Alissa Wilkinson

Though it verges on the overstuffed at times, Vivarium is dirty, sinister, hair-raising, and thoroughly entertaining — and completely worth a watch if you’re feeling a little, well, trapped.

It’s a triptych that at first seems slight, then gains meaning the longer you hold its three seemingly disconnected short films in juxtaposition and peer through the overlaps.

Ready Player One is set in a dystopian future. But it seems to have no idea how dystopian it really is.

Though it has some problems as a film — some of which are part and parcel of translating a book to the screen — Native Son still packs a punch, one that connects directly with the gut.

When the source material was so fun, the cover is bound to be enjoyable, and this one is, even if it sags a little around the two-thirds mark. There’s punning, and contraptions, and ducks that shoot lasers out of their eyes. It’s a good time.

Piece By Piece sidesteps feeling rote by doing something that seems, frankly, bizarre. That it works at all is a product of the quirky form fitting the subject well. It’s chaotic, sure. But that’s the fun of it.

It doesn’t always work, but you won’t mind that much, because it’s so beautiful to look at.

It’s inexcusable for a movie that tries to say daring and surprising things about a very urgent matter of cultural and political importance to be so thuddingly predictable in so many places.

Pope Francis — A Man of His Word isn’t likely to convert any of Francis’s critics, but it might just convince the indifferent that he has something to say to our world.

The jokes feel tired. The actors are mostly doing their best, but the screenplay too often leaves them mimicking comedy rather than performing it.

Even when he’s in a mediocre movie (and he often is), LaBeouf is a magnetic onscreen presence. There’s a naturalism and complexity to his McEnroe that keeps him from being turned into a caricature. It’s hard not to want more of him.

What does work about H Is for Hawk (aside from Mabel, whose presence is enough to recommend the film) is its refusal to make grief facile or tidy, or to proclaim that healing must look the same for everyone.

A hopeful break-up film, with three leads who sparkle together.

What we get here isn’t interesting, and it’s not told in an interesting way.

Alpha is definitely sentimental, even pandering at times. But its unexpected setting, images, set pieces, and even language balance out the sentimentality with a strangely raw and cinematically adventurous aesthetic that’s uncommon for a film of its sort.

Blood-soaked and intense, it is occasionally uneven in tone, with varying degrees of skill from the cast. But story-wise, it mostly holds together, a thinker of a thriller that, even when it heads into pure slasher territory, still has its brain turned on.

For one, it’s immersive and incredibly beautiful, shot like poetry and scored by Mali Obomsawin. The result is both stunning and sobering.

It’s clear that the movie has a point of view; what’s most interesting, though, is the raw materials it employs.

To the degree it works — and it does, a lot of the time — it’s a testament to its performers, especially Gordon and, once she arrives on the scene, Viswanathan, both of whom bring an energy to the screen that always has a touch of mischief, like they could veer off into lunacy or ecstasy at any time.

The result is a bland heist movie in space that does nothing unexpected and never justifies its existence.

This isn’t just about fringe cults on ranches anymore: It’s about social groups, theories about the world, the bubble you float around in on the internet, the candidate you believe in an election.

Morris’s film is less a takedown of its subject, and more a Rorschach test for its viewers. What you’ll see is precisely what you’re primed to see — and that, not Bannon’s ideas themselves, is the point.

Beautiful Boy is a beautifully made and complex rendering of a father and son’s relationship that ends with too little hope to fit into people’s “inspirational movie” box. But at its best, it’s a strong rendering of both that horror and the frayed rays of hope that sometimes break through. It’s not easy to watch, but it is, in its own way, still beautiful.

By the end, a kind of narrative lethargy has set in. “Armand” feels mostly like an interesting formal exercise: an attempt to meld realism and surrealism in the most nondescript of places, but in a way that evokes an ancient terror.

Dumbo isn’t entirely unpleasant to watch — on the whole, it’s probably Burton’s best since Big Fish, whatever that’s worth — and while the scenes in which the elephant takes flight around the circus tent aren’t exactly magical, they’re pretty fun.

The farce props up the nihilism, and gives The Monkey a strangely hopeful refrain.

It’s not exactly for the faint of heart, and its wild zinging from plot point to plot point can get tiring. But if you’re on the hunt for a frightening and original horror movie, it’s a stellar choice.

As “Eric LaRue” starts barreling toward an upsetting conclusion, you start to wonder about everything that’s happened earlier in the movie, about what went unsaid and now refuses to stay quiet.