Roger Moore

Whatever promise there is in this well-worn existentialist premise starts to dissipate once the first guy meets the second, and the attention steadily fades the more characters in search of an exit — or a GPS fix — that they meet on their journey.

The Bengali is a lovely home movie about finding one’s roots, a simple tale that connects a New Orleans family to its West Bengal patriarch, who came over from India in the late 19th century.

The film is a celebration of the most optimistic big thinker of them all, a figure who has been at the forefront of many of the best phenomena, trends, technology and values inculcated in modern culture.

Because we know this screenplay is going to tell us a lot more “why” than we need to know or care to know. And that’s a sign they didn’t pay attention to more important things, like scripting more interesting characters, more terrifying situations and pithier lines, or getting the actors to buy in and give the viewer something to grab hold of.

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.

To the Moon is a psychological/psychedelic thriller that has a lot of trouble coming together and more trouble getting to its fairly obvious point.

The tamest movie ever made about dabbling in LSD and Riot Grrrl culture has to be Acid Test, a non-prescription sleep aid of a movie.

Director and co-writer Tory Jones opens his picture with a painfully inept podcast interview, setting an amateurish tone that the picture never shakes.

What emerges is more a “feeling” than a narrative, more a sensation (irritation, in my case) than cinema, and more BS than your average performative, bubbly and empty TED talk held in a stockyard.

This sentimental, sweet and romantic voyage crashes into the rocks in the third act with bizarre turns that lean into Chinese self-sacrifice so hard the indoctrination is the least grating thing about it, and all the added supernaturalism in the world can’t rescue it.

It mopes along when it isn’t leaving out what seem to be whole passages, transitions, backstory and the like. The action doesn’t flow at all, and relationships have a brittle, abrupt quality.

Even at its most unpleasant, it’s never less than fascinating.

Snoop shows up and we almost get a laugh. But that’s far too little and entirely too late to give Bromates a chance.

What a sad and sappy seize-the-day satire The Loneliest Boy in the World turns out to be.

Lancaster briskly covers a lot of ground, making it a most watchable overview of a subject that whole documentary series and a library’s worth of books have been devoted to. And it’s a valuable document as well, getting many of these survivors on film one last time as they remember the context, the stakes and the deadly work they volunteered to do the last time the world faced a global threat from fascist totalitarianism.

The action is stunningly static, the murders something of an afterthought and the logic illogical, starting with the “smores” campfire party being set in broad daylight. And the slaughter, when it finally starts in earnest, is by-the-book and dull and features the fakest looking blood this side of Heinz 57.

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.

The jump-frights pay off, the effects are excellent and the zombie makeup even better. And there’s something to be said for the novelty of it all. It isn’t every night-of-the-living-dead spawn that’s built around the Islamic way of death.

Even at this late stage of the game, Hopkins is still managing to break new ground on screen, and we’d hate for this fiasco to be his last.

Bar Fight! is an 84 minute long break-up “Who gets custody of ‘our‘ regular bar?” comedy that hits the wall at about the 30 minute mark.

The drama, with characters trying to avert a tragedy under tragic circumstances, is cleverly-constructed, with its contrivances nicely obscured by the glorious sense of place and time seen, in hindsight, as at best another “grey area” moment in the mixed bag of late era colonialism, at worst as another crippling blow dealt to a culture destined to barely survive the experience.

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

This Tommy Boulding tale is depressingly straightforward and generally lacks the urgency of people being chased to death and the menace of upper class twits on horseback dressed for the hunt and dressed to kill.

A lightly fiesty performance by Leslie Uggams in the title role and a general feel-good vibe are the chief recommendations of Dotty & Soul, a plucky but corny comedy from actor turned writer, director and star Adam Saunders.

Shinzô Katayama’s Missing is a serial killer thriller that trips you up, bounces you around and repels and entertains you all along the way.

It’s a movie that demands we tune out long before it tries to “explain” away its shortcomings.

What a dreadful bore The Sleep Experiment turns out to be.

Whatever the virtues of the somewhat colorless cast, the script’s idea of wit and edge leaves them literally “stuck in a loop.”

Suliman plays the whole movie on simmer, about to boil over with rage, outrage and verge-of-tears frustration. Unterberger gives us a gutsy but naive filmmaker with a sense of mystery and no compunctions about ethical or moral shortcuts.

It’s not so much a “sweet nothing” as a “nothing nothing” of a holiday movie, bearing evidence that it’s been cut and a lot has been left out. And judging from what made this release print, the edits were no great loss.

The production design is cool, the cutting and staging are sharp. But the movie that comes out of all that doesn’t play. So maybe I’ll give the record a listen.

The whole plays as flat, never quite hitting a high, never remotely touching bottom.

If you like your fights righteously brutal and head-buttingly realistic and your car chases Vin Diesel free, this is the thriller for you.

The Chalk Line is never a complete write-off, but there is no getting around that it isn’t what it could have been.

This was potentially a timely, politically-charged thriller sure to pack a punch. Blows are landed, and characters are triggered.

This is no credit to anybody involved, dull and dumb, badly directed from a really bad script the director took a co-writing credit on. Leave this corpse buried.

I appreciate the effort it took to get a Western made in this day and age. It’s a good story. Redford knew it. So does Momoa. And there are some scattered stand-out moments.

If Grillo can’t make the guy interesting to watch, and writer-director Bobby Moresco (he shared the screenwriting Oscar for “Crash”) can’t fudge Ferruccio’s life story into something more involving than this, I dare say that some suit at Lionsgate sat in a screening room at some point and wondered aloud, “Well, what was the point of THAT?”

Safe Place makes for a beautifully subtle portrayal of guilt, fear and grief, the stress a loved one’s actions bring to those who love them and the acknowledgement that whatever they could have done, odds are it probably wouldn’t have changed the course of history.

Maybe this film played as quick and warm and fun in Sweden. But for me it just lumbered and stumbled along.

There aren’t more than a couple of laughs mixed in with a couple of legitimately sweet interludes in Fantasy Football, when all’s said and done. But everybody involved puts a cheerful face on things and makes this kids’ film endurable, if not quite passable entertainment.

One just hopes The Once and Future John McClane was well-compensated, and that his retirement is as comfortable as he’s earned, even if this is nobody’s idea of “Redemption.”

Reverence for fallen comrades, a “leave no man behind” ethos, esprit de corps valued and a fondness for good ol’American made military hardware make this one worth checking out. Any film that reminds us how human beings are a lot alike in dire situations is a good thing.

We should all reserve “instantly awful” for C-movie garbage like Pistolera, an underworld vengeance thriller that is almost unwatchable, godawful pretty much from the first frame to the last.

It’s not helped along its merry way by clumsy plotting, slack direction and stiff performances, which seem more amateurish the further away from the leads that you get. But you can see the promising seeds that gave birth to it, even if they weren’t nurtured all the way to harvest.

It’s a somewhat dimwitted thriller, sloppily plotted. But the fights are pretty good — and there are a LOT of them.

It’s not deep, not insightful and not all that funny outside of the dynamic these two set up on screen.

The picture is a very slow starter, and even when the script begins to jolt, shock and make us fear our protagonist is merely fodder for the machine, even as it teases us with the idea that a man can only take so much, we know better than to get our hopes up too much.

It’s badly-written and amateurishly-acted, so amateurishly that one feels sorry for much of the cast.

It’s a straight-up B-movie, and like a lot of them it tries too hard to be jokey. But all involved have a little fun with it, which pays dividends in the damnedest places.

With a movie like Head Rush, you come for the action, but usually you hope for the cheese that comes with it to be a little better than this.

Heche makes her curtain call memorable, not wasting one second of her screen time, a compact performance of canniness and compassion that nicely complements the leads and makes this worth watching, if not really worth “endorsing.”

The performances are on low simmer as the characters turn towards sinister or allegedly desperate, and do nothing to engage us in the proceedings. And the payoff is flat, with even the violence failing to up the heartrate as it supposedly ups the ante.

Terrible movie, dull and heartless and drably-acted by actors whose agents have no souls, the proof being they “booked” the poor players for this unthrilling thriller about hunting humans, “the most dangerous game.”

It’s a loud, in-your-face tapdance through horror tropes that passes muster as a slick production even if it isn’t the most original thing I’ve seen this month.

A gimmicky, obscurant and clumsy style of storytelling spoils what could have been gripping story.

I liked the cartwheeling, wall-walking, bullet-dodging nonsense of the brawls. Note the fight choreography and blur of swirling cameras and edits designed to make us think an 85 pound pixie is dropping hulking gangsters by the metric ton in every fight. It’s all too glib about the blood-letting and entirely too childish and nonsensical for me to get into.

Lonesome manages to be a movie long on charm and short on most everything else.

The tone is jokey enough, a few of the gags land.

Pointless scenes are scattered in with those that advance the plot, but even the ones designed to flesh out the characters via cliches — the abused daughter our gang leader lost track of in prison — just set one’s teeth on edge.

It quietly takes hold of the viewer with patience, a gripping story that has plenty to say to audiences all over the world, especially those with under-policed police, accepted corruption at the highest levels, where a “War on Women” is a political policy, even if it’s never been declared.

It’s not a badly-crafted film, just a shallow gloss on these characters and a relationship that they don’t explain, don’t dissect and analyze, but simply live.

Think “American Graffiti” and “High Fidelity” in terms of themes and genre, without the wit, budget, or cast to pull that off.

It stumbles from eye-rolling to infuriating all the way to risible as the filmmakers turn professional failure into armed and trained victimhood, and then into savage “learn your lesson” revenge.

The most impressive element to this Michiel van Erp film (“Open Seas” was his) is the way it shifts direction and tone so abruptly that it could give you whiplash.

The debut feature of writer-director Thom Harp is a raunchy, skirt-hiking farce that never quite achieves the happy ending all involved were hoping for, although it finds a few laughs and some oh-no-they-didn’ts.

The three “stories” here don’t really connect. The music is good, but the stories are so different, with each falling on different spots on the “Is there a point to all this?” spectrum that ,the film doesn’t measure up to the tunes.

The cast is quite good, and the locations — including a trip to the White Sands National Monument — ground the picture in a particular place and a corner of the culture.

Three Day Millionaire, scripted by Paul Stephenson and directed by Jack Spring (“Destination: Dewsbury”), is a Ritchie-lite movie that gets many of the basics right even as a misses a couple of the most obvious.

Ocean Boy is awkward and ungainly — as if made by someone determined to hit his life’s real-or-fictional waypoints, to gloss up his own image while playing up the obstacles he had to overcome, but incapable of managing any of that particularly gracefully.

The slack pacing and perfunctory ways the killings are staged by director Philip Gagnon mean that the only real question is “Who will care?”

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

The lower-than-low stakes render this adaptation barely serviceable as a harmless kiddie time-killer. There’s just too little going on, and dance numbers with middling choreography and chattering digital critters don’t change that.

Even if the Malaysian undead don’t have the rules of “Zombieland” down pat, the effects are decent and the makeup is outstanding even if the plot is canned/store-brand generic and the frights not all that frightening.

The acting ranges from adequate to laughable, and the direction cannot overcome the atonal screech of the screenwriting.

Slight as it is, it’s all a little creepy and occasionally kind of funny, in a dry, dark and oh-my-God-did-she-open-that-wound AGAIN bloody way.

The picture tends to peter out as we drift away from Mordecai, relating his life story to Nina in animated flashbacks.

The Nigerian setting is the main novelty in this flatlining melodrama.

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.

Every script twist throwing them together is as obvious as every character trait/action that points to a doomed marriage. Every line of dialogue is as bad in English as it was in the original Polish.

If you love movies and think you know the medium’s history, prepare to be overwhelmed.

Freeman has a few moments, and Hauser has aged into a fine dad-bodied man-of-action. It’s a pity they’re stuck in messes like this, without even an on-location Roman vacation to show for it.

“Brothers in Blues” is a documentary attempt to chart their careers, get at their influences and at least take a stab at recreating their lives and the world they came from and how it shaped them. It’s OK for what it is, but what it is somewhat less than it should be.

I do love me a solid B-movie, and this one, after it finds its footing, delivers. Still not sold on adding Oklahoma to my bucket list, though. But Swab might be getting me there.

Esra and Liquorish are balls-out in some of their scenes together. They always click, and are at their funniest when they’re fighting, indulging and humiliating each other. More of that, please.

The Pilgrim is a serene, scenic and soul-searching indie drama that goes adrift as it charts an over-familiar course.

A lot of the issues stem from the film’s short running time and flat storytelling and pacing.

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?

The action beats are pro forma, as are the way stations of this plot.

Nobody here is given enough help by the script for this thing to play as funny or touching and surprising.

A stunningly-realistic, pulse-pounding punchout at the climax of Kin Long Chan’s Hong Kong noir Hand Rolled Cigarette (Sau gyun yin) joins the list of tussles that come close to topping “Oldboy.”

Stalker is a ridiculously-chatty bore of a thriller, a stunning waste of viewing time about an actress and a second unit photographer stuck in an elevator.

Our nostalgic attachment to actresses who had their share of iconic roles decades ago is worth something. And “Chantilly Bridge” does a service in reminding us that Slater, Richardson, Shire, Cruise, Eikenberry, Sheedy and Williams are still around, still good at what they do and still employable.

Partners in Crime never manages to be more than a hit or miss affair, a one-day “Weekend at Bernie’s” that doesn’t have nearly as much fun with its best sight gag — a corpse — and can’t find enough laughs in that parody of femininity that drag often is to make up for it.

Director Espinoza does a fine job with the action beats and the epic settings. But every time this brief but not brisk genre thriller breaks into a new “Chapter,” aka “Chapter III: The Evil Guest,” he crosses from homage into parody and from master genre filmmaker into somebody whose “Achilles heel” is his screenwriting.

So unless you’re an Ip Man completist, “The Awakening” sits among the Ip Man movies you don’t bother with unless you’re behind on your sleep.

Not terrible, could have easily been better had our director, co-writer and star not tripped over all his many jobs along the way.

It’s an old fashioned romance in a queer setting, and is about reaching that moment when cruising, casual sex and narcissism aren’t enough — and are ending, anyway, because at least in terms of your “crowd,” you’re getting “old.”

Yes, the story’s a goof, a nonsensical mash-up that gives his character an excuse to bowl over legions of hired swordsmen and soldiers, monks and wizarding world warriors. But Yen is terrific, a Smiler with the Knife anti-hero who has the charisma Jet Li lacked and a cool bravado that never suited everyman martial arts comic Jackie Chan.

It’s impossible to shake the feeling that Pilgrimage, which takes its title from the book that was eventually published, is more a collection of missed opportunities than a tale for the ages.

Phenomena plays more like the promising pilot to a TV series than a movie that wholly delivers the comic or traumatic goods.

The plot is cut-and-pasted from a thousand better thrillers, only dumber, with scenes that serve zero purpose and jokes nobody would find funny.

This isn’t the best “version” of this “do over” story ever. But it pushes a lot of the right buttons and is just different enough to be worth revisiting “Groundhog Day” One More Time, here in the company of cute young Swedes.

When you see the brutish incuriosity, the cowardly pack-mentality cruelty and utter disregard for “selflessness” and “compassion,” it’s hard not to see its North American analogs among the most self-serving, system-rigging raised-to-be-authoritarians among us. And pray that they devour each other rather than us.

The bad title isn’t the worst sin of Organ Trail, basically a dawdling B Western rendered violent enough to be labeled “horror.”

I got a few laughs out of Double Life, a Canadian thriller about a two-timing man who gets murdered and the widow and his chick-on-the-side who team up to solve the crime.

Not all of Chokehold makes sense or seems logical. But as the threats rise and the deeds are done, Tatlitug and Saylay and screenwriter Hakan Gunday keep us engrossed and invested in this bad-man-turning-worse and his fate.

Massalas immerses us in this pole-dancing “Oliver Twist” tale and the cast goes all-in to show us a Greece beyond the migrant headlines and the tourist sites, one where you’d better watch your wallet, because not everyone can count on a stampede of drag queens to bail you out of a jam.

The Matchmaker is an edgy Saudi parable, an inverted “Handmaid’s Tale” warning the patriarchy about a mythical reckoning to come from the oppressed women in their lives.

The incidents, relationships and even the intrigues here are all over-familiar tropes, which prevents this competently-made thriller ever rise to the level of engaging.

The special effects are so amateurish as to look like continuity errors.

Netflix wasted a lot of Polish Zlotys on a terrible movie that had apparently no one in the U.S. company bothered to read and approve, or even have translated so that they could see and hear how bad it was doomed to be.

Yes, fast is funny, but predictable is predictable, and this rom-com stumbles badly as it lurches towards the inevitable — she’s hired him to bust them up, he’s slow figuring this out.

This crisp and ever-co-conveniently murderous farce demonstrates that revenge can be served hot or cold, and as messy as is necessary, just so long as you have the proper cleaning products at hand to tidy up afterwards.

Call this one a swing-and-a-miss and “Better luck next time,” because I like the idea and the casting and the sexy tone, just not what they did with those elements.

The pace never picks up from that slow-walk pedestrian opening, making “Velvet Jesus” a half hour movie stretched to 102 tedious, uninvolving minutes.

The Big 4 never goes far wrong when action is the reason for the season. Tjahjanto and his team know how to frame, film and edit a good brawl, and a decent shoot-out, too.

I’ve seen just enough recent Chinese cinema to see “Born to Fly” as a bit cheesier than most exports, but only on the edges of the rank propaganda of some Chinese war films, which span most wars China has fought, from ancient times to Korea.

An elegaic documentary.

Hard Feelings still manages to find a few outrageous laughs.

Whatever cultural mores “Missed Connections” is operating under, there aren’t many parts of the world where this tepid, tame adults-flirting-like-tweens rom-com will be seen as romantic or comic.

The structure gives the picture a diffuse feel, as if the writer-director hopes to lay on backstory that will distract us from how short a distance this story covers and not allow the viewer to realize how thin the text is, with or without these subtexts.

It’s dreadful by most any measure — violent, tin-eared, clumsily-staged and uncertainly-acted. And it’s head-slappingly stupid as a police procedural.

The familiar, easily-guessed plot points and story beats entertain just enough to compensate for how unchallenging and unsurprising most of this is. Whatever one thinks of poets, movies about poets are always a tad on the pretentious, tin-eared side.

Director and co-writer Mordini makes a total hash of things by battering the timeline into atoms, constantly skipping from “three months before the event” to “130 hours” before back to “two months before,” and on and on.

It sprints out of the gate for 15 minutes, spills blood and settling scores in the finale and is boring as brie in the middle acts.

It’s always nice when musicians that mattered to their fans are memorialized in movies like this. As most of us mark the waypoints of our early lives with songs, the attachments are real and last a lifetime.

Bodega is a dopey, druggy and funny midnight movie about one young guy’s need for social media affirmation to go along with the drug money that supports his modest New York lifestyle.

The Wildflower is an infuriating melodrama about victims of abuse in Nigeria, oddly presented as a “dramedy” to the domestic market, as some of what’s being shown is alleged to have a comic intent.

Nabatian gets an engrossing, involving story out of these familiar themes with artistic interludes via dance, surrealistic flourishes as Santeria flashbacks and en pointe performances.

Dead Shot is a lean, myopic thriller that remembers the IRA wars against UK “paras” and special units as tit-for-tat violence that couldn’t help but turn “personal.”

At this point, one has to say that Skiba’s shown his cards in genre after genre after genre, and he’s still drawing nothing but deuces and one-eyed jacks, a loser’s hand every time.

The direction is solid, punchy. Yet the picture isn’t so much plotted as given a time frame to squeeze a lot of fistfights into. The pranks are ancient, the girl characters barely given a function and the laughs few and far between.

The film never quite finds its sweet spot. The violence mixed with flippant modern vernacular is never quite darkly funny, and the film leaves one puzzled about Belle’s agenda, or the Witch’s. The Beast’s, at least, we understand.

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.

The task of pulling these dispirate, franchise-sized plot elements and this populous cast into a coherent narrative with fun action beats proves too much for director and co-writer Antoni Mykowski, who bites off more than he can chew for his feature film debut.

It’s more or less watchable, especially as it takes a turn towards the daffy in the third act. But filmmaker Óskar Thór Axelsson (“I Remember You”) cooks up a classic ninety minute thriller wrapped in an ungainly 110 minute package.

The acting isn’t bad, but like the fight choreography, it’s of uneven quality.

None of the care taken with the visuals and potential poster shots of all the over-styled “stars” trickled down to the screenplay, with only the occasional snappy come-back making us forget the lack of a plot, logic, character motivation (in most cases) or sense that any of this means a damned thing.

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

File Natty Knocks under that broad horror film rubric “I’ve seen worse.”

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

This slow-moving picture finds a resolution, but not a satisfying or surprising conclusion.

Like the first film, it’s a sexy look at a glossy, affluent and urban Turkey of high fashion, social climbing and liberated women. But like “Love Tactics,” it has a hard time finding much that’s cute, new and surprising in such a tale.

I won’t oversell this, but a climactic chase in an out-of-control hedgehog float pretty much pegs the middle-school mirth meter, and that’s the target audience here.

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

Havelka’s not-quite-farce reminds us of how important “rules” are,” and how bad actors can bend them into obstruction, how important civility is and how pointless it is for a gay man or anybody else to try and explain “solidarity” and group action to the dogmatic, the dim and the determined-to-do-nothing.

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

The Baker delivers on all the promise of its premise, all the salesmanship it took to get it cast, financed and filmed in the lovely Caymans.

Hidden Strike is a bad movie that’s easy to endorse. A buddy comedy co-starring the master the genre, Jackie Chan, here paired with that jock joker John Cena, it’s action for those who like their cheese paired with some fine…whines.

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.

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

Pulpy as the plot is, with an ending that adds an anti-climax or two, “Bad City” is a definite step up from “Hydra.”

As dytopias go, this one isn’t a complete bust. Paradise serves up food for thought in a just-provocative-enough satire of the growing gap between the coddled and well-cared-for rich and everybody they’re screwing over.

The true story of a Korean diplomat kidnapped in civil war-torn Lebanon in the ’80s becomes the most exciting, most entertaining buddy picture in years —“Ransomed” — the best action pic of the summer.

Cultural novelty aside, I found “Zom 100” to be pretty tame and tepid going, start to finish. Some decent chases, adorably doable but DULL bucket list items, and cute leads are about all there is to it.

Match Me if You Can is an indie rom-com that just isn’t — quick or romantic. There are funny lines and a cute moment, here and there. And director Marian Yeager knows that in cinematic terms, comedy plays best when it plays out in playful closeups. But this wilted rose of late summer doesn’t have 75 minutes worth of jokes, gags and adorable laughs. And it runs for over 100.

It’s all played broadly enough to feel funny (ish) even when it isn’t. But the pacing is off, and the mystery-solving takes precedence over the comedy, leaving us with a puzzle that might be solved but lacking enough laughs to hold one’s interest for 90 minutes, much less 124.

An adorable, uplifting ache of a movie, writer-director Janis Pugh’s modest marvel floats by on the glories of a well-crafted pop song and summons up “An Officer and a Gentleman” for its finale.

Everything feels articifial and bloodless, even the murders.

It’s the very embodiment of The Wrong Stuff.

Sorry, We’re Closed, is a hopeful, brisk and sprawling “cook’s tour” with “self-care” and support for COVID closed eateries and their stressed chefs and staff as its subtext.

It’s a slick, university-set thriller with a sexy young cast and grisly deaths that the viewer works her or his way through to figure out whodunit. But from the archetypal characters to the standard-issue murder settings and modes of death, there isn’t much here to hold the interest of anybody who’s ever seen a horror movie.

“Redville” is a deathly-slow, emotionally empty exericise in “Is this Purgatory?” But even though everything existential and cinematic can’t be “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” I hand it to them for trying.

The many melodramatic touches would almost certainly have marred my experience of The Fallen Bridge, had this mystery thriller been a formulaic Hollywood product. But it’s Chinese — VERY Chinese — and that adds layers of meaning to even mundane details, enriching the film and almost overwhelming even the obvious contrivances.

Camargo puts a sympathetic face on a statistic, an innocent child targeted, and the collateral damage that spills over from that shatters lives, limits futures and has blowback that the online anti-immigration zealots can’t begin to fathom.

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

No More Bets is a heavy-handed Chinese thriller about the evils of gambling, the perils of emigrating and the righteousness of Chinese policing as it pertains to international online scamming conspiracies.

This “Swan Princess” is animated babysitting for tiny tots, nothing more. And even they will someday look back on what they watched as a pre-schooler and roll their eyes.

Ms. Gunn mugs a bit and isn’t so much bad as not colorful enough to pull off what is almost a one-woman show. Movies that fail are rarely the fault of the actors. Unless they co-write the mostly charmless script.

A movie that goes from bad to exponentially worse by giving itself over to what is passed-off as an all back-story, over-sharing bar-pickup conversation.

“Kingdom of Storms” “Dazzling to look at,” sure. But the ungainliness of this lumbering, over-populated narrative has one often wondering, “Wait, where’d the Fox Demon go?”

There’s a resigned tone to much of this film, a fatalistic “This can only end one way” despite every quirky shift in direction and mood.

If survival against the odds tales are your thing, it’s worth a watch despite the occasional eye-roll.

Whatever potential it had, the film just isn’t very good, with or without fact checking.

It’s a film built on a foolproof formula, in which the fools foul up the basics.

Obscure, clumsily-pretentious, under-scripted and flatly acted, there’s nothing to recommend here.

Pre Fab! is an amusing, informative and bittersweet documentary.

It’s an occasionally cute, strained attempt at twee that never quite comes together or comes off.

The best martial arts action and gunplay are in the first act. After that, this convoluted Wolf Pack tale turns into something of a mutt.

Director Cheang keeps this brutal movie on the march, stomping through the sordid side of a city he knows well, giving up his story’s twists grudgingly and keeping us engaged no matter how ugly things turn.

It’s all kind of sadly formulaic and dispassionately passionate, but also adult and occasionally surprising in where it takes our assisted suicide sympathies.

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

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

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

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

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

The animation, which does more with color than with character design, settings or sight-gags, is adequate, nothing more. Turn it on, leave the room and bake a pie. Maybe it’ll jump-start a small child’s interest in the books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comedy is very hard to create out of hate.

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

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

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

Fouéré pretty much steals the picture, which despite its bizarre twists and taste of torture porn-level violence, takes on a tired familiarity common to such tales.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The Arctic Convoy is not all that novel or new. But it’s beautifully put together, well-acted and tautly-acted.

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

The kids aren’t bad, just stuck playing blandly-written uninteresting “types.” The production has a candy-colored high school glow that nothing we see or hear lives up to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

While one doffs one’s (not coonskin) hat at anyone trying to make a frontier thriller on an indie budget, this “Ballad” borders on abominable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waiting for Dalí gets by on charm, settings and set-ups. It’s a pity more of those set-ups don’t deliver the “twee” the picture promises.

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

A World War I overreach, pretty much start to finish.

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

So anyone expecting this depiction of Asperger’s/”on the spectrum” autism to advance the medium will be sorely disappointed. The artistic milieu and tentative attempts at making a connection shine, but too much of what’s here is just genre cliches.

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

The leads are compelling, the action furious and the suspense right on the edge of riveting, which is more than enough to make this “Escape” an odyssey we want to take with these people who want to decide their own future, rather than having a failing totalitarian state do it for them.

What the film sorely lacks is much in the way of urgency. Even the get-aways are dull. And for all the sexual heat of the Bruno/Annie connection, their relationship lacks weight or drama.

The Champion isn’t a winner, but formulaic or not, it’s never quite a total write-off either.

It’s all just (almost) good, clean and forgettable “fun,” for those young enough to be delighted by it.

One Fast Move is several scenes of solid if unspectacular motorcycle racing and stunt driving footage in search of a plot.

House of Ga’a is at its best in action, as the fight choreography is good and the pacing is sharpest. When we settle on palace intrigues, the picture slows to the point of being static with interiors, infighting and betrayals of the sort one sees in soap operas the world over, even those set in pre-colonial West Africa.

As for the results, some sequences play, some are novel and some are tried and trite cliches.

The Other Laurens is a slow, drifting mystery thriller that takes a while to decide what it’s about, takes another while to add on complications and adds a third while to attempt to get to some sort ofint.

Truth be told, the world didn’t need a third “Baby Assassins” movie. All writer-director Yuko Sakamoto did was make a longer, more bloated, more character-cluttered version of the first two films.

The performances are perfunctory, with little heart, heat or whimsy. The picture never looks cheap, but the melodramatic flourishes dumb it down at every turn.

The script by Dan Hall is strictly paint-by-numbers — cut and dried and predictable. But the execution atones for some of that, and the performances give it that extra something that makes even a formulaic thriller worth your time.

The screenplay never gets past that “workshop this into something sharper” stage, and the many players never transcend that “promising introduction” that their characters are given.

It’s kind of shambolic, half-assed and terrible, but almost amusing in the right frame of mind (altered) and with the right audience (surfers).

The narrative never strays from the formula/quest that Ha is on. But writer-director Oh isn’t shy about boring us half-to-death as we wait for that inevitable connecting of the dots, resolution of the search and the inevitable brandishing of the “Revolver.”

Set on the 2012 Colombian/Venezuelan border, Pimpinero: Blood and Oil opens with great promise and tasty action picture possibilities before running out of gas in the middle acts as it shifts point of view and stumbles towards the even deadlier prospects of its finale.

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.

“Jack” is engaging, even if this account of death and dying meanders a bit and plays as more emotionally flat than you’d expect.

When it all does go wrong — slowly, tediously and incredulously — little of what we’ve seen before is allowed to make a lick of sense.

A thriller with simple primal plot undone by a leaky script and a loss of nerve.

There’s little to nothing redeemable in it, a film where half the scenes have no reason to exist and the other half go on past any point they may have.

Claire Ayoub’s debut feature is witty but utterly predictable, uplifting in all the right ways, manipulative in many others. Characters are a checkbox of political correctness and incorrectness, with mean girls and a mom who wants to “understand,” but just can’t without help. What all that adds up to is good-hearted and damned adorable.

The sequel is fitfully amusing and watchable. But you can sense the greater silliness that inspired it in this “Blues Brothers go Metal” road odyssey.

Comedy is quick and The Zombie Wedding lumbers, staggers and stumbles up to the wedding, and flails like a tortoise sinking in quicksand after the “I do’s.”

Canary Black is an almost wholly unsatisfying thriller that seemingly had enough necessary ingredients to comprise a full meal.

Writer-director Nora Fiffer’s debut feature shows us the tears and hopes that we understand them. And she finds humor amid the insights about this particular version of post partum depression.

Jon Holmberg’s Swedish caper-comedy/prison escape dramedy and “Fugitive” spoof Trouble is more amusingly frustrating than stupidly frustrating.

CTRL is a slick and melodramatic Indian variation of the “runaway computer/evil AI” formula, a tale that begins jaunty and jokey and staggers into sinister in the most heavy-handed ways.

Stockholm Bloodbath has fine action beats and furious avenging, but collapses into a sort of resignation about the parts of the tale that must be rendered faithfully.

It’s immersive enough, luring us into this world and fearing for our heroines’ safety. But the abrupt shifts in focus make one wish Han Shuai had taken some more crowd-pleasing course, or gone all-in on the darkness of this underworld an out-of-her-element ex-pat finds herself in.

There’s no suspense in the tale, even in its “big finish.” “Tragic” was never in the cards, as this con man got away with his stunt. But this could have been dark and funny. It isn’t.

Daffy to the point of kid-friendly — remember, he did a kids’ cartoon series — it’s lighthearted fun with little of the grim seriousness and unsubtle People’s Republican messaging of his recent films. Because this time, Jackie Chan plays Jackie Chan.

For all the relationship insights dog-lovers-savvy our screenwriters fold into this slight, low-stakes tale, they wisely let underfilmed Portland itself take on a co-starring role.

It’s sober minded enough. Yet it’s all rather less satisfying than it might have been.

It’s an indie film that reminds us there’s talent out there that mainstream distributors haven’t embraced — in front of and behind the camera. And fittingly enough for the subject generation, “Meltdown” feels self-satisfied but incomplete, with a finale that plays like a pulled-punch.

You can sometimes get away with a just-getting-by budget on your C-movie actioner by getting quick and getting witty. Get Fast doesn’t get over.

This promise is at long last fulfilled in the third act, and that chase is pretty impressive. But the movie that gets us there is dumb, talky and pokey in the extreme.

Under the Volcano can most easily be appreciated for allowing us to put ourselves in others’ shoes.

The Red Virgin is a smart and timely tragedy, coming out as cultures around the world are either embracing equality or trying to roll back the clock on women’s rights.

For such a short thriller, “Ferry” never manages to feel brisk or breathless or even satisfying. Lammers should be irked that they wasted such an interesting character on a movie full of “kindergarten s–t.”

Director Andersen (he did the disaster movie “The Quake”) keeps this slick, polished production moving even as he and the screenwriters avoid many of the tried-and-true devices — training-for-the-mission montages, etc. — of the genre.

Director and co-writer Jérémie Guez shows more flashes of competence than inspiration here. His film is slow and clunky, beginning with promise, ending with the last of a string of third act let-downs.

The acting is wildly uneven here, with some players either amatuerish or uncomfortable enough acting in English as to stand apart from the rest.

The performances are semi-serious, at best, and longtime producer turned director/co-writer Steve Barnett’s first feature directing job staggers right up to the DMZ between awful and “OK, at least that’s over with.”

Dreyfuss lends a little sparkle to what is otherwise a dully predicatable affair. Even the performances pitched to be appropriate reactions to shark terror, losing loved ones or friends, feel low energy.

Co-writers/directors Fabrizio Laurenti and Niccolò Vivarelli (one of Vivarelli’s sons) make a half-decent case that Vivarelli is worth knowing about beyond the borders of his homeland.

The images can be lovely, but the cryptic clues in the story fail to surprise when they arrive or move when they’re “explained.”

For all the seriousness of the subtexts Three Birthdays feels shallow, lightweight and less serious than it should, with a cast “acting as” rather than inhabiting characters from that strangest setting of all — the distant-enough but not-terribly-distant past.

Such movies thrive on the hope they present and the big moments when that hope is either proven or sadly dashed by the finale. And this “Lucca’s World” delivers.

The entire deadpan affair is more reasonably amusing than hilarious, but the pauses in the action, with the screen going to black and “users” of this Amazon streaming movie commenting their complants– “That’s it?” “That’s not a movie” and “On this budget, this is what you get” — are laugh out loud funny.