Roger Moore

The contrast between Eichner’s polished, breathless, amusingly angry riffs and the acting around him calls attention to itself. He’s not an inviting presence and the performance lacks the acting tools that let the viewer in and make us warm to this relationship and root for this couple.

Cluzet brings a marvelous edge to the tit-for-tat exchanges that ratchet up the anger, which is pretty much what his character wants. Oh yes, he’s easy to hate.

Director, writer and co-star Daniel Hendler‘s film is a mystery, a journey of personal growth and a quixotic quest to diagnose what constitutes “eccentric” behavior and what relatives and the courts might consider insane.

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

Pfeiffer is as grand as ever, and in every sense of the word.

“Rising Dragon” still makes a fascinating film version of a “further reading” history lesson, a reminder of the historical enmity between Korean and its avaricious, warlike neighbor and why Koreans in the film and in the modern day regard this as a “battle of the righteous against the unrighteous.”

The combat sequences are straightforward and well-handled.

Lena Dunham's amusing meander through "post graduate delirium," a relationship comedy about nothing so much as the permanent relationships of family and New Yorker's relationship with space - and the lack of it.

Red 2 goes down easily, from Marvin’s demented moments of relationship advice to Dame Helen’s tender and amusing “Hitchcock” reunion with Sir Anthony. There’s a knowing twinkle in their eyes, and in everybody else’s. “Yeah, we could’ve done a Bond film,” they seem to wink. “And it would’ve been a bloody fun one, at that.”

A rousing good tale from an age when ships of wood were sailed by men of iron.

Busan doesn’t reinvent the zombie movie so much as make it work well enough that you buy in — good performances, a nice selection of moments of “sacrifice,” the usual “What are they THINKING?” twists.

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.

A thriller that makes you wish you knew how to scream "O.M.G." in Korean.

He’s a terrific documentary storyteller, as his drug trade documentaries made clear. He just got too cute for his own good and got in his own way a bit, here.

It adds bubbles to the show, but doesn’t change the essentially deadpan, amusingly banal nature of this journey and the two charming old men who take it.

Forget the cop-out of an anti-climax that the makers of The Policeman’s Lineage insisted upon, and you’ve got a decent thriller built around the struggle for a young Korean cop’s soul.

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

It’s a perfectly pleasant movie to sit through, although there’s more sitting than the material warrants, and “pleasant” shouldn’t be the highest note you’re reaching for — not with this many “names” in the cast (Eddie Izzard and Bill Pullman show up later).

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.

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.

Your appreciation of Perfect Days hangs on how fascinating you think a toilet cleaner would be, and how much interior life you’re willing to add to Wenders’ repetitive and superficial “meditation” on such a character.

Although well-told, it’s an over-familiar story, and a sad one. And being far enough removed from the issues that have police in the spotlight post-Ferguson, The Seven Five also feels a little dated. Remember when all we had to worry about was cops going on the take?

Thanks for Sharing is a bit of a head-snapper in its tone changes, stumbling into flippancy. The light moments are appreciated, but they do tend to undercut the sobriety of it all.

This tiny Catholic school for women dominated the sport at a turning point in history, and this plucky, old-fashioned sports drama sets the scene and tells the tale with a lot of heart and a dash of wit.

The best thing about the script and direction is that we rarely get too far ahead of it. We think we see what’s coming, but you never know.

The bottom line for every horror tale is the same. Does it chill, get those hairs on the back of your neck to stand up? Is it satisfying, in either a righteous or abandon-all-hope climax? Don’t cry for “La Llorona.” She gets a wet, dirty job done.

Into the Weeds lives up to its title, thanks to having to boil complex science, a wide-ranging tragedy and scandal and mini profiles of those trapped in it or fighting in court into a 96 minute film. The film is a lot to digest and can feel cluttered and rushed, saving time for a long rap by aspiring musician Johnson in the closing scene.

A polished, kid-friendly and even lighthearted Life of Jesus animated film.

The sentimentality — for his mother, his formative childhood, an old lover — is what interests Almodóvar, here. And while it’s great that longtime collaborators Cruz and Banderas showed up to help him walk down memory lane, it’s not the most interesting cinematic journey he’s taken us on.

Little Big Women is a perfectly watchable genre melodrama, an old-fashioned “women’s picture,” with sentiment, intricate relationships, intrigue and not-too-heavy-to-take heartbreak.

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.

And John Cusack. “One semester at NYU” is all the Internet Movie Database gives him, as far as credentials. But he’s got opinions, especially about the meltdown of 2007-8. And he’s outraged. So anyway.

In detail and combat spectacle, Stalingrad is hard to beat. And whatever its failings, one can’t help but be curious about a story as connected to national identity as this one, a film that like today’s Russia, feels more Soviet than Russian.

"Raiders!” will make any movie buff laugh out loud at the sheer chutzpah and kiddie problem-solving that it took to, for instance, recreate that boulder chasing Indy out of a South American temple.

The star here is a version of every street stray you’ve seen in Central or South America, a big-eyed brown beauty named Amendoim, which is “Peanuts” in Portuguese. He romps through scenes, vocalizes on cue and turns on the charm after every apartment-trashing, food-stealing/scene stealing frolic.

This is indie cinema with a point and a point of view, and Glidewell, Ferrell and the cast deserve to have this engrossing and worthhile drama be a career highlight that should lead to others.

Warm and witty performances by Spencer, Hensen and Monae, the stoic moral stature Costner plays and unlikable-until-they’re-reasonable turns by Dunst and Parsons make Hidden Figures a winner, a piece of unknown history rendered flesh and blood funny, uplifting and never less than entertaining.

It’s all cute enough, campy enough and bawdy enough to pass muster. But when you title your film Fire Island you’re not just going where other films and series have gone before. You’re so “on the nose” that nothing we see will surprise.

The many melodramatic touches would almost certainly have marred my experience of The Fallen Bridge, had this mystery thriller been a formulaic Hollywood product. But it’s Chinese — VERY Chinese — and that adds layers of meaning to even mundane details, enriching the film and almost overwhelming even the obvious contrivances.

Director Robert Schwartzman keeps the tone light and the pace between funny scenes and cringe-worthy moments quick. He’s the brother of actor/director Jason Schwartzman and son of Talia Shire and, with them and Sofia Coppola and Nicolas Cage, part of the extended family of Coppola filmmakers.

McElhone mopes in the early scenes and shimmers through the later ones, even as she suffers. “Carmen” becomes a veritable Maltese fashion shoot at times.

A smart, adult thriller.

The stories share a beguiling, meditative strangeness that draws us in. Hamaguchi sets up our expectations, then upends them with this revelation about a character or that wrinkle in the plot.

True Mothers is a melodrama with 90 minutes of story awash in 139 minutes of movie. Kawase holds our interest by letting us see the unexpressed pain of characters generally too well-mannered to express loss, shock, outrage and resentment out loud.

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

The debut feature of commercial director Aristotle Torres, it’s immersed in street life, a vivid portrait of gangs — “crews” — that spread their name and mark their turf with “bubble letter” art and logos, and occasionally defend it with pistols.

Fireline is worthwhile mainly as the background research for a more coherent, tense and nuts and bolts (fictional) feature film that recreates much of what we see here in more easily grasped recreations and better organized storytelling.

The film doesn’t have the pacing of a theatrical release — it’s “streaming slow,” sluggish at times.

The movie’s third act is wholly about how this forgotten story came back to light, and while it is moving, it’s ungainly, and as generic as much of what’s come before.

Musician Dave Grohl and music mogul David Geffen wax enthusiastic. But leave it to Bruce Springsteen to find the poetry of the place.

The Spy Behind the Plate feels played, stuffed with filler, overrun with experts of varying merit, and doesn’t break enough new ground to warrant the effort.

A winning narration (read by Greg Kinnear) holds things together. And there's just enough script for a good cast to run with. Harris and Madigan lift the whole enterprise just by being who and what they are - great actors.

Haters, head for the door. But Gleeks? Get your "Glee" on.

“King” is worth the price of admission just to see the ex-James Bond swanning around the Hall of Mirrors in glorious wig and the stylish raiment of Louis XIV and his trend-setting court.

In the roller coaster between serious and silly that Instant Family bounces along on, Byrne is the Fast-Pass holder, and she makes this uneven dramedy a hoot, and more importantly, makes it work.

The performances present an engaging contrast, with Bomer growing on you as you start to appreciate what’s broken in Sean, and Patiño’s deadpan shrug evolving into something more compassionate.

Whatever its qualities and shortcomings, Swiss Army Man makes one promise it most certainly keeps. You have never seen anything remotely like it.

Young O’Connor has a pale, clumsy walking bean-pole awkwardness about him, and uses that ungainly appearance to good effect.

This is more worth seeing for Olin and Dern’s tetchy and touching interactions, portraying a marriage of devotion and decay. Every filmmaker who preaches that “Casting is everything,” or 90 percent of everything, isn’t exaggerating. The Artist’s Wife proves it.

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’s a trifle hard to categorize. It has a light-enough tone that you feel it’s aiming for laughs, but those are few and far between. At least the message is clear, no matter how much meandering goes on as it’s being delivered.

Bullock gives us an old-fashioned star turn at the center of an equally-celebrated supporting cast and gives a young woman director from her mother’s homeland a big break. Call Unforgivable a mixed bag, but an intensely watchable one.

That it lacks the snap, crackle and kapow of the summer's better comic book blockbusters isn't surprising. With all this effort riding on a big, expensive and rushed studio summer picture, the real miracle is that any of them come to life.

Marriage Story is almost funny enough and touching just often enough to endorse. It’s good, but it’s no “Scenes from a Marriage” or “Husbands and Wives” or hell, “Company,” for that matter. It’s just Netflixable.

The film is more creepy than scary, more interested in detailing the incantations and talisman’s of this “protect the harvest/village” faith. But the peril is palpable just often enough that we buy-in.

A nail-biting thriller in the classic Hitchcock style.

There’s no judgement here, so any laughs you have are of your own devising. They’re a funny lot, the devout and the doubters. Even the late USC historian Kevin Starr takes the subject seriously, parking it within ancient belief systems and modern California loopiness.

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.

“Jack” is engaging, even if this account of death and dying meanders a bit and plays as more emotionally flat than you’d expect.

It’s not a great movie, a deep film or a transcendent experience, the way “Groundhog Day” is. But Before I Fall is an admirable knockoff, a “teachable moments” movie about that first time we take stock, realize the what and who we should treasure, and let them know it.

Kampmeir’s made a lean, disturbing #MeToo tale that should be the last thing any acting class shows its students before graduation, if not on enrollment day as well.

Tony Hale makes an interesting “Variation on a Character Played by Steve Carell,” and there are a few laughs mixed in with a lot of cringes and endless examples of callous cruelty. The ending pulled this one off the fence for me, and it was barely on that fence to start with.

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.

Emotional shortcomings aside, Touch still pulls you in, an immersive story of alien worlds — the 1960s, Iceland and Japan — sympathetically and patiently told, a lovely two hour break from the world and the fresh waves of bad news that stain even the best of times.

There's too much cheese, but there are still enough amusing action beats and funny one-liners to let one say, 30 Minutes or Less delivers, more or less on time.

Take Me tickles just often enough to be worth its 84 minutes, not something I’d trek out to see at the cinema, but perfectly Netflixable.

Cochran has conjured up a caper that’s just clever enough and characters just winning enough to hold our interest long enough to be surprised at the resolution to the puzzle that she conjures up.

Audiard has conjured up a fascinating snapshot of love in the age of easy, online-assisted sex. Paris, 13th District feels both authentic and thanks to its dreamy setting, as romantic as only affairs in the City of Love can be, whether they involve courtesans or college students.

It may be straight-up melodrama, from its lone, corny, over-explaining flashback to the cliched drunk tank our hero finds himself in to the grim hysteria of an ambulance ride. Desplechin’s film still strikes enough of the right notes to be entertaining.

The design is brighter and sharper, the jokes are broader and the villainy utterly generic in this by-the-(comic)-book adaptation.

They’ve made a cute comic book movie, amusing but forgettable, probably not as culture-shifting as “Wonder Woman” and “Black Panther” turned out to be. But take your daughters to Captain Marvel. They’ll be the final arbiters here. Because Disney princess fans are the ones who’ll really be liberated by this rock’em sock’em role model.

The banter waxes and wanes a tad more than I’d like. And yes, Lying and Stealing, being a genre picture, is the 14,764th “one last job” movie.

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.

[Nowlin] makes Blood Stripe a solid, compelling drama about the post traumatic stresses unique to women in combat, a film that — thanks to her stoic performance and intimate, unfussy direction — engenders sympathy but never pity.

Red Dot is a savage if not wholly satisfying “flip-the-script” stalked in the wilderness thriller whose cleverness comes from its subtext.

The Mule is not one of Eastwood’s greats, but it does hold your interest and keep you tickled, almost from first to last.

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.

if nothing else, Lucha Mexico can be appreciated for its honest depiction of a cultural outlet that gives its public, young and old, a chance to let off steam and yell until they’re hoarse at these uniquely Mexican archetypes.

It still bogs down terribly in the later acts, but manages to find a little suspense and a big laugh or two the finale.

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.

There are wrinkles to this sensitive story that add interest, elements of plot, romantic complications and the like.

Perhaps it’s out of date, but if anybody can make the “Latin Spitfire” stereotype cool, funny and scary again, it’s Hayek, who all but takes over the movie with her loud, brassy and delusional confidence.

It’s not particularly ambitious and there’s barely a hint of “breaks from formula” in it. But in The Accountant 2, it’s not the individual numbers that matter. It’s how it all adds up.

Haley’s movies have an old-fashioned comfort food quality, and this sits happily on the menu with his earlier 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.

The situations, no real adults included, amuse just enough to make this “Summer” worth remembering.

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.

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.

Coming to a too-obvious conclusion aside, if there’s a better minimalist parable for “living online,” I’m hard pressed to think of it.

I haven’t seen Measure for Measure on the stage in years, but the rough shape of it forms in the mind watching this adaptation, its hits (characters) and the reasons it’s called “a problem play.” And those bones, a poignant romance, betrayals and mercy coming from the most unexpected places and vivid characters, pretty much save this film, or at least make it watchable.

The Song of Names is a more interesting than fascinating mystery than it is a profound statement on memory, loss, tragedy and faith — which was plainly its aim. The conflict is more talked about than keenly felt, the climax something of an over-the-top anti-climax.

A documentary of gentle surprises, reflection and tenderness, depicting a troubled part of the world’s truly original take on the concept of what a “biker gang” could be.

The performances work, despite their requisite flatness. It’s just that the few flashes of heightened drama and the gentleness of the Kasie/Octavio scenes aren’t enough to lift the weight these characters and this story carries.

“Let’s Play Two” doesn’t re-invent or for that matter add anything to the concert doc genre. But for fans, it’s a lovely time capsule, a bunch of 50somethings, still sporting the torn jeans and well-worn t-shirts, leaping about, playing with feeling and getting a joyous job done.

The ending is entirely too pat, considering what’s come before. But Burson has channeled her dark memories of freshman year into something that occasionally touches and often tickles, but stings with familiarity, start to finish.

A fascinating documentary experiment in fathoming the heretofor “unfathomable” genius of Johannes Vermeer.

All in all, it’s an eye-opening offering from DisneyNature, even with the Chinese pandering, Chinese spin and image-burnishing we can sense was part of the package.

The melodramatic script isn’t the draw here. It’s the demanding artistry, the behind-the-curtains peek at how the dancing/flying sausage factory of pop concert tours are pieced together.

It’s a B-movie, start to finish, a film noir with Americo-Persian flourishes, but a formula picture in any event. The Persian Connection still manages scenes that pop, violence that shocks (and satisfies) and performances that remind us that in the United States, movie stars come from all races and classes. Eventually.

Its spooky tone and the odd jolt don’t remedy its chilly remoteness or self-conscious longueurs. But it’s good to be reminded that there’s a reason we cling to the afterlife as a concept and flock to films that indulge that belief, the warm and fuzzy versions, anyway.

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

Mills stuffs his film with cynical teachers, absentee parents and kids trying to cope with the minefield that even Canadian high schools are built on.

There’s something to be said for a B-movie that doesn’t deviate from formula, that pulls you in to its simple “revenge” plot and doesn’t let go until the credits roll.

Verbinski makes a striking return to risk-taking form with the ambitious, sometimes dazzling and even heartfelt Jeremiad Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

If the spirit of the season is making you sick to your stomach, The Night Before, scruffy and uneven as it is, might be the perfect purge.

The obstacles to love are all winners and include losing contact (pre-Internet), moving, closing a business, changing jobs, falling into trouble over and over again. And the payoff, set to a certain song in a certain year after 11 years have passed, is worth it.

It's a solid, old-fashioned action yarn filled with the very latest dive gear and the oldest plot formula in the movie-maker's playbook.

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.

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.

The mystery isn’t all that mysterious, but the brisk pacing and banter atone for any real sins this shoot-em-in-the-temple comedy stumbles into.

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.

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

A goofy, gonzo thrill ride, “Vengeance” is a bad movie sequel so bad it’s good, a bad movie that’s almost a great bad movie.

Burden is still a movie of faith with more virtues than failings, more ambition than merely pandering and more topicality than we’d care to admit.

It’s quite simple in structure, simply sublime in execution.

“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.

The first seventeen minutes of The Sound of Silence plays like the best short film in many a year. It’s compact, provocative and thanks to the serenity of its star, Peter Sarsgaard, and fraught exhaustion of the client (Rashida Jones), draws us in pretty much instantly. It leaves us with a sense of whimsy unexplained — mystery.

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

It’s not the most surprising story of its type, and it’s far from Bahrani’s most graceful film. His more intimate, less sprawling tales never felt this clunky, with all the seams showing. But Gourav makes a barely-likable and yet entertaining tour guide.

The pacing, the in-your-face energy of “The First Temptation” put it over. If you’re easily offended about anything described above, it’s not for you. Watch something else.

The bad guys really stand out, with Mikkelsen pulling off something he never managed as a Bond villain. He’s genuinely frightening.

Greene has a lot more to play than West, but truthfully, the leads seem like bemused anchors for the funnier characters to bounce off of. That’s sitcom writing.

If you see it and wonder what the fuss was about, look no further than its star, the face that ate up another awards season.

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.

Robert Stone directed the wonderful environmental movement history documentary “Earth Days,” and that earns him the benefit of the doubt for his latest, Pandora’s Promise. He needs that benefit, because what he sets out to do in 87 minutes is upend 50 years of green movement anti-nuclear power dogma.

There aren’t a lot of surprises when characters behave the way a thousand screenplays have ordained they must, but the little moments of indulging their better angels, and their worst, give Prisoner’s Daughter a gritty, B-movie authenticity that is intensely satisfying.

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

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

Writer-director Rob Ryan lets Sister Kate’s compelling story — communications consulting work that took her to the Netherlands, made her a millionaire, and then a victim as her con man husband stole all her money — and how MUCH of that story Sister Kate wants to tell, hijack his movie.

Schreiber and Malone leave it all on the set in this sad but wistful romance, a movie about teen dreams that lose all meaning if they’re deferred too long.

A dry and moody piece built on closely-observed characters, not on thrills or an unraveling plot.

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

Collette always delivers fair value. Her Ellie is hard-drinking, high-mileage, slimmed down and flirting with Cougar-hood, a woman living in the trap of her world, her work and the love she lost.

The stakes could not be more intimate and personal here, but as reassured as we might be that something like “due process” and “common sense” will prevail, Wright and O’Connor do a good job of playing people who aren’t so sure, whose faith in people — not the state — to show compassion has its limits.

Schimberg’s film goes for predictable emotions and rests on a fairly predictable formula. But what transpires in the middle to late acts is surprising, even as it feels as contrived as the shy-deformed-man who quickly becomes a master salesman transition.

Director and co-writer Eli Horowitz, a veteran of TV’s “Homecoming,” throws in just enough curveballs to keep us guessing and just enough generational jabs to make the script kind of funny and kind of mean-spirited.

The film is R-rated R.L. Stine — simple, catchy, punchy and playfully derivative.

It’s easily the weakest of the four iterations of that title. If Disney and Pixar really needed to revisit a tale that they had gracefully ended, it should have been more of a victory lap. This, whatever its modest charms, has the feel of an end zone dance — crass, unnecessary, and a slightly pale reflection of the glories that warranted it.

Them That Follow is “Winter’s Bone” with snake-handlers. It’s a quiet thriller that suggests that the form the violence takes in such remote communities may be different, but its sources can be identical.

ZZ Top: That Little Ol’Band from Texas is a straight, no-chaser band biography documentary, lacking flash and big name peers singing their praises and expert testimony to park them in their rightful place in music history.

Writer-director Ted Koland can be a little obvious. It’s not a deep movie. But everybody, especially Ramsey, is dealing with something. And Timlin (TV’s “Zero Hour”) gives heart to this wonderful, nuanced character.

Anybody expecting high drama or even a little righteous outrage and “Hollywood” melodrama may feel sorely let down by Green’s portrait.

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.

Never works up a romantic head of steam, never captures the frisson and ferment of a tumultuous age. And, thanks to the flat depiction of Schiller, Beloved Sisters never overcomes the feeling that it’s a lecture, with a little rough and ready German sex tossed in, here and there, to wake up the class.

Surprises may be few and far between, with every confrontation and dramatic moment preordained. But Mine 9 delivers suspense and pathos, geology and geography, and a spot-on cast puts faces and lives behind iconic “types,” and make this one of the most Netflixable films the streaming service offers.

It’s the detail, the sense of small lives closed off and growing more isolated that makes this film worth watching.

Tommy Lee Jones gives us a saltier version of MacArthur than the image-conscious general ever let on to.

It is well-thought-out, beautifully shot by Andrew Jeric (“Sightless”) and the actors, playing stock “types,” add value with performances that land, even when characters are doing one of the “three things” you should never risk in a tornado, even as the sentimental script is skipping past a teenager’s questions about the afterlife so that we can get to a scene where today’s storm chasers slow-clap the son of their late idol.

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

The leads are showcased engagingly, the locations — even ruined a bombed out Polish church, but including Paris, Yugoslavia and Occupied Berlin — rendered in romantic tones. But there’s not enough connection between those leads to generate the level of heat aimed for here.

But Waititi is to be treasured for simply seeing all this as lightweight fun, a bit of nonsense with a bunch of movie stars dressing up like gods and having a laugh.

A comedy that barely flirts with funny and a grim weeper that never quite raises a tear, Cake has one thing going for it — Jennifer Aniston.

Five Feet Apart sinks or swims on the couple cast to run the show here, and Richardson is an open-hearted wonder, a human empathy machine. We connect with her in a heartbeat, even though she’s a “type” playing a “type.”

But Wilde gives this woman her all. We see her with every freckles and imperfection showing on her cover girl face. And in the couple of scenes that require fight choreography, she handles herself well enough to be convincing.

Crazy Rich Asians puts its emphasis on “Crazy Rich,” and “Asians,” when a little more “Crazy” would get us through its glitzy two hours with less tedium and more style.

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

Charm and humor are in shorter supply than you’d hope. There’s barely a funny moment in it, even though there are English-accented attempts at jokes about how often sailors say “Yarrrr,” and a cute baby beast is introduced, right on cue, in the later acts.

Rust and Bone doesn't earn the ending it delivers.

The bottom-line on this bottom-baring/bottom-branding farce is “Is it funny, on top of all the shocks?” And yes, it is. On a number of few occasions, all of them involving Jeff Chang.

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.

It’s immersive and biting and fun to parse for its deeper meaning, even if it most certainly isn’t for every taste.

Del Toro’s robots have weight and mass, and their epic, Hong Kong-smashing fights with the four and six-legged, clawed and horned monsters are visually coherent, unlike the messy blur of the “Transformers” movies. There’s a light, humorous feel to “Pacific Rim” because the science is silly and logic takes a flying leap.

Chung goes to such effort to avoid melodrama — predictable, artificial or over-the-top confrontations — that Munyurangabo never alters its sedate, almost somnambular pacing.

Yes, the story’s a goof, a nonsensical mash-up that gives his character an excuse to bowl over legions of hired swordsmen and soldiers, monks and wizarding world warriors. But Yen is terrific, a Smiler with the Knife anti-hero who has the charisma Jet Li lacked and a cool bravado that never suited everyman martial arts comic Jackie Chan.

Whatever Mothering Sunday lacks in emotional payoffs, it’s the shattered tone that Husson gets across that makes it work. Few films have done as well at capturing the disorienting, utterly-deflating feeling of a grief everyone involved realizes they will never, ever get over, so there’s no sense even trying to talk about it.

As uneven as it is, Life as We Know It still goes down like comic comfort food, especially for anybody who's ever dealt with parenthood.

It’s not a thrill-a-minute piece of children’s entertainment, but winning performances by young Finn Little, by Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush as the adult “boy,” and by Trevor Jamieson and Morgana Davies, lift it.

Which is what this film actually lacks, provocation. The film celebrates him, but the lack of critical mulling over from people who aren’t in his fan club doesn’t keep him from seeming somewhat unlikeable.

A transgressive blend of stoner comedy, horny teenager movie and "Blair Witch" reality riff, this no-budget romp through teen New Orleans crosses the line and erases that line in a hell-bent pursuit of hell-bound laughs. And yeah, it's often funny as all get out.

As beautiful and intimate as Fire of Love often is, the sometimes grating, flat and precious narration makes one long for this material to have been folded into Herzog’s superior “Into the Inferno.” Romantic “obsession” is kind of his thing, and there’s not enough new here to warrant expanding on it.

The performances are subdued, not really pitched to match the rising horror facing them all. Still, you have to hand it to Bustamente. He’s made a La Llorona movie with pointed politics, real world villains and righteous wrath. Sometimes, the horrors are in the headlines, or what the headlines aren’t telling us.

The Advent Calendar is a creeper of a thriller. It stalks you, sidles up and immerses the viewer in its world and its mood. This Belgian film (in French and German with English subtitles) doesn’t deliver frights or shocks so much as it serves up shivers.

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’s not quite up to the tempo of a screwball farce, although the script has that complexity. The jokes are droll and sly.

It’s a performance of compact, comical fury packed into a movie that cost what they wasted on the “Wonder Woman 1984” avocado toast catering, a little B-movie that could, headed by a pint-sized badass with “Grace” as her middle name.

Tell me you don’t see echoes of “A Beautiful Mind.” Nelson lets us see Crowley’s fleeting dream of filmmaking glory, this ache to tell a story he believed in above all else, consume him.

Paul Negoescu’s deadpan film finds a few grins as it slowly gets up to speed, and manages a fine finish that makes it worth recommending.

Damon the Oscar-winning writer does something nobody else in Hollywood would – write a dumb character for Matt Damon to play.

It has the edge of a butter knife. But the stars are ever-so-engaging.

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.

It’s an engrossing character portrait of a woman who has been so on-task for so long that she doesn’t recognize real romance when it shows up and makes her an offer of a better or at least different life, and her struggles with what to do with that.

The picture is a very slow starter, and even when the script begins to jolt, shock and make us fear our protagonist is merely fodder for the machine, even as it teases us with the idea that a man can only take so much, we know better than to get our hopes up too much.

The script is flat and linear, the dialogue mostly out of tune — utterly lacking crackle.

Entirely too literal, but it still manages to be a literally hair-raising piece of modern-style old school Gothic horror.

The venerable acting firm of Smith-Kline & Scott Thomas make certain that this Paris trip is anything but a waste.

No 108 minute music history can hope to be complete, and the circumscribed “Gimme Danger” is very much a mixed bag in that regard. But Jarmusch gets a lot right and a lot documented on film in this winning and sometimes amusing musical history tour.

Maybe Jimi: All is By My Side is as good a Jimi Hendrix bio-pic as we’ll ever get, at least so long as there are legal entanglements strangling the late guitar god’s legacy.

Writer-director Nora Fiffer’s debut feature shows us the tears and hopes that we understand them. And she finds humor amid the insights about this particular version of post partum depression.

The performances are pretty sharp... But the situations feel contrived, the romantic pairings a bit arbitrary. Strip away the narration, and this would be more cinematic. Take away the setting and this is fairly routine stuff.

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."

“My Best Friend” remembers the playful, rebellious and occasional mean girl that Anne was in a somewhat staid but well-acted film about Anne’s last years.

The Notebook makes for a grim but utterly fascinating parable.

[Ree] virtually never surprises us, making his film more a celebratory hagiography for proud Norwegians than anything the rest of the world, in and out of chess, can embrace.

The film stumbles into a cross-country odyssey that dominates its last third. That is fascinating, but not properly set up, much like the film itself. How I Live Now skips over the “How,” loses itself in the “I” and never lets the pathos of “Live Now” pay off.

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

An engaging, accomplished cast and an insistently light tone recommend Ezra, another road trip bonding tale about autism and loved ones struggling to understand it.

Benedetta is a gripping, graphic and shockingly moving film biography.

It’s still a must-see for Kubrick fans, because here he is, exploring his themes of “evil” and “the duality of man” and “intelligence” and control — talking about his photography background, making his favorite Napoleon as a movie director analogies.

I found this parable a tad pokey for my tastes, almost sleep-inducing in the middle acts. The title promises a picture with more momentum, a longer “road” journey, and I was disappointed when it settled into how hard it is to get work and get by in Bangkok.

Writer-director John Swab (“Run With the Hunted”) delivers a B-movie with few surprises but plenty of good, solid punches at a mess that didn’t fix a problem, it just allowed a fresh field of predators to profit from it.

Just far enough off the well-worn mob movie path to be worth a look, even if — like too much on Netflix — you feel the need to bail and see what else is available before it bleeds out.

The picture has the rage and energy of early Spike Lee films, and the same “How do I END this?” third act failings. I wanted to love it, but it stalls long before it takes a turn towards something so bizarre it’ll be taught in film schools for decades, “How NOT to give your sci-fi satire a climax.”

Director Midi Z and his muse (Ke-Xi Wu is in most of his films, including “The Road to Mandalay”) take us on an increasingly fraught and stylized trip down the rabbit hole of “big break” success and the guilt and emotional scars that linger from what Nina might have endured to get there.

It’s always lovely to see Bening and Nighy, always a warm delight to set some of this tug of war on the pebbly beaches, rocky crags and chalky cliffs. Otherwise, it’s a “kitchen sink” drama, without many blowups, no big shocks and not a lot that sticks to the ribs after the credits have rolled.

For all the impressive (but not dazzling) effects, the scattered jokes and stentorian acting (especially from the Olympians), there’s not much here that will stick with you after the popcorn’s gone. But as any ancient Greek could tell you, that’s sort of the point.

A perfectly pleasant but fluffy, inconsequential romantic comedy.

The very “slam dunk” nature of the case in the court of public opinion makes 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets drag along and feel incomplete as it does.

The leads are compelling, the action furious and the suspense right on the edge of riveting, which is more than enough to make this “Escape” an odyssey we want to take with these people who want to decide their own future, rather than having a failing totalitarian state do it for them.

It’s a fairly thorough survey of all that’s going wrong, and many of the efforts underway worldwide to save, seed and repopulate eco systems that are vital to our diet and the safety of our shores as the seas rise and the storms surge.

It is a sci-fi parable with performances that click and situations — tried and true as they are — that pop. We can only hope that “It’s only a movie” will be the way we look back on it.

The script by Dan Hall is strictly paint-by-numbers — cut and dried and predictable. But the execution atones for some of that, and the performances give it that extra something that makes even a formulaic thriller worth your time.

If it’s not for everybody (I think fans of the play will like it), that’s no crime either. I appreciate the effort, got in sync (eventually) with what Hooper was trying to do and found myself quite moved, once or twice — which is twice more than “The Rise of Skywalker” managed.

Bullied covers new ground even as it feels, at times, as if it’s all over the place. Remember, an academic made it, not a professional filmmaker.

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.

As this “true story” hews closely to the plot points of many a spy thriller, The Courier invites comparisons that highlight its shortcomings, telegraphing punches that we sense are coming and failing to ever land a telling blow.

Whatever leftovers The Holdovers serve up, Payne and his once-and-future-muse Giamatti make this cinematic comfort food perfectly palatable.

Casino Royale is just swell when Bond is busting up bathrooms in Prague, busting up embassies in Madagascar and busting a move in Nassau. But when he gets to, well, Casino Royale (here, in the former Yugoslav Republic of Montenegro), the film goes utterly flat.

Terminator Salvation is one of the most visually impressive films in the series. The action is non-stop and the look borders on dazzling.... But ironically for a series that's supposed to be about an embattled humanity struggling against those who lack it, there isn't an emotional moment in this.

Only Posey lightens up and lights up Irrational Man, which, for all its hectoring faults, is still a “Woody Allen Film,” and thus not a total write-off. At least the Newport, Rhode Island and environs locations are fresh.

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.”

It’s entirely too scattered, sacrificing coherence, loaded down with characters who are more clutter than carriers of plot and substance.

But for a guy with all these comedy credits, Thurber (and his by-the-numbers star) fail to give the spark of sarcastic life to this version of John “Die Hard” McClain. The script gives Will one half-funny aside, and a single funny line.

I found Encanto more aggravating than entertaining.

It’s all cheerfully cheesy with the occasional off-color crack, a whole lot of jokes that don’t land, and a cast that’s not-quite-amusing-enough to remind us that Leslie “Airplane/Naked Gun” Nielsen was the Best Canadian at this kind of comedy.

Wine Country is no “Sideways,” even if the contrived stakes are supposed to be greater. It’s built for a particular audience and some of the laughs will hit home for anybody who’s gotten that AARP “invitation” in the mail. But Poehler’s film never crosses the tipping point of being worth 100 minutes of your time.

It's still a short-enough time-killer of a thriller -- not the worst of the summer, but a long way from the current state of the art.

It's a film of noble sacrifice and "good deaths" but surprisingly few chuckles.

Catch Hell has physical torture and sexually explicit mind games. It has a star who seems resigned to his fate and willing to give up and savage bumpkins straight out of “Deliverance” ready to take out their hatred of Hollywood and Hollywood values on him. That description gives this simple, ferociously feral thriller more depth than it deserves.

When we’re meant to be moved, there’s a disconnect. And when we should be transfixed, something Marceau managed in mastering his art, we’re let down.

"A Year” won’t tell aficionadoes anything new, and even novices may grate at its superficiality, a brief whiff of bouquet when more of a sip or two was called for.

This undramatic and flat peek “inside” the sewing rooms of Christian Dior holds little in the way of entertainment.

What it’s not very good at getting across is the source of the pain, the disaffection that drives our anti-hero’s excesses or his art.

Whatever power this piece of writing had over the two of them, Captive fails to capture the magic, hope or whatever made it a best seller.

There’s little sense of forward motion to any of this.

The whole affair is so slow as to let the mind play casting exercises. This seems instantly dated in 2019.

The documentary material is informative and mind-opening. The mockumentary surrounding it is a bit of a drag, and lets the movie down.

Murugarren, an editor turned writer-director, finally hits on a tone that suits this dark but potentially comic subject in the ensuing decades of the story.

Seagrass is psychologically interesting, and touching here and there. But one can’t help but get the feeling our filmmaker never got out of the shallows.

Me Before You is a goofy, giddy doomed romance and female wish-fulfillment fantasy.

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.

It’s a wonder the horror masters at Blumhouse didn’t send him back for one last rewrite over this ending.

This picture’s just a clockwork contraption of clever “tools” used cleverly and little more, none of them more than Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere or whatever editing software they used to cut this sterile jewel into shape with.

I can’t say it wasn’t interesting to sit through, but Thieves never rises above a seriously long-winded B-movie, a shoot-em-up in which no matter how graphic the violence that the characters mete out and witness, nobody ever lets you forget they’re playing cops and robbers.

It is a puzzle without a particularly interesting (to my Western eyes) solution. Whatever its visual qualities, and really the only comparison points are the weirder Japanese anime efforts, the strangeness of it all makes it a confusing big screen experience.

The Hunter’s Prayer isn’t in that top drawer. But with action auteur Jonathan Mostow (“Breakdown”) behind the camera and Sam Worthington in front of it, it gives fair value — and then some — as it treads a well-worn path.

The settings are often striking as The Last City never lets you forget you’re dabbling in the avant garde, so it’s got that going for it.

When you slow everything to sleepwalk pacing, you deflate the frights and strip away the urgency that we and the characters should feel, the sense that something terrible is coming, that time is running out.

Plemons and Stone, who has become the director’s Oscar-winning muse, are terrifyingly real. And the allegory of a civilization in crisis lured like lemmings off this or that cliff of lunacy lands hard.

With scores of faith-based films about Christianity hitting movie screens every year, the sheer novelty of The Lady of Heaven makes it worth seeing, just as background on a religion most of us know very little about. That’s where the film excels, even if the many obstacles the production had to get around distracted one and all to the extent that they somewhat botched the messaging.

Yet another “Blade Runner” knock-off, a sci-fi dystopia about robots getting too smart for humanity’s own good on an already sun-cooked Earth.

Anonymous Club isn’t an invitation. Don’t know the lyrics? Kind of hard to make them out. Underwhelmed by this guitar snippet or that one? Well, she does like the label “slacker garage rock.” Leave this one to the fans.

It’s perfectly watchable, but let it play on during the bathroom breaks and search for snacks. It’s so slow you probably won’t miss anything vital, not until the third act.

The word that best fits it as a comedy, a romance and a coming-of-age story is “innocuous.” It’s just that at this point in history, after Neil Patrick Harris, after “Glee!,” “innocuous” doesn’t feel like enough.

It’s all very civilized and oh-so-French. But frankly, for all the posh settings and lovely costumes, all the lovely nudes and copulation, Curiosa is a chilly, unemotional drag. And the performances do little to warm things up.

Connolly’s film, formerly titled less poetically, “Backcountry,” has a lovely, wintry tone and a few minor surprises. The action sequences are competently handled, even if there’s little real suspense about what is coming and where this is going.

There’s merit in this story, which takes its hero on a circular path back to what anchors him in his world. But the novelty of the setting and the characters doesn’t mean we give the storyteller, who gets lost in the sordid sexual side of life above the Arctic Circle, a pass.

Nona never has much in the line of suspense, but that long tease of an opening act robs the film of the grim and gritty drama Polish skims over in the brothel passages. It doesn’t strip the story of its pathos. But the imbalance here is patience-testing and maddening.

Director Malcolm D. Lee (“Girls Trip,” “The Best Man”) and the credited screenwriters try to wring a little fun out of all this, and miss as often as they hit. But younger kids will eat up the eye candy and get a tiny taste of what The Looney Tunes were all about, even if this big budget monstrosity never comes close to the anarchy created by Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and the team at Warner Brothers’ “Termite Terrace.”

None of this film’s shortcomings took me totally out of it. I was drawn into the story, in spite of its “Oh come now” moments when our hero gets a break, or avoids having every bone broken by doing something nobody who has a choice would hazard.

The first act of “Queenpins” makes you giddy at the comic possibilities, but the finale is the final straw in the letdown it too-quickly becomes.