The film's message -- about how the Internet is sabotaging our real-life relationships -- doesn't resonate with absolute clarity, but Disconnect does a much more effective job than anyone could hope to do in 140 characters or less.

Songs such as "We Shall Overcome," "Wade in the Water" and "This Little Light of Mine" are powerful to begin with. Listening to them, music-video-style, over footage shot during the era, however, elevates them.

This is featherweight, family-friendly fare, through and through. But that doesn’t detract from its ability to distract, thanks largely to a fun, fast-moving script, rich production values and director Harry Bradbeer’s willingness to stand back and let star Millie Bobby Brown shine.

It's not a perfect film, mind you. It's too long by a quarter, and actor-turned-director Charles Martin Smith ("The Untouchables") lets any sense of real structure slip away in the film's crowded third act.

More seriously -- and substantively -- "A Late Quartet" was a quiet but thoughtful meditation on the power, and the necessary pain, of human connections. By comparison, Quartet is a flimsy bit of cinematic puffery that takes every obvious path on its way to its even more obvious "seize-the-day" message.

When a film's clichés are so obvious that its cast points them out for you, you've got to wonder how hard it's really trying.

Still, it's all enjoyable enough, playing out like a cross between "Pride and Prejudice" and "Amistad" -- and a welcome change of pace for those trying to avoid the radioactive spiders and time-traveling mutants that have otherwise invaded the summer movie season.

An effort to spin high art out of a guilty-pleasure cult classic, this new Suspiria is -- like the original -- off-the-charts bonkers. But it’s also off-the-charts unpleasant, a cold, hard-to-embrace slog made up of mostly of stomach-turning moments of body horror interrupted by long stretches of stylish but mind-numbing pretension.

You might love it or you might hate it, but you won't soon forget it -- and you won't be able to say you've seen a movie quite like Swiss Army Man before.

While this nouveau Fright Night does a reasonable job of maintaining the fun spirit of the original film, between the blood splatters and vamp stakings, it never builds on what the original had to offer -- and thus never quite makes a convincing case for its own existence.

What most saw as entirely charming behavior others saw as a nuisance. After all, a playful whale has a way of unwittingly damaging rudders and outriggers and outboard motors and such. Worse, wildlife officials saw Luna's behavior as potentially dangerous, for the people he encountered -- and for the whale himself.

No one should mistake Scott’s Napoleon as an overtly political film. It’s true ambitions are to entertain and inform, in that order.

His (Andrew Dominik) film delivers when it matters, especially with its crystallizing final lines. Not only do they wrap a bow on what ends up being a treatise on the uglier side of capitalism, but they stand among the most memorable closing lines in recent Hollywood history.

While Infinitely Polar Bear makes an admirable argument that mental illness is something to be managed rather than dreaded like a death sentence, it's hard not to feel as if Forbes' film perhaps paints too rosy of a portrait of what can be a devastating condition to families.

This is a jazz movie, both in style and in substance, and so, rather, his goal is to try to capture the fog-like essence of Miles.

It's an engrossing film, rich with action and emotion.

If there's a breath of fresh air in it all, it's in the form of the young actress Jessica Barden playing a smoking, swearing, Tom Sawyer-flavored teenage delinquent determined to add some life to her excruciatingly boring rural existence.

As engrossing as The Young Victoria is, this isn't a movie that will stay with you very long. Mostly that's because Blunt's character does little by way of evolving.

Visually and tonally, Miss Sloane -- like Chastain's one-note performance, in which she does little but bark and glower -- is slick but soulless, a film that takes itself far too seriously and misjudges how smart it really is.

A well-conceived superhero romp in its own right, and one that stands nicely on its own six legs.

With no real beginning and no real ending, the unsatisfying "Mockingjay Part 1" is essentially all middle -- one big, stretched out, watered-down second act. The result is a handsome film, but also a talky one that takes a while to hit its storytelling stride and that, once there, repeatedly stalls to fill time.

It succeeds wonderfully, offering moviegoers a rare taste of rarified air -- and as compelling an argument as you can make for seeing a movie writ large on the oversized screen of an actual movie theater.

As pleasant as the Downton Abbey movie is, it’s hard not to wish for something more substantive, more memorable.

As with most Ferrell projects, there's nothing profound going on in The Other Guys. It's just a bit of good, stupid fun, had at the expense of an uber-formulaic genre that has long been ripe for the spoofing. But it also works.

It is an inspiring, well-assembled portrait of one man's love for his autistic 6-year-old son and the measures he's willing to go to help the boy -- and the family -- cope with his neurological challenges.

Vol. 1 functions reasonably well as a standalone film in its own right, playing out like a dose of mass therapy, an interesting, Von Trier-led sexploration of humankind's conflicted approach to sex: We love it, but we also fear it and are often thoroughly ashamed of it.

Writer-director Markus Schleinzer's exceedingly dark drama -- guaranteed to make audiences squirm in their seats -- is emotionally unsettling.

Niccol's film won't likely achieve the high-flying box-office success of "Top Gun," but it is similar to that 1986 film in that it will likely get people talking after the closing credits roll.