Roger Moore

Once the magic box, its allure and its consequences take over, the run-of-the-mill Wish Upon loses its promise and its footing.

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

It’s a B-movie, start to finish, a film noir with Americo-Persian flourishes, but a formula picture in any event. The Persian Connection still manages scenes that pop, violence that shocks (and satisfies) and performances that remind us that in the United States, movie stars come from all races and classes. Eventually.

There’s one touching scene — just one. It hints at a movie that might have been, one that didn’t involve strippers and strip clubs. The performances are mostly flat, but let’s not lay this mess at the feet of the actors.

This is more “Iris” than “Frida” or “Seraphine,” though anyone who has ever seen the screen story of an artist — “Basquiat,” “Pollock,” etc. — will ease into the well-established rhythms of such films.

The Big Sick makes good use of some vintage Nanjiani 9/11 comebacks, some winning (if not new) backstage backbiting comedy club observations and marvelous, heartfelt work by three great actors who carry their leading man and his overlong, not-a-million-laughs “personal” story across the finish line.

“We punched a hole in the darkness,” they declare, and as the film is framed within a ceremony where their efforts are honored by the world’s journalists as the most significant reporting going on right now, you’d have to agree.

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

There’s little reason for director and co-writer (with Elisabeth Holm) Gillian Robespierre to set the movie in 1995. But floppy discs, pay phones, CD stores, PJ Harvey on the radio and “Mad About You” and Hillary Clinton — in that famous pink pantsuit — on TV suggest filmmakers’ living out some bit of comfort-zone autobiography in this warped dramedy.

The conversations with Emilio mostly just reinforce, with delicacy and omissions of REAL dirt about Kubrick’s on-set tyranny, the picture of Kubrick that many others have painted over the years.

The picture is pleasant enough, righteous in its cause and inspiring in its “I’ve got no time for cancer” message.

To me, it’s just another “Jurassic World,” technology and production design on a whole new plane, story, dialogue and characters that we’ve seen before (too often), the entire hyped and over-rated enterprise half-forgotten before it hits Netflix.

It’s a fun vanity project, an interesting history as seen from its insiders.

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

It all feels random and slapped together, with seriously under-developed heroes, villains, over-the-top geyser-of-blood violence played for laughs.

The movie revels in watching the out-of-place Beatriz as she quietly observes the guests arriving wearing clothes and jewels that cost more than her broken car.

It’s worth the three hour investment in time only if you keep a notepad to jot down the hidden gems in France’s rich post-war film tradition.

One more pan dipped into the Supervillain Gru goldmine shows this Illumination franchise is a claim that’s petered out, with no fresh ideas — no funny ones, anyway.

Coppola stripped the tale, cut the length, eschews menace and goes easy on the malice, which made the earlier version of the story work. Even as an arch, serio-comic female revenge fantasy, this Beguiled fails to cast the necessary spell.

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

The Ornithologist is so stunningly strange and out of its time that this slow and deliberate film holds your attention, making you wonder what wonder or calamity will befall Fernando next.

Good Fortune is laced with celebrity endorsements.

Baby Driver doesn’t invite over-thinking. But as visceral, swaggering summer popcorn picture fun, it’s hard to beat. Impossible, as a matter of fact. Forget your comic books and sci-fi sequels. THIS is the movie of the summer.

It’s easily the worst installment in this endlessly awful series, probably the worst movie of the summer.

Nobody Speak is a little unbalanced, and top-heavy, thanks to the overwhelming focus on the more murky Gawker trial.

Overlong, more solid than inspiring, it makes a good go of illustrating just how much fame, music and controversy the man squeezed into 25 short years.

Cars 3 surpasses “Monster University” as the dullest, dimmest Pixar movie ever.

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

The only way to appreciate The Book of Henry is by treating it as the movie equivalent of a summer read, a beach book that tries to pack in the full breadth of human experience into a few too many pages.

Even though it rallies in its last third to manage something like comic momentum, Rough Night never recovers from the bloody death and the mess that ensues.

Past Life is best appreciated as an attempt to finally give permission, at the source of the grievance (Israel), not to forget, but to at least forgive.

Seymour gives the most interesting performance, and even it comes off like a pulled-punch.

The messy tangle of the plot, which involves Steve-Bruce getting knocked out, more than once, does little more than throw a whole lot of potentially silly stuff against the screen — some of it landing laughs.

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

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

Action-packed and patently ridiculous, it’s all in good fun.

Michell ensures that the cryptic finale to My Cousin Rachel isn’t so much a solution as an invitation to an argument on the drive home from the cinema.

Brett Haley’s film captures Elliott in all his majesty, his twinkle dimming as he casts his eyes out over the mountains beyond his house or the rocky beach down the hill.

Movies, life and love, Jacques says, “are like souffles — all about timing.” And Coppola’s is just…off. Paris Can Wait could have been a perfectly adorable wish-fulfillment fantasy for an over-40 audience. She just needed to wait until landing a more engaging leading man.

Mara delivers the movie’s emotional punches like a prize-fighter, utterly selling us on the notion that this cold, remote and guarded member of the working class walking wounded has found her true love in the one guy who needs her, sticks with her and saves her life.

Shults has concocted a nightmare within a nightmare, a test of nerves and a wary mystery.

There’s not much room for performance in all this. Cohen does that acting school rendition of small-town-punk thing, Hirsch tries to simmer and Kravitz brings a little heat and paranoia to Roxxy.

An endlessly inventive and anarchic Dreamworks romp based on the Dav Pilkey children’s books, it thrives on prankster pals, over-matched adults and a hand-drawn comic book hero’s ethos.

Yeah, it’s dark. It starts sarcastic, bends towards sardonic and ends up downright deep in its observations about couples, the stresses on a relationship and the importance of knowing how to “fight fair.”

The movie is a derivative hash of comic book picture plot points and origin story touchstones — half “Captain America: The First Avenger,” half “Thor.” But director Patty Jenkins, who did not get enough credit for “Monster,” keeps Gadot in frame and the tone light.

Its few novel touches aren’t enough to lift Aaron’s Blood into the realm of vampire-movie-worth-seeing.

The Journey‘s wonderful stars — Spall, Meaney, Highmore, a testy Stephens and of course Hurt — make this sentimental saunter go down easily.

The Student makes a chilling allegory for the post-fact age (Russia invented it, remember), and a cautionary tale for cultures everywhere. There’s such a thing as being too tolerant of the intolerant.

The Hunter’s Prayer isn’t in that top drawer. But with action auteur Jonathan Mostow (“Breakdown”) behind the camera and Sam Worthington in front of it, it gives fair value — and then some — as it treads a well-worn path.

Kon Tiki directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg strike just the right tone, and found just enough heart left in this tattered tale.

It’s a movie that doesn’t focus as much on the creation of the work as it does on a fresh view of the woman who made it.

It’s a slow-moving/unsatisfying in the end how-will-she-escape thriller dragged out by too many scenes explaining the torturer’s psyche, undone by an ending that no Hollywood studio would allow past the “bad idea in the script” stage.

It’s a goof that isn’t goofy enough, a romp that doesn’t, and a tone-deaf riff on a show that was already a parody, in and of itself.

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

Degan ably imitates drug trip experiences with the visuals and editing. But he also captures a rich boy detoxing from therapeutic drugs and a corrosive-to-some culture for many months.

What does pay off is the odd moment of dark comedy.

For all the corn, Lowriders can be appreciated for its rolling stock and serving a criminally under-served audience...a film with fine performances and teachable moments amidst all the melodrama.

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

Wakefield is a sometimes funny, always smart movie that never quite finds the depth to be brilliant.

When “Covenant” is not head-slappingly obvious and perfunctory, it’s just laugh-out-loud ludicrous.

It’s got enough laughs to get by.

It lacks the fireworks or stunning revelations of an A-picture in this genre. But it works as a nice showcase for a cast that’s largely been relegated to small supporting roles these days.

The Lovers is a compact tale, a chamber music melodrama underscored by lavish, romantic strings and a Prokofiev waltz. It never quite escapes the stage-bound feeling.

In all honesty, the rat-a-tat repartee and tasty touches of Classic pre-Madonna Ritchie don’t excuse a bastardization that takes forever to get on its feet, that lacks the requisite love story (Ritchie and his “boys will be boys” pictures), that presents too much of Angle-land as a burnt-out pit quarry, that revels in anachronisms.

Cedar has given Gere his own “House of Cards” to move into, where the game analogies spin out as chess and, most tellingly, dominoes. Norman needs them to fall just so, and if they do, he will be a man to be reckoned with.

When The Wall goes wrong, it doesn’t instantly crumble, though you can feel the foundation collapsing underneath the film’s feet. Taylor-Johnson, who must carry it, holds our interest. It’s just that we know, judging from that fatal flaw screenwriter Dwain Worrell built in as a plot contrivance, that it won’t end well, either.

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

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

The paranoia underlined, high-lighted and foot-noted by an over-reaching satire like “The Circle” seems more reasonable by the minute.

What flipped by as a funny, big-budget whimsy before takes on gravitas — daddy issues, intimacy issues, trust issues.

Trackdown goes down easy, and the character portraits are just interesting enough to hold our attention. But you can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a more interesting movie that cut closer to home.

I love the way the film sets us up with “types” — ambitious, narcissistic politico, “trophy” wife, loyal spouse, doting dad — and thoroughly upends them time and again.

Plays like an ill-considered vanity project intended for export to Mother Russia. Maybe there, they’ll be willing to ignore the stiff acting, dull directing and story whose ending is guessable almost from the opening credits.

“BANG!” isn’t shy about looking at the dark side. Berns was in a business with brutally sharp elbows, and he learned quickly to give as good as he got.

Director Barber makes the period video look exactly like misplaced family home movies — rolling picture, static, shaky, the works.

Gould creates a fascinating portrait of the work and the patient, harried and detail-oriented folks who do it.

A lovely, nostalgic look not just at a war the Brits just can’t stop memorializing, but at the way movies were made way back when, with a little magic and a dollop of sentiment could carry a story for audiences starved for anything that offered them the possibility of a happy ending.

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

Some moments might make you smirk. But there’s little that makes you laugh.

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

All in all, it’s an eye-opening offering from DisneyNature, even with the Chinese pandering, Chinese spin and image-burnishing we can sense was part of the package.

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.

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

“Lost City” aims for a sort of new-fashioned old-fashioned approach to this subject, and that unfortunately makes it more Earthbound than soaring, more pedestrian than epic.

The Promise, despite its battles, its vivid recreation of the last days of Constantinople (renamed Istanbul), its historical sweep,despite a very good cast, never feels “epic” and rarely do its romantically drawn characters draw us into their romance and their tragedy.

The Case for Christ won’t convert any critical thinker, but more disappointingly, it fails as faith-based entertainment. It’s a house of cards built to defend a house of cards, with meek-inheriting the Earth acting in the bargain.

There’s never been much more than a fringe audience for anime in the U.S., which suggests that Hollywood might not be long in taking a live-action shot at this story. But whatever the budget, whoever the stars, they’ll have to go some ways to top the magic managed by artists and their brushes spelling out Your name.

Evans is convincingly rugged, convincingly smart and convincingly wearied from the weight of deciding this child’s future.

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

There is no worse way for an actor to make his exit from the screen which he lit up for fifty years. Yeah, O’Toole wanted one last check so he took a tiny role in this silly slaughterhouse.

Truman becomes a bittersweet character study in death and friendship, a film that lets the sweet overcome the bitter.

It has about as much satiric bite as a Polident commercial, a reverse mortgage of a movie promising dividends its enfeebled script never delivers.

“Shot!” makes for a light, smart and often funny dance through an era with the man whose images made icons out of many, and burned those icons into our visual memory.

The Void devolves into a creature feature.

That’s the sole challenge and only entertainment value in this nicely-animated drivel, figuring out the voices.

It is a story of a reckoning — several reckonings — that is afraid of actually wrestling with the consequences of betrayal and self-abuse, of letting its characters naturally mellow or die because they can’t.

A rambling, insomnia-curing meditation on music and the musical life that has too little of either to make any sense at all.

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

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

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

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

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

I connected with its out-there take on the first days of sibling rivalry, the acknowledgement that humanity is utterly distracted by cute puppy videos on the Internet and with Baldwin, a silky-smooth comic bully whose onscreen bark is always a lot worse than his bite.

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

The humanity of the performances and pathos of the tale shine through the tropes and cliches to make this smart movie with the dumb-pun for a title a worthy enterprise and well worth your time.

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

It’s coherent enough to suggest competence, but Shepard plainly would have been better served sending the script out for doctoring, or contenting himself with acting and maybe second-unit (action sequence) directing.

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.

Writer-directors Geoffrey Orthwein and Andrew Sullivan had a solid concept and a great setting, but not much else.

I can’t say I loved it, as it drags and drags and only occasionally springs to life. But this “tale as old as time” resonates as well as it ever has, and its songs still stick with you long after the closing credits.

Paxton makes a marvelous menace. The picture’s biggest failing is losing sight of him for the middle acts, and its second biggest failing is giving the equally valuable Colm Feore too little to do.

It’s no use wishing The Last Word had come out better. But with plenty of examples of failed-films aimed at an older audience to compare it to, an “I’ve seen worse” makes for some consolation.

Even though this “ending” is a lot less surprising than it must have been on the pages of Julian Barnes’ novel, Broadbent humanizes the mystery and makes us care long past the point where we’ve solved it.

It’s hardly the last word on this scam and its hilarious embrace of the “Duck Soup” uniforms and the addled imagination and crackpot ideas of L. Ron Hubbard. But that’s the point.

What we’re left with is a botched romance saddled with an over-arching, over-reaching message, one that only the Turks will be quick to embrace.

Findlay and Scott don’t force their charm on us, Wilkinson makes the aphorisms, anecdotes and literary quotations poetic and warm. So much of it takes place in the flowers and brambles of a garden that the movie smells like spring.

It’s repetitive and jargon-filled and a little too long. But “Zero” is still a fascinating story, troubling and chilling when you realize that the people in charge of the government now are the very people we need government to protect us from — scammers, frauds, “wealth re-distribution” hustlers and their protectors.

While I appreciate any faith-based film that isn’t all about the anger and intellectual dishonesty of “God’s Not Dead,” there’s no endorsing a fairy-tale this literal and insipid.

Nothing much happens here. It’s scenic, but writer-director Alexander Janko has cast the thing with no flavor. Nobody has an accent, not even the local Cape Cod characters.

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

Tiny profundities, clever twists and lots of giggles are the hallmarks of Table 19, a wedding comedy with on-the-nose casting and slight, uneven charms.

It makes for a warm history lesson about a country and a love affair that prefigured a change in a corner of the world where the news, for decades, was dominated by violence, injustice and fear.

It’s not a great movie, a deep film or a transcendent experience, the way “Groundhog Day” is. But Before I Fall is an admirable knockoff, a “teachable moments” movie about that first time we take stock, realize the what and who we should treasure, and let them know it.

It’s a stupid, ill-plotted heist picture, but Collide does have its moments.

Hollywood will simplify it to that big concept, and trim writer-director Maren Ade’s flaccid storytelling and many aimless scenes into something tighter, funnier and almost certainly less German.

Director Ash Brannon (“Surf’s Up”) and a slew of credited co-writers could not uncover a laugh in this material. Not a one-liner, not one single sight gag that pays off. The animation is generic, but pretty enough. The music? Sort of a Chinese market research idea of “rock.”

The Salesman makes for a gripping drama of a relationship in crisis.

Bitter Harvest never amounts to more than a colorful misfire, a picture with much of the pageant of the period, but little of the roiling passions that dominate politics in the Breadbasket of Europe, even today.

Sketch-comedy whiz Jordan Peele of TV’s ”Key and Peele” and “Keanu” has cooked up the smartest horror movie in ages, an edge-of-your-seat thriller that is entertaining and creepily enlightening at the same time.

“Clown” and “Henry” are the same movie. But if an artist is someone who “pounds the same nail over and over again,” give it up for Phillips.

Logan is a bloody and noble finale to Jackman’s turn with the sideburns and metal claws. It broods and growls, lashes out and swears, and Jackman is magnificent at every one of those.

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

We will see worse movies this year than The Great Wall. But we won’t one more cynical.

There’s little tension or comic build-up.

Beyond that, what is the drive — personal, psychological , body image or otherwise — that they must have in common? “Glitter” never gets close to that.

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

Gnecco, a Chilean comic actor well-known all over Latin America for assorted TV series, smirks and recites and plays Neruda as the legend he was and the role of a lifetime he’s become.

At 104 minutes, this CG/looks-like-stop-motion cartoon, drags. The screen is overcrowded with characters and gadgets that make it feel like a long, LEGO commercial.

A film which promises “darker” but delivers “funnier” — with some of the laughs intentional.

None of the cast brings anything like genuine terror or urgency to the proceedings. Only Vincent D’Onofrio, making a third act appearance, acquits himself with honor.

The fists fly, the bullets blaze and the mayhem borders on magnificent in John Wick: Chapter 2, a sequel that ups the artistic ante even as it boosts the body count of that sleeper hit about the assassin’s assassin played by Keanu Reeves.

13 Minutes is a taut, smart and straightforward bio-drama of this largely forgotten early figure in German resistance to the Hitler regime.

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

A goofy, gonzo thrill ride, “Vengeance” is a bad movie sequel so bad it’s good, a bad movie that’s almost a great bad movie.

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

The winsome Lynch, narrating her story and irresistibly (to Auden) poker-faced in her dealings with the outside world, makes a heroine worth knowing and following to the ends of Ireland, with or without a wand.

The science is sloppy, the sentimentality is sloppier in “The Space Between Us,” a sci-fi romance pairing up agreeable leads in a cut-and-paste script.

If you’ve ever wondered just how co-dependent the relationship between filmmaker and subject can be in the course of filming a documentary, Left on Purpose answers that question. And how.

This “Comedian” is — like many a desperate stand-up — content to go for the dirty/easy laugh, the kind you see coming a mile off, the kind you feel coarse for rewarding with a snicker, the kind you can hear in any high school locker room.

As thrilling as it is that Franco got In Dubious Battle made — the title comes from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” — and as impressive as the cast list is on paper, his inability to spot star power and screen charisma in actors younger than himself lets him and Steinbeck down.

The film lacks the spark of life or wit that might have made it work.

There’s a fascinating satire of America’s unholy alliance of heartless corporations and the religious dupes who worship them just sitting here. But it’ll take a wit far cleverer than action hack Paul W.S. Anderson to work that out.

Return of Xander Cage adds up to a movie “all jacked up on Red Bull and Mountain Dew.” And we all know how bad that stuff is for you.

It’s all harmless enough, with the odd lump-in-the-throat moment as another dog meets his or her end. As a lifelong dog owner, I found the going rather grim.

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

It’s not a deep film, but it is a rich one — full of flesh and blood characters, realistic “coming of age” moments and pithy homilies on the state of relationships, gender roles, “the California Dream” and the American one.

It’s altogether ridiculous, made all the sadder because we’ve seen this ridiculousness before.

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

A taut, riveting police procedural that maintains suspense even as it finds humor in the people, their funny accents and way with profanity, and pathos.

Huppert, after a career that has included “Entre Nous,” “8 Women,” and the equally unnerving “The Piano Teacher,” makes this unfiltered fury the capstone of a stunning career in which she journeyed from French sex symbol to grande dame of European cinema without losing even a hint of her allure.

The Bye Bye Man is a moldy slice of Wisconsin-set cheese, a horror film that manages as many unwanted laughs as frights.

The legends of America’s great robber barons are equal parts inspiring and appalling. And damned if The Founder doesn’t get that balance just right.

It has maddeningly unsatisfying theological debates, scrupulous though myopic period detail and an utter lack of narrative drive.

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

This wistful, melancholy yet hopeful romance has a warmth that singes, a poetry to its stock situations and a biting allegory about the country where Western civilization began facing a world of troubles, not all of its own making.

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

The action beats are barely passable — glitchy, pixelated jerks in the digitally-augmented jumps, punches, etc. The production design — dark on dark, all the better to hide the bored actors.

A light and lively look at a drug culture and trade that didn’t avoid all of the darkness that followed.

Best of all is the man who stands front and center, thinking, smoking and expounding, off-the-cuff, about a subject he spent his career and life mulling over, fuming over and struggling to understand in depth.

Buy the kids the soundtrack, skip the movie.

It’s bracing and inspiring, what filmmakers Keith Fulton and Leo Pepe show us in that first hour.

A Great American Play becomes a Great American Film with Fences, Denzel Washington’s letter-faithful adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece.

Quest or no quest, cool locations or green screen soundstages, shirtless Fassbender or Fassbender in an assassin’s hoodie, “Assassin’s” never breaks the creed of Hollywood filmed video games — “Action packed, but dull.”

McDonagh’s script is so ad hoc, so clumsily random, that nothing adds up to anything.

The film has lots of promising problems for us to dive into with our heroes, mechanical and philosophical puzzles to sort out. But from the opening moments, Jon Spaihts’ screenplay drifts off course, choosing to explain things that would be more dramatic as mysteries and secrets.

Miss Sloane is a Capital Hill tale in the “State of Play/House of Cards” mold, a melodramatic thriller more realistic than “Scandal,” slightly less riveting than “Scandal.”

A Monster Calls makes a case for remembering that fairytales can terrify as they teach and test us.

It’s almost wholly satisfying — witty, warm and entertaining — a film in which fatalism isn’t a joke, where pitiless death is doled out by Empire and Rebellion, where those deaths have weight and meaning, where suspense is genuine.

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

It’s fair if not entirely accurate to say everything funny it you can see in the trailers and TV ads for Why Him? Because those samples aren’t the least big amusing, and there is a random laugh or three in this holiday comedy to put the “R” back in Christmas.

Warm and witty performances by Spencer, Hensen and Monae, the stoic moral stature Costner plays and unlikable-until-they’re-reasonable turns by Dunst and Parsons make Hidden Figures a winner, a piece of unknown history rendered flesh and blood funny, uplifting and never less than entertaining.

Portman lets us feel the way her loss utterly empties life of meaning and purpose. But Chilean director Pablo Larrain (“The Club”) lets little John Jr. (Aiden and Brody Weinberg) provide the heart-wrenching release, just as he did back at that state funeral in 1963.

Big moments drown in a soundmix of sappy muzak. Good actors are wasted, left and right. Classic Montiel.

A cluttered, ham-fisted farce that pulls its punches so often that it never pops, a meandering mess that never gets up to the speed one needs to achieve “romp.”

The germ of an interesting idea was here, and the collection of murder rooms makes for a dazzling third act setting. But the movie flatlines every time a chewy supporting player (Michael Pare is another) isn’t on the screen.

Dullness “Incarnate,” in other words.

As its quickly stumbles through its crimes and clues, A Kind of Murder leaves you with the uneasy feeling that a promising mystery has simply been designed to death.

Lion is moving and inspiring.

Nicolas Pecse’s debut feature as writer-director is a patient, pitiless thriller, a macabre tale set in the rural South where random violence is the stuff of folk legend, and morbid bluegrass ballads.

Benson, who turns 87 on Dec. 2, comes off as an adorable Scots curmudgeon in Justin Bare and Matthew Miele’s film.

What Lonergan has created here is one of the cinema’s defining statements on the kind of grief that leaves you gutted, of wounds that will never heal. He’s got the guts to make us uncomfortable in scene after scene, and the courage to deny us “The Hollywood Ending.”

It’s rarely scary. But the effects suggest a bigger budget than “SiRENS” might have warranted. And a couple of those are downright impressive and add to the feeling that this indie Satanic slasher pic is punching above its weight class.

The movie unravels as its surprises become melodramatic flourishes, undercutting its tension with coincidences, lapses in motivation and head-scratching responses to situations that are pretty conventional — cut and dried — despite the lurid, Vegas/Ellis undertones.

A striking if predictable and plainly-staged docudrama set in one of the world’s most forbidding landscapes.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle (“Whiplash”) reaches for the stars, and cast the picture beautifully. But this throwback musical (songs by Justin Hurwitz) lurches along on show business cliches in between dreamy flights of fancy.

Even if it is too brief and leaves too much out to be “definitive,” it serves up heaping helpings of Mifune’s film work and bits of home movies and the like to create a fascinating man-behind the stoic face/samurai icon below-the-topknot portrait of Mifune.

The settings are pristine, and feel about as real and lived in as “The Polar Express.” The performances have a stiffness that borders on motion-capture animation. Director Robert Zemeckis brings us a “Casablanca” without a scrap of heart, an “English Patient” with all of the splendor, and none of the heat.

It’s more scenic than dramatic. Sadly, the same could be said about Lautner, who never seems to deliver even as his window for “stardom” closes.

Plays more like a sermon than cinema, a sermon delivered by uninspired preachers. And everybody knows America gave up sermons and thinking about Big Questions on Sundays for football and mindless entertainment decades ago.

The take-away impression from “BS 2” is that the vulgar world has passed it by, that it’s power to shock has dissipated by all that’s been said and done and elected in the intervening years. A drunken, swearing, whoring St. Nick? That’s all you’ve got?

The best teen comedy since the heyday of Hughes, raunchier and randier as befits the passing decades, but with kids just as mixed-up as ever, and over exactly the same things. Teen angst never goes away, it just deserves a witty updating every now and then.

Elba’s action credentials are well-established, so there’s little for him to prove here. The fights are convincing enough, even if the plot is all coincidence, conspiracy and con jobs.

A moving, hilarious and stunningly-animated adventure epic.

Naomi Watts deserves better than this. So does Oliver Platt. So do we.

[Ree] virtually never surprises us, making his film more a celebratory hagiography for proud Norwegians than anything the rest of the world, in and out of chess, can embrace.

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

The 24 Hour War is a bracing reminder of the days when drivers became legends, racecar teams were a big source of national pride and when Ford got out of the business of building “living rooms on wheels” and took its chances on “the Super Bowl of Speed” — LeMans.

Teller, who takes us from grins to grimaces with skill, and Eckhart, given his best role in years and his most likable performance ever, make Bleed for This worth the pain.

The terrible, only-happens-in-the-movies crime and his character’s investigation of it are all that animate these “Nocturnal Creatures.”

Gay coming-of-age stories are common enough these days, but Moonlight finds a new perspective, a new setting and a compelling new filmmaking voice to tell that story. It’s one of the best pictures of the year.

The acting is rarely broad and Fan Bingbing delivers a credible haplessness in Lian. The broader comedy translates well-enough.

Beatty, who plays Hughes in the picture, tries to give us a movie as wildly eccentric and asymmetrical as the man himself. He’s concocted a random romantic farce that isn’t romantic or particularly farcical. But random? Yeah.

Warm, intimate and brittle, Loving is the most important movie of 2016, and one of the best.

Arrival puts Villeneuve, who first came to attention with “Incendies,” firmly in the first rank of filmmakers, a director capable of not just entertaining, but challenging. And the wide-eyed Adams, near the top of the list of the best actresses never to win an Oscar, delivers another riveting, melancholy and life-affirming performance that threatens to change that, maybe as soon as next February.

The Monster is as dull and predictable as its title, a creature feature in which the melodramatic flashbacks are the only bits with bite.

Sicario is a conventionally unconventional drug wars thriller, a well-cast, breathlessly executed peek into the heart of a Trumpian nightmare of Mexican cartels which kill at will on either side of an embattled border.

The film suffers from abrupt, under-motivated transformations and has the pall of death hanging over it since we know what’s coming.

As holiday movie comfort food, it more than fills the bill.

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

The vast majority of us are so far removed from any common farming past that we idealize it and the people who live that lifestyle. Peter and the Farm is a sober reminder of how hard and callous that life is, and will come as a shock to anybody with romantic dreams of “chucking it all” to live off the land.

Doctor Strange doesn’t break formula, and no, they will never ever be able to surprise us with his origin story again. It’s still head, shoulders and cloak above so much of what’s being churned out the seemingly bottomless vaults of Marvel and DC Comics.

No 108 minute music history can hope to be complete, and the circumscribed “Gimme Danger” is very much a mixed bag in that regard. But Jarmusch gets a lot right and a lot documented on film in this winning and sometimes amusing musical history tour.

A caper comedy that neither capers nor gives birth to many laughs.

Kids, say the five-and-unders seeing their first movie, may connect with this confection. But if you’re old enough to know what “puerile” means, there’s nothing to cling to here.

It’s a good-if-not-great movie, old fashioned but anachronistic dialogue, action that’s more impressive than inspiring, a combat film that like Eastwood’s Western “Unforgiven,” tries to have it both ways — a sermon against the violence of man delivered in a very violent story.

The thriller is mildly thrilling, the intrigues reasonably intriguing. But it’s the sex that sells this.

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

And Graham? Still wearing the short shorts, the shorter skirts, the knee socks and the wider than wide eyes. She and My Dead Boyfriend aren’t exactly bad, they’re just out of place and out of time. But at least she’s not playing another hooker.

Wish it wasn’t so, I still find the character brash and cranky fun. But until Perry parts with a nickel and brings in funny people to goose his ideas into something wittier, Madea isn’t MIA, she’s DOA.

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.

Priceless isn’t a particularly dislikable film, just an exhausted one — a couple of scenes have sardonic bite, the final confrontation is staged with some thought.

Reaser, Thomas, Basso and especially the demonically playful Miss Wilson play the Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard script like a fiddle.

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.

It’s also overlong and sentimental. But it’s a vivid, warm and amusing portrait of a real man, someone whose life began in darkness, experienced the light of a great love and has collapsed into a pit of self-pity.

Autumn Lights has a hint of Ingmar Bergman about it in intent, setting and title (he made “Autumn Sonata”). But in execution, we can’t tell if this was meant to be an homage or a parody.

Even without big revelations or surprises, it’s not without its charms. “Little Sister” levitates above the trite and banal, even if it never quite takes flight.

The wimpy kid here isn’t interesting, the “worst years” a dull exaggeration and the movie not worth the 92 minutes it takes to sit through.

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

But even as Hart grows richer, more remote and seemingly less relate-able, there’s still manic hilarity in the little man. He’s still fearlessly fearful, defiantly shallow and amusingly self-effacing on stage.

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

Writer-director Lee Kirk’s script manages a few laugh-out-loud lines and moments, and Armstrong has an offhanded charm that plays well in a role tailor-made for him. But Ordinary World is a little too enamored of the phrase “Truth in advertising.” It’s run of the mill, humdrum, “ordinary” in its set up.

Writer/director James Steven Sadwith’s autobiographical coming-of-age film doesn’t have a lot of originality to it, in spite of the nearly-unique nature of his youthful encounter with the Great Writer. But Cooper’s turn gives it weight and life.

The film’s courtroom concentration — the suit, prep and trial took years — makes it one of the driest treatments of The Holocaust ever. But Weisz and Wilkinson find emotions around the edges of all that be-wigged legal wrangling.

A tricky thriller whose tricks are less important than its riveting leading lady.

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

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

Paulson and Duplass make all this talk (never once mumbling) fascinating, lived-in and real, taking us into the sad, lost lives of these two long lost lovers.

Amanda Knox may not change anybody’s mind. But it should.

It’s a solid film, but the mission creep of its many messages, its format — interviews broken up by vintage news footage, old movies (“The Birth of a Nation”) — and a stylistic choice by DuVernay dull its impact.

Arnold has made a bleak romance that shimmers with hope, an overlong odyssey that we smell just as surely as we feel.

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

It’s not bad, a solid “Hollywood” history of the 1830s Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia with a love story, religion, injustices, torture and murder, a movie with middling, un-affecting acting but high artistic pretensions.

It’s overlong and rarely surprising, but Nair skillfully plays the limited board this story gives her, a queen among filmmakers making all the right moves.

Stand-up comic, impressionist and actor Kevin Pollack steps behind the camera for The Late Bloomer, a sweet-spirited if slightly rude rom com masquerading as a sex comedy.

Every guy in this thing who isn’t in clown makeup is as bad as the ridiculous, obvious and disjointed script they’re trying to play.

Berg reminds us that even in the worst disaster, people can be selfless, heroic, and in the case of Aaron Dale Burkeen, professional even if those who gamble with their fates are not.

Movies like this grate largely because of their test tube “solutions” to real world problems as old as the species.

It’s not as start-to-finish funny as Warner Animation’s “Lego Movie”, and that also goes for the quirky Lego cartoon short — basically the chicken-botched filming of the opening credits to a martial arts movie...But there’s wit, warmth and invention here, enough to make you hopeful for a Warner Animation future.

The charms of Hillsong: Let Hope Rise, essentially a tour documentary about a big pop band created by an Australian megachurch, plum evaded me.

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

Which is what this film actually lacks, provocation. The film celebrates him, but the lack of critical mulling over from people who aren’t in his fan club doesn’t keep him from seeming somewhat unlikeable.

My Blind Brother takes things in some very predictable directions, and Goodhart was too goodhearted to let Scott go full-bore jerk as Robbie.

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

Zellweger shows flashes of her Oscar winning talent and is certainly not past her sell-by date, even if she’s tampered entirely too much with the packaging.

From its New Orleans mansion and penthouse office suites, to its Mercedes and parties packed with haute couture glamour, it presents a vision of aspiration and achievement that Hollywood generally ignores.

It doesn’t really skip by, but Krasinski keeps the squishiness to a minimum and lets his co-stars land the laughs even if The Hollars are nothing to shout about.

The voice of skepticism is sorely missed in Oliver Stone’s credulous bio-pic, Snowden.

A tale worthy of a hundred Cold War thrillers.

How He Fell in Love isn’t dazzling, warm and fuzzy. For all the damage being done, there’s not a lot of harsh edge to it, either. But it feels real.

I can’t say it all works, and there’s an epilogue that plays as more insipid than biting. But it’s a daring piece to put on the stage, even more daring to commit to film.

You don’t have to remember the 1943 mid-WWII Oscar winning “The Human Comedy” to realize that Meg Ryan’s version, Ithaca, is missing something.

Feuerzeig makes the fateful choice of telling the whole story through Albert’s eyes, and decked out in too-old-for-this leather and straightened hair and piercings, she conjures up a hellish life.

Landing a lead like Caan underscores the fact that there was the germ of a twisty, tough thriller here. It’s too bad the script and uncertain direction let The Good Neighbor down.

The colors are vibrant, the sea, palm trees, birds, bird-feathers and Crusoe’s red hair are almost photo-realistic. But as a kids’ cartoon, Wild Life is a an utter dud.

Sully might not rank among Eastwood’s greatest films, but it shows his canny skill at deciding how to tell a story in which everybody knows the ending. That he manages to make it suspenseful and downright moving shows him at his professional best.

This is a toothless satire, a sermon lacking the bite or broad wit of similar films.