Roger Moore

Whoever is primarily to blame, Son-in-Law starts out confused and stays confusing almost to the can’t-come-soon-enough closing credits.

It’s a grand looking production and a well-cast, well-acted and high-minded film. But Hytner and Bennett have conjured up a Big Show and an Important Statement, and so cluttered the narrative that they lose track of which statements they’re serious about making.

Arnett’s funny. No doubt about it. But he needs material to work with, and “Is This Thing On?” doesn’t deliver it.

It may be straight-up melodrama, from its lone, corny, over-explaining flashback to the cliched drunk tank our hero finds himself in to the grim hysteria of an ambulance ride. Desplechin’s film still strikes enough of the right notes to be entertaining.

They all — including Irons and Johannes, who lost his band and record deal after Slovak finally made his Chili Peppers “side band” commitment permanent — come off as reflective, sober, compassionate and grateful to each other for the life-changing experience their stardom or near stardom gave them.

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

It doesn’t really work.

Hellfire is exactly the sort of movie you’d expect Dolph Lundgren to wind down his career with. Keitel and Lang deserve better.

Time and again, the screenwriters and director give us a hint that “reality” doesn’t figure into this school or its Shakespeare-quoting/street bike wheely-popping coeds, and that maybe they don’t know how steroids work and how long it takes for “roid rage” to kick in either.

Just when you think you’ve got a performer all figured out, they go out and surprise you with a sweet and sentimental story of love and loss and dogs.

The first act is mythic and mysterious enough to lure us in, before the cannibals show up, the implausibilities pile up and the holes in the plot turn out to be a lot bigger than anything a katana sword would make.

A Father’s Miracle is so corny and klunky that one wonders if any of the other versions have been the least bit believable. We know they were crowd pleasers, and this one might have an audience, too. One wonders just who might buy into something so tooth-achingly sweet yet darkly dopey at the same time.

The screenplay almost lets everybody down, and referencing Chekhov (“Three Sisters”) doesn’t amount to anything if you don’t inject more depth into the characters and situations as a consequence. But the settings are gorgeous. Some situations bear fruit and others deliver laughs.

Runt is a sweet and ever so slight Aussie farm country comedy in the “Babe” tradition.

As Accused wallows deeper and deeper into melodrama, with one-note performances almost making every character a caricature, the inescapable conclusion one leaps to is that this film’s late-to-the-game subject matter and quaint treatment of it was made by some seriously unsophisticated filmmakers.

Refuge is a frankly stupid and formulaic “whodunit” wrapped in torture, retribution and guilt from all the dirty secrets men keep.

Director and co-writer Gabriel Mascaro (“Neon Bull,” “August Winds”) keeps his film anchored in harsh realities of a present doomed to drift into an even uglier future, even as he traffics in allegories and parables and tropes of mythic trips of self-discovery dating back to Homer’s “The Odyssey.”

A fun and furious phenomenon of the ’90s New York punk scene is given its due and another faint glimpse of the spotlight in Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks, a wry, wizened and not remotely bitter doc about a band that never quite made it, but should have.

There’s witty banter about bank robberies in a “just tap your card” society — “Nobody uses cash any more.” And director Ben Wheatley (Free Fire and Sightseers were his) knows his way around a shoot-out, punch-out, snowplow chase or what have you. One film fan’s “predictable” can be a lot of filmgoers’ comfort food.

Sossai hasn’t made a movie that sentimentalizes alcoholism, but he has managed to suggest the mistakes, busted dreams, dashed hopes and futility of getting ahead or getting by in a barely-functioning democracy and permanently-rigged “market economy” that makes the bottle such an appealing escape.

Bacon plays a little and sings a little, Sedgwick handles jokes and pathos and in the scenes that count and turns “professional” in a heartbeat. And each gets across a shared empathy and humanity that bridges any gap in class and life experience.

Coogan, Cattaneo and screenwriter Jeff Pope have adapted a touching tale that is the Argentine penguin embodiment of “Keep Calm and Carry On,” for those who’re willing to see it.

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

Soaking up the one-liners and Hill’s antic but comically winded patter makes one wonder if even recasting the lead would have helped.

Films fail for a lot of reasons, almost all of them behind the camera — weak script, lackluster direction, poor pacing, etc. But every now and then, miscasting or an out-of-her-depth lead performance also takes some of the blame. Bailey isn’t up to carrying this off.

I thought I was settling in for something fresh, but the working class poverty is well-furnished and familial and entirely too tidy compared to “Rocky,” the underdog reaching for revenge and/or glory underwhelms and the darkest moments don’t move or touch the viewer in any meaningful way.

There’s no edge to any of this. The stakes are low and treated as no big deal.

An imposing and impressive lead performance somewhat atones for an awkwardly structured script and a charisma-starved supporting cast in A Great Awakening.

The leads are terrific, the bit players biting and distinctly believable “types.”

The Chinese thriller 731 is a wildly ambitious attempt to get a heroic horror movie out of an infamous crime against humanity.

The Secret Between Us is a static, turgid and low-stakes tale about lives disrupted by “secrets” plural, any and all of which have been potboiled to death on daytime soap operas going back decades.

The script runs out of fresh ideas and novel ways to challenge the dueling dancers quickly, and soon trips over its own tropes.

It’s a near miracle that anyone could get a movie out of this. But Ozon, like Visconti before him, has. It’s not for the sentimental, the conventional or the faithful. But The Stranger, in book or its latest cinematic form, is for the intellectually curious and questioning. Just don’t go expecting it to provide many answers.

A drama about an aged actor lost in his old roles, with two caregivers indulging his “harmless” dementia and acting out his old scripts with him, it lacks anything in the way of wit and much that would make it dramatic.

Taken at face value, Agent Zero isn’t bad, but it is heartless. The stakes are low, and we never really fear for our heroine as she seems invulnerable, if not exactly invincible. With this one, you come for the fights, sniping and shootouts and not much else.

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

While there are a couple of laughs and comical come-uppances, the picture drowns in its own gore.

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

Sinister as this often feels, the pedestrian direction, sloppy confusion of “frogs” and “toads” and the third act’s parade of perfunctory script beats bogs the film down. “Wetiko” never quite escapes the feel of genre pic that doesn’t quite come off.

The picture plays and Monroe and Withers make us invest in the characters and “This isn’t half bad” makes this a date movie that comes off, romance novel origins be damned.

No, there’s not much to this thin plot and the monotonous visual limitations don’t deliver the claustrophobia you might expect to heighten the growing dread. But for horror that’s alarming in the most primal, aural and piloerection ways, Undertone hits enough right notes to recommend.

It’s great that Sang found another way to chew on the facets, faces and foibles of his native land, one that didn’t involve ravenous zombies.

You don’t need a wine buzz to “appreciate” The Napa Boys, a vulgar, lowbrow and clumsily unfunny send of up “Sideways” and lots of pop culture of similar vintage. But it probably helps.

It’s always been a talky two-hander, a very static and melodramatic “filmed play,” in this case, with the filming taking place in a Buenos Aires park. But a lot of the comedy — old men lying, puffing up their past or having no tolerance for those who lie, the old “I’m not Rappaport” comedy sketch at its center — translates well enough.

Watching “Wuthering” as the hype fades just underscores what a tease the entire tale has been turned into. More sensual than sexual and far less sexy than it seems to take itself for, this rainswept, fog-choked “Wuthering” withers on the production-designed-to-death vine.

Whatever random “madness” envelopes The Bride’s mind, Gyllenaal gives us a jumbled peek at her stream of consciousness, too.

The slapstick doesn’t slap — not that often, anyway. And the one-liners don’t land. Even the “funny” voices aren’t funny, and the wacky character design seems lacking in the wacky.

Even if the surprises are few, the plot twists have a comforting subtext that leaves us with the hope that for Lamia, things might just come out all right — with or without baking The President’s Cake.

Co-writers Joe Ballarini and Frank E. Flowers (who also directed) cobble together characters and cliches from many a pirate tale for this ham-fisted affair, which sacrifices fun for fighting and sinks like a stone.

The “No one believes the truth any more” messaging may be timely, but this isn’t satire or even “high concept” silliness. It’s just an antic collection of almost-random scenes not-quite-sprinted-through by Rex, Cavalero and Milligan and slow-walked by Biggs, who is, as always, a good sport about it all.

The leads make it all likable and the stunts and editing are first rate even as stuntman-turned-director Olivier Schneider (“GTMax”) fails to deliver a single surprise or even delay this or that inevitable cliche.

Revealing, entertaining and touching.

Verbinski makes a striking return to risk-taking form with the ambitious, sometimes dazzling and even heartfelt Jeremiad Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

Money spent on this cast was well-spent. The performances are riveting but never shake the reality the players and Layton anchor their characters in.

Relationship Goals is as generic as a self-help book cover, and doomed to be forgotten as quickly as the book it’s based on will be.

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

Solo Mio is a mild-mannered comedy of the “Left at the Altar/Honeymoon Goes Wrong” school. It’s a little Runaway Bride, a lot of Honeymoon Crasher or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but without any of the edge or many of the laughs of its predecessors.

Even though it gives away one twist/gag too easily and tends to pummel us in the finale, I have no notes. This is a damned funny riff on “Survivor” and the very idea that the dainty McAdams might have a little “Misery” era Kath Bates in her.

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

For all the cans of worms it almost opens and doesn’t quite, it still tugs at the hearstrings as we remember the awful crime and the child who survived nearly a year of abuse, hunger and living under an abusive fanatic’s veil.

The Wolves Always Come at Night is a vivid document of a family and culture struggling to adjust to the harsh realities of climate change and just what that “change” means on a personal level to people who may not know the science, but they believe what they’re seeing with their own eyes and have experienced within their own living memory.

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

The Rip remains perfectly watchable, if a tad slow, more than a little confused at times and utterly mired in a mess of its own making in that head-slapping finale.

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

Mechanical/CGI shark attack simulations have improved over the decades, and are as terrifying as ever. But the longer this brief “inspired by true events” tale goes on, the more tropes and far-fetched cliches Roach-Turner trots out.

The lack of urgency lowers the stakes, and the “explanations” are less interesting than the mystery they purport to “solve.” The performances never rise above adequate into compelling territory. But at least the setting is a dazzler.

Band on the Run is a sweet little nothing of a roadtrip comedy where the “nothing” overwhelms the “sweet.” It has its moments. Just not that many.

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

Human interactions, human conflict (dog eat dog Darwinism), human intellect and human resolve never made it into the finished film.

Realistic mid-life concerns and life reassessments earn a drab and generally colorless going over in Blue Eyed Girl, a dramedy with little real drama and even less comedy.

Sure, it’s a Canadian indie dramedy by a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker. But writer-director Johnny Ma brings an outsider’s view and respect for Korean manners, mores and Kimchi to this wistful fish-out-of-water romance.

Yes, it plays like a piece of theater workshopped into various finales. And no, you never forget that what you’re watching is gimmicky. But so what?

It may be too “Cinema Appreciation 101” for many. But for those of us really into film history and the birth of a screen master making a movie DIY style, on the fly, on the cheap and destined to “change cinema,” even if only briefly as those “rules” for how to tell a story got set in stone for a reason, “Nouvelle Vague” checks all the boxes.

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

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

Howell-Baptiste makes a mesmerizing yet earthy and “real” tour guide through the meandering narrative of We Strangers. She’s the best reason to watch this inscrutable film that’s easy to take-in but tricky to decode, based on what’s included and what’s left underdeveloped or simply undeciphered.

Rigidly formulaic and strictly low-heat as far as romances go, I’m guessing you can guess every turn the plot takes just by my listing the pertinent plot points.

Writer-director Kayci Lacob frames her debut feature with the dullest author’s public book reading ever, and trots through an utterly conventional collection of genre cliches as she tries to make the story of a child-teen-coed obsessed with becoming Steve Jobs interesting. She fails.

I’d call the title “Relentless” truth in advertising, althought “Pitiless,” “Endless” and “Senseless” work just as well.

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

I Was a Strranger is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate.

Winslet, as actress and director, gets us to the emotional core of the story with skill and compassion even as her movie introduces its emotional buttons, one by one, before punching each in turn with a care and sensitivity that make this “Goodbye” therapeutic as well as over-familiar.

It’s a beautiful film, equal parts sentimental and bluntly realistic. Like “Honeyland,” what Kotevska is capturing is a vanishing way of it.

In Safdie’s film, all this expended on screen energy and effort isn’t edifying or rewarding. It’s just exhausting.

If you’re allergic to “cute,” stay home. Otherwise, pack your hanky and try to keep your singing along at a level that it won’t drown out what’s coming off the screen. Because what Brewer, Jackman and Hudson cook up here is comfort food at its most comforting.

The results are even worse than you feared.

The picture simply isn’t pitched in a light enough tone to work as comedy, and the “mystery” isn’t mysterious enough to come off either. A reach for “shared humanity” rings hollow.

Dogged determination in the face of hopelessness is the byword in writer-director Kim Byung-woo’s thriller, which is meant to be an action essay in the core compassion of humanity. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” may suit the mood this film sets. But keeping calm and carrying on is a hard ethos to shake when the stakes are this high.

James Cameron was very much running out of interesting things to say and show in his “Avatar” franchise with the second movie, Avatar: The Way of Water. The third film, Avatar: Fire and Ash confirms that fear and adds on a dose of dread for good measure. On no, the 70something sci-fi impressario has two more “Avatars” in the works.

There’s promise to this or that character and in the twists that almsot certainly played better in the novel than Feig manages on screen. But the promise is squandered in a pokey, obvious movie that stumbles towards stupid in the anti-climactic latter acts.

The Fakenapping isn’t very good. But it’s got possibilities.

There is a hint of pathos, here and there. And Olsen, more interesting than amusing in this role, tries her best to wring emotion out of this bummer/bauble of a movie. She can’t, and Teller and Turner — who have some comic chemistry together — have no more luck transcending this lavish setting in search of a better story.

This well-intentioned dramedy goes wrong right from the start and careens downhill from there.

The Chronology of Water” can be more soberly appreciated on general release for Poots’ fearless, put-it-all-out-there performance than for Stewart’s early missteps and her exploitive mania for the explicit and the repellent, “truth” or fiction.

There isn’t much to this.

The lives themselves are interesting, even if we only get a glimpse of them, even Cass’s. But truth be told this never really ties the Cass story to the immigrant story (he did the same sort of work in his day, we surmise, and might be prejudiced) and never amounts to much more than a selection of snapshots.

Clooney? When he has a comical moment, he makes the most of it. His attempts at heartfelt epiphany left me cold.

It comes off, it plays and it entertains. And the impressive, high-end Sunrise Animation Studio production values — realistic landscapes, clever character designs and tje scale of a capital city under construction (Gibeah, pre-Jerusalem) — are just the icing on the cake.