Roger Moore

Baby Driver doesn’t invite over-thinking. But as visceral, swaggering summer popcorn picture fun, it’s hard to beat. Impossible, as a matter of fact. Forget your comic books and sci-fi sequels. THIS is the movie of the summer.

It’s about parenting, the job that never ends and the parents who never stop second-guessing how they’re managing it. Beautifully cast, summery and bittersweet with moments of dry wit, “Prayer” is a small scale tragedy in light, deft strokes.

In these, America’s darkest days since the Vietnam War, Crip Camp is an inspiring, upbeat shaft of light and a sobering reminder that whatever conservatives want to say about the ’60s, every now and then, hippies changed America, and helped America change the world.

It’s about stasis, death and personal rebirth, not consequences or collateral damage. It suffers from those omissions.

Starts at a sprint and hurtles at us for a good long, stretch, before it stops to catch its breath.

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

Still, lovely as it often is, Atlantics isn’t as deep as it wants to come off and isn’t anybody’s idea of a great film. But in the world it depicts and the vivid characters inhabiting it, it is engaging, informative and absolutely worth your while — perfectly Netflixable.

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

The finale to the Harry Potter saga is, like most of the films in the series, a bit of a slog. But it's a generally satisfying slog.

The escalations and rising violence and body count utterly botch any sense of mystery about each “usual suspect,” and that shred of promise Cornish & Co. give the picture in her opening moments is lost.

The Salesman makes for a gripping drama of a relationship in crisis.

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.

Sketch-comedy whiz Jordan Peele of TV’s ”Key and Peele” and “Keanu” has cooked up the smartest horror movie in ages, an edge-of-your-seat thriller that is entertaining and creepily enlightening at the same time.

It’s a good film. Will families gather round whatever video streaming device extant to watch it 60 years from now, the way we have with the 1961 film? No. This “West Side” is good, not great...But the joyous, moving and racially-charged show “West Side Story” has always been still makes this a must-see movie for the holidays and a worthy successor to a classic.

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

Amy does its greatest service by holding up a mirror to this sad icon who lived her life in imitation of “The Rose.”

There's a soap opera going on inside that tin can with a cannon.

Ash is the Purest White is a sweeping Chinese crime saga that’s more interesting for what it shows than what it’s about.

I Am Another You, now streaming on Amazon, is never judgmental, although Dylan gets a tiny taste of that from one (among many) religious stranger.

The Rider is a docudrama as elegy, a slice of rodeo realism that both romanticizes and demythologizes the Cowboy Way in a corner of America where that still means something.

Truthfully, it’s a tame and tepid affair for a kids’ film, with its chief recommendation being the chunks of truth built into its story.

It’s a modest but immersive film more interested in cryptic characters and plot lines and in period detail — minimal effects, mostly in the third act — and the idea that some sort of rift in reality might be possible, that it could happen, and why not in the Swiss Alps in 1962?

A Canterbury Tale may not be top rank of films from Powell’s canon. It’s dated in some unflattering ways (a stammerer is ridiculed as “the village idiot”). But it makes an adorably quaint snapshot — complete with marijuana joke — of the war in Britain and an English countryside perhaps properly spoiled by progress and by too many years of TV’s “Escape to the Country.”

There are scenes that will make your jaw drop, and moments that make your heart stop.

Fuhrman’s polished intensity draws us in, even if we’re repelled a bit by this young woman who will not give herself “a break,” at anything.

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

There isn’t an original idea in “Snake Eyes,” so even if the first big brawl is cool enough to give one false hope, the puerile story leaves our star and the director of “RED” (and “R.I.P.D.”) nowhere to go, even on a cool, whining electric street bike.

The charms of The Wild Robot sneak up on you.

The movie feels lived in, greasy and real. [Bujalski] just needed more funny lines and help figuring out the most promising thread among the many he introduces to pursue.

Writer-director Valentyn Vasyanovych (“Atlantis,” “Black Level”) uses irony, horror and a sober-minded, unspoken acceptance of “this is the way our lives are now” to tell a quiet, harrowing story of one extended family’s experiences of the war.

Rogue Agent presents some things that truly stretch credulity as simple facts, leaving the viewer to slap our head in wonder because, damned if this story isn’t “true.” You can look it up, although that’s not recommended until after you’ve seen it. Because as this clever script winds its way towards a finale that’s not really a conclusion, you’d be cheating yourself of the fun of the mystery-thriller you’re watching, and the one you’re frantically writing in your head as possibility after possibility pops up, is wrestled with and discarded to make way for the next.

It's a story about storytelling, with differing versions of events in which people die by the sword. Filled with Yimou's characteristic symbolism and zest for striking colors, it's a fictional account of the unification of China.

For all the appetizers, the endless array of main courses and diabetic coma desserts we see dished-up here, Anh Hung Tran gives us a meal that is more overwhelming in its scope than wholly satisfying in its consumption.

Mudbound is not a great film, not polished enough to earn its “Oscar contender” hype. But it is a worthwhile one. It doesn’t touch us the way the sentimental “Places in the Heart” did, but doesn’t flinch (much) from showing the Bad Old Days at their very worst, which more sentimental films on this subject invariably do.

Passing almost passes muster by virtue of its two winning leads. If only Hall had given them fireworks to play and a world that feels more vibrant than a faded black and white photograph.

Honeyland is an elegiac and gloriously photogenic tragedy, an environmental parable played out in striking images and stark lessons in the high desert of northern Macedonia.

Sorogoyen tells this story of steady, tense escalation with great patience.

Actor turned writer-director Francis Lee revels in the grimy greys of Yorkshire in early spring, treeless hills covered with stone ruins and stone walls that need repair. The accents are thick, the mud is thicker and the romance could not be less romantic. At first.

Everybody Wants Some!! is just Linklater showing he can still summon up the immaturity to do a film like the ones he did when he had no name, no polish and was just starting out...This is the sort of movie he’d have made had he never grown as a filmmaker, if he’d only been a one-trick indie cinema pony, like Kevin Smith. And the world has already decided one Kevin Smith is more than enough.

Like the characters in this inter-connected world, you may feel the need to let go of The Past, only to realize, after the credits, the hold it still has on you.

Koepp and Soderbergh make this as much about mistrust and fidelity in a marriage as it is about spies-gone-wrong. They keep their film intimate and interrogatory, giving it an old fashioned theatrical feel.

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

It’s the clever scene changes, transitions and under-reactions of the players to every event — astonishment at Imad Khan’s skill, Henry’s blase realization he need never lose at blackjack again, changes of heart and matters of life and death — that entertain here.

Glibly put, this challenging time-skipping rumination is the big screen equivalent of watching that "Tree" grow.

A delicious femme fatale thriller with mystery, tragedy and more than a few deadpan laughs.

There’s a lot here anybody who’s had a comparative religion course will recognize — a plea for selflessness, self-reflection, non-violence and being considerate of others. But what makes The Divine Protector flirt with being campy fun is the scary lady’s walk-on music.

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

Blaze is really something, a riveting and challenging experience and an extraordinary film not to be missed.

The result is wintry and melancholy, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” or “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” in tone. And because of that, it’s a trifle duller than the man himself surely must have been.

Oscar winner Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) carves in stone the case for Rogers’ as an authentic American TV saint.

ZZ Top: That Little Ol’Band from Texas is a straight, no-chaser band biography documentary, lacking flash and big name peers singing their praises and expert testimony to park them in their rightful place in music history.

Michael B. Jordan (“Red Tails”) is never less than riveting as Oscar, and he has to be.

Torres is so subtle at portraying a mother unable to show panic or righteous rage that when Eunice finally does let her guard down it’s almost shocking. It’s a great performance.

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

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

I was fascinated, but I can’t say I liked Ghostbox Cowboy as much as I enjoyed the films it seems inspired by.

Brett Haley’s film captures Elliott in all his majesty, his twinkle dimming as he casts his eyes out over the mountains beyond his house or the rocky beach down the hill.

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

All Joking Aside isn’t awful and Harewood isn’t its lone shortcoming. The script is too thin to hold our interest. Stand-up is so over-covered as film subject matter that the only way it can work in a movie these days is as backdrop for a more interesting story in the foreground.

Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s film is funny, cutting and true to its source material, an amusingly unblinkered look at girlhood that may be a bit budgetarily-malnourished but could not show up on screens at a better time.

In a banner year for African American representation in front of and behind the camera, King looks like a filmmaker who will get more trips to the plate, more chances to touch’em all. Stanfield is already a rising star and in-demand talent. And after his Messianic turn here, Kaluuya’s star is in the ascent and his phone — if there’s any justice in Hollywood — has to be ringing off the hook. He lets us see what his contemporaries saw in Hampton, and he makes us wonder just who he might have become.

It’s indulgent. But we knew that. It’s Tarantino. We come for the indulgence. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood might be his most self-aware picture yet, a time-burning wallow in 1960s pop culture, fashions and the “magic of the movies.” It’s also misshapen and meandering.

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

Even if the surprises are few, the plot twists have a comforting subtext that leaves us with the hope that for Lamia, things might just come out all right — with or without baking The President’s Cake.

It is the colors, the life contained in those vivid those tableux, the theaters, street scenes of this or that army marching by, the shadows and fog of “reality” intruding on the rigidly constrained theatrical performances that stick in the memory from this masterpiece.

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.”

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

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

Riseborough’s performance is in the pocket, letting us reach for her instead of assaulting us with needy antics. The way she switches from feeble come-ons and pleas for help into furious F-bomb tantrums is a marvel. It’s totally-committed acting, no doubt about it.

Moving On is still more than funny enough to coast by, but demanding in ways that flatter and honor its seasoned cast, each of whom gets the best role she or he has had in years thanks to Weitz’s light comedy with a dark edge.

It’s easily the weakest of the four iterations of that title. If Disney and Pixar really needed to revisit a tale that they had gracefully ended, it should have been more of a victory lap. This, whatever its modest charms, has the feel of an end zone dance — crass, unnecessary, and a slightly pale reflection of the glories that warranted it.

Seagrass is psychologically interesting, and touching here and there. But one can’t help but get the feeling our filmmaker never got out of the shallows.

Haneke tells this tale a bit too patiently for my taste. But the metaphors are unmistakable, as is the power of the film’s message.

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

In the Heights doesn’t truly reach the heights, except when everybody’s on their feet.

As beautiful and intimate as Fire of Love often is, the sometimes grating, flat and precious narration makes one long for this material to have been folded into Herzog’s superior “Into the Inferno.” Romantic “obsession” is kind of his thing, and there’s not enough new here to warrant expanding on it.

Zhao, bouncing back from the Marvel “Eternals” paycheck picture/debacle, serves up a touching romance between a distracted young man of letters and a woman so attuned to nature she hunts with a pet hawk, knows the uses of every herb and tree and the incantations that go with their preparation and is thus labeled the “daughter of a witch.”

It’s not edge-of-your-seat alarming and its jolts are more creepy than shocking. But for all its period detail and head games, “Witch” works on the most primitive level.

An imaginative, scary and wonderfully rendered stop-motion fright.

That said, it works, sucking you into its “vast night” and taking us all back to an innocent time where the future was endless possibilities, “radio” was how a small town kid punched his “ticket out of here,” and TV took you to “another dimension…the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.”

It’s a compact, perfect performance in a tight, tense genre picture that manages just enough twists and surprises to separate it from the hired-killer-movie pack.

Its spooky tone and the odd jolt don’t remedy its chilly remoteness or self-conscious longueurs. But it’s good to be reminded that there’s a reason we cling to the afterlife as a concept and flock to films that indulge that belief, the warm and fuzzy versions, anyway.

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

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

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

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

The Descendants lets Payne show us the Other America and the Other Americans - little lives caught up in small but epic problems far away from the La La Land of Hollywood hype, sex and violence.

Gosling caps an already-distinguished career with an unfussy performance that lets us see behind the stone-faced public mask this most enigmatic American hero wore, from the moment he became a public figure to the very end of his days.

It’s more an instant cult film than a picture with any prayer of reaching millions.

Byrne and Kroll have a nice estranged sibling chemistry, not up to “The Skeleton Twins,” but in that ballpark.

Outcast is what happens when stunt men direct. The fights are marvelously choreographed, the swordplay splendid and the bloody body count high in director Nicholas Powell’s Middle East/Far East quest tale. The script? Derivative, dim and dull. The performances? Not much, either.

This Arthur is on the rocks long before Last Call.

It’s worth checking out Stonewalling just to see a picture of China that’s not State Approved or attempted by outsiders.

It’s a beautiful film, equal parts sentimental and bluntly realistic. Like “Honeyland,” what Kotevska is capturing is a vanishing way of it.

Too cute, too star-studded and entirely too long.

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