It's a fatiguing, low-key character study that drags along annoyingly and pleads for patience, but stick with it and you'll find the engrossing centerpiece performance by Ms. Theron a captivating reward that is well worth the effort.

The surprising results are unlike anything I’ve seen lately, and the best surprise of all is a funny, inspired and career-enhancing star performance by Ben Stiller that left me touched, applauding and laughing out loud.

With no solution to the horrors it introduces, it’s a screamfest that seems rather pointless, too, but somewhat redeemed by a few genuine thrills, an imaginative use of makeup and camerawork, and a great supporting performance by the gifted young Millicent Simmonds, who returns as Regan.

The great screenwriter Steven Zaillian's elaborate, convoluted script, so muddled that even after it's over you still don't know what it's all about, is a drawback - but the movie is a master class in sinister style, tense and deeply uncomfortable.

Not everything from Ireland travels as well as the whiskey. Like mud-thick porridge, Shadow Dancer, another dreary, confusing conspiracy thriller about the Irish “troubles,” is one of them.

While The Caine Mutiny is a showcase for its actors, it doesn’t put much else on display.

It overcomes inescapable boxing and martial arts clichés and leaves you thoroughly sated, energized and wanting more.

Its virtues are many and this filmed version of Hardy’s fourth novel is well worth seeing. It rises head and shoulders above most of what we’ve been seeing lately.

Laugh-out-loud funny and somewhat melancholic.

As much as I liked it, I have to admit Run & Jump is a work of no action — of love unrequited, feelings unexpressed and goals never reached. Sitting through it requires great patience. I don’t think this is an Ireland that would interest John Ford.

It’s a forgettable film, but what it says about the debilitating effect of technological abuse is sickening enough to make you think twice about upgrading your smartphone.

It’s far from subtle, more than a little sudsy, but also pleasingly direct and full of heart. Most significantly though, its timing is perfect.

So Breath is not without its pleasures, but it takes longer for the boys to grow up than it does to master Big Smokey. It needs a push, an edge, a reason to care about what happens next.

Bob Trevino Likes It, the feature film debut from award-winning short film and web series director Tracie Laymon, wistfully and powerfully recaptures a more guileless era in our digital lives—which the Facebook interface and the lead character’s cracked second-gen iPhone put at around 2010.

While the film plays lip service (perhaps one too many times) to the healing power of music, it is really about how self-deception fuels and sustains. It may not keep us alive, but it will keep us going while we here.

This is the extraordinary biopic about the fascinating, complex and inspirational example set by genius cosmologist and physicist Stephen Hawking.

It is both empathetic and brutal, but at the core is a hint of optimism. That despite our human instinct to create conflict, we could do better. In conveying this in such an original way, McQueen proves that there is always a new way to navigate a well-trodden path.

By the end, Shazam! feels like a corporate product that’s so thirsty for approval from all quadrants that it never ends up figuring out what it is.

A painful, heart-rending coming of age drama, L’immensità, which translates as “immensity,” is a sensitive, painful prize winner from the Venice Film Festival that mirrors the ethos and intensity of a tortured family’s experience in a time of change.

When it comes to thrillers, this one is as good as it gets. Not for the squeamish, but for anyone who loves movies, it’s too exhilarating to miss.

By the time the end finally comes, there's no relief. You're left with the vague recollection of an interesting movie you were watching before you got kidnapped and subjected to over an hour of torture porn starring a fat, sadistic clown.

The sense of joy that emanates from nearly every frame of Theater Camp, a film that arrived like a burst of July sunshine in the January frost of this year’s Sundance, is as palpable as grease paint and every bit as sweet as bug juice.

Companion offers a relatively surface-level thriller that asks far bigger questions than its easygoing vibe might suggest.

A Complete Unknown never really parses anything new about Dylan or reveals his psychology, instead letting us continue to wonder about the man behind the dark lens. It’s a thrilling, entertaining journey as we do, with performances that never falter by actors who clearly did the work and then let it go once on set.

Well-crafted, potently written and beautifully acted.

It’s gritty, nostalgic and occasionally romanticized, especially if you have an affinity for the era in which it’s set, which Nichols clearly does.

Ostensibly a middling programmer meant to satiate our cinematic bloodlust during the lull between John Wick 4 and The Equalizer 3, this period neck-snapper from Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander may not only surpass both those films, it could end up taking the gore-splattered crown as the most satisfying, over-the-top violent action movie of the summer.

Unusual and invigorating.