Roger Moore

Mendoza’s pitch, to “get it right” and have “real combat vets” have their story told, might be noble in its intention and the tribute (stay through the credits) to their service the film represents. But he and Garland emphasize authenticity over empathy, accuracy over dramatic connection.

The Amateur may be a mixed-bag of coincidences, not-quite-plausible technological traps and narrow escapes, and a tad old fashioned feeling in this post-justice/post-accountability world. But Malek keeps us invested and interested in this quest.

Writer-director Conners makes the most of her good fortune in casting. She has Smith be the grandmotherly gravitas at the center of this quiet storm, wise with her years and so old she’s aged into the truth teller so many need to hear, with only a couple daring to listen.

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.”

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

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.

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

I like the women’s world this picture creates, with Sue Jean Kim cast as a Columbia U. colleague and Ann Dowd as the sympathetic support-system neighbor. But The Friend is an uneven, not wholly satisfying experience in most ways.

It works, in that arch-action-vehicle-built on-cliches sort of way.

Love the cast, and scattered moments of this play as cutting or funny. The problem is, almost every one of those bits is in the trailer, which plays as a lot more amusing than this drag.

The Life List is as bland as its title, a movie unworthy of comparison to most any “Bucket List” movie you can think of. Well, exxcept for that dramatic climax, the one that comes before the fender-bender of an anti-climax.

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 not on a par with Scorsese or Coppola’s best statements on this history, but it’s not bad. And twice the De Niro at the same price makes it a bargain.

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

Labeling Jonathan Majors‘s turn in Magazine Dreams “deeply disturbing” is the epitome of understatement.

Writer-director Blichfeldt’s debut feature is more cringe-worthy than laugh-out-loud funny. She picked obvious targets. But there’s a lot to be said for having the audicity to “go there” and go gory when you’re sending up the ugly open secret that “Beauty is pain,” that it’s a trap and that it’s well past time to stop taking fairy tales with princes and “Sleeping Beauties” at “children’s story” face value.

Sure, Locked is a remake. It doesn’t hold a lot of surprises if you’ve seen the original. Yes, it has “Hollywood” touches. But Hopkins and Skarsgård and Yarovesky deliver, even if they leave out my favorite joke from the original film.

Being Maria is a film that tries and mostly succeeds in immersing us in the experience of the French actress Maria Schneider, cast and almost certainly abused and exploited in a movie that would both make her name, and ruin it, to say nothing of the psychological damage it probably left her with.

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.

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.

Aimed at kids who’ll giggle at the adorably retro robots and snicker at the profanity, “Electric State” creates cringes you didn’t know you’d cringe about.

The blunt truth is that there’s very little that’s original or even interesting in this empty rehash of many a recent YA franchise with occasional pauses for song.

Koepp and Soderbergh make this as much about mistrust and fidelity in a marriage as it is about spies-gone-wrong. They keep their film intimate and interrogatory, giving it an old fashioned theatrical feel.

Thrillers live on tension and rising suspense. This one discards suspense too early. And action comedies are, by design, fast and furious. This one, while serving up some serioulsy gory action and splatter film laughs, can’t get out of its own way.

Bridges and Davison preside over this elegy with intimate, subtle and affecting performances that lift the entire undertaking to the edge of poetry.

Only Errol Morris could make a murderer in prison come off more credible than pretty much anybody else in a true crime documentary.

The Assessment is smart and sinister sci-fi of “The Handmaids Tale” school, a striking, minimalist parable about humanity’s failings in facing an inhumane future.

Like “Cocaine Bear,” Borderline was built with “midnight movie” appeal in mind. And even if it never quite adds up to more than that, it doesn’t disapoint.