Manohla Dargis

Nolan’s love of movies and commitment to them — to what they can do, what they can be, what they should be — runs like an electric current through his filmography, lighting it, and oftentimes you, up. That passion is in every frame of his monumental adaptation of The Odyssey, one of the most Nolan of Nolan spectacles in its thematic concerns, formal playfulness, kinetic thrills and unabashed showmanship.

Stories of family hurt have a way of working you over, and Bouchra has its moments. Yet the more the filmmakers focus on the mother-daughter relationship, all while also embracing narrative self-reflexivity, the more drearily familiar — and toothless — this movie becomes.

That this movie never matches the brilliance of Miller’s goes without saying, despite the heavy-metal clanging. That Alcock manages to rise above the fray with a performance that never feels like borrowed goods is at once a surprise and a gift.

It’s fine, pretty and amusing, but if no one’s heart seems in it, perhaps it’s time to make way for other toys.

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is one of those movies that sweeps you up from the start and rarely lets you down.

This is that rare movie that could do with a longer running time, which would, perhaps, give it greater depth.

There are some promising themes in “Power Ballad” — the soulful joys of collaboration, the precarity of celebrity, the evils of the music industry — but the movie never develops them. Instead, the director John Carney, who wrote the script with Peter McDonald, keeps everything nice and insistently light, gesturing at complexities rather than delving into them.

Like the first movie, the second is a sleek diversion with brittle and sharp laughs, truckloads of couture threads and lashings of light drama.

Jones has turned a life into a hackneyed survivor’s story with cartoon villains, cardboard saints, pretty scenery, mewling piano notes and expedient, drama-goosing epiphanies.

The downer here is that Lowery doesn’t seem to know what to do with his stars, performers who are never better than when they’re just doing what they do best — you know, acting.