Roger Moore

There is never a moment I didn’t wholly buy into the Two Emmas and their delicious on-screen rivalry. But there isn’t a moment where you lean back, laugh and revel at what glorious fun this is, when it plainly could have been and should have been.

It’s still nasty fun, just not as nasty and acridly funny as that ’80s comic trio of Turner, Douglas and DeVito were able to make it.

While there are a couple of laughs and comical come-uppances, the picture drowns in its own gore.

Its the laugh-out-loud brazen chutzpah of it all and Huppert’s cocksure, casual and lie-on-the-fly amorality in the title role that gives Mama Weed her buzz. Huppert has never been sunnier or funnier.

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

Repetitious, tedious, and pretty much joyless.

As B-movies about Hitler’s corpse and who might have a use for it — then, and now — go, Burial manages to be watchable, even when it’s making your eyes roll.

“The Vote” was on PBS’s “American Experience,” the gloriously acrid “Mrs. America” on Hulu and the sweet Helen Reddy biopic “I Am Woman” came to theaters and streaming. The Glorias rides the crest of that wave, the best project of the lot, and quite possibly the film of the year.

As long as their are little lives worth a little intense scrutiny, there’ll be indie films like Sam & Kate, pleasant diversions that give legendary stars the indulgence of a victory lap, this time with their kids along for the ride.

The whole affair feels corporate, cooked-up-by-committee.

Beuys isn’t a film that lays out, in simple, clear terms, what he and his work are about. But Veiel does manage to refresh our memories of Beuys, and let the man — in his own (subtitled) words, re-make the case that art is “a blow against the enemy,” a revolution.

Somehow, writer-director Sean Mullin’s short, far-fetched love affair comedy charms and works more often than not.

Much more of a mixed bag of a movie than you’d hope. A “broken system” isn’t going to be driven to change by pulled punches like this one.

“Force of Nature” is more solid and perfunctory than the even more exotic and atmospheric “The Dry.” But the players, the situations and the twists, which are pretty good, recommend it.

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

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.

What works beautifully are the grace notes to the craft of acting, to first love/first marriage.

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.

A drama about an aged actor lost in his old roles, with two caregivers indulging his “harmless” dementia and acting out his old scripts with him, it lacks anything in the way of wit and much that would make it dramatic.

You don’t expect a movie about The Holocaust to be flippant, glib almost.

Moore makes this caricature of 1950s motherhood a down-to-Earth delight.

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.

Smith peoples the film with the same cast, including Kris Kristofferson as Hazel’s grandpa and Tom Nowicki as the aquarium’s benefactor. There just isn’t enough for them all to do. Freeman gets the few funny lines, which are all the same.

Osage County does offer up one almost-heartbreaking moment. But it’s so icky that, like the rest of the film, you kind of want to wash it out of your mouth — with supermarket Merlot — rather than savor it.

The picture feels cluttered, with the big set pieces outlined and diagrammed and arriving at precise moments in the 160 minutes of the movie.

If you’re patient enough to stick around for the wilder third act, Spin Me Round kind of turns things around. Not quite enough, but close.

But the violence, when it comes, is shocking. The native cunning, when it makes itself known, is chilling.

It’s a garish mess, more interesting as a concept and production design exercise than as a movie. But you’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Storm Over Brooklyn is a tense, tight and timely film that reminds us that America itself has been doing the same — trying its best to ignore something that’s been there, for those willing or forced to see it, all along.

Even if Hurley has only one movie in him and this hit-and-miss proposition is it, Hurley’s personal story is fresh and engaging enough to stand out, a coming-of-age saga with modest ambitions that get to the heart of some still “self evident” truths — the freedom to be who you are, life your life and pursue your own dream of America.

I laughed at some of the lunacy, found myself checking my watch by the third act’s inevitable overkill. But if you can’t see the fun in Helen Mirren taking the wheel of a purple Nobler supercar and one-handing it — backwards — through the darkened streets of Olde London Towne, this isn’t for you.

The smart, subdued finale is the only one that we’d believe and accept — logical, and damning and thought-provoking, not unlike the thriller than precedes it.

Brewer gave the film a little Southern hip hop, and brought in real Southerners Quaid, Andie MacDowell and Ray McKinnon to further Southernize it.

The visceral visuals make this a barely-serviceable/watchable summer popcorn picture. But the bar was set high too long ago for that to be enough for America’s Bond.

Longoria keeps her directing eyes on the “feel-good movie” prize, which limits the film’s ambition as we bounce from scene to uplifting scene, many of them involved adorable moppets taste-testing very hot chili baths to bake into the Cheetohs.

Start to finish, it’s a bloody delightful romp.

Jenkins is one of my favorite actors, but this strikes me as one he should have passed on. McGhie comes off better, but his character’s background is sloppily sketched-in.

Well-cast, properly gloomy, with a serious bone to pick about Beantown’s “good ol’boys at the bar” sexism and chummy mediocrity, it’s a step-up for writer-director Matt Ruskin, whose “Crown Heights” had similar “attack the system” ambitions but fell short of the mark.

Sure, it’s basically one long testicles joke. But set your expectations low enough and you’ll find a laugh, here and there.

Icelandic filmmaker Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir uses images, melancholy reveries and the voice-over narration of her nine year old protagonist to turn Guðbergur Bergsson’s novel into an austere, chilly and cryptic film.

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

A smart and reasonably taut thriller aimed at a generation that may be hard to convince to put down its phones long enough to watch.

There is a hint of pathos, here and there. And Olsen, more interesting than amusing in this role, tries her best to wring emotion out of this bummer/bauble of a movie. She can’t, and Teller and Turner — who have some comic chemistry together — have no more luck transcending this lavish setting in search of a better story.

The finale Barber and actress-turned-screenwriter Julia Hart deliver is righteously, remorselessly satisfying.

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

It’s got just about enough laughs, but there’s so much more that the Script by Committee wants to shoehorn in, like female empowerment, bad parenting passed off as “doing our best” just like our parents, gay marriage and the incredibly sexist college Greek system, a relic of the “Animal House” era that remains as “rapey” as ever.

Miguel Arteta did “Chuck & Buck” and “The Good Girl,” and in star and co-writer Alia Shawcat, of “Arrested Development” and the TBS series “Search Party,” he’s got a collaborator willing to put it all out there and forget her comic crutches for an intimate, damaged and personal story packed into day and night of enforced intimacy with somebody who might “be the one.”

There are laughs aplenty in the dialogue, which has several characters spout nonsensical lines — “You told me the title was clear.”

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

Forever After still goes down like warmed-over porridge. You don’t have to be Goldilocks to think that this time they’ve cooked their Golden Goose.

It’s not biting, it’s pummeling. And while it isn’t incompetent or terribly written, acted or shot, while its warning has the sting of “Yeah, we’re pretty close to that happening here,” it is just plain unpleasant to sit through.

While small children may be enchanted by this little gastropod that could, adults will be more sorely tested. For all the horsepower Turbo boasts about, the movie tends toward the sluggish — as in slow as a slug.

The Spine of Night is a reasonably good-looking — and gory — animated sword and sorcery saga for adults, a movie set in a wholly-realized fantasy world, but lacking a story or characters that invite us to invest ourselves in their fate.

Husband and wife Joe Manganiello and Sofia Vergara star in Bottom of the Ninth, a “second chance” romance that get swallowed by the generic and generally dull baseball story it’s wrapped in.

Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, ex-“Saturday Night Live” bandmates, funny women so utterly in sync as to be matching halves of “slap” and “stick,” simply click. Even when they’re out of character.

The direction, by Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland), is breathless, with lovely grace notes — he uses silences to end his action beats. And if this incarnation of Bond still doesn't inspire affection, he does command respect, awe, a sense that a real man is risking life and limb for queen and crown.

Forget that [Washington’s] lumpy, “on the spectrum” character turn is designed to attract Oscar attention, and maybe this overlong but engaging character study in crisis goes down easier.

It’s engrossing, violent, frightening and funny in the ways it captures the way kids speak with no adults around, and the way kids act when society’s rules take a back seat in time of war.

Tragedy Girls is “Heathers” without the just desserts (virtually no one “deserves” his or her fate), “Mean Girls” who don’t truly turn on each other, a slasher satire without a punchline.

So yes, there’s good stuff here, mostly in the earlier acts. But even mixed-bag horror flicks deserve to be seen on a big screen. We viewers and those who entertain us have a pact, after all.

“Midnight” is “Martian” without the whizbang humor and optimism, so downbeat it’s like the saddest parts of “Gravity” and all of “Solaris.” And while Clooney & Co. make it watchable, it’s so derivative and over-familiar as to be akin to watching paint dry — richly-tinted, shiny acrylic paint, if that’s any consolation.

The extraordinary third act arrives, and the movie finds its heart and its message.

13 Minutes is a taut, smart and straightforward bio-drama of this largely forgotten early figure in German resistance to the Hitler regime.

The cutting remarks rarely leave a mark, the mystery is unraveled with little care, and takes on the “Twilight Zone” air of “The Box,” which didn’t work either. And nobody’s funny. Veteran TV funnyman McHale is given little funny to play or say, and that goes for everybody else. Only a query of the withdrawn, deadpan Gretel offers so much as a chuckle.

Attempts at “suspense” in the heist itself are ineptly handled. The script and the leads strain to wring the “cute” out of this, but that’s in short supply.

The story is lightweight and flimsy, and the resolution of the plot is too on-the-nose, pat, but the unfeeling nature of this future — about halfway to “Her” if you remember that film — and the mechanical nature of interactions, even sex, make Creative Control one of the most interesting recent exercises in film futurism.

The sources of comedy here include that colorful milieu, the oddballs who populate it and the way people with no special skills might attempt a burglary. There’s not quite enough of each on its own, but together all that adds up to a few laughs and plenty of chuckles.

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

Truthfully, it’s a tame and tepid affair for a kids’ film, with its chief recommendation being the chunks of truth built into its story.

The Twilight Saga comes close to that sweet spot between swooning silliness and special effects slaughter with Eclipse.

“Ugly Dolls” screenwriter Alison Peck finds her niche with this picture, throwing just enough plot wrinkles and smart-ass banter into the mix to make the formula — if not exactly fresh — at least fresh-adjacent.

You don’t realize how much a good horror movie depends on acting until you stumble in that rare one whose cast actually gets it right.

Genre fans may eat this up, but it’s not anything I’d call a “must see” film, despite its obvious ambition.

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

A screen elegy is supposed to make you sad and give the viewer an appreciation for all this character and the actor playing him was, and a little of what remains. Cry Macho just generates pity.

It’s a psychological thriller built around two intense and graphic sex scenes, and a few other moments of expedient nudity. Mind games, stalking and graphic violence work their way in. But it’s the sex that seems to be the movie’s reason for being.

In the hands of director Thea Sharrock, screenwriter Jonny Sweet and a sparkling cast, it becomes a parable on shifting social mores, sexism, morality confused with legality and women’s suffrage. It’s a vulgar hoot.

The voice of skepticism is sorely missed in Oliver Stone’s credulous bio-pic, Snowden.

What’s on the screen is more allegorical than interesting, although some of the visuals reach the level of indelibly nightmarish.

It is Bell who makes the movie, belligerent, coiled fury from the tip of his bald head to the toes he bounces on as he stomps into the frame, threatening one and all, righteous in his racist wrath.

A misshapen, aimless midlife crisis travelogue/romance with discourses on the the repression and inequity of Saudi Arabia, dating in the Islamic world and the nature of American/Chinese business competition, it’s the weakest Tom Hanks vehicle in decades.

All that matters is A) Is it scary? and B) Is it funny? Those answers are “A little” and “More or less.”

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).

Eden isn’t the subtlest allegory about life in troubled times, but Howard rarely makes a bad film and he hasn’t here. From its eyes-averting grimness to its eye-rolling obviousness and “inevitability, Eden is a parable that plays.

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

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.

It’s all perfectably passable filler, a nice “escape” with the kids at the movies, with a few stunning animated effects to recommend it.

It’s as fun as ever, and edgier than you remember.

It’s formulaic, but good clean fun. And it’s a fair dinkum way for the kiddos to learn Oz wildlife and Oz slang in a cartoon.

If screen comedies are poker games, then Paone, working from a script by Jonathan Jacobson, leaves a lot of money on the table, not properly playing the wonderful hand she’s dealt. But The Kill Room, which also needed a better title, has enough funny going on to recommend it if you don’t think of all it might have been.

“Sweet” and “sensitive” may win the day. But this fight over Our Son is a little bland and predigested, and even if that underscores the point that marriage and family and the dynamics that create dysfunction are all the same (“Open marriage” included.), that doesn’t give this affecting film much room for surprise.

Screenwriter Wenk hits the religious redemption allegory a tad too hard, and the picture doesn’t so much finish as peter out, with an anti-climax or two. But Fuqua and “Kill Bill,” “Aviator” and “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” cinematographer Robert Richardson give us one gorgeously-composed shot after another.

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.

Cámara holds the film together and touches us with the moments we see him teaching important things like compassion and responsibility to his son.

An adventure drama with sea legs, a story of heroism steeped in period detail, played with sympathy and stoicism by people who respect such old fashioned virtues.

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

Seagull, as radiantly self-absorbed as Bening can be, as self-serious as Howle and Stoll come off, as winsome as Ronan remains and as funny and cranky as Moss’s mastery of Masha might be, never quite adds up to an adaptation that’s anything more than “Well, we saw them do Chekhov.”

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.

Writer-director Drew Pearce has tarted up a dullish action comedy that finds laughs hard to come by and its moral underpinnings shaky.

A winning and quite moving look at the immigrant experience, and how fragile and fraught this past decade’s politics have revealed it to be.

Fading Gigolo is John Turturro’s idea of an old school Woody Allen comedy, so he wrote Allen into it.

While not all Holocaust sagas are created equal, an uncensored, grim realities and all treatment of Salomon’s life would certainly be novel enough to warrant the telling. That’s a case Charlotte never makes.

Gemma Bovery manages a few surprises, even if you know the Flaubert novel Simmonds was sending up.

Rendered toothless, with barely a hint of menace or humor, much less jokes or sight gags, “Ivan” plays as downbeat and dispirited.

A well-crafted documentary variation on "Defiance," Ukrainian Jews saving themselves by going underground -- literally.

No scene seems superfluous even if many go on too long. “A bit of a wallow” may cross your mind, as it did mine.

The surprises are few, and none of it am0unts to a whole lot. But for those up to taking yet another British sentimental journey to “their finest hour,” A Royal Night Out manages something unheard of in the decades of Windsor wooliness since. It makes them cute, if only for one night.

There's a taste of Southern Gothic here, even though this story is set in Michigan. The incendiary mix of religion, sex and crime threatens to ignite every time Stone tries to turn the interogations back on Mabry.

That points to the biggest shortcoming of Blink of an Eye. It’s a seriously unchallenging documentary, one that has no contrary voices suggesting why Waltrip never won before Earnhardt took him on (More hard luck? Nobody says so, nobody asks.) and as it lapses into hagiography, borders on “NASCAR Sanctioned” and “Official Myth-Burnishing.”

It’s not everything you could have hoped for, but for a fan, the final Indiana Jones movie tips the scale as “not bad, not bad at all.”

Bloom does a nice job of expressing, wordlessly, where this man has been, what blend of guilt, fury and obligation drive him and shaped his life. It’s not the most subtle character or film built around an abuse survivor, but there’s substance in the performance that lifts Retaliation above its hammered-home metaphors.

Beautiful Beings, titled “Berdreymi” in Icelandic, is superb at capturing the universal problem of idle, unsupervised boys making bad choices, creating “Lord of the Flies” pecking orders and lashing out in violence because nobody’s taught them otherwise.

Stretching, stuffing and filling make this film play flatter, as if all the fun is gone. The jokes are few and far between, and they die of loneliness in the wait.

Pixar is as entitled to a swing and a miss as any studio. But the lovely-looking miscalculation that is Elemental stands out on the CGI animation house’s resume as a rare swing-and-almost-completely-miss.

Vollrath uses the tight space he had to film in to great, suspenseful advantage. It’s a film of extreme close-ups, low instrument-panel lighting, of checklists, procedures, first aid and in-your-face violence. There are no glib taunts, threats or macho one-liners.

It's not the smoothest thriller. But All Good Things is thoroughly engrossing, a roman a clef that chillingly ponders a puzzle and suggests solutions outlandish enough to be stranger than anything Hollywood, on its own, could make up.

The unlikely pairing of Amber Heard and Christopher Walken pays comic dividends in One More Time, an agreeably predictable famous father/bitter daughter dramedy.

It turns out that reuniting Bloodsport and Peacemaker from “Suicide Squad” wasn’t the can’t-miss that nobody predicted.

Daybreakers is a stylish but unavoidably silly sci-fi vampire thriller.

Samuel’s film is an embarassment of acting riches, laugh-out-loud funny when it wants to be and thought-provoking when it dares to be.

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

The tone and atmosphere are immersive and decidedly analog, and the whole nature of “sound” thing makes an interesting metaphysical text or subtext.

What lifts this Irish film above the “Here they come, SHOOT’em!” trap are the moral dilemmas, the shaky ground underneath either side of those dilemmas and performances that can be downright wrenching in their humanity.

Fun? That’s the word this production’s team never learned. But again, getting the dead cat makeup (it rarely looks digital, if indeed it was) right seems like the top priority.

Though it is funnier and out-charms “Tio Papi,” it lacks the whimsy, magical realism and kid-friendly sentiment of the sleeper hit, “Instructions Not Included.”

There's only so much humor you can wring from the f-bomb, even if you are a cute animated alien.

See it for the glories of young stars about to take over Hollywood. Because it’s hard to figure out another reason to get all the way through this version of “Going All the Way.”

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.

Although some discount this thriller for its simplicity and middle act shortcomings, genre fans will relish its grit, grim dilemmas and period-perfect detail, all in service of an entertaining and believable yarn that honors both the history and the erased history of the American West.

There’s little tension, little sense of the suffering even if we understand the stakes. The best you can say about the whole enterprise is that it’s a righteous story, clumsily told.

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.

The leads make this tolerable.

A sequel to This is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary that really invented that label, can’t help but play as winded, gassed, joked-out and pointless.

The dance sequences, what few there are, have more daring to them than the plot of the picture. The back-stabbing and bonding and breaking down are all so tame that you wonder why they bothered.

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.

It’s a lot less “spice” and a bit more “sweet” than I’d care for, but Malik has made a warm comedy that introduces, embraces and every-so-gently-chides an under-represented American community in all their glory, their fun and their foibles.

The thing that “Disappearance” does perfectly is, unfortunately, its most anti-cinematic trait. Grief and a romantic break-up have never been more deflatingly, depressingly captured.

Invisible Beauty is a documentary that makes one reconsider, yet again, the role fashion plays in society by how it has always narrowed “standards of beauty,” how it presents “what power looks like” and by remembering a woman who was one of the first through the door to “inclusion.”

If you’re easily offended, or even have a modest vulgarity/raunch threshold, “Dicks” isn’t/aren’t for you. But in a midnight showing amongst the also-not-easily-shocked lovers of cult comedy dirty laughs, “Dicks” would be hard to beat. Ahem.

Charm and wit count for a lot in romantic comedies, and they compensate for the many sins of Funny Story.

A slight and somewhat demure romantic comedy/friendship comedy built around two mildly interesting characters.

Has a lot of that winking wit we've come to expect from our post-"Spider Man" Marvel movies. It has a hunky, self-mocking young star, solid support from a couple of Oscar winners and the slick sheen that state-of-the-art effects can give you.

The Wedding Guest is no “Bourne” or “Run Lola Run,” or “The Getaway.” It’s just an ambling “antic” dash through the New India, forced to deal with Indian train and bus timetables (many rental car counter scenes) and the region’s sea of humanity, “where anyone (who looks Indian or Pakistani) could get lost.” And if that’s the case, what’s the hurry?

Antlers left me with the feeling of being the work of a top drawer craftsman who never quite reconciles himself to the job, who forgets the “nature’s revenge” theme and leaves the child abuse subtext under-explored, never builds suspense or any sense of rising panic in the town, the school or the sheriff’s department, and yet still manages to deliver a gruesomely good looking film despite all that.

The Notebook makes for a grim but utterly fascinating parable.

Just stumbles on and on, introducing new theories and facts and then explaining, explaining explaining them, right up to the closing credits.

As with the strutting, dancer-turned-bouncer Swayze picture of yore, there’s an unreality to it all that gives Road House a comical lift.

Gleeson, Pinsent and Kitsch make this a diverting comic travelogue for anybody who misses “Northern Exposure” but has no intention of moving to Alaska, or in this case, Newfoundland.

Byrne and Kroll have a nice estranged sibling chemistry, not up to “The Skeleton Twins,” but in that ballpark.

There’s nothing much new here, but the performances and the milieu make Filly Brown an entertaining, honorable installment in a story that is the American Dream incarnate, and has been ever since the first wannabe showed up on Tin Pan Alley at the beginning of the last century.

“William” lacks the fireworks or even high drama that would give it scale or stakes, that would make it more consequential. And its moral parable feels underdeveloped. But Disney still has managed to tell a thought-provoking story on a subject worth viewing through a lens of ethics and morality, even if he can’t quite break free of “Planet of the Apes” parallels.

The things that should make it work are here, most of them anyway. The fact that it doesn’t draw you in or deliver an ending with impact doesn’t mean it couldn’t have.

It’s not an unpleasant watch, on the nose or not. Olsen has a sexy calm about her, Sudeikis, so easy to dislike by virtue of the roles he plays and the cruel, smartass glint always in his eyes, is softening a bit as his career reaches middle age.

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

Tina Fey gives her finest, funniest big screen performance by essentially doing in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot what she did so well on TV’s “30 Rock.”

Even if it plays like a sitcom pilot that might get picked up after a little recasting, “Broken Hearts Gallery” is never unpleasant and only rarely a drag. In rom-com starved Hollywood, call that a “win” and call it a day.

Maybe this is Zack Snyder’s “first, best destiny” as a filmmaker. But when he can’t even get through a formulaic zombie picture without crawling, maybe he was never destined to deserve final cut.

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.

The intrigues are rather routine in ways that point out that perhaps the director of a “Nanny McPhee” movie wasn’t the best choice for this. But McGregor, Harris, Skarsgard and Lewis give fair value and give this the lived-in feel of even the most far-fetched LeCarre plots.

The dialogue has its moments, but the jokes are too sparse to buttress the arch, comic book camp tone Mr. Adam Egypt Mortimer was going for. And while the wigs are fabulous and the effects interesting, it’s all something of a hash. Coherent enough, sure, but making sense of it seems like a fool’s errand, start to finish.

The film is full of sharp observations about academic contests today, with Tiger Moms and tough-love Dads browbeating the kids from the wings. The ending is kind of a tap-out, but Bateman keeps this clipping along, maintaining the mean streak and potty mouth that makes Bad Words the dirtiest and funniest comedy of the new year.

If it wasn’t for Webber, given the funniest part to play (over the top pastor) and playing it to the hilt, the dead spots and blase leading man would dull this to the point of distraction.

Chatty, self-absorbed, streetwise and sex obsessed, even if he wasn’t drawing his quintessential “New York types,” we’d call Jules Feiffer’s characters “cartoons.”

Addicted to Love is a crude, laugh-starved and vulgar C-list copy-and-paste of “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” and proof of the thesis that if you’re going to steal, you might want to aim higher than a movie nobody EVER called a “classic.”

Elle is almost enough to make one forget the vapid, incomplete story Minghella-the-younger’s stuck her in.

The story arc is entirely too familiar to sustain the two-hours-plus length, the violence, gore and language are the only elements that lift it from the weepy melodrama that Southpaw wants to be into “Raging Bull” territory.

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.

It’s not interesting enough in between action beats to make you stay in the same room with it. Bathroom break? Need to make a sandwich? Just leaving it running. You’re not missing much.

Land of Bad is a solid-enough B-movie combat thriller with the cast and production values of an A-picture.

Writer-director Christopher Landon is better at calling for cute camera angles and 360 degree pans and plotting — silly and farfetched as it is — than he is at jokes and zingers, which made the first film stand out.

King handles the flashy moments — a big speech or two, a firm stand on principle or three. But there’s just not enough here, and too much at the same time, for “Shirley” to come off.

Anniversary may be, like its “movie of the moment” forebears, another shout into the void. But everybody involved — especially Lane, whose performance is another career highlight — can take heart in trying to sum up democracy’s collapse as seen through one, generally slow-to-alarm inside-the-beltway family’s disintegration. Yeah, it happened like this.

I was a little awestruck, here and there, at the world “Miss Peregrine” serves up. And I liked the dark and deadly sensibility Burton was reaching for. But the cast and the oh-so-conventional third act Battle Royale let a promising premise down.

Is this Evil Dead (no “The”) any good? Yes and no. It several genuinely hair-raising moments and presents, for your edification and enjoyment, some of the most graphic horror violence ever presented on the screen.

Lacking a smoking gun, this Riviera-set crime thriller lacks both thrills and convincing evidence of a crime. “Poetic license” or not, that doesn’t add up to an engrossing film.

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.

This is a storyteller’s movie, one where we can’t really trust any story to be true. That’s something of a cheat, because we are set up to believe there are bigger deceptions going on and hidden agendas that simply don’t pan out or are left hanging.

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

The resolution to this puzzle is so botched it’s insulting, as if they’re daring us to laugh at the notion that this is merely “the beginning.”

A bloody, violent and yet grimly comic tale.

Eva isn’t surprising enough to break new ground. But the cast, the gorgeous wintry setting and suggestion of a tech future that is closer than we fear make it a most watchable variation on a well-worn sci-fi theme.

The whole enterprise is very much a mixed bag, but as films that cater to this audience go, Woodlawn isn’t half bad.

Band of Robbers is a film of little flourishes that work better than the story they’re adorning.

For all the corn, Lowriders can be appreciated for its rolling stock and serving a criminally under-served audience...a film with fine performances and teachable moments amidst all the melodrama.

As alien encounter documentaries or mockumentaries go, Skyman is boringly earthbound.

It’s brief, but not so much to-the-point as wandering around it for an hour. And while it doesn’t spoil the effect of the whole, it does feel wanting as a finale. It’s the dullest “Small Axe” of the five.

What Smith and Gardiner have adapted is a rare and precious thing, a movie whose narrative momentum is carried by the simplest of longings — hope.

It’s not half bad, with a couple of decent fights — and a few where the fight choreographer’s instructions are a bit too obvious — and a fine finale, the scenes that come after two or three “explanations” too many.

The picture is thus a mixed bag, rather like “Hobbs & Shaw” and “Deadpool 2,” and Leitch’s “Bullet Train” — funny, but leaning on Gosling’s twinkling charisma and inside-the-movies jokes and pratfalls to come off, which it does just often enough to recommend.

A movie franchise can only take us by surprise once, and by that measure, Iron Man 2 is a preordained letdown. But so much of what gave the first film its gas — is still here.

That diffuse focus and meandering narrative is the only real shortcoming in this consequential and touching weeper.

Baby Ruby is pitched somewhere between domestic melodrama, a tale of a crack-up, and paranoid thriller. Wohl and Merlant keep shifting the ground underneath Jo and the viewer, throwing us off balance.

As the violence escalates and whatever was getting out of hand gets seriously out of hand, Barbarians can turn downright riveting.

They turn more of the story over to the comic relief, the dopey tow truck Tow Mater, and get a sillier, more kid-friendly movie out of it. Yes, Cars 2 is better than "Cars."

I didn’t hate “Cold Pursuit,” but it’s not the giddy darker-than-dark murder-comedy that “In Order of Disappearance” was, and that this film’s trailers (Memorably choreographed to “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” a MUCH better title, BTW) promised.

It’s deathly slow, deadly-dull and makes one long for the days when it looked like [Roth] was shifting, full-time, into producing.

When The Wall goes wrong, it doesn’t instantly crumble, though you can feel the foundation collapsing underneath the film’s feet. Taylor-Johnson, who must carry it, holds our interest. It’s just that we know, judging from that fatal flaw screenwriter Dwain Worrell built in as a plot contrivance, that it won’t end well, either.

Ordinary Angels is a kind-hearted weeper that gets by on good vibes and the talents of the Unsinkable Hilary Swank.

Director and co-writer Xavier Gens’ bleak thriller doesn’t do much with characters and doesn’t traffic much in “hope” and a new day dawning.

It’s a kid-friendly thriller of the sci-fi apocalypse variety, forlorn but engaging enough to sit through. Barely. High stakes, thin on action and heavy on sentiment, it takes “Short Circuit” to doomsday and reaches for tears — here and there — as it does.

Aussie actress Krew Boylan turns out to be a better Dolly Parton impersonator than screenwriter in Seriously Red, her self-scripted star vehicle. It’s a self-serious and seriously-confusing identity crisis comedy tucked into what might have been a gender role romp of the “Connie & Carla” variety.

Too much of what’s here is over-familiar, and the “familiar” isn’t anything anybody would get all sentimental over.

It’s a fascinating film, jaw-dropping in its breath and potential depth, even if it skims the surface of what the grinding, isolating life that level of wealth and fame brings with it.

The laughs are few and far between and the “heart,” so important to a good rom-com, is left out altogether.

Kesy is scary and a bit crazy-eyed, wearing his tats and a grill and carrying himself like a rough customer fresh out of stir. It’s a pity he has to talk so much.

We don’t get enough of her mistreatment by the British press (back THEN) and enough justification for “Why should we care, again, now?”

I love the way the film sets us up with “types” — ambitious, narcissistic politico, “trophy” wife, loyal spouse, doting dad — and thoroughly upends them time and again.

Neeson is the rock anchoring all this, making the incredible at least passably credible as he lurches into the frame with his limping boxer’s gait. But you get the sense that he is no more “Taken” with this than we are.

A clever (and foreshadowed) touch or two notwithstanding, in the end, the filmmakers’ attempts at misdirecting the viewer’s expectations fail and the movie’s endless “on the nose” characters, moments and lines of dialogue overwhelm it.

A barely serviceable romantic comedy.

Sarandon is always a compelling presence, but too much is left unsaid and unplayed here to pull us in. Viper Club needed action, suspense, more pathos and forward motion. She tries to do it all with her eyes, and it’s not enough.

“Sting” isn’t great fun or great really in any sense. But it’s not bad for a giant spider killer thriller B-movie set in snowy New York and shot in Australia.

Wrath of Man passes muster for its mayhem and mise en scene, a good-looking but unfussy film that may not work its flashbacks in as gracefully as you’d like, breaks into “chapters” that do nothing for its flow, yet makes its violence and vengeance as grimly gripping and visceral as any Ritchie had put on the screen.

A British eOne/Netflix production, packs a bunch of boy-bonding lads off into the wilds of Sweden. No “found footage,” but it’s “The Borgholm Witch Project” in the Swedish “Cabin in the Woods,” “Wicker Man,” the works.

The first funny film to give those "Bridesmaids" a run for their money.

Horror is all about that short-circuit the screen's technical manipulations cause in our brain, so this isn't high art. But Mama is easily the most moving, most chilling ghost story since "Insidious," an emotional tale efficiently and affectingly told.

Robert Redford delivers one last lecture on ’60s idealism and passes another baton to Shia LaBeouf in The Company You Keep, an engrossing thriller about the last anti-Vietnam War radicals still underground.

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.

Actress turned director (TV’s “House of Cards,” “The Americans”) Roxann Dawson balances the hospital room action with the impact finding the lost boy had on the faithless paramedic. There are beautiful moments that capture the quiet terror of death by drowning.

The actors are game, the action beats are handled with skill. But the story lacked shape. Laurent had the cachet to land a great cast, but not the skill to bend a tired, unsurprising journey and the script that relates it into something more interesting.

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.

Perhaps this slow and generally dull and opaque picture never should have seen the light of day.

Trainer lets us meet bold thinkers who found a way to put a modern twist on what a museum — “an eighteenth century idea (stuck) in a 19th century box” — could be.

A true indie film roller-coaster ride, from moon-eyed romance to aching heartbreak, cerebral puzzle to incredibly moving, emotional resolution to that puzzle. In a season of the year where sci-fi is dumbed down and then dumbed some more for mass consumption, here’s a piece of speculative fiction that will stick with you long after the last Transformer’s battery has died.

Manages a tear or two, and enough laughs to get by, even if from first scene to last the strain to stop just short of cloying shows.

Tone is tough when you’re snickering at “gun nuts” while you live the good life off underhanded ways of selling them. The movie takes swipes at Bush era bungling and corruption while reveling in it, because, well, these guys had fun doing it?

Through it all, Washington’s stillness is emphasized, so much so that the film slows down just to make sure we appreciate the presence and the talent behind it.

Branagh & Co. keep up appearances with a thriller that works mainly because all of its parts — locations, fights and plot twists — are well worn from all the thrillers they’ve been in before.

Whatever random “madness” envelopes The Bride’s mind, Gyllenaal gives us a jumbled peek at her stream of consciousness, too.

“Viral” is a sobering reminder that hatred of “the other” didn’t disappear after Pogroms and The Holocaust, and that it isn’t limited to jihadists and skinheads.

It’s a slight comedy, delicate as kheer with nothing remotely weighty about it. The biggest surprise about that might be the light touch veteran director Tom Dey brings to Shiwani Srivastava’s sweet and simple script.

It’s a glib yet informative and sometimes entertaining re-hashing of everything we know about how bad sugar is for us.

Never graduates to the uplifting tale it sets out to be.

With Settlers, the filmmaker takes us on a journey as much internal as extra-terrestrial.

Military myth-making dies hard in Combat Obscura, perhaps the most unfiltered account of American boots on the ground in Afghanistan.

The flashbacks, the “everybody has a story” part of The Flood, puts it over.

Extraction runs into the same problems any movie that’s on-the-run/fighting-your-way-out faces. It’s wearing, characters get shortchanged and the temptation to take absurd shortcuts in logic just to get us from point A to B is irresistible.

The setting and various religious rifts are unfamiliar, if the domestic/romantic melodrama isn’t.

The patience of the sport and the tranquility of the settings casts a spell, and it all comes together in modestly, honestly moving ways.

Christmas with the Campbells is a soft-and-squishy Christmas rom-com that tries ever-so-hard to be “edgy” when it oh-so-obviously isn’t.

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

It all swirls together in a riot of color, action, deadpan gags and musical and martial arts mayhem, a kids’ movie that rushes by you so fast you won’t want to take a concession stand break.

Watts’ stoic, sturdy performance and the film’s affecting and formula-busting third act make this Infinite Storm well worth weathering.

An action picture whose aging hero we care about and root for, a thriller with tension and style, a B-movie Hitchcock would have been happy to call his own.

A brilliant conceit sets up a cutesy, just-clever-enough New York comedy in God’s Time, a tale of twelve steps and an addict with a grudge and a gun.

In a lot of ways, Die Another Day is a return to Bond's bad-old-days, the early 1980s, when the plots were outlandish and haphazard, the stunts were fake and the whole enterprise was being treated as a cartoon.

The mystery, the drift of Weightless still makes for a captivating indie film experience, tension without melodrama, mistakes with consequences, a world where people are facing the future and accepting responsibility even as Joel, and his chip off the old block kid, live in denial of it.

Jason Schwartzman may be a little old for the part, but there’s something of a “voice of his generation” spin to his role in 7 Chinese Brothers.

Potter’s film is at is most artful in the painterly ways she composes the wordless scenes of the girls testing cigarettes, hitchhiking with the wrong boys and Rosa exploring heavy petting with another boy, showing off for Ginger.

The most valuable thing about the film, implied in the shared narration by Terrence Howard and director Martin Shore, is capturing these legends one more time before it’s too late.

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.

The courtroom finale, eating up much of the third act, is a corker. And Pearce holds our focus, still or animated, chewing up a scene or so underplaying it he’s still the center of attention. Like the Great Master he is, he knows how to grab the eye and hold its focus, with or without a menacing mustache.

Antonio Banderas plays the growling veteran miner who shows flint and organizational moxie when the worst happens. And Lou Diamond Phillips, laying it on thick, is the guilt-ridden colleague, trapped with the others, whose job it is “to keep these men SAFE.” Which he does. Repeatedly. Loudly. Passionately.

While writer-director Greg Jardin does his level best to bowl us over with “technique” (split screens, endless 360 degree handheld pans, etc.) and does a decent enough job at complicating his role-playing-game-run-amok plot, a somewhat bland cast of players can’t manage to convince us that they’re possessed by the mind and spirit of someone else.

Concussion deserves more of an audience than just the film festival circuit. And it’s not just an introduction to a writer-director with talent, but to a slew of under-employed and superb actresses, and the hunky Tchaikovsky.

It’s great seeing Woodley out of YA sci-fi and into a role that makes use of her approachable reality.

Thurman, oily accent dripping with menace, is no Disney villain here. She’s real world dangerous, vulpine, callous, keeping supernatural secret threats from her pupils.

It’s a pull-out-all-the-stops weeper, full of martrydom, coincidence, over-the-top cruelty, manipulation and plot contrivances.

It was never going to be as riotous as the trailers, but it's still funny, and in the case of Isla Fisher -- damned funny.

It's a bit long to be as kid friendly as this educational and visually striking film is meant to be.

This isn’t the least interesting story I’ve ever seen told in anime, but it’s right up there. The dialogue’s of the “I wish I had parents! To talk me OUTTA things like this!” school.

Visually, this is a most impressive effort. But it’s not particularly smart or witty or even kiddie profound in its messaging, and in avoiding easy laughs (jokes), it achieves liftoff even if it never quite soars.

Those Jackasses from "Jackass" aren't getting better, they're getting older.

The Nonnas are the stars and the hook that makes this one work.

A mildly entertaining sermon about American “Cowboy Capitalism” as it rubs up against “The French Way.”

Dawdling along as it does, Million Dollar Arm rarely shows us the “juice,” a baseball comedy that is as tentative as a base on balls.

Like good satire, Us and Them burns, bites and wounds as it lands its punches. Like stumbling satire, the tone feels off as writer-director Martin lets things go too far even as Danny’s mates start to absorb his message.

The pointlessness is the point, and there’s zero entertainment value in that, no matter how many critics throw up their hands and use “fever dream” as a reason to cop out, give it a thumb’s up, and move on.

Chastain is perfect. Forget the prosthetics and the “clown makeup” mimicry. She gets under the character’s skin, sings in her own voice and never lets an insincere moment flicker by on the screen.

The funny moments outnumber the warm ones. There's a touch of religion and plenty of melodrama, especially in the contrivances of a cluttered and drawn out third act.

A lumbering ordeal of a picture.

Bad Match is too short and formulaic to give us anything to really chew on.

After "Zombieland," The Crazies struggles to find novelty and laughs, and must battle the overwhelming sense that we’ve been here, seen this too often and too recently to experience any real surprises.

Ibiza is just…boring.

What’s fresh here is the tone – rude, blunt and bordering on shrill. This is a less in-your-face Michael Moore-style take on this subject.

The Wandering Earth II is even bigger, more sprawling and more daffy in its Big Science. It’s got a few first act jokes before turning somber, dogged and yet never fatalistic. It’s also more cluttered and more pointed in its Chinese messaging. So naturally it’s almost an hour longer than the two hour original.

An overlong, all-inclusive and all-too-tepid bio-pic of the great Olympian.

Director Lucky McKee is here for the violence — mostly in flashbacks. Perhaps Veach talked him into the idea that the “twist” everybody with a pulse sees coming is explanation enough for how maddening this drivel is to listen to.

You’re Not You fails to bring us the fear or the tears that this story warrants. It sticks in the mind no longer than it takes you to change shirts after that ice bucket dunking.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the filmmakers hope, that you’ll be so swept up in “representation” that you won’t notice how generic the story is, and how dull and drab and laugh-starved its execution turns out to be.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a burlesque of comic book movies, embracing their popularity, mocking the characters, situations, genre and its fans all the way to the Vancouver bank vault where Marvel Jesus insists Disney deposit the $billion this fun, bad movie is going to make.

The performances are daft enough to land, and the audacity of it all counts for something.

Crass, gross and juvenile in all the best (and worst) ways, Diary is aimed squarely at a tween "don't touch the cheese" demographic. And if you don't get it, maybe you're just too old for a good booger joke.

A weak villain, a couple of eye-rollingly unlikely cons and dead stretches that make 105 minutes play like 145 and you've got Focus, the last dog of February, where comatose con job movies are released to the sounds of silence.

A teen romance with most of the rough edges rubbed off, Paper Towns is as pleasantly bland as the city that is its setting — Orlando.

It’s easy enough to sit through, but the entire affair is more deflating than heartening.

I’d say Parker, Najimy and Midler all did a great public service coming back to these characters and deserve the thanks of a grateful nation for giving this their all, giving us a few laughs and a lot of grins and giving legions of little girls Disney role models who aren’t princesses waiting around for some prince to get a clue.

The test of the movie is whether we’ll instinctively root for the standard white-girl-in-jeopardy and accept the physical abuse, mental anguish and humiliations Sarah must endure before figuring out if she can fight back. Because Bloom? She gives us nothing.

No, it’s not a subtle film. Nor were the Germans, it’s worth remembering. But it’s handsomely mounted and well-acted, and reaches a fine if far-fetched action climax.

Percy vs. Goliath is dramatically flat, predictable in its pluck at times. But Walken is magnificent, and the other casting — on the nose as it is (Ricci can still pull off the young activist willing to sleep in her car for the cause) — works.

There are disposable characters, and not just the villain’s minions. But one of the dumber elements of these movies is how so few of the actual leads, friend or foe, from previous pictures seem to stay dead.

Non-Stop is a solid, workmanlike action picture that builds slowly, bends over backwards to over-explain itself and its villain, and delivers a lulu of an ending.

Colangelo’s film gives us a world that feels lived-in, with non-actors mixed in with the professionals, and convincingly so.

It’s formulaic, rarely funny and seriously cynical for a movie aimed at small kids. But a couple of moments have a lovely and quite-unexpected pathos to them.

The film tells Annie Parker’s story with heart and wit, and finds a few funny insights into the stubborn, brusque woman, Dr. Mary-Claire King, whose lonely quest to find proof would bear fruit.

It’s not as start-to-finish funny as Warner Animation’s “Lego Movie”, and that also goes for the quirky Lego cartoon short — basically the chicken-botched filming of the opening credits to a martial arts movie...But there’s wit, warmth and invention here, enough to make you hopeful for a Warner Animation future.