Roger Moore

No matter how convuluted and contrived the situations, motivations and conflicts within might seem, no matter how obvious the need to jam in other exotic, tourist-brochure locations, no matter how many female leads Cruise interacts-but-never-quite-“clicks” with, the entertainment value remains right on the edge of off-the-charts.

For all his “slow cinema” indulgences and patience-testing “patience” as a story teller, the old master Davies, Lowden (“Dunkirk”) and the poet Sassoon mentored make sure Benediction leaves us with an emotional punch that no film this year can match.

Tobias Lindholm’s film has documentary realism even in its more melodramatic moments.

The performances click, although I have to say nobody here generates much in the line of pathos.

If you know “Ikiru,” you remember how all this plays out. And Ishiguro’s script hits not just the same notes as Kurosawa’s original screenplay, but the right ones.

This is a movie that floats by on dazzlingly silly banter and well-slung slang.

The Croods: A New Age has some of the derivative limitations of the first film — the faint whiff of riding “Ice Age’s” coattails. But the players make their slapsticking, pratfalling, punking and pranking characters breathe, live, love and care.

With Invisible Hands, filmmaker Shraysi Tandon has made a damning expose, and a documentary piece of advocacy journalism.

Forget the cop-out of an anti-climax that the makers of The Policeman’s Lineage insisted upon, and you’ve got a decent thriller built around the struggle for a young Korean cop’s soul.

Sorelle and her documentary-real characters and the grounded unknown players playing them humanize their culture and show us their challenges are versions of all our challenges, no matter how many generations removed from it we think we are.

It was always going to be a chilling, emotionally deflating film. Kurzel and Grant double-down on that by not showing the murders and not focusing on the victims. And they finish it off with a coda that doesn’t let the way this slaughter impacted Australian society get sugar-coated, the way it’s often discussed in the US.

Erlingsson takes a fairly cut-and-dried caper comedy and tosses twist after twist into it, letting Woman at War surprise us just as often as it repeats a running gag (the poor, cursing bicycle-camping Spaniard).

That warhorse genre “the police procedural” earns a fresh look with the French drama The Night of the 12th, an uncommonly sensitive inside-view of a grim case and its toll on the friends and family of the victim and the increasingly frustrated detectives working it.

Law can still make us smell the sweating his characters do when they’re gambling, striving and hoping like hell to keep all the balls they’re juggling in the air just a few moments longer.

It stands with the greatest racing movies ever, and it’s certainly the most entertaining. But there is no doubt about one last superlative. Ford v Ferrari is one of the best pictures of the year.

Frenetic scenes over-stuffed with pop art/comic-bookish visuals, politically-savvy “tech is taking over” messaging and a handful of seriously silly and over-the-top moments give The Mitchells vs. the Machines its fizz and buzz.

I still found it engrossing, and in a country where most hotels have chambermaids that look just like Evelia, occasionally moving and often troubling.

The film is more overwhelming than uplifting.

Rimini is a darkly-comic Austrian tale of a Lounge Singer in Winter, figuratively and literally.

The cinematography darkens the tone, the performances — especially Smith, Way and young Millard-Lloyd, revel in reality. And if at the end we feel no more for “Ray & Liz” than they apparently did for their own kids, that’s a final, cruel endorsement of the truth acted-out by all involved.

Rockwell’s achievement is to script a simple character study, cast it with an actress up to turning it into a tour de force, and making the entire enterprise a history lesson in the true cost of Giuliani’s “more livable city” experiment.

The Proposal is serene, patient and sucks you into this quandary with skill. To her credit, Magid makes us care, even though we’re not sure what she’s got in mind or if she’s as persuasive as she thinks she is.

Western Stars isn’t misguided. It’s just dull and self-serious. But if you’re Bruce Springsteen, nobody around you’s going to point that out.

There’s nothing deep in this Banana Split, nothing remotely moving or profound. But Marks (TV’s “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”) and Liberato (“If I Stay”) let us believe these two would connect, push each other’s buttons and bruise each other, and in just that way — just not in the way the title implies.

The Flash, while it never comes close to the gee whiz “I can do THIS?” novelty of the many Spider-Man “origin” iterations, makes a charming, nostalgic and sometimes touching addition to the genre, and lets us hope Miller will recover enough to return to acting this character and others.

“Not awful” is Emmerich’s victory, here.

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

It’s all a bit much, as the picture’s two halves are in no way equal, and the post climax scenes, reaching for “healing,” tend to soften the film’s blows. The emotions stick, but feel rather flat after the tension and release of the opening scenes. That robs Waves of the gut punch we feel coming, even after the anti-climax has slow-walked out of the gate.