Roger Moore

It’s easily the weakest of the four iterations of that title. If Disney and Pixar really needed to revisit a tale that they had gracefully ended, it should have been more of a victory lap. This, whatever its modest charms, has the feel of an end zone dance — crass, unnecessary, and a slightly pale reflection of the glories that warranted it.

Seagrass is psychologically interesting, and touching here and there. But one can’t help but get the feeling our filmmaker never got out of the shallows.

Haneke tells this tale a bit too patiently for my taste. But the metaphors are unmistakable, as is the power of the film’s message.

What a charming little animated whimsy Chicken for Linda! is.

In the Heights doesn’t truly reach the heights, except when everybody’s on their feet.

As beautiful and intimate as Fire of Love often is, the sometimes grating, flat and precious narration makes one long for this material to have been folded into Herzog’s superior “Into the Inferno.” Romantic “obsession” is kind of his thing, and there’s not enough new here to warrant expanding on it.

Zhao, bouncing back from the Marvel “Eternals” paycheck picture/debacle, serves up a touching romance between a distracted young man of letters and a woman so attuned to nature she hunts with a pet hawk, knows the uses of every herb and tree and the incantations that go with their preparation and is thus labeled the “daughter of a witch.”

It’s not edge-of-your-seat alarming and its jolts are more creepy than shocking. But for all its period detail and head games, “Witch” works on the most primitive level.

An imaginative, scary and wonderfully rendered stop-motion fright.

That said, it works, sucking you into its “vast night” and taking us all back to an innocent time where the future was endless possibilities, “radio” was how a small town kid punched his “ticket out of here,” and TV took you to “another dimension…the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.”

It’s a compact, perfect performance in a tight, tense genre picture that manages just enough twists and surprises to separate it from the hired-killer-movie pack.

Its spooky tone and the odd jolt don’t remedy its chilly remoteness or self-conscious longueurs. But it’s good to be reminded that there’s a reason we cling to the afterlife as a concept and flock to films that indulge that belief, the warm and fuzzy versions, anyway.

But he’s (McQueen) still made one of the best thrillers of the year and one of the best heist pictures since David Mamet made “Heist,” the modern benchmark for excellence in violent, complex cinematic capers.

Co-writer/director Russell Harbaugh has created a chamber tragedy, intimate in its dimensions, devastating in the damage we see spiral out of that one death.

Give Leblanc credit, though. Any time you make a movie with well-played characters who compel the audience to want to shout at the screen, you’ve accomplished something.

On Her Shoulders also gets to the essence of Nadia. Her speeches (in English and Arabic with English subtitles) move audience after audience to tears.

The Descendants lets Payne show us the Other America and the Other Americans - little lives caught up in small but epic problems far away from the La La Land of Hollywood hype, sex and violence.

Gosling caps an already-distinguished career with an unfussy performance that lets us see behind the stone-faced public mask this most enigmatic American hero wore, from the moment he became a public figure to the very end of his days.

It’s more an instant cult film than a picture with any prayer of reaching millions.

Byrne and Kroll have a nice estranged sibling chemistry, not up to “The Skeleton Twins,” but in that ballpark.

Outcast is what happens when stunt men direct. The fights are marvelously choreographed, the swordplay splendid and the bloody body count high in director Nicholas Powell’s Middle East/Far East quest tale. The script? Derivative, dim and dull. The performances? Not much, either.

This Arthur is on the rocks long before Last Call.

It’s worth checking out Stonewalling just to see a picture of China that’s not State Approved or attempted by outsiders.

It’s a beautiful film, equal parts sentimental and bluntly realistic. Like “Honeyland,” what Kotevska is capturing is a vanishing way of it.

Too cute, too star-studded and entirely too long.

13 Assassins is entirely too long and too talky. But the cat-and-mouse game of strategy, figuring out when and where to ambush the evil overlord's entourage, is fascinating.