Peter Rainer

A central dictum of any mystery thriller is this: Make your protagonists, especially your villains, worth caring about. The Girl on the Train, directed by Tate Taylor from a script by Erin Cressida Wilson, falls down on the job.

An actor making his directorial debut, Parker, who plays Turner and also co-wrote the script with Jean McGianni Celestin, has taken hold of an incendiary subject and coarsened its complexities into agitprop.

Wilkinson’s acting is likely to be undervalued simply because it seems effortless.

Their chief adversary is the greedy, heedless BP executive played by John Malkovich in his finest slinky-slimy mode. At its best, the movie is like “The Towering Inferno” but without all the sudsy subplots that doused that film’s fires.

The children are under the aegis of Miss Peregrine – played with divaesque triumphalism by Eva Green – who is capable of transforming herself into a falcon.

Well, it is shameless, and it tugs the heart in all the obvious places, but it has a winning vivaciousness and a trio of performances by its lead actors that transcend its “inspirational” niche.

The film has so many moodswings that watching it induces whiplash, and just about everybody in it, from Winslet on down to Judy Davis, playing the dressmaker’s crotchety mother, flagrantly overdoes it.

Well-observed and unassuming as this film is, it glides along rather too blandly.

Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning 2014 Snowden documentary “Citizenfour” is, almost inevitably, a stronger experience. That, too, was a species of political thriller but, unlike Stone’s film, it’s actually thrilling.

Starts slowly and ominously and gradually accelerates into a frenzy.

The great Ennio Morricone, still going strong at 87, wrote the marvelous film score.

The linkages between these mostly brief snippets is somewhat haphazard, but, given the waywardness of her travels, that’s appropriate.

There are many kinds of heroism, of course, but the version on display in Sully is, well, unsullied, and that sort of thing is more suitable for a monument than a movie.

A lean, efficient modern Western that is so satisfyingly constructed I’m tempted to say it’s just about perfect. There’s a special pleasure in watching a movie that knows exactly what it’s after and then, in scene after scene, gets it.

It doesn’t help that most of the film is shot in a thick gray-green overlay that sets an immediate tone of abject dreariness. I’m not implying that Portman should have included high-kicking musical numbers to lighten the mood, but there is a Jewish tradition of mining the black comedy in tragedy that the film would have done well to avail itself of.

The most interesting character in Imperium is not even Nate. It’s Gerry Conway (Sam Trammell), a seemingly normal family man who reads the great philosophers and loves the music of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, even making an exception for the recordings of Jewish maestro Leonard Bernstein. Terrorists come in all flavors.

As Judah Ben-Hur – full names, please – Huston is serviceable, but he’s a finer actor than this costumed kitsch allow him to be. As Judah’s boyhood best friend and adoptive brother, Messala, against whom Judah will eventually square off in the Roman Circus, Toby Kebbell has even less to work with than Huston, and he bears a disconcerting resemblance to motivational guru Tony Robbins.

War Dogs ends up being no better than its protagonists at delivering the goods.

Florence Foster Jenkins isn’t really about how passion trumps art. It’s about how life is more important than art.

Director Ira Sachs, who co-wrote with Mauricio Zacharias, has a plangent feeling for the small-scale travails of “ordinary” people – who, of course, are only ordinary on the surface.

Writer-director David Ayer doesn’t have the right graphic technique for a comic-book-style jamboree – he’s strictly a noirish-pulp guy – and the characters, all of whom are promisingly introduced, fizzle fast.

I will never be comfortable with the concept of Bosch as charming prankster. Just one look at the paintings will cure you of that notion.

The computer-animated portions that function as a real-world framing device are more tedious than fanciful.

For a movie featuring so much emotional discord, Indignation has an overly cautious tone: It could have been made in 1951. I realize that this effect is largely intentional, but that doesn’t altogether excuse it.

The documentary Gleason, a big Sundance hit, is difficult to watch – and that’s the point.

Other welcome faces include Alicia Vikander as a CIA analyst who has a better bead on Bourne than her superiors; Julia Stiles, in a repeat appearance as the spy’s former contact; and Riz Ahmed as a Silicon Valley billionaire.

I do hope there will be many more future installments. I’d like to spend more time with these folks.

All I can say is, I certainly hope this dreary, bleary comedy doesn’t end up serving as a referendum on anything. That would be a disservice to women, not to mention movies.