Director Jaume Collet-Serra's family adventure may be as self-referential and avaricious as any of the Mouse House's live-action blockbusters, but the film's cheerful spirit and charm prove utterly infectious, and I wound up having more and more fun as the film progressed.

Director Malcolm D. Lee's LeBron-James-meets-the-Looney-Tunes adventure, beyond feeling cynical and desperate, may be the most flabbergasting, relentlessly self-promoting entertainment I've ever endured. Lee's movie is constantly selling, yet the only thing it actually gave me was a headache.

Directed by Everardo Gout and written, as all of them have been, by James DeMonaco, The Forever Purge is the fifth and purportedly final (sure, whatever) installment in the popular series of horror thrillers, and offhand, it's hard to think of another long-running film franchise that has gotten more mileage out of being not bad.

Lauded by the Boston Globe as “brilliant metaphorical filmmaking,” director István Szabó's 1981 drama Mephisto serves as the latest presentation in the Kinogarten series of German-themed works screened on the first Friday of every month, with Rock Island's Rozz-Tox and Davenport's German American Heritage Center, on July 2, co-hosting their presentation of the first Hungarian movie to ever win the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film.