Entertainment

In what could be the first of several films, Shailene Woodley stars as Baltimore Police Officer Eleanor Falco, a deeply troubled, not very well-educated young woman who finds herself in the middle of a giant manhunt when she is chosen by leader Geoffrey Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn) to help head the operation. The target is an unknown man, who has murdered 29 people near the harbor with a Vietnam-era sniper rifle, using the noise of fireworks to cover up his shots and his location. Eleanor has scars on her wrists. She lives alone with a cat and finds release and relief swimming laps in a local pool. Using laser technology, the police later locate the residence the sniper used as a lair. The place then blows up.

VAN WERT — The Gaither Family Vocal Band has made a lot of history as one of the premier Christian groups in music.

A droll, easygoing procession of slights, obstacles and microaggressions on the road to an artist’s gallery opening, “Showing Up” could be classified as co-writer and director Kelly Reichardt’s first comedy since her “Old Joy” 17 years ago. But labels are deceptive. There’s subterranean seriousness underneath the deadpan-comic surface here, and much of Reichardt’s previous work found plenty of quiet comedy and seemingly accidental lightness amid some pretty tough lives.

VAN WERT — Lisa McClowry might not look like Cher in her normal life, but when she steps up on stage in full makeup and costume, like she will at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Niswonger Center, she said the audience will feel as if they are in the room with the best-selling living legend.

A past-present temporal mashup, “Paint” from first-time feature writer-director Brit McAdams is set in a world that has stood still, or at least been slow to catch up to our present day. The film, which is set in Vermont and is said to be a sendup of pioneering TV artist Bob Ross, is a deadpan, perhaps too deadpan and not-very-funny comedy that paints a portrait (excuse me, it’s contagious) of Carl Nargle (Owen Wilson), a bearded, ‘fro-sporting, pipe-smoking star of the local Burlington, Vermont, PBS station. Carl’s show is entitled “Paint,” and on it he, OK, paints pictures, all of them of Vermont’s Mount Mansfield, the highest peak in the state.

At the end of “Air,” director and co-star Ben Affleck, bafflingly bewigged as Nike CEO and co-founder Phil Knight, lies back on his office couch and utters a single word: “equity.” It’s a bit of a cheeky callback to something that happens even before the movie starts: the appearance of the production logo for Affleck’s new company, Artists Equity, which produced “Air,” and which seeks to shake up business as usual in Hollywood, in the same way that Nike and the Jordan family shook up business as usual in the sneaker industry.

It’s one of the great ironies of cinema that many — not all, but many — of the most seemingly arthouse filmmakers make some of the most approachable films.

Yimou Zhang, the great Fifth Generation Chinese auteur and director of “Raise the Red Lantern” (1991), “Hero” (2002), “House of Flying Daggers” (2004), “A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop” (2009) and the Matt Damon-starring (also with Pedro Pascal) “The Great Wall” (2016), sets his sights on the Song Dynasty and a patriotic poem attributed to the real-life Chinese hero General Yue Fei.

In a recent interview with GQ, Hong Kong star Donnie Yen noted that Caine, his character in the upcoming action blockbuster “John Wick: Chapter 4,” had originally been given a more common Chinese name. The choice bothered Yen, who lobbied successfully to have the character renamed. “Why does he always have to be called Shang or Chang?” he said in the interview. “Why do you have to be so generic?”

Say this for “Operation Fortune,” and say this first: Hugh Grant is having a ball.