Roger Moore

Would this movie be enough to create a new generation of fans? No. That’s why it ended up on Paramount+, where we old farts can get nostalgic and remember funnier moments from them, their earlier movie and their heydays in MTV’s golden age, with or without the Dulcolax.

There are laughs, here and there, and bursts of fun. But picking over one’s notes and picking apart a picture which offers no real third act surprises (Well, Seth Meyers shows up.) and not an over-abundance of laughs one is left grasping at the depressingly obvious moral to the tale.

Truthfully, there aren’t enough gags and giggles to make this take flight. It sort of lumbers by for 100 minutes before sputtering out in the finale.

140 minutes of “fly on the wall” filmmaking, mostly of Eilish performing, songwriting (or avoiding it, as her brother complains), doing photo shoots and radio interviews and peaking at Coachella is a bit much.

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

Sossai hasn’t made a movie that sentimentalizes alcoholism, but he has managed to suggest the mistakes, busted dreams, dashed hopes and futility of getting ahead or getting by in a barely-functioning democracy and permanently-rigged “market economy” that makes the bottle such an appealing escape.

The last reaction I expected the new screen adaptation of The Boys in the Band to provoke was indifference. But Tony winner or not, 50th anniversary film remake be damned, there isn’t a whole lot that this stagebound opening of a time capsule brings to 2020.

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

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

With this “Director’s Cut,” Gomez-Rejon and his editors have saved a witty, well-acted and gorgeous-looking movie and given it the heart, history and intellectual heft it needed to come off.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead made a magnificent drunk in “Smashed,” so it should be no surprise that she kills as a stand-up comic in All About Nina.

This movie is fascinating on a lot of levels.

The acting can feel flat and unpolished, and the intimacy of the story is both an asset and a limitation to its ambitions. But any horror fan looking for the next “came out of nowhere” genre phenomenon need look no further. It’s not the “Citizen Kane” of witch movies, but it’s creepy and DIY fun and well worth tracking down.

The entire affair plays as pro-forma, pre-ordained, pre-digested and pre-dictable.

It’s not the worst movie in that Poe-Christie “kill off characters, one by one” formula. The players do well by their moments of terror or sadistic cruelty. But it’s entirely too obvious to come off, entirely too cluttered to have a character or characters rope us in, and entirely too chatty-jokey to ever be scary. And it’s not funny enough to work as a sick comedy.

There is little urgency to this spiraling disaster. Soderbergh has made a lot of noise this past year about quitting directing and taking up a less collaborative, more solitary pursuit - painting. This is an anti-social painter's movie. Millions are dying, but he doesn't care that much. So why should we?

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

[Nowlin] makes Blood Stripe a solid, compelling drama about the post traumatic stresses unique to women in combat, a film that — thanks to her stoic performance and intimate, unfussy direction — engenders sympathy but never pity.

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.

Writer-director Blichfeldt’s debut feature is more cringe-worthy than laugh-out-loud funny. She picked obvious targets. But there’s a lot to be said for having the audicity to “go there” and go gory when you’re sending up the ugly open secret that “Beauty is pain,” that it’s a trap and that it’s well past time to stop taking fairy tales with princes and “Sleeping Beauties” at “children’s story” face value.

The B-movie king is in rare form in Color Out of Space, a sci-fi thriller that might have been titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Magenta” had horror icon H.P. Lovecraft been born a lot later, and — you know — had a sense of humor.

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

It’s a scruffy little movie that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny or over-thinking — at all. But its charm carries it a long way.

Jokes, sparkling bits of dialogue, a few touching third act twists and laughs in surprising places.

Epicentro is a lovely new tone poem to Cuba, as it is now, the Cuba behind the propaganda from within and without.

It’s a slow-moving/unsatisfying in the end how-will-she-escape thriller dragged out by too many scenes explaining the torturer’s psyche, undone by an ending that no Hollywood studio would allow past the “bad idea in the script” stage.

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

The energy, humor and wit of the early scenes carry it. And the pathos of the later scenes, along with a burger joint break down and the fun in discovering the secret to any rapper’s success as a novelty act (rapping about “my mom”) make even the slow jams go down easy, leaving a warm, fuzzy afterglow that makes LA seem nicer and maybe a trifle less superficial than its image.

Materialists is dry and ironic and “honest” while laying bare the hopes that we all cling to that love isn’t really as materialistic as she’s saying. But the rare air of the artificial, archetypal world she sets out to make her big statement in leaves the viewer grasping for not just a breath of fresh air, but hope.

The falcon metaphor is clumsy and ill-defined, and Aloft is never much more than a lovely, dull cheat.

Sure, he’s proven all he ever needs to prove, and then some, on the road. He’s dominated Broadway. Sold millions of records in his day. But this film and his last one, a doc about a C&W bend in the road on his musical journey (“Under Western Stars”) feels stiff, stale, self-serving and self-conscious.

Like any fan, I’ll watch anything Anderson turns his attention to. But all the stars and star cameos, all the jaunty, classical music needle drops, all the del Toro drollery, the “lost boys” cadre of Korda kids and the Middle Eastern history hinted at in the “schemes” can’t paper over how flat and empty this “scheme” turns out to be.

It's a farce with sexual come-ons and actual sex - the Boy Scout Tim's first encounter with a hooker and a crack pipe - but Cedar Rapids never loses track of the humanity of its characters.

Good performances by Derbez and the kids recommend Radical. But wading through the cliches of the genre and stumbling towards that inevitable feel-good finale — blowing any “highs” the picture might celebrate, make it hard to recommend.

It’s a healthy reminder that fighting corruption, even in something as mundane as college admissions, is vital to society’s health, that Americans need to at least believe there’s a “level playing field,” and that not guaranteeing that is how we mediocre our way from the top of the world to Banana Republic in just a generation.

A scenic, poetic, striking and moving thriller about Sicily’s “problem” viewed through the lens of youth and young love. The spooky overtones make its title an honest one, even if the frights are few. This is a “Ghost Story” well worth telling, and seeing.

Happy Christmas, which is set around Christmas, shares several plot and thematic points with “Neighbors,” but without the aggression or belly laughs.

Ahmed, poker-faced start to finish, puts us in this guy’s shoes and in his head when his best laid plans are derailed, his “control” is shattered and his identity endangered. It’s another great character turn by a star who’s gained his leading man status the old fashioned way — by giving one raw, layered and compelling performance at a time.

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

Whatever ideas Mohawk had behind it, whatever the filmmaker saw in the cast, especially Ms. Horn (think Grace Slick circa “White Rabbit”) not much of a movie came out of the effort.

I can’t say this is one of the best, too grim and gory. But it does get a down and dirty job done.

All that a cast filled with music personalities adds to the dull, trashy money-laundering melodrama “For the Love of Money” is the occasional pause for a song. And the last thing this movie should do is pause.

All these disparate boons, bonuses and bungles combine to make The Fabulous Filipino Brothers a film that transcends it failings and becomes not just funny and warm enough to work, but a cultural touchstone, a movie well worth dropping in on if you enjoyed any of other “cultures among us” comedies that preceded it.

All Butler, director Tony Olmos and the rest of the cast and crew were shooting for is a cultish comedy with a few laughs, undercooked politics and undigested zombie victims. There’s no arc to the story and little that you’d call funny or ambitious or politically pointed.

Why Don’t You Just Die! is a grimly gruesome and laugh-out-loud tale of lies, double-crosses, brawls, gunplay and torture. And if Madonna’s ex-husband didn’t learn Russian to make it, writer-director Kirill Sokolov gives him quite the tip of the cap in this dark movie of murder and mayhem in Mother Russia.

Prime Minister is thus an against the grain movie of its moment, out of step politically, and an intimate to the point of myopic doc that zeroes in on the personality it is profiling.

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

It’s the title character and the great character actor playing him that turns this otherwise decent indie Western into something special. And Nelson pulls that off every time he squints or opens his mouth.

Maestro and Varela are the soul and heart — respectively — of this film, one giving it a speechless urgency, the other bringing a woman of science’s common sense pathos and rising alarm.

The stern star and fascinating if limited peek into the world of ratings, even in a period piece set in a more conservative time, makes Censor a horror title well worth a look, “video nasties” included.

We Are Guardians reminds us that some fights you can’t give up, even as they seem more impossible with every step-backward election. And that some people realize that one hard truth before the rest of us.

Lion is moving and inspiring.

The rise, fall and mainstreaming of hip hop fashion is explored in Sacha Jenkins’ Fresh Dressed, a documentary that visits an under explored corner of rap music history.

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 triumph of “Miseducation” is how lightly it treads down a well-worn path, how quaint and out of date it makes the attitudes of early ’90s authority seem to modern eyes.

Rocketman is a slog, a nearly joyless musical that threatens to take flight at several near-tingling moments and never does.

Kudos to Kino Lorber for letting people see it for free at a time when not everyone is in a position to sing to or applaud the health care professionals risking their own health to save us from a pandemic.

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

The characters are distinct, if broadly drawn, with Aubrey, Micucci, Reilly and Franco making the strongest impressions.

Through Short’s American Songbook jazz, I knew about the place long before I ever visited New York. And Miele’s documentary lets us know it even better, even if we can’t afford the cheapest rooms (not head-spinningly expensive). That would be, of course, the “Harrison Ford Suite.”

It’s still a must-see for Kubrick fans, because here he is, exploring his themes of “evil” and “the duality of man” and “intelligence” and control — talking about his photography background, making his favorite Napoleon as a movie director analogies.

Handled with great sensitivity by all involved, it comes off in all the most predictable ways.

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

I recognize the effects, the makeup, the murderous efficency and the bottom-line/it’s sometimes scary values of this visit to “The Evil Dead,” a film that was originally going straight to HBO Max. But the lack of fun marks this big screen abattoir squarely in “not my ‘Evil Dead'” and “not really my thing.”

The visions are grim, grisly and graphic, although actual hair-raising moments are rare — a chase here, a narrow escape there. Director Andy Muschietti (“Mama”) keeps the violence lurid and shocking, interrupted by moments of often-profane gallow’s humor.

Rarely has a filmmaker gone to so much trouble to create a world and populate it realistically, only to throw the whole thing into the Melodrama Mixer for a laughably unbelievable third act.

The Vigil is the most original, most chilling horror film of the new year. And let me hasten to add, it’s not even close.

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.

As a film, its mix of interviews, little snippets of street life and Goodman’s drawled history lessons take a back seat to the loose and breezy recording sessions all around town. There’s no re-inventing the wheel, here.

It won’t supplant “March of the Penguins.” But DisneyNature has scored another kid-friendly natural world documentary about wild creatures we all connect with and that today’s kids will grow up wanting to protect from climate change and the other man-made threats facing them.

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

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

Your appreciation of Perfect Days hangs on how fascinating you think a toilet cleaner would be, and how much interior life you’re willing to add to Wenders’ repetitive and superficial “meditation” on such a character.

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

“Pitch Perfect” writer turned first-time director Kay Cannon makes some of these big moments pay off, and delivers the sweetest, most sensitive “coming out” scene at the prom that you can imagine. What Cannon can’t do is keep this picture from stopping cold every fifteen minutes or so, sensitive moments that kill the comic momentum and make us notice that the kid actors aren’t in the same charisma league as the grownups.

Every artist has a hint of the self-obsessed navel-gazer about her or him. And Serendipity has its share of that. And suffice it to say, if you’re not into modern conceptual art, this isn’t for you. But if you are, there’s something celebratory in this artist obsessed with female sexuality, fertility and the female form taking this potentially deadly diagnosis and making art out of it.

The film is thus mostly a surface gloss with a bit of context, relying on the performers and thinkers from way back when to create all the interest here. But Daytime Revolution is a nice editing job of presenting that landmark week of slightly weird TV to viewers 52 years later.

Green Book invites you to come along for the ride, the comfort food, the socio-political sparks and the laughs.

The Animal Kingdom does what it does fairly well. But what it does isn’t all that original, and lacks the pathos you’d think such a situation might generate in those who live through it.

Stolevski’s over-reliance on close-ups gives us detailed maps of each man’s dermatology, but tends to wash away the extra impact we’d feel about bigger moments of connection.

But aside from a couple of genuinely touching moments, “Rez Ball” is dramatically flat. Heartache and heartbreak are suggested but never plumbed or embraced.

It’s a fascinating period in music and an equally fascinating story of promise, talent, expectations and failure. But you can’t help but feel that Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me won’t settle the most important argument of all to the unconverted — Were they as good as the hype?

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.

The Changeover is a moody, menacing thriller with a YA (Young Adult) heroine.

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

The whole affair has a touch of “Polar Express” about it, kind of holiday heartless.

Whatever audience awards this pic has claimed on the film festival circuit, there’s no weight to it, and the sentimental lighter touches and limp jokes aren’t enough to carry it.

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

Oh Lucy! is a slight comedy of offbeat, culture clash charms with a dark, flinty edge. It benefits from spot-on casting, testy-funny situations and cultural stereotypes that well up just below the surface, stereotypes popped almost the moment they’re exposed.

Great filmmakers remember that cinema is a visual medium, that you never say something with dialogue when you can show it with an image. That’s how Clio Barnard tells the story of Dark River, a quiet, tense and beautiful tale of brothers and sisters and abuse set in Yorkshire sheep country.

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

The unfolding plot makes just enough sense to get by, but that might be because it’s so predictable we can pretty much guess who dies and “in order of disappearance.”

Gatlopp can show its budget and feel a little malnourished, here and there. And the emotional moments are mostly superficial cliches, with a trite, tried and true familiarity. But no cut-rate, scratch-the-emotional-surface “Jumanji” knock-off should play this cute, funny and sweet.

Touching, disheartening and surprising, Gook punches through the noise of 2017’s clamor over race with a sobering look at a defining moment in modern American history. It’s a simple, straight-forward and compelling reminder that the villains and the victims were spread further across the spectrum than we’ve ever dared to accept.

Yalda: A Night of Forgiveness is a riveting and thoroughly engrossing satire of Iranian culture and the work-arounds built into a theocracy, ways of ignoring calls for reform and the shedding of “tradition.”

If you’ve ever wondered just how co-dependent the relationship between filmmaker and subject can be in the course of filming a documentary, Left on Purpose answers that question. And how.

What we’re left with is a fumbling, groping and almost wholly-unsatisfying thriller set in a towering old house near the water’s edge, where the wind howls and there’s a shock, fright or laugh behind every tree.

Sure, you can hire an Italian Robert Pattinson look-alike as your “recruiter/groomer” for “undead” fresh blood in your “Romeo & Juliet rise from the grave” romantic thriller. Doesn’t mean you have to lay on the fairy dust glitter and what not.

The fiddling-while-Earth-burns nature of global “leadership” and their parade of useless and vacuous “statements” joke lands, and is then pounded repeatedly as almost all of these leaders, scrambling through a foggy forest at night, fearing bog zombies and a planet about to go up in flames, struggle to stay on task and come up with that “statement.”

Planes: Fire & Rescue is roughly twice as good as its predecessor, Planes, which was so story-and-laugh starved it would have given “direct-to-video” a bad name. Yes, there was nowhere to go but up.

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

In a genre - the animated holiday film - already overflowing with the sentimental, the silly Arthur Christmas is a most welcome treat to find stuffed into the cinema's stockings this holiday season.

Streep, Marshall & Co. still manage to do the “Woods” justice. And if it’s more impressive than embraceable, remember your Sondheim (“Sweeney Todd,” “A Little Night Music,” etc.). That’s kind of his thing.

And Mrs is a bittersweet and offbeat romantic comedy of love and loss and mourning, and a most unexpected star vehicle for unfiltered Irish comic Aisling Bea, nicely paired up with Carrie Fisher’s kid, Billie Lourd.

Forgive the fact that actress turned writer-director Elizabeth Chomko is bad at history and math. Dad is driving around in a ’60s GTO with a broken convertible top in the middle of a Chicago winter. No, he’s not driving the Camry.

Paulson and Duplass make all this talk (never once mumbling) fascinating, lived-in and real, taking us into the sad, lost lives of these two long lost lovers.

Leto makes us wish for a Russian “Summer of Love” that never was.

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 takes talent, in front of and behind the camera, to create something engrossing and new in the timeworn time-travel odyssey. Whatever its shortcomings, Predestination is never at a loss for surprises.

The directing debut of co-writer and star Dina Amer is a vivid portrait of the French underclass and one of the best movies to ever make us walk a mile in the shoes of someone we might not be able to identify with — someone radicalized — but who seems more relatable and understandable, the more time we spend with her.

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

About 15 minutes of its dazzling visuals and narrative incoherence is enough.

It’s unnerving at times, assaulting at others. “Disorienting” is the idea, and even if many of the tricks are simple and the plot unfolds along a generally predictable track, Climax achieves that goal. And how.

The arresting, nightmarish visuals and sight gags pay off. It’s just the scanty supply of them that keep a clever idea or three and a novel setting from ever jelling into a movie destined to become an evergreen, a seasonal classic.

It’s not bad, a solid “Hollywood” history of the 1830s Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia with a love story, religion, injustices, torture and murder, a movie with middling, un-affecting acting but high artistic pretensions.

The settings are often striking as The Last City never lets you forget you’re dabbling in the avant garde, so it’s got that going for it.

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.

Trumbo is a warm and witty profile in courage.

Through it all, Quatro comes off as “I did it my way” defiant, a fascinating survivor still looked up to by women who were motivated to get into music, thanks to her.

Far from Home gets that all-important “tone” just right, over-the-top silliness in which no one involved, from screenwriter and director to cast and crew, ever lets us forget that they’re in on the joke.

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

The movie is so “interior,” it so zeroes in on Isaac and his baleful stare, that we’re relieved any time something overtly funny happens.

Although well-told, it’s an over-familiar story, and a sad one. And being far enough removed from the issues that have police in the spotlight post-Ferguson, The Seven Five also feels a little dated. Remember when all we had to worry about was cops going on the take?

E-Demon isn’t particularly frightening.

Citizen Penn isn’t a wholly balanced portrait of the “do gooder” star and humanitarian. It flirts with turning towards hagiography, here and there. But what it manages to get across is that dismissing Penn and his passion for philanthropy of this sort is a mistake, that he’s sincere, committed to the long game, and an impatient man-of-action pretty good at articulating why you should pitch in, too, in whatever way works.

A workmanlike “true crime” thriller.

Potter’s film is at is most artful in the painterly ways she composes the wordless scenes of the girls testing cigarettes, hitchhiking with the wrong boys and Rosa exploring heavy petting with another boy, showing off for Ginger.

Adding more sources to the story don’t illuminate it, they extend it to no avail, turning a 90 minute movie into two hours that still don’t make the informed guessing more informed, or more entertaining.

A taut, riveting police procedural that maintains suspense even as it finds humor in the people, their funny accents and way with profanity, and pathos.

Actor turned writer-director Larry Fessenden (“Beneath,” “Wendigo”) seeks to distract us from the well-worn path by talking us to death. There are endless scenes of the doctor (David Call of “Tiny Furniture”) “teaching” the creation he names “Adam” (CLE-verrr) the fundamentals of life.

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

The Armor of Light isn’t a mind-changing documentary. But Disney/Hughes’ film suggests that Schenck’s conversion is the beginning of an attempted unwinding of “a Faustian pact” (his words) between the NRA and evangelical Christianity.

Sweet, cute to the point of cutesy.

It’s just not that funny, not that sad and not on target, satirically. This “Welcome” isn’t nearly welcoming enough.

What I can’t say is that Greener Grass is much of a movie, that it held together for me. It’s like three “Upright Citizens Brigade” episodes, built on a common cast and haphazzardly selected themes, barely jelling into a “story.” Still, see “Greener Grass” for the set pieces.

Sympathetic performances alternately show us terrified captives and distraught and frustrated relatives, and from a terrific first act set piece where we see the risks to kidnappers when they don’t realize their new hostage is a gymnast.

Of all the Zoomed pandemic movies, big budget and small, the brilliant storyboarding, concise scripting, motivated and moving performances (direction) and editing of The Same Storm make this the one they ought to teach in film schools. And of all the lockdown films, this is the one that brings back the fullest range of experiences, emotions, fears, fury and hope of 2020.

The energy flags in this lighthearted dark romp, but that happens in comedies that live and die on their snappy, shticky banter. Blood Relatives is still shticky enough — and sticky enough — to deliver laughs with bite.

It’s a mesmerizing movie, in its way, a chronological stream-of-consciousness dissection of a very specific “type” — Western, indulged, pretty enough to attract attention, careless with how he uses it, too removed from his contemporaries to care or commit.

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

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

The thing looks just beautiful, and having the wonderful character actor Clancy Brown as a creepy old mortician “telling” the tales lends it gravitas and ups its cool quotient. But the stories from Spindell, heretofore a maker of short films (including an earlier version of a “story” told here), are wildly uneven in tension, suspense and horror.

We’re invited to dream along with the filmmakers, without a lot of background, footnotes or interviews with experts or the celebrated folks who once lived there.

Let’s not think too much about the resolution to Stacey Gregg’s haunting Here Before. It’s too pat to feel satisfying after all that we’ve invested in that’s come before it. But what we’ve seen and settled into up to that climax is another sublime performance from Andrea Riseborough, one of the subtlest and most expressive actresses working today.

The animation’s so flat, static and dull it relies on brighter-than-bright sparkly colors to make it pop. Like “Power Puff Girls” or “My Little Pony.” The jokes are infantile-obvious and pounded home with a sledgehammer, as if the writers figured they had to get through something especially thick.

A Taxi Driver is a Korean epic, a tipping point in the history of South Korea. A little old-fashioned and a touch melodramatic, it’s still a compelling Korean “Year of Living Dangerously.”

The Drop is a simmering thriller from the writer who gave us “Mystic River” and “Gone, Baby Gone,” a tale heavy with the weight of violence we know is coming.

This isn't "Up in the Air," and we're not dealing with this awful event on a metaphysical level. But there's truth in between the cliches.

Frenetic scenes over-stuffed with pop art/comic-bookish visuals, politically-savvy “tech is taking over” messaging and a handful of seriously silly and over-the-top moments give The Mitchells vs. the Machines its fizz and buzz.

As the warts and all image emerges, with her surgically-polished profile never breaking a sweat, we still can’t help but get a kick out of her Bieber-Snoop fed revival. Because as much as her comeuppance seemed destined, that “comeback” makes her story as American as they come.

The movie’s third act is wholly about how this forgotten story came back to light, and while it is moving, it’s ungainly, and as generic as much of what’s come before.

Eye-opening and damning, American Relapse is a blunt force look at the “cycle” of opioid addiction and the ways this American epidemic has been monetized by those with an eye towards making a buck out of any bad thing that happens.

The Monster is as dull and predictable as its title, a creature feature in which the melodramatic flashbacks are the only bits with bite.

Of all the gonzo-goofy comic book adaptations that embrace video gaming sensibilities, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is the gonzo-goofiest.

The stunts are old hat and the recycling makes Fahrenheit 11/9 longer and more of a drag than it needs to be. He doesn’t really have an ending, just a string of open-ended warnings and uncanny resemblances to Germany in the 1930s.

Actress turned writer-director Clea Duvall (“The Intervention”) and comic actress turned first-time co-writer Mary Holland made something of a holiday hash of it, a movie with good moments buried under clumsy ones, with plenty of pandering layered on top of sentiment.

Henson didn’t live long. But his restless mind and energy were devoted to sweet-natured and sometimes challenging entertainment — he never wanted to be a “children’s puppeteer” — that he produced with almost every waking second. “Idea Man” reminds us that the ideas he explored live on after him.

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

A brisk-enough but seriously formulaic Dutch thriller.

It’s the mesmerizing Rylance and the film’s theatrical single-set stage “mystery” that sell The Outfit, a “cutter” in his element, showing not just what he makes, but what he’s made of in this minimalist mob tale built around a mild-mannered man who takes the measure of everyone he meets.

What’s most impressive about Cha Cha Raal Smooth isn’t Raiff’s riffing, his character’s offhanded charm and his semi-“smooth” cha cha moves. It’s the deft way he lets the viewer figure things out.

This is a “feel good” movie that lets you feel good only after it shows you how bad everything can get.

Edwin keeps the tone machismo-deflating and goofy, and the film on its feet between fights. Our leads have enough chemistry when they’re throwing down that their characters’ problematic love life together seems immaterial.

It is stately, quiet and elegiac, all respect-your-elders politesse for “Pleasantly dull.”

The wistful and poignant stuff doesn’t play as well as the surprising setbacks to romance, many of them delivered by the weirdly randy Sean at the most opportune times.

Taken as a whole, the film is the quintessence of “mixed bag,” with some sketch situations, characters and performances commanding our attention, and others just sort of drifting by, “connecting” the disparate stories but accomplishing little else.

The great pleasure in the picture is the way Pearce, Minogue, McMahon and the other adults hurl themselves into the vulgarity of it all.

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 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.

This thriller begins at a crawl and finishes with a sprint. The foreshadowing is obvious even if the next twist rarely is.

A darker-than-dark British comedy.

It’s a bit of a muddle and a touch too soap operatic. But Newton, Rose and Ejiofor give their characters and this story just enough pathos to make the history lessons sink in.

As he fills the screen with an A-list that includes Oscar winner Regina King, Idris Elba, Delroy Lindo, LaKeith Stanfield and others, peppers the dialogue with a Tarantino-load of Samuel L. Jacksonisms and layers the soundtrack with reggae, hip hop and R&B, Samuel goes beyond parody and settles on just grating.

Pandering? Yes. But pandering with polish.

A rich and powerful patriarch faces the end with a household full of women scheming against him in “The Origin of Evil,” a clever and twisty French thriller that’s a little bit “King Lear” and a little bit more “Sucession.”

The entire film, a most worthwhile enterprise in itself, drags on and becomes more patience-testing than incendiary.

BuyBust is brimming with life, furiously protected and furiously taken, a bracing introduction of Matti and Filipino cinema to the world.

First Match is a gritty streetwise high school wrestling tale and coming of age/finding your “thing” drama. Emmanuelle makes a fearsome first film impression as Mo, a kid worth giving up on, which is why almost everyone has.

Mutt overreaches in the ways it folds all this drama into a single day. And maybe you can’t “have it both ways” in a movie on this touchiest of current hot-button subjects.

Yelchin doesn't generate the same warmth or passion that Jones does. That is partly by design, as this whole affair was her idea, after all.

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

The script, from a story by actresses Thomas and Reiner, is fiercely feminine and adept at juggling conflicting agendas and “needs.”

The cast and filmmakers have made a very good movie about a very tough subject. and somehow have managed to never cop out once by showing us easy answers.

It’s starved of oxygen and incident, of funny lines or clever exchanges.

As much sympathy as she deserves, Keshishian’s film doesn’t find nearly enough drama in Gomez’s crises to separate this musician profile doc from the many others we’ve seen about Katy Perry and a legion of others over the decades. The point of view is too narrow, the “outside” voices entirely star-approved insiders.

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.

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?

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

Whatever its intent, Bravetown stumbles through a steady supply of contrivances designed to make the budget work and the storylines overlap.

Whatever transpires or is left unexplained, Jóhannsson never loses track of the mood he sets out to establish, that of a frosty folk tale that suggests that not everything we do to cope with grief is healthy, acceptable and should be dressed up as a little girl.

Yes, the jokes are mostly low-hanging fruit, and quite a few of them you’ve seen and heard in the trailers. But they’re still funny. And Merchant didn’t let the trailers give away the whole movie. Not by a long shot.

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

The picture is all over the place, with many many actors, many plot threads and characters switching from Japanese to Chinese to hard-boiled English in a flash. But John Woo knows pacing, knows how to keep a movie on its feet and hurtling forward, and damned if ManHunt doesn’t manage that, flaws and failings and all.

The most politically potent sci-fi/horror film series since the early years of George A. Romero gets a bloody, visceral and yes, emotional prequel with The First Purge, the movie that tells how we got from “here” to “there.”

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

There’s no denying that this works as a thriller, that Smile is a well-crafted fright delivery system even as it slows to a crawl and stumbles into an ending we’ve seen coming for the past hour.

The topicality — filming this well into the COVID outbreak and shutdown — and eagerness to offend are what recommend “Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm.” It’s a fun character to revisit and an important time to bring him back.

The Conjuring is like a prequel to 40 years of demonic possession thrillers.

The Meddler is a film of cute moments and the odd touching scene, which serve to interrupt the steady cavalcade of cliches.

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

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.

It’s a beautifully shot and reasonably balanced film, but one that struggles to find a hopeful note to end on.

It’s a slight and simple story, but the way it’s folded into the music lends it weight and scale.

Jones tells this story with care and a lack of hurry, a pace to fit an age when people traveled no faster than two mules pulling a wagon could carry them. It’s “True Grit” and “The African Queen” with a moment of “Lawrence of Arabia,” period-perfect and a total immersion in this world.

Manages to tell an over-familiar coming out story with sensitivity, and a Georgian accent.

Ozon’s cast expertly navigates this downbeat terrain, and find the sometimes humorous irony of helping an unpleasant man and “bad father” get out of their hair.

Western or sci-fi Western, Prospect never sets its sights higher than violent, quasi-poetic B-movie and as such does not disappoint.

Parker makes the “loop” of repetition eye-rollingly funny, forlorn and wistful, even hopeful in a “Maybe this time we’ll get it” way.

It’s all something of a jumble, with even its “kumbaya" messaging muddled in a murk of competing story agendas.

Too subdued for its own good, too stuck in Trond’s head, with his narration, to ever break through. The odd moving moment in a stunning setting — set pieces center around the dangers of small-farm logging — is surrounded by a lot that’s implied, and too little that’s shown.

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

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

Martinessi has made a modestly engrossing, too-too-tasteful film about older “ladies who lunch” and cope with their own form of quiet desperation. If only it had more spark, conflict, color and heat.

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

You’ll want to catch The Wave because it’s fun to see Hollywood disaster movie cliches rendered in Norwegian.

The frights are passable, the foreshadowing (extreme close-ups of nails being pounded through boards, etc.) telling and the humor — sick as it is — quite funny.

Stretched to three hours, including a pointless (old fashioned) overture and intermission, does it live up to the “Cinema Event” Tarantino has hyped it as? Hell no. It’s just a minimalist Spaghetti Western suffering from auteur bloat — sometimes entertaining, with not even remotely enough story of action to support its insuperable length and gravitas.

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.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter — an illusion to a priest’s cassock? — never amounts to much more than its tone, the dread Perkins summons up with morose faces, shadows and music.

A light and lively look at a drug culture and trade that didn’t avoid all of the darkness that followed.

There’s deja vu in watching Tolontan deal with Romanian TV, which eagerly follows his team’s reporting each night, but which cannot resist from shooting at the messenger when he appears on their talk shows, losing the thread and forgetting the real victims here.

Whatever the film’s shortcomings, you can’t say the cast isn’t on the mark and that Lyne, at the very least, still has it and remains very much a master at sucking us in and making us care, no matter who the hero and who the villain might be.

Simple as it is, Ash & Dust lurches between incoherent and shout-at-the-screen mess and there’s barely a minute that’s worth sitting through the other 83 minutes of it for.

Peace by Chocolate is a charming, almost achingly-sweet fish-out-of-water comedy about Syrian Civil War refugees adjusting to life in small town Canada. Considering the family business they try to establish — chocolate making– “sweet” is pretty much a given.

In Spanish with English subtitles, has a lovely, big budget sheen (Shlomo Godder was the cinematographer) and a cast that plays this as documentary real.

Lindon takes these various licenses she gives herself and her movie to conjure up something thoughtful, tender and coming-of-age insightful in Spring Blossom.

The scenery is still stunning, but there’s little of the brio of a filmmaker who went on to make “Deliverance,” “Excalibur” and the glorious “Hope and Glory” in it.

Wilson holds our attention with her manner, her actions and her eyes, creating a broken beauty who may be too flighty to figure out her “gather ye rosebuds” years are coming to an end, and too impulsive to see the impulses that help make her “beguiling” are just self-defeating and self-destructive.

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.

Like the other famous current example of the mercurial, dimwitted bullying, sexually abusive misogynist/narcissist, we know the True Believers’ epiphany won’t be something they welcome.

An imposing and impressive lead performance somewhat atones for an awkwardly structured script and a charisma-starved supporting cast in A Great Awakening.

The Water Man is a gorgeous looking tween fantasy/adventure in the “Bridge to Terabithia” tradition, well-cast and designed to tug at the heartstrings. But the feature directing debut of co-star David Oyelowo (“Selma”) is a Bridge to Nowhere — dramatically flat and emotionally lacking.

Eastwood’s made some bad movies in recent years, along with some gems. This is the first film of his I’ve seen since his organutan co-star days that had me embarrassed for him.

A mesmerizing immersion in music, a “scene” and the obsessions of a member of the “Hey everyone, notice ME” generation.

The Night House serves up the subtle horror of expectations, invites us to join our heroine in fearing the worst, perhaps simply resigned to it. And Hall makes everything we see and that Beth experiences credible, which may be the creepiest thing about it.

American Animals is a tense, taut sober and occasionally silly thriller that reminds us that the Caribbean Island at the end of the Hollywood heist is always a mirage.

“Acreage” is so embedded in that earth you can taste it, smell the tobacco, cedar and slowly rotting corn stalks on those gently sloping hills.

Leave the World Behind is not awful or wrong-headed or particularly insightful as a parable. It just isn’t very good at what disaster movies are supposed to be good at.

The whole movie...feels like an under-developed sketch that goes on for too long.

It’s still a fine showcase for great acting, a great setting and a pretty good, if not great yarn unraveling the social fabric of a family, its history and the ugly secrets Everybody Knows but nobody has talked about — until now.

The film itself is more recognizably human and considered, while lacking any comic edge or sense that the romantic stakes are high.

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

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is a great name for a documentary about Hayao Miyazaki and his animation house, Japan’s Studio Ghibli.

Sandler’s in a role tailor made for him, and he still lets us see the wheels turning and the effort it takes to make this guy feel real. And for all its half-hearted twists, there’s rarely a minute’s doubt as to where this “Hustle” will end up.

It adds bubbles to the show, but doesn’t change the essentially deadpan, amusingly banal nature of this journey and the two charming old men who take it.

An oddly unaffecting portrait of damaged soldiers trying to break back into civilian life.

The only thing that Other Music does differently from the scores of “last days of a dying business” docs preceding it is showing us the day AFTER the emotional “last day in business” scene.

Even in the film’s third act lurch into sheer melodrama, with brittle conversations carried out on eggshells, Morales and Duplass are wholly immersed in character. The twists are believable because they’re totally credible in their roles.

Director Sebastian Cordero — he did the John Leguizamo journalism thriller “Chronicles” — serves up chilling and all-too-real ways to die in space and maintains tension even if suspense is in short supply in a tale told in flashback.

Nobody Speak is a little unbalanced, and top-heavy, thanks to the overwhelming focus on the more murky Gawker trial.

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.

It starts promisingly, builds towards something Roald Dahl cutting and cute, and kind of comes to pieces, like crumb cake.

Fort Bliss is a solid tough-adjustment-coming-home melodrama built around a superb performance by Michelle Monaghan.

Ordinary rules of drama don’t apply in the Marvel Universe, so expecting Avengers: Infinity War to build suspense, reach a climax and deliver some sort of conclusion is just…unreasonable.

But Wilde gives this woman her all. We see her with every freckles and imperfection showing on her cover girl face. And in the couple of scenes that require fight choreography, she handles herself well enough to be convincing.

This unblinking yet unsatisfying ensemble drama features kinky sex, ruthless opportunism, violence and psychosis. Very Cronenberg.

It may be straight-up melodrama, from its lone, corny, over-explaining flashback to the cliched drunk tank our hero finds himself in to the grim hysteria of an ambulance ride. Desplechin’s film still strikes enough of the right notes to be entertaining.

And John Cusack. “One semester at NYU” is all the Internet Movie Database gives him, as far as credentials. But he’s got opinions, especially about the meltdown of 2007-8. And he’s outraged. So anyway.

Actor turned writer-director Matthew J. Saville’s debut feature makes for a dry, unemotional blend of dark comedy and co-dependency, scenic but desultory, even when Rampling is at her best.

“F1” is a shiny, streamlined and perfectly aerodynamic version of an old fashioned star vehicle.

Reeves animates the action and the filmmakers surround him with wonderful co-stars; the quietly menacing McShane, the chop shop operator (John Leguizamo), the dapper “cleaner” (David Patrick Kelly of “The Warriors”) and the spitting, hissing Nyqvist.

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

The performances and the ready supply of one-liners make this an amusing look at a new generation getting lost down memory lane.

There’s a humility and generosity of spirit in their work here — testy as it sometimes is — that plays like a breath of fresh air in an era of “cancel culture” and those hellbent on testing it.

Chef is Favreau’s most personal film since “Swingers,” an overlong comedy full of his food, his taste in music, his favorite places and a boatload of his favorite actors.

Genre fans may eat this up, but it’s not anything I’d call a “must see” film, despite its obvious ambition.

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

But without the gags to enliven the travelogue, without more funny lines to lighten the load and impart that message, Missing Link feels like a missed opportunity. It’s the second animated stab at making comedy out of Big Foot and never much more than second best on the subject.

It’s a movie whose winning warmth, plucky “up from nothing” story and genteel rowdiness are infectious. But its glory is in another gem of performance from Toni Collette.

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

Audacious, violent and disquieting, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a summer sequel that's better than it has any right to be.

I found this parable a tad pokey for my tastes, almost sleep-inducing in the middle acts. The title promises a picture with more momentum, a longer “road” journey, and I was disappointed when it settled into how hard it is to get work and get by in Bangkok.

Ejiofor’s movie teases and never lets us forget exactly where it’s heading. And it uses an almost unforgivable amount of its running time taking us where we know it is going.

Brown is the marvel-in-motion who powers this machine. She lets this showcase make the case for a post-child-actress career, showing off pluck, comfort with stunts and something her chilly TV series rarely allows her — charm.

My Friend Dahmer gives us one of the most fascinating portraits of a serial killer, ever.

A fascinating block of broadcasting trapped in amber, a little radio history about passionate people doing something they love, willing to beg for bucks on the air to continue doing it and finding enough kindred spirits, “people who don’t quite fit in” in a shrinking sea of radio listeners to cling to FM life a little longer.

Nyong’o, Hounsou, Quinn and Wolff win our pity, our empathy and our respect as these New Yorkers face their fates at the beginning of a global nightmare which no one can see through, see past or realistically expect to survive. They make “Day One” both engrossing, and a great argument for why this “franchise” has said what it has to say and thus is ready to take its final bow.

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.

Miracle is a thriller of deceptive simplicity and paralyzing jolts.

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.

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

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

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

Eisenberg, perfectly, pliably put upon, is the engine that drives this picture.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a burlesque of comic book movies, embracing their popularity, mocking the characters, situations, genre and its fans all the way to the Vancouver bank vault where Marvel Jesus insists Disney deposit the $billion this fun, bad movie is going to make.

The serene and forlorn snowscapes echo the Coen Brothers’ greatest movie, and the story evolves from quest to odyssey as Kumiko clings to her delusion and we start to wonder if maybe this loon isn’t onto something, that maybe the Coens WERE trying to tell us something. And only Kumiko and the Zellners figured that out.

Just Mercy is a movie about a touchstone case that proved that to be a lie, a righteous, well-intentioned but uneven emotional roller coaster of a film that plays it safe a little too often itself.

Unwieldy, overlong and overly reliant on melodramatic coincidences, A Place in the Pines is still better than it has any right to be, thanks to its cast.

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

A tram here, a car there, a little attention to wardrobe, and contrasting haircuts (a Hitler/Himmler buzz was the dead give-away somebody was a Nazi) and we get an idea of what this world looked like. But “Fabian” fails to immerse us in that world, and being as leisurely as a limited series in its pacing, loses the urgency of what to later audiences can only be a “cautionary” tale.

Zeroing in on Carr as the movie's "hero" was a smart move. He comes off as smart, confrontational and unconventional.

The minimalist Share? does manage to be thought-provoking, just not thought-provoking enough to recommend, any more than its exercise in single-set-up filmmaking is.

What we have in these three films is the streaming equivalent of a summer horror beach book, an R.L. Stine page-turner more interesting for “how this all turns out” than any shocks, frights or tugs at the heartstrings.

The movie revels in watching the out-of-place Beatriz as she quietly observes the guests arriving wearing clothes and jewels that cost more than her broken car.

Anonymous Club isn’t an invitation. Don’t know the lyrics? Kind of hard to make them out. Underwhelmed by this guitar snippet or that one? Well, she does like the label “slacker garage rock.” Leave this one to the fans.