Whether they're navigating a recently flooded Prague or the pristine waters of a Tuscan swimming pool, the fiends and angels who populate Beauty in Trouble are like so many scorpions explaining why they sting the fabled frog trying to help them: "It's my nature."

This is an impassioned movie, made with conviction and evangelical verve. It's also hysterical and overbearing and alienating.

What Mayor lacks in terms of wiki-esque biography it more than makes up for in immediacy and exquisite timing.

Although Whitney follows a familiar structure, Macdonald infuses it with artful editorial choices, marking the chapters of Houston’s life with brief but vivid montages of the times in which she lived.

It's brilliantly acted. But best of all, it's brilliantly made.

Days of Future Past is, in itself, as intoxicating as a shot of adrenaline. It’s what summer movies are meant to be.

Both grimly naturalistic and infused with classical values at their most thoughtfully composed, Land of Mine is epic but deeply intimate; elegant but tough.

Manzoor has created a world that feels at once very real — multicultural London, a blend of modernity and tradition — and very, very unreal. The story is a sci-fi and kung fu stew, with a mad-professor plotline that’s more than a little hard to swallow. Fortunately, the candy-colored sweetness of the sauce — a feminist story that is at heart about sibling love — makes all the hoo-hah go down a little easier.

Yelchin’s performance — grizzled, neurotic — is sadly on-the-nose, making us feel as if we’re watching the last act of a troubled young man.

Put in terms that Bob (and perhaps only Bob fans) can understand: This movie may not be the Meatsiah — beef tartare inside a medium-well burger inside beef Wellington — but it’s pretty well done.

Not since the heyday of Frank Capra, perhaps, has there been a movie that so seamlessly combines screwball comedy with get-out-your-handkerchiefs heart. Peggy Sue Got Married isn't about solving life's problems, it's about accepting them, in a world where love doesn't conquer all, but conquers enough. And in the hands of director Francis Coppola, that message makes what could have been merely a delightful lark about time travel into something much more.

Bring Her Back is close to, but not quite, a triumph of style over substance — foreboding, unnerving and ultimately very gooey in ways that linger like the aftermath of a bad dream yet lack the nightmare cogency of truly great horror.

It's in this final chapter that the director states his message, which is handled so lightly, almost incidentally, you might miss it. But it's a profound one. For what the girls learn is that the way to get what they want -- no, need -- isn't by hoarding something, but by letting go.

Like a miniature universe made entirely of millions of tiny plastic bricks, The Lego Batman Movie looks and feels like it could only have been put together by a roomful of mad geniuses, moving in a ballet of well-choreographed creativity: It’s simultaneously epic and humble.

A Prairie Home Companion tries to embrace the spirit of that longtime radio series but suffocates the very qualities that make the original show so special in the first place.

It's tasty enough, and probably good for you, but at 73 minutes, the film is hardly a very filling entree.

Monica is moody, slow-moving and stronger on style than characterization, yet Lysette and Clarkson endow it with feeling. This is a broken-family drama that culminates not with shouted recriminations or smashed crockery, but with baths, massages and gentle kisses.

Microbe and Gasoline doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it just might ride four of them into your heart.

While the younger Van Peebles certainly looks the part, Baadasssss! never feels like anything more than kids playing dress-up.

Amy Schumer proves her cinematic bona fides in Trainwreck, a strikingly assured feature film debut in which she proves herself as authentic an actress as she is deft as a writer.

The story it tells is conventional, chronological and straightforward. And that’s enough. With a story this charming, who needs bells and whistles?

Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny — Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, “Sister Midnight,” is an absolute original.

A psychic journey deep into the very fabric of Iranian (and by extension, all) life.

Hilarious, touching and wonderfully dyspeptic.

It's of an odd genre: a formally scripted (by Tony Grisoni) feature with a musical score that adheres totally to journalistic accuracy and willfully ignores formula, melodrama and uplift. It's a real down-lift.

Stone's film is a case study in cultural analysis that aims at too much and achieves too little.

The movie may or may not be entirely true to Brontë, but it is surpassingly, and often deliciously, Brontë-esque.

Remarkably entertaining.