Roger Moore

It all adds up to tinselled treacle, inoffensive enough to be shown at Christmas Eve church services, but barely tolerable — dramatically and aesthetically — in any other setting.

If you’re looking for a clinic on how you don’t need a whole season of “Fargo” or “True Detective” to immerse you in a criminal milieu and the sorts of fixes folks living and working there get themselves into, you could do a lot worse than planning a trip to Lake George.

The sequel is fitfully amusing and watchable. But you can sense the greater silliness that inspired it in this “Blues Brothers go Metal” road odyssey.

This promise is at long last fulfilled in the third act, and that chase is pretty impressive. But the movie that gets us there is dumb, talky and pokey in the extreme.

Cloying tendencies aside, Joy is a welcome feel-good movie about science, a “Hidden Figures” for IVF and the sort of movie a lot of people will take comfort in as the world’s anti-science ignoramuses, anti-vaccine rubes and anti-“expert” opportunists control most of the media megaphones these days.

Whatever audience awards this pic has claimed on the film festival circuit, there’s no weight to it, and the sentimental lighter touches and limp jokes aren’t enough to carry it.

I enjoyed the spectacle of this about as much as I enjoyed “Ben-Hur” or “Napoleon” or “Gladiator.” But it’s hard to find the beating heart of this story because it doesn’t really have one.

This picture should have passed by in a sprint, not slogged past like an overlong, overbudgeted Macy’s Parade with Music that would test the patience of anyone, including that toughest PG audience of all — kids.

A harrowing, moving and nostalgic day and a couple of nights in the life of a Black boy lost during the darkest days of World War II.

The middle acts, where Emilia Pérez has her coming out, reconnects with her “fixer” lawyer and pulls her kids and her still-clueless ex-wife close to her, sag and slow the movie’s sprint to a crawl.

Under the Volcano can most easily be appreciated for allowing us to put ourselves in others’ shoes.

Goswami’s understated performance drives this brilliant debut feature, a sometimes silent observer who can barely register shock at some of what she sees and experiences.

I highly recommend you pay a quick visit to the Wikipedia page dedicated to German theologian and resistance martyr Dietrch Bonhoeffer before taking on writer-director Todd Komarnicki’s film “Bonhoeffer.” Otherwise, you might be as lost as I was thanks to the botched chronology acted-out by a little-known cast in a screen biography that does not live up to its over-reaching subtitle — “Pastor. Spy. Assassin.”

Juror # 2 is competently cast, acted, shot and put together. But the script is melodramatic to the point of “hackneyed,” with a couple of unintentional laughs thrown in for good measure.

It’s a funny film, but never actually hilarious. It has its touching scenes, its mild jolts of surprise.

Anora lacks the raw emotion, street energy and urgency of Baker’s transgender romp “Tangerine” — and the pathos of his acclaimed peek at childhood homelessness in the “paradise” of “The Florida Project.”

What the film sorely lacks is much in the way of urgency. Even the get-aways are dull. And for all the sexual heat of the Bruno/Annie connection, their relationship lacks weight or drama.

You can sometimes get away with a just-getting-by budget on your C-movie actioner by getting quick and getting witty. Get Fast doesn’t get over.

Close to You can be appreciated for its frank depicton of the post-hormone and surgery body and life of a transgender man no longer tormented by the confusion and self-loathing of gender dysphoria. But the story Savage and Page chose to tell with Page’s new reality can seem trite and melodramatic.

Canary Black is an almost wholly unsatisfying thriller that seemingly had enough necessary ingredients to comprise a full meal.

Stockholm Bloodbath has fine action beats and furious avenging, but collapses into a sort of resignation about the parts of the tale that must be rendered faithfully.

Unexplained, disorganized and cluttered with characters we strain to identify in banal situations that go nowhere, this isn’t one that’s going to replace “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Story” or even “The Family Stone” or “Feast of the Seven Fishes” on anybody’s holiday movie list.

Heretic leans on horror and serial killer thriller conventions for its plot and rising suspense. The foreshadowing is obvious, but the ways it is deployed always surprise and chill.

Uplifting in the right spots, touching near the end, cute and yet cloying, maudlin and manipulative everywhere else, it punches a lot of familiar buttons when it comes to faith-based films for the holidays.

It is the funniest film you’ll see this year.

It’s a slasher star vehicle for “Outer Banks” ingenue Madison Bailey, and she acquits hewrself with honor in a narrative that could not be more generic were it not for her and the whole time traveling thing.

Across the River and Into the Trees is sedate to the point of “slow,” old fashioned to a degree that will feel dated, and yet every minute of it — every gorgeous image, every twist and turn, even the predictable ones — is to be savored.

It’s sober minded enough. Yet it’s all rather less satisfying than it might have been.