NEW YORK. A serious, even lugubrious, tone and a top-flight cast add heft to the ecclesiastical melodrama “Conclave” (PG, Focus). Yet the film is fundamentally a power-struggle potboiler kept roiling by attention-grabbing plot developments — the last and most significant of which Catholic viewers will likely find uncomfortable at best.

NEW YORK. Fans of the 2017 film “Wonder” may recognize the character of Julian Abans (Bryce Gheisar), a student on whose adjustment to a new school the opening scenes of the touching wartime drama “White Bird” (PG-13, Lionsgate) focus. Julian was the bully who persecuted the facially deformed but heroic-hearted protagonist of the earlier movie.

NEW YORK. “The afterlife is so random,” observes a character in the horror-comedy sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (PG-13, Warner Bros.). If the disorganized structure of returning director Tim Burton’s follow-up to the Reagan-era film that first made his reputation as a conjurer of Gothic atmosphere is anything to go by, it must be arbitrary indeed.

NEW YORK.  Kevin Costner directed, co-wrote and stars in the epic Western, “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1” (R, New Line). The first installment of a proposed tetralogy, the sprawling film is visually pleasing but its narrative feels unwieldy.

NEW YORK. Evident good intentions are not matched by dramatic craftsmanship in the fantasy “Harold and the Purple Crayon” (PG, Columbia). Though director Carlos Saldanha’s blend of animation and live action, adapted from the 1955 children’s book by Crockett Johnson, makes some respectable moral points, it’s not especially entertaining.