“Oh, man,” the concession worker says. “We really need that one.”

“Dune II” notwithstanding, it has been a difficult year at the average movie theater. Now comes the new Godzilla/Kong smackdown — the marketing materials, for the record, tell us that the “X” in “Godzilla X Kong” is silent, which is a confusing waste of a perfectly good letter. But I’m happy to report that the follow-up to the 2021 “Godzilla vs. Kong” does the job — unevenly, yes, but with a pleasantly reckless spirit of engagement.

It’s directed, as was the 2021 movie, by Adam Wingard and features the return of Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Kaylee Hottle and assorted digital MonsterVerse golden oldies, from ‘Zilla to Kong to Mothra and more, shined up and fulla’ beans.

Maybe the preview crowd on Tuesday was an outlier, but I doubt it. The bursts of applause, particularly in the blithely destructive Rio de Janeiro climax — a team-building exercise for the headliners — had the ring of genuine approval, not just something you do because the movie’s begging for it. At one point Godzilla and Kong sprint toward their enemy, Scar King, the orange authoritarian nightmare whose territorial ambitions as a Kong-scaled antagonist know no bounds. You know the shot: the action-movie slow-mo dash toward the camera, executed here in such a way as to suggest Godzilla and Kong have spent many hours rewatching “Bad Boys.”

Dumb, right? Well, sure. Also amusing, and exciting and sincere. For the audience, it’s a shameless bid for applause that satisfies our deepest urges to see two endlessly competitive beings find the joy in starring, however briefly, in a Michael Bay action movie.

At the end of “Godzilla vs. Kong,” the atomically charged sea lizard and the woolly plus-sized simian reconciled, uneasily (without lawyers), after vanquishing the human-made Mechagodzilla. Despite widespread human fear and skepticism, Godzilla agreed (again, without lawyers) to keep a beady eye in his touchingly too-small head on monstrous threats to humankind on Earth’s surface. Kong returned to Hollow Earth, the gravity-scrambled inner wonderland of verdant beauty and violent predators. The film worked like a remake of “The Odd Couple,” proving that two lonely Titans can share a planet without driving each other crazy.

The threats double, triple and quadruple in the new movie. Scar King, whose miserably enslaved followers include a Titan “ancient” in the Godzilla vein, ranks as Headache No. 1.  But there are others, and Godzilla gives up his post to chase down an unexplained distress signal emitting from Hollow Earth. The signal perplexes the humans in “Godzilla X Kong,” nervous about what might happen if Godzilla and Kong mix it up again.

These humans of whom we speak include the brilliant, eternally preoccupied scientist Dr. Andrews (the Hall character). Her adopted daughter Jia (Hottle), the sole surviving member of the Iwi tribe of Skull Island, has been plagued by visions of Hollow Earth and imminent catastrophe, and with her telepathic communication with her pal Kong heightened, something’s definitely up. Reunited with the Titan-obsessed podcaster Bernie (Henry) and Andrews’ one-time squeeze Trapper (Dan Stevens), the humans zwoop to Hollow Earth to make their own set of astonished green-screen discoveries on cue.

Whole sections of “Godzilla X Kong” shove the humans off-screen for many minutes at a time. Few will complain. I love Hall in just about everything and she and Hottle capture enough authentic feeling in their mother/daughter relationship to earn a tear or two themselves. To be fair, some of that comes from the screenplay by writers Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater, though the laziest exposition and boilerplate dialogue puts the “bored” in “cardboard.” (I stopped counting how often Hall’s character says “Oh, my god!” in response to whatever she’s oh-my-godding about.)

Whatever; nobody’s paying for the words here. “Godzilla X Kong” makes up for its own deficiencies with oddball flourishes. Wingard and the writers work like rogue chefs at an Olive Garden, tossing everything they can at any number of walls to see what sticks. The sight of Godzilla curling up like a kitten, napping inside the Colosseum in Rome after he’s half-trashed it in order to save it from an attacker: very nice. Later on, chowing down on a lifetime’s worth of free food (atomic energy stored under the Arctic ice), Godzilla’s bad breath and body odor color changes from blue to bright pink, as if he’s getting dolled up for a Summer of ’23 weekend with Barbenheimer.

The movie proceeds with brutal bouts of MMA combat with 300-foot combatants. The comparatively measured and selective action storytelling of the 2014 Gareth Edwards “Godzilla,” like last year’s terrific Japanese revitalizer “Godzilla Minus One,” feels a long way from Wingard’s janky funhouse movies. But they have their own relentless, overstuffed appeal; I wouldn’t recommend them if they didn’t.

If I focus more on Godzilla in this new picture than Kong (the movie’s slightly more Kong-centric), maybe it’s because the best dog I ever had also had a too-small head. Not sure that’s enough to build an entire Godzilla ethos around, but I’ll take it up with my therapist.

And I’ll take these Godzilla/Kong MonsterVerse movies over most other corporate studio franchises these days, especially the recent “Jurassic Park” outings, which were, what’s the word … lousy. Yes, Godzilla and Kong cause untold and blithely unexamined human and property damage in Wingard’s latest, enough so that I wouldn’t mind seeing an entire movie at some point in this franchise’s lifespan devoted to lawsuits and legal battles, if only to see how Godzilla and Kong behave in a courtroom. The Rio carnage is quite extensive; earlier, there’s a dash of sweet pathos in the sight of Godzilla klutzing around Rome, damaging priceless landmarks because he can’t help it. Typical foreign tourist.

But let’s be realistic: What good is realism to “Godzilla X Kong”? Final question: Which low-level employee took the time to add the extra exclamation point to the dire control panel warning “GODZILLA VITALS SURGING!!”? There are only four possible words for whoever it was: employee of the month.

“Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for creature violence and action)

Running time: 2:02

How to watch: Premieres in theaters March 28

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

The biopic form practically demands failure, or at least a series of narrative compromises made under pressure from so many factions: the real-life subject, or keepers of the now-deceased subject’s estate, nervous about an unsympathetic truth or two; the streamer or studio backing the project; and the filmmakers themselves, trying to do right by the person featured in the title, while finding a shape — and the ideal performer — to make the thing work.

“Shirley,” now streaming on Netflix, constitutes the latest frustrating, two-hour example of all that pressure. You don’t, however, detect any of it in the carefully detailed performance of Regina King as Shirley Chisholm, the first Black female member of the U.S. Congress, who campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972.

Watching King in scenes with the late, great Lance Reddick (as Chisholm advisor Wesley “Mac” Holder), or Terrence Howard (Arthur Hardwick, her second husband; they met as New York State legislators in 1966), or André Holland (as Chisholm’s rival presidential hopeful Walter Fauntroy), you can relish the skill sets of these performers — their sleight-of-hand ease with even the horsiest loads of exposition. This, too, can scarcely be avoided in any biopic: those moments when two characters are meant to be talking like they know each other well, and are well-acquainted with the background or context of whatever they’re discussing. Problem is, the audience isn’t. So the dialogue starts sounding like they’re speaking directly to the viewer, in bullet points.

“Shirley” struggles with many such moments. Writer-director John Ridley, who also produced, focuses the two hours he has on a few months in ’72, when Chisholm took on the political challenge of her life, seeking 1,500 delegates amid a pale male sea of skepticism. Nixon was set to go for a second Republican term pre-Watergate; in those days, scandalous and/or illegal presidential activity was enough for a vast majority of the party in power to ditch the man in charge. McGovern, the way-out-ahead Democratic front-runner, felt inevitable though he got creamed by Nixon in the end.

Did Chisholm and her better-known, better-funded competitors, from Humphrey to Muskie to Lindsay, have a chance? No, and yes. Campaigns turn on a series of dimes, and coin tosses with fate. In America, we’re besotted with underdog stories because they typically involve long-shots who end up winning. “Shirley” can’t work that way, although Chisholm proved an seriously inspirational political figure. She had her eye on the future, whether she would run the country in that future or not.

I wish the movie dramatized those harried campaign months more persuasively, without quite so many speech-y bits even when no one’s making any speeches. Five minutes into “Shirley” in a brief scene from Chisholm’s first congressional year, there’s a confrontation with a bigoted white Southern pol, fussed about this interloping Black woman from Brooklyn earning the same $42,500 annual salary he does. Does the scene work? Only as crude shorthand. It feels more like a biopic straining for hit-and-run impact, rather than a telling fragment in a real-life story.

The actors do all they can, all the time. Lucas Hedges portrays young, green law student Robert Gottlieb, who at 21 became Chisholm’s national student organizer; Christina Jackson, astutely delineating campaign worker and future Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s conflicted feelings about politics, adds welcome doses of subtlety. Along with Reddick and company, these two buoy a script gradually taking on more and more water.

King’s in charge, of course. Her real-life sister Reina King plays Chisholm’s sister Muriel, resentful of Shirley’s favored-daughter status. In their scenes, and in every scene elsewhere, the top-billed Oscar winner (King won for her work in “If Beale Street Could Talk”) works low-keyed wonders in selling what’s overstated in an understated, humanizing way. Chisholm came from Guyanese and Bajan (Barbadian) descent, and while King foregoes some vocal particulars (the sibilant “s,” mainly) she evokes Chisholm’s public persona and refreshing candor extremely well.

Writer-director Ridley, who won his own Oscar for adapting “12 Years a Slave,” has done solid work (the recent Apple miniseries “Five Days at Memorial”) and at least one directorial documentary project, the 1992 Los Angeles uprising documentary (“Let It Fall”), that is very close to great. With “Shirley” we’re close to almost-not-quite territory, and visually, Ridley sticks with conventional shot sequences of characters in frame, alone, either speaking or reacting. This makes fluidity and interpersonal flow pretty difficult. The political particulars of Chisholm’s presidential bid, and the question of why so many other candidate’s delegates got funneled into McGovern’s losing campaign, never risk much complication. Time is too short.

At one point King, as Chisholm, resists the advisors’ pleas to simplify her “messaging” (was that word in circulation 52 years ago?) by saying: “I am not leaving out the nuance!” In “Shirley,” the top-shelf actors aren’t, either. Even if their material does.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

“Shirley” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for profanity including racial slurs, brief violence and some smoking)

Running time: 1:57

How to watch: Now streaming on Netflix.

Folks, this week has been one of those bouts. First, it was the new “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” (verdict: too much “heart” and digital mayhem, not enough funny). And now, streaming on Prime Video, we have another ’80s-derived throwback, the “Road House” remake with Jake Gyllenhaal.

The 1989 Patrick Swayze edition, costarring Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, Kathleen Wilhoite and, singing along with “Sh-Boom,” Ben Gazzara, was nothing but ridiculous trash. And fun. Calling it “human-scaled” makes the old “Road House” sound as if it took place somewhere on planet Earth, among humans, which isn’t really true. And yet who says we can’t enjoy a sustained feat of complete fraudulence, if the spirit’s right and a movie takes some downtime for love scenes between beat-downs?

The new “Road House” has no time for sex. Compared with the old one, it’s 30 times bloodier and one-third as fun. Still, there are things to recommend it, namely the Irishman.

The action has been relocated from outside Kansas City to the fictional Glass Key, Florida. Screenwriters Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry establish bouncer Dalton as a suicidal, scandal-clouded Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight with more baggage than Swayze’s Dalton ever lugged. Traveling by Greyhound, Dalton has come to the Florida Keys to take a job at the beachfront bar owned by Frankie (Jessica Williams). She needs a legit set of abs to control her insanely unruly customers and keep the peace.

That Dalton does, violently. Director Doug Liman escalates the bone-crunch melees with propulsive crimson relish, albeit with tons of editing cheats and medium-good digital trickery. The narrative obstacles in “Road House” carry over from the ’89 movie; there’s a corrupt crime family running amok, with Billy Magnussen amusingly detestable as the primary scumbag. Once again, a discreetly smoldering local doctor (Daniela Melchior) patches up Dalton after his initial run-in with the local rabble, and sees this mysterious, courtly stranger as potential date-night material.

The old “Road House” dripped with casually rampant misogyny disguised as examples of the ungentlemanly bad behavior Dalton must vanquish. Most of that ambiance is gone here. So is any trace of actual sensual anything. The central “romance” this time barely registers. Reductively, you could put it this way: Liman’s “Road House” gets the job done, but it’s the wrong job, and the ratios are off. When movie fantasies like this reduce the sexual current between its leads to nil, the emphasis on crazier and crazier brutality starts feeling not just jaded, or bloodthirsty, but a drag.

On the other hand, you know who’s great in this? Conor McGregor, best known as an Irish UFC star, making his feature debut in “Road House” as Knox, the special guest assailant the bad guys hire to dispose of Dalton. McGregor’s a born entertainer, delightfully overripe and dementedly committed to every close-up and every strutting threat of grievous bodily harm. His bare bottom gets a wittily star-making entrance of its own, in a traveling shot that goes so long, it’s basically a “Road House” spinoff.

Gyllenhaal has his moments; he finds some wit in Dalton’s zingers, and in his scenes with the local bookstore owner’s teenage daughter (Hannah Love Lanier), the star gets a pleasant “Shane” vibe going. To be sure, “Road House” succumbs to its own bouts of reductivist critique, or self-critique. At one point the scrappy, baseball bat-wielding kid summarizes the stranger’s arrival in Western movie genre terms: “Local townsfolk send for hero to help clean up the rowdy saloon.” Then she adds: “You know. That crap.”

“Road House” — 2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for nudity, violence, alcohol use and foul language)

Running time: 1:54

How to watch: Now streaming on Prime Video

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

In that case? April 5 is your day. As part of Cinema/Chicago’s calendar of events — the nonprofit that’s best known for the Chicago International Film Festival — director, screenwriter and producer Karyn Kusama will conduct a master class on what she has learned directing for television and film. The session’s title: “Directing for Television and Film.” Kusama shares that title’s forthright quality.

It took her several years of finance hustling to make her 2000 debut independent feature “Girlfight” starring Michelle Rodriguez. The “no”s Kusama encountered en route came with a wearying refrain: Make the aspiring boxer at the story’s center a white girl, not a Latina. She held out for Rodriguez, who took off from there.

Kusama made “Girlfight” for $1 million. Her second feature, the Charlize Theron futuristic assassin thriller “Aeon Flux,” cost 62 times that. Paramount Pictures didn’t love Kusama’s cut, which led to significant cuts, reshoots, changes and, because studio inference always knows best, a financial failure. Up and down; down and up. This is the way of most filmmaking careers, especially careers straddling independent work and the conglomerates.

I love a lot of Kusama’s films; one of my favorites, her 2015 indie “The Invitation” — another $1 million gem, shot in three weeks with 12 actors and one hillside LA house — works like sinister gangbusters. Without giving the premise away, it ends with a beautiful, ice-cold whammy reminiscent of the ’70s paranoia thrillers Kusama adores.

More recently, she has flourished in television, directing the initial episodes of Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” which she executive produces. This summer she starts filming “The Terror” for AMC, a six-hour miniseries — directing two of the six episodes, executive producing the rest. Master classes such as the April 5 Chicago talk, part of Cinema/Chicago’s Chicago Industry Exchange series, provoke all kinds of questions from attendees, she says. Some gravitate toward the aspirational and idealistic, she says: “What is the art we want to be making? What is the art we want to be seeing?” Others spring from career doubts and the ability to buy groceries, i.e.: Can I make a living behind a camera?

Now 56, Kusama joined me on Zoom from the Los Feliz LA home she shares with frequent collaborator, screenwriter husband Phil Hay, and their son. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: You’ve done these sorts of master classes before. Is “How am I going to make a living?” the question that keeps coming up?

A: It’s the evergreen question, and it has a way of getting overlooked sometimes in relation to matters of personal vision and art-making. Finding a professional path we can actually survive on — how to make this industry and art form work for us, as professionals — that’s the question. And it’s become even more urgent these last couple of years.

I feel like I’ve learned so much in my 25 years in the business, but I’m struck at how it literally never stops changing. And so rapidly.  In my own work, I’m thinking a lot about provoking and encouraging an audience to cultivate a more thoughtful attention span. The attention span of viewers has radically shifted away from … paying attention (laughs). I mean, that’s just the noise of our particular world right now. But it’s an important mission: to get people to sit down and watch something with total engagement. That’s a high bar as a filmmaker to reach, and it’s a high bar for the viewer. I wish it were easier. But I’m open to the challenge of it.

Q: You directed the pilot episode of “Yellowjackets.” This was just before the pandemic?

A: We had our last day of editing the day before the national lockdown in March 2020. Right down to the wire. I remember thinking: Huh. I wonder how bad this virus might be? (With the pilot) we had to be mindful of a television audience required to make a lot of connections between a character we establish as played by a teenaged actor and then that character’s adult counterpart. There were so many things in that first episode we wanted to feel effortlessly connected, hopefully, for the audience. While staying engaging. That’s a constant mission for any filmmaker. Keeping questions about the story alive, while answering enough of them so that a viewer doesn’t feel lost.

Q: So: clear. And interesting.

A: Clear, but just clear enough. And engaging. That’s a tough balance to strike.

Q: It reminds me of your Trailers From Hell segment on “The Parallax View,” the 1974 Alan J. Pakula film. I’m a little older than you but we both saw that at a pretty young age —

A: I just saw a print of that here in LA at the Egyptian Theatre last week! It was so great to watch it on the big screen again. And to be reminded how mysterious that movie is. Inspiring, really. A true artifact of a great era in filmmaking.

Q: There’s a lot of small-screen production going on in Chicago, as you know. And there’s a lot of uncertainty and anxiety among folks graduating from film school here. Wherever you are, in Chicago, LA or New York — you came through NYU yourself, before working for filmmaker John Sayles — it’s not easy to make the next step. What do you tell students about that?

A: Well, let’s start with this: Chicago is one of the greatest cities in the world. If I could live anywhere other than LA or New York, it would be Chicago. So much about it is historically, architecturally and politically significant to me. I see it as a center of art-making. And I like to instill that sense of local pride (in young filmmakers) of where we come from, where we got our education, wherever we first truly interacted with art. There’s always so much interesting material in the place we come from. I grew up in St. Louis, which always wanted to be Chicago, but for a lot of reasons it didn’t turn out that way. Yet I appreciate everything I got out of living there.

I’ve talked to some of the film schools in Chicago, and I don’t lead with the idea that all the action’s in Los Angeles or New York because I don’t think that’s true. There’s a wealth of young talent gaining real skills in Chicago, different from the skills they might’ve gotten from film school in Los Angeles or New York. It’s a more intimate community, and a great place to make some lifelong connections. There are times with LA particularly where it just feels sprawling and impossible.

Q: Coming out of NYU, did New York’s compression or however you want to describe it — did it make things easier?

A: It can. But wherever you are, there’s the likelihood of doing a lot of the wrong kind of work for a while. I went along a path working on music videos, and industrial videos, which is good training. But I didn’t necessarily find my direction for a while. It helped to meet a filmmaker like John Sayles, who was such a mentor to me, and in many respects a bridge between the indie film world and the studio world, for which he wrote a lot of screenplays. I was really lucky my trajectory led me to him. It takes some time to find those people.

Q: When you talk to groups, based on how you watch movies yourself, is there any advice you feel is important to pass along to younger filmmakers about what to do, literally, with the camera? How to use it in a way that serves the material, and in ways that won’t feel like nobody in particular designed the shot? 

A: I think young filmmakers have to identify how they like to see, and what they respond to in the films they love. The films that make them feel something. There are films we may admire, or be impressed by, but for me, the goal in making movies is to make people feel something. I encourage young filmmakers to let a movie work its particular magic on them, and then revisit it in order to unearth what made the movie work, what kept you up at night. Some movies just disturb me so deeply, I want to get better control of it, in a way, and learn for myself how and why it works the way it does. And then you can start to look into technical choices, every element and detail of the filmmaking, the sound, the color, the movement, and of course, the performances. It all builds your emotional reality.

It’s not something you learn overnight. Or ever fully learn, period. Luckily.

Q: Let’s say I’m 23. I’m about to direct my first feature. I show up to your master class, and I’m looking for one good practical piece of advice. What is that advice?

A: Honestly? I’d tell you to make getting a good night’s sleep your mission in life. Every single night. I am now at an age where a single night of bad sleep throws me off for too long. And I can’t afford it anymore. Young people should get in the habit of great sleep hygiene. It makes or breaks your ability to think on set.

Q: That’s fantastic advice. I’m not making any movies, but I’ll try it.

A: It’s mom-of-a-teenager advice, I guess. Which I am. But I’ve come to believe it for myself.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Best Oscars show in several years. Surprising, yes?

Yes. Especially given the expected and ultimately fulfilled dominance of front-runner “Oppenheimer” — seven wins, including for best picture, best director (Christopher Nolan), best actor (Cillian Murphy), best supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr.), plus cinematography, musical score and editing — and hardly any awards constituting an upset. Minimal upsets plus zero train-wreck moments (no Will Smith violence; no envelope mix-up, though I did love the tiny jump scare Al Pacino provoked with his abrupt reveal of the biggest award of the night) typically means bleh TV. So why was the 96th running of the bull Sunday such a surprise, even without actual surprises?

Here are five theories that, stitched together, form one big Frankentheory, in honor of Emma Stone’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Bella Baxter in “Poor Things.”

1. The quality of goods on display: Way up this year. Take the 10 best picture nominees. Even “Maestro,” the one arguably least deserving of inclusion, had some terrific elements and scenes in its corner. The Thanksgiving Day argument between Leonard and Felicia Bernstein (Bradley Cooper, not the evening’s happiest attendee, and best actress nominee Carey Mulligan) made the rest of the movie’s relationship details feel either dodgy, phony or rushed. But look, compared to some of the lesser titles filling out recent best picture nomination lists? “Elvis” in 2022? “Don’t Look Up” in 2021? “Promising Young Woman” in 2020? “Jojo Rabbit” in 2019? “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Green Book” in 2018?

2. The actual, unironic love and respect in the room: So many Oscar ceremonies arrive in righteous sanctimony without much in the way of interesting things to say in between numbers. This year was different, and better. The production itself sold its various presentation concepts, such as rounding up five previous Oscar winners to introduce this year’s performing categories, with a shrewd blend of wit and heart. And when certain winners took the stage and took the opportunity to express a view or two, miraculously it kept the show moving.

3. Now that’s how you go political: Quick, civil but pointed, and move on. Footage of the late Russian dissident, Putin enemy and likely Putin casualty Alexei Navalny, slipped into the show Sunday night in a beautiful and moving way. Also brief. Just right. Elsewhere, winning the international feature Oscar, “Zone of Interest” writer-director Jonathan Glazer referred to his film’s depiction of dehumanization in relation to Hitler’s Third Reich as well as linking it to Israel’s invasion of Gaza: “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”  No stridency, no reiterations, just clear opinions eloquently expressed, with one eye on the clock.

4. It’s fair game to take on the local industry on the industry’s biggest night: Oscar winner Cord Jefferson, who adapted (and directed) “American Fiction,” maximized his speech time by calling out the conglomerated, amalgamated, any-old-tentpole-in-a-storm mess that is contemporary Hollywood. Instead of throwing dice at a $200 million franchise burger, Jefferson said, “why not try making twenty $10 million dollar movies?”

5. When a sound designer gets an Oscar-night standing ovation, something is working: For “The Zone of Interest,” designer Johnnie Burn and production sound mixer Tarn Willers created a welter of ghastly everyday horrors, largely unseen but ever-present: furnaces, gunshots, screams, not quite realistic, not quite fantastic. It’s design genius of monstrous subtlety. My friend Eric Lindbom texted me from a Los Angeles Oscar party and said it first, and best: Not since “The Conversation” in 1974 has there been a feature so reliant on such a brilliantly detailed soundscape.

While we’re on it: When a film as bracing as “The Zone of Interest” garners five Oscar nominations, in an especially rich year, the Academy members are doing something right. They, and we, got an entertaining awards show in the bargain. Four-time MC Jimmy Kimmel? Solid. Coming off Jo Koy’s herniated hosting effort at the Golden Globes two months ago, I’ll take solid and easygoing, no questions asked.

Emily Blunt squared off against Ryan Gosling for a grudge match of a “Barbenheimer” peacekeeping mission. Quite droll. So was Kate McKinnon. And special thanks to John Mulaney for a transcendent non-sequitur riff on “Field of Dreams” dream logic, smack in the middle of introducing the category of best sound design. Long comic odds, for sure. But Mulaney found gold.

I suppose you had to be there, or rather anywhere, somewhere, watching. But this is why morning-after YouTubing has a secure place in this world. And amazingly — for a while longer — so does Oscar.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

The question lingers, though: What did the 2008 “Kung Fu Panda” achieve that “Panda 4” manages only here and there and now and then?

A first movie in any animated franchise has the theoretical edge, of course, in presenting the world new characters and new everything. The initial “Kung Fu Panda” banked on plenty of martial arts action, but it took some time setting up the specific comic improbability of an amiable panda such as Po, voiced by Jack Black, ascending to his destiny as the Dragon Warrior, protector of all that is good in his corner of ancient China. The film mixed genuine comic invention with clever variants on live-action martial arts movies a la Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and so many others.

Eight years have flown, inched along or both, depending on your pandemic experience, since “Panda 3.” In “Panda 4,” screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger return, working with co-writer Darren Lemke and co-directors Mike Mitchell (“Shrek 4,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks 3”) and Stephanie Stine. Stine makes her feature directorial debut here. Her experience as art director includes “Raya and the Last Dragon” and a “How to Train Your Dragon” sequel, gratifying visual accomplishments both.

It always happens in franchise sequels, be they Iron Man or be they Panda: At some point the dangers of a celebrity’s ego becomes a major plot point. In “Panda 4,” Po is enjoying fame, relative fortune and unlimited dumplings at this stage of his Dragon Warrior tenure. Straight off, mentor Shifu (Dustin Hoffman returning for exasperated vocal mutterings) relays the news that Po must now appoint the next Dragon Warrior, so Po can transition into a quieter role he does not want: steward and protector of the Valley of Peace, armed with the Staff of Wisdom.

The staff has the power to crack open the spirit realm, wherein dwell the late, great kung fu masters, including the fearsome snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane). The new film’s adversary, The Chameleon (Viola Davis), has risen to the top of the underworld, extorting a piece of almost everything, like a female lizard Capone. She’s a mob boss of supreme deception, changing her appearance at will. Her evil ambitions include snagging the Staff of Wisdom for her own morally unwise reasons.

This plays out as a string of perpetual near-death scenarios for Po and his frenemy of a new ally, the streetwise fox Zhen (Awkwafina). The movie rarely shuts up or calms down for more than five seconds, and while the first “Panda” sequels were getting that way, the relative rhythmic variety and verbal spice of the original feels pretty far gone now.

Many prefer their animated babysitters this way, probably — rarely a pause or a downshift. I did laugh four or five times, once for each credited writer including the “additional material” writers: Po’s meditation mantra “inner peace” gradually changing to “dinner, please” sounds just so coming from Jack Black’s mouth, for example. Also there’s a delightful bull-in-a-china-shop sight gag, executed with a wry delicacy missing from most of the rest of the movie.

Maybe the quality slippage comes down to its production budget; this one cost roughly half of what the other three “Pandas” cost. But maybe not. Maybe the pandemic has played tricks with screenwriters’ heads regarding what they think audiences want, and need, and how to finesse it. “Panda 4” feels more akin to one one of the “Ice Age” movies, laden with occasionally funny but constantly nattering snark and meanness, so that you don’t really buy the sincere bits. Black and Awkwafina and Hoffman do their jobs, but the jokes have a way of arriving like jokes, and sounding like jokes, but not quite being jokes. This is an action movie foremost, which is fine.

Or rather, OK-fairly good.

“Kung Fu Panda 4” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for martial arts action/mild violence, scary images and some mild rude humor)

Running time: 1:34

How to watch: Premieres in theaters March 7

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

“They Shot the Piano Player,” investigates the short life and 1976 disappearance and likely political assassination of Brazilian jazz keyboardist Francisco Tenório Júnior, a revered if spottily known figure in the realm of jazz.

The film comes from Spanish director Fernando Trueba, here co-directing once again with artist Javier Mariscal. Their memorably fragrant collaboration on the 2010 animated gem “Chico & Rita” explored a similar, childlike animation style and related thematic ideas, creating a fictional love story spiced with various real-life jazz geniuses, from Dizzy Gillespie to Tito Puente.

“They Shot the Piano Player” is more about truth than imagination, but the cross-currents between the two are everywhere. It begins with a book signing. A (fictional) Brooklyn-based journalist acknowledges that his new book on Tenório Jr. was born from an unfinished book on the cultural history and analysis of the bossa nova movement. The name Tenório was new to him, he tells his bookstore audience. But realizing Tenório Jr. played on so many seminal bossa nova albums coming out of Brazil, exported to an eternally grateful world, he had his subject.

That subject’s tragic, dangling-modifier of an ending only made it more urgent. On tour in Buenos Aires, in the midst of the Argentinean dictatorship’s state-sanctioned torture and murder spree targeting vaguely defined dissidents, the Brazilian piano player met up with his lover. Late that night, Tenório Jr. left the hotel for a nearby sandwich shop. “He went to the corner and didn’t come back,” the woman recalls in “They Shot the Piano Player,” whose real-life memories become part of the film’s nonfiction/fiction amalgam.

The filmmakers keep an eye on clarity, which is important since docu-hybrids risk fudging the line between imagined reality and real reality. Jeff Goldblum, an identifiable performer if ever there was one, provides the voice of the journalist researching Tenório’s influence and disappearance. It’s a true if foggy story big enough to encompass many friends, relatives, children and admirers — along with material highlighting the U.S. role in various Latin American coups and dictatorial regimes.

Most of the voices we hear are authentic, coming from the filmmakers’ interviews, then rendered visually as animated versions of the real people. Elsewhere in “They Shot the Piano Player” (the title riffing on the 1960 Francois Truffaut film “Shoot the Piano Player”), the movie dreams up scenes of Tenório Jr. on tour, or with his lover, or with his wife and children. He was a family man, by many accounts, albeit a dreamy, unreliable, unfaithful and perennially broke family man.

The film basically and improbably works, even with some limitations. Most of the brilliant, gorgeous, world-changing music, starting with the 1958 recording of “Chega de Saudade,” confines itself to the first half. The second half goes too deep into the writer’s investigation of what likely happened to Tenório Jr. after he became one of the “disappeared” to accommodate much in the way of bossa nova breezes. “They Shot the Piano Player” sometimes feels like two films, required to share the same framework.

Even so, the telling details linger. One Tenório contemporary, who says he witnessed the kidnapping, remembers that the brutal Argentinean government favored Ford Falcons, black, as the abduction vehicles of choice. In the end Tenório Jr. may have had the simple, awful bad luck to visit Buenos Aires at a time when widespread sweeps and incarceration of “subversive elements” permeated daily life and death. Tenório Jr. didn’t care much about politics or political dissent. Maybe not at all, in fact. It was enough, says one real-life government flunky, now “reformed,” that Tenório Jr. ventured out late one night looking like a Communist sympathizer — because, as the man says, after a nervous pause, he seemed like he’d have “artist and musician friends.”

“They Shot the Piano Player” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for smoking and some violence)

Running time: 1:46

How to watch: In theaters

Attorney Mea Harper takes the case of accused murderer Zyair Malloy (Trevante Rhodes), very big in the art world and living in a very big loft to prove it. His high-ceiling workplace, also his sexplace, is accessed by a freight elevator on loan from Glenn Close and “Fatal Attraction.”

The legal eagle is not in a good place of her own as “Mea Culpa” embarks on its merry, trashy way. The attorney’s anesthesiologist husband (Sean Sagar) has been semi-secretly unemployed for eight months after getting high on his own supply. Her brother-in-law (Nick Sagar) is the district attorney, itching to prosecute the accused artist and further his own mayoral ambitions.

Mea’s in-laws wriggle under the thumb of her husband’s not-nice mother (Kerry O’Malley), near death after a cancer diagnosis but full of vitriolic zingers. Early in “Mea Culpa,” shot mostly in Atlanta with a few exterior bits on location in Chicago for fake authenticity, mom is birthday-gifted with a many-thousand-dollars wristwatch. “How much was it?” seethes the resentful, cash-strapped Mea on the ride home. Don’t worry, her husband replies, “I sold the piano.”

Enticed by the prospect of going head-to-head in court against her DA brother-in-law, Mea goes all in with the case of the mysterious hunky artist. Zyair’s up against considerable circumstance evidence, including cellphone footage of one of his missing-presumed-dead ex-lovers screaming “HE’S GOING TO KILL ME!” But did he? And what’s the story behind the fractured skull bits embedded in one of the artist’s paintings?

Mea keeps it strictly business for a scene or two. Then it’s sexytime, full of candlelit finger painting on various body parts. Quicker than you can draw a Jagged Edge around the Body of Evidence, “Mea Culpa” gets squirrelier and squirrelier, though much of Perry’s dialogue in the earlier scenes sets the tone. “I am your attorney. I am not your friend,” Mea states for the record, although she’s no match for the come-ons murmured by Rhodes: “I find you incredibly attractive … the way you smell … your brilliance … all very intriguing.” The Isaac Hayes cover of “Walk on By” on the turntable takes it from there.

Writer-producer-director Perry knows what he’s doing here, and what he’s willfully overdoing. If the relatively chaste 2020 Netflix ripoff “Fatal Affair” can revive the late ’80s-mid-’90s cycle of legal trouble, Perry can too, with more skin and some polish to go with the ridiculousness. Amanda Jones’ cello-lined musical score is a real plus, even if its restraint is fundamentally at odds with the reasons we watch stuff like this. Which are?

For many, the reasons go back to the simple pleasures of heckling, either out loud or in our own interior monologues. It’s not about derision, really, even with set-ups and payoffs as wait, whaaaaat? as those in “Mea Culpa.” When Zyair forces his lawyer to watch him in flagrante delicto with an anonymous nude groupie, appearing out of thin air, it’s practically an improv prompt. Also, Zyair happens to live directly above an underground crimson-hued sex club. You know, as one does. Imagine the homeowner association fees.

Without giving away the last 20 minutes, which really go for it, “Mea Culpa” includes the useful reminder that anyone who offers someone red wine and says “Here, I made you a drink” is walking human neon sign spelling danger. There’s no “making” a glass of wine. There’s just the “pouring.” You say “making,” and you’re saying “glassful of trouble,” which tends to give the game away a little more pointedly than warranted.

Tyler Perry the screenwriter may never come close to the skill level of Tyler Perry the first-rate actor; he does not appear on screen here, which is sad. But Tyler Perry the producing entertainment force remains an empire of its own.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

“Mea Culpa” — 2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language, some violence and drug use)

Running time: 2:00

How to watch: Now streaming on Netflix

But there was also that time the future Boston Globe film critic and author of the new book “Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema” saw a double bill of “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown,” starring Pam Grier. Grier figures prominently in Henderson’s book, published earlier this month.

It’s an extremely good read, and Henderson is coming to Chicago’s Music Box Theatre for a book signing and a 35mm screening of the 1972 “Super Fly,” another seminal title in the garish, brutal, vitally expressive screen era of Blaxploitation.

That word doesn’t fly with everyone these days. Nor did it in the long-deferred phase of American film that brought a flowering of Black opportunities on screen — Henderson frames the timeline as 1970 to 1978 — sparked by the success of “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” followed by “Shaft” a year later, in 1971.

Henderson has no problem with the label because he loves the range of work it encompasses. “Is it a genre, like comedy or Western,” he writes in the book’s prologue, “or something more fluid and harder to define? I like to describe it the way I’d describe the equally slippery term ‘film noir’: Blaxploitation is an era, a period of time when certain films are definitive examples and others are up for discussion and debate.”

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Odie, isn’t age 4 at least 10 years too early for “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown”?

A: I definitely should not have them at that age! That same year, 1974, I also saw a double feature of “Enter the Dragon” and “Black Belt Jones.” I recall being fascinated by both Jim Kelly’s and Pam Grier’s Afros, usurped only by Franklyn Ajaye’s Afro two years later in “Car Wash.” I saw a lot of movies way too young, but when you have aunties or older cousins, you had opportunities to do things like that. I remember my pops saying to me a lot of the time, after we saw something on the deuce, 42nd Street, in Times Square: “Don’t tell your mother.”

Q: Take us back to the beginning. Some folks might guess the Blaxploitation era started with “Shaft,” but that was a major studio, MGM, not American International Pictures …

A: “Shaft” was the movie that basically saved MGM from bankruptcy, so Hollywood had a big stake in the film’s success. At that point MGM was about to merge with 20th Century Fox, but the deal fell through. And then “Shaft” made a lot of money, directed by Gordon Parks. The year before, though, Samuel Goldwyn Jr. made “Cotton Comes to Harlem” with Ossie Davis directing, and that made a lot of money first. That one got it on Hollywood’s radar that Black folks would see a movie about Black people.

Defining Blaxploitation by a single genre would be disingenuous, but there are characteristics common to all that aren’t genre-specific: the attitude, the swagger and most importantly, I’d argue, the music and the fashion.

Q: I mean, the “Foxy Brown” opening credits are almost too much for one movie. Fantastic. And an irresistible song, although compared to the title song from “Trouble Man”?

A: That’s one of Marvin Gaye’s best songs. He wanted to be a singer like Frank Sinatra, not the sexy soul singer he became. But he wrote the entire score for “Trouble Man.” Michael Kahn, who became Spielberg’s editor, he edited that film, by the way.

Q: You write in the book that you began research with one explanation for Blaxploitation era’s demise in mind. But that changed?

A: It did, yes. My theory was it died because by the late ’70s there were a lot more Black people on TV, and TV was free. You had a big event like “Roots,” but before that, Black sitcoms that were hits: “The Jeffersons,” “Good Times,” “Sanford and Son.” I assumed what killed Blaxploitation was a combination of that, plus the blockbusters like “Jaws” and “Star Wars.” Black folks went for those, just like everybody else.

But then Elvis Mitchell interviewed me for his Netflix documentary on Blaxploitation, “Is That Black Enough for You?” And we had this friendly dispute about what killed it off. He thinks it was (the commercial failure) of “The Wiz” in 1978. We went back and forth on that, and he finally said, “I think we actually think the same thing here: That when the (Blaxploitation) movies ceased to be marketable for Black audiences, the era died.” “The Wiz” cost an ungodly amount of money, and lost a lot. But it’s beloved by Black folks my age everywhere. As much as I have problems with “The Wiz,” I cannot deny my childhood love of it.

Q: Was the Blaxploitation era of the real low-down movies, lots of crime and sex, a double-edged sword, do you think?

A: You have to first talk about what was happening on screen before this time. With Hollywood’s pre-Code era (1929-1934), in movies like “Baby Face,” actors of color occasionally did more than bit roles — the maid, the porter. But until Sidney Poitier came along in the middle of the 20th century, there wasn’t much besides those mostly negative images. When Poitier became a star, he fell victim to having to represent the entire race in a positive light. Eventually he took control of his own movies and started directing, and that allowed him to be freer.

With Blaxploitation, yes, a lot of it’s salacious, with a little bit of message thrown in, like the broccoli you hide underneath the cheese sauce so the kids’ll eat it (laughs). But Black folks saw themselves in power. When I saw Jim Kelly in “Black Belt Jones” or Pam Grier in “Coffy,” I mean, that’s different from watching Clint Eastwood sticking a gun in a Black guy’s face and asking him if he feels lucky. Or watching  Thug Number Three  on an episode of “Beretta.” Pam Grier pulling a gun out of her Afro meant one thing: We were in power.

As with anything that starts underground, once it goes mainstream, it’s going to be destroyed. Maybe that’s what happened with Blaxploitation.

Q: It didn’t take long in the ’70s for “respectable” studio films, the ones that won Oscars, to co-opt the same levels of violence.

A: Right. Look at “The Godfather,” which came from a really trashy book. I always say that was an exploitation movie directed too damn well to be called an exploitation movie.

Q: Do you think Blaxploitation got a dubious or double-edged second life thanks to Quentin Tarantino?

A: Well, I loved “Jackie Brown” …

Q: My favorite of his.

A: Mine too. That’s where he distills Blaxploitation down to an essence, really. With “Django Unchained,” which I also like, he’s focusing (completely) on all the most salacious and negative imagery he can. It’s a pastiche that often works. But not always. Tarantino, and I hate to say this, he does the white-boy thing, focusing on what he thinks are the coolest elements of Blaxploitation without realizing that some of what he’s doing is too much. And not worth leaning into.

Q: You list a lot of favorites in “Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras.” Do you have a favorite moment or sequence that captures everything you love about Blaxploitation?

A: The opening of “Shaft.” When Shaft comes out of the subway at 42nd Street, in time with that song, and walks down the street. That’s the defining moment for me. I did that literally yesterday, and I’ll do it again tonight: Walk out of the Times Square station at 42nd Street and hear that theme in my head. (Director) Gordon Parks told Richard Roundtree to just cross the street without looking, because Shaft would never look both ways. That moment when he almost gets run over by the cab? That really happened. He almost got Richard Roundtree run over the first day. On the first day of filming.

True, the story of “Dune” offers some built-in possibilities for success with such a potentially ridiculous scene. This two-hour, 46-minute continuation of the 2021 “Dune” is the sandiest movie since “Lawrence of Arabia.” This means whirlwinds and sandstorms worthy of Frank Herbert’s massive hunk of trippy science fiction lit, which in turn means lots of dramatic visual texture – all the better to disguise as well as complement the sequel’s extraordinarily sophisticated blend of digital and practical design elements.

As the budding anti-colonialist revolutionary Paul Atreides, Chalamet risks life, limb and career embarrassment, faking like he’s getting his balance against considerable headwinds and near-zero visibility atop a particularly gargantuan sandworm on the move. He’s clobbered with everything the sound designer, the composer, the editor, the cinematographer and the effects armies have created, and it’s chaotic bordering on “Wait, what am I looking at?”

And then a smile comes over your face because the scene is actually working, and you believe it. There are many flights of fancy in director David Lynch’s certifiably insane 1984 “Dune,” but in that one, the “ride ’em, wormboy!” scene does not work. This one works, because Villeneuve and his tiptop digital and practical design wizards are the best we have working in modern movies.

But these first two “Dune” films really are gorgeous. They don’t look or behave like any comparable, massively budgeted contemporary studio enterprise, whether it’s a Marvel or a “Star Wars” derivative.

Now: Is “Dune: Part Two” my thing? Does the bloody fall of House Atreides and the vengeful rise of messiah-in-training Paul Atreides, played by Chalamet; the battle for domination over the spice harvesting business on the desert planet Arrakis; and the machinations of the Emperor of the Universe (Christopher Walken, but of course we knew that already) and his daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world? And what about the political and romantic alliance between Paul and Chani, the fierce Fremen warrior fighting for her people? Chani is once again played by Zendaya, who actually has things to do and say in “Dune: Part Two.” Javier Bardem returns, too, with an expanded presence, as Fremen leader Stilgar, heading the revolt against the invading Harkonnen.

With a different filmmaker I’d say no, not my space jam. I read the first “Dune” novel only in prep for the 2021 film, and I fought it most of the way. But director and co-writer Villeneuve, whose previous works include, on the high end, “Incendies” (2010) and “Arrival” (2016), uses the screen to imagine technological and otherworldly amazements, and treat them matter-of-factly. A movie can strip source material for parts, and its own needs, and still capture its essence. When the dragonfly-styled helicopters known as ornithopters reappear for duty in “Dune: Part Two,” they’re just as terrific as they were in “Dune 1.”

The sequel features more and larger battles and mayhem, though it also features lots of murmuring strategy in extremely dark corridors. Among the new wrinkles: There’s an old-school scene of Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha, the nephew of the unsightly Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard), in gladitorial-style combat against three surviving Atreides soldiers. It’s part of a section in the movie depicted in monochrome black-and-white. That’s life under a black sun — a cinematographer’s dream! (The inspired Greg Fraser returns as director of photography on “Dune: Part Two,” along with all the other key visual collaborators from the 2021 success.)

Take away all the larger power plays, and at heart the movie’s a study in how the younger generation, nearly 11,000 years in the future, is still learning to maneuver around their know-it-all elders. Like Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson enjoys a larger share of the storyline this time. As Lady Jessica, the now-widowed pregnant mother of Paul, she communicates telepathically with her newborn daughter while movin’ on up to the Bene Gesserit order of mystics who foresaw Paul’s destiny before anyone else in the universe. She’s pushing her kid to fulfill that destiny; meantime the oil-slicked blob Baron Harkonnen sees in his nephew (Butler) a bloodthristy psychotic — we know this because on first reference, someone says “he’s psychotic” — and the logical heir to his corner of the universe.

This isn’t Butler’s biggest screen role to date, but it’s his most effective by a long shot, and he gives the sludgier passages of “Dune: Part Two” a needed jolt. Also, it’s very gratifying for a film so dependent on digital effects to lean into more traditional methods for a first-rate duel between Feyd-Rautha and Paul, staged, edited and executed like something out of Act 5 of “Hamlet.”

What we have here, in the end, doesn’t end anything — no film in which the last lines include “the holy war begins!” could pretend otherwise. This is a middle-chapter installment, landing on the same note of “to be continued, if business is good” as the previous “Dune.” What Villeneuve and company achieve in “Dune: Part Two” is every bit as impressive and, in its peak imagery, hypnotic as part one. And, yes, frustrating. Even fans have to concede that Villeneuve’s facility for cinematic movement has its limitations (glaring in the dull finale of “Blade Runner 2049,” for example).

So “Dune: Part Two” is not a zingy marvel of narrative momentum. But it’s not trying for that. Rewatching the 2021 movie earlier this week reminded me of just how much of an aesthetic outlier Villeneuve is these days. He shows us sights to behold, truly and consistently. As for Chalamet, he remains effective in his murmuring-brook way. It’s a mite low-key for the character’s circumstances, as well as for the movie’s massivity. On the other hand, he’s easy to take, and the “Boy from the Outer World” has a lot on his mind, which is plagued by horrifying psychic visions of what’s to come if “Dune 3” gets the go-ahead.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

‘Dune: Part Two’ — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of strong violence, some suggestive material and brief strong language)

Running time: 2:46

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Feb. 29