Roger Moore

Pint-sized James — you never realize how short her other leading men were until you see her paired with Hammer — carries this Rebecca, and I think carries it off, even as it’s taking us places no “Rebecca” has ever gone before. It’s not a classic and not “Hitchcock,” but hell, thanks to James, Hammer, Thomas and Dowd, it’ll do.

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

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

For a movie about a tragedy and the struggle to cover it with professionalism and compassion, September 5 is more historically intriguing than compelling and in the end, an emotionally hollow experience.

Cranston takes small bites of this Beef Jerky Tartar script and chews, chews chews — savoring every corny fake-Russian line like the voice actor he was before “Breaking Bad” made him a star.

The intrigues are rather routine in ways that point out that perhaps the director of a “Nanny McPhee” movie wasn’t the best choice for this. But McGregor, Harris, Skarsgard and Lewis give fair value and give this the lived-in feel of even the most far-fetched LeCarre plots.

Slight as it is, it’s all a little creepy and occasionally kind of funny, in a dry, dark and oh-my-God-did-she-open-that-wound AGAIN bloody way.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle isn’t for the torture porn crowd, and R-rated horror fanatics will no doubt find it dull. They won’t be totally in the wrong for thinking so. But the rest of us can appreciate the chill and growing dread that only a most sympathetic Shirley Jackson adaptation can deliver, that only a production as accomplished as this can manage.

Pulpy as the plot is, with an ending that adds an anti-climax or two, “Bad City” is a definite step up from “Hydra.”

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.

The pitfalls — drugs, marriage (Janina Use) to an amoral hustler to happens to be a banker) — are tried and true, if not downright trite. But it starts well, finishes with a flourish and finds enough “Isn’t this rip-off cute?” moments to be worth your while.

Brit hunk Alex Pettyfer has grown into a solid and quite interesting lead to build this potential sci-fi movie series around.

Never graduates to the uplifting tale it sets out to be.

Director Trevor White is more known as a producer (“Wind River” and “Ingrid Goes West”), and he’s not bad at maintaining suspense in producer/screenwriter Andrew Zilch of Youtube’s “Good Mythical Morning” somewhat predictable script.

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

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

It’s omissions mean that it’s simply not the last word on the subject.

What keeps us around until the closing credits, where Hart and Hall bust each other up, is the electrical charge between those two. They’re the Wimbledon Finals of sexy, sassy, drunken comic banter — two pros, evenly matched enough to put on a great show, even if they make us forget about the rest of the movie around them as they do.

If this isn’t the musical bio pic we would have hoped this truly larger than life figure deserved, it is perfectly serviceable. The performances ensure that there’s a charismatic, recognizably-human icon at its center, flawed and passionate and downright messianic at times.

The dry nature of the material and how it is treated limit the drama in this subject and flattened-out performances lower its entertainment value. But it’s daring, any way you slice that single potato wedge you’re having for lunch.

Things get into the area of “Oh come on” before they’re done. But The Shallows never tries to pass itself off as deep. It’s a straight, simple and primal thriller playing with our darkest deep sea fear — getting eaten.

But if you like claustrophobic stories of survival, putting yourself in the winter shoes of our antagonists, it’s not bad.

It’s a bit of a muddle and a touch too soap operatic. But Newton, Rose and Ejiofor give their characters and this story just enough pathos to make the history lessons sink in.

It poetically folds Hindu myth into a story of self-discovery, “coming out” and finding oneself and love, a journey that is a rocky road indeed in Levin M. Sivan’s film.

What a daft and twee thing Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose is. And God help anybody trying to market this dry, eccentric comedy built around the charms of Simon Pegg, Minnie Driver, Christopher Lloyd and sci-fi author Neil Gaiman voicing a (possibly) imaginary “talking mongoose.”

The porn industry of the era is as much a part of the movie as the classic cars (re-used in the background, in scene after scene) and the leisure suits. But the zingers, which fall off markedly in the latter third when the energy flags and the plot unravels, always pack a punch.

Writer-director Jordan Ross, of the MTV series “True Life,” maintains tension and fills in the fascinating back stories on these characters, peeking beyond drug abuse and arrest statistics, humanizing the entire genre eco-system.

Ross keeps his camera in McConaughey’s face, too. Every dirt stain, every twitch, every glower, wink and wince, is hard to miss. It’s not a bad performance, but it is an absurdly busy one.

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

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

It’s obvious and slow and cute in all the places you’d expect, melodramatic in many of the others. But for what it is, it is superbly-crafted.

Luther doesn’t hit the story’s discovering-one’s-sexuality elements hard, and serves up little dollops of tribal wisdom that play as weary bromides. Benny should be hunting for “hózhǫ́,” a life that will make him happy and content.

The stars have an unapproachability in their characters and performances that makes the whole enterprise play like a game in which we aren’t given all the rules.

The movie is a stupid, over-the-top comic-booky action picture with the occasional cheesy effect, oddball casting and an utterly predictable get-that-guy-before-he-gets-us plot, but Evans and a couple of his mates make it passable entertainment.

It is Krieps’ performance that carries Corsage, a woman in all her many moods, shadings, fears and desires, treated as abnormal and gossiped about and controlled by insults from pretty much every male in her life. And more than a little annoyed about it.

The most politically potent sci-fi/horror film series since the early years of George A. Romero gets a bloody, visceral and yes, emotional prequel with The First Purge, the movie that tells how we got from “here” to “there.”

Though light enough in tone, packed with good messages and delivering a couple of lovely, touching moments, "Mars" still has that plastic look that made you wish you were seeing the REAL Tom Hanks in "Polar Express" or the REAL Jim Carrey in "A Christmas Carol."

It’s “post death/doom metal” served with a side of cheese, and it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

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

You’d have to go pretty far wrong to get me to pan anything pairing up Plaza with Caine, and Best Sellers tries its best, at times. But Caine does a grand grump, and Plaza reaches beyond her repertoire of eviscerating, man-eating side-eyes. They make this page-turner worth sticking with until the bittersweet end, and that’s enough.

It’s a bio-pic that keeps its brilliant, sultry, complicated subject at arm’s length.

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.

I’m Charlie Walker has just enough “feel good” and “that’ll show them” elements to get by. But I dare say a better film was hacked out of it, at some point. The evidence of that easy enough to see.

What Benson and Moorhead have conjured up here is their oddest, most esoteric dramedy yet, a tale quirky and weird, more serious than silly and certainly worth a look just to pick through the torrent of references herein. You’ve just got to be on their wavelength to get anything more than passing pleasure out of it.

I have to say I went along with it, more amused by the craft and bursts of wit and gripped by a bit of tension, here and there, than appalled by the inhumanity. It taps into our shared phobia about ridesharing and “over-sharing,” not that EVERYbody is alarmed by these phenomena.

Eden isn’t the subtlest allegory about life in troubled times, but Howard rarely makes a bad film and he hasn’t here. From its eyes-averting grimness to its eye-rolling obviousness and “inevitability, Eden is a parable that plays.

Stuntman (“Fight Club,””300”) turned director (he had a hand in “John Wick”) David Leitch proves he was the right guy for the job with every furious blast of onscreen mayhem.

Group Therapy doesn’t reinvent the “revealing” profile of comedians documentary. But it’s a novel approach to having performers talk about themselves, those who pursued the work, lifestyle and “sharing” until it killed them.

The milieu may be familiar, and the third act revelations and actions are both predictable and somewhat clumsily handled. But Sennott wraps herself completely around this character, giving us vulnerability behind the cocky facade, worry and responsibility in a profession not known for producing the stable and well-adjusted.

I won’t oversell this, but a climactic chase in an out-of-control hedgehog float pretty much pegs the middle-school mirth meter, and that’s the target audience here.

It isn’t “Wag the Dog” or “In the Loop,” and the “Ab Fab” borrowings aren’t as loopy. But How to Fake a War amuses and impresses and entertains as it does.

The Animal Kingdom does what it does fairly well. But what it does isn’t all that original, and lacks the pathos you’d think such a situation might generate in those who live through it.

The wistful and poignant stuff doesn’t play as well as the surprising setbacks to romance, many of them delivered by the weirdly randy Sean at the most opportune times.

M.O.M. loses some steam in its third act as Lyman struggles to cook up an ending that comes anywhere near the suspense she’s been building. Edwards fights a not-quite-losing battle with going “over-the-top” crazy as Jacob.

Red has enough acting flourishes and incidental action pleasures to make it an adrenalin-jacked giggle, if not exactly the romp one so fervently expects.

“Lost City” aims for a sort of new-fashioned old-fashioned approach to this subject, and that unfortunately makes it more Earthbound than soaring, more pedestrian than epic.

This Ukrainian Crocodile Preacher makes an arresting subject, someone you’ll want to meet just to hear his story and see the past that put him on the path to being his country’s “Catcher in the Rye,” saving children from an ugly world and a doomed future.

Director Roger Michell (“Venus,”Notting Hill”) cast this well and earns stellar on-the-nose performances from Sarandon, Wilson, Duncan and Wasikowska.

I found the whole “Hidden Blade” rather less satisfying than its individual component parts. The many characters, myriad plot points and points of view and added complications with the narrative timeline clutter things up. But scene after immaculately-realized, quietly-menacing scene pays off.

The mystery, the drift of Weightless still makes for a captivating indie film experience, tension without melodrama, mistakes with consequences, a world where people are facing the future and accepting responsibility even as Joel, and his chip off the old block kid, live in denial of it.

Jon Holmberg’s Swedish caper-comedy/prison escape dramedy and “Fugitive” spoof Trouble is more amusingly frustrating than stupidly frustrating.

It doesn’t wholly come off, with back stories too thinly developed, pathos and cruelty blending with the whimsy of a New York con.

Daft and sloppy as it is, 3 Days rarely fails to entertain.

The film takes so much in — gay bars and a workmate crush, first-time sex in a “Love Hotel” — that it tends to wander.

Novitiate is very much a mixed-bag of a movie, condemned by the fanatic at The Catholic Legion of Decency, but too revealing and realistic to discard outright, too heartfelt to fail to move, at times.

Lovely as it sometimes is and impressive as the cast may be, it holds too few surprises and dramatic peaks to make it a stand-out in a genre that’s fast-becoming old 19th century hat.

An engrossing and immersive look at an isolated battle in “America’s Longest War,” a representative bloody stalemate in a country where that’s the best most of those fighting there can hope for.

Arthur the King is a sweetly sentimental story all but guaranteed to move any dog fancier to tears.

Daffy to the point of kid-friendly — remember, he did a kids’ cartoon series — it’s lighthearted fun with little of the grim seriousness and unsubtle People’s Republican messaging of his recent films. Because this time, Jackie Chan plays Jackie Chan.

I just wish there’d been more to this allegory, something more than Radcliffe’s Ig explaining his protrusions to one and all with “They’re horns. It’s a crazy story.”

No, you won’t remember this a year from now — just the vapor-thoughts effect, the jokey tone that floats around that and the heroes and villains. But how much of “The Hunger Games” sticks in the memory after four films? Heroes, villains, the train and a bow and arrow? Maybe?

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

The picture’s a bit dry and too quiet for my taste. The puzzle at its center is funny and intriguing, and hardly enough to drive the narrative.

Sandoval has made a film with cultural currency and the rich texture of a New York setting for a story as immediate as today’s headlines, and just as sad.

“King Redux” has just a couple of more laughs than the first Disney cartoon, but being 30 minutes longer, that’s not much of a plus. The original vs. remake comparison is hard to get away from here, but I have to say I was moved just once by this remake — that lovely opening note of African song/chant still thrills.

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.

I found the early acts boring with moments of shock. But the finale to “Sleep” is a corker and well worth Yu’s perhaps unintentional efforts to encourage the viewer to doze-off. That climax is a waking nightmare of the worst-fears-confirmed variety. Whose worst fears? Watch and see.

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

Workman’s film feels exploitative, and the filmmaker cannot help but make Carbee look a little creepy and a bit pathetic. The only thing that eases your conscience watching Magical Universe is the difficulty in deciding, “Who was using whom here?”

Coming 2 America still provides enough smiles to make up for the lack of belly-laughs. And if you want to hear Murphy’s famous “heh-heh-heh” laugh, stay through the credits.

In the end, it’s up to Rae (“Insecure”), at her most glamorous, and Stanfield (“Knives Out”) at his most romantic to put this over. And as they do, The Photograph develops into something rare in the movies this and most Valentine’s Days — a romance that feels romantic.

Manages to pop the hairs on the back of your neck more than most repetitive, predictable and gory Hollywood horror films these days.

The movie loses its purpose and coherence whenever it drifts away from Hanif.

This mild-mannered fantasy makes a sweet-spirited love letter to Outback life, Paris and the enduring cool of jazz, as Miles Davis played it.

That miss-or-hit collection of horror shorts, “The ABCs of Death” becomes more hit or miss with its sequel, ABCs of Death 2.

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.

The jury’s out on that, but not on the growing concern Screened Out scratches the surface of. It may feel incomplete, lacking focus (put the phone back down, Hyatt) and myopic. But it lays out the parameters of the problem, the “social validation feedback loop” of effort, attention and “rewards” that these successful businesses manipulate in ways that are starting to feel insidious and destructive.

The picture is pleasant enough, righteous in its cause and inspiring in its “I’ve got no time for cancer” message.

If Palmer isn’t that demanding of star and audience, it’s a perfectly serviceable story for at least reminding the film world that you’re out there, available and perfectly capable of delivering the dramatic goods.

The Greatest Showman is, like the singing, dancing, versatile actor who stars in it, larger than life. And if this is the only screen musical we can get out of the last of his peak performing years, it’ll do.

The film is enough of a watershed moment in cinema to deserve “classic” status, even if it’s a tad mild-mannered (PG rated) and convoluted.

Anderson loses his way, failing to thin out the novel and its overload of characters, piling scene upon scene that neither amusingly complicates the plot, nor advances it. Phoenix, however, is never less than fun.

Because as much as one might have loved The Boss, the films of Gurinder Chadha or the expectation of an empowering message about racism and the liberation identifying with a great songwriter/spokesman for the down-and-out can be, as much as you might think that Chadha (“Bend it Like Beckham”) has been marching towards that day when she’d make a musical set among the Subcontinent Diaspora relocated to the U.K., those expectations are a tad too much.

An earthy, funny and sometimes poignant portrait of a family that could only exist in the fantasy of the movies.

“Force of Nature” is more solid and perfunctory than the even more exotic and atmospheric “The Dry.” But the players, the situations and the twists, which are pretty good, recommend it.

It’s a glib yet informative and sometimes entertaining re-hashing of everything we know about how bad sugar is for us.

It’s just romantic enough and barely funny enough to qualify as a romantic comedy. But it works, despite never being graceful or unstuck enough to take flight.

It’s light, a little hard to follow the occasionally funny exchanges with all the talking over one another, and perfectly watchable, a real novelty in the Sandler canon if nothing really new for Baumbach.

The not-quite-comical squirming discomfort of some of scenes remind the viewer that Neumark cut his producing teeth on TV’s “Portlandia.” It’d be easy to see these characters, in more cartoonish form, on that show. But whatever tone he was going for, the thin sprinkling of laughs makes First Blush drag on more than it should.

What’s Love Got to Do With It? manages to show us a classic rise/fall/comeback tale with a little flair and a lot of heat.

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

It’s a cryptic, gloomy and paranoid thriller about hackers, election interference, the omnipotent personal data mining resource of the Internet, how it is used against us by marketers and how foreign operators can use that same data to turn us on each other.

It takes an absurdly long time getting here, but with a lot of “Man, that’s nuts” along the way, it’s pretty much worth the wait.

The minimalism works well in the early acts, and even the preachy finale — with its civics and socio-political debates built in — doesn’t wholly break the spell of 4×4. If nothing else, you’ll pick up your owner’s manual and give it a glance after seeing this one.

There’s not an awful lot here, but this may be the best of the “pandemic” movies — science fiction and horror that is both “of” this moment, and a parable about it.

It’s too bloody, too depressing and infuriating, and Andrews makes it his business to not give the viewer much relief or satisfaction with any of it. But it’s also quite good, even if it denies us much that would give the viewer some sense of relief or justice.

The Bengali is a lovely home movie about finding one’s roots, a simple tale that connects a New Orleans family to its West Bengal patriarch, who came over from India in the late 19th century.

It’s compelling because it reminds one that transgender discrimination is wrong, in every culture, and just how venal, backward and dumb a person doing the discriminating comes off, no matter what language they speak and cultural tradition they claim to be “defending.”

Tebo’s film gives us the sense that Tyler was living the dream most every rock singer of his generation shares, to front a Big Band, with horns and backup singers, paying homage to some old favorites, and vamping through others, and having a ball doing it.

It’s a mesmerizing movie, in its way, a chronological stream-of-consciousness dissection of a very specific “type” — Western, indulged, pretty enough to attract attention, careless with how he uses it, too removed from his contemporaries to care or commit.

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

Heard sets herself up as a Megan Fox with talent. And Cage? He delivers. Mock him for his bad choices if you will, but consider this. Who else could have made this work, or would even want to?

Whatever the film’s shortcomings, you can’t say the cast isn’t on the mark and that Lyne, at the very least, still has it and remains very much a master at sucking us in and making us care, no matter who the hero and who the villain might be.

The lyrics aren’t all that. But in an action film, it’s tempo that matters. The Rhythm Section never loses the beat.

The film’s narrow focus make it more an expression of support for those who stutter and those trying to make stutterers’ lives better than an “explainer,” a movie that covers a lot more ground on the subject.

It’s a dark, deadpan comedy that isn’t really funny, but whose premise is the the quintessence of “permission to laugh.”

What an odd duck of a doc Big Fur is. But that just means director Dan Wayne has gotten damned close to his subject.

It doesn’t really skip by, but Krasinski keeps the squishiness to a minimum and lets his co-stars land the laughs even if The Hollars are nothing to shout about.

In Peter Ambrosio’s witty, biting and amusingly inconsequential indie comedy, Natasha (Dasha Nekrasova) is a woman with shades, a red trench coat and a mission.

Allen has long been an actress with perfectly expressive eyes, and wearing her years with grace has been a hallmark of her recent work. Yes, she gets to show Nora still has “some fight” left in her. No, Nora doesn’t come off as reasonable when she does.

The documentary, like the idea behind it, makes for a fascinating thought experiment. And a few years down the road, maybe it’ll be worth revisiting to wonder if more than one interview subject has wound up in an institution.

The effect is a movie that has a couple of great scenes tucked into a brilliantly excruciating tale that will not let go of its feeling of dread, or its manic energy.

“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.

Bitch, truth be told, isn’t as daring and “out there” as its titles promises.

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

There’s real suspense in the central dilemma and in the Hail Mary efforts to think and work their way out of this. But thin character development and slow pacing render this slower and soapier than one would wish.

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

You People is a comic throwback, an all-star Jonah and Lauren and Nia, Julia and Eddie, Mike Epps and David Duchovny singing John Legend off-key at the piano farce that begins with a sprint, gets gassed far too often and yet still produces a lot of laughs, all of them packed into its funniest stretches.

Winslet, as actress and director, gets us to the emotional core of the story with skill and compassion even as her movie introduces its emotional buttons, one by one, before punching each in turn with a care and sensitivity that make this “Goodbye” therapeutic as well as over-familiar.

Breaking Fast is an Islamic “Wedding Banquet,” a West Hollywood rom-com so cute it flirts with “cutesy,” almost cloying when it isn’t being cute, but damned adorable in the bargain.

Bridges and Davison preside over this elegy with intimate, subtle and affecting performances that lift the entire undertaking to the edge of poetry.

The unfolding plot makes just enough sense to get by, but that might be because it’s so predictable we can pretty much guess who dies and “in order of disappearance.”

Flock of Four never achieves the giddy highs of a “Diner” or the classics of this genre and period. But it varies the formula just enough to set up the finale. And then Cathey, maestro that he is, brings in on home with a killer solo.

This version of the story has a few funny moments, but plays things straight and still manages to be a rewarding and enjoyable remake of this story of “Tous pour un” and “one for all.” Maybe they’ll find more of the “fun” in the second half/”sequel” — “The Three Musketeers — Part 2: Milady.”

Though properly chilling when it’s supposed to be, it’s a film whose effects, script and performances keep it at arm’s length when it is supposed to be moving.

Whatever else Whannell, making his directing debut, manages in this third chapter of this soon-to-be-beaten-to-death series, casting Shaye and giving the actress who dates back to the original “A Nightmare on Elm Street” her due pays off.

The Discoverers showcases Dunne in a part he was born to play.

Howell-Baptiste makes a mesmerizing yet earthy and “real” tour guide through the meandering narrative of We Strangers. She’s the best reason to watch this inscrutable film that’s easy to take-in but tricky to decode, based on what’s included and what’s left underdeveloped or simply undeciphered.

A rough and rough around the edges tale of children growing up on the mean streets of the wrong side of Brooklyn. It’s a coming of age story of a self-absorbed, downtrodden punk with a dream who learns about the love that comes with responsibility.

Neeson, freed from the straight-jacket that too many action films have slapped on him, gives Tom a stoic, crusty vulnerability that comes out in every line, post-diagnosis.

Taken on its own merits, this profile of "Buck" Brannaman is a pleasant and touching but somewhat superficial insight to the man and his methods.

Neill is quietly compelling, as always. Brody underplays Pete, emphasizing his suffering, his victimhood, his guilt. It’s a performance mostly of reactions, and the aforementioned wayward accent.

The film, four years in the making, gets into Martin’s professional history without getting close to the man — a little taste of a misunderstood childhood, almost nothing of his personal life.

Guzman makes even the most trite moment — hailing a taxi in oh-so-tolerant Paris — amusing.

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

The film is thus mostly a surface gloss with a bit of context, relying on the performers and thinkers from way back when to create all the interest here. But Daytime Revolution is a nice editing job of presenting that landmark week of slightly weird TV to viewers 52 years later.

The film’s second half more than atones for its drifting, muted early scenes cataloguing many a romance novel/movie cliche.

One of those performances you just lose yourself in carries off June Again, a sweet and sentimental portrait of dementia, and the “paradoxical lucidity” that gives some sufferers a short respite from the memories, manners, skills and knowledge that disease has stripped from them.

Twice Born fails to tug at the heartstrings or wring tears from us. Hirsch plays exuberant and callow well, Cruz is tragic and earthy as ever. But the two of them never really click — sex scenes included.

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

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

In keeping it simple and personal, Reynaud finds the sweet-spot in a movie whose ebb and flow we know by heart, whose finale is the one we’re almost sure to expect.

Director McCarthy stages a red shadow pantomime that’s the best filmed version of “the play within a play.” Ever.

This "Inception" meets "Made in Heaven" by way of "They Live" is also the screwiest movie Matt Damon has been in since, what, "Dogma?"

Does this stylistically unstylish picture stand with the lurid glories of “Casino,” the pulse-pounding narrative drive and cinema semiotics of “The Departed,” or the charismatic cynicism of “Goodfellas?” Give me a freaking break.

The performances and the milieu, with its colorful colloquial speech and loving if blundering sisterly relationships, is what sells “Premature” and makes it an indie film well worth your time.

But the script has laugh-out-loud moments and zippy exchanges. Middleditch and Weixler give this smarts and just enough sexy sass to work. And Bang gives it heart.

It’s a lovely film, a sentimental parable that carefully recreates a post-war Japan obsessed with obliterating its past.

The players embrace this for the lark it is. Their pleasure in going this gonzo spills off the screen.

Official Secrets, despite its blasé title, despite the fact that this “true” story isn’t on a LeCarre level, in spite of its paucity of dramatic outbursts, is still a most engrossing history reminder.

Even if some of the second and third act twists upend some expectations, even if the Big Sky setting (it was filmed in New Zealand) promises “epic,” the melodramatic characters and touches give it a predictable familiarity.

In Full Bloom is a patient, simple post-war parable of fighters — cultures in collision, dreams and disappointment.

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

A generally upbeat and exhaustively-thorough film.

In the end, what God’s Country is wrestling with is too big for the movie or the filmmakers’ ambitions.

Homewrecker is laugh-out-loud funny and edge-of-you-seat thrilling just often enough to come off. Dollar for low-budget dollar, it delivers fun and value many a Hollywood production would envy.

Becoming Burlesque makes a cute fictional introduction to the art form, the reason women practice it and what can happen when cultures this far apart run smack into each other — pastie to pastie.

It's fun in a bad way and bad in a fun way, and that’ll do for this late in the summer.

It’s superficial, but that plays into the hands of the film’s star, Ashton Kutcher.

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

“William” lacks the fireworks or even high drama that would give it scale or stakes, that would make it more consequential. And its moral parable feels underdeveloped. But Disney still has managed to tell a thought-provoking story on a subject worth viewing through a lens of ethics and morality, even if he can’t quite break free of “Planet of the Apes” parallels.

The film manages to be a meditative essay on death and dying and love, even if the chill never quite wears off.

The Meddler is a film of cute moments and the odd touching scene, which serve to interrupt the steady cavalcade of cliches.

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.

Te Ata may not be an Oscar contender, but it is well-acted, touching and certainly good enough to deserve this Netflix curtain call.

What this film from the director of "The Devil Wears Prada" does manage is a gentle amiability.

If you’re looking for low-exertion a summer escape movie with a bucket list travel destination as its setting and a donkey and the hapless, lovelorn sap who rides him as its stars, “My Donkey, My Lover & I” certainly fills the bill.

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

The paranoia underlined, high-lighted and foot-noted by an over-reaching satire like “The Circle” seems more reasonable by the minute.

Giving equal weight to the four different points of view is one thing. Give us multiple timelines on top of that and you lose focus to the point where everything turns fuzzy.

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

The thing that “Disappearance” does perfectly is, unfortunately, its most anti-cinematic trait. Grief and a romantic break-up have never been more deflatingly, depressingly captured.

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

Despite his dabbling in many indulgences, Serj Tankian doesn’t come off as shallow or particularly superficial here. But this documentary almost does.

Adding more sources to the story don’t illuminate it, they extend it to no avail, turning a 90 minute movie into two hours that still don’t make the informed guessing more informed, or more entertaining.

Ebrahimi, dogged and fierce in “Holy Spider,” carries the picture by simply humanizing a character who could be Anywoman facing this sort of crisis in a foreign land, or a home country that disregards women’s rights.

The rise, fall and mainstreaming of hip hop fashion is explored in Sacha Jenkins’ Fresh Dressed, a documentary that visits an under explored corner of rap music history.

The performances have an offhanded charm and street reality that sells this. And there are worse ways to spend your movie-going time that taking a walk on the not-so-wild side through Toronto’s colorful neighborhoods with the dreamers who long to escape them.

It’s a star vehicle that reminds us of why star power still counts for something, even if the comic thriller you park this pairing of Butch and Sundance in has them upstaged by a kid still young enough to be willing to not just wear tidy whiteys, but to run all over New York in them.

An engaging musical documentary.

It lacks the fireworks or stunning revelations of an A-picture in this genre. But it works as a nice showcase for a cast that’s largely been relegated to small supporting roles these days.

Few jokes take us by surprise, but enough comic haymakers land to make “Burt Wonderstone” credible, in not exactly “incredible.”

When all is said and done, “Here Awhile” is here just long enough for Anna Camp to break your heart.

It’s not a “Nework” for our times. But a game cast and a reasonably tense take on a topic that is a major component of this election year’s zeitgeist — financial cheats stealing from America, and never brought to justice — make it work.

While The Laureate impresses here and there, there’s nothing that truly dazzles and little that sizzles, either.

The adults are sharp and the kids are all right. It plays, even if the pacing’s slow by Western standards. And while you might not know the rules of snooker any better by the end than you did at the outset, there’s enough here to make one want to look them up.

Three great performers committing to their parts will always be a pleasure, and the fact that each was beloved by generations makes this dramedy an easy sell for most film buffs.

The romantic leads are engaging and can sing, one of them a lot better than the other. The production is eye-popping, visually, more India than Arabia — Guy Ritchie frenetic at times, and mildly amusing. And Will Smith gets to strut his stuff in Hammer pants. Again.

More interesting as history, re-written, than as the moral parable this true story became.

Hogancamp seems a pleasant, offbeat and intuitive fellow who probably takes all this less seriously than those who "discovered" him.

It’s a showcase for Vietnamese actress, model and pretty-convincing martial artist Veronica Ngo (Ngo Van Tranh), who takes beating after beating, and delivers beating after beating, as she brawls her way through the child-trafficking trade of Indochina.

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.

The film manages to move and touch us, revealing that the books are timeless due to their exquisite, English craftsmanship, their wit and warmth.

The entire deadpan affair is more reasonably amusing than hilarious, but the pauses in the action, with the screen going to black and “users” of this Amazon streaming movie commenting their complants– “That’s it?” “That’s not a movie” and “On this budget, this is what you get” — are laugh out loud funny.

It’s meandering and a little messy, and voice-over narrated almost to death. But the vivacious presence of newcomer Layla Mohammadi as spitfire daughter Leila and Liousha Noor as Shireen, her stern, disapproving “Strength of Silence” mother carry it with flashes of snark, spite and soul.

Nairobby may not be an instant classic. It’s still a sharp enough opening outing to be worth a look and easily earns that second check Netflix should write to give us more gritty tales from Kenya from this very promising first-time director.

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

“Happiest Man” gets at what makes Flanigan the perfect brand ambassador for the theme park, the “Happiest Place on Earth” that’s smart enough to employ “The Happiest Man on Earth” for decade after decade, a guy who isn’t shy about going above and beyond to “bring the magic” to everyone who visits, every single day.

Chatty, self-absorbed, streetwise and sex obsessed, even if he wasn’t drawing his quintessential “New York types,” we’d call Jules Feiffer’s characters “cartoons.”

If it’s not one of Anderson’s best, “the good parts” stand out as some of the most endearing moments the movies have given us this year.

It’s got a good enough cast, a couple of twists and enough brute force to it that it’s worth taking in on its own terms. Those terms being “We’re imitating the McDonagh Brothers, so what?”

As a brutal and gory combat picture with historical underpinnings, these “Secret Soldiers” acquit themselves heroically. The action is visceral and intense.

So the revelations, when they come in “Rewind,” don’t have the jolt that they did in “Capturing the Friedmans,” or even in the mini series about the widely-publicized crimes of R. Kelly and Michael Jackson.

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

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

Alemania is a sweet, understated coming-of-age story, unsurprising in many ways as it borrows its central who-will-stay/who-will-travel story arc from “American Graffiti,” of all films.

Entirely too much of the preceding film is precious, self-absorbed, self-serving, superficial bordering on in-bleeping-sufferable.

I can’t say Wish Man is a great film, or even a particularly good one. But it has heart, Steel & Co. make it likeable and writer-director Davies makes its emotional payoff pay off.

The winsome Lynch, narrating her story and irresistibly (to Auden) poker-faced in her dealings with the outside world, makes a heroine worth knowing and following to the ends of Ireland, with or without a wand.

True Spirit doesn’t add anything fresh to the genre, just fresh faces and Aussie pluck, with even the tunes . . . pretty much on the nose. But that’s what “feel good” movies often are, comfort food, with the occasional surprise, a “darkest hour,” a little pathos and a lot of heart.

The latest from writer/director Ruben Ostlund, who created the masterly and more coherent “Force Majeure,” it plays like a performance art piece that outstays its welcome.

I don’t want to overssell Black and Blue. It doesn’t transcend its genre. But it doesn’t waste our time, modulates its chase with alternating brisk and slow pacing, hand-held camera sprints interrupted by bursts of violence and stops, every so often, at a moral crossroad.

Like “Brazil” and “Twelve Monkeys,” it’s about human connections in a technologically warped world rendered lonely and unlivable by the lack of those connections.

Gatlopp can show its budget and feel a little malnourished, here and there. And the emotional moments are mostly superficial cliches, with a trite, tried and true familiarity. But no cut-rate, scratch-the-emotional-surface “Jumanji” knock-off should play this cute, funny and sweet.

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.

It’s still an intensely likable and watchable dramedy, even if it never quite reaches that “generation defining comedy” thing.

Yes, coincidences rule the day in this story, but that contributes to its compactness. It’s a tight tale with a steadily-escalating threat level based on Robert’s growing obsession with his new “friend,” and the extreme efforts he’s more than eager to make to keep him and them “out of a Latvian prison.”

The film, co-scripted and directed by Crane and Grylls, with Crane playing Hamlet, and narrated and somewhat driven by Oosterveen, who portrays Polonius, is a mad idea but a great gimmick, one that occasionally transcends that gimmick.

Handled with great sensitivity by all involved, it comes off in all the most predictable ways.

The intrigues are breathless and the violence so in your face that it takes a seriously off-key third act to make this one more a mixed bag than it was setting up to be.

With Settlers, the filmmaker takes us on a journey as much internal as extra-terrestrial.

The midway point in the low-budget sci-fi thriller Volition is a real make-or-break moment. It’s there that this film about a clairvoyant who tries to avert the doom he sees in his future takes a turn and adds on baggage.

Martinessi has made a modestly engrossing, too-too-tasteful film about older “ladies who lunch” and cope with their own form of quiet desperation. If only it had more spark, conflict, color and heat.

It’s got enough laughs to get by.

Cute and quippy, Merry Little Batman is an adorably silly holiday goof on DC/Warner Brothers’ most valuable comic book franchise.

Statham, 56 and fit enough to bring the fury, benefits from impressive stuntwork — his own, his double’s and the legion of stunt men/minions he’s meant to stab, kick, punch and plow his way through. And everybody can toast the breathless editing from Geoffrey O’Brien, who should be on everybody involved’s Christmas card list after this.

As our old friend Ricardo Montalban said thirty years ago in “The Wrath of Khan,” still the best of the “Star Treks” — “It is veeery coooooold in space.” “Into Darkness,” for all its dense textures and epic scale, left me cold.

Thurman, oily accent dripping with menace, is no Disney villain here. She’s real world dangerous, vulpine, callous, keeping supernatural secret threats from her pupils.

Will, Ejiofor and Blige, as a mother who never wavers from what she sees as her primary duty, make this odyssey feel personal and the pitfalls we see coming and ever-mounting life tests seem surmountable if only this brilliant mind isn’t wasted by an America reluctant to embrace “Whatever hurts my brother hurts me.”

The picture plays, the amnesia crutch the plot leans on never gives way and the players, especially Souza, keep us invested and interested until the last mystery of those missing 32 Weeks is revealed.

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

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

Jonathan "50/50" Levine has turned Isaac Marion's teen romance novel into an often amusing tongue-in-cheek romantic comedy - tongue in cheek, and brains in teeth. Chewy, tasty brains.

It’s still an intriguing and somewhat cerebral entry in the horror canon, a movie that reminds us that the real “monsters” are trauma and the real confrontations are best handled in a therapist’s office.

But Hardy is fascinating to watch, first scene to last, an actor wholly committed, as always, even if the script for this showcase feels incomplete or straight-to-video.

The Son is a horror film, but with subtle chills substituting for shrieks and freaks and blood.

It’s not bad, a solid “Hollywood” history of the 1830s Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia with a love story, religion, injustices, torture and murder, a movie with middling, un-affecting acting but high artistic pretensions.

None of it adds up to much more than a chuckle or two, a smile or three and a lot of slow, poetically drawn-out moments of mild anguish or the simple delight of walking through Greenwich Village in the spring.

Drljaca gives this simple story just enough melodrama to get by, and frankly it could have used more. But it is an engrossing portrait of romance in a beautiful place not-that-many-decades removed from a genocidal civil war.

Mandibles is a shambolic, sometimes funny and always-silly amble through the South of France.

Sex, skin, scenery and aspirational affluence are the Netflix selling points, here. But director/co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski made this a drama, not a comedy. She’s leaning towards cultural commentary.

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

The emptiness of oligarchy and a ruling kleptocracy feels both distinctly Italian and innately universal in Loro.

Rubenstein’s character study suggests that it’s not all that great being Noemí Gold at 27. But all things considered, it’s not all that bad either.

There’s nothing deep in this Banana Split, nothing remotely moving or profound. But Marks (TV’s “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”) and Liberato (“If I Stay”) let us believe these two would connect, push each other’s buttons and bruise each other, and in just that way — just not in the way the title implies.

All we’re really in the end is the gimmick and an appreciation for how cleverly it comes off. And a reminder to not “answer messages from the dead.”

Entirely too much of the tale is given away in the trailers, which causes this Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett film, scripted by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, to lumber out of the gate and take a while to get going. And there’s a lot of momentum-killing “explaining” in the second and third acts that stops the gory fun in its pointe-shoes tracks.

A fine finish and some good performances recommend Fancy Dance.

The characters are only superficially sketched in, but we still fear for them, understand their code and above all else, appreciate the dirty, bloody, high-risk work these professionals do. That they go through all this and risk everything, by choice, is something Berg, to his credit, never lets us forget.

It’s not a dazzler, not even a knee-slapper. But “Nothing to Do” sets its goals and meets them, and reminds us and every indie filmmaker out there that America is overrun with skilled, talented actors desperate for work.

As the violence escalates and whatever was getting out of hand gets seriously out of hand, Barbarians can turn downright riveting.

The singing is nice, the peripheral characters interesting. But a love that others don’t approve of, that may get in the way of a big concert debut? That makes Gabrielle a bit too Lifetime Original Movie for its own good.

A Forgotten Man still makes for a most watchable account of a country that may have “gotten it from both sides” during the war, which acted out of self-preservation and self-interst, but which got an undeserved pass for its selective, opportunistic views of “neutrality.”

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

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

There aren’t many surprises, but the amusing bit players, throw-away lines and general “feels” that Top End Wedding leaves you with put it over. There are laughs, sure, but who doesn’t cry at weddings?

Osage County does offer up one almost-heartbreaking moment. But it’s so icky that, like the rest of the film, you kind of want to wash it out of your mouth — with supermarket Merlot — rather than savor it.

It’s a sturdy enough story that it can withstand a little dilly-dallying, and the visceral finale is as heart-pounding as we need this story — when the lambs rose up against their slaughterers — to be.