Roger Moore

The execution of writer-director Seth Worley’s doesn’t turn up pathos or laughs. And the kids? Well…

She Rides Shotgun is a compelling, gripping B-movie ride, a picture that reaches for highfalutin “Trojan Horse” allegories when what it does best is a lot more obvious.

Nostalgia only gets you so far, and whatever “feels” folks cling to from the original “upset the uptight golf world” original, it’s not enough to float this bloated corpse of a comedy.

Watching unhappy, uncertain children grow in confidence as they learn, bond and then run loving, yipping, straining sled dogs is incredibly touching.

A rom-com that almost goes for it and almost comes off before losing its nerve.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, what we see on the screen is gloriously over-designed joylessness.

It gives Buckley fans lots of the music and some of the details and color of the life that Buckley lived.

Casting real musicians to actually play the work in question may have been a gimmick, but it lends the picture an authenticity rare for a screen comedy.

It’s kind of a mess, but an ambitious one hitting on themes Aster’s fans will recognize as his favorites. And as Aster scores points on conspiracy-obsessed America, cultish America, gun-fetishizing America, virtue signalling America and the limits of “back the blue,” he’s pretty much earned the right to be heard out, if not the benefit of the doubt.

It is a competently filmed but utterly unsurprising tale.

The love story doesn’t deliver. But everything historically referenced, explored and explained that keeps it from being the emotional heart of “Shoshana” does.

This stuff doesn’t write itself, but it does seem as if Perry’s put the whole enterprise on autopilot, and his supporting “family” can’t riff or improvise much that’s funny into the worn out formula.

Almost Cops winds up as almost a buddy comedy, and certainly not one that works.

The plot is all over the place, the villains kind of amorphous and just generally “against” the idea of a Superman and there just isn’t enough Fillion or enough jokes to get the picture over the hump.

The doctor is plucky, but only in the dullest and most predictable ways. Self-sacrifice shows up at the most expected moment. And the ticking clock third act has been here and done that in more movies than one can count.

It’s wistful and sad and uplifting in unexpected ways as it underscores the prophecy of the knowing nurse (her name is omitted from any cast list I can find) who counsels the family about what’s really going on here.

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.

A script that leans into melodrama and wildly uneven performances are the undoing of The Ghost Trap, an immersive peek into Maine lobstering life and the people who live it.

“Old Guard 2” is 20 minutes shorter than the original film, but if you think that means it’s more brisk you’re mistaken.

It turns out that reuniting Bloodsport and Peacemaker from “Suicide Squad” wasn’t the can’t-miss that nobody predicted.

Offerman’s Jerry Kane is a villain for the ages, a man with a point of view that more people share than we’d like to believe. He makes Sovereign must-see cinema for understanding not just a “type,” but a movement and a moment, and just where they’re taking us if we let them.

Some of the jokes land. Some do not. And through it all, not a moment of rising threat level or terror registers credibly on anybody’s face. It’s as if they’re all in on the joke, with Williams merely the worst at spoiling the punchline.

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

It’s an engrossing character portrait of a woman who has been so on-task for so long that she doesn’t recognize real romance when it shows up and makes her an offer of a better or at least different life, and her struggles with what to do with that.

If you’ve ever been curious, without wanting to endure a drawn-out day-long slaughter by the world’s best-dressed and best-compensated butchers, “Afternoons of Solitude” will put you in that ring with a celebrated torero.

The script is a cut-and-paste job — lazy plotting, dull dialogue, no twists at all.

40 Acres is a tense, violent and generally satisfying survivalist thriller.

Boyle and Garland have made a go at making a zombie movie for the moment, a post-Brexit, Israeli genocide, Middle East war, insensate MAGA ICE-goons thriller that makes you think even if all the technique, editing and new levels of violence can’t hide the fact that the filmmakers haven’t quite made up their minds about what they’re trying to say.

The Life of Chuck has a resignation and a timeliness to it that render any “escape” it might offer moot. Every viewer brings his or her own baggage into the cinema, but whatever might have touched many seems buried under disorganized treacle.

The fights in this bad-boy-amongst-bad-boys butcher shop thriller have to be seen to be believed. “The Raid,” assorted blind swordsman tales, “Oldboy” and John Wickworld all are glimpsed in this slaughter in scarlet saga from Seiji Tanaka.

Martin gets at the man’s philosophy, his message that humanity is using up and destroying what Gaia, the Earth, has to offer when living in harmony with nature is becoming more necessary by the moment. It’s the pragmatic details — not just “How do you poop?” — but the power grid (Solar?), the diet, means of making the limited money you need there and the like that this brief, touching and sometimes poetic documentary lacks.

The fights are as furious as the story is ludicrous.

A bit of entertainment creeps in, much of it provided by Jackson and Brosnan, even if it turns out they weren’t on the set together for more than a day or two.

It’s all handled reasonably well, with just enough twists to hold the interest and just enough attention to the logic of it all for Brand Ingelsby’s script to make sense — more or less.

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.

You can see, hear and feel the strain in the Brazilian comedy “Cheers to Life (Vida a Vida),” the great effort expended to achieve “cute.”

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.

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.

The good intentions are obvious, but the movie wrapped around them is a something of a bore.

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.

It’s a pull-out-all-the-stops weeper, full of martrydom, coincidence, over-the-top cruelty, manipulation and plot contrivances.

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.

“The World of John Wick” hotels, “tribes,” murder contract infrastucture, “rules” and codes and lots of punchouts don’t really add up to much of a movie.

Veteran TV writer and director DeYoung lures the viewer in and leads us in amused, faintly contemptuous but always nervous laughter.

It’s the filmmakers’ unsparing depiction of violence against children that overwhelms this story of supernaturalism or desperate, misguided superstition. That seems excessive, a shock-value cheat that gives this “wrenching nature of loss and grief” story a sense of overkill.

It’s not totally soulless, even if it is mostly laugh-free. But hundreds of millions in tickets sold or not, the filmmakers never manage anything like a reason that this intellectual property should have been remade.

It’s just French enough to feel novel, after decades of Austen adaptations, biographies and the like, a “fresh take” that isn’t all that but does no shame to its titular novelist and the iconic bookseller who figures she “wrecked my life.”

This “Kid” is somewhat better than the one Chan made with Will Smith’s kid several years back, but “Cobra Kai” fans may find the generic plot weighs down the punches too much to be worth the trouble.

Light romances and rom-coms have proven so difficult to pull off in recent years that whenever one comes along that works well enough, you can’t help but whisper “Hallelujah,” even if you can’t quite justify shouting it.

Director, co-writer and self-distributor Jason “J.” Horton (“Craving,” assorted other C-movies) set out to make an “Evil Dead” without Sam Raimi’s flair for humor and “gotchas,” without his gift for story and ear for zingers and without Bruce Campbell as everybody’s favorite horror anti-hero.

No characters in this are developed enough to invest in them or pin them down as suspects. At about the time Blood Red Raincoat Killer whips out a circular saw, which is as inventive as the murders get, the movie invites us to check out.

Krasinski and González manage some light mid-brawl banter that hints at “chemistry” that the script doesn’t really provide. Portman soldiers through it, with Gleason at his least inspired and Ritchie helming his uncoolest clunker since his divorce from Madonna.

It’s only a movie, of course, not one of the better ones in this sometimes entertaining but occasionally muddled franchise. Taken to heart as a movie of its moment, and not just experienced as “a ride,” it’s too bad they had to go out with a bummer.

The fights are furious and bloody. Don’t get too attached to anybody. Or any body part.

Apte is the riveting center of it all, making sense out of nonsense, and when she can’t, just bluffing and bullying her unfiltered way towards enlightenment, or something just short of it.

Grisi has made a simple parable for life on Earth and the consequences the most remote people face from climate change, and a film that’s worth rooting for as Utama is Bolivia’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature competition at the Oscars.

The Surfer bites off more than it can existentially chew, but it works well enough. And Cage, McMahon, Cassim and Justin Rosniak, as the stereotypical cop-who-sides-with-the-bullying-locals are terrific — by turns hatefully or ruefully so.

Endless, dizzying 360 degree pans, hand-held on-his-way-to-the-stage snippets and jolting, beads-of-sweat/strings-of-spit closeups and a cranked up score can’t hide the vacuity of it all.

The Nonnas are the stars and the hook that makes this one work.

If your thriller’s quick enough and cryptic enough, viewers won’t notice it’s not remotely as clever as you thought it was. But when you title your ghost story The Ruse, you’ve already given away that.

Whatever interest — and laughs (those HATS) — that holds isn’t enough to distract us from guessing plot twists a dozen scenes in advance or from giggling at how Feig and screenwriters Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis stumble through a “How do we END this mess?” debate, one which Feig clumsily slaps on the screen without bothering to edit.

It’s more a (somewhat) satisfying “finale” than a logical one.

As the cliche goes, this film is both sad and life-affirming in its depiction of end-of-life concerns.

Whatever its sluggish pace and stumbling grasp of time, Queen of the Ring still manages to be a fine vehicle for making a case for women’s equality in a period piece that more than gives this sport and that period in time its due.

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

The scripted schemes don’t unravel easily, until the “talking villain” finale reveals all. That makes Exterritorial more “solid than surprising, and even that “solid” footing grows more slippery with each implausible escape or too-convenient plot twist.

This immaculately lit and shot (by Maximilian Pittner) and gorgeously designed (by François-Renaud Labarthe, who did “Clouds of Sils Maria”) and costumed (Miyako Bellizzi) potboiler does justice to Sagan’s “ultimate beach novel” source, even if it never escapes that label.

The characters aren’t sketched in. They’re underscripted outlines for “characters,” which might cut it for a video game, but not for a movie. The multiple deaths and rebirths fatally lower the plot’s stakes, and nobody in the cast makes us feel the terror or the grisly ends that keep happening to them.

It’s not particularly ambitious and there’s barely a hint of “breaks from formula” in it. But in The Accountant 2, it’s not the individual numbers that matter. It’s how it all adds up.

As cute and predictable as this all is, the cast hurls itself at this slight farce and makes it play.

I think the remake hits the comic highlights harder. But if you’ve seen “Fix the World,” there’s no reason to bother with “Dad Quest.” If you haven’t seen the original film, “Quest” is at least a decently acted, occasionally amusing and somewhat quick “summary” of the superior film it’s based on.

No characters really pop and there’s little room for pathos, humor or anything else.

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

Coogler introduces themes, agendas and histories in collision with this film. But once “Sinners” transitions from Black history at a crossroads into straight-up horror, nothing much is made of the Big Ideas in this ungainly mashup of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Crossroads” and “From Dust Til Dawn.”