Roger Moore

Whatever it took to make this “Mary Poppins” light on its feet, it’s rare that the tone turns sunny. The gloomy start (I’d have cut that opening number) and pervasive fog and heavy subject matter — death, lost childhood innocence, impending poverty, etc. — never let it soar.

It's so sentimental and sweet that you can almost forgive the kids' comedy Ramona and Beezus for not being nearly funny enough.

It’s still an eye-opener, especially for the casual fan who hasn’t devoured all the many books on Early Disney as a subject and Mickey as a character, a corporate brand and a cultural touchstone.

“A Grand Finale” may not be all that grand, but it more or less checks off the boxes in allowing fans to revel in this world one last time and bid the great house and great cast bon voyage, even if the low-stakes/no-stakes send-off isn’t all it might have been.

Giroux makes the possible love affair so mild-mannered that there aren’t a lot of sparks when these cultures clash, just a “You’re strange, WEIRD,” vs. “I’m not strange. YOU are!”

This sinks or swims on its songs, and Miranda as a busking/hustling/rhyme-spitting monkey makes it swim.

Director Omid Nooshin gives this story harrowing touches largely through arresting camera angles and aggressive editing. He ensures that “Last Passenger” features a couple of jaw-dropping moments even as it traverse familiar ground.

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

Some of the one-liners land, a few scenes play as half-amusing. But the chop-chop-choppy narrative trick of scores of “this is 4 hours after the death” or “two years” before it wrecks the flow of the story, such as it is.

One can’t help but think this Pope deserves more than a simple, stale travelogue.

The film, inspired by a Michael Lewis (“Moneyball,” “The Big Short, “The Blind Side,””Liar’s Poker”) magazine article and relying much on Lewis’s take on the man, the writer and his self-created mythos, is a reminder of Wolfe’s once-giantic footprint in the culture.

There's nothing thrilling about summarily dispatching everybody who isn't meant to survive to the credits, nothing entertaining about meathook, hatchet and chainsaw murdering that we've seen scores of times.

This dark comedy has a lot of promise for about half its length. Then, unfortunately, it settles into the mundane genre picture that it seems doomed to be.

It’s almost wholly satisfying — witty, warm and entertaining — a film in which fatalism isn’t a joke, where pitiless death is doled out by Empire and Rebellion, where those deaths have weight and meaning, where suspense is genuine.

Bennett impresses, first scene to last.

It makes for a warm history lesson about a country and a love affair that prefigured a change in a corner of the world where the news, for decades, was dominated by violence, injustice and fear.

You have to remind yourself to breathe.

Garlin doesn’t discover anything new about this well-documented phenomenon. But rounding up his (under-employed) comic pals and turning them loose on Little League is funny enough by itself.

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.

This isn’t Netflix’s “The Farewell,” which would be expecting too much. But it’s not too much to expect a more revealing and rewarding story than this.

It’s an engaging yarn, set in a place, a time and among a people rarely represented on the big screen. But “Ultima” is a poetic novel that becomes prosaic on the screen.

Surprises may be few and far between, with every confrontation and dramatic moment preordained. But Mine 9 delivers suspense and pathos, geology and geography, and a spot-on cast puts faces and lives behind iconic “types,” and make this one of the most Netflixable films the streaming service offers.

A lot of the charm is still here, much of it coming from the innocent, well-mannered bear abroad, perfectly voiced by Ben Whishaw.

A light tone, just enough compelling back-stories and just-high-enough stakes make all the difference in the world between formulaic “plucky underdog” sports movies that work, and those that don’t.

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.

Before the Fall has the germ of a great idea, one that will get the film noticed and some festival play. But the promise of “Pride” is, in this case, not fully kept. It lacks the wit and the light touch to come off.

Reaser, Thomas, Basso and especially the demonically playful Miss Wilson play the Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard script like a fiddle.

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.”

Whatever the grownups say, Manyaka's Chanda is the one person in this village who understands how simple things really are, that it really does come down to Life, Above All.

What’s fresh here is the tone – rude, blunt and bordering on shrill. This is a less in-your-face Michael Moore-style take on this subject.

With Kusama, the older she gets, the more interesting her “story” becomes. But what makes that story connect is the art itself — dazzling, overwhelming, mesmerizing and playful. All the obsession and depression, brazenness and brass in the world wouldn’t matter if she hadn’t had the goods, all along.

It’s not about the game, or even “how they played the game.” It’s how the game shapes who they are or will become, for good or ill.

The romance here is more perfunctory, less heartfelt. And that goes for several big twists in the tepid plot. Events are mandated by script requirements, never organic.

Sorry to beat the hell out of a book millions have bought and presumably adored. But Where the Crawdads Sing doesn’t sing a note in film form, and plays more like Nicholas Sparks than Harper Lee, more a Lifetime Original Movie than anything worth the price of a cinema ticket.

A serious upgrade in “Dragon Ball” franchise animation runs up against the same overdoses of exposition, endless back story and arcane plot contrivances designed to pit characters against each other in epic throwdowns in Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero.

Re/Member does just well enough by a killer concept to merit a Hollywood remake, because this version stumbles here and there, and simply fails at the finish.

A comedy with no urgency, edge or stakes isn’t much of a comedy, with or without “pressure.”

"The Debt," a very good 2007 Israeli thriller with Cold War and Holocaust connections, earns a nerve-wracking and entertaining Hollywood remake.

It's still as charming as a ham-fisted Hollywood treatment of a kids' cartoon can be. I don't see why any ten year-old wouldn't adore Dora.

What is here –a good if not “all star” cast, colorful characters, the settings and the story — has charm enough to get by even if no one will ever confuse Mr. Malcolm’s List for “Sense & Sensibility.”

Rambles a bit and telegraphs its ending. But its earnestness in reminding us of this story and just what America represents to the world’s rising tide of refugees, and why, makes it a winner, a valuable history lesson wrapped in a feel-good bow.

Pace is a great thing in any funny movie. But there’s a point when you aren’t finishing a thought, doing justice to this character or that threat. When you’re skipping by the cool stuff, you know you’re going too fast.

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

Thanks to Banderas and his Corinthian leather purr and writers who know how to use it, "Puss" is the best animated film of 2011.

A sentimental and cheerful affair that doesn’t amount to much more than an attempt to tap into their residual good vibes.

The nuts-and-bolts of the work — the precision flying, the money laundering and cash impact on a small town that looks the other way — make other movies and TV shows on the subject seem humorless and tame.

Haley’s movies have an old-fashioned comfort food quality, and this sits happily on the menu with his earlier works.

The laughs in Drunk Bus may come in familiar places, but there’s a genuine effort to flip the script just enough to avoid the standard traps in such farces.

What makes Films Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is Bening’s performance, which is as one might expect is much more than mere impersonation.

Linklater is still able to move us, even after he’s bored us half out of the movie with his long set-up, even after Cranston has sucked all the oxygen out of the picture with his hernia-inducing twinkle, even after we’ve given up on Last Flag Flying as too damned cute for its own good.

Corben doesn’t stop with just the “sex scandal” part of this. “God Forbid” takes us back to the blackmail-worthy “quid pro quo” of Falwell’s endorsement of the profane, obscene and hilariously Godless Donald Trump. Then journalists, academics and historians tie Falwell’s father, the dynasty-founding racist turned anti-abortion opportunist Jerry Falwell, to Trumpism and the State of the Nation today.

Taut, smart and satisfying, I See You is the sleeper of the month, and should put Graye on the radar as a screenwriter to watch. And it should remind Hollywood that if smart cookie Helen Hunt sees something in it, this is a project worth filming.

It’s not wholly coherent. But anyone in the mood for a quirky, absurdist farce with full frontal nudity, gunplay and a lost hero trying to fulfill his pregnant girlfriend’s deal-breaker request should check out Kill the Jockey (simply “El Jockey” in Argentina). Because surreal and screwy film fare like this is rare, with or without subtitles.

Kids may get a little something out of it thanks to its various “Young Adult Fiction” types and tropes. Maybe they’ll enjoy pondering if low gravity could be the thing that “saves” baseball. Anybody old enough to drive will be bored.

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.

Here, he’s made a good (not great) movie that’s not captured the interest of audiences or reviewers. Sure, he didn’t realize his “hero” was just one of its villains. And The Front Runner may not achieve its overreaching ambitions. But that’s appropriate, too. Neither did Gary Hart.

Krippendorff squeezes a lot of layers of the urban teen experience into Cocoon’s slim 93 or so minutes, and gives a lot of shades to her characters, who are never simple “types” the way most Hollywood films about high schoolers are.

Vengeance lets you appreciate its ambition and wince at its obvious overreach.

There’s promise to this or that character and in the twists that almsot certainly played better in the novel than Feig manages on screen. But the promise is squandered in a pokey, obvious movie that stumbles towards stupid in the anti-climactic latter acts.

Collette always delivers fair value. Her Ellie is hard-drinking, high-mileage, slimmed down and flirting with Cougar-hood, a woman living in the trap of her world, her work and the love she lost.

Kier makes a most companionable tour guide for us as the day gently, sadly and amusingly makes its way to the long night to come.

Even Mice Belong in Heaven is the most adorable and unusual animated offering for kids this year.

Just the Two of Us seems pre-ordained and predigested, with every emotion tugged at and every “trigger” and behavioral “tell” underlined so as to remove any doubt about what’s going on, who is the victim and who is to blame.

Dogged determination in the face of hopelessness is the byword in writer-director Kim Byung-woo’s thriller, which is meant to be an action essay in the core compassion of humanity. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” may suit the mood this film sets. But keeping calm and carrying on is a hard ethos to shake when the stakes are this high.

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).

Although the film hews closely to the historical record, the pace is so sedate one wonders if a brisker production could have carried the story on to the war’s end, as Hall’s exploits were ongoing.

The scruffiness is intentional and the film has that conventional search for heroes and heroines — who to follow, single-out and build the movie around. But Whose Streets? also lets us see how citizens journey from outrage to action, from passivity to protest to influencing public policy, just by standing up and saying “Enough!”

The Erik Patterson and Jessica Scott script is laughably generic, and even the potentially alarming moments are given a cut-rate handling by director Spencer Squire, who hopefully resented the fact that the production didn’t even have money for spectral effects.

Aronofsky ensures that Butler and his merry band of miscreant castmates make Caught Stealing a frenetic and fun farewell to summer, if a very bloody one.

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.

Madden, screenwriter Michelle Ashford and the cast perform their greatest service in reminding us that real history, unadorned, can make the best drama.

It is a well-acted and vivid re-creation of a dark, downbeat era when "girls don't play electric guitar," and you had to be someone pretty tough and pretty special to try it.

Throwing a lot of production design at the limp stories within this recycled tale doesn’t make it look or play scary. It just makes it loud and expensive looking.

It would be hard to understate how intensely lovable Scrambled is.

As volcanic as Maguire needs to be, it’s those who react to Fischer most tellingly — Sarsgaard’s priest, and Schreiber’s Spassky — that make Pawn Sacrifice the gripping and entertaining history lesson that it is.

Bye Bye Germany makes for a sly, smart, funny and still touching peek into that horrid past, a dramedy with pathos and a reminder that “L’chaim, to life” is the best way to remember it — with a toast to life. In the end, that’s the best revenge of all.

An animated comedy of mixed messaging, thin humor and indifferent entertainment value, Ron’s Gone Wrong still has every chance of winning younger viewers over with its heart. That depends on how much affection kids can summon up for a cute robot.

Branagh and Williams are worth the price of admission, the former "wunderkind" of British stage and screen having a go at the pretentious, plummy Olivier.

I didn’t expect to like it, and Timothy Brady’s script never quite hits that “sleeper” sweet spot. But All Square rides its spot-on casting, sharply defined performances and beer-stained sense of place well past second base, if not all the way home.

It's still a short-enough time-killer of a thriller -- not the worst of the summer, but a long way from the current state of the art.

Mockingjay II is a bare bones finale — a tedious two hours in which nothing at all happens, with the briefest of breaks for a zombie chase and attack and a half-hearted bit of sci-fi combat.

It is Carrey, turning his patented rubber-faced, rubber-voiced shtick loose on a role with heart, substance and entertainment value, who makes this romantic farce a movie too good to sit on any studio's shelf.

The fact that Serena, ranked number one again this year — the oldest woman (31) ever so ranked — means that their story isn’t over, and that if a skeptic wants to finally appreciate their historic impact on the game, he or she still has time to come around.

“Always and Forever” is still likable, still cute, but utterly out of ideas.

The performers are given stock types to play, and Elba and Dillon, at least, can do a little with that.

"Evil" fails to triumph. Utterly.

It's a bleak yet optimistic film, and Ferrell perfectly underplays his Carver anti-hero and delivers a rich, layered and subtle performance. And a funny one.

Obvious and jaw-droppingly bloody, it still gives Heigl her funniest role in years.

It was never going to be “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Reserve that honor for the film that inspired it. But Saving Mr. Banks is still one of the best pictures of the year.

One of the most entertaining history lessons you could ever hope to sit through.

I can’t say I loved it, as it drags and drags and only occasionally springs to life. But this “tale as old as time” resonates as well as it ever has, and its songs still stick with you long after the closing credits.

A film that shines a light on those who would be a candle in the midst of the Medieval darkness of modern, white Southern American Christianity.

Andrew Rossi’s documentary is a bit scatter shot in its approach.

It’s a gritty, lived-in film that feels like a smelly, life-is-nasty-brutish-and-short for anyone not in the ruling classes depiction of the Renaissance — beautiful and painterly even in it’s ugliness.

X-Men: First Class still sings the praises of Marvel Studios' marvelous quality control of comic book movies. It's good, clean summer movie fun where the money they spend is up on the screen - with actors and effects - so that we won't mind spending our money on it.

When “Covenant” is not head-slappingly obvious and perfunctory, it’s just laugh-out-loud ludicrous.

James is a winsome presence, with able support from Huisman, Powell, Goode, Courtenay, Parkinson and Wilton. But the story veers into pure melodrama.

Sunset was never going to be a thriller, and the Chekhov comparison is mainly due to the Eastern European theatricality of it all. This unfolds like a memory play on wheels, rolling through the cafe society, simmering political tensions and brave new (automobiles, electricity) world heedless that this world is about to end. Suddenly.

Critical Thinking is a cluttered, cliched and ungainly story.

It’s everything a screen drama and indie film should be — a novel story, characters we rarely see and care about and immersion in a world we know nothing about.

Monsters University is a prequel that is far more conventional, not nearly as witty or clever as that original.

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

As this “true story” hews closely to the plot points of many a spy thriller, The Courier invites comparisons that highlight its shortcomings, telegraphing punches that we sense are coming and failing to ever land a telling blow.

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

The difference between “The Lego Movie” and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part is the distance between “love” and “like.”

This is more “Iris” than “Frida” or “Seraphine,” though anyone who has ever seen the screen story of an artist — “Basquiat,” “Pollock,” etc. — will ease into the well-established rhythms of such films.

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

“Clown” and “Henry” are the same movie. But if an artist is someone who “pounds the same nail over and over again,” give it up for Phillips.

Is Adventures in Public School appropriate for young kids, the ones with Netflix as their baby sitter? Certainly not. This is some seriously adult, flirt-with-pervy “TV-14” doesn’t really cover it stuff.

I have to say the film’s set-up is more interesting than the resolution, which is seriously straightforward. But the violence isn’t “Hollywood,” it’s human. And the remote, windswept setting has its chilling pleasures as well.

Kavanagh’s second coup was in giving this too-familiar tale just the right star power, with the criminally under-used Hirsch shining as our anti-hero and Cusack, settling into the playing-the-heavy part of his career with as much wit as he can muster.

A quietly disturbing slice of Southern Gothic that isn’t Southern at all.

Unfortunately, the more things spiral into anarchy, the less interesting the story becomes.

It’s a fun, generally brisk biography, one whose tone might be the artist’s credo. Newton declared that there are “only two dirty words” in any of the three languages he spoke — “art” and “good taste.” He never let either limit what he was trying to say.

It’s hard getting to be “Miss Americana.” It’s almost impossible to stay “Miss Americana.” This semi-intimate film gives mere mortals an appreciation of the personal cost of getting there, staying there and staying reasonably sane and happy as you do.

Entertainment is rife with randomness, shot through with misery and self-loathing and flat out unpleasant as a screen experience.

Twisters is set to be one of the biggest hits of the summer, with a budget that convinced two studios to share the cost and distribution. But that lack of the human touch lowers the stakes, minimized the suspense and left me cold. The effects are next generation impressive, but they’ve been getting steadily better in the tornado movies between Twister and Twisters.

The film’s stumbling unoriginality, cliched characters and intended jokes that land like flops from a constipated greenhouse gassy cow, however earn every ounce of ire I can summon.

The mercurial Brand is spot on as the mercurial Aldous, putting over outrageously titled tunes with panache.

Stearns has still made us laugh through the grimaces for much of “The Art of Self-Defense,” and if nothing else, has given anyone — “Karate Kid” parents or adults — a veritable checklist of the warning signs that maybe this dojo isn’t for you, signs that perhaps the sensei doesn’t use the word “teacher” because what he really wants aren’t classes, but a cult.

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

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 ending is entirely too pat, considering what’s come before. But Burson has channeled her dark memories of freshman year into something that occasionally touches and often tickles, but stings with familiarity, start to finish.

It’s no great surprise that the great Australian director Bruce Beresford wrings every ounce of sweet out of Ladies in Black.

The film’s brevity means some ideas are under-developed. But what we’re left with is a sublime and sublimely simple portrait of a love that’s been lived in and the devotion it will take to ensure that endures.

Fortunately for us, Kendrick delivers. She immerses us in Alice’s efforts to keep her secrets and avoid sorting anything out even if she suspects the status quo is everything her friends seem to suggest it is.

Devil’s Peak is a simple story whose filmmakers lose track of threads and characters, perhaps owing to editing.

Fahy does a decent job conveying vulnerability, even if the desperation that should figure in here seems a tad tame until the third act. Sklenar is mostly just a hunky pawn, here.

Lindholm’s patience with this material kind of outlasts ours. There needs to be more flesh on the bone to justify the two hour running time. The dead spots show.

Labeling Jonathan Majors‘s turn in Magazine Dreams “deeply disturbing” is the epitome of understatement.

There are stretches in this movie, which I saw in a crowded preview last night, where you literally could hear a pin drop. The silence on the soundtrack is breathless, the held breaths of the audience deafening.

The acting is rarely broad and Fan Bingbing delivers a credible haplessness in Lian. The broader comedy translates well-enough.

With The Prosecutor we come for Donnie Yen and for the fights, and if we’re studying Mandarin, to bone up on Chinese legal arcana. Because God knows there’s a lot of dialogue to this thing. But at some point, all that starts to feel superfluous and in the end, boring.

Like life after a murder, there is no “happy” ending, no thrilling feeling of justice served. In the Fade is that rare thriller which finds more to mull over in the culture clash — within Germany, within the Turkish expatriate community, and between German justice and American expectations, between German storytelling and Hollywood endings.

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

It’s not remotely as polished as the earlier contenders in the field, but “Klaus” is good enough to have earned a theatrical release, on a par with MGM’s “The Addams Family,” in any event.

If the carnage of “nutria skinning contests” doesn’t turn you off, the sheer waste just might.

We Are Living Things is more a movie of feelings than plot or explanations of that plot and the characters. And as such, dark as it sometimes gets, it’s a winner.

Butterfield is quite good, the other kids well-matched and Spall, Hawkins and Marsan terrific in support. That adds up to a picture well-worth your time.

It’s on-screen onanism, and rarely more than that.

Lacking a more coherent organizing principle than “fly on the wall/slice of life” renders Stop-Zemlia — which takes its title from a sort of long-running game of slap-tag — somewhat colorless, if not entirely pointless.

Double Down South is a languid, drawling bore that’s about as interesting as the games that are its centerpiece.

Interminably slow of foot, filled with static, anachronistic and politically correct sermons performed in a whisper, bloody-minded outburst interrupting the beautiful scenery photographed like a cut-rate cable TV movie, it is an utterly inept outing from the director who got Jeff Bridges his Oscar.

The one thing Coherence needs most is that word that gives it its title.

As dark as “The Grifters,” as over-the-top as “The Sting,” Sharper is a fresh take on a time-tested genre, a “Who can you trust?” tale from the Land of the Big Con.

If only the film around these players had been more worthy of their efforts.

Freeman gives a little something to moments of angst. But seriously. Yawn. It’s a movie so familiar in its tropes, storybeats and dialogue that it feels like a half-forgotten picture or TV show you’ve already seen. The makeup is often “Walking Dead” mediocre.

This may not be Rylance’s greatest film, the stakes being as low as they are. But his impersonation is both uncanny — stay through the credits — and adorable.

A farce that dabbles in darkness. True confessions here, sexual mores tested there. We see where this is going long before it gets there, and in a short movie, that can be fatal.

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

Del Toro’s robots have weight and mass, and their epic, Hong Kong-smashing fights with the four and six-legged, clawed and horned monsters are visually coherent, unlike the messy blur of the “Transformers” movies. There’s a light, humorous feel to “Pacific Rim” because the science is silly and logic takes a flying leap.

There’s a touch of “The Invisible Man” to this unsettling story of the misery of being married to a cruel control freak. But “Swallow,” for all its People Magazine psychoanalysis, is harrowing in different ways and gripping in its myopia. All Hunter has is this mania for “control” of one thing in her life — what she puts in her mouth. All we have is worry over her mental health, and discomfort in confronting it.

The first third is brisk and witty, the middle third gloomy and the finale of Part 1 not so much a cliffhanger as a grim, inspiring tease, a masterly build-up to put "I can't wait for part 2" on every Muggles' lips.

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

An animated comedy that’s passably animated but generally unfunny.

A tale worthy of a hundred Cold War thrillers.

A most deserving Oscar winner and a film that could provoke discussion anywhere it is shown, anywhere people of any age are being bullied.

Pets United could struggle a bit even to keep a toddler distracted for 92 minutes.

A fascinating but frustrating overreach that is never more fun than when it’s most over the top, but never really gets a handle on what it’s supposed to be about.

In a cinema recently overrun with combat documentaries, Marshall Curry’s Point and Shoot manages a first. Here’s a film that captures the romance of war amongst today’s young and testosterone-fueled. Want to know why young men from all over the world have flocked to fight for ISIS? Point and Shoot explains it.

I can’t say it necessarily comes off, although I’m not out-of-line declaring that it doesn’t pay off — not in a horror movie or crisis-of-faith melodrama sense.

I love Indian cinema that gives us a sense of the ecosystems of the street, Rafi’s world. That’s the best element of Photograph.

Parkinson knowing this story backwards and forwards means he’s become an expert on how to tease out the suspense and tug at the heartstrings.

It's a plucky film that covers a lot of ground and uncovers this wonderful, ancient ritual that people of many faiths and from all walks of life take on.

As violent and primal as “Animal Kingdom,” but not as brisk. The film grinds to a halt in between confrontations. And those shoot-outs are simple, direct and bloody, not “staged” in the Hollywood sense.

The laughs - Doug tries to take up the pipe, a la Sherlock Holmes - are on the flat side.

True Mothers is a melodrama with 90 minutes of story awash in 139 minutes of movie. Kawase holds our interest by letting us see the unexpressed pain of characters generally too well-mannered to express loss, shock, outrage and resentment out loud.

In the best picture of 2015, Carey Mulligan is the stoic, long-suffering sweatshop worker radicalized into action.

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

Shoot outs, wisecracks, narrow escapes and brutal, bloodied captures, a big BOOM that might be coming and Raybans that might never come off. It’s oh-so-pretty to look at. But talk about empty calories.

It’s a somewhat sprawling and almost ungainly film, years in the making, very revealing and yet notably incomplete.

Paxton makes a marvelous menace. The picture’s biggest failing is losing sight of him for the middle acts, and its second biggest failing is giving the equally valuable Colm Feore too little to do.

A feisty, funny, down-and-dirty farce as nasty as a Supreme Court dissent, as timely as a Jenner magazine cover.

Alvarez — of the remade “Evil Dead,” “Don’t Breathe” and the “Girl in the Spider’s Web” remake — gets a little novelty and even less suspense out of rediscoveries, re-imagined pursuits and murders and ill-considered fights with “the perfect (killer) creature” that cinematic spacefarers have been stumbling into for generations.

Susan Johnson ensures this adaptation of the Jenny Han novel maintains a wistful, winsome view of first love, first scene to last.

Enforcement, released as “Shorta” (Arabic slang for “cops”) in Europe, is a solid is slow-moving police actioner that reminds us that no matter the continent, police work is the same dangerous game. And that the world over, that “game” has entirely too many of the wrong sorts of people signing up.

It plays like an animated musical built around forgettable tunes and impressive animated effects that were cooked up before the script was decided on.

The Vanishing manages to shock even as it fails to truly surprise, a movie that takes a worn situation and wrings fresh pain out of it as it reaches — over-reaches — to solve a mystery that is probably even more mysterious than whatever the screenwriter’s cooked up.

It’s a blunt instrument of a movie, and often melodramatic. But it sometimes moves and often hits its target square on the nose.

There’s no ignoring that The Damned has a visual, visceral power that should stick in the memory.

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?”

The shock has worn off and the transition to slasher porn to “thriller” proves to be a bit of a stretch for West. But maybe, now that all this “Pearl,” “Maxine” period piece business is out of his system, he’ll try something fresh.

Some movies you want to hug, just to reward how a film makes you feel and what magic it is when a setting, a character, a star and a story sing together in near perfect harmony.

Enola Homes 2 is a proper delight, start to finish, one of the best “juvenile” entertainments of the year.

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

The sad stuff works, just not well enough to make tears well up. And wasting Midler and Livingston in middling roles with almost no funny things to say or play is just the icing on the you-know-what.

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

They’ve made a cute comic book movie, amusing but forgettable, probably not as culture-shifting as “Wonder Woman” and “Black Panther” turned out to be. But take your daughters to Captain Marvel. They’ll be the final arbiters here. Because Disney princess fans are the ones who’ll really be liberated by this rock’em sock’em role model.

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.

Once you get past the cliched Spanglish dialogue and the sentimental tone of the early acts, A Better Life settles down into something both involving and moving.

There’s a lot that feels incomplete here, introduced and abandoned or at least never wrestled with. And much of what transpires after the assorted ingredients are introduced is utterly predictable.

Rental Family is an almost miraculously sensitive movie about the limits of such “services” in a culture where decorum, saving face, protecting feelings, apologies and shame are appreciated for their real value. And it’s about acting and the core of that “calling,” making connections with strangers while playing a part that entertains, flatters or fulfills them on some level.

No, there’s not much to this thin plot and the monotonous visual limitations don’t deliver the claustrophobia you might expect to heighten the growing dread. But for horror that’s alarming in the most primal, aural and piloerection ways, Undertone hits enough right notes to recommend.

It’s an amusing gloss on a punk icon who never gave up the rebellion and never let go of the safety pins.

Yeah, Head Count loses its head in the third act. Whatever promise it had is long gone by then (there’s little urgency among the stoners, the threat seems more existential than real). And in a crowd of characters we have zero time to develop empathy for (like their director, they’re all beautiful), when the Big Moment comes, the only sane response is “Who cares?”

Nobody knocks anything out of the park, but this “Fletch” piles up the singles and doubles, an endless parade of funny lines almost always just thrown away, casually.

It's a celebration of great old actors set in a world of once-great singers, and Hoffman's affection for them and the material shows in every frame.

Adam makes you realize we’re a long way from “Chasing Amy.” Or maybe not.

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

Hart is so sparing with her action beats and so staid and self-serious in her supernatural touches that the picture never sparks to life.

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.

It lacks the shocks of “Midsommer,” the perverse comedy of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” and the violence of “The Wicker Man.” But it’s still a good yarn, cautionary, allegorical, well-acted and stoically played out to its inevitable conclusion.

Many moments will make you avert your eyes.

The film, which also details Pang’s Chinese immigrant upbringing and mentions her subsequent life and career in and around the music business, joins other building block documentaries like “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” in performing two services — keeping his memory alive, and wholly charting the many currents of the life of this singular figure in global pop culture history.

If The Bad Guys 2 isn’t as hilarious as “Bad Guys 1,” it’s still got lots of giggles provided by a steller, comical voice cast providing a big part of the soundtrack to some genuine Tex Avery style eyeball-popping, gonzo, in-your-face animation.

The laughs may be a little too easy — dressing ANYbody up as Geraldo Rivera is a cheap guffaw — and the messaging too pointed and lopsided to appeal to every viewer.

Beautifully cast, touchingly played and handsomely mounted, Belle is as close to perfect as any costumed romance has a right to be.

Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name,” “I Am Love”) gives us a challenging puzzle of an indulgence that rattles on and on, like a hearse with blown shocks, well past its point of resolution.

Whatever its qualities and shortcomings, Swiss Army Man makes one promise it most certainly keeps. You have never seen anything remotely like it.

We’re taken back to a naive era, when the boundaries of “smut” were narrower, when even the images of an unlikely “adult” star (she never did sex films or “real” porn) seem now like good, clean fun.

Fright Night can also boast of having the best vampire-villain in ages. The bushy-browed Colin Farrell was BORN to wear fangs.

Matafeo just bubbles off the screen here, a cluelessly confidant young woman just oozing snark and misguided notions of how “This changes nothing.“ Lewis makes a fine straight man for her to bounce off of.

Ready or Not is a “Get Out” that doesn’t quite get it, a “Purge” that pulls its most important punches.

The surprises are rewarding, the irony expressed with the perfect touch of drollery and the climax beautifully handled, even if the film goes on one scene too long past that.

Hawke and Ejogo, who played civil rights icon Coretta Scott King in “Selma,” have enough soul and charisma and chemistry to hold the screen and make us feel Born to be Blue, even if we, like Jane in the movie, never quite “get” Chet Baker.

It’s a sardonic satire that lacks the wit, style or pacing to let it come off.

Efira’s ability to play manipulative and nurturing, cunning and hurt, selfishly deceitful and vulnerable is impressive, and utterly necessary for the twists this script (by Barraud and Héléna Klotz) serves up.

Elvis works, often brilliantly and always beautifully, a musical bio-pic that’s a little bit “Ray” and “I Walk the Line,” with hints of “Get on Up” “Judy” and “Rocket Man.” It can be frustrating, like the man himself. And who’s to say if its appeal won’t be limited generationally, racially or geographically?

This isn't satire, it isn't that funny and the only bits that work are the titillating ones.

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

What holds our interest and holds the story together is this winning cast in these familiar, lovable (somewhat) roles. A dozen years on and this exercise in globe-trotting, in “We’re growing older, but not up” reminds us that what’s true in life is just as true in casting movies — pick your friends carefully enough and they’ll entertain you for a lifetime.

One is left with the gnawing feeling that there isn’t much point to his Napoleon, that there are no messages/warnings for today in his narrative and that maybe his “take” on the character is more superficial than deep, more British monarchist than revolutionary and more set-pieces and romance than historically accurate and insightful.

Glass Chin is a boxing picture with very little actual boxing.

Every scene — the pointed and the pointless — goes on too long. No character is wholly motivated or explained.

The funny bits drift past their payoff, the pace flags (88 minute movie stretched out to 107) and the light, tongue-in-cheek tone, the riffing banter between the leads isn’t enough to save it.

There’s not a whole lot to this, but Tsang injects a lot of visual variety, and a few laughs, into “The Black Hole” that Sammy must magically extract herself from.

A featherweight little charmer.

Bouchareb gets fine performances from several wonderful, under-utilized actors, including Ellen Burstyn and Tim Guinee in smaller roles. But his morality play is too muted to work, too muzzled to have any bite.

It’s wacky. You scratch your head at the training ground, a veritable digital brothel (quite chaste) where aspiring hostesses learn the art. You wonder who on Earth would spend money for “gifts” that impress these young women (and young men), and are also meant to impress their fellow “fans” with how “rich” you are.

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.

Like most movies of this genre, you find yourself wishing it was better, more horrific or more despairing, maybe with a message of some sort, ANY sort.

Across the River and Into the Trees is sedate to the point of “slow,” old fashioned to a degree that will feel dated, and yet every minute of it — every gorgeous image, every twist and turn, even the predictable ones — is to be savored.

Miles Ahead is a performance showcase, and might have seemed like a sure Oscar nomination for Cheadle, on paper, had the picture been more complete, more fulfilling.

It’s good, not great, and it’s not Ayer’s fault that the rarer these B-movies become, the more we expect from them.

While we may ogle Tamara, blush at her charms and revel in her world, in the end Tarama Drewe is just a bit of Brit tease that doesn't come off.

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.

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.”

Like many a genre picture before it, there’s a sci-fi gimmick and little else to prop it up beyond repeating variations on “How do we escape this suburban hell?” ad infinitum.

Writer/director James Steven Sadwith’s autobiographical coming-of-age film doesn’t have a lot of originality to it, in spite of the nearly-unique nature of his youthful encounter with the Great Writer. But Cooper’s turn gives it weight and life.

A gonzo, gory and goofball B-movie about fathers, sons and killing or being killed.

Everett makes this Wilde a magnificent ruin, reveling in self-pity rather than wallowing in it.

A lively, silly opening and a deft and daft finale rescue it from all its Avengers/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. back-engineering.

Stalter & Co. make her a funny, infuriating and unpleasantly empathetic figure, “Portland” quirky no matter where you find her.

It’s not a bad film, this first-half of the concluding chapter of “The Hunger Games.” But it is, from first scene to last, just a tedious good-looking set-up for what one might hope would be a more lively, and perhaps better lit and ventilated finale.

Mistitled and meandering, it is Michael Moore’s worst film, his weakest whack at America: What Went Wrong?

Orley’s screenplay borrows from several sources and is never quite wrestled into the same shape as the legions of better movies on this boy-comes-of-age theme that preceded it.

It’s too long, meanders hither and yon in getting to the ending we’re looking for.

These pictures have grown less cute, less charming and less fun with each passing installment, and this one just drags as it meanders towards its over-hyped lump-in-throat finale.

Shifts in tone aside, you’d still have to call “Bookworm” a winner — or I would — with Wood at his most vulnerable and winning and Fisher justifying her chattering pedant paycheck serving up equal parts adorable and insufferable.

As righteous as it is, Crown Heights fritters away goodwill normally built by intimate, revealing performances, sacrificing clarity for under-explained bulk examples of injustice, and exhausting its sense of outrage in the process.

Actor-turned-director and co-writer Bill Watterson keeps the tone light and the surprises surprising, for the most part. The energy flags as the picture loses a little of its momentum in the middle acts. It’s only 80 minutes long, so even that doesn’t hurt it much.

Even if “cool” is prioritized over logic or novelty in this bloody battle to the death, it’s still enough to recommend Ngo’s bracing, kinetic and beautifully shot and edited tale of life and death, rape and revenge in Old/New Saigon.

Trackdown goes down easy, and the character portraits are just interesting enough to hold our attention. But you can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a more interesting movie that cut closer to home.

Hall anchors the picture, at home on stage singing and playing, and a bit of an impulsive, arrested-development mess off it.

The sweet, the comic and the tragic blend together most agreeably in the winsome French romance The Hedgehog.

If Led Zeppelin’s place in the culture outlives them, later films will plumb the depths of their “real” experience of fame, success, sex, drugs and rock’n roll. This is the coffee picture table book version.

Writer director Gaspar Antillo peels the cover off this mystery with the patience of an art cinema veteran, limiting his dramatic “incidents” to amplify their impact.

It’s not subtle, not particularly scary or suspenseful either. What The Beach House has going for it is dread, a feeling that rides along with it from its opening frames to the horror parable’s final image.

It’s an uneven affair that begins with a flourish, works to develop homeless street cred, wanders into the maudlin wilderness for the middle acts and rallies for a predictable, over-the-top, break-out-your-Kleenex finale.

Which is what this film actually lacks, provocation. The film celebrates him, but the lack of critical mulling over from people who aren’t in his fan club doesn’t keep him from seeming somewhat unlikeable.

It’s thorough, almost academic textbook/video-accompanying-a-film-studies-class broad in its scope.

Murray and writer-director Theodore Melfi play us like a music box, manipulating and charming our socks off even as the Vincent for whom the film is named curses, gambles, drinks and cheats — all in front of an impressionable 10-year old.

Writer-director John Swab (“Run With the Hunted”) delivers a B-movie with few surprises but plenty of good, solid punches at a mess that didn’t fix a problem, it just allowed a fresh field of predators to profit from it.

Whatever predictable, melodramatic turns this Jason Raftopoulos film takes, it rarely blinks and never gives itself over to the “romance” of gambling and the gambler’s lifestyle.

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

There’s nothing in Cliff Walkers that we haven’t seen in many a prior spy tale, and it’s not a picture you’d single out for great acting moments. Clean up the blood, and you could call it almost old-fashioned. It’s still a corker of a thriller that keeps you guessing which Hero of the Revolution will sacrifice him or herself next.

“Catching Fire” makes an intriguing portrait because its first half establishes the Pallenberg in the public perception, and in her mind’s eye — a free spirit with a great eye for fashion.

When it’s all over, the viewer gets to wrestle with everything everyone here does — the plight of Syria, the nature of art, “exploitation” and the nature of “freedom.” Not bad for the first Tunisian film much of the world will have ever had the chance to see.

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.”

This is what filmed spectacle used to look like — a trip to a place or time most of us could never see.

Much of that plays like politically correct lip service, and like much of this Downton Abbey, feels unnecessary. But that’s the thing about a cinematic feast for the eyes and the ears like this. You trim the fat, you run the risk of making the whole meal tasteless and dull.

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

As "Hangovers" go, Part III isn't challenging or unpleasant, just instantly forgettable. It won't take much to sleep this one off.

Call Me Lucky is another of those “the funniest comic you never saw” documentaries.

Cedar has given Gere his own “House of Cards” to move into, where the game analogies spin out as chess and, most tellingly, dominoes. Norman needs them to fall just so, and if they do, he will be a man to be reckoned with.

The Traitor is important Italian Cosa Nostra history rendered in boring, leisurely strokes.

One never shakes the feeling that this entire enterprise is seriously tone deaf.

The best thing about the script and direction is that we rarely get too far ahead of it. We think we see what’s coming, but you never know.

The comic book connecting scenes work, and the violence, when it comes, is a shocking contrast to the low-energy/low-heat movie surrounding those moments.

I enjoyed the spectacle of this about as much as I enjoyed “Ben-Hur” or “Napoleon” or “Gladiator.” But it’s hard to find the beating heart of this story because it doesn’t really have one.

“Personal” picture or whatever larger objective Rehemeier was aiming for, he’s made a very long and not that funny comedy connected by disjointed and generally unoriginal scenes rather than a coherent narrative.

There may be nothing new to Nobody. But Odenkirk & Crew make sure that this mass production action movie has plenty of bespoke fun stitched in.

Greenland doesn’t often surprise, but it never disappoints.

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.

Kinds of Kindness is an obscurant, indulgent wank — two hours and forty-five minutes of cryptic cruelty, messianic fervor, cannibalism and perhaps a metaphoric peek at the futility of faith, the limits of dogma and the eagerness of the indoctrinated to be exploited.

I didn’t dislike “Player One,” even if I rolled my eyes at the low-hanging fruit one-liners and cloying characters, the on-the-nose soundtrack tunes (Van Halen?), the cringe-worthy avatars from your favorite horror movies, all introduced to the giggles and applause of an audience sure it’s in on the joke. Because the movie was concocted to elicit just that reaction.

This may not be the “definitive” Capote biography. Perhaps PBS will be the one to get around to that, some day. Burnough’s still made an entertaining and generally brisk overview of the career and the life of the most famous writer of his day.

A low energy romance, a movie that rewards a filmgoer with the patience to let this affair play itself out. Sink or swim, Connie and Jack will come out of this changed. And so will we.

Is The Lodge the most disturbing thriller of the year? Judas Priest, I hope so. Dark and despairing, grim and gripping, it’s not necessarily shocking. It doesn’t live or die on its “big twists.” But it gets in your head and messes around there. Just as it was designed to do. I can’t remember a horror movie that left me as gutted as this one.

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

This is as decrepit and tone-deaf as any movie he’s ever made, a corpse of a period piece, production-designed to the hilt, distractedly directed, a failure that hints at The End of Woody.

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

Dull, carnal, and explicitly so in both regards, it’s a slow-moving slog through one crushed soul as she relates the empty, passionless pursuits of her youth.