'Swiped': Strictly a surface affair

 Lily James gives an energized performance in Swiped, a movie in which she portrays Whitney Wolfe, the woman who helped design the dating app Tinder. After being pushed aside by Tinder’s execs, Wolfe went on to found Bumble, a female-centric dating app that made her a billionaire. Director Rachel Lee Goldenberg falls prey to a common problem in stories about rapid-fire successes followed by a fall and then renewal. The rise usually proves more engaging than the fall.  In this case, the story's second half charts the sexism Wolfe experienced at Tinder, a business where a “bro” culture seemed to prevail. The atmosphere is so toxic, Wolfe fails to support a loyal female co-worker (Myha’la). Ben Schnetzer portrays the charming tech whiz and Tinder co-founder who bets on Wolfe’s marketing savvy. Jackson White portrays Justin, another Tinder co-founder, but one who turns on Wolfe when their ill-advised romance sours. Dan Stevens portrays Russian-born Andrey Andreev,  the head of Badoo, an international dating site. Andreev becomes  Wolfe’s corporate savior, but ultimately proves to be another supporter of bad-boy behavior. I’m a bit put off by movies that tell real-life stories because I’m never entirely sure of what liberties might have been taken to enhance the drama. I’m assuming Goldenberg’s storytelling is accurate enough, but her movie tends toward superficiality. It’s a gloss on female issues in a male-dominated tech world that could have dived deeper. For the record, if you're looking for info on Whitney Wolfe, you'd do well to look under her married name, Whitney Wolfe Herd. She was married after most of the events in the movie took place.

The vicious side of college life

 Fraternity hazing may be an easy target, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't become the subject of a cautionary tale about uncontrolled cruelty on college campuses. Director Andrew Neel's Goat is just such a movie. Neel begins his story when local thugs attack a high school senior (Ben Schnetzer), beating him almost senseless. Time passes and Schnetzer's Brad heals, but he heads for his first year in college with a lingering case of post-traumatic stress. Neel contrasts the random cruelty Brad suffered in his hometown with the organized humiliations orchestrated by the fraternity Brad pledges. Brad's older brother (Nick Jonas) -- a senior at the same school -- urges his brother to join the frat. The promise, of course, is that friendship and social acceptance will follow the demeaning rigors of Hell Week. Increasingly, Neel focuses the drama on Jonas's Brett, a young man who begins to understand that his fraternity brothers are crossing the line between acceptable rites of initiation and behavior that -- in other contexts -- might qualify as criminal. Goat doesn't take us any place we haven't been before, but its message bears repeating. Neel and his young cast skillfully handle events that are intended to repulse -- and do. Consider Goat an antidote to recent hard-partying, frat-boy comedies such as 2014's Neighbors. Goat's not about college fun; it's about the torture some will endure in order not to feel socially ostracized.

'The Book Thief' gets it all wrong

It's not often that a movie gets just about everything wrong, but that's the case -- at least in my view -- with The Book Thief, an adaptation of a popular 2006 young-adult novel by Australian author Markus Zusak.

Director Brian Percival, known for directing six episodes of Downton Abbey, turns a World War II Holocaust story into a kind of fairy tale that also wants to celebrate the power of the written word.

This resultant tone -- radically misguided, I think -- turns The Book Thief into a preposterously sanitized portrait of hardship and war, all built around an achingly pretentious gimmick: The story is narrated by Death (the off-screen voice of actor Roger Allam).

Liesel Meminger (Sophie Nelisse) provides the story with its center. Liesel's mother, a leftist threatened by the rise of Nazism, allows her daughter to be adopted by a German couple: Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and Rosa (Emily Watson). Rush's character is a kindly older man who soon begins teaching Liesel how to read; Watson's Rosa is a gruff woman whose good heart gradually is exposed.

Liesel's best friend is Rudy (Nico Liersch), a boy who looks as if he could serve as a poster child for Aryan supremacy, but who is good-natured, loyal and infectiously likable.

A pivotal plot twist kicks in when Hans and Rosa decide to hide a young Jewish man named Max (Ben Schnetzer) from the Nazis. Hans feels he must give Max shelter because the boy's father saved Hans's life during World War I.

As Liesel becomes an increasingly voracious reader, the movie seems to be proclaiming the saving power of words, the transcendental elevation that literature often promises. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway) no words saved the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust and who received little support from their neighbors. Of course, that's not the stuff of fairy tales.)

Steeped in faux German accents and making haphazard use of subtitles, The Book Thief has an accomplished enough look, but still stands as a big-screen misstep. To buy into this movie, you have to believe that it's possible for people to be in a building that suffers a direct hit by Allied bombs, and, moments later, be displayed in the streets, their dead bodies totally unmutilated.

I can't say that The Book Thief represents a case of good intentions that simply didn't pan out; for the life of me, I couldn't figure out exactly what the movie's intentions were.

Perhaps The Book Thief worked as a novel; as a movie, it tends to be as guileless as a grade-school primer -- and no more revealing.

The Book Thief occasionally has its English-speaking cast spouting a few German words. I'll add to the multi-lingual babble by saying, "Nein." "Nein." And, "nein" again.