Brandon Yu

It’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all.

Ultimately what this version, directed by Rupert Sanders, is spiritually derived from is neither the film nor the comic, but rather the flattened popular image that the film produced — a Hot Topic-style version of alternative consciousness.

Underneath the blinding lights, the Weeknd has always told us, is a hollow core. In that regard, the movie has mirrored the music.

This film from Li Xiaofeng turns a crime soap opera into an allegory about the moral costs of rapacious expansion — to middling effect.

Even as a Lifetime-esque soap, What Remains sputters, lacking any of the sensational twists to allow itself to sink into enjoyable pulp. The film ultimately hopes to position itself above such a story, aiming instead for a meditation on faith and forgiveness, but its writing and direction lacks the emotional substance to produce anything legitimately affecting.

The film does not offer any particularly new insights, but witnessing the events of Jan. 6 this way — as a matter-of-fact, two-and-a-half-hour montage that seems to occur at once in slow motion and with shocking speed — creates a terror that is perhaps newly visceral and sustained.

Even while it’s hampered by these rough edges, the movie is terrifically scored and beautifully shot.

The documentary, directed by Jack Youngelson, is about the slow, difficult work of reaching out, opening up and eventually finding a glimmer of hope, day by day.

Exceptionally well-crafted and anchored by moving performances from Koma and Mensah-Offei, the film is, in one sense, a great work about that basic human desire to long for something better, and the heartbreak that often comes with it.

As the team unearths evidence, the documentary offers a ripe window into the process of scientific discovery.

It’s not an easy task to make a movie out of a kids’ show from a bygone era, but the film does a relatively smooth job of dipping into — but not overdoing — the nostalgia and retaining the lighthearted, wacky tone that was the show’s signature.

The film lacks any well-executed surprises to help it push past one-dimensional satire, and Howery is not strong enough of a dramatic actor to keep a single-setting, single-character film like this consistently engaging.

The doc mostly amounts to a sweet nostalgia trip about a niche group of obsessive young people. It’s also an ode to young adulthood itself: For most of the group, latching on to cinema was simply a means of finding a community, and themselves.

In recent years Netflix has become a factory for B-rate Christmas movies, with the occasional cheap comfort to be found in its manufactured holiday romances. This bizarre concoction, not so much.

Despite the film’s aims at spiky commentary, the class rebellion mostly serves as the thin wrapping to, at best, a middling heist movie that loses some of the punchy tension of the original’s getaway sequences. At its worst, it’s no more than a teenage soap opera.

Rather than being its own entry into the genre, Pools instead is a green director’s hodgepodge emulation of ideas and tricks we’ve seen elsewhere.

This is, in short, as polished as you would expect of a work about a pop behemoth, a companion piece to their new album that’s less a revelatory look at the meaning of their time away than a sentimental welcome back for the group and its fans. For the BTS Army, that’s likely more than enough.