Movie & Television Reviews

Capsule reviews of theatrical movies available now for streaming or scheduled for broadcast on network or cable television as well as notes on TV programming for the same week.

Oregon, it can safely be said, features some of North America’s most scenic landscapes. In the tense, hard-edged horror film “Wolf Man,” however, the Beaver State’s natural beauty is contrasted with occult ugliness in a manner that only the sturdiest fans of the genre may find palatable.

Film buffs will easily recognize that the atmospheric horror yarn “Nosferatu” (Focus) is both a variation on and an homage to the eponymous 1922 silent genre classic helmed by F. W. Murnau. Unlike that foundational film, however, the newcomer is both artistically flawed and, ultimately, morally unbridled.

If nothing else, “Better Man” (Paramount), the biopic of British pop star Robbie Williams, avoids the familiar formula of show business sagas. Most fundamentally, that’s because Williams voices himself as a CGI chimpanzee.

As narrated by Rafiki (voice of John Kani), a wise mandrill, the story looks back to the youthful bond between two princely lions, Mufasa (voice of Aaron Pierre) and Taka (voice of Kelvin Harrison Jr.).

In approaching the comic adventure “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” (Paramount), viewers will likely be expecting to witness more of the hyperkinetic antics that are the trademark of the Sega video game-based characters around whom the franchise is built. What they may not be bargaining for are complex layers of emotional pain.

Catholic moviegoers will naturally take an interest in any project related to the works of their renowned co-religionist, novelist J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973). But the question always remains whether any new adventure set in his fictional land of Middle-earth will share in the elusive magic of the stories he himself spun.