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The biggest movie on Memorial Day weekend is a sputtering rocket ride to the future.

"Tomorrowland" ambitiously aims to re-create the sense of wonder that Walt Disney's retro-future vision captured back in the day. It achieves that in fits and starts, as it brings together an optimistic teen inventor (Britt Robertson) with a jaded genius (George Clooney), but there's a lot of downtime in between in director Brad Bird's haltingly paced adventure. Robertson and Clooney have a fun chemistry, but the scene-stealer is young Raffey Cassidy as a remarkably composed little girl from Tomorrowland.

The other big studio entry this weekend is "Poltergeist," a lackluster remake of Tobe Hooper's 1982 haunted-house thriller. Writer David Lindsay-Abaire ("Rise of the Guardians," "Rabbit Hole") mixes things up some, but mostly sticks to the basic plot of a suburban family who find their new house is harboring a malevolent spirit. Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt are serviceable as the parents, but there's nothing particularly special to justify this remake. (A full review will be posted online later today.)

The best new movie is "Iris," a lively documentary about 93-year-old New York fashion icon Iris Apfel, whose free-spirited philosophy on clothes, accessories and life make her ageless. It's the final film of documentarian Albert Maysles, who died in March at the age of 88, and an entertaining coda on a great career.

The military drama "Good Kill" stars Ethan Hawke as an Air Force fighter pilot who has been grounded, and now oversees drone strikes from the safety of a base near Las Vegas. Writer-director Andrew Niccol ("Gattaca," "The Host") creates some chilling images of remote-controlled warfare, but gets too preachy about the pros and cons of America's drone policy.

"Roar," a relic from 1981, is both unwatchable and fascinating at the same time. The story of an animal researcher (Noel Marshall, who directed) in Africa whose family gets uncomfortably close to his subjects — a pride of wild lions — is ineptly crafted. But the fact that Marshall cast his own family, including wife Tippi Hedren and stepdaughter Melanie Griffith, and set more than 100 untamed big cats on them and the crew is insane.

Two more movies opening this week weren't screened for local critics: "Lost River," a dark fantasy drama that marks the directorial debut of Ryan Gosling; and "Where Hope Grows," an inspirational drama about a burned-out baseball player who meets a young man with Down syndrome.