Roger Moore

The story shuffles between dark comedy and clumsy mystery, monster movie and psycho-drama, with no character or performance generating a whit of sympathy.

The story sets up a clumsy psycho-sexual dynamic and a faux family, but the film doesn’t develop those.

The faith-based football bio-drama Greater fails on so many levels one scarcely knows where to begin.

Statham should hold out for movies that offer him more than a few exotic stamps on his passport.

It’s a romance novel, a romantic fable, brought to life by a pretty good cast that cannot make it more than is, that cannot give it more meaning and make it less frustrating than novelist M.L. Stedman intended.

It’s all quite predictable — save for the sinister use of the music of Missing Persons — and a trifle bland. But the depictions of password-access mayhem are chillingly real, and Brosnan gets across the helplessness that many his age, all over the world, feel at the new tech and the new rules — no rules at all — threatening his ruin.

The script, from a story by actresses Thomas and Reiner, is fiercely feminine and adept at juggling conflicting agendas and “needs.”

I could have done without a talky, explain everybody’s motivations third act. But there’s no getting around the crowd-pleasing nature of the bloody, vengeful and self-righteous wrath that rains down upon one and all in the finale.

Tanne has crafted a winning film of smart, probing conversation that plays like an affectionate going away gift to the Obamas.

Hands of Stone is still a first-rate boxing picture, a B-movie with just enough A-picture touches to make it sting.

Everyone, from director to cast, seems so rushed that there’s no time for romance, less time for leaps of faith and every moment of conversion is abrupt, dictated by the script and not by the heart.

Tone is tough when you’re snickering at “gun nuts” while you live the good life off underhanded ways of selling them. The movie takes swipes at Bush era bungling and corruption while reveling in it, because, well, these guys had fun doing it?

A quantum leap forward in animation and design, if not a great leap in motion capture technology or in story.

Those scenes with Letts are worth the price of admission, even if the movie overall drags, dry and not nearly as droll as Roth must have intended.

The film’s unblinking and unfiltered look at the indignities and horrors of ALS and its impact on a loving marriage is without parallel.

An imaginative, scary and wonderfully rendered stop-motion fright.

It’s demented, and it’s damned-near brilliant.

Florence is hilarious, and sadly fragile, and Streep makes her pain both funny and poignant.

One of the best pictures of the year and the best movie of the summer.

A terrific heist picture.

As crass as it is, I’ve seen worse.

Connolly’s film, formerly titled less poetically, “Backcountry,” has a lovely, wintry tone and a few minor surprises. The action sequences are competently handled, even if there’s little real suspense about what is coming and where this is going.

It’s a lovely film, stately, sylvan and slow. It would take an insensate child and a very cynical adult to not fall for at least some of its charms.

A stunning blend of styles, from hand-drawn sketches to computer-assisted visuals with flashbacks made in gorgeous, textured stop-motion animation with models and tactile sets, it does justice to the book while updating its messages for contemporary audiences.

The story is pure melodrama and more conventional than daring. But Tallulah makes a fine demonstration project to under-employed talent — in front of and behind the camera.

The action beats are taut, but the story arc crumbles under the weight of all the movies it steals from. The casting fails to pop, in most instances.

This is as decrepit and tone-deaf as any movie he’s ever made, a corpse of a period piece, production-designed to the hilt, distractedly directed, a failure that hints at The End of Woody.

It’s predictable, downright conventional, considering how much more “out there” his breakout film, “Sleepwalk With Me” (also about a struggling comic) was.

An over-reach for a “Hangover” styled spin on motherhood, with drugs, sex, booze and “experiment,” it reaches raucous on occasion. There are laughs, a disproportionate number of them coming from the trained comic in the cast, Kathryn Hahn.

A smart and reasonably taut thriller aimed at a generation that may be hard to convince to put down its phones long enough to watch.

More Pegg, please. Less of everything else. But then, it’s too late for that. “Collision Course” is already a bomb.

D’Souza, naif to American history that he is, could have done a real service instead of being another right wing Pied Piper leading the lemmings off a cliff. He could have asked “What happened to Our/My Republican Party?” and giving blunt, truth-spoken-to-power answers. He’d rather trash the America that GOP policies in large part created.

The visceral visuals make this a barely-serviceable/watchable summer popcorn picture. But the bar was set high too long ago for that to be enough for America’s Bond.

Skarsgard has carved out a wide niche for his varied and colorful acting career to inhabit. He’s stoic and unflinching here, a man on a mission.

It’s a psychological thriller built around two intense and graphic sex scenes, and a few other moments of expedient nudity. Mind games, stalking and graphic violence work their way in. But it’s the sex that seems to be the movie’s reason for being.

Pandering? Yes. But pandering with polish.

An earthy, funny and sometimes poignant portrait of a family that could only exist in the fantasy of the movies.

Herzog asks if one and all if they think “the Internet dreams of itself”?

Little Men doesn’t come to grips with much of anything, leaving relationships and questions of sexuality and even Leonor’s uncertain future uncertain.

The jokes are broad and narrow as ever. It’s a very inside-baseball riff on fashion and fashionistas and always has been. As the cameos fly by — Jon Hamm to Sadie Frost, Stella McCartney to Jean-Paul Gaultier — you might miss the funniest and most obvious joke of all.

You don’t realize how much a good horror movie depends on acting until you stumble in that rare one whose cast actually gets it right.

The script, by Feig and veteran “Madtv/The Heat” writer Kate Dippold, allows room for a sea of cameos with precious little that’s funny for any of the stars, or the “guest stars” to say.

The intrigues are rather routine in ways that point out that perhaps the director of a “Nanny McPhee” movie wasn’t the best choice for this. But McGregor, Harris, Skarsgard and Lewis give fair value and give this the lived-in feel of even the most far-fetched LeCarre plots.

When all that’s taken into account, The Infiltrator feels like a TV mini series squished into two hours, with the budget, supporting cast and period piece compromises to match.

But as with every other film in his fast-growing canon, Gibney wields his authoritative research and storytelling skills like a scalpel, getting at a subject we aren’t talking about with blunt facts and informed, cautionary speculation.

Speaking of Looney, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how violent this pre-tween farce is. Slapfights, brawls, violent death and near-death experiences abound. Along with butt-sniffing and toilet-sipping (at a party) gags.

The girls go wild and they make “Mike and Dave” as nasty as they wanna be, and a pleasant, pervy surprise of a summer comedy.

Whatever subtlety there was remaining in the satirical intentions of The Purge franchise pretty much fly out the door and into the blood-soaked night of The Purge: Election Night.

if nothing else, Lucha Mexico can be appreciated for its honest depiction of a cultural outlet that gives its public, young and old, a chance to let off steam and yell until they’re hoarse at these uniquely Mexican archetypes.

Worst of all is this 85-minute-story-in-a-two-hour-movie’s lack of urgency.

That score — insistent, sexy, jazzy and loud — almost puts it over, letting us skim over the ways the laws of logic and physics are violated, the lack of charisma of these “charismatic” magicians, the works. Until the ending, where it all feels like a cheap cheat and a waste of two hours and nine minutes of your life.

The result is a “Legend” that feels inoffensively modern, or at least less offensive than it could have been...But you can’t make a bold statement or exciting action picture when every frame is filled with fear — of offending someone, of upsetting animal rights activists, of giving the audience a Tarzan they won’t recognize, of failure.

Whatever its qualities and shortcomings, Swiss Army Man makes one promise it most certainly keeps. You have never seen anything remotely like it.

Refn’s skewering of this empire of awfulness is undercut by his plodding, portentous pacing.

So The BFG isn’t the “BFD” it might have been. Lovely as it often is, it’s a one hour and fifty-seven minute long kids’ movie designed to be watched, at home, with interruptions. And believe me, you’ll know it.

Independence Day: Resurgence is all big effects, big explosions, epic battles rendered in state-of-the-art strokes. But really bad writing, achingly bad acting, groaning scenes and a serious lack of suspense and surprise all add up to zero fun, this time around.

Ross keeps his camera in McConaughey’s face, too. Every dirt stain, every twitch, every glower, wink and wince, is hard to miss. It’s not a bad performance, but it is an absurdly busy one.

Things get into the area of “Oh come on” before they’re done. But The Shallows never tries to pass itself off as deep. It’s a straight, simple and primal thriller playing with our darkest deep sea fear — getting eaten.

More voices would have been nice, and just one person, on camera, defending the whole “safe space” where “hate speech” and “bullying” is banned on campuses is a grievous omission.

This quick, short Sundance Film Festival award winner leaves out a lot more about Brinkley than in it includes. But save your trip to the library (or Wikipedia) for after the film. The surprises, comic and tragic, are worth waiting for.

The helplessness one gets being pinned down and tickled, the chilling fear of that, nicely parallels the chill and fear of reporting a story powerful people don’t want reported, which Farrier shows us in this odd and shocking expose.

It dawdles between action beats and big laughs, and in the third act, that lets much of the wind out of it.

"Raiders!” will make any movie buff laugh out loud at the sheer chutzpah and kiddie problem-solving that it took to, for instance, recreate that boulder chasing Indy out of a South American temple.

There are enough laughs in Finding Dory to justify Disney wanting a sequel to “Finding Nemo,” one of the most successful animated films of all time. And there’s enough heart and smarts to warrant Pixar making it.

With so many recycled scenes and cliches to get through, Lee let his comedy run on too long. But Seoul Searching is worth a look and a laugh.

The movie is a vexing, patience-testing two and a quarter hours, and takes a full hour to get the Warrens on a plane to the UK. But the few, well-spaced out scares are real spine-tinglers.

If you’ve loved the game, you might appreciate the visuals cooked up for this fantasy universe. I was bored out of my skull, pretty much start to finish, from the “Lord of the Rings” opening to the Old Testament/Moses Afloat finale.

The Oscar winning Moore slings just enough of an accent for her lines to be funny. Her top-knot hairstyle says everything about the character we need to know — frosty, severe.

Guzman makes even the most trite moment — hailing a taxi in oh-so-tolerant Paris — amusing.

It’s still just a patience-testing bauble for anybody over the age of 12. The Turtles, in this latest incarnation, were and remain shiny but stupid entertainment for kids.

Do-Over is “Grown-Ups” with guns. And with no Colin Quinn or Chris Rock or Rob Schneider or Norm McDonald or Kevin Nealon.

The whole movie...feels like an under-developed sketch that goes on for too long.

A sensitive, unconventional baseball tale rendered in the muted tones of dread, a young player’s fear of letting everyone down.

Me Before You is a goofy, giddy doomed romance and female wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Five Nights gives us only about two nights worth of movie, and far less to chew on than the stingy-with-story director would have us believe.

It’s a documentary concocted out of decades of film and TV interviews — some confrontational, some awkward, often quite funny.

Alice Through the Looking Glass, which has precious little to do with the rhyming collection Lewis Carroll penned with that title, is a dreary, joyless affair.

It aims for the heart, but misses. It reaches for existential but never manages much more than “twee.”

More a movie that you appreciate and ponder than one you embrace and enjoy. Whatever its intellectual pretensions, I am looking forward to never seeing it again.

The script is a cut-and-pasting of random thriller cliches and hoary thriller one-liners.

It’s got just about enough laughs, but there’s so much more that the Script by Committee wants to shoehorn in, like female empowerment, bad parenting passed off as “doing our best” just like our parents, gay marriage and the incredibly sexist college Greek system, a relic of the “Animal House” era that remains as “rapey” as ever.

The effects — monsters, demons — are mildly chilling. But Josh Nadler’s script is amateurish in the extreme.

The sum of Fathers and Daughters is so much less than each of its individual parts. A misshapen attempt at maudlin (not unlike Muccino’s other Hollywood films), it enrages, here and there, but rarely touches or moves us.

The scariest thing about The Darkness turns out to be the trailers to this summer’s more promising horror offerings, “Lights Out” and “Don’t Breathe.”

This Ukrainian Crocodile Preacher makes an arresting subject, someone you’ll want to meet just to hear his story and see the past that put him on the path to being his country’s “Catcher in the Rye,” saving children from an ugly world and a doomed future.

The porn industry of the era is as much a part of the movie as the classic cars (re-used in the background, in scene after scene) and the leisure suits. But the zingers, which fall off markedly in the latter third when the energy flags and the plot unravels, always pack a punch.

If you want another lesson about why we should be going to Mars and what we’ll encounter and maybe find out about ourselves, “Unknown” will do until we have an actual liftoff.

Sudeikis is well-cast as a bird whose “cardinal sin” is cynicism, but he has virtually nothing funny to say.

It’s not a “Nework” for our times. But a game cast and a reasonably tense take on a topic that is a major component of this election year’s zeitgeist — financial cheats stealing from America, and never brought to justice — make it work.

The performances are of the meaningful, lingering stares variety, everybody working out what everybody else’s game is.

It takes nothing away from the awful thing people who experience this go through in saying that movies about it all too often are all tropes that render it trite.

The Meddler is a film of cute moments and the odd touching scene, which serve to interrupt the steady cavalcade of cliches.

The epic effects, titanic struggles and ever-evolving line-up of characters of "Apocalypse," coming hot on the heels of “Civil War” and “Batman v. Superman” and “Deadpool,” underline the exhausted ingredients of the formula these movies all use. The filmmakers strain to find something new to do with them, and watching them try too hard is wearying.

This “Risky Business” is averse to risk. There’s no edge to it. Only the sentimental stuff works.

Mothers and Daughters is drabness on the screen personified, a “Lifetime Original Movie” too unoriginal for Lifetime to want anything to do with it.

There’s a “for fans only” feel to the latest “Avengers” movie, Captain America: Civil War, that won’t be to every taste. A talky, often ponderous exercise in comic book movie elephantiasis, it overdoses on characters, old and new, sometimes not even bothering to name them.

Gervais fakes caring about character, jokes or doing the work to make Special Correspondents come off. He’s never made a worse film. And topping that, he’s never made a lazier one.

Even though Sing Street covers familiar ground, its director knows how to make his pigeon-hole adorable. The address’s charms win you over in the end.

Kidman works up to a fine but somewhat under-motivated fury.

It’s wildly uneven, rather like their TV series... And it is wincingly violent, with some of the John Woo-style slo-mo shootouts going on too long and spilling too much blood. But the chemistry is still there, the banter between the bald, bug-eyed, high-maintenance metrosexual Keegan Michael Key and the slow-burning Peele still zings.

An ensemble holiday comedy packed with all the sappy sentimentality and mawkish manipulation that only the old master, Garry Marshall would dare give it.

It’s Stan that Queen Mimi celebrates, right alongside the charismatic and eccentric Queen that is the film’s star in this good but not great documentary.

A misshapen, aimless midlife crisis travelogue/romance with discourses on the the repression and inequity of Saudi Arabia, dating in the Islamic world and the nature of American/Chinese business competition, it’s the weakest Tom Hanks vehicle in decades.

Hemingway in Cuba lives and dies on its “Papa,” and Yari did himself no favors by cutting corners there.

A ferocious, bloody, primal and pitiless gut-punch of a movie.

The two sisters one is the cleverest, the two albinos one the most unfathomable and “The Flea” the least inscrutable. See it for the eye candy, the vivid recreation of an Italian “Once upon a time,” all of it done without computers and digital fakery.

The mirror effects are still striking, Theron, Blunt, Hemsworth and Chastain still fairy-tale beautiful. But The Huntsman: Winter’s War, is the very picture of a movie that should have never been made. It never, for one second, gives us a reason to think otherwise.

This “Jungle Book” could give remakes a good name.

And so it does in the deft and delightful Elvis & Nixon, a short, quick and clever recreation of the how that came to pass and an imagined version of the conversation that could have taken place.

A sometimes entertaining, dazzling-on-the-field biography built around an utterly colorless lead performance.

Miles Ahead is a performance showcase, and might have seemed like a sure Oscar nomination for Cheadle, on paper, had the picture been more complete, more fulfilling.

Everybody Wants Some!! is just Linklater showing he can still summon up the immaturity to do a film like the ones he did when he had no name, no polish and was just starting out...This is the sort of movie he’d have made had he never grown as a filmmaker, if he’d only been a one-trick indie cinema pony, like Kevin Smith. And the world has already decided one Kevin Smith is more than enough.

13 Cameras plays as a tease, not sexual or graphically violent enough to count as exploitation, not suspenseful enough to get by. And with this plot, this “hidden camera” gimmick, without exploitation, it’s nothing.

And Reynolds? Put your money on him hitting his knees tonight and thanking Marvel for that red suit and all those zingers that “Deadpool” gets to deliver. They saved him from duds like this.

It’s an indulgent movie, drifting through grief on a sea of cliches.

The whole adds up to a charming portrait of the micro-fame and full, rich (not that rich) lives of the big actors who played little roles in the most carefully watched and memorized movie since “Citizen Kane.”

Sally Field brings a bubbly, misdirected vitality to Hello, My Name is Doris, a cute better-late-than-never romance tailor-made for her talents and lifelong image.

Overlong, polished but drab civics lesson of a comedy. This “Barbershop” is in sore need of a trim, and not just a little off the top, either.

Hardcore Henry is jarring and so a-cinematic that I couldn’t enjoy much of the technical razzle-dazzle this ticking-clock monstrosity was hurling at me.

It’s an absolutely chilling road picture, filled with tension, dread and a threat of violence. The longer we don’t know where that threat is coming from, the more suspenseful it is.

The laughs don’t even land with a thud. In The Boss, they almost never land at all.

In a righteous world, the better-acted, upbeat and faith-affirming “Miracles from Heaven” would eat this angry tirade for lunch.

Eye in the Sky is a tasty ticking-clock thriller parked at the intersection of politics and propaganda, military technology and combat morality. It’s not the first movie about the ethics of drone warfare. The low-budget nail-biter “Drones” beat it to the punch by a couple of years.

We Like It Like That fills in some very necessary course requirements in Americans’ college of musical knowledge. Just hearing how that seminal, signature hit “Bang Bang” came about is worth the price of admission.

The unlikely pairing of Amber Heard and Christopher Walken pays comic dividends in One More Time, an agreeably predictable famous father/bitter daughter dramedy.

The acting is Disney Channel broad, the writing is about six drafts shy of having enough laughs. And any message about “who rescued who,” the rescued pet owners’ creed, is lost.

Unfortunately, the more things spiral into anarchy, the less interesting the story becomes.

The mystery, the great cast and the slow simmer of tension that Egoyan builds into Remember recommend it. The third act payoff won’t be to every taste. Egoyan is the Canadian Spike Lee in that regard.

It’s a fun film, not quite as lighthearted as the similar “Knuckleball” documentary of a short while back, but amusing enough.

Hawke and Ejogo, who played civil rights icon Coretta Scott King in “Selma,” have enough soul and charisma and chemistry to hold the screen and make us feel Born to be Blue, even if we, like Jane in the movie, never quite “get” Chet Baker.

Hiddleston can’t pull off the folksiness that was Williams’ public persona.

This is a comic book epic with a lot of fat and flab around the edges. But the fights are shorter and more involving than the “Transformers” cluttered clashes of “Man of Steel.”

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is a veritable feast of low-hanging fruit. The laughs are obvious, we see them coming a mile away.

It’s not much of a movie, frankly. But our good will goes a long way where Pee Wee’s concerned. Herman appreciation is like love for Tinker Belle. If you want to like it enough, you will.

It’s just not enough. The Bronze is predictable, and outside of Rauch, Cole and a very convincing (conditioning, some training, clever editing) Haley Lu Richardson, the cast is bland. Strong has nothing to play, and nobody else makes an impression. The Bronze is proof that one great joke is not the route to comic gold, or for that matter silver.

83 minutes of excruciating, nauseating, boundary-pushing “comedy” that never for a second feels like it’s anything but visual evidence of the end of Sacha Baron Cohen’s comic leading-man career.

This sort of movie really should be about more than meekly obvious names for human traits separated into tribes, the future tech, the dystopian landscape, the fashions, the hair styles...But there isn’t a line that lands, a scene that sticks with you, an emotion you feel or a moment this movie drags you to the edge of your seat.

The normally dependable Rockwell seems uncertain of what to do with Verdean.

The Program wisely hangs on Foster’s fierce performance, transforming himself into Lance.

A quietly disturbing slice of Southern Gothic that isn’t Southern at all.

The movie flirts with supernaturalism. But the Beams’ story is anchored in smaller miracles — the reliability of friends, the kindness of strangers.

As a stand-alone film it flirts with utter incoherence.

10 Cloverfield Lane is built on the fear of an unknown that we know. Turns out, all that secrecy and hype and branding the “Cloverfield” name were not just this product’s marketing strategy. That’s all they had. Period...So, “Room” is still in theaters. It’s more harrowing, more terrifying, more thrilling and moving than Cloverfield Lane could ever hope to be. Go see that instead.

The direction, by Cyrus Nowrasteh (“The Stoning of Soroya M.”) lacks urgency or art. The performances are, for the most part, emotionally flat.

A few frights pay off, but most don’t. The performances are TV-series flat — designed for close-ups.

The story is lightweight and flimsy, and the resolution of the plot is too on-the-nose, pat, but the unfeeling nature of this future — about halfway to “Her” if you remember that film — and the mechanical nature of interactions, even sex, make Creative Control one of the most interesting recent exercises in film futurism.

Lolo is entirely too familiar, too predictable, a character study in romantic mishaps that’s far less interesting than the name Delpy cooked up for her “little alpine bunny,” a passive, pretty creature worthy of our contempt, at least as Wells envisioned him.

This could have been a lighter picture, sort of a semi-dark Nick Hornby spin on music. That might have been less accurate, but more watchable.

And John Cusack. “One semester at NYU” is all the Internet Movie Database gives him, as far as credentials. But he’s got opinions, especially about the meltdown of 2007-8. And he’s outraged. So anyway.

There’s little drama, but the fights and chases (Butler hanging out of a moving SUV) are exciting, if not very original.

Tina Fey gives her finest, funniest big screen performance by essentially doing in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot what she did so well on TV’s “30 Rock.”

You’ll want to catch The Wave because it’s fun to see Hollywood disaster movie cliches rendered in Norwegian.

If the only martial arts movies you’re seeing are “Crouching Tiger” pictures, it’s good to know that they’re keeping up with the state of the art, even if they’re not actually inventing it.

Winds up a thoughtful puzzle of a movie that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, a slice of Southern Gothic displaced into rural, redneck New York that loses something in the geographic translation.

The movie’s message about tolerance and not pre-judging others sings, and the many chases, interrogations (a weasel ably voiced by Alan Tudyk) and narrow escapes pay off.

Poots, Davis, McCormack, Squibb and Whigham quickly sketch in interesting, if not quite compelling characters. And they, more than the story or locale, make A Country Called Home worth a brief visit.

There’s a long year ahead of us, but Gods of Egypt is going to stand out as one of the sillier, more puzzling big budget, special-effects driven period pieces to come out.

It’s a film that flirts with cloying, here and there — especially at the end. But it reminds us, even before that U.N. recognition becomes official, that there’ll always be an England, that English manners survive, and there’ll always be a Maggie Smith, imperious, hilarious and glorious in that wonderful third act her life and career have given her.

It’s just callow, the way we all are/were in our 20s.Which is why the best generational “take stock” reunion movies wait until everybody hits 30, or close to it, before even trying to make sense of it all.

A clever ticking clock mystery, it tries your patience even if it is giving some of the best character actors in the movies plenty of screen time to chew the scenery, try on accents and make jokes in even the bloodiest, darkest moments.

An overlong, all-inclusive and all-too-tepid bio-pic of the great Olympian.

As “Forrest Gump” proved, never bet against a supportive mom. There’s a need and a market for lump-in-the-throat, feel-good treacle.

Neill is quietly compelling, as always. Brody underplays Pete, emphasizing his suffering, his victimhood, his guilt. It’s a performance mostly of reactions, and the aforementioned wayward accent.

Yes, it’s aimed at believers. But Reynolds & Co. avoid the traps of Mel Gibson’s movie and many others by making these times horrifically real, but these Biblical figures and what they were about compelling in their kindness, soft-selling their message so sweetly that even a Roman with blood on his hands will question his Empire, his religion and his way of living before all is said and done.

Nobody saw it last summer. And Hollywood isn’t beating down the cast’s collectives doors. Yet. But these Slow Learners catch on just in time to be the best cheap date movie for Valentine’s Day.

It’s not edge-of-your-seat alarming and its jolts are more creepy than shocking. But for all its period detail and head games, “Witch” works on the most primitive level.

The whole affair is too cluttered to clip along, laugh to laugh, love to love. Director Christian Ditter (“Love, Rosie”) had too many characters to serve to give anybody room to breathe.

Tobias Lindholm’s film has documentary realism even in its more melodramatic moments.

Writer-director Adam Alleca is better at the keyboard, cooking up chewy tough talk, than behind the camera. The shootout stuff is only passably staged, and the blood-bursts (not his fault…entirely) look digitally added, in some places.

A “high concept comedy” from the days when those were a thing, it’s basically a cacophony of cameos and random sight gags hurled at the viewer in a tsunami of haute couture hype.

Diamond Tongues is a witheringly funny but still sympathetic portrait of a show business “type.”

There are more funny lines and opening credit sight gags in this than most comedies have in their full running time.

Riley makes a lousy, hoarse-voiced Darcy. James sets off no sparks with him, suggests no heartbreaking longing. If you want to make a point about women liberated by a zombie invasion into independent-minded martial arts warriors, why do it with one of the greatest romance novels of all time? There’s barely a laugh here, and nothing resembling human emotion.

The Choice is another endless, nearly-sinless-in-the-sun Sparks melodrama, one that benefits from a couple of charming leads and some folksy, down home humor. But that title frames it in tragedy. And that “choice” leaves this tepid romance mired in the maudlin.

Mistitled and meandering, it is Michael Moore’s worst film, his weakest whack at America: What Went Wrong?

When the Coen Brothers miss, they miss with gusto. Images of Babe Ruth, swinging and collapsing in a heap from the effort come to mind.

A rousing good tale from an age when ships of wood were sailed by men of iron.

Plays as a franchise out of ideas, out of jokes and more naked about its real place in the film firmament –as panda pandering to the enormous Chinese movie market.

The action is visceral and exciting, but everything between the shootouts, especially the mostly-insipid flashbacks (A pre-Civil War romantic hot air balloon ride in Missouri? Really?) just makes you impatient for Jane to get that gun and get on with it.

It’s exactly what the title portrays it to be — “Grandpa” Robert DeNiro, as potty-mouthed, oversexed and politically incorrect as he’s ever been.

Is it a spoiler to refer to the coda of thriller The Boy as the clumsiest cop out in recent horror history?

An adventure drama with sea legs, a story of heroism steeped in period detail, played with sympathy and stoicism by people who respect such old fashioned virtues.

The best you can say about Forsaken is that it attracted a good cast, sports the odd cool character or hard-bitten bit of dialogue and that the rare surprises in its stolid, formulaic script are pleasant ones.

A cast of no-names and a story so clunky it grinds gears every time it changes scenes take nothing from surprisingly effective (cheap) effects and the odd laugh-out-loud one-liner.

It’s all so obvious and (unintentionally) laugh-out-loud funny...Seriously, if you’re not five steps ahead of The Fifth Wave, you need to have yourself tested.

Alternately daring and dull, inventively animated, intimate and yet impersonal, it’s challenging enough to turn off most.

The result is a Save the Planet comedy that plays much longer than its 86 minutes.

As for this long, boring, violent sequel? Life’s too short.

As a brutal and gory combat picture with historical underpinnings, these “Secret Soldiers” acquit themselves heroically. The action is visceral and intense.

There isn’t much more to this than that — a couple of frights, a growing suspicion, and some dry jokes. Kudos to Dormer for getting a paid vacation to Japan, and not having to strip to play it.

The players and their flinty, smart dialogue make this lean movie the screen equivalent of bleached bones in the desert sand — bones with just enough meat on them to lure us in.

Take it as a transitional comedy for kids about to outgrow “Kung Fu Panda” and keep your expectations low — very low — and you won’t mind it.

The intellectual ambition, the showy “smart” dialogue and collectively quotable characters played by actors we respect make Anesthesia watchable, and its existence as an indie film that attracted this cast, won financing and made it into theaters easy to explain.

The Abandoned leaves us in the lurch, wondering at the nonsensical ending exactly what we wondered at the beginning. Jason Patric — Jason PATRIC? Man, what happened?

No matter how gorgeous Synchronicity looks, it can’t keep you from feeling this was an opportunity missed.

Entertainment is rife with randomness, shot through with misery and self-loathing and flat out unpleasant as a screen experience.

Band of Robbers is a film of little flourishes that work better than the story they’re adorning.

Movies that dabble in homelessness, even movies about cute filmmakers who want to film and flirt with the homeless, require more commitment than this. No number of scenes featuring a nubile nude can countermand that.

It never adds up to anything more than the mood Demeestere manages to translate from Franco’s fiction. Which makes Yosemite a “film festival movie,” nothing more than a promising idea or two and an interesting tone to recommend it.

The casting does the film few favors. Ramirez is charismatic, but has none of Patrick Swayze’s mad twinkle. It’s a humorless film that makes you go “Wow” more than it involves you.

A violent and grimly obvious frontier thriller that Clint Eastwood might have made during his Spaghetti Days.

The film is on shaky ground as it veers into persecution and some paranoid “Silkwood” touches.

A riveting saga of pain, grit and the brute moral relativism of revenge, the first law of all, and the only one that mattered back then. The Revenant is one of the best pictures of the year.

Stretched to three hours, including a pointless (old fashioned) overture and intermission, does it live up to the “Cinema Event” Tarantino has hyped it as? Hell no. It’s just a minimalist Spaghetti Western suffering from auteur bloat — sometimes entertaining, with not even remotely enough story of action to support its insuperable length and gravitas.

By playing it too safe, Daddy’s Home never finds that comic sweet spot and never rises above, “Well, it’s not awful.”

The Big Short becomes not just amusing and explanatory, a real tour de force for its fast-talking cast.

The Force Awakens boils down to a couple of genuine lump-in-the-throat moments, and those are due to nostalgia. The rest? Seen it, done it, been there, and remember it — even though it was “a long time ago.”

The surprises are rewarding, the irony expressed with the perfect touch of drollery and the climax beautifully handled, even if the film goes on one scene too long past that.

The players and the situation (taken from a Hubert Monteilhet) novel make Phoenix an approachable, less-grueling Holocaust story than most. But the unreality of it all undoes some of that and makes this brief, smart and heartfelt story feel like a pulled-punch.

Russell sets out to frustrate, and he does. And Joy never rises above that, an aggravating, un-fulfilling and empty night at the cinema with great actors trapped in an overdue flop from people we were just starting to figure were flop-proof.

Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, ex-“Saturday Night Live” bandmates, funny women so utterly in sync as to be matching halves of “slap” and “stick,” simply click. Even when they’re out of character.

There’s just nothing to this — nothing funny, at least. It’s too long...has some bizarre violence...and is built around another inept-and-doesn’t-care-that-he-is turn by Sandler.

Chi-Raq is Spike Lee’s most audacious film in decades. DECADES.

It’s better in conception than in execution, with all the energy hurled at the effects and murderous Krampus attacks. The actors fail to feel the fear.

Tom Hardy manages the brilliant trick of playing two physically, emotionally and intellectually distinct mobster brothers in Legend.

Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea merely unravels the yarn that inspired the great book, a good-looking film that never sinks, but never really soars either.

Standard issue spy stuff, a surprise or two, a shootout or three. Nothing you should pay money to see in a theater.

The surprises are few, and none of it am0unts to a whole lot. But for those up to taking yet another British sentimental journey to “their finest hour,” A Royal Night Out manages something unheard of in the decades of Windsor wooliness since. It makes them cute, if only for one night.

As befits a film with Martin Scorsese as a credited producer, “Wannabe” is more “King of Comedy” tragic, more sadly psychotic, than its 2014 predecessor.

A movie that won’t convert anyone, a film for the faithful who want to believe nothing but the best about Mother Teresa. Real life is rarely cut and dry, and dramatically flat, as this.

The film could have used a little context....But “The Race that Eats its Young” is still a fun and quick introduction to a sport that, to most of us, seems so extreme as to invite the sort of eccentrics the filmmakers capture here.

It’s pretty, occasionally cute, but trippy — random. Yeah, there’s one credited screenwriter, but more than all but the worst Pixar product, it shows the signs of “written by committee.”

At this stage of this saga, you kind of know where it’s going and which emotional buttons will be punched, the ones I predicted way back in 1984 with my little "IV-I.V.” crack. Another two hours and 13 minutes of it, even with decent “Rocky” style (roundhouse punch after roundhouse punch) is hardly merited.

Haynes never lifts Carol above over-dressed melodrama. And with every perfect bar where every perfect martini is served, every perfect dive of a motel on the “Lolita” roadtrip that the “just friends” abruptly take together, Carol betrays its true priorities.

Still, those who adore the two stars will find some fun here. And if you don’t “know the story,” you won’t be nearly as bored as the rest of us.

If history’s tide runs against the Globe, at least those who worked there have the satisfaction of exposing a global wrong, and helping to end it. And they have McCarthy’s film, one of the best pictures of 2015, as a permanent record, a tribute in cinematic form, to their art and craft in its finest hour.

A terrific film, not as moving or damning as this year’s Amy Winehouse expose, but a warm piece of cinematic scholarship.

Crowley wisely keeps Ronan center stage and often in close-up. She lets us feel the pain of leave-takings, the depression of homesickness in that pre-digital age, the dilemma of first love, and maybe second love, overlapping, the pull of the familiar vs. the hope of the new and different.

[Hooper and Redmayne] find the humanity, here, the confusion and repulsion built on ignorance and darkness. And with a winning performance and a sympathetic eye, they shine a light into that darkness so that the rest of us can see.

Perhaps some of the same flaws lay beneath the surface of the original film, but the distraction of subtitles helped hide them. Here, they’re gaping holes knock “Secret” off the tracks long before it’s far-fetched twist ending.

Mockingjay II is a bare bones finale — a tedious two hours in which nothing at all happens, with the briefest of breaks for a zombie chase and attack and a half-hearted bit of sci-fi combat.

It’s a vacuous affair, dull performances trapped in duller writing, ironically funny only when you take the writer’s words to be the screenwriter’s admission of guilt.

If the spirit of the season is making you sick to your stomach, The Night Before, scruffy and uneven as it is, might be the perfect purge.

A surehanded, tight and minimalist amateur-kidnapping thriller that benefits from a cast of some repute and a few nods to Tarantino within its 94 minutes.

Miss You Already may be the funniest, sunniest weeper in history.

The story bores you to tears until it takes its tragic turn.

It’s all so hackneyed, so overfamiliar and formulaic.

As it meanders from over-familiar set-pieces and cliches — Tahir drums on empty paint buckets for money, predators face them at every turn, a callous system trips them up, and when they break into that brownstone, naturally they play dress-up — Shelter loses its way.

This abortion of a thriller fails, utterly, and bombed completely. So even though there’s a “Witch Hunter 2” in development, don’t count on it.

A thriller with this setting and this cast can never go too far wrong. Flutter doesn’t hit the jackpot, but at least it’s a decent even-money bet.

Trumbo is a warm and witty profile in courage.

The wistful and poignant stuff doesn’t play as well as the surprising setbacks to romance, many of them delivered by the weirdly randy Sean at the most opportune times.

The Armor of Light isn’t a mind-changing documentary. But Disney/Hughes’ film suggests that Schenck’s conversion is the beginning of an attempted unwinding of “a Faustian pact” (his words) between the NRA and evangelical Christianity.

Antonio Banderas plays the growling veteran miner who shows flint and organizational moxie when the worst happens. And Lou Diamond Phillips, laying it on thick, is the guilt-ridden colleague, trapped with the others, whose job it is “to keep these men SAFE.” Which he does. Repeatedly. Loudly. Passionately.

Skyfall is far and away the best, and the most British of the Daniel Craig-James Bond movies.

Spectre, set up to be the Daniel Craig finale as Bond, isn’t a terrible installment in the franchise. It’s the lightest of the Craig Bonds — no sin in that. But like the end of Connery, the exit of Roger Moore and the layoff notice given Pierce Brosnan, it’s a tired, trite “greatest hits” re-packaging of stunts, chases and fights from earlier, better Bonds.

Lucy (Hadley Belle Miller) is still full of nickel-a-session psychotherapy, Linus still soulful enough to recognize his friend’s heart. And Charlie’s sister Sally (Mariel Sheets) still assumes Linus is her “Sweet Baboo.”

The most shocking thing about Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, is that four hacks fought to have their names listed in the credits under “screenplay.”

The whole enterprise is very much a mixed bag, but as films that cater to this audience go, Woodlawn isn’t half bad.

It’s a fine film, and a surprising history lesson — not because the Germans don’t remember the Holocaust, but because we’re reminded that there was a time when they didn’t want to.

Beasts on No Nation makes a terrific vehicle for Elba and a grim reminder that even if we’re tired of hearing of it.

In the best picture of 2015, Carey Mulligan is the stoic, long-suffering sweatshop worker radicalized into action.

It doesn’t have the laughs or the killer cast of “Superbad,” but there are gory giggles aplenty in this B-movie addition to the genre that displaced vampires once Edward impregnated Bella.

Whatever its ambitions, this is just another vengeance fantasy and one that doesn’t transcend its genre.

The story takes a surprising turn midway through, a change in direction that deepens the experience for the viewer, making us culpable in at least part of the misery these two face.

We see the mistakes before the principals do. That’s what makes the news-story-gone-wrong drama Truth so compelling.

Victoria shows us just how real things can get in this tiny-camera/infinite filming (video) capacity era.

Burnt isn’t a bad movie, but the melodrama is overwrought and overdone, the romance warmed over and the “Cocktail” formula shaken, stirred and utterly played.

Green, who once had a solid and arty indy cinema career going, cannot for the life of him hit the right tone, here. The film is waterlogged when it should be jaunty, and the cynicism and the sentimentality are kept at arm’s length.

“Bone” is an unflinchingly-violent and stupidly long genre mashup. It’s Tarantino without all the anachronisms and swearing.

It strips away the myth and icon and reveals Jobs for the hustler-huckster he was, just a smooth, smiling turtleneck, trying to sell us something. In many ways, his film makes all other Jobs movies unnecessary.

This lame, laugh-starved script makes him look like an Old Man — not a funny old man or a Grumpy old man (see the fine “St. Vincent” for that). Just old and not really up to trying too hard.

That lets Diabolical join the burgeoning ranks of half-hearted horror films that most of us don’t get around to watching because there’s not much reward for doing so.

A farce that dabbles in darkness. True confessions here, sexual mores tested there. We see where this is going long before it gets there, and in a short movie, that can be fatal.

Del Toro reminds us just how chilling bumping into the supernatural is supposed to be, just how stomach churning violence is and just how many shades of red blood shows us, from first spurt to crusty dust.

Musician Dave Grohl and music mogul David Geffen wax enthusiastic. But leave it to Bruce Springsteen to find the poetry of the place.

Philippe co-wrote directed and stars in Catch, so it’s easy to read a lot into this performance, a low-maintenance, low wattage but still recognizable movie star reduced to making a low-budget film in Shreveport.

Pretty much the perfect scary movie for kids.

Long, patient and chilling, it vividly captures a time in America and the feel of divided Berlin in the muted blues and greys that color our memories of that “duck and cover” age.

Of all the scary guys Michael Shannon has ever played — sociopaths, murderers, hell, even General Zod in a Superman movie — none is more frightening that his character in 99 Homes.

This might have made a decent eye-candy musical for kids. But aside from Nirvana and a choral “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the miner kids, there is no music.

The new documentary on Keith by Morgan “20 Feet From Stardom” Neville still manages to surprise and delight.

It’s a garish mess, more interesting as a concept and production design exercise than as a movie. But you’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Experimenter is a capital example of that prophet-ahead-of-his-time narrative, a movie about a scientist who lived (just) long enough to revel in the fact that he was onto something before everybody else. And that he was right.