WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE

is a production that is as strong as any Springsteen anthem and as inspiring as any lyrics by the Boss. — Rick Bentley, Tribune News Service PG-13, 104 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic, Madison Art Cinemas, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Stonington. Starts tonight at Westbrook, Lisbon. More so than most filmmakers who treat their characters like human beings, rather than cardboard plot inhabitants, the writer-director Richard Linklater intuits his way into finding the right tone, or mixture of tones, for whatever story he’s telling. His good and great work has come from all over the place: science fiction novels (“A Scanner Darkly”), young-adult historical fiction (“Me and Orson Welles”), memories of Texas childhood, teen years, college and true-crime sagas (“Dazed and Confused,” “Boyhood,” “Everybody Wants Some!!”, “Bernie”). Spanning 18 years of real time, his “Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight” reminded audiences audiences before and during the age of perpetual digital agitation: Talking things through, without screens and with verifiable eye contact, usually gets you somewhere. At his best Linklater does the same thing. He makes eye contact with the people in his movies. Sometimes he wins. Sometimes he doesn’t. And sometimes he lands in a vexing middle ground, as with his latest film, an adaptation co-written with Holly Gent and Vince Palmo of the 2012 Maria Semple novel “Where’d You Go, Bernadette.” Narrated by 15-year-old Bee Branch, Semple’s epistolary comedy conveys its story of Bee; her brilliant, devoted ex-architect mother, Bernadette; and Microsoft visionary father, Elgin, by way of emails, FBI missives and other correspondence. Once in the architectural vanguard, now semi-disgraced (for reasons eventually revealed) and socially phobic in a quippy, nattering way, Bernadette has sub-contracted a good portion of her life to an unseen “virtual assistant” somewhere overseas. The weight of that misjudgment eventually leads to the disappearance of the title. Bee pieces together the paper trail that leads her, and her father, to Bernadette’s life-changing whereabouts. All of this is in the trailer, including a lot that happens in the final half hour of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette.” Judging from the final version, what drew Linklater to the book was its comic texture, just serious enough to matter, as well as Semple’s investigation of creativity, parenting and what happens when one crowds out the other. The movie feels a little off from the beginning. The dialogue works less effectively as dialogue, rather than dialogue quoted in various correspondence. It’s arch without being especially witty. The primary mixed blessing in “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” turns out to be a first-rate actress. Cate Blanchett is a supreme technician, inarguably versatile and never less than compelling. Yet her characterization of Bernadette feels a mite strenuous — stagy, in the wrong way, as opposed to film-y in the right, Linklater way. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE 2

1/2 PG, 96 minutes. Playing now at Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. The “Angry Birds” movies are the textbook definition of chaotic energy. The second film in the franchise, “The Angry Birds Movie 2” (grammar nerds will chafe at this awkward phrasing), directed by Thurop Van Orman and written by Peter Ackerman, Eyal Podell and Jonathan E. Stewart, is somehow even more chaotic than the first. But what else could one possibly expect from the sequel to the animated feature adaptation of a smartphone game where the object is to launch small round birds at green pigs using slingshots? These movies are wacky. They’re silly. The writers launch ‘90s jokes right over the heads of the kiddie audience, aiming squarely for the noggins of their parents. They’ve got the entire Sony Music catalog, and you bet they’re gonna cram in 30 seconds of every familiar hit song to which they already have the rights. It’s a colorful, cuckoo-crazy, sometimes funny, often bewildering experience, to which you slowly become numb with every incongruous shot of Leonard the pig’s round, green butt. Come to think of it, it’s the kind of entertainment that could only be enhanced with a little green. But it’s not all just pop music and toilet humor (though that’s a lot of it). The saga is a tale of the violent horrors of colonialism. In the first film, peaceful flightless birds battled the invasion of an ingratiating porcine population, led by Leonard (Bill Hader), who had the ulterior motive of stealing their eggs for food. After leading a guerrilla mission on Piggy Island to rescue the eggs from the porky pioneers, angry outcast Red (Jason Sudeikis) became a folk hero. Now, the birds and pigs must band together to survive as a mysterious third party has launched an all-out attack on both islands in a ruthless land-grab. The offending invader is Zeta (Leslie Jones), an embittered eagle who has marshalled all her tremendous scientific might into launching ice bombs (and then lava-filled ice bombs) at Bird and Piggy Islands because her own island is “too cold” and she’d like a tropical vacation. Red reluctantly agrees to team up with Leonard because he believes his only worth lies in his identity as a rebel hero. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

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