Now we know how he lost his hair, maybe next time we'll learn why he mispronounces his name

X-Men: Apocalypse

Crit

Oh, hell yeah! God as supervillain, brilliant and true to the experience of most believers. Oh, I know, that DC thing earlier this year paid lip service to godlike superheroism, but it's no metaphor here: this En Sabah Nur dude (an unrecognizable Oscar Isaac) really is the Big Kahuna, or at least sincerely believes himself to be, which is a difference without a distinction. And so it falls on mutantdom to kill God--how cool is that?

Problem is that there's too much superpower overlap. Like one superdude can run so fast as to move almost instantaneously, carrying others with him; another superdude can rearrange his molecules so as to move instantaneously, carrying others with him. Yeah, really useful to have both those guys on the same team. Also: Sophie Turner brings every ounce of acting chops to Jean Grey (whose powers are pretty much the same as Professor X's, but with more kinetic potential) as she does to Sansa Stark. But I quibble: a perfectly competent summer popcorn cruncher.

Trailers

• Assassin's Creed--Man, Michael Fassbender either digs the superhero stuff or digs the paychecks that allow him to do the arthouse stuff.
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story--What, like Episode VI.i?
• Independence Day: Resurgence--Most of this was unfamiliar, so I assume what I saw before was just a teaser, but a fuller look doesn't make me any more favorably inclined.

Good fortune

Love & Friendship

Crit

This is sort of like Airplane! (which, coincidentally, the Criterion is screening next weekend) for the cerebrum: instead of a gag at every turn, there's a witticism. And while I think Airplane! is also very smart, it's not smart this way. Jane Austen + Whit Stillman = yes, please.

Trailers

• Café Society--Woody's latest.
• Indignation--Adaptation of a Philip Roth novel about a Jewish boy involved with a troubled shiksa. Go figure.

And though "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" was actually 1979, it fits

The Nice Guys

Crit

I tried to resist this, I swear I did, and if you demanded that I eviscerate it on cold critical principles, I could, but dammit, I had fun, so piss off with your cold critical principles. A good, goofy comic noir, and I don't care what you hear elsewhere: Ryan Gosling is a fine comic actor, with a mastery of slapstick, and while comedy doesn't seem to come as naturally to Russell Crowe, he holds up his end OK.

One lie the movie tells: that all popular music by white people in 1977 sucked and all popular music by black people in 1977 was awesome. In fact, all popular music in 1977 sucked.

Trailers

• The Accountant--Ben Affleck as autistic hit man.
• War Dogs--Apparently formerly called Arms and the Dudes. High dumb probability.
• Jason Bourne--Ran out of intriguing nouns, I guess. Damon is back. And Stiles.
• Free State of Jones--Matthew McConaughey as a rebellious Rebel. I'm kinda excited about this one

His satanic majesty's request

A Bigger Splash

Crit

It's sort of a fucked up Eden to begin with, Marianne (Tilda Swinton) resting her damaged rock star vocal cords under the care of former suicidal addict Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts). Still, theirs is a relatively idyllic existence before the uber-phallic serpent Harry (Ralph Fiennes) shows up, with his hell spawn Penelope (Dakota Johnson, about whose acting I'm not going to make any sadomasochistic jokes).

It's Fiennes's movie, as director Luca Guadagnino has clearly invited him to chew up an entire Mediterranean island's worth of scenery and to embody more wickedness than in those Harry Potter flicks.

Unsurprisingly, then something bad happens. and even then it's just all too silly to worry much about.

Trailers

• Absolutely Fabulous--Uh, I think not.
• The Magnificent Seven--Very smug to have identified this in seconds, without having known that a remake was afoot. This version bends gender (a townswoman is sent to hire gunmen) and race (Denzel is the first of the seven).

Al Gore rhythm

Money Monster

Crit

The day Julia Roberts and/or George Clooney gets blown to pieces by a righteously angry bomber is the day the Hollywood sign comes crashing down the hills and a jagged piece of it fatally impales Harvey Weinstein. So there goes any suspense from the get-go. 

Take that away and you've got a silly plot and Julia Roberts and George Clooney. Meaning I've spent my time and money on worse. But I think I'd have preferred Oceans Whatever Number We're Up To Now. 

Trailers

• Inferno--Three words: Dan Brown novel.
• Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk--Confused 19-year-old Iraq veteran's homecoming; directed by Ang Lee.
• The Girl on the Train--No, apparently not a English-language remake of La Fille du RER.
• Hell or High Water--Angry brothers try to be Bonnie & Clyde.

n/0

The Man Who Knew Infinity

Crit

Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) braves, in order of significance, emigration, celibacy, bigotry, tuberculosis, and a pathologically manipulative mother to become a math hall of famer. The real Ramanujan was short and swarthy and generally unattractive by Western standards, not at all Dev Patelish; and the real Mrs. Ramanujan, left behind in Madras so that the genius could study at Cambridge, was 10 when they married, not the mature beauty we see in the film.

Well, OK, it's a movie, and it's OK to cheat in a movie if the movie's good. But on the whole, I'd have been happier doing math myself.

Trailers

• Florence Foster Jenkins--Didn't we just see this in French, and wasn't it called Marguerite? Well, that was excellent, and this one has Streep.
• Love and Friendship--Whit Stillman does Jane Austen--looks hilarious.

Spoils

Francofonia

Crit

Like director Alexsandr Sokurov's earlier Russian Ark, set in the Hermitage, this nominal documentary, set largely in the Louvre, is a strange and unique and indescribable film. Let me try to describe it.

A framing narrative features the filmmaker Skyping with the captain (named Kirk--an early joke seems to suggest that a phone interlocutor has misheard the name as a famous rhyming name of a captain, and a later companion joke has Sokurov addressing a Russian author as Mister Chekhov) of a ship apparently carrying artworks across treacherous seas. What are we to make of that frame? No idea--that art is always in jeopardy, no less from nature than from humankind?

The bigger narrative involves the undeclared collaboration between Jacques Jaujard, charged with protecting the Louvre's artworks from the ravages of war, and Count Metternich, charged with overseeing the Third Reich's appropriation of the art of conquered lands.

Oh, and Napoléon wanders in and out of the picture, along with Marianne, the French personification of liberté, egalité, et fraternité.

As I said, indescribable.

For art's sake

The Family Fang

Crit

I'm never the guy who sees the plot twist coming, but I was pretty sure it was going to be different this time. Nope.

Jason Bateman (who also directed) and Nicole Kidman play children abused when young by their parents (Jason Butler Harner and Kathryn Hahn young, Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett in the present) in service of transgressive performance art.

Was I distracted by my (inaccurate) anticipation of where the story was going, or is it really less compelling that it thinks it is?

Drive it like you stole it

Sing Street

Crit

Oh, yes, I think John Carney (Once) will have another hit on Broadway soon, but you know what? I don't care a whit that I was manipulated by a tired plot about boy getting girl via rock & roll--it works, mate. And--this is key--the songs written by a pair of smart youngsters sound like songs within reach of smart youngsters' abilities; think "The One After 909."

Trailer

• The Founder--Michael Keaton as Roy Kroc, the man who hijacked a business from a couple of brothers of Scottish descent and changed the way we eat.

A clean, well-lighted Havana

Papa: Hemingway in Cuba

Crit

If I were going to write a single-adjective review (not a bad idea for most films), the adjective would be "picturesque." The filmmakers are very proud of having shot in Cuba, and as is true of every Cuba film worth its cocktail salt, the cars are absolutely fabulous (apparently drivers in 1957 never even had fender-benders).

But good god: this is enough to make Hemingway dig himself up and blow his brains out again. The only remotely worthwhile thing about the film is a nod to the homoeroticism carefully submerged in Hemingway's life and art: he was, after all, the godfather of the bromance.

End credits puzzler: sanitation of a line from To Have and Have Not: One man alone ain't got no [bloody fucking] chance. 

Trailers

• Our Kind of Traitor--From a Le Carre novel.
• The Infiltrator--Chasing Pablo Escobar.
• Captain Fantastic--Family raised in wilderness, more civilized than the "civilized"; a hard maybe.