Roger Moore

So what we have here is a tolerably efficient horror title — not scary, not that suspenseful, just gory — that fails to deliver on the promise that casting that rascal Koechner makes. Not bad, but not exactly good, either.

Even lacking the laughs and romance, he (Emmerich) has delivered an entertaining eye-roller of alternative history.

Perhaps little more workshopping this script was in order, because the three main characters put on their own three act play in the film’s latter half. Everything that delays packing us in that pressure cooker with them undercuts the most novel version of “a boxing picture” that most of us have ever seen.

Lifelong friends and comic colleagues Whitney Call and Mallory Everton pair up again for Stop and Go, the most infectiously funny COVID road comedy ever.

Smith folds mortality, grief and regret into the story to give it depth, but the strain of being glib about those elements shows. Scene after scene plays out without so much as a chuckle.

Take "Kick-Ass." Strip it of most of its wit and charm, amp up the violence, the sadism. Make it more crude and coarse and gory. And what you're left with is Super.

Marsden is pretty much the only reminder of how campy and giddy this material once was and that the new film should have striven to be. Love him. Love Rudolph. Adore Amy Adams most of all. But Disenchanted plays like a contractual obligation, a paycheck, a nearly laughless show of loyalty to the folks who made you what you are.

Take Ride On for what it is, Chan’s attempt at a graceful bow to the inevitable, and an affectionate remembrance of all the crazy stuff he’s done, the risks he’s taken and the bruises and broken bones he’s suffered when dangerous stunts go dangerously wrong.

If you love Foo Fighters and have a soft spot for the “splattertoons” corner of horror, you won’t want to miss Studio 666.

Try not to guess all that happens, because rare RARE mild jolts aside, this picture’s as clockwork as my Citizen watch.

It all feels and plays recycled and watered-down — the longing, the testy edge that’s supposed to signal “sparks,” the heartache of indecision.

If you know the song that underscores this romance, know the Jerry Jeff and Sammy Davis Jr. and Nina Simone versions of it, you get what the novelist and the filmmakers were going for here. Reality is melancholy. Imagination and memory are our escape from it.

It’s a seriously inoffensive confection about facing one’s “issues” and fears and helping people. And if Paramount wants to move a little toy merchandise in the process, why not?

The reporter/convict dynamic doesn’t have enough layers to carry the film without some hint of mystery. The relationship between the two, chilling as it is, never raises this “Story” from generic to profound.

Effects guru turned director Wes Ball got great production design and some splendid combat set pieces out of this, and amps up the tension with a nervous, jumpy camera and tight editing.

A mildly unconventional love story drags Road Hard to a most conventional conclusion. But Carolla gets a lot of stuff about his career choice off his chest, sometimes hilariously, in this hits-too-close-to-home comedy.

A clever and adorable original film remade with most of the charm wrung out of it.

The banter is, first scene to last, awful. Delivering bad dialogue at top speed doesn’t make it better, Ms. Clarke.

The performances are moving and get the job done, and Kurylenko (“Quantum of Solace”) wins us over by the way she slowly lets Connor, her enemy, win her sympathy.

This isn't the worst of the bunch, not by far. But my premonition is this won't be the finale this series has screamed out for these past few years. This decapitation train never seems to reach its destination.

That four-handed screenplay gives us 85 minutes of movie, and “Zombieland/Venom” director Ruben Fleischer drags that out to nearly two hours. That underscores just how much this disposable piffle outstays its welcome.

The fizziness of it all kind of overwhelms some of the shortcomings and distracts us from others.

It's a movie benefiting from another sparkling, sexy and emotionally available performance by Natalie Portman.

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 movie comedy that is funnier in performance than it ever was as a script.

The magical thing that Hathaway accomplishes here is in getting this film made and this look at the New York music scene out there.

Perry's great gift to this unfilmable play is getting it on the screen, his sharp eye for casting and his evident affection and sympathy for black womanhood, even in movies in which he doesn't don a dress.

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

Eat Pray Love isn't a bad movie -- just a spiritually dead one, wearing and wearying.

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.

The performances are spot on. And all involved have made a marvelously melancholy “feel good” movie that ticks off so many Brit film boxes — eccentric characters, quaint and soggy setting, emotions kept under wraps and a charming, wistful story about moving on, being smart enough to realize the need for it and kind enough to help others manage it as well.

Howard doesn’t make awful films, and as somebody who spent much of my earlier life in Appalachia, I’m not inclined to write this problematic portrayal off entirely. But self-satisfied people on both ends of the political spectrum will see what they want to in this story, and that’s not a compliment.

Connolly’s film, formerly titled less poetically, “Backcountry,” has a lovely, wintry tone and a few minor surprises. The action sequences are competently handled, even if there’s little real suspense about what is coming and where this is going.

Pugh has never been better than she is here, utterly immersed in the character’s accent and world-shrinking despair. And Freeman lends some flint and fire and sparkle to this simple redemption tale that touches, amuses, overreaches and overstays its welcome.

The Hunt is like sitting in a deer blind (Look it up, Hollywoodies) on the wrong corner of the pasture. Pointless.

McDonagh’s script is so ad hoc, so clumsily random, that nothing adds up to anything.

The banter waxes and wanes a tad more than I’d like. And yes, Lying and Stealing, being a genre picture, is the 14,764th “one last job” movie.

True Spirit doesn’t add anything fresh to the genre, just fresh faces and Aussie pluck, with even the tunes . . . pretty much on the nose. But that’s what “feel good” movies often are, comfort food, with the occasional surprise, a “darkest hour,” a little pathos and a lot of heart.

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.

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.

It barely has a fright in it on its own, this bloody, Mexican-made supernatural thriller set in the hill country near Tijuana. But open it with a hot “Blue is the Warmest Color” sex scene, toss in a few other hot and heavy moments and a generous helping of nudity and you can be sure, at least, of getting a Hollywood studio’s attention.

It’s great that Sang found another way to chew on the facets, faces and foibles of his native land, one that didn’t involve ravenous zombies.

It’s just another sign that this generation of bottom-line-obsessed execs at the House of Mouse has lost the thread. Nobody there seems to “Whistle While You Work,” and the evidence is turning up on screen.

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.

Torre’s a sturdy presence holding the story together, but the lack of surprises and fear of getting too “edgy” undo a promising portrait of street life among the “cheaters” who start to feel the “cheated” may have something to offer beyond what they can steal from them.

But the handsomely-mounted period production has its rewards and the finale manages a nice messiness that undoes some of what’s trite and far-fetched that’s come before it.

Lolo is entirely too familiar, too predictable, a character study in romantic mishaps that’s far less interesting than the name Delpy cooked up for her “little alpine bunny,” a passive, pretty creature worthy of our contempt, at least as Wells envisioned him.

Why not wade in? Why not? That’s almost the only real action or borderline funny thing to it for 45 minutes or so. And it’s only 86 minutes long.

It’s not all that coherent either, a filmic piece of flotsam that one and all drift along with, touching on themes but never wrestling with them, glimpsing the sights but never really showing them to us.

"The Fire Saga Story” has barely enough sparks for a sketch, much less a “saga.”

It has about as much satiric bite as a Polident commercial, a reverse mortgage of a movie promising dividends its enfeebled script never delivers.

Disney's Prom is to real high school what "High School Musical" was to "West Side Story" – all fluff, no edge.

Like “Brazil” and “Twelve Monkeys,” it’s about human connections in a technologically warped world rendered lonely and unlivable by the lack of those connections.

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.

So yes, there’s the whiff of Stephen King’s story “The Body” to this, with emotional BFF bonding and the like. But barely a note of this contrived, Nutrasweetened melodrama engages, even on those rare instances in which something rings true.

It's fun in a bad way and bad in a fun way, and that’ll do for this late in the summer.

Meet Cute makes for an offbeat spin on its titular rom-com convention, and Cuoco and Davidson give it just enough heart to pay off, something I attribute to Kaley C. because on his own, Davidson can be funnier, but he’s usually as warm as refrigerated cod.

It’s a film that wants to be a little of this, a lot of that and funny in the bargain. You want to like it so much that you can sense Disney getting a new franchise out of it, even if it doesn’t quite come off. But if they do sequels, they’d bloody well better hire somebody who knows comedy to film them.

I connected with its out-there take on the first days of sibling rivalry, the acknowledgement that humanity is utterly distracted by cute puppy videos on the Internet and with Baldwin, a silky-smooth comic bully whose onscreen bark is always a lot worse than his bite.

The polished production sometimes touches and amuses despite its naïve “love conquers all” script.

Time Lapse is time travel thriller that flatlines, mainly because of the consistently flat performances.

The fights are Old Hollywood meets New Bloodbath — corny and carnage-filled. The whole saga seems pre-ordained, pre-packaged and pretty boring, entirely too predictable to come off.

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.

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

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

Or, well, melodrama. Because the further this picture plows along, the more “Isn’t that convenient,” in terms of plot twists, comes into play.

There’s little wit to this, and not enough spark to the story to overcome the tepid jokes. The animation is good, but underwhelming.

Find Me Falling never reaches beyond the low hanging fruit. But that turns out to be pretty sweet, if not quite as filling or challenging as you might hope.

In taking a second swing at a comedy where the object is to make special needs characters funny, but not the object of fun, you’d figure that Farrelly might have had the nerve to dance closer to the edge, or at least find some big, warm laughs. And you’d think that Harrelson could have made this funnier in his sleep. Neither is the case.

The Devil Has a Name stops staggering down that fine line between thriller and spoof and takes a header straight into the ditch.

As familiar as much of this can seem, the players draw us in and make us invest in it. Even if the resolution is entirely too pat and emotionally lacking.

It’s just that every situation everybody gets into is a cliche (“stranded” for the night, etc). Throw in the fact that the movie’s on life support when the leads aren’t on screen, and you see the problem.

It has humor and a touch of charm, but plainly needed more love, more passion, more Shakespeare.

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

As its quickly stumbles through its crimes and clues, A Kind of Murder leaves you with the uneasy feeling that a promising mystery has simply been designed to death.

It’s an indulgent downer, not utterly incoherent but a grim journey from hopelessness to pointlessness.

While The Laureate impresses here and there, there’s nothing that truly dazzles and little that sizzles, either.

You People is a comic throwback, an all-star Jonah and Lauren and Nia, Julia and Eddie, Mike Epps and David Duchovny singing John Legend off-key at the piano farce that begins with a sprint, gets gassed far too often and yet still produces a lot of laughs, all of them packed into its funniest stretches.

Scarborough asks us to get past the nudity, the sexual heat and blatant titillation and consider the dynamics and consequences of these situations.

This cast and this world make for a grand escape from the mundane necessities of life as we’re immersed in a coming-of-age tale like few others, one that should make anybody with a soft spot for Salinger and empathy for those who had to “manage” him just a tad envious.

The pleasures of Welcome to the Rileys are in the simplest human message of all. Take an interest in somebody who needs help and the life you save may be your own.

The screenplay almost lets everybody down, and referencing Chekhov (“Three Sisters”) doesn’t amount to anything if you don’t inject more depth into the characters and situations as a consequence. But the settings are gorgeous. Some situations bear fruit and others deliver laughs.

The Case for Christ won’t convert any critical thinker, but more disappointingly, it fails as faith-based entertainment. It’s a house of cards built to defend a house of cards, with meek-inheriting the Earth acting in the bargain.

For all its showmanship, Now You See Me has a lot less up its sleeve than it lets on.

A ditzy film that offers more evidence that good actors, good action and one-liners don’t solve the one thing missing in every movie video game adaptation – a story that makes sense.

It’s a passably chilling bit of nonsense that builds on the past, the tropes of the genre, and relies on them for the odd jolt and the occasional ironic laugh.

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

That it lacks the snap, crackle and kapow of the summer's better comic book blockbusters isn't surprising. With all this effort riding on a big, expensive and rushed studio summer picture, the real miracle is that any of them come to life.

It’s preachier, more diverse in its casting. All of which make it more specific and limit it. Throw in generally lackluster performances and illogical plot twists and “Anarchy” is seriously crippled.

The final act of a thriller is where the payoff lies. We’ve invested in the characters and relationships. We fear for them, and as we do, the suspense should build to the point where it weighs on you. The Violent Heart has that weight about it right from the start. And if the climax seems wanting, perhaps one twist too many, it still doesn’t spoil the mystery we see unfold and the solutions we have time to consider over its 100 or so minutes.

Blonde is too ambitious and too important a cinematic subject to dismiss out of hand. Wildly uneven, misguided, bluntly exploitive at times, it also has moments of wrenching pathos and a mournful tone that will never let a film fan look at a Monroe movie the same way again.

Veteran Danish director Peter Flinth (“Beatles” and “Nobel’s Last Will” were his) delivers a film that feels approved by its co-writer and star in terms of thoroughness, but that lumbers as it passes from one waypoint to the next in the standard “alone in the Arctic” narrative.

There’s a compactness to it all that I appreciate (“Big Little Lies” had more incidents, but like all limited-run cable series, the story drips out like molasses in winter). But the story and story arc here are truncated and can leave the viewer still-interested and somewhat dissatisfied when all is said and done.

This tiny Catholic school for women dominated the sport at a turning point in history, and this plucky, old-fashioned sports drama sets the scene and tells the tale with a lot of heart and a dash of wit.

Black Christmas has a female empowerment “woke/revenge” subtext, making it a slap in the face to the “torture porn” decade of horror. Sorority girls, hunted on a college campus where this sort of thing may have been going on through time immemorial, turn the tables on their tormentors...Great...If only they’d get around to that a tad earlier. But no, we’ve got to have an hour of summary slaughter, a collection of the dullest, least sympathetic and most poorly set-up murders in the history of Dead Teenager Movies.

The picture lacks for nothing but big laughs.

But it’s as much fun as a dumb time-travel murder mystery/cop thriller has any right to be. Just don’t let it keep you up at night sorting through it all, again, the way the folks who take notes (critics) have to. It’ll spoil it.

The tempered violence, the nature of the villains, the easy bonhomie of our leads and a cast peppered with great supporting players make Escape Plan go down easier than the other “Rambo/Last Man Standing/Expendables” pictures that brought these two aged action stars back from the dead.

The Life List is as bland as its title, a movie unworthy of comparison to most any “Bucket List” movie you can think of. Well, exxcept for that dramatic climax, the one that comes before the fender-bender of an anti-climax.

Yes, coincidences rule the day in this story, but that contributes to its compactness. It’s a tight tale with a steadily-escalating threat level based on Robert’s growing obsession with his new “friend,” and the extreme efforts he’s more than eager to make to keep him and them “out of a Latvian prison.”

For a horror movie, Night’s End comes up awfully short in frights. Even the manufactured quick-cut “jolts” couldn’t alarm a toddler, even if the SHRIEK accompanying them would wake anybody.

It’s a smidge too cute and a bit too long, but Huard and Scott make this comical journey (in French and “Franglish” with English subtitles), a trip from indifference to kindness, incompetence to responsibility, a most rewarding reinvention of what “family” can mean.

The lightly abrasive way Bibb and Duhamel connect and the hurt hanging over most everybody lift this predictable dramedy out of the goat corral, pig pen and barn and into something perfectly serviceable and sweet and a cut or three above what you find on The Hallmark Channel

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

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.”

A winning "Robin Hood and his Merry Doormen" comedy about getting even. A cast of comedy specialists each deliver their comic specialties to perfection, delivering double-takes and one liners so well that you don't notice how clunky the actual caper in this caper comedy is.

It’s an indulgent movie, drifting through grief on a sea of cliches.

Everybody has to lean into the would-be laughs too hard because they’re uncertain there’s another one coming again any time soon. The situations are recycled and dully predictable.

The movie surrounding the tunes isn’t all that, despite Illumination’s dazzling, colorful animation.

A picture whose picaresque premise holds more promise that its star or director deliver.

McKay’s just as “right” about his target as ever. But the tone of this “Deep Impact/Wag the Dog” mashup is off. It veers towards strident, and as the clutter gathers around it, it drifts into dull. The jokes dry up and only a few members of his cast are veterans of “let make this funnier on the set” filmmaking.

The simple pleasure of seeing Ethan Hawke and Ewan McGregor paired-up as brothers by different mothers does the heavy lifting of Raymond & Ray, a downbeat dramedy about their dead father’s last wish.

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

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

The result is wintry and melancholy, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” or “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” in tone. And because of that, it’s a trifle duller than the man himself surely must have been.

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

Like "Avatar," "Legacy" is a film too in love with its own good looks. And like the original "TRON," the sequel's a bit of a slog.

It's an infuriatingly static picture - actors walking around when they should be running, ruminating when they should be panicking, generally failing to convey fear and pick up the pace.

The aloof, guarded Cumberbatch plays Assange as a mixture of brilliance, hucksterism, ego and naivete. He carries the baggage of an actor who plays “smart,” with a menacing edge.

I can’t say it wasn’t interesting to sit through, but Thieves never rises above a seriously long-winded B-movie, a shoot-em-up in which no matter how graphic the violence that the characters mete out and witness, nobody ever lets you forget they’re playing cops and robbers.

It’s a smart, poignant skewering of lives of diminishing returns, two grown men flailing at life and failing at life at 33.

Its real value is as an oral and visual history of Springsteen, where he met his bandmates and the musical milieu he was fortunate enough to grow up in.

Here are the Young Men makes for an interesting snapshot of yet another version of “wayward youth.”

It’s better in conception than in execution, with all the energy hurled at the effects and murderous Krampus attacks. The actors fail to feel the fear.

First time feature director Richard Raymond never quite lifts this above generic in tone and message.

Zoe Chao puts on a clinic on “the funny new BF of the leading lady” as a rom-com trope in Your Place or Mine, an exceptionally mild-mannered farce set up as a Reese Witherspoon/Ashton Kutcher vehicle.

There are enough fun bits here to stream The Gray Man, maybe as background noise, only worth your attention now and again. And there are so very many head-slapping moments that one can’t help but think, “It must be time to pause (or cancel) Netflix again.”

The action is visceral and exciting, but everything between the shootouts, especially the mostly-insipid flashbacks (A pre-Civil War romantic hot air balloon ride in Missouri? Really?) just makes you impatient for Jane to get that gun and get on with it.

Director Allen Hughes ("The Book of Eli") hides the secrets well and stages a good fight and chase. But what's most entertaining about Brian Tucker's script is the lived-in feel it has.

This uneven and often unsatisfying dramedy’s saving grace might be the sadness that permeates the sunny settings, the sunny bus ride and the beatific awe they feel upon reaching that holy grotto and giving themselves over to the water “cure” machinery the nuns there run.

More voices would have been nice, and just one person, on camera, defending the whole “safe space” where “hate speech” and “bullying” is banned on campuses is a grievous omission.

Terminator Salvation is one of the most visually impressive films in the series. The action is non-stop and the look borders on dazzling.... But ironically for a series that's supposed to be about an embattled humanity struggling against those who lack it, there isn't an emotional moment in this.

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

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.

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

Acts of Vengeance has great fights, solid performances and a smart story hook. Not a great movie, but as vengeance pictures go, an efficient one and a film that doesn’t grate on the viewer or humiliate its star and gore-obsessed director, unlike SOME movies of the genre one could name.

Maybe if “Rita” had been forced into more bachelorette weekend antics with Paige, bubbly Aimee Carrero and Addie Weyrich, the strain of trying to keep up, comically, with Keaton wouldn’t have been so obvious. As it is, “Mack & Rita” is a criminal waste of seasoned comic talent and a criminal misuse of some of the most beautiful Hollywood starlets coming up behind them.

The cameos and third act actor introductions turn this into an all-star romp — of sorts — further lightening the tone.

It fails on pretty much every level.

The science fiction is solid. The melodrama has you wondering how much longer we have to spend with this unbelievable “couple.”

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

Though light enough in tone, packed with good messages and delivering a couple of lovely, touching moments, "Mars" still has that plastic look that made you wish you were seeing the REAL Tom Hanks in "Polar Express" or the REAL Jim Carrey in "A Christmas Carol."

If you want to see “Force Majeure,” rent it and stream it. If you want to see two terrific comic talents circling around it in something lighter and funnier, then Downhill it is.

Words and Pictures is the cloying title of a cloying little comedy made by talented people who, not that long ago, deserved better than this, and knew it.

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

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

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

Funny people can cover for a lot of screen comedy sins. But in this one, the sins aren’t “Little” and the players too hampered by script and direction to put out the dumpster fire this very nearly is.

The best of them you could certainly see as full length features, chilling little tastes of a complete vision — story, characters, horrific situations and visual aesthetic. The worst? Simply generic.

As befits a film with Martin Scorsese as a credited producer, “Wannabe” is more “King of Comedy” tragic, more sadly psychotic, than its 2014 predecessor.

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.

Degan ably imitates drug trip experiences with the visuals and editing. But he also captures a rich boy detoxing from therapeutic drugs and a corrosive-to-some culture for many months.

A movie that has no right to the touching finale Whannell cooks up, a nice payoff to a movie that isn’t really worth sitting through to reach that payoff.

The picture plays and Monroe and Withers make us invest in the characters and “This isn’t half bad” makes this a date movie that comes off, romance novel origins be damned.

It’s just romantic enough and barely funny enough to qualify as a romantic comedy. But it works, despite never being graceful or unstuck enough to take flight.

The plot is a tangle of storylines, alternate suspects, femme fatales and dead-end subplots which add up to little that isn’t obvious or that makes much sense.

Like Vin Diesel, it has bulk, lumbering clumsily along as it repeats Diesel’s greatest hits — the ones that don’t require him to drive a fast and furious car.

Tone counts for everything in action mysteries like this, and the team that made “Lone Survivor,” “Deepwater Horizon,” “Patriots Day” and the debacle “Mile 22” know each other’s strengths and play to them.

The diminutive McAvoy, trying his hand at all manner of action, may be hoping to become the Scottish Tom Cruise. But Welcome to the Punch shows he’s still more of a Scottish Michael J. Fox, an actor better served by roles with more charm and less grimacing than this one.

Neeson stoic turn and the history we’re supposed to remember make “Mark Felt” work.

Phoenix, Oregon is “Big Night” in a bowling alley.

In detail and combat spectacle, Stalingrad is hard to beat. And whatever its failings, one can’t help but be curious about a story as connected to national identity as this one, a film that like today’s Russia, feels more Soviet than Russian.

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.

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.

It’s a B-movie, start to finish, a film noir with Americo-Persian flourishes, but a formula picture in any event. The Persian Connection still manages scenes that pop, violence that shocks (and satisfies) and performances that remind us that in the United States, movie stars come from all races and classes. Eventually.

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

It’s not the least bit original, which is no cardinal sin. But without the laughs, “Love Tactics” plays like a travelogue with kissing.

One more pan dipped into the Supervillain Gru goldmine shows this Illumination franchise is a claim that’s petered out, with no fresh ideas — no funny ones, anyway.

It’s a handsomely-mounted, pleasant but dry and almost dull trip back to the Roaring 20s, “Masterpiece” style. Which is it say “Roaring” isn’t really allowed.

A script that scrimps on laughs — not enough zingers or pratfalls — and relies on sentiment to get by lets them down.

There's too much cheese, but there are still enough amusing action beats and funny one-liners to let one say, 30 Minutes or Less delivers, more or less on time.

There’s a fascinating satire of America’s unholy alliance of heartless corporations and the religious dupes who worship them just sitting here. But it’ll take a wit far cleverer than action hack Paul W.S. Anderson to work that out.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is wanton slaughter lightened by monstrous zingers delivered in a growl that needs subtitles, a colossal waste of talent in front of the camera and not exactly a resume builder behind it.

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

Adds up to a lot of nothing at all. Nothing.

Bissell has made a film where the casting isn’t the only thing that’s “on-the-nose.” The message, where the film’s sympathies lie and its emphasis on the character with the bigger journey to make could earn it some “Green Book” styled blowback.

It's a modestly effective but jaw-droppingly violent picture.

Patrick Stewart preens, poses and gives us a little song and dance in Hunting Elephants, livening up a fairly dark and somewhat predictable Israeli caper comedy.

It’s hard getting to be “Miss Americana.” It’s almost impossible to stay “Miss Americana.” This semi-intimate film gives mere mortals an appreciation of the personal cost of getting there, staying there and staying reasonably sane and happy as you do.

There’s a reason romantic cliches became cliches. This is one way love develops, and as the script is taken from the memoirs of actor Sergey Fetisov, there’s only so much criticism that’s warranted about the waypoints of this romance.

Office Invasion, an English-language romp, wouldn’t romp in any language.

The film lacks the spark of life or wit that might have made it work.

The milieu — coastal-industrial Australia — is interesting, with its stoner arms dealers and crazed thugs of every age. But what sells Son of a Gun is McGregor’s presence and performance, a guy using and mentoring a gullible but gutsy young man, trying to impart the wisdom of the wizened con to the kid.

A Tourist’s Guide to Love is a lovely Vietnamese travelogue in search of a romantic comedy that would transform the trip into a movie.

7 Days in Entebbe is a blasé stroll through a desperate and harrowing affair, inspiring more boredom than fear and utterly lacking in suspense.

There’s a demographic niche desperate to be served that this movie is aimed at, and more’s the pity that it’s not better as there are so few filmmakers and studios willing to tell stories of this generation, for this generation.

Masucci’s intensely charismatic Fassbinder, bathed in cigarette smoke, working “26 hour days” even before the cocaine and barbiturate addictions that took over later, looks like walking death the moment we meet him. That lets Enfant Terrible reinforce the suspicion that Fassbinder is more famous for his excesses than his films, 40 years after his death.

Human interactions, human conflict (dog eat dog Darwinism), human intellect and human resolve never made it into the finished film.

Co-writers/directors Sam and Max Eggers go for symbolic nightmares and simple toilet-accidents for shocks and wicked sneers that only Belinda sees to set us up for something more fraught, fundamental and final than their movie delivers.

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.

Huppert at 65 is “still getting it done.” She’s a magnetic presence in any film. But too much of this one is trite, tried and true. And the tunes? Not tone-deaf, but close.

If this sequel proves anything, it’s that more is not always better.

Live by Night gets lost almost from the moment it leaves Lehane and Affleck’s home turf, Boston.

The Beanie Bubble may be a tad conventional in its approach to this “origin story” and its “rise and fall” narrative arc. But it’s a fun, infuriating trip down memory lane thanks to the people traditionally left out of this “story,” the women who made it happen for the guy who got all the credit.

Lee, in a sort of humorless send-up of Tarantino, substitutes kinky for mystery, explicit sex and violence for sex and violence with real shock value. When it comes to this remake, you plainly can’t teach an oldboy like Lee new tricks.

So while we can appreciate the decent effects, the bang-up settings and a good cast, we can only hope they got some sight-seeing in on their days off. Whatever magic there was on this shoot is probably in their home movies.

A comedy that barely flirts with funny and a grim weeper that never quite raises a tear, Cake has one thing going for it — Jennifer Aniston.

It’s good to see all these folks together in the same picture. But Affleck and Chuck MacLean don’t script enough clever bits, smart action beats and funny lines to let “The Instigators” instigate much of anything.

As a brutal and gory combat picture with historical underpinnings, these “Secret Soldiers” acquit themselves heroically. The action is visceral and intense.

A bloated all-star melodrama with none of the lean, mean legalese of a John Grisham adaptation, it’s a showboat’s movie cast with a lot of actors each promised “a big, cool scene.”

The actors could have given us more, but the mad rush to get where EVERYbody knows this thing is going (with an odd wrinkle or two) deprives them of that and us of the “escape” a better movie would have delivered.

There’s no reason the missionary-recruiter turned stalker idea couldn’t work. But this one doesn’t.

Empathy, Inc. has the compactness of a Poe short story or a “Twilight Zone” parable. But its third act surprises aren’t surprising at all. Suspense is created when the audience is a step ahead of the heroine/hero, not five steps ahead.

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

Ardor, in the end, has little ardor, or originality or magic about it. It’s just a mundane C-movie action picture that tries to pass itself off as something deeper.

A solid Helen Mirren turn in the title role gets lost in a choppy narrative and haze of cigarette smoke in Golda.

If it’s not convincing as either a find-one’s-faith parable or clever spoof of pop Christianity, at least it’s relevant.

The funny lines don’t land — partly because they’re weak and partly because Baruchel the director couldn’t arm-twist his actors into giving him more.

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.

Some of the profane hip hop acts seem dated in the sea of upbeat soul, pop and alt-rock acts presented here. But Pearl Jam and Run-DMC, inspiring joyous sing-alongs to their hits, just seem timeless.

The script is straight-up formula, which suggests few surprises, but also that the component parts should have clicked better than they did.

It’s a trifle silly. But you don’t have to take Six Minutes to Midnight seriously to lose yourself in the pleasure of some very fine actors having a go at an old fashioned B-movie, poppycock included.

The sad truth of the matter is that Disney took 15 years to make a sequel and never came up with a compelling story for that sequel to tell, and spent all that money without casting anybody who’d hold our interest dashing through all this red-neon nothingness for two hours.

Movies like Upheaval are more propaganda than history.

Haters, head for the door. But Gleeks? Get your "Glee" on.

The acquired taste that is Seth MacFarlane is harder to acquire and the one joke in his one-joke comedy about the pot-smoking/potty-mouthed teddy bear wears thin in the endless two hours of Ted 2.

Divergent, the latest outcast-teen-battles-The-System thriller, is similar enough to “The Hunger Games” that hardcore Katniss fans may dismiss it. But it’s a more streamlined film, with a love story with genuine heat and deaths with genuine pathos.

The Greatest Showman is, like the singing, dancing, versatile actor who stars in it, larger than life. And if this is the only screen musical we can get out of the last of his peak performing years, it’ll do.

The story’s dawdling pace works against it, and attempts at injecting urgency into the third act seem too chatty and explanatory for suspense to build. The effects are more interesting than chilling.

Last Vegas isn’t “out there” in a “Hangover” sense. It’s comical comfort food, with actors doing the sorts of things they’ve done for decades. But even if this is the safest Vegas romp of them all, this cast never lets us forget that we’re in very good hands.

Two Oscar winners in the cast, plus Pegg and Pixar’s good luck charm John Ratzenberger, and “Luck” turns out to have none.

Director Darrell Roodt does nothing to build suspense and little to build empathy for the character.

While Nilsson’s instincts for making Dashcam an updated, new-tech “Blow Up” were good, his execution isn’t. Dashcam is a dry, slow and dull 80 minutes of a loner TV news editor stumbling into evidence that proves a Big Conspiracy behind the death of a famous politician.

There’s not much new here, but it’s as engrossing as the better entries in this formulaic quest and that’s largely owing to [Radcliffe’s] charisma and focused self-martyrdom.

Among the players, the wild-haired Bardem stands out, and a vampy Diaz sets the stage for uninhibited future in villain roles, or deadly-sexy car sales.

Movies, life and love, Jacques says, “are like souffles — all about timing.” And Coppola’s is just…off. Paris Can Wait could have been a perfectly adorable wish-fulfillment fantasy for an over-40 audience. She just needed to wait until landing a more engaging leading man.

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

Elba’s action credentials are well-established, so there’s little for him to prove here. The fights are convincing enough, even if the plot is all coincidence, conspiracy and con jobs.

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

It isn’t much, amusing junk at best. But Dead Ant lets Busey be a stoner-philosopher, Hailey be a rock-chick heroine (’80s style) and Coiro (“Entourage”) demonstrate the power of a “power chord” in a “power ballad,” especially where there are murderous insects concerned.

Yeah, Head Count loses its head in the third act. Whatever promise it had is long gone by then (there’s little urgency among the stoners, the threat seems more existential than real). And in a crowd of characters we have zero time to develop empathy for (like their director, they’re all beautiful), when the Big Moment comes, the only sane response is “Who cares?”

It’s a good-looking, mindless romp aimed at the children of all ages who watch professional wrestling. Formulaic and silly, it might not be reason one to subscribe to the Kevin Costner network. But there are a couple of laughs and lots of utterly ridiculous “action” in the octagon where the Big Boys play.

A single decent twist and a pleasant lump-in-the-throat finale are what you get for your time, here. Not much, but not a lot of family friendly movies do better.

As a stand-alone film, this one has about four kings too many to be wholly engaging.

Planes: Fire & Rescue is roughly twice as good as its predecessor, Planes, which was so story-and-laugh starved it would have given “direct-to-video” a bad name. Yes, there was nowhere to go but up.

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

Tommy Lee Jones gives us a saltier version of MacArthur than the image-conscious general ever let on to.

When your set pieces fail to surprise, your dialogue fails to deliver even one decent one-liner and your villain looks like he’s dealing with dysentery on location, maybe 17-18 years isn’t long enough between reboots.

Solo Mio is a mild-mannered comedy of the “Left at the Altar/Honeymoon Goes Wrong” school. It’s a little Runaway Bride, a lot of Honeymoon Crasher or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but without any of the edge or many of the laughs of its predecessors.

Child’s Play is perfunctory.

And Kendrick? After 45 minutes or so of thin entertainment, Anna gets her groove back. Bubbly Noelle has no time for pessimism.

The God Committee is the sort of solid drama you get when actors you think you know are gifted with a script they can sink their teeth into, and make the most of their moment to shine.

It’s never wholly fair to dismiss a movie just because it’s unpleasant to sit through. But that’s a good place to start with We Need to Do Something.

It doesn’t come together nearly as neatly as you’d like. But “Hypochondriac” manages a few chills and some eyes-averting gore thanks to Will’s memories of what happened and how close he is to repeating the awful past he grew up in.

Gran Turismo is a beautiful looking film. Jacques Jouffret photographed it like the slickest car commercial you’ve ever seen, and Austyn Daines and Colby Parker Jr. edited us right into and inside the race cars and the races recreated here. It plays. It’s also damned entertaining. Don’t anybody tell you otherwise.

The design... is stunning, an improvement over 2006′s “300.” And the action never disappoints. It’s a pity this colorless cast doesn’t hold a candle to the Butler/Headey/Michael Fassbender/David Wenham crew of the original, that the writers couldn’t conjure up thrilling speeches to match the original.

The bad guys are more interesting than the good ones, the heists — including an armored car — are generic.

It’s not the worst movie in that Poe-Christie “kill off characters, one by one” formula. The players do well by their moments of terror or sadistic cruelty. But it’s entirely too obvious to come off, entirely too cluttered to have a character or characters rope us in, and entirely too chatty-jokey to ever be scary. And it’s not funny enough to work as a sick comedy.

There isn’t much to this that will appeal to anybody over the age of eight. But the film’s real sin is in how it shortchanges the legend and the Mexicanness of all this.

I’d say writer-director Danluck’s story unravels entirely too easily, but that’s crediting her with “raveling” that she never quite gets around to.

Flock of Four never achieves the giddy highs of a “Diner” or the classics of this genre and period. But it varies the formula just enough to set up the finale. And then Cathey, maestro that he is, brings in on home with a killer solo.

A tuneful, affable rockumentary.

The leads have just enough chemistry to make them credible as a couple.

Choppy and bordering on incoherent, Bullet to the Head is Stallone's answer to Schwarzenegger's "The Last Stand," an action exercise in "Here's how we used to do it."

A bit of entertainment creeps in, much of it provided by Jackson and Brosnan, even if it turns out they weren’t on the set together for more than a day or two.

It's all tiresome, muddied and artlessly made.

Red Right Hand’s not quick enough to be the gritty mixed-bag B-movie that was its destiny, but the players, the place and pistol-packing might be enough for those who go for that sort of thing.

A tricky thriller whose tricks are less important than its riveting leading lady.

Gold isn’t really bad. It’s just not enough to amount to anything, or anything much.

This episodic romance works in fits and starts, and captures a bittersweet faux British turn by Anne Hathaway, plainly mismatched in being paired with real-life Brit Jim Sturgess.

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

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).

Fey plays this inner-outer conflict well. But at her most wide-eyed and vulnerable, she still has trouble making a romance credible, even with Rudd, edgy comedy’s puppy dog of a leading man.

The saving grace of “As It Was” is Gallagher’s saving grace as well, that John Lennon-meets-John Lydon voice, the songs he wrote or co-wrote that brought him back from the dead, the album that restored his place in British rock.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is much ado about a lot of microscopic nothing.

This high-mileage/hard-mileage cast crackles and sells the conceit, that aged Brits — whom no one would suspect because Britain’s native-born criminal element long ago lost its initiative and its edge to “Albanians” and foreign imports — could pull this off.

There aren’t a lot of surprises when characters behave the way a thousand screenplays have ordained they must, but the little moments of indulging their better angels, and their worst, give Prisoner’s Daughter a gritty, B-movie authenticity that is intensely satisfying.

It’s a grim, well-acted vengeance thriller with moral underpinnings that would have worked, with or without the supernatural “judgement” folded into its unraveling grief, guilt and madness.

Broome (of TV’s “The Buccaneers”) carries himself like a convincing insolent rich lout. And the car chases and brawls pass muster, even if the plot turns too-predictable-to-tolerate early on.

I found this a perfectly handsome and literarily defensible mounting of a well-known tale that was far and away the most bloodless version of it. Ever.

The original sin of Don’t Worry Darling might be how drunk the filmmakers get on the universe they create, dragging and dragging a less and less interesting pastiche of ’50s life — a drunken office party with a stripper, because we’re all so liberal and “modern” — on for so long that the more exciting third act comes as a refreshing jolt.

It’s not a leap to call “Leap!” perfectly watchable, if entirely too dull for the very young — especially the hyper-active.

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

The script is just a collection of horror tropes. Jake reads from the Encyclopedia of Shadows book his dad left him. A fortune teller animatronic display spooks the kids. The frights are tepid at best. The banter is “sick, and not in a good way.”

A down-and-dirty genre picture that manages a couple of decent plot twists, a couple of passable car chases and two epic shoot-outs.

The dynamic of pitching two willful, smart cookies into this situation pays almost no dividends, even though they’re each out of their element.

Modestly entertaining and uplifting version of a “greatest story” that has proven as malleable as it is timeless.

Director Ash Brannon (“Surf’s Up”) and a slew of credited co-writers could not uncover a laugh in this material. Not a one-liner, not one single sight gag that pays off. The animation is generic, but pretty enough. The music? Sort of a Chinese market research idea of “rock.”

Van Damme is in on the joke, and never for a second lets us see that he’s in on it. That’s what’s the most fun about The Last Mercenary.

A watchable failure, at best.

When you’ve wasted a perfectly good Blythe Danner appearance and then weighed down your late second act with “big secrets” that would drown a better comedy than this, you’re not making the case that Netflix should sign you to a lifetime contract, no matter how charmingly Irish you are.

Riff Raff lives down to its title, a trashy movie with a gilded cast — a cast a tad tarnished thanks to the addition of this to their resumes.

It’s too long and wildly uneven. And the longer it goes on, the more uneven and oddball it seems.

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

When any of these movies get to the sequel stage, original thought goes out the window and it’s all about the colorful, clever ways they find to stick a knife into a B-list actor or actress. “Prey at Night” can’t even manage that.

But as the truism “If you’ve seen one ‘Godzilla’ movie, you’ve seen them all” still applies, I kind of hope they choke on the cash from this one.

It’s a slow film, and almost painfully melodramatic in its obvious twists and turns. But the performances are finely tuned, and the story arc and situations — aside from a few pauses for a song — quietly gripping.

The story sets up a clumsy psycho-sexual dynamic and a faux family, but the film doesn’t develop those.

For what it is and for whom it is intended, it’s not a bad movie, just an indifferent one.

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.

It takes nothing away from the awful thing people who experience this go through in saying that movies about it all too often are all tropes that render it trite.

Crown Vic isn’t a bad picture. It’s just too unexceptional to stand out.

Lake of Death (De dødes tjern) is a mildly creepy Norwegian thriller.

The predictability of much of what we see unfold here isn’t an asset. “Marsh King’s Daughter” can feel perfunctory, lacking the interior life that a novel gives characters. But the settings, the striking cinematography, sharp, suspense-heightening editing of the action beats and the stars lead this Marsh King’s Daughter out of the swamp.

The end product isn’t remotely as bad as one might fear.

Standard issue spy stuff, a surprise or two, a shootout or three. Nothing you should pay money to see in a theater.