Roger Moore

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

With this “Girl” and her bicycle, the cute bits, rare laugh out loud moments, occasionally zippy lines and limply obvious farcical predicaments are never more than instantly forgettable.

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

Re/Member does just well enough by a killer concept to merit a Hollywood remake, because this version stumbles here and there, and simply fails at the finish.

In the end, we’re left with a gimmick movie that doesn’t come off, an accurate-enough artifact of the global lockdown of last spring that will be remembered for that, and little else.

Sure, it’s good-looking, cautionary and clever enough. But there’s not much in this “Game” that you’d call thrilling or fun.

It just makes for a cluttered, derivative and somewhat soulless finale to a trilogy that millions embraced and some folks love.

Laughs and lump-in-the-throat moments are in too short supply for Resort to Love to come off.

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

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.

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

As it is, Trial by Fire finds its “Dead Man Walking” heart only after Dern shows up, and only hits its tension-building sweet spot as the “ticking clock” of impending execution winds down. It’s a sermon with too much preamble and a big finish, with some rough-edged nap time tucked in between.

A pull-out-all-the-cliches and throw in a few on-the-nose new ones script leaves Halle Berry’s directing debut, Bruised, a split decision.

Chloe and Theo feels like Dakota Johnson’s atonement for the meretricious slime that was “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

I’ll Find You comes off like a lot of the lip-sync’d singing and mimed playing of the actors portraying musicians — fake and lacking the heart and passion necessary to pull this off.

Wiseman has filmed and under-edited what amounts to a public record of a sliver of a village captured at one moment in time, playing up the boredom, celebrating the pace of life yet never noting its problems or discovering its charms.

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

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

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.

It's as disquieting as it is unsatisfying, a slog through gender issues, surgery and violence - sexual and otherwise.

Only Hopkins, readily referencing his bag of tricks, seems to get what to make of this "inspired by trues events (and a book by Matt Baglio)" hooey.

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

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.

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.

A slick, upbeat Church of Latter Day Saints-backed documentary that aims to answer the image of the church and its members “shaped by the media and popular culture.”

A clever and adorable original film remade with most of the charm wrung out of it.

Fletcher and his players never quite hit on a tone that works. Fantastical dream sequences and side trips to the store to get “more bullets” never quite rise to the level of wry commentary. This just isn’t as cute and funny as Fletcher seems to think it is.

There are clever ideas and casting flourishes at the heart of “Boy Kills World.” But in execution, one keeps coming back to the phrase “Less is more,” even in a hyper-violent action comedy where the excess is kind of the point.

Sweet, cute to the point of cutesy.

Mainly, though, Safelight is just a California tourism travelogue — See Scenic Joshua Tree, Visit the Lighthouses of Southern California. Which we do, in 80 odd-but-not-odd-enough minutes.

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.

Those scenes with Letts are worth the price of admission, even if the movie overall drags, dry and not nearly as droll as Roth must have intended.

Though we “see” the attraction between the two young women, we rarely feel it. Luchetti makes her beautiful looking film about this budding summer romance, but never quite convinces us of her passionate interest in it, or in much else that was going on in Italy in 1938.

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

Master never shakes the feeling that we’re seeing a collection of tropes and ideas that never come together in a coherent narrative.

With The Prosecutor we come for Donnie Yen and for the fights, and if we’re studying Mandarin, to bone up on Chinese legal arcana. Because God knows there’s a lot of dialogue to this thing. But at some point, all that starts to feel superfluous and in the end, boring.

The movie's central gimmick isn't enough, and when more supernatural twists that don't play by the movie's own fantasy rules kick in, it lost me.

A Cop Movie is a slick exploration/explanation of Mexican policing. But as the style drifts from first-person, dash-cam point of view “reality” to a laughably generic foot chase through the city and onto the subway, it becomes obvious that believing what we see and hear is meant to matter here. And the gimmicks undercut that too many times along the way.

I Want You Back is a rom-com that sort of drifts along, not quite petering out, not exactly sparking to life, until that magical moment when Pete Davidson shows up.

As “unfilmmable” as a movie about men lost in words, attempting to write a dictionary might seem, there is a better picture in this subject, based on journalist/history buff Simon Winchester’s best selling book. Limiting its scope, beefing up the connection between the “consanguineous” correspondents, their letters and their meetings, giving the two men competing agendas (acceptance by academia vs “redemption”) rather than shoehorning both of them into one and losing the “love story” would have been a start.

The acting is rarely broad and Fan Bingbing delivers a credible haplessness in Lian. The broader comedy translates well-enough.

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

It’s a star vehicle, awards bait and a showcase thriller that barely holds your interest as you wait through the whispers and “She looks TERRIBLE” closeups for something exciting or moving to happen.

For all its filmmaking care and care-worn performances, is nothing more than a beach book, inconsequential and utterly out of place in January.

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.

Sean McNamara’s “Big Game” formula drama is ONLY about the Big Game — an endless procession of them. Characters are shortchanged, emotion impact is deadened. Heck, the dead teen’s funeral/wake is practically covered in a simple, short montage.

It’s a film that wants to be a little of this, a lot of that and funny in the bargain. You want to like it so much that you can sense Disney getting a new franchise out of it, even if it doesn’t quite come off. But if they do sequels, they’d bloody well better hire somebody who knows comedy to film them.

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

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.

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

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

Twin Flower is a solid if static on-the-road thriller that loses its way when it stops running.

The mixed-bag Reclaim turns out to be doesn’t hide the fact that there’s a tighter, more impactful movie in this material, a common complaint with overlong made-for-Netflix productions. Indulging the filmmaker, like a mother indulging her kids for too long, doesn’t do anybody any good.

The dance is pulsating and fun, well-staged and beautifully shot. The sex is dancer-athletic, titillating and mostly packaged in a montage sure to be a widely-shared Reddit clip any day now. But the whole is rather an empty experience, something I confess it shares with other Larraín films. Ema is pretty, provocative and surprising in ways that are more interesting to chew on than satisfying to experience.

Twisters is set to be one of the biggest hits of the summer, with a budget that convinced two studios to share the cost and distribution. But that lack of the human touch lowers the stakes, minimized the suspense and left me cold. The effects are next generation impressive, but they’ve been getting steadily better in the tornado movies between Twister and Twisters.

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.

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.

The cloying narration and the inclusion of Fonda are just warnings for that moment, 70 minutes in, when this comic chemical train goes completely off the rails. Rockwell, Wilde, Monaghan are worth the price of admission, but “Better Living” would have been better off with more chemistry and less cutesy.

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

The most universally relatable thing about Anne+ is the confusion and panic over the direction many of us haven’t figured out we want our lives to take in our 20s. That’s Anne in a nutshell.

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

I didn’t hate this slaughter-at-the-soap opera reboot. Not until it goes seriously off the rails in the third act, anyway. But don’t get your “torture porn” hopes up with the word “slaughter.” It is PG-13, after all. And this isn’t “Hostel.”

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

It’s got pacing problems and (serious) coherence issues to go along with the Ritchie touches and yet another visual homage to the epic corridor kill-off in the Korean classic “Oldboy.”

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.

Coogler introduces themes, agendas and histories in collision with this film. But once “Sinners” transitions from Black history at a crossroads into straight-up horror, nothing much is made of the Big Ideas in this ungainly mashup of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Crossroads” and “From Dust Til Dawn.”

Coppola stripped the tale, cut the length, eschews menace and goes easy on the malice, which made the earlier version of the story work. Even as an arch, serio-comic female revenge fantasy, this Beguiled fails to cast the necessary spell.

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

Planes: Fire & Rescue is roughly twice as good as its predecessor, Planes, which was so story-and-laugh starved it would have given “direct-to-video” a bad name. Yes, there was nowhere to go but up.

It’s better in conception than in execution, with all the energy hurled at the effects and murderous Krampus attacks. The actors fail to feel the fear.

The film itself is more recognizably human and considered, while lacking any comic edge or sense that the romantic stakes are high.

The human acting is, for the most part, indifferent, with even the polished Laurent (“Inglorious Basterds,””Beginners,” “Night Train to Lisbon”) underwhelming owing to the lack of big emotional moments in the script.

Never Too Late never transcends the undemanding, old fashioned lighter-than-light entertainment for seniors that it’s meant to be.

Blech’s is almost the only voice heard in the movie, and after a while, he’s all too easy to tune out.

Pace is a great thing in any funny movie. But there’s a point when you aren’t finishing a thought, doing justice to this character or that threat. When you’re skipping by the cool stuff, you know you’re going too fast.

It’s always been a talky two-hander, a very static and melodramatic “filmed play,” in this case, with the filming taking place in a Buenos Aires park. But a lot of the comedy — old men lying, puffing up their past or having no tolerance for those who lie, the old “I’m not Rappaport” comedy sketch at its center — translates well enough.

Divergent, the latest outcast-teen-battles-The-System thriller, is similar enough to “The Hunger Games” that hardcore Katniss fans may dismiss it. But it’s a more streamlined film, with a love story with genuine heat and deaths with genuine pathos.

It makes for a chilling portrait of fanaticism at work, even if it is more historical than anything worthy of “let’s feel that fear again” topicality. Even if we suspect its designed to gin up more support for our Islamic ally in the Middle East.

There are a few laughs and some chewy turns (Brolin, mainly) to sink our teeth into. But “Wake Up Dead Man,” for all its St. Paul Blinded on the Road to Damascus “case of pink-eye” zingers, doesn’t amuse enough to dazzle, and doesn’t get the best out of a cast that deserves better.

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

It has about as much satiric bite as a Polident commercial, a reverse mortgage of a movie promising dividends its enfeebled script never delivers.

Barefoot is “Rainman” meets “Benny & Joon.”

While there are things to be explored and pondered in drab “Saint Omer,” Diop’s organization of her message and lack of prioritization of simple courtesy-to-the-viewer information we need in order to follow the story and answer that fundamental question, “What the hell is this thing about?” leaves a lot to be desired.

Gore Verbinski’s film is an overlong array of noisy, digitally-assisted chases, shootouts, crashes and explosions with the occasional flash of homage to the “real” Lone Ranger that suggests a better movie than the pricey, jumbled compromise Verbinski delivered.

The Protector gets pretty much everything wrong.

The effects are indie-comedy cheap, and the tale’s overarching morality’s a bit murky.

There are a few scattered laughs.

It’s an indulgent movie, drifting through grief on a sea of cliches.

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.

Sticking close to “the facts” ensures that The Stronghold turns into a bit of a grind. The over-the-top moments are restrained by that reality, and some pursuits, arrests and brawls seem so low-stakes as to undercut the whole enterprise.

Little Men doesn’t come to grips with much of anything, leaving relationships and questions of sexuality and even Leonor’s uncertain future uncertain.

“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.

I kind of got into the film’s dark, masochistic comic vibe but found it ungainly and lumbering.

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.

Three Day Millionaire, scripted by Paul Stephenson and directed by Jack Spring (“Destination: Dewsbury”), is a Ritchie-lite movie that gets many of the basics right even as a misses a couple of the most obvious.

It teeters unsatisfyingly between forlorn and wistful. Looking for something more? You’ll have to find that “Elsewhere.”

Wahlberg and the movie are likable enough, but overstay their welcome like a priest or pastor who never mastered the art of wrapping things up.

Unlike say, “Doogal” or “Hoodwinked 2,” at least you won’t want to gouge your eyes out after this one.

It’s kind of a mess, but an ambitious one hitting on themes Aster’s fans will recognize as his favorites. And as Aster scores points on conspiracy-obsessed America, cultish America, gun-fetishizing America, virtue signalling America and the limits of “back the blue,” he’s pretty much earned the right to be heard out, if not the benefit of the doubt.

At some point, “cute” no longer figures into it, and you’re just joking around with guns and gunplay tropes that aren’t any funnier simply because they’ve already been beaten to death.

It’s a epic tragedy, and summing it up in under two hours does nobody justice.

Blonde is too ambitious and too important a cinematic subject to dismiss out of hand. Wildly uneven, misguided, bluntly exploitive at times, it also has moments of wrenching pathos and a mournful tone that will never let a film fan look at a Monroe movie the same way again.

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

There are some explosive laughs in this. But they show up so randomly, with the story in between the payoff moments so lame, that Game Over screams out for more editing.

In all honesty, the rat-a-tat repartee and tasty touches of Classic pre-Madonna Ritchie don’t excuse a bastardization that takes forever to get on its feet, that lacks the requisite love story (Ritchie and his “boys will be boys” pictures), that presents too much of Angle-land as a burnt-out pit quarry, that revels in anachronisms.

It’s not a great film, with some edge Sparks put in the novel left out of the script. But there’s real chemistry between the young lovers and an old fashioned virtue to the father-daughter, father-daughter’s boyfriend scenes.

As screenwriters, their First Best Destiny might be keeping a script doctor on speed dial. Their “mystery” isn’t nearly mysterious enough. And that three act structure makes for a grim, distressing and lumbering opening, a tense and bloody finale and a middle act — the one set in the modern day that “explains” what’s going on — that is as straight-up hackwork, a Tyler Perry fashion show meant to add dread but where rolling one’s eyes is the only proper response.

It’s a generally frank and sober-minded essay on Black female sexuality, body image issues and the perils of dating not just somebody younger, but someone from another class.

This “beer run” from Inwood, Manhattan, to Saigon and “up country” environs starts jaunty, gets somber and sentimental and then goes oh-so-very-wrong. You’ll feel it the instant it happens, just as I did.

The script is a mad, muddled blitz of one-liners and movie references. Some of the animation is a hoot, and a few voice actors stand out.

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

It’s just not enough. The Bronze is predictable, and outside of Rauch, Cole and a very convincing (conditioning, some training, clever editing) Haley Lu Richardson, the cast is bland. Strong has nothing to play, and nobody else makes an impression. The Bronze is proof that one great joke is not the route to comic gold, or for that matter silver.

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.

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

Not a ringing endorsement, but as faith-based dramas go, this isn’t angry and isn’t an over-reach. Its virtues are the same as ever, even if its dramatic shortcomings only grow with time.

“Cheaper” in this case plays like a TV pilot, one that could use a lot more laughs.

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.

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

A musical vamp on young LA's decade-long Pussycat Dolls fascination with tarting up like strippers and shaking those money makers, it's somewhat less than the sum of its parts. But those parts. Oh my.

The fights are well-staged, the chases dull. But as Insurgent wraps up, it picks up speed and depth, and gives you hope that maybe this series won’t wrap up as the copy-and-paste “Hunger Games” it has felt like, from the moment the books were word-processed onto the best seller lists.

Materialists is dry and ironic and “honest” while laying bare the hopes that we all cling to that love isn’t really as materialistic as she’s saying. But the rare air of the artificial, archetypal world she sets out to make her big statement in leaves the viewer grasping for not just a breath of fresh air, but hope.

One more pan dipped into the Supervillain Gru goldmine shows this Illumination franchise is a claim that’s petered out, with no fresh ideas — no funny ones, anyway.

Like a lot of musical bio-pics, from maudlin Whitney Houston stories to the overrated Oscar winners “La Vie En Rose” and the much more fun “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the filmmakers limit us to “the greatest hits.” And that’s a far from complete or wholly satisfying immersion in this life and her world.

Find Me Falling never reaches beyond the low hanging fruit. But that turns out to be pretty sweet, if not quite as filling or challenging as you might hope.

The terrible, only-happens-in-the-movies crime and his character’s investigation of it are all that animate these “Nocturnal Creatures.”

Bitter Harvest never amounts to more than a colorful misfire, a picture with much of the pageant of the period, but little of the roiling passions that dominate politics in the Breadbasket of Europe, even today.

“Peninsula” is basically a digital effects dumbing down of “Train to Busan.”

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

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

A lumbering ordeal of a picture.

The slapstick doesn’t slap — not that often, anyway. And the one-liners don’t land. Even the “funny” voices aren’t funny, and the wacky character design seems lacking in the wacky.

At this stage of this saga, you kind of know where it’s going and which emotional buttons will be punched, the ones I predicted way back in 1984 with my little "IV-I.V.” crack. Another two hours and 13 minutes of it, even with decent “Rocky” style (roundhouse punch after roundhouse punch) is hardly merited.

The script provides a few good lines and the cast a few decent moments. But “old school” Universal horror — dating from the studio’s 1930s history — means “old hat,” in most cases.

Frustrating as it is, this scruffy, misshapen farce still has laugh-out-loud lines, and lightly-amusing send-ups of an idea that has intuition going for it, and little else.

To me, it’s just another “Jurassic World,” technology and production design on a whole new plane, story, dialogue and characters that we’ve seen before (too often), the entire hyped and over-rated enterprise half-forgotten before it hits Netflix.

I’m still a big fan of the actor, not much of a fan of Cold Blood.

Movies like this don’t settle the UFO question, and there’s no sense pretending the Department of Defense settled it for you when they didn’t.

Jackass Forever is a valedictory victory lap for the scruffy little troupe of “stunt” dudes who risk almost certain injury — and certain humiliation — for laughs, lowbrow fame and cold-hard-cash.

Goldberger’s script hangs on a couple of Big Secrets — his and hers — revealed in the middle acts. And it lives or dies on any sparks the two leads set off, which are few in number.

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.

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.

There’s a "don’t overthink this” watchability to Miss Bala.

It’s no use wishing The Last Word had come out better. But with plenty of examples of failed-films aimed at an older audience to compare it to, an “I’ve seen worse” makes for some consolation.

A single decent twist and a pleasant lump-in-the-throat finale are what you get for your time, here. Not much, but not a lot of family friendly movies do better.

It's meant to be faintly Pythonesque with a hint of bowdlerized "The Black Adder"...But it's entirely too slow of foot for that comparison to pay off.

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.

Repetitious, tedious, and pretty much joyless.

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.

I’d say writer-director Danluck’s story unravels entirely too easily, but that’s crediting her with “raveling” that she never quite gets around to.

There’s just a hint of “art” to all this, of course. But just a hint. Mostly it’s just random and pointless scenes circling a heroine who is just a 19 year-old, living her life and doing what she loves after the rain stops.

Disney/Pixar’s animated “Luca” is “The Little Mermaid” without the heart, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” without the laughs. It’s a gorgeous-looking time-killer aimed at a very young and undemanding audience.

Even the reckless behavior of youth seems recycled from every other film in this summer romance genre. Pretty it may be. But all those elements conspire to make “Last Summer” not one we’ll remember, but one quickly forgotten.

Jokier and more obviously derivative, Mission: Impossible-Rogue Nation is the funniest “MI” picture, and maybe the worst of the series.

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.

Paxton makes a marvelous menace. The picture’s biggest failing is losing sight of him for the middle acts, and its second biggest failing is giving the equally valuable Colm Feore too little to do.

The only way to appreciate The Book of Henry is by treating it as the movie equivalent of a summer read, a beach book that tries to pack in the full breadth of human experience into a few too many pages.

It’s a slow-moving/unsatisfying in the end how-will-she-escape thriller dragged out by too many scenes explaining the torturer’s psyche, undone by an ending that no Hollywood studio would allow past the “bad idea in the script” stage.

The assorted heart-to-hearts play well, and Silverstone still shows some (limited) comic chops. But there’s no flow, no scene-topping-scene build-up of laughs, heart, etc.

Deep thoughts about re-directing cynically manipulated celebrity, lump in the throat moments at people rising up against their oppressors, a couple of memorable deaths and attempts at sacrifice play as flat when there’s nothing around them to serve as contrast.

It works, in that arch-action-vehicle-built on-cliches sort of way.

A barely serviceable romantic comedy.

It is stately, quiet and elegiac, all respect-your-elders politesse for “Pleasantly dull.”

It makes its points, takes the intensely-unlikable guy where he was always headed, and then sticks around a full half hour after the climax, another 15 minutes past the anti-climax.

The picture lives or dies on wheels, and the track scenes, with chase cars, drone shots and the like, are terrific. Eventually, the street chases and races measure up, too. Eventually.

The Cult of Roth will almost certainly eat this holiday horror feast up. But this turkey is never more than a mixed bag, and as the laughs peter out and the “clues” are contrived to fit the finale, “Thanksgiving” takes that tryptophan turn towards nodding off, the curse of Turkey Day since that first Thanksgiving — in Virginia.

This unblinking yet unsatisfying ensemble drama features kinky sex, ruthless opportunism, violence and psychosis. Very Cronenberg.

Schrader’s made a long meditation on something that’s right up his alley, and it still feels incomplete while it’s in progress, and even in the final reckoning.

It’s the best showcase Russell Crowe‘s had in forever. Sure, it’s a B-picture, a straight-up rage-on-the-road genre movie in the “Duel,””Changing Lanes” or “Falling Down” mold. But Crowe, overweight and the very embodiment of “gone to seed,” gives this villain-we-all-know a face to fear and a hulking pick-up truck to match.

Like homelessness itself, Paradise Cove has problems we, and the folks who made this, can’t talk our way out of.

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.

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

The funniest thing about it all is the mere fact that it exists, this silly nothing of a comedy film series built around European “AmCar” nuts, fans of American muscle back from way back when. No, it’s not much of a movie. But if any of those conceits tickles your clutch-pedal foot, it’s good for a laugh or three.

It’s a good-looking, mindless romp aimed at the children of all ages who watch professional wrestling. Formulaic and silly, it might not be reason one to subscribe to the Kevin Costner network. But there are a couple of laughs and lots of utterly ridiculous “action” in the octagon where the Big Boys play.

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

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

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.

So yes, even if you know how this story goes, there are moments that work wickedly well in between the needlessly drawn out ones, by which I mean the entire, predictable third act.

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

The cast doesn’t have the sassy swagger of the “Fast & Furious” crew. Paul, surrounded by co-stars of the same modest height, isn’t particularly charismatic in this setting. He’s not a natural “quiet tough guy.” But the actors are second bananas here — to the Koenigsegg Ageras, Saleens and Shelby Mustang that feed America’s Need for Speed, on screen and off. And the cars deliver.

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

The scenery is startling and the cinematography by Todd McMullen striking.

It doesn’t have the laughs or the killer cast of “Superbad,” but there are gory giggles aplenty in this B-movie addition to the genre that displaced vampires once Edward impregnated Bella.

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.

There’s a “for fans only” feel to the latest “Avengers” movie, Captain America: Civil War, that won’t be to every taste. A talky, often ponderous exercise in comic book movie elephantiasis, it overdoses on characters, old and new, sometimes not even bothering to name them.

Disney's Prom is to real high school what "High School Musical" was to "West Side Story" – all fluff, no edge.

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.

When the thriller’s third act collapses in on itself , breaking its own unsentimental rules and reminding us that this is the studio that reboots “Spider-Man” every three years, whether we ask for it or not, “like” becomes a stretch.

Whatever dread we feared leading up to it, the climax deflates in a heartbeat despite Reeser’s bust-a-bottle-over-my-head efforts.

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

This lame, laugh-starved script makes him look like an Old Man — not a funny old man or a Grumpy old man (see the fine “St. Vincent” for that). Just old and not really up to trying too hard.

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

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.

It’s all in good, violent fun until it gets to be too much and you realize they’re never going to top their big two-hour-mark throwdown.

The dialogue has no snap, crackle or you-know-what, the dragons are better defined but aren’t really the focus here.

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

Giroux makes the possible love affair so mild-mannered that there aren’t a lot of sparks when these cultures clash, just a “You’re strange, WEIRD,” vs. “I’m not strange. YOU are!”

A mediocre, gimmicky 2015 romantic comedy that featured a star-studded supporting cast, some cute characters, witty banter and adorable leads.

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.

Nordling makes a terrific heavy, Rhames oozes credibility as the wizened small-time crook turned small business owner, Bosworth holds her own and Phillippe hits just the right notes — crooked to the core, wary of everybody except for “family,” naive enough to think his instincts are enough.

The human stuff is entirely too predictable. And the whole thing is so Disney sweet and cutesey it’ll make your teeth hurt.

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.

It’s a tale too concerned with keeping a secret that’s not a secret at all, and condoning behavior that has might warrant a police “all points bulletin” elsewhere. But it’s well-acted and quite watchable.

Funny people can cover for a lot of screen comedy sins. But in this one, the sins aren’t “Little” and the players too hampered by script and direction to put out the dumpster fire this very nearly is.

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.

It’s still good, clean “fun” and as harmless as it is high-tone and, by now, tone deaf (a world where money is no object and COVID does not exist). At least they have the good grace to officially wrap it all up in a way that leaves no room for sequels

A soapy period piece that hits all the usual mileposts in filmed versions of such stories.

The picture lacks for nothing but big laughs.

Most of these gags didn’t make the “movie” for a reason. And those that did and are recycled here don’t add up to the same sort of experience “Forever” delivered.

Perry’s sympathetic treatment of this history — stay through the credits — is laudable, and no one can ever say he can’t turn out slick to the point of immaculate melodramas. These ladies are so smartly made-up and prepped for their closeups that it calls to attention how tidy and sterile this cinematic war is. It barely looks lived-in, much less fought.

There's an unexpected wistfulness, a bittersweet undercurrent to Going the Distance that could not have been in the script. This romantic comedy co-starring Drew Barrymore and longtime beau Justin Long was finished just as the real life couple was splitting up. For good, this time.

The slack pacing and generally flat performances rob “Last Night” of any urgency and lower the stakes.

As a fan of Cohn and Duprat’s tighter, darker previous collaborations I was keenly aware of the passage of screen time and slack pacing here. “Official Competition” feels like an 80 minute spoof bundled in the gauze of a 115 minute film.

Torres has plenty of fellow aficionados on camera telling us that they “get it,” but not really why. And he samples so little of the actual film that we’re kind of left in the dark.

If you’re still a dewy-eyed teen fresh out of going “Awwwww” at the out-of-date coming-out romance “Love, Simon,” there’s nothing wrong with stuffing a few tissues in your pocket and bracing for, if not a good cry, at least the sniffle or two Midnight Sun promises.

Ad Vitam is competently shot and cut and works well enough for long enough stretches to recommend. But equally long stretches of training and graduation and karaoke celebrating kill its momentum.

The longer it goes on, the more over-the-top the set pieces get and the more dated the “geopolitics” of it all seems. Clancy has one big theme that turns up in almost all of his adapted-into-scripts novels, and it’s front and center here, served up without apology by a deliriously successful writer whose every book had a whiff of “His Greatest Hits” about it.

Huppert at 65 is “still getting it done.” She’s a magnetic presence in any film. But too much of this one is trite, tried and true. And the tunes? Not tone-deaf, but close.

Sylvie’s Love comes off like a novel idea given every chance to shine, but let down by a maudlin TV movie script that needed polish.

As a filmmaker, Kundalkar’s sense of pace seems borrowed from Russian novelists — the most long-winded ones. Watching this movie is like watching cobalt paint dry for long stretches.

A movie that won’t convert anyone, a film for the faithful who want to believe nothing but the best about Mother Teresa. Real life is rarely cut and dry, and dramatically flat, as this.

It has maddeningly unsatisfying theological debates, scrupulous though myopic period detail and an utter lack of narrative drive.

It’s pretty, occasionally cute, but trippy — random. Yeah, there’s one credited screenwriter, but more than all but the worst Pixar product, it shows the signs of “written by committee.”

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

Whatever the film’s other failings, it presents an incredible story with a credulous, approachable innocence that it to be envied, whether or not you believe a word of it.

The leads are engaging and some jokes land. But none of them cut deep because there’s little edge to any of this.

Windfall isn’t bad. It’s just predictable and dully inconsequential.

As befits a film with Martin Scorsese as a credited producer, “Wannabe” is more “King of Comedy” tragic, more sadly psychotic, than its 2014 predecessor.

Rag Doll is a boxing-my-way-out-of-a-jam drama that flirts with being interesting, in between passages of middling melodrama and wilder, illogical “Nobody’ll see THAT coming” surprises.

Paskal is a Malaysian Seal Team Six thriller, an action picture that rarely missteps when it’s all about the action, but that takes too many detours into dull, cliched melodrama to recommend.

The pre-teen girls this is intended for have a right to expect more laughs, broader villainy and more fun. This time out, the glass slipper doesn’t fit.

This doesn’t have the wit or warmth of “Swing Vote” or the mean-spirited political currency of “Veep.”

The picture never gains much traction, tumbling to and fro among the assorted story threads.

Emancipation is a decent enough slave-escape thriller, but one can’t help but wince at its lead performance and the clunky dialogue and cliched scenes that bring it to a stop, time and again.

This sentimental, sweet and romantic voyage crashes into the rocks in the third act with bizarre turns that lean into Chinese self-sacrifice so hard the indoctrination is the least grating thing about it, and all the added supernaturalism in the world can’t rescue it.

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.

One is left with the gnawing feeling that there isn’t much point to his Napoleon, that there are no messages/warnings for today in his narrative and that maybe his “take” on the character is more superficial than deep, more British monarchist than revolutionary and more set-pieces and romance than historically accurate and insightful.

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.

When all that’s taken into account, The Infiltrator feels like a TV mini series squished into two hours, with the budget, supporting cast and period piece compromises to match.

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.

Hollywood will be hard pressed to top this lean Canadian indie picture that knows it’s just another dumb werewolf movie, but has fun with that knowledge.

Even though “Dude” strikes a teens-behaving-badly blow for gender parity, even if it’s every bit as raunchy as most boys-get-blasted comedies of its ilk, its several random laughs don’t build to anything, its deep thoughts are too shallow to uplift the genre, or the age group it might have been aimed at.

A mild-mannered kids' comedy that makes for a pleasant-enough time killer.

The younger sister of the formidable Vera Farmiga gives flat, rushed and unconvincing line readings, especially in her paragraph-long, exposition-packed monologues. Is that by design? Is this a clever teen “acting” to manipulate her memory detective? The actress should be better at masking that, if that’s the case. And if it isn’t, she should be just…better.

It’s not a leap to call “Leap!” perfectly watchable, if entirely too dull for the very young — especially the hyper-active.

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

Love Life doesn’t coalesce into anything deeper than “Everybody’s dealing with something” and “Life’s a mess that only gets messier.” And in the end, this quiet drama — stumbling into near comedy for the finale — is just pointless enough to pass for “dull.”

Obvious and jaw-droppingly bloody, it still gives Heigl her funniest role in years.

It skews very young, and for that crowd, Hotel Transylvania 2 works well enough. If this is Sandler’s sentence for all the awful, lazy live-action fare he’s fed his fans over the years, he and we can say he got off easy.

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

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

“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.

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

In a film lacking in real frights, the pathos of a young novitiate’s suicide attempt hits you hard, because it’s one of the few moments in the lovely and lushly-detailed Consecration that makes you feel something.

A historically interesting story is painted in broad, colorless strokes, alternating as it does between soap opera and slapstick.

Acts of Vengeance has great fights, solid performances and a smart story hook. Not a great movie, but as vengeance pictures go, an efficient one and a film that doesn’t grate on the viewer or humiliate its star and gore-obsessed director, unlike SOME movies of the genre one could name.

Reid’s toxic smile and Matthews’ working class wantonness work. But in a role no-doubt written for him, Jones downloads his entire arsenal — hurt, shyness, pain, guilt and rage — onto the screen. This is a performance that smacks of desperation and denial, a paranoid loner making it up as he goes along.

Actress turned director Brea Grant (TV’s “Eastsiders”) serves up a pungent, gory goof of a nurses-gone-bad comedy, dark as dirt and corrosive as Clorox.

Ramchandani delivers a dazzling third act chase, on foot, through L.A.’s sweatshop district, a nervy, hand-held sprint that finally gets this static story up on its feet.

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.

Tedious as all this vampire exposition is (and there’s a LOT), the jokey tone here is much appreciated, with everyone “a few corpuscles shy of an artery” and the action as predictable as “a porcupine in a hot tub.”

Every element is measurably inferior to the original film — plot, jokes, sight gags (a clever optical eye-scanner joke lands), voices and design.

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.

The plot is all over the place, the villains kind of amorphous and just generally “against” the idea of a Superman and there just isn’t enough Fillion or enough jokes to get the picture over the hump.

This is closer to an “After School Special,” and yes — that’s an even older reference than “Sixteen Candles” — an R-rated “After School Special.”

Ocean Boy is awkward and ungainly — as if made by someone determined to hit his life’s real-or-fictional waypoints, to gloss up his own image while playing up the obstacles he had to overcome, but incapable of managing any of that particularly gracefully.

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

As undemanding and shambolic as it is, The Tender Bar takes you in with warm afterglow and some winning, “I’d like to have a drink with that guy” moments.

The narrative never strays from the formula/quest that Ha is on. But writer-director Oh isn’t shy about boring us half-to-death as we wait for that inevitable connecting of the dots, resolution of the search and the inevitable brandishing of the “Revolver.”

It’s sentimental and kid-friendly, with a couple of decent grace notes. If your kids are at the undemanding age, have at it. Just try not to notice when the plot and incidents in it turn eye-rolling.

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.

There’s a lot that’s agreeable about “Uncorked,” but this overlong movie loses its fizz pretty much when Eli goes abroad. And as any oenophile will tell you, you can’t get that fizz back once the bottle’s “uncorked.”

The debut feature of Gabriela García Rivas doesn’t give us much. It makes us work, bring our own “meaning” to the film. And there are hints that this is because she hadn’t quite made up her own mind in that regard. Inscrutable. And kind of dull.

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

It’s all harmless enough, with the odd lump-in-the-throat moment as another dog meets his or her end. As a lifelong dog owner, I found the going rather grim.

I didn’t fall for the surfeit of mood manipulation that opens A White, White Day. All that time-lapse stuff and its ilk is a nice contrast to the shock and action that takes over the third act. They’re just a very dull way of managing that.

Too cute, too star-studded and entirely too long.

This adaptation doesn’t entirely founder on the rocks. But the viewer is a couple of steps ahead of the action, start to finish. The innocents take forever to figure out the obvious.

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.

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.