Schull's quietly commanding performance is a stunning piece of acting, in which the character seems to reveal new layers every time she's on screen.

A cunning civics lesson about religious pluralism that will have civic-minded citizens throwing up the devil horns even if they’re not quite ready to proclaim mocking allegiance to Satan.

For fans, counting up how many superheroes can emerge from the clown car of one three-hour movie is half the fun. For casual moviegoers — say, those who might skip minor installments such as “Ant-Man and the Wasp” — it accounts for half the exhaustion, a bit of world-building fatigue to go along with the sensory overload of a fantasy realm that seems stuck in perpetual apocalypse.

It doesn’t take long to suspect you are witnessing an epic fail of Alexander proportions — a visionary filmmaker pouring years of craft and ambition, not to mention millions of dollars and the talents of dozens of gung-ho actors, down the drain of a misconceived “statement.”

This won't be the best movie audiences will ever see, but at least it's fun to watch with pretty visuals and upbeat songs.

Overall, kids will enjoy the story's humorous moments punctuated by a couple barf jokes — always popular with the under-12 crowd. Meanwhile, their Gen-X and Millennial parents may find the story of the struggles of parenting familiar. They might also have flashbacks to their own childhoods through a soundtrack featuring artists like REO Speedwagon and Whitesnake.

There is no sense of dread or impending doom; instead it's just one jolt after another. It's like having someone jump out at you every five minutes, and about as much fun.

Little won't offer a lot of surprises as it hums along to the inevitable conclusion, but it is funny.

While the movie is a mess, it can be a fun ride as long as you first put your brain into "do not disturb" mode.

[Denis] definitely never holds back from shocking the audience with multiple sudden deaths, haunting rape scenes and various graphic moments. But with such little character development, why invest in these stories?

It's bold, nasty and gleefully disturbing, and will stay with you once the lights go up. For horror fans, those are all good things.

While Diane is perhaps 96 of the most depressing minutes on film this year, its quiet honesty is compelling. treating aging and death with a respect to the inevitability of both.

[Estevez] still hasn't progressed beyond the film-school basics, but somehow he managed to recruit an all-star cast of (presumably) like-minded activists for The Public.

Like Tom Hanks in Big, Levy does a great job of capturing — or parodying — the giddiness of a kid flexing his adult muscles (literally and figuratively). The two-hour-plus running time breezes by in a well-paced adventure that mines familiar comic-book tropes for laughs.

Director Shawn Seet’s film is surprisingly sweet and moving.

The Wind succeeds on two fronts. First, the despair of isolation comes through on nearly every frame, a situation as dire as any demon. Secondly, Lizzy stays steadfast, refusing to succumb even as her husband disappears. That's a credit to the vision of Tammi, who refuses to let the The Wind devolve into a typical, and predictable, horror movie.

The title implies a sort of old-world glamour, but the proverbial gilded cage is looking a bit dilapidated in The Heiresses, a subtle but intense character study from Paraguayan director Marcelo Martinessi.

Movie-release schedules are set by studios months in advance, and many are the movie that had the misfortune to open at an inopportune time. But Hotel Mumbai is responsible for myriad other poor creative decisions that make a spectacle of misery.

As far as acting, DeVito steals the show with characteristic energy a ringleader would be proud of. But Farrell's chemistry with the kids never takes off, costing the film a portion of emotion. And the writing doesn't help much, either. The family's relationship is supposed to be strained, but it never feels like they convincingly resolve insecure feelings around each other. Still, no matter how fans look at it, it's hard to deny how adorable Dumbo is.

Those who enjoy either World War II movies or period dramas likely will enjoy this movie, even if some of the plot twists are predictable. It's an enjoyable deviation from the typical war story, but if there were more layers of warmth and stronger emotional connections between the characters, it could have built to a more satisfying conclusion.

Peele’s visual audacity is at times breathtaking, and always serves a greater purpose. There is a beautiful overhead shot of the family walking along the beach, carrying their supplies, casting long shadows. There’s no way to know in the moment you’re admiring this that it carries meaning that informs the rest of the film. That’s just terrific filmmaking.

For all its vivid period atmosphere and striking scenes, there is a meandering quality that keeps the film from being truly involving. It's not the lack of sentiment, but perhaps the absence of any sort of momentum.

Directed by John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks), it’s a well-crafted procedural, but it’s also a whole lot of familiar tropes put together in familiar ways.

It may be haphazard and loosely focused. But thanks to Skarsgård it’s never really boring.

What seems primed to play out like a by-the-numbers social message movie with a classic redemption arc becomes something much more sophisticated, and much more challenging for the viewer. Schoenaerts' performance deserves much of the praise.

The screwball plot is woefully thin and predictable, with inane situations and characters who barely act human.

It’s a weird little genre, the sick-teen romance. “Five Feet Apart” winds up as just a pedestrian entry in it, because it tries way too hard on the melodrama front. Being a teenager is difficult enough. Being a sick teenager is presumably that much harder. Being a teenager in “Five Feet Apart” means suffering from something else, in addition: overkill. And that’s deadly.

In a world where film arguably celebrates youth more often than middle-aged people in Hollywood, it's refreshing to see the opposite artfully done with one step on the dance floor at a time.