The film’s scenario involves two families, one house, and a deadly disease, all in the service of a bleak tale of terror.

Viewers who enjoy the Pirates films will likely find this outing better paced and more polished than the prior “Stranger Tides,” which increasingly looks like the franchise’s orphan child.

Davies posits that Dickinson’s literary talents might have been exceptional, but the terrors and sorrows that directed those talents were as universal as they come.

While the film doesn’t have pronounced investigative aspirations, as a historical record it’s a stellar work, condensing a complex event into a riveting 114-minutes treatment.

The film is superbly performed and shot in a naturalistic style, full of the fraught long takes and edgy, oblique conversations that characterize the pinnacle of contemporary Romanian cinema.

Based on the bestselling nonfiction book of the same name by David Grann, Z concerns the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his obsessive ambition to discover a fabled city deep in the Amazon rain forest.

It’s melodrama executed with precision and a distinctly French note of bitterness.

The film seems to contain at least four divergent modes: a ghost story; a character study; a realist portrait of fashion and celebrity culture; and a 2010s Continental variation on a De Palma cat-and-mouse thriller.

Though the film has its weak points, the monster action is superb, terrifying stuff, easily besting recent entries like “Jurassic World.”

The swan song for Hugh Jackman’s vigorous, often cheeky portrayal of Wolverine is the best of 20th Century Fox’s eight X-Men features by a significant margin.