All in all, this is perhaps one of those films you applaud more for design than execution while hoping at the same time that its boundary-testing restlessness becomes more widely influential.

Magic Mike XXL isn’t really a movie. It’s a bachelorette party, or a book club, or any other safe space where women gather for some of that “you go, girl” good feeling. It’s an amusement-park ride. Fasten the safety belt, secure your purses, and get ready to scream.

Black Phone 2 may be a power ballad to the original’s minor chord metal, but it still rocks.

This sumptuous-looking film clearly spared no expense in its visual rendering; its optical flourishes and attention to detail aim for the Disney gold standard and, for the most part, come pretty darn close.

The Wretched may be guilty of stealing shamelessly from "Rear Window," "Disturbia," and the best summercamp slasher and small-town supernatural chillers, but none of those were exactly raw innovators, either.

With all the hallmarks of a prestige picture, chief among them a great cast and creative crew and an "important" message, The Soloist plays its tune with a frequently heavy hand.

Any film in which grande dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench share the screen is one worth seeing, if only to marvel at their deft skills in the art of acting.

Young children will enjoy this piece of sweet cartoon candy.

Only a couple years removed from his screen super-success in Saturday Night Fever, Travolta struts his way through Urban Cowboy’s modern-West parable about machismo, cowboy manqué, and mechanical bulls. Travolta captures some of the confusion of a little big man on the new prairie, Debra Winger provides a vixenish challenge to his manhood, and Scott Glenn plays the guy in the figurative black cowboy hat.

Sisto's direction is a victory of glacial tone over actual content, and John and the Hole's frustrations outweigh its insight into the forces that can spawn a monster.

What holds the film together before that nerve-jangling sequence is Ivenko as the young genius.

McKay has made a protest film, plainly seething – a primal howl from a guy who used to just goose howls of laughter.

While I was expecting a few more plot twists, Ocean’s 8 is a safe bet for some glitzy summer fun.

When people think fondly of John Hughes, it's movies like Ferris Bueller that they're thinking of.

Screenwriter Steve Conrad has less success with the female characters: The always dependable Davis is forced into shrewish territory, and David's mother (Judith McConnell) is so barely present that it's a wonder she's written in at all.

The casting is the only part of the movie that feels genuine, with Hudson channeling the Dreamgirls emotive performance that earned her an early career Oscar.

Unfortunately, the film begins to fall apart when it leaves film parody and strays too close to reality. This film is so timely, it has the young pilots flying a bombing run on Saddam Hussein's nuclear plant. Either these filmmakers were lucky, or they made it last week. It almost seems as if the latter is true, because Hot Shots handling of Middle Eastern bad guys is just a little too heavy handed -- no, make that insulting and insensitive.

The film has a Leone eye (courtesy of cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía) coupled with a drowsy, doomy pace which, emboldened by the salt-licked Bolivian settings and the finely calibrated acting from all, makes for a phantasmagoric trip down a strangely different memory lane.

Julia, Huston, Ricci, and Workman are all excellent in their roles (Carol Kane as Granny Addams seems little more than an afterthought), but they're unfortunately not enough to save this elongated mess. If you haven't yet seen the first film, rent that instead, or, better yet, go pick up a volume of the original Addams cartoons.

If you're looking for a few hours of mindless, uncomplicated, air-conditioned escapism to get you through a hot late-summer's evening, I'd recommend you look some place other than Traitor.

A grinning but toothless comedy, this Christmas-themed outing pales in inventiveness compared to the original, which brought sweet, silly anarchy to its one-thing-leads-to-another plotting.

Authenticity is strangely lacking in Laurel Canyon, although Cholodenko’s exquisite eye for framing remains uncorrupted. Laurel Canyon is often visually captivating.

The script also takes the occasional dip into hokeyness, but even that is buoyed by its ballsy leading ladies.

The film is often quietly humorous.

While not quite up to the standard of Chan's finest movies, Rumble in the Bronx is fast-paced, funny, and exciting, and should serve as a nice introduction for the uninitiated to the hyperactive world of Hong Kong action filmmaking.

This time the acclaimed filmmaker tackles an entire “ism” and, much like its ambiguous title, Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore’s film is an unmethodical survey of a gargantuan topic, one that has only grown more so in the year since he began work on the project.

A conventional story, conventionally told.

In essence, the artistic failure of She's So Lovely is traceable to a single, supremely ironic fact: For a story by a writer with so much professed faith in the power of truth to bubble up out of apparent chaos, there's hardly anything here that feels recognizably true.