Roger Moore

It’s the sort of movie Hollywood made plenty of examples of, from the early ’40s well into the ’60s. Hanks has skippered a picture that stands with the best of them, movies like “The Enemy Below,” an action-packed thriller with pathos, patriotism and military professionalism. It might have been lost among the blockbusters of a normal movie-going summer. This year, it’s as good an excuse as any to sign up for Apple TV+.

Even if it is too brief and leaves too much out to be “definitive,” it serves up heaping helpings of Mifune’s film work and bits of home movies and the like to create a fascinating man-behind the stoic face/samurai icon below-the-topknot portrait of Mifune.

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

Based on the children’s books by Aaron Blabey, the plot isn’t all that, but The Bad Guys sparkles to life when it’s at its most antic — frantic chases, capers going wrong or just heated, animated debates in the gang.

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.

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.

If you love movies you should love the ones with great writing. And if you’re looking for that yardstick against which to better judge any movie that comes along, you can’t do better than immerse yourself in Chinatown.

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.

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.

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

Writer-director Jaco Van Dormael (“Toto the Hero”) spins flashbacks and time-lapse photography, stunning montages, whirling, circling cameras and stunning underwater, deep space and Martian landscape photography into a film that is as intentionally opaque as it is overlong.

I liked the tone and the limited arcs the characters play out. Up to a point. Scenes are smartly conceived and well-played. But I don’t care how much or how little the film cost. There isn’t much going on here, and even some of that isn’t explained on the screen between the opening shot and the closing credits, which is where it counts.

The new creature feature Monsters is an intriguing mash-up of "District 9," "The Host" and assorted recent post-apocalypse road pictures.

As the picture careens around towards its anti-climactic climax, one really does wonder about the point of it all.

An engaging personal essay documentary about not having children, complete with interviews, arguments, hard data and sound reasoning coming from both sides of the debate. It’s all aimed at figuring out what Trump — no relation — will decide as she is now in her 40s and “the clock is ticking.”

Director Thomas Balmes and his editors find moments of humor in “discoveries” or the unfettered urinating of a baby brought up without diapers.

If you’re into comics, “Drawn to Perfection” will illuminate for you one of the greatest artists the medium has produced. And if you’re not, you’ll still be bowled over by the quality of the work, the life in the drawn figures and the wicked, inviting sparkle in their eyes that made Stevens the standard which every artist since has had to measure herself or himself against.

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.

Deutch is is just-short-of-dazzling as the persuasive opportunist who convinces one and all that “debt is JAIL,” and what they’re selling to debtors is the chance to “break these people OUT.”

The Fortune Cookie still plays as funny. Not as funny as “One, Two, Three,” his grandest farce, or the more celebrated “Some Like It Hot.” Matthau makes it amusing. But there’s just a sliver of hope and the tiniest hint of “bittersweet” about it, something Wilder occasionally allowed into his screenplays.

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

Every element is measurably inferior to the original film — plot, jokes, sight gags (a clever optical eye-scanner joke lands), voices and design.

“Tone” is the triumph of the Welsh thriller The Feast. Tone — in its lonely, remote setting, its chilly, unsettling characters and the deeply unpleasant things that transpire — is everything.

Bacon plays a little and sings a little, Sedgwick handles jokes and pathos and in the scenes that count and turns “professional” in a heartbeat. And each gets across a shared empathy and humanity that bridges any gap in class and life experience.

Wright is one of the great character actors working these days, and losing track of him and his character hurts the film.

Michell ensures that the cryptic finale to My Cousin Rachel isn’t so much a solution as an invitation to an argument on the drive home from the cinema.

Populated with a peerless supporting cast, actors who bring just the right history to their roles.

Sure, it’s a gimmick. But it’s playful, it works and suits this material to a T.

A grueling, amusing and eventually inspiring bio-pic about the greatest long distance swimmer of them all.

The film’s courtroom concentration — the suit, prep and trial took years — makes it one of the driest treatments of The Holocaust ever. But Weisz and Wilkinson find emotions around the edges of all that be-wigged legal wrangling.

As colorful as it and its people are, Cooper lets the brawling and the bigger-than-big performances get the better of him, and his story. Out of the Furnace feels undercooked, as a result.

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

The movie’s messaging has a righteous and educational undertone that makes this a worthy addition to the genre.

A revealing documentary.

So while the jokes often land and the music is still perfectly in tune, the novelty’s gone from “Pitch Perfect”, the sequel to the surprise hit of 2012.

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

Fellowes gives the characters’ moments that sing, and director Simon Curtis (“My Week with Marilyn,” “Goodbye Christopher Robin”) makes the entire frothy affair skip along, start to finish.

When the thriller’s third act collapses in on itself , breaking its own unsentimental rules and reminding us that this is the studio that reboots “Spider-Man” every three years, whether we ask for it or not, “like” becomes a stretch.

You don’t feel Francis is challenged on anything here, and as lightly charming and impressive as he and this almost-all-access documentary is, one can only imagine what the great doc-makers — Errol Morris or Werner Herzog or Barbara Koppel — could have done with this.

If what you’re looking for it fists of fury, he can provide them. And if you’re looking for signs that a guy who is playing heavies in small roles in big budget pictures is growing as a performer, that he and Johnson have gotten better since “Debt Collector,” just not all that much, Avengement is going to be your kind of movie.

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

It makes for a chilling portrait of fanaticism at work, even if it is more historical than anything worthy of “let’s feel that fear again” topicality. Even if we suspect its designed to gin up more support for our Islamic ally in the Middle East.

An engaging take on a drifting character at an age when we’re all adrift.

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.

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.

It’s more tame than daring, at least that’s how Perfect Strangers plays north of the border. And the resolution is abrupt and unsatisfying. But the actors are uniformly superb, with Suárez and Bichir standing out.

Chemistry is king. It's one reason the rom-com has long seemed like the toughest code for Hollywood to crack. But never underestimate the power of snappy, rapid-fire banter, the paving stones of the Hollywood road to romance.

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.

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.

Its grisly violence and ridicule-religion tone make it sort of the anti-"Exorcism of Emily Rose."

Cute, bordering on cutesy, yes. Light and shallow and inconsequential in a lot of ways. But funny? Rarely.

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.

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

It works, here and there, and Polaha is perfectly believable as an ex-jock and ex-jerk who lets a little child lead him out of the darkness.

It’s slow-moving and generally unpleasant, unless you want to see the bare bones of fight choreography exposed on screen, “one two three DUCK, one two KICK,” something much more commonplace in the action cinema’s past.

Roberts and Union pull out the stops trying to find laughs in this script, mostly failing.

Nicolas Pecse’s debut feature as writer-director is a patient, pitiless thriller, a macabre tale set in the rural South where random violence is the stuff of folk legend, and morbid bluegrass ballads.

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

Whatever “charms” it reached for vanish for the attempted over-the-top finale, which left me cold and didn’t come close to making the sale about the “Embrace your inner rage” spin this is allegedly about.

By any measure, Christina Noble was not your average heroine of a faith-based film. By any measure, hers was not a life with your average share of suffering.

While Shyamalan does well by the story’s assorted jolts, and tries to have fun with a bit of casting against type with Bautista and Grint, “Knock” is so emotionally flat that I found it impossible to care about. For a film in which the stakes couldn’t be higher, that’s a fatal failing.

Like Vi, a woman accused of “never taking chances,” Nappily Ever After never takes a chance, rarely exerts itself for a laugh or a moment of heart. Al-Mansour (“Mary Shelley”) plays it safe. We get the message. What we don’t get is “entertained.”

The lives themselves are interesting, even if we only get a glimpse of them, even Cass’s. But truth be told this never really ties the Cass story to the immigrant story (he did the same sort of work in his day, we surmise, and might be prejudiced) and never amounts to much more than a selection of snapshots.

It’s not much of a movie, frankly. But our good will goes a long way where Pee Wee’s concerned. Herman appreciation is like love for Tinker Belle. If you want to like it enough, you will.

This is “Southern Gothic” that lives up to its name.

Pitt and Arianda utterly inhabit these dolts and their delusional dreams. They’re careless and clumsy, never thinking things through, never seriously considering the inevitable consequences of what happens when you poke the bull.

An eye-opening period piece that takes us back to the dark days of the Irish Police State.

The story is pure melodrama and more conventional than daring. But Tallulah makes a fine demonstration project to under-employed talent — in front of and behind the camera.

The effects, the gory makeup and what-not, are first rate, and the means of dispatching zombies creative, here and there.

Green Zone isn't so much a bad movie as a misguided one.

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.

This isn’t just his road to redemption story. Master Gardener is about planting seeds, culling dead or dying branches and making room for new growth.

The central romance earns short shrift, with all these characters to service and all those story lines to get in. It doesn’t help that Williams’ Lucille doesn’t give herself over to the passion and never quite sells us this “relationship.” Schoenaerts broods over just what he might be putting on the line, but Williams is so cool that we don’t buy into the risks taken.

"Limehouse” is more a fascinating world to be immersed in than a dazzling telling of a morbid tale.

Borg vs. McEnroe is a vivid reminder of the personal nature of this genteel combat sport, of a great rivalry and of a time when America, Sweden and the world were their most passionate about it.

Charles Shyer, who co-wrote this with a Netflix house hack (“Dangerous Lies”) blows too many of his shots at “charming,” never quite nails down the “romance” and dithers away the “mystery” in this flavorless variation on formula.

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

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.

Spring Break – it’s every bit as much fun as you think it is. Until it isn’t.

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.

Yes, there are glib laughs. And yes, there’s a very touching moment in the finale. But, yeah. Exhausting.

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.

So…weird. So very, very weird. Luz disquieting, creepy and murky demonic possession thriller, a cryptic chiller that gets by on lots of mood, a smattering of violence and special effects and seriously unsettling sound design.

Comical, colorful, wonderfully cast and beautifully animated.

The rest is entirely too obvious for its own good, something we’ve never been able to say about a Ruben Östlund before, and hopefully won’t ever say again.

Hardley has conjured up an interesting twist to this “journey of healing” narrative, abandoning laughs for metaphysical pathos.

Let It Go is a thriller best-appreciated for its trio of tour de force performances — for Diane Lane and Kevin Costner’s understated Western American couple that’s so familiar and lived-in that their most powerful moments are wordless, and for Great Brit Lesley Manville’s furious, uncompromising North Dakota matriarch.

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

The final act isn’t as interesting as the first two were to me. But Hirsch impresses, as usual, as a man losing his wits and Dern always gives fair value as a canny old coot who knows more than he’s letting on.

The first 25 minutes or so of this “Contagion” meets “28 Days Later” thriller will leave you breathless. And the rest of it serves up novel and often entertaining solutions to the various “zombie problems” that this over-exposed genre presents.

What one is left with is a gorgeous, quiet and tragic appreciation of Callas.

Sally Field brings a bubbly, misdirected vitality to Hello, My Name is Doris, a cute better-late-than-never romance tailor-made for her talents and lifelong image.

Vreeland’s film, wallowing in the Beaton vision of beauty via his images, his art and his screen work, does a marvelous service in reclaiming this dandy’s dandy/designer’s designer and iconic photographer from obscurity.

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.

As horrific as the subtext is, Solarz finds universal humor in a cranky old man on this one last quest. But he doesn’t let Abraham, assorted bystanders or the audience off the hook either.

Shyamalan gets his chutzpah, if not exactly his mojo back with this solid and modestly thrilling thriller.

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.

It becomes a screen thriller you mentally set aside, like a puzzle with insufficient challenges to ever be worth tackling again.

Alpha has to stand as one of the pleasant surprises of the cinematic summer, a gritty yet sentimental fantasy about that first Ice Age boy to fall for a dog.

It seems well cast and well-acted, but fundmentally misguided, dry and heartless.

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.

Donahue’s film goes down the rabbit hole on a few subjects, which cause the film to drift a bit, almost to the point of mission creep. It tends to lean most heavily on the directing ranks, even though actresses are the vast bulk of its eyewitnesses.

Moretz is as real as ever, and Knightley manages Megan’s transition from annoyingly naive to adorably confused. But for that she has help, and for that she and we should thank Rockwell. In this case, the actor most accomplished at playing slackers is the one who gets everybody — and the movie — to grow up.

The Rip remains perfectly watchable, if a tad slow, more than a little confused at times and utterly mired in a mess of its own making in that head-slapping finale.

Free Fire falls short as a moral lesson or satiric statement, shorter still as a “Shoot’em Up” style ballet of bullets.

It’s wildly uneven, rather like their TV series... And it is wincingly violent, with some of the John Woo-style slo-mo shootouts going on too long and spilling too much blood. But the chemistry is still there, the banter between the bald, bug-eyed, high-maintenance metrosexual Keegan Michael Key and the slow-burning Peele still zings.

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.

Performances aside, there just aren’t enough “Mommy Issues” here to justify the tedium of a movie that challenges you and wears you out but doesn’t deliver a payoff satisfying enough to make it worth this much of your time.

I haven’t loved all of these semi-campy/semi-serious Branagh dates with Dame Agatha. But “Haunting” is an unadulerated delight. Only in “Venice” can you hear Tina Fey scream.

The voice casting is on the money and these funny people - and I'm including Pitt, who plays this sort of self-mocking Adonis well, even in animated form - make this cute comedy come off.

Actress turned director Brea Grant (TV’s “Eastsiders”) serves up a pungent, gory goof of a nurses-gone-bad comedy, dark as dirt and corrosive as Clorox.

I was delighted at the beginning, and steadily more appalled at most everything that followed. There's no sugarcoating the fact that I look forward to never seeing this "Resurrection" again.

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.

The action beats are bigger and better than they’ve ever been in a Ninja Turtle film — brawls, shootouts, a snowy car-and-truck chase with big explosions and what not. But in between those scenes is an awful lot of chatter and exposition. For a film that aims younger (save for the die-hards who grew up with this franchise), that’s deadly dull.

With no real suspense and little empathy, Friend Request devolves into your standard horror cast-killer time-killer. There are more frights in the trailers for upcoming Halloween horror films preceding this — “Jigsaw” and “Happy Death Day” among them.

It’s a far-from-awful folk tale with a horrific edge. But it’s not suspenseful, and the generally unaffecting performances by the Israeli cast fail to draw us in and create empathy for the endangered.

Even if we see “trouble” the minute we spy that first phone, we don’t necessarily guess how this fascinating “speed of change” story will play out.

When all is said and done, it’s doesn’t deliver on the creepy premise it promises.

This Dinner with Vampires is a few courses short of being a meal.

At some point, you either throw up your hands at any of these military recruitment films — American, Chinese or Indian — or just go with them, no matter how silly they start to seem, each in its own culturally-distinct silly ways. I just consistently roll my eyes and opt for the former.

Though we “see” the attraction between the two young women, we rarely feel it. Luchetti makes her beautiful looking film about this budding summer romance, but never quite convinces us of her passionate interest in it, or in much else that was going on in Italy in 1938.

In focusing on the tunes and the lyrics, Mangold makes us reconsider the head-snapping surprise of that Nobel Prize in Literature.

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

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

The Cult of Roth will almost certainly eat this holiday horror feast up. But this turkey is never more than a mixed bag, and as the laughs peter out and the “clues” are contrived to fit the finale, “Thanksgiving” takes that tryptophan turn towards nodding off, the curse of Turkey Day since that first Thanksgiving — in Virginia.

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.'

It’s a funny, bloody mess, but a polished C-movie that aspires to B-movie status.

There’s a lot that’s agreeable about “Uncorked,” but this overlong movie loses its fizz pretty much when Eli goes abroad. And as any oenophile will tell you, you can’t get that fizz back once the bottle’s “uncorked.”

Manages to tell an over-familiar coming out story with sensitivity, and a Georgian accent.

What Collee and Maras and their cast get across most clearly is the utter helplessness and hopelessness of the victims. Again, this isn’t “Die Hard.”

It’s topical, but it settles nothing, informative and sensitive in its representations, cute but never cute enough.

A rom-com that almost goes for it and almost comes off before losing its nerve.

Winslet is convincingly flinty, uncompromising and American in the part, a feminist in the truest traditional sense of the word. Excellent supporting cast aside, she’s the reason to see “Lee,” a one woman argument for why what Lee Miller documented and how she documented it mattered in a movie that honors her memory, and the memories that haunted her to the end of her days.

The stakes, gravitas, wit and great actors demonstrating great acting of “Rogue One,” the best of these new LucasFilms, are sorely lacking...“Adequate” is not what we want or expect from a “Star Wars” story.

The broad, goofy jokes and one-liners land — even if they feel a little winded, this time.

With villains cribbed from the generations of cheap thrillers that precede it and action scenes that have no novelty to them, Heatstroke starts looking like Adam Sandler’s “Blended” more by the minute — a movie the cast signed up for to get a free working African vacation out of it.

Golden Years is a romantic comedy with questions and perhaps a very modern “answer” to that “Will it go on like this until the end?” challenge. But even though it’s well-acted, scenic and charming enough, perhaps finding a few more laughs should have been a higher priority.

Call Jane is a moving and surprisingly uplifting period piece about America’s pre-sexual revolution past, a late ’60s story of women who organized to ensure that the most personal and difficult decision many women will ever face was hers to make, with their help.

Cloying tendencies aside, Joy is a welcome feel-good movie about science, a “Hidden Figures” for IVF and the sort of movie a lot of people will take comfort in as the world’s anti-science ignoramuses, anti-vaccine rubes and anti-“expert” opportunists control most of the media megaphones these days.

Earnest, righteous, historically accurate and often entertaining.

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.

There is nobody to relate to. That makes the movie’s muddled message a chore to plow through and its payoff more of a shrug that the sharp slap it could have been.

In a tale this timeworn and a film this devoid of humor, with only a few moments of humanity, with tension frittered away by the tedious repetition of the fights, anybody who has ever seen Godzilla in any incarnation can be forgiven for asking the obvious. “What else have you got?”

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

A compelling drama about self-image, dashed dreams and the growing up that might be on the other side of despair.

The Assessment is smart and sinister sci-fi of “The Handmaids Tale” school, a striking, minimalist parable about humanity’s failings in facing an inhumane future.

There is absolutely nothing new in this variation on the time-honored creature-feature tropes. But the fun just builds and builds as our heroes and our Irish island come to a solution that seems — on the surface — awfully Irish in its logic.

Kon-Tiki is a grand old school yarn with enough drama and dramatic incidents to make even Indiana Jones envious at the adventure of it all.

The animation lifts Loving Vincent (he signed some of his letters with a hearty “handshake from your loving Vincent”) above the mystery, above mere biography, into something brilliant, revealing and unique.

Only Errol Morris could make a murderer in prison come off more credible than pretty much anybody else in a true crime documentary.

Writer-director Lucia Puenzo, adapting her own historical novel, concocts a disquieting and chilling thriller out of what might be a lost chapter in the infamous career of Nazi Doctor Joseph Mengele.

There’s no suspense, little that’s thrilling or that justifies any investment in this dawdling melodrama with music.

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.

Put The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster on your list of must-see/won’t-be-here-long summer thrillers, crowd-pleasing movie comfort food that embraces an old formula and manages to do something smart, insightful and topically relevent with it.

Writer-director John Carney re-plays his greatest hit with Begin Again, a semi-successful attempt to recreate the magic of the Oscar-winning musical “Once” in New York with a big name cast.

Perry's great gift to this unfilmable play is getting it on the screen, his sharp eye for casting and his evident affection and sympathy for black womanhood, even in movies in which he doesn't don a dress.

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 resolutions to the mystery, the depictions of what we’ve only suspected, are gruesome, conventional and dull and generic. And that amulet? It’s an afterthought.

Derbez remains a likable presence, and that’s the highest praise you can throw at “The Valet” in the feeble hope that it sticks. But even “likeable” wears out its welcome when the story hits the wall at the 60 minute mark, and there aren’t enough jokes to fill a single sitcom episode.

It’s not a whole meal, but Abe sits easy on the palette and leaves you wanting more.

Katie Silberman’s script has a flip, zingy quality at its best. But like any rom-com that works, it takes at least one time-out to reach for the heart.

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

The worst thing you can say about the new Roar Uthaug (“The Wave,” “Tomb Raider”) thriller Troll is that “It’s no ‘Trollhunter.'” It lacks the wit and the mismatch peril of André Øvredal’s classic rock-bodied creature feature of 2010. So “dumb,” sure. “Fun?” Not so much.

The picture hews too closely to formula to be anything more than filmic comfort food.

It’s not the editor, but the editing strategy that undermines Beautiful Boy.

The laughs — from sight gags, on-the-nose-casting (Burn Gorman as a priest named “Damien”), quirky Keaton, Ryder and O’Hara line-readings and the contributions of newcomers Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe — are hard to come by.

Adams. From the first time we saw her on the screen, we knew what she was feeling and thinking, just from staring into those huge, hopeful and sometimes hurt eyes. Her big eyes make this Big Eyes one of the best pictures of the year.

There’s nothing about “Goodrich” that would scare producers away from working with a filmmaker whose only goal might be to become “Nancy Meyers: The Next Generation,” even if there’s little original to lure them in either.

37 Seconds is a remarkably frank and surprisingly warm depiction of disability, care-giving and sexuality.

His hair is thinning and his features are thickening, and Jude Law is evolving into a more interesting actor as this happens. He’s more at home in tough guy roles such as “Dom Hemingway.” The gritty submarine thriller Black Sea is his latest one of those. But in this case, it’s a salty performance that seems just beyond his grasp.

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.

The lack of organization keeps this from being a complete film, or a great one. That Summer is a footnote to “Grey Gardens.” But for those wholly engrossed in the history, the tragedy and the “real Beales,” before “Grey Gardens” set their personas in stone and made them immortal, it’s a fascinating artifact and another piece of the puzzle of who they were before the caricatures took over.

This certainly played differently in the UK than it will in the US, where children’s rights appear to have more latitude, even if they can seem even more at the mercy of the caprices of the judiciary.

It’s “Avatar” simplistic, glib and dumb and not nearly as funny as they seem to think it is.

For all its fun flourishes and tepid over familiarity, fans are going to dig this. It is, after all, the movie they paid for. They’re the folks who “like this sort of thing.” The rest of us can be forgiven for waiting for it to show up on Netflix — on TV.

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

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

Patel turns a “straight best friend” cliche into a quietly compelling sounding board, and never lets us see the wheels turning. And Harwood does well enough by a preening character who is as capable of teen cruelty as any classmate, and frankly often unlikable.

A slow-burn thriller/slow-footed thriller.

It’s a brisk blur of a documentary that ventures from “How could a smarter machine not be a better machine?” to “the Faustian bargain” we’ve made with technology that will render 7,000,000 data entry jobs and 4,000,000 driving/transporting jobs (very soon) to medicine, law, journalism and other careers obsolete.

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.

Ahead of the Curve does a decent job of summarizing a forty year blur in gay history and Stevens’ role in it as a spokeswoman for her sexuality and community on TV in the ’90s — “Power Dykes,” on the next “Geraldo!” — a pioneering publisher and a leader in the culture’s breathtaking shift in attitudes on sexuality, marriage and gender identity.

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

The sentimental stuff is limp and unaffecting.

For a movie built on probing conversations, details and relationships, it’s pretty good. Not in the LeCarre class, but imitation is the sincerest form of spycraft flattery.

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.

It makes a grand showcase for the snobby, aloof villainy of Richard E. Grant, who devours his best role in decades like a starving man who breaks his fast with caviar and canapes.

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

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

The Void devolves into a creature feature.

Funny Boy is valuable in letting us see this world and this history through different eyes.

The funniest kids’ cartoon of the summer.

A tale told under a cloud with unreliable witnesses, it’s a slow and soft spoken drama that too breaks the chilling spell Tøndel is trying to cast.

Entourage is the uninvited dinner guest who then insists on sticking around long after the party’s over.

A warm grin of recognition here and there and memories of better banter, quicker pacing and a real fish-out-of-water feel from the earlier films is about the best one can hope to get out of this “Cop.”

Not Okay wants to be kind of a goof on the subject. Deutch seems to want to make it one. But former child actress turned writer-director Quinn Shephard doesn’t appear to be on the same page with this heavy-handed mope.

Burton has blown up Disney’s ode to magic, misfits finding their gift and a mother’s love into a shiny but bloated, glum affair that feels “BIG EVENT” in scope, and depressingly heartless in execution.

NONE of these vignettes are funny. None. Cryptic and revealing? Nope. I’m giving this one star for the decent indie cinema production values, and out of pity for the actors.

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

It’s about stasis, death and personal rebirth, not consequences or collateral damage. It suffers from those omissions.

Message and metaphor are all and The Bookshop, with its terrific cast and lovely setting, barely overcomes that burden.

It’s the directing debut of Angus MacLachlan, who wrote “Junebug” and thus gave Amy Adams the perfect introduction to the world. “Goodbye” displays the same canny ear for human interactions, both comical and confessional.

It’s hardly the last word on this scam and its hilarious embrace of the “Duck Soup” uniforms and the addled imagination and crackpot ideas of L. Ron Hubbard. But that’s the point.

Wakefield is a sometimes funny, always smart movie that never quite finds the depth to be brilliant.

This is closer to an “After School Special,” and yes — that’s an even older reference than “Sixteen Candles” — an R-rated “After School Special.”

It’s smart and topical, touching and touchy. And it is, as the French would put it, un putain de délice — delightful, with an expletive added for emphasis.

Eyes Off Me is more carnal than emotional or particularly psychological.

Whatever its loftier existential ambitions, Free Guy is never much more than big screen eye candy with Reynolds’ grinning deadpan anchoring it with his amusing over and under reactions to all that befalls Guy. And if you love Reynolds — And seriously, who doesn’t? — that’s enough.

A brooding film that feels strangely out of its era, perhaps on purpose.

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.

I Want You Back is a rom-com that sort of drifts along, not quite petering out, not exactly sparking to life, until that magical moment when Pete Davidson shows up.

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

It’s daring enough to hint that there’s no way this story (the film was made in 2017) would be greenlit for filming, even in the UK, today.

Jonathan plays like an intellectual puzzle that isn’t challenging enough, an acting exercise that has everything but emotional connection and a tour de force robbed of its force by just lying there, inert when it should be picking up steam, cold when the characters and scenario should be heating up.

The actors may give their all and the squirrel might indeed “stick the landing.” Flora & Ulysses still falls a little short of the mark.

The violence in Plane is sudden, shocking and damned personal, as director Jean-François Richet keeps his camera tight and hand-held on the hand-to-hand combat sequences, and he stages the shootouts on a “unruly mob vs. professionals” level.

It’s a fine film, and a surprising history lesson — not because the Germans don’t remember the Holocaust, but because we’re reminded that there was a time when they didn’t want to.

It’s a playful and tasty crash course in deli history, deli dining and deli language, a world of smoked meats, cured meats and fresh fish. Vegetarians are excused.

H is for Happiness prioritizes ”feels” over coherence, weird-for-weird’s-sake touches over character development, while expecting endless voice-over narration to caulk over the cracks. It doesn’t.

The biggest revelation in the latest “the funny person behind the facade” documentary, Marty: Life is Short may be how beloved Short is within show business.

Davis and Spencer give faces and fully-fleshed out lives to women who must have been more than what they did for a living as The Help.

If you can’t get more than just a taste of terror from throwing half a dozen orphans into a haunted house, maybe your “universe” isn’t expanding at all and your “Creation” has run its course.

Daddio is a cinematic seminar in the value of movie stars.

The leads are charmingly mismatched, but adorable enough to root for, as a couple. Forestier is a wildly uninhibited actress, sexy as all get out. She makes this girl dangerous, seemingly capable of anything.

The best 85 minute primer you will ever get on Bitcoin, its many imitators and the potentially world-changing technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible.

You could Oscar short-list the production design (Pascal Le Guellec, Thierry Zemmou) and art direction (Patrick Schmidt, Paulo Gonçalves), even pay special homage to Ellis’s cinematography. That doesn’t change the fact that the writer/director/DP has made a werewolf movie as pretty as a painting, and almost as animated. It looks better than it plays.

The King is something of a tin-eared bore and a massive waste of time.

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.

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.

It’s a star vehicle, awards bait and a showcase thriller that barely holds your interest as you wait through the whispers and “She looks TERRIBLE” closeups for something exciting or moving to happen.

Sleight is a prestidigitation thriller that lives up to its title only if you misspell it.

This isn’t quite the spectacle that the signature films of the genre are, but lacking the seriousness of those isn’t exactly a shortcoming.

The movie before it is rather undone by the third act that ends it.

It is a film of (somewhat) mutual admiration and clever, clever words, the product of “a wickedly brilliant mind” (Woolf) and a popular poettess and wit, descended from Gypsies (Isabella Rosellini plays Vita’s disapproving Gypsy grande dame mother), a “a sapphist” with scandalous appetites.

Cowan (“Sunrise in Heaven”) is the big find here, giving us a doll-voiced minx with a hardened sex-worker’s shtick and a survivor’s instincts. Penelope works her search for “something that makes my thighs twitch” act on every heterosexual male in range, and turns most into putty. If only this script had found some place interesting to send her and Frank.

The viewer is both miles ahead of the characters in guessing where this is going, and befuddled at the clumsy ways it gets there, or avoids letting us think we know how it’s getting there.

As Accused wallows deeper and deeper into melodrama, with one-note performances almost making every character a caricature, the inescapable conclusion one leaps to is that this film’s late-to-the-game subject matter and quaint treatment of it was made by some seriously unsophisticated filmmakers.

The younger Franco doesn’t reinvent the genre or advance it in any way. But horror, as always, proves a nice proof-of-directing-chops test case, and he passes with flying colors. The performances are pitch-perfect, the picture opens with dread and the suspense builds nicely.

The Monkey has no pace, no rising sense of urgency or suspense, no real path it’s following and little or nothing that amounts to a message.

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.

A scruffy, raunchy and random farce.

Rubble Kings is more interesting as cultural mythology than straight history.

As stories of the Occupation and impending Holocaust go, A Radiant Girl never overcomes its artistic emotional detachment.

The new documentary on Keith by Morgan “20 Feet From Stardom” Neville still manages to surprise and delight.

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

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.

Crisp, compact and cryptic, The American is a standard-issue hit-man thriller tailor made for George Clooney.

Almost every shot is a postcard-perfect African vista, and every animal shown in majestic close-up.

Whatever precious touches emerge, I have to say Words on Bathroom Walls works. The performances are stellar and earn the emotional connection we feel with the characters. The lighter touches — Garcia, Bostick and especially Robb (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), going all Woodstock Stevie Nicks — are a delight.

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

It’s a lovely work, imbued with all the sweetness a Who’s Who of great animators can give it.

Too many character actions seem inorganic, pre-ordained by the needs of the script. The set-up is strained, the quick move to violence perfunctory.

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

The last 75 minutes of Babysplitters doesn’t live up to the promise of the first 45. What is light, snappy and fun becomes labored, cluttered and almost too serious for its own good.

Snook does a nice job of unraveling, and LaTorre makes a perfectly infuriating, undisciplined child. But Run Rabbit Run never moves at anything faster than a saunter, and takes forever to stop meandering about and get on the obvious horror parable it is trying to put over.

Kelman’s direction of his script highlights its more arch or even ludicrous/risible elements. The pacing is too sedate to give the narrative urgency and race past the clunkier moments. And the performances aren’t any more subtle than the sometimes absurd action beats.

A nail-biting thriller in the classic Hitchcock style.

This one just never seems to end, and when the illogical end arrives, a laughably dumb coda is layered on top of it.

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.

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

Start to finish, it’s a delight.

You’d think with the director of “Yes, God, Yes” (Karen Maine) behind the camera, this comedy would take flight. Too much of what’s here stops just short of paying off with a big laugh. Blame the script or the tentative players (aside from Deaver, none of the younger cast members knows how to stick a punchline), but for all its intended charm and hilarity, Rosaline always settles for “ish.”

The leads are engaging and some jokes land. But none of them cut deep because there’s little edge to any of this.

Aniara is science fiction cinema from the land of Bergman and Strindberg — sharply observed, just brittle enough to fend of sentiment, bleak when bleak is what is called for.

Using animation, interviews with Malala and her equally passionate father, Ziauddin, Guggenheim tells of the girl named for a famous female Afghan poetess/warrior, raised in the Swat Valley.

The acting is superb and spare, as you might expect.

Remembering Gene Wilder isn’t bad. But it’s incomplete enough to call attention to its shallowness. It never overcomes that “Coming up next on ‘Biography'” superficiality.

This wistful, melancholy yet hopeful romance has a warmth that singes, a poetry to its stock situations and a biting allegory about the country where Western civilization began facing a world of troubles, not all of its own making.

Horse Girl makes a nice showcase for a writer/actress with range and fearlessness. It’s just that — dread aside — the film feels lightweight and frothy, first scene to last. She’s put her all into a character that keeps us at arm’s length and a movie that’s not serious enough for its subject — mental illness.

Jake Gyllenhaal does tour de force double duty in the intimate thriller Enemy, a cryptic essay on identity. He is terrific in both guises, but he is trapped in a frustrating puzzle without a solution.

This “Wolfboy’s” adventures leave a sweet aftertaste, even if we realize it isn’t exactly a meal, or even a full portion of dessert, when we think about it.

The cold-bloodedness of it all suggests a harder-nosed thriller of the “Hell or High Water” school was what Tost had in mind. But he tries to soften that up with sentiment, and the plot and tone never coalesce around that compromise.

All this amorality is in service of a morality tale, of course, pointing out that politics is more than just a game manipulated by liars and cheats. It’s a blood-port, and hate speech incites hate crimes in this self-righteous, long and meandering allegory.

Brett Haley’s film captures Elliott in all his majesty, his twinkle dimming as he casts his eyes out over the mountains beyond his house or the rocky beach down the hill.

There’s a laid back confidence to the jokes, a flippancy to his chats with corporate types, consultants and nutrition experts, and a down home connection to the interviews (a farmer cries, fast food workers decry their exploitation) with real people trapped in this onerus machine.

The magic in the film is in the actors. Only somebody who has stripped himself emotionally bare for the camera could achieve the level of performance that Goldwyn gets from every single SAG member on this set.

It’s a violent, noisy, slangy and pricey superhero movie that’s for fankids, not fanboys or fangirls or the lactose intolerant. Talk about cheesy.

If you’re allergic to “cute,” stay home. Otherwise, pack your hanky and try to keep your singing along at a level that it won’t drown out what’s coming off the screen. Because what Brewer, Jackman and Hudson cook up here is comfort food at its most comforting.

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

All music documentaries are subjective in that they’re the most engrossing to those the most into the music. But for the right fan, Roher’s lovely leafing through musical history will be touching and at times thrilling.

James Cameron was very much running out of interesting things to say and show in his “Avatar” franchise with the second movie, Avatar: The Way of Water. The third film, Avatar: Fire and Ash confirms that fear and adds on a dose of dread for good measure. On no, the 70something sci-fi impressario has two more “Avatars” in the works.

It’s a gripping and glum account of the ebb and flow of a strike in an era when all the power lies with management, and too much of the media sympathy lies with ownership — stockholders.

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

It’s a modest but immersive film more interested in cryptic characters and plot lines and in period detail — minimal effects, mostly in the third act — and the idea that some sort of rift in reality might be possible, that it could happen, and why not in the Swiss Alps in 1962?

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.

Hedlund has the best lines and makes a great case for future employment in movies of this genre. Affleck is reliably reliable in such roles, Pascal (of TV’s “Narcos”) impresses and Isaac is more prepped for action here than he was in “Operation Finale” or the “Star Wars” movies. Hunnam has the flattest character to play, something that doesn’t help a guy who always comes off as a less interesting, less fun version of Hedlund, even in movies where they don’t co-star.

All things considered, Ray Romano’s Somewhere in Queens is a pretty watchable dramedy despite all the “lows” that hang over it. It’s low-heat and downbeat, with low stakes and low ambition. The situations are low on originality and the jokes are strictly low-hanging fruit.

Speaking of Looney, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how violent this pre-tween farce is. Slapfights, brawls, violent death and near-death experiences abound. Along with butt-sniffing and toilet-sipping (at a party) gags.

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.

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.

The goofy tone is maintained, start to finish. But that finale is the biggest dud among the various clunky set-ups that don’t produce anything funny or scary or romantic.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s most charismatic performance ever anchors Martin Scorsese’s robust and raunchy lowlifes-of-high-finance comedy The Wolf of Wall Street.

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

This “virtual” instead of “real” world, with its toxic environment and compliant, drugged and plugged-in populace, feels insanely topical at times.

Babylon is gorgeous and grotesque, huge, noisy, and unlike anything else we’ve seen or heard on screen this year.

Skincare sets us up for something dark and scintillating, a sinister descent into desperation. But it’s as frustrating as a fresh wedding day zit, and sadly, about as inconsequential.

Co-writers Joe Ballarini and Frank E. Flowers (who also directed) cobble together characters and cliches from many a pirate tale for this ham-fisted affair, which sacrifices fun for fighting and sinks like a stone.

But as useful as it is to chew on ideas that don't hew to climate change dogma, Cool It leaves big questions about Lomborg unanswered.