THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

Antoine Fuqua’s remake of 1960’s The Magnificent Seven, itself a remake of Akira Kurusawa’s Seven Samurai, isn’t a very good movie. If you’re able to ignore that, however, you can still have a very good time; given the assembled talent, this vengeance-minded Western is practically a triumph of screen charisma and the fine art of iconic posing over middling concerns such as depth of character and historical realism. You may not believe a minute of it, but you may be grinning too hard to care.

SNOWDEN

When his identity first became public in June of 2013, former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden resembled the real-life hero of a real-life Oliver Stone movie – a well-scrubbed, nerdishly handsome government opponent and champion of truth in the vein of JFK’s Jim Garrison. It seems somehow inevitable, then, that the famed whistleblower would indeed find himself the focus of a Stone-directed bio-pic, and the chief pleasures of Snowden lie in the beautiful match-up of subject matter and creative force; this truly feels like a movie Oliver Stone was born to make. Perhaps it would’ve felt like even more of one had the film not already been made – in 2014, as Laura Poitras’ exceptional documentary Citizenfour. But as unnecessary movies go, this new work is a strong and sober one, with the added benefit of revealing Joseph Gordon-Levitt to be a surprisingly uncanny mimic.

Music

Jackie Greene

The Redstone Room

Wednesday, September 28, 7:30 p.m.

Americana and roots-rock musician Jackie Greene will perform with his ensemble at Davenport’s Redstone Room on September 28, and in a review of his most recent album Back to Birth, GratefulMusic.com praised the artist’s “ability to move from one instrument to another as he has done during shows since he was too young to vote or enlist in our military.” That’s right: The 35-year-old headliner was a multi-instrumentalist back in high school, and even self-released his debut Rusty Nails before he earned his diploma. Talk about Greene initiative.

THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS

Romantic dramas for adults have been so infrequent this millennium that it sometimes seems they appear only when studios feel the need for another generally laughable Nicholas Sparks adaptation, which makes it hard, in The Light Between Oceans, to know whether to swoon or chortle when – honest to God – a woman accepts a marriage proposal by saying, “Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!” (I was sure that line had been put out to pasture after the demise of vaudeville.) Yet writer/director Derek Cianfrance is nothing if not sincere, occasionally to his detriment, and his take on novelist M.L. Stedman’s period romance is serious-minded, thematically resonant, and, at times, emotionally devastating in ways that the Sparks oeuvre almost never is. It’s the film’s second-half plot contrivances, and the unfortunate arm-twisting that accompanies them, that routinely bring Sparks to mind.