EW Critical Mass: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children reviews

With four movies entering wide release on Friday, selecting the right one to catch over the weekend can be an intimidating task. That’s where EW’s Critical Mass guide comes in. From Tim Burton’s first live-action fantasy in 4 years, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, to the latest Mark Wahlberg actioner, Deepwater Horizon, read what the critics have to say about Sept. 30’s new releases in the reviews below.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Opens Sept. 30.

EW’s Devan Coggan says:

Miss Peregrine has all the visual hallmarks of your classic Burton—a child with teeth on the back of her head, a girl who wears lead shoes to keep from floating away (Ella Purnell, swapping powers with another character from the book). But the film chooses style over substance, emphasizing how cool the children’s powers are without fleshing them out as full characters. To compete with Burton’s best, his heroic weirdos need a little more heart—and the monsters need sharper teeth. B–

Read the full EW review here.

Rotten Tomatoes: 63%

Metacritic: 54

Deepwater Horizon

Opens Sept. 30.

EW’s Leah Greenblatt says:

What works almost disturbingly well is the way Berg calibrates his delivery of the disaster while still holding on to the human scale of it. Alternating between the visceral jolt of experiencing the destruction firsthand and a God’s-eye view of its root cause and effect, he brings a man-made tragedy into fiery focus — and reminds us why it deserves more than corporate fines and a few fading headlines. B+

Read the full EW review here.

Rotten Tomatoes: 79%

Metacritic: 67

Masterminds

Opens Sept. 30.

EW’s Christian Holub says:

Masterminds has been “coming soon” for so long it would put Batman v Superman to shame, but the end result is an entertaining comic thriller with physical showcases for many of Saturday Night Live’s best recent veterans.

Read the full EW review here.

Rotten Tomatoes: 44%

Metacritic: 49

Queen of Katwe

Expands nationwide Sept. 30.

EW’s Joe McGovern says:

The movie continually breaks down when it attempts to build dramatic conflict — whether in the stiff, canned dialogue among the chess team, or Robert’s acquiescent wife, or the stock roadblock characters. One of those is the sullen, glowering Harriet (Nyong’o), Phiona’s mother, whose gnashing disapproval of her daughter’s hobby never reads in her dialogue as convincing or compelling. Nair would have been wiser to put the camera on Nyong’o and just let her vivid, extraordinary face speak volumes of truth. C+

Read the full EW review here.

Rotten Tomatoes: 91%

Metacritic: 73

The Magnificent Seven

Now playing.

EW’s Leah Greenblatt says:

Having duly assembled his homicide squad, director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Southpaw) allows for several breezy, too-brief scenes of team-building before steering the story toward its gleefully bloody and bullet-riddled climax. Though there are a few clever turns in all the methodical mayhem, the final hour ultimately feels like a waste of his charismatic actors and the easy chemistry they share. And as heartening as it is to see a wild bunch so genuinely diverse on screen — the days of the otherwise great Eli Wallach playing the 1960 film’s villain in blatant brownface are far behind us, thankfully­ — its color-freed casting turns out to be more a tease than a revelation. While the slick script provides some ace one-liners, most go to Washington and Pratt; why not allow Vasquez more than tossed-off muchacho jokes, or give Red Harvest a tenth as many lines as he has arrowheads? A movie like that could have been magnificent. But this Seven’s just silly, solid entertainment: multiplex fun by numbers. B

Read the full EW review here.

Rotten Tomatoes: 62%

Metacritic: 54

Storks

Now playing.

EW’s Devan Coggan says:

There’s a delightfully madcap pace to Storks, and most of the rapid-fire jokes land, whether our heroes are running from a frenzied wolf pack who keep transforming themselves into suspension bridges and submarines, or silently battling a sinister penguin gang to avoid waking a sleeping baby. Less interesting is a subplot about the kid’s intended family, an overworked couple (Jennifer Aniston and Ty Burrell) who largely ignore their existing son. Add in Tulip’s quest to find her own family, and an annoying, bro-ish pigeon antagonist (Stephen Kramer Glickman), and Storks starts to feel a little stuffed. Still, the film’s lesson about finding your family never comes off as saccharine, and although there’s nothing particularly innovative about its message, Storks is a little bundle of joy. B

Read the full EW review here.

Rotten Tomatoes: 63%

Metacritic: 55

Sully

Now playing

EW’s Chris Nashawaty says:

Still, the reason why the movie works at all is Hanks. I can’t imagine it airing anywhere but on Lifetime without him. On the page, Sullenberger is a pretty vanilla, one-dimensional character. A cipher with wings pinned to his chest. There’s nothing inherently cinematic about him. But Hanks, of course, brings a career’s worth of excellence, depth, good will, and trust-me assurance to the story that isn’t necessarily in Todd Komarnicki’s script. As in last year’s equally hagiographic Bridge of Spies, he doesn’t give a flashy performance or go big in the way most actors would. He knows there’s power in subtlety, in quiet, in the unspoken gesture — the words that aren’tspoken. He knows that less can often be more. Like Sully, he’s the kind of guy you want behind the controls. B

Read the full EW review here.

Rotten Tomatoes: 82%

Metacritic: 74

Bridget Jones’s Baby

Now playing.

EW‘s Kevin P. Sullivan says:

The script contains some genuinely uproarious laughs and is sharper than it needs to be, even if some of the jokes feel as old as Bridget’s condoms. (Admittedly, the conversation about “Gangnam Style” does end in a genuinely funny place.) But Bridget Jones’s Baby is a welcome return for the character and a more fitting ending than Edge of Reason… for now at least. In another 12 years, who knows? B+

Read the full EW review here.

Rotten Tomatoes: 77%

Metacritic: 59

Snowden

Now playing.

EW’s Leah Greenblatt says:

But the movie goes wrong, alas, almost from the moment Gordon-Levitt opens his mouth. Literally: Whatever timbre he’s aiming for — presumably something in the realm of the real Snowden — he sounds almost cartoonishly odd, like a kid doing his rec-room version of Buffalo Bill’s monotone from Silence of the Lambs. And there’s about as much nuance in everything that follows: We learn quickly and clumsily that Snowden is next-level gifted, even among the pointy-headed prodigies of the CIA training program; that the government sometimes does very bad things in the name of security and freedom; and that the performances of Rhys Ifans and Nicolas Cage are only as good, approximately, as the hairpieces provided for their roles. C

Read the full EW review here.

Rotten Tomatoes: 63%

Metacritic: 58