Roger Moore

When My Old Ass works, it’s comically judgmental, droll in the ennui the older feel about the young and sentimental about what you’re missing out on by focusing on the impulse of the moment.

Minding the Gap is a film of skill, pathos and humor, not the deepest movie up for an Best Documentary Oscar this year, but certainly the most approachable.

Parkinson knowing this story backwards and forwards means he’s become an expert on how to tease out the suspense and tug at the heartstrings.

There is nothing, simply nothing, to make you feel that you’ve led a sexually-sheltered life, that your understanding of the modern fluid, on-the-spectrum nature of sexuality is superficial at best, than Queer Japan.

Sorelle and her documentary-real characters and the grounded unknown players playing them humanize their culture and show us their challenges are versions of all our challenges, no matter how many generations removed from it we think we are.

The tone ranges from testy to distraught, but always “adult” in the insistence on talking this out.

It’s not a particularly revealing film, more a reiteration of her credits and credentials, just a hint here and there about how her parents’ influenced her career choice, even after death. Her son Joel tries to remember Ruth ever talking about losing her parents to The Holocaust. She didn’t unless he or his sister asked.

The debut feature of co-directors Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman may tell a classic “How’ll you keep’em down on the farm after they’ve seen the lights of the big city?” tale. But the details they include and the surprising places they take it make it a novel and richly-rewarding film experience.

It’s comical, but not really a comedy, spiritual without being all that deep. But as it grapples with what drives a creative person, paints the “after life” and “before life” eternity in Picasso-with-a-light-pen strokes and questions what makes life worth living, it can be quite touching.

Simien focuses too much on the character played by his star, Williams, which seems a mistake. Scenes are underscored with classical music chestnuts, a trite way of suggesting “academia.” And the ending is an eye-roller.

This wistful, melancholy yet hopeful romance has a warmth that singes, a poetry to its stock situations and a biting allegory about the country where Western civilization began facing a world of troubles, not all of its own making.

A well-crafted documentary variation on "Defiance," Ukrainian Jews saving themselves by going underground -- literally.

If you’re tempted into the woods by this film, maybe you’ll be a little more open to the idea of “individual rights” gathered in number to battle “corporate rights” in search of a more sane and sustainable way of looking at the forest, and the trees within it.

In French with English subtitles, is a showcase for Anne Dorval in the title role. Over the course of this overlong melodrama she wins our understanding and occasionally our sympathy as she struggles to get and keep a job, find a man and keep her maddening, monster of a son (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) under control.

It wouldn’t work without Chris Mulkey, playing a heartless sociopath ex-con hired to kill a man.

Deer has made a richly-detailed debut feature about an ugly piece of Canadian history, and it’s to her credit that she lets young heroine see the escalation from both sides, and lets the viewer see what this does to her.

A brisk blast of bloody good fun, sci-fi with a little social commentary as subtext. Attack the Block is the movie that "Battle: Los Angeles" was not - thrilling, nerve-wracking and fun.

There is absolutely nothing new in this variation on the time-honored creature-feature tropes. But the fun just builds and builds as our heroes and our Irish island come to a solution that seems — on the surface — awfully Irish in its logic.

This high-mileage/hard-mileage cast crackles and sells the conceit, that aged Brits — whom no one would suspect because Britain’s native-born criminal element long ago lost its initiative and its edge to “Albanians” and foreign imports — could pull this off.

What we’re left with is a fascinating glimpse of the myopic mania for “inspiration” of the artist, and a look at a culture where compassion and restitution (apparently) carry more weight than “punishment’ for the thief.

The spookiest and most entertaining horror flick since "Paranormal Activity."

Bonnar has a hint of Robert Carlyle’s “Trainspotting” rage, and Jones plays a plump, sensitive Nick Frost lite here. Amusingly.

The best 85 minute primer you will ever get on Bitcoin, its many imitators and the potentially world-changing technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible.

When it’s over, there’s nothing more to take from the film than the uneasy feeling that what we’ve seen is either intolerant and biased, or a warning. It’s not Islamophobic to fear the spread of this primitive oppression, be it in Syria or Nigeria.

A moving and entertaining documentary about the young international volunteers who dashed to Israel in 1948 to create an Israeli Air Force.

A funny, thought-provoking teen romance/sex comedy in French, a light romp that never quite romps and doesn’t quite touch or delight.

James McAvoy wallows in it in his new film, Filth. He embraces the sexual depravity, the drug and alcohol abuse, the bullying, vile language, racism and rank sexism of being a Scottish cop on the loose.

It’s wacky. You scratch your head at the training ground, a veritable digital brothel (quite chaste) where aspiring hostesses learn the art. You wonder who on Earth would spend money for “gifts” that impress these young women (and young men), and are also meant to impress their fellow “fans” with how “rich” you are.

Logan is a bloody and noble finale to Jackman’s turn with the sideburns and metal claws. It broods and growls, lashes out and swears, and Jackman is magnificent at every one of those.

The Penny Black is an utterly-engrossing might-be-true-crime docu-mystery, a film laid out like a private eye thriller (they even hire an Archer Agency detective in LA, shades of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer), a story with big money, competing agendas, shady characters and a classic “unreliable narrator.

Aniara is science fiction cinema from the land of Bergman and Strindberg — sharply observed, just brittle enough to fend of sentiment, bleak when bleak is what is called for.

Deadpool 2 gets by as simply on a par with “Deadpool,” an ultra-violent joked-up Energizer Bunny of a comic book movie with a fun supporting cast, dead-pan deaths and deadpan Deadpool jokes about those deaths.

It's a vivid, blunt and candid look at their kill-or-be-killed existence, which Joubert writes and Irons narrates is "the eternal dance of Africa."

The Elephant in the Living Room is damning, but also very sad. These stories, as Harrison points out, never have a happy ending.

In simplifying the stakes, narrowing the focus, giving us a fixed villain, and shooting in “WWII period piece” black and white, Frankenheimer gives us a riveting ride through a war fought over values and fundamental freedoms — among them, the freedom to create, value and appreciate whatever artistic expression you choose, and not just the oompah music, idealized landscapes and muscular propaganda of the tasteless goons in charge.

All involved are to be commended for taking a shot at modernizing a classic novel and rendering it into another lesson that history does repeat itself, that as the philosopher said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

It’s a magical movie memoir of the making of a movie-maker, with Spielbergian sparks of delight and inspiration, and heaping helpings of Spielberg sentiment.

Arnold has made a bleak romance that shimmers with hope, an overlong odyssey that we smell just as surely as we feel.

Everybody comes off as smart, articulate, on-task, hard-working and not prone to panic.

Rare is the comedy that seems to make time stand still. But for 77 cringeworthy and hilarious minutes, that’s what writer-director Emma Seligman pulls off with Shiva Baby.

It’s an intricate, intimate thriller about a single soldier’s nightmare day and night on the front lines.

Duncan Jones, director of the very fine and very paranoid "Moon," makes this seemingly silly situation work, building tension over 93 minutes.

Like its anti-hero, Young Ahmed is narrow in focus, intimate in detail and troubling in its monomania. Start to finish, it forces one despairing question on us, one it cannot answer. Can Young Ahmed be saved?

Under the Volcano lacks some of the details, grit and personal dirty-laundry edge of the legion of earlier recording studio history documentaries — “Muscle Shoals” and “Sound City” among them.

Writer-director Lucia Puenzo, adapting her own historical novel, concocts a disquieting and chilling thriller out of what might be a lost chapter in the infamous career of Nazi Doctor Joseph Mengele.

And by casting the hard-not-to-be-adorable Steve Carell as the self-promoting “male chauvinist pig” Riggs, they’ve produced a picture that’s alternately giddy and touching, with its heart coming from a budding romance and many of its laughs from the naked, reflexive sexism of the era.

Grossman’s film makes us appreciate what a smart kid she is and how she somehow shrugs off the way she triggers the climate-denial right.

The Beanie Bubble may be a tad conventional in its approach to this “origin story” and its “rise and fall” narrative arc. But it’s a fun, infuriating trip down memory lane thanks to the people traditionally left out of this “story,” the women who made it happen for the guy who got all the credit.

A trio of writers took New York critic turned studio exec Mark Hellinger’s notion for a “Roaring” era gangster saga and peppered it with enough snappy dialogue to pass for a screwball comedy.

Gangster Squad is a gang war drama built on Western conventions, a rootin' tootin', Camel-smokin', whiskey swillin' shoot'em up.

The film is full of sharp observations about academic contests today, with Tiger Moms and tough-love Dads browbeating the kids from the wings. The ending is kind of a tap-out, but Bateman keeps this clipping along, maintaining the mean streak and potty mouth that makes Bad Words the dirtiest and funniest comedy of the new year.

It’s an adoring portrait, covering Lewis’s early life (he started wearing a tie in elementary school, and has never stopped) and the breadth of his career, letting him tell the folksy story of “the boy from Troy, Alabama” to crowds of fans and peers.

Monkey Man gives a well-worn genre a furious and funny kick in the ‘nads.

It’s a gritty, lived-in film that feels like a smelly, life-is-nasty-brutish-and-short for anyone not in the ruling classes depiction of the Renaissance — beautiful and painterly even in it’s ugliness.

The film reminds us that as amusing as he could be, he wasn’t the dazzling wit history packaged him as. “Relevant” is how he wanted to be remembered. And before he died, he got a filmmaker to remind us of exactly that.

Less mopey and downbeat than TV star Zach Braff's "Garden State." But it succeeds in many of the same sweet ways and is similar enough to warrant labeling Radnor "Zach Braff: The Next Generation."

Everett makes this Wilde a magnificent ruin, reveling in self-pity rather than wallowing in it.

The aloof, guarded Cumberbatch plays Assange as a mixture of brilliance, hucksterism, ego and naivete. He carries the baggage of an actor who plays “smart,” with a menacing edge.

The mystery, the great cast and the slow simmer of tension that Egoyan builds into Remember recommend it. The third act payoff won’t be to every taste. Egoyan is the Canadian Spike Lee in that regard.

Goldblum is always best at being Jeff Goldblum, and his oily/silky charm tends to unbalance the neat, brittle little tragedy we’re watching.

Baumbach overreaches, making this character a selfish, off-putting cultural (LA) and generational scold. But Stiller, in his most “real” performance in ages, finds the function in this catalog of dysfunctions, the humanity in this humanity-hating crank.

It’s a parable of Catholic Ireland given a mod, fourth-wall breaking framework by Chilean director Sebastián Lelio, who gave us “Gloria.” He and his players make it not just vividly period-real, but bracing entertainment as well.

Like Tati himself, The Illusionist feels like a relic of a different time.

Howard’s magnetic performance, delivered in a blizzard of mood-swing close-ups, hints at any number of possibilities.

The trip is amusing enough, the doggy excesses funny and the climax, pre-ordained by their destination, will punch you right in the heart — not hard, just enough to deploy that hanky.

One serious omission in the film - identifying what these seemingly prosperous alumni of the band do for a living and did with their lives.

For its first 90 minutes, Bodied dazzles, ducks and dishes through a corner of hip hop most of us only experience through documentaries or Youtube clips. Here’s a movie that takes the form seriously, and gives us a taste of how hilarious it can be — for those not on the receiving end of these epic couplets of insult.

Miles Ahead is a performance showcase, and might have seemed like a sure Oscar nomination for Cheadle, on paper, had the picture been more complete, more fulfilling.

It's a movie benefiting from another sparkling, sexy and emotionally available performance by Natalie Portman.

Under the Skin isn’t conventional, thrilling or particularly satisfying in a sci-fi aliens-are-hunting-us sense. But it manages something far more sinister and fascinating. It gets under your skin and imprints on your memory.

A summer movie that staggers down that fine line between sentimental and snarky, a tale of nature and nurture and first love that manages to charm more than any R-rated movie about horny teens has a right to.

Kapsalis has written and directed an engrossing “woman on the verge” tale. But it is Azura Skye who draws us into it, earns our sympathy and makes us fear for how far this woman will be pushed before she pushes back, or snaps altogether.

Queen & Slim is an African American art film channeling a 1970s blaxploitation, on-the-lam-from-the-law road picture vibe. As its riveting, rambling, geographically-inept two hours roll by, lurid visions of the blaxploitation cinema of that era bubble through an indie spin on “Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry,” “Sugarland Express” and “Vanishing Point.”

It’s almost wholly satisfying — witty, warm and entertaining — a film in which fatalism isn’t a joke, where pitiless death is doled out by Empire and Rebellion, where those deaths have weight and meaning, where suspense is genuine.

Alternately stark and lurid, poetic and very well acted, it’s a return to form for McDonagh, who rather lost the plot with “War on Everyone.”

“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.

As horrific as the subtext is, Solarz finds universal humor in a cranky old man on this one last quest. But he doesn’t let Abraham, assorted bystanders or the audience off the hook either.

The documentary makes this much clear. The days of ignoring and neglecting Puerto Rico need to end. Puerto Ricans remind us that they deserve it, and that from now on, they insist on it.

The physical comedy might appeal to younger viewers just getting hooked on anime. . . . Yet the ideal audience for this film is going to skew older, better able to appreciate the themes and the higher-end anime art that Watanabe and his team achieved.

An entertaining old-fashioned prison escape movie with a touch of the epic about it.

Though other films have followed the drama of those earliest days there — “In the Same Breath” and “76 Days” — Chang’s film takes the unusual tack of personalizing the pandemic, and humanizing the first population trapped in it.

It’s all of a piece, and just as charming and engrossing as a silly mockumentary about a robot maturing from boot-up to rebellious teens can be. No, Wales doesn’t come off as anything but grey and repressed and backward. But whatever Brian and Charles don’t do for Welsh tourism they more than make up for in warm, goofy entertainment value.

Using animation, interviews with Malala and her equally passionate father, Ziauddin, Guggenheim tells of the girl named for a famous female Afghan poetess/warrior, raised in the Swat Valley.

Renner’s performance — beginning with bluster and descending into twitchy paranoia — sells it and makes us fret for every “messenger” suddenly the target of the spotlight himself.

It remains an eye-opening and artful look at just what it took to create that couture, that image and that legacy and that brand — still vital and popular all these years after the shy dreamer’s death.

Step is an inspiring documentary.

As violent and primal as “Animal Kingdom,” but not as brisk. The film grinds to a halt in between confrontations. And those shoot-outs are simple, direct and bloody, not “staged” in the Hollywood sense.

You don’t expect a movie about The Holocaust to be flippant, glib almost.

The thriller is mildly thrilling, the intrigues reasonably intriguing. But it’s the sex that sells this.

[Hooper and Redmayne] find the humanity, here, the confusion and repulsion built on ignorance and darkness. And with a winning performance and a sympathetic eye, they shine a light into that darkness so that the rest of us can see.

An old fashioned Japanese folk tale beautifully rendered in old-fashioned hand-drawn animation.

Kurosawa has made a period piece with believable characters and intrigues that generally avoid melodrama. The stakes are human-scaled and deathly personal.

Trainer lets us meet bold thinkers who found a way to put a modern twist on what a museum — “an eighteenth century idea (stuck) in a 19th century box” — could be.

“Heaven” isn’t exactly an infomercial, but it’s not much deeper than that.

The Wind Rises was a dream project for the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, and this gorgeous film makes a fine capstone for his career.

Booksmart is the first non-Netflix teen sex comedy to come off in ages, and hints that too-pretty/too smart/too funny Olivia Wilde could be the next Judd Apatow, if not this generation’s John Hughes.

With Kusama, the older she gets, the more interesting her “story” becomes. But what makes that story connect is the art itself — dazzling, overwhelming, mesmerizing and playful. All the obsession and depression, brazenness and brass in the world wouldn’t matter if she hadn’t had the goods, all along.

It’s a funny film, but never actually hilarious. It has its touching scenes, its mild jolts of surprise.

The robberies and shootouts are staged to brilliant effect. And even the over-the-top acting moments can be forgiven by the “period piece” nature of the history being told.

A lovely, nostalgic look not just at a war the Brits just can’t stop memorializing, but at the way movies were made way back when, with a little magic and a dollop of sentiment could carry a story for audiences starved for anything that offered them the possibility of a happy ending.

It’s a credit to the makers of the soccer documentary Nossa Chape that they’d still have a decent film, even without the tragedy that underscores the one they made.

This is "Her Hangover," a smarter and sweeter stumble to the altar that never quite gets to Vegas, and doesn't seem to mind.

If you don’t know this history, and neither I nor James Cameron (apparently) did, the “wonder women” behind “Wonder Woman” will make your draw drop.

Benson, who turns 87 on Dec. 2, comes off as an adorable Scots curmudgeon in Justin Bare and Matthew Miele’s film.

The film’s brevity means some ideas are under-developed. But what we’re left with is a sublime and sublimely simple portrait of a love that’s been lived in and the devotion it will take to ensure that endures.

Damn this is fun.

Lester’s film underscores how few TV talkers today have the stature, much less the spine, to ask questions that people don’t want asked, much less be required to answer.

By equal turns hilarious and right on the edge of horrific.

As a Steve Carell comedy, it works. He plays the victim well, the guy romantically in over his head ever better. Surrounding him with people this funny - Ryan Gosling, who knew?

It’s filled with wry laughs, comical rural “types” and over-the-top, fame-craving desperation worthy of an over-the-top slapback.

If you’ve made up your mind about her, it’s hard to see this intriguing documentary changing that made up mind. The movie turned my head, here and there. But the questions about her honesty linger, along with the notoriety.

It’s a quiet, thoughtful and handsomely mounted film, offering another plum role to Alicia Vikander (“Ex Machina”) as Brittain. Vikander and the film take Britain, and Brittain, from idealism and hope to grim reality and regret.

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

It’s not “Blow” or “American Gangster” or “American Made” even, not on that level of sobering (if sometimes comical) morality tale. But White Boy Rick still makes for a blunt reminder of just how low we all sank during the “Just say no” ’80s, when the only people punished for not saying “No” were cajoled into saying “Yes,” and faced “Black Time” for doing it.

The lack of dramatic tension that knowing the ending before you being creates isn't a huge drawback.

That’s what Chess Story is, mournful and just cryptic enough to leave you guessing what you just saw, but touched, engaged and intrigued by it, comfortable in realizing that over-explaining is not necessary and would spoil some of the fun.

Populated with a peerless supporting cast, actors who bring just the right history to their roles.

Finders Keepers manipulates the stories like reality TV, pushing the viewers’ allegiance away from this man and towards that one, back and forth.

Before, Now & Then is a dreamy Indonesian drama about changing expectations and ideas of “freedom” that pass through the life of a Muslim woman through twenty years of her life.

I connected with its out-there take on the first days of sibling rivalry, the acknowledgement that humanity is utterly distracted by cute puppy videos on the Internet and with Baldwin, a silky-smooth comic bully whose onscreen bark is always a lot worse than his bite.

Wakefield is a sometimes funny, always smart movie that never quite finds the depth to be brilliant.

John Cusack plays this older, post-breakdown Wilson, a twitchy, tentative millionaire genius who has the guilelessness and sweetness of an abused puppy.

Hands of Stone is still a first-rate boxing picture, a B-movie with just enough A-picture touches to make it sting.

The most adorable “action” pic of the summer is a senior citizen’s caper comedy that’s novel enough and clever enough that the fact that it also has something to say is merely the cherry on top of the cinematic sundae.

The film captures the essence of an event that “ties the city together.”

Vega makes Marina noble, martyred and yet defiant, fiercely clinging to her femininity when we’re so desperate for her to bust Bruno’s nose. It’s a performance of sublime, constrained fury and tender conciliation.

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

There are enough laughs in Finding Dory to justify Disney wanting a sequel to “Finding Nemo,” one of the most successful animated films of all time. And there’s enough heart and smarts to warrant Pixar making it.

The scruffiness is intentional and the film has that conventional search for heroes and heroines — who to follow, single-out and build the movie around. But Whose Streets? also lets us see how citizens journey from outrage to action, from passivity to protest to influencing public policy, just by standing up and saying “Enough!”

Even if we see “trouble” the minute we spy that first phone, we don’t necessarily guess how this fascinating “speed of change” story will play out.

This may not be Rylance’s greatest film, the stakes being as low as they are. But his impersonation is both uncanny — stay through the credits — and adorable.

Eggers indulges himself in all the tricks of the scary cinema’s trade — simple historic ffects given a digital boost in recreating an 1830s Europe of gloom, greys and shades of brown and red. The most chilling image is of the shadow of count’s clawed hand, stretching across a sleeping city, reaching for Ellen.

It lacks the shocks of “Midsommer,” the perverse comedy of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” and the violence of “The Wicker Man.” But it’s still a good yarn, cautionary, allegorical, well-acted and stoically played out to its inevitable conclusion.

The Square may be played in a thick Aussie dialect that’s hard to fathom. But thanks to bravura filmmaking that never violates the classic rules of the genre, they could be household names here someday, too.

Paulson underplays the Motivated Mom from Hell thing so well that when lines are crossed and the “game” is out in the open, we still don’t know what to expect from her.

Smile 2 is a genuinely horrific plunge into terror.

Almost everything about the writing, publishing, fame-fighting and Monk confronting his own prejudices, seems truncated to make more room for family drama. And while the relationship with his sister (Ross) seems beautifully lived-in until it’s chopped off, and every moment Wright and Brown trade jibes, jabs and affectionate brotherly connections is rewarding, nothing else delivers at that level.

Even though Sing Street covers familiar ground, its director knows how to make his pigeon-hole adorable. The address’s charms win you over in the end.

Benjamin is a brief, brisk movie that somehow manages to squeeze in seven characters of consequence, tell an amusing and romantic story, and still find the time to dip its toes into something darker.

It’s a lovely work, imbued with all the sweetness a Who’s Who of great animators can give it.

This tight, tense and oh-so-logical home invasion tale brings “Wait Until Dark” into the cell phone era, with suspense that rivals the equally simple “Don’t Breathe.”

An action-packed epic, a moving sci-fi allegory rendered in broad, lush strokes by the latest state of the computer animator’s art.

“Divide” is a damning film, with just enough new material to entice the curious.

By the end, we’re a lot more sympathetic because this movie and this performance let us live in her shoes, just for a little while, and feel her burdens, grief, guilt and panic as we do.

The film, inspired by a Michael Lewis (“Moneyball,” “The Big Short, “The Blind Side,””Liar’s Poker”) magazine article and relying much on Lewis’s take on the man, the writer and his self-created mythos, is a reminder of Wolfe’s once-giantic footprint in the culture.

An endlessly inventive and anarchic Dreamworks romp based on the Dav Pilkey children’s books, it thrives on prankster pals, over-matched adults and a hand-drawn comic book hero’s ethos.

It's a fine summation of this complicated story, one that focuses heavily on Echols and his sweeping declarations about the state of justice in Arkansas and America.

The pleasures of Welcome to the Rileys are in the simplest human message of all. Take an interest in somebody who needs help and the life you save may be your own.

Calpasoro expertly ratchets up the suspense in The Warning (El Aviso), showing two timelines whose protagonists grow more frantic by the minute.

An intimate portrait, a slice-of-life that goes just far enough beyond the cliches to be fascinating.

Filmmakers Jimmy Chin (Honnold’s longtime cinematographer) and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi get us up close, letting the camera do what Honnnold must do — extreme closeups of the rock face, intensely hunting for that next imperfection in the smooth granite, that next crack or crag that will move him further up the 3200 hundred foot wall.

Hollywood treats the road to revenge as straight, narrow and bloody. With Riders of Justice, Jensen considers the myriad other places such a path can lead and finds regret, heart and humor along the way.

Let It Go is a thriller best-appreciated for its trio of tour de force performances — for Diane Lane and Kevin Costner’s understated Western American couple that’s so familiar and lived-in that their most powerful moments are wordless, and for Great Brit Lesley Manville’s furious, uncompromising North Dakota matriarch.

It almost (but not quite) defies description.

If nobody in Hollywood has snapped up the rights to this for an English-language remake, they’re missing the boat. Eye for an Eye is a simple sharp Spanish thriller that rarely blinks.

Haynes never lifts Carol above over-dressed melodrama. And with every perfect bar where every perfect martini is served, every perfect dive of a motel on the “Lolita” roadtrip that the “just friends” abruptly take together, Carol betrays its true priorities.

A harrowing, moving and nostalgic day and a couple of nights in the life of a Black boy lost during the darkest days of World War II.

Fellowes gives the characters’ moments that sing, and director Simon Curtis (“My Week with Marilyn,” “Goodbye Christopher Robin”) makes the entire frothy affair skip along, start to finish.

Rarely has a movie been so sexual without being remotely sexy. Rarely has a guy who might be admired in a sex comedy as a "playa" seemed more pathetic with each fresh conquest.

I find them hilarious, and I think this fourth and “final” outing in their “trilogy” is the funniest since the first.

It’s a comedy of sight gags, zingers and awkward pauses — lots of those. Sentimental at times, yes. But funny. Always.

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.

It all makes for a more riveting “what might have happened” mystery, a history lesson with a caveat and a damned entertaining one at that.

Hedges (“Manchester by the Sea”) gives us every shade of confused, angry, desperation as the “upstanding and honest son” his father has praised him as from his Baptist pulpit.

It makes for a fun if sometimes shambolic (a few anecdotes ramble on) remembrance of a time and an artist who symbolized it. And if the filmmakers didn’t buy up a few Brezinskis before releasing this, that’s on them.

Westdijk gives us a little bickering, a little bonding, a little personal growth, a bit of Scotland and a lot of Waterboys. And if that’s not enough to add up to a comic winner, I don’t know what is.

Here is THE must-see documentary for a world living under quarantine. Spaceship Earth is about can-do cooperation, art and science coalescing, about “learning by doing” and recognizing that “small groups of people are the engines of change.”

As she tastes the foods of the country, delighting in this old favorite or that new regional wrinkle on a traditional recipe, you may find yourself fretting that you’re watching this on an empty stomach.

Director Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline”) folds in all the pieces of the plot almost haphazardly, and instead concentrates on character and mood — gloomy people mostly trapped in a gloomy house.

Every time we relax into our smug “I know where this is going,” Pereda finds a way to trip us up.

Ex Machina is an “Island of Dr. Moreau” for the singularity era. It’s a cerebral, chilling and austere thriller that stokes our fears about digital privacy and artificial intelligence, a film that works largely thanks to a breakout mechanically empathetic turn by Alicia Vikander (“A Royal Affair,””Seventh Son”).

Edwards comes off as salty but sentimental, remembering the support she got from the crew and that the crew got from the world’s ports as they dashed from stop to stop — Uruguay, Australia, Auckland and Fort Lauderdale among them.

There are moments when you wonder if this CNN-produced documentary is telling the whole story, if there was cherry picking in points of view chosen.

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is a sweet, sad and sentimental Thai end-of-life melodrama titled and set-up like a greedy-family farce.

What Wang gives us is an engagingly sentimental story with warmth, compassion and wit, peopled by relatives who, for all their cultural differences, are universal and yet enviable in their devotion to “the good lie” and the quality of life they see as worth protecting with it.

McGarry, with this slick, invigorating film, whose action is set to a pulsating James Lavino musical score, has broadened a national debate that anti-healthcare reform folks have narrowed via the courts and political demonization.

But every few years, something like “Bombshell” comes along to remind us, as we look up her credits on IMDb on our iPhone or Droid, that we should never under-estimate the great beauties among us. A lot of them are a lot more than just a pretty face.

Even when it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, it is amusing and utterly disarming.

this is a straight-ahead ticking clock thriller, with the usual Tony S. trademarks - punchy dialogue and men doing what needs to be done.

If the Northern Irish are still learning from the ancient Greeks, maybe the rest of us should give them a listen, too.

Our leads have a toe-to-toe intensity that clicks in many scenes. Wood and Kirby are well-matched, with Kirby giving us the superiority complex that generations of post-Bundy Hollywood serial killers have affected, and Wood showing just how troubling this assignment becomes.

Athena becomes a mural of magnificently orchestrated chaos painted over a penny-plain story of brothers in conflict, and one of the most gripping action pictures to come out of France in recent memory.

A mix of overt shouting matches and subtler moments illustrate this war of wills, ideologies and parenting styles. And the odd hallucinatory reverie reminds the characters, and the viewer, that try as we might, there’s no wishing a big problem away when it comes bulldozing and dynamiting at your door.

Chippa is an utterly enchanting fantasy version of an Indian street child’s life.

The Joneses manages a deft blend of the sexy, the sad and the silly. And Borte doles out his secrets and surprises in ways that make it easy to keep up with these Joneses.

Fukada has delivered another subtle, startling and demanding drama about lives upended in a country that rarely gives us any hint this sort of thing happens, a film built on stoic performances that give up their reserve when the worst kind of pressure is applied.

“Scandalous” is a journalism expose that lives up, or down, to its hype.

The resulting film is a fascinating mystery, a weird case study and an unalloyed delight.

There’s just enough chemistry to the film to be daunting, and it would be easy to get lost in the “endocrine disruptors” and “estrogen mimics” in the wares of almost every company that wants us to not smell, lighten our skin or clean our hair.

It’s the best Almodovar movie Almodovar never made, a riotous, gory farce that might be the funniest movie of the summer, and surely is the coolest.

The Croods: A New Age has some of the derivative limitations of the first film — the faint whiff of riding “Ice Age’s” coattails. But the players make their slapsticking, pratfalling, punking and pranking characters breathe, live, love and care.

Marissa Taylor, one of over 100 journalists worldwide involved in the expose, adds “Why are people going to care that the rich don’t pay their taxes and crooks are crooks?”

Have we learned anything? Have the “Bond villains” at the heart of this story been discouraged from repeating their actions? Do we have any idea what can be done, and is anything at all BEING done?

“Viral” is a sobering reminder that hatred of “the other” didn’t disappear after Pogroms and The Holocaust, and that it isn’t limited to jihadists and skinheads.

The story is lightweight and flimsy, and the resolution of the plot is too on-the-nose, pat, but the unfeeling nature of this future — about halfway to “Her” if you remember that film — and the mechanical nature of interactions, even sex, make Creative Control one of the most interesting recent exercises in film futurism.

Call Jane is a moving and surprisingly uplifting period piece about America’s pre-sexual revolution past, a late ’60s story of women who organized to ensure that the most personal and difficult decision many women will ever face was hers to make, with their help.

Dark, darkly funny, surreal and nauseatingly violent, Love Lies Bleeding is a serious shock to the system.

Sugar Daddy is a mature, artful and disturbing peek into being “open minded” about something that borders on “sex work,” and sometimes crosses that border.

Every Little Thing is a documentary as delicate and magical as its subjects.

This take on the tale offers little that’s new, but the sentimental draw of the story is as strong as ever.

The just-turned-77 indie icon may comically gripe, walking through a horror convention in the film’s opening, that he’s “unrecognized, unrewarded for my lifetime achievement.” But the fans know. And after “King Cohen,” you will too.

OutStanding: A Comedy Revolution is one of the most informative and certainly the most entertaining historical documentaries about LGBTQ history on offer this Pride Month.

As foul-mouthed and politically-incorrect (era appropriate) as Dolemite is My Name is, it is a classic Hollywood feel-good movie, a sentimental tale of an underdog overcoming obstacle after obstacle to follow his bliss.

Mendelsohn, a great character actor, has unforced, natural and funny scenes with everybody, delicious moments with Falco, Mann, Tahan, Britton and Everyman Character Actor Camp.

[Farrier's] made a fascinating picture to ponder about how difficult it is to challenge a system and its gullible pawns who enable such predators to get away with all that they do.

13 Assassins is entirely too long and too talky. But the cat-and-mouse game of strategy, figuring out when and where to ambush the evil overlord's entourage, is fascinating.

Cyrano is meant to make you cry, and this musical and its star do, and more than once.

The new documentary on Keith by Morgan “20 Feet From Stardom” Neville still manages to surprise and delight.

The scenario here is soapy and a tad familiar. But Cheng’s vivid depiction of the life going on all around his characters . . . enriches the story and makes José, his life, his world and his predicament something anyone can relate to.

Huppert, after a career that has included “Entre Nous,” “8 Women,” and the equally unnerving “The Piano Teacher,” makes this unfiltered fury the capstone of a stunning career in which she journeyed from French sex symbol to grande dame of European cinema without losing even a hint of her allure.

Slay the Dragon became the rallying cry of the Michigan and now national grassroots campaign to end this partisan practice. But as hopeful as the movie wants to be, it can’t help but make obvious how many steps “the people” are behind those Project RedMap masterminds.

The God Committee is the sort of solid drama you get when actors you think you know are gifted with a script they can sink their teeth into, and make the most of their moment to shine.

The engaging leads, stumbling through a romance they’re too young to temper, finesse or control, give Mario the spark of life and make it another ground-breaking genre film that eventually Hollywood will get around to remaking.

Jihadists makes for a fascinating if talking-head heavy indictment of a myopic ideology that claims “We just want to be left to ourselves” to do as they see fit “in our own lands.”

Silo is a quietly gripping “trouble in farm country” thriller.

You like fights? All-Time High has a couple of all-time winners, bone-snapping brawls shot in long, beautifully-choreographed takes. But here, no matter how much blood is spilled and debilitating injuries or even death meted out, it’s mostly played for laughs.

Even its occasional confusing moments add texture to this brittle but touching tale.

The Promised Land, with its themes of futilely fighting a “rigged” system to change one’s status, with dubious rewards even if you win, makes a most worthy saga, even without the sagebrush.

Berninger is hero and villain of this comic essay in ineptitude masquerading as a rock band on tour doc.

Enola Homes 2 is a proper delight, start to finish, one of the best “juvenile” entertainments of the year.

I Am Not an Easy Man works, an over-reaching satire that gets at the horrors women face in a world where they don’t have equality or the entitled initiative to succeed and a film that suggests God help us if the shoe is ever on the other foot.

The Whistlers is that rare cops-and-criminals picture that gives us a little to chew on and a new skill to practice — whistling.

Because if there’s one fact everyone should absorb from this sometimes-cutesy documentary, it’s that this big hope for a better, smarter, fairer and healthier America is No Small Matter.

A wonderful movie anyone who's ever experienced dog ownership at its most glorious, and most embarrassing.

Jasper has blended “Precious” with “Hustle & Flow,” and even if you don’t dig the music, you will root for the characters and hope for a happy ending even though disaster and tragedy lurk around every corner.

The finale Barber and actress-turned-screenwriter Julia Hart deliver is righteously, remorselessly satisfying.

The nuts-and-bolts of the work — the precision flying, the money laundering and cash impact on a small town that looks the other way — make other movies and TV shows on the subject seem humorless and tame.

It’s hardly the last word on this scam and its hilarious embrace of the “Duck Soup” uniforms and the addled imagination and crackpot ideas of L. Ron Hubbard. But that’s the point.

EO has a message, and it’s somewhat bleak and generally told in a decidedly oblique fashion.

For a fairly generic sports documentary, Rising Phoenix still manages a few thrills, some moving moments and a lot of sports action.

Our writer-director has conjured up a full, flesh and blood life. And our star transforms Emily from a repressed Yorkshire artist who channeled her passions onto the pages of one of the Great Romantic Novels into a human being of sexual passion, love and heartbreak, and a thing for Men on the Moors.

Bravo, National Geographic Channel, for flying in the face of the zeitgeist, getting this made and putting it in front of audiences in theaters, and later on TV.

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.

Population control, consumption control, treading more lightly? Yeah, we know that. We just don’t want to hear it. Yet. Will Planet of the Humans open our ears?

It’s a hard movie to embrace, and some of that stems from the entitlement that simmers in the background of the school, those who attend it, of the city, the monied elite and indeed the filmmaker herself, who narrates and does the questioning here. They’re no less victims, but as they admit, they “knew.”

It’s a fascinating peek into another way of living, urban Roma (“Gypsies”) who refuse to assimilate or accommodate, to look backward even as they’re steadfastly refusing to plan ahead.

The acting is as immaculate as the digitally-augmented settings.

Bohemian Rhapsody and Rami Malek cleverly and warmly distill an era and its music into a thoroughly entertaining piece of music history.

It makes for an engrossing character study, a Latin film with lots of local color, a hint of magical realism and an air of hopelessness tinged with menace — a unique cinematic experience.

A flipped take on tween-to-teen romance that make it such a minor gem.

Shockingly, it's funny. Often in shocking or at least wildly inappropriate ways.

Through Daxiong’s vivid and realistic drawings, rendered into mid-grade animation in assistance of a gripping story, we get to know not only persecuted Falun Gong survivors, but those who perished opposing the one-party dictatorship.

First-time writer-director Nia DaCosta may have filmed her Northern Plains tale on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. But she has a firm grasp of the loneliness and hopelessness of lives left behind by a boom in a state where working class women’s career and OB-GYN options are limited.

Thanks to a muddy, gloomy glorious Dark-Ages-on-a-Budget look and the almost heartbreaking pathos Patel brings to each “lesson learned” moment, it works.

It's a sturdy World War II yarn, with harrowing and heart-breaking moments sprinkled throughout.

Glass lets her story simmer and her characters brood for almost 80 minutes, Maud’s rapturous passion rising even as she lashes out — in sexual and self-injurious ways — at the deity who isn’t giving her direct answers. And then the writer-director slaps us right across the face with a finale that feels harrowing and somehow right and true.

For all his “slow cinema” indulgences and patience-testing “patience” as a story teller, the old master Davies, Lowden (“Dunkirk”) and the poet Sassoon mentored make sure Benediction leaves us with an emotional punch that no film this year can match.

You don’t have to speak the myriad tongues (many not translated) to follow the action, fall into the heedless forward momentum, to be outraged at the discrimination, and to be utterly charmed by this winner from the Subcontinent.

Its blend of mystery, suspense, chills and pathos are perfectly pitched. Presence is simply sublime.

Anyone who has heard tapes of the real King confronting LBJ will realize that the power dynamic depicted here just doesn’t ring true. King’s moral authority asserted itself, but nobody stood up to Johnson to his face. Nobody.

The movie’s message about tolerance and not pre-judging others sings, and the many chases, interrogations (a weasel ably voiced by Alan Tudyk) and narrow escapes pay off.

“Shot!” makes for a light, smart and often funny dance through an era with the man whose images made icons out of many, and burned those icons into our visual memory.

“Zone” is a cryptic, underexplained tale that buries us in banality and educates us about evil.

It’s not the most consequential of films, but from first stop to almost the last, it’s a trippy, traveling delight.

The Black Godfather is filmmaker Reginald Hudlin’s love letter to Avant, a major figure in music, politics, concert promotion, the star making machinery of Hollywood and the friendly ear and — when needed — megaphone with connections who can “get you paid.” It’s a film of warm remembrances and salty anecdotes, deals made with just a phone call, “power” wielded almost always behind the scenes.

The lack of urgency may bore those unused to Jarmusch’s style and pacing. But his languor is his calling card. The deliberate pacing makes the offhand jokes and dry observations seem funnier than they are, at least in this case. This borders on being “cute.” And dull.

Stalter & Co. make her a funny, infuriating and unpleasantly empathetic figure, “Portland” quirky no matter where you find her.

Strong finds his character and stays focused, first scene to last, a brilliant performance even if it never quite matches Ron Leibman’s ferocious turn as the man-as-dying-monster in the stage version of “Angels in America.”

The Red Virgin is a smart and timely tragedy, coming out as cultures around the world are either embracing equality or trying to roll back the clock on women’s rights.

A stunning exercise in 3D and a delightful celebration of Scorsese's lifelong love of the movies, something he, like Hugo, developed on childhood.

The Inspection is best appreciated as a showcase for Woodbine and Union, each taking her or his best big screen dramatic role in years and bringing it home in scene after scene.

Here’s a “feel good” film that puts us through our share of feeling bad before it delivers its triumph.

Saturday Night won’t be to every generation’s taste. The look-alike cast is generally good, if hardly substitutes for “the real thing” in some cases. But if you were “there,” or at least caught the show in those birthing years, it’s a lot of fun, with or without the stimulants.

Mahdavian is content to sketch in these lives and simply observe two women at their jobs.

The ghost of John Hughes smiles upon Easy A, a film that freely and giddily borrows from and pays tribute to Hughes' famous Holy Trinity of '80s teen angst comedies.

It’s a bit too spare and Malik-like for its own good. But the incessant voice-over, another Malick trademark, here makes the whole enterprise feel overheard, a story constructed from memory where the words are just ways of underlining what we would come to know about Lincoln the man based on Lincoln the boy.

The detail, the worn-out wooden boat that is the main location, is perfect. And the calming effect of the sea is utterly spoiled by the tension that’s always there. Daily routine aside, every encounter with the pitiless crew is fraught with peril, and the violence when it comes — is shocking, primitive and sadistic.

They turn more of the story over to the comic relief, the dopey tow truck Tow Mater, and get a sillier, more kid-friendly movie out of it. Yes, Cars 2 is better than "Cars."

Sure, it’s a gimmick. But it’s playful, it works and suits this material to a T.

It’s not history, stunning palace locations and lush costumes aside. The Favourite is just fun, “something completely different,” though it does tend to drag as it takes us where we are sure it must go.

My Blind Brother takes things in some very predictable directions, and Goodhart was too goodhearted to let Scott go full-bore jerk as Robbie.

Buck gives a performance impressive enough to call “break out,” but Gathegi, in a largely non-verbal role, utterly loses himself in the makeup, the wardrobe, the environment and the character.

It’s the rarest of films that truly allows us to see that world through another’s eyes.

It’s an utterly immersive Franco-Haitian gumbo, complete with flashbacks, “magic” as practiced by those who know “the old ways,” teen hormones and the zombi origin story.

“Selma” wasn’t the only film about race to get short shrift from Oscar voters this past year. Black or White is a frank, touching and very well-acted melodrama about child custody and cultural perceptions of “blackness” and “the race card,” and could have earned Octavia Spencer and Kevin Costner fresh Oscar nominations.

It takes guts to take on the mob in a place where its been tolerated for centuries. And sometimes the bravest of those in that fight aren’t in uniform. Some of them are still carrying a Pentax.