Calum Marsh

The solemn excavation of Smith’s life and death — she died at 39 of a drug overdose, in 2007 — ultimately brings the movie, despite Macfarlane’s well-meaning efforts, squarely into the territory of what it’s attempting to condemn: lurid voyeurism.

The film is at its most compelling when tackling this tension between care and resentment head-on — it has a ring of truth that’s sadly squandered whenever Huang reaches for easy laughs.

For all its gung-ho violence, the film never feels fraught or nasty enough: It never risks true offense or tastelessness, never takes a gamble on anything that could be interpreted the wrong way or that might sidestep expectations. Somehow it makes killing Nazis feel pretty tame.

This tedious, unfunny, screamingly unoriginal romantic adventure film is so flimsy and so insubstantial that it’s practically vaporous.

Holmes is a generous but indiscriminate director of actors: She has the tendency, not uncommon among actors turned directors, of extending a cast of inconsistent talent a degree of latitude better reserved for the heaviest hitters. (She doesn’t have this problem with her own performance, which is both compelling and well-situated in the context of the film.)

While the details are meticulous, the attitude is all wrong, trading the simple, unaffected charm that has served the character so well since his introduction in 1981 for a snarky and fatuous air that leans hard on winking humor and bland, hackneyed irony.

The film frames them as having been somehow embroiled in a political situation, rather than actively, knowingly engaged in it — and its attempts to remain apolitical and focus on the music are as naïve as the band’s.

A funny and thoughtful high school comedy.

What should be a cute story about a mischievous orange tabby cat instead becomes an ironic, even vaguely smug movie in the vein of something like “Deadpool.”

Much of the dialogue feels canned and phony in the style of a badly written sitcom. But coming out of J. Lo’s mouth, I believed it.

Between its old-hat story, flagrantly distasteful humor and lousy visual effects, Virtually Heroes feels as if it’s been sitting on a shelf for a lot longer than 10 years. It probably should have remained there.

While it’s true that a certain tepid aspect is common to most B westerns, those of the ’30s and ’40s were made with a baseline competence that The Old Way is woefully lacking.

It’s a winning setup, and the director, Daryl Wein, escalates the action shrewdly, with clever rom-com engineering.

It’s the sort of bland, innocuous trifle that will swiftly recede into the oblivion of a streaming service menu — a comedy without laughs and a family movie without heart, lacking any of the wit or charm of Kinney’s original stories.

That winsome charm and gusto is infectious, as in a Central Park-set dance number with some of the Technicolor verve of an old Hollywood musical, and it manages to sustain this unflagging exuberance across its fleet 72-minute running time.

Mostly it made me want to watch the original, which, as always, remains well worth revisiting.

If this is the standard we’re dealing with, I’d rather have amnesia.

While Falwell Jr. may indeed be a charlatan, ridiculing his sexual predilections seems like a pretty dubious way to prove it.

Like Pez, the film is charming and colorful — and perhaps too sweet.

Wadlow, a good horror director, seems hamstrung by the family-friendly context and struggles to develop tension in the absence of a plausible threat of violence.

"Lyle” has a brisk, whimsical momentum that is utterly infectious in the early going. Then it stops dead.

The film repeatedly undercuts whatever tension is mustered with its frustrating tendency to crack goofy, juvenile jokes.

Of course, these logistical problems would be excusable if the romance at the center of the movie were remotely compelling or if the jokes were actually funny.

We Are as Gods is a mildly interesting documentary about a very interesting man.

The infectious brio at the heart of “Bojangles” is a testament to the performances of the ensemble cast, but especially Duris and Efira, whose chemistry is magnetic.

The “Dragon Ball” formula is repetitive and predictable. But it’s difficult to overstate how exquisitely gratifying that formula can be.

When the kids are just doing kid stuff . . . Secret Headquarters has the playful, mischievous air of something like “The Goonies.” When the kids acquire some of the Guard’s superpowers and start flying around and fighting baddies, it has the air of … well, of just another superhero movie.

Logan, who also wrote the screenplay, feels so averse to engaging with the thorny political implications inherent in this material — of having to negotiate a cast of gay, transgender and nonbinary characters in a horror context — that the whole thing winds up seeming rather tame.