Roger Moore

This thriller goes from bad to worse without the good manners of providing any one element that could be latched on to as more hilariously bad than the next. I couldn’t even find the elements of a bad movie drinking game out of this.

Non-linear in its storytelling, stingy with its facts, details and “truth,” it’s a picture that violates a lot of the basic covenants between filmmaker and audience.

When a movie has long-established its rhythm and basically admitted it has none and then bursts to life — even briefly — it’s worth noting.

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.

The payoff doesn’t totally makeup for the longueurs that introduce Alone With You. But there’s promise enough and the picture’s short enough that it’s not a total waste of time, or waste of a lot of time.

Skin Trade, a project Lundgren co-wrote and has been trying to film for years, feels so dated and over-familiar that “half-decent” always seems just out of reach.

The animation’s not bad, the songs aren’t much, the jokes are even less. Tiny, tiny tykes might find something to like about it. But long-review-short here — it’s too dull to sit through, too noisy to sleep through.

If you deign to watch this waste of a good shipboard location, remember this, me mateys. As bad as VampyrZ on a Boat is, there’s a Western epilogue that’s even worse.

It’s a psychological thriller built around two intense and graphic sex scenes, and a few other moments of expedient nudity. Mind games, stalking and graphic violence work their way in. But it’s the sex that seems to be the movie’s reason for being.

The escalations and rising violence and body count utterly botch any sense of mystery about each “usual suspect,” and that shred of promise Cornish & Co. give the picture in her opening moments is lost.

There isn’t an original idea in “Snake Eyes,” so even if the first big brawl is cool enough to give one false hope, the puerile story leaves our star and the director of “RED” (and “R.I.P.D.”) nowhere to go, even on a cool, whining electric street bike.

Glibly put, this challenging time-skipping rumination is the big screen equivalent of watching that "Tree" grow.

There’s a lot here anybody who’s had a comparative religion course will recognize — a plea for selflessness, self-reflection, non-violence and being considerate of others. But what makes The Divine Protector flirt with being campy fun is the scary lady’s walk-on music.

All Joking Aside isn’t awful and Harewood isn’t its lone shortcoming. The script is too thin to hold our interest. Stand-up is so over-covered as film subject matter that the only way it can work in a movie these days is as backdrop for a more interesting story in the foreground.

Outcast is what happens when stunt men direct. The fights are marvelously choreographed, the swordplay splendid and the bloody body count high in director Nicholas Powell’s Middle East/Far East quest tale. The script? Derivative, dim and dull. The performances? Not much, either.

This Arthur is on the rocks long before Last Call.

Nice period detail, a few cute situations, one half-interesting character and three laughs, that’s the pickle this picture puts itself in.

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 shifts in tone, stakes and genre are abrupt and so clumsily-handled you’re allowed to wonder “What just happened?” And the heist is such a non-starter as to leave one at a loss as to what the Oscar winning actor, one of my favorites, ever saw in 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.

Hot Flashes don’t generate much heat — comical or otherwise. A pity, since that rare menopause comedy is a terrible thing to waste.

Action-packed and impressively stupid.

Among that promising cast, only Plummer and Ehle give us anything more than paint-by-numbers turns. Travolta? He’s a pale imitation of himself, as ill-fitted to the role as that odd prison soul patch he sports under Ray’s carefully streaked mop of hair.

Stolen Vacation is a stumbling, slow-footed Mexican “vacation” comedy (titled “Viaje Todo Robado” in Spanish) that barely gets out the front door, fails to arrive at its destination and never once gets up to speed.

It’s all just as soapy and unreal as “Downton Abbey,” with little of the mother-daughter-“sacrifice” of poignancy of “The Joy Luck Club.”

The situations are so arch and artificial as to make commenting on the acting (not empathetic) pointless.

The narrative is built on oddly theatrical twists, a film that begins in mystery and then sheepishly sets out to EXPLAIN every mystery away in the middle acts.

What we’re left with is a botched romance saddled with an over-arching, over-reaching message, one that only the Turks will be quick to embrace.

Horror movies succeed or fail in a lot of ways, but the real Achilles heel of too many of them is in front of the camera. The actors don’t commit, don’t get across terror, panic, paranoia or rage. That’s an issue here.

A caper comedy that neither capers nor gives birth to many laughs.

We’ve figured out where the murder mystery/thriller Brazen is going long before our heroine finds herself in the presence of the murderer in the “explain it all” talk talk talk finale. Truth be told, there aren’t a lot of surprises in this slow-pokey Alyssa Milano star vehicle for Netflix.

Though it rarely looks as malnourished as say, “Europa Report” or “Moon,” Last Days on Mars does show how starved of new ideas sci-fi cinema is.

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.

The entire affair plays like an attempt to pander to the North American market. But if we wanted to see a slick wish-fulfillment rom-com about a single mom finding success and love on a cooking show, we’d watch The Hallmark Channel and not bother traveling Around the World with Netflix.

Ghosts of Red Ridge is a low-budget Western that tries to be a ghost story. It’s not anything to write home about in either genre.

Despite an epic fight or two, Parker robs us of the revenge, the suspense of the hunt, of Parker's methodical way of tracking down those who betrayed him, one by one.

Here’s a charmless little nothing riff on “Sweet Home Alabama” starring nobody you ever heard of and filmed in everybody’s second-favorite Beaufort, the one in South Carolina.

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

A harmless but almost charmless adaptation of a book by L. Frank Baum’s grandson.

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

If your thriller’s quick enough and cryptic enough, viewers won’t notice it’s not remotely as clever as you thought it was. But when you title your ghost story The Ruse, you’ve already given away that.

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

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

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.

A film which promises “darker” but delivers “funnier” — with some of the laughs intentional.

Results is a comedy that never offers more than unsatisfactory ones — results, I mean.

There’s no reason this cast with this story in this setting shouldn’t have been something almost hilarious. There’s little evidence on the screen that was ever going to happen.

The mystery doesn’t entirely play fair, not that it’s interesting enough to entice one into sticking with this. The acting is pretty bad, and there’s a general unpleasantness to the proceedings that makes the film a video equivalent chastity belt.

The dialogue has its moments, but the jokes are too sparse to buttress the arch, comic book camp tone Mr. Adam Egypt Mortimer was going for. And while the wigs are fabulous and the effects interesting, it’s all something of a hash. Coherent enough, sure, but making sense of it seems like a fool’s errand, start to finish.

The Alternate has the effects and a plot that could work, but falls short in pretty much every other regard.

A frothy little nothing of a Canadian updating of “Cinderella” set in the Canadian fashion industry. But the shoe doesn’t quite fit in this slow-footed farce, a vehicle for pretty blonde Portia Doubleday (“Youth in Revolt”).

Leave this one to fans of the series, because as a stand-alone movie, it’s a dud.

The damned thing doesn’t play. The rube jokes fall flat, the complex caper doesn’t skate by the way the best of the “Oceans” pictures did. It’s “Masterminds” meets “Little Miss Sunshine,” with a heaping helping of Coen Brothers “Burn After Reading” contempt for its characters.

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.

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.

Very bad and interminably long, Storage Locker brings together a perfect storm of terrible script, inept acting and cheese-puff (as opposed to the more expensive “cheese ball”) effects.

The film is a somber, somnambulent drift for long stretches, interrupted by cheap jolts and the occasional grim “legitimate” one.

All this cinema-talk analysis is tedious, making the movie Malcolm made sound tedious, too. And all this theatricality in the writing, blocking and acting always leads to a film that keeps the viewer at arm’s length. No amount of Washington shouting or Zendaya overwhelmed in his tsunami of speechifying changes that.

Marsden is pretty much the only reminder of how campy and giddy this material once was and that the new film should have striven to be. Love him. Love Rudolph. Adore Amy Adams most of all. But Disenchanted plays like a contractual obligation, a paycheck, a nearly laughless show of loyalty to the folks who made you what you are.

The entire enterprise feels like a piece of experimental theater that needs further workshopping before it’s ready for the stage.

From Italy with Amore is like pasta your local Olive Garden left standing in water overnight. It’s shapeless, tasteless, inedible goo, and about as Italian as Chico Marx.

The shifts in attitude Knightley and Skarsgård have to act out are abrupt and jarring enough to feel like perfunctory requirements of a melodramatic script.

A thriller that misses the mark, and not by a little.

Writer-director Lee Kirk’s script manages a few laugh-out-loud lines and moments, and Armstrong has an offhanded charm that plays well in a role tailor-made for him. But Ordinary World is a little too enamored of the phrase “Truth in advertising.” It’s run of the mill, humdrum, “ordinary” in its set up.

It’s just the jokes that aren’t funny — not even to the supposedly undemanding (very young) audience these films are tailored to.

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.

There was a better movie in this story, this setting and this cast.

An animated comedy that’s passably animated but generally unfunny.

Still waters may run deep, as the old saying goes. But Beside Still Waters there’s nothing deeper than “The Big Chill.”

Director Darrell Roodt does nothing to build suspense and little to build empathy for the character.

The film manages to be intriguing but seriously dull.

The writer-director, perhaps for reasons of economy (surely not vanity) cast himself as the romantic lead. And Rik Swartzwelder, competent behind the camera, is an utter stiff on screen.

The Mother is watchable, here and there. Decently acted. Over-the-top, but not far enough over it to make it fun.

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.

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.

The performances don’t register, the filmmaking produces a couple of hair-raising images and a few ghoulish/gross ones.

Slick but cheesy, dubbed, filmed and set in Australia but really for the enormous Chinese film market. And Chan fans will find it memorable for one sequence which shows the 64 year-old can still make a fight funny.

10 Cloverfield Lane is built on the fear of an unknown that we know. Turns out, all that secrecy and hype and branding the “Cloverfield” name were not just this product’s marketing strategy. That’s all they had. Period...So, “Room” is still in theaters. It’s more harrowing, more terrifying, more thrilling and moving than Cloverfield Lane could ever hope to be. Go see that instead.

It’s self-indulgent and self-referential, more a humorless counterpoint to “X” than a precursor.

Stewart and Yeun (“Minari,” “Nope”) do their best to animate their flesh-and-blood scenes with confusion, curiosity and attraction. But they don’t have enough screen time to make this learn-how-to-love experiment come off.

The costumes — cop, soldier, Spartan and cowboy — and lack of them mimics “Magic Mike.” The melodrama — keeping his sideline secret from his mother and would-be girlfriend — duller.

Judging from this, The Fate of Lee Khan was to die of boredom waiting for the “fun parts” to begin.

At least this time, some of the laughs are intentional.

Unrest could have been a lot of things that it’s not — “fascinating,” “illuminating,” “entertaining” and even “inspiring” among them. Instead, we’re treated to engrossing details that never add up to more than watching a second hand labor its way around a clock face.

Cinematically-static if well-acted, and dramatically-flat throughout, it’s an end-of-the-date story of gamesmanship, competing agendas and differing interpretations of what’s going on in a coupling towards copulation sense.

Collision is the title of this South African variation on an Oscar winning theme. It’s a slow-footed, convoluted “coincidence” riddled take on the movie in which all of LA’s problems are laid bare thanks to a traffic pileup. So it’s not like director and co-writer Fabien Martorell was hiding his cards or anything.

The message delivered isn't subtle, with Kendrick delivering toss-away lines that suggest he doesn't even tolerate "the option" of divorce. But the bigger message might be that the Kendricks haven't sold out, "gone Hollywood" or watered down their Baptist beliefs based on efforts to reach an audience beyond the faithful.

Director Scooter Corkle fails to find the frights in this. And it’s not like Damien Ober’s script sets anybody involved up for success.

I’ll admit I was probably too sober watching this to appreciate its finer points — or ignore how much the picture slows down in the middle acts. But for me, Ninja Badass runs out of gas at about the “half-assed” point.

The gimmick and the satiric target here are broader and the punches miss the mark far more often than they land. But if you’re blitzed enough…

This “Corn” sat on the shelf during COVID lockdown, but we can’t say it went stale during the delay. This was cynical in conception and rotten in execution long before the masks came out.

As crass as it is, I’ve seen worse.

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.

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

An oddly-dated, obvious and overwrought melodrama about gender roles and the toxic masculinity of Wall Street hedge funders, “Fair Play” is practically a parody of decades of women in the workplace romantic thrillers.

And nothing in this raunchy romp through excess registers or delivers a laugh. Shore is still annoying, but funny never figures into it.

This picture should have passed by in a sprint, not slogged past like an overlong, overbudgeted Macy’s Parade with Music that would test the patience of anyone, including that toughest PG audience of all — kids.

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.