Roger Moore

If survival against the odds tales are your thing, it’s worth a watch despite the occasional eye-roll.

Filmmaker and muse/alter ego have put recognizable, human characters in an extreme situation and dared us to guess how they’ll exit it. And no matter how they might leave, we absolutely believe every possibility of what might come, because that just comes with being a woman in a world that’s more hostile to them than you think.

The debut feature of commercial director Aristotle Torres, it’s immersed in street life, a vivid portrait of gangs — “crews” — that spread their name and mark their turf with “bubble letter” art and logos, and occasionally defend it with pistols.

Aafter taking forever to open up the story (some good on location footage in Haiti) and stumbling a bit in setting the “growing sense of doom” tone, Green loses the plot and with it the power to land a big third act punch. Finishing with a swing and a miss can’t have been his intent.

It’s all kind of sadly formulaic and dispassionately passionate, but also adult and occasionally surprising in where it takes our assisted suicide sympathies.

Director Cheang keeps this brutal movie on the march, stomping through the sordid side of a city he knows well, giving up his story’s twists grudgingly and keeping us engaged no matter how ugly things turn.

“Ashkal” manages to pique our interest and burn itself into the memory.

Camargo puts a sympathetic face on a statistic, an innocent child targeted, and the collateral damage that spills over from that shatters lives, limits futures and has blowback that the online anti-immigration zealots can’t begin to fathom.

The best martial arts action and gunplay are in the first act. After that, this convoluted Wolf Pack tale turns into something of a mutt.

It’s an occasionally cute, strained attempt at twee that never quite comes together or comes off.

Pre Fab! is an amusing, informative and bittersweet documentary.

It’s perfectly watchable, but let it play on during the bathroom breaks and search for snacks. It’s so slow you probably won’t miss anything vital, not until the third act.

Obscure, clumsily-pretentious, under-scripted and flatly acted, there’s nothing to recommend here.

It’s a somewhat sprawling and almost ungainly film, years in the making, very revealing and yet notably incomplete.

It’s a film built on a foolproof formula, in which the fools foul up the basics.

Whatever potential it had, the film just isn’t very good, with or without fact checking.

The whole affair has a whiff of “Going through the motions” to it, as the self-butchery and slaughter visited upon “guilty” victims is handled without suspsense or pathos. One pitiless, perfunctory murder follows the next with a sort of shrug.

It’s the clever scene changes, transitions and under-reactions of the players to every event — astonishment at Imad Khan’s skill, Henry’s blase realization he need never lose at blackjack again, changes of heart and matters of life and death — that entertain here.

As the picture careens around towards its anti-climactic climax, one really does wonder about the point of it all.

Pace is a great thing in any funny movie. But there’s a point when you aren’t finishing a thought, doing justice to this character or that threat. When you’re skipping by the cool stuff, you know you’re going too fast.

There’s a resigned tone to much of this film, a fatalistic “This can only end one way” despite every quirky shift in direction and mood.

For a Quixotic, quick turn-around comic thriller about stock market winners, losers and supervillains, Dumb Money isn’t half bad.

If screen comedies are poker games, then Paone, working from a script by Jonathan Jacobson, leaves a lot of money on the table, not properly playing the wonderful hand she’s dealt. But The Kill Room, which also needed a better title, has enough funny going on to recommend it if you don’t think of all it might have been.

There’s novelty in their “find another way” around violence conflict resolution messsaging, the effects are excellent, if not quite at a Marvel level at the moment and it finishes well. But bland leads, a story that feels similar to many other “Spy Kids” adventures and the paucity of colorful supporting players kind of washes the Spanish/Spanglish fun right out of this most Tex-Mex of kids’ franchises.

Heartwarming, amusing, apalling and sad, this story of flawed baseball team owner, promoter/cheerleader Mike Veeck takes us through the ups and downs of a third generation “baseball guy,” and manages to be damned entertaining pretty much start to finish.

A movie that goes from bad to exponentially worse by giving itself over to what is passed-off as an all back-story, over-sharing bar-pickup conversation.

The action beats have a nonsensical excitement to them. The chases are competently shot and edited and the fight scenes still play. But it’s all so weary and overfamiliar, giving one the sense that many involved stopped trying on the first take or third rewrite. It’s just gassed.

An oddly-dated, obvious and overwrought melodrama about gender roles and the toxic masculinity of Wall Street hedge funders, “Fair Play” is practically a parody of decades of women in the workplace romantic thrillers.

“Cute” becomes “cutesie.” But after an insipid and unamusing start, “Sight” rallies as it takes on more serious subjects, giving Richardson (“Five Feet Apart,””White Lotus”) and Hardy (he was drummer Roger Taylor in “Bohemian Rhapsody”) a chance to shine.

“Kingdom of Storms” “Dazzling to look at,” sure. But the ungainliness of this lumbering, over-populated narrative has one often wondering, “Wait, where’d the Fox Demon go?”

[Farrier's] made a fascinating picture to ponder about how difficult it is to challenge a system and its gullible pawns who enable such predators to get away with all that they do.

Ms. Gunn mugs a bit and isn’t so much bad as not colorful enough to pull off what is almost a one-woman show. Movies that fail are rarely the fault of the actors. Unless they co-write the mostly charmless script.

It’s an allegory that works but never quite scores a knock-out blow and a satiric thriller that manages a lot of still-angry name-calling but little sense that this will ever be enough.

It’s an adorable small-scale romance with music.

The jolts may be few, as most chapters focus on the don’t-look-away gruesomeness of what they serve up. But almost all of the jokes land.

There isn’t much here, and there’s absolutely nothing here we haven’t seen in every other summer camp comedy — on film or on TV — that preceded this one, including the fact that Christopher Lloyd’s on board.

A rich and powerful patriarch faces the end with a household full of women scheming against him in “The Origin of Evil,” a clever and twisty French thriller that’s a little bit “King Lear” and a little bit more “Sucession.”

It’s a dark, deadpan comedy that isn’t really funny, but whose premise is the the quintessence of “permission to laugh.”

The film, inspired by a Michael Lewis (“Moneyball,” “The Big Short, “The Blind Side,””Liar’s Poker”) magazine article and relying much on Lewis’s take on the man, the writer and his self-created mythos, is a reminder of Wolfe’s once-giantic footprint in the culture.

Handled with great sensitivity by all involved, it comes off in all the most predictable ways.

Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America, delivers just what its title promises, apalling accounts of decade after decade of minimizing horrific abuse by serial boy-rapists, a scandal so big it “dwarfs” the “Catholic Church and Baptist Church” scandals, as one expert testifies in the film.

I haven’t loved all of these semi-campy/semi-serious Branagh dates with Dame Agatha. But “Haunting” is an unadulerated delight. Only in “Venice” can you hear Tina Fey scream.

The players vary in their commitments, from barely worth the effort to trying too hard. The third act delivers a couple of warm moments that lift it. But this picture’s a corpse still being shock-paddled and CPR-pounded on the operating table.

What a random, almost plotless debacle The Nun II turns out to be.

There are good things about it, but nothing great and nothing all that worthy of our attention. But the cast battles any low expectations it might create and gives the viewer something to hang onto.

This “Swan Princess” is animated babysitting for tiny tots, nothing more. And even they will someday look back on what they watched as a pre-schooler and roll their eyes.

The plot of Love Again is so over-familiar I stopped streaming it not once but thrice to make certain I’d never seen it before.

Seligman and Sennott serve up a timely and bracing counter-punch and counter-narrative in the ongoing culture wars, a fun poke-in-the-eye at gay bashers and stereotypes that amuses almost as much as it transgresses.

No More Bets is a heavy-handed Chinese thriller about the evils of gambling, the perils of emigrating and the righteousness of Chinese policing as it pertains to international online scamming conspiracies.

Is Choose Love “inane,” “insipid” or merely an “innocuous” attempt to make the cinematic romantic comedy a viewer’s choice “will they or won’t they” experience?

Screenwriter Wenk hits the religious redemption allegory a tad too hard, and the picture doesn’t so much finish as peter out, with an anti-climax or two. But Fuqua and “Kill Bill,” “Aviator” and “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” cinematographer Robert Richardson give us one gorgeously-composed shot after another.

What a daft and twee thing Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose is. And God help anybody trying to market this dry, eccentric comedy built around the charms of Simon Pegg, Minnie Driver, Christopher Lloyd and sci-fi author Neil Gaiman voicing a (possibly) imaginary “talking mongoose.”

Fremont is a droll comedy about the immigrant experience that only has to hint at the trauma such uprootings often involve, and about how residents of the host country generally don’t have a clue about what this newcomer is dealing with, or how to help.

The many melodramatic touches would almost certainly have marred my experience of The Fallen Bridge, had this mystery thriller been a formulaic Hollywood product. But it’s Chinese — VERY Chinese — and that adds layers of meaning to even mundane details, enriching the film and almost overwhelming even the obvious contrivances.

It’s a slick, university-set thriller with a sexy young cast and grisly deaths that the viewer works her or his way through to figure out whodunit. But from the archetypal characters to the standard-issue murder settings and modes of death, there isn’t much here to hold the interest of anybody who’s ever seen a horror movie.

“Redville” is a deathly-slow, emotionally empty exericise in “Is this Purgatory?” But even though everything existential and cinematic can’t be “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” I hand it to them for trying.

Before, Now & Then is a dreamy Indonesian drama about changing expectations and ideas of “freedom” that pass through the life of a Muslim woman through twenty years of her life.

A solid Helen Mirren turn in the title role gets lost in a choppy narrative and haze of cigarette smoke in Golda.

“Dave” manages to be just cute enough to come off, largely thanks to that cast, this setting and its “everybody hates bankers” ethos.

The life lesson and messaging is upbeat and sentimental.

Neeson gives us a bit more to chew on here than his standard hunt-for-his-daughter/avenge-his-son fare, an actor who lets us see the panic, see the wheels frantically turning and who never shies away from letting us see him sweat.

The stakes are higher, the cast has lost any pandemic-paunch/puffiness and everybody tries harder in Vacation Friends 2, which is something, I guess.

The set-up may be "Burning Bed” melodramatic, but Foumbi never lets the film tumble into predictability. We see things almost wholly from Marie’s point of view, but get a sense of the human being inside her captor. The plot has its obvious contrivances, but they never take us out of the story and never dictate any predictable “Hollywood” turn.

Invisible Beauty is a documentary that makes one reconsider, yet again, the role fashion plays in society by how it has always narrowed “standards of beauty,” how it presents “what power looks like” and by remembering a woman who was one of the first through the door to “inclusion.”

Sorry, We’re Closed, is a hopeful, brisk and sprawling “cook’s tour” with “self-care” and support for COVID closed eateries and their stressed chefs and staff as its subtext.

Don’t Look Away is a textbook film for anybody hoping to learn how to make a scary, fun and attention-worthy thriller with next-to-no-money.

Everything feels articifial and bloodless, even the murders.

Very bad and interminably long, Storage Locker brings together a perfect storm of terrible script, inept acting and cheese-puff (as opposed to the more expensive “cheese ball”) effects.

The animation is sharp, the animated action beats fluid and fun.

Whatever the dynamics of this troubled, narcissistic same-sex quartet, “Bad Things” feels creepier than it is and promises frights or shocks and explanations it never quite pulls off.

As a dumb movie that makes you laugh, “Strays” falls somewhere between “Ted,” the cussing Teddy Bear tale, and “Cocaine Bear.” Just don’t go if you’re easily offended.

Havelka’s not-quite-farce reminds us of how important “rules” are,” and how bad actors can bend them into obstruction, how important civility is and how pointless it is for a gay man or anybody else to try and explain “solidarity” and group action to the dogmatic, the dim and the determined-to-do-nothing.

Efira’s ability to play manipulative and nurturing, cunning and hurt, selfishly deceitful and vulnerable is impressive, and utterly necessary for the twists this script (by Barraud and Héléna Klotz) serves up.

Dead Shot is a lean, myopic thriller that remembers the IRA wars against UK “paras” and special units as tit-for-tat violence that couldn’t help but turn “personal.”

The shocked inability to focus on what one must do despite the pull of pretending, saying and repeating “it’ll all be over soon” is vividly recreated in this small-scale version of a larger scale tragedy to come.

It’s all played broadly enough to feel funny (ish) even when it isn’t. But the pacing is off, and the mystery-solving takes precedence over the comedy, leaving us with a puzzle that might be solved but lacking enough laughs to hold one’s interest for 90 minutes, much less 124.

Gran Turismo is a beautiful looking film. Jacques Jouffret photographed it like the slickest car commercial you’ve ever seen, and Austyn Daines and Colby Parker Jr. edited us right into and inside the race cars and the races recreated here. It plays. It’s also damned entertaining. Don’t anybody tell you otherwise.

Match Me if You Can is an indie rom-com that just isn’t — quick or romantic. There are funny lines and a cute moment, here and there. And director Marian Yeager knows that in cinematic terms, comedy plays best when it plays out in playful closeups. But this wilted rose of late summer doesn’t have 75 minutes worth of jokes, gags and adorable laughs. And it runs for over 100.

Love Life doesn’t coalesce into anything deeper than “Everybody’s dealing with something” and “Life’s a mess that only gets messier.” And in the end, this quiet drama — stumbling into near comedy for the finale — is just pointless enough to pass for “dull.”

The script provides a few good lines and the cast a few decent moments. But “old school” Universal horror — dating from the studio’s 1930s history — means “old hat,” in most cases.

Barthes has given us an immaculate, vividly-believable future to be dreaded and avoided. But she’s put it in a movie so unemotional that we can’t invest ourselves in taking a stand to prevent it, even if the script ordains that the under-motivated Rachel and Alvy do.

The conclusion has a rough logic to its consequences, but seems arrived at abruptly. Big emotions we expect never quite arrive after that first “machining.”

Its predictability doesn’t break Between Two Worlds, but it does soften the blows it intends to deliver.

Cultural novelty aside, I found “Zom 100” to be pretty tame and tepid going, start to finish. Some decent chases, adorably doable but DULL bucket list items, and cute leads are about all there is to it.

The true story of a Korean diplomat kidnapped in civil war-torn Lebanon in the ’80s becomes the most exciting, most entertaining buddy picture in years —“Ransomed” — the best action pic of the summer.

The Meg 2: The Trench loses the benefit of being an off-the-wall big-budget B-movie surprise, and it loses most of the laughs served up by the monster movie that took the summer of 2018 by surprise.

The Baker delivers on all the promise of its premise, all the salesmanship it took to get it cast, financed and filmed in the lovely Caymans.

As dytopias go, this one isn’t a complete bust. Paradise serves up food for thought in a just-provocative-enough satire of the growing gap between the coddled and well-cared-for rich and everybody they’re screwing over.

Pulpy as the plot is, with an ending that adds an anti-climax or two, “Bad City” is a definite step up from “Hydra.”

A slow-burn thriller/slow-footed thriller.

When you’ve wasted a perfectly good Blythe Danner appearance and then weighed down your late second act with “big secrets” that would drown a better comedy than this, you’re not making the case that Netflix should sign you to a lifetime contract, no matter how charmingly Irish you are.

This slow-moving picture finds a resolution, but not a satisfying or surprising conclusion.

That warhorse genre “the police procedural” earns a fresh look with the French drama The Night of the 12th, an uncommonly sensitive inside-view of a grim case and its toll on the friends and family of the victim and the increasingly frustrated detectives working it.

The story is comic book childish in its simplicity . . . But the execution is dazzling and kid-friendly.

Limp one-liners, derivitive characters and action set pieces remind us every minute or so just how little originality ever figured into it.

Hidden Strike is a bad movie that’s easy to endorse. A buddy comedy co-starring the master the genre, Jackie Chan, here paired with that jock joker John Cena, it’s action for those who like their cheese paired with some fine…whines.

Eyes Off Me is more carnal than emotional or particularly psychological.

File Natty Knocks under that broad horror film rubric “I’ve seen worse.”

North Circular is geographically and emotionally evocative, just gorgeous to see, to hear and to immerse yourself in, enveloped in an ancient city’s lore via its music.

Sorogoyen tells this story of steady, tense escalation with great patience.

I won’t oversell this, but a climactic chase in an out-of-control hedgehog float pretty much pegs the middle-school mirth meter, and that’s the target audience here.

But “harmless” is a hard sell to hang on a two hour comedy with too-few laughs and a scary movie with no edgy frights.

Like the first film, it’s a sexy look at a glossy, affluent and urban Turkey of high fashion, social climbing and liberated women. But like “Love Tactics,” it has a hard time finding much that’s cute, new and surprising in such a tale.

Gladstone carries the picture as a reactor — to the stories she hears from this waitress, that grandfatherly distant relative, the bride-to-be. But even those reactions are subdued.

By the end, we’re a lot more sympathetic because this movie and this performance let us live in her shoes, just for a little while, and feel her burdens, grief, guilt and panic as we do.

Cobweb is a horror genre piece as simple and to the point as its title.

The screenplay sings a song of silliness and conspiracy, start to finish.

Kudos to all involved for making a horror movie with a simple gimmick, a lot of gore and a few things to say about teen culture in a social media age, none of them having anything to do with TikTok.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a movie of its moment, a brilliant bauble of female empowerment, scathing satire and genuine wit.

The Beanie Bubble may be a tad conventional in its approach to this “origin story” and its “rise and fall” narrative arc. But it’s a fun, infuriating trip down memory lane thanks to the people traditionally left out of this “story,” the women who made it happen for the guy who got all the credit.

In Oppenheimer, Nolan tells an epic story tacked onto an introspective, multi-faceted life, a hero in the Greek tragedy mold — brilliant and focused, but a man who knew his flaws and conflicted enough about his work that he all but accepted his fate as just deserts for all the “blood on my hands.”

None of the care taken with the visuals and potential poster shots of all the over-styled “stars” trickled down to the screenplay, with only the occasional snappy come-back making us forget the lack of a plot, logic, character motivation (in most cases) or sense that any of this means a damned thing.

The acting isn’t bad, but like the fight choreography, it’s of uneven quality.

It’s more or less watchable, especially as it takes a turn towards the daffy in the third act. But filmmaker Óskar Thór Axelsson (“I Remember You”) cooks up a classic ninety minute thriller wrapped in an ungainly 110 minute package.

The task of pulling these dispirate, franchise-sized plot elements and this populous cast into a coherent narrative with fun action beats proves too much for director and co-writer Antoni Mykowski, who bites off more than he can chew for his feature film debut.

It isn’t until the “camp” is shoved upstage and the kids and their Big Theater Show step downstage and into the light that “Theater Camp” finds its heart and hits its best notes.

This short, not-quite-brisk film’s real shortcoming is that writer-director Jérémie Rozan makes it all about the MO and the VO — “how they’re doing it,” and having his hero explain how, ad nauseum, start-to-finish, in voice-over narration.

Every action in this Cannes award-winner is motivated if not wholly rational. Every consequence grimly believable and shorn of artifice and melodrama.

Hawaiian-born director Keoni Waxman treats us to a veritable Hong Kong travelogue of sights and street scenes, a shiny utterly empty-headed romance with none of the grit of Hong Kong action and little of the charm of a normal romance, because almost everybody here is too obnoxious to relate to.

Novel setting aside, this just isn’t original enough to manage much in the way of shock and awe.

It makes a grand showcase for the snobby, aloof villainy of Richard E. Grant, who devours his best role in decades like a starving man who breaks his fast with caviar and canapes.

This uneven and often unsatisfying dramedy’s saving grace might be the sadness that permeates the sunny settings, the sunny bus ride and the beatific awe they feel upon reaching that holy grotto and giving themselves over to the water “cure” machinery the nuns there run.

Afire is a dry, downbeat character study for the first two acts and a film that turns to melodrama — the fire upon them — for the third.

Kokomo City is eye-and-ear-opening and mind-expanding and easily the most colorful black and white documentary you’re going to see this year. Guaranteed.

Snook does a nice job of unraveling, and LaTorre makes a perfectly infuriating, undisciplined child. But Run Rabbit Run never moves at anything faster than a saunter, and takes forever to stop meandering about and get on the obvious horror parable it is trying to put over.

This “Trip to Greece” isn’t an epic journey, and that includes the familiar emotional ground the characters have to cover. But the leads click, the scenery is fab and there are just enough chuckles, sweet laughs and grimaces to make it worth 100 minutes of our time in the sundrenched birthplace of Western Civilization.

One sure way to gauge a horror film’s success is whether it shocks and shakes you, makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. That never happened for me, here. For all the interesting performances and promising characters in this one, I think the actor/director and actor’s director lets us off the hook entirely too easily.

The film never quite finds its sweet spot. The violence mixed with flippant modern vernacular is never quite darkly funny, and the film leaves one puzzled about Belle’s agenda, or the Witch’s. The Beast’s, at least, we understand.

A compelling hot-button subject and engrossing “true story” runs up against a ponderous script, pedestrian direction and the limited range of star Jim Caviezel in Sound of Freedom, a lumbering thriller about international child sex trafficking that flatlines when it’s meant to be moving, uplifting and inspiring.

No matter how convuluted and contrived the situations, motivations and conflicts within might seem, no matter how obvious the need to jam in other exotic, tourist-brochure locations, no matter how many female leads Cruise interacts-but-never-quite-“clicks” with, the entertainment value remains right on the edge of off-the-charts.

A bit of action mayhem at the midway mark plays. Brosnan and Barkin are as amusing as the script allows them to be and Devine works himself up to “maybe I don’t need to gouge my eyes/ears out every time he appears.”

The direction is solid, punchy. Yet the picture isn’t so much plotted as given a time frame to squeeze a lot of fistfights into. The pranks are ancient, the girl characters barely given a function and the laughs few and far between.

At this point, one has to say that Skiba’s shown his cards in genre after genre after genre, and he’s still drawing nothing but deuces and one-eyed jacks, a loser’s hand every time.

Smith has made a film that’s not unlike Wham!’s hits — bouncy, light and frothy, nothing that demands anything of the viewer and listener other than a smile.

It’s a fast and sometimes funny fantasy with an anime vibe. Jokes and sight-gags are more important than plot originality or coherence or characters that are little more than caricatures.

Millie Lies Low is a next-level cringe-comedy from Kiwi Country, a New Zealand goof on the Deep Fake lives the savvy among us can live on social media when our real lives are coming off the rails.

I think most of us inclined to go see it will be doing all its heavy lifting for it, as what’s here feels slight, incomplete and not nearly as funny, cute and deep as these folks seem to believe.

Asteroid City is like a stop-motion animated Anderson film, in which he uses real actors in stop-motion. How is indulging oneself in that reductive, self-defeating cleverness a good idea?

There’s little wit to this, and not enough spark to the story to overcome the tepid jokes. The animation is good, but underwhelming.

Nabatian gets an engrossing, involving story out of these familiar themes with artistic interludes via dance, surrealistic flourishes as Santeria flashbacks and en pointe performances.

Even though I couldn’t imagine the endurance contest of experiencing the show in person in real time, this documentary — which identifies via graphics the songs and their earlier-than-you-realized dates of composition — leaves you wanting more. As dazzling as this highlights sampler can be, one hopes more of it will be released in bite-sized servings.

There aren’t a lot of surprises when characters behave the way a thousand screenplays have ordained they must, but the little moments of indulging their better angels, and their worst, give Prisoner’s Daughter a gritty, B-movie authenticity that is intensely satisfying.

Too much of what’s here is over-familiar, and the “familiar” isn’t anything anybody would get all sentimental over.

While [Lawrence] is game for anything, whatever it takes to pound a laugh out of a moment, it’s not enough in a comedy that sprints out of the gate, buries us under zingers and turns all sensitive and sentimental as it pulls its punches in the second and third acts.

The Wildflower is an infuriating melodrama about victims of abuse in Nigeria, oddly presented as a “dramedy” to the domestic market, as some of what’s being shown is alleged to have a comic intent.

Bodega is a dopey, druggy and funny midnight movie about one young guy’s need for social media affirmation to go along with the drug money that supports his modest New York lifestyle.

It’s always nice when musicians that mattered to their fans are memorialized in movies like this. As most of us mark the waypoints of our early lives with songs, the attachments are real and last a lifetime.

It sprints out of the gate for 15 minutes, spills blood and settling scores in the finale and is boring as brie in the middle acts.

You’re kind of left with the nagging feeling that this could work or could have worked with a more deft touch at the wordprocessor or sitting behind the camera on set.

Non-linear in its storytelling, stingy with its facts, details and “truth,” it’s a picture that violates a lot of the basic covenants between filmmaker and audience.

It’s not interesting enough in between action beats to make you stay in the same room with it. Bathroom break? Need to make a sandwich? Just leaving it running. You’re not missing much.

It’s not everything you could have hoped for, but for a fan, the final Indiana Jones movie tips the scale as “not bad, not bad at all.”

Veteran director Tim Story (“Barbershop,”Shaft”) knows to keep the camera where the joke is –in everybody’s face — and the pace quick enough for The Blackening to skip along its well-worn path, making merry and making scary the way of many a Wayans Brother did before them.

The film is both touching and infuriating as Boyle shows us as direct a cause-and-effect in an addiction case as any documentary ever.

It makes for a fun if sometimes shambolic (a few anecdotes ramble on) remembrance of a time and an artist who symbolized it. And if the filmmakers didn’t buy up a few Brezinskis before releasing this, that’s on them.

As stories of the Occupation and impending Holocaust go, A Radiant Girl never overcomes its artistic emotional detachment.

Director and co-writer Mordini makes a total hash of things by battering the timeline into atoms, constantly skipping from “three months before the event” to “130 hours” before back to “two months before,” and on and on.

The patience of the sport and the tranquility of the settings casts a spell, and it all comes together in modestly, honestly moving ways.

The familiar, easily-guessed plot points and story beats entertain just enough to compensate for how unchallenging and unsurprising most of this is. Whatever one thinks of poets, movies about poets are always a tad on the pretentious, tin-eared side.

Pixar is as entitled to a swing and a miss as any studio. But the lovely-looking miscalculation that is Elemental stands out on the CGI animation house’s resume as a rare swing-and-almost-completely-miss.

Longoria keeps her directing eyes on the “feel-good movie” prize, which limits the film’s ambition as we bounce from scene to uplifting scene, many of them involved adorable moppets taste-testing very hot chili baths to bake into the Cheetohs.

The Flash, while it never comes close to the gee whiz “I can do THIS?” novelty of the many Spider-Man “origin” iterations, makes a charming, nostalgic and sometimes touching addition to the genre, and lets us hope Miller will recover enough to return to acting this character and others.

Put The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster on your list of must-see/won’t-be-here-long summer thrillers, crowd-pleasing movie comfort food that embraces an old formula and manages to do something smart, insightful and topically relevent with it.

But the half-hearted attempts to build a hero’s quest story about these increasingly collectible toys and ongoing campaign to wash the humanity right out of the franchise is something all the shiny, tactile and identifiable Freightliner, Porsche or Ducati parts in humanoid robotic form cannot hide.

It’s dreadful by most any measure — violent, tin-eared, clumsily-staged and uncertainly-acted. And it’s head-slappingly stupid as a police procedural.

The structure gives the picture a diffuse feel, as if the writer-director hopes to lay on backstory that will distract us from how short a distance this story covers and not allow the viewer to realize how thin the text is, with or without these subtexts.

The cast does what it can with the material, but their big speeches rarely add up to a “big moment.”

Whatever cultural mores “Missed Connections” is operating under, there aren’t many parts of the world where this tepid, tame adults-flirting-like-tweens rom-com will be seen as romantic or comic.

Built on a quietly compelling performance by Virginie Efira (“Benedetta,” “Elle”), it may be the best depiction of how trauma changes your psyche and your life since the Peter Weir Jeff Bridges/Rosie Perez drama “Fearless.”

Sukowa makes a fine villain, one among many “using” Dali. But Kingsley is the reason to visit Daliland, allowing us to “be in the presence…of genius” and be irritated, titillated, amused and maybe a little depressed about the trap our imperious host has flounced into and embraced as the doom he dreads but so feverishly craves.

The picture hews too closely to formula to be anything more than filmic comfort food.

This is a movie that lets us understand the foibles and dark underpinnings of a movement that seems to have transcended removing itself from “this world’s” everyday concerns to embracing the ugliest elements of its dogma — superstition, dogmatic intolerance, “control” and a disregard for any American or American institution that doesn’t fit their myopic worldview.

A mad cinematic jumble of comic book imagery, comic book mimicry, multiverse plotting and ponderous, pandering fan service.

I love a good gonzo binge boozing comedy as much as the next guy, but I found almost nothing funny in this.

When you see the brutish incuriosity, the cowardly pack-mentality cruelty and utter disregard for “selflessness” and “compassion,” it’s hard not to see its North American analogs among the most self-serving, system-rigging raised-to-be-authoritarians among us. And pray that they devour each other rather than us.

The story here didn’t do much for me and seems like a rickety, illogically-pieced-together structure to hang this narrative on. But the players and the craftsmanship — the lighting, editing, silences and loud noises, they make up for that and deliver those frights we ordered the moment we bought a ticket.

Hard Feelings still manages to find a few outrageous laughs.

Everything about this movie feels familiar, like we’ve seen it multiple times before, not necessarily always starring Gerry Butler. Yes he’s a credible, charismatic action star who always delivers the goods, even in middling fare like this.

The supporting cast has its moments, but this movie sinks or swims with this father-son dynamic. And their banter, not the constant “ba-da-BING” of would-be punchlines voiced-over by Maniscalco, is what’s funny.

Expecting to catch lightning in a bottle twice was mostly wishful thinking on the part of everyone involved.

It’s a sad story, of course, with overdoses and deaths and sort of classical American “price of fame” arc. But it’s also revealing, and only rarely judgemental — even handed, I thought.

Maestro and Varela are the soul and heart — respectively — of this film, one giving it a speechless urgency, the other bringing a woman of science’s common sense pathos and rising alarm.

This “Mermaid,” weighted down with expectations, responsibility to the corporate bottom line and what feels like fear that “We’re going to screw this ‘sure thing’ up,” sinks and rarely swims, an epic that impresses when it’s under the sea, but never really moves us. And when it’s on dry land, it could not be more bland.

An elegaic documentary.

This isn’t just his road to redemption story. Master Gardener is about planting seeds, culling dead or dying branches and making room for new growth.

Fans of the comics will certainly get more out of it than newbies like me. All we see is all the other middling YA sagas it resembles, borrows from and fails to match or improve upon.

Again, stunningly stupid, and a lot more digital than one would like.

Take away the point-by-point comparison, even accepting the jump shots and backdoor cuts on the court, this remake still never gets off the ground.

The fights are OK, the shootouts nothing to remember, the chases are passable and the killings themselves perfunctory.

It’s a sweetly sentimental documentary, acknowledging Berra’s own role in leaning into the “cartoon” image that the sporting media built around him and the confusion that created.

The entire enterprise feels like a piece of experimental theater that needs further workshopping before it’s ready for the stage.

A lightly fiesty performance by Leslie Uggams in the title role and a general feel-good vibe are the chief recommendations of Dotty & Soul, a plucky but corny comedy from actor turned writer, director and star Adam Saunders.

Kids may get a little something out of it thanks to its various “Young Adult Fiction” types and tropes. Maybe they’ll enjoy pondering if low gravity could be the thing that “saves” baseball. Anybody old enough to drive will be bored.

The Mother is watchable, here and there. Decently acted. Over-the-top, but not far enough over it to make it fun.

It’s easy enough to follow, but annoying in that we know we’re wasting brainpower piecing this pointless jumble together.

It’s a relief when the talking/screeching version of Day has an accident and the silent version takes over. He manages the pratfalls and double-takes well enough. He’s no Keaton, Chaplin, Begnini, Sellers or David Hyde Pierce, to name some of the great physical comics of ancient and recent vintage. There’s no shame in that.

I’ve seen just enough recent Chinese cinema to see “Born to Fly” as a bit cheesier than most exports, but only on the edges of the rank propaganda of some Chinese war films, which span most wars China has fought, from ancient times to Korea.

The Big 4 never goes far wrong when action is the reason for the season. Tjahjanto and his team know how to frame, film and edit a good brawl, and a decent shoot-out, too.

The pace never picks up from that slow-walk pedestrian opening, making “Velvet Jesus” a half hour movie stretched to 102 tedious, uninvolving minutes.

Call this one a swing-and-a-miss and “Better luck next time,” because I like the idea and the casting and the sexy tone, just not what they did with those elements.

This crisp and ever-co-conveniently murderous farce demonstrates that revenge can be served hot or cold, and as messy as is necessary, just so long as you have the proper cleaning products at hand to tidy up afterwards.

A flat, lukewarm glass of Spanish sidra without anything to recommend it beyond the lovely San Sebastian scenery and the fact that it is what is alleged to be Allen’s next to last film.

Yes, fast is funny, but predictable is predictable, and this rom-com stumbles badly as it lurches towards the inevitable — she’s hired him to bust them up, he’s slow figuring this out.

The Breaker Upperers is a rude and rowdy Kiwi comedy about two friends who run a service that helps people get out of hard-to-end relationships.

If Grillo can’t make the guy interesting to watch, and writer-director Bobby Moresco (he shared the screenwriting Oscar for “Crash”) can’t fudge Ferruccio’s life story into something more involving than this, I dare say that some suit at Lionsgate sat in a screening room at some point and wondered aloud, “Well, what was the point of THAT?”

Our core quartet are a well-preserved and still charming lot, with each giving a glimpse of their comic specialties. But like that spring fling, “80 for Brady,” the material here just isn’t up to the legends being paid to perform it.

Yes, this is a lightly-fictionalized account of the birth of one of the seminal technologies of our time, fuzzied up just enough to keep the lawyers at bay. But if it’s not how it literally went down, it certainly makes for a colorful yarn to pass around the campfire on those cold nights in the Great White North.

They may not name the illness after him. But when the “tough son of a bitch” underwrites the research that ends it, you can be damned sure his name’ll be on the cure.

A tight, minimalist thriller this smart, rhetoric-based turning towards violence and its repercussions, is too good and too important to ignore.

Netflix wasted a lot of Polish Zlotys on a terrible movie that had apparently no one in the U.S. company bothered to read and approve, or even have translated so that they could see and hear how bad it was doomed to be.

This quietly riveting Cannes Golden Camera Award (Best First Feature) nominee introduces a filmmaker with a great eye and almost serene patience, and an early mastery of this genre should he choose to make it his specialty.

The special effects are so amateurish as to look like continuity errors.

Oakley’s ability to find a hopeful spin to put on this bleak time is a history lesson for us all.

Carmen is more a movie of tableaux and emotions than a story with a clean linear narrative that leads us along moment by moment. It’s so far from being a literal “Carmen” that one can barely call it an adaptation.

The incidents, relationships and even the intrigues here are all over-familiar tropes, which prevents this competently-made thriller ever rise to the level of engaging.

I got a few laughs out of Double Life, a Canadian thriller about a two-timing man who gets murdered and the widow and his chick-on-the-side who team up to solve the crime.

Land of Gold is a sweet immigrant’s odyssey road picture that walks the fine line between “cute” and “cutesey” all the way from LA To Boston.

The Matchmaker is an edgy Saudi parable, an inverted “Handmaid’s Tale” warning the patriarchy about a mythical reckoning to come from the oppressed women in their lives.

Unrest could have been a lot of things that it’s not — “fascinating,” “illuminating,” “entertaining” and even “inspiring” among them. Instead, we’re treated to engrossing details that never add up to more than watching a second hand labor its way around a clock face.

These pictures have grown less cute, less charming and less fun with each passing installment, and this one just drags as it meanders towards its over-hyped lump-in-throat finale.

This isn’t the best “version” of this “do over” story ever. But it pushes a lot of the right buttons and is just different enough to be worth revisiting “Groundhog Day” One More Time, here in the company of cute young Swedes.

Sadly, you can make the case that this is one of the better “bedtime story” versions of this tale, as it’s perfunctory enough to be sleep-inducing.

Massalas immerses us in this pole-dancing “Oliver Twist” tale and the cast goes all-in to show us a Greece beyond the migrant headlines and the tourist sites, one where you’d better watch your wallet, because not everyone can count on a stampede of drag queens to bail you out of a jam.

Writer-director Nida Manzoor’s debut feature is outlandish, over-the-top and furiously funny.

The bad title isn’t the worst sin of Organ Trail, basically a dawdling B Western rendered violent enough to be labeled “horror.”

Not all of Chokehold makes sense or seems logical. But as the threats rise and the deeds are done, Tatlitug and Saylay and screenwriter Hakan Gunday keep us engrossed and invested in this bad-man-turning-worse and his fate.

Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s film is funny, cutting and true to its source material, an amusingly unblinkered look at girlhood that may be a bit budgetarily-malnourished but could not show up on screens at a better time.

Take Ride On for what it is, Chan’s attempt at a graceful bow to the inevitable, and an affectionate remembrance of all the crazy stuff he’s done, the risks he’s taken and the bruises and broken bones he’s suffered when dangerous stunts go dangerously wrong.

The performances are subdued and sublime, highlighting each character’s efforts to reject or embrace his fate, or both.

Smart? Writer-director Alexis Jacknow’s debut feature borders on brilliant.

It’s all a bit much, but all in good, gory fun even if this genre mashup never quite transcends any genre it borrows from.

A Tourist’s Guide to Love is a lovely Vietnamese travelogue in search of a romantic comedy that would transform the trip into a movie.

The plot is cut-and-pasted from a thousand better thrillers, only dumber, with scenes that serve zero purpose and jokes nobody would find funny.

Not terrible, could have easily been better had our director, co-writer and star not tripped over all his many jobs along the way.

Some movies you want to hug, just to reward how a film makes you feel and what magic it is when a setting, a character, a star and a story sing together in near perfect harmony.

All things considered, Ray Romano’s Somewhere in Queens is a pretty watchable dramedy despite all the “lows” that hang over it. It’s low-heat and downbeat, with low stakes and low ambition. The situations are low on originality and the jokes are strictly low-hanging fruit.

I recognize the effects, the makeup, the murderous efficency and the bottom-line/it’s sometimes scary values of this visit to “The Evil Dead,” a film that was originally going straight to HBO Max. But the lack of fun marks this big screen abattoir squarely in “not my ‘Evil Dead'” and “not really my thing.”

Performances aside, there just aren’t enough “Mommy Issues” here to justify the tedium of a movie that challenges you and wears you out but doesn’t deliver a payoff satisfying enough to make it worth this much of your time.

Ghosted manifests itself as a pleasantly amusing piece of cheese, embraceable for the breezy time-killer it is. But if they dare decide to franchise it, they’ll need a writing upgrade for that to come off.

Plan 75 rarely manipulates and never tugs so hard at the heartstrings that it breaks your heart. Honestly, I think it needs to.

It’s a fascinating and utterly engrossing film, immersing us in this world, fretting over what we can see coming before the principals do, and relating it to the xenophobia and bigotry out in the open in America, just as it is in backward, rural Transylvania.

The movie’s messaging has a righteous and educational undertone that makes this a worthy addition to the genre.

Phenomena plays more like the promising pilot to a TV series than a movie that wholly delivers the comic or traumatic goods.

The film, which also details Pang’s Chinese immigrant upbringing and mentions her subsequent life and career in and around the music business, joins other building block documentaries like “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” in performing two services — keeping his memory alive, and wholly charting the many currents of the life of this singular figure in global pop culture history.

Sweetwater had promise in conception, but that promise disappeared in the screenwriting long before the screenwriter directed his own script into a near coma.

The acting ranges from adequate to laughable, and the direction cannot overcome the atonal screech of the screenwriting.

It’s impossible to shake the feeling that Pilgrimage, which takes its title from the book that was eventually published, is more a collection of missed opportunities than a tale for the ages.

Mesmerizingly beautiful diving footage, a drifting narrative and some solid performances recommend Blueback, a sweet but somewhat squishy eco-parable set Down Under and starring native Oz daughter Mia Wasikowska.

Crackling scenes mix with clunkers, clever twists meet cliches and its all a hash when it comes to justifying the “team” set up in this mass shooting spree thriller To Catch a Killer.

As a stand-alone film, this one has about four kings too many to be wholly engaging.

Crowe seems to impose his own sense of fun on the proceedings, which gives it a light touch even when it should have fear-for-the-victims’ lives gravitas.

Despite the f-bombs, the egomania and a montage of Troyal shooting a beer commercial and having a hissy fit as he does, too little here rises to the level of “satire” or even “amusing.”

A few flashes of humor — in court (Jenny is a lawyer), in the romantic clutches and in (violent) action — and Collette’s career-long likability are all Mafia Mamma has going for it. It’s not enough.

Splattered geysers of blood, ripped off limbs and the like aside, this is a slight comedy, and McKay has the sense to get in, get gory, get his close-ups and get out of there before 93 minutes have passed. That makes for a vampire comedy everybody can sink their teeth into.

The surgeries shown here, organs in their place in the crowded human body, functioning or failing, is indeed eye-opening. But the film’s structure is, as an ancient Roman critic would have put it, inportunum et inordinatum.

Yes, the story’s a goof, a nonsensical mash-up that gives his character an excuse to bowl over legions of hired swordsmen and soldiers, monks and wizarding world warriors. But Yen is terrific, a Smiler with the Knife anti-hero who has the charisma Jet Li lacked and a cool bravado that never suited everyman martial arts comic Jackie Chan.

There isn’t much to this that will appeal to anybody over the age of eight. But the film’s real sin is in how it shortchanges the legend and the Mexicanness of all this.

Showing Up is amiable, pointilistically-observed minutia in which the minutia’s the point. It’s not for everyone, even among those who know art, and know “what I like.”

Not really enough amuses or dazzles, and attempts at giving us something emotionally “moving” or religilously inspiring fall well short of the mark. But for a middling-at-best movie, Praise This isn’t bad, even if it isn’t all that praiseworthy.

Ozon’s cast expertly navigates this downbeat terrain, and find the sometimes humorous irony of helping an unpleasant man and “bad father” get out of their hair.

I do love me a solid B-movie, and this one, after it finds its footing, delivers. Still not sold on adding Oklahoma to my bucket list, though. But Swab might be getting me there.

Wilson seems perfectly cast, but comes off as so mellow there’s barely anything comical to hang onto. A few flashes here and there tell us where this could have gone.

The few laughs kind of die of loneliness, in what is allegedly a children’s animated comedy. And without laughs, all this ill-conceived animated replacement for one of the most infamous live-action flops of the ’90s has to offer is nostalgia for a simple game of a simpler time. The eight-and-unders this is aimed at are way too young to get that.

Making it all work is the cast, all experienced but mostly just-unknown enough to give How to Blow Up a Pipeline a genuine indie anarchist feel.

Rockwell’s achievement is to script a simple character study, cast it with an actress up to turning it into a tour de force, and making the entire enterprise a history lesson in the true cost of Giuliani’s “more livable city” experiment.

Stalker is a ridiculously-chatty bore of a thriller, a stunning waste of viewing time about an actress and a second unit photographer stuck in an elevator.

What this movie doesn’t have is “pace.”

Sure, it’s mercifully free of the Sandler hangers-on that were a staple of his succession of increasingly awful Hollywood comedies. But one almost wishes somebody with at least a little experience landing a laugh was featured in the supporting cast.

Even if “cool” is prioritized over logic or novelty in this bloody battle to the death, it’s still enough to recommend Ngo’s bracing, kinetic and beautifully shot and edited tale of life and death, rape and revenge in Old/New Saigon.

Pugh has never been better than she is here, utterly immersed in the character’s accent and world-shrinking despair. And Freeman lends some flint and fire and sparkle to this simple redemption tale that touches, amuses, overreaches and overstays its welcome.

It’s an old fashioned romance in a queer setting, and is about reaching that moment when cruising, casual sex and narcissism aren’t enough — and are ending, anyway, because at least in terms of your “crowd,” you’re getting “old.”

The movie and the story it tells are kind of all over the place.

Air is a beautifully featherweight triumph of “on-the-nose” casting.

So unless you’re an Ip Man completist, “The Awakening” sits among the Ip Man movies you don’t bother with unless you’re behind on your sleep.

One can’t help but think this Pope deserves more than a simple, stale travelogue.

Director Espinoza does a fine job with the action beats and the epic settings. But every time this brief but not brisk genre thriller breaks into a new “Chapter,” aka “Chapter III: The Evil Guest,” he crosses from homage into parody and from master genre filmmaker into somebody whose “Achilles heel” is his screenwriting.

Partners in Crime never manages to be more than a hit or miss affair, a one-day “Weekend at Bernie’s” that doesn’t have nearly as much fun with its best sight gag — a corpse — and can’t find enough laughs in that parody of femininity that drag often is to make up for it.

Rodeo is so good it’s almost sure to inspire a Hollywood remake. Catch it in the original French grit, because while we know Zazie Beetz can ride, who knows if they’ll meet her quote?

It’s still a must-see for Kubrick fans, because here he is, exploring his themes of “evil” and “the duality of man” and “intelligence” and control — talking about his photography background, making his favorite Napoleon as a movie director analogies.

What a fascinating, layered character Return to Seoul is built around.

It’s a subtle and subtly-acted story told at a slow simmer, adding twists even as it takes an inevitable turn towards tragic. Many a transgender tale is cast in operatically-tragic terms. But here, anything less would feel like a cheat.

The gimmick and the satiric target here are broader and the punches miss the mark far more often than they land. But if you’re blitzed enough…

It’s not high art and not much for big thrills. But there’s no sense fighting how light and fun this is if you give yourself over to it.

A stunningly-realistic, pulse-pounding punchout at the climax of Kin Long Chan’s Hong Kong noir Hand Rolled Cigarette (Sau gyun yin) joins the list of tussles that come close to topping “Oldboy.”