Roger Moore

Age of Extinction runs on and on, popcorn piffle without end.

It isn’t quite “Snakes on a Plane,” a high concept comedy in which ALL of the fun is in the title and the billing. But it’s too close.

Farrell, Swinton, Chen and Ip do what they can with their characters. But it’s hard to decide if anyone here is just another demon or angel in Doyle’s fevered brain, or real.

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.

This short, not-quite-brisk film’s real shortcoming is that writer-director Jérémie Rozan makes it all about the MO and the VO — “how they’re doing it,” and having his hero explain how, ad nauseum, start-to-finish, in voice-over narration.

The script piles the preposterous on top of the absurd and the film's thin charms dissipate, revealing the creaking movie star contraption underneath.

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.

With Moretz here to ensure it’s at least a story we invest in, bringing emotional heft to the moments that beg for it, this nothing-special dystopia manages the bare minimum that fans should expect from films of this genre.

It’s not everything you could have hoped for, but for a fan, the final Indiana Jones movie tips the scale as “not bad, not bad at all.”

The leads click well enough. But every moment Hart and Harrelson aren’t on the screen, the film dies. The real torture in this torture comedy becomes the too-long wait for it to end.

It all sort of comes apart in an orgy of clumsy over-explanation that doesn’t truly explain anything. But the quintet is well-cast.

As B-movies about Hitler’s corpse and who might have a use for it — then, and now — go, Burial manages to be watchable, even when it’s making your eyes roll.

Sleight is a prestidigitation thriller that lives up to its title only if you misspell it.

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.

After Walking with the Enemy, two hours and four minutes of torture, rape and mass shootings, you’ll feel you’ve been tested, too.

It’s promising in premise, but limply plotted, offering Derbez too few chances to cut loose even as he makes the most of a game and goofy Hollywood-supplied supporting cast.

The “origin story” that is the film’s chief appeal takes a back seat to “series pilot” requirements. The film’s biggest asset becomes a handicap. “Saints” never feels thorough, thought-through or complete.

“Afterlife” is a laugh-starved, jerry-rigged clunker that finds about one fifth as many laughs as the originals.

Thorough as it is in covering the history of the company and the retail phenomenon — my first newspaper feature story was visiting and grading all the videos in a small city where I worked, which led to my first hate mail and angry calls — Last Blockbuster plays like a TV feature story that goes on too long.

An oddly unaffecting portrait of damaged soldiers trying to break back into civilian life.

The intellectual ambition, the showy “smart” dialogue and collectively quotable characters played by actors we respect make Anesthesia watchable, and its existence as an indie film that attracted this cast, won financing and made it into theaters easy to explain.

The performers are given stock types to play, and Elba and Dillon, at least, can do a little with that.

While we may ogle Tamara, blush at her charms and revel in her world, in the end Tarama Drewe is just a bit of Brit tease that doesn't come off.

It’s starved of oxygen and incident, of funny lines or clever exchanges.

King handles the flashy moments — a big speech or two, a firm stand on principle or three. But there’s just not enough here, and too much at the same time, for “Shirley” to come off.

The tone and atmosphere are immersive and decidedly analog, and the whole nature of “sound” thing makes an interesting metaphysical text or subtext.

This is a good cast, but it’s all played at a rather shrill pitch that must work better on the stage. The intimacy of the screen makes it all uncomfortably in our face.

Director Sebastian Cordero — he did the John Leguizamo journalism thriller “Chronicles” — serves up chilling and all-too-real ways to die in space and maintains tension even if suspense is in short supply in a tale told in flashback.

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

The Other Laurens is a slow, drifting mystery thriller that takes a while to decide what it’s about, takes another while to add on complications and adds a third while to attempt to get to some sort ofint.

While [Lawrence] is game for anything, whatever it takes to pound a laugh out of a moment, it’s not enough in a comedy that sprints out of the gate, buries us under zingers and turns all sensitive and sentimental as it pulls its punches in the second and third acts.

The whole movie...feels like an under-developed sketch that goes on for too long.

For an hour or so, director Lurie tackles the tropes lightly as we see lots of football practices, and a few games, and not a lot of anything else. And it plays, helped by the fact that the formidable Masterson doesn’t need a lot of script to get across a flinty “West Texas Gal.”

Ambulance is 80 minutes of pure mayhem wallowing through 140-150 minutes of pure Michael Bay hokum.

It’s too bad the muted Home Run didn’t take its own advice about being daring and inventive.

As midnight movies go, it’s not (more than) half bad. Round up some friends for a midnight movie date, designate a driver and…enjoy.

It’s Kirby who makes this worth watching, and even that performance is nothing anyone would call “warm.” If “The Queen” and a “Mission:Impossible” villain didn’t make her a star, this certainly will. It’s all the “pieces” around her that let down this “woman.”

Intentions and inspiration aside, Last Jedi doesn’t add up to an “Empire Strikes Back” for this trilogy. There’s no romance, little pathos and no real punch-in-the-gut moment. Its emotionally sterile tone was set with “The Force Awakens,” and that’s proven hard to shake, new innovations and plot twists aside.

Horse Girl makes a nice showcase for a writer/actress with range and fearlessness. It’s just that — dread aside — the film feels lightweight and frothy, first scene to last. She’s put her all into a character that keeps us at arm’s length and a movie that’s not serious enough for its subject — mental illness.

This “virtual” instead of “real” world, with its toxic environment and compliant, drugged and plugged-in populace, feels insanely topical at times.

The performances pay off. But the story elements with the funniest possibilities — the salesman, the crazed 13 year-old — dangle out there without any payoff.

The long, somewhat sluggish comic thriller director Kan Eguchi gets out of this manga adaptation has scattered laughs and lots and lots of killing, much of that played as comedy, too. We are not that amused. But the big set-pieces here are wowzers, good enough to merit a sequel (“The Fable: A Hitman Who Doesn’t Kill”), so let’s dive in.

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

An indie thriller with promise, if not quite the pace and polish it needs to deliver the drama, excitement and heartbreak.

As Borowczyk’s career was hijacked by his own infamy, documentarian Kuba Mikurda’s “Love Express” camera captures gestures, the waving about of hands by the various interview subjects as they try to rationalize both his path and his ensuing fate.

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

The three stories could each have been their own movie, and probably a more compelling one than this mash-up turns out to be. Everybody gets in everybody else’s way for the first two and a half acts.

The acting is quite good, with Ayano (of “The Promised Land” and the recent “Humunculous”) a charismatic lead. The mob brawls and chases early on are visceral enough to pull you in. But Ono lets the air out of the balloon of even the action sequences entirely too quickly. The “family” material is less interesting, the “relationship” perfunctory and even acts of vengeance seem rushed so that we can get back to the boring stuff.

It’s an uneven affair that begins with a flourish, works to develop homeless street cred, wanders into the maudlin wilderness for the middle acts and rallies for a predictable, over-the-top, break-out-your-Kleenex finale.

It’s another self-consciously odd, almost surreal “smirk” of a comedy about two misfits who aren’t just BFFs in Morgansfield High, they’re each others only friends. And how you take it depends on how easy a laugh you are.

All that matters is A) Is it scary? and B) Is it funny? Those answers are “A little” and “More or less.”

In Safdie’s film, all this expended on screen energy and effort isn’t edifying or rewarding. It’s just exhausting.

It’s topical, but it settles nothing, informative and sensitive in its representations, cute but never cute enough.

It’s not entertaining. It’s discomforting at times, and at others obtuse and downright icky. But it does leave you with a little to chew on, if somewhat less that its creator presumes.

The culinary culture clash comedy The Hundred-Foot Journey dawdles, like a meal that drags on and on because the waiter is too busy texting to bother bringing you the check.

The comic book connecting scenes work, and the violence, when it comes, is a shocking contrast to the low-energy/low-heat movie surrounding those moments.

The action beats are bigger and better than they’ve ever been in a Ninja Turtle film — brawls, shootouts, a snowy car-and-truck chase with big explosions and what not. But in between those scenes is an awful lot of chatter and exposition. For a film that aims younger (save for the die-hards who grew up with this franchise), that’s deadly dull.

I wouldn’t mind seeing these characters again (Batacam penned a sequel, I hear), because the bare bones of a First Gen crime thriller are here. It’s just that everybody involved needs more practice in the genre to get it right.

Like Vi, a woman accused of “never taking chances,” Nappily Ever After never takes a chance, rarely exerts itself for a laugh or a moment of heart. Al-Mansour (“Mary Shelley”) plays it safe. We get the message. What we don’t get is “entertained.”

The quest, which takes our heroes to the Sea of Monsters, aka The Bermuda Triangle, is generic in the extreme. The fights/escapes all lack any sense of urgency and peril.

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

The laughs — from sight gags, on-the-nose-casting (Burn Gorman as a priest named “Damien”), quirky Keaton, Ryder and O’Hara line-readings and the contributions of newcomers Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe — are hard to come by.

But what’s here is still a promising, entertaining effort. And it’s a fine showcase for Cavazos, who nails Bridget’s vocal fry, her pose, the disturbed and self-destructive vibe that she wears like a stocking cap, her armor against a world her illness — meds or no meds — won’t let her master.

The movie and the story it tells are kind of all over the place.

The leads are more tolerable than engaging, but some scenes sing, the roadside stops have a timeworn charm and Irons, Gathegi and Bello make Better Start Running move right along, even if it rarely achieves a sprint.

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

Nobody on Earth loves dogs more than me, but The Dog Doc is too credulous and tone deaf to affluence to give a pass.

Even though it never lets us forget the lack of star power and modest budget, even if it never makes the leap to “compelling,” Raven’s Hollow is never less than an interesting effort and a good-looking argument that given the money, Hatton could show us something, with the right script.

The germ of an idea is here. They’re aiming for the correct tone, but neither the script nor the players land on the “twee” bullseye.

Give Green props for all that he got right, bringing Curtis back and making her the focus, for starters. But all involved seem to have painted themselves into a narrative corner that they weren’t able to write their way out of.

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

Clutter aside, it’s a likeable, well-intentioned mess of a comedy, one that’ll leave you with the warm fuzzies even if it loses the “thread” once, twice or thrice along the way.

It’s a loud, in-your-face tapdance through horror tropes that passes muster as a slick production even if it isn’t the most original thing I’ve seen this month.

Bloody, brutal and melodramatic.

Everyone, from director to cast, seems so rushed that there’s no time for romance, less time for leaps of faith and every moment of conversion is abrupt, dictated by the script and not by the heart.

Once you get past the cliched Spanglish dialogue and the sentimental tone of the early acts, A Better Life settles down into something both involving and moving.

As it meanders from over-familiar set-pieces and cliches — Tahir drums on empty paint buckets for money, predators face them at every turn, a callous system trips them up, and when they break into that brownstone, naturally they play dress-up — Shelter loses its way.

It’s all lovely to look at, as you’d expect from a movie directed by a camera operator/DP. But it has all the nutritional value of an orchid blossom.

The result is a “Legend” that feels inoffensively modern, or at least less offensive than it could have been...But you can’t make a bold statement or exciting action picture when every frame is filled with fear — of offending someone, of upsetting animal rights activists, of giving the audience a Tarzan they won’t recognize, of failure.

In a tale this timeworn and a film this devoid of humor, with only a few moments of humanity, with tension frittered away by the tedious repetition of the fights, anybody who has ever seen Godzilla in any incarnation can be forgiven for asking the obvious. “What else have you got?”

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.

Theater fans will bask in the knowing glow of “theater types” and offstage ensemble shenanigans. If only there were more of them for everybody to giggle at and feel invited to the party. Because curse or no curse, Ghost Light is never more than a “brief candle.”

It’s perfectly passable holiday entertainment for people who dated during the “Rocky” and “Raging Bull” era. Just don’t expect this Grudge Match to be much of a challenge.

It’s got a few laughs and a tiny dollop of heart.

Aftershock then becomes a catalog of most every unpleasant way of dying you can imagine.

Speaking of Looney, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how violent this pre-tween farce is. Slapfights, brawls, violent death and near-death experiences abound. Along with butt-sniffing and toilet-sipping (at a party) gags.

It’s too adult to be a “family” film, not edgy or gripping enough for grownups.

Astral may have a refreshing quiet dread about it. But at some point, the stakes are raised and a big payoff is in order. The climax has to feel like something the movie preceding it has earned. Not here.

The violent payoffs are well-staged and edited, and the archetypes solid. But McGowan can’t force herself or her cast to just get on with what they know they must get on with. The “Creek” never quite dries up, but we never get to the rapids either.

The action beats are taut, but the story arc crumbles under the weight of all the movies it steals from. The casting fails to pop, in most instances.

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.

The trouble with The Change-Up is that it doesn't change-up enough of the formula to render this new.

Screenwriter Lauryn Kahn and director Mimi Cave take a broad swipe at “Just give me a smile,” sexism and the objectification of women. Their aim is dark comedy — darker than dark, darker even than “Promising Young Woman.” But the chuckles are mostly in the finale.

It’s set up the way Chekhov’s play is traditionally-mounted these days, as an actor’s showcase. That’s just not enough to put His Three Daughters over.

As indie “spectral agent” dramedies go, it’s worth a look and offers a few laughs if little else.

Too much of what’s here is over-familiar, and the “familiar” isn’t anything anybody would get all sentimental over.

What we have in these three films is the streaming equivalent of a summer horror beach book, an R.L. Stine page-turner more interesting for “how this all turns out” than any shocks, frights or tugs at the heartstrings.

Beyond the Mask lacks the wit or excitement to truly come off, though it is intriguing enough to make you hope this team gets to make more films, perhaps spending more money on screenwriting as they do.

The often dry script, funereal pacing and generic spectacle of the digitally-augmented set-pieces makes for a movie that’s like “Captain Marvel,” only about half as much fun.

When the Coen Brothers miss, they miss with gusto. Images of Babe Ruth, swinging and collapsing in a heap from the effort come to mind.

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

Even die-hard horror fans can’t help but notice Halloween Kills stumbles through the nostalgia that made Green’s “Halloween” reboot work, and that “Kills” isn’t scary in the least.

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

If the filmmakers were as ballsy in scripting it as they had in asking Michael Caine to co-star in it, they’d have had something.

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

The Blackcoat’s Daughter — an illusion to a priest’s cassock? — never amounts to much more than its tone, the dread Perkins summons up with morose faces, shadows and music.

Hallestrom and his screenwriters may be stuck with Sparks’ formula, but they take advantage of the geography, the leads and a couple of homespun supporting players – Robin Mullens is a wonderfully folksy owner of the seaside seafood shack.

Hiddleston can’t pull off the folksiness that was Williams’ public persona.

Baird, and his sometimes muse Fimmel, are heading in the right direction. But this more tight if a tad tedious thriller doesn’t quite finish the trip or seal the deal.

The finale is seriously undigested, but that’s consistent with the film as a whole. It’s a workable, salvageable caper comedy that needed more comedy and a heist picture that needed a bit more interesting content and character development outside of the heist.

A fascinating but frustrating overreach that is never more fun than when it’s most over the top, but never really gets a handle on what it’s supposed to be about.

Convincing shaky cam or not, in the end all we’re left with is what we started with, just another bigfoot movie.

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

Filmmaker Berkowitz? He might be worth watching, too. The dialogue works and the performances hold up. But with a background in editing, he’s still not showing us much command of story and pacing. Maybe next time, as this outing only achieves “close, but no title this time” status.

I liked the tone and the limited arcs the characters play out. Up to a point. Scenes are smartly conceived and well-played. But I don’t care how much or how little the film cost. There isn’t much going on here, and even some of that isn’t explained on the screen between the opening shot and the closing credits, which is where it counts.

A vivid recreation of the early history of professional golf is the principle pleasure of Tommy’s Honour, a stately, slow and distressingly dull biography of 19th century Scottish golf hero Tom Morris.

Mendoza’s pitch, to “get it right” and have “real combat vets” have their story told, might be noble in its intention and the tribute (stay through the credits) to their service the film represents. But he and Garland emphasize authenticity over empathy, accuracy over dramatic connection.

It’s not goofy, original or clever enough to dazzle and hold the attention of anyone over 12. But then, it’s not designed to.

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.

The younger Franco doesn’t reinvent the genre or advance it in any way. But horror, as always, proves a nice proof-of-directing-chops test case, and he passes with flying colors. The performances are pitch-perfect, the picture opens with dread and the suspense builds nicely.

The thing looks just beautiful, and having the wonderful character actor Clancy Brown as a creepy old mortician “telling” the tales lends it gravitas and ups its cool quotient. But the stories from Spindell, heretofore a maker of short films (including an earlier version of a “story” told here), are wildly uneven in tension, suspense and horror.

Take away much of the myth, most of the sorcery and all of the humor of the 1982 John Milius-Arnold Schwarzenegger version of the sword and sorcery epic "Conan the Barbarian" and you've got an idea what the new "Conan" is like.

None of the performances of these unlikable characters grab you, give the viewer a sense of what’s at stake and why we should care. There’s also something very “Entourage” about Inside Game, both in the “guys from the neighborhood” group dynamic and the toxic sexism that the film practically embraces.

Mondocane is a mixed bag, as its sci-fi without really committing to that, “Oliver Twist” without the warmth, entirely too predictable for stretches and entirely too frustrating in its finale.

The effects are top notch and there are some chills in it. It’s just that the picture loses itself and any momentum it has in “explaining” these wonders and healings as the work of a Mary who isn’t the “Virgin Mary” all involved assume it is.

A lighter touch — it really wants to be a sentimental, downbeat comedy — might have made this yodeling Thai melodrama sing. As it is, it only hums along here and there, carried by its sweetness and superficially developed characters.

The one and only “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is in jeopardy again in Rupture, a sci-fi tale of terror and torture porn whose title just might be a pun on “Rapture.”

Think of Marty as an R-rated Napoleon Dynamite — foul-mouthed, irritating, irritable, self-absorbed and clueless. He’s also a bit dangerous, the personification of the bird that gives his filmed story its title — Buzzard.

I thought it was entirely too on-the-nose, time and again, as it saunters towards a finale sure to surprise no one, even those it leaves feeling film-comfort-food satisfied at the end.

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

Lucy in the Sky is a Lifetime Original Movie-style melodrama, over-thought, over-scripted and over-directed into something spacey, ethereal and trippy by the guy who gave us TV’s “Legion.”

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

The fact that Lopez is a good actress underneath the “image” (and vanity) makes us believe her, even when we know better.

An animated comedy of mixed messaging, thin humor and indifferent entertainment value, Ron’s Gone Wrong still has every chance of winning younger viewers over with its heart. That depends on how much affection kids can summon up for a cute robot.

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.

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.

Burnt isn’t a bad movie, but the melodrama is overwrought and overdone, the romance warmed over and the “Cocktail” formula shaken, stirred and utterly played.

As Catholic horror tales goe, Deliver Us is more of a good-looking failure than a scary, thrilling or entertaining dive into Church arcana.

As I’ve mentioned in many reviews of films of this ilk over the years, this isn’t my favorite genre. Unlike the somewhat better “Black Panther,” this installment was always going to be more somber thanks to the loss of its star. What the film lacks is the will to make make that loss heartbreaking.

Baldwin and Hayek knock back highballs and wine and whine that their lives of conspicuous consumption are over, belt out “The Sun’ll Come Out, Tomorrow” in Spanish and throw themselves at this as if it’s “As You Like It.”

H is for Happiness prioritizes ”feels” over coherence, weird-for-weird’s-sake touches over character development, while expecting endless voice-over narration to caulk over the cracks. It doesn’t.

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.

The performances, actors playing stock characters, are passable if not terribly compelling. The production design is first rate. But we see every single story beat coming at us like a comet we’ve been expecting for years.

Brolin is so damned good in the saddle, in the hat and in the part that a half-sober viewer could half forget how half-arsed this movie he's starring in is.

I appreciate the direction they wanted to take this, but the jokes needed work, the ridicule should be more directed at Jackson’s character’s various blind spots and intolerances — “This is my ‘Puerto Ricans I don’t trust’ file.” — and disrespect for human rights.

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

The tears in Clouds are built in. But all this manipulation feels excessive, unnecessary padding for a story that needed a vigorous trimming to break your heart and uplift you as it does.

Showing Up is amiable, pointilistically-observed minutia in which the minutia’s the point. It’s not for everyone, even among those who know art, and know “what I like.”

If you love exposition and shapely if bland young actors in leather, skinny jeans, knee boots, Goth cocktail dresses and heavy eye makeup, this may be the movie for you.

These pictures have grown less cute, less charming and less fun with each passing installment, and this one just drags as it meanders towards its over-hyped lump-in-throat finale.

A mad cinematic jumble of comic book imagery, comic book mimicry, multiverse plotting and ponderous, pandering fan service.

The Way Back is a dull if somewhat likable nothing of a sports melodrama.

Fahy does a decent job conveying vulnerability, even if the desperation that should figure in here seems a tad tame until the third act. Sklenar is mostly just a hunky pawn, here.

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.

The sad saga kind of plods along a predictable path — courts, violence, love — with only a couple of mild surprises in store in the third act. But no, there’s nothing remotely surprising in the finale.

Sure, he’s proven all he ever needs to prove, and then some, on the road. He’s dominated Broadway. Sold millions of records in his day. But this film and his last one, a doc about a C&W bend in the road on his musical journey (“Under Western Stars”) feels stiff, stale, self-serving and self-conscious.

Filmmakers John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle (“As Above, So Below,” “Quarantine”) serve up a horrific string of “Sophie’s Choice” situations, in between the breathless chases and brutal violence.

The actors are game, the action beats are handled with skill. But the story lacked shape. Laurent had the cachet to land a great cast, but not the skill to bend a tired, unsurprising journey and the script that relates it into something more interesting.

It all makes for a somber and self-serious (Shyamalan’s Achilles Heel) popcorn pic that is easy enough to sit through even as its pointlessness grows with every act, and its final act underlines and admits it.

The script isn’t much and the direction — save for a spirited high school bake sale food fight — is lackluster.

It takes a lot of effort to achieve the “effortlessness” in Hathaway’s performance of a character seemingly tailor-made for her, but she rarely lets that effort show.

It’s “Avatar” simplistic, glib and dumb and not nearly as funny as they seem to think it is.

The Next Level is a game too glitchy to stick with long enough to finish, so limited in appeal that it’d be under the tree Christmas Eve, consigned to a closet or basement storage by New Year’s.

Sinister as this often feels, the pedestrian direction, sloppy confusion of “frogs” and “toads” and the third act’s parade of perfunctory script beats bogs the film down. “Wetiko” never quite escapes the feel of genre pic that doesn’t quite come off.

What screenwriter Christina Hodson delivers is an appealing heroine, an adorably vulnerable robot, all alone among the Mean Old Earthlings, and something this insanely successful but ever-so-empty-headed franchise has never had — charm.

I appreciated its randomness, the underlying sweetness, even if too many of the monologues were more grating than charming. And the novel setting, while it doesn’t show us as much of the city as we’ve never seen (I’ve ridden the bus along these routes a few times) on screen, does count for something.

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

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

Wildly uneven, as I said earlier. But at least some good character actors got a nice German vacation out of it, and Berlin, I Love You is pretty enough to make you plan your own. Just avoid the bars, brothels and laundromats and you’ll be fine.

For those of us who have longed for a “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion” meets “Wedding Crashers” in French, Netflix is here to fill that void.

When the Game Stands Tall is a solid if unsurprising and uninspiring melodrama.

Still, those who adore the two stars will find some fun here. And if you don’t “know the story,” you won’t be nearly as bored as the rest of us.

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

The Old Ways never builds empathy for anyone, making it a horror movie you watch but don’t “experience,” its bland heroine someone who never makes us fear for her sanity, her safety or her life.

While the filmmakers might have shot for "Midnight Run," but settled for "Due Date," they wound up only achieving "Guilt Trip." Identity Thief is sputtering long before that mid-movie moment when it turns all sentimental and goes off the rails.

The third act has higher stakes and violence and rituals that race against a clock. But by then the story’s spell has dissipated, and any hope the tale might twist into something scarier, sadder or funnier is long gone.

Life Upside Down is a pleasant enough and appropriately downbeat “COVID Lockdown Comedy” of no particular consequence.

But “Story” plays out a bit like the band itself. It peaks early, hits its giddy stride during the blur of sudden fame, notorious personal appearances and all-for-a-goof excesses, and then fizzles out utterly.

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

The action finale, the actual 15 Minutes of War, atones for many of the sins this solid B-picture tallies up until then.

Would I go out to see Otherhood? No. Nor should you. And we don’t have to. It’s not all that, but it’s perfectly “Netflixable.”

Too much of what is here feels like filler, not advancing the plot or our understanding of the characters as this cast performs them, not sparkling enough to lift the rom-com beyond “adequate.”

The music drops are good enough to pass muster, and the peformances mostly transcend the tried and trite story and the frankly pedestrian direction.

If this hits, and it could, we could see a whole new chapter in Heigl’s struggling, diva-damaged big screen career. No more frothy, ill-conceived romances, just scary Joan Crawford/Barbara Stanwyck/Bette Davis/Theresa Russell minxes, black widows and back-stabbers. Why couldn’t she become the movie woman America loves to hate?

Sunset was never going to be a thriller, and the Chekhov comparison is mainly due to the Eastern European theatricality of it all. This unfolds like a memory play on wheels, rolling through the cafe society, simmering political tensions and brave new (automobiles, electricity) world heedless that this world is about to end. Suddenly.

An ambitious, over-reaching film without the budget, polish or will to achieve its aims.

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.

American Assassin is a Big Action Beats formula thriller that overstays its welcome and never quite gels around its hunky young star, allowing Michael Keaton to steal the movie out from under him.

The whole affair has a touch of “Polar Express” about it, kind of holiday heartless.

The most interesting character and performance come from the great Indian actor Iffran Khan (“Life of Pi,” “Jurassic World,” “The Lunchbox”). He brings a wonderful world weariness to this “dark money” criminal mastermind.

Dawdling along as it does, Million Dollar Arm rarely shows us the “juice,” a baseball comedy that is as tentative as a base on balls.

The Spine of Night is a reasonably good-looking — and gory — animated sword and sorcery saga for adults, a movie set in a wholly-realized fantasy world, but lacking a story or characters that invite us to invest ourselves in their fate.

The War with Grandpa can feel old fashioned. It’s too mild-mannered for our Pg-13-and-up era. But little kids — VERY little kids — will chuckle at the pranks.

Use Me is a mockumentary that works only as long as its still mocking.

I love Shannon’s performance here — introspective, guilt-ridden, sad and thoughtful. He makes the character credible on several levels, a simple man capable of “Being There” profundities, the very picture of the “haunted artist.” Or fake haunted artist.

Cullen and Warren give this drama a gravitas and poignance that transcends the trite formula It Snows all the Time never strays from.

It’s only a movie, of course, not one of the better ones in this sometimes entertaining but occasionally muddled franchise. Taken to heart as a movie of its moment, and not just experienced as “a ride,” it’s too bad they had to go out with a bummer.

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

It all adds up to perfectly banal kids’ entertainment, with just a single decent plot twist, a few cute lines and a tried and a couple of trite and true messages — “Trust yourself” and “stop polluting” stand out.

The central premise is a half-hearted retread. And the gags come from a score of earlier films and sitcoms.

The Wretched is a polished reasonably tight tale of a witch infestation coming to rural, lakeside Michigan, and the teenage boy who screams “Why won’t anybody BELIEVE me?”

Almost everything about this one hints at a funnier movie than “Smoke” turns out to be, from the goofy, Home Shopping Network show (or PBS grilling series) title to clouds of exhalations that decorate many scenes that aren’t as amusing as the filmmakers seem to think.

This culture-clash/mother bonding story was never going to be “Frozen River,” but you do sense that a lot of potential was squandered in denying these mothers big moments of mourning, bigger confrontations with the fathers of their sons.

O’Loughlin is the very definition of comic dead weight. Imagine making Greg Kinnear carry half of "Baby Mama," or sending Tina Fey out with Matthew Fox on "Date Night" and you’ll get the picture.

It’s just that the whole affair feels winded, an argument — Will humans finally accept the mutants among us? — that’s exhausted everybody concerned, with many involved somehow knowing that those “Days of Future Past” are returning.

Some of the subtexts director/provocateur Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your name,” “Suspiria”) suggests, in this adaptation of what is allegedly a more darkly comical novel (by Camille DeAngelis), have been given short shrift in creating a film of gruesome shock value, another startling performance by Mark Rylance, and little more.

It’s indulgent. But we knew that. It’s Tarantino. We come for the indulgence. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood might be his most self-aware picture yet, a time-burning wallow in 1960s pop culture, fashions and the “magic of the movies.” It’s also misshapen and meandering.

The conventions of the “fresh out of prison” drama are long-established. But they’re recycled, to good effect, in Chapter & Verse, a well-acted genre picture that suffers only from a chronic inability to surprise.

It’s a harmless and not utterly charmless Polish kids’ dramedy (subtitled, or dubbed into English) of The Big Game genre — a video game team hoping to win The Big “Robot Masters” e-sports tournament.

Unwieldy, overlong and overly reliant on melodramatic coincidences, A Place in the Pines is still better than it has any right to be, thanks to its cast.

And no, it doesn’t make much sense. Surely this is the strangest movie Cage has ever been in, and that’s saying something. But arresting image follows arresting image in Sono’s fevered vision.

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

Butler wears the weary man of war thing well, and his stunt crew is aces. Just don’t take any of the rest of this seriously.

Revealer punches above its weight in the production design and acting. But the script needed punching up, with more incidents and more testy one-liners to get through, and the funereal pacing makes what’s here play dull and uninvolving.

This isn’t Netflix’s “The Farewell,” which would be expecting too much. But it’s not too much to expect a more revealing and rewarding story than this.

As a stand-alone film it flirts with utter incoherence.

The resolutions to the mystery, the depictions of what we’ve only suspected, are gruesome, conventional and dull and generic. And that amulet? It’s an afterthought.

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

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

A broad, goofy primer on the not-quite-cutting-edge of consensual adult sexuality.

Russell sets out to frustrate, and he does. And Joy never rises above that, an aggravating, un-fulfilling and empty night at the cinema with great actors trapped in an overdue flop from people we were just starting to figure were flop-proof.

The third act’s twists and wrinkles aren’t worth the brain power it takes to sort them out. The scheme uncovered plays as low stakes, the violence simply an admission that “We need to give the audience something for their money.”

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

The picture just lies there, inert and lifeless, despite the attractive and interesting cast and what must-have-looked like a can’t-miss premise.

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

Squared Love is a vapid little “Around the World with Netflix” bauble from Poland, a romance about a teacher whose side hustle is modeling.

It doesn’t really work.

It’s a far-from-awful folk tale with a horrific edge. But it’s not suspenseful, and the generally unaffecting performances by the Israeli cast fail to draw us in and create empathy for the endangered.

Poots, Davis, McCormack, Squibb and Whigham quickly sketch in interesting, if not quite compelling characters. And they, more than the story or locale, make A Country Called Home worth a brief visit.

A few flashes of humor — in court (Jenny is a lawyer), in the romantic clutches and in (violent) action — and Collette’s career-long likability are all Mafia Mamma has going for it. It’s not enough.

It’s a sentimental, sometimes moving affair... It is also at times a reminder of how hard it is to manage a decent Civil War movie on a limited budget, and how hard it is, even today, to tell a Civil War tale untainted by revisionism.

Taken as a whole, the film is the quintessence of “mixed bag,” with some sketch situations, characters and performances commanding our attention, and others just sort of drifting by, “connecting” the disparate stories but accomplishing little else.

Call it a “near miss” comedy, with a bit of “better luck, more joked-up script, editing editing next time” written into Yardi’s contract.

Molly’s Game has a mesmerizing quality, and an exhausting talk-your-ear-off air that is almost shockingly uncinematic.

The energy in Timur Bekmambetov’s latest thriller — he did “Night Watch,””Wanted,” the “Ben Hur” remake, and produced the similar online thriller “Unfriended” — dissapates almost by default after that heady first act.

It’s over familiar, a movie that plays like recycled, R-rated outtakes from “Rules of Engagement” or “How I Met Your Mother.”

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

The whole plays as flat, never quite hitting a high, never remotely touching bottom.

Wang seems to have sincerely set out to make a cautionary tale, “inspired by true events,” with a dedication in the opening suggesting she knew a victim of MDMA. But what she’s releasing is straight-up exploitation, and a film too cautious to work on that level, too torrid to play the “Stay off drugs!” card.

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

This 2016 film was one of the first hints that “SNL” veteran Shannon was poised for a grand second act in her career (“Divorce”). Here, she’s angry, despairing, barely clinging to hope but determined to do right by her son, who hasn’t quite come out to her.

The bar for this version of “J-Horror” is high (“The Vigil,” “The Possession”), but not so high that The Offering couldn’t have managed something fresh and more interesting and at least more sensible than this.

American Dreamer is riveting to sit through, but too pitiless to embrace.

This milieu, kids flopping from apartment to house-breaking to checked-out hotel room that the maids haven’t cleaned yet, has an earthy promise that rarely delivers. Younger viewers may find a character to identify with, but the movie presents us only with superficialities

Aside from a moment here and there, we get little commitment from our star trio. What should be wrenching all along the way is mainly momentary grief, guilt or fear. For us to buy in, the leads have to buy in. They don’t.

Writer-director Benjamin Cleary’s debut feature does neither Ali nor himself any favors. The movie’s so low-key and low-heat that it’s slow. And with that lack of pace we’re forced to confront, often, how over-familiar this story, this version of “the future” and this film are.

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.

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

It’s impossible to shake the feeling that Pilgrimage, which takes its title from the book that was eventually published, is more a collection of missed opportunities than a tale for the ages.

The movie? Not all that, but Ng, Wu and On handle the fights and stunts with amused skill and Wu’s way with the lighter material makes it a lark, a middling martial arts action comedy that’s worth a few laughs, if you’re in the mood for that.

That points to the biggest shortcoming of Blink of an Eye. It’s a seriously unchallenging documentary, one that has no contrary voices suggesting why Waltrip never won before Earnhardt took him on (More hard luck? Nobody says so, nobody asks.) and as it lapses into hagiography, borders on “NASCAR Sanctioned” and “Official Myth-Burnishing.”

It’s an ungainly film that loses focus time and again, drifting off to indulge its stars with extraneous scenes and badly-handled or simply unnecessary story threads.

Extraction runs into the same problems any movie that’s on-the-run/fighting-your-way-out faces. It’s wearing, characters get shortchanged and the temptation to take absurd shortcuts in logic just to get us from point A to B is irresistible.

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

Hedlund has the best lines and makes a great case for future employment in movies of this genre. Affleck is reliably reliable in such roles, Pascal (of TV’s “Narcos”) impresses and Isaac is more prepped for action here than he was in “Operation Finale” or the “Star Wars” movies. Hunnam has the flattest character to play, something that doesn’t help a guy who always comes off as a less interesting, less fun version of Hedlund, even in movies where they don’t co-star.

The performances are daft enough to land, and the audacity of it all counts for something.

Anybody familiar with Jarmusch’s work will recognize his static style — the muted long conversations, the quiet, the storytelling largely lacking in incident, melodrama or narrative drive. Longtime fans will wonder where the humor is.

It’s brutishly heavy-handed, with a performance or two so hammy they came straight from the smokehouse. But those quibbles aside, Beneath Us is a torture porn satire that never fails to hold one’s interest, even if it doesn’t quite come off. It takes you from point A to point U — underground, literally “beneath us,” with efficiency and visceral verve.

This thriller sits on the gory edge of the blade, teetering between “not all that” and “not that bad.”

This “Seven” is more diverse, less patronizing than the famous Western it remakes. But it lacks the moral certitude and righteousness of its predecessor, a pre-Vietnam “America saves Paradise from a Dictator” allegory.

It’s not bad, and there’s always the argument that “your reach should exceed your grasp.” But Indivisible lumbers along too slowly to sustain interest via the seen-it-before combat scenes before getting to the REAL story — what the experience does to those who survived it and those they left behind.

Jonathan plays like an intellectual puzzle that isn’t challenging enough, an acting exercise that has everything but emotional connection and a tour de force robbed of its force by just lying there, inert when it should be picking up steam, cold when the characters and scenario should be heating up.

Well-intentioned, but predictable and instantly dated.

Phenomena plays more like the promising pilot to a TV series than a movie that wholly delivers the comic or traumatic goods.

Devil is the sort of story Rod Serling would have taken for a spin in "The Twilight Zone," back in the day. Shyamalan came up with the idea, produced it and got others to script and direct this 76 minute exercise in movie minimalism.

The film only picks up with its finale, and even that grand, murderous and visually stunning spectacle is somewhat spoiled by a preachy epilogue.

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

Sleepover is cheerful enough that it passes the time, even as that time passes ever-so-slowly as it stumbles for clues, through a Boston sight gag or two and into the “big finish” that’s more a series of minor busts. Leave this one to the tween-and-unders.

It’s not half bad, with a couple of decent fights — and a few where the fight choreographer’s instructions are a bit too obvious — and a fine finale, the scenes that come after two or three “explanations” too many.

Most of us are a little too jaded or at least sober-minded to swallow this at face value. Carefully limiting the “history” you tell gives the impression of competence, quick victory and a short war.

The players are good, with Mirchoff earnest and young as a nice contrast to the salty, rough-and-tumble elders, especially the iconic screen heavy, Perlman. It’s just that when the last card is dealt on this Poker Night, Francis isn’t content to let the best hand win.

“The Raid” was a great action film in which the violence, excessive though it was, served as obstacles in the hero’s simple quest. In Raid 2 the violence is the movie, its excess used to cover for an inept story, thinly-drawn characters and dead spots.

It’s fiction, far-fetched, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, beach-book thriller fiction. It provokes many reactions, but the one that stands out is “cheated.”

What’s left out of Light Up the Sky is a LOT more interesting than anything we’re shown here. It’d have to be. Because even by the standards of “officially approved” pop phenom bios of the Bieber/Miley variety, this is weak tea.

It’s about stasis, death and personal rebirth, not consequences or collateral damage. It suffers from those omissions.