Roger Moore

Showtime slick and boxing picture predictable, Cradle of Champions is about the New York epicenter of Golden Gloves boxing.

The action beats are colorful and dazzling theme-park rides run amok. Frenetic action substitutes for wit, here.

It’s unnerving at times, assaulting at others. “Disorienting” is the idea, and even if many of the tricks are simple and the plot unfolds along a generally predictable track, Climax achieves that goal. And how.

Perhaps its going to take two documentaries to plumb the depths of Bannon’s persona, what drives this frump who rails against elites even as he’s serving their purposes so well. Klayman’s has an incomplete yet polished feel to it. There’s too much we don’t find out.

The leads, whatever their ability to handle fight choreography, are bland in the extreme, uninteresting to the point where the picture wilts at their mere appearance.

It’s a sturdy enough story that it can withstand a little dilly-dallying, and the visceral finale is as heart-pounding as we need this story — when the lambs rose up against their slaughterers — to be.

Kavanagh’s second coup was in giving this too-familiar tale just the right star power, with the criminally under-used Hirsch shining as our anti-hero and Cusack, settling into the playing-the-heavy part of his career with as much wit as he can muster.

Breathtaking and definitive, Apollo 11 avoids voice-over narration or overly-explaining anything about America’s date with destiny in July of 1969. If we aren’t old enough to remember it, we’re supposed to know it. It’s in our DNA.

There’s a funnier, more biting movie in this premise, this cast and their treatment of it. But Parente never lets his picture get up a head of steam, never lets it take off.

It’s more clever than smart, but here’s an animated film for adults (violence, nudity) that challenges and rewards the viewer who — yes — paid attention in class, and whose bucket list includes MoMa, the Louvre, the Musée D’Orsay, the Reina Sofia and Prado, Met and Musée Rodin.

I cannot get over how satisfying it is to see Chris Pratt as the heavy.

Babylon brims over with life in ways that few films of recent vintage could manage, a movie-moment that remembers when “One Love” was enough to end any argument and calm any troubled waters.

They’ve made a cute comic book movie, amusing but forgettable, probably not as culture-shifting as “Wonder Woman” and “Black Panther” turned out to be. But take your daughters to Captain Marvel. They’ll be the final arbiters here. Because Disney princess fans are the ones who’ll really be liberated by this rock’em sock’em role model.

I’m Not Here is never more than a short, morose melodrama whose chief shortcoming is that there’s not more that’s new, that there’s not more “here” here.

Boring characters boringly-played.

I wouldn’t mind seeing these characters again (Batacam penned a sequel, I hear), because the bare bones of a First Gen crime thriller are here. It’s just that everybody involved needs more practice in the genre to get it right.

It’s filled with wry laughs, comical rural “types” and over-the-top, fame-craving desperation worthy of an over-the-top slapback.

The choreography is elaborate, but gives itself away, lower level pro wrestling style. They’re not fights, they’re half-speed dances with big sweeping kicks and punches ducked in close-up. So that we can see, you know, how fake it all is.

It’s all a bit on-the-nose, but writer-director Keith Behrman keeps it topical and touching, even if he never quite transcends prioritizing that topicality.

It’s competent on several levels, generally well-acted and no more unpleasant than it is challenging.

Arctic doesn’t vary from the conventions of this genre — ever. But Mikkelsen’s star turn at the center of it makes this wintry tale its own “Revenent,” with suffering and compassion, terror and even humor playing out on his expressive face.

In avoiding the “Big Question,” and not really substituting enough of the writing, plotting and characters to give us a clear picture of her talent or make the documentary more compelling, we wonder if the fact that we don’t know who she is might be the secret to her appeal.

The plot is more cluttered than clear, almost playing fair with what the audience knows and what Mike should be able to reason out, but never quite.

The writer-director has made a personal work of emotion and power, but with an indulgently slow, patience-shredding pace.

Yes, the jokes are mostly low-hanging fruit, and quite a few of them you’ve seen and heard in the trailers. But they’re still funny. And Merchant didn’t let the trailers give away the whole movie. Not by a long shot.

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

It’s a revealing film that doesn’t skimp on the pitfalls facing the four young men who are its subjects and the blind spots of the white coach who pushes, inspires and badgers them through a long, grueling season.

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

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

The Changeover is a moody, menacing thriller with a YA (Young Adult) heroine.

For a “sweet nothing” of a movie, you kind of wish “nothing” wasn’t the most accurate description.

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.

Minding the Gap is a film of skill, pathos and humor, not the deepest movie up for an Best Documentary Oscar this year, but certainly the most approachable.

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

Erlingsson takes a fairly cut-and-dried caper comedy and tosses twist after twist into it, letting Woman at War surprise us just as often as it repeats a running gag (the poor, cursing bicycle-camping Spaniard).

Wilson, letting the strain show the way a hundred other funny folks expected to “save” a flimsy comedy built around them have before her, has never seemed more out of her depth.

Greene has a lot more to play than West, but truthfully, the leads seem like bemused anchors for the funnier characters to bounce off of. That’s sitcom writing.

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.

Still, the frights, with Mom seeing the hand-chopping serial killer’s face (Paul Fauteux) on her little boy’s body, the stabbings and threats of worse to come (hilariously foreshadowed to death) deliver the requisite pulse-stopping punch...If that’s all you’re hoping for in a horror picture, fine. If not, you’ve been warned.

A documentary of gentle surprises, reflection and tenderness, depicting a troubled part of the world’s truly original take on the concept of what a “biker gang” could be.

No, it’s not on a par with “Bridesmaids” or “Girls’ Trip.” The sentimental stuff, the piercing insights Ali picks up about men, are instantly forgettable. But Henson plays the hell out of this part, no subtlety allowed.

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

Mostly though, Beneath the Leaves keeps us at arm’s length and the cast at half-speed, a disappointing combination when your aim was an intricate, raw-nerves thriller with visceral violence, surprises and characters we connect with enough to root for.

Filmmaker Berkowitz? He might be worth watching, too. The dialogue works and the performances hold up. But with a background in editing, he’s still not showing us much command of story and pacing. Maybe next time, as this outing only achieves “close, but no title this time” status.

The difference between “The Lego Movie” and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part is the distance between “love” and “like.”

Snyder and co-writer Jason Begue paint a delightful alternative portrait of Hasidism and its practioners, going beyond the rituals and beyond respectful mockery, showing us foul-mouthed kids and an insular world clumsily at odds with the culture they’ve settled in.

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.

The leads are showcased engagingly, the locations — even ruined a bombed out Polish church, but including Paris, Yugoslavia and Occupied Berlin — rendered in romantic tones. But there’s not enough connection between those leads to generate the level of heat aimed for here.

Labiki isn’t above manipulating us as she lightly underlines the points she wants to emphasize, but she never lets Capernaum turn into a lecture.

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.

No matter how big your TV, you have to think the biggest screen is where this wondrous relic of the pop festivals of the 1960s belongs.

Huss holds center stage with a body-contorting commitment like few actors we’ve seen outside of an A-picture about addiction. It’s great work in a middling movie.

In Like Flynn would probably benefit from lowered “cut-rate Indiana Jones” expectations. But Mulcahy is too visual (a music video vet) and visceral a director to not lift them, just a bit, in the best of those early scenes, before the weary screenplay limited supply of charisma in the cast let him and the movie down.

It’s a far-from-awful folk tale with a horrific edge. But it’s not suspenseful, and the generally unaffecting performances by the Israeli cast fail to draw us in and create empathy for the endangered.

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

As familiar as the path Then Came You generally takes might be, it’s got lots of clever laugh-at-death touches, a few sparkling surprises and a gut-punch third act “reveal.”

This is smelly, dirty authentic-feeling male bonding and is the best thing in the movie.

The setting, the sexy tone, the cast and snippets of sharp dialogue tamped down my eye rolling through the film’s first half. McConaughey, who has more than his share of seaside tales, gives fair value in delivering salty lines.

[Franti] asks good questions, doesn’t overwhelm the film with his own story and just oozes empathy and easygoing charm everywhere he goes.

The plot is strictly hash, with coincidences, obvious clues and twists we see coming, with a couple of half-speed fights and half-hearted shootouts and car chases tossed in for variety.

If the carnage of “nutria skinning contests” doesn’t turn you off, the sheer waste just might.

Stan & Ollie treads too lightly on the conflicts and never quite delivers that big belly laugh that their silent comedies managed.

Every now and then, one of those movies takes a stab at being “about something.” Not here. It’s instantly forgettable to anyone who isn’t a fanatic lost in the minutia of their corner of junk culture.

The Swedish Rapace thrives in roles that call for action, toughness and vulnerability. She’s perfect in this part, where her forward motion and capacity for acting out violence drives the picture.

It all makes for a somber and self-serious (Shyamalan’s Achilles Heel) popcorn pic that is easy enough to sit through even as its pointlessness grows with every act, and its final act underlines and admits it.

An Acceptable Risk is “Scandal” with less sex and fewer fireworks. Almost no fireworks, to be honest.

The Brawler is a poor excuse for a boxing picture and a middling screen biography, but it does manage a few saving graces.

The sentimental stuff half-works, but “Kids” never works up any silly sense of “Hate.” Without that conviction, the characters don’t make sense, the scenes don’t set up a debate that sets off sparks and I Hate Kids plays like “Actually, I’m not all that keen on kids.”

Cornish relies on Western audiences’ memory of chivalry, swords in stones, ladies in lakes, “the Once and Future King” and Round Tables to deliver a dose of good clean fun — with violence and jokes and a social relevence so obvious even a child could see it.

The movie is like Bill Foster’s mad experiment, a dry technical exercise with a functioning heart, but no soul whatsoever.

Dog’s Way Home is aimed at the very young, so don’t expect anything challenging. It moves along but felt limp and kind of lifeless, for all the sentimentality Smith & Co. serve up.

The upside of The Upside is that Hart’s fans will find just enough here to warrant the ticket price.

Jihadists makes for a fascinating if talking-head heavy indictment of a myopic ideology that claims “We just want to be left to ourselves” to do as they see fit “in our own lands.”

Whatever predictable, melodramatic turns this Jason Raftopoulos film takes, it rarely blinks and never gives itself over to the “romance” of gambling and the gambler’s lifestyle.

It’s a horror picture that can’t quite find the laughs it is going for and never, for more than a moment or two, provides frights.

There’s virtually nothing to this short, thin yet (barely) feature-length dramedy. A few funny lines wither in the dark and minutes upon minutes of screen time burn off space imagery and Jobe pondering the nature of it in his addled head.

It’s more tame than daring, at least that’s how Perfect Strangers plays north of the border. And the resolution is abrupt and unsatisfying. But the actors are uniformly superb, with Suárez and Bichir standing out.

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

For all the resilience Baldwin and Jenkins show us here, it is the poet Langston Hughes’ line about “a dream deferred” that comes most easily to mind.

The year may be young, but Hollywood is going to be hard pressed to come up with a climax that is more anti-climactic than the many anti-climaxes that bring down the curtain on Escape Room, the first official dog of the new year.

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.

Zamecka’s all-access film means we see Ola’s desperation, and Magda’s resignation. Each one needs a break, and each is counting on the other to give it to her. Seeing Ola with a baby half-brother in her lap is just chilling.

The violent payoffs are well-staged and edited, and the archetypes solid. But McGowan can’t force herself or her cast to just get on with what they know they must get on with. The “Creek” never quite dries up, but we never get to the rapids either.

The Vanishing manages to shock even as it fails to truly surprise, a movie that takes a worn situation and wrings fresh pain out of it as it reaches — over-reaches — to solve a mystery that is probably even more mysterious than whatever the screenwriter’s cooked up.

The main reason people check this out will be Whittaker’s new role as Doctor Who. And she doesn’t disappoint. She gives this walking-wounded woman a hint of the coquette she never realized she was, a smartness informed by sadness and — with a little boy she’s utterly ill-qualified to baby sit, much less mentor — a purpose.

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

A system that’s been rigged for the super rich to do what they want, the will of the people be damned, is not fit for light comedy.

It’s just not funny.

Buffalo Boys is rather tedious going in between the fights, and those action beats are spaced too far apart.

Through vivid, wrenching performances by Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges, it personalizes the statistics, and personalizes the glib talk show therapists who counsel “Let them go, you can’t save them.” Not if it’s your kid.

Filmmakers Jimmy Chin (Honnold’s longtime cinematographer) and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi get us up close, letting the camera do what Honnnold must do — extreme closeups of the rock face, intensely hunting for that next imperfection in the smooth granite, that next crack or crag that will move him further up the 3200 hundred foot wall.

I didn’t hate this, which is faint praise, I know.

Welcome to Marwen won’t be another Zemeckis blockbuster, won’t be anybody’s idea of Oscar bait. But here’s a thought-provoking holiday movie that gives the viewer something to chew on even if the story feels a trifle undigested, at times.

What screenwriter Christina Hodson delivers is an appealing heroine, an adorably vulnerable robot, all alone among the Mean Old Earthlings, and something this insanely successful but ever-so-empty-headed franchise has never had — charm.

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

It is immersive, letting us hear and feel the concussion of artillery, if not whistling hail of bullets and the desperation and fury of hand to hand combat.

Between Worlds is a down and dirty supernatural thriller with the faintest veneer of substance covering the sordid.

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

The inserts are almost all funny, but they stop the picture dead in its tracks. Repeatedly.

Whatever it took to make this “Mary Poppins” light on its feet, it’s rare that the tone turns sunny. The gloomy start (I’d have cut that opening number) and pervasive fog and heavy subject matter — death, lost childhood innocence, impending poverty, etc. — never let it soar.

The surprising thing about the film of Phillip Reeve’s Mortal Engines, essentially a movie about roving, bulldozing cities that devour small towns, is how long this eye candy holds your interest.

The actors are game, the action beats are handled with skill. But the story lacked shape.

It is Dafoe’s compact, internalized turn as the artist, letting us feel his pain rather than bellowing about it (see “Lust for Life” for that) that pulls us in and gets us as close to the artist as any film ever has. It’s glorious work, and a grand capstone to a fabulous career, with or without Oscar recognition.

No, Sony Animation should not have let Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse out its doors and onto big screens in this blurred, jerky, pixelated condition.

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

It’s not history, stunning palace locations and lush costumes aside. The Favourite is just fun, “something completely different,” though it does tend to drag as it takes us where we are sure it must go.

The production design is top drawer. It’s just that if I’m mentioning that, there’s little else in the movie to recommend it.

Nona never has much in the line of suspense, but that long tease of an opening act robs the film of the grim and gritty drama Polish skims over in the brothel passages. It doesn’t strip the story of its pathos. But the imbalance here is patience-testing and maddening.

The American Meme traces this democratized/Americanized form of “celebrity” back to its origins and profiles some of the web’s more notorious creations in a generally entertaining and somewhat illuminating account of recent history.

The sex scenes have a strained sense of fun about them, one partner trying too hard, the other bowled over. The pain, when it comes, feels real, unforced and complicated partly because Tom does seem like a guy with a limited ceiling in pretty much every regard.

Vox Lux is “A Star is Born” for the bubblegum babies of pop.

All the Devil’s Men kills off its most interesting character too soon and traipses past story beats so familiar that taking notes on the film (as I always do) seems superfluous. It’s not a good B-actioner. It’s routine in the extreme.

That The Quake can still grab, alarm and thrill is a testament to skilled storytelling, empathetic performances and effects that rewrite the book on how disasters play out on the big screen.

Chilean-born writer-director Sebastián Silva (“Nasty Baby”) gives us an intimate mumblecore (lots and lots of talking) allegory about the struggle to maintain your identity when everything around you seems to subsume it.

“Divide” is a damning film, with just enough new material to entice the curious.

A scenic, poetic, striking and moving thriller about Sicily’s “problem” viewed through the lens of youth and young love. The spooky overtones make its title an honest one, even if the frights are few. This is a “Ghost Story” well worth telling, and seeing.

But Jones, luminous in support in such dramas as “The Theory of Everything,” carries this picture, delivers thrilling arguments thrillingly and puts a warm, human face on a legal figure who has become liberalism’s Obi Wan Kenobi, “our only hope.”

I was fascinated, but I can’t say I liked Ghostbox Cowboy as much as I enjoyed the films it seems inspired by.

An engrossing, marvelously-acted account of the monarchical cousins that suggests their real enemy wasn’t each other — it was the grasping, pushy and ambitious men who surrounded each in her own court.

All the performances are lifted by screenwriter Tony Binns (“Truckstop Bloodsuckers”) clever dialogue, and Mackie and Jake Smith have cute chemistry largely due to his writing as well.

Once she gets out of her own way, von Trotta provides a generally breezy overview, appreciation and dissection of one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived.

With Invisible Hands, filmmaker Shraysi Tandon has made a damning expose, and a documentary piece of advocacy journalism.

American Street Kid is a bracing, revealing and almost co-dependent film about homeless teens living on the streets in what has to be the Homeless Teen Capital of North America — Los Angeles.

It’s wacky. You scratch your head at the training ground, a veritable digital brothel (quite chaste) where aspiring hostesses learn the art. You wonder who on Earth would spend money for “gifts” that impress these young women (and young men), and are also meant to impress their fellow “fans” with how “rich” you are.

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

Lump “Littlest Reindeer” in with “The Star” and every other released and forgotten animated half-hearted holiday hit that never was.

Whatever it wants to say about abuse, its mental, social and sexual impact on its victims, however “daring” it aims to be, Back Roads loses in its pursuit of the sordid.

The best 85 minute primer you will ever get on Bitcoin, its many imitators and the potentially world-changing technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible.

Here, he’s made a good (not great) movie that’s not captured the interest of audiences or reviewers. Sure, he didn’t realize his “hero” was just one of its villains. And The Front Runner may not achieve its overreaching ambitions. But that’s appropriate, too. Neither did Gary Hart.

She made her glittering life seem tragic, even as she denied her own right to feel sorry for herself thanks to everything her gift and her “destiny” gave her.

Cochran has conjured up a caper that’s just clever enough and characters just winning enough to hold our interest long enough to be surprised at the resolution to the puzzle that she conjures up.

What balderdash. And not the fun kind, either.

The romantic comedy elements here are just offbeat enough to appeal. But with every encounter with the needles, the music and the Song of Back and Neck, the pitch rises and the laughs — awkward and endlessly surprising — turn to cackles and then guffaws.

Pike is magnificent in this part, giving us layers to the hard-drinking live-for-today chain-smoker who could be moved to tears, repeatedly, by the suffering she saw.

There’s barely an original thought or novel theme in Creed II, a movie that wrings more bloody-nose money from the original “Rocky” sequels in recycling characters, themes, fights and situations and putting Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson instead of Stallone and Talia Shire in them this time.

“Swimming” wears its “Full Monty” ambitions (it isn’t on that level, but its funny enough) on its trunks, with the flippant banter and blend of melancholy sentimentality and sight gag silliness. It even uses a Tom Jones anthem for its “big finish.” Yeah, there’s an “informal world championships” for men who do this. No, seriously.

The film, like the enterprise itself, can be a rather tedious affair, with proselytizing woven into the spiritual journeys all these runners take on different pieces of ground, and for different beliefs.

It’s one of those limited-release films that few will see, with acting so compact and contained that everyone who loves great screen performances should. Weisz, Firth and Thewlis give us understated, unfussy performances that lift The Mercy, a wonderfully tragic story with a hint of magnificence about it.

Shoplifters, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is a film acted with great sensitivity, a rough story delicately told.

We can sense that whatever love story Trainin set out to make, the one the Tsuk’s provide isn’t going to be the one expected.

It’s a film whose best jokes are sight gags, but sight gags visualizing what eBay, Snapchat and Youtube look like from inside the web, mocking Internet Economics and the sorts of web content that lands “likes” and “shares.” These are plainly aimed at adults.

I’m not a huge fan of this series, but this has to be the worst of the lot, more agonizing to sit through than the page-by-page “true to the book” bores by Chris Columbus, duller than the weakest of the artless Yates pictures.

Director de Fontenay has a great eye for detail — filling Mobile Homes with inside cock-fighting particulars and manufactured housing factory work, roadhouses and after hours “clubs” where the chicken fighting takes place.

The talk turns toward the tedious and the jokes, the situations and the romantic longing never draw us in. The viewer isn’t so much a part of the story as a bystander, curious and occasionally titillated, but rarely moved.

In the roller coaster between serious and silly that Instant Family bounces along on, Byrne is the Fast-Pass holder, and she makes this uneven dramedy a hoot, and more importantly, makes it work.

Jonathan plays like an intellectual puzzle that isn’t challenging enough, an acting exercise that has everything but emotional connection and a tour de force robbed of its force by just lying there, inert when it should be picking up steam, cold when the characters and scenario should be heating up.

Roma is arty and beautiful, but also a bit like sitting on a sofa while Cuarón flips through family photo albums, never narrating or over-explaining any single moment or image.

The engaging leads, stumbling through a romance they’re too young to temper, finesse or control, give Mario the spark of life and make it another ground-breaking genre film that eventually Hollywood will get around to remaking.

Western or sci-fi Western, Prospect never sets its sights higher than violent, quasi-poetic B-movie and as such does not disappoint.

Marissa Taylor, one of over 100 journalists worldwide involved in the expose, adds “Why are people going to care that the rich don’t pay their taxes and crooks are crooks?”

Here character is sacrificed pure action and story becomes whatever they can make of a fifth rate Bond villain and ridiculous plot device.

Astral may have a refreshing quiet dread about it. But at some point, the stakes are raised and a big payoff is in order. The climax has to feel like something the movie preceding it has earned. Not here.

One pitfall of building your movie out of recycled materials is always going to be pacing. When every character is cardboard, every scene is preordained, you have to get more pop out of the performances and move this damned thing along.

The harrowing nature of the work is the primary focus of this film and many others on this subject. But Colvin never comes off as the classic adrenaline junkie/Hemingway wannabe that too many of these films turn their heroes into.

But he’s (McQueen) still made one of the best thrillers of the year and one of the best heist pictures since David Mamet made “Heist,” the modern benchmark for excellence in violent, complex cinematic capers.

Two big themes run through Meow Wolf: Origin Story. One is “inclusivity.” Even people who get into tiffs and storm off find themselves invited back in, “a lot more like a family than friends,” Caity Kennedy says. The other is uncompromising idealism.

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.

Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name,” “I Am Love”) gives us a challenging puzzle of an indulgence that rattles on and on, like a hearse with blown shocks, well past its point of resolution.

It’s as forgettable as the torn wrapping paper piled around the tree 15 minutes into Christmas morning.

On a sliding scale, The Long Dumb Road is closer to “The Guilt Trip” or “We’re the Millers” than “Midnight Run,” “Nebraska,” “Sideways” or any of the acknowledged recent classics of the genre.

It’s damning in its depiction of a culture “willing to look the other way so long as he was making a lot of people a lot of money.”

It’s not the editor, but the editing strategy that undermines Beautiful Boy.

Forgive the fact that actress turned writer-director Elizabeth Chomko is bad at history and math. Dad is driving around in a ’60s GTO with a broken convertible top in the middle of a Chicago winter. No, he’s not driving the Camry.

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

Violent, raunchy and raw, sexual and street-wise, Pimp is straight-up exploitation, a serious departure for the starlet, would-be pop star and 25 year old veteran of the screen trade.

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

The performers and performances sell The Delinquent Season.

Too much of what is here feels like filler, not advancing the plot or our understanding of the characters as this cast performs them, not sparkling enough to lift the rom-com beyond “adequate.”

Hedges (“Manchester by the Sea”) gives us every shade of confused, angry, desperation as the “upstanding and honest son” his father has praised him as from his Baptist pulpit.

There’s barely a laugh in it. And Haddish does lasting damage to her brand and suggests “time’s up” on her 15 minutes as she mugs, vamps, overplays and over-reaches in a vain attempt to give what she HAD to see what “not funny” a laugh.

For its first 90 minutes, Bodied dazzles, ducks and dishes through a corner of hip hop most of us only experience through documentaries or Youtube clips. Here’s a movie that takes the form seriously, and gives us a taste of how hilarious it can be — for those not on the receiving end of these epic couplets of insult.

It’s a lot to take in, and Fail State doesn’t leave the viewer with a lot of hope. When the Obama Administration figured out how to grade such operations and shut down the ones plainly set up to fail their students, Corinthian, Everest, ITT Tech and DeVry went away.

Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms offers up a heaping helping of eye candy and treacle for the holidays, If only they’d had a coherent story and a good actress in the lead. If only those were the only two serious shortcomings in this brainless, cotton candy bauble.

But I found ”Buster” to be a film that danced out of the starting gate and trotted or gamboled along, pleasantly and/or grimly ever after — perfectly watchable, probably more watchable in segments in the “Let’s put this on pause” comfort of your own home.

Grant is the cinema’s favorite gay British best friend, and he makes a wonderfully louche lush as Jack Hock, Israel’s only friend. But being a homeless, aged coke-dealing Lothario doesn’t bode well for how dependable he’s going to be when the going gets tough.

It’s entirely too dramatically thin and lacking in real suspense to stand among the great or even middling submarine movies.

A sci-fi/ghost story mashup, it’s got nonsensical science, unemotional actors and direction that can’t be called that in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s head-slappingly stupid, a waste of time and scenery and an embarrassment to all concerned.

Dweck mixes cheerfully amateurish interviews and staged moments with the driving community and track eco-system with poetic and visceral footage of the action on the track, racing sequences often set to sacred choral music by Mozart.

It’s not bad, and there’s always the argument that “your reach should exceed your grasp.” But Indivisible lumbers along too slowly to sustain interest via the seen-it-before combat scenes before getting to the REAL story — what the experience does to those who survived it and those they left behind.

It’s a neo-noir murder mystery capturing Heard at peak femme fatale in a tale observed, manipulated and told by a struggling writer (Billy Bob Thornton) for “the chaos.” “Chaos” doesn’t quite sum up the movie. But almost.

A disarmingly charming documentary about Green’s walk, the people he meets and oh, the things he’s seen.

Green Book invites you to come along for the ride, the comfort food, the socio-political sparks and the laughs.

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.

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.

There’s little that’s new here, but the performances give this time capsule picture heart, with Madsen, Smith and Chiklis taking their archetypal characters beyond “type.”

The Sisters Brothers sneaks its messages in the back door, how a world built on justifiable fear and firearms makes life cheap and souls hollow, how the amorality and violence numbed one and all and how lives back then could be just as angst-ridden as they are today, no matter how quick the “hero” is on the draw.

The film is an emphatic re-branding of the the “legalize pot” movement, putting suffering children’s faces front and center in the fight, with weeping parents and increasingly defiant doctors, most of them in states where medical and/or recreational marijuana is already legal, making case on the kids’ behalf.

Like the pod Holloway is trapped in, the movie’s mostly just adrift — limited power, with time running out. Not fast enough, it turns out.

Bohemian Rhapsody and Rami Malek cleverly and warmly distill an era and its music into a thoroughly entertaining piece of music history.

Everett makes this Wilde a magnificent ruin, reveling in self-pity rather than wallowing in it.

While Causey does find historical connections between her family and America’s racial divide, her “Shadow” lengthens into a much broader look at racism in America, the tipping point moments. The film overreaches and loses some of its power-of-personal experience as it travels far and wide.

Brooding Oscar winner Casey Affleck may be playing a morose burnout case, but his eyes give away genuine delight in his scenes with the titular The Old Man & a Gun.

Limerick native co-writer/director David Gleeson (“Cowboys & Angels”) ensures we get lots of local color in the people, the scenery and the school and Irish pub life in this story.

Mid90s becomes, in full flower, a movie with characters more interesting or unusual than its very conventional story and setting, not a bad film so much as an incomplete one.

Great Buster turns Bogdanovich’s lifelong appreciation into cinematic adoration, using generous clips of Keaton’s short films, features and late-life TV appearances to remind us that, as Johnny Knoxville says in the movie, “he was funny then, he’s funny now and he’ll be funny 100 years from now.”

The result is a film that lacks fury and outrage, that straddles a morally murky fence. It’s not that Whale of a Tale lacks a point of view, it’s that it lacks conviction about any point of view.

It’s easier talking about the film’s most promising bits, because too little of the rest of it has anything particularly funny to offer.

It’s a movie finding its audience, but as nakedly obvious as its message is and as limited as its shock/entertainment/outrage value might be — the empty seats in the press gallery of the trial suggest “the real enemy” — “Gosnell” isn’t likely to change anybody’s mind.

In Wang, we see a stoic Everyman, straining to defy time like the rest of us, working so hard he sometimes forgets to dye the gray out of his hair, trying to keep his head about him even as his agent breaks down in tears.

Knightley and West create spectacular friction in these roles, two people who loved, collaborated and rubbed each other the wrong way and the right way, and from that, a great artist was created, shaped and immortalized — with a little help from her lawyers.

More a good movie of its moment than a great film, The Hate U Give is a drama built on messaging and a hand full of terrific, emotionally-charged scenes.

For all these cumulative credibility that the “Pineapple Express” team bring to Halloween, this is only marginally better than the many sequels or the 2007 Rob Zombie re-boot.

Director Dianne Dreyer and screenwriter Audra Gorman have worked in the business for years — producing, location-managing, etc. They have contacts and “how to get your film made” know-how. What they lacked here was a plot, dialogue, characters or dramatic situations that were worth anybody’s time.

On Her Shoulders also gets to the essence of Nadia. Her speeches (in English and Arabic with English subtitles) move audience after audience to tears.

The inclusion of so many young voices gives "What Were They Thinking?” an optimistic feel.

It’s too adult to be a “family” film, not edgy or gripping enough for grownups.

Theater fans will bask in the knowing glow of “theater types” and offstage ensemble shenanigans. If only there were more of them for everybody to giggle at and feel invited to the party. Because curse or no curse, Ghost Light is never more than a “brief candle.”

The plot feels played and the stakes feel low.

Bad acting by pretty people, chilly sex scenes acted out in mail order S&M wear, laughable dialogue and money money everywhere. What is this, “Fifty Shades of Ebony?”

The leads are more tolerable than engaging, but some scenes sing, the roadside stops have a timeworn charm and Irons, Gathegi and Bello make Better Start Running move right along, even if it rarely achieves a sprint.

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

Nathaniel Kahn’s collected interviews with artists, hype-driven dealers, well-heeled collectors and art historians and visits to Sotheby’s and the Frieze Art Fair and elsewhere give us the scale of the business, the birth of competitive modern art collecting and a sense of the recent history of this winner-take-all playground of the richest of the rich.

Green’s film is about a tragedy, born in a time of great national stress. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s an absolutely riveting piece of movie-making, one you can be sure Jean Renoir would appreciate.

Gosling caps an already-distinguished career with an unfussy performance that lets us see behind the stone-faced public mask this most enigmatic American hero wore, from the moment he became a public figure to the very end of his days.

I didn’t expect to like it, and Timothy Brady’s script never quite hits that “sleeper” sweet spot. But All Square rides its spot-on casting, sharply defined performances and beer-stained sense of place well past second base, if not all the way home.

It’s not particularly frightening, it goes on entirely too long, but if you’re inured to the shocks and tropes of American horror, The 3rd Eye/Mata Batin) will hold your interest and make you wonder how long it will take Blumhouse to remake it.

I Still See You is a middling mystery thriller in which the supernatural is explained and over-explained by long bursts of exposition, “rules” and scientific gobbledygoop.

It’s a formulaic dramedy with a little pathos, some wit, some unusual-in-real-life-but-not so-much-in-rom-coms situations.

Liyana is still a wonder, and the story the kids cook up themselves every bit as epic as the one Disney plagiarized for “The Lion King.” This effort turns out so delightful that somebody should hire these children as focus group consultants the next time Hollywood wants to tell a tale of Africa.

Filmmakers Lowell and Mortimer were there to document every excruciating inch, with stunning Yosemite scenery as their backdrop for almost every striking frame. The film they got out of it is, like the experience they were documenting, one of a kind.

Director Griffiths never lets reality slip too far beyond her film’s grasp, though the sexual complications, all of them, play like melodramatic conventions, some less organic than others. She’s still delivered a convincing portrait of a world and how its limited horizons shape those who might never escape it.

Director Bryn Evans works hard to maintain the suspense of a championship points race, covering that 2017 season from the pits, the telecommunications center, the garages and the RV where Dixon and his wife and kids stay on race weeks. We see a big crash, a furious physical recovery and the quiet stoicism of Dixon and those rare few who can do what he does.

I mean, we all love Tom Hardy, but he can’t break through in this thinly-scripted, dully acted and badly directed Marvel comic brought to life.

The mystery is more intriguing than the movie is alarming.

Director and co-writer Thomas Bidegain (he scripted “A Prophet”) gives us a tail of futility, of “saving” someone who does not want to be saved and the racism built into Alain’s fanatical pursuit.

The film founders when Lew sends the couple, platonic and respectful (he is a Muslim, remember), on the run. That dash rather spoils the picture’s paranoid compactness, and it goes on and on, melodrama added unto melodrama.

In the end, “Viking” finds its destiny to be kind of a half-finished, half-financed and half-hearted Viking saga, with only the arrival of the Irish vegetarian hippies led by Indiana Jones’ nemesis, Belloq, to delight us.

Gooding makes his directing debut with Bayou Caviar, a slow moving thriller as complex as Great Granny’s Jambalaya recipe. And in spite of that pacing, some stereotypical casting and a need to contort and drag out the finale, it makes for messy movie-watching fun.

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.

Ponderously telling some parts of its sketch-of-a-story from multiple points of view, it’s an excruciating exercise in self-indulgence, packed with flashbacks and those big speeches/big scenes that draw names like Oscar winner Jeff Bridges, Dakota Johnson and Jon Hamm to its cast. It adds up to nothing more than two hours and 21 minutes of tedium, with the odd spasm of violence, back-story or musical interlude.

Director Trevor White is more known as a producer (“Wind River” and “Ingrid Goes West”), and he’s not bad at maintaining suspense in producer/screenwriter Andrew Zilch of Youtube’s “Good Mythical Morning” somewhat predictable script.

Wright is one of the great character actors working these days, and losing track of him and his character hurts the film.

Funny, few people have fond things to say about the decade that followed. But Studio 54 they want to remember, or hear about if they were too young to get a gander at it in its glory. Studio 54 gives them their most thorough look back yet.

Musically sharp and dramatically flat, the latest version of A Star is Born starts impressively and falls off sharply, a sudsy, overwrought remake that drowns in its abrupt, perfunctory emotional leaps.

The killings aren’t particularly gripping, there’s little suspense in the earliest ones and the menace is pretty watered down for much of the movie.

While “Summer” is lightly amusing, here and there, it treads heavily on some pretty slippery ground. Gleason makes all the checkpoints that the plot passes through feel perfunctory.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead made a magnificent drunk in “Smashed,” so it should be no surprise that she kills as a stand-up comic in All About Nina.

The casting seems right, the pacing washes out the overbearing nature of these lives and waters down the motivations this script seems intent on providing.

Scenes go on past their payoff, gags are flogged to death after the punch line.

With all the emphasis we put on “plot” in the movies, novelty in the setting, situations and obsessions of the characters, it’s a shame when a comedy comes along that can’t make the most of a good one.

Michael Larnell’s flinty and uplifting film of the early days of Lolita “Roxanne Shanté” Gooden, the Queen of Queensbridge, a mid-80s fury who became a years-in-the-making “overnight success” and role model, lives on grit and heart and some terrific performances by Chanté Adams, Nia Long and Oscar winner Mahershala Ali.

The universal truths are banal, the narcissistic navel gazing in this episode of “Hoarders” just inspires eye rolling. 306 Hollywood is a home movie best left to the home it was shot in.

Her style, smart outspokenness, controlling her image and art, are a wonder to behold.

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

It’s no surprise that the story of rock’s original female badass makes for a gritty, inspiring documentary.

A delight, a jokey-smart cartoon that enlightens and teaches even as it entertains. Because we need to learn that sometimes there really are monsters “out there,” and sometimes, the monsters are us.

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

Lacy’s impressively thorough film forces anybody willing to watch it to reconsider her, measure her life’s work and legacy against that of her iconic father and appreciate the screen legend and cultural force she has been.

The best effects are the simplest, and kudos to the effects rigger or production assistants who nailed this precision-slamming in one take. We, like Lee Pace playing Mark, his mouth agape, are shocked and shaken that something inexplicable has just happened.

Like Vi, a woman accused of “never taking chances,” Nappily Ever After never takes a chance, rarely exerts itself for a laugh or a moment of heart. Al-Mansour (“Mary Shelley”) plays it safe. We get the message. What we don’t get is “entertained.”

The stunts are old hat and the recycling makes Fahrenheit 11/9 longer and more of a drag than it needs to be. He doesn’t really have an ending, just a string of open-ended warnings and uncanny resemblances to Germany in the 1930s.

It’s just something some gullible, poorly-read studio exec heard and thought, “I think I’ll spend Jeff Bezos’s millions on THAT.” The fool.

It’s a C-movie, pretty much start to finish. And once Ojala gets his sermons about the environment out of the way and gets down to business, he’s got a movie gore goofballs TROMA Films would be proud to distribute.

Plot? Ten different kinds of ridiculous.

Bit actor and sometime director Ari Gold and his co-writer/collaborator Elizabeth Bull conjure up a warm, wistful movie about nostalgia itself — its traps, and its rewards.

Stephanie simply toddles along, intriguing for 20 minutes, exciting for three or four, and dull the remaining 60 minutes of its tedious, been-there/saw-that-coming running time.

A thoughtful, lightly-affecting drama about a lonely man’s search for feeling in a life without pain. It has an affecting gimmick, but lives on its engaging performances, good actors playing lived-in, flawed and realistic characters.

There’s no sense being modest at this phase in his Oscar-winning/Oscar producing career, but even as he’s feted, from Montreux to Stockholm, New York to Washington, there’s a refreshing lack of pretense to the sharp-dressed octogenarian at the center of all this fuss.

The Toybox itself, like the movie about it, is never scary, just kind of grim and rusty and dogged. It obeys no “horror” or “ghost” rules and makes less sense the more you think about it.

As history, Intelligent Lives is invaluable at reminding us of the speed of change, once such change is recognized and accepted as necessary.

Get past the “You learn something every day” aspect of writer-director Amma Asante’s follow-up to “Belle” and “A United Kingdom,” and the picture grates and annoys and falls to pieces, and not quietly. It’s so wrong. And there’s so much of it.

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

Covering such well-worn horror territory requires novel touches, fresh sources of fear, committed-to-the-terror performances, but above all a dread that Nightworld never manages.

Mendelsohn, a great character actor, has unforced, natural and funny scenes with everybody, delicious moments with Falco, Mann, Tahan, Britton and Everyman Character Actor Camp.

The pleasures of some good acting by Berenger and David, Gina Gerhon and Bruce Dern doesn’t overcome the overfamiliarity of the journey, the stops along the way and the late life lessons learned as they “keep the chrome up,” or try to. It’s tired in every sense of the word.

This certainly played differently in the UK than it will in the US, where children’s rights appear to have more latitude, even if they can seem even more at the mercy of the caprices of the judiciary.

It’s not “Blow” or “American Gangster” or “American Made” even, not on that level of sobering (if sometimes comical) morality tale. But White Boy Rick still makes for a blunt reminder of just how low we all sank during the “Just say no” ’80s, when the only people punished for not saying “No” were cajoled into saying “Yes,” and faced “Black Time” for doing it.

Offers a decent if superficial portrait of the man and a vast sampling of the work that identifies him, undeniably, as an artist.

Ripped is the sort of comedy that can ill afford to waddle through an interminable 16 minute prologue with two even less funny actors playing even more blitzed versions of Love and Peters as teens.

Eastwood has zero difficulty play-acting scenes in which he’s incapable of expressing any emotion or eliciting any reaction from his audience. Few of the comic veterans around him manage anything either.

A fascinating if somewhat muted spy thriller from the director of “The Iceman” and “Criminal,” Ariel Vroman.

A Simple Favor is a thriller that ticks likes a Timex, a precision exercise in button-pushing manipulation and a laugh out loud mystery that mocks its own manipulations, giggles at its own far-fetched twists.

Through it all, the icon endures — wild-haired, bug-eyed, his manic keening and yelping evolving into something quite musical in midlife. The man? Surviving, keeping the faith and carrying on. And mellowing. Just not all that much.

It truly works on the level too many other faith-based dramas do, as comfort food for the faithful, an altar call for the already saved.

The body count and blood and guts gets old in an instant. And while there’s something inherently hilarious in casting Jake Busey as a lab-coated scientist, the manic combat in between the blasts of banter is wearying.

Bravo, National Geographic Channel, for flying in the face of the zeitgeist, getting this made and putting it in front of audiences in theaters, and later on TV.

Wang seems to have sincerely set out to make a cautionary tale, “inspired by true events,” with a dedication in the opening suggesting she knew a victim of MDMA. But what she’s releasing is straight-up exploitation, and a film too cautious to work on that level, too torrid to play the “Stay off drugs!” card.

E-Demon isn’t particularly frightening.