Roger Moore

A visually arresting, fascinating failure that may have you reaching for the calamine lotion before it’s over.

Fey flirts and Carell kvetches, Walhberg goes shirtless and Liotta eats Italian. No surprises there. What really clicks is the couple at the core.

A snappy, sweet-spirited teen comedy about a smart girl who tries to fight high school labeling with wit and words. And the occasional punch.

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

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

Population control, consumption control, treading more lightly? Yeah, we know that. We just don’t want to hear it. Yet. Will Planet of the Humans open our ears?

Even as the film wanders about and the emotional bond between mother and child is seriously lacking in this story and these performances, there’s still something engrossing about seeing a mother’s journey through the trials and errors of ensuring her child has an opportunity to learn and at least a shot at a normal, healthy and happy life — with or without pills.

The jolts may be few, as most chapters focus on the don’t-look-away gruesomeness of what they serve up. But almost all of the jokes land.

Howell-Baptiste makes a mesmerizing yet earthy and “real” tour guide through the meandering narrative of We Strangers. She’s the best reason to watch this inscrutable film that’s easy to take-in but tricky to decode, based on what’s included and what’s left underdeveloped or simply undeciphered.

With a striking setting, menacing music scoring gloomy shots of bulls running through swampland in the fog and an up-close look at this unusual variation of bullfighting (it’s barely explained), “Animale” puts us in the mood for a fright even if it’s slow to deliver one.

It’s not so much bad as dull and ill-conceived. It doesn’t so much end as sputter out.

A handsome production, its few settings (indoors and outdoors) painterly and period-perfect. It’s entirely too long for a filmed chamber drama of such limited stakes. But Ullmann’s adaptation reminds us that the gap between “those people,” now called “the one percent,” and the rest of the world will always be ripe for conflict, drama and tension, no matter how much we evolve.

Minions will tickle the very young and has roughly twice as many laughs as those Disney “Planes” pictures, or Pixar’s “Monster’s University.” So “Kumbaya,” kids, kumbaya.

Jackman gamely does his best, Levy keeps the kid just shy of insufferable and just this side of kid-appropriate in his behavior and language.

It's a solid, engrossing thriller, but a slack one.

Though it only rarely reaches the level of gonzo farce that it might have been, "Diary" is still an agreeably drunken stagger through the novel Thompson based on his formative year as a writer.

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

It's so sentimental and sweet that you can almost forgive the kids' comedy Ramona and Beezus for not being nearly funny enough.

The movie unravels as its surprises become melodramatic flourishes, undercutting its tension with coincidences, lapses in motivation and head-scratching responses to situations that are pretty conventional — cut and dried — despite the lurid, Vegas/Ellis undertones.

James McAvoy wallows in it in his new film, Filth. He embraces the sexual depravity, the drug and alcohol abuse, the bullying, vile language, racism and rank sexism of being a Scottish cop on the loose.

Bouchareb gets fine performances from several wonderful, under-utilized actors, including Ellen Burstyn and Tim Guinee in smaller roles. But his morality play is too muted to work, too muzzled to have any bite.

A vivid recreation of the early history of professional golf is the principle pleasure of Tommy’s Honour, a stately, slow and distressingly dull biography of 19th century Scottish golf hero Tom Morris.

This Herefter, despite the odd engaging moment, is a terrible letdown, like investing in a belief system and discovering there's no "here" that you've been after all your life.

The Croods: A New Age has some of the derivative limitations of the first film — the faint whiff of riding “Ice Age’s” coattails. But the players make their slapsticking, pratfalling, punking and pranking characters breathe, live, love and care.

Bell classes up the joint enough to shame director and co-writer Craig Moss (the “Bad Ass” movies) into wishing he’d at least kept his black-eyed children as serious as Bell. “Deadpan” doesn’t work when your scary, monstrous villains let us in on their smirk.

Again, stunningly stupid, and a lot more digital than one would like.

Impressive. And violent. Just not a lot of fun.

A daft pitch-black dark comedy about family dysfunction that plays out over painfully ugly family Christmas celebration.

The general comic ineptitude at work here muzzles killer supporting player Chris Parnell (playing her dad) and squanders fine, bubbly work by Rice (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”) in the film’s faster-paced opening act.

Even though the plot gets mired in lapses of logic in the third act, Noto never lets that hang up his movie. It’s a well-cast and very well-acted film.

A glorious and accomplished cast walking (never horseback riding) through a vivid, overcast 1830s snowscape, an American Gothic nightmare too generic and a tad too slow, but made entertaining by what every actor on the payroll brings to the show.

The one-liners just kind of lie there. The movie’s many make-out scenes do what they do in most exploitation films, they stop the movie cold.

There’s no humor and no pathos. The Cuckoo-Clock Heart, pretty as it is, lacks any heart at all.

The film’s pacing is stumbling and the longer it goes on, the less urgency we feel in that chase.

The situations are painstakingly set up and downright painful to sit through. So enjoy, or endure the appetizers, because with this Dinner, dessert is truly the topper.

His comedy, whatever it was at an earlier age, is comfort food now.

For all the vivid combat sequences, the gritty adjustment-back-home touches and a couple of genuinely emotional scenes, it feels incomplete, choppy and something of a cheat.

Russell sets out to frustrate, and he does. And Joy never rises above that, an aggravating, un-fulfilling and empty night at the cinema with great actors trapped in an overdue flop from people we were just starting to figure were flop-proof.

Dullness “Incarnate,” in other words.

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

It’s not period detail that lets Summerland down. It’s not moving beyond the story’s naturally watchable qualities (cast, setting, period) to give us a film that ever feels it doesn’t need one contrived situation after another just to stagger to its feet. Not that it ever moves those feet once it does, mind you.

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

It’s got a good enough cast, a couple of twists and enough brute force to it that it’s worth taking in on its own terms. Those terms being “We’re imitating the McDonagh Brothers, so what?”

It’s no “48 Hrs.” or “Fugitive,” but Below Zer is a good one, with or without subtitles.

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

Here’s a sweet, slight little samosa of a Euro-Indian comedy, a tale that’s a little bit topical, a tad picaresque, with just a hint of Bollywood thrown in spice.

Writer-directors Geoffrey Orthwein and Andrew Sullivan had a solid concept and a great setting, but not much else.

The film is on shaky ground as it veers into persecution and some paranoid “Silkwood” touches.

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

An odd duck of a thriller. Quiet, talkative, with the occasional explosion of violence, it has ghosts and characters philosophizing, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald or blurting insensitive non-sequiturs.

McConaughey, as I mentioned, has an Oscar. But this “performance” seems so unerringly stoned and slack-jawed that you can’t believe it’s not filmed reality.

Writer-director Richard Shepard did “”The Matador” and “The Hunting Party”, and he surrounds Law’s lunatic Dom with assorted underworld figures who have mellowed where Dom did not.

The best one can say for Spaceman is that it’s a trippy curiosity. The worst is that it’s a serious swing-and-a-miss for the Sand Man, and a career low for Carey M.

Whatever action Bond, Zorro and “Green Lantern” vet Martin Campbell cooks up...none of it involves urgency.

A jaunty, upbeat and thoroughly entertaining motorsport documentary about the racing series of the future, today.

But as we follow the back and forth of a newly-empowered Britney Spears in battling her father, any documentary that takes up the cause of an embattled public figure, even one long dead, at least leaves us with hope.

The ending of the movie is a real grabber, the sort of thing that lifts and improves a tediously long and otherwise mediocre film and tricks you into thinking it was better than it really was as you leave the theater.

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.

If every generation gets the Superman it deserves, Man of Steel suggests we’ve earned one utterly without wit or charm.

The winsome Lynch, narrating her story and irresistibly (to Auden) poker-faced in her dealings with the outside world, makes a heroine worth knowing and following to the ends of Ireland, with or without a wand.

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

Bacon plays a little and sings a little, Sedgwick handles jokes and pathos and in the scenes that count and turns “professional” in a heartbeat. And each gets across a shared empathy and humanity that bridges any gap in class and life experience.

The occasional blood-curdling scream notwithstanding, Offseason is more chilling and gloomy than frightening.

A chaotic and engrossing mystery built around that evergreen of the espionage and political intrigue genre, the hunt for a “mole” in Korean intelligence agencies.

It’s a timid, tired but a tender-hearted wartime romance that should have more edge than its subject promises.

Watching “Wuthering” as the hype fades just underscores what a tease the entire tale has been turned into. More sensual than sexual and far less sexy than it seems to take itself for, this rainswept, fog-choked “Wuthering” withers on the production-designed-to-death vine.

The lapses in logic and anachronistic hardware, pistols that never miss and the like might make the historically-minded cringe. But if you like your commando raids bloody and bloody fun (at times), The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare more or less fills the bill.

As holiday movie comfort food, it more than fills the bill.

Manages to deliver a striking, nicely detailed, visceral thriller built on a corny, old-fashioned script.

It’s fiction, far-fetched, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, beach-book thriller fiction. It provokes many reactions, but the one that stands out is “cheated.”

Ultrasound challenges us to go with our instincts and first impressions no matter what we learn about characters later on, only to upend those impressions on occasion. It puzzles and annoys and maybe even infuriates.

A little mystery and a lot less narration would have better-served this sordid saga.

Clifford the Big Red Dog is simple, sometimes silly little nothing of a kids’ movie, lightweight and harmless and of no great consequence whatsover. But it’s got sight gags and giant dog slobber jokes, giant dog farts and giant dog weeing-on-trees humor. So the littlest viewers, for whom it is intended, will find a laugh here and there.

Writer-director Lee Kirk’s script manages a few laugh-out-loud lines and moments, and Armstrong has an offhanded charm that plays well in a role tailor-made for him. But Ordinary World is a little too enamored of the phrase “Truth in advertising.” It’s run of the mill, humdrum, “ordinary” in its set up.

Angelfish is seriously undemanding, but benefits from novel settings (few New York movies are set in Marble Hill/Kings Bridge) and a period piece story that strips away the artifice and distraction that love in the age of cell phones promises. Back in ’93, you had to use a pay phone when you wanted privacy, had to write somebody’s number down and had to wait in the apartment if you were expecting a call...That's true love.

The movie hinges on Murray's turn as FDR, and frankly, he comes up wanting.

“Eleven” turns out to be an overreach, with too many voices to be anything but superficial, too few (she skipped sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America) to be thorough.

The most laughably ludicrous and clumsy “explainer” of a third act that Shyamalan has ever served up.

Fall of the American Empire isn’t an awful film, and it probably will prove as prophetic as “Decline of the American Empire.” But it never lets you forget that its filmmaker identifies too closely with his hero, that he’s “too intelligent” to make a thriller, or bother with getting one right. And in so-doing, his blunders are just as obvious as Pierre Paul’s.

It’s introductory by nature, polished yet primitive, just like the films that dominated gay big screen storytelling long before the alphabetic expansion to “LGBTQ.”

It’s not awful, not “so bad it’s good,” either. Take away the “twist,” which you’ve guessed and which anybody seeing the trailer or even the poster could figure out, and We Summon the Darkness only summons tedium.

It’s not a “Nework” for our times. But a game cast and a reasonably tense take on a topic that is a major component of this election year’s zeitgeist — financial cheats stealing from America, and never brought to justice — make it work.

As Danny Boyle movies go, I’d still rather see him get his shot at James Bond. As Beatles tributes go, I have to say I prefer Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe,” which re-set the songbook in thrilling and inventing ways. Yesterday just makes me long for that unjustly maligned flop.

We expect documentaries to tell us the ugly, unvarnished truth, although that’s generally a futile hope and a goal rarely achieved. In this case, selective editing stigmatizes its heroine and avoids the more interesting wrinkles in the story, which — difficult as it was to tell — feels incomplete.

Ambulance is 80 minutes of pure mayhem wallowing through 140-150 minutes of pure Michael Bay hokum.

In Search of Fellini fails to figure out twee, and more’s the pity, because the fellow who gave his name to the title perfected that — in decades of subtitled films made in his native Italy.

Whatever subtlety there was remaining in the satirical intentions of The Purge franchise pretty much fly out the door and into the blood-soaked night of The Purge: Election Night.

For all its attempts at delivering a heartfelt message, the finale is more something that unravels than resolves. But Everything Everywhere All at Once is still something to see, something that demands to be seen in a cinema, mouth agape at the wonders playing out on the huge wall — the bigger the IMAX the better — in front of you.

The story here didn’t do much for me and seems like a rickety, illogically-pieced-together structure to hang this narrative on. But the players and the craftsmanship — the lighting, editing, silences and loud noises, they make up for that and deliver those frights we ordered the moment we bought a ticket.

Here’s one to catch at Red Box, on Netflix or your favorite “family” movie channel. Everything about Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase says, firmly and with conviction, “TV movie.”

“Cute” becomes “cutesie.” But after an insipid and unamusing start, “Sight” rallies as it takes on more serious subjects, giving Richardson (“Five Feet Apart,””White Lotus”) and Hardy (he was drummer Roger Taylor in “Bohemian Rhapsody”) a chance to shine.

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 execution is novel, fascinating and just musically/romantically entertaining enough to not totally muck up the suspense that’s built in.

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

I like the way writer-director Kat Candler, expanding a short film she made a few years back, doesn’t give away the whole back-story — what killed the mother, who might have been to blame.

Heigl’s performance is more brittle, kind of her signature but also required in playing a woman going through a divorce. She has rarely given a bad performance, even if the films she picked were failures.

Close to You can be appreciated for its frank depicton of the post-hormone and surgery body and life of a transgender man no longer tormented by the confusion and self-loathing of gender dysphoria. But the story Savage and Page chose to tell with Page’s new reality can seem trite and melodramatic.

Tom Hardy manages the brilliant trick of playing two physically, emotionally and intellectually distinct mobster brothers in Legend.

A most romantic way to spend your time at the movies this fall, a “date picture” about do over dates that works, this time around.

Chairman Mao wouldn't necessarily approve. And even today, China won't be showing Mao's Last Dancer.

A faintly-creepy, lightly amusing horror comedy that promises a surprise twist and a hint of heart.

If this mad gamble is indeed the “final film” of a great director from the Golden Age of great directors, cinephiles can celebrate the fact that at least he got it cast, filmed, edited and distributed and lived to see its release. That’s more than Orson Welles could say.

The culinary culture clash comedy The Hundred-Foot Journey dawdles, like a meal that drags on and on because the waiter is too busy texting to bother bringing you the check.

Aquaman has that usual DC bloat about it, too much attempted, a movie not trimmed (in the script stage) into its best, most coherent story, sharpest jokes and most important confrontations.

It’s not really a holiday action movie “escape” when you’re not really escaping the gruesome gore and inhumanity the movie is all-too-giddy about showcasing.

It’s not a classic of the genre, not moving enough to truly grip the viewer and pull us to the edge of our seats. But a very good cast and a general respect for the facts makes The Command a worthy-enough entry, one that realizes sometimes there is no happy ending.

As meaty as this script sounds — every line another morsel — it never allows Wahlberg the chance to make us care what happens to Jim. Do we want him to get what’s coming to him, or are we rooting for him? Either way, Wyatt, Monahan and Wahlberg succeed only in frustrating our will, cashing out with a cop-out finale, making our two hour gamble on The Gambler something less than a sure thing.

Writer-director Lara Gallagher can be praised for avoiding the “gay porn cliches” this story could have devolved into. But she shoots for a thriller tone with this, and beat that notion into Katy Jarzebowsk, who did the “tenterhooks” thriller score.

The Flash, while it never comes close to the gee whiz “I can do THIS?” novelty of the many Spider-Man “origin” iterations, makes a charming, nostalgic and sometimes touching addition to the genre, and lets us hope Miller will recover enough to return to acting this character and others.

There’s just enough novelty and fun to recommend Spirited — something I’ve never done for the sour “Scrooged” — with Reynolds and Ferrell hoofing and singing like this is what they’ve wanted to do all their professional lives.

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

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

The first pleasant surprise of spring, a gorgeous kids’ cartoon with heart and wit, if not exactly a firm grasp of paleontology.

Kids, say the five-and-unders seeing their first movie, may connect with this confection. But if you’re old enough to know what “puerile” means, there’s nothing to cling to here.

Ganz has a wonderful twinkle about him that makes him perfect for Freud. If only he’d had a little something to chew on. If only the character felt like more than a Big Name afterthought.

Minamata doesn’t have the punch or paranoia of “Silkwood.” But I’d say Levitas, Depp & Co. have delivered a “message movie” with as much pathos and righteousness as the pollution lawsuit drama “Dark Waters.” And at least this one isn’t about a heroic lawyer.

Hobo hits the screen as a grim, visually ugly, intermittently funny-occasionally preachy piece with only the estimable Mr. Hauer to recommend it.

What few real tests the young man from Back East must face, the picture about his coming of age passes the most important. It looks and feels right, with buffal-in-their-element scenes that don’t have the scale of “Dances With Wolves,” but play big enough to make the parable’s point land and land hard.

Two very good looking people play two offbeat and abrasively charming lovers in Love & Other Drugs. And when your screen romance is as sexual as this one, it helps if your stars are about as good looking with their clothes off as human beings get.

It comes off, it plays and it entertains. And the impressive, high-end Sunrise Animation Studio production values — realistic landscapes, clever character designs and tje scale of a capital city under construction (Gibeah, pre-Jerusalem) — are just the icing on the cake.

The dry nature of the material and how it is treated limit the drama in this subject and flattened-out performances lower its entertainment value. But it’s daring, any way you slice that single potato wedge you’re having for lunch.

Wilmer Valderrama utterly reinvents himself here as Angel.

It’s not that ambitious, but it’s perfectly executed by Justice, her little-known supporting cast and veteran TV director (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”) Stuart McDonald. I’d say it’s good enough that maybe Ms. Justice can start a little arm-twisting — get her studio to spend a little more on writers, co-stars, etc. That’s how Doris did it.

The best you can say about Forsaken is that it attracted a good cast, sports the odd cool character or hard-bitten bit of dialogue and that the rare surprises in its stolid, formulaic script are pleasant ones.

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.

Bitch, truth be told, isn’t as daring and “out there” as its titles promises.

The tears in Clouds are built in. But all this manipulation feels excessive, unnecessary padding for a story that needed a vigorous trimming to break your heart and uplift you as it does.

Of all the impersonations, Thomas Lennon‘s spot-on send up of the balding, sunglassed cynic Donaghue is the one that dazzles. Matching Belushi’s fearless lunacy or Chevy Chase’s studied pratfalls is trickier on even a “generous” Netflix budget.

Truth be told, “Unstoppable” doesn’t do much that a hundred other surfing docs haven’t done — sometimes better — visually. It’s the personal story that has to sell it.

May not be as emotionally compelling as John Ford's work ("The Prisoner of Shark Island"), but it's every bit as meticulously crafted.

The dull, exhausted toy ad that the TV commercials prophesied came true.

It traffics in some of the very stereotypes it sends up and wastes a Big Name here and there. But it’s often laugh-out-loud funny, over-the-top, from its casting to its run time.

“King Redux” has just a couple of more laughs than the first Disney cartoon, but being 30 minutes longer, that’s not much of a plus. The original vs. remake comparison is hard to get away from here, but I have to say I was moved just once by this remake — that lovely opening note of African song/chant still thrills.

The Secret Life of Pets 2 offers up more giddy giggles for the little kiddies, a dog-wise/cat-savvy comedy that aims squarely at the youngest common denominator — and scores.

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.

In this not-even-faintly scary, rarely funny horror comedy, Smith is still sucking down big gulps of empty calories and hoping we’ll laugh at his belch.

Caine is magnificent. This is not some laughable Stallone-boxing-at-60 exercise in vanity. He's an old man playing an old man, but one who lived through experiences that both scarred him for life and prepared him for his final test.

The helplessness one gets being pinned down and tickled, the chilling fear of that, nicely parallels the chill and fear of reporting a story powerful people don’t want reported, which Farrier shows us in this odd and shocking expose.

Bushwick never rises above bush league, more a missed opportunity than a wickedly on-target winner.

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 not goofy, original or clever enough to dazzle and hold the attention of anyone over 12. But then, it’s not designed to.

Blumenthal’s stirring story would be an invaluable addition to any anthology of various survivors’ experiences. But when the ethos of keeping these stories alive is “Never Again,” and “Never again” was happening again right in front of Ella Blumenthal and her entire family for decades upon decades, it isn’t “off message” for your movie to make some effort to address it. Ignoring that is disingenuous at best, and tone deaf at the very least.

It’s not high art or a great film, just a genre tale with a twist. And it’s a tad predictable, by the time that third act rolls around. But Monaghan and the kids sell the premise, and the movie plays.

There’s novelty in their “find another way” around violence conflict resolution messsaging, the effects are excellent, if not quite at a Marvel level at the moment and it finishes well. But bland leads, a story that feels similar to many other “Spy Kids” adventures and the paucity of colorful supporting players kind of washes the Spanish/Spanglish fun right out of this most Tex-Mex of kids’ franchises.

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

Walker has few “big” scenes, no memorable dialogue and plays up the exhaustion, which tamps down the emotions of his performance. So even an action packed finale can’t rescue this dramatically thin exercise in one-man showmanship.

Nixon scores the film’s one laugh-out-loud moment. Nobody else generates anything more than a weak chuckle.

The intellectual ambition, the showy “smart” dialogue and collectively quotable characters played by actors we respect make Anesthesia watchable, and its existence as an indie film that attracted this cast, won financing and made it into theaters easy to explain.

A rambling, insomnia-curing meditation on music and the musical life that has too little of either to make any sense at all.

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.

A thin collegiate romance hung on the “sugar babies” concept. You’ve almost certainly heard of this college-coed-seeks-sugar-daddy phenomenon. New Romantic summarizes its appeal and takes the most predictable path to showing our sugar baby the down side.

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.

There are magical moments, and brilliant sequences tossed into this ensalada of a movie.

Every F-bomb, every sex gag or sexual comment, feels like an overreach and Dan just another Black character hoping the cool kids shine a little light his way.

It’s not just that Kindred doesn’t go full “Rosemary’s Baby” with why these strangers want her to have her baby at home where they can get at it, or that we get little clear notion of why they won’t let her “Get Out.” It’s that the movie has very little, suspense and thrills-wise, to offer instead.

The Joneses manages a deft blend of the sexy, the sad and the silly. And Borte doles out his secrets and surprises in ways that make it easy to keep up with these Joneses.

Everything here is something we’ve seen before — chases, “light saber” fights, the big Bond-sized set-piece finale. It gets fairly tedious fairly early on.

Home is a energetic, obvious animated comedy packed with the sort of low humor and silly laughs that drive very small children wild.

Alvarez knows her audience and has a better idea of what they want to see than I do, so more power to her and best of luck in the future. But maybe a little more effort to skip over or at least conceal the cliches, types and tropes would make that future work more “timeless” than generic and disposable as “this year’s beach romance movie for teens.”

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

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.

This movie hangs utterly on performance, and DiCaprio’s Gatsby is mesmerizing.

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

This is “The Florida Project” set in Pennsylvania, a memoir both brilliantly specific and depressingly universal.

DePalma flirts with the lurid and tosses in some interesting third act surprises, but never finds his way back to the sexually charged tone and shocks of his earlier thrillers.

“Magic” lacks too many things to rank among Allen’s better recent films — the come-uppance and zeitgeist currency of “Blue Jasmine,” the frivolity of that don’t-think-too-much-about-this lark “Midnight in Paris.” But the biggest shortcoming is right there in the title, a tease if ever there was one.

Winslet, as actress and director, gets us to the emotional core of the story with skill and compassion even as her movie introduces its emotional buttons, one by one, before punching each in turn with a care and sensitivity that make this “Goodbye” therapeutic as well as over-familiar.

It’s pretty late in the game to be getting a primer on this years-long epidemic, but the least you can say about this super-slick, ADHD friendly film is that you can’t watch it and say you don’t have an idea how it could benefit you or your kid, and just a taste of exactly why it’s a bad idea.

A good cast and amusing situations make it a pleasant, sometimes amusing if not particularly memorable experience.

Equal parts “The Crucible,” “Kill Bill” and well, hell — “Carrie” — Assassination Nation is straight up action exploitation, a scantily clad, sexed-up slut-shamed girls satire about scantily clad, sexed-up and slut-shamed girls who get even.

The real delight here is Barkhad Abdi, the “I am captain now” pirate of “Captain Phillips.”

Tom Doiron’s first produced script lapses into a long series of over-explained “expository endings” which spoil the mystery of what’s come before. But Eckhart reminds us of how good he can be when given a showy role, and a supporting cast worthy of his talents.

It takes an absurdly long time getting here, but with a lot of “Man, that’s nuts” along the way, it’s pretty much worth the wait.

Pledge is a bloody, nervy and lean thriller about “hazing” taken to its logical extreme. If you’re OK with torturing somebody so that the “shared experience” will “bond” you to your “brothers,” maybe there’s a little sociopath in you, Pledge.

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

It’s a charming, whimsical and ever-so-slight film, a bit of an over-reach but pleasant enough, even when it falls short.

It’s well-cast, but Tautou and Duris don’t set off the sparks and create the longing that would give this tragic romance some heft. Everybody else takes a back seat to the inspired visuals.

The performances are sharp, with the actors getting across fear, intense cold and a range of emotions, from desperate panic to noble sacrifice. It’s just that Life is more inevitable than surprising.

Whatever interest — and laughs (those HATS) — that holds isn’t enough to distract us from guessing plot twists a dozen scenes in advance or from giggling at how Feig and screenwriters Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis stumble through a “How do we END this mess?” debate, one which Feig clumsily slaps on the screen without bothering to edit.

It’s all eye candy and spectacle, all a bit much and pointlessly hard to follow. But make no mistake, this is something to see, even if making sense of it can feel more trouble than it’s worth.

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

Beast is an over-the-top savage and sometimes head-slappingly silly animal attack thriller. Its artfully paranoid and claustrophobic, comically cuddly and pretty much begs the audience to shout at the screen. A lot.

Noomi is good, the supporting “types” perfectly serviceable, the look — that killer image of combat team skating into the darkness from their base as it is being bombed to bits — arresting. But that ending? It’s a bust.

Wilson and Farmiga still give good value. But this franchise and these fictionalized characters and their Catholic boogeymen claptrap have gone about as far as they can go.

It's a junky, crowd-pleasing movie of sidekicks – Guzman and Knoxville – bad acting, over the top shootouts, and catch phrases.

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

This 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.

Nonna’s “price” is marked down and the movie about it is as instantly forgettable as its predecessor.

You’d have to go pretty far wrong to get me to pan anything pairing up Plaza with Caine, and Best Sellers tries its best, at times. But Caine does a grand grump, and Plaza reaches beyond her repertoire of eviscerating, man-eating side-eyes. They make this page-turner worth sticking with until the bittersweet end, and that’s enough.

It’s a mixed bag in itself, but squeezing Chris Hemsworth into an outside-the-box role in between “Thor” outings and having him face-off with Teller in a simple story with a high-end setting and “human choice” morality pays off.

All of which add up to a “movie” that’s a lot closer to “content” than to cinematic art, or even a movie that inspires, thrills, touches or moves.

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

No, this isn’t deep. But there are some surprises and just enough laughs. If you’ve ever dealt with family over the death of a relative, the sting of recognition alone is worth an extra giggle or two.

It gets the pulse racing every time the chips are down and the zombies won’t stay down and dead.

Dreamworks built its animation empire out of smart-mouthed, sight-gagged character comedies like “Shrek” and “Puss in Boots” and “Madagascar.” It’s not shocking that they came back to the “Kung Fu Panda,” as, like Pixar, they’ve hit the wall when it comes to new ideas. But even they’d have to admit that cashing-in on a time-tested intellectual property may make business sense, and that Po and Co. deserved better than this.

What a daft and twee thing Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose is. And God help anybody trying to market this dry, eccentric comedy built around the charms of Simon Pegg, Minnie Driver, Christopher Lloyd and sci-fi author Neil Gaiman voicing a (possibly) imaginary “talking mongoose.”

It’s not a great film, with a story that has too much “Lifetime Original Movie” slack and soap operatic touches for its own good. But as Jerry Wald says, “It’s all about timing.”

Late to the game, blandly cast and scripted with every Italian American cliche in the “How to Make Spaghetti” cookbook, it is Eastwood’s worst film as a director.

It’s rarely scary. But the effects suggest a bigger budget than “SiRENS” might have warranted. And a couple of those are downright impressive and add to the feeling that this indie Satanic slasher pic is punching above its weight class.

There are possibilities here, a set-up that could deliver something more than a directing exercise in driving the viewer a trifle mad with boredom. But not much else, and certainly nothing that gives away Lanthimos becoming the darling of challenging, thought provoking international cinema.

The action climax is solid, tense and exciting.

Whatever “it” is, that spark that film actresses and actors have that makes them interesting and empathetic and anything else on the screen, Fanning doesn’t have it.

The Bachelors is movie romance comfort food, rarely surprising, rarely upsetting in the places it takes its couples.

It’s engrossing and touching and very well-acted, with Kajol taking this star vehicle as far as her temper, her chastened rage and her skill in applying that Old English word that starts with an F can take it. Anu even gives Milan a George Carlin-style lecture in its proper usage. Nicely f—–g done there, sister.

"The War of the Rohirrim” is narrated to death because it has to be, otherwise it would be impossible to follow. And it’s dull and simplistic as narrative, more of a “comic book” take on Tolkien than an actual adaptation of anything Tolkien would have allowed to be published.

Streep is positively effervescent in the part, sassy and in good voice (the acoustic Jenny Lewis cover is spot-on). And for all its overly-familiar notes, Ricki and the Flash rarely seems out-of-tune.

I’m the first to admit this isn’t my favorite genre. But anybody can tell when a horror movie works. The few chills hand one or two almost jaw-dropping moments of gore delivered in the most predictable ways don’t quite get the job done here.

As Jackass japes go, though, Bad Grandpa was better in concept and in its short, punchy TV commercials than it is as a feature.

Hands of Stone is still a first-rate boxing picture, a B-movie with just enough A-picture touches to make it sting.

The film manages to move and touch us, revealing that the books are timeless due to their exquisite, English craftsmanship, their wit and warmth.

Most of us are a little too jaded or at least sober-minded to swallow this at face value. Carefully limiting the “history” you tell gives the impression of competence, quick victory and a short war.

Writer-director Michael Johnson covers a lot of familiarly morbid teen ground in All the Wilderness, a film with touches of “Ordinary People” and a hint of “Harold & Maude.” But touches and a hint aren’t enough to lift this morose movie into anything any of us need to see or hear to deepen our understanding of teen depression, grief and love.

If we don’t fall in love with it, we kind of grin and fall in “like” before all is (un)said and done.

As child kidnapping/trafficking thrillers go — and yes, there have been scores of these — No Exit barely stands out from the pack and overreaches at times. But it puts us in somebody’s snow-caked shoes and dares us to reason or fight our way out of this with her, which is all you can ask.

Arthur the King is a sweetly sentimental story all but guaranteed to move any dog fancier to tears.

It’s promising in premise, but limply plotted, offering Derbez too few chances to cut loose even as he makes the most of a game and goofy Hollywood-supplied supporting cast.

Good production values and a solid supporting cast don’t hide the fact that it’s a tepid thriller that barely works up a decent fright or two.

Any nostalgia that helped sell their last outing is gone baby gone.

Cinematically-static if well-acted, and dramatically-flat throughout, it’s an end-of-the-date story of gamesmanship, competing agendas and differing interpretations of what’s going on in a coupling towards copulation sense.

The theater scenes are so cleverly conceived — theater companies are notorious for such “Noises Off” shenanigans — and so well-acted that the film can only become a disappointment when this setting and story thread are abandoned.

As a dumb movie that makes you laugh, “Strays” falls somewhere between “Ted,” the cussing Teddy Bear tale, and “Cocaine Bear.” Just don’t go if you’re easily offended.

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

The height and the way he used it should have been addressed. The film, like the player cast as its lead, is too short to do the subject justice.

The most politically potent sci-fi/horror film series since the early years of George A. Romero gets a bloody, visceral and yes, emotional prequel with The First Purge, the movie that tells how we got from “here” to “there.”

It’s slick and scenic and the stars wear their black robber unitards with French elan. But Wingwomen never adds up to the sum of its parts, no matter how many are added to it.

But the script has laugh-out-loud moments and zippy exchanges. Middleditch and Weixler give this smarts and just enough sexy sass to work. And Bang gives it heart.

There’s too much to Wasp Network, much of it good, to dismiss it out of hand. But it only takes an hour of this two hour-plus movie for us to figure out Assayas wasn’t the right writer-director to pull it off.

As “Forrest Gump” proved, never bet against a supportive mom. There’s a need and a market for lump-in-the-throat, feel-good treacle.

This Charlie McCarthy (“The One I Love”) drama is sci-fi at its cheapest, a Netflix film that relies on location, weather and quiet to set its tone and a very good cast to make it watchable.

Some of the jokes land. Some do not. And through it all, not a moment of rising threat level or terror registers credibly on anybody’s face. It’s as if they’re all in on the joke, with Williams merely the worst at spoiling the punchline.

The jury’s out on that, but not on the growing concern Screened Out scratches the surface of. It may feel incomplete, lacking focus (put the phone back down, Hyatt) and myopic. But it lays out the parameters of the problem, the “social validation feedback loop” of effort, attention and “rewards” that these successful businesses manipulate in ways that are starting to feel insidious and destructive.

It’s still an intensely likable and watchable dramedy, even if it never quite reaches that “generation defining comedy” thing.

The script veers away from history with its whole “agent with a conscience” balderdash. The crazed partner Vaughn plays is straight out of bad melodrama.

One of the finest films of the ’80s, a high point for Caine, Walters and Gilbert and a movie I think about all the time because it literally changed my life.

It’s just competent, light entertainment.

Captive State might have achieved some sort of screen satisfaction had the straight-forward-with-obvious-twist script not been hacked into tiny image bites, rendering huge passages of it a confused visual mush.

Every promising direction is stopped dead in its tracks. And most every fraught yet comical situation is left to wither on the vine.

How to Please a Woman may play to its target audience, giving voice to female relationship frustrations and the like. But as pleasantly drab as it generally is, I dare say it won’t please any gender, any where.

Even if it bogs down in the middle acts — seriously bogs down — and has missing pieces of the story puzzle even as it takes pains to show us what would be his downfall, this Allan Ungar dramedy plays. More or less.

That doesn’t make Oblivion a bad movie, just a familiar one — generic.

Illusion isn’t a movie with a lot of highs and lows, just a downbeat tale of grief, hope and acceptance struggling mightily with defiant persistence. Buzek and Minorowicz keep us engaged almost in spite of themselves in a movie that hints it might be more conventional than it truly is, but truly isn’t.

Blandly-cast, dully-scripted and flatly-directed, the only moments of life in this story are tucked in that eight-man rowing shell.

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.

And Monroe, Moretz’s “Fifth Wave” co-star (best-known for “It Follows”), has just enough edge to make Erica a New Yorker newcomers to the city might want to listen to when she barks out a warning, even if it’s hard to take somebody this into yoga — and yoga pants — that seriously.

The movie creates a lovely arc for how we think of Ali, from monster to, “Well, maybe not.” But you’re allowed to think the filmmaker is naive, tilting his story toward those on Ali’s side, buttressing a case for his humanity and justifiable skyjacking.

Stripping it of its cruelty, sense of grievance and teen-impulsive passion for violent revenge rubs off too much of what made the first film work from this “sequel.” And no cameo from the first film can atone for that.

Stiles, who classes up everything she touches, had to see something in this. Julia won’t let us down. In Julia we trust. And damned if she doesn’t deliver, as this grim march through murder curdles from Grand Guignol to laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Costner and Garner are good and Langella properly menacing, but Leary has lost his fastball and seems to be holding something back in his quarrel scenes with Costner. Costner has to carry the film, which he does.

First-time writer/director Peter Sattler finds a few surprises to throw at us in this somewhat conventional “Stockholm Syndrome” story.

Movies like Becky don’t work when the villains don’t go all in and when the pace flags to the point where we notice the clunky dialogue and less than involving performances.

The energy in Timur Bekmambetov’s latest thriller — he did “Night Watch,””Wanted,” the “Ben Hur” remake, and produced the similar online thriller “Unfriended” — dissapates almost by default after that heady first act.

Every time we figure we know how this will turn out because we’ve seen 74 earlier versions of “this movie,” Huang trips us up. His flawed hero, more flawed parents and pipe dreams become our dreams, which “Big Game” or not, is all we could hope for in any sports dramedy.

It’s not terrible, just irritating. Freak Show is too busy flying the white flag, surrendering to the obvious, to ever let its freak flag fly.

It isn’t quite “Snakes on a Plane,” a high concept comedy in which ALL of the fun is in the title and the billing. But it’s too close.

Sunset was never going to be a thriller, and the Chekhov comparison is mainly due to the Eastern European theatricality of it all. This unfolds like a memory play on wheels, rolling through the cafe society, simmering political tensions and brave new (automobiles, electricity) world heedless that this world is about to end. Suddenly.

This “Seven” is more diverse, less patronizing than the famous Western it remakes. But it lacks the moral certitude and righteousness of its predecessor, a pre-Vietnam “America saves Paradise from a Dictator” allegory.

It’s all handled reasonably well, with just enough twists to hold the interest and just enough attention to the logic of it all for Brand Ingelsby’s script to make sense — more or less.

Death and new life, cultural prejudices and that Swiss obsession with money play into a film that is Germanic in its darkness, as subtle as a wet slap and funny? Eventually.

No tolerable climax is complete without a clock-watching anti-climax that so stretches things out that you start to discount the fabulous production design, the pointed parable about America’s rural vs. urban schism and how much fun Jason Schwartzman, in the Elizabeth Banks role, is having with all this.

Its the pleasure of this cast’s company — grounded, detailed performances with a flourish here and there — that make this otherwise routine thriller pay off.

It’s all harmless enough, and a lovely Yorkshire travelogue if nothing else.

It's a little racy for our "High School Musical" set. But Bran Nue Dae (say it out loud) will play anywhere fans like a musical so cute you want to pinch its cheeks.

Covering the same ground in an utterly conventional, voice-over-narrated-to-death melodrama gives us a film with no thrills, little suspense and, thanks to generally bland performances, almost no emotional resonance.

Visually striking, thought-provoking yet emotionally drained, Anon is just too empty to make one care.

The obvious artifice doesn’t change the film’s essential adolescent truth. High school is all about “being lonely.”

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

The entire enterprise feels like a piece of experimental theater that needs further workshopping before it’s ready for the stage.

So even though Signal isn’t great sci-fi, you’d never know it to look at it and listen to it.

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.

The germ of an idea is here. I’m just not sure it’s worth more than a shorter film than this one, which at 80 minutes is a bit of a drag.

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.

Colman is brilliant, Ward brings a lovely wounded nobility to Stephen and the warm and cuddly Jones is set up to sum it all up. But Mendes will not or cannot take us there in this personal project that perhaps needed another person or two’s input, and workshopping and re-writing before the camera rolled.

It’s just the jokes that aren’t funny — not even to the supposedly undemanding (very young) audience these films are tailored to.

Love John Woo. Love to see a few more action pics from him before he takes his well-deserved retirement. But as hymns to revenge on gangsters go, “Silent Night” hits too many of the same chords over and over, and without punchy, pithy dialogue, none of them are all that musical.

A confident, cocky and often comic promenade down the same primrose path.

The problem with Dead Don’t Die is that it just doesn’t play. Jarmusch’s style doesn’t fit the material at feature film length. The long double-takes and slow-burn reactions, in this context, don’t delight, tickle or amuse.

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

Not all of it works. But giddy moments and goofy touches — former Bond villain Steven Berkoff shows up as “my inspiration,” the ghost of infamous 1930s novelist, occultist, thinker and druggy Alastair Crowley — put Creation Stories over.

Wonderland is equal parts Lewis Carroll and Grace Slick. It’s inspired by Carroll’s "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," but also, apparently, by Slick’s psychedelic ‘60s anthem, “White Rabbit.” It’s a trip, man.

The film still manages to be a beautifully-detailed recreation of a well-worn piece of history, most thought-provoking in its novel approach to the motivations and intent of those involved.

Which is a big build-up to essentially saying, “This movie’s a stiff.”

Statham, 56 and fit enough to bring the fury, benefits from impressive stuntwork — his own, his double’s and the legion of stunt men/minions he’s meant to stab, kick, punch and plow his way through. And everybody can toast the breathless editing from Geoffrey O’Brien, who should be on everybody involved’s Christmas card list after this.

What this film from the director of "The Devil Wears Prada" does manage is a gentle amiability.

It’s obvious and slow and cute in all the places you’d expect, melodramatic in many of the others. But for what it is, it is superbly-crafted.

Book Club, aka Sisterhood of the Traveling Spanx, stuffs the screen with Oscar and Emmy winning actresses of a certain age and hopes the laughs will follow. And they do, just often enough to make this genial, eye-roller of a farce work.

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

Director Roger Michell (“Venus,”Notting Hill”) cast this well and earns stellar on-the-nose performances from Sarandon, Wilson, Duncan and Wasikowska.

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

And no, it doesn’t make much sense. Surely this is the strangest movie Cage has ever been in, and that’s saying something. But arresting image follows arresting image in Sono’s fevered vision.

The Program wisely hangs on Foster’s fierce performance, transforming himself into Lance.

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

I can’t speak to the manga that inspired it, but Cameron, Rodriguez and third screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis give us settings, characters and story elements from “Blade Runner,” “Robocop” and “Rollerball,” all hanging from the framework of Cameron’s TV series, “Dark Angel.” Whatever comfort these over-familiar tropes deliver, “surprise” and “invention” don’t figure here.

Writer-director Defa manages a few engaging exchanges, smart scenes and running gags.

It’s all lovely to look at, as you’d expect from a movie directed by a camera operator/DP. But it has all the nutritional value of an orchid blossom.

It’s almost disappointing that the movie plays things more or less straight after that jarring first act.

A warm grin of recognition here and there and memories of better banter, quicker pacing and a real fish-out-of-water feel from the earlier films is about the best one can hope to get out of this “Cop.”

That miss-or-hit collection of horror shorts, “The ABCs of Death” becomes more hit or miss with its sequel, ABCs of Death 2.