Marc Savlov

A glorious, action-and-pathos packed capstone to the rebooted Apes franchise.

Spall and Meaney are mesmerizingly watchable in a film that’s 40% gruff dialogue and 60% seething silences.

There’s plenty of nifty action set-pieces on display here – including a decidedly unamazing but hilarious gag involving Spidey and a kid’s tree house – but for the first time, the most popular of all of Marvel’s 1960s-era characters genuinely focuses less on the amazing and more on the boy behind the mask, and that’s a welcome change of pace.

The third time is definitely not the charm.

The Beguiled is a slow-burn tale of repressed sexuality and duplicitous doings. Its final twist, though, steals it from the realm of male-gaze fantasies into sheer nightmare territory.

This latest entry is simply dumb, dull, and pointless.

This is an interesting/odd take on the Cars universe, seeing as how this is a movie squarely aimed at pre-teens who likely have no concept of aging, let alone four-wheeled mortality, or for that matter Joseph Campbell’s monomythic “Hero’s Journey.”

It’s big, it’s slick, it’s very, very Hollywood, but it’s just not that good a film. It’s not even as much fun – and monster movies, as opposed to horror movies, should be fun – as the 1999 Brendan Fraser vehicle of the same name.

This is a film that can’t decide if it wants to be a war movie or a rescue dog melodrama and therefore falls into cinematic no-man’s/woman’s-land.

This, uh, wonderfully directed and near-perfectly cast iconic heroine female empowerment story is so similar in tone and feel to Marvel Studios’ "Captain America" that I was waiting for Stan Lee to show up, possibly as a eunuch.

It is, in fact, an instant classic, the sort of film that will make you check under your bed at night and then amplify into terror the midnight creaks and 3am breezes that unsettle every house at times, most especially yours. Highly recommended.

This ship has sailed, sank, and not to put too fine a bowsprit on it, sucks.

Winger is as good here as she’s ever been, and Letts, an actor whose face you know but whose name you can never quite remember, is terrific, communicating his lust for Lucy with dry aplomb.

As YA adaptations go, this isn’t quite "The Notebook," but its core demographic of teen girls will likely be more than satisfied.

Director Ben Young’s first narrative feature is loosely based on actual events, which makes watching this psychological horror show all the more harrowing.

It’s the sort of cat-and-mouse game that recalls certain elements of such disparate films as John Boorman’s "Hell in the Pacific," Larry Cohen’s screenplay for "Phone Booth," and, one key line in Dan O’Bannon’s "Return of the Living Dead," believe it or not.

Director and writer Gunn is a dab hand with space opera quippery and most of the set-pieces land bang on target, with collateral emotional damage to boot.

Like its protagonist, Sleight is a scrappy, semi-super origin story that lacks the existential heft of, say, M. Night Shyamalan’s "Unbreakable," or the grim comic nihilism of James Gunn’s "Super."

Phoenix Forgotten is borderline generic, desert-set found footage that apes the aforementioned Witchiness and genre constraints to a snooze-worthy T.

This is one fish tale that’s well nigh guaranteed to linger in the viewers’ midnight memories long after its cinematic nocturnal emissions have unspooled.

Armie Hammer slyly steals the show as Ord, a very chill American arms dealer.

There are blood-red visual motifs all over the place, but The Devil’s Candy isn’t particularly bloody in and of itself. It suggests acts of terrible evil far more than it shows, and is all the more intense for it. Highly recommended.

Hathaway and Sudeikis totally nail their respective roles (kudos to the great Tim Blake Nelson, to boot), and while Colossal falls shy of perfection, so does real life.

Gifted may rely on the extremely old-school lovable-orphan-and-adopted-parent template, but there’s a certain emotionally complex realism to both the performances and the storyline that lifts the film beyond the obvious and the cliched.

A strictly-for-the-kiddies animated reboot of the seemingly ancient Smurf brand, The Lost Village is so tame it hardly merits a PG rating.

Certain touches resonate and remain memorable long after the film’s conclusion – I’m talking to you, creepy robo-geishas – but for all its CGI bells, whistles, and Johansson, this simply can’t compare to its (highly recommended) Japanese forebears.

Theroux (who co-wrote with director Dower) manages to dredge up some new, albeit not particularly revelatory, intel on the litigation-happy group, and the tack they take to get there is interesting in and of itself.

As a parable about the inherently dehumanizing aspects of the rat race, it’s bloody good fun.