Comment on 'No Good Deed' unseats 'Guardians of the Galaxy' at the box office

The Sony thriller "No Good Deed," which stars Elba as an escaped convict and Taraji P. Henson as the innocent he terrorizes, opened on top of the box office with $24.25 million. Amid the national conversation about violence against women comes "No Good Deed," a brutal thriller about, you guessed it, a "malignant narcissist" committing all sorts of violence against women. The erotic touches, her coy attention to appearance after the audience has seen him as a man of violence, are a joke. Winter, the dolphin with a prosthetic tail, is back, and there's a new threat against the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. Laugh-out-loud funny and production-designed to death, the last of the summer of 2014's popcorn pictures pops off the screen. A willing cast playing stupid-cool characters, video-game-friendly action beats and a touch of heart make this a rare pleasant surprise in a summer that has sorely lacked them. The visual effects are solid, especially the computer-generated turtles, who are believable as flesh-and-blood characters. The laughs are loud, lewd and low in "Let's Be Cops," a spoof of cop "buddy pictures" that is pretty much the definition of "an August comedy." Michael Roskam's crime drama is getting attention as the late James Gandolfini's final appearance in a feature film, and it's a memorable farewell. Fans of Gayle Forman's popular novel for young adults and devotees of up-and-coming actor Chloë Grace Moretz, may be willing to overlook the clichéd situations and artless dialogue here. The story of an Indian family that relocates to Europe and opens a restaurant in rural France, this is an appealing film about different food cultures, with fine performances by Helen Mirren (as a formidable French restaurateur) and Manish Dayal, as a young cook with talent.