Roger Moore

Co-writers/directors Sam and Max Eggers go for symbolic nightmares and simple toilet-accidents for shocks and wicked sneers that only Belinda sees to set us up for something more fraught, fundamental and final than their movie delivers.

You always cut a little slack for trash cinema that knows it’s trash. So props to the folks who made the green screen monstrosity Beyond Skyline, a creature-feature sequel to the 2010 aliens-invade-LA thriller “Skyline.”

As Long as We Both Shall Live is underpopulated and lifeless, as stark as Nya’s stand-up comic pal’s act, and the anemic response to it.

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

There’s barely an original thought or novel theme in Creed II, a movie that wrings more bloody-nose money from the original “Rocky” sequels in recycling characters, themes, fights and situations and putting Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson instead of Stallone and Talia Shire in them this time.

Any grace notes 70something Liam Neeson brings to his aging and about to become infirm man of action in Absolution are pretty much overwhelmed by cliches, loose ends and overreaches in a sloppily pieced-together screenplay.

“Vanishing” is ambitious, but in every trite, pat and melodramatic way you can think of.

A crowded cast of some of the finest actors in the cinema act the hell out of a gimmicky, episodic, hit-or-miss script in Brooklyn’s Finest, Antoine Fuqua’s latest attempt to relive the glories of "Training Day."

Leave this one to fans of the series, because as a stand-alone movie, it’s a dud.

It’s easy enough to follow, but annoying in that we know we’re wasting brainpower piecing this pointless jumble together.

While writer-director Greg Jardin does his level best to bowl us over with “technique” (split screens, endless 360 degree handheld pans, etc.) and does a decent enough job at complicating his role-playing-game-run-amok plot, a somewhat bland cast of players can’t manage to convince us that they’re possessed by the mind and spirit of someone else.

A “high concept comedy” from the days when those were a thing, it’s basically a cacophony of cameos and random sight gags hurled at the viewer in a tsunami of haute couture hype.

The Case for Christ won’t convert any critical thinker, but more disappointingly, it fails as faith-based entertainment. It’s a house of cards built to defend a house of cards, with meek-inheriting the Earth acting in the bargain.

Perhaps the Russians should stick to that which their cinema is famous for — brooding romances, laments for the long lost glories of communism, and fake viral videos. This comic book adaptation thing evades them.

This thoughtful but windy and winded sci-fi thriller shortchanges the science – understandably - and the thrills. The directing debut of “Dark Knight” cinematographer Wally Pfister is a mopey affair with indifferent performances, heartless romance and dull action. It transcends nothing.

It’s as random as its title suggests, a genre flick that doesn’t do much more than stumble and angst-out from one killing to the next.

The plot feels played and the stakes feel low.

Your level of enjoyment of Areel Abu Bakar’s film is predetermined by how much you enjoy little snippets of exotic scenery (and plenty of ugly rice paddy ditches, back alleys, etc) and your tolerance for the tedium that precedes the “Brawl in the Bus,” “Melee in the Market,” “Duel on the Docks” and “Fight to the (not quite) Death in the Factory.”

This “Kid” is somewhat better than the one Chan made with Will Smith’s kid several years back, but “Cobra Kai” fans may find the generic plot weighs down the punches too much to be worth the trouble.

When a movie has long-established its rhythm and basically admitted it has none and then bursts to life — even briefly — it’s worth noting.

The best that can be said for “Step V” is that it has some sparkling moments of choreography, clever gimmicks as themes for the dance-offs and lovely costumes.

Snook does a nice job of unraveling, and LaTorre makes a perfectly infuriating, undisciplined child. But Run Rabbit Run never moves at anything faster than a saunter, and takes forever to stop meandering about and get on the obvious horror parable it is trying to put over.

No One Gets Out Alive is more a director’s ominous looking show-reel than a coherent, frightening horror tale.

There are interesting story elements and locations. But the claustrophobia of the car works against it.

The story shuffles between dark comedy and clumsy mystery, monster movie and psycho-drama, with no character or performance generating a whit of sympathy.

That assault is dully-staged and filmed by director Aku Louhimies, as is every counter-assault and border crossing that follows. This or that moment plays well enough. But this ungainly beast is hard to follow. It’s even harder to invest in any character in it.

A nearly laughless comedy that doesn’t do its writer/director/stars any favors.

The scariest thing about The Darkness turns out to be the trailers to this summer’s more promising horror offerings, “Lights Out” and “Don’t Breathe.”

Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms offers up a heaping helping of eye candy and treacle for the holidays, If only they’d had a coherent story and a good actress in the lead. If only those were the only two serious shortcomings in this brainless, cotton candy bauble.

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

There’s novelty in their “find another way” around violence conflict resolution messsaging, the effects are excellent, if not quite at a Marvel level at the moment and it finishes well. But bland leads, a story that feels similar to many other “Spy Kids” adventures and the paucity of colorful supporting players kind of washes the Spanish/Spanglish fun right out of this most Tex-Mex of kids’ franchises.

The characters are thinly sketched in, even if the leads manage something approaching two dimensional.

Take the title as a warning. This isn’t a “Harbinger” of disaster. It’s just all portents of evil, and precious little that’s entertaining comes with it.

If your thriller’s quick enough and cryptic enough, viewers won’t notice it’s not remotely as clever as you thought it was. But when you title your ghost story The Ruse, you’ve already given away that.

The sum of Fathers and Daughters is so much less than each of its individual parts. A misshapen attempt at maudlin (not unlike Muccino’s other Hollywood films), it enrages, here and there, but rarely touches or moves us.

It’s still just a patience-testing bauble for anybody over the age of 12. The Turtles, in this latest incarnation, were and remain shiny but stupid entertainment for kids.

They’re “colorful,” but only barely. The characters are just sketched in and the performances don’t add much to those sketches.

Most of the attempted humor here is about clueless old folks still able to get a dirty job done and the enervating shrug of deciding whether or not to just “give up” themselves. The fights are fun, but far between.

Whatever it wants to say about abuse, its mental, social and sexual impact on its victims, however “daring” it aims to be, Back Roads loses in its pursuit of the sordid.

The players vary in their commitments, from barely worth the effort to trying too hard. The third act delivers a couple of warm moments that lift it. But this picture’s a corpse still being shock-paddled and CPR-pounded on the operating table.

This lean indie picture runs out of surprises early and never overcomes flat, uninvolving acting, primarily by the eyepatch-wearing filmmaking in a tour-de-dull performance.

Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name,” “I Am Love”) gives us a challenging puzzle of an indulgence that rattles on and on, like a hearse with blown shocks, well past its point of resolution.

This Herefter, despite the odd engaging moment, is a terrible letdown, like investing in a belief system and discovering there's no "here" that you've been after all your life.

The direction, by Cyrus Nowrasteh (“The Stoning of Soroya M.”) lacks urgency or art. The performances are, for the most part, emotionally flat.

That simple quest, packaged in a 95 minute movie, takes forever to play out thanks to one eye-rolling Pause for a Monologue after another.

A thriller that isn’t thrilling, a horror comedy that rarely produces more than a chuckle or three, a sentimental tale that can’t quite wring a tear out of death and loss, “We Have a Ghost” dishonors pretty much every hit film it steals from.

All this cinema-talk analysis is tedious, making the movie Malcolm made sound tedious, too. And all this theatricality in the writing, blocking and acting always leads to a film that keeps the viewer at arm’s length. No amount of Washington shouting or Zendaya overwhelmed in his tsunami of speechifying changes that.

No wit, few frights and not much in the way of thrills, either.

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.

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

It's only a movie, and not a remotely effective one. And for Zellweger, whose "Miss Potter" and "Appaloosa" were barely seen, with "Leatherheads" and "New in Town" further deflating her A-list clout, that's the real shame here.

Salt and Fire is an odd environmental thriller, a perhaps-promising project that attracted Michael Shannon and Gael Garcia Bernal to Bolivia to see what this mad genius would make of it. Not much, as it turns out.

An excruciatingly empty chunk of eye candy that spends over two hours trying to convince us they’re not ripping off “Dune.”

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.

The milieu is more interesting than anyone in it and anything they do or have happen to them in Ragged Heart, an earthy dive into the underbelly of a “music scene that was” — Athens, Ga.

With the romance not clicking and the resolution lacking much of anything that tugs at the heartstrings, Running with Grace never rises above “Walking in Place.” And that, as you know, never gets you anywhere.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, what we see on the screen is gloriously over-designed joylessness.

A mad mash-up of sci-fi, Western, sacrilegious silliness and vampire movie. What lifts it to "I've seen worse" status is the previous teaming of star and director Scott Stewart, who last gave us the archangel fighting off other angels fiasco "Legion."

It’s so pretty that it almost fills the bill as holiday TV babysitting for little kids, and so slow that they’re almost guaranteed to not sit still for it.

Whatever its intent, White Bird in a Blizzard misuses most everybody involved, especially the dazzling young star of “The Descendants,””The Fault in Our Stars” and “Divergent.”

In Search of Fellini fails to figure out twee, and more’s the pity, because the fellow who gave his name to the title perfected that — in decades of subtitled films made in his native Italy.

Interminably slow of foot, filled with static, anachronistic and politically correct sermons performed in a whisper, bloody-minded outburst interrupting the beautiful scenery photographed like a cut-rate cable TV movie, it is an utterly inept outing from the director who got Jeff Bridges his Oscar.

It’s just another sign that this generation of bottom-line-obsessed execs at the House of Mouse has lost the thread. Nobody there seems to “Whistle While You Work,” and the evidence is turning up on screen.

A screen romance that echoes its title. It gets by. Barely.

The script leaves a lot out, the acting is competent — everybody pants in fear when appropriate — if not compelling. The direction limits the gimmicks to a single yanked-out-of-the-frame shot and the script is most concerned about not wasting a moment between the next application of that knife-plunging-into-flesh effect.

Overlong and entirely too ambitious in the number of “issues” it tries to cover, To Save a Life wanders all over the place before reaching its very predictable conclusions.

It's a fitfully amusing, not remotely scary slasher picture.

Late to the game, blandly cast and scripted with every Italian American cliche in the “How to Make Spaghetti” cookbook, it is Eastwood’s worst film as a director.

The slow pacing and elementary mistakes about how to frame, light, film and edit horror to make it shock and awe render this otherwise good-looking, stark and elemental thriller too bland to pay off.

A picture whose picaresque premise holds more promise that its star or director deliver.

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

Maybe this is Zack Snyder’s “first, best destiny” as a filmmaker. But when he can’t even get through a formulaic zombie picture without crawling, maybe he was never destined to deserve final cut.

It's all tiresome, muddied and artlessly made.

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.

That Disney touch (which even Disney has trouble replicating) is missing. Even the hockey is unconvincing.

The messy tangle of the plot, which involves Steve-Bruce getting knocked out, more than once, does little more than throw a whole lot of potentially silly stuff against the screen — some of it landing laughs.

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

The one gag that works is probably a little racist, or at least racially touchy. Jackie Chan voices the lead mouse in a sea of martial artist mice who beat the purple out of Surly any time he ventures into Chinatown.

Crackling scenes mix with clunkers, clever twists meet cliches and its all a hash when it comes to justifying the “team” set up in this mass shooting spree thriller To Catch a Killer.

The David Loughery script — he wrote Ealy’s “The Intruder” — wins points for attempted twists, but frankly they don’t build suspense or deliver shocks, so what’s the point?

But the half-hearted attempts to build a hero’s quest story about these increasingly collectible toys and ongoing campaign to wash the humanity right out of the franchise is something all the shiny, tactile and identifiable Freightliner, Porsche or Ducati parts in humanoid robotic form cannot hide.

The best movies like this do a much better job of selling the building terror, the fear of a gruesome injury or death by being eaten alive– drowning in the process.

Director Michael W. Watkins, whose decades of TV credits go back to "Quantum Leap," manages one clever visual gag - a bus wreck, observed from the far side of a cornfield. We hear a crunch, see a telephone pole wobble and a little puff of smoke. Then Watkins blows the moment with a fiery overkill.

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.

Schadt has the makings of a close-to-the-vest thriller like “The Loft,” but Silent Panic might have been more at home taking a “Weekend at Bernie’s” dark farce direction.

With all the emphasis we put on “plot” in the movies, novelty in the setting, situations and obsessions of the characters, it’s a shame when a comedy comes along that can’t make the most of a good one.

There isn’t much to this that will appeal to anybody over the age of eight. But the film’s real sin is in how it shortchanges the legend and the Mexicanness of all this.

The Meg 2: The Trench loses the benefit of being an off-the-wall big-budget B-movie surprise, and it loses most of the laughs served up by the monster movie that took the summer of 2018 by surprise.

I’ll admit I was probably too sober watching this to appreciate its finer points — or ignore how much the picture slows down in the middle acts. But for me, Ninja Badass runs out of gas at about the “half-assed” point.

Beezel won’t surprise anyone who has seen more that three or four horror films. But it’s far from awful, with decent performances, makeup, effects and “shock me, baby” editing.

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.

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.

Whatever its ambitions, this is just another vengeance fantasy and one that doesn’t transcend its genre.

Even Spiderverse-savvy Spiderman might consider this singularly confusing, a botched effort to say something scientific-sound and profound in a story that’s basically a lawyer-novelist riffing on “The French Connection,” and doing it badly.

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.

The good intentions are obvious, but the movie wrapped around them is a something of a bore.

The Life of Chuck has a resignation and a timeliness to it that render any “escape” it might offer moot. Every viewer brings his or her own baggage into the cinema, but whatever might have touched many seems buried under disorganized treacle.

The problem with Dead Don’t Die is that it just doesn’t play. Jarmusch’s style doesn’t fit the material at feature film length. The long double-takes and slow-burn reactions, in this context, don’t delight, tickle or amuse.

The title performance, the awful lip-syncing, the utter lack of stage presence, cripples this movie in ways no mere maudlin cover of “Nights in White Satin” in Italian could.

This is like watching the paint dry in the still-new Tyler Perry Studios soundstages.

Big Muddy is a big ol’ muddle of a thriller, a lot of dangerous characters converging, from various parts of the Canadian prairie, on a femme fatale and her teenage son. It’s a modern day Western, a B-movie that founders on a weak leading lady and a stumbling lack of urgency in the direction.

A little Kevin Hart goes a long way in Ride Along, a dull buddy picture engineered as a vehicle for the mini motor mouth and the perma-sneering Ice Cube.

10 Cloverfield Lane is built on the fear of an unknown that we know. Turns out, all that secrecy and hype and branding the “Cloverfield” name were not just this product’s marketing strategy. That’s all they had. Period...So, “Room” is still in theaters. It’s more harrowing, more terrifying, more thrilling and moving than Cloverfield Lane could ever hope to be. Go see that instead.

Mom’s Night Out sets itself up for laughs that it rarely delivers.

It’s all so obvious and (unintentionally) laugh-out-loud funny...Seriously, if you’re not five steps ahead of The Fifth Wave, you need to have yourself tested.

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 wheels come off Shortcut pretty much the moment the kids have to flee that bus.

Lopez and Duhamel — who has done his damnedest to create onscreen chemistry with the likes of Julianne Hough, Elisha Cuthbert, Megan Fox and (shudder) Katherine Heigl — click and almost will this into being more fun than it should be.

The limp start and depressed finish make Hooking Up a sex comedy in which you can like the cast even as you give up on the movie. Early.

Nothing much happens here. It’s scenic, but writer-director Alexander Janko has cast the thing with no flavor. Nobody has an accent, not even the local Cape Cod characters.

Loud and tedious, “Die Hard 5” is a shaky-cam/Sensuround blast of bullets and bombs, digital explosions and death defying feats of defying death.

A messy, indulgent and shallow movie.

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.

The Tax Collector fails on Ayer’s watch. The script is something of a muddle, with abrupt, illogical turns and too much time spent immersing us in Ayer’s version of LA Latinx culture, with a gang twist.

The execution of writer-director Seth Worley’s doesn’t turn up pathos or laughs. And the kids? Well…

The resolution’s both predictable and perfunctory. “Unsatisfying” comes with the package, and that goes for the movie itself — lazy pop psychology, underdeveloped sociology and psychology and an allegory that never comes close to sticking the landing.

It’s just a spooky period piece with some neat red fog effects, tepid dialogue and a mystery so slow to unravel, with so little urgency to it, that simply sticking with it to the closing credits might be the biggest test of all.

There isn’t much more to this than that — a couple of frights, a growing suspicion, and some dry jokes. Kudos to Dormer for getting a paid vacation to Japan, and not having to strip to play it.

While I appreciate any faith-based film that isn’t all about the anger and intellectual dishonesty of “God’s Not Dead,” there’s no endorsing a fairy-tale this literal and insipid.

It’s a perfectly pleasant sit-through of a couple-trying-to-become-a-triple comedy, even if pretty much every single situation, from first scene to its last, slaps you in the face with “Where’d I see THAT before?”

Promised Hearts never for an instant lets us lose hope that true love will find a way, which is a universal message every romance hews to. But the film requires too much patience and relies on too many hoary plot devices to have a prayer of coming off, at least in much of the rest of the world.

With no building of suspense, little connection with a lot of the thinly-scripted characters, and no volcano movie ever having much of a story to go with its effects, Skyfire still falls short of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano,” even if it is marginally better than “Miami Magma.”

The first hair-raising moment comes 50 minutes in, but the deaths are anti-climactic even as the chilling tone is maintain, largely through dim lighting and very good actors

The most credible material here might be the samples of 1950s “flying saucer mania” movies, connecting all this to Atomic Age zeitgeist in perhaps the most paranoid corner of a pretty paranoid country.

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.

It’s coherent enough, but entirely too long and unpleasant when it could have been one brutishly edgy hoot after another.

No, the “subjects” aren’t interesting. At all.

It’s not just that Kindred doesn’t go full “Rosemary’s Baby” with why these strangers want her to have her baby at home where they can get at it, or that we get little clear notion of why they won’t let her “Get Out.” It’s that the movie has very little, suspense and thrills-wise, to offer instead.

Nobody has much that's funny to say or cool to do. Even the spy gadgets are lame.

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

It’s all just as soapy and unreal as “Downton Abbey,” with little of the mother-daughter-“sacrifice” of poignancy of “The Joy Luck Club.”

Clinical as a classroom lecture, it’s a limp sadomasochism primer, which explains both the runaway success of the E.L. James novel and the startling pre-opening sales stats from America’s Promise Keepers belt.

Boring characters boringly-played.

A few frights pay off, but most don’t. The performances are TV-series flat — designed for close-ups.

The entire affair plays as pro-forma, pre-ordained, pre-digested and pre-dictable.

Choppy and bordering on incoherent, Bullet to the Head is Stallone's answer to Schwarzenegger's "The Last Stand," an action exercise in "Here's how we used to do it."

A rowdy, random and not-nearly-raunchy-enough misfire in that regard, a buddy picture with stolen money from work, stolen concert tickets, stolen drugs and one guy’s dream of flying off to Brazil and getting into the healthy rainforest nuts export business.

The payoff doesn’t totally makeup for the longueurs that introduce Alone With You. But there’s promise enough and the picture’s short enough that it’s not a total waste of time, or waste of a lot of time.

It stops making sense about thirty minutes in and never recovers.

It’s formulaic, rarely funny and seriously cynical for a movie aimed at small kids. But a couple of moments have a lovely and quite-unexpected pathos to them.

It all feels like a story and characters and plot resolution that we’ve seen scads of times before.

An undemanding, childish adventure picture.

A sequel to This is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary that really invented that label, can’t help but play as winded, gassed, joked-out and pointless.

The production values and high-caliber cast suggest Big Game had better intentions than results. Helander may have memorized “Die Hard” and “Air Force One” and “Olympus Has Fallen.” But his version of that formula, given the loopy twist of making a woodsman/kid the hero “with particular skills,” loses most everything in translation.

There isn’t much here, and there’s absolutely nothing here we haven’t seen in every other summer camp comedy — on film or on TV — that preceded this one, including the fact that Christopher Lloyd’s on board.

Despite an epic fight or two, Parker robs us of the revenge, the suspense of the hunt, of Parker's methodical way of tracking down those who betrayed him, one by one.

The dull screenplay does the actors no favors, and the charisma-starved players respond in kind.

The germ of an idea is here. I’m just not sure it’s worth more than a shorter film than this one, which at 80 minutes is a bit of a drag.

Moore, doing a variation of her vile “Disclosure” character from back in the ’90s, makes a fine foil for the others, who only need sharper lines and more inventive situations to give this picture a chance. Which it never has.

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.

Hawaiian-born director Keoni Waxman treats us to a veritable Hong Kong travelogue of sights and street scenes, a shiny utterly empty-headed romance with none of the grit of Hong Kong action and little of the charm of a normal romance, because almost everybody here is too obnoxious to relate to.

About a third of the short films land a few laughs. But even the weakest material is lifted by the actors.

Director Barber makes the period video look exactly like misplaced family home movies — rolling picture, static, shaky, the works.

As sex farces go, A Nice Girl Like You is about as nasty, dirty and funny as a sitcom…on The Disney Channel.

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

Even the absurdly callous and well-equipped coroners (Matt Passmore, Hannah Emily Anderson) barely manage to wipe the smirks off their faces as they examine corpses.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is more Gatling guns and grenades than The Brothers Grimm.

There are plenty of possibilities set up here, most of them blown. There’s no Mike Tyson, no Bengal tiger, no Vegas even. There’s barely a hint of Kern’s funniest previous acting credit, “Bloodsucking Bastards.”

Blasted is a laser tag fight that ends prematurely because every idiot accidentally points his gun at himself right at the start.

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

Last Goodbye’s value as an “Around the World with Netflix” taste of another culture is limited.

Critical Thinking is a cluttered, cliched and ungainly story.

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 performances are affecting even if the message seems a tad trite, and not exactly on-brand, considering Italy’s cultural reputation for family, “la dolce vita” and all that. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and can a marriage really be saved in one?

If this mad gamble is indeed the “final film” of a great director from the Golden Age of great directors, cinephiles can celebrate the fact that at least he got it cast, filmed, edited and distributed and lived to see its release. That’s more than Orson Welles could say.

The settings are pristine, and feel about as real and lived in as “The Polar Express.” The performances have a stiffness that borders on motion-capture animation. Director Robert Zemeckis brings us a “Casablanca” without a scrap of heart, an “English Patient” with all of the splendor, and none of the heat.

Rodriguez has to carry the picture, but hamstrung by the “reality” of the role, she only plays two notes — exhausted and manic.

A bit of entertainment creeps in, much of it provided by Jackson and Brosnan, even if it turns out they weren’t on the set together for more than a day or two.

And then that ending shows up, and all the talking, over-the-topping and slow-walked butchery washes away whatever good will, or grudging acceptance this “requel” almost achieves.

Whatever action Bond, Zorro and “Green Lantern” vet Martin Campbell cooks up...none of it involves urgency.

The Dressmaker doesn’t so much change the pattern of this “Peyton Place” style story as render it ugly and humorless.

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

The too-obvious/too-slow “Remains” doesn’t frighten, doesn’t engross and doesn’t remain on the memory much past the closing credits.

Writer-director Mateo Sanz exhausts us with all these academics, shortchanging the development of on-screen relationships thanks to endless voice-over (and on-camera) analysis.

Neeson always gives fair value in these woebegone, quick-and-dirty actioners. But closing in on 70, the fakery meant to show him brawling or driving too fast and what not isn’t that subtle.

It plays like an animated musical built around forgettable tunes and impressive animated effects that were cooked up before the script was decided on.

The characters are never more than caricatures, the set-up is too conventional and the payoff doesn’t pay off at all. As for the jokes? Too many are awaiting that next rewrite or polish.

It’s a low-stakes, dramatically flat affair, a picture that never plucks the heartstrings it’s meant to.

A sentimental and cheerful affair that doesn’t amount to much more than an attempt to tap into their residual good vibes.

It’s more unpleasant than scary, and ever so slow in getting up to speed.

Fuqua’s a better director than this and Logan’s a better writer than “Michael” shows. Now that everybody’s delivered a blockbuster out of this troubled man of mystery, maybe there’ll be money to try something more serious.

Addicted to Love is a crude, laugh-starved and vulgar C-list copy-and-paste of “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” and proof of the thesis that if you’re going to steal, you might want to aim higher than a movie nobody EVER called a “classic.”

There’s little chemistry between the leads, the dialogue has a drab, lifeless Lifetime Original Movie quality and the sci-fi elements are limited to mundane layman’s-eye-view takes on space travel and a dash of the technology that’s replaced fireworks — “artificial meteor showers.”

Director Jordan Ross (“Thumper”) upsets expectations somewhat with the casting. But not enough to make this make sense or play as smoothly as you’d hope.

Stephanie simply toddles along, intriguing for 20 minutes, exciting for three or four, and dull the remaining 60 minutes of its tedious, been-there/saw-that-coming running time.

As alien encounter documentaries or mockumentaries go, Skyman is boringly earthbound.

The whole enterprise plays like a throwback, summoning up memories of Lee’s cut-rate/no-script “chop sockey” pictures where the charisma was obvious, the fights epic, the stories an afterthought and the effects wincingly obvious.

It’s entirely too dramatically thin and lacking in real suspense to stand among the great or even middling submarine movies.

It never adds up to anything more than the mood Demeestere manages to translate from Franco’s fiction. Which makes Yosemite a “film festival movie,” nothing more than a promising idea or two and an interesting tone to recommend it.

Almost everything introduced into this leisurely two hour movie feels undigested, under-developed. There’s an earnestness to all of this that feels more accepted than justified.

It's a junky, crowd-pleasing movie of sidekicks – Guzman and Knoxville – bad acting, over the top shootouts, and catch phrases.

Unfinished Business, the second film Vaughn has done with the deliberately paced Canadian Ken Scott (“Delivery Man”) groans under the weight of expected laughs, expectations that are rarely met.

A film that starts feebly, gets its feet under it, but never goes anywhere.

Marilyn’s Eyes has a few ideas worth running with. But in an effort to not be “problematic,” to show these people’s problems as real enough to make them a danger to themselves or others, the filmmakers have created a mental health comedy that manages almost nothing that’s funny, and a dramedy nobody would believe, in or out of Italy.

Easley manages some striking if murky and so dimly-lit you can’t follow the action ritual sequences. I could see that footage recycled in nightmare sequences of better films, with better acting and better sound, etc.

It’s self-indulgent and self-referential, more a humorless counterpoint to “X” than a precursor.

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.

What we’re left with is a botched romance saddled with an over-arching, over-reaching message, one that only the Turks will be quick to embrace.

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.

Sweetwater had promise in conception, but that promise disappeared in the screenwriting long before the screenwriter directed his own script into a near coma.

Looking Glass fails to be anything more than another make-work project for the cinema’s busiest actor, a man with bills to pay and a conviction that the Devil finds work for idle hands. It’s just that sometimes, it’s better to leave those hands idle than to take whatever the next offer you can squeeze in might be.

Disney's effort to turn Kristen Bell into America's Sweetheart reaches its tipping point with You Again, a flat romantic comedy that packages her in a funny setup and surrounds her with funny people.

Bell, a petite, pretty blonde, may or may not have the Meg Ryan-Julia Roberts-Sandra Bullock goods. When in Rome, a leaden variation on that rom-com recipe, fails utterly to make her case.

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.

The dialogue has its moments, but the jokes are too sparse to buttress the arch, comic book camp tone Mr. Adam Egypt Mortimer was going for. And while the wigs are fabulous and the effects interesting, it’s all something of a hash. Coherent enough, sure, but making sense of it seems like a fool’s errand, start to finish.

Williams and the cast are better than the movie they’re saddled with.

Traffik isn’t a very good thriller, and if you aren’t two or three steps ahead of it, much of the time, you need more practice.

The Fanatic narrows into a simple character study by Travolta. That’s not enough, and what’s here is as quaint and dated as many of the words that come out of Moose’s mouth.

Drew’s still got it even if The Stand-In doesn’t.

Effects aside, irrespective of Reynolds, Pokémon is what Pokémon has always been on the big screen — pablum.

Cheap, short and slow, Hot Pursuit is a comedy that never lets your forget that pairing up Sofia Vergara with Reese Witherspoon should have worked better than this.

Siberia slogs along like the failed pilot for a poorly-thought out cable series, one with Eastern European development incentives but without enough drama, incident, intrigue or plot to justify its running time.

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!

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

It’s on-screen onanism, and rarely more than that.

Netflix should have hunted around for a hungry young female screenwriter to take a pass at this script. It lacks warmth, a feel for its heroine, who may narrate in voice-over, but comes off as more removed from the proceedings this time.

They made a promise, with their cool trailer, that their dull, bloody movie couldn’t keep.

Riley makes a lousy, hoarse-voiced Darcy. James sets off no sparks with him, suggests no heartbreaking longing. If you want to make a point about women liberated by a zombie invasion into independent-minded martial arts warriors, why do it with one of the greatest romance novels of all time? There’s barely a laugh here, and nothing resembling human emotion.

The absurd turns the story takes to serve up streetwise and bloody "life lessons" for the kid will make any parent blanch and any movie lover roll his or her eyes.

As it is, we’re looking at the outline for a funny teen rom-com, not one that feels finished or that pays off.

Plot? Ten different kinds of ridiculous.

A violent and grimly obvious frontier thriller that Clint Eastwood might have made during his Spaghetti Days.

The fights are as furious as the story is ludicrous.

In taking a second swing at a comedy where the object is to make special needs characters funny, but not the object of fun, you’d figure that Farrelly might have had the nerve to dance closer to the edge, or at least find some big, warm laughs. And you’d think that Harrelson could have made this funnier in his sleep. Neither is the case.

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 only twists to this — little character quirks and the like — are just dopey and off-topic, the stuff to make an action fan wonder “What’s up with that?”

We Are Your Friends has no heartbeat. It flatlines, early on.

It’s all so hackneyed, so overfamiliar and formulaic.

The action beats are colorful and dazzling theme-park rides run amok. Frenetic action substitutes for wit, here.

The normally dependable Rockwell seems uncertain of what to do with Verdean.

A couple of bit characters come closest to landing a laugh. None of the leads do. The script is social media savvy, making tepid jokes about the “commitment” difference between a couple selfie “in your story” or on “your grid” on Instagram.

Friendzone flatlines for long stretches as it meanders towards the classic rom-com finale. Use it as colorful background noise or to brush up on your French dating slang, because that’s all it’s good for.

The pleasures of some good acting by Berenger and David, Gina Gerhon and Bruce Dern doesn’t overcome the overfamiliarity of the journey, the stops along the way and the late life lessons learned as they “keep the chrome up,” or try to. It’s tired in every sense of the word.

The Mother is watchable, here and there. Decently acted. Over-the-top, but not far enough over it to make it fun.

The science is sloppy, the sentimentality is sloppier in “The Space Between Us,” a sci-fi romance pairing up agreeable leads in a cut-and-paste script.

The conflict is watered-down, the picture has no urgency or pacing, the “sparks” are in short supply, and Adams’ deadpan take on Agnes may play to her strengths, or be the only note she knows and we can’t tell the difference.

It flirts with being offensive, but falls short. It’s not entirely maudlin, not wholly misogynistic, but close enough.

But the charm is thin and the laughs hard to find in this iteration. Aside from a little nostalgia for the middling film this is based on, He’s All That just isn’t all that.

The animation’s so flat, static and dull it relies on brighter-than-bright sparkly colors to make it pop. Like “Power Puff Girls” or “My Little Pony.” The jokes are infantile-obvious and pounded home with a sledgehammer, as if the writers figured they had to get through something especially thick.

Marionette is a perfectly-gloomy but overly-subdued Scottish thriller pretty much wholly undone by a contorted “twist” that derails its third act.

Is Choose Love “inane,” “insipid” or merely an “innocuous” attempt to make the cinematic romantic comedy a viewer’s choice “will they or won’t they” experience?

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

Blackhat will serve no purpose other than deflating the “Heat” director’s reputation and the star’s chances of ever starring in anything that doesn’t involve a helmet with horns on it.

There’s not much to grab hold of, here. The Visitor fights a losing battle with over-familiarity, sauntering through horror tropes that predate 24 frames-per-second era celluloid.

It’s an American "Love Actually" without the warmth that writer-director Richard Curtis stuffs into his all-star confections, without the wit, without much love, actually.

The many sex scenes in Lust Life Love scream “INSECURITY,” as in there’s no confidence in either the scripted interior lives of the characters or the cast’s performance of them. When you limit your story to just “Lust” and “Love,” the life you depict can’t help but seem shallow and contrived.

There’s a long year ahead of us, but Gods of Egypt is going to stand out as one of the sillier, more puzzling big budget, special-effects driven period pieces to come out.

A serious upgrade in “Dragon Ball” franchise animation runs up against the same overdoses of exposition, endless back story and arcane plot contrivances designed to pit characters against each other in epic throwdowns in Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero.

Shock value has no value if it’s not shockingly funny.

A script that leans into melodrama and wildly uneven performances are the undoing of The Ghost Trap, an immersive peek into Maine lobstering life and the people who live it.

It all feels random and slapped together, with seriously under-developed heroes, villains, over-the-top geyser-of-blood violence played for laughs.

That score — insistent, sexy, jazzy and loud — almost puts it over, letting us skim over the ways the laws of logic and physics are violated, the lack of charisma of these “charismatic” magicians, the works. Until the ending, where it all feels like a cheap cheat and a waste of two hours and nine minutes of your life.

Covering the same ground in an utterly conventional, voice-over-narrated-to-death melodrama gives us a film with no thrills, little suspense and, thanks to generally bland performances, almost no emotional resonance.

Limp one-liners, derivitive characters and action set pieces remind us every minute or so just how little originality ever figured into it.

The sentimental stuff half-works, but “Kids” never works up any silly sense of “Hate.” Without that conviction, the characters don’t make sense, the scenes don’t set up a debate that sets off sparks and I Hate Kids plays like “Actually, I’m not all that keen on kids.”

Held may have messaging that fits the cultural moment well enough, and visceral violence that pulls us in and engages — eventually. But that first hour has beaten our interest in this slow-moving indie thriller to death long before that.

Captive State might have achieved some sort of screen satisfaction had the straight-forward-with-obvious-twist script not been hacked into tiny image bites, rendering huge passages of it a confused visual mush.

Whatever ideas Mohawk had behind it, whatever the filmmaker saw in the cast, especially Ms. Horn (think Grace Slick circa “White Rabbit”) not much of a movie came out of the effort.

The fights are Old Hollywood meets New Bloodbath — corny and carnage-filled. The whole saga seems pre-ordained, pre-packaged and pretty boring, entirely too predictable to come off.

The film is a somber, somnambulent drift for long stretches, interrupted by cheap jolts and the occasional grim “legitimate” one.

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.

Mockingjay II is a bare bones finale — a tedious two hours in which nothing at all happens, with the briefest of breaks for a zombie chase and attack and a half-hearted bit of sci-fi combat.

The Brawler is a poor excuse for a boxing picture and a middling screen biography, but it does manage a few saving graces.

The tunes are cute (ish), the production design sparkling and the performances have their moments. But the conflicts are sour and dull, and Lotte’s journey, to “star” and then producer of a big production numbers wedding show called Just Say Yes isn’t the script twist that could save this, any of it.

Writer-director Adam Alleca is better at the keyboard, cooking up chewy tough talk, than behind the camera. The shootout stuff is only passably staged, and the blood-bursts (not his fault…entirely) look digitally added, in some places.

The film needed more scenes, more background, more fizzy fun and more pathos for any of this to come off properly.

The funny lines don’t land — partly because they’re weak and partly because Baruchel the director couldn’t arm-twist his actors into giving him more.

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.

There’s just not enough to this.

It's light in tone, feather-weight. But there aren't many laughs in it.

The best one can say about I Used to be Famous is that, all things considered, it’s harmless, and not entirely charmless.

There’s more to a dark comedy than a really dark crime, more to a thriller than a slo-motion pursuit and more to the rural South than arch, slow redneck stereotypes.

All Joking Aside isn’t awful and Harewood isn’t its lone shortcoming. The script is too thin to hold our interest. Stand-up is so over-covered as film subject matter that the only way it can work in a movie these days is as backdrop for a more interesting story in the foreground.

Once the picture finally gets around to what it’s supposed to be doing, it almost turns exciting and visceral, and it kind of makes sense. Nothing shows viscera and blood to better advantage than white on white clothing and decor — spattered and arterial sprayed. All a bit too little entirely too late, here.

One can grasp and hope all one wants. There just isn’t much to grab hold of here and not much to this other than some pretty pictures, a few featherweight stereotypes — Argentine, American, Taiwanese and Jewish — and a whole lot of potential pretty much squandered.

Harmless nonsense this may be, but if you’re under the impression it does a wildly popular, award-winning “creativity” game justice, you’d have to be right on the demographic money in terms of who the picture is pitched to — 12 years-old.

It’s a stunt-heavy chase picture with some arresting camera work, but not much else to recommend it.

Scott, last seen as Alicia Silverstone’s other half in “Sister of the Groom,” shows a menace that the movies don’t often let him play. Making him one of the “bad people” in a tale where “bad things happen to bad people” works. If only the rest of the movie had.