Roger Moore

Sensation is so lifeless and pointless as to make one ponder “What is the half-life on a ‘Game of Thrones’ career bounce?”

There’s little to this film that hints that “Holiday Rush” could have been saved. But mixing it up, more, centering more on the adult conflicts because the kids aren’t funny enough, might have reminded us that Malco can still be funny. This just makes that a distant memory.

A solid formula sports picture with a light dose of faith and some overt small town America “conservative signaling,” and a generally entertaining movie thanks to a decent lead and stellar supporting cast.

A swift and streamlined tragedy by the greatest playwright in the English language becomes a lean, quick and brutally brisk film in Coen’s hands.

I was delighted at the beginning, and steadily more appalled at most everything that followed. There's no sugarcoating the fact that I look forward to never seeing this "Resurrection" again.

Skiing/sledding gags, a Roomba run amok bit — there’s just enough going on to keep the littlest kids interested. And a tiny dollop of heart helps.

The movie surrounding the tunes isn’t all that, despite Illumination’s dazzling, colorful animation.

King’s Man doesn’t send up the tragic comedy of the start of The Great War, doesn’t rewrite history in any particularly interesting, illuminating or entertaining way. It just gets stuck in the mud, like the millions whose lives were squandered in it.

With Moretz here to ensure it’s at least a story we invest in, bringing emotional heft to the moments that beg for it, this nothing-special dystopia manages the bare minimum that fans should expect from films of this genre.

It’s an indulgent downer, not utterly incoherent but a grim journey from hopelessness to pointlessness.

It’s an ungainly film that loses focus time and again, drifting off to indulge its stars with extraneous scenes and badly-handled or simply unnecessary story threads.

Fuhrman’s polished intensity draws us in, even if we’re repelled a bit by this young woman who will not give herself “a break,” at anything.

It’s a good-looking, mindless romp aimed at the children of all ages who watch professional wrestling. Formulaic and silly, it might not be reason one to subscribe to the Kevin Costner network. But there are a couple of laughs and lots of utterly ridiculous “action” in the octagon where the Big Boys play.

However much you know about these people and this subject, Sorkin shines a light in dark or unjustly-ignored corners of their epic story. And he makes obvious the strain and burden of “Being the Ricardos” into a film that’s witty and bittersweet.

The effects are off-the-chart dazzling, and if nothing else, the picture jumps out of the gate and sprints until one and all get good and winded entirely too quickly.

It’s formulaic, but good clean fun. And it’s a fair dinkum way for the kiddos to learn Oz wildlife and Oz slang in a cartoon.

As undemanding and shambolic as it is, The Tender Bar takes you in with warm afterglow and some winning, “I’d like to have a drink with that guy” moments.

With scores of faith-based films about Christianity hitting movie screens every year, the sheer novelty of The Lady of Heaven makes it worth seeing, just as background on a religion most of us know very little about. That’s where the film excels, even if the many obstacles the production had to get around distracted one and all to the extent that they somewhat botched the messaging.

McKay’s just as “right” about his target as ever. But the tone of this “Deep Impact/Wag the Dog” mashup is off. It veers towards strident, and as the clutter gathers around it, it drifts into dull. The jokes dry up and only a few members of his cast are veterans of “let make this funnier on the set” filmmaking.

As random as it all is, The Hand of God does add up to a “movie” in the broadest sense, just not a very coherent or interesting one.

Last Shoot Out doesn’t exactly live up to the promise of its title. The shoot-outs are pale imitations of even the lamest B-Westerns of late era syndicated TV — “Guns of Paradise” comes to mind. The plot is straight-up formula, the dialogue either cornpone without the polish or tin-eared and anachronistic.

Bullock gives us an old-fashioned star turn at the center of an equally-celebrated supporting cast and gives a young woman director from her mother’s homeland a big break. Call Unforgivable a mixed bag, but an intensely watchable one.

I found the whole thing more tiresome than intriguing, and wouldn’t recommend it unless you threatened me with being locked in a cage with MacKay in character. Now THAT would be scary.

It’s a generally frank and sober-minded essay on Black female sexuality, body image issues and the perils of dating not just somebody younger, but someone from another class.

Colman’s performance is the film’s marvel. But Gyllenhaal’s brilliant, subtle manipulations make hers one of the most auspicious directing debuts in years, a veteran, intimidating cinematic “bad girl” who turns her withering gaze on us and strings us along, wondering what became of The Lost Daughter.

This isn’t a compelling take on coupleshood — not quirky, not touching, not much of anything at all except disappointing.

It’s a lot less “spice” and a bit more “sweet” than I’d care for, but Malik has made a warm comedy that introduces, embraces and every-so-gently-chides an under-represented American community in all their glory, their fun and their foibles.

Tone-deaf, ineptly scripted and directed, lifeless and tedious, it’s only 82 minutes long. I want those 82 back.

It’s a sports movie that’ll make you think, and its release — cleverly-timed for the weekend when the only college tilt is the rare one with real “student athletes,” the Army/Navy game — invites fans to put down the beer, get off those Internet sports gambling sites, and think about what’s going on.

This Silent Night doesn’t land its satiric punches cleanly. And in abandoning the “comedy” part of “dark comedy,” it isn’t exactly a place to visit to get happy during a global pandemic.

Writer-director Benjamin Cleary’s debut feature does neither Ali nor himself any favors. The movie’s so low-key and low-heat that it’s slow. And with that lack of pace we’re forced to confront, often, how over-familiar this story, this version of “the future” and this film are.

Red Pill gives us bupkiss. And while there are later moments that get closer to the mark, most of the “pick-them-off, one-by-one” tropes come off flat.

The obscurant strain of it all shows. Most of what’s here would be filler in a better film, or bullet point scenes in a story more wholly-shaped and worked out.

This isn’t one of the filmmaker’s great films, but it is a serious return to form and a movie that makes us feel the pain of women — in childbirth, in disappointment and in loss — as intensely as he does.

Benedetta is a gripping, graphic and shockingly moving film biography.

Even Mice Belong in Heaven is the most adorable and unusual animated offering for kids this year.

The Advent Calendar is a creeper of a thriller. It stalks you, sidles up and immerses the viewer in its world and its mood. This Belgian film (in French and German with English subtitles) doesn’t deliver frights or shocks so much as it serves up shivers.

It’s a good film. Will families gather round whatever video streaming device extant to watch it 60 years from now, the way we have with the 1961 film? No. This “West Side” is good, not great...But the joyous, moving and racially-charged show “West Side Story” has always been still makes this a must-see movie for the holidays and a worthy successor to a classic.

Stunningly-detailed, with an A-list cast up and down the line, it’s a gorgeous and gloomy dip into the dark side, immersive and bleak from start to finish.

The only “issues” that feel lived-in are the ones literally everybody faces — health, aging parents and grandparents — mortality. It’s the players most wrapped up in those who stand out. The rest is just colorful, sometimes flippant, background noise.

Even if some of the second and third act twists upend some expectations, even if the Big Sky setting (it was filmed in New Zealand) promises “epic,” the melodramatic characters and touches give it a predictable familiarity.

The funniest thing about it all is the mere fact that it exists, this silly nothing of a comedy film series built around European “AmCar” nuts, fans of American muscle back from way back when. No, it’s not much of a movie. But if any of those conceits tickles your clutch-pedal foot, it’s good for a laugh or three.

This Hide and Seek isn’t hatefully bad. It’s short, well-acted and easy enough to follow until it isn’t. It’s the “until it isn’t” that earns it the label, “disappointing.”

Phoenix and Hoffman really sell C’mon, C’mon, settling into “siblings” with such ease that even their phone conversations have a lived-in familiarity

While “Summit” doesn’t expand the animation frontier or lift animation as an artform, it’s a perfectly watchable way of telling a reasonably compelling story.

The long, somewhat sluggish comic thriller director Kan Eguchi gets out of this manga adaptation has scattered laughs and lots and lots of killing, much of that played as comedy, too. We are not that amused. But the big set-pieces here are wowzers, good enough to merit a sequel (“The Fable: A Hitman Who Doesn’t Kill”), so let’s dive in.

Puce finds fear and a disheartening, misdirected fury in all this, and pathos in its resolution. And she does it in a subtle but provocative drama that may not make the Best International Feature Oscar field, but is still one of the best pictures of 2021.

Despite scoring a few laughs at the expense of the louche, lazy louts of the Batek clan, the lesson to be taught is watered town, the “teachable moments” a mere string of pulled punches. It feels as if several of the story’s necessary steps have been skipped.

Te Ata may not be an Oscar contender, but it is well-acted, touching and certainly good enough to deserve this Netflix curtain call.

In a winter of dull holiday romances and seriously unimaginative seasonal slop, this one tickles and delights and is at least good enough to put off that “Christmas Story” rerun you know you’re getting around to, because that after-all is a tradition.

All that a cast filled with music personalities adds to the dull, trashy money-laundering melodrama “For the Love of Money” is the occasional pause for a song. And the last thing this movie should do is pause.

If indeed this is a full on franchise reboot, this “origin story” is no "Welcome to Raccoon City" at all. It’s a warning to avoid ever coming back.

Although Citizen Ashe covers the highlights of a life and career that has drifted from the public consciousness in the nearly 30 years since his death, it doesn’t get all that close to its subject.

A pull-out-all-the-cliches and throw in a few on-the-nose new ones script leaves Halle Berry’s directing debut, Bruised, a split decision.

In just 70 minutes, Hymanson has shown us what “soul mates” look like, and leveled with us about the best possible outcome for our final years, months and days. Not bad.

Hudgens’ times-three star turn — underwritten as every character is — would be more fun if she was surrounded by a supporting cast that could bring laughs, pathos and a little more charisma to the party.

It falls utterly apart in the equally-slow-footed third act, finishing the botch-job begun in the first.

Freeland is a film many can identify with, even if you’ve never picked up a pipe or bong. It’s a universal story, a timeless tale about anybody who’s napped a little too long and woken up to realize the working world has changed and might have no place for you in it.

A movie that progresses at this rate gives you a lot of time to pick over what it’s really getting at.

It’s a movie of repressed characters living interior monologues not delivered, the cinema of droning along storytelling rebranded as “serene” or “patient.” That makes this festival darling one of those films you ponder and appreciate, almost at arm’s length. It’s that afraid of moving you.

I can’t say it necessarily comes off, although I’m not out-of-line declaring that it doesn’t pay off — not in a horror movie or crisis-of-faith melodrama sense.

It’s so pretty that it almost fills the bill as holiday TV babysitting for little kids, and so slow that they’re almost guaranteed to not sit still for it.

Miranda gives us a revised but affectionate, intimate and respectful adaptation of a stage show about one man’s deadline-obsessed creative process and how impossibly difficult it is to write and mount a musical and launch your career in the priciest, cruelest crucible of them all, The Big Apple.

Scott looked at all the sordid, unscrupulous and deadly goings-on that ended the Gucci family's days of running the ‘House of Gucci’ and saw a cartoon. Watching his take on a fashion empire's downfall...you can sometimes see his point.

If it’s not one of Anderson’s best, “the good parts” stand out as some of the most endearing moments the movies have given us this year.

“Afterlife” is a laugh-starved, jerry-rigged clunker that finds about one fifth as many laughs as the originals.

The movie’s a wash, and worse — too slow, not particularly well-acted or scripted. But there’s a little something to it, so no quick write-off here.

The jokes are treacly, the situations warmed-over from scores of better movies and the whole thing plays kind of 1943.

I found Encanto more aggravating than entertaining.

Long Promised Road, taking its title from a lesser-known tune by the band, is a celebration of the glorious third act of a performer whose struggles became legend, whose victimhood became notorious and whose “genius” no longer requires quotation marks.

A Cop Movie is a slick exploration/explanation of Mexican policing. But as the style drifts from first-person, dash-cam point of view “reality” to a laughably generic foot chase through the city and onto the subway, it becomes obvious that believing what we see and hear is meant to matter here. And the gimmicks undercut that too many times along the way.

They Say Nothing Stays the Same is a melodramatic, stately and beautiful Japanese period piece.

7 Prisoners gets us caught up in its moral quandary and the hard mathematics of survival, and is just long enough, with enough forks in the road Mateus faces, to put us in his shoes.

It’s a trifle hard to categorize. It has a light-enough tone that you feel it’s aiming for laughs, but those are few and far between. At least the message is clear, no matter how much meandering goes on as it’s being delivered.

Kemper, I have to say, just brings it. Sure, there were stunt doubles on board, but the pratfalls, the fury of a woman wronged, the lie-on-the-fly cunning — this is a You-Don’t-Mess-With-Momma we can get behind.

It’s a Hallmark Channel holiday movie on a Netflix budget. The characters are bland, the performances not much better and the writing almost instantly awful — tin-eared, clumsy ESL grammar and usage, the works.

Belfast is a moving, tense and yet often lightly comical experience. And as one of the best pictures of 2021 ends, you remember how good a filmmaker Branagh can be, and marvel at how he was able to pack all this warmth, wit and trauma into just 100 minutes.

Here’s a film, opening in a nation overrun with cooking shows and entire TV networks devoted to food and a whole section of society labeling itself “foodies.” And bless her big, butter-basted heart, here’s the woman changed it.

As film subjects, college romances and the trials and tribulations of college life may be mundane in the extreme, even set against the Sport of Winklevii. But Shannon is always so good you tend to lose track of all that when he’s on screen. He’s just not on it enough to save the movie.

The film takes so much in — gay bars and a workmate crush, first-time sex in a “Love Hotel” — that it tends to wander.

“Tone” is the triumph of the Welsh thriller The Feast. Tone — in its lonely, remote setting, its chilly, unsettling characters and the deeply unpleasant things that transpire — is everything.

The story? It’s a patchwork mess.

Passing almost passes muster by virtue of its two winning leads. If only Hall had given them fireworks to play and a world that feels more vibrant than a faded black and white photograph.

When all is said and done, it’s doesn’t deliver on the creepy premise it promises.

It’s a boorish “sex” comedy without a line or situation that amuses, an all-star all-in-one-house holiday romp that never romps and a Britcom-ish farce that would never make it to British TV, even boiled down to a half hour of its “best” bits.

If I’ve seen a better performance in recent years than Stewart’s in this “fable from a true tragedy,” I can’t remember it. She’s stunning.

Clifford the Big Red Dog is simple, sometimes silly little nothing of a kids’ movie, lightweight and harmless and of no great consequence whatsover. But it’s got sight gags and giant dog slobber jokes, giant dog farts and giant dog weeing-on-trees humor. So the littlest viewers, for whom it is intended, will find a laugh here and there.

Deer has made a richly-detailed debut feature about an ugly piece of Canadian history, and it’s to her credit that she lets young heroine see the escalation from both sides, and lets the viewer see what this does to her.

Marionette is a perfectly-gloomy but overly-subdued Scottish thriller pretty much wholly undone by a contorted “twist” that derails its third act.

As he fills the screen with an A-list that includes Oscar winner Regina King, Idris Elba, Delroy Lindo, LaKeith Stanfield and others, peppers the dialogue with a Tarantino-load of Samuel L. Jacksonisms and layers the soundtrack with reggae, hip hop and R&B, Samuel goes beyond parody and settles on just grating.

It’s a kid-friendly thriller of the sci-fi apocalypse variety, forlorn but engaging enough to sit through. Barely. High stakes, thin on action and heavy on sentiment, it takes “Short Circuit” to doomsday and reaches for tears — here and there — as it does.

It’s a derivative, noisy, sometimes-amusing Greek myth-reinventing eye-roller, full of fan-service, inclusion, dry-eyed deaths and “high stakes” that feel like a half-hearted send-up of that idea.

The Beta Test is a wired, wound-up and instantly-hip/instantly-dated Hollywood riff on relationships — romantic, business and otherwise.

It does a good enough job of giving us a helpless outsider-looking-in view of this foundering form of postpartum depression, making us sympathize if never quite helping us understand how this happened to Jules and what those who love her can do — beyond chemicals — to save her.

From watching and reading their saga as it played out, one could only imagine the worst of this “tennis parent” from hell and what he put his kids through. King Richard and Will Smith good-naturedly and affectionately upend that.

The beasts are revealed too early, the “gotcha” moments are kind of botched.

There’s a humility and generosity of spirit in their work here — testy as it sometimes is — that plays like a breath of fresh air in an era of “cancel culture” and those hellbent on testing it.

Antlers left me with the feeling of being the work of a top drawer craftsman who never quite reconciles himself to the job, who forgets the “nature’s revenge” theme and leaves the child abuse subtext under-explored, never builds suspense or any sense of rising panic in the town, the school or the sheriff’s department, and yet still manages to deliver a gruesomely good looking film despite all that.

Wherever they were going with this, writer-director Mularuk ensures that the journey is slow and seems even slower.

For an emotionally-grounded disaster movie, I found it a harrowing recreation of the real thing, emotionally affecting and not bad. Not bad at all.

The Spine of Night is a reasonably good-looking — and gory — animated sword and sorcery saga for adults, a movie set in a wholly-realized fantasy world, but lacking a story or characters that invite us to invest ourselves in their fate.

This magazine of a movie is something to be savored, a rarefied delight that’s intellectually aspirational, as the great magazines used to be. It rewards the well-read, the art observer, the film lover, the Francophile and the Wes Anderson fanatic.

Fontana’s tale is austere, quiet and posh, mirroring the world he’s depicting. There’s enough mystery here to hold our interest.

An ambitious, over-reaching film without the budget, polish or will to achieve its aims.

The cast is sharp, fleshing out character “types” into flesh-and-blood people we recognize. Blom’s haunted, guilty gaze sticks with you, every hand-to-hand fight has desperation and every death has weight and meaning.

The film’s third act is somewhat anti-climactic, even if it does have the novelty of being among the few depictions of how hard it was to convince the world this was going on.

An animated comedy of mixed messaging, thin humor and indifferent entertainment value, Ron’s Gone Wrong still has every chance of winning younger viewers over with its heart. That depends on how much affection kids can summon up for a cute robot.

Demigod is awful, so bad that I grow weary of mocking it. Approach at your own peril.

While Nilsson’s instincts for making Dashcam an updated, new-tech “Blow Up” were good, his execution isn’t. Dashcam is a dry, slow and dull 80 minutes of a loner TV news editor stumbling into evidence that proves a Big Conspiracy behind the death of a famous politician.

The execution, acting and chilling Soviet Bloc production design are more impressive than any surprise “Hyacinth” struggles to come up with.

Sympathetic performances alternately show us terrified captives and distraught and frustrated relatives, and from a terrific first act set piece where we see the risks to kidnappers when they don’t realize their new hostage is a gymnast.

Even die-hard horror fans can’t help but notice Halloween Kills stumbles through the nostalgia that made Green’s “Halloween” reboot work, and that “Kills” isn’t scary in the least.

Sweet Thing starts from natural empathy at the sight of seeing kids struggling, but refuses to grapple with that.

The many sex scenes in Lust Life Love scream “INSECURITY,” as in there’s no confidence in either the scripted interior lives of the characters or the cast’s performance of them. When you limit your story to just “Lust” and “Love,” the life you depict can’t help but seem shallow and contrived.

There’s not enough of the music . . . . Immersive and informative as it is, that keeps “The Velvet Underground” from being definitive. And that in turn lets it fall short of making its case, backed up by musicians and music critics, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, of their seminal status.

Friendzone flatlines for long stretches as it meanders towards the classic rom-com finale. Use it as colorful background noise or to brush up on your French dating slang, because that’s all it’s good for.

There’s a trick to making first-film-in-a-franchise films, and while the sweep of this one is every bit the eye candy fans could hope for, Villeneuve, the screenwriters and I must add composer Zimmer don’t so much stick the landing as let their picture peter out.

In My Own Time gives us a taste of what might have been much more than a soulful novelty act, an American Original who might have been too “authentic” for her time, if not for ours.

Scott and his collaborators find the ugly human foibles underneath the armor, court finery and gowns and make this story from an age when the one percent had the power of life and death over everyone else, when women were literally “property,” topical and timely.

The movie’s tedious overuse of voice-over cripples it.

Whatever transpires or is left unexplained, Jóhannsson never loses track of the mood he sets out to establish, that of a frosty folk tale that suggests that not everything we do to cope with grief is healthy, acceptable and should be dressed up as a little girl.

A solid B-movie revenge thriller, well-acted and tightly put-together, kept simple by design.

The ground covered is a tad overfamiliar, Gyllenhaal’s reactions predictably over the top and even the tropes of the genre (“real time”) can seem unsurprising and overplayed. But Fuqua makes every minute of screen time count, maintaining the suspense and claustrophobia even in those stretches where he takes the foot off the gas.

It’s understandable that MGM would want to make a sequel to their sleeper smash of a couple of years ago. It’s laudable that they stuck with the same animation house that made that one, giving them another fine visual showcase. But it’s unforgivable that MGM would do a rush job sequel and waste all this glorious animation on a corpse of a kids’ comedy

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is wanton slaughter lightened by monstrous zingers delivered in a growl that needs subtitles, a colossal waste of talent in front of the camera and not exactly a resume builder behind it.

No One Gets Out Alive is more a director’s ominous looking show-reel than a coherent, frightening horror tale.

Britney Vs Spears adds just enough to the story to be worth the obsessed-viewer’s trouble.

Craig, in his final turn in the role, makes Bond not just vulnerable (he’s managed that before) but someone with a sense of humor.

This film charting the rise of a “movement” that morphed into an “industry” is a mixed bag — upbeat and celebratory, contorting itself into a pretzel to avoid dealing with anything that might ruffle the potential audience.

Surge is a penny plain concept executed with skill and acted with real verve.

Lifelong friends and comic colleagues Whitney Call and Mallory Everton pair up again for Stop and Go, the most infectiously funny COVID road comedy ever.

The performances are as deflated as the subject matter, which, considering the caliber of the players and the track record of the director, points back to the script.

The dance sequences, what few there are, have more daring to them than the plot of the picture. The back-stabbing and bonding and breaking down are all so tame that you wonder why they bothered.

The “origin story” that is the film’s chief appeal takes a back seat to “series pilot” requirements. The film’s biggest asset becomes a handicap. “Saints” never feels thorough, thought-through or complete.

The cast is uniformly sexy, but the romances presented don’t spark, mostly owing to how unnatural and artificial they feel. At the end of any rom-com, you like to think “she belongs with him/he belongs with her,” and here that just isn’t true.

The sadness that courses through this uneasy and deliberate courtship won’t be to every taste. But for the brave, for those experienced enough to know about “baggage” and that no one gets out of here alive, this tale of finding a surprise connection in the twilight years, overcoming shrinking horizons and the burden of grief, disappointment and melancholy will resonate.

Apache Junction is another static, artless and pokey Western with an aimless, scattershot script, a few horses, a little gunplay and nothing that does any credit to the acting profession. At all.

Storm Lake celebrates the professionalism of a newspaper family — the elders worked at newspapers elsewhere before starting this one — who put out a clean, polished news product week after week, embracing some changes and dodging others.

Sticking close to “the facts” ensures that The Stronghold turns into a bit of a grind. The over-the-top moments are restrained by that reality, and some pursuits, arrests and brawls seem so low-stakes as to undercut the whole enterprise.

It’s the title character and the great character actor playing him that turns this otherwise decent indie Western into something special. And Nelson pulls that off every time he squints or opens his mouth.

The film manages to be intriguing but seriously dull.

A winning and quite moving look at the immigrant experience, and how fragile and fraught this past decade’s politics have revealed it to be.

I dare say every review of this adaptation has the words “well-intentioned” in it. “Sweet,” too. So it is. But if that’s the best thing you can say about it, well…

Writer-director David Midell cast this well, turned in a script with a bitter, metallic aftertase and never wastes a second of screen time, giving us two points of view — outside and inside that door — letting us stay one step ahead of this slow tumble off a cliff.

You’d have to go pretty far wrong to get me to pan anything pairing up Plaza with Caine, and Best Sellers tries its best, at times. But Caine does a grand grump, and Plaza reaches beyond her repertoire of eviscerating, man-eating side-eyes. They make this page-turner worth sticking with until the bittersweet end, and that’s enough.

Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster is an adoring appreciation of a screen icon, one of the founding figures in the birth of The Horror Movie, a cultured man who made his good name scaring generations half to death.

Throwing a lot of production design at the limp stories within this recycled tale doesn’t make it look or play scary. It just makes it loud and expensive looking.

Patel turns a “straight best friend” cliche into a quietly compelling sounding board, and never lets us see the wheels turning. And Harwood does well enough by a preening character who is as capable of teen cruelty as any classmate, and frankly often unlikable.

There’s no reason this cast with this story in this setting shouldn’t have been something almost hilarious. There’s little evidence on the screen that was ever going to happen.

A screen elegy is supposed to make you sad and give the viewer an appreciation for all this character and the actor playing him was, and a little of what remains. Cry Macho just generates pity.

And no, it doesn’t make much sense. Surely this is the strangest movie Cage has ever been in, and that’s saying something. But arresting image follows arresting image in Sono’s fevered vision.

The slack pacing and generally flat performances rob “Last Night” of any urgency and lower the stakes.

Chastain is perfect. Forget the prosthetics and the “clown makeup” mimicry. She gets under the character’s skin, sings in her own voice and never lets an insincere moment flicker by on the screen.

The pacing doesn’t build dread, the characters don’t build empathy.

Schrader’s made a long meditation on something that’s right up his alley, and it still feels incomplete while it’s in progress, and even in the final reckoning.

Nowhere Inn never quite crawls out from under the David Byrne influence as a movie or a film conceit. It’s more droll than funny, and only novel in the sense that she’s mocking the conventions of such movies and they’re beyond mockery at this point.

It’s not another “Romeo & Juliet” variation, even if the title suggests that. The stakes are low, the tropes too familiar and while the leads may get across the intensity of their crush with just their eyes, they don’t bring much else to this formulaic, tepid teen romance.

This one just never seems to end, and when the illogical end arrives, a laughably dumb coda is layered on top of it.

Performances? Nobody in this will be topping their resume with it. Neither will the director. Let’s hope it’s just a blip, a disaster soon to be forgotten by him and the studio that wrote the checks for it. I’m pretty sure he already has.

It’s not much fun, and not particularly gripping.

This may not be the “definitive” Capote biography. Perhaps PBS will be the one to get around to that, some day. Burnough’s still made an entertaining and generally brisk overview of the career and the life of the most famous writer of his day.

The first act of “Queenpins” makes you giddy at the comic possibilities, but the finale is the final straw in the letdown it too-quickly becomes.

Even in the film’s third act lurch into sheer melodrama, with brittle conversations carried out on eggshells, Morales and Duplass are wholly immersed in character. The twists are believable because they’re totally credible in their roles.

The film needed more scenes, more background, more fizzy fun and more pathos for any of this to come off properly.

The stage magic here is the simplicity of the production — just characters in chairs, swaying in time to simulate a bus ride, singing as they do.

Sad to say that adults in positions of authority acting like adults — diplomatic, courteous — is the most refreshing historical artifact resurrected in Worth.

Kurosawa has made a period piece with believable characters and intrigues that generally avoid melodrama. The stakes are human-scaled and deathly personal.

A couple of bit characters come closest to landing a laugh. None of the leads do. The script is social media savvy, making tepid jokes about the “commitment” difference between a couple selfie “in your story” or on “your grid” on Instagram.

The air goes out of the balloon, bit by bit, through a Macau fight club and high rise scaffolding chase, and the long middle acts settle into tedium, exposition and entropy.

Sure, you had me at Yakuza Princess. But was there ever a more ponderous gangland saga set in the Japanese mafia than this?

Martyr’s Lane is a reminder that you don’t need entrails and screams, demons and cadavers to cast a ghostly spell. Sometimes, a weathered abandoned doll in a fall-cluttered English garden, a lock of hair or faint scratching at a window is all it takes.

A messy, indulgent and shallow movie.

The Old Ways never builds empathy for anyone, making it a horror movie you watch but don’t “experience,” its bland heroine someone who never makes us fear for her sanity, her safety or her life.

Obscene wealth, the gauche, unsophisticated rich, “experts” with agendas, “free port” storage and insane amounts of money float by under the unblinking gaze of an Italo-European Jesus, “Salvator Mundi” but still “not even a good painting.”

The science is gibberish, the dialogue likewise, the characters cardboard with stiff performances to match.

In keeping it simple and personal, Reynaud finds the sweet-spot in a movie whose ebb and flow we know by heart, whose finale is the one we’re almost sure to expect.

But the charm is thin and the laughs hard to find in this iteration. Aside from a little nostalgia for the middling film this is based on, He’s All That just isn’t all that.

But as we follow the back and forth of a newly-empowered Britney Spears in battling her father, any documentary that takes up the cause of an embattled public figure, even one long dead, at least leaves us with hope.

If you’re tempted into the woods by this film, maybe you’ll be a little more open to the idea of “individual rights” gathered in number to battle “corporate rights” in search of a more sane and sustainable way of looking at the forest, and the trees within it.

Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt) is so gossamer-light and cute that you don’t realize how good it is until it punches you, right in the heart.

Everybody has to lean into the would-be laughs too hard because they’re uncertain there’s another one coming again any time soon. The situations are recycled and dully predictable.

This is horror with grandeur, a movie that pays homage to history and feels so of-the-moment as to seem fresh out of the lab...Candyman, the glossiest horror movie in ages, isn’t just horror. It’s horror that reaches for the Latin in that MGM (which produced the original film and gets co-credit here) logo we see in the opening credits — “Ars gratia artis,” “art for art’s sake.”

Penn the elder has made a movie more concerned with grainy images captured in twilight than pace, more wrapped up in picture-postcard cinematography than a plot that surprises or dialogue that rings true.

A moving and engaging kids’ movie with just enough hard edge to come off.

It’s a colorful, cheerful and messy movie, meandering out of the starting gate, struggling to avoid anything remotely edgy or interesting.

Timlin is terrific, showing us a wonk and political animal in the making — focused, unintimidated and kind of fearless, a young woman traveling solo to the roughest corner of the country for smelly, disgusting work with the hardened souls who perform it.

The performances are documentary real, with just enough melodrama about them to keep things interesting.

A tale of boy-meets-girl, girl-wrecks-boys-life told with sublime melancholy by Japanese auteur Kôji Fukada, The Real Thing plays like the darkest “romantic comedy” you ever saw.

It’s never wholly fair to dismiss a movie just because it’s unpleasant to sit through. But that’s a good place to start with We Need to Do Something.

It’s a seriously inoffensive confection about facing one’s “issues” and fears and helping people. And if Paramount wants to move a little toy merchandise in the process, why not?

Our leads have a toe-to-toe intensity that clicks in many scenes. Wood and Kirby are well-matched, with Kirby giving us the superiority complex that generations of post-Bundy Hollywood serial killers have affected, and Wood showing just how troubling this assignment becomes.

I have to say the film’s set-up is more interesting than the resolution, which is seriously straightforward. But the violence isn’t “Hollywood,” it’s human. And the remote, windswept setting has its chilling pleasures as well.

There’s value in movies that depict America as still-welcoming of immigrants in these divisive times, but Confetti (the title has to do with how Meimei sees letters, and processes information) rubs almost all the edges off.

The occasional decently-staged fight or grace note here stands out, because there aren’t many. A story this badly constructed with dialogue this stilted and characters this thin is simply beneath Momoa, at this stage.

Overrun is 109 minutes of every action pic cliche under the sun, and a heist set in a mausoleum, which I have to admit I’ve never seen before.

If you see just one “Hitler” film this year, make it this one.

The script is straight-up formula, which suggests few surprises, but also that the component parts should have clicked better than they did.

Under the Volcano lacks some of the details, grit and personal dirty-laundry edge of the legion of earlier recording studio history documentaries — “Muscle Shoals” and “Sound City” among them.

The third act’s twists and wrinkles aren’t worth the brain power it takes to sort them out. The scheme uncovered plays as low stakes, the violence simply an admission that “We need to give the audience something for their money.”

Vitaletti has good players all dressed up in period garb, but gives them no place to go.

Demonic just makes you wonder whatever possessed Blomkamp in thinking it would work.

Scott, last seen as Alicia Silverstone’s other half in “Sister of the Groom,” shows a menace that the movies don’t often let him play. Making him one of the “bad people” in a tale where “bad things happen to bad people” works. If only the rest of the movie had.

The Night House serves up the subtle horror of expectations, invites us to join our heroine in fearing the worst, perhaps simply resigned to it. And Hall makes everything we see and that Beth experiences credible, which may be the creepiest thing about it.

A visually arresting, fascinating failure that may have you reaching for the calamine lotion before it’s over.

First time feature director Jeannette Nordahl puts us in Ida’s shoes and makes us ponder her uncertain fate just enough to make Wildland work.

Despite the savagery of the fights, there’s nothing satisfying in this slaughter, a movie which spills blood and spatters gore because it’s out of other ideas.

None of this film’s shortcomings took me totally out of it. I was drawn into the story, in spite of its “Oh come now” moments when our hero gets a break, or avoids having every bone broken by doing something nobody who has a choice would hazard.

The players can’t quite put it over and the writer-director can’t quite pull it off. It’s a thriller that shuffles when it needs to trot, simmers when it needs to boil and goes on after it needs to end.

Kier makes a most companionable tour guide for us as the day gently, sadly and amusingly makes its way to the long night to come.

I found this more “interesting” as a problem-solving exercise than entertaining, more “watchable” than “good.”

It’s still good, clean “fun” and as harmless as it is high-tone and, by now, tone deaf (a world where money is no object and COVID does not exist). At least they have the good grace to officially wrap it all up in a way that leaves no room for sequels

Not Going Quietly lets us see a fierce, and dying, advocate for health care show us what John Lewis meant by “Good trouble.”

Odd twists aren’t wholly explained, relationships are uncertain, characters flip from antagonists to trusting confidantes with no more motivation than the expediencies of the script. Most of the performers struggle to find their footing, and when in doubt, walk even slower and talk even slower still.

The dance is pulsating and fun, well-staged and beautifully shot. The sex is dancer-athletic, titillating and mostly packaged in a montage sure to be a widely-shared Reddit clip any day now. But the whole is rather an empty experience, something I confess it shares with other Larraín films. Ema is pretty, provocative and surprising in ways that are more interesting to chew on than satisfying to experience.

Nobody in the supporting cast is fleshed out, save for the mother character. Five screenwriters adapting a Rintik Sedu novel, 105 minutes of screen time, and this “Pretty in Pink” basically boils down to two and a half characters.

It’s sentimental and kid-friendly, with a couple of decent grace notes. If your kids are at the undemanding age, have at it. Just try not to notice when the plot and incidents in it turn eye-rolling.

Stately as it is, Respect never quite becomes a “great film,” but Hudson, Whitaker, McDonald, Burgess and Maron ensure it’s never less than an entertaining one, a musical biography that gives the Queen of Soul her royal due.

I found it a movie musical that loses its way when it loses its sense of play.

This sinks or swims on its songs, and Miranda as a busking/hustling/rhyme-spitting monkey makes it swim.

Whatever its loftier existential ambitions, Free Guy is never much more than big screen eye candy with Reynolds’ grinning deadpan anchoring it with his amusing over and under reactions to all that befalls Guy. And if you love Reynolds — And seriously, who doesn’t? — that’s enough.

For a comedy that gets in its own way more often than not, that doesn’t give nearly enough screen time to the two somewhat funnier women (Park is seriously hilarious and seriously shortchanged) or even enough to let the leads fully form their characters, this still manages some serious third act laughs.

I thought the picture started strong and finished with a whimper, with flashes of fun standing out in draggy middle acts that play like boring filler.

It’s a sometimes hilarious post-mumblecore meditation, rumination and romp about getting prepared (for childbirth) and realizing how unprepared you are, about judging the lumps who raised you and realizing that maybe they didn’t have the data at their disposal you do, Dr. Spock or not.

The portrait that emerges is of a guy who could tell you why you’d want to see “Putney Swope,” and how he’d sell it to the masses, but not somebody you’d want to work for or ever suffer through a disgusting meal with.

There’s nothing wrong with weaving a story the viewer can’t unravel as its playing out. But John and the Hole doesn’t have enough of a story to maintain any narrative drive and doesn’t point towards answers or give the viewer any hope of resolution or release.

Hostage House makes the viewer feel like the hostage.

The debut feature of co-directors Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman may tell a classic “How’ll you keep’em down on the farm after they’ve seen the lights of the big city?” tale. But the details they include and the surprising places they take it make it a novel and richly-rewarding film experience.

Jones has a winsome screen presence and a pleasant, lilting voice that may not sell Ruby as “Berklee School of Music” material, but thin or not, it gets by. As does CODA.

Notorious Nick follows a formula and makes it work. Stay through the credits if you want to see the real Nick Newell in action.

Everything we see in the Polish made-for-Netflix thriller Bartkowiak we’ve seen in half a century of boxing movies.

You want great action? Eschew the comic book movies and read a few subtitles. Escape from Mogadishu is in a league of its own this summer.

Even Spiderverse-savvy Spiderman might consider this singularly confusing, a botched effort to say something scientific-sound and profound in a story that’s basically a lawyer-novelist riffing on “The French Connection,” and doing it badly.

Laughs and lump-in-the-throat moments are in too short supply for Resort to Love to come off.

Schreiber and Malone leave it all on the set in this sad but wistful romance, a movie about teen dreams that lose all meaning if they’re deferred too long.

Thanks to a muddy, gloomy glorious Dark-Ages-on-a-Budget look and the almost heartbreaking pathos Patel brings to each “lesson learned” moment, it works.

Fine performances aside, this is a classic 100 minute thriller that runs on for an extra 40 minutes and blows the punch line.

Van Damme is in on the joke, and never for a second lets us see that he’s in on it. That’s what’s the most fun about The Last Mercenary.

A good cast and amusing situations make it a pleasant, sometimes amusing if not particularly memorable experience.

It’s diverse by design, sunny and as I say the dolphin is as adorable as dolphins unfailingly are. If you’re looking for something beyond Disney+ or the hormones and conspicuous consumption of virtually every series and streaming movie made for this audience, it’s worth a watch.

It’s a film that wants to be a little of this, a lot of that and funny in the bargain. You want to like it so much that you can sense Disney getting a new franchise out of it, even if it doesn’t quite come off. But if they do sequels, they’d bloody well better hire somebody who knows comedy to film them.

It works the deadpan side of the street, spare in its dialogue, leaning on sight gags and situational ironies. What you get is an intimate parody of a parable, a comedy content to earn smirks and knowing grins and never reach for belly laughs.

It’s all very civilized and oh-so-French. But frankly, for all the posh settings and lovely costumes, all the lovely nudes and copulation, Curiosa is a chilly, unemotional drag. And the performances do little to warm things up.

The energy, humor and wit of the early scenes carry it. And the pathos of the later scenes, along with a burger joint break down and the fun in discovering the secret to any rapper’s success as a novelty act (rapping about “my mom”) make even the slow jams go down easy, leaving a warm, fuzzy afterglow that makes LA seem nicer and maybe a trifle less superficial than its image.

The Evening Hour may lean into stereotypes of Appalachia and the lawless dead end many find themselves driving into. But King, working from Elizabeth Palmore’s script, humanizes the character “types” and the “statistics” to make one of the more compelling dramas set in this world and its struggles.

The leads make this tolerable.

There isn’t an original idea in “Snake Eyes,” so even if the first big brawl is cool enough to give one false hope, the puerile story leaves our star and the director of “RED” (and “R.I.P.D.”) nowhere to go, even on a cool, whining electric street bike.

There’s an efficiency that settles in and manifests itself through the problems and the problem solving. The viewer is in on it, because we “get” the genre conventions they’re playing around with, we know why X, Y or Z as a counter-measure will work.

The most laughably ludicrous and clumsy “explainer” of a third act that Shyamalan has ever served up.

Aside from a moment here and there, we get little commitment from our star trio. What should be wrenching all along the way is mainly momentary grief, guilt or fear. For us to buy in, the leads have to buy in. They don’t.

The most credible material here might be the samples of 1950s “flying saucer mania” movies, connecting all this to Atomic Age zeitgeist in perhaps the most paranoid corner of a pretty paranoid country.

Deep winds up a somewhat lifeless enterprise that manages a suspenseful moment or two almost in spite of itself.

The actors could have given us more, but the mad rush to get where EVERYbody knows this thing is going (with an odd wrinkle or two) deprives them of that and us of the “escape” a better movie would have delivered.

What we have in these three films is the streaming equivalent of a summer horror beach book, an R.L. Stine page-turner more interesting for “how this all turns out” than any shocks, frights or tugs at the heartstrings.

Its the laugh-out-loud brazen chutzpah of it all and Huppert’s cocksure, casual and lie-on-the-fly amorality in the title role that gives Mama Weed her buzz. Huppert has never been sunnier or funnier.

The light and lightly-unsettling charms of Sublet win you over, even if you suspect that Fox has merely added a sexual edge to atone for the political and ethnic strife he’s taken care to avoid.

It’s a terrific film, much more reflective than the tributes CNN whipped together right after Bourdain’s death

The first two acts aren’t necessarily made “better” by the twists and resolutions of the far more involving third act. But it’s not a spoiler to say that “Classic” comes a tad closer to that label thanks to a boffo finish.

Director Malcolm D. Lee (“Girls Trip,” “The Best Man”) and the credited screenwriters try to wring a little fun out of all this, and miss as often as they hit. But younger kids will eat up the eye candy and get a tiny taste of what The Looney Tunes were all about, even if this big budget monstrosity never comes close to the anarchy created by Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and the team at Warner Brothers’ “Termite Terrace.”

The cleverest thing about Marian Vosumets’ film is how it pricks the viewer’s prejudices as it introduces us to an assortment of British folk with all-too-typical relationships with food and potentially unhealthy attitudes about body image.

What Smith and Gardiner have adapted is a rare and precious thing, a movie whose narrative momentum is carried by the simplest of longings — hope.

Perhaps the Russians should stick to that which their cinema is famous for — brooding romances, laments for the long lost glories of communism, and fake viral videos. This comic book adaptation thing evades them.

The leads are competent, with a few wincingly-obvious exceptions. But this dull, tin-eared script, a trite story leadenly told, never gives them a chance.

Wright has paid the ultimate fan homage to Sparks here, a movie so adoring and infectiously fun that they’ll live on in the “music films” queue.

Mandibles is a shambolic, sometimes funny and always-silly amble through the South of France.

It is terrible on a lot of levels, a godawful script that was drably-cast and indifferently-directed and passes before the eyes, deathly-dull scene after leaden scene.

“Can You You Bring It” is a fascinating history lesson, especially to generations that didn’t grow up under the AIDS specter, when sexuality and dating had dire consequences and when the big city worlds of dance, theater and the arts were decimated, almost overnight.

Great White might be the dullest shark attack thriller ever.

If Israeli B-movie maker Navot Papushado (“Rabies,” “Big Bad Wolves”) had kept this thing on its feet and sprinting — fewer pauses for motherly pathos, Spaghetti Western face-offs, etc. — “Milkshake” would have gone down easier, no matter how much gunpowder was used.

The God Committee is the sort of solid drama you get when actors you think you know are gifted with a script they can sink their teeth into, and make the most of their moment to shine.

Holy Beasts doesn’t quite come off in terms of coherence or dramatic tension, but impresses in almost every scene.

Even the reckless behavior of youth seems recycled from every other film in this summer romance genre. Pretty it may be. But all those elements conspire to make “Last Summer” not one we’ll remember, but one quickly forgotten.

Pig hangs on Cage’s soulful intensity in the part, a man who used to be somebody who, as one contemptuous old acquaintance hisses “doesn’t exist” now.

There’s a perfunctory quality to the situations and performances, the dialogue and the “terror,” cribbed from scores of “kids killed at camp” thrillers.

I found the entire enterprise just a tad above “boring,” lacking much in the way of action or urgency or connection with the characters. But eventually it settles in and we get moments of mild excitement and genuine pathos.

Downeast is an indie thriller so simple as to be elemental.

It becomes a screen thriller you mentally set aside, like a puzzle with insufficient challenges to ever be worth tackling again.

Your level of enjoyment of Areel Abu Bakar’s film is predetermined by how much you enjoy little snippets of exotic scenery (and plenty of ugly rice paddy ditches, back alleys, etc) and your tolerance for the tedium that precedes the “Brawl in the Bus,” “Melee in the Market,” “Duel on the Docks” and “Fight to the (not quite) Death in the Factory.”

The germ of an idea is here. They’re aiming for the correct tone, but neither the script nor the players land on the “twee” bullseye.

With Settlers, the filmmaker takes us on a journey as much internal as extra-terrestrial.

There’s real suspense in the central dilemma and in the Hail Mary efforts to think and work their way out of this. But thin character development and slow pacing render this slower and soapier than one would wish.

The moral of the story, “the power of human friendship,” must have taken 33 seconds to come up with. But some of the sight gags — Long disguising himself as human, the two of them escaping the bad guys by donning a dragon parade costume — are a stitch.

A damned clever neo-noir with a top-drawer cast, genuine suspense, dark humor and a plot that keeps you guessing for a very long time, this Steven Soderbergh thriller has everything a good heist picture needs to get over.

The film is R-rated R.L. Stine — simple, catchy, punchy and playfully derivative.

I might’ve cut The Tomorrow War a little more slack had screenwriter Zach Dean not conjured up the crappiest, sappiest most over-extended finale in living sci-fi movie memory.

The acting is quite good, with Ayano (of “The Promised Land” and the recent “Humunculous”) a charismatic lead. The mob brawls and chases early on are visceral enough to pull you in. But Ono lets the air out of the balloon of even the action sequences entirely too quickly. The “family” material is less interesting, the “relationship” perfunctory and even acts of vengeance seem rushed so that we can get back to the boring stuff.