'Beast'; Tension and not much else

Idris Elba provides Beast with a  major draw. But Elba's presence can't offset an improbably scripted thriller in which Elba's character and two daughters (Iyana Halley and Leah Jeffries) are threatened by a vengeful and highly motivated lion. A group of poacher's killed the beast's entire pride, turning the lion into a killer of humans. The movie begins to resemble a Cujo knockoff -- only set in a South African game park. Early on, Elba's Dr. Nate Samuels, guilty about not having seen early signs of his late wife's cancer, travels with his kids from the US to South Africa. He  hooks up with an old friend and wildlife protector (Sharlto Copley). Samuels hopes to strengthen his bond with his kids by visiting the country where his wife was raised. Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur follows a predictable course, setting up scenes in which the lion (CGI) threatens to kill its human prey. A vague thematic connection arises: The lion failed to protect his charges and Dr. Samuels fears that he won't be able to keep his daughters alive. A couple of fuzzy dream sequences don't add much, but the movie whips up tension by adopting a horror movie tone. For  a time, the characters are confined inside a van as the lion stages one pounding assault after another. There's no faulting the cast but the screenplay isn't really fresh enough to create much cinematic roar. Oh well, Beast at least has the decency to confine itself to an economical 90-minute running time. 

An uneven 'Gringo' founders

The movie features a surprising comic turn from David Oyelowo as a mid-level executive with the world's worst luck.

Another exercise in cynical comedy with a violent streak, Gringo includes at least one element we haven't seen before: A Nigerian businessman nicely played by David Oyelowo struggles to establish himself in a less-than-honorable segment of the US economy.

Overall, though, Gringo seems stuck in a genre rut that’s too familiar to any strike strong chords.

It doesn’t help that Gringo's purposefully convoluted plot revolves around a medical marijuana pill that a variety of different folks are trying to use for ill-gotten gains or that the screenplay involves the kind of strained cleverness that allows for apparently unrelated characters to crisscross.

It’s enjoyable to watch Oyelowo, still best known for having portrayed Martin Luther King in Selma, play a beaten-down chump who has piled up some major debt. His immigrant character, who believes in following rules, makes a perfect target for his scheming bosses at a Chicago-based pharmaceutical company, a duo played by Joel Edgerton and Charlize Theron.

As the story — most of which takes place in Juarez, Mexico — unfolds, director Nash Edgerton — Joel’s brother — introduces a variety of supposedly colorful characters, some of them outright duds. I'm thinking of a couple (Harry Treadaway and Amanda Seyfried) that works in a guitar shop. These two more or less stumble into the plot as does a predictably ruthless Mexican drug lord (Carlos Corona) known as The Black Panther.

Edgerton and Theron fulfill the movie’s dueling viper quotient with Theron giving her all as a woman for whom cunning, calculation, and profane insults come as easily as breathing. At one point -- presumably to show how callous her character can be -- the screenplay has Theron's Elaine do an impression of a deaf woman trying to speak. A line is crossed: An attempt to be funny makes you wince.

Also on board, Thandie Newton as the wife of Oyelowo’s beleaguered Harold, a woman whose infidelity constitutes a case of dramatic piling on.

But that’s the deal. Nothing goes right for poor Harold as the movie puts him through a half-serious, half-comic wringer that includes the arrival of the brother (Sharlto Copley) of Edgerton's character, a supposedly reformed mercenary who we first meet trying to straighten out his crooked life by doing volunteer work in earthquake-stricken Haiti.

Amusing in spurts, Gringo is easily shrugged off, probably because little about it seems plausible or pointed.

Dysfunctional family, dysfunctional movie

Somewhere in the movie called The Hollars, a good family story might be hiding. Unfortunately, director John Krasinski, who also plays the lead role, didn't find it. This story of a dysfunctional Ohio family centers on the discovery that Mom (Margo Martingale) has a brain tumor. Dad (Richard Jenkins) can't stop weeping. One of the family's grown sons (Sharlto Copley) is mired in on-going tension with Dad, whose heating business verges on bankruptcy. Krasinksi plays the family's other son, the kid who left town to establish himself as an artist in the big city. Lest any stone of complication be left unturned, Krasinski's John Hollar and his girlfriend (Anna Kendrick) are expecting a baby. Sincere in its sentiments and including a few touching scenes, The Hollars nonetheless presents a symphony of false notes that even a cast featuring the wonderful Martingale and Jenkins can't bring into tune.

'Chappie' is ... finish the rhyme yourself

A robot with consciousness gets lost in another junkyard of a movie.

Chappie -- a movie about a robot with the same consciousness as humans -- never seems able to resolve a rash of internal conflicts. Is it unashamed B-movie trash? Is it a goofy send-up that turns a robot into a silly child? Is it a descendant of Short Circuit or of RoboCop? Is it something else entirely?

Because it never answers these questions Chappie turns into another junkyard of a movie that takes what might generously be called a casual approach to logic.

For director Neill Blomkamp (District 9 and Elysium), the third time hardly qualifies as a charm.

So what do we get?

Blomkamp's story about a robot who's given consciousness and then is captured by thugs features:

-- An over-amped Dev Patel as an engineer who has figured out how to make a fully conscious robot.
-- Then there's Hugh Jackman as a brooding former military man who wants to make the ultimate fighting robot, but whose creation has been put on hold.

-- And don't forget Yo-Landi Visser and Ninja, South African rappers who belong to a group called Die Antwoord. They appear as a team of tattooed miscreants who are softened to the point of redemption by their contact with Chappie.

-- Sigourney Weaver, in an entirely negligible role, plays the head of a company that builds police robots for the city of Johannesburg.

When the movie opens, the city's crime rate is down and the robot cops seem to be functioning with great efficiency.

This germ of an idea could have provided the basis for an interesting merger of sci-fi and police procedural.

Instead, Blomkamp vents his impulse for rampant action coupled with moments of oddball comedy in which the innocent robot refers to the shady characters who are trying to teach it their felonious ways as "mommy" and "daddy."

Chappie trying to mimic the strut and speech of the street-wise gangstas who have taken control of him seems puerile.

These ploys may have been intended to be amusing, but to me, they looked dumb, particularly because they're repeated ad nauseam as the movie builds (or perhaps stumbles) toward the moment when Johannesburg's robot police force is hacked and criminals run unimpeded throughout the city's streets.

One more thing before we leave the world of artificial intelligence behind.

I'm sick of seeing real newspeople in works of fiction. Chappie opens with CNN's Anderson Cooper narrating a feature about the way robots have helped reduce crime in South Africa. Cooper sets the stage for what's to come, but it's time newspeople gave more thought to the ways in which they're used to lend an aura of authenticity to otherwise preposterous movies.

Such participation may give a movie an air of credibility, but it doesn't necessarily do the same for the participating newspeople.

Back to Chappie.

At times, Blomkamp tosses an idea at us, say when Chappie -- who's rather lithe for a robot and is voiced by Sharlto Copley -- wonders why Deon bothered to make him in the first place if he's doomed to expire when his batteries, which can't be replaced, run out.

Just what we needed, a reminder of another movie, a bit of A.I.-like poignancy?

Chappie, by the way, ends in a way that seems to open the door for a sequel. I couldn't help thinking that a second movie might be more interesting than the one I just watched.

That doesn't mean I'm advocating for another helping. Take it as a statement about the inadequacies of this first installment.

'Maleficent:' A new take on an old tale

Sleeping Beauty for the 21st century -- beautifully crafted, but not always captivating.

Angelina Jolie can be positively wicked as Maleficent, an aggrieved fairy seeking revenge against the king who stole her wings.

Maleficent, of course, is the title character of Disney's reworking of the Sleeping Beauty story, a tale the studio told in a classic helping of 1959 animation.

With her cheek bones built to harrowing heights by make-up whiz Rick Baker, Jolie flashes predatory white teeth and keeps a cool sense of menace about herself.

She's striking and also a bit freaky looking in headgear that gives her a devilish pair of horns.

Director Robert Stromberg, production designer on movies such as Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful, creates an encompassing visual environment while telling the Sleeping Beauty story in a way that gives it a bit of feminist spin -- and provides us with the inside scoop on a story we thought we knew.

Early scenes introduce us to Maleficent as a child (Isobelle Molloy), a happy fairy girl who establishes a relationship with a human, a boy named Stephan (Michael Higgins).

Stephan will grow up, discover ambition, and steal Maleficent's wings, thus enabling himself to become king of the humans and forcing his childhood flame to turn toward evil.

The Sleeping Beauty of this tale -- Elle Fanning's Aurora -- is a smiling, blonde-haired girl who seems carefree and guileless -- and not nearly as intriguing as Maleficent.

Aurora's father, of course, is the grown Stephan. As king, Stephan (Sharlto Copley) insists on keeping his daughter away from the palace until after her 16th birthday.

To that end, Aurora is raised in a secluded forest cottage by three comically addled fairies (Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple and Lesley Manville).

All of this has to do with the vengeful curse that Maleficent put on Aurora at her christening: In a fit of icy rage, Maleficent condemned Aurora to prick her finger on a spindle at age 16. She'd then fall into a death-like sleep from which she could be roused only by the kiss of true love.

It's just here that the story takes an unexpected turn, about which a little must be said.

During her time in the woods, Aurora develops a relationship with the watchful Maleficent, and the movie raises a question that generates interest without much suspense: Will Maleficent stick to her guns or will she soften as she gets to know Aurora? How bad a badass is Maleficent really?

The tale seems to have been calibrated to maximize CGI: There are many odd-looking creatures, some of whom may a bit scary for the youngest kids.

Stromberg does a nice job with a character named Diaval, a crow that Maleficent transforms into a variety of different creatures, all of them charged with doing her bidding.

Some movies are pure stinkbombs; others are total winners; still others are decent in their way, but may not scale the intended heights.

That seems to be the case with Maleficent, a movie that engages fitfully and flies high at times. Beautifully crafted as it is, Maleficent doesn't consistently provide the desired level of captivation.

'Oldboy:' Reworking a cult classic

Spike Lee tries hand at a story that attempts to bring the shock of a South Korean movie to American multiplexes.

I wasn't a major fan of director Chan-Wook Park's Oldboy, but I admired its shocking audacity: Park's revenge saga featured the kind of violence that tends to delight certain genre enthusiasts. Among other things, the movie's main character ate a live octopus and extracted an adversary's teeth with a claw hammer.

Released in 2003, Oldboy was not a movie for the squeamish: It appealed mainly to those who were caught up in Park's revenge trilogy, which included Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005). Personally, I liked Lady Vengeance best.

I have no idea how Spike Lee's remake will play with those who are unfamiliar with the original. But for those of us who know Park's movie, watching Lee's version becomes little more than an exercise in comparative viewing.

Lee doesn't skimp on shock or violence as he brings Mark Protosevich's screenplay to life. The remake offers a mixture of new wrinkles and familiar ploys that should keep fans of the original guessing right up until the finale.

In this version, Joe (Josh Brolin) -- the main character -- is a hopelessly crude advertising executive whose offensive behavior is matched only by his alcoholic intake. After a particularly awful drunken binge, Joe awakens in what appears to be a shabby motel room. He has no idea how he got there. It eventually dawns on Joe that he's being held prisoner, although he has no idea why. He remains in this state -- being fed nothing but dumplings from Chinese takeout -- for 20 years.

While imprisoned, Joe -- whose room has a television set that mostly broadcasts advertisements for exercise equipment -- sees a newscast in which he learns that his estranged wife was murdered. His three-year-old daughter has been placed in the care of others.

Poor Joe: He's the only suspect in the crime.

When Joe's finally released, he dedicates his life to proving his innocence and wreaking vengeance on his captors. Of course, he must first find out who his captors are.

It's difficult to say more without spoilers, but it's worth knowing that Lee and Protosevich (I Am Legend) approach Park's story by offering variations on many of the same issues that concerned Park: namely perverse sex and brutal violence. Like Park, Lee gradually doles out revelations that are intended to rock Joe's already shaky world.

Lee brings an eclectic approach to casting. South Africa's Sharlto Copley (District 9) plays Joe's nemesis; Elizabeth Olsen portrays a social worker and former drug addict who tries to help Joe after his escape; and Michael Imperioli signs on as a bartender who has known Joe since the days when they both attended the same prep school.

Lee also finds a role for Samuel L. Jackson, who plays the man in charge of Joe's imprisonment. He also works in one of his trademark dolly shots lest we forget who's behind the camera.

Fans of the original will want to know that Lee replicates the hammer fight that became a signature of the original. The way Lee tweaks the story may be slightly more preposterous than the way in which Park brought it to its chasenting conclusion. The American version also has a tendency to over-explain things that remained more beneficially murky in the original.

But the main thing missing from this American version is the soulful, agonized performance of Choi Min-shik, who played the imprisoned man in Park's movie. The other actors don't compare as well, either. It's not that they give bad performances; it's more that the raw quality of the original (as difficult to take as the outré violent touches) isn't always in evidence.

What's left is a weird plot and dreary atmospherics as Lee dips into waters that reminded me not only of Park but of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg.

It would be wrong to deem Oldboy a total failure: I was interested in how Lee and Protosevich approached their task, but I never figured out why they wanted to take on the job in the first place.