"Hysteria" is a fun fling of a movie about medical science at its shakiest. Literally.

This amusing period comedy chronicles the invention of the vibrator in the late Victorian era, when doctors used early versions of the electrical device to bring women to sexual satisfaction. This was done in the name of treating women thought to be suffering from “hysteria,” a vague diagnostic catch-all that covered pretty much all female complaints from melancholia to mania.

The male doctors, unable even to envision what to them was the then-preposterous notion that women might have sexual needs or could achieve actual orgasm, viewed the vibrator as a scientific device that relieved female patients of built-up, ahem, pressure, leaving them calm and appropriately docile. 

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As sure as the Pope resides at the Vatican, the Catholic Church won’t be organizing busloads of parishioners for fieldtrips to go see “The Perfect Family.”

That’s because this slight satirical comedy has as its center a woman so slavishly devoted to the church that she has worn blinders for years that keep her from seeing that her own family is falling apart. The film’s title, “The Perfect Family,” is meant to be ironic with a neon yellow highlighter through it.

A matronly Kathleen Turner tears with gusto into the role of Eileen Cleary, a seemingly devoted wife and mother who spends...

Nicholas Sparks is a brand name. He’s the author of mawkish, bestselling romantic novels that Hollywood keeps turning into even worse mawkish, romantic films, several of which have scored at the box office.

The list includes “The Notebook,” by far the best and most successful of the lot, as well as “Message in a Bottle,” “Nights at Rodanthe,” “A Walk to Remember,” “Dear John” and “The Last Song.”

The latest novel of his to arrive on the big screen is “The Lucky One.” A slack and predictable love story, which takes place mostly in rural Louisiana, it is the filmic equivalent of trudging through syrupy sorghum.

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Willem Dafoe, his gaunt, weathered face all sharply chiseled angles, determinedly hikes through dense foliage and across mountain meadows, setting and baiting traps.

He’s in the mountains of Tasmania, the Australian island state that’s 150 miles south of the mainland.

Also read: 'American Reunion' Review: This Pie Has Become Tasteless

An American mercenary, he’s trying to catch a Tasmanian tiger, a wolf-like marsupial believed to have been...