The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel gets a lot of mileage from the sheer cuteness of its aging English actors. Hot on the heels of the very successful BBC series Downton Abbey, Hotel features two of that series’ stars in roles that share much with their television characters. Maggie Smith plays Muriel, a disdainful and snobbish woman in need of hip replacement surgery, and Penelope Wilton plays Jean, the killjoy wife of a submissive retiree with meager savings. She and her husband Douglas (played delightfully, as always, by Bill Nighy) and Muriel and several other elderly Brits find themselves, for various reasons, traveling to the newly opened eponymous hotel in India. Muriel is compelled to go there by the promise of more rapid surgery while Jean and Douglas simply can’t afford a decent retirement in England. Evelyn (Judi Dench), recently widowed and also under financial strain, makes the trip for adventure’s sake, while Madge has her hopes set on winning the heart of a wealthy widower. Tom Wilkinson plays a solicitor who abruptly quits his practice to go to India on a personal quest that is revealed as the movie unfolds.

There’s a bit of a Fantasy Island vibe as these very different individuals with very different motives are thrown together in a very foreign environment. (Yes, there’s something very “very” about this movie.) It is not giving away much to say that some find what they are looking for and others do not. In spite of the large number of principal characters, the movie does not feel fragmented or episodic because their stories do intertwine with each other. Also linking them is the struggle of the hotel’s young owner, played by Dev Patel, who is struggling to raise the finances to resurrect his father’s abandoned hotel (which is certainly “Exotic,” but not really “Best” in any category) and to manage a romance against his mother’s wishes. It’s a very (there it is again) enjoyable visit with some charmingly funny and well, very British, people.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World begins with the grim news that humanity’s last hope for survival, a mission to intercept a 70-mile-wide asteroid on a collision course with Earth, has failed. The asteroid will hit the Earth in three weeks. Allow me an astronomical aside at this point. An impactor that large, roughly 10 times larger and 1000 times more energetic than the dinosaur-killer of 65 million years ago, would absolutely spell not just the end of civilization but of almost all life on Earth. A global firestorm would do the bulk of the damage, followed by starvation of pretty much everything else. Some tiny creatures would likely survive in some deeply buried or protected habitat. Perhaps worms at the ocean floor and bacteria in the oceans or underground would survive. But we would not. An impactor of that size would have to be a cometary (icy) object from the outer solar system as all asteroids that size have been discovered and none poses any potential threat of impact for the immediate future.

As soon as Dodge (Steve Carrell) and his wife hear this news over their car radio, his wife gives him one horrified look, then turns and dashes from the car and runs away without another glance back. It’s a perfect introduction to what the movie is about. His wife is more terrified of spending her last days with Dodge than she is, it seems, about only having three weeks to live. Not that Dodge is a bad guy. He’s a sweetly ordinary and unambitious insurance salesman who finds himself suddently alone at the brink of extinction. Chance throws him together with his neighbor, Penny (Keira Knightley), and they head off in search of Dodge’s high school sweetheart. She is not the one that got away, he tells Penny, but “the first one that got away.” Your heart has to go out to the guy.

The backdrop to their road trip is the broad range of reactions to the impending end of the world. The screenplay by Lorene Scafaria (who also directed) does a nice job of showing the full spectrum, from hard-core drug use at parties and orgies, to riots, to the policeman who unwaveringly follows the letter of the law. Assassins offer their services to people who want to die an unpredictable death. Others line up to be baptised in the ocean. A newscaster continues reporting the disintegration of society until the last day.

Penny is impulsive, quirky and emotional. Dodge, unlike his name, is steady. I felt an academic interest in seeing how different people reacted to their situation. The end of the world brings an entirely new level to the question of “what is important” beyond the more familiar terrain of movies about people with terminal illnesses. We all know (or at least have a strong suspicion) that we may one day die, but we expect that life and the human experiment will continue. For me, the hope that I have played some role in furthering that experiment, is a big part of what keeps me going. And chocolate. But if the experiment ends with me, what do I do? I found I did not want to give this hypothetical very much consideration.

Sigh. Prometheus is, at first blush, a fairly standard sci-fi thriller (with superior visual effects) that only seems to disappoint perhaps because of the outsized expectations attached to it. But then the more you think about it, the less it disappoints for not being very scary, and the more it disappoints because it’s filled with a lot of nonsense. Alien and Aliens were gripping, thrilling, scary, and engrossing in large part because they were so simple and focused. They were about escaping with your life. Everyone in the movie wanted to do it, and everyone in the audience was on board. We would do (or at least we hope we would) everything that Ellen Ripley and her shipmates did to kill the monsters and get back home. This makes us emotionally invested in the characters and makes all the camera tricks, scary music, and terrifying alien beasties really, really – well – scary. One thing I learned from Prometheus is that when the heroes in a scary movie do really dumb things I don’t care as much when they get eviscerated. If I had a nickel for every time one scientist told another scientist (quite sensibly) “don’t touch that” in this movie and the guy went ahead and touched it anyway I’d have close to a quarter. Guess what happens when they touch the thing they oh-so-obviously shouldn’t be touching. Sigh.

Okay, so what is really going on in this movie? Well first the stuff that doesn’t require a spoiler alert. A giant bald albino disintegrates himself into a waterfall somewhere, releasing his DNA into a river. Then two young archaeologists in love discover a cave painting of a giant pointing at six dots in the sky and a trillionaire finances a deep-space mission with the young archaeologists on board to go see what’s up on one of those six dots. Their theory, as well as that of the trillionaire who paid for the Prometheus expedition, is that this race of ancient astronauts are the genetic engineers of humans. One character, at least, is as astonished by this claim as I was. He asks Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (the archaeologists) if they have any evidence to support throwing out “two hundred years of Darwinism”. Let’s put aside for the moment that it’s not 200 years of “Darwinism” (which makes the theory of evolution sound like a cult) but rather 3.8 billion years of accumulated detailed forensic evidence showing that all life on Earth is related to each other and is 3.8 billion years old, not 40,000 years old (the posited time that the alien “Engineers” created humans). Putting that aside, Shaw’s answer to this question is even more disturbing. She has no evidence. “It is what I choose to believe,” she says. The last time I checked the only place where belief trumps reality is Fox News.

How does this all fit in with killer aliens? It doesn’t, really. The screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof (who cut his nonsense-writing chops on Lost and wrote the upcoming Star Trek sequel, sigh) makes a connection, but it is forced. In one brief bit of exposition the captain of Prometheus (who, along with almost everyone else on the ship apparently signed up to go on a deep-space mission for many years without having any idea what the mission was) explains why they are being attacked by aliens instead of having deep philosophical discussions with our genetic engineers. It’s an alien movie that has been shoe-horned into a sappy story about human origins that cloaks hokey pseudo-science (Erich Von Däniken, anyone?) with the trappings of science. It’s a poor fit. While there are some nasty-looking aliens and one excellent sequence in which Shaw has to operate on herself, most of the time we’re distracted from being scared by wondering why there are killer aliens on the planet of our creators, why everyone keeps touching the oozing black goo, and why anyone thought it would be a good idea to turn a space monster thriller into whatever it is this is.

Part documentary, part drama, and part comedy, Bernie is entertaining in a faintly disturbing way. One might find this movie more enjoyable if seeing it without knowing anything about it, so I’ll give a spoiler alert now. I don’t reveal anything that is not revealed in the movie’s trailer, nevertheless it would be a surprise to those who see it un-forewarned.

While we laugh at the reactions of the people in a small Texas town to the murder of one of their neighbors, a faint voice in the dark recesses tries to remind us that we are laughing about an actual death and, perhaps more troubling, a certain casual acceptance of murder. It reminds me of another Texas story in which a judge explains to a man why one can get away with killing another human, but if you kill another man’s cow you will not escape punishment. “The reason,” the judge says, “is that there is no such thing as a cow that needs killing.” Not so with people. The person who needs killing in Bernie is Marjorie Nugent, a mean widow played by Shirley Maclaine.

Following the death of her husband, Bernie (Jack Black, excellent in this role) befriends Marjorie who, being generally mean, has no friends. Bernie, on the other hand, being nice, is able to put up with Marjorie and eventually becomes her ambiguously gay male girlfriend. They go on first class vacations around the world together and even get couples’ massages and pedicures. Bernie, though, is unphased by her wealth and continues to live in a dumpy little house and drive a dumpy big car. But Marjorie’s all-consuming selfishness and bad temper eventually snaps even Bernie’s mild manners.

Matthew McConnaughey plays the district attorney who prosecutes Bernie for murder. But the trial is the denouement, not the center of the story. Director Richard Linklater, who co-wrote the screenplay with journalist Skip Hollandsworth who covered the original true story of Bernie, mixes traditional dramatic filmmaking with documentary interviews with the actual residents of the town of Carthage Texas who knew Bernie and Marjorie. These interviews provide many of the film’s laughs. They are not just colorful renderings, but genuine insights into the true nature of two singular individuals and the nature of right and wrong.

Charlize Theron and Kristen Stewart square off as the wicked queen Ravenna and Snow White in this uneven adaptation of the German fairy tale. The idea of the movie is engaging and fun: take a 19th-century fairy-tale and update it for modern sensibilities and tell it with the cinematic tools of the 21st century. In other words, make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs cool. It partially succeeds.

Chris Hemsworth (Thor) plays the huntsman sent into the dark forest to capture Snow White who escapes Ravenna’s castle just before having her heart ripped out. He’s a bit too Thorish to be a believable leading man for Stewart’s slender and pensive Snow White. More on that later. Ravenna gets a bit of a tragic touch-up in this telling. She is driven to kill Snow White (Yes, that really is her name in the movie; should I call her “Snow” for short? I didn’t think so.) not by jealousy but by self-preservation. The nasty magic that keeps her going is threatened by Snow White’s beauty and purity. Get S.W.’s beating heart in your hands, the magic mirror tells Ravenna, and you’ll have immortality and as a bonus won’t need to suck the life and beauty out of every young woman unlucky enough to cross your path. Ravenna sucks the life out of the land as well, but flashes of her backstory portray her as locked into a life of evil-doing by a spell as a child. It’s a significant improvement on vanity as a motive for all this bloodshed.

Snow White also gets an update, though at times the screenwriters leave her oddly mute. She musters a call to arms to lead the last ragtag army to attack Ravenna’s stronghold, but her interactions both with the huntsman and with Prince William (Sam Claflin) are mostly one-sided. More interesting is her portrayal as a Christ figure. As Ravenna is bestowed with deadly magic, Snow White exudes healing magic. Those in her midst are cured of their ailments. Old wounds heal. The animals in the enchanted forest delight in her presence. She is referred to as “the one” and is “blessed” or annointed by a magical figure in the woods. And of course she rises from the dead, wearing a white dress that practically glows. With all this magic flitting around, one can hear the conversation among the producers during pre-production stressing about an anticipated backlash from Christian conservatives denouncing the movie just as they did the Harry Potter franchise. That, at least, is the only plausible explanation I can conceive of for Snow White reciting a prayer from the Bible early in the movie while locked in her cell: it inoculates the movie against charges of Satanism.

There are, indeed, seven dwarfs and a poison apple, and there’s a PG-13 amount of fantasy blood and violence. But there is also a running time that could have lost 10-15 minutes during Snow White’s long trek from the bad forest through the good forest to the good castle before leading the attack on the bad castle. And then there is the odd bit about Prince William (Snow White’s childhood friend, now a dashing archer and protector of those who resist Ravenna) and the huntsman (who is not given any other name in the movie). Spoiler Alert: yes, I actually have to give a spoiler alert in a review about Snow White.

Ambiguity in the romantic future of the characters might work in some movies (though I am never a fan of it), but in Snow White it’s downright peculiar. The apparently-dead Snow White gets a kiss on the lips from not one but two would-be true-loves in this movie. Only one works. At her triumphant coronation after slaying Ravenna, both are present. We get no closure, just a lingering shot of meaningful but indecipherable looks from Kristen Stewart.

Allow me to rant a bit. I’m a big fan of storytellers actually finishing their stories. The end of Inception, for example, was not deep but dumb in my opinion. Okay, so he’s dreaming. In a couple of hours he’ll wake up. Where and in what condition? In the plane? In prison? Insane? Finish the damn story, I say. Snow White’s ending isn’t as bad as that, but it’s oddly anticlimactic and unsatisfying.

Edgar Allen Poe’s tales of murder and the macabre inspire a 19th-century serial killer in The Raven. Although it is dressed up in literary garb, the movie shares many of the standard traits of a serial killer thriller. The killer is diabolically (and implausibly) clever. John Cusack, as Poe, has a few choice one-liners (“I detest people who detest me,” he offers by way of explanation for an acrid relationship). In fact, almost everyone in the movie seems to at least dislike Poe and not without reason. The notable exception is Emily (Alice Eve), his would-be fiancee (would-be, were it not for the objections of Emily’s father), a beautiful young woman whose attraction to the grumpy, broke, and much older Poe is never satisfatorily explained. Especially since the normally appealing Cusack appears to be channeling Nicolas Cage in this picture. Not just his goatee and high-domed forehead recall Cage, but Cusack also affects a sometimes sullen slack-jawed snarl that made me wonder if I had accidentally wandered into a screening of Face/Off with Cusack taking on Travolta’s role, or perhaps Con Air (where they really did team up).

The Raven has a difficult start: we know from the beginning that it ends with Poe’s death. What we don’t know is whether the serial killer will be caught and how many victims will succumb to him. In addition there is the academic puzzle of what game the serial killer is playing. Fortunately we are not required to believe that Poe could solve these murders on his own and he is provided with a helpful detective (played by Luke Evans) who, in a refreshing break from stereotype for this kind of role, actually is helpful. The chase for the bad guy is filled with a fair amount of grotesquerie, though not close to the level of horror movies that wallow in blood and guts. Director James McTeigue keeps it tense without being exploitative or manipulative.

I now understand my craving for chocolate milkshakes, chocolate ice cream, and hot chocolate: according to the Men in Black, “chocolatized dairy products” help alleviate the symptoms of temporal headaches. Those are the headaches caused by disruptions to the space-time continuum from time travel. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones reprise their roles as Agents J and K from the Men in Black bureau that deals with the colorful and vibrant underground civilization of aliens living among us and makes sure we remain blissfully ignorant of them. This installment’s extra gimmick is that brutal alien assassin Boris the Animal travels back to July 1969 to prevent his arrest by a young Agent K and clear the way for the later conquest of Earth by his home planet. Nice plan. For reasons not entirely clear, J is immune from Boris (the Animal’s) time meddling and proceeds to chase him back to prevent him from preventing K from preventing him from conquering Earth.

I’ve never understood why time travelers with a mission such as J’s don’t give themselves more time to catch the bad guy. J goes back to the exact day where he knows Boris (the Animal) will kill someone. Speaking for myself I’d go back, oh, a week or two early so I could case the joint and set up a good plan to catch the bad guy. But that’s just me. Josh Brolin does a pitch-perfect job of channeling a younger Tommy Lee Jones as K in 1969. We also get a cameo by SNL regular Bill Hader (sporting, oddly, a prosthetic upper lip) as Andy Warhol and Emma Thompson as Agent O.

Men in Black 3 is a romp of a movie with a fun screenplay by Etan Cohen (no, not Ethan) and efficient directing by Barry Sonnenfeld, who helmed the first two installments. It plays with the paradoxes of time travel with an amusing alien named Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg) who sees all the possible futures of all possible actions all of the time. “It’s exhausting” he tells J and K, and we believe him. It’s borderline exhausting just listening to him describe the various possible futures just of the next few minutes. There are fewer explosions and fights than in The Avengers but an equally upbeat tongue-in-cheek attitude toward saving the world from complete destruction by aliens. The upcoming Prometheus promises a different mood entirely for the same extraterrestrial threat.