Roger Moore

Writer-director Patrick Dickinson’s film transcends those nostalgic trappings to make sublime, understated points about the way grief empties you out and doesn’t always bring surviving families close together.

Hilarity does not ensue. The romance has its barely believable moments.

Nyong’o, Hounsou, Quinn and Wolff win our pity, our empathy and our respect as these New Yorkers face their fates at the beginning of a global nightmare which no one can see through, see past or realistically expect to survive. They make “Day One” both engrossing, and a great argument for why this “franchise” has said what it has to say and thus is ready to take its final bow.

The big gunfight is brief, the big Horizon massacre beautiful, gripping and horrific in ways most of the movie, save for its grand, aspen-lined mountain or desert vistas, never manages.

Scorsese — narrating and appearing on camera — makes it both a personal essay on what their films meant to him, how he experienced them as a boy and student and the ways he’s incorporated their themes and styles into his own work, and a Master Class in understanding and appreciating the cinema of two of the medium’s greatest innovators.

You see enough of these movies and you get a bit jaded. Even the title seems derivative. But for those young enough to have missed generations of this sort of story, Edge of Everything hits the right notes, even if they come at exactly the moments we expect them to.

It’s lightweight, vague and a tad obscure, never quite delivering the parable it promises, limiting the young, quarelsome and randy new couple next door as mere decorative titilation, the priest is unrealized comic potential.

Stalter & Co. make her a funny, infuriating and unpleasantly empathetic figure, “Portland” quirky no matter where you find her.

Daddio is a cinematic seminar in the value of movie stars.

For anybody who relishes performance over “the puzzle,” who gets a charge out of seeing screen legends make Ewan McGregor sweat, Mother, Couch! is worth getting off the sofa for.

Even graded on the kid-movie-curve, Rally Caps comes up short.

Nonna’s “price” is marked down and the movie about it is as instantly forgettable as its predecessor.

A fine finish and some good performances recommend Fancy Dance.

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

This is a two hour waste of a lot of fine vintage motorcycles.

The miracle of Ghostlight is that cast and crew here take the punch-lines associated with actors and acting, the dreamy delusions its often overly-sensitive practitioners are famous for, and turn them into the greatest gifts acting gives to actors.

It still bogs down terribly in the later acts, but manages to find a little suspense and a big laugh or two the finale.

It’s certainly the worst movie ever filmed in Scotland.

OutStanding: A Comedy Revolution is one of the most informative and certainly the most entertaining historical documentaries about LGBTQ history on offer this Pride Month.

Remembering Gene Wilder isn’t bad. But it’s incomplete enough to call attention to its shallowness. It never overcomes that “Coming up next on ‘Biography'” superficiality.

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

Group Therapy doesn’t reinvent the “revealing” profile of comedians documentary. But it’s a novel approach to having performers talk about themselves, those who pursued the work, lifestyle and “sharing” until it killed them.

The most adorable “action” pic of the summer is a senior citizen’s caper comedy that’s novel enough and clever enough that the fact that it also has something to say is merely the cherry on top of the cinematic sundae.

Laughs are few and far between here, but a movie about the emotional RED ALERT that heralds puberty is bound to produce a few.

20,000 Species of Bees grabs you on several levels, starting with the arresting Basque Country locations. We pick up the rituals of beekeepers, but also explore how one of the fruits of the hive — beeswax — is vital in casting bronze sculptures.

The Grab is more informative than polemical, and plays as a dry — sometimes suspenseful, often fact-packed — treatment of the subject.

Its efforts to find “cute” and “charming” in a romance between this fake killer and a woman who wanted to hire him fall flat. The many disguises and guises trotted out by star and co-writer Glen Powell as a New Orleans assassin didn’t play as funny, even if the “acting” and predicaments his real-life character talked his way out of are amusing.

It isn’t scary, with even the best-engineered “gotchas” landing flat. Kind of a big deal when you’re making a horror film. It’s joyless and humorless to boot.

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

Director and co-writer Xavier Gens’ bleak thriller doesn’t do much with characters and doesn’t traffic much in “hope” and a new day dawning.

Lacking much in the way of pace or panic, if just sort of flounders.

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

A beautifully-acted genre picture with a wonderful sense of place.

Whatever intrigues, insights and darkly comic charms writer-director Savi Gabizon gave audiences for his oddball Israeli dramedy “Longing” are mostly lost in translation in a Richard Gere remake he filmed in Canada.

An engaging, accomplished cast and an insistently light tone recommend Ezra, another road trip bonding tale about autism and loved ones struggling to understand it.

Shrug off the low-stakes involved, try not to notice its too-easy-to-guess “twist” and forget any notion of the moral ambiguity that might have been what this picture is about. It’s slick, but just too dumb to get into.

Whatever virtues there are in the fights and chases here, and there aren’t many, the fact that there’s maybe one laugh in this sequel should be telling.

Henson didn’t live long. But his restless mind and energy were devoted to sweet-natured and sometimes challenging entertainment — he never wanted to be a “children’s puppeteer” — that he produced with almost every waking second. “Idea Man” reminds us that the ideas he explored live on after him.

Alfre Woodard, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Kathy Bates and Dennis Haysbert burn through some of their supply of good will on “Summer Camp,” an all-star comedy with AARP casting appeal and nothing else going for it.

Like a lot of musical bio-pics, from maudlin Whitney Houston stories to the overrated Oscar winners “La Vie En Rose” and the much more fun “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the filmmakers limit us to “the greatest hits.” And that’s a far from complete or wholly satisfying immersion in this life and her world.

Zero to Hero barely gets past “zero” and never comes close to “hero.”

The film that emerges feels sanitized, much like the band’s overall reputation over the decades, Nancy Reagan-approved California kids who harmonized like angels.

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

Woszczynska tell this story with a mesmerizing deliberateness that won’t be to every taste, and its subtlety mutes the movie’s impact, if not its message. But for a debut feature, she’s made a litmus test drama set in a stunningly scenic place, and dared us to really “see” it and those who live there and who visit, and wonder if we’re any better than they are.

It begins with grand promise and achieves spectacle — via digitally-assisted stunts, explosions, etc. — on a scale that raises the bar on popcorn pic action. If only it all seemed justifiable and logical.

Sometimes the over-the-top violence can be a saving grace in such genre films. Sometimes the villain makes them worth watching. Occasionally, the suspense atones for a world of shortcomings. Not here.

There isn’t much to “the story,” and certainly little in the basic situation that we haven’t seen in movies about Italians, Greeks, Spanish, gay or young or old characters. But the musical novelty numbers absolutely make the featherweight Musica come off.

Ruprah uses interviews, coverage of festivals, the history of butterfly tourism (falling off due to violence and monarch decline) and reenactments to tell this sad, touching and infuriating story.

The performances pay off. But the story elements with the funniest possibilities — the salesman, the crazed 13 year-old — dangle out there without any payoff.

The more voice-over narration that winds through the soundtrack, the more I hated this facile, lazy exercise in excess.

The players are fine, but the mopey pace and somewhat generic “twists” to the plot make A Stage of Twilight — whose title promises a literariness the script never lives up to — something of a well-intentioned slog.

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

It’s not the most ambitious, original thriller or dazzling writing-directing debut. But Galluppi makes his covenant with the genre and the audience, and fulfills his obligations in a solid and satisfying roadside diner drama with moments of suspense, blasts of violence and enough dark dry laughs to remind us it’s supposed to be fun.

It’s lovely to look at. But that leaden, endless time-suck of an opening act is a fatal flaw that “Kingdom” never overcomes. And two and a half hours is a helluva long time to take to get to a point, not that they ever do.

The stakes could not be more intimate and personal here, but as reassured as we might be that something like “due process” and “common sense” will prevail, Wright and O’Connor do a good job of playing people who aren’t so sure, whose faith in people — not the state — to show compassion has its limits.

It features a few ironic laughs, a couple clever conceits, some fun amateur hockey action, and a pair of showcase roles for the female leads. But its mopey, meandering narrative isn’t helped by a choppy, navel-gazing nature, and its black-and-white-flashbacks and shifts in point of view slow its forward motion to a crawl.

Yes, most every joke churned out here has a “low hanging fruit” or “fruit food colored” air about it. But Gaffigan, Schumer, McCarthy, Grant and most everybody here has a chance to score. And so they do.

“Force of Nature” is more solid and perfunctory than the even more exotic and atmospheric “The Dry.” But the players, the situations and the twists, which are pretty good, recommend it.

It’s a gritty and lowdown “showcase” in slumming, an attempt at a sort of Riley Keough re-invention for the well-heeled/married-well “Bates Motel” alumna.

It takes a lot of effort to achieve the “effortlessness” in Hathaway’s performance of a character seemingly tailor-made for her, but she rarely lets that effort show.

Not exciting, not funny, not quite sexy and pretty violent, considering the tone they seemed to be going for, Checkmate can’t even manage a draw.

It’s immersive and biting and fun to parse for its deeper meaning, even if it most certainly isn’t for every taste.

The picture is thus a mixed bag, rather like “Hobbs & Shaw” and “Deadpool 2,” and Leitch’s “Bullet Train” — funny, but leaning on Gosling’s twinkling charisma and inside-the-movies jokes and pratfalls to come off, which it does just often enough to recommend.

You’ve got to have more than good intentions and a grasp of how to do things on the cheap . . . to justify making a movie that’s already been made and a story that others have already told.

The tennis, with augmented sound, shotmaking, balls-eye-view camera work and the like, dazzles. And whatever the strengths of the leads, the sexual dynamics of this relationship are every bit as of America at this “moment” as the beautiful biracial player’s “color” that the script takes pains to point out.

There are clever ideas and casting flourishes at the heart of “Boy Kills World.” But in execution, one keeps coming back to the phrase “Less is more,” even in a hyper-violent action comedy where the excess is kind of the point.

Khoury’s light touch with a serious-minded script keeps the stakes low but intensely personal in what is essentially a story of a kid who risks his scholastic career, his good relations with his family and his “future” to impress a girl.

If its jolts are few, the chilling tone sells it as one of the smarter horror tales to come along of late, north or south of the border.

Entirely too much of the tale is given away in the trailers, which causes this Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett film, scripted by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, to lumber out of the gate and take a while to get going. And there’s a lot of momentum-killing “explaining” in the second and third acts that stops the gory fun in its pointe-shoes tracks.

The lapses in logic and anachronistic hardware, pistols that never miss and the like might make the historically-minded cringe. But if you like your commando raids bloody and bloody fun (at times), The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare more or less fills the bill.

Deadly Justice is a C or D movie thriller so badly scripted, amateurishly-acted and stridently-scored that you wonder where the money to make it, or make it all better, went?

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

“Sting” isn’t great fun or great really in any sense. But it’s not bad for a giant spider killer thriller B-movie set in snowy New York and shot in Australia.

The anarchy is mild-mannered, the sight gags limp and the human interactions produce no laughs and little in the way of charm, either.

Martin Bourboulon’s two films more than hold their own with Hollywood’s best versions of this classic cloak-and-swordplay mystery, preserving the surprises and adding a few fresh ones to iconic, noble-hearted “All for one, and one for all” heroics.

It’s a thriller with few new wrinkles to time-tested formulas. But the plot is within the realm of possibility and the perilous situations never quite stumble into “heroine tied to the railroad tracks” cliches, even though they come close.

It’s sometimes riveting, almost wrenching at others and kind of depressing. And it generally succeeds in its main mission, de-romanticizing “civil war” and “secession,” words that the glib, the rural, old-enough-to-know-better low-information voter types and their leaders throw around.

A Forgotten Man still makes for a most watchable account of a country that may have “gotten it from both sides” during the war, which acted out of self-preservation and self-interst, but which got an undeserved pass for its selective, opportunistic views of “neutrality.”

A comedy with no urgency, edge or stakes isn’t much of a comedy, with or without “pressure.”

Even the shortcomings in this documentary suggest it’s just another part of a long-overdue “moment” for two most-deserving musicans, still not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but “Closer to Fine” than ever.

“Catching Fire” makes an intriguing portrait because its first half establishes the Pallenberg in the public perception, and in her mind’s eye — a free spirit with a great eye for fashion.

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

It seems well cast and well-acted, but fundmentally misguided, dry and heartless.

I like the way Moss and McBaine set us up to accept stereotypes — about teenage girls and their priorities, about conservative Emily or confident liberal Faith — and then upend those expectations.

The lack of surprises, the contrived nature of the conflicts that turn into love connections and the cumbersome voiced-over-to-death technique and the abandonment of the whole “tearsmith” metaphor render this potential teen tearjerker nothing to cry over.

If only the film around these players had been more worthy of their efforts.

Monkey Man gives a well-worn genre a furious and funny kick in the ‘nads.

A light tone, just enough compelling back-stories and just-high-enough stakes make all the difference in the world between formulaic “plucky underdog” sports movies that work, and those that don’t.

What a charming little animated whimsy Chicken for Linda! is.

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

Heart of the Hunter strains to get out of its own way, a provocative action picture that wants to sprint and can’t stop stumbling and getting distracted all the way from the starting gun to the finish line.

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

It’s a lighthearted spectacle, but so disconnected from reality, narrative and human emotions that there’s almost nothing to it.

Action beats involving a river the distraught father tries to cross, heedless of the danger, and a frozen lake are impressive. It’s just that whatever they spent the money on — Donnie Yen, effects and location shooting — it wasn’t on a compelling or even all that competent script.

The Oath isn’t anywhere near compelling, convincing or even interesting enough to make that sale. The movie’s lifeless and generic, and does nothing to shake the sense that the theology behind it is probably balderdash.

In the hands of director Thea Sharrock, screenwriter Jonny Sweet and a sparkling cast, it becomes a parable on shifting social mores, sexism, morality confused with legality and women’s suffrage. It’s a vulgar hoot.

At some point, you either throw up your hands at any of these military recruitment films — American, Chinese or Indian — or just go with them, no matter how silly they start to seem, each in its own culturally-distinct silly ways. I just consistently roll my eyes and opt for the former.

The film that tells the story of his life skips over the unknown and never seems much more than a surface gloss. But it’s a fitting tribute to an unforgettable fringe figure who played an important role in the preservation of America’s Passtime.

King handles the flashy moments — a big speech or two, a firm stand on principle or three. But there’s just not enough here, and too much at the same time, for “Shirley” to come off.

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

Ebrahimi, dogged and fierce in “Holy Spider,” carries the picture by simply humanizing a character who could be Anywoman facing this sort of crisis in a foreign land, or a home country that disregards women’s rights.

Everybody strikes what seems to be the perfect tone for the material.

They’ve tapped into a fun angle to visit the “Devil, real or unreal” thriller genre, a “master tape” that comes close enough to broadcast standards to pass muster, and goes over-the-top enough to be fun enough to recommend.

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.

At some point, “cute” no longer figures into it, and you’re just joking around with guns and gunplay tropes that aren’t any funnier simply because they’ve already been beaten to death.

I was wholly taken in by the forlorn setting and by the racism subtext in play here. But too little happens in “Limbo” for my taste, and there’s a fine line between “patient” storytelling and a film so slack in its pacing as to lower the stakes and test the viewer’s patience.

This Irish Wish sits uneasily in the gap between “competent” and “moderately inspired.”

The Animal Kingdom does what it does fairly well. But what it does isn’t all that original, and lacks the pathos you’d think such a situation might generate in those who live through it.

The third act has higher stakes and violence and rituals that race against a clock. But by then the story’s spell has dissipated, and any hope the tale might twist into something scarier, sadder or funnier is long gone.

The Bloody Hundredth doesn’t cover much that’s new in its remembrance of this unit and the nature of the Western Europe air war. But it makes a fine companion piece to the series and the “real” Rosie,” Crosby and Richard Macon underscore its accuracy with their memories of the fight and their experience of it.

Scene after scene drags on past its usefulness. We “get” the tone, and yet are then subjected to 132 minutes immersed in that tone telling about 90 minutes worth of story.

The sad saga kind of plods along a predictable path — courts, violence, love — with only a couple of mild surprises in store in the third act. But no, there’s nothing remotely surprising in the finale.

This “Posse” is never much more than a mixed-bag — sometimes entertaining, sometimes pedantic, and never as quick or as nimble on its feet as it needs to be to come off.

American Dreamer doesn’t so much end as peter (Ahem.) out, with a finale that feels like a series of compromises which no one wanted to winnow down. But if you skip the movie leading up to that, you’ll be missing a lot of laughs and a tale that takes that “Peter Dinklage as sex symbol” thing about as far as it can go.

Problemista becomes the Great Tilda’s grandest playground, a chance to wear the wacky fashions, keep her hair at its unruliest and let her furious freak flag fly in the best “I want to speak to the manager” send-up ever.

The documentary does the best job of any film of rescuing the painter from the iconic, tragic artist who created the work by getting beyond the hair, the fashion sense and the eyebrow-lidded stare that one can’t help of think of when one hears the name Frida Kahlo.

Dark, darkly funny, surreal and nauseatingly violent, Love Lies Bleeding is a serious shock to the system.

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

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 movie’s third act is wholly about how this forgotten story came back to light, and while it is moving, it’s ungainly, and as generic as much of what’s come before.

Arthur the King is a sweetly sentimental story all but guaranteed to move any dog fancier to tears.

Some of it plays, some of it doesn’t. Brown isn’t bad, although her character’s coming into her own is so preachy and self-empowering that it’s eye-rolling time.

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

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

“Personal” picture or whatever larger objective Rehemeier was aiming for, he’s made a very long and not that funny comedy connected by disjointed and generally unoriginal scenes rather than a coherent narrative.

Dreamworks built its animation empire out of smart-mouthed, sight-gagged character comedies like “Shrek” and “Puss in Boots” and “Madagascar.” It’s not shocking that they came back to the “Kung Fu Panda,” as, like Pixar, they’ve hit the wall when it comes to new ideas. But even they’d have to admit that cashing-in on a time-tested intellectual property may make business sense, and that Po and Co. deserved better than this.

The best one can say for Spaceman is that it’s a trippy curiosity. The worst is that it’s a serious swing-and-a-miss for the Sand Man, and a career low for Carey M.

Your appreciation of Perfect Days hangs on how fascinating you think a toilet cleaner would be, and how much interior life you’re willing to add to Wenders’ repetitive and superficial “meditation” on such a character.

The Peasants is an engaging way of taking us back to a simpler time when the people are just as petty, inconsiderate and greedy as people have always been and always will be.

From Italy with Amore is like pasta your local Olive Garden left standing in water overnight. It’s shapeless, tasteless, inedible goo, and about as Italian as Chico Marx.

The acting isn’t awful, but the writing has degenerated from insipid to eye-rolling.

Left to his own devices, Ethan Coen — sans brother Joel — is just a generic vulgarian grasping for laughs out of an ill-considered cartoon of a cultural commentary comedy.

Ordinary Angels is a kind-hearted weeper that gets by on good vibes and the talents of the Unsinkable Hilary Swank.

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

As Catholic horror tales goe, Deliver Us is more of a good-looking failure than a scary, thrilling or entertaining dive into Church arcana.

The dry nature of the material and how it is treated limit the drama in this subject and flattened-out performances lower its entertainment value. But it’s daring, any way you slice that single potato wedge you’re having for lunch.

With this film, Villeneuve more fully realizes his overarching intent, and “Dune” becomes what it was meant to be pretty much all along — the “Lawrence of Arabia” of science fiction. It may not have the subtexts of “Lawrence,” but it’s smart and large scale, so that every frame reminds you “This is Epic.”

Red Right Hand’s not quick enough to be the gritty mixed-bag B-movie that was its destiny, but the players, the place and pistol-packing might be enough for those who go for that sort of thing.

It’s the very embodiment of The Wrong Stuff.

Seagrass is psychologically interesting, and touching here and there. But one can’t help but get the feeling our filmmaker never got out of the shallows.

It’s at its best when capturing the flavor of the fraught times Einstein lived in, especially his later years, when he — not unlike J. Robert Oppenheimer — was encouraged to mull over his role and even the idea of his “guilt” in unleashing the atomic age.

German comedies are an acquired taste, and some are so dry you can’t pick up on the fact that they’re supposed to be funny right away. Even by that bending-over-backwards criteria, even if comedy isn’t the main goal here, The Heartbreak Agency disappoints.

Tilk is properly gonzo in the lead role. But too much of what surrounds him is static, dull and listless. A vigorous edit might have helped. A bit of joking up the screenplay before rolling camera would have helped more.

There’s no guesswork to any of it, not in its “viral” climax or its inevitable Mr. Right. But maybe people who’ve never seen a rom-com will get something out of it.

There’s suspense in a few stand-off moments, but the plot’s twists grow less unexpected by the minute.

The fact that Lopez is a good actress underneath the “image” (and vanity) makes us believe her, even when we know better.

I thought it was entirely too on-the-nose, time and again, as it saunters towards a finale sure to surprise no one, even those it leaves feeling film-comfort-food satisfied at the end.

One can appreciate all that is accomplished with the bare minimum of visual variety and external clues, threats or assistance and still find this thiller wanting. At the end of the day, you’ve got to deliver some payoff worthy of the paranoia and suspense everybody is talking themselves into.

Land of Bad is a solid-enough B-movie combat thriller with the cast and production values of an A-picture.

“Jane the Virgin” alumna Rodriguez has the timing and bubbly energy to make her character tolerable in a slick movie that’s unoriginal, trite and cliched. She gives it her all, but this was never more than a feeble excuse for a Valentine’s Day romantic comedy.

It’s interesting enough as it invites the viewer into interpretations, messages it might be sending and observations Devos is making about our changing world and those best adapted to roll with those changes, taking comfort and pleasure wherever they settle and accumulate.

Madame Web is joyless, a “Jonah Hex” level disaster of a comic book movie.

If this isn’t the musical bio pic we would have hoped this truly larger than life figure deserved, it is perfectly serviceable. The performances ensure that there’s a charismatic, recognizably-human icon at its center, flawed and passionate and downright messianic at times.

The right emotional buttons are punched, enough of them at just the right moment for Bleeding Love to not bleed out. It plays like 12 step cinematic comfort food, and if you’re drawn to it and find yourself enjoying it, no “making amends” is necessary.

While actress turned director Carlson Young keeps the trains and planes running (slowly) on time, she doesn’t give us a single scene that pops, or production design that ever comes across as upscale, only little flashes of wit and fun from the veterans in the cast, who are better than the material. She’s managed a slick and shiny wish-fulfillment fantasy that is strictly downmarket — Hallmark movie chic.

It manages a moment, here and there and just a hint of who screenwriter/genuine “character” Diablo Cody (“Juno,” “Young Adult,””Jennifer’s Body”) once was.

The players make it likeable and allow the jokes to whizz by. It’s also lovely-to-look-at and laughably weird enough to play, which is all we’ve ever wanted in a Midnight Movie.

Although some discount this thriller for its simplicity and middle act shortcomings, genre fans will relish its grit, grim dilemmas and period-perfect detail, all in service of an entertaining and believable yarn that honors both the history and the erased history of the American West.

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

Will allows us to take 100 minutes and wonder anew how we’d react to the unthinkable, how we’d respond to the unimaginable, what line we’d draw and perhaps what side of the line we’d allow ourselves to stand on.

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.

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

It would be hard to understate how intensely lovable Scrambled is.

It gets the pulse racing every time the chips are down and the zombies won’t stay down and dead.

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

This Netflix production, scripted by Kaufman and perhaps rendered into something more sensible by co-writer and children’s animation vet Lloyd Taylor (“Nimona”) is fanciful but formulaic, and unlike most of Kaufman’s boundary-breaking writing, it’s downright derivative.

The frights may be standard issue, but that novel setting, the ways characters rise to or shrink from their greatest tests, and the grim nature of human life in this most fragile of ages make Out of Darkness a winner, right down to the minimalist pun of its title.

As “mixed bag” coming-of-age dramas go, Suncoast surprises with its heart and consistently punches above its emotional weight.

It’s not goofy, original or clever enough to dazzle and hold the attention of anyone over 12. But then, it’s not designed to.

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

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

Kaluuya co-wrote and co-directed the film, which may have nothing to do with its distracted focus and murky messaging. Or that may explain the movie’s failings entirely. Whatever the cause, it makes for a somewhat immersive mixed-bag of a movie, which puts a damper on any temptation to use “promising first film” in describing it.

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.

I.S.S. can be poignant and even pulse-pounding. But a promising lift-off, chilling set-up, dazzling production design and good effects can’t overcome a “more impressive than entertaining” label.

The lazy affluence of this script by writer-director Castille Landon, means no real locations are identified, no scenic spot is appreciated and nobody depicted isn’t beach-body ready to peel off this or that article of clothing for some PG-13 grinding that barely merits an R-rating.

The Promised Land, with its themes of futilely fighting a “rigged” system to change one’s status, with dubious rewards even if you win, makes a most worthy saga, even without the sagebrush.

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

Origin is noble, high-minded, moving and eye-opening. But as difficult as it was sure to be, shaping these themes, threads and characters into a movie, the film should have been sharper, tighter, poignant but more to the point.

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

This Dinner with Vampires is a few courses short of being a meal.

It’s a somewhat unfocused narrative, relying on music and “disco” dance as a bonding device, one of a few novel touches in a story that’s all-too-familiar.

Double Down South is a languid, drawling bore that’s about as interesting as the games that are its centerpiece.

Chen (“Wet Season” was his previous film) has made a movie of familiar themes and recognizable antecedents. But he offsets that by dropping us into an alien world so disorienting that little here neatly fits into a narrative box.

War Blade is of value only to filmmakers with big ideas and no money, or to film schools where it might be shown as an example of what you can manage on a shoestring, a generic script and no one on set who can block, stage, shoot and edit a proper fight to the death.

Statham, 56 and fit enough to bring the fury, benefits from impressive stuntwork — his own, his double’s and the legion of stunt men/minions he’s meant to stab, kick, punch and plow his way through. And everybody can toast the breathless editing from Geoffrey O’Brien, who should be on everybody involved’s Christmas card list after this.

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

It’s as fun as ever, and edgier than you remember.

Bayona also made one of the most visceral and moving survival epics in film history, the tsunami story “The Impossible.” He tells this tale of battling impossible odds with compassion and an empathy that make it quite moving at times.

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

There’s nothing interesting going on here.

It’s compelling because it reminds one that transgender discrimination is wrong, in every culture, and just how venal, backward and dumb a person doing the discriminating comes off, no matter what language they speak and cultural tradition they claim to be “defending.”

Good Grief is sober-minded, considered and almost sweet.

Samuel’s film is an embarassment of acting riches, laugh-out-loud funny when it wants to be and thought-provoking when it dares to be.

For all the appetizers, the endless array of main courses and diabetic coma desserts we see dished-up here, Anh Hung Tran gives us a meal that is more overwhelming in its scope than wholly satisfying in its consumption.

A couple of decent twists, some good performances and two grimly realistic third-act fights recommend this new film from the director of “Double Date,” Ying-Ting Tseng. Everything else? Tried and true and kind of worn out.

Stripped of story (mostly) and drama (almost entirely), what we’re left with is a lot of coital coupling and thrupling. Take away the “chapter” headings and this is straight-to-video titilation, and not all that titilating at that.

Night Swim never amounts to much more than a dip in lukewarm water.

The racing sequences here are next-level intimate, putting us in the car better than most any film that preceded this one. The crashes in that no-rollbar, pre-seatbelt era are horrific.

Mutt overreaches in the ways it folds all this drama into a single day. And maybe you can’t “have it both ways” in a movie on this touchiest of current hot-button subjects.

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

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

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

Visually, this is a most impressive effort. But it’s not particularly smart or witty or even kiddie profound in its messaging, and in avoiding easy laughs (jokes), it achieves liftoff even if it never quite soars.

Cast and crew ensure that the film is a brisk, upbeat, feel-good bounce through a story that has become an American classic, and well worth a holiday family outing at the movies.

It’s an engrossing story, even at its most gruesome or theatrical. For my money, it’s more satisfying, cinematic, exotic and allegorical than the thematically and historically similar “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Cute and quippy, Merry Little Batman is an adorably silly holiday goof on DC/Warner Brothers’ most valuable comic book franchise.

Blandly-cast, dully-scripted and flatly-directed, the only moments of life in this story are tucked in that eight-man rowing shell.

The leads are pretty much flawless.

A gripping story of idealism battered by bruising reality, high-handed authority and arrogant, misguided students who organize themselves to achieve maximum chaos, “Lounge” is a cautionary slice of education in an “Every parent’s an expert” era.

It’s light and fun and when all else fails, which it seldom does, the sheer scale of it all, that “bigness,” bowls you over and lets you and the kids leave the cinema with a big grin, and a big craving for chocolate before you get home.

A myopic, tense dystopian thrillers go, Concrete Utopia reels us in, jolts and even shocks us and gets the viewer thinking, at least a little. Not every action film or disaster movie can make that claim.

This grand curtain call is a much better gateway film for inspiring new fans of the undisputed master of his art form to dig into his back catalog and visit the striking and distinct worlds he dreamed up over his legendary sixty year career.

The performances are good, the wrestling thrillingly-shot and cut together. But with a meandering message and an ending that is almost a parody of the “paradise” these boys reach for, it’s forgiveable to consider “The Iron Claw” — scripted and acted to the limits of what the script serves up — as little better than a draw.

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.

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

Just as we’ve started to savor all the possibilities presented by this set-up, director William Oldroyd and screenwriters Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh take an abrupt, lurid and predictably melodramatic turn, and “Eileen” goes right off the rails.

Comedy is very hard to create out of hate.

Into the Weeds lives up to its title, thanks to having to boil complex science, a wide-ranging tragedy and scandal and mini profiles of those trapped in it or fighting in court into a 96 minute film. The film is a lot to digest and can feel cluttered and rushed, saving time for a long rap by aspiring musician Johnson in the closing scene.

Stolen Vacation is a stumbling, slow-footed Mexican “vacation” comedy (titled “Viaje Todo Robado” in Spanish) that barely gets out the front door, fails to arrive at its destination and never once gets up to speed.

There are bigger films and more entertaining stories coming to screens this holiday season. But there isn’t one more life and love-affirming than All of Us Strangers, a movie that reminds us that memory burnishes loved ones for a reason.

This version of the story has a few funny moments, but plays things straight and still manages to be a rewarding and enjoyable remake of this story of “Tous pour un” and “one for all.” Maybe they’ll find more of the “fun” in the second half/”sequel” — “The Three Musketeers — Part 2: Milady.”

Polaha, our lead, doesn’t embarass himself but doesn’t make Kevin a compelling enough figure to let him carry the movie.

Every element is measurably inferior to the original film — plot, jokes, sight gags (a clever optical eye-scanner joke lands), voices and design.

“Sweet” and “sensitive” may win the day. But this fight over Our Son is a little bland and predigested, and even if that underscores the point that marriage and family and the dynamics that create dysfunction are all the same (“Open marriage” included.), that doesn’t give this affecting film much room for surprise.

Keoghan — as innocent or cunning, oaf or graceful dancer-in-the-near-dark, will leave you amazed at this performance and startled at just what he was willing to do to fit in in “Saltburn” — the great house or the not-quite-great movie.

Even its occasional confusing moments add texture to this brittle but touching tale.

The stars have an unapproachability in their characters and performances that makes the whole enterprise play like a game in which we aren’t given all the rules.

These movies are rarely much more than background noise for holiday decorating/entertaining/cooking, or TV babysitting for parents trying to manage all that grownup stuff. Candy Cane Lane doesn’t offer much even for those being baby-sat, either.

For long stretches, Godzilla Minus One concentrates on relationships and conversations, which despite their intent, do little to advance the plot or illuminate simply-drawn characters.

Love John Woo. Love to see a few more action pics from him before he takes his well-deserved retirement. But as hymns to revenge on gangsters go, “Silent Night” hits too many of the same chords over and over, and without punchy, pithy dialogue, none of them are all that musical.

“Zone” is a cryptic, underexplained tale that buries us in banality and educates us about evil.

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

Mercy Road is meant to wrong-foot us, rattle us and make us nevous-to-the-point-of-panic, just like Tom. More often than not, that works in this.

What a maddening, convoluted and bizarrely complex comic thriller I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me is.

You like fights? All-Time High has a couple of all-time winners, bone-snapping brawls shot in long, beautifully-choreographed takes. But here, no matter how much blood is spilled and debilitating injuries or even death meted out, it’s mostly played for laughs.

This take on the tale offers little that’s new, but the sentimental draw of the story is as strong as ever.

The film is more creepy than scary, more interested in detailing the incantations and talisman’s of this “protect the harvest/village” faith. But the peril is palpable just often enough that we buy-in.

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

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

Fireline is worthwhile mainly as the background research for a more coherent, tense and nuts and bolts (fictional) feature film that recreates much of what we see here in more easily grasped recreations and better organized storytelling.

There just isn’t enough going on, enough to chew on or entertain, to make Tropic — remember the European Space Agency launches from tropical French Guyana — worth one’s time.

A screenplay that doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts, it’s a picture that stumbles along rather than progresses in any strictly linear sense. But that sometimes frustrating unconventionality — sometimes funny, often not — and the riveting presence of Nic Cage on center stage recommend it, in spite of everything else. Or maybe because of everything else.

Almost everything about the writing, publishing, fame-fighting and Monk confronting his own prejudices, seems truncated to make more room for family drama. And while the relationship with his sister (Ross) seems beautifully lived-in until it’s chopped off, and every moment Wright and Brown trade jibes, jabs and affectionate brotherly connections is rewarding, nothing else delivers at that level.

Luther doesn’t hit the story’s discovering-one’s-sexuality elements hard, and serves up little dollops of tribal wisdom that play as weary bromides. Benny should be hunting for “hózhǫ́,” a life that will make him happy and content.

An animated comedy that’s passably animated but generally unfunny.

One is left with the gnawing feeling that there isn’t much point to his Napoleon, that there are no messages/warnings for today in his narrative and that maybe his “take” on the character is more superficial than deep, more British monarchist than revolutionary and more set-pieces and romance than historically accurate and insightful.

It’s a road trip romance that doesn’t so much charmingly play out as dully pass by through a VW camper’s windows.

The story is off, the heart is missing and the laughs aren’t there.

It’s a Wonderful Knife doesn’t just slash through our expectations about what we’re going to see. It stumbles in managing the basics, starting with “Must make some kind of sense, surreal or otherwise.

The Cult of Roth will almost certainly eat this holiday horror feast up. But this turkey is never more than a mixed bag, and as the laughs peter out and the “clues” are contrived to fit the finale, “Thanksgiving” takes that tryptophan turn towards nodding off, the curse of Turkey Day since that first Thanksgiving — in Virginia.

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.

Good performances by Derbez and the kids recommend Radical. But wading through the cliches of the genre and stumbling towards that inevitable feel-good finale — blowing any “highs” the picture might celebrate, make it hard to recommend.

It is essential viewing for any fan of ’60s music history and The Rolling Stones’ place in it, even for those of us who haven’t forgotten Brian Jones and his place in it.

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.

Whatever leftovers The Holdovers serve up, Payne and his once-and-future-muse Giamatti make this cinematic comfort food perfectly palatable.

In an age when a New Prurience might be a part of the “Control Women” agenda that Poor Things is puncturing, Lanthimos, McNamara and Stone have given us a picture that prods, provokes and delights in any discomfort it might create, a bawdy odyssey that, whatever your reservations, insists on being the Must See Movie of the season.

The minimalist Share? does manage to be thought-provoking, just not thought-provoking enough to recommend, any more than its exercise in single-set-up filmmaking is.

Rustin is quotable, brisk and inspiring, even if it feels less epic than it should. It has the budget, cast and scale of a good made-for-TV/streaming movie, not really “theatrical” in scope.

The fizziness of it all kind of overwhelms some of the shortcomings and distracts us from others.

It’s slick and scenic and the stars wear their black robber unitards with French elan. But Wingwomen never adds up to the sum of its parts, no matter how many are added to it.

The dreamy, diffuse nature of reality in this narrative makes it feel incomplete. But Zalopany grabs our attention and has us fearing, not just for Kea’s precarious hold on survival, but for what we might not know about her that may or may not be revealed as she sinks or swims just off “Waikiki” beach.

The set-piece fights are epic, the “clean house” shoot-out is John Woo-sized and hell, this tiny dancer packs a flame thrower.

The predictability of much of what we see unfold here isn’t an asset. “Marsh King’s Daughter” can feel perfunctory, lacking the interior life that a novel gives characters. But the settings, the striking cinematography, sharp, suspense-heightening editing of the action beats and the stars lead this Marsh King’s Daughter out of the swamp.

As the folks in this rise and fall of Pharma Frauds saga could tell you, it’s the third act where all the consequences show up and the piper must be paid. That’s where this story’s make-or-break moments are parked, and there are too few of them to let it get off the screen with as much promise as it opened with.

Raba is a hoot, and even if Csokas isn’t in the bloom of brawling, villainous youth, he gives fair value and he and Brie and Raba and even Cena show commitment to their parts in all this far beyond what this nonsense deserved.

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

A Swedish thriller that picks off its characters, “Scream” or “Ten Little Indians” style, but satisfies us along the way, especially in the bang-up bloody finale.

It’s funny, here and there. Burr’s not a bad actor, and he surrounds himself with better ones. But this “Last Man Standing” is a smug, presumptuous, pose for any funnyman, even if you are slightly more evolved than Tim Allen.

A grueling, amusing and eventually inspiring bio-pic about the greatest long distance swimmer of them all.

Cailee Spaeny delivers a suppressed and yearning to break free performance in the title role in a movie that doesn’t give Mrs. Presley much in the way of fireworks as she struggles to gain agency in her life from a man who was, from her early teens (14) her entire life.

If you’re easily offended, or even have a modest vulgarity/raunch threshold, “Dicks” isn’t/aren’t for you. But in a midnight showing amongst the also-not-easily-shocked lovers of cult comedy dirty laughs, “Dicks” would be hard to beat. Ahem.

A lighter touch — it really wants to be a sentimental, downbeat comedy — might have made this yodeling Thai melodrama sing. As it is, it only hums along here and there, carried by its sweetness and superficially developed characters.

I liked the tone and the limited arcs the characters play out. Up to a point. Scenes are smartly conceived and well-played. But I don’t care how much or how little the film cost. There isn’t much going on here, and even some of that isn’t explained on the screen between the opening shot and the closing credits, which is where it counts.

It’s meandering and a little messy, and voice-over narrated almost to death. But the vivacious presence of newcomer Layla Mohammadi as spitfire daughter Leila and Liousha Noor as Shireen, her stern, disapproving “Strength of Silence” mother carry it with flashes of snark, spite and soul.

Being Disney-centric, there’s a lot here’s that’s been covered elsewhere in documentaries such as “Waking Sleeping Beauty.” But where “Pencils vs. Pixels” breaks new ground is in the transition that all but wiped out traditional hand-drawn animation.

The Burial makes an entertaining story about standing up to legal mistreatment, sticking up for the Little Man and punching up at predators who never seem to run out of ways to misuse and overcharge the grieving at their most vulnerable.