The film is an emotional rollercoaster bursting full of dynamic tensions, mind-bending twists and shattering truths. It’s the perfect combination of high marital drama and science fiction thinkpiece, and with the lengths the film goes to, Foe is a worthy addition to the emotional sci-fi canon.

It takes a farcical premise and tries to find something meaningful to say about it. It doesn’t succeed, but the effort is worth analyzing.

Next Goal Wins is [Waititi's] best and most crowd-pleasing effort to date.

Voyagers is a smart and effective little sci-fi thriller about the best-laid plans of scientists crumbling in the face of teenage hormones and human frailty.

Though its mix of European romanticism, lustrous trappings, and nostalgic movie love can occasionally make Planetarium feel like a galaxy all its own, the effect is more illusory than enveloping.

It’s an overpowering world of steampunk delights, almost Miyazakian in its presentation. It’s hard to complain about a path being well-worn when all the sights will make your eyes pop.

The weight of history is a heavy burden for one film to carry, especially when freighted still further by contemporary parallels. Ultimately, Leyna is as much a symbol as a fully-drawn character, one young girl representing multitudes. Nevertheless, those who find their way to her essential story will come away not only enlightened, but undeniably touched.

A misguided attempt to spin a nightmare scenario into a cutesy rom-com premise, this British production takes place in a harrowingly claustrophobic world where personal growth ends at age 18, and you meet everyone you’ll ever become friends with in your whole life during high school.

At the climax of Into the Storm, colossal tornadoes make noise, blow things up, and go around in circles; that's pretty much all the film does, too.

The characters, the dumb dialogue, and the story mechanics are the biggest problems with “Hot Summer Nights,” which never convinces, while it uses an annoying, legend-building voiceover narration from an unseen local to keep hawking the notion that we’re seeing life-changing, mythic events.

These above average, slightly forgettable movies may not live forever, but Theron’s badassery might.

The Gates' is constantly on the verge of getting better, sometimes on the verge of getting good, but it never quite gets there. It’s a missed opportunity for thrills, social commentary, humor and/or horror.

“Welcome to Raccoon City” overstuffs itself with so many characters and plot points that nothing has room to develop. The pretty-good cast gets buried alive in a rushed and ill-conceived screenplay, and it doesn’t help that the film is murkily photographed and tonally dreary.

That face-off between two comics legends becomes but one in a series of big things bashing into other big things, which is what Snyder and writers Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer mistake for storytelling. The trio do manage to cough up an acceptable number of ooh-that’s-cool moments, and fans who will be satisfied with those will be satisfied with those, but any other ideas and characters the movie might offer get lost in the rubble.

The excellent cast of This Is Where I Leave You cannot be faulted; all talented performers, they collectively make a constant effort to bring some sort of life to the limp script and uninspired direction.

Viewers interested in martial-arts action are bound to find the combat-with-a-C to be lackluster in that way that hand-to-hand fighting tends to be when it gets drowned out by digital effects. More likely to have fun with this latest Mortal Kombat are Sam Raimi enthusiasts who can appreciate the comedy in over-the-top geysers of fake blood, which the film unleashes with increasing regularity as the fights get more serious.

The film offers one or two surprises. And when its humor lands, Rauch ensures that it sticks.

First-time feature filmmaker Dave Wilson and cinematographer Jacques Jouffret (“Mile 22”) can manipulate the speed of combat scenes all he wants (the stylistic crutch of a slo-mo point of contact is evergreen) but dull choreography, CGI overuse and Cuisinart editing are still the bane of today’s action sequences.

It’s always watchable, and it has a distinctively grainy, intimate look, but the vague, generic characters and incidents are the kind of thing you might scribble on the back of an envelope without having done any research at all.

A deft combination of excitement and thoughtfulness, an excellent and unexpected film.

Despite arriving a decade too late, there’s a version of the small-town coming-out comedy 4th Man Out...that could feel relevant. But first-time director Andrew Nackman’s emotionally shallow, vaguely misogynistic take isn’t it.

It just never goes far enough with its ridiculousness to reach pure entertainment, and it certainly can’t be taken seriously enough to justify its melodrama.

Hillsong — Let Hope Rise stands out against that harsh tone of much recent Christian indie cinema by being a winning, friendly, and at times moving film.

One of the most tedious apocalypses to come down the chute in recent years, this series gets lamer, and lazier, with each entry. The only ‘Trial’ offered by this film is the ordeal of watching it.

The Princess somehow manages to be both under-written and insultingly obvious.

Crowe’s acting is fine, but he hasn’t done himself any favors with his by-the-book direction or paltry script.

Though he finds little room for subtlety and even less interest in complex moral shadings, director Edoardo De Angelis can still ably wring tension from this brave, if foolhardy, mission, spinning his camera around ever-cramped quarters as the two crews, enemies-turned-shipmates, navigate uncharted terrain.

A militaristic B-movie heavy on action but light on faux-patriotic bombast? It seems fair to call that its own kind of treasure.