Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson, Charlotte Rampling, Michael K. Williams

Justin Kurzel

“Assassin’s Creed” is not the video game adaptation that fans have been waiting for. What makes the action film most disappointing is that it comes from director Justin Kurzel, who crafted last year’s visceral adaptation of “Macbeth,” which also starred Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Kurzel’s latest has style to spare, but it’s missing the soul and emotion from his previous work.

Calum Lynch (Fassbender) has just been given a second chance. Michael Leslie, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage’s script opens with the convicted murder on death row. With his last words, Calum says that he’ll meet his father in hell, but instead of dying, he wakes up, disturbed and shocked, in an unknown location and greeted by Sofia (Cotillard), a scientist who wants to rid the world of violence. She informs Calum that one of his ancestors, Aguilar de Nerha, was an assassin in 15th century Spain, and he has the power to relive his memories through a contraption called the Animus. Sofia and her father, Rikkin (Jeremy Irons), are looking for the “apple,” a MacGuffin that will cure people of violence and destroy free will, and Calum and Aguilar’s memories can lead them right to it. Despite the high stakes, most of the film’s events are inconsequential.

Calum is a blank slate. We know his terrible past, and he describes his aggressive personality, but there’s little internal life to the character, which isn’t true of most of Fassbender’s performances. The world and the rules are the primary focus of the script, not the characters. In the first act, there’s plenty of information revealed but very little of it regards Calum and why we should care about him and what’s beneath the aggression. The character’s underwhelming attempts at comedic relief don’t help matters, either.

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Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Lizzy Caplan, Matthew Goode, Jared Harris

Robert Zemeckis

Robert Zemeckis typically makes big pieces of popcorn entertainment. Admittedly, the “Back to the Future” and “Forrest Gump” director’s most recent films have been more distancing than enthralling, but his latest, the World War II romance “Allied,” is one of his more human and tangible movies yet. It’s also his most purely enjoyable film since “Cast Away.”

Zemeckis and screenwriter Steven Knight open the story with Canadian intelligence officer Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) parachuting down into the French Moroccan desert. It’s quite an image – one that relies on obvious visual effects – but it grabs the viewer’s attention with silence and curiosity, dropping them into the story along with Max. The agent is then picked up by an unnamed man and told that he must meet his wife, fellow special operative and French Resistance spy Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard), for dinner. Max and Marianne’s mission is simple: play house convincingly enough for the Germans in Casablanca, make some important contacts, and get into the right room to kill a high-ranking German ambassador. Their mission goes according to plan, but what they didn’t expect is that they would fall in love in the process.

Once the mission is complete, Max asks Marianne to return to London with him. The two have a daughter they deeply love, but their lives begin to crumble when Max is informed by a mysterious (and higher ranking) S.O.E. official (Simon McBurney) that his wife is a spy for the Nazis. If the source is correct, Max will have to shoot his wife or else he’ll be executed. A plan is put into motion – leak information to Marianne and see if it gets to the enemy – but with each passing minute, Max can’t handle the thought that the woman he loves is a double agent.

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Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Paddy Considine, David Thewlis

Justin Kurzel

Some lucky high school kids are going to watch director Justin Kurzel’s “Macbeth” during class someday. If you find William Shakespeare’s language difficult to interpret, Kurzel helps you wash it down with some stunningly nightmarish imagery, stirring performances and a surprising amount of levity.

Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) is a battered and scarred soldier. A thane of Scotland, he hears of a prophecy from three witches that he will one day rule his land as its king. The character is haunted by the start of the film, after he and Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard) lose a child, but his madness grows and grows over the course of the story. At the insistence of his domineering yet loving wife, he murders the King of Scotland, taking over the throne.

Kurzel and the film’s three screenwriters, Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie and Todd Louiso, have turned Shakespeare’s play into a horror movie of sorts. They dive under the skin of the characters, making their pain, past and present, collide in an explosive fashion. It goes without saying that Shakespeare did that as well, but Kurzel and the writers have crafted both a faithful and modern adaptation, although one that’s not too modern.

The battle sequences rely more on mood than hack-and-slash action. This isn’t “300,” for example, as Kurzel is more focused on how the violence affects Macbeth than showing heads flying in the air. There are these fantastic moments in which Kurzel and his DP Adam Arkpaw use slow-motion, not to amp up the action, but to heighten the reaction shots of Macbeth. The battle sequences are impressive on a technical level, but how the director tackles the interior conflicts is just as powerful, if not more so.

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