Roger Moore

The Fakenapping isn’t very good. But it’s got possibilities.

There is a hint of pathos, here and there. And Olsen, more interesting than amusing in this role, tries her best to wring emotion out of this bummer/bauble of a movie. She can’t, and Teller and Turner — who have some comic chemistry together — have no more luck transcending this lavish setting in search of a better story.

This well-intentioned dramedy goes wrong right from the start and careens downhill from there.

The Chronology of Water” can be more soberly appreciated on general release for Poots’ fearless, put-it-all-out-there performance than for Stewart’s early missteps and her exploitive mania for the explicit and the repellent, “truth” or fiction.

There isn’t much to this.

The lives themselves are interesting, even if we only get a glimpse of them, even Cass’s. But truth be told this never really ties the Cass story to the immigrant story (he did the same sort of work in his day, we surmise, and might be prejudiced) and never amounts to much more than a selection of snapshots.

Clooney? When he has a comical moment, he makes the most of it. His attempts at heartfelt epiphany left me cold.

It comes off, it plays and it entertains. And the impressive, high-end Sunrise Animation Studio production values — realistic landscapes, clever character designs and tje scale of a capital city under construction (Gibeah, pre-Jerusalem) — are just the icing on the cake.

Little Trouble Girls is a conventional girls’ coming-of-age tale whose clever twist is equating sexual awakening with spiritual awakening, at least in the eyes and ears of an impressionable teen.

Zhao, bouncing back from the Marvel “Eternals” paycheck picture/debacle, serves up a touching romance between a distracted young man of letters and a woman so attuned to nature she hunts with a pet hawk, knows the uses of every herb and tree and the incantations that go with their preparation and is thus labeled the “daughter of a witch.”

With this film, Tsou belatedly announces herself as “The Next Sean Baker,” a sure-handed director with an ear, an eye and empathy for the huddled masses whose story she tells.

Attempts at “suspense” in the heist itself are ineptly handled. The script and the leads strain to wring the “cute” out of this, but that’s in short supply.

The Protector gets pretty much everything wrong.

There are a few laughs and some chewy turns (Brolin, mainly) to sink our teeth into. But “Wake Up Dead Man,” for all its St. Paul Blinded on the Road to Damascus “case of pink-eye” zingers, doesn’t amuse enough to dazzle, and doesn’t get the best out of a cast that deserves better.

As current as these issues and this debate remains, a story meant to pass judgement after the dust settles just comes off as mediocre, murky, both-sidesing virtue signalling from a writer out of her depth.

For all its attempted ethereal touches, Train Dreams never settles on a track that delivers one.

Rental Family is an almost miraculously sensitive movie about the limits of such “services” in a culture where decorum, saving face, protecting feelings, apologies and shame are appreciated for their real value. And it’s about acting and the core of that “calling,” making connections with strangers while playing a part that entertains, flatters or fulfills them on some level.

I laughed at a few of the more audacious butcherings, but that was early on. The narrative settles into a slog in the middle acts and no pull-out-the-stops train ride finale could drag it out of the mud.

Stretching, stuffing and filling make this film play flatter, as if all the fun is gone. The jokes are few and far between, and they die of loneliness in the wait.

This is indie cinema with a point and a point of view, and Glidewell, Ferrell and the cast deserve to have this engrossing and worthhile drama be a career highlight that should lead to others.

Playdate is perfectly awful, glib in its violence, cavalier about “collateral damage” and packed with what regular family movie watchers might call “Hollywood parenting” — kids who curse, bully and have zero respect for sportsmanship and adults, especially parents.

What Ozon flirts with is the superior adaptability and endurance of those who can let the past be the past, and the costs of not getting over to those who won’t.

There’s no depth to the characters, especially Tee Yai, little that tells us how or what each is thinking or hoping. The shootouts are routine if excessive and the finale inevitable.

Mensore gets it right and tells a story validated by journalism and every trip through the region and everybody you know who lives there.

That four-handed screenplay gives us 85 minutes of movie, and “Zombieland/Venom” director Ruben Fleischer drags that out to nearly two hours. That underscores just how much this disposable piffle outstays its welcome.

The film’s pacing is stumbling and the longer it goes on, the less urgency we feel in that chase.

The clumsy arbitrariness of the plot, the “rules” of this world and the limits the story imposes which characters sometimes ignore undercut any “reality” we’re meant to buy into.

They’re just churning this junk out on a budget that guarantees it’ll sell, quality be damned.