It’s way too much and a bunch of nothing at the same time, and even agents of chaos who take wicked delight in witnessing this type of pandemonium may find themselves worn out before the film’s predictably hyperbolic conclusion.

The central premise of the friends’ dropping their high school relationships never takes off when the film has so little interest in fleshing those connections out even slightly, but it’s easy to root for the two of them to find happiness.

The film is both masterfully unadorned and wholly original, steering forward confidently under Kandari’s guidance. It’s a movie best viewed with absolutely no primer, a delicious little adventure with a humorous — and human — heart.

There’s fun to be had here, at least so long as audiences know what they’re getting — and what they’re not.

Beatles ’64 does what it can to emphasize the positive — and downplay its sociopolitical theorizing — by seeing the British Invasion through the eye of the storm.

It’s always a tough ask to improve upon an original, but “Moana 2” is a sprightly addition to this sea-faring legacy. It does something nearly impossible in our sequel-glutted world: made me want further adventures. “Moana 3,” ahoy?

The film serves as a tribute to a certain brand of journalism that can only be achieved by venturing out into the great unknown and putting one’s self in harm’s way. But more than anything, it tells a human story about someone who understood herself well enough to live the exact life she wanted while accepting every consequence that came with it.

What comes through most by the time Bread & Roses wraps up is that our responsibility now is not to ourselves, but to future generations, to ready them to face down their aggressors instead of merely accepting their will.

Stories that are “timely” or “prescient” may be the norm these days, but Spellbound works a little magic to ensure that such messaging, as important as it may be, doesn’t get in the way of a good time for the entire family. That’s another thing we need now, more than ever.

Cole clearly deserves as many posthumous tributes as the culture can afford, especially since he received so little in his lifetime, but reverence, particularly as a way of combatting decades of indifference, isn’t necessarily the best solution

As is so often the case for Hong, his latest is a gentle, hypnotically watchable film that breezes by as Iris does herself, dallying around Seoul in a loose summer dress and her striking bright-green cardigan.

DuBowski’s activist portrait Sabbath Queen is overwhelmingly ambitious in its time-spanning, as searching and curious as its primary subject. We don’t leave the movie with a firm sense of who Amichai is beyond his religious backdrop, but I think that’s the point: Who he is as a person has become muddled and tangled up with the one he’s supposed to represent.

A Photographic Memory is guided by a probing specificity, and the deeper it pushes into the weeds of Sheila’s past — and the harder it listens for how they might reverberate through Rachel’s present — the easier it gets for viewers to hear echoes from their own lives in the stuff of the filmmaker’s search.

In some ways, Dream Team feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. By leaning into its low effort, too-cool-to-care aesthetic, it subliminally tells audiences that anyone offering substantial criticisms is just a square who didn’t get it.

At least superficially, Hello, Love, Again offers something for everyone: stirring romance, politically-tinged drama, and shots of Calgary that resemble a regional tourist board’s wet dream. In execution, however, the film exhibits something of a split personality by awkwardly moving between cutesy soap operatic romance and an unsparing, oft-devastating portrait of the myriad hurdles facing foreign workers.

As a holiday rom-com, however, The Merry Gentlemen is sorely lacking the sparkle and comfort that is found in so many other recent holiday movies like it.

Musicals are meant to be big, expansive, overstuffed, emotionally rich, so consuming that the concept of singing and dancing about it make all the sense in the world. Just as “Wicked” starts hitting its highest notes, it’s over. For now. For another year. And not for good.

Neither the deficiencies of Thorne’s script nor the made-for-TV feeling of Taylor’s direction ever fully obscure the enduringly relevant principle they exist to serve: Science will always keep inching forward, but it’s society’s job to ensure that bringing life into this world is a happiness worth the heartache of living in it.

With a generous scope and ease of tone, Sankey never fails to let her most vulnerable material breathe even as the subject’s enormity threatens to suffocate.

The lessons here may go down easy, but “Out of My Mind” knows better than to resolve the lifelong tug-of-war between what’s possible for Melody and what isn’t. Instead, it simply suggests that she has more to say than most people have learned how to hear, which is almost their loss as much as it is her own.

Wang leaves audiences with the sense that, for good or for ill, the individuality of humans will never be fully stamped out. The same variance that makes it difficult to herd people into ideological molds ensures that, when things go wrong, someone will always be ready to speak up.

“Life Comes in Flashes” doesn’t go out of its way to highlight the more salacious details of Bogart’s story, but it’s also not as bowdlerized as some viewers might expect from an estate-approved doc.

That Christmas may be holiday-centric, but its messages about community, doing good, and kindness are timeless and universal.

Ghost Cat Anzu may be much sillier and less substantial than “Spirited Away,” but this warm little weirdo of a charmer eventually builds into something that squeezes your ribs like a hug, as it blazes a scattered and unhurried path towards its own acceptance of the fact that life is for the living.

Gladiator II” wouldn’t be the first sequel to become bogged down in its resemblance to its forebear, but the various superficial modifications made to characterizations and action sequences operate under faulty bigger-is-better sequel logic.

The film, adapted by Ryan Swanson and Platte F. Clark & Darin McDaniel from Barbara Robinson’s 1972 novel of the same name, is much more interested in providing spiritual lessons than narrative excitement.

Rapaport and Farley’s script turns the speech patterns of amoral idiots into a science, relying on perfectly placed filler words and profanities to wrap horrible ideas in hilarious sentences.

There is a stirring sense of discovery in every corner of the searching “Luther” that will awe both the most knowledgeable Vandross fans and those who are only versed in the well-known brushstrokes and ballads of his career. That latter group will learn a lot, too, hopefully making it their mission to broaden their playlists with Vandross classics.