“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.

Releasing this week on Netflix, the sports comedy-drama shines a light on the Homeless World Cup, an annual event in which, yes, homeless male and female footballers — soccer players to us — play for their countries in matches of four-on-four “street” soccer, which is played on a smaller field, er, pitch.

Made with the support of the event’s namesake organization and said to be inspired by true stories, “The Beautiful Game” focuses mainly on fellas comprising the English club and their coach, a former professional star player.

The direction by the suddenly busy Thea Sharrock — her film “Wicked Little Letters” debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and lands in Northeast Ohio theaters next week — and screenplay by Frank Cottrell-Boyce leave a lot to be desired.

The film has the flow of a match where neither team manages more than a few scoring opportunities, but it does eke out a win.

The ever-enjoyable Bill Nighy (“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” “Living”) stars as the aforementioned player-turned-coach, Mal, who also spent time as a scout for a pro club. When we meet him, he is hunting for big game — former pro Vinny (Micheal Ward), who has been living out of his car for a stretch as he’s struggled to find steady work.

Mal explains to Vinny that he’s been involved with the Homeless World Cup for years and that he’s set to take his 12th team to the tournament, which this year is in Rome.

“You ever won it?” Vinny asks.

“It’s not about winning,” Mal says.

“You’re desperate to win it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t object.”

Mal tells him that every player at the tournament has a story to tell — “heartbreaking, unexpected, thrilling stories” — and seems to want Vinny to take part in the Homeless World Cup for reasons that go beyond the fact he clearly would be the team’s best player.

Vinny is the prideful type and initially rebuffs Mal, but perhaps eager to impress the young daughter he visits at a playground who’s being raised by his ex, he agrees to go.

With the possible exception of the team’s existing striker, Cal (Kit Young), the players warmly welcome Vinny into their supportive dynamic, but he chooses to keep his distance, even once they’re all in Rome and competing. He does provide some much-needed scoring punch, unabashedly installing a “pass it to me” core team strategy.

It isn’t the fault of Ward (“Empire of Light,” “The Old Guard”) that it’s so hard to warm to Vinny, as Sharrock, whose credits also include the controversial 2016 tearjerker “Me Before You,” and Cottrell-Boyce, perhaps best known for TV writing, fly too close to the sun with his character arc. Vinny simply is too hard to like for too long.

As a result, we wish “The Beautiful Game” gave us more time with Nighy’s Mal, who habitually talks to his beloved late wife. Still, there seems to be a little chemistry between him and Gabriella (Valeria Golino of “Rain Man” fame), who helps run the event and talks a little trash on behalf of her host Italian squad. it feels like a missed opportunity not to make more out of, um, “Mal-riella,” if we may be so bold, than the movie does.

“The Beautiful Game” includes mini-subplots involving the English players, the closest to impactful of which involves Nathan (Callum Scott Howells), a recovering heroin addict who tries hard to connect with his cold roommate, Vinny.

The movie also devotes some attention to two other teams: South Africa, expected to be the dominant squad in England’s group before running into travel trouble; and Japan, competing for the first time. Thanks to the performance of Susan Wokoma as the infectiously enthusiastic nun coaching the South African team, the former element adds a little something to the proceedings. (The latter adds very little.)

Lastly, we spend a little time with Rosita (Cristina Rodlo), a hugely talented player for the U.S. who catches the eye of British player Jason (Sheyi Cole), who doesn’t make the best of first impressions. After getting past that, they spend a bit of time together, with Rosita explaining why the Homeless World Cup — and soccer in general — could mean so much to her future.

Thinking “Ted Lasso” crossed with “Next Goal Wins” gets you in the ballpark as to what “The Beautiful Game” has to offer, although it’s not as strong as either the Apple TV+ hit or the 2023 film from writer-director Taika Waititi, respectively.

Despite all its fumbling about, “The Beautiful Game” succeeds as a celebration of the Homeless World Cup, championing not only what the experience means for those who participate in it but also its power to inspire others around the world.

According to the film’s production notes, the event has taken place 18 times since its inaugural 2003 event in Graz, Austria. After three years off due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Homeless World Cup took place last year in Sacramento, California, with this year’s set for Seoul, South Korea, in September.

A number of non-speaking roles in the film are played by those who have competed in the affair, lending that little bit of authenticity to “The Beautiful Game.”

In the end, what Mal says about the Homeless World Cup may be true, that it’s not about winning. Instead, it would seem to be about lifting the spirit, as the movie inspired by it does.

‘The Beautiful Game’

Where: Netflix

When: March 29

Rated: PG-13 for some language, a suggestive reference, brief partial nudity and drug references

Runtime: 2 hours, 5 minutes

Stars (of four): 2.5

If you want to head to the theaters, check out Luc Besson’s wacky “DogMan” and our find of the week “Lousy Carter” (showing one night only in San Francisco).

Here’s our roundup.

“Renegade Nell”: “Happy Valley” creator Sally Wainwright enlivens the popular tween fantasy-tinged genre with this exemplary female powered Disney+ series set in 18th-century England. In eight addictive episodes, the on-point filmmaker succeeds where others have failed, injecting just the right doses of intrigue and humor into a quietly subversive feminist story.

Best of all, the series is thankfully not a prequel nor a reboot, and, refreshingly, not a sequel. And what joy it is to have a lively female protagonist at the center of it all, a quick-tempered young adult who’s confident and rebellious and restless. Nell is infamous, too, trying to clear her name in a shocking murder.

“Nell” is made stronger by its well-written characters. And it is purpose-driven Nell (Louisa Harland, channeling some Jessie Buckley intensity) — a legend in the making — who anchors it. She’s gained not only notoriety but superpowers via a Tinkerbell-esque sidekick Billy Blind (Nick Mohammed).

When Nell and her two sisters flee from those who want to keep them quiet, their paths continue to cross with a duplicitous highwayman/aristocrat (Frank Dillane, providing much of the humor) who is the younger paramour of an irresponsible, gossip-mongering newspaper editor (Joely Richardson, living it up here), and a privileged brother (Jake Dunne) and sister (Alice Kremelberg) who are enabled int their tapping to the dark side by the Earl of Poynton (Adrian Lester).

There are many more engaging characters and a slew of clever cameos from British stars. Each play essential parts in the action, and do their fair share of conniving and derring-do to aid or defeat the grand, evil purposes of the bad guys. “Renegade Nell” gallops ahead of other Disney+ offerings by telling a new story tremendously well, and giving us a young woman who defies the ruling class to gain not only justice but freedom. Details: 3½ stars out of 4; all episodes available starting March 29.

“A Gentleman in Moscow”: Anyone who gulped down Amor Towles’ 2016 literary page-turner and then campaigned friends to follow suit will approach Showtime’s eight-part adaptation with a touch of trepidation. Rest easy, dear readers, showrunner and executive producer Ben Vanstone and creator/writer Joe Murtagh have done this one a solid and nothing more.

Ewan McGregor initially seems like an odd casting choice to play Count Alexander Rostov — a 1920s aristocrat whose mouthy ways lead to his getting forever confined by a Bolshevik court panel to the ritzy Metropol hotel. But he grows on you and gives another one of his emotionally complex performances, even if he’s not a Russian.

What might look on the outside look like a cushy sentence is anything but as Rostov’s ordered to never step outside and is confined within the dilapidated, uncomfortable accommodations in a drafty, chilly attic. Down below, he befriends many: confident actress Anna Urbanova (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, giving a classic, classy performance) who relishes her healthy sexual appetite, and a precocious child instrumental in playing a critical, life-changing part in his life as the decades fly by and the screws get tightened on dissent.

Unlike some series, the extended length of this one benefits the decades-spanning story arc, with each episode cycling us through Russian history and showing how the changing political winds whisked away some in power leaving the powerless to find strength, love and greater meaning. Details: 3 stars; starts streaming March 29 on Paramount+ (with Showtime) and then on March 31 on Showtime.

“STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces”: The first part of Morgan Neville’s entirely worthwhile two-part Apple TV+ series blows the audience away in its creative approach in charting comedian Steve Martin’s childhood, fledgling stand-up career and then his phenomenally successful stage shows. Told entirely without the fallback plan of a talking head, it overlays interviews with Martin and others with video and images of the time. It’s an immersive experience and one of the most creative and unique approaches used for a documentary about a famous person.

The second part is less adventurous but finds Steve at home, preparing for a show with his friend and “Only Murders in the Building” co-star Martin Short, his wife, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, friend Tina Fey and costar Diane Keaton, amongst others. It focuses more on his film career, and features clips from some of his biggest successes (“The Jerk,” “Parenthood”) and his biggest failures (“Pennies From Heaven” and Nora Ephron’s “Mixed Nuts”). The energy and momentum of the first part deflates in the second, but it is in tempo with the man himself, as a much more content, less anxiety-ridden Martin candidly reflects on the films, his greatest loves (including art), his emotionally shut-off father and a renaissance-like career that includes author, painter and playwright amongst other talents. It is a telling glimpse into the life of a creative artist who learns the invaluable truth that all the trappings of success mean so little until you’ve built a place you call home. It’s an exceptional documentary, even if the second half can’t quite keep up with the first. Details: 3½ stars; drops March 29 on Apple TV+.

“DogMan”: Luc Besson’s bizarro but commendable character study swings from great to awful, sometimes in a matter of seconds. What prevents its erratic tendencies from going entirely off leash is Caleb Landry Jones’ gutsy, fully committed performance. You can’t take your eyes off this underrated actor. He’s unforgettable as Douglas Munrow, a loner drag performer (he does a very cool Marilyn) in a wheelchair who’s more at home with his own pack of scraggly dogs than he is with humans. He has a good reason — his cruel dog-fighting father kicked him out and locked him in the filthy backyard kennel till he broke out. The dogs were the only ones who showed Douglas unconditional love and also protected him. Besson wrote this outlandish story, and while his directing is better than his screenwriting there is an undeniable flair to everything about this weird affair. Yes, it continually goes on and off the rails, but then it spits you off into an unexpected, but rather ingenious, place at the end. So given all that, is it worth seeing? Yes, but only if you plunge rather than lean into its chaotic  mindset from the very start. Details: 2.5 stars, in theaters Friday.

Find of the week

“Lousy Carter”: Indie filmmaker Bob Byington’s biting comedy fails on all counts in the originality department with its worn-out premise of a pompous professional – in this case a college literature professor who’s teaching a master’s course on “The Great Gatsby” –  confronting mortality when his doc says he has six months to live. A “death sentence” is one of the most overused plots but Byington’s dry-witted black comedy works better than the bulk of ‘em because it is wickedly funny and uncompromising and that’s due to the acidic screenwriting from Byington and the wry lead performance from David Krumholtz as a former dreamer with a big, hardly commercial idea to make an animated movie out of a Nabokov novel. Byington’s cast this droll comedy well with funny turns from actors portraying Carter’s forthright ex-girlfriend (Oliva Thirlby), a funeral-loving grad student (Luxy Banner) who challenges him all the time and his sorta best friend (Martin Starr) and his horny wife (Jocelyn DeBoer). Told in just under 80 minutes, “Lousy Carter” made me laugh uncomfortably quite often and then even shocked me at the end. Details: 3 stars; screens March 31 at the Roxie in San Francisco; also available On Demand starting March 29.

Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.

Streaming Friday, March 29, on Apple TV+ comes a revealing two-part documentary about beloved comedian Steve Martin, directed by Oscar winning “20 Feet from Stardom” director Morgan Neville. “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces,” is a truly unique documentary project, the two halves distinctly different but fitting together to create an illuminating portrait of Martin and his relationship to fame and creativity.

The first half “Then” tracks his early life, through childhood, the budding of his comedy career, his boundary-pushing stand-up shows, and his meteoric rise to fame in the 1970s, becoming a pop culture sensation through his platinum-selling comedy albums, sold-out tours and many appearances hosting “Saturday Night Live.” The first part ends with Martin’s transition to a film career with “The Jerk,” and his first major stumble with the poorly received “Pennies from Heaven.”

The second half of the two-part film, titled “Now,” follows Martin in the present day, co-starring on the Hulu hit “Only Murders in the Building” with his longtime friend and collaborator Martin Short, living a private life with his wife and young daughter. In contrast to the chaotic frenzy of his life in the 1970s, Neville captures Martin in moments of quiet contentment, biking with Short through Santa Barbara, fixing easy meals on the road, and reflecting on his life. It’s a fascinating and riveting watch, in which the elusive star opens up like never before about the highs and lows of his personal life and career.

But while “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces,” is an absorbing watch, it will likely make you want to revisit his filmography, especially the early titles from the late 1970s and ’80s on which the documentary focuses. So here’s a little primer of where to watch some of Steve Martin’s earliest films, as an accompaniment to the doc.

His breakout role was obviously in “The Jerk” (1979), which he wrote and Carl Reiner directed. Martin stars as a simple country boy who heads off for life in the big city. The film was a massive hit and cemented Martin as a star. Stream it on Showtime or rent it elsewhere. In 1982, Martin and Reiner reunited for the noir parody “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”

The documentary also focuses on the 1981 flop “Pennies from Heaven,” a 1930s-style movie musical directed by Herbert Ross and co-starring Bernadette Peters and Christopher Walken. Martin in a sincere mode was not warmly received by critics and audiences, and the film explores how that failure was a deep wound for Martin. A fascinating object in his career history, rent “Pennies from Heaven” on all digital platforms.

Of course, there’s the iconic 1986 comedy “Three Amigos!,” which Martin wrote with Lorne Michaels and Randy Newman, directed by John Landis and co-starring Short and “SNL” star Chevy Chase. Stream it on AMC+, The Roku Channel, or rent it elsewhere.

But while he was making these rom-coms, he was also starring as a beloved movie dad, in 1989’s “Parenthood,” directed by Ron Howard, heading up an all-star ensemble cast including Mary Steenburgen, Dianne Wiest, Jason Robards, Rick Moranis, Martha Plimpton, Keanu Reeves and Joaquin Phoenix. Stream it on Netflix. He also starred in the 1991 film “Father of the Bride” opposite Diane Keaton and Kimberly Williams-Paisley (plus Short and a tiny Kieran Culkin). Stream it on Disney+ or rent.

There are so many more fantastic Steve Martin movies, but the documentary will inspire you to revisit these early favorites in his career, so consider this the companion guide to “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces” on Apple TV+.

(Katie Walsh is the Tribune News Service film critic and co-host of the “Miami Nice” podcast.)

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

In the late 1990s, NBC ran a promotional campaign with the slogan, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you,” aimed at boosting summer reruns of such hits as “Mad About You” and “Frasier.”

Updated for 2024, the line would be, “If you haven’t streamed it, it’s new to you.”

Original series created to drive new subscribers to streaming platforms are showing up more frequently on linear broadcast and cable TV networks. Media companies are looking to expose the programs to broader audiences and fill out their lineups to help pay the freight as they battle to keep pace with Netflix.

This summer, CBS will be running the first season of the Taylor Sheridan crime drama “Tulsa King” starring Sylvester Stallone — a show that was made for streamer Paramount+. You can binge rival Peacock’s new reality series “The McBee Dynasty,” but if you want to kick it old school, individual episodes air weekly on parent company NBCUniversal’s USA Network.

In January, ABC aired the first season of the Hulu hit “Only Murders in the Building,” It performed well enough for the network to plan on airing another season at some point in the future.

The trend runs counter to the perception that viewers looking for non-sports entertainment programming have abandoned linear TV.

It may be true that many younger consumers who have grown up with streaming don’t even own a TV set, which they see as a gadget to bombard their parents and grandparents with pharmaceutical drug commercials all day. But for media companies, linear TV, while on the decline with shrinking ratings and cord-cutting, has turned into a marketing tool that expands public awareness of their streaming shows.

Meanwhile, the streaming businesses owned by legacy media companies such as NBCUniversal parent Comcast Corp., Paramount Global and Disney are all under pressure from Wall Street to generate profits. Turning to linear networks is a means of generating more revenue to help monetize their investments in streaming.

“These companies are hemorrhaging money [on streaming],” said Doug Herzog, a veteran cable and broadcast executive. “None of it is working great. That’s the issue. They are trying things out because that’s what they should be doing.”

Paramount Global Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra summed up the approach at an investor conference where he said his company aims to get “the most we possibly can out of every single dollar that we invest in content.”

Executives say viewers can expect to see more original programs created exclusively for streaming services pop up on broadcast and cable channels.

That’s because the broadcast networks have the ability to reach more than 95% of the homes in the U.S. While cord-cutting has reduced the number of homes getting pay TV, major cable networks are connected to about 70 million homes, still more than most subscriber-based streaming services. Peacock, for example, has about 30 million paying subscribers.

Streaming shows can become hits and cultural touchstones, but it’s harder for them to reach the kind of critical mass that big network TV series such as “Friends” once achieved. That’s why the legacy companies are finding that shows already exposed on streaming can pass as original programming on linear TV.

“It’s something we will continue to do because what you see in a fragmented marketplace — as popular as these shows are — there are still people who have not seen them,” said Craig Erwich, who as president of the Disney Television Group oversees ABC and Hulu. “Putting them in different places and telling people they are there is always additive. It’s never cannibalistic.”

With a cast that includes Martin Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez, “Only Murders in the Building” is a show with the kind of broad appeal linear TV networks still seek, requiring just a few edits of foul language.

Disney found that half of the viewers who watched “Only Murders” on ABC were not signed up to Hulu, which has almost 50 million subscribers. After the series aired on the broadcast network, viewers wanted more. The hours of viewing for the first two seasons of the program rose by 40% on its original streaming home.

“It was new to a lot of people,” Erwich noted. “It surprises me because the show is so wildly popular in both consumption and critical acclaim that you start to think that everybody who wants to see this has seen it. But it’s a big country and there are many different types of people who want to watch TV in many different types of ways.”

NBCUniversal similarly saw viewers flock to Peacock to watch the second season of the medical anthology drama “Dr. Death,” after episodes from Season 1 aired on NBC. Viewing of the show on Peacock rose 58%.

“Only Murders” came in handy for ABC, as last year’s strikes by Hollywood screenwriters and actors had shut down production for months and cut off the pipeline of fresh programming. But the network was looking for a way to deploy the show well before the labor stoppages became a factor, executives said.

Streaming shows are likely to show up on the networks during the summer months, when repeats can no longer draw a sizable crowd. Rather than investing in original series for a smaller available audience, CBS can turn to a streaming show with a high-profile star such as “Tulsa King,” which features Stallone as a crime boss.

Last week, NBCUniversal’s Peacock unveiled a new serialized reality show, “The McBee Dynasty,” which tells the story of a family ranch and the four brothers vying to take over the business from their patriarch. The entire series is available to stream on Peacock while individual episodes air Monday nights after “WWE Raw” on USA Network.

Funneling the nearly 2 million WWE fans per week into the Peacock series uses one of the most time-honored stunts in the TV playbook.

The notion of a TV schedule where viewers are compelled to make an appointment to watch shows has almost become an anachronism in the age of streaming video on demand. But pulling an audience from one time period to the next remains the most efficient way to drive millions of viewers into sampling a new program, especially following live events or reality competition shows that are best enjoyed by watching in real time.

“The concept of a show-to-show audience flow is real,” said Frances Berwick, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment. “There is still a tremendous amount of value in it.”

Bravo aired the first season of the Peacock reality competition “Traitors” ahead of the streaming debut of its second batch. It was an easy fit, Berwick noted, as several of the players on the program come from the Bravo slate of reality shows such as “Below Deck.”

“We’ll do it where it makes sense and we have the right content,” Berwick said.

Most streaming shows making it to linear TV are staying under the same corporate umbrella. But it may be only a matter of time before networks regularly provide a second window for original shows created for platforms that they do not own. It’s already happening.

Fox recently cut a deal with Amazon’s Prime Video to get a broadcast run of the game show “The 1% Club” a week after episodes make their streaming debut. The CW is currently airing the Canadian sitcom “Children Ruin Everything,” which was created for the Roku Channel.

Similar deals and experiments are probably ahead in the effort to get programs in front of enough viewers to build them into profitable assets.

“We’re going to see a lot of creativity,” Berwick said. “Good content is good content.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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.

In theaters this week, “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” is the follow-up to the largely enjoyable 2021 adventure “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.” The latter, which saw Jason Reitman — son of Ivan Reitman, director of 1984’s original “Ghostbusters” and its 1989 sequel, “Ghostbusters II” — at the helm, introduced a new generation of brave spirit-catching souls while also bringing back key legacy characters.

Well, the “Ghostbusters” franchise obviously isn’t ready to let go of the past.

“Frozen Empire” — co-written, like its predecessor, by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, who takes over directing duties this time — is similarly packed with multiple generations of Ghostbusters. As a result, it doesn’t feel as fresh as “Afterlife.”

Nonetheless, it’s again a pretty entertaining way to spend a couple of hours.

Following a prologue set in 1904 New York City in which a few frozen folks literally fall to pieces, we move to the modern Big Apple and catch up with the family at the heart of the new movie, descendants of deceased original Ghostbuster Egon Spengler. Mom Callie (Carrie Coon), son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and daughter Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) are out on the hunt, packed into the vehicle synonymous with the Ghostbusters, Ecto-1, being driven by Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd), who’s graduated from being Phoebe’s teacher to her, um, “step-teacher,” as he awkwardly puts it.

Bankrolled by Ghostbuster-turned-philanthropist Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), the family now resides in the Ghostbusters’ old Tribeca firehouse, traveling by pole from where they sleep to the other levels of the aged building.

Another hero is, again, Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz, the former Ghostbuster now spending his time buying old objects he eagerly scans with his PKE reader for paranormal energy and hosts an online show with the help of Podcast (Logan Kim), who has migrated to New York from Oklahoma along with the Spenglers, as has Lucky (Celeste O’Connor), Trevor’s friend.

We also get — and no complaints here — Bill Murray’s original Ghostbuster Peter Venkman popping in for a few meaningful minutes of screentime.

Expect another familiar face or two, while newcomers include Patton Oswalt’s Dr. Hubert Wartzki, an expert in ghostly and ghastly folklore, and James Acaster’s Lars, a scientist working with Winston’s new Paranormal Research Center. (Making his film debut, Acaster is a very creative comedian who earns a few lab-related laughs.)

The more important new characters, however, are Melody (Emily Alyn Lind of “Gossip Girl”), a ghost trapped in this world who befriends Phoebe, and Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani), a neighborhood hustler who must embrace his destiny as “the firemaster” if humanity is to survive a coming threat.

That danger is Garraka, a terrifying demon with the power of “the death chill” who has been trapped in an ancient artifact for more than a century.

With so many characters to juggle and seemingly determined to give us a reasonable runtime, Reitman and Kenan don’t even try to give many of them arcs. The major exception is Phoebe, who’s benched after the fact that she’s only 15 becomes an issue for New York’s mayor, who’s not exactly a longtime ally of the Ghostbusters. (Meanwhile, Trevor is now 18 and wants to be treated like an adult, but “Stranger Things” star Wolfhard rather quickly becomes an afterthought in “Frozen Empire.”)

The most fun is provided by Nanjiani, the star of “The Big Sick” and “The Lovebirds” sticking some comedic lines as only he can as the increasingly important Nadeem.

Overall, even as “Frozen Empire” is essentially going through the ghostbusting motions, it is consistently pleasant thanks to its appealing cast. For example, Rudd (“Ant-Man”) is his usual brand of everyman-charming as Gary, who is asked by girlfriend Callie to start being more of a dad to her kids, which will mean being the bad guy sometimes.

Tastes surely vary on this kind of thing, but we’re pleased that, after building up the threat of Garraka, “Frozen Empire” doesn’t devolve into a seemingly endless supernatural battle sequence — like certain “Ghostbusters” installments we could name. Fear not, for there are ice spikes and proton packs aplenty in the climax, but we all know how this affair is going to end, so there’s no need to drag it out.

Counting the disappointing 2016 reboot, “Ghostbusters,” “Frozen Empire” — appropriately dedicated to Ivan Reitman, who died a few months after the release of “Afterlife” — is the fifth film in the franchise, and we’re guessing a sixth isn’t too far off in the distance.

We wouldn’t mind that, but maybe don’t invite quite so many folks to that paranormal party.

‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’

Where: Theaters.

When: March 22.

Rated: PG-13 for supernatural action/violence, language and suggestive references.

Runtime: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

Stars (of four): 2.5.

LOS ANGELES — M. Emmet Walsh, the character actor who brought his unmistakable face and unsettling presence to films including “Blood Simple” and “Blade Runner,” has died at age 88, his manager said Wednesday.

Walsh died from cardiac arrest on Tuesday at a hospital in St. Albans, Vermont, his longtime manager Sandy Joseph said.

The ham-faced, heavyset Walsh often played good old boys with bad intentions, as he did in one of his rare leading roles as a crooked Texas private detective in the Coen brothers’ first film, the 1984 neo-noir “Blood Simple.”

Joel and Ethan Coen said they wrote the part for Walsh, who would win the first Film Independent Spirit Award for best male lead for the role.

Critics and film geeks relished the moments when he showed up on screen.

Roger Ebert once observed that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”

Walsh played a crazed sniper in the 1979 Steve Martin comedy “The Jerk” and a prostate-examining doctor in the 1985 Chevy Chase vehicle “Fletch.”

In 1982’s gritty, “Blade Runner,” a film he said was grueling and difficult to make with perfectionist director Ridley Scott, Walsh plays a hard-nosed police captain who pulls Harrison Ford from retirement to hunt down cyborgs.

Born Michael Emmet Walsh, his characters led people to believe he was from the American South, but he could hardly have been from any further north.

Walsh was raised on Lake Champlain in Swanton, Vermont, just a few miles from the U.S.-Canadian border, where his grandfather, father and brother worked as customs officers.

He went to a tiny local high school with a graduating class of 13, then to Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.

He acted exclusively on the stage, with no intention of doing otherwise, for a decade, working in summer stock and repertory companies.

Walsh slowly started making film appearances in 1969 with a bit role in “Alice’s Restaurant,” and did not start playing prominent roles until nearly a decade after that when he was in his 40s, getting his breakthrough with 1978’s “Straight Time,” in which he played Dustin Hoffman’s smug, boorish parole officer.

Walsh was shooting “Silkwood” with Meryl Streep in Dallas in the autumn of 1982 when he got the offer for “Blood Simple” from the Coen brothers, then-aspiring filmmakers who had seen and loved him in “Straight Time.”

“My agent called with a script written by some kids for a low-budget movie,” Walsh told The Guardian in 2017. “It was a Sydney Greenstreet kind of role, with a Panama suit and the hat. I thought it was kinda fun and interesting. They were 100 miles away in Austin, so I went down there early one day before shooting.”

Walsh said the filmmakers didn’t even have enough money left to fly him to New York for the opening, but he would be stunned that first-time filmmakers had produced something so good.

“I saw it three or four days later when it opened in LA, and I was, like: Wow!” he said. “Suddenly my price went up five times. I was the guy everybody wanted.”

In the film he plays Loren Visser, a detective asked to trail a man’s wife, then is paid to kill her and her lover.

Visser also acts as narrator, and the opening monologue, delivered in a Texas drawl, included some of Walsh’s most memorable lines.

“Now, in Russia they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That’s the theory, anyway,” Visser says. “But what I know about is Texas. And down here, you’re on your own.”

He was still working into his late 80s, making recent appearances on the TV series “The Righteous Gemstones” and “American Gigolo.”

And his more than 100 film credits included director Rian Johnson’s 2019 family murder mystery, “Knives Out” and director Mario Van Peebles’ Western “Outlaw Posse,” released this year.