Guy Lodge

If the dialogue and characterization never rise above the pedestrian, however, those tensions do at least bring some malicious rooting interest to the essential survival drama — with a strain of toxic friction evident from the get-go between nice-girl protagonist Sarah (Kathryn Newton) and her narcissistic BFF Max (Lana Condor).

More cheerfully lightweight than it is actively funny, the film is mostly content to coast on the affable hangdog charm of “New Girl” star Jake Johnson — who’s a commendably likable anchor for proceedings considering his character is, at least half the time, a blundering douchebag.

Pinocchio: Unstrung is never especially frightening, and even its jump scares are oddly muffled, but it is abundantly gross and grisly in all the ways a cheap-and-cheerful slasher should be.

Bad Counselors is at pains not to make Burning Bush look overly absurd, which, while fair enough, rather curbs its comic possibilities: There’s little irony or mischief in a film where every character is good at heart, and not much conflict either.

There's nary a dull moment in the director's typically muscular, temporally complex interpretation, but despite a fine, bone-weary turn from Matt Damon as the wandering king of Ithaca, it's more sensually than emotionally felt.

The diversity of voices assembled is a suitable reflection of the subject’s reach and impact, and while a more provocative film might have included more skeptics or critics — perhaps one to account for why, as is incredulously noted here, Oliver never received a full-length review in the New York Times — Waters’ doc is unabashedly a celebration, and persuasive as such.

What binds and lifts all this foolery is the palpable love they have for what they do, and the other people doing it. You leave “Jackass: Best and Last” believing that they’ll actually miss all this, and that’s enough to make us miss it too.

Even as it ultimately bends to convention, the film is such a weird, willful popular entertainment for much of its (blessedly snappy) running time that it holds your goodwill: It’s almost bellissima but it’s fully, madly moviosa, and that’s more than the seventh entry in any animated franchise has a right to be.

Even at its most formally playful, the film is marked by an earnestness of tone that makes it feel like work, especially given a two-hour-plus runtime that exposes the repetitiveness of its rhetoric and the sparseness of its drama.

For all its otherwise precision-engineered sweetness, “Voicemails for Isabelle” doesn’t find its way there. Which is a shame, because Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson — two reliably likable actors, alike in age, genre credentials and button-cuteness — do everything in their power to make you believe.