Ben Croll

Take your seat and bask in the presence of the coolest characters actors working today, but don’t ask for more than a few chuckles. Don’t call it fan service – call it coolness oblige.

Though he finds little room for subtlety and even less interest in complex moral shadings, director Edoardo De Angelis can still ably wring tension from this brave, if foolhardy, mission, spinning his camera around ever-cramped quarters as the two crews, enemies-turned-shipmates, navigate uncharted terrain.

You’re grateful for the time spent with a genuine epic of ideas and rueful that such heady themes weren’t more fully explored in a better film.

Ghost in the Shall is a technical knockout, a here-and-now valentine to what design wizardry Hollywood can pull off in 2017. At the same time, it does so in service of a tired tale full of repurposed visual tricks, storytelling clichés and big-studio concessions.

Without much by way of variance, the film spins on and spins out, jumping from austere interiors in Mexico City to San Francisco and back again, putting forward a cogent political read that does little to flatter those looking for anything more.

If this bloody entr’acte, whose title addition works as both noun and verb, has little to offer but a jacked up body count on a bed of fan service, it serves both with panache, charging forward as an almost elemental slasher outing unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is hardly a disappointment, but it does, in places, feel like a missed opportunity.

An undeniably entertaining watch, Suburbicon stumbles when it tries to recycle effective old ingredients into something new.

You can only linger so long with such a parade of oddities making ever stranger choices before your eyes grow weary of gawking at a pageant of hideous beauty, and you start checking the clock.

The film isn’t a total wash. Seydoux finds ways to move and emote through her Noh mask, and Dumont finds interesting avenues to explore, tracking the uneasy dance between compassion and commodification when dealing with hot-button stories. Only it’s all too much, too long, too repetitive, too one-note, too contemptuous of the very idea of cinematic pleasure to really land.

Deception, as a novel and as a film, offers a curio for obsessives, a postcard for archivists, and a not-too-interesting bump in the road for everyone else.

Like pouring yourself a warm glass of milk or slipping into a hot bath, the languid and visually sumptuous romance lulls you into a sleepy sense of calm, never asking for more than gentle aesthetic appreciation for its impeccable craft.

Dolan shoots in tightly held close-ups, forgoing spatial staging for the immediate pleasures of fabric and light. Whereas similar imagery filled his previous films with energy and life, here it just makes the somber piece feel more claustrophobic and inert.

If, when printed and sent off for posterity, a snapshot like “Coma” offers a small degree of archival value — while answering the question Bonello poses at the start — it might also arrive as a postcard from a time all-too-thankfully gone by.

Brother and Sister seems more like a retread (and a retreat) than anything that’s come prior, marking a new step forward for the lauded director by taking a disappointing step back.

Mike Leigh’s expansive, exhaustive, and extraordinarily thorough portrait of early 19th-century political activism is, to put it one way, deliberate in pace and tone. To put it bluntly — and in an argot more readily familiar to its cast of working-class characters — the film is bloody well dull.

It’s all perfectly well-done, and it all recedes into memory the instant you leave the theater.

For all its stodgy touches, the film itself is like a cast-in-amber relic of the not-so-distant past.

Unable to neatly reconcile its two narrative premises, the film loses momentum, pushing well past the brisk runtime and zippy pace this kind of material usually depends on. That overextension also affects tone, as Salvadori never quite settles on how sharp the film should be.

Those with buy-in might find themselves won over, as, on its own terms, Marcello Mio offers a heartfelt and even occasionally moving show of artistic trust and collaboration, playing as an unambiguous love note from a filmmaker to his favorite star.

A blood-soaked, bone-crunching hymn to religious devotion and faith, Hacksaw Ridge doesn’t hum Mel Gibson’s favorite themes; it shouts them.

Feeling simultaneously overstuffed and undercooked, Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium tries to ring a warning bell about, well, a lot of things. In the end, though, it works best as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of filmmakers biting off more than they can chew.

Victoria & Abdul is an otherwise benignly toothless, pleasantly glossy affair, but it does force us to confront one tricky question: When treating a subject as fraught as British imperial rule, when does a film’s benign inoffensiveness become offensive in and of itself?

This material could make for a powerful work, but Viceroy’s House is certainly not it.

Ultimately, “Golda” holds three firm beliefs: That Meir is a leader to admire, that Mirren is an actress to adore, and that all interactions must be reverse engineered to fit this limited scope. It makes for a superficial biopic and blinkered bit of history, but does give the venerable performer a new accent to chew on and the chance to blow some smoke.