Roger Moore

The screenplay never gets past that “workshop this into something sharper” stage, and the many players never transcend that “promising introduction” that their characters are given.

It’s obvious and slow and cute in all the places you’d expect, melodramatic in many of the others. But for what it is, it is superbly-crafted.

Borderlands is terrible on every level, a real Dog of August, in movie-lover shorthand.

It’s good to see all these folks together in the same picture. But Affleck and Chuck MacLean don’t script enough clever bits, smart action beats and funny lines to let “The Instigators” instigate much of anything.

Braff can still land a punch line and manage goofy, “sensy” banter. There just isn’t enough of it here to hold one’s interest. Comedies do not live on low-hanging fruit alone.

Golden Years is a romantic comedy with questions and perhaps a very modern “answer” to that “Will it go on like this until the end?” challenge. But even though it’s well-acted, scenic and charming enough, perhaps finding a few more laughs should have been a higher priority.

It doesn’t work. It should have, but it doesn’t, despite Hart’s best efforts.

No, it’s not a subtle film. Nor were the Germans, it’s worth remembering. But it’s handsomely mounted and well-acted, and reaches a fine if far-fetched action climax.

House of Ga’a is at its best in action, as the fight choreography is good and the pacing is sharpest. When we settle on palace intrigues, the picture slows to the point of being static with interiors, infighting and betrayals of the sort one sees in soap operas the world over, even those set in pre-colonial West Africa.

Fuji’s performance is the highlight here, a man of science and obsessive Ham radio buff struggling to communicate what he’s going through but failing to soften his personality as his memory, and the self-control it might contain, fail.

An expertly shot and edited thriller built around a cringey/creepy performance by Josh Hartnett is undone by an indulgent father trying to make a pop starlet/actress out of his daughter in Trap, the latest from M. Night Shyamalan.

The diplomatic thing to do would be to say the new film of Harold and the Purple Crayon is misguided, dull and mostly humorless and leave it at that.

It’s historic, set in Kowloon’s long gone but infamous high rise “walled city” slum, and between the over-the-top action, deadpan underreactions and silly supernaturalism, it is laugh-out-loud funny

It can be cute, playful and romantic, then turn dishearteningly violent as it serves up a generous sampling of what life on the untamed frontier could be like. It’s also frustrating in its lapses in logic, its cumbersome, shuffled and dream-infused structure.

The escalations and rising violence and body count utterly botch any sense of mystery about each “usual suspect,” and that shred of promise Cornish & Co. give the picture in her opening moments is lost.

It matters that the story’s told out of order. It’s great that they landed Hershey and Begley for small but chewy supporting roles. And Fitzgerald’s gamble on her most daring, naked (not quite literally) performance pays off in what could be her break-out role, even if she had a bit of explaining to do to mom and dad when the credits rolled.

Dance First isn’t exactly bad. It’s just too narrow in focus, too incomplete, a biopic that leaves us “waiting” for an elusive, mythic “author” to truly make his entrance.

As for the results, some sequences play, some are novel and some are tried and trite cliches.

The Arctic Convoy is not all that novel or new. But it’s beautifully put together, well-acted and tautly-acted.

Our stars may be timeless, but you should’ve seen them when they commanded more control of their projects than this and could demand the rewrites this tepid typewritten treacle needed.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a burlesque of comic book movies, embracing their popularity, mocking the characters, situations, genre and its fans all the way to the Vancouver bank vault where Marvel Jesus insists Disney deposit the $billion this fun, bad movie is going to make.

The latest incarnation of “Doctor Jekyll” isn’t scary enough or campy/weird enough to come off.

Park and Lively give this novel yet familiar story its heart and weight, each offering support when guidance won’t do.

Bennett impresses, first scene to last.

Roberts and Union pull out the stops trying to find laughs in this script, mostly failing.

Though we “see” the attraction between the two young women, we rarely feel it. Luchetti makes her beautiful looking film about this budding summer romance, but never quite convinces us of her passionate interest in it, or in much else that was going on in Italy in 1938.

So anyone expecting this depiction of Asperger’s/”on the spectrum” autism to advance the medium will be sorely disappointed. The artistic milieu and tentative attempts at making a connection shine, but too much of what’s here is just genre cliches.

[Segal's] no better than anyone else would be at wringing laughs from this crap script. Yes, he co-wrote it. But if enough people stream this on movie-content-starved Amazon Prime, maybe he’ll get another shot at getting a better movie out of this franchise.