The first half hour or so of Bobcat Goldthwait‘s “God Bless America” promises so much more than the film is finally able to deliver. Here is a film that begins with merciless comic savagery and descends into merely merciless savagery. But wow, what an opening.

It consists of a man watching television, and the television he watches. The man is Frank (Joel Murray, Bill’s brother). His head rests uneasily on his sofa as the screams of the wailing baby next door drill through the paper-thin walls. He suffers from migraines. On TV, he sees stupidity and cruelty. The news channels portray an America in decay. Such idiotic plagues as the Westboro Baptist Church are seen picketing veterans’ funerals, TV rants are delivered by unhinged commentators, reality TV reduces civilization to the consumption of worthless consumer trash, and Frank stares in pain at the screen.

Of course the Westboro Church isn’t mentioned by name, but there’s no mistaking its “God Hates Fags” posters. Later in the film, daringly, Goldthwait’s script does name names, including Diablo Cody, who Frank despises for having created, in “Juno,” a heroine who is actually very much like the one in this movie. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, Frank learns from his foul-mouthed doctor that he’s dying of an incurable brain tumor. Then at his hateful job (in an office filled with co-workers obsessed with celebrity gossip), he makes a thoughtful gesture and is fired for moronic reasons of political correctness. Then on reality TV he sees a famous teenage brat throw a tantrum because her parents gave her a car but it isn’t the one she asked for, an Escalade.

All of this is especially effective because of Joel Murray’s performance. He makes Frank a decent, level-headed, respectable man, not an obvious comedy type. He is also smart and articulate in explaining his revulsion with aspects of current American civilization — so articulate, indeed, that sometimes he sounds like a combination of Al Franken, Rachel Maddow and the “I’m mad as hell” speech in “Network.”

After getting the one-two punch of being fired and diagnosed with a brain tumor, something cracks. He sticks a gun in his mouth, and then decides, as a symbolic gesture, to first shoot the spoiled brat on reality TV.

That’s when the film goes astray. His shooting is witnessed by Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), a girl about the same age as his victim, who tells him it was awesome. She urges him not to stop when there are still so many worthy targets and insists on coming along with him on what turns out to be a cross-country murder spree. While we understood why Frank might have been pushed over the edge with his first murder, you can’t just go around killing people, y’know. And Roxy comes across as a deranged teenage psychopath.

Much of their relationship involves Frank trying to behave decently with her, despite her oblivion to the idea that a 45-year-old man has no business in bed with an underage girl. Roxy is a disturbed creature. Yet they pal up and enjoy a strange immunity to being captured, despite how easy it should be to spot them. Everything finally leads to the live broadcast of an “American Idol”-type TV show, where Frank wants to vent his disgust at the way America has mocked a fat kid who sang off-key and was driven to attempt suicide.

In that subplot, Goldthwait exhibits some of the sharp and perceptive intelligence that often informs the film. Turns out the fat kid didn’t want to kill himself because people laughed at him, but because he might be taken off TV. Nice. It does seem true that a lot of people will do anything, however humiliating, for fame.

But by that point in the film, the air has gone out of Goldthwait’s balloon. What he has created, in the name of comic social commentary, is an amoral movie about two psychopaths killing people they believe deserve to die. As a general rule, that’s an evil reason for taking someone’s life. If we agree with Frank and Roxy, we also agree with people who shoot at abortion clinics, kids who open fire at their schools, and drivers in road-rage killings. I see what Goldthwait is trying to do and agree with many of his complaints about our society, but finally it becomes impossible to laugh.

“The Sound of My Voice” is a sci-fi thriller made with smoke and mirrors. No special effects, no other worlds, only the possibility of time travel, which you can’t show but can only talk about. In fact, it’s probably not science fiction at all, but belongs in some related category, like a story from the old Weird Tales magazine.

We meet Peter and Lorna, a young couple who are members of that most common Los Angeles set, would-be filmmakers. Peter (Christopher Denham) is interested in a San Fernando Valley cult and has enlisted Lorna (Nicole Vicius) in his plan to make a clandestine documentary exposing it. His preparations include swallowing a radio transmitter to collect sound and dialogue, although one hopes it doesn’t record any intestinal gurglings.

It’s a low-rent cult. After being told to strip and shower, the two are blindfolded and led into a drab, ordinary basement, occupied by several cult members dressed in white garments. They learn the drill, including a complex handshake that includes so many secret grips and twists one could surely infiltrate any fraternity with it.

A hush falls, and Maggie (Brit Marling) enters in a white veil. She is tethered to an oxygen tank, sits cross-legged in the circle and gradually shares her story. She is from the year 2054, where a civil war is raging. Her body is so vulnerable to present-day toxins that she can only consume organic food grown by her followers, and her source of protein is their blood. She is never dire nor dramatic, sounds comforting, but makes strange demands. For example, the cult members must vomit to purge themselves, something Peter claims he can’t do (“not even as a child”). Under Maggie’s spell, he successfully hurls, which tells you something.

The film is divided into parts, numbered in big bold numerals on the screen, and one part shows Maggie’s arrival in the present day as she wanders dazed on a highway while wearing only a sheet. Of course, there could be more than one explanation for that condition, and “The Sound of My Voice” never precisely declares whether her story is true. Without going into detail, I can say that the film never precisely declares anything to be true.

The key figure here is Brit Marling, who co-wrote the script with the director, Zal Batmanglij. She also starred in and co-wrote “Another Earth” (2011), a much better film. In that one, she played a young astrophysicist distracted by the appearance in the sky of a second Earth. I won’t go into detail. Both films use their sci-fi premises as an avenue into human stories that might not be quite as compelling without them.

She is a talent with an understated presence. It conveys in this film an insidious conviction: What is her motive, really? And she demonstrates with Batmanglij that you can conjure out of a very small budget a quietly compelling film. “The Sound of My Voice” makes me very interested in what she’ll come up with next.

It’s not often a thriller keeps me wound up as well as “Headhunters” did. I knew I was being manipulated and didn’t care. It was a pleasure to see how well it was being done. Unlike too many thrillers that depend on stunts, special effects and the Queasy-Cam, this one devises a plot where it matters what happens. It’s not all kinetic energy.

It’s from Norway. Why has Scandinavia been producing such good thrillers? Maybe because their filmmakers can’t afford millions for CGI and must rely on cheaper elements like, you know, stories and characters. “Headhunters” deserves comparison with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “Insomnia” and “Let the Right One In.”

At its center is an everyman, Roger Brown, who is an executive headhunter. While interviewing job candidates, he learns information that’s invaluable in his second job, as an art thief. He needs the money and tells us why: He’s keenly aware that he stands 5-foot-6 and is married to Diana, a statuesque blond. On her he lavishes expensive gifts and a luxurious lifestyle and even sets her up with her own art gallery. He doesn’t believe she could love him for himself.

Brown (Aksel Hennie) is a smooth-talking type with the cool nerve necessary to enter homes and replace valuable paintings with deceptive reproductions. At a gallery opening, Diane (Synnøve Macody Lund) introduces him to a new client: Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). This man looks like trouble. Tall, chiseled, confident, he has just resigned as CEO of a multinational, and Brown would like to recruit him for a rival firm. He’s persuasive. He won’t stop until the man agrees to lunch.

Greve, as it turns out, inherited a Rubens from his grandmother. Perfect. Brown can place him with the firm and steal his painting. But when he learns the devastating news that Diana and Clas have been having an affair, he sabotages the job offer. Clas Greve is not a man you want to cross. Trained as a military commando, survivor of Bolivian torture, fiercely proud, he wants revenge. He’s the sort of villain that a thriller needs: intelligent and remorseless. Not a gimmick character, but an implacable enemy.

Enough about the plot. What “Headhunters” has done, skillfully, is enlist our sympathy with Roger Brown and our interest in Clas Greve. They’re not simply plot markers. And Diane is not simply a trophy blond, but warm and nice, and if she had an affair, well, so did Roger — with Lotte (Julie Ølgaard), who he treats with disturbing callousness. We’ve seen Clas in a dressing room, his muscular back criss-crossed with whip marks. We know, and Roger knows, he means business.

“Headhunters” then opens up into a long, punishing chase, as Clas tracks Roger across Norway in a series of increasingly perilous situations. The short man proves courageous and resilient, and can think quickly. His method for hiding in an outhouse from Roger and his dog is admirably practical. It’s incredible he hangs onto his life. Yes, this follows thriller formulas. What is important is that it has the unfaked weight of reality. No fancy effects, but flesh and blood and real locations.

Even though the film helpfully explains a few things in its closing scenes, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to follow the plot step by step. It’s a labyrinth of double-crosses and deceptions. Roger doesn’t know who he can trust, and neither do we. The director, Morten Tyldum, has a gift for visual shocks and reveals. Everything can change in a single edit.

“Headhunters” is like an argument for the kinds of thrillers I miss. It entertains with story elements, in which the scares evolve from human behavior. Pure action is boring. Chase scenes are boring, unless you devise one as “Headhunters” does, with a shaky farm tractor. Sex scenes can even be boring, unless there is the illusion that the partners care. “Headhunters” plays fair.

“The Dictator” is funny, in addition to being obscene, disgusting, scatological, vulgar, crude and so on. Having seen Sacha Baron Cohen promoting it on countless talk shows, I feared the movie would feel like deja vu. But no. He establishes a claim to be the best comic filmmaker now working. And in a speech about dictatorships, he practices merciless political satire.

Compared to the gleeful transgressions of “Borat” and “Bruno,” this is Cohen’s most conventional film. It has a plot, it has a romance, it sticks to the story. Not that it’s mainstream, although judging by the laughter of a preview audience, who knows where the stream is anymore? He also wisely gets in, gets his laughs, and quits. The movie, like Bruno,” falls short of 90 minutes, in an era where too many comedies run on relentlessly.

Cohen plays General Admiral Aladeen of the North African nation of Wadiya, which seems superimposed upon parts of Egypt and Sudan and is a spitting distance from Saudi Arabia. Here he occupies a huge palace, used for addressing admiring throngs of his worshippers and having sex not only with Megan Fox, but also, judging by his wall of post-coital Polaroids, Kim Kardashian, Arnold Schwarzengger and Oprah. Megan Fox has a great cameo, showing up for sex but drawing the line at an all-night cuddle.

Aladeen’s premier is Tahir (Ben Kingsley), rightful heir to the throne, who is plotting to overthrow him. After an assassination fails, Tahir encourages Aladeen to address the United Nations, where he hopes another assassination will succeed. After being de-bearded by a security man (John C. Reilly), Aladeen finds himself wandering the streets of Manhattan while being impersonated in public by a body double.

He finds his way into an extreme left-wing health food store run by Zoey (Anna Faris), and despite the radical difference in their beliefs the General Admiral finds himself falling for her. That sets up satire in general about feminists, vegetarians and immigrant-huggers. Then Aladeen wanders into Manhattan’s “Little Waadeya” neighborhood, where a Wadiyan restaurant seems filled with people he thought he’d executed.

Although the movie very casually follows the progress of the romance and the assassination scheme, Cohen and the director, Larry Charles, are about as dedicated to plot as the Marx Brothers; the movie’s spiritual ancestor is “Duck Soup” and Groucho’s Freedonian dictator Rufus T. Firefly. There is also a taste of Buster Keaton‘s physical humor in a scene where Aladeen attempts to slide on a cable high above the street into the upper floor of a hotel.

Cohen’s attack on the material is free-wheeling, his attitude is anarchist, and he’s more good-humored than in “Borat” and “Bruno.” I hope he isn’t entertaining any ambitions to become beloved and popular. I expected this to be the most offensive of the three titles, and while you can’t say it isn’t offensive (especially in scenes involving a dead civil rights leader’s severed head), it’s somehow… nicer, maybe you could say.

Footnote: I want to know more about the Newcastle Hotel in New York. I don’t believe there is one. It provides the fodder for a running gag about product placement that plugs the name again and again and again.

Tim Burton‘s “Dark Shadows” is all dressed up with nowhere to go, an elegant production without a central drive. It offers wonderful things, but they aren’t what’s important. It’s as if Burton directed at arm’s length, unwilling to find juice in the story. Yes, the original TV soap opera is a cult classic, but he approaches his “Dark Shadows” as an amusing trifle, and for a feature-length film, we need more than attitude to sink our teeth in.

The gripping early scenes create expectations the movie doesn’t satisfy. We learn the early history of the Collins family in America, which would create a fishing dynasty and spawn the vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp). Burton is famous for his visuals, and here we have a symphonic evocation of the gothic sensibility. He shows the erection of the Collinwood Manor, a shriek of architecture, on a hill above the new Maine town of Collinsport. We learn how young Barnabas falls in love with the angelic Josette (Bella Heathcote) and spurns the love of Angelique (Eva Green).

Angelique, a witch, forces Josette to flee in terror to a cruel stony finger pointing out from a rocky cliff. Waves dash the stones far below. He pursues her, tries to save her, but is unable to stop her from falling to her death. This is great storytelling, because it’s played straight. I didn’t expect the whole movie to be pitched at this level, but it sets a note the rest never matches. Barnabas, made into a vampire by Angelique, is wrapped in chains, sealed in a coffin and buried for 190 years. The story moves forward to 1972, where the joke is that a vampire like Barnabas from the 1700s is out of place.

Freed from his entombment, Barnabas returns to Collinwood to find it dilapidated and cobwebby, and the family fortunes in disrepair. As proud of his family as any 18th century merchant prince and as proud of the mansion as when his parents were building it, he moves in to set things right.

The current inhabitants include Elizabeth Collins (Michelle Pfeiffer), who runs the family fortunes; her teenage daughter, Carolyn (Chloe Grace Moretz); Elizabeth’s useless brother, Roger (Jonny Lee Miller); Roger’s disturbed son, David (Gully McGrath), and a live-in psychiatrist named Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter). Family dinners are a depressing event, with everyone clustered around one end of a banquet table, except for Carolyn, who skulks at the other end. Meals are served by Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley), a wizened drunk.

Johnny Depp, as pale as anyone might be after being buried for two centuries, caresses architectural details with talon-like fingernails, and treats the others with elaborate courtesy. His performance is arch and mannered, as perhaps it should be, but so is everyone else’s; the result falls between satire and lampoon, and creates such a distance between characters and style that nobody seems to much care what happens — except for the witch Angelique, who is still alive and whose Angel Bay fish cannery is bankrupting the Collins family.

Having ordered that he be buried forever, Angelique is still inexplicably hot for Barnabas. But there’s tension because of the young and beautiful Victoria, who has become the new governess; surely it is no coincidence that she is played by Bella Heathcote, who also was Josette. Now we have the same romantic rivalry reborn in modern times.

Much of the amusement comes from Depp’s reactions to 1970s pop culture. The soundtrack is populated by rock classics, Carolyn’s room is decorated like any teenage girl’s, and Barnabas is torn between alarm and fascination when he sees his first lava lamp. Yes, now that you mention it, lava lamps do somewhat resemble coagulated gobs of blood floating in urine.

With reasoning suitable for a Jane Austen hero, Barnabas restores Collinwood to its former glory and decides to hold a formal ball to impress the locals. Carolyn pouts that this is unbelievably out of touch. In a good idea that doesn’t pay off, Alice Cooper is hired to perform. “The ugliest woman I’ve ever seen!” Barnabas exclaims after examining Alice through his opera glasses. Alice Cooper’s appearance, alas, is limited to a few snatches of songs — typical of the cameo appearances that rock stars used to make in movies that had nothing to do with them. We are denied the intriguing prospect of an extended scene between Barnabas and Alice.

This is the eighth collaboration between Burton and Depp, who go back to “Edward Scissorhands” (1990) together. We know we can expect a pitch-perfect performance by Depp, who plays Barnabas with a lasered intensity, and we know Burton’s sets and art direction will be spectacular. I think the best use of Depp in a Burton world was “Sleepy Hollow” (1999). Here Depp seems to inhabit a world of his own, perhaps in self-defense. The others seem to be performing parodies of their characters. “Dark Shadows” begins with great promise, but then the energy drains out.