Roger Moore

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

Not a ringing endorsement, but as faith-based dramas go, this isn’t angry and isn’t an over-reach. Its virtues are the same as ever, even if its dramatic shortcomings only grow with time.

Worst of all is this 85-minute-story-in-a-two-hour-movie’s lack of urgency.

An excruciatingly empty chunk of eye candy that spends over two hours trying to convince us they’re not ripping off “Dune.”

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.

“January release” or not, it’s still a shame that all this talent, an epic fight in a fish market and some cool shootouts and chases were wasted this way.

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

It’s brutishly heavy-handed, with a performance or two so hammy they came straight from the smokehouse. But those quibbles aside, Beneath Us is a torture porn satire that never fails to hold one’s interest, even if it doesn’t quite come off. It takes you from point A to point U — underground, literally “beneath us,” with efficiency and visceral verve.

Take away the point-by-point comparison, even accepting the jump shots and backdoor cuts on the court, this remake still never gets off the ground.

Delia’s Gone never wholly transcends formula, and when it strays from expectations it seems on more uncertain ground. But Budreau, who wrote and directed Ethan Hawke’s fine Chet Baker jazz biopic “Born to be Blue,” bathes his film in overcast, sets his characters up with the sparest of sketches and then runs the table with them like a pool hustler with a film camera.

This thriller sits on the gory edge of the blade, teetering between “not all that” and “not that bad.”

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

Witty, warm, well-cast and often wickedly funny.

A perfectly adequate superhero comic-book movie, all explosions, chases, gunfights, sword fights and blood feuds. There’s even a little humor in it.

At least Momoa is fun. Find him a comedy, somebody. He’s got Joe Manganiello’s build, and enough of his comic chops to handle a a movie that doesn’t require him to play a biker, a barbarian or a deep sea beefcake.

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

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

If you’re over the age of five, and you’re not taking someone UNDER the age of five to see My Little Pony: The Movie, you’re in the wrong theater.

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.

The trouble with The Change-Up is that it doesn't change-up enough of the formula to render this new.

The quest, which takes our heroes to the Sea of Monsters, aka The Bermuda Triangle, is generic in the extreme. The fights/escapes all lack any sense of urgency and peril.

Even the absurdly callous and well-equipped coroners (Matt Passmore, Hannah Emily Anderson) barely manage to wipe the smirks off their faces as they examine corpses.

Boring characters boringly-played.

Rapace is all over the place with her performance — needy, then self-assured, enraged, then in love. The always feral Farrell seems as dismayed by her as the rest of us.

A cautionary eco-parable wrapped in a seriously dull and myopic time-travel thriller, 2067 bogs down early on in questions of “fate” and “determinism,” and never tears itself free of that bog.

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

For all the impressive (but not dazzling) effects, the scattered jokes and stentorian acting (especially from the Olympians), there’s not much here that will stick with you after the popcorn’s gone. But as any ancient Greek could tell you, that’s sort of the point.

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.

Devine? Still an acquired taste that defies acquisition.

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

There’s barely a laugh in it. And Haddish does lasting damage to her brand and suggests “time’s up” on her 15 minutes as she mugs, vamps, overplays and over-reaches in a vain attempt to give what she HAD to see what “not funny” a laugh.

Needed more movie to go with its message.

A frothy little nothing of a Canadian updating of “Cinderella” set in the Canadian fashion industry. But the shoe doesn’t quite fit in this slow-footed farce, a vehicle for pretty blonde Portia Doubleday (“Youth in Revolt”).

Good acting and sharp editing make The Barber a most engrossing serial killer thriller. But too much talk, mostly in a lecturing over-explained finale, almost undoes all of that.

Marceau remains an arresting screen presence, but that’s severely tested by Azuelos’ inane, meandering and trite tale of love, loss and closure, wrapped in a female wish fulfillment fantasy.

The cast doesn’t have the sassy swagger of the “Fast & Furious” crew. Paul, surrounded by co-stars of the same modest height, isn’t particularly charismatic in this setting. He’s not a natural “quiet tough guy.” But the actors are second bananas here — to the Koenigsegg Ageras, Saleens and Shelby Mustang that feed America’s Need for Speed, on screen and off. And the cars deliver.

Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms offers up a heaping helping of eye candy and treacle for the holidays, If only they’d had a coherent story and a good actress in the lead. If only those were the only two serious shortcomings in this brainless, cotton candy bauble.

The entire affair isn’t terrible, just a drag. Truth be told, they’ve taken this idea and pounded the cute right out of it. Time to put the pacifier in this boss baby and move on.

As uneven as it is, Life as We Know It still goes down like comic comfort food, especially for anybody who's ever dealt with parenthood.

A rather dull and talkative comedy about two mismatched colleagues trapped in Albuquerque for a day of true confessions and misbehavior.

Aftershock then becomes a catalog of most every unpleasant way of dying you can imagine.

This “beer run” from Inwood, Manhattan, to Saigon and “up country” environs starts jaunty, gets somber and sentimental and then goes oh-so-very-wrong. You’ll feel it the instant it happens, just as I did.

It’s “Gump” rendered in the shallowest strokes, an “evocative” saga with all the depth of Billy Joel’s Boomer anthem, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

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.

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

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.

Aafter taking forever to open up the story (some good on location footage in Haiti) and stumbling a bit in setting the “growing sense of doom” tone, Green loses the plot and with it the power to land a big third act punch. Finishing with a swing and a miss can’t have been his intent.

I wouldn’t mind seeing these characters again (Batacam penned a sequel, I hear), because the bare bones of a First Gen crime thriller are here. It’s just that everybody involved needs more practice in the genre to get it right.

It’s a tediously derivative tale.

So there’s every reason to expect this to suck, completely and utterly. But the tunes become a sort of saving grace, the animation’s not bad and the there’s enough slapstick to keep tiny tykes distracted.

Netflix should have hunted around for a hungry young female screenwriter to take a pass at this script. It lacks warmth, a feel for its heroine, who may narrate in voice-over, but comes off as more removed from the proceedings this time.

For a bad movie, it’s a fun.

It’s more unpleasant than scary, and ever so slow in getting up to speed.

The general idea here is a sound one, taking the conventions of a celebrated genre and sending them up. But LaBute’s incessant grasping for laughs out of “The Next Tuesday” and “Sometime After That” titles is instantly cloying.

Penn doesn’t work much, and this idea of combining his two careers — as actor, producer and co-writer, and as humanitarian — may have its heart in the right place. But take away the preaching, and this is just Penn’s version of a late-career Mel Gibson movie. He should be better than this.

The script, by actor turned writer John Posey, has structural problems and motivational issues in between the cliches. And Cena, a few movies into his career, is still all presence and no acting.

The more we know, the less mysterious and less interesting Escape the Field is. The more that’s revealed, the more obvious the panic amongst those writers becomes.

There’s not much to grab hold of, here. The Visitor fights a losing battle with over-familiarity, sauntering through horror tropes that predate 24 frames-per-second era celluloid.

Devolves from quiet character study into full-blown, over-the-top “star vehicle” in its last act.

Melissa K. Stack’s script has snap and crackle to go with the pop, making this female wish-fulfillment fantasy an “Eat, Pray, Revenge” that delivers the punches that two “Sex and the City” movies never could.

It’s easier talking about the film’s most promising bits, because too little of the rest of it has anything particularly funny to offer.

Tammy, in the end, feels like a pulled punch. McCarthy promises a haymaker she never quite delivers.

This well-intentioned dramedy goes wrong right from the start and careens downhill from there.

It is a competently filmed but utterly unsurprising tale.

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

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…

Divorce Corp is a lot pointed outrage that damning as its seems, feels suspect.

A sometimes entertaining, dazzling-on-the-field biography built around an utterly colorless lead performance.

Snoop is funny, in all his unfiltered fury. But the problem with shock-value comical profanity is its numbing effect. It stops being funny after awhile. We get used to it.

Fuqua’s a better director than this and Logan’s a better writer than “Michael” shows. Now that everybody’s delivered a blockbuster out of this troubled man of mystery, maybe there’ll be money to try something more serious.

An entirely too manipulative, too obvious couple-in-jeopardy thriller, and a fun “bad” movie.

Desolate is about two plot twists too complicated for its own good.

“Innocuous, predictable and well-cast” is about all the praise “Mother of the Bride” warrants, unless you consider another movie featuring the lovely scenery of Phuket, Thailand a deal-maker.

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

Everything about this couple, from the way they pair up to the ways their romance plays out, feels scripted and inorganic, people “acting” like they’re soul mates because that’s in the job description. They know it, and we know it from watching them.

As horror musicals go, Stage Fright is never more than an out-of-town tryout.

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

The script here is pure junk, running gags about balding Murr’s secret hotel “party” life and the like.

Skin Trade, a project Lundgren co-wrote and has been trying to film for years, feels so dated and over-familiar that “half-decent” always seems just out of reach.

The normally dependable Rockwell seems uncertain of what to do with Verdean.

It turns out “Love” isn’t “Guaranteed,” any more than laughs, relatable characters or anything else.

Planes looks, sounds and feels like a direct-to-video project, which in an earlier age when people still bought DVDs it would have been. In theaters, it’s nothing more than a laughless 90 minute commercial for toys available at a retailer near you.

The story? It’s a patchwork mess.

Writer-director Austin Stark’s film crams a lot into 90 minutes, leaving no room for grace notes, little time for the heart that this truncated story cries out for.

It truly works on the level too many other faith-based dramas do, as comfort food for the faithful, an altar call for the already saved.

It’s as random as its title suggests, a genre flick that doesn’t do much more than stumble and angst-out from one killing to the next.

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

“Acreage” is so embedded in that earth you can taste it, smell the tobacco, cedar and slowly rotting corn stalks on those gently sloping hills.

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

The head-spinning puppet is beautifully-rendered, and the addition of the clattering, clacking sound effect that his wooden hinge-joints make is a plus.

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.

It’s a mad, ambitious allegory that dives into the Deal with the Devil one makes for a career in the game.

The performances are believable enough. But the film’s violence is both expected and absurdly random.

It’s a big ol’swing and a miss of a movie, a thriller whose frantic, crazy-quilt editing can’t hide how static and motionless it often feels, whose laptop-loads of “quotable” words don’t cover the inanity of every sentence.

A broad and formulaic culture-clash comedy built on fill-in-the-blank wedding comedy clichés.

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.

Submergence is a soapy, melodramatic romance in quiet greys and limp emotions.

Entourage is the uninvited dinner guest who then insists on sticking around long after the party’s over.

Run with the Hunted kind of rattles around like a racoon confined in a tiger cage. The milieu and characters are here, with “Lost Boys” references that don’t really hide the “Oliver Twist” structure. The “twists” in this “Oliver” are entirely predictable, including the finale.

When you’ve already put two sequels to this atrocity into the pre-production pipeline… Maybe you should stop. Or maybe the rest of us, the movie-going, sci-fi loving, “Terminator” adoring public have to be the ones to say it. “This ends here.”

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 Pickup never amounts to much more than a take-it-or-leave-it action comedy.

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

The aliens are far more lifelike than they ever were in the Will Smith/Tommie Lee Jones “MIB” movies, but the shiny ray guns are as generic as ever and the shootouts surprisingly dull, if expensive looking.

The Enforcer is filmed-proof that the difference between a C-movie and a straight-up, watchable B-picture is Antonio Banderas. Ask first-time director Richard Hughes. He’ll tell you.

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

The singing is nice, the peripheral characters interesting. But a love that others don’t approve of, that may get in the way of a big concert debut? That makes Gabrielle a bit too Lifetime Original Movie for its own good.

The Erik Patterson and Jessica Scott script is laughably generic, and even the potentially alarming moments are given a cut-rate handling by director Spencer Squire, who hopefully resented the fact that the production didn’t even have money for spectral effects.

Filmmakers John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle (“As Above, So Below,” “Quarantine”) serve up a horrific string of “Sophie’s Choice” situations, in between the breathless chases and brutal violence.

A humorless, muddled, bloody and generally unpleasant thriller.

There’s paranoia and airborne suspense, tension and personal, in-your-face violence. But it’s glib as all get out, dumb when it isn’t being glib and not nearly as much fun as Gibson seems to think he’s made it out to be.

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

It’s a mediocre mash-up of genres that leaves no cliche unspoken, no horror trope unturned.

Only Hopkins, readily referencing his bag of tricks, seems to get what to make of this "inspired by trues events (and a book by Matt Baglio)" hooey.

By the time we reach the third act, which is where the trial we’ve been teased plays out (at great, boring length), The Citizen has exhausted its supply of immigration cliches and our patience.

No, you won’t remember this a year from now — just the vapor-thoughts effect, the jokey tone that floats around that and the heroes and villains. But how much of “The Hunger Games” sticks in the memory after four films? Heroes, villains, the train and a bow and arrow? Maybe?

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?

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

The stakes are higher, the cast has lost any pandemic-paunch/puffiness and everybody tries harder in Vacation Friends 2, which is something, I guess.

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.

Drew’s still got it even if The Stand-In doesn’t.

Frozen, undercooked and sorely lacking much in the way of “all the trimmings,” this turkey isn’t ready to serve.

Whatever their other gifts, they cannot find the fizz here and can never get Wiig to commit to the sort of film that she, even when she was making it, must have realized was beneath her in her post-”Bridesmaids” glory.

She (Parker) looks exhausted, first scene to last, and that fatigue spills off the screen onto us.

Seeing these veteran players go through their paces, find their comic rhythms and probe for laughs where many a laugh has been found before is not a bad thing.

Would I go out to see Otherhood? No. Nor should you. And we don’t have to. It’s not all that, but it’s perfectly “Netflixable.”

Lump “Littlest Reindeer” in with “The Star” and every other released and forgotten animated half-hearted holiday hit that never was.

The plot, for all its tried and true conventions, has eye-rolling leaps in logic and sort of lumbers between star cameos until we reach a far-fetched if generic conclusion.

Haggis lets us get way ahead of the characters and the figure out what the title of this writerly tale — Third Person — has to do with the sometimes illogical connections between stories. That’s not a problem. Dragging, dragging dragging the tales out after he reaches a logical climax and something close to a resolution with each is not.

There are a TV season’s worth of soap opera betrayals, melodramatic traumas and blundering efforts to learn from and escape this media miasma.

Devil’s Peak is a simple story whose filmmakers lose track of threads and characters, perhaps owing to editing.

We know the drill. Every move, every twist, every quest, every moment of filler pointing us to a finale we see coming an hour off.

Everyone, from director to cast, seems so rushed that there’s no time for romance, less time for leaps of faith and every moment of conversion is abrupt, dictated by the script and not by the heart.

If you’re still a dewy-eyed teen fresh out of going “Awwwww” at the out-of-date coming-out romance “Love, Simon,” there’s nothing wrong with stuffing a few tissues in your pocket and bracing for, if not a good cry, at least the sniffle or two Midnight Sun promises.

It just makes for a cluttered, derivative and somewhat soulless finale to a trilogy that millions embraced and some folks love.

It’s an unwieldy, unsatisfying film that doesn’t live up to the high-minded allegory it aims to be.

Slack direction just makes Murder Mystery groan along when a little pacing, as ALWAYS, would have covered up some of the other shortcomings.

Howard doesn’t make awful films, and as somebody who spent much of my earlier life in Appalachia, I’m not inclined to write this problematic portrayal off entirely. But self-satisfied people on both ends of the political spectrum will see what they want to in this story, and that’s not a compliment.

But this clunky movie is more fun to play the “Wait, why?” game with than to actually watch.

The Abandoned leaves us in the lurch, wondering at the nonsensical ending exactly what we wondered at the beginning. Jason Patric — Jason PATRIC? Man, what happened?

As edgy female wish-fulfillment fantasy, showing that fantasy’s consequences, Adore engrosses and engages, never titillates and never betrays even the tiniest hint of revulsion.

It’s understandable that MGM would want to make a sequel to their sleeper smash of a couple of years ago. It’s laudable that they stuck with the same animation house that made that one, giving them another fine visual showcase. But it’s unforgivable that MGM would do a rush job sequel and waste all this glorious animation on a corpse of a kids’ comedy

The tone of what feels, for its first half hour, like a solid action picture, feels off the moment the zingers start-flying.

No, it’s not the least bit original. It’s cheesy to the point of lactose intolerant, which is another way of saying it’s loaded with fart jokes. And yes, the best laughs reside in the outtakes under the credits. Which include fart jokes.

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.

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

Traffik isn’t a very good thriller, and if you aren’t two or three steps ahead of it, much of the time, you need more practice.

It’s a tolerable Hawke time-killer.

Yet another “Blade Runner” knock-off, a sci-fi dystopia about robots getting too smart for humanity’s own good on an already sun-cooked Earth.

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

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

First time feature writer-director Brian Shoaf stages some painfully awkward, sensitive and probing counseling sessions for Slate and Quinto to play. The script has lovely snatches of dialogue and fascinating, wounded characters.

It's a humorless movie of morphing zombies (they take on beastly attributes), phoned-in performances and trite dialogue.

It’s the sort of movie whose finale leaves you wondering, “Why do they always leave out what happens next?”

A mild-mannered kids' comedy that makes for a pleasant-enough time killer.

Unlike “The Passion of the Christ,” there’s no Aramaic with English subtitles, a lot less blood and no anti-Semitism. No character feels like a caricature... But it’s also dramatically flat, with few actors making much of an impression as they play saints and sinners.

The setting, the sexy tone, the cast and snippets of sharp dialogue tamped down my eye rolling through the film’s first half. McConaughey, who has more than his share of seaside tales, gives fair value in delivering salty lines.

The script piles the preposterous on top of the absurd and the film's thin charms dissipate, revealing the creaking movie star contraption underneath.

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

The film is enough of a watershed moment in cinema to deserve “classic” status, even if it’s a tad mild-mannered (PG rated) and convoluted.

It flirts with being offensive, but falls short. It’s not entirely maudlin, not wholly misogynistic, but close enough.

This generously-budgeted/no-“name” stars horror epic is just all over the place; never quite serious, never remotely silly enough.

The characters are thinly sketched in, even if the leads manage something approaching two dimensional.

I’ve always liked Lopez. Like Brown. Have enjoyed Liu’s recent turns and I’ve always been on Team Mark Strong. But this is pretty bad, and can’t have been any fun to film, either.

Gore Verbinski’s film is an overlong array of noisy, digitally-assisted chases, shootouts, crashes and explosions with the occasional flash of homage to the “real” Lone Ranger that suggests a better movie than the pricey, jumbled compromise Verbinski delivered.

Lacks surprises.

The movie's central gimmick isn't enough, and when more supernatural twists that don't play by the movie's own fantasy rules kick in, it lost me.

“Walking” takes care to ID each new dinosaur species introduced, including factoids about what they ate and any special skills they might have had. It’s downright educational. Just don’t tell your kids that.

There’s nothing surprising about this late ’60s tale, including its connection to the modern ghost stories told in “The Amityville Horror” and “The Conjuring.” But what it lacks in originality it makes up with in hair-raising execution. You will scream like a teenage girl.

Cranston takes small bites of this Beef Jerky Tartar script and chews, chews chews — savoring every corny fake-Russian line like the voice actor he was before “Breaking Bad” made him a star.

Nobody has much that's funny to say or cool to do. Even the spy gadgets are lame.

It’s basically just a random collection of cliches filtered through the movies its veteran documentary producer-director seems to have half-forgotten.

The fights are reasonably well-choreographed, the stuntwork not totally obvious. The effects are adequate, there are half-assed “graphic novel” chapter breaks and titles — “The Rabbit,” and the like. The story? Strictly wakkie nunu. At least Cage is here for a few laughs.

“Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner takes his act to the big screen with Are You Here, which turns out to be the most quotable Owen Wilson comedy since “Zoolander.”

There’s little tension or comic build-up.

But Echo Boomers — terrible title, BTW — can’t get by on echoes of better thrillers that covered the same ground. And betting on Schwarzenegger making the family name an acting dynasty seems like a long shot, even in a business known for its nepotism.

Better than any animated film released in the doldrums of January has a right to be.

Soaking up the one-liners and Hill’s antic but comically winded patter makes one wonder if even recasting the lead would have helped.

It's a film of noble sacrifice and "good deaths" but surprisingly few chuckles.

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

I found Cordelia an intriguing, immersive mystery that left me with more questions — not about what’s really going on, but about more mundane third act specifics — than it has answers to.

I love a good gonzo binge boozing comedy as much as the next guy, but I found almost nothing funny in this.

Relationship Goals is as generic as a self-help book cover, and doomed to be forgotten as quickly as the book it’s based on will be.

Hollywood will be hard pressed to top this lean Canadian indie picture that knows it’s just another dumb werewolf movie, but has fun with that knowledge.

The Double is barely half the movie it had the potential of becoming.

It’s a perfectly pleasant sit-through of a couple-trying-to-become-a-triple comedy, even if pretty much every single situation, from first scene to its last, slaps you in the face with “Where’d I see THAT before?”

Cage, without having to play a ghostly motorcyclist or hot rod driver from Hell or sorcerer or sci-fi hero or kinky cop, reminds us that he used to know subtlety. So even if Frozen Ground breaks little new ground in the serial killer thriller genre, there’s hope Cage will leave the ham behind before Alaska freezes over.

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.

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

Life Upside Down is a pleasant enough and appropriately downbeat “COVID Lockdown Comedy” of no particular consequence.

The production design is top drawer. It’s just that if I’m mentioning that, there’s little else in the movie to recommend it.

A bit of action mayhem at the midway mark plays. Brosnan and Barkin are as amusing as the script allows them to be and Devine works himself up to “maybe I don’t need to gouge my eyes/ears out every time he appears.”

Demonic just makes you wonder whatever possessed Blomkamp in thinking it would work.

But the charm is thin and the laughs hard to find in this iteration. Aside from a little nostalgia for the middling film this is based on, He’s All That just isn’t all that.

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.

Paris-Manhattan is an amusing little nothing of a movie built around the wit and wisdom of Woody Allen.

Whatever its intent, Bravetown stumbles through a steady supply of contrivances designed to make the budget work and the storylines overlap.

That Disney touch (which even Disney has trouble replicating) is missing. Even the hockey is unconvincing.

This Arthur is on the rocks long before Last Call.

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

A movie with dull leads, scripted by a veteran of second tier sitcoms and helmed by an even less promising director, it started life flavorless and nobody added even a hint of spice along the way.

The story’s “twists” don’t merit the use of the word, and the action beats are generic in the extreme — big explosions here and there, shoot-outs, sniping and fist-fighting and pissed-off beat-downs.

[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.

It doesn’t have a laugh in it, and the story isn’t worth more than a sentence long summary.

The effects are top notch and there are some chills in it. It’s just that the picture loses itself and any momentum it has in “explaining” these wonders and healings as the work of a Mary who isn’t the “Virgin Mary” all involved assume it is.

You’d have to go back to the ’80s to find a film with this jaded a view of Hollywood, a town where every aspiring actor knows every yoga instructor who knows every producer and they all swap partners and dance. Constantly.

Director Malcolm D. Lee (“Girls Trip,” “The Best Man”) and the credited screenwriters try to wring a little fun out of all this, and miss as often as they hit. But younger kids will eat up the eye candy and get a tiny taste of what The Looney Tunes were all about, even if this big budget monstrosity never comes close to the anarchy created by Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and the team at Warner Brothers’ “Termite Terrace.”

Still, those who adore the two stars will find some fun here. And if you don’t “know the story,” you won’t be nearly as bored as the rest of us.

Film buffs will see Goodbye World as a sort of “Trigger Effect” meets “Return of the Secaucus Seven” — growing up, learning to look at the world through more jaded adult eyes as the world ends.

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.

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.

A screen romance that echoes its title. It gets by. Barely.

The narrative is built on oddly theatrical twists, a film that begins in mystery and then sheepishly sets out to EXPLAIN every mystery away in the middle acts.

Whatever power this piece of writing had over the two of them, Captive fails to capture the magic, hope or whatever made it a best seller.

Sex Tape is not quite the train wreck its TV ads make it out to be.

The human stuff is entirely too predictable. And the whole thing is so Disney sweet and cutesey it’ll make your teeth hurt.

It’s a slasher star vehicle for “Outer Banks” ingenue Madison Bailey, and she acquits hewrself with honor in a narrative that could not be more generic were it not for her and the whole time traveling thing.

James always makes a more sturdy than inspiring leading man, but the Great and Oscar winning Whitaker usually has a little more to play than this. Only Dove, playing a mistrusting young woman escaping a limited life for a far riskier one, makes a lasting impression.

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

The jokes are strictly low-hanging fruit, but the film’s predictable path takes just enough care to avoid the places we’re sure we’re headed to sustain its 91 minutes.

Hot Flashes don’t generate much heat — comical or otherwise. A pity, since that rare menopause comedy is a terrible thing to waste.

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

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

In that climate, the desultory 6 Days can be appreciated for at least having the guts to show us what can go wrong.

Take away much of the myth, most of the sorcery and all of the humor of the 1982 John Milius-Arnold Schwarzenegger version of the sword and sorcery epic "Conan the Barbarian" and you've got an idea what the new "Conan" is like.

Gervais fakes caring about character, jokes or doing the work to make Special Correspondents come off. He’s never made a worse film. And topping that, he’s never made a lazier one.

It’s over familiar, a movie that plays like recycled, R-rated outtakes from “Rules of Engagement” or “How I Met Your Mother.”

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

Gooding makes his directing debut with Bayou Caviar, a slow moving thriller as complex as Great Granny’s Jambalaya recipe. And in spite of that pacing, some stereotypical casting and a need to contort and drag out the finale, it makes for messy movie-watching fun.

The payoff doesn’t totally makeup for the longueurs that introduce Alone With You. But there’s promise enough and the picture’s short enough that it’s not a total waste of time, or waste of a lot of time.

Affleck? You never believe a word he says, not a gesture. This is the sort of acting he did in the sort of movies he made before he started writing and directing his own movies — bad.

Writer-director Adam Alleca is better at the keyboard, cooking up chewy tough talk, than behind the camera. The shootout stuff is only passably staged, and the blood-bursts (not his fault…entirely) look digitally added, in some places.

The cast is solid, game, competent. And the you can’t fault an audience for seeking a little female victimhood/female empowerment in their romantic thrillers.

The one gag that works is probably a little racist, or at least racially touchy. Jackie Chan voices the lead mouse in a sea of martial artist mice who beat the purple out of Surly any time he ventures into Chinatown.

Devine, like Adam Sandler, has hitched his cinematic wagon to Netflix, and they have done likewise. But as ready as the Jack Black comparison (musical, plump, tries too hard) might be, it’s only mean because it’s accurate.

The overarching problem is pacing and dramatic tension.

Lucy in the Sky is a Lifetime Original Movie-style melodrama, over-thought, over-scripted and over-directed into something spacey, ethereal and trippy by the guy who gave us TV’s “Legion.”

All Back to the Fatherland manages to do is suggest the subject is worth more attention.

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

There are so few laughs in this thing that it’d have been a shame had somebody gotten hurt making us laugh at their pain.

Writer-director Ted Koland can be a little obvious. It’s not a deep movie. But everybody, especially Ramsey, is dealing with something. And Timlin (TV’s “Zero Hour”) gives heart to this wonderful, nuanced character.

As with any movie, this kids' film is only as good as its writing - the jokes, the cute bits, the heart. And that's where Alpha and Omega comes up short.

Only in Canada would an artist this fascinating, home-grown and maniacally uneven continue to draw the subsidies, attention and loyalty from his fellow Canadians now big Hollywood stars to get his increasingly unhinged thrillers made.

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

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

Brit hunk Alex Pettyfer has grown into a solid and quite interesting lead to build this potential sci-fi movie series around.

Thank heavens Krasinski, at least, had the screenwriter's ear. He makes every one-liner land. "The Hamptons are like a zombie movie directed by Ralph Lauren."

It’s still good, clean “fun” and as harmless as it is high-tone and, by now, tone deaf (a world where money is no object and COVID does not exist). At least they have the good grace to officially wrap it all up in a way that leaves no room for sequels

There’s little beyond the grey-and-grim production design here that one would venture so far as to call it “great.” But Fractured provides an interesting mystery, engrossing story and a couple of superb action beats, more than enough to make it “Netflixable.”

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.

Bloody, brutal and melodramatic.

Even Spiderverse-savvy Spiderman might consider this singularly confusing, a botched effort to say something scientific-sound and profound in a story that’s basically a lawyer-novelist riffing on “The French Connection,” and doing it badly.

Not great, not [a] picture that will change the shape of musical theater. But the playful, sweet, pointed and sometimes poignant Stuck is certainly worth the 85 minutes it’ll take you to watch it.

The picture simply isn’t pitched in a light enough tone to work as comedy, and the “mystery” isn’t mysterious enough to come off either. A reach for “shared humanity” rings hollow.

I hated this clunker long before the third act “twists” that are supposed to make it better, make it make sense and give us hope that this is a future franchise.

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

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.

There are a couple of laughs, generally not from the leads. And the gory mayhem, from “accidental” executions at the end of a torture session to what a grenade does to a human body, is played for giggles, too.

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

Fans of the comics will certainly get more out of it than newbies like me. All we see is all the other middling YA sagas it resembles, borrows from and fails to match or improve upon.

The mirror effects are still striking, Theron, Blunt, Hemsworth and Chastain still fairy-tale beautiful. But The Huntsman: Winter’s War, is the very picture of a movie that should have never been made. It never, for one second, gives us a reason to think otherwise.

It’s perfectly passable holiday entertainment for people who dated during the “Rocky” and “Raging Bull” era. Just don’t expect this Grudge Match to be much of a challenge.

The players vary in their commitments, from barely worth the effort to trying too hard. The third act delivers a couple of warm moments that lift it. But this picture’s a corpse still being shock-paddled and CPR-pounded on the operating table.

If this is what the excruciating finished film looks like, what manner of dreck must Mr. Bowie’s son have left on the cutting room floor?

Rodriguez has to carry the picture, but hamstrung by the “reality” of the role, she only plays two notes — exhausted and manic.

I mean, we all love Tom Hardy, but he can’t break through in this thinly-scripted, dully acted and badly directed Marvel comic brought to life.

So much is just so…obvious.

Kemper, I have to say, just brings it. Sure, there were stunt doubles on board, but the pratfalls, the fury of a woman wronged, the lie-on-the-fly cunning — this is a You-Don’t-Mess-With-Momma we can get behind.

The whole enterprise plays like a throwback, summoning up memories of Lee’s cut-rate/no-script “chop sockey” pictures where the charisma was obvious, the fights epic, the stories an afterthought and the effects wincingly obvious.

Brawls and epic shoot-outs break out, droll action heroes and venemous villains smirk and sneer, bodies fly about and the body count soars in a light thriller that begins with great promise and stumbles into ponderous “streaming” pacing before the struggle to rally at the finale arrives.

For a dumb genre pic, What Lies Below is as goofy and fun as it is wet and…weird. Don’t spoiler alert your friends, let the ogles and giggles surprise them as much as it will you.

Yes, this remake is old fashioned, and maybe the “mark” (Alex Sharp of “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”) is a tad green and less interesting. But sometimes, it’s fun watching two wildly different stars mix it up in sumptuous settings, and seemingly have a ball doing it.

Drift is utterly conventional in so many ways. But the relatively unknown cast, the rough hewn setting and startling cinematography — footage that rivals many a surf documentary’s best shots — give it a boost.

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

With Halloween II, Zombie shows conclusively that he's not interested in growing, getting better or ever becoming an original. He's just a hack with a made-up name, a cult following and a wife who can't act.

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

Just when you give up on the intended comedy ever coming together, it dives into something edgier. But that flip-flop is only a tease for a movie that never was, and probably never was going to be funnier than the one they ended up making, which is as charmless as it is laughless.

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

While the filmmakers might have shot for "Midnight Run," but settled for "Due Date," they wound up only achieving "Guilt Trip." Identity Thief is sputtering long before that mid-movie moment when it turns all sentimental and goes off the rails.

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.

Aside from those random moments, this is an utter excrement storm, from start to finish. And as bad as the acting, nonsensical plot and dialogue are, there’s not a laugh in this thing — intentional or unintentional.

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.

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

The players are good, with Mirchoff earnest and young as a nice contrast to the salty, rough-and-tumble elders, especially the iconic screen heavy, Perlman. It’s just that when the last card is dealt on this Poker Night, Francis isn’t content to let the best hand win.

Everly has just enough novel touches to entice aficionados, but not enough to transcend the carnage and cliches. But Hayek, back in the sort of B movie that launched her career, gives good value and will make you cackle in surprise, if you’re the sort who can giggle at the old ultra-violence as it is served up in heaping helpings here.

It’s competent on several levels, generally well-acted and no more unpleasant than it is challenging.

Antonio Banderas pretty much steals The Expendables 3. But at this stage in that winded franchise, that amounts to petty theft.

Heist pictures don’t come much dumber than 7 Minutes.

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

For a “sweet nothing” of a movie, you kind of wish “nothing” wasn’t the most accurate description.

And “iPhone ad” or not, watching Watts power through this picture with nothing jogging togs and Apple’s pride and joy has me sold. Maybe I’ve bought my last Android after all.

Part II is every bit as cheap and far more generic, nothing more than a run of the mill ghost story masquerading as The Devil Made Her Do It.

Kraven the Hunter’s the empty hole where a real movie’s beating heart should have been.

Anna Faris and Chris Evans don't have enough scenes together, don't have enough funny lines and aren't surrounded by enough funny people to give this "Bridesmaids-lite" a shot.

This terminal illness tale rises above the form, mainly thanks to a stellar cast and a refusal to drift into maudlin, a film that saves its big emotions for a wrenching finale that it earns.

Safer at Home is so trapped in its own gimmick, so myopic, so limited in action and lacking close-ups that build viewer empathy with characters, this becomes just an interested “failed” exercise.

There’s little coherence to its style and subtexts even if its plot is penny plain.

It stops making sense about thirty minutes in and never recovers.