Roger Moore

Yes, “schmaltzy” and “corny” fit in any description of this 1940 film. The soundstages don’t do justice to Holland or London or the North Atlantic. But what plays over 80 years later is the wit, the Ben Hecht (“The Front Page”) and Benchley-written exchanges between the posh Brit and the American trying to work his way into the political inner circles where Europe was about to take a stand against fascism.

It takes nothing away from The End of the Tour in labeling this Jason Segel/Jesse Eisenberg dramedy a “bromance.”

Alternately daring and dull, inventively animated, intimate and yet impersonal, it’s challenging enough to turn off most.

Yes, it's pretty much a must to have seen the first film. Where Dragon Tattoo felt like fall, Played with Fire was shot in the Swedish summer, which suits the faster pace, ramped up violence and fresh collection of supporting players -- cops, a kickboxer, and a couple of borderline Bond villains.

The impression “Three Minutes” leaves is that it’s more probing than moving, more of a mystery to be unraveled than an emotional journey into who and what were lost. It’s still quite worthwhile as history and as a meditation on tragedy and the nature of filmed memory.

Fontana’s tale is austere, quiet and posh, mirroring the world he’s depicting. There’s enough mystery here to hold our interest.

I love the light, intensely likable lilt Whishaw (“Q” in the latest James Bond films) gives Paddington’s line-readings. You forget the bear is animated and that bears can’t talk, and your children won’t even need that much encouragement to suspend disbelief.

The first great movie of the year.

Hard Truths is reminder that filmmaker/artists/observers of his stripe are once-in-a-generation, one-per-culture talents.

It’s one of the best pictures of the year.

Too much of what is here feels like filler, not advancing the plot or our understanding of the characters as this cast performs them, not sparkling enough to lift the rom-com beyond “adequate.”

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.

We should all be so lucky as to live in a world designed, peopled and manipulated by Wes Anderson. His latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is a dark, daft and deft triumph of design details.

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

Musically sharp and dramatically flat, the latest version of A Star is Born starts impressively and falls off sharply, a sudsy, overwrought remake that drowns in its abrupt, perfunctory emotional leaps.

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.

This filmed staging, which wouldn’t have “played” well on the big screen, is as rich with cinematic possibilities as it is musically. If millions find and love this version on the home screen, perhaps this “Hamilton” will encourage Disney to properly adapt it for the big screen down the road. I’d pay good money to see that.

Hopkins, Colman, Williams, Sewell and Poots give us an eyeful and and earful of a fate awaiting far too many of us in this quietly gripping and intimate drama.

It’s a somber film with flashes of wit, with funereal pacing and long, poignant close-ups that let the players — especially Ashkenazi and Adler — let us see there’s more than what we see on the surface, just with a look.

Trace works because even if this film avoids the classic “disturbed vet” story cliches, that this situation is untenable, dangerous and limiting. The marvel of Leave No Trace is that we continue watching, utterly absorbed, to see if Tom will figure that out as well.

Engrossing and moving story of a alternately warm and combative relationship.

This isn’t one of the filmmaker’s great films, but it is a serious return to form and a movie that makes us feel the pain of women — in childbirth, in disappointment and in loss — as intensely as he does.

A terrific heist picture.

In an age when a New Prurience might be a part of the “Control Women” agenda that Poor Things is puncturing, Lanthimos, McNamara and Stone have given us a picture that prods, provokes and delights in any discomfort it might create, a bawdy odyssey that, whatever your reservations, insists on being the Must See Movie of the season.

As history, Intelligent Lives is invaluable at reminding us of the speed of change, once such change is recognized and accepted as necessary.

One is left with the gnawing feeling that there isn’t much point to his Napoleon, that there are no messages/warnings for today in his narrative and that maybe his “take” on the character is more superficial than deep, more British monarchist than revolutionary and more set-pieces and romance than historically accurate and insightful.

Whatever its cultural significance, it’s just passable entertainment, a noble attempt at waxing mythical that never, for one second, delivers that out-of-body giddiness that makes popcorn pictures of its ilk burst to life.

Crowley wisely keeps Ronan center stage and often in close-up. She lets us feel the pain of leave-takings, the depression of homesickness in that pre-digital age, the dilemma of first love, and maybe second love, overlapping, the pull of the familiar vs. the hope of the new and different.

Breathtaking and definitive, Apollo 11 avoids voice-over narration or overly-explaining anything about America’s date with destiny in July of 1969. If we aren’t old enough to remember it, we’re supposed to know it. It’s in our DNA.

Whatever power this piece of writing had over the two of them, Captive fails to capture the magic, hope or whatever made it a best seller.

Lacy’s impressively thorough film forces anybody willing to watch it to reconsider her, measure her life’s work and legacy against that of her iconic father and appreciate the screen legend and cultural force she has been.

For all the resilience Baldwin and Jenkins show us here, it is the poet Langston Hughes’ line about “a dream deferred” that comes most easily to mind.

Serious and silly, self-aware and ironic, it’s the movie that questions stardom, fame and celebrity, built around a role Michael Keaton had to become a has-been to play.

Grant is the cinema’s favorite gay British best friend, and he makes a wonderfully louche lush as Jack Hock, Israel’s only friend. But being a homeless, aged coke-dealing Lothario doesn’t bode well for how dependable he’s going to be when the going gets tough.

The heart, action and sophistication of the artwork make this folk tale the best animated film of the year.

The lack of dramatic fireworks mute the film’s impact somewhat. And young Ms. Nelson has an unfortunate tendency to mumble, swallow her lines.

The set-up may be "Burning Bed” melodramatic, but Foumbi never lets the film tumble into predictability. We see things almost wholly from Marie’s point of view, but get a sense of the human being inside her captor. The plot has its obvious contrivances, but they never take us out of the story and never dictate any predictable “Hollywood” turn.

As dated as such films inevitably are, the collaborators here ensure that this 1950s melodrama never feels like an artifact, but merely another era in the passing parade of Egypt’s rough and tumble underclasses, perhaps one less divided by religious conservatism than the Muslim Brotherhood Egypt of today.

The sentimentality — for his mother, his formative childhood, an old lover — is what interests Almodóvar, here. And while it’s great that longtime collaborators Cruz and Banderas showed up to help him walk down memory lane, it’s not the most interesting cinematic journey he’s taken us on.

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

What a fascinating, layered character Return to Seoul is built around.

There’s not enough of the music . . . . Immersive and informative as it is, that keeps “The Velvet Underground” from being definitive. And that in turn lets it fall short of making its case, backed up by musicians and music critics, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, of their seminal status.

“Can You You Bring It” is a fascinating history lesson, especially to generations that didn’t grow up under the AIDS specter, when sexuality and dating had dire consequences and when the big city worlds of dance, theater and the arts were decimated, almost overnight.

Mission: Impossible — Fallout, is everything a summer action pic should be — a delirious procession of stunning stunts, epic brawls, state-of-the-art car chases and ticking clock countdowns.

Everybody here absorbs the music in August Wilson’s ear, the poetry of the lines and the history and psychology he touches on through them.

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.

A scruffy, anarchic picture that gets better as it stumbles along.

By turns glorious and thrilling, revealing and well — mythic and fictional — Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” joins the ranks of epic concert tour documentaries, capturing an epic moment in American roots music and the icon who conjured it.

It’s brief, but not so much to-the-point as wandering around it for an hour. And while it doesn’t spoil the effect of the whole, it does feel wanting as a finale. It’s the dullest “Small Axe” of the five.

While I like the challenge of his self-conscious cinema, I find the urge to go glib every time I encounter one of his films almost too hard to resist.

But marrying this “Grapes of Wrath” saga to a “journey of self-discovery” narrative in this blend of restlessness and dogged, “no whining” desperation makes Nomadland an instant indie classic and one of the best films of 2020.

Bræin Hovig and Skarsgård take us into their confidence as they make these choices, decisions, promises and compromises. The wonder of Hope is how much of that they do without dialogue, just with a look, a gesture, a silent scream of despair or teeth grinding in resignation.

It’s worth the three hour investment in time only if you keep a notepad to jot down the hidden gems in France’s rich post-war film tradition.

The sex is explicit and frequent and pretty much covers the spectrum. The drug use that accompanies it cringe-worthy. No man could have ever gotten away with adapting Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel in such frank terms.

This solo ordeal won’t be to every taste, but All Is Lost is a grand vehicle for the actor and for that viewer ready to consider his or her own mortality, the problems, conflicts, strengths and shortcomings you’re sure you leave behind when you just sail away.

Equal parts funny and forlorn, with a smattering of the violence that always been a sort of Emerald Isle background noise, The Banshees of Inisherin is Martin McDonagh’s most Irish film, because it’s a lot like Ireland itself.

Hereditary isn’t original enough to merit “great film” praise. But by bending and extending the tropes of the genre and hiring top drawer talent to buy in, Aster makes us buy in, too, and gives us a pretty disturbing picture to chew on and mull over on the way home.

Paris-Manhattan is an amusing little nothing of a movie built around the wit and wisdom of Woody Allen.

No, Sony Animation should not have let Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse out its doors and onto big screens in this blurred, jerky, pixelated condition.

A solid formula sports picture with a light dose of faith and some overt small town America “conservative signaling,” and a generally entertaining movie thanks to a decent lead and stellar supporting cast.

Oakley’s ability to find a hopeful spin to put on this bleak time is a history lesson for us all.

A swift and streamlined tragedy by the greatest playwright in the English language becomes a lean, quick and brutally brisk film in Coen’s hands.

The animation is lovely, if perhaps a tad Pixar 2.0 in texture, color palette, complexity and “realism.”

The Shape of Water is first and foremost a genre picture. And as that, it’s a loving homage to cinema from an age where movies couldn’t be as obvious about this forbidden subject or that unspoken sexuality. It’s a good film of its type, just not a great one.

So the revelations, when they come in “Rewind,” don’t have the jolt that they did in “Capturing the Friedmans,” or even in the mini series about the widely-publicized crimes of R. Kelly and Michael Jackson.

Cast and crew ensure that the film is a brisk, upbeat, feel-good bounce through a story that has become an American classic, and well worth a holiday family outing at the movies.

Moneyball is a thinking person's baseball movie, and a baseball fan's thinking movie.

As a stand-alone film it flirts with utter incoherence.

Sir Ben sells it and faithfully maintains our interest in what happens, and what happens to Avram, from first scene to last, a spy in his element, a Spider in the Web.

Schreck and her show are smart, informative, funny and often touching.

Chilling, cruel and funny — in an icy, Swedish way.

Compared to the gravitas of “The 49th Parallel” and “One of Our Aircraft is Missing,” and the strained metaphors of “A Canterbury Tale,” “I Know Where I’m Going” is downright fluffy, feather light, despite a harrowing peril-at-sea sequence that is as polished as anything from the filming tank/rear projection era in black and white film.

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.

Playground is so vividly-detailed that it could be triggering to anyone whose childhood wasn’t ideal. And even if you don’t get ugly flashbacks from it, you will marvel how any of us get through this hazing rite of passage without permanent scars or long-term psychotherapy.

A feisty, funny, down-and-dirty farce as nasty as a Supreme Court dissent, as timely as a Jenner magazine cover.

The story takes a surprising turn midway through, a change in direction that deepens the experience for the viewer, making us culpable in at least part of the misery these two face.

And Dern, a great character actor who made his mark opposite everyone from Redford and John Wayne to Jane Fonda, embraces the roll of a lifetime.

A mad cinematic jumble of comic book imagery, comic book mimicry, multiverse plotting and ponderous, pandering fan service.

It’s omissions mean that it’s simply not the last word on the subject.

Manages to pop the hairs on the back of your neck more than most repetitive, predictable and gory Hollywood horror films these days.

Little Men doesn’t come to grips with much of anything, leaving relationships and questions of sexuality and even Leonor’s uncertain future uncertain.

That humor is a the delicious underpinning to whatever melodrama happens as these five connect and clash. And that humor is what reassures us, even at its darkest moments, that no matter how things work out for the adults, these kids are going to be all right.

If you're looking for a filmmaker to document, for all of humanity, "one of the greatest discoveries in the history of human culture," the great Werner Herzog is your guy.

It’s all pretty enough, but this is lesser Ghibli, more a “Borrowers” than a “Ponyo,” an animated bauble as hollow as a turtle shell purse.

Showing Up is amiable, pointilistically-observed minutia in which the minutia’s the point. It’s not for everyone, even among those who know art, and know “what I like.”

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.

A quietly compelling if not particularly emotional and sober-minded treatment of an infamous incident.

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.

The stars have an unapproachability in their characters and performances that makes the whole enterprise play like a game in which we aren’t given all the rules.

What makes Say Anything timeless isn’t the cast so much as it is the characters, and isn’t the story as much as the way it is told. The dialogue, crisp and (relatively) clean by modern, coarse and cliched standards, is its own “grand romantic gesture,” teen angst, teen curiosity and the teen dilemma incarnate.

The austere beauty of Vitalina Varela is in faces of its characters, the darkness that envelops a corner of Lisbon tourists rarely see. It’s a somber, lyrical and relentlessly understated meditation on grief and a grudge.

It’s the script, started by many hands, crafted into something an actor at his best seething, or in full bellow, could sink his teeth into, that makes this series of movie accidents a “lust for glory” that lasts.

Colman’s performance is the film’s marvel. But Gyllenhaal’s brilliant, subtle manipulations make hers one of the most auspicious directing debuts in years, a veteran, intimidating cinematic “bad girl” who turns her withering gaze on us and strings us along, wondering what became of The Lost Daughter.

The Big Sick makes good use of some vintage Nanjiani 9/11 comebacks, some winning (if not new) backstage backbiting comedy club observations and marvelous, heartfelt work by three great actors who carry their leading man and his overlong, not-a-million-laughs “personal” story across the finish line.

The shocks — drunken montages of murderous and carnal abandon, gooey, intertwined and ugly — are entirely the point. Whether they make sense, illuminate the human condition or “entertain” is almost immaterial.

The stories share a beguiling, meditative strangeness that draws us in. Hamaguchi sets up our expectations, then upends them with this revelation about a character or that wrinkle in the plot.

“We punched a hole in the darkness,” they declare, and as the film is framed within a ceremony where their efforts are honored by the world’s journalists as the most significant reporting going on right now, you’d have to agree.

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.