ANNABELLE: CREATION

1/2 R, 109 minutes. Through tonight only at Westbrook. Still playing at Waterford, Stonington, and Lisbon. Dolls are so easily, effectively creepy that the tossed off prologue of “The Conjuring” generated a breakout star. Now, the evil porcelain doll Annabelle has a franchise of her own, with “Annabelle,” and the latest, “Annabelle: Creation,” a prequel of a prequel that director David F. Sandberg ably spins into a satisfyingly spooky origin story. Sandberg made a bit of a sensation last year with his clever horror debut, “Lights Out,” and his command of cinematography, lighting, production design and sound makes “Annabelle: Creation” a fine heir to the legacy of “The Conjuring” and “The Conjuring 2” auteur James Wan. — Katie Walsh, Tribune Content Agency

BABY DRIVER

R, 90 minutes. Opens tonight at Stonington. Opens Friday at Westbrook and Lisbon. Edgar Wright has never met a film genre he couldn’t transform. He took the slow-walking world of zombies and infused it with high energy comedy to create “Shawn of the Dead.” The right turn he made in what appeared to be a sleepy village cop movie with “Hot Fuzz” created cinematic whiplash. Now, the director-writer has tackled the rather driven-into-the-ground genre of fast cars with “Baby Driver.” It starts out looking to be nothing more than a fast story of furious thugs, but Wright quickly turns it into a blend of “Reservoir Dogs” and “Romeo and Juliet.” The collision of two such diverse scenarios sounds like what would happen if someone made a peanut butter and ketchup sandwich. As with all of Wright’s work, all you have to do is give his twisted sense of filmmaking a few moments and the beauty of contradictions becomes a thing of beauty. “Baby Driver” starts with a typical bank robbery and car chase. Behind the wheel is Baby (Ansel Elgort), a young man who doesn’t look old enough to drive. — Rick Bentley, Tribune Content Agency

THE BIG SICK

1/2 R, 119 minutes. Through tonight only at Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Opening Friday at Lisbon. Still playing at Westbrook. The brainchild of comedian-writer Kumail Nanjiani, best-known as Dinesh on the HBO series “Silicon Valley,” “The Big Sick” gets added heft from the fact that it’s largely autobiographical. When combined with the strong performances, especially from a positively electric Holly Hunter, this is a film that fires on all cylinders. Nanjiani plays himself, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant trying to make it as a stand-up on the Chicago comedy circuit. One night, a woman in the audience good-naturedly heckles him, leading to a conversation with her after he gets off stage. She turns out to be Emily (Zoe Kazan) and they soon become much more than upstaged performer and overly zealous crowd member. Because she’s a white American, he keeps her a secret from his family who only want him to marry a South Asian Muslim. — Cary Darling, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

THE DARK TOWER

PG-13, 95 minutes. Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Stephen King spent more than three decades writing his self-declared magnum opus, “The Dark Tower” series, which comprises over four thousand pages. It’s taken a decade of development for the project to make its way to movie screens. The film’s epic source material and extended origin story were always going to cast a long shadow over the final product, but the film should stand on its own merit, or lack thereof. After much anticipation, “The Dark Tower” that arrives on screens this weekend is inconsistent, incoherent and often cheesy. — Katie Walsh, Tribune Content Agency

DESPICABLE ME 3

H1/2 PG, 90 min. Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Though the Minions now have their own film (of the same name), they still pull back-up duty in the “Despicable Me” franchise, and yes, they are somewhat awkwardly shoehorned into “Despicable Me 3,” a serviceable stop on the inevitable way to “Despicable Me 4.” — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

DETROIT

R, 143 minutes. Through tonight only at Stonington and Waterford. With a panoramic docudrama sweep that gives way to the disquieting intimacy of a horror-thriller, Kathryn Bigelow’s tense, excruciating and entirely necessary new film “Detroit” returns us to the summer of 1967, when racial tensions engulfed the Motor City and claimed 43 lives over five days of violent unrest. In thrusting the viewer directly into a war zone, the film recalls Bigelow’s prior collaborations with the screenwriter Mark Boal, “The Hurt Locker” (2009) and “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012), still the two finest dramas yet made about America’s post-9/11 military and intelligence operations in the Middle East. If “Detroit” feels even harder to watch in its jagged, you-are-there ferocity, it may be because its particular war zone, although 50 years removed from the present, feels so much closer to home. It may also be because Bigelow and Boal, whose behind-the-headlines thrillers have been marked by a certain ideological distance, have cast aside any pretense to neutrality here. With “Detroit” they have made a picture whose political resonance in the Black Lives Matter era is fierce and unambiguous. — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

DUNKIRK

R, 107 min. Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. With a bare minimum of dialogue, and a brutal maximum of scenes depicting near-drowning situations in and around Dunkirk, France, in late May and early June 1940, Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” is a unique waterboarding of a film experience. Many will respond to it, primally, as a grueling dramatization of what the English call “the Dunkirk spirit,” one that turned a perilous mass evacuation of British and Allied troops, under German fire (though bad weather kept the Luftwaffe largely at bay), into a show of collective resilience at a crucial early crossroads of World War II. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

THE EMOJI MOVIE

PG, 86 minutes. Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. “Words aren’t cool” is the courtship advice imparted by one texting teen to another in “The Emoji Movie.” That statement is the canary in the coal mine that “Cyrano de Bergerac” this movie is most decidedly not. Will Alex (Jake T. Austin) choose the right emoji to express his ardor for Addie (Tati Gabrielle)? Or will “meh” emoji Gene (T.J. Miller) mess it all up for him? “The Emoji Movie” is an easy, cheap target for abuse. — Katie Walsh, Tribune Content Agency

47 METERS DOWN

PG-13. 89 minutes. Opens Friday at Lisbon. After the surprising success of last year’s “girl with shark” thriller “The Shallows,” “47 Meters Down” seems to be posing the question, “what if ‘The Shallows’… but deep?” Because that’s

exactly what it is, and it even tells you how deep right there in the title. This time there are two girls, not just the one, though star Mandy Moore is ostensibly the lead in this claustrophobic underwater nightmare. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

GIRLS TRIP

already well-established personas, make for a fine pair of unlikely partners, and hit a few well-placed punchlines with expert delivery. — Katie Walsh, Tribune Content Agency

AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER