Out of the Furnace

It doesn't surprise me to learn that CinemaScore audiences assigned "Out of the Furnace" an average grade of C+ this weekend. It's bleak and unremitting, as far from a crowd pleaser as mainstream movies get. But the first half is very good, and even the second half - which becomes a fairly standard revenge story - contains some of the riveting scenes that merit a recommendation for true film fans.

Bettie Page Reveals All, These Birds Walk, Sweet Dreams

Bettie Page Reveals All

Sweet Dreams

These Birds Walk

Finally, a trio of documentaries, in each of which the filmmaking falls short of the interest of the subject.

Reaching for the Moon

Another biopic, this one of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop, is the best of the week’s offerings.

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

It’s something of an accomplishment that Idris Elba’s vocal intonations as Nelson Mandela are as listenable as Morgan Freeman’s in “Invictus” – after all, Freeman’s voice is an industry unto itself.

Delivery Man

Vince Vaughn has remade the jaw-droppingly bad French-Canadian comedy “Starbuck,” about a former sperm donor who has inadvertently fathered 500-some-odd children (so perfectly multicultural they could be a Benetton ad), into an almost equally bad English-language French comedy called “Delivery Man.”

Oldboy

A lot of would-be cineastes have reflexively pooh-poohed Spike Lee’s remake of the Korean film “Oldboy,” but I prefer Lee’s version.

Frozen

“Frozen” falls squarely (so to speak) within the classic mold of Disney animation, though it’s several rungs short of the studio’s early-1990s run that reached its zenith with the eye-popping visual imagination and nonstop inventiveness of “Aladdin,” and well below the 21st-century benchmark set by “Tangled” a few years ago. (Of course, Pixar’s “Up” and “Wall-E” occupy another level entirely.)