Action and disaster headline the Magic Lantern

Above: Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig star in Noah Baumbach's "White Noise." (Photo/ Netflix)

If you’re willing to venture out to see a movie, the Magic Lantern Theatre will likely be adding a couple of intriguing films to its Friday schedule.

One, “White Noise,” is based on a 1985 novel by the American writer Don DeLillo. The other is an original story titled “Leonor Will Never Die.”

“White Noise”: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle headline this Noah Baumbach adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel about a family trying to weather a deadly airborne toxic disaster.

Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang wrote, “Excessive reverence has killed many a well-meaning adaptation, but this ‘White Noise,’ at once wildly mercurial and fastidiously controlled, somehow winds up triumphing over its own death.”

Stephanie Zacharek of Time magazine has a different view. “A movie about the American condition, whatever that is, that feels beamed in from the planet of the chuckling beard strokers. It’s hard to know how seriously we’re supposed to take any of it.”

(Note: Netflix will begin streaming “White Noise” on Dec. 30.)

“Leonor Will Never Die”: Martika Ramirez Escobar wrote and directed this study of a retired filmmaker (played by Sheila Francisco) who, while in a coma, imagines herself the superheroine of her own unfinished screenplay. (In Filipino with English subtitles)

Jeannette Catsoulis of the New York Times wrote, “Defiantly gray-haired and wrapped in shapeless floral frocks, (Franciso) makes Leonor a touchingly adamant heroine, one whose playfulness masks her need to mourn her lost child and vanished career.”

Steve Davis of the Austin Chronicle added, “Although its ambitions often exceed its reach, the meta-mad Filipino film ‘Leonor Will Never Die’ bursts with imaginative impulses, scoring slightly more hits than misses.”

As usual, I’ll update the mainstream releases on Wednesday.