Movie & Television Reviews

It’s hard to imagine the pitch session at which the premise of the would-be psychological thriller “The Carpenter’s Son” (Magnolia) was presented for approval. “Drawing on a 2nd-century apocryphal text,” the summary might have run, “why don’t we turn Jesus’ teenage years into the basis for a horror film?”

Rage is the predominant emotion in “The Running Man” (Paramount), the second screen version of Stephen King’s eponymous 1982 novel. As directed and co-written by Edgar Wright, it’s an anger-fuelled action film that’s bitter in mood as well as morally ambivalent.

With a grunting, barbaric alien for its protagonist, the sci-fi action film “Predator: Badlands” (20th Century) gets off to an unpromising start. Yet by the end of the movie, the brute in question — Dek by name and played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi — has experienced a conversion to better values.

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.

Existential issues: the fear of becoming outmoded, of dying unloved, of having one’s work forgotten, are wrestled with in the very loosely fact-based mix of comedy and drama “Blue Moon” (Sony Pictures Classics).