Roger Moore

Dafoe is always a wonder to watch. But the picture needed more drama, maybe a touch of humor about its “Martian” styled “work the problem” exercise, and more of a sense of self-awareness in our thief who is trapped “inside” a just deserts parable of his own creation.

Three films in, and Ridley has mastered the fierce scowl and “stick the landing” poses of a superhero movie. She has not, in any sense, created a character who moves us with her expressions of fear or grief. Every time somebody she cares about dies, it’s dry tears all around.

Project Wolf Hunting is a brutally efficient killing machine long before the supernatural twist stomps into the proceedings. That almost seems like a gimmick-too-far.

Whatever the dynamics of this troubled, narcissistic same-sex quartet, “Bad Things” feels creepier than it is and promises frights or shocks and explanations it never quite pulls off.

It’s a wonder the horror masters at Blumhouse didn’t send him back for one last rewrite over this ending.

It is a sci-fi parable with performances that click and situations — tried and true as they are — that pop. We can only hope that “It’s only a movie” will be the way we look back on it.

Donkeyhead has heart and humor in nicely matched doses, and is good enough that you hope Darshi has another movie in mind as a follow-up, and that Netflix has the sense and Canadian dollars to let her make it.

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

A dark and brawny version of the Robin Hood legend that anchors itself in English history and loses some of the merriment in the process.

The screenplay needed more work and the film in the can a lot more editing to make The Mauritanian worthy of the talent on the set.

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.

It's not as scary as it needs to be or as clever as it thinks it is, but the new 3D version of "Piranha" is at least as gimmicky as those fabled 3D films of yore. With all the pointless 3D cartoons and joyless 3D ""Clash of the Titans" conversions, at last here's a picture that tosses its cookies, its coffee cups and its D-cups right in your lap.

American Dreamer doesn’t so much end as peter (Ahem.) out, with a finale that feels like a series of compromises which no one wanted to winnow down. But if you skip the movie leading up to that, you’ll be missing a lot of laughs and a tale that takes that “Peter Dinklage as sex symbol” thing about as far as it can go.

German director Sherry Hormann, working from a script based on an infamous 2005 case, summons up outrage, heartache, worry and judgement in 90 tight and damning minutes.

Before it trips over its own overly complex plot, before the comic leads have exhausted their modestly amusing repertoires, this odd stoner/sci fi creature feature blows out of the gate and threatens - for about thirty minutes - to blow your mind. Then it doesn't.

In every “Purge,” it’s always darkest before the dawn. But with The Forever Purge, we have to consider what we do after the sun comes up and the goons among us haven’t stopped, and haven’t been brought to justice.

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

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.

A winning narration (read by Greg Kinnear) holds things together. And there's just enough script for a good cast to run with. Harris and Madigan lift the whole enterprise just by being who and what they are - great actors.

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.

If Palmer isn’t that demanding of star and audience, it’s a perfectly serviceable story for at least reminding the film world that you’re out there, available and perfectly capable of delivering the dramatic goods.

Take it as a transitional comedy for kids about to outgrow “Kung Fu Panda” and keep your expectations low — very low — and you won’t mind it.

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.

A thriller that isn’t thrilling, a horror comedy that rarely produces more than a chuckle or three, a sentimental tale that can’t quite wring a tear out of death and loss, “We Have a Ghost” dishonors pretty much every hit film it steals from.

It’s not totally soulless, even if it is mostly laugh-free. But hundreds of millions in tickets sold or not, the filmmakers never manage anything like a reason that this intellectual property should have been remade.

Penn the elder has made a movie more concerned with grainy images captured in twilight than pace, more wrapped up in picture-postcard cinematography than a plot that surprises or dialogue that rings true.

Even if it’s not wholly “amazing,” “Maurice” is close enough, a flip and fun film about a rodent conspiracy.

True to the intent of the Christian apologist Lewis' novels, there are lessons to be learned, many of them delivered by the chivalrous mouse, Reepicheep, voiced with a plummy verve by Simon Pegg.

As “cute and cuddly” as ever, and often downright hilarious.

There is virtually nothing here we haven’t seen in a dozen similar movies, particularly that “Kramer vs. Kramer” parenting arc (one parental “indulgence” leads to disaster, etc.). But it’s perfectly watchable, maybe even for the entire family. Just keep a finger on the “mute” button whenever Lil Rel opens his mouth.

It’s a bit too spare and Malik-like for its own good. But the incessant voice-over, another Malick trademark, here makes the whole enterprise feel overheard, a story constructed from memory where the words are just ways of underlining what we would come to know about Lincoln the man based on Lincoln the boy.

So while this Spider-Man is, if anything, more competent than the first film it’s still not one that demands that you stick around after the credits. There’s nothing there.

The action takes a quick turn for the preposterous and the bleak in the finale. But fear not. Just break out the Kleenex, parents. And not just for yourselves.

There’s a lot of fun mixed in with the somber assessments of a failed relationship. In the end, it’s too much to juggle or do justice to, and On a Magical Night is never quite “could this be the magic at last.”

Beyond Outrage reaches above and beyond most Hollywood underworld movies to deliver a tale of righteous revenge doled out only after showing us how much it is deserved.

Humor Me is never much more than a comfort food comedy — funny people, given mildly funny situations and just enough funny things to say, find a few laughs and a lot of grins.

The Journey‘s wonderful stars — Spall, Meaney, Highmore, a testy Stephens and of course Hurt — make this sentimental saunter go down easily.

Splattered geysers of blood, ripped off limbs and the like aside, this is a slight comedy, and McKay has the sense to get in, get gory, get his close-ups and get out of there before 93 minutes have passed. That makes for a vampire comedy everybody can sink their teeth into.

Ross keeps his camera in McConaughey’s face, too. Every dirt stain, every twitch, every glower, wink and wince, is hard to miss. It’s not a bad performance, but it is an absurdly busy one.

It’s kind of slapdash and all over the place — again, like “Girls” — introducing interesting characters and losing track of them, focusing on the most sexually promiscuous/adventurous young woman in the lot. It doesn’t really hold together or earn its “My point, and I do have one” scene.

Precious, protracted and pleasant enough.

The plot feels played and the stakes feel low.

Despite his dabbling in many indulgences, Serj Tankian doesn’t come off as shallow or particularly superficial here. But this documentary almost does.

When we’re meant to be moved, there’s a disconnect. And when we should be transfixed, something Marceau managed in mastering his art, we’re let down.

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

Cage and Dafoe never give less than their best, Cook is not bad, though the women aren’t allowed to make any impression at all, and Schrader’s acting just makes one wish he’d called in a favor and gotten a real actor to be The Greek.

If it's not an unerringly faithful adaptation of Shakespeare's play, it still manages enough wit and charm to come off.

It’s the worst of the trilogy, beginning and ending as an over-the-top blunt instrument, pounding home the opening act exorcism and middling finale with breathless editing and a soundtrack amplified into a sledgehammer.

It’s easy enough to follow, but annoying in that we know we’re wasting brainpower piecing this pointless jumble together.

James takes his comic lumps like a man. His Griffin suffers injuries and indignities and lets us laugh at him as he does. No matter where the script wanders and where the direction founders, at some point, James' comic instincts take over. And this time, they don't let him down.

The movie’s a wash, and worse — too slow, not particularly well-acted or scripted. But there’s a little something to it, so no quick write-off here.

A solid formula sports picture with a light dose of faith and some overt small town America “conservative signaling,” and a generally entertaining movie thanks to a decent lead and stellar supporting cast.

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.”

Whatever the film’s shortcomings, you can’t say the cast isn’t on the mark and that Lyne, at the very least, still has it and remains very much a master at sucking us in and making us care, no matter who the hero and who the villain might be.

It’s a sad story, of course, with overdoses and deaths and sort of classical American “price of fame” arc. But it’s also revealing, and only rarely judgemental — even handed, I thought.

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

Whatever its virtues, Eli is a movie that can’t help but suffer in comparison to the much-delayed and much better "Road."

But Teems and his team get a nice spin on Southern Gothic tropes and types, and The Quarry makes for a slow, simmering tale that has glorious performances and rewards, even in its noticeable shortcomings.

As in reality, the best part of the story of any such romance is that bowled-over introduction. It’s every complication that intrudes after that which becomes a drag, and becomes the part we forget or wish we could.

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

That makes Guest of Honour more unsatisfying than bad, more polished than it could be in many ways, but sloppy in ones that count — namely the script. It’s a textbook case of a “fascinating failure.”

An 'E.T.' knockoff that works.

In Let Me Explain, you’re never NOT aware that you’re watching a gifted, rubber-faced/rubber voiced performer (his “Laugh at My Pain” concert film was a surprising hit in 2011) work too hard to make inferior material go over.

The production values and high-caliber cast suggest Big Game had better intentions than results. Helander may have memorized “Die Hard” and “Air Force One” and “Olympus Has Fallen.” But his version of that formula, given the loopy twist of making a woodsman/kid the hero “with particular skills,” loses most everything in translation.

Good Fortune is laced with celebrity endorsements.

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.

Campbell gets across the quiet struggle of knowing one’s fate and trying to keep it from breaking her son’s future — concealing, then revealing, edging up to “the talk.”

All this cinema-talk analysis is tedious, making the movie Malcolm made sound tedious, too. And all this theatricality in the writing, blocking and acting always leads to a film that keeps the viewer at arm’s length. No amount of Washington shouting or Zendaya overwhelmed in his tsunami of speechifying changes that.

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.

Plays more like a sermon than cinema, a sermon delivered by uninspired preachers. And everybody knows America gave up sermons and thinking about Big Questions on Sundays for football and mindless entertainment decades ago.

A gorgeously animated combat fantasy - "The Lord of the Rings" meets "Happy Feet."

If you want another lesson about why we should be going to Mars and what we’ll encounter and maybe find out about ourselves, “Unknown” will do until we have an actual liftoff.

Films fail for a lot of reasons, almost all of them behind the camera — weak script, lackluster direction, poor pacing, etc. But every now and then, miscasting or an out-of-her-depth lead performance also takes some of the blame. Bailey isn’t up to carrying this off.

It’s never much more than a marginal vehicle for our always-gets-his-villain copper. And it goes utterly off the rails in the talk-talk-talk/escape-or-die finale.

Director Scott Mann did the all-star but little-seen “Heist” a few years back, and wrings what he can out of this tired plot. For me, the picture started with a bang, leveled off and then gently nose-dived in the third act.

It doesn’t really skip by, but Krasinski keeps the squishiness to a minimum and lets his co-stars land the laughs even if The Hollars are nothing to shout about.

I.S.S. can be poignant and even pulse-pounding. But a promising lift-off, chilling set-up, dazzling production design and good effects can’t overcome a “more impressive than entertaining” label.

And as much pleasure as one gets out of Lawrence’s stone-faced pairings with the formidable Irons, Schoenaerts and Rampling, her third act duet with the dazzling Parker (of “RED”) reminds us of what this one-dimensional “Sparrow” is lacking — the spark of life.

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

Ila is the heart and soul of Closeness, and Zhovner breathes an impulsive fury into her.

A few pranks, some slapstick, some pratfalls, with a modern “Stooge” as the hero. Not many laughs, but hey — he’s keeping the “moron comedy” genre alive.

Ill-timed for an America fighting and losing its endless battle with reality and “facts,” “Moon” is glib, dull and ahistorical. Not a romance, kind of comic and too stupid to be satire, it wastes leads Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum.

"Gattaca" director Andrew Niccol's sense of the zeitgeist is as on the money as ever with In Time, a sci-fi parable that plays like "Occupy Wall Street: The Movie."

Green, who once had a solid and arty indy cinema career going, cannot for the life of him hit the right tone, here. The film is waterlogged when it should be jaunty, and the cynicism and the sentimentality are kept at arm’s length.

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

This is pretentious, chatty and maddeningly slow.

Tenderly-conceived, tastefully-directed, handsomely-mounted and prestigiously-cast, its a drama that runs up against the wall of over-familiarity and the ceiling of expectations. Even without being the umpteenth version of this sort of film to come out, it’s pretty bland going.

This is “Crank” with one long, frenetic, ticking-clock chase and the occasional “Mission: Impossible” level stunt, and a body count and a story that you cannot let yourself think about, even though both are in your face and appalling, first scene to closing credits.

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

Levine writes and shoots enough scenes in inventive ways to make this mildly-frustrating melodrama work.

White House Down is a corker, real competition for “Fast & Furious 6″ as the dumbest fun you’ll have at the movies this summer.

The script here is pretty stale stuff, with an under-developed side story of the cop (Karen Mok) on Donako’s trail and dialogue (in English and Chinese) that is often banal.

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

It does a good enough job of giving us a helpless outsider-looking-in view of this foundering form of postpartum depression, making us sympathize if never quite helping us understand how this happened to Jules and what those who love her can do — beyond chemicals — to save her.

It doesn’t take a hectoring Michael Moore or patronizing Dinesh D’Souza to properly account for “what happened” and “who these people are, and why” they supported Donald Trump. It turns out Trump supporters, “in their own words,” is the most damning portrait of them imaginable.

Coogan, Cattaneo and screenwriter Jeff Pope have adapted a touching tale that is the Argentine penguin embodiment of “Keep Calm and Carry On,” for those who’re willing to see it.

Basically a Royal Caribbean ad masquerading as a romantic comedy.

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.

This isn’t an A-picture, either behind the camera or in front of it. It plays like a competent TV film, lacking the polish or “names” of a “Downton Abbey,” but good enough to work.

Well-acted, smartly-reported and heartfelt.

The jeopardy is built-into the situation, but the frights feel low-stakes and simply don’t get the scary job done.

The absurd turns the story takes to serve up streetwise and bloody "life lessons" for the kid will make any parent blanch and any movie lover roll his or her eyes.

The venerable acting firm of Smith-Kline & Scott Thomas make certain that this Paris trip is anything but a waste.

It’s perfectly watchable, but let it play on during the bathroom breaks and search for snacks. It’s so slow you probably won’t miss anything vital, not until the third act.

This “Posse” is never much more than a mixed-bag — sometimes entertaining, sometimes pedantic, and never as quick or as nimble on its feet as it needs to be to come off.

Nostalgia only gets you so far, and whatever “feels” folks cling to from the original “upset the uptight golf world” original, it’s not enough to float this bloated corpse of a comedy.

This is still a most original take on the consequences of following your own "yellowbrickroad" when you don't know, for sure, that there's an Oz at the end of it.

O’Brien and Pollack have nice chemistry, and the darkened rinks, offices and under-lit houses give the picture a pervasive, tragic gloom that the sketchy but conventionally structured story never lives down to.

None of it adds up to much more than a chuckle or two, a smile or three and a lot of slow, poetically drawn-out moments of mild anguish or the simple delight of walking through Greenwich Village in the spring.

A mawkish Dorothy Blyskal script, based on a memoir by the three, a cumbersome flashback structure that lacks suspense, a grasped then quickly abandoned cloying voice-over narration and the unaffected and ineffective acting make this feel like the worst movie Clint’s made since he stopped teaming up with a baboon.

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

Stewart and Yeun (“Minari,” “Nope”) do their best to animate their flesh-and-blood scenes with confusion, curiosity and attraction. But they don’t have enough screen time to make this learn-how-to-love experiment come off.

Blackhat will serve no purpose other than deflating the “Heat” director’s reputation and the star’s chances of ever starring in anything that doesn’t involve a helmet with horns on it.

The mystery, the great cast and the slow simmer of tension that Egoyan builds into Remember recommend it. The third act payoff won’t be to every taste. Egoyan is the Canadian Spike Lee in that regard.

Director and co-writer Eli Horowitz, a veteran of TV’s “Homecoming,” throws in just enough curveballs to keep us guessing and just enough generational jabs to make the script kind of funny and kind of mean-spirited.

I found the whole thing more tiresome than intriguing, and wouldn’t recommend it unless you threatened me with being locked in a cage with MacKay in character. Now THAT would be scary.

There’s a funny movie in the “big city sophisticates SHOCKED by the transgressive nonsense that goes on in a small (college) town.” This isn’t it.

It’s a Wonderful Knife doesn’t just slash through our expectations about what we’re going to see. It stumbles in managing the basics, starting with “Must make some kind of sense, surreal or otherwise.

Coming 2 America still provides enough smiles to make up for the lack of belly-laughs. And if you want to hear Murphy’s famous “heh-heh-heh” laugh, stay through the credits.

Whatever else Whannell, making his directing debut, manages in this third chapter of this soon-to-be-beaten-to-death series, casting Shaye and giving the actress who dates back to the original “A Nightmare on Elm Street” her due pays off.

Aniston's work opposite the screen's premiere mild-mannered funnyman shows her at her most engaged and pitch perfect.

Uygur is the fuming, fulminating embodiment of the prophetic movie character Howard Beale from “Network.” He is, indeed, Mad as Hell and he isn’t “going to take it anymore.” But the jury’s out on exactly what he’ll do about that.

Everything about this movie feels familiar, like we’ve seen it multiple times before, not necessarily always starring Gerry Butler. Yes he’s a credible, charismatic action star who always delivers the goods, even in middling fare like this.

Well-intentioned, but predictable and instantly dated.

An expertly shot and edited thriller built around a cringey/creepy performance by Josh Hartnett is undone by an indulgent father trying to make a pop starlet/actress out of his daughter in Trap, the latest from M. Night Shyamalan.

A Death on the Nile that never lets us forget its quality and attention to detail, but forgets to be much in the way of fun.

With no building of suspense, little connection with a lot of the thinly-scripted characters, and no volcano movie ever having much of a story to go with its effects, Skyfire still falls short of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano,” even if it is marginally better than “Miami Magma.”

It’s a derivative, noisy, sometimes-amusing Greek myth-reinventing eye-roller, full of fan-service, inclusion, dry-eyed deaths and “high stakes” that feel like a half-hearted send-up of that idea.

Silly as it sounds, 47 Meters Down is downright intense. And it manages the odd surprise twist, too.

It’s a bio-pic that keeps its brilliant, sultry, complicated subject at arm’s length.

A detail-oriented thriller that lets us keep up even as it races to a conclusion.

With its obvious melodrama, obviously misleading “locations” and even more obvious big stunts, Black Beauty doesn’t transcend its sentimental children’s entertainment origins. But Avis more than does the novel justice.

Sad and forlorn as Maggie is, there are no surprises left in Zombieland.

The ending is laugh-out-loud ludicrous, and the stops (the train gets snowbound — imagine that) dictated by a very old formula. But it is the stylish journey, my friends, that matters , not the destination.

[Ree] virtually never surprises us, making his film more a celebratory hagiography for proud Norwegians than anything the rest of the world, in and out of chess, can embrace.

Sweet, sentimental, silly and star-studded, Nanny McPhee Returns is one of the best children's movies of the year.

Snook does a nice job of unraveling, and LaTorre makes a perfectly infuriating, undisciplined child. But Run Rabbit Run never moves at anything faster than a saunter, and takes forever to stop meandering about and get on the obvious horror parable it is trying to put over.

It doesn’t really work.

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

The Amateur may be a mixed-bag of coincidences, not-quite-plausible technological traps and narrow escapes, and a tad old fashioned feeling in this post-justice/post-accountability world. But Malek keeps us invested and interested in this quest.

Coogan is game and Fisher strikes the right tone. But there’s so much bad behavior to “expose” and complain about that there’s no room for fun.

This Superfly is all hair and clothes and cars. There’s nothing beneath the surface.

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

Anyone But You is about as close as Hollywood can get to a rom-com that works these days. Which is to say, “Not terribly close,” even though it’s not exactly terrible.

Self/less doesn’t offer many surprises. It’s a lot like other body-switch thrillers, and is practically a remake of the 1966 John Frankenheimer rich-guy-buys-handsome-young-body tale “Seconds.” But it has generous pleasures.

Ghost in the Shell can’t escape its own ghosts, the movies, stories, characters and even settings of truly original work that predates it. For all its gory mayhem, it’s a movie as bloodless as it is sexless.

Even Channing Tatum seems a little embarrassed by all this by the time the third act rolls around.

It dawdles between action beats and big laughs, and in the third act, that lets much of the wind out of it.

This Silent Night doesn’t land its satiric punches cleanly. And in abandoning the “comedy” part of “dark comedy,” it isn’t exactly a place to visit to get happy during a global pandemic.

The spookiest and most entertaining horror flick since "Paranormal Activity."

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

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.

Handsomely mounted, period perfect and starring the empathetic Mia Wasikowska in the title role, the new Madame Bovary narrows the scope and finds a different focus within Gustave Flaubert’s novel.

Get Santa is an at-times adorably daft holiday farce.

How He Fell in Love isn’t dazzling, warm and fuzzy. For all the damage being done, there’s not a lot of harsh edge to it, either. But it feels real.

As current as these issues and this debate remains, a story meant to pass judgement after the dust settles just comes off as mediocre, murky, both-sidesing virtue signalling from a writer out of her depth.

Fukada has delivered another subtle, startling and demanding drama about lives upended in a country that rarely gives us any hint this sort of thing happens, a film built on stoic performances that give up their reserve when the worst kind of pressure is applied.

For all its stunning and stark wilderness settings (Spain and the Canary Islands), its stunning effects, technical proficiency and scriptural cleverness, Exodus is a chilly affair... It’s still an exciting, entertaining epic.

The ending smacks of Hollywood rewriting of history. But The Devil's Double shows the political consequences of Uday's misdeeds, the delicate negotiations that keep the people with grievances in line. And Dominic Cooper delivers a career-making performance.

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.

You don’t have to be a Tom Brady hater to pan this. But you are obligated to separate this wan script and feebly-fictionalized laugher from its stars, who have legendary comic chops that this movie treats like oversized false teeth.

Even when it strays away from its core messaging, Wildflower never steps on a mine. And when you’re working your way through a minefield, you call that a win every time.

“Jane the Virgin” alumna Rodriguez has the timing and bubbly energy to make her character tolerable in a slick movie that’s unoriginal, trite and cliched. She gives it her all, but this was never more than a feeble excuse for a Valentine’s Day romantic comedy.

It’s a sports movie that’ll make you think, and its release — cleverly-timed for the weekend when the only college tilt is the rare one with real “student athletes,” the Army/Navy game — invites fans to put down the beer, get off those Internet sports gambling sites, and think about what’s going on.

Depp could be dismissed as just a name and a costume who got the film financed, but his Franco-Teutonic take on Joll never quite crosses into caricature. It’s good to see him putting in the effort. Pattinson? His tiny part basically is just a name and a costume who got the film financed.

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.

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

A leaden, violent and tone-deaf script and two surprisingly unfunny stars — one trying WAY too hard and the other not trying at all — bury The Spy Who Dumped Me.

3D or not, the film about the mop-topped Canadian - who turns 17 March 1 - doesn't let us get very close to "the talent."

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

Nobody saw it last summer. And Hollywood isn’t beating down the cast’s collectives doors. Yet. But these Slow Learners catch on just in time to be the best cheap date movie for Valentine’s Day.

Nicola Voon’s novel becomes a charmingly gooey but somewhat gutless adolescent romance all highlighted and underlined with “forbidden love” semiotics.

It’s a dopey premise that this film, from the director of the romantic weeper “The Vow” (based on David Levithan’s novel), hangs on. But if you don’t buy in, you’ll miss out on one of the more intriguing and honest — if idealized — portraits of high school that the movies have served up of late.

A newfangled old-fashioned movie about glory, honor, sacrifice and a martial code that crosses into fascism, homoerotism and homophobia at the same time -- there are plenty of turn-off buttons in this one. But by Zeus, this is a ripping yarn, told with limb-rending gusto, an iconic ancient battle as seen by an iconic comic-book creator, Frank Miller.

Gooding brings just enough streetwise credibility to make Brown work.

It's a fitfully amusing, not remotely scary slasher picture.

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.

Whatever romance and charm Gruen summoned forth from these rough and tumble show people living by their own laws in a traveling, self-contained world of poverty and cruelty, director Francis Lawrence has hacked and ground them off.

Carrie Pilby never rises to the level of hateful, or even annoying. It never rises above mediocre, and that’s the problem.

The epic effects, titanic struggles and ever-evolving line-up of characters of "Apocalypse," coming hot on the heels of “Civil War” and “Batman v. Superman” and “Deadpool,” underline the exhausted ingredients of the formula these movies all use. The filmmakers strain to find something new to do with them, and watching them try too hard is wearying.

If only every comedy had the surprise twist that the Czech road picture Winter Flies saves for its finale. It’s simple, and simple-minded, and it so upends expectations that it leaves you the way every comedy should — tickled.

No Man’s Land plays like a buffet diner who has overfilled his plate. There’s too much thrown in here to do justice to anybody’s story.

Clooney, for the first time in his directing career (“Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Ides of March”) never finds the sweet spot, and never quite wrestled the script into a shape entertaining enough to make the liberties he and Heslov took with the facts worth it.

A tragic quasi-musical that never quite finds its way.

None of this film’s shortcomings took me totally out of it. I was drawn into the story, in spite of its “Oh come now” moments when our hero gets a break, or avoids having every bone broken by doing something nobody who has a choice would hazard.

A clever ticking clock mystery, it tries your patience even if it is giving some of the best character actors in the movies plenty of screen time to chew the scenery, try on accents and make jokes in even the bloodiest, darkest moments.

It’s a thriller bookended with humans vs. robots shootouts, and stuffed with boring corporate intrigues in between.

Epic isn’t epic, but it isn’t half bad, either. It’s just that as high as the bar has been raised on this sort of animation, this is more evidence that a strong story is worth more than any next generation software.

Hyatt isn’t very good at getting across the urgency of the story, and for all the suggestions of torture (“Another 20 lashes!”) and scenes of prisoners being burned, the picture lacks drama or the tension that an account — based on the New Testament’s “Acts” and Christian tradition — might have had.

Vitaletti has good players all dressed up in period garb, but gives them no place to go.

The laughs follow an overly familiar path, but it’s great to see Grier, one of the bright lights of the seminal TV sketch comedy “In Living Color,” button down this judge and find ways to break formula and make him hilarious.

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

Randall Park’s interpretation of Kim is dark, and darkly funny, a delusional turn with wincing, believable bits of psychoanalysis.

Yes, the technology has improved in the 27 years that have passed. But the ensuing years have also produced first person shooter video games which utterly preclude the need for this as a movie. Visceral, violent toys that they are, they still have more heart than this.

Stupid scene follows bloated speech, all the way through to a finale set up to go off, but which fizzles like soggy fireworks.

Saint Laurent plays like the most inside-baseball fashion film ever, too many random “highlights,” too few moments of inspiration.

This one doesn’t show strain because it doesn’t have to. The charm and the humor are obvious, our investment in their plight easy and the bad guys perfectly hissable.

There’s something so delicious when Brits such as Thompson and Irons sink their fangs – sorry – into Deep South dialect. Thompson devours scenery, supporting players and dialogue with every “Bless your heart, shooo-gah” in the script, and Irons curls his non-existent mustache with every syrupy zinger.

There’s no edge to any character in the movie.

Ford, in a performance as affecting as any he’s ever given, lifts this romance in ways we never see coming.

These movies are about reminding us how these songs made us feel when they were new, and how bowled over we were by the people who performed them. Ackie, Lemmons & Co. do that, and rescue Houston from her “tragedy” to remind us why the world fell in love with her and once-in-a-generation voice.

It is funny, and Redford, gracious as ever, makes a wonderful straight-man for a comic co-costar who has the face, voice and posture of a geezer who probably should have tackled this healing hike 20 years earlier.

I was one of the few naysayers when the franchise was rebooted with “Jurassic World,” yet even with the bar set lower for expectations on this one, I found it “Transformers” boring, a summer movie that however much it earns, fails to justify its existence.

The picture, which is earning dismissive reviews in some quarters, wouldn’t work without the oddball, mismatched chemistry between Witherspoon and Ferrell, who are a walking sight gag when they’re in the same shot.

Refn’s skewering of this empire of awfulness is undercut by his plodding, portentous pacing.

Findlay and Scott don’t force their charm on us, Wilkinson makes the aphorisms, anecdotes and literary quotations poetic and warm. So much of it takes place in the flowers and brambles of a garden that the movie smells like spring.

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.

There’s little sense of forward motion to any of this.

The bleak outlook of this story won’t be to every taste. But Residue brings a painful beauty to a real-life “whitewashing” of a city that will never let you look at gentrification from a realtor’s point of view ever again.

Vengeance lets you appreciate its ambition and wince at its obvious overreach.

Don’t Look Away is a textbook film for anybody hoping to learn how to make a scary, fun and attention-worthy thriller with next-to-no-money.

Actor Andy Serkis (“Black Panther”) steps behind the camera to direct here, and manages a genial, slow-moving and upbeat picture — for the middle acts. The first act courtship is strictly “Masterpiece Theater,” and the drawn-out third-act a grim different picture with an altogether different agenda.

Love the cast, and scattered moments of this play as cutting or funny. The problem is, almost every one of those bits is in the trailer, which plays as a lot more amusing than this drag.

It’s the players and their points of view that let Bullet Head score something close to a bulls-eye, even if the shot is fired at easy, close range.

Like "42," Cesar Chavez lacks the budget to feel truly epic in scope. The violence is scattered, shocking and personal, the struggles within the union muted but the outrage — is palpable.

Director John Madden and his crew make India the most alluring, scrubbing any hint of squalor from Jaipur, and filming in the cooler months. Nobody sweats. That means that this time, this “Exotic” hotel is more a place to check into briefly, in passing, and not the sort of place you’d want to lose yourself in.

A mirthless, joyless comedy with nary a hint of romance, mystery or justification for its existence.

Shockingly, it's funny. Often in shocking or at least wildly inappropriate ways.

Te Ata may not be an Oscar contender, but it is well-acted, touching and certainly good enough to deserve this Netflix curtain call.

The whole affair is too cluttered to clip along, laugh to laugh, love to love. Director Christian Ditter (“Love, Rosie”) had too many characters to serve to give anybody room to breathe.

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

Surge is a penny plain concept executed with skill and acted with real verve.

As it is, we’re looking at the outline for a funny teen rom-com, not one that feels finished or that pays off.

For all Singer’s expertise at making the fantastic real, all we’re left with here is an expensive-looking bauble – worth looking over, but not really anything to treasure.

The new Funeral, directed by social commentator-director Neil LaBute ("Lakeview Terrace") doesn’t improve on the original, which wasn’t exactly a classic despite its classic structure.

Eisener runs up against the wall of shocks that stop being shocking and torrents of tiny tyke profanity that become repetitive and stop being funny. This isn’t “Attack the Block,” not by a ways.

Workshop the story, script-doctor the dialogue and recast the lovely leads with actors who generate a little actual sexual heat and Besson might have had another “Fifth Element,” a minor classic on his hands.

Desierto never amounts to much more than a variation on a theme we know by heart, predictable at every single sandy step they take.

A Forgotten Man still makes for a most watchable account of a country that may have “gotten it from both sides” during the war, which acted out of self-preservation and self-interst, but which got an undeserved pass for its selective, opportunistic views of “neutrality.”

There are missteps, threads that seems to clash with everything that’s woven around them. But Moverman and director Marc Meyers (“My Friend Dahmer”) keep that loom weaving, their story moving forward and their movie about the sometimes discounted value of Human Capital perfectly engrossing, from start to finish.

The Advent Calendar is a creeper of a thriller. It stalks you, sidles up and immerses the viewer in its world and its mood. This Belgian film (in French and German with English subtitles) doesn’t deliver frights or shocks so much as it serves up shivers.

But even if this film of a Susanna Jones novel makes a middling whodunit, it’s still a fine vehicle for Vikander, an actress of quiet reserve and inner fury. She and the exotic setting lift Earthquake Bird, even if it never fully takes flight.

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.

The end result is a thriller that doesn’t race towards a climax we figure out (finally) 20 minutes in advance, it limps there.

What gives it’s juice is the supporting cast. John Bernthal (“The Walking Dead”) is credibly wary as the ex-con John begs to get him in the door of the drug world. And the terrific Michael Kenneth Williams is the first dealer he meets, a guy who pulls a gun on him just to test him.

It’s not the worst movie of the “power from a pill” genre, an idea that dates back decades (TV’s “Mr. Terrific” comes to mind). But that’s one overriding problem, here. Project Power feels powered-out ten minutes in.

But for a guy with all these comedy credits, Thurber (and his by-the-numbers star) fail to give the spark of sarcastic life to this version of John “Die Hard” McClain. The script gives Will one half-funny aside, and a single funny line.

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.

What it’s not very good at getting across is the source of the pain, the disaffection that drives our anti-hero’s excesses or his art.

Expecting to catch lightning in a bottle twice was mostly wishful thinking on the part of everyone involved.

Yes, it’s aimed at believers. But Reynolds & Co. avoid the traps of Mel Gibson’s movie and many others by making these times horrifically real, but these Biblical figures and what they were about compelling in their kindness, soft-selling their message so sweetly that even a Roman with blood on his hands will question his Empire, his religion and his way of living before all is said and done.

Christmas on the Square isn’t much, but what’s here is a pleasant enough time-killer, which is more than you can say about the vast majority of holiday-themed Hallmark/Hulu/Netflix et al fare this season.

The Song of Names is a more interesting than fascinating mystery than it is a profound statement on memory, loss, tragedy and faith — which was plainly its aim. The conflict is more talked about than keenly felt, the climax something of an over-the-top anti-climax.

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.”

Umma turns out to be a “quality” thriller that can’t be bothered to get down and dirty and scary.

The Liberator may be a Cliff Notes version of South American history, but Ramirez breathes life into it and makes us care.

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.

It's a sordid tale and, in Gibney's telling, a cautionary one.

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

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.

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.

Even though it rallies in its last third to manage something like comic momentum, Rough Night never recovers from the bloody death and the mess that ensues.

A surehanded, tight and minimalist amateur-kidnapping thriller that benefits from a cast of some repute and a few nods to Tarantino within its 94 minutes.

Pegg is the very picture of schizophrenia — funny and charming, here and there, lucid when he can get it together to lie to a doctor, bug-eyed and furious when Theo’s independence is threatened and his view that “time” is being controlled…by somebody — isn’t taken seriously.

This all adds up to a movie whose net laughs exceed any annoyance Corden, the endless pop song action montages and frantic, “Ace Ventura” animal antics create.

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.”

It’s a labored film thanks to trite dialogue, to interesting characters like a “good Austrian” journalist (Daniel Bruhl) who wants his country held accountable who are given short shrift, and to the many court scenes have a hint of humor, but no spark.

If you have any recollection of the original film at all, it’s too easy to note that scene by scene, character by character and plot element by plot element, they remade it slightly less funny and somewhat less touching in most every regard.

Me Before You is a goofy, giddy doomed romance and female wish-fulfillment fantasy.

This “Kid” is somewhat better than the one Chan made with Will Smith’s kid several years back, but “Cobra Kai” fans may find the generic plot weighs down the punches too much to be worth the trouble.

A film that starts feebly, gets its feet under it, but never goes anywhere.

It’s a lovely, immersive experience, a movie that invites the viewer to ponder the nature of conscience, the bravery of conscientous objecting and the realization of how what happened there could happen anywhere that people embrace ignorance and hate, and others either go along with them, or do nothing.

The script runs out of fresh ideas and novel ways to challenge the dueling dancers quickly, and soon trips over its own tropes.

Director Gavin O’Connor (“Warrior”) is at a loss in trying to shape this into a lean, chilly action picture. The fights and shootouts work, some of the accounting stuff is funny, but the rest is a muddle.

It’s utterly harmless, even in its subtexts — that hip hop and funk are where ALL music comes together. If the kids are going stir crazy, give it a download.

The plot works its way past red herrings and into anti-climaxes, never quite drowning in melodrama, but coming damned close, time and again.

Whatever its intent, White Bird in a Blizzard misuses most everybody involved, especially the dazzling young star of “The Descendants,””The Fault in Our Stars” and “Divergent.”

The film captures the magic and manic energy of the performances, the inventive choreography and spine-tingling tunes.

A little more chaos might have truly lit this one up.

Any grace notes 70something Liam Neeson brings to his aging and about to become infirm man of action in Absolution are pretty much overwhelmed by cliches, loose ends and overreaches in a sloppily pieced-together screenplay.

All these years after Predator, these decades past the classic film, "Most Dangerous Game," that inspired this genre, it’s good to see the idea of the hunter becoming the hunted still gets the blood racing.

It's light in tone, feather-weight. But there aren't many laughs in it.

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

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

It’s a bit of a muddle and a touch too soap operatic. But Newton, Rose and Ejiofor give their characters and this story just enough pathos to make the history lessons sink in.

Ritchie papers over a paper-thin story with artificial twists and very funny turns by the likes of Farrell, Grant, Marsan and Dockery.

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

As cute and predictable as this all is, the cast hurls itself at this slight farce and makes it play.

A cut-rate cast, green director and a script so bad it wouldn’t attract betters actors or directors is no way to rebuild public confidence in your business, or its “Netflix Original” movies.

At Midnight is the mildest R-rated rom-com on record, a tame and tepid affair pairing up a couple of career supporting players as the leads, with mild-mannered laughs, lukewarm love scenes and conventional wish-fulfillment-fantasy plot points.

It's all quite lovely, mesmerizing – and right on the edge of sleep-inducing.

Rare is the thriller that goes as completely and utterly wrong as The Call does at almost precisely the one hour mark. Which is a crying shame, because for an hour, this is a riveting, by the book kidnapping.

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

The girls go wild and they make “Mike and Dave” as nasty as they wanna be, and a pleasant, pervy surprise of a summer comedy.

Over-the-top, but not far enough over the top to fully pay off. But Ganem makes the title character, and her soapy doppelganger, enough of a hoot to make it worth staying through the credits.

Performances? Nobody in this will be topping their resume with it. Neither will the director. Let’s hope it’s just a blip, a disaster soon to be forgotten by him and the studio that wrote the checks for it. I’m pretty sure he already has.

But for all the period detail, characters are a little too healthy and well-scrubbed to be convincing and the actual look of the film is video-flat and dull — ugly.

It just takes a very long time to get going. Apparently seventh grade doesn't pack as much potential for amusing, scarred-for-life trauma as sixth grade.

As weighty as a snowflake, and just as prone to turn to mush at room temperature, Let It Snow is a holiday comedy that sits right in Netflix’s wheelhouse.

The wimpy kid here isn’t interesting, the “worst years” a dull exaggeration and the movie not worth the 92 minutes it takes to sit through.

It probably never had a prayer of being a wide release, with Lawrence and Grant’s co-mingled careers shrinking in ambition and appeal. But there’s charm here, and Grant is engagingly disengaged playing somebody who knows the fickle finger of Hollywood fate no longer points his way.

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

Too little is made of the actual closure of the bridges, of the tightening net closing in on the pursued.

It’s too short to do justice to its subject, but in an era when young women build careers and get rich off “secret” sex tapes that somehow make their way onto the Internet, maybe that’s all this subject deserves. Lovelace was but an aberration, an amusing, then quaintly grim footnote on our way to a Paris Hilton/Kim Kardashian future.

An engaging if undemanding romantic outing, newfangled enough to be social media-current, old fashioned enough to warrant bringing the whole family. Just remember to brush your teeth afterwards.

The drama is fairly mild, the action cute and slapshticky and the Lyle sight gags aimed at six and unders, so don’t look or listen for great verbal or visual wit.

Hardcore Henry is jarring and so a-cinematic that I couldn’t enjoy much of the technical razzle-dazzle this ticking-clock monstrosity was hurling at me.