Roger Moore

For those of us who have longed for a “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion” meets “Wedding Crashers” in French, Netflix is here to fill that void.

The whole affair is so rushed and half-assed — they have Duran Duran songs on the soundtrack, years before the band released its first LP.

For a fan, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is a lot more than a quick trip through her career and her life, even if it offers few deep insights into her psyche and to others might seem just an exercise in Boomer musical nostalgia.

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

Would I go out to see Otherhood? No. Nor should you. And we don’t have to. It’s not all that, but it’s perfectly “Netflixable.”

Chained for Life invites repeat viewing and “cult film” status, pretty much by design. Whatever writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s other intentions, he’s made a must-see movie for film buffs, one you must-see again just to get all the inside jokes.

The film is, sadly, rarely funny.

A less bland script would have helped. More edge, more slang, more contrast between the city girl (woman) and the country film. Falling Inn Love isn’t unpleasant. It’s only problem is that it’s not enough of anything else, either.

A tale of love, murder and revenge that borrows from “Hamlet,” it’s a bit of a stiff as a thriller, despite the attention to detail, the lovely pools of light much of the action (onstage and off) is photographed in.

Sir Ben sells it and faithfully maintains our interest in what happens, and what happens to Avram, from first scene to last, a spy in his element, a Spider in the Web.

But it’s as much fun as a dumb time-travel murder mystery/cop thriller has any right to be. Just don’t let it keep you up at night sorting through it all, again, the way the folks who take notes (critics) have to. It’ll spoil it.

Rapace is always good, in big budget features or films of more modest budget and ambitions, like this Australian production. She and Strahovski pair up as rivals so well that you say a silent prayer that the picture doesn’t lose its nerve. But of course, it does.

Official Secrets, despite its blasé title, despite the fact that this “true” story isn’t on a LeCarre level, in spite of its paucity of dramatic outbursts, is still a most engrossing history reminder.

The Refuge is like an outtake reel, the dullest parts of “Drive” and that Tom Hardy in an SUV drama “Locke” without dialogue or action or much of anything to hold our interest.

The Fanatic narrows into a simple character study by Travolta. That’s not enough, and what’s here is as quaint and dated as many of the words that come out of Moose’s mouth.

I was shocked at how emotional the film, covering familiar ground with a lot of familiar footage, could be.

The film’s third act surprises are fascinating post Golden Age of Queer Cinema choices.

There’s little that’s light here, but I was still reminded of the early films of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who began his career in the heady years after the repression of the Franco regime.

Becoming Burlesque makes a cute fictional introduction to the art form, the reason women practice it and what can happen when cultures this far apart run smack into each other — pastie to pastie.

Empathy, Inc. has the compactness of a Poe short story or a “Twilight Zone” parable. But its third act surprises aren’t surprising at all. Suspense is created when the audience is a step ahead of the heroine/hero, not five steps ahead.

There’s just nothing here. Even as comfort food for true believers, Overcomer cannot overcome its myriad shortcomings.

There isn’t much to Before You Know It, but where there is I have to say I absolutely adored.

This movie staggers along. So many of its sins could be minimized by an unsentimental slashing of establishing shots and establishing scenes, a thinning out of that dead-zone in the middle and a vigorous pass at the nervy but too drawn-out finale.

A heartbreaking, underplayed and intensely gripping Roddy Doyle story about modern homelessness.

The cast is uniformly fine, with Neustaedter (of TV’s “The Colony”) throwing an evil Heath Ledger vibe and young Zolghadri born to play a prison “snitch.”

The final act isn’t as interesting as the first two were to me. But Hirsch impresses, as usual, as a man losing his wits and Dern always gives fair value as a canny old coot who knows more than he’s letting on.

The film’s “star” and his work, his actors, his peers, his filmdom fans are all that matter. And they’re packed into this 107 minute biography and fan letter.

Butler wears the weary man of war thing well, and his stunt crew is aces. Just don’t take any of the rest of this seriously.

Or, well, melodrama. Because the further this picture plows along, the more “Isn’t that convenient,” in terms of plot twists, comes into play.

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

Use Me is a mockumentary that works only as long as its still mocking.

Ready or Not is a “Get Out” that doesn’t quite get it, a “Purge” that pulls its most important punches.

Honeyland is an elegiac and gloriously photogenic tragedy, an environmental parable played out in striking images and stark lessons in the high desert of northern Macedonia.

It won’t keep you up at night, but just enough of Rapid Eye Movement spoke to me to let it work. It might work for you, too.

Night Hunter is good enough that we can see why a cast of this caliber would sign on and trek to Canada in the winter. There are good scenes, good lines, a couple of good performances. But whatever coherence the players saw on the page was lost in the trip between the shoot on set and the editing bay, from the looks of it.

It is a film of (somewhat) mutual admiration and clever, clever words, the product of “a wickedly brilliant mind” (Woolf) and a popular poettess and wit, descended from Gypsies (Isabella Rosellini plays Vita’s disapproving Gypsy grande dame mother), a “a sapphist” with scandalous appetites.

Terrible script and flaccid direction by Ben Medina. Terrible movie. Will it be the worst of 2019? We’ll see, and we’ll remember.

A wildly uneven one-joke farce, sometimes amusing in that “Oh no they DIDN’T,” way, dispiriting in many others, it’s one of those “If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the laughs” late-summer arrivals.

The foreshadowing is too too obvious, the assorted set pieces have no punch and little logic.

Richard Linklater’s film of Where’d You Go Bernadette may offer the great Cate Blanchett a star vehicle she can sink her incisors into. But rather than a meaty meal, it’s a gooey goulash of randomly expressed “feels.”

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

Documentaries are utterly reliant on their subject to be appealing, and while “Remember My Name” does soften him a bit, it’s hard to make the case that it merits a total reevaluation of the man and his music.

This isn’t quite the spectacle that the signature films of the genre are, but lacking the seriousness of those isn’t exactly a shortcoming.

Gwen has the tenor of a spooky folk Welsh folk legend and the grasping, gasping punch of an Industrial Revolution parable.

I won’t say it’s excruciating, but viewers of every age will be keenly aware of the passage of time and this colossal waste of it.

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

Adam makes you realize we’re a long way from “Chasing Amy.” Or maybe not.

Martinessi has made a modestly engrossing, too-too-tasteful film about older “ladies who lunch” and cope with their own form of quiet desperation. If only it had more spark, conflict, color and heat.

Isn’t scary and isn’t worth the nearly two hours it eats up.

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

Because as much as one might have loved The Boss, the films of Gurinder Chadha or the expectation of an empowering message about racism and the liberation identifying with a great songwriter/spokesman for the down-and-out can be, as much as you might think that Chadha (“Bend it Like Beckham”) has been marching towards that day when she’d make a musical set among the Subcontinent Diaspora relocated to the U.K., those expectations are a tad too much.

As the picture sputters and stalls, losing its quick pace and brutal efficiency in the later acts, this comic book adaptation reveals the flaws in its execution, if not its very origins.

There isn’t a bad performance in it, and those turns made me buy in just enough. It’s still a mixed bag, but for those in a “Ghost” frame of mind, it’s not bad.

Still, Wicked Witches isn’t a total write-off. But when your movie’s this short, getting to the point, giving us “the good stuff” and all that jazz has got to happen earlier.

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

That leaves it all up to the dog and the dog's story, and the pathos of that makes this weeper on wheels a winner. Barely.

It's still as charming as a ham-fisted Hollywood treatment of a kids' cartoon can be. I don't see why any ten year-old wouldn't adore Dora.

Affleck ratchets up the suspense and raises the stakes with the film’s third act, but takes his sweet indulgent time getting us there. He establishes the relationship and the characters in a patience-testing twelve minute opening scene.

It’s a scruffy little movie that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny or over-thinking — at all. But its charm carries it a long way.

Love, Antosha doesn’t break new ground in the celebrity biographical documentary, but it scores over most other examples of the genre simply by virtue of its subject.

But through all the excess, the schmaltz, the digitally-augmented fights and the practically all-digital car chases and stunts, the marvelous cast keep “Hobbs & Shaw” from totally stalling out. Call it a bad movie you can’t help but laugh at, and with, and get the extra large popcorn. You’re going to need it.

In the end, perhaps it is less important that Cold Case Hammarskjöld finds or doesn’t find its “smoking gun,” or that it makes or doesn’t make its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

“Raise Hell” is a movie of laughs, because nobody ever popped the balloons of political pretense like the hard-drinking, chain-smoking six-foot permanent “outsider” Molly Ivins.

The Son is a horror film, but with subtle chills substituting for shrieks and freaks and blood.

There’s no predicting how “Teacher” will play in the world wide cinescape. But it hit me. I found writer-director Adam Dick’s debut feature relentlessly disturbing on all sorts of levels. And no, that won’t be to every taste.

For a genre picture, this one is better than average, letting us see what two fine actors saw in the script and not leaving them or us disappointed in the result.

Can’t say it’s great, can’t say I didn’t laugh, more than once. If splatter is your kind of thing, this is your kind of movie. Not bad for what it is, in other words. And don’t forget the subtitles!

It’s indulgent. But we knew that. It’s Tarantino. We come for the indulgence. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood might be his most self-aware picture yet, a time-burning wallow in 1960s pop culture, fashions and the “magic of the movies.” It’s also misshapen and meandering.

Donahue’s film goes down the rabbit hole on a few subjects, which cause the film to drift a bit, almost to the point of mission creep. It tends to lean most heavily on the directing ranks, even though actresses are the vast bulk of its eyewitnesses.

If you’re boat shopping, at least it’s better than the online videos at the boat builder’s website. “Dead Water” still sinks more than it swims.

I’ll watch anything with Goldblum in it, and The Mountain has its rewards, although no one should be fooled into thinking this is anything but disturbing. Sheridan’s joyless, blank-faced turn just underscores that.

What Wang gives us is an engagingly sentimental story with warmth, compassion and wit, peopled by relatives who, for all their cultural differences, are universal and yet enviable in their devotion to “the good lie” and the quality of life they see as worth protecting with it.

Star Richard Dreyfuss gets his moments and finds a couple more of those signature, pugnacious Richard Dreyfuss lines to nail. And the whole sentimental affair goes down easier than you might expect from that desultory opening act.

Does all that add up to a movie? Not for anybody over oh, six. It’s not awful, and as I said, the conceit is a good building block for a film. Just not this one.

All is Well/Alles ist gut feels real, lived in and endured. And that, in the end, is its message, the no-going-back horror of realizing that life has changed and justice may never come your way and nothing you say or don’t say will fix that.

The romance at the heart of this Russo-American “Affair to Remember” is tepid bathwater, blase and lacking sparks.

Jay Myself paints an affectionate, curmudgeonly documentary portrait of one of New York’s greatest photographers. Jay Maisel was a star of ad photography during the “Mad Men” era, an art photographer of great renown after that and a portrait photographer whose work graced profiles and album covers, such as Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue.”

A vivid, estrogen-charged charmer, a winning twist on “chasing your dream” and “You can have it all” with just enough sober slapdowns to keep it honest.

Stearns has still made us laugh through the grimaces for much of “The Art of Self-Defense,” and if nothing else, has given anyone — “Karate Kid” parents or adults — a veritable checklist of the warning signs that maybe this dojo isn’t for you, signs that perhaps the sensei doesn’t use the word “teacher” because what he really wants aren’t classes, but a cult.

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

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

It’s sexist, vulgar and retrograde.

The tone of what feels, for its first half hour, like a solid action picture, feels off the moment the zingers start-flying.

So…weird. So very, very weird. Luz disquieting, creepy and murky demonic possession thriller, a cryptic chiller that gets by on lots of mood, a smattering of violence and special effects and seriously unsettling sound design.

Like a fine wine, Louis Garrel‘s A Faithful Man needs to be opened to the elements, to “breathe.” Because if there’s ever been a more airless, so-dry-one-hesitates-to-label-it “romantic comedy,” I’ve yet to set parched eyes upon it.

The entertainment value in a straight-up genre picture like this is how fraught each new corner of peril that they turn manages to be. And there’s plenty of that. And damned if Aja and his cast find some actual emotion in all this, too.

Movies like this make one wonder if Netflix has found an algorithm that makes them pay off. Their track record with youth rom-coms and sex-comedies (this is the former, decidedly PG with a smattering of profanity) is stellar.

A film that shines a light on those who would be a candle in the midst of the Medieval darkness of modern, white Southern American Christianity.

Desolate is about two plot twists too complicated for its own good.

“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.

Its real value is as an oral and visual history of Springsteen, where he met his bandmates and the musical milieu he was fortunate enough to grow up in.

The picture has a stolid competence about it that it never rises above.

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.

It’s a gripping and glum account of the ebb and flow of a strike in an era when all the power lies with management, and too much of the media sympathy lies with ownership — stockholders.

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

Corey Deshon’s script is a veritable catalogue of thriller devices, types and worn out situations. Every “cut” and “paste” shows. And no amount of sex in the hot tub or stabbings in the eye can hide that.

The characters feel real, the situations not that-far-fetched, and the dialogue has the halting, fresh-picked life of improvisation, a tribute to the script by “mumblecore” mistress Lynn Shelton, who also directed, and Michael Patrick O’Brien of “Saturday Night Live.” No lie, it is laugh out loud funny.

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.

Lester’s film underscores how few TV talkers today have the stature, much less the spine, to ask questions that people don’t want asked, much less be required to answer.

Operatic in tone, a love poem that’s “Howl” raw in scope and despair, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a deadpan elegy to a city, its ever-shifting populace, family lore and the weight of the past.

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

Nanjiani just kills when he’s grabbing stereotypes (meek, moral South Asians, overly-polite drivers) and shaking them to their senses. But the wisecracks thin out and grate when the violence takes center stage. And Stuber is stupidly violent.

The story may be overly familiar, but the language is slangy and crude, the sex is teen-impulsive and primitive, and the confrontations — on a littered beach, in that school parking lot, in a pool hall — are alarming. Firecrackers is a simple tale told with a raw ferocity and fuse-burning-down dread for the explosions to come.

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

Schadt has the makings of a close-to-the-vest thriller like “The Loft,” but Silent Panic might have been more at home taking a “Weekend at Bernie’s” dark farce direction.

Walking on Water not only shows the artist in action, it gets at why these gimmicky and despite what he says (“We never repeat ourselves!”) repetitive thematic artworks are so popular with the public, and have been since the 1960s. Whimsy on this scale is hard to find.

Far from Home gets that all-important “tone” just right, over-the-top silliness in which no one involved, from screenwriter and director to cast and crew, ever lets us forget that they’re in on the joke.

It seems as if almost everybody in this fascinating artifact has a megaphone at some point, even Bogdanovich, doing his Jimmy Cagney impression, maybe a little Tennessee Williams, quoting Welles’ beloved Bard in line that gives the entire enterprise its one truly poignant moment. “Our revels now are ended.”

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.

Edwards comes off as salty but sentimental, remembering the support she got from the crew and that the crew got from the world’s ports as they dashed from stop to stop — Uruguay, Australia, Auckland and Fort Lauderdale among them.

Director McCarthy stages a red shadow pantomime that’s the best filmed version of “the play within a play.” Ever.

I can’t say I enjoyed it, but Midsommar did what the Midnight Sun does to anybody who first experiences it. It kept me up all night.

Ron Howard has made a sublime movie.

A horror movie that pulls you in, bumps you back into your seat and almost brings a tear to the eye.

With the romance not clicking and the resolution lacking much of anything that tugs at the heartstrings, Running with Grace never rises above “Walking in Place.” And that, as you know, never gets you anywhere.

Holy Lands works when Harry and Moshe are bickering, and doesn’t quite work anytime they’re not on the screen.

It’s still a fine showcase for great acting, a great setting and a pretty good, if not great yarn unraveling the social fabric of a family, its history and the ugly secrets Everybody Knows but nobody has talked about — until now.

Wildly uneven, as I said earlier. But at least some good character actors got a nice German vacation out of it, and Berlin, I Love You is pretty enough to make you plan your own. Just avoid the bars, brothels and laundromats and you’ll be fine.

Child’s Play is perfunctory.

There are a lot of irritants and clumsy touches to Besson’s latest, infuriatingly inferior version of “La Femme Nikita” that ruin it.

It’s no great surprise that the great Australian director Bruce Beresford wrings every ounce of sweet out of Ladies in Black.

Into the Mirror gets as close as any movie ever has to simulating the state of mind of someone conflicted, if no longer confused about his sexuality — the feelings, paranoia, decision making and resolve that takes one from the closet to the drag club.

I kept wincing at the inappropriate coma-side banter, an absurdly underplayed and glib “officially dead” debate that may be the worst end-of-life decision discussion ever filmed. Hara’s low energy performance isn’t the only problem with such scenes, just the most pronounced — deflated, disinterested, exhausted-seeming.

The great pleasure in the picture is the way Pearce, Minogue, McMahon and the other adults hurl themselves into the vulgarity of it all.

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.

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.

The performances anchoring American Woman are some of the finest screen acting we’ll see this year.

As midnight movies go, it’s not (more than) half bad. Round up some friends for a midnight movie date, designate a driver and…enjoy.

With each rewind, the picture locks-up and we disconnect with what’s going on, and more importantly, with the characters. Which renders the minimalist promise of The Perfection a promise largely unfulfilled.

The real value in Greenfield-Sanders’ film, which goes into limited theatrical release this weekend before coming to PBS in 2020, is in Morrison’s struggles with the white patriarchy of American letters.

Slack direction just makes Murder Mystery groan along when a little pacing, as ALWAYS, would have covered up some of the other shortcomings.

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

There are laughs, here and there, and bursts of fun. But picking over one’s notes and picking apart a picture which offers no real third act surprises (Well, Seth Meyers shows up.) and not an over-abundance of laughs one is left grasping at the depressingly obvious moral to the tale.

All Back to the Fatherland manages to do is suggest the subject is worth more attention.

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

There’s a demographic niche desperate to be served that this movie is aimed at, and more’s the pity that it’s not better as there are so few filmmakers and studios willing to tell stories of this generation, for this generation.

I appreciate the direction they wanted to take this, but the jokes needed work, the ridicule should be more directed at Jackson’s character’s various blind spots and intolerances — “This is my ‘Puerto Ricans I don’t trust’ file.” — and disrespect for human rights.

By turns glorious and thrilling, revealing and well — mythic and fictional — Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” joins the ranks of epic concert tour documentaries, capturing an epic moment in American roots music and the icon who conjured it.

The Black Godfather is filmmaker Reginald Hudlin’s love letter to Avant, a major figure in music, politics, concert promotion, the star making machinery of Hollywood and the friendly ear and — when needed — megaphone with connections who can “get you paid.” It’s a film of warm remembrances and salty anecdotes, deals made with just a phone call, “power” wielded almost always behind the scenes.

The aliens are far more lifelike than they ever were in the Will Smith/Tommie Lee Jones “MIB” movies, but the shiny ray guns are as generic as ever and the shootouts surprisingly dull, if expensive looking.

Bonnar has a hint of Robert Carlyle’s “Trainspotting” rage, and Jones plays a plump, sensitive Nick Frost lite here. Amusingly.

The narrative is built on oddly theatrical twists, a film that begins in mystery and then sheepishly sets out to EXPLAIN every mystery away in the middle acts.

It’s a pretty but lifeless confection, sort of the Netflix house style. But most Netflix teen comedies — and I’ve reviewed dozens — have more edge and humor than this.

Call it a “near miss” comedy, with a bit of “better luck, more joked-up script, editing editing next time” written into Yardi’s contract.

The too-obvious/too-slow “Remains” doesn’t frighten, doesn’t engross and doesn’t remain on the memory much past the closing credits.

Baldwin lets us see glimpses of a movie that might be — on cable or streaming, a mini-series of “The People Vs. O.J. Simpson” style. Baldwin gets the tall, ungainly gait down and the makeup looks like that of a vain, egotistical “winner” who’d had work done to give him that profile.

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

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.

It’s just that the whole affair feels winded, an argument — Will humans finally accept the mutants among us? — that’s exhausted everybody concerned, with many involved somehow knowing that those “Days of Future Past” are returning.

Yes, there are glib laughs. And yes, there’s a very touching moment in the finale. But, yeah. Exhausting.

This could be the laziest screenplay you’ll watch or hear this year, so mark down this title and the date you saw it, not to mention the name under “script by” at the bottom of this review.

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

The story gives away its direction and intentions far too early and obviously. But these onetime “Fresh off the Boat” co-stars make a cute, cuddly couple that we root for, even if every joke doesn’t land, even if they let that devilish Keanu steal their movie from them.

Straight America can finally get to know the name of Dr. Frank Kameny, a very smart man with a very big grievance against the government, one he was willing to endure mockery and the loss of his original career to settle.

Leto makes us wish for a Russian “Summer of Love” that never was.

But as the truism “If you’ve seen one ‘Godzilla’ movie, you’ve seen them all” still applies, I kind of hope they choke on the cash from this one.

Wonders of the Sea doesn’t break much in the way of new ground. We’ve seen slow-motion sting-rays, spiny lobsters, hermit crabs, octopi and moray eels before. But the extreme close-ups, vivid colors of the various habitats the Cousteaus take us are worth the price of admission. And if ever there was a time we need to be reminded of what we need to save in the briny blue, it’s now.

As funereal as it all can feel, All is True manages the wistfulness that must have been Branagh’s design, the director of “Thor” and “Murder on the Orient Express” returning to his first love, his idol, for an affectionate if somewhat perfunctory portrait.

Rocketman is a slog, a nearly joyless musical that threatens to take flight at several near-tingling moments and never does.

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

It’s just that there’s much to recommend it outside of those failings, sharp observations about the trap of small town life and the persona you take on in your teens than you never escape, the casual cruelty of teenagers that can (in the movies, anyway) leave scars that linger forever, the craving for acceptance that once denied, you never outgrow.

I love Indian cinema that gives us a sense of the ecosystems of the street, Rafi’s world. That’s the best element of Photograph.

For the Birds unfolds its increasingly bittersweet story and we see the problem and the destructive nature of the solution to it, one can’t help but wish there’d been a tad more attention paid to “What’s going through the bird lady’s head?”

Brightburn is a generally humorless affair, with the only “laughs” given a sadistic edge, with paint-by-numbers frights and cut-and-paste “big emotional moments” that even the formidable Banks cannot make pay off.

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.

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

A lovely German elegy to the nobility of work and the family we create while working. It’s a quiet, insightful idyll set in the world of modern retail, seen from the ground level — literally.

I found the whole more than a tad insipid.

The romantic leads are engaging and can sing, one of them a lot better than the other. The production is eye-popping, visually, more India than Arabia — Guy Ritchie frenetic at times, and mildly amusing. And Will Smith gets to strut his stuff in Hammer pants. Again.

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.

The most ambitious thing about this laid-back documentary was creating a tribute concert and getting big names to perform in it, and that is lovely to hear and behold. The glory of Echo in the Canyon is gathering the oral histories of a generation of performers who are passing from the scene, getting their final words on how it all happened.

It all feels like a story and characters and plot resolution that we’ve seen scads of times before.

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

Domino is a drab, implausible and melodramatic terrorism thriller showing his ongoing interest in the post 9-11 world of “Redacted" (2007). Drab, that is, until he gets to one of those famous set-pieces.

Booksmart is the first non-Netflix teen sex comedy to come off in ages, and hints that too-pretty/too smart/too funny Olivia Wilde could be the next Judd Apatow, if not this generation’s John Hughes.

But if you’re waiting for that heartbeat-skipping moment that big screen romances have to deliver to come off, don’t bother your cardiologist. The Sun is Also a Star can’t deliver one.

You get what the filmmakers were going for, even if they can’t quite bring themselves to trimming this down to the leaner, less cluttered neo noir it wants to be.

John Wick, Chapter 3: Parabellum still gets a bloody job done, and still merits all the fan-murderer adulation our anti-hero gets every time he meets a new hunter hoping to cash in that reward money.

It flirts with being offensive, but falls short. It’s not entirely maudlin, not wholly misogynistic, but close enough.

It is the most American movie of 2019, wearing its optimism in every gilded, rain-speckled, sun-flecked frame.

Even though the film is period-perfect, using actual locations and accurate costumes (hoop skirts are good for a laugh), “Wild Nights” suffers from a cell-phone video flatness in its cinematography, a little too “Drunk History” for its own good in that regard.

The acting provokes eye-rolling pretty much from the opening scene.

The actor/director and his co-stars more than do justice to this fascinating moment in Cold War history and one of ballet’s transformative figures.

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

The jokes are strictly low-hanging fruit, but the film’s predictable path takes just enough care to avoid the places we’re sure we’re headed to sustain its 91 minutes.

Yes, this remake is old fashioned, and maybe the “mark” (Alex Sharp of “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”) is a tad green and less interesting. But sometimes, it’s fun watching two wildly different stars mix it up in sumptuous settings, and seemingly have a ball doing it.

It’s not a particularly revealing film, more a reiteration of her credits and credentials, just a hint here and there about how her parents’ influenced her career choice, even after death. Her son Joel tries to remember Ruth ever talking about losing her parents to The Holocaust. She didn’t unless he or his sister asked.

Tolkien mopes between the dry way stations of the man’s biography, like the dullish opening chapter of a promising Masterpiece Theatre.

It’s not one of [Zhang’s] very best, not on a par with “Hero” (Jet Li’s finest hour) or “House of Flying Daggers” even. But it still becomes a rousing, stately entry in the martial arts genre. Eventually.

Aniara is science fiction cinema from the land of Bergman and Strindberg — sharply observed, just brittle enough to fend of sentiment, bleak when bleak is what is called for.

Effects aside, irrespective of Reynolds, Pokémon is what Pokémon has always been on the big screen — pablum.

It reads livelier than it plays, I must say. But the sophistication of it all, the provocative disagreements of the many long conversations, pulled me in.

Dench gives a knotty, empathetic performance, reluctantly self-righteous. And Crookson is a perfectly serviceable, fiery younger Joan. The men? They’re just archetypes, and rather drab ones.

The Proposal is serene, patient and sucks you into this quandary with skill. To her credit, Magid makes us care, even though we’re not sure what she’s got in mind or if she’s as persuasive as she thinks she is.

It’s a fun movie right up to the sobering reality that even the best moments are going to have sadness injected into by the cold, cruel world.

The Dirty Kind is a movie with no pace, no narrative drive, sleepwalking performances and zero urgency. That’s why if you jump to the end of the review you’ll see zero stars, a rating so rare I have to track down internet art to illustrate it whenever I have to trot it out.

But the handsomely-mounted period production has its rewards and the finale manages a nice messiness that undoes some of what’s trite and far-fetched that’s come before it.

So there’s every reason to expect this to suck, completely and utterly. But the tunes become a sort of saving grace, the animation’s not bad and the there’s enough slapstick to keep tiny tykes distracted.

An entirely too manipulative, too obvious couple-in-jeopardy thriller, and a fun “bad” movie.

But what sticks with you are the beautiful shots of kelp forests and otters, ponds seen from the bottom up, Africa and South America both threatened and, when “corrected,” healed. That’s the upbeat message that Carroll identifies in the opening moments of the film.

It’s topical and never terrible. But Just Say Goodbye plays as if a word was left out of end of the title — “Already.”

Like most movies of this genre, you find yourself wishing it was better, more horrific or more despairing, maybe with a message of some sort, ANY sort.

Creadon presents all this in a brisk, lively film, with lots of topical music underscoring the archival footage, and interviews with everyone from former students who became journalists or members of Congress to Ted Koppel and former Senator Alan Simpson.

The love story falls a little short, but the scientific sense of “the moment” is often spot-on in this mixed-bag of a debut from Canadian writer-director Akash Sherman.

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.

In Peterloo, Leigh reminds us how wars, and anti-labor massacres, are forgotten in the “history is written by the winners” rules of the game. And even if the film gets away from him, here and there, it’s good to have him remind us the game isn’t actually over. Yet.

It’s not entertaining. It’s discomforting at times, and at others obtuse and downright icky. But it does leave you with a little to chew on, if somewhat less that its creator presumes.

The sweeping footage they captured is moving in its beauty. But the real reason for the film is “reason.” Ben Masters’ movie talks to stakeholders — ranchers, Border Patrol agents, experts on patterns of migration and immigration along the U.S./Mexico border and members of Congress. And none of them think this wall thing is a very good idea, for reasons ranging from the impracticality of it and the lack of utility (It won’t do the job.)

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

Avengers: Endgame is nothing if not the crowd-pleasingest crowd-pleaser in recent cinema history...Give everybody, and I do mean EVERYbody, a curtain call.

The eccentric, serene, almost poetic documentary about Kelly, his business, his protege guitar builder/decorator, the former art student Cindy Hulej.

A revealing documentary.

This one is too interesting, funny and aggressively/transgressively sexy — if there even is such a thing these days — to pass by.

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

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

It’s not edgy enough to join the ranks of indie horror classics, but Body at Brighton Rock is a solidly just–scary-enough thriller that reminds us that it’s not “found footage” that makes us jump, it’s things that shriek in the pitch black night.

Be Natural, from the moment of release, becomes one of the seminal documentaries on early film history and must-see movie watching for any serious cinephile.

But what’s here is still a promising, entertaining effort. And it’s a fine showcase for Cavazos, who nails Bridget’s vocal fry, her pose, the disturbed and self-destructive vibe that she wears like a stocking cap, her armor against a world her illness — meds or no meds — won’t let her master.

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.

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

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

First-time writer-director Nia DaCosta may have filmed her Northern Plains tale on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. But she has a firm grasp of the loneliness and hopelessness of lives left behind by a boom in a state where working class women’s career and OB-GYN options are limited.

Instant Dreams is still an argument for the magical in a world that is “losing magic.”

If the game is more civilized now, it’s thanks to the excesses of bullying brutes like Bob Probert. That’s a message Day doesn’t take the time to get across, leaving “Tough Guy” a little thin in the “And your point is?” department.

It won’t supplant “March of the Penguins.” But DisneyNature has scored another kid-friendly natural world documentary about wild creatures we all connect with and that today’s kids will grow up wanting to protect from climate change and the other man-made threats facing them.

The Hellboy reboot is a a fecal matter weather event film fiasco, a gory ill-conceived debacle that drives a stake through the heart of the franchise, no matter how many post-credits “teases” the producers tack on.

It’s a serious-minded first-real-love/first sexual experience coming-of-age drama which takes forever to make anything happen, and when it does (the “big reveal”), it’s so lame as to make you weigh your life up to this point, and what inspired you to waste 105 minutes on this drivel.

It can feel superficial and less revealing than we might want. Much is left out, but for that we can probably turn to the book got out of the experience. “Mister Satan’s Apprentice.”

“Trans women are women, too. And need to pee, JUST like you!” Whatever else Knowlton’s film captures, and no matter what its shortcomings in setting and balance, etc. (misspelled graphics on sources of data, for instance), “The Most Dangerous Year” can be appreciated for that simple explanation.

But you know what they say about most martial arts movies, come for the fights, stay for the fights.

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

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.

Donnie is a most unusual character to serve as our tour guide to “A Dark Place.” British character actor Andrew Scott (“Spectre,””Pride” and TV’s Moriarty in “Sherlock”) utterly immerses himself in this “town weirdo” character who becomes obsessed with a little boy on his route who disappears, and then is found drowned in a local creek.

The supporting cast is game and Moss is riveting, transformed and transforming before our eyes, and not just in a “rock bod” vs. “mom bod” sense. She never lets Her Smell turn boring and her scent is what lingers after the credits have rolled.

Not great, not [a] picture that will change the shape of musical theater. But the playful, sweet, pointed and sometimes poignant Stuck is certainly worth the 85 minutes it’ll take you to watch it.

Rottentail is a midnight movie that midnight movie audiences (a little drunk, a bit forgiving and in love with on-screen cheese) can get behind.

But without the gags to enliven the travelogue, without more funny lines to lighten the load and impart that message, Missing Link feels like a missed opportunity. It’s the second animated stab at making comedy out of Big Foot and never much more than second best on the subject.

Ash is the Purest White is a sweeping Chinese crime saga that’s more interesting for what it shows than what it’s about.

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

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

Bissell has made a film where the casting isn’t the only thing that’s “on-the-nose.” The message, where the film’s sympathies lie and its emphasis on the character with the bigger journey to make could earn it some “Green Book” styled blowback.

The shifts in attitude Knightley and Skarsgård have to act out are abrupt and jarring enough to feel like perfunctory requirements of a melodramatic script.

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

What Collee and Maras and their cast get across most clearly is the utter helplessness and hopelessness of the victims. Again, this isn’t “Die Hard.”

It’s a little more fun than “Aquaman,” not quite up to “Captain Marvel.” Like “Fantastic Four,” it’s a gateway drug comic book adaptation, a superhero movie on training wheels, best suitable for young kids (save for the insane and unsustainable running time) about to embark on a lifetime of fandom.

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.

Filmmakers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon pound their points home like Madison Avenue vets, worried if they don’t use a ham for a cudgel, their audience might miss the point.

I found the story and the timid Valli/Kris “romance” tiresome. His Father’s Voice lacks the bubbly sense of fun Bollywood musicals deliver, and the performances are, almost to a one, stagey, theatrical and flat. But the dancing dazzles as we watch the story of Rama and Sita pieced together by gestures, perfectly-struck poses and elaborately refined movement.

Eye-opening and damning, American Relapse is a blunt force look at the “cycle” of opioid addiction and the ways this American epidemic has been monetized by those with an eye towards making a buck out of any bad thing that happens.

Clermont-Tonnerre never surprises with The Mustang, but in stripping the story to elemental visuals that tell a simple, touching story, she’s announced herself as a cinematic storyteller to watch.

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

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

Burton has blown up Disney’s ode to magic, misfits finding their gift and a mother’s love into a shiny but bloated, glum affair that feels “BIG EVENT” in scope, and depressingly heartless in execution.

Garrone makes wonderful use of his diminutive leading man (best known for the film “Asino vola”), and Fonte manages to be both empathetic and pathetic here.

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

It’s a handsomely-mounted, pleasant but dry and almost dull trip back to the Roaring 20s, “Masterpiece” style. Which is it say “Roaring” isn’t really allowed.

Alarming, inspiring and yes, laugh-out-loud funny, Hail Satan? is a delightful documentary dissection of America’s favorite anti-religion, The Satanic Temple.

It’s a perfectly pleasant sit-through of a couple-trying-to-become-a-triple comedy, even if pretty much every single situation, from first scene to its last, slaps you in the face with “Where’d I see THAT before?”

I love the genre and appreciate any effort in this cinematic field. But you’ve got to do something with the cliches, realize what you can cut out (83 minutes of movie in a two-hour+ picture?), figure out what you can show visually instead of having characters explain and for the Love of God don’t cut to an extra falling three feet when we’ve just seen him tumble off a ten foot wall.

Director Nancy Schwartzman takes us into a crime, the investigation of it, the impact of reporting on that crime and the changing tides of local and national public opinion about what we used to call “date rape” in this gripping, disturbing and brilliant “anatomy of a rape” film.

Sex Trip demonstrates that sometimes a tired idea is just that, tired.

Taken by itself, it’s thought-provoking enough to pass muster. Get “Get Out” out of your head, because truly, all Peele’s two thrillers have in common is hype.

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.”

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

There was a better movie in this story, this setting and this cast.

It’s a straight-up “Cars” knock-off about racing and a race car who escapes his pedestrian “retired” life as a taxi when he falls for an exotic Italian supercar.

A funny, thought-provoking teen romance/sex comedy in French, a light romp that never quite romps and doesn’t quite touch or delight.

It’s not a dazzler, not even a knee-slapper. But “Nothing to Do” sets its goals and meets them, and reminds us and every indie filmmaker out there that America is overrun with skilled, talented actors desperate for work.

Moore makes this solo moment touching, bittersweet and triumphant.