Movie Reviews

The resilience of the indestructible loving family, in this case, a Mexican American clan, forms the heart and soul of "Blue Beetle" (Warner Bros.). Even as the DC Comics-derived adventure occasionally lapses into cliches, moreover, this solid core endures – and helps to make the film built around it acceptable for a fairly broad audience.

In the early 1990s, video game designer Kazunori Yamauchi, along with several colleagues, set out to develop a car racing simulation that would be realistic down to the smallest detail. How well they succeeded may be judged by fact-based drama that takes its name from the title of the franchise they created, "Gran Turismo."

Seafood goes bad, very bad, very quickly. So, too, does the dead fish-scented sequel "Meg 2: The Trench."

In rebooting a decades-old franchise with "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" (Paramount), director and co-writer Jeff Rowe has the titular testudines take a meditative turn. What should they make of humanity, they wonder. And what does the future hold for them?

Those who enter "Haunted Mansion" (Disney) in search of laughs will likely come away from it more satisfied than those who go in seeking eerie chills. As for the film's appropriate audience, it's a project best suited to grown-ups, though mature teens will probably be equipped to take it on as well.

Life in plastic may be fantastic but the tedious ideology-driven comedy "Barbie" (Warner Bros.) is not. Although genuinely objectionable elements are relatively few, moreover, this is distinctly not a movie for the age group to which the figurine of the title is primarily marketed.

If writer-director Christopher Nolan's impressive but uneven portrait "Oppenheimer" (Universal) is anything to go by, famed theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was a highly complex man. As portrayed by Cillian Murphy in a layered performance, he was at once charismatic yet naive, by turns a champion and victim of his times.

"God's children are not for sale." Such is the motto of Tim Ballard, the indefatigably determined real-life crimefighter portrayed by Jim Caviezel in the fact-based drama "Sound of Freedom" (Angel Studios).