Michael Nordine

If it’s easy to wish “Idea Man” were as bold as its subject, though, it’s just as easy to be won over by this deservedly heartfelt tribute to him.

"Chapter 1” can’t help feeling like an ersatz imitation at times, but it seems the franchise’s well hasn’t run dry just yet.

Though its loose, improvisatory feel is suited to the material, most of its humor feels like the first draft of a better film — as though the entire movie consists of what should have been deleted scenes.

It’s a diverting enough entertainment from a group that has repeatedly proven itself to be capable of much more.

“Who asked for this?” is the question such projects invoke, and Lindsey Anderson Beer’s film never comes up with a satisfying answer.

If anything, delving into action/comedy territory distracts from what made the original kinda-sorta touching at a few key moments: the heart beneath the hijinks. It’s still beating here, but not as strongly as it did the first time.

Despite Suresh’s oft-repeated mantra that “the world’s best never rest,” it’s hard not to wish that the movie itself would take more breaks and give father and son time to bond with one another.

It’s sci-fi informed by a Gen-Z sensibility, with a particular focus on those Zoomers who can’t imagine a bright future on the planet they actually inhabit — an ever-expanding demographic, one imagines.

While the movie itself is more whimsical than magical, it does have a few tricks up its sleeve.

Rarely ha-ha funny and never scary, it’s ultimately more sentimental than anything else — a clunky approach that undermines its strong performances.

“Rise” is a serviceable — if also forgettable — entry in the cowabunga canon.

The film’s low-key charms, such as they are, aren’t restrained by adherence to formula so much as its myopic worldview.

Doula ultimately comes across less as an actual comedy and more as a slice of life that’s lighthearted but also low stakes.

The movie’s ending is misguided to the point of being perplexing rather than upsetting, recasting everything that came before it in a less favorable light. That’s a shame, as this father-daughter drama starring John Cho has more than its fair share of touching moments before hitting the roadblock that is its questionable third act.

The problem, then, is that too much of this is dispiriting without also being enlightening — the view Gallardo takes is almost that of a bird’s eye, showing much from an emotional remove but revealing little beyond surface-level horrors and characters so numb to it all that we’re left with little choice but to feel the same way.

While it wouldn’t exactly be accurate to say that Dark Glasses was worth waiting a decade for, a world in which Argento continues working till the bitter end is preferable to one in which we don’t have movies like this at all.

The result certainly isn’t fast food, but neither is it fine dining.

“Bob Spit” is most notable for its formal approach, which intermingles animated interviews of Angeli with a bizarre, at times surreal narrative featuring characters from his comic strips.

Fear Street in general and the 1978 chapter in particular are at their best when forging their own path, which makes it a shame when they’re too reluctant to walk it.

Where Edge of the World distinguishes itself is in its evocative visuals of Borneo’s unspoiled beauty (courtesy of cinematographer Jaime Feliu-Torres) and the lived-in intensity of Meyers. If the film can’t help but feel like a relic from a bygone era, that’s ultimately part of its appeal.

While it’s never actively bad, The New Mutants rarely imbues any of its happenings with any real heft. Like the remote hospital that serves as its setting, the film as a whole feels too closed off from the rest of its fictional universe to matter much.

It feels like an attempt to transpose the mix of thrills and prestige of a film like “Argo” onto a different true story, a paint-by-numbers approach that’s far less compelling than drawing outside the lines would have been.

Come to Daddy has twists galore, not to mention a heavy dose of gore, but the further it drifts from its initial understated dynamic, the less each successive development seems to matter.

As a film, the biggest issue with A Million Little Pieces isn’t whether any of this happened; it’s that, even if it did, none of it stands out from the many similar movies that came before it.

The single-minded simplicity of its plotting can at times be an asset rather than a hindrance; in a summer even more bogged down by needless sequels and remakes than most, Crawl is, at the very least, a lean thriller that isn’t based on an existing property.

Embedded in all this is a would-be message about those who trade freedom for security, the human spirit, and so on and so forth, all of which is too muddled to register with the intended force. Captive State is many things at once — or at least it’s trying to be — and every match it lights along the way is quickly snuffed out.

Sagawa is disturbed and alienated, but that doesn’t make him a compelling documentary subject in and of itself. Maybe that’s the point: Demystifying Sigawa takes away some of the near-mythic power that’s been attributed to him over the years.

It isn’t involving enough for you to ever truly care about how these many, many problems will resolve themselves, and not funny enough for the experience to be more enjoyable.