Grade: C+

The atmosphere is the real star of this new screen version of Shakespeare’s Scottish play, in which even Michael Fassbender’s ambitious thane and Marion Cotillard’s manipulative Lady Macbeth—as well as the Bard’s text—play second fiddle to the graphic-novel mood of gloom, blood and fatalism favored by director Justin Kurzel and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw. The result is not without its impressive moments, but like so many of the earlier screen adaptations, this “Macbeth” falls short.

One intriguing element of the much-edited screenplay fashioned by Todd Louiso, Jacob Koskoff and Michael Lesslie is its emphasis on father-son relationships. The play alludes to Lady Macbeth’s having given birth, but Kurzel’s film expands on that by beginning with a scene in which the couple presides over the funeral of an infant, presumably theirs, and then spotlighting the death of an older boy—either Macbeth’s older son or a favored squire to whom he’s become a surrogate father—in the initial battle sequence. Later the film makes a point of placing special focus not only on Duncan (David Thewlis) and Malcolm (Jack Reynor), but on Banquo (Paddy Considine) and young Feance (Lochlann Harris), the lad who here takes up the sword of vengeance at the very close. It also takes pains to show us the fiery execution of Macduff’s (Sean Harris) children along with his wife (Elizabeth Debicki).

The fire motif is also an element of the red hue that Kurzel and Arkapaw add to the final reel: they have Macduff set the timbers his soldiers are carrying from Birnam Wood aflame. That might not make much sense in the context of the narrative, wherein the branches are intended to conceal the approaching invaders, but it certainly does exhibit extravagant visual flair.

These are interesting interpretive touches, but this “Macbeth” is, despite its love of gore and swordplay (though, to be sure, it doesn’t match Polanski in that respect), mostly a grimly lugubrious, and not terribly compelling, affair. One can understand Kurzel’s desire to avoid the sort of declamatory style that Orson Welles brought to his threadbare 1948 film (or Olivier would surely have brought to his, had he made one—Branagh probably will when he gets around to it), but the solution he’s adopted—of having a good deal of the text whispered or mumbled, often against montages of extraneous visuals—has the effect of muting its effect. (Another choice, in which one of the most famous soliloquies is delivered straight into the camera, as if it were the equivalent of an interview, doesn’t work much better.) The result is a version of “Macbeth” that comes across as a prolonged dirge interrupted occasionally by spurts of action—mostly at beginning and end, though at a few points in between as well.

Nor do the cast make up for the directorial choices with overpowering performances. Fassbender brings a leonine gruffness to Macbeth, but doesn’t capture the character’s emotional descent following the death of Duncan in much more than a generalized way, and his recitation of the dialogue has little poetry. Cotillard is similarly hampered by Kurzel’s vision. She’s very good in the scene showing her cunningly covering up the evidence of her husband’s guilt in Duncan’s death, and is aided by the addition of situating Lady Macbeth as a witness to the killing of the Macduff clan. But while she registers strength in the sequence in which her husband sees Banquo’s ghost during a celebratory feast, her later scenes—even her big mad moment—are less persuasive. The remaining cast is good without bringing any special insight.

In fact, throughout Kurzel appears less interested in the actors than the settings in which they’re placed. He and Arkapaw certainly employ the Scottish locations to good effect, fashioning windswept vistas that emphasize the unforgiving harshness of the environment. And Ely Cathedral is an imposing stand-in for Macbeth’s castle. Fiona Crombie’s production design, Nick Dent’s art direction and Alice Felton’s set decoration are all excellent, and costume designer Jacqueline Durran has provided garb that adds a touch of imagination to authenticity.

But in the end the film has the feel of being more Kurzel’s “Macbeth” than Shakespeare’s. One could make the same observation about Welles’s and Polanski’s versions (or Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” of course), but in each of those cases there are more compensatory elements than one finds here.

Grade: C+

Apparently an attempt to fashion a cooler, hipper version of “Star Wars” in advance of Disney’s restart of that Lucas franchise (it might be mistaken for the earlier adventures of Han Solo, without even an Obi-wan figure to lend it a touch of gravitas), Marvel’s latest superhero behemoth “Guardians of the Galaxy” is one of those movies that should actually be labeled as FFO—“For Fanboys Only”—except that being an efficiently made product of the Marvel Factory’s assembly line operation, its blend of explosive action and juvenile humor will probably appeal to a far wider part of today’s filmgoing public. It’s a completely vacuous reiteration of the “saving the universe” plot common to all these pictures, but audiences will no doubt eat up its non-stop mixture of CGI wizardry and puerile gags.

Based not on the original comic-book series of the late sixties and early seventies but the 2008 reboot, “Guardians” brings together a bunch of misfits—preening, jokey humanoid outlaw Peter Quill, aka “Starlord” (Chris Pratt); green-toned alien femme fatale Gamora (Zoe Saldana); burly, tattooed giant Drax (Dave Bautista); cynical, wise-cracking genetically modified raccoon Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper); and anthropomorphic tree Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel)—to take on a powerful villain called Ronan (Lee Pace), who’s intent on destroying the planet Xandar, which is presided over by a female leader (Glenn Close).

The MacGuffin of the plot is an orb with mysterious destructive power. After a brief prologue in which we see the young Quill (Wyatt Oleff) witness the death of his mother and get abducted by an alien spaceship, we find him grown and entering a cave to secure the orb for his boss, the blue-tinted Ravager (i.e., outlaw) leader Yondu (Michael Rooker). After a battle with Ronan’s henchman Korath (Djimon Hounsou), Quill escapes. But he has no intention of handing over the orb to Yondu; he takes it to Xandar intending to fence it himself. That’s where he meets Gamora, Rocket and Groot. She wants to steal the orb; they’re bounty hunters who want to snatch Quill. Their confrontation leads them all to be arrested and sent to prison, where they encounter Drax, who has a personal grudge against Ronan and joins with them in escaping. Another encounter with Ronan, Korath and Gamora’s stepsister Nebula (Karen Gillan) puts them all in jeopardy, but eventually they—along with Yondu’s fleet—make their way to Xandar, where they mount a joint stand with the Xandarian defenders against Ronan, who by now has mastered the power of the orb.

This threadbare plot is nothing more than an excuse for a chain of splashy battle scenes, interrupted by lots of jocular bickering among the oddball crew. Much of the latter is provided by Cooper’s Rocket, who bad-mouths everybody but his buddy Groot (the tone of whose sole words he’s able to reinterpret), and especially Pratt’s Quill, a dude who takes little seriously and constantly grooves to the mix tape of ’70s pop tunes that’s the only link he possesses to his mother (as well as serving to score many of the movie’s set-pieces). There are points at which the picture tries for sentiment or poignancy—the prologue, for example, but also a few scenes in which characters are put in jeopardy or are apparently killed—but none of them has any real depth. And the material featuring Ronan and his ally Thanos (voiced by an uncredited Josh Brolin) is all too reminiscent of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” with the duo coming across like deep-voiced Skeletor wannabes.

The most crowd-pleasing “characters” are likely to be Rocket and Groot, who are marvels of CGI imaging and whom Cooper and Diesel voice with surprising point. Pratt seems to be doing a sort of homage to Captain Mal Reynolds of “Serenity,” which perhaps explains Nathan Fillion’s walk-on in the prison sequence. Saldana exhibits her customary athleticism but otherwise serves mostly as eye candy, and as Drax Bautista shows the sort of talent characteristic of most ex-wrestlers: he’s a hulking presence, and delivers his lines, laden with elevated vocabulary as a jocular counterpoint to his bulging physique, in a monotonous growl. But that’s what the part requires. Close suffers from the same problem that afflicted Natalie Portman in the second “Star Wars” trilogy—she’s too concerned with trying to keep her unsightly hairdo in place to act, except in the most generalized fashion. But John C. Reilly is able to add a few wry touches to his turn as a Xandar policeman and the scowling Rooker savors Yondu’s nastiness, both overshadowing Benicio Del Toro’s brief turn as a distinctly weird “collector” of unusual artifacts.

“Guardians” represents a very different thing from James Gunn’s previous movie, “Super,” which tried—even if unsuccessfully—to investigate the dark side of fanboydom and the damage it can lead to. By contrast this is a jokey, lighthearted, and ultimately inconsequential riff about another guy determined to be a famous hero. It’s been elaborately produced—though the settings devised by the effects team have a comic-book look, one can hardly fault the production design of Charles Wood or Ben Davis’ cinematography—and the visual effects, especially those involving Rocket and Groot, are smoothly integrated into the live-action material. What original music there is, once you factor in the pop tunes, is provided in pretty standard fashion by Tyler Bates, and one can be thankful to editors (Craig Wood, Fred Raskin and Hughes Winborne for the fact that for a Marvel superhero movie, this one comes in at a relatively trim two hours (even less if you skip the final credits).

The very empty-headedness of “Guardians of the Galaxy” will probably insure its enormous success, since many in the audience will be able to identify with it.