Roger Moore

Nagy immerses us in this time and this world with simple images, archetypal characters and common-to-combat-film situations, another army far from home, out of its depth and uncertain of the necessity and ethics of its mission.

It may be straight-up melodrama, from its lone, corny, over-explaining flashback to the cliched drunk tank our hero finds himself in to the grim hysteria of an ambulance ride. Desplechin’s film still strikes enough of the right notes to be entertaining.

They all — including Irons and Johannes, who lost his band and record deal after Slovak finally made his Chili Peppers “side band” commitment permanent — come off as reflective, sober, compassionate and grateful to each other for the life-changing experience their stardom or near stardom gave them.

It doesn’t all work, and some key elements are lost any time you mess with a classic plot. But if there’s an agenda in this “Farm,” it’s that good but misguided people (animals here) have to admit they’ve been had before their deeply-flawed, criminally cruel idols can be brought down. And calling out their stupidity is no way to lead, either.

Just when you think you’ve got a performer all figured out, they go out and surprise you with a sweet and sentimental story of love and loss and dogs.

The screenplay almost lets everybody down, and referencing Chekhov (“Three Sisters”) doesn’t amount to anything if you don’t inject more depth into the characters and situations as a consequence. But the settings are gorgeous. Some situations bear fruit and others deliver laughs.

Runt is a sweet and ever so slight Aussie farm country comedy in the “Babe” tradition.

Director and co-writer Gabriel Mascaro (“Neon Bull,” “August Winds”) keeps his film anchored in harsh realities of a present doomed to drift into an even uglier future, even as he traffics in allegories and parables and tropes of mythic trips of self-discovery dating back to Homer’s “The Odyssey.”

A fun and furious phenomenon of the ’90s New York punk scene is given its due and another faint glimpse of the spotlight in Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks, a wry, wizened and not remotely bitter doc about a band that never quite made it, but should have.

There’s witty banter about bank robberies in a “just tap your card” society — “Nobody uses cash any more.” And director Ben Wheatley (Free Fire and Sightseers were his) knows his way around a shoot-out, punch-out, snowplow chase or what have you. One film fan’s “predictable” can be a lot of filmgoers’ comfort food.

Sossai hasn’t made a movie that sentimentalizes alcoholism, but he has managed to suggest the mistakes, busted dreams, dashed hopes and futility of getting ahead or getting by in a barely-functioning democracy and permanently-rigged “market economy” that makes the bottle such an appealing escape.

Coogan, Cattaneo and screenwriter Jeff Pope have adapted a touching tale that is the Argentine penguin embodiment of “Keep Calm and Carry On,” for those who’re willing to see it.

The leads are terrific, the bit players biting and distinctly believable “types.”

It’s a near miracle that anyone could get a movie out of this. But Ozon, like Visconti before him, has. It’s not for the sentimental, the conventional or the faithful. But The Stranger, in book or its latest cinematic form, is for the intellectually curious and questioning. Just don’t go expecting it to provide many answers.

The picture plays and Monroe and Withers make us invest in the characters and “This isn’t half bad” makes this a date movie that comes off, romance novel origins be damned.

No, there’s not much to this thin plot and the monotonous visual limitations don’t deliver the claustrophobia you might expect to heighten the growing dread. But for horror that’s alarming in the most primal, aural and piloerection ways, Undertone hits enough right notes to recommend.

It’s great that Sang found another way to chew on the facets, faces and foibles of his native land, one that didn’t involve ravenous zombies.

Even if the surprises are few, the plot twists have a comforting subtext that leaves us with the hope that for Lamia, things might just come out all right — with or without baking The President’s Cake.

Revealing, entertaining and touching.

Verbinski makes a striking return to risk-taking form with the ambitious, sometimes dazzling and even heartfelt Jeremiad Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

Money spent on this cast was well-spent. The performances are riveting but never shake the reality the players and Layton anchor their characters in.

Even though it gives away one twist/gag too easily and tends to pummel us in the finale, I have no notes. This is a damned funny riff on “Survivor” and the very idea that the dainty McAdams might have a little “Misery” era Kath Bates in her.

For all the cans of worms it almost opens and doesn’t quite, it still tugs at the hearstrings as we remember the awful crime and the child who survived nearly a year of abuse, hunger and living under an abusive fanatic’s veil.

The Wolves Always Come at Night is a vivid document of a family and culture struggling to adjust to the harsh realities of climate change and just what that “change” means on a personal level to people who may not know the science, but they believe what they’re seeing with their own eyes and have experienced within their own living memory.

Sure, it’s a Canadian indie dramedy by a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker. But writer-director Johnny Ma brings an outsider’s view and respect for Korean manners, mores and Kimchi to this wistful fish-out-of-water romance.

Yes, it plays like a piece of theater workshopped into various finales. And no, you never forget that what you’re watching is gimmicky. But so what?

It may be too “Cinema Appreciation 101” for many. But for those of us really into film history and the birth of a screen master making a movie DIY style, on the fly, on the cheap and destined to “change cinema,” even if only briefly as those “rules” for how to tell a story got set in stone for a reason, “Nouvelle Vague” checks all the boxes.

Howell-Baptiste makes a mesmerizing yet earthy and “real” tour guide through the meandering narrative of We Strangers. She’s the best reason to watch this inscrutable film that’s easy to take-in but tricky to decode, based on what’s included and what’s left underdeveloped or simply undeciphered.

I Was a Strranger is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate.

Winslet, as actress and director, gets us to the emotional core of the story with skill and compassion even as her movie introduces its emotional buttons, one by one, before punching each in turn with a care and sensitivity that make this “Goodbye” therapeutic as well as over-familiar.

It’s a beautiful film, equal parts sentimental and bluntly realistic. Like “Honeyland,” what Kotevska is capturing is a vanishing way of it.

If you’re allergic to “cute,” stay home. Otherwise, pack your hanky and try to keep your singing along at a level that it won’t drown out what’s coming off the screen. Because what Brewer, Jackman and Hudson cook up here is comfort food at its most comforting.

It comes off, it plays and it entertains. And the impressive, high-end Sunrise Animation Studio production values — realistic landscapes, clever character designs and tje scale of a capital city under construction (Gibeah, pre-Jerusalem) — are just the icing on the cake.

Little Trouble Girls is a conventional girls’ coming-of-age tale whose clever twist is equating sexual awakening with spiritual awakening, at least in the eyes and ears of an impressionable teen.

Zhao, bouncing back from the Marvel “Eternals” paycheck picture/debacle, serves up a touching romance between a distracted young man of letters and a woman so attuned to nature she hunts with a pet hawk, knows the uses of every herb and tree and the incantations that go with their preparation and is thus labeled the “daughter of a witch.”

With this film, Tsou belatedly announces herself as “The Next Sean Baker,” a sure-handed director with an ear, an eye and empathy for the huddled masses whose story she tells.

Rental Family is an almost miraculously sensitive movie about the limits of such “services” in a culture where decorum, saving face, protecting feelings, apologies and shame are appreciated for their real value. And it’s about acting and the core of that “calling,” making connections with strangers while playing a part that entertains, flatters or fulfills them on some level.

This is indie cinema with a point and a point of view, and Glidewell, Ferrell and the cast deserve to have this engrossing and worthhile drama be a career highlight that should lead to others.

What Ozon flirts with is the superior adaptability and endurance of those who can let the past be the past, and the costs of not getting over to those who won’t.

Mensore gets it right and tells a story validated by journalism and every trip through the region and everybody you know who lives there.

Frankenstein is beautiful to look at and thoughtful enough to make one ponder its two hundred year old themes and warnings anew.

Reichardt takes her time setting up this slow-motion trainwreck and keeps her cards close to her vest in terms of character details that underscore just how “wrong” this whole thing goes. She spares us the melodramatics and just lets things happen and the consequences be accepted in ways no conventional thriller would.

Auction is good, underhanded fun, and even the loose ends that Bonitzer leaves hanging — perhaps this had a longer cut at some point — leave one uncertain about how this high-stakes poker game will play out or who might upend the table with not-quite-all-their-cards on it for that final hand.

The performances have an offhanded charm and street reality that sells this. And there are worse ways to spend your movie-going time that taking a walk on the not-so-wild side through Toronto’s colorful neighborhoods with the dreamers who long to escape them.

It’s a brooding performance in a brooding movie, not your conventional rags to riches triumph or Jeremy Allen White Sings The Boss biopic. But White and Cooper make it interesting and entertaining enough to invest in.

Director, writer and co-star Daniel Hendler‘s film is a mystery, a journey of personal growth and a quixotic quest to diagnose what constitutes “eccentric” behavior and what relatives and the courts might consider insane.

Anniversary may be, like its “movie of the moment” forebears, another shout into the void. But everybody involved — especially Lane, whose performance is another career highlight — can take heart in trying to sum up democracy’s collapse as seen through one, generally slow-to-alarm inside-the-beltway family’s disintegration. Yeah, it happened like this.

It’s a wonderful time capsule and a warm — with some reservations — remembrance of growing up in showbiz, the children of famous people who’d get stopped on the street, in the restaurant or wherever by strangers, even when the kids were the ones desperately wanting and needing their attention.

The performances are spot on. And all involved have made a marvelously melancholy “feel good” movie that ticks off so many Brit film boxes — eccentric characters, quaint and soggy setting, emotions kept under wraps and a charming, wistful story about moving on, being smart enough to realize the need for it and kind enough to help others manage it as well.

Romer covers a lot of ground in this sometimes touching and even inspiring documentary. About all she misses is Japan’s invitation to participate in the Little League World Series, and its early dominance and ongoing success there.

The star here is a version of every street stray you’ve seen in Central or South America, a big-eyed brown beauty named Amendoim, which is “Peanuts” in Portuguese. He romps through scenes, vocalizes on cue and turns on the charm after every apartment-trashing, food-stealing/scene stealing frolic.

It pairs up the graceful, athletic and best-in-comedic roles Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, an earthy actress who easily summons up wary, wounded and beguiling with just a dimpled smile and a twinkle in her eye. Throw in the deadpan delight Lakeith Stanfield, June Temple who brings more to trashy-funny than any of her peers, Peter Dinklage at his most irritable and veteran Oz-villain Ben Mendelsohn — cast against type as a good-hearted pastor — and you’ve got yourself a winner.

Friends, acquaintances and fans still get choked up when the subject of the late Canadian comic wonder John Candy comes up.

Good Boy makes the humans all but superfluous as its star delivers some of the most realistic reactions to the unexplainable this time-worn genre has ever seen.

“Battle” is is by turns serio-comic and chilling to the point of depressing.

Alemania is a sweet, understated coming-of-age story, unsurprising in many ways as it borrows its central who-will-stay/who-will-travel story arc from “American Graffiti,” of all films.

It’s a mad, ambitious allegory that dives into the Deal with the Devil one makes for a career in the game.

The various subplots collide in entertaining ways, and the “payback” chapters are full of surprises, which are easy enough to understand without the tedious business of throwing in anti-climactic flashbacks to ensure everybody “gets” why this or that happened and why any of it makes sense. We got it. We were paying attention.

“A Grand Finale” may not be all that grand, but it more or less checks off the boxes in allowing fans to revel in this world one last time and bid the great house and great cast bon voyage, even if the low-stakes/no-stakes send-off isn’t all it might have been.

Live-action kid-friendly fare like Grow is a rare thing, these days, especially at the height of Horror Season. Better grab the tykes and dash off to this before the last “pumpkin spice” lattes are served.

Washington gives one of his great performances as King, a man comfortable swinging between two worlds with diverging ways of thinking and even talking.

A polished, kid-friendly and even lighthearted Life of Jesus animated film.

Aronofsky ensures that Butler and his merry band of miscreant castmates make Caught Stealing a frenetic and fun farewell to summer, if a very bloody one.

It’s still nasty fun, just not as nasty and acridly funny as that ’80s comic trio of Turner, Douglas and DeVito were able to make it.

The players are the reason to relish this bon bon, with Kingsley in fine fidget, Brosnan all Irish leftist bluster and Mirren giving a comic edge to a performance that harks back to “Prime Suspect” past.

Restless is a spare, reasonably taut thriller of the “Neighbor from Hell” subgenre, the sort of movie most any member of Western or Eastern Civilization can relate to.

It’s about parenting, the job that never ends and the parents who never stop second-guessing how they’re managing it. Beautifully cast, summery and bittersweet with moments of dry wit, “Prayer” is a small scale tragedy in light, deft strokes.

The laugh-out-loud appearances — not just performing music but “performing” interviews — more than compensate for missing “It used to be about the MUSIC, man.” That makes “Devo” a delight, even if you were never into the band, even if you weren’t in on the joke.

Eden isn’t the subtlest allegory about life in troubled times, but Howard rarely makes a bad film and he hasn’t here. From its eyes-averting grimness to its eye-rolling obviousness and “inevitability, Eden is a parable that plays.

Ahmed, poker-faced start to finish, puts us in this guy’s shoes and in his head when his best laid plans are derailed, his “control” is shattered and his identity endangered. It’s another great character turn by a star who’s gained his leading man status the old fashioned way — by giving one raw, layered and compelling performance at a time.

This remake just breezes by, a comedy more in touch with its tone, more whimsy than wham-bam-thanky-ma’am and the like. It’s less carnal and more romantic.

Cregger, like Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers, knows that smart horror is the best horror. And that any horror movie that starts arguments and conversations the moment the credits roll is a winner.

Familiar Touch is a simple, documdrama-real film of frank honesty and sensitivity about dementia and adjusting to life in Memory Care.

It’s a reminder of when civility, fair play and principles mattered, of when decent people of influence like Sullivan didn’t think twice about standing up to myopic bigots like Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge.

It’s not wholly coherent. But anyone in the mood for a quirky, absurdist farce with full frontal nudity, gunplay and a lost hero trying to fulfill his pregnant girlfriend’s deal-breaker request should check out Kill the Jockey (simply “El Jockey” in Argentina). Because surreal and screwy film fare like this is rare, with or without subtitles.

Mixed bag or not, films like “Keroauc’s Road” feed on the novel and the novelist’s mythology. And when they’re on their game, they get at what Kerouac’s sensory-overload novel tapped into that is quintessentially American — mercurial restlessness, eagerness to live a life less ordinary and that core realization that staying in one place — even a New York, New Orleans or Los Angeles — is no way to get to where you want to go.

If The Bad Guys 2 isn’t as hilarious as “Bad Guys 1,” it’s still got lots of giggles provided by a steller, comical voice cast providing a big part of the soundtrack to some genuine Tex Avery style eyeball-popping, gonzo, in-your-face animation.

Brie and Franco know how to find their way from grim to funny. The laughs come in their deadpan underreactions and freaked-out over-reactions at their plight.

She Rides Shotgun is a compelling, gripping B-movie ride, a picture that reaches for highfalutin “Trojan Horse” allegories when what it does best is a lot more obvious.

Watching unhappy, uncertain children grow in confidence as they learn, bond and then run loving, yipping, straining sled dogs is incredibly touching.

It gives Buckley fans lots of the music and some of the details and color of the life that Buckley lived.

Casting real musicians to actually play the work in question may have been a gimmick, but it lends the picture an authenticity rare for a screen comedy.

The love story doesn’t deliver. But everything historically referenced, explored and explained that keeps it from being the emotional heart of “Shoshana” does.

It’s wistful and sad and uplifting in unexpected ways as it underscores the prophecy of the knowing nurse (her name is omitted from any cast list I can find) who counsels the family about what’s really going on here.

We Are Guardians reminds us that some fights you can’t give up, even as they seem more impossible with every step-backward election. And that some people realize that one hard truth before the rest of us.

Offerman’s Jerry Kane is a villain for the ages, a man with a point of view that more people share than we’d like to believe. He makes Sovereign must-see cinema for understanding not just a “type,” but a movement and a moment, and just where they’re taking us if we let them.

“F1” is a shiny, streamlined and perfectly aerodynamic version of an old fashioned star vehicle.

It’s an engrossing character portrait of a woman who has been so on-task for so long that she doesn’t recognize real romance when it shows up and makes her an offer of a better or at least different life, and her struggles with what to do with that.

If you’ve ever been curious, without wanting to endure a drawn-out day-long slaughter by the world’s best-dressed and best-compensated butchers, “Afternoons of Solitude” will put you in that ring with a celebrated torero.

40 Acres is a tense, violent and generally satisfying survivalist thriller.

Boyle and Garland have made a go at making a zombie movie for the moment, a post-Brexit, Israeli genocide, Middle East war, insensate MAGA ICE-goons thriller that makes you think even if all the technique, editing and new levels of violence can’t hide the fact that the filmmakers haven’t quite made up their minds about what they’re trying to say.

The fights in this bad-boy-amongst-bad-boys butcher shop thriller have to be seen to be believed. “The Raid,” assorted blind swordsman tales, “Oldboy” and John Wickworld all are glimpsed in this slaughter in scarlet saga from Seiji Tanaka.

Martin gets at the man’s philosophy, his message that humanity is using up and destroying what Gaia, the Earth, has to offer when living in harmony with nature is becoming more necessary by the moment. It’s the pragmatic details — not just “How do you poop?” — but the power grid (Solar?), the diet, means of making the limited money you need there and the like that this brief, touching and sometimes poetic documentary lacks.

It’s all handled reasonably well, with just enough twists to hold the interest and just enough attention to the logic of it all for Brand Ingelsby’s script to make sense — more or less.

It’s a mesmerizing movie, in its way, a chronological stream-of-consciousness dissection of a very specific “type” — Western, indulged, pretty enough to attract attention, careless with how he uses it, too removed from his contemporaries to care or commit.

Prime Minister is thus an against the grain movie of its moment, out of step politically, and an intimate to the point of myopic doc that zeroes in on the personality it is profiling.

And Mrs is a bittersweet and offbeat romantic comedy of love and loss and mourning, and a most unexpected star vehicle for unfiltered Irish comic Aisling Bea, nicely paired up with Carrie Fisher’s kid, Billie Lourd.

Veteran TV writer and director DeYoung lures the viewer in and leads us in amused, faintly contemptuous but always nervous laughter.