Roger Moore

Actor-turned-director and co-writer Bill Watterson keeps the tone light and the surprises surprising, for the most part. The energy flags as the picture loses a little of its momentum in the middle acts. It’s only 80 minutes long, so even that doesn’t hurt it much.

Hustlers finds awkward laughs in female-on-male cruelty, loses its nerve in the late acts, but finds its heart in the finale. And it hits the “I don’t want to depend on anybody” empowerment message awfully hard.

Director and co-writer Thomas Bidegain (he scripted “A Prophet”) gives us a tail of futility, of “saving” someone who does not want to be saved and the racism built into Alain’s fanatical pursuit.

The objects he assembles or carves out of stone will outlive him, but it’ll only be a hint of the mind that saw beauty in the destruction, decay and rebirth that nature itself was creating all around him.

As slight as Venus feels, it’s just titillating enough to matter, just twisted enough — Really, casting your wife and a guy who looks like you? — to suggest that even in his 70s, even with virtually no budget, Polanski can deliver a compelling walk on the kinky side.

Feuerzeig makes the fateful choice of telling the whole story through Albert’s eyes, and decked out in too-old-for-this leather and straightened hair and piercings, she conjures up a hellish life.

Knightley and West create spectacular friction in these roles, two people who loved, collaborated and rubbed each other the wrong way and the right way, and from that, a great artist was created, shaped and immortalized — with a little help from her lawyers.

It’s good, not great, and it’s not Ayer’s fault that the rarer these B-movies become, the more we expect from them.

The Baker delivers on all the promise of its premise, all the salesmanship it took to get it cast, financed and filmed in the lovely Caymans.

Give Leblanc credit, though. Any time you make a movie with well-played characters who compel the audience to want to shout at the screen, you’ve accomplished something.

Obscene wealth, the gauche, unsophisticated rich, “experts” with agendas, “free port” storage and insane amounts of money float by under the unblinking gaze of an Italo-European Jesus, “Salvator Mundi” but still “not even a good painting.”

It’s gorgeous, intimate and beautifully photographed. And it’s cute and kid-friendly, with just enough jokes to balance the drama that comes from any film that flirts with how dangerous and unforgiving The Wild actually is.

If you haven’t sampled the works of Miike before now, here’s the perfect introduction. And yakuza action-comedy fans, you never forget your First Love.

Laugh-out-loud funny and production-designed to death, Guardians of the Galaxy pops off the screen.

A thoroughly entertaining ride, as strange as it is beautiful, growing even stranger and more beautiful in the later acts.

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 climax is deflating and lets down a fabulously grey woods, heather and moors production design and the wicked promise contained in the story’s premise — that there’s a little Lady Macbeth in every woman, at least as far as men are concerned.

The film’s third act surprises are fascinating post Golden Age of Queer Cinema choices.

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.

The players, the stakes and the milieu make Tetris well worth your time, especially for anyone nostalgic for all the time we wasted on this simple yet elementally addicting game.

Madden, screenwriter Michelle Ashford and the cast perform their greatest service in reminding us that real history, unadorned, can make the best drama.

Aniston's work opposite the screen's premiere mild-mannered funnyman shows her at her most engaged and pitch perfect.

Raunchy, rude and weapons-grade wicked, Girls Trip is the funniest big studio comedy since “Trainwreck.”

Sweet, sentimental, silly and star-studded, Nanny McPhee Returns is one of the best children's movies of the year.

Pegg is the very picture of schizophrenia — funny and charming, here and there, lucid when he can get it together to lie to a doctor, bug-eyed and furious when Theo’s independence is threatened and his view that “time” is being controlled…by somebody — isn’t taken seriously.

What Collee and Maras and their cast get across most clearly is the utter helplessness and hopelessness of the victims. Again, this isn’t “Die Hard.”

Straight Up wrestles with its messaging, which bogs the picture down. It takes a few predictable turns, and some predictably unpredictable ones. But Sweeney maintains the manic patter even when the pacing flags.

The real value in Greenfield-Sanders’ film, which goes into limited theatrical release this weekend before coming to PBS in 2020, is in Morrison’s struggles with the white patriarchy of American letters.

The characters feel real, the situations not that-far-fetched, and the dialogue has the halting, fresh-picked life of improvisation, a tribute to the script by “mumblecore” mistress Lynn Shelton, who also directed, and Michael Patrick O’Brien of “Saturday Night Live.” No lie, it is laugh out loud funny.

What a charming little animated whimsy Chicken for Linda! is.

It’s bracing and inspiring, what filmmakers Keith Fulton and Leo Pepe show us in that first hour.

The Proposal is serene, patient and sucks you into this quandary with skill. To her credit, Magid makes us care, even though we’re not sure what she’s got in mind or if she’s as persuasive as she thinks she is.

A winking comedy with dark underpinnings and some of Shakespeare’s most wicked wordplay.

A grueling, amusing and eventually inspiring bio-pic about the greatest long distance swimmer of them all.

Gould creates a fascinating portrait of the work and the patient, harried and detail-oriented folks who do it.

Barbarian is a horror movie that gets the basics right. All of them.

It’s more engrossing than terrifying, horrific instead of simply scary.

It takes a while to get up to speed, but once it does, “Farmageddon” delivers the jokes, visual puns and slapstick in a mad flurry.

13 Minutes is a taut, smart and straightforward bio-drama of this largely forgotten early figure in German resistance to the Hitler regime.

It’s a fun film, not quite as lighthearted as the similar “Knuckleball” documentary of a short while back, but amusing enough.

Inception is an elegant, portentous ride, though I’m not sure Nolan is any closer to visualizing the real (dream) deal than Hitchcock was.

Glass Chin is a boxing picture with very little actual boxing.

For shout at the screen, redemptive revenge that you can sink your teeth into, Bad Day for the Cut is hard to beat. Even if you almost need subtitles to unravel the dialogue at times.

It’s a warm portrait, warts and all, if not as critical and definitive as one might like.

Like "42," Cesar Chavez lacks the budget to feel truly epic in scope. The violence is scattered, shocking and personal, the struggles within the union muted but the outrage — is palpable.

Mosul is a combat thriller that passes on an appreciation of professionalism and patriotism in a different language, in different uniforms, but with a universal focus on “mission” and “hope.”

It’s no “48 Hrs.” or “Fugitive,” but Below Zer is a good one, with or without subtitles.

It’s manipulative and overlong, too loud and “Incredibles” action-packed for the very young. But the manipulation errs on the side of mercy, compassion, sacrifice and humanity.

In movie fan shorthand? “Blood Simple” meets “Mystic Pizza.”

Aussie director Robert Connolly (“The Bank”) takes his time with this material, slowly building up characters, layer by layer. The stresses of the drought are stated overtly at first, and slip into the background.

The supporting cast is game and Moss is riveting, transformed and transforming before our eyes, and not just in a “rock bod” vs. “mom bod” sense. She never lets Her Smell turn boring and her scent is what lingers after the credits have rolled.

Director Scott Leberecht’s eye-opening and memory-jogging documentary is a Spaz Williams — he was given the nickname ironically, because “Look at me. I’m Popeye!” — appreciation and in many ways a rehabilitation project.

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

It is funny, and Redford, gracious as ever, makes a wonderful straight-man for a comic co-costar who has the face, voice and posture of a geezer who probably should have tackled this healing hike 20 years earlier.

Bell, appearing on camera but speaking in voice-over like everybody else, makes the celebration fun and the tragedy bittersweet in this fine tribute to the mother she only got to know and appreciate “too late” to gain the full benefits of being raised by an icon.

Put The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster on your list of must-see/won’t-be-here-long summer thrillers, crowd-pleasing movie comfort food that embraces an old formula and manages to do something smart, insightful and topically relevent with it.

Run & Jump is an uncommonly offbeat and charmingly unconventional romance, an Irish comedy that lets itself get very serious, now and again, and is all the richer for it.

It’s an absolutely chilling road picture, filled with tension, dread and a threat of violence. The longer we don’t know where that threat is coming from, the more suspenseful it is.

These movies are about reminding us how these songs made us feel when they were new, and how bowled over we were by the people who performed them. Ackie, Lemmons & Co. do that, and rescue Houston from her “tragedy” to remind us why the world fell in love with her and once-in-a-generation voice.

Florence is hilarious, and sadly fragile, and Streep makes her pain both funny and poignant.

More impressive than moving, more thought-provoking than heartfelt — chilling in its magnificence.

It’s not on a par with the sublime “Wallace & Gromit” films or the brilliant “Chicken Run.” But it’s quite funny, and delightful to see finger prints in not-quite-perfect clay arms and legs.

A chaotic and engrossing mystery built around that evergreen of the espionage and political intrigue genre, the hunt for a “mole” in Korean intelligence agencies.

Souffle-light and long on charm.

Maybe it’s not as revealing as its teasing title suggests, but Tab Hunter Confidential makes a splendid history lesson and light, fun portrait of what you can only call a blessed life, one lived with a big, open secret that only old age convinced him he should let out.

A little more chaos might have truly lit this one up.

Kusijanovic has given us a “Lolita” without exploitation, a “Knife in Water” with spear guns, and a disturbing riff on toxic masculinity and rash teenaged impulses simmered in a seaside chowder of sex and gamesmanship, making for a dazzling first feature.

It’s repetitive and jargon-filled and a little too long. But “Zero” is still a fascinating story, troubling and chilling when you realize that the people in charge of the government now are the very people we need government to protect us from — scammers, frauds, “wealth re-distribution” hustlers and their protectors.

It is astonishing how off-key Bundles goes, and how badly the violence is introduced into this light dramedy, and how grimly and poorly-acted that violence plays out.

Here’s a fascinating piece of history that escaped much of the world’s notice, when it happened back in 1988.

In Maker’s tale, first-time documentary director Bill Gallagher finds a story of privation and perseverance, personal pain, of tragedies and triumphs. It’s a running saga reminder that life and sport only rarely dole out ” Hollywood ending.” But the struggle is its own reward and is inspiring in its own right.

Tenet is as much mind-challenging, action-packed fun as sitting in cinema wearing a mask for two and a half hours can be.

Funny, few people have fond things to say about the decade that followed. But Studio 54 they want to remember, or hear about if they were too young to get a gander at it in its glory. Studio 54 gives them their most thorough look back yet.

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.

It’s a lot to take in, and Fail State doesn’t leave the viewer with a lot of hope. When the Obama Administration figured out how to grade such operations and shut down the ones plainly set up to fail their students, Corinthian, Everest, ITT Tech and DeVry went away.

With Invisible Hands, filmmaker Shraysi Tandon has made a damning expose, and a documentary piece of advocacy journalism.

The frights may be standard issue, but that novel setting, the ways characters rise to or shrink from their greatest tests, and the grim nature of human life in this most fragile of ages make Out of Darkness a winner, right down to the minimalist pun of its title.

But as we follow the back and forth of a newly-empowered Britney Spears in battling her father, any documentary that takes up the cause of an embattled public figure, even one long dead, at least leaves us with hope.

A tale worthy of a hundred Cold War thrillers.

Davis flirts with dazzling, at times, all dolled up in a tri-cornered hat, a shower curtain for a cape and a horse to ride into negotiations with. It’s a delightful performance as a deranged character, somebody who has let the proliferation of construction cranes in Miami drive him nuts.

It’s a moving, harrowing film that hangs on a beatifically transparent performance by screen newcomer Zhaila Farmer.

Narrowing the focus to this song elevates the film and its subject, and makes a fascinating window into one creative life, lived in curiosity, looking for answers and groping — for seven years — just to come up with a song that explains it all.

Perhaps only an Iraq War combat vet would dare to tackle Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with the sort of sarcasm and gallows humor of My Dead Friend Zoe.

It's a celebration of great old actors set in a world of once-great singers, and Hoffman's affection for them and the material shows in every frame.

The dreamy, diffuse nature of reality in this narrative makes it feel incomplete. But Zalopany grabs our attention and has us fearing, not just for Kea’s precarious hold on survival, but for what we might not know about her that may or may not be revealed as she sinks or swims just off “Waikiki” beach.

It’s adorable, the most adorable thing on Netflix right now.

In showing us the upside of turning a deaf ear to those with the money to amplify their self-interested voices of doubt, Gameau and 2040 give us the tiniest of hopes that maybe things will get better soon enough for us to escape the very worst.

The film could have used a little context....But “The Race that Eats its Young” is still a fun and quick introduction to a sport that, to most of us, seems so extreme as to invite the sort of eccentrics the filmmakers capture here.

Exarchopoulos is a revelation, wearing her neediness, vulnerability and arousal with every muscle in her face, her posture, even her hair. It’s an utterly naked performance, literally and figuratively.

As spy thrillers go, more chilling than thrilling. But that's what makes it easy to relate to.

A movie franchise can only take us by surprise once, and by that measure, Iron Man 2 is a preordained letdown. But so much of what gave the first film its gas — is still here.

In the end, perhaps it is less important that Cold Case Hammarskjöld finds or doesn’t find its “smoking gun,” or that it makes or doesn’t make its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

The kids are collectively adorable and talented. The adults could not have been cast better, with Riseborough and Graham relishing every over-the-top moment as the Parents from Hell — or at least Hemel Hampstead — Lynch shimmering as a teacher with a heart and Thompson giving us a seriously Soviet vibe as the fireplug-shaped ogre Trunchbull.

Here’s a film, opening in a nation overrun with cooking shows and entire TV networks devoted to food and a whole section of society labeling itself “foodies.” And bless her big, butter-basted heart, here’s the woman changed it.

I prefer my documentaries to be more informative than Gods of Mexico. But that prehistoric cinema connection renders this mesmerizing film as magical as it is historical.

Marshall makes for an entertaining take on history and Boseman’s winning performance a playful spin on an icon the passing decades have chiseled in stone as a Great Man and one of the giants of American legal history.

There’s nothing salacious in the new documentary about the Bureau’s investigation of King, MLK/FBI. What this film sets out to document, put into context and explain is something that began life as Bureau File Number 100-106670 and that came to look, with hindsight, like a vendetta against the civil rights leader and Nobel laureate.

The Fire Inside is a feel-good picture that feeds off our disappointment that not everybody who succeeds against the odds wholly “succeeds” against those odds, and makes us wonder if this will ever change.

No matter how big your TV, you have to think the biggest screen is where this wondrous relic of the pop festivals of the 1960s belongs.

The most ambitious thing about this laid-back documentary was creating a tribute concert and getting big names to perform in it, and that is lovely to hear and behold. The glory of Echo in the Canyon is gathering the oral histories of a generation of performers who are passing from the scene, getting their final words on how it all happened.

Beautiful Beings, titled “Berdreymi” in Icelandic, is superb at capturing the universal problem of idle, unsupervised boys making bad choices, creating “Lord of the Flies” pecking orders and lashing out in violence because nobody’s taught them otherwise.

The chaotic violence, when co-writers/director Guido van Driel and Lennert Hillege dish it out, is frenetic — a drunk’s weaving and teetering hand-held camer chase, sudden turns towards the brutal, an assault that seems to come out of nowhere — to a drunk.

Whatever twists this puzzle tosses at us, the film reminds us that a great actor, in close-up, telling a story with just her or his eyes, is still the greatest special effect the movies have to offer. This cast telling this story ensures us that nobody will be dozing off Before I Go to Sleep.

Invisible Beauty is a documentary that makes one reconsider, yet again, the role fashion plays in society by how it has always narrowed “standards of beauty,” how it presents “what power looks like” and by remembering a woman who was one of the first through the door to “inclusion.”

Horror is all about that short-circuit the screen's technical manipulations cause in our brain, so this isn't high art. But Mama is easily the most moving, most chilling ghost story since "Insidious," an emotional tale efficiently and affectingly told.

Final Portrait is a slight little nothing of a story, but I delighted in its wordplay, its depiction of a Paris as imagined in the greys and dull browns of Giacometti’s art.

It’s too much a movie of “types,” and loses track of story elements that would seem important enough to warrant further exploration. The whole Christian conservative law-and-order mantle feels like a fuzzy afterthought on Jane, forgotten far too soon.

Mericoffer keeps this interior journey on simmer for most of the film, only exploding in his “protests too much” reaction to being confronted with some version of his true self. It’s a compact, tightly-wound performance, which suits the film beautifully.

There’s something so delicious when Brits such as Thompson and Irons sink their fangs – sorry – into Deep South dialect. Thompson devours scenery, supporting players and dialogue with every “Bless your heart, shooo-gah” in the script, and Irons curls his non-existent mustache with every syrupy zinger.

Baby Ruby is pitched somewhere between domestic melodrama, a tale of a crack-up, and paranoid thriller. Wohl and Merlant keep shifting the ground underneath Jo and the viewer, throwing us off balance.

What lifts this Irish film above the “Here they come, SHOOT’em!” trap are the moral dilemmas, the shaky ground underneath either side of those dilemmas and performances that can be downright wrenching in their humanity.

The Third Wife lacks the Technicolor saturated hues of the great Zhang Yimou Chinese period pieces it imitates — “Ju Dou,” Red Sorghum” and “To Live” among them. It lacks the emotional, dramatic punch of those stories as well.

It’s more clever than smart, but here’s an animated film for adults (violence, nudity) that challenges and rewards the viewer who — yes — paid attention in class, and whose bucket list includes MoMa, the Louvre, the Musée D’Orsay, the Reina Sofia and Prado, Met and Musée Rodin.

The delightful “Footnotes” is grounded in reality, light on its feet, with just enough intrigues, betrayals and twists to fill 80 brisk minutes with minor delights.

Five Fingers for Marseilles is a modern day Western, a tale of revolutionary South Africa and its aftermath, a world of blood, revenge, “stepping in” to right a great wrong, and fighting back. It’s a Sotho “Shane,” brutally beautiful and iconic, fraught with symbolism, harrowing in its violence and its consequences.

Silver’s given us a wry, wise and whimsical movie who cutting edges are somewhat removed from the lead characters, whose wit involves both leaning into Jewish stereotypes, and upending them.

Apollo 10 1/2 might have been utterly forgettable without the rotoscoped adding of computer-painted rose-colored glasses. But in this form, it becomes something timeless, not autobiography (Linklater’s parents divorced when he was 7), but a sweet and somewhat innocent memory play animated in brighter-than-real-life color, a summary of how things were in an America that accomplished great things even as its institutions strained at revolutionary/evolutionary change that continues to this day.

Erlingsson takes a fairly cut-and-dried caper comedy and tosses twist after twist into it, letting Woman at War surprise us just as often as it repeats a running gag (the poor, cursing bicycle-camping Spaniard).

The Woman King reminds us that the real history we don’t know makes for a great story, and a grand action yarn. You want to learn where all the good parts and “realistic” elements of that comic book movie “Black Panther” and its sequel came from? Gaze upon “The Woman King,” and be thrilled.

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.

In covering all the bases, the film’s energy can’t help but flag in the later acts. But Cortes has made an impressive music history that restores a “king” to his rightful place in rock royalty, one that acknowledges that everything outrageous about the music and the people who perform it, the stuff “your parents hated” about it, as Waters puts it, started with Little Richard Penniman.

Saulnier’s made a slow-burn thriller that surprises and keeps us guessing and waiting, mostly for that moment when somebody draws “First Blood,” and even then he trips up expectations, and deliciously so.

There’s a touch of “The Invisible Man” to this unsettling story of the misery of being married to a cruel control freak. But “Swallow,” for all its People Magazine psychoanalysis, is harrowing in different ways and gripping in its myopia. All Hunter has is this mania for “control” of one thing in her life — what she puts in her mouth. All we have is worry over her mental health, and discomfort in confronting it.

It’s a moving but simple, unfussy film about several subjects Wajda identified with — individuality in a conformist state, Polish identity, the artist’s role in society and the state’s often-stated rejection of all of that.

Kore-eda peels away the layers of this family and Ryôta’s story building towards the latest typhoon headed their way. It is the third act’s riding out of that storm that this light and faintly despairing tale, with its almost-comic anti-hero, turns poignant.

Even though there’s nothing we haven’t seen before in this movie, she and Some Freaks remind us not just of the cruelties of the teen years, the insecurities and secret shame, but of how young we are when we figure out that it’s all just perception.

Thanks to its most engaging, sympathetic stars, even the over-familiar path it takes lets us find the warmth in the predictable first steps its characters take toward a richer life.

This isn’t a straightforward biography, but Tell Me When I Die is how many a filmmaker of an artistic bent would love to go out and hope to be remembered — with a little philosophy, a little sadness and a smile of reminiscence.

The writer-director and his star manage several chills, a bit of breathless suspense and some eyes-averting gore as they challenge us to stare down the threat of “Men” their EveryWoman faces and confronts. And they put us in her shoes, shaken by their violence, handicapped by her own empathy and guilt until she sees the Big Societal Picture — the cruel manipulation of a system engineered to keep her from “the forbidden fruit” and under control.

Low Life is a jittery, nerve-wracking thriller, a peek behind the “gotcha” cell phone camera of a confrontational stalker-of-stalkers.

Ghost Protocol is the most action-packed, most jokey and self-aware, most James Bond-ish of all the Cruise Mission films.

The film, which also details Pang’s Chinese immigrant upbringing and mentions her subsequent life and career in and around the music business, joins other building block documentaries like “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” in performing two services — keeping his memory alive, and wholly charting the many currents of the life of this singular figure in global pop culture history.

Trumbo is a warm and witty profile in courage.

A blend of comedy, song and dance, drama and male and female servicemember interviews, it’s funny, biting and tuneful, and it takes you right back there if you lived through it, and might be an eye-opener for activist “Ok, Boomer” millennials.

The documentary Room 237 is an ostensibly thoughtful deep reading, a deconstruction of Stanley Kubrick’s film of Stephen King’s 1980 novel “The Shining.” What it really is, is a bunch of obsessives obsessing about an obsessive movie maker’s obsessive movie.

Past Life is best appreciated as an attempt to finally give permission, at the source of the grievance (Israel), not to forget, but to at least forgive.

The fact that Bulger, at long last, is rotting in jail, is little consolation. Perhaps only a Hollywood version of this story, one starring Johnny Depp, can give it a satisfying conclusion.

The Conductor is an engaging, musically-adept documentary that tracks Marin Alsop’s dogged march to make her “first woman to head a major symphony orchestra” dream come true.

Miracle is a thriller of deceptive simplicity and paralyzing jolts.

Charles stuck “Outside” reminds us not just that we’re not alone, no matter how much we want to be, and that in the Big City, the biggest journey can be one of just a few steps on foot crossing a chasm you’ve built in your own head.

Al Zahrani, making her screen debut, holds our interest by not holding her temper. Maryam is young enough to be impatient, traditional enough to play by the rules and realistic enough to see the futility of it all.

It would be hard to understate how intensely lovable Scrambled is.

The Ornithologist is so stunningly strange and out of its time that this slow and deliberate film holds your attention, making you wonder what wonder or calamity will befall Fernando next.

In My Own Time gives us a taste of what might have been much more than a soulful novelty act, an American Original who might have been too “authentic” for her time, if not for ours.

It’s never self-congratulatory, rarely “I told you so,” although if anybody on Planet Earth is entitled to owning that phrase it’s Al Gore.

The fourth comic book movie of the summer is the best comic book movie of the summer. Johnston has delivered a light, clever and deftly balanced adventure picture with real lump in the throat nostalgia.

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.

Pretty much the perfect scary movie for kids.

Once she gets out of her own way, von Trotta provides a generally breezy overview, appreciation and dissection of one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived.

Alarming, inspiring and yes, laugh-out-loud funny, Hail Satan? is a delightful documentary dissection of America’s favorite anti-religion, The Satanic Temple.

The Program wisely hangs on Foster’s fierce performance, transforming himself into Lance.

They (Refn and Gosling) have collaborated on a car picture that unnerves us with its idling quiet, and then pins our ears back when they stomp the accelerator.

This quiet, dread-filled combat picture works, sketching in the men beyond the “types” in impressionistic scenes that relate history, advance the story and break the heart.

In the Shadow of Iris is a tight and twisty French thriller about a kidnapping gone wrong. Sexy casting and a taste of kink dress up this tale that begins conventionally, throws its first sleight-of-hand trick at us, and saves a few more for the third act.

Seriously, for a movie about garbage, Wasted! (Anna Chai and Nari Kye co-directed it) is awfully appetizing.

The performances here, gathered mostly at campsight jam sessions, under the various meet-and-pick tents all over Felts Park in Galax, or on the stages there, are just jaw dropping.

Beasts on No Nation makes a terrific vehicle for Elba and a grim reminder that even if we’re tired of hearing of it.

It’s the directing debut of Angus MacLachlan, who wrote “Junebug” and thus gave Amy Adams the perfect introduction to the world. “Goodbye” displays the same canny ear for human interactions, both comical and confessional.

Argentina, 1985 earns its gravitas from the gripping testimony of those who survived kidnapping, or who witnessed it. And while the closing argument might not be “To Kill a Mockingbird” poetic, it is blunt and moving.

The helplessness one gets being pinned down and tickled, the chilling fear of that, nicely parallels the chill and fear of reporting a story powerful people don’t want reported, which Farrier shows us in this odd and shocking expose.

The film’s “star” and his work, his actors, his peers, his filmdom fans are all that matter. And they’re packed into this 107 minute biography and fan letter.

Berg reminds us that even in the worst disaster, people can be selfless, heroic, and in the case of Aaron Dale Burkeen, professional even if those who gamble with their fates are not.

Fright Night can also boast of having the best vampire-villain in ages. The bushy-browed Colin Farrell was BORN to wear fangs.

On Her Shoulders also gets to the essence of Nadia. Her speeches (in English and Arabic with English subtitles) move audience after audience to tears.

"It was a perfect tabloid story," the Brit Peter Tory, who covered it, remembers. "Kinky sex, religion, kidnapping, a beauty queen."

It’s a fine film, and a surprising history lesson — not because the Germans don’t remember the Holocaust, but because we’re reminded that there was a time when they didn’t want to.

Labiki isn’t above manipulating us as she lightly underlines the points she wants to emphasize, but she never lets Capernaum turn into a lecture.

We miss the cute, upbeat tone of the film’s opening chapter in its latter stages, as the family becomes CBD refugees (people move where the legal drug that’s helping them is). But Waldo on Weed is still the most adorable piece of cinematic advocacy for legalizing pot ever filmed.

Yes, it’s aimed at believers. But Reynolds & Co. avoid the traps of Mel Gibson’s movie and many others by making these times horrifically real, but these Biblical figures and what they were about compelling in their kindness, soft-selling their message so sweetly that even a Roman with blood on his hands will question his Empire, his religion and his way of living before all is said and done.

Buried in a “fat suit,” his physical acting limited to the life of immobility Charlie has sentenced himself to, Fraser will break your heart playing the character’s pain and compassion.

Stearns has still made us laugh through the grimaces for much of “The Art of Self-Defense,” and if nothing else, has given anyone — “Karate Kid” parents or adults — a veritable checklist of the warning signs that maybe this dojo isn’t for you, signs that perhaps the sensei doesn’t use the word “teacher” because what he really wants aren’t classes, but a cult.

A vivid, estrogen-charged charmer, a winning twist on “chasing your dream” and “You can have it all” with just enough sober slapdowns to keep it honest.

Spiro has still gotten a striking, gritty and touching debut feature out of this cast, a movie that may lack much in the way of surprises but makes up for it with toughness, empathy and realism.

With its lesser-known cast, The Kid Detective was always going to get lost in the cinematic shuffle, with or without a pandemic closing most theaters. But Morgan and his new muse have concocted a whodunit that could give Hercule Poirot a run for his money in a contest for the year’s best mystery.

Offers a decent if superficial portrait of the man and a vast sampling of the work that identifies him, undeniably, as an artist.

Valadez lets her actor’s faces do most of the talking here. It’s a music-free film of long, tense silences and splashes of fraught shakedowns and terror.

It's a little racy for our "High School Musical" set. But Bran Nue Dae (say it out loud) will play anywhere fans like a musical so cute you want to pinch its cheeks.

Steven Soderbergh, rightly considered one of Hollywood’s smartest movie makers, is at his cleverest in Side Effects, a canny, cunning big idea thriller in a minor key, an engrossing zeitgeist whodunit about Wall Street, Big Pharma, prescription drugs and the power we give psychiatry and psychologists.

Gloria has a palpable loneliness about it, and Garcia makes us feel that and fear the emptiness that is staring Gloria in the face. Not a lot happens in this closely-observed character study, but few recent movies have dared to show this stage of life, the creeping solitude that memories of your disco past cannot fend off.

But Norton makes a sturdy, inexperienced but curious hero, a man every bit as idealistic about “the truth” and Sarsgaard’s Duranty is about “a movement bigger than any one person,” his “agenda.”

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.

Casting Salonga, a singing actress best known for Disney’s animated “Mulan,” and not letting her sing is a cheat. But Watson is a laid-back delight and makes Rose’s odyssey make sense musically and emotionally.

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

Across the River and Into the Trees is sedate to the point of “slow,” old fashioned to a degree that will feel dated, and yet every minute of it — every gorgeous image, every twist and turn, even the predictable ones — is to be savored.

Sword of God is a minimalist tale, without a lot of story and only a few shocking instances of violence that don’t require translation or deciphering. This is “First Contact” as it played out in many primitive places over the course of many centuries.

Hamm gives us everything we saw over the years-long run of “Mad Men” in an intricate, concise 110 minute movie — swagger, romance, hope and secrets, professional mastery and gutted personal oblivion.

Craig, in his final turn in the role, makes Bond not just vulnerable (he’s managed that before) but someone with a sense of humor.

A glorious and accomplished cast walking (never horseback riding) through a vivid, overcast 1830s snowscape, an American Gothic nightmare too generic and a tad too slow, but made entertaining by what every actor on the payroll brings to the show.

The film doesn’t significantly alter the picture of Soros that has emerged from a “60 Minutes” profile here or a CNN interview there. But those aren’t the media organizations lying about his background, exaggerating his influence or twisting his motives. They aren’t the ones drawing Satan’s horns on his head.

But he’s (McQueen) still made one of the best thrillers of the year and one of the best heist pictures since David Mamet made “Heist,” the modern benchmark for excellence in violent, complex cinematic capers.

Lucy (Hadley Belle Miller) is still full of nickel-a-session psychotherapy, Linus still soulful enough to recognize his friend’s heart. And Charlie’s sister Sally (Mariel Sheets) still assumes Linus is her “Sweet Baboo.”

A winning "Robin Hood and his Merry Doormen" comedy about getting even. A cast of comedy specialists each deliver their comic specialties to perfection, delivering double-takes and one liners so well that you don't notice how clunky the actual caper in this caper comedy is.

All this piling on turns Ghost of Peter Sellers into a “pathography,” the nickname given biographies that torch the reputations of the dead. And frankly, it’s deserved.

A sensitive, unconventional baseball tale rendered in the muted tones of dread, a young player’s fear of letting everyone down.

The “banality of evil” was never so hypocritical, so banal and so evil.

Mossville: When Great Trees Fall is an infuriating film that captures “environmental racism” at its most obvious, a film shot at a little known but infamous ground zero example in the American South.

It’s all a bit on-the-nose, but writer-director Keith Behrman keeps it topical and touching, even if he never quite transcends prioritizing that topicality.

Co-writer/director Russell Harbaugh has created a chamber tragedy, intimate in its dimensions, devastating in the damage we see spiral out of that one death.

Jones has a winsome screen presence and a pleasant, lilting voice that may not sell Ruby as “Berklee School of Music” material, but thin or not, it gets by. As does CODA.

If you like your fights righteously brutal and head-buttingly realistic and your car chases Vin Diesel free, this is the thriller for you.

Director Rekhi maintains that mystery and steadily ramps up the suspense as we follow his heroine down a rabbit hole filled with vipers.

It’s a poetic, mystical and meandering immersion in the life-as-a-slave experience, both for the viewer and for our on-screen surrogate.

This comic travelogue is like a “Manhattan” era Woody Allen starring in an Italian/Roman version of Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” — droll, scenic and adorable.

Katz’s script, settings and characters surprise and delight, and Kirke, Kravitz and Cho deliver performances perfectly in sync with a murder mystery set in Hollywood.

As volcanic as Maguire needs to be, it’s those who react to Fischer most tellingly — Sarsgaard’s priest, and Schreiber’s Spassky — that make Pawn Sacrifice the gripping and entertaining history lesson that it is.

Tobias Lindholm’s film has documentary realism even in its more melodramatic moments.

If you don’t like buzzwords or self-“actualization” jargon, Disclosure is going to be a hard pill to swallow. It’s a film awash in actresses, activists, models and historians (overwhelmingly trans female), almost all of them using this new nomenclature that the public at large is struggling to catch up with.

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.

The Oscar winning Moore slings just enough of an accent for her lines to be funny. Her top-knot hairstyle says everything about the character we need to know — frosty, severe.

Has a lot of that winking wit we've come to expect from our post-"Spider Man" Marvel movies. It has a hunky, self-mocking young star, solid support from a couple of Oscar winners and the slick sheen that state-of-the-art effects can give you.

[Schumer’s] made this woman real, flawed, funny and carnal.

What’s surprising is the way Welcome to Leith achieves a balance in the storytelling.

The Vanishing manages to shock even as it fails to truly surprise, a movie that takes a worn situation and wrings fresh pain out of it as it reaches — over-reaches — to solve a mystery that is probably even more mysterious than whatever the screenwriter’s cooked up.

The fists fly, the bullets blaze and the mayhem borders on magnificent in John Wick: Chapter 2, a sequel that ups the artistic ante even as it boosts the body count of that sleeper hit about the assassin’s assassin played by Keanu Reeves.

“BANG!” isn’t shy about looking at the dark side. Berns was in a business with brutally sharp elbows, and he learned quickly to give as good as he got.

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.

Throwing somebody with one “particular skill” that doesn’t include violence, criminal or espionage subterfuge or the like? As an exercise in screenwriting problem-solving that’s almost always a fun film to watch.

The reporter/convict dynamic doesn’t have enough layers to carry the film without some hint of mystery. The relationship between the two, chilling as it is, never raises this “Story” from generic to profound.

Earnest, righteous, historically accurate and often entertaining.

There’s a laid back confidence to the jokes, a flippancy to his chats with corporate types, consultants and nutrition experts, and a down home connection to the interviews (a farmer cries, fast food workers decry their exploitation) with real people trapped in this onerus machine.

Tamahori is a filmmaker in both his elements here, a Maori who never allows this Maori story to turn patronizing, an action auteur (he counts a Bond film, a “XXX” thriller and “The Edge” among his credits) who knows how to make violence visceral, and in combat scenes, an epic experience.

Farmiga directs and plays this as a woman with questions. Thus, the tone is a bit all over the place - frank discussion and depictions of sex, but with an equally frank embrace of Christianity, talking the talk and walking the walk.

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.

Sorry We Missed You is Loach’s intimate, scathing take on life in the “gig economy,” a family not getting ahead or even holding its own, but swimming as frantically as it can even as they spiral down the drain. It’s his best film in years, and with a resume that includes “My Name is Joe” and “The Angel’s Share,” that’s saying something.

Heartwarming, amusing, apalling and sad, this story of flawed baseball team owner, promoter/cheerleader Mike Veeck takes us through the ups and downs of a third generation “baseball guy,” and manages to be damned entertaining pretty much start to finish.

The world Sakamoto brings back to life . . . is as vivid as any saga of samurai, shoguns, ronin and clans.

Dolphin Reef is DisneyNature’s best undersea documentary ever, and a great reason to sign up for Disney+ all by itself. Leave it on as the credits roll to see how the team got these amazing images and you’ll be even more impressed.

Tina Fey gives her finest, funniest big screen performance by essentially doing in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot what she did so well on TV’s “30 Rock.”

This German story, when it works, is fraught with the tension young people there recognize as the stakes in this struggle

It’s an engrossing story, even at its most gruesome or theatrical. For my money, it’s more satisfying, cinematic, exotic and allegorical than the thematically and historically similar “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

This adorable documentary places this comic survivor and pioneer on a pedestal and recounts an epic career that had her on stage with Evelyn Nesbit — the scandalous vamp of “Ragtime” — in the ’20s.

Writer-director Nida Manzoor’s debut feature is outlandish, over-the-top and furiously funny.

At the end of the day, ordinary people trying to get justice or revenge or closure on their own, or providing that as a paid service that they’re ill-equipped to deliver, is damned funny.

Director de Fontenay has a great eye for detail — filling Mobile Homes with inside cock-fighting particulars and manufactured housing factory work, roadhouses and after hours “clubs” where the chicken fighting takes place.

Brighton 4th is the kind of ambling, immersive movie that you check out for the chance to visit a different culture and see the world through others’ eyes, but that you remember for its warmth, the connection that binds people who never let themselves be simply resigned to their family obligations.

Drawling, florid Southern homosexuals who were “out” long before that was done, or safe to do, they make a fascinating, intensely quotable pair of wits in Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation, a documentary built on their relationship with each other, their art, their respective psyches, fame and the world they lived in.

Days of Future Past is most everything we’d hoped the summer’s earlier popcorn pictures would be, most of all — fun.

Death and new life, cultural prejudices and that Swiss obsession with money play into a film that is Germanic in its darkness, as subtle as a wet slap and funny? Eventually.

Kier makes a most companionable tour guide for us as the day gently, sadly and amusingly makes its way to the long night to come.

The gorgeous flora and fauna of Sri Lanka are well-represented, even as the monkey business ranges from cute to cutesy.

The performances are documentary real, with just enough melodrama about them to keep things interesting.

Take that sign at the entrance to his Tulbagh, South Africa compound seriously – "Beware of Mr. Baker."

Still, this is Zhang at his peak — twenty years before the horrors of “The Great Wall,” working with his muse (Gong Li will be seen next in Disney’s “Mulan”) and showing off a China that the Communist oligarchs would eventually come to emulate — of Western style luxury and opulence, and the casual, business-as-usual corruption that helps one acquire it.

An adventure drama with sea legs, a story of heroism steeped in period detail, played with sympathy and stoicism by people who respect such old fashioned virtues.

A simple tale, sharply drawn and smartly told, a portrait of a people, a place and a centuries-old conflict that this wise yet myopic citrus farmer cannot get his mind around any more than we can.

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.

Writer-director Rob Garver has gotten at the essence of the woman — a frustrated playwright who turned criticism into “short stories and sonnets,” as one fan says.

Vorozhbit opens up her play just enough to make it cinematic, without losing the power that these disparate stories from a combat zone carry. One watches it with the hope that some day she’ll get to make another, and that Ukrainian cinemas will be open to show it, if they’re still standing.

The Swedish Rapace thrives in roles that call for action, toughness and vulnerability. She’s perfect in this part, where her forward motion and capacity for acting out violence drives the picture.

Perry's great gift to this unfilmable play is getting it on the screen, his sharp eye for casting and his evident affection and sympathy for black womanhood, even in movies in which he doesn't don a dress.

Director Omid Nooshin gives this story harrowing touches largely through arresting camera angles and aggressive editing. He ensures that “Last Passenger” features a couple of jaw-dropping moments even as it traverse familiar ground.

The daft feather-light French farce Potiche is a period piece designed to remind us of just how far and how fast women have come in the Western world.

This comedy produces the biggest, loudest laughs of any movie this summer.

Brooding Oscar winner Casey Affleck may be playing a morose burnout case, but his eyes give away genuine delight in his scenes with the titular The Old Man & a Gun.

Co-directors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyma give us a sci-fi dreamscape, a colorful slice of Africa, lovely multi-lingual music, and a “There’s no such thing as a free iPhone” message in their musical. That’s quite the hack they’ve pulled off.

Bayona also made one of the most visceral and moving survival epics in film history, the tsunami story “The Impossible.” He tells this tale of battling impossible odds with compassion and an empathy that make it quite moving at times.

Affleck ratchets up the suspense and raises the stakes with the film’s third act, but takes his sweet indulgent time getting us there. He establishes the relationship and the characters in a patience-testing twelve minute opening scene.

There’s intrigue, danger, fear and hope all clinging to Tom as he visits the farm.

Robert Duvall may be 83, but he’s still up to playing a real Texas hell raiser on the screen. He can hold his own with bad hombres.

The Edge of Democracy won’t convince that “It CAN happen here.” It’ll make you wonder how far down the hole we’ve already tumbled.

Zamecka’s all-access film means we see Ola’s desperation, and Magda’s resignation. Each one needs a break, and each is counting on the other to give it to her. Seeing Ola with a baby half-brother in her lap is just chilling.

As the “Nostradamus of fashion” (from Bozek’s written narration performed by “Sex and the City” star Parker), he had a higher calling. “He helped people ‘see’ in a new way.” Indeed he did. And The Times of Bill Cunningham helps us see him in a new way.

A soft-spoken cast given to underplaying, a muddy, overcast setting in the beaver-trapping era on The Frontier and reveries about the simple pleasures of home, dearly bought in a rough and tumble world of men make this quiet, almost melancholy movie one to be savored.

The mercurial Brand is spot on as the mercurial Aldous, putting over outrageously titled tunes with panache.

It’s historic, set in Kowloon’s long gone but infamous high rise “walled city” slum, and between the over-the-top action, deadpan underreactions and silly supernaturalism, it is laugh-out-loud funny

Phantom Thread is a dry, chilly and occasionally droll tale of unconventional love in 1950s British haute couture. But whatever this cryptic, slow and dramatically thin character study lacks, Lewis lovingly paints over with one last meticulously detailed, compact and sharply observed performance.

Eye in the Sky is a tasty ticking-clock thriller parked at the intersection of politics and propaganda, military technology and combat morality. It’s not the first movie about the ethics of drone warfare. The low-budget nail-biter “Drones” beat it to the punch by a couple of years.

Greatest Movie isn't Spurlock's best. It plays like an overlong, overly cutesy TV news report (woman and man on street interviews included) on product placement.

The film’s scruffy charms do not dim with age. If you’re in the mood for a musical roman a clef where the songs are sharp and the singing is effortlessly on key, don’t underestimate Songwriter.

A first-rate one-woman-against-the-system drama.

A most romantic way to spend your time at the movies this fall, a “date picture” about do over dates that works, this time around.

Forbes makes this story compelling, moving and provocative enough to prompt outrage.

They make this one tick over like clockwork, jumpy opening to nerve-wracking finish.

It isn’t “The Ten Commandments” and Crowe is no Charlton Heston. But Noah makes Biblical myth grand in scope and intimate in appeal. The purists can always go argue over “God Isn’t Dead.” The rest of creation can appreciate this rousing good yarn, told with blood and guts and brawn and beauty, with just a hint of madness to the whole enterprise.