Roger Moore

The characters are never more than caricatures, the set-up is too conventional and the payoff doesn’t pay off at all. As for the jokes? Too many are awaiting that next rewrite or polish.

As the warts and all image emerges, with her surgically-polished profile never breaking a sweat, we still can’t help but get a kick out of her Bieber-Snoop fed revival. Because as much as her comeuppance seemed destined, that “comeback” makes her story as American as they come.

Whatever “charms” it reached for vanish for the attempted over-the-top finale, which left me cold and didn’t come close to making the sale about the “Embrace your inner rage” spin this is allegedly about.

Conclave is a deliciously immersive experience, a narrative that commands our attention and expects our speculation even if it maintains a distance that allows it all to seem out-of-step, fusty and even darkly humorous at its most extreme.

Hardy, perfecting the “meek” American shlub “type” he tackled in “The Drop” years ago, soldiers through this and has as much fun with the synthesized voice of Venom as he can.

Such movies are manipulative by nature and we embrace them for that. Here, that’s more obvious and heavy-handed, and the manipulation tends to spare us tears — and laughs — when the tears are entirely the point.

Some of it works, too much of it doesn’t. The pacing is fast enough in stretches, the performances amusingly broad and the pratfuls and punches sometimes amuse.

There’s no suspense in the tale, even in its “big finish.” “Tragic” was never in the cards, as this con man got away with his stunt. But this could have been dark and funny. It isn’t.

In Woman of the Hour, an infamous piece of ’70s serial killer lore becomes a suspenseful and disheartening thriller in the hands of director and star Anna Kendrick.

There’s nothing about “Goodrich” that would scare producers away from working with a filmmaker whose only goal might be to become “Nancy Meyers: The Next Generation,” even if there’s little original to lure them in either.

Smile 2 is a genuinely horrific plunge into terror.

Writer-director Nora Fiffer’s debut feature shows us the tears and hopes that we understand them. And she finds humor amid the insights about this particular version of post partum depression.

I swear I never thought I’d see Oscar winner Laura Dern in a movie as empty and pointless as Lonely Planet.

It’s immersive enough, luring us into this world and fearing for our heroines’ safety. But the abrupt shifts in focus make one wish Han Shuai had taken some more crowd-pleasing course, or gone all-in on the darkness of this underworld an out-of-her-element ex-pat finds herself in.

The performances are perfunctory, with little heart, heat or whimsy. The picture never looks cheap, but the melodramatic flourishes dumb it down at every turn.

For all the relationship insights dog-lovers-savvy our screenwriters fold into this slight, low-stakes tale, they wisely let underfilmed Portland itself take on a co-starring role.

Daffy to the point of kid-friendly — remember, he did a kids’ cartoon series — it’s lighthearted fun with little of the grim seriousness and unsubtle People’s Republican messaging of his recent films. Because this time, Jackie Chan plays Jackie Chan.

Shifts in tone aside, you’d still have to call “Bookworm” a winner — or I would — with Wood at his most vulnerable and winning and Fisher justifying her chattering pedant paycheck serving up equal parts adorable and insufferable.

The film is thus mostly a surface gloss with a bit of context, relying on the performers and thinkers from way back when to create all the interest here. But Daytime Revolution is a nice editing job of presenting that landmark week of slightly weird TV to viewers 52 years later.

Sure, it’s a gimmick. But it’s playful, it works and suits this material to a T.

Saturday Night won’t be to every generation’s taste. The look-alike cast is generally good, if hardly substitutes for “the real thing” in some cases. But if you were “there,” or at least caught the show in those birthing years, it’s a lot of fun, with or without the stimulants.

Strong finds his character and stays focused, first scene to last, a brilliant performance even if it never quite matches Ron Leibman’s ferocious turn as the man-as-dying-monster in the stage version of “Angels in America.”

Schimberg’s film goes for predictable emotions and rests on a fairly predictable formula. But what transpires in the middle to late acts is surprising, even as it feels as contrived as the shy-deformed-man who quickly becomes a master salesman transition.

CTRL is a slick and melodramatic Indian variation of the “runaway computer/evil AI” formula, a tale that begins jaunty and jokey and staggers into sinister in the most heavy-handed ways.

The fiddling-while-Earth-burns nature of global “leadership” and their parade of useless and vacuous “statements” joke lands, and is then pounded repeatedly as almost all of these leaders, scrambling through a foggy forest at night, fearing bog zombies and a planet about to go up in flames, struggle to stay on task and come up with that “statement.”

The script by Dan Hall is strictly paint-by-numbers — cut and dried and predictable. But the execution atones for some of that, and the performances give it that extra something that makes even a formulaic thriller worth your time.

The viewer is both miles ahead of the characters in guessing where this is going, and befuddled at the clumsy ways it gets there, or avoids letting us think we know how it’s getting there.

Sorelle and her documentary-real characters and the grounded unknown players playing them humanize their culture and show us their challenges are versions of all our challenges, no matter how many generations removed from it we think we are.