbelievable “couple.”

Give it up for Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. You’ll never see them work harder at a comedy than in The Heat, a stumbling, aggressively loud and profane cop buddy picture where they struggle to wring “funny” out of a script that isn’t.

The film’s pacing is stumbling and the longer it goes on, the less urgency we feel in that chase.

There’s no depth to the characters, especially Tee Yai, little that tells us how or what each is thinking or hoping. The shootouts are routine if excessive and the finale inevitable.

Torre’s a sturdy presence holding the story together, but the lack of surprises and fear of getting too “edgy” undo a promising portrait of street life among the “cheaters” who start to feel the “cheated” may have something to offer beyond what they can steal from them.

It’s a relief when the talking/screeching version of Day has an accident and the silent version takes over. He manages the pratfalls and double-takes well enough. He’s no Keaton, Chaplin, Begnini, Sellers or David Hyde Pierce, to name some of the great physical comics of ancient and recent vintage. There’s no shame in that.

Truth be told, I was never a fan of the first “Dumber,” but the stars made it endurable and convincingly stupid. Here, they’re sometimes funny, and sometimes just sad. They’re better than this, no matter how good they are at hiding the fact that they know it.

Still, the frights, with Mom seeing the hand-chopping serial killer’s face (Paul Fauteux) on her little boy’s body, the stabbings and threats of worse to come (hilariously foreshadowed to death) deliver the requisite pulse-stopping punch...If that’s all you’re hoping for in a horror picture, fine. If not, you’ve been warned.

The best martial arts action and gunplay are in the first act. After that, this convoluted Wolf Pack tale turns into something of a mutt.

Yes, the technology has improved in the 27 years that have passed. But the ensuing years have also produced first person shooter video games which utterly preclude the need for this as a movie. Visceral, violent toys that they are, they still have more heart than this.

What we’re left with is a stark reminder that, “BlackKklansman” aside, it’s possible to agree with most everything Spike Lee says in his movies these days while lamenting the decline in his storytelling skills and his unwillingness to edit them into sharper focus.

Whatever variations on a theme this script offers, none of it works without the ache we’re supposed to feel for those torn apart by sudden death. Endless never delivers that.

No One Lives has to give away its biggest, best secret (the killers have messed with the wrong guy) far too early for its own good.

Tedious time-killer of a kiddie comedy.

Sullivan sparkles. Nobody else does, and that smothers the movie, surprise or no surprise.

If it’s worth reciting the decades it took to pack all this imagery into sets so dark that much of it doesn’t register, it’s also worth noting that effects folk are, by definition, masters of making the trees. Whether or not they grasp the “forest” and can tell a compelling, coherent story about it isn’t exactly a given.

A coming-of-age melodrama seemingly displaced in time.

Director and co-writer Mordini makes a total hash of things by battering the timeline into atoms, constantly skipping from “three months before the event” to “130 hours” before back to “two months before,” and on and on.

A compelling hot-button subject and engrossing “true story” runs up against a ponderous script, pedestrian direction and the limited range of star Jim Caviezel in Sound of Freedom, a lumbering thriller about international child sex trafficking that flatlines when it’s meant to be moving, uplifting and inspiring.

Everything feels articifial and bloodless, even the murders.

Hallstrom and his low-heat stars can’t find the pulse of this corpse.

Land of Bad is a solid-enough B-movie combat thriller with the cast and production values of an A-picture.

The test of the movie is whether we’ll instinctively root for the standard white-girl-in-jeopardy and accept the physical abuse, mental anguish and humiliations Sarah must endure before figuring out if she can fight back. Because Bloom? She gives us nothing.

There’s promise to this or that character and in the twists that almsot certainly played better in the novel than Feig manages on screen. But the promise is squandered in a pokey, obvious movie that stumbles towards stupid in the anti-climactic latter acts.

Lopez is a gorgeous woman with the same mousy voice she came into the movies with 20 years ago. She’s all about the makeup, the hair, the clothes. She plays the part like someone imitating a TV teacher, from her classroom posture to her delivery.

The characters in The Perfect Game speak old school “Hollywood Mexican.” In other words, they speak English with accents that we haven’t heard since the golden Age of Speedy Gonzalez.

A quantum leap forward in animation and design, if not a great leap in motion capture technology or in story.

James Cameron was very much running out of interesting things to say and show in his “Avatar” franchise with the second movie, Avatar: The Way of Water. The third film, Avatar: Fire and Ash confirms that fear and adds on a dose of dread for good measure. On no, the 70something sci-fi impressario has two more “Avatars” in the works.

It's all very messy and entirely too obvious at the same time. Montiel makes the most of his settings, but the story keeps staggering into dead ends.

Overlong, polished but drab civics lesson of a comedy. This “Barbershop” is in sore need of a trim, and not just a little off the top, either.

The effects are decent, the acting desultory in “Prey for the Devil,” a School for Exorcists thriller that promises more than it delivers.

Our core quartet are a well-preserved and still charming lot, with each giving a glimpse of their comic specialties. But like that spring fling, “80 for Brady,” the material here just isn’t up to the legends being paid to perform it.

Theron and Washington vamp this monstrosity up and almost never let on that they know this project didn’t really work out. That sets an example for the many younger players in the cast, who do their best to play more than this scene’s stunning costume.

But for all the period detail, characters are a little too healthy and well-scrubbed to be convincing and the actual look of the film is video-flat and dull — ugly.

Statham should hold out for movies that offer him more than a few exotic stamps on his passport.

If indeed this is a full on franchise reboot, this “origin story” is no "Welcome to Raccoon City" at all. It’s a warning to avoid ever coming back.

The faith-based football bio-drama Greater fails on so many levels one scarcely knows where to begin.

There’s little to this film that hints that “Holiday Rush” could have been saved. But mixing it up, more, centering more on the adult conflicts because the kids aren’t funny enough, might have reminded us that Malco can still be funny. This just makes that a distant memory.

That four-handed screenplay gives us 85 minutes of movie, and “Zombieland/Venom” director Ruben Fleischer drags that out to nearly two hours. That underscores just how much this disposable piffle outstays its welcome.