What separates Blaze from its peers, however, is the obvious affection the filmmakers have for their assortment of damaged characters. In Ben Dickey, Hawke and company have found a remarkable physical and musical double for Foley.

Where Kore-eda finds his languid but captivating pace is in the constant itch that there are no ways to quite make all of the pieces fit.

Skate Kitchen’s mild melodrama meanders all over the place, not unlike the many skateboarders who shred the skate parks and streets, carving hypnotic, slo-mo figure-eights or outrageous triple ollies on every available surface and obstacle.

Instead of aiming for biographical overview, this film strives to capture a sense of what makes Sakamoto’s music tick. (Hint: It’s not a metronome, but rather, the sounds of nature.)

Despite the often unsettling subject matter, this adaptation of Emily M. Danforth's teen novel isn’t an intense experience: no big confrontational scenes, few (if any) histrionic moments.

There’s something inexplicably soothing about the wide shots of the boys rolling along, spiraling down the levels of a parking garage or swerving around city streets at sunset.

The film opens with a camera slowly swirling around a skull. Red droplets splash on the cranium. In Michael Nyman’s score, a brass section booms rhythmically like blood in your ears. The effect is brooding and provocative. It’s pure drama. It’s perfectly Alexander McQueen.

The resulting sequences might as well be lifted directly from Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy; watching these pockets of pure cinema emerge from a "crowd-pleasing" story of a boy and his dog may just be one of the oddest experiences you have at the movies this summer.

Wu quite simply is a stunner. Best known for playing the tough-love matriarch from ABC’s "Fresh off the Boat," she betters the book version of Rachel by making her earthier, steelier, and more playful.

Considering that the whole point of the Slender Man mythos is that it is so adaptable and mutable, to pour it into the most generic of formats is just lazy. Compared to the thematically linked and superior "The Mothman Prophecies" (where Richard Gere chases a pre-digital urban myth), it's the most generic choice imaginable, and stinks of focus group thinking.

There’s an earnestness amid the well-executed jump scares and gruesome pay-off, an honesty that can sometimes be in short supply in teen-centric horror.

The film is funnier than it has every right to be, given the boilerplate premise of dogs bringing people together, but Marino and co. go for the brass ring.

The Meg is simply mediocre, PG-13 monster-moviemaking at its mind-numbing kinda/sorta best-ish. Meh.

Does the man make the uniform, or does the uniform make the man? Schwentke's conclusion is as dark as you may fear.

For all its amazing high points (and this satirically minded takedown of the ludicrousness of the American racist right has many of those) BlacKkKlansman also shows Lee at his weakest. The slight running time drags, a sensation not helped by Terence Blanchard's underwhelming score.

Never Goin’ Back and its overworked tropes should, by all rights, be a trifle of a film, but what Frizzell and her two leads deliver is more fun than a floating party boat.

True, Christopher Robin may take a little time to get to those emotions, mainly due to a scene-setting introduction that could stretch the attention of the most wriggly children. But once Pooh and Christopher are once more paw-in-hand, it's just enchanting.

A peerless fusing of dumbshow performance and background sound editing, there's a rising panic that allows the final, violent closing act to seem shockingly organic.

In another universe, the juxtaposition of family and tragedy might’ve produced something unique; instead, it feels like a pastiche of borrowed story beats from better movies.

Kunis and McKinnon don’t exactly set the screen on fire with their chemistry, and there are only the most perfunctory shadings to their characters.

It’s not entirely clear what “generation” is the guilty one being examined in filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s third full-length documentary, but it’s safe to say that we are now several decades into the decline of Western civilization (that Creem critic was right, you guys).

This is filmmaking as polemic, and much in the same way as Michael Moore’s (much better) films have a particular agenda to puzzle out various ways in which our country has failed us, this traffics in the same vein.

The film’s basic problem is that it jumps around too much, with an array of speakers from Montana to Washington, D.C. to California.

Funny, vibrant, insightful, tragic, achingly timely, and yet with an underlying message about empathy that is timeless, Blindspotting may be the summer's most essential movie.

A relentlessly entertaining exercise in putting Cruise’s Ethan Hunt through his paces again. And again. And again. But hey, there’s much pleasure in watching him continually fall off things.

Packed with an equal amount of fart gags and jokes about the modern state of superhero films, Teen Titans is a perfect bit of escapism for families suffering from superhero fatigue.

Parker has cast credible young versions of all the original players, although in most cases vintage outperforms new grape.

Burnham’s sociological precision as a screenwriter and director, however, would likely not feel as genuine if not for Fisher in the pivotal role of Kayla. She doesn’t act the part as much as she breathes it. It may be the most honest performance you’ll see in a movie this year.