There is a moment in Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth George Miller-directed installment in the franchise, that encapsulates the entire experience of viewing the film very succinctly. Two cars rip along a desert wasteland: one with our hero Max and the other with the primary antagonists. Desperate for more power, members of each car crawl along their respective hoods and take turns literally spitting gasoline into their growling engine blocks as flames shoot vigorously from either side. This movie isn’t a matter of loud and louder; it’s a matter of loudest and louderest.

We are re-introduced to Mad Max (Tom Hardy), still inhabiting the post-apocalyptic setting of the previous films, as he is captured by pale creatures called the War Boys and strung up like a human IV to be used as a universal blood donor. When a gasoline collecting  cavalcade led by Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) veers off course, the War Boys are instructed by their leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) to pursue the convoy at all costs. With Max in tow, the War Boys and Furiosa engage in long stretches of highway warfare filled with insane antics and limitless explosions.

My chief critique of Mad Max: Fury Road is an admittedly simple one: it’s too much. Good action movies will typically have one or two climactic setpieces that put the main characters in peril for an appropriate amount of time. The extended car chase from last year’s Nightcrawler is a great example: it’s grounded, it’s thrilling and it has a real sense of unpredictability to it. Alternately, Mad Max feels like a ten-minute chase sequence that has been blown out to a two-hour feature. It’s an exhausting proposition, one that eventually lead me to ask myself “do I really need to watch another car crash and explode?”

Thankfully, bits of respite are interspersed throughout the film in the form of moderately interesting backstories and bouts of character development. Even in these moments, the overdone score is pumped up louder than necessary but at least the actors have a chance to show off their chops. The most notable among them is Charlize Theron, who has always been a very reliable actress and she brings forth a unique sense of loss and resiliency to her character. Tom Hardy, taking over for Mel Gibson in the Mad Max role, doesn’t have very much dialogue but provides yet another credible performance of commanding physicality and ferocity.

Indeed, the fight scenes that include Hardy stand as the most well choreographed portions of the movie. From a visual perspective, there’s plenty to admire about the universe that George Miller has created here and I certainly respect his proclivity towards practical stunts over computer generated effects. There are even unexpected moments of dark slapstick humor that crop up from time to time. Unfortunately, Miller has crafted a movie that I found to be bombastic beyond belief and one that left my ears ringing as opposed to my adrenaline pumping.

The wonderfully weird but not entirely successful Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter begins with the title character, played by Rinko Kikuchi, finding an abandoned VHS copy of the Coen Brothers’ classic Fargo buried in the sand on a beach. Curious, she takes the tape back to her apartment and studies the film with quiet intensity, taking scrupulous notes and even taking sketch paper to the screen to complete a drawing. Kumiko takes the “true story” disclaimer at the beginning of the film seriously and treats it like a documentary, although the entirety of Fargo is completely fictional and the note was intended as a small bit of stylistic satire from the Coens.

This is lost on the troubled and lonesome Kumiko, who increasingly grows weary of her meaningless desk job and the impending pangs of adulthood. When she sees Steve Buscemi’s character bury a satchel of money in the middle of a snowy Fargo field, she almost can’t believe her good fortune. After relinquishing her adorable bunny companion Bunzo, Kumiko journeys from Tokyo to Minnesota with only a stolen company credit card and a hand stitched map that she believes will lead her to the unclaimed treasure.

To make matters more confusing, Kumiko is itself based partially on the real events surrounding Takako Konishi, whose story is told in depth in the film This Is a True Story. What director David Zellner and his brother Nathan have done is taken the elements of truth and fiction from all of these idiosyncratic narrative strands and created a sort of off-kilter urban legend of their own. Fittingly, they create an unusual tone throughout the story, with a mix of introspective character studyand  fish-out-of-water comedy that’s sure to throw audiences off.

Despite this, the film’s most obvious flaw is that the Zellners really have no idea how we should perceive Kumiko. She’s our heroine and we want to see her succeed but ultimately, we know that she’s running a fool’s errand. How hard can we root for someone who travels across the world expecting a stolen credit card to provide ample funding for her trip? Even the gracious strangers that she meets on the way who try to aid her in her quest are eventually jettisoned by Kumiko. By the end, my sympathy and patience was running thin for her, which is a problem for a movie that focuses so solely on its main character.

Don’t get me wrong: I would much rather the Zellners go this route instead of trying to make Kumiko a “quirky” and “lovable” stereotype who is set up to be the butt of the movie’s jokes. Despite the main character’s struggles, Kumiko is never a mean-spirited work but instead, it is a much more thoughtful film with a peculiar edge and a memorably bizarre setup. Unfortunately, the journey ultimately does not pay off.

The Imitation Game is the second biopic this season that attempts to portray a well known genius but like The Theory of Everything, Game somehow loses its way and seems to have trouble conveying what was so remarkable about its subject. As the marketing cleverly suggests, Alan Turing was indeed an enigma but director Morten Tyldum does little to shed any new light on his personal or professional affairs. It’s a very straightforward, easily digestable film and while it has an worthwhile story to tell, I can’t help but feel disappointed that it didn’t probe deeper into Turing’s mind.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays the legendary mathmetician with the same brand of affable arrogance that he’s perfected in the BBC series Sherlock. The film follows Turing during important stretches of his life but focuses primarily on his time as an MI6-recruited cryptanalyst during the Second World War. He leads a crack team of coding experts, including Joan Clarke (Keira Knightly) and Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), to eventually break the daunting Nazi Enigma code and provide the Allied Forces with a tactical advantage that would eventually lead to their early victory in the War.

The wartime code breaking section of the movie is its most compelling, distilling the team’s years of struggle with the nigh indecipherable cryptograph into moments of crushing defeat and inspiring triumph. The film’s most poignant scene comes after the code is broken, in which the group’s knowledge of an impending Nazi attack must be kept confidential in order to keep the secrecy of their solution in tact. The scene delves further into the tragic irony of this realization, as one of the coders recognizes one of the Nazi’s targets as the boat on which his brother is serving. It’s a heartbreaking moment and a memorable emotional climax for the film.

Sadly, the portions of the story that involve Turing’s troubled times as a boarding school student and his personal post-War struggles that led to his eventual suicide are not nearly as affecting. The push-pull nature of the flashbacks and flash forwards is distracting and simply not worth it, given that there’s more than enough to dissect in the main mission storyline alone. Especially contrived is the repetition of a line about exceeding expectations that made me roll my eyes all three times that it was uttered. The movie is also awkwardly framed within an interrogation scene that never leads to anything that would justify its inclusion in the first place.

Despite these directorial flaws, The Imitation Game finds its most indespensible asset in Cumberbatch, who has a knack for unveiling layers of repressed emotion in his portrayals of brilliant men. Knightly also turns in a confident performance as a longtime partner of Turning’s, who wasn’t shy about going toe-to-toe with him on an intellectual and personal basis throughout his life. Unfortunately, the good work by the actors here is hindered by a lack of chronological cohesion and an overall shallow approach to a complicated historical figure.

The new Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything is a wonderfully frustrating film that sports a truly spellbinding lead performance by Eddie Redmayne but is lacking in just about every other category. Almost all of its scenes feel like they were designed to provide just enough conflict to advance the story but not enough to challenge the viewer in any way. Perhaps some will be taken with its pleasant and vapid retelling of Hawking’s first marriage but on the whole, I was somehow offended by the inoffensive tone of the entire movie.

We start at Cambridge University in 1963, where the young Hawking meets and subsequently courts a charming literature student named Jane Wilde, played by Felicity Jones. After an innocuous fall in the park, he is diagnosed with motor neuron disease and informed by his campus physician that he has 2 years to live. Despite this revelation, Jane vows to remain by his side as he pursues a burgeoning career in theoretical physics. While their marriage is constantly tested by his worsening condtion, they find solace in a third-party father figure named Jonathan Jones, who is played by Charlie Cox.

Redmayne’s portrayal of Stephen Hawking is nothing short of astonishing and frankly, it may be one of the only compelling reasons to see the film in the first place. He’s able to capture Hawking’s gradual deterioration with an incredible range of facial and physical expressiveness but most importantly, he’s able to convey the spirit of a fiery genius without uttering a single word. Even when he’s wheelchair bound and nearly unintelligible, there’s a devilish wit working tirelessly beneath the surface that Redmayne is able to communicate to the audience on a seemingly telepathic level.

Despite this tremendous performance and Hawking’s remarkable life achievements, the film decides to focus instead on Jane’s struggle as a wife and mother of three children. This perspective could have proven interesting had the execution not been so toothless but more often than not, we’re left with melodramatic scenes that don’t resonate or build to anything meaningful. While the direction by James Marsh is frequently aimless, it deserves to be said that Anthony McCarten’s screenplay is not as overly sentimental as it could have been and light touches of humor are applied gracefully throughout the movie.

Marsh previously crafted the gripping and inventive documentary Man On Wire and it’s a shame to see a talented director create something as stripped down and apprehensive as The Theory of Everything is. Only in its third act when Hawking’s ability to communicate is revitalized do we see glimmers of a more thoughtful movie. I wish to believe that Marsh had a much more clever vision in mind for this story that was suppressed by the film’s producers in order to streamline it for Oscar contention. Redmayne will no doubt get the attention he so rightly deserves but beyond that, the film is a black hole of biopic aspirations.

The final entry in the Hunger Games series has arrived and in the tradition of the hugely successful Harry Potter and Twilight films, it has been split into two parts with the final film being released a year from now. While I haven’t read the books and can’t tell you if Part 1 creates a viable stopping point for the final film, I can say that this standalone portion of Mockingjay feels quite stretched at feature length and I have a hard time believing that this material couldn’t be skillfully condensed into one movie. Clearly this was a financial decision on the part of Lionsgate to milk their $1.5 billion (and counting) franchise as long as they can.

Mockingjay picks up right where we left off from Catching Fire, with our heroine Katniss Everdeen, played by Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence, living in the bombed-out District 13 and still reeling from the outcome of the Quarter Quell. Her actions in those Games have sparked uprisings and civil unrest throughout the Districts and the President of 13 Alma Coin, played with conviction by Julianne Moore, hopes to mold Katniss into a symbol of united revolution against the Capitol. She agrees under the condition that her lost love Peeta, played by Josh Hutcherson, be retrieved from the clutches of the Capitol and its corrupt President Snow, reprised with grinning menace by Donald Sutherland.

The film has taken away what I always thought was one of the least interesting things about the previous entries, the Games themselves, but it hasn’t replaced them with much exciting material either. Fans of the series will likely be put off by the Katniss-less action in Part 1, in which the main character fires exactly one arrow in combat, although it does produce one of the movie’s most satisfying, trailer-ready shots. The majority of the material here is comprised of characters brooding or explaining or plotting, which may prove worthwhile for Part 2 but doesn’t leave us with much for now.

All of the characters, Katniss included, feel sidelined and underutilized, often waiting for things to happen as opposed to moving the story along themselves. If that was a conscious decision on the part of director Francis Lawrence, it comes off more as spinning its wheels rather than organically building tension. The acting here is similarly dubious; I never imagined that Josh Hutcherson would give a more convincing performance than Jennifer Lawrence in this film (or any film, really) but it’s sadly the case here.

Despite this, Mockingjay is not without its share of inspired moments. There are thankfully some beats of levity in a scene that finds Katniss botching her lines for an overproduced propaganda film that has cheeky notes of political satire embedded. I was most taken with a quietly poetic scene in which soldiers infiltrate the Capitol to retrieve previous Tributes, which frequently reminded me of the Abbottabad raid sequence in Zero Dark Thirty. Here’s hoping that the finale has more gripping scenes like this one but for now, it feels like we’re stuck with the world’s most expensive bookmark.

Based on the worldwide best-selling novel, Before I Go To Sleep is a serviceable amnesiac thriller that doesn’t reinvent the wheel but does enough to make it a worthwhile entry in the genre. Writer/director Rowan Joffé faithfully adapts the novel but while the movie is a brisk hour and a half, it somehow loses the propulsive, page-turning energy that the book maintains throughout. The film routinely sidesteps the slow reveals of the source material in favor of Twists with a capital “T” that can come off as more manipulative than intriguing.

Nicole Kidman plays Christine Lucas, a forty-year-old English housewife who wakes up every morning thinking she is still in her mid-twenties with no memory of her current self. She wakes up next to Ben, played by Colin Firth, who says they have been married for years and that he has been taking care of her since the accident that caused her anterograde amnesia. When Ben leaves for work, Christine gets a call from Dr. Nasch, played by Mark Strong, who says he is a neuropsychologist who has been working with her to restore her memory by maintaining a secret video diary every day.

These entries serve as the narrative backbone of the film, allowing Christine to build a foundation from the blank slate that awaits her every morning and allowing the audience to catch various clues and hints that are presented. When she asks the same question on two separate days and gets different answers, mistrust forms and she knows that she is not being told the full story of her accident and what has happened since. This setup leads to a series of developments that range from tediously melodramatic to genuinely suspenseful, the latter applying most often to the film’s final act.

Kidman is very good here, finding creative layers of despair and confusion in a role that could have easily been repetitive and monotonous. Firth and Strong do what they can but they are ultimately pawns in service of the film’s twisty plot line. The look and feel of the film is generally chilly and removed, as evidenced by the steely blue color palette that it works from. While the story that it presents is indeed sad, the film does take itself quite seriously and perhaps some humor could have been injected to give things a more human and less sterile feeling.

Seeing this movie after having recently re-read the book, I was glad to see that the movie followed so closely with the original story’s revolving plot. Even though I knew the ending going in, I was re-taken into the story and somehow still surprised at points. Still, some deviations still managed to irk me, in particular a poorly-judged scene that involved a character’s misreading of a name tag and the triggering of a flashback that felt forced and contrived. Overall, Before I Go To Sleep is an admirable, if not totally memorable, effort.