Roger Moore

Howard’s magnetic performance, delivered in a blizzard of mood-swing close-ups, hints at any number of possibilities.

Loser has flashes of empathy and a high mindedness about literature and philosophy and book learning in general. It’s just that it’s light on “heart,” and has a touch of what the Bard labeled “lackwit” in its banter and the ways its few funny lines are played.

There are completists who have to see every movie in a “universe.” The phrase “The studio saw you coming” applies to them.

I enjoyed watching Garner get back to her “Alias” chops, cuts, slices, shots and head-butts. The editing makes you think she could do this stuff, and her reactions to pain — emotional and ammunitional, is genuine. But it’s a silly slaughterhouse of a movie.

A sad, slight faith-based drama about loss, grieving, fresh starts and loyalty.

Five Fingers for Marseilles is a modern day Western, a tale of revolutionary South Africa and its aftermath, a world of blood, revenge, “stepping in” to right a great wrong, and fighting back. It’s a Sotho “Shane,” brutally beautiful and iconic, fraught with symbolism, harrowing in its violence and its consequences.

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.

The drunk provides the best one-line review for this mess, one a pretty talented cast should have taken to heart before taking Netflix’s money. “Not all ideas are good ones.”

It’s an exceptionally good looking movie. But the performances have that hand-tied-behind-the-back quality that tales that operate by supernatural “rules” often exist under. Grace doesn’t get worked up, nor does anyone else, though Clarkson takes another run at “nasty” (check her out in “Sharp Objects”) and Mulvey is monstrous in that psychopathic way.

The situations, no real adults included, amuse just enough to make this “Summer” worth remembering.

Rambin, a rawboned character actress with “Hunger Games” and “True Detective” credits, is faintly interesting as this character, but she can’t spin gold out of paw-paw blossoms.

It sounds like an R-rated comedy, but plays like a Disney Channel one littered with profanity, pot and bloodless life lessons about getting older, being a parent and losing yourself. Rarely has an 82 minute comedy felt more like a complete waste of one’s time.

A coming-of-age melodrama seemingly displaced in time.

When you slow everything to sleepwalk pacing, you deflate the frights and strip away the urgency that we and the characters should feel, the sense that something terrible is coming, that time is running out.

With Kusama, the older she gets, the more interesting her “story” becomes. But what makes that story connect is the art itself — dazzling, overwhelming, mesmerizing and playful. All the obsession and depression, brazenness and brass in the world wouldn’t matter if she hadn’t had the goods, all along.

Writer-director Mateo Sanz exhausts us with all these academics, shortchanging the development of on-screen relationships thanks to endless voice-over (and on-camera) analysis.

Dapolito gets at what Radner represented to those who followed her, and what Radner recognized in herself, that play-acting comedy let her “be prettier than I was, be people I could never be…Comedy allowed me to be in control of my situation.”

The end is too much like a “You may have already won” come-on, a poker game where the other player is using a 56 card deck, when you’re still counting on 52...A cheat, in other words.

The Little Stranger is a quiet, stately Gothic ghost story, an exquisitely observed British period piece built upon understated, reserved and stoic performances by Domhnall Gleeson and the formidable Ruth Wilson.

A rowdy, random and not-nearly-raunchy-enough misfire in that regard, a buddy picture with stolen money from work, stolen concert tickets, stolen drugs and one guy’s dream of flying off to Brazil and getting into the healthy rainforest nuts export business.

I hated this clunker long before the third act “twists” that are supposed to make it better, make it make sense and give us hope that this is a future franchise.

It’s the execution that lets this dog down. Not enough funny lines and even the cheap, dirty laughs are in short supply.

You don’t expect a movie about The Holocaust to be flippant, glib almost.

When a movie has long-established its rhythm and basically admitted it has none and then bursts to life — even briefly — it’s worth noting.

It’s a movie decorated with glittering performances, and not just by its leading lady and leading man.

Even the climax has a savage predictability to it — everyone but the characters on screen can see it coming. Netflixable? Not so much.

There’s virtually nothing to distinguish Reprisal from a thousand other cop-vs-robber B pictures, except for the violence.

Rockwell, Schwartz, Fox, Ferdinando and Callow make it engaging in between its darkly-funny bursts of slow-motion violence — be their characters expertly menacing, or just mean and inept.

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.

Here’s a clever, sideways take on the grimmest of human horrors, a clever parable that delivers the same heavy message, but with mordant wit and originality.

It’s the movie-making, the acting, that let it down. One lump in the throat moment with all these trials, all this tragedy and the path to uplift the story takes is hardly enough, considering the subjects engaged here.

It has no laughs, no thrills and little that would distract, much less entertain a child.

The grey gathering gloom that hangs over Super Dark Times seeps into your bones.

Tramps tends towards cutesy, with its “Bonnie & Clyde” bluegrass banjo chase music and Ellie’s biting “Who’re you to judge ME?” baiting, every time moon-eyed Danny steps into it, over-sharing sexual experiences, implying she has a lot more.

The best performance? Well, Dratch is a natch when it comes to disguising herself in drag. But Haylock, wearing Urkel glasses in his science teacher guise and the zaniest eye makeup this side of Bozo as Bianca, is as divine as Divine, a Rupaul for our times and a character deserving of a funnier film than this comedy set in a “Godforsaken country (not really, unless Russia has old Super 8 Motels for locations) that smells like burnt cat!”

A lifetime of watching this genre has given me an appreciation for the rare films that work and a patience for even the crappy ones, like I Am Vengeance. But as much as I love me some fisticuffs and Limey trash talk — “Where do you and the other traitorous wankers hang out?” — there’s just nothing to this one.

Is Adventures in Public School appropriate for young kids, the ones with Netflix as their baby sitter? Certainly not. This is some seriously adult, flirt-with-pervy “TV-14” doesn’t really cover it stuff.

Message and metaphor are all and The Bookshop, with its terrific cast and lovely setting, barely overcomes that burden.

Whatever dread we feared leading up to it, the climax deflates in a heartbeat despite Reeser’s bust-a-bottle-over-my-head efforts.

Susan Johnson ensures this adaptation of the Jenny Han novel maintains a wistful, winsome view of first love, first scene to last.

The dialogue, like the situations and the strident score, can seem played out. Rare is the line that takes one by surprise.

It’s a big ol’swing and a miss of a movie, a thriller whose frantic, crazy-quilt editing can’t hide how static and motionless it often feels, whose laptop-loads of “quotable” words don’t cover the inanity of every sentence.

Time will tell if this latest pop idol has staying power — the falsetto songs mostly run together in the ears of a non-fan — but even Sheeran doubters should appreciate the work ethic, musicianship and wit of this chart-topping ginger tyro.

It’s a brisk blur of a documentary that ventures from “How could a smarter machine not be a better machine?” to “the Faustian bargain” we’ve made with technology that will render 7,000,000 data entry jobs and 4,000,000 driving/transporting jobs (very soon) to medicine, law, journalism and other careers obsolete.

Alpha has to stand as one of the pleasant surprises of the cinematic summer, a gritty yet sentimental fantasy about that first Ice Age boy to fall for a dog.

A jarring, jolting entry in the “Hand that Rocks the Cradle” genre, a too-obvious thriller that still lands a sucker punch or three.

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

The movie feels lived in, greasy and real. [Bujalski] just needed more funny lines and help figuring out the most promising thread among the many he introduces to pursue.

A gloomy but dull vampire tale set against the backdrop of 12 step programs.

Moselle’s second film to focus on a fringe-dwelling “pack” but first to be a narrative, fictional feature, has an intimacy that the novelty of a free-range family of raised-by-themselves boys did not.

John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection is quite simply the greatest tennis film ever made and one of the finest documentaries to honor any sport.

The Package is funnier than any one joke/”dick” joke comedy has any right to be.

James is a winsome presence, with able support from Huisman, Powell, Goode, Courtenay, Parkinson and Wilton. But the story veers into pure melodrama.

Crazy Rich Asians puts its emphasis on “Crazy Rich,” and “Asians,” when a little more “Crazy” would get us through its glitzy two hours with less tedium and more style.

Give White credit for the picture’s fairly eerie tone and look — darkened streets, foggy forests of spindly pines, shadows and more shadows. It’s just not worth more than the occasional hair-raising instant.

The movie dawdles along, boring us as it does, in between action sequences. There’s a good chase or two, a generic escape here and there, but almost no cool lines and no catch-phrases.

Where the film is fascinating is the ways it examines the wandering lives of working musicians who stay in touch with the tunes even as life goes on.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny. But an engaging cast — human and canine — give it, and us, almost enough warm-and-fuzzies to get by.

Thurman, oily accent dripping with menace, is no Disney villain here. She’s real world dangerous, vulpine, callous, keeping supernatural secret threats from her pupils.

Throughout Death of a Nation, which has the usual attacks on Clintons and George Soros and the third act “patriotic performances by D’Souza approved singers, even an African American choir, the man finds himself coddling Nazis.

I can’t say this is one of the best, too grim and gory. But it does get a down and dirty job done.

We know where it’s going before it gets there, but a game cast act as if they don’t. But they know there’s no heavy lifting here, and they make something that should be easy feel and especially sound easy. Amazing how few rom-coms manage even that.

Icelandic filmmaker Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir uses images, melancholy reveries and the voice-over narration of her nine year old protagonist to turn Guðbergur Bergsson’s novel into an austere, chilly and cryptic film.

Spiro has still gotten a striking, gritty and touching debut feature out of this cast, a movie that may lack much in the way of surprises but makes up for it with toughness, empathy and realism.

This is “The Florida Project” set in Pennsylvania, a memoir both brilliantly specific and depressingly universal.

Basically a Royal Caribbean ad masquerading as a romantic comedy.

Van Sant, a legendarily sensitive filmmaker, never fails to see the difficulties in Callahan’s journey, the spirit it takes to overcome them or the fact that they were all difficulties of the man’s own creation. That lifts this “uplifting” story above the twelve steps that are its natural starting point and into the realm of something more challenging than the genre conventions it otherwise adheres to.

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.

The whole affair feels like a desperate, big-budget response to last year’s far superior and non-Disney “Goodbye, Christopher Robin.”

Stay through the charming closing credits — the only place “charm” figures into this — to see who Hayes is.

It’s a tediously derivative tale.

The triumph of “Miseducation” is how lightly it treads down a well-worn path, how quaint and out of date it makes the attitudes of early ’90s authority seem to modern eyes.

By equal turns hilarious and right on the edge of horrific.

BuyBust is brimming with life, furiously protected and furiously taken, a bracing introduction of Matti and Filipino cinema to the world.

Only in Canada would an artist this fascinating, home-grown and maniacally uneven continue to draw the subsidies, attention and loyalty from his fellow Canadians now big Hollywood stars to get his increasingly unhinged thrillers made.

Like taking a peek into the many influences Rowling synthesized into her Potter world.

Shaff has made a movie that skims the surface, like a “How Magazines are Made” video for kids that no kid will want to sit through and will keep few adults awake.

BlackKklansman is the funniest Spike Lee movie in decades, a film of such wit, tension, passion and relevance that it is his most important work since “Malcolm X.”

Here, he’s (Peña) bland, under-emoting in the face of terror and fronting a middling actioner that isn’t as thought-provoking as its creators expected, as surprising as they think it’s “twist” is and isn’t smart enough to get out of its own way.

The animation’s so flat, static and dull it relies on brighter-than-bright sparkly colors to make it pop. Like “Power Puff Girls” or “My Little Pony.” The jokes are infantile-obvious and pounded home with a sledgehammer, as if the writers figured they had to get through something especially thick.

The comic instincts are there, the novelty of the premise is a winner, but you can’t help thinking that it’s a promise that’s only half-kept.

There are scenes that will make your jaw drop, and moments that make your heart stop.

A scruffy, raunchy and random farce.

Calpasoro expertly ratchets up the suspense in The Warning (El Aviso), showing two timelines whose protagonists grow more frantic by the minute.

A melodramatic and ham-fisted mashup of beachside-summer-I-came-of-age romance and birth-of-a-weed-dealer drama.

Maybe it’s not as revealing as its teasing title suggests, but Tab Hunter Confidential makes a splendid history lesson and light, fun portrait of what you can only call a blessed life, one lived with a big, open secret that only old age convinced him he should let out.

There have been better documentaries this year, but none of them are the roller-coaster ride that Three Identical Strangers turns out to be.

Here’s a “feel good” film that puts us through our share of feeling bad before it delivers its triumph.

Mission: Impossible — Fallout, is everything a summer action pic should be — a delirious procession of stunning stunts, epic brawls, state-of-the-art car chases and ticking clock countdowns.

It’s not the career-making genre thriller that the fictionalized “At Close Range” was for director James Foley. Patrick’s no Christopher Walken, after all. But his riveting turn, and some terrific support from the under-used Davison and misused Graham make Last Rampage worth checking out.

As our understanding of sexuality and its “fluid” nature among much of the population changes, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood serves a larger purpose. By telling these tales now, he’s blunting the shock of the pace of changing mores and acceptance of the different.

The just-turned-77 indie icon may comically gripe, walking through a horror convention in the film’s opening, that he’s “unrecognized, unrewarded for my lifetime achievement.” But the fans know. And after “King Cohen,” you will too.

There’s no judgement here, so any laughs you have are of your own devising. They’re a funny lot, the devout and the doubters. Even the late USC historian Kevin Starr takes the subject seriously, parking it within ancient belief systems and modern California loopiness.

A throw-away movie, and an utter waste of time, another make-work project for Sandler’s less and less funny stable of pals.

Charisma and old-fashioned talent, what we glibly file under the label “chemistry” when actors click with every single co-star they share a movie with, carry him through in The Equalizer 2, a dawdling thriller that sacrifices thrills, surprises and at times coherence for the sake of character.

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

As lovely and striking as this place is, worth web searching to see about vacationing there, the drama it provides is entirely scenic — fog and snow and rain, seasons changing. And that’s not going to be to every taste any more than the tedious “I’m cold, there’s some pain” on-camera confessions.

Like good satire, Us and Them burns, bites and wounds as it lands its punches. Like stumbling satire, the tone feels off as writer-director Martin lets things go too far even as Danny’s mates start to absorb his message.

It’s a whirlwind tour of a life lived on the cusp of his corner of the subculture, brisk and information over-loading and entirely self-serving.

The many songs are mostly forgettable deep tracks from the Abba repertoire, as the first film burned through most of the hits.

That rare made-for-Netflix comedy clever enough, desperate enough, that it could have found an audience on the big screen.

It is stately, quiet and elegiac, all respect-your-elders politesse for “Pleasantly dull.”

Solomon’s book Far From the Tree becomes Rachel Dretzin’s upbeat documentary of the same name, a film that celebrates “difference” even as it accepts the heartbreak and agonizing effort it takes for people and society to change attitudes towards those we have historically treated as “abnormal…diseased…retarded” and “broken.”

The Feels is a slapdash lesbian entry in the field, a laugh-free roundup of seven friends for a bachelorette weekend in or around Healdsburg, in California’s Sonoma Valley wine country.

A sturdy melodrama, more enjoyable for its performances than from its aged, time-tested and formulaic plot.

Thanks to its most engaging, sympathetic stars, even the over-familiar path it takes lets us find the warmth in the predictable first steps its characters take toward a richer life.

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.

It’s not a reinvention of the genre, but it is a fairly engrossing variation on a theme. And that’s in large part due to the violence — sexual and otherwise — it recreates.

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.

The picture has the rage and energy of early Spike Lee films, and the same “How do I END this?” third act failings. I wanted to love it, but it stalls long before it takes a turn towards something so bizarre it’ll be taught in film schools for decades, “How NOT to give your sci-fi satire a climax.”

Whatever ideas Mohawk had behind it, whatever the filmmaker saw in the cast, especially Ms. Horn (think Grace Slick circa “White Rabbit”) not much of a movie came out of the effort.

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.

A British eOne/Netflix production, packs a bunch of boy-bonding lads off into the wilds of Sweden. No “found footage,” but it’s “The Borgholm Witch Project” in the Swedish “Cabin in the Woods,” “Wicker Man,” the works.

Reichardt’s serene, slow style means that even the big incidents in these stories pack no punch.

Siberia slogs along like the failed pilot for a poorly-thought out cable series, one with Eastern European development incentives but without enough drama, incident, intrigue or plot to justify its running time.

As comedies go, it’s not a kill shot. But it makes a miss almost as entertaining.

If nothing else, the timely Shock and Awe is a blunt reminder of how important a skeptical press is in countering a popular government — or even an unpopular one — that is hellbent on lying, misleading, on doing something for nefarious reasons, and has all of cable news, talk radio and a truth-averse internet backing it up.

It’s just the jokes that aren’t funny — not even to the supposedly undemanding (very young) audience these films are tailored to.

Houston was a real mess, to be sure — probably abused as a child, certainly abused as a wife, ill-used by her crooked Dad, not saved by friends, family or the industries that made fortunes off her. But she was a “singular talent, a huge figure in the culture.” “Whitney” is a touching naked look at how that American Tragedy played out.

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.

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.

The most politically potent sci-fi/horror film series since the early years of George A. Romero gets a bloody, visceral and yes, emotional prequel with The First Purge, the movie that tells how we got from “here” to “there.”

If there’s an overbearing flaw to Custody, it is its lack of surprises.

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.

Trace works because even if this film avoids the classic “disturbed vet” story cliches, that this situation is untenable, dangerous and limiting. The marvel of Leave No Trace is that we continue watching, utterly absorbed, to see if Tom will figure that out as well.

The production design — digital backdrops augmenting vast living rooms and a library, even — is impressive. It’s rare that production design ever rescues a movie from a script that’s gone down the rabbit hole of ridiculous that Tau does.

I laughed more than once, and grinned at a couple of adorable surprise twists. Definitely Netflixable.

A mediocre, gimmicky 2015 romantic comedy that featured a star-studded supporting cast, some cute characters, witty banter and adorable leads.

When the thriller’s third act collapses in on itself , breaking its own unsentimental rules and reminding us that this is the studio that reboots “Spider-Man” every three years, whether we ask for it or not, “like” becomes a stretch.

Slick but cheesy, dubbed, filmed and set in Australia but really for the enormous Chinese film market. And Chan fans will find it memorable for one sequence which shows the 64 year-old can still make a fight funny.

The performances are perfectly serviceable, but building this thing around a passive, pathological liar, a literal “love the one you’re with” butterfly, might be the most quaint thing about it. It’s more maddening than “motivated,” more eye-rolling than funny.

The central romance earns short shrift, with all these characters to service and all those story lines to get in. It doesn’t help that Williams’ Lucille doesn’t give herself over to the passion and never quite sells us this “relationship.” Schoenaerts broods over just what he might be putting on the line, but Williams is so cool that we don’t buy into the risks taken.

The laughs in this insomnia cure come in the first act, almost all of them at the funeral. Once the machinations of a tedious, trite and formulaic script take hold, the novelty of hearing lionized actresses curse (demurely) wears off, so do the charms of Wild Oats.

If it wasn’t for Webber, given the funniest part to play (over the top pastor) and playing it to the hilt, the dead spots and blase leading man would dull this to the point of distraction.

It’s a bad movie, but it has hints of the simplest failing of a lot of movies made by folks who come from long-form TV. It’s episodic to a fault, with no episodes fleshed out and developed, characters played by actors at least as interesting as Chris Mulkey (as underboss Frank DeCicco) and not the generic goombahs rounded up here.

Goldie Hawn narrates the damned thing, incessantly. Maybe she’s here to speed things along, “Gold-spain” the simpler-than-simplistic script to the target audience and add gravitas. “SPF” is 75 minute movie that grinds its gears, scene after scene after scene.

First Match is a gritty streetwise high school wrestling tale and coming of age/finding your “thing” drama. Emmanuelle makes a fearsome first film impression as Mo, a kid worth giving up on, which is why almost everyone has.

It’s jarring and stereotype-smashing, for starters, and just plain disturbing on top of that.

Boseman carries himself with confidence in every role, but the rat hole this picture twists into must have left even him shaken.

Chatty, self-absorbed, streetwise and sex obsessed, even if he wasn’t drawing his quintessential “New York types,” we’d call Jules Feiffer’s characters “cartoons.”

As one publisher says enthusiastically of Hogancamp’s work, “There’s no irony in it.” That’s true of the movie, which sorely lacks context and authority in trumpeting these photos of bloodied GI Joes as more than what they were intended, as therapy for a wounded man and his obsessed vision of a world where the wrongs that happened to him can be made right.

It’s too long, meanders hither and yon in getting to the ending we’re looking for.

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.

It’ll be on PBS at some point, but don’t wait. Seeing it in a cinema has a hint of religious experience about it.

The cast is accomplished and confident, as you’d expect as these teens range in age from mid-20s to 30 (Ms. Sanz).

Devine, like Adam Sandler, has hitched his cinematic wagon to Netflix, and they have done likewise. But as ready as the Jack Black comparison (musical, plump, tries too hard) might be, it’s only mean because it’s accurate.

I Am Another You, now streaming on Amazon, is never judgmental, although Dylan gets a tiny taste of that from one (among many) religious stranger.

The movie is imminently watchable, and the surface sheen is fine, but the real Berg remains more mystery than man with a mission.

Damsel could have joined the ranks of, if not great Western comedies (“Destry Rides Again,” “Support Your Local Sheriff”), at least pretty good ones (“Cat Ballou,””Support Your Local Gunfighter”). As it is, we can guffaw at the characterizations and situations for a good hour before that horse is plum played out.

Katie Silberman’s script has a flip, zingy quality at its best. But like any rom-com that works, it takes at least one time-out to reach for the heart.

Vreeland’s film, wallowing in the Beaton vision of beauty via his images, his art and his screen work, does a marvelous service in reclaiming this dandy’s dandy/designer’s designer and iconic photographer from obscurity.

I Am Not an Easy Man works, an over-reaching satire that gets at the horrors women face in a world where they don’t have equality or the entitled initiative to succeed and a film that suggests God help us if the shoe is ever on the other foot.

The movie before it is rather undone by the third act that ends it.

It was never going to be as riotous as the trailers, but it's still funny, and in the case of Isla Fisher -- damned funny.

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

A tuneful, affable rockumentary.

The plot, which takes a few too many predictable turns, isn’t as interesting as the characters and the rich milieu Lediga puts them.

It makes for a chilling portrait of fanaticism at work, even if it is more historical than anything worthy of “let’s feel that fear again” topicality. Even if we suspect its designed to gin up more support for our Islamic ally in the Middle East.

Incredibles 2 is a superhero action comedy that’s about something, and when’s the last time the moneychangers at Marvel could make that claim?

It’s worthwhile enough to justify the film being made, but just barely.

What all involved, including cinematographer-turned-director Pasha Patriki, settle for is easier, dumber and far less interesting, a movie that lives down to its vague, murky title with endless shootouts through sets that don’t remotely resemble what this prison is supposed to be.

This is closer to an “After School Special,” and yes — that’s an even older reference than “Sixteen Candles” — an R-rated “After School Special.”

Haley’s movies have an old-fashioned comfort food quality, and this sits happily on the menu with his earlier works.

Upgrade manages to entice and provoke, impress and terrify, if you let it.

Writer-director Drew Pearce has tarted up a dullish action comedy that finds laughs hard to come by and its moral underpinnings shaky.

A make-work project for generations of Hollywood women and female fashion celebrities, it is pristine in its visuals — mainly closeups of the Oscar winners and other great beauties of its cast precise in its caper — and utterly bloodless in execution.

Great filmmakers remember that cinema is a visual medium, that you never say something with dialogue when you can show it with an image. That’s how Clio Barnard tells the story of Dark River, a quiet, tense and beautiful tale of brothers and sisters and abuse set in Yorkshire sheep country.

Deborah Haywood’s Pin Cushion is an easy film to laud, a hard one to warm up to.

The performances range from unconvincing to not-quite-compelling, with Wilson the sole standout.

Adding more sources to the story don’t illuminate it, they extend it to no avail, turning a 90 minute movie into two hours that still don’t make the informed guessing more informed, or more entertaining.

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.

Zoo is a sweet and occasionally sad tale, told with sensitivity and performed with great charm by all concerned.

Seagull, as radiantly self-absorbed as Bening can be, as self-serious as Howle and Stoll come off, as winsome as Ronan remains and as funny and cranky as Moss’s mastery of Masha might be, never quite adds up to an adaptation that’s anything more than “Well, we saw them do Chekhov.”

It’s slow-moving and generally unpleasant, unless you want to see the bare bones of fight choreography exposed on screen, “one two three DUCK, one two KICK,” something much more commonplace in the action cinema’s past.

Oscar winner Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) carves in stone the case for Rogers’ as an authentic American TV saint.

There are so few laughs in this thing that it’d have been a shame had somebody gotten hurt making us laugh at their pain.

Hereditary isn’t original enough to merit “great film” praise. But by bending and extending the tropes of the genre and hiring top drawer talent to buy in, Aster makes us buy in, too, and gives us a pretty disturbing picture to chew on and mull over on the way home.

It’s great seeing Woodley out of YA sci-fi and into a role that makes use of her approachable reality.

Beast is hard to watch at times, from its graphic crime-scene photos to the pitiless way a rabbit is dispatched. But as cryptic as it aims to be, it’s not hard to follow.

A mud and blood quest fantasy of the “Conan” school, and calling it a B-movie insults a rich tradition of cheap but entertaining Bs.

It’s a credit to the makers of the soccer documentary Nossa Chape that they’d still have a decent film, even without the tragedy that underscores the one they made.

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.

Wells has an approachable pluck about her, but Radnor is such a bland big screen presence that they set off no sparks and never make us believe them as a couple, or root for them.

Maybe it’s just the gruesome, excruciating detail of the dismemberments, with an illogically sick “love story” glibly grafted on it, but this thing seems to go on forever. Again, not my genre. I thought it was dead, and in the #MeToo era, it ought to be.

Maineland is informative in the most basic ways. But the big hole in Wang’s film is in failing to capture the disconnect, the true culture shock of children of neon bedecked skyscrapers, mansions and coddling parents packed off to the backwoods of Maine. And the second biggest hole is missing the frison that must have been experienced by both sides in this exchange.

Ibiza is just…boring.

American Animals is a tense, taut sober and occasionally silly thriller that reminds us that the Caribbean Island at the end of the Hollywood heist is always a mirage.

Visuals tell the “stories,” but not in any sort of brisk, engaging way. It’s a ponderous, dated and obscure male wish-fulfillment fantasy — women as objects in the sexual service of men, the ultimate “girl’s locker room” scene, assorted lesbian moments designed to titillate.

The sentiments and the story arc are perfectly supportable, the execution? Slow, slack, humorless and lifeless. The Outcasts stops dead in its tracks at the midway point and never recovers.

The acting is soap operatic, the action is sluggish and static and even the sound effects rob the shoot-outs — murders, actually, as most of the protagonists are hired killers of the Brazil of the 1910s to 1940s — sound like popguns.

The dialogue and performances are far more interesting than the lazy, cliche-ridden story Feste cooked up.

Mary Shelley is in essence “Becoming Frankenstein,” the story of how a British teen had the education, talent, life experience and literary ambitions thanks to the salon she was a part of, to create one of the seminal novels in the history of horror.

The stakes, gravitas, wit and great actors demonstrating great acting of “Rogue One,” the best of these new LucasFilms, are sorely lacking...“Adequate” is not what we want or expect from a “Star Wars” story.

Freeman gives a little something to moments of angst. But seriously. Yawn. It’s a movie so familiar in its tropes, storybeats and dialogue that it feels like a half-forgotten picture or TV show you’ve already seen. The makeup is often “Walking Dead” mediocre.

The lack of organization keeps this from being a complete film, or a great one. That Summer is a footnote to “Grey Gardens.” But for those wholly engrossed in the history, the tragedy and the “real Beales,” before “Grey Gardens” set their personas in stone and made them immortal, it’s a fascinating artifact and another piece of the puzzle of who they were before the caricatures took over.

It’s not the most consequential of films, but from first stop to almost the last, it’s a trippy, traveling delight.

Dormer locks our attention in, and makes us root for Sofia, whatever her motives might be.

What a bowser.

A finely-acted tenterhooks drama about religion, sexuality, tradition and isolation. It is a movie grounded in a rigid hierarchy and ritual, but with a cruel undercurrent of despair.

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.

Book Club, aka Sisterhood of the Traveling Spanx, stuffs the screen with Oscar and Emmy winning actresses of a certain age and hopes the laughs will follow. And they do, just often enough to make this genial, eye-roller of a farce work.

We expect more racing, more heists, more jail and more heat. “Fidele” loyally never quite clears “lukewarm,” and is awfully slow coming to a boil.

It’s a powerful, disturbing crisis of faith drama that takes on the raiments of a thriller, and a tour de force for the understated acting of Ethan Hawke.

Gospel According to André immortalizes a man of his moment, who invented himself and made his own moment. And as he winds down his career and takes a deep, sweeping, cape-bedecked parting bow, this self-flattering film biography gives us one last chance to appreciate what a trip he’s had, and what a trip he’s been.

Deadpool 2 gets by as simply on a par with “Deadpool,” an ultra-violent joked-up Energizer Bunny of a comic book movie with a fun supporting cast, dead-pan deaths and deadpan Deadpool jokes about those deaths.

You don’t feel Francis is challenged on anything here, and as lightly charming and impressive as he and this almost-all-access documentary is, one can only imagine what the great doc-makers — Errol Morris or Werner Herzog or Barbara Koppel — could have done with this.

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.

The picture is all over the place, with many many actors, many plot threads and characters switching from Japanese to Chinese to hard-boiled English in a flash. But John Woo knows pacing, knows how to keep a movie on its feet and hurtling forward, and damned if ManHunt doesn’t manage that, flaws and failings and all.

Falcone’s latest, Life of the Party, is death itself...There’s nobody there to push her, nobody on set with the power and emotional remove to tell McCarthy that they need another take, they need funnier lines, or that her halting line-readings do no make the unfunny script funny.

Whatever the intent of Ian Cheney’s film, at its best it humanizes a class of people being demonized in America’s virulent outbreak of Know-Nothingism. These are smart, funny and charming worker bees with limits to their knowledge, just like the rest of us.

If there’s one thing that Hollywood thrillers and the legions of actors who march through them teach us, it’s that faking shock and breath-gulping panic isn’t easy. And hiding boredom, for some actors, is damned near impossible.

Sollers Point isn’t really about the plot, or advancing it. It’s all about the place, the sorts of people in it and the good and bad support systems that could sink or swim our hero. Thanks to Lombardi, we stick around for the answer.

An underachieving comical character study that wears out its welcome after too short a while, and a minor-key mystery with a “Gung Ho!” mein.

It’s a staged reading of a horror movie, not a compelling, chilling or even that interesting thriller.

The Rider is a docudrama as elegy, a slice of rodeo realism that both romanticizes and demythologizes the Cowboy Way in a corner of America where that still means something.

Veteran second unit director Vaughn Stein (“World War Z,” “Sherlock Holmes”) had access to talent and to people who could finance a film, and proves adept at managing a cohesive, distinct look and feel. But his inept story and fumbling efforts to connect the disparate threads of a tale no one cares about make his actors look bad.

It’s a hard movie to embrace, and some of that stems from the entitlement that simmers in the background of the school, those who attend it, of the city, the monied elite and indeed the filmmaker herself, who narrates and does the questioning here. They’re no less victims, but as they admit, they “knew.”

Through Short’s American Songbook jazz, I knew about the place long before I ever visited New York. And Miele’s documentary lets us know it even better, even if we can’t afford the cheapest rooms (not head-spinningly expensive). That would be, of course, the “Harrison Ford Suite.”

It has the edge of a butter knife. But the stars are ever-so-engaging.

Visually striking, thought-provoking yet emotionally drained, Anon is just too empty to make one care.

It’s a compact, perfect performance in a tight, tense genre picture that manages just enough twists and surprises to separate it from the hired-killer-movie pack.

This isn’t Cody’s most witty script, and the Oscar-winning Theron isn’t the most gifted at delivering these warmed-over one-liners.

Great villains make good thrillers, Hitchcock said. But he had the good sense to cast empathetic and talented movie stars as his heroes and heroines, too.

Interminable.

No, there are NOT enough dissenting voices in the film, she’s that popular. But it’s jarring to see the turn the film, and the country take, away from civility, a steady march toward equal rights and the profane, law-flouting death-to-mine-enemies, progress-torching culture we’re moved into.

Actor turned writer-director Francis Lee revels in the grimy greys of Yorkshire in early spring, treeless hills covered with stone ruins and stone walls that need repair. The accents are thick, the mud is thicker and the romance could not be less romantic. At first.

There’s no shame to everyone’s intentions, but there’s no honor in the result, either. The Honor List can’t even live up to its bad-pun title.

It adds up to very little, but as time-killers that help you brush up on your Spanish go, it’s got enough laughs to get by. Almost.

Wartime survival epics are a rich genre unto themselves, and with The 12th Man, Norway has one that ranks among the very best.

If you’ve made up your mind about her, it’s hard to see this intriguing documentary changing that made up mind. The movie turned my head, here and there. But the questions about her honesty linger, along with the notoriety.

Amateur shines a light on a seriously dysfunctional system. It’s a sell-out updating of “Hoop Dreams” for the viral video era, a sharp-edges-rubbed-off film that holds interest even as it loses some of its testy edge drifting towards a wish fulfillment fantasy conclusion.

The one-liners just kind of lie there. The movie’s many make-out scenes do what they do in most exploitation films, they stop the movie cold.

It is a comedy as free of laughs as any film that’s landed Ron Perlman in its cast and rented a train for its finale has a right to be.

Ordinary rules of drama don’t apply in the Marvel Universe, so expecting Avengers: Infinity War to build suspense, reach a climax and deliver some sort of conclusion is just…unreasonable.

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.

The sprawl of it, the seeming disorganization, all work to its advantage and betray Kings' ambition. Ergüven wasn’t going for documentary, she was aiming for an impressionistic “feel” — terror, outrage, helplessness, a city and a system that aren’t built for you, even when you’re hurt, even when you’re in trouble.

Carrey doesn’t deliver any sizzle in this role. Csokas chews him right out of their scenes, and the always soulful Gainsbourg (“Nymphomaniac,” “Antichrist”) lets us think we’re looking right into her horrific past, even if this dull, obvious “mystery” doesn’t seem worthy of any of their talents.

Katz’s script, settings and characters surprise and delight, and Kirke, Kravitz and Cho deliver performances perfectly in sync with a murder mystery set in Hollywood.

Traffik isn’t a very good thriller, and if you aren’t two or three steps ahead of it, much of the time, you need more practice.

Even though “Dude” strikes a teens-behaving-badly blow for gender parity, even if it’s every bit as raunchy as most boys-get-blasted comedies of its ilk, its several random laughs don’t build to anything, its deep thoughts are too shallow to uplift the genre, or the age group it might have been aimed at.

It’s a tolerable Hawke time-killer.

In focusing on the lives lived AFTER living through a genocide, co-writer/director Kean has made a most accessible documentary, one built around compelling characters giving eyewitness testimony to both the worst moments in human history, and some of the most inspiring.

An almost-empowering, never-quite-hilarious farce that gets by on charm.

Paradox is sort of a cinematic flip book companion piece to Young’s “Paradox” album. And it’s mess, son.

Few horror movies hold up under close-examination and dissection. But Ghost Stories has the goods to occasionally creep even the most jaded gene viewer out, something each year’s cinematic bumper crop of “Boo” rarely achieves.

This quiet, dread-filled combat picture works, sketching in the men beyond the “types” in impressionistic scenes that relate history, advance the story and break the heart.

The Mercury 13 started getting their due in the ’90s, when the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle took off. This illuminating, artful and inspiring film completes that process.

Truthfully, it’s a tame and tepid affair for a kids’ film, with its chief recommendation being the chunks of truth built into its story.

I did laugh, here and there.

Miguel Arteta did “Chuck & Buck” and “The Good Girl,” and in star and co-writer Alia Shawcat, of “Arrested Development” and the TBS series “Search Party,” he’s got a collaborator willing to put it all out there and forget her comic crutches for an intimate, damaged and personal story packed into day and night of enforced intimacy with somebody who might “be the one.”

Final Portrait is a slight little nothing of a story, but I delighted in its wordplay, its depiction of a Paris as imagined in the greys and dull browns of Giacometti’s art.

"Backstabbing” makes an interesting run at painting the many shades of grey in this corner of diplomacy.

Hamm gives us everything we saw over the years-long run of “Mad Men” in an intricate, concise 110 minute movie — swagger, romance, hope and secrets, professional mastery and gutted personal oblivion.

It’s not convincing, not impressive, and after “Jumanji,” Johnson’s agents will probably never let him within a city block of Brad Peyton.

Macy, working from a seriously stereotypical script by Will Aldis, achieves a mild level of madcap, here and there.

Bloodlight and Bami may be mostly for her most faithful fans, but it makes for an interesting, just-revealing-enough portrait for those who only know her from the image she’s created and the music that rarely made it out of the clubs, back in the day.

Wandering into the unknowns doesn’t serve history or the film well enough to make Chappaquiddick anything more than cinematic escape for folks who don’t like the current history they’d rather avoid thinking about by going to the movies.

Cut rate horror like this, they’re just girls in revealing outfits and boys drooling after them — until the next coed gets killed. Preferably after her big make-out scene.

Submergence is a soapy, melodramatic romance in quiet greys and limp emotions.

Zellweger brings that lovely vulnerability that “Jerry Maguire” first introduced to the world.

Borg vs. McEnroe is a vivid reminder of the personal nature of this genteel combat sport, of a great rivalry and of a time when America, Sweden and the world were their most passionate about it.

A Quiet Place makes for an entertaining, nerve-rattling essay on what might save us, the power of connection and the symphony our environment provides when we give it the silence it begs for and so seldom gets.

Sean McNamara’s “Big Game” formula drama is ONLY about the Big Game — an endless procession of them. Characters are shortchanged, emotion impact is deadened. Heck, the dead teen’s funeral/wake is practically covered in a simple, short montage.

First time feature writer-director Brian Shoaf stages some painfully awkward, sensitive and probing counseling sessions for Slate and Quinto to play. The script has lovely snatches of dialogue and fascinating, wounded characters.

“Pitch Perfect” writer turned first-time director Kay Cannon makes some of these big moments pay off, and delivers the sweetest, most sensitive “coming out” scene at the prom that you can imagine. What Cannon can’t do is keep this picture from stopping cold every fifteen minutes or so, sensitive moments that kill the comic momentum and make us notice that the kid actors aren’t in the same charisma league as the grownups.

Spinning Man keeps on spinning and keeps us interested, until that third act, when all this has to be resolved and the script tumbles all over itself ending, not ending and adding an epilogue that undoes the clumsy wrap-up concocted here. And here we are, a couple of hundred words later, and “forgettable” is still the label that best fits.

It’s daring enough to hint that there’s no way this story (the film was made in 2017) would be greenlit for filming, even in the UK, today.

Counterfeiters rarely builds up suspense, and Hirschberg the actor doesn’t register the panic that Bridger must be feeling as the walls close in. Decent sequences are followed with clumsy, amateurish ones — the worst stoned come-on scene in recent memory.

The virtues of God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, are few. So let’s get them out of the way right out of the gate. It’s replaced the generally hostile, defensive and political tone of the first two films with a veneer of “We have to learn to get along.” It’s still toxic, only less so.

It is a puzzle without a particularly interesting (to my Western eyes) solution. Whatever its visual qualities, and really the only comparison points are the weirder Japanese anime efforts, the strangeness of it all makes it a confusing big screen experience.