In Zach Cregger's electrifying "Weapons," the summer's most rewarding, inventive and thoroughly unconventional thrill ride, 17 children go missing in the middle of the night, and that's only the beginning to this engaging, unpredictable tale.

Julia Garner plays the elementary school teacher whose entire classroom, save for one student, wanders off mysteriously one evening at 2:17 a.m., running out of their front doors and into the night, arms outstretched at their sides like airplane wings. Josh Brolin plays the father of one of the boys, and Alden Ehrenreich plays a cop in Maybrook, the fictional Pennsylvania town where "Weapons" is set.

But their connections to the inciting incident are just a jumping off point for Cregger's zig-zagging plotting, which cuts in and out of its central my

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