Roger Moore

For an hour or so, director Lurie tackles the tropes lightly as we see lots of football practices, and a few games, and not a lot of anything else. And it plays, helped by the fact that the formidable Masterson doesn’t need a lot of script to get across a flinty “West Texas Gal.”

Alemania is a sweet, understated coming-of-age story, unsurprising in many ways as it borrows its central who-will-stay/who-will-travel story arc from “American Graffiti,” of all films.

Pairing up Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell for a big screen fantasy romance doesn’t pay off in “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” a film that has one or two big moments on its road-trip-romantic “journey,” a little digitally augmented “beauty” along the way, but little that measures up to anybody’s idea of “bold.”

It’s a mad, ambitious allegory that dives into the Deal with the Devil one makes for a career in the game.

The tone and atmosphere are immersive and decidedly analog, and the whole nature of “sound” thing makes an interesting metaphysical text or subtext.

Perhaps little more workshopping this script was in order, because the three main characters put on their own three act play in the film’s latter half. Everything that delays packing us in that pressure cooker with them undercuts the most novel version of “a boxing picture” that most of us have ever seen.

The various subplots collide in entertaining ways, and the “payback” chapters are full of surprises, which are easy enough to understand without the tedious business of throwing in anti-climactic flashbacks to ensure everybody “gets” why this or that happened and why any of it makes sense. We got it. We were paying attention.

“A Grand Finale” may not be all that grand, but it more or less checks off the boxes in allowing fans to revel in this world one last time and bid the great house and great cast bon voyage, even if the low-stakes/no-stakes send-off isn’t all it might have been.

A sequel to This is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary that really invented that label, can’t help but play as winded, gassed, joked-out and pointless.

The resolution’s both predictable and perfunctory. “Unsatisfying” comes with the package, and that goes for the movie itself — lazy pop psychology, underdeveloped sociology and psychology and an allegory that never comes close to sticking the landing.

Live-action kid-friendly fare like Grow is a rare thing, these days, especially at the height of Horror Season. Better grab the tykes and dash off to this before the last “pumpkin spice” lattes are served.

Director Sherry Hormann (“A Regular Woman,” “Desert Flower”) and screenwriter Stephanie Sycholt (“Themba”) get the sex and the scenery right. Its the “mystery,” “intrigue” and “thrills” that are the picture’s undoing.

The leads have just enough chemistry to make them credible as a couple.

Washington gives one of his great performances as King, a man comfortable swinging between two worlds with diverging ways of thinking and even talking.

There are few things worse than disguises that don’t amuse, bungled arrests that don’t amount to much more than a forced smile and cricket jokes that, to use a baseball analogy, are never more than “a swing and a miss.”

Wilson and Farmiga still give good value. But this franchise and these fictionalized characters and their Catholic boogeymen claptrap have gone about as far as they can go.

A polished, kid-friendly and even lighthearted Life of Jesus animated film.

It takes the involvement of the FBI and subpoenas and Big Government tech to nail down what IP address in this tiny village was the source of all that turmoil, anguish and mental health mayhem. That isn’t right.

Aronofsky ensures that Butler and his merry band of miscreant castmates make Caught Stealing a frenetic and fun farewell to summer, if a very bloody one.

It’s still nasty fun, just not as nasty and acridly funny as that ’80s comic trio of Turner, Douglas and DeVito were able to make it.

The players are the reason to relish this bon bon, with Kingsley in fine fidget, Brosnan all Irish leftist bluster and Mirren giving a comic edge to a performance that harks back to “Prime Suspect” past.

Restless is a spare, reasonably taut thriller of the “Neighbor from Hell” subgenre, the sort of movie most any member of Western or Eastern Civilization can relate to.

What We Hide is no Winter’s Bone. But this isn’t a bad effort at capturing how the drug crisis impacts its youngest victims. It’s simply an unsurprising one.

It’s about parenting, the job that never ends and the parents who never stop second-guessing how they’re managing it. Beautifully cast, summery and bittersweet with moments of dry wit, “Prayer” is a small scale tragedy in light, deft strokes.

Daniel’s Gotta Die is instantly forgettable.

The laugh-out-loud appearances — not just performing music but “performing” interviews — more than compensate for missing “It used to be about the MUSIC, man.” That makes “Devo” a delight, even if you were never into the band, even if you weren’t in on the joke.

Eden isn’t the subtlest allegory about life in troubled times, but Howard rarely makes a bad film and he hasn’t here. From its eyes-averting grimness to its eye-rolling obviousness and “inevitability, Eden is a parable that plays.

Ahmed, poker-faced start to finish, puts us in this guy’s shoes and in his head when his best laid plans are derailed, his “control” is shattered and his identity endangered. It’s another great character turn by a star who’s gained his leading man status the old fashioned way — by giving one raw, layered and compelling performance at a time.