Roger Moore

In the end, it’s up to Rae (“Insecure”), at her most glamorous, and Stanfield (“Knives Out”) at his most romantic to put this over. And as they do, The Photograph develops into something rare in the movies this and most Valentine’s Days — a romance that feels romantic.

The end product isn’t remotely as bad as one might fear.

The movie isn’t much, but I’d love to visit the location.

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

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.

Yeah, it’s on-the-nose and plenty of the laughs are low-hanging fruit. But for guys with limited reach, this crew makes those easy laughs come easily, and unlike the film’s title, no pun intended.

This movie plays like the middle picture in a trilogy — a romance in a holding pattern. The arguments are realistic but inserted as mere plot requirements.

It doesn’t wholly come off, with back stories too thinly developed, pathos and cruelty blending with the whimsy of a New York con.

Woods rarely softens Goldie up for the viewer. But every now and then we see the bravado drop and her “hear” what the adults she consults and storms away from are telling her — “Child Services could help…What’s your PLAN?”

Seriously, if you can’t talk Sandler, who has a deal with Netflix, into dragging Wayans back from the dead for this, why bother?

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

As the “Nostradamus of fashion” (from Bozek’s written narration performed by “Sex and the City” star Parker), he had a higher calling. “He helped people ‘see’ in a new way.” Indeed he did. And The Times of Bill Cunningham helps us see him in a new way.

O’Brien and Pollack have nice chemistry, and the darkened rinks, offices and under-lit houses give the picture a pervasive, tragic gloom that the sketchy but conventionally structured story never lives down to.

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.

With faith-based films, message often trumps other considerations, not a happy situation in most movie genres. Faith, Hope & Love gets the “faith” in, and the “hope” and even a hint of “love.” It’s the comedy that lets this romantic comedy down.

A gonzo, gory and goofball B-movie about fathers, sons and killing or being killed.

Fence-straddling point-of view and well-worn story beats aside, Ly has crafted a tight, gimmick-free thriller.

It is a movie of magic and (sometimes) messy messaging, of carefree play with never a worry about meals or tetanus shots — a lot like Beasts of the Southern Wild.

The Whistlers is that rare cops-and-criminals picture that gives us a little to chew on and a new skill to practice — whistling.

Is The Lodge the most disturbing thriller of the year? Judas Priest, I hope so. Dark and despairing, grim and gripping, it’s not necessarily shocking. It doesn’t live or die on its “big twists.” But it gets in your head and messes around there. Just as it was designed to do. I can’t remember a horror movie that left me as gutted as this one.

An indie thriller with promise, if not quite the pace and polish it needs to deliver the drama, excitement and heartbreak.

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

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

Jokes, sparkling bits of dialogue, a few touching third act twists and laughs in surprising places.

Filmmaker Pack is a partisan hack and this is artless political agitprop.

It’s hard getting to be “Miss Americana.” It’s almost impossible to stay “Miss Americana.” This semi-intimate film gives mere mortals an appreciation of the personal cost of getting there, staying there and staying reasonably sane and happy as you do.

And when the credits roll, we cast our eyes about the theater at all the other paying patrons casting their eyes around the theater, all of us wondering the same thing. “Wait, that’s it?”

They made a promise, with their cool trailer, that their dull, bloody movie couldn’t keep.

"Dated,” quaint and tentative it may be. But Jenkins’ themes and big ideas make “Cane River” a debut film with promise, ambition and social currency.

The lyrics aren’t all that. But in an action film, it’s tempo that matters. The Rhythm Section never loses the beat.

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

The performances and the milieu, with its colorful colloquial speech and loving if blundering sisterly relationships, is what sells “Premature” and makes it an indie film well worth your time.

Movies about assassins (“Nine Hours to Rama,” “The Gandhi Murder”) rarely get this deeply into the life and conditions that inspire a political murder. “Incitement,” which swept last year’s Israeli Academy Awards and was Israel’s entry as “Best International Feature” for Hollywood’s Oscars, manages to be both thorough, damning and fraught throughout.

They turn a chilly environment warm and a conventional story into something surprising, lived-in, with the glorious romantic ache that too many romantic comedies can’t be bothered with.

But there’s no terror, here. None. Perhaps, before one more version of this novel is committed to the screen, some enterprising film executive with the power to secure financing or “green light” the project should read the bloody book and figure out if it has any currency in the age of “Paranormal Activity” or “Halloween” sequels or reboots. Because damned if I can think of a filmed version of it that works, and I’ve seen a few.

I found the entire enterprise a touching, rough-hewn delight, never sparing us the explicit sex and violence of Daniel’s life “before,” moist-eyed in seeing how his “outside the collar” thinking is a tonic for a tortured town that needs to move on.

Ritchie papers over a paper-thin story with artificial twists and very funny turns by the likes of Farrell, Grant, Marsan and Dockery.

The B-movie king is in rare form in Color Out of Space, a sci-fi thriller that might have been titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Magenta” had horror icon H.P. Lovecraft been born a lot later, and — you know — had a sense of humor.

It’s an utterly immersive Franco-Haitian gumbo, complete with flashbacks, “magic” as practiced by those who know “the old ways,” teen hormones and the zombi origin story.

The film’s brevity means some ideas are under-developed. But what we’re left with is a sublime and sublimely simple portrait of a love that’s been lived in and the devotion it will take to ensure that endures.

Director William Kaufman is no Walter Hill, but his shootouts — and there are many — are competent. It’s not a good script and it’s not a good thriller, so this isn’t much better than his earlier efforts (“The Hit List,” “The Prodigy”).

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

There’s a sense of fence-sitting in the film’s point of view, embracing free will, while waffling on “tradition” and arranged marriages within an insular culture. It’s not unpleasant, just grating and in many instances, too familiar to be much fun. Kind of “meh,” overall.

Boy, Assassination 33 A.D. doesn’t lack for ambition. By turns prophetic and pious, pistol-packing and profane, it is the nuttiest “Jesus movie” since “Life of Brian.”

It’s fanciful enough, but Weathering with You is too scattered with dashes of dullness making for many dead spots. It’s not on a par with virtually anything the anime master Hiyao Miyazaki made, and falls well short of the heart of “Your name.”

It’s not about the game, or even “how they played the game.” It’s how the game shapes who they are or will become, for good or ill.

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.

Until Lee finds himself a story editor and a more literate, genre-savvy group of readers to workshop his screenplays, until he figures out that hitching his wagon to a star who is more “available” than charismatic, these films are never going to hide their malnourished, rushed origins.

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 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.

The score, by Alexis Maingaud, is horror strings on steroids and quite lovely. Director Andrew Desdmond and his production designer and cinematographer conjure up a properly spooky look and setting — overcast skies, dimly-lit chambers, a foggy forest. But the script delivers very little punch or pace to let that creepy vibe pay off.

It’s seriously uninspired, lifeless and lame, “noño.”

The scenario here is soapy and a tad familiar. But Cheng’s vivid depiction of the life going on all around his characters . . . enriches the story and makes José, his life, his world and his predicament something anyone can relate to.

There’s nothing here to hold one’s interest more than 30 minutes. By that time, the viewer is as winded as the hapless cast.

There just isn’t enough to this script to make the Bowie premise of the picture a promise the movie can keep.

There’s just enough chemistry to the film to be daunting, and it would be easy to get lost in the “endocrine disruptors” and “estrogen mimics” in the wares of almost every company that wants us to not smell, lighten our skin or clean our hair.

It’s a rather harmless confection, hanging on a likable turn by Martínez and a few amusing moments from young Miss Carbonell. But the comic and romantic payoffs are limp, and the picture wanders on past its climax.

Few movies are as instantly-awful as Expo, a thriller your average viewer will be too discerning to not switch off mere moments past the credits. In a world of A, B and C-thrillers, here’s a D-or-worse one — ineptly scripted, badly acted, violent and stupid in the laziest ways.

Michael Jai White’s better than this. He should be getting better offers, should be a household name. Hollywood let the man down.

A Patient Man is a cagey tale of loss, grief, guilt and revenge.

If nobody in Hollywood has snapped up the rights to this for an English-language remake, they’re missing the boat. Eye for an Eye is a simple sharp Spanish thriller that rarely blinks.

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

Once the picture finally gets around to what it’s supposed to be doing, it almost turns exciting and visceral, and it kind of makes sense. Nothing shows viscera and blood to better advantage than white on white clothing and decor — spattered and arterial sprayed. All a bit too little entirely too late, here.

Nothing to Lose 2 is one of the most pointless sequels ever, as it recovers too much of the same persecuted and rising above it ground.

This is so perfunctory and edge-free that it plays as incomplete, a movie “talked” into great reviews by hearing the filmmaker’s personal connection to the story.

This is like watching the paint dry in the still-new Tyler Perry Studios soundstages.

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

The Edge of Democracy won’t convince that “It CAN happen here.” It’ll make you wonder how far down the hole we’ve already tumbled.

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.

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

Sheen and Banderas make their characters fun, but they’re the only ones.

The first half of the story is far more intriguing than the second, and “The Host” goes almost wholly wrong from that magic moment AFTER we wonder, “Just what the Hell is going on here?”

It’s a deathly unfunny comedy, and staggeringly incompetent to boot.

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

Ofra Bloch is a psychotherapist, specializing in trauma, who always wanted to be a filmmaker. But it’s her actual profession, not her preferred one, that makes her documentary Afterward a valuable document.

Underwater’s a goof — a fun bad movie and a perfectly fine way to waste 90 minutes at the cinema.

Like a Boss delivers a solid opening twenty minutes, and a few laughs, here and there, after that. Just not enough.

Have we learned anything? Have the “Bond villains” at the heart of this story been discouraged from repeating their actions? Do we have any idea what can be done, and is anything at all BEING done?

American Factory is too dispassionate to be a rallying cry, too sobering to be a “wake-up call,” but still a terrific fly-on-the-wall look at the struggles of America’s working class.

Just Mercy is a movie about a touchstone case that proved that to be a lie, a righteous, well-intentioned but uneven emotional roller coaster of a film that plays it safe a little too often itself.

Caan, Gossett, Sorvino and the rest get to work, everybody puts some effort in. But man — let’s wish for better things for everybody involved, save for the screenwriter.

As with most every film, there’s the germ of a good idea here — a faintly-edgy faith-based music movie with an unconventional leading lady and a story arc that avoids conventional “Star is Born” dynamics. It’s just that nobody involved seems to have a grasp of what they could do with this, other than the most predictable choices.

The first hair-raising moment comes 50 minutes in, but the deaths are anti-climactic even as the chilling tone is maintain, largely through dim lighting and very good actors

Advocate is a reminder to audiences everywhere of the importance of the rule of law, its equal application and appointing judges who understand that importance.

Director Dillard & Co. had a promising minimalist horror pitch, but blew it in execution.

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

Powley, a delight in “”Diary of a Teenage Girl” and “A Royal Night Out,” can be applauded for trying something darker, but the checkbox script and pedestrian direction Marius A. Markevicius, who produced Peter Weir’s escape from Siberia thriller “The Way Back,” let her down.

Devolves from quiet character study into full-blown, over-the-top “star vehicle” in its last act.

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

A revealing, intimate and interesting peek behind the fresco-bedecked walls of an institution trapped in a past of its own invention, confronting a future in which it still relies on a succession of very old men to meet.

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.

Three films in, and Ridley has mastered the fierce scowl and “stick the landing” poses of a superhero movie. She has not, in any sense, created a character who moves us with her expressions of fear or grief. Every time somebody she cares about dies, it’s dry tears all around.

The effect is a movie that has a couple of great scenes tucked into a brilliantly excruciating tale that will not let go of its feeling of dread, or its manic energy.

Gerwig’s concocted a fresh, frothty and fun take on a timeworn classic, the perfect family film for the holidays.

The laughs may be a little too easy — dressing ANYbody up as Geraldo Rivera is a cheap guffaw — and the messaging too pointed and lopsided to appeal to every viewer.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a man who may or may not be a serial killer in Awake, a thriller that promises to start quickly and find a fresh twist or two by the end, and fails at both.

McGuiness, the daughter of U-2 impressario Paul McGuiness, got Irish Film Board money to make this, and that was money flushed down an Irish drain. Whatever she was getting at, she doesn’t really get at it. And if you’re here looking to unravel “What this was all about,” I feel your pain.

Smith’s easy way with a joke keeps the tone light, and for all the mayhem, this is still pretty fluffy and cute. It’s not “The Incredibles,” but it’s a reasonable and quite amusing facsimile.

In Woodard’s stillness is a singularly great performance from a career decorated with them.

It took a lot to get through this, because I re-HEEEL-ly hated that stupid, talky, bloody and endless opening chase. I’ll cut it a teensy bit of slack for A) Ryan Reynolds and B) that really cool effect at the end...But that’s it. Done with this. Unless it becomes a damned franchise.

It’s misshapen and clumsy, start to finish.

It’s a lovely, immersive experience, a movie that invites the viewer to ponder the nature of conscience, the bravery of conscientous objecting and the realization of how what happened there could happen anywhere that people embrace ignorance and hate, and others either go along with them, or do nothing.

Black Christmas has a female empowerment “woke/revenge” subtext, making it a slap in the face to the “torture porn” decade of horror. Sorority girls, hunted on a college campus where this sort of thing may have been going on through time immemorial, turn the tables on their tormentors...Great...If only they’d get around to that a tad earlier. But no, we’ve got to have an hour of summary slaughter, a collection of the dullest, least sympathetic and most poorly set-up murders in the history of Dead Teenager Movies.

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.

Allen has long been an actress with perfectly expressive eyes, and wearing her years with grace has been a hallmark of her recent work. Yes, she gets to show Nora still has “some fight” left in her. No, Nora doesn’t come off as reasonable when she does.

Eastwood’s made some bad movies in recent years, along with some gems. This is the first film of his I’ve seen since his organutan co-star days that had me embarrassed for him.

Still, lovely as it often is, Atlantics isn’t as deep as it wants to come off and isn’t anybody’s idea of a great film. But in the world it depicts and the vivid characters inhabiting it, it is engaging, informative and absolutely worth your while — perfectly Netflixable.

The Next Level is a game too glitchy to stick with long enough to finish, so limited in appeal that it’d be under the tree Christmas Eve, consigned to a closet or basement storage by New Year’s.

A historically and dramatically sloppy version of the“Apalachin Conference” made on a shoestring and starring David Arquette.

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

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.

Honey Boy just tells us one story, with judgement and compassion, with an honesty that surprises and moves us. And it leaves it to us to decide if it was all worth it, if indeed the end justifies the means. You will never look at a child’s performance in a film or TV show the same way after this.

The animation’s not bad, the songs aren’t much, the jokes are even less. Tiny, tiny tykes might find something to like about it. But long-review-short here — it’s too dull to sit through, too noisy to sleep through.

If this rainforest bespoiling melodrama leaves the viewer unsatisfied, that’s because there is no happy ending here. You can’t help but think as you’re leaving the film that everything you saw here was doomed, save for the bureaucrats and Wall Street types. Everything green and everyone living in the green is under threat.

I can’t say Wish Man is a great film, or even a particularly good one. But it has heart, Steel & Co. make it likeable and writer-director Davies makes its emotional payoff pay off.

Taut, smart and satisfying, I See You is the sleeper of the month, and should put Graye on the radar as a screenwriter to watch. And it should remind Hollywood that if smart cookie Helen Hunt sees something in it, this is a project worth filming.

There are laughs and moments of warmth. And there are annoyingly familiar confrontations that have a grounding in legitimate cultural grievances, but which a lot of funny shouting cannot resolve, during or After Class.

Its moments of whimsy have a forced, static quality, and never feel anything but scripted, contrived and stiff. But taken as science fiction, which is what this is, Anya is a provocative tale of human genetics, cultural isolation and ethnic necessity grafted onto an unlikely coupling and what that couple wants out of this relationship.

In Fabric takes a while to settle in, and that goes for the viewing experience, too. It takes a few minutes for us to surf the wave Strickland wants us on, to get in sync with the vibe he’s going for...But rare is the horror movie that finds off-the-rack laughs in everything from ’70s fashions and consumerism to ’70s British sex and slang, and does it with haute couture style.

Director Luke Lorentzen (“New York Cuts”) puts us in the front seat of the Med Care van staffed by the men of the Ochoa family, freelance entrepreneurs trying to feed and care for a big family from inside an ambulance. Their story has thrills and compassion, hard luck and grief.

1917 loses its urgency just enough to make you notice and wonder “What are these two doing? Get BACK to the MISSION!”

The best one can say about The Mandela Effect is that it’s a fascinating, if heartless, failure, skimming the surface of the conspiracy, not doing justice to the tragedy. Even if it ensures that we never, ever watch “Looney Toons (Tunes)” the same way again.

It almost (but not quite) defies description.

The lack of dramatic fireworks mute the film’s impact somewhat. And young Ms. Nelson has an unfortunate tendency to mumble, swallow her lines.

Does this stylistically unstylish picture stand with the lurid glories of “Casino,” the pulse-pounding narrative drive and cinema semiotics of “The Departed,” or the charismatic cynicism of “Goodfellas?” Give me a freaking break.

A great movie like Dark Waters reminds us of what happened, of just what the “system” failed to do to safeguard us. And it reminds us of what a legal crusade looks like — a years-long grind of discovery, depositions, evidence and trials, and to be thankful for dogged, dull pluggers like Robert Bilott who stopped a mass murder in progress, armed with only a degree from “a no name law school.”

American Son never quite lapses into terrible, but as with a play that needs another week of out of town tryouts, it “never gets on its feet,” either.

A Million Little Pieces is little more than a million little melodrama rehab cliches.

The germ of a good idea is here, the dialogue isn’t awful even if the finale kind of is.

On the whole, The Knight Before Christmas is one to skip, a sweet nothing that’s a lot more “nothing” than sweet.

Like the other famous current example of the mercurial, dimwitted bullying, sexually abusive misogynist/narcissist, we know the True Believers’ epiphany won’t be something they welcome.

Queen & Slim is an African American art film channeling a 1970s blaxploitation, on-the-lam-from-the-law road picture vibe. As its riveting, rambling, geographically-inept two hours roll by, lurid visions of the blaxploitation cinema of that era bubble through an indie spin on “Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry,” “Sugarland Express” and “Vanishing Point.”

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.

Too little is made of the actual closure of the bridges, of the tightening net closing in on the pursued.

It’s all a bit much, as the picture’s two halves are in no way equal, and the post climax scenes, reaching for “healing,” tend to soften the film’s blows. The emotions stick, but feel rather flat after the tension and release of the opening scenes. That robs Waves of the gut punch we feel coming, even after the anti-climax has slow-walked out of the gate.

It plays like an animated musical built around forgettable tunes and impressive animated effects that were cooked up before the script was decided on.

But even if this film of a Susanna Jones novel makes a middling whodunit, it’s still a fine vehicle for Vikander, an actress of quiet reserve and inner fury. She and the exotic setting lift Earthquake Bird, even if it never fully takes flight.

A solid, engrossing docudrama — staged and acted — not, as its director claims, a documentary. That still doesn’t rob the film of its simple power, the suspense of wondering just who will turn on whom, and if elephants will be killed in the bargain.

The scenario is pro forma, the dialogue trite and the fights often staged at walk-through speed. Some of the performances are achingly amateurish.

The O’Hair virtues depicted here are that she was brave, defiant and when the need arose, articulate. And if history has taught us nothing, it’s that she was ahead of her times and probably right most of the time. One has to see through a pretty ugly movie to glean that, though. This is an ugly portrait, perhaps unfairly so.

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.

At the end of the day, ordinary people trying to get justice or revenge or closure on their own, or providing that as a paid service that they’re ill-equipped to deliver, is damned funny.

It’s an authoritative take on “How we got here.” And it’s a lot to take in, almost too much at times. But Citizen K serves up these insights — from an admittedly tarnished “hero” who has used his exile to attempt to induce change — in Gibney’s usual arresting style. We’re meant to be appalled, edified and forewarned.

She had to be more charismatic than this to inspire over the ages.

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

It’s just that mutual admirers Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager, two smug, smirking jerks having a conservative ‘free speech” circle smirk, aren’t the guys to host such a debate and give it a high-minded fair hearing in this most divisive of eras.

It’s not remotely as polished as the earlier contenders in the field, but “Klaus” is good enough to have earned a theatrical release, on a par with MGM’s “The Addams Family,” in any event.

But damn, this thing is pretty much joyless — no fun at all. Reports of Stewart’s gifts as a budding comedienne have been wildly-exaggerated, the one-liners don’t land and the story’s a non-starter and a bit of a downer, to boot.

Frankie is filled with absurdly frank confessions and moments of over-sharing as a stellar cast breaks up into pairs for scenes that don’t so much go anywhere as flesh in the back stories in front of one of the loveliest tourist towns on The Continent.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a biographical essay in sweetness and light.

And The Good Liar lapses into being “The Poor” one in a movie that’s become both more far-fetched and utterly conventional.

As weighty as a snowflake, and just as prone to turn to mush at room temperature, Let It Snow is a holiday comedy that sits right in Netflix’s wheelhouse.

The performances here, gathered mostly at campsight jam sessions, under the various meet-and-pick tents all over Felts Park in Galax, or on the stages there, are just jaw dropping.

Burning Cane has great regional cinema bonafides, a bit of film festival hype and the rhythm of poetry in its images, human connections, monologues and gloom.

Mickey and the Bear is to be relished for its performances and its gritty indie cinema sense of place.

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.

I still found it engrossing, and in a country where most hotels have chambermaids that look just like Evelia, occasionally moving and often troubling.

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

A proper whodunit, as twist-turny as you might expect, and as amusingly edgy and cutting as its title suggests.

The banter is, first scene to last, awful. Delivering bad dialogue at top speed doesn’t make it better, Ms. Clarke.

The awkward moments outnumber the actually amusing ones, and neither is much evident in this script.

Every wrinkle in the plot is nakedly contrived, an obvious screenplay convenience. Every gag is given away. Every one-liner vanishes into the void. Kids may love projectile poop gags, but even they should be able to smell the odor Playing with Fire puts out there.

Crown Vic isn’t a bad picture. It’s just too unexceptional to stand out.

It stands with the greatest racing movies ever, and it’s certainly the most entertaining. But there is no doubt about one last superlative. Ford v Ferrari is one of the best pictures of the year.

I can’t stress enough how undemanding, easy-going, predictable and familiar this comedy is. Nor can I stress enough how well its tried-and-true ingredients blend, how much it feels grounded in a place and the people there.

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.

“Not awful” is Emmerich’s victory, here.

The Disappearance of My Mother captures the 1960s supermodel turned ’70s (and beyond) Marxist/feminist, a striking figure who raised children by building an afterlife of journalism, activism and education.

None of the performances of these unlikable characters grab you, give the viewer a sense of what’s at stake and why we should care. There’s also something very “Entourage” about Inside Game, both in the “guys from the neighborhood” group dynamic and the toxic sexism that the film practically embraces.

The “meet cute” kind of works. Almost. Somewhat.

Cousins may be a cinematic novelty in Brazil, but aside from the nudity (more or less tastefully handled), there’s little novel or entertaining for film audiences this far north, just titillation.

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

There’s precious little action, and beavers with Italian accents, weasels with German and French ones (“Vive l’resistence!”) and zero laughs spread over 92 minutes.

Tubman’s case to be on the $20 bill, as a heroine straight out of American myth, is made, a brave Christian woman sprinting down the path of the righteous. Harriet stumbles when it makes her more prophetic and less a woman of action than she was.

The picture waddles here and there, spills lots of blood, reaches its climax, and then goes on and on past it. Too much of a good thing? Don’t be ridiculous.

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.”

I had high hopes for this. The trailers really play up the sentimental tug of bringing Hamilton back on the payroll. But damn, “Dark Fate” is dull.

Ximei makes a quietly compelling heroine, and the filmmakers — who can be seen questioning the men in sunglasses following her around — do her their greatest service in just letting her tell her story, just letting their camera capture the indifference, fear and fury that has been officialdom’s knee-jerk reaction to her cause.

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

The world doesn’t need another movie or TV series about the Texas football obsession (Leland was in “Friday Night Lights,” too). It surely doesn’t need another African American athlete claiming “I ain’t smart like my mama” in search of a way out via athletics.

The chaotic violence, when co-writers/director Guido van Driel and Lennert Hillege dish it out, is frenetic — a drunk’s weaving and teetering hand-held camer chase, sudden turns towards the brutal, an assault that seems to come out of nowhere — to a drunk.

Horror movies succeed or fail in a lot of ways, but the real Achilles heel of too many of them is in front of the camera. The actors don’t commit, don’t get across terror, panic, paranoia or rage. That’s an issue here.

With Parasite [Bong] transcends genre even as he sharpens his social satire skills, delivering a movie that will resonate from Seoul to Syracuse, Helsinki to Hong Kong, one of the great films of 2019.

Hopkins makes an interesting, confused and increasingly dubious victim/hero/survivor. But the whole doesn’t answer any questions, not that it asks any interesting ones in the first place.

As a film, it’s not particularly revealing and adds little to what we know and understand about Young.

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.

It’s not highbrow entertainment. Movies like this always feel “designed,” like a theme park ride — story beat, JOLT, exposition exposition JOLT, etc. But Countdown manages the bare minimum — the occasional shock, characters we root for, thanks to the actors playing them, and situations fraught enough that the audience is talking back to the screen.

What I can’t say is that Greener Grass is much of a movie, that it held together for me. It’s like three “Upright Citizens Brigade” episodes, built on a common cast and haphazzardly selected themes, barely jelling into a “story.” Still, see “Greener Grass” for the set pieces.

I don’t want to overssell Black and Blue. It doesn’t transcend its genre. But it doesn’t waste our time, modulates its chase with alternating brisk and slow pacing, hand-held camera sprints interrupted by bursts of violence and stops, every so often, at a moral crossroad.

The Great Alaskan Race reaches for those tears, but may best be appreciated by being the most historically accurate — if fictionalized and not wholly complete — version of this story we’re likely to get.

Western Stars isn’t misguided. It’s just dull and self-serious. But if you’re Bruce Springsteen, nobody around you’s going to point that out.

It’s Soderbergh’s shot at “The Big Short,” and it falls somewhat short. It’s convoluted, basically because it has to be. The story is necessarily episodic as the cast of characters is international and hard to pin down and connect. If you’re lost, you’re not alone. The evidence suggests Soderbergh and his screenwriter were, too.

With this “Director’s Cut,” Gomez-Rejon and his editors have saved a witty, well-acted and gorgeous-looking movie and given it the heart, history and intellectual heft it needed to come off.

Every artist has a hint of the self-obsessed navel-gazer about her or him. And Serendipity has its share of that. And suffice it to say, if you’re not into modern conceptual art, this isn’t for you. But if you are, there’s something celebratory in this artist obsessed with female sexuality, fertility and the female form taking this potentially deadly diagnosis and making art out of it.

The Lighthouse stands apart as one of the beautifully composed, shot and acted films of the year, as well as the most harrowing.

If Woody Harrelson can’t make Elvis jokes land, you know your movie’s in trouble.

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

In the month since this documentary went into limited release, it’s proven prophetic about events as crimes are alleged or revealed in Washington. Where’s My Roy Cohn? even seems to predict how the tidal wave of high crimes and misdemeanors might play out.

The endless on-and-on-it-goes finale grasps for emotions it only earns by being so very appalling in the build up to it. One doesn’t feel redeemed or revived after enduring it. Just relief.

Lucy in the Sky is a Lifetime Original Movie-style melodrama, over-thought, over-scripted and over-directed into something spacey, ethereal and trippy by the guy who gave us TV’s “Legion.”

In Peter Ambrosio’s witty, biting and amusingly inconsequential indie comedy, Natasha (Dasha Nekrasova) is a woman with shades, a red trench coat and a mission.

It’s an amusing gloss on a punk icon who never gave up the rebellion and never let go of the safety pins.

Miller has pulled some far-flung threads together to create a fascinating “state of the struggle” report, one that women like Hussein are fighting, one speech, one interview, one graphic demonstration of FGM at a time.

The choppy, episodic-TV vignettes-“story” never works in a feature film. But there is a “Breaking Bad” logic to the narrative.

There’s little beyond the grey-and-grim production design here that one would venture so far as to call it “great.” But Fractured provides an interesting mystery, engrossing story and a couple of superb action beats, more than enough to make it “Netflixable.”

Devine? Still an acquired taste that defies acquisition.

There’s little that I’d call hilarious here, as Operator is more smart, smooth and droll than laugh-out-loud funny.

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.

You might might grin at the nostalgia of it all, an inventive moment or two, but little else.

It’s as interesting a failure as I’ve run across this year, a hollowed-out holiday wallow in regrets that wear into scar tissue, the only thing that dulls the depression and justifies the fatalism of seeing all your deferred dreams and delusions, bad bets and poor choices come home to roost in a single day.

It’s a showcase for Vietnamese actress, model and pretty-convincing martial artist Veronica Ngo (Ngo Van Tranh), who takes beating after beating, and delivers beating after beating, as she brawls her way through the child-trafficking trade of Indochina.

A movie with a whole lot of running around, zero pathos, no romance — one of the many holes in Will Smith’s movie acting game — and a central conceit that’s given away in the trailers.

The Consequences here are a movie that’s more intriguing than arresting, and not harrowing enough to be the most convincing recreation of the real thing.

It’s a routine thriller with a far-fetched, not-entirely medically-defensible premise (hero with knife in chest). Still, Edge of Fear could have been much worse than the sometimes-tense, sometimes mediocre mixed bag it turns out to be.

Secret Obsession never looks like anything more than the quick, cheap and under-developed hack job that it is.

It’s not bad. But it’s not surprising either.

The formula may be worn from a dozen or more Hollywood pictures covering the same ground. But the novelty of the setting and the working class characters and accents — “D’y-knowhutImean?” — are fresh.

Hopelessly out of date, and even more out of date for the fact that the folks making it don’t realize that in the first place.

This movie is fascinating on a lot of levels.

As pretty as everything and everyone are in this vapid film, there’s nothing to disentangle here, no empathetic performance to cling no matter what sympathies we bring to someone going through this.

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

The grace notes don’t obscure the ugly situation we’re shown here. It’s not compact, perfectly organized film, but The Cave is an honest fly-on-the-wall/cinema verite portrait of a place and a couple of the people working in it.

Carrie Pilby never rises to the level of hateful, or even annoying. It never rises above mediocre, and that’s the problem.

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

Too slow, too few funny lines to go with a couple of promising comic situations, Ready to Mingle turns out to have been the wrong title to translate this tie-the-knot-of-die comedy to. They left out the “Not.”

The film loses much of its lean, mean narrative drive when we get into group dynamics — who can you trust, who has been drinking the tall grass KoolAid — and the whole supernatural mumbo-jumbo “explaining” what they’re dealing with, and how they can escape it, takes over In the Tall Grass.

Sullivan sparkles. Nobody else does, and that smothers the movie, surprise or no surprise.

As foul-mouthed and politically-incorrect (era appropriate) as Dolemite is My Name is, it is a classic Hollywood feel-good movie, a sentimental tale of an underdog overcoming obstacle after obstacle to follow his bliss.

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.

It’s not the worst time travel tale ever, but it does earn the most dismissive assessement you can give a movie in this genre. It’s not worth your time.

Love the scenery (not enough of it), hated most everything else about Under the Eiffel Tower.

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

A watchable failure, at best.

A film that starts feebly, gets its feet under it, but never goes anywhere.

It’s well-acted and broadly sympathetic, but a time-killer of a comedy that kills too much time for its own good.

On a musical bio-pic scale, this isn’t “Rocketman” or “Bohemian Rhapsody,” not “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” “Sweet Dreams” or “Get on Up.” It’s unfortunately a lot closer to “Jimi: All is By My Side.” Uncanny in its impersonation, flat as a movie, forgettable as a biography.

There’s more to a dark comedy than a really dark crime, more to a thriller than a slo-motion pursuit and more to the rural South than arch, slow redneck stereotypes.

This is tedium itself.

Yeah, Head Count loses its head in the third act. Whatever promise it had is long gone by then (there’s little urgency among the stoners, the threat seems more existential than real). And in a crowd of characters we have zero time to develop empathy for (like their director, they’re all beautiful), when the Big Moment comes, the only sane response is “Who cares?”

Fun, fun stuff. And scary? Yes, but not necessarily in the ways you might think going in.

Davis flirts with dazzling, at times, all dolled up in a tri-cornered hat, a shower curtain for a cape and a horse to ride into negotiations with. It’s a delightful performance as a deranged character, somebody who has let the proliferation of construction cranes in Miami drive him nuts.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle isn’t for the torture porn crowd, and R-rated horror fanatics will no doubt find it dull. They won’t be totally in the wrong for thinking so. But the rest of us can appreciate the chill and growing dread that only a most sympathetic Shirley Jackson adaptation can deliver, that only a production as accomplished as this can manage.

There’s a funny movie in the “big city sophisticates SHOCKED by the transgressive nonsense that goes on in a small (college) town.” This isn’t it.

This “Affair,” as it stands, is nothing to die for, or even catch a cold over. The execution here, bland direction (a veteran of “The Mirror 2” behind the camera), colorless dialogue and performances pitched as almost mild-mannered (save for Welliver) earn this one a bored shrug.

The emptiness of oligarchy and a ruling kleptocracy feels both distinctly Italian and innately universal in Loro.

The film is a portait in dogeddness and going against the current thinking in cancer treatment and research.

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.

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.

So far, in Monroe, where white folks interviewed in the film Always in Season lament the reenactment and gripe about “leaving the past alone,” nobody’s talked.

No, the “subjects” aren’t interesting. At all.

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

“Last Blood?” Let’s hope so.

Trauma is a Time Machine is a film whose weighty subject matter doesn’t demand this sort of obscurant treatment. It’s self-conscious to a fault.

Auggie isn’t “Her,” but it’s short enough to hold our interest, even if it’s not engrossing enough to manage anything more.

Moore, doing a variation of her vile “Disclosure” character from back in the ’90s, makes a fine foil for the others, who only need sharper lines and more inventive situations to give this picture a chance. Which it never has.

If you haven’t sampled the works of Miike before now, here’s the perfect introduction. And yakuza action-comedy fans, you never forget your First Love.

Whatever its virtues, the film comes together more adroitly than satisfyingly. Think of Zeroville as an artifact, worth looking at as a piece of pre-history that cannot — at present — shed its baggage, and frankly didn’t need that off-screen baggage to be a bust.

Jeffrey Wright plays the world weary library director trying to keep the peace and hold on to some semblance of the institution’s core mission — a fact delivering, education supplementing bastion of learning, civic responsibility and civility. That’s one thing The Public absolutely nails.

“In moments of great upheaval,” Broadway wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda declares, hinting at the dark politics of bigotry and anti-semitism on the rise here and abroad, “‘Fiddler’ is going to seem relevant.”

It begins as a chatty, catty and not that amusing or harrowing hostage tale that falls well short of “thriller,” and devolves into something less.

Yes, we’ve filled the atmosphere with levels of carbon dioxide not seen in 66 million years of geologic time. But at least we get our own “epoch,” the Anthropocene, named after us. And there’s a smidgen of cautious hope underscoring much of what we see here.

Fazili has made an otherwise-unblinking cell-phone verite film of the crisis of our times, a first-person account of what people who cannot live where they are do to save themselves. Nobody watching “Midnight Traveler” can come away from it unimpressed, even if some are determined to look on this crisis and remain unmoved.

Just when you give up on the intended comedy ever coming together, it dives into something edgier. But that flip-flop is only a tease for a movie that never was, and probably never was going to be funnier than the one they ended up making, which is as charmless as it is laughless.

We few, we not-easily-bored few, can catch “The Goldfinch” in a theater and revel in unerringly modulated performances — everybody is so softspoken that the verbal explosions have alarming violence about them — and a world we might envy, or at least resent a little bit.

Tall Girl may miss, but it doesn’t miss by much.

She’s not unattractive, except when the movie goes out of its way to make her so. But Bell’s screen presence isn’t warm or engaging and the script’s jokes aren’t good enough to transform that.

Ad Astra (Latin for “To the Stars”) has dazzling eye candy and reasonable extrapolations of what near future space colonization might look like...But like too many imitation “Space Odysseys,” it flunks that most basic test applied to science fiction of this nature. It doesn’t make us care what happens, and I, for one, don’t care to see it again.

Actor turned writer-director Larry Fessenden (“Beneath,” “Wendigo”) seeks to distract us from the well-worn path by talking us to death. There are endless scenes of the doctor (David Call of “Tiny Furniture”) “teaching” the creation he names “Adam” (CLE-verrr) the fundamentals of life.

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.

It’s those human touches that make 3 Days with Dad endurable. And if they don’t quite save it (the difference between character actors and leading actors is not skill, but charisma), they at least give it purpose, with the occasional break for levity.

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.

Hustlers finds awkward laughs in female-on-male cruelty, loses its nerve in the late acts, but finds its heart in the finale. And it hits the “I don’t want to depend on anybody” empowerment message awfully hard.

The saving grace of “As It Was” is Gallagher’s saving grace as well, that John Lennon-meets-John Lydon voice, the songs he wrote or co-wrote that brought him back from the dead, the album that restored his place in British rock.

It’s stunning stuff. But lacking a story, per se, and with no narrative drive, Aquarela is almost sleep-inducing, like a loop playing on super-high-resolution video on the screen.

Much of that plays like politically correct lip service, and like much of this Downton Abbey, feels unnecessary. But that’s the thing about a cinematic feast for the eyes and the ears like this. You trim the fat, you run the risk of making the whole meal tasteless and dull.

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

American Dreamer is riveting to sit through, but too pitiless to embrace.

Imprisoned never escapes its lack of drive, never takes on the urgency this scenario promises.

Scarborough asks us to get past the nudity, the sexual heat and blatant titillation and consider the dynamics and consequences of these situations.