Roger Moore

Good Fortune is laced with celebrity endorsements.

Streep is positively effervescent in the part, sassy and in good voice (the acoustic Jenny Lewis cover is spot-on). And for all its overly-familiar notes, Ricki and the Flash rarely seems out-of-tune.

Bad Hair and its follicles are on their firmest ground just poking at the prejudice, pressure and unnatural (but admittedly lovely) beauty that women feel compelled to pursue to get noticed, get ahead and get theirs. The supernatural element feels unnecessary, save for the finale.

Director Bryn Evans works hard to maintain the suspense of a championship points race, covering that 2017 season from the pits, the telecommunications center, the garages and the RV where Dixon and his wife and kids stay on race weeks. We see a big crash, a furious physical recovery and the quiet stoicism of Dixon and those rare few who can do what he does.

All My Puny Sorrows never quite escapes the burden of its genre. The literary framework artificially raises the tone of the discussion, but heavy helpings of voice-over narration weigh on it with a gravitas that is already implied and need not be pounded into our ears, scene after scene.

With so many recycled scenes and cliches to get through, Lee let his comedy run on too long. But Seoul Searching is worth a look and a laugh.

The girls go wild and they make “Mike and Dave” as nasty as they wanna be, and a pleasant, pervy surprise of a summer comedy.

The director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” has once again taken on a complex evil being done in our name, a subject no one really wants to think about, and forced us to consider the many ramifications of making a flippant and terminal judgment on something that demands attention and understanding, in light of what we now know.

“Dave” manages to be just cute enough to come off, largely thanks to that cast, this setting and its “everybody hates bankers” ethos.

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

It’s just French enough to feel novel, after decades of Austen adaptations, biographies and the like, a “fresh take” that isn’t all that but does no shame to its titular novelist and the iconic bookseller who figures she “wrecked my life.”

Damsel could have joined the ranks of, if not great Western comedies (“Destry Rides Again,” “Support Your Local Sheriff”), at least pretty good ones (“Cat Ballou,””Support Your Local Gunfighter”). As it is, we can guffaw at the characterizations and situations for a good hour before that horse is plum played out.

A bittersweet, wistful rom-com that may not be all that it might have been, but isn’t all that bad as it is.

Its efforts to find “cute” and “charming” in a romance between this fake killer and a woman who wanted to hire him fall flat. The many disguises and guises trotted out by star and co-writer Glen Powell as a New Orleans assassin didn’t play as funny, even if the “acting” and predicaments his real-life character talked his way out of are amusing.

Director Griffiths never lets reality slip too far beyond her film’s grasp, though the sexual complications, all of them, play like melodramatic conventions, some less organic than others. She’s still delivered a convincing portrait of a world and how its limited horizons shape those who might never escape it.

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.

It’s not a bon bon or a comic delight. But Bourgeois-Tacquet and her muse Demoustier give coquettes, gamines and manic pixie dream girls (a Hollywood staple) the kind of butt-kicking all those people who misguidedly hated poor Amelie for decades ago longed for.

Director Tommy Haines, a Midwesterner, knows the lay of the land and gives us a sometimes graceful, occasionally bone-jarring film that vividly captures action on the ice — trash talk and brawls include — and far more banal lives off of it.

The first two acts aren’t necessarily made “better” by the twists and resolutions of the far more involving third act. But it’s not a spoiler to say that “Classic” comes a tad closer to that label thanks to a boffo finish.

The movie is imminently watchable, and the surface sheen is fine, but the real Berg remains more mystery than man with a mission.

It’s an old fashioned romance in a queer setting, and is about reaching that moment when cruising, casual sex and narcissism aren’t enough — and are ending, anyway, because at least in terms of your “crowd,” you’re getting “old.”

Co-writer and director João Paulo Miranda Maria serves up a limited-dialogue parable of racism, cultures clashing and the violence that ripples from that in this film. Using limited dialogue, just a handful of characters and behavior that ranges from intolerant to monstrous cruelty, he parks Traditional Brazil squarely in the path of outsiders-with-a-different-agenda Brazil.

If you want to see “Force Majeure,” rent it and stream it. If you want to see two terrific comic talents circling around it in something lighter and funnier, then Downhill it is.

Beyond Outrage reaches above and beyond most Hollywood underworld movies to deliver a tale of righteous revenge doled out only after showing us how much it is deserved.

Clooney, for the first time in his directing career (“Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Ides of March”) never finds the sweet spot, and never quite wrestled the script into a shape entertaining enough to make the liberties he and Heslov took with the facts worth it.

The unlikely pairing of Amber Heard and Christopher Walken pays comic dividends in One More Time, an agreeably predictable famous father/bitter daughter dramedy.

Like many such films, the subject seems more fascinating than the Far Out Isn’t Far Enough’s treatment of him.

It does a good enough job of giving us a helpless outsider-looking-in view of this foundering form of postpartum depression, making us sympathize if never quite helping us understand how this happened to Jules and what those who love her can do — beyond chemicals — to save her.

If you know the song that underscores this romance, know the Jerry Jeff and Sammy Davis Jr. and Nina Simone versions of it, you get what the novelist and the filmmakers were going for here. Reality is melancholy. Imagination and memory are our escape from it.

Ghosted manifests itself as a pleasantly amusing piece of cheese, embraceable for the breezy time-killer it is. But if they dare decide to franchise it, they’ll need a writing upgrade for that to come off.

The 24 Hour War is a bracing reminder of the days when drivers became legends, racecar teams were a big source of national pride and when Ford got out of the business of building “living rooms on wheels” and took its chances on “the Super Bowl of Speed” — LeMans.

Watts’ stoic, sturdy performance and the film’s affecting and formula-busting third act make this Infinite Storm well worth weathering.

The glory in a simple, formulaic “musical memoir” like this is how familiar this ground has become, how the “you’re not alone” and “It gets better” messaging is reinforced with every new incarnation of this well-worn path through “My Wonderless Years.”

Stiles, who classes up everything she touches, had to see something in this. Julia won’t let us down. In Julia we trust. And damned if she doesn’t deliver, as this grim march through murder curdles from Grand Guignol to laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Whatever they edited out of The Sunlit Night, they made certain to keep the funny, sweet and sunny parts. And Slate makes the time pass like a late summer Green Flash — an enchanting moment or two or three, and gone.

As this biography of an autistic fashion designer progresses and we notice who most of those outside the family are giving testimonials to Kyle’s treatment and his prognosis are from the same “institute,” “Let Me Be Me” prompts a wary raised eyebrow of skepticism.

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.

The Barr cousins give us a film of novel scenes, comical moments of sexual experimentation which have a few laughs and a little pathos.

It takes talent, in front of and behind the camera, to create something engrossing and new in the timeworn time-travel odyssey. Whatever its shortcomings, Predestination is never at a loss for surprises.

The Amateur may be a mixed-bag of coincidences, not-quite-plausible technological traps and narrow escapes, and a tad old fashioned feeling in this post-justice/post-accountability world. But Malek keeps us invested and interested in this quest.

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

A regal, majestic and downright arty take on this teacher, champion and philosopher whose life spanned much of the twentieth century.

For a dumb genre pic, What Lies Below is as goofy and fun as it is wet and…weird. Don’t spoiler alert your friends, let the ogles and giggles surprise them as much as it will you.

Whatever its cultural significance, it’s just passable entertainment, a noble attempt at waxing mythical that never, for one second, delivers that out-of-body giddiness that makes popcorn pictures of its ilk burst to life.

It’s a slow film, and almost painfully melodramatic in its obvious twists and turns. But the performances are finely tuned, and the story arc and situations — aside from a few pauses for a song — quietly gripping.

The plot is more cluttered than clear, almost playing fair with what the audience knows and what Mike should be able to reason out, but never quite.

Nobody saw it last summer. And Hollywood isn’t beating down the cast’s collectives doors. Yet. But these Slow Learners catch on just in time to be the best cheap date movie for Valentine’s Day.

It’s “uplifting,” but conventionally so, with a certain dignity surrounding it. These are, after all, “the finest palettes in Africa.”

There’s an efficiency that settles in and manifests itself through the problems and the problem solving. The viewer is in on it, because we “get” the genre conventions they’re playing around with, we know why X, Y or Z as a counter-measure will work.

Miranda gives us a revised but affectionate, intimate and respectful adaptation of a stage show about one man’s deadline-obsessed creative process and how impossibly difficult it is to write and mount a musical and launch your career in the priciest, cruelest crucible of them all, The Big Apple.

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

Michael Larnell’s flinty and uplifting film of the early days of Lolita “Roxanne Shanté” Gooden, the Queen of Queensbridge, a mid-80s fury who became a years-in-the-making “overnight success” and role model, lives on grit and heart and some terrific performances by Chanté Adams, Nia Long and Oscar winner Mahershala Ali.

Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan gives us a summary of Mongolian history and samples modern Mongolian culture as it takes us to a little-visited piece of Central Asia, a land of forest, desert and steppes surrounded by Russia to the north and China to the south, but influenced most these days by South Korea and the West.

Chairman Mao wouldn't necessarily approve. And even today, China won't be showing Mao's Last Dancer.

While Marcel the Shell with Shoes might have lost its cutesy, two-person production DIY cachet, he finishes the journey to the big screen with his charm and Slate’s wit intact. What he goes through can be laugh-out-loud weird, and surprisingly touching. And if this film is Marcel’s teeny, tiny curtain call as a cultural phenomenon, it’s a perfectly adorable one.

It gets the pulse racing every time the chips are down and the zombies won’t stay down and dead.

The conversations with Emilio mostly just reinforce, with delicacy and omissions of REAL dirt about Kubrick’s on-set tyranny, the picture of Kubrick that many others have painted over the years.

The cast is sharp, fleshing out character “types” into flesh-and-blood people we recognize. Blom’s haunted, guilty gaze sticks with you, every hand-to-hand fight has desperation and every death has weight and meaning.

It works, after a fashion — a romance that isn’t a romantic comedy. But Bier, a wonderful director, proves that “Love” isn’t all you need to make us swoon. You need a lighter touch.

Nobody should be making serious vampire or zombie movies at this stage of the horror cycle, so this riff on the genre absolutely fills the bill. And making it a commentary on gentrification? Inspired.

Eddie Marsan makes this radio thriller worth staying tuned into — his face giving away terror, rage, cunning and panic, often in the same scene. Some supporting players shrink when cast front and center. Not this one.

Writer/director/editor David Heinz gives us a road picture of sweet anecdotes, kind encounters and little conflict, an America with its rough edges rubbed off.

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.

The picture is all over the place, with many many actors, many plot threads and characters switching from Japanese to Chinese to hard-boiled English in a flash. But John Woo knows pacing, knows how to keep a movie on its feet and hurtling forward, and damned if ManHunt doesn’t manage that, flaws and failings and all.

For a comedy that gets in its own way more often than not, that doesn’t give nearly enough screen time to the two somewhat funnier women (Park is seriously hilarious and seriously shortchanged) or even enough to let the leads fully form their characters, this still manages some serious third act laughs.

Mixed bag or not, films like “Keroauc’s Road” feed on the novel and the novelist’s mythology. And when they’re on their game, they get at what Kerouac’s sensory-overload novel tapped into that is quintessentially American — mercurial restlessness, eagerness to live a life less ordinary and that core realization that staying in one place — even a New York, New Orleans or Los Angeles — is no way to get to where you want to go.

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

Handsomely mounted, period perfect and starring the empathetic Mia Wasikowska in the title role, the new Madame Bovary narrows the scope and finds a different focus within Gustave Flaubert’s novel.

But I found ”Buster” to be a film that danced out of the starting gate and trotted or gamboled along, pleasantly and/or grimly ever after — perfectly watchable, probably more watchable in segments in the “Let’s put this on pause” comfort of your own home.

“Bone” is an unflinchingly-violent and stupidly long genre mashup. It’s Tarantino without all the anachronisms and swearing.

It’s just that movie-star turned director Angelina Jolie is a bit too enamored of vast panorama shots created with drones and keeping her mostly under-age cast clean, well-fed and front-and-center in the story.

Frenetic scenes over-stuffed with pop art/comic-bookish visuals, politically-savvy “tech is taking over” messaging and a handful of seriously silly and over-the-top moments give The Mitchells vs. the Machines its fizz and buzz.

A mildly unconventional love story drags Road Hard to a most conventional conclusion. But Carolla gets a lot of stuff about his career choice off his chest, sometimes hilariously, in this hits-too-close-to-home comedy.

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

The actor James D’Arcy (“Dunkirk,” TV’s “Homeland” and “Broadchurch”) wrote and directed this, and he tends towards the maudlin at times. He sets up a sort of competition for Natalia between father and son, which is mercifully dispensed with.

American Dreamer doesn’t so much end as peter (Ahem.) out, with a finale that feels like a series of compromises which no one wanted to winnow down. But if you skip the movie leading up to that, you’ll be missing a lot of laughs and a tale that takes that “Peter Dinklage as sex symbol” thing about as far as it can go.

Moselle, granted all this access, leaves so many questions unanswered that The Wolfpack is frustrating to sit through.

It won’t keep you up at night, but just enough of Rapid Eye Movement spoke to me to let it work. It might work for you, too.

The documentary isn’t anything resembling an over-reach, trotting out stats, uses, compassionate arguments and “harmless” stances that have been around for decades, and never effectively refuted. It’s all as easy to swallow as a THC-infused brownie.

Meet Cute makes for an offbeat spin on its titular rom-com convention, and Cuoco and Davidson give it just enough heart to pay off, something I attribute to Kaley C. because on his own, Davidson can be funnier, but he’s usually as warm as refrigerated cod.

It’s a sports movie that’ll make you think, and its release — cleverly-timed for the weekend when the only college tilt is the rare one with real “student athletes,” the Army/Navy game — invites fans to put down the beer, get off those Internet sports gambling sites, and think about what’s going on.

While small children may be enchanted by this little gastropod that could, adults will be more sorely tested. For all the horsepower Turbo boasts about, the movie tends toward the sluggish — as in slow as a slug.

It’s not close to being the scariest movie you’ve seen this year. But the political/immigration subtext, the grim cause-and-effect of their haunting and a pretty good twist or two make His House a haunted British council flat tale well worth checking out.

The reason to fall into Blue Jasmine is Blanchett’s cagey, broken turn.

Splattered geysers of blood, ripped off limbs and the like aside, this is a slight comedy, and McKay has the sense to get in, get gory, get his close-ups and get out of there before 93 minutes have passed. That makes for a vampire comedy everybody can sink their teeth into.

Stan & Ollie treads too lightly on the conflicts and never quite delivers that big belly laugh that their silent comedies managed.

Randall Park’s interpretation of Kim is dark, and darkly funny, a delusional turn with wincing, believable bits of psychoanalysis.

In avoiding the “Big Question,” and not really substituting enough of the writing, plotting and characters to give us a clear picture of her talent or make the documentary more compelling, we wonder if the fact that we don’t know who she is might be the secret to her appeal.

It’s all kind of sadly formulaic and dispassionately passionate, but also adult and occasionally surprising in where it takes our assisted suicide sympathies.

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

It’s more a (somewhat) satisfying “finale” than a logical one.

Sollers Point isn’t really about the plot, or advancing it. It’s all about the place, the sorts of people in it and the good and bad support systems that could sink or swim our hero. Thanks to Lombardi, we stick around for the answer.

The Brass Teapot stumbles into tedium, a parable that never quite resolves itself into the moral lesson it so desperately wants to convey.

The laughs follow an overly familiar path, but it’s great to see Grier, one of the bright lights of the seminal TV sketch comedy “In Living Color,” button down this judge and find ways to break formula and make him hilarious.

The sources of comedy here include that colorful milieu, the oddballs who populate it and the way people with no special skills might attempt a burglary. There’s not quite enough of each on its own, but together all that adds up to a few laughs and plenty of chuckles.

Villains doesn’t hold many surprises, but it’s fun to see the bad-people vs. bad people who have met by accident scenario, a familiar thriller trope, play out.

Even without big revelations or surprises, it’s not without its charms. “Little Sister” levitates above the trite and banal, even if it never quite takes flight.

More a good movie of its moment than a great film, The Hate U Give is a drama built on messaging and a hand full of terrific, emotionally-charged scenes.

The buffoonery goes epic in this sillier than silly sequel, a broad, down and dirty comedy overfilled with funny people trying to one-up one another on the set in the classic “best line wins” school of comic improvisation.

The clever touch here is having Franklin imagine, in his mind, Becca actually there with him as they’re having these chats.

It’s not on a par with Scorsese or Coppola’s best statements on this history, but it’s not bad. And twice the De Niro at the same price makes it a bargain.

And Mrs is a bittersweet and offbeat romantic comedy of love and loss and mourning, and a most unexpected star vehicle for unfiltered Irish comic Aisling Bea, nicely paired up with Carrie Fisher’s kid, Billie Lourd.

Haggis lets us get way ahead of the characters and the figure out what the title of this writerly tale — Third Person — has to do with the sometimes illogical connections between stories. That’s not a problem. Dragging, dragging dragging the tales out after he reaches a logical climax and something close to a resolution with each is not.

Branagh & Co. keep up appearances with a thriller that works mainly because all of its parts — locations, fights and plot twists — are well worn from all the thrillers they’ve been in before.

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

It’s at its best when capturing the flavor of the fraught times Einstein lived in, especially his later years, when he — not unlike J. Robert Oppenheimer — was encouraged to mull over his role and even the idea of his “guilt” in unleashing the atomic age.

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

Chastain is perfect. Forget the prosthetics and the “clown makeup” mimicry. She gets under the character’s skin, sings in her own voice and never lets an insincere moment flicker by on the screen.

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

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

“Walking” takes care to ID each new dinosaur species introduced, including factoids about what they ate and any special skills they might have had. It’s downright educational. Just don’t tell your kids that.

If you’re easily offended, or even have a modest vulgarity/raunch threshold, “Dicks” isn’t/aren’t for you. But in a midnight showing amongst the also-not-easily-shocked lovers of cult comedy dirty laughs, “Dicks” would be hard to beat. Ahem.

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

Boyle and Garland have made a go at making a zombie movie for the moment, a post-Brexit, Israeli genocide, Middle East war, insensate MAGA ICE-goons thriller that makes you think even if all the technique, editing and new levels of violence can’t hide the fact that the filmmakers haven’t quite made up their minds about what they’re trying to say.

She Rides Shotgun is a compelling, gripping B-movie ride, a picture that reaches for highfalutin “Trojan Horse” allegories when what it does best is a lot more obvious.

It’s a bit slow in the later going, but Travis Stevens’ (“Girl on the Third Floor”) latest film works on several levels, due in no small part for a good cast that buys in completely.

There’s little that’s light here, but I was still reminded of the early films of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who began his career in the heady years after the repression of the Franco regime.

This Wolverine gets our hopes up, and falls short.

It’s a bit all over the place, introducing characters and possible story threads that it abandons, which accounts for what feels like a somewhat bloated running time for a dramedy that’s essentially a three-hander, and that wants to be — despite dramatic moments — a comedy. But the leads and the lovely scenery make up for some of that.

The fizziness of it all kind of overwhelms some of the shortcomings and distracts us from others.

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

40 Acres is a tense, violent and generally satisfying survivalist thriller.

The Bloody Hundredth doesn’t cover much that’s new in its remembrance of this unit and the nature of the Western Europe air war. But it makes a fine companion piece to the series and the “real” Rosie,” Crosby and Richard Macon underscore its accuracy with their memories of the fight and their experience of it.

Washington gives one of his great performances as King, a man comfortable swinging between two worlds with diverging ways of thinking and even talking.

While “Summit” doesn’t expand the animation frontier or lift animation as an artform, it’s a perfectly watchable way of telling a reasonably compelling story.

Screenwriter Wenk hits the religious redemption allegory a tad too hard, and the picture doesn’t so much finish as peter out, with an anti-climax or two. But Fuqua and “Kill Bill,” “Aviator” and “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” cinematographer Robert Richardson give us one gorgeously-composed shot after another.

There’s no point in overselling a conventional, rarely surprising horror picture, a picture that manages one good, cheap jolt and a solid hour of dread. But Lazarus reminds us that a genre overwhelmed by junk fare doesn’t need to be that way. It’s not effects, gore or novelty that matter. It’s all in the execution, and electrocution.

It’s all a little hard to follow. But it’s always a wonder to look at, and even children will pick up on the fact that this is a different take on a classic tale, even if they, like the adults watching it with them, may sit on the fence about how well this hybrid story works.

Eat Pray Love isn't a bad movie -- just a spiritually dead one, wearing and wearying.

Equal parts inspired and irresponsible, the new film from Miguel Arteta (director of the cult hit 'Chuck and Buck') turns C.D. Payne's books into a hit-or-miss homage to that French classic of outlaw love, 'Breathless.'

Ordinary Angels is a kind-hearted weeper that gets by on good vibes and the talents of the Unsinkable Hilary Swank.

The final act of a thriller is where the payoff lies. We’ve invested in the characters and relationships. We fear for them, and as we do, the suspense should build to the point where it weighs on you. The Violent Heart has that weight about it right from the start. And if the climax seems wanting, perhaps one twist too many, it still doesn’t spoil the mystery we see unfold and the solutions we have time to consider over its 100 or so minutes.

Wrath of Man passes muster for its mayhem and mise en scene, a good-looking but unfussy film that may not work its flashbacks in as gracefully as you’d like, breaks into “chapters” that do nothing for its flow, yet makes its violence and vengeance as grimly gripping and visceral as any Ritchie had put on the screen.

The drama, with characters trying to avert a tragedy under tragic circumstances, is cleverly-constructed, with its contrivances nicely obscured by the glorious sense of place and time seen, in hindsight, as at best another “grey area” moment in the mixed bag of late era colonialism, at worst as another crippling blow dealt to a culture destined to barely survive the experience.

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

For a genre picture, this one is better than average, letting us see what two fine actors saw in the script and not leaving them or us disappointed in the result.

They’ve made an uneven melodrama that’s easier to get behind than to endorse for its cinematic realism. But I will. Maybe for old time’s sake.

And “iPhone ad” or not, watching Watts power through this picture with nothing jogging togs and Apple’s pride and joy has me sold. Maybe I’ve bought my last Android after all.

A clever ticking clock mystery, it tries your patience even if it is giving some of the best character actors in the movies plenty of screen time to chew the scenery, try on accents and make jokes in even the bloodiest, darkest moments.

A one-joke comedy about vampires, and yet another mockumentary/fake documentary, a gimmick that has turned seriously stale in recent years.

The head-spinning puppet is beautifully-rendered, and the addition of the clattering, clacking sound effect that his wooden hinge-joints make is a plus.

Action-packed and patently ridiculous, it’s all in good fun.

A romantic melodrama that’s so well-cast and acted and made with such loving care that you could almost forgive how long it takes to get to its obvious conclusion, how melodramatic the whole “sordid” affair is.

Depp could be dismissed as just a name and a costume who got the film financed, but his Franco-Teutonic take on Joll never quite crosses into caricature. It’s good to see him putting in the effort. Pattinson? His tiny part basically is just a name and a costume who got the film financed.

Skeleton Twins may not be a wholly fleshed-out character study, and nobody here takes a flying leap out of his or her comfort zone. But the timing of this tale of depression, suicide and how vulnerable we all are to our past, our demons and our shortcomings, is enough to recommend this engagingly melancholy comedy.

Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, ex-“Saturday Night Live” bandmates, funny women so utterly in sync as to be matching halves of “slap” and “stick,” simply click. Even when they’re out of character.

I cannot get over how satisfying it is to see Chris Pratt as the heavy.

Bird cooks up lots of eye candy, but the dazzle wears off, and nobody really connects emotionally.

For all the cans of worms it almost opens and doesn’t quite, it still tugs at the hearstrings as we remember the awful crime and the child who survived nearly a year of abuse, hunger and living under an abusive fanatic’s veil.

It’s a mixed bag in itself, but squeezing Chris Hemsworth into an outside-the-box role in between “Thor” outings and having him face-off with Teller in a simple story with a high-end setting and “human choice” morality pays off.

No scene seems superfluous even if many go on too long. “A bit of a wallow” may cross your mind, as it did mine.

A snappy, sweet-spirited teen comedy about a smart girl who tries to fight high school labeling with wit and words. And the occasional punch.

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.

Time will tell if this latest pop idol has staying power — the falsetto songs mostly run together in the ears of a non-fan — but even Sheeran doubters should appreciate the work ethic, musicianship and wit of this chart-topping ginger tyro.

How He Fell in Love isn’t dazzling, warm and fuzzy. For all the damage being done, there’s not a lot of harsh edge to it, either. But it feels real.

A handsome production, its few settings (indoors and outdoors) painterly and period-perfect. It’s entirely too long for a filmed chamber drama of such limited stakes. But Ullmann’s adaptation reminds us that the gap between “those people,” now called “the one percent,” and the rest of the world will always be ripe for conflict, drama and tension, no matter how much we evolve.

But the handsomely-mounted period production has its rewards and the finale manages a nice messiness that undoes some of what’s trite and far-fetched that’s come before it.

Everybody strikes what seems to be the perfect tone for the material.

Whatever transpires or is left unexplained, Jóhannsson never loses track of the mood he sets out to establish, that of a frosty folk tale that suggests that not everything we do to cope with grief is healthy, acceptable and should be dressed up as a little girl.

“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.

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

The Changeover is a moody, menacing thriller with a YA (Young Adult) heroine.

Maine’s still made a teen sex comedy with heart, smarts and subtlety that Netflix, which owns this genre, rarely bothers with.

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

The jump-frights pay off, the effects are excellent and the zombie makeup even better. And there’s something to be said for the novelty of it all. It isn’t every night-of-the-living-dead spawn that’s built around the Islamic way of death.

East Tennessee filmmaker Paul Harrill (“Something, Anything”) builds his film on soft-spoken conversations, quietly-voiced disagreements and — almost as an afterthought, suspense.

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

The frights are muted, but the air of dread that hangs over Irish writer-director Kate Dolan’s debut feature makes it an immersive experience, one anybody with “mother issues” will quickly identify with.

This all adds up to a movie whose net laughs exceed any annoyance Corden, the endless pop song action montages and frantic, “Ace Ventura” animal antics create.

As “mixed bag” coming-of-age dramas go, Suncoast surprises with its heart and consistently punches above its emotional weight.

There’s just enough novelty and fun to recommend Spirited — something I’ve never done for the sour “Scrooged” — with Reynolds and Ferrell hoofing and singing like this is what they’ve wanted to do all their professional lives.

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

Jackman gives a great performance at the center of a frustrating film that never quite lets us hope that anyone involved will find answers, and never lets its characters, or the viewer off the hook even if they do.

But it’s as much fun as a dumb time-travel murder mystery/cop thriller has any right to be. Just don’t let it keep you up at night sorting through it all, again, the way the folks who take notes (critics) have to. It’ll spoil it.

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.

Even though it gives away one twist/gag too easily and tends to pummel us in the finale, I have no notes. This is a damned funny riff on “Survivor” and the very idea that the dainty McAdams might have a little “Misery” era Kath Bates in her.

A movie comedy that is funnier in performance than it ever was as a script.

A mildly entertaining sermon about American “Cowboy Capitalism” as it rubs up against “The French Way.”

Before it trips over its own overly complex plot, before the comic leads have exhausted their modestly amusing repertoires, this odd stoner/sci fi creature feature blows out of the gate and threatens - for about thirty minutes - to blow your mind. Then it doesn't.

Does well in capturing the cruelty of school life and the assorted "types" who inhabit schools there and here. But it's more twee than clever, more affectionate than romantic and more promising than satisfying.

Kingsley is entirely too stiff and proper in this part to suggest any heat between them, and even if that serves the script, the film cries out for more warmth. It’s a chilly piece, scattered funny situations and laugh-out-loud lines, and a good cast performing them.

Yes, it’s an R-rated “How I Met Your Mother,” without the mother. But the Jeremy Catalino banter sparkles, with Gleeson gifted with assorted tirades, manifestos and shrieking lectures (to frat boys and the compliant “little sisters” who show up for their beer busts).

It benefits from a smart, sassy script and winning performances from assorted pretty young things who star in it.

The players and the situation (taken from a Hubert Monteilhet) novel make Phoenix an approachable, less-grueling Holocaust story than most. But the unreality of it all undoes some of that and makes this brief, smart and heartfelt story feel like a pulled-punch.

It’s not one of Polanski’s masterpieces, but The Ghost Writer doesn’t dilute his reputation as a master of suspense.

It’s formulaic, but good clean fun. And it’s a fair dinkum way for the kiddos to learn Oz wildlife and Oz slang in a cartoon.

Drift is utterly conventional in so many ways. But the relatively unknown cast, the rough hewn setting and startling cinematography — footage that rivals many a surf documentary’s best shots — give it a boost.

Western or sci-fi Western, Prospect never sets its sights higher than violent, quasi-poetic B-movie and as such does not disappoint.

This one doesn’t show strain because it doesn’t have to. The charm and the humor are obvious, our investment in their plight easy and the bad guys perfectly hissable.

It’s a scruffy little movie that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny or over-thinking — at all. But its charm carries it a long way.

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

An engaging wallow in the land of the losers.

Director Allen Hughes ("The Book of Eli") hides the secrets well and stages a good fight and chase. But what's most entertaining about Brian Tucker's script is the lived-in feel it has.

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.

So while this Spider-Man is, if anything, more competent than the first film it’s still not one that demands that you stick around after the credits. There’s nothing there.

This isn’t an A-picture, either behind the camera or in front of it. It plays like a competent TV film, lacking the polish or “names” of a “Downton Abbey,” but good enough to work.

While Causey does find historical connections between her family and America’s racial divide, her “Shadow” lengthens into a much broader look at racism in America, the tipping point moments. The film overreaches and loses some of its power-of-personal experience as it travels far and wide.

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

There’s witty banter about bank robberies in a “just tap your card” society — “Nobody uses cash any more.” And director Ben Wheatley (Free Fire and Sightseers were his) knows his way around a shoot-out, punch-out, snowplow chase or what have you. One film fan’s “predictable” can be a lot of filmgoers’ comfort food.

The movie flirts with supernaturalism. But the Beams’ story is anchored in smaller miracles — the reliability of friends, the kindness of strangers.

It’s a whirlwind tour of a life lived on the cusp of his corner of the subculture, brisk and information over-loading and entirely self-serving.

When You Finish Saving the World is smart and articulate. It’s flippant. There’s a hint of idealism, a heavy dose of “not fitting in,” and an earnest desire to do right clashing with some self-mocking narcissism.

Woszczynska tell this story with a mesmerizing deliberateness that won’t be to every taste, and its subtlety mutes the movie’s impact, if not its message. But for a debut feature, she’s made a litmus test drama set in a stunningly scenic place, and dared us to really “see” it and those who live there and who visit, and wonder if we’re any better than they are.

The action climax is solid, tense and exciting.

Lindon takes these various licenses she gives herself and her movie to conjure up something thoughtful, tender and coming-of-age insightful in Spring Blossom.

There’s a lot of fun mixed in with the somber assessments of a failed relationship. In the end, it’s too much to juggle or do justice to, and On a Magical Night is never quite “could this be the magic at last.”

Owen and Riseborough play their characters awfully close to the vest, not investing in anything that would allow this story to take the romantic or melodramatic turns we expect. But truthfully, that hamstrings the movie.

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

The various subplots collide in entertaining ways, and the “payback” chapters are full of surprises, which are easy enough to understand without the tedious business of throwing in anti-climactic flashbacks to ensure everybody “gets” why this or that happened and why any of it makes sense. We got it. We were paying attention.

Mesmerizingly beautiful diving footage, a drifting narrative and some solid performances recommend Blueback, a sweet but somewhat squishy eco-parable set Down Under and starring native Oz daughter Mia Wasikowska.

Findlay and Scott don’t force their charm on us, Wilkinson makes the aphorisms, anecdotes and literary quotations poetic and warm. So much of it takes place in the flowers and brambles of a garden that the movie smells like spring.

The new Funeral, directed by social commentator-director Neil LaBute ("Lakeview Terrace") doesn’t improve on the original, which wasn’t exactly a classic despite its classic structure.

It’s another one of the many Israeli films over the years that emphasizes connection, accidental or forced, in the close-quarters of Palestine — Israel, the Occupied Territories, lands under the Palestinian Authority. And like most of these films, it offers a glimmer of hope, even if it’s too much to expect Orit Fouks Rotem’s film to play out as wholly neutral.

The film that emerges feels sanitized, much like the band’s overall reputation over the decades, Nancy Reagan-approved California kids who harmonized like angels.

The combat sequences are good, if nothing we haven’t seen before and staged and shot more impressively in films from Europe, America, Australia and Turkey.

A fun and furious phenomenon of the ’90s New York punk scene is given its due and another faint glimpse of the spotlight in Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks, a wry, wizened and not remotely bitter doc about a band that never quite made it, but should have.

If nothing else, the timely Shock and Awe is a blunt reminder of how important a skeptical press is in countering a popular government — or even an unpopular one — that is hellbent on lying, misleading, on doing something for nefarious reasons, and has all of cable news, talk radio and a truth-averse internet backing it up.

It’s not high art and not much for big thrills. But there’s no sense fighting how light and fun this is if you give yourself over to it.

The characters have enough layers to seem human, fully-formed and in equal measure loveable and contemptible.

The story has hints of Edgar Allan Poe and other masters of horror about it, and is clever enough to be well worth a look, no matter how many credited screenwriters it took to come up with it and polish into the production screenplay.

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

Run All Night doesn’t re-imagine a worn out genre so much as drop a quart of Marvel Mystery Oil into the crankcase of that vintage V-8 for one last ride through the Mean Streets.

That leaves it all up to the dog and the dog's story, and the pathos of that makes this weeper on wheels a winner. Barely.

The visions are grim, grisly and graphic, although actual hair-raising moments are rare — a chase here, a narrow escape there. Director Andy Muschietti (“Mama”) keeps the violence lurid and shocking, interrupted by moments of often-profane gallow’s humor.

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

Phoenix, Oregon is “Big Night” in a bowling alley.

We can sense that whatever love story Trainin set out to make, the one the Tsuk’s provide isn’t going to be the one expected.

As an expose, ScarfFace makes a great surface gloss on this “sport,” just deep enough to suggest how unsavory it all is, perhaps not deep enough to lead to legal action against the filmmakers. The “scandals” surrounding it are usually limited to the deaths.

It's almost kitschy - the way Stone injects himself into a couple of scenes, an eccentric Eli Wallach cameo, the inclusion of a Charlie Sheen moment that flat out winks at the audience.

But without the gags to enliven the travelogue, without more funny lines to lighten the load and impart that message, Missing Link feels like a missed opportunity. It’s the second animated stab at making comedy out of Big Foot and never much more than second best on the subject.

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

Fine performances aside, this is a classic 100 minute thriller that runs on for an extra 40 minutes and blows the punch line.

Notorious Nick follows a formula and makes it work. Stay through the credits if you want to see the real Nick Newell in action.

As comedies go, it’s not a kill shot. But it makes a miss almost as entertaining.

A thriller with this setting and this cast can never go too far wrong. Flutter doesn’t hit the jackpot, but at least it’s a decent even-money bet.

140 minutes of “fly on the wall” filmmaking, mostly of Eilish performing, songwriting (or avoiding it, as her brother complains), doing photo shoots and radio interviews and peaking at Coachella is a bit much.

Dead Shot is a lean, myopic thriller that remembers the IRA wars against UK “paras” and special units as tit-for-tat violence that couldn’t help but turn “personal.”

The gags, puns mostly, skew quite young. And those things Spongebob does that drive his onscreen castmate nuts — the shrieks and giggles and songs — are pitched to be a lot more irritating to adults than to small fry.

The story hews closely to formula (expect a BIG GAME). But the Deep South pool hall milieu, the lived-in characters and the top drawer supporting players make Walkaway Joe worth sitting still for and watching, all the way through the credits.

What gives it’s juice is the supporting cast. John Bernthal (“The Walking Dead”) is credibly wary as the ex-con John begs to get him in the door of the drug world. And the terrific Michael Kenneth Williams is the first dealer he meets, a guy who pulls a gun on him just to test him.

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

Mumford and O’Leary get beyond the cardboard character “types” and make these people more interesting and conflicted than they first seem. And the claustrophobic milieu, just two people staring at long range video, punching buttons, maneuvering their Reaper and trying to make snap decisions that won’t haunt them, serve the movie well.

There’s a trick to making first-film-in-a-franchise films, and while the sweep of this one is every bit the eye candy fans could hope for, Villeneuve, the screenwriters and I must add composer Zimmer don’t so much stick the landing as let their picture peter out.

Johannson has never played a sweeter character on the screen, and she delivers an endearing performance.

All the performances are lifted by screenwriter Tony Binns (“Truckstop Bloodsuckers”) clever dialogue, and Mackie and Jake Smith have cute chemistry largely due to his writing as well.

As a film, its mix of interviews, little snippets of street life and Goodman’s drawled history lessons take a back seat to the loose and breezy recording sessions all around town. There’s no re-inventing the wheel, here.

Grant and director Natasha Kermani (“Imitation Girl,””Shattered”) package their “message” into a pretty clever if not all that ambitious thriller, with Grant our stoic heroine, fighting the good fight, night after night, plainly able to “go it alone” but maybe wondering if it’s worth it.

Writer-director Lara Gallagher can be praised for avoiding the “gay porn cliches” this story could have devolved into. But she shoots for a thriller tone with this, and beat that notion into Katy Jarzebowsk, who did the “tenterhooks” thriller score.

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.

The performances click, although I have to say nobody here generates much in the line of pathos.

The players are the reason to relish this bon bon, with Kingsley in fine fidget, Brosnan all Irish leftist bluster and Mirren giving a comic edge to a performance that harks back to “Prime Suspect” past.

The attractive young people do what attractive young people do, right up to the point where class is threatened. The well that divides the community (Mariel Hemingway plays the mayor) becomes an interpersonal chasm, not just a social one.

The set-up is screwy and simple, the setting riveting and the key ingredients are not necessarily what the picture is about, but pivotal to its power.

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

It’s a brutal blur of a movie, rendering its themes and actions in broad, violent strokes. That’s a help, as they mumbled accents are a bloody jumble to get through without subtitles.

A gorgeously animated combat fantasy - "The Lord of the Rings" meets "Happy Feet."

As one publisher says enthusiastically of Hogancamp’s work, “There’s no irony in it.” That’s true of the movie, which sorely lacks context and authority in trumpeting these photos of bloodied GI Joes as more than what they were intended, as therapy for a wounded man and his obsessed vision of a world where the wrongs that happened to him can be made right.

Downeast is an indie thriller so simple as to be elemental.

The matter-of-fact way everybody involved faces this supernatural horror drains most of the chills right out of it.

Martin gets at the man’s philosophy, his message that humanity is using up and destroying what Gaia, the Earth, has to offer when living in harmony with nature is becoming more necessary by the moment. It’s the pragmatic details — not just “How do you poop?” — but the power grid (Solar?), the diet, means of making the limited money you need there and the like that this brief, touching and sometimes poetic documentary lacks.

Too subdued for its own good, too stuck in Trond’s head, with his narration, to ever break through. The odd moving moment in a stunning setting — set pieces center around the dangers of small-farm logging — is surrounded by a lot that’s implied, and too little that’s shown.

Walking on Water not only shows the artist in action, it gets at why these gimmicky and despite what he says (“We never repeat ourselves!”) repetitive thematic artworks are so popular with the public, and have been since the 1960s. Whimsy on this scale is hard to find.

If Laugh at My Pain makes people take a second look at this perpetual third banana on the big screen, so much the better.

The Photographer reminds us how hard it is to say something new on this subject, to avoid third act melodrama, even when the tale is essentially true. A lot of luck and chance were involved in deciding who lived and who died.

It doesn’t all work, and some key elements are lost any time you mess with a classic plot. But if there’s an agenda in this “Farm,” it’s that good but misguided people (animals here) have to admit they’ve been had before their deeply-flawed, criminally cruel idols can be brought down. And calling out their stupidity is no way to lead, either.

And Monroe, Moretz’s “Fifth Wave” co-star (best-known for “It Follows”), has just enough edge to make Erica a New Yorker newcomers to the city might want to listen to when she barks out a warning, even if it’s hard to take somebody this into yoga — and yoga pants — that seriously.

Wilson holds our attention with her manner, her actions and her eyes, creating a broken beauty who may be too flighty to figure out her “gather ye rosebuds” years are coming to an end, and too impulsive to see the impulses that help make her “beguiling” are just self-defeating and self-destructive.

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.

The story is kind of all over the place, scatterbrained without being madcap (This one feels tinkered with, reshoots, re-edits.).

Oculus earns its frights the old fashioned way — with convincingly traumatized characters, with smoke and with mirrors.

The only thing that Other Music does differently from the scores of “last days of a dying business” docs preceding it is showing us the day AFTER the emotional “last day in business” scene.

The characters are distinct, if broadly drawn, with Aubrey, Micucci, Reilly and Franco making the strongest impressions.

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

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

Like life itself, Next Exit is very much a mixed bag — tiny triumphs weighed down by a lifetime of tragedies, guilt, blame and regret in a film that works as a road comedy and kind of works as an exploration of existential crisis, just not as well.