Roger Moore

Philippe co-wrote directed and stars in Catch, so it’s easy to read a lot into this performance, a low-maintenance, low wattage but still recognizable movie star reduced to making a low-budget film in Shreveport.

Avoiding the conventional one man’s journey “from prejudiced to lovesick” leaves Haymaker with a vacuum where its heart should be. The picture was never destined to be a knockout, but settling for a draw seems a waste.

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

Entourage is the uninvited dinner guest who then insists on sticking around long after the party’s over.

It’s not so much bad as dull and ill-conceived. It doesn’t so much end as sputter out.

She (Parker) looks exhausted, first scene to last, and that fatigue spills off the screen onto us.

The jokes are strictly low-hanging fruit, but the film’s predictable path takes just enough care to avoid the places we’re sure we’re headed to sustain its 91 minutes.

This cannot be about music if you don’t have the rights. So there’s virtually no on-stage performance content. That means you have to downplay the significance of meeting the big musical collaborators of his life, too.

As weighty as a snowflake, and just as prone to turn to mush at room temperature, Let It Snow is a holiday comedy that sits right in Netflix’s wheelhouse.

O’Brien and Pollack have nice chemistry, and the darkened rinks, offices and under-lit houses give the picture a pervasive, tragic gloom that the sketchy but conventionally structured story never lives down to.

There’s value in movies that depict America as still-welcoming of immigrants in these divisive times, but Confetti (the title has to do with how Meimei sees letters, and processes information) rubs almost all the edges off.

It features a few ironic laughs, a couple clever conceits, some fun amateur hockey action, and a pair of showcase roles for the female leads. But its mopey, meandering narrative isn’t helped by a choppy, navel-gazing nature, and its black-and-white-flashbacks and shifts in point of view slow its forward motion to a crawl.

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.

Here character is sacrificed pure action and story becomes whatever they can make of a fifth rate Bond villain and ridiculous plot device.

The whole enterprise is very much a mixed bag, but as films that cater to this audience go, Woodlawn isn’t half bad.

This is so perfunctory and edge-free that it plays as incomplete, a movie “talked” into great reviews by hearing the filmmaker’s personal connection to the story.

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

Scorsese has delivered an ordeal pretty much guaranteed to leave a bad taste in your mouth, one that in this case plays as pedestrian and repetitive, and never feels like an “epic.”

It’s all eye candy and spectacle, all a bit much and pointlessly hard to follow. But make no mistake, this is something to see, even if making sense of it can feel more trouble than it’s worth.

The love story falls a little short, but the scientific sense of “the moment” is often spot-on in this mixed-bag of a debut from Canadian writer-director Akash Sherman.

There are laughs, but the uneven cast and the odd wonderful bit of physical shtick don’t add up to the sustained silliness that Masterminds cries out for.

Can Evrenol’s thriller is heavy on parable, semi-nonsensical in plot, but benefits from good acting and a grimly-realized children’s odyssey undertaken in post-Apocalyptic future.

Call Me by Your Name isn’t so much a bad movie as a dull, bloated one, a tale of teen sexual intensity drawn out beyond the point of holding our interest, footnoted with all these spoken (repeatedly, by one and all) provisos — “This is OK because…” That’s all well and good, but I found it lacking as drama (no parental conflict), romance and period piece, a turgid potboiler overheated under the Tuscan sun.

There is never a moment I didn’t wholly buy into the Two Emmas and their delicious on-screen rivalry. But there isn’t a moment where you lean back, laugh and revel at what glorious fun this is, when it plainly could have been and should have been.

Rocketman is a slog, a nearly joyless musical that threatens to take flight at several near-tingling moments and never does.

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

A mad, laugh-out-loud mashup of “The Little Mermaid,” “Harry Potter,” assorted vampire tales, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” the disaster epic “2012” and oh – “Pokemon” – just to impose the cinematic precedents on display here, Sorcerer is a Chinese twist on the reliable sword and sorcery genre which caused Hollywood to impose “Clash of the Titans” and “Immortals” on the undeserving.

Bouchareb gets fine performances from several wonderful, under-utilized actors, including Ellen Burstyn and Tim Guinee in smaller roles. But his morality play is too muted to work, too muzzled to have any bite.

The script has coincidences and twists that just pretzel-up the awkwardness. The direction is perfunctory, lacking the extreme close-ups that deliver bigger laughs — the Coen Brothers/Barry Sonnenfeld Rule. There’s enough here to provoke a smirk, here and there — maybe a chuckle. And one of the tiny surprises shows us how charming this all could have been.

All Back to the Fatherland manages to do is suggest the subject is worth more attention.

3D or not, the film about the mop-topped Canadian - who turns 17 March 1 - doesn't let us get very close to "the talent."

The most impressive element to this Michiel van Erp film (“Open Seas” was his) is the way it shifts direction and tone so abruptly that it could give you whiplash.

It’s possible to be a bit awed by the “JFK” ambition of 88, even if the execution waters down Eromose’s message to the point where we wonder if he’s simply lost his nerve.

The half-hearted lean into “jokey” means that Hunted never gets under your skin and transitions into a visceral experience.

It’s a good looking film, just a tad on the dull and predictable side. But the occasional flash of Hopkins threatens, at several moments, to turn this formulaic true-heist tale into something more psychological, more pathological or at least allegorical. He isn’t really given the chance.

An awkward blend of ultra-realistic violence, boundaries-bending satire and low comedy.

Workshop the story, script-doctor the dialogue and recast the lovely leads with actors who generate a little actual sexual heat and Besson might have had another “Fifth Element,” a minor classic on his hands.

Actress turned writer-director Clea Duvall (“The Intervention”) and comic actress turned first-time co-writer Mary Holland made something of a holiday hash of it, a movie with good moments buried under clumsy ones, with plenty of pandering layered on top of sentiment.

A movie worth seeing, worth mulling over, but not necessarily enjoyed.

It begins with such promise, a kinky modernist twist on a classical sci-fi morality tale. That it degenerates into conventional, genre horror is all the more disappointing.

Sweet Thing starts from natural empathy at the sight of seeing kids struggling, but refuses to grapple with that.

The one thing Coherence needs most is that word that gives it its title.

A faintly-creepy, lightly amusing horror comedy that promises a surprise twist and a hint of heart.

Too little is made of the actual closure of the bridges, of the tightening net closing in on the pursued.

You’re kind of left with the nagging feeling that this could work or could have worked with a more deft touch at the wordprocessor or sitting behind the camera on set.

The dance sequences, what few there are, have more daring to them than the plot of the picture. The back-stabbing and bonding and breaking down are all so tame that you wonder why they bothered.

There’s no getting around the disquiet Ramsay goes for and achieves with this nightmarish primer on postpartum depression at its most extreme. But at some point, the shocks numb you in ways the tedium of the myopic, intimate story hasn’t.

A confident, cocky and often comic promenade down the same primrose path.

It’s pretentious and indulgent. But as with most Ferrara films, Tommaso makes for an interesting trip into a seriously unconventional mind visualized by an always unconventional storyteller.

The air goes out of the balloon, bit by bit, through a Macau fight club and high rise scaffolding chase, and the long middle acts settle into tedium, exposition and entropy.

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

The film’s great gift to this piece of much-filmed history is demythologizing Jackson, a figure the script and Shannon portray as well-intentioned, hard-nosed and out of his depth in attempting to try charismatic sociopaths that most of the world would rather had been rounded up and shot.

Performances aside, there just aren’t enough “Mommy Issues” here to justify the tedium of a movie that challenges you and wears you out but doesn’t deliver a payoff satisfying enough to make it worth this much of your time.

Danish director Henrik Ruben Genz (“Terribly Happy”) can’t hide his cards and rarely even tries to. He’s stuck with a script that has “Promise you won’t kill us,” maybe the silliest line ever uttered to a murderer, but that features some dandy threats, some by the villain who doesn’t drive the Jaguar.

Even with the conspiracy and implied frame-up plot unfolding, the first hundred minutes of this “Drive” is too timid to deserve its over-the-top climax and over-explained payoff.

Alvarez knows her audience and has a better idea of what they want to see than I do, so more power to her and best of luck in the future. But maybe a little more effort to skip over or at least conceal the cliches, types and tropes would make that future work more “timeless” than generic and disposable as “this year’s beach romance movie for teens.”

The Believer is a creepy pseudo-intellectual horror story, a pretentious and arch mashup of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Misery.”

The setting and set-up are reliable, if a bit desert-southwest tried and true. The acting’s tolerable, the action beats good and the finale has a nice kick to it.

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

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

One pitfall of building your movie out of recycled materials is always going to be pacing. When every character is cardboard, every scene is preordained, you have to get more pop out of the performances and move this damned thing along.

Perhaps some of the same flaws lay beneath the surface of the original film, but the distraction of subtitles helped hide them. Here, they’re gaping holes knock “Secret” off the tracks long before it’s far-fetched twist ending.

That makes Guest of Honour more unsatisfying than bad, more polished than it could be in many ways, but sloppy in ones that count — namely the script. It’s a textbook case of a “fascinating failure.”

This Netflix production, scripted by Kaufman and perhaps rendered into something more sensible by co-writer and children’s animation vet Lloyd Taylor (“Nimona”) is fanciful but formulaic, and unlike most of Kaufman’s boundary-breaking writing, it’s downright derivative.

Here’s a sweet, slight little samosa of a Euro-Indian comedy, a tale that’s a little bit topical, a tad picaresque, with just a hint of Bollywood thrown in spice.

A little mystery and a lot less narration would have better-served this sordid saga.

I recognize the effects, the makeup, the murderous efficency and the bottom-line/it’s sometimes scary values of this visit to “The Evil Dead,” a film that was originally going straight to HBO Max. But the lack of fun marks this big screen abattoir squarely in “not my ‘Evil Dead'” and “not really my thing.”

I’ve found Ferrara’s cryptic, navel-gazing bent of late both tedious and yet fascinating in what he’s trying to get across about where his head’s at when he makes this or that self-reflective film.

All things considered, Ray Romano’s Somewhere in Queens is a pretty watchable dramedy despite all the “lows” that hang over it. It’s low-heat and downbeat, with low stakes and low ambition. The situations are low on originality and the jokes are strictly low-hanging fruit.

The picture’s meandering story told at a quiet, balletic pace rob it of much of the intensity that such Warning Labels for Ballet movies thrive on.

It doesn’t quite come off, and the “message” of this parable is either murky or too mundane to pay off. But there’s just enough here to make The Man Without Gravity worth your trouble, if only to see and hear how adorable Italian kids, just learning to insult, to love and to talk with their hands, can be.

Hyatt isn’t very good at getting across the urgency of the story, and for all the suggestions of torture (“Another 20 lashes!”) and scenes of prisoners being burned, the picture lacks drama or the tension that an account — based on the New Testament’s “Acts” and Christian tradition — might have had.

The picture never has much comic edge, and goes soft altogether in the later acts.

It truly works on the level too many other faith-based dramas do, as comfort food for the faithful, an altar call for the already saved.

The “Rescue Rangers” is technically impressive enough to be worth a look. And if you’re of a certain age, it might give you a bit of the warm fuzzies.

For all the bursts of blood, the gunplay and execution-style head-shots that punctuate scores of deaths, it’s hard to see Olympus Has Fallen (Secret Service code) as much more than another movie manifestation of a first-person shooter video game.

I.S.S. can be poignant and even pulse-pounding. But a promising lift-off, chilling set-up, dazzling production design and good effects can’t overcome a “more impressive than entertaining” label.

What’s missing from director Colin “Safety Not Guaranteed” Trevorrow’s thriller is that “wow factor” that Spielberg’s first outing delivered. Lacking that, and any serious effort at rethinking the story formula, Jurassic World plays like a theme park ride that’s a decade out of date.

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.

Abduction puts Lautner in motion and never goes very far wrong as long as he remains in motion.

The dawdling pace, meandering story and drifting point of view blunt this hooligan tale’s impact and pull its punches. It’s a “Clockwork Orange” without a social message, a hooliganism expose without much of a point, something the frustrating finale only underscores.

Savannah gets by on touches of grace and spirited performances, especially by Caviezel. After being so serious for so very long, it’s great fun to see him take on a “genuine character” with all the boozing, brawling and shooting that entails.

Whatever its sluggish pace and stumbling grasp of time, Queen of the Ring still manages to be a fine vehicle for making a case for women’s equality in a period piece that more than gives this sport and that period in time its due.

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

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.

Sure, it’s a mixed-bag, sentimental and soft even as the story contrives to put the friends at odds, with deadly consequences. But Ghost Lab has flashes of style and wit that suggest we’ll be hearing more from this filmmaker, and that it could be fun.

The most laughably ludicrous and clumsy “explainer” of a third act that Shyamalan has ever served up.

It’s just that there’s much to recommend it outside of those failings, sharp observations about the trap of small town life and the persona you take on in your teens than you never escape, the casual cruelty of teenagers that can (in the movies, anyway) leave scars that linger forever, the craving for acceptance that once denied, you never outgrow.

Truthfully, there aren’t enough gags and giggles to make this take flight. It sort of lumbers by for 100 minutes before sputtering out in the finale.

An empty-headed nothing of a caper comedy.

The Great Alaskan Race reaches for those tears, but may best be appreciated by being the most historically accurate — if fictionalized and not wholly complete — version of this story we’re likely to get.

Any documentary that points to a way out of the agonizing, expensive, life-extending trap of “The American Way of Death” is worth a look. This one, affectionate and atypical, poignant and privileged, grates almost as often as it moves.

Whatever “it” is, that spark that film actresses and actors have that makes them interesting and empathetic and anything else on the screen, Fanning doesn’t have it.

There are a few sensitive scenes, but it’s the big blasts of raunchy that deliver its laughs.

The folks re-adapting White’s book for Beyond the Reach tamper and tinker with perfection — a little overly convenient cheating here, a contrived finale that goes wrong and then goes more wrong. The film staggers under these blows and never really recovers.

The Chalk Line is never a complete write-off, but there is no getting around that it isn’t what it could have been.

Impressive. And violent. Just not a lot of fun.

Dogged determination in the face of hopelessness is the byword in writer-director Kim Byung-woo’s thriller, which is meant to be an action essay in the core compassion of humanity. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” may suit the mood this film sets. But keeping calm and carrying on is a hard ethos to shake when the stakes are this high.

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.

This film charting the rise of a “movement” that morphed into an “industry” is a mixed bag — upbeat and celebratory, contorting itself into a pretzel to avoid dealing with anything that might ruffle the potential audience.

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.

It begins with grand promise and achieves spectacle — via digitally-assisted stunts, explosions, etc. — on a scale that raises the bar on popcorn pic action. If only it all seemed justifiable and logical.

The slapstick is very small-kid friendly and even the most adult-friendly jokes are pretty mild stuff.

The movie never convinces us that Forster is convinced himself. The director lines up this bad good man in his sights, but he never quite has the nerve quite to pull the trigger.

As C-movies aiming for B go, “Saints” is watchable if utterly perfunctory in between the fights. It may have “Schrader” on the credits, but there’s not enough of The Master’s Touch here to elevate the material, the leading man or the movie to where it wants to be.

The last 75 minutes of Babysplitters doesn’t live up to the promise of the first 45. What is light, snappy and fun becomes labored, cluttered and almost too serious for its own good.

It’s like “Girls” with more funky New York locations, but with less sex, and with fewer laughs.

The script here is pretty stale stuff, with an under-developed side story of the cop (Karen Mok) on Donako’s trail and dialogue (in English and Chinese) that is often banal.

Besson aims his movie at anyone who’s ever held a grudge at an ill-mannered French waiter or clerk (haughty, and by the way, they’d NEVER condescend to speak to you in English). If that includes you, The Family has serves up a little wish-fulfillment payback, with a baseball bat.

This movie plays like the middle picture in a trilogy — a romance in a holding pattern. The arguments are realistic but inserted as mere plot requirements.

The movie’s tedious overuse of voice-over cripples it.

I was a little awestruck, here and there, at the world “Miss Peregrine” serves up. And I liked the dark and deadly sensibility Burton was reaching for. But the cast and the oh-so-conventional third act Battle Royale let a promising premise down.

Everybody Wants Some!! is just Linklater showing he can still summon up the immaturity to do a film like the ones he did when he had no name, no polish and was just starting out...This is the sort of movie he’d have made had he never grown as a filmmaker, if he’d only been a one-trick indie cinema pony, like Kevin Smith. And the world has already decided one Kevin Smith is more than enough.

The epic effects, titanic struggles and ever-evolving line-up of characters of "Apocalypse," coming hot on the heels of “Civil War” and “Batman v. Superman” and “Deadpool,” underline the exhausted ingredients of the formula these movies all use. The filmmakers strain to find something new to do with them, and watching them try too hard is wearying.

There’s a solid 90 minutes of fun movie here, 100 tops. And this thing just goes on and on, that “Neflix editing” that doesn’t take into account how quickly-paced screen teen rom-coms need to be.

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.

Penn the elder has made a movie more concerned with grainy images captured in twilight than pace, more wrapped up in picture-postcard cinematography than a plot that surprises or dialogue that rings true.

I’m inclined to cut The Twentieth Century slack for sending me on a deep Wiki dive into Canadian history, and the visual inventiveness and perverse camp of it all. But Maddin got there first, and his movies didn’t feel this gassed for the last half hour.

Hector might have been better off staying at home and reading a book, which also pretty much applies to the audience, in this case.

If “Collateral” fails to move you — and it might, because I was untouched — it may have to do with the clumsy clockwork machinations of a script that has to make its entire unholy and unethical premise seem “logical” and understandable.

It doesn’t transcend its genre, it wallows in it. Sometimes, that’s almost enough.

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

A rom-com that almost goes for it and almost comes off before losing its nerve.

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

It’s not highbrow entertainment. Movies like this always feel “designed,” like a theme park ride — story beat, JOLT, exposition exposition JOLT, etc. But Countdown manages the bare minimum — the occasional shock, characters we root for, thanks to the actors playing them, and situations fraught enough that the audience is talking back to the screen.

Ammonite is an explicit and seriously sexy sex scene wrapped in a dull period piece that illuminates neither the characters nor the titular fossils that bring them together.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the filmmakers hope, that you’ll be so swept up in “representation” that you won’t notice how generic the story is, and how dull and drab and laugh-starved its execution turns out to be.

It’s a timid, tired but a tender-hearted wartime romance that should have more edge than its subject promises.

Mistitled and meandering, it is Michael Moore’s worst film, his weakest whack at America: What Went Wrong?

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

Whatever romance and charm Gruen summoned forth from these rough and tumble show people living by their own laws in a traveling, self-contained world of poverty and cruelty, director Francis Lawrence has hacked and ground them off.

White House Down is a corker, real competition for “Fast & Furious 6″ as the dumbest fun you’ll have at the movies this summer.

Cut through the cute that crosses into “cutesie,” tolerate the stereotypes and ignore the sentiment that claws at cloying, and Team Marco plays like a pleasant time killer of a comedy suitable for the whole family.

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

Somehow, writer-director Sean Mullin’s short, far-fetched love affair comedy charms and works more often than not.

Good performances by Derbez and the kids recommend Radical. But wading through the cliches of the genre and stumbling towards that inevitable feel-good finale — blowing any “highs” the picture might celebrate, make it hard to recommend.

Shoot outs, wisecracks, narrow escapes and brutal, bloodied captures, a big BOOM that might be coming and Raybans that might never come off. It’s oh-so-pretty to look at. But talk about empty calories.

Needed more movie to go with its message.

Sandler’s in a role tailor made for him, and he still lets us see the wheels turning and the effort it takes to make this guy feel real. And for all its half-hearted twists, there’s rarely a minute’s doubt as to where this “Hustle” will end up.

Ghost in the Shell can’t escape its own ghosts, the movies, stories, characters and even settings of truly original work that predates it. For all its gory mayhem, it’s a movie as bloodless as it is sexless.

A la Mala begins with promise and finishes well enough to justify the investment in time. It’s all that dull, formulaic stuff mediados película (mid movie) that sucks the salt right off the tequila glass and leaves this one too stale to swallow.

But pretending this is anything other than pleasant, time-killing filler for the next Marvel marvel is laughable. Changing up the story removes some of the onus of comparison to the first Tobey Maguire/Sam Raimi “Spider-Man.” Not when it comes to romance, suspense, guts and heart, however.

Tone is tough when you’re snickering at “gun nuts” while you live the good life off underhanded ways of selling them. The movie takes swipes at Bush era bungling and corruption while reveling in it, because, well, these guys had fun doing it?

But Echo Boomers — terrible title, BTW — can’t get by on echoes of better thrillers that covered the same ground. And betting on Schwarzenegger making the family name an acting dynasty seems like a long shot, even in a business known for its nepotism.

If you’re a demonic possession movie completist, if you simply must see everything in this worn genre that crosses your path as it crosses itself, you could do worse.

The “reality” and the suspense and the narrowly-defined “entertainment value” dissipates in an ending that talks its way out of any sense the story might have made and any sense of satisfaction the viewer might have hoped for.

One can appreciate all that is accomplished with the bare minimum of visual variety and external clues, threats or assistance and still find this thiller wanting. At the end of the day, you’ve got to deliver some payoff worthy of the paranoia and suspense everybody is talking themselves into.

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

For all its attempted ethereal touches, Train Dreams never settles on a track that delivers one.

It’s an indie film that reminds us there’s talent out there that mainstream distributors haven’t embraced — in front of and behind the camera. And fittingly enough for the subject generation, “Meltdown” feels self-satisfied but incomplete, with a finale that plays like a pulled-punch.

There’s not a lot to this, and if you’re looking for straight-up frights, you’ll be let down. But I laughed more than once at these kids trying to get answers for the unexplainable.

It’s an engaging yarn, set in a place, a time and among a people rarely represented on the big screen. But “Ultima” is a poetic novel that becomes prosaic on the screen.

Non-Stop is a solid, workmanlike action picture that builds slowly, bends over backwards to over-explain itself and its villain, and delivers a lulu of an ending.

Writer-director Defa manages a few engaging exchanges, smart scenes and running gags.

It’s not interesting enough in between action beats to make you stay in the same room with it. Bathroom break? Need to make a sandwich? Just leaving it running. You’re not missing much.

A quick, dark sketch of a comedy, sort of a Bob Oedenkirk special.

The look of Zhang Chong’s (“The Fourth Wall”) film is more impressive than the hard-to-follow “Inception-ish” story or the acting.

There’s little tension, little sense of the suffering even if we understand the stakes. The best you can say about the whole enterprise is that it’s a righteous story, clumsily told.

Good acting and sharp editing make The Barber a most engrossing serial killer thriller. But too much talk, mostly in a lecturing over-explained finale, almost undoes all of that.

The soothing, almost comically-whispered narration by Michael Stuhlbarg fills in around the edges as he reads Ferragamo’s words, and almost hint at places this film might take us.

Colman is brilliant, Ward brings a lovely wounded nobility to Stephen and the warm and cuddly Jones is set up to sum it all up. But Mendes will not or cannot take us there in this personal project that perhaps needed another person or two’s input, and workshopping and re-writing before the camera rolled.

It just takes a very long time to get going. Apparently seventh grade doesn't pack as much potential for amusing, scarred-for-life trauma as sixth grade.

It’s well-cast, but Tautou and Duris don’t set off the sparks and create the longing that would give this tragic romance some heft. Everybody else takes a back seat to the inspired visuals.

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.

The leads make this tolerable.

Manages to deliver a striking, nicely detailed, visceral thriller built on a corny, old-fashioned script.

Maybe this film played as quick and warm and fun in Sweden. But for me it just lumbered and stumbled along.

Janney is flinty enough in what isn’t one of her best performances. Smollett, recently seen in “Lovecraft Country,” but a reliable screen presence since “Eve’s Bayou,” gives the picture its heart.

Martone gets bogged down in the family melodrama and drags out that first act’s play (Wasn’t there a funnier one to sample?) so much that he wears down our interest in what’s going on.

A less bland script would have helped. More edge, more slang, more contrast between the city girl (woman) and the country film. Falling Inn Love isn’t unpleasant. It’s only problem is that it’s not enough of anything else, either.

Seeing these veteran players go through their paces, find their comic rhythms and probe for laughs where many a laugh has been found before is not a bad thing.

The Big 4 never goes far wrong when action is the reason for the season. Tjahjanto and his team know how to frame, film and edit a good brawl, and a decent shoot-out, too.

The results aren’t great. The picture’s predictable except when it’s at its most illogical, and the pacing is slow-footed when it needed to canter. But hell, you throw Thomas Jane, Gabriel Byrne, Scottie Thompson, Anna Camp and Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss against a saloon wall, you’re going to hit something.

What’s served up is dry history that neither judges nor commits to what might be “tragic” in this story, which is understandable, given the principals.

Alice Through the Looking Glass, which has precious little to do with the rhyming collection Lewis Carroll penned with that title, is a dreary, joyless affair.

I’m afraid this is another case of Netflix’s Big Blank Check indulging a filmmaker, who cashed it and lost himself in the “White Noise” superficialities while never quite wrestling a perhaps-unfilmable novel into shape.

It's a movie of thematic dead-ends. Director Azazel Jacobs and writer Patrick DeWitt give us a slow SLOW and somewhat morose tale that isn't remotely funny or profound enough to sustain that pace and tone.

New Zealand and West Virginia provide the striking settings, and you can almost see what the cast saw in this as promising and meaty. But the script skips past deeper debates and doesn’t deliver much in the line of fireworks for the love triangle.

House of Ga’a is at its best in action, as the fight choreography is good and the pacing is sharpest. When we settle on palace intrigues, the picture slows to the point of being static with interiors, infighting and betrayals of the sort one sees in soap operas the world over, even those set in pre-colonial West Africa.

The movie this most closely resembles is the similar “true story” “Calendar Girls,” only with no nudity and less comic edge.

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

Burton has blown up Disney’s ode to magic, misfits finding their gift and a mother’s love into a shiny but bloated, glum affair that feels “BIG EVENT” in scope, and depressingly heartless in execution.

Even if it bogs down in the middle acts — seriously bogs down — and has missing pieces of the story puzzle even as it takes pains to show us what would be his downfall, this Allan Ungar dramedy plays. More or less.

So while the jokes often land and the music is still perfectly in tune, the novelty’s gone from “Pitch Perfect”, the sequel to the surprise hit of 2012.

An over-reach for a “Hangover” styled spin on motherhood, with drugs, sex, booze and “experiment,” it reaches raucous on occasion. There are laughs, a disproportionate number of them coming from the trained comic in the cast, Kathryn Hahn.

A Remarkable Tale stays upbeat and positive, and manages to have a little fun with a subject that’s roiled the world for a decade. Cute or not, that’s saying something.

It’s utterly harmless, even in its subtexts — that hip hop and funk are where ALL music comes together. If the kids are going stir crazy, give it a download.

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 sometimes entertaining, dazzling-on-the-field biography built around an utterly colorless lead performance.

There isn’t a bad performance in it, and those turns made me buy in just enough. It’s still a mixed bag, but for those in a “Ghost” frame of mind, it’s not bad.

But it’s like they’re at a loss about what to do with real people, real situations, real traumas or emotions without comic book men and women in tights and lots and lots of effects.

I’m Not Here is never more than a short, morose melodrama whose chief shortcoming is that there’s not more that’s new, that there’s not more “here” here.

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.

Heart of the Hunter strains to get out of its own way, a provocative action picture that wants to sprint and can’t stop stumbling and getting distracted all the way from the starting gun to the finish line.

Doucouré brings a much-needed new perspective and new voice to the cinema. But this doesn’t have the depth or grim impact of a “Kids” (1995) or “thirteen” (2003).

As in reality, the best part of the story of any such romance is that bowled-over introduction. It’s every complication that intrudes after that which becomes a drag, and becomes the part we forget or wish we could.

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

We don’t get enough of her mistreatment by the British press (back THEN) and enough justification for “Why should we care, again, now?”

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.

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

Free Fire falls short as a moral lesson or satiric statement, shorter still as a “Shoot’em Up” style ballet of bullets.

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.

What We Hide is no Winter’s Bone. But this isn’t a bad effort at capturing how the drug crisis impacts its youngest victims. It’s simply an unsurprising one.

Heche makes her curtain call memorable, not wasting one second of her screen time, a compact performance of canniness and compassion that nicely complements the leads and makes this worth watching, if not really worth “endorsing.”

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

It’s all pretty enough, but this is lesser Ghibli, more a “Borrowers” than a “Ponyo,” an animated bauble as hollow as a turtle shell purse.

A visually arresting, fascinating failure that may have you reaching for the calamine lotion before it’s over.

The plot is convoluted to the point that the picture is almost never not ponderous. There’s a lot more “history” than is probably necessary, and less comedy than was required to make this come off. Still, it’s kid-friendly and martial arts-happy and almost on a par with the least of the Depp “Pirates” pictures.

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

With faith-based films, message often trumps other considerations, not a happy situation in most movie genres. Faith, Hope & Love gets the “faith” in, and the “hope” and even a hint of “love.” It’s the comedy that lets this romantic comedy down.

Can’t say it’s great, can’t say I didn’t laugh, more than once. If splatter is your kind of thing, this is your kind of movie. Not bad for what it is, in other words. And don’t forget the subtitles!

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

The picture hews too closely to formula to be anything more than filmic comfort food.

It’s competent on several levels, generally well-acted and no more unpleasant than it is challenging.

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

Desolate is about two plot twists too complicated for its own good.

Tragedy Girls is “Heathers” without the just desserts (virtually no one “deserves” his or her fate), “Mean Girls” who don’t truly turn on each other, a slasher satire without a punchline.

The upside of The Upside is that Hart’s fans will find just enough here to warrant the ticket price.

The line between “cute” and “cutesy” is violated, repeatedly, in the sometimes funny, often cloying comedy The English Teacher.

Eisener runs up against the wall of shocks that stop being shocking and torrents of tiny tyke profanity that become repetitive and stop being funny. This isn’t “Attack the Block,” not by a ways.

It’s “Dragon Tattoo” complicated, without that one writer who could thin the material out, discerning between what is important and what should be treated as subtext, and cast accordingly.

It’s a garish mess, more interesting as a concept and production design exercise than as a movie. But you’ve never seen anything quite like it.

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

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

The players utterly inhabit their banal characters, but Hartigan only delivers a couple of scenes that merit all this attention to detail.

What’s on the screen is more allegorical than interesting, although some of the visuals reach the level of indelibly nightmarish.

Lacking a more coherent organizing principle than “fly on the wall/slice of life” renders Stop-Zemlia — which takes its title from a sort of long-running game of slap-tag — somewhat colorless, if not entirely pointless.

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.

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.

Its grisly violence and ridicule-religion tone make it sort of the anti-"Exorcism of Emily Rose."

Orley’s screenplay borrows from several sources and is never quite wrestled into the same shape as the legions of better movies on this boy-comes-of-age theme that preceded it.

Hare Krishna! never amounts to anything more than a mix of historic relic and modern day recruitment film. And aside from the already-converted, who’s going to want to see that?

Whatever their other gifts, they cannot find the fizz here and can never get Wiig to commit to the sort of film that she, even when she was making it, must have realized was beneath her in her post-”Bridesmaids” glory.

A muddled mystery-thriller that’s something of a wash, one that director-turned-actor David Cronenberg all but steals.

The Retreat may be horror by the numbers, but there are solid reasons these character types and story tropes are recycled, again and again. As they teach you in horror film school, they endure because they work, even if they don’t have a prayer of surprising anybody as they do.

Beast is an over-the-top savage and sometimes head-slappingly silly animal attack thriller. Its artfully paranoid and claustrophobic, comically cuddly and pretty much begs the audience to shout at the screen. A lot.

Here’s a no-budget Canadian thriller that comes oh-so-close to being the “Little Horror Engine that Could.” Halloween Party almost gets by on just-enough character development, a workable plot — if they’d stick with it — and Classic Canadian Comic Banter.

The finale Reijn slaps on Babygirl seems a cop-out afterthought.

Kidman works up to a fine but somewhat under-motivated fury.

Lonesome manages to be a movie long on charm and short on most everything else.

Actor-turned-director John Asher’s warm and fuzzy picture undercuts a big chunk of the goodwill it earns by parking multiple endings after its climax, and beating its sappy theme song — a cover of The Carpenters’ “Close to You” — into our heads, scene after scene.

You’d think with the director of “Yes, God, Yes” (Karen Maine) behind the camera, this comedy would take flight. Too much of what’s here stops just short of paying off with a big laugh. Blame the script or the tentative players (aside from Deaver, none of the younger cast members knows how to stick a punchline), but for all its intended charm and hilarity, Rosaline always settles for “ish.”

Saint Laurent plays like the most inside-baseball fashion film ever, too many random “highlights,” too few moments of inspiration.

Has a "been there, done that, jailed for it" feel.

Beware of any advertising that labels Andersson “wacky” and this a comedy. Even by deadpan Swedish standards, this is pretty dry.

Kemper, I have to say, just brings it. Sure, there were stunt doubles on board, but the pratfalls, the fury of a woman wronged, the lie-on-the-fly cunning — this is a You-Don’t-Mess-With-Momma we can get behind.

It’s not the editor, but the editing strategy that undermines Beautiful Boy.

Story matters, and this one didn’t need to be told.

It’s a stoner “Catastrophe,” for those who remember that Sharon Horgan/Rob Delaney TV series of a few years back — trippier and raunchier if not as sensitive or frankly, as funny.

We expect documentaries to tell us the ugly, unvarnished truth, although that’s generally a futile hope and a goal rarely achieved. In this case, selective editing stigmatizes its heroine and avoids the more interesting wrinkles in the story, which — difficult as it was to tell — feels incomplete.

It’s all perfectly workmanlike, save for the fights, which are splendid. If Medieval Times are your jam (as they are mine), Medieval is worth a look and almost entertaining enough to get by.

Wilson seems perfectly cast, but comes off as so mellow there’s barely anything comical to hang onto. A few flashes here and there tell us where this could have gone.

The singer and tabloid darling Chris Brown more than holds his own with this crew, apparently not even needing a dance double.

The story is nonsensical and the action tepid. So if you don’t find the Brit-quips funny, there’s not much for you in Mortdecai, just vintage British motorcars, foppish gibberish and Depp curling and re-curling that mustache, punctuating every line with “Right!” or “Quite!” That makes for a quite watchable mess.

The Wedding Guest is no “Bourne” or “Run Lola Run,” or “The Getaway.” It’s just an ambling “antic” dash through the New India, forced to deal with Indian train and bus timetables (many rental car counter scenes) and the region’s sea of humanity, “where anyone (who looks Indian or Pakistani) could get lost.” And if that’s the case, what’s the hurry?

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.

Everly has just enough novel touches to entice aficionados, but not enough to transcend the carnage and cliches. But Hayek, back in the sort of B movie that launched her career, gives good value and will make you cackle in surprise, if you’re the sort who can giggle at the old ultra-violence as it is served up in heaping helpings here.

But if you’re waiting for that heartbeat-skipping moment that big screen romances have to deliver to come off, don’t bother your cardiologist. The Sun is Also a Star can’t deliver one.

It’s easy enough to sit through, but the entire affair is more deflating than heartening.

Hart is so sparing with her action beats and so staid and self-serious in her supernatural touches that the picture never sparks to life.

The picture simply isn’t pitched in a light enough tone to work as comedy, and the “mystery” isn’t mysterious enough to come off either. A reach for “shared humanity” rings hollow.

Film buffs will see Goodbye World as a sort of “Trigger Effect” meets “Return of the Secaucus Seven” — growing up, learning to look at the world through more jaded adult eyes as the world ends.

The movie creates a lovely arc for how we think of Ali, from monster to, “Well, maybe not.” But you’re allowed to think the filmmaker is naive, tilting his story toward those on Ali’s side, buttressing a case for his humanity and justifiable skyjacking.

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

This Silent Night doesn’t land its satiric punches cleanly. And in abandoning the “comedy” part of “dark comedy,” it isn’t exactly a place to visit to get happy during a global pandemic.

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.

Fading Gigolo is John Turturro’s idea of an old school Woody Allen comedy, so he wrote Allen into it.

Whatever its intent, Bravetown stumbles through a steady supply of contrivances designed to make the budget work and the storylines overlap.

A surehanded, tight and minimalist amateur-kidnapping thriller that benefits from a cast of some repute and a few nods to Tarantino within its 94 minutes.

What makes Films Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is Bening’s performance, which is as one might expect is much more than mere impersonation.

I found the entire enterprise just a tad above “boring,” lacking much in the way of action or urgency or connection with the characters. But eventually it settles in and we get moments of mild excitement and genuine pathos.

The performances are perfunctory and the scenario standard-issue even if the execution of this no-budget thriller is top drawer.

You might be rooting for it at the end as fervently as you were at the promising beginning. But by then, it’s already disappointed, with far too many punchless punchlines for its own good.

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 takes the involvement of the FBI and subpoenas and Big Government tech to nail down what IP address in this tiny village was the source of all that turmoil, anguish and mental health mayhem. That isn’t right.

As stories of the Occupation and impending Holocaust go, A Radiant Girl never overcomes its artistic emotional detachment.