Roger Moore

McKendrick handles this with skill, reassuring us at many a turn that we’re in good hands. And in every scene Deutch reassures McKendrick that in signing Netflix’s Meg Ryan, she’s cast this perfectly.

It’s horrific, gruesome at times and grim going for a “wish fulfillment fantasy” tale, even one that goes oh-so-wrong. But what shakes you is how deflatingly sad it is.

Spielberg brings his usual technical prowess and directorial sizzle to some impressive chases, 360 degree pans covering impressive sets and suspenseful escapes of the cliff-hanger variety. But what’s jolting about this big budget epic is how utterly conventional it all is.

This outing just bubbles over with hope for a planet overheating and losing arable land to deserts and vital rain forests to short term oligarchical cashing in. Because regenerative farming — crop and cattle pastures, pig pen etc. rotation — is catching on.

This cast plays the hell out of this violent parable about what one endures, who one believes caused it, the need for revenge and the cost of giving those who deserve it their comeuppance.

“Propeller” is unfailingly sweet and never cloying.

A movie that stands up for science in an age of science-denying charlatans is a blessing. And this “true story” hews closely enough to the facts to play as history.

Capitalism’s end game is taunted and satirized in I Love Boosters, a loopy, anarchic comedy about shoplifting, fashion, media mass indoctrination and This Cultural Moment.

Barris has made a good film.

If the absurdity of it all is what we take away from this distant mirror held up to our own roiled times, so much the better.

The biggest revelation in the latest “the funny person behind the facade” documentary, Marty: Life is Short may be how beloved Short is within show business.

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.