“Mortal Kombat” was just a video game back in 1992, offering players some character histories and the creation of weird realms to support a fantasy fighting game that offered striking visuals and, of course, ridiculous amounts of graphic violence. It was Grand Guignol for the arcade generation, but its producers didn’t stop there, offering video game sequels (the latest chapter was released in 2019), comic books, merchandise, and, of course, movies. There have been a few attempts to bring the video game universe to the big screen, mostly notably a 1995 offering from director Paul W.S. Anderson. The new “Mortal Kombat” endeavors to launch the brand name to new cinematic heights, offered a sizable budget to detail flashy visuals and boasting an R-rating to preserve the core appeal of the game, maintaining its gore zone standards. It also happens to be an entertaining picture once it gets past mountains of exposition, delivering heavy fighting between strange combatants, and bodies are appropriately destroyed in a myriad of ways.

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Movies about space travel or exploration usually dip into thriller cinema to help connect the dots for viewers. It’s a way to maintain audience participation, giving them some nail-biting sequences to hold attention, with most filmmakers using some level of science to help buttress a vision for blockbuster entertainment. Think “Gravity” or the recent “The Midnight Sky.” “Stowaway” has a cast of familiar faces and a healthy visual effects budget, and it initially appears to be more of an intellectual and emotional tale of survival in deep space, asking hard questions about sacrifice when disaster strikes, examining the value of human life in an unwinnable situation. “Stowaway” initially seems interested in a dramatic offering of debate and introspection, and it does its best work in quieter moments. Co-writer/director Joe Penna doesn’t remain in the stillness for the length of the picture, eventually succumbing to marketplace demands, but he delivers two acts of fascinating distress in need of a better ending.

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How does a filmmaker get their arms around the world of “Sesame Street” and everything it’s inspired? Arguably the finest, most creative television show ever produced, “Sesame Street” has lasted for over five decades, reaching out to generations of viewers raised on its blissful mixture of education and entertainment, stacked with human and monster characters who’ve helped to create amazing moments of learning and laughing, giving the audience a chance to understand the world around them in a way other programming carefully ignores. There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to this show, and director Marilyn Agrelo (“Mad Hot Ballroom”) has the unenviable task of assembling an origin story. Adapting Michael Davis’s book, “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street,” Agrelo doesn’t bite off more than she can chew with the documentary, providing a look at the formative years of “Sesame Street,” focusing on producing and performing forces that helped to establish the mission of the series, eventually launching a show that achieved the impossible: it changed the world.

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It takes something special to make a relationship story work these days, and writer/director Nikole Beckwith has exactly that with “Together Together.” It’s a story about love developing between two vastly different people, but it remains careful about the tentative union, keeping the material away from a sitcom approach. It’s also a pregnancy tale, but Beckwith doesn’t turn the experience into a wacky event with nervous parents. She avoids most cliches with the endeavor, preferring a human approach to the complications of parenthood and partnership that arrive in the movie. “Together Together” works extremely hard to remain focused on feelings, and Beckwith is triumphant in that regard, creating an intimate but approachable odyssey of connection during a special experience, working with a terrific cast to bring it to life.

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Family issues and a device apocalypse compete for screen time in “The Mitchells vs. the Machines,” the latest offering from Sony Pictures Animation, who recently enjoyed a creative and financial breakthrough with 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” Keeping the visual style of the hit film, but losing the superhero, writer/directors Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe hunt for a comfortable balance between sensitive material about the familial experience and the frantic scope of the titular war. “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” is superbly crafted and cast, maintaining a sharp sense of humor that plays into today’s meme-saturated world, and it’s guaranteed to please younger viewers eager to watch something that’s silly and speedy. Rianda and Rowe show difficulty sustaining such storytelling velocity, getting lost in the manic energy of the effort, but there are moments of cartoon clarity that keep the movie together.

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It’s about time someone made a film about the world of tabletop gaming, which has experienced a resurgence in popularity over the last five years. Mercifully, writer/director Michael Lovan doesn’t make a documentary with “Murder Bury Win,” instead using the mechanics of gameplay and the ruthlessness of the marketplace to inspire a comedic rendering of board game horrors playing out in the real world. Lovan doesn’t have big bucks to bring his vision to life, instead offering an inspired screenplay that, for the first half, secures a playful understanding of creative partnerships and failure, soon adding some macabre business to twist the material in all sorts of directions. “Murder Bury Win” could use an editorial pruning, but it’s highly amusing at times, offering committed performances and periodic darkness to keep the whole endeavor enjoyable.

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James Cameron likes water. More specifically, he’s fascinated by the depths of the ocean, spending his career exploring strange deep-sea discoveries (1989’s “The Abyss”), aquatic tragedies (1997’s “Titanic”), and has personally spent time in various submersibles, using his incredible wealth to fund voyages into oceanic darkness, offering viewers a chance to experience the underwater world alongside him. Heck, the man even made a movie about flying fishes (1982’s “Piranha II: The Spawning”), so clearly there’s something about this Earthly kingdom he can’t flush out of his system. For “Secrets of the Whales,” Cameron takes an executive producer position, overseeing the creation of a four-part documentary on these magnificent creatures, with directors Brian Armstrong and Andy Mitchell doing the heavy lifting, sending cameras to the far reaches of the world to capture the behavior of whales, getting to understand what makes them tick and identify how much in common they have with humans.

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“Wildcat” is a great example of misleading movie marketing. The production knows it doesn’t have an exciting picture, but there’s no way to sell a story about an American prisoner suffering inside an Iraqi safe house for 90 minutes. That static nature of the material doesn’t lend itself to outside interest, resulting in the creation of a poster that features a tank, marching soldiers, and a fresh image of star Georgina Campbell (none of these elements are present in the effort), and the trailer attempts to portray the endeavor as some type of tense thriller, with plenty of charged confrontations and physical activity. “Wildcat” barely moves during its run time, as writer/director Jonathan W. Stokes is focused on creating a study of endurance in the face of Middle Eastern evil, keeping the script to silences and monologues. It’s a supremely dull offering, but for those electing to watch the film, keep in mind the final cut isn’t anything like the movie the studio is trying to promote.

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“Here Are the Young Men” is an adaptation of a novel by Rob Doyle, which is the first of many problems facing the production. It’s book that takes 304 pages to work through the angst and anger of juvenile characters on the precipice of adulthood, embarking on a destructive summer before responsibility seeks to divide them, possibly forever. Doyle had the benefit of pages to work out these personalities and their tenuous grip on sanity. Writer/director Eoin Macken has 95 minutes to make it through some impossibly bleak and surreal storytelling, and it’s a marathon he can’t complete. “Here Are the Young Men” has ideas on the nature of masculinity and psychopathic tendencies, even squeezing something resembling a commentary on media influence, but Macken is working uphill with this material, struggling to make sense of motivations and subplots, and his taste in casting leaves much to be desired.

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It’s not easy to introduce a vampire film to the masses these days, as the subgenre is loaded with competition, with each endeavor attempting to have fun with monster thrills while dealing the challenge of familiarity. Just last week there was “Jakob’s Wife,” a clever reworking of master/slave relationships, and now there’s “Boys from County Hell,” which brings bloodsucking problems to rural Ireland, combining beer-soaked camaraderie with the dangers that come with a creature of the night. Writer/director Chris Baugh has the right idea with the picture, but doesn’t give the effort enough urgency. “Boys from County Hell” delivers violence and retains interest in becoming a creature feature, eventually, but the path to a payoff is unexpectedly slow, and Baugh struggles with tonality, bringing together fantasy survival challenges and the real-world pain of personal loss, making for quite an uneven movie at times.

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