Roger Moore

It’s a brutal blur of a movie, rendering its themes and actions in broad, violent strokes. That’s a help, as they mumbled accents are a bloody jumble to get through without subtitles.

The Devil Below is at its best when our soon to shrink quintet is on the run, scrambling to figure out what’s chasing them and if the locals are there to help or make things worse.

Like homelessness itself, Paradise Cove has problems we, and the folks who made this, can’t talk our way out of.

For a 76 minute thriller, it wastes a helluva lot of time.

Bullied covers new ground even as it feels, at times, as if it’s all over the place. Remember, an academic made it, not a professional filmmaker.

Little Big Women is a perfectly watchable genre melodrama, an old-fashioned “women’s picture,” with sentiment, intricate relationships, intrigue and not-too-heavy-to-take heartbreak.

Paranormal Prison has a great location — a closed penitentiary in Boise, Idaho. It’s got a time-tested concept, a paranormal Youtube show comes in to “Blair Witch”/reality TV the place one last time before it’s torn down. But half of its paltry 70 minutes of screen time are spent “explaining.”

Pedestrian shot selection and editing finish off any sense of “urgency” that the story is meant to generate.

In Full Bloom is a patient, simple post-war parable of fighters — cultures in collision, dreams and disappointment.

There are messy movies and shambolic comedies, and then there’s whatever the hell Last Call is supposed to be. It’s a “back to the old neighborhood” comedy almost guaranteed to give you a hangover. I’m on my third aspirin already, and I haven’t had a drop.

There are few things more maddening than sitting through a thriller that should work, that has the requisite elements in place, and just doesn’t.

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.

The film’s narrow focus make it more an expression of support for those who stutter and those trying to make stutterers’ lives better than an “explainer,” a movie that covers a lot more ground on the subject.

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.

As he types away, constantly interrupted, taking too little care of his health, exasperated by a dying Lexus or his sons’ addiction to “screens,” we marvel at the compulsion of the artist to make art, to leave a legacy not just to all of us, but to those living under his roof.

I wanted a little more out of the script, some further explanation, at least a few of the loose ends wrapped up. But what’s here is a near triumph of mood and tone over “story,” and certainly creepy enough to recommend.

You can’t help notice the elephant in the room that McHugh ignores. Despite the inclusion of 63 year-old Ice-T and acts with African American performers on the festival bills, the audience they’re playing to (as shown here at least) is entirely white, almost entirely over 30, mostly 50ish.

The Parish needed to be more Catholic, more creepy and have a lot more suspense and sense of what’s at stake to come off.

It would be nice if this generally laudatory, understated and reflective film served as Gilliam’s victory lap. It captures his dogged persistence and his artist’s eye, and humanizes him by letting us see him playing with his son in home movies, then playing with his grandchild in others.

Luz is a slow, soapy prison romance that, if nothing else, is not quite like any prison and “getting out” picture you’ve ever seen.

I like the idea, and any movie set in a weird subculture is automatically engrossing. More of this “board game universe,” including other obsessives, would have helped. The characters are amusing as “types,” but rather blandly played. And the finale is downright half-assed. But there’s promise here, and I think another crack at the concept could be a winner. Let’s hope nobody lures them to a remote cabin and bribes them out of their pitch.

Westdijk gives us a little bickering, a little bonding, a little personal growth, a bit of Scotland and a lot of Waterboys. And if that’s not enough to add up to a comic winner, I don’t know what is.

The Believer is a creepy pseudo-intellectual horror story, a pretentious and arch mashup of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Misery.”

Every coarse and crude moment feels like a punch that Stasko pulled or that his cast didn’t have the stomach to deliver.

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.

Nothing feels wholly fleshed-out, dramatic possibilities are frittered away left and right and nothing here makes us feel tense, aroused or “involved.”

The glory in a simple, formulaic “musical memoir” like this is how familiar this ground has become, how the “you’re not alone” and “It gets better” messaging is reinforced with every new incarnation of this well-worn path through “My Wonderless Years.”

There’s enough here that “Irul,” which means “darkness,” would be a fun, moody movie for a screenwriting class to pick apart and try to workshop into something better.

You’d think the Italian creators of Beate (Blessed) could have made a funnier, sunnier film in their sleep.

Trigger Point is shockingly conventional, with many a plot point, story beat and even shoot-out recycled from decades of other such films.

The Man in the Hat is a gloriously simple unalloyed delight.

There’s just not enough heart or story to make up the shortfall that the viewer feels, first scene to last.

The finale to Threshold, a supernatural thriller about a junkie who figures she’s possessed, is a doozy — alarming, rattling and with a neat little twist that underlines its point. And it’d have to be, considering the general snooze this siblings/bonding road picture has been pretty much in its entirety leading up to that. This may be the slowest-moving “road picture” or “thriller” on record.

Sure, it’s a mixed-bag, sentimental and soft even as the story contrives to put the friends at odds, with deadly consequences. But Ghost Lab has flashes of style and wit that suggest we’ll be hearing more from this filmmaker, and that it could be fun.

The film is an exceptionally messy and character-cluttered rush with few laughs among its various players’ reprising their Greatest (Character Trait) Hits.

An engaging musical documentary.

Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm is a cute surface gloss in the “if these recording studio walls could talk” genre.

The “reality” and the suspense and the narrowly-defined “entertainment value” dissipates in an ending that talks its way out of any sense the story might have made and any sense of satisfaction the viewer might have hoped for.

The movie? Not all that, but Ng, Wu and On handle the fights and stunts with amused skill and Wu’s way with the lighter material makes it a lark, a middling martial arts action comedy that’s worth a few laughs, if you’re in the mood for that.

There aren’t really two sides to this, even as we hear discussions of “buying out” people who have made this trade their livelihood, even as we see legislation move slowly, face gubernatorial vetoes and court tests as the reefs grow more barren and brown.

American Fighter never overcomes the perfunctory story and B-movie “types” performing it.

None of them are stop-this-ride-I-wanna-get-off scary. They’re all too short, with the linking story playing like the dull filler it is.

The structure is ad hoc and the plot choppy, with the action beats — such as they are — holding the movie together and maintaining our interest. But just barely.

There are little chuckles around the edges of this limp noodle of a comedy, and just a hint of romance to it. It should be bubbling over with both.

The Penny Black is an utterly-engrossing might-be-true-crime docu-mystery, a film laid out like a private eye thriller (they even hire an Archer Agency detective in LA, shades of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer), a story with big money, competing agendas, shady characters and a classic “unreliable narrator.

There’s not a lot to this, and if you’re looking for straight-up frights, you’ll be let down. But I laughed more than once at these kids trying to get answers for the unexplainable.

The look of Zhang Chong’s (“The Fourth Wall”) film is more impressive than the hard-to-follow “Inception-ish” story or the acting.

It’s a slender film with simplistic “live your truth” and “YOLO” messages, but Spall and Newman and Dena Kaplan . . . give it the heart and pathos it needs to pay off.

What’s served up is dry history that neither judges nor commits to what might be “tragic” in this story, which is understandable, given the principals.

Ferry is a straight-up old-fashioned “mobster grows morals” thriller from The Netherlands, a movie that doesn’t surprise but does what it does with efficiency and a hint of style.

The first two acts aren’t necessarily made “better” by the twists and resolutions of the far more involving third act. But it’s not a spoiler to say that “Classic” comes a tad closer to that label thanks to a boffo finish.

Without any “action” or compelling performances or any interesting thing at all — near kitchen accidents don’t count — what remains is a coma-inducing-dull “low budget B-horror movie without any discernible stars.”

You’ve got to meet this dopey desert slasher picture on its own terms. You have to be ready to laugh at the archetypes/stereotypes, the one-liners, the D-movie bravado.

Dancing Queens kind of has it all. And by “all” I mean nothing much.

The germ of an idea is here. They’re aiming for the correct tone, but neither the script nor the players land on the “twee” bullseye.

So many movies about Mary Shelley and the writing of “Frankenstein,” and yet there’s always room for another bad one.

Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt) is so gossamer-light and cute that you don’t realize how good it is until it punches you, right in the heart.

It is terrible on a lot of levels, a godawful script that was drably-cast and indifferently-directed and passes before the eyes, deathly-dull scene after leaden scene.

I found the entire enterprise just a tad above “boring,” lacking much in the way of action or urgency or connection with the characters. But eventually it settles in and we get moments of mild excitement and genuine pathos.

There’s value in movies that depict America as still-welcoming of immigrants in these divisive times, but Confetti (the title has to do with how Meimei sees letters, and processes information) rubs almost all the edges off.

The players can’t quite put it over and the writer-director can’t quite pull it off. It’s a thriller that shuffles when it needs to trot, simmers when it needs to boil and goes on after it needs to end.

The leads are competent, with a few wincingly-obvious exceptions. But this dull, tin-eared script, a trite story leadenly told, never gives them a chance.

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.”

A dark comedy without much in the way of laughs, Filthy Animals serves up a string of characters, each repellent in this way or several others, no one to root for, no “message” to take to heart and with an ending so unsatisfying as to leave one slack-jawed and muttering one question.

Downeast is an indie thriller so simple as to be elemental.

Even the reckless behavior of youth seems recycled from every other film in this summer romance genre. Pretty it may be. But all those elements conspire to make “Last Summer” not one we’ll remember, but one quickly forgotten.

Holy Beasts doesn’t quite come off in terms of coherence or dramatic tension, but impresses in almost every scene.

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.

The cleverest thing about Marian Vosumets’ film is how it pricks the viewer’s prejudices as it introduces us to an assortment of British folk with all-too-typical relationships with food and potentially unhealthy attitudes about body image.

Deep winds up a somewhat lifeless enterprise that manages a suspenseful moment or two almost in spite of itself.

Under the Volcano lacks some of the details, grit and personal dirty-laundry edge of the legion of earlier recording studio history documentaries — “Muscle Shoals” and “Sound City” among them.

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.

Notorious Nick follows a formula and makes it work. Stay through the credits if you want to see the real Nick Newell in action.

Martone gets bogged down in the family melodrama and drags out that first act’s play (Wasn’t there a funnier one to sample?) so much that he wears down our interest in what’s going on.

It’s all very civilized and oh-so-French. But frankly, for all the posh settings and lovely costumes, all the lovely nudes and copulation, Curiosa is a chilly, unemotional drag. And the performances do little to warm things up.

It works the deadpan side of the street, spare in its dialogue, leaning on sight gags and situational ironies. What you get is an intimate parody of a parable, a comedy content to earn smirks and knowing grins and never reach for belly laughs.

It’s diverse by design, sunny and as I say the dolphin is as adorable as dolphins unfailingly are. If you’re looking for something beyond Disney+ or the hormones and conspicuous consumption of virtually every series and streaming movie made for this audience, it’s worth a watch.

It’s sentimental and kid-friendly, with a couple of decent grace notes. If your kids are at the undemanding age, have at it. Just try not to notice when the plot and incidents in it turn eye-rolling.

Everything we see in the Polish made-for-Netflix thriller Bartkowiak we’ve seen in half a century of boxing movies.

Hostage House makes the viewer feel like the hostage.

For a comedy that gets in its own way more often than not, that doesn’t give nearly enough screen time to the two somewhat funnier women (Park is seriously hilarious and seriously shortchanged) or even enough to let the leads fully form their characters, this still manages some serious third act laughs.

Nobody in the supporting cast is fleshed out, save for the mother character. Five screenwriters adapting a Rintik Sedu novel, 105 minutes of screen time, and this “Pretty in Pink” basically boils down to two and a half characters.

Odd twists aren’t wholly explained, relationships are uncertain, characters flip from antagonists to trusting confidantes with no more motivation than the expediencies of the script. Most of the performers struggle to find their footing, and when in doubt, walk even slower and talk even slower still.

I found this more “interesting” as a problem-solving exercise than entertaining, more “watchable” than “good.”

In keeping it simple and personal, Reynaud finds the sweet-spot in a movie whose ebb and flow we know by heart, whose finale is the one we’re almost sure to expect.

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.

Overrun is 109 minutes of every action pic cliche under the sun, and a heist set in a mausoleum, which I have to admit I’ve never seen before.

Hudgens’ times-three star turn — underwritten as every character is — would be more fun if she was surrounded by a supporting cast that could bring laughs, pathos and a little more charisma to the party.

It’s a colorful, cheerful and messy movie, meandering out of the starting gate, struggling to avoid anything remotely edgy or interesting.

A moving and engaging kids’ movie with just enough hard edge to come off.

It’s not another “Romeo & Juliet” variation, even if the title suggests that. The stakes are low, the tropes too familiar and while the leads may get across the intensity of their crush with just their eyes, they don’t bring much else to this formulaic, tepid teen romance.

Sticking close to “the facts” ensures that The Stronghold turns into a bit of a grind. The over-the-top moments are restrained by that reality, and some pursuits, arrests and brawls seem so low-stakes as to undercut the whole enterprise.

The science is gibberish, the dialogue likewise, the characters cardboard with stiff performances to match.

A messy, indulgent and shallow movie.

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

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.

The pacing doesn’t build dread, the characters don’t build empathy.

The slack pacing and generally flat performances rob “Last Night” of any urgency and lower the stakes.

Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster is an adoring appreciation of a screen icon, one of the founding figures in the birth of The Horror Movie, a cultured man who made his good name scaring generations half to death.

The execution, acting and chilling Soviet Bloc production design are more impressive than any surprise “Hyacinth” struggles to come up with.

Storm Lake celebrates the professionalism of a newspaper family — the elders worked at newspapers elsewhere before starting this one — who put out a clean, polished news product week after week, embracing some changes and dodging others.

Apache Junction is another static, artless and pokey Western with an aimless, scattershot script, a few horses, a little gunplay and nothing that does any credit to the acting profession. At all.

The cast is uniformly sexy, but the romances presented don’t spark, mostly owing to how unnatural and artificial they feel. At the end of any rom-com, you like to think “she belongs with him/he belongs with her,” and here that just isn’t true.

The cast is sharp, fleshing out character “types” into flesh-and-blood people we recognize. Blom’s haunted, guilty gaze sticks with you, every hand-to-hand fight has desperation and every death has weight and meaning.

This isn’t a compelling take on coupleshood — not quirky, not touching, not much of anything at all except disappointing.

Wherever they were going with this, writer-director Mularuk ensures that the journey is slow and seems even slower.

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

A solid B-movie revenge thriller, well-acted and tightly put-together, kept simple by design.

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.

The set-ups for big laughs are laboriously spoiled by the slack pacing.

It’s a boorish “sex” comedy without a line or situation that amuses, an all-star all-in-one-house holiday romp that never romps and a Britcom-ish farce that would never make it to British TV, even boiled down to a half hour of its “best” bits.

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 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.

Demigod is awful, so bad that I grow weary of mocking it. Approach at your own peril.

As film subjects, college romances and the trials and tribulations of college life may be mundane in the extreme, even set against the Sport of Winklevii. But Shannon is always so good you tend to lose track of all that when he’s on screen. He’s just not on it enough to save the movie.

As action pictures go, this one isn’t exciting enough to make up for the tedious pacing or the outright silliness of the script and the woodenness of the performers.

Despite scoring a few laughs at the expense of the louche, lazy louts of the Batek clan, the lesson to be taught is watered town, the “teachable moments” a mere string of pulled punches. It feels as if several of the story’s necessary steps have been skipped.

This Hide and Seek isn’t hatefully bad. It’s short, well-acted and easy enough to follow until it isn’t. It’s the “until it isn’t” that earns it the label, “disappointing.”

The film takes so much in — gay bars and a workmate crush, first-time sex in a “Love Hotel” — that it tends to wander.

It falls utterly apart in the equally-slow-footed third act, finishing the botch-job begun in the first.

It’s more a time-killer than anything anybody, young or old, needs to see. But the animation’s quite good.

If your kids are Chinese menu savvy, just figuring out what this character/dish or that one is that this or that character is supposed to be. For adults, it could play as a take-out dinner date drinking game movie, a 90 minute think-up-your-own-pun fest.

Puce finds fear and a disheartening, misdirected fury in all this, and pathos in its resolution. And she does it in a subtle but provocative drama that may not make the Best International Feature Oscar field, but is still one of the best pictures of 2021.

The long, somewhat sluggish comic thriller director Kan Eguchi gets out of this manga adaptation has scattered laughs and lots and lots of killing, much of that played as comedy, too. We are not that amused. But the big set-pieces here are wowzers, good enough to merit a sequel (“The Fable: A Hitman Who Doesn’t Kill”), so let’s dive in.

Skiing/sledding gags, a Roomba run amok bit — there’s just enough going on to keep the littlest kids interested. And a tiny dollop of heart helps.

The funniest thing about it all is the mere fact that it exists, this silly nothing of a comedy film series built around European “AmCar” nuts, fans of American muscle back from way back when. No, it’s not much of a movie. But if any of those conceits tickles your clutch-pedal foot, it’s good for a laugh or three.

Red Pill gives us bupkiss. And while there are later moments that get closer to the mark, most of the “pick-them-off, one-by-one” tropes come off flat.

Last Shoot Out doesn’t exactly live up to the promise of its title. The shoot-outs are pale imitations of even the lamest B-Westerns of late era syndicated TV — “Guns of Paradise” comes to mind. The plot is straight-up formula, the dialogue either cornpone without the polish or tin-eared and anachronistic.

Tone-deaf, ineptly scripted and directed, lifeless and tedious, it’s only 82 minutes long. I want those 82 back.

It’s a generally frank and sober-minded essay on Black female sexuality, body image issues and the perils of dating not just somebody younger, but someone from another class.

The debut feature of writer-director Aimee Long is a somber, thought-provoking essay on policing, race, firearms and family.

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.

It’s an absurd, strained and seriously unfunny animated comedy that shows what can happen when animation veterans with limited imaginations try to conjure up a myth to give a “story” to an Irish dancing stage show somebody bought the rights to.

There’s little to this film that hints that “Holiday Rush” could have been saved. But mixing it up, more, centering more on the adult conflicts because the kids aren’t funny enough, might have reminded us that Malco can still be funny. This just makes that a distant memory.

Sensation is so lifeless and pointless as to make one ponder “What is the half-life on a ‘Game of Thrones’ career bounce?”

One of those performances you just lose yourself in carries off June Again, a sweet and sentimental portrait of dementia, and the “paradoxical lucidity” that gives some sufferers a short respite from the memories, manners, skills and knowledge that disease has stripped from them.

American Gadfly is about a campaign that few noticed outside of the twitterverse, a funny, unfiltered re-introduction of Gravel to America and a peek into todayt American politics and the political and political news ecosystem.

Scenes are clunky and disjointed. The dialogue is bad. Elwes and Patric do their best, but they have trouble hiding their dismay at some of the staging and most of the writing. The performances are adequate in the most tepid sense. Playing caricatures instead of characters is challenging.

The constant jumping back and forth in multiverse-styled timelines is more exasperating than charming, thought-provoking or even entertaining.

The Ledge has a simple set-up, a naturally perilous setting, a convincing heroine and a whole lot of hanging around, waiting for the next “That could never happen” narrow escape.

There’s Barcelona scenery and sex, posh parties and sex, and obvious foreshadowing and melodrama at every turn. Subtle? Not in the least.

Tedious courtroom scenes, flat acting, sermonizing speeches, under-explained “explanations” of the technology needed — nobody is likely to stick with this to the end.

The setting and set-up are reliable, if a bit desert-southwest tried and true. The acting’s tolerable, the action beats good and the finale has a nice kick to it.

I’ll Find You comes off like a lot of the lip-sync’d singing and mimed playing of the actors portraying musicians — fake and lacking the heart and passion necessary to pull this off.

Amandla has no emotional core. This potentially riveting drama about siblings and violence and a country going through one of the most astonishing political/racial transformations in history has barely a moment that moves or inspires.

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.

Old Strangers, a thriller awkwardly resembling a “creature feature,” and even more awkwardly labeled a “thriller,” falls somewhere on the student film/relatives-wrote-me-checks-so’s-I-could-make-a-movie spectrum of ineptitude.

I got next to nothing out of this movie.

The lifeless script, the aimlessness that drifts from scene to scene and the eye-rolling cliche of a payoff and finale give away a movie that’s running on fumes, not ideas.

Suffice it to say, every clumsy bit of mugging, every tin-eared line, every new scene is its own reason to groan.

This isn’t a bad cast, but Confession is a bad script. The “twists” barely merit that label, the story leading up to those twists barely holds one’s interest. The entire affair is contrived and melodramatic in the extreme.

The Conductor is an engaging, musically-adept documentary that tracks Marin Alsop’s dogged march to make her “first woman to head a major symphony orchestra” dream come true.

An utterly adorable hero dog tale based on a true story.

I’d say there’s about 40 minutes of playful cult fun-poking here, and a movie that goes on an hour beyond that expiration point.

“My Best Friend” remembers the playful, rebellious and occasional mean girl that Anne was in a somewhat staid but well-acted film about Anne’s last years.

The Privilege is a too-predictable German mashup of a couple of horror genres and several paranoid thrillers, all underscored by the big idea in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”

Mau, which tells a short version of the designer’s life story and early triumphs, dwells mostly on his ongoing crusade, accentuating the positive. The man insists that as we’ve designed these messes, we can design our way out of them.

10 Truths About Love plays as about eight truths under budget, a parsimonious rom-com that needed a better script, better director, funnier supporting players and co-equal leads who actually click.

The computer in a human body thing could have delivered laughs, but the slapstick is limited and Mauro’s jerky motions, quizzical looks and machine-as-human quirks never quite get there.

Writer/director Callie Khouri and screenwriter Angelina Burnett (TV’s “Boss,” “Halt and Catch Fire”) correct that. And with the two Broadway stars they cast, women who do their own singing, they give us a brisk (OK, rushed), sentimental “behind the glamour” gloss of a bio-pic.

Whatever Agladze was getting at about the difference between sight and “seeing,” plumbing the obscurant Other Me to discern it isn’t worth the trouble.

The most universally relatable thing about Anne+ is the confusion and panic over the direction many of us haven’t figured out we want our lives to take in our 20s. That’s Anne in a nutshell.

Every sequence has gags that just kill, situations that are a hoot in the making.

A Grand Romantic Gesture is a wistful romance in a minor key, a flash of “love, the second (or maybe last) time around” with no flash at all.

The drama is compelling enough, and the messaging is vague by-design and with good reason. But the meandering interwoven stories don’t gel in ways heighten the drama or add weight to the message.

When you set your romance against the most aesthetically pleasing watersport of them all — kite surfing — you’d better make sure the melodramatic story is fun, tortured, twisty and/or steamy enough to keep folks from wondering, “When’re they going to show more kite surfing?”

Gastambide is right on the cusp of adequate in playing a corrupt cop on the verge of panicking. Abkarian is menacing enough to suggest he can still hold his own in a fight. But the performances are generally on a par with the screenplay — perfunctory.

McDonough co-scripted this contrived star vehicle, a thriller that lets you see all the wheels arbitrarily set in motion and hear every gear that grinds along the way.

Rookie Season is the quintessential “vanity project,” with decent enough race footage and banal nothings delivered in voice-over by the drivers, with the Scottish champ Liddell taking care to be diplomatic about how he characterizes the rich poseur who wrecks the car in early races as DePew devotes himself to conquering a steep learning curve.

UFO is a cheerfully cheesy, sometimes sappy and always formulaic teen romance from the “bad boys on bikes” school.

The arc of this story is insipid to tragically sad. And neither extreme is certain to provoke more than an indifferent shrug from even the most saccharine-tolerant viewer.

If you’re a fan of the genre, or even if you’re just well-versed in the Sean Connery Bond era, The Unknown Man from Shandigor is sure to impress and amuse, shaken or stirred.

We never buy the gorgeous Hassouni as anything remotely “Meskina,” as if that’s part of the “fairy tale” that is her life. The laughs are too scattered for this to pay off.

Guttenberg is bad, and while not everybody on board is as bad or worse, enough of them are to make you puzzle over how something this crummy, but not crummy enough to be any fun, ever got made.

Fear can’t help but cover familiar immigrant narrative ground. But Hristov and his characters maintain a deadpan drollery that makes this grimmer take on the migrant’s plight and Eastern Europe’s often hateful backwardness play as lighter than it really is.

Love and Leashes seems far more intent on explaining and removing “fear of the unknown” and the label “pervert” from BDSM than it is in actually titillating, amusing or entertaining as it does.

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.

As this biography of an autistic fashion designer progresses and we notice who most of those outside the family are giving testimonials to Kyle’s treatment and his prognosis are from the same “institute,” “Let Me Be Me” prompts a wary raised eyebrow of skepticism.

A stellar cast makes us invest in this tragedy-in-the-making, because it’s the rough patches and detours that let Streamline find its way to clear water.

Hell Hath No Fury hath no fury, and rarely even rises to the level of “fitfully entertaining.”

Gibson shows up just to add a splash of color and swagger to what seems like an endless wait between action beats.

It’s a moving, harrowing film that hangs on a beatifically transparent performance by screen newcomer Zhaila Farmer.

Squared Love is a vapid little “Around the World with Netflix” bauble from Poland, a romance about a teacher whose side hustle is modeling.

Win a Trip to Browntown! is a “family” comedy about anal sex, an almost-laugh-free lurch along the not-so-fine-line between “insipid” and “insufferable.”

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.

That scenery — hot springs, stunning vistas, the glories of Machu Picchu and a seaside finale near Nazca — offers some compensation for the cute nothing that this movie is. Not enough, but some.

Veteran British nature documentarian Alastair Fothergill and his “Penguins” director partner Jeff Wilson give us a sober-minded call to action in this beautifully-shot film.

It’s still a mess of a movie, with no flow to its long, meandering narrative (I see why they chopped it, but they should have done a better job of it.). And “Man of God” never wants to let us connect with a character we’d root for.

This mild-mannered fantasy makes a sweet-spirited love letter to Outback life, Paris and the enduring cool of jazz, as Miles Davis played it.

Waterman is a grand feel-good remembrance of an epic life, a documentary that could make even non-surfers and “haoles” (non-Hawaiians) swell with tearful pride that the human race ever produced this “bronze god” who walked among us and changed the world.

Forget the logical lapses and the many ways Grant tries to differentiate the many Madelines. It just doesn’t play — not as funny, not as horrific and funny.

Yes, it’s dull and mostly-predictable. But it’s more of a near miss than you might expect.

Mericoffer keeps this interior journey on simmer for most of the film, only exploding in his “protests too much” reaction to being confronted with some version of his true self. It’s a compact, tightly-wound performance, which suits the film beautifully.

As a filmmaker, Kundalkar’s sense of pace seems borrowed from Russian novelists — the most long-winded ones. Watching this movie is like watching cobalt paint dry for long stretches.

The slick, confusing and yet somehow familiar Egyptian thriller 30. March forces the Western viewer to engage it in one’s own film comfort zone — genre. It’s a “clear my name” or “Could I really have done this?” thriller with a disorienting lack of sure-footing.

There are thrillers that build toward a climax and thrillers that blow the ending after succeeding in creating suspense. Room 203 never really gets up a head of steam and just sort of peters out in a predictable, anti-climactic finale.

Not every player has the screen presence of our leading lady, so director Symington never lets a scene go by that Lelia Symington isn’t in the center of.

It doesn’t all come together as neatly as it might have, and there are potential laughs and screwball moments left dangling. But Winograd sticks with what he knows, sentiment, and makes this “Fix” stick.

"Yaksha” has lurid red light district fights and embassy heists, laugh-out-loud insults and the funniest use of “drones” as a plot device of any espionage thriller.

Blown chances aside and paced fast or stumbling into slow, “Apples” is never less than cute and often pretty funny.

Rondini does her best to give the picture “local color” — an octopus fished out of Homer’s “wine dark sea,” a town square that feels utterly Mediterranean. But there’s not enough “color,” jokes, romance, surprises or incidents — just the occasional accident — to animate this still-life.

Most of these gags didn’t make the “movie” for a reason. And those that did and are recycled here don’t add up to the same sort of experience “Forever” delivered.

The leads click just well enough in a serio-comic “bromance” sort of way. And Antonaroli ensures that the story clips along, never letting us lose the thread or the fact that the stakes are literally life and death, something underscored by the hammer blows of the finale.

Even with the conspiracy and implied frame-up plot unfolding, the first hundred minutes of this “Drive” is too timid to deserve its over-the-top climax and over-explained payoff.

Mountain goat attacks, bee shenanigans, squabbling conspirators and boorish local tourism appeals from a town that isn’t quite popular, isn’t really quaint and is not the least bit funny in itself hobble this already-too-tame “Taming” from start to finish.

The picture’s meandering story told at a quiet, balletic pace rob it of much of the intensity that such Warning Labels for Ballet movies thrive on.

The dawdling pace, meandering story and drifting point of view blunt this hooligan tale’s impact and pull its punches. It’s a “Clockwork Orange” without a social message, a hooliganism expose without much of a point, something the frustrating finale only underscores.

Director Carnevale and screenwriters Fernando Balmayor and Nicolás Giacobone (“Birdman”) completely and utterly lose the thread in the “message” and “moral of the story” department. And most annoying of all, their puzzlingly, infuriatingly vapid movie takes two hours doing it.

There’s a lighter, funnier, sexier movie in this material. But it was probably the one already made in Argentina, without the cool dance numbers.

The kids are pretty good actors, but this clumsy, hacked-together story does nobody any credit.

Kongsi Raya may never fully shake the feeling that we’re watching a Malaysian take on some Doris Day “Virgin Queen” rom-com from the early 1960s. But Chin manages to get G-rated laughs out of this subject in 2022, which is saying something.

In losing its nerve, it’s neither fish nor fowl, dramedy nor comedy, an is doomed to wander across your Netflix screen like a pilgrim in the comic/cosmic wilderness, a picture with a purpose, but no rewarding way of fulfilling it. It feels like work.

This warm, embracing little film — catching up with old friends from “the road,” remembering epic road trips following the band, chatting with other, even-more-devoted fans and even the director of another Deadhead documentary — vividly creates a sense of the community that the band inspired, with its own economy, values and shared creed.

Its 81 drab minutes pass by like a long, labored comic death rattle.

What a tin-eared foot-fault of a comedy 40-Love is.

Judging from the inane script, the unhurried direction by stuntman-turned-director Jesse V. Johnson, and by the destruction wrought when machine guns tear up cars, houses and people (nothing graphic enough to be “honest), it’s obvious that the budget here went to actors and ordinance.

It’s never as funny as it should be, nor as grimly exciting as it might have been, although there’s a giddy Fosse-meets-hip hop quality to the song and dance, and the wirework/FX-littered fights have their John Woo moments.

Thar never quite gets up the head of steam that a generic thriller whose ending is pre-ordained needs to pass muster.

The leads aren’t bad, but this script is fatally flawed and you’d hope they’d notice that before the camera rolls.

Private Property struggles to find its footing and never escapes the feeling that we’re watching something out of date.

The script, alas, runs out of funny situations too quickly, and without those, funny lines become sparse as Tankhouse lurches into the later acts towards its wholly inevitable conclusion.

In Polish with subtitles, or dubbed into English, “The Getaway King” is a thoroughly charming rogue packed into a perfectly entertaining caper comedy.

Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan gives us a summary of Mongolian history and samples modern Mongolian culture as it takes us to a little-visited piece of Central Asia, a land of forest, desert and steppes surrounded by Russia to the north and China to the south, but influenced most these days by South Korea and the West.

The title is far and away the raciest thing about it. It’s closer to a PG-13 rom-com than an R-rated sex farce. Take away ritzy Ibiza, one of two settings, and the story could take place anywhere. And the dull collection of characters struggling with marriage, babies, commitment and “love” are mostly a lost cause for the mostly-Dutch cast trying to make them interesting.

That quarrelsome, secrets-keeping couple from Cuzco are still saying “Si, mi amor (Yes, my love)” in Let’s Tie the Knot, Honey (¿Nos casamos? Sí, mi amor), an antic if not-quite-silly-enough sequel to their earlier Peruvian rom-com.

The mission debrief on “The Prey” is that it’s not remotely exciting or scary enough to be worth a look, and not nearly goofy enough to be “so bad it’s fun.”

As it turns out, a sputtering anti-climax is about all this movie deserves.

Tram finds the heart, humanity and humor in all this in the kids, their simpler understanding of the world and simple, goofy solutions to confrontations.

Moloch has a fairly conventional plot with story beats and a resolution that will have the ring of familiarity to anybody who’s ever seen a horror film based on a folk tale. But van den Brink and his crew bathe this beast in a gorgeous murky gloom that sets the tone.

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

The Perfect Family is so tone-deaf and wrong-footed that you’d feel annoyed at the filmmakers, if you weren’t already busy pitying them.

Writer-director Christopher Winterbauer’s Wyrm wears its weirdness like a museum special exhibit — “Mid-century Mod Meets The Absurd.” His loopy debut feature, developed from his earlier short film of the same title, takes on grief and loss and adolescence, coming at every Big Theme and minor subtext just a little off center.

It “could be funny,” and certainly is amusing, here and there. But maybe they wrung all the laughs that were in it out of it, and this is all there ever was to it.

Brown never comes close to transcending the formula this film is made under. But the players, the myopic setting and narrowly-focused screenplay ensure that Trees of Peace is a good example of how and why this formula is still around. It endures because it works.

The fact that the voice cast is more competent than comical or charismatic works against the one-liners. But the best sight gag is a winner.

The situation has suspense built into it, but there is none. The premise is predicated on urgency. We never feel it.

The picture lives or dies on wheels, and the track scenes, with chase cars, drone shots and the like, are terrific. Eventually, the street chases and races measure up, too. Eventually.

Once it finally gets going, The Witch: Part 2, the Other One is impressive. But there’s nothing here that transcends the genre, and what is here is a simple, slow-moving witch-hunt story whose clutter keeps it from ever truly getting up to speed.

This dog never manages much more than a waddle.

After a couple of opening shoot-outs, this straight-up C-movie — directed by Jon Keeyes, scripted by Matthew Rogers — flops into lots and lots of cliche-riddled conversation, some time line stumbles (“Five years earlier,” or is it?) and finishes with a whole lot of gunfire, most of it by The Character Who Never Reloads.

Revealer punches above its weight in the production design and acting. But the script needed punching up, with more incidents and more testy one-liners to get through, and the funereal pacing makes what’s here play dull and uninvolving.

Trevor: The Musical has pluck and real kids with just-hit-pubertyish voices and kid-simplified choreography awash in positive messaging in a show that feels seriously dated, if worthwhile in the attempt.

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.”

This milieu, kids flopping from apartment to house-breaking to checked-out hotel room that the maids haven’t cleaned yet, has an earthy promise that rarely delivers. Younger viewers may find a character to identify with, but the movie presents us only with superficialities

As an expose, ScarfFace makes a great surface gloss on this “sport,” just deep enough to suggest how unsavory it all is, perhaps not deep enough to lead to legal action against the filmmakers. The “scandals” surrounding it are usually limited to the deaths.

There’s just not enough to this.

The entire affair looks pricey but cut-rate at the same time, like a Tesla… The Budweiser product placement does nothing to dispel that.

All Toscana has to offer is some decent (limited) scenery, a little taste of high-end cooking, and a love story that’s about as romantic as the one The Bard set in foggy Helsignor.

Any 100 minute movie with 40 minutes of story, one that blows the romance pretty much entirely and takes a dive in its big moment, is something even teens will outgrow before the closing credits.

It’s a tale too concerned with keeping a secret that’s not a secret at all, and condoning behavior that has might warrant a police “all points bulletin” elsewhere. But it’s well-acted and quite watchable.

Torres has plenty of fellow aficionados on camera telling us that they “get it,” but not really why. And he samples so little of the actual film that we’re kind of left in the dark.

There’s something to be said for quitting while you’re ahead.

Lacking that skepticism, with filmmakers hellbent on creating something “sensational” (meh) that fellow believers will want to see, “The House in Between” is never more than an endlessly-hyped collection “Didjoo SEE that? (We see nothing), “Hear THAT?” (maybe a thumb) moments.

Paskal is a Malaysian Seal Team Six thriller, an action picture that rarely missteps when it’s all about the action, but that takes too many detours into dull, cliched melodrama to recommend.

The film’s serious shortcoming is relying on a mystery that we guess instantly, and not serving up any real frights and stylish touches to distract us from the conclusion we see coming early in the first act.

The story is simple, and the narrative still manages to be muddled here and there, especially towards the end. But Moon Garden is a dazzling use of various effects and animation techniques to tell a child’s-eye-view story of purgatory, or something awfully close to it.

One thing that separates this film from similar movies (Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book” and “Soldier of Orange” are two of the best) is that it takes the story past the German surrender and into the murky waters of post-Occupation collaborator-hunting.

Dull, uninvolving and downright off-putting in the story it tells and the way that it tells it, “Wall” doesn’t make sense until you consider that its star co-directed it. It’s a dubious star vehicle and something of a head-scratcher, even after we realize that.

The adults are sharp and the kids are all right. It plays, even if the pacing’s slow by Western standards. And while you might not know the rules of snooker any better by the end than you did at the outset, there’s enough here to make one want to look them up.

Swiss director and co-writer Oliver Rihs (“Ready, Steady Ommm!”) takes a serious step into the big time with this gripping saga, a story that begins escape-artist jaunty and occasionally finds its way back there even as the story turns grimmer and the color palette progressively greyer.

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.

This movie is terrible right out of the gate, and execrable by the time Willis makes his belated bow — 23 minutes in.

Mandylor isn’t bad, pretty much every thing and everybody else is. But at least it’s short.

I can’t really endorse Fair Game. But there’s enough good stuff in it — “Mad Max/Road Warrior” mimicking stunts, etc — that you can see what QT saw in it and why he figured he could “improve” on a good idea whose execution wasn’t all it might have been.

All well and good, or at least adequate. But as a screenwriter his star vehicle has organizational problem and a twisty story in which all the energy is devoted to keeping those twists from being obvious.

There isn’t much to this aside from an attractive but bland and colorless cast parked in front of seaside vistas, stunning coves to swim or dive in and the like.

The performances are uneven, with a few players having experience on obscure, equally malnourished and overreaching indie film sets, and others outright amateurs. There are continuity errors, with shots not quite matching up.

Schmaltz aside, I enjoyed this enough to recommend it up until it took that second act turn.

Cult, sullen and furious, manipulative and demanding, gives us as vivid a picture of toxic interpersonal dependency as we can stomach, never giving ground, crossing one line after the other until we’re screaming at her, Jojo, Daniel and the TV in indignation.

“Rising Dragon” still makes a fascinating film version of a “further reading” history lesson, a reminder of the historical enmity between Korean and its avaricious, warlike neighbor and why Koreans in the film and in the modern day regard this as a “battle of the righteous against the unrighteous.”

The combat sequences are straightforward and well-handled.

Shaffer has filmed a great primer on a key figure in the history of cinema and the perfect movie for anyone whose interest was piqued by “Nope” to learn “the real story,” which is colorful enough without the glorious myths surrounding it.

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.

The mixed-bag Reclaim turns out to be doesn’t hide the fact that there’s a tighter, more impactful movie in this material, a common complaint with overlong made-for-Netflix productions. Indulging the filmmaker, like a mother indulging her kids for too long, doesn’t do anybody any good.

I kind of got into the film’s dark, masochistic comic vibe but found it ungainly and lumbering.

Scene after scene lacks spark or fire or heart.

Sure, it drags a bit in the middle acts, and even shifts point of view for a while, away from the barista Beni and his occasionally-weeping pal, Jody. But the Battle Royale finale is fun.

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

It’s a brazenly bouncy bloodbath built around that well known romantic comedy “type,” manic murderous pixie teen girls. OK, it’s an interesting sadistic twist on a popular rom-com type.

Danner, of “Hello Herman” and “Bad Impulse,” cooked up a sadly unsurprising story with screenwriter Jason Chase Tyrell and all the pretty people and pretty settings and flashbacks can’t finesse “The Runner” into something it’s not — tense and compelling.

This Camping Trip is the oddest blend of “Look what we’ve learned now” showing off and rank filmmaking incompetence I’ve seen in ages.

The third act is nonsense contrived to deliver the Big Reveal, which is neither big nor revealing.

Even though it never lets us forget the lack of star power and modest budget, even if it never makes the leap to “compelling,” Raven’s Hollow is never less than an interesting effort and a good-looking argument that given the money, Hatton could show us something, with the right script.

Cullen and Warren give this drama a gravitas and poignance that transcends the trite formula It Snows all the Time never strays from.

It’s a harmless and not utterly charmless Polish kids’ dramedy (subtitled, or dubbed into English) of The Big Game genre — a video game team hoping to win The Big “Robot Masters” e-sports tournament.

It is astonishing how off-key Bundles goes, and how badly the violence is introduced into this light dramedy, and how grimly and poorly-acted that violence plays out.

Good intentions run smack into self-indulgence in “MVP,” a slack, sentimental, cliche-and-stereotype-stuffed drama from activist, charitable foundation founder, Green Beret vet and actor Nate Boyer.

B-movie mainstay Steven C. Miller (2012’s “Silent Night,” a few recent Bruce Willis action pix) builds suspense here and there and stages a reasonably invented murder-by-technology moment or two. But Margaux is so formulaic as to forbid anything resembling a surprise.

It’s very self-conscious and gets very meta and kind of arty. But if Adieu Godard rarely achieves laugh-out-loud chuckles, scene after scene finds grins, giggles and bits of comical outrage.

The “telling anecdotes” from friends, the TV interviews Michael did himself, the armchair analysis of the things that drove Michael and shaped his later life make “Portrait of an Artist” a terrific snapshot of the Wham! star who became a legendary figure not just in music, but the gay community and world pop culture as well.

It doesn’t hang together very well pretty much from the start. But by the third act, this messy mayhem goes right off the rails, as if there were rails it was following in the first place.

Nairobby may not be an instant classic. It’s still a sharp enough opening outing to be worth a look and easily earns that second check Netflix should write to give us more gritty tales from Kenya from this very promising first-time director.

Director Tommy Haines, a Midwesterner, knows the lay of the land and gives us a sometimes graceful, occasionally bone-jarring film that vividly captures action on the ice — trash talk and brawls include — and far more banal lives off of it.

Scene after excruciating scene unfolds, unravels or just plain bleeds out, right before our ever-sleepier eyes.

Almost everything about this one hints at a funnier movie than “Smoke” turns out to be, from the goofy, Home Shopping Network show (or PBS grilling series) title to clouds of exhalations that decorate many scenes that aren’t as amusing as the filmmakers seem to think.

It’s adorable, the most adorable thing on Netflix right now.