Writer-director Sophia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring” is a fascinating exposé of American celebrity and consumer culture. The film is based on Nancy Jo Sales’ terrific Vanity Fair article, “The Suspect Wore Louboutins,” and it focuses on the real-life story of several teens and young adults who robbed celebrity homes in exclusive Los Angeles neighborhoods. In the film, the youth use the Internet to determine when Hollywood stars are away from home and plunder their places at will. 

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.

Filmcraft: Directing is composed of 16 interview-profiles of internationally acclaimed filmmakers. Goodridge also devotes five Legacy chapters to “innovators and pioneers in the filmmaking field.” The directors he chooses “to represent the first 115 years of cinema” are the usual suspects: Kurosawa, Bergman, Ford, Hitchcock, and Godard — the filmmakers whose films you wind up watching eventually, dutifully. 

Viewers who demand strict realism from their movies will have big problems with “Man on a Ledge,” an intense thriller about a person pushed to the breaking point. Sam Worthington plays Nick Cassidy, a former cop convicted of a diamond theft that he swears he didn’t perpetrate. After an unlikely escape from prison, he makes his way to a lofty, Manhattan hotel, climbs out a window and threatens to throw himself to the street below.