Roger Moore

It’s a visually and dramatically flat picture in which the co-directors just check off the touchstones in Samson’s storied career, lurching forward, parking him in reasonably rustic settings with tunics and smocks and sometimes shirtless. There’s little character arc, and even less story arc.

The goofy tone is maintained, start to finish. But that finale is the biggest dud among the various clunky set-ups that don’t produce anything funny or scary or romantic.

The blunt truth is that there’s very little that’s original or even interesting in this empty rehash of many a recent YA franchise with occasional pauses for song.

The bad title isn’t the worst sin of Organ Trail, basically a dawdling B Western rendered violent enough to be labeled “horror.”

Mountain goat attacks, bee shenanigans, squabbling conspirators and boorish local tourism appeals from a town that isn’t quite popular, isn’t really quaint and is not the least bit funny in itself hobble this already-too-tame “Taming” from start to finish.

Sorry to beat the hell out of a book millions have bought and presumably adored. But Where the Crawdads Sing doesn’t sing a note in film form, and plays more like Nicholas Sparks than Harper Lee, more a Lifetime Original Movie than anything worth the price of a cinema ticket.

It’s not another “Romeo & Juliet” variation, even if the title suggests that. The stakes are low, the tropes too familiar and while the leads may get across the intensity of their crush with just their eyes, they don’t bring much else to this formulaic, tepid teen romance.

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

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

“Obama’s America” flutters to the ground like so much GOP convention confetti, all assertions, few facts and little substance other than the conspiratorial right wing talking points that are how D’Souza’s makes his living.

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

It's an infuriatingly static picture - actors walking around when they should be running, ruminating when they should be panicking, generally failing to convey fear and pick up the pace.

It’s a decently-animated, dialogue-heavy comedy that manages a few laughs from the age-old sight gags of “Blazing Saddles” and a lot of groaners that pass for one-liners.

There’s not enough that’s new to merit raising this corner of hell all over again.

There’s nobody delivering the laughs in this arid action comedy.

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

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

Too slow, too few funny lines to go with a couple of promising comic situations, Ready to Mingle turns out to have been the wrong title to translate this tie-the-knot-of-die comedy to. They left out the “Not.”

McDonagh’s script is so ad hoc, so clumsily random, that nothing adds up to anything.

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

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

Cowan (“Sunrise in Heaven”) is the big find here, giving us a doll-voiced minx with a hardened sex-worker’s shtick and a survivor’s instincts. Penelope works her search for “something that makes my thighs twitch” act on every heterosexual male in range, and turns most into putty. If only this script had found some place interesting to send her and Frank.

Fouéré pretty much steals the picture, which despite its bizarre twists and taste of torture porn-level violence, takes on a tired familiarity common to such tales.

There’s promise here. But that higher end of expectations would have been for this to be a solid genre thriller, not a dawdling, dull drip-painting of a tale. Painter deadens the climax so badly that you almost welcome the anti-climax that follows.

Despite the f-bombs, the egomania and a montage of Troyal shooting a beer commercial and having a hissy fit as he does, too little here rises to the level of “satire” or even “amusing.”

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

Match Me if You Can is an indie rom-com that just isn’t — quick or romantic. There are funny lines and a cute moment, here and there. And director Marian Yeager knows that in cinematic terms, comedy plays best when it plays out in playful closeups. But this wilted rose of late summer doesn’t have 75 minutes worth of jokes, gags and adorable laughs. And it runs for over 100.

There’s little tension or comic build-up.

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.

Smith folds mortality, grief and regret into the story to give it depth, but the strain of being glib about those elements shows. Scene after scene plays out without so much as a chuckle.

Call this one a swing-and-a-miss and “Better luck next time,” because I like the idea and the casting and the sexy tone, just not what they did with those elements.

We will see worse movies this year than The Great Wall. But we won’t one more cynical.

Foe bores the viewer to tears on the long march towards getting to its point.

Argento may stay on brand with this film, with a few gory moments amid its violence. But he’s rarely tamed things to the point where they’re pro forma, dull and preordained.

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

A generally joyless pastiche of sorcery history, imitation Potter "chosen one" Messianics and mirthless silliness, it's another in a string of recent black marks against Cage's Oscar-owning reputation.

I liked the cartwheeling, wall-walking, bullet-dodging nonsense of the brawls. Note the fight choreography and blur of swirling cameras and edits designed to make us think an 85 pound pixie is dropping hulking gangsters by the metric ton in every fight. It’s all too glib about the blood-letting and entirely too childish and nonsensical for me to get into.

It’s a thriller bookended with humans vs. robots shootouts, and stuffed with boring corporate intrigues in between.

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

Rambin, a rawboned character actress with “Hunger Games” and “True Detective” credits, is faintly interesting as this character, but she can’t spin gold out of paw-paw blossoms.

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

It sprints out of the gate for 15 minutes, spills blood and settling scores in the finale and is boring as brie in the middle acts.

All Toscana has to offer is some decent (limited) scenery, a little taste of high-end cooking, and a love story that’s about as romantic as the one The Bard set in foggy Helsignor.

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.

Breathless, ticking-clock pacing would have stripped the narrative of the many pauses where we’re allowed to think “Oh come ON” before the next stock character makes a bow, the next blow lands or next crooked angle presents itself.

While Nilsson’s instincts for making Dashcam an updated, new-tech “Blow Up” were good, his execution isn’t. Dashcam is a dry, slow and dull 80 minutes of a loner TV news editor stumbling into evidence that proves a Big Conspiracy behind the death of a famous politician.

The slack pacing and perfunctory ways the killings are staged by director Philip Gagnon mean that the only real question is “Who will care?”

We never buy the gorgeous Hassouni as anything remotely “Meskina,” as if that’s part of the “fairy tale” that is her life. The laughs are too scattered for this to pay off.

There’s no reason the missionary-recruiter turned stalker idea couldn’t work. But this one doesn’t.

It's not as scary as it needs to be or as clever as it thinks it is, but the new 3D version of "Piranha" is at least as gimmicky as those fabled 3D films of yore. With all the pointless 3D cartoons and joyless 3D ""Clash of the Titans" conversions, at last here's a picture that tosses its cookies, its coffee cups and its D-cups right in your lap.

The Clapper isn’t hateful, which is a huge step up for Montiel. It’s merely puerile, insipid, clumsy with only the barest hints of believeability.

Zellweger brings that lovely vulnerability that “Jerry Maguire” first introduced to the world.

The kids aren’t bad, just stuck playing blandly-written uninteresting “types.” The production has a candy-colored high school glow that nothing we see or hear lives up to.

It’s a colorful, cheerful and messy movie, meandering out of the starting gate, struggling to avoid anything remotely edgy or interesting.

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

Priceless isn’t a particularly dislikable film, just an exhausted one — a couple of scenes have sardonic bite, the final confrontation is staged with some thought.

The end product isn’t remotely as bad as one might fear.

At long last, The Twilight Saga sinks utterly into camp with Breaking Dawn: Part 1.

The script veers away from history with its whole “agent with a conscience” balderdash. The crazed partner Vaughn plays is straight out of bad melodrama.

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

The acting isn’t terrible, though the script at times makes the players seem that way.

Seth MacFarlane wants to be a movie star in the worst way. A Million Ways to Die in the West is result of this longing, a long/longer/longest comedy with long waits between jokes and longer waits between those that work. Thus, does his leading man career begin and end with a “worst way” Western.

It’s a derivative, noisy, sometimes-amusing Greek myth-reinventing eye-roller, full of fan-service, inclusion, dry-eyed deaths and “high stakes” that feel like a half-hearted send-up of that idea.

As straight exploitation, it's amusing, in fits and starts. It's just that Colombiana lacks the kinetic energy of "The Transporter" and the pathos of "La Femme Nikita."

Director Dianne Dreyer and screenwriter Audra Gorman have worked in the business for years — producing, location-managing, etc. They have contacts and “how to get your film made” know-how. What they lacked here was a plot, dialogue, characters or dramatic situations that were worth anybody’s time.

The ghost gimmicks, sight-gags and settings — the New York Public Library — as well as the non-supernatural villain (Atherton) are, like Murray’s attempts at his jokey old self, simply recycled from the original films.

A rude and seriously crude riff on taking a vacation from marriage.

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

If you can’t get more than just a taste of terror from throwing half a dozen orphans into a haunted house, maybe your “universe” isn’t expanding at all and your “Creation” has run its course.

Red Snow isn’t very good, as a package. It opens with a night-filmed, poorly-conceived and acted “first kill,” drops abruptly into the broad daylight banalities of Olivia’s life and never gets up any sort of head of steam. But I like what they were going for here, as obvious as it seems. Nice try. Now have another go of it.

Braff can still land a punch line and manage goofy, “sensy” banter. There just isn’t enough of it here to hold one’s interest. Comedies do not live on low-hanging fruit alone.

To Your Last Death is a gory gimmick without a decent movie behind it.

Which is a big build-up to essentially saying, “This movie’s a stiff.”

Bell classes up the joint enough to shame director and co-writer Craig Moss (the “Bad Ass” movies) into wishing he’d at least kept his black-eyed children as serious as Bell. “Deadpan” doesn’t work when your scary, monstrous villains let us in on their smirk.

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.

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

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

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

Then there's Pacino, out-of-place and yet somehow right at home. You want big? Al does BIG. And since is as close as we're likely to get to "Don Corleone Does Don Quixote," that alone is worth the price of admission.

The film manages one grand "300″ moment, Cavill rallying troops for battle, doing his best Gerard Butler. But the lack of humor, the confusing, stumbling story and limited color palette blunt the film's 3D slo-mo shots of heads exploding and torsos torn asunder by the sword.

See it for the glories of young stars about to take over Hollywood. Because it’s hard to figure out another reason to get all the way through this version of “Going All the Way.”

The film is an exceptionally messy and character-cluttered rush with few laughs among its various players’ reprising their Greatest (Character Trait) Hits.

It’s a bad movie, but it has hints of the simplest failing of a lot of movies made by folks who come from long-form TV. It’s episodic to a fault, with no episodes fleshed out and developed, characters played by actors at least as interesting as Chris Mulkey (as underboss Frank DeCicco) and not the generic goombahs rounded up here.

This isn't satire, it isn't that funny and the only bits that work are the titillating ones.

The picture feels cluttered, with the big set pieces outlined and diagrammed and arriving at precise moments in the 160 minutes of the movie.

The film never quite finds its sweet spot. The violence mixed with flippant modern vernacular is never quite darkly funny, and the film leaves one puzzled about Belle’s agenda, or the Witch’s. The Beast’s, at least, we understand.

This Charlie McCarthy (“The One I Love”) drama is sci-fi at its cheapest, a Netflix film that relies on location, weather and quiet to set its tone and a very good cast to make it watchable.

Judging from this, The Fate of Lee Khan was to die of boredom waiting for the “fun parts” to begin.

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

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

I got a few laughs out of Double Life, a Canadian thriller about a two-timing man who gets murdered and the widow and his chick-on-the-side who team up to solve the crime.

One sure way to gauge a horror film’s success is whether it shocks and shakes you, makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. That never happened for me, here. For all the interesting performances and promising characters in this one, I think the actor/director and actor’s director lets us off the hook entirely too easily.

It’s never as funny as it should be, nor as grimly exciting as it might have been, although there’s a giddy Fosse-meets-hip hop quality to the song and dance, and the wirework/FX-littered fights have their John Woo moments.

A weak villain, a couple of eye-rollingly unlikely cons and dead stretches that make 105 minutes play like 145 and you've got Focus, the last dog of February, where comatose con job movies are released to the sounds of silence.

In a righteous world, the better-acted, upbeat and faith-affirming “Miracles from Heaven” would eat this angry tirade for lunch.

There’s barely a laugh or interesting, much less exciting moment in this.

“The World of John Wick” hotels, “tribes,” murder contract infrastucture, “rules” and codes and lots of punchouts don’t really add up to much of a movie.

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

With villains cribbed from the generations of cheap thrillers that precede it and action scenes that have no novelty to them, Heatstroke starts looking like Adam Sandler’s “Blended” more by the minute — a movie the cast signed up for to get a free working African vacation out of it.

Yeah, Head Count loses its head in the third act. Whatever promise it had is long gone by then (there’s little urgency among the stoners, the threat seems more existential than real). And in a crowd of characters we have zero time to develop empathy for (like their director, they’re all beautiful), when the Big Moment comes, the only sane response is “Who cares?”

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

A tragic quasi-musical that never quite finds its way.

An ensemble holiday comedy packed with all the sappy sentimentality and mawkish manipulation that only the old master, Garry Marshall would dare give it.

I was delighted at the beginning, and steadily more appalled at most everything that followed. There's no sugarcoating the fact that I look forward to never seeing this "Resurrection" again.

It’s deathly slow, deadly-dull and makes one long for the days when it looked like [Roth] was shifting, full-time, into producing.

Would No Good Deed have anything worth talking about without the Ray Rice sucker punch tie-in? Barely.

There are little chuckles around the edges of this limp noodle of a comedy, and just a hint of romance to it. It should be bubbling over with both.

The scripted schemes don’t unravel easily, until the “talking villain” finale reveals all. That makes Exterritorial more “solid than surprising, and even that “solid” footing grows more slippery with each implausible escape or too-convenient plot twist.

The slapstick is mild-mannered, there's no romance, not a hint of emotion.

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

The costumes — cop, soldier, Spartan and cowboy — and lack of them mimics “Magic Mike.” The melodrama — keeping his sideline secret from his mother and would-be girlfriend — duller.

In losing its nerve, it’s neither fish nor fowl, dramedy nor comedy, an is doomed to wander across your Netflix screen like a pilgrim in the comic/cosmic wilderness, a picture with a purpose, but no rewarding way of fulfilling it. It feels like work.

Like the first film, it’s a sexy look at a glossy, affluent and urban Turkey of high fashion, social climbing and liberated women. But like “Love Tactics,” it has a hard time finding much that’s cute, new and surprising in such a tale.

There are good things about it, but nothing great and nothing all that worthy of our attention. But the cast battles any low expectations it might create and gives the viewer something to hang onto.

It’s a straight-up “Cars” knock-off about racing and a race car who escapes his pedestrian “retired” life as a taxi when he falls for an exotic Italian supercar.

A brisk-enough but seriously formulaic Dutch thriller.

It’s sexist, vulgar and retrograde.

This isn’t a compelling take on coupleshood — not quirky, not touching, not much of anything at all except disappointing.

For all the fun these folks could have had with Hercules maintaining the supernatural assistance facade, or denying it as his handlers gild his lily testifying that it’s true, the movie is content to just go through the motions.

Why not wade in? Why not? That’s almost the only real action or borderline funny thing to it for 45 minutes or so. And it’s only 86 minutes long.

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?”

The charm has aged right out of this silly stoner franchise.

Cinematically-static if well-acted, and dramatically-flat throughout, it’s an end-of-the-date story of gamesmanship, competing agendas and differing interpretations of what’s going on in a coupling towards copulation sense.

To the Moon is a psychological/psychedelic thriller that has a lot of trouble coming together and more trouble getting to its fairly obvious point.

Suffice it to say, I found this “Bricklayer” about three bricks shy of a load.

Three films in, and Ridley has mastered the fierce scowl and “stick the landing” poses of a superhero movie. She has not, in any sense, created a character who moves us with her expressions of fear or grief. Every time somebody she cares about dies, it’s dry tears all around.

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.

A tale of love, murder and revenge that borrows from “Hamlet,” it’s a bit of a stiff as a thriller, despite the attention to detail, the lovely pools of light much of the action (onstage and off) is photographed in.

It’s more or less watchable, especially as it takes a turn towards the daffy in the third act. But filmmaker Óskar Thór Axelsson (“I Remember You”) cooks up a classic ninety minute thriller wrapped in an ungainly 110 minute package.

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.

I kept wincing at the inappropriate coma-side banter, an absurdly underplayed and glib “officially dead” debate that may be the worst end-of-life decision discussion ever filmed. Hara’s low energy performance isn’t the only problem with such scenes, just the most pronounced — deflated, disinterested, exhausted-seeming.

Entertainment is rife with randomness, shot through with misery and self-loathing and flat out unpleasant as a screen experience.

There’s virtually nothing to distinguish Reprisal from a thousand other cop-vs-robber B pictures, except for the violence.

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

This is smelly, dirty authentic-feeling male bonding and is the best thing in the movie.

Some moments might make you smirk. But there’s little that makes you laugh.

Even the climax has a savage predictability to it — everyone but the characters on screen can see it coming. Netflixable? Not so much.

If this movie was better it might make rom coms great again. But I cannot lie. It won’t.

The movie borders on abhorrent.

Aside from the comic-book movie supernatural brawls — with lots more blood and profanity — there’s nothing at all to this.

The picture tends to peter out as we drift away from Mordecai, relating his life story to Nina in animated flashbacks.

What he’s doing, it turns out, is lowering the viewer’s standards of proof for a vigorous return to “2016″ territory, a hatchet job on Obama and Obamacare that tries to tie everything to a 1960s “radical” organizer who might have influenced the president.

Blackjack: The Jackie Ryan Story is a slow motion train wreck about a slow-motion train wreck of a basketballer.

No tolerable climax is complete without a clock-watching anti-climax that so stretches things out that you start to discount the fabulous production design, the pointed parable about America’s rural vs. urban schism and how much fun Jason Schwartzman, in the Elizabeth Banks role, is having with all this.

The cast is accomplished and confident, as you’d expect as these teens range in age from mid-20s to 30 (Ms. Sanz).

It’s not terrible, just irritating. Freak Show is too busy flying the white flag, surrendering to the obvious, to ever let its freak flag fly.

The Privilege is a too-predictable German mashup of a couple of horror genres and several paranoid thrillers, all underscored by the big idea in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”

Mackie always gives fair value, but this seems silly and beneath him, even though he’s done time in the Marvel universe.

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

The things that should make it work are here, most of them anyway. The fact that it doesn’t draw you in or deliver an ending with impact doesn’t mean it couldn’t have.

The acting isn’t bad, the Barcelona and environs settings gorgeous and there’s a nice tug of the heartstring in the finale. But in all honesty, only one thing works in In Family I Trust,” a Spanish rom-com based on a Laura Norton novel. It’s a running gag, and it involves a dwarf.

A time-filler for bored 5 year-olds, nothing more.

The action beats are pro forma, as are the way stations of this plot.

I didn’t hate it, but didn’t get much out of it and found it boring. Still, fans of kidnapping, impaling, hot-poker-in-the-eye cinema may take to it as their cinematic happy place.

I think the remake hits the comic highlights harder. But if you’ve seen “Fix the World,” there’s no reason to bother with “Dad Quest.” If you haven’t seen the original film, “Quest” is at least a decently acted, occasionally amusing and somewhat quick “summary” of the superior film it’s based on.

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

A warm grin of recognition here and there and memories of better banter, quicker pacing and a real fish-out-of-water feel from the earlier films is about the best one can hope to get out of this “Cop.”

On the whole, The Knight Before Christmas is one to skip, a sweet nothing that’s a lot more “nothing” than sweet.

The brawls have to do most of the heavy lifting in your typical martial arts genre picture, even the ones in a scenic setting. That’s doubly true in The Forbidden City, a stumbling and generally indifferent kung fu thriller with comic touches set in The Enternal City — Rome.

The cutting remarks rarely leave a mark, the mystery is unraveled with little care, and takes on the “Twilight Zone” air of “The Box,” which didn’t work either. And nobody’s funny. Veteran TV funnyman McHale is given little funny to play or say, and that goes for everybody else. Only a query of the withdrawn, deadpan Gretel offers so much as a chuckle.

Deep winds up a somewhat lifeless enterprise that manages a suspenseful moment or two almost in spite of itself.

The Luring owes a bit to Stephen King — lots of bits. But writer-director Christoper Welles doesn’t grab enough of King’s horror leftovers to make a meal. Still, when you get bored — and you will — the “borrowings” will stand out and sort of accumulate in your mind.

Somewhere is a triumph of tedium, banality passing for depth, a vacuous embrace of nothing.

E-Demon isn’t particularly frightening.

The Pilgrim is a serene, scenic and soul-searching indie drama that goes adrift as it charts an over-familiar course.

Scenes go on past their payoff, gags are flogged to death after the punch line.

It’s not much fun, and not particularly gripping.

Performances? Nobody in this will be topping their resume with it. Neither will the director. Let’s hope it’s just a blip, a disaster soon to be forgotten by him and the studio that wrote the checks for it. I’m pretty sure he already has.

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.

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

That scenery — hot springs, stunning vistas, the glories of Machu Picchu and a seaside finale near Nazca — offers some compensation for the cute nothing that this movie is. Not enough, but some.

Director William Kaufman is no Walter Hill, but his shootouts — and there are many — are competent. It’s not a good script and it’s not a good thriller, so this isn’t much better than his earlier efforts (“The Hit List,” “The Prodigy”).

Not Okay wants to be kind of a goof on the subject. Deutch seems to want to make it one. But former child actress turned writer-director Quinn Shephard doesn’t appear to be on the same page with this heavy-handed mope.

The animation, which does more with color than with character design, settings or sight-gags, is adequate, nothing more. Turn it on, leave the room and bake a pie. Maybe it’ll jump-start a small child’s interest in the books.

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.

This plot, with its murderous, sexy love and murder entanglements, can work. This cast might make it come off, when more of them have movie and not mostly stage experience.

Any nostalgia that helped sell their last outing is gone baby gone.

10 Truths About Love plays as about eight truths under budget, a parsimonious rom-com that needed a better script, better director, funnier supporting players and co-equal leads who actually click.

The germ of a good idea is here, the dialogue isn’t awful even if the finale kind of is.

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

And the worker bees? They mutiny. It’s a riot. For real. But the movie? You have your two laughs. I mentioned them at the top. Be content with them or find yourself something else to Netflix.

Corey Deshon’s script is a veritable catalogue of thriller devices, types and worn out situations. Every “cut” and “paste” shows. And no amount of sex in the hot tub or stabbings in the eye can hide that.

It’s a psychological thriller built around two intense and graphic sex scenes, and a few other moments of expedient nudity. Mind games, stalking and graphic violence work their way in. But it’s the sex that seems to be the movie’s reason for being.

Sarandon is always a compelling presence, but too much is left unsaid and unplayed here to pull us in. Viper Club needed action, suspense, more pathos and forward motion. She tries to do it all with her eyes, and it’s not enough.

There’s no suspense, no flow to the story, little pathos in the flashbacks and a lot of dead spots where the story stops cold. I like everybody on the screen here, just not in this movie — not in this cut of it anyway.

I’m not a huge fan of this series, but this has to be the worst of the lot, more agonizing to sit through than the page-by-page “true to the book” bores by Chris Columbus, duller than the weakest of the artless Yates pictures.

Powley, a delight in “”Diary of a Teenage Girl” and “A Royal Night Out,” can be applauded for trying something darker, but the checkbox script and pedestrian direction Marius A. Markevicius, who produced Peter Weir’s escape from Siberia thriller “The Way Back,” let her down.

Juror # 2 is competently cast, acted, shot and put together. But the script is melodramatic to the point of “hackneyed,” with a couple of unintentional laughs thrown in for good measure.

A leaden, violent and tone-deaf script and two surprisingly unfunny stars — one trying WAY too hard and the other not trying at all — bury The Spy Who Dumped Me.

The best performance? Well, Dratch is a natch when it comes to disguising herself in drag. But Haylock, wearing Urkel glasses in his science teacher guise and the zaniest eye makeup this side of Bozo as Bianca, is as divine as Divine, a Rupaul for our times and a character deserving of a funnier film than this comedy set in a “Godforsaken country (not really, unless Russia has old Super 8 Motels for locations) that smells like burnt cat!”

The gimmick and the satiric target here are broader and the punches miss the mark far more often than they land. But if you’re blitzed enough…

This overlong but rarely slow picture almost gets by on Momoa’s playfulness bouncing off Bautista — “You got old.” “You got FAT.” — and a light tone that almost wholly belies the arm-yanked-off/head-sliced/woman-tossed-out-a-window gore we’re treated to.

Because crime thrillers, nut-with-a-knife horror movies, combat films, Westerns and the like are so very familiar, you’ve got to raise the bar on those tropes and action beats just to surprise and impress us. Stratton is a special forces thriller that fails to do that.

Airplane Mode is a shiny little rom-com bauble from Brazil that strains and strains to find a laugh.

A crushing bore of a screen romance starring one of writer Norman Mailer’s nine children.

Pixar is as entitled to a swing and a miss as any studio. But the lovely-looking miscalculation that is Elemental stands out on the CGI animation house’s resume as a rare swing-and-almost-completely-miss.

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

Every now and then, one of those movies takes a stab at being “about something.” Not here. It’s instantly forgettable to anyone who isn’t a fanatic lost in the minutia of their corner of junk culture.

Mostly though, Beneath the Leaves keeps us at arm’s length and the cast at half-speed, a disappointing combination when your aim was an intricate, raw-nerves thriller with visceral violence, surprises and characters we connect with enough to root for.

The bad guys are more interesting than the good ones, the heists — including an armored car — are generic.

The acting is Disney Channel broad, the writing is about six drafts shy of having enough laughs. And any message about “who rescued who,” the rescued pet owners’ creed, is lost.

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

Forgive the fact that actress turned writer-director Elizabeth Chomko is bad at history and math. Dad is driving around in a ’60s GTO with a broken convertible top in the middle of a Chicago winter. No, he’s not driving the Camry.

There isn’t much to this.

So much is just so…obvious.

I didn’t hate this, which is faint praise, I know.

Action-packed and impressively stupid.

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

Wilson and Farmiga still give good value. But this franchise and these fictionalized characters and their Catholic boogeymen claptrap have gone about as far as they can go.

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

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

This slow-moving picture finds a resolution, but not a satisfying or surprising conclusion.

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.

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

It’s a slick, university-set thriller with a sexy young cast and grisly deaths that the viewer works her or his way through to figure out whodunit. But from the archetypal characters to the standard-issue murder settings and modes of death, there isn’t much here to hold the interest of anybody who’s ever seen a horror movie.

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

A couple of performances pop, but the foreshadowing is so obvious we know almost every thing to expect, and when to expect it.

Our villain is cool and collected, just not very interesting.

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.

Kelman’s direction of his script highlights its more arch or even ludicrous/risible elements. The pacing is too sedate to give the narrative urgency and race past the clunkier moments. And the performances aren’t any more subtle than the sometimes absurd action beats.

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

Filmmaker Pack is a partisan hack and this is artless political agitprop.

Domino is a drab, implausible and melodramatic terrorism thriller showing his ongoing interest in the post 9-11 world of “Redacted" (2007). Drab, that is, until he gets to one of those famous set-pieces.

There’s not much room for performance in all this. Cohen does that acting school rendition of small-town-punk thing, Hirsch tries to simmer and Kravitz brings a little heat and paranoia to Roxxy.

The animation’s not bad, the songs aren’t much, the jokes are even less. Tiny, tiny tykes might find something to like about it. But long-review-short here — it’s too dull to sit through, too noisy to sleep through.

Luz is a slow, soapy prison romance that, if nothing else, is not quite like any prison and “getting out” picture you’ve ever seen.

The title is far and away the raciest thing about it. It’s closer to a PG-13 rom-com than an R-rated sex farce. Take away ritzy Ibiza, one of two settings, and the story could take place anywhere. And the dull collection of characters struggling with marriage, babies, commitment and “love” are mostly a lost cause for the mostly-Dutch cast trying to make them interesting.

It begins as a chatty, catty and not that amusing or harrowing hostage tale that falls well short of “thriller,” and devolves into something less.

The central premise, that you need to couple up to avoid that “wheelchair/diaper” analogy, is what’s ludicrous here. A rom-com as pathetic as this reminds us that we do indeed die alone.

Despite Palmer’s investment in the title role, there’s little more to add about Alice except that it shows up two years too late, even less logical, and a lot of budget dollars short of “Antebellum."

The arc of this story is insipid to tragically sad. And neither extreme is certain to provoke more than an indifferent shrug from even the most saccharine-tolerant viewer.

That quarrelsome, secrets-keeping couple from Cuzco are still saying “Si, mi amor (Yes, my love)” in Let’s Tie the Knot, Honey (¿Nos casamos? Sí, mi amor), an antic if not-quite-silly-enough sequel to their earlier Peruvian rom-com.

Collision is the title of this South African variation on an Oscar winning theme. It’s a slow-footed, convoluted “coincidence” riddled take on the movie in which all of LA’s problems are laid bare thanks to a traffic pileup. So it’s not like director and co-writer Fabien Martorell was hiding his cards or anything.

The Nigerian setting is the main novelty in this flatlining melodrama.

First-time director/co-writer Tim Garrick has little sense of timing and the movie mainly just lies there, never percolating to life, never living down to its lowdown and lewd promise.

I got next to nothing out of this movie.

The computer in a human body thing could have delivered laughs, but the slapstick is limited and Mauro’s jerky motions, quizzical looks and machine-as-human quirks never quite get there.

I might’ve cut The Tomorrow War a little more slack had screenwriter Zach Dean not conjured up the crappiest, sappiest most over-extended finale in living sci-fi movie memory.

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.

The sad truth of the matter is that Disney took 15 years to make a sequel and never came up with a compelling story for that sequel to tell, and spent all that money without casting anybody who’d hold our interest dashing through all this red-neon nothingness for two hours.

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.

The constant jumping back and forth in multiverse-styled timelines is more exasperating than charming, thought-provoking or even entertaining.

"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.

Hell Hath No Fury hath no fury, and rarely even rises to the level of “fitfully entertaining.”

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 starts promisingly, builds towards something Roald Dahl cutting and cute, and kind of comes to pieces, like crumb cake.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is wanton slaughter lightened by monstrous zingers delivered in a growl that needs subtitles, a colossal waste of talent in front of the camera and not exactly a resume builder behind it.

The entire affair plays like an attempt to pander to the North American market. But if we wanted to see a slick wish-fulfillment rom-com about a single mom finding success and love on a cooking show, we’d watch The Hallmark Channel and not bother traveling Around the World with Netflix.

B-movie mainstay Steven C. Miller (2012’s “Silent Night,” a few recent Bruce Willis action pix) builds suspense here and there and stages a reasonably invented murder-by-technology moment or two. But Margaux is so formulaic as to forbid anything resembling a surprise.

Sudeikis is well-cast as a bird whose “cardinal sin” is cynicism, but he has virtually nothing funny to say.

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

The story? It’s a patchwork mess.

They may have wrung everything out of “Shazam” in just one movie. And this is just that movie’s inferior sequel.

Here’s a German comedy stuffed with cutesy touches but little else, a madcap scamper from start to finish that still feels static and kind of staid, and a gorgeous character who’s meant to be funny, but who makes you wish our heroine would break a damn bottle over her head.

It’s a short drama that lurches through assorted abrupt changes in tone, temperament and relationships.

We’ve figured out where the murder mystery/thriller Brazen is going long before our heroine finds herself in the presence of the murderer in the “explain it all” talk talk talk finale. Truth be told, there aren’t a lot of surprises in this slow-pokey Alyssa Milano star vehicle for Netflix.

Eiza González of “Hobbs & Shaw” and “Baby Driver” is a stunning beauty who handles what action choreography they entrust to her. She knows how to suck in her cheeks as she’s about to set off grenades in the computer room like an action bombshell badass. Very Olivia Wilde.

Teddy’s Christmas is a holiday fantasy for children that’s long on charm and light — to the point of “slight” — in entertainment value.

Dull, carnal, and explicitly so in both regards, it’s a slow-moving slog through one crushed soul as she relates the empty, passionless pursuits of her youth.

Like too many of his movies of late, the idea here is to “See it for Cena,” as the film around him isn’t up to the big funny man’s big, scenery-devouring turn.

The acquired taste that is Seth MacFarlane is harder to acquire and the one joke in his one-joke comedy about the pot-smoking/potty-mouthed teddy bear wears thin in the endless two hours of Ted 2.

Pets United could struggle a bit even to keep a toddler distracted for 92 minutes.

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.

I found the whole thing more tiresome than intriguing, and wouldn’t recommend it unless you threatened me with being locked in a cage with MacKay in character. Now THAT would be scary.

Eastwood has zero difficulty play-acting scenes in which he’s incapable of expressing any emotion or eliciting any reaction from his audience. Few of the comic veterans around him manage anything either.

"Evil" fails to triumph. Utterly.

It makes a grand showcase for the snobby, aloof villainy of Richard E. Grant, who devours his best role in decades like a starving man who breaks his fast with caviar and canapes.

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

Degan ably imitates drug trip experiences with the visuals and editing. But he also captures a rich boy detoxing from therapeutic drugs and a corrosive-to-some culture for many months.

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.

Stewart and Yeun (“Minari,” “Nope”) do their best to animate their flesh-and-blood scenes with confusion, curiosity and attraction. But they don’t have enough screen time to make this learn-how-to-love experiment come off.

The sad stuff works, just not well enough to make tears well up. And wasting Midler and Livingston in middling roles with almost no funny things to say or play is just the icing on the you-know-what.

Last Shoot Out doesn’t exactly live up to the promise of its title. The shoot-outs are pale imitations of even the lamest B-Westerns of late era syndicated TV — “Guns of Paradise” comes to mind. The plot is straight-up formula, the dialogue either cornpone without the polish or tin-eared and anachronistic.

It’s a C-movie, pretty much start to finish. And once Ojala gets his sermons about the environment out of the way and gets down to business, he’s got a movie gore goofballs TROMA Films would be proud to distribute.

The plot is a tangle of storylines, alternate suspects, femme fatales and dead-end subplots which add up to little that isn’t obvious or that makes much sense.