Roger Moore

The sex scenes have a strained sense of fun about them, one partner trying too hard, the other bowled over. The pain, when it comes, feels real, unforced and complicated partly because Tom does seem like a guy with a limited ceiling in pretty much every regard.

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.

A thoughtful, lightly-affecting drama about a lonely man’s search for feeling in a life without pain. It has an affecting gimmick, but lives on its engaging performances, good actors playing lived-in, flawed and realistic characters.

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 leads are more tolerable than engaging, but some scenes sing, the roadside stops have a timeworn charm and Irons, Gathegi and Bello make Better Start Running move right along, even if it rarely achieves a sprint.

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

Bad acting by pretty people, chilly sex scenes acted out in mail order S&M wear, laughable dialogue and money money everywhere. What is this, “Fifty Shades of Ebony?”

It’s not particularly frightening, it goes on entirely too long, but if you’re inured to the shocks and tropes of American horror, The 3rd Eye/Mata Batin) will hold your interest and make you wonder how long it will take Blumhouse to remake it.

It’s too adult to be a “family” film, not edgy or gripping enough for grownups.

The inclusion of so many young voices gives "What Were They Thinking?” an optimistic feel.

While Causey does find historical connections between her family and America’s racial divide, her “Shadow” lengthens into a much broader look at racism in America, the tipping point moments. The film overreaches and loses some of its power-of-personal experience as it travels far and wide.

We can buy a romance warming up between these two, but not based on what this fiasco delivers.

The performers and performances sell The Delinquent Season.

Astral may have a refreshing quiet dread about it. But at some point, the stakes are raised and a big payoff is in order. The climax has to feel like something the movie preceding it has earned. Not here.

The engaging leads, stumbling through a romance they’re too young to temper, finesse or control, give Mario the spark of life and make it another ground-breaking genre film that eventually Hollywood will get around to remaking.

The film, like the enterprise itself, can be a rather tedious affair, with proselytizing woven into the spiritual journeys all these runners take on different pieces of ground, and for different beliefs.

American Street Kid is a bracing, revealing and almost co-dependent film about homeless teens living on the streets in what has to be the Homeless Teen Capital of North America — Los Angeles.

Wonders of the Sea doesn’t break much in the way of new ground. We’ve seen slow-motion sting-rays, spiny lobsters, hermit crabs, octopi and moray eels before. But the extreme close-ups, vivid colors of the various habitats the Cousteaus take us are worth the price of admission. And if ever there was a time we need to be reminded of what we need to save in the briny blue, it’s now.

All the performances are lifted by screenwriter Tony Binns (“Truckstop Bloodsuckers”) clever dialogue, and Mackie and Jake Smith have cute chemistry largely due to his writing as well.

There’s virtually nothing to this short, thin yet (barely) feature-length dramedy. A few funny lines wither in the dark and minutes upon minutes of screen time burn off space imagery and Jobe pondering the nature of it in his addled head.

It’s a horror picture that can’t quite find the laughs it is going for and never, for more than a moment or two, provides frights.

The Untold Story feels threadbare, a comedy creaking along on a walker. It’s not the cast that’s “old,” it’s the screenplay’s paucity of new ideas, new observations about life, fresh gags or situations that seem “ready for the home.”

Jihadists makes for a fascinating if talking-head heavy indictment of a myopic ideology that claims “We just want to be left to ourselves” to do as they see fit “in our own lands.”

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

Filmmaker Berkowitz? He might be worth watching, too. The dialogue works and the performances hold up. But with a background in editing, he’s still not showing us much command of story and pacing. Maybe next time, as this outing only achieves “close, but no title this time” status.

Baldwin and Hayek knock back highballs and wine and whine that their lives of conspicuous consumption are over, belt out “The Sun’ll Come Out, Tomorrow” in Spanish and throw themselves at this as if it’s “As You Like It.”

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.

[Franti] asks good questions, doesn’t overwhelm the film with his own story and just oozes empathy and easygoing charm everywhere he goes.

Huss holds center stage with a body-contorting commitment like few actors we’ve seen outside of an A-picture about addiction. It’s great work in a middling movie.

The car and foot chases sparkle, even if the blur of edits undercut every other action beat, never letting the eye settle on an actor, an action or an emotion.

This “Affair,” as it stands, is nothing to die for, or even catch a cold over. The execution here, bland direction (a veteran of “The Mirror 2” behind the camera), colorless dialogue and performances pitched as almost mild-mannered (save for Welliver) earn this one a bored shrug.

No matter how big your TV, you have to think the biggest screen is where this wondrous relic of the pop festivals of the 1960s belongs.

It’s a showcase for Vietnamese actress, model and pretty-convincing martial artist Veronica Ngo (Ngo Van Tranh), who takes beating after beating, and delivers beating after beating, as she brawls her way through the child-trafficking trade of Indochina.

The choreography is elaborate, but gives itself away, lower level pro wrestling style. They’re not fights, they’re half-speed dances with big sweeping kicks and punches ducked in close-up. So that we can see, you know, how fake it all is.

A documentary of gentle surprises, reflection and tenderness, depicting a troubled part of the world’s truly original take on the concept of what a “biker gang” could be.

Greene has a lot more to play than West, but truthfully, the leads seem like bemused anchors for the funnier characters to bounce off of. That’s sitcom writing.

There’s just a hint of “art” to all this, of course. But just a hint. Mostly it’s just random and pointless scenes circling a heroine who is just a 19 year-old, living her life and doing what she loves after the rain stops.

Hart’s portrayal of the young Lennon, cocky before the confidence that universal adoration swept over him, remains definitive and makes one want to revisit “Backbeat” (where I first interviewed him) and get the fuller picture, John in living color.

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

The Photographer reminds us how hard it is to say something new on this subject, to avoid third act melodrama, even when the tale is essentially true. A lot of luck and chance were involved in deciding who lived and who died.

The attractive young people do what attractive young people do, right up to the point where class is threatened. The well that divides the community (Mariel Hemingway plays the mayor) becomes an interpersonal chasm, not just a social one.

Her film has little dramatic arc to it, and little uplift. It plays as flatly as the desert valleys the girls pedal through.

It’s a sturdy enough story that it can withstand a little dilly-dallying, and the visceral finale is as heart-pounding as we need this story — when the lambs rose up against their slaughterers — to be.

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

It’s not a dazzler, not even a knee-slapper. But “Nothing to Do” sets its goals and meets them, and reminds us and every indie filmmaker out there that America is overrun with skilled, talented actors desperate for work.

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.

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

With faith-based films, message often trumps other considerations, not a happy situation in most movie genres. Faith, Hope & Love gets the “faith” in, and the “hope” and even a hint of “love.” It’s the comedy that lets this romantic comedy down.

Movies like this make one wonder if Netflix has found an algorithm that makes them pay off. Their track record with youth rom-coms and sex-comedies (this is the former, decidedly PG with a smattering of profanity) is stellar.

But what’s here is still a promising, entertaining effort. And it’s a fine showcase for Cavazos, who nails Bridget’s vocal fry, her pose, the disturbed and self-destructive vibe that she wears like a stocking cap, her armor against a world her illness — meds or no meds — won’t let her master.

I found the story and the timid Valli/Kris “romance” tiresome. His Father’s Voice lacks the bubbly sense of fun Bollywood musicals deliver, and the performances are, almost to a one, stagey, theatrical and flat. But the dancing dazzles as we watch the story of Rama and Sita pieced together by gestures, perfectly-struck poses and elaborately refined movement.

If the game is more civilized now, it’s thanks to the excesses of bullying brutes like Bob Probert. That’s a message Day doesn’t take the time to get across, leaving “Tough Guy” a little thin in the “And your point is?” department.

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

It’s likable enough, but after breaking out of the blocks, the picture gets gassed by the midway mark. The best it can do after that is not “win” or “place,” but just “show.”

This could be the laziest screenplay you’ll watch or hear this year, so mark down this title and the date you saw it, not to mention the name under “script by” at the bottom of this review.

The Dirty Kind is a movie with no pace, no narrative drive, sleepwalking performances and zero urgency. That’s why if you jump to the end of the review you’ll see zero stars, a rating so rare I have to track down internet art to illustrate it whenever I have to trot it out.

Murugarren, an editor turned writer-director, finally hits on a tone that suits this dark but potentially comic subject in the ensuing decades of the story.

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.

The acting provokes eye-rolling pretty much from the opening scene.

The picture has a stolid competence about it that it never rises above.

The scenario is pro forma, the dialogue trite and the fights often staged at walk-through speed. Some of the performances are achingly amateurish.

Bonnar has a hint of Robert Carlyle’s “Trainspotting” rage, and Jones plays a plump, sensitive Nick Frost lite here. Amusingly.

Sullivan sparkles. Nobody else does, and that smothers the movie, surprise or no surprise.

Call it a “near miss” comedy, with a bit of “better luck, more joked-up script, editing editing next time” written into Yardi’s contract.

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.

Into the Mirror gets as close as any movie ever has to simulating the state of mind of someone conflicted, if no longer confused about his sexuality — the feelings, paranoia, decision making and resolve that takes one from the closet to the drag club.

The Refuge is like an outtake reel, the dullest parts of “Drive” and that Tom Hardy in an SUV drama “Locke” without dialogue or action or much of anything to hold our interest.

The world doesn’t need another movie or TV series about the Texas football obsession (Leland was in “Friday Night Lights,” too). It surely doesn’t need another African American athlete claiming “I ain’t smart like my mama” in search of a way out via athletics.

The picture never gains much traction, tumbling to and fro among the assorted story threads.

It’s sexist, vulgar and retrograde.

Secret Obsession never looks like anything more than the quick, cheap and under-developed hack job that it is.

4L is set in Africa and feels like Africa, but that grounding flow of Africa into your soul that one character promises never happens.

I can’t say Wish Man is a great film, or even a particularly good one. But it has heart, Steel & Co. make it likeable and writer-director Davies makes its emotional payoff pay off.

Does all that add up to a movie? Not for anybody over oh, six. It’s not awful, and as I said, the conceit is a good building block for a film. Just not this one.

Can’t say it’s great, can’t say I didn’t laugh, more than once. If splatter is your kind of thing, this is your kind of movie. Not bad for what it is, in other words. And don’t forget the subtitles!

The Son is a horror film, but with subtle chills substituting for shrieks and freaks and blood.

There’s no predicting how “Teacher” will play in the world wide cinescape. But it hit me. I found writer-director Adam Dick’s debut feature relentlessly disturbing on all sorts of levels. And no, that won’t be to every taste.

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

It won’t keep you up at night, but just enough of Rapid Eye Movement spoke to me to let it work. It might work for you, too.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a man who may or may not be a serial killer in Awake, a thriller that promises to start quickly and find a fresh twist or two by the end, and fails at both.

A less bland script would have helped. More edge, more slang, more contrast between the city girl (woman) and the country film. Falling Inn Love isn’t unpleasant. It’s only problem is that it’s not enough of anything else, either.

There’s little that’s light here, but I was still reminded of the early films of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who began his career in the heady years after the repression of the Franco regime.

Use Me is a mockumentary that works only as long as its still mocking.

It’s rubbish, start to finish. And bless their hearts, I see they’ve got a sequel in the works.

Becoming Burlesque makes a cute fictional introduction to the art form, the reason women practice it and what can happen when cultures this far apart run smack into each other — pastie to pastie.

Tall Girl may miss, but it doesn’t miss by much.

For those of us who have longed for a “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion” meets “Wedding Crashers” in French, Netflix is here to fill that void.

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

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

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.

Trauma is a Time Machine is a film whose weighty subject matter doesn’t demand this sort of obscurant treatment. It’s self-conscious to a fault.

Nothing to Lose 2 is one of the most pointless sequels ever, as it recovers too much of the same persecuted and rising above it ground.

It’s a warm portrait, warts and all, if not as critical and definitive as one might like.

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.”

As pretty as everything and everyone are in this vapid film, there’s nothing to disentangle here, no empathetic performance to cling no matter what sympathies we bring to someone going through this.

Hopelessly out of date, and even more out of date for the fact that the folks making it don’t realize that in the first place.

It’s not bad. But it’s not surprising either.

It’s a routine thriller with a far-fetched, not-entirely medically-defensible premise (hero with knife in chest). Still, Edge of Fear could have been much worse than the sometimes-tense, sometimes mediocre mixed bag it turns out to be.

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

In Peter Ambrosio’s witty, biting and amusingly inconsequential indie comedy, Natasha (Dasha Nekrasova) is a woman with shades, a red trench coat and a mission.

The best one can say about The Mandela Effect is that it’s a fascinating, if heartless, failure, skimming the surface of the conspiracy, not doing justice to the tragedy. Even if it ensures that we never, ever watch “Looney Toons (Tunes)” the same way again.

As a film, it’s not particularly revealing and adds little to what we know and understand about Young.

The performances here, gathered mostly at campsight jam sessions, under the various meet-and-pick tents all over Felts Park in Galax, or on the stages there, are just jaw dropping.

The picture waddles here and there, spills lots of blood, reaches its climax, and then goes on and on past it. Too much of a good thing? Don’t be ridiculous.

None of the performances of these unlikable characters grab you, give the viewer a sense of what’s at stake and why we should care. There’s also something very “Entourage” about Inside Game, both in the “guys from the neighborhood” group dynamic and the toxic sexism that the film practically embraces.

The “meet cute” kind of works. Almost. Somewhat.

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

The awkward moments outnumber the actually amusing ones, and neither is much evident in this script.

MacFadyen has the chewiest role and his performance reflects that, the only one to truly stand out.

At the end of the day, ordinary people trying to get justice or revenge or closure on their own, or providing that as a paid service that they’re ill-equipped to deliver, is damned funny.

It’s a humorless fright fest with corpses, mildly-impressive effects, a Big League string orchestra score and sturdy work by Madsen (“Leatherface”) in the lead.

If this rainforest bespoiling melodrama leaves the viewer unsatisfied, that’s because there is no happy ending here. You can’t help but think as you’re leaving the film that everything you saw here was doomed, save for the bureaucrats and Wall Street types. Everything green and everyone living in the green is under threat.

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

Its moments of whimsy have a forced, static quality, and never feel anything but scripted, contrived and stiff. But taken as science fiction, which is what this is, Anya is a provocative tale of human genetics, cultural isolation and ethnic necessity grafted onto an unlikely coupling and what that couple wants out of this relationship.

It’s misshapen and clumsy, start to finish.

As with most every film, there’s the germ of a good idea here — a faintly-edgy faith-based music movie with an unconventional leading lady and a story arc that avoids conventional “Star is Born” dynamics. It’s just that nobody involved seems to have a grasp of what they could do with this, other than the most predictable choices.

Eddie Marsan makes this radio thriller worth staying tuned into — his face giving away terror, rage, cunning and panic, often in the same scene. Some supporting players shrink when cast front and center. Not this one.

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

It teeters unsatisfyingly between forlorn and wistful. Looking for something more? You’ll have to find that “Elsewhere.”

If nobody in Hollywood has snapped up the rights to this for an English-language remake, they’re missing the boat. Eye for an Eye is a simple sharp Spanish thriller that rarely blinks.

A Patient Man is a cagey tale of loss, grief, guilt and revenge.

Michael Jai White’s better than this. He should be getting better offers, should be a household name. Hollywood let the man down.

Few movies are as instantly-awful as Expo, a thriller your average viewer will be too discerning to not switch off mere moments past the credits. In a world of A, B and C-thrillers, here’s a D-or-worse one — ineptly scripted, badly acted, violent and stupid in the laziest ways.

It’s a rather harmless confection, hanging on a likable turn by Martínez and a few amusing moments from young Miss Carbonell. But the comic and romantic payoffs are limp, and the picture wanders on past its climax.

There’s just enough chemistry to the film to be daunting, and it would be easy to get lost in the “endocrine disruptors” and “estrogen mimics” in the wares of almost every company that wants us to not smell, lighten our skin or clean our hair.

There just isn’t enough to this script to make the Bowie premise of the picture a promise the movie can keep.

There’s nothing here to hold one’s interest more than 30 minutes. By that time, the viewer is as winded as the hapless cast.

It’s seriously uninspired, lifeless and lame, “noño.”

The mystery isn’t all that mysterious, but the brisk pacing and banter atone for any real sins this shoot-em-in-the-temple comedy stumbles into.

The pacing, the in-your-face energy of “The First Temptation” put it over. If you’re easily offended about anything described above, it’s not for you. Watch something else.

It’s a fairly thorough survey of all that’s going wrong, and many of the efforts underway worldwide to save, seed and repopulate eco systems that are vital to our diet and the safety of our shores as the seas rise and the storms surge.

There’s a sense of fence-sitting in the film’s point of view, embracing free will, while waffling on “tradition” and arranged marriages within an insular culture. It’s not unpleasant, just grating and in many instances, too familiar to be much fun. Kind of “meh,” overall.

The obstacles to love are all winners and include losing contact (pre-Internet), moving, closing a business, changing jobs, falling into trouble over and over again. And the payoff, set to a certain song in a certain year after 11 years have passed, is worth it.

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”).

At least, at 77 minutes, Deadcon doesn’t waste much of our time.

An indie thriller with promise, if not quite the pace and polish it needs to deliver the drama, excitement and heartbreak.

Homewrecker is laugh-out-loud funny and edge-of-you-seat thrilling just often enough to come off. Dollar for low-budget dollar, it delivers fun and value many a Hollywood production would envy.

Seriously, if you can’t talk Sandler, who has a deal with Netflix, into dragging Wayans back from the dead for this, why bother?

It’s a chatty, over-populated comedy that sprints out of the gate and gets gassed about an hour in. Its tragedy is that Cuenca chose to drag out this shambolic slice-of-the-scruffy-life out for another hour after that.

The movie isn’t much, but I’d love to visit the location.

M.O.M. loses some steam in its third act as Lyman struggles to cook up an ending that comes anywhere near the suspense she’s been building. Edwards fights a not-quite-losing battle with going “over-the-top” crazy as Jacob.

There aren’t many surprises, but the amusing bit players, throw-away lines and general “feels” that Top End Wedding leaves you with put it over. There are laughs, sure, but who doesn’t cry at weddings?

Even if the acting and sound make it dated, they don’t blunt the provocative anti-war message Klimov and his crew were getting across.

The cast is game, with Imperioli and Ventimiglia, Sandow and the Portuguese Padrão standing out. The players, the colorful milieu and the parade of nightclub acts make this a fun if somewhat undigested night out, chased with a hangover.

Whatever was going on on the set, incoherence duels incompetence in the finished product.

Because if there’s one fact everyone should absorb from this sometimes-cutesy documentary, it’s that this big hope for a better, smarter, fairer and healthier America is No Small Matter.

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

Fronteras is a stunningly stupid, talky, meandering Border Patrol thriller.

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

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

Same “s—-y” lines, same tone-deaf line readings. Same silly, archetype characters played by actors in over their heads. Same ridiculous variations on the Tom Clancy/movie-fed myth of the “surgical strike.”

And Turman, as he has pretty much every time the role is worthy of his talents, stands out, giving Justine that extra dose of humanity and heart that makes it worth your while.

Even when it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, it is amusing and utterly disarming.

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

Our Neopolitan director knows this territory and immerses us in it, showing us far more than he has any character explain.

The dialogue is as banal as the picture is striking to look at.

Sure, it’s a surface gloss treatment of the subject, mentioning the racism groups encountered, the financial exploitation rampant back then (and on through *NSYNC). But Streetlight Harmonies is valuable in rounding up a lot of the first and second generation stars and getting their memories on film before they die off.

Mossville: When Great Trees Fall is an infuriating film that captures “environmental racism” at its most obvious, a film shot at a little known but infamous ground zero example in the American South.

It’s all a muddle and a disappointment.

What a waste of a half-interesting idea, and of Ireland as a location.

Worst movie ever filmed in Louisville!

Its narrow “in veterans’ own words” focus allows the film to avoid the big psychological questions about the personailty types that join the “all volunteer military” and what people who have been in combat really get out of spilling all this blood once they come home.

The debut feature of Gabriela García Rivas doesn’t give us much. It makes us work, bring our own “meaning” to the film. And there are hints that this is because she hadn’t quite made up her own mind in that regard. Inscrutable. And kind of dull.

The story hews closely to formula (expect a BIG GAME). But the Deep South pool hall milieu, the lived-in characters and the top drawer supporting players make Walkaway Joe worth sitting still for and watching, all the way through the credits.

Tune in. All the cool kids will be there.

It doesn’t quite come off, and the “message” of this parable is either murky or too mundane to pay off. But there’s just enough here to make The Man Without Gravity worth your trouble, if only to see and hear how adorable Italian kids, just learning to insult, to love and to talk with their hands, can be.

It’s derivative, uneven, clumsy and absurdly sexist. But educators, stuck at home, will get a few laughs out of the differences and universalities of middle school, over here and over there.

He seems like a decent man, and there’s genuine research grappling with how the mind functions under Buddhist meditation and the psychology of compassion, which has long been his Message to the World. But “Scientist” comes off as something of an over-reach.

Twin Flower is a solid if static on-the-road thriller that loses its way when it stops running.

It’s never “good,” but the awfulness is amusing, here and there. But only here and there.

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

It’s a compelling Holocaust/espionage story not given the most dazzling treatment, cinematically.

The Plagues of Breslau throws a lot of fresh ideas at the genre and blood on the screen, making for one of the most surprising pictures to wear the label “serial killer thriller” in years.

The story fails to adequately maintain the mystery — Is this real, or just in the writer’s head? And messing around with that “reality” as the closing credits are about to roll is just a cheat, and dumb to boot.

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

Sword of God is a minimalist tale, without a lot of story and only a few shocking instances of violence that don’t require translation or deciphering. This is “First Contact” as it played out in many primitive places over the course of many centuries.

The animation isn’t awful, but the best one can say for the script is that it does no harm.

The film is all over the place, like life — messy. But boy, this memoir got on my last nerve.

That’s the fresh angle to this standard-issue “What did you do in the war?” doc, the children, grandchildren and other family members curious about “Where grandpa fought,” “How my uncle died,” “What Dad’s base when he was in the service looked like,” and even “How mom met dad.”

The emotional punches in this film (in Italian, with English subtitles) reminded me of “Peggy Sue Got Married,” thanks largely to how Puccini and Porcaroli play them. The poignant moments may be sentimental, but they work...That goes for the film as well. Contrived, manipulative? Sure. But sweet and subtle and even surprising, here and there.

Never have I ever wanted to reach through a screen and give a screenwriter a good, hard “What the hell is the MATTER with you?” shaking. Until The Dinner Party.

When all is said and done, “Here Awhile” is here just long enough for Anna Camp to break your heart.

The West may have long regarded the East as “inscrutable.” In Japan, they save that word for felines, who come off here as reserved, loyal, observant and aloof. On the money, to anybody who’s ever shared a life with a cat. Money well spent, Netflix. Let’s see what else you’ve got.

Throwing “They say she practices witchcraft” into it in the late stages is just desperation, a cheat, a plot twist for a movie with little or no plot.

Eighty-seven minutes, gunplay and life-and-death consequences, and this feels like a perfunctory drag — a Movie of the Week from back when TV made those.

A few decent frights and a couple of intentional laughs would have gone a long way towards pulling this up to the bottom rung on the horror (or horror comedy) ladder.

The melodramatic script isn’t the draw here. It’s the demanding artistry, the behind-the-curtains peek at how the dancing/flying sausage factory of pop concert tours are pieced together.

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

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.

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

There’s no getting around how this workaholic’s audience-accessible oeuvre will endure after he’s gone (he’s pushing 90), and how these museums have permanently altered the cultural life in the cities that host them.

It’s not so bad it’s good, not bad-funny or bad-sad even. It’s just bad.

In Maker’s tale, first-time documentary director Bill Gallagher finds a story of privation and perseverance, personal pain, of tragedies and triumphs. It’s a running saga reminder that life and sport only rarely dole out ” Hollywood ending.” But the struggle is its own reward and is inspiring in its own right.

The script ranges from bad to worse, with generic character melt-downs and amateurish plot lapses.

The charisma and talent it took to make bad movies watchable just isn’t there.

Darkness Falls fails all up and down the line.

365 Days is slick, shiny and insanely silly softcore, with a situation that beggars belief at most every turn.

Tame as it now seems, “Madchen,” restored and re-issued via virtual cinema streaming (check your local art cinema’s website) is still a movie of prescience, poetry and honesty, essential viewing for anybody interested in the cinema as bellwether of change and indicator of the cultural cutting edge.

Choked is not a very good film, but it’s a perfectly watchable and engrossing peek into a culture, its classes and its politics — governmental and sexual.

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

You don’t have to speak the myriad tongues (many not translated) to follow the action, fall into the heedless forward momentum, to be outraged at the discrimination, and to be utterly charmed by this winner from the Subcontinent.

Jennifer Bagley’s debut documentary is an upbeat portrait of best friends propping each other up, urging acceptance on each other’s families and ensuring that even as they transition, the road to “it gets better” is a short one.

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

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

This is the sort of bad horror that is best experienced with a crowd of fellow aficionados, maybe over the favorite beverage of Wicked Wanda (Petty). Maybe social distance with a few friends?

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.

Chippa is an utterly enchanting fantasy version of an Indian street child’s life.

NOBODY in this thing is the least bit interesting as a character, NONE of the situations are funny or freighted with great personal or social import.

Writer-director Roy shows himself to be a De Sica, Spike Lee or Cuaron of the Philippines, an artist who points his camera at his world and makes us see it the way he does.

The script has coincidences and twists that just pretzel-up the awkwardness. The direction is perfunctory, lacking the extreme close-ups that deliver bigger laughs — the Coen Brothers/Barry Sonnenfeld Rule. There’s enough here to provoke a smirk, here and there — maybe a chuckle. And one of the tiny surprises shows us how charming this all could have been.

It isn’t “Wag the Dog” or “In the Loop,” and the “Ab Fab” borrowings aren’t as loopy. But How to Fake a War amuses and impresses and entertains as it does.

Try as they might — and they never let us forget they’re trying too hard — co-stars Ben Matheny and Matthew Paul Martinez, with Cory Dumesnil as a nerdy-goofy “hostage” in tow, can’t get this clunker across one state line, much less all the way across the country, from BFE, Mississippi to San Clemente, Cali-forny.

Hard Kill is a garbage thriller made because the producers had access to an abandoned factory complex, a lot of tac gear to dress their color-coordinated “terrorist” minions in and Bruce Willis’s name.

A daft, sometimes dizzy and occasionally sentimental dash through relationships, parenting, morality, and life experiences packed into a story of a boy born and magically aging “four years, every hour on the hour” through his life over one long day, it is one filmmaker’s One Big Idea for a movie.

Blech’s is almost the only voice heard in the movie, and after a while, he’s all too easy to tune out.

The muted tone and funereal gloom that linger in the film gives it a mortician’s remove. We aren’t necessarily moved by this tragedy and the ways those who survived contributed to it or failed to avert it.

As dark comedies about communicating with ghosts go, Dead falls closer to “The Frighteners” than “Ghost Town.” It’s funny enough in a stoner comedy way, but as its got a serial killer in it, well, you see my point.

The picture is inert. And there are all these inserts, Wolf in close-up in pretty bad makeup telling “the story” of that night to unseen interrogators. Every film has a whiff of “vanity project” about it. Sometimes, that “vanity” makes you wince.

The entire enterprise reeks not just of “privilege,” but of shallow, self-indulgent narcissistic entitlement.

The Pool is terror at its most primal, a simple Thai thriller that’s complex in its simplicity.

What an odd duck of a doc Big Fur is. But that just means director Dan Wayne has gotten damned close to his subject.

As Borowczyk’s career was hijacked by his own infamy, documentarian Kuba Mikurda’s “Love Express” camera captures gestures, the waving about of hands by the various interview subjects as they try to rationalize both his path and his ensuing fate.

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

Director Rekhi maintains that mystery and steadily ramps up the suspense as we follow his heroine down a rabbit hole filled with vipers.

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

It’s harmless enough. Still, the only reason to watch it is if you and/or the kids need to brush up on your Spanish.

There are moments when Ferguson’s riffing and Gifford’s riffing back or starting a song that he interrupts that the chemistry she saw and wanted to exploit is obvious. But good gawd, Kathie Lee. This is such a clumsy, cheesy, contrived script, with every contrivance obvious and abruptly introduced. And misshapen!

They’ve made an uneven melodrama that’s easier to get behind than to endorse for its cinematic realism. But I will. Maybe for old time’s sake.

That whole dynamic, that the child is preordained to greatness or mediocrity by blood and birth, is undercut in the film. It’s either troubling or amusing to consider, seeing as how this story all takes place in a land whose dominant culture lives as self-described “chosen people.”

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.

Sleepwalking performances, a lack of action and a general ennui behind the camera cripple this bio-terrorism thriller, which takes place in an “Andromeda Strain” lab complex under assault by those who would cover up a genocide, protected by a crusading doctor/researcher and her scientist ex.

The Devil to Pay — a great title, by the way — is a lean, mean straight-up genre thriller, leaning into some mountain stereotypes, twisting away from others.

A Remarkable Tale stays upbeat and positive, and manages to have a little fun with a subject that’s roiled the world for a decade. Cute or not, that’s saying something.

In the Shadow of Iris is a tight and twisty French thriller about a kidnapping gone wrong. Sexy casting and a taste of kink dress up this tale that begins conventionally, throws its first sleight-of-hand trick at us, and saves a few more for the third act.

The performances are flat, drained of anything you’d call a spark.

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

Movies like this don’t settle the UFO question, and there’s no sense pretending the Department of Defense settled it for you when they didn’t.

If you’re going to compete with the streamer that keeps finding funny-dirty things to do with Joey King, you might want to hire some women behind the camera to help you catch up.

The cleverest thing about the laugh-every-two-minutes comedy John Bronco is that nobody involved tried to stretch this extended sketch of an idea into feature film length.

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.

It’s a cryptic, gloomy and paranoid thriller about hackers, election interference, the omnipotent personal data mining resource of the Internet, how it is used against us by marketers and how foreign operators can use that same data to turn us on each other.

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

Three Comrades is short but not rushed, and rough viewing almost from start to finish. The documentary style (hand held camera, even in chases) adds to the sad reality of it all, lives of drunken, hate-filled desperation.

The Giant is a colossal waste of time, 100 minutes of underlit scenes filled with (mostly) high school characters whispering every single profundity that writer/director David Raboy can think of putting in their mouths in a story that never engages us or even tries to.

Virtually everything in this road comedy feels contrived, even the payoff to the “mysteries.” But Murton and Morris, making her screen debut, make the ride pleasant if not the least bit surprising.

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

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

Here’s a no-budget Canadian thriller that comes oh-so-close to being the “Little Horror Engine that Could.” Halloween Party almost gets by on just-enough character development, a workable plot — if they’d stick with it — and Classic Canadian Comic Banter.

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

The documentary makes this much clear. The days of ignoring and neglecting Puerto Rico need to end. Puerto Ricans remind us that they deserve it, and that from now on, they insist on it.

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

It poetically folds Hindu myth into a story of self-discovery, “coming out” and finding oneself and love, a journey that is a rocky road indeed in Levin M. Sivan’s film.

The assorted heart-to-hearts play well, and Silverstone still shows some (limited) comic chops. But there’s no flow, no scene-topping-scene build-up of laughs, heart, etc.

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

It’s all cheerfully cheesy with the occasional off-color crack, a whole lot of jokes that don’t land, and a cast that’s not-quite-amusing-enough to remind us that Leslie “Airplane/Naked Gun” Nielsen was the Best Canadian at this kind of comedy.

Emmy’s peril, which she cannot fully articulate, should have more of the focus. Making it all about Dad’s credulous acceptance of “spirits” and ghosts, and his breakdown under the strain, just isn’t as interesting, no matter how much seething he does in the process.

In the title role of Tatsushi Ohmori‘s Mother, Masami Nagasawa gives us one of the great screen monsters of recent memory.

The cast is game, but plainly not in a position to add laughs to a script that feels more workshop-ready than “locked.”

It’s all so damned sweet, maybe not “strictly PG,” but as our heroine lives her season-long story arc, she comes out in a different place than where she started, bonds with her “a little too cool” grandparents, works out some Mommy/Daddy issues and grows.

There’s enough here to merit a look, to see “What kind of movie romance can you make in a pandemic?” and to feed 2020 nostalgia.

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

It’s a case study in the difference between smart writing with pathos and wit, and witless imitation, between “barely adequate” child actors and ones with charisma that the camera catches.

Buck gives a performance impressive enough to call “break out,” but Gathegi, in a largely non-verbal role, utterly loses himself in the makeup, the wardrobe, the environment and the character.

There’s nothing remotely witty about this, no real room for pathos or outrage either.

What I found most interesting was getting at the places where Warren himself screwed up.

The film doesn’t significantly alter the picture of Soros that has emerged from a “60 Minutes” profile here or a CNN interview there. But those aren’t the media organizations lying about his background, exaggerating his influence or twisting his motives. They aren’t the ones drawing Satan’s horns on his head.

This light, wistful Canadian romantic comedy clings to its longing and amuses in its awkwardness. Well-cast, well-acted, a touch melancholy and a tad overlong, it’s one of those movies that would have passed me, you and everybody else by if a pandemic hadn’t derailed the global movie-consuming model.

It’s another self-consciously odd, almost surreal “smirk” of a comedy about two misfits who aren’t just BFFs in Morgansfield High, they’re each others only friends. And how you take it depends on how easy a laugh you are.

The film’s problematic agenda clashes with its clumsy, unrealistic narrative, and like too many “cops shoot an unarmed Black man” tales, it leaves nothing but harm in its wake.

The picture plays, the amnesia crutch the plot leans on never gives way and the players, especially Souza, keep us invested and interested until the last mystery of those missing 32 Weeks is revealed.

Rubenstein’s character study suggests that it’s not all that great being Noemí Gold at 27. But all things considered, it’s not all that bad either.

Cut through the cute that crosses into “cutesie,” tolerate the stereotypes and ignore the sentiment that claws at cloying, and Team Marco plays like a pleasant time killer of a comedy suitable for the whole family.

There have been too many movies titled “The Call,” so when Hollywood remakes it they’ll have to tweak that. But Chung-hyun Lee has delivered a tight, surprising and moving thriller good enough to ensure that they will.

The acting’s bad, the dialogue a clutter of cliches, banal affirmations, half-hearted jokes and vocalized pauses — those words all of us use while we’re trying to think of what to say. “You know what I’m saying?” Filler like that should never show up in a script, and this script is almost ALL filler.

Every single thing about this, every scene, has the pace of pandesol (Filipino bread) batter slowly dripping out of the mixing bowl. Mom’s activities have a bland, predictable righteousness. Brix’s reactions to each revelation and meeting each person who knew his mother are stunningly unemotional and insipidly scripted.

Inane snippets of conversation, an over-sharing reverie by a French-American (male) nurse, brittle, off-putting and stiff performances seemingly molded from single-use plastic, a story that goes nowhere and does so at an excruciating pace — Elyse is a quiet, shiny and empty catastrophe.

It’s not quite up to the tempo of a screwball farce, although the script has that complexity. The jokes are droll and sly.

It’s got pacing problems and (serious) coherence issues to go along with the Ritchie touches and yet another visual homage to the epic corridor kill-off in the Korean classic “Oldboy.”

Schuster wrote Frau Stern specifically for Sommerfeld, and we can see what he saw in her in just a scene or two.

This intimate saga is an alternately sad and intense take on “the sins of the father” and the rippling effects of violence. And if it’s not quite as incident-packed as a movie of this length ought to be, what’s here is rich in character and a rewarding experience.

Can Evrenol’s thriller is heavy on parable, semi-nonsensical in plot, but benefits from good acting and a grimly-realized children’s odyssey undertaken in post-Apocalyptic future.

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

Avoiding the conventional one man’s journey “from prejudiced to lovesick” leaves Haymaker with a vacuum where its heart should be. The picture was never destined to be a knockout, but settling for a draw seems a waste.

The pacing isn’t comedy-brisk, and for all the implications of the story, what we’re shown of all the machinations and intrigues seems a tad thin. Sibilia doesn’t sweat a lot of details about how they built this thing, costs and logistics. He’s more interested in the nutty notion and the nut who had it, all to impress a very pretty almost-a-lawyer.

When everyone and everything is this low-heat, even a Hallmark level holiday romance faces that dreaded two-word review every actor and filmmaker fears. Who cares?

If it’s only marginally better than much of the holiday-oriented fare of Netflix or Hallmark, that just means it fits right in.

“Thriller” doesn’t quite fit here, because no matter what the stakes, nobody seems that worked up about them. It’s more disquieting than fun, but more amusing than troubling.

The not-quite-comical squirming discomfort of some of scenes remind the viewer that Neumark cut his producing teeth on TV’s “Portlandia.” It’d be easy to see these characters, in more cartoonish form, on that show. But whatever tone he was going for, the thin sprinkling of laughs makes First Blush drag on more than it should.

There’s nothing here but a cute kid finding another cute kid and considering a romance while she waits for that DNA test, or her mother, to come back.

Red Dot is a savage if not wholly satisfying “flip-the-script” stalked in the wilderness thriller whose cleverness comes from its subtext.

Whatever drama and arc there is to his story is mostly suggested (depression, ballooning in weight for a time), is stuff that happened after he got his first feature made years BEFORE he started making this movie. The clips and boilerplate, unemotional on-camera narration of Clapboard Jungle seems less interesting than what he’d already been through.

This picture is rough going for animal lovers. It has a certain quality, but I found it as unpleasant as any account of callous people mistreating animals, whatever angle they’re furtively working.

This isn’t a straightforward biography, but Tell Me When I Die is how many a filmmaker of an artistic bent would love to go out and hope to be remembered — with a little philosophy, a little sadness and a smile of reminiscence.

The minimalism works well in the early acts, and even the preachy finale — with its civics and socio-political debates built in — doesn’t wholly break the spell of 4×4. If nothing else, you’ll pick up your owner’s manual and give it a glance after seeing this one.

We’ve seen much of this before, and as interesting as Gathegi makes this guy — stream “Princess of the Row” when you get a chance — the lack of surprises in the various waypoints of the story rob the twists at the end of any impact.