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.