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“The Duke” is a very British heist movie, a true-crime caper with no guns, no car chases, toad in the hole for dinner, and Gracie Fields warbling a song called “A Nice Cup of Tea” on the soundtrack. It’s so British, in fact, that its central character is named Kempton Bunton, but at least he has the good grace to joke about it. The film’s director is Roger Michell, best known for “Notting Hill,” and who recently made the luvvie love-in documentary, “Tea with the Dames....

It was May 1993 when the “Super Mario Bros.” movie was first released to a nation of very confused gamers, and it’s safe to say that Hollywood and video games have experienced a somewhat tumultuous relationship ever since. Forget oil and water, we’re talking Sonic and Robotnik, Avalanche and Shinra, “Cyberpunk 2077” and anyone who paid $60 to play it. Logic suggests there’s money to be made from crossing the streams, but almost 30 years of ostensible slam-dunks have yielded little success in either direction....

Now, Sorrentino revisits the summer when he learned that lesson the hard way, as the famed stylist churns his memories into a soberingly autobiographical coming-of-age story about a Neopolitan teenager whose entire world is lost and redeemed in almost the same breath. Appropriately erratic and transcendent in equal measure, “The Hand of God” might be shot with uncharacteristic restraint by Sorrentino’s baroque standards, but its relative calm allows him to crystallize a truth that was sometimes lost amid the chaos of his more circus-like epics: Heaven and hell are very real places that co-exist right here on Earth, often on top of and inside each other so completely that people can lose sight of where they are if they forget to close their eyes and imagine they’re somewhere else....

Samuel’s world is populated by characters named after real-life Black figures who lived (and sometimes caused chaos) in the Old West. For Samuel and his star Jonathan Majors, who plays the revenge-minded Nat Love, it was about unearthing the true history of the American West and getting into the hearts and minds of lives lived and lost without the narrative of slavery or oppression. Just as essential: finding a way of turning that history, one rarely explored on the big screen, into a brand-new cinematic adventure....

This alone is reason enough to see it, which audiences can on December 10 thanks to The Met Live in HD. For film lovers unsure about opera, let the reasonably priced ticket be a gateway to new experiences. Phelim McDermott’s creatively staged production and Tom Pye’s clever set and costume design should read beautifully onscreen, crafted as they are to be seen from afar. Composer Kevin Puts and librettist Greg Pierce leave only the meat of the story, choosing familiar lines of repetition as guiding refrains....

For starters, it’s not Whedon’s series — not anymore. Though the showrunner behind “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and writer-director of Marvel’s “The Avengers” penned and shot the pilot and keeps his creator credit on subsequent episodes, Whedon left “The Nevers” after production had wrapped, claiming he was “genuinely exhausted” from working through a pandemic. (His departure also came soon after Warner Bros. took “remedial steps” following an investigation into malfeasance on Whedon’s “Justice League” set)....

Quaid’s “Oppenheimer” co-star Cillian Murphy starred as crazed scientist Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins” and subsequent two sequels, “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises.” Quaid revealed to Thrillist that he had an out-of-body comic book fan experience watching the new “Batman” in theaters alongside Murphy. “I’m like, ‘Cool. I get to see ‘Batman’ with Cillian Murphy,’” Quaid said. “But then it dawned on me: Scarecrow just asked me if I wanted to see ‘Batman....