“Intense movie,” said the usher as I, and the two other men in the audience, left the theater. High-stress, high-volume is another way to describe the life of jeweller Howard Ratner, played brilliantly by Adam Sandler – neither hero nor antihero, a gambling addict, basketball fan, unfaithful husband, lousy father whom you don’t exactly root for or against but can’t take your eyes off of. You accept the dramatic license, which packs about six months of traumatic incident into six days, partly because the Safdie brothers weave real-life touches – an Ethiopian mine accident, the Celtics’ NBA finals against the 76ers, a club performance by the Weeknd – so smoothly into the frantic narrative of Howard’s existence. Kevin Garnett and newcomer Keith Williams Richards are memorable in secondary roles. It’s a serious movie with a great performance and fitting ending, but it’s not for everyone.

What an intelligent film! What acting! And how daring – to base a film on the life of a living person, and the Pope, no less! I’m not a Catholic, but the spectacle of cardinals in robes, the scale of the Vatican and Castel Gondolfo, and the power and beauty of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel were awe-inspiring. The story itself, capturing the doctrinal debate within the Catholic Church, was smoothly laid out and instructive. But all was background for two Oscar-worthy performances: Anthony Hopkins can be a ham, but being God’s right-hand man provides a license for excess. The revelation was Jonathan Pryce, who somehow matched Hopkins with his modesty. The scenes of the two of them in conversation together were absolutely riveting. I could have used less of the Argentine flashback story, but that may be because I was eager to return to the splendor of Rome.

Not having read the book, I first struggled to identify the four sisters, then I continued to struggle with Greta Gerwig’s constant cutting between “seven years earlier” and the present. Then I had to adjust to the semi-saccharine tone of the girls (with the occasional exception of nasty little sister Amy), the mother, and the neighbors all doing good and constantly playing happily together. All the jumping around certainly kept me on my toes, and Saoirse Ronan is a delight to watch. Timothee Chalamet was as beautiful as ever, although I’m wondering if by now I’ve seen too much of his beauty. And speaking of beauty, the camera shots were a little too beautiful: they distracted my attention from the actors and didn’t seem in keeping with the homespun story. As my (female) companion said, “I liked it, but I didn’t love it.”

Despite theoretically compressing 18 non-stop hours into a two-hour film, the pace was so slow that I kept overanalyzing  the absurd story. Yes, war is senseless, but if 1,200 lives are at stake, can’t you do better than send a total greenhorn and whomever he chooses off on a horrendously challenging rescue mission? And why do they have to crawl over corpses through no-man’s land when there is an armed caravan of Allied troops driving up the road ahead of them? And when our hero meets this caravan, why is he sent off alone on this crucial mission? And what about the planes flying overhead? Can’t they deliver a message? And why are our heroes loath to hurt the Germans when they encounter them? As other critics have noted, we bounce from obstacle to obstacle like a video game, without any effort at characterization; and this movie competes with Harriet for glossing over how the end zone is miraculously reached. Having Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch in the roles of commanding officers only accentuated the inappropriateness of entrusting our two with anything.

This is the third “whistleblower” film I’ve seen this week. Whereas the first two – The —Report” and “Dark Water” – were unremittingly serious, Laundromat is a comedy, with Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas hamming it up as Mossack and Fonseca, name partners of the Panama City law firm recently exposed for its tax-evasion and money laundering (hence the film title) practices. Tying the narrative thread is Meryl Streep in a comic role as a small-town widow intent on finding out what happened to the insurance payout from her husband’s death. The movie presents a series of anecdotes illustrating the unsavory tactics of M&F clients – none of which, unfortunately, helped me understand what exactly M&F did. Yes, they created shell corporations in tax havens, but how did that work? What was clear, because the movie came out and said it, is that “they system” allows the rich to get richer through often-legal tax avoidance, and the meek won’t be inheriting the earth any time soon.