Jesse Hassenger

Fuze doesn’t fly off the rails at its midpoint. It keeps moving forward at a steady clip. By its final stretch, however, the effort to sustain itself becomes more visible, and less quietly confident.

The movie’s thread about parental neglect and/or sacrifice is wispy. As a carnival geek show, though, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy delivers the goods, and at greater volume than its unofficial predecessors. It isn’t as personal a movie as the possessive title implies, but the marketing is largely correct: For the first time in ages, a mummy presides over a real horror show.

Though their conflicts eventually lead to horror-movie violence, the cruelest fate, the movie implies, may be a professional life consigned to malls, overpriced novelty coffee drinks, and other commercial/cultural remnants of a millennial youth.

It’s both a canny contemporary riff on the material and a well-made but only moderately scary slasher.

It doesn’t capture the full horror potential of climate change, rising floodwaters, or even bloodthirsty sharks. But the filmmakers sure throw themselves into the fray with enthusiasm.

Alpha is more of a horror-inflected drama than an outright genre piece, which allowed plenty of critics to fixate, not unfairly, on its failings as an AIDS metaphor. Yet the movie has resonance beyond simply recalling the years of its creator’s youth.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie doesn’t really have the patience for character-based conflict, or plotting more complicated (or motivated) than groups of characters showing up to different planets on cue.

After so many smirky bloodfests, They Will Kill You scarcely needs believable human relationships to earn some goodwill. All it really needs is Beetz convincingly going through hell.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice practically warns the audience against taking it too seriously, even while talking out the other side of its mouth about its own heartfelt themes.

While there’s plenty of familiarity in Pixar’s small-scale animated romp Hoppers, there’s also a smart, unruly variation at its center.