Roger Moore

The movie is a bit of a female empowerment muddle, with promising young actress-turned writer-director Emerald Fennell rearing back as if to deliver a knock-out blow, and only grazing what she’s swinging at, often as not...But she makes Promising Young Woman so consistently dark and foreboding that we never let our guard down, never get our hopes up and brace for the next moment that comes when “it’s time to pay the piper.”

And nothing in this raunchy romp through excess registers or delivers a laugh. Shore is still annoying, but funny never figures into it.

The David Loughery script — he wrote Ealy’s “The Intruder” — wins points for attempted twists, but frankly they don’t build suspense or deliver shocks, so what’s the point?

The often dry script, funereal pacing and generic spectacle of the digitally-augmented set-pieces makes for a movie that’s like “Captain Marvel,” only about half as much fun.

Everybody here absorbs the music in August Wilson’s ear, the poetry of the lines and the history and psychology he touches on through them.

Trainer lets us meet bold thinkers who found a way to put a modern twist on what a museum — “an eighteenth century idea (stuck) in a 19th century box” — could be.

It traffics in too many false frights, leans heavily on lapses in logic and loses its way when super-naturalism kicks in.

Funny Boy is valuable in letting us see this world and this history through different eyes.

If it’s only marginally better than much of the holiday-oriented fare of Netflix or Hallmark, that just means it fits right in.

Yes, Reece has been doing this for years and his films have taken on a nice polish. And I dare say this one would “play” in the right group setting, with proper alcoholic lubrication. But from its nonsensical title to the inconsequential plot behind that title, Climate for the Hunter doesn’t have enough to offer to make it worth recommending, save for members of the vampire camp cognoscenti. And even they might prefer seeing it tipsy.

The players give it their best, as tedious exercises like this are rarely the fault of the cast. The fight choreography rises to “adequate.” The effects are OK — mostly — a planet overrun with “pilots,” another filled with semi-visible alien versions called “shadow creatures.

Mosul is a combat thriller that passes on an appreciation of professionalism and patriotism in a different language, in different uniforms, but with a universal focus on “mission” and “hope.”

Hard Kill is a garbage thriller made because the producers had access to an abandoned factory complex, a lot of tac gear to dress their color-coordinated “terrorist” minions in and Bruce Willis’s name.

The whole affair has a touch of “Polar Express” about it, kind of holiday heartless.

When everyone and everything is this low-heat, even a Hallmark level holiday romance faces that dreaded two-word review every actor and filmmaker fears. Who cares?

Inane snippets of conversation, an over-sharing reverie by a French-American (male) nurse, brittle, off-putting and stiff performances seemingly molded from single-use plastic, a story that goes nowhere and does so at an excruciating pace — Elyse is a quiet, shiny and empty catastrophe.

Mangrove isn’t the most emotional film in the series, nor the easiest way to be eased into this world. Courtroom dramas are predisposed to bogging down on the screen. But McQueen makes its history come alive, and lets us see the importance of this restaurant and its place within the events, lives and culture that emerge from every other movie in the series.

I’d say Half Brothers half works, but that’s unjustifiably generous.

The assorted heart-to-hearts play well, and Silverstone still shows some (limited) comic chops. But there’s no flow, no scene-topping-scene build-up of laughs, heart, etc.

Temple’s made a fascinating film that sets the record straight — in a lot of slurred words — about MacGowan while he’s still able to do it.

The pacing isn’t comedy-brisk, and for all the implications of the story, what we’re shown of all the machinations and intrigues seems a tad thin. Sibilia doesn’t sweat a lot of details about how they built this thing, costs and logistics. He’s more interested in the nutty notion and the nut who had it, all to impress a very pretty almost-a-lawyer.

Linden, while hard-pressed to take this anywhere we don’t see from a mile off, manages several tense moments and scenes with real suspense, before delivering a finale that’s a grim, teeth-gritting corker.

But marrying this “Grapes of Wrath” saga to a “journey of self-discovery” narrative in this blend of restlessness and dogged, “no whining” desperation makes Nomadland an instant indie classic and one of the best films of 2020.

Thorough as it is in covering the history of the company and the retail phenomenon — my first newspaper feature story was visiting and grading all the videos in a small city where I worked, which led to my first hate mail and angry calls — Last Blockbuster plays like a TV feature story that goes on too long.

In the hands of Tom Hanks and his “Captain Phillips” director, Paul Greengrass, this adaptation of a Paulette Jiles novel becomes a parable for these “troubled times,” a story of race and unrepentant racism, men of violence who won’t give up that violence and the power of a free press to rectify that.

In a year when much of the world has been stuck at home, day drinking, Another Round is a welcome shot of bitters with a warm cognac chaser, and a bracing/revealing renewal of a grand Danish partnership, Vinterberg and Mads his muse.

It traffics in some of the very stereotypes it sends up and wastes a Big Name here and there. But it’s often laugh-out-loud funny, over-the-top, from its casting to its run time.

White, who did “Ask Dr. Ruth” and a “Serena” documentary, is very good at getting the blood boiling over the injustices at every turn, the feigned outrage of North Koreans trying to bully their way out of blame and Malaysians who let the world know that they know who was involved and how, and just what they were willing to do about it.

Hopkins, Colman, Williams, Sewell and Poots give us an eyeful and and earful of a fate awaiting far too many of us in this quietly gripping and intimate drama.

Every single thing about this, every scene, has the pace of pandesol (Filipino bread) batter slowly dripping out of the mixing bowl. Mom’s activities have a bland, predictable righteousness. Brix’s reactions to each revelation and meeting each person who knew his mother are stunningly unemotional and insipidly scripted.

Can Evrenol’s thriller is heavy on parable, semi-nonsensical in plot, but benefits from good acting and a grimly-realized children’s odyssey undertaken in post-Apocalyptic future.

The dialogue has its moments, but the jokes are too sparse to buttress the arch, comic book camp tone Mr. Adam Egypt Mortimer was going for. And while the wigs are fabulous and the effects interesting, it’s all something of a hash. Coherent enough, sure, but making sense of it seems like a fool’s errand, start to finish.

The script is a passing parade of grace notes, most delivered with a light touch.

Here’s a tip. Try not to bore us so much next time.

Tom Doiron’s first produced script lapses into a long series of over-explained “expository endings” which spoil the mystery of what’s come before. But Eckhart reminds us of how good he can be when given a showy role, and a supporting cast worthy of his talents.

There are tips and too-obvious clues about what’s really going on here. And Miele drags out the finale, too, trying to bring on the tears. But Miller and Luna give this romance a history, weariness and testy spark that keeps Wander Darkly going even after we’ve guessed what its destination is.

I’m inclined to cut The Twentieth Century slack for sending me on a deep Wiki dive into Canadian history, and the visual inventiveness and perverse camp of it all. But Maddin got there first, and his movies didn’t feel this gassed for the last half hour.

The best “wake up” call documentary of 2020, a movie filled with warnings discussed by the very smart women sounding those warnings, the very smart women doing something about this very real threat.

The heart, action and sophistication of the artwork make this folk tale the best animated film of the year.

It’s got pacing problems and (serious) coherence issues to go along with the Ritchie touches and yet another visual homage to the epic corridor kill-off in the Korean classic “Oldboy.”

It doesn’t amount to much more than some winsome smirks and a chuckle or two, but its mere existence is a delight.

It’s not quite up to the tempo of a screwball farce, although the script has that complexity. The jokes are droll and sly.

Drew’s still got it even if The Stand-In doesn’t.

It’s brief, but not so much to-the-point as wandering around it for an hour. And while it doesn’t spoil the effect of the whole, it does feel wanting as a finale. It’s the dullest “Small Axe” of the five.

A couple of random laughs die of loneliness here. None of the romances are developed and have time to register, much less click. And here’s Dugan, squinting at the cue cards, energetically serving up the awful double-entendres as host of a show no one would watch unless creepy grandpa the host was a LOT creepier and funnier.

Fincher’s made a sometimes fascinating/sometimes plodding recreation of film history, perhaps with its own share of Oscar bait attached. But his richly-detailed movie just reminds us that the more modest “RKO 281,” about the actual filming of “Kane,” and “The Cradle Will Rock” and “Me and Orson Welles,” about Welles’ days shaking up New York theater, were a lot more entertaining.

Billie is the far and away the most definitive Billie Holiday biography ever put on screen, a film that celebrates her magic and examines the demons that haunted her, chemical and human.

Everything about this couple, from the way they pair up to the ways their romance plays out, feels scripted and inorganic, people “acting” like they’re soul mates because that’s in the job description. They know it, and we know it from watching them.

A script that scrimps on laughs — not enough zingers or pratfalls — and relies on sentiment to get by lets them down.

The acting’s bad, the dialogue a clutter of cliches, banal affirmations, half-hearted jokes and vocalized pauses — those words all of us use while we’re trying to think of what to say. “You know what I’m saying?” Filler like that should never show up in a script, and this script is almost ALL filler.

There have been too many movies titled “The Call,” so when Hollywood remakes it they’ll have to tweak that. But Chung-hyun Lee has delivered a tight, surprising and moving thriller good enough to ensure that they will.

It’s not the neatest film-dissecting-filmmakers story, with rough edges, lurches in tone and trite tropes and dialogue. But the characters make us wince in recognition and the situations, even the ones we know are coming, are real enough to cringe over.

There’s little sense wasting 100 minutes on stale fruitcake like this.

McQueen makes the viewer work towards understanding the themes and subtexts of these films. He gloriously recreates the jaw-dropping delight the bullied, racially-taunted kid experiences the first time he sees the shops and colorfully-attired street life of “his” people on moving day.

Christmas on the Square isn’t much, but what’s here is a pleasant enough time-killer, which is more than you can say about the vast majority of holiday-themed Hallmark/Hulu/Netflix et al fare this season.

Cut through the cute that crosses into “cutesie,” tolerate the stereotypes and ignore the sentiment that claws at cloying, and Team Marco plays like a pleasant time killer of a comedy suitable for the whole family.

Ammonite is an explicit and seriously sexy sex scene wrapped in a dull period piece that illuminates neither the characters nor the titular fossils that bring them together.

It’s comical, but not really a comedy, spiritual without being all that deep. But as it grapples with what drives a creative person, paints the “after life” and “before life” eternity in Picasso-with-a-light-pen strokes and questions what makes life worth living, it can be quite touching.

Rubenstein’s character study suggests that it’s not all that great being Noemí Gold at 27. But all things considered, it’s not all that bad either.

The picture plays, the amnesia crutch the plot leans on never gives way and the players, especially Souza, keep us invested and interested until the last mystery of those missing 32 Weeks is revealed.

The film’s problematic agenda clashes with its clumsy, unrealistic narrative, and like too many “cops shoot an unarmed Black man” tales, it leaves nothing but harm in its wake.

It’s another self-consciously odd, almost surreal “smirk” of a comedy about two misfits who aren’t just BFFs in Morgansfield High, they’re each others only friends. And how you take it depends on how easy a laugh you are.

Buck gives a performance impressive enough to call “break out,” but Gathegi, in a largely non-verbal role, utterly loses himself in the makeup, the wardrobe, the environment and the character.

Howard doesn’t make awful films, and as somebody who spent much of my earlier life in Appalachia, I’m not inclined to write this problematic portrayal off entirely. But self-satisfied people on both ends of the political spectrum will see what they want to in this story, and that’s not a compliment.

The Croods: A New Age has some of the derivative limitations of the first film — the faint whiff of riding “Ice Age’s” coattails. But the players make their slapsticking, pratfalling, punking and pranking characters breathe, live, love and care.

With its obvious melodrama, obviously misleading “locations” and even more obvious big stunts, Black Beauty doesn’t transcend its sentimental children’s entertainment origins. But Avis more than does the novel justice.

The script is slapdash and daft, and not in a good way. And you almost feel sorry for Swardson being forced to carry it and set the “teabagging” tone. But the viewer is the victim here.

There is nothing, simply nothing, to make you feel that you’ve led a sexually-sheltered life, that your understanding of the modern fluid, on-the-spectrum nature of sexuality is superficial at best, than Queer Japan.

Actress turned writer-director Clea Duvall (“The Intervention”) and comic actress turned first-time co-writer Mary Holland made something of a holiday hash of it, a movie with good moments buried under clumsy ones, with plenty of pandering layered on top of sentiment.

This light, wistful Canadian romantic comedy clings to its longing and amuses in its awkwardness. Well-cast, well-acted, a touch melancholy and a tad overlong, it’s one of those movies that would have passed me, you and everybody else by if a pandemic hadn’t derailed the global movie-consuming model.

The friends-making-a-movie vibe that permeates this — Power did the animation himself, guessing the Petersons are siblings — is the most charming thing about Attack of the Demons. A wittier script might have allowed that friends DIYing a horror cartoon vibe to translate into something more fun on the screen.

The film doesn’t significantly alter the picture of Soros that has emerged from a “60 Minutes” profile here or a CNN interview there. But those aren’t the media organizations lying about his background, exaggerating his influence or twisting his motives. They aren’t the ones drawing Satan’s horns on his head.

The fights are reasonably well-choreographed, the stuntwork not totally obvious. The effects are adequate, there are half-assed “graphic novel” chapter breaks and titles — “The Rabbit,” and the like. The story? Strictly wakkie nunu. At least Cage is here for a few laughs.

The director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” has once again taken on a complex evil being done in our name, a subject no one really wants to think about, and forced us to consider the many ramifications of making a flippant and terminal judgment on something that demands attention and understanding, in light of what we now know.

What I found most interesting was getting at the places where Warren himself screwed up.

What we’re left with is a fumbling, groping and almost wholly-unsatisfying thriller set in a towering old house near the water’s edge, where the wind howls and there’s a shock, fright or laugh behind every tree.

There’s nothing remotely witty about this, no real room for pathos or outrage either.

All Joking Aside isn’t awful and Harewood isn’t its lone shortcoming. The script is too thin to hold our interest. Stand-up is so over-covered as film subject matter that the only way it can work in a movie these days is as backdrop for a more interesting story in the foreground.

And Kendrick? After 45 minutes or so of thin entertainment, Anna gets her groove back. Bubbly Noelle has no time for pessimism.

The documentary makes this much clear. The days of ignoring and neglecting Puerto Rico need to end. Puerto Ricans remind us that they deserve it, and that from now on, they insist on it.

Grossman’s film makes us appreciate what a smart kid she is and how she somehow shrugs off the way she triggers the climate-denial right.

The thing looks just beautiful, and having the wonderful character actor Clancy Brown as a creepy old mortician “telling” the tales lends it gravitas and ups its cool quotient. But the stories from Spindell, heretofore a maker of short films (including an earlier version of a “story” told here), are wildly uneven in tension, suspense and horror.

The totality of human existence might be summed up in the forlorn, inquisitive and sometimes playful narrations of the great German filmmaker, that keen-eyed observer of humanity Werner Herzog.

But Echo Boomers — terrible title, BTW — can’t get by on echoes of better thrillers that covered the same ground. And betting on Schwarzenegger making the family name an acting dynasty seems like a long shot, even in a business known for its nepotism.

On celluloid or in person, Billy Friedkin’s still a great storyteller.

A compelling drama about self-image, dashed dreams and the growing up that might be on the other side of despair.

Paulson underplays the Motivated Mom from Hell thing so well that when lines are crossed and the “game” is out in the open, we still don’t know what to expect from her.

Director and co-writer Christopher Landon (the “Happy Death Day” films were his, and “Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) doesn’t have enough jokes or amusingly murderous sight gags to make “Freaky” take flight.

It’s a case study in the difference between smart writing with pathos and wit, and witless imitation, between “barely adequate” child actors and ones with charisma that the camera catches.

The Giant is a colossal waste of time, 100 minutes of underlit scenes filled with (mostly) high school characters whispering every single profundity that writer/director David Raboy can think of putting in their mouths in a story that never engages us or even tries to.

Alex Winter’s Zappa is perhaps the most thorough Zappa screen biography to come along, and that’s acknowledging how hopeless the job of making The Compleat Zappa bio-doc is.

There’s enough here to merit a look, to see “What kind of movie romance can you make in a pandemic?” and to feed 2020 nostalgia.

The Climb invites us along for the ride and keeps our interest, whether or not love or bromance, as they say, finds a way.

For a bad movie, it’s a fun.

As funny as a mass shooting at the North Pole, and relying on just such a finale to sell it, Fatman is one of the epic miscalculations of any cinematic holiday season.

It’s all so damned sweet, maybe not “strictly PG,” but as our heroine lives her season-long story arc, she comes out in a different place than where she started, bonds with her “a little too cool” grandparents, works out some Mommy/Daddy issues and grows.

The most interesting theme touched on is the different choices the siblings make — one, staying behind and the other opting for something like an adventure. But even that’s thinly developed.

The cast is game, but plainly not in a position to add laughs to a script that feels more workshop-ready than “locked.”

In the title role of Tatsushi Ohmori‘s Mother, Masami Nagasawa gives us one of the great screen monsters of recent memory.

The acting is uneven, the action not awful but not great either (some of the stage punches are obvious) and the ending a total cheat.

Let It Go is a thriller best-appreciated for its trio of tour de force performances — for Diane Lane and Kevin Costner’s understated Western American couple that’s so familiar and lived-in that their most powerful moments are wordless, and for Great Brit Lesley Manville’s furious, uncompromising North Dakota matriarch.

Emmy’s peril, which she cannot fully articulate, should have more of the focus. Making it all about Dad’s credulous acceptance of “spirits” and ghosts, and his breakdown under the strain, just isn’t as interesting, no matter how much seething he does in the process.

It’s all cheerfully cheesy with the occasional off-color crack, a whole lot of jokes that don’t land, and a cast that’s not-quite-amusing-enough to remind us that Leslie “Airplane/Naked Gun” Nielsen was the Best Canadian at this kind of comedy.

It’s not close to being the scariest movie you’ve seen this year. But the political/immigration subtext, the grim cause-and-effect of their haunting and a pretty good twist or two make His House a haunted British council flat tale well worth checking out.

There’s not much to this other than the “let’s make a teen rom-com about incest” hook. But if they figured that would at least get Call Me Brother noticed, they seem to have miscalculated.

Pairing Loren up with a child with this much spark, acting-up and acting-out, proves to be a winning formula for the film.

It poetically folds Hindu myth into a story of self-discovery, “coming out” and finding oneself and love, a journey that is a rocky road indeed in Levin M. Sivan’s film.

Engaging performances aside, even with a moment of tooth-grinding levity here and there, The Day of the Lord isn’t doing the demonic possession genre any favors by turning its actors into bloody pulps via abuse, torture and pummelings.

It’s not just that Kindred doesn’t go full “Rosemary’s Baby” with why these strangers want her to have her baby at home where they can get at it, or that we get little clear notion of why they won’t let her “Get Out.” It’s that the movie has very little, suspense and thrills-wise, to offer instead.

It’s not the worst movie in that Poe-Christie “kill off characters, one by one” formula. The players do well by their moments of terror or sadistic cruelty. But it’s entirely too obvious to come off, entirely too cluttered to have a character or characters rope us in, and entirely too chatty-jokey to ever be scary. And it’s not funny enough to work as a sick comedy.

The players sell it. And the jolts — an apparition here, a ghost in a shadows there — get the job done.

So yes, there’s good stuff here, mostly in the earlier acts. But even mixed-bag horror flicks deserve to be seen on a big screen. We viewers and those who entertain us have a pact, after all.

Writer-director Marchal loses track of characters, story threads, mob cash and drugs, impatient as he is to get to the next shoot out.

Stripping it of its cruelty, sense of grievance and teen-impulsive passion for violent revenge rubs off too much of what made the first film work from this “sequel.” And no cameo from the first film can atone for that.

Well-acted, smartly-reported and heartfelt.

There’s deja vu in watching Tolontan deal with Romanian TV, which eagerly follows his team’s reporting each night, but which cannot resist from shooting at the messenger when he appears on their talk shows, losing the thread and forgetting the real victims here.

The central premise, that you need to couple up to avoid that “wheelchair/diaper” analogy, is what’s ludicrous here. A rom-com as pathetic as this reminds us that we do indeed die alone.

Here’s a no-budget Canadian thriller that comes oh-so-close to being the “Little Horror Engine that Could.” Halloween Party almost gets by on just-enough character development, a workable plot — if they’d stick with it — and Classic Canadian Comic Banter.

This “Wolfboy’s” adventures leave a sweet aftertaste, even if we realize it isn’t exactly a meal, or even a full portion of dessert, when we think about it.

Blackjack: The Jackie Ryan Story is a slow motion train wreck about a slow-motion train wreck of a basketballer.

What she ended up with is a movie you feel “the weight of” rather than comprehend, and even at that, with all the long pauses and quiet, unfriendly conversations over smokes, it’s of no consequence whatsoever.

Virtually everything in this road comedy feels contrived, even the payoff to the “mysteries.” But Murton and Morris, making her screen debut, make the ride pleasant if not the least bit surprising.

The “hair” with a murderous mind of its own is more funny than scary.

The courtroom finale, eating up much of the third act, is a corker. And Pearce holds our focus, still or animated, chewing up a scene or so underplaying it he’s still the center of attention. Like the Great Master he is, he knows how to grab the eye and hold its focus, with or without a menacing mustache.

Bad Hair and its follicles are on their firmest ground just poking at the prejudice, pressure and unnatural (but admittedly lovely) beauty that women feel compelled to pursue to get noticed, get ahead and get theirs. The supernatural element feels unnecessary, save for the finale.

It’s a pleasant kid-friendly diversion on a par with Pearl’s “Abominable."

The topicality — filming this well into the COVID outbreak and shutdown — and eagerness to offend are what recommend “Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm.” It’s a fun character to revisit and an important time to bring him back.

Sure, he’s proven all he ever needs to prove, and then some, on the road. He’s dominated Broadway. Sold millions of records in his day. But this film and his last one, a doc about a C&W bend in the road on his musical journey (“Under Western Stars”) feels stiff, stale, self-serving and self-conscious.

You have to be in the mood for it, but The Place of No Words is a touching, sweet and intimate fantasy unlike most any film you’ve seen, save for its much more expensive and less moving antecedent, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Pint-sized James — you never realize how short her other leading men were until you see her paired with Hammer — carries this Rebecca, and I think carries it off, even as it’s taking us places no “Rebecca” has ever gone before. It’s not a classic and not “Hitchcock,” but hell, thanks to James, Hammer, Thomas and Dowd, it’ll do.

Three Comrades is short but not rushed, and rough viewing almost from start to finish. The documentary style (hand held camera, even in chases) adds to the sad reality of it all, lives of drunken, hate-filled desperation.

So many romances have ended with the couple soaked to the skin in a “We’re so in love we never noticed its raining” downpour. Love Like the Falling Rain just makes one want to give everybody a towel and send them home.

It’s a cryptic, gloomy and paranoid thriller about hackers, election interference, the omnipotent personal data mining resource of the Internet, how it is used against us by marketers and how foreign operators can use that same data to turn us on each other.

There’s promise here. But that higher end of expectations would have been for this to be a solid genre thriller, not a dawdling, dull drip-painting of a tale. Painter deadens the climax so badly that you almost welcome the anti-climax that follows.

It’s a kid-friendly mash-up of limited imagination and endless exposition. Boring as all get out, in other words.

With its lesser-known cast, The Kid Detective was always going to get lost in the cinematic shuffle, with or without a pandemic closing most theaters. But Morgan and his new muse have concocted a whodunit that could give Hercule Poirot a run for his money in a contest for the year’s best mystery.

The only twists to this — little character quirks and the like — are just dopey and off-topic, the stuff to make an action fan wonder “What’s up with that?”

The set-up is screwy and simple, the setting riveting and the key ingredients are not necessarily what the picture is about, but pivotal to its power.

What’s left out of Light Up the Sky is a LOT more interesting than anything we’re shown here. It’d have to be. Because even by the standards of “officially approved” pop phenom bios of the Bieber/Miley variety, this is weak tea.

The cleverest thing about the laugh-every-two-minutes comedy John Bronco is that nobody involved tried to stretch this extended sketch of an idea into feature film length.

It is Sorkin’s film’s sense of “right now” that sticks with you.

Sleepwalking performances, a lack of action and a general ennui behind the camera cripple this bio-terrorism thriller, which takes place in an “Andromeda Strain” lab complex under assault by those who would cover up a genocide, protected by a crusading doctor/researcher and her scientist ex.

A crushing bore of a screen romance starring one of writer Norman Mailer’s nine children.

Schreck and her show are smart, informative, funny and often touching.

This meandering Pietro Marcello (“Lost and Beautiful”) film seems to exist out of time, a fictional “struggling artist” biography as rife with cliches as it is obtuse in story and message.

The acting isn’t bad, or particularly emotional and compelling. But the bigger problem is that Reddick’s script lets down this promising “survivor’s guilt/revenge” concept in several ways. It throws a too-obvious suspect at us, and gives no one a single memorable line.

The Devil Has a Name stops staggering down that fine line between thriller and spoof and takes a header straight into the ditch.

Few movies grab the lonely, lost and timeless suck of freshman year at college as well as Shithouse, the debut feature of writer, director and co-star Cooper Raiff.

Writer-director Rob Garver has gotten at the essence of the woman — a frustrated playwright who turned criticism into “short stories and sonnets,” as one fan says.

The picture never has much comic edge, and goes soft altogether in the later acts.

The tears in Clouds are built in. But all this manipulation feels excessive, unnecessary padding for a story that needed a vigorous trimming to break your heart and uplift you as it does.

The attractive young people do what attractive young people do, right up to the point where class is threatened. The well that divides the community (Mariel Hemingway plays the mayor) becomes an interpersonal chasm, not just a social one.

If you’re going to compete with the streamer that keeps finding funny-dirty things to do with Joey King, you might want to hire some women behind the camera to help you catch up.

The War with Grandpa can feel old fashioned. It’s too mild-mannered for our Pg-13-and-up era. But little kids — VERY little kids — will chuckle at the pranks.

The script is a clumsy patchwork of gimmicks — history professor Jon playing mind-games with his captors — obvious bits of foreshadowing and Wikipedia-shallow discourses on Rachmaninoff and Goya, all designed to fill the minutes between Ruby Rose throw-downs.

As a “faith-based” film spoof, this one is basically a 90 minute swing-and-a-miss.

A few pranks, some slapstick, some pratfalls, with a modern “Stooge” as the hero. Not many laughs, but hey — he’s keeping the “moron comedy” genre alive.

Movies like this don’t settle the UFO question, and there’s no sense pretending the Department of Defense settled it for you when they didn’t.

Casting Salonga, a singing actress best known for Disney’s animated “Mulan,” and not letting her sing is a cheat. But Watson is a laid-back delight and makes Rose’s odyssey make sense musically and emotionally.

There’s no getting around how this workaholic’s audience-accessible oeuvre will endure after he’s gone (he’s pushing 90), and how these museums have permanently altered the cultural life in the cities that host them.

Nobody should be making serious vampire or zombie movies at this stage of the horror cycle, so this riff on the genre absolutely fills the bill. And making it a commentary on gentrification? Inspired.

The performances are flat, drained of anything you’d call a spark.

A cautionary eco-parable wrapped in a seriously dull and myopic time-travel thriller, 2067 bogs down early on in questions of “fate” and “determinism,” and never tears itself free of that bog.

The last reaction I expected the new screen adaptation of The Boys in the Band to provoke was indifference. But Tony winner or not, 50th anniversary film remake be damned, there isn’t a whole lot that this stagebound opening of a time capsule brings to 2020.

The picture is inert. And there are all these inserts, Wolf in close-up in pretty bad makeup telling “the story” of that night to unseen interrogators. Every film has a whiff of “vanity project” about it. Sometimes, that “vanity” makes you wince.

It’s a seductive, amusing and beguiling turn, with perhaps an Oscar nomination in it. And it’s message is clear, to our director and her muse. When the persona becomes legend, play the legend.

In the Shadow of Iris is a tight and twisty French thriller about a kidnapping gone wrong. Sexy casting and a taste of kink dress up this tale that begins conventionally, throws its first sleight-of-hand trick at us, and saves a few more for the third act.

There are moments when Ferguson’s riffing and Gifford’s riffing back or starting a song that he interrupts that the chemistry she saw and wanted to exploit is obvious. But good gawd, Kathie Lee. This is such a clumsy, cheesy, contrived script, with every contrivance obvious and abruptly introduced. And misshapen!

Actress turned director Brea Grant (TV’s “Eastsiders”) serves up a pungent, gory goof of a nurses-gone-bad comedy, dark as dirt and corrosive as Clorox.

July created some interesting, conflicted characters, and wrote some funny lines and one absolutely gut-punch of a scene for Kajillioaire. But her coup here was the casting.

What’s on the screen is more allegorical than interesting, although some of the visuals reach the level of indelibly nightmarish.

“The Vote” was on PBS’s “American Experience,” the gloriously acrid “Mrs. America” on Hulu and the sweet Helen Reddy biopic “I Am Woman” came to theaters and streaming. The Glorias rides the crest of that wave, the best project of the lot, and quite possibly the film of the year.

The Devil to Pay — a great title, by the way — is a lean, mean straight-up genre thriller, leaning into some mountain stereotypes, twisting away from others.

Jenkins is one of my favorite actors, but this strikes me as one he should have passed on. McGhie comes off better, but his character’s background is sloppily sketched-in.

The confusion between reality and hallucination absolutely butchers the film’s forward momentum.

They’re “colorful,” but only barely. The characters are just sketched in and the performances don’t add much to those sketches.

As dark comedies about communicating with ghosts go, Dead falls closer to “The Frighteners” than “Ghost Town.” It’s funny enough in a stoner comedy way, but as its got a serial killer in it, well, you see my point.

But “Story” plays out a bit like the band itself. It peaks early, hits its giddy stride during the blur of sudden fame, notorious personal appearances and all-for-a-goof excesses, and then fizzles out utterly.

As somebody who’s long complained that faith-based dramas need a firmer footing in the real world, and maybe a little edge, it pains me to complain that Sno Babies takes such things entirely too far.

This “virtual” instead of “real” world, with its toxic environment and compliant, drugged and plugged-in populace, feels insanely topical at times.

Brown is the marvel-in-motion who powers this machine. She lets this showcase make the case for a post-child-actress career, showing off pluck, comfort with stunts and something her chilly TV series rarely allows her — charm.

This is more worth seeing for Olin and Dern’s tetchy and touching interactions, portraying a marriage of devotion and decay. Every filmmaker who preaches that “Casting is everything,” or 90 percent of everything, isn’t exaggerating. The Artist’s Wife proves it.

Pets United could struggle a bit even to keep a toddler distracted for 92 minutes.

Here’s a German comedy stuffed with cutesy touches but little else, a madcap scamper from start to finish that still feels static and kind of staid, and a gorgeous character who’s meant to be funny, but who makes you wish our heroine would break a damn bottle over her head.

Kapsalis has written and directed an engrossing “woman on the verge” tale. But it is Azura Skye who draws us into it, earns our sympathy and makes us fear for how far this woman will be pushed before she pushes back, or snaps altogether.

They’ve made an uneven melodrama that’s easier to get behind than to endorse for its cinematic realism. But I will. Maybe for old time’s sake.

The wheels come off Shortcut pretty much the moment the kids have to flee that bus.

That whole dynamic, that the child is preordained to greatness or mediocrity by blood and birth, is undercut in the film. It’s either troubling or amusing to consider, seeing as how this story all takes place in a land whose dominant culture lives as self-described “chosen people.”

The muted tone and funereal gloom that linger in the film gives it a mortician’s remove. We aren’t necessarily moved by this tragedy and the ways those who survived contributed to it or failed to avert it.

Law can still make us smell the sweating his characters do when they’re gambling, striving and hoping like hell to keep all the balls they’re juggling in the air just a few moments longer.

A little mystery and a lot less narration would have better-served this sordid saga.

H is for Happiness prioritizes ”feels” over coherence, weird-for-weird’s-sake touches over character development, while expecting endless voice-over narration to caulk over the cracks. It doesn’t.

NONE of these vignettes are funny. None. Cryptic and revealing? Nope. I’m giving this one star for the decent indie cinema production values, and out of pity for the actors.

The bleak outlook of this story won’t be to every taste. But Residue brings a painful beauty to a real-life “whitewashing” of a city that will never let you look at gentrification from a realtor’s point of view ever again.

Director Roger Michell (“Venus,”Notting Hill”) cast this well and earns stellar on-the-nose performances from Sarandon, Wilson, Duncan and Wasikowska.

It’s harmless enough. Still, the only reason to watch it is if you and/or the kids need to brush up on your Spanish.

Doucouré brings a much-needed new perspective and new voice to the cinema. But this doesn’t have the depth or grim impact of a “Kids” (1995) or “thirteen” (2003).

It’s a chatty, over-populated comedy that sprints out of the gate and gets gassed about an hour in. Its tragedy is that Cuenca chose to drag out this shambolic slice-of-the-scruffy-life out for another hour after that.

Some of the effects are OK, and the night shots around the lake show some sophistication. But the script is utter crap, the performances pro forma and the “threat” even sillier, if bloodier, than it was last time around.

The detail, the worn-out wooden boat that is the main location, is perfect. And the calming effect of the sea is utterly spoiled by the tension that’s always there. Daily routine aside, every encounter with the pitiless crew is fraught with peril, and the violence when it comes — is shocking, primitive and sadistic.

There have been a lot of documentaries about Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s America, and more will show up between now and election day 2020. But the only one on that subject that strikes me as “essential viewing” is Red, White & Wasted, an eye-opening peek into the psyche, intellect, folkways and values of “the Trump base” we hear so much about these days.

Social Dilemma is a good film, probably too little too late to play a role in saving democracy or healing a nation so divided half of it won’t do the most basic things to stop a pandemic. But there you are, and there we are.

As screenwriters, their First Best Destiny might be keeping a script doctor on speed dial. Their “mystery” isn’t nearly mysterious enough. And that three act structure makes for a grim, distressing and lumbering opening, a tense and bloody finale and a middle act — the one set in the modern day that “explains” what’s going on — that is as straight-up hackwork, a Tyler Perry fashion show meant to add dread but where rolling one’s eyes is the only proper response.

Even if it plays like a sitcom pilot that might get picked up after a little recasting, “Broken Hearts Gallery” is never unpleasant and only rarely a drag. In rom-com starved Hollywood, call that a “win” and call it a day.

It’s not a great film, with a story that has too much “Lifetime Original Movie” slack and soap operatic touches for its own good. But as Jerry Wald says, “It’s all about timing.”

What we have here in the disastrously dull pilot to a TV series only comic book diehards would watch.

Alone still takes a simple premise and smacks us around with it for 95 reasonably suspenseful, thrilling minutes. And that’s enough.

You’ve got to be in the right frame of mind for “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” which can be as much a downer and a chore as “Anomalisa” or “Synechdoche, New York.” In the end, it’s a morose puzzle of a tale that one can appreciate, even if you don’t mind if you never see it again.

It turns out “Love” isn’t “Guaranteed,” any more than laughs, relatable characters or anything else.

I haven’t seen Measure for Measure on the stage in years, but the rough shape of it forms in the mind watching this adaptation, its hits (characters) and the reasons it’s called “a problem play.” And those bones, a poignant romance, betrayals and mercy coming from the most unexpected places and vivid characters, pretty much save this film, or at least make it watchable.

Critical Thinking is a cluttered, cliched and ungainly story.

I adored the animated Mulan, but the best I can say for this one is it’s pretty enough, and watchable. Whatever they market-researched and committee-scripted into this, I wanted something with more heart, better action and at least a hint of fun.

It’s fiction, far-fetched, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, beach-book thriller fiction. It provokes many reactions, but the one that stands out is “cheated.”

But we still get a pretty entertaining thriller out of what’s here, no matter how the finale sets up and how the picture resolves itself.

Apocalypse ’45 is a cut above the boilerplate docs whipped up for the various “World War II” channels on TV.

The parable is simple to the point of simplistic, but Noas makes a most engaging tour guide on this slide down the slippery slope. And the people, places, music and food of Cuba make one long for the day when “the gringo embargo” and travel ban are gone and we can all sample its charms.

It’s an uneven affair that begins with a flourish, works to develop homeless street cred, wanders into the maudlin wilderness for the middle acts and rallies for a predictable, over-the-top, break-out-your-Kleenex finale.

But if you like claustrophobic stories of survival, putting yourself in the winter shoes of our antagonists, it’s not bad.

For a fairly generic sports documentary, Rising Phoenix still manages a few thrills, some moving moments and a lot of sports action.

A sentimental and cheerful affair that doesn’t amount to much more than an attempt to tap into their residual good vibes.

The whole affair is just nuts, staggeringly irresponsible.

Tenet is as much mind-challenging, action-packed fun as sitting in cinema wearing a mask for two and a half hours can be.

It’s loud, fast, in-your-face, broad and low.

The test of the movie is whether we’ll instinctively root for the standard white-girl-in-jeopardy and accept the physical abuse, mental anguish and humiliations Sarah must endure before figuring out if she can fight back. Because Bloom? She gives us nothing.

Zeroing in on Robin’s disease, his decline and what she and a few others close to him observed, with plenty of medical explanations, make this brief film feel complete, in its own way. What they’ve made is a solid, medically sound and emotional final chapter in a life that touched many, one that deserves to be remembered for how he really lived and what truly caused his death.

Whatever precious touches emerge, I have to say Words on Bathroom Walls works. The performances are stellar and earn the emotional connection we feel with the characters. The lighter touches — Garcia, Bostick and especially Robb (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), going all Woodstock Stevie Nicks — are a delight.

A daft, sometimes dizzy and occasionally sentimental dash through relationships, parenting, morality, and life experiences packed into a story of a boy born and magically aging “four years, every hour on the hour” through his life over one long day, it is one filmmaker’s One Big Idea for a movie.

Blech’s is almost the only voice heard in the movie, and after a while, he’s all too easy to tune out.

Sleepover is cheerful enough that it passes the time, even as that time passes ever-so-slowly as it stumbles for clues, through a Boston sight gag or two and into the “big finish” that’s more a series of minor busts. Leave this one to the tween-and-unders.

Iannucci’s cleverest touch may be that casting, giving a wonderful cross-section of British acting the chance to say those wonderful words, reclaim Dickens from the “Masterpiece Theater” swells.

The title may fool you into thinking this is some sort of Argentine mob family saga, but don’t fall for that. This is a courtroom telenovela with better makeup and lighting, and fewer dramatics.

It’s not terrible, just irritating. Freak Show is too busy flying the white flag, surrendering to the obvious, to ever let its freak flag fly.

Director Rekhi maintains that mystery and steadily ramps up the suspense as we follow his heroine down a rabbit hole filled with vipers.

The street life is vividly captured, and the dialogue — in English, Igbo and Yoruba (with English subtitles) — is sharp and expository.

Epicentro is a lovely new tone poem to Cuba, as it is now, the Cuba behind the propaganda from within and without.

Baldwin and Hayek knock back highballs and wine and whine that their lives of conspicuous consumption are over, belt out “The Sun’ll Come Out, Tomorrow” in Spanish and throw themselves at this as if it’s “As You Like It.”

Desert One is unsparing and unflinching.

As Borowczyk’s career was hijacked by his own infamy, documentarian Kuba Mikurda’s “Love Express” camera captures gestures, the waving about of hands by the various interview subjects as they try to rationalize both his path and his ensuing fate.

Sandoval has made a film with cultural currency and the rich texture of a New York setting for a story as immediate as today’s headlines, and just as sad.

“Peninsula” is basically a digital effects dumbing down of “Train to Busan.”

Rendered toothless, with barely a hint of menace or humor, much less jokes or sight gags, “Ivan” plays as downbeat and dispirited.

It’s static, an action picture that becomes a still-life right before our eyes.

Weaver holds her own, but the character, the scene and the script are a total drag.

It’s the best showcase Russell Crowe‘s had in forever. Sure, it’s a B-picture, a straight-up rage-on-the-road genre movie in the “Duel,””Changing Lanes” or “Falling Down” mold. But Crowe, overweight and the very embodiment of “gone to seed,” gives this villain-we-all-know a face to fear and a hulking pick-up truck to match.

The only thing that Other Music does differently from the scores of “last days of a dying business” docs preceding it is showing us the day AFTER the emotional “last day in business” scene.

It’s not the worst movie of the “power from a pill” genre, an idea that dates back decades (TV’s “Mr. Terrific” comes to mind). But that’s one overriding problem, here. Project Power feels powered-out ten minutes in.

Sex, skin, scenery and aspirational affluence are the Netflix selling points, here. But director/co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski made this a drama, not a comedy. She’s leaning towards cultural commentary.

Hawke? He mumble-whispers his way through the notoriously introverted Tesla, not taking even a stab at a Croatian accent. That he sings in this same voice is kind of rubbing our noses in it.

It’s thorough, almost academic textbook/video-accompanying-a-film-studies-class broad in its scope.

Storm Over Brooklyn is a tense, tight and timely film that reminds us that America itself has been doing the same — trying its best to ignore something that’s been there, for those willing or forced to see it, all along.

What an odd duck of a doc Big Fur is. But that just means director Dan Wayne has gotten damned close to his subject.

It’s paint-by-numbers screenwriting, and even that wouldn’t be awful if the picture was quicker, lighter on its feet. It’s an 80 minute comedy in a 110 minute package.

The Pool is terror at its most primal, a simple Thai thriller that’s complex in its simplicity.

Whatever variations on a theme this script offers, none of it works without the ache we’re supposed to feel for those torn apart by sudden death. Endless never delivers that.

The entire enterprise reeks not just of “privilege,” but of shallow, self-indulgent narcissistic entitlement.

It’s as random as its title suggests, a genre flick that doesn’t do much more than stumble and angst-out from one killing to the next.

None of it ever truly comes together in a way that makes “Almost Love” almost a rom-rom that works. “Almost” pretty much covers it.

I have to say I went along with it, more amused by the craft and bursts of wit and gripped by a bit of tension, here and there, than appalled by the inhumanity. It taps into our shared phobia about ridesharing and “over-sharing,” not that EVERYbody is alarmed by these phenomena.

Same “s—-y” lines, same tone-deaf line readings. Same silly, archetype characters played by actors in over their heads. Same ridiculous variations on the Tom Clancy/movie-fed myth of the “surgical strike.”

The actor James D’Arcy (“Dunkirk,” TV’s “Homeland” and “Broadchurch”) wrote and directed this, and he tends towards the maudlin at times. He sets up a sort of competition for Natalia between father and son, which is mercifully dispensed with.

“Ugly Dolls” screenwriter Alison Peck finds her niche with this picture, throwing just enough plot wrinkles and smart-ass banter into the mix to make the formula — if not exactly fresh — at least fresh-adjacent.

The performances are subdued, not really pitched to match the rising horror facing them all. Still, you have to hand it to Bustamente. He’s made a La Llorona movie with pointed politics, real world villains and righteous wrath. Sometimes, the horrors are in the headlines, or what the headlines aren’t telling us.

It’s easy enough to sit through, but the entire affair is more deflating than heartening.

It isn’t “Wag the Dog” or “In the Loop,” and the “Ab Fab” borrowings aren’t as loopy. But How to Fake a War amuses and impresses and entertains as it does.

Depp could be dismissed as just a name and a costume who got the film financed, but his Franco-Teutonic take on Joll never quite crosses into caricature. It’s good to see him putting in the effort. Pattinson? His tiny part basically is just a name and a costume who got the film financed.

The Tax Collector fails on Ayer’s watch. The script is something of a muddle, with abrupt, illogical turns and too much time spent immersing us in Ayer’s version of LA Latinx culture, with a gang twist.

This is a storyteller’s movie, one where we can’t really trust any story to be true. That’s something of a cheat, because we are set up to believe there are bigger deceptions going on and hidden agendas that simply don’t pan out or are left hanging.

Too subdued for its own good, too stuck in Trond’s head, with his narration, to ever break through. The odd moving moment in a stunning setting — set pieces center around the dangers of small-farm logging — is surrounded by a lot that’s implied, and too little that’s shown.

It’s not period detail that lets Summerland down. It’s not moving beyond the story’s naturally watchable qualities (cast, setting, period) to give us a film that ever feels it doesn’t need one contrived situation after another just to stagger to its feet. Not that it ever moves those feet once it does, mind you.

It’s starved of oxygen and incident, of funny lines or clever exchanges.

Stupid scene follows bloated speech, all the way through to a finale set up to go off, but which fizzles like soggy fireworks.

Shine Your Eyes will grab you and take you to a place you’ve never been and into a mystery which only a sibling can solve.

All this amorality is in service of a morality tale, of course, pointing out that politics is more than just a game manipulated by liars and cheats. It’s a blood-port, and hate speech incites hate crimes in this self-righteous, long and meandering allegory.

The performances click, although I have to say nobody here generates much in the line of pathos.

First-time feature director Nick Rowland makes the violence in-your-face and the scenes where Arm starts to struggle with it wrenching. Dude stages a mean Irish backroads car-chase, too.

While lawyers read, in one montage, from their mountains of hate mail, there’s not a lot of balance to the film, aside from snippets of Fox News opinionators praising this or that Trump extra-legal executive fiat.

It’s all harmless, if almost charmless, rendered in different shades of “bland."