Roger Moore

It all adds up to “not half-bad,” with Page managing the emotional high point and Clemons and Norton delivering the near-laughs and Luna the sober man-of-science common sense. Tricky thing about half-bad, though. That means, at its best, it’s only half good.

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.

An unsatisfying if often surprising experience, a less warm and fuzzy "Parenthood."

The laughs - Doug tries to take up the pipe, a la Sherlock Holmes - are on the flat side.

The surgeries shown here, organs in their place in the crowded human body, functioning or failing, is indeed eye-opening. But the film’s structure is, as an ancient Roman critic would have put it, inportunum et inordinatum.

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

The whole affair plays as muzzled, truncated and incomplete — a ten furlong dash through a two mile (16 furlong) race.

Bad Match is too short and formulaic to give us anything to really chew on.

A tram here, a car there, a little attention to wardrobe, and contrasting haircuts (a Hitler/Himmler buzz was the dead give-away somebody was a Nazi) and we get an idea of what this world looked like. But “Fabian” fails to immerse us in that world, and being as leisurely as a limited series in its pacing, loses the urgency of what to later audiences can only be a “cautionary” tale.

“Not awful” is Emmerich’s victory, here.

The film, starring Ashton Sanders (“Moonlight”) as a rapper wannabe, hustler/mob-soldier in training, doesn’t show us much that we haven’t seen before. Maybe a little more back-story, a few extra pieces in the “motivation/how we got here” puzzle, all set to a sing-along gangsta rap (mostly) soundtrack. It’s depressingly over-familiar, or at least generic.

Extraordinary Measures isn’t extraordinary. It’s simply safe.

Costner and Garner are good and Langella properly menacing, but Leary has lost his fastball and seems to be holding something back in his quarrel scenes with Costner. Costner has to carry the film, which he does.

Movies that make you come to them are, by definition, thought-provoking. But aside from concentrating and grasping at any actor, character or plot wrinkle that might let us “into” Cronenberg’s world and thought processes, there isn’t anything here that invites, entertains or even titillates.

Linklater is still able to move us, even after he’s bored us half out of the movie with his long set-up, even after Cranston has sucked all the oxygen out of the picture with his hernia-inducing twinkle, even after we’ve given up on Last Flag Flying as too damned cute for its own good.

Eyes Off Me is more carnal than emotional or particularly psychological.

This halfway-there thriller still makes an excellent showcase for Emilia Clarke, shedding whatever “Game of Thrones” baggage she has left and hinting at the dangerous places she might yet take us.

Even the third act fights and shootouts can’t pull Those Who Wish Me Dead back from the you-know-what.

Kilmer makes a worthy, if somewhat underscripted villain. And some of the bits -- MacGruber idiotically setting traps that the bad guys never fall for -- tickle. But this still feels instantly dated, a "Hot Rod in a Role Models" era.

Matt Palmer’s film is an engrossing but unsurprising swirl of self-preservation instincts, grief, panic and terror. It achieves pulse-pounding only once, and rarely strays from the predictable path set for it.

If your kids are Chinese menu savvy, just figuring out what this character/dish or that one is that this or that character is supposed to be. For adults, it could play as a take-out dinner date drinking game movie, a 90 minute think-up-your-own-pun fest.

And The Good Liar lapses into being “The Poor” one in a movie that’s become both more far-fetched and utterly conventional.

It’s not period detail that lets Summerland down. It’s not moving beyond the story’s naturally watchable qualities (cast, setting, period) to give us a film that ever feels it doesn’t need one contrived situation after another just to stagger to its feet. Not that it ever moves those feet once it does, mind you.

It’s a straight-up B-movie, and like a lot of them it tries too hard to be jokey. But all involved have a little fun with it, which pays dividends in the damnedest places.

Remembering Gene Wilder isn’t bad. But it’s incomplete enough to call attention to its shallowness. It never overcomes that “Coming up next on ‘Biography'” superficiality.

Mechanical/CGI shark attack simulations have improved over the decades, and are as terrifying as ever. But the longer this brief “inspired by true events” tale goes on, the more tropes and far-fetched cliches Roach-Turner trots out.

Some of us can see what’s coming, which isn’t a deal-breaker as far as making Glorious watchable. What’s required here is that the characters keep us engaged until the payoff or twist or grim or happy resolution. What would be nice is if we feel something/anything for any given character.

No characters really pop and there’s little room for pathos, humor or anything else.

What this movie doesn’t have is “pace.”

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.

"A Dame to Kill For” isn’t the shock to the system “Sin City” was. But whatever its plot repetition and warmed-over tough talk cost it, this is still a movie like few others you’ve ever seen, a 3D slice of Nihilistic noir that will have you narrating your own guts and guns story on the drive home, chewing on a toothpick as you do.

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.

The film is something of an unemotional muddle, never quite finding the heart of mother-daughter love it so seems to want to test in this story.

The two sisters one is the cleverest, the two albinos one the most unfathomable and “The Flea” the least inscrutable. See it for the eye candy, the vivid recreation of an Italian “Once upon a time,” all of it done without computers and digital fakery.

Basically a bloody buddy picture that tries too hard.

It’s Soderbergh’s shot at “The Big Short,” and it falls somewhat short. It’s convoluted, basically because it has to be. The story is necessarily episodic as the cast of characters is international and hard to pin down and connect. If you’re lost, you’re not alone. The evidence suggests Soderbergh and his screenwriter were, too.

Golden Years is a romantic comedy with questions and perhaps a very modern “answer” to that “Will it go on like this until the end?” challenge. But even though it’s well-acted, scenic and charming enough, perhaps finding a few more laughs should have been a higher priority.

“Eleven” turns out to be an overreach, with too many voices to be anything but superficial, too few (she skipped sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America) to be thorough.

As the folks in this rise and fall of Pharma Frauds saga could tell you, it’s the third act where all the consequences show up and the piper must be paid. That’s where this story’s make-or-break moments are parked, and there are too few of them to let it get off the screen with as much promise as it opened with.

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.

While actress turned director Carlson Young keeps the trains and planes running (slowly) on time, she doesn’t give us a single scene that pops, or production design that ever comes across as upscale, only little flashes of wit and fun from the veterans in the cast, who are better than the material. She’s managed a slick and shiny wish-fulfillment fantasy that is strictly downmarket — Hallmark movie chic.

“Brothers in Blues” is a documentary attempt to chart their careers, get at their influences and at least take a stab at recreating their lives and the world they came from and how it shaped them. It’s OK for what it is, but what it is somewhat less than it should be.

Starts at a sprint and hurtles at us for a good long, stretch, before it stops to catch its breath.

The performances are solid, and the early scenes — recreating the crimes, etc. — are fascinating at a documentary level. Setting up the context is useful, a PD under a cloud and determined to avoid race riots that might return if dirty cops were in on all this. But the rabbit hole closed in for me about an hour in.

There’s just too much that hobbles this horse opera to let it gracefully unfold and canter off into the snowy sunset.

It’s all perfectly high-minded and polished, but all of this could have been treated with more spark than comes across here.

It’s a humorless fright fest with corpses, mildly-impressive effects, a Big League string orchestra score and sturdy work by Madsen (“Leatherface”) in the lead.

It’s slick and scenic and the stars wear their black robber unitards with French elan. But Wingwomen never adds up to the sum of its parts, no matter how many are added to it.

It’s flippant and glib, sure. But there are too many dead people in it for it to make its “so very safe” point.

4L is set in Africa and feels like Africa, but that grounding flow of Africa into your soul that one character promises never happens.

That makes Kick Ass 2 more sour than sweet, a movie that jokes about comic book fanboys but stops short of mocking them the way the first film did.

Although I can’t go all-in on Choose or Die, I will say that there’s a lot to be said for a horror movie with clever twists, a top flight cast and a witty consistency to its conceit.

But “harmless” is a hard sell to hang on a two hour comedy with too-few laughs and a scary movie with no edgy frights.

This “Comedian” is — like many a desperate stand-up — content to go for the dirty/easy laugh, the kind you see coming a mile off, the kind you feel coarse for rewarding with a snicker, the kind you can hear in any high school locker room.

It “could be funny,” and certainly is amusing, here and there. But maybe they wrung all the laughs that were in it out of it, and this is all there ever was to it.

It’s a live-action version of on an ’80s cartoon that was designed to sell toys. This is “Transformers” without the Bumblebee Camaro, a lot of action, a few one-liners, and a lot of gunplay.

At least, at 77 minutes, Deadcon doesn’t waste much of our time.

The problem with rounding up every comic friend you can think of to make a movie is that virtually none of them see their characters properly served. Everybody — everybody funny anyway — gets short shrift.

An old school ghost story, with a supernatural cause-and-effect story and modest and modestly effective effects — watery footsteps, creaking stairs, shadows glimpsed through a window.

More harmless than entertaining, a limp exercise in cinematic baby-sitting for the six-and-under set.

It’s a Gibson showcase and a Liotta curtain call worth seeing, shortcomings be damned.

It’s introductory by nature, polished yet primitive, just like the films that dominated gay big screen storytelling long before the alphabetic expansion to “LGBTQ.”

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.

For all the vivid combat sequences, the gritty adjustment-back-home touches and a couple of genuinely emotional scenes, it feels incomplete, choppy and something of a cheat.

Little Boy is loaded with weighty subjects and teachable moments, all doled out between generous helpings of tragedy and sentiment. It’s ambitious, but a cluttered weeper whose lessons might have stuck, had there been fewer of them.

Laugh-out-loud funny? Yes. It’s just a pity that the “more is better” bodycount sours the picture long before its drawn-out ending spoils the punchline.

The horror comedy Werewolves Within didn’t quite do the trick for me. But it’s a great example of how hitting the right tone can keep you watching, even if the “horror” isn’t all that and not nearly enough jokes land.

Jake Gyllenhaal does tour de force double duty in the intimate thriller Enemy, a cryptic essay on identity. He is terrific in both guises, but he is trapped in a frustrating puzzle without a solution.

See You in Valhalla still manages a decent payoff. A scrappy/sappy dramedy about siblings who return, after their “Viking” brother’s death to the home they once fled, it covers over-familiar ground without much in the line of novelty.

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.

This picture is rough going for animal lovers. It has a certain quality, but I found it as unpleasant as any account of callous people mistreating animals, whatever angle they’re furtively working.

The funny bits drift past their payoff, the pace flags (88 minute movie stretched out to 107) and the light, tongue-in-cheek tone, the riffing banter between the leads isn’t enough to save it.

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

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.

Director and co-writer Christopher Landon (the “Happy Death Day” films were his, and “Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) doesn’t have enough jokes or amusingly murderous sight gags to make “Freaky” take flight.

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.

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.

Neeson is in solid form, villains do their villainy and the sassy lady driver copes with anti-Native racism with her smart mouth and her fists, to fun effect. But that over-the-top third act, topping even the odd operating-on-ice physics of The Ice Road, tends to take the air right out of the Jonathan Hensleigh film’s tires.

It’s more striking to look at than riveting to follow. But if you ever doubted Europe has wilderness to rival America’s dazzling snow-capped peaks, wild waterfalls and unforgiving forests, it’s worth a look.

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

Frankie is filled with absurdly frank confessions and moments of over-sharing as a stellar cast breaks up into pairs for scenes that don’t so much go anywhere as flesh in the back stories in front of one of the loveliest tourist towns on The Continent.

This “Mermaid,” weighted down with expectations, responsibility to the corporate bottom line and what feels like fear that “We’re going to screw this ‘sure thing’ up,” sinks and rarely swims, an epic that impresses when it’s under the sea, but never really moves us. And when it’s on dry land, it could not be more bland.

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.

The Promise, despite its battles, its vivid recreation of the last days of Constantinople (renamed Istanbul), its historical sweep,despite a very good cast, never feels “epic” and rarely do its romantically drawn characters draw us into their romance and their tragedy.

Robinson manages some suspense, but the thriller’s ticking clock is a weak one.

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

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

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

Dog Gone isn’t a very good movie. But if you and your kids love dogs, you’d be cheating yourself by missing it.

Devil’s Peak is a simple story whose filmmakers lose track of threads and characters, perhaps owing to editing.

As impressive as the effects can be, as effective as the blend of TV news helicopter POV shots, security camera footage, cell-phone video and storm chaser images mimicked here turn out, the human stories are given short shrift in this “spend our budget on effects” action picture.

The best one can say about The Mandela Effect is that it’s a fascinating, if heartless, failure, skimming the surface of the conspiracy, not doing justice to the tragedy. Even if it ensures that we never, ever watch “Looney Toons (Tunes)” the same way again.

Novel setting aside, this just isn’t original enough to manage much in the way of shock and awe.

After the first blush of how cute this conceit is . . . Better Man becomes a simple catalog of pop stardom clichés.

Veteran character actor McMurray has the best speeches and most interesting scenes, making his CEO a class warrior and a master of “the illusion” of “The American Dream.” The details are different, but the bottom line is so overly familiar as to make Americons feel, too often, like a movie we’ve seen before and a strident lecture we’re never going to pay attention to until the bottom drops out again.

They waste this cast and these characters on a story so conventional, so neatly wrapped up in the finale, that the real mystery is how Gregorini and co-writer Sarah Thorpe didn’t see that.

If you’re looking for a teen comedy that isn’t a grow-up-too-fast exposure to your tweens, Kissing Booth isn’t it. But the arc of the story packs a lot of lust and relationship lessons that anybody older than 15 can relate to, and learn from.

Good things come in small packages and life’s little pleasures are to be treasured, but Ant Man and The Wasp — together, equal-billed and boring — are too little of a good thing.

James always makes a more sturdy than inspiring leading man, but the Great and Oscar winning Whitaker usually has a little more to play than this. Only Dove, playing a mistrusting young woman escaping a limited life for a far riskier one, makes a lasting impression.

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

Manages a tear or two, and enough laughs to get by, even if from first scene to last the strain to stop just short of cloying shows.

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.

Cobweb is a horror genre piece as simple and to the point as its title.

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

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

The racing sequences here are next-level intimate, putting us in the car better than most any film that preceded this one. The crashes in that no-rollbar, pre-seatbelt era are horrific.

Among the cast, the Oscar winner Cotillard acquits herself the best, bleary-eyed and bitter.

The big gunfight is brief, the big Horizon massacre beautiful, gripping and horrific in ways most of the movie, save for its grand, aspen-lined mountain or desert vistas, never manages.

On a musical bio-pic scale, this isn’t “Rocketman” or “Bohemian Rhapsody,” not “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” “Sweet Dreams” or “Get on Up.” It’s unfortunately a lot closer to “Jimi: All is By My Side.” Uncanny in its impersonation, flat as a movie, forgettable as a biography.

Scribbler is just daring and interesting enough that you can see why a fairly accomplished cast — from Cassidy to Dushku, Gershon to Campbell — was drawn to it, even if the execution underwhelms.

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 conclusion has a rough logic to its consequences, but seems arrived at abruptly. Big emotions we expect never quite arrive after that first “machining.”

Arnett’s funny. No doubt about it. But he needs material to work with, and “Is This Thing On?” doesn’t deliver it.

It’s the sort of movie whose finale leaves you wondering, “Why do they always leave out what happens next?”

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.

The real value in Mope is stripping the sheen and the glamour off of porn, still shot, as it was in the pre-Internet “Boogie Nights,” in the unfashionable San Fernando Valley (Van Nuys and environs).

Penn doesn’t work much, and this idea of combining his two careers — as actor, producer and co-writer, and as humanitarian — may have its heart in the right place. But take away the preaching, and this is just Penn’s version of a late-career Mel Gibson movie. He should be better than this.

The shocks — drunken montages of murderous and carnal abandon, gooey, intertwined and ugly — are entirely the point. Whether they make sense, illuminate the human condition or “entertain” is almost immaterial.

The more correct title would have been “Retribution,” which could work for any number of Statham vehicles over the years. But Redemption is just different enough to make us remember “The Bank Job” or “Killer Elite” or that he’s about to give those fun-but-silly “Fast & Furious” movies a proper villain.

It’s an unwieldy, unsatisfying film that doesn’t live up to the high-minded allegory it aims to be.

Emmy’s peril, which she cannot fully articulate, should have more of the focus. Making it all about Dad’s credulous acceptance of “spirits” and ghosts, and his breakdown under the strain, just isn’t as interesting, no matter how much seething he does in the process.

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

The Rip remains perfectly watchable, if a tad slow, more than a little confused at times and utterly mired in a mess of its own making in that head-slapping finale.

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

It’s a grand looking production and a well-cast, well-acted and high-minded film. But Hytner and Bennett have conjured up a Big Show and an Important Statement, and so cluttered the narrative that they lose track of which statements they’re serious about making.

I found it a movie musical that loses its way when it loses its sense of play.

I found this more “interesting” as a problem-solving exercise than entertaining, more “watchable” than “good.”

The animation’s good, lovely but not dazzling.

Would this movie be enough to create a new generation of fans? No. That’s why it ended up on Paramount+, where we old farts can get nostalgic and remember funnier moments from them, their earlier movie and their heydays in MTV’s golden age, with or without the Dulcolax.

It's a solid, engrossing thriller, but a slack one.

There’s enough here to merit a look, to see “What kind of movie romance can you make in a pandemic?” and to feed 2020 nostalgia.

Signing on an impressive cast, writer-director Drew Hancock takes a big, roundhouse swing at “coupling” in a distracted, instant gratification craving, uncompromising and not-entirely-adult era, and at sending up a rom-com convention or two. But the best he manages is a slow roller to shortstop with this icy, rarely amusing and gory dark comedy.

The Water Man is a gorgeous looking tween fantasy/adventure in the “Bridge to Terabithia” tradition, well-cast and designed to tug at the heartstrings. But the feature directing debut of co-star David Oyelowo (“Selma”) is a Bridge to Nowhere — dramatically flat and emotionally lacking.

There’s ambition and a dollop of intellectual heft to the indie dramedy Daddy. Even if it misplaces characters, shortchanges its goals and fails to deliver much in the way of a satisfying conclusion, you can appreciate the attempt and the effort involved.

Bell has a beguiling, big-grin screen presence. And her ability to charm a cast into taking on her projects is admirable. Charming a script-doctor or two who could joke the films up would be a big help.

Precious, protracted and pleasant enough.

As dytopias go, this one isn’t a complete bust. Paradise serves up food for thought in a just-provocative-enough satire of the growing gap between the coddled and well-cared-for rich and everybody they’re screwing over.

The film is sweetest when the characters touch on death, the impermanence of life and the role memory plays in keeping dead loved ones alive.

The payoff isn’t nearly as interesting as the cryptic set-up and disquieting performances and scenes that precede it in The Wait.

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

It’s still a half-decent movie, closer to Neeson’s late-career “Taken” peak than his most recent films. But if he’s letting the audience see the writing on the wall, it might be time for him to stop and read it, too.

Spirit Untamed is almost exactly what anybody not nine would expect out of a feature film spun out of an animated TV show. Bland. Passable animation, but not “cutting edge,” not even on the blade. Simplistic story, maudlin “friends” and “teamwork” sentiment, dialogue that sounds generated by a “talk down to the kids” app.

When The Wall goes wrong, it doesn’t instantly crumble, though you can feel the foundation collapsing underneath the film’s feet. Taylor-Johnson, who must carry it, holds our interest. It’s just that we know, judging from that fatal flaw screenwriter Dwain Worrell built in as a plot contrivance, that it won’t end well, either.

The Enforcer is filmed-proof that the difference between a C-movie and a straight-up, watchable B-picture is Antonio Banderas. Ask first-time director Richard Hughes. He’ll tell you.

It seems well cast and well-acted, but fundmentally misguided, dry and heartless.

The third act has moments of tenderness and warmth that belie the featherweight film they’re tucked into. And any movie that lets Hamill show off his malleable voice-over skills, and play a human being, is to be treasured.

Asteroid City is like a stop-motion animated Anderson film, in which he uses real actors in stop-motion. How is indulging oneself in that reductive, self-defeating cleverness a good idea?

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

An odd duck of a thriller. Quiet, talkative, with the occasional explosion of violence, it has ghosts and characters philosophizing, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald or blurting insensitive non-sequiturs.

It’s loud, fast, in-your-face, broad and low.

It’s not a badly-crafted film, just a shallow gloss on these characters and a relationship that they don’t explain, don’t dissect and analyze, but simply live.

The Chronology of Water” can be more soberly appreciated on general release for Poots’ fearless, put-it-all-out-there performance than for Stewart’s early missteps and her exploitive mania for the explicit and the repellent, “truth” or fiction.

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.

Every minute that The Jesus isn’t in a bowling alley Turturro and his movie lose a lot of what made him stand out.

Whizbang editing aside, it’s a slow slog of a movie with a seriously obvious destination.

Run with the Hunted kind of rattles around like a racoon confined in a tiger cage. The milieu and characters are here, with “Lost Boys” references that don’t really hide the “Oliver Twist” structure. The “twists” in this “Oliver” are entirely predictable, including the finale.

More a movie that you appreciate and ponder than one you embrace and enjoy. Whatever its intellectual pretensions, I am looking forward to never seeing it again.

Survivor, predictable, short and shallow ticking clock thriller that it is, is more “Three Days of the Condor” than “Taken.” And thanks to its stars, it’s more engrossing and fun than it has any right to be.

“Mansfield” feels incomplete, reality TV that doesn’t quite the deliver the drama.

I like the idea, and any movie set in a weird subculture is automatically engrossing. More of this “board game universe,” including other obsessives, would have helped. The characters are amusing as “types,” but rather blandly played. And the finale is downright half-assed. But there’s promise here, and I think another crack at the concept could be a winner. Let’s hope nobody lures them to a remote cabin and bribes them out of their pitch.

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

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

None of it ever truly comes together in a way that makes “Almost Love” almost a rom-rom that works. “Almost” pretty much covers it.

It’s a kid-friendly thriller of the sci-fi apocalypse variety, forlorn but engaging enough to sit through. Barely. High stakes, thin on action and heavy on sentiment, it takes “Short Circuit” to doomsday and reaches for tears — here and there — as it does.

Virtually everything in this road comedy feels contrived, even the payoff to the “mysteries.” But Murton and Morris, making her screen debut, make the ride pleasant if not the least bit surprising.

Lacks surprises.

I think most of us inclined to go see it will be doing all its heavy lifting for it, as what’s here feels slight, incomplete and not nearly as funny, cute and deep as these folks seem to believe.

The lack of frights and jolts and general mesmerizing tone of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair make it “horror” only in terms of the mood. It feels more like a stab at social commentary and satire.

It’s an allegory that works but never quite scores a knock-out blow and a satiric thriller that manages a lot of still-angry name-calling but little sense that this will ever be enough.

It’s diverse by design, sunny and as I say the dolphin is as adorable as dolphins unfailingly are. If you’re looking for something beyond Disney+ or the hormones and conspicuous consumption of virtually every series and streaming movie made for this audience, it’s worth a watch.

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

Fitfully amusing or not, the whole demented enterprise of Rango comes into question when you're that tone-deaf about what's appropriate for children.

Passing almost passes muster by virtue of its two winning leads. If only Hall had given them fireworks to play and a world that feels more vibrant than a faded black and white photograph.

The voice of skepticism is sorely missed in Oliver Stone’s credulous bio-pic, Snowden.

The lives themselves are interesting, even if we only get a glimpse of them, even Cass’s. But truth be told this never really ties the Cass story to the immigrant story (he did the same sort of work in his day, we surmise, and might be prejudiced) and never amounts to much more than a selection of snapshots.

The film suffers from abrupt, under-motivated transformations and has the pall of death hanging over it since we know what’s coming.

It’s a self-consciously-filmed soft-spoken drama about family, family responsibilities and family secrets, and truthfully a rather drab affair where the stakes are low and the emotions kept in check for the most part.

A combat movie that’s as generic as they come.

It’s not an unpleasant watch, on the nose or not. Olsen has a sexy calm about her, Sudeikis, so easy to dislike by virtue of the roles he plays and the cruel, smartass glint always in his eyes, is softening a bit as his career reaches middle age.

Writer-directors Geoffrey Orthwein and Andrew Sullivan had a solid concept and a great setting, but not much else.

Derbez remains a likable presence, and that’s the highest praise you can throw at “The Valet” in the feeble hope that it sticks. But even “likeable” wears out its welcome when the story hits the wall at the 60 minute mark, and there aren’t enough jokes to fill a single sitcom episode.

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

A watchable failure, at best.

A bland tear-jerker that lacks the drama or commitment to wholly come off.

Individual scenes play better than the whole, just as some performances shine — McKenna-Bruce, Jarvis, Grant and even Ms. Johnson — and get the hang of dry Austen wit and its sometimes clumsy “try to keep up” updatings better than others.

A teen romance with most of the rough edges rubbed off, Paper Towns is as pleasantly bland as the city that is its setting — Orlando.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a burlesque of comic book movies, embracing their popularity, mocking the characters, situations, genre and its fans all the way to the Vancouver bank vault where Marvel Jesus insists Disney deposit the $billion this fun, bad movie is going to make.

The plot is convoluted, not the least bit inviting or deep and frankly puerile, with PG-13 violence and “darkness” draped over it.

Underwater’s a goof — a fun bad movie and a perfectly fine way to waste 90 minutes at the cinema.

If you’re patient enough to stick around for the wilder third act, Spin Me Round kind of turns things around. Not quite enough, but close.

It’s all bloody exhausting, and pretty much from the start.

Ganz has a wonderful twinkle about him that makes him perfect for Freud. If only he’d had a little something to chew on. If only the character felt like more than a Big Name afterthought.

Landing a lead like Caan underscores the fact that there was the germ of a twisty, tough thriller here. It’s too bad the script and uncertain direction let The Good Neighbor down.

Western Stars isn’t misguided. It’s just dull and self-serious. But if you’re Bruce Springsteen, nobody around you’s going to point that out.

Our nostalgic attachment to actresses who had their share of iconic roles decades ago is worth something. And “Chantilly Bridge” does a service in reminding us that Slater, Richardson, Shire, Cruise, Eikenberry, Sheedy and Williams are still around, still good at what they do and still employable.

Every scene — the pointed and the pointless — goes on too long. No character is wholly motivated or explained.

Your enjoyment of Horrible Bosses 2 is almost wholly dependent on your tolerance for clusters of funny actors, babbling, riffing — and in the case of Charlie Day, screeching — all at once.

If Led Zeppelin’s place in the culture outlives them, later films will plumb the depths of their “real” experience of fame, success, sex, drugs and rock’n roll. This is the coffee picture table book version.

Danner, of “Hello Herman” and “Bad Impulse,” cooked up a sadly unsurprising story with screenwriter Jason Chase Tyrell and all the pretty people and pretty settings and flashbacks can’t finesse “The Runner” into something it’s not — tense and compelling.

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

There are a TV season’s worth of soap opera betrayals, melodramatic traumas and blundering efforts to learn from and escape this media miasma.

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.

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.

The fights are furious and bloody. Don’t get too attached to anybody. Or any body part.

A moody, intimate character study filmed and performed in shades of grey.

The last reaction I expected the new screen adaptation of The Boys in the Band to provoke was indifference. But Tony winner or not, 50th anniversary film remake be damned, there isn’t a whole lot that this stagebound opening of a time capsule brings to 2020.

The three “stories” here don’t really connect. The music is good, but the stories are so different, with each falling on different spots on the “Is there a point to all this?” spectrum that ,the film doesn’t measure up to the tunes.

This dark comedy has a lot of promise for about half its length. Then, unfortunately, it settles into the mundane genre picture that it seems doomed to be.

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.

Yes, Reece has been doing this for years and his films have taken on a nice polish. And I dare say this one would “play” in the right group setting, with proper alcoholic lubrication. But from its nonsensical title to the inconsequential plot behind that title, Climate for the Hunter doesn’t have enough to offer to make it worth recommending, save for members of the vampire camp cognoscenti. And even they might prefer seeing it tipsy.

Whatever drama and arc there is to his story is mostly suggested (depression, ballooning in weight for a time), is stuff that happened after he got his first feature made years BEFORE he started making this movie. The clips and boilerplate, unemotional on-camera narration of Clapboard Jungle seems less interesting than what he’d already been through.

Bacon plays a little and sings a little, Sedgwick handles jokes and pathos and in the scenes that count and turns “professional” in a heartbeat. And each gets across a shared empathy and humanity that bridges any gap in class and life experience.

The basic ingredients of something gripping, tense and heartfelt, and in an unusual setting and culture, are here. Our director/cook spoiled the stew, with a lot of help from her miscast-cast main ingredient.

The moral of the story, “the power of human friendship,” must have taken 33 seconds to come up with. But some of the sight gags — Long disguising himself as human, the two of them escaping the bad guys by donning a dragon parade costume — are a stitch.

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

As righteous as it is, Crown Heights fritters away goodwill normally built by intimate, revealing performances, sacrificing clarity for under-explained bulk examples of injustice, and exhausting its sense of outrage in the process.

The dialogue is generally bland, though the insults have a seriously racist sting.

If it’s only marginally better than much of the holiday-oriented fare of Netflix or Hallmark, that just means it fits right in.

You can’t help notice the elephant in the room that McHugh ignores. Despite the inclusion of 63 year-old Ice-T and acts with African American performers on the festival bills, the audience they’re playing to (as shown here at least) is entirely white, almost entirely over 30, mostly 50ish.

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.

The kids do what kids do in such syrupy summer camp (PG) romances. There’s a little melodrama, tears, a crisis of faith. At least the adults take a shot at bringing the funny.

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

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

As Danny Boyle movies go, I’d still rather see him get his shot at James Bond. As Beatles tributes go, I have to say I prefer Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe,” which re-set the songbook in thrilling and inventing ways. Yesterday just makes me long for that unjustly maligned flop.

Everything here is something we’ve seen before — chases, “light saber” fights, the big Bond-sized set-piece finale. It gets fairly tedious fairly early on.

There’s nothing surprising about this late ’60s tale, including its connection to the modern ghost stories told in “The Amityville Horror” and “The Conjuring.” But what it lacks in originality it makes up with in hair-raising execution. You will scream like a teenage girl.

It’s rarely scary. But the effects suggest a bigger budget than “SiRENS” might have warranted. And a couple of those are downright impressive and add to the feeling that this indie Satanic slasher pic is punching above its weight class.

The Expendables feels, well -- disposable, a movie whose nostalgia isn't enough to make this 50. caliber trip down Memory Lane worth the fake napalm.

Director and co-writer Aly Muritiba’s melodrama is slow — 29 minute-long PROLOGUE slow — formulaic, dated and obvious considering “The Crying Game” opened 30 years ago north of the equator. But tender performances might reward those patient enough to sit through its scenic, formulaic and dramatically-limited longueurs.

But as useful as it is to chew on ideas that don't hew to climate change dogma, Cool It leaves big questions about Lomborg unanswered.

The performances are engrossing — especially Harrisson as the short-tempered African Muslim. But veteran director Alexandre Arcady (“Last Summer in Tangiers,” “Hold Up”) seems more concerned with the message and moral lesson here than with suspense.

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

It’s static, an action picture that becomes a still-life right before our eyes.

She’s not unattractive, except when the movie goes out of its way to make her so. But Bell’s screen presence isn’t warm or engaging and the script’s jokes aren’t good enough to transform that.

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.

Blame it on the weak chemistry of the stars, blame it on the way the script refuses to let them develop chemistry and the perfunctory way the story is dispensed with, but the sparks aren’t there.

A brooding film that feels strangely out of its era, perhaps on purpose.

The novelty of having a real homeless junkie play a version of herself drives Heaven Knows What, a gritty hand-held character portrait of heroin addict life in New York today.

Sex Tape is not quite the train wreck its TV ads make it out to be.

It’s all just (almost) good, clean and forgettable “fun,” for those young enough to be delighted by it.

In a culture at war over “truth” and “facts” versus “sincere” beliefs, Love & Saucers aligns itself firmly with the cranks without even the courtesy of a wink to suggest it’s not in on the joke.

Robert Rodriguez is like that friend who loves to tell jokes, but always goes on and on, well past the punch line. Remember how he beat the living daylights out of his “Spy Kids” franchise? That’s what he’s working toward with Machete.

Byrne and Kroll have a nice estranged sibling chemistry, not up to “The Skeleton Twins,” but in that ballpark.

Some of it plays, some of it doesn’t. Brown isn’t bad, although her character’s coming into her own is so preachy and self-empowering that it’s eye-rolling time.

Rendered toothless, with barely a hint of menace or humor, much less jokes or sight gags, “Ivan” plays as downbeat and dispirited.

Director Espinoza does a fine job with the action beats and the epic settings. But every time this brief but not brisk genre thriller breaks into a new “Chapter,” aka “Chapter III: The Evil Guest,” he crosses from homage into parody and from master genre filmmaker into somebody whose “Achilles heel” is his screenwriting.

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.

It’s rather less than the sum of its parts, but the action beats director Tommy Wirkola & Co. serve up ensure Rapace and What Happened to Monday keep punching above their weight.

A fairly amusing rough draft for a high concept high school romantic comedy.

This meandering Pietro Marcello (“Lost and Beautiful”) film seems to exist out of time, a fictional “struggling artist” biography as rife with cliches as it is obtuse in story and message.

One can’t help but think this Pope deserves more than a simple, stale travelogue.

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.

Like many a genre picture before it, there’s a sci-fi gimmick and little else to prop it up beyond repeating variations on “How do we escape this suburban hell?” ad infinitum.

I laughed at some of the lunacy, found myself checking my watch by the third act’s inevitable overkill. But if you can’t see the fun in Helen Mirren taking the wheel of a purple Nobler supercar and one-handing it — backwards — through the darkened streets of Olde London Towne, this isn’t for you.

The "Made of Honor" screenwriters don't deliver enough jokes or feisty exchanges between the ill-matched traveling companions.

Director J.D. Dillard’s film, “inspired by” the “true story” of Jesse L. Brown, a color-barrier-breaking pilot for the U.S. Navy, may be a straight up B-movie, from its lesser known cast to story beats that flirt with war movie tropes and over-the-top hokum. But it sure looks like an A-picture.

Bad Teacher is a pulled punch, a pot-smoking/kid cussing/teacher copulating farce that is less than the sum of its parts.

Antonio Banderas pretty much steals The Expendables 3. But at this stage in that winded franchise, that amounts to petty theft.

It’s disappointing that Spurlock didn’t have the access, the footage or the spine to depict any of the cynicism behind such creations.

Here’s the sort of scruffy action comedy that suits the post-box office-draw careers of one-time hipster John Cusack and fading action star Thomas Jane. It covers the costs of a fun few weeks of working vacation in Australia and provides a few on-screen laughs along the way.

So as much as every generation deserves it’s own Romeo & Juliet, this latest one does nothing to make anyone older than Hailee Steinfeld forget the heat of Baz Lurhmann’s far sexier, noisier and passionate modern dress version of 1996, where Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio completely convinced us that they knew how to “play Satan’s game.” And how.

The film has lots of promising problems for us to dive into with our heroes, mechanical and philosophical puzzles to sort out. But from the opening moments, Jon Spaihts’ screenplay drifts off course, choosing to explain things that would be more dramatic as mysteries and secrets.

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.

As colorful as it and its people are, Cooper lets the brawling and the bigger-than-big performances get the better of him, and his story. Out of the Furnace feels undercooked, as a result.

I did laugh, here and there.

It’s all pitched in the same in-your-face/energy-drink hyped pace and volume, which all but beats the “funny” out of a lot of the attempted humor.

While the setting is striking, a Paris “28 Days Later/Rammbock/I Am Legend” dark and silent after the end of civilization, genre fans may find this passive narrative slow and largely devoid of action, despite the odd burst of menace. Because it is. Slow.

It’s a dopey but pulse-pounding B-movie.

Stolevski’s over-reliance on close-ups gives us detailed maps of each man’s dermatology, but tends to wash away the extra impact we’d feel about bigger moments of connection.