Roger Moore

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

Mendoza’s pitch, to “get it right” and have “real combat vets” have their story told, might be noble in its intention and the tribute (stay through the credits) to their service the film represents. But he and Garland emphasize authenticity over empathy, accuracy over dramatic connection.

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.

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.

The narrative never strays from the formula/quest that Ha is on. But writer-director Oh isn’t shy about boring us half-to-death as we wait for that inevitable connecting of the dots, resolution of the search and the inevitable brandishing of the “Revolver.”

The music drops are good enough to pass muster, and the peformances mostly transcend the tried and trite story and the frankly pedestrian direction.

Promised Hearts never for an instant lets us lose hope that true love will find a way, which is a universal message every romance hews to. But the film requires too much patience and relies on too many hoary plot devices to have a prayer of coming off, at least in much of the rest of the world.

Harmless nonsense this may be, but if you’re under the impression it does a wildly popular, award-winning “creativity” game justice, you’d have to be right on the demographic money in terms of who the picture is pitched to — 12 years-old.

I like the women’s world this picture creates, with Sue Jean Kim cast as a Columbia U. colleague and Ann Dowd as the sympathetic support-system neighbor. But The Friend is an uneven, not wholly satisfying experience in most ways.

It works, in that arch-action-vehicle-built on-cliches sort of way.

Love the cast, and scattered moments of this play as cutting or funny. The problem is, almost every one of those bits is in the trailer, which plays as a lot more amusing than this drag.

The Life List is as bland as its title, a movie unworthy of comparison to most any “Bucket List” movie you can think of. Well, exxcept for that dramatic climax, the one that comes before the fender-bender of an anti-climax.

Waiting for Dalí gets by on charm, settings and set-ups. It’s a pity more of those set-ups don’t deliver the “twee” the picture promises.

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.

It’s just another sign that this generation of bottom-line-obsessed execs at the House of Mouse has lost the thread. Nobody there seems to “Whistle While You Work,” and the evidence is turning up on screen.

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

Writer-director Blichfeldt’s debut feature is more cringe-worthy than laugh-out-loud funny. She picked obvious targets. But there’s a lot to be said for having the audicity to “go there” and go gory when you’re sending up the ugly open secret that “Beauty is pain,” that it’s a trap and that it’s well past time to stop taking fairy tales with princes and “Sleeping Beauties” at “children’s story” face value.

Sure, Locked is a remake. It doesn’t hold a lot of surprises if you’ve seen the original. Yes, it has “Hollywood” touches. But Hopkins and Skarsgård and Yarovesky deliver, even if they leave out my favorite joke from the original film.

Being Maria is a film that tries and mostly succeeds in immersing us in the experience of the French actress Maria Schneider, cast and almost certainly abused and exploited in a movie that would both make her name, and ruin it, to say nothing of the psychological damage it probably left her with.

Wrestling, the wrestling underworld and the sorts of folks obsessed with it was a promising setting. The premise feels familiar enough to have worked, in some form. Not this one, though. Kids, I want my 93 minutes back.

There’s no subtext to any of this, no commentary on culture, society or politics, government, anti-vax cranks or human failings. And thanks to Viktor Csák and Krisztián Illés, who scripted this, there’s not much of a “text” either.

Aimed at kids who’ll giggle at the adorably retro robots and snicker at the profanity, “Electric State” creates cringes you didn’t know you’d cringe about.

The blunt truth is that there’s very little that’s original or even interesting in this empty rehash of many a recent YA franchise with occasional pauses for song.

Koepp and Soderbergh make this as much about mistrust and fidelity in a marriage as it is about spies-gone-wrong. They keep their film intimate and interrogatory, giving it an old fashioned theatrical feel.

Thrillers live on tension and rising suspense. This one discards suspense too early. And action comedies are, by design, fast and furious. This one, while serving up some serioulsy gory action and splatter film laughs, can’t get out of its own way.

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

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

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.

Like “Cocaine Bear,” Borderline was built with “midnight movie” appeal in mind. And even if it never quite adds up to more than that, it doesn’t disapoint.

The characters are thinly sketched in, even if the leads manage something approaching two dimensional.

The “battle of wits” is pretty one-sided. We end up investing in a slow-moving, low-heat thriller that never really comes to a boil.

If the movies are going to talk about labor, human rights, cruel “leaders” and love in the world Gen Z is growing up in, the raw deal facing Mickeys 1-17 is a good place to do it.

A tale that touches and tickles and exposes us to the trials of other lives in a very different part of the world, it’ll make you glad you showed up to read the subtitles.

The shootouts are first-rate, in that “bad guys mostly miss, good guys never do” way.

Riff Raff lives down to its title, a trashy movie with a gilded cast — a cast a tad tarnished thanks to the addition of this to their resumes.

The sex and romance elements are more abrupt, perfunctory and charmless in this take. But they go for the same upbeat, heartwarming feel in the finale, which plays about the same.

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

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

Perhaps only an Iraq War combat vet would dare to tackle Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with the sort of sarcasm and gallows humor of My Dead Friend Zoe.

It’s pretty enough and just engaging enough to suggest it might just become a series pilot.

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

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

The animation is lovely, if perhaps a tad Pixar 2.0 in texture, color palette, complexity and “realism.”

Everyone is Going to Die is a generic home invasion thriller that clumsily struggles with the #MeToo “message” grafted onto it.

Hard Truths is reminder that filmmaker/artists/observers of his stripe are once-in-a-generation, one-per-culture talents.

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.

The world Sakamoto brings back to life . . . is as vivid as any saga of samurai, shoguns, ronin and clans.

Broome (of TV’s “The Buccaneers”) carries himself like a convincing insolent rich lout. And the car chases and brawls pass muster, even if the plot turns too-predictable-to-tolerate early on.

Director Scott Derrickson ensures the action beats are solid enough, that the production design is CGI-assisted gloomy and that the stars looked good in whatever light, fight choreography or romantic interlude they were placed.

There isn’t a laugh or light moment in this unwieldy beast of a movie. As a political allegory, it doesn’t play. As Marvel action pic, it’s sorely lacking. At least they spared no expense in the cherry blossoms dept.

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

Make no mistake, “Soundtrack” is a real work of art, an historic film painted with extant footage, a fresh interview or two, sound from many sources and thoughts, facts and opinions from a wide range of people with a stake in not just events back then, but the urgent need to have those facts preserved and honestly served up to those of us trapped in the present.

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

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.

Writer-director Wang isn’t splitting the atom or reinventing the wheel here, and the film’s variations from the tropes for this genre aren’t unique or all that revelatory. But “Didi” makes a most relatable tour guide in helping us remember what running straight into a wall as you hit your teens was like.

Succubus, a supernatural thriller re-titled “The Demoness” for video distribution, is a show reel of nudity and horror sex, of looped, disembodied voices reading lines from a “doesn’t really understand English” translation of a screenplay that was already bad at plot, suspense, action, character and dialogue.

Torres is so subtle at portraying a mother unable to show panic or righteous rage that when Eunice finally does let her guard down it’s almost shocking. It’s a great performance.

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.

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

The final verdict on Kinda Pregnant is kind of tired and kind of played, with a star who needs to find some new shtick if she’s to have another cultural moment all her own.

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.

This one lands punches but rarely laughs, reaches for pathos where there is none and relies heavily on the sentiment that earned Quan an Oscar.

Bogota: City of the Lost is an underworld “how criminals crime” procedural with an exotic setting and fish-out-of-water characters but no pace or narrative drive worthy of its novelty.

The performances are semi-serious, at best, and longtime producer turned director/co-writer Steve Barnett’s first feature directing job staggers right up to the DMZ between awful and “OK, at least that’s over with.”

The picture, which is earning dismissive reviews in some quarters, wouldn’t work without the oddball, mismatched chemistry between Witherspoon and Ferrell, who are a walking sight gag when they’re in the same shot.

Such movies thrive on the hope they present and the big moments when that hope is either proven or sadly dashed by the finale. And this “Lucca’s World” delivers.

The images can be lovely, but the cryptic clues in the story fail to surprise when they arrive or move when they’re “explained.”

Signing on an impressive cast, writer-director Drew Hancock takes a big, roundhouse swing at “coupling” in a distracted, instant gratification craving, uncompromising and not-entirely-adult era, and at sending up a rom-com convention or two. But the best he manages is a slow roller to shortstop with this icy, rarely amusing and gory dark comedy.

An adoring portrait of a Star at 80.

Every Little Thing is a documentary as delicate and magical as its subjects.

Stewart and Yeun (“Minari,” “Nope”) do their best to animate their flesh-and-blood scenes with confusion, curiosity and attraction. But they don’t have enough screen time to make this learn-how-to-love experiment come off.

Dreyfuss lends a little sparkle to what is otherwise a dully predicatable affair. Even the performances pitched to be appropriate reactions to shark terror, losing loved ones or friends, feel low energy.

Beezel won’t surprise anyone who has seen more that three or four horror films. But it’s far from awful, with decent performances, makeup, effects and “shock me, baby” editing.

There’s paranoia and airborne suspense, tension and personal, in-your-face violence. But it’s glib as all get out, dumb when it isn’t being glib and not nearly as much fun as Gibson seems to think he’s made it out to be.

Its blend of mystery, suspense, chills and pathos are perfectly pitched. Presence is simply sublime.

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

It’s a low-stakes, dramatically flat affair, a picture that never plucks the heartstrings it’s meant to.

For all the seriousness of the subtexts Three Birthdays feels shallow, lightweight and less serious than it should, with a cast “acting as” rather than inhabiting characters from that strangest setting of all — the distant-enough but not-terribly-distant past.

Co-writers/directors Fabrizio Laurenti and Niccolò Vivarelli (one of Vivarelli’s sons) make a half-decent case that Vivarelli is worth knowing about beyond the borders of his homeland.

God help me, I laughed a few times. And God bless Foxx for luring Cameron Diaz back on screen, and for his recovery. They’re damned cute together, even if their movie isn’t all that in concept, writing and any scene that involves “inaction.”

You’d be hard-pressed to think of a motion picture parable that more perfectly fits its moment and the mood of the country and the world it premiered into. Corbet has tapped into the zeitgeist as well as The American Myth and made a movie that makes you wince because he, like László Tóth, refused to sentimentalize it or avert his eyes from the ugliness.

Nickel Boys is American history, Southern history and Florida history uncovered and exposed, and a cautionary lesson to a culture backsliding into the comfort of more and more lies and delusions, all served up in one of the most artful films of 2024.

Try not to guess all that happens, because rare RARE mild jolts aside, this picture’s as clockwork as my Citizen watch.

I’m a longtime Palmer fan, and she’s almost never been this dull. She and SZA needed an edgier script to sparkle.

It’s all perfectly high-minded and polished, but all of this could have been treated with more spark than comes across here.

All Butler, director Tony Olmos and the rest of the cast and crew were shooting for is a cultish comedy with a few laughs, undercooked politics and undigested zombie victims. There’s no arc to the story and little that you’d call funny or ambitious or politically pointed.

Ad Vitam is competently shot and cut and works well enough for long enough stretches to recommend. But equally long stretches of training and graduation and karaoke celebrating kill its momentum.

After the first blush of how cute this conceit is . . . Better Man becomes a simple catalog of pop stardom clichés.

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

There’s just too much that hobbles this horse opera to let it gracefully unfold and canter off into the snowy sunset.

The heists are derivative, un-rehearsed and unexciting, with curious gadgetry and half-assed problem solving.

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

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

The acting is wildly uneven here, with some players either amatuerish or uncomfortable enough acting in English as to stand apart from the rest.

It’s an indie film that reminds us there’s talent out there that mainstream distributors haven’t embraced — in front of and behind the camera. And fittingly enough for the subject generation, “Meltdown” feels self-satisfied but incomplete, with a finale that plays like a pulled-punch.

Throwing somebody with one “particular skill” that doesn’t include violence, criminal or espionage subterfuge or the like? As an exercise in screenwriting problem-solving that’s almost always a fun film to watch.

As amusing as Wallace’s sputtered reactions to their predicaments always are, as cute as the work song the singing gnomes compose might be — “We break out little backs, and never stop to have a brew ’cause we’ve got battery packs!” — it’s the parade of sight gags that sell these clay-animated comic jewels.

Story matters, and this one didn’t need to be told.