Roger Moore

Red 2 goes down easily, from Marvin’s demented moments of relationship advice to Dame Helen’s tender and amusing “Hitchcock” reunion with Sir Anthony. There’s a knowing twinkle in their eyes, and in everybody else’s. “Yeah, we could’ve done a Bond film,” they seem to wink. “And it would’ve been a bloody fun one, at that.”

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

It’s a violent, noisy, slangy and pricey superhero movie that’s for fankids, not fanboys or fangirls or the lactose intolerant. Talk about cheesy.

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

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

Minor moments of slapstick may tickle the kids, but anybody older, especially those who remember what Williams was like in his prime and how funny Stiller was just two “Museum” movies ago, will wish this tomb had stayed sealed.

Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea merely unravels the yarn that inspired the great book, a good-looking film that never sinks, but never really soars either.

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

An engaging Israeli film about the days when the people throwing rocks, assassinating soldiers and setting off bombs were Jews out to carve a state for themselves out of the British "mandate" in Palestine.

A soapy period piece that hits all the usual mileposts in filmed versions of such stories.

Kampmeir’s made a lean, disturbing #MeToo tale that should be the last thing any acting class shows its students before graduation, if not on enrollment day as well.

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.

A musical vamp on young LA's decade-long Pussycat Dolls fascination with tarting up like strippers and shaking those money makers, it's somewhat less than the sum of its parts. But those parts. Oh my.

What “Cure” doesn’t do particularly well is introduce a mystery, add menace and heighten suspense in racing towards a conclusion. There’s no “Race” for the “Cure.” Still, it’s just chilling to experience, a novel and thought-provoking take on what ails us and our fruitless search for relief.

Restless is far more precious than profound. But that takes little away from this soulful teenage exploration of love, life and death.

When it works, it works. But if this character and this franchise are to survive, “Never Go Back” needs to be a promise Reacher makes — about ever playing a parent again.

The Dressmaker doesn’t so much change the pattern of this “Peyton Place” style story as render it ugly and humorless.

It manages a moment, here and there and just a hint of who screenwriter/genuine “character” Diablo Cody (“Juno,” “Young Adult,””Jennifer’s Body”) once was.

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.

The story is off, the heart is missing and the laughs aren’t there.

Marionette is a perfectly-gloomy but overly-subdued Scottish thriller pretty much wholly undone by a contorted “twist” that derails its third act.

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

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

The general comic ineptitude at work here muzzles killer supporting player Chris Parnell (playing her dad) and squanders fine, bubbly work by Rice (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”) in the film’s faster-paced opening act.

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

Blase actors rob this of any prayer of being scary.

Guzman makes even the most trite moment — hailing a taxi in oh-so-tolerant Paris — amusing.

For all the fun these folks could have had with Hercules maintaining the supernatural assistance facade, or denying it as his handlers gild his lily testifying that it’s true, the movie is content to just go through the motions.

Nona never has much in the line of suspense, but that long tease of an opening act robs the film of the grim and gritty drama Polish skims over in the brothel passages. It doesn’t strip the story of its pathos. But the imbalance here is patience-testing and maddening.

Whatever they edited out of The Sunlit Night, they made certain to keep the funny, sweet and sunny parts. And Slate makes the time pass like a late summer Green Flash — an enchanting moment or two or three, and gone.

The Evening Hour may lean into stereotypes of Appalachia and the lawless dead end many find themselves driving into. But King, working from Elizabeth Palmore’s script, humanizes the character “types” and the “statistics” to make one of the more compelling dramas set in this world and its struggles.

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

The heart of Max is a boy learning about an always faithful dog, and as sentimental and manipulative as their bonding moments are, that’s what works.

This doesn’t have the wit or warmth of “Swing Vote” or the mean-spirited political currency of “Veep.”

There are clever ideas and casting flourishes at the heart of “Boy Kills World.” But in execution, one keeps coming back to the phrase “Less is more,” even in a hyper-violent action comedy where the excess is kind of the point.

If the only martial arts movies you’re seeing are “Crouching Tiger” pictures, it’s good to know that they’re keeping up with the state of the art, even if they’re not actually inventing it.

It’s well-acted and broadly sympathetic, but a time-killer of a comedy that kills too much time for its own good.

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.

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

It’s too bad the script lacks the sight gags or one-liners that could have made this good looking picture more animated.

Clever, funny but emotionally stunted. Like most teenagers.

For a genre picture, this one is better than average, letting us see what two fine actors saw in the script and not leaving them or us disappointed in the result.

As Sonic the Hedgehog 2 blows up the box office on its opening weekend, it’s worth reminding one and that while this may be cheesy, inane and only suitable for the ten-and-unders, you’re saving the cinema, the movie-going experience, and getting kids back in a habit that could easily disappear.

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

What a random, almost plotless debacle The Nun II turns out to be.

It’s a lighthearted spectacle, but so disconnected from reality, narrative and human emotions that there’s almost nothing to it.

There’s nothing interesting going on here.

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.

Whatever the film’s other failings, it presents an incredible story with a credulous, approachable innocence that it to be envied, whether or not you believe a word of it.

While The Giver scores points for being smarter and deeper than “The Hunger Games” or its inferior photo-copy (“Divergent”), coming after all those other versions of this plot does neither it, nor us, any favors. The Giver has nothing new to offer.

Despite Palmer’s investment in the title role, there’s little more to add about Alice except that it shows up two years too late, even less logical, and a lot of budget dollars short of “Antebellum."

It’s not on a par with Scorsese or Coppola’s best statements on this history, but it’s not bad. And twice the De Niro at the same price makes it a bargain.

There’s no methodical build-up to the suspense, no time to empathize with the characters, just unneeded bits of exposition the first film didn’t need to scare you to death.

If Israeli B-movie maker Navot Papushado (“Rabies,” “Big Bad Wolves”) had kept this thing on its feet and sprinting — fewer pauses for motherly pathos, Spaghetti Western face-offs, etc. — “Milkshake” would have gone down easier, no matter how much gunpowder was used.

There’s little sense wasting 100 minutes on stale fruitcake like this.

It’s not much fun, and not particularly gripping.

These movies are rarely much more than background noise for holiday decorating/entertaining/cooking, or TV babysitting for parents trying to manage all that grownup stuff. Candy Cane Lane doesn’t offer much even for those being baby-sat, either.

They may have wrung everything out of “Shazam” in just one movie. And this is just that movie’s inferior sequel.

The characters aren’t sketched in. They’re underscripted outlines for “characters,” which might cut it for a video game, but not for a movie. The multiple deaths and rebirths fatally lower the plot’s stakes, and nobody in the cast makes us feel the terror or the grisly ends that keep happening to them.

Mumford and O’Leary get beyond the cardboard character “types” and make these people more interesting and conflicted than they first seem. And the claustrophobic milieu, just two people staring at long range video, punching buttons, maneuvering their Reaper and trying to make snap decisions that won’t haunt them, serve the movie well.

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

Ptacek, as she was in the short, makes a great foil. And the addition of Rossum and Perlman to the cast adds pathos and paranoia, guilt and menace.

The players embrace this for the lark it is. Their pleasure in going this gonzo spills off the screen.

It demands attention. It requires a lot of life experience to connect to its themes and subject matter. It’s a movie for the old, and those dealing with the philosophical, taking-stock questions of life. If that describes you, sad as it sometimes feels, Nostalgia can be an exercise well worth doing.

A genuine “bodice ripper” of a thriller, with the requisite heavy breathing that comes after said bodice is ripped. The sex isn’t explicit, but Olsen and Isaac suggest the heat that gives this doomed affair its momentum.

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.

Rock is a poorly written and ineptly directed genre piece that lacks tension, suspense, fear, all those things that make’ a “thriller” thrilling.

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

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

I didn’t hate it, but didn’t get much out of it and found it boring. Still, fans of kidnapping, impaling, hot-poker-in-the-eye cinema may take to it as their cinematic happy place.

Absolutely nothing about Gringo works. Well, maybe one decent car crash pays off. The performances, situations, dialogue and story beats are just flung at the screen in the vain hope that something sticks...Nothing does.

The movie borders on abhorrent.

That score — insistent, sexy, jazzy and loud — almost puts it over, letting us skim over the ways the laws of logic and physics are violated, the lack of charisma of these “charismatic” magicians, the works. Until the ending, where it all feels like a cheap cheat and a waste of two hours and nine minutes of your life.

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

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

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.

The film loses much of its lean, mean narrative drive when we get into group dynamics — who can you trust, who has been drinking the tall grass KoolAid — and the whole supernatural mumbo-jumbo “explaining” what they’re dealing with, and how they can escape it, takes over In the Tall Grass.

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.

Actress turned director (TV’s “House of Cards,” “The Americans”) Roxann Dawson balances the hospital room action with the impact finding the lost boy had on the faithless paramedic. There are beautiful moments that capture the quiet terror of death by drowning.

I can’t say it’s very good, because it isn’t. But the magnificent walking, talking, pratfall-taking sight gag that is Dave Bautista? Well cast.

The few laughs kind of die of loneliness, in what is allegedly a children’s animated comedy. And without laughs, all this ill-conceived animated replacement for one of the most infamous live-action flops of the ’90s has to offer is nostalgia for a simple game of a simpler time. The eight-and-unders this is aimed at are way too young to get that.

Yes, it’s an R-rated “How I Met Your Mother,” without the mother. But the Jeremy Catalino banter sparkles, with Gleeson gifted with assorted tirades, manifestos and shrieking lectures (to frat boys and the compliant “little sisters” who show up for their beer busts).

We Are Your Friends has no heartbeat. It flatlines, early on.

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.

The film manages one grand "300″ moment, Cavill rallying troops for battle, doing his best Gerard Butler. But the lack of humor, the confusing, stumbling story and limited color palette blunt the film's 3D slo-mo shots of heads exploding and torsos torn asunder by the sword.

The occasional decently-staged fight or grace note here stands out, because there aren’t many. A story this badly constructed with dialogue this stilted and characters this thin is simply beneath Momoa, at this stage.

A generally joyless pastiche of sorcery history, imitation Potter "chosen one" Messianics and mirthless silliness, it's another in a string of recent black marks against Cage's Oscar-owning reputation.

You might might grin at the nostalgia of it all, an inventive moment or two, but little else.

"English Reborn" isn't terrible and is certainly seriously harmless.

The film is more creepy than scary, more interested in detailing the incantations and talisman’s of this “protect the harvest/village” faith. But the peril is palpable just often enough that we buy-in.

Pint-sized James — you never realize how short her other leading men were until you see her paired with Hammer — carries this Rebecca, and I think carries it off, even as it’s taking us places no “Rebecca” has ever gone before. It’s not a classic and not “Hitchcock,” but hell, thanks to James, Hammer, Thomas and Dowd, it’ll do.

It’s all rater less than the sum of its parts, but the first two thirds of You Should Leave” impress and engross. It’s a pity we don’t get to see it with an audience. Because if there’s one thing that amplifies tiny frights, it’s other people overreacting as if they’re scared out of their wits.

Our core quartet are a well-preserved and still charming lot, with each giving a glimpse of their comic specialties. But like that spring fling, “80 for Brady,” the material here just isn’t up to the legends being paid to perform it.

The ghost gimmicks, sight-gags and settings — the New York Public Library — as well as the non-supernatural villain (Atherton) are, like Murray’s attempts at his jokey old self, simply recycled from the original films.

It’s a generally uplifting account of the hippies and spiritual searchers who turned away from LSD and drug experimenting and turned towards faith, without giving up their tie-dye or VW Microbuses.

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.”

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

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

Too cute, too star-studded and entirely too long.

Dance First isn’t exactly bad. It’s just too narrow in focus, too incomplete, a biopic that leaves us “waiting” for an elusive, mythic “author” to truly make his entrance.

I haven’t seen Measure for Measure on the stage in years, but the rough shape of it forms in the mind watching this adaptation, its hits (characters) and the reasons it’s called “a problem play.” And those bones, a poignant romance, betrayals and mercy coming from the most unexpected places and vivid characters, pretty much save this film, or at least make it watchable.

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

Manipulative, contrived, melodramatic — all labels we slap on that most perfectly titled movie genre, “the weeper.” All fit If I Stay like original packaging.

Despite the savagery of the fights, there’s nothing satisfying in this slaughter, a movie which spills blood and spatters gore because it’s out of other ideas.

The players give it their best, as tedious exercises like this are rarely the fault of the cast. The fight choreography rises to “adequate.” The effects are OK — mostly — a planet overrun with “pilots,” another filled with semi-visible alien versions called “shadow creatures.

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

Clinical as a classroom lecture, it’s a limp sadomasochism primer, which explains both the runaway success of the E.L. James novel and the startling pre-opening sales stats from America’s Promise Keepers belt.

The script is flat and linear, the dialogue mostly out of tune — utterly lacking crackle.

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

Lopez and Duhamel — who has done his damnedest to create onscreen chemistry with the likes of Julianne Hough, Elisha Cuthbert, Megan Fox and (shudder) Katherine Heigl — click and almost will this into being more fun than it should be.

It isn’t all that much fun. The odd chuckle doesn’t atone for the scads of laughs that just don’t land in a story that spins its wheels on the snowy streets of NYC. Except when the crooks drive a Rivian.

But if you like claustrophobic stories of survival, putting yourself in the winter shoes of our antagonists, it’s not bad.

But Hardy is fascinating to watch, first scene to last, an actor wholly committed, as always, even if the script for this showcase feels incomplete or straight-to-video.

I laughed a few times, but this pile of cluttered, poorly organized exposition interrupted by CGI brawls isn’t going to headline screenwriter Jeremy Slater’s resume.

I just wish there’d been more to this allegory, something more than Radcliffe’s Ig explaining his protrusions to one and all with “They’re horns. It’s a crazy story.”

The film founders when Lew sends the couple, platonic and respectful (he is a Muslim, remember), on the run. That dash rather spoils the picture’s paranoid compactness, and it goes on and on, melodrama added unto melodrama.

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.

While there might be a movie in this material, the muted performances, muffled emotions and simple lack of dramatic sparks or surprises wastes the talents of one and all.

Laughs and lump-in-the-throat moments are in too short supply for Resort to Love to come off.

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.

Humorless, shallow and grim will get you only so far.

It begins badly and turns progressively worse before rallying, “Terminator” style, in a test of human against machine that will-not-die in a movie that does not want to end.

This Irish Wish sits uneasily in the gap between “competent” and “moderately inspired.”

You always cut a little slack for trash cinema that knows it’s trash. So props to the folks who made the green screen monstrosity Beyond Skyline, a creature-feature sequel to the 2010 aliens-invade-LA thriller “Skyline.”

Though it rarely looks as malnourished as say, “Europa Report” or “Moon,” Last Days on Mars does show how starved of new ideas sci-fi cinema is.

The story is kind of all over the place, scatterbrained without being madcap (This one feels tinkered with, reshoots, re-edits.).

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

It’s not the worst time travel tale ever, but it does earn the most dismissive assessement you can give a movie in this genre. It’s not worth your time.

Jeffrey Wright plays the world weary library director trying to keep the peace and hold on to some semblance of the institution’s core mission — a fact delivering, education supplementing bastion of learning, civic responsibility and civility. That’s one thing The Public absolutely nails.

Argento may stay on brand with this film, with a few gory moments amid its violence. But he’s rarely tamed things to the point where they’re pro forma, dull and preordained.

God help me, I laughed a few times. And God bless Foxx for luring Cameron Diaz back on screen, and for his recovery. They’re damned cute together, even if their movie isn’t all that in concept, writing and any scene that involves “inaction.”

Instant Dreams is still an argument for the magical in a world that is “losing magic.”

The only twists to this — little character quirks and the like — are just dopey and off-topic, the stuff to make an action fan wonder “What’s up with that?”

After four films and a TV series, maybe it’s time to mothball this Hotel for a bit.

It’s a thriller with few new wrinkles to time-tested formulas. But the plot is within the realm of possibility and the perilous situations never quite stumble into “heroine tied to the railroad tracks” cliches, even though they come close.

The Brawler is a poor excuse for a boxing picture and a middling screen biography, but it does manage a few saving graces.

Until Lee finds himself a story editor and a more literate, genre-savvy group of readers to workshop his screenplays, until he figures out that hitching his wagon to a star who is more “available” than charismatic, these films are never going to hide their malnourished, rushed origins.

Hero Mode isn’t interesting enough to stand on its own, despite manic efforts by Astin and an amusing line here and there.

The film manages to be a meditative essay on death and dying and love, even if the chill never quite wears off.

It isn’t scary, with even the best-engineered “gotchas” landing flat. Kind of a big deal when you’re making a horror film. It’s joyless and humorless to boot.

I didn’t hate this, which is faint praise, I know.

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

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

Any time you can top your tale of crisis, calamity and heroism with sacrifice, pathos and a hopeful message, you call that a “win,” in Hollywood or Aelsund.

Held may have messaging that fits the cultural moment well enough, and visceral violence that pulls us in and engages — eventually. But that first hour has beaten our interest in this slow-moving indie thriller to death long before that.

There isn’t enough that plays as all that funny in this version of the comic satire Groom cooked up.

Just about any other rendition of Dickens’ classic novella that you can hunt down is going to be better than this treacly humbug from Netflix.

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

I swear I never thought I’d see Oscar winner Laura Dern in a movie as empty and pointless as Lonely Planet.

The entire affair feels malnourished, under-rehearsed and starved of energy.

The effects are good enough, but there’s a lack of wit and ambition here that just reeks.

A flipped take on tween-to-teen romance that make it such a minor gem.

It’s a stunt-heavy chase picture with some arresting camera work, but not much else to recommend it.

It’s just too much — too much graphic violence, too many plot wrinkles, too much stupidity, too many supporting players to track...For a movie as physically fit as this one wants to be, Pain & Gain is carrying way too much extra weight.

An exploitation picture built on redneck cliches and big city liberal outrage, it's not all bad. But it is a pretty unpleasant wallow in the obvious.

“Selma” wasn’t the only film about race to get short shrift from Oscar voters this past year. Black or White is a frank, touching and very well-acted melodrama about child custody and cultural perceptions of “blackness” and “the race card,” and could have earned Octavia Spencer and Kevin Costner fresh Oscar nominations.

Robert Duvall may be 83, but he’s still up to playing a real Texas hell raiser on the screen. He can hold his own with bad hombres.

I might’ve cut The Tomorrow War a little more slack had screenwriter Zach Dean not conjured up the crappiest, sappiest most over-extended finale in living sci-fi movie memory.

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 sadness that courses through this uneasy and deliberate courtship won’t be to every taste. But for the brave, for those experienced enough to know about “baggage” and that no one gets out of here alive, this tale of finding a surprise connection in the twilight years, overcoming shrinking horizons and the burden of grief, disappointment and melancholy will resonate.

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

Gigi & Nate is what happens when you round up a good cast and a pretty polished director for a screenplay that turns away from its strengths, takes a swing at “important,” and misses.

Jackman gives a great performance at the center of a frustrating film that never quite lets us hope that anyone involved will find answers, and never lets its characters, or the viewer off the hook even if they do.

Sure, Locked is a remake. It doesn’t hold a lot of surprises if you’ve seen the original. Yes, it has “Hollywood” touches. But Hopkins and Skarsgård and Yarovesky deliver, even if they leave out my favorite joke from the original film.

Less mopey and downbeat than TV star Zach Braff's "Garden State." But it succeeds in many of the same sweet ways and is similar enough to warrant labeling Radnor "Zach Braff: The Next Generation."

While “Summer” is lightly amusing, here and there, it treads heavily on some pretty slippery ground. Gleason makes all the checkpoints that the plot passes through feel perfunctory.

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

Holland’s kinetic turn as the young pickpocket/historian and bartender turned adventurer is emphatic proof that it’s not just digital effects and stuntmen in that spider suit. But the movie? It’s as edgy as a Scooby Doo mystery, as plausible a “National Treasure” mashup with “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

It’s a decently-animated, dialogue-heavy comedy that manages a few laughs from the age-old sight gags of “Blazing Saddles” and a lot of groaners that pass for one-liners.

Crowe seems to impose his own sense of fun on the proceedings, which gives it a light touch even when it should have fear-for-the-victims’ lives gravitas.

As straight exploitation, it's amusing, in fits and starts. It's just that Colombiana lacks the kinetic energy of "The Transporter" and the pathos of "La Femme Nikita."

Justice League doesn’t have anyone with the witty way with a line Robert Downey Jr. brings to Ironman, or the swagger of Chris Hemsworth (Thor) to carry it. But Momoa’s bemused physicality has its own cockiness, Miller’s wide-eyed Flash innocence and Gadot’s commitment to earnest, brave and spoiling for a fight Diana put “The Avengers” on notice.

Great White might be the dullest shark attack thriller ever.

At long last, The Twilight Saga sinks utterly into camp with Breaking Dawn: Part 1.

None of it, not Welles’ flirtation with his Lady Macduff later Lady Macbeth (Ashli Haynes), not Welles’ domestic problems, not the cast’s various burdens and foibles, is scripted or acted in ways as compelling as the real story, which has been related, in great detail, by every Welles biographer.

Five Nights gives us only about two nights worth of movie, and far less to chew on than the stingy-with-story director would have us believe.

Stuffed to the gills with Perry's mix of the sacred and the silly and a serious dose of self-help for the self-absorbed.

This could have been a lighter picture, sort of a semi-dark Nick Hornby spin on music. That might have been less accurate, but more watchable.

It’s just that this one has nothing much to offer, archetypal characters giving rote performances of a script that needed serious workshopping and edge-adding.

Limerick native co-writer/director David Gleeson (“Cowboys & Angels”) ensures we get lots of local color in the people, the scenery and the school and Irish pub life in this story.

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

Repetitious, tedious, and pretty much joyless.

It’s a vacuous affair, dull performances trapped in duller writing, ironically funny only when you take the writer’s words to be the screenwriter’s admission of guilt.

Harmless nonsense this may be, but if you’re under the impression it does a wildly popular, award-winning “creativity” game justice, you’d have to be right on the demographic money in terms of who the picture is pitched to — 12 years-old.

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?

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

The action beats are colorful and dazzling theme-park rides run amok. Frenetic action substitutes for wit, here.

It's the same movie as the earlier "gotta dance" over-choreographed crunk-and-breakdance epics. Exactly the same.

This grimly unpleasant two and a half hour endurance contest is an almost unwatchable, frustrating smorgasbord of blood, guts and gore.

A rude and seriously crude riff on taking a vacation from marriage.

The best that can be said for “Step V” is that it has some sparkling moments of choreography, clever gimmicks as themes for the dance-offs and lovely costumes.

No wit, few frights and not much in the way of thrills, either.

The latest incarnation of “Doctor Jekyll” isn’t scary enough or campy/weird enough to come off.

Still, the frights, with Mom seeing the hand-chopping serial killer’s face (Paul Fauteux) on her little boy’s body, the stabbings and threats of worse to come (hilariously foreshadowed to death) deliver the requisite pulse-stopping punch...If that’s all you’re hoping for in a horror picture, fine. If not, you’ve been warned.

It’s got a good enough cast, a couple of twists and enough brute force to it that it’s worth taking in on its own terms. Those terms being “We’re imitating the McDonagh Brothers, so what?”

A mawkish Dorothy Blyskal script, based on a memoir by the three, a cumbersome flashback structure that lacks suspense, a grasped then quickly abandoned cloying voice-over narration and the unaffected and ineffective acting make this feel like the worst movie Clint’s made since he stopped teaming up with a baboon.

Riley makes a lousy, hoarse-voiced Darcy. James sets off no sparks with him, suggests no heartbreaking longing. If you want to make a point about women liberated by a zombie invasion into independent-minded martial arts warriors, why do it with one of the greatest romance novels of all time? There’s barely a laugh here, and nothing resembling human emotion.

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.

The lyrics aren’t all that. But in an action film, it’s tempo that matters. The Rhythm Section never loses the beat.

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.

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

It’s got enough laughs to get by.

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.

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 mob movie tropes and cliches end up being the only memorable moments in Lansky, material so overfamiliar we can finish the lines before the actors do.

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

Mackie always gives fair value, but this seems silly and beneath him, even though he’s done time in the Marvel universe.

A Million Little Pieces is little more than a million little melodrama rehab cliches.

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.

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

“Bombardment” pulls you in, and like the worst videos from Russia’s murderous invasion of Ukraine, doesn’t flinch from showing us the heartbreaking slaughter of war and its frantic-search-for-survivors aftermath.

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

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.

The Mother is watchable, here and there. Decently acted. Over-the-top, but not far enough over it to make it fun.

A little like modern country music - odd moments of sincerity, heart and authenticity peek through the plastic, the hype and the manufactured hokum.

There’s a generous sampling of horror “mystery” cliches in this script, plenty of this or that death/disappearance “doesn’t make any sense.”

There are good things about it, but nothing great and nothing all that worthy of our attention. But the cast battles any low expectations it might create and gives the viewer something to hang onto.

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

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

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

A genre mash-up that never quite achieves "So very bad it's good" status.

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 first act of “Queenpins” makes you giddy at the comic possibilities, but the finale is the final straw in the letdown it too-quickly becomes.

One sure way to gauge a horror film’s success is whether it shocks and shakes you, makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. That never happened for me, here. For all the interesting performances and promising characters in this one, I think the actor/director and actor’s director lets us off the hook entirely too easily.

Few jokes take us by surprise, but enough comic haymakers land to make “Burt Wonderstone” credible, in not exactly “incredible.”

Director Kevin Lewis powers through this thing (the odd mispronounced “blown” line makes it into the film) as if he knows the script is crap and that his leading lady’s not the best at registering shock, fear or fury and there’s no point in looking for a better take. But Cage, dyed hair, beard and boots, brings home the B-movie bacon, as usual. It’s just seriously undercooked this time out.

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.

Salt and Fire is an odd environmental thriller, a perhaps-promising project that attracted Michael Shannon and Gael Garcia Bernal to Bolivia to see what this mad genius would make of it. Not much, as it turns out.

The acting isn’t awful and the production values are passable. McDonough makes a much better villain than anybody shoved into that sort of role here. This is an origin story that lacks anything in the way of a “hook” to whet the viewer ‘s appetite for a series. Even the “Christianity” angle is soft-peddled.

Plan A starts with promise, and features that rare novel take on The Holocaust as a subject. But the fascinating history isn’t truly given its due, the suspense never has a chance to build and the characters and the cast playing them don’t make that leap from “competent” to compelling.”

The movie flirts with supernaturalism. But the Beams’ story is anchored in smaller miracles — the reliability of friends, the kindness of strangers.

The players, attractive as they are, register more as “types” filling out an EEO chart than distinct people, save for the first three introduced. The dialogue devolves into variations of “I got this.”

The film is a choppy series of sketches and snapshots that don’t really take us inside the man’s head. [2021 Director's Cut]

The cast, plainly packed with second or third choices, lets it down. Is there anything in James Franco’s past that suggests larger-than-life, a fast-talking, womanizing con-man? And the three witches – Theodora, Evanora and Glinda – are Bland, Blander and Blond Bland.

Seth MacFarlane wants to be a movie star in the worst way. A Million Ways to Die in the West is result of this longing, a long/longer/longest comedy with long waits between jokes and longer waits between those that work. Thus, does his leading man career begin and end with a “worst way” Western.

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.

A graphically violent, sexually explicit teen horror tale, it was close to being ahead of its time, in its time. Now, it plays like a quaint, fairly obvious period piece — from 2006.

Bushwick never rises above bush league, more a missed opportunity than a wickedly on-target winner.

An empty-headed nothing of a caper comedy.

A thriller that misses the mark, and not by a little.

Call it a vanity project or bargain basement movie mythos, but no hard-boiled biker picture ever looked or sounded like Road to Paloma.

That’s what Kingsman: The Golden Circle is like — recycled Bond gags and settings, sophomoric humor, and maybe an hour of dead time scattered throughout a two hour and fifteen minute mess.

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

Heard sets herself up as a Megan Fox with talent. And Cage? He delivers. Mock him for his bad choices if you will, but consider this. Who else could have made this work, or would even want to?

As familiar as the path Then Came You generally takes might be, it’s got lots of clever laugh-at-death touches, a few sparkling surprises and a gut-punch third act “reveal.”

It’s generic in the extreme, predictable to a laughable degree and littered with dialogue as inane and cliched as the characters and the situations.

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

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.

If you’re going to commit to a blasphemous stoner comedy mocking the New Testament prophesy of the coming Rapture, you’d better go all in. Because halfway isn’t funny.

Our stars may be timeless, but you should’ve seen them when they commanded more control of their projects than this and could demand the rewrites this tepid typewritten treacle needed.

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

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.

The central premise, that you need to couple up to avoid that “wheelchair/diaper” analogy, is what’s ludicrous here. A rom-com as pathetic as this reminds us that we do indeed die alone.

Action-packed and impressively stupid.

Sure, it’s mercifully free of the Sandler hangers-on that were a staple of his succession of increasingly awful Hollywood comedies. But one almost wishes somebody with at least a little experience landing a laugh was featured in the supporting cast.

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

The limp start and depressed finish make Hooking Up a sex comedy in which you can like the cast even as you give up on the movie. Early.

83 minutes of excruciating, nauseating, boundary-pushing “comedy” that never for a second feels like it’s anything but visual evidence of the end of Sacha Baron Cohen’s comic leading-man career.

It skews very young, and for that crowd, Hotel Transylvania 2 works well enough. If this is Sandler’s sentence for all the awful, lazy live-action fare he’s fed his fans over the years, he and we can say he got off easy.

As a director, Roberts comes off as more of a producer. He can get a movie made, he’s just damned artless in making it.

Brightburn is a generally humorless affair, with the only “laughs” given a sadistic edge, with paint-by-numbers frights and cut-and-paste “big emotional moments” that even the formidable Banks cannot make pay off.

The sex sequences are revealingly awkward - with their "Don't try this at home" message. But without characters we can invest in, this "Hangover Meets Zack & Miri Make a Porno" is just the "porno," and entirely too tame for that, too.

Churchill seems a hasty addition to this Summer of War, with a valid point of view and portrayal, but without the budget or scope to be anything more than a lot of shouted arguments — a stage play with very pretty historical backdrops.

“Wolf Creek” director Greg McLean efficiently runs through the deaths, but where’s the terror, puzzle-solving logic or anything else to hold our interest? It’s just unpleasant, nothing more.

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

It all swirls together in a riot of color, action, deadpan gags and musical and martial arts mayhem, a kids’ movie that rushes by you so fast you won’t want to take a concession stand break.

“Swimming” wears its “Full Monty” ambitions (it isn’t on that level, but its funny enough) on its trunks, with the flippant banter and blend of melancholy sentimentality and sight gag silliness. It even uses a Tom Jones anthem for its “big finish.” Yeah, there’s an “informal world championships” for men who do this. No, seriously.

King’s Man doesn’t send up the tragic comedy of the start of The Great War, doesn’t rewrite history in any particularly interesting, illuminating or entertaining way. It just gets stuck in the mud, like the millions whose lives were squandered in it.

The actor James D’Arcy (“Dunkirk,” TV’s “Homeland” and “Broadchurch”) wrote and directed this, and he tends towards the maudlin at times. He sets up a sort of competition for Natalia between father and son, which is mercifully dispensed with.

Foe bores the viewer to tears on the long march towards getting to its point.

Like too many of his movies of late, the idea here is to “See it for Cena,” as the film around him isn’t up to the big funny man’s big, scenery-devouring turn.

So it’s no “Starbuck,” which most people won’t mind because Americans don’t read subtitles. But even in this form, Delivery Man and the guy who plays him still deliver where it counts.

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

Whatever brownie points Tillman scored with "Notorious", Faster is that wake-up call that he's no John Woo.

Shakman cast this well, so well he can afford to waste a good actor like Oliver Platt on a tiny role as a careless, Bluetooth-addicted Fed and Thornton on a couple of simple exposition scenes.

Not really enough amuses or dazzles, and attempts at giving us something emotionally “moving” or religilously inspiring fall well short of the mark. But for a middling-at-best movie, Praise This isn’t bad, even if it isn’t all that praiseworthy.

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.

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.

There’s something to be said for a B-movie that doesn’t deviate from formula, that pulls you in to its simple “revenge” plot and doesn’t let go until the credits roll.

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

Auggie isn’t “Her,” but it’s short enough to hold our interest, even if it’s not engrossing enough to manage anything more.

The surprising thing about the film of Phillip Reeve’s Mortal Engines, essentially a movie about roving, bulldozing cities that devour small towns, is how long this eye candy holds your interest.

This Dracula is somehow somewhat better than the worst versions of the tale we’ve seen in recent decades, but a few bites short of adequate or anything approaching Coppola’s ’90s film or Robert Eggers’ gorgeous and stark “Nosferatu.”

Get past the “You learn something every day” aspect of writer-director Amma Asante’s follow-up to “Belle” and “A United Kingdom,” and the picture grates and annoys and falls to pieces, and not quietly. It’s so wrong. And there’s so much of it.

Collins (“Mirror Mirror”) and Claflin, of the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, do well by the mooning over each other across a crowded dance floor stuff. But they have to keep us believing in “the dream” and hoping for their romance. They don’t.

Violent, raunchy and raw, sexual and street-wise, Pimp is straight-up exploitation, a serious departure for the starlet, would-be pop star and 25 year old veteran of the screen trade.

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

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

It’s pretty enough and just engaging enough to suggest it might just become a series pilot.

It aims for that “Hangover” blend of the sick and the sentimental. And it doesn’t work.

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

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

“Old Guard 2” is 20 minutes shorter than the original film, but if you think that means it’s more brisk you’re mistaken.

A historically interesting story is painted in broad, colorless strokes, alternating as it does between soap opera and slapstick.

If indeed this is a full on franchise reboot, this “origin story” is no "Welcome to Raccoon City" at all. It’s a warning to avoid ever coming back.

There are a couple of effective moments, a chill here and there, a canted camera that captures Grace’s possession by whatever “snake” this cult worships.

A flat, lukewarm glass of Spanish sidra without anything to recommend it beyond the lovely San Sebastian scenery and the fact that it is what is alleged to be Allen’s next to last film.

This is a comic book epic with a lot of fat and flab around the edges. But the fights are shorter and more involving than the “Transformers” cluttered clashes of “Man of Steel.”