The R-rated Hellboy is a comedically gory but otherwise not particularly funny reboot of the comic book character (previously brought to PG-13-rated life by Ron Perlman and director Guillermo del Toro), a red-skinned, horned demon with a giant fist who works with the Bureau for Paranormal Research...

Here's an amusing coincidence. Little, which is a reversal of the Tom Hanks classic Big, was written by Tina Gordon Chism, who also wrote What Men Want, a reversal of What Women Want. Chism's niche, apparently, is mediocre rewrites of fantasy comedies where the premise is reversed and the main...

Missing Link is Laika's fifth gorgeously detailed work of stop-motion animation and the fourth to leave me kind of cold. Only the studio's debut, Coraline, had the intended impact; ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings were all wonderful to look at but offered no emotional...

The interesting thing about anti-abortion propaganda film Unplanned is how little it tries to persuade anyone of anything. Preaching to the choir, it presupposes that everyone already agrees abortion is murder and that no further discussion is necessary to prove it. It also assumes you believe...

Hollywood continues to solve racism one bigot at a time with The Best of Enemies, a shiny, shallow trinket based on true events that, in the hands of first-time feel-good filmmaker Robin Bissell, seem made-up. It's 1971 in Durham, N.C., where the schools are still segregated and C.P. Ellis (Sam...

(On HBO.) Little had to be changed about the plot of Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son to make it work with an adaptation set in the present, but something must have been lost in translation. As directed by first-timer Rashid Johnson (a respected Chicago artist) from a screenplay by...

The title character in Hotel Mumbai is actually called the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, or the Taj for short, and it was one of a dozen Mumbai locations attacked by Islamic terrorists on November 26, 2008, ultimately killing 174 people and injuring hundreds more. The film, directed by first-timer...

The whole point of Pet Sematary -- both Stephen King's 1983 novel and the effective 1989 movie version -- is that you shouldn't revive the dead because they won't be the same when they come back. (It's one of those universal, timeless messages.) So it's a little on the nose that the new adaptation,...

Despite their adventures ostensibly being aimed at kids, most superheroes aren't children themselves. Except for the Spider-Men and occasional moments with the younger X-Persons, we rarely see a superhero revel in the sheer delight of having awesome powers. So part of what makes Shazam! a treat...

The title character in The Beach Bum, a stoner-poet named Moondog, is the part Matthew McConaughey was born to play, and he is indeed at his McConaughey-est here: grinning, giggling, pontificating, publicly urinating, stumbling hazily from one party to the next, just generally living his best life....

The self-cannibalization at Disney continues with Dumbo, a turgid, labored, bloated live-action remake of the 1941 animated classic with precisely none of the original's emotion, charm, or joy. Why do these things that are obviously bad ideas to begin with keep turning out so bad? It is a...

Coming-out stories have become common enough that movies are starting to tell them with nuance. The "Am I gay?" question no longer has only two possible answers; there's a whole spectrum, as 17-year-old Franky Winter (Josh Wiggins) discovers in Giant Little Ones, a discreet and decidedly...

An apocalyptic event happens so subtly in Starfish that you almost don't notice it. The reasons for that are probably more practical than artistic -- it costs money to show widespread devastation -- but it adds to the intrigue of this melancholy sci-fi drama, which can feel both realistic and...

Jordan Peele, the newly minted horror auteur behind Get Out, gives us a lot to process in the early minutes of his follow-up, the suspenseful and more overtly horrific Us. We're told of a network of underground tunnels in the United States (the "U.S." of the title?); images of rabbits in cages...

One thing you can say for sure about Relaxer: There will never be a gender-swapped remake of it. The story, first juvenile and then surreal, only makes sense in the context of men's craving for competition and willingness to spend absurd amounts of time and energy on total nonsense. That's not to...