Roger Moore

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

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

Mumblecore maven Kris Swanberg co-wrote and directed this, a film which could have used more sparks in the confrontations, more snap to the banter and more originality — start to finish.

Teller, who takes us from grins to grimaces with skill, and Eckhart, given his best role in years and his most likable performance ever, make Bleed for This worth the pain.

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

Our Neopolitan director knows this territory and immerses us in it, showing us far more than he has any character explain.

An almost-empowering, never-quite-hilarious farce that gets by on charm.

The performances are good, the wrestling thrillingly-shot and cut together. But with a meandering message and an ending that is almost a parody of the “paradise” these boys reach for, it’s forgiveable to consider “The Iron Claw” — scripted and acted to the limits of what the script serves up — as little better than a draw.

What sells this formulaic corker of Apocalypse Porn is the cast.

Even if it’s not wholly “amazing,” “Maurice” is close enough, a flip and fun film about a rodent conspiracy.

It traffics in some of the very stereotypes it sends up and wastes a Big Name here and there. But it’s often laugh-out-loud funny, over-the-top, from its casting to its run time.

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

Here are the Young Men makes for an interesting snapshot of yet another version of “wayward youth.”

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.

The film’s third act is somewhat anti-climactic, even if it does have the novelty of being among the few depictions of how hard it was to convince the world this was going on.

Filmmaker Alankrita Shrivastava presents a vivid setting, a post-“gas tragedy” Bhopal full of working class/middle class life and clashing gender mores.

Mr. Roosevelt isn’t a laugh right. “Quirky” pops to mind a lot more often than is healthy for a movie grasping for our love. But it is funny enough, and alternately sweet and caustic as it depicts, in quick sketches and sharp observances, the LA of our nightmarish ambitions and the Austin of our hip, homey fantasies.

Nagy immerses us in this time and this world with simple images, archetypal characters and common-to-combat-film situations, another army far from home, out of its depth and uncertain of the necessity and ethics of its mission.

Eye-opening and engrossing, but no more so than your average episode of Ramsay’s old “Kitchen Nightmares” show. Less faked conflict, perhaps, but less revealing as well.

A Swedish thriller that picks off its characters, “Scream” or “Ten Little Indians” style, but satisfies us along the way, especially in the bang-up bloody finale.

The deeper into this story that the movie gets and the darker things turn, the more we see this tale the way the stars do — as a tragedy only in the eyes of its two main characters. Brown and Hall elevate this low-hanging-fruit simply because they have to.

The chatter is funny and the drunken acting-out just amusing enough to make these Pretty Problems pretty cute and easy to sit through.

I’ll watch anything with Goldblum in it, and The Mountain has its rewards, although no one should be fooled into thinking this is anything but disturbing. Sheridan’s joyless, blank-faced turn just underscores that.

The cast is uniformly fine, with Neustaedter (of TV’s “The Colony”) throwing an evil Heath Ledger vibe and young Zolghadri born to play a prison “snitch.”

There isn’t much to Before You Know It, but where there is I have to say I absolutely adored.

It’s a fast and sometimes funny fantasy with an anime vibe. Jokes and sight-gags are more important than plot originality or coherence or characters that are little more than caricatures.

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.

Cohen comes close to getting at why Canadians are so funny (at least in the arts). It’s their long winters. We need Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd and many others to explain that to us.

It’s “A Christmas Carol” riff for those who already know the story, and entirely too on-the-nose for its own good.

It’s been a minute or decade or three since we’ve seen urban homelessness put on display with this level of detail in this blend of pathos and judgement.

Call it a vanity project or bargain basement movie mythos, but no hard-boiled biker picture ever looked or sounded like Road to Paloma.

A bloody, violent and yet grimly comic tale.

Mercy Road is meant to wrong-foot us, rattle us and make us nevous-to-the-point-of-panic, just like Tom. More often than not, that works in this.

There’s little beyond the grey-and-grim production design here that one would venture so far as to call it “great.” But Fractured provides an interesting mystery, engrossing story and a couple of superb action beats, more than enough to make it “Netflixable.”

A big, broad dysfunctional family comedy, sort of a “Parenthood” pushed into R-rated “Adulthood” territory.

If The Night Clerk rises above “near miss” status, that’s thanks to the cast.

Taken by itself, it’s thought-provoking enough to pass muster. Get “Get Out” out of your head, because truly, all Peele’s two thrillers have in common is hype.

For all Singer’s expertise at making the fantastic real, all we’re left with here is an expensive-looking bauble – worth looking over, but not really anything to treasure.

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.

Equal parts “The Crucible,” “Kill Bill” and well, hell — “Carrie” — Assassination Nation is straight up action exploitation, a scantily clad, sexed-up slut-shamed girls satire about scantily clad, sexed-up and slut-shamed girls who get even.

As child kidnapping/trafficking thrillers go — and yes, there have been scores of these — No Exit barely stands out from the pack and overreaches at times. But it puts us in somebody’s snow-caked shoes and dares us to reason or fight our way out of this with her, which is all you can ask.

Concussion deserves more of an audience than just the film festival circuit. And it’s not just an introduction to a writer-director with talent, but to a slew of under-employed and superb actresses, and the hunky Tchaikovsky.

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.

To the Stars may be a mixed bag of over-familiar obstacles and dated themes. But this period-perfect piece and a solid cast take us back to an uglier time, just as we were about to forget it.

This filmed staging, which wouldn’t have “played” well on the big screen, is as rich with cinematic possibilities as it is musically. If millions find and love this version on the home screen, perhaps this “Hamilton” will encourage Disney to properly adapt it for the big screen down the road. I’d pay good money to see that.

The drama is compelling enough, and the messaging is vague by-design and with good reason. But the meandering interwoven stories don’t gel in ways heighten the drama or add weight to the message.

Roma is arty and beautiful, but also a bit like sitting on a sofa while Cuarón flips through family photo albums, never narrating or over-explaining any single moment or image.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle (“Whiplash”) reaches for the stars, and cast the picture beautifully. But this throwback musical (songs by Justin Hurwitz) lurches along on show business cliches in between dreamy flights of fancy.

The film captures the magic and manic energy of the performances, the inventive choreography and spine-tingling tunes.

Get Santa is an at-times adorably daft holiday farce.

Kline presents us with a coming-of-age story, or an artist finding his voice tale, and never quite delivers either.

That rare made-for-Netflix comedy clever enough, desperate enough, that it could have found an audience on the big screen.

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

Runt is a sweet and ever so slight Aussie farm country comedy in the “Babe” tradition.

Masucci’s intensely charismatic Fassbinder, bathed in cigarette smoke, working “26 hour days” even before the cocaine and barbiturate addictions that took over later, looks like walking death the moment we meet him. That lets Enfant Terrible reinforce the suspicion that Fassbinder is more famous for his excesses than his films, 40 years after his death.

Keoghan — as innocent or cunning, oaf or graceful dancer-in-the-near-dark, will leave you amazed at this performance and startled at just what he was willing to do to fit in in “Saltburn” — the great house or the not-quite-great movie.

Project Wolf Hunting is a brutally efficient killing machine long before the supernatural twist stomps into the proceedings. That almost seems like a gimmick-too-far.

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

Some of the profane hip hop acts seem dated in the sea of upbeat soul, pop and alt-rock acts presented here. But Pearl Jam and Run-DMC, inspiring joyous sing-alongs to their hits, just seem timeless.

If the movie finds its pathos and laughs around the edges, Literally, Right Before Aaron finds its easy if limited appeal outside the Hollywood mainstream, where “Home Again” is somebody’s idea of what a romantic comedy should be these days.

I do love me a solid B-movie, and this one, after it finds its footing, delivers. Still not sold on adding Oklahoma to my bucket list, though. But Swab might be getting me there.

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.

Though it only rarely reaches the level of gonzo farce that it might have been, "Diary" is still an agreeably drunken stagger through the novel Thompson based on his formative year as a writer.

The most fascinating material here is hearing his mother’s ambitions — a desire to come to America and “get rich — and Smalls’ myriad musical influences, not just his pals and peers but those father figure mentors who entered his life.

The screenplay almost lets everybody down, and referencing Chekhov (“Three Sisters”) doesn’t amount to anything if you don’t inject more depth into the characters and situations as a consequence. But the settings are gorgeous. Some situations bear fruit and others deliver laughs.

There’s wit and whimsy in this 53rd Disney cartoon, a distant cousin of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairytale, “The Snow Queen.”

“Sweet” and “sensitive” may win the day. But this fight over Our Son is a little bland and predigested, and even if that underscores the point that marriage and family and the dynamics that create dysfunction are all the same (“Open marriage” included.), that doesn’t give this affecting film much room for surprise.

It’s Stan that Queen Mimi celebrates, right alongside the charismatic and eccentric Queen that is the film’s star in this good but not great documentary.

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

Sad and forlorn as Maggie is, there are no surprises left in Zombieland.

Gwen has the tenor of a spooky folk Welsh folk legend and the grasping, gasping punch of an Industrial Revolution parable.

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.

A fascinating look into a custom that the movies and TV have only touched on and mentioned with a raised eyebrow of mild dismissal.

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.”

It’s not a great documentary, and considering how many of these she has released, it’s not a particularly revealing one — outside of her efforts (doctor’s visits, treatments) to deal with this ongoing pain.

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.

It’s probably meant to be funnier than I took it, but at least the slaughterhouse smorgasbord laid out here has a light touch.

Seligman and Sennott serve up a timely and bracing counter-punch and counter-narrative in the ongoing culture wars, a fun poke-in-the-eye at gay bashers and stereotypes that amuses almost as much as it transgresses.

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

Ila is the heart and soul of Closeness, and Zhovner breathes an impulsive fury into her.

Not great, not [a] picture that will change the shape of musical theater. But the playful, sweet, pointed and sometimes poignant Stuck is certainly worth the 85 minutes it’ll take you to watch it.

Like "Avatar," "Legacy" is a film too in love with its own good looks. And like the original "TRON," the sequel's a bit of a slog.

Amateur shines a light on a seriously dysfunctional system. It’s a sell-out updating of “Hoop Dreams” for the viral video era, a sharp-edges-rubbed-off film that holds interest even as it loses some of its testy edge drifting towards a wish fulfillment fantasy conclusion.

Or, well, melodrama. Because the further this picture plows along, the more “Isn’t that convenient,” in terms of plot twists, comes into play.

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

Among the players, the wild-haired Bardem stands out, and a vampy Diaz sets the stage for uninhibited future in villain roles, or deadly-sexy car sales.

The humanity of the performances and pathos of the tale shine through the tropes and cliches to make this smart movie with the dumb-pun for a title a worthy enterprise and well worth your time.

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.”

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

Reichardt hangs her film on Eisenberg, who subtly suggests a loner whose primary gift for the cause is he whole in his soul where a longing or human contact should be. It’s a terrific performance and it holds the movie together even as Night Moves stumbles toward its foregone, and rather poorly handled, conclusion.

Burning Cane has great regional cinema bonafides, a bit of film festival hype and the rhythm of poetry in its images, human connections, monologues and gloom.

Miss Sloane is a Capital Hill tale in the “State of Play/House of Cards” mold, a melodramatic thriller more realistic than “Scandal,” slightly less riveting than “Scandal.”

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.

An intricate and daft tale of love, family and revenge.

Moon delivers the popcorn in gigantic fist-fulls of fun.

So much is left hanging, unsaid or unresolved, even in the finale. But Yangawa still makes for a fascinating Asian variation of cultures and ideas of love and romance in collision, even if it’s no “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

You don’t realize how much a good horror movie depends on acting until you stumble in that rare one whose cast actually gets it right.

It’s great that Sang found another way to chew on the facets, faces and foibles of his native land, one that didn’t involve ravenous zombies.

The sex scenes have a strained sense of fun about them, one partner trying too hard, the other bowled over. The pain, when it comes, feels real, unforced and complicated partly because Tom does seem like a guy with a limited ceiling in pretty much every regard.

The messaging in Rich Kid$ might be heavy-handed, preachy even. The plot twists can be melodramatic and predictable. It’s still a fine indie calling card for all involved — in front of and behind the camera.

What few real tests the young man from Back East must face, the picture about his coming of age passes the most important. It looks and feels right, with buffal-in-their-element scenes that don’t have the scale of “Dances With Wolves,” but play big enough to make the parable’s point land and land hard.

Clever, funny but emotionally stunted. Like most teenagers.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is an absolute must-see for Gilliam fans and “film that never was” buffs. It’s a picture that crossed into legend long before it was actually, fully and completely in the can.

Holy Beasts doesn’t quite come off in terms of coherence or dramatic tension, but impresses in almost every scene.

The jokes are broad and narrow as ever. It’s a very inside-baseball riff on fashion and fashionistas and always has been. As the cameos fly by — Jon Hamm to Sadie Frost, Stella McCartney to Jean-Paul Gaultier — you might miss the funniest and most obvious joke of all.

The mystery is more intriguing than the movie is alarming.

Minamata doesn’t have the punch or paranoia of “Silkwood.” But I’d say Levitas, Depp & Co. have delivered a “message movie” with as much pathos and righteousness as the pollution lawsuit drama “Dark Waters.” And at least this one isn’t about a heroic lawyer.

Spinning Plates is a surprisingly affecting juggling act, with each story having its compelling third act revelations of the extreme obstacles each eatery and its owners have faced and will face.

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

It’s filmic fool’s gold, as every scene that doesn’t sparkle is just dirt -- dank, gritty visuals, murky plotting and very bad line-readings from Troyer (Mini-Me from the Austin Powers movies).

Writer-director Christopher Winterbauer’s Wyrm wears its weirdness like a museum special exhibit — “Mid-century Mod Meets The Absurd.” His loopy debut feature, developed from his earlier short film of the same title, takes on grief and loss and adolescence, coming at every Big Theme and minor subtext just a little off center.

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.

Well-acted, smartly-reported and heartfelt.

The considerable charms of Jason Bateman and Olivia Wilde get a considered workout in the lightly charming New York romance The Longest Week. It’s a droll comedy, with a droll narration.

As holiday movie comfort food, it more than fills the bill.

First time feature writer-director Brian Shoaf stages some painfully awkward, sensitive and probing counseling sessions for Slate and Quinto to play. The script has lovely snatches of dialogue and fascinating, wounded characters.

In every “Purge,” it’s always darkest before the dawn. But with The Forever Purge, we have to consider what we do after the sun comes up and the goons among us haven’t stopped, and haven’t been brought to justice.

Avengers: Endgame is nothing if not the crowd-pleasingest crowd-pleaser in recent cinema history...Give everybody, and I do mean EVERYbody, a curtain call.

A few genuinely (and literally) hair-raising moments, a few knowing winks and a lot to think about lift It Follows above the horror pack.

No matter how great her ambitions, no matter how little she was able to accomplish, thanks to the strictures of her time, here was a woman history remembers simply through the force of her personality and the simple courage it took to be ahead of her time.

The title’s a trite metaphor and the surprises are thin. But the sleepy scenery and charming performances – Stewart escapes her vampires and reminds everyone what the fuss used to be about – keep The Yellow Handkerchief from blowing it.

As familiar as much of this can seem, the players draw us in and make us invest in it. Even if the resolution is entirely too pat and emotionally lacking.

It’s too short to do justice to its subject, but in an era when young women build careers and get rich off “secret” sex tapes that somehow make their way onto the Internet, maybe that’s all this subject deserves. Lovelace was but an aberration, an amusing, then quaintly grim footnote on our way to a Paris Hilton/Kim Kardashian future.

But even if this film of a Susanna Jones novel makes a middling whodunit, it’s still a fine vehicle for Vikander, an actress of quiet reserve and inner fury. She and the exotic setting lift Earthquake Bird, even if it never fully takes flight.

It is a movie of magic and (sometimes) messy messaging, of carefree play with never a worry about meals or tetanus shots — a lot like Beasts of the Southern Wild.

More voices would have been nice, and just one person, on camera, defending the whole “safe space” where “hate speech” and “bullying” is banned on campuses is a grievous omission.

A solid B-movie revenge thriller, well-acted and tightly put-together, kept simple by design.

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.

Moore makes this caricature of 1950s motherhood a down-to-Earth delight.

Good Grief is sober-minded, considered and almost sweet.

The height and the way he used it should have been addressed. The film, like the player cast as its lead, is too short to do the subject justice.

Kudos to all involved for making a horror movie with a simple gimmick, a lot of gore and a few things to say about teen culture in a social media age, none of them having anything to do with TikTok.

Huston’s made his film with such care that the lack of other surprises hinders but never hobbles it.

Choked is not a very good film, but it’s a perfectly watchable and engrossing peek into a culture, its classes and its politics — governmental and sexual.

Bloom does a nice job of expressing, wordlessly, where this man has been, what blend of guilt, fury and obligation drive him and shaped his life. It’s not the most subtle character or film built around an abuse survivor, but there’s substance in the performance that lifts Retaliation above its hammered-home metaphors.

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

If we don’t fall in love with it, we kind of grin and fall in “like” before all is (un)said and done.

Contrived as it often seems, The Last Right is just unpredictable enough to pass muster, just cute enough to charm and just romantic enough to get by.

It’s the best film of this trilogy, but truthfully, none of the “Hobbit” thirds have been any better than middling “Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter” installments. Considering the vaunted reputation J.R.R.Tolkien enjoys, this overdone “There and Back Again” never quite got us there.

Its narrow “in veterans’ own words” focus allows the film to avoid the big psychological questions about the personailty types that join the “all volunteer military” and what people who have been in combat really get out of spilling all this blood once they come home.

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

“Serviceable,” the stinging critique of a young man’s potential by his publisher/father, fits.

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

Gooding brings just enough streetwise credibility to make Brown work.

Movies like “Fall” are all about the tropes (Foreshadowing, anyone?), the stunts and the editing, all in service of a formula that’s not wholly bulletproof, but close...And here, enough of that pays off that while we notice how simple it all is, you give the devils their due. It’s still damned good for what it is.

Unsane makes a creepily watchable thriller, but it’s so light on thrills and suspense that its Hitchcockian twist feels like an afterthought, a cheat not earned by the movie we’ve watched come before it.

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

It only manages a couple of big laughs, but its droll, judgy tone and some fun performances put it over.

The muted tone and funereal gloom that linger in the film gives it a mortician’s remove. We aren’t necessarily moved by this tragedy and the ways those who survived contributed to it or failed to avert it.

The most interesting portion of this film is footage itself, much of it quite grim, and the search for these German cannisters of film, seeing snippets of how it was gathered up and edited by editor, actor and later director Robert Parrish, among others (mentioned in a letter of Stuart Schulberg’s read in voice over) and was used in the Nuremberg court.

It’s a movie of repressed characters living interior monologues not delivered, the cinema of droning along storytelling rebranded as “serene” or “patient.” That makes this festival darling one of those films you ponder and appreciate, almost at arm’s length. It’s that afraid of moving you.

In a winter of dull holiday romances and seriously unimaginative seasonal slop, this one tickles and delights and is at least good enough to put off that “Christmas Story” rerun you know you’re getting around to, because that after-all is a tradition.

Writer-director Karen Leigh Hopkins has lots of fun with this surreal set up, and only really loses the thread when reality intrudes.

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.

What Anderson delivers this one time is a genuine spectacle, a gladiator movie with a volcano in the middle of it.

Stuffed to the gills with Perry's mix of the sacred and the silly and a serious dose of self-help for the self-absorbed.

It’s a generally uplifting account of the hippies and spiritual searchers who turned away from LSD and drug experimenting and turned towards faith, without giving up their tie-dye or VW Microbuses.

Well-cast, properly gloomy, with a serious bone to pick about Beantown’s “good ol’boys at the bar” sexism and chummy mediocrity, it’s a step-up for writer-director Matt Ruskin, whose “Crown Heights” had similar “attack the system” ambitions but fell short of the mark.

Percy vs. Goliath is dramatically flat, predictable in its pluck at times. But Walken is magnificent, and the other casting — on the nose as it is (Ricci can still pull off the young activist willing to sleep in her car for the cause) — works.

The whole affair is too cluttered to clip along, laugh to laugh, love to love. Director Christian Ditter (“Love, Rosie”) had too many characters to serve to give anybody room to breathe.

But we still get a pretty entertaining thriller out of what’s here, no matter how the finale sets up and how the picture resolves itself.

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

The Matchmaker is an edgy Saudi parable, an inverted “Handmaid’s Tale” warning the patriarchy about a mythical reckoning to come from the oppressed women in their lives.

On a sliding scale, The Long Dumb Road is closer to “The Guilt Trip” or “We’re the Millers” than “Midnight Run,” “Nebraska,” “Sideways” or any of the acknowledged recent classics of the genre.

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.

Writer-director Conners makes the most of her good fortune in casting. She has Smith be the grandmotherly gravitas at the center of this quiet storm, wise with her years and so old she’s aged into the truth teller so many need to hear, with only a couple daring to listen.

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.

Director Corbett Redford — a longtime member of that scene, so don’t take his name at face value — tracked down generations of Bay Area punks and tells as complete a story of the music, ethos, lifestyle and politics of this movement as anyone could want.

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

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.

A movie that progresses at this rate gives you a lot of time to pick over what it’s really getting at.

Zellweger shows flashes of her Oscar winning talent and is certainly not past her sell-by date, even if she’s tampered entirely too much with the packaging.

While The Giver scores points for being smarter and deeper than “The Hunger Games” or its inferior photo-copy (“Divergent”), coming after all those other versions of this plot does neither it, nor us, any favors. The Giver has nothing new to offer.

You watch this film and never, for a second, do you forget you’re seeing art in motion.

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.

The ground covered is a tad overfamiliar, Gyllenhaal’s reactions predictably over the top and even the tropes of the genre (“real time”) can seem unsurprising and overplayed. But Fuqua makes every minute of screen time count, maintaining the suspense and claustrophobia even in those stretches where he takes the foot off the gas.

Self/less doesn’t offer many surprises. It’s a lot like other body-switch thrillers, and is practically a remake of the 1966 John Frankenheimer rich-guy-buys-handsome-young-body tale “Seconds.” But it has generous pleasures.

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

This isn’t the best “version” of this “do over” story ever. But it pushes a lot of the right buttons and is just different enough to be worth revisiting “Groundhog Day” One More Time, here in the company of cute young Swedes.

It’s a mood piece, and the element that ensures that it comes off is Matz Müller’s brittle, unsettling soundtrack. The characters may debate the morality of their behavior in dialogue, but it is the soundtrack that matches their actions — violent, reckless and disharmonious to the end.

Watching two pros throw themselves into a low-budget movie shot, on location, in BFE Mississippi isn’t just amusing, it’s inspiring. Love what you do kids, and you’ll never get old, with or without the vampire’s kiss.

Even with all this sparkle, the film staggers through its third act. By then, the script has rubbed the rough edges off the villains and made whatever point it was going to make several times over.

It’s great seeing Woodley out of YA sci-fi and into a role that makes use of her approachable reality.

As thrilling as it is that Franco got In Dubious Battle made — the title comes from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” — and as impressive as the cast list is on paper, his inability to spot star power and screen charisma in actors younger than himself lets him and Steinbeck down.

The sport is surveyed and discussed as the historic route of the underclasses to change their station in life.

Best of all is this setting — stark, reddish brown and sun-baked, the sort of place one only goes when every other possibility has been exhausted, and only movie stars could avoid turning instantly tanned and weathered.

The story here didn’t do much for me and seems like a rickety, illogically-pieced-together structure to hang this narrative on. But the players and the craftsmanship — the lighting, editing, silences and loud noises, they make up for that and deliver those frights we ordered the moment we bought a ticket.

If screen comedies are poker games, then Paone, working from a script by Jonathan Jacobson, leaves a lot of money on the table, not properly playing the wonderful hand she’s dealt. But The Kill Room, which also needed a better title, has enough funny going on to recommend it if you don’t think of all it might have been.

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

It's a bit long to be as kid friendly as this educational and visually striking film is meant to be.

It’s brief, but not so much to-the-point as wandering around it for an hour. And while it doesn’t spoil the effect of the whole, it does feel wanting as a finale. It’s the dullest “Small Axe” of the five.

Land of Gold is a sweet immigrant’s odyssey road picture that walks the fine line between “cute” and “cutesey” all the way from LA To Boston.

Even though the plot gets mired in lapses of logic in the third act, Noto never lets that hang up his movie. It’s a well-cast and very well-acted film.

It’s the patient, meandering storytelling, the ordinary characters who make tenuous connections and conjure up the unexpected, the dreamy tone that sticks with you.

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.

But even as Hart grows richer, more remote and seemingly less relate-able, there’s still manic hilarity in the little man. He’s still fearlessly fearful, defiantly shallow and amusingly self-effacing on stage.

Since the movie’s street side dream doesn’t add much more than a gimmicky “interpretation” of their sound, you’re left with a deafening dirge –well-played, but really, no improvement on your basic concert film.

Moloch has a fairly conventional plot with story beats and a resolution that will have the ring of familiarity to anybody who’s ever seen a horror film based on a folk tale. But van den Brink and his crew bathe this beast in a gorgeous murky gloom that sets the tone.

There’s a lot going on here, none of it terribly deep. But Doctor Sleep still makes a worthy successor to “The Shining,” that rarest of sequels driven by genuine curiosity and fascination with characters and their continuing story and not by corporate bean counters and their bottom line cynicism.

It’s a grim, well-acted vengeance thriller with moral underpinnings that would have worked, with or without the supernatural “judgement” folded into its unraveling grief, guilt and madness.

The entertainment value in a straight-up genre picture like this is how fraught each new corner of peril that they turn manages to be. And there’s plenty of that. And damned if Aja and his cast find some actual emotion in all this, too.

It’s still nasty fun, just not as nasty and acridly funny as that ’80s comic trio of Turner, Douglas and DeVito were able to make it.

An 'E.T.' knockoff that works.

It’s fun, the kind of thriller tailor-made for crowd-sourced jolts and laughs.

Last Vegas isn’t “out there” in a “Hangover” sense. It’s comical comfort food, with actors doing the sorts of things they’ve done for decades. But even if this is the safest Vegas romp of them all, this cast never lets us forget that we’re in very good hands.

This one is too interesting, funny and aggressively/transgressively sexy — if there even is such a thing these days — to pass by.

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

“Ugly Dolls” screenwriter Alison Peck finds her niche with this picture, throwing just enough plot wrinkles and smart-ass banter into the mix to make the formula — if not exactly fresh — at least fresh-adjacent.

It’s a mad, ambitious allegory that dives into the Deal with the Devil one makes for a career in the game.

A jarring, jolting entry in the “Hand that Rocks the Cradle” genre, a too-obvious thriller that still lands a sucker punch or three.

Scott looked at all the sordid, unscrupulous and deadly goings-on that ended the Gucci family's days of running the ‘House of Gucci’ and saw a cartoon. Watching his take on a fashion empire's downfall...you can sometimes see his point.

You have to be in the mood for it, but The Place of No Words is a touching, sweet and intimate fantasy unlike most any film you’ve seen, save for its much more expensive and less moving antecedent, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

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

"Yaksha” has lurid red light district fights and embassy heists, laugh-out-loud insults and the funniest use of “drones” as a plot device of any espionage thriller.

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.

At 104 minutes, this CG/looks-like-stop-motion cartoon, drags. The screen is overcrowded with characters and gadgets that make it feel like a long, LEGO commercial.

He seems like a decent man, and there’s genuine research grappling with how the mind functions under Buddhist meditation and the psychology of compassion, which has long been his Message to the World. But “Scientist” comes off as something of an over-reach.

The drama is fairly mild, the action cute and slapshticky and the Lyle sight gags aimed at six and unders, so don’t look or listen for great verbal or visual wit.

Shults has concocted a nightmare within a nightmare, a test of nerves and a wary mystery.

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

The script is tighter than the direction and editing. But the set-pieces dazzle (think Korean war toys) and the performances by the cops have a nice cynicism about them.

A beautifully-acted genre picture with a wonderful sense of place.

It’s even dumber than the earlier installments, but it knows it. And the result is some good, clean kid-friendly fun, save for the odd profanity — Odin is known for his curses, after all. Even the killing seems to lack fatal finality.

Welcome to Marwen won’t be another Zemeckis blockbuster, won’t be anybody’s idea of Oscar bait. But here’s a thought-provoking holiday movie that gives the viewer something to chew on even if the story feels a trifle undigested, at times.

There’s a whole lot of “bizarre” going here, but it’s easy enough to follow and its meaning and message are simple enough to understand.

A solid, engrossing docudrama — staged and acted — not, as its director claims, a documentary. That still doesn’t rob the film of its simple power, the suspense of wondering just who will turn on whom, and if elephants will be killed in the bargain.

Blown chances aside and paced fast or stumbling into slow, “Apples” is never less than cute and often pretty funny.

It’s nicely-detailed, with decent effects, moderate suspense and a distinctly Korean approach to how this sort of calamity might go down in an Asian country where saving face, keeping “order” and maintaining authority play havoc with the public safety.

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

Overlong, more solid than inspiring, it makes a good go of illustrating just how much fame, music and controversy the man squeezed into 25 short years.

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.

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.

It’s a pleasant kid-friendly diversion on a par with Pearl’s “Abominable."

Brown never comes close to transcending the formula this film is made under. But the players, the myopic setting and narrowly-focused screenplay ensure that Trees of Peace is a good example of how and why this formula is still around. It endures because it works.

Her film has little dramatic arc to it, and little uplift. It plays as flatly as the desert valleys the girls pedal through.

It’s a solid film, but the mission creep of its many messages, its format — interviews broken up by vintage news footage, old movies (“The Birth of a Nation”) — and a stylistic choice by DuVernay dull its impact.

The patchwork story and pacing robs The Butler of the wit and heart that might have made it a companion piece to the far simpler and more powerful “The Help.” Daniels settles for a soapy, preachy American history version of “Downton Abbey.”

It’s all in good fun, even if you’re never really surprised by anything, even if your eyes roll with every barrel roll of a plot twist in the later acts. The stunts, the knock-you-around-in-your-seat dogfighting, still has “the need for speed” and a license to thrill.

The story is simple, and the narrative still manages to be muddled here and there, especially towards the end. But Moon Garden is a dazzling use of various effects and animation techniques to tell a child’s-eye-view story of purgatory, or something awfully close to it.

Even as the film wanders about and the emotional bond between mother and child is seriously lacking in this story and these performances, there’s still something engrossing about seeing a mother’s journey through the trials and errors of ensuring her child has an opportunity to learn and at least a shot at a normal, healthy and happy life — with or without pills.

A nasty, elemental thriller, basically a four-character play with blood and guts and sex and drugs and dares

Aftersun is unnecessarily obscure and overdoes the whole “understated/unstated” thing.

Although Citizen Ashe covers the highlights of a life and career that has drifted from the public consciousness in the nearly 30 years since his death, it doesn’t get all that close to its subject.

The extraordinary third act arrives, and the movie finds its heart and its message.

Tammy, in the end, feels like a pulled punch. McCarthy promises a haymaker she never quite delivers.

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.

Little Trouble Girls is a conventional girls’ coming-of-age tale whose clever twist is equating sexual awakening with spiritual awakening, at least in the eyes and ears of an impressionable teen.

If you’re looking for an animated dip into Indian culture and a film that charts its own path to a distinct animated style, it’s well worth a look.

The Humbling should have been more brisk, should have been cut, and should have had more of the Pacino who finishes this thing off with a flourish. The soul searching and sense of a life misspent are interesting. But there’s an awful lot of hooey before we get to the “Hoo hah.”

A revealing, intimate and interesting peek behind the fresco-bedecked walls of an institution trapped in a past of its own invention, confronting a future in which it still relies on a succession of very old men to meet.

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.

This “Trip to Greece” isn’t an epic journey, and that includes the familiar emotional ground the characters have to cover. But the leads click, the scenery is fab and there are just enough chuckles, sweet laughs and grimaces to make it worth 100 minutes of our time in the sundrenched birthplace of Western Civilization.

The leads are pretty much flawless.

Unlike “The Passion of the Christ,” there’s no Aramaic with English subtitles, a lot less blood and no anti-Semitism. No character feels like a caricature... But it’s also dramatically flat, with few actors making much of an impression as they play saints and sinners.

Truth be told, “Unstoppable” doesn’t do much that a hundred other surfing docs haven’t done — sometimes better — visually. It’s the personal story that has to sell it.

Its real value is as an oral and visual history of Springsteen, where he met his bandmates and the musical milieu he was fortunate enough to grow up in.

Besson’s script may let her (and Freeman) down in the third act, but the 89 minute long Lucy is so brisk it’ll give you whiplash. Even marginal thrillers benefit from a director and star who have a sense of urgency and are as hellbent as this on not overstaying their welcome.

Best of all, the filmmakers took the time to give these hard men just the right things to say - not catchphrases, just lines that smell of blood and gunpowder every time Statham, Owen or DeNiro utter them.

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.

Director Andersen (he did the disaster movie “The Quake”) keeps this slick, polished production moving even as he and the screenwriters avoid many of the tried-and-true devices — training-for-the-mission montages, etc. — of the genre.

If the game is more civilized now, it’s thanks to the excesses of bullying brutes like Bob Probert. That’s a message Day doesn’t take the time to get across, leaving “Tough Guy” a little thin in the “And your point is?” department.

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.

The story gives away its direction and intentions far too early and obviously. But these onetime “Fresh off the Boat” co-stars make a cute, cuddly couple that we root for, even if every joke doesn’t land, even if they let that devilish Keanu steal their movie from them.

The performances are moving and get the job done, and Kurylenko (“Quantum of Solace”) wins us over by the way she slowly lets Connor, her enemy, win her sympathy.

It’s not a reinvention of the genre, but it is a fairly engrossing variation on a theme. And that’s in large part due to the violence — sexual and otherwise — it recreates.

As the picture drifts through its middle acts, the thought occurs that a little less movie might have made a much punchier, pithier and more satisfying film.

No, this isn't how it really happened. But director Charles Martin Smith ("Air Bud") wrings plenty of heartfelt tears and a few laughs out of this fictionalized account.

The fact that “Lost City” still plays, still delivers plenty of cute and sometimes bawdy laughs amidst all the homages, tributes to and “borrowings” from better films is a tribute to its stars and its one great conceit — that it’s taking on a jokey, derivative genre, and everybody in it is in on that joke.

For all its sure-handed sense of place, its occasional grace notes of loss, grief and misery, This is Where We Live fails to seize and break our hearts, keeping its glum characters at arm’s length and doling out “hope” in tiny, cloying teaspoon-size servings.

A sloppy, raucous, time travel farce in the grown-men-gone-wild "Hangover" style, it’s a surprisingly satisfying, if not exactly LMAO, riot.

The right emotional buttons are punched, enough of them at just the right moment for Bleeding Love to not bleed out. It plays like 12 step cinematic comfort food, and if you’re drawn to it and find yourself enjoying it, no “making amends” is necessary.

"Way Down” veers towards cute and settles on “twee” far more often than it should.

The main reason people check this out will be Whittaker’s new role as Doctor Who. And she doesn’t disappoint. She gives this walking-wounded woman a hint of the coquette she never realized she was, a smartness informed by sadness and — with a little boy she’s utterly ill-qualified to baby sit, much less mentor — a purpose.

It’s a dry yet fascinating film that covers a lot of ground between the riots, the creation of the Riotsvilles and the convention where its training was unleashed on first Miami and Miami Beach, and later on Chicago.

The movie is a vexing, patience-testing two and a quarter hours, and takes a full hour to get the Warrens on a plane to the UK. But the few, well-spaced out scares are real spine-tinglers.