Film reviews: The Accountant 2 and The Shrouds

The Accountant 2

Directed by Gavin O'Connor (R)

Once you get past the ridiculous setup, "you will likely find yourself enjoying this extremely entertaining movie," said Jordan Hoffman in Entertainment Weekly. As in the hit 2016 original, Ben Affleck stars as Christian Wolff, an autistic accountant with two superpowers: fixing mobsters' books and killing villains. This time, he's battling a human-trafficking operation, though that part of the plot is inscrutable. "I have seen The Accountant 2 twice, and I still have no idea what the hell the bad guys are doing." But there's enough distraction here, partly owing to a shift in tone that "leaves room for more action and comedy."

The franchise continues to provide "a very Hollywood treatment of autism," said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. Because Wolff is autistic, he's a genius at pattern recognition. But "at least the film has an enormous affection for its hero, as well as empathy for his frustrations." And while the comedy can "veer toward the cutesy," as when Chris tries speed dating, the scenes that reunite Affleck with Jon Bernthal as Chris' contract-killer brother are great. One is the brains, the other's the brawn, a dynamic reminiscent of '80s action movies that "put together two likable stars in polar opposite character types and then just let the sparks fly," said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. "The problem is everything else." The movie is half buddy comedy, half crime thriller. "Merging the two becomes an assignment too difficult for even The Accountant to decipher."

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The Shrouds

Directed by David Cronenberg (R)

"The Shrouds is a grief story as only David Cronenberg would ever think to shoot one," said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. Inspired by the legendary body-horror director's anguish over his wife's death from cancer, the sardonic film is often "cadaverously stiff," but its coldness proves "deeply comforting" in the days after you've seen it. Vincent Cassel stars as a widowed entrepreneur who has created a graveyard technology that allows mourners to use a smartphone app to observe their departed loved ones as they decay. Though Cassel is styled to look like Cronenberg, said Justin Chang in The New Yorker, the character, Karsh, is clearly not a straight stand-in, and "what begins as a drama of grief soon morphs into a study of how grief is exploited, manipulated, and compartmentalized."

When Karsh's business suffers a round of attacks of unknown origin, the mystery leads him down a wormhole of conspiracy theories. But he's also experiencing visions of his wife, played by Diane Kruger, and the story "doesn't resolve so much as dissipate, in a series of almost comically perfunctory reversals and whispers of geopolitical peril." For many viewers, it'll be frustrating that the movie, which "promised to be akin to a droll Coen brothers comedy" instead "wanders off into reverie," said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. "Cronenberg may not care about closure, but a movie can benefit greatly from it."