Movie reviews: THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND, WARFARE, THE KING OF KINGS 

• Focus Features
• The Ballad of Wallis Island

The Ballad of Wallis Island
You can feel nearly every beat of this quirky British comedy coming from a mile away, but it's still one of those charming crowd-pleasers that squeezes every drop of potential out of its premise and its cast. Adapting their 2007 short film, director James Griffiths and co-writers Tom Basden & Tim Key set up a terrific idea: Eccentric millionaire Charles Heath (Key) hires fading folk-music star Herb McGwyer (Basden) for a private concert on the remote island where he lives, unaware that it's also going to be a reunion with his one-time professional (and personal) partner Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan). The bulk of the humor is built on the awkward interactions between Charles and Herb—and between Charles and literally everybody else, as it turns out, as though he needs to use every syllable he's had bottled up with nobody else around, usually to make absurdly strained attempts at wordplay. It's a delightful performance, one that Basden generously allows to take center stage as McGwyer's own post-"McGwyer Mortimer" artistic floundering doesn't hit quite as hard, despite a solid connection with Mulligan. Yes, it's another gentle tale about making peace with the past and finding a way to move on; it also happens to be one that finds a wildly entertaining intersection between Plains, Trains & Automobiles and Inside Llewyn Davis. Available April 11 in theaters. (PG-13)

• A24 Films
• Warfare

Warfare
If verisimilitude were an inherent virtue, Warfare would be a masterpiece. But it isn't, and it isn't. Co-directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza—the latter a military veteran and technical advisor for Garland on 2024's Civil War—re-create a 2006 Navy SEAL operation in Iraq, when a company occupying a house in Ramadi comes under attack. The events portrayed are undeniably harrowing, with graphic wartime violence, bone-rattling sound design and a sense of the chaos that can ensue when a mission goes sideways, and your ability to think rationally about what comes next starts to evaporate. That, however, is where Warfare begins and ends, as it never bothers to give any of the American soldiers, and certainly not any of the enemy insurgents, discernible personalities; if not for the familiarity of certain actors like Will Poulter, Charles Melton and Michael Gandolfini, it would be difficult to tell many of them apart. It's almost more off-putting that the film opens with the group of soldiers pre-mission getting their horndog on to a circa-1990s exercise video, as though we should care for them more not because they're individual actual humans, but because they're a generic cluster of red-blooded American boys. You may very well come away with a greater sense of what it's like to be in the middle of combat, but let's not behave like no other film had ever done so before, or better. Available April 11 in theaters. (R)

• Angel Studios
• The King of Kings

The King of Kings
The concept dates back more than 150 years, so you can't exactly blame it on writer/director Seong-ho Jang, but it's still hard for this attempt at making the life of Jesus seem hip and exciting not to feel like a feature-length animated version of the "[youth pastor voice]" meme. Based on an 1840s kid-friendly version of "The Life of Our Lord" created by Charles Dickens, it finds the celebrated author (voiced by Kenneth Branagh) attempting to re-direct the energies of his rambunctious young son Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) by recounting the story of Jesus (Oscar Isaac) from the Nativity right through the Resurrection. Jang drops Walter and his pet cat directly into the action at various points, attempting to insert some slapstick energy and the idea of the Incarnation as a personal event rather than simply a historical abstraction. But this is still fundamentally a straightforward re-telling of the Gospel of Luke (mostly), and the familiar names in the English-language voice cast—also including Forest Whitaker, Pierce Brosnan, Uma Thurman and Ben Kingsley—play things far too earnestly to make it truly engaging for young folks. Plus, even a PG-rated, tamed-down version of the Passion is still rough stuff. While artistically, this is still several steps above the cheaply-made Bible story kid-vids of a generation ago, it can't move past the self-seriousness even when the youth pastor is telling it to you while straddling a backwards chair. Available April 11 in theaters. (PG)