John Mulderig

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.

The latest such gambit vulgarly ventriloquizes dogs and results in the mangy comedy “Strays.”

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.

Seafood goes bad, very bad, very quickly. So, too, does the dead fish-scented sequel “Meg 2: The Trench” (Warner Bros.)

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.

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.

In a timely move, the folks behind the slick, vibrant espionage thriller “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” have added an experimental Artificial Intelligence project run amok to their roster of villains.