This week, pain is everywhere.
In one film, suffering is how man hears the voice of God.
In another, a man tears apart the lives of his wife and co-workers to achieve his own salvation. In a third, pain is the pathway into the heart of a lover.
Silence(NC16, 161 minutes, opens tomorrow, 4/5 stars) tells the story of the persecution of Catholics in 17th-century Japan. It opens with a scene of profound cruelty: Portuguese Jesuits are hung on crosses, slowly cooked to death at a hot spring, while an anguished Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson) looks on.
From Macau, two priests - Garupe (Adam Driver) and Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) - after hearing that Ferreira has renounced his faith, volunteer to infiltrate the country. They hope to rescue Ferreira as well as minister to the kakure kirishitan, or hidden Christians.
Director and writer Martin Scorsese and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks adapt Japanese writer Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel of the same name into a spare, terrifying movie about the demands that faith places on the faithful.
Rodrigues and Garupe grow feral as they navigate a landscape crawling with spies, aided by the untrustworthy, Gollum-like Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka).
Their ragged physical state reflects the condition of their faith, shaken by witnessing the agonising deaths of villagers who refuse to trample on fumi-e, medals bearing images of Jesus or Mary.
This is a film of dirt and flesh - the camera takes a calm, unflinching view of the most horrible forms of torment.
Scorsese takes the side of the victims, then that of their captors, who speak in such elegant, humanistic terms, they make the priests and their followers look like fanatics.
That tug of war between the secular and the divine will be familiar to viewers of Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ (1998), also co-written by Cocks.
Here, there are more layers, dealing with imperialism disguised as religious freedom and the Western mind's obsession with absolutes. That abstraction collides with the Japanese preference for seeing the world as the film sees it: a land ruled by cicadas, the mountains, the sea and the forest, all implacably indifferent to human suffering, and where every deal made with God is imperfect and open to negotiation.
The Founder(PG13, 116 minutes, opens tomorrow, 3.5/5 stars) opens with the 50something Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) speaking to the camera, persuading - or rather, pleading with you - to trust him.
He is selling blenders, but as all salesmen know, he needs to sell himself first.
The problem is, he no longer believes in his own patter and his order books are blank.
The story of the man who took a burger shop owned by two efficiency nerds in San Bernadino and turned it into a global enterprise is told as a bitter fairy tale, sometimes as black comedy.
At the centre is the astonishing performance by Keaton as the man whose moral fibre is nowhere as strong as his ambition.
Director John Lee Hancock made his name with award-winning biopics The Blind Side (2009) and Saving Mr. Banks (2013).
He and writer Robert D. Siegel (The Wrestler, 2008) turn in a work that has fun with the idea that nice guys such as Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch), the real founders, not only finish last, but their contributions are also doomed to go down the memory hole, like an empty package of french fries into a bin.
Fifty Shades Darker(R21, 118 minutes, opens tomorrow, 3/5 stars), the second instalment of the erotic trilogy, lands softly, like the rustling of silk bondage scarves.
It deals with Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) happy and in control of her life, now that she has taken herself away from the sadistic embrace of lover Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan).
Unlike Sam Taylor-Johnson who helmed the previous film, director James Foley prefers plot over sumptuous set design or luxurious surfaces.
That strategy has its merits, but the thriller narrative, involving persons from Grey's shadowy past coming to the fore, exposes the shallowness of the story, which would fit into 15 minutes of a standard television prime-time soap.
