Roger Moore

This one lands punches but rarely laughs, reaches for pathos where there is none and relies heavily on the sentiment that earned Quan an Oscar.

Bogota: City of the Lost is an underworld “how criminals crime” procedural with an exotic setting and fish-out-of-water characters but no pace or narrative drive worthy of its novelty.

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.”

The picture, which is earning dismissive reviews in some quarters, wouldn’t work without the oddball, mismatched chemistry between Witherspoon and Ferrell, who are a walking sight gag when they’re in the same shot.

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

Signing on an impressive cast, writer-director Drew Hancock takes a big, roundhouse swing at “coupling” in a distracted, instant gratification craving, uncompromising and not-entirely-adult era, and at sending up a rom-com convention or two. But the best he manages is a slow roller to shortstop with this icy, rarely amusing and gory dark comedy.

An adoring portrait of a Star at 80.

Every Little Thing is a documentary as delicate and magical as its subjects.

Stewart and Yeun (“Minari,” “Nope”) do their best to animate their flesh-and-blood scenes with confusion, curiosity and attraction. But they don’t have enough screen time to make this learn-how-to-love experiment come off.

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.

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.

There’s paranoia and airborne suspense, tension and personal, in-your-face violence. But it’s glib as all get out, dumb when it isn’t being glib and not nearly as much fun as Gibson seems to think he’s made it out to be.

Its blend of mystery, suspense, chills and pathos are perfectly pitched. Presence is simply sublime.

There’s no ignoring that The Damned has a visual, visceral power that should stick in the memory.

It’s a low-stakes, dramatically flat affair, a picture that never plucks the heartstrings it’s meant to.

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.

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.

God help me, I laughed a few times. And God bless Foxx for luring Cameron Diaz back on screen, and for his recovery. They’re damned cute together, even if their movie isn’t all that in concept, writing and any scene that involves “inaction.”

You’d be hard-pressed to think of a motion picture parable that more perfectly fits its moment and the mood of the country and the world it premiered into. Corbet has tapped into the zeitgeist as well as The American Myth and made a movie that makes you wince because he, like László Tóth, refused to sentimentalize it or avert his eyes from the ugliness.

Nickel Boys is American history, Southern history and Florida history uncovered and exposed, and a cautionary lesson to a culture backsliding into the comfort of more and more lies and delusions, all served up in one of the most artful films of 2024.

Try not to guess all that happens, because rare RARE mild jolts aside, this picture’s as clockwork as my Citizen watch.

I’m a longtime Palmer fan, and she’s almost never been this dull. She and SZA needed an edgier script to sparkle.

It’s all perfectly high-minded and polished, but all of this could have been treated with more spark than comes across here.

All Butler, director Tony Olmos and the rest of the cast and crew were shooting for is a cultish comedy with a few laughs, undercooked politics and undigested zombie victims. There’s no arc to the story and little that you’d call funny or ambitious or politically pointed.

Ad Vitam is competently shot and cut and works well enough for long enough stretches to recommend. But equally long stretches of training and graduation and karaoke celebrating kill its momentum.

After the first blush of how cute this conceit is . . . Better Man becomes a simple catalog of pop stardom clichés.

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.