Roger Moore

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.