Roger Moore

If The Night Clerk rises above “near miss” status, that’s thanks to the cast.

Aside from the comic-book movie supernatural brawls — with lots more blood and profanity — there’s nothing at all to this.

It’s just not enough. The Bronze is predictable, and outside of Rauch, Cole and a very convincing (conditioning, some training, clever editing) Haley Lu Richardson, the cast is bland. Strong has nothing to play, and nobody else makes an impression. The Bronze is proof that one great joke is not the route to comic gold, or for that matter silver.

Eiza González of “Hobbs & Shaw” and “Baby Driver” is a stunning beauty who handles what action choreography they entrust to her. She knows how to suck in her cheeks as she’s about to set off grenades in the computer room like an action bombshell badass. Very Olivia Wilde.

It’s superficial, but that plays into the hands of the film’s star, Ashton Kutcher.

The movie is a stupid, over-the-top comic-booky action picture with the occasional cheesy effect, oddball casting and an utterly predictable get-that-guy-before-he-gets-us plot, but Evans and a couple of his mates make it passable entertainment.

Devil is the sort of story Rod Serling would have taken for a spin in "The Twilight Zone," back in the day. Shyamalan came up with the idea, produced it and got others to script and direct this 76 minute exercise in movie minimalism.

If it weren’t for the well-intentioned moments of pathos — a tear or two, hear and there — Tio Papi would be a complete waste of time.

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

It’s a Gibson showcase and a Liotta curtain call worth seeing, shortcomings be damned.

Best of all, the filmmakers took the time to give these hard men just the right things to say - not catchphrases, just lines that smell of blood and gunpowder every time Statham, Owen or DeNiro utter them.

Leave this one to fans of the series, because as a stand-alone movie, it’s a dud.

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

Well-acted, smartly-reported and heartfelt.

Night Swim never amounts to much more than a dip in lukewarm water.

The performances are more effective than affecting, although every player has her or his “moment.” There are interesting ideas thrown in, but they’re bandied about, not really addressed or dealt with.

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

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.

Starts at a sprint and hurtles at us for a good long, stretch, before it stops to catch its breath.

It’s all eye-rolling, laugh-out-loud action nonsense, and often damned entertaining, another highlight of King’s ever-lengthening highlight reel of a career.

Survival of the Dead lacks the wit of "Zombieland," the polish and punch of last winter's "The Crazies," a remake of a Romero zombie picture from the '70s.

The shifts in tone, stakes and genre are abrupt and so clumsily-handled you’re allowed to wonder “What just happened?” And the heist is such a non-starter as to leave one at a loss as to what the Oscar winning actor, one of my favorites, ever saw in this.

It’s entirely too dramatically thin and lacking in real suspense to stand among the great or even middling submarine movies.

Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway is a curiously perfunctory affair, a laughless comedy based on the Beatrix Potter animal darlings of scores of dainty little books created when the world was less cynical.

What sells this formulaic corker of Apocalypse Porn is the cast.

Although I can’t go all-in on Choose or Die, I will say that there’s a lot to be said for a horror movie with clever twists, a top flight cast and a witty consistency to its conceit.

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

If this isn’t the musical bio pic we would have hoped this truly larger than life figure deserved, it is perfectly serviceable. The performances ensure that there’s a charismatic, recognizably-human icon at its center, flawed and passionate and downright messianic at times.

As screenwriters, their First Best Destiny might be keeping a script doctor on speed dial. Their “mystery” isn’t nearly mysterious enough. And that three act structure makes for a grim, distressing and lumbering opening, a tense and bloody finale and a middle act — the one set in the modern day that “explains” what’s going on — that is as straight-up hackwork, a Tyler Perry fashion show meant to add dread but where rolling one’s eyes is the only proper response.

Sudeikis is well-cast as a bird whose “cardinal sin” is cynicism, but he has virtually nothing funny to say.

No One Gets Out Alive is more a director’s ominous looking show-reel than a coherent, frightening horror tale.

The failures pile up quickly after that promising first act and The Seventh Day doesn’t hold the interest past day two

Silo is a quietly gripping “trouble in farm country” thriller.

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

Kilmer makes a worthy, if somewhat underscripted villain. And some of the bits -- MacGruber idiotically setting traps that the bad guys never fall for -- tickle. But this still feels instantly dated, a "Hot Rod in a Role Models" era.

The endless on-and-on-it-goes finale grasps for emotions it only earns by being so very appalling in the build up to it. One doesn’t feel redeemed or revived after enduring it. Just relief.

As it meanders from over-familiar set-pieces and cliches — Tahir drums on empty paint buckets for money, predators face them at every turn, a callous system trips them up, and when they break into that brownstone, naturally they play dress-up — Shelter loses its way.

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.

The more correct title would have been “Retribution,” which could work for any number of Statham vehicles over the years. But Redemption is just different enough to make us remember “The Bank Job” or “Killer Elite” or that he’s about to give those fun-but-silly “Fast & Furious” movies a proper villain.

Hilarity does not ensue. The romance has its barely believable moments.

Scenes go on past their payoff, gags are flogged to death after the punch line.

If you liked “Scrubs,” and I did, for a few seasons, anyway, you’ll be happy Braff got to make his movie and happy that you got to see it.

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.

The Brass Teapot stumbles into tedium, a parable that never quite resolves itself into the moral lesson it so desperately wants to convey.

Never Too Late never transcends the undemanding, old fashioned lighter-than-light entertainment for seniors that it’s meant to be.

The matter-of-fact way everybody involved faces this supernatural horror drains most of the chills right out of it.

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

I found the whole more than a tad insipid.

It is a film of (somewhat) mutual admiration and clever, clever words, the product of “a wickedly brilliant mind” (Woolf) and a popular poettess and wit, descended from Gypsies (Isabella Rosellini plays Vita’s disapproving Gypsy grande dame mother), a “a sapphist” with scandalous appetites.

Sometimes the over-the-top violence can be a saving grace in such genre films. Sometimes the villain makes them worth watching. Occasionally, the suspense atones for a world of shortcomings. Not here.

Sorry to beat the hell out of a book millions have bought and presumably adored. But Where the Crawdads Sing doesn’t sing a note in film form, and plays more like Nicholas Sparks than Harper Lee, more a Lifetime Original Movie than anything worth the price of a cinema ticket.

Slick but cheesy, dubbed, filmed and set in Australia but really for the enormous Chinese film market. And Chan fans will find it memorable for one sequence which shows the 64 year-old can still make a fight funny.

For all the heists, chases and shoot-outs, it's a sluggish picture. Characters feel the need to stop the action to explain themselves. Thoroughly.

Fletcher and his players never quite hit on a tone that works. Fantastical dream sequences and side trips to the store to get “more bullets” never quite rise to the level of wry commentary. This just isn’t as cute and funny as Fletcher seems to think it is.

That simple quest, packaged in a 95 minute movie, takes forever to play out thanks to one eye-rolling Pause for a Monologue after another.

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

It’s a formula dance movie that puts minimal effort into deviating from that formula. But every so often, “Free Dance” threatens to take flight.

There’s an efficiency that settles in and manifests itself through the problems and the problem solving. The viewer is in on it, because we “get” the genre conventions they’re playing around with, we know why X, Y or Z as a counter-measure will work.

The shifts in attitude Knightley and Skarsgård have to act out are abrupt and jarring enough to feel like perfunctory requirements of a melodramatic script.

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.

Red Snow isn’t very good, as a package. It opens with a night-filmed, poorly-conceived and acted “first kill,” drops abruptly into the broad daylight banalities of Olivia’s life and never gets up any sort of head of steam. But I like what they were going for here, as obvious as it seems. Nice try. Now have another go of it.

Pairing up Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell for a big screen fantasy romance doesn’t pay off in “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” a film that has one or two big moments on its road-trip-romantic “journey,” a little digitally augmented “beauty” along the way, but little that measures up to anybody’s idea of “bold.”

It’s meant to be a comedy, with a lot of gunplay and arterial spray. It’s not funny.

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

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

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.

With Moretz here to ensure it’s at least a story we invest in, bringing emotional heft to the moments that beg for it, this nothing-special dystopia manages the bare minimum that fans should expect from films of this genre.

Like a lot of musical bio-pics, from maudlin Whitney Houston stories to the overrated Oscar winners “La Vie En Rose” and the much more fun “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the filmmakers limit us to “the greatest hits.” And that’s a far from complete or wholly satisfying immersion in this life and her world.

The leads are engaging, but not nearly as much as they and the film they’re in assume they are.

Writer-director Karen Leigh Hopkins has lots of fun with this surreal set up, and only really loses the thread when reality intrudes.

This script, this leaden direction ensures that even as the teen wish-fulfillment fantasy, complete with young women playing dress-up, Monte Carlo fails.

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

It’s just that the whole affair feels winded, an argument — Will humans finally accept the mutants among us? — that’s exhausted everybody concerned, with many involved somehow knowing that those “Days of Future Past” are returning.

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.

The eggshells the screenwriter and director walk on distance the story from the reality it aims to imitate. And that robs this tale of loss, grief and redemption of its punch.

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.

I highly recommend you pay a quick visit to the Wikipedia page dedicated to German theologian and resistance martyr Dietrch Bonhoeffer before taking on writer-director Todd Komarnicki’s film “Bonhoeffer.” Otherwise, you might be as lost as I was thanks to the botched chronology acted-out by a little-known cast in a screen biography that does not live up to its over-reaching subtitle — “Pastor. Spy. Assassin.”

What we have here in the disastrously dull pilot to a TV series only comic book diehards would watch.

A crowded cast of some of the finest actors in the cinema act the hell out of a gimmicky, episodic, hit-or-miss script in Brooklyn’s Finest, Antoine Fuqua’s latest attempt to relive the glories of "Training Day."

There isn’t an original idea in “Snake Eyes,” so even if the first big brawl is cool enough to give one false hope, the puerile story leaves our star and the director of “RED” (and “R.I.P.D.”) nowhere to go, even on a cool, whining electric street bike.

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

Crackling scenes mix with clunkers, clever twists meet cliches and its all a hash when it comes to justifying the “team” set up in this mass shooting spree thriller To Catch a Killer.

This is smelly, dirty authentic-feeling male bonding and is the best thing in the movie.

Neill is quietly compelling, as always. Brody underplays Pete, emphasizing his suffering, his victimhood, his guilt. It’s a performance mostly of reactions, and the aforementioned wayward accent.

But without the gags to enliven the travelogue, without more funny lines to lighten the load and impart that message, Missing Link feels like a missed opportunity. It’s the second animated stab at making comedy out of Big Foot and never much more than second best on the subject.

It all makes for a somber and self-serious (Shyamalan’s Achilles Heel) popcorn pic that is easy enough to sit through even as its pointlessness grows with every act, and its final act underlines and admits it.

Garlin doesn’t discover anything new about this well-documented phenomenon. But rounding up his (under-employed) comic pals and turning them loose on Little League is funny enough by itself.

The foreshadowing is too too obvious, the assorted set pieces have no punch and little logic.

That leaves it all up to the dog and the dog's story, and the pathos of that makes this weeper on wheels a winner. Barely.

The baseball is sloppy and the sentiments border on maudlin in You Gotta Believe, the latest “true story” Texas sports dramedy from director Ty Roberts and writer Lane Garrison.

The results are even worse than you feared.

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.”

Despite the locations and the informative narrative, almost every scene is missing that spark that would bring the characters to life and immediacy to the story.

It’s funny, here and there. Burr’s not a bad actor, and he surrounds himself with better ones. But this “Last Man Standing” is a smug, presumptuous, pose for any funnyman, even if you are slightly more evolved than Tim Allen.

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.

Nordling makes a terrific heavy, Rhames oozes credibility as the wizened small-time crook turned small business owner, Bosworth holds her own and Phillippe hits just the right notes — crooked to the core, wary of everybody except for “family,” naive enough to think his instincts are enough.

Yes, most every joke churned out here has a “low hanging fruit” or “fruit food colored” air about it. But Gaffigan, Schumer, McCarthy, Grant and most everybody here has a chance to score. And so they do.

Though properly chilling when it’s supposed to be, it’s a film whose effects, script and performances keep it at arm’s length when it is supposed to be moving.

Corey Deshon’s script is a veritable catalogue of thriller devices, types and worn out situations. Every “cut” and “paste” shows. And no amount of sex in the hot tub or stabbings in the eye can hide that.

Still waters may run deep, as the old saying goes. But Beside Still Waters there’s nothing deeper than “The Big Chill.”

Nanjiani just kills when he’s grabbing stereotypes (meek, moral South Asians, overly-polite drivers) and shaking them to their senses. But the wisecracks thin out and grate when the violence takes center stage. And Stuber is stupidly violent.

The fights are well-staged, the chases dull. But as Insurgent wraps up, it picks up speed and depth, and gives you hope that maybe this series won’t wrap up as the copy-and-paste “Hunger Games” it has felt like, from the moment the books were word-processed onto the best seller lists.

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

It's a solid, old-fashioned action yarn filled with the very latest dive gear and the oldest plot formula in the movie-maker's playbook.

I found the picture moving in spite of its seeming unwillingness to wholly grapple with race and Coogan’s unwillingness to master the Afrikaner accent. He’s a gifted mimic, and Riseborough manages it. What gives? But what it does wrestle with is profound, and profoundly disturbing.

The David Loughery script — he wrote Ealy’s “The Intruder” — wins points for attempted twists, but frankly they don’t build suspense or deliver shocks, so what’s the point?

I have to say I went along with it, more amused by the craft and bursts of wit and gripped by a bit of tension, here and there, than appalled by the inhumanity. It taps into our shared phobia about ridesharing and “over-sharing,” not that EVERYbody is alarmed by these phenomena.

In the end, we’re left with a gimmick movie that doesn’t come off, an accurate-enough artifact of the global lockdown of last spring that will be remembered for that, and little else.

But the half-hearted attempts to build a hero’s quest story about these increasingly collectible toys and ongoing campaign to wash the humanity right out of the franchise is something all the shiny, tactile and identifiable Freightliner, Porsche or Ducati parts in humanoid robotic form cannot hide.

Dog Gone isn’t a very good movie. But if you and your kids love dogs, you’d be cheating yourself by missing it.

This thoughtful but windy and winded sci-fi thriller shortchanges the science – understandably - and the thrills. The directing debut of “Dark Knight” cinematographer Wally Pfister is a mopey affair with indifferent performances, heartless romance and dull action. It transcends nothing.

Interns Wilson and Vaughn swap lines like veteran jazz musicians who still have a sense of play about them — an endless supply of nicknames, high-and-low fives, dated slang and goodwill — theirs for each other, and ours for them.

A few flashes of humor — in court (Jenny is a lawyer), in the romantic clutches and in (violent) action — and Collette’s career-long likability are all Mafia Mamma has going for it. It’s not enough.

Interminable.

This is tedium itself.

A cast of no-names and a story so clunky it grinds gears every time it changes scenes take nothing from surprisingly effective (cheap) effects and the odd laugh-out-loud one-liner.

The technology to make these movies eye candy of the first order is here. But the people making them are at a loss for a decent story to put these superheroes in, much less a movie that matters.

Neeson is in solid form, villains do their villainy and the sassy lady driver copes with anti-Native racism with her smart mouth and her fists, to fun effect. But that over-the-top third act, topping even the odd operating-on-ice physics of The Ice Road, tends to take the air right out of the Jonathan Hensleigh film’s tires.

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.

There isn’t a laugh or light moment in this unwieldy beast of a movie. As a political allegory, it doesn’t play. As Marvel action pic, it’s sorely lacking. At least they spared no expense in the cherry blossoms dept.

Burnt isn’t a bad movie, but the melodrama is overwrought and overdone, the romance warmed over and the “Cocktail” formula shaken, stirred and utterly played.

Great villains make good thrillers, Hitchcock said. But he had the good sense to cast empathetic and talented movie stars as his heroes and heroines, too.

Powley, a delight in “”Diary of a Teenage Girl” and “A Royal Night Out,” can be applauded for trying something darker, but the checkbox script and pedestrian direction Marius A. Markevicius, who produced Peter Weir’s escape from Siberia thriller “The Way Back,” let her down.

Despite an epic fight or two, Parker robs us of the revenge, the suspense of the hunt, of Parker's methodical way of tracking down those who betrayed him, one by one.

The performances present an engaging contrast, with Bomer growing on you as you start to appreciate what’s broken in Sean, and Patiño’s deadpan shrug evolving into something more compassionate.

A bittersweet, wistful rom-com that may not be all that it might have been, but isn’t all that bad as it is.

By playing it too safe, Daddy’s Home never finds that comic sweet spot and never rises above, “Well, it’s not awful.”

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

The younger sister of the formidable Vera Farmiga gives flat, rushed and unconvincing line readings, especially in her paragraph-long, exposition-packed monologues. Is that by design? Is this a clever teen “acting” to manipulate her memory detective? The actress should be better at masking that, if that’s the case. And if it isn’t, she should be just…better.

It’s never more than a theme park that isn’t worth the price of admission.

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.

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

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.

It’s an ungainly film that loses focus time and again, drifting off to indulge its stars with extraneous scenes and badly-handled or simply unnecessary story threads.

The movie and the story it tells are kind of all over the place.

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

Basically a bloody buddy picture that tries too hard.

None of it ever truly comes together in a way that makes “Almost Love” almost a rom-rom that works. “Almost” pretty much covers it.

Moon delivers the popcorn in gigantic fist-fulls of fun.

Best of all is this setting — stark, reddish brown and sun-baked, the sort of place one only goes when every other possibility has been exhausted, and only movie stars could avoid turning instantly tanned and weathered.

If there’s one thing that Hollywood thrillers and the legions of actors who march through them teach us, it’s that faking shock and breath-gulping panic isn’t easy. And hiding boredom, for some actors, is damned near impossible.

It’s a epic tragedy, and summing it up in under two hours does nobody justice.

There’s no suspense, no flow to the story, little pathos in the flashbacks and a lot of dead spots where the story stops cold. I like everybody on the screen here, just not in this movie — not in this cut of it anyway.

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.

Not every cute movie about the mentally ill is Oscar worthy, but this touching and riotous one from Down Under works well enough.

This “Trip to Greece” isn’t an epic journey, and that includes the familiar emotional ground the characters have to cover. But the leads click, the scenery is fab and there are just enough chuckles, sweet laughs and grimaces to make it worth 100 minutes of our time in the sundrenched birthplace of Western Civilization.

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.

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

McGuiness, the daughter of U-2 impressario Paul McGuiness, got Irish Film Board money to make this, and that was money flushed down an Irish drain. Whatever she was getting at, she doesn’t really get at it. And if you’re here looking to unravel “What this was all about,” I feel your pain.

As a “faith-based” film spoof, this one is basically a 90 minute swing-and-a-miss.

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

A couple of bit characters come closest to landing a laugh. None of the leads do. The script is social media savvy, making tepid jokes about the “commitment” difference between a couple selfie “in your story” or on “your grid” on Instagram.

Individual scenes play better than the whole, just as some performances shine — McKenna-Bruce, Jarvis, Grant and even Ms. Johnson — and get the hang of dry Austen wit and its sometimes clumsy “try to keep up” updatings better than others.

It’s a Hallmark Channel holiday movie on a Netflix budget. The characters are bland, the performances not much better and the writing almost instantly awful — tin-eared, clumsy ESL grammar and usage, the works.

I love Shannon’s performance here — introspective, guilt-ridden, sad and thoughtful. He makes the character credible on several levels, a simple man capable of “Being There” profundities, the very picture of the “haunted artist.” Or fake haunted artist.

A ten-years-too-late comedy.

Is it a spoiler to refer to the coda of thriller The Boy as the clumsiest cop out in recent horror history?

“Cheaper” in this case plays like a TV pilot, one that could use a lot more laughs.

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

“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.

Even die-hard horror fans can’t help but notice Halloween Kills stumbles through the nostalgia that made Green’s “Halloween” reboot work, and that “Kills” isn’t scary in the least.

Whatever it wants to say about abuse, its mental, social and sexual impact on its victims, however “daring” it aims to be, Back Roads loses in its pursuit of the sordid.

This is more “Something Mild” than “Something Wild.” But Firth and Blunt handle their characters’ many revelations with care and play with layers of hurt and disappointment with great sympathy and pathos.

I love the genre and appreciate any effort in this cinematic field. But you’ve got to do something with the cliches, realize what you can cut out (83 minutes of movie in a two-hour+ picture?), figure out what you can show visually instead of having characters explain and for the Love of God don’t cut to an extra falling three feet when we’ve just seen him tumble off a ten foot wall.

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

The message delivered isn't subtle, with Kendrick delivering toss-away lines that suggest he doesn't even tolerate "the option" of divorce. But the bigger message might be that the Kendricks haven't sold out, "gone Hollywood" or watered down their Baptist beliefs based on efforts to reach an audience beyond the faithful.

A few cheap jolts is all director Tom Harper can manage in this minimal gloom.

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.

It took a lot to get through this, because I re-HEEEL-ly hated that stupid, talky, bloody and endless opening chase. I’ll cut it a teensy bit of slack for A) Ryan Reynolds and B) that really cool effect at the end...But that’s it. Done with this. Unless it becomes a damned franchise.

Bad one-liners, performers straining to find a laugh, Awkwafina making one question why stardom ever came her way, and even John Cena is at a loss about what to do to make this abortion of an action comedy show a pulse.

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 script is a clumsy patchwork of gimmicks — history professor Jon playing mind-games with his captors — obvious bits of foreshadowing and Wikipedia-shallow discourses on Rachmaninoff and Goya, all designed to fill the minutes between Ruby Rose throw-downs.

That assault is dully-staged and filmed by director Aku Louhimies, as is every counter-assault and border crossing that follows. This or that moment plays well enough. But this ungainly beast is hard to follow. It’s even harder to invest in any character in it.

A perfectly pleasant but fluffy, inconsequential romantic comedy.

No characters in this are developed enough to invest in them or pin them down as suspects. At about the time Blood Red Raincoat Killer whips out a circular saw, which is as inventive as the murders get, the movie invites us to check out.

It’s still a half-decent movie, closer to Neeson’s late-career “Taken” peak than his most recent films. But if he’s letting the audience see the writing on the wall, it might be time for him to stop and read it, too.

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

The cut-and-paste writing and lackluster direction are the main failings. There’s little to this that you’d call a “story,” even less “story” that makes sense.

Donnie is a most unusual character to serve as our tour guide to “A Dark Place.” British character actor Andrew Scott (“Spectre,””Pride” and TV’s Moriarty in “Sherlock”) utterly immerses himself in this “town weirdo” character who becomes obsessed with a little boy on his route who disappears, and then is found drowned in a local creek.

Filmmaker Pack is a partisan hack and this is artless political agitprop.

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.”

It’s a live-action version of on an ’80s cartoon that was designed to sell toys. This is “Transformers” without the Bumblebee Camaro, a lot of action, a few one-liners, and a lot of gunplay.

Time will tell if this latest pop idol has staying power — the falsetto songs mostly run together in the ears of a non-fan — but even Sheeran doubters should appreciate the work ethic, musicianship and wit of this chart-topping ginger tyro.

A few frights pay off, but most don’t. The performances are TV-series flat — designed for close-ups.

Krasinski and González manage some light mid-brawl banter that hints at “chemistry” that the script doesn’t really provide. Portman soldiers through it, with Gleason at his least inspired and Ritchie helming his uncoolest clunker since his divorce from Madonna.

Robert Rodriguez is like that friend who loves to tell jokes, but always goes on and on, well past the punch line. Remember how he beat the living daylights out of his “Spy Kids” franchise? That’s what he’s working toward with Machete.

In a film lacking in real frights, the pathos of a young novitiate’s suicide attempt hits you hard, because it’s one of the few moments in the lovely and lushly-detailed Consecration that makes you feel something.

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

Hardy, perfecting the “meek” American shlub “type” he tackled in “The Drop” years ago, soldiers through this and has as much fun with the synthesized voice of Venom as he can.

The mystery isn’t all that engrossing, and the picture devolves into some CYA third act over-explaining to compensate for that. It can be a bit much, and more often than not. So OK, maybe it is a bad picture that’s still fun.

Whatever intrigues, insights and darkly comic charms writer-director Savi Gabizon gave audiences for his oddball Israeli dramedy “Longing” are mostly lost in translation in a Richard Gere remake he filmed in Canada.

Mostly, it’s just a clumsy lecture about who we’re becoming, haves vs have-nots, with the haves armed to the teeth.

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

The central premise is a half-hearted retread. And the gags come from a score of earlier films and sitcoms.

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

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.

Love Wedding Repeat teeters within reach of tolerable, although this cast — Claflin is NOT a funny man, no one EVER gives Munn anything funny to do — and these situations never gave the picture a chance.

A little Kevin Hart goes a long way in Ride Along, a dull buddy picture engineered as a vehicle for the mini motor mouth and the perma-sneering Ice Cube.

The three stories could each have been their own movie, and probably a more compelling one than this mash-up turns out to be. Everybody gets in everybody else’s way for the first two and a half acts.

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.

Love the scenery (not enough of it), hated most everything else about Under the Eiffel Tower.

The longer it goes on, the more over-the-top the set pieces get and the more dated the “geopolitics” of it all seems. Clancy has one big theme that turns up in almost all of his adapted-into-scripts novels, and it’s front and center here, served up without apology by a deliriously successful writer whose every book had a whiff of “His Greatest Hits” about it.

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.

The score, by Alexis Maingaud, is horror strings on steroids and quite lovely. Director Andrew Desdmond and his production designer and cinematographer conjure up a properly spooky look and setting — overcast skies, dimly-lit chambers, a foggy forest. But the script delivers very little punch or pace to let that creepy vibe pay off.

There’s barely a hint of fun and nary a drop of pathos in any of this.

I’m Charlie Walker has just enough “feel good” and “that’ll show them” elements to get by. But I dare say a better film was hacked out of it, at some point. The evidence of that easy enough to see.

The story shuffles between dark comedy and clumsy mystery, monster movie and psycho-drama, with no character or performance generating a whit of sympathy.

An odd, unpleasant 2011 thriller from Austria only now earning limited U.S. release. It’s a reminder of why so few filmmakers experiment with visual-only storytelling. It’s hard to pull off.

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

That makes Kick Ass 2 more sour than sweet, a movie that jokes about comic book fanboys but stops short of mocking them the way the first film did.

With scores of faith-based films about Christianity hitting movie screens every year, the sheer novelty of The Lady of Heaven makes it worth seeing, just as background on a religion most of us know very little about. That’s where the film excels, even if the many obstacles the production had to get around distracted one and all to the extent that they somewhat botched the messaging.

They waste this cast and these characters on a story so conventional, so neatly wrapped up in the finale, that the real mystery is how Gregorini and co-writer Sarah Thorpe didn’t see that.

Weaver holds her own, but the character, the scene and the script are a total drag.

The supporting players are more interesting than the leads, who never make us care about them or root for them. And it’s fascinating to watch a brilliant talent like Redgrave and a game hoofer like Bergin try to lift this dead weight all by themselves.

The bottom line for every horror tale is the same. Does it chill, get those hairs on the back of your neck to stand up? Is it satisfying, in either a righteous or abandon-all-hope climax? Don’t cry for “La Llorona.” She gets a wet, dirty job done.

Populated with a peerless supporting cast, actors who bring just the right history to their roles.

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?

Shock value has no value if it’s not shockingly funny.

What Anderson delivers this one time is a genuine spectacle, a gladiator movie with a volcano in the middle of it.

Shortcomings aside, stylistic overkill (Hellloooo Brian DePalma) included, the only real downside to all this is the too-obvious “mystery” is the dishonor it does the filmmaker Wright, Letts & Co. are “paying tribute” to. Don’t let a bad Hitchock homage scare you away from The Master of Suspense.

When the Game Stands Tall is a solid if unsurprising and uninspiring melodrama.

A bland tear-jerker that lacks the drama or commitment to wholly come off.

What a salacious and silly miscalculation Miller’s Girl turns out to be.

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.

They assembled a cast worthy of a “Death on the Nile” variation set in a fjord. But director and co-writer Simon Stone, who did a fine job with Carey Mulligan’s “The Dig,” is utterly at sea in this genre.

Watching this head-slappingly stupid movie is an exercise is seeing David Ayer sucked into the drain that Arnold’s been spiraling down ever since his “comeback.”

There’s a "don’t overthink this” watchability to Miss Bala.

Whatever twists this puzzle tosses at us, the film reminds us that a great actor, in close-up, telling a story with just her or his eyes, is still the greatest special effect the movies have to offer. This cast telling this story ensures us that nobody will be dozing off Before I Go to Sleep.

As sex farces go, A Nice Girl Like You is about as nasty, dirty and funny as a sitcom…on The Disney Channel.

13 Cameras plays as a tease, not sexual or graphically violent enough to count as exploitation, not suspenseful enough to get by. And with this plot, this “hidden camera” gimmick, without exploitation, it’s nothing.

The best movies like this do a much better job of selling the building terror, the fear of a gruesome injury or death by being eaten alive– drowning in the process.

I did laugh, here and there.

Alfre Woodard, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Kathy Bates and Dennis Haysbert burn through some of their supply of good will on “Summer Camp,” an all-star comedy with AARP casting appeal and nothing else going for it.

The first hair-raising moment comes 50 minutes in, but the deaths are anti-climactic even as the chilling tone is maintain, largely through dim lighting and very good actors

The players and their flinty, smart dialogue make this lean movie the screen equivalent of bleached bones in the desert sand — bones with just enough meat on them to lure us in.

The blunt truth is that there’s very little that’s original or even interesting in this empty rehash of many a recent YA franchise with occasional pauses for song.

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.

The O’Hair virtues depicted here are that she was brave, defiant and when the need arose, articulate. And if history has taught us nothing, it’s that she was ahead of her times and probably right most of the time. One has to see through a pretty ugly movie to glean that, though. This is an ugly portrait, perhaps unfairly so.

Wrongheaded in conception, eye-rolling in execution, Chappie is a childish blend of the cute robot goofiness of “Short Circuit,” and the bloody-minded mayhem of “Robocop.” Neill Blomkamp, the director of “District 9,” has utterly exhausted his supply of South African sci-fi ideas with this disaster, an excruciating two hours of your life you will fear, quite rightly, ever getting back.

The slapstick is mild-mannered, there's no romance, not a hint of emotion.

Bullock gives us an old-fashioned star turn at the center of an equally-celebrated supporting cast and gives a young woman director from her mother’s homeland a big break. Call Unforgivable a mixed bag, but an intensely watchable one.

So as much as every generation deserves it’s own Romeo & Juliet, this latest one does nothing to make anyone older than Hailee Steinfeld forget the heat of Baz Lurhmann’s far sexier, noisier and passionate modern dress version of 1996, where Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio completely convinced us that they knew how to “play Satan’s game.” And how.

Britney Vs Spears adds just enough to the story to be worth the obsessed-viewer’s trouble.

It’s a load of horrific hooey.

A mad mash-up of sci-fi, Western, sacrilegious silliness and vampire movie. What lifts it to "I've seen worse" status is the previous teaming of star and director Scott Stewart, who last gave us the archangel fighting off other angels fiasco "Legion."

Ad Vitam is competently shot and cut and works well enough for long enough stretches to recommend. But equally long stretches of training and graduation and karaoke celebrating kill its momentum.

It flirts with “insipid,” and is about as funny as a teenager’s funeral.

The right emotional buttons are punched, enough of them at just the right moment for Bleeding Love to not bleed out. It plays like 12 step cinematic comfort food, and if you’re drawn to it and find yourself enjoying it, no “making amends” is necessary.

Lohan does what she can with this thin, treacly material, shows she can be a team player and bring value without (one hopes) drama to a set and a project that may not be an A-picture, but still gets her name out there in a non gossipy way. Good for her.

Gangster Squad is a gang war drama built on Western conventions, a rootin' tootin', Camel-smokin', whiskey swillin' shoot'em up.

The cloying narration and the inclusion of Fonda are just warnings for that moment, 70 minutes in, when this comic chemical train goes completely off the rails. Rockwell, Wilde, Monaghan are worth the price of admission, but “Better Living” would have been better off with more chemistry and less cutesy.

As funny as a mass shooting at the North Pole, and relying on just such a finale to sell it, Fatman is one of the epic miscalculations of any cinematic holiday season.

There are a lot of irritants and clumsy touches to Besson’s latest, infuriatingly inferior version of “La Femme Nikita” that ruin it.

The acting, like the tepid thriller it is parked in, is so mild mannered it lowers the stakes when it should be raising them.

After a bloody prologue, when a lumberman sprays his blood all over the interior of his pickup’s windshield, Dark Was the Night settles in for a long, creepy slumber — more sleepy than creepy, truthfully.

An Acceptable Risk is “Scandal” with less sex and fewer fireworks. Almost no fireworks, to be honest.

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.

The laughs don’t even land with a thud. In The Boss, they almost never land at all.

Tony Hale makes an interesting “Variation on a Character Played by Steve Carell,” and there are a few laughs mixed in with a lot of cringes and endless examples of callous cruelty. The ending pulled this one off the fence for me, and it was barely on that fence to start with.

Your enjoyment of Horrible Bosses 2 is almost wholly dependent on your tolerance for clusters of funny actors, babbling, riffing — and in the case of Charlie Day, screeching — all at once.

There isn’t much to this.

It’s the best showcase Russell Crowe‘s had in forever. Sure, it’s a B-picture, a straight-up rage-on-the-road genre movie in the “Duel,””Changing Lanes” or “Falling Down” mold. But Crowe, overweight and the very embodiment of “gone to seed,” gives this villain-we-all-know a face to fear and a hulking pick-up truck to match.

I appreciate the direction they wanted to take this, but the jokes needed work, the ridicule should be more directed at Jackson’s character’s various blind spots and intolerances — “This is my ‘Puerto Ricans I don’t trust’ file.” — and disrespect for human rights.

Our villain is cool and collected, just not very interesting.

The action beats are taut, but the story arc crumbles under the weight of all the movies it steals from. The casting fails to pop, in most instances.

The sci-fi thriller 65 is a “Twilight Zone” episode that over-explains its set-up and surrenders its punch line, a simple quest narrative that lacks thrills and never makes us invest in it and the first serious miscalculation Adam Driver’s made since taking a shot at playing the villainous Kylo Ren.

The pitfalls — drugs, marriage (Janina Use) to an amoral hustler to happens to be a banker) — are tried and true, if not downright trite. But it starts well, finishes with a flourish and finds enough “Isn’t this rip-off cute?” moments to be worth your while.

American Dreamer is riveting to sit through, but too pitiless to embrace.

Young O’Connor has a pale, clumsy walking bean-pole awkwardness about him, and uses that ungainly appearance to good effect.

For an emotionally-grounded disaster movie, I found it a harrowing recreation of the real thing, emotionally affecting and not bad. Not bad at all.

We few, we not-easily-bored few, can catch “The Goldfinch” in a theater and revel in unerringly modulated performances — everybody is so softspoken that the verbal explosions have alarming violence about them — and a world we might envy, or at least resent a little bit.

The Meg 2: The Trench loses the benefit of being an off-the-wall big-budget B-movie surprise, and it loses most of the laughs served up by the monster movie that took the summer of 2018 by surprise.

A transgressive blend of stoner comedy, horny teenager movie and "Blair Witch" reality riff, this no-budget romp through teen New Orleans crosses the line and erases that line in a hell-bent pursuit of hell-bound laughs. And yeah, it's often funny as all get out.

Braff can still land a punch line and manage goofy, “sensy” banter. There just isn’t enough of it here to hold one’s interest. Comedies do not live on low-hanging fruit alone.

Unlike “The Matrix,” there’s too little to hang onto thanks to a flimsy story that dives into future-tech and glib heaven-or-hell discourses, and characters who keep us at arm’s length.

Wahlberg and the movie are likable enough, but overstay their welcome like a priest or pastor who never mastered the art of wrapping things up.

Whizbang editing aside, it’s a slow slog of a movie with a seriously obvious destination.

Daft and sloppy as it is, 3 Days rarely fails to entertain.

When the surprises aren’t very surprising except in ways that betray the picture’s tone and every illogical thing we can’t help but notice gives away those surprises, the only conclusion is that this “Astronaut” doesn’t have the right stuff even if Mara does.

Welcome to Marwen won’t be another Zemeckis blockbuster, won’t be anybody’s idea of Oscar bait. But here’s a thought-provoking holiday movie that gives the viewer something to chew on even if the story feels a trifle undigested, at times.

No matter how great her ambitions, no matter how little she was able to accomplish, thanks to the strictures of her time, here was a woman history remembers simply through the force of her personality and the simple courage it took to be ahead of her time.

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.

The film’s tone is all wrong, the pacing is dead and the veering between sex, sadness and sado-masochistic violence is enough to give you motion sickness. It’s a bad movie.

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

Boseman carries himself with confidence in every role, but the rat hole this picture twists into must have left even him shaken.

There’s a modicum of suspense, the sense that not all will survive and casting that gives away who has the best chance. It’s a shame everybody involved, including self-righteous Matts, is so unpleasant there’s nobody to root for.

Robinson manages some suspense, but the thriller’s ticking clock is a weak one.

Deliver Us from Evil takes a very long time to deliver us from dullness.

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.

There’s barely a laugh or interesting, much less exciting moment in this.

The story’s over-familiarity isn’t the best reason to skip Blood and Money. Its messaging is. And whatever butch points Berenger earns for getting the job done in extreme conditions at an age when “don’t slip you’ll break your hip” has to be a concern are squandered on a film that isn’t worth it.

Here, he’s (Peña) bland, under-emoting in the face of terror and fronting a middling actioner that isn’t as thought-provoking as its creators expected, as surprising as they think it’s “twist” is and isn’t smart enough to get out of its own way.

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.

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

Domino is a drab, implausible and melodramatic terrorism thriller showing his ongoing interest in the post 9-11 world of “Redacted" (2007). Drab, that is, until he gets to one of those famous set-pieces.

The performances are passable, save for Murray — who goes ham, and Alec Baldwin, as a general who goes comically nuclear. He at least leaves an impression.