Roger Moore

So what we have here is a tolerably efficient horror title — not scary, not that suspenseful, just gory — that fails to deliver on the promise that casting that rascal Koechner makes. Not bad, but not exactly good, either.

The film is an exceptionally messy and character-cluttered rush with few laughs among its various players’ reprising their Greatest (Character Trait) Hits.

Bell classes up the joint enough to shame director and co-writer Craig Moss (the “Bad Ass” movies) into wishing he’d at least kept his black-eyed children as serious as Bell. “Deadpan” doesn’t work when your scary, monstrous villains let us in on their smirk.

It’s a slender film with simplistic “live your truth” and “YOLO” messages, but Spall and Newman and Dena Kaplan . . . give it the heart and pathos it needs to pay off.

In every “Purge,” it’s always darkest before the dawn. But with The Forever Purge, we have to consider what we do after the sun comes up and the goons among us haven’t stopped, and haven’t been brought to justice.

A hilariously dark and dirty road comedy built on a stripper’s “my hand to God this happened” tweets.

The entire affair isn’t terrible, just a drag. Truth be told, they’ve taken this idea and pounded the cute right out of it. Time to put the pacifier in this boss baby and move on.

This thriller plays, with realistic real-time problem-solving, melodramatic near-misses, violence and suspense. We fear for the heroine, even if she’s not nobly heroic, and fret over her strength and cunning even as her resolve never wavers.

The British Pugh and American Johansson click in ways you’d never expect. And that’ll be handy, as they’re going up against “a man who commands the very will of others.”

The mob movie tropes and cliches end up being the only memorable moments in Lansky, material so overfamiliar we can finish the lines before the actors do.

Neeson is in solid form, villains do their villainy and the sassy lady driver copes with anti-Native racism with her smart mouth and her fists, to fun effect. But that over-the-top third act, topping even the odd operating-on-ice physics of The Ice Road, tends to take the air right out of the Jonathan Hensleigh film’s tires.

The horror comedy Werewolves Within didn’t quite do the trick for me. But it’s a great example of how hitting the right tone can keep you watching, even if the “horror” isn’t all that and not nearly enough jokes land.

I laughed at some of the lunacy, found myself checking my watch by the third act’s inevitable overkill. But if you can’t see the fun in Helen Mirren taking the wheel of a purple Nobler supercar and one-handing it — backwards — through the darkened streets of Olde London Towne, this isn’t for you.

Coming to a too-obvious conclusion aside, if there’s a better minimalist parable for “living online,” I’m hard pressed to think of it.

Give Leblanc credit, though. Any time you make a movie with well-played characters who compel the audience to want to shout at the screen, you’ve accomplished something.

It’s more creepy than terrifying, more thought-provoking than we initially expect, although perhaps not as “deep” as the filmmakers’ intended.

There is virtually nothing here we haven’t seen in a dozen similar movies, particularly that “Kramer vs. Kramer” parenting arc (one parental “indulgence” leads to disaster, etc.). But it’s perfectly watchable, maybe even for the entire family. Just keep a finger on the “mute” button whenever Lil Rel opens his mouth.

Questlove, billed as Ahmir-Khalib Thompson here, has made one of the most entertaining concert films in years, a piece of Baby Boomer nostalgia that is thrilling and moving, jaw-dropping (those Pips get me, every time) and toe-tapping, and a history lesson, all rolled into one.

Disney/Pixar’s animated “Luca” is “The Little Mermaid” without the heart, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” without the laughs. It’s a gorgeous-looking time-killer aimed at a very young and undemanding audience.

Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway is a curiously perfunctory affair, a laughless comedy based on the Beatrix Potter animal darlings of scores of dainty little books created when the world was less cynical.

I’ve found Ferrara’s cryptic, navel-gazing bent of late both tedious and yet fascinating in what he’s trying to get across about where his head’s at when he makes this or that self-reflective film.

So many movies about Mary Shelley and the writing of “Frankenstein,” and yet there’s always room for another bad one.

Perhaps it’s out of date, but if anybody can make the “Latin Spitfire” stereotype cool, funny and scary again, it’s Hayek, who all but takes over the movie with her loud, brassy and delusional confidence.

As a director, Roberts comes off as more of a producer. He can get a movie made, he’s just damned artless in making it.

Al Zahrani, making her screen debut, holds our interest by not holding her temper. Maryam is young enough to be impatient, traditional enough to play by the rules and realistic enough to see the futility of it all.

Rodriguez has to carry the picture, but hamstrung by the “reality” of the role, she only plays two notes — exhausted and manic.

If Fuqua & Co. had taken a more askance view of this quintessentially goofy concept, they might have gotten an “Edge of Tomorrow” out of it, with Wahlberg and Ejiofor in on the joke. They didn’t, opting for “gonzo nonsense” that’s as watchable as it is forgettable.

Movies like Upheaval are more propaganda than history.

In the Heights doesn’t truly reach the heights, except when everybody’s on their feet.

Drawling, florid Southern homosexuals who were “out” long before that was done, or safe to do, they make a fascinating, intensely quotable pair of wits in Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation, a documentary built on their relationship with each other, their art, their respective psyches, fame and the world they lived in.

Dancing Queens kind of has it all. And by “all” I mean nothing much.

Hero Mode isn’t interesting enough to stand on its own, despite manic efforts by Astin and an amusing line here and there.

Spirit Untamed is almost exactly what anybody not nine would expect out of a feature film spun out of an animated TV show. Bland. Passable animation, but not “cutting edge,” not even on the blade. Simplistic story, maudlin “friends” and “teamwork” sentiment, dialogue that sounds generated by a “talk down to the kids” app.

It’s the worst of the trilogy, beginning and ending as an over-the-top blunt instrument, pounding home the opening act exorcism and middling finale with breathless editing and a soundtrack amplified into a sledgehammer.

You’ve got to meet this dopey desert slasher picture on its own terms. You have to be ready to laugh at the archetypes/stereotypes, the one-liners, the D-movie bravado.

Without any “action” or compelling performances or any interesting thing at all — near kitchen accidents don’t count — what remains is a coma-inducing-dull “low budget B-horror movie without any discernible stars.”

Sure, it’s a mixed-bag, sentimental and soft even as the story contrives to put the friends at odds, with deadly consequences. But Ghost Lab has flashes of style and wit that suggest we’ll be hearing more from this filmmaker, and that it could be fun.

The stern star and fascinating if limited peek into the world of ratings, even in a period piece set in a more conservative time, makes Censor a horror title well worth a look, “video nasties” included.

This German story, when it works, is fraught with the tension young people there recognize as the stakes in this struggle

A single decent twist and a pleasant lump-in-the-throat finale are what you get for your time, here. Not much, but not a lot of family friendly movies do better.

Ahead of the Curve does a decent job of summarizing a forty year blur in gay history and Stevens’ role in it as a spokeswoman for her sexuality and community on TV in the ’90s — “Power Dykes,” on the next “Geraldo!” — a pioneering publisher and a leader in the culture’s breathtaking shift in attitudes on sexuality, marriage and gender identity.

There is never a moment I didn’t wholly buy into the Two Emmas and their delicious on-screen rivalry. But there isn’t a moment where you lean back, laugh and revel at what glorious fun this is, when it plainly could have been and should have been.

It’s been a minute or decade or three since we’ve seen urban homelessness put on display with this level of detail in this blend of pathos and judgement.

But the “Quiet” once again drowns out the “noise” in this, the best creature feature of our times.

Ferry is a straight-up old-fashioned “mobster grows morals” thriller from The Netherlands, a movie that doesn’t surprise but does what it does with efficiency and a hint of style.

What’s served up is dry history that neither judges nor commits to what might be “tragic” in this story, which is understandable, given the principals.

It’s a gritty, lived-in film that feels like a smelly, life-is-nasty-brutish-and-short for anyone not in the ruling classes depiction of the Renaissance — beautiful and painterly even in it’s ugliness.

The look of Zhang Chong’s (“The Fourth Wall”) film is more impressive than the hard-to-follow “Inception-ish” story or the acting.

There’s not a lot to this, and if you’re looking for straight-up frights, you’ll be let down. But I laughed more than once at these kids trying to get answers for the unexplainable.

The “reality” and the suspense and the narrowly-defined “entertainment value” dissipates in an ending that talks its way out of any sense the story might have made and any sense of satisfaction the viewer might have hoped for.

The Penny Black is an utterly-engrossing might-be-true-crime docu-mystery, a film laid out like a private eye thriller (they even hire an Archer Agency detective in LA, shades of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer), a story with big money, competing agendas, shady characters and a classic “unreliable narrator.

There are little chuckles around the edges of this limp noodle of a comedy, and just a hint of romance to it. It should be bubbling over with both.

Lindon takes these various licenses she gives herself and her movie to conjure up something thoughtful, tender and coming-of-age insightful in Spring Blossom.

The energy in Timur Bekmambetov’s latest thriller — he did “Night Watch,””Wanted,” the “Ben Hur” remake, and produced the similar online thriller “Unfriended” — dissapates almost by default after that heady first act.

Maybe this is Zack Snyder’s “first, best destiny” as a filmmaker. But when he can’t even get through a formulaic zombie picture without crawling, maybe he was never destined to deserve final cut.

The structure is ad hoc and the plot choppy, with the action beats — such as they are — holding the movie together and maintaining our interest. But just barely.

It’s a movie whose winning warmth, plucky “up from nothing” story and genteel rowdiness are infectious. But its glory is in another gem of performance from Toni Collette.

Frenetic scenes over-stuffed with pop art/comic-bookish visuals, politically-savvy “tech is taking over” messaging and a handful of seriously silly and over-the-top moments give The Mitchells vs. the Machines its fizz and buzz.

The movie loses its purpose and coherence whenever it drifts away from Hanif.

Shortcomings aside, stylistic overkill (Hellloooo Brian DePalma) included, the only real downside to all this is the too-obvious “mystery” is the dishonor it does the filmmaker Wright, Letts & Co. are “paying tribute” to. Don’t let a bad Hitchock homage scare you away from The Master of Suspense.

Petzold emphasizes the dreamy nature of the story, which can be nightmarish if you fear drowning in the dark.

Paul Negoescu’s deadpan film finds a few grins as it slowly gets up to speed, and manages a fine finish that makes it worth recommending.

The Retreat may be horror by the numbers, but there are solid reasons these character types and story tropes are recycled, again and again. As they teach you in horror film school, they endure because they work, even if they don’t have a prayer of surprising anybody as they do.

None of them are stop-this-ride-I-wanna-get-off scary. They’re all too short, with the linking story playing like the dull filler it is.

American Fighter never overcomes the perfunctory story and B-movie “types” performing it.

There aren’t really two sides to this, even as we hear discussions of “buying out” people who have made this trade their livelihood, even as we see legislation move slowly, face gubernatorial vetoes and court tests as the reefs grow more barren and brown.

If Final Account has a shortcoming, it’s that few moments stick out as most chilling of all.

The laughs in Drunk Bus may come in familiar places, but there’s a genuine effort to flip the script just enough to avoid the standard traps in such farces.

There’s a generous sampling of horror “mystery” cliches in this script, plenty of this or that death/disappearance “doesn’t make any sense.”

The movie? Not all that, but Ng, Wu and On handle the fights and stunts with amused skill and Wu’s way with the lighter material makes it a lark, a middling martial arts action comedy that’s worth a few laughs, if you’re in the mood for that.

Aussie director Robert Connolly (“The Bank”) takes his time with this material, slowly building up characters, layer by layer. The stresses of the drought are stated overtly at first, and slip into the background.

The supporting players are more interesting than the leads, who never make us care about them or root for them. And it’s fascinating to watch a brilliant talent like Redgrave and a game hoofer like Bergin try to lift this dead weight all by themselves.

Even the third act fights and shootouts can’t pull Those Who Wish Me Dead back from the you-know-what.

Masucci’s intensely charismatic Fassbinder, bathed in cigarette smoke, working “26 hour days” even before the cocaine and barbiturate addictions that took over later, looks like walking death the moment we meet him. That lets Enfant Terrible reinforce the suspicion that Fassbinder is more famous for his excesses than his films, 40 years after his death.

Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm is a cute surface gloss in the “if these recording studio walls could talk” genre.

An engaging musical documentary.

This thriller sits on the gory edge of the blade, teetering between “not all that” and “not that bad.”

It’s the depictions of social breakdown, Swedish tempers exploding, soldiers questioning their priorities in an absence of orders and the action beats — Björn’s crackpot defense of the power station — that drive the narrative, punching through one Big Effect, crash or firefight right into the next.

Hollywood treats the road to revenge as straight, narrow and bloody. With Riders of Justice, Jensen considers the myriad other places such a path can lead and finds regret, heart and humor along the way.

The situations are documentary-real, the acting barely feels like “acting” at all as we invest in the story, feel its pain and fear its outcome.

The Man in the Hat is a gloriously simple unalloyed delight.

This isn’t anybody’s idea of a new horror classic. But The Djinn takes a basic story and delivers the basic jolts and frights we expect from it. No more, no less.

The humor moves the picture along, which truthfully starts VERY slowly thanks to an overlong “Tigers in the ’80s” prologue. But Tran’s screenplay problem-solving is first rate.

There’s “cryptic” and “vague” and then “incoherent to everyone else” and unfortunately, Moya sets up shop at that end of the spectrum.

Wrath of Man passes muster for its mayhem and mise en scene, a good-looking but unfussy film that may not work its flashbacks in as gracefully as you’d like, breaks into “chapters” that do nothing for its flow, yet makes its violence and vengeance as grimly gripping and visceral as any Ritchie had put on the screen.

The finale to Threshold, a supernatural thriller about a junkie who figures she’s possessed, is a doozy — alarming, rattling and with a neat little twist that underlines its point. And it’d have to be, considering the general snooze this siblings/bonding road picture has been pretty much in its entirety leading up to that. This may be the slowest-moving “road picture” or “thriller” on record.

This halfway-there thriller still makes an excellent showcase for Emilia Clarke, shedding whatever “Game of Thrones” baggage she has left and hinting at the dangerous places she might yet take us.

The cast and filmmakers have made a very good movie about a very tough subject. and somehow have managed to never cop out once by showing us easy answers.

It flirts with “insipid,” and is about as funny as a teenager’s funeral.

The Water Man is a gorgeous looking tween fantasy/adventure in the “Bridge to Terabithia” tradition, well-cast and designed to tug at the heartstrings. But the feature directing debut of co-star David Oyelowo (“Selma”) is a Bridge to Nowhere — dramatically flat and emotionally lacking.

Citizen Penn isn’t a wholly balanced portrait of the “do gooder” star and humanitarian. It flirts with turning towards hagiography, here and there. But what it manages to get across is that dismissing Penn and his passion for philanthropy of this sort is a mistake, that he’s sincere, committed to the long game, and an impatient man-of-action pretty good at articulating why you should pitch in, too, in whatever way works.

Silo is a quietly gripping “trouble in farm country” thriller.

Tony Hale makes an interesting “Variation on a Character Played by Steve Carell,” and there are a few laughs mixed in with a lot of cringes and endless examples of callous cruelty. The ending pulled this one off the fence for me, and it was barely on that fence to start with.

Percy vs. Goliath is dramatically flat, predictable in its pluck at times. But Walken is magnificent, and the other casting — on the nose as it is (Ricci can still pull off the young activist willing to sleep in her car for the cause) — works.

The longer it goes on, the more over-the-top the set pieces get and the more dated the “geopolitics” of it all seems. Clancy has one big theme that turns up in almost all of his adapted-into-scripts novels, and it’s front and center here, served up without apology by a deliriously successful writer whose every book had a whiff of “His Greatest Hits” about it.

It’s the sort of film that starts out bad and occasionally lapses into awful, largely thanks to a dull lead and the fact that the script has him narrating, in voice over, his every move in the second person.

Charles stuck “Outside” reminds us not just that we’re not alone, no matter how much we want to be, and that in the Big City, the biggest journey can be one of just a few steps on foot crossing a chasm you’ve built in your own head.

I like the idea, and any movie set in a weird subculture is automatically engrossing. More of this “board game universe,” including other obsessives, would have helped. The characters are amusing as “types,” but rather blandly played. And the finale is downright half-assed. But there’s promise here, and I think another crack at the concept could be a winner. Let’s hope nobody lures them to a remote cabin and bribes them out of their pitch.

There’s nothing in Cliff Walkers that we haven’t seen in many a prior spy tale, and it’s not a picture you’d single out for great acting moments. Clean up the blood, and you could call it almost old-fashioned. It’s still a corker of a thriller that keeps you guessing which Hero of the Revolution will sacrifice him or herself next.

Aside from the comic-book movie supernatural brawls — with lots more blood and profanity — there’s nothing at all to this.

Death and new life, cultural prejudices and that Swiss obsession with money play into a film that is Germanic in its darkness, as subtle as a wet slap and funny? Eventually.

The film’s major revelations are not how hilarious, anarchic and charismatic the Muppets were and are. That’s been covered elsewhere. What’s fascinating here is remembering the lesser known figures who shaped the show that was to come.

Von Sydow paints a compelling and very entertaining portrait of a showbiz original who found a niche, made his mark with an act famed for its shock value, and yet dabbled in most every musical style to come along after he broke big because he could and would try anything.

It might not wholly succeed, but Beckwith’s Together Together is wrestling the word “relationship” away from wherever it is now and back to a simpler time, when “I’ll be there for you” meant something, and not just to Phoebe, Joey, Chandler & Co.

The basic ingredients of something gripping, tense and heartfelt, and in an unusual setting and culture, are here. Our director/cook spoiled the stew, with a lot of help from her miscast-cast main ingredient.

The story’s dawdling pace works against it, and attempts at injecting urgency into the third act seem too chatty and explanatory for suspense to build. The effects are more interesting than chilling.

No scene seems superfluous even if many go on too long. “A bit of a wallow” may cross your mind, as it did mine.

Trigger Point is shockingly conventional, with many a plot point, story beat and even shoot-out recycled from decades of other such films.

Watching two pros throw themselves into a low-budget movie shot, on location, in BFE Mississippi isn’t just amusing, it’s inspiring. Love what you do kids, and you’ll never get old, with or without the vampire’s kiss.

The soulful, vibrant, expressive art is almost documentary in nature, like great cave paintings put on cardboard.

Contrived as it often seems, The Last Right is just unpredictable enough to pass muster, just cute enough to charm and just romantic enough to get by.

You’d think the Italian creators of Beate (Blessed) could have made a funnier, sunnier film in their sleep.

There’s enough here that “Irul,” which means “darkness,” would be a fun, moody movie for a screenwriting class to pick apart and try to workshop into something better.

The obvious artifice doesn’t change the film’s essential adolescent truth. High school is all about “being lonely.”

While I like the challenge of his self-conscious cinema, I find the urge to go glib every time I encounter one of his films almost too hard to resist.

Whizbang editing aside, it’s a slow slog of a movie with a seriously obvious destination.

The performances, actors playing stock characters, are passable if not terribly compelling. The production design is first rate. But we see every single story beat coming at us like a comet we’ve been expecting for years.

For a dumb genre pic, What Lies Below is as goofy and fun as it is wet and…weird. Don’t spoiler alert your friends, let the ogles and giggles surprise them as much as it will you.

The glory in a simple, formulaic “musical memoir” like this is how familiar this ground has become, how the “you’re not alone” and “It gets better” messaging is reinforced with every new incarnation of this well-worn path through “My Wonderless Years.”

Nothing feels wholly fleshed-out, dramatic possibilities are frittered away left and right and nothing here makes us feel tense, aroused or “involved.”

Here are the Young Men makes for an interesting snapshot of yet another version of “wayward youth.”

Sugar Daddy is a mature, artful and disturbing peek into being “open minded” about something that borders on “sex work,” and sometimes crosses that border.

The tunes are cute (ish), the production design sparkling and the performances have their moments. But the conflicts are sour and dull, and Lotte’s journey, to “star” and then producer of a big production numbers wedding show called Just Say Yes isn’t the script twist that could save this, any of it.

Held may have messaging that fits the cultural moment well enough, and visceral violence that pulls us in and engages — eventually. But that first hour has beaten our interest in this slow-moving indie thriller to death long before that.

Williams, playing a young woman fighting her fears even as the hint of recognition of what she’s dealing with keeps her from flipping out entirely, makes us believe Val’s peril and believe in her ability to fight it.

Director Midi Z and his muse (Ke-Xi Wu is in most of his films, including “The Road to Mandalay”) take us on an increasingly fraught and stylized trip down the rabbit hole of “big break” success and the guilt and emotional scars that linger from what Nina might have endured to get there.

Rare is the comedy that seems to make time stand still. But for 77 cringeworthy and hilarious minutes, that’s what writer-director Emma Seligman pulls off with Shiva Baby.

Every eye-rolling dash of wish-fulfillment fantasy frees this genre picture from the concrete and touches or tickles. Middling movie or not, this one’s well worth a look.

A brooding film that feels strangely out of its era, perhaps on purpose.

The effects are top notch and there are some chills in it. It’s just that the picture loses itself and any momentum it has in “explaining” these wonders and healings as the work of a Mary who isn’t the “Virgin Mary” all involved assume it is.

The kids do what kids do in such syrupy summer camp (PG) romances. There’s a little melodrama, tears, a crisis of faith. At least the adults take a shot at bringing the funny.

This cut-and-paste cliche collection could have been written by a machine.

The film is a choppy series of sketches and snapshots that don’t really take us inside the man’s head. [2021 Director's Cut]

The fights are epic, and I have to admit, the ever-improving CGI makes Kong the most empathetic he’s been since he was sniffing his fingers around Fay Wray.

Every coarse and crude moment feels like a punch that Stasko pulled or that his cast didn’t have the stomach to deliver.

There are messy movies and shambolic comedies, and then there’s whatever the hell Last Call is supposed to be. It’s a “back to the old neighborhood” comedy almost guaranteed to give you a hangover. I’m on my third aspirin already, and I haven’t had a drop.

The Believer is a creepy pseudo-intellectual horror story, a pretentious and arch mashup of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Misery.”

There are a few scattered laughs.

Giving Lloyd too little to do, and not having funnier players in Victor’s posse are both lost opportunities. Smart can still hit a punchline and isn’t given anything amusing to play or say here.

Westdijk gives us a little bickering, a little bonding, a little personal growth, a bit of Scotland and a lot of Waterboys. And if that’s not enough to add up to a comic winner, I don’t know what is.

Pfeiffer is as grand as ever, and in every sense of the word.

Tina is a summarization and a celebration.

The failures pile up quickly after that promising first act and The Seventh Day doesn’t hold the interest past day two

It’s a trifle silly. But you don’t have to take Six Minutes to Midnight seriously to lose yourself in the pleasure of some very fine actors having a go at an old fashioned B-movie, poppycock included.

There may be nothing new to Nobody. But Odenkirk & Crew make sure that this mass production action movie has plenty of bespoke fun stitched in.

The story’s direction becomes deflatingly predictable once all the various characters and plot elements are set up. But Rose Plays Julie is a psychological thriller where pathos, suspense and the silent confusion of our heroine compete for primacy. Start to finish, this is damned unsettling.

As this “true story” hews closely to the plot points of many a spy thriller, The Courier invites comparisons that highlight its shortcomings, telegraphing punches that we sense are coming and failing to ever land a telling blow.

It’s a healthy reminder that fighting corruption, even in something as mundane as college admissions, is vital to society’s health, that Americans need to at least believe there’s a “level playing field,” and that not guaranteeing that is how we mediocre our way from the top of the world to Banana Republic in just a generation.

Gorgeous and almost shockingly moving.

Luz is a slow, soapy prison romance that, if nothing else, is not quite like any prison and “getting out” picture you’ve ever seen.

[A] terrific and informative documentary.

There’s not an awful lot here, but this may be the best of the “pandemic” movies — science fiction and horror that is both “of” this moment, and a parable about it.

All of which add up to a “movie” that’s a lot closer to “content” than to cinematic art, or even a movie that inspires, thrills, touches or moves.

The cutting remarks rarely leave a mark, the mystery is unraveled with little care, and takes on the “Twilight Zone” air of “The Box,” which didn’t work either. And nobody’s funny. Veteran TV funnyman McHale is given little funny to play or say, and that goes for everybody else. Only a query of the withdrawn, deadpan Gretel offers so much as a chuckle.

The performances are solid, and the early scenes — recreating the crimes, etc. — are fascinating at a documentary level. Setting up the context is useful, a PD under a cloud and determined to avoid race riots that might return if dirty cops were in on all this. But the rabbit hole closed in for me about an hour in.

When it’s all over, the viewer gets to wrestle with everything everyone here does — the plight of Syria, the nature of art, “exploitation” and the nature of “freedom.” Not bad for the first Tunisian film much of the world will have ever had the chance to see.

As in reality, the best part of the story of any such romance is that bowled-over introduction. It’s every complication that intrudes after that which becomes a drag, and becomes the part we forget or wish we could.

The Devil Below is at its best when our soon to shrink quintet is on the run, scrambling to figure out what’s chasing them and if the locals are there to help or make things worse.

The Parish needed to be more Catholic, more creepy and have a lot more suspense and sense of what’s at stake to come off.

The Vigil is the most original, most chilling horror film of the new year. And let me hasten to add, it’s not even close.

You can’t help notice the elephant in the room that McHugh ignores. Despite the inclusion of 63 year-old Ice-T and acts with African American performers on the festival bills, the audience they’re playing to (as shown here at least) is entirely white, almost entirely over 30, mostly 50ish.

The film’s narrow focus make it more an expression of support for those who stutter and those trying to make stutterers’ lives better than an “explainer,” a movie that covers a lot more ground on the subject.

This cast and this world make for a grand escape from the mundane necessities of life as we’re immersed in a coming-of-age tale like few others, one that should make anybody with a soft spot for Salinger and empathy for those who had to “manage” him just a tad envious.

If you’re looking for an animated dip into Indian culture and a film that charts its own path to a distinct animated style, it’s well worth a look.

I wanted a little more out of the script, some further explanation, at least a few of the loose ends wrapped up. But what’s here is a near triumph of mood and tone over “story,” and certainly creepy enough to recommend.

As he types away, constantly interrupted, taking too little care of his health, exasperated by a dying Lexus or his sons’ addiction to “screens,” we marvel at the compulsion of the artist to make art, to leave a legacy not just to all of us, but to those living under his roof.

Sacrilege doesn’t defile a horror formula. It just shows us how following the recipe to the letter doesn’t always work.

The script leaves a lot out, the acting is competent — everybody pants in fear when appropriate — if not compelling. The direction limits the gimmicks to a single yanked-out-of-the-frame shot and the script is most concerned about not wasting a moment between the next application of that knife-plunging-into-flesh effect.

All this cinema-talk analysis is tedious, making the movie Malcolm made sound tedious, too. And all this theatricality in the writing, blocking and acting always leads to a film that keeps the viewer at arm’s length. No amount of Washington shouting or Zendaya overwhelmed in his tsunami of speechifying changes that.

The Barr cousins give us a film of novel scenes, comical moments of sexual experimentation which have a few laughs and a little pathos.

Coming 2 America still provides enough smiles to make up for the lack of belly-laughs. And if you want to hear Murphy’s famous “heh-heh-heh” laugh, stay through the credits.

Every time we figure we know how this will turn out because we’ve seen 74 earlier versions of “this movie,” Huang trips us up. His flawed hero, more flawed parents and pipe dreams become our dreams, which “Big Game” or not, is all we could hope for in any sports dramedy.

No, you won’t remember this a year from now — just the vapor-thoughts effect, the jokey tone that floats around that and the heroes and villains. But how much of “The Hunger Games” sticks in the memory after four films? Heroes, villains, the train and a bow and arrow? Maybe?

Yalda: A Night of Forgiveness is a riveting and thoroughly engrossing satire of Iranian culture and the work-arounds built into a theocracy, ways of ignoring calls for reform and the shedding of “tradition.”

It’s still an intensely likable and watchable dramedy, even if it never quite reaches that “generation defining comedy” thing.

The most fascinating material here is hearing his mother’s ambitions — a desire to come to America and “get rich — and Smalls’ myriad musical influences, not just his pals and peers but those father figure mentors who entered his life.

Enforcement, released as “Shorta” (Arabic slang for “cops”) in Europe, is a solid is slow-moving police actioner that reminds us that no matter the continent, police work is the same dangerous game. And that the world over, that “game” has entirely too many of the wrong sorts of people signing up.

Grant and director Natasha Kermani (“Imitation Girl,””Shattered”) package their “message” into a pretty clever if not all that ambitious thriller, with Grant our stoic heroine, fighting the good fight, night after night, plainly able to “go it alone” but maybe wondering if it’s worth it.

It’s got a good enough cast, a couple of twists and enough brute force to it that it’s worth taking in on its own terms. Those terms being “We’re imitating the McDonagh Brothers, so what?”

Bræin Hovig and Skarsgård take us into their confidence as they make these choices, decisions, promises and compromises. The wonder of Hope is how much of that they do without dialogue, just with a look, a gesture, a silent scream of despair or teeth grinding in resignation.

“Raya” is a pleasant enough kids’ adventure — “Raiders of the Lost Ark” meets “Mulan” who is now a “Tomb Raider.”

The target demo here is the same as it ever was — 8-and-under. There’s plenty of slapstick and critter gags for them, crashing furniture, trashed hotel rooms and wedding party mishaps. The rest of us? “Cute” it is and cute these two forever will be.

140 minutes of “fly on the wall” filmmaking, mostly of Eilish performing, songwriting (or avoiding it, as her brother complains), doing photo shoots and radio interviews and peaking at Coachella is a bit much.

Zinshtein covers enough of the bases and gives all those she interviews the screen time to speak their truth. And if they’re a gun nut, grievance-wielding pastor who is sure he’s not the crackpot he comes off as here, merely “right,” we all ought to be worried. Dogmatic cranks shouldn’t be setting dark, confrontational policies when their fondest hope is that they’re self-fulfilling.

As Long as We Both Shall Live is underpopulated and lifeless, as stark as Nya’s stand-up comic pal’s act, and the anemic response to it.

The three stories could each have been their own movie, and probably a more compelling one than this mash-up turns out to be. Everybody gets in everybody else’s way for the first two and a half acts.

There are few things more maddening than sitting through a thriller that should work, that has the requisite elements in place, and just doesn’t.

But it’s like they’re at a loss about what to do with real people, real situations, real traumas or emotions without comic book men and women in tights and lots and lots of effects.

Stevens mugs, Fisher vamps and Mann and Dench do their damnedest. But you can’t improve on Coward, and there’s no re-animating this corpse.

I found the picture moving in spite of its seeming unwillingness to wholly grapple with race and Coogan’s unwillingness to master the Afrikaner accent. He’s a gifted mimic, and Riseborough manages it. What gives? But what it does wrestle with is profound, and profoundly disturbing.

Safer at Home is so trapped in its own gimmick, so myopic, so limited in action and lacking close-ups that build viewer empathy with characters, this becomes just an interested “failed” exercise.

Despite his dabbling in many indulgences, Serj Tankian doesn’t come off as shallow or particularly superficial here. But this documentary almost does.

In Full Bloom is a patient, simple post-war parable of fighters — cultures in collision, dreams and disappointment.

Pedestrian shot selection and editing finish off any sense of “urgency” that the story is meant to generate.

Lovely as it sometimes is and impressive as the cast may be, it holds too few surprises and dramatic peaks to make it a stand-out in a genre that’s fast-becoming old 19th century hat.

This clever and darker than dark thriller gives us villains to hiss at and villains to root for. But at the end of the day, when evil is done and hope is thin, “justice” and revenge blur. In the movies, at least, we bay for an avenger to spill some blood.

Greenland doesn’t often surprise, but it never disappoints.

It’s a bio-pic that keeps its brilliant, sultry, complicated subject at arm’s length.

The final act of a thriller is where the payoff lies. We’ve invested in the characters and relationships. We fear for them, and as we do, the suspense should build to the point where it weighs on you. The Violent Heart has that weight about it right from the start. And if the climax seems wanting, perhaps one twist too many, it still doesn’t spoil the mystery we see unfold and the solutions we have time to consider over its 100 or so minutes.

Writer-director John Swab (“Run With the Hunted”) delivers a B-movie with few surprises but plenty of good, solid punches at a mess that didn’t fix a problem, it just allowed a fresh field of predators to profit from it.

The actors may give their all and the squirrel might indeed “stick the landing.” Flora & Ulysses still falls a little short of the mark.

Red Dot is a savage if not wholly satisfying “flip-the-script” stalked in the wilderness thriller whose cleverness comes from its subtext.

Paranormal Prison has a great location — a closed penitentiary in Boise, Idaho. It’s got a time-tested concept, a paranormal Youtube show comes in to “Blair Witch”/reality TV the place one last time before it’s torn down. But half of its paltry 70 minutes of screen time are spent “explaining.”

Little Big Women is a perfectly watchable genre melodrama, an old-fashioned “women’s picture,” with sentiment, intricate relationships, intrigue and not-too-heavy-to-take heartbreak.

It’s no “48 Hrs.” or “Fugitive,” but Below Zer is a good one, with or without subtitles.

Ford has made a downbeat, realistic treatment of this subject that doesn’t have a built-in call-to-arms as part of its make-up. That’s implied. Nobody, no couples, should have to go through this.

Bullied covers new ground even as it feels, at times, as if it’s all over the place. Remember, an academic made it, not a professional filmmaker.

For a 76 minute thriller, it wastes a helluva lot of time.

The acting is superb and spare, as you might expect.

The best thing about the script and direction is that we rarely get too far ahead of it. We think we see what’s coming, but you never know.

That’s Hutton’s gift of “Lapsis,” a puzzling picture that challenges, leaves out “all the answers” and serves up Tony Soprano-lite as our intrepid, in-over-his-head tour guide through a hell of our own creation.

“Always and Forever” is still likable, still cute, but utterly out of ideas.

Like homelessness itself, Paradise Cove has problems we, and the folks who made this, can’t talk our way out of.

Director Kevin Lewis powers through this thing (the odd mispronounced “blown” line makes it into the film) as if he knows the script is crap and that his leading lady’s not the best at registering shock, fear or fury and there’s no point in looking for a better take. But Cage, dyed hair, beard and boots, brings home the B-movie bacon, as usual. It’s just seriously undercooked this time out.

It’s all lovely to look at, as you’d expect from a movie directed by a camera operator/DP. But it has all the nutritional value of an orchid blossom.

The funny bits drift past their payoff, the pace flags (88 minute movie stretched out to 107) and the light, tongue-in-cheek tone, the riffing banter between the leads isn’t enough to save it.

Shoot outs, wisecracks, narrow escapes and brutal, bloodied captures, a big BOOM that might be coming and Raybans that might never come off. It’s oh-so-pretty to look at. But talk about empty calories.

Unlike “The Matrix,” there’s too little to hang onto thanks to a flimsy story that dives into future-tech and glib heaven-or-hell discourses, and characters who keep us at arm’s length.

It’s not that the performances are incompetent. The script is alarmingly tone-deaf.

As we watch David Osit’s documentary Mayor, we see a public figure who is sweating the little things because the big things are all but off limits to him.

In a banner year for African American representation in front of and behind the camera, King looks like a filmmaker who will get more trips to the plate, more chances to touch’em all. Stanfield is already a rising star and in-demand talent. And after his Messianic turn here, Kaluuya’s star is in the ascent and his phone — if there’s any justice in Hollywood — has to be ringing off the hook. He lets us see what his contemporaries saw in Hampton, and he makes us wonder just who he might have become.

Add the fact that it’s the tamest R-rated romantic comedy in the history of motion pictures to its gloomy pauses and funereal pace and you haven’t got a rom-com on your hands, just a rom-corpse.

The documentary, like the idea behind it, makes for a fascinating thought experiment. And a few years down the road, maybe it’ll be worth revisiting to wonder if more than one interview subject has wound up in an institution.

The intimacy of the story and the black and white cinematography keep Dear Comrades! from crossing into “epic.” Konchalovskiy is more interested in reminding people of the violence their neighbors, soldiers, police and leaders are capable of, how drab and circumscribed life was back then.

The minimalism works well in the early acts, and even the preachy finale — with its civics and socio-political debates built in — doesn’t wholly break the spell of 4×4. If nothing else, you’ll pick up your owner’s manual and give it a glance after seeing this one.

The not-quite-comical squirming discomfort of some of scenes remind the viewer that Neumark cut his producing teeth on TV’s “Portlandia.” It’d be easy to see these characters, in more cartoonish form, on that show. But whatever tone he was going for, the thin sprinkling of laughs makes First Blush drag on more than it should.

The whole tedious affair makes one wish they’d gone to less trouble making a bad movie with tame villains, an uninteresting lead and confused (Was this recut to play up “the plague?”), scattered story.

True Mothers is a melodrama with 90 minutes of story awash in 139 minutes of movie. Kawase holds our interest by letting us see the unexpressed pain of characters generally too well-mannered to express loss, shock, outrage and resentment out loud.

I’m the first to admit this isn’t my favorite genre. But anybody can tell when a horror movie works. The few chills hand one or two almost jaw-dropping moments of gore delivered in the most predictable ways don’t quite get the job done here.

It’s a brutal blur of a movie, rendering its themes and actions in broad, violent strokes. That’s a help, as they mumbled accents are a bloody jumble to get through without subtitles.

Avoiding the conventional one man’s journey “from prejudiced to lovesick” leaves Haymaker with a vacuum where its heart should be. The picture was never destined to be a knockout, but settling for a draw seems a waste.

Williams and the cast are better than the movie they’re saddled with.

As indie “spectral agent” dramedies go, it’s worth a look and offers a few laughs if little else.

If Palmer isn’t that demanding of star and audience, it’s a perfectly serviceable story for at least reminding the film world that you’re out there, available and perfectly capable of delivering the dramatic goods.

I found this parable a tad pokey for my tastes, almost sleep-inducing in the middle acts. The title promises a picture with more momentum, a longer “road” journey, and I was disappointed when it settled into how hard it is to get work and get by in Bangkok.

This is pretentious, chatty and maddeningly slow.

We’ve seen much of this before, and as interesting as Gathegi makes this guy — stream “Princess of the Row” when you get a chance — the lack of surprises in the various waypoints of the story rob the twists at the end of any impact.

I didn’t hate it, but didn’t get much out of it and found it boring. Still, fans of kidnapping, impaling, hot-poker-in-the-eye cinema may take to it as their cinematic happy place.

Its the pleasure of this cast’s company — grounded, detailed performances with a flourish here and there — that make this otherwise routine thriller pay off.

It’s engrossing and touching and very well-acted, with Kajol taking this star vehicle as far as her temper, her chastened rage and her skill in applying that Old English word that starts with an F can take it. Anu even gives Milan a George Carlin-style lecture in its proper usage. Nicely f—–g done there, sister.

Chung (“Lucky Life”), filming a tale both familiar and alien and a story not far removed from his own childhood, has made a breakout film of brittle tenderness, heart and hope — one that we hope makes him a filmmaker to watch from here on out.

That diffuse focus and meandering narrative is the only real shortcoming in this consequential and touching weeper.

Glass lets her story simmer and her characters brood for almost 80 minutes, Maud’s rapturous passion rising even as she lashes out — in sexual and self-injurious ways — at the deity who isn’t giving her direct answers. And then the writer-director slaps us right across the face with a finale that feels harrowing and somehow right and true.

It’s not the most surprising story of its type, and it’s far from Bahrani’s most graceful film. His more intimate, less sprawling tales never felt this clunky, with all the seams showing. But Gourav makes a barely-likable and yet entertaining tour guide.

Yes, it gets gassed about a half hour in, with things not picking up much until the Big Finale. But those who like this sort of thing — horror played for laughs, a cult-movie by design — will surely find this the sort of thing they like.

Valadez lets her actor’s faces do most of the talking here. It’s a music-free film of long, tense silences and splashes of fraught shakedowns and terror.

This isn’t a straightforward biography, but Tell Me When I Die is how many a filmmaker of an artistic bent would love to go out and hope to be remembered — with a little philosophy, a little sadness and a smile of reminiscence.

Matafeo just bubbles off the screen here, a cluelessly confidant young woman just oozing snark and misguided notions of how “This changes nothing.“ Lewis makes a fine straight man for her to bounce off of.

This picture is rough going for animal lovers. It has a certain quality, but I found it as unpleasant as any account of callous people mistreating animals, whatever angle they’re furtively working.

There’s no suspense, no flow to the story, little pathos in the flashbacks and a lot of dead spots where the story stops cold. I like everybody on the screen here, just not in this movie — not in this cut of it anyway.

No Man’s Land plays like a buffet diner who has overfilled his plate. There’s too much thrown in here to do justice to anybody’s story.

Breaking Fast is an Islamic “Wedding Banquet,” a West Hollywood rom-com so cute it flirts with “cutesy,” almost cloying when it isn’t being cute, but damned adorable in the bargain.

Whatever drama and arc there is to his story is mostly suggested (depression, ballooning in weight for a time), is stuff that happened after he got his first feature made years BEFORE he started making this movie. The clips and boilerplate, unemotional on-camera narration of Clapboard Jungle seems less interesting than what he’d already been through.

There’s nothing here but a cute kid finding another cute kid and considering a romance while she waits for that DNA test, or her mother, to come back.

A thriller that misses the mark, and not by a little.

“Heaven” isn’t exactly an infomercial, but it’s not much deeper than that.

Mackie always gives fair value, but this seems silly and beneath him, even though he’s done time in the Marvel universe.

The screenplay needed more work and the film in the can a lot more editing to make The Mauritanian worthy of the talent on the set.

As a movie, this One Night in Miami is more promising than polished, more righteous than riveting viewing.

In the end, we’re left with a gimmick movie that doesn’t come off, an accurate-enough artifact of the global lockdown of last spring that will be remembered for that, and little else.

Mulligan — drawn, wan and yet steely here — and Fiennes’ lightly-laid-on sturdy working class polymath turn make The Dig touching and richly rewarding, as entertaining as any movie about archeology could be without a bullwhip.

One never shakes the feeling that this entire enterprise is seriously tone deaf.

The half-hearted lean into “jokey” means that Hunted never gets under your skin and transitions into a visceral experience.

It’s a fascinating peek into another way of living, urban Roma (“Gypsies”) who refuse to assimilate or accommodate, to look backward even as they’re steadfastly refusing to plan ahead.

There’s nothing salacious in the new documentary about the Bureau’s investigation of King, MLK/FBI. What this film sets out to document, put into context and explain is something that began life as Bureau File Number 100-106670 and that came to look, with hindsight, like a vendetta against the civil rights leader and Nobel laureate.

With no building of suspense, little connection with a lot of the thinly-scripted characters, and no volcano movie ever having much of a story to go with its effects, Skyfire still falls short of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano,” even if it is marginally better than “Miami Magma.”

It’s a bit all over the place, introducing characters and possible story threads that it abandons, which accounts for what feels like a somewhat bloated running time for a dramedy that’s essentially a three-hander, and that wants to be — despite dramatic moments — a comedy. But the leads and the lovely scenery make up for some of that.

Herself is an uplifting real world drama in classic weeper/wish-fulfillment fantasy clothes, a story of pluck and heart, violence and sadness.

“Grizzly II” never comes close to “so bad its good,” although there are laughs at how bad it actually is, here and there.

Here’s a charmless little nothing riff on “Sweet Home Alabama” starring nobody you ever heard of and filmed in everybody’s second-favorite Beaufort, the one in South Carolina.

It’s Kirby who makes this worth watching, and even that performance is nothing anyone would call “warm.” If “The Queen” and a “Mission:Impossible” villain didn’t make her a star, this certainly will. It’s all the “pieces” around her that let down this “woman.”

It teeters unsatisfyingly between forlorn and wistful. Looking for something more? You’ll have to find that “Elsewhere.”

Moroccan producer (French TV’s “The Bureau”) turned director Hicham Hajji has no sense of pace, and while he’s got “names” on board, he doesn’t give them much to chew on. The script has these half-hearted efforts to shoehorn third-act twists and political messaging into the picture, but they’re as a limp and obvious as one actor’s feigned southern drawl in the finale.

It’s the rarest of films that truly allows us to see that world through another’s eyes.

Sylvie’s Love comes off like a novel idea given every chance to shine, but let down by a maudlin TV movie script that needed polish.

Although the arc of the story is quite conventional in terms of Ruben’s “stages of death and dying” journey, the script and Ahmed’s affecting, sympathetic performance make us cling to the same hopes that Ruben does, that he can recover some of his hearing, maybe enough to get some of his life back.

As “unfilmmable” as a movie about men lost in words, attempting to write a dictionary might seem, there is a better picture in this subject, based on journalist/history buff Simon Winchester’s best selling book. Limiting its scope, beefing up the connection between the “consanguineous” correspondents, their letters and their meetings, giving the two men competing agendas (acceptance by academia vs “redemption”) rather than shoehorning both of them into one and losing the “love story” would have been a start.

This intimate saga is an alternately sad and intense take on “the sins of the father” and the rippling effects of violence. And if it’s not quite as incident-packed as a movie of this length ought to be, what’s here is rich in character and a rewarding experience.

It’s a performance of compact, comical fury packed into a movie that cost what they wasted on the “Wonder Woman 1984” avocado toast catering, a little B-movie that could, headed by a pint-sized badass with “Grace” as her middle name.

Even if we see “trouble” the minute we spy that first phone, we don’t necessarily guess how this fascinating “speed of change” story will play out.