The fact that Guillermo del Toro is an executive producer of “Mama” is a tip-off that this won’t be just another horror film with misbehaving and soon-to-be-dismembered teenagers or a drooling, slime-soaked monster. 

And it’s not. But neither is it “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006), the producer-director’s brilliant, politically aware gothic fairytale.

“Mama” is a fitfully involving supernatural tale of parents and parental figures both good and bad.  The feature film debut of director-co writer Andrés Muschietti, it opens with a distraught and possibly criminal father (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) grabbing his two young daughters and driving with them deep into the wintery woods in the Northwest. He leads the girls on foot to an isolated cabin where, soon after their arrival, a large, black-clad apparition...

It’s like catching up with old friends. They’re a little heavier than when we last saw them and have a few more wrinkles, but they’re still very much who they always were.

We know that because, even as we’re looking at their 56-year old selves up on the screen, it is intercut with footage of them at 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42 or 49 years old, answering the same question or explaining how they were feeling then.

“56 UP” is the latest installment in director Michael Apted’s extraordinary documentary series that began in 1964 as “Seven UP,” a television documentary in Great Britain. That first film, on which a then...

Anyone going to this film expecting a sex comedy or dirty doings based on the title is going to be disappointed. But so will filmgoers just looking for a compelling story and a movie that draws them in.

"Lay the Favorite" is a fitfully entertaining comic drama about a young woman who discovers her true calling, along with some scary encounters with questionable types, when she gets a job working for a professional gambler.

Despite a wealth of talent both on screen and behind the camera -- Stephen Frears (“The Queen”) directed -- the movie never finds a consistent tone or establishes much dramatic momentum. At its best, it's a diverting character study depicting several of Vegas' more colorful denizens.

The movie is based on a real-life memoir published in 2010 by Beth Raymer.  British-American actress Rebecca Hall plays Beth, an...

Contrary to the title, “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” is entirely an expected journey.

Filmgoers who saw director Peter Jackson’s previous trilogy, “The Lord of the Rings,” may feel as if they’re watching those films again, only with characters who are less distinctive this time out and, if it’s possible, even more sword-swinging battle scenes.

While Jackson yet again demonstrates his ability with “The Hobbit” to make a film that is ambitiously epic and visually inventive, it’s neither as engrossing nor exhilarating as the first time around with “Rings.” Maybe you just can’t go home to Middle-earth again.

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