John Mulderig

In their latest big-screen variation on the eponymous CBS-TV series starring Edward Woodward that ran for four seasons beginning in 1985, screenwriter Richard Wenk and director Antoine Fuqua have a few things going for them.

The tale of Texan Rickey Hill’s against-the-odds struggle to become a major league baseball player should, potentially, make for an engaging film.

Director Neill Blomkamp’s lively against-the-odds tale recounts the unlikely career of working-class Welsh lad Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe).

The Last Voyage of the Demeter registers as competent but uneven, with its evident artistic intent barely justifying the quarts of blood spilt as its plot unfolds.

Things get dark down under in the Australian horror yarn “Talk to Me.”

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.

The onset of overlapping strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has put Hollywood on hiatus.

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.