The purpose of this fitfully funny comedy from director Malcolm D. Lee is to allow Kevin Hart, playing a high school dropout seeking to pass the GED exam to secure a promising job, to trade barbs with Tiffany Haddish in the role of his feisty teacher. A few of their exchanges work.

After his parents are killed in an accident, a 10-year-old boy (Owen Vaccaro) goes to live with his eccentric uncle (Jack Black), who turns out to be a warlock. Having mastered some of the rudiments of his new guardian's craft, the lad assists him and his best friend (Cate Blanchett), a nice witch, in trying to locate and stop the timepiece of the title, a doomsday device with the capacity to turn the calendar back before the advent of humanity.

It's a collection of interlocking, intergenerational stories that begins with a couple (Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde) happily expecting the arrival of a daughter, then follows the baby's life as both a child (Kya Kruse) and a grown-up (Olivia Cooke) and links her destiny to that of a Spanish family (parents Sergio Peris-Mencheta and Laia Costa and son Alex Monner) through a fateful visit they pay to her native New York.

Writer-director Sam Levinson's messy teen-age satire devolves into a heavy-handed morality tale about our online lives, dark sexual secrets, scapegoating, public shaming and mass mayhem.

Lurid thriller in which a mild-mannered young widow (Anna Kendrick) strikes up an unlikely friendship with the sophisticated, hard-bitten mother (Blake Lively) of one of her son's classmates. But when her new pal mysteriously disappears and she tries to track her down, she discovers just how little she really knew about her.