Roger Moore

It’s a grand looking production and a well-cast, well-acted and high-minded film. But Hytner and Bennett have conjured up a Big Show and an Important Statement, and so cluttered the narrative that they lose track of which statements they’re serious about making.

Arnett’s funny. No doubt about it. But he needs material to work with, and “Is This Thing On?” doesn’t deliver it.

It doesn’t really work.

Bacon plays a little and sings a little, Sedgwick handles jokes and pathos and in the scenes that count and turns “professional” in a heartbeat. And each gets across a shared empathy and humanity that bridges any gap in class and life experience.

Sinister as this often feels, the pedestrian direction, sloppy confusion of “frogs” and “toads” and the third act’s parade of perfunctory script beats bogs the film down. “Wetiko” never quite escapes the feel of genre pic that doesn’t quite come off.

It’s always been a talky two-hander, a very static and melodramatic “filmed play,” in this case, with the filming taking place in a Buenos Aires park. But a lot of the comedy — old men lying, puffing up their past or having no tolerance for those who lie, the old “I’m not Rappaport” comedy sketch at its center — translates well enough.

The slapstick doesn’t slap — not that often, anyway. And the one-liners don’t land. Even the “funny” voices aren’t funny, and the wacky character design seems lacking in the wacky.

The Rip remains perfectly watchable, if a tad slow, more than a little confused at times and utterly mired in a mess of its own making in that head-slapping finale.

Mechanical/CGI shark attack simulations have improved over the decades, and are as terrifying as ever. But the longer this brief “inspired by true events” tale goes on, the more tropes and far-fetched cliches Roach-Turner trots out.

In Safdie’s film, all this expended on screen energy and effort isn’t edifying or rewarding. It’s just exhausting.

The picture simply isn’t pitched in a light enough tone to work as comedy, and the “mystery” isn’t mysterious enough to come off either. A reach for “shared humanity” rings hollow.

Dogged determination in the face of hopelessness is the byword in writer-director Kim Byung-woo’s thriller, which is meant to be an action essay in the core compassion of humanity. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” may suit the mood this film sets. But keeping calm and carrying on is a hard ethos to shake when the stakes are this high.

The Chronology of Water” can be more soberly appreciated on general release for Poots’ fearless, put-it-all-out-there performance than for Stewart’s early missteps and her exploitive mania for the explicit and the repellent, “truth” or fiction.

The lives themselves are interesting, even if we only get a glimpse of them, even Cass’s. But truth be told this never really ties the Cass story to the immigrant story (he did the same sort of work in his day, we surmise, and might be prejudiced) and never amounts to much more than a selection of snapshots.

Clooney? When he has a comical moment, he makes the most of it. His attempts at heartfelt epiphany left me cold.

The Protector gets pretty much everything wrong.

There are a few laughs and some chewy turns (Brolin, mainly) to sink our teeth into. But “Wake Up Dead Man,” for all its St. Paul Blinded on the Road to Damascus “case of pink-eye” zingers, doesn’t amuse enough to dazzle, and doesn’t get the best out of a cast that deserves better.

As current as these issues and this debate remains, a story meant to pass judgement after the dust settles just comes off as mediocre, murky, both-sidesing virtue signalling from a writer out of her depth.

For all its attempted ethereal touches, Train Dreams never settles on a track that delivers one.

The film’s great gift to this piece of much-filmed history is demythologizing Jackson, a figure the script and Shannon portray as well-intentioned, hard-nosed and out of his depth in attempting to try charismatic sociopaths that most of the world would rather had been rounded up and shot.

There’s no getting around the disquiet Ramsay goes for and achieves with this nightmarish primer on postpartum depression at its most extreme. But at some point, the shocks numb you in ways the tedium of the myopic, intimate story hasn’t.

Farrell, Swinton, Chen and Ip do what they can with their characters. But it’s hard to decide if anyone here is just another demon or angel in Doyle’s fevered brain, or real.

Plemons and Stone, who has become the director’s Oscar-winning muse, are terrifyingly real. And the allegory of a civilization in crisis lured like lemmings off this or that cliff of lunacy lands hard.

The leads are engaging and some jokes land. But none of them cut deep because there’s little edge to any of this.

For an hour or so, director Lurie tackles the tropes lightly as we see lots of football practices, and a few games, and not a lot of anything else. And it plays, helped by the fact that the formidable Masterson doesn’t need a lot of script to get across a flinty “West Texas Gal.”

The tone and atmosphere are immersive and decidedly analog, and the whole nature of “sound” thing makes an interesting metaphysical text or subtext.

Perhaps little more workshopping this script was in order, because the three main characters put on their own three act play in the film’s latter half. Everything that delays packing us in that pressure cooker with them undercuts the most novel version of “a boxing picture” that most of us have ever seen.

The leads have just enough chemistry to make them credible as a couple.

It takes the involvement of the FBI and subpoenas and Big Government tech to nail down what IP address in this tiny village was the source of all that turmoil, anguish and mental health mayhem. That isn’t right.

What We Hide is no Winter’s Bone. But this isn’t a bad effort at capturing how the drug crisis impacts its youngest victims. It’s simply an unsurprising one.

The over-the-top violence is funny in the early scenes. But it turns more and more abrupt, more over-the-top and more sadistic the longer the story unfolds.

Truth be told, the world didn’t need a third “Baby Assassins” movie. All writer-director Yuko Sakamoto did was make a longer, more bloated, more character-cluttered version of the first two films.

The cold-bloodedness of it all suggests a harder-nosed thriller of the “Hell or High Water” school was what Tost had in mind. But he tries to soften that up with sentiment, and the plot and tone never coalesce around that compromise.

With a striking setting, menacing music scoring gloomy shots of bulls running through swampland in the fog and an up-close look at this unusual variation of bullfighting (it’s barely explained), “Animale” puts us in the mood for a fright even if it’s slow to deliver one.

The script isn’t much and the direction — save for a spirited high school bake sale food fight — is lackluster.

A rom-com that almost goes for it and almost comes off before losing its nerve.

It’s kind of a mess, but an ambitious one hitting on themes Aster’s fans will recognize as his favorites. And as Aster scores points on conspiracy-obsessed America, cultish America, gun-fetishizing America, virtue signalling America and the limits of “back the blue,” he’s pretty much earned the right to be heard out, if not the benefit of the doubt.

The plot is all over the place, the villains kind of amorphous and just generally “against” the idea of a Superman and there just isn’t enough Fillion or enough jokes to get the picture over the hump.

Materialists is dry and ironic and “honest” while laying bare the hopes that we all cling to that love isn’t really as materialistic as she’s saying. But the rare air of the artificial, archetypal world she sets out to make her big statement in leaves the viewer grasping for not just a breath of fresh air, but hope.

Like any fan, I’ll watch anything Anderson turns his attention to. But all the stars and star cameos, all the jaunty, classical music needle drops, all the del Toro drollery, the “lost boys” cadre of Korda kids and the Middle Eastern history hinted at in the “schemes” can’t paper over how flat and empty this “scheme” turns out to be.

It’s the filmmakers’ unsparing depiction of violence against children that overwhelms this story of supernaturalism or desperate, misguided superstition. That seems excessive, a shock-value cheat that gives this “wrenching nature of loss and grief” story a sense of overkill.

It’s only a movie, of course, not one of the better ones in this sometimes entertaining but occasionally muddled franchise. Taken to heart as a movie of its moment, and not just experienced as “a ride,” it’s too bad they had to go out with a bummer.

The fights are furious and bloody. Don’t get too attached to anybody. Or any body part.

Whatever its sluggish pace and stumbling grasp of time, Queen of the Ring still manages to be a fine vehicle for making a case for women’s equality in a period piece that more than gives this sport and that period in time its due.

No characters really pop and there’s little room for pathos, humor or anything else.

The film itself is more recognizably human and considered, while lacking any comic edge or sense that the romantic stakes are high.

Coogler introduces themes, agendas and histories in collision with this film. But once “Sinners” transitions from Black history at a crossroads into straight-up horror, nothing much is made of the Big Ideas in this ungainly mashup of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Crossroads” and “From Dust Til Dawn.”

There’s ambition and a dollop of intellectual heft to the indie dramedy Daddy. Even if it misplaces characters, shortchanges its goals and fails to deliver much in the way of a satisfying conclusion, you can appreciate the attempt and the effort involved.

Fahy does a decent job conveying vulnerability, even if the desperation that should figure in here seems a tad tame until the third act. Sklenar is mostly just a hunky pawn, here.

Mendoza’s pitch, to “get it right” and have “real combat vets” have their story told, might be noble in its intention and the tribute (stay through the credits) to their service the film represents. But he and Garland emphasize authenticity over empathy, accuracy over dramatic connection.

The narrative never strays from the formula/quest that Ha is on. But writer-director Oh isn’t shy about boring us half-to-death as we wait for that inevitable connecting of the dots, resolution of the search and the inevitable brandishing of the “Revolver.”

The music drops are good enough to pass muster, and the peformances mostly transcend the tried and trite story and the frankly pedestrian direction.

It works, in that arch-action-vehicle-built on-cliches sort of way.

A tale told under a cloud with unreliable witnesses, it’s a slow and soft spoken drama that too breaks the chilling spell Tøndel is trying to cast.

If Led Zeppelin’s place in the culture outlives them, later films will plumb the depths of their “real” experience of fame, success, sex, drugs and rock’n roll. This is the coffee picture table book version.

Signing on an impressive cast, writer-director Drew Hancock takes a big, roundhouse swing at “coupling” in a distracted, instant gratification craving, uncompromising and not-entirely-adult era, and at sending up a rom-com convention or two. But the best he manages is a slow roller to shortstop with this icy, rarely amusing and gory dark comedy.

Co-writers/directors Fabrizio Laurenti and Niccolò Vivarelli (one of Vivarelli’s sons) make a half-decent case that Vivarelli is worth knowing about beyond the borders of his homeland.

It’s all perfectly high-minded and polished, but all of this could have been treated with more spark than comes across here.

Ad Vitam is competently shot and cut and works well enough for long enough stretches to recommend. But equally long stretches of training and graduation and karaoke celebrating kill its momentum.

After the first blush of how cute this conceit is . . . Better Man becomes a simple catalog of pop stardom clichés.

There’s just too much that hobbles this horse opera to let it gracefully unfold and canter off into the snowy sunset.

With The Prosecutor we come for Donnie Yen and for the fights, and if we’re studying Mandarin, to bone up on Chinese legal arcana. Because God knows there’s a lot of dialogue to this thing. But at some point, all that starts to feel superfluous and in the end, boring.

It’s an indie film that reminds us there’s talent out there that mainstream distributors haven’t embraced — in front of and behind the camera. And fittingly enough for the subject generation, “Meltdown” feels self-satisfied but incomplete, with a finale that plays like a pulled-punch.

Story matters, and this one didn’t need to be told.

The finale Reijn slaps on Babygirl seems a cop-out afterthought.

Just the Two of Us seems pre-ordained and predigested, with every emotion tugged at and every “trigger” and behavioral “tell” underlined so as to remove any doubt about what’s going on, who is the victim and who is to blame.

Perry’s sympathetic treatment of this history — stay through the credits — is laudable, and no one can ever say he can’t turn out slick to the point of immaculate melodramas. These ladies are so smartly made-up and prepped for their closeups that it calls to attention how tidy and sterile this cinematic war is. It barely looks lived-in, much less fought.

This thriller begins at a crawl and finishes with a sprint. The foreshadowing is obvious even if the next twist rarely is.

It’s all perfectably passable filler, a nice “escape” with the kids at the movies, with a few stunning animated effects to recommend it.

Set on the 2012 Colombian/Venezuelan border, Pimpinero: Blood and Oil opens with great promise and tasty action picture possibilities before running out of gas in the middle acts as it shifts point of view and stumbles towards the even deadlier prospects of its finale.

The sequel is fitfully amusing and watchable. But you can sense the greater silliness that inspired it in this “Blues Brothers go Metal” road odyssey.

Whatever audience awards this pic has claimed on the film festival circuit, there’s no weight to it, and the sentimental lighter touches and limp jokes aren’t enough to carry it.

I enjoyed the spectacle of this about as much as I enjoyed “Ben-Hur” or “Napoleon” or “Gladiator.” But it’s hard to find the beating heart of this story because it doesn’t really have one.

The middle acts, where Emilia Pérez has her coming out, reconnects with her “fixer” lawyer and pulls her kids and her still-clueless ex-wife close to her, sag and slow the movie’s sprint to a crawl.

Anora lacks the raw emotion, street energy and urgency of Baker’s transgender romp “Tangerine” — and the pathos of his acclaimed peek at childhood homelessness in the “paradise” of “The Florida Project.”

What the film sorely lacks is much in the way of urgency. Even the get-aways are dull. And for all the sexual heat of the Bruno/Annie connection, their relationship lacks weight or drama.

Close to You can be appreciated for its frank depicton of the post-hormone and surgery body and life of a transgender man no longer tormented by the confusion and self-loathing of gender dysphoria. But the story Savage and Page chose to tell with Page’s new reality can seem trite and melodramatic.

Stockholm Bloodbath has fine action beats and furious avenging, but collapses into a sort of resignation about the parts of the tale that must be rendered faithfully.

Uplifting in the right spots, touching near the end, cute and yet cloying, maudlin and manipulative everywhere else, it punches a lot of familiar buttons when it comes to faith-based films for the holidays.

It’s sober minded enough. Yet it’s all rather less satisfying than it might have been.

Such movies are manipulative by nature and we embrace them for that. Here, that’s more obvious and heavy-handed, and the manipulation tends to spare us tears — and laughs — when the tears are entirely the point.

Some of it works, too much of it doesn’t. The pacing is fast enough in stretches, the performances amusingly broad and the pratfuls and punches sometimes amuse.

There’s nothing about “Goodrich” that would scare producers away from working with a filmmaker whose only goal might be to become “Nancy Meyers: The Next Generation,” even if there’s little original to lure them in either.

The fiddling-while-Earth-burns nature of global “leadership” and their parade of useless and vacuous “statements” joke lands, and is then pounded repeatedly as almost all of these leaders, scrambling through a foggy forest at night, fearing bog zombies and a planet about to go up in flames, struggle to stay on task and come up with that “statement.”

But aside from a couple of genuinely touching moments, “Rez Ball” is dramatically flat. Heartache and heartbreak are suggested but never plumbed or embraced.

It’s set up the way Chekhov’s play is traditionally-mounted these days, as an actor’s showcase. That’s just not enough to put His Three Daughters over.

The performances are daft enough to land, and the audacity of it all counts for something.

The laughs — from sight gags, on-the-nose-casting (Burn Gorman as a priest named “Damien”), quirky Keaton, Ryder and O’Hara line-readings and the contributions of newcomers Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe — are hard to come by.

Ramchandani delivers a dazzling third act chase, on foot, through L.A.’s sweatshop district, a nervy, hand-held sprint that finally gets this static story up on its feet.

It’s a Gibson showcase and a Liotta curtain call worth seeing, shortcomings be damned.

The Other Laurens is a slow, drifting mystery thriller that takes a while to decide what it’s about, takes another while to add on complications and adds a third while to attempt to get to some sort ofint.

It’s good to see all these folks together in the same picture. But Affleck and Chuck MacLean don’t script enough clever bits, smart action beats and funny lines to let “The Instigators” instigate much of anything.

Golden Years is a romantic comedy with questions and perhaps a very modern “answer” to that “Will it go on like this until the end?” challenge. But even though it’s well-acted, scenic and charming enough, perhaps finding a few more laughs should have been a higher priority.

No, it’s not a subtle film. Nor were the Germans, it’s worth remembering. But it’s handsomely mounted and well-acted, and reaches a fine if far-fetched action climax.

House of Ga’a is at its best in action, as the fight choreography is good and the pacing is sharpest. When we settle on palace intrigues, the picture slows to the point of being static with interiors, infighting and betrayals of the sort one sees in soap operas the world over, even those set in pre-colonial West Africa.

Dance First isn’t exactly bad. It’s just too narrow in focus, too incomplete, a biopic that leaves us “waiting” for an elusive, mythic “author” to truly make his entrance.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a burlesque of comic book movies, embracing their popularity, mocking the characters, situations, genre and its fans all the way to the Vancouver bank vault where Marvel Jesus insists Disney deposit the $billion this fun, bad movie is going to make.

Though we “see” the attraction between the two young women, we rarely feel it. Luchetti makes her beautiful looking film about this budding summer romance, but never quite convinces us of her passionate interest in it, or in much else that was going on in Italy in 1938.