The film is no masterpiece — again, George can’t illuminate why a million people were murdered by their own countrymen. But as we focus on Rusesabagina’s almost farcically desperate attempts to forestall tragedy, we have a vision of genocide as a virus with its own terrible momentum.

That magnetic, musical pull toward Evan is at work in Chbosky’s movie version. But now the pull is coupled with a powerful push — in other words, repulsion — that keeps us from being seduced.

In the end, you’re left with a movie that doesn’t quite jell but expands in the mind. It’s an excellent Book Club movie — it demands to be discussed, debated, embraced, or (perhaps) rejected.

Chappaquiddick is somehow both cynical and deeply inquisitive about the morals of every character involved.

El Chicano is often exciting, but don’t expect to leave the theater riding an action movie high.

Class Action Park tries with only partial success to capture the dissonance between the funny war stories told about that hazardous site and how awful and tragic it was that young people lost their lives there.

Ultimately, Hotel Transylvania 3 is for very young children, and God love it for that.

Karia’s film is uneven, but, as with its aforementioned staging of “To be or not to be,” it tosses enough new ideas around to keep us watching.

It’s the writer, Diablo Cody, and the director, Jason Reitman, who have screws loose. Or maybe they’re just desperate to make their film a chick "Rushmore" or "Garden State."

The Circle is a tonal mess: part satire, part moralistic melodrama. Some of it is broadly acted, some of it subtle, much of it overheated. It has great moments, though.

For all its feverish activity, Mother! feels static.

Let me add something in the movie’s favor. Although I don’t love Jojo Rabbit, I love that it exists.

Naishuller doesn’t bring the elegant coherence that Leitch and Stahelski do to their fight sequences or manage the same touch of absurdity to lighten up the brutal excesses. What he does have is Bob Odenkirk, and watching Odenkirk join the middle-aged action hero fold is pleasurable enough to make Nobody worth the while, even if it’s an obvious echo of other, better recent films.

The film is superbly acted (especially by Macdissi, who makes the father a borderline hysteric), but it's hard to know what to feel except, "How can any girl navigate this oversexualized culture?"

The effect is a bit like watching "Gone With the Wind" with a dumpling substituting for Scarlett O’Hara.

What saves it is Dennis Quaid.

It has the air of a television-show fragment, and not just because its initial entanglement feels like the stuff of a pilot, something that has to be gotten out of the way to reach the actual premise. It’s also because it introduces characters who feel like they have storylines in the wings.

Baldwin is so good in the coming-of-age gangster drama Brooklyn Rules that it's like watching a voodoo priest.

Wicked is as enchanting as it is exhausting.

The Planet of the Apes movies were built on rage and shame about the world as it exists. And whatever its many flaws, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes gets that largely right.

The Sitter feels slapdash and quick, but you might not want to have it any other way.

Should be remembered for a pair of performers -- Derek Luke and Viola Davis, whose cameo as the mother who abandoned him cuts through the sap like an acetylene torch.

Sea Fever teases out elemental anxieties that have been given fresh life by unfortunate reality, but the movie is worth seeing because, when all’s said and done, it gives us characters and circumstances we can care about.

Like any conspiracy theorist, you sense that landing on an actually airtight unified theory would almost spoil the fun for Mitchell.

By framing Mamie’s story entirely in the context of her son’s death, Till keeps us on the outside of her transformation from a woman focused on her own life to one who believes, as she says in a speech at the end, that “what happens to any of us anywhere in the world had better be the business of us all.”

This is Pitt’s movie, and like its star, it never opens itself up enough to truly take off.

It may not entirely work as a movie, but The Muppets shines as a piece of touching pop nostalgia.

The don’t-speak values of the series, faithfully preserved by Sarnoski and beautifully expressed by Nyong’o, are still welcome in a Hollywood landscape that would prefer to drown audiences in sound. But if you repeat it enough, a bold new approach to multiplex thrills becomes just more noise.