But while that stew sounds familiar, Marry Me takes almost too long to get really cracking, with both romance and laughs in short supply, until a mercifully charming final act.

Along with a few bouncy numbers from “The Greatest Showman” duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Bardem is the driving force behind “Lyle,” and the train loses major steam without its kooky conductor.

It never crystallizes into a singular experience, and instead collapses in a rush of well-intentioned innovations.

Janney makes a great murderous curmudgeon, but the script’s big reveal strands the actress with a “layered” character who’s never given the chance to transcend the most basic aspects of her archetype. Worse: She only gets to kill like three people!

Emmerich takes the story at face value and delivers a film unlike any of his others. That is to say, a boring one.

It’s easy to imagine a performer more attuned to deliver intense, driven performances unlock the full potential of this character. As it is, The Cut never quite cuts as deep as you want it to.

His new sequel contains as much blatant fan service as you might expect, and some of it is probably even worse than what you’re imagining, but the film eventually finds its footing by making (and committing to) some legitimately bold choices.

Much like its message, Disenchanted reminds us that every moment has the potential for providing us with a happily ever after, but it’s the good and the bad that makes it ever more enchanting. Did we need a sequel to “Enchanted”? Not really, but it’s cute enough to cast a bit of an escapist spell this holiday season.

It’s a crime drama chewed up by a cheeky sense of humor — or, maybe it’s a quirky comedy set against the miserable campgrounds that lie on the fringes of the criminal underworld.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could make another movie about 19th century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that’s as febrile and virtuosic as Ken Russell’s “The Music Lovers,” but dissident filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov ... has risen to the challenge with his usual aplomb, orchestrating a historical melodrama that’s almost as feverish as last year’s “Petrov’s Flu.”

A semi-feral drama about parental fears that isn’t remotely scary enough to catalyze those concerns into the action it puts on screen, Wolf Man runs away from its potential with its tail between its legs. “There is nothing here worth dying for,” reads the “no trespassing” sign on the childhood home where Blake inexplicably returns with his wife and daughter. There’s nothing here worth watching for either.

Before the movie came along, the show had an ardent critic in Liam Kennedy, a criminology professor who believes “PAW Patrol” “encourages complicity in a global capitalist system that produces inequalities and causes environmental harms.” While it’s doubtful the humorless dirge of a movie will make enough of an impression to mold young minds in any lasting way, the critique of “PAW Patrol” is useful as an amalgamation of certain favorite Hollywood themes that ought to be retired.

It’s director Wes Ball who emerges as the real hero here, the former visual effects supervisor proving himself to be the rare filmmaker who can force some genuine vigor into one of these banal modern blockbusters.

Little about Last Christmas is that surprising, but as Hollywood continues to grapple with the idea that the rom-com still has legs and audiences are hungry for comfort food entertainment, it’s a welcome addition to a rebounding genre.

The crime-fighting? That’s nice, but the real fun is in the bonding, most of it at the hand of oddly wholesome sequences in which they all try to one-up each other’s magical skills.

Tellingly, the most pleasurable moments in Nia DaCosta’s “The Marvels” don’t hinge on the audience having an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Marvel. . . . They’re just solid pieces of blockbuster filmmaking: charming stars (like the full-force charisma of Iman Vellani and the appealing vulnerability of Teyonah Parris), sprightly action, and zippy humor.

Many of the problems with Closed Circuit stem from a script littered with first-draft exposition...exacerbated by unimaginative staging.

Contextualized by the documentary, the movie amounts to an enticing narrative experiment even when it doesn't quite hold together.

Holidays is a fun romp with flashes of brilliance.

Like a grand opera, Bel Canto weaves many stories into one sweeping epic.

Unfortunately, while Julianne Moore and Ellen Page go great lengths to make the central romance convince, Nyswaner's undercooked script and Peter Sollett's direction have the opposite effect, reducing Freeheld to a tired formula.

This is irrefutably Kinnaman’s movie, but Connolly fatally undervalues him. He doesn’t trust his actor to walk the emotional tightrope his film stretches taut before him, to sell us on the idea of a father digging himself deeper into a hole of his own design.

Though Pugh valiantly muscles through the melancholy beats of Braff’s melodrama, there are too many other characters and plot threads to allow her to do much besides heave the story forward.

The “Jurassic” sequels were bad enough when they made an effort to evolve — they’re even less worth seeing now that they already come pre-fossilized.

Combining the droll self-satisfaction of a New Yorker cartoon with the wet gore of an Eli Roth movie, Zobel’s tense, well-crafted, and deviant grindhouse take on the national temperature has no trouble caricaturing what ails us, but even that fun combo lacks the killer instinct required to see us more clearly than we see each other.

The good news is that the fans of Antoine Fuqua’s “The Equalizer” — a bland and pulpy 2014 riff on the ’80s TV series of the same name — are in for more of the same. The bad news is that the rest of us are, too.

It doesn’t always fit seamlessly together, but it’s far more entertaining than that might lead on. This is a spirited and sweet spin on classic material that deserves kudos for its balance of necessary updates and affection for the old ways. Mostly, it’s a reminder of what’s actually worth considering and critiquing: the final product. This one is good.

Lellouche may not be an original, but he is a committed craftsman and an avid synthesizer of forms, and if there’s one thing this starry-eyed epic demonstrates, it’s that even well-worn genres can be enlivened by sincerity, surprises and visual punch — in other words, a bit of ouf.