THE LOBSTER

At nearly any given moment in its two-hour running length, Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster has the power to make you laugh or cry. If you choose to laugh out of derision or cry with frustration, that’s your business, and it’d be hard not to empathize with either reaction. If, however, you find yourself on Lanthimos’ and his movie’s shared, absurdist-deadpan wavelength, you might find the Greek writer/director’s latest tragicomedy – and first English-language one – both extraordinarily funny and almost embarrassingly moving. Never before has the mere sight of a Shetland pony made me chuckle, or well up once I registered exactly what it was I was chuckling at.

X-MEN: APOCALYPSE

Everyone knows that when the world is imperiled in a comic-book movie, the world is never truly in peril; it’s not like costumed characters, after the Earth’s destruction, are gonna take their in-fighting to Mars for the inevitable sequel. But despite its foreboding title, the stakes in director Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse are particularly low, given that the action takes place in 1983, a full 17 years before the events of Singer’s 2000 X-Men. Clearly, as evidenced by the franchise forebears, Michael Fassbender’s Magneto and James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier will survive the climactic devastation, considering they still need to turn into Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. Cyclops and Storm and Jean Grey are all on safe ground, as are Mystique and Beast and Nightcrawler. The winged bad guy Angel can probably go, unless he finds a way to remain a teenager for two-decades-plus and turn into 2006’s good-guy Angel. But are the filmmakers really going to kill off recent recruit Quicksilver when, as personified by Evan Peters, he’s been the best reason for the series’ last two films to exist?

MONEY MONSTER

In Money Monster’s opening sequence, you can sense director Jodie Foster and her cast going for the slick, workplace-comedy pizzazz of Aaron Sorkin’s walk-and-talks in The West Wing and Steve Jobs and not quite getting there. George Clooney, as the braying host of a Mad Money-esque financial-advice program, alternately smooth-talks and ignores technicians and guests minutes before air time, and Julia Roberts, as the show’s director, trails him with exasperated good humor. Yet something feels off. You recognize the jokes as jokes, but because they’re delivered with such over-calculated disregard and nobody appears emotionally connected to their dialogue, they’re not very funny. However, right after the live broadcast begins, a young man with a gun and bomb-lined jacket interrupts the proceedings, and threatens to kill the host unless his demands are met. And then the oddest thing happens: Money Monster starts to become really funny.

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!

In the first minutes of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, freshman pitcher Jake (Blake Jenner), at the tail end of a 1980 summer, arrives at his new college digs: a frat-less frat house populated entirely by fellow members of his baseball team. Upon entering, he walks to the kitchen, and the moment he gets there, the kitchen’s ceiling cracks and crunches and ever-so-slightly caves in; the guys upstairs, it turns out, have been filling a waterbed that’s clearly heavier than the second floor will allow. They come down to survey the damage, which is considerable. They marvel at how bad things almost got. And then they pop open some beers and move on to other matters.