Roger Moore

A summer movie that staggers down that fine line between sentimental and snarky, a tale of nature and nurture and first love that manages to charm more than any R-rated movie about horny teens has a right to.

It sounds like an R-rated comedy, but plays like a Disney Channel one littered with profanity, pot and bloodless life lessons about getting older, being a parent and losing yourself. Rarely has an 82 minute comedy felt more like a complete waste of one’s time.

Sadly, you can make the case that this is one of the better “bedtime story” versions of this tale, as it’s perfunctory enough to be sleep-inducing.

So many “lose my virginity over the summer” comedies, from “American Pie” to “Superbad,” “Can’t Hardly Wait” to “Girl Next Door.” But aside from the hilarious “Twilight Saga,” how many have told that torrid tale from the girl’s point of view? The To Do List is a summer romantic comedy dedicated to rectifying that imbalance in a single stroke.

Even though this “ending” is a lot less surprising than it must have been on the pages of Julian Barnes’ novel, Broadbent humanizes the mystery and makes us care long past the point where we’ve solved it.

The trip is amusing enough, the doggy excesses funny and the climax, pre-ordained by their destination, will punch you right in the heart — not hard, just enough to deploy that hanky.

Rogue Agent presents some things that truly stretch credulity as simple facts, leaving the viewer to slap our head in wonder because, damned if this story isn’t “true.” You can look it up, although that’s not recommended until after you’ve seen it. Because as this clever script winds its way towards a finale that’s not really a conclusion, you’d be cheating yourself of the fun of the mystery-thriller you’re watching, and the one you’re frantically writing in your head as possibility after possibility pops up, is wrestled with and discarded to make way for the next.

Despite the f-bombs, the egomania and a montage of Troyal shooting a beer commercial and having a hissy fit as he does, too little here rises to the level of “satire” or even “amusing.”

By the time the interminable finale reaches, over-reaches and gracelessly makes its exit, we’ve lost track of anything we found sweet, funny, charming or touching that came before it.

It's all quite lovely, mesmerizing – and right on the edge of sleep-inducing.

The lack of surprises, the contrived nature of the conflicts that turn into love connections and the cumbersome voiced-over-to-death technique and the abandonment of the whole “tearsmith” metaphor render this potential teen tearjerker nothing to cry over.

The dancing is well-executed and staged, and the club scenes are fun. The banter may be forced and the formula the film follows exhausted. But quibbling with Magic Mike XXL is like griping about the latest turns in the “Step Up” saga. Nobody will hear you over the girlish squeals of delight from the paying customers.

There’s a perfunctory quality to the situations and performances, the dialogue and the “terror,” cribbed from scores of “kids killed at camp” thrillers.

The Peasants is an engaging way of taking us back to a simpler time when the people are just as petty, inconsiderate and greedy as people have always been and always will be.

A muddled mystery-thriller that’s something of a wash, one that director-turned-actor David Cronenberg all but steals.

Both Black Phones are derivative . . . But the derivations Derrickson went for in the sequel are simply not as arresting or interesting.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is an absolute must-see for Gilliam fans and “film that never was” buffs. It’s a picture that crossed into legend long before it was actually, fully and completely in the can.

The Wretched is a polished reasonably tight tale of a witch infestation coming to rural, lakeside Michigan, and the teenage boy who screams “Why won’t anybody BELIEVE me?”

There’s nothing wrong with weaving a story the viewer can’t unravel as its playing out. But John and the Hole doesn’t have enough of a story to maintain any narrative drive and doesn’t point towards answers or give the viewer any hope of resolution or release.

The actor/director and his co-stars more than do justice to this fascinating moment in Cold War history and one of ballet’s transformative figures.

A system that’s been rigged for the super rich to do what they want, the will of the people be damned, is not fit for light comedy.

A make-work project for generations of Hollywood women and female fashion celebrities, it is pristine in its visuals — mainly closeups of the Oscar winners and other great beauties of its cast precise in its caper — and utterly bloodless in execution.

A vintage Hill bit with a horse coming through glass doors and a couple of decent exchanges in an overall perfunctory big shootout finale arrive just in time to remind of us how great this filmmaker once was, and how sad it is that he has to hang up his spurs with Dead for a Dollar.

Stately as it is, Respect never quite becomes a “great film,” but Hudson, Whitaker, McDonald, Burgess and Maron ensure it’s never less than an entertaining one, a musical biography that gives the Queen of Soul her royal due.

The charm has aged right out of this silly stoner franchise.

Try as she might, Collyer cannot help but judge these people, a not-quite-fatal flaw in a movie about the down and out.

A well-acted tale of an underdog's triumph that sorely lacks an underdog, it teeters between pleasantly generic film biography and rank manipulation.

What he’s doing, it turns out, is lowering the viewer’s standards of proof for a vigorous return to “2016″ territory, a hatchet job on Obama and Obamacare that tries to tie everything to a 1960s “radical” organizer who might have influenced the president.

I still don’t see why this not-that-fantastical fantasy needed to be animated, and no, “just because it’s a manga” is not reason enough. It’s nobody’s idea of a deep dive into making movies, and not even a particularly entertaining take on the subject.

Yes, there are surprises and a scene crackles, here and there. But the tony haute cuisine milieu can fool you into thinking that there’s more to this than the chic, perfectly-presented appetizer this is.

Bad movies are rarely as much fun as these “Fast and the Furious” pictures. And make no mistake about it — they’re bad.

Funnier than the last Muppets movie, with far better songs (by Bret McKenzie), punnier puns and all manner of geo-political gags, cultural wisecracks and star cameos.

The animation’s good, lovely but not dazzling.

The fact that Lopez is a good actress underneath the “image” (and vanity) makes us believe her, even when we know better.

It’s been a minute or decade or three since we’ve seen urban homelessness put on display with this level of detail in this blend of pathos and judgement.

Abominable isn’t a bad film, and the Chinese violin renders some moments quite touching. But it is dull and some of that comes from the similar animated films that beat it to market over the past year.

German director Sherry Hormann, working from a script based on an infamous 2005 case, summons up outrage, heartache, worry and judgement in 90 tight and damning minutes.

Linden, while hard-pressed to take this anywhere we don’t see from a mile off, manages several tense moments and scenes with real suspense, before delivering a finale that’s a grim, teeth-gritting corker.

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.”

This cut-and-paste cliche collection could have been written by a machine.

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

The film’s great gift to this piece of much-filmed history is demythologizing Jackson, a figure the script and Shannon portray as well-intentioned, hard-nosed and out of his depth in attempting to try charismatic sociopaths that most of the world would rather had been rounded up and shot.

The picture never has much comic edge, and goes soft altogether in the later acts.

One can appreciate all that is accomplished with the bare minimum of visual variety and external clues, threats or assistance and still find this thiller wanting. At the end of the day, you’ve got to deliver some payoff worthy of the paranoia and suspense everybody is talking themselves into.

Mechanical/CGI shark attack simulations have improved over the decades, and are as terrifying as ever. But the longer this brief “inspired by true events” tale goes on, the more tropes and far-fetched cliches Roach-Turner trots out.

There’s nothing deep in this script, and the delayed romance, between real-life lovers Roberts and Evan Peters (of “American Horror Story”) sets off no sparks. The characters are sort of a grab bag of “types.”

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

Since the movie’s street side dream doesn’t add much more than a gimmicky “interpretation” of their sound, you’re left with a deafening dirge –well-played, but really, no improvement on your basic concert film.

For all its plot trickery, mind science and relationship square dancing, Trance doesn’t have the emotional tug or technical pizzaz of Boyle’s best films – “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Trainspotting” or “127 Hours.”

The obscurant strain of it all shows. Most of what’s here would be filler in a better film, or bullet point scenes in a story more wholly-shaped and worked out.

The street life is vividly captured, and the dialogue — in English, Igbo and Yoruba (with English subtitles) — is sharp and expository.

You have to be in the mood for it, but The Place of No Words is a touching, sweet and intimate fantasy unlike most any film you’ve seen, save for its much more expensive and less moving antecedent, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

The players, the stakes and the milieu make Tetris well worth your time, especially for anyone nostalgic for all the time we wasted on this simple yet elementally addicting game.

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

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.

There’s not enough that’s new to merit raising this corner of hell all over again.

I’ve always appreciated the humor in these films, but by the time things go wholly over the top for the finale this time, the joking has run its course.

Beneath all the melodrama, beyond the fine performances, what sets At Any Price apart is the depiction of farming as it is today, the salesmanship, the traditions and ideals abandoned for greater profits and easier work and the ruthless world these patented “high yield” seeds have made.

Appreciate Elysium for what it is, sci-fi that’s smarter, more topical and more invigorating than most of what passes through that genre these days, and another sign that its director is the most promising chap to enter the field since the inception of Christopher Nolan.

Isn’t scary and isn’t worth the nearly two hours it eats up.

This Wolverine gets our hopes up, and falls short.

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.

At two hours and 15 minutes, the new Karate Kid takes an absurd amount of time to get to that “big match.”

Keoghan — as innocent or cunning, oaf or graceful dancer-in-the-near-dark, will leave you amazed at this performance and startled at just what he was willing to do to fit in in “Saltburn” — the great house or the not-quite-great movie.

It takes guts to take on the mob in a place where its been tolerated for centuries. And sometimes the bravest of those in that fight aren’t in uniform. Some of them are still carrying a Pentax.

There are a few scattered laughs.

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.

We’re reminded not just of sacrifice, but of those to whom service is a genuine calling and what that bandied-about word “hero” really means.

Past Life is best appreciated as an attempt to finally give permission, at the source of the grievance (Israel), not to forget, but to at least forgive.

The delightful “Footnotes” is grounded in reality, light on its feet, with just enough intrigues, betrayals and twists to fill 80 brisk minutes with minor delights.

As February comic book movies go, this works well enough to make you glad they didn’t cook up another “Ghost Rider.”

Barthes has given us an immaculate, vividly-believable future to be dreaded and avoided. But she’s put it in a movie so unemotional that we can’t invest ourselves in taking a stand to prevent it, even if the script ordains that the under-motivated Rachel and Alvy do.

Fans will eat this up and probably forget it — save for the odd body blowing up — before the next comic book movie comes along. But Birds of Prey is all empowered with no idea what to do with that power, nothing of consequence, anyway.

As midnight movies go, it’s not (more than) half bad. Round up some friends for a midnight movie date, designate a driver and…enjoy.

But even as Hart grows richer, more remote and seemingly less relate-able, there’s still manic hilarity in the little man. He’s still fearlessly fearful, defiantly shallow and amusingly self-effacing on stage.

Saturday Night won’t be to every generation’s taste. The look-alike cast is generally good, if hardly substitutes for “the real thing” in some cases. But if you were “there,” or at least caught the show in those birthing years, it’s a lot of fun, with or without the stimulants.

It’s a romance novel, a romantic fable, brought to life by a pretty good cast that cannot make it more than is, that cannot give it more meaning and make it less frustrating than novelist M.L. Stedman intended.

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.

It’s “A Christmas Carol” riff for those who already know the story, and entirely too on-the-nose for its own good.

The Grab is more informative than polemical, and plays as a dry — sometimes suspenseful, often fact-packed — treatment of the subject.

Maybe it’s not as revealing as its teasing title suggests, but Tab Hunter Confidential makes a splendid history lesson and light, fun portrait of what you can only call a blessed life, one lived with a big, open secret that only old age convinced him he should let out.

The fact that “Lost City” still plays, still delivers plenty of cute and sometimes bawdy laughs amidst all the homages, tributes to and “borrowings” from better films is a tribute to its stars and its one great conceit — that it’s taking on a jokey, derivative genre, and everybody in it is in on that joke.

This mismatched "couple" - have made, over the course of three long subtitled Swedish thrillers, the most dynamic duo of recent cinema history.

This is just a “big game” formula sports movie that aims low and still comes up short.

Spectre, set up to be the Daniel Craig finale as Bond, isn’t a terrible installment in the franchise. It’s the lightest of the Craig Bonds — no sin in that. But like the end of Connery, the exit of Roger Moore and the layoff notice given Pierce Brosnan, it’s a tired, trite “greatest hits” re-packaging of stunts, chases and fights from earlier, better Bonds.

It’s nicely-detailed, with decent effects, moderate suspense and a distinctly Korean approach to how this sort of calamity might go down in an Asian country where saving face, keeping “order” and maintaining authority play havoc with the public safety.

There’s no sense being modest at this phase in his Oscar-winning/Oscar producing career, but even as he’s feted, from Montreux to Stockholm, New York to Washington, there’s a refreshing lack of pretense to the sharp-dressed octogenarian at the center of all this fuss.

Millie Lies Low is a next-level cringe-comedy from Kiwi Country, a New Zealand goof on the Deep Fake lives the savvy among us can live on social media when our real lives are coming off the rails.

The script, by Feig and veteran “Madtv/The Heat” writer Kate Dippold, allows room for a sea of cameos with precious little that’s funny for any of the stars, or the “guest stars” to say.

This isn’t one of the best movies of this genre. But when at its best, it takes Marvel places it’s been entirely too timid to go before, and I’m NOT talking about this endlessly flogged “multiverse” business.

The script isn’t much and the direction — save for a spirited high school bake sale food fight — is lackluster.

The unfailing sweetness of Paul Rudd's lead performance makes what could have been another raunchy and rude R-rated farce a bracing change of pace in a summer of aggressive comedies about aggressive people, from "Bad Teachers" to "Horrible Bosses."

It’s not that the performances are incompetent. The script is alarmingly tone-deaf.

Anora lacks the raw emotion, street energy and urgency of Baker’s transgender romp “Tangerine” — and the pathos of his acclaimed peek at childhood homelessness in the “paradise” of “The Florida Project.”

Oh, it’s not as clever as it thinks it is. And truthfully, for a “romp” it only occasionally romps. But See How They Run is still a warm, witty and winning old fashioned “whodunit” and an equally old-fashioned “theater” comedy, pronounced “THEE-a-turr” in the British style. I found it an old fashioned hoot.

Renner’s performance — beginning with bluster and descending into twitchy paranoia — sells it and makes us fret for every “messenger” suddenly the target of the spotlight himself.

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.

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

“Scandalous” is a journalism expose that lives up, or down, to its hype.

The acting is as immaculate as the digitally-augmented settings.

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

I won’t say it’s excruciating, but viewers of every age will be keenly aware of the passage of time and this colossal waste of it.

Some of us can see what’s coming, which isn’t a deal-breaker as far as making Glorious watchable. What’s required here is that the characters keep us engaged until the payoff or twist or grim or happy resolution. What would be nice is if we feel something/anything for any given character.

The big and small screens have been awash in military features and documentaries since 9/11, and there’s not a lot to The Kill Team that qualifies as new or surprising. But a decent level of suspense and the genuine dread Skarsgård casts, like a shadow, inform it and make it stand out in a genre that may not outlive America’s endless military involvement in that corner of the world.

With each rewind, the picture locks-up and we disconnect with what’s going on, and more importantly, with the characters. Which renders the minimalist promise of The Perfection a promise largely unfulfilled.

Trumbo is a warm and witty profile in courage.

The “origin story” that is the film’s chief appeal takes a back seat to “series pilot” requirements. The film’s biggest asset becomes a handicap. “Saints” never feels thorough, thought-through or complete.

No, it’s not deep. But the film, a sung-through (virtually no dialogue) musical by Jason Robert Brown, is sweet and sunny and occasionally funny.

It’s a World War II thriller so out of date the only words to describe it are also obsolete — Potboiler and Cornball.

An engrossing, marvelously-acted account of the monarchical cousins that suggests their real enemy wasn’t each other — it was the grasping, pushy and ambitious men who surrounded each in her own court.

The settings are pristine, and feel about as real and lived in as “The Polar Express.” The performances have a stiffness that borders on motion-capture animation. Director Robert Zemeckis brings us a “Casablanca” without a scrap of heart, an “English Patient” with all of the splendor, and none of the heat.

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

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

And then that ending shows up, and all the talking, over-the-topping and slow-walked butchery washes away whatever good will, or grudging acceptance this “requel” almost achieves.

Impressive as it looks, it’s emotionally lacking, humorless and kind of dull.

One pitfall of building your movie out of recycled materials is always going to be pacing. When every character is cardboard, every scene is preordained, you have to get more pop out of the performances and move this damned thing along.

Every time you think “torture porn” is dead and gone, here comes another blood-and-bludgeoning tale to try and revive it.

A wildly uneven one-joke farce, sometimes amusing in that “Oh no they DIDN’T,” way, dispiriting in many others, it’s one of those “If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the laughs” late-summer arrivals.

The David Loughery script — he wrote Ealy’s “The Intruder” — wins points for attempted twists, but frankly they don’t build suspense or deliver shocks, so what’s the point?

The upshot of all this, two hours and 24 minutes of vintage car chases, fire escape chases, punch-outs and puzzling over clues? “It’s NOT ‘Chinatown,’ Jake.”

Buried in a “fat suit,” his physical acting limited to the life of immobility Charlie has sentenced himself to, Fraser will break your heart playing the character’s pain and compassion.

So even though this isn’t the greatest of “Expectations” — David Lean’s black and white version in the ’40s will your heart — it’s still a pretty grand one.

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

The entertainment value in a straight-up genre picture like this is how fraught each new corner of peril that they turn manages to be. And there’s plenty of that. And damned if Aja and his cast find some actual emotion in all this, too.

It’s one of those limited-release films that few will see, with acting so compact and contained that everyone who loves great screen performances should. Weisz, Firth and Thewlis give us understated, unfussy performances that lift The Mercy, a wonderfully tragic story with a hint of magnificence about it.

The film’s political focus seems a tad narrow, but the evidence that this tour — however it came to be — did them no favors and didn’t do Nixon any more service than his association with “Up With People” is convincing.

Loser has flashes of empathy and a high mindedness about literature and philosophy and book learning in general. It’s just that it’s light on “heart,” and has a touch of what the Bard labeled “lackwit” in its banter and the ways its few funny lines are played.

McFarland is old-fashioned without being dull, pandering without feeling cloying or racist.

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

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

Wang seems to have sincerely set out to make a cautionary tale, “inspired by true events,” with a dedication in the opening suggesting she knew a victim of MDMA. But what she’s releasing is straight-up exploitation, and a film too cautious to work on that level, too torrid to play the “Stay off drugs!” card.

Uplifting in the right spots, touching near the end, cute and yet cloying, maudlin and manipulative everywhere else, it punches a lot of familiar buttons when it comes to faith-based films for the holidays.

Nowhere Inn never quite crawls out from under the David Byrne influence as a movie or a film conceit. It’s more droll than funny, and only novel in the sense that she’s mocking the conventions of such movies and they’re beyond mockery at this point.

It’s never less than watchable, but I can’t say it’s particularly memorable (save for that soundtrack). Perfectly Netfixable adventure in a minor key.

The conclusion has a rough logic to its consequences, but seems arrived at abruptly. Big emotions we expect never quite arrive after that first “machining.”

The whole affair feels like a desperate, big-budget response to last year’s far superior and non-Disney “Goodbye, Christopher Robin.”

The often dry script, funereal pacing and generic spectacle of the digitally-augmented set-pieces makes for a movie that’s like “Captain Marvel,” only about half as much fun.

Off the wall? Friend, you don’t know off the wall until you’ve seen five twelve-year-old girl singer-dancers cover the Tina Turner/Phil Spector epic “River Deep, Mountain High” in the screwball kiddie dance comedy, Standing Ovation.

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

The American Meme traces this democratized/Americanized form of “celebrity” back to its origins and profiles some of the web’s more notorious creations in a generally entertaining and somewhat illuminating account of recent history.

As homeless road pictures go, this is more “Peanut Butter Falcon” than “Leave No Trace.” Dad’s not in the picture long, but there’s a “Captain Fantastic” element to the portrayal.

Give it up for Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. You’ll never see them work harder at a comedy than in The Heat, a stumbling, aggressively loud and profane cop buddy picture where they struggle to wring “funny” out of a script that isn’t.

Ponderously telling some parts of its sketch-of-a-story from multiple points of view, it’s an excruciating exercise in self-indulgence, packed with flashbacks and those big speeches/big scenes that draw names like Oscar winner Jeff Bridges, Dakota Johnson and Jon Hamm to its cast. It adds up to nothing more than two hours and 21 minutes of tedium, with the odd spasm of violence, back-story or musical interlude.

Like those '70s movies it borrows from, there's a blast of tongue-in-cheek politics built around a "They messed with the WRONG Mexican" message. No, this may not go over in Arizona.

It’s a grand looking production and a well-cast, well-acted and high-minded film. But Hytner and Bennett have conjured up a Big Show and an Important Statement, and so cluttered the narrative that they lose track of which statements they’re serious about making.

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

It’s a formulaic dramedy with a little pathos, some wit, some unusual-in-real-life-but-not so-much-in-rom-coms situations.

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.

Deneuve suggests the self-absorption of the beautiful, coping with the petty insults of age, making Bettie a bundle of nerves wrestling with a complicated past and an increasingly frazzled present. See it for her performance, and a lovely slice of French scenery.

The bar for this version of “J-Horror” is high (“The Vigil,” “The Possession”), but not so high that The Offering couldn’t have managed something fresh and more interesting and at least more sensible than this.

Miller’s film, based on an A.S. Byatt short story, is long and feels incomplete, weighty without much psychological or intellectual heft, colorful but rarely dazzling and never whimsical enough.

This one is too interesting, funny and aggressively/transgressively sexy — if there even is such a thing these days — to pass by.

It’s a pleasant kid-friendly diversion on a par with Pearl’s “Abominable."

Looming large above this “Long Walk” is Elba, in a mostly still performance, one of quietly compelling authority that dominates every moment.

The whole affair has a whiff of “Going through the motions” to it, as the self-butchery and slaughter visited upon “guilty” victims is handled without suspsense or pathos. One pitiless, perfunctory murder follows the next with a sort of shrug.

It’s a first rate thriller, more cerebral than Tom-Cruise-does-his-own-stunts, and all the more engaging for it.

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

Pretty much the perfect scary movie for kids.

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

Beatty, who plays Hughes in the picture, tries to give us a movie as wildly eccentric and asymmetrical as the man himself. He’s concocted a random romantic farce that isn’t romantic or particularly farcical. But random? Yeah.

Maineland is informative in the most basic ways. But the big hole in Wang’s film is in failing to capture the disconnect, the true culture shock of children of neon bedecked skyscrapers, mansions and coddling parents packed off to the backwoods of Maine. And the second biggest hole is missing the frison that must have been experienced by both sides in this exchange.

Its predictability doesn’t break Between Two Worlds, but it does soften the blows it intends to deliver.

Williams, playing a young woman fighting her fears even as the hint of recognition of what she’s dealing with keeps her from flipping out entirely, makes us believe Val’s peril and believe in her ability to fight it.

Poehler and Rudd riff and banter like old marrieds, and make even the cheesiest lines funny, make even the cliched dating montages set to syrupy pop music feel — if not fresh and new — at least funny enough to mock.

To the Stars may be a mixed bag of over-familiar obstacles and dated themes. But this period-perfect piece and a solid cast take us back to an uglier time, just as we were about to forget it.

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.

Wilson, letting the strain show the way a hundred other funny folks expected to “save” a flimsy comedy built around them have before her, has never seemed more out of her depth.

An often moving and always disturbing film. Little is explained, motivations aren't explored. We miss them, at times. It's still a film of power, wit and thought-provoking ideas, one well worth seeing.

It’s all harmless, if almost charmless, rendered in different shades of “bland."

The dialogue is hard-bitten and Mamet-sharp.

The script wastes far too much time on the whole “You don’t take me seriously, so I shan’t take YOU seriously!”

It’s a mood piece, and the element that ensures that it comes off is Matz Müller’s brittle, unsettling soundtrack. The characters may debate the morality of their behavior in dialogue, but it is the soundtrack that matches their actions — violent, reckless and disharmonious to the end.

The film, starring Ashton Sanders (“Moonlight”) as a rapper wannabe, hustler/mob-soldier in training, doesn’t show us much that we haven’t seen before. Maybe a little more back-story, a few extra pieces in the “motivation/how we got here” puzzle, all set to a sing-along gangsta rap (mostly) soundtrack. It’s depressingly over-familiar, or at least generic.

Breathless, ticking-clock pacing would have stripped the narrative of the many pauses where we’re allowed to think “Oh come ON” before the next stock character makes a bow, the next blow lands or next crooked angle presents itself.

But through all the excess, the schmaltz, the digitally-augmented fights and the practically all-digital car chases and stunts, the marvelous cast keep “Hobbs & Shaw” from totally stalling out. Call it a bad movie you can’t help but laugh at, and with, and get the extra large popcorn. You’re going to need it.

My Blind Brother takes things in some very predictable directions, and Goodhart was too goodhearted to let Scott go full-bore jerk as Robbie.

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

Bernthal’s resolute, fearsome and touching performance make this Pilgrimage well worth the journey.

The best faith-based film ever made, an uplifting, entertaining and wonderfully-acted account of surfer Bethany Hamilton's life before and after a shark bit her arm off in the waters off her favorite Hawaiian beach.

Evans is convincingly rugged, convincingly smart and convincingly wearied from the weight of deciding this child’s future.

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

A delight, a jokey-smart cartoon that enlightens and teaches even as it entertains. Because we need to learn that sometimes there really are monsters “out there,” and sometimes, the monsters are us.

Scott looked at all the sordid, unscrupulous and deadly goings-on that ended the Gucci family's days of running the ‘House of Gucci’ and saw a cartoon. Watching his take on a fashion empire's downfall...you can sometimes see his point.

However much you know about these people and this subject, Sorkin shines a light in dark or unjustly-ignored corners of their epic story. And he makes obvious the strain and burden of “Being the Ricardos” into a film that’s witty and bittersweet.

An over-reach for a “Hangover” styled spin on motherhood, with drugs, sex, booze and “experiment,” it reaches raucous on occasion. There are laughs, a disproportionate number of them coming from the trained comic in the cast, Kathryn Hahn.

The many songs are mostly forgettable deep tracks from the Abba repertoire, as the first film burned through most of the hits.

Life of Crime is lesser-Leonard, an all-star kidnapping comedy that manages to “Be Cool” even if the filmmaker never quite finds the grim faced grins that the best Elmore noirs boast.

Smart? Writer-director Alexis Jacknow’s debut feature borders on brilliant.

The violent payoffs are well-staged and edited, and the archetypes solid. But McGowan can’t force herself or her cast to just get on with what they know they must get on with. The “Creek” never quite dries up, but we never get to the rapids either.

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

Lean and relentless, patient and pitiless, “Killing Ground” is the sort of thriller that gives horror movies a good name.

One of the best pictures of the year and the best movie of the summer.

Such movies are manipulative by nature and we embrace them for that. Here, that’s more obvious and heavy-handed, and the manipulation tends to spare us tears — and laughs — when the tears are entirely the point.

It’s a meditative movie, as one underscored with Beethoven’s solo piano pieces “Moonlight Sonata” and “Für Elise” would have to be. Brodsky isn’t the first to get across what it feels like to experience the world without hearing it, so she doesn’t dwell on that, even if it is her central thesis.

The Humbling should have been more brisk, should have been cut, and should have had more of the Pacino who finishes this thing off with a flourish. The soul searching and sense of a life misspent are interesting. But there’s an awful lot of hooey before we get to the “Hoo hah.”

This tight, tense and oh-so-logical home invasion tale brings “Wait Until Dark” into the cell phone era, with suspense that rivals the equally simple “Don’t Breathe.”

It’s not “Blow” or “American Gangster” or “American Made” even, not on that level of sobering (if sometimes comical) morality tale. But White Boy Rick still makes for a blunt reminder of just how low we all sank during the “Just say no” ’80s, when the only people punished for not saying “No” were cajoled into saying “Yes,” and faced “Black Time” for doing it.

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

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.

It never adds up to anything more than the mood Demeestere manages to translate from Franco’s fiction. Which makes Yosemite a “film festival movie,” nothing more than a promising idea or two and an interesting tone to recommend it.

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

Mom and Dad is a reminder of how much gonzo fun a B-movie can be, how hilarious “Crank” was and what a hoot Nicolas Cage — who makes almost entirely B, C and D movies these days — is when he’s uncaged and unhinged.

Unbroken stumbles into most every movie of the genre in ways that suggest she (Jolie) hasn’t figured out how these things work. Suspense and pathos evade her as she turns an admittedly unwieldy biography into a dull, perfunctory and truncated film.

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

This culture-clash/mother bonding story was never going to be “Frozen River,” but you do sense that a lot of potential was squandered in denying these mothers big moments of mourning, bigger confrontations with the fathers of their sons.

The performances are engrossing — especially Harrisson as the short-tempered African Muslim. But veteran director Alexandre Arcady (“Last Summer in Tangiers,” “Hold Up”) seems more concerned with the message and moral lesson here than with suspense.

None of it adds up to much of a movie. Italian Studies is more an experimental collection of filmed conversations, filmed docu-drama style, interspersed with clips of a gorgeous blonde wandering New York. But because it stars Vanessa Kirby…

An amusing, well-acted and sharply-timed holiday comedy, old friends getting together to prove that careers, families and kids aside, they’ve still got their R-rated edge, just as they did in college.

I think most of us inclined to go see it will be doing all its heavy lifting for it, as what’s here feels slight, incomplete and not nearly as funny, cute and deep as these folks seem to believe.

It’s a zombie comedy, so the laughs come in mostly very familiar places.

A winning "Robin Hood and his Merry Doormen" comedy about getting even. A cast of comedy specialists each deliver their comic specialties to perfection, delivering double-takes and one liners so well that you don't notice how clunky the actual caper in this caper comedy is.

That makes Sarah's Key that rare Holocaust tale that punches through the cobwebs of history and its dry, inhuman statistics, and brings that terrible past to life.

It’s the best film of this trilogy, but truthfully, none of the “Hobbit” thirds have been any better than middling “Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter” installments. Considering the vaunted reputation J.R.R.Tolkien enjoys, this overdone “There and Back Again” never quite got us there.

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.

It’s not much of a “Movie,” but the bottom line is that Galifianakis, the interviews and those being subjected to them are still funny. Enjoy a beverage while watching and you’ll be doing your own spit takes.

As funereal as it all can feel, All is True manages the wistfulness that must have been Branagh’s design, the director of “Thor” and “Murder on the Orient Express” returning to his first love, his idol, for an affectionate if somewhat perfunctory portrait.

The Hollywood debut of Korean filmmaker Chan-Wook Park (“Oldboy”) is a vivid, short exercise in tone, a movie lacking shocks and huge surprises, but one that makes up for that by creeping us out, from start to finish.

For all its sure-handed sense of place, its occasional grace notes of loss, grief and misery, This is Where We Live fails to seize and break our hearts, keeping its glum characters at arm’s length and doling out “hope” in tiny, cloying teaspoon-size servings.

The sport is surveyed and discussed as the historic route of the underclasses to change their station in life.

Fresh insights are rare and dramatic moments rarer in Barbet Schroeder’s meditation on Germans forgiving themselves for the Holocaust, Amnesia.

Every now and then, one of those movies takes a stab at being “about something.” Not here. It’s instantly forgettable to anyone who isn’t a fanatic lost in the minutia of their corner of junk culture.

Wasikowska’s character arc is fun, Herriman makes a perfectly charming and vile villain, and the period detail in this Aussie production — more Brothers Grimm 16th century than the real thing — gives Judy & Punch the perfect stage to tell their satiric story without having to pull any you-know-whats.

There’s nothing interesting going on here.

This isn’t anybody’s idea of a new horror classic. But The Djinn takes a basic story and delivers the basic jolts and frights we expect from it. No more, no less.

The fights are epic, and I have to admit, the ever-improving CGI makes Kong the most empathetic he’s been since he was sniffing his fingers around Fay Wray.

While [Lawrence] is game for anything, whatever it takes to pound a laugh out of a moment, it’s not enough in a comedy that sprints out of the gate, buries us under zingers and turns all sensitive and sentimental as it pulls its punches in the second and third acts.

There’s a lot going on here, none of it terribly deep. But Doctor Sleep still makes a worthy successor to “The Shining,” that rarest of sequels driven by genuine curiosity and fascination with characters and their continuing story and not by corporate bean counters and their bottom line cynicism.

There’s not much to say about the enervated romance The Boy Downstairs, except that literally every character and actor playing that character is more interesting than the leads.

If you’ve made up your mind about her, it’s hard to see this intriguing documentary changing that made up mind. The movie turned my head, here and there. But the questions about her honesty linger, along with the notoriety.

Truth be told, J. Edgar drags, even when it pays homage to the widely discredited urban legend that the guy liked to dress in drag.

The script runs out of fresh ideas and novel ways to challenge the dueling dancers quickly, and soon trips over its own tropes.

Things drag, here and there. But kids will dig the slapstick, the talking dog and giggle at what flies out of the Sphinx’s butt, or drops from the rear-end of the Trojan Horse. Adults will be tickled at the usual Dreamworks parade of one-liners, running gags and puns, and feel a little sentimental.

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

The chatter is funny and the drunken acting-out just amusing enough to make these Pretty Problems pretty cute and easy to sit through.

Buy the kids the soundtrack, skip the movie.

The casting seems right, the pacing washes out the overbearing nature of these lives and waters down the motivations this script seems intent on providing.

It’s a brooding performance in a brooding movie, not your conventional rags to riches triumph or Jeremy Allen White Sings The Boss biopic. But White and Cooper make it interesting and entertaining enough to invest in.

Sweet and sunny (Lots of English language pop tunes) and laugh-out-loud silly and well worth seeing before Hollywood remakes it with somebody like Matthew McConaughey in the title role.

Desperation loses out to resignation in The Lovebirds, a flailing couple-on-the-lam comedy that pairs up Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani, with indifferent results.

But Jones, luminous in support in such dramas as “The Theory of Everything,” carries this picture, delivers thrilling arguments thrillingly and puts a warm, human face on a legal figure who has become liberalism’s Obi Wan Kenobi, “our only hope.”

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.

The characters are never more than caricatures, the set-up is too conventional and the payoff doesn’t pay off at all. As for the jokes? Too many are awaiting that next rewrite or polish.

Aside from a moment here and there, we get little commitment from our star trio. What should be wrenching all along the way is mainly momentary grief, guilt or fear. For us to buy in, the leads have to buy in. They don’t.

Zellweger shows flashes of her Oscar winning talent and is certainly not past her sell-by date, even if she’s tampered entirely too much with the packaging.

You don’t need a wine buzz to “appreciate” The Napa Boys, a vulgar, lowbrow and clumsily unfunny send of up “Sideways” and lots of pop culture of similar vintage. But it probably helps.

And so it does in the deft and delightful Elvis & Nixon, a short, quick and clever recreation of the how that came to pass and an imagined version of the conversation that could have taken place.

The acting is quite good, with Ayano (of “The Promised Land” and the recent “Humunculous”) a charismatic lead. The mob brawls and chases early on are visceral enough to pull you in. But Ono lets the air out of the balloon of even the action sequences entirely too quickly. The “family” material is less interesting, the “relationship” perfunctory and even acts of vengeance seem rushed so that we can get back to the boring stuff.

Cars 3 surpasses “Monster University” as the dullest, dimmest Pixar movie ever.

Good Grief is sober-minded, considered and almost sweet.

The jokes are broad and narrow as ever. It’s a very inside-baseball riff on fashion and fashionistas and always has been. As the cameos fly by — Jon Hamm to Sadie Frost, Stella McCartney to Jean-Paul Gaultier — you might miss the funniest and most obvious joke of all.

An unblinkingly fierce and bloody tale of slaughter and revenge.

Shot Caller is an overlong brutally clumsy attempt to have it both ways.

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.

There have been a lot of documentaries about Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s America, and more will show up between now and election day 2020. But the only one on that subject that strikes me as “essential viewing” is Red, White & Wasted, an eye-opening peek into the psyche, intellect, folkways and values of “the Trump base” we hear so much about these days.

Watching two pros throw themselves into a low-budget movie shot, on location, in BFE Mississippi isn’t just amusing, it’s inspiring. Love what you do kids, and you’ll never get old, with or without the vampire’s kiss.

The moral of the story, “the power of human friendship,” must have taken 33 seconds to come up with. But some of the sight gags — Long disguising himself as human, the two of them escaping the bad guys by donning a dragon parade costume — are a stitch.

The leads are terrific, the bit players biting and distinctly believable “types.”

Director Zack Snyder choreographs this like a video game, emphasizing the body count over character.

The Double is barely half the movie it had the potential of becoming.

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

Whatever the intent of Ian Cheney’s film, at its best it humanizes a class of people being demonized in America’s virulent outbreak of Know-Nothingism. These are smart, funny and charming worker bees with limits to their knowledge, just like the rest of us.

Roberta Grossman’s cute documentary gives weight to the tune, tracing its lineage to a town – Sadagora, in the Ukraine – and the 19th century. It bubbled to life as a “Nigun,” a wordless hymn or prayer, more hummed than sung.

Alternately stark and lurid, poetic and very well acted, it’s a return to form for McDonagh, who rather lost the plot with “War on Everyone.”

This film based on Alan Glynn's novel "Dark Fields" is entirely too reliant on voice-over, a bit too tarted-up by Burger in an effort to make this head trip a visual experience.

The over-the-top violence is funny in the early scenes. But it turns more and more abrupt, more over-the-top and more sadistic the longer the story unfolds.

Hemingway wins us over and, in the end, comes off as earnest in her desire to use her celebrity to help shine a light on the maladies that have shattered her family, time and again.

What’s missing from director Colin “Safety Not Guaranteed” Trevorrow’s thriller is that “wow factor” that Spielberg’s first outing delivered. Lacking that, and any serious effort at rethinking the story formula, Jurassic World plays like a theme park ride that’s a decade out of date.

Technically spare and smart, fascinating in the dilemma it wrestles with, Realive is, in the end, too chilly to warm up to.

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.

Sukowa makes a fine villain, one among many “using” Dali. But Kingsley is the reason to visit Daliland, allowing us to “be in the presence…of genius” and be irritated, titillated, amused and maybe a little depressed about the trap our imperious host has flounced into and embraced as the doom he dreads but so feverishly craves.

Dormer locks our attention in, and makes us root for Sofia, whatever her motives might be.

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

The action is fun. And the unintentional laughs from the plot lapses, check-writing and black-face — Did I mention how these two try to “pass” in Africa? — are almost worth devoting well-over two hours to The Whistleblower. Almost.

Miss You Already may be the funniest, sunniest weeper in history.

Even the third act fights and shootouts can’t pull Those Who Wish Me Dead back from the you-know-what.

What you come for here, aside from nostalgia, is the excess, and “Gangsta” directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah serve that up in heaping helpings. Characters topple into pools of blood, all manner of vehicle is raced and blown up. And Miami has never looked sexier on the screen.

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.

While actress turned director Carlson Young keeps the trains and planes running (slowly) on time, she doesn’t give us a single scene that pops, or production design that ever comes across as upscale, only little flashes of wit and fun from the veterans in the cast, who are better than the material. She’s managed a slick and shiny wish-fulfillment fantasy that is strictly downmarket — Hallmark movie chic.

“The World of John Wick” hotels, “tribes,” murder contract infrastucture, “rules” and codes and lots of punchouts don’t really add up to much of a movie.

I’ve found Ferrara’s cryptic, navel-gazing bent of late both tedious and yet fascinating in what he’s trying to get across about where his head’s at when he makes this or that self-reflective film.

This Paranormal doesn't tamper with the formula that worked in the first two films. It lacks the "money" moments that those films delivered and ends with a finale that is downright conventional. "Paranormal" reveals itself for what it has become, the "Saw" of found video thrillers.

Repellently violent, intimately epic and powered by a performance so absorbed, hurt, confused and just “out there” that it makes everything that’s come before it in the genre just a vamp in tights, Joker turns every previous film in this justly maligned genre into “just a cartoon.” Damn. There’s an Oscar in this.

Thorough as it is in covering the history of the company and the retail phenomenon — my first newspaper feature story was visiting and grading all the videos in a small city where I worked, which led to my first hate mail and angry calls — Last Blockbuster plays like a TV feature story that goes on too long.

For anybody who relishes performance over “the puzzle,” who gets a charge out of seeing screen legends make Ewan McGregor sweat, Mother, Couch! is worth getting off the sofa for.

For an hour or so, director Lurie tackles the tropes lightly as we see lots of football practices, and a few games, and not a lot of anything else. And it plays, helped by the fact that the formidable Masterson doesn’t need a lot of script to get across a flinty “West Texas Gal.”

This “Mermaid,” weighted down with expectations, responsibility to the corporate bottom line and what feels like fear that “We’re going to screw this ‘sure thing’ up,” sinks and rarely swims, an epic that impresses when it’s under the sea, but never really moves us. And when it’s on dry land, it could not be more bland.

Nagy immerses us in this time and this world with simple images, archetypal characters and common-to-combat-film situations, another army far from home, out of its depth and uncertain of the necessity and ethics of its mission.

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.

Carmen is more a movie of tableaux and emotions than a story with a clean linear narrative that leads us along moment by moment. It’s so far from being a literal “Carmen” that one can barely call it an adaptation.

Kazan, as she proved in “Ruby Sparks,” has a whimsical, quirky girl-next-door appeal. Radcliffe, wearing post-Harry Potter stubble and delivering toothy, jaw-jutting grins, makes it easy for us to believe he cannot get her out of his head.

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.

The Retreat may be horror by the numbers, but there are solid reasons these character types and story tropes are recycled, again and again. As they teach you in horror film school, they endure because they work, even if they don’t have a prayer of surprising anybody as they do.

A beautifully-acted genre picture with a wonderful sense of place.

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

Winds up a thoughtful puzzle of a movie that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, a slice of Southern Gothic displaced into rural, redneck New York that loses something in the geographic translation.

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 traffics in too many false frights, leans heavily on lapses in logic and loses its way when super-naturalism kicks in.