A great cast full of interesting actors take stock characters and familiar conflicts into surprising territory. Standing Up, Falling Down looks like a movie you’ve seen a dozen times before… or more specifically, three movies: There’s the one about the guy who comes back home after giving up on his dreams and finds everything still where he left it; there’s the one about the genial drunk whose gregariousness hides the sadness in his soul; and the one about the sad young man who learns valuable life lessons through his friendship with a senior citizen. Matt Ratner’s first feature is all of those stories. Dramatically, Peter Hoare’s screenplay is a little on the basic side, leaning on stock characters and familiar conflicts. But the execution is sound and it kinda works. Go figure.

Daniel Radcliffe plays an unlikely action hero thrust into an online reality show where it’s kill or be killed. Since setting down his wand for the last time, Daniel Radcliffe has been challenging himself with a series of surprising movie choices, tackling horror (Horns), thriller (Imperium), drama (Kill Your Darlings) and avant-garde indie (Swiss Army Man). In his hyper-violent new film, Guns Akimbo, Radcliffe reinvents himself as an action star, albeit an unlikely one. Guns Akimbo casts him very much against type, but the gamble pays off, with Radcliffe a likable lead in this high-octane assault on the senses that plays like a cross between Crank and The Truman Show. It is as bonkers as that sounds.

‘Color Out of Space’ Review: Bother From Another Planet Nicolas Cage and Joely Richardson face an evil shade of lilac in this inventive sci-fi horror film directed by Richard Stanley. “Color Out of Space,” apparently, is blindingly bright and magnificently malevolent. In this bonkers yet weirdly beautiful science fiction-horror hybrid (directed, with retro panache, by the great Richard Stanley), the light is a throbbing lilac and blood is Schiaparelli pink. And if I tell you that Nicolas Cage’s eyeballs will turn into ultraviolet high-beams, then you’ll know immediately if you’re in or out. Lovers of aberrant, gooey B-movies will be all in. Cage plays Nathan, a gentleman farmer who can show you how to whip up a cassoulet or milk an alpaca. Nathan’s main preoccupations are lingering daddy issues and a stalled sex life resulting from the recent illness of his wife, Theresa (Joely Richardson). But just as that particular dry spell is breaking, a meteorite crashes into their front yard, its crater releasing poisonous, multihued energy that alters DNA in disgustingly inventive ways. And when Theresa’s body begins a seeming attempt to suck the youngest of their three children back into the womb, an increasingly unhinged Nathan becomes convinced that only family solidarity will save them. Based on a 1929 short story by H.P. Lovecraft, “Color Out of Space” has more going on than just the squishy satisfactions of its old-school creature effects (reminiscent of Rob Bottin’s ingenious work on John Carpenter’s “The Thing”). Using shape-shifting as a messy metaphor for sickness and childhood trauma, Stanley and Cage leap so far over the psychological top that they never come back to earth. By the end, my own eyeballs hadn’t changed color, but they must have looked like pinwheels.

Three disabled men go on a road trip to lose their virginity at a special-needs bordello in this ingratiating remake of a Belgian film. The rare remake that’s actually a slight improvement on its predecessor, Richard Wong’s “Come as You Are” translates Geoffrey Enthoven’s 2011 Belgian “Hasta la Vista” to middle America. Other changes are less substantial, but this seriocomedy has a less formulaic feel than the original while remaining a crowd-pleasing buddy pic-caper with a soft-pedaled minority empowerment theme. Reception in real-world disabled communities may be somewhat muted by the casting of able-bodied actors in the lead roles. Nonetheless, it’s hard to entirely resist this loosely fact-inspired tale of three physically challenged men road-tripping to Montreal in order to lose their virginity at a “special needs” bordello.