Behind, again. The doldrums before the May sweeps have allowed us to catch up on recorded television, so we have watched a few on-line movies that we missed the first time around. So… Three theatrical movies and two off the wire.

“Power Rangers” is silly and utterly predictable and shallow and so much fun that none of the other stuff matters.

“Beauty and the Beast” is a problem. The animated film on which it was based was pretty much perfect, and there was no real hope of adding anything to it with a live action remake. Of course, it made an obscene amount of money, and the art of cinema exists in service to the business of cinema, so that is all the justification that was needed. We enjoyed it enough, and certainly don’t regret seeing it. But it has a flatness that makes me feel queasy about those obscene amounts of money.

“Going in Style” is a geriatric caper movie. The three main stars have nearly 250 years among them, but given who they are, they could be entertaining reading telephone books at each other. This movie is a bit better than that, which is to say that it is slightly better than it needs to be.

“Monster Trucks” is silly and utterly predictable and kind of pointless, but that was pretty obvious going in. It did what it set out to do, and I don’t regret seeing it.

“Love & Friendship” is a hideous trainwreck pieced together from an early Jane Austen story. It lacks sympathetic charaters, and the plot is convoluted and sketchy to the edge of incomprehensibility. The dialog sounds like a parody of the Austen style. If you are an Austen fan, this is worth seeing for the sake of completeness. Otherwise, it is interesting only as a study in bad film making.

Uncle Hyena