Roger Moore

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.

There’s nothing about “Goodrich” that would scare producers away from working with a filmmaker whose only goal might be to become “Nancy Meyers: The Next Generation,” even if there’s little original to lure them in either.

A Patient Man is a cagey tale of loss, grief, guilt and revenge.

It’s a chatty, over-populated comedy that sprints out of the gate and gets gassed about an hour in. Its tragedy is that Cuenca chose to drag out this shambolic slice-of-the-scruffy-life out for another hour after that.

Actor turned writer-director Matthew J. Saville’s debut feature makes for a dry, unemotional blend of dark comedy and co-dependency, scenic but desultory, even when Rampling is at her best.

Esra and Liquorish are balls-out in some of their scenes together. They always click, and are at their funniest when they’re fighting, indulging and humiliating each other. More of that, please.

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.

Smith peoples the film with the same cast, including Kris Kristofferson as Hazel’s grandpa and Tom Nowicki as the aquarium’s benefactor. There just isn’t enough for them all to do. Freeman gets the few funny lines, which are all the same.

There are disposable characters, and not just the villain’s minions. But one of the dumber elements of these movies is how so few of the actual leads, friend or foe, from previous pictures seem to stay dead.

There just isn’t enough going on, enough to chew on or entertain, to make Tropic — remember the European Space Agency launches from tropical French Guyana — worth one’s time.

It’s good to see Depardieu in an English-speaking role again, but he can only carry A Farewell to Fools so far by himself, especially when he never commits to “simple” heart and soul.

The casting seems right, the pacing washes out the overbearing nature of these lives and waters down the motivations this script seems intent on providing.

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

Trevor: The Musical has pluck and real kids with just-hit-pubertyish voices and kid-simplified choreography awash in positive messaging in a show that feels seriously dated, if worthwhile in the attempt.

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

It’s just callow, the way we all are/were in our 20s.Which is why the best generational “take stock” reunion movies wait until everybody hits 30, or close to it, before even trying to make sense of it all.

As the picture sputters and stalls, losing its quick pace and brutal efficiency in the later acts, this comic book adaptation reveals the flaws in its execution, if not its very origins.

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

The Force Awakens boils down to a couple of genuine lump-in-the-throat moments, and those are due to nostalgia. The rest? Seen it, done it, been there, and remember it — even though it was “a long time ago.”

Movies from Zambia, especially one with a Welsh connection, are an exotic and rare thing. But while there’s novelty and promise to Nyoni’s little-girl-trapped tale, it tumbles into incoherence too early to merit endorsement.

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 not much of a movie, frankly. But our good will goes a long way where Pee Wee’s concerned. Herman appreciation is like love for Tinker Belle. If you want to like it enough, you will.

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

His comedy, whatever it was at an earlier age, is comfort food now.

Tubman’s case to be on the $20 bill, as a heroine straight out of American myth, is made, a brave Christian woman sprinting down the path of the righteous. Harriet stumbles when it makes her more prophetic and less a woman of action than she was.

Scattered, indulgent and flat-footed.

It’s a rather harmless confection, hanging on a likable turn by Martínez and a few amusing moments from young Miss Carbonell. But the comic and romantic payoffs are limp, and the picture wanders on past its climax.

Giving Lloyd too little to do, and not having funnier players in Victor’s posse are both lost opportunities. Smart can still hit a punchline and isn’t given anything amusing to play or say here.

Once it finally gets going, The Witch: Part 2, the Other One is impressive. But there’s nothing here that transcends the genre, and what is here is a simple, slow-moving witch-hunt story whose clutter keeps it from ever truly getting up to speed.

The stakes, gravitas, wit and great actors demonstrating great acting of “Rogue One,” the best of these new LucasFilms, are sorely lacking...“Adequate” is not what we want or expect from a “Star Wars” story.

Refn’s skewering of this empire of awfulness is undercut by his plodding, portentous pacing.

What I can’t say is that Greener Grass is much of a movie, that it held together for me. It’s like three “Upright Citizens Brigade” episodes, built on a common cast and haphazzardly selected themes, barely jelling into a “story.” Still, see “Greener Grass” for the set pieces.

The Traitor is important Italian Cosa Nostra history rendered in boring, leisurely strokes.

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

It becomes a screen thriller you mentally set aside, like a puzzle with insufficient challenges to ever be worth tackling again.

If you want another lesson about why we should be going to Mars and what we’ll encounter and maybe find out about ourselves, “Unknown” will do until we have an actual liftoff.

Just stumbles on and on, introducing new theories and facts and then explaining, explaining explaining them, right up to the closing credits.

As current as these issues and this debate remains, a story meant to pass judgement after the dust settles just comes off as mediocre, murky, both-sidesing virtue signalling from a writer out of her depth.

You could Oscar short-list the production design (Pascal Le Guellec, Thierry Zemmou) and art direction (Patrick Schmidt, Paulo Gonçalves), even pay special homage to Ellis’s cinematography. That doesn’t change the fact that the writer/director/DP has made a werewolf movie as pretty as a painting, and almost as animated. It looks better than it plays.

Barthes has given us an immaculate, vividly-believable future to be dreaded and avoided. But she’s put it in a movie so unemotional that we can’t invest ourselves in taking a stand to prevent it, even if the script ordains that the under-motivated Rachel and Alvy do.

While I like the challenge of his self-conscious cinema, I find the urge to go glib every time I encounter one of his films almost too hard to resist.

The cold-bloodedness of it all suggests a harder-nosed thriller of the “Hell or High Water” school was what Tost had in mind. But he tries to soften that up with sentiment, and the plot and tone never coalesce around that compromise.

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

In Like Flynn would probably benefit from lowered “cut-rate Indiana Jones” expectations. But Mulcahy is too visual (a music video vet) and visceral a director to not lift them, just a bit, in the best of those early scenes, before the weary screenplay limited supply of charisma in the cast let him and the movie down.

Truth be told, the world didn’t need a third “Baby Assassins” movie. All writer-director Yuko Sakamoto did was make a longer, more bloated, more character-cluttered version of the first two films.

This thing is one rewrite away from being something we’d remember.

As random as it all is, The Hand of God does add up to a “movie” in the broadest sense, just not a very coherent or interesting one.

Yes, there are surprises and a scene crackles, here and there. But the tony haute cuisine milieu can fool you into thinking that there’s more to this than the chic, perfectly-presented appetizer this is.

Though it is funnier and out-charms “Tio Papi,” it lacks the whimsy, magical realism and kid-friendly sentiment of the sleeper hit, “Instructions Not Included.”

We’re some 100 minutes into the picture before the grating, gauche Davidson — and his character, Scott Carlin — achieves “Well, we should cut the kid a break” status. Apatow pictures always run long, but here the thin laughs make us reach “All RIGHT already” far too soon.

There are magical moments, and brilliant sequences tossed into this ensalada of a movie.

As "Hangovers" go, Part III isn't challenging or unpleasant, just instantly forgettable. It won't take much to sleep this one off.

Before the Fall has the germ of a great idea, one that will get the film noticed and some festival play. But the promise of “Pride” is, in this case, not fully kept. It lacks the wit and the light touch to come off.

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.

I was fascinated, but I can’t say I liked Ghostbox Cowboy as much as I enjoyed the films it seems inspired by.

Bad movies are rarely as much fun as these “Fast and the Furious” pictures. And make no mistake about it — they’re bad.

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

It’s those human touches that make 3 Days with Dad endurable. And if they don’t quite save it (the difference between character actors and leading actors is not skill, but charisma), they at least give it purpose, with the occasional break for levity.

Tall Girl may miss, but it doesn’t miss by much.

The incidents, relationships and even the intrigues here are all over-familiar tropes, which prevents this competently-made thriller ever rise to the level of engaging.

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 low-hanging-fruit laughs and occasional flashes of charm make Easter Sunday a perfectly watchable if generally underwhelming comedy. But hey, maybe this sitcom pilot will be picked up after all, with or without the funny accent.

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

We’ve seen much of this before, and as interesting as Gathegi makes this guy — stream “Princess of the Row” when you get a chance — the lack of surprises in the various waypoints of the story rob the twists at the end of any impact.

Huss holds center stage with a body-contorting commitment like few actors we’ve seen outside of an A-picture about addiction. It’s great work in a middling movie.

Alternately daring and dull, inventively animated, intimate and yet impersonal, it’s challenging enough to turn off most.

Greenwood and Richardson make a fine, discordant couple and the young leads have a certain chemistry. If only Feste had realized she’d stripped almost all the conflict out of the story.

All this amorality is in service of a morality tale, of course, pointing out that politics is more than just a game manipulated by liars and cheats. It’s a blood-port, and hate speech incites hate crimes in this self-righteous, long and meandering allegory.

Much more of a mixed bag of a movie than you’d hope. A “broken system” isn’t going to be driven to change by pulled punches like this one.

The supporting cast has its moments, but this movie sinks or swims with this father-son dynamic. And their banter, not the constant “ba-da-BING” of would-be punchlines voiced-over by Maniscalco, is what’s funny.

The fiddling-while-Earth-burns nature of global “leadership” and their parade of useless and vacuous “statements” joke lands, and is then pounded repeatedly as almost all of these leaders, scrambling through a foggy forest at night, fearing bog zombies and a planet about to go up in flames, struggle to stay on task and come up with that “statement.”

It’s likable enough, but after breaking out of the blocks, the picture gets gassed by the midway mark. The best it can do after that is not “win” or “place,” but just “show.”

Winter’s Tale has no narrative drive and too little heart to come off.

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.”

It’s just not that funny, not that sad and not on target, satirically. This “Welcome” isn’t nearly welcoming enough.

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.

Shyamalan gets his chutzpah, if not exactly his mojo back with this solid and modestly thrilling thriller.

Rottentail is a midnight movie that midnight movie audiences (a little drunk, a bit forgiving and in love with on-screen cheese) can get behind.

The new creature feature Monsters is an intriguing mash-up of "District 9," "The Host" and assorted recent post-apocalypse road pictures.

The theater scenes are so cleverly conceived — theater companies are notorious for such “Noises Off” shenanigans — and so well-acted that the film can only become a disappointment when this setting and story thread are abandoned.

James takes his comic lumps like a man. His Griffin suffers injuries and indignities and lets us laugh at him as he does. No matter where the script wanders and where the direction founders, at some point, James' comic instincts take over. And this time, they don't let him down.

I can’t say it necessarily comes off, although I’m not out-of-line declaring that it doesn’t pay off — not in a horror movie or crisis-of-faith melodrama sense.

“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.

What you come for here, aside from nostalgia, is the excess, and “Gangsta” directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah serve that up in heaping helpings. Characters topple into pools of blood, all manner of vehicle is raced and blown up. And Miami has never looked sexier on the screen.

It’s not a bad film, this first-half of the concluding chapter of “The Hunger Games.” But it is, from first scene to last, just a tedious good-looking set-up for what one might hope would be a more lively, and perhaps better lit and ventilated finale.

There’s no drama, no conflict, and apparently no one told director Jody Lee Lipes that even documentaries require some of that to be rendered watchable.

It’s not subtle, not particularly scary or suspenseful either. What The Beach House has going for it is dread, a feeling that rides along with it from its opening frames to the horror parable’s final image.

This was potentially a timely, politically-charged thriller sure to pack a punch. Blows are landed, and characters are triggered.

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.

Ordinary rules of drama don’t apply in the Marvel Universe, so expecting Avengers: Infinity War to build suspense, reach a climax and deliver some sort of conclusion is just…unreasonable.

This thriller begins at a crawl and finishes with a sprint. The foreshadowing is obvious even if the next twist rarely is.

While it is laudable that Oscar winner Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, Vivica A. Fox and Anne Heche lent their support to writer-director Jeta Amata’s film, the help he really needed was from screenwriters. Clunky lines, broadly drawn characters, arch situations, from start to finish, Black November is an uphill battle against the urge to roll your eyes.

As exhausted as this series and the genre it comes from is, it still manages a few decent jolts thanks to that new approach and a pretty good cast’s reactions to what they, and we, see through the video camera’s viewfinder.

The Wildflower is an infuriating melodrama about victims of abuse in Nigeria, oddly presented as a “dramedy” to the domestic market, as some of what’s being shown is alleged to have a comic intent.

The inserts are almost all funny, but they stop the picture dead in its tracks. Repeatedly.

Neeson gives us a bit more to chew on here than his standard hunt-for-his-daughter/avenge-his-son fare, an actor who lets us see the panic, see the wheels frantically turning and who never shies away from letting us see him sweat.

Like any fan, I’ll watch anything Anderson turns his attention to. But all the stars and star cameos, all the jaunty, classical music needle drops, all the del Toro drollery, the “lost boys” cadre of Korda kids and the Middle Eastern history hinted at in the “schemes” can’t paper over how flat and empty this “scheme” turns out to be.

If only the film around these players had been more worthy of their efforts.

Clifford the Big Red Dog is simple, sometimes silly little nothing of a kids’ movie, lightweight and harmless and of no great consequence whatsover. But it’s got sight gags and giant dog slobber jokes, giant dog farts and giant dog weeing-on-trees humor. So the littlest viewers, for whom it is intended, will find a laugh here and there.

American Son never quite lapses into terrible, but as with a play that needs another week of out of town tryouts, it “never gets on its feet,” either.

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

Writer-director Rian Johnson returns to the scene of the triumph with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and finds the going a bit slower, the supporting cast less colorful, less venomous and less star-studded and the mystery quite a bit duller than the last time around.

It sometimes moves us, where the admittedly more arduous ordeal of Louis “Unbroken” Zamperini failed to move, at least on the big screen.

Love John Woo. Love to see a few more action pics from him before he takes his well-deserved retirement. But as hymns to revenge on gangsters go, “Silent Night” hits too many of the same chords over and over, and without punchy, pithy dialogue, none of them are all that musical.

It’s the filmmakers’ unsparing depiction of violence against children that overwhelms this story of supernaturalism or desperate, misguided superstition. That seems excessive, a shock-value cheat that gives this “wrenching nature of loss and grief” story a sense of overkill.

It’s not really a holiday action movie “escape” when you’re not really escaping the gruesome gore and inhumanity the movie is all-too-giddy about showcasing.

The violence in Plane is sudden, shocking and damned personal, as director Jean-François Richet keeps his camera tight and hand-held on the hand-to-hand combat sequences, and he stages the shootouts on a “unruly mob vs. professionals” level.

It’s stunning stuff. But lacking a story, per se, and with no narrative drive, Aquarela is almost sleep-inducing, like a loop playing on super-high-resolution video on the screen.

The set-ups for big laughs are laboriously spoiled by the slack pacing.

Kaluuya co-wrote and co-directed the film, which may have nothing to do with its distracted focus and murky messaging. Or that may explain the movie’s failings entirely. Whatever the cause, it makes for a somewhat immersive mixed-bag of a movie, which puts a damper on any temptation to use “promising first film” in describing it.

The performances range from unconvincing to not-quite-compelling, with Wilson the sole standout.

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

Perhaps some adults can lose themselves in this world, reveling in the magic, plumbing for Rowling’s themes and deeper meaning. Not me.

Yes, it’s dull and mostly-predictable. But it’s more of a near miss than you might expect.

I still don’t see why this not-that-fantastical fantasy needed to be animated, and no, “just because it’s a manga” is not reason enough. It’s nobody’s idea of a deep dive into making movies, and not even a particularly entertaining take on the subject.

His hair is thinning and his features are thickening, and Jude Law is evolving into a more interesting actor as this happens. He’s more at home in tough guy roles such as “Dom Hemingway.” The gritty submarine thriller Black Sea is his latest one of those. But in this case, it’s a salty performance that seems just beyond his grasp.

A well-acted tale of an underdog's triumph that sorely lacks an underdog, it teeters between pleasantly generic film biography and rank manipulation.

For long stretches, Godzilla Minus One concentrates on relationships and conversations, which despite their intent, do little to advance the plot or illuminate simply-drawn characters.

Green Zone isn't so much a bad movie as a misguided one.

About 15 minutes of its dazzling visuals and narrative incoherence is enough.

“Kingdom of Storms” “Dazzling to look at,” sure. But the ungainliness of this lumbering, over-populated narrative has one often wondering, “Wait, where’d the Fox Demon go?”

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

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.

The movie lacks the wince-with-recognition middle school spark that marked the first film in this tweenage franchise.

Jackie Earle Haley, the fans' choice to take on the role of Freddy Krueger in the remake of the 1984 boogeyman blockbuster A Nightmare on Elm Street proves stunningly, rousingly…adequate…for the job.

It’s an oddly unaffecting childhood odyssey, and that’s only partly due to its obnoxious sixth grade artist, Paul Graff, played by Michael Banks Repeta.

Mansions is like “Vehicle 19″ or “Takers,” dumb, noisy junk.

There’s no edge to any character in the movie.

There’s “cryptic” and “vague” and then “incoherent to everyone else” and unfortunately, Moya sets up shop at that end of the spectrum.

Just as we’ve started to savor all the possibilities presented by this set-up, director William Oldroyd and screenwriters Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh take an abrupt, lurid and predictably melodramatic turn, and “Eileen” goes right off the rails.

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.

The most interesting theme touched on is the different choices the siblings make — one, staying behind and the other opting for something like an adventure. But even that’s thinly developed.

For a bad movie, it’s a fun.

Set on the 2012 Colombian/Venezuelan border, Pimpinero: Blood and Oil opens with great promise and tasty action picture possibilities before running out of gas in the middle acts as it shifts point of view and stumbles towards the even deadlier prospects of its finale.

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

Impressive as it looks, it’s emotionally lacking, humorless and kind of dull.

Director Scott Mann did the all-star but little-seen “Heist” a few years back, and wrings what he can out of this tired plot. For me, the picture started with a bang, leveled off and then gently nose-dived in the third act.

A tale told under a cloud with unreliable witnesses, it’s a slow and soft spoken drama that too breaks the chilling spell Tøndel is trying to cast.

Cute, bordering on cutesy, yes. Light and shallow and inconsequential in a lot of ways. But funny? Rarely.

Somewhat less than the sum of its many amusing or at least unusual parts. But with Goldman, West and all these classy co-stars, he’s at least kicking butt in better company these days.

Winds up a thoughtful puzzle of a movie that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, a slice of Southern Gothic displaced into rural, redneck New York that loses something in the geographic translation.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is a veritable feast of low-hanging fruit. The laughs are obvious, we see them coming a mile away.

The players can’t quite put it over and the writer-director can’t quite pull it off. It’s a thriller that shuffles when it needs to trot, simmers when it needs to boil and goes on after it needs to end.

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

The sylvan setting and short bursts of dramatic interplay are more interesting than coherent in this brief, undeveloped adaptation.

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.

A good cast and the best of intentions cannot save the 1970s Boston school busing melodrama The Walk from its excesses. Funereal pacing, characters that are simplistic “types” and dialogue that recycles cliches and bromides pretty much overwhelm it.

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.

The saving grace of this more-rude-than-funny film are its cast. They’re just a quartet of Simi Valley “Woohooo” girls in the opening, but the players make each member of this motley crew distinct, human and out of her depth. And Janet (Flanagan)? You’ll want to party with her.

Holy Lands works when Harry and Moshe are bickering, and doesn’t quite work anytime they’re not on the screen.

It’s lightweight, vague and a tad obscure, never quite delivering the parable it promises, limiting the young, quarelsome and randy new couple next door as mere decorative titilation, the priest is unrealized comic potential.

This Paranormal doesn't tamper with the formula that worked in the first two films. It lacks the "money" moments that those films delivered and ends with a finale that is downright conventional. "Paranormal" reveals itself for what it has become, the "Saw" of found video thrillers.

The actors may give their all and the squirrel might indeed “stick the landing.” Flora & Ulysses still falls a little short of the mark.

If “the gals” have to bow out, at least they try to do it in a sprint -- in their Manolo Blahniks. It’s a pity nobody told them you can’t run in heels -- in sand dunes.

You see enough of these movies and you get a bit jaded. Even the title seems derivative. But for those young enough to have missed generations of this sort of story, Edge of Everything hits the right notes, even if they come at exactly the moments we expect them to.

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

Macy, working from a seriously stereotypical script by Will Aldis, achieves a mild level of madcap, here and there.

This isn’t Cody’s most witty script, and the Oscar-winning Theron isn’t the most gifted at delivering these warmed-over one-liners.

The worst thing you can say about the new Roar Uthaug (“The Wave,” “Tomb Raider”) thriller Troll is that “It’s no ‘Trollhunter.'” It lacks the wit and the mismatch peril of André Øvredal’s classic rock-bodied creature feature of 2010. So “dumb,” sure. “Fun?” Not so much.

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

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

Hard Feelings still manages to find a few outrageous laughs.

There’s no humor and no pathos. The Cuckoo-Clock Heart, pretty as it is, lacks any heart at all.

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

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.

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

Clooney? When he has a comical moment, he makes the most of it. His attempts at heartfelt epiphany left me cold.

This might have made a decent eye-candy musical for kids. But aside from Nirvana and a choral “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the miner kids, there is no music.

Charles Dance is the Nosferatu-garbed monster in the cave, a balding, toothy villain in the great tradition of British vampires — Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman, Michael Sheen and Kate Beckinsale among them. The moment he shows up, all shadowy menace and prophecy, “Dracula” gets interesting.

Co-writers/directors Fabrizio Laurenti and Niccolò Vivarelli (one of Vivarelli’s sons) make a half-decent case that Vivarelli is worth knowing about beyond the borders of his homeland.

Tenderly-conceived, tastefully-directed, handsomely-mounted and prestigiously-cast, its a drama that runs up against the wall of over-familiarity and the ceiling of expectations. Even without being the umpteenth version of this sort of film to come out, it’s pretty bland going.

The movie hinges on Murray's turn as FDR, and frankly, he comes up wanting.

An instant midnight movie, a morbid mishmash of styles and filmmaking formats – 26 films, 26 filmmakers from the four corners of the horror globe, all making short films about death. It’s not for everyone.

'Twilight' of the Body Snatchers, without much urgency or sexual heat.

It’s never much more than a marginal vehicle for our always-gets-his-villain copper. And it goes utterly off the rails in the talk-talk-talk/escape-or-die finale.

The King is something of a tin-eared bore and a massive waste of time.

Plays as a franchise out of ideas, out of jokes and more naked about its real place in the film firmament –as panda pandering to the enormous Chinese movie market.

Schmaltz aside, I enjoyed this enough to recommend it up until it took that second act turn.

The performances are sharp, with the actors getting across fear, intense cold and a range of emotions, from desperate panic to noble sacrifice. It’s just that Life is more inevitable than surprising.

Whatever Ron Rash’s novel had to offer, Bier has rendered it into something soapy, with everything compelling about it washed out.

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

Hawke? He mumble-whispers his way through the notoriously introverted Tesla, not taking even a stab at a Croatian accent. That he sings in this same voice is kind of rubbing our noses in it.

Star Richard Dreyfuss gets his moments and finds a couple more of those signature, pugnacious Richard Dreyfuss lines to nail. And the whole sentimental affair goes down easier than you might expect from that desultory opening act.

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.

Christmas on the Square isn’t much, but what’s here is a pleasant enough time-killer, which is more than you can say about the vast majority of holiday-themed Hallmark/Hulu/Netflix et al fare this season.

A couple of decent twists, some good performances and two grimly realistic third-act fights recommend this new film from the director of “Double Date,” Ying-Ting Tseng. Everything else? Tried and true and kind of worn out.

Ferrell is as fearless as ever, stripping down and looking foolish, willing to be out-of-touch and out of step. Hart has his manic moments. But in this buddy comedy, the buddies are not equal and that limits the laughs.

In a lot of ways, Die Another Day is a return to Bond's bad-old-days, the early 1980s, when the plots were outlandish and haphazard, the stunts were fake and the whole enterprise was being treated as a cartoon.

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

The universal truths are banal, the narcissistic navel gazing in this episode of “Hoarders” just inspires eye rolling. 306 Hollywood is a home movie best left to the home it was shot in.

Like the pod Holloway is trapped in, the movie’s mostly just adrift — limited power, with time running out. Not fast enough, it turns out.

A melodramatic, overreaching and sometimes just inaccurate script by Nic Cage’s go-to screenwriters undermines director Mario Van Peebles’ World War II epic.

Wilson, letting the strain show the way a hundred other funny folks expected to “save” a flimsy comedy built around them have before her, has never seemed more out of her depth.

Stripping this to a film with fewer characters, maybe playing up the best actors giving the best performances — McGinley, Lindo, Shwayze and PenaVega stand out — would have helped.

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.

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.

There’s no suspense in the tale, even in its “big finish.” “Tragic” was never in the cards, as this con man got away with his stunt. But this could have been dark and funny. It isn’t.

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.

It’s a load of horrific hooey.

Action beats involving a river the distraught father tries to cross, heedless of the danger, and a frozen lake are impressive. It’s just that whatever they spent the money on — Donnie Yen, effects and location shooting — it wasn’t on a compelling or even all that competent script.

The laughs are few and far between and the “heart,” so important to a good rom-com, is left out altogether.

Cage and Dafoe never give less than their best, Cook is not bad, though the women aren’t allowed to make any impression at all, and Schrader’s acting just makes one wish he’d called in a favor and gotten a real actor to be The Greek.

The script runs out of fresh ideas and novel ways to challenge the dueling dancers quickly, and soon trips over its own tropes.

It’s topical and never terrible. But Just Say Goodbye plays as if a word was left out of end of the title — “Already.”

It works, here and there, and Polaha is perfectly believable as an ex-jock and ex-jerk who lets a little child lead him out of the darkness.

A gimmicky, obscurant and clumsy style of storytelling spoils what could have been gripping story.

It’s the execution that lets this dog down. Not enough funny lines and even the cheap, dirty laughs are in short supply.

Miller’s film, based on an A.S. Byatt short story, is long and feels incomplete, weighty without much psychological or intellectual heft, colorful but rarely dazzling and never whimsical enough.

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

The executions and worst of the violence is kept off camera. The acting varies from passable to rote, wooden recitation. And there’s a hint of humor.

“Personal” picture or whatever larger objective Rehemeier was aiming for, he’s made a very long and not that funny comedy connected by disjointed and generally unoriginal scenes rather than a coherent narrative.

The film may be commenting on the cushy way the rich and famous coped with Covid. But it’s insufferable at depicting insufferability.

The production design — digital backdrops augmenting vast living rooms and a library, even — is impressive. It’s rare that production design ever rescues a movie from a script that’s gone down the rabbit hole of ridiculous that Tau does.

The whole affair is just nuts, staggeringly irresponsible.

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

Peixota has made a spacey film that is almost neutral on its subject, a soft-spoken pastel-colored meditation on Scientology that never wrestles it into the larger thesis of the psychology of “belief” he might have been aiming for.

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

Counterfeiters rarely builds up suspense, and Hirschberg the actor doesn’t register the panic that Bridger must be feeling as the walls close in. Decent sequences are followed with clumsy, amateurish ones — the worst stoned come-on scene in recent memory.

A solid if occasionally silly B-picture of the sort that JCVD used to make, before “JCVD” suggested there might be more to him than mere “Muscles from Brussels.”

As crass as it is, I’ve seen worse.

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.

No matter how gorgeous Synchronicity looks, it can’t keep you from feeling this was an opportunity missed.

The effects, the gory makeup and what-not, are first rate, and the means of dispatching zombies creative, here and there.

Whatever promise there is in this well-worn existentialist premise starts to dissipate once the first guy meets the second, and the attention steadily fades the more characters in search of an exit — or a GPS fix — that they meet on their journey.

This one just never seems to end, and when the illogical end arrives, a laughably dumb coda is layered on top of it.

Echoes of War needs prettier visuals and bigger ideas, because the dialogue is too formulaic and the violence to come is entirely too predictable to hold our interest for 100 minutes.

The performances are perfectly serviceable, but building this thing around a passive, pathological liar, a literal “love the one you’re with” butterfly, might be the most quaint thing about it. It’s more maddening than “motivated,” more eye-rolling than funny.

The players are fine, but the mopey pace and somewhat generic “twists” to the plot make A Stage of Twilight — whose title promises a literariness the script never lives up to — something of a well-intentioned slog.

It’s all quite predictable — save for the sinister use of the music of Missing Persons — and a trifle bland. But the depictions of password-access mayhem are chillingly real, and Brosnan gets across the helplessness that many his age, all over the world, feel at the new tech and the new rules — no rules at all — threatening his ruin.

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

Secret Obsession never looks like anything more than the quick, cheap and under-developed hack job that it is.

The direction is solid, punchy. Yet the picture isn’t so much plotted as given a time frame to squeeze a lot of fistfights into. The pranks are ancient, the girl characters barely given a function and the laughs few and far between.

It’s an occasionally cute, strained attempt at twee that never quite comes together or comes off.

I’ve always appreciated the humor in these films, but by the time things go wholly over the top for the finale this time, the joking has run its course.

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.

Taken at face value, Agent Zero isn’t bad, but it is heartless. The stakes are low, and we never really fear for our heroine as she seems invulnerable, if not exactly invincible. With this one, you come for the fights, sniping and shootouts and not much else.

There’s virtually nothing to this short, thin yet (barely) feature-length dramedy. A few funny lines wither in the dark and minutes upon minutes of screen time burn off space imagery and Jobe pondering the nature of it in his addled head.

Carrey doesn’t deliver any sizzle in this role. Csokas chews him right out of their scenes, and the always soulful Gainsbourg (“Nymphomaniac,” “Antichrist”) lets us think we’re looking right into her horrific past, even if this dull, obvious “mystery” doesn’t seem worthy of any of their talents.

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

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

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

The movie’s a wash, and worse — too slow, not particularly well-acted or scripted. But there’s a little something to it, so no quick write-off here.

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

It’s no surprise that a Child of Mamet should have a clever way with a line and wicked sense of when to drop some tasty profanity. But Two-Bit Waltz is amateur theatrics committed to celluloid, a cast of “adorable” eccentrics performing scenes with the precious, remedial chapter titles.

The plot and characters really do make you wonder if the writer-director has experienced the real world, and not just the world as seen in “The Sting” or “Tin Cup” or “The Flim-Flam Man.”

The production design is cool, the cutting and staging are sharp. But the movie that comes out of all that doesn’t play. So maybe I’ll give the record a listen.

There aren’t more than a couple of laughs mixed in with a couple of legitimately sweet interludes in Fantasy Football, when all’s said and done. But everybody involved puts a cheerful face on things and makes this kids’ film endurable, if not quite passable entertainment.

This movie staggers along. So many of its sins could be minimized by an unsentimental slashing of establishing shots and establishing scenes, a thinning out of that dead-zone in the middle and a vigorous pass at the nervy but too drawn-out finale.

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

Give it up for Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. You’ll never see them work harder at a comedy than in The Heat, a stumbling, aggressively loud and profane cop buddy picture where they struggle to wring “funny” out of a script that isn’t.

The film’s pacing is stumbling and the longer it goes on, the less urgency we feel in that chase.

There’s no depth to the characters, especially Tee Yai, little that tells us how or what each is thinking or hoping. The shootouts are routine if excessive and the finale inevitable.

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

It’s a relief when the talking/screeching version of Day has an accident and the silent version takes over. He manages the pratfalls and double-takes well enough. He’s no Keaton, Chaplin, Begnini, Sellers or David Hyde Pierce, to name some of the great physical comics of ancient and recent vintage. There’s no shame in that.

Truth be told, I was never a fan of the first “Dumber,” but the stars made it endurable and convincingly stupid. Here, they’re sometimes funny, and sometimes just sad. They’re better than this, no matter how good they are at hiding the fact that they know it.

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.

The best martial arts action and gunplay are in the first act. After that, this convoluted Wolf Pack tale turns into something of a mutt.

Yes, the technology has improved in the 27 years that have passed. But the ensuing years have also produced first person shooter video games which utterly preclude the need for this as a movie. Visceral, violent toys that they are, they still have more heart than this.

What we’re left with is a stark reminder that, “BlackKklansman” aside, it’s possible to agree with most everything Spike Lee says in his movies these days while lamenting the decline in his storytelling skills and his unwillingness to edit them into sharper focus.

Whatever variations on a theme this script offers, none of it works without the ache we’re supposed to feel for those torn apart by sudden death. Endless never delivers that.

No One Lives has to give away its biggest, best secret (the killers have messed with the wrong guy) far too early for its own good.

Tedious time-killer of a kiddie comedy.

Sullivan sparkles. Nobody else does, and that smothers the movie, surprise or no surprise.

If it’s worth reciting the decades it took to pack all this imagery into sets so dark that much of it doesn’t register, it’s also worth noting that effects folk are, by definition, masters of making the trees. Whether or not they grasp the “forest” and can tell a compelling, coherent story about it isn’t exactly a given.

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

Director and co-writer Mordini makes a total hash of things by battering the timeline into atoms, constantly skipping from “three months before the event” to “130 hours” before back to “two months before,” and on and on.

A compelling hot-button subject and engrossing “true story” runs up against a ponderous script, pedestrian direction and the limited range of star Jim Caviezel in Sound of Freedom, a lumbering thriller about international child sex trafficking that flatlines when it’s meant to be moving, uplifting and inspiring.

Everything feels articifial and bloodless, even the murders.

Hallstrom and his low-heat stars can’t find the pulse of this corpse.

Land of Bad is a solid-enough B-movie combat thriller with the cast and production values of an A-picture.

The test of the movie is whether we’ll instinctively root for the standard white-girl-in-jeopardy and accept the physical abuse, mental anguish and humiliations Sarah must endure before figuring out if she can fight back. Because Bloom? She gives us nothing.

There’s promise to this or that character and in the twists that almsot certainly played better in the novel than Feig manages on screen. But the promise is squandered in a pokey, obvious movie that stumbles towards stupid in the anti-climactic latter acts.

Lopez is a gorgeous woman with the same mousy voice she came into the movies with 20 years ago. She’s all about the makeup, the hair, the clothes. She plays the part like someone imitating a TV teacher, from her classroom posture to her delivery.

The characters in The Perfect Game speak old school “Hollywood Mexican.” In other words, they speak English with accents that we haven’t heard since the golden Age of Speedy Gonzalez.