Roger Moore

The world Sakamoto brings back to life . . . is as vivid as any saga of samurai, shoguns, ronin and clans.

The fights in this bad-boy-amongst-bad-boys butcher shop thriller have to be seen to be believed. “The Raid,” assorted blind swordsman tales, “Oldboy” and John Wickworld all are glimpsed in this slaughter in scarlet saga from Seiji Tanaka.

The sex and romance elements are more abrupt, perfunctory and charmless in this take. But they go for the same upbeat, heartwarming feel in the finale, which plays about the same.

The shootouts are first-rate, in that “bad guys mostly miss, good guys never do” way.

The film’s second half more than atones for its drifting, muted early scenes cataloguing many a romance novel/movie cliche.

The “battle of wits” is pretty one-sided. We end up investing in a slow-moving, low-heat thriller that never really comes to a boil.

The clumsy arbitrariness of the plot, the “rules” of this world and the limits the story imposes which characters sometimes ignore undercut any “reality” we’re meant to buy into.

There’s no subtext to any of this, no commentary on culture, society or politics, government, anti-vax cranks or human failings. And thanks to Viktor Csák and Krisztián Illés, who scripted this, there’s not much of a “text” either.

Wrestling, the wrestling underworld and the sorts of folks obsessed with it was a promising setting. The premise feels familiar enough to have worked, in some form. Not this one, though. Kids, I want my 93 minutes back.

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

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

The music drops are good enough to pass muster, and the peformances mostly transcend the tried and trite story and the frankly pedestrian direction.

I think the remake hits the comic highlights harder. But if you’ve seen “Fix the World,” there’s no reason to bother with “Dad Quest.” If you haven’t seen the original film, “Quest” is at least a decently acted, occasionally amusing and somewhat quick “summary” of the superior film it’s based on.

The cast is game, which always counts for something. It wasn’t a hard movie to watch, as blandly predictable as it is

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

No characters really pop and there’s little room for pathos, humor or anything else.

There’s ambition and a dollop of intellectual heft to the indie dramedy Daddy. Even if it misplaces characters, shortchanges its goals and fails to deliver much in the way of a satisfying conclusion, you can appreciate the attempt and the effort involved.

The various subplots collide in entertaining ways, and the “payback” chapters are full of surprises, which are easy enough to understand without the tedious business of throwing in anti-climactic flashbacks to ensure everybody “gets” why this or that happened and why any of it makes sense. We got it. We were paying attention.

As the cliche goes, this film is both sad and life-affirming in its depiction of end-of-life concerns.

The scripted schemes don’t unravel easily, until the “talking villain” finale reveals all. That makes Exterritorial more “solid than surprising, and even that “solid” footing grows more slippery with each implausible escape or too-convenient plot twist.

It’s more a (somewhat) satisfying “finale” than a logical one.

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

Director, co-writer and self-distributor Jason “J.” Horton (“Craving,” assorted other C-movies) set out to make an “Evil Dead” without Sam Raimi’s flair for humor and “gotchas,” without his gift for story and ear for zingers and without Bruce Campbell as everybody’s favorite horror anti-hero.

Restless is a spare, reasonably taut thriller of the “Neighbor from Hell” subgenre, the sort of movie most any member of Western or Eastern Civilization can relate to.

The Protector gets pretty much everything wrong.

The script is a cut-and-paste job — lazy plotting, dull dialogue, no twists at all.

The fights are as furious as the story is ludicrous.

It’s an engrossing character portrait of a woman who has been so on-task for so long that she doesn’t recognize real romance when it shows up and makes her an offer of a better or at least different life, and her struggles with what to do with that.

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

You can see, hear and feel the strain in the Brazilian comedy “Cheers to Life (Vida a Vida),” the great effort expended to achieve “cute.”

The performances have an offhanded charm and street reality that sells this. And there are worse ways to spend your movie-going time that taking a walk on the not-so-wild side through Toronto’s colorful neighborhoods with the dreamers who long to escape them.

Martin gets at the man’s philosophy, his message that humanity is using up and destroying what Gaia, the Earth, has to offer when living in harmony with nature is becoming more necessary by the moment. It’s the pragmatic details — not just “How do you poop?” — but the power grid (Solar?), the diet, means of making the limited money you need there and the like that this brief, touching and sometimes poetic documentary lacks.

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

The doctor is plucky, but only in the dullest and most predictable ways. Self-sacrifice shows up at the most expected moment. And the ticking clock third act has been here and done that in more movies than one can count.

Almost Cops winds up as almost a buddy comedy, and certainly not one that works.

This stuff doesn’t write itself, but it does seem as if Perry’s put the whole enterprise on autopilot, and his supporting “family” can’t riff or improvise much that’s funny into the worn out formula.

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

It’s wistful and sad and uplifting in unexpected ways as it underscores the prophecy of the knowing nurse (her name is omitted from any cast list I can find) who counsels the family about what’s really going on here.

What We Hide is no Winter’s Bone. But this isn’t a bad effort at capturing how the drug crisis impacts its youngest victims. It’s simply an unsurprising one.

Mikael Marcimain’s direction of the action beats is never more than passably exciting. And an honest take on “An Honest Life” might be that everything between those robberies, riots and burglaries just reminds you that there aren’t enough robberies, riots and burglaries to keep one awake through all that tedious voice-over narration.

Casting real musicians to actually play the work in question may have been a gimmick, but it lends the picture an authenticity rare for a screen comedy.

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

Mixed bag or not, films like “Keroauc’s Road” feed on the novel and the novelist’s mythology. And when they’re on their game, they get at what Kerouac’s sensory-overload novel tapped into that is quintessentially American — mercurial restlessness, eagerness to live a life less ordinary and that core realization that staying in one place — even a New York, New Orleans or Los Angeles — is no way to get to where you want to go.

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

This remake just breezes by, a comedy more in touch with its tone, more whimsy than wham-bam-thanky-ma’am and the like. It’s less carnal and more romantic.

Director Sherry Hormann (“A Regular Woman,” “Desert Flower”) and screenwriter Stephanie Sycholt (“Themba”) get the sex and the scenery right. Its the “mystery,” “intrigue” and “thrills” that are the picture’s undoing.

It takes the involvement of the FBI and subpoenas and Big Government tech to nail down what IP address in this tiny village was the source of all that turmoil, anguish and mental health mayhem. That isn’t right.

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

A polished, kid-friendly and even lighthearted Life of Jesus animated film.

There are few things worse than disguises that don’t amuse, bungled arrests that don’t amount to much more than a forced smile and cricket jokes that, to use a baseball analogy, are never more than “a swing and a miss.”

Live-action kid-friendly fare like Grow is a rare thing, these days, especially at the height of Horror Season. Better grab the tykes and dash off to this before the last “pumpkin spice” lattes are served.

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

Alemania is a sweet, understated coming-of-age story, unsurprising in many ways as it borrows its central who-will-stay/who-will-travel story arc from “American Graffiti,” of all films.

The star here is a version of every street stray you’ve seen in Central or South America, a big-eyed brown beauty named Amendoim, which is “Peanuts” in Portuguese. He romps through scenes, vocalizes on cue and turns on the charm after every apartment-trashing, food-stealing/scene stealing frolic.

From the moment the movie makers blow the “meet cute,” this “The Shop Around the Corner/You’ve Got Mail” ripoff doesn’t tickle, tantalize or titilate, even when the ladies of the shop engage in competitive tire-changing.

Sitcom-veteran Lavin navigates the abrasive tactlessness of the archetype she’s playing with ease, even if the Yiddishisms feel forced and dated a generation older than the character she’s supposed to be playing.

The cast is game but rather drab — even the villains.

Romer covers a lot of ground in this sometimes touching and even inspiring documentary. About all she misses is Japan’s invitation to participate in the Little League World Series, and its early dominance and ongoing success there.

Director, writer and co-star Daniel Hendler‘s film is a mystery, a journey of personal growth and a quixotic quest to diagnose what constitutes “eccentric” behavior and what relatives and the courts might consider insane.

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

About 70 minutes of this 92 minute comedy is a pretty good actress (Nascimento starred in “A Wolf at the Door”) cussing out the influencer, her “misogynistic idiot” boss, her best friend (Patricia Ramos) and on down the line.

Caterpillar presents itself as a gay man’s documentary journey of self-discovery, when it’s really about body dysphoria/dysmorphai and faddish cosmetic surgery taken to its extreme.

They’re just churning this junk out on a budget that guarantees it’ll sell, quality be damned.

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

There’s no depth to the characters, especially Tee Yai, little that tells us how or what each is thinking or hoping. The shootouts are routine if excessive and the finale inevitable.

Mensore gets it right and tells a story validated by journalism and every trip through the region and everybody you know who lives there.

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

This is indie cinema with a point and a point of view, and Glidewell, Ferrell and the cast deserve to have this engrossing and worthhile drama be a career highlight that should lead to others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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