As Hopkins's Lecter is concerned, it's official: He's Freddy Krueger.

The most provocative thing about The Beaver is the adult-movie title. The film itself is alternately fascinating and dull, though mostly the latter.

A desperate, cynical self-parody.

More like that crowd-pleasing UK fluff that requires great actresses to do wacky things. Mirren is such an easy, breezy presence that you might think she's playing the screenwriting equivalent of air.

Norman gets most of its punch from two terrific performances.

Director/co-writer Ariel Vromen has made a grimly passable crime drama in the sub-“GoodFellas”/“Sopranos” vein, and if you’re looking for something to order up on a slow Saturday night, it’ll do.

The best audiences for this thrilling confabulation may be younger ones: They’ll feel their minds expand with inspiration and be less inclined to deflate back to earth afterward. Somebody did something amazing back in 1862; The Aeronauts commemorates it with artifice, enthusiasm, and a smattering of the truth.

This is a grim, at times lurid tale with hard observations about growing up poor, Black, and male in America — about the cycles of defeat that can land multiple generations in prison — and many of the details have the sting of the rap songs that permeate the soundtrack. Elsewhere, however, All Day and a Night plays like an urban crime thriller made with more earnestness than style.

The dread in Mitchell’s film never cuts to the bone, because we never really care about his characters.

"Hobbs & Shaw” is fine summer meathead entertainment, a brainless bone-cruncher with clever players, a decent script, and enough demolition derby mayhem to satisfy the yahoo lurking within the most civilized of moviegoers.

You can picture the DreamWorks corporate confab: "OK, the kids respond to move-it, move-it repetition - give us something else repetitive, and let's get herding." It wasn't just desperate, it was insulting.

Essentially, it's 90 minutes of mostly disarming nothingness. [10 Dec 1993, p.59]

This isn't a great piece of nonfiction filmmaking, but it has its moments.

You may find yourself wishing that Webb (“500 Days of Summer”) would just power through court. We’d gladly watch more of Grace and Evans silhouetted against the sunset, their connection evident in his indulgent posing as her makeshift jungle gym.

The actors are excellent, as are the bruising re-creations of the firefight and the uncountable injuries sustained.

Everyone from Channing Tatum to Danny DeVito to Hollywood transplant LeBron James is here voicing the movie’s winsomely rendered snow creatures, but it’s the creative story more than the routine-if-likable characters that makes this one so engaging.

For the record, Rare Birds doesn't even fly as a birder's special, since Tasseter's Sulfurious Duck is a fictional species. Now, if they'd seen a Eurasian Wigeon, then we'd be talking.

Isn't awful, but neither is it the tangy entertainment it could have been.

As literary desecrations go, this makes for perfectly acceptable, occasionally very enjoyable children's entertainment. You'll forget about it by Monday, though, and if they're old enough to have developed some taste, so will your kids.

House of Gucci is pretty much can’t-miss. Except that it does.

Like the title characters and the performances that go with them, Being the Ricardos has real zip. It’s a virtue of Sorkin’s tendency to glibness. His writing can be irritatingly slick, but never boring.

This is no “Bridesmaids.” What the film’s premise has in novelty, it lacks in execution. The characters are uninspired, and they continue to lack depth and plausibility throughout.

I wish I could tell you that Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is ridiculous and I hated it, but the fact is that it’s ridiculous and I loved every minute.

The cast does capable work, but you’ll wish the movie concentrated more on the comedy, which has some zing, rather than the straighter elements, which quickly start to drag.

The movie never fully clicks.

The movie is sardonic, hip, heartfelt, surprisingly white, and for all its ensemble pleasures, it's squarely about a furiously prim young woman and how she learns to bend.

Part detective story, part coming of political age saga, and all teenage identity crisis, Captive is the first film written and directed by Gaston Biraben , who has worked steadily as a Hollywood sound editor since the early '90s. That professionalism shows in the polished filmmaking as well as an occasional tendency toward shallower melodrama than the situation deserves.

The result is a genuinely cathartic night at the movies - which is one of the reasons we go to them in the first place. Art it ain't, but popcorn is rarely this skilled or seductive.