Due to the nature of his role, Ben Affleck is never allowed to laugh here. With Jon Bernthal gleefully egging him on, though, you can sense how deeply the actor must want to. Heaven knows my audience, myself included, was laughing.

Technically virtuosic and undeniably gripping, Warfare seems to raise the bar in terms of realistic depictions of wartime atrocities, and that bar was already set awfully high. But while the movie isn't fun, nor is it meant to be, I also didn't find it satisfying … though the notion persists that it isn't meant to be that, either.

Yes, a horned, magical creature does perish – at least twice. But forget its demise(s): Nothing that happens to the apparently not-mythical beast is quite as grisly as what happens to most of the movie's humans, our collection of potential victims including a Big Pharma titan and a grown man who seemingly doesn't own a pair of long pants. So, you know … it's okay to laugh if they die.

For roughly two-thirds of its length, director David Yarovesky's largely stationary thriller Locked is like 127 Hours if the boulder were played by Anthony Hopkins.