Roger Moore

For all its pleasures, as Germaine nudges Claude toward that “ideal” ending that will make the reader say “I never saw that coming” and “It could not have ended any other way” at the same time, one only wishes this absorbing but melodramatic film had taken that advice.

Would No Good Deed have anything worth talking about without the Ray Rice sucker punch tie-in? Barely.

Gibney uses interviews, fresh and archival, and a court deposition and reporters’ memories of long-exposure to Jobs for his evidence. And it’s damning, from the financial cheating to the lack of philanthropy to the arrogance that let him think he knew better than modern medicine how to treat his cancer.

The movie creates a lovely arc for how we think of Ali, from monster to, “Well, maybe not.” But you’re allowed to think the filmmaker is naive, tilting his story toward those on Ali’s side, buttressing a case for his humanity and justifiable skyjacking.

It all feels like a story and characters and plot resolution that we’ve seen scads of times before.

The resolution’s both predictable and perfunctory. “Unsatisfying” comes with the package, and that goes for the movie itself — lazy pop psychology, underdeveloped sociology and psychology and an allegory that never comes close to sticking the landing.

If the movies are going to talk about labor, human rights, cruel “leaders” and love in the world Gen Z is growing up in, the raw deal facing Mickeys 1-17 is a good place to do it.

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

It’s not close to being the scariest movie you’ve seen this year. But the political/immigration subtext, the grim cause-and-effect of their haunting and a pretty good twist or two make His House a haunted British council flat tale well worth checking out.

There’s more to a dark comedy than a really dark crime, more to a thriller than a slo-motion pursuit and more to the rural South than arch, slow redneck stereotypes.

The Barr cousins give us a film of novel scenes, comical moments of sexual experimentation which have a few laughs and a little pathos.

The Olive Trees of Justice is languid but never feels slow. It tells a story but not really with words and dialogue. And it traffics in sentiment without getting lost in sentimentality.

It is a puzzle without a particularly interesting (to my Western eyes) solution. Whatever its visual qualities, and really the only comparison points are the weirder Japanese anime efforts, the strangeness of it all makes it a confusing big screen experience.

“Bone” is an unflinchingly-violent and stupidly long genre mashup. It’s Tarantino without all the anachronisms and swearing.

The plot is convoluted to the point that the picture is almost never not ponderous. There’s a lot more “history” than is probably necessary, and less comedy than was required to make this come off. Still, it’s kid-friendly and martial arts-happy and almost on a par with the least of the Depp “Pirates” pictures.

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.”

The complications in each character’s lives are funny, wholly believable and just nasty enough to rule out any second date as this never-ending first one staggers on and on, towards an ending we may see coming, but not without a few serious twists to navigate along the way.

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.

It’s fanciful enough, but Weathering with You is too scattered with dashes of dullness making for many dead spots. It’s not on a par with virtually anything the anime master Hiyao Miyazaki made, and falls well short of the heart of “Your name.”

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

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

The band’s rippling impact is undeniable.

The beasts are revealed too early, the “gotcha” moments are kind of botched.

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

Few movies about getting sober are as brilliant at conveying the allure of drowning, wallowing in alcohol, the emotional and physical liberation it seems to offer, as The Outrun. And rare is the story told within this most personal of experiences that exults in its trials, the gut check of “one day at a time” and the exultant release from the trap of addiction.

It’s just that movie-star turned director Angelina Jolie is a bit too enamored of vast panorama shots created with drones and keeping her mostly under-age cast clean, well-fed and front-and-center in the story.

He’s a terrific documentary storyteller, as his drug trade documentaries made clear. He just got too cute for his own good and got in his own way a bit, here.

Unexplained, disorganized and cluttered with characters we strain to identify in banal situations that go nowhere, this isn’t one that’s going to replace “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Story” or even “The Family Stone” or “Feast of the Seven Fishes” on anybody’s holiday movie list.

A warts-and-all documentary about the daredevil-hustler, that for all its inherent evil — and the guy was a real piece of work — is still a joyous, laugh-out-loud celebration of an outlandish, larger-than-life showman.

Extra Ordinary is entirely too ordinary too much of the time.

Moving, majestic and manly, Only the Brave is a nearly perfect rendition of the sort of righteous, heroic entertainment Hollywood routinely built around its best leading men.

It’s almost a hagiography, and Vidal would have demanded no less.

The totality of human existence might be summed up in the forlorn, inquisitive and sometimes playful narrations of the great German filmmaker, that keen-eyed observer of humanity Werner Herzog.

The film is sweetest when the characters touch on death, the impermanence of life and the role memory plays in keeping dead loved ones alive.

[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.

Woods rarely softens Goldie up for the viewer. But every now and then we see the bravado drop and her “hear” what the adults she consults and storms away from are telling her — “Child Services could help…What’s your PLAN?”

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.

When the Coen Brothers miss, they miss with gusto. Images of Babe Ruth, swinging and collapsing in a heap from the effort come to mind.

At a nearly relentless two hours and 49 minutes, “Painted Bird” is an excessive test of patience and tolerance for the range of human depravity touched on.

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

Riff Raff lives down to its title, a trashy movie with a gilded cast — a cast a tad tarnished thanks to the addition of this to their resumes.

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

So even though Signal isn’t great sci-fi, you’d never know it to look at it and listen to it.

As our old friend Ricardo Montalban said thirty years ago in “The Wrath of Khan,” still the best of the “Star Treks” — “It is veeery coooooold in space.” “Into Darkness,” for all its dense textures and epic scale, left me cold.

Dope has a hint of “Virginity Hit” and “Project X” about it, but it goes much further than those trangressive and sometimes violent romps. It challenges its characters, its community and us to think beyond cause-and-effect, stereotypes and expectations. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, Famuyiwa is onto something both funny and thought provoking.

The narrative may dawdle, the anachronistic music contributes to a disorienting disconnect and there may be too much of a suggestion that “love” is one-sided thing, first to last. Guadagnino’s ” romances”seem to lean that way. But Craig’s performance more than compensates for those shortcomings.

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

Plemons and Stone, who has become the director’s Oscar-winning muse, are terrifyingly real. And the allegory of a civilization in crisis lured like lemmings off this or that cliff of lunacy lands hard.

But you know what they say about most martial arts movies, come for the fights, stay for the fights.

This Netflix production, scripted by Kaufman and perhaps rendered into something more sensible by co-writer and children’s animation vet Lloyd Taylor (“Nimona”) is fanciful but formulaic, and unlike most of Kaufman’s boundary-breaking writing, it’s downright derivative.

Sweet Thing starts from natural empathy at the sight of seeing kids struggling, but refuses to grapple with that.

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.

By any measure, Christina Noble was not your average heroine of a faith-based film. By any measure, hers was not a life with your average share of suffering.

Coppola stripped the tale, cut the length, eschews menace and goes easy on the malice, which made the earlier version of the story work. Even as an arch, serio-comic female revenge fantasy, this Beguiled fails to cast the necessary spell.

The Beta Test is a wired, wound-up and instantly-hip/instantly-dated Hollywood riff on relationships — romantic, business and otherwise.

Odds are you'll find something of substance, a few life lessons in between the laughs in 50/50.

J.J. Abrams, with Steven Spielberg producing, has made one of those jaw-dropping out-of-body summer entertainments that kids old enough to swear and see PG-13 films will remember on into adulthood.

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.

A striking if predictable and plainly-staged docudrama set in one of the world’s most forbidding landscapes.

The choppy, episodic-TV vignettes-“story” never works in a feature film. But there is a “Breaking Bad” logic to the narrative.

Co-writer and director João Paulo Miranda Maria serves up a limited-dialogue parable of racism, cultures clashing and the violence that ripples from that in this film. Using limited dialogue, just a handful of characters and behavior that ranges from intolerant to monstrous cruelty, he parks Traditional Brazil squarely in the path of outsiders-with-a-different-agenda Brazil.

It’s “post death/doom metal” served with a side of cheese, and it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

This is horror with grandeur, a movie that pays homage to history and feels so of-the-moment as to seem fresh out of the lab...Candyman, the glossiest horror movie in ages, isn’t just horror. It’s horror that reaches for the Latin in that MGM (which produced the original film and gets co-credit here) logo we see in the opening credits — “Ars gratia artis,” “art for art’s sake.”

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.

Warhunt is never wholly incompetent, never “so bad it’s good” or anything of the sort. Even by the lowered standards of “a C-movie starring Mickey Rourke,” it’s never more than a waste of 90 minutes

Into the Weeds lives up to its title, thanks to having to boil complex science, a wide-ranging tragedy and scandal and mini profiles of those trapped in it or fighting in court into a 96 minute film. The film is a lot to digest and can feel cluttered and rushed, saving time for a long rap by aspiring musician Johnson in the closing scene.

It’s not high art and not much for big thrills. But there’s no sense fighting how light and fun this is if you give yourself over to it.

No 108 minute music history can hope to be complete, and the circumscribed “Gimme Danger” is very much a mixed bag in that regard. But Jarmusch gets a lot right and a lot documented on film in this winning and sometimes amusing musical history tour.

Sirens is an engaging behind-the-scenes doc about this band.

It’s an allegory that works but never quite scores a knock-out blow and a satiric thriller that manages a lot of still-angry name-calling but little sense that this will ever be enough.

Maclean and his cast create a sound, tone and feel that makes even a moldy tale like this lean, mean and fresh, even if it never quite transcends the gun smoke of its genre.

The surprises are rewarding, the irony expressed with the perfect touch of drollery and the climax beautifully handled, even if the film goes on one scene too long past that.

The basic ingredients of something gripping, tense and heartfelt, and in an unusual setting and culture, are here. Our director/cook spoiled the stew, with a lot of help from her miscast-cast main ingredient.

I can’t say I enjoyed it, but Midsommar did what the Midnight Sun does to anybody who first experiences it. It kept me up all night.

The players sell it. And the jolts — an apparition here, a ghost in a shadows there — get the job done.

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.

There’s no getting around the disquiet Ramsay goes for and achieves with this nightmarish primer on postpartum depression at its most extreme. But at some point, the shocks numb you in ways the tedium of the myopic, intimate story hasn’t.

Arnett’s funny. No doubt about it. But he needs material to work with, and “Is This Thing On?” doesn’t deliver it.

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.

Bull is a magnificently malevolent creation, on the page and in the flesh.

Doctor Strange doesn’t break formula, and no, they will never ever be able to surprise us with his origin story again. It’s still head, shoulders and cloak above so much of what’s being churned out the seemingly bottomless vaults of Marvel and DC Comics.

I thought the picture started strong and finished with a whimper, with flashes of fun standing out in draggy middle acts that play like boring filler.

Geostorm isn’t “Olympus Has Fallen” or “Gods of Egypt.” It’s no better or worse than any of them, but it gives one little hope for the upcoming “Hunter Killer” or “Den of Thieves” or, for that matter, “Angel Has Fallen,” sequel to “London Has Fallen” which was a sequel to “Olympus Has Fallen.” Butler is in a bad-movie rut.

Lena Dunham's amusing meander through "post graduate delirium," a relationship comedy about nothing so much as the permanent relationships of family and New Yorker's relationship with space - and the lack of it.

It's a movie of thematic dead-ends. Director Azazel Jacobs and writer Patrick DeWitt give us a slow SLOW and somewhat morose tale that isn't remotely funny or profound enough to sustain that pace and tone.

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

Moore makes us root for Alice, not for a cure, which still seems a reach, but for a completion of her life’s goals, a chance to control her fate as long as she has the wherewithal to do it.

They’ve tapped into a fun angle to visit the “Devil, real or unreal” thriller genre, a “master tape” that comes close enough to broadcast standards to pass muster, and goes over-the-top enough to be fun enough to recommend.

Entirely too much of the preceding film is precious, self-absorbed, self-serving, superficial bordering on in-bleeping-sufferable.

If you’re looking for low-exertion a summer escape movie with a bucket list travel destination as its setting and a donkey and the hapless, lovelorn sap who rides him as its stars, “My Donkey, My Lover & I” certainly fills the bill.

This is dizzy diverting fun, from it's first Carell one-liner to the 3D gimmick gags stuffed into the closing credits.

Mumford and O’Leary get beyond the cardboard character “types” and make these people more interesting and conflicted than they first seem. And the claustrophobic milieu, just two people staring at long range video, punching buttons, maneuvering their Reaper and trying to make snap decisions that won’t haunt them, serve the movie well.

They made a promise, with their cool trailer, that their dull, bloody movie couldn’t keep.

Easley manages some striking if murky and so dimly-lit you can’t follow the action ritual sequences. I could see that footage recycled in nightmare sequences of better films, with better acting and better sound, etc.

Just as we’ve started to savor all the possibilities presented by this set-up, director William Oldroyd and screenwriters Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh take an abrupt, lurid and predictably melodramatic turn, and “Eileen” goes right off the rails.

Mogambo isn’t all that, but it isn’t bad.

Not a neat and tidy thriller. It is a most engrossing one, commanding our attention even as the filmmaker tries to slip this or that hole in the plot past us.

With a lot of silence, some wonderful, minimalist effects doled out for maximum shock value, and a focused, fear-filled turn by Moss, Whannell has updated a timeless title with a genuinely horrific message.

It’s too long, and maybe there’s a little too much concern about the way Pattinson’s hair flops over one eye. But from first frame to last, Reeves matches the master, Christopher Nolan in two important regards. As in the last Nolan “Dark Knight,” this Batman is embattled and almost overwhelmed by a city and its institutions coming apart at the seams. And like Nolan’s “Knights,” this beast of a movie looks, sounds and plays as epic.

Arctic doesn’t vary from the conventions of this genre — ever. But Mikkelsen’s star turn at the center of it makes this wintry tale its own “Revenent,” with suffering and compassion, terror and even humor playing out on his expressive face.

A tale that touches and tickles and exposes us to the trials of other lives in a very different part of the world, it’ll make you glad you showed up to read the subtitles.

An 'E.T.' knockoff that works.

Chilean-born writer-director Sebastián Silva (“Nasty Baby”) gives us an intimate mumblecore (lots and lots of talking) allegory about the struggle to maintain your identity when everything around you seems to subsume it.

The cast does what it can with the material, but their big speeches rarely add up to a “big moment.”

There are laughs and moments of warmth. And there are annoyingly familiar confrontations that have a grounding in legitimate cultural grievances, but which a lot of funny shouting cannot resolve, during or After Class.

Hearts and Bones isn’t particularly graceful in the way it unfolds, and it doesn’t hide one man’s secret well enough or give the other’s the weight it seems to represent. But some very fine acting, a few poignant scenes and a general earnestness carry it off.

If you’re looking for a clinic on how you don’t need a whole season of “Fargo” or “True Detective” to immerse you in a criminal milieu and the sorts of fixes folks living and working there get themselves into, you could do a lot worse than planning a trip to Lake George.

A dry and moody piece built on closely-observed characters, not on thrills or an unraveling plot.

Everything about this couple, from the way they pair up to the ways their romance plays out, feels scripted and inorganic, people “acting” like they’re soul mates because that’s in the job description. They know it, and we know it from watching them.

It does a poor job of showing the tragedy of Turing’s hidden life but a better job at making a bigger case — unconventional people make unconventional thinkers.

I can’t say it all works, and there’s an epilogue that plays as more insipid than biting. But it’s a daring piece to put on the stage, even more daring to commit to film.

Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name,” “I Am Love”) gives us a challenging puzzle of an indulgence that rattles on and on, like a hearse with blown shocks, well past its point of resolution.

She made her glittering life seem tragic, even as she denied her own right to feel sorry for herself thanks to everything her gift and her “destiny” gave her.

Wrongheaded in conception, eye-rolling in execution, Chappie is a childish blend of the cute robot goofiness of “Short Circuit,” and the bloody-minded mayhem of “Robocop.” Neill Blomkamp, the director of “District 9,” has utterly exhausted his supply of South African sci-fi ideas with this disaster, an excruciating two hours of your life you will fear, quite rightly, ever getting back.

“The Raid” was a great action film in which the violence, excessive though it was, served as obstacles in the hero’s simple quest. In Raid 2 the violence is the movie, its excess used to cover for an inept story, thinly-drawn characters and dead spots.

The air goes out of the balloon, bit by bit, through a Macau fight club and high rise scaffolding chase, and the long middle acts settle into tedium, exposition and entropy.

Disney/Pixar’s animated “Luca” is “The Little Mermaid” without the heart, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” without the laughs. It’s a gorgeous-looking time-killer aimed at a very young and undemanding audience.

Director Dan Trachtenberg (“10 Cloverfield Lane” and TV’s “The Boys”) makes great use of locations (Alberta, Canada) and the film’s set-piece fights. Screenwriter Patrick Aison sticks to the “Predator” basics for the alien hunter, and creates some wonderfully visceral scenes that try to reason out how bow and arrow, hatchet and woodlore skills might be used against a super-sized/super-powered foe.

The end is too much like a “You may have already won” come-on, a poker game where the other player is using a 56 card deck, when you’re still counting on 52...A cheat, in other words.

The Menu is entertaining enough. But the meal is — like the horror movie logic of it all — perfunctory, if magnificently presented.

For a movie about a tragedy and the struggle to cover it with professionalism and compassion, September 5 is more historically intriguing than compelling and in the end, an emotionally hollow experience.

Heretic leans on horror and serial killer thriller conventions for its plot and rising suspense. The foreshadowing is obvious, but the ways it is deployed always surprise and chill.

The film parks her at the center of a universe that was and is all about gender tolerance and inclusion, even if one doubts her claims of a “post ‘velvet rope'” party ethos.

It’s a lovely film, stately, sylvan and slow. It would take an insensate child and a very cynical adult to not fall for at least some of its charms.

The dance is pulsating and fun, well-staged and beautifully shot. The sex is dancer-athletic, titillating and mostly packaged in a montage sure to be a widely-shared Reddit clip any day now. But the whole is rather an empty experience, something I confess it shares with other Larraín films. Ema is pretty, provocative and surprising in ways that are more interesting to chew on than satisfying to experience.

The plot is convoluted, not the least bit inviting or deep and frankly puerile, with PG-13 violence and “darkness” draped over it.

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.

The players utterly inhabit their banal characters, but Hartigan only delivers a couple of scenes that merit all this attention to detail.

The effects are off-the-chart dazzling, and if nothing else, the picture jumps out of the gate and sprints until one and all get good and winded entirely too quickly.

It’s a film whose best jokes are sight gags, but sight gags visualizing what eBay, Snapchat and Youtube look like from inside the web, mocking Internet Economics and the sorts of web content that lands “likes” and “shares.” These are plainly aimed at adults.

Freeland is a film many can identify with, even if you’ve never picked up a pipe or bong. It’s a universal story, a timeless tale about anybody who’s napped a little too long and woken up to realize the working world has changed and might have no place for you in it.

The most interesting theme touched on is the different choices the siblings make — one, staying behind and the other opting for something like an adventure. But even that’s thinly developed.

Schreiber and Malone leave it all on the set in this sad but wistful romance, a movie about teen dreams that lose all meaning if they’re deferred too long.

The film is a portait in dogeddness and going against the current thinking in cancer treatment and research.

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.

It’s a stoner “Catastrophe,” for those who remember that Sharon Horgan/Rob Delaney TV series of a few years back — trippier and raunchier if not as sensitive or frankly, as funny.

The leads are pretty much flawless.

Animated musicals are only as good as their songs, and this one isn't on a par with "Beauty and the Beast" or even "The Princess and the Frog."

Cruise and Blunt have only as much chemistry as the script allows.

The flashbacks, the “everybody has a story” part of The Flood, puts it over.

Like those '70s movies it borrows from, there's a blast of tongue-in-cheek politics built around a "They messed with the WRONG Mexican" message. No, this may not go over in Arizona.

Adults are invited to tap into the magic of childhood adventure, the magical realism that connects these kids across the ages. Kids may be challenged by its arcane history, its connections and coincidences and its pacing, but rewarded for paying close attention to the mystery the movie asks us to help solve.

There’s little that’s new here, but the performances give this time capsule picture heart, with Madsen, Smith and Chiklis taking their archetypal characters beyond “type.”

It’s a good-if-not-great movie, old fashioned but anachronistic dialogue, action that’s more impressive than inspiring, a combat film that like Eastwood’s Western “Unforgiven,” tries to have it both ways — a sermon against the violence of man delivered in a very violent story.

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

You want great action? Eschew the comic book movies and read a few subtitles. Escape from Mogadishu is in a league of its own this summer.

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.

So far, in Monroe, where white folks interviewed in the film Always in Season lament the reenactment and gripe about “leaving the past alone,” nobody’s talked.

It’s a lovely film, a sentimental parable that carefully recreates a post-war Japan obsessed with obliterating its past.

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

Luther doesn’t hit the story’s discovering-one’s-sexuality elements hard, and serves up little dollops of tribal wisdom that play as weary bromides. Benny should be hunting for “hózhǫ́,” a life that will make him happy and content.

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.

White finds ways for Stiller to surprise us, and the veteran actor manages to hide his cards in scene after scene, letting us keep up with him, but never ever allowing us to guess where his emotions will take him next, and what form they’ll take.

It is Banderas who brings home the tocino and serves up the whole jamon when the situation demands it. Which in the case of the immodest, flamboyant and recklessly brave Puss-in-Boots, is pretty much every moment he opens his mouth in his delightful, and perhaps final romp as the character.

The animation’s good, lovely but not dazzling.

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.

I have to say I went along with it, more amused by the craft and bursts of wit and gripped by a bit of tension, here and there, than appalled by the inhumanity. It taps into our shared phobia about ridesharing and “over-sharing,” not that EVERYbody is alarmed by these phenomena.

It’s a bio-pic that keeps its brilliant, sultry, complicated subject at arm’s length.

But the “Quiet” once again drowns out the “noise” in this, the best creature feature of our times.

Yes, we’ve filled the atmosphere with levels of carbon dioxide not seen in 66 million years of geologic time. But at least we get our own “epoch,” the Anthropocene, named after us. And there’s a smidgen of cautious hope underscoring much of what we see here.

Park and Lively give this novel yet familiar story its heart and weight, each offering support when guidance won’t do.

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.

An engrossing and immersive look at an isolated battle in “America’s Longest War,” a representative bloody stalemate in a country where that’s the best most of those fighting there can hope for.

There may be a change coming to the business of collectible books, which is a major thesis of Young’s lovely and lush if meandering, bookshelf browse of a movie. Is the sun setting on this esoteric obsession? Or is a big-city hipster-driven revival turning that around?

The dialogue has no snap, crackle or you-know-what, the dragons are better defined but aren’t really the focus here.

Owen and Riseborough play their characters awfully close to the vest, not investing in anything that would allow this story to take the romantic or melodramatic turns we expect. But truthfully, that hamstrings the movie.

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.

I can’t say this is head and shoulders above any other “Emma.” to come along. But de Wilde, her leading lady and her production team have made the matchmaker in need of her own match fresh and modern in a period piece detailed — right down to the acapella folk tunes and hymns sung on the soundtrack.

The Disappearance of My Mother captures the 1960s supermodel turned ’70s (and beyond) Marxist/feminist, a striking figure who raised children by building an afterlife of journalism, activism and education.

It’s a somewhat unfocused narrative, relying on music and “disco” dance as a bonding device, one of a few novel touches in a story that’s all-too-familiar.

Warrior is a straight genre picture, a fight movie of the old school. But it's a mixed martial arts tale, and as such, it's the best MMA movie ever.

The performances work, despite their requisite flatness. It’s just that the few flashes of heightened drama and the gentleness of the Kasie/Octavio scenes aren’t enough to lift the weight these characters and this story carries.

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.”

If it isn’t as decorous and deft as the Jane Austen romances of an earlier literary (and cinematic) age, the longing is still there in a story that feels more lived-in, brutish and realistic.

If its jolts are few, the chilling tone sells it as one of the smarter horror tales to come along of late, north or south of the border.

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.

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.

Stourton (“The Spy Who Dumped Me”) makes a depressingly relatable Mr. Put-Upon, with a hapless humorlessness that makes that “one of the funniest guys on the planet” the biggest insult of all.

David Dastmalchian wrote and co-stars in this generic but well-acted trip down junky lane.

A wickedly on-target cautionary tale about whom we let “influence” us and just how little is to be gained by looking “West,” much less going there.

Chen (“Wet Season” was his previous film) has made a movie of familiar themes and recognizable antecedents. But he offsets that by dropping us into an alien world so disorienting that little here neatly fits into a narrative box.

Built on a quietly compelling performance by Virginie Efira (“Benedetta,” “Elle”), it may be the best depiction of how trauma changes your psyche and your life since the Peter Weir Jeff Bridges/Rosie Perez drama “Fearless.”

No, there are NOT enough dissenting voices in the film, she’s that popular. But it’s jarring to see the turn the film, and the country take, away from civility, a steady march toward equal rights and the profane, law-flouting death-to-mine-enemies, progress-torching culture we’re moved into.

Even the shortcomings in this documentary suggest it’s just another part of a long-overdue “moment” for two most-deserving musicans, still not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but “Closer to Fine” than ever.

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.

Billie is the far and away the most definitive Billie Holiday biography ever put on screen, a film that celebrates her magic and examines the demons that haunted her, chemical and human.

Miller has pulled some far-flung threads together to create a fascinating “state of the struggle” report, one that women like Hussein are fighting, one speech, one interview, one graphic demonstration of FGM at a time.

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.

I could have done without a talky, explain everybody’s motivations third act. But there’s no getting around the crowd-pleasing nature of the bloody, vengeful and self-righteous wrath that rains down upon one and all in the finale.

It’s just competent, light entertainment.

Molly’s Game has a mesmerizing quality, and an exhausting talk-your-ear-off air that is almost shockingly uncinematic.

It’s damning in its depiction of a culture “willing to look the other way so long as he was making a lot of people a lot of money.”

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 life lesson and messaging is upbeat and sentimental.

Because as much as one might have loved The Boss, the films of Gurinder Chadha or the expectation of an empowering message about racism and the liberation identifying with a great songwriter/spokesman for the down-and-out can be, as much as you might think that Chadha (“Bend it Like Beckham”) has been marching towards that day when she’d make a musical set among the Subcontinent Diaspora relocated to the U.K., those expectations are a tad too much.

Yeah, it’s on-the-nose and plenty of the laughs are low-hanging fruit. But for guys with limited reach, this crew makes those easy laughs come easily, and unlike the film’s title, no pun intended.

You'd better watch out. You'd better not swear. Have a gun handy, loaded for bear. Santa Claus is coming…to Finland.

Maine’s still made a teen sex comedy with heart, smarts and subtlety that Netflix, which owns this genre, rarely bothers with.

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

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

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.

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

The performers, working in Hebrew (with English subtitles), make their characters empathetic, emphatic, human and humane.

Problemista becomes the Great Tilda’s grandest playground, a chance to wear the wacky fashions, keep her hair at its unruliest and let her furious freak flag fly in the best “I want to speak to the manager” send-up ever.

We knew Livingston, Kendrick and Johnson (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) would work in this setting. But Wilde adds to the growing repertoire she showed off in “Deadfall” and “Butter,” films no one saw but which revealed that she’s a lot more than a pretty face.

This delightful and inspiring drama succeeds the way Hawking has, even as he fails to deliver that “one theory” that explains “everything.” It’s reaching beyond your grasp, in life, in science and in film biographies, that achieves greatness.

Garrone makes wonderful use of his diminutive leading man (best known for the film “Asino vola”), and Fonte manages to be both empathetic and pathetic here.

Director Dillard & Co. had a promising minimalist horror pitch, but blew it in execution.

Cassel's performance...the best reason to see this, one of the best French (In French with English subtitles) crime thrillers of the new millennium.

Artistically, Get on Up rivals “Walk the Line,” with a lead performance on a par with the career-making turns of Angela Bassett (“What’s Love Got to Do With It?”) and Jamie Foxx (“Ray”). With this wonder of the summer, Boseman and Taylor deliver a piece of American cultural history every bit as important as the Jackie Robinson story, a story told with heart, humor, funk and soul.

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.

The animation is the one novel element to this, a familiar sort of film on a most familiar subject. But the movie lets its subject — Sonia — be its strength, and if you’ve ever had the privilege of meeting a survivor willing to talk about what they experienced, you know how smart that decision was.

There’s “cryptic” and “vague” and then “incoherent to everyone else” and unfortunately, Moya sets up shop at that end of the spectrum.

Great Buster turns Bogdanovich’s lifelong appreciation into cinematic adoration, using generous clips of Keaton’s short films, features and late-life TV appearances to remind us that, as Johnny Knoxville says in the movie, “he was funny then, he’s funny now and he’ll be funny 100 years from now.”

Perhaps its going to take two documentaries to plumb the depths of Bannon’s persona, what drives this frump who rails against elites even as he’s serving their purposes so well. Klayman’s has an incomplete yet polished feel to it. There’s too much we don’t find out.

It’s a little more fun than “Aquaman,” not quite up to “Captain Marvel.” Like “Fantastic Four,” it’s a gateway drug comic book adaptation, a superhero movie on training wheels, best suitable for young kids (save for the insane and unsustainable running time) about to embark on a lifetime of fandom.

It’s all perfectly high-minded and polished, but all of this could have been treated with more spark than comes across here.

Dafoe, high on the list of best actors never to win an Oscar, was at his very best in this portrait of a loner who starts to take stock of “the life” at 40.

It’s like “Girls” with more funky New York locations, but with less sex, and with fewer laughs.

The story’s arc may feel familiar, but it isn’t utterly predictable, with the child’s enterprise and cunning nicely matched against Marsan’s I’m Bigger Than You omnipotence. And the messaging of “Vesper” leaves this bleak tale a little room to breathe and anyone watching it the tiniest prayer of hope.

Prisoners is never less than engrossing. It’ll keep you guessing. It’s just too bad that the last thirty minutes make us feel like the prisoners, here.

A feather-light meringue of a romance to remind us there will always be a Paris.

For all its plot trickery, mind science and relationship square dancing, Trance doesn’t have the emotional tug or technical pizzaz of Boyle’s best films – “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Trainspotting” or “127 Hours.”

Skeleton Twins may not be a wholly fleshed-out character study, and nobody here takes a flying leap out of his or her comfort zone. But the timing of this tale of depression, suicide and how vulnerable we all are to our past, our demons and our shortcomings, is enough to recommend this engagingly melancholy comedy.

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

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

The conventions of the “fresh out of prison” drama are long-established. But they’re recycled, to good effect, in Chapter & Verse, a well-acted genre picture that suffers only from a chronic inability to surprise.

The film is an emphatic re-branding of the the “legalize pot” movement, putting suffering children’s faces front and center in the fight, with weeping parents and increasingly defiant doctors, most of them in states where medical and/or recreational marijuana is already legal, making case on the kids’ behalf.

There’s merit in this story, which takes its hero on a circular path back to what anchors him in his world. But the novelty of the setting and the characters doesn’t mean we give the storyteller, who gets lost in the sordid sexual side of life above the Arctic Circle, a pass.

It isn’t until the “camp” is shoved upstage and the kids and their Big Theater Show step downstage and into the light that “Theater Camp” finds its heart and hits its best notes.

In the month since this documentary went into limited release, it’s proven prophetic about events as crimes are alleged or revealed in Washington. Where’s My Roy Cohn? even seems to predict how the tidal wave of high crimes and misdemeanors might play out.

The Walk is the movie that takes us up there, gives us the jitters and makes us titter along the way.

This undramatic and flat peek “inside” the sewing rooms of Christian Dior holds little in the way of entertainment.

Like the master big screen poker player than he is, Roth never ever shows his cards.

Plan 75 rarely manipulates and never tugs so hard at the heartstrings that it breaks your heart. Honestly, I think it needs to.

Signing on an impressive cast, writer-director Drew Hancock takes a big, roundhouse swing at “coupling” in a distracted, instant gratification craving, uncompromising and not-entirely-adult era, and at sending up a rom-com convention or two. But the best he manages is a slow roller to shortstop with this icy, rarely amusing and gory dark comedy.

In focusing on the tunes and the lyrics, Mangold makes us reconsider the head-snapping surprise of that Nobel Prize in Literature.

Writer-director Marchal loses track of characters, story threads, mob cash and drugs, impatient as he is to get to the next shoot out.

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.

This clever and darker than dark thriller gives us villains to hiss at and villains to root for. But at the end of the day, when evil is done and hope is thin, “justice” and revenge blur. In the movies, at least, we bay for an avenger to spill some blood.

Neeson, freed from the straight-jacket that too many action films have slapped on him, gives Tom a stoic, crusty vulnerability that comes out in every line, post-diagnosis.

But as a movie, is the story or the animation worth a 104 minute investment in time? Maybe if you’re really young and time is something you’ve got a lot of. Yeah, you can pick up on (more or less) what’s happening within a few minutes. But I can’t say it’s really worth it.

This is a two hour waste of a lot of fine vintage motorcycles.

The players make it likeable and allow the jokes to whizz by. It’s also lovely-to-look-at and laughably weird enough to play, which is all we’ve ever wanted in a Midnight Movie.

The singing is nice, the peripheral characters interesting. But a love that others don’t approve of, that may get in the way of a big concert debut? That makes Gabrielle a bit too Lifetime Original Movie for its own good.

It’s all a bit much, but all in good, gory fun even if this genre mashup never quite transcends any genre it borrows from.

Semans’ script suggests guilt, blame and next-level psychological mind-games in the connection between his heroine and her perceived nemesis. As in other films that go down this path, there’s uncertainty about what’s actually happening to Margaret and what’s just in her head.

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.

"Raiders!” will make any movie buff laugh out loud at the sheer chutzpah and kiddie problem-solving that it took to, for instance, recreate that boulder chasing Indy out of a South American temple.

The porn industry of the era is as much a part of the movie as the classic cars (re-used in the background, in scene after scene) and the leisure suits. But the zingers, which fall off markedly in the latter third when the energy flags and the plot unravels, always pack a punch.

It’s just not enough. The Bronze is predictable, and outside of Rauch, Cole and a very convincing (conditioning, some training, clever editing) Haley Lu Richardson, the cast is bland. Strong has nothing to play, and nobody else makes an impression. The Bronze is proof that one great joke is not the route to comic gold, or for that matter silver.

A stunning blend of styles, from hand-drawn sketches to computer-assisted visuals with flashbacks made in gorgeous, textured stop-motion animation with models and tactile sets, it does justice to the book while updating its messages for contemporary audiences.

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.

A very good cast headed by Billy Crudup, Michael Angarano and Tye Sheridan stars in The Stanford Prison Experiment, a film as straight-forward and clinically chilling as its title.

Rodeo is so good it’s almost sure to inspire a Hollywood remake. Catch it in the original French grit, because while we know Zazie Beetz can ride, who knows if they’ll meet her quote?

I like the women’s world this picture creates, with Sue Jean Kim cast as a Columbia U. colleague and Ann Dowd as the sympathetic support-system neighbor. But The Friend is an uneven, not wholly satisfying experience in most ways.

The effects are indie-comedy cheap, and the tale’s overarching morality’s a bit murky.

Duvall, an American Lear not going gently into that good night, reminds us that it will be a sad day indeed for movie fans when it's about time for him to Get Low.

The middle acts, where Emilia Pérez has her coming out, reconnects with her “fixer” lawyer and pulls her kids and her still-clueless ex-wife close to her, sag and slow the movie’s sprint to a crawl.

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.

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

Capital in the 21st Century, in documentary form, is an almost overwhelming alarm bell, a call to action and a fact, chart, animated illustration-and-quote-stuffed history of “how we got here” in the first place.

Herself is an uplifting real world drama in classic weeper/wish-fulfillment fantasy clothes, a story of pluck and heart, violence and sadness.

Good things come in small packages and life’s little pleasures are to be treasured, but Ant Man and The Wasp — together, equal-billed and boring — are too little of a good thing.

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.

It’s OK for April, in other words, but not up to the higher standards of a Marvel summer blockbuster.

It’s a self-consciously-filmed soft-spoken drama about family, family responsibilities and family secrets, and truthfully a rather drab affair where the stakes are low and the emotions kept in check for the most part.

It’ll be on PBS at some point, but don’t wait. Seeing it in a cinema has a hint of religious experience about it.

It might not wholly succeed, but Beckwith’s Together Together is wrestling the word “relationship” away from wherever it is now and back to a simpler time, when “I’ll be there for you” meant something, and not just to Phoebe, Joey, Chandler & Co.

Solomon’s book Far From the Tree becomes Rachel Dretzin’s upbeat documentary of the same name, a film that celebrates “difference” even as it accepts the heartbreak and agonizing effort it takes for people and society to change attitudes towards those we have historically treated as “abnormal…diseased…retarded” and “broken.”

It's as disquieting as it is unsatisfying, a slog through gender issues, surgery and violence - sexual and otherwise.

Wright is one of the great character actors working these days, and losing track of him and his character hurts the film.

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

The footage is striking, the memories of the man vivid, and the finale, a tribute to the next phase of the sport, winged suits, which Carl didn’t live to see, still stuns you.

Not to gush or go too far overboard, but the warmth of a movie like “Mrs. Harris” is downright restorative in the viewing, two escapist hours that remind us that everyone is entitled to courtesy, a fair shake and a little beauty and luxury, and most of all, the hope that life can get better.

Wartime survival epics are a rich genre unto themselves, and with The 12th Man, Norway has one that ranks among the very best.

It can be cute, playful and romantic, then turn dishearteningly violent as it serves up a generous sampling of what life on the untamed frontier could be like. It’s also frustrating in its lapses in logic, its cumbersome, shuffled and dream-infused structure.

It’s also overlong and sentimental. But it’s a vivid, warm and amusing portrait of a real man, someone whose life began in darkness, experienced the light of a great love and has collapsed into a pit of self-pity.

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.

Hudlin’s embracing film reminds us that there was a lot of history that unfolded around this one man, and a lot of change came about thanks to this one extraordinary life of achievement and humility, grace and principled defiance.

Stunningly-detailed, with an A-list cast up and down the line, it’s a gorgeous and gloomy dip into the dark side, immersive and bleak from start to finish.

It’s a dark, deadpan comedy that isn’t really funny, but whose premise is the the quintessence of “permission to laugh.”

The production values and high-caliber cast suggest Big Game had better intentions than results. Helander may have memorized “Die Hard” and “Air Force One” and “Olympus Has Fallen.” But his version of that formula, given the loopy twist of making a woodsman/kid the hero “with particular skills,” loses most everything in translation.

That The Quake can still grab, alarm and thrill is a testament to skilled storytelling, empathetic performances and effects that rewrite the book on how disasters play out on the big screen.

No social, psychological or satiric point is made. No laughs are scored. And nobody involved will be slapping this on their “sizzle reel” or resume…save for the writer-director, who may be beloved but who may never ever get to make another movie after this “all-star” debacle.

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.

Every scene is magical, every image a work of art in Song of the Sea.

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.

Ximei makes a quietly compelling heroine, and the filmmakers — who can be seen questioning the men in sunglasses following her around — do her their greatest service in just letting her tell her story, just letting their camera capture the indifference, fear and fury that has been officialdom’s knee-jerk reaction to her cause.

Merchants of Doubt has its moments when the professional deniars hem and haw about who pays them to do what they do. But mostly, they’re glib, smug, self-confessed and self-righteous tools of Big Coal, Big Chemical or Big Oil.

Director and co-writer Tony Stone built his script out of Kaczynski’s endless writings, his letters to the editor, his phone calls with his increasingly estranged and eventually alarmed family, and out of his infamous newspaper-published “manifesto.” And Copley brings the articulate, twisted and deranged writings to life.

It’s a film that flirts with cloying, here and there — especially at the end. But it reminds us, even before that U.N. recognition becomes official, that there’ll always be an England, that English manners survive, and there’ll always be a Maggie Smith, imperious, hilarious and glorious in that wonderful third act her life and career have given her.

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.

The unfailing sweetness of Paul Rudd's lead performance makes what could have been another raunchy and rude R-rated farce a bracing change of pace in a summer of aggressive comedies about aggressive people, from "Bad Teachers" to "Horrible Bosses."

It’s a fanciful conceit and a well-animated parable about prejudice, standards of beauty and the shifting sands of the painters’ art.

The movie lacks the wince-with-recognition middle school spark that marked the first film in this tweenage franchise.