Roger Moore

Fuqua’s a better director than this and Logan’s a better writer than “Michael” shows. Now that everybody’s delivered a blockbuster out of this troubled man of mystery, maybe there’ll be money to try something more serious.

Whoever is primarily to blame, Son-in-Law starts out confused and stays confusing almost to the can’t-come-soon-enough closing credits.

Hellfire is exactly the sort of movie you’d expect Dolph Lundgren to wind down his career with. Keitel and Lang deserve better.

Time and again, the screenwriters and director give us a hint that “reality” doesn’t figure into this school or its Shakespeare-quoting/street bike wheely-popping coeds, and that maybe they don’t know how steroids work and how long it takes for “roid rage” to kick in either.

The first act is mythic and mysterious enough to lure us in, before the cannibals show up, the implausibilities pile up and the holes in the plot turn out to be a lot bigger than anything a katana sword would make.

A Father’s Miracle is so corny and klunky that one wonders if any of the other versions have been the least bit believable. We know they were crowd pleasers, and this one might have an audience, too. One wonders just who might buy into something so tooth-achingly sweet yet darkly dopey at the same time.

As Accused wallows deeper and deeper into melodrama, with one-note performances almost making every character a caricature, the inescapable conclusion one leaps to is that this film’s late-to-the-game subject matter and quaint treatment of it was made by some seriously unsophisticated filmmakers.

Refuge is a frankly stupid and formulaic “whodunit” wrapped in torture, retribution and guilt from all the dirty secrets men keep.

Farrelly’s movie, like his comic shock-shtick, gets old in a hurry.

Soaking up the one-liners and Hill’s antic but comically winded patter makes one wonder if even recasting the lead would have helped.

Films fail for a lot of reasons, almost all of them behind the camera — weak script, lackluster direction, poor pacing, etc. But every now and then, miscasting or an out-of-her-depth lead performance also takes some of the blame. Bailey isn’t up to carrying this off.

I thought I was settling in for something fresh, but the working class poverty is well-furnished and familial and entirely too tidy compared to “Rocky,” the underdog reaching for revenge and/or glory underwhelms and the darkest moments don’t move or touch the viewer in any meaningful way.

There’s no edge to any of this. The stakes are low and treated as no big deal.

An imposing and impressive lead performance somewhat atones for an awkwardly structured script and a charisma-starved supporting cast in A Great Awakening.

The Chinese thriller 731 is a wildly ambitious attempt to get a heroic horror movie out of an infamous crime against humanity.

The Secret Between Us is a static, turgid and low-stakes tale about lives disrupted by “secrets” plural, any and all of which have been potboiled to death on daytime soap operas going back decades.

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

A drama about an aged actor lost in his old roles, with two caregivers indulging his “harmless” dementia and acting out his old scripts with him, it lacks anything in the way of wit and much that would make it dramatic.

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.

Maybe I’m too reluctant to let go of my reactions to the first trailers for it. But “cloying” is a hard sell at 156 often interminable minutes.

While there are a couple of laughs and comical come-uppances, the picture drowns in its own gore.

The brawls have to do most of the heavy lifting in your typical martial arts genre picture, even the ones in a scenic setting. That’s doubly true in The Forbidden City, a stumbling and generally indifferent kung fu thriller with comic touches set in The Enternal City — Rome.

You don’t need a wine buzz to “appreciate” The Napa Boys, a vulgar, lowbrow and clumsily unfunny send of up “Sideways” and lots of pop culture of similar vintage. But it probably helps.

Watching “Wuthering” as the hype fades just underscores what a tease the entire tale has been turned into. More sensual than sexual and far less sexy than it seems to take itself for, this rainswept, fog-choked “Wuthering” withers on the production-designed-to-death vine.

Whatever random “madness” envelopes The Bride’s mind, Gyllenaal gives us a jumbled peek at her stream of consciousness, too.

Co-writers Joe Ballarini and Frank E. Flowers (who also directed) cobble together characters and cliches from many a pirate tale for this ham-fisted affair, which sacrifices fun for fighting and sinks like a stone.

The “No one believes the truth any more” messaging may be timely, but this isn’t satire or even “high concept” silliness. It’s just an antic collection of almost-random scenes not-quite-sprinted-through by Rex, Cavalero and Milligan and slow-walked by Biggs, who is, as always, a good sport about it all.

The leads make it all likable and the stunts and editing are first rate even as stuntman-turned-director Olivier Schneider (“GTMax”) fails to deliver a single surprise or even delay this or that inevitable cliche.

Relationship Goals is as generic as a self-help book cover, and doomed to be forgotten as quickly as the book it’s based on will be.

This Dracula is somehow somewhat better than the worst versions of the tale we’ve seen in recent decades, but a few bites short of adequate or anything approaching Coppola’s ’90s film or Robert Eggers’ gorgeous and stark “Nosferatu.”

Solo Mio is a mild-mannered comedy of the “Left at the Altar/Honeymoon Goes Wrong” school. It’s a little Runaway Bride, a lot of Honeymoon Crasher or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but without any of the edge or many of the laughs of its predecessors.

This overlong but rarely slow picture almost gets by on Momoa’s playfulness bouncing off Bautista — “You got old.” “You got FAT.” — and a light tone that almost wholly belies the arm-yanked-off/head-sliced/woman-tossed-out-a-window gore we’re treated to.

There are several smirks, a couple of near chuckles and nothing more as far as “sex comedy” giggles go.

If you’re going to explain your movie’s ending, it’s usually a good idea not to botch the explanation so badly that anyone who’s ever seen a variation on this plot is given license to shout at the screen.

The lack of urgency lowers the stakes, and the “explanations” are less interesting than the mystery they purport to “solve.” The performances never rise above adequate into compelling territory. But at least the setting is a dazzler.

Band on the Run is a sweet little nothing of a roadtrip comedy where the “nothing” overwhelms the “sweet.” It has its moments. Just not that many.

It all feels and plays recycled and watered-down — the longing, the testy edge that’s supposed to signal “sparks,” the heartache of indecision.

Human interactions, human conflict (dog eat dog Darwinism), human intellect and human resolve never made it into the finished film.

Realistic mid-life concerns and life reassessments earn a drab and generally colorless going over in Blue Eyed Girl, a dramedy with little real drama and even less comedy.

Méndez kind of makes this silly, coincidence-packed nonsense play. Sort of.

The cast is game, with Huston properly frantic, Johnson oozing menace and Fuhrman dialing up the pluck and self-preservation savvy in her role. It’s not their fault “Unit 234” turns out to be a blood-stained episode of “Storage Wars.”

Rigidly formulaic and strictly low-heat as far as romances go, I’m guessing you can guess every turn the plot takes just by my listing the pertinent plot points.

Writer-director Kayci Lacob frames her debut feature with the dullest author’s public book reading ever, and trots through an utterly conventional collection of genre cliches as she tries to make the story of a child-teen-coed obsessed with becoming Steve Jobs interesting. She fails.

I’d call the title “Relentless” truth in advertising, althought “Pitiless,” “Endless” and “Senseless” work just as well.

Every promising direction is stopped dead in its tracks. And most every fraught yet comical situation is left to wither on the vine.

The results are even worse than you feared.

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.

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.

The Fakenapping isn’t very good. But it’s got possibilities.

There is a hint of pathos, here and there. And Olsen, more interesting than amusing in this role, tries her best to wring emotion out of this bummer/bauble of a movie. She can’t, and Teller and Turner — who have some comic chemistry together — have no more luck transcending this lavish setting in search of a better story.

This well-intentioned dramedy goes wrong right from the start and careens downhill from there.

There isn’t much to this.

Attempts at “suspense” in the heist itself are ineptly handled. The script and the leads strain to wring the “cute” out of this, but that’s in short supply.

I laughed at a few of the more audacious butcherings, but that was early on. The narrative settles into a slog in the middle acts and no pull-out-the-stops train ride finale could drag it out of the mud.

Stretching, stuffing and filling make this film play flatter, as if all the fun is gone. The jokes are few and far between, and they die of loneliness in the wait.

Playdate is perfectly awful, glib in its violence, cavalier about “collateral damage” and packed with what regular family movie watchers might call “Hollywood parenting” — kids who curse, bully and have zero respect for sportsmanship and adults, especially parents.

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.

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.

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

The clumsy arbitrariness of the plot, the “rules” of this world and the limits the story imposes which characters sometimes ignore undercut any “reality” we’re meant to buy into.

They’re just churning this junk out on a budget that guarantees it’ll sell, quality be damned.

Caterpillar presents itself as a gay man’s documentary journey of self-discovery, when it’s really about body dysphoria/dysmorphai and faddish cosmetic surgery taken to its extreme.

From the moment the movie makers blow the “meet cute,” this “The Shop Around the Corner/You’ve Got Mail” ripoff doesn’t tickle, tantalize or titilate, even when the ladies of the shop engage in competitive tire-changing.

As the mayhem, six shooters and bad-acting go off all around him, Dorff stands above it all, reminding us that this might have been taken seriously instead of all this vamped bad makeup, acting and screenwriting ineptitude and goofing around by players who figure they’re better than this.

It isn’t all that much fun. The odd chuckle doesn’t atone for the scads of laughs that just don’t land in a story that spins its wheels on the snowy streets of NYC. Except when the crooks drive a Rivian.

About 70 minutes of this 92 minute comedy is a pretty good actress (Nascimento starred in “A Wolf at the Door”) cussing out the influencer, her “misogynistic idiot” boss, her best friend (Patricia Ramos) and on down the line.

They assembled a cast worthy of a “Death on the Nile” variation set in a fjord. But director and co-writer Simon Stone, who did a fine job with Carey Mulligan’s “The Dig,” is utterly at sea in this genre.

When the surprises aren’t very surprising except in ways that betray the picture’s tone and every illogical thing we can’t help but notice gives away those surprises, the only conclusion is that this “Astronaut” doesn’t have the right stuff even if Mara does.

Both Black Phones are derivative . . . But the derivations Derrickson went for in the sequel are simply not as arresting or interesting.

The sad truth of the matter is that Disney took 15 years to make a sequel and never came up with a compelling story for that sequel to tell, and spent all that money without casting anybody who’d hold our interest dashing through all this red-neon nothingness for two hours.

The cast is game but rather drab — even the villains.

Sitcom-veteran Lavin navigates the abrasive tactlessness of the archetype she’s playing with ease, even if the Yiddishisms feel forced and dated a generation older than the character she’s supposed to be playing.

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

Pairing up Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell for a big screen fantasy romance doesn’t pay off in “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” a film that has one or two big moments on its road-trip-romantic “journey,” a little digitally augmented “beauty” along the way, but little that measures up to anybody’s idea of “bold.”

A sequel to This is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary that really invented that label, can’t help but play as winded, gassed, joked-out and pointless.

The resolution’s both predictable and perfunctory. “Unsatisfying” comes with the package, and that goes for the movie itself — lazy pop psychology, underdeveloped sociology and psychology and an allegory that never comes close to sticking the landing.

Director Sherry Hormann (“A Regular Woman,” “Desert Flower”) and screenwriter Stephanie Sycholt (“Themba”) get the sex and the scenery right. Its the “mystery,” “intrigue” and “thrills” that are the picture’s undoing.

There are few things worse than disguises that don’t amuse, bungled arrests that don’t amount to much more than a forced smile and cricket jokes that, to use a baseball analogy, are never more than “a swing and a miss.”

Wilson and Farmiga still give good value. But this franchise and these fictionalized characters and their Catholic boogeymen claptrap have gone about as far as they can go.

Daniel’s Gotta Die is instantly forgettable.

Breathless, ticking-clock pacing would have stripped the narrative of the many pauses where we’re allowed to think “Oh come ON” before the next stock character makes a bow, the next blow lands or next crooked angle presents itself.

War of the Worlds is bad, almost laugh-out-loud bad, and that “almost” is the killer here.

Last Goodbye’s value as an “Around the World with Netflix” taste of another culture is limited.

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

The Pickup never amounts to much more than a take-it-or-leave-it action comedy.

Mikael Marcimain’s direction of the action beats is never more than passably exciting. And an honest take on “An Honest Life” might be that everything between those robberies, riots and burglaries just reminds you that there aren’t enough robberies, riots and burglaries to keep one awake through all that tedious voice-over narration.

Kelman’s direction of his script highlights its more arch or even ludicrous/risible elements. The pacing is too sedate to give the narrative urgency and race past the clunkier moments. And the performances aren’t any more subtle than the sometimes absurd action beats.

There are maybe 20 minutes worth of jokes, sight-gags, slapstick bits and innuendo in those 85 minutes.

The execution of writer-director Seth Worley’s doesn’t turn up pathos or laughs. And the kids? Well…

Nostalgia only gets you so far, and whatever “feels” folks cling to from the original “upset the uptight golf world” original, it’s not enough to float this bloated corpse of a comedy.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, what we see on the screen is gloriously over-designed joylessness.

It is a competently filmed but utterly unsurprising tale.

This stuff doesn’t write itself, but it does seem as if Perry’s put the whole enterprise on autopilot, and his supporting “family” can’t riff or improvise much that’s funny into the worn out formula.

Almost Cops winds up as almost a buddy comedy, and certainly not one that works.

The doctor is plucky, but only in the dullest and most predictable ways. Self-sacrifice shows up at the most expected moment. And the ticking clock third act has been here and done that in more movies than one can count.

A script that leans into melodrama and wildly uneven performances are the undoing of The Ghost Trap, an immersive peek into Maine lobstering life and the people who live it.

“Old Guard 2” is 20 minutes shorter than the original film, but if you think that means it’s more brisk you’re mistaken.

It turns out that reuniting Bloodsport and Peacemaker from “Suicide Squad” wasn’t the can’t-miss that nobody predicted.