Roger Moore

There’s a lot that feels incomplete here, introduced and abandoned or at least never wrestled with. And much of what transpires after the assorted ingredients are introduced is utterly predictable.

Moore’s performance is unfiltered and fierce, manic at times, a tour de force turn and maybe even her career best.

It’s a grim, well-acted vengeance thriller with moral underpinnings that would have worked, with or without the supernatural “judgement” folded into its unraveling grief, guilt and madness.

By the time the credits roll, it’s succeeded in creating zero interest in investing any more time in this universe or this story.

There’s little to nothing redeemable in it, a film where half the scenes have no reason to exist and the other half go on past any point they may have.

Slower and more superficial than the original or not, the riveting performances and the vague political parable of the way the story is spun this time out put this one thriller over.

Say this for the action comedy The Killer’s Game. This eye-popping, gory cartoon of a movie should give stuntman/stun-coordinator turned-director J.J. Perry a helluva sizzle reel.

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is a sweet, sad and sentimental Thai end-of-life melodrama titled and set-up like a greedy-family farce.

Parker makes the “loop” of repetition eye-rollingly funny, forlorn and wistful, even hopeful in a “Maybe this time we’ll get it” way.

The milieu may be familiar, and the third act revelations and actions are both predictable and somewhat clumsily handled. But Sennott wraps herself completely around this character, giving us vulnerability behind the cocky facade, worry and responsibility in a profession not known for producing the stable and well-adjusted.

Saulnier’s made a slow-burn thriller that surprises and keeps us guessing and waiting, mostly for that moment when somebody draws “First Blood,” and even then he trips up expectations, and deliciously so.

A World War I overreach, pretty much start to finish.

The performances are daft enough to land, and the audacity of it all counts for something.

When it all does go wrong — slowly, tediously and incredulously — little of what we’ve seen before is allowed to make a lick of sense.

Co-writers/directors Sam and Max Eggers go for symbolic nightmares and simple toilet-accidents for shocks and wicked sneers that only Belinda sees to set us up for something more fraught, fundamental and final than their movie delivers.

The laughs — from sight gags, on-the-nose-casting (Burn Gorman as a priest named “Damien”), quirky Keaton, Ryder and O’Hara line-readings and the contributions of newcomers Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe — are hard to come by.

What [Weitz] doesn’t produce are frights, suspense and the rising sense of dread such a film has to have to work.

A thriller with simple primal plot undone by a leaky script and a loss of nerve.

Ramchandani delivers a dazzling third act chase, on foot, through L.A.’s sweatshop district, a nervy, hand-held sprint that finally gets this static story up on its feet.

While one doffs one’s (not coonskin) hat at anyone trying to make a frontier thriller on an indie budget, this “Ballad” borders on abominable.

If we don’t fall in love with it, we kind of grin and fall in “like” before all is (un)said and done.

Silver’s given us a wry, wise and whimsical movie who cutting edges are somewhat removed from the lead characters, whose wit involves both leaning into Jewish stereotypes, and upending them.

For a guy who jumped straight into putting his name before the title of his films, Lee Daniels is still too ham-fisted and clumsy to make these down-market melodramas come off. And he’s got no clue about building suspense and delivering shocks.

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

Quaid’s impersonation is solid, and makes one wish he’d been given the chance to take on a more nuanced version of the title character.

One Fast Move is several scenes of solid if unspectacular motorcycle racing and stunt driving footage in search of a plot.

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.

“Jack” is engaging, even if this account of death and dying meanders a bit and plays as more emotionally flat than you’d expect.

Experienced movie watchers will pick up attempted hints of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Can’t Hardly Wait” and “Sixteen Candles” in the more graceful moments. Not that there are a lot of those.

The Other Laurens is a slow, drifting mystery thriller that takes a while to decide what it’s about, takes another while to add on complications and adds a third while to attempt to get to some sort ofint.

Kravitz delivers an exception to that rule, a thriller with bite and a point of view that makes for a bracing, bloody chaser to a year of rising feminine rage barely masked in this week’s political expressions of feminine hope and joy.

This picture never overcomes a general heartlessness that permeates even the abrupt romance that supposedly launches and drives it.

An adorable, uplifting ache of a movie, writer-director Janis Pugh’s modest marvel floats by on the glories of a well-crafted pop song and summons up “An Officer and a Gentleman” for its finale.

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.

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

Skincare sets us up for something dark and scintillating, a sinister descent into desperation. But it’s as frustrating as a fresh wedding day zit, and sadly, about as inconsequential.

Alvarez — of the remade “Evil Dead,” “Don’t Breathe” and the “Girl in the Spider’s Web” remake — gets a little novelty and even less suspense out of rediscoveries, re-imagined pursuits and murders and ill-considered fights with “the perfect (killer) creature” that cinematic spacefarers have been stumbling into for generations.

Will, Ejiofor and Blige, as a mother who never wavers from what she sees as her primary duty, make this odyssey feel personal and the pitfalls we see coming and ever-mounting life tests seem surmountable if only this brilliant mind isn’t wasted by an America reluctant to embrace “Whatever hurts my brother hurts me.”

It’s kind of shambolic, half-assed and terrible, but almost amusing in the right frame of mind (altered) and with the right audience (surfers).

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

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 screenplay never gets past that “workshop this into something sharper” stage, and the many players never transcend that “promising introduction” that their characters are given.

It’s obvious and slow and cute in all the places you’d expect, melodramatic in many of the others. But for what it is, it is superbly-crafted.

Borderlands is terrible on every level, a real Dog of August, in movie-lover shorthand.

It’s good to see all these folks together in the same picture. But Affleck and Chuck MacLean don’t script enough clever bits, smart action beats and funny lines to let “The Instigators” instigate much of anything.

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.

Golden Years is a romantic comedy with questions and perhaps a very modern “answer” to that “Will it go on like this until the end?” challenge. But even though it’s well-acted, scenic and charming enough, perhaps finding a few more laughs should have been a higher priority.

It doesn’t work. It should have, but it doesn’t, despite Hart’s best efforts.

No, it’s not a subtle film. Nor were the Germans, it’s worth remembering. But it’s handsomely mounted and well-acted, and reaches a fine if far-fetched action climax.

House of Ga’a is at its best in action, as the fight choreography is good and the pacing is sharpest. When we settle on palace intrigues, the picture slows to the point of being static with interiors, infighting and betrayals of the sort one sees in soap operas the world over, even those set in pre-colonial West Africa.

Fuji’s performance is the highlight here, a man of science and obsessive Ham radio buff struggling to communicate what he’s going through but failing to soften his personality as his memory, and the self-control it might contain, fail.

An expertly shot and edited thriller built around a cringey/creepy performance by Josh Hartnett is undone by an indulgent father trying to make a pop starlet/actress out of his daughter in Trap, the latest from M. Night Shyamalan.

The diplomatic thing to do would be to say the new film of Harold and the Purple Crayon is misguided, dull and mostly humorless and leave it at that.

It’s historic, set in Kowloon’s long gone but infamous high rise “walled city” slum, and between the over-the-top action, deadpan underreactions and silly supernaturalism, it is laugh-out-loud funny

It can be cute, playful and romantic, then turn dishearteningly violent as it serves up a generous sampling of what life on the untamed frontier could be like. It’s also frustrating in its lapses in logic, its cumbersome, shuffled and dream-infused structure.

The escalations and rising violence and body count utterly botch any sense of mystery about each “usual suspect,” and that shred of promise Cornish & Co. give the picture in her opening moments is lost.

It matters that the story’s told out of order. It’s great that they landed Hershey and Begley for small but chewy supporting roles. And Fitzgerald’s gamble on her most daring, naked (not quite literally) performance pays off in what could be her break-out role, even if she had a bit of explaining to do to mom and dad when the credits rolled.

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

As for the results, some sequences play, some are novel and some are tried and trite cliches.

The Arctic Convoy is not all that novel or new. But it’s beautifully put together, well-acted and tautly-acted.

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

Deadpool & Wolverine is a burlesque of comic book movies, embracing their popularity, mocking the characters, situations, genre and its fans all the way to the Vancouver bank vault where Marvel Jesus insists Disney deposit the $billion this fun, bad movie is going to make.

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

Park and Lively give this novel yet familiar story its heart and weight, each offering support when guidance won’t do.

Bennett impresses, first scene to last.

Roberts and Union pull out the stops trying to find laughs in this script, mostly failing.

Though we “see” the attraction between the two young women, we rarely feel it. Luchetti makes her beautiful looking film about this budding summer romance, but never quite convinces us of her passionate interest in it, or in much else that was going on in Italy in 1938.

So anyone expecting this depiction of Asperger’s/”on the spectrum” autism to advance the medium will be sorely disappointed. The artistic milieu and tentative attempts at making a connection shine, but too much of what’s here is just genre cliches.

[Segal's] no better than anyone else would be at wringing laughs from this crap script. Yes, he co-wrote it. But if enough people stream this on movie-content-starved Amazon Prime, maybe he’ll get another shot at getting a better movie out of this franchise.

Find Me Falling never reaches beyond the low hanging fruit. But that turns out to be pretty sweet, if not quite as filling or challenging as you might hope.

Twisters is set to be one of the biggest hits of the summer, with a budget that convinced two studios to share the cost and distribution. But that lack of the human touch lowers the stakes, minimized the suspense and left me cold. The effects are next generation impressive, but they’ve been getting steadily better in the tornado movies between Twister and Twisters.

The Champion isn’t a winner, but formulaic or not, it’s never quite a total write-off either.

Tamahori is a filmmaker in both his elements here, a Maori who never allows this Maori story to turn patronizing, an action auteur (he counts a Bond film, a “XXX” thriller and “The Edge” among his credits) who knows how to make violence visceral, and in combat scenes, an epic experience.

The film is a somber, somnambulent drift for long stretches, interrupted by cheap jolts and the occasional grim “legitimate” one.

The shock has worn off and the transition to slasher porn to “thriller” proves to be a bit of a stretch for West. But maybe, now that all this “Pearl,” “Maxine” period piece business is out of his system, he’ll try something fresh.

Ill-timed for an America fighting and losing its endless battle with reality and “facts,” “Moon” is glib, dull and ahistorical. Not a romance, kind of comic and too stupid to be satire, it wastes leads Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum.

Emotional shortcomings aside, Touch still pulls you in, an immersive story of alien worlds — the 1960s, Iceland and Japan — sympathetically and patiently told, a lovely two hour break from the world and the fresh waves of bad news that stain even the best of times.

It’s all just (almost) good, clean and forgettable “fun,” for those young enough to be delighted by it.

The leads are compelling, the action furious and the suspense right on the edge of riveting, which is more than enough to make this “Escape” an odyssey we want to take with these people who want to decide their own future, rather than having a failing totalitarian state do it for them.