Roger Moore

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

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

I’m a longtime Palmer fan, and she’s almost never been this dull. She and SZA needed an edgier script to sparkle.

The film’s serious shortcoming is relying on a mystery that we guess instantly, and not serving up any real frights and stylish touches to distract us from the conclusion we see coming early in the first act.

Leave the World Behind is not awful or wrong-headed or particularly insightful as a parable. It just isn’t very good at what disaster movies are supposed to be good at.

The pace is stumbling, the characters are broad, the makeup and the performances uneven, though Sorbo dives into his tactless, unethical indoctrinator role with Satanic glee.

This Tommy Boulding tale is depressingly straightforward and generally lacks the urgency of people being chased to death and the menace of upper class twits on horseback dressed for the hunt and dressed to kill.

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

In Let Me Explain, you’re never NOT aware that you’re watching a gifted, rubber-faced/rubber voiced performer (his “Laugh at My Pain” concert film was a surprising hit in 2011) work too hard to make inferior material go over.

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

Try not to guess all that happens, because rare RARE mild jolts aside, this picture’s as clockwork as my Citizen watch.

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

When all is said and done, it’s doesn’t deliver on the creepy premise it promises.

Imprisoned never escapes its lack of drive, never takes on the urgency this scenario promises.

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.

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.

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

At least this time, some of the laughs are intentional.

An oddly-dated, obvious and overwrought melodrama about gender roles and the toxic masculinity of Wall Street hedge funders, “Fair Play” is practically a parody of decades of women in the workplace romantic thrillers.

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

What a sad and sappy seize-the-day satire The Loneliest Boy in the World turns out to be.

Child’s Play is perfunctory.

The clumsy arbitrariness of the plot, the “rules” of this world and the limits the story imposes which characters sometimes ignore undercut any “reality” we’re meant to buy into.

Stretching, stuffing and filling make this film play flatter, as if all the fun is gone. The jokes are few and far between, and they die of loneliness in the wait.

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.

I’ve seen just enough recent Chinese cinema to see “Born to Fly” as a bit cheesier than most exports, but only on the edges of the rank propaganda of some Chinese war films, which span most wars China has fought, from ancient times to Korea.

Maybe I’m too reluctant to let go of my reactions to the first trailers for it. But “cloying” is a hard sell at 156 often interminable minutes.

When you’ve wasted a perfectly good Blythe Danner appearance and then weighed down your late second act with “big secrets” that would drown a better comedy than this, you’re not making the case that Netflix should sign you to a lifetime contract, no matter how charmingly Irish you are.

It’s a drab, emotionally flat film.

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

Anyone But You is about as close as Hollywood can get to a rom-com that works these days. Which is to say, “Not terribly close,” even though it’s not exactly terrible.

Aniston doesn’t bring her old A-game to this. But at least she’s not quiet and reserved and no-energy, her approach to too many roles of late. Butler makes the most of his Neanderthal rut.

Loser has flashes of empathy and a high mindedness about literature and philosophy and book learning in general. It’s just that it’s light on “heart,” and has a touch of what the Bard labeled “lackwit” in its banter and the ways its few funny lines are played.

“Magic” lacks too many things to rank among Allen’s better recent films — the come-uppance and zeitgeist currency of “Blue Jasmine,” the frivolity of that don’t-think-too-much-about-this lark “Midnight in Paris.” But the biggest shortcoming is right there in the title, a tease if ever there was one.

Geostorm isn’t “Olympus Has Fallen” or “Gods of Egypt.” It’s no better or worse than any of them, but it gives one little hope for the upcoming “Hunter Killer” or “Den of Thieves” or, for that matter, “Angel Has Fallen,” sequel to “London Has Fallen” which was a sequel to “Olympus Has Fallen.” Butler is in a bad-movie rut.

A slow-burn thriller/slow-footed thriller.

The romance here is more perfunctory, less heartfelt. And that goes for several big twists in the tepid plot. Events are mandated by script requirements, never organic.

How to Please a Woman may play to its target audience, giving voice to female relationship frustrations and the like. But as pleasantly drab as it generally is, I dare say it won’t please any gender, any where.

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

Whatever subtlety there was remaining in the satirical intentions of The Purge franchise pretty much fly out the door and into the blood-soaked night of The Purge: Election Night.

The structure gives the picture a diffuse feel, as if the writer-director hopes to lay on backstory that will distract us from how short a distance this story covers and not allow the viewer to realize how thin the text is, with or without these subtexts.

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

The People Garden guards its feeble secrets so well audience ennui sets in, as it always does when we’re way ahead of where a movie is taking us.

I laughed at a few of the more audacious butcherings, but that was early on. The narrative settles into a slog in the middle acts and no pull-out-the-stops train ride finale could drag it out of the mud.

Gigi & Nate is what happens when you round up a good cast and a pretty polished director for a screenplay that turns away from its strengths, takes a swing at “important,” and misses.

It’s not deep, not insightful and not all that funny outside of the dynamic these two set up on screen.

Hudgens’ times-three star turn — underwritten as every character is — would be more fun if she was surrounded by a supporting cast that could bring laughs, pathos and a little more charisma to the party.

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

After four films and a TV series, maybe it’s time to mothball this Hotel for a bit.

Hidden Strike is a bad movie that’s easy to endorse. A buddy comedy co-starring the master the genre, Jackie Chan, here paired with that jock joker John Cena, it’s action for those who like their cheese paired with some fine…whines.

It seemed wittier on the page, with the Romeo/Romero puns and know-the-credits jokes with names and characters. Strictly low-hanging fruit, even for a lame horror parody. But after seeing it, you really do wonder if Hollywood will ever make another if they can do no worse with no budget attempts like this.

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

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

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.

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

Good intentions run smack into self-indulgence in “MVP,” a slack, sentimental, cliche-and-stereotype-stuffed drama from activist, charitable foundation founder, Green Beret vet and actor Nate Boyer.

Nobody in the supporting cast is fleshed out, save for the mother character. Five screenwriters adapting a Rintik Sedu novel, 105 minutes of screen time, and this “Pretty in Pink” basically boils down to two and a half characters.

By the time the interminable finale reaches, over-reaches and gracelessly makes its exit, we’ve lost track of anything we found sweet, funny, charming or touching that came before it.

Night Hunter is good enough that we can see why a cast of this caliber would sign on and trek to Canada in the winter. There are good scenes, good lines, a couple of good performances. But whatever coherence the players saw on the page was lost in the trip between the shoot on set and the editing bay, from the looks of it.

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

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

There’s not much to say about the enervated romance The Boy Downstairs, except that literally every character and actor playing that character is more interesting than the leads.

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

The writer-director, perhaps for reasons of economy (surely not vanity) cast himself as the romantic lead. And Rik Swartzwelder, competent behind the camera, is an utter stiff on screen.

It’s just the jokes that aren’t funny — not even to the supposedly undemanding (very young) audience these films are tailored to.

The whole affair is so rushed and half-assed — they have Duran Duran songs on the soundtrack, years before the band released its first LP.

There are several smirks, a couple of near chuckles and nothing more as far as “sex comedy” giggles go.

This isn’t the least interesting story I’ve ever seen told in anime, but it’s right up there. The dialogue’s of the “I wish I had parents! To talk me OUTTA things like this!” school.

This “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Grieving” left me wanting a movie to go with the 70 minute Ducati ad.

Leclercq’s remake of an “all time classic” thriller feels wrong-footed, right from the start.

A slick one hour and 50 minute version of those political convention hagiographies ("A Man From Hope"), so it's not exactly an objective take on its subject, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

One never shakes the feeling that this entire enterprise is seriously tone deaf.

At times, with its stiff, charisma-impaired cast, its digital sets and slo-mo slaughter, The Legend of Hercules has a whiff of the Augean Stables about it — if you catch my drift.

The banter is, first scene to last, awful. Delivering bad dialogue at top speed doesn’t make it better, Ms. Clarke.

There’s little wit to this, and not enough spark to the story to overcome the tepid jokes. The animation is good, but underwhelming.

The whole affair feels corporate, cooked-up-by-committee.

It’s the worst of the trilogy, beginning and ending as an over-the-top blunt instrument, pounding home the opening act exorcism and middling finale with breathless editing and a soundtrack amplified into a sledgehammer.

The film manages to be intriguing but seriously dull.

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.

I’d say there’s about 40 minutes of playful cult fun-poking here, and a movie that goes on an hour beyond that expiration point.

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?

The result is a love triangle that feels invented, theatrical and artificial and a musical history that we never, ever believe.

Daybreakers is a stylish but unavoidably silly sci-fi vampire thriller.

The actors could have given us more, but the mad rush to get where EVERYbody knows this thing is going (with an odd wrinkle or two) deprives them of that and us of the “escape” a better movie would have delivered.

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

Glibly put, this challenging time-skipping rumination is the big screen equivalent of watching that "Tree" grow.

Again, stunningly stupid, and a lot more digital than one would like.

Buy the kids the soundtrack, skip the movie.

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.

It’s all something of a jumble, with even its “kumbaya" messaging muddled in a murk of competing story agendas.

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

This is just a “big game” formula sports movie that aims low and still comes up short.

If you’re boat shopping, at least it’s better than the online videos at the boat builder’s website. “Dead Water” still sinks more than it swims.

One just hopes The Once and Future John McClane was well-compensated, and that his retirement is as comfortable as he’s earned, even if this is nobody’s idea of “Redemption.”

A few pranks, some slapstick, some pratfalls, with a modern “Stooge” as the hero. Not many laughs, but hey — he’s keeping the “moron comedy” genre alive.

The sex sequences are revealingly awkward - with their "Don't try this at home" message. But without characters we can invest in, this "Hangover Meets Zack & Miri Make a Porno" is just the "porno," and entirely too tame for that, too.

Charles Shyer, who co-wrote this with a Netflix house hack (“Dangerous Lies”) blows too many of his shots at “charming,” never quite nails down the “romance” and dithers away the “mystery” in this flavorless variation on formula.

The Devil Has a Name stops staggering down that fine line between thriller and spoof and takes a header straight into the ditch.

The narrative veers between the action-packed and the insipid often enough to give one whiplash. The messaging is so shallow as to simply invite shrugging off. And the jokes are few and far between.

It’s an indulgent downer, not utterly incoherent but a grim journey from hopelessness to pointlessness.

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

Abuda is a talented actress, but her limited range and dull acting choices turn Miss Virginia, the movie and the character, into a shrinking violet.

American Fighter never overcomes the perfunctory story and B-movie “types” performing it.

Time Lapse is time travel thriller that flatlines, mainly because of the consistently flat performances.

Ms. Gunn mugs a bit and isn’t so much bad as not colorful enough to pull off what is almost a one-woman show. Movies that fail are rarely the fault of the actors. Unless they co-write the mostly charmless script.

None of them are stop-this-ride-I-wanna-get-off scary. They’re all too short, with the linking story playing like the dull filler it is.

There’s a funnier, more biting movie in this premise, this cast and their treatment of it. But Parente never lets his picture get up a head of steam, never lets it take off.

A mirthless, joyless comedy with nary a hint of romance, mystery or justification for its existence.

Stupid scene follows bloated speech, all the way through to a finale set up to go off, but which fizzles like soggy fireworks.

As he fills the screen with an A-list that includes Oscar winner Regina King, Idris Elba, Delroy Lindo, LaKeith Stanfield and others, peppers the dialogue with a Tarantino-load of Samuel L. Jacksonisms and layers the soundtrack with reggae, hip hop and R&B, Samuel goes beyond parody and settles on just grating.

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.

There’s not much to this other than the “let’s make a teen rom-com about incest” hook. But if they figured that would at least get Call Me Brother noticed, they seem to have miscalculated.

Too many character actions seem inorganic, pre-ordained by the needs of the script. The set-up is strained, the quick move to violence perfunctory.

Movies like Becky don’t work when the villains don’t go all in and when the pace flags to the point where we notice the clunky dialogue and less than involving performances.

Caterpillar presents itself as a gay man’s documentary journey of self-discovery, when it’s really about body dysphoria/dysmorphai and faddish cosmetic surgery taken to its extreme.

I wanted to love The Stray, and I’d have been satisfied if it had reached as high as “liked.”

The general comic ineptitude at work here muzzles killer supporting player Chris Parnell (playing her dad) and squanders fine, bubbly work by Rice (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”) in the film’s faster-paced opening act.

It’s all played broadly enough to feel funny (ish) even when it isn’t. But the pacing is off, and the mystery-solving takes precedence over the comedy, leaving us with a puzzle that might be solved but lacking enough laughs to hold one’s interest for 90 minutes, much less 124.

The pointlessness is the point, and there’s zero entertainment value in that, no matter how many critics throw up their hands and use “fever dream” as a reason to cop out, give it a thumb’s up, and move on.

The fun is in shorter supply. And all these gear-jamming chases and wince-inducing explosions cannot hide that this ride has long been on a road to nowhere.

It’s a pull-out-all-the-stops weeper, full of martrydom, coincidence, over-the-top cruelty, manipulation and plot contrivances.

It aims for the heart, but misses. It reaches for existential but never manages much more than “twee.”

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

But as a movie, is the story or the animation worth a 104 minute investment in time? Maybe if you’re really young and time is something you’ve got a lot of. Yeah, you can pick up on (more or less) what’s happening within a few minutes. But I can’t say it’s really worth it.

Two Oscar winners in the cast, plus Pegg and Pixar’s good luck charm John Ratzenberger, and “Luck” turns out to have none.

Filled with Smurf wholesomeness, Smurf puns and posi-Smurf messages about never giving up “on family,” The Smurfs 2 still sucks Smurfberries.

Sure, you can hire an Italian Robert Pattinson look-alike as your “recruiter/groomer” for “undead” fresh blood in your “Romeo & Juliet rise from the grave” romantic thriller. Doesn’t mean you have to lay on the fairy dust glitter and what not.

7 Days in Entebbe is a blasé stroll through a desperate and harrowing affair, inspiring more boredom than fear and utterly lacking in suspense.

Scene after scene lacks spark or fire or heart.

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

The whole tedious affair makes one wish they’d gone to less trouble making a bad movie with tame villains, an uninteresting lead and confused (Was this recut to play up “the plague?”), scattered story.

Pedestrian shot selection and editing finish off any sense of “urgency” that the story is meant to generate.

The casting does the film few favors. Ramirez is charismatic, but has none of Patrick Swayze’s mad twinkle. It’s a humorless film that makes you go “Wow” more than it involves you.

Amandla has no emotional core. This potentially riveting drama about siblings and violence and a country going through one of the most astonishing political/racial transformations in history has barely a moment that moves or inspires.

It’s a violent, noisy, slangy and pricey superhero movie that’s for fankids, not fanboys or fangirls or the lactose intolerant. Talk about cheesy.

A harmless but almost charmless adaptation of a book by L. Frank Baum’s grandson.

So unless you’re an Ip Man completist, “The Awakening” sits among the Ip Man movies you don’t bother with unless you’re behind on your sleep.

This picture should have passed by in a sprint, not slogged past like an overlong, overbudgeted Macy’s Parade with Music that would test the patience of anyone, including that toughest PG audience of all — kids.

For such a short thriller, “Ferry” never manages to feel brisk or breathless or even satisfying. Lammers should be irked that they wasted such an interesting character on a movie full of “kindergarten s–t.”

Director Scott Derrickson ensures the action beats are solid enough, that the production design is CGI-assisted gloomy and that the stars looked good in whatever light, fight choreography or romantic interlude they were placed.

Hero Mode isn’t interesting enough to stand on its own, despite manic efforts by Astin and an amusing line here and there.

This is as decrepit and tone-deaf as any movie he’s ever made, a corpse of a period piece, production-designed to the hilt, distractedly directed, a failure that hints at The End of Woody.

If you’re going to explain your movie’s ending, it’s usually a good idea not to botch the explanation so badly that anyone who’s ever seen a variation on this plot is given license to shout at the screen.

So many romances have ended with the couple soaked to the skin in a “We’re so in love we never noticed its raining” downpour. Love Like the Falling Rain just makes one want to give everybody a towel and send them home.

What she ended up with is a movie you feel “the weight of” rather than comprehend, and even at that, with all the long pauses and quiet, unfriendly conversations over smokes, it’s of no consequence whatsoever.

It's the same movie as the earlier "gotta dance" over-choreographed crunk-and-breakdance epics. Exactly the same.

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.

Take Care manages, more often than not, to rise to the level of pleasant time killer, a rom-com with just enough surprises to justify getting those New York filming permits.

The effects are good enough, but there’s a lack of wit and ambition here that just reeks.

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

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

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

Love and Leashes seems far more intent on explaining and removing “fear of the unknown” and the label “pervert” from BDSM than it is in actually titillating, amusing or entertaining as it does.

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

A slight and somewhat demure romantic comedy/friendship comedy built around two mildly interesting characters.

The third act is nonsense contrived to deliver the Big Reveal, which is neither big nor revealing.

The action is fun. And the unintentional laughs from the plot lapses, check-writing and black-face — Did I mention how these two try to “pass” in Africa? — are almost worth devoting well-over two hours to The Whistleblower. Almost.

Add the fact that it’s the tamest R-rated romantic comedy in the history of motion pictures to its gloomy pauses and funereal pace and you haven’t got a rom-com on your hands, just a rom-corpse.

The finale to Threshold, a supernatural thriller about a junkie who figures she’s possessed, is a doozy — alarming, rattling and with a neat little twist that underlines its point. And it’d have to be, considering the general snooze this siblings/bonding road picture has been pretty much in its entirety leading up to that. This may be the slowest-moving “road picture” or “thriller” on record.

It’s all a muddle and a disappointment.

Selfie Dad may be topical, and doesn’t lean on the Christian “victimhood” crutch as hard as the worst films in this genre. Where it fails is in suspense, emotion and comedy.

If the teetering middle acts don’t chase you away, the cop-out finale will have you grinding your teeth over the two hours you just wasted with Miss Shampoo.

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

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is much ado about a lot of microscopic nothing.

Yes, fast is funny, but predictable is predictable, and this rom-com stumbles badly as it lurches towards the inevitable — she’s hired him to bust them up, he’s slow figuring this out.

The Parish needed to be more Catholic, more creepy and have a lot more suspense and sense of what’s at stake to come off.

This Arthur is on the rocks long before Last Call.

It stumbles from eye-rolling to infuriating all the way to risible as the filmmakers turn professional failure into armed and trained victimhood, and then into savage “learn your lesson” revenge.

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

Partners in Crime never manages to be more than a hit or miss affair, a one-day “Weekend at Bernie’s” that doesn’t have nearly as much fun with its best sight gag — a corpse — and can’t find enough laughs in that parody of femininity that drag often is to make up for it.

Every promising direction is stopped dead in its tracks. And most every fraught yet comical situation is left to wither on the vine.

The cast is game, with Huston properly frantic, Johnson oozing menace and Fuhrman dialing up the pluck and self-preservation savvy in her role. It’s not their fault “Unit 234” turns out to be a blood-stained episode of “Storage Wars.”

A historically and dramatically sloppy version of the“Apalachin Conference” made on a shoestring and starring David Arquette.

The Devil Below is at its best when our soon to shrink quintet is on the run, scrambling to figure out what’s chasing them and if the locals are there to help or make things worse.

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

The performances don’t register, the filmmaking produces a couple of hair-raising images and a few ghoulish/gross ones.

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”).

Through it all, leading man Park maintains a quiet stoicism that holds it all together. More or less. But that turns out to be a pretty tall order for a simple-enough-genre thriller whose director is hellbent on sowing confusion and creating narrative chaos for a huge portion of his picture.

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

Méndez kind of makes this silly, coincidence-packed nonsense play. Sort of.

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

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

There isn’t much to this aside from an attractive but bland and colorless cast parked in front of seaside vistas, stunning coves to swim or dive in and the like.

Results is a comedy that never offers more than unsatisfactory ones — results, I mean.

The acting isn’t bad, or particularly emotional and compelling. But the bigger problem is that Reddick’s script lets down this promising “survivor’s guilt/revenge” concept in several ways. It throws a too-obvious suspect at us, and gives no one a single memorable line.

Holland’s kinetic turn as the young pickpocket/historian and bartender turned adventurer is emphatic proof that it’s not just digital effects and stuntmen in that spider suit. But the movie? It’s as edgy as a Scooby Doo mystery, as plausible a “National Treasure” mashup with “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

A bloated all-star melodrama with none of the lean, mean legalese of a John Grisham adaptation, it’s a showboat’s movie cast with a lot of actors each promised “a big, cool scene.”

Thar never quite gets up the head of steam that a generic thriller whose ending is pre-ordained needs to pass muster.

Movies like Upheaval are more propaganda than history.

Among that promising cast, only Plummer and Ehle give us anything more than paint-by-numbers turns. Travolta? He’s a pale imitation of himself, as ill-fitted to the role as that odd prison soul patch he sports under Ray’s carefully streaked mop of hair.

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

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

As a dumb movie that makes you laugh, “Strays” falls somewhere between “Ted,” the cussing Teddy Bear tale, and “Cocaine Bear.” Just don’t go if you’re easily offended.

Lacking a smoking gun, this Riviera-set crime thriller lacks both thrills and convincing evidence of a crime. “Poetic license” or not, that doesn’t add up to an engrossing film.

The end result is a thriller that doesn’t race towards a climax we figure out (finally) 20 minutes in advance, it limps there.

The Spanish romance “Te quiero, imbécil (I Love You, Stupid)” is the cut-and-paste job in question, a script with modest potential, a passable cast and cutesy execution. And about the best you can say about it is that it finishes well.

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.

Aussie actress Krew Boylan turns out to be a better Dolly Parton impersonator than screenwriter in Seriously Red, her self-scripted star vehicle. It’s a self-serious and seriously-confusing identity crisis comedy tucked into what might have been a gender role romp of the “Connie & Carla” variety.

This Dracula is somehow somewhat better than the worst versions of the tale we’ve seen in recent decades, but a few bites short of adequate or anything approaching Coppola’s ’90s film or Robert Eggers’ gorgeous and stark “Nosferatu.”

Color City is thin gruel, even by recent, weaker Pixar standards.

Band of Robbers is a film of little flourishes that work better than the story they’re adorning.

It’s not awful, and not utterly “incoherent.” But the comedy isn’t broad enough to come off, and white male midlife wish-fulfillment fantasy (Jimmy’s pursued by a fetching Boston blogger/band-booker half his age) is seriously passé.

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.

If Woody Harrelson can’t make Elvis jokes land, you know your movie’s in trouble.

In the end, “Viking” finds its destiny to be kind of a half-finished, half-financed and half-hearted Viking saga, with only the arrival of the Irish vegetarian hippies led by Indiana Jones’ nemesis, Belloq, to delight us.

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.

The only question that’s worth considering in Seventh Son is whether this all-star B-movie is bad enough to cost Julianne Moore her “Still Alice” Oscar. And the answer to that is, “Not really.”

Freeman gives a little something to moments of angst. But seriously. Yawn. It’s a movie so familiar in its tropes, storybeats and dialogue that it feels like a half-forgotten picture or TV show you’ve already seen. The makeup is often “Walking Dead” mediocre.

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

Despite scoring a few laughs at the expense of the louche, lazy louts of the Batek clan, the lesson to be taught is watered town, the “teachable moments” a mere string of pulled punches. It feels as if several of the story’s necessary steps have been skipped.

It’s an absurd, strained and seriously unfunny animated comedy that shows what can happen when animation veterans with limited imaginations try to conjure up a myth to give a “story” to an Irish dancing stage show somebody bought the rights to.

I Still See You is a middling mystery thriller in which the supernatural is explained and over-explained by long bursts of exposition, “rules” and scientific gobbledygoop.

No, it doesn’t come off. The entire enterprise feels under-developed and hamstrung, and not just by whatever level of “lockdown” conditions this was filmed under.

A cartoon fantasy cooked up from a half-baked idea from George Lucas.

The acting is stiff, almost every scene without a chase or a fight is dull and static.

Ibiza is just…boring.

A ten-years-too-late comedy.

In this not-even-faintly scary, rarely funny horror comedy, Smith is still sucking down big gulps of empty calories and hoping we’ll laugh at his belch.

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

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

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?

Dull, uninvolving and downright off-putting in the story it tells and the way that it tells it, “Wall” doesn’t make sense until you consider that its star co-directed it. It’s a dubious star vehicle and something of a head-scratcher, even after we realize that.

It’s not awful, not “so bad it’s good,” either. Take away the “twist,” which you’ve guessed and which anybody seeing the trailer or even the poster could figure out, and We Summon the Darkness only summons tedium.

A dull but harmless big-screen comedy aimed at the youngest movie goers.

As with the strutting, dancer-turned-bouncer Swayze picture of yore, there’s an unreality to it all that gives Road House a comical lift.

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

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

It’s almost disappointing that the movie plays things more or less straight after that jarring first act.

What starts out feeling lean and stylishly stripped-down, with a faintly-creepy young lead, waters her down and winds up playing cut-rate, abridged and cheap.

Everyone is Going to Die is a generic home invasion thriller that clumsily struggles with the #MeToo “message” grafted onto it.

It’s a pretty but lifeless confection, sort of the Netflix house style. But most Netflix teen comedies — and I’ve reviewed dozens — have more edge and humor than this.

While Shyamalan does well by the story’s assorted jolts, and tries to have fun with a bit of casting against type with Bautista and Grint, “Knock” is so emotionally flat that I found it impossible to care about. For a film in which the stakes couldn’t be higher, that’s a fatal failing.

The performers are all polished and make do the best they can with a script that has maybe 50 minutes worth of rom-com lost in a 100 minute movie.

It’s a tolerable Hawke time-killer.

The occasional decently-staged fight or grace note here stands out, because there aren’t many. A story this badly constructed with dialogue this stilted and characters this thin is simply beneath Momoa, at this stage.

It turns out that reuniting Bloodsport and Peacemaker from “Suicide Squad” wasn’t the can’t-miss that nobody predicted.

As film subjects, college romances and the trials and tribulations of college life may be mundane in the extreme, even set against the Sport of Winklevii. But Shannon is always so good you tend to lose track of all that when he’s on screen. He’s just not on it enough to save the movie.

The debut feature of writer-director Thom Harp is a raunchy, skirt-hiking farce that never quite achieves the happy ending all involved were hoping for, although it finds a few laughs and some oh-no-they-didn’ts.

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

You’ve got to meet this dopey desert slasher picture on its own terms. You have to be ready to laugh at the archetypes/stereotypes, the one-liners, the D-movie bravado.

I found the whole more than a tad insipid.

It’s preachier, more diverse in its casting. All of which make it more specific and limit it. Throw in generally lackluster performances and illogical plot twists and “Anarchy” is seriously crippled.

The plot works its way past red herrings and into anti-climaxes, never quite drowning in melodrama, but coming damned close, time and again.

The result is a Save the Planet comedy that plays much longer than its 86 minutes.

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

No, it’s not very good. Neither was “I Am Vengeance.” But the redeeming qualities of any C-movie are that it doesn’t waste time, and gives you a few laughs in between the neck-snappings. I Am Vengeance: Retaliation manages that, time and again.

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

Rookie Season is the quintessential “vanity project,” with decent enough race footage and banal nothings delivered in voice-over by the drivers, with the Scottish champ Liddell taking care to be diplomatic about how he characterizes the rich poseur who wrecks the car in early races as DePew devotes himself to conquering a steep learning curve.

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.

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

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

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

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

As somebody who’s long complained that faith-based dramas need a firmer footing in the real world, and maybe a little edge, it pains me to complain that Sno Babies takes such things entirely too far.

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.

Cousins may be a cinematic novelty in Brazil, but aside from the nudity (more or less tastefully handled), there’s little novel or entertaining for film audiences this far north, just titillation.

As Sonic the Hedgehog 2 blows up the box office on its opening weekend, it’s worth reminding one and that while this may be cheesy, inane and only suitable for the ten-and-unders, you’re saving the cinema, the movie-going experience, and getting kids back in a habit that could easily disappear.

There is nobody to relate to. That makes the movie’s muddled message a chore to plow through and its payoff more of a shrug that the sharp slap it could have been.

There’s little drama, but the fights and chases (Butler hanging out of a moving SUV) are exciting, if not very original.

It’s a neo-noir murder mystery capturing Heard at peak femme fatale in a tale observed, manipulated and told by a struggling writer (Billy Bob Thornton) for “the chaos.” “Chaos” doesn’t quite sum up the movie. But almost.

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.”

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

If survival against the odds tales are your thing, it’s worth a watch despite the occasional eye-roll.

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

The title may fool you into thinking this is some sort of Argentine mob family saga, but don’t fall for that. This is a courtroom telenovela with better makeup and lighting, and fewer dramatics.

Still, Wicked Witches isn’t a total write-off. But when your movie’s this short, getting to the point, giving us “the good stuff” and all that jazz has got to happen earlier.

More Pegg, please. Less of everything else. But then, it’s too late for that. “Collision Course” is already a bomb.

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

The shootouts are first-rate, in that “bad guys mostly miss, good guys never do” way.

Departing Seniors has some decent suspense, a surprise or two, and a few things to say about bullying, if not about “outing” a still-working-it-out classmate in an only-in-the-movies high school that tolerates vaping. But what we’re seeing never escapes that “cut and paste” feeling.

It all feels and plays recycled and watered-down — the longing, the testy edge that’s supposed to signal “sparks,” the heartache of indecision.

Writer-director Drew Pearce has tarted up a dullish action comedy that finds laughs hard to come by and its moral underpinnings shaky.

Blase actors rob this of any prayer of being scary.

Garfield still loves his lasagna, still underestimates Odie the dog and grumbles about “Mondays.” But slapstick and decent CGI animation aside, and even grading on that “aimed at very young children” curve, this “Garfield Movie” is slim pickings.