Roger Moore

The resolutions to the mystery, the depictions of what we’ve only suspected, are gruesome, conventional and dull and generic. And that amulet? It’s an afterthought.

The last 75 minutes of Babysplitters doesn’t live up to the promise of the first 45. What is light, snappy and fun becomes labored, cluttered and almost too serious for its own good.

It’s a fun, generally brisk biography, one whose tone might be the artist’s credo. Newton declared that there are “only two dirty words” in any of the three languages he spoke — “art” and “good taste.” He never let either limit what he was trying to say.

Polsky takes us on quite the sleigh ride, from the sunny silliness of gambling on Russian hockey, and then marketing it, to the grim reality that sets in — threats, intimidation and even murders.

At a nearly relentless two hours and 49 minutes, “Painted Bird” is an excessive test of patience and tolerance for the range of human depravity touched on.

Try as they might — and they never let us forget they’re trying too hard — co-stars Ben Matheny and Matthew Paul Martinez, with Cory Dumesnil as a nerdy-goofy “hostage” in tow, can’t get this clunker across one state line, much less all the way across the country, from BFE, Mississippi to San Clemente, Cali-forny.

Lake of Death (De dødes tjern) is a mildly creepy Norwegian thriller.

Bloom does a nice job of expressing, wordlessly, where this man has been, what blend of guilt, fury and obligation drive him and shaped his life. It’s not the most subtle character or film built around an abuse survivor, but there’s substance in the performance that lifts Retaliation above its hammered-home metaphors.

The younger Franco doesn’t reinvent the genre or advance it in any way. But horror, as always, proves a nice proof-of-directing-chops test case, and he passes with flying colors. The performances are pitch-perfect, the picture opens with dread and the suspense builds nicely.

This is the sort of bad horror that is best experienced with a crowd of fellow aficionados, maybe over the favorite beverage of Wicked Wanda (Petty). Maybe social distance with a few friends?

Giving equal weight to the four different points of view is one thing. Give us multiple timelines on top of that and you lose focus to the point where everything turns fuzzy.

It’s not subtle, not particularly scary or suspenseful either. What The Beach House has going for it is dread, a feeling that rides along with it from its opening frames to the horror parable’s final image.

No, there’s little in the way of fireworks and it’s not “stop the presses” news that film actresses have to be fiercely self-absorbed. But a film-lover’s movie like The Truth gets at the vulnerability that comes with that in cute but cutting, sly and subtle ways. Thank Deneuve for that. “I could play this role dead drunk!” Damn right she could.

Father Soldier Son can be compared to the controversial Vietnam era doc “Hearts and Minds,” as well as the sober WWII’s aftermath “The Best Years of Our Lives,”in its focus, its intimacy and its politics.

Benjamin is a brief, brisk movie that somehow manages to squeeze in seven characters of consequence, tell an amusing and romantic story, and still find the time to dip its toes into something darker.

The script has coincidences and twists that just pretzel-up the awkwardness. The direction is perfunctory, lacking the extreme close-ups that deliver bigger laughs — the Coen Brothers/Barry Sonnenfeld Rule. There’s enough here to provoke a smirk, here and there — maybe a chuckle. And one of the tiny surprises shows us how charming this all could have been.

It’s a mediocre mash-up of genres that leaves no cliche unspoken, no horror trope unturned.

As sex farces go, A Nice Girl Like You is about as nasty, dirty and funny as a sitcom…on The Disney Channel.

Whatever they edited out of The Sunlit Night, they made certain to keep the funny, sweet and sunny parts. And Slate makes the time pass like a late summer Green Flash — an enchanting moment or two or three, and gone.

Damn this is fun.

The entire affair plays as pro-forma, pre-ordained, pre-digested and pre-dictable.

The midway point in the low-budget sci-fi thriller Volition is a real make-or-break moment. It’s there that this film about a clairvoyant who tries to avert the doom he sees in his future takes a turn and adds on baggage.

Never Too Late never transcends the undemanding, old fashioned lighter-than-light entertainment for seniors that it’s meant to be.

Ganz has a wonderful twinkle about him that makes him perfect for Freud. If only he’d had a little something to chew on. If only the character felt like more than a Big Name afterthought.

We Are Little Zombies is the most entertaining thing to come out of Japan since sushi, “Iron Chef” and the Miata.

It’s the sort of movie Hollywood made plenty of examples of, from the early ’40s well into the ’60s. Hanks has skippered a picture that stands with the best of them, movies like “The Enemy Below,” an action-packed thriller with pathos, patriotism and military professionalism. It might have been lost among the blockbusters of a normal movie-going summer. This year, it’s as good an excuse as any to sign up for Apple TV+.

Put these elements together with some solid acting by James and a touching turn by the Parisian Martin, and Archive becomes a genre film that, if it doesn’t transcend the sum of its parts, at least has the parts to let us buy in and enjoy the story that it’s telling, derivative as it is.

This is spooky on an effects and story-telling level, downright chilling on a personal one.

A soft-spoken cast given to underplaying, a muddy, overcast setting in the beaver-trapping era on The Frontier and reveries about the simple pleasures of home, dearly bought in a rough and tumble world of men make this quiet, almost melancholy movie one to be savored.

NOBODY in this thing is the least bit interesting as a character, NONE of the situations are funny or freighted with great personal or social import.

The script ranges from bad to worse, with generic character melt-downs and amateurish plot lapses.

Shock value has no value if it’s not shockingly funny.

Through it all, Quatro comes off as “I did it my way” defiant, a fascinating survivor still looked up to by women who were motivated to get into music, thanks to her.

It’s an adoring portrait, covering Lewis’s early life (he started wearing a tie in elementary school, and has never stopped) and the breadth of his career, letting him tell the folksy story of “the boy from Troy, Alabama” to crowds of fans and peers.

As alien encounter documentaries or mockumentaries go, Skyman is boringly earthbound.

Homewrecker is laugh-out-loud funny and edge-of-you-seat thrilling just often enough to come off. Dollar for low-budget dollar, it delivers fun and value many a Hollywood production would envy.

This filmed staging, which wouldn’t have “played” well on the big screen, is as rich with cinematic possibilities as it is musically. If millions find and love this version on the home screen, perhaps this “Hamilton” will encourage Disney to properly adapt it for the big screen down the road. I’d pay good money to see that.

Straight Up wrestles with its messaging, which bogs the picture down. It takes a few predictable turns, and some predictably unpredictable ones. But Sweeney maintains the manic patter even when the pacing flags.

It’s not so bad it’s good, not bad-funny or bad-sad even. It’s just bad.

It’s not awful, and not utterly “incoherent.” But the comedy isn’t broad enough to come off, and white male midlife wish-fulfillment fantasy (Jimmy’s pursued by a fetching Boston blogger/band-booker half his age) is seriously passé.

An engrossing and immersive look at an isolated battle in “America’s Longest War,” a representative bloody stalemate in a country where that’s the best most of those fighting there can hope for.

That makes Guest of Honour more unsatisfying than bad, more polished than it could be in many ways, but sloppy in ones that count — namely the script. It’s a textbook case of a “fascinating failure.”

"The Fire Saga Story” has barely enough sparks for a sketch, much less a “saga.”

Yeah, it’s a genre piece — street chases and fights along the docks and on a farm. Yeah, the dialogue’s kept to a minimum, nothing much to write home about. But is it breathless, blow-the-doors-off fun? “Oh putain oui!”

Writer director Gaspar Antillo peels the cover off this mystery with the patience of an art cinema veteran, limiting his dramatic “incidents” to amplify their impact.

If you don’t like buzzwords or self-“actualization” jargon, Disclosure is going to be a hard pill to swallow. It’s a film awash in actresses, activists, models and historians (overwhelmingly trans female), almost all of them using this new nomenclature that the public at large is struggling to catch up with.

Because if there’s one fact everyone should absorb from this sometimes-cutesy documentary, it’s that this big hope for a better, smarter, fairer and healthier America is No Small Matter.

This doesn’t have the wit or warmth of “Swing Vote” or the mean-spirited political currency of “Veep.”

Run with the Hunted kind of rattles around like a racoon confined in a tiger cage. The milieu and characters are here, with “Lost Boys” references that don’t really hide the “Oliver Twist” structure. The “twists” in this “Oliver” are entirely predictable, including the finale.

German director Sherry Hormann, working from a script based on an infamous 2005 case, summons up outrage, heartache, worry and judgement in 90 tight and damning minutes.

There’s too much to Wasp Network, much of it good, to dismiss it out of hand. But it only takes an hour of this two hour-plus movie for us to figure out Assayas wasn’t the right writer-director to pull it off.

But Norton makes a sturdy, inexperienced but curious hero, a man every bit as idealistic about “the truth” and Sarsgaard’s Duranty is about “a movement bigger than any one person,” his “agenda.”

The film meanders a bit, and dawdles a bit more. But its compelling and unblinking portrait of a girl’s life, her expectations, prospects, obstacles and second class status.

The West may have long regarded the East as “inscrutable.” In Japan, they save that word for felines, who come off here as reserved, loyal, observant and aloof. On the money, to anybody who’s ever shared a life with a cat. Money well spent, Netflix. Let’s see what else you’ve got.

It’s all rater less than the sum of its parts, but the first two thirds of You Should Leave” impress and engross. It’s a pity we don’t get to see it with an audience. Because if there’s one thing that amplifies tiny frights, it’s other people overreacting as if they’re scared out of their wits.

In Maker’s tale, first-time documentary director Bill Gallagher finds a story of privation and perseverance, personal pain, of tragedies and triumphs. It’s a running saga reminder that life and sport only rarely dole out ” Hollywood ending.” But the struggle is its own reward and is inspiring in its own right.

Like many a first film from someone experienced in episodic TV, Babyteeth gives us a lot to chew on. But in this case, that turns it into the very best kind of emotional roller-coaster, one that wins its laughs and earns its tears. In a year without blockbusters, this Aussie indie marvel stands out — one of the best films of the summer.

Vollrath uses the tight space he had to film in to great, suspenseful advantage. It’s a film of extreme close-ups, low instrument-panel lighting, of checklists, procedures, first aid and in-your-face violence. There are no glib taunts, threats or macho one-liners.

Chippa is an utterly enchanting fantasy version of an Indian street child’s life.

No, it’s not very good. Neither was “I Am Vengeance.” But the redeeming qualities of any C-movie are that it doesn’t waste time, and gives you a few laughs in between the neck-snappings. I Am Vengeance: Retaliation manages that, time and again.

Selfie Dad may be topical, and doesn’t lean on the Christian “victimhood” crutch as hard as the worst films in this genre. Where it fails is in suspense, emotion and comedy.

Jennifer Bagley’s debut documentary is an upbeat portrait of best friends propping each other up, urging acceptance on each other’s families and ensuring that even as they transition, the road to “it gets better” is a short one.

You don’t have to speak the myriad tongues (many not translated) to follow the action, fall into the heedless forward momentum, to be outraged at the discrimination, and to be utterly charmed by this winner from the Subcontinent.

As homeless road pictures go, this is more “Peanut Butter Falcon” than “Leave No Trace.” Dad’s not in the picture long, but there’s a “Captain Fantastic” element to the portrayal.

The film manages to be a meditative essay on death and dying and love, even if the chill never quite wears off.

What we’re left with is a stark reminder that, “BlackKklansman” aside, it’s possible to agree with most everything Spike Lee says in his movies these days while lamenting the decline in his storytelling skills and his unwillingness to edit them into sharper focus.

It’s on-screen onanism, and rarely more than that.

A jaunty, upbeat and thoroughly entertaining motorsport documentary about the racing series of the future, today.

This “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Grieving” left me wanting a movie to go with the 70 minute Ducati ad.

The real value in Mope is stripping the sheen and the glamour off of porn, still shot, as it was in the pre-Internet “Boogie Nights,” in the unfashionable San Fernando Valley (Van Nuys and environs).

Choked is not a very good film, but it’s a perfectly watchable and engrossing peek into a culture, its classes and its politics — governmental and sexual.

365 Days is slick, shiny and insanely silly softcore, with a situation that beggars belief at most every turn.

Darkness Falls fails all up and down the line.

The charisma and talent it took to make bad movies watchable just isn’t there.

That’s the fresh angle to this standard-issue “What did you do in the war?” doc, the children, grandchildren and other family members curious about “Where grandpa fought,” “How my uncle died,” “What Dad’s base when he was in the service looked like,” and even “How mom met dad.”

The tone ranges from testy to distraught, but always “adult” in the insistence on talking this out.

We’re some 100 minutes into the picture before the grating, gauche Davidson — and his character, Scott Carlin — achieves “Well, we should cut the kid a break” status. Apatow pictures always run long, but here the thin laughs make us reach “All RIGHT already” far too soon.

When all is said and done, “Here Awhile” is here just long enough for Anna Camp to break your heart.

Vivian makes for a fascinating account of the psychological scars of a divorce, born mainly by their reserved, internalizing mother but rippling through to the daughters.

The caper is routine, the twists don’t — twist. “American Crime” just lies there, a corpse awaiting reanimation that never comes.

It’s a formula dance movie that puts minimal effort into deviating from that formula. But every so often, “Free Dance” threatens to take flight.

Never have I ever wanted to reach through a screen and give a screenwriter a good, hard “What the hell is the MATTER with you?” shaking. Until The Dinner Party.

In showing us the upside of turning a deaf ear to those with the money to amplify their self-interested voices of doubt, Gameau and 2040 give us the tiniest of hopes that maybe things will get better soon enough for us to escape the very worst.

Movies like Becky don’t work when the villains don’t go all in and when the pace flags to the point where we notice the clunky dialogue and less than involving performances.

Director Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline”) folds in all the pieces of the plot almost haphazardly, and instead concentrates on character and mood — gloomy people mostly trapped in a gloomy house.

They make this one tick over like clockwork, jumpy opening to nerve-wracking finish.

It’s pretentious and indulgent. But as with most Ferrara films, Tommaso makes for an interesting trip into a seriously unconventional mind visualized by an always unconventional storyteller.

As she tastes the foods of the country, delighting in this old favorite or that new regional wrinkle on a traditional recipe, you may find yourself fretting that you’re watching this on an empty stomach.

It’s a perfectly pleasant movie to sit through, although there’s more sitting than the material warrants, and “pleasant” shouldn’t be the highest note you’re reaching for — not with this many “names” in the cast (Eddie Izzard and Bill Pullman show up later).

And the worker bees? They mutiny. It’s a riot. For real. But the movie? You have your two laughs. I mentioned them at the top. Be content with them or find yourself something else to Netflix.

Desperation loses out to resignation in The Lovebirds, a flailing couple-on-the-lam comedy that pairs up Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani, with indifferent results.

The Price of Desire is an indulgent, gauzy dream from memory, of Gray swanning around white rooms in white dresses uttering profundities in English and French — with white subtitles. It’s as visually inane, austere and pretentious as its dialogue.

We don’t get enough of her mistreatment by the British press (back THEN) and enough justification for “Why should we care, again, now?”

The animation isn’t awful, but the best one can say for the script is that it does no harm.

The Spanish romance “Te quiero, imbécil (I Love You, Stupid)” is the cut-and-paste job in question, a script with modest potential, a passable cast and cutesy execution. And about the best you can say about it is that it finishes well.

What we’re left with is a fascinating glimpse of the myopic mania for “inspiration” of the artist, and a look at a culture where compassion and restitution (apparently) carry more weight than “punishment’ for the thief.

The performers are all polished and make do the best they can with a script that has maybe 50 minutes worth of rom-com lost in a 100 minute movie.

What’s worth watching and considering is the athleticism, bravery and calling of the dancers, just needing that next gig, just wanting to hang on to their careers a little longer, just wanting another chance to show “what I did for love.”

I find them hilarious, and I think this fourth and “final” outing in their “trilogy” is the funniest since the first.

Maine’s still made a teen sex comedy with heart, smarts and subtlety that Netflix, which owns this genre, rarely bothers with.

A few decent frights and a couple of intentional laughs would have gone a long way towards pulling this up to the bottom rung on the horror (or horror comedy) ladder.

So the revelations, when they come in “Rewind,” don’t have the jolt that they did in “Capturing the Friedmans,” or even in the mini series about the widely-publicized crimes of R. Kelly and Michael Jackson.

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.”

The jury’s out on that, but not on the growing concern Screened Out scratches the surface of. It may feel incomplete, lacking focus (put the phone back down, Hyatt) and myopic. But it lays out the parameters of the problem, the “social validation feedback loop” of effort, attention and “rewards” that these successful businesses manipulate in ways that are starting to feel insidious and destructive.

It’s flippant and glib, sure. But there are too many dead people in it for it to make its “so very safe” point.

It’s always lovely to see Bening and Nighy, always a warm delight to set some of this tug of war on the pebbly beaches, rocky crags and chalky cliffs. Otherwise, it’s a “kitchen sink” drama, without many blowups, no big shocks and not a lot that sticks to the ribs after the credits have rolled.

But this clunky movie is more fun to play the “Wait, why?” game with than to actually watch.

Eighty-seven minutes, gunplay and life-and-death consequences, and this feels like a perfunctory drag — a Movie of the Week from back when TV made those.

Throwing “They say she practices witchcraft” into it in the late stages is just desperation, a cheat, a plot twist for a movie with little or no plot.

A romantic comedy that could not be more “twee” if it tried.

Spade practically cringes through this thing, not a good look when you’re a high-mileage 55. And a little of Lapkus, shrieking profanities at children, lap-dancing at the luau, goes a long way.

Phoenix, Oregon is “Big Night” in a bowling alley.

The film is all over the place, like life — messy. But boy, this memoir got on my last nerve.

The story’s over-familiarity isn’t the best reason to skip Blood and Money. Its messaging is. And whatever butch points Berenger earns for getting the job done in extreme conditions at an age when “don’t slip you’ll break your hip” has to be a concern are squandered on a film that isn’t worth it.

But Hardy is fascinating to watch, first scene to last, an actor wholly committed, as always, even if the script for this showcase feels incomplete or straight-to-video.

The emotional punches in this film (in Italian, with English subtitles) reminded me of “Peggy Sue Got Married,” thanks largely to how Puccini and Porcaroli play them. The poignant moments may be sentimental, but they work...That goes for the film as well. Contrived, manipulative? Sure. But sweet and subtle and even surprising, here and there.

Campbell gets across the quiet struggle of knowing one’s fate and trying to keep it from breaking her son’s future — concealing, then revealing, edging up to “the talk.”

Mostly, Becoming is a collection of “feels,” hugs and tears with fans, students and family, and big promotional moments that director Nadia Hallgren wisely never allows to come off as a “victory lap.” Entering stadiums to the gushing introductions of the likes of Oprah, played in by Alicia Keys’ anthem “This Girl is on Fire,” could easily have led this unapologetic hagiography to that.

There’s a lot of fun mixed in with the somber assessments of a failed relationship. In the end, it’s too much to juggle or do justice to, and On a Magical Night is never quite “could this be the magic at last.”

The story hews closely to formula (expect a BIG GAME). But the Deep South pool hall milieu, the lived-in characters and the top drawer supporting players make Walkaway Joe worth sitting still for and watching, all the way through the credits.

You Don’t Nomi makes some points, misses the mark attempting to make others, but keeps us entertained as it encourages film buffs to view “Showgirls” within the framework of a filmmaker’s career, to accept that notion that “An artist is someone pounds the same nail, over and over again.”

A Secret Love is in intimate, chaste romance starring two discrete little old ladies, longtime Chicagoans, who let one of them’s great nephew interview them about their lives and their love affair as those lives were starting to wind down.

The film, starring Ashton Sanders (“Moonlight”) as a rapper wannabe, hustler/mob-soldier in training, doesn’t show us much that we haven’t seen before. Maybe a little more back-story, a few extra pieces in the “motivation/how we got here” puzzle, all set to a sing-along gangsta rap (mostly) soundtrack. It’s depressingly over-familiar, or at least generic.

Touching and funny, awkward and wistful, it’s also evidence of a Hollywood crime.

Ila is the heart and soul of Closeness, and Zhovner breathes an impulsive fury into her.

It’s a warm portrait, warts and all, if not as critical and definitive as one might like.

Capital in the 21st Century, in documentary form, is an almost overwhelming alarm bell, a call to action and a fact, chart, animated illustration-and-quote-stuffed history of “how we got here” in the first place.

The end result is a thriller that doesn’t race towards a climax we figure out (finally) 20 minutes in advance, it limps there.

Judging from this, The Fate of Lee Khan was to die of boredom waiting for the “fun parts” to begin.

Sword of God is a minimalist tale, without a lot of story and only a few shocking instances of violence that don’t require translation or deciphering. This is “First Contact” as it played out in many primitive places over the course of many centuries.

The situations are so arch and artificial as to make commenting on the acting (not empathetic) pointless.

The effects, the gory makeup and what-not, are first rate, and the means of dispatching zombies creative, here and there.

The ladies aren’t funny enough to wring laughs out of the script, and the gay jokes are both out-of-date and too few in number to compensate.

It starts promisingly, builds towards something Roald Dahl cutting and cute, and kind of comes to pieces, like crumb cake.

The acting isn’t bad, the Barcelona and environs settings gorgeous and there’s a nice tug of the heartstring in the finale. But in all honesty, only one thing works in In Family I Trust,” a Spanish rom-com based on a Laura Norton novel. It’s a running gag, and it involves a dwarf.

It’s everything a screen drama and indie film should be — a novel story, characters we rarely see and care about and immersion in a world we know nothing about.

To the Stars may be a mixed bag of over-familiar obstacles and dated themes. But this period-perfect piece and a solid cast take us back to an uglier time, just as we were about to forget it.

The Plagues of Breslau throws a lot of fresh ideas at the genre and blood on the screen, making for one of the most surprising pictures to wear the label “serial killer thriller” in years.

Its message is well-worth repeating in a time of economic upheaval.

The flashbacks, the “everybody has a story” part of The Flood, puts it over.

The story fails to adequately maintain the mystery — Is this real, or just in the writer’s head? And messing around with that “reality” as the closing credits are about to roll is just a cheat, and dumb to boot.

Extraction runs into the same problems any movie that’s on-the-run/fighting-your-way-out faces. It’s wearing, characters get shortchanged and the temptation to take absurd shortcuts in logic just to get us from point A to B is irresistible.

The Wretched is a polished reasonably tight tale of a witch infestation coming to rural, lakeside Michigan, and the teenage boy who screams “Why won’t anybody BELIEVE me?”

The pitfalls — drugs, marriage (Janina Use) to an amoral hustler to happens to be a banker) — are tried and true, if not downright trite. But it starts well, finishes with a flourish and finds enough “Isn’t this rip-off cute?” moments to be worth your while.

Population control, consumption control, treading more lightly? Yeah, we know that. We just don’t want to hear it. Yet. Will Planet of the Humans open our ears?

Here is THE must-see documentary for a world living under quarantine. Spaceship Earth is about can-do cooperation, art and science coalescing, about “learning by doing” and recognizing that “small groups of people are the engines of change.”

It’s a compelling Holocaust/espionage story not given the most dazzling treatment, cinematically.

It’s likable enough, but after breaking out of the blocks, the picture gets gassed by the midway mark. The best it can do after that is not “win” or “place,” but just “show.”

Tune in. All the cool kids will be there.

Angelfish is seriously undemanding, but benefits from novel settings (few New York movies are set in Marble Hill/Kings Bridge) and a period piece story that strips away the artifice and distraction that love in the age of cell phones promises. Back in ’93, you had to use a pay phone when you wanted privacy, had to write somebody’s number down and had to wait in the apartment if you were expecting a call...That's true love.

Writer-director Lara Gallagher can be praised for avoiding the “gay porn cliches” this story could have devolved into. But she shoots for a thriller tone with this, and beat that notion into Katy Jarzebowsk, who did the “tenterhooks” thriller score.

But the violence, when it comes, is shocking. The native cunning, when it makes itself known, is chilling.

The Kindergarten Teacher is a great performance, the latest from an actress with a reputation for giving them. Watch it on Netflix and see what the Academy missed.

Wasikowska’s character arc is fun, Herriman makes a perfectly charming and vile villain, and the period detail in this Aussie production — more Brothers Grimm 16th century than the real thing — gives Judy & Punch the perfect stage to tell their satiric story without having to pull any you-know-whats.

It’s a touching story, and a deflating one. And Johns (“Fishermen’s Friends”) makes Daniel Blake Everyman and Everywoman, stoic and hard-working, overwhelmed by a system that’s been rigged to prevent claims, to make the “safety net” not all that safe at all.

Sand Storm builds a sense of dread into the proceedings. It’s not literal “head cut off” violence that we fear. It’s the victims getting nothing out of all this acrimony and negotiation. It’s knowing this film will never deliver “a Hollywood ending.”

It’s never “good,” but the awfulness is amusing, here and there. But only here and there.

The film doesn’t judge, either. Viewers who might cringe at the subject matter can decide for themselves if the sweeping changes in the culture that the ensuing decades have brought have been glorious, catastrophic or a seriously mixed bag.

The bad guys are more interesting than the good ones, the heists — including an armored car — are generic.

It’s a flurry of wild claims, dubious “experts,” Ad hominem attacks on doubt-sewers, aka “fascist demagogues” of “the national security (and media) state,” clip after clip of sci-fi movies mixed in with newsreel footage, cherry-picked “proof” via inter-title quotes from thinkers, scientists and others — read by narrator Jeremy Piven — and endorsements.

It’s a humorless fright fest with corpses, mildly-impressive effects, a Big League string orchestra score and sturdy work by Madsen (“Leatherface”) in the lead.

He seems like a decent man, and there’s genuine research grappling with how the mind functions under Buddhist meditation and the psychology of compassion, which has long been his Message to the World. But “Scientist” comes off as something of an over-reach.

It’s derivative, uneven, clumsy and absurdly sexist. But educators, stuck at home, will get a few laughs out of the differences and universalities of middle school, over here and over there.

Busan doesn’t reinvent the zombie movie so much as make it work well enough that you buy in — good performances, a nice selection of moments of “sacrifice,” the usual “What are they THINKING?” twists.

We expect documentaries to tell us the ugly, unvarnished truth, although that’s generally a futile hope and a goal rarely achieved. In this case, selective editing stigmatizes its heroine and avoids the more interesting wrinkles in the story, which — difficult as it was to tell — feels incomplete.

I can’t say Seventeen sprints by, but its many grace notes make up for the slack pace.

It doesn’t quite come off, and the “message” of this parable is either murky or too mundane to pay off. But there’s just enough here to make The Man Without Gravity worth your trouble, if only to see and hear how adorable Italian kids, just learning to insult, to love and to talk with their hands, can be.

But Teems and his team get a nice spin on Southern Gothic tropes and types, and The Quarry makes for a slow, simmering tale that has glorious performances and rewards, even in its noticeable shortcomings.

Kore-eda peels away the layers of this family and Ryôta’s story building towards the latest typhoon headed their way. It is the third act’s riding out of that storm that this light and faintly despairing tale, with its almost-comic anti-hero, turns poignant.

This isn’t Netflix’s “The Farewell,” which would be expecting too much. But it’s not too much to expect a more revealing and rewarding story than this.

Love Wedding Repeat teeters within reach of tolerable, although this cast — Claflin is NOT a funny man, no one EVER gives Munn anything funny to do — and these situations never gave the picture a chance.

It’s not a whole meal, but Abe sits easy on the palette and leaves you wanting more.

Surprises may be few and far between, with every confrontation and dramatic moment preordained. But Mine 9 delivers suspense and pathos, geology and geography, and a spot-on cast puts faces and lives behind iconic “types,” and make this one of the most Netflixable films the streaming service offers.

It’s utterly harmless, even in its subtexts — that hip hop and funk are where ALL music comes together. If the kids are going stir crazy, give it a download.

The lightly abrasive way Bibb and Duhamel connect and the hurt hanging over most everybody lift this predictable dramedy out of the goat corral, pig pen and barn and into something perfectly serviceable and sweet and a cut or three above what you find on The Hallmark Channel

Dolphin Reef is DisneyNature’s best undersea documentary ever, and a great reason to sign up for Disney+ all by itself. Leave it on as the credits roll to see how the team got these amazing images and you’ll be even more impressed.

Kudos to Kino Lorber for letting people see it for free at a time when not everyone is in a position to sing to or applaud the health care professionals risking their own health to save us from a pandemic.

I didn’t fall for the surfeit of mood manipulation that opens A White, White Day. All that time-lapse stuff and its ilk is a nice contrast to the shock and action that takes over the third act. They’re just a very dull way of managing that.

The debut feature of Gabriela García Rivas doesn’t give us much. It makes us work, bring our own “meaning” to the film. And there are hints that this is because she hadn’t quite made up her own mind in that regard. Inscrutable. And kind of dull.

Tone counts for everything in action mysteries like this, and the team that made “Lone Survivor,” “Deepwater Horizon,” “Patriots Day” and the debacle “Mile 22” know each other’s strengths and play to them.

Adds up to a lot of nothing at all. Nothing.

Bye Bye Germany makes for a sly, smart, funny and still touching peek into that horrid past, a dramedy with pathos and a reminder that “L’chaim, to life” is the best way to remember it — with a toast to life. In the end, that’s the best revenge of all.

Its narrow “in veterans’ own words” focus allows the film to avoid the big psychological questions about the personailty types that join the “all volunteer military” and what people who have been in combat really get out of spilling all this blood once they come home.

The cinematography darkens the tone, the performances — especially Smith, Way and young Millard-Lloyd, revel in reality. And if at the end we feel no more for “Ray & Liz” than they apparently did for their own kids, that’s a final, cruel endorsement of the truth acted-out by all involved.

There are a couple of laughs, generally not from the leads. And the gory mayhem, from “accidental” executions at the end of a torture session to what a grenade does to a human body, is played for giggles, too.

It’s rubbish, start to finish. And bless their hearts, I see they’ve got a sequel in the works.

Zengel is a balled-up fist of energy in the title role, getting across the sweetness that can convince those who take pity on Benni that “she’s making progress,” but unleashing hell in a flash to remind them she isn’t.

The film only picks up with its finale, and even that grand, murderous and visually stunning spectacle is somewhat spoiled by a preachy epilogue.

There are possibilities here, a set-up that could deliver something more than a directing exercise in driving the viewer a trifle mad with boredom. But not much else, and certainly nothing that gives away Lanthimos becoming the darling of challenging, thought provoking international cinema.

Like some of Mel’s other B pictures, Blood Father delivers the goods. And that’s all it ever promises to do.

Worst movie ever filmed in Louisville!

What a waste of a half-interesting idea, and of Ireland as a location.

Movies from Zambia, especially one with a Welsh connection, are an exotic and rare thing. But while there’s novelty and promise to Nyoni’s little-girl-trapped tale, it tumbles into incoherence too early to merit endorsement.

It lacks the shocks of “Midsommer,” the perverse comedy of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” and the violence of “The Wicker Man.” But it’s still a good yarn, cautionary, allegorical, well-acted and stoically played out to its inevitable conclusion.

We miss the cute, upbeat tone of the film’s opening chapter in its latter stages, as the family becomes CBD refugees (people move where the legal drug that’s helping them is). But Waldo on Weed is still the most adorable piece of cinematic advocacy for legalizing pot ever filmed.

It’s all a muddle and a disappointment.

It’s meant to be a comedy, with a lot of gunplay and arterial spray. It’s not funny.

Slay the Dragon became the rallying cry of the Michigan and now national grassroots campaign to end this partisan practice. But as hopeful as the movie wants to be, it can’t help but make obvious how many steps “the people” are behind those Project RedMap masterminds.

Mossville: When Great Trees Fall is an infuriating film that captures “environmental racism” at its most obvious, a film shot at a little known but infamous ground zero example in the American South.

Sure, it’s a surface gloss treatment of the subject, mentioning the racism groups encountered, the financial exploitation rampant back then (and on through *NSYNC). But Streetlight Harmonies is valuable in rounding up a lot of the first and second generation stars and getting their memories on film before they die off.

The dialogue is as banal as the picture is striking to look at.

There’s a lot that’s agreeable about “Uncorked,” but this overlong movie loses its fizz pretty much when Eli goes abroad. And as any oenophile will tell you, you can’t get that fizz back once the bottle’s “uncorked.”

It remains an eye-opening and artful look at just what it took to create that couture, that image and that legacy and that brand — still vital and popular all these years after the shy dreamer’s death.

MacFadyen has the chewiest role and his performance reflects that, the only one to truly stand out.

Like many a genre picture before it, there’s a sci-fi gimmick and little else to prop it up beyond repeating variations on “How do we escape this suburban hell?” ad infinitum.

Our Neopolitan director knows this territory and immerses us in it, showing us far more than he has any character explain.

And Turman, as he has pretty much every time the role is worthy of his talents, stands out, giving Justine that extra dose of humanity and heart that makes it worth your while.

It’s not awful, not “so bad it’s good,” either. Take away the “twist,” which you’ve guessed and which anybody seeing the trailer or even the poster could figure out, and We Summon the Darkness only summons tedium.

Funnier lines, more sharply-defined characters, higher stakes in the whole “Who lives/who dies?” game and darker twists would make Same Boat float instead of sink.

Lost Girls is a moody, atmospheric but oddly unemotional mystery.

In these, America’s darkest days since the Vietnam War, Crip Camp is an inspiring, upbeat shaft of light and a sobering reminder that whatever conservatives want to say about the ’60s, every now and then, hippies changed America, and helped America change the world.

There’s nothing deep in this Banana Split, nothing remotely moving or profound. But Marks (TV’s “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”) and Liberato (“If I Stay”) let us believe these two would connect, push each other’s buttons and bruise each other, and in just that way — just not in the way the title implies.

When we’re meant to be moved, there’s a disconnect. And when we should be transfixed, something Marceau managed in mastering his art, we’re let down.

Orley’s screenplay borrows from several sources and is never quite wrestled into the same shape as the legions of better movies on this boy-comes-of-age theme that preceded it.

In movie fan shorthand? “Blood Simple” meets “Mystic Pizza.”

Why Don’t You Just Die! is a grimly gruesome and laugh-out-loud tale of lies, double-crosses, brawls, gunplay and torture. And if Madonna’s ex-husband didn’t learn Russian to make it, writer-director Kirill Sokolov gives him quite the tip of the cap in this dark movie of murder and mayhem in Mother Russia.

Kampmeir’s made a lean, disturbing #MeToo tale that should be the last thing any acting class shows its students before graduation, if not on enrollment day as well.

Even when it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, it is amusing and utterly disarming.

It’s an earnest film graced with surprising glimpses of humanity amid persistent racist venality. The great value is in showing us a piece of history we don’t know but should, and as a terrific showcase for Mackie, Jackson, Long and Hoult.

The limp start and depressed finish make Hooking Up a sex comedy in which you can like the cast even as you give up on the movie. Early.

To Your Last Death is a gory gimmick without a decent movie behind it.

All this piling on turns Ghost of Peter Sellers into a “pathography,” the nickname given biographies that torch the reputations of the dead. And frankly, it’s deserved.

It’s all just as soapy and unreal as “Downton Abbey,” with little of the mother-daughter-“sacrifice” of poignancy of “The Joy Luck Club.”

Burden is still a movie of faith with more virtues than failings, more ambition than merely pandering and more topicality than we’d care to admit.

The script here is pure junk, running gags about balding Murr’s secret hotel “party” life and the like.

M.O.M. loses some steam in its third act as Lyman struggles to cook up an ending that comes anywhere near the suspense she’s been building. Edwards fights a not-quite-losing battle with going “over-the-top” crazy as Jacob.

Eiza González of “Hobbs & Shaw” and “Baby Driver” is a stunning beauty who handles what action choreography they entrust to her. She knows how to suck in her cheeks as she’s about to set off grenades in the computer room like an action bombshell badass. Very Olivia Wilde.

Nobody on Earth loves dogs more than me, but The Dog Doc is too credulous and tone deaf to affluence to give a pass.

I can’t say it’s very good, because it isn’t. But the magnificent walking, talking, pratfall-taking sight gag that is Dave Bautista? Well cast.

The Hunt is like sitting in a deer blind (Look it up, Hollywoodies) on the wrong corner of the pasture. Pointless.

Pegg is the very picture of schizophrenia — funny and charming, here and there, lucid when he can get it together to lie to a doctor, bug-eyed and furious when Theo’s independence is threatened and his view that “time” is being controlled…by somebody — isn’t taken seriously.

A bland tear-jerker that lacks the drama or commitment to wholly come off.

The lighter touches in Human Nature, which lists Dan Rather as a producer, come from scientists who are all “Big Bang Theory” extras at heart — referencing sci fi books and movies to make their points. Will we accept a positive vision of how this hurtle towards the future turns out (“Star Trek”) or a dystopic one (“Blade Runner”)?

There are missteps, threads that seems to clash with everything that’s woven around them. But Moverman and director Marc Meyers (“My Friend Dahmer”) keep that loom weaving, their story moving forward and their movie about the sometimes discounted value of Human Capital perfectly engrossing, from start to finish.

It’s brutishly heavy-handed, with a performance or two so hammy they came straight from the smokehouse. But those quibbles aside, Beneath Us is a torture porn satire that never fails to hold one’s interest, even if it doesn’t quite come off. It takes you from point A to point U — underground, literally “beneath us,” with efficiency and visceral verve.

It’s a moving but simple, unfussy film about several subjects Wajda identified with — individuality in a conformist state, Polish identity, the artist’s role in society and the state’s often-stated rejection of all of that.

The Third Wife lacks the Technicolor saturated hues of the great Zhang Yimou Chinese period pieces it imitates — “Ju Dou,” Red Sorghum” and “To Live” among them. It lacks the emotional, dramatic punch of those stories as well.

Neeson, freed from the straight-jacket that too many action films have slapped on him, gives Tom a stoic, crusty vulnerability that comes out in every line, post-diagnosis.

This is a “feel good” movie that lets you feel good only after it shows you how bad everything can get.

The Way Back is a dull if somewhat likable nothing of a sports melodrama.

Extra Ordinary is entirely too ordinary too much of the time.

There’s a touch of “The Invisible Man” to this unsettling story of the misery of being married to a cruel control freak. But “Swallow,” for all its People Magazine psychoanalysis, is harrowing in different ways and gripping in its myopia. All Hunter has is this mania for “control” of one thing in her life — what she puts in her mouth. All we have is worry over her mental health, and discomfort in confronting it.

But as a movie, is the story or the animation worth a 104 minute investment in time? Maybe if you’re really young and time is something you’ve got a lot of. Yeah, you can pick up on (more or less) what’s happening within a few minutes. But I can’t say it’s really worth it.

I can’t say this is head and shoulders above any other “Emma.” to come along. But de Wilde, her leading lady and her production team have made the matchmaker in need of her own match fresh and modern in a period piece detailed — right down to the acapella folk tunes and hymns sung on the soundtrack.

It is a sci-fi parable with performances that click and situations — tried and true as they are — that pop. We can only hope that “It’s only a movie” will be the way we look back on it.

The script veers away from history with its whole “agent with a conscience” balderdash. The crazed partner Vaughn plays is straight out of bad melodrama.

Sorry We Missed You is Loach’s intimate, scathing take on life in the “gig economy,” a family not getting ahead or even holding its own, but swimming as frantically as it can even as they spiral down the drain. It’s his best film in years, and with a resume that includes “My Name is Joe” and “The Angel’s Share,” that’s saying something.

The romance here is more perfunctory, less heartfelt. And that goes for several big twists in the tepid plot. Events are mandated by script requirements, never organic.

Coogan is game and Fisher strikes the right tone. But there’s so much bad behavior to “expose” and complain about that there’s no room for fun.

There may be a change coming to the business of collectible books, which is a major thesis of Young’s lovely and lush if meandering, bookshelf browse of a movie. Is the sun setting on this esoteric obsession? Or is a big-city hipster-driven revival turning that around?

Airplane Mode is a shiny little rom-com bauble from Brazil that strains and strains to find a laugh.

The whole affair plays as muzzled, truncated and incomplete — a ten furlong dash through a two mile (16 furlong) race.

With a lot of silence, some wonderful, minimalist effects doled out for maximum shock value, and a focused, fear-filled turn by Moss, Whannell has updated a timeless title with a genuinely horrific message.

Anybody expecting high drama or even a little righteous outrage and “Hollywood” melodrama may feel sorely let down by Green’s portrait.

Addicted to Love is a crude, laugh-starved and vulgar C-list copy-and-paste of “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” and proof of the thesis that if you’re going to steal, you might want to aim higher than a movie nobody EVER called a “classic.”

Every minute that The Jesus isn’t in a bowling alley Turturro and his movie lose a lot of what made him stand out.

Rag Doll is a boxing-my-way-out-of-a-jam drama that flirts with being interesting, in between passages of middling melodrama and wilder, illogical “Nobody’ll see THAT coming” surprises.

The messaging in Rich Kid$ might be heavy-handed, preachy even. The plot twists can be melodramatic and predictable. It’s still a fine indie calling card for all involved — in front of and behind the camera.

Fronteras is a stunningly stupid, talky, meandering Border Patrol thriller.

How you stretch that thin, worn-out comedy concept to two hours is you let almost every scene go on past its comic payoff.

A diverting and picturesque romance that will have you dreaming of a French vacation and the lovely sights — human and otherwise — to be seen there.

Comedy is the most subjective film genre, and all this menstruation, abortion, Catholicism and Meeting Mr. Wrong won’t be to every taste. I found Saint Frances a real indie comedy shot in the arm (first-timer Alex Thompson directed). And I cannot wait to see what O’Sullivan comes up with next.

This is “Southern Gothic” that lives up to its name.

Businesses destroyed, lives shaken to their core, the cars of bystanders crushed, cops helpless to stop it — it’s awful and tragic, sure. But it’s something to see, man.

It stops making sense about thirty minutes in and never recovers.

It takes a while to get up to speed, but once it does, “Farmageddon” delivers the jokes, visual puns and slapstick in a mad flurry.

The animation’s good, lovely but not dazzling.

Whatever was going on on the set, incoherence duels incompetence in the finished product.

There is one seriously suspenseful scene in the script, and it’s suspenseful because the trailers to the movie have given it away. Nothing else in it is scary, and the third act’s a career-killing embarrassment.

The cast is game, with Imperioli and Ventimiglia, Sandow and the Portuguese Padrão standing out. The players, the colorful milieu and the parade of nightclub acts make this a fun if somewhat undigested night out, chased with a hangover.

The austere beauty of Vitalina Varela is in faces of its characters, the darkness that envelops a corner of Lisbon tourists rarely see. It’s a somber, lyrical and relentlessly understated meditation on grief and a grudge.

It’s introductory by nature, polished yet primitive, just like the films that dominated gay big screen storytelling long before the alphabetic expansion to “LGBTQ.”

If The Night Clerk rises above “near miss” status, that’s thanks to the cast.

Abuda is a talented actress, but her limited range and dull acting choices turn Miss Virginia, the movie and the character, into a shrinking violet.

I found this a perfectly handsome and literarily defensible mounting of a well-known tale that was far and away the most bloodless version of it. Ever.

“Viral” is a sobering reminder that hatred of “the other” didn’t disappear after Pogroms and The Holocaust, and that it isn’t limited to jihadists and skinheads.

The Traitor is important Italian Cosa Nostra history rendered in boring, leisurely strokes.

It’s still a lovely character study in a lovely setting, even if the romance rarely achieves the urgency or heat to truly animate this “portrait.”

I didn’t hate this slaughter-at-the-soap opera reboot. Not until it goes seriously off the rails in the third act, anyway. But don’t get your “torture porn” hopes up with the word “slaughter.” It is PG-13, after all. And this isn’t “Hostel.”

We can buy a romance warming up between these two, but not based on what this fiasco delivers.