Calum Marsh

It’s fast, witty, and packed with clever punchlines, though it still finds time for several scatological gags.

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.

It can be a preachy and po-faced movie, to be sure, but a handsome one.

Merrily We Roll Along is an OK movie of a good production of a great musical: on balance, another worthy addition to the Stephen Sondheim canon, which can always stand to be expanded.

Naturally, the guests are weirdos, though none are very memorable. And since Glover himself is the ultimate weirdo, it all feels a bit much.

The only serious liability is the script, which never quite goes far enough. The provocative questions don’t have provocative answers, and though the film gestures toward edginess, it feels altogether too tame, lacking a bunny-boiling moment that would really make you squirm.

Ebony & Ivory, in its unrelenting aggression, is particularly exhausting, though I suppose you have to admire the integrity of its vision. Irritating as Hosking’s humor is, you can’t deny his commitment to the bit.

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.

Wolfhard and Bryk don’t relish violence or gore: Hell of a Summer is surprisingly tame, with most of its kills kept tastefully offscreen.

The cast is game — especially Cox, who gets to do some over-the-top Linda Blair mugging — but the script, by a “Saturday Night Live” writer, Kent Sublette, is puerile and abrasive, lacking the wit of “Evil Dead” (an obvious influence) and the brio of “Scary Movie.”

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.

The game itself is so good. I’m not sure the movie understands why.

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

Effort goes only so far, and The 4:30 Movie doesn’t surpass Smith’s usual limitations.

Its story of high school freshmen navigating a libertine house party follows exactly the trajectory you would expect, with few laughs and even fewer surprises.

Only Howell truly embodies the spirit of the Old West.

I appreciate Shepard’s affection: I also grew up loving movies, and I found his wistful reminiscences of being awed by “Jaws” and “Star Wars” relatable. But Shepard’s level of self-regard can be stultifying.

A competent director can do only so much with a poor script, and Arcadian is littered with shortcuts and screenwriting clichés. It is vague to the point of careless, and often seems to be inventing rules for its monsters as it goes along.

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.”

The combination of finale and premiere inevitably feels lopsided.

Lily Sullivan plays this unnamed reporter with cagey, harried intensity, and she is more than capable of carrying this one-woman show.

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.

The frustrating thing is that Marshall, Herlihy and especially Higgins really are funny, and the film has some huge laughs. That’s enough for a sketch show. It’s not quite enough for a film.

While Brooks deserves acclaim, he deserves it in a format as compelling and dynamic as he is. “Defending My Life” is simply too flat.

Subject is at its clearest when interrogating the material conditions of documentary filmmaking, as during a segment about whether the subjects of nonfiction films have the right to be paid for their participation; it feels slipperier when glossing issues of diversity and representation.

Instead of challenging assumptions, exploring implications or discussing the difficult questions here, Holt merely mines the material for superficial shock value and lurid titillation.

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.

As the harried friends careen across the resort through a series of comical mishaps, the movie has the feel of a TV rerun. More compelling are the too-rare moments of plotless leisure.

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

And yet, even if the computer shenanigans look goofy, they’re more interesting than the movie’s run-of-the-mill spy thrills.

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.

In any given moment, the movie is either overstating the importance of its subject or trivializing it.

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.

In the end, with only Hudson to deal with, Kijak gets the big picture.

These visual flourishes, while derivative, are charming and well-realized. The writing, however, has none of Anderson’s wit, tending instead toward a kind of broad and fatuous slapstick that’s closer to “2 Broke Girls” than “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

While it has a blatant shoestring sheen, Come Out Fighting isn’t arch or irony-laden; in fact, the tone is quite serious, albeit also seriously clichéd.

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.

This brand of arch, inside-baseball riffing is a scourge on modern family films, present in almost every animated movie with an all-star cast. But it’s especially grating delivered by Johnson and Hart, who, despite the vocal talent they have shown in the past, give two of the least inspired voice performances in recent memory.

In The Man From Toronto, directed by Patrick Hughes, the vague sense of location is typical of a broader lack of effort. Although Hart, as the broadly comic version of the classic Hitchcockian Wrong Man, has a certain goofball charm, his frantic coward routine gets old quickly, with no appreciable change as the action-flick danger continues to escalate.

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.

The result is a 103-minute vanity project I found utterly exhausting.

Although she is buoyant and cheerful, Nikuko is cast as oafish and uncouth, and she is always ultimately the butt of the joke. It’s a puerile, mean-spirited tendency that altogether spoils the otherwise exquisite imagery.

The director, Ulloa, tries to mask the derivative story by embellishing the violence, cutting to closeups of flesh wounds and bullet holes as a distraction from the routine plot and hardboiled dialogue — he seems to be aiming for stark and gritty, but his tough-talking assassins, crime lords and arms dealers bring the whole thing closer to unintentional camp.

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.

The three-part scope is ambitious, but Foxhole is a film made on a very small scale.

“It is belief as much as anything that allows one to cling to a wall,” James Salter wrote in his mountaineering novel “Solo Faces.” The Sanctity of Space is at its best when conveying the power of that belief.

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.

The one-take gimmick — much easier to achieve now thanks to digital cameras —has become common enough that it barely qualifies as novel.

“Black + White” does feature plenty of Peterson’s music, including several cover renditions performed in tribute for the film by a contemporary ensemble. But at almost every opportunity, Avrich undermines these numbers by cutting to one of an endless lineup of talking heads, usually to repeat predictable platitudes about Peterson’s brilliance.

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.

When it isn’t fawning over roller rinks, “Goonies” posters, and Casio watches, 8 Bit Christmas (streaming on HBO Max) is a warm and refreshingly earnest holiday comedy.

A winking attitude doesn’t make the extremely tired formula any less rote or tiresome. Despite the in-jokes and references (including nods to “Point Break” and “Heat”), the movie can’t transcend its own clichés.

In flattening everything into a single shade of funereal gray, “No Future” has none of the ineffable, multifaceted complexity of life.

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.

It’s an exercise in watching someone have the world’s slowest revelation.

The plot, stretched thin even at just 90 minutes, is extremely predictable, and therefore boring, and the film doesn’t do enough with its high-concept shock-therapy conceit to feel fresh or novel.

Papushado’s flamboyance feels cocky and indiscriminate, as if he’s simply trying really hard to make every image seem cool.

The cast can only do so much with thin material, and Waltz, duping and swindling grandly, isn’t equipped to make the long con interesting.

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.

This is a film about the devastation of Inner Mongolia and the systematic annihilation of its migrant workers, but it is no mere coup d'œil of righteous advocacy. It is a work of film art.

This is portraiture for the Zhangke-acquainted. Admirers will find much of interest here, as Salles, scrupulously self-effacing, affords Jia the latitude to think and talk at his leisure — to speak at length, and candidly, about his work and what informs it.

This is a masterpiece not because it culminates in some redemptive catharsis or clinching argument for social change, but because, by disavowing such facile ends, it meets the mess of life on its own clear and true terms.

The stories have an almost dreamlike sweep and imaginative energy, and the film never exhausts that exuberance. More extraordinary still is its emotional depth.

However you enjoy its nearly four hundred minutes, I expect you'll be held rapt till the last second by a film of abundant wit and generous heart.