FILM: What's hitting movie theaters on Friday

This week's film releases — there are a lot of 'em — feature a little bit of everything: tragedy, comedy, serial killers, bad drag. And that's just the new Tyler Perry movie.

Here's what you can look forward to seeing.

BREATHE
The directorial debut of actor Andy Serkis, a lush biopic about Robin Cavendish, a polio-afflicted Brit who helped design breakthrough medical devices in the mid-20th century. Rated PG-13.

GEOSTORM
The guy who wrote a bunch of those Roland Emmerich disaster films in the ’90s has a crack at his own. As is genre tradition, an international all-star cast runs from tsunamis, hurricanes and the like. Rated PG-13.

LUCKY (3½ stars)
Opening at the Magic Lantern, the final star vehicle for the late, great Harry Dean Stanton is a gentle, modest, subtly quirky study of the daily routine of a 90-something veteran facing his twilight years. Features one- or two-scene cameos from the likes of Ron Livingston, Ed Begley Jr., Tom Skerritt and David Lynch as a fedora-sporting man with a beloved pet tortoise named President Roosevelt. Not rated.

MARK FELT: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE
Liam Neeson stars as modern history’s most famous whistleblower, best known as Deep Throat, who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein bring the Nixon administration to its knees. Rated PG-13.

ONLY THE BRAVE
This fact-based drama enmeshes us within the ranks of Arizona firefighters known as the Granite Mountain Hotshots, specifically as they attempt to contain the deadly Yarnell Hill wildfire in 2013. Rated PG-13.

SAME KIND OF DIFFERENT AS ME
Based on the bestselling nonfiction book, this inspirational story considers the unexpected friendship between a violent homeless man and the middle-class married couple taking on a terminal illness. Rated PG-13.

THE SNOWMAN (1 star)
The first big-screen take on novelist Jo Nesbø’s popular Scandinavian gumshoe Harry Hole hasn't been getting kind notices, and our critic MaryAnn Johanson follows suit: It's "unrelenting tedium," she says, and "pointless awfulness." The biggest mystery here: How could so many talented people make something so slapdash and boring? Rated R.

TAKE EVERY WAVE: THE LIFE OF LAIRD HAMILTON (at the Magic Lantern)
Pioneering athlete, daredevil, reckless risk-taker — however you describe him, Laird Hamilton unquestionably changed the rules of surfing in the ’80s. This documentary chronicles his career through the present day. Not rated.

TYLER PERRY’S BOO 2! A MADEA HALLOWEEN
Everyone’s favorite foul-mouthed, rage-prone grandmother is back in another horror-comedy, and this time she’s after a masked killer filleting nubile teens. But who’s the real threat here — the slasher, or Madea? Rated PG-13.

Also Playing


HAPPY DEATH DAY (2½ stars)
Last weekend's box office champ was this slasher movie reimagining of Groundhog Day, with a conceited sorority sister getting stuck in a time loop where she’s repeatedly killed by a masked psycho. More comedy than horror, it’s got a few nifty genre-busting tricks up its sleeve, but it’s hard not to wish it had pushed its premise into nastier, gutsier territory. Rated PG-13.

MARSHALL (3 stars)
In 1941, more than a quarter-century before he became the Supreme Court’s first African-American justice, attorney Thurgood Marshall (Chadwick Boseman) is called to defend a black chauffeur accused of raping a white woman. Though it hardly reinvents the biopic wheel, the film is a slickly produced courtroom drama anchored by pertinent messages about racial and social injustice. Rated PG-13.

PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN (2½ stars)
Wonder Woman’s comic-book origins are dramatized in this steamy 1930s-set drama, as the character’s feminist ethos emerge from the polyamorous relationship of her creator, psychologist William Moulton Marston, his wife and their younger mistress. Glossily made and well-acted but too broadly written, and ultimately tamer than its central relationship suggests. Rated R.