Roger Moore

The Fire Inside is a feel-good picture that feeds off our disappointment that not everybody who succeeds against the odds wholly “succeeds” against those odds, and makes us wonder if this will ever change.

In focusing on the tunes and the lyrics, Mangold makes us reconsider the head-snapping surprise of that Nobel Prize in Literature.

Just the Two of Us seems pre-ordained and predigested, with every emotion tugged at and every “trigger” and behavioral “tell” underlined so as to remove any doubt about what’s going on, who is the victim and who is to blame.

For such a short thriller, “Ferry” never manages to feel brisk or breathless or even satisfying. Lammers should be irked that they wasted such an interesting character on a movie full of “kindergarten s–t.”

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.

The acting isn’t awful and the production values are passable. McDonough makes a much better villain than anybody shoved into that sort of role here. This is an origin story that lacks anything in the way of a “hook” to whet the viewer ‘s appetite for a series. Even the “Christianity” angle is soft-peddled.

Director and co-writer Jérémie Guez shows more flashes of competence than inspiration here. His film is slow and clunky, beginning with promise, ending with the last of a string of third act let-downs.

The Red Virgin is a smart and timely tragedy, coming out as cultures around the world are either embracing equality or trying to roll back the clock on women’s rights.

Kraven the Hunter’s the empty hole where a real movie’s beating heart should have been.

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

This thriller begins at a crawl and finishes with a sprint. The foreshadowing is obvious even if the next twist rarely is.

What one is left with is a gorgeous, quiet and tragic appreciation of Callas.

The narrative may dawdle, the anachronistic music contributes to a disorienting disconnect and there may be too much of a suggestion that “love” is one-sided thing, first to last. Guadagnino’s ” romances”seem to lean that way. But Craig’s performance more than compensates for those shortcomings.

A dark comedy without much in the way of laughs, Filthy Animals serves up a string of characters, each repellent in this way or several others, no one to root for, no “message” to take to heart and with an ending so unsatisfying as to leave one slack-jawed and muttering one question.

There’s sacrifice, but little compassion and little sense of the allure of the origin story that launched a global religion. This account from an “elevated historical” space has action, but the drama in the story is mostly dull pre-ordained “prophecy,” as if that’s enough.

It’s all perfectably passable filler, a nice “escape” with the kids at the movies, with a few stunning animated effects to recommend it.

It fails on pretty much every level.

The robberies and shootouts are staged to brilliant effect. And even the over-the-top acting moments can be forgiven by the “period piece” nature of the history being told.

Huston’s made his film with such care that the lack of other surprises hinders but never hobbles it.

Ghosts of Red Ridge is a low-budget Western that tries to be a ghost story. It’s not anything to write home about in either genre.

Set on the 2012 Colombian/Venezuelan border, Pimpinero: Blood and Oil opens with great promise and tasty action picture possibilities before running out of gas in the middle acts as it shifts point of view and stumbles towards the even deadlier prospects of its finale.

It all adds up to tinselled treacle, inoffensive enough to be shown at Christmas Eve church services, but barely tolerable — dramatically and aesthetically — in any other setting.

If you’re looking for a clinic on how you don’t need a whole season of “Fargo” or “True Detective” to immerse you in a criminal milieu and the sorts of fixes folks living and working there get themselves into, you could do a lot worse than planning a trip to Lake George.

The sequel is fitfully amusing and watchable. But you can sense the greater silliness that inspired it in this “Blues Brothers go Metal” road odyssey.

This promise is at long last fulfilled in the third act, and that chase is pretty impressive. But the movie that gets us there is dumb, talky and pokey in the extreme.

Cloying tendencies aside, Joy is a welcome feel-good movie about science, a “Hidden Figures” for IVF and the sort of movie a lot of people will take comfort in as the world’s anti-science ignoramuses, anti-vaccine rubes and anti-“expert” opportunists control most of the media megaphones these days.

Whatever audience awards this pic has claimed on the film festival circuit, there’s no weight to it, and the sentimental lighter touches and limp jokes aren’t enough to carry it.

I enjoyed the spectacle of this about as much as I enjoyed “Ben-Hur” or “Napoleon” or “Gladiator.” But it’s hard to find the beating heart of this story because it doesn’t really have one.

This picture should have passed by in a sprint, not slogged past like an overlong, overbudgeted Macy’s Parade with Music that would test the patience of anyone, including that toughest PG audience of all — kids.

A harrowing, moving and nostalgic day and a couple of nights in the life of a Black boy lost during the darkest days of World War II.

The middle acts, where Emilia Pérez has her coming out, reconnects with her “fixer” lawyer and pulls her kids and her still-clueless ex-wife close to her, sag and slow the movie’s sprint to a crawl.

Under the Volcano can most easily be appreciated for allowing us to put ourselves in others’ shoes.

Goswami’s understated performance drives this brilliant debut feature, a sometimes silent observer who can barely register shock at some of what she sees and experiences.

I highly recommend you pay a quick visit to the Wikipedia page dedicated to German theologian and resistance martyr Dietrch Bonhoeffer before taking on writer-director Todd Komarnicki’s film “Bonhoeffer.” Otherwise, you might be as lost as I was thanks to the botched chronology acted-out by a little-known cast in a screen biography that does not live up to its over-reaching subtitle — “Pastor. Spy. Assassin.”

Juror # 2 is competently cast, acted, shot and put together. But the script is melodramatic to the point of “hackneyed,” with a couple of unintentional laughs thrown in for good measure.

It’s a funny film, but never actually hilarious. It has its touching scenes, its mild jolts of surprise.

Anora lacks the raw emotion, street energy and urgency of Baker’s transgender romp “Tangerine” — and the pathos of his acclaimed peek at childhood homelessness in the “paradise” of “The Florida Project.”

What the film sorely lacks is much in the way of urgency. Even the get-aways are dull. And for all the sexual heat of the Bruno/Annie connection, their relationship lacks weight or drama.

You can sometimes get away with a just-getting-by budget on your C-movie actioner by getting quick and getting witty. Get Fast doesn’t get over.

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

Canary Black is an almost wholly unsatisfying thriller that seemingly had enough necessary ingredients to comprise a full meal.

Stockholm Bloodbath has fine action beats and furious avenging, but collapses into a sort of resignation about the parts of the tale that must be rendered faithfully.

Unexplained, disorganized and cluttered with characters we strain to identify in banal situations that go nowhere, this isn’t one that’s going to replace “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Story” or even “The Family Stone” or “Feast of the Seven Fishes” on anybody’s holiday movie list.

Heretic leans on horror and serial killer thriller conventions for its plot and rising suspense. The foreshadowing is obvious, but the ways it is deployed always surprise and chill.

Uplifting in the right spots, touching near the end, cute and yet cloying, maudlin and manipulative everywhere else, it punches a lot of familiar buttons when it comes to faith-based films for the holidays.

It is the funniest film you’ll see this year.

It’s a slasher star vehicle for “Outer Banks” ingenue Madison Bailey, and she acquits hewrself with honor in a narrative that could not be more generic were it not for her and the whole time traveling thing.

Across the River and Into the Trees is sedate to the point of “slow,” old fashioned to a degree that will feel dated, and yet every minute of it — every gorgeous image, every twist and turn, even the predictable ones — is to be savored.

It’s sober minded enough. Yet it’s all rather less satisfying than it might have been.

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.

It’s “Gump” rendered in the shallowest strokes, an “evocative” saga with all the depth of Billy Joel’s Boomer anthem, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

The characters are never more than caricatures, the set-up is too conventional and the payoff doesn’t pay off at all. As for the jokes? Too many are awaiting that next rewrite or polish.

As the warts and all image emerges, with her surgically-polished profile never breaking a sweat, we still can’t help but get a kick out of her Bieber-Snoop fed revival. Because as much as her comeuppance seemed destined, that “comeback” makes her story as American as they come.

Whatever “charms” it reached for vanish for the attempted over-the-top finale, which left me cold and didn’t come close to making the sale about the “Embrace your inner rage” spin this is allegedly about.

Conclave is a deliciously immersive experience, a narrative that commands our attention and expects our speculation even if it maintains a distance that allows it all to seem out-of-step, fusty and even darkly humorous at its most extreme.

Hardy, perfecting the “meek” American shlub “type” he tackled in “The Drop” years ago, soldiers through this and has as much fun with the synthesized voice of Venom as he can.

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

Some of it works, too much of it doesn’t. The pacing is fast enough in stretches, the performances amusingly broad and the pratfuls and punches sometimes amuse.

There’s no suspense in the tale, even in its “big finish.” “Tragic” was never in the cards, as this con man got away with his stunt. But this could have been dark and funny. It isn’t.

In Woman of the Hour, an infamous piece of ’70s serial killer lore becomes a suspenseful and disheartening thriller in the hands of director and star Anna Kendrick.

There’s nothing about “Goodrich” that would scare producers away from working with a filmmaker whose only goal might be to become “Nancy Meyers: The Next Generation,” even if there’s little original to lure them in either.

Smile 2 is a genuinely horrific plunge into terror.

Writer-director Nora Fiffer’s debut feature shows us the tears and hopes that we understand them. And she finds humor amid the insights about this particular version of post partum depression.

I swear I never thought I’d see Oscar winner Laura Dern in a movie as empty and pointless as Lonely Planet.

It’s immersive enough, luring us into this world and fearing for our heroines’ safety. But the abrupt shifts in focus make one wish Han Shuai had taken some more crowd-pleasing course, or gone all-in on the darkness of this underworld an out-of-her-element ex-pat finds herself in.

The performances are perfunctory, with little heart, heat or whimsy. The picture never looks cheap, but the melodramatic flourishes dumb it down at every turn.

For all the relationship insights dog-lovers-savvy our screenwriters fold into this slight, low-stakes tale, they wisely let underfilmed Portland itself take on a co-starring role.

Daffy to the point of kid-friendly — remember, he did a kids’ cartoon series — it’s lighthearted fun with little of the grim seriousness and unsubtle People’s Republican messaging of his recent films. Because this time, Jackie Chan plays Jackie Chan.

Shifts in tone aside, you’d still have to call “Bookworm” a winner — or I would — with Wood at his most vulnerable and winning and Fisher justifying her chattering pedant paycheck serving up equal parts adorable and insufferable.

The film is thus mostly a surface gloss with a bit of context, relying on the performers and thinkers from way back when to create all the interest here. But Daytime Revolution is a nice editing job of presenting that landmark week of slightly weird TV to viewers 52 years later.

Sure, it’s a gimmick. But it’s playful, it works and suits this material to a T.

Saturday Night won’t be to every generation’s taste. The look-alike cast is generally good, if hardly substitutes for “the real thing” in some cases. But if you were “there,” or at least caught the show in those birthing years, it’s a lot of fun, with or without the stimulants.

Strong finds his character and stays focused, first scene to last, a brilliant performance even if it never quite matches Ron Leibman’s ferocious turn as the man-as-dying-monster in the stage version of “Angels in America.”

Schimberg’s film goes for predictable emotions and rests on a fairly predictable formula. But what transpires in the middle to late acts is surprising, even as it feels as contrived as the shy-deformed-man who quickly becomes a master salesman transition.

CTRL is a slick and melodramatic Indian variation of the “runaway computer/evil AI” formula, a tale that begins jaunty and jokey and staggers into sinister in the most heavy-handed ways.

The fiddling-while-Earth-burns nature of global “leadership” and their parade of useless and vacuous “statements” joke lands, and is then pounded repeatedly as almost all of these leaders, scrambling through a foggy forest at night, fearing bog zombies and a planet about to go up in flames, struggle to stay on task and come up with that “statement.”

The script by Dan Hall is strictly paint-by-numbers — cut and dried and predictable. But the execution atones for some of that, and the performances give it that extra something that makes even a formulaic thriller worth your time.

The viewer is both miles ahead of the characters in guessing where this is going, and befuddled at the clumsy ways it gets there, or avoids letting us think we know how it’s getting there.

Sorelle and her documentary-real characters and the grounded unknown players playing them humanize their culture and show us their challenges are versions of all our challenges, no matter how many generations removed from it we think we are.

The family intrigues don’t amount to much, and Nick’s “secret” — the thing that has him sneaking sips from bottles all over the island — is even less original.

While writer-director Greg Jardin does his level best to bowl us over with “technique” (split screens, endless 360 degree handheld pans, etc.) and does a decent enough job at complicating his role-playing-game-run-amok plot, a somewhat bland cast of players can’t manage to convince us that they’re possessed by the mind and spirit of someone else.

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

Few movies about getting sober are as brilliant at conveying the allure of drowning, wallowing in alcohol, the emotional and physical liberation it seems to offer, as The Outrun. And rare is the story told within this most personal of experiences that exults in its trials, the gut check of “one day at a time” and the exultant release from the trap of addiction.

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

Humorless, shallow and grim will get you only so far.

Jon Holmberg’s Swedish caper-comedy/prison escape dramedy and “Fugitive” spoof Trouble is more amusingly frustrating than stupidly frustrating.

Screenwriter Jim Beggarly (“Free Samples,” “A Country Called Home”) must have tailor-made this part for Falco, one that honors her screen baggage as the mistress of unconventional mothers.

But aside from a couple of genuinely touching moments, “Rez Ball” is dramatically flat. Heartache and heartbreak are suggested but never plumbed or embraced.

There’s madness afoot, and Demoustier ably captures how overmatched a mere interviewer would always be with Dalí. And the various actors playing Dalí indulge in grand vamping of the genius in a script that only occasionally hints at his sense of his own mortality.

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

Will & Harper became a hopeful, upbeat snapshot of a nation struggling with its own transition, just a couple of pals in a collectible Jeep, experiencing the “real” America — diners, dives and Walmarts and the wide array of folks who inhabit it, at least some of whom are starting to “get it.”

Winslet is convincingly flinty, uncompromising and American in the part, a feminist in the truest traditional sense of the word. Excellent supporting cast aside, she’s the reason to see “Lee,” a one woman argument for why what Lee Miller documented and how she documented it mattered in a movie that honors her memory, and the memories that haunted her to the end of her days.

When My Old Ass works, it’s comically judgmental, droll in the ennui the older feel about the young and sentimental about what you’re missing out on by focusing on the impulse of the moment.

The charms of The Wild Robot sneak up on you.

Claire Ayoub’s debut feature is witty but utterly predictable, uplifting in all the right ways, manipulative in many others. Characters are a checkbox of political correctness and incorrectness, with mean girls and a mom who wants to “understand,” but just can’t without help. What all that adds up to is good-hearted and damned adorable.

It’s a star vehicle that reminds us of why star power still counts for something, even if the comic thriller you park this pairing of Butch and Sundance in has them upstaged by a kid still young enough to be willing to not just wear tidy whiteys, but to run all over New York in them.

Comedy is quick and The Zombie Wedding lumbers, staggers and stumbles up to the wedding, and flails like a tortoise sinking in quicksand after the “I do’s.”

I found the early acts boring with moments of shock. But the finale to “Sleep” is a corker and well worth Yu’s perhaps unintentional efforts to encourage the viewer to doze-off. That climax is a waking nightmare of the worst-fears-confirmed variety. Whose worst fears? Watch and see.