Roger Moore

It's all very messy and entirely too obvious at the same time. Montiel makes the most of his settings, but the story keeps staggering into dead ends.

Overlong, polished but drab civics lesson of a comedy. This “Barbershop” is in sore need of a trim, and not just a little off the top, either.

The effects are decent, the acting desultory in “Prey for the Devil,” a School for Exorcists thriller that promises more than it delivers.

Our core quartet are a well-preserved and still charming lot, with each giving a glimpse of their comic specialties. But like that spring fling, “80 for Brady,” the material here just isn’t up to the legends being paid to perform it.

Theron and Washington vamp this monstrosity up and almost never let on that they know this project didn’t really work out. That sets an example for the many younger players in the cast, who do their best to play more than this scene’s stunning costume.

But for all the period detail, characters are a little too healthy and well-scrubbed to be convincing and the actual look of the film is video-flat and dull — ugly.

Statham should hold out for movies that offer him more than a few exotic stamps on his passport.

If indeed this is a full on franchise reboot, this “origin story” is no "Welcome to Raccoon City" at all. It’s a warning to avoid ever coming back.

The faith-based football bio-drama Greater fails on so many levels one scarcely knows where to begin.

There’s little to this film that hints that “Holiday Rush” could have been saved. But mixing it up, more, centering more on the adult conflicts because the kids aren’t funny enough, might have reminded us that Malco can still be funny. This just makes that a distant memory.

That four-handed screenplay gives us 85 minutes of movie, and “Zombieland/Venom” director Ruben Fleischer drags that out to nearly two hours. That underscores just how much this disposable piffle outstays its welcome.

As it turns out, a sputtering anti-climax is about all this movie deserves.

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.

This is “Crank” with one long, frenetic, ticking-clock chase and the occasional “Mission: Impossible” level stunt, and a body count and a story that you cannot let yourself think about, even though both are in your face and appalling, first scene to closing credits.

Husband and wife Joe Manganiello and Sofia Vergara star in Bottom of the Ninth, a “second chance” romance that get swallowed by the generic and generally dull baseball story it’s wrapped in.

Basically a Royal Caribbean ad masquerading as a romantic comedy.

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.”

Thrillers live on tension and rising suspense. This one discards suspense too early. And action comedies are, by design, fast and furious. This one, while serving up some serioulsy gory action and splatter film laughs, can’t get out of its own way.

Cut rate horror like this, they’re just girls in revealing outfits and boys drooling after them — until the next coed gets killed. Preferably after her big make-out scene.

Odd twists aren’t wholly explained, relationships are uncertain, characters flip from antagonists to trusting confidantes with no more motivation than the expediencies of the script. Most of the performers struggle to find their footing, and when in doubt, walk even slower and talk even slower still.

Off the wall? Friend, you don’t know off the wall until you’ve seen five twelve-year-old girl singer-dancers cover the Tina Turner/Phil Spector epic “River Deep, Mountain High” in the screwball kiddie dance comedy, Standing Ovation.

The ladies aren’t funny enough to wring laughs out of the script, and the gay jokes are both out-of-date and too few in number to compensate.

The friends-making-a-movie vibe that permeates this — Power did the animation himself, guessing the Petersons are siblings — is the most charming thing about Attack of the Demons. A wittier script might have allowed that friends DIYing a horror cartoon vibe to translate into something more fun on the screen.

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

There’s a resigned tone to much of this film, a fatalistic “This can only end one way” despite every quirky shift in direction and mood.

Like a fine wine, Louis Garrel‘s A Faithful Man needs to be opened to the elements, to “breathe.” Because if there’s ever been a more airless, so-dry-one-hesitates-to-label-it “romantic comedy,” I’ve yet to set parched eyes upon it.

Sitcom-veteran Lavin navigates the abrasive tactlessness of the archetype she’s playing with ease, even if the Yiddishisms feel forced and dated a generation older than the character she’s supposed to be playing.

With every desperate F-bomb, every “Dad, what’s a rim job?” crudity, every crass overreach into vulgarity, Vacation feels pointless, dated and dirty.

Writer-director Marchal loses track of characters, story threads, mob cash and drugs, impatient as he is to get to the next shoot out.

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.

Whatever merits the production values have, the cheap frights don't deliver, the performers bring no pathos and the gimmick behind Apollo 18 flat out does not work.

Gastambide is right on the cusp of adequate in playing a corrupt cop on the verge of panicking. Abkarian is menacing enough to suggest he can still hold his own in a fight. But the performances are generally on a par with the screenplay — perfunctory.

Private Property struggles to find its footing and never escapes the feeling that we’re watching something out of date.

It’s kind of slapdash and all over the place — again, like “Girls” — introducing interesting characters and losing track of them, focusing on the most sexually promiscuous/adventurous young woman in the lot. It doesn’t really hold together or earn its “My point, and I do have one” scene.

The script, alas, runs out of funny situations too quickly, and without those, funny lines become sparse as Tankhouse lurches into the later acts towards its wholly inevitable conclusion.

The final verdict on Kinda Pregnant is kind of tired and kind of played, with a star who needs to find some new shtick if she’s to have another cultural moment all her own.

I can’t really endorse Fair Game. But there’s enough good stuff in it — “Mad Max/Road Warrior” mimicking stunts, etc — that you can see what QT saw in it and why he figured he could “improve” on a good idea whose execution wasn’t all it might have been.

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.

Stone cold sober, King Knight is a bit of a sweet-spirited grind, funny intent delivering funny moments that are so scattered the picture never gets up a comic head of steam.

Bogota: City of the Lost is an underworld “how criminals crime” procedural with an exotic setting and fish-out-of-water characters but no pace or narrative drive worthy of its novelty.

All well and good, or at least adequate. But as a screenwriter his star vehicle has organizational problem and a twisty story in which all the energy is devoted to keeping those twists from being obvious.

And while banter may be “EVERYthing,” pacing is PARAMOUNT in comedy. Bruce!!! and its star never get out of his own way.

The images can be lovely, but the cryptic clues in the story fail to surprise when they arrive or move when they’re “explained.”

Good looking (it was filmed in Winter Garden) but slow and bland, this faith-based tear-jerker is a depressingly unemotional affair, with writing and some of the acting so flat that even its emotionally loaded situations can’t inspire waterworks.

A screen elegy is supposed to make you sad and give the viewer an appreciation for all this character and the actor playing him was, and a little of what remains. Cry Macho just generates pity.

Attempts at “suspense” in the heist itself are ineptly handled. The script and the leads strain to wring the “cute” out of this, but that’s in short supply.

Expecting to catch lightning in a bottle twice was mostly wishful thinking on the part of everyone involved.

Like a Boss delivers a solid opening twenty minutes, and a few laughs, here and there, after that. Just not enough.

Too many characters means there’s somebody for everybody to potentially identify with, but none of them have enough to do, with only Law and to a lesser degree Mikkelsen, who brings real contempt and menace to Grindelwald, making much of an impression.

And Reynolds? Put your money on him hitting his knees tonight and thanking Marvel for that red suit and all those zingers that “Deadpool” gets to deliver. They saved him from duds like this.

Do-Over is “Grown-Ups” with guns. And with no Colin Quinn or Chris Rock or Rob Schneider or Norm McDonald or Kevin Nealon.

Moroccan producer (French TV’s “The Bureau”) turned director Hicham Hajji has no sense of pace, and while he’s got “names” on board, he doesn’t give them much to chew on. The script has these half-hearted efforts to shoehorn third-act twists and political messaging into the picture, but they’re as a limp and obvious as one actor’s feigned southern drawl in the finale.

The one-liners just kind of lie there. The movie’s many make-out scenes do what they do in most exploitation films, they stop the movie cold.

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

The Monkey has no pace, no rising sense of urgency or suspense, no real path it’s following and little or nothing that amounts to a message.

It’s pretty enough and just engaging enough to suggest it might just become a series pilot.

The performances are as deflated as the subject matter, which, considering the caliber of the players and the track record of the director, points back to the script.

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

Crowe seems to impose his own sense of fun on the proceedings, which gives it a light touch even when it should have fear-for-the-victims’ lives gravitas.

It’s a serious-minded first-real-love/first sexual experience coming-of-age drama which takes forever to make anything happen, and when it does (the “big reveal”), it’s so lame as to make you weigh your life up to this point, and what inspired you to waste 105 minutes on this drivel.

On the sliding critter-comedy scale, Furry Vengeance falls somewhere between the Chipmunks and the Chihuahua (the one from Beverly Hills).

Is Adventures in Public School appropriate for young kids, the ones with Netflix as their baby sitter? Certainly not. This is some seriously adult, flirt-with-pervy “TV-14” doesn’t really cover it stuff.

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.

Whatever its virtues, the film comes together more adroitly than satisfyingly. Think of Zeroville as an artifact, worth looking at as a piece of pre-history that cannot — at present — shed its baggage, and frankly didn’t need that off-screen baggage to be a bust.

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.

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.”

Blandly-cast, dully-scripted and flatly-directed, the only moments of life in this story are tucked in that eight-man rowing shell.

There’s no shame to everyone’s intentions, but there’s no honor in the result, either. The Honor List can’t even live up to its bad-pun title.

It's a rarely amusing movie overwhelmed by grating kids, unfunny sidekicks, half-hearted Sandler funny voices and a co-star who seems more fearful of smiling with each passing year.

A comedy with no urgency, edge or stakes isn’t much of a comedy, with or without “pressure.”

There’s a funny movie in the “big city sophisticates SHOCKED by the transgressive nonsense that goes on in a small (college) town.” This isn’t it.

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.

Sure, it’s basically one long testicles joke. But set your expectations low enough and you’ll find a laugh, here and there.

A graphically violent, sexually explicit teen horror tale, it was close to being ahead of its time, in its time. Now, it plays like a quaint, fairly obvious period piece — from 2006.

For a horror movie, Night’s End comes up awfully short in frights. Even the manufactured quick-cut “jolts” couldn’t alarm a toddler, even if the SHRIEK accompanying them would wake anybody.

An imposing and impressive lead performance somewhat atones for an awkwardly structured script and a charisma-starved supporting cast in A Great Awakening.

As the picture careens around towards its anti-climactic climax, one really does wonder about the point of it all.

It’s all harmless enough, and a lovely Yorkshire travelogue if nothing else.

It’s paint-by-numbers screenwriting, and even that wouldn’t be awful if the picture was quicker, lighter on its feet. It’s an 80 minute comedy in a 110 minute package.

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

It’s just that this one has nothing much to offer, archetypal characters giving rote performances of a script that needed serious workshopping and edge-adding.

Jake’s narration, about how you can either “finesse” your way out of a jam, or “Bogart your way through it,” is drab. As are the performances. Especially the leads.

A Grand Romantic Gesture is a wistful romance in a minor key, a flash of “love, the second (or maybe last) time around” with no flash at all.

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

Funnier lines, more sharply-defined characters, higher stakes in the whole “Who lives/who dies?” game and darker twists would make Same Boat float instead of sink.

The acting is uneven, the action not awful but not great either (some of the stage punches are obvious) and the ending a total cheat.

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 cast is uniformly sexy, but the romances presented don’t spark, mostly owing to how unnatural and artificial they feel. At the end of any rom-com, you like to think “she belongs with him/he belongs with her,” and here that just isn’t true.

It’s not the least bit original, which is no cardinal sin. But without the laughs, “Love Tactics” plays like a travelogue with kissing.

Whatever random “madness” envelopes The Bride’s mind, Gyllenaal gives us a jumbled peek at her stream of consciousness, too.

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.

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

There’s Barcelona scenery and sex, posh parties and sex, and obvious foreshadowing and melodrama at every turn. Subtle? Not in the least.

It’s a vacuous affair, dull performances trapped in duller writing, ironically funny only when you take the writer’s words to be the screenwriter’s admission of guilt.

And when the credits roll, we cast our eyes about the theater at all the other paying patrons casting their eyes around the theater, all of us wondering the same thing. “Wait, that’s it?”

It’s a serious “meh,” squishy and sentimental — like a Woody Allen (cough cough) rough draft, with lots more swearing.

None of it, not Welles’ flirtation with his Lady Macduff later Lady Macbeth (Ashli Haynes), not Welles’ domestic problems, not the cast’s various burdens and foibles, is scripted or acted in ways as compelling as the real story, which has been related, in great detail, by every Welles biographer.

Some of the jokes land. Some do not. And through it all, not a moment of rising threat level or terror registers credibly on anybody’s face. It’s as if they’re all in on the joke, with Williams merely the worst at spoiling the punchline.

The laughs in this insomnia cure come in the first act, almost all of them at the funeral. Once the machinations of a tedious, trite and formulaic script take hold, the novelty of hearing lionized actresses curse (demurely) wears off, so do the charms of Wild Oats.

It’s not that the performances are incompetent. The script is alarmingly tone-deaf.

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.

The Life List is as bland as its title, a movie unworthy of comparison to most any “Bucket List” movie you can think of. Well, exxcept for that dramatic climax, the one that comes before the fender-bender of an anti-climax.

What a maddening, convoluted and bizarrely complex comic thriller I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me is.

Whatever interest — and laughs (those HATS) — that holds isn’t enough to distract us from guessing plot twists a dozen scenes in advance or from giggling at how Feig and screenwriters Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis stumble through a “How do we END this mess?” debate, one which Feig clumsily slaps on the screen without bothering to edit.

The obscurant strain of it all shows. Most of what’s here would be filler in a better film, or bullet point scenes in a story more wholly-shaped and worked out.

A movie with a whole lot of running around, zero pathos, no romance — one of the many holes in Will Smith’s movie acting game — and a central conceit that’s given away in the trailers.

The Fakenapping isn’t very good. But it’s got possibilities.

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.

Watching “Wuthering” as the hype fades just underscores what a tease the entire tale has been turned into. More sensual than sexual and far less sexy than it seems to take itself for, this rainswept, fog-choked “Wuthering” withers on the production-designed-to-death vine.

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

Here’s one to catch at Red Box, on Netflix or your favorite “family” movie channel. Everything about Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase says, firmly and with conviction, “TV movie.”

Love the cast, and scattered moments of this play as cutting or funny. The problem is, almost every one of those bits is in the trailer, which plays as a lot more amusing than this drag.

It’s not the worst movie of the “power from a pill” genre, an idea that dates back decades (TV’s “Mr. Terrific” comes to mind). But that’s one overriding problem, here. Project Power feels powered-out ten minutes in.

All that a cast filled with music personalities adds to the dull, trashy money-laundering melodrama “For the Love of Money” is the occasional pause for a song. And the last thing this movie should do is pause.

The “No one believes the truth any more” messaging may be timely, but this isn’t satire or even “high concept” silliness. It’s just an antic collection of almost-random scenes not-quite-sprinted-through by Rex, Cavalero and Milligan and slow-walked by Biggs, who is, as always, a good sport about it all.

How you stretch that thin, worn-out comedy concept to two hours is you let almost every scene go on past its comic payoff.

There’s nothing wrong with weaving a story the viewer can’t unravel as its playing out. But John and the Hole doesn’t have enough of a story to maintain any narrative drive and doesn’t point towards answers or give the viewer any hope of resolution or release.

This Hide and Seek isn’t hatefully bad. It’s short, well-acted and easy enough to follow until it isn’t. It’s the “until it isn’t” that earns it the label, “disappointing.”

Co-writers Joe Ballarini and Frank E. Flowers (who also directed) cobble together characters and cliches from many a pirate tale for this ham-fisted affair, which sacrifices fun for fighting and sinks like a stone.

A clever (and foreshadowed) touch or two notwithstanding, in the end, the filmmakers’ attempts at misdirecting the viewer’s expectations fail and the movie’s endless “on the nose” characters, moments and lines of dialogue overwhelm it.

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.

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.

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

Not really enough amuses or dazzles, and attempts at giving us something emotionally “moving” or religilously inspiring fall well short of the mark. But for a middling-at-best movie, Praise This isn’t bad, even if it isn’t all that praiseworthy.

There are few things more maddening than sitting through a thriller that should work, that has the requisite elements in place, and just doesn’t.

The year may be young, but Hollywood is going to be hard pressed to come up with a climax that is more anti-climactic than the many anti-climaxes that bring down the curtain on Escape Room, the first official dog of the new year.

Hemingway in Cuba lives and dies on its “Papa,” and Yari did himself no favors by cutting corners there.

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.

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

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

The picture grinds its gears, time and again, losing what’s “funny” in favor of all sorts of distractions, all of them humdrum when compared to the Big Idea that this is supposed to be built around.

While “Summer” is lightly amusing, here and there, it treads heavily on some pretty slippery ground. Gleason makes all the checkpoints that the plot passes through feel perfunctory.

“Always and Forever” is still likable, still cute, but utterly out of ideas.

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 Jason Statham vehicle Homefront is such a generic tough-guy-against-the-odds ’80s style actioner that you’d swear Sly Stallone starred in it. He did, back in the day. Or versions of it. This one, Stallone just scripted.

A misshapen, aimless midlife crisis travelogue/romance with discourses on the the repression and inequity of Saudi Arabia, dating in the Islamic world and the nature of American/Chinese business competition, it’s the weakest Tom Hanks vehicle in decades.

I appreciate the effort it took to get a Western made in this day and age. It’s a good story. Redford knew it. So does Momoa. And there are some scattered stand-out moments.

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.

Here’s a tip. Try not to bore us so much next time.

Unrest could have been a lot of things that it’s not — “fascinating,” “illuminating,” “entertaining” and even “inspiring” among them. Instead, we’re treated to engrossing details that never add up to more than watching a second hand labor its way around a clock face.

I’d say Half Brothers half works, but that’s unjustifiably generous.

When you set your romance against the most aesthetically pleasing watersport of them all — kite surfing — you’d better make sure the melodramatic story is fun, tortured, twisty and/or steamy enough to keep folks from wondering, “When’re they going to show more kite surfing?”

Humorless, shallow and grim will get you only so far.

Red Right Hand’s not quick enough to be the gritty mixed-bag B-movie that was its destiny, but the players, the place and pistol-packing might be enough for those who go for that sort of thing.

Rage lets us see where all the money was spent — on Cage, and on a noisy, metal-rending car chase through scenic Mobile. It’s head-slappingly dumb, it’s dull and even the novelty of filming outside of the over-filmed Los Angeles adds nothing.

Give it points on setting and a couple of the performances, but the joke-starved All's Faire in Love only rarely rises to the level of fair to middling.

There’s enough here that “Irul,” which means “darkness,” would be a fun, moody movie for a screenwriting class to pick apart and try to workshop into something better.

The leads, whatever their ability to handle fight choreography, are bland in the extreme, uninteresting to the point where the picture wilts at their mere appearance.

Hardcore Henry is jarring and so a-cinematic that I couldn’t enjoy much of the technical razzle-dazzle this ticking-clock monstrosity was hurling at me.

The villains are weak and the narrative has little drive to it.

It’s not art. But The Human Race does manage to take a worn out formula and nonsense story and finds a few novel touches, a little humor and hints of pathos in between the exploding heads.

A lightly fiesty performance by Leslie Uggams in the title role and a general feel-good vibe are the chief recommendations of Dotty & Soul, a plucky but corny comedy from actor turned writer, director and star Adam Saunders.

You’d think the Italian creators of Beate (Blessed) could have made a funnier, sunnier film in their sleep.

Despite the savagery of the fights, there’s nothing satisfying in this slaughter, a movie which spills blood and spatters gore because it’s out of other ideas.

A little like modern country music - odd moments of sincerity, heart and authenticity peek through the plastic, the hype and the manufactured hokum.

Wherever they were going with this, writer-director Mularuk ensures that the journey is slow and seems even slower.

None of it adds up to much of a movie. Italian Studies is more an experimental collection of filmed conversations, filmed docu-drama style, interspersed with clips of a gorgeous blonde wandering New York. But because it stars Vanessa Kirby…

The entire enterprise feels like a piece of experimental theater that needs further workshopping before it’s ready for the stage.

There are thrillers that build toward a climax and thrillers that blow the ending after succeeding in creating suspense. Room 203 never really gets up a head of steam and just sort of peters out in a predictable, anti-climactic finale.

"English Reborn" isn't terrible and is certainly seriously harmless.

Cultural novelty aside, I found “Zom 100” to be pretty tame and tepid going, start to finish. Some decent chases, adorably doable but DULL bucket list items, and cute leads are about all there is to it.

Vice is a low-budget sci-fi thriller that borrows heavily from “Blade Runner” and “Westworld,” and serves as an answer to the question “How much movie can you get when you shoot your $10 million film in Mobile, Alabama? The answer is, quite a lot — with modernist buildings, striking control room sets and the city’s docks serving as a backdrop.

This “Risky Business” is averse to risk. There’s no edge to it. Only the sentimental stuff works.

This is not a bad cast, but whatever wit the script aims for is lost in the queasy details director Miguel Sapochnik found more fascinating.

Vitaletti has good players all dressed up in period garb, but gives them no place to go.

Wells has an approachable pluck about her, but Radnor is such a bland big screen presence that they set off no sparks and never make us believe them as a couple, or root for them.

Lacking much in the way of pace or panic, if just sort of flounders.

So this Mexican cartoon, in Spanish with English subtitles, is racy enough to count as a bit of culture clash. How young, exactly, do they teach kids testicle puns and stripper/massage “Happy Ending” jokes South of the Border?

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

The mob movie tropes and cliches end up being the only memorable moments in Lansky, material so overfamiliar we can finish the lines before the actors do.

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

The performers are more competent than compelling, a common failing of faith-based films. Blame the edge-free, freshly-scrubbed characters that they play. Sadly, even as a safe-for-seniors saga ready-made for The Hallmark Channel, this is pretty thin gruel.

There’s something to be said for quitting while you’re ahead.

It’s the sort of film that starts out bad and occasionally lapses into awful, largely thanks to a dull lead and the fact that the script has him narrating, in voice over, his every move in the second person.

Mothers and Daughters is drabness on the screen personified, a “Lifetime Original Movie” too unoriginal for Lifetime to want anything to do with it.

It’s a movie finding its audience, but as nakedly obvious as its message is and as limited as its shock/entertainment/outrage value might be — the empty seats in the press gallery of the trial suggest “the real enemy” — “Gosnell” isn’t likely to change anybody’s mind.

It aims for that “Hangover” blend of the sick and the sentimental. And it doesn’t work.

The slick, confusing and yet somehow familiar Egyptian thriller 30. March forces the Western viewer to engage it in one’s own film comfort zone — genre. It’s a “clear my name” or “Could I really have done this?” thriller with a disorienting lack of sure-footing.

As instantly forgettable as the pleasant but unremarkable tunes Miller, Sagal and assorted soundtrack artists sing during the film.

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.

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

Richard Linklater’s film of Where’d You Go Bernadette may offer the great Cate Blanchett a star vehicle she can sink her incisors into. But rather than a meaty meal, it’s a gooey goulash of randomly expressed “feels.”

Director and co-writer Xavier Gens’ bleak thriller doesn’t do much with characters and doesn’t traffic much in “hope” and a new day dawning.

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.

Stevens mugs, Fisher vamps and Mann and Dench do their damnedest. But you can’t improve on Coward, and there’s no re-animating this corpse.

Sex Trip demonstrates that sometimes a tired idea is just that, tired.

The acting is soap operatic, the action is sluggish and static and even the sound effects rob the shoot-outs — murders, actually, as most of the protagonists are hired killers of the Brazil of the 1910s to 1940s — sound like popguns.

Well, Green Lantern isn't "Jonah Hex" bad. But it's silly enough to be part of the same "silliest Warner Brothers comic book summer movies of all time" conversation.

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.

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.

The plot of Love Again is so over-familiar I stopped streaming it not once but thrice to make certain I’d never seen it before.

Ready or Not is a “Get Out” that doesn’t quite get it, a “Purge” that pulls its most important punches.

This generally mild-mannered comedy sinks or swims on Hart’s back. And as one scene makes clear, Little Man can’t swim.

The worst comic book adaptation since “Jonah Hex.”

The first major movie disappointment of 2018.

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.

Both Black Phones are derivative . . . But the derivations Derrickson went for in the sequel are simply not as arresting or interesting.

A make-work project for generations of Hollywood women and female fashion celebrities, it is pristine in its visuals — mainly closeups of the Oscar winners and other great beauties of its cast precise in its caper — and utterly bloodless in execution.

The romance at the heart of this Russo-American “Affair to Remember” is tepid bathwater, blase and lacking sparks.

Stripping it of its cruelty, sense of grievance and teen-impulsive passion for violent revenge rubs off too much of what made the first film work from this “sequel.” And no cameo from the first film can atone for that.

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

I was one of the few naysayers when the franchise was rebooted with “Jurassic World,” yet even with the bar set lower for expectations on this one, I found it “Transformers” boring, a summer movie that however much it earns, fails to justify its existence.

Mikael Marcimain’s direction of the action beats is never more than passably exciting. And an honest take on “An Honest Life” might be that everything between those robberies, riots and burglaries just reminds you that there aren’t enough robberies, riots and burglaries to keep one awake through all that tedious voice-over narration.

Actor turned writer-director Larry Fessenden (“Beneath,” “Wendigo”) seeks to distract us from the well-worn path by talking us to death. There are endless scenes of the doctor (David Call of “Tiny Furniture”) “teaching” the creation he names “Adam” (CLE-verrr) the fundamentals of life.

But I can’t remember a Marvel movie that went to less trouble giving us an “origin story,” that put more effort into tying the tale into this corner of the Marvel “universe,” and that had less going for it.

Whatever McCarthy hoped to do with this thin story and star casting, all he ended up with was another average Sandler movie — not as bad as some, no better than most.

I dare say every review of this adaptation has the words “well-intentioned” in it. “Sweet,” too. So it is. But if that’s the best thing you can say about it, well…

There are moments, here and there, where you can see what a pretty good cast saw in the possibilities of the material.

The Best of Me plays like the worst of Nicholas Sparks.

Zoe Chao puts on a clinic on “the funny new BF of the leading lady” as a rom-com trope in Your Place or Mine, an exceptionally mild-mannered farce set up as a Reese Witherspoon/Ashton Kutcher vehicle.

I enjoyed watching Garner get back to her “Alias” chops, cuts, slices, shots and head-butts. The editing makes you think she could do this stuff, and her reactions to pain — emotional and ammunitional, is genuine. But it’s a silly slaughterhouse of a movie.

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).

I can’t say it’s very good, because it isn’t. But the magnificent walking, talking, pratfall-taking sight gag that is Dave Bautista? Well cast.

There are completists who have to see every movie in a “universe.” The phrase “The studio saw you coming” applies to them.

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

When the slow burn is this slow coming to a boil, it’s a lot easier to just shrug and move on to a thriller that makes more sense.

A romantic comedy that could not be more “twee” if it tried.

The polished production sometimes touches and amuses despite its naïve “love conquers all” script.

Even if the Malaysian undead don’t have the rules of “Zombieland” down pat, the effects are decent and the makeup is outstanding even if the plot is canned/store-brand generic and the frights not all that frightening.

Minor moments of slapstick may tickle the kids, but anybody older, especially those who remember what Williams was like in his prime and how funny Stiller was just two “Museum” movies ago, will wish this tomb had stayed sealed.

The sex and romance elements are more abrupt, perfunctory and charmless in this take. But they go for the same upbeat, heartwarming feel in the finale, which plays about the same.

The script is just a collection of horror tropes. Jake reads from the Encyclopedia of Shadows book his dad left him. A fortune teller animatronic display spooks the kids. The frights are tepid at best. The banter is “sick, and not in a good way.”

It mopes along when it isn’t leaving out what seem to be whole passages, transitions, backstory and the like. The action doesn’t flow at all, and relationships have a brittle, abrupt quality.

A violent, clumsy, jokey, badly-plotted and miscast mess.

There’s no suspense, little that’s thrilling or that justifies any investment in this dawdling melodrama with music.

Carrie Pilby never rises to the level of hateful, or even annoying. It never rises above mediocre, and that’s the problem.

Boy, Assassination 33 A.D. doesn’t lack for ambition. By turns prophetic and pious, pistol-packing and profane, it is the nuttiest “Jesus movie” since “Life of Brian.”

Maybe if “Rita” had been forced into more bachelorette weekend antics with Paige, bubbly Aimee Carrero and Addie Weyrich, the strain of trying to keep up, comically, with Keaton wouldn’t have been so obvious. As it is, “Mack & Rita” is a criminal waste of seasoned comic talent and a criminal misuse of some of the most beautiful Hollywood starlets coming up behind them.

Polaha, our lead, doesn’t embarass himself but doesn’t make Kevin a compelling enough figure to let him carry the movie.

The pacing doesn’t build dread, the characters don’t build empathy.

Unexplained, disorganized and cluttered with characters we strain to identify in banal situations that go nowhere, this isn’t one that’s going to replace “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Story” or even “The Family Stone” or “Feast of the Seven Fishes” on anybody’s holiday movie list.

Riff Raff lives down to its title, a trashy movie with a gilded cast — a cast a tad tarnished thanks to the addition of this to their resumes.

A genre mash-up that never quite achieves "So very bad it's good" status.

Engaging performances aside, even with a moment of tooth-grinding levity here and there, The Day of the Lord isn’t doing the demonic possession genre any favors by turning its actors into bloody pulps via abuse, torture and pummelings.

Nothing feels wholly fleshed-out, dramatic possibilities are frittered away left and right and nothing here makes us feel tense, aroused or “involved.”

It falls utterly apart in the equally-slow-footed third act, finishing the botch-job begun in the first.

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.

A humorless, muddled, bloody and generally unpleasant thriller.

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.

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

A stylish, moody and atmospheric tale contorted into a young adult horror story, it never works up a decent fright.

UFO is a cheerfully cheesy, sometimes sappy and always formulaic teen romance from the “bad boys on bikes” school.

Eastwood’s made some bad movies in recent years, along with some gems. This is the first film of his I’ve seen since his organutan co-star days that had me embarrassed for him.

Though it rarely looks as malnourished as say, “Europa Report” or “Moon,” Last Days on Mars does show how starved of new ideas sci-fi cinema is.

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.

Maybe they all took a gander at that random, ridiculous scenario and hoped that the car would be cool enough to bail them out. It isn’t.

It’s inoffensive, unless you take umbrage at the idea that the only people who know not to steal are True Believers and all that keeps society from an instant meltdown are the Faithful.

Sheen and Banderas make their characters fun, but they’re the only ones.

Trigger Point is shockingly conventional, with many a plot point, story beat and even shoot-out recycled from decades of other such films.

Not terrible, could have easily been better had our director, co-writer and star not tripped over all his many jobs along the way.

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.

The leads make it all likable and the stunts and editing are first rate even as stuntman-turned-director Olivier Schneider (“GTMax”) fails to deliver a single surprise or even delay this or that inevitable cliche.

An animated comedy that’s passably animated but generally unfunny.

An underachieving comical character study that wears out its welcome after too short a while, and a minor-key mystery with a “Gung Ho!” mein.

With a movie like Head Rush, you come for the action, but usually you hope for the cheese that comes with it to be a little better than this.

Red Pill gives us bupkiss. And while there are later moments that get closer to the mark, most of the “pick-them-off, one-by-one” tropes come off flat.

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

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.

A Tourist’s Guide to Love is a lovely Vietnamese travelogue in search of a romantic comedy that would transform the trip into a movie.

The plot is strictly hash, with coincidences, obvious clues and twists we see coming, with a couple of half-speed fights and half-hearted shootouts and car chases tossed in for variety.

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.

If what you’re looking for it fists of fury, he can provide them. And if you’re looking for signs that a guy who is playing heavies in small roles in big budget pictures is growing as a performer, that he and Johnson have gotten better since “Debt Collector,” just not all that much, Avengement is going to be your kind of movie.

This isn't the worst of the bunch, not by far. But my premonition is this won't be the finale this series has screamed out for these past few years. This decapitation train never seems to reach its destination.

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.

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.

The script is straight-up formula, which suggests few surprises, but also that the component parts should have clicked better than they did.

Bar Fight! is an 84 minute long break-up “Who gets custody of ‘our‘ regular bar?” comedy that hits the wall at about the 30 minute mark.

The film is, sadly, rarely funny.

It’s another pointless romp through Sandlerland — where the women are buxom, the kids have catch-phrases and the jokes are below average.

She had to be more charismatic than this to inspire over the ages.

Like Vin Diesel, it has bulk, lumbering clumsily along as it repeats Diesel’s greatest hits — the ones that don’t require him to drive a fast and furious car.

While there are a couple of laughs and comical come-uppances, the picture drowns in its own gore.

The Chinese thriller 731 is a wildly ambitious attempt to get a heroic horror movie out of an infamous crime against humanity.

But there’s no terror, here. None. Perhaps, before one more version of this novel is committed to the screen, some enterprising film executive with the power to secure financing or “green light” the project should read the bloody book and figure out if it has any currency in the age of “Paranormal Activity” or “Halloween” sequels or reboots. Because damned if I can think of a filmed version of it that works, and I’ve seen a few.

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

The structure is ad hoc and the plot choppy, with the action beats — such as they are — holding the movie together and maintaining our interest. But just barely.

McConaughey, as I mentioned, has an Oscar. But this “performance” seems so unerringly stoned and slack-jawed that you can’t believe it’s not filmed reality.

Everybody has to lean into the would-be laughs too hard because they’re uncertain there’s another one coming again any time soon. The situations are recycled and dully predictable.

Far more grim than "Grimm," and not nearly as much fun as it should have been.

You don’t have to be a Tom Brady hater to pan this. But you are obligated to separate this wan script and feebly-fictionalized laugher from its stars, who have legendary comic chops that this movie treats like oversized false teeth.