Roger Moore

The film’s political focus seems a tad narrow, but the evidence that this tour — however it came to be — did them no favors and didn’t do Nixon any more service than his association with “Up With People” is convincing.

Well-cast, properly gloomy, with a serious bone to pick about Beantown’s “good ol’boys at the bar” sexism and chummy mediocrity, it’s a step-up for writer-director Matt Ruskin, whose “Crown Heights” had similar “attack the system” ambitions but fell short of the mark.

The action beats are pro forma, as are the way stations of this plot.

The cast is quite good, and the locations — including a trip to the White Sands National Monument — ground the picture in a particular place and a corner of the culture.

In covering all the bases, the film’s energy can’t help but flag in the later acts. But Cortes has made an impressive music history that restores a “king” to his rightful place in rock royalty, one that acknowledges that everything outrageous about the music and the people who perform it, the stuff “your parents hated” about it, as Waters puts it, started with Little Richard Penniman.

Director Jordan Ross (“Thumper”) upsets expectations somewhat with the casting. But not enough to make this make sense or play as smoothly as you’d hope.

The performances are affecting even if the message seems a tad trite, and not exactly on-brand, considering Italy’s cultural reputation for family, “la dolce vita” and all that. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and can a marriage really be saved in one?

A lot of the issues stem from the film’s short running time and flat storytelling and pacing.

Longtime fans of one of China’s greatest living filmmakers won’t want to miss this one. It isn’t every day that Zhang Yimou jokes around. You’ll want to be there for every bloody punchline.

The Pilgrim is a serene, scenic and soul-searching indie drama that goes adrift as it charts an over-familiar course.

The players, the stakes and the milieu make Tetris well worth your time, especially for anyone nostalgic for all the time we wasted on this simple yet elementally addicting game.

Rimini is a darkly-comic Austrian tale of a Lounge Singer in Winter, figuratively and literally.

It is well-thought-out, beautifully shot by Andrew Jeric (“Sightless”) and the actors, playing stock “types,” add value with performances that land, even when characters are doing one of the “three things” you should never risk in a tornado, even as the sentimental script is skipping past a teenager’s questions about the afterlife so that we can get to a scene where today’s storm chasers slow-clap the son of their late idol.

They may have wrung everything out of “Shazam” in just one movie. And this is just that movie’s inferior sequel.

Esra and Liquorish are balls-out in some of their scenes together. They always click, and are at their funniest when they’re fighting, indulging and humiliating each other. More of that, please.

It’s worth checking out Stonewalling just to see a picture of China that’s not State Approved or attempted by outsiders.

As the picture drifts through its middle acts, the thought occurs that a little less movie might have made a much punchier, pithier and more satisfying film.

Dafoe is always a wonder to watch. But the picture needed more drama, maybe a touch of humor about its “Martian” styled “work the problem” exercise, and more of a sense of self-awareness in our thief who is trapped “inside” a just deserts parable of his own creation.

Even when it strays away from its core messaging, Wildflower never steps on a mine. And when you’re working your way through a minefield, you call that a win every time.

The sci-fi thriller 65 is a “Twilight Zone” episode that over-explains its set-up and surrenders its punch line, a simple quest narrative that lacks thrills and never makes us invest in it and the first serious miscalculation Adam Driver’s made since taking a shot at playing the villainous Kylo Ren.

Moving On is still more than funny enough to coast by, but demanding in ways that flatter and honor its seasoned cast, each of whom gets the best role she or he has had in years thanks to Weitz’s light comedy with a dark edge.

It’s never much more than a marginal vehicle for our always-gets-his-villain copper. And it goes utterly off the rails in the talk-talk-talk/escape-or-die finale.

It’s about stasis, death and personal rebirth, not consequences or collateral damage. It suffers from those omissions.

A featherweight little charmer.

I’ve always appreciated the humor in these films, but by the time things go wholly over the top for the finale this time, the joking has run its course.

In taking a second swing at a comedy where the object is to make special needs characters funny, but not the object of fun, you’d figure that Farrelly might have had the nerve to dance closer to the edge, or at least find some big, warm laughs. And you’d think that Harrelson could have made this funnier in his sleep. Neither is the case.

“Brothers in Blues” is a documentary attempt to chart their careers, get at their influences and at least take a stab at recreating their lives and the world they came from and how it shaped them. It’s OK for what it is, but what it is somewhat less than it should be.

It’s fun, the kind of thriller tailor-made for crowd-sourced jolts and laughs.

Freeman has a few moments, and Hauser has aged into a fine dad-bodied man-of-action. It’s a pity they’re stuck in messes like this, without even an on-location Roman vacation to show for it.

If you love movies and think you know the medium’s history, prepare to be overwhelmed.

Every script twist throwing them together is as obvious as every character trait/action that points to a doomed marriage. Every line of dialogue is as bad in English as it was in the original Polish.

I love Shannon’s performance here — introspective, guilt-ridden, sad and thoughtful. He makes the character credible on several levels, a simple man capable of “Being There” profundities, the very picture of the “haunted artist.” Or fake haunted artist.

The debut feature of writer-director Thom Harp is a raunchy, skirt-hiking farce that never quite achieves the happy ending all involved were hoping for, although it finds a few laughs and some oh-no-they-didn’ts.

This “Corn” sat on the shelf during COVID lockdown, but we can’t say it went stale during the delay. This was cynical in conception and rotten in execution long before the masks came out.

I prefer my documentaries to be more informative than Gods of Mexico. But that prehistoric cinema connection renders this mesmerizing film as magical as it is historical.

A thriller that isn’t thrilling, a horror comedy that rarely produces more than a chuckle or three, a sentimental tale that can’t quite wring a tear out of death and loss, “We Have a Ghost” dishonors pretty much every hit film it steals from.

It isn’t quite “Snakes on a Plane,” a high concept comedy in which ALL of the fun is in the title and the billing. But it’s too close.

It’s a generally uplifting account of the hippies and spiritual searchers who turned away from LSD and drug experimenting and turned towards faith, without giving up their tie-dye or VW Microbuses.

So much is left hanging, unsaid or unresolved, even in the finale. But Yangawa still makes for a fascinating Asian variation of cultures and ideas of love and romance in collision, even if it’s no “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

A brilliant conceit sets up a cutesy, just-clever-enough New York comedy in God’s Time, a tale of twelve steps and an addict with a grudge and a gun.

Re/Member does just well enough by a killer concept to merit a Hollywood remake, because this version stumbles here and there, and simply fails at the finish.

The smart, subdued finale is the only one that we’d believe and accept — logical, and damning and thought-provoking, not unlike the thriller than precedes it.

It’s not all that coherent either, a filmic piece of flotsam that one and all drift along with, touching on themes but never wrestling with them, glimpsing the sights but never really showing them to us.

Stolevski’s over-reliance on close-ups gives us detailed maps of each man’s dermatology, but tends to wash away the extra impact we’d feel about bigger moments of connection.

West. . .takes on nothing less than life itself, its eddies and the backwash that we struggle to understand as it is happening and only really pick up on after this or that phase has passed. And he does it via a sneaky story that’s just realistic enough to trick you into feeling it’s straightforward, when no, that’s not the idea at all.

Actor turned writer-director Matthew J. Saville’s debut feature makes for a dry, unemotional blend of dark comedy and co-dependency, scenic but desultory, even when Rampling is at her best.

The Nigerian setting is the main novelty in this flatlining melodrama.

The picture tends to peter out as we drift away from Mordecai, relating his life story to Nina in animated flashbacks.

Slight as it is, it’s all a little creepy and occasionally kind of funny, in a dry, dark and oh-my-God-did-she-open-that-wound AGAIN bloody way.

Even if the Malaysian undead don’t have the rules of “Zombieland” down pat, the effects are decent and the makeup is outstanding even if the plot is canned/store-brand generic and the frights not all that frightening.

The slack pacing and perfunctory ways the killings are staged by director Philip Gagnon mean that the only real question is “Who will care?”

Ocean Boy is awkward and ungainly — as if made by someone determined to hit his life’s real-or-fictional waypoints, to gloss up his own image while playing up the obstacles he had to overcome, but incapable of managing any of that particularly gracefully.

Three Day Millionaire, scripted by Paul Stephenson and directed by Jack Spring (“Destination: Dewsbury”), is a Ritchie-lite movie that gets many of the basics right even as a misses a couple of the most obvious.

I found the whole “Hidden Blade” rather less satisfying than its individual component parts. The many characters, myriad plot points and points of view and added complications with the narrative timeline clutter things up. But scene after immaculately-realized, quietly-menacing scene pays off.

The mystery isn’t all that engrossing, and the picture devolves into some CYA third act over-explaining to compensate for that. It can be a bit much, and more often than not. So OK, maybe it is a bad picture that’s still fun.

It’s possible to be a bit awed by the “JFK” ambition of 88, even if the execution waters down Eromose’s message to the point where we wonder if he’s simply lost his nerve.

At Midnight is the mildest R-rated rom-com on record, a tame and tepid affair pairing up a couple of career supporting players as the leads, with mild-mannered laughs, lukewarm love scenes and conventional wish-fulfillment-fantasy plot points.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is much ado about a lot of microscopic nothing.

Rye Lane has all the ingredients of a classic romantic comedy. All of them.

Devil’s Peak is a simple story whose filmmakers lose track of threads and characters, perhaps owing to editing.

Our writer-director has conjured up a full, flesh and blood life. And our star transforms Emily from a repressed Yorkshire artist who channeled her passions onto the pages of one of the Great Romantic Novels into a human being of sexual passion, love and heartbreak, and a thing for Men on the Moors.

Zoe Chao puts on a clinic on “the funny new BF of the leading lady” as a rom-com trope in Your Place or Mine, an exceptionally mild-mannered farce set up as a Reese Witherspoon/Ashton Kutcher vehicle.

In a film lacking in real frights, the pathos of a young novitiate’s suicide attempt hits you hard, because it’s one of the few moments in the lovely and lushly-detailed Consecration that makes you feel something.

The three “stories” here don’t really connect. The music is good, but the stories are so different, with each falling on different spots on the “Is there a point to all this?” spectrum that ,the film doesn’t measure up to the tunes.

The cast is spot-on, top to bottom, and the leads are engaging and romantic except for when they’re being teen and mean.

Even Channing Tatum seems a little embarrassed by all this by the time the third act rolls around.

The laughs are few and far between and the “heart,” so important to a good rom-com, is left out altogether.

The most impressive element to this Michiel van Erp film (“Open Seas” was his) is the way it shifts direction and tone so abruptly that it could give you whiplash.

Aussie actress Krew Boylan turns out to be a better Dolly Parton impersonator than screenwriter in Seriously Red, her self-scripted star vehicle. It’s a self-serious and seriously-confusing identity crisis comedy tucked into what might have been a gender role romp of the “Connie & Carla” variety.

It stumbles from eye-rolling to infuriating all the way to risible as the filmmakers turn professional failure into armed and trained victimhood, and then into savage “learn your lesson” revenge.

As dark as “The Grifters,” as over-the-top as “The Sting,” Sharper is a fresh take on a time-tested genre, a “Who can you trust?” tale from the Land of the Big Con.

Think “American Graffiti” and “High Fidelity” in terms of themes and genre, without the wit, budget, or cast to pull that off.

True Spirit doesn’t add anything fresh to the genre, just fresh faces and Aussie pluck, with even the tunes . . . pretty much on the nose. But that’s what “feel good” movies often are, comfort food, with the occasional surprise, a “darkest hour,” a little pathos and a lot of heart.

It’s not a badly-crafted film, just a shallow gloss on these characters and a relationship that they don’t explain, don’t dissect and analyze, but simply live.

It is very much “A Love Story,” letting Anderson do almost all of the talking.

Director Vaughn Stein takes forever to get this movie on its feet, and the slower he goes, the more Collins stands out as inadequate as his lead.

Nordling makes a terrific heavy, Rhames oozes credibility as the wizened small-time crook turned small business owner, Bosworth holds her own and Phillippe hits just the right notes — crooked to the core, wary of everybody except for “family,” naive enough to think his instincts are enough.

Even if it’s not wholly “amazing,” “Maurice” is close enough, a flip and fun film about a rodent conspiracy.

While Shyamalan does well by the story’s assorted jolts, and tries to have fun with a bit of casting against type with Bautista and Grint, “Knock” is so emotionally flat that I found it impossible to care about. For a film in which the stakes couldn’t be higher, that’s a fatal failing.

A two and a half hour Icelandic parable isn’t going to be to every taste. But Pálmason, framing his movie in old still photograph 1.33.1 aspect ratio, immerses us in a place and a time — beautiful, unspoiled and eternal. And he makes us question, as Lucas, Ragnar and others do, the function of faith in such circumstances, and the usefulness of those who insist on proselytizing without listening.

The shocks — drunken montages of murderous and carnal abandon, gooey, intertwined and ugly — are entirely the point. Whether they make sense, illuminate the human condition or “entertain” is almost immaterial.

It’s another one of the many Israeli films over the years that emphasizes connection, accidental or forced, in the close-quarters of Palestine — Israel, the Occupied Territories, lands under the Palestinian Authority. And like most of these films, it offers a glimmer of hope, even if it’s too much to expect Orit Fouks Rotem’s film to play out as wholly neutral.

You People is a comic throwback, an all-star Jonah and Lauren and Nia, Julia and Eddie, Mike Epps and David Duchovny singing John Legend off-key at the piano farce that begins with a sprint, gets gassed far too often and yet still produces a lot of laughs, all of them packed into its funniest stretches.

You don’t have to be a Tom Brady hater to pan this. But you are obligated to separate this wan script and feebly-fictionalized laugher from its stars, who have legendary comic chops that this movie treats like oversized false teeth.

Sirens is an engaging behind-the-scenes doc about this band.

The most interesting portion of this film is footage itself, much of it quite grim, and the search for these German cannisters of film, seeing snippets of how it was gathered up and edited by editor, actor and later director Robert Parrish, among others (mentioned in a letter of Stuart Schulberg’s read in voice over) and was used in the Nuremberg court.

Cluzet brings a marvelous edge to the tit-for-tat exchanges that ratchet up the anger, which is pretty much what his character wants. Oh yes, he’s easy to hate.

It’s a first rate thriller, more cerebral than Tom-Cruise-does-his-own-stunts, and all the more engaging for it.

Riseborough’s performance is in the pocket, letting us reach for her instead of assaulting us with needy antics. The way she switches from feeble come-ons and pleas for help into furious F-bomb tantrums is a marvel. It’s totally-committed acting, no doubt about it.

I like the way Dhont gives viewers room to make up our own minds about what’s happening and come to different conclusions than you’d expect from him, given the subject matter and the tack his first two feature films have taken.

Life Upside Down is a pleasant enough and appropriately downbeat “COVID Lockdown Comedy” of no particular consequence.

Lopez and Duhamel — who has done his damnedest to create onscreen chemistry with the likes of Julianne Hough, Elisha Cuthbert, Megan Fox and (shudder) Katherine Heigl — click and almost will this into being more fun than it should be.

A bittersweet, wistful rom-com that may not be all that it might have been, but isn’t all that bad as it is.

It’s not high art or a great film, just a genre tale with a twist. And it’s a tad predictable, by the time that third act rolls around. But Monaghan and the kids sell the premise, and the movie plays.

One just hopes The Once and Future John McClane was well-compensated, and that his retirement is as comfortable as he’s earned, even if this is nobody’s idea of “Redemption.”

It’s borderline abusive in the way it wastes screen time and the viewer’s time.

The Wandering Earth II is even bigger, more sprawling and more daffy in its Big Science. It’s got a few first act jokes before turning somber, dogged and yet never fatalistic. It’s also more cluttered and more pointed in its Chinese messaging. So naturally it’s almost an hour longer than the two hour original.

A gimmicky, obscurant and clumsy style of storytelling spoils what could have been gripping story.

This picture’s just a clockwork contraption of clever “tools” used cleverly and little more, none of them more than Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere or whatever editing software they used to cut this sterile jewel into shape with.

It’s a thriller bookended with humans vs. robots shootouts, and stuffed with boring corporate intrigues in between.

The drama, with characters trying to avert a tragedy under tragic circumstances, is cleverly-constructed, with its contrivances nicely obscured by the glorious sense of place and time seen, in hindsight, as at best another “grey area” moment in the mixed bag of late era colonialism, at worst as another crippling blow dealt to a culture destined to barely survive the experience.

Fortunately for us, Kendrick delivers. She immerses us in Alice’s efforts to keep her secrets and avoid sorting anything out even if she suspects the status quo is everything her friends seem to suggest it is.

Office Invasion, an English-language romp, wouldn’t romp in any language.

It quietly takes hold of the viewer with patience, a gripping story that has plenty to say to audiences all over the world, especially those with under-policed police, accepted corruption at the highest levels, where a “War on Women” is a political policy, even if it’s never been declared.

The picture is a very slow starter, and even when the script begins to jolt, shock and make us fear our protagonist is merely fodder for the machine, even as it teases us with the idea that a man can only take so much, we know better than to get our hopes up too much.

Pointless scenes are scattered in with those that advance the plot, but even the ones designed to flesh out the characters via cliches — the abused daughter our gang leader lost track of in prison — just set one’s teeth on edge.

The tone is jokey enough, a few of the gags land.

Lonesome manages to be a movie long on charm and short on most everything else.

Eisener runs up against the wall of shocks that stop being shocking and torrents of tiny tyke profanity that become repetitive and stop being funny. This isn’t “Attack the Block,” not by a ways.

Illusion isn’t a movie with a lot of highs and lows, just a downbeat tale of grief, hope and acceptance struggling mightily with defiant persistence. Buzek and Minorowicz keep us engaged almost in spite of themselves in a movie that hints it might be more conventional than it truly is, but truly isn’t.

Blaze is really something, a riveting and challenging experience and an extraordinary film not to be missed.

This thriller goes from bad to worse without the good manners of providing any one element that could be latched on to as more hilariously bad than the next. I couldn’t even find the elements of a bad movie drinking game out of this.

I liked the cartwheeling, wall-walking, bullet-dodging nonsense of the brawls. Note the fight choreography and blur of swirling cameras and edits designed to make us think an 85 pound pixie is dropping hulking gangsters by the metric ton in every fight. It’s all too glib about the blood-letting and entirely too childish and nonsensical for me to get into.

Baby Ruby is pitched somewhere between domestic melodrama, a tale of a crack-up, and paranoid thriller. Wohl and Merlant keep shifting the ground underneath Jo and the viewer, throwing us off balance.

There’s a solid 90 minutes of fun movie here, 100 tops. And this thing just goes on and on, that “Neflix editing” that doesn’t take into account how quickly-paced screen teen rom-coms need to be.

This generously-budgeted/no-“name” stars horror epic is just all over the place; never quite serious, never remotely silly enough.

Dog Gone isn’t a very good movie. But if you and your kids love dogs, you’d be cheating yourself by missing it.

While there are things to be explored and pondered in drab “Saint Omer,” Diop’s organization of her message and lack of prioritization of simple courtesy-to-the-viewer information we need in order to follow the story and answer that fundamental question, “What the hell is this thing about?” leaves a lot to be desired.

It’s a loud, in-your-face tapdance through horror tropes that passes muster as a slick production even if it isn’t the most original thing I’ve seen this month.

Terrible movie, dull and heartless and drably-acted by actors whose agents have no souls, the proof being they “booked” the poor players for this unthrilling thriller about hunting humans, “the most dangerous game.”

The comic book connecting scenes work, and the violence, when it comes, is a shocking contrast to the low-energy/low-heat movie surrounding those moments.

It’s smart and topical, touching and touchy. And it is, as the French would put it, un putain de délice — delightful, with an expletive added for emphasis.

Theron and Washington vamp this monstrosity up and almost never let on that they know this project didn’t really work out. That sets an example for the many younger players in the cast, who do their best to play more than this scene’s stunning costume.

The violence in Plane is sudden, shocking and damned personal, as director Jean-François Richet keeps his camera tight and hand-held on the hand-to-hand combat sequences, and he stages the shootouts on a “unruly mob vs. professionals” level.

The bar for this version of “J-Horror” is high (“The Vigil,” “The Possession”), but not so high that The Offering couldn’t have managed something fresh and more interesting and at least more sensible than this.

When You Finish Saving the World is smart and articulate. It’s flippant. There’s a hint of idealism, a heavy dose of “not fitting in,” and an earnest desire to do right clashing with some self-mocking narcissism.

Beautiful Beings, titled “Berdreymi” in Icelandic, is superb at capturing the universal problem of idle, unsupervised boys making bad choices, creating “Lord of the Flies” pecking orders and lashing out in violence because nobody’s taught them otherwise.

That’s what Chess Story is, mournful and just cryptic enough to leave you guessing what you just saw, but touched, engaged and intrigued by it, comfortable in realizing that over-explaining is not necessary and would spoil some of the fun.

Heche makes her curtain call memorable, not wasting one second of her screen time, a compact performance of canniness and compassion that nicely complements the leads and makes this worth watching, if not really worth “endorsing.”

The performances are on low simmer as the characters turn towards sinister or allegedly desperate, and do nothing to engage us in the proceedings. And the payoff is flat, with even the violence failing to up the heartrate as it supposedly ups the ante.

It’s badly-written and amateurishly-acted, so amateurishly that one feels sorry for much of the cast.

Athena becomes a mural of magnificently orchestrated chaos painted over a penny-plain story of brothers in conflict, and one of the most gripping action pictures to come out of France in recent memory.

That simple quest, packaged in a 95 minute movie, takes forever to play out thanks to one eye-rolling Pause for a Monologue after another.

If you have any recollection of the original film at all, it’s too easy to note that scene by scene, character by character and plot element by plot element, they remade it slightly less funny and somewhat less touching in most every regard.

A glorious and accomplished cast walking (never horseback riding) through a vivid, overcast 1830s snowscape, an American Gothic nightmare too generic and a tad too slow, but made entertaining by what every actor on the payroll brings to the show.

With a movie like Head Rush, you come for the action, but usually you hope for the cheese that comes with it to be a little better than this.

There’s no suspense, little that’s thrilling or that justifies any investment in this dawdling melodrama with music.

The arresting, nightmarish visuals and sight gags pay off. It’s just the scanty supply of them that keep a clever idea or three and a novel setting from ever jelling into a movie destined to become an evergreen, a seasonal classic.

Thanks to the distinct look of films from Cartoon Saloon, this Nora Twomey (she also directed “The Breadwinner”) project plays and feels like a fairytale that has a bit more going on than sight-gags and punchlines.

The kids are collectively adorable and talented. The adults could not have been cast better, with Riseborough and Graham relishing every over-the-top moment as the Parents from Hell — or at least Hemel Hampstead — Lynch shimmering as a teacher with a heart and Thompson giving us a seriously Soviet vibe as the fireplug-shaped ogre Trunchbull.

It’s a straight-up B-movie, and like a lot of them it tries too hard to be jokey. But all involved have a little fun with it, which pays dividends in the damnedest places.

These movies are about reminding us how these songs made us feel when they were new, and how bowled over we were by the people who performed them. Ackie, Lemmons & Co. do that, and rescue Houston from her “tragedy” to remind us why the world fell in love with her and once-in-a-generation voice.

It’s fair to say that this “Charlie Brown Christmas” length film is pretty much an instant classic.

Blonde is too ambitious and too important a cinematic subject to dismiss out of hand. Wildly uneven, misguided, bluntly exploitive at times, it also has moments of wrenching pathos and a mournful tone that will never let a film fan look at a Monroe movie the same way again.

It is Banderas who brings home the tocino and serves up the whole jamon when the situation demands it. Which in the case of the immodest, flamboyant and recklessly brave Puss-in-Boots, is pretty much every moment he opens his mouth in his delightful, and perhaps final romp as the character.

Babylon is gorgeous and grotesque, huge, noisy, and unlike anything else we’ve seen or heard on screen this year.

It’s not deep, not insightful and not all that funny outside of the dynamic these two set up on screen.

The best one can say about I Used to be Famous is that, all things considered, it’s harmless, and not entirely charmless.

Its beautiful, digitally-realized other-worldly visuals are eye-popping, so crystalline as to be disorienting. You lose track of where the screen ends and the tactile, physical cinema you’re watching it in begins.

Director Scott Leberecht’s eye-opening and memory-jogging documentary is a Spaz Williams — he was given the nickname ironically, because “Look at me. I’m Popeye!” — appreciation and in many ways a rehabilitation project.

By the time the interminable finale reaches, over-reaches and gracelessly makes its exit, we’ve lost track of anything we found sweet, funny, charming or touching that came before it.

It’s a somewhat dimwitted thriller, sloppily plotted. But the fights are pretty good — and there are a LOT of them.

It’s not helped along its merry way by clumsy plotting, slack direction and stiff performances, which seem more amateurish the further away from the leads that you get. But you can see the promising seeds that gave birth to it, even if they weren’t nurtured all the way to harvest.

The best animated film Netflix has ever made, and the best animated film of 2022.

We should all reserve “instantly awful” for C-movie garbage like Pistolera, an underworld vengeance thriller that is almost unwatchable, godawful pretty much from the first frame to the last.

Martone gets bogged down in the family melodrama and drags out that first act’s play (Wasn’t there a funnier one to sample?) so much that he wears down our interest in what’s going on.

As we hear details of the sorts of things about which there is no doubt, the perversion, cruelty and impunity of the well-connected accused, it’s easy to dig in one’s heels like Blanquita herself, hoping for the best, hoping that something resembling justice will come out of this version of “the truth,” no matter how twisted it might be.

Polley has taken a pointed, of-its-moment novel and turned it into an indictment and a plea for civil discourse in a call-to-arms moment.

I did not care for The Mean One mess. I do not like bastardized Seuss, I confess.

Emancipation is a decent enough slave-escape thriller, but one can’t help but wince at its lead performance and the clunky dialogue and cliched scenes that bring it to a stop, time and again.

It begins badly and turns progressively worse before rallying, “Terminator” style, in a test of human against machine that will-not-die in a movie that does not want to end.

Janney is flinty enough in what isn’t one of her best performances. Smollett, recently seen in “Lovecraft Country,” but a reliable screen presence since “Eve’s Bayou,” gives the picture its heart.

Colman is brilliant, Ward brings a lovely wounded nobility to Stephen and the warm and cuddly Jones is set up to sum it all up. But Mendes will not or cannot take us there in this personal project that perhaps needed another person or two’s input, and workshopping and re-writing before the camera rolled.

Reverence for fallen comrades, a “leave no man behind” ethos, esprit de corps valued and a fondness for good ol’American made military hardware make this one worth checking out. Any film that reminds us how human beings are a lot alike in dire situations is a good thing.

The worst thing you can say about the new Roar Uthaug (“The Wave,” “Tomb Raider”) thriller Troll is that “It’s no ‘Trollhunter.'” It lacks the wit and the mismatch peril of André Øvredal’s classic rock-bodied creature feature of 2010. So “dumb,” sure. “Fun?” Not so much.

Just about any other rendition of Dickens’ classic novella that you can hunt down is going to be better than this treacly humbug from Netflix.

Jackman gives a great performance at the center of a frustrating film that never quite lets us hope that anyone involved will find answers, and never lets its characters, or the viewer off the hook even if they do.

Some of the subtexts director/provocateur Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your name,” “Suspiria”) suggests, in this adaptation of what is allegedly a more darkly comical novel (by Camille DeAngelis), have been given short shrift in creating a film of gruesome shock value, another startling performance by Mark Rylance, and little more.

It’s a bit slow in the later going, but Travis Stevens’ (“Girl on the Third Floor”) latest film works on several levels, due in no small part for a good cast that buys in completely.

Buried in a “fat suit,” his physical acting limited to the life of immobility Charlie has sentenced himself to, Fraser will break your heart playing the character’s pain and compassion.

As it is, we’re looking at the outline for a funny teen rom-com, not one that feels finished or that pays off.

The sources of comedy here include that colorful milieu, the oddballs who populate it and the way people with no special skills might attempt a burglary. There’s not quite enough of each on its own, but together all that adds up to a few laughs and plenty of chuckles.

It is Krieps’ performance that carries Corsage, a woman in all her many moods, shadings, fears and desires, treated as abnormal and gossiped about and controlled by insults from pretty much every male in her life. And more than a little annoyed about it.

It’s not really a holiday action movie “escape” when you’re not really escaping the gruesome gore and inhumanity the movie is all-too-giddy about showcasing.

Writer-director Rian Johnson returns to the scene of the triumph with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and finds the going a bit slower, the supporting cast less colorful, less venomous and less star-studded and the mystery quite a bit duller than the last time around.

Charles Shyer, who co-wrote this with a Netflix house hack (“Dangerous Lies”) blows too many of his shots at “charming,” never quite nails down the “romance” and dithers away the “mystery” in this flavorless variation on formula.

Christmas with the Campbells is a soft-and-squishy Christmas rom-com that tries ever-so-hard to be “edgy” when it oh-so-obviously isn’t.

The theater scenes are so cleverly conceived — theater companies are notorious for such “Noises Off” shenanigans — and so well-acted that the film can only become a disappointment when this setting and story thread are abandoned.

EO has a message, and it’s somewhat bleak and generally told in a decidedly oblique fashion.

There aren’t more than a couple of laughs mixed in with a couple of legitimately sweet interludes in Fantasy Football, when all’s said and done. But everybody involved puts a cheerful face on things and makes this kids’ film endurable, if not quite passable entertainment.

Director J.D. Dillard’s film, “inspired by” the “true story” of Jesse L. Brown, a color-barrier-breaking pilot for the U.S. Navy, may be a straight up B-movie, from its lesser known cast to story beats that flirt with war movie tropes and over-the-top hokum. But it sure looks like an A-picture.

Maybe this film played as quick and warm and fun in Sweden. But for me it just lumbered and stumbled along.

The soothing, almost comically-whispered narration by Michael Stuhlbarg fills in around the edges as he reads Ferragamo’s words, and almost hint at places this film might take us.

It’s a magical movie memoir of the making of a movie-maker, with Spielbergian sparks of delight and inspiration, and heaping helpings of Spielberg sentiment.

There are magical moments, and brilliant sequences tossed into this ensalada of a movie.

Safe Place makes for a beautifully subtle portrayal of guilt, fear and grief, the stress a loved one’s actions bring to those who love them and the acknowledgement that whatever they could have done, odds are it probably wouldn’t have changed the course of history.

The film’s stumbling unoriginality, cliched characters and intended jokes that land like flops from a constipated greenhouse gassy cow, however earn every ounce of ire I can summon.

This is no credit to anybody involved, dull and dumb, badly directed from a really bad script the director took a co-writing credit on. Leave this corpse buried.

The Inspection is best appreciated as a showcase for Woodbine and Union, each taking her or his best big screen dramatic role in years and bringing it home in scene after scene.

The energy flags in this lighthearted dark romp, but that happens in comedies that live and die on their snappy, shticky banter. Blood Relatives is still shticky enough — and sticky enough — to deliver laughs with bite.

It’s no “Babadook” or “Mama,” but for a horror movie for people who won’t realize they’re watching a horror movie, it’s not bad.

At least Momoa is fun. Find him a comedy, somebody. He’s got Joe Manganiello’s build, and enough of his comic chops to handle a a movie that doesn’t require him to play a biker, a barbarian or a deep sea beefcake.

Marsden is pretty much the only reminder of how campy and giddy this material once was and that the new film should have striven to be. Love him. Love Rudolph. Adore Amy Adams most of all. But Disenchanted plays like a contractual obligation, a paycheck, a nearly laughless show of loyalty to the folks who made you what you are.

I’m afraid this is another case of Netflix’s Big Blank Check indulging a filmmaker, who cashed it and lost himself in the “White Noise” superficialities while never quite wrestling a perhaps-unfilmable novel into shape.

The Menu is entertaining enough. But the meal is — like the horror movie logic of it all — perfunctory, if magnificently presented.

What it’s not very good at getting across is the source of the pain, the disaffection that drives our anti-hero’s excesses or his art.

It’s a parable of Catholic Ireland given a mod, fourth-wall breaking framework by Chilean director Sebastián Lelio, who gave us “Gloria.” He and his players make it not just vividly period-real, but bracing entertainment as well.

Schrader lets her players do the heavy lifting, and to a one, they don’t let her down. The women of this scandal and this movie about reporting it make She Said a thoroughly engrossing account of how one of the touchstone stories of our time came to light, one door knocked-on, one tearful recollection at a time.

None of it is remotely original, little of it is even the least bit charming.

I appreciate the effort it took to get a Western made in this day and age. It’s a good story. Redford knew it. So does Momoa. And there are some scattered stand-out moments.

Lohan does what she can with this thin, treacly material, shows she can be a team player and bring value without (one hopes) drama to a set and a project that may not be an A-picture, but still gets her name out there in a non gossipy way. Good for her.

The new film from award-winning Venezuelan filmmaker Lorenzo Vigas is a lean, quiet and disturbing parable about global capitalism as it is practiced in much of the Third World.

The shifts in tone, stakes and genre are abrupt and so clumsily-handled you’re allowed to wonder “What just happened?” And the heist is such a non-starter as to leave one at a loss as to what the Oscar winning actor, one of my favorites, ever saw in this.

It’s quite simple in structure, simply sublime in execution.

This was potentially a timely, politically-charged thriller sure to pack a punch. Blows are landed, and characters are triggered.

The Chalk Line is never a complete write-off, but there is no getting around that it isn’t what it could have been.

If you like your fights righteously brutal and head-buttingly realistic and your car chases Vin Diesel free, this is the thriller for you.

Director Scooter Corkle fails to find the frights in this. And it’s not like Damien Ober’s script sets anybody involved up for success.

The whole plays as flat, never quite hitting a high, never remotely touching bottom.

There’s just enough novelty and fun to recommend Spirited — something I’ve never done for the sour “Scrooged” — with Reynolds and Ferrell hoofing and singing like this is what they’ve wanted to do all their professional lives.

A chaotic and engrossing mystery built around that evergreen of the espionage and political intrigue genre, the hunt for a “mole” in Korean intelligence agencies.

Meet Cute makes for an offbeat spin on its titular rom-com convention, and Cuoco and Davidson give it just enough heart to pay off, something I attribute to Kaley C. because on his own, Davidson can be funnier, but he’s usually as warm as refrigerated cod.

Equal parts funny and forlorn, with a smattering of the violence that always been a sort of Emerald Isle background noise, The Banshees of Inisherin is Martin McDonagh’s most Irish film, because it’s a lot like Ireland itself.

It’s still an eye-opener, especially for the casual fan who hasn’t devoured all the many books on Early Disney as a subject and Mickey as a character, a corporate brand and a cultural touchstone.

The production design is cool, the cutting and staging are sharp. But the movie that comes out of all that doesn’t play. So maybe I’ll give the record a listen.

It’s an oddly unaffecting childhood odyssey, and that’s only partly due to its obnoxious sixth grade artist, Paul Graff, played by Michael Banks Repeta.

About 15 minutes of its dazzling visuals and narrative incoherence is enough.

Lindholm’s patience with this material kind of outlasts ours. There needs to be more flesh on the bone to justify the two hour running time. The dead spots show.

Causeway is slight but immersive, warm with the occasional chill and engaging in ways two very good actors can manage with just the barest bones of a story and a scattering of secrets to give away, one pained revelation at a time.

As I’ve mentioned in many reviews of films of this ilk over the years, this isn’t my favorite genre. Unlike the somewhat better “Black Panther,” this installment was always going to be more somber thanks to the loss of its star. What the film lacks is the will to make make that loss heartbreaking.

Bar Fight! is an 84 minute long break-up “Who gets custody of ‘our‘ regular bar?” comedy that hits the wall at about the 30 minute mark.

Enola Homes 2 is a proper delight, start to finish, one of the best “juvenile” entertainments of the year.

Scenes are clunky and disjointed. The dialogue is bad. Elwes and Patric do their best, but they have trouble hiding their dismay at some of the staging and most of the writing. The performances are adequate in the most tepid sense. Playing caricatures instead of characters is challenging.

It’s not so much a “sweet nothing” as a “nothing nothing” of a holiday movie, bearing evidence that it’s been cut and a lot has been left out. And judging from what made this release print, the edits were no great loss.

As long as their are little lives worth a little intense scrutiny, there’ll be indie films like Sam & Kate, pleasant diversions that give legendary stars the indulgence of a victory lap, this time with their kids along for the ride.

A brisk-enough but seriously formulaic Dutch thriller.

All involved are to be commended for taking a shot at modernizing a classic novel and rendering it into another lesson that history does repeat itself, that as the philosopher said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

It’s the patient, meandering storytelling, the ordinary characters who make tenuous connections and conjure up the unexpected, the dreamy tone that sticks with you.

If you know “Ikiru,” you remember how all this plays out. And Ishiguro’s script hits not just the same notes as Kurosawa’s original screenplay, but the right ones.

Whatever the virtues of the somewhat colorless cast, the script’s idea of wit and edge leaves them literally “stuck in a loop.”

Truthfully, there aren’t enough gags and giggles to make this take flight. It sort of lumbers by for 100 minutes before sputtering out in the finale.

Suliman plays the whole movie on simmer, about to boil over with rage, outrage and verge-of-tears frustration. Unterberger gives us a gutsy but naive filmmaker with a sense of mystery and no compunctions about ethical or moral shortcuts.

As much sympathy as she deserves, Keshishian’s film doesn’t find nearly enough drama in Gomez’s crises to separate this musician profile doc from the many others we’ve seen about Katy Perry and a legion of others over the decades. The point of view is too narrow, the “outside” voices entirely star-approved insiders.

You might be rooting for it at the end as fervently as you were at the promising beginning. But by then, it’s already disappointed, with far too many punchless punchlines for its own good.

Cámara holds the film together and touches us with the moments we see him teaching important things like compassion and responsibility to his son.

What a dreadful bore The Sleep Experiment turns out to be.

Shinzô Katayama’s Missing is a serial killer thriller that trips you up, bounces you around and repels and entertains you all along the way.

The sentimental stuff is limp and unaffecting.

The directing debut of co-writer and star Dina Amer is a vivid portrait of the French underclass and one of the best movies to ever make us walk a mile in the shoes of someone we might not be able to identify with — someone radicalized — but who seems more relatable and understandable, the more time we spend with her.

What Benson and Moorhead have conjured up here is their oddest, most esoteric dramedy yet, a tale quirky and weird, more serious than silly and certainly worth a look just to pick through the torrent of references herein. You’ve just got to be on their wavelength to get anything more than passing pleasure out of it.

This Tommy Boulding tale is depressingly straightforward and generally lacks the urgency of people being chased to death and the menace of upper class twits on horseback dressed for the hunt and dressed to kill.

Even if you do know how this story ends, it’s beautifully touching seeing and hearing somebody who’s been through the fame, celebrity and cocaine wringer, just grateful at the victory lap her biggest fan provides for her.

Field and Blanchett have given us an unforgettable character presented in almost molecular detail, and a glorious, guts-and-Gustav behind-the-scenes plunge into a rarefied world few of us have so much as dabbled in or seriously wondered about, even if we know our Tchaikovsky from our Mahler, pianissimo from forte.

The effects are decent, the acting desultory in “Prey for the Devil,” a School for Exorcists thriller that promises more than it delivers.

It only manages a couple of big laughs, but its droll, judgy tone and some fun performances put it over.

Corben doesn’t stop with just the “sex scandal” part of this. “God Forbid” takes us back to the blackmail-worthy “quid pro quo” of Falwell’s endorsement of the profane, obscene and hilariously Godless Donald Trump. Then journalists, academics and historians tie Falwell’s father, the dynasty-founding racist turned anti-abortion opportunist Jerry Falwell, to Trumpism and the State of the Nation today.

It’s impossible not to see this character and this riveting performance by Amir-Ebrahimi and not think of the brave women protesting their treatment and status right now on the streets of Iran’s cities. Arezoo, like hundreds of thousands of her sisters, persists.

A delicious femme fatale thriller with mystery, tragedy and more than a few deadpan laughs.

There’s a lot here anybody who’s had a comparative religion course will recognize — a plea for selflessness, self-reflection, non-violence and being considerate of others. But what makes The Divine Protector flirt with being campy fun is the scary lady’s walk-on music.

Call Jane is a moving and surprisingly uplifting period piece about America’s pre-sexual revolution past, a late ’60s story of women who organized to ensure that the most personal and difficult decision many women will ever face was hers to make, with their help.

The film, four years in the making, gets into Martin’s professional history without getting close to the man — a little taste of a misunderstood childhood, almost nothing of his personal life.

Through Daxiong’s vivid and realistic drawings, rendered into mid-grade animation in assistance of a gripping story, we get to know not only persecuted Falun Gong survivors, but those who perished opposing the one-party dictatorship.

Even at this late stage of the game, Hopkins is still managing to break new ground on screen, and we’d hate for this fiasco to be his last.

Like life itself, Next Exit is very much a mixed bag — tiny triumphs weighed down by a lifetime of tragedies, guilt, blame and regret in a film that works as a road comedy and kind of works as an exploration of existential crisis, just not as well.

The jump-frights pay off, the effects are excellent and the zombie makeup even better. And there’s something to be said for the novelty of it all. It isn’t every night-of-the-living-dead spawn that’s built around the Islamic way of death.

The milieu is more interesting than anyone in it and anything they do or have happen to them in Ragged Heart, an earthy dive into the underbelly of a “music scene that was” — Athens, Ga.

A fascinating but frustrating overreach that is never more fun than when it’s most over the top, but never really gets a handle on what it’s supposed to be about.

None of it, not Welles’ flirtation with his Lady Macduff later Lady Macbeth (Ashli Haynes), not Welles’ domestic problems, not the cast’s various burdens and foibles, is scripted or acted in ways as compelling as the real story, which has been related, in great detail, by every Welles biographer.

Argentina, 1985 earns its gravitas from the gripping testimony of those who survived kidnapping, or who witnessed it. And while the closing argument might not be “To Kill a Mockingbird” poetic, it is blunt and moving.

The cut-and-paste writing and lackluster direction are the main failings. There’s little to this that you’d call a “story,” even less “story” that makes sense.

As familiar as much of this can seem, the players draw us in and make us invest in it. Even if the resolution is entirely too pat and emotionally lacking.

A workmanlike “true crime” thriller.

It’s just that every situation everybody gets into is a cliche (“stranded” for the night, etc). Throw in the fact that the movie’s on life support when the leads aren’t on screen, and you see the problem.

In this Golden Age of biographical musical documentaries, the filmmaker who is now working on an Ed Sullivan doc has taken a subject we thought we knew all we needed to know about, and all but re-introduced him to a new age. Well done

“Happiest Man” gets at what makes Flanigan the perfect brand ambassador for the theme park, the “Happiest Place on Earth” that’s smart enough to employ “The Happiest Man on Earth” for decade after decade, a guy who isn’t shy about going above and beyond to “bring the magic” to everyone who visits, every single day.

The action is stunningly static, the murders something of an afterthought and the logic illogical, starting with the “smores” campfire party being set in broad daylight. And the slaughter, when it finally starts in earnest, is by-the-book and dull and features the fakest looking blood this side of Heinz 57.

Lancaster briskly covers a lot of ground, making it a most watchable overview of a subject that whole documentary series and a library’s worth of books have been devoted to. And it’s a valuable document as well, getting many of these survivors on film one last time as they remember the context, the stakes and the deadly work they volunteered to do the last time the world faced a global threat from fascist totalitarianism.

What a sad and sappy seize-the-day satire The Loneliest Boy in the World turns out to be.

Aftersun is unnecessarily obscure and overdoes the whole “understated/unstated” thing.

The settings are often striking as The Last City never lets you forget you’re dabbling in the avant garde, so it’s got that going for it.

The climbing footage is striking and the Alpine settings breathtaking in “Summit Fever,” a mountaineering thriller that also boasts some of the most stark and startling deaths the genre has ever seen.