Ben Kenigsberg

A moving documentary with generous amounts of music.

Romania has delivered some of the most bracing filmmaking of the past 20 years (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”), but Queen Marie shows that its cinematic output also extends to stiff, exposition-clotted biopics.

If Burnette’s formal instincts are suboptimal — the pervasive backlighting and underlighting keep much of the action in shadow — his dramatic instincts are worse.

As a relationship movie, not just for the pair but those around them, Four Good Days is more complex than its outward trappings and preachier scenes — like an anguished Molly addressing a high school class — suggest.

Jordan makes a sturdy enough action hero, but the character as portrayed doesn’t give him any contours to play.

While the carnage demonstrates some imagination (can ice cauterize wounds? Did a hat just turn into a table saw?), the rules, extending even to whether death is permanent, are so arbitrary that nothing matters. Test … your patience.

Even those resistant to easy nostalgia will find plenty to think about.

If the bigger picture of In the Earth doesn’t appear fully realized — this is a movie not just of the moment, but perhaps rushed to meet it — it would be difficult, this year, for at least some of its atmosphere of isolation-induced madness not to inspire a chill.