Calum Marsh

The humor is over-the-top and often exaggeratedly juvenile, but like many nominally “dumb” comedies, it’s the product of a keen and deliberate intelligence.

The action in The Wrecking Crew is so good, its fights so brisk and its car chases so lively, that it makes you wish its muscular leads, Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, had starred in more decent action movies.

Lynch is a difficult influence to wield responsibly, yet Erkman keeps it largely under control: A Desert, if at times too ambitious, certainly feels distinct.

Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison and Rachel Zegler, as the teens tasked with thwarting the apocalypse, make charming heroes — but it’s Mooney himself, as the loquacious stoner Garret, who is the film’s dopey MVP.

The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.

If the movie’s portrayal of rivalrous (and homoerotic) hypermasculinity doesn’t always seem original, it is nevertheless realized with seriousness and vigor.

With its rambling momentum and quick-witted, almost musical dialogue, it feels less like “Superbad” than a Robert Altman movie, sort of like a pint-size “California Split.”

This is pretty routine material, but it’s been realized with charm and enthusiasm: The director, Simon Cellan Jones, maintains a good handle on the comic-thriller tone and shoots the action with wit and creativity.

While sometimes grating, the film is always appealing, with pleasing details, down to its Art Deco end titles.

Yoo was granted exceptional access to San Quentin, and when she depicts the mundane qualities of life there — inmates working odd jobs, writing letters, passing the time alone in their cells — the movie gains some of the penetrating clarity of one of Frederick Wiseman’s films.

Office Race, a ribald comedy from Jared Lapidus about an inveterate deadbeat reluctantly training for a marathon, understands one of the great unspoken truths about running: that it is a miserable, arduous, soul-destroying pastime, and also deeply, profoundly rewarding.

With compelling verve, “Hall of Shame,” from the director Bryan Storkel, tells the story of Conte’s ignominious rise and fall.

The director having fun is the presiding feeling here — which may account for why the movie is so frequently amusing, and occasionally delightful.

The flashbacks are well-written and add off-the-court dramatic interest, but it’s the basketball action that is the movie’s claim to excellence. Expertly staged and beautifully rendered using a combination of computer-generated imagery and traditional hand-drawn animation, it’s often so spectacular that I am eager to watch again.

The documentary “Glitch” is slyer and smarter than some of its paint-by-numbers dramatized contemporaries, and the story it prefers to tell is more interesting and complex than the battle of two domineering egoists who came up with a novelty app.

A funny and thoughtful high school comedy.

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

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.

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

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.

It’s not simply a movie about how Giannis became one of the most dominant players in the league. It’s about why Giannis is so lovable.

A wry take on the material that combines animation and live-action comedy, the movie has some of the hip flair and anarchic meta-humor of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” as well as an irreverent, self-referential attitude that’s rather appealing.

Sprouse plays it a touch broad, veering sometimes from endearing to goofy. But Condor is note-perfect, and Winterbauer directs with a light, playful touch, giving the movie an energy that’s nimble and vibrantly sexy.

The ensemble of children has a natural, authentic-seeming rapport, and Braff and Union, as the beleaguered but loving parents, have an easy, irresistible chemistry, buzzing with big-hearted charisma every time they share the screen.

They/Them/Us finds sharp humor in more relatable friction: namely between Charlie and Lisa (Amy Hargreaves) as they attempt to reconcile their domestic responsibilities with their voracious sexual appetites.

I suppose it doesn’t cohere into anything more than the sum of its parts. But this is the first time I’ve felt the anthology horror format really worked, and gosh, the parts are really good.

Tender and exuberant, it includes set pieces modeled on “Footloose” and “Grease,” and feels closer to those films in spirit than to the Disney Channel. This is the kind of movie that vibrates with the energy of the people who made it, whose enthusiasm radiates from the screen.