Roger Moore

The payoff isn’t nearly as interesting as the cryptic set-up and disquieting performances and scenes that precede it in The Wait.

The best you can say about this Yogi Bear is that he's harmless. No animal was harmed in the making of this picture except the one Hanna-Barbera made a bundle on almost 50 years ago.

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

The too-obvious/too-slow “Remains” doesn’t frighten, doesn’t engross and doesn’t remain on the memory much past the closing credits.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime fiasco, an epic fail like none we have seen this year, a bad idea by a very bad director and a career-crippling credit for all concerned. You don't want to miss it.

A violent and grimly obvious frontier thriller that Clint Eastwood might have made during his Spaghetti Days.

Is Choose Love “inane,” “insipid” or merely an “innocuous” attempt to make the cinematic romantic comedy a viewer’s choice “will they or won’t they” experience?

There’s not much new here. But a savvy, sassy script, smart casting and genuine “I feel sorry for this white boy” chemistry between Hart and Gad make Wedding Ringer an R-rated bromance that will touch you as often as it tickles you.

Unlike say, “Doogal” or “Hoodwinked 2,” at least you won’t want to gouge your eyes out after this one.

Watts masters Diana’s look — the way she carried her head and used those wide, coyly expressive eyes — but is only passable at impersonating the voice.

The whole affair is just nuts, staggeringly irresponsible.

Self/less doesn’t offer many surprises. It’s a lot like other body-switch thrillers, and is practically a remake of the 1966 John Frankenheimer rich-guy-buys-handsome-young-body tale “Seconds.” But it has generous pleasures.

“Best.” is a tepid holiday tale that has little to do with Christmas save for skewering that humbragging tradition, the family “Christmas Letter,” in which we boast about our year and play up the achievements of our kids and try not to sound like we’re over-selling them and us.

Farrelly’s movie, like his comic shock-shtick, gets old in a hurry.

O’Loughlin is the very definition of comic dead weight. Imagine making Greg Kinnear carry half of "Baby Mama," or sending Tina Fey out with Matthew Fox on "Date Night" and you’ll get the picture.

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

A caper comedy that neither capers nor gives birth to many laughs.

"Way Down” veers towards cute and settles on “twee” far more often than it should.

Twice Born fails to tug at the heartstrings or wring tears from us. Hirsch plays exuberant and callow well, Cruz is tragic and earthy as ever. But the two of them never really click — sex scenes included.

This is like watching the paint dry in the still-new Tyler Perry Studios soundstages.

There isn’t much more to this than that — a couple of frights, a growing suspicion, and some dry jokes. Kudos to Dormer for getting a paid vacation to Japan, and not having to strip to play it.

Bitter Harvest never amounts to more than a colorful misfire, a picture with much of the pageant of the period, but little of the roiling passions that dominate politics in the Breadbasket of Europe, even today.

It’s good to see Depardieu in an English-speaking role again, but he can only carry A Farewell to Fools so far by himself, especially when he never commits to “simple” heart and soul.

The falcon metaphor is clumsy and ill-defined, and Aloft is never much more than a lovely, dull cheat.

What a bust The Dark Tower turns out to be. A thriller with tepid thrills, a horror movie with bland frights, a generic fantasy quest story in which we mope along with joyless, heartless characters in an out-of-date celebration of Old West gunplay, this never should have left pre-production.

This abortion of a thriller fails, utterly, and bombed completely. So even though there’s a “Witch Hunter 2” in development, don’t count on it.

It’s altogether ridiculous, made all the sadder because we’ve seen this ridiculousness before.

The War with Grandpa can feel old fashioned. It’s too mild-mannered for our Pg-13-and-up era. But little kids — VERY little kids — will chuckle at the pranks.

Wildly uneven, as I said earlier. But at least some good character actors got a nice German vacation out of it, and Berlin, I Love You is pretty enough to make you plan your own. Just avoid the bars, brothels and laundromats and you’ll be fine.

Ferrell is as fearless as ever, stripping down and looking foolish, willing to be out-of-touch and out of step. Hart has his manic moments. But in this buddy comedy, the buddies are not equal and that limits the laughs.

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.

Ghosted manifests itself as a pleasantly amusing piece of cheese, embraceable for the breezy time-killer it is. But if they dare decide to franchise it, they’ll need a writing upgrade for that to come off.

Stand-up comic, impressionist and actor Kevin Pollack steps behind the camera for The Late Bloomer, a sweet-spirited if slightly rude rom com masquerading as a sex comedy.

The folks re-adapting White’s book for Beyond the Reach tamper and tinker with perfection — a little overly convenient cheating here, a contrived finale that goes wrong and then goes more wrong. The film staggers under these blows and never really recovers.

A goofy, gonzo thrill ride, “Vengeance” is a bad movie sequel so bad it’s good, a bad movie that’s almost a great bad movie.

The considerable charms of Jason Bateman and Olivia Wilde get a considered workout in the lightly charming New York romance The Longest Week. It’s a droll comedy, with a droll narration.

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

Alice Through the Looking Glass, which has precious little to do with the rhyming collection Lewis Carroll penned with that title, is a dreary, joyless affair.

It all adds up to tinselled treacle, inoffensive enough to be shown at Christmas Eve church services, but barely tolerable — dramatically and aesthetically — in any other setting.

The leads click well enough. But every moment Hart and Harrelson aren’t on the screen, the film dies. The real torture in this torture comedy becomes the too-long wait for it to end.

None of it’s handled with much pace, humor, suspense or style until our third act journey into the NeverEver. And even that, derivative as it is, misses the mark in terms of real frights.

As “found footage” horror movies go, The Possession of Michael King is more unpleasant than scary.

The acting is bad, but the script is “Do you want fries with that?” awful, as that might be where we next encounter this hack Craig Thomas Devlin. Garcia’s direction makes “lackluster” seem aspirational.

The story bores you to tears until it takes its tragic turn.

Sure, you had me at Yakuza Princess. But was there ever a more ponderous gangland saga set in the Japanese mafia than this?

The dialogue is dull, the performances perfunctory and while it is novel to leave out “the explainer” character — that slim hope that a priest, an expert on the Occult or whoever, can give the characters answers — common to this genre, leaving that character out robs the film of pathos and urgency.

Siberia slogs along like the failed pilot for a poorly-thought out cable series, one with Eastern European development incentives but without enough drama, incident, intrigue or plot to justify its running time.

The picture just lies there, inert and lifeless, despite the attractive and interesting cast and what must-have-looked like a can’t-miss premise.

The sprawl of it, the seeming disorganization, all work to its advantage and betray Kings' ambition. Ergüven wasn’t going for documentary, she was aiming for an impressionistic “feel” — terror, outrage, helplessness, a city and a system that aren’t built for you, even when you’re hurt, even when you’re in trouble.

There are laughs aplenty in the dialogue, which has several characters spout nonsensical lines — “You told me the title was clear.”

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

It’s a terrible movie with some pretty good actors, an arresting opening and a few striking images lost in what is otherwise 111 minutes of shouting-at-the-screen crap.

Schadt has the makings of a close-to-the-vest thriller like “The Loft,” but Silent Panic might have been more at home taking a “Weekend at Bernie’s” dark farce direction.

A “high concept comedy” from the days when those were a thing, it’s basically a cacophony of cameos and random sight gags hurled at the viewer in a tsunami of haute couture hype.

It’s an American "Love Actually" without the warmth that writer-director Richard Curtis stuffs into his all-star confections, without the wit, without much love, actually.

The bottom-line on this bottom-baring/bottom-branding farce is “Is it funny, on top of all the shocks?” And yes, it is. On a number of few occasions, all of them involving Jeff Chang.

Hallestrom and his screenwriters may be stuck with Sparks’ formula, but they take advantage of the geography, the leads and a couple of homespun supporting players – Robin Mullens is a wonderfully folksy owner of the seaside seafood shack.

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

There was a better movie in this story, this setting and this cast.

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.

American Son never quite lapses into terrible, but as with a play that needs another week of out of town tryouts, it “never gets on its feet,” either.

Action-packed and patently ridiculous, it’s all in good fun.

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

This one lands punches but rarely laughs, reaches for pathos where there is none and relies heavily on the sentiment that earned Quan an Oscar.

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.

Brolin is so damned good in the saddle, in the hat and in the part that a half-sober viewer could half forget how half-arsed this movie he's starring in is.

It’s a good looking film, just a tad on the dull and predictable side. But the occasional flash of Hopkins threatens, at several moments, to turn this formulaic true-heist tale into something more psychological, more pathological or at least allegorical. He isn’t really given the chance.

None of the current generation of wrestler-actors seem to have the charisma or comic gifts of a Hulk Hogan or Dwayne Johnson.

Looking Glass fails to be anything more than another make-work project for the cinema’s busiest actor, a man with bills to pay and a conviction that the Devil finds work for idle hands. It’s just that sometimes, it’s better to leave those hands idle than to take whatever the next offer you can squeeze in might be.

This sort of movie really should be about more than meekly obvious names for human traits separated into tribes, the future tech, the dystopian landscape, the fashions, the hair styles...But there isn’t a line that lands, a scene that sticks with you, an emotion you feel or a moment this movie drags you to the edge of your seat.

“Serviceable,” the stinging critique of a young man’s potential by his publisher/father, fits.

Sacrilege doesn’t defile a horror formula. It just shows us how following the recipe to the letter doesn’t always work.

The crimes associated with these mothballed machines are bland and perfunctory, the direction dull and the script inept in the extreme.

Outcast is what happens when stunt men direct. The fights are marvelously choreographed, the swordplay splendid and the bloody body count high in director Nicholas Powell’s Middle East/Far East quest tale. The script? Derivative, dim and dull. The performances? Not much, either.

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

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

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

The most epic miscalculation since the Golden Summer of M. Night Shyamalan. An unerotic unthrilling erotic thriller in the video game mold, Sucker Punch is "Last Airbender" with bustiers.

Spade practically cringes through this thing, not a good look when you’re a high-mileage 55. And a little of Lapkus, shrieking profanities at children, lap-dancing at the luau, goes a long way.

The science is sloppy, the sentimentality is sloppier in “The Space Between Us,” a sci-fi romance pairing up agreeable leads in a cut-and-paste script.

It’s not a great film, with some edge Sparks put in the novel left out of the script. But there’s real chemistry between the young lovers and an old fashioned virtue to the father-daughter, father-daughter’s boyfriend scenes.

The direction, by Cyrus Nowrasteh (“The Stoning of Soroya M.”) lacks urgency or art. The performances are, for the most part, emotionally flat.

Most people would give up on it if they stumbled across it on Netflix, and the payoff certainly justifies that abandonment.

Even with all this sparkle, the film staggers through its third act. By then, the script has rubbed the rough edges off the villains and made whatever point it was going to make several times over.

An old school ghost story, with a supernatural cause-and-effect story and modest and modestly effective effects — watery footsteps, creaking stairs, shadows glimpsed through a window.

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

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

An undemanding, childish adventure picture.

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.

Director Barber makes the period video look exactly like misplaced family home movies — rolling picture, static, shaky, the works.

Holy Lands works when Harry and Moshe are bickering, and doesn’t quite work anytime they’re not on the screen.

Sure, it’s a thriller, and by the pull-out-all-the-stops finale, it acts like it. But soapy, turgid trash is one of the guy’s brands — when he isn’t playing Madea. And this eye-roller is on-brand, first scene to last.

If you love exposition and shapely if bland young actors in leather, skinny jeans, knee boots, Goth cocktail dresses and heavy eye makeup, this may be the movie for you.

It’s all so obvious and (unintentionally) laugh-out-loud funny...Seriously, if you’re not five steps ahead of The Fifth Wave, you need to have yourself tested.

The moment that first letter is opened and its trite, moony expressions of love and pointless (in a love letter) pages of exposition are narrated, the movie turns Sparks insipid.

The family intrigues don’t amount to much, and Nick’s “secret” — the thing that has him sneaking sips from bottles all over the island — is even less original.

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

The virtues of God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, are few. So let’s get them out of the way right out of the gate. It’s replaced the generally hostile, defensive and political tone of the first two films with a veneer of “We have to learn to get along.” It’s still toxic, only less so.

The "Made of Honor" screenwriters don't deliver enough jokes or feisty exchanges between the ill-matched traveling companions.

While I appreciate any faith-based film that isn’t all about the anger and intellectual dishonesty of “God’s Not Dead,” there’s no endorsing a fairy-tale this literal and insipid.

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.

Age of Extinction runs on and on, popcorn piffle without end.

Profane, profanely silly and blasphemous to beat the band, Legion begins well before plunging into the abyss of tedium.

When you slow everything to sleepwalk pacing, you deflate the frights and strip away the urgency that we and the characters should feel, the sense that something terrible is coming, that time is running out.

As for this long, boring, violent sequel? Life’s too short.

It is as slow, slick and superficial as the director of “21″ and “Killers” can make it.

It doesn’t have the laughs or the killer cast of “Superbad,” but there are gory giggles aplenty in this B-movie addition to the genre that displaced vampires once Edward impregnated Bella.

DePalma flirts with the lurid and tosses in some interesting third act surprises, but never finds his way back to the sexually charged tone and shocks of his earlier thrillers.

Independence Day: Resurgence is all big effects, big explosions, epic battles rendered in state-of-the-art strokes. But really bad writing, achingly bad acting, groaning scenes and a serious lack of suspense and surprise all add up to zero fun, this time around.

It strips away the myth and icon and reveals Jobs for the hustler-huckster he was, just a smooth, smiling turtleneck, trying to sell us something. In many ways, his film makes all other Jobs movies unnecessary.

If you’ve loved the game, you might appreciate the visuals cooked up for this fantasy universe. I was bored out of my skull, pretty much start to finish, from the “Lord of the Rings” opening to the Old Testament/Moses Afloat finale.

If it’s not for everybody (I think fans of the play will like it), that’s no crime either. I appreciate the effort, got in sync (eventually) with what Hooper was trying to do and found myself quite moved, once or twice — which is twice more than “The Rise of Skywalker” managed.

Scribbler is just daring and interesting enough that you can see why a fairly accomplished cast — from Cassidy to Dushku, Gershon to Campbell — was drawn to it, even if the execution underwhelms.

The first half of the story is far more intriguing than the second, and “The Host” goes almost wholly wrong from that magic moment AFTER we wonder, “Just what the Hell is going on here?”

With this “Girl” and her bicycle, the cute bits, rare laugh out loud moments, occasionally zippy lines and limply obvious farcical predicaments are never more than instantly forgettable.

Sinister 2 has so little connection to the first film (save for the home movies) that if you see enough horror movies, you will strain to recall the original.

Carano can still, at 35, deliver in the fight scenes. But this post-apocalyptic dog of a picture shows her racing into “over the hill so I’ll just use guns” territory, something Chuck and Jean Claude and Jackie only got around to when the stunts got to be too much.

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.

What balderdash. And not the fun kind, either.

Landing a lead like Caan underscores the fact that there was the germ of a twisty, tough thriller here. It’s too bad the script and uncertain direction let The Good Neighbor down.

A throw-away movie, and an utter waste of time, another make-work project for Sandler’s less and less funny stable of pals.

The target demo here is the same as it ever was — 8-and-under. There’s plenty of slapstick and critter gags for them, crashing furniture, trashed hotel rooms and wedding party mishaps. The rest of us? “Cute” it is and cute these two forever will be.

There are some explosive laughs in this. But they show up so randomly, with the story in between the payoff moments so lame, that Game Over screams out for more editing.

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

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.

The chases are nothing special.

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

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

It doesn’t wholly come off, with back stories too thinly developed, pathos and cruelty blending with the whimsy of a New York con.

And telling your story with endless pages of sarcastic, venomous narration? It doesn’t work and even Henson was bored with it, judging from her line-readings.

Unfinished Business, the second film Vaughn has done with the deliberately paced Canadian Ken Scott (“Delivery Man”) groans under the weight of expected laughs, expectations that are rarely met.

Perhaps it’s out of date, but if anybody can make the “Latin Spitfire” stereotype cool, funny and scary again, it’s Hayek, who all but takes over the movie with her loud, brassy and delusional confidence.

The kids do what kids do in such syrupy summer camp (PG) romances. There’s a little melodrama, tears, a crisis of faith. At least the adults take a shot at bringing the funny.

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

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

The bad guys really stand out, with Mikkelsen pulling off something he never managed as a Bond villain. He’s genuinely frightening.

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.

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

Perry has made better movies, and perhaps worse ones. But never one as dull as this.

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.

It’s just that mutual admirers Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager, two smug, smirking jerks having a conservative ‘free speech” circle smirk, aren’t the guys to host such a debate and give it a high-minded fair hearing in this most divisive of eras.

“King” is worth the price of admission just to see the ex-James Bond swanning around the Hall of Mirrors in glorious wig and the stylish raiment of Louis XIV and his trend-setting court.

It is a comedy as free of laughs as any film that’s landed Ron Perlman in its cast and rented a train for its finale has a right to be.

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

All these petty crimes against originality wouldn’t matter a whit if Snyder & Co. mashed it all up into something fun or at least more distracting.

The confusion between reality and hallucination absolutely butchers the film’s forward momentum.

There’s no point in overselling a conventional, rarely surprising horror picture, a picture that manages one good, cheap jolt and a solid hour of dread. But Lazarus reminds us that a genre overwhelmed by junk fare doesn’t need to be that way. It’s not effects, gore or novelty that matter. It’s all in the execution, and electrocution.

The action beats are bigger and better than they’ve ever been in a Ninja Turtle film — brawls, shootouts, a snowy car-and-truck chase with big explosions and what not. But in between those scenes is an awful lot of chatter and exposition. For a film that aims younger (save for the die-hards who grew up with this franchise), that’s deadly dull.

While it is laudable that Oscar winner Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, Vivica A. Fox and Anne Heche lent their support to writer-director Jeta Amata’s film, the help he really needed was from screenwriters. Clunky lines, broadly drawn characters, arch situations, from start to finish, Black November is an uphill battle against the urge to roll your eyes.

Terrible script and flaccid direction by Ben Medina. Terrible movie. Will it be the worst of 2019? We’ll see, and we’ll remember.

It's meant to be faintly Pythonesque with a hint of bowdlerized "The Black Adder"...But it's entirely too slow of foot for that comparison to pay off.

It’s not highbrow entertainment. Movies like this always feel “designed,” like a theme park ride — story beat, JOLT, exposition exposition JOLT, etc. But Countdown manages the bare minimum — the occasional shock, characters we root for, thanks to the actors playing them, and situations fraught enough that the audience is talking back to the screen.

What a bowser.

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.

Bruce Willis, looking decrepit and acting like he gave his last damn a dozen years ago, stars in what plays like an old man’s movie for angry, emasculated and frightened old men.

There isn’t a bad performance in it, and those turns made me buy in just enough. It’s still a mixed bag, but for those in a “Ghost” frame of mind, it’s not bad.

The Hellboy reboot is a a fecal matter weather event film fiasco, a gory ill-conceived debacle that drives a stake through the heart of the franchise, no matter how many post-credits “teases” the producers tack on.

Curse of Downer’s Grove is so awful it’s no fair to lay it all at the feet of the co-writer, who didn’t direct or cast this disaster, after all.

Slow-witted and slowly paced, with characters kept at arm’s length, our biggest concern is not whether Ricky will indeed be Hit by Lightning, but whether anybody will find a spark of life in this corpse of a comedy.

The sum of Fathers and Daughters is so much less than each of its individual parts. A misshapen attempt at maudlin (not unlike Muccino’s other Hollywood films), it enrages, here and there, but rarely touches or moves us.

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.

Hangman is ridiculous from the start.

What works beautifully are the grace notes to the craft of acting, to first love/first marriage.

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

Absurdly plotted, ineptly scripted and haplessly acted, Creature is a new variation on the "Creature from the Black Lagoon" theme.

These days, Adam Sandler is a bottle of beer that’s lost all its bubbles — cheap, mass produced domestic beer. So let’s focus on what works in his latest, Blended, because he sure doesn’t.

Director Vaughn Stein takes forever to get this movie on its feet, and the slower he goes, the more Collins stands out as inadequate as his lead.

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.

It’s a kid-friendly mash-up of limited imagination and endless exposition. Boring as all get out, in other words.

It’s all so hackneyed, so overfamiliar and formulaic.

There's nothing thrilling about summarily dispatching everybody who isn't meant to survive to the credits, nothing entertaining about meathook, hatchet and chainsaw murdering that we've seen scores of times.

Cheap, short and slow, Hot Pursuit is a comedy that never lets your forget that pairing up Sofia Vergara with Reese Witherspoon should have worked better than this.

Cop Out is still funnier than the dreadful later Eddie Murphy cop pictures. But it feels like an homage to a period best forgotten.

The only way to appreciate The Book of Henry is by treating it as the movie equivalent of a summer read, a beach book that tries to pack in the full breadth of human experience into a few too many pages.

Tedious as all this vampire exposition is (and there’s a LOT), the jokey tone here is much appreciated, with everyone “a few corpuscles shy of an artery” and the action as predictable as “a porcupine in a hot tub.”

A sad, slight faith-based drama about loss, grieving, fresh starts and loyalty.

Moore, doing a variation of her vile “Disclosure” character from back in the ’90s, makes a fine foil for the others, who only need sharper lines and more inventive situations to give this picture a chance. Which it never has.

Winter’s Tale has no narrative drive and too little heart to come off.

The film suffers from abrupt, under-motivated transformations and has the pall of death hanging over it since we know what’s coming.

With no real suspense and little empathy, Friend Request devolves into your standard horror cast-killer time-killer. There are more frights in the trailers for upcoming Halloween horror films preceding this — “Jigsaw” and “Happy Death Day” among them.

Its star, Brandon Routh, is just as miscast as a droll, world-weary "investigator of the undead" as he was as a boy-Man of Steel back in 2006.

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

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

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.”

A mediocre, gimmicky 2015 romantic comedy that featured a star-studded supporting cast, some cute characters, witty banter and adorable leads.

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

Just far enough off the well-worn mob movie path to be worth a look, even if — like too much on Netflix — you feel the need to bail and see what else is available before it bleeds out.

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.

As "Hangovers" go, Part III isn't challenging or unpleasant, just instantly forgettable. It won't take much to sleep this one off.

Enjoyable mainly for its performances — Pegg’s comic venality, Palmer’s nagging ruthlessness, Brown’s quiet cruelty — and the creative ways it kills its way toward an ending that we’ve seen pretty close to the beginning.

A melodramatic, overreaching and sometimes just inaccurate script by Nic Cage’s go-to screenwriters undermines director Mario Van Peebles’ World War II epic.

Little Boy is loaded with weighty subjects and teachable moments, all doled out between generous helpings of tragedy and sentiment. It’s ambitious, but a cluttered weeper whose lessons might have stuck, had there been fewer of them.

Lopez is a gorgeous woman with the same mousy voice she came into the movies with 20 years ago. She’s all about the makeup, the hair, the clothes. She plays the part like someone imitating a TV teacher, from her classroom posture to her delivery.

The action beats have a nonsensical excitement to them. The chases are competently shot and edited and the fight scenes still play. But it’s all so weary and overfamiliar, giving one the sense that many involved stopped trying on the first take or third rewrite. It’s just gassed.

There’s no reason this cast with this story in this setting shouldn’t have been something almost hilarious. There’s little evidence on the screen that was ever going to happen.

Aimed at kids who’ll giggle at the adorably retro robots and snicker at the profanity, “Electric State” creates cringes you didn’t know you’d cringe about.

Wish it wasn’t so, I still find the character brash and cranky fun. But until Perry parts with a nickel and brings in funny people to goose his ideas into something wittier, Madea isn’t MIA, she’s DOA.

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

An old fashioned romantic mystery that benefits from a wizened, much-honored cast and a still-exotic setting.

Tedious time-killer of a kiddie comedy.

Hopkins makes an interesting, confused and increasingly dubious victim/hero/survivor. But the whole doesn’t answer any questions, not that it asks any interesting ones in the first place.

As C-movies aiming for B go, “Saints” is watchable if utterly perfunctory in between the fights. It may have “Schrader” on the credits, but there’s not enough of The Master’s Touch here to elevate the material, the leading man or the movie to where it wants to be.

Rockwell, Schwartz, Fox, Ferdinando and Callow make it engaging in between its darkly-funny bursts of slow-motion violence — be their characters expertly menacing, or just mean and inept.

These guys set out to make a movie where they could crack each other up. At this late date, they can't even manage that.

It all feels random and slapped together, with seriously under-developed heroes, villains, over-the-top geyser-of-blood violence played for laughs.

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

The slapstick is very small-kid friendly and even the most adult-friendly jokes are pretty mild stuff.

The humorless, generic, and chatty Frankenstein served up here makes you wonder if the good doctor, in all his patching-together of parts, didn’t forget the brains.

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

Give White credit for the picture’s fairly eerie tone and look — darkened streets, foggy forests of spindly pines, shadows and more shadows. It’s just not worth more than the occasional hair-raising instant.

No social, psychological or satiric point is made. No laughs are scored. And nobody involved will be slapping this on their “sizzle reel” or resume…save for the writer-director, who may be beloved but who may never ever get to make another movie after this “all-star” debacle.

Cochran has conjured up a caper that’s just clever enough and characters just winning enough to hold our interest long enough to be surprised at the resolution to the puzzle that she conjures up.

Dullness “Incarnate,” in other words.

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

Greenwood and Richardson make a fine, discordant couple and the young leads have a certain chemistry. If only Feste had realized she’d stripped almost all the conflict out of the story.

It’s a drab, emotionally flat film.

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

If you’re not laughing at this, early and often, you’re made of sterner stuff than the players they paid to show up for this, but didn’t.

James takes his comic lumps like a man. His Griffin suffers injuries and indignities and lets us laugh at him as he does. No matter where the script wanders and where the direction founders, at some point, James' comic instincts take over. And this time, they don't let him down.

"What's the worst that could happen?" The answer to that is, you could end up in a summer comedy that's barely funny enough to warrant — ahem — release in the summer.

The most shocking thing about Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, is that four hacks fought to have their names listed in the credits under “screenplay.”

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

The Price of Desire is an indulgent, gauzy dream from memory, of Gray swanning around white rooms in white dresses uttering profundities in English and French — with white subtitles. It’s as visually inane, austere and pretentious as its dialogue.

It has no laughs, no thrills and little that would distract, much less entertain a child.

Hearts and Bones isn’t particularly graceful in the way it unfolds, and it doesn’t hide one man’s secret well enough or give the other’s the weight it seems to represent. But some very fine acting, a few poignant scenes and a general earnestness carry it off.

Paradox is sort of a cinematic flip book companion piece to Young’s “Paradox” album. And it’s mess, son.

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

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

There are interesting story elements and locations. But the claustrophobia of the car works against it.

There is one seriously suspenseful scene in the script, and it’s suspenseful because the trailers to the movie have given it away. Nothing else in it is scary, and the third act’s a career-killing embarrassment.

A slick, upbeat Church of Latter Day Saints-backed documentary that aims to answer the image of the church and its members “shaped by the media and popular culture.”

None of it is remotely original, little of it is even the least bit charming.

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.

The Great Alaskan Race reaches for those tears, but may best be appreciated by being the most historically accurate — if fictionalized and not wholly complete — version of this story we’re likely to get.

The singer and tabloid darling Chris Brown more than holds his own with this crew, apparently not even needing a dance double.

Endless, dizzying 360 degree pans, hand-held on-his-way-to-the-stage snippets and jolting, beads-of-sweat/strings-of-spit closeups and a cranked up score can’t hide the vacuity of it all.

The sequel is dominated by Rob Corddry, a fearless funnyman best taken in tiny doses. The doses aren’t tiny enough and the laughs are few and far between this time in the tub.

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

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

Here’s the sort of scruffy action comedy that suits the post-box office-draw careers of one-time hipster John Cusack and fading action star Thomas Jane. It covers the costs of a fun few weeks of working vacation in Australia and provides a few on-screen laughs along the way.

I did not care for The Mean One mess. I do not like bastardized Seuss, I confess.

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

This lame, laugh-starved script makes him look like an Old Man — not a funny old man or a Grumpy old man (see the fine “St. Vincent” for that). Just old and not really up to trying too hard.

Hector might have been better off staying at home and reading a book, which also pretty much applies to the audience, in this case.

A sci-fi/ghost story mashup, it’s got nonsensical science, unemotional actors and direction that can’t be called that in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s head-slappingly stupid, a waste of time and scenery and an embarrassment to all concerned.

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.

The film is something of an unemotional muddle, never quite finding the heart of mother-daughter love it so seems to want to test in this story.

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

It doesn’t all work, and some key elements are lost any time you mess with a classic plot. But if there’s an agenda in this “Farm,” it’s that good but misguided people (animals here) have to admit they’ve been had before their deeply-flawed, criminally cruel idols can be brought down. And calling out their stupidity is no way to lead, either.

If the movie finds its pathos and laughs around the edges, Literally, Right Before Aaron finds its easy if limited appeal outside the Hollywood mainstream, where “Home Again” is somebody’s idea of what a romantic comedy should be these days.

Disney's effort to turn Kristen Bell into America's Sweetheart reaches its tipping point with You Again, a flat romantic comedy that packages her in a funny setup and surrounds her with funny people.

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

It often seems that “Agent 47” is more concerned with landscape, buildings, offices and subway stations than it is with characters. It’s a lost cause and we lose interest long before we’re shown the exotic architecture of Singapore.

If Fuqua & Co. had taken a more askance view of this quintessentially goofy concept, they might have gotten an “Edge of Tomorrow” out of it, with Wahlberg and Ejiofor in on the joke. They didn’t, opting for “gonzo nonsense” that’s as watchable as it is forgettable.

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

Loud and tedious, “Die Hard 5” is a shaky-cam/Sensuround blast of bullets and bombs, digital explosions and death defying feats of defying death.

You get what the filmmakers were going for, even if they can’t quite bring themselves to trimming this down to the leaner, less cluttered neo noir it wants to be.

Lawyer-turned-screenwriter Dylan Schaffer's script is an unhappy combination of genres, tones, too many dead stretches of people in cars and inept dialogue. Rapaport's tiresome patter doesn't allow for the weak laughs to land.

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

It’s a movie of pointless scenes.

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

The trailer to this was frenetic enough that I came in expecting something zippier and wittier. I laughed maybe twice. That could be a “wrong generation to ‘get it'” thing. But I’m putting my money on “This ugly, gross, spittle-spattered and incoherent junk movie just isn’t funny.”

Some Kind of Hate is perfectly hateful, just not entertaining.

The script is a cut-and-pasting of random thriller cliches and hoary thriller one-liners.

It’s coherent enough to suggest competence, but Shepard plainly would have been better served sending the script out for doctoring, or contenting himself with acting and maybe second-unit (action sequence) directing.

Sadly, Immigration Tango is like a slow-dance with your sister - perfunctory, awkward and without a hint of heat.

The first major movie disappointment of 2018.

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

Coarse, crude but often cute, The Big Wedding serves up the spectacle of its title, and the bigger spectacle of four AARP-eligible Oscar winners cursing like sailors.

See You in Valhalla still manages a decent payoff. A scrappy/sappy dramedy about siblings who return, after their “Viking” brother’s death to the home they once fled, it covers over-familiar ground without much in the line of novelty.

The tedium makes us forget the cynicism.

The messy tangle of the plot, which involves Steve-Bruce getting knocked out, more than once, does little more than throw a whole lot of potentially silly stuff against the screen — some of it landing laughs.

It’s a sentimental, sometimes moving affair... It is also at times a reminder of how hard it is to manage a decent Civil War movie on a limited budget, and how hard it is, even today, to tell a Civil War tale untainted by revisionism.

Big moments drown in a soundmix of sappy muzak. Good actors are wasted, left and right. Classic Montiel.

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

Timlin is terrific, showing us a wonk and political animal in the making — focused, unintimidated and kind of fearless, a young woman traveling solo to the roughest corner of the country for smelly, disgusting work with the hardened souls who perform it.

Stay through the charming closing credits — the only place “charm” figures into this — to see who Hayes is.

It's not a bad looking movie, with Deco design touches that remind me of the earlier Rand film adaptation, "The Fountainhead." But the acting's flat and the script is absurdly cluttered with characters whose purpose may only truly become clear if they ever are allowed to make the other two films they have planned.

The best you can say about this hooey is that at least he had the King of the Bs, Ron Perlman, along for a few sidekick laughs.

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.

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

Survivor, predictable, short and shallow ticking clock thriller that it is, is more “Three Days of the Condor” than “Taken.” And thanks to its stars, it’s more engrossing and fun than it has any right to be.

There’s precious little action, and beavers with Italian accents, weasels with German and French ones (“Vive l’resistence!”) and zero laughs spread over 92 minutes.

A lump of cinematic coal Perry’s shoving into America’s stockings this holiday season.

The 3D adds little, and the hallmarks of the Chris Columbus directing style are unevenness and luck. With a little of the latter, this could be a huge hit. But with a better star, sharper script and more Dinklage, it could have been a champ.

It’s an exceptionally good looking movie. But the performances have that hand-tied-behind-the-back quality that tales that operate by supernatural “rules” often exist under. Grace doesn’t get worked up, nor does anyone else, though Clarkson takes another run at “nasty” (check her out in “Sharp Objects”) and Mulvey is monstrous in that psychopathic way.

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.

It’s a relief when the talking/screeching version of Day has an accident and the silent version takes over. He manages the pratfalls and double-takes well enough. He’s no Keaton, Chaplin, Begnini, Sellers or David Hyde Pierce, to name some of the great physical comics of ancient and recent vintage. There’s no shame in that.

The story is nonsensical and the action tepid. So if you don’t find the Brit-quips funny, there’s not much for you in Mortdecai, just vintage British motorcars, foppish gibberish and Depp curling and re-curling that mustache, punctuating every line with “Right!” or “Quite!” That makes for a quite watchable mess.

It’s the execution that lets this dog down. Not enough funny lines and even the cheap, dirty laughs are in short supply.

It all adds up to “not half-bad,” with Page managing the emotional high point and Clemons and Norton delivering the near-laughs and Luna the sober man-of-science common sense. Tricky thing about half-bad, though. That means, at its best, it’s only half good.

If “the gals” have to bow out, at least they try to do it in a sprint -- in their Manolo Blahniks. It’s a pity nobody told them you can’t run in heels -- in sand dunes.

Neeson always gives fair value in these woebegone, quick-and-dirty actioners. But closing in on 70, the fakery meant to show him brawling or driving too fast and what not isn’t that subtle.

Once the picture finally gets around to what it’s supposed to be doing, it almost turns exciting and visceral, and it kind of makes sense. Nothing shows viscera and blood to better advantage than white on white clothing and decor — spattered and arterial sprayed. All a bit too little entirely too late, here.

There’s sacrifice, but little compassion and little sense of the allure of the origin story that launched a global religion. This account from an “elevated historical” space has action, but the drama in the story is mostly dull pre-ordained “prophecy,” as if that’s enough.

It’s easily the worst installment in this endlessly awful series, probably the worst movie of the summer.

Limp and lifeless, this Next Door neighbor should be evicted to DVD.