Roger Moore

The pointlessness is the point, and there’s zero entertainment value in that, no matter how many critics throw up their hands and use “fever dream” as a reason to cop out, give it a thumb’s up, and move on.

Tram finds the heart, humanity and humor in all this in the kids, their simpler understanding of the world and simple, goofy solutions to confrontations.

No, it’s not particularly cinematic. It’s not a must that you catch this on the big screen. But if you’re a fan of the show, or have the faintest inkling that you could be one, you should. It’s not deep or all that sophisticated. Yet it’s always quick, and often damned funny.

Most of these gags didn’t make the “movie” for a reason. And those that did and are recycled here don’t add up to the same sort of experience “Forever” delivered.

There’s a reason romantic cliches became cliches. This is one way love develops, and as the script is taken from the memoirs of actor Sergey Fetisov, there’s only so much criticism that’s warranted about the waypoints of this romance.

It’s all cute enough, campy enough and bawdy enough to pass muster. But when you title your film Fire Island you’re not just going where other films and series have gone before. You’re so “on the nose” that nothing we see will surprise.

Derbez remains a likable presence, and that’s the highest praise you can throw at “The Valet” in the feeble hope that it sticks. But even “likeable” wears out its welcome when the story hits the wall at the 60 minute mark, and there aren’t enough jokes to fill a single sitcom episode.

The closing image of We Feed People, Ron Howard’s uplifting documentary about Chef José Andrés and the righteous work he and the non-governmental-organization charity he helped found, World Central Kitchen, is a kicker, one of documentary cinema’s great story-in-a-single-shot punchlines.

It’s not that ambitious, but it’s perfectly executed by Justice, her little-known supporting cast and veteran TV director (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”) Stuart McDonald. I’d say it’s good enough that maybe Ms. Justice can start a little arm-twisting — get her studio to spend a little more on writers, co-stars, etc. That’s how Doris did it.

That quarrelsome, secrets-keeping couple from Cuzco are still saying “Si, mi amor (Yes, my love)” in Let’s Tie the Knot, Honey (¿Nos casamos? Sí, mi amor), an antic if not-quite-silly-enough sequel to their earlier Peruvian rom-com.

The title is far and away the raciest thing about it. It’s closer to a PG-13 rom-com than an R-rated sex farce. Take away ritzy Ibiza, one of two settings, and the story could take place anywhere. And the dull collection of characters struggling with marriage, babies, commitment and “love” are mostly a lost cause for the mostly-Dutch cast trying to make them interesting.

Mondocane is a mixed bag, as its sci-fi without really committing to that, “Oliver Twist” without the warmth, entirely too predictable for stretches and entirely too frustrating in its finale.

Neither the subject nor the movie is for everyone. But On the Count of Three is a fascinating variation on a dark comedy theme, and its light touch with hidden depth is one of the most worthwhile farces about “the only serious question,” as Albert Camus famously put it — “whether or not to kill oneself.”

It’s all in good fun, even if you’re never really surprised by anything, even if your eyes roll with every barrel roll of a plot twist in the later acts. The stunts, the knock-you-around-in-your-seat dogfighting, still has “the need for speed” and a license to thrill.

The “Rescue Rangers” is technically impressive enough to be worth a look. And if you’re of a certain age, it might give you a bit of the warm fuzzies.

The writer-director and his star manage several chills, a bit of breathless suspense and some eyes-averting gore as they challenge us to stare down the threat of “Men” their EveryWoman faces and confronts. And they put us in her shoes, shaken by their violence, handicapped by her own empathy and guilt until she sees the Big Societal Picture — the cruel manipulation of a system engineered to keep her from “the forbidden fruit” and under control.

Rehmeier gives this conventionally unconventional romance some surprises and twists, upending expectations early on and never letting “Dinner in America” settle into “predictable.”

I’ll admit I was probably too sober watching this to appreciate its finer points — or ignore how much the picture slows down in the middle acts. But for me, Ninja Badass runs out of gas at about the “half-assed” point.

Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan gives us a summary of Mongolian history and samples modern Mongolian culture as it takes us to a little-visited piece of Central Asia, a land of forest, desert and steppes surrounded by Russia to the north and China to the south, but influenced most these days by South Korea and the West.

The general comic ineptitude at work here muzzles killer supporting player Chris Parnell (playing her dad) and squanders fine, bubbly work by Rice (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”) in the film’s faster-paced opening act.

What starts out feeling lean and stylishly stripped-down, with a faintly-creepy young lead, waters her down and winds up playing cut-rate, abridged and cheap.

It’s a terrible movie with some pretty good actors, an arresting opening and a few striking images lost in what is otherwise 111 minutes of shouting-at-the-screen crap.

Fellowes gives the characters’ moments that sing, and director Simon Curtis (“My Week with Marilyn,” “Goodbye Christopher Robin”) makes the entire frothy affair skip along, start to finish.

Miracle is a thriller of deceptive simplicity and paralyzing jolts.

In Polish with subtitles, or dubbed into English, “The Getaway King” is a thoroughly charming rogue packed into a perfectly entertaining caper comedy.

The script, alas, runs out of funny situations too quickly, and without those, funny lines become sparse as Tankhouse lurches into the later acts towards its wholly inevitable conclusion.

Private Property struggles to find its footing and never escapes the feeling that we’re watching something out of date.

The jeopardy is built-into the situation, but the frights feel low-stakes and simply don’t get the scary job done.

Mau, which tells a short version of the designer’s life story and early triumphs, dwells mostly on his ongoing crusade, accentuating the positive. The man insists that as we’ve designed these messes, we can design our way out of them.

Thar never quite gets up the head of steam that a generic thriller whose ending is pre-ordained needs to pass muster.

Alvarez knows her audience and has a better idea of what they want to see than I do, so more power to her and best of luck in the future. But maybe a little more effort to skip over or at least conceal the cliches, types and tropes would make that future work more “timeless” than generic and disposable as “this year’s beach romance movie for teens.”

The leads are engaging, but not nearly as much as they and the film they’re in assume they are.

As a fan of Cohn and Duprat’s tighter, darker previous collaborations I was keenly aware of the passage of screen time and slack pacing here. “Official Competition” feels like an 80 minute spoof bundled in the gauze of a 115 minute film.

It’s a slight film, but as befits something as introspective and spooky as this, it’s not delicate or dainty.

What a tin-eared foot-fault of a comedy 40-Love is.

Its 81 drab minutes pass by like a long, labored comic death rattle.

This warm, embracing little film — catching up with old friends from “the road,” remembering epic road trips following the band, chatting with other, even-more-devoted fans and even the director of another Deadhead documentary — vividly creates a sense of the community that the band inspired, with its own economy, values and shared creed.

The more we know, the less mysterious and less interesting Escape the Field is. The more that’s revealed, the more obvious the panic amongst those writers becomes.

Though other films have followed the drama of those earliest days there — “In the Same Breath” and “76 Days” — Chang’s film takes the unusual tack of personalizing the pandemic, and humanizing the first population trapped in it.

Marceau remains an arresting screen presence, but that’s severely tested by Azuelos’ inane, meandering and trite tale of love, loss and closure, wrapped in a female wish fulfillment fantasy.

This isn’t one of the best movies of this genre. But when at its best, it takes Marvel places it’s been entirely too timid to go before, and I’m NOT talking about this endlessly flogged “multiverse” business.

Writer-director Valentyn Vasyanovych (“Atlantis,” “Black Level”) uses irony, horror and a sober-minded, unspoken acceptance of “this is the way our lives are now” to tell a quiet, harrowing story of one extended family’s experiences of the war.

In losing its nerve, it’s neither fish nor fowl, dramedy nor comedy, an is doomed to wander across your Netflix screen like a pilgrim in the comic/cosmic wilderness, a picture with a purpose, but no rewarding way of fulfilling it. It feels like work.

Kongsi Raya may never fully shake the feeling that we’re watching a Malaysian take on some Doris Day “Virgin Queen” rom-com from the early 1960s. But Chin manages to get G-rated laughs out of this subject in 2022, which is saying something.

All My Puny Sorrows never quite escapes the burden of its genre. The literary framework artificially raises the tone of the discussion, but heavy helpings of voice-over narration weigh on it with a gravitas that is already implied and need not be pounded into our ears, scene after scene.

The kids are pretty good actors, but this clumsy, hacked-together story does nobody any credit.

It’s adorable, finding laughs (look for the Bond joke in the finale) and connecting with shared sentiments. It’s one last feather in the cap of a filmmaker who always touched as he entertained, who often wore his heart on his sleeve and made damned sure his actors did as well.

This isn’t the least interesting story I’ve ever seen told in anime, but it’s right up there. The dialogue’s of the “I wish I had parents! To talk me OUTTA things like this!” school.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the filmmakers hope, that you’ll be so swept up in “representation” that you won’t notice how generic the story is, and how dull and drab and laugh-starved its execution turns out to be.

As a film, its mix of interviews, little snippets of street life and Goodman’s drawled history lessons take a back seat to the loose and breezy recording sessions all around town. There’s no re-inventing the wheel, here.

It’s still a half-decent movie, closer to Neeson’s late-career “Taken” peak than his most recent films. But if he’s letting the audience see the writing on the wall, it might be time for him to stop and read it, too.

There’s a lighter, funnier, sexier movie in this material. But it was probably the one already made in Argentina, without the cool dance numbers.

Rondini does her best to give the picture “local color” — an octopus fished out of Homer’s “wine dark sea,” a town square that feels utterly Mediterranean. But there’s not enough “color,” jokes, romance, surprises or incidents — just the occasional accident — to animate this still-life.

Co-writer and director João Paulo Miranda Maria serves up a limited-dialogue parable of racism, cultures clashing and the violence that ripples from that in this film. Using limited dialogue, just a handful of characters and behavior that ranges from intolerant to monstrous cruelty, he parks Traditional Brazil squarely in the path of outsiders-with-a-different-agenda Brazil.

It’s not a bon bon or a comic delight. But Bourgeois-Tacquet and her muse Demoustier give coquettes, gamines and manic pixie dream girls (a Hollywood staple) the kind of butt-kicking all those people who misguidedly hated poor Amelie for decades ago longed for.

I still don’t see why this not-that-fantastical fantasy needed to be animated, and no, “just because it’s a manga” is not reason enough. It’s nobody’s idea of a deep dive into making movies, and not even a particularly entertaining take on the subject.

The things that should make it work are here, most of them anyway. The fact that it doesn’t draw you in or deliver an ending with impact doesn’t mean it couldn’t have.

Madden, screenwriter Michelle Ashford and the cast perform their greatest service in reminding us that real history, unadorned, can make the best drama.

It’s not all that original and not actually on a par with the benchmark films of this corner of horror, “Night of the Living Dead,” “28 Days Later,” “World War Z” and “Zombieland.” But Hernández shows a flair for thrillers and an eye for showy visual storytelling that, with his third film (after “La casa muda” and “You Shall Not Sleep”) establishes him as a horror director to watch.

It’s still a mess of a movie, with no flow to its long, meandering narrative (I see why they chopped it, but they should have done a better job of it.). And “Man of God” never wants to let us connect with a character we’d root for.

Director Carnevale and screenwriters Fernando Balmayor and Nicolás Giacobone (“Birdman”) completely and utterly lose the thread in the “message” and “moral of the story” department. And most annoying of all, their puzzlingly, infuriatingly vapid movie takes two hours doing it.

The dawdling pace, meandering story and drifting point of view blunt this hooligan tale’s impact and pull its punches. It’s a “Clockwork Orange” without a social message, a hooliganism expose without much of a point, something the frustrating finale only underscores.

Hatching, titled Pahanhautoja in Finnish, is a sins-of-the-mother creature feature parable played out in blunt, gruesome strokes in director Hanna Bergholm’s film, based on a script by Ilja Rautsi.

The picture’s meandering story told at a quiet, balletic pace rob it of much of the intensity that such Warning Labels for Ballet movies thrive on.

Mountain goat attacks, bee shenanigans, squabbling conspirators and boorish local tourism appeals from a town that isn’t quite popular, isn’t really quaint and is not the least bit funny in itself hobble this already-too-tame “Taming” from start to finish.

Peace by Chocolate is a charming, almost achingly-sweet fish-out-of-water comedy about Syrian Civil War refugees adjusting to life in small town Canada. Considering the family business they try to establish — chocolate making– “sweet” is pretty much a given.

Even with the conspiracy and implied frame-up plot unfolding, the first hundred minutes of this “Drive” is too timid to deserve its over-the-top climax and over-explained payoff.

The leads click just well enough in a serio-comic “bromance” sort of way. And Antonaroli ensures that the story clips along, never letting us lose the thread or the fact that the stakes are literally life and death, something underscored by the hammer blows of the finale.

The band’s rippling impact is undeniable.

Veteran British nature documentarian Alastair Fothergill and his “Penguins” director partner Jeff Wilson give us a sober-minded call to action in this beautifully-shot film.

Not every player has the screen presence of our leading lady, so director Symington never lets a scene go by that Lelia Symington isn’t in the center of.

There’s not a whole lot to this, but Tsang injects a lot of visual variety, and a few laughs, into “The Black Hole” that Sammy must magically extract herself from.

Drljaca gives this simple story just enough melodrama to get by, and frankly it could have used more. But it is an engrossing portrait of romance in a beautiful place not-that-many-decades removed from a genocidal civil war.

It’s almost disappointing that the movie plays things more or less straight after that jarring first act.

It’s funny enough so long as Cage and Pascal are bromancing their way towards that big pay off/stand-off, the one you’ve seen in all the trailers because, let’s face it, it sells “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.”

This three-part picture is more interesting than titillating, a film best appreciated as a semi-sordid slice of interior lives in a culture that worships good manners and may or may not have invented pornography, but certainly perfected it in either case.

Taken as a whole, the film is the quintessence of “mixed bag,” with some sketch situations, characters and performances commanding our attention, and others just sort of drifting by, “connecting” the disparate stories but accomplishing little else.

Blown chances aside and paced fast or stumbling into slow, “Apples” is never less than cute and often pretty funny.

"Yaksha” has lurid red light district fights and embassy heists, laugh-out-loud insults and the funniest use of “drones” as a plot device of any espionage thriller.

While not all Holocaust sagas are created equal, an uncensored, grim realities and all treatment of Salomon’s life would certainly be novel enough to warrant the telling. That’s a case Charlotte never makes.

The portrait that emerges is that of a dogged, principled (by Russian standards) muckraker who exposes corruption in the Russian oligarchy, an accomplished TikTok/Youtube warrior who uses such platforms to broadcast his exposes and organize his movement since most Russian media are afraid to cover him.

For a horror movie, Night’s End comes up awfully short in frights. Even the manufactured quick-cut “jolts” couldn’t alarm a toddler, even if the SHRIEK accompanying them would wake anybody.

For all its attempts at delivering a heartfelt message, the finale is more something that unravels than resolves. But Everything Everywhere All at Once is still something to see, something that demands to be seen in a cinema, mouth agape at the wonders playing out on the huge wall — the bigger the IMAX the better — in front of you.

Based on the children’s books by Aaron Blabey, the plot isn’t all that, but The Bad Guys sparkles to life when it’s at its most antic — frantic chases, capers going wrong or just heated, animated debates in the gang.

Although I can’t go all-in on Choose or Die, I will say that there’s a lot to be said for a horror movie with clever twists, a top flight cast and a witty consistency to its conceit.

There are thrillers that build toward a climax and thrillers that blow the ending after succeeding in creating suspense. Room 203 never really gets up a head of steam and just sort of peters out in a predictable, anti-climactic finale.

This may not be Rylance’s greatest film, the stakes being as low as they are. But his impersonation is both uncanny — stay through the credits — and adorable.

The film captures the essence of an event that “ties the city together.”

It doesn’t all come together as neatly as it might have, and there are potential laughs and screwball moments left dangling. But Winograd sticks with what he knows, sentiment, and makes this “Fix” stick.

Wahlberg and the movie are likable enough, but overstay their welcome like a priest or pastor who never mastered the art of wrapping things up.

Too many characters means there’s somebody for everybody to potentially identify with, but none of them have enough to do, with only Law and to a lesser degree Mikkelsen, who brings real contempt and menace to Grindelwald, making much of an impression.

Edwin keeps the tone machismo-deflating and goofy, and the film on its feet between fights. Our leads have enough chemistry when they’re throwing down that their characters’ problematic love life together seems immaterial.

There is nobody to relate to. That makes the movie’s muddled message a chore to plow through and its payoff more of a shrug that the sharp slap it could have been.

The lack of frights and jolts and general mesmerizing tone of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair make it “horror” only in terms of the mood. It feels more like a stab at social commentary and satire.

It’s never less than epic, never less than the new benchmark in Viking stories put on film.

Panahi spins all this into a road comedy with a bittersweet aftertaste, letting us laugh out loud at the travel companion from Hell — or at least “The Ransom of Red Chief” — while wistfully reminding us of loss and leave-takings, the helpless desperation of running afoul of an authoritarian state, the very foundations of heartbreak.

As Sonic the Hedgehog 2 blows up the box office on its opening weekend, it’s worth reminding one and that while this may be cheesy, inane and only suitable for the ten-and-unders, you’re saving the cinema, the movie-going experience, and getting kids back in a habit that could easily disappear.

Playground is so vividly-detailed that it could be triggering to anyone whose childhood wasn’t ideal. And even if you don’t get ugly flashbacks from it, you will marvel how any of us get through this hazing rite of passage without permanent scars or long-term psychotherapy.

It’s “post death/doom metal” served with a side of cheese, and it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

For a movie built on probing conversations, details and relationships, it’s pretty good. Not in the LeCarre class, but imitation is the sincerest form of spycraft flattery.

Audiard has conjured up a fascinating snapshot of love in the age of easy, online-assisted sex. Paris, 13th District feels both authentic and thanks to its dreamy setting, as romantic as only affairs in the City of Love can be, whether they involve courtesans or college students.

The slick, confusing and yet somehow familiar Egyptian thriller 30. March forces the Western viewer to engage it in one’s own film comfort zone — genre. It’s a “clear my name” or “Could I really have done this?” thriller with a disorienting lack of sure-footing.

As a filmmaker, Kundalkar’s sense of pace seems borrowed from Russian novelists — the most long-winded ones. Watching this movie is like watching cobalt paint dry for long stretches.

It’s probably meant to be funnier than I took it, but at least the slaughterhouse smorgasbord laid out here has a light touch.

Mericoffer keeps this interior journey on simmer for most of the film, only exploding in his “protests too much” reaction to being confronted with some version of his true self. It’s a compact, tightly-wound performance, which suits the film beautifully.

Ambulance is 80 minutes of pure mayhem wallowing through 140-150 minutes of pure Michael Bay hokum.

No, it doesn’t come off. The entire enterprise feels under-developed and hamstrung, and not just by whatever level of “lockdown” conditions this was filmed under.

Whatever Mothering Sunday lacks in emotional payoffs, it’s the shattered tone that Husson gets across that makes it work. Few films have done as well at capturing the disorienting, utterly-deflating feeling of a grief everyone involved realizes they will never, ever get over, so there’s no sense even trying to talk about it.

Bull is a magnificently malevolent creation, on the page and in the flesh.

But I can’t remember a Marvel movie that went to less trouble giving us an “origin story,” that put more effort into tying the tale into this corner of the Marvel “universe,” and that had less going for it.

Waterman is a grand feel-good remembrance of an epic life, a documentary that could make even non-surfers and “haoles” (non-Hawaiians) swell with tearful pride that the human race ever produced this “bronze god” who walked among us and changed the world.

Grasping for meaning in its unsettling, occasionally comic and always cryptic “relationship” can be an interesting thought exercise.

It was always going to be a chilling, emotionally deflating film. Kurzel and Grant double-down on that by not showing the murders and not focusing on the victims. And they finish it off with a coda that doesn’t let the way this slaughter impacted Australian society get sugar-coated, the way it’s often discussed in the US.

An intimate piece of romantic folklore with breathtaking geographical ambition, The Tale of the King Crab comes to theaters feeling familiar, but startling in what it shows us and where it takes us.

Yes, it’s dull and mostly-predictable. But it’s more of a near miss than you might expect.

Forget the logical lapses and the many ways Grant tries to differentiate the many Madelines. It just doesn’t play — not as funny, not as horrific and funny.

There are a couple of effective moments, a chill here and there, a canted camera that captures Grace’s possession by whatever “snake” this cult worships.

This high-mileage/hard-mileage cast crackles and sells the conceit, that aged Brits — whom no one would suspect because Britain’s native-born criminal element long ago lost its initiative and its edge to “Albanians” and foreign imports — could pull this off.

It takes a while to settle into Loznitsa’s storytelling style and get a handle on the points he’s making. Non-natives aren’t going to pick up on every allusion, the nuances of accent or even the differences between the Russian and Ukrainian being spoken (with subtitles).

McDonough co-scripted this contrived star vehicle, a thriller that lets you see all the wheels arbitrarily set in motion and hear every gear that grinds along the way.

Brighton 4th is the kind of ambling, immersive movie that you check out for the chance to visit a different culture and see the world through others’ eyes, but that you remember for its warmth, the connection that binds people who never let themselves be simply resigned to their family obligations.

[A] wordless, moving and sometimes unsettling documentary.

Ostrochovský never quite achieves “riveting” with this narrative. But he’s made a chilling reminder of the Bad Old Days, when the Cold War might have given the world moral clarity about who was for freedom and civil liberties and who sought to quash them.

The arc of this story is insipid to tragically sad. And neither extreme is certain to provoke more than an indifferent shrug from even the most saccharine-tolerant viewer.

Apollo 10 1/2 might have been utterly forgettable without the rotoscoped adding of computer-painted rose-colored glasses. But in this form, it becomes something timeless, not autobiography (Linklater’s parents divorced when he was 7), but a sweet and somewhat innocent memory play animated in brighter-than-real-life color, a summary of how things were in an America that accomplished great things even as its institutions strained at revolutionary/evolutionary change that continues to this day.

X doesn’t reinvent one of the most popular, time-tested horror genres so much as breathe a little life into it.

The plot is convoluted, not the least bit inviting or deep and frankly puerile, with PG-13 violence and “darkness” draped over it.

The fact that “Lost City” still plays, still delivers plenty of cute and sometimes bawdy laughs amidst all the homages, tributes to and “borrowings” from better films is a tribute to its stars and its one great conceit — that it’s taking on a jokey, derivative genre, and everybody in it is in on that joke.

The frights are muted, but the air of dread that hangs over Irish writer-director Kate Dolan’s debut feature makes it an immersive experience, one anybody with “mother issues” will quickly identify with.

Watts’ stoic, sturdy performance and the film’s affecting and formula-busting third act make this Infinite Storm well worth weathering.

The complications in each character’s lives are funny, wholly believable and just nasty enough to rule out any second date as this never-ending first one staggers on and on, towards an ending we may see coming, but not without a few serious twists to navigate along the way.

Master never shakes the feeling that we’re seeing a collection of tropes and ideas that never come together in a coherent narrative.

Noomi is good, the supporting “types” perfectly serviceable, the look — that killer image of combat team skating into the darkness from their base as it is being bombed to bits — arresting. But that ending? It’s a bust.

That scenery — hot springs, stunning vistas, the glories of Machu Picchu and a seaside finale near Nazca — offers some compensation for the cute nothing that this movie is. Not enough, but some.

Marilyn’s Eyes has a few ideas worth running with. But in an effort to not be “problematic,” to show these people’s problems as real enough to make them a danger to themselves or others, the filmmakers have created a mental health comedy that manages almost nothing that’s funny, and a dramedy nobody would believe, in or out of Italy.

Win a Trip to Browntown! is a “family” comedy about anal sex, an almost-laugh-free lurch along the not-so-fine-line between “insipid” and “insufferable.”

Squared Love is a vapid little “Around the World with Netflix” bauble from Poland, a romance about a teacher whose side hustle is modeling.

It’s a moving, harrowing film that hangs on a beatifically transparent performance by screen newcomer Zhaila Farmer.

Windfall isn’t bad. It’s just predictable and dully inconsequential.

An utterly adorable hero dog tale based on a true story.

“Cheaper” in this case plays like a TV pilot, one that could use a lot more laughs.

Despite Palmer’s investment in the title role, there’s little more to add about Alice except that it shows up two years too late, even less logical, and a lot of budget dollars short of “Antebellum."

Gibson shows up just to add a splash of color and swagger to what seems like an endless wait between action beats.

Whatever the film’s shortcomings, you can’t say the cast isn’t on the mark and that Lyne, at the very least, still has it and remains very much a master at sucking us in and making us care, no matter who the hero and who the villain might be.

Hell Hath No Fury hath no fury, and rarely even rises to the level of “fitfully entertaining.”

The film itself is an innocuous but pleasant “Junior High School Musical” from the writer/creator of that Disney blockbuster — Federle — with Gabriel Mann (“A Million Little Things”) serving up pleasantly forgettable songs.

It’s the mesmerizing Rylance and the film’s theatrical single-set stage “mystery” that sell The Outfit, a “cutter” in his element, showing not just what he makes, but what he’s made of in this minimalist mob tale built around a mild-mannered man who takes the measure of everyone he meets.

A stellar cast makes us invest in this tragedy-in-the-making, because it’s the rough patches and detours that let Streamline find its way to clear water.

As this biography of an autistic fashion designer progresses and we notice who most of those outside the family are giving testimonials to Kyle’s treatment and his prognosis are from the same “institute,” “Let Me Be Me” prompts a wary raised eyebrow of skepticism.

Most of the attempted humor here is about clueless old folks still able to get a dirty job done and the enervating shrug of deciding whether or not to just “give up” themselves. The fights are fun, but far between.

Love and Leashes seems far more intent on explaining and removing “fear of the unknown” and the label “pervert” from BDSM than it is in actually titillating, amusing or entertaining as it does.

Blumenthal’s stirring story would be an invaluable addition to any anthology of various survivors’ experiences. But when the ethos of keeping these stories alive is “Never Again,” and “Never again” was happening again right in front of Ella Blumenthal and her entire family for decades upon decades, it isn’t “off message” for your movie to make some effort to address it. Ignoring that is disingenuous at best, and tone deaf at the very least.

Ultrasound challenges us to go with our instincts and first impressions no matter what we learn about characters later on, only to upend those impressions on occasion. It puzzles and annoys and maybe even infuriates.

Simple as it is, Ash & Dust lurches between incoherent and shout-at-the-screen mess and there’s barely a minute that’s worth sitting through the other 83 minutes of it for.

The mystery doesn’t entirely play fair, not that it’s interesting enough to entice one into sticking with this. The acting is pretty bad, and there’s a general unpleasantness to the proceedings that makes the film a video equivalent chastity belt.

Everything here is something we’ve seen before — chases, “light saber” fights, the big Bond-sized set-piece finale. It gets fairly tedious fairly early on.

Ahed’s Knee isn’t as sexy, satiric and light as its Felliniesque opening promises. But Lapid manages to make a lot of points about the creative person’s life in modern Israel, the sensitivities triggered and the moral quandary a thinking Israeli finds her or himself in.

“Bombardment” pulls you in, and like the worst videos from Russia’s murderous invasion of Ukraine, doesn’t flinch from showing us the heartbreaking slaughter of war and its frantic-search-for-survivors aftermath.

Gold isn’t really bad. It’s just not enough to amount to anything, or anything much.

The occasional blood-curdling scream notwithstanding, Offseason is more chilling and gloomy than frightening.

Stourton (“The Spy Who Dumped Me”) makes a depressingly relatable Mr. Put-Upon, with a hapless humorlessness that makes that “one of the funniest guys on the planet” the biggest insult of all.

Clutter aside, it’s a likeable, well-intentioned mess of a comedy, one that’ll leave you with the warm fuzzies even if it loses the “thread” once, twice or thrice along the way.

Fear can’t help but cover familiar immigrant narrative ground. But Hristov and his characters maintain a deadpan drollery that makes this grimmer take on the migrant’s plight and Eastern Europe’s often hateful backwardness play as lighter than it really is.

There are moments, here and there, where you can see what a pretty good cast saw in the possibilities of the material.

The plot is convoluted to the point that the picture is almost never not ponderous. There’s a lot more “history” than is probably necessary, and less comedy than was required to make this come off. Still, it’s kid-friendly and martial arts-happy and almost on a par with the least of the Depp “Pirates” pictures.

Turning Red isn’t so much a bad movie as a tentative one. It came to life with grand intentions, some cute characters, a ready-made toy tie-in and a hint of controversy. It plays as focus-grouped and watered-down — not the daring, boundary-pushing children’s edutainment it might have been.

Guttenberg is bad, and while not everybody on board is as bad or worse, enough of them are to make you puzzle over how something this crummy, but not crummy enough to be any fun, ever got made.

We never buy the gorgeous Hassouni as anything remotely “Meskina,” as if that’s part of the “fairy tale” that is her life. The laughs are too scattered for this to pay off.

The lifeless script, the aimlessness that drifts from scene to scene and the eye-rolling cliche of a payoff and finale give away a movie that’s running on fumes, not ideas.

And “iPhone ad” or not, watching Watts power through this picture with nothing jogging togs and Apple’s pride and joy has me sold. Maybe I’ve bought my last Android after all.

The plot works its way past red herrings and into anti-climaxes, never quite drowning in melodrama, but coming damned close, time and again.

If you’re a fan of the genre, or even if you’re just well-versed in the Sean Connery Bond era, The Unknown Man from Shandigor is sure to impress and amuse, shaken or stirred.

Veteran Danish director Peter Flinth (“Beatles” and “Nobel’s Last Will” were his) delivers a film that feels approved by its co-writer and star in terms of thoroughness, but that lumbers as it passes from one waypoint to the next in the standard “alone in the Arctic” narrative.

I’d say there’s about 40 minutes of playful cult fun-poking here, and a movie that goes on an hour beyond that expiration point.

UFO is a cheerfully cheesy, sometimes sappy and always formulaic teen romance from the “bad boys on bikes” school.

It’s too long, and maybe there’s a little too much concern about the way Pattinson’s hair flops over one eye. But from first frame to last, Reeves matches the master, Christopher Nolan in two important regards. As in the last Nolan “Dark Knight,” this Batman is embattled and almost overwhelmed by a city and its institutions coming apart at the seams. And like Nolan’s “Knights,” this beast of a movie looks, sounds and plays as epic.

Rookie Season is the quintessential “vanity project,” with decent enough race footage and banal nothings delivered in voice-over by the drivers, with the Scottish champ Liddell taking care to be diplomatic about how he characterizes the rich poseur who wrecks the car in early races as DePew devotes himself to conquering a steep learning curve.

Director, co-writer and star Nicolas Maury (“Dear Prudence,” “Paris, je t’aime”) serves up a dry comedy that invites us to watch Jérémie suffer and laugh at him as he haplessly copes with everything confronting him over the course of this lightly-amusing film (titled “Garçon chiffon” in French).

Gastambide is right on the cusp of adequate in playing a corrupt cop on the verge of panicking. Abkarian is menacing enough to suggest he can still hold his own in a fight. But the performances are generally on a par with the screenplay — perfunctory.

Not all of it works. But giddy moments and goofy touches — former Bond villain Steven Berkoff shows up as “my inspiration,” the ghost of infamous 1930s novelist, occultist, thinker and druggy Alastair Crowley — put Creation Stories over.

No, this isn’t deep. But there are some surprises and just enough laughs. If you’ve ever dealt with family over the death of a relative, the sting of recognition alone is worth an extra giggle or two.

As child kidnapping/trafficking thrillers go — and yes, there have been scores of these — No Exit barely stands out from the pack and overreaches at times. But it puts us in somebody’s snow-caked shoes and dares us to reason or fight our way out of this with her, which is all you can ask.

There’s style and a vivid sense of place in this most unusual movie, a film of future tech and sonic booming jets and unelectrified farms where the work is still done by hand, the way it has been for hundreds of years. That makes this “Walk” long, but rewarding in the end.

Any time you can top your tale of crisis, calamity and heroism with sacrifice, pathos and a hopeful message, you call that a “win,” in Hollywood or Aelsund.

When you set your romance against the most aesthetically pleasing watersport of them all — kite surfing — you’d better make sure the melodramatic story is fun, tortured, twisty and/or steamy enough to keep folks from wondering, “When’re they going to show more kite surfing?”

The drama is compelling enough, and the messaging is vague by-design and with good reason. But the meandering interwoven stories don’t gel in ways heighten the drama or add weight to the message.

Ronnie’s is a gloriously musical celebration of the club where everyone from Dizzy to Sonny, Chet to Miles, Sarah and Ella to Carmen and Cleo held forth.

There’s Barcelona scenery and sex, posh parties and sex, and obvious foreshadowing and melodrama at every turn. Subtle? Not in the least.

It’s not the least bit original, which is no cardinal sin. But without the laughs, “Love Tactics” plays like a travelogue with kissing.

This is an intimate epic that alarms as it sprints out of the gate, settles into a lingering tension and even as it is winding down, manages to keep the viewer frightened and on tenterhooks. That’s what living under a fascist regime is like.

A Grand Romantic Gesture is a wistful romance in a minor key, a flash of “love, the second (or maybe last) time around” with no flash at all.

Stone cold sober, King Knight is a bit of a sweet-spirited grind, funny intent delivering funny moments that are so scattered the picture never gets up a comic head of steam.

Every sequence has gags that just kill, situations that are a hoot in the making.

The most universally relatable thing about Anne+ is the confusion and panic over the direction many of us haven’t figured out we want our lives to take in our 20s. That’s Anne in a nutshell.

Whatever Agladze was getting at about the difference between sight and “seeing,” plumbing the obscurant Other Me to discern it isn’t worth the trouble.

Writer/director Callie Khouri and screenwriter Angelina Burnett (TV’s “Boss,” “Halt and Catch Fire”) correct that. And with the two Broadway stars they cast, women who do their own singing, they give us a brisk (OK, rushed), sentimental “behind the glamour” gloss of a bio-pic.

I’ll Find You comes off like a lot of the lip-sync’d singing and mimed playing of the actors portraying musicians — fake and lacking the heart and passion necessary to pull this off.

Robinson’s purpose here is to cut through the lies, propaganda and rhetoric and look at what all those folks so anxious to ban and even burn books are trying to cover up.

The film invites us to imagine interior lives, a narrowing of the “pursuit of happiness” to tasks at hand, modest goals, music, food and love. As our pandemic waxes and wanes, “Lunana” becomes one of the great cinematic escapes of recent years.

Cyrano is meant to make you cry, and this musical and its star do, and more than once.

You could Oscar short-list the production design (Pascal Le Guellec, Thierry Zemmou) and art direction (Patrick Schmidt, Paulo Gonçalves), even pay special homage to Ellis’s cinematography. That doesn’t change the fact that the writer/director/DP has made a werewolf movie as pretty as a painting, and almost as animated. It looks better than it plays.

No social, psychological or satiric point is made. No laughs are scored. And nobody involved will be slapping this on their “sizzle reel” or resume…save for the writer-director, who may be beloved but who may never ever get to make another movie after this “all-star” debacle.

If you love Foo Fighters and have a soft spot for the “splattertoons” corner of horror, you won’t want to miss Studio 666.

The computer in a human body thing could have delivered laughs, but the slapstick is limited and Mauro’s jerky motions, quizzical looks and machine-as-human quirks never quite get there.

The trailer to this was frenetic enough that I came in expecting something zippier and wittier. I laughed maybe twice. That could be a “wrong generation to ‘get it'” thing. But I’m putting my money on “This ugly, gross, spittle-spattered and incoherent junk movie just isn’t funny.”

The acting is bad, but the script is “Do you want fries with that?” awful, as that might be where we next encounter this hack Craig Thomas Devlin. Garcia’s direction makes “lackluster” seem aspirational.

The acting can feel flat and unpolished, and the intimacy of the story is both an asset and a limitation to its ambitions. But any horror fan looking for the next “came out of nowhere” genre phenomenon need look no further. It’s not the “Citizen Kane” of witch movies, but it’s creepy and DIY fun and well worth tracking down.

10 Truths About Love plays as about eight truths under budget, a parsimonious rom-com that needed a better script, better director, funnier supporting players and co-equal leads who actually click.

As action pictures go, this one isn’t exciting enough to make up for the tedious pacing or the outright silliness of the script and the woodenness of the performers.

Even if Hurley has only one movie in him and this hit-and-miss proposition is it, Hurley’s personal story is fresh and engaging enough to stand out, a coming-of-age saga with modest ambitions that get to the heart of some still “self evident” truths — the freedom to be who you are, life your life and pursue your own dream of America.

Screenwriter Lauryn Kahn and director Mimi Cave take a broad swipe at “Just give me a smile,” sexism and the objectification of women. Their aim is dark comedy — darker than dark, darker even than “Promising Young Woman.” But the chuckles are mostly in the finale.

Sure, you can hire an Italian Robert Pattinson look-alike as your “recruiter/groomer” for “undead” fresh blood in your “Romeo & Juliet rise from the grave” romantic thriller. Doesn’t mean you have to lay on the fairy dust glitter and what not.

Leave this one to fans of the series, because as a stand-alone movie, it’s a dud.

The trip is amusing enough, the doggy excesses funny and the climax, pre-ordained by their destination, will punch you right in the heart — not hard, just enough to deploy that hanky.

The Ledge has a simple set-up, a naturally perilous setting, a convincing heroine and a whole lot of hanging around, waiting for the next “That could never happen” narrow escape.

There’s a whole lot of “bizarre” going here, but it’s easy enough to follow and its meaning and message are simple enough to understand.

Holland’s kinetic turn as the young pickpocket/historian and bartender turned adventurer is emphatic proof that it’s not just digital effects and stuntmen in that spider suit. But the movie? It’s as edgy as a Scooby Doo mystery, as plausible a “National Treasure” mashup with “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Director and co-writer Tony Stone built his script out of Kaczynski’s endless writings, his letters to the editor, his phone calls with his increasingly estranged and eventually alarmed family, and out of his infamous newspaper-published “manifesto.” And Copley brings the articulate, twisted and deranged writings to life.

Minamata doesn’t have the punch or paranoia of “Silkwood.” But I’d say Levitas, Depp & Co. have delivered a “message movie” with as much pathos and righteousness as the pollution lawsuit drama “Dark Waters.” And at least this one isn’t about a heroic lawyer.

Like the master big screen poker player than he is, Roth never ever shows his cards.

The Privilege is a too-predictable German mashup of a couple of horror genres and several paranoid thrillers, all underscored by the big idea in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”

About the best one can say about “TG2” is that in addition to never surprising and never moving us emotionally, it never offends.

“My Best Friend” remembers the playful, rebellious and occasional mean girl that Anne was in a somewhat staid but well-acted film about Anne’s last years.

All these disparate boons, bonuses and bungles combine to make The Fabulous Filipino Brothers a film that transcends it failings and becomes not just funny and warm enough to work, but a cultural touchstone, a movie well worth dropping in on if you enjoyed any of other “cultures among us” comedies that preceded it.

It’s not half bad, with a couple of decent fights — and a few where the fight choreographer’s instructions are a bit too obvious — and a fine finale, the scenes that come after two or three “explanations” too many.

And our child-actress-turned-young adult girl-next-door lead makes this flawed heroine sympathetic enough that she wears you down even as the movie around her sometimes just wears you out.

An engaging if undemanding romantic outing, newfangled enough to be social media-current, old fashioned enough to warrant bringing the whole family. Just remember to brush your teeth afterwards.

I Want You Back is a rom-com that sort of drifts along, not quite petering out, not exactly sparking to life, until that magical moment when Pete Davidson shows up.

Let’s not think too much about the resolution to Stacey Gregg’s haunting Here Before. It’s too pat to feel satisfying after all that we’ve invested in that’s come before it. But what we’ve seen and settled into up to that climax is another sublime performance from Andrea Riseborough, one of the subtlest and most expressive actresses working today.

Donkeyhead has heart and humor in nicely matched doses, and is good enough that you hope Darshi has another movie in mind as a follow-up, and that Netflix has the sense and Canadian dollars to let her make it.

Neeson always gives fair value in these woebegone, quick-and-dirty actioners. But closing in on 70, the fakery meant to show him brawling or driving too fast and what not isn’t that subtle.

A tram here, a car there, a little attention to wardrobe, and contrasting haircuts (a Hitler/Himmler buzz was the dead give-away somebody was a Nazi) and we get an idea of what this world looked like. But “Fabian” fails to immerse us in that world, and being as leisurely as a limited series in its pacing, loses the urgency of what to later audiences can only be a “cautionary” tale.

The human stuff is entirely too predictable. And the whole thing is so Disney sweet and cutesey it’ll make your teeth hurt.

A Death on the Nile that never lets us forget its quality and attention to detail, but forgets to be much in the way of fun.

Reinsve makes a more beguiling than compelling lead, letting on Julie’s “flakey” qualities, giving us hints that she’s self-aware enough to be bothered by them.

I think I laughed once.

Bell, appearing on camera but speaking in voice-over like everybody else, makes the celebration fun and the tragedy bittersweet in this fine tribute to the mother she only got to know and appreciate “too late” to gain the full benefits of being raised by an icon.

The payoff doesn’t totally makeup for the longueurs that introduce Alone With You. But there’s promise enough and the picture’s short enough that it’s not a total waste of time, or waste of a lot of time.

It’s just a spooky period piece with some neat red fog effects, tepid dialogue and a mystery so slow to unravel, with so little urgency to it, that simply sticking with it to the closing credits might be the biggest test of all.

There’s barely a hint of fun and nary a drop of pathos in any of this.

Jackass Forever is a valedictory victory lap for the scruffy little troupe of “stunt” dudes who risk almost certain injury — and certain humiliation — for laughs, lowbrow fame and cold-hard-cash.

Yes, there are surprises and a scene crackles, here and there. But the tony haute cuisine milieu can fool you into thinking that there’s more to this than the chic, perfectly-presented appetizer this is.

The plot is a tangle of storylines, alternate suspects, femme fatales and dead-end subplots which add up to little that isn’t obvious or that makes much sense.

The Conductor is an engaging, musically-adept documentary that tracks Marin Alsop’s dogged march to make her “first woman to head a major symphony orchestra” dream come true.

The debut feature of writer-director Aimee Long is a somber, thought-provoking essay on policing, race, firearms and family.

Lacking a more coherent organizing principle than “fly on the wall/slice of life” renders Stop-Zemlia — which takes its title from a sort of long-running game of slap-tag — somewhat colorless, if not entirely pointless.

The film still manages to be a beautifully-detailed recreation of a well-worn piece of history, most thought-provoking in its novel approach to the motivations and intent of those involved.

Clint Bentley’s debut feature film is an elegiac tribute to the lonely, dangerous and tenuous life of a jockey. Filmed in “magic hour” glow, with almost every scene a beautifully backlit postcard, Jockey makes a fine star vehicle for one of the finest character actors working today, Clifton Collins, Jr.

This isn’t a bad cast, but Confession is a bad script. The “twists” barely merit that label, the story leading up to those twists barely holds one’s interest. The entire affair is contrived and melodramatic in the extreme.

Suffice it to say, every clumsy bit of mugging, every tin-eared line, every new scene is its own reason to groan.

A movie with dull leads, scripted by a veteran of second tier sitcoms and helmed by an even less promising director, it started life flavorless and nobody added even a hint of spice along the way.

While The Laureate impresses here and there, there’s nothing that truly dazzles and little that sizzles, either.

There’s something to be said for a B-movie that doesn’t deviate from formula, that pulls you in to its simple “revenge” plot and doesn’t let go until the credits roll.

I got next to nothing out of this movie.

Old Strangers, a thriller awkwardly resembling a “creature feature,” and even more awkwardly labeled a “thriller,” falls somewhere on the student film/relatives-wrote-me-checks-so’s-I-could-make-a-movie spectrum of ineptitude.

None of it adds up to much of a movie. Italian Studies is more an experimental collection of filmed conversations, filmed docu-drama style, interspersed with clips of a gorgeous blonde wandering New York. But because it stars Vanessa Kirby…

The picture grinds its gears, time and again, losing what’s “funny” in favor of all sorts of distractions, all of them humdrum when compared to the Big Idea that this is supposed to be built around.

Warhunt is never wholly incompetent, never “so bad it’s good” or anything of the sort. Even by the lowered standards of “a C-movie starring Mickey Rourke,” it’s never more than a waste of 90 minutes

“King” is worth the price of admission just to see the ex-James Bond swanning around the Hall of Mirrors in glorious wig and the stylish raiment of Louis XIV and his trend-setting court.

We’ve figured out where the murder mystery/thriller Brazen is going long before our heroine finds herself in the presence of the murderer in the “explain it all” talk talk talk finale. Truth be told, there aren’t a lot of surprises in this slow-pokey Alyssa Milano star vehicle for Netflix.

The stories share a beguiling, meditative strangeness that draws us in. Hamaguchi sets up our expectations, then upends them with this revelation about a character or that wrinkle in the plot.

It’s an absurd, strained and seriously unfunny animated comedy that shows what can happen when animation veterans with limited imaginations try to conjure up a myth to give a “story” to an Irish dancing stage show somebody bought the rights to.

After four films and a TV series, maybe it’s time to mothball this Hotel for a bit.

And then that ending shows up, and all the talking, over-the-topping and slow-walked butchery washes away whatever good will, or grudging acceptance this “requel” almost achieves.

There’s just not enough heart or story to make up the shortfall that the viewer feels, first scene to last.

The set-ups for big laughs are laboriously spoiled by the slack pacing.

Ejiofor’s movie teases and never lets us forget exactly where it’s heading. And it uses an almost unforgivable amount of its running time taking us where we know it is going.

Tedious courtroom scenes, flat acting, sermonizing speeches, under-explained “explanations” of the technology needed — nobody is likely to stick with this to the end.

The constant jumping back and forth in multiverse-styled timelines is more exasperating than charming, thought-provoking or even entertaining.

It all makes for a more riveting “what might have happened” mystery, a history lesson with a caveat and a damned entertaining one at that.

The slow pacing and elementary mistakes about how to frame, light, film and edit horror to make it shock and awe render this otherwise good-looking, stark and elemental thriller too bland to pay off.

One of those performances you just lose yourself in carries off June Again, a sweet and sentimental portrait of dementia, and the “paradoxical lucidity” that gives some sufferers a short respite from the memories, manners, skills and knowledge that disease has stripped from them.

“January release” or not, it’s still a shame that all this talent, an epic fight in a fish market and some cool shootouts and chases were wasted this way.

American Gadfly is about a campaign that few noticed outside of the twitterverse, a funny, unfiltered re-introduction of Gravel to America and a peek into todayt American politics and the political and political news ecosystem.

It’s all a little hard to follow. But it’s always a wonder to look at, and even children will pick up on the fact that this is a different take on a classic tale, even if they, like the adults watching it with them, may sit on the fence about how well this hybrid story works.

It’s more a time-killer than anything anybody, young or old, needs to see. But the animation’s quite good.

Hart is so sparing with her action beats and so staid and self-serious in her supernatural touches that the picture never sparks to life.

This tight, tense and oh-so-logical home invasion tale brings “Wait Until Dark” into the cell phone era, with suspense that rivals the equally simple “Don’t Breathe.”

It makes its points, takes the intensely-unlikable guy where he was always headed, and then sticks around a full half hour after the climax, another 15 minutes past the anti-climax.

There’s merit in this story, which takes its hero on a circular path back to what anchors him in his world. But the novelty of the setting and the characters doesn’t mean we give the storyteller, who gets lost in the sordid sexual side of life above the Arctic Circle, a pass.