Beast (R)

Idris Elba, Sharlto Copely.

Idris Elba fights a lion in this most “exactly as advertised” thriller. Sure, everybody gets a bit of backstory: Elba plays a father of two daughters (Iyana Halley, Norah Samuels), the older of whom is nearly levitating with rage at him for separating from their mother right before the mom got sick and later died of cancer. Copely is a guy in charge of a South African nature reserve who has maybe tangled with poachers. And the lion they eventually fight has the backstory of watching poachers kill his pride and then going all John Wick, lion-style. But all that is very secondary to “Elba v. Lion,” which is why we’re all here.

And on this score the movie delivers. It is fine, maybe even good if probably not great. Elba is exactly what you expect him to be — the movie doesn’t make him superhuman but does make him an Elba-amount of strong and increasingly capable at fending off the angry lion. It offers you exactly the action and suspense you expect and doesn’t get bogged down by trying to do anything more. B Available for rent or purchase via VOD.

Pinocchio (PG)

Tom Hanks, Cynthia Erivo.

The already disturbing story of Pinocchio does not get cuter in this shiny plasticine live-action adaptation of the 1940 Disney cartoon. Here, Hanks (presumably involved because of director Robert Zemeckis? Or is this a “sea witch gives you legs but at a price” situation?) is Geppetto, a sad widower made even sadder by thoughts of his young son who has also died. He makes a large-ish puppet, wishes on Cynthia Erivo (a blue star/Blue Fairy) and wakes to find that the puppet is now sorta alive (with a voice by child actor Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) but his new “son” is still wooden. Jiminy Cricket (voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a cricket and the movie’s narrator with meta tendencies, is tasked with serving as Pinocchio’s conscience, which is a tough job when a kid knows nothing about the world, is chucked out the door to go to school and is immediately preyed upon by a con artist fox (Keegan-Michael Key) who sells Pinocchio to a traveling puppet show producer.

This movie sort of pokes fun at some of the crazier aspects of the story and gives us some of the songs — “I’ve Got No Strings” etc. — but that’s just not enough to make your olden-days cautionary tale to kids about the untrustworthy world entertaining or charming or funny. It’s weird — its strange spread of accents is weird, its general joylessness is weird and its ending is so weirdly abrupt I rewound to make sure I didn’t miss something. C- Available on Disney+

Luck (G)

Voices of Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg.

In this animated movie, 18-year-old Sam (voice of Noblezada) ages out of the foster care system and has to make her own way — working a job at a gardening store, taking online classes, navigating her new apartment. But she’s worried about something that has always plagued her: bad luck. How bad? She accidentally locks herself in her bathroom, drops her toast jelly side down and gets a flat tire, all on her first day of work. But then she meets Bob (voice of Pegg), a black cat. Bob is an employee in the Land of Luck and he accidentally drops his lucky penny right next to Sam. She picks it up, planning to give it to Hazel (voice of Adelynn Spoon), a young girl she bonded with at the group home who yearns for a forever home just like Sam once did. While holding the coin (and absorbing its luck) she experiences how the other half lives, with computer uploads that work and streetlights that are always green.

When Sam accidentally flushes the lucky penny, she tracks down Bob to get Hazel a new one. She follows him to the Land of Luck to score herself another penny, and Sam and Bob reluctantly work together to try to get the coin but find themselves upsetting the delicate balance of good and bad luck.

This movie is light and generally sweet and has a lot of cuteness in the form of cats, leprechauns, a colorful dragon and adorable hazmat bunnies. It also has a fair amount of talking and while my elementary school kids basically stuck with the movie I could tell that their attention waned a bit in the middle as the movie gets bogged down in a bunch of tasks for its characters to complete. A richly textured Pixar movie this ain’t but it was acceptable for family movie-night entertainment. B- Available on Apple TV+.

Me Time (R)

Kevin Hart, Mark Wahlberg.

“Regular person in crazy situations” is the formula for this buddy movie about a stay-at-home dad who gets a week by himself. Sonny’s (Hart) wife Maya (Regina Hall) urges him to chillax at home while she takes the kids to her parents for spring break. Maybe he’ll even attend the multi-day 44th birthday party of his longtime friend Huck (Wahlberg; sure, ha, “44”), who he hasn’t seen for a while due to Huck’s “woo-hoo, Burning Man!” lifestyle while Sonny is more focused on PTA meetings and family schedules. Huck drags a bus full of his weirdly young friends out to the desert for their own off-the-grid music-festy experience full of alleged fun that just sounds like a parade of horrors (Forage for food! Sleep in this yurt! Poop in this bucket!). But this overplanned, underplumbed event is only the start to the craziness Sonny encounters now that he has taken a step into Huck’s world.

Look, I’m not, like, mad that this movie exists. It’s not terrible. Kevin Hart is in movies like this for a reason; he is skilled at being the comedy straight man who can also go a little zany. And there are nice touches — the big friend-relationship step of learning the name of a fellow parent previously only known as “Kid’sname’s Dad.” But there aren’t as many truly askew moments as you’d want to really sell the “wild ride”-ness of this movie. C+ Available on Netflix.

Easter Sunday (PG-13)

Jo Koy, Lydia Gaston.

Comedian Jo Koy plays a version of himself called Jo Valencia who is a comedian with a big Filipino-American family, a sullen teenage son called Junior (Brandon Wardell) and a shot at landing the lead in a sitcom pilot. Jo is having a hard time balancing co-parenting Junior with giving his all at his audition, where they knock him off balance by asking him to give his character a Filipino accent. He’s wrestling with this angle to the job opportunity and trying to help Junior figure out his teenage life when his mom, Susan (Gaston), asks him to travel from the L.A. area up to the Bay Area for Easter. It’s a whole to-do — church, a big meal, family drama — and Jo decides to go and drag Junior along. Family and work become even harder to balance as Jo tries to make a surprise second audition a five-hour drive away and deal with family nuttiness that includes a half-baked gangster and a stolen pair of Manny Pacquioa’s gloves.

Easter Sunday has a lot of good ideas but it still has some very rough draft-y qualities, like an impromptu comedy set Jo Valencia does at his church and some of the sillier gangster stuff. There is a subplot about Junior’s not quite fitting in with the wider community of his Filipino-American family that makes for some good “first- and second-generation American kids in an immigrant family” stuff, but it is never quite as fully realized — more a pitch for a thing that could be a part of Jo Valencia’s story than something the movie fully examines.

And ultimately, I hope that’s what Easter Sunday turns out to be — a starting point for a stronger, more fully filled in story that Jo Koy gets to tell in some future vehicle. C+ Available on VOD.