Roger Moore

Co-writer/director Russell Harbaugh has created a chamber tragedy, intimate in its dimensions, devastating in the damage we see spiral out of that one death.

It doesn’t have a laugh in it, and the story isn’t worth more than a sentence long summary.

I didn’t dislike “Player One,” even if I rolled my eyes at the low-hanging fruit one-liners and cloying characters, the on-the-nose soundtrack tunes (Van Halen?), the cringe-worthy avatars from your favorite horror movies, all introduced to the giggles and applause of an audience sure it’s in on the joke. Because the movie was concocted to elicit just that reaction.

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.

Sure, an uplifting film like The Heart of Nuba plays like hagiography, but you’re hard-pressed to find complaints about this saintly, sometimes profane surgeon and healer. Unless you want to interview al-Bashir for your film.

Not just rewarding and quite moving, but important oral and visual history, a movie worth watching even if you think you’ve read or seen all there is to know about this seminal figure in American history.

It’s clever to the edge of brilliant, and damned funny, start to finish.

A fascinating look into a custom that the movies and TV have only touched on and mentioned with a raised eyebrow of mild dismissal.

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

Lean on Pete is a somber, quixotic trek through a modern West of limited horizons, finite opportunities and the sense that even the young are just playing out their string. It’s a long, unhurried drama with the odd flash of violence and tragedy.

Unsane makes a creepily watchable thriller, but it’s so light on thrills and suspense that its Hitchcockian twist feels like an afterthought, a cheat not earned by the movie we’ve watched come before it.

If you’re still a dewy-eyed teen fresh out of going “Awwwww” at the out-of-date coming-out romance “Love, Simon,” there’s nothing wrong with stuffing a few tissues in your pocket and bracing for, if not a good cry, at least the sniffle or two Midnight Sun promises.

Frustrating as it is, this scruffy, misshapen farce still has laugh-out-loud lines, and lightly-amusing send-ups of an idea that has intuition going for it, and little else.

There are some explosive laughs in this. But they show up so randomly, with the story in between the payoff moments so lame, that Game Over screams out for more editing.

Bitch, truth be told, isn’t as daring and “out there” as its titles promises.

Action-packed and impressively stupid.

The action takes a quick turn for the preposterous and the bleak in the finale. But fear not. Just break out the Kleenex, parents. And not just for yourselves.

This Charlie McCarthy (“The One I Love”) drama is sci-fi at its cheapest, a Netflix film that relies on location, weather and quiet to set its tone and a very good cast to make it watchable.

It’s pretty late in the game to be getting a primer on this years-long epidemic, but the least you can say about this super-slick, ADHD friendly film is that you can’t watch it and say you don’t have an idea how it could benefit you or your kid, and just a taste of exactly why it’s a bad idea.

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.

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

It’s a drab, emotionally flat film.

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

The word that best fits it as a comedy, a romance and a coming-of-age story is “innocuous.” It’s just that at this point in history, after Neil Patrick Harris, after “Glee!,” “innocuous” doesn’t feel like enough.

It’s disquieting and then disturbing, almost from start to finish.

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

It’s a sardonic satire that lacks the wit, style or pacing to let it come off.

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

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

An engaging wallow in the land of the losers.

There are plenty of possibilities set up here, most of them blown. There’s no Mike Tyson, no Bengal tiger, no Vegas even. There’s barely a hint of Kern’s funniest previous acting credit, “Bloodsucking Bastards.”

“Change” finds humanity, a sweet moment or two (rare) and some good-natured laughs at the misperceptions and misunderstandings that occur when on-the-spectrum meets off-the-spectrum, and even among people all on the same wavelength.

Just far enough off the well-worn mob movie path to be worth a look, even if — like too much on Netflix — you feel the need to bail and see what else is available before it bleeds out.

The first great movie of the year.

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.

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.

Aside from those random moments, this is an utter excrement storm, from start to finish. And as bad as the acting, nonsensical plot and dialogue are, there’s not a laugh in this thing — intentional or unintentional.

Which is a big build-up to essentially saying, “This movie’s a stiff.”

At times the film shows itself an outsiders-looking-in take on the culture it depicts.

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

The entire film, a most worthwhile enterprise in itself, drags on and becomes more patience-testing than incendiary.

The pieces are of a biting, depressing nature — long-ago traumas, broken lives often illustrated by the moment that broke them.

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

It’s a dopey premise that this film, from the director of the romantic weeper “The Vow” (based on David Levithan’s novel), hangs on. But if you don’t buy in, you’ll miss out on one of the more intriguing and honest — if idealized — portraits of high school that the movies have served up of late.

Bruce Willis, looking decrepit and acting like he gave his last damn a dozen years ago, stars in what plays like an old man’s movie for angry, emasculated and frightened old men.

Oh Lucy! is a slight comedy of offbeat, culture clash charms with a dark, flinty edge. It benefits from spot-on casting, testy-funny situations and cultural stereotypes that well up just below the surface, stereotypes popped almost the moment they’re exposed.

In that climate, the desultory 6 Days can be appreciated for at least having the guts to show us what can go wrong.

“Vanishing” is ambitious, but in every trite, pat and melodramatic way you can think of.

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

If this is what the excruciating finished film looks like, what manner of dreck must Mr. Bowie’s son have left on the cutting room floor?

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

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

I love this sub-genre of crime pictures, and while this isn’t on a par with the true classics of the type, it’s in the conversation. A little of Tom Hardy’s cellphone in the car myopia “Locke,” a little of Gosling’s “Drive,” and a lot of Grillo goes a long way.

Structurally, director Lucky McKee (Hah!) chooses to tell this story in flashback so we know the scope of the final conflict. The finale is unsatisfying in the extreme — suggesting nobody here actually watched “Sierra Madre.”

Way too much of Game Night is given away in the trailer, the violence is a bit much and truth be told — the folding in on itself plot gets in its own way, especially in the third act. But Bateman makes the big bucks for being the best put-upon “hero” in comedy. And McAdams, doing an epic Amanda Plummer (“Pulp You Know What,” remember?) absolutely steals the picture.

Actor Andy Serkis (“Black Panther”) steps behind the camera to direct here, and manages a genial, slow-moving and upbeat picture — for the middle acts. The first act courtship is strictly “Masterpiece Theater,” and the drawn-out third-act a grim different picture with an altogether different agenda.

It’s never less than watchable, but I can’t say it’s particularly memorable (save for that soundtrack). Perfectly Netfixable adventure in a minor key.

It’s an alarming indictment of the way we’ve been taught to think, and where that warped thinking has put millions of our fellow citizens.

Vega makes Marina noble, martyred and yet defiant, fiercely clinging to her femininity when we’re so desperate for her to bust Bruno’s nose. It’s a performance of sublime, constrained fury and tender conciliation.

And as much pleasure as one gets out of Lawrence’s stone-faced pairings with the formidable Irons, Schoenaerts and Rampling, her third act duet with the dazzling Parker (of “RED”) reminds us of what this one-dimensional “Sparrow” is lacking — the spark of life.

It’s a visually and dramatically flat picture in which the co-directors just check off the touchstones in Samson’s storied career, lurching forward, parking him in reasonably rustic settings with tunics and smocks and sometimes shirtless. There’s little character arc, and even less story arc.

Whatever its cultural significance, it’s just passable entertainment, a noble attempt at waxing mythical that never, for one second, delivers that out-of-body giddiness that makes popcorn pictures of its ilk burst to life.

Eye-opening and engrossing, but no more so than your average episode of Ramsay’s old “Kitchen Nightmares” show. Less faked conflict, perhaps, but less revealing as well.

On Body and Soul isn’t as linear in its storytelling style or as results-oriented in its plot as a Hollywood or Western European film wrestling with these themes might be. That’s why the foreign language Oscar category is so valuable. It insists that viewers at least take a shot at seeing the world through another culture’s eyes via challenging films.

Levine writes and shoots enough scenes in inventive ways to make this mildly-frustrating melodrama work.

This all adds up to a movie whose net laughs exceed any annoyance Corden, the endless pop song action montages and frantic, “Ace Ventura” animal antics create.

It’s not on a par with the sublime “Wallace & Gromit” films or the brilliant “Chicken Run.” But it’s quite funny, and delightful to see finger prints in not-quite-perfect clay arms and legs.

The attempts at jokes don’t land and cameos are no substitute for story, performances or wit in the script. This super hero spoof is a played out idea excruciatingly executed.

For shout at the screen, redemptive revenge that you can sink your teeth into, Bad Day for the Cut is hard to beat. Even if you almost need subtitles to unravel the dialogue at times.

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.

At least this time, some of the laughs are intentional.

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.

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

Cummings, working from a Louann Brizendine book, has rendered romance clinical and forgotten to drop more sugar water in the Petri dish. She was too busy clinging to that “explain the brain” conceit to notice. The movie’s just not that damned funny.

The first major movie disappointment of 2018.

Hall anchors the picture, at home on stage singing and playing, and a bit of an impulsive, arrested-development mess off it.

Carano can still, at 35, deliver in the fight scenes. But this post-apocalyptic dog of a picture shows her racing into “over the hill so I’ll just use guns” territory, something Chuck and Jean Claude and Jackie only got around to when the stunts got to be too much.

Of all the impersonations, Thomas Lennon‘s spot-on send up of the balding, sunglassed cynic Donaghue is the one that dazzles. Matching Belushi’s fearless lunacy or Chevy Chase’s studied pratfalls is trickier on even a “generous” Netflix budget.

What lifts this Irish film above the “Here they come, SHOOT’em!” trap are the moral dilemmas, the shaky ground underneath either side of those dilemmas and performances that can be downright wrenching in their humanity.

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

Interminably slow of foot, filled with static, anachronistic and politically correct sermons performed in a whisper, bloody-minded outburst interrupting the beautiful scenery photographed like a cut-rate cable TV movie, it is an utterly inept outing from the director who got Jeff Bridges his Oscar.

An old fashioned, corny film hagiography that may please the most ardent fans, who will be more tolerant of its lax pacing and high cheese content.

Looking Glass fails to be anything more than another make-work project for the cinema’s busiest actor, a man with bills to pay and a conviction that the Devil finds work for idle hands. It’s just that sometimes, it’s better to leave those hands idle than to take whatever the next offer you can squeeze in might be.

Writer/director/editor David Heinz gives us a road picture of sweet anecdotes, kind encounters and little conflict, an America with its rough edges rubbed off.

A tale of sibling rivalry and sibling bonding in the drug trade, and an unlikely whirlwind romance, I appreciated the characters and the up-to-date Aussie slang more than I believed the setting, those characters or how they got to be here.

The picture lacks for nothing but big laughs.

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.

Phantom Thread is a dry, chilly and occasionally droll tale of unconventional love in 1950s British haute couture. But whatever this cryptic, slow and dramatically thin character study lacks, Lewis lovingly paints over with one last meticulously detailed, compact and sharply observed performance.

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

The overarching problem is pacing and dramatic tension.

There’s little coherence to its style and subtexts even if its plot is penny plain.

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

In Search of Fellini fails to figure out twee, and more’s the pity, because the fellow who gave his name to the title perfected that — in decades of subtitled films made in his native Italy.

Too many character actions seem inorganic, pre-ordained by the needs of the script. The set-up is strained, the quick move to violence perfunctory.

Everybody comes off as smart, articulate, on-task, hard-working and not prone to panic.

The objects he assembles or carves out of stone will outlive him, but it’ll only be a hint of the mind that saw beauty in the destruction, decay and rebirth that nature itself was creating all around him.

An action picture whose aging hero we care about and root for, a thriller with tension and style, a B-movie Hitchcock would have been happy to call his own.

But the script has laugh-out-loud moments and zippy exchanges. Middleditch and Weixler give this smarts and just enough sexy sass to work. And Bang gives it heart.

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.

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.

I love the light, intensely likable lilt Whishaw (“Q” in the latest James Bond films) gives Paddington’s line-readings. You forget the bear is animated and that bears can’t talk, and your children won’t even need that much encouragement to suspend disbelief.

The Road Movie is not a narrative film. It doesn’t tell a story, even though there is comedy, tragedy, madness and romance amidst all the crashes and explosions.

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

I, Tonya flirts with mocking its characters, but Janney and especially Robbie counter that with their unblinking, “not on my watch” performances.

The Clapper isn’t hateful, which is a huge step up for Montiel. It’s merely puerile, insipid, clumsy with only the barest hints of believeability.

“Pitch 3” is a movie as predictable as the big explosion and escape that opens the picture, as the lame script-crutch “Three Weeks Earlier” flashback, as the assorted “love interests” cooked up for this installment, as trite as Fat Amy’s description of how she became estranged from her “dodgy” crook of a father.

It’s alternately wacky and bleak, and despite stunning Korean scenery and a passable chase or two, it feels small-screen. It’s also obvious, with an ending you can guess in the first ten minutes.

Tell me you don’t see echoes of “A Beautiful Mind.” Nelson lets us see Crowley’s fleeting dream of filmmaking glory, this ache to tell a story he believed in above all else, consume him.

Perhaps this slow and generally dull and opaque picture never should have seen the light of day.

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

Wow. This is what comic purgatory looks like. Actors, trapped in a laugh-free road comedy called Father Figures — a paying (gullible) audience, slack-jawed in dismay, trapped there with them for two hours.

Beuys isn’t a film that lays out, in simple, clear terms, what he and his work are about. But Veiel does manage to refresh our memories of Beuys, and let the man — in his own (subtitled) words, re-make the case that art is “a blow against the enemy,” a revolution.

Scott and Plummer conspire to give us the ultimate portrait of greed, pettiness and the deep psychological holes in the souls of those obsessed with acquiring wealth and maintaining it.

The whole affair feels corporate, cooked-up-by-committee.

Every scene — the pointed and the pointless — goes on too long. No character is wholly motivated or explained.

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

It’s just that movie-star turned director Angelina Jolie is a bit too enamored of vast panorama shots created with drones and keeping her mostly under-age cast clean, well-fed and front-and-center in the story.

Thanks to Oldman’s unerring portrayal of a deeply flawed man rising to face a crisis, and inspiring a nation to rise with him, it’s an equally worthy reminder that there have been bad times before today’s, and that people, great and small, saw them through.

[A] sturdy, gripping film.

The movie borders on abhorrent.

Humor Me is never much more than a comfort food comedy — funny people, given mildly funny situations and just enough funny things to say, find a few laughs and a lot of grins.

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

Mom and Dad is a reminder of how much gonzo fun a B-movie can be, how hilarious “Crank” was and what a hoot Nicolas Cage — who makes almost entirely B, C and D movies these days — is when he’s uncaged and unhinged.

The Shape of Water is first and foremost a genre picture. And as that, it’s a loving homage to cinema from an age where movies couldn’t be as obvious about this forbidden subject or that unspoken sexuality. It’s a good film of its type, just not a great one.

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.”

The extraordinary third act arrives, and the movie finds its heart and its message.

Because crime thrillers, nut-with-a-knife horror movies, combat films, Westerns and the like are so very familiar, you’ve got to raise the bar on those tropes and action beats just to surprise and impress us. Stratton is a special forces thriller that fails to do that.

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

In a culture at war over “truth” and “facts” versus “sincere” beliefs, Love & Saucers aligns itself firmly with the cranks without even the courtesy of a wink to suggest it’s not in on the joke.

What it doesn’t have, in any abundance, is laughs. “Started” plays like a Ron Shelton comedy for people too old to enjoy Ron Shelton comedies.

Mudbound is not a great film, not polished enough to earn its “Oscar contender” hype. But it is a worthwhile one. It doesn’t touch us the way the sentimental “Places in the Heart” did, but doesn’t flinch (much) from showing the Bad Old Days at their very worst, which more sentimental films on this subject invariably do.

A fascinating block of broadcasting trapped in amber, a little radio history about passionate people doing something they love, willing to beg for bucks on the air to continue doing it and finding enough kindred spirits, “people who don’t quite fit in” in a shrinking sea of radio listeners to cling to FM life a little longer.

It’s the players and their points of view that let Bullet Head score something close to a bulls-eye, even if the shot is fired at easy, close range.

The effects are indie-comedy cheap, and the tale’s overarching morality’s a bit murky.

The title performance, the awful lip-syncing, the utter lack of stage presence, cripples this movie in ways no mere maudlin cover of “Nights in White Satin” in Italian could.

What Carrey adds to our understanding of the man is his simpatico sense that you either become your creation and go to your grave as someone nobody really knows, or you move on from that and find ways of expressing someone closer to who you really are, leaving that “character” or persona you’ve created for public consumption behind.

It’s “A Christmas Carol” riff for those who already know the story, and entirely too on-the-nose for its own good.

Forget that [Washington’s] lumpy, “on the spectrum” character turn is designed to attract Oscar attention, and maybe this overlong but engaging character study in crisis goes down easier.

Hangman is ridiculous from the start.

But every few years, something like “Bombshell” comes along to remind us, as we look up her credits on IMDb on our iPhone or Droid, that we should never under-estimate the great beauties among us. A lot of them are a lot more than just a pretty face.

The real delight here is Barkhad Abdi, the “I am captain now” pirate of “Captain Phillips.”

It benefits from a smart, sassy script and winning performances from assorted pretty young things who star in it.

It’s more clever than brilliant, more respectfully mocking than affecting, and it allows us to step back and consider the wisdom of the whole enterprise — hurling legions of stars and lots of Hollywood cash at a movie about making a really bad — though not the “worst ever made” — motion picture.

Like life after a murder, there is no “happy” ending, no thrilling feeling of justice served. In the Fade is that rare thriller which finds more to mull over in the culture clash — within Germany, within the Turkish expatriate community, and between German justice and American expectations, between German storytelling and Hollywood endings.

“What’s a baby going to do with Frankinsense? BIRTHday party!” Maybe they’re both right. But only very young children will find anything funnier and more entertaining in The Star than that.

The ending is entirely too pat, considering what’s come before. But Burson has channeled her dark memories of freshman year into something that occasionally touches and often tickles, but stings with familiarity, start to finish.

Wonder, through depictions of the burdens shouldered by its characters, through jolting displays of childhood cruelty and heartfelt moments of compassion, earns that reach-for-the-handkerchief.

The whole enterprise is amusing, warm and embracing, so much so that English words fall short of perfectly summing up this utterly charming film. Only a Spanish word will do. “Encantada.”

It’s one of the best pictures of the year.

Writer-director Jordan Ross, of the MTV series “True Life,” maintains tension and fills in the fascinating back stories on these characters, peeking beyond drug abuse and arrest statistics, humanizing the entire genre eco-system.

There are wrinkles to this sensitive story that add interest, elements of plot, romantic complications and the like.

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.

Geostorm isn’t “Olympus Has Fallen” or “Gods of Egypt.” It’s no better or worse than any of them, but it gives one little hope for the upcoming “Hunter Killer” or “Den of Thieves” or, for that matter, “Angel Has Fallen,” sequel to “London Has Fallen” which was a sequel to “Olympus Has Fallen.” Butler is in a bad-movie rut.

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

While Saving Capitalism the movie is light on contrary voices (Nobody was willing to go on camera saying “Everything’s fine. The system works great just as it is!”) and a bit murky in the “action” stage of its arguments, it still makes for an eye-opener, especially for those unfamiliar with Reich’s career.

The Mighty Atom is an engagingly adoring film.

My Friend Dahmer gives us one of the most fascinating portraits of a serial killer, ever.

Linklater is still able to move us, even after he’s bored us half out of the movie with his long set-up, even after Cranston has sucked all the oxygen out of the picture with his hernia-inducing twinkle, even after we’ve given up on Last Flag Flying as too damned cute for its own good.

The script is so starved of originality, jokes and slapstick laughs that Burns pushed his actors to deliver lines faster and faster. Wahlberg, always antic on the set with Ferrell, hurtles through his dialogue in a near-slurred blur...It rarely pays off, as the jokes are just lame.

The animation is the one novel element to this, a familiar sort of film on a most familiar subject. But the movie lets its subject — Sonia — be its strength, and if you’ve ever had the privilege of meeting a survivor willing to talk about what they experienced, you know how smart that decision was.

The ending is laugh-out-loud ludicrous, and the stops (the train gets snowbound — imagine that) dictated by a very old formula. But it is the stylish journey, my friends, that matters , not the destination.

Mr. Roosevelt isn’t a laugh right. “Quirky” pops to mind a lot more often than is healthy for a movie grasping for our love. But it is funny enough, and alternately sweet and caustic as it depicts, in quick sketches and sharp observances, the LA of our nightmarish ambitions and the Austin of our hip, homey fantasies.

Goldberger’s script hangs on a couple of Big Secrets — his and hers — revealed in the middle acts. And it lives or dies on any sparks the two leads set off, which are few in number.

Adults are invited to tap into the magic of childhood adventure, the magical realism that connects these kids across the ages. Kids may be challenged by its arcane history, its connections and coincidences and its pacing, but rewarded for paying close attention to the mystery the movie asks us to help solve.

It’s the genius of this genial, formulaic coming-of-age comedy that Lady Bird never seems too broadly drawn. We’ve known this kid, gone to school with her, watched her reinventions continue straight on into college.

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.

Even the absurdly callous and well-equipped coroners (Matt Passmore, Hannah Emily Anderson) barely manage to wipe the smirks off their faces as they examine corpses.

Nothing like celebrating the holidays with a puerile, sentimental and foul-mouthed slapstick farce for kids masquerading as “adult” entertainment.

The height and the way he used it should have been addressed. The film, like the player cast as its lead, is too short to do the subject justice.

It’s not a great film, but Beatriz grows in stature as Bonnie searches for firmer footing. She and Stahl create a relationship that feels lived-in and fragile.

Entirely too much of the preceding film is precious, self-absorbed, self-serving, superficial bordering on in-bleeping-sufferable.

The film manages to move and touch us, revealing that the books are timeless due to their exquisite, English craftsmanship, their wit and warmth.

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

The animation lifts Loving Vincent (he signed some of his letters with a hearty “handshake from your loving Vincent”) above the mystery, above mere biography, into something brilliant, revealing and unique.

With Suburbicon, George Clooney finally achieves one of his bucket-list goals as director, making a satirical misfire every bit as tone-deaf as the worst works of his movie-making mentors, the Coen Brothers.

It’s even dumber than the earlier installments, but it knows it. And the result is some good, clean kid-friendly fun, save for the odd profanity — Odin is known for his curses, after all. Even the killing seems to lack fatal finality.

If this movie was better it might make rom coms great again. But I cannot lie. It won’t.

Killing of a Sacred Deer is grim-going, too long for the thin parable it is built upon. But Lanthimos orchestrates these performances into a perfectly-matched pitch, before lighting a match against this chill for an emotional climax that, like the picture before it, moves you even as it leaves you cold.

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.

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

Moving, majestic and manly, Only the Brave is a nearly perfect rendition of the sort of righteous, heroic entertainment Hollywood routinely built around its best leading men.

It’s a funny, bloody mess, but a polished C-movie that aspires to B-movie status.

Novitiate is very much a mixed-bag of a movie, condemned by the fanatic at The Catholic Legion of Decency, but too revealing and realistic to discard outright, too heartfelt to fail to move, at times.

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

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

It’s light, a little hard to follow the occasionally funny exchanges with all the talking over one another, and perfectly watchable, a real novelty in the Sandler canon if nothing really new for Baumbach.

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).

If you don’t know this history, and neither I nor James Cameron (apparently) did, the “wonder women” behind “Wonder Woman” will make your draw drop.

If you’re over the age of five, and you’re not taking someone UNDER the age of five to see My Little Pony: The Movie, you’re in the wrong theater.

I wanted to love The Stray, and I’d have been satisfied if it had reached as high as “liked.”

Marshall makes for an entertaining take on history and Boseman’s winning performance a playful spin on an icon the passing decades have chiseled in stone as a Great Man and one of the giants of American legal history.

Whatever action Bond, Zorro and “Green Lantern” vet Martin Campbell cooks up...none of it involves urgency.

It’s not a great documentary, and considering how many of these she has released, it’s not a particularly revealing one — outside of her efforts (doctor’s visits, treatments) to deal with this ongoing pain.

The scenery is startling and the cinematography by Todd McMullen striking.

The Bachelors is movie romance comfort food, rarely surprising, rarely upsetting in the places it takes its couples.

Seriously, for a movie about garbage, Wasted! (Anna Chai and Nari Kye co-directed it) is awfully appetizing.

The documentary isn’t anything resembling an over-reach, trotting out stats, uses, compassionate arguments and “harmless” stances that have been around for decades, and never effectively refuted. It’s all as easy to swallow as a THC-infused brownie.

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.

More impressive than moving, more thought-provoking than heartfelt — chilling in its magnificence.

The latest from writer/director Ruben Ostlund, who created the masterly and more coherent “Force Majeure,” it plays like a performance art piece that outstays its welcome.

It all adds up to “not half-bad,” with Page managing the emotional high point and Clemons and Norton delivering the near-laughs and Luna the sober man-of-science common sense. Tricky thing about half-bad, though. That means, at its best, it’s only half good.

Rarely has a movie gone as deep into the magical resiliency and adaptability of childhood.

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

“Let’s Play Two” doesn’t re-invent or for that matter add anything to the concert doc genre. But for fans, it’s a lovely time capsule, a bunch of 50somethings, still sporting the torn jeans and well-worn t-shirts, leaping about, playing with feeling and getting a joyous job done.

And by casting the hard-not-to-be-adorable Steve Carell as the self-promoting “male chauvinist pig” Riggs, they’ve produced a picture that’s alternately giddy and touching, with its heart coming from a budding romance and many of its laughs from the naked, reflexive sexism of the era.

The nuts-and-bolts of the work — the precision flying, the money laundering and cash impact on a small town that looks the other way — make other movies and TV shows on the subject seem humorless and tame.

Start to finish, it’s a bloody delightful romp.

The dull, exhausted toy ad that the TV commercials prophesied came true.

Technically spare and smart, fascinating in the dilemma it wrestles with, Realive is, in the end, too chilly to warm up to.

It’s a tour de force for Stanton, purposefully plodding forward, a sagebrush philosopher giving his valedictory performance, a lovely curtain call that bookends with his other famous shot at leading man — “Paris, Texas.”

If the movie finds its pathos and laughs around the edges, Literally, Right Before Aaron finds its easy if limited appeal outside the Hollywood mainstream, where “Home Again” is somebody’s idea of what a romantic comedy should be these days.

White finds ways for Stiller to surprise us, and the veteran actor manages to hide his cards in scene after scene, letting us keep up with him, but never ever allowing us to guess where his emotions will take him next, and what form they’ll take.

With no real suspense and little empathy, Friend Request devolves into your standard horror cast-killer time-killer. There are more frights in the trailers for upcoming Halloween horror films preceding this — “Jigsaw” and “Happy Death Day” among them.

Don’t Sleep is heartless, fright-free and, yes — sleep-inducing.

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

[Nowlin] makes Blood Stripe a solid, compelling drama about the post traumatic stresses unique to women in combat, a film that — thanks to her stoic performance and intimate, unfussy direction — engenders sympathy but never pity.

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.

It may be generic and inspiring TV movie subject matter, but Green immerses us in this world and punches up the limited horizons that face these characters.

It’s more engrossing than terrifying, horrific instead of simply scary.

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.

It’s a short drama that lurches through assorted abrupt changes in tone, temperament and relationships.

It’s the dullest movie about Tinseltown in decades, an irritating film full of irritating turns.

"Limehouse” is more a fascinating world to be immersed in than a dazzling telling of a morbid tale.

It’s an unwieldy, unsatisfying film that doesn’t live up to the high-minded allegory it aims to be.

The visions are grim, grisly and graphic, although actual hair-raising moments are rare — a chase here, a narrow escape there. Director Andy Muschietti (“Mama”) keeps the violence lurid and shocking, interrupted by moments of often-profane gallow’s humor.

What works beautifully are the grace notes to the craft of acting, to first love/first marriage.

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.

This badly-acted, incompetently written, clumsily directed and ineptly-edited fiasco is so awful that spelling the cast and crew’s names correctly in a review is an act of unblinking cruelty.

As righteous as it is, Crown Heights fritters away goodwill normally built by intimate, revealing performances, sacrificing clarity for under-explained bulk examples of injustice, and exhausting its sense of outrage in the process.

Jasper has blended “Precious” with “Hustle & Flow,” and even if you don’t dig the music, you will root for the characters and hope for a happy ending even though disaster and tragedy lurk around every corner.

Rarely has a filmmaker gone to so much trouble to create a world and populate it realistically, only to throw the whole thing into the Melodrama Mixer for a laughably unbelievable third act.

The whole enterprise plays like a throwback, summoning up memories of Lee’s cut-rate/no-script “chop sockey” pictures where the charisma was obvious, the fights epic, the stories an afterthought and the effects wincingly obvious.

A wickedly on-target cautionary tale about whom we let “influence” us and just how little is to be gained by looking “West,” much less going there.

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

The lost art of slapstick — physical comedy — is so rarely practiced that when true masters of it show up on screen it’s like a surprise smack right on your funnybone.

Step is an inspiring documentary.

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

“Serviceable,” the stinging critique of a young man’s potential by his publisher/father, fits.

California Typewriter is a most engaging documentary about the latest wrinkle in the Return of Analog.

The third act has moments of tenderness and warmth that belie the featherweight film they’re tucked into. And any movie that lets Hamill show off his malleable voice-over skills, and play a human being, is to be treasured.

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.

The Trip to Spain is still worth it for that stamp on your passport and the giggles these two fussing, mismatched friends make — two cynics abroad, making each other miserable and us amused.

Touching, disheartening and surprising, Gook punches through the noise of 2017’s clamor over race with a sobering look at a defining moment in modern American history. It’s a simple, straight-forward and compelling reminder that the villains and the victims were spread further across the spectrum than we’ve ever dared to accept.

The damned thing doesn’t play. The rube jokes fall flat, the complex caper doesn’t skate by the way the best of the “Oceans” pictures did. It’s “Masterminds” meets “Little Miss Sunshine,” with a heaping helping of Coen Brothers “Burn After Reading” contempt for its characters.

A Taxi Driver is a Korean epic, a tipping point in the history of South Korea. A little old-fashioned and a touch melodramatic, it’s still a compelling Korean “Year of Living Dangerously.”

Pattinson, who never lets on that he’s wearing an alien accent, gives Connie just a hidden hint of charm.

A lumbering ordeal of a picture.

[Renner] and Sheridan and some terrific, under-used supporting players...give Wind River a somber, grim grace and the relentless forward motion of a thriller.

Actor-turned-director and co-writer Bill Watterson keeps the tone light and the surprises surprising, for the most part. The energy flags as the picture loses a little of its momentum in the middle acts. It’s only 80 minutes long, so even that doesn’t hurt it much.

The one gag that works is probably a little racist, or at least racially touchy. Jackie Chan voices the lead mouse in a sea of martial artist mice who beat the purple out of Surly any time he ventures into Chinatown.

If you can’t get more than just a taste of terror from throwing half a dozen orphans into a haunted house, maybe your “universe” isn’t expanding at all and your “Creation” has run its course.

Bell has a beguiling, big-grin screen presence. And her ability to charm a cast into taking on her projects is admirable. Charming a script-doctor or two who could joke the films up would be a big help.

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

The scruffiness is intentional and the film has that conventional search for heroes and heroines — who to follow, single-out and build the movie around. But Whose Streets? also lets us see how citizens journey from outrage to action, from passivity to protest to influencing public policy, just by standing up and saying “Enough!”

It’s never self-congratulatory, rarely “I told you so,” although if anybody on Planet Earth is entitled to owning that phrase it’s Al Gore.

What a bust The Dark Tower turns out to be. A thriller with tepid thrills, a horror movie with bland frights, a generic fantasy quest story in which we mope along with joyless, heartless characters in an out-of-date celebration of Old West gunplay, this never should have left pre-production.

If Bigelow cannot quite bring herself to gracefully end her difficult, challenging movie — which changed studios and finds itself parked in theaters on the tail end of popcorn picture season — it’s because it’s too important a subject to risk shortchanging, too pointed a message to risk letting audiences miss.

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

Bernthal’s resolute, fearsome and touching performance make this Pilgrimage well worth the journey.

It’s a reminder that making pretty pictures out of painful history is just a tentative step toward actually grappling with that history, no matter how hard politicians and revisionists fight to keep that from happening.

Fresh insights are rare and dramatic moments rarer in Barbet Schroeder’s meditation on Germans forgiving themselves for the Holocaust, Amnesia.

The characters are distinct, if broadly drawn, with Aubrey, Micucci, Reilly and Franco making the strongest impressions.

But a cluster of screenwriters found barely a single laugh in this wayward tale of a “Meh” face emoji in search of reprogramming. Not a one.

Stuntman (“Fight Club,””300”) turned director (he had a hand in “John Wick”) David Leitch proves he was the right guy for the job with every furious blast of onscreen mayhem.

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.

Director Corbett Redford — a longtime member of that scene, so don’t take his name at face value — tracked down generations of Bay Area punks and tells as complete a story of the music, ethos, lifestyle and politics of this movement as anyone could want.

Screenwriter Bill Dubuque — forget that name — illustrates Dane’s sense of responsibility and victimhood by scribbling the clunkiest, clumsiest, most tin-eared “sex” scene in the history of the big screen. If that online screenwriting course offers a refund, pal, GRAB it.

It’s a World War II thriller so out of date the only words to describe it are also obsolete — Potboiler and Cornball.

Shot Caller is an overlong brutally clumsy attempt to have it both ways.

Lean and relentless, patient and pitiless, “Killing Ground” is the sort of thriller that gives horror movies a good name.

Even though there’s nothing we haven’t seen before in this movie, she and Some Freaks remind us not just of the cruelties of the teen years, the insecurities and secret shame, but of how young we are when we figure out that it’s all just perception.

Raunchy, rude and weapons-grade wicked, Girls Trip is the funniest big studio comedy since “Trainwreck.”

The climax is deflating and lets down a fabulously grey woods, heather and moors production design and the wicked promise contained in the story’s premise — that there’s a little Lady Macbeth in every woman, at least as far as men are concerned.

The acting isn’t terrible, though the script at times makes the players seem that way.

Great directors make great movies. And with Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan has made his second masterpiece, thrilling history retold, remembered and relished.