Roger Moore

Few horror movies hold up under close-examination and dissection. But Ghost Stories has the goods to occasionally creep even the most jaded gene viewer out, something each year’s cinematic bumper crop of “Boo” rarely achieves.

Radice has delivered an engaging portrait of a loose cannon back when professional sports still produced such unfiltered creatures, a man who lived by his own rules, said what he thought and wore curlers to practice when he felt like it.

I can’t stress enough how undemanding, easy-going, predictable and familiar this comedy is. Nor can I stress enough how well its tried-and-true ingredients blend, how much it feels grounded in a place and the people there.

Journalists are being targeted in combat zones around the world. Hondros highlights that danger and brings out the humanity in a career that was above and beyond the stereotypes of their profession.

Heartwarming, amusing, apalling and sad, this story of flawed baseball team owner, promoter/cheerleader Mike Veeck takes us through the ups and downs of a third generation “baseball guy,” and manages to be damned entertaining pretty much start to finish.

The writer-director has made a personal work of emotion and power, but with an indulgently slow, patience-shredding pace.

The fun is supposed to build from the elaborate plots the marrieds and the bros engage in to foil each other. Only, it doesn’t.

It isn’t “The Ten Commandments” and Crowe is no Charlton Heston. But Noah makes Biblical myth grand in scope and intimate in appeal. The purists can always go argue over “God Isn’t Dead.” The rest of creation can appreciate this rousing good yarn, told with blood and guts and brawn and beauty, with just a hint of madness to the whole enterprise.

Movies that make you come to them are, by definition, thought-provoking. But aside from concentrating and grasping at any actor, character or plot wrinkle that might let us “into” Cronenberg’s world and thought processes, there isn’t anything here that invites, entertains or even titillates.

It doesn’t transcend its genre, it wallows in it. Sometimes, that’s almost enough.

It’s funny enough so long as Cage and Pascal are bromancing their way towards that big pay off/stand-off, the one you’ve seen in all the trailers because, let’s face it, it sells “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.”

A tale of boy-meets-girl, girl-wrecks-boys-life told with sublime melancholy by Japanese auteur Kôji Fukada, The Real Thing plays like the darkest “romantic comedy” you ever saw.

The British Pugh and American Johansson click in ways you’d never expect. And that’ll be handy, as they’re going up against “a man who commands the very will of others.”

Showtime slick and boxing picture predictable, Cradle of Champions is about the New York epicenter of Golden Gloves boxing.

“Trans women are women, too. And need to pee, JUST like you!” Whatever else Knowlton’s film captures, and no matter what its shortcomings in setting and balance, etc. (misspelled graphics on sources of data, for instance), “The Most Dangerous Year” can be appreciated for that simple explanation.

New Zealand and West Virginia provide the striking settings, and you can almost see what the cast saw in this as promising and meaty. But the script skips past deeper debates and doesn’t deliver much in the line of fireworks for the love triangle.

Yes, Reece has been doing this for years and his films have taken on a nice polish. And I dare say this one would “play” in the right group setting, with proper alcoholic lubrication. But from its nonsensical title to the inconsequential plot behind that title, Climate for the Hunter doesn’t have enough to offer to make it worth recommending, save for members of the vampire camp cognoscenti. And even they might prefer seeing it tipsy.

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

The performances anchoring American Woman are some of the finest screen acting we’ll see this year.

Its chilling third act suggests that sooner or later, even these riders on the Islamic short bus are going to get one right. And that won't be funny at all.

Where the film is fascinating is the ways it examines the wandering lives of working musicians who stay in touch with the tunes even as life goes on.

Rustin is quotable, brisk and inspiring, even if it feels less epic than it should. It has the budget, cast and scale of a good made-for-TV/streaming movie, not really “theatrical” in scope.

Director, co-writer and star Nicolas Maury (“Dear Prudence,” “Paris, je t’aime”) serves up a dry comedy that invites us to watch Jérémie suffer and laugh at him as he haplessly copes with everything confronting him over the course of this lightly-amusing film (titled “Garçon chiffon” in French).

There are bigger films and more entertaining stories coming to screens this holiday season. But there isn’t one more life and love-affirming than All of Us Strangers, a movie that reminds us that memory burnishes loved ones for a reason.

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.

It’s not bad, but as Scorsese, America’s greatest living filmmaker and film history buff should know, even Hitchcock came up short on occasion.

Green’s film is about a tragedy, born in a time of great national stress. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s an absolutely riveting piece of movie-making, one you can be sure Jean Renoir would appreciate.

Bluebird never rises to the heights of grief, guilt and regret of the film it most closely resembles, Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter,” achieved. But Morton gives us a wonderful take on silent suffering.

Saoirse Ronan shines in the title role, a wily, physically-fit and lethal girl.

Yeah, it’s dark. It starts sarcastic, bends towards sardonic and ends up downright deep in its observations about couples, the stresses on a relationship and the importance of knowing how to “fight fair.”

Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America, delivers just what its title promises, apalling accounts of decade after decade of minimizing horrific abuse by serial boy-rapists, a scandal so big it “dwarfs” the “Catholic Church and Baptist Church” scandals, as one expert testifies in the film.

Every eye-rolling dash of wish-fulfillment fantasy frees this genre picture from the concrete and touches or tickles. Middling movie or not, this one’s well worth a look.

Its beautiful, digitally-realized other-worldly visuals are eye-popping, so crystalline as to be disorienting. You lose track of where the screen ends and the tactile, physical cinema you’re watching it in begins.

Veteran director Tim Story (“Barbershop,”Shaft”) knows to keep the camera where the joke is –in everybody’s face — and the pace quick enough for The Blackening to skip along its well-worn path, making merry and making scary the way of many a Wayans Brother did before them.

It’s all pitched in the same in-your-face/energy-drink hyped pace and volume, which all but beats the “funny” out of a lot of the attempted humor.

Affleck ratchets up the suspense and raises the stakes with the film’s third act, but takes his sweet indulgent time getting us there. He establishes the relationship and the characters in a patience-testing twelve minute opening scene.

This winning film wins you over without manipulation, without guile and without ulterior motives. If you can’t feel good about humanity after this one, you can’t feel good.

It’s worthwhile enough to justify the film being made, but just barely.

A sequel that delivers more heart than laughs, and is, if anything, more visually dazzling than the 2008 original film.

Vox Lux is “A Star is Born” for the bubblegum babies of pop.

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.

The third act has moments of tenderness and warmth that belie the featherweight film they’re tucked into. And any movie that lets Hamill show off his malleable voice-over skills, and play a human being, is to be treasured.

It’s movies like “Secret Agent” that made the director, not the stars, the household name, the “brand” film fans would seek out then and for generations to come.

The gimmick and the satiric target here are broader and the punches miss the mark far more often than they land. But if you’re blitzed enough…

The terrible, only-happens-in-the-movies crime and his character’s investigation of it are all that animate these “Nocturnal Creatures.”

Throwing somebody with one “particular skill” that doesn’t include violence, criminal or espionage subterfuge or the like? As an exercise in screenwriting problem-solving that’s almost always a fun film to watch.

Baldwin lets us see glimpses of a movie that might be — on cable or streaming, a mini-series of “The People Vs. O.J. Simpson” style. Baldwin gets the tall, ungainly gait down and the makeup looks like that of a vain, egotistical “winner” who’d had work done to give him that profile.

It is a story of a reckoning — several reckonings — that is afraid of actually wrestling with the consequences of betrayal and self-abuse, of letting its characters naturally mellow or die because they can’t.

An often hilarious/generally irreverent comedy.

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

Doucouré brings a much-needed new perspective and new voice to the cinema. But this doesn’t have the depth or grim impact of a “Kids” (1995) or “thirteen” (2003).

The dazzling thing in Magician is how Workman breezily covers the various periods in Welles’ career, periods worthy of entire books, from his childhood as “The Boy Wonder,” to his post-“Kane” “Gypsy” years, when Hollywood was sure it had plenty of reasons not to hire him as a director, on up to today, as Richard “Boyhood” Linklater dubs him “the patron saint of indie filmmakers.”

For all these cumulative credibility that the “Pineapple Express” team bring to Halloween, this is only marginally better than the many sequels or the 2007 Rob Zombie re-boot.

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

The Little Stranger is a quiet, stately Gothic ghost story, an exquisitely observed British period piece built upon understated, reserved and stoic performances by Domhnall Gleeson and the formidable Ruth Wilson.

It takes a lot of effort to achieve the “effortlessness” in Hathaway’s performance of a character seemingly tailor-made for her, but she rarely lets that effort show.

The film is R-rated R.L. Stine — simple, catchy, punchy and playfully derivative.

Kidman works up to a fine but somewhat under-motivated fury.

The talk turns toward the tedious and the jokes, the situations and the romantic longing never draw us in. The viewer isn’t so much a part of the story as a bystander, curious and occasionally titillated, but rarely moved.

Scott and his collaborators find the ugly human foibles underneath the armor, court finery and gowns and make this story from an age when the one percent had the power of life and death over everyone else, when women were literally “property,” topical and timely.

In that climate, the desultory 6 Days can be appreciated for at least having the guts to show us what can go wrong.

You might be rooting for it at the end as fervently as you were at the promising beginning. But by then, it’s already disappointed, with far too many punchless punchlines for its own good.

Clooney? When he has a comical moment, he makes the most of it. His attempts at heartfelt epiphany left me cold.

Yes, it gets gassed about a half hour in, with things not picking up much until the Big Finale. But those who like this sort of thing — horror played for laughs, a cult-movie by design — will surely find this the sort of thing they like.

Director and co-writer Thomas Bidegain (he scripted “A Prophet”) gives us a tail of futility, of “saving” someone who does not want to be saved and the racism built into Alain’s fanatical pursuit.

Long Promised Road, taking its title from a lesser-known tune by the band, is a celebration of the glorious third act of a performer whose struggles became legend, whose victimhood became notorious and whose “genius” no longer requires quotation marks.

What this movie doesn’t have is “pace.”

Jason Schwartzman may be a little old for the part, but there’s something of a “voice of his generation” spin to his role in 7 Chinese Brothers.

I was shocked at how emotional the film, covering familiar ground with a lot of familiar footage, could be.

This “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Grieving” left me wanting a movie to go with the 70 minute Ducati ad.

A generally upbeat and exhaustively-thorough film.

Screenwriter Lauryn Kahn and director Mimi Cave take a broad swipe at “Just give me a smile,” sexism and the objectification of women. Their aim is dark comedy — darker than dark, darker even than “Promising Young Woman.” But the chuckles are mostly in the finale.

I found it a movie musical that loses its way when it loses its sense of play.

Wandering into the unknowns doesn’t serve history or the film well enough to make Chappaquiddick anything more than cinematic escape for folks who don’t like the current history they’d rather avoid thinking about by going to the movies.

Like a fine wine, Louis Garrel‘s A Faithful Man needs to be opened to the elements, to “breathe.” Because if there’s ever been a more airless, so-dry-one-hesitates-to-label-it “romantic comedy,” I’ve yet to set parched eyes upon it.

This film based on Alan Glynn's novel "Dark Fields" is entirely too reliant on voice-over, a bit too tarted-up by Burger in an effort to make this head trip a visual experience.

Blame it on the weak chemistry of the stars, blame it on the way the script refuses to let them develop chemistry and the perfunctory way the story is dispensed with, but the sparks aren’t there.

A smart, adult thriller.

The film could have used a little context....But “The Race that Eats its Young” is still a fun and quick introduction to a sport that, to most of us, seems so extreme as to invite the sort of eccentrics the filmmakers capture here.

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.

We’re some 100 minutes into the picture before the grating, gauche Davidson — and his character, Scott Carlin — achieves “Well, we should cut the kid a break” status. Apatow pictures always run long, but here the thin laughs make us reach “All RIGHT already” far too soon.

And when the credits roll, we cast our eyes about the theater at all the other paying patrons casting their eyes around the theater, all of us wondering the same thing. “Wait, that’s it?”

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is much ado about a lot of microscopic nothing.

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.

The Wolves Always Come at Night is a vivid document of a family and culture struggling to adjust to the harsh realities of climate change and just what that “change” means on a personal level to people who may not know the science, but they believe what they’re seeing with their own eyes and have experienced within their own living memory.

It isn't a great film. But it is a smart and high-minded one, wonderfully cast, with understated direction. Clooney is good enough in the lead to stir talk of a political future.

Hawke? He mumble-whispers his way through the notoriously introverted Tesla, not taking even a stab at a Croatian accent. That he sings in this same voice is kind of rubbing our noses in it.

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

The parable is simple to the point of simplistic, but Noas makes a most engaging tour guide on this slide down the slippery slope. And the people, places, music and food of Cuba make one long for the day when “the gringo embargo” and travel ban are gone and we can all sample its charms.

A lovely German elegy to the nobility of work and the family we create while working. It’s a quiet, insightful idyll set in the world of modern retail, seen from the ground level — literally.

A game about “making the wrong move at the right time” becomes the right movie for Jewison, one that transformed a comedy guy into somebody who’d make dramas a lot better than this, often with a social subtext that couldn’t help but strike a nerve.

There’s intrigue, danger, fear and hope all clinging to Tom as he visits the farm.

Sissy is a one messed-up thriller wrapped up in the most adorable, upbeat and value-affirming package.

There’s more than a hint of the ‘90s Roddy Doyle adaptation “The Commitments” in all this – people far removed from Memphis and Detroit connecting to soul music on a spiritual level.

The movie is a derivative hash of comic book picture plot points and origin story touchstones — half “Captain America: The First Avenger,” half “Thor.” But director Patty Jenkins, who did not get enough credit for “Monster,” keeps Gadot in frame and the tone light.

The real value in Mope is stripping the sheen and the glamour off of porn, still shot, as it was in the pre-Internet “Boogie Nights,” in the unfashionable San Fernando Valley (Van Nuys and environs).

Ibiza is just…boring.

It’s static, an action picture that becomes a still-life right before our eyes.

The whole affair is so slow as to let the mind play casting exercises. This seems instantly dated in 2019.

Director and co-writer Christopher Landon (the “Happy Death Day” films were his, and “Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) doesn’t have enough jokes or amusingly murderous sight gags to make “Freaky” take flight.

The fun is in shorter supply. And all these gear-jamming chases and wince-inducing explosions cannot hide that this ride has long been on a road to nowhere.

As our understanding of sexuality and its “fluid” nature among much of the population changes, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood serves a larger purpose. By telling these tales now, he’s blunting the shock of the pace of changing mores and acceptance of the different.

Upgrade manages to entice and provoke, impress and terrify, if you let it.

Put these elements together with some solid acting by James and a touching turn by the Parisian Martin, and Archive becomes a genre film that, if it doesn’t transcend the sum of its parts, at least has the parts to let us buy in and enjoy the story that it’s telling, derivative as it is.

The Old Ways never builds empathy for anyone, making it a horror movie you watch but don’t “experience,” its bland heroine someone who never makes us fear for her sanity, her safety or her life.

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

The 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.

What flipped by as a funny, big-budget whimsy before takes on gravitas — daddy issues, intimacy issues, trust issues.

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

The humor moves the picture along, which truthfully starts VERY slowly thanks to an overlong “Tigers in the ’80s” prologue. But Tran’s screenplay problem-solving is first rate.

Van Sant, a legendarily sensitive filmmaker, never fails to see the difficulties in Callahan’s journey, the spirit it takes to overcome them or the fact that they were all difficulties of the man’s own creation. That lifts this “uplifting” story above the twelve steps that are its natural starting point and into the realm of something more challenging than the genre conventions it otherwise adheres to.

Just when you think you’ve got a performer all figured out, they go out and surprise you with a sweet and sentimental story of love and loss and dogs.

Rosewater was the name Bahari gave his persecutor (Kim Bodnia), a cunning, perfumed older man charged with getting a confession from this Westernized Iranian, a confession that discredits his reporting and the bad light Iran is in since the election, with its ensuing violent government crackdown on protesters.

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.

First-time feature director Nick Rowland makes the violence in-your-face and the scenes where Arm starts to struggle with it wrenching. Dude stages a mean Irish backroads car-chase, too.

Wolf relies more on surprise plot twists than the standard “ticking clock” of Hollywood thrillers. And there are stunning turns, a few that will make your jaw drop.

Gospel According to André immortalizes a man of his moment, who invented himself and made his own moment. And as he winds down his career and takes a deep, sweeping, cape-bedecked parting bow, this self-flattering film biography gives us one last chance to appreciate what a trip he’s had, and what a trip he’s been.

As I’ve mentioned in many reviews of films of this ilk over the years, this isn’t my favorite genre. Unlike the somewhat better “Black Panther,” this installment was always going to be more somber thanks to the loss of its star. What the film lacks is the will to make make that loss heartbreaking.

We get little sense of his interior life, what was going on in his head as school, girlfriends and music were competing for his attention and music was winning out. His drive is suggested, but never really felt in the performance.

A “high concept comedy” from the days when those were a thing, it’s basically a cacophony of cameos and random sight gags hurled at the viewer in a tsunami of haute couture hype.

Lucy (Hadley Belle Miller) is still full of nickel-a-session psychotherapy, Linus still soulful enough to recognize his friend’s heart. And Charlie’s sister Sally (Mariel Sheets) still assumes Linus is her “Sweet Baboo.”

This overlong but rarely slow picture almost gets by on Momoa’s playfulness bouncing off Bautista — “You got old.” “You got FAT.” — and a light tone that almost wholly belies the arm-yanked-off/head-sliced/woman-tossed-out-a-window gore we’re treated to.

Melodramatic, impulsive, painful, but never quite "totally unnecessary."

It’s not a thrill-a-minute piece of children’s entertainment, but winning performances by young Finn Little, by Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush as the adult “boy,” and by Trevor Jamieson and Morgana Davies, lift it.

Sometimes Always Never has enough outside-looking-in charm, and Nighy, to make it nice fit to any Anglophile filmgoer.

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

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

It’s not all that original and not actually on a par with the benchmark films of this corner of horror, “Night of the Living Dead,” “28 Days Later,” “World War Z” and “Zombieland.” But Hernández shows a flair for thrillers and an eye for showy visual storytelling that, with his third film (after “La casa muda” and “You Shall Not Sleep”) establishes him as a horror director to watch.

Even though there’s nothing we haven’t seen before in this movie, she and Some Freaks remind us not just of the cruelties of the teen years, the insecurities and secret shame, but of how young we are when we figure out that it’s all just perception.

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

The light and lightly-unsettling charms of Sublet win you over, even if you suspect that Fox has merely added a sexual edge to atone for the political and ethnic strife he’s taken care to avoid.

Love Life doesn’t coalesce into anything deeper than “Everybody’s dealing with something” and “Life’s a mess that only gets messier.” And in the end, this quiet drama — stumbling into near comedy for the finale — is just pointless enough to pass for “dull.”

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

Somewhere is a triumph of tedium, banality passing for depth, a vacuous embrace of nothing.

Smile 2 is a genuinely horrific plunge into terror.

Lost Girls is a moody, atmospheric but oddly unemotional mystery.

Overlong, polished but drab civics lesson of a comedy. This “Barbershop” is in sore need of a trim, and not just a little off the top, either.

A Mexican-accented kids’ cartoon so colorful and unconventionally dazzling it almost reinvents the art form. As pretty as a just-punctured pinata, endlessly inventive, warm and traditional, it serves up Mexican culture in a riot of Mexican colors and mariachi-flavored music.

It’s a fascinating slice of rock and pop archeology and well worth your time.

It’s more creepy than terrifying, more thought-provoking than we initially expect, although perhaps not as “deep” as the filmmakers’ intended.

The cast is spot-on, top to bottom, and the leads are engaging and romantic except for when they’re being teen and mean.

The soothing, almost comically-whispered narration by Michael Stuhlbarg fills in around the edges as he reads Ferragamo’s words, and almost hint at places this film might take us.

The pre-teen girls this is intended for have a right to expect more laughs, broader villainy and more fun. This time out, the glass slipper doesn’t fit.

The Spy Behind the Plate feels played, stuffed with filler, overrun with experts of varying merit, and doesn’t break enough new ground to warrant the effort.

Mr. Holmes is an elegiac, understated tale of The Detective in Winter, a rare thing in its own right.

Sad to say that adults in positions of authority acting like adults — diplomatic, courteous — is the most refreshing historical artifact resurrected in Worth.

A Simple Favor is a thriller that ticks likes a Timex, a precision exercise in button-pushing manipulation and a laugh out loud mystery that mocks its own manipulations, giggles at its own far-fetched twists.

A moody, intimate character study filmed and performed in shades of grey.

A thriller that makes you wish you knew how to scream "O.M.G." in Korean.

It’s all a bit on-the-nose, but writer-director Keith Behrman keeps it topical and touching, even if he never quite transcends prioritizing that topicality.

Kravitz delivers an exception to that rule, a thriller with bite and a point of view that makes for a bracing, bloody chaser to a year of rising feminine rage barely masked in this week’s political expressions of feminine hope and joy.

Plays as a franchise out of ideas, out of jokes and more naked about its real place in the film firmament –as panda pandering to the enormous Chinese movie market.

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

Slower and more superficial than the original or not, the riveting performances and the vague political parable of the way the story is spun this time out put this one thriller over.

Wonder, through depictions of the burdens shouldered by its characters, through jolting displays of childhood cruelty and heartfelt moments of compassion, earns that reach-for-the-handkerchief.

Maybe Jimi: All is By My Side is as good a Jimi Hendrix bio-pic as we’ll ever get, at least so long as there are legal entanglements strangling the late guitar god’s legacy.

It's amusingly off-the-wall, but entirely too cluttered to come together.

What’s left out of Light Up the Sky is a LOT more interesting than anything we’re shown here. It’d have to be. Because even by the standards of “officially approved” pop phenom bios of the Bieber/Miley variety, this is weak tea.

Yes, it's pretty much a must to have seen the first film. Where Dragon Tattoo felt like fall, Played with Fire was shot in the Swedish summer, which suits the faster pace, ramped up violence and fresh collection of supporting players -- cops, a kickboxer, and a couple of borderline Bond villains.

The Trip to Spain is still worth it for that stamp on your passport and the giggles these two fussing, mismatched friends make — two cynics abroad, making each other miserable and us amused.

Borgman is a chilling, cryptic film that commands your attention even as its writer-director devotes much of his attention to keeping you from figuring it out.

It doesn’t have a laugh in it, and the story isn’t worth more than a sentence long summary.

The twists become increasingly obvious as the layers of intrigue are peeled off. But the third act, with its stark choices and grisly cliffhanger of a brawl, pays off, even it that payoff feels a tad more conventional than is promised.

A sensitive, unconventional baseball tale rendered in the muted tones of dread, a young player’s fear of letting everyone down.

The horror comedy Werewolves Within didn’t quite do the trick for me. But it’s a great example of how hitting the right tone can keep you watching, even if the “horror” isn’t all that and not nearly enough jokes land.

Snyder and co-writer Jason Begue paint a delightful alternative portrait of Hasidism and its practioners, going beyond the rituals and beyond respectful mockery, showing us foul-mouthed kids and an insular world clumsily at odds with the culture they’ve settled in.

This plot, with its murderous, sexy love and murder entanglements, can work. This cast might make it come off, when more of them have movie and not mostly stage experience.

When any of these movies get to the sequel stage, original thought goes out the window and it’s all about the colorful, clever ways they find to stick a knife into a B-list actor or actress. “Prey at Night” can’t even manage that.

Paltrow and McGrath’s interpretation of the character and recreation of the mores of the time are spot-on. This is an “Emma” of her era — young, privileged, cosseted and a busybody who sticks her nose in others’ business without noting that her own happiness and chief means of providing happiness to others are being neglected.

The thrill of the new, the delight in discovering how light on their feet and how trippingly the Whedon one-liners can fall off the tongue, is fading. A bloated blockbuster movie-as-commodity like Age of Ultron doesn’t herald the end of this franchise or genre. But you can see it from here.

The fourth comic book movie of the summer is the best comic book movie of the summer. Johnston has delivered a light, clever and deftly balanced adventure picture with real lump in the throat nostalgia.

Best taken as the perfect film to transition your kids from animation to live action fare – short, sweet, and educational.

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

City Island is a light “family” romance that goes about as far as its novel location -- an island neighborhood tucked in the middle of New York City -- and a good cast can carry it.

Kaluuya co-wrote and co-directed the film, which may have nothing to do with its distracted focus and murky messaging. Or that may explain the movie’s failings entirely. Whatever the cause, it makes for a somewhat immersive mixed-bag of a movie, which puts a damper on any temptation to use “promising first film” in describing it.

This picture’s just a clockwork contraption of clever “tools” used cleverly and little more, none of them more than Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere or whatever editing software they used to cut this sterile jewel into shape with.

It’s demented, and it’s damned-near brilliant.

It’s a live-action version of on an ’80s cartoon that was designed to sell toys. This is “Transformers” without the Bumblebee Camaro, a lot of action, a few one-liners, and a lot of gunplay.

It’s an alarming indictment of the way we’ve been taught to think, and where that warped thinking has put millions of our fellow citizens.

Sure, an uplifting film like The Heart of Nuba plays like hagiography, but you’re hard-pressed to find complaints about this saintly, sometimes profane surgeon and healer. Unless you want to interview al-Bashir for your film.

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

Pairing Loren up with a child with this much spark, acting-up and acting-out, proves to be a winning formula for the film.

In Peterloo, Leigh reminds us how wars, and anti-labor massacres, are forgotten in the “history is written by the winners” rules of the game. And even if the film gets away from him, here and there, it’s good to have him remind us the game isn’t actually over. Yet.

I found Cordelia an intriguing, immersive mystery that left me with more questions — not about what’s really going on, but about more mundane third act specifics — than it has answers to.

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

Like good satire, Us and Them burns, bites and wounds as it lands its punches. Like stumbling satire, the tone feels off as writer-director Martin lets things go too far even as Danny’s mates start to absorb his message.

Director J.D. Dillard’s film, “inspired by” the “true story” of Jesse L. Brown, a color-barrier-breaking pilot for the U.S. Navy, may be a straight up B-movie, from its lesser known cast to story beats that flirt with war movie tropes and over-the-top hokum. But it sure looks like an A-picture.

“Obama’s America” flutters to the ground like so much GOP convention confetti, all assertions, few facts and little substance other than the conspiratorial right wing talking points that are how D’Souza’s makes his living.

There’s barely an original thought or novel theme in Creed II, a movie that wrings more bloody-nose money from the original “Rocky” sequels in recycling characters, themes, fights and situations and putting Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson instead of Stallone and Talia Shire in them this time.

Director Midi Z and his muse (Ke-Xi Wu is in most of his films, including “The Road to Mandalay”) take us on an increasingly fraught and stylized trip down the rabbit hole of “big break” success and the guilt and emotional scars that linger from what Nina might have endured to get there.

Through vivid, wrenching performances by Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges, it personalizes the statistics, and personalizes the glib talk show therapists who counsel “Let them go, you can’t save them.” Not if it’s your kid.

It is very much “A Love Story,” letting Anderson do almost all of the talking.

The legends of America’s great robber barons are equal parts inspiring and appalling. And damned if The Founder doesn’t get that balance just right.

A rather dull and talkative comedy about two mismatched colleagues trapped in Albuquerque for a day of true confessions and misbehavior.

This three-part picture is more interesting than titillating, a film best appreciated as a semi-sordid slice of interior lives in a culture that worships good manners and may or may not have invented pornography, but certainly perfected it in either case.

I adored the animated Mulan, but the best I can say for this one is it’s pretty enough, and watchable. Whatever they market-researched and committee-scripted into this, I wanted something with more heart, better action and at least a hint of fun.

There are tips and too-obvious clues about what’s really going on here. And Miele drags out the finale, too, trying to bring on the tears. But Miller and Luna give this romance a history, weariness and testy spark that keeps Wander Darkly going even after we’ve guessed what its destination is.

Absurdly long, absurdly over the top and absurdly absurd, Five Five - still manages to be more fun than any movie with its outrageous carbon footprint has any right to be.

The first seventeen minutes of The Sound of Silence plays like the best short film in many a year. It’s compact, provocative and thanks to the serenity of its star, Peter Sarsgaard, and fraught exhaustion of the client (Rashida Jones), draws us in pretty much instantly. It leaves us with a sense of whimsy unexplained — mystery.

The chaotic violence, when co-writers/director Guido van Driel and Lennert Hillege dish it out, is frenetic — a drunk’s weaving and teetering hand-held camer chase, sudden turns towards the brutal, an assault that seems to come out of nowhere — to a drunk.

What screenwriter Christina Hodson delivers is an appealing heroine, an adorably vulnerable robot, all alone among the Mean Old Earthlings, and something this insanely successful but ever-so-empty-headed franchise has never had — charm.

It’s impossible not to see this character and this riveting performance by Amir-Ebrahimi and not think of the brave women protesting their treatment and status right now on the streets of Iran’s cities. Arezoo, like hundreds of thousands of her sisters, persists.

The whole adds up to a charming portrait of the micro-fame and full, rich (not that rich) lives of the big actors who played little roles in the most carefully watched and memorized movie since “Citizen Kane.”

Mara delivers the movie’s emotional punches like a prize-fighter, utterly selling us on the notion that this cold, remote and guarded member of the working class walking wounded has found her true love in the one guy who needs her, sticks with her and saves her life.

As with her best films, Coppola is utterly at ease in this milieu and it shows.

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

The most valuable thing about the film, implied in the shared narration by Terrence Howard and director Martin Shore, is capturing these legends one more time before it’s too late.

I love this sub-genre of crime pictures, and while this isn’t on a par with the true classics of the type, it’s in the conversation. A little of Tom Hardy’s cellphone in the car myopia “Locke,” a little of Gosling’s “Drive,” and a lot of Grillo goes a long way.

Businesses destroyed, lives shaken to their core, the cars of bystanders crushed, cops helpless to stop it — it’s awful and tragic, sure. But it’s something to see, man.

Causeway is slight but immersive, warm with the occasional chill and engaging in ways two very good actors can manage with just the barest bones of a story and a scattering of secrets to give away, one pained revelation at a time.

You Don’t Nomi makes some points, misses the mark attempting to make others, but keeps us entertained as it encourages film buffs to view “Showgirls” within the framework of a filmmaker’s career, to accept that notion that “An artist is someone pounds the same nail, over and over again.”

Del Toro reminds us just how chilling bumping into the supernatural is supposed to be, just how stomach churning violence is and just how many shades of red blood shows us, from first spurt to crusty dust.

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

So The BFG isn’t the “BFD” it might have been. Lovely as it often is, it’s a one hour and fifty-seven minute long kids’ movie designed to be watched, at home, with interruptions. And believe me, you’ll know it.

Cornish relies on Western audiences’ memory of chivalry, swords in stones, ladies in lakes, “the Once and Future King” and Round Tables to deliver a dose of good clean fun — with violence and jokes and a social relevence so obvious even a child could see it.

Nobody on Earth loves dogs more than me, but The Dog Doc is too credulous and tone deaf to affluence to give a pass.

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

Way too much of Game Night is given away in the trailer, the violence is a bit much and truth be told — the folding in on itself plot gets in its own way, especially in the third act. But Bateman makes the big bucks for being the best put-upon “hero” in comedy. And McAdams, doing an epic Amanda Plummer (“Pulp You Know What,” remember?) absolutely steals the picture.

In Don Jon Gordon-Levitt hasn’t made a great movie. But he has made a fun one, short and sweet, with a third act punch that is so to-the-point it’ll take your breath away.

Frankenstein is beautiful to look at and thoughtful enough to make one ponder its two hundred year old themes and warnings anew.

For a movie that doesn’t have an actual interview with the subject of the film, Kaepernick & America isn’t half bad, although the material they have to work with is so thin the co-directors had to pad out their movie with one of the strangest tricks I’ve ever seen in a documentary.

Greatest Movie isn't Spurlock's best. It plays like an overlong, overly cutesy TV news report (woman and man on street interviews included) on product placement.

On a musical bio-pic scale, this isn’t “Rocketman” or “Bohemian Rhapsody,” not “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” “Sweet Dreams” or “Get on Up.” It’s unfortunately a lot closer to “Jimi: All is By My Side.” Uncanny in its impersonation, flat as a movie, forgettable as a biography.

The film itself is an innocuous but pleasant “Junior High School Musical” from the writer/creator of that Disney blockbuster — Federle — with Gabriel Mann (“A Million Little Things”) serving up pleasantly forgettable songs.

Verbinski makes a striking return to risk-taking form with the ambitious, sometimes dazzling and even heartfelt Jeremiad Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

It’s light and fun and when all else fails, which it seldom does, the sheer scale of it all, that “bigness,” bowls you over and lets you and the kids leave the cinema with a big grin, and a big craving for chocolate before you get home.

The universal truths are banal, the narcissistic navel gazing in this episode of “Hoarders” just inspires eye rolling. 306 Hollywood is a home movie best left to the home it was shot in.

We see the mistakes before the principals do. That’s what makes the news-story-gone-wrong drama Truth so compelling.

Vorozhbit opens up her play just enough to make it cinematic, without losing the power that these disparate stories from a combat zone carry. One watches it with the hope that some day she’ll get to make another, and that Ukrainian cinemas will be open to show it, if they’re still standing.

There’s little reason for director and co-writer (with Elisabeth Holm) Gillian Robespierre to set the movie in 1995. But floppy discs, pay phones, CD stores, PJ Harvey on the radio and “Mad About You” and Hillary Clinton — in that famous pink pantsuit — on TV suggest filmmakers’ living out some bit of comfort-zone autobiography in this warped dramedy.

Parkland is a fascinating insider’s view of those fateful two days in November of 1963, when a president was murdered, his assassin was gunned down in custody and generations of conspiracies were born.

It’s not as start-to-finish funny as Warner Animation’s “Lego Movie”, and that also goes for the quirky Lego cartoon short — basically the chicken-botched filming of the opening credits to a martial arts movie...But there’s wit, warmth and invention here, enough to make you hopeful for a Warner Animation future.

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

The Road Movie is not a narrative film. It doesn’t tell a story, even though there is comedy, tragedy, madness and romance amidst all the crashes and explosions.

In Like Flynn would probably benefit from lowered “cut-rate Indiana Jones” expectations. But Mulcahy is too visual (a music video vet) and visceral a director to not lift them, just a bit, in the best of those early scenes, before the weary screenplay limited supply of charisma in the cast let him and the movie down.

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

There are possibilities here, a set-up that could deliver something more than a directing exercise in driving the viewer a trifle mad with boredom. But not much else, and certainly nothing that gives away Lanthimos becoming the darling of challenging, thought provoking international cinema.

It’s Kirby who makes this worth watching, and even that performance is nothing anyone would call “warm.” If “The Queen” and a “Mission:Impossible” villain didn’t make her a star, this certainly will. It’s all the “pieces” around her that let down this “woman.”

And our child-actress-turned-young adult girl-next-door lead makes this flawed heroine sympathetic enough that she wears you down even as the movie around her sometimes just wears you out.

There’s not much new here, but at least Byzantium has well-acted, compelling characters telling its time-worn tale with style. That’s the best we can hope for, these days, from this genre that will not die.

I’m afraid this is another case of Netflix’s Big Blank Check indulging a filmmaker, who cashed it and lost himself in the “White Noise” superficialities while never quite wrestling a perhaps-unfilmable novel into shape.

Ofra Bloch is a psychotherapist, specializing in trauma, who always wanted to be a filmmaker. But it’s her actual profession, not her preferred one, that makes her documentary Afterward a valuable document.

McElhone mopes in the early scenes and shimmers through the later ones, even as she suffers. “Carmen” becomes a veritable Maltese fashion shoot at times.

It pairs up the graceful, athletic and best-in-comedic roles Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, an earthy actress who easily summons up wary, wounded and beguiling with just a dimpled smile and a twinkle in her eye. Throw in the deadpan delight Lakeith Stanfield, June Temple who brings more to trashy-funny than any of her peers, Peter Dinklage at his most irritable and veteran Oz-villain Ben Mendelsohn — cast against type as a good-hearted pastor — and you’ve got yourself a winner.

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

The “Rescue Rangers” is technically impressive enough to be worth a look. And if you’re of a certain age, it might give you a bit of the warm fuzzies.

It’s a sometimes hilarious post-mumblecore meditation, rumination and romp about getting prepared (for childbirth) and realizing how unprepared you are, about judging the lumps who raised you and realizing that maybe they didn’t have the data at their disposal you do, Dr. Spock or not.

Writer-director Benjamin Cleary’s debut feature does neither Ali nor himself any favors. The movie’s so low-key and low-heat that it’s slow. And with that lack of pace we’re forced to confront, often, how over-familiar this story, this version of “the future” and this film are.

The formula may be worn from a dozen or more Hollywood pictures covering the same ground. But the novelty of the setting and the working class characters and accents — “D’y-knowhutImean?” — are fresh.

An awkward blend of ultra-realistic violence, boundaries-bending satire and low comedy.

The narrative veers between the action-packed and the insipid often enough to give one whiplash. The messaging is so shallow as to simply invite shrugging off. And the jokes are few and far between.

For a Quixotic, quick turn-around comic thriller about stock market winners, losers and supervillains, Dumb Money isn’t half bad.

It’s pretty, occasionally cute, but trippy — random. Yeah, there’s one credited screenwriter, but more than all but the worst Pixar product, it shows the signs of “written by committee.”

It’s borderline abusive in the way it wastes screen time and the viewer’s time.

Breaking isn’t “Dog Day Afternoon” or “Inside Man” because it isn’t as good or as original as those two classics of the genre. But Boyega, Williams and Beharie make this well worth our while, a tense and empathetic hostage thriller that could be literally — one last cliche coming — “ripped from today’s headlines.”

Ron Howard has made a sublime movie.

Master never shakes the feeling that we’re seeing a collection of tropes and ideas that never come together in a coherent narrative.

Look for Jackson’s cameo in the opening, which sets the tone. Call it another visual triumph for New Zealand’s vision of Middle Earth.

The wildly improbable set-up is merely the jumping off point for an exploration of grief, guilt and redemption.

The tennis, with augmented sound, shotmaking, balls-eye-view camera work and the like, dazzles. And whatever the strengths of the leads, the sexual dynamics of this relationship are every bit as of America at this “moment” as the beautiful biracial player’s “color” that the script takes pains to point out.

Mid90s becomes, in full flower, a movie with characters more interesting or unusual than its very conventional story and setting, not a bad film so much as an incomplete one.

Director and co-writer Aly Muritiba’s melodrama is slow — 29 minute-long PROLOGUE slow — formulaic, dated and obvious considering “The Crying Game” opened 30 years ago north of the equator. But tender performances might reward those patient enough to sit through its scenic, formulaic and dramatically-limited longueurs.

Tamahori is a filmmaker in both his elements here, a Maori who never allows this Maori story to turn patronizing, an action auteur (he counts a Bond film, a “XXX” thriller and “The Edge” among his credits) who knows how to make violence visceral, and in combat scenes, an epic experience.

It’s no surprise that the story of rock’s original female badass makes for a gritty, inspiring documentary.

It’s pretentious and indulgent. But as with most Ferrara films, Tommaso makes for an interesting trip into a seriously unconventional mind visualized by an always unconventional storyteller.

Marshall makes for an entertaining take on history and Boseman’s winning performance a playful spin on an icon the passing decades have chiseled in stone as a Great Man and one of the giants of American legal history.

It begins with such promise, a kinky modernist twist on a classical sci-fi morality tale. That it degenerates into conventional, genre horror is all the more disappointing.

Howard finds the heart in this story, and the perfect places to pluck the heartstrings. It’s an emotional movie, given a real-time “What we don’t know yet” urgency by Nicholson’s script, and a sort of awestruck “Look what these 5,000 people did just to save these children” credulity by one of Hollywood’s greatest “movies with heart” filmmakers.

The debut feature of commercial director Aristotle Torres, it’s immersed in street life, a vivid portrait of gangs — “crews” — that spread their name and mark their turf with “bubble letter” art and logos, and occasionally defend it with pistols.

Whatever Mothering Sunday lacks in emotional payoffs, it’s the shattered tone that Husson gets across that makes it work. Few films have done as well at capturing the disorienting, utterly-deflating feeling of a grief everyone involved realizes they will never, ever get over, so there’s no sense even trying to talk about it.

Screenwriter Jim Beggarly (“Free Samples,” “A Country Called Home”) must have tailor-made this part for Falco, one that honors her screen baggage as the mistress of unconventional mothers.

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

It’s a performance of compact, comical fury packed into a movie that cost what they wasted on the “Wonder Woman 1984” avocado toast catering, a little B-movie that could, headed by a pint-sized badass with “Grace” as her middle name.

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

Tubman’s case to be on the $20 bill, as a heroine straight out of American myth, is made, a brave Christian woman sprinting down the path of the righteous. Harriet stumbles when it makes her more prophetic and less a woman of action than she was.

Mills stuffs his film with cynical teachers, absentee parents and kids trying to cope with the minefield that even Canadian high schools are built on.

It’s lovely to look at. But that leaden, endless time-suck of an opening act is a fatal flaw that “Kingdom” never overcomes. And two and a half hours is a helluva long time to take to get to a point, not that they ever do.

Like some of Mel’s other B pictures, Blood Father delivers the goods. And that’s all it ever promises to do.

It’s the depictions of social breakdown, Swedish tempers exploding, soldiers questioning their priorities in an absence of orders and the action beats — Björn’s crackpot defense of the power station — that drive the narrative, punching through one Big Effect, crash or firefight right into the next.

Perhaps some adults can lose themselves in this world, reveling in the magic, plumbing for Rowling’s themes and deeper meaning. Not me.

There are more funny lines and opening credit sight gags in this than most comedies have in their full running time.

Director Scott Leberecht’s eye-opening and memory-jogging documentary is a Spaz Williams — he was given the nickname ironically, because “Look at me. I’m Popeye!” — appreciation and in many ways a rehabilitation project.

Never works up a romantic head of steam, never captures the frisson and ferment of a tumultuous age. And, thanks to the flat depiction of Schiller, Beloved Sisters never overcomes the feeling that it’s a lecture, with a little rough and ready German sex tossed in, here and there, to wake up the class.

Mostly, Becoming is a collection of “feels,” hugs and tears with fans, students and family, and big promotional moments that director Nadia Hallgren wisely never allows to come off as a “victory lap.” Entering stadiums to the gushing introductions of the likes of Oprah, played in by Alicia Keys’ anthem “This Girl is on Fire,” could easily have led this unapologetic hagiography to that.

Mansions is like “Vehicle 19″ or “Takers,” dumb, noisy junk.

There’s a solid 90 minutes of fun movie here, 100 tops. And this thing just goes on and on, that “Neflix editing” that doesn’t take into account how quickly-paced screen teen rom-coms need to be.

It reads livelier than it plays, I must say. But the sophistication of it all, the provocative disagreements of the many long conversations, pulled me in.

Straight Up wrestles with its messaging, which bogs the picture down. It takes a few predictable turns, and some predictably unpredictable ones. But Sweeney maintains the manic patter even when the pacing flags.

They Say Nothing Stays the Same is a melodramatic, stately and beautiful Japanese period piece.

This Mission unfolds at a near dead-sprint -- frenetic editing, whiplash camera pans, all hiding an intentionally under-explained plot and generic action beats that will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a ticking-clock thriller. But if Mission: Impossible 3 is the first pitch of the popcorn-movie season, just two words come to mind -- butter up. [5 May 2006, p.8]

Through it all, the icon endures — wild-haired, bug-eyed, his manic keening and yelping evolving into something quite musical in midlife. The man? Surviving, keeping the faith and carrying on. And mellowing. Just not all that much.

The film may be commenting on the cushy way the rich and famous coped with Covid. But it’s insufferable at depicting insufferability.

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

The Way Back is a dull if somewhat likable nothing of a sports melodrama.

Thanks to its most engaging, sympathetic stars, even the over-familiar path it takes lets us find the warmth in the predictable first steps its characters take toward a richer life.

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