FOLLOWING FILMS

Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s adaptation of “Gone Girl” author Gillian Flynn’s novel “Dark Places” takes its titular theme to the hilt, in a film that is as its title suggests unrelentingly dreary. Not that it has much of a choice given the subject matter. A gothic Americana mystery, “Dark Places” spans two timelines as it unravels the truth behind one horrific crime. In the present, Libby Day (Charlize Theron) is a traumatized adult shuffling aimlessly through life. Nearly 30 years since her mother and sisters were murdered and her brother was convicted as their killer, the leader of a sort of underground crime “fan club" approaches her. At first they make a deal to pick her brain about what happened and then they drop a bombshell. They believe her brother is innocent and they want her help to prove it. From here the movie registers as a whodunit, unwinding all of the lurid details that led up to the awful conclusion with the promise of uncovering the real perpetrator....

A caravan of crazy roams the desert, leaving in its wake a chaotic free-for-all of frantic neuroses. There’s no way to soft sell this review, so let’s just get to it. The latest “Mad Max” is an assortment of cockamamie pandemonium that leaps from one lurid explosion to the next in a momentum-less rush to keep viewers from noticing a script spread thin on character development or anything else of valuable dimension. The plot is straightforward and difficult to explain at the same time. This is mostly because it is so heavily mired in a barrage of convoluted eccentricity that hinders any chance to decipher a coherent explanation for any of its on-screen happenings. The gist is this: Max (Tom Hardy), a near mute, is captured by a group of crazy people who are chasing after Furiosa (Charlize Theron), the commander of a war rig who’s taken off with their leader’s enslaved harem. Max winds up helping them and in the gang’s ensuing escape across the desert, they must face off agains...