Re-creating that ensemble buzz and that alcoholically fueled soul scraping is an almost impossible task, but in She’s So Lovely, director Nick Cassavetes, working from an unproduced script by his old man (who died in 1989), gives it a ballsy go.

Cage, so great and unexpectedly subdued in last year's small-scale indie drama Pig, has a ball with his own myth-making, a star contracting and expanding in the movie's fun-house mirror of fame and destabilized celebrity. Not that he ever went anywhere.

Husbands and Wives is a big, spongy ball of therapeutic angst. I hope Woody Allen continues pouring his life into his movies, but next time he’d do well to keep the couch off camera.

A film literally made from thin air, the French thriller Oxygen (on Netflix starting Friday) is a neat little sci-fi nightmare; a cool-toned exercise in claustrophobia that nearly pulls off the innate improbabilities of its high-concept nonsense.

The ”you know how to whistle, don’t you?” scene is justifiably famous, and there’s plenty more where that came from.

There's a deeper idea here — really! — and it's one that only gets more obvious with time, something to do with arrested boyhood and the gleeful self-ruination of one's own body.

There’s a weird, hedonistic thrill to seeing an entire movie filled with jokes this cheap, including gags about PMS, Sean Penn, and a Tammy Faye Bakker type (who hosts a show called Exorcism Tonight).

The film gently sends up the messiness of modern matrimony, and Alda has assembled an appealing group of actors and given them plenty of breathing room.

A New Era is strictly high-toned formula, from its God's-eye opening over spire-tipped turrets and green-velvet lawns to its soft-focus finish, but it feels like home.

They don't really make fairy tales for women over 40. If they did, though, it might look a little like Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris — a featherweight meringue of a movie so sweet it threatens to float away on its own sugar high, if not for the sheer generosity of the story's premise and luminous commitment of its lead actress.

Beneath the runes and visions, it's a tale as old as Game of Thrones, and as simple as a story told around a campfire: a ride of the Valkyries spelled out in gore and popcorn.

Downey’s deftness is so miraculous, in fact, that it’s a shame Heart and Souls never really lets him cut loose.

Restrained, sober, decorous.

Still, with everything working against him, the Duke manages to be an old-school badass and stick it to those fancypants Brits.

A love triangle, or maybe something more like a love polygon, lies at the center of the slight but alluring latest from Parisian writer-director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, The Sisters Brothers) — one of those supremely French films in which impossibly chic people fight, come together, and fall apart, all filmed in saturated black and white.

Watch it sincerely or as a curiosity; at least you know you won't forget it.

While The River Wild pays lip service to equally weighty ideas, in the end it’s merely an agitated but tidy ride.

Subtle it's not: Kate is red-meat storytelling, all broad outlines and crunched bones. But there's a visual wit and visceral energy to it that other recent efforts (the pop-feminist comic-book gloss Gunpowder Milkshake, also on Netflix, and Amazon Prime's spectacularly silly Jolt, featuring a rampaging Kate Beckinsale) struggle to find.

Dramatizing totalitarian oppression is hardly novel, but Farewell My Concubine may be the first film to capture the unique spiritual cruelty of a regime in which beauty itself had become a crime.

The acting is strong (especially that of 13-year-old Roddy McDowall as the youngest son and Maureen O’Hara as the lovelorn daughter), and Arthur Miller’s Oscar-winning photography gives the images a spooky luster, but a little bit of Ford’s salt-of-the-earth piety goes an awfully long way.

Gucci might have been a better movie if it had fully committed to the high camp its Blondie-soundtracked trailer promises. It's more serious than that, at least intermittently; a strange melange of too much and not enough. The script also skimps, weirdly, on the actual murder, which is treated mostly as a framing device and felonious afterthought until the final moments. But even a House divided is still more fun than it probably should be: a big messy chef's kiss to money and fashion and above all, movie stars — criming and scheming like they have nothing left to lose, until it's true.

The cumulative effect in Thieves is quite haunting.

Ridicule gently suggests that the culture of sound bites has deep roots.

Even within the stagy confines of the movie's Scenes From a Marriage setup, Horgan and McAvoy manage to tease out the more subtle and enduring bits in their characters' unravelings.

Wonder's spare, muted intrigue hangs mostly on Pugh and atmosphere, an elusive minor-key mystery.

It’s just Paul and Lee hanging out, playing off each other beautifully, every exchange of dialogue a gloveless, effortless toss ‘n’ catch, sparkling under Laszlo Kovacs’ sun-kissed cinematography.

Blunt but brutally effective little slice of supernatural horror.

A black comedy about a rural family that’s devolved into cannibalism, Spider Baby probably struck the few people who saw it as disturbing, but post-Texas Chainsaw Massacre it’s more Gidget than gore, interesting mostly for its cast (Lon Chaney is surprisingly affecting) and black-and-white, early-’60s ambiance.