Reviews by Richard Roeper or Roger Moore, unless otherwise noted.

Heads Up

“Almost Ablaze” — Teton Gravity Research presents “Almost Ablaze,” a global odyssey combining state-of-the-art cinematography and the most progressive riding on the planet. Experience a new level of sensory overload as each athlete is wired for sound, immersing the audience completely in the moment. The film screens at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Tower Theatre in Bend. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 day of show. Tickets for children (ages 16 and under) are $5 (at the door only). (no MPAA rating)

— Synopsis from Teton Gravity Research

“Annabelle” — She terrified you in “The Conjuring,” but this is where it all began for Annabelle. Capable of unspeakable evil, the actual doll exists locked up in an occult museum in Connecticut — visited only by a priest who blesses her twice a month. The supernatural thriller begins before the evil was unleashed. “Annabelle” stars Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton and Alfre Woodard. The film opens Oct. 3 with a few early screenings Thursday. (R)

— Synopsis from Warner Bros. Pictures.

The Gadabout Film Festival — Now in its 12th year, the independent short film festival is currently on tour. This year’s topic is “Speechless,” and all of the films contain no dialogue. The Gadabout Film Festival will screen at 7 p.m. Monday at the Volcanic Theatre Pub in Bend. Cost is $5. (no MPAA rating)

— Synopsis from festival’s website

“Gone Girl” — Directed by David Fincher and based on the global best-seller by Gillian Flynn, “Gone Girl” unearths the secrets at the heart of a modern marriage. On the occasion of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) reports that his beautiful wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), has gone missing. Under pressure from the police and a growing media frenzy, Nick’s portrait of a blissful union begins to crumble. Soon his lies, deceits and strange behavior have everyone asking the same dark question: Did Nick Dunne kill his wife? The film opens Oct. 3 with a few early screenings Thursday. (R)

— Synopsis from 20th Century Fox

“Gone With the Wind” — In celebration of its 75th anniversary, “Gone With the Wind” returns to the big screen. The film is fully remastered and includes a specially produced introduction by Turner Classic Movie host Robert Osborne. The film will screen at 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday and Wednesday at the Regal Old Mill Stadium 16 & IMAX in Bend. Cost is $12.50. 245 minutes. (PG)

— Synopsis from Fathom Events

“Left Behind” — Without warning, millions of people around the globe simply vanish. All that remains are their clothes and belongings … and an overwhelming sense of terror. The vanishings cause unmanned vehicles to crash and burn. Emergency forces everywhere are devastated. Gridlock, riots and looting overrun the cities. And there is no one to help or provide the answers. In an instant, the earth is plunged into darkness. Nicolas Cage stars in this story of the Rapture. The film opens Oct. 3 with a few early screenings Thursday. (PG-13)

— Synopsis from film’s website

“Tim Rice’s From Here to Eternity” — Adapted from James Jones’ classic 1951 novel, Tim Rice’s breathtaking new musical is a gripping tale of illicit love and army life set in 1941 Hawaii, immediately prior to the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Having recently transferred to the base, troubled Army Private Prewitt falls for kind-hearted escort club girl Lorene. Simultaneously his platoon sergeant, Warden, embarks on a dangerous affair with his captain’s wife, Karen — setting the lives of both men on a course they cannot control. Filmed specifically for movie theaters across two nights at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre, this event will provide cinema audiences across the county with an exclusive first look at Tim Rice’s acclaimed production before its 2015 Broadway debut. In addition, audiences will be treated to behind-the-scenes footage from the Shaftesbury and an interview with Rice. The event screens at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Regal Old Mill Stadium 16 & IMAX in Bend. Cost is $18. 155 minutes. (no MPAA rating)

— Synopsis from Fathom Events

“Untrammeled” and “The Meaning of Wild” — Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, the Deschutes National Forest and Discover Your Forest will present a double header of “Untrammeled” and “The Meaning of Wild.” The films will screen at 6 tonight (doors open at 5 p.m.) at McMenamins Old St. Francis School in Bend. Cost is $5. (no MPAA rating).

What’s New

“The Boxtrolls” — There’s something about stop motion 3-D animation — the not-quite-real textures of skin and hair, the quite real cloth and metal, the subtle gloomy lighting effects — that says “spooky.” All the best animated films with a hint of Halloween have been stop motion animation or digital efforts that duplicate that hand-molded model look — “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Coraline.” “The Boxtrolls” is from Laika, the studio that made “ParaNorman” and “Coraline.” This adaptation of an Alan Snow novel (“Here Be Monsters!”) is inventive and fanciful and almost certainly the best animated film of the year. It’s spooky and funny and a little twisted, with a little social commentary in the “ParaNorman” style. Start to finish, it’s a delight. The film is available locally in 3-D. Editor’s Note: Morgan Hay from Laika will be attending a special screening of “The Boxtrolls” in Sisters. He will bring some of the puppets from the film and will share how stop-motion animation works. The special event begins at 2:30 p.m. Saturday at the Sisters Movie House. Rating: Three and a half stars. 97 minutes. (PG) — Moore

“The Equalizer” — This ridiculous and audacious thriller features some gruesomely creative violence, but it’s equally memorable for the small, gritty moments. And most of all, it’s got Denzel Washington going for it. This film is available locally in IMAX. Rating: Three and a half stars. 128 minutes. (R) — Roeper

“The Trip to Italy” — It took decades of biting, testy collaborations and the better part of two road-trip movies, but Rob Brydon finally makes his pal/sparring partner Steve Coogan crack up, laughing, in “The Trip to Italy.” The formula of “The Trip” is repeated — two actors, one semi-famous with a reputation for unpleasantness, the other even less famous — off on a dining tour, riffing, debating, insulting and driving. But this time, they’re sent to Italy instead of the north of England. Sunshine, local wines, pasta and winding roads along the Amalfi Coast, instead of gray skies, imported wines, wintry foods and pastoral backroads. Rating: Three and a half stars. 108 minutes. (no MPAA rating) — Moore

Still showing

“Boyhood” — Director Richard Linklater filmed the core cast of this family drama over the course of 12 years, and the result is a living time capsule so pitch-perfect, the experience of watching it is almost unsettling. It’s an unforgettable, elegant epic that captures the arc of a young life perhaps better than any previous American movie. Ever. Rating: Four stars. 160 minutes. (R) — Roeper

“Dolphin Tale 2” — You might have thought “Dolphin Tale,” the sleeper hit kids’ film of a few falls back, was a complete, compact and uplifting story that didn’t really need a second act. And if so, you were on the money. A fictionalized account of the true story of Winter, a badly-injured dolphin, rescued by the Clearwater (Fla.) Aquarium, and how a prosthetic tail was fabricated for her allowing her to swim and survive and inspire veterans, cancer survivors and accident victims of all ages with her pluck, “Dolphin Tale” covered all the bases. So “Dolphin Tale 2” feels, in its best moments, like little more than “Winter’s Greatest Hits.” The dolphin is in trouble again, the embattled aquarium faces the threat of losing custody of the dolphins it is rehabilitating, and Morgan Freeman shows up in the third act to complain about how tiny a baby dolphin they’re caring for is. Rating: Two stars. 104 minutes. (PG) — Moore

“The Drop” — Tom Hardy stars as a quiet lunk serving drinks at the bar run by his cousin (James Gandolfini), a former loan shark shoved aside by Chechen mobsters. Although there are a few scenes of bloodshed, “The Drop” is much more about the nature of violent men than the brief explosions of violence that can define an entire life. There’s so much to admire here. Rating: Three and a half stars. 106 minutes. (R) — Roeper

“The Expendables 3” — Here we have some of the most beloved action stars of the last half-century — from Han Solo to the Terminator to Rambo — and they’re mired in a live-action cartoon with witless dialogue, a nothing plot and endless action sequences. “The Expendables 3” is proof a movie can be exceedingly loud and excruciatingly dull. Rating: One star. 126 minutes. (PG-13) — Roeper

“Frank” — Some movies are built for mass appeal, and some aim smaller, “festival films” they’re called. “Frank” feels like a “festival film” aimed squarely at one festival, the one that is the setting of its third act. Here’s an eccentric tragicomedy, with music, built to play like gangbusters at Austin’s South by Southwest music-movie fanboy/fangirl festival. The title character is a singer/songwriter who performs and lives his entire life wearing a gigantic plastic head over his skull. The fact that the great Michael Fassbender is the talking, fuming, rambling and singing man-behind-the-mask makes this wildly improbable film all the more intriguing. Rating: Three stars. 100 minutes. (R) — Moore

“The Giver” — The beloved children’s novel by Lois Lowry becomes a movie starring Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep about a supposedly utopian society where everyone is comfortably numb to love and pain. For a story designed to touch our emotions and remind us of all the wonderful highs and all the devastating lows of a life undiluted, it’s not nearly as involving as you might expect. Rating: Two stars. 94 minutes. (PG-13) — Roeper

“Guardians of the Galaxy” — Chris Pratt plays the leader of a misfit band of anti-heroes, including a cynical raccoon and a walking tree, in this refreshing confection of entertainment, a mostly lighthearted and self-referential comic-book movie with loads of whiz-bang action, some laugh-out-loud moments and a couple of surprisingly beautiful and touching scenes as well. Rating: Three and a half stars. 122 minutes. (PG-13) — Roeper

“Hercules” — It was a bra-less age, when men wore skirts of leather, planted their feet and commenced to speechifying. About heroic deeds, which they made up, or at least exaggerated — in Greek. This is the world of “Hercules,” a B-movie with a hint of “300-Lite” about it. Directed by Brett Ratner and starring Dwayne Johnson, it’s a brief, violent and narrowly-focused tale of a Hercules utterly removed from myth. This is Hercules as hired warrior, Herc the Merc, an incredible Greek hulk whose “half-man, half-god” story is declaimed, loudly, to one and all by his brash press agent of a nephew, Iolaus (Reece Ritchie of “Prince of Persia”). What Ratner has turned out here is a myth with all the mythology stripped from it. This 98-minute film has three decent battles in it, and a long training sequence where the Thracians are prepared for battle. Why make a Hercules movie about that? Rating: One and a half stars. 98 minutes. (PG-13) — Moore

“The Hundred-Foot Journey” — The culinary culture clash comedy “The Hundred-Foot Journey” dawdles, like a meal that drags on and on because the waiter is too busy texting to bother bringing you the check. Based on the Richard Morais novel, it’s a low-flame romance and low-heat feud about a family of Indian restaurateurs who set up their spicy, gaudy and noisy eatery across the road from a posh, Michelin-endorsed, haute cuisine establishment in rural France. This “Hundred-Foot Journey” seems to end several steps shy of completion, a bland romantic comedy where the actors don’t show us their characters’ love for each other or the food that supposedly is their reason for living. They merely talk a good game. Rating: Two stars. 121 minutes. (PG) — Moore

“If I Stay” — After a car accident, high school senior Mia (Chloë Grace Moretz) lives both in a coma and as a spiritual alter ego looking on. The movie plays like a high school version of “Ghost,” only less involving, less romantic and a little creepier. Rating: One and a half stars. 107 minutes. (PG-13) — Roeper

“Let’s Be Cops” — The laughs are loud, lewd and low in “Let’s Be Cops,” a spoof of cop “buddy pictures” that is pretty much the definition of “an August comedy.” The last month of summer is typically a dumping ground for titles studios don’t have high hopes for. Sometimes, that’s due to the lack of marketable stars. Sometimes, they’re just too hard to market period. And sometimes, if they’re comedies, it’s because the belly laughs are few and far between. All of those apply here. Jake Johnson of TV’s “New Girl” is paired up with another generation of Wayans — Damon Wayans Jr. — in this farce about two Ohio losers losing their way through Los Angeles, a tough place to be a single guy with zero status. Rating: One and a half stars. 104 minutes. (R) — Moore

“Maleficent” — “Maleficent” is an admittedly great-looking, sometimes creepy, often plodding and utterly unconvincing re-imagining of “Sleeping Beauty” as a female empowerment metaphor. Angelina Jolie looks great, but she delivers a one-note performance as the villain from the 1959 Disney classic. Sometimes it’s best to let Sleeping Beauty lie. Rating: One and a half stars. 97 minutes. (PG) — Roeper

“The Maze Runner” — This month’s “young adults save the future” film franchise is “The Maze Runner,” an indifferent quest tale about boys trapped in a gigantic maze with no idea how they got there. A teen boy (Dylan O’Brien) wakes up, screaming, on a freight elevator soaring up to a field, where it promptly drops its “greenie” or newby into a clatch of rustic boys his own age. He doesn’t know his name or anything else other than the English language. But the other lads set him straight. This is “Glades,” the glade. Some boys are “Builders,” some are “Runners.” They run through the vast walled maze that surrounds their encampment each day, coming home just before the huge walls creak shut on gigantic gears each night. The actors aren’t bad, with “Nanny McPhee” vet Thomas Brodie-Sangster standing out by being as skinny as a teen stuck in the woods, forced to fend for himself, and O’Brien, Aml Ameen, Will Poulter and Ki Hong Lee having decent screen presence. But all these literary underpinnings do not disguise a blasé, emotion-starved script, dialogue that ineptly repeats what the images have already shown us is happening, stagey scenes where characters poke each other in the chest to keep them from storming out of the camera frame. And the resolution to this puzzle is so botched it’s insulting, as if they’re daring us to laugh at the notion that this is merely “the beginning.” Rating: One and a half stars. 112 minutes. (PG-13) — Moore

“A Most Wanted Man” — In his last starring role, Philip Seymour Hoffman is nothing short of brilliant as a world-weary German intelligence operator on the trail of a man who escaped from a Russian prison. Based on a John le Carre novel, this is one of the best spy thrillers in recent years. Rating: Four stars. 121 minutes. (R) — Roeper

“No Good Deed” — Screen Gems ignores the Ray Rice controversy and national conversation about violence against women with “No Good Deed,” a brutal thriller about, you guessed it, a “malignant narcissist” committing all sorts of violence against women. The team behind “Obsessed” serves up Idris Elba as an escaped convict savagely menacing Taraji P. Henson and assorted other females in assaults so savage you’d think they happened in a casino elevator. Rating: One and a half stars. 84 minutes. (PG-13) — Moore

“Planes: Fire & Rescue” — “Planes: Fire & Rescue” is roughly twice as good as its predecessor, “Planes,” which was so story-and-laugh starved it would have given “direct-to-video” a bad name. Yes, there was nowhere to go but up. The sequel’s story is about something — Dusty the racing plane (voiced by Dane Cook) learns to be a S.E.A.T., a Single Engine Ariel Tanker, a fire-fighting plane. For very young children, it offers animated suspense and lovely and exciting animated aerial footage of planes and helicopters fighting forest fires in the American West. The characters are, to a one, stiffs. But bringing in Ed Harris (as a no-nonsense trainer/helicopter), Hal Holbrook (voicing an ancient fire truck) and Wes Studi (a Native American Sikorsky Sky Crane chopper) classes things up. A couple of flight sequences take us over majestic deserts and amber waves of grain — beautiful animated scenery. Other than that, there’s not much to this. Rating: Two stars. 83 minutes. (PG) — Moore

“Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” — The multiple storylines in this dark, exhilarating sequel are punctuated by bursts of creative violence as booze-soaked, world-weary anti-heroes obsess over taking down a longtime enemy or protecting a temptress in distress. There’s a lot of movie going on here. Rating: Three and a half stars. 102 minutes. (R) — Roeper

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” — The “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” earn a Michael Bay-produced 3-D re-boot that spares no expense in special effects and spares no decibel in the volume that is the soundtrack to all their new mayhem. These digitally-animated super-sized turtles have real-world presence and weight, stumping onto the scene like teenagers who haven’t learned to do anything quietly. Their brawls with their trigger-happy foes from the Foot Clan are a blur of body blows and bullets. Their wise-cracks are up-to-date, their love of pizza unabated. Their human friend is a fluff-friendly TV reporter played by Megan Fox. So yeah, Bay gave this production the full “Transformers” treatment. It’s entirely too violent, but teenaged turtles armed with ninja swords, knives and nunchucks have always been violent, from their origins in the 1980s comic books to assorted TV series and the films of the ‘90s and an animated flop of 2007. The action beats are bigger and better than they’ve ever been in a Ninja Turtle film — brawls, shootouts, a snowy car-and-truck chase with big explosions and what not.

But in between those scenes is an awful lot of chatter and exposition. Rating: Two stars. 100 minutes. (PG-13) — Moore

“This Is Where I Leave You” — You’re going to gather Jane Fonda, Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver and other greats in the same room, and you’re going to make them engage in clichés? Across the board, I like the actors in this movie so much better than I like — or care about — the characters they play in this film, a family version of “The Big Chill.” Rating: Two stars. 103 minutes. (R) — Roeper

“Tusk” — Writer-director Kevin Smith has created one of the creepiest movies I’ve ever seen. It’s as if “Misery” met “The Human Centipede” on the corner of Grotesque and Haunting. It’s a movie I never want to see again, but I can’t deny its lasting effect. Rating: Three stars. 102 minutes. (R) — Roeper

“A Walk Among the Tombstones” — In Scott Frank’s stylish and smart thriller, Liam Neeson plays Matthew Scudder, an alcoholic private investigator hired to find a drug dealer’s kidnapped wife. Scudder spends a lot more time working out his demons than he does drawing his gun, and that makes him all the more interesting. Rating: Three stars. 114 minutes. (R) — Roeper

“When the Game Stands Tall” — It’s the latest of that peculiar sub-genre of sports films, where filmmakers bend over backwards to make a perennial powerhouse football factory look like an underdog. These stories, about a Permian High in Texas (“Friday Night Lights”) or T.C. Williams in Virginia (“Remember the Titans”) look at status as a burden, and claim to be about “more than a game,” even as they build toward their by-the-book “Big Game” finale. “When the Game” varies the formula by being faith-based, about a pious coach (Jim Caviezel) who talks about building character as much as he worries about blocking schemes. And for all the naked manipulation of the music and the story that builds toward an only slightly unexpected climax, “When the Game Stands Tall” never delivers that lump in the throat that a “Rudy” or “We Are Marshall” or “Friday Night Lights” managed. It’s as if everybody involved knows how less fulfilling it is to root for the favorites and not the underdogs. Rating: Two stars. 115 minutes. (PG) — Moore

“The Zero Theorem” — “The Zero Theorem” is director Terry Gilliam’s latest dazzling dose of sci-fi eye candy, and the third film in what some are calling his “Brazil” trilogy. Like “Brazil” and “Twelve Monkeys,” it’s about human connections in a technologically warped world rendered lonely and unlivable by the lack of those connections. Christoph Waltz is Qohen Leth, a bald loner who is sure he’s being worked to death. He pounds away at his keyboard in some vague, vain pursuit of “catching up” on his job. That entails using “memory vials” handed to him through a sliding panel on his work station as he 3-D models the problems that these vials somehow are related to. The film also stars Matt Damon, Melanie Thierry, Tilda Swinton, David Thewlis and Ben Whishaw. Rating: Two and a half stars. 107 minutes. (R) — Moore