Roger Moore

Give Green props for all that he got right, bringing Curtis back and making her the focus, for starters. But all involved seem to have painted themselves into a narrative corner that they weren’t able to write their way out of.

Of all the Zoomed pandemic movies, big budget and small, the brilliant storyboarding, concise scripting, motivated and moving performances (direction) and editing of The Same Storm make this the one they ought to teach in film schools. And of all the lockdown films, this is the one that brings back the fullest range of experiences, emotions, fears, fury and hope of 2020.

Director Lucky McKee is here for the violence — mostly in flashbacks. Perhaps Veach talked him into the idea that the “twist” everybody with a pulse sees coming is explanation enough for how maddening this drivel is to listen to.

Snoop shows up and we almost get a laugh. But that’s far too little and entirely too late to give Bromates a chance.

Even as the film wanders about and the emotional bond between mother and child is seriously lacking in this story and these performances, there’s still something engrossing about seeing a mother’s journey through the trials and errors of ensuring her child has an opportunity to learn and at least a shot at a normal, healthy and happy life — with or without pills.

The rest is entirely too obvious for its own good, something we’ve never been able to say about a Ruben Östlund before, and hopefully won’t ever say again.

As Chukwu keeps her camera on Mamie, she turns a blow against racism into a history lesson with human faces — good, poisonous, and so mutilated that we have to be forced to see it to understand our culture’s ugliest truth.

The documentary material is informative and mind-opening. The mockumentary surrounding it is a bit of a drag, and lets the movie down.

You’d think with the director of “Yes, God, Yes” (Karen Maine) behind the camera, this comedy would take flight. Too much of what’s here stops just short of paying off with a big laugh. Blame the script or the tentative players (aside from Deaver, none of the younger cast members knows how to stick a punchline), but for all its intended charm and hilarity, Rosaline always settles for “ish.”

Argento may stay on brand with this film, with a few gory moments amid its violence. But he’s rarely tamed things to the point where they’re pro forma, dull and preordained.

Sissy is a one messed-up thriller wrapped up in the most adorable, upbeat and value-affirming package.

The acting is as immaculate as the digitally-augmented settings.

A clever (and foreshadowed) touch or two notwithstanding, in the end, the filmmakers’ attempts at misdirecting the viewer’s expectations fail and the movie’s endless “on the nose” characters, moments and lines of dialogue overwhelm it.

It’s all bloody exhausting, and pretty much from the start.

The drama is fairly mild, the action cute and slapshticky and the Lyle sight gags aimed at six and unders, so don’t look or listen for great verbal or visual wit.

It mopes along when it isn’t leaving out what seem to be whole passages, transitions, backstory and the like. The action doesn’t flow at all, and relationships have a brittle, abrupt quality.

Even at its most unpleasant, it’s never less than fascinating.

There’s no denying that this works as a thriller, that Smile is a well-crafted fright delivery system even as it slows to a crawl and stumbles into an ending we’ve seen coming for the past hour.

Any documentary that points to a way out of the agonizing, expensive, life-extending trap of “The American Way of Death” is worth a look. This one, affectionate and atypical, poignant and privileged, grates almost as often as it moves.

There’s not much to grab hold of, here. The Visitor fights a losing battle with over-familiarity, sauntering through horror tropes that predate 24 frames-per-second era celluloid.

There’s not enough that’s new to merit raising this corner of hell all over again.

A vintage Hill bit with a horse coming through glass doors and a couple of decent exchanges in an overall perfunctory big shootout finale arrive just in time to remind of us how great this filmmaker once was, and how sad it is that he has to hang up his spurs with Dead for a Dollar.

It’s all pitched in the same in-your-face/energy-drink hyped pace and volume, which all but beats the “funny” out of a lot of the attempted humor.

Because we know this screenplay is going to tell us a lot more “why” than we need to know or care to know. And that’s a sign they didn’t pay attention to more important things, like scripting more interesting characters, more terrifying situations and pithier lines, or getting the actors to buy in and give the viewer something to grab hold of.

Every time we relax into our smug “I know where this is going,” Pereda finds a way to trip us up.

I’d say Parker, Najimy and Midler all did a great public service coming back to these characters and deserve the thanks of a grateful nation for giving this their all, giving us a few laughs and a lot of grins and giving legions of little girls Disney role models who aren’t princesses waiting around for some prince to get a clue.

If the Northern Irish are still learning from the ancient Greeks, maybe the rest of us should give them a listen, too.

An organized riot of images and sounds, Moonage Daydream is perhaps the only way a documentary biographer could approach the story of David Bowie. Brett Morgen (“Crossfire Hurricane”) has made his true masterpiece, the perfect film to celebrate a multifaceted life of aesthetic excess.

The contrast between Eichner’s polished, breathless, amusingly angry riffs and the acting around him calls attention to itself. He’s not an inviting presence and the performance lacks the acting tools that let the viewer in and make us warm to this relationship and root for this couple.

If you deign to watch this waste of a good shipboard location, remember this, me mateys. As bad as VampyrZ on a Boat is, there’s a Western epilogue that’s even worse.

The script is just a collection of horror tropes. Jake reads from the Encyclopedia of Shadows book his dad left him. A fortune teller animatronic display spooks the kids. The frights are tepid at best. The banter is “sick, and not in a good way.”

This sentimental, sweet and romantic voyage crashes into the rocks in the third act with bizarre turns that lean into Chinese self-sacrifice so hard the indoctrination is the least grating thing about it, and all the added supernaturalism in the world can’t rescue it.

Project Wolf Hunting is a brutally efficient killing machine long before the supernatural twist stomps into the proceedings. That almost seems like a gimmick-too-far.

It’s all harmless enough, and a lovely Yorkshire travelogue if nothing else.

This “beer run” from Inwood, Manhattan, to Saigon and “up country” environs starts jaunty, gets somber and sentimental and then goes oh-so-very-wrong. You’ll feel it the instant it happens, just as I did.

The story’s arc may feel familiar, but it isn’t utterly predictable, with the child’s enterprise and cunning nicely matched against Marsan’s I’m Bigger Than You omnipotence. And the messaging of “Vesper” leaves this bleak tale a little room to breathe and anyone watching it the tiniest prayer of hope.

Even if it bogs down in the middle acts — seriously bogs down — and has missing pieces of the story puzzle even as it takes pains to show us what would be his downfall, this Allan Ungar dramedy plays. More or less.

Hudlin’s embracing film reminds us that there was a lot of history that unfolded around this one man, and a lot of change came about thanks to this one extraordinary life of achievement and humility, grace and principled defiance.

It doesn’t hang together very well pretty much from the start. But by the third act, this messy mayhem goes right off the rails, as if there were rails it was following in the first place.

The Enforcer is filmed-proof that the difference between a C-movie and a straight-up, watchable B-picture is Antonio Banderas. Ask first-time director Richard Hughes. He’ll tell you.

What emerges is more a “feeling” than a narrative, more a sensation (irritation, in my case) than cinema, and more BS than your average performative, bubbly and empty TED talk held in a stockyard.

Director and co-writer Tory Jones opens his picture with a painfully inept podcast interview, setting an amateurish tone that the picture never shakes.

Whatever promise there is in this well-worn existentialist premise starts to dissipate once the first guy meets the second, and the attention steadily fades the more characters in search of an exit — or a GPS fix — that they meet on their journey.

Her sound, her look, her fashion sense and her politics are discussed and marveled at by those interviewed, who see her as a woman decades ahead of her time whom the passage of time has largely validated and exonerated.

The tamest movie ever made about dabbling in LSD and Riot Grrrl culture has to be Acid Test, a non-prescription sleep aid of a movie.

McElhone mopes in the early scenes and shimmers through the later ones, even as she suffers. “Carmen” becomes a veritable Maltese fashion shoot at times.

To the Moon is a psychological/psychedelic thriller that has a lot of trouble coming together and more trouble getting to its fairly obvious point.

In the end, what God’s Country is wrestling with is too big for the movie or the filmmakers’ ambitions.

Tafdrup’s film plays as nightmarish to anyone with real sensitivity long before it turns truly sinister.

The original sin of Don’t Worry Darling might be how drunk the filmmakers get on the universe they create, dragging and dragging a less and less interesting pastiche of ’50s life — a drunken office party with a stripper, because we’re all so liberal and “modern” — on for so long that the more exciting third act comes as a refreshing jolt.

It’s self-indulgent and self-referential, more a humorless counterpoint to “X” than a precursor.

It’s a dry yet fascinating film that covers a lot of ground between the riots, the creation of the Riotsvilles and the convention where its training was unleashed on first Miami and Miami Beach, and later on Chicago.

The film is a celebration of the most optimistic big thinker of them all, a figure who has been at the forefront of many of the best phenomena, trends, technology and values inculcated in modern culture.

Nobody knocks anything out of the park, but this “Fletch” piles up the singles and doubles, an endless parade of funny lines almost always just thrown away, casually.

The Alternate has the effects and a plot that could work, but falls short in pretty much every other regard.

The Woman King reminds us that the real history we don’t know makes for a great story, and a grand action yarn. You want to learn where all the good parts and “realistic” elements of that comic book movie “Black Panther” and its sequel came from? Gaze upon “The Woman King,” and be thrilled.

The Bengali is a lovely home movie about finding one’s roots, a simple tale that connects a New Orleans family to its West Bengal patriarch, who came over from India in the late 19th century.

Cinematically-static if well-acted, and dramatically-flat throughout, it’s an end-of-the-date story of gamesmanship, competing agendas and differing interpretations of what’s going on in a coupling towards copulation sense.

Smith folds mortality, grief and regret into the story to give it depth, but the strain of being glib about those elements shows. Scene after scene plays out without so much as a chuckle.

It’s “uplifting,” but conventionally so, with a certain dignity surrounding it. These are, after all, “the finest palettes in Africa.”

The finale is seriously undigested, but that’s consistent with the film as a whole. It’s a workable, salvageable caper comedy that needed more comedy and a heist picture that needed a bit more interesting content and character development outside of the heist.

Take the title as a warning. This isn’t a “Harbinger” of disaster. It’s just all portents of evil, and precious little that’s entertaining comes with it.

Wilson holds our attention with her manner, her actions and her eyes, creating a broken beauty who may be too flighty to figure out her “gather ye rosebuds” years are coming to an end, and too impulsive to see the impulses that help make her “beguiling” are just self-defeating and self-destructive.

The head-spinning puppet is beautifully-rendered, and the addition of the clattering, clacking sound effect that his wooden hinge-joints make is a plus.

Barbarian is a horror movie that gets the basics right. All of them.

B-movie mainstay Steven C. Miller (2012’s “Silent Night,” a few recent Bruce Willis action pix) builds suspense here and there and stages a reasonably invented murder-by-technology moment or two. But Margaux is so formulaic as to forbid anything resembling a surprise.

It’s all perfectly workmanlike, save for the fights, which are splendid. If Medieval Times are your jam (as they are mine), Medieval is worth a look and almost entertaining enough to get by.

Oh, it’s not as clever as it thinks it is. And truthfully, for a “romp” it only occasionally romps. But See How They Run is still a warm, witty and winning old fashioned “whodunit” and an equally old-fashioned “theater” comedy, pronounced “THEE-a-turr” in the British style. I found it an old fashioned hoot.

Krieps makes her journey into this open wound not just intriguing, but heartbreaking.

As the violence escalates and whatever was getting out of hand gets seriously out of hand, Barbarians can turn downright riveting.

If you know the song that underscores this romance, know the Jerry Jeff and Sammy Davis Jr. and Nina Simone versions of it, you get what the novelist and the filmmakers were going for here. Reality is melancholy. Imagination and memory are our escape from it.

As B-movies about Hitler’s corpse and who might have a use for it — then, and now — go, Burial manages to be watchable, even when it’s making your eyes roll.

It’s the detail, the sense of small lives closed off and growing more isolated that makes this film worth watching.

It’s got a few laughs and a tiny dollop of heart.

The deeper into this story that the movie gets and the darker things turn, the more we see this tale the way the stars do — as a tragedy only in the eyes of its two main characters. Brown and Hall elevate this low-hanging-fruit simply because they have to.

The conflict is watered-down, the picture has no urgency or pacing, the “sparks” are in short supply, and Adams’ deadpan take on Agnes may play to her strengths, or be the only note she knows and we can’t tell the difference.

Low Life is a jittery, nerve-wracking thriller, a peek behind the “gotcha” cell phone camera of a confrontational stalker-of-stalkers.

It’s adorable, the most adorable thing on Netflix right now.

Scene after excruciating scene unfolds, unravels or just plain bleeds out, right before our ever-sleepier eyes.

Baird, and his sometimes muse Fimmel, are heading in the right direction. But this more tight if a tad tedious thriller doesn’t quite finish the trip or seal the deal.

Director Tommy Haines, a Midwesterner, knows the lay of the land and gives us a sometimes graceful, occasionally bone-jarring film that vividly captures action on the ice — trash talk and brawls include — and far more banal lives off of it.

The intrigues are breathless and the violence so in your face that it takes a seriously off-key third act to make this one more a mixed bag than it was setting up to be.

Nairobby may not be an instant classic. It’s still a sharp enough opening outing to be worth a look and easily earns that second check Netflix should write to give us more gritty tales from Kenya from this very promising first-time director.

Gigi & Nate is what happens when you round up a good cast and a pretty polished director for a screenplay that turns away from its strengths, takes a swing at “important,” and misses.

No wit, few frights and not much in the way of thrills, either.

The effects are good enough, but there’s a lack of wit and ambition here that just reeks.

Breaking isn’t “Dog Day Afternoon” or “Inside Man” because it isn’t as good or as original as those two classics of the genre. But Boyega, Williams and Beharie make this well worth our while, a tense and empathetic hostage thriller that could be literally — one last cliche coming — “ripped from today’s headlines.”

The “telling anecdotes” from friends, the TV interviews Michael did himself, the armchair analysis of the things that drove Michael and shaped his later life make “Portrait of an Artist” a terrific snapshot of the Wham! star who became a legendary figure not just in music, but the gay community and world pop culture as well.

It’s very self-conscious and gets very meta and kind of arty. But if Adieu Godard rarely achieves laugh-out-loud chuckles, scene after scene finds grins, giggles and bits of comical outrage.

The general idea here is a sound one, taking the conventions of a celebrated genre and sending them up. But LaBute’s incessant grasping for laughs out of “The Next Tuesday” and “Sometime After That” titles is instantly cloying.

This movie is terrible right out of the gate, and execrable by the time Willis makes his belated bow — 23 minutes in.

Kline presents us with a coming-of-age story, or an artist finding his voice tale, and never quite delivers either.

If Booker goes on to unseat the hilariously hated, Russia loving Rand Paul for a Senate seat this fall, From the Hood to the Holler will make a fascinating footnote for a sea change in American politics.

For a movie that doesn’t have an actual interview with the subject of the film, Kaepernick & America isn’t half bad, although the material they have to work with is so thin the co-directors had to pad out their movie with one of the strangest tricks I’ve ever seen in a documentary.

Some of the one-liners land, a few scenes play as half-amusing. But the chop-chop-choppy narrative trick of scores of “this is 4 hours after the death” or “two years” before it wrecks the flow of the story, such as it is.

Good intentions run smack into self-indulgence in “MVP,” a slack, sentimental, cliche-and-stereotype-stuffed drama from activist, charitable foundation founder, Green Beret vet and actor Nate Boyer.

A serious upgrade in “Dragon Ball” franchise animation runs up against the same overdoses of exposition, endless back story and arcane plot contrivances designed to pit characters against each other in epic throwdowns in Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero.

There isn’t enough that plays as all that funny in this version of the comic satire Groom cooked up.

Miller’s film, based on an A.S. Byatt short story, is long and feels incomplete, weighty without much psychological or intellectual heft, colorful but rarely dazzling and never whimsical enough.

Beast is an over-the-top savage and sometimes head-slappingly silly animal attack thriller. Its artfully paranoid and claustrophobic, comically cuddly and pretty much begs the audience to shout at the screen. A lot.

Delia’s Gone never wholly transcends formula, and when it strays from expectations it seems on more uncertain ground. But Budreau, who wrote and directed Ethan Hawke’s fine Chet Baker jazz biopic “Born to be Blue,” bathes his film in overcast, sets his characters up with the sparest of sketches and then runs the table with them like a pool hustler with a film camera.

Although the film hews closely to the historical record, the pace is so sedate one wonders if a brisker production could have carried the story on to the war’s end, as Hall’s exploits were ongoing.

It’s a bracing, damning indictment of a world where women have no bodily autonomy wrapped in a visceral, on-the-lam chase thriller in which every man our heroine meets is not just an existential threat, but a real one.

Blasted is a laser tag fight that ends prematurely because every idiot accidentally points his gun at himself right at the start.

It is astonishing how off-key Bundles goes, and how badly the violence is introduced into this light dramedy, and how grimly and poorly-acted that violence plays out.

It’s a harmless and not utterly charmless Polish kids’ dramedy (subtitled, or dubbed into English) of The Big Game genre — a video game team hoping to win The Big “Robot Masters” e-sports tournament.

Cullen and Warren give this drama a gravitas and poignance that transcends the trite formula It Snows all the Time never strays from.

Stiles, who classes up everything she touches, had to see something in this. Julia won’t let us down. In Julia we trust. And damned if she doesn’t deliver, as this grim march through murder curdles from Grand Guignol to laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Even though it never lets us forget the lack of star power and modest budget, even if it never makes the leap to “compelling,” Raven’s Hollow is never less than an interesting effort and a good-looking argument that given the money, Hatton could show us something, with the right script.

It’s a slight and simple story, but the way it’s folded into the music lends it weight and scale.

Director and co-writer Aly Muritiba’s melodrama is slow — 29 minute-long PROLOGUE slow — formulaic, dated and obvious considering “The Crying Game” opened 30 years ago north of the equator. But tender performances might reward those patient enough to sit through its scenic, formulaic and dramatically-limited longueurs.

The third act is nonsense contrived to deliver the Big Reveal, which is neither big nor revealing.

This Camping Trip is the oddest blend of “Look what we’ve learned now” showing off and rank filmmaking incompetence I’ve seen in ages.

Danner, of “Hello Herman” and “Bad Impulse,” cooked up a sadly unsurprising story with screenwriter Jason Chase Tyrell and all the pretty people and pretty settings and flashbacks can’t finesse “The Runner” into something it’s not — tense and compelling.

The impression “Three Minutes” leaves is that it’s more probing than moving, more of a mystery to be unraveled than an emotional journey into who and what were lost. It’s still quite worthwhile as history and as a meditation on tragedy and the nature of filmed memory.

If you’re patient enough to stick around for the wilder third act, Spin Me Round kind of turns things around. Not quite enough, but close.

Umma turns out to be a “quality” thriller that can’t be bothered to get down and dirty and scary.

It’s a brazenly bouncy bloodbath built around that well known romantic comedy “type,” manic murderous pixie teen girls. OK, it’s an interesting sadistic twist on a popular rom-com type.

It’s a violent, noisy, slangy and pricey superhero movie that’s for fankids, not fanboys or fangirls or the lactose intolerant. Talk about cheesy.

The unfolding plot makes just enough sense to get by, but that might be because it’s so predictable we can pretty much guess who dies and “in order of disappearance.”

Sure, it drags a bit in the middle acts, and even shifts point of view for a while, away from the barista Beni and his occasionally-weeping pal, Jody. But the Battle Royale finale is fun.

Amandla has no emotional core. This potentially riveting drama about siblings and violence and a country going through one of the most astonishing political/racial transformations in history has barely a moment that moves or inspires.

Scene after scene lacks spark or fire or heart.

Maybe if “Rita” had been forced into more bachelorette weekend antics with Paige, bubbly Aimee Carrero and Addie Weyrich, the strain of trying to keep up, comically, with Keaton wouldn’t have been so obvious. As it is, “Mack & Rita” is a criminal waste of seasoned comic talent and a criminal misuse of some of the most beautiful Hollywood starlets coming up behind them.

Movies like “Fall” are all about the tropes (Foreshadowing, anyone?), the stunts and the editing, all in service of a formula that’s not wholly bulletproof, but close...And here, enough of that pays off that while we notice how simple it all is, you give the devils their due. It’s still damned good for what it is.

I kind of got into the film’s dark, masochistic comic vibe but found it ungainly and lumbering.

We Are Living Things is more a movie of feelings than plot or explanations of that plot and the characters. And as such, dark as it sometimes gets, it’s a winner.

This is “Crank” with one long, frenetic, ticking-clock chase and the occasional “Mission: Impossible” level stunt, and a body count and a story that you cannot let yourself think about, even though both are in your face and appalling, first scene to closing credits.

The mixed-bag Reclaim turns out to be doesn’t hide the fact that there’s a tighter, more impactful movie in this material, a common complaint with overlong made-for-Netflix productions. Indulging the filmmaker, like a mother indulging her kids for too long, doesn’t do anybody any good.

Shaffer has filmed a great primer on a key figure in the history of cinema and the perfect movie for anyone whose interest was piqued by “Nope” to learn “the real story,” which is colorful enough without the glorious myths surrounding it.

It would be nice if this generally laudatory, understated and reflective film served as Gilliam’s victory lap. It captures his dogged persistence and his artist’s eye, and humanizes him by letting us see him playing with his son in home movies, then playing with his grandchild in others.

So yes, there’s the whiff of Stephen King’s story “The Body” to this, with emotional BFF bonding and the like. But barely a note of this contrived, Nutrasweetened melodrama engages, even on those rare instances in which something rings true.

It’s still an intriguing and somewhat cerebral entry in the horror canon, a movie that reminds us that the real “monsters” are trauma and the real confrontations are best handled in a therapist’s office.

Rogue Agent presents some things that truly stretch credulity as simple facts, leaving the viewer to slap our head in wonder because, damned if this story isn’t “true.” You can look it up, although that’s not recommended until after you’ve seen it. Because as this clever script winds its way towards a finale that’s not really a conclusion, you’d be cheating yourself of the fun of the mystery-thriller you’re watching, and the one you’re frantically writing in your head as possibility after possibility pops up, is wrestled with and discarded to make way for the next.

Emily the Criminal is the face and voice of not just the summer, but an American generation right now, looking for a break and desperate enough to cross the line if they don’t get it.

It’s a slight comedy, delicate as kheer with nothing remotely weighty about it. The biggest surprise about that might be the light touch veteran director Tom Dey brings to Shiwani Srivastava’s sweet and simple script.

Howard finds the heart in this story, and the perfect places to pluck the heartstrings. It’s an emotional movie, given a real-time “What we don’t know yet” urgency by Nicholson’s script, and a sort of awestruck “Look what these 5,000 people did just to save these children” credulity by one of Hollywood’s greatest “movies with heart” filmmakers.

The low-hanging-fruit laughs and occasional flashes of charm make Easter Sunday a perfectly watchable if generally underwhelming comedy. But hey, maybe this sitcom pilot will be picked up after all, with or without the funny accent.

One can grasp and hope all one wants. There just isn’t much to grab hold of here and not much to this other than some pretty pictures, a few featherweight stereotypes — Argentine, American, Taiwanese and Jewish — and a whole lot of potential pretty much squandered.

Two Oscar winners in the cast, plus Pegg and Pixar’s good luck charm John Ratzenberger, and “Luck” turns out to have none.

Director Dan Trachtenberg (“10 Cloverfield Lane” and TV’s “The Boys”) makes great use of locations (Alberta, Canada) and the film’s set-piece fights. Screenwriter Patrick Aison sticks to the “Predator” basics for the alien hunter, and creates some wonderfully visceral scenes that try to reason out how bow and arrow, hatchet and woodlore skills might be used against a super-sized/super-powered foe.

The combat sequences are straightforward and well-handled.

Vengeance lets you appreciate its ambition and wince at its obvious overreach.

It’s kind of slapdash and all over the place — again, like “Girls” — introducing interesting characters and losing track of them, focusing on the most sexually promiscuous/adventurous young woman in the lot. It doesn’t really hold together or earn its “My point, and I do have one” scene.

The cameos and third act actor introductions turn this into an all-star romp — of sorts — further lightening the tone.

“Rising Dragon” still makes a fascinating film version of a “further reading” history lesson, a reminder of the historical enmity between Korean and its avaricious, warlike neighbor and why Koreans in the film and in the modern day regard this as a “battle of the righteous against the unrighteous.”

It doesn’t come together nearly as neatly as you’d like. But “Hypochondriac” manages a few chills and some eyes-averting gore thanks to Will’s memories of what happened and how close he is to repeating the awful past he grew up in.

Some of us can see what’s coming, which isn’t a deal-breaker as far as making Glorious watchable. What’s required here is that the characters keep us engaged until the payoff or twist or grim or happy resolution. What would be nice is if we feel something/anything for any given character.

It’s formulaic, rarely funny and seriously cynical for a movie aimed at small kids. But a couple of moments have a lovely and quite-unexpected pathos to them.

Semans’ script suggests guilt, blame and next-level psychological mind-games in the connection between his heroine and her perceived nemesis. As in other films that go down this path, there’s uncertainty about what’s actually happening to Margaret and what’s just in her head.

The clever touch here is having Franklin imagine, in his mind, Becca actually there with him as they’re having these chats.

The best movies like this do a much better job of selling the building terror, the fear of a gruesome injury or death by being eaten alive– drowning in the process.

There are enough fun bits here to stream The Gray Man, maybe as background noise, only worth your attention now and again. And there are so very many head-slapping moments that one can’t help but think, “It must be time to pause (or cancel) Netflix again.”

Not Okay wants to be kind of a goof on the subject. Deutch seems to want to make it one. But former child actress turned writer-director Quinn Shephard doesn’t appear to be on the same page with this heavy-handed mope.

The World is Yours isn’t an out-and-out farce, but the Guy Ritchie plot, cast of characters and even editing strategy finds laughs left, right and every which way in between.

The leads click well enough. But every moment Hart and Harrelson aren’t on the screen, the film dies. The real torture in this torture comedy becomes the too-long wait for it to end.

If you’re looking for low-exertion a summer escape movie with a bucket list travel destination as its setting and a donkey and the hapless, lovelorn sap who rides him as its stars, “My Donkey, My Lover & I” certainly fills the bill.

A thoroughly entertaining ride, as strange as it is beautiful, growing even stranger and more beautiful in the later acts.

It’s topical, but it settles nothing, informative and sensitive in its representations, cute but never cute enough.

How to Please a Woman may play to its target audience, giving voice to female relationship frustrations and the like. But as pleasantly drab as it generally is, I dare say it won’t please any gender, any where.

Cult, sullen and furious, manipulative and demanding, gives us as vivid a picture of toxic interpersonal dependency as we can stomach, never giving ground, crossing one line after the other until we’re screaming at her, Jojo, Daniel and the TV in indignation.

Schmaltz aside, I enjoyed this enough to recommend it up until it took that second act turn.

Tenderly-conceived, tastefully-directed, handsomely-mounted and prestigiously-cast, its a drama that runs up against the wall of over-familiarity and the ceiling of expectations. Even without being the umpteenth version of this sort of film to come out, it’s pretty bland going.

The performances are uneven, with a few players having experience on obscure, equally malnourished and overreaching indie film sets, and others outright amateurs. There are continuity errors, with shots not quite matching up.

Individual scenes play better than the whole, just as some performances shine — McKenna-Bruce, Jarvis, Grant and even Ms. Johnson — and get the hang of dry Austen wit and its sometimes clumsy “try to keep up” updatings better than others.

It’s a decently-animated, dialogue-heavy comedy that manages a few laughs from the age-old sight gags of “Blazing Saddles” and a lot of groaners that pass for one-liners.

Sorry to beat the hell out of a book millions have bought and presumably adored. But Where the Crawdads Sing doesn’t sing a note in film form, and plays more like Nicholas Sparks than Harper Lee, more a Lifetime Original Movie than anything worth the price of a cinema ticket.

A generally upbeat and exhaustively-thorough film.

There isn’t much to this aside from an attractive but bland and colorless cast parked in front of seaside vistas, stunning coves to swim or dive in and the like.

Genre fans may eat this up, but it’s not anything I’d call a “must see” film, despite its obvious ambition.

Anonymous Club isn’t an invitation. Don’t know the lyrics? Kind of hard to make them out. Underwhelmed by this guitar snippet or that one? Well, she does like the label “slacker garage rock.” Leave this one to the fans.

All well and good, or at least adequate. But as a screenwriter his star vehicle has organizational problem and a twisty story in which all the energy is devoted to keeping those twists from being obvious.

I can’t really endorse Fair Game. But there’s enough good stuff in it — “Mad Max/Road Warrior” mimicking stunts, etc — that you can see what QT saw in it and why he figured he could “improve” on a good idea whose execution wasn’t all it might have been.

Director Scott Mann did the all-star but little-seen “Heist” a few years back, and wrings what he can out of this tired plot. For me, the picture started with a bang, leveled off and then gently nose-dived in the third act.

As beautiful and intimate as Fire of Love often is, the sometimes grating, flat and precious narration makes one long for this material to have been folded into Herzog’s superior “Into the Inferno.” Romantic “obsession” is kind of his thing, and there’s not enough new here to warrant expanding on it.

Not to gush or go too far overboard, but the warmth of a movie like “Mrs. Harris” is downright restorative in the viewing, two escapist hours that remind us that everyone is entitled to courtesy, a fair shake and a little beauty and luxury, and most of all, the hope that life can get better.

Mandylor isn’t bad, pretty much every thing and everybody else is. But at least it’s short.

Charm and humor are in shorter supply than you’d hope. There’s barely a funny moment in it, even though there are English-accented attempts at jokes about how often sailors say “Yarrrr,” and a cute baby beast is introduced, right on cue, in the later acts.

Director and co-writer Eli Horowitz, a veteran of TV’s “Homecoming,” throws in just enough curveballs to keep us guessing and just enough generational jabs to make the script kind of funny and kind of mean-spirited.

A Love Song is a lovely, valedictory film for two of the best actors of their generation, so it’s worth the effort you make to track it down. Any time a movie maker crafts something this gentle and fine for two wonderful players who rarely get the spotlight is to be celebrated.

The resulting film is a fascinating mystery, a weird case study and an unalloyed delight.

A mix of overt shouting matches and subtler moments illustrate this war of wills, ideologies and parenting styles. And the odd hallucinatory reverie reminds the characters, and the viewer, that try as we might, there’s no wishing a big problem away when it comes bulldozing and dynamiting at your door.

Almost everything introduced into this leisurely two hour movie feels undigested, under-developed. There’s an earnestness to all of this that feels more accepted than justified.

Kusijanovic has given us a “Lolita” without exploitation, a “Knife in Water” with spear guns, and a disturbing riff on toxic masculinity and rash teenaged impulses simmered in a seaside chowder of sex and gamesmanship, making for a dazzling first feature.

But Waititi is to be treasured for simply seeing all this as lightweight fun, a bit of nonsense with a bunch of movie stars dressing up like gods and having a laugh.

It’s all eye-rolling, laugh-out-loud action nonsense, and often damned entertaining, another highlight of King’s ever-lengthening highlight reel of a career.

Narrowing the focus to this song elevates the film and its subject, and makes a fascinating window into one creative life, lived in curiosity, looking for answers and groping — for seven years — just to come up with a song that explains it all.

That assault is dully-staged and filmed by director Aku Louhimies, as is every counter-assault and border crossing that follows. This or that moment plays well enough. But this ungainly beast is hard to follow. It’s even harder to invest in any character in it.

The situation has suspense built into it, but there is none. The premise is predicated on urgency. We never feel it.

Alternately stark and lurid, poetic and very well acted, it’s a return to form for McDonagh, who rather lost the plot with “War on Everyone.”

Accepted isn’t as thorough as you’d expect (Again, NO teachers are interviewed.). But it succeeds by not offering a simple black and white take on what went on and what is going on with how schools “accept” students and just how arbitrary that unjust system is.

This Juliette Binoche drama has heat and hurt and a whiff of intrigue as Denis (“High Life,” “Beau Travail”) peels away layers of background that reveals more and more of the true nature of her characters.

Swiss director and co-writer Oliver Rihs (“Ready, Steady Ommm!”) takes a serious step into the big time with this gripping saga, a story that begins escape-artist jaunty and occasionally finds its way back there even as the story turns grimmer and the color palette progressively greyer.

The adults are sharp and the kids are all right. It plays, even if the pacing’s slow by Western standards. And while you might not know the rules of snooker any better by the end than you did at the outset, there’s enough here to make one want to look them up.

Dull, uninvolving and downright off-putting in the story it tells and the way that it tells it, “Wall” doesn’t make sense until you consider that its star co-directed it. It’s a dubious star vehicle and something of a head-scratcher, even after we realize that.

One thing that separates this film from similar movies (Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book” and “Soldier of Orange” are two of the best) is that it takes the story past the German surrender and into the murky waters of post-Occupation collaborator-hunting.

The story is simple, and the narrative still manages to be muddled here and there, especially towards the end. But Moon Garden is a dazzling use of various effects and animation techniques to tell a child’s-eye-view story of purgatory, or something awfully close to it.

The film’s serious shortcoming is relying on a mystery that we guess instantly, and not serving up any real frights and stylish touches to distract us from the conclusion we see coming early in the first act.

Paskal is a Malaysian Seal Team Six thriller, an action picture that rarely missteps when it’s all about the action, but that takes too many detours into dull, cliched melodrama to recommend.

Lacking that skepticism, with filmmakers hellbent on creating something “sensational” (meh) that fellow believers will want to see, “The House in Between” is never more than an endlessly-hyped collection “Didjoo SEE that? (We see nothing), “Hear THAT?” (maybe a thumb) moments.

There’s something to be said for quitting while you’re ahead.

Torres has plenty of fellow aficionados on camera telling us that they “get it,” but not really why. And he samples so little of the actual film that we’re kind of left in the dark.

The car and foot chases sparkle, even if the blur of edits undercut every other action beat, never letting the eye settle on an actor, an action or an emotion.

It’s a tale too concerned with keeping a secret that’s not a secret at all, and condoning behavior that has might warrant a police “all points bulletin” elsewhere. But it’s well-acted and quite watchable.

It’s a serious “meh,” squishy and sentimental — like a Woody Allen (cough cough) rough draft, with lots more swearing.

Any 100 minute movie with 40 minutes of story, one that blows the romance pretty much entirely and takes a dive in its big moment, is something even teens will outgrow before the closing credits.

As C-movies aiming for B go, “Saints” is watchable if utterly perfunctory in between the fights. It may have “Schrader” on the credits, but there’s not enough of The Master’s Touch here to elevate the material, the leading man or the movie to where it wants to be.

All Toscana has to offer is some decent (limited) scenery, a little taste of high-end cooking, and a love story that’s about as romantic as the one The Bard set in foggy Helsignor.

The entire affair looks pricey but cut-rate at the same time, like a Tesla… The Budweiser product placement does nothing to dispel that.

The setting and set-up are reliable, if a bit desert-southwest tried and true. The acting’s tolerable, the action beats good and the finale has a nice kick to it.

There’s just not enough to this.

As an expose, ScarfFace makes a great surface gloss on this “sport,” just deep enough to suggest how unsavory it all is, perhaps not deep enough to lead to legal action against the filmmakers. The “scandals” surrounding it are usually limited to the deaths.

The story has hints of Edgar Allan Poe and other masters of horror about it, and is clever enough to be well worth a look, no matter how many credited screenwriters it took to come up with it and polish into the production screenplay.

Easley manages some striking if murky and so dimly-lit you can’t follow the action ritual sequences. I could see that footage recycled in nightmare sequences of better films, with better acting and better sound, etc.

The action climax is solid, tense and exciting.

There’s little chemistry between the leads, the dialogue has a drab, lifeless Lifetime Original Movie quality and the sci-fi elements are limited to mundane layman’s-eye-view takes on space travel and a dash of the technology that’s replaced fireworks — “artificial meteor showers.”

Revealer punches above its weight in the production design and acting. But the script needed punching up, with more incidents and more testy one-liners to get through, and the funereal pacing makes what’s here play dull and uninvolving.

It all swirls together in a riot of color, action, deadpan gags and musical and martial arts mayhem, a kids’ movie that rushes by you so fast you won’t want to take a concession stand break.

Would this movie be enough to create a new generation of fans? No. That’s why it ended up on Paramount+, where we old farts can get nostalgic and remember funnier moments from them, their earlier movie and their heydays in MTV’s golden age, with or without the Dulcolax.

After a couple of opening shoot-outs, this straight-up C-movie — directed by Jon Keeyes, scripted by Matthew Rogers — flops into lots and lots of cliche-riddled conversation, some time line stumbles (“Five years earlier,” or is it?) and finishes with a whole lot of gunfire, most of it by The Character Who Never Reloads.

An alternately searing and scalding piece of family history that doesn’t spare the beautiful narcissist doing the examining.

You watch this film and never, for a second, do you forget you’re seeing art in motion.

Trevor: The Musical has pluck and real kids with just-hit-pubertyish voices and kid-simplified choreography awash in positive messaging in a show that feels seriously dated, if worthwhile in the attempt.

What is here –a good if not “all star” cast, colorful characters, the settings and the story — has charm enough to get by even if no one will ever confuse Mr. Malcolm’s List for “Sense & Sensibility.”

There are stretches in this movie, which I saw in a crowded preview last night, where you literally could hear a pin drop. The silence on the soundtrack is breathless, the held breaths of the audience deafening.

While Marcel the Shell with Shoes might have lost its cutesy, two-person production DIY cachet, he finishes the journey to the big screen with his charm and Slate’s wit intact. What he goes through can be laugh-out-loud weird, and surprisingly touching. And if this film is Marcel’s teeny, tiny curtain call as a cultural phenomenon, it’s a perfectly adorable one.

An intimate and moving drama.

Krippendorff squeezes a lot of layers of the urban teen experience into Cocoon’s slim 93 or so minutes, and gives a lot of shades to her characters, who are never simple “types” the way most Hollywood films about high schoolers are.

It makes for an engrossing character study, a Latin film with lots of local color, a hint of magical realism and an air of hopelessness tinged with menace — a unique cinematic experience.

The leads aren’t bad, but this script is fatally flawed and you’d hope they’d notice that before the camera rolls.

This dog never manages much more than a waddle.

Once it finally gets going, The Witch: Part 2, the Other One is impressive. But there’s nothing here that transcends the genre, and what is here is a simple, slow-moving witch-hunt story whose clutter keeps it from ever truly getting up to speed.

The entire affair plays like an attempt to pander to the North American market. But if we wanted to see a slick wish-fulfillment rom-com about a single mom finding success and love on a cooking show, we’d watch The Hallmark Channel and not bother traveling Around the World with Netflix.

Collision is the title of this South African variation on an Oscar winning theme. It’s a slow-footed, convoluted “coincidence” riddled take on the movie in which all of LA’s problems are laid bare thanks to a traffic pileup. So it’s not like director and co-writer Fabien Martorell was hiding his cards or anything.

It’s a stoner “Catastrophe,” for those who remember that Sharon Horgan/Rob Delaney TV series of a few years back — trippier and raunchier if not as sensitive or frankly, as funny.

The results aren’t great. The picture’s predictable except when it’s at its most illogical, and the pacing is slow-footed when it needed to canter. But hell, you throw Thomas Jane, Gabriel Byrne, Scottie Thompson, Anna Camp and Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss against a saloon wall, you’re going to hit something.

The picture’s a bit dry and too quiet for my taste. The puzzle at its center is funny and intriguing, and hardly enough to drive the narrative.

It’s a self-consciously-filmed soft-spoken drama about family, family responsibilities and family secrets, and truthfully a rather drab affair where the stakes are low and the emotions kept in check for the most part.

It’s all in good, violent fun until it gets to be too much and you realize they’re never going to top their big two-hour-mark throwdown.

The picture lives or dies on wheels, and the track scenes, with chase cars, drone shots and the like, are terrific. Eventually, the street chases and races measure up, too. Eventually.

We’re invited to dream along with the filmmakers, without a lot of background, footnotes or interviews with experts or the celebrated folks who once lived there.

This one doesn’t show strain because it doesn’t have to. The charm and the humor are obvious, our investment in their plight easy and the bad guys perfectly hissable.

Elvis works, often brilliantly and always beautifully, a musical bio-pic that’s a little bit “Ray” and “I Walk the Line,” with hints of “Get on Up” “Judy” and “Rocket Man.” It can be frustrating, like the man himself. And who’s to say if its appeal won’t be limited generationally, racially or geographically?

The Erik Patterson and Jessica Scott script is laughably generic, and even the potentially alarming moments are given a cut-rate handling by director Spencer Squire, who hopefully resented the fact that the production didn’t even have money for spectral effects.

The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs becomes a rare look into lives we never see on film and their struggles in a place we never see on film — sunny, scenic and hotly contested Kashmir.

A mesmerizing immersion in music, a “scene” and the obsessions of a member of the “Hey everyone, notice ME” generation.

It’s all of a piece, and just as charming and engrossing as a silly mockumentary about a robot maturing from boot-up to rebellious teens can be. No, Wales doesn’t come off as anything but grey and repressed and backward. But whatever Brian and Charles don’t do for Welsh tourism they more than make up for in warm, goofy entertainment value.

Yes, coincidences rule the day in this story, but that contributes to its compactness. It’s a tight tale with a steadily-escalating threat level based on Robert’s growing obsession with his new “friend,” and the extreme efforts he’s more than eager to make to keep him and them “out of a Latvian prison.”

Gatlopp can show its budget and feel a little malnourished, here and there. And the emotional moments are mostly superficial cliches, with a trite, tried and true familiarity. But no cut-rate, scratch-the-emotional-surface “Jumanji” knock-off should play this cute, funny and sweet.

Impressive as it looks, it’s emotionally lacking, humorless and kind of dull.

The execution is novel, fascinating and just musically/romantically entertaining enough to not totally muck up the suspense that’s built in.

The physical comedy might appeal to younger viewers just getting hooked on anime. . . . Yet the ideal audience for this film is going to skew older, better able to appreciate the themes and the higher-end anime art that Watanabe and his team achieved.

The fact that the voice cast is more competent than comical or charismatic works against the one-liners. But the best sight gag is a winner.

The characters have enough layers to seem human, fully-formed and in equal measure loveable and contemptible.

It’s a mixed bag in itself, but squeezing Chris Hemsworth into an outside-the-box role in between “Thor” outings and having him face-off with Teller in a simple story with a high-end setting and “human choice” morality pays off.

Brown never comes close to transcending the formula this film is made under. But the players, the myopic setting and narrowly-focused screenplay ensure that Trees of Peace is a good example of how and why this formula is still around. It endures because it works.

What’s most impressive about Cha Cha Raal Smooth isn’t Raiff’s riffing, his character’s offhanded charm and his semi-“smooth” cha cha moves. It’s the deft way he lets the viewer figure things out.

Mahdavian is content to sketch in these lives and simply observe two women at their jobs.

It “could be funny,” and certainly is amusing, here and there. But maybe they wrung all the laughs that were in it out of it, and this is all there ever was to it.

It just makes for a cluttered, derivative and somewhat soulless finale to a trilogy that millions embraced and some folks love.

A good cast and the best of intentions cannot save the 1970s Boston school busing melodrama The Walk from its excesses. Funereal pacing, characters that are simplistic “types” and dialogue that recycles cliches and bromides pretty much overwhelm it.

For all his “slow cinema” indulgences and patience-testing “patience” as a story teller, the old master Davies, Lowden (“Dunkirk”) and the poet Sassoon mentored make sure Benediction leaves us with an emotional punch that no film this year can match.

Forget the cop-out of an anti-climax that the makers of The Policeman’s Lineage insisted upon, and you’ve got a decent thriller built around the struggle for a young Korean cop’s soul.

I’m Charlie Walker has just enough “feel good” and “that’ll show them” elements to get by. But I dare say a better film was hacked out of it, at some point. The evidence of that easy enough to see.

The film is something of an unemotional muddle, never quite finding the heart of mother-daughter love it so seems to want to test in this story.

Writer-director Christopher Winterbauer’s Wyrm wears its weirdness like a museum special exhibit — “Mid-century Mod Meets The Absurd.” His loopy debut feature, developed from his earlier short film of the same title, takes on grief and loss and adolescence, coming at every Big Theme and minor subtext just a little off center.

The Perfect Family is so tone-deaf and wrong-footed that you’d feel annoyed at the filmmakers, if you weren’t already busy pitying them.

Sandler’s in a role tailor made for him, and he still lets us see the wheels turning and the effort it takes to make this guy feel real. And for all its half-hearted twists, there’s rarely a minute’s doubt as to where this “Hustle” will end up.

Moloch has a fairly conventional plot with story beats and a resolution that will have the ring of familiarity to anybody who’s ever seen a horror film based on a folk tale. But van den Brink and his crew bathe this beast in a gorgeous murky gloom that sets the tone.

Movies that make you come to them are, by definition, thought-provoking. But aside from concentrating and grasping at any actor, character or plot wrinkle that might let us “into” Cronenberg’s world and thought processes, there isn’t anything here that invites, entertains or even titillates.

A cut-rate cast, green director and a script so bad it wouldn’t attract betters actors or directors is no way to rebuild public confidence in your business, or its “Netflix Original” movies.

As it turns out, a sputtering anti-climax is about all this movie deserves.

Through it all, Akhlaghirad makes a fine, seething muse for Rasoulof, a character who never quite gave up his student protestor past now speaking for a filmmaker who plainly never outgrew his, either.

If it’s worth reciting the decades it took to pack all this imagery into sets so dark that much of it doesn’t register, it’s also worth noting that effects folk are, by definition, masters of making the trees. Whether or not they grasp the “forest” and can tell a compelling, coherent story about it isn’t exactly a given.

I found Cordelia an intriguing, immersive mystery that left me with more questions — not about what’s really going on, but about more mundane third act specifics — than it has answers to.

It’s never as funny as it should be, nor as grimly exciting as it might have been, although there’s a giddy Fosse-meets-hip hop quality to the song and dance, and the wirework/FX-littered fights have their John Woo moments.

Judging from the inane script, the unhurried direction by stuntman-turned-director Jesse V. Johnson, and by the destruction wrought when machine guns tear up cars, houses and people (nothing graphic enough to be “honest), it’s obvious that the budget here went to actors and ordinance.

Co-directors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyma give us a sci-fi dreamscape, a colorful slice of Africa, lovely multi-lingual music, and a “There’s no such thing as a free iPhone” message in their musical. That’s quite the hack they’ve pulled off.