Beatles ’64 **
Sixty years on, “Beatlemania” remains a fascinating cultural moment, and the idea of showing previously unseen footage of the Beatles’ February 1964 visit to America—including their landmark Ed Sullivan Show appearance—shot by the legendary Albert and David Maysles feels like an amazing opportunity. So it’s maddening instead to find that material turned into such an utterly formless documentary. Director David Tedeschi—veteran editor for Martin Scorsese’s music documentaries including George Harrison: Living in the Material World—shares that archival footage of Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr dealing with the madness of their American fans, as well as interviews with people on the street who were either part of or incredulous of that fandom. It’s solid material, and Tedeschi occasionally hits on fun details, like how annoyed the lads all seem about New York deejay Murray the K following them around everywhere. But otherwise, he often flails about in search of context: Was this really all about a nation in need of release mere months after the assassination of JFK? Is it the story of the Beatles being able to meet and honor the Black American artists who shaped their music? Is it about the reflections of now-aging Baby Boomers on why Beatlemania mattered? The hodgepodge doesn’t hold together, burying an amazing slice of history in an ineffectual attempt to find a big picture. Available Nov. 29 via Disney+. (NR)

Moana 2 **1/2
Sometimes, you just have to acknowledge that your main problem with a movie is really the principle of what it represents—in this case, a sequel that’s merely “the same, but more.” Here, Disney follows up its 2016 feature by sending Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) and the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) out on another seafaring quest, in this case lifting a curse on a sunken island in order to allow for a reunification of divided island peoples. It’s kind of a nice idea to center unity over division as an inherent good, but the filmmaking team here never seems interested in pursuing it beyond the abstract, focusing instead on set pieces and musical numbers. And in both cases, compared to the original, they’re just bigger without being any better; in particular, the new songwriting team of Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear feel like they’re trying to mimic the style of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Moana songs in a way that just draws attention to their shortcomings, including quite a few half-assed rhymes. Cravalho and Johnson remain engaging central figures, and there are a few fun visual ideas, like a giant blobfish-looking critter. The whole enterprise simply reeks of unnecessariness, regurgitating themes of brave striving. It’s a place-filler on a release calendar, something where you can pass the time without thinking too hard about how it’s less an act of creation than an act of re-creation. Available Nov. 27 in theaters. (PG)

Maria ***
I’m not about to complain when a creative-artist biopic ditches the structural predictability that often hinders the genre; I will suggest that it’s possible to be a bit more selective about what to install in its place. Director Pablo Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight offer a profile of celebrated operatic soprano Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) that focuses on the final week of her life in 1977 Paris, long retired from public performance but not ready to give up her craft entirely. Knight previously employed a similar device of understanding a public figure through a relatively narrow window of time (and collaborated with Larraín) in the Princess Diana feature Spencer, and it allows Jolie’s performance to capture how the persona of an imperious diva is used as a kind of emotional shield. That material alone—emphasizing Maria’s relationship with her two loyal house servants (Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher), and her love-hate relationship with living up to her own legend—proves compelling enough, but the script also takes a detour into a hallucinated journalist (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as Maria processes her life. And there are occasional black-and-white flashbacks to pivotal moments, like being pimped out to Nazi soldiers by her mother as a youth in Greece, or her first meeting with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) which sometimes feel more distracting than insightful. The result is an often-entertaining character study that feels like it misunderstands the idea of “opera” as meaning “there’s no such thing as too much.” Available Nov. 27 in theaters; Dec. 13 via Netflix. (R)

Nutcrackers **
Director David Gordon Green continues one of the weirdest career arcs in contemporary filmmaking—from stylized art-house dramas to stoner comedies to horror reboots—with this “What Really Matters” dramedy that seems unclear on how the formula actually works. Our workaholic protagonist is Michael (Ben Stiller), a Chicago-based real-estate developer who travels to rural Ohio during the holiday season to “temporarily” oversee the care of his four nephews (real-life siblings Homer, Ulysses, Arlo and Atlas Janson), orphaned after the death of his estranged sister and her husband. Shenanigans naturally ensue in Leland Douglas’s screenplay—what with the city slicker dealing with farm life, and the near-feral quartet of kids making Michael’s life difficult—which should naturally evolve into a familial connection. It is, however, a problem Stiller isn’t deft enough an actor to play a subtle transformation from “guy who has to work on the big presentation” to “guy who reads bedtime stories,” and one of the subplots—involving a potential foster mom—is a bit too creepy and dark for the intended tone here. All the key emotional beats end up falling flat; it even feels like a possible romantic interest in Linda Cardellini’s child-services case worker is abandoned because it isn’t going anywhere. The slapstick manages to evoke a few gentle smiles, but Green might want to learn that What Really Matters is understanding the structure of the genre you’re working in. Available Nov. 29 via Hulu. (NR)

Sweethearts **1/2
It’s hardly unprecedented for a narrative to offer a secondary character whose sub-plot is much more interesting than that of the ostensible protagonists, but it can still make for some frustrating viewing when you spend much of the time waiting for the filmmakers to get back to the good stuff. At its core, this is the tale of Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) and Ben (Nico Hiraga), a pair of platonic BFF-since-middle-school struggling through their freshman year as college dormmates, who realize that what they need to shake them out of their doldrums is to break up with their respective hometown romantic partners during Thanksgiving break. What follows is mostly a good old-fashioned “one crazy night” comedy premise, as Jamie and Ben find their plans repeatedly thwarted, and the situations writers Jordan Weiss (who also directed) and Dan Brier concoct for them are rarely as laugh-out-loud funny or outrageous as they seem intended to be. But then periodically they’ll turn their attention to Palmer (Caleb Hearon), the third member of Jamie and Ben’s friend troika, who’s planning on using the holiday to come out as gay—and Hearon creates a character too endearing and complicated to exist in the “gay friend” supporting character shadows. Theoretically, those two largely-parallel stories both explore that messy post-high-school time of figuring out who you really are and what you want—but only one of them feels like more than a thin armature on which to hang a bunch of bawdy set pieces. Available Nov. 28 via Max. (R)