The shock ending isn't all that shocking if you're a fan of genre films, but it's nonetheless effective despite the fact that it sidesteps several key questions. Never mind: It's hellishly fun.

Boden and Fleck's unabashedly warmhearted film is a sensitively wrought but also very funny portrait of the way we respond to pressure.

True, the melodrama on display here can't compare to the likes of Larry, Moe, Curly, and the cannibals, but then this goofily charming quartet of Western outsiders is far more real than reel.

Apparently fit and reasonably trim, Deal's honesty touches a nerve that the band's music only gnawed on back in the day.

Summer Wars is a magnificently manufactured piece of film entertainment that goes beyond the obvious and manages to comment, often obliquely, on everything from Facebook to virtual war and/or terrorism without ever seeming heavy-handed or strident.

Dafoe, as expected, is magnificent in the taciturn role, but the film tends to falter when he's not out stalking, combining as it does elements of family drama, environmental outrage, and outright suspense.

When Les Misérables is good, it is very, very good, and when it is bad, it's usually because Russell Crowe has opened his mouth.

Consider this yet another nail in the Eighties coffin.

A dead-chamber misfire, a hollowpoint dud.

What we get is more of the same from Ferrell – funny faces, goofy accents, pratfalls aplenty – and that ain't bad. It just could have been a lot better.

The film’s simplest pleasure is its naturalism – the illusion it creates of observing the animals undetected.

Eastwood's grim handling of even grimmer subject matter could have used some paring down toward its histrionic ending, but Changeling is still one of the director's most assured and engaging historical horror shows.

It’s harrowing to ponder, but a joy to watch unfold when told by someone with such distinct cinematic prowess.

It’s still a hellish glimpse into one of climbing’s worst days ever, and there’s no way to resolve the unresolvable, but as it is The Summit, like K2 itself, remains an icily beautiful and altogether deadly mystery.

Time and again, Devor sabotages his own attempt to bring "zoos," literally and figuratively, into the light.

Like the character of Rocky, it's got heart to spare, and is by turns one of the sweetest of the sweet-science pictures as well as one of the most doleful. Fighters fight, it's what they do. And Balboa, god bless him, fights on.

Bruckheimer -– always eager to egg on the public’s thirst for bigger, louder, stupider –- has done a scandalous amount of damage to contemporary cinema, but for once, his dubious talent for big-buck bombast is exploited for good rather than evil.

If you ever thought "Footloose" might’ve been improved with an Irish brogue and a short pour of agitprop, then by all means look to this latest from Ken Loach, Britain’s elder statesman of cinema and its evergreen champion of the working class.

Its view of mankind is unkind, to say the least, but any race that can produce such remarkably garish gore as this is perhaps salvageable somehow, someday.

Pearl, in other words, is one of those guys put on earth to make the rest of us feel like we're wasting our lives.

Wright is terrific – sensitive and alert – in the live-action opening. But that opening runs more than 45 minutes long, a way too heavy-handed preamble to the crazed animation to come, and the actress’ vocal delivery – soft-spoken, gently bewildered – is too soporific to pull off lines like, “Look at me, I’m your prophet of doom.”

Honeymoon in Vegas is what every stupid comedy should be to justify the price of admission, sadly it is no more than that.

Blood Quantum operates from a place of tribal identity and that no white audience members will truly be able to understand. In this way, Barnaby’s film rejects the default white gaze of so many horror films, choosing to tell a story through an unapologetically Indigenous lens.

No matter where your political gullibilities lie, Green Zone is a riveting piece of actioneering.

Penn's Bicke is often so pitiable it's hard not to want to look away – but what else to expect from perhaps our most compulsively watchable contemporary actor?

The story is simple, sometimes to a fault.

Austin mainstays the Zellner brothers have managed to make a Western genre film appropriate for the #MeToo era’s audience.

Great fun to watch, thoughtful and timely, Thomas in Love is likely to generate some decidedly interesting post-film conversations as well.