Roger Moore

The Walk is the movie that takes us up there, gives us the jitters and makes us titter along the way.

It skews very young, and for that crowd, Hotel Transylvania 2 works well enough. If this is Sandler’s sentence for all the awful, lazy live-action fare he’s fed his fans over the years, he and we can say he got off easy.

So this Mexican cartoon, in Spanish with English subtitles, is racy enough to count as a bit of culture clash. How young, exactly, do they teach kids testicle puns and stripper/massage “Happy Ending” jokes South of the Border?

Whatever power this piece of writing had over the two of them, Captive fails to capture the magic, hope or whatever made it a best seller.

Satire, parody, racist skewerings of racism, sacred cows slaughtered, silly slides down the slippery slope into Anti-Semitism. And breasts. Lots and lots of breasts!

There’s no edge to any character in the movie.

Starts at a sprint and hurtles at us for a good long, stretch, before it stops to catch its breath.

This is what filmed spectacle used to look like — a trip to a place or time most of us could never see.

Some Kind of Hate is perfectly hateful, just not entertaining.

The cast is solid, game, competent. And the you can’t fault an audience for seeking a little female victimhood/female empowerment in their romantic thrillers.

The tedium makes us forget the cynicism.

As volcanic as Maguire needs to be, it’s those who react to Fischer most tellingly — Sarsgaard’s priest, and Schreiber’s Spassky — that make Pawn Sacrifice the gripping and entertaining history lesson that it is.

The “banality of evil” was never so hypocritical, so banal and so evil.

A faintly-creepy, lightly amusing horror comedy that promises a surprise twist and a hint of heart.

Cohen comes close to getting at why Canadians are so funny (at least in the arts). It’s their long winters. We need Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd and many others to explain that to us.

What’s surprising is the way Welcome to Leith achieves a balance in the storytelling.

Butterfield is quite good, the other kids well-matched and Spall, Hawkins and Marsan terrific in support. That adds up to a picture well-worth your time.

It’s just a clumsily written, flatly-acted sermon built on some of the same stereotypes that made Tyler Perry rich.

The chases are nothing special.

Chloe and Theo feels like Dakota Johnson’s atonement for the meretricious slime that was “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

New Zealand and West Virginia provide the striking settings, and you can almost see what the cast saw in this as promising and meaty. But the script skips past deeper debates and doesn’t deliver much in the line of fireworks for the love triangle.

Why not wade in? Why not? That’s almost the only real action or borderline funny thing to it for 45 minutes or so. And it’s only 86 minutes long.

A rather dull and talkative comedy about two mismatched colleagues trapped in Albuquerque for a day of true confessions and misbehavior.

It is funny, and Redford, gracious as ever, makes a wonderful straight-man for a comic co-costar who has the face, voice and posture of a geezer who probably should have tackled this healing hike 20 years earlier.

Kingsley is entirely too stiff and proper in this part to suggest any heat between them, and even if that serves the script, the film cries out for more warmth. It’s a chilly piece, scattered funny situations and laugh-out-loud lines, and a good cast performing them.

Filmmakers John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle (“As Above, So Below,” “Quarantine”) serve up a horrific string of “Sophie’s Choice” situations, in between the breathless chases and brutal violence.

We Are Your Friends has no heartbeat. It flatlines, early on.

Jason Schwartzman may be a little old for the part, but there’s something of a “voice of his generation” spin to his role in 7 Chinese Brothers.

Gibney uses interviews, fresh and archival, and a court deposition and reporters’ memories of long-exposure to Jobs for his evidence. And it’s damning, from the financial cheating to the lack of philanthropy to the arrogance that let him think he knew better than modern medicine how to treat his cancer.

A smart, adult thriller.

It often seems that “Agent 47” is more concerned with landscape, buildings, offices and subway stations than it is with characters. It’s a lost cause and we lose interest long before we’re shown the exotic architecture of Singapore.

Sinister 2 has so little connection to the first film (save for the home movies) that if you see enough horror movies, you will strain to recall the original.

Curse of Downer’s Grove is so awful it’s no fair to lay it all at the feet of the co-writer, who didn’t direct or cast this disaster, after all.

A warts-and-all documentary about the daredevil-hustler, that for all its inherent evil — and the guy was a real piece of work — is still a joyous, laugh-out-loud celebration of an outlandish, larger-than-life showman.

It's fun in a bad way and bad in a fun way, and that’ll do for this late in the summer.

The truth is far stranger. And Maloof and Siskel reveal it only gradually. They structure their documentary thusly — negatives found, fame and acclaim follow, a post-mortem triumph. And then the REAL Vivian starts to emerge.

Mills stuffs his film with cynical teachers, absentee parents and kids trying to cope with the minefield that even Canadian high schools are built on.

The finale Barber and actress-turned-screenwriter Julia Hart deliver is righteously, remorselessly satisfying.

It all adds up to a terrific, if biased on the side of the winners (Dre and Cube) history lesson, and a thoroughly compelling, very American and utterly modern musical biography.

Mistress America is Baumbach’s version of a Wes Anderson comedy. Strip away the gaudy colors, snippets of animation and earnest loopiness and you get lots of witty banter, breathlessly delivered by an engaging cast of believable and unbelievably glib characters.

This thing is one rewrite away from being something we’d remember.

It’s like “Girls” with more funky New York locations, but with less sex, and with fewer laughs.

There’s intrigue, danger, fear and hope all clinging to Tom as he visits the farm.

Most people would give up on it if they stumbled across it on Netflix, and the payoff certainly justifies that abandonment.

It’s not so much bad as dull and ill-conceived. It doesn’t so much end as sputter out.

It’s a joyless relaunch/re-imaging.

Streep is positively effervescent in the part, sassy and in good voice (the acoustic Jenny Lewis cover is spot-on). And for all its overly-familiar notes, Ricki and the Flash rarely seems out-of-tune.

An intimate portrait, a slice-of-life that goes just far enough beyond the cliches to be fascinating.

It takes nothing away from The End of the Tour in labeling this Jason Segel/Jesse Eisenberg dramedy a “bromance.”

It’s a lovely work, imbued with all the sweetness a Who’s Who of great animators can give it.

Writer-director Austin Stark’s film crams a lot into 90 minutes, leaving no room for grace notes, little time for the heart that this truncated story cries out for.

The sex is explicit and frequent and pretty much covers the spectrum. The drug use that accompanies it cringe-worthy. No man could have ever gotten away with adapting Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel in such frank terms.

Ghost Protocol is the most action-packed, most jokey and self-aware, most James Bond-ish of all the Cruise Mission films.

The fights are Old Hollywood meets New Bloodbath — corny and carnage-filled. The whole saga seems pre-ordained, pre-packaged and pretty boring, entirely too predictable to come off.

After a bloody prologue, when a lumberman sprays his blood all over the interior of his pickup’s windshield, Dark Was the Night settles in for a long, creepy slumber — more sleepy than creepy, truthfully.

Jokier and more obviously derivative, Mission: Impossible-Rogue Nation is the funniest “MI” picture, and maybe the worst of the series.

A dialogue-free romp that is a shear delight, shear perfection, if not quite a master-fleece.

A time-filler for bored 5 year-olds, nothing more.

And the viewer is left with one inescapable conclusion. Conservatives further to the right than Buckley could ever have dreamed control Congress. And gays, like Vidal, can get married. They both won.

Call Me Lucky is another of those “the funniest comic you never saw” documentaries.

An eye-opening period piece that takes us back to the dark days of the Irish Police State.

It’s a glib yet informative and sometimes entertaining re-hashing of everything we know about how bad sugar is for us.

A teen romance with most of the rough edges rubbed off, Paper Towns is as pleasantly bland as the city that is its setting — Orlando.

With every desperate F-bomb, every “Dad, what’s a rim job?” crudity, every crass overreach into vulgarity, Vacation feels pointless, dated and dirty.

The very “slam dunk” nature of the case in the court of public opinion makes 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets drag along and feel incomplete as it does.

The 3D adds little, and the hallmarks of the Chris Columbus directing style are unevenness and luck. With a little of the latter, this could be a huge hit. But with a better star, sharper script and more Dinklage, it could have been a champ.

Mumblecore maven Kris Swanberg co-wrote and directed this, a film which could have used more sparks in the confrontations, more snap to the banter and more originality — start to finish.

Jake’s narration, about how you can either “finesse” your way out of a jam, or “Bogart your way through it,” is drab. As are the performances. Especially the leads.

The story arc is entirely too familiar to sustain the two-hours-plus length, the violence, gore and language are the only elements that lift it from the weepy melodrama that Southpaw wants to be into “Raging Bull” territory.

The script is tighter than the direction and editing. But the set-pieces dazzle (think Korean war toys) and the performances by the cops have a nice cynicism about them.

[Schumer’s] made this woman real, flawed, funny and carnal.

Mainly, though, Safelight is just a California tourism travelogue — See Scenic Joshua Tree, Visit the Lighthouses of Southern California. Which we do, in 80 odd-but-not-odd-enough minutes.

Mr. Holmes is an elegiac, understated tale of The Detective in Winter, a rare thing in its own right.

A very good cast headed by Billy Crudup, Michael Angarano and Tye Sheridan stars in The Stanford Prison Experiment, a film as straight-forward and clinically chilling as its title.

Ardor, in the end, has little ardor, or originality or magic about it. It’s just a mundane C-movie action picture that tries to pass itself off as something deeper.

A lively, silly opening and a deft and daft finale rescue it from all its Avengers/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. back-engineering.

Only Posey lightens up and lights up Irrational Man, which, for all its hectoring faults, is still a “Woody Allen Film,” and thus not a total write-off. At least the Newport, Rhode Island and environs locations are fresh.

If you’re not laughing at this, early and often, you’re made of sterner stuff than the players they paid to show up for this, but didn’t.

Minions will tickle the very young and has roughly twice as many laughs as those Disney “Planes” pictures, or Pixar’s “Monster’s University.” So “Kumbaya,” kids, kumbaya.

When you’ve already put two sequels to this atrocity into the pre-production pipeline… Maybe you should stop. Or maybe the rest of us, the movie-going, sci-fi loving, “Terminator” adoring public have to be the ones to say it. “This ends here.”

Best of all is this setting — stark, reddish brown and sun-baked, the sort of place one only goes when every other possibility has been exhausted, and only movie stars could avoid turning instantly tanned and weathered.

It’s a simple, cheap and limited concept beautifully executed. The players, especially Tena, tell us the story with their faces.

Self/less doesn’t offer many surprises. It’s a lot like other body-switch thrillers, and is practically a remake of the 1966 John Frankenheimer rich-guy-buys-handsome-young-body tale “Seconds.” But it has generous pleasures.

A feisty, funny, down-and-dirty farce as nasty as a Supreme Court dissent, as timely as a Jenner magazine cover.

Well-intentioned, but predictable and instantly dated.

Heigl’s performance is more brittle, kind of her signature but also required in playing a woman going through a divorce. She has rarely given a bad performance, even if the films she picked were failures.

Amy does its greatest service by holding up a mirror to this sad icon who lived her life in imitation of “The Rose.”

The dancing is well-executed and staged, and the club scenes are fun. The banter may be forced and the formula the film follows exhausted. But quibbling with Magic Mike XXL is like griping about the latest turns in the “Step Up” saga. Nobody will hear you over the girlish squeals of delight from the paying customers.

This winning film wins you over without manipulation, without guile and without ulterior motives. If you can’t feel good about humanity after this one, you can’t feel good.

Beware of any advertising that labels Andersson “wacky” and this a comedy. Even by deadpan Swedish standards, this is pretty dry.

The heart of Max is a boy learning about an always faithful dog, and as sentimental and manipulative as their bonding moments are, that’s what works.

The rise, fall and mainstreaming of hip hop fashion is explored in Sacha Jenkins’ Fresh Dressed, a documentary that visits an under explored corner of rap music history.

The acquired taste that is Seth MacFarlane is harder to acquire and the one joke in his one-joke comedy about the pot-smoking/potty-mouthed teddy bear wears thin in the endless two hours of Ted 2.

A broad, goofy primer on the not-quite-cutting-edge of consensual adult sexuality.

A little more chaos might have truly lit this one up.

The germ of an idea is here. I’m just not sure it’s worth more than a shorter film than this one, which at 80 minutes is a bit of a drag.

The production values and high-caliber cast suggest Big Game had better intentions than results. Helander may have memorized “Die Hard” and “Air Force One” and “Olympus Has Fallen.” But his version of that formula, given the loopy twist of making a woodsman/kid the hero “with particular skills,” loses most everything in translation.

Glass Chin is a boxing picture with very little actual boxing.

Heist pictures don’t come much dumber than 7 Minutes.

Dope has a hint of “Virginity Hit” and “Project X” about it, but it goes much further than those trangressive and sometimes violent romps. It challenges its characters, its community and us to think beyond cause-and-effect, stereotypes and expectations. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, Famuyiwa is onto something both funny and thought provoking.

Sure, it’s basically one long testicles joke. But set your expectations low enough and you’ll find a laugh, here and there.

It’s a wholly original child’s-eye-view of emotions and growing up, a demanding movie for small children and a rewarding and touching one for their parents.

Rubble Kings is more interesting as cultural mythology than straight history.

The performances are believable enough. But the film’s violence is both expected and absurdly random.

A moody, intimate character study filmed and performed in shades of grey.

What’s missing from director Colin “Safety Not Guaranteed” Trevorrow’s thriller is that “wow factor” that Spielberg’s first outing delivered. Lacking that, and any serious effort at rethinking the story formula, Jurassic World plays like a theme park ride that’s a decade out of date.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl isn’t deep. But this sure-to-be-a-crowd-pleasing laugher/weeper reminds us that there’s nothing wrong with a romantic comedy that reaches for inspiring and cathartic between the laughs.

The result is wintry and melancholy, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” or “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” in tone. And because of that, it’s a trifle duller than the man himself surely must have been.

Moselle, granted all this access, leaves so many questions unanswered that The Wolfpack is frustrating to sit through.

Handsomely mounted, period perfect and starring the empathetic Mia Wasikowska in the title role, the new Madame Bovary narrows the scope and finds a different focus within Gustave Flaubert’s novel.

This lean indie picture runs out of surprises early and never overcomes flat, uninvolving acting, primarily by the eyepatch-wearing filmmaking in a tour-de-dull performance.

Beyond the Mask lacks the wit or excitement to truly come off, though it is intriguing enough to make you hope this team gets to make more films, perhaps spending more money on screenwriting as they do.

Whatever else Whannell, making his directing debut, manages in this third chapter of this soon-to-be-beaten-to-death series, casting Shaye and giving the actress who dates back to the original “A Nightmare on Elm Street” her due pays off.

The fights and deaths are somewhat comical, the one-liners hit or miss and the stunts faked with less sleight of hand than a director experienced in action might have managed. And Feig can’t bear to end this thing, which goes on far past the point of endurance. But he’s done better by McCarthy here, and she has delivered a performance that’s more deft than her usual daft.

John Cusack plays this older, post-breakdown Wilson, a twitchy, tentative millionaire genius who has the guilelessness and sweetness of an abused puppy.

It’s a quiet, thoughtful and handsomely mounted film, offering another plum role to Alicia Vikander (“Ex Machina”) as Brittain. Vikander and the film take Britain, and Brittain, from idealism and hope to grim reality and regret.

Entourage is the uninvited dinner guest who then insists on sticking around long after the party’s over.

The performances are passable, save for Murray — who goes ham, and Alec Baldwin, as a general who goes comically nuclear. He at least leaves an impression.

Survivor, predictable, short and shallow ticking clock thriller that it is, is more “Three Days of the Condor” than “Taken.” And thanks to its stars, it’s more engrossing and fun than it has any right to be.

Gemma Bovery manages a few surprises, even if you know the Flaubert novel Simmonds was sending up.

What sells this formulaic corker of Apocalypse Porn is the cast.

Lacking a smoking gun, this Riviera-set crime thriller lacks both thrills and convincing evidence of a crime. “Poetic license” or not, that doesn’t add up to an engrossing film.

A fairly amusing rough draft for a high concept high school romantic comedy.

Results is a comedy that never offers more than unsatisfactory ones — results, I mean.

The novelty of having a real homeless junkie play a version of herself drives Heaven Knows What, a gritty hand-held character portrait of heroin addict life in New York today.

Blase actors rob this of any prayer of being scary.

The costumes — cop, soldier, Spartan and cowboy — and lack of them mimics “Magic Mike.” The melodrama — keeping his sideline secret from his mother and would-be girlfriend — duller.

The falcon metaphor is clumsy and ill-defined, and Aloft is never much more than a lovely, dull cheat.

Bird cooks up lots of eye candy, but the dazzle wears off, and nobody really connects emotionally.

The footage is striking, the memories of the man vivid, and the finale, a tribute to the next phase of the sport, winged suits, which Carl didn’t live to see, still stuns you.

The performers, working in Hebrew (with English subtitles), make their characters empathetic, emphatic, human and humane.

Time Lapse is time travel thriller that flatlines, mainly because of the consistently flat performances.

The Kafkaesque nightmare a woman endures trying to get a divorce in a theocracy is played out, in sometimes comical/often excruciating detail in Gett: The Trail of Viviane Amsalem.

So while the jokes often land and the music is still perfectly in tune, the novelty’s gone from “Pitch Perfect”, the sequel to the surprise hit of 2012.

Grim, gruesome and glorious.

Echoes of War needs prettier visuals and bigger ideas, because the dialogue is too formulaic and the violence to come is entirely too predictable to hold our interest for 100 minutes.

A solid if occasionally silly B-picture of the sort that JCVD used to make, before “JCVD” suggested there might be more to him than mere “Muscles from Brussels.”

It works, here and there, and Polaha is perfectly believable as an ex-jock and ex-jerk who lets a little child lead him out of the darkness.

David Dastmalchian wrote and co-stars in this generic but well-acted trip down junky lane.

Although well-told, it’s an over-familiar story, and a sad one. And being far enough removed from the issues that have police in the spotlight post-Ferguson, The Seven Five also feels a little dated. Remember when all we had to worry about was cops going on the take?

Patrick Stewart preens, poses and gives us a little song and dance in Hunting Elephants, livening up a fairly dark and somewhat predictable Israeli caper comedy.

Whatever its intent, Bravetown stumbles through a steady supply of contrivances designed to make the budget work and the storylines overlap.

Saint Laurent plays like the most inside-baseball fashion film ever, too many random “highlights,” too few moments of inspiration.

Cheap, short and slow, Hot Pursuit is a comedy that never lets your forget that pairing up Sofia Vergara with Reese Witherspoon should have worked better than this.

Giroux makes the possible love affair so mild-mannered that there aren’t a lot of sparks when these cultures clash, just a “You’re strange, WEIRD,” vs. “I’m not strange. YOU are!”

Sad and forlorn as Maggie is, there are no surprises left in Zombieland.

Nixon scores the film’s one laugh-out-loud moment. Nobody else generates anything more than a weak chuckle.

Every F-bomb, every sex gag or sexual comment, feels like an overreach and Dan just another Black character hoping the cool kids shine a little light his way.

Maclean and his cast create a sound, tone and feel that makes even a moldy tale like this lean, mean and fresh, even if it never quite transcends the gun smoke of its genre.

By any measure, Christina Noble was not your average heroine of a faith-based film. By any measure, hers was not a life with your average share of suffering.

Skin Trade, a project Lundgren co-wrote and has been trying to film for years, feels so dated and over-familiar that “half-decent” always seems just out of reach.

If it isn’t as decorous and deft as the Jane Austen romances of an earlier literary (and cinematic) age, the longing is still there in a story that feels more lived-in, brutish and realistic.

The thrill of the new, the delight in discovering how light on their feet and how trippingly the Whedon one-liners can fall off the tongue, is fading. A bloated blockbuster movie-as-commodity like Age of Ultron doesn’t herald the end of this franchise or genre. But you can see it from here.

More harmless than entertaining, a limp exercise in cinematic baby-sitting for the six-and-under set.

It’s just not that funny, not that sad and not on target, satirically. This “Welcome” isn’t nearly welcoming enough.

The plot’s puzzle isn’t engaging enough to warrant solving. And the performances, save for Sizemore, are perfunctory and seemingly puzzled themselves.

Maysles could have made this another “Grey Gardens,” seeing Apfel as just a well-heeled hoarder. But Apfel never comes off as eccentric, just singular.

The performances are engrossing — especially Harrisson as the short-tempered African Muslim. But veteran director Alexandre Arcady (“Last Summer in Tangiers,” “Hold Up”) seems more concerned with the message and moral lesson here than with suspense.

The performances are moving and get the job done, and Kurylenko (“Quantum of Solace”) wins us over by the way she slowly lets Connor, her enemy, win her sympathy.

See You in Valhalla still manages a decent payoff. A scrappy/sappy dramedy about siblings who return, after their “Viking” brother’s death to the home they once fled, it covers over-familiar ground without much in the line of novelty.

Little Boy is loaded with weighty subjects and teachable moments, all doled out between generous helpings of tragedy and sentiment. It’s ambitious, but a cluttered weeper whose lessons might have stuck, had there been fewer of them.

Ford, in a performance as affecting as any he’s ever given, lifts this romance in ways we never see coming.

Among that promising cast, only Plummer and Ehle give us anything more than paint-by-numbers turns. Travolta? He’s a pale imitation of himself, as ill-fitted to the role as that odd prison soul patch he sports under Ray’s carefully streaked mop of hair.

Byrne and Kroll have a nice estranged sibling chemistry, not up to “The Skeleton Twins,” but in that ballpark.

A frothy little nothing of a Canadian updating of “Cinderella” set in the Canadian fashion industry. But the shoe doesn’t quite fit in this slow-footed farce, a vehicle for pretty blonde Portia Doubleday (“Youth in Revolt”).

Sequels are cynical by nature, but this one, with its casino product placement ad and director Andy Fickman apparently checking his text messages instead of trying to punch the limp gags into shape, is purely a paycheck. James may not deserve better, but the kids they’re pitching this to do.

All we’re really in the end is the gimmick and an appreciation for how cleverly it comes off. And a reminder to not “answer messages from the dead.”

The folks re-adapting White’s book for Beyond the Reach tamper and tinker with perfection — a little overly convenient cheating here, a contrived finale that goes wrong and then goes more wrong. The film staggers under these blows and never really recovers.

An unblinkingly fierce and bloody tale of slaughter and revenge.

A simple tale, sharply drawn and smartly told, a portrait of a people, a place and a centuries-old conflict that this wise yet myopic citrus farmer cannot get his mind around any more than we can.

The gorgeous flora and fauna of Sri Lanka are well-represented, even as the monkey business ranges from cute to cutesy.

The reporter/convict dynamic doesn’t have enough layers to carry the film without some hint of mystery. The relationship between the two, chilling as it is, never raises this “Story” from generic to profound.

The plot and characters really do make you wonder if the writer-director has experienced the real world, and not just the world as seen in “The Sting” or “Tin Cup” or “The Flim-Flam Man.”

The moment that first letter is opened and its trite, moony expressions of love and pointless (in a love letter) pages of exposition are narrated, the movie turns Sparks insipid.

Ex Machina is an “Island of Dr. Moreau” for the singularity era. It’s a cerebral, chilling and austere thriller that stokes our fears about digital privacy and artificial intelligence, a film that works largely thanks to a breakout mechanically empathetic turn by Alicia Vikander (“A Royal Affair,””Seventh Son”).

First time feature director Richard Raymond never quite lifts this above generic in tone and message.

An eye opener.

The executions and worst of the violence is kept off camera. The acting varies from passable to rote, wooden recitation. And there’s a hint of humor.

This undramatic and flat peek “inside” the sewing rooms of Christian Dior holds little in the way of entertainment.

Kiley has created a pretty engrossing and somewhat moving story of a selfish, self-destructive drunk who finds, if not faith, at least the willingness to look outside of herself to try and help others and the chance to actually join the human race.

Enjoyable mainly for its performances — Pegg’s comic venality, Palmer’s nagging ruthlessness, Brown’s quiet cruelty — and the creative ways it kills its way toward an ending that we’ve seen pretty close to the beginning.

It’s a labored film thanks to trite dialogue, to interesting characters like a “good Austrian” journalist (Daniel Bruhl) who wants his country held accountable who are given short shrift, and to the many court scenes have a hint of humor, but no spark.

The fun is in shorter supply. And all these gear-jamming chases and wince-inducing explosions cannot hide that this ride has long been on a road to nowhere.

Shakman cast this well, so well he can afford to waste a good actor like Oliver Platt on a tiny role as a careless, Bluetooth-addicted Fed and Thornton on a couple of simple exposition scenes.

It wouldn’t work without Chris Mulkey, playing a heartless sociopath ex-con hired to kill a man.

Wilmer Valderrama utterly reinvents himself here as Angel.

Whatever “it” is, that spark that film actresses and actors have that makes them interesting and empathetic and anything else on the screen, Fanning doesn’t have it.

Home is a energetic, obvious animated comedy packed with the sort of low humor and silly laughs that drive very small children wild.

Good acting and sharp editing make The Barber a most engrossing serial killer thriller. But too much talk, mostly in a lecturing over-explained finale, almost undoes all of that.

A nearly laughless comedy that doesn’t do its writer/director/stars any favors.

Wolf relies more on surprise plot twists than the standard “ticking clock” of Hollywood thrillers. And there are stunning turns, a few that will make your jaw drop.

Stripping this to a film with fewer characters, maybe playing up the best actors giving the best performances — McGinley, Lindo, Shwayze and PenaVega stand out — would have helped.

Ferrell is as fearless as ever, stripping down and looking foolish, willing to be out-of-touch and out of step. Hart has his manic moments. But in this buddy comedy, the buddies are not equal and that limits the laughs.

Whatever Ron Rash’s novel had to offer, Bier has rendered it into something soapy, with everything compelling about it washed out.

A quote by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke opens White God — “Everything terrible is something that needs our love.” But that goes for the film, too. Who will want to see a movie so focused on dogs, in which they’re brutalized and killed?

The performances don’t register, the filmmaking produces a couple of hair-raising images and a few ghoulish/gross ones.

Penn doesn’t work much, and this idea of combining his two careers — as actor, producer and co-writer, and as humanitarian — may have its heart in the right place. But take away the preaching, and this is just Penn’s version of a late-career Mel Gibson movie. He should be better than this.

It seemed wittier on the page, with the Romeo/Romero puns and know-the-credits jokes with names and characters. Strictly low-hanging fruit, even for a lame horror parody. But after seeing it, you really do wonder if Hollywood will ever make another if they can do no worse with no budget attempts like this.

It’s a stunt-heavy chase picture with some arresting camera work, but not much else to recommend it.

The serene and forlorn snowscapes echo the Coen Brothers’ greatest movie, and the story evolves from quest to odyssey as Kumiko clings to her delusion and we start to wonder if maybe this loon isn’t onto something, that maybe the Coens WERE trying to tell us something. And only Kumiko and the Zellners figured that out.

The fights are well-staged, the chases dull. But as Insurgent wraps up, it picks up speed and depth, and gives you hope that maybe this series won’t wrap up as the copy-and-paste “Hunger Games” it has felt like, from the moment the books were word-processed onto the best seller lists.

Eva isn’t surprising enough to break new ground. But the cast, the gorgeous wintry setting and suggestion of a tech future that is closer than we fear make it a most watchable variation on a well-worn sci-fi theme.

Run All Night doesn’t re-imagine a worn out genre so much as drop a quart of Marvel Mystery Oil into the crankcase of that vintage V-8 for one last ride through the Mean Streets.

The sport is surveyed and discussed as the historic route of the underclasses to change their station in life.

Whatever McCarthy hoped to do with this thin story and star casting, all he ended up with was another average Sandler movie — not as bad as some, no better than most.

Obvious and jaw-droppingly bloody, it still gives Heigl her funniest role in years.

It’s a fascinating slice of rock and pop archeology and well worth your time.

A few genuinely (and literally) hair-raising moments, a few knowing winks and a lot to think about lift It Follows above the horror pack.

The pre-teen girls this is intended for have a right to expect more laughs, broader villainy and more fun. This time out, the glass slipper doesn’t fit.

Unfinished Business, the second film Vaughn has done with the deliberately paced Canadian Ken Scott (“Delivery Man”) groans under the weight of expected laughs, expectations that are rarely met.

Director John Madden and his crew make India the most alluring, scrubbing any hint of squalor from Jaipur, and filming in the cooler months. Nobody sweats. That means that this time, this “Exotic” hotel is more a place to check into briefly, in passing, and not the sort of place you’d want to lose yourself in.

Wrongheaded in conception, eye-rolling in execution, Chappie is a childish blend of the cute robot goofiness of “Short Circuit,” and the bloody-minded mayhem of “Robocop.” Neill Blomkamp, the director of “District 9,” has utterly exhausted his supply of South African sci-fi ideas with this disaster, an excruciating two hours of your life you will fear, quite rightly, ever getting back.

"A Year” won’t tell aficionadoes anything new, and even novices may grate at its superficiality, a brief whiff of bouquet when more of a sip or two was called for.

Merchants of Doubt has its moments when the professional deniars hem and haw about who pays them to do what they do. But mostly, they’re glib, smug, self-confessed and self-righteous tools of Big Coal, Big Chemical or Big Oil.

It’s a good looking film, just a tad on the dull and predictable side. But the occasional flash of Hopkins threatens, at several moments, to turn this formulaic true-heist tale into something more psychological, more pathological or at least allegorical. He isn’t really given the chance.

Bouchareb gets fine performances from several wonderful, under-utilized actors, including Ellen Burstyn and Tim Guinee in smaller roles. But his morality play is too muted to work, too muzzled to have any bite.

A mildly unconventional love story drags Road Hard to a most conventional conclusion. But Carolla gets a lot of stuff about his career choice off his chest, sometimes hilariously, in this hits-too-close-to-home comedy.

Think of Marty as an R-rated Napoleon Dynamite — foul-mouthed, irritating, irritable, self-absorbed and clueless. He’s also a bit dangerous, the personification of the bird that gives his filmed story its title — Buzzard.

The scenery is still stunning, but there’s little of the brio of a filmmaker who went on to make “Deliverance,” “Excalibur” and the glorious “Hope and Glory” in it.

Everly has just enough novel touches to entice aficionados, but not enough to transcend the carnage and cliches. But Hayek, back in the sort of B movie that launched her career, gives good value and will make you cackle in surprise, if you’re the sort who can giggle at the old ultra-violence as it is served up in heaping helpings here.

There’s no point in overselling a conventional, rarely surprising horror picture, a picture that manages one good, cheap jolt and a solid hour of dread. But Lazarus reminds us that a genre overwhelmed by junk fare doesn’t need to be that way. It’s not effects, gore or novelty that matter. It’s all in the execution, and electrocution.

This unblinking yet unsatisfying ensemble drama features kinky sex, ruthless opportunism, violence and psychosis. Very Cronenberg.

It’s an intricate, intimate thriller about a single soldier’s nightmare day and night on the front lines.

A la Mala begins with promise and finishes well enough to justify the investment in time. It’s all that dull, formulaic stuff mediados película (mid movie) that sucks the salt right off the tequila glass and leaves this one too stale to swallow.

A weak villain, a couple of eye-rollingly unlikely cons and dead stretches that make 105 minutes play like 145 and you've got Focus, the last dog of February, where comatose con job movies are released to the sounds of silence.

Forbes makes this story compelling, moving and provocative enough to prompt outrage.

Bluebird never rises to the heights of grief, guilt and regret of the film it most closely resembles, Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter,” achieved. But Morton gives us a wonderful take on silent suffering.

Over-the-top, but not far enough over the top to fully pay off. But Ganem makes the title character, and her soapy doppelganger, enough of a hoot to make it worth staying through the credits.

It’s a playful and tasty crash course in deli history, deli dining and deli language, a world of smoked meats, cured meats and fresh fish. Vegetarians are excused.

An old school ghost story, with a supernatural cause-and-effect story and modest and modestly effective effects — watery footsteps, creaking stairs, shadows glimpsed through a window.

Every scene is magical, every image a work of art in Song of the Sea.

The sequel is dominated by Rob Corddry, a fearless funnyman best taken in tiny doses. The doses aren’t tiny enough and the laughs are few and far between this time in the tub.

A snappy, sweet-spirited teen comedy about a smart girl who tries to fight high school labeling with wit and words. And the occasional punch.

Writer-director Michael Johnson covers a lot of familiarly morbid teen ground in All the Wilderness, a film with touches of “Ordinary People” and a hint of “Harold & Maude.” But touches and a hint aren’t enough to lift this morose movie into anything any of us need to see or hear to deepen our understanding of teen depression, grief and love.

McFarland is old-fashioned without being dull, pandering without feeling cloying or racist.

A one-joke comedy about vampires, and yet another mockumentary/fake documentary, a gimmick that has turned seriously stale in recent years.

Clinical as a classroom lecture, it’s a limp sadomasochism primer, which explains both the runaway success of the E.L. James novel and the startling pre-opening sales stats from America’s Promise Keepers belt.

No, it’s not deep. But the film, a sung-through (virtually no dialogue) musical by Jason Robert Brown, is sweet and sunny and occasionally funny.

As February comic book movies go, this works well enough to make you glad they didn’t cook up another “Ghost Rider.”

The morality tale element is a joke, the love story is feeble and there’s no tension to what’s about to happen or what then begins happening. The script gives away its mysteries.

The result is a love triangle that feels invented, theatrical and artificial and a musical history that we never, ever believe.

It’s omissions mean that it’s simply not the last word on the subject.

The writer-director, perhaps for reasons of economy (surely not vanity) cast himself as the romantic lead. And Rik Swartzwelder, competent behind the camera, is an utter stiff on screen.

It probably never had a prayer of being a wide release, with Lawrence and Grant’s co-mingled careers shrinking in ambition and appeal. But there’s charm here, and Grant is engagingly disengaged playing somebody who knows the fickle finger of Hollywood fate no longer points his way.

The only question that’s worth considering in Seventh Son is whether this all-star B-movie is bad enough to cost Julianne Moore her “Still Alice” Oscar. And the answer to that is, “Not really.”

Uygur is the fuming, fulminating embodiment of the prophetic movie character Howard Beale from “Network.” He is, indeed, Mad as Hell and he isn’t “going to take it anymore.” But the jury’s out on exactly what he’ll do about that.

The gags, puns mostly, skew quite young. And those things Spongebob does that drive his onscreen castmate nuts — the shrieks and giggles and songs — are pitched to be a lot more irritating to adults than to small fry.

An excruciatingly empty chunk of eye candy that spends over two hours trying to convince us they’re not ripping off “Dune.”

If you see it and wonder what the fuss was about, look no further than its star, the face that ate up another awards season.

Collins (“Mirror Mirror”) and Claflin, of the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, do well by the mooning over each other across a crowded dance floor stuff. But they have to keep us believing in “the dream” and hoping for their romance. They don’t.