Roger Moore

Like any fan, I’ll watch anything Anderson turns his attention to. But all the stars and star cameos, all the jaunty, classical music needle drops, all the del Toro drollery, the “lost boys” cadre of Korda kids and the Middle Eastern history hinted at in the “schemes” can’t paper over how flat and empty this “scheme” turns out to be.

“The World of John Wick” hotels, “tribes,” murder contract infrastucture, “rules” and codes and lots of punchouts don’t really add up to much of a movie.

Veteran TV writer and director DeYoung lures the viewer in and leads us in amused, faintly contemptuous but always nervous laughter.

It’s the filmmakers’ unsparing depiction of violence against children that overwhelms this story of supernaturalism or desperate, misguided superstition. That seems excessive, a shock-value cheat that gives this “wrenching nature of loss and grief” story a sense of overkill.

It’s not totally soulless, even if it is mostly laugh-free. But hundreds of millions in tickets sold or not, the filmmakers never manage anything like a reason that this intellectual property should have been remade.

It’s just French enough to feel novel, after decades of Austen adaptations, biographies and the like, a “fresh take” that isn’t all that but does no shame to its titular novelist and the iconic bookseller who figures she “wrecked my life.”

This “Kid” is somewhat better than the one Chan made with Will Smith’s kid several years back, but “Cobra Kai” fans may find the generic plot weighs down the punches too much to be worth the trouble.

Light romances and rom-coms have proven so difficult to pull off in recent years that whenever one comes along that works well enough, you can’t help but whisper “Hallelujah,” even if you can’t quite justify shouting it.

Director, co-writer and self-distributor Jason “J.” Horton (“Craving,” assorted other C-movies) set out to make an “Evil Dead” without Sam Raimi’s flair for humor and “gotchas,” without his gift for story and ear for zingers and without Bruce Campbell as everybody’s favorite horror anti-hero.

No characters in this are developed enough to invest in them or pin them down as suspects. At about the time Blood Red Raincoat Killer whips out a circular saw, which is as inventive as the murders get, the movie invites us to check out.

Krasinski and González manage some light mid-brawl banter that hints at “chemistry” that the script doesn’t really provide. Portman soldiers through it, with Gleason at his least inspired and Ritchie helming his uncoolest clunker since his divorce from Madonna.

It’s only a movie, of course, not one of the better ones in this sometimes entertaining but occasionally muddled franchise. Taken to heart as a movie of its moment, and not just experienced as “a ride,” it’s too bad they had to go out with a bummer.

The fights are furious and bloody. Don’t get too attached to anybody. Or any body part.

Apte is the riveting center of it all, making sense out of nonsense, and when she can’t, just bluffing and bullying her unfiltered way towards enlightenment, or something just short of it.

Grisi has made a simple parable for life on Earth and the consequences the most remote people face from climate change, and a film that’s worth rooting for as Utama is Bolivia’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature competition at the Oscars.

The Surfer bites off more than it can existentially chew, but it works well enough. And Cage, McMahon, Cassim and Justin Rosniak, as the stereotypical cop-who-sides-with-the-bullying-locals are terrific — by turns hatefully or ruefully so.

Endless, dizzying 360 degree pans, hand-held on-his-way-to-the-stage snippets and jolting, beads-of-sweat/strings-of-spit closeups and a cranked up score can’t hide the vacuity of it all.

The Nonnas are the stars and the hook that makes this one work.

If your thriller’s quick enough and cryptic enough, viewers won’t notice it’s not remotely as clever as you thought it was. But when you title your ghost story The Ruse, you’ve already given away that.

Whatever interest — and laughs (those HATS) — that holds isn’t enough to distract us from guessing plot twists a dozen scenes in advance or from giggling at how Feig and screenwriters Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis stumble through a “How do we END this mess?” debate, one which Feig clumsily slaps on the screen without bothering to edit.

It’s more a (somewhat) satisfying “finale” than a logical one.

As the cliche goes, this film is both sad and life-affirming in its depiction of end-of-life concerns.

Whatever its sluggish pace and stumbling grasp of time, Queen of the Ring still manages to be a fine vehicle for making a case for women’s equality in a period piece that more than gives this sport and that period in time its due.

It’s all something of a jumble, with even its “kumbaya" messaging muddled in a murk of competing story agendas.

The scripted schemes don’t unravel easily, until the “talking villain” finale reveals all. That makes Exterritorial more “solid than surprising, and even that “solid” footing grows more slippery with each implausible escape or too-convenient plot twist.

This immaculately lit and shot (by Maximilian Pittner) and gorgeously designed (by François-Renaud Labarthe, who did “Clouds of Sils Maria”) and costumed (Miyako Bellizzi) potboiler does justice to Sagan’s “ultimate beach novel” source, even if it never escapes that label.

The characters aren’t sketched in. They’re underscripted outlines for “characters,” which might cut it for a video game, but not for a movie. The multiple deaths and rebirths fatally lower the plot’s stakes, and nobody in the cast makes us feel the terror or the grisly ends that keep happening to them.

It’s not particularly ambitious and there’s barely a hint of “breaks from formula” in it. But in The Accountant 2, it’s not the individual numbers that matter. It’s how it all adds up.