For a movie that looks gorgeous, evokes memories of a cinematic classic and boasts a bundle of star power, “Oz the Great and Powerful” is oddly flat. It’s not that the film is terrible; it’s just not as good as it could or should have been. Based on the “Oz” novels of L. Frank Baum, the story is set decades before events portrayed in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.”  That makes the project a prequel of sorts, and director Sam Raimi knew audiences would compare his work to the classic preceding it.

There’s nothing funny about real-life identity theft, but that didn’t stop screenwriter Craig Mazin and director Seth Gordon from attempting to milk laughs from the subject. In “Identity Thief,” the pair tell the story of Sandy Patterson (Jason Bateman), a finance executive who gets swindled by a shameless female grifter named Diana (Melissa McCarthy). Diana starts by stealing Sandy’s unisex name. Then, she runs up masses of credit card debt, ruins his reputation and triggers a warrant for his arrest. 

Stories We Tell, a new documentary by filmmaker Sarah Atwood, opens with this quote offered by her father, Michael, whose writings serve as the film’s narration. What follows is a methodical investigation into the life of one woman, her mother, from the perspectives of an entire family. Through their observations and experiences, we are presented with a fractured image of a dynamic personality, loved by all but known by few: Diane.

It’s hard to tell if Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s contemporary re-imagining of Henry James’ 1897 novel is too ambitious, or not ambitious enough; either way, the promising film features unavoidable plot holes large enough to fall straight into. There’s no question that Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan are both superb actors, but as little Maisie’s inept, spoiled parents, not even their combined power can fill these empty characterizations. 

The marketing for “Dark Skies” makes a big deal out of producer Jason Blum’s involvement in the horror hits “Paranormal Activity” and “Insidious.” Emphasizing this makes sense because the three movies share the same structure, which involves placing characters in unsettling situations and slowly intensifying the danger.  The focus in “Dark Skies” is on Daniel and Lacy Barrett (Josh Hamilton and Keri Russell), a financially struggling couple whose problems multiply when strange things begin happening in their home. 

A film robs you of imagining the world of a novel as you want to, while a novel cannot as accurately capture the televisual world we now live in. Part of Gatsby’s appeal is its depiction of a time when the American dream was a promising ideal, when the U.S. was not, as Horace from Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (2010) puts it, a “fat, demented pimp.” The Great Gatsby was written when the U.S. was on the upswing, and now that the nation is in decline, it makes sense that there will be nostalgia for the ‘good-old days’. 

It would be nice to see Jason Statham try something more demanding than his standard, tough-guy role. Still, he has so thoroughly perfected the part that it’s easy to enjoy his performances. In “Parker,” Statham goes back to the well, playing the title character: a professional thief with an interesting code of ethics. In an early scene, Parker says he won’t steal from people who can’t afford it, won’t hurt people who don’t deserve it and always follows through on a promise. 

Kuklinski killed well over 100 people as a contract killer for the DeCavalcante and Gambino crime families in New Jersey and New York from the late 1960s until his arrest in 1986. He earned his nickname “The Iceman” by freezing the bodies of his victims for months before dumping them, confusing the time of death and keeping the police at bay for over a decade. His wife and children knew nothing of his “career” until the AFT bust. 

There have been many failed attempts to bring On the Road to the silver screen by U.S. filmmakers. Francis Ford Coppola, who purchased the rights to the screenplay in 1979, tried several times to adapt the work into film, but his efforts never materialized. “I never knew how to do it,” he remarked when Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles accepted the cumbersome task of filming the unfilmable. It was Salles (best known for the Motorcycle Diaries, another road film) that Coppola finally trusted to make On the Road a reality, with a screenplay developed by José Rivera. 

“Cloud Atlas” is a film for a particular type of moviegoer: the sort who like to carefully deconstruct a picture, laboring over the meaning of each moment. Although that may sound like work, the effort is rewarded because “Cloud Atlas” is littered with symbolism and ideas that go largely undiscovered after a single viewing. The movie not only tells six individual tales, it tells them using the same actors.