In Theaters

Fans of the Dan Curtis cult classic need to proceed with caution. This is not your -- or your parents' -- Dark Shadows. Oh sure, the cast of characters appears to be the same and the storyline still centers on the cursed Collins clan, but for the most part, director Tim Burton and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (the scribe behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter) have decided to take the material in a more familiar, non-fan friendly direction. Gone are the interpersonal intrigues and snarky subtexts that made the '60s/'70s soap so successful. In its place is a 'shadow' of its former self, still fun and fascinating but a bit of a letdown for those on the original Barnabas bandwagon.

After making so many films about basically decent people, it's good to know that Richard Linklater had some Hitchcock in him. In his deft comedy Bernie, Linklater brings not just the winsome touch that's made his lighter work like The School of Rock so broadly appealing but also a more acidic and satirical tone that darkens the shade under the bright Texas sun. Hitch would have sharpened his hooks more, particularly for a film set in such a busybody-riddled small town, but he would have appreciated Linklater's steady accumulation of detail and grievances, not to mention the resolutely straightforward handling of the murder itself. What Linklater brings to this curious and fact-based story, which just about no other American filmmaker of the moment could, is his expansive sense of character and genial lack of judgment. This is a film about a really nice guy. A murderer, for sure, but just the nicest murderer you're ever likely to meet.

Artists who try to understand the minds of children are hardly ever successful. The usual tendency is to err on the side of the simplistic (wide-eyed wonder of the innocent) or unbelievably complex (the child who acts like a miniature adult). In his bright-eyed and wispy-light comedy I Wish, Hirokazu Kore-Eda doesn't fall prey to either cliched manner of handling his young, sprightly characters. The children he puts on screen here are smart and thoughtful, but not overly so, whimsical, short-sighted, and fully convinced of the efficacy of magical thinking -- in other words, wholly like children in the real world. That he's not able to take these characters and turn his film into something more engaging and easier to grab a hold of, is an unfortunate thing -- he understands people to a degree most filmmakers would envy. If only that was all that were necessary.

Filmmakers run all kinds of risks when they try to update the classics; for all the universality of some of the great dramas, they can fail miserably when downloaded into new and sometimes incompatible formats (witness what happens when studios try to dress up Austen and Shakespeare as candy-colored high school comedies). This risk is even more prevalent, though, when it comes to the Greeks -- everything being declaimed from on high and all those gods causing mischief makes for a tricky translation -- which is why most everybody stays away. (Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite is one of the only films in recent memory that used an honest-to-God chorus and got away with it.) Nadine Labaki's zesty Where Do We Go Now? has to navigate two minefields: updating Aristophanes's Lysistrata and setting this comedy amidst modern Lebanon's murderous religious strife. The result isn't a new classic, but stands nevertheless as a potent and lively satire about how the violence of men tears societies down and the lengths to which women go to staunch the bleeding.

It's one thing to join a bunch of standalone superheroes in the comics and quite another in the movies. Superheroes are attention hogs, so commanding of the myopic spotlight that a single specimen can carry multiple films all on his/her own. In the comics, a writer has the freedom to develop origins and individual tangents, allowing each major character the time and space to chart their own stories while joining forces for the major set pieces. The serialization allows readers to settle into the superhero omnibus. On the big screen, however, time is swift and finite, even in an epic spectacle. A filmmaker has anywhere between 120 and 150 minutes to establish each character, bring them all together, develop a labyrinthine world domination plot, and save space for each character to make signature impressions amid a handful of massive action ballets. Somehow, against all odds, Joss Whedon does just that with The Avengers, a slam-bang comics-inspired blast where the superhero collective fuses seamlessly and works marvelously.

It's familiar fish-out-of-water meets nutty oldsters in the latest from Shakespeare in Love's John Madden. The premise finds British pensioners of all archetypical makes escaping to India because it's cheap and unusual. Hopefully, in the far off mystical East, they won't be treated like government/social/familial burdens. Our collective includes a man who was raised in "the Colony" (Tom Wilkinson), a widow trying to jump start a new life (Judi Dench), a couple (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton) whose marriage is crumbling, a pair of sexed-up singles (Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup) and an elderly matron (Maggie Smith) in desperate need of some important medical care. They all end up in Dev Patel's rundown excuse for holiday lodging, a place where the phones don't work, there are no doors, and the dirty, grimy accommodations are less than inviting.

When it comes to creative careers, choosing to become a ballet dancer is close to the most punishing one you could select. Starting from an age at which most children are still trying to master using a spoon while sitting upright, would-be ballet dancers train for hours a day in the finer points of the craft. Bloody feet and broken bones are the least of it. As a record of this kind of endeavor, Bess Kargman's crowd-pleasing but ultimately dissatisfying documentary First Position doesn't come close to conveying the level of dedication required to become even moderately competent in ballet. However, if you want to see a clutch of thoroughly talented and frighteningly motivated young dancers get put through their paces in the pursuit of a scholarship to a top-line dance school, then Kargman's film is the ticket.

Like many of the gritty old American experimental films that the intrepid resurrectionists over at Milestone have been unearthing, spit-shining, and gift-wrapping for eager cinemaphiles of late, Shirley Clarke's The Connection is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's a riveting and adventurous spectacle of Lost Bohemia, riddled with junkie-artiste stream-of-consciousness and graced with a blow-the-roof-off jazz soundtrack. On the other, it's the worst kind of terribly determined mid-century American neo-realism, all mannered non-sequiturs and straining self-importance. (If nothing else, this is a film that tries hard at everything it does.) The sheer vivacity and discipline of vision that Clarke brings to this long-unseen and once controversial film wins out over its many negatives, but it's a close thing.

Jason Statham is no longer an actor. He's a brand, a beefed up icon of steely action who tends to rise above the ridiculous scripts he agrees on to become a buff human adrenal gland. He's the Hulk minus the massive roid rage outbursts, a model made out of sinew and sharp, angular cuts. Seeing his name on the marquee guarantees something -- a proficient amount of butt kicking, an abundance of bad-ass attitude, an occasional lapse into narrative illogic (or three). Luckily, Safe excels at all three, turning a could-have-been dud into a late Spring delight.

It's a shame, really. Jason Segel and co-star Emily Blunt have so much natural chemistry together that something like The Five Year Engagement should resonate with real emotion. As the onscreen couple attempting to mix career, relocation, and the realities of modern romance, the two have a palpable connection. But that's only part of the genre mandates. Without a solid sampling of comedy, all we have is a couple of attractive actors in fake love. Unfortunately, the script by Mr. Segel and director Nicolas Stoller doesn't live up to their previous success - the hilarious Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Instead, this feels like an incomplete draft, a version where initial punchlines weren't polished and where too much attention was paid to the onscreen relationship.

Twisting the already warped tales of Edgar Allan Poe into a Se7en-like serial killer thriller, era appropriate and complete with the demented alcoholic author himself, must have seemed like a spiffy idea at the pitch meeting. After all, everyone from the late Michael Jackson to the pumped up Sylvester Stallone has been aiming to bring the American luminary, famous for such works as "The Tell Tale Heart" and "The Pit and the Pendulum", to the big screen. But where baffling biopics once ruled the reinvention, we now have The Raven, an askew mash-up of Poe references and typical genre tropes. While there is a great deal of potential in the premise, it is mostly lost in the routine direction of V for Vendetta helmer James McTeigue and the slight screenplay from Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare.

From the penetrating pen of Jo Nesbø, arguably Scandinavia's hottest mystery writer, comes this "scandi-crime" thriller which tells us what happens when a bad guy meets another bad guy and the 2nd bad guy is really bad. Like, nasty. Murderous. Psychopathic. And, very well armed.

It's tempting to look for easy sociological explanations for the mini-bubble in films about cults and small extremist groups. Such reasons aren't likely to be found, beyond the broadening disinclination of people in the West (no matter how quickly they'll "join" a social media group) to be members of classically cohesive collectives like churches, the Rotary Club, or even bowling leagues. Zal Batmanglij's canny and suspenseful head-knotter Sound of My Voice initially seems of a piece with films like Martha Marcy May Marlene, United Red Army, and the new festival film First Winter. It, too, revolves around a small gang of earnest believers following a leader whose motives are suspect at best. Where Batmanglij's film stands apart is in its unalloyed skill and confidence -- this is one of the most assured feature debuts in recent memory -- and in his ability to turn this exploration of cult indoctrination into both a profound character study and a nail-biting thriller. But for a conclusion that arrives long before the audience is ready for it to be over with, this would have been the runaway indie hit of the year.

If Captain Jack Sparrow, even with all of his treachery and rum-imbibing, threatened to turn pirates cuddly and innocuous, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, the new stop-motion feature from Aardman Animation, makes them even more potentially adorable, rendered in the patented Aardman squashed-and-stretched style of homely cuteness. The movie doesn't exactly shy away from pirating activities -- dubloons are stolen, people are run through, and so forth -- but its heroes aren't quite so rough and tumble. They love piracy despite not being much good at it.

They're so dedicated to their craft, in fact, that they are identified only by pirate-related descriptors: there's the Pirate Captain (voice of Hugh Grant); Number Two, or the Pirate with a Scarf (Martin Freeman); the Pirate with Gout (Brendan Gleeson);  and so on.  It's less a career than a lifestyle choice; even Queen Victoria (voiced by Imelda Staunton) professes to hate pirates not for their pillaging or marauding, but for aesthetic reasons: she despises their sea shanties, their pirate hats, their "dinosaur" ways. Even in this anti-pirate climate, however, Pirate Captain's "wanted" poster only offers twelve dubloons for his capture -- plus a free pen.

Perhaps it's time to put the vampire to rest, cinematically speaking. Romance has rotted the once vital movie monster to the point where ridiculous coming of age claptrap like The Moth Diaries can be passed off as full-on fright fodder. Instead, it's a slightly Sapphic excursion into that hub of unrequited lesbian love, the all-girls boarding school. Adapted from -- you guessed it -- a popular young adult novel, our main narrative centers around a rivalry between dour gal Rebecca (Sara Bolger) and eerie Goth interloper Ernessa (Lily Cole). When the latter arrives at the exclusive Brangwyn College, she is a pasty faced fascination among the various rich witch cliques. Before long, she is presumably draining the lifeblood out of everything -- including this dull excuse for entertainment.

Rest easy: in spite of similarities in both theme and appearance, The Lucky One is actually not Charlie St. Cloud 2. The specter of deceased loved ones does linger over the proceedings, but it's done in a very amorphous mannet. And yes, there is a harrowing waterbound rescue sequence, but it is essentially a deus ex machina, so the screenplay can conveniently pass judgment on the its less-than-wholesome characters. Plus, there is the small matter that The Lucky One, unlike Charlie St. Cloud, doesn't entirely suck. There is certainly enough eye-rolling, teeth-gnashing plot machinations to make the sentient film lover's stomach churn, but the film is at least good-natured and occasionally charming, less flagrantly offensive than many recent tear-jerkers. Yes, I am damning with faint praise.

As part of his transition from an original King of Comedy to a satiric self-help guru, Steve Harvey has done the unthinkable. He's exposed the secrets to successful communication with men via undermining the overriding machismo of our paternalistic society...or something like that. His bestselling book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man taught a nation of tired women how to work their belligerent beloveds, navigating the unsettled waters of commitment, consideration, and carousing. Now director Tim Story (Fantastic Four) and screenwriters Keith Marryman and David A. Newman (Friends with Benefits) have translated the tome into a randy RomCom featuring an all-star African-American cast. Far more fun than the awful He's Just Not That Into You, this feather-light confection may lack true insights, but it does offer a lot of heart -- and humor.

Chimpanzee is the latest in Disneynature's continuing series of kid-friendly wildlife documentaries that began with 2009's Earth and has continued every year on Earth Day with Oceans and African Cats. The concept is simple: take a basic Discovery Channel doc and affix a cutesy storybook narrative to its cuddly animal "protagonists." Such a fusion often breeds a semi-uncomfortable blend of irrepressible manufactured cuteness and stark real-life survival-of-the-fittest brutality. Kids will alternately swell with happiness and recoil in horror.

It's been a long time since the toga-wrapped revolution of Animal House and the whole National Lampoon "slobs vs. snobs" gauntlet toss. Long enough that in Whit Stillman's long-awaited collegiate farce Damsels in Distress, his lead damsel can intone darkly about how at elite Seven Oaks college, "an atmosphere of male barbarism predominates," and we are meant to think the better of her for saying it. It's not that Stillman is trying to get away with some dire, Tom Wolfe-ian jeremiad about declining standards. Instead, he seems to want to upend the school-set comedy with his own brand of highly literate, quasi-conservative thoughtfulness (characters intoning about how much more interesting homosexuality used to be before wider societal acceptance, and so on) and splice it with a crisp and pastel-hued surrealism. It's Dadaism for the preppie set.

There are few filmmakers working today with the ability to both drill deep into primal emotions and maintain an artful perspective on their wracking turmoil; France's Mia Hansen-Løve is one of them. In Goodbye, First Love, her ode to the foolish obstinacy of young love, writer/director Hansen-Løve shows -- in bright colors and dark, gusting squalls -- what it is like to be swept away by overwhelming, and often unrealistic, feelings. Certainly, her teenagers and young adults here flirt not just with each other but with extreme ridiculousness. But it's a ridiculousness that's universally understood.