Technically, the procedure is brain damage

Battle of Memories

Crit

Huh! You take Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and adapt it into a tortuous Hitchcockian mystery plot made with Chinese actors in Thailand--that might just work.

There'll always be an England

Their Finest

Crit

One might think that a film whose cast includes Gemma Arterton and Bill Nighy had enough charm to be forgiven the most obvious romantic twist in cinema history, and truth to tell, I think it would have, but the filmmakers apparently feared otherwise, else why toss in a random tragedy? Yes, yes, I know: people died randomly and tragically in London during the Blitz, not to mention all over Europe and the Pacific. But rarely have I felt randomness more cynically calculated.

Trailers

• My Cousin Rachel--Based on a Daphne du Maurier novel, stars Rachel Weisz. Not to be confused with My Cousin Vinny.
• An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power--Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the earth's atmosphere.

Amazon.qualm

The Lost City of Z

Crit

Monomaniacal explorer neglects loving family but finds what he's looking for in the end. Wanted to love this, but could barely stay awake. I've been told the final shot is brilliant, but I barely remember it.

Trailers

• Megan Leavy--A marine and her dog.
• The Wall--No, not that wall. The one between the U.S. soldier and the Iraqi sniper.
• The Beguiled--Looks potentially creepy, but great cast directed by . . . [wait for it] . . . Sophia Coppola.
• Baby Driver--Young, preternaturally slick getaway driver falls in love. What could go wrong?

Seoulmates

Colossal

Crit

What a wildly weird mashup of juvenile sci-fi tear-in-the-space-time-continuum nonsense with thoroughly adult themes of manipulation, obsession, and substance abuse. And I mean that as a compliment. Here there be monsters.

Trailers

• Ingrid Goes West--I have no idea what this is about or why the trailer was a red band (adult audiences only).
• The Book of Henry--Yet another in the endless stream of films about a genius kid persuading his mother to murder the neighbor who's sexually abusing his stepdaughter.

Attack of the zombie cars

The Fate of the Furious

Crit

Hey, wait, this isn't about primeval golf, before Americans or even the English got excited by it. That film was promised but not delivered, but I was at the theater, and I was up for a holiday movie, and it was already paid for (via MoviePass), so I talked myself into the wisdom of having some dumb.

Well, I don't know about the wisdom, but I came to the right place for the dumb, and much of it (like virtually every moment with Dwayne Johnson, and the Manhattan zombie cars chase) was fun. I knew going in that there was one Oscar winner in the cast; the second, uncredited and Cockney-accented, was a pleasant surprise, as was the presence of two favorite supporting actors from Game of Thrones.

But dumb tends to be less fun in, say, the fourth half-hour than in the first three. Suffice it to say I won't be spending the rest of the long weekend bingewatching the first 7 films in the franchise.

Trailers

• The Mummy--Talk about your femmes fatales.
• Atomic Blonde--Ditto, as Fate's Ms. Theron keeps playing the action number on the wheel.

I feel you

Kimi no na wa. (Your name.)

Crit

So many clichés lurk, so many traps loom when your themes include:

1. soulmates
2. soul sharing
3. déjà vu
4. time shifting, especially
5. time shifting to undo a past disaster

Yet this animated adaptation of a novel by the director, Makoto Shinkai, skates around all the potholes to be one of the smartest, most original, most moving, and most visually beautiful films to employ those well-worn tropes. A meteoric, yet quiet, stunner.

Trailers

• Leap!--Kids with dreams, animated.
• Spark--Monkey with dreams, animated.
• Everything, Every Thing--I think the second iteration is supposed to be meaningfully split into 2 words, though the online sources don't support my perception. Anyway, another teen with a medical problem that keeps her in a parent-bubble until the arrival of a liberator of the opposite sex (and here, different race). I shouldn't be so cynical--I've loved 1 or 2 of those pics--but this looks unlikely to rise above the goo.

The first casualty

Cézanne et moi

Crit

A meditation on the incompatibility of art and friendship, as the moi of the title, Émile Zola (Guillaume Canet) and the Cézanne of the title (Guillaume Gallienne) spend their adult lives dueling with the respective phallic implements of their respective vocations.

Of particular note, and doubtless where virtually the entire clearance budget went, is an end titles sequence morphing through version after version of Cézanne views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Spectacular.

Frantz

Crit

Though a fan of François Ozon (Under the Sand, Swimming Pool, Ricky), I was ready to express disappointment with the predictable turn this film, about the visit of a young Frenchman to the family (prewidowed fiancée included) of a German killed in the Great War, takes in the third act--until I realized that there was a whole nother act left, with nothing remotely predictable about it. I've never seen Lubitsch's 1932 Broken Lullaby, on which this is based, but if it was as subtly and delicately poised between expectation and revelation as this one is, well, credit Ozon for excellent thievery at worst.

#chooselife

T2 Trainspotting

Crit

Gee, last time we saw the boys, their futures all seemed so bright. What could have gone wrong? Turns out it wasn't the heroin that was a problem so much as the existential Glaswegian despair. Who knew?

Against all odds, director Danny Boyle has wrestled the original cast back into harness and made a solid sequel to a film that had no business ever having a sequel made. No, the energy's not as high as in the original, but everyone's had 20 years of hard living; is your energy as high?

Trailers

• The Lost City of Z--Pronounced "zed," as the searchers are British. 

Ink and brush

Umi yori mo mada fukaku (After the storm)

Crit

Yes, there's a storm--typhoon number 24 for the year, to be specific--but Hirokazu Koreeda's film is mostly irenic. Cloudy, to be sure--as Ryōta (Hiroshi Abe), a long-ago-award-winning novelist who now would be making enough as a slightly crooked private eye if only he didn't gamble so much of it away, sees his ex-wife and son being wooed by a conventionally better man--but quiet and satisfying, not tempestuous.