In the action thriller Hunter Killer, Gerard Butler plays Sam Glass, a stern, reckless, my-way-or-the-highway submarine captain who's initially seen, on dry land, in the process of picking off a deer with a long-range rifle. Nothing about the image surprised me – the grim-faced, half-bearded Butler looks the way he always does in his movies, and of course the guy is packing heat. (Bambi fans, though, can rest easy: After Glass spies the deer's mate and baby trotting behind him, the ol' softie refuses to pull the trigger.) Yet I'll admit I was more than a little jazzed by the introduction's Scottish locale. Would director Donovan Marsh's outing have the nerve to cast Scotland native Butler as an actual Scot, and spare us the pain of listening to one of the star's continually unbearable attempts at an American accent?

Damien Chazelle's Neil Armstrong bio-pic opened this past weekend, and viewed strictly on a technical level, it's a virtuosic work, one boasting hand-held camerawork and earth-shaking sound effects that effectively put you, cramped and uncomfortable (and also kind of exhilarated), right inside lunar capsules along with our hero and his fellow NASA recruits. Yet despite being titled First Man, what I left my screening really wanting to talk about was the film's First Lady, given that Janet Armstrong portrayer Claire Foy and the focus extended to the character make Chazelle's La La Land follow-up far more engaging than it might've otherwise been.

You know a tearjerker is really working when, in its last 15 minutes, the mere sight of a well-done steak is enough to get viewers weepy. But the latest iteration of A Star Is Born – the third American remake of this timeless show-biz melodrama since 1937's original (itself a sort of remake of 1932's What Price Hollywood?) – is a tearjerker that leaves you less wiped out than electrified.

Given that his directorial credits have included a couple of Hostels, the gory Cabin Fever, and the unapologetically repellant cannibal shocker The Green Inferno, hiring Eli Roth to helm a kiddie scare comedy seemed, at first, to be a phenomenally terrible idea, like putting Lars von Trier in charge of church camp or asking Tarantino to babysit. Amazingly, however, Roth proves himself the right director for the job of The House with a Clock in Its Walls, a movie no funnier or scarier than, say, 2015's Jack Black vehicle Goosebumps, but one with plenty of charm, sweetness, and child-friendly gross-outs. Roth being Roth, know that you will witness projectile vomiting. But the puke is wholly composed of pumpkin guts, and the face it lands on is Black's, so you know … . No harm, no foul.