Author: Roger Moore

“The Judge” dawdles, lingers, takes sidebars and recesses – much like a celebrity trial in which TV cameras have been allowed into the courtroom. A bloated all-star melodrama with none of the lean, mean legalese of a John Grisham adaptation, it’s a showboat’s movie cast with a lot of actors each promised “a big, cool…

Starring Jeremy Renner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Platt, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta; directed by Michael Cuesta; 106 minutes; R for language and drug content “Kill the Messenger,” the film about journalist Gary Webb’s shocking newspaper stories that connected the Reagan-era CIA to America’s crack epidemic, shows just how hard it is to film…

Starring Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Alfre Woodard, Tony Amendola; directed by John R. Leonetti; R for intense sequences of disturbing violence and terror; 98 minutes A child’s crayon rolls across a floor. Curtains fly back from a window you thought was closed. A TV-distracted seamstress looks at her late-
model sewing machine less and less as…

Starring the voices of Ben Kingsley, Jared Harris, Nick Frost, Elle Fanning; directed by Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable; 100 minutes; PG for action, some peril and mild rude humor There’s something about stop motion 3-D animation – the not-quite-real textures of skin and hair, the quite real cloth and metal, the subtle gloomy lighting…

“The Equalizer” serves up Denzel Washington at his coolest. Eyes weary with experience but still taking it all in, skull shaved to hide the advancing years, he still carries himself with that feline stride – the greatest, most masculine movie star walk since John Wayne’s. He’s almost too cool for this film, based on the…

Starring Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne, Kathryn Hahn; directed by Shawn Levy, screenplay by Jonathan Tropper; 103 minutes; rated R for language, sexual content and some drug use “This is Where I Leave You” is a big, broad dysfunctional family comedy, sort of a “Parenthood” pushed into 
R-rated “Adulthood” territory.…

This month’s “young adults save the future” film franchise is “The Maze Runner,” an indifferent quest tale about boys trapped in a gigantic maze with no idea how they got there. A teen boy (Dylan O’Brien) wakes up, screaming, on a freight elevator soaring up to a field, where it promptly drops its “greenie,” or…

You might have thought “Dolphin Tale,” the sleeper hit kids’ film of a few falls back, was a complete, compact and uplifting story that didn’t really need a second act. And if so, you were on the money. A fictionalized account of the true story of Winter, a badly injured dolphin rescued by the Clearwater…

They also serve who pour and observe. That’s Bob Saginowski’s modus operandi. He’s bartender-
for-life at Cousin Marv’s on the cruel side of Brooklyn, a 30-something loner living in the house his late parents bought. Bob notices things, which we gather is a pretty solid survival strategy for this corner of Brooklyn. There’s menace in the…

A musical mashup of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis biography and myth, “The Identical” plays like a failed, faith-based “Inside Llewyn Davis.” And that’s the closest thing to a compliment it will get. Built around a too-tall Elvis impersonator, Blake Rayne, it tells the story of fictional twins separated at birth. One grew up to…