This movie gets four stars just for coolness. Samuel L. Jackson, the Armani leather coat, and the Oscar-winning theme song are a match made in heaven, and it is just plain summer-popcorn-movie fun to see them all work it together.

This Shaft goes back further than the original Shaft movie to the days of the cool, ironic, been-there, seen-that, but still a man of integrity at heart characters that Humphrey Bogart played in movies like “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Big Sleep,” and before that to the sagas of knights and quests and damsels in distress. They will always be outsiders, cleaning up the messes of the insiders, and they will always be stronger, smarter, and more loyal than the people they help. They are always too honest to be able to get along with anyone. Even the law enforcers have to cut too many corners and they never pick the right corners to cut.

What made the original “Shaft” so galvanizing was the notion of a black man in this role, a man who wasn’t trying to impress Spencer Tracy or Rod Steiger as Sidney Poitier was doing in mainstream Hollywood movies of that era. He was not trying to get what whites had. He was completely satisfied living within the black world, and he would take on even a white man who threatened it. In movie terms, he was Malcolm X to Poitier’s Martin Luther King. This was deeply threatening, but deeply exciting, too.

And it was new in a way it can never be new again. The challenge was creating a new version that would be just as electrifying although it was released in a different environment.

Director John Singleton, whose “Furious” character in “Boyz N the Hood” shared a lot of Shaft’s outlook, has updated the movie and the character. This is a story about the nephew of the original Shaft (played again in this movie by Richard Roundtree), who is so far from his private detective uncle’s commitment to independence that he is a policeman. But when a corrupt system lets a rich racist murderer jump bail, Shaft throws his badge at the judge like a ninja weapon and goes out on the street to see that justice is done.

The script is uneven and filled with holes, showing evidence of reported on-set disagreements between the producer, director, and star. Reportedly, too, Jeffrey Wright’s performance as drug dealer Peoples Hernandez was so exciting that the movie was reworked to give him more screen time. That is easy to believe, because he is electrifying. That contributes, however, to the difficulty in managing all the plot threads. Efforts to bring the two bad guys together, the Dominican drug dealer and the preppy racist (Christian Bale) may provide some interesting moments, especially when the drug dealer starts networking in a holding cell, asking the preppy for his business card, but it slows the story down.

But Singleton knows that when things waver, all he has to do is cut back to Jackson and the theme song to keep the audience happy, and it works remarkably well.

Parents should know that there is incessant use of the f-word and graphic violence, including self-inflicted ice-pick wounds and lots of punching and shooting. A character is blatantly racist and another is a drug dealer. Especially troubling is a conclusion that is surprisingly supportive of vigilante-style solutions, despite indications that even Shaft believes that this time the system will result in justice.

Families who see this movie should talk about how Shaft knows when to follow the rules and when to break them, and what would happen if someone with a less perfectly honed sense of justice were to break as many rules (and noses) as Shaft does.

People who like this movie might enjoy seeing the original to compare the way that different directors, different times, and different budgets change the way the story is told.

In the future, a race of 9-foot-tall, dreadlocked aliens called Psychlos takes over the earth following a nine-minute battle. A thousand year later, the few remaining humans are hunter-gatherers and the evil Psychlos maintain earth as an outpost for mining. Terl (John Travolta), furious at not being allowed to return to the home planet, decides to use humans to mine gold for him to keep. But one of the humans, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), encourages the others to revolt.

There. Now you know everything you need to know about the movie and I’ve saved you the trouble of trying to sit through it. You might think it can’t be that bad because science fiction movies often have cheeseball dialogue and cardboard performances and as long as the special effects and explosions are good, it does not really matter. You would be wrong. This movie was made due to the ceaseless efforts of its star, John Travolta, and it is the most horrible example of vanity filmmaking since Isaac from “The Love Boat” cast himself as “Othello.”

The movie could be used as an exam for film school students on what not to do.

Acting: John Travolta’s performance as the bad guy in this movie is reminiscent not of his brilliant work in movies like “Get Shorty,” “Face/Off” and “Pulp Fiction” but of his character in “Welcome Back Kotter,” Vinnie Barbarino, trying to act tough. His attempts to sound imperious and sarcastic lack any sense of presence or dignity, and then, to make it worse, he follows them with an attempt at a contemptuous laugh that sounds a cross between Faye Dunaway railing about the wire hangers in “Mommy Dearest” and Dr. Evil in “Austin Powers.” Poor Forrest Whitaker does his best with an idiotic role as Terl’s sidekick and whipping boy. Some other actor struggles underneath the worst make-up job since Dan Ackroyd in “Nothing But Trouble.”

Design and effects: The humans look like a hair band on a bad day. The Psychlos look like a hair band on a really bad day. The sets are dark, dank, and uninspired. The explosions are boring. And it is all much too loud.

Dialogue: At some points, we hear the Psychlos’ dialogue as garbled mush resembling the way the clay people used to talk in the old “Flash Gordon” serials. Unfortunately, at times we hear it in English. “Couldn’t you forget to file the report, as a friend?” “As a friend I could forget to file the report, but fortunately, I’m not your friend.” “While you were still learning to spell your name, I was being trained in how to conquer galaxies!” “Never engage in a criminal activity unless you have a patsy to pin everything on.” And my personal favorite: “Jonnie, I know you don’t believe in fate, but I’ve always known this was your destiny.”

Plot: The plot is not very interesting and completely illogical. Even if we assume that the Psychlos really wanted minerals from the earth, if they were so advanced that they could annihilate the human population in nine minutes, how could it take them more than a thousand years to extract it? Jonnie has to figure out a way to produce gold for Terl while he and his men are really secretly using flight simulators somehow still functioning after a thousand years. This is to enable them to learn to fly fighter jets, also somehow still functioning after a thousand years, kind of like the scene in “Sleeper” when Woody Allen starts up a Volkswagen Bug that had been abandoned for hundreds of years, except not intentionally funny. The audience dissolved in laughter at Jonnie’s solution – just get the gold from Fort Knox, which conveniently had been overlooked during the Psychlo’s thousand-year domination of the planet, and was still intact but ready to be emptied out. Somehow a group of humans who are illiterate and have not even discovered the wheel manage to master thousands of years of literal rocket science in a couple of days, transport over to the Psychlos’ planet and blow it all up with one well-placed bomb. Not since that girl learned how to be a ballerina without leaving the house in “Flowers in the Attic” or Rock Hudson went to medical school really really fast so he could invent an operation to cure Jane Wyman’s blindness in “The Magnificent Obsession” has there been such an example of speed learning.

Halfway through the movie, my son leaned over to whisper, “It’s the movie Ed Wood wanted to make but never had the money for.” He is right – this movie has Wood’s genuine fervor overriding genuine ineptitude.

Parents should know that the movie has a lot of sci-fi violence, with lots of explosions, characters in peril and some gory dismemberment. There are a couple of mild expletives and some mild sexual references. Women are treated as sex objects or taken as hostages.

Families who see the movie should talk about the importance of learning and history (Jonnie is inspired by the Declaration of Independence), and they should contrast the way that the Psychlos use “leverage” (blackmail) to manipulate each other with the teamwork and loyalty shown by the humans. They might also want to compare this movie to some sci-fi classics, like the “Star Wars” movies. Or, they might just want to skip this one and watch those instead.

Two characters stare blankly at the closed door, as flashing lights from the patrol cars circle the room and a voice booms out, “Come out with your hands up!” Henry (Paul Newman) turns to Carol (Linda Fiorentino) and says, “You haven’t lived until you’ve had someone say that to you.”

Henry is a bank robber, released from prison into a nursing home because he is completely incapacitated by a stroke. Or so it appears. Carol, a nurse, thinks he is faking. Behind those vacant eyes she gets a glimpse of a kind of vitality and adventure that mesmerizes her. Every trick she tries to get him to respond, including climbing onto his lap, fails, until she takes one last chance. She was right.

Eventually, it becomes clear to her what she really wants. She wants to do a bank job with him. She once dreamed of thrills and excitement, and now she spends her time teaching frail and elderly people to do wheelchair calisthenics. She does not want to become like the people she works with in the nursing home, at least not without some adventures to remember. Carol has a husband, Wayne (Dermot Mulroney). Though she promises Henry that “he is clutch,” what will he do when things go wrong?

Though far from the glamour of the robbery of the world’s tallest building in “Entrapment,” this is essentially the same idea – a fabulous old coot and a fabulous young beauty plan a heist and take us along. This movie is better. It has some clever dialogue (one line about a toaster is one of the funniest of the year), and it has the impeccable delivery of Newman and Fiorentino, who could make the time of day recording sound riveting.

The great thing about good heist movies is that they are such marvelous puzzles. Here are the obstacles – how do we overcome them? Then here are the things we never anticipated – how do we respond to them? No one is more fun to watch play wicked than Newman and Fiorentino, but the script lets us down by conveniently skipping a few steps. Worse is the ending, which feels, given the less than 90 minute screening time, as though the movie was chopped up before release. It leaves us disappointed, making the characters less loveable scamp adventure-seekers into soul-less sociopaths.

Parents should know that the movie begins with a flashback scene in which Carol and Wayne make out while driving, leading to an accident, there is an R-ish scene in which we see and hear Carol and Wayne having sex, many characters smoke and drink and one uses drugs, and, even considering the conventions of heist movies, this one has an amoral tone that leaves us unsatisfied.

People who enjoy this movie will also like Paul Newman’s performance as a con man and card sharp in the Oscar-winning “The Sting” and as an old west train robber in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

This is the best documentary since “Hoop Dreams,” and it is not a coincidence that it, too, is about sports. That means that it is about money, ambition, competition, dreams realized and dashed, race, money, families — both functional and dys — integrity, money, corruption, rookies, veterans, money, the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat. And, did I mention money? In other words, it is about America.

If it had been fiction, we would dismiss it as a cliché. It has all the stock characters, from the young wrestlers with dreams, trying to break into the big time to the old-timers, families begging them to quit, who just can’t walk away. And it has all the stock situations as the characters test themselves over and over, giving their heart and often many other parts of their body to see how far they can go, competing with each other and with themselves. And it’s a story, as the narrator tells us, of “pageantry, athleticism, incredibly cheesy acting,” of “strong men taking matters into their own hands,” of guys who live to make people say, “I can’t believe they did that!” — of professional wrestling. It turns out that “it’s not as fake as you think.” The outcomes may be set in advance, but the blood is real.

Writer-director Barry Blaustein asks, “What sort of man bashes another man’s head into a ring post for a living?” And then he goes on the road to show us the answer. We begin with Vince McMahon, the fourth generation in his family to own the then-called World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment). At over $1 billion at the time of the film, it was larger than the New York Rangers, Knicks, and Mets combined. Its licensing scope was second in the nation, after South Park. If you ask him what business he is in, he doesn’t say sports -– he says, “We make movies.” And indeed, just like the old-time movie studios, they have in-house musicians, costumers, scriptwriters, and directors, who work together to create the spectacle. We even see props – – items that show up in the ring include snakes, a parrot, a branding iron, barbed wire, a metal folding chair, a toaster, and, perhaps most improbably, pedicured toenails on the feet of a female wrestler who protests, “You’ll make me cry!” when complimented.

We see McMahon working with a former Denver Bronco, whose ability to throw up on demand leads to the creation of a new “character” to be added to the WWF. Just as Norma Jeane Baker became Marilyn Monroe, Darren Drosdov becomes “Puke.” And we see a would-be wrestling superstar protesting to a director/coreographer, “That WAS my strut!” Puke is not a successful character (and, as we learn in a note following the movie, Drosnov is later paralyzed from a wrestling injury). But McMahon has endless ideas, even turning himself into a character, for all those in the audience who like to see the employees beating up on the boss. As they sing in “Gypsy,” “You gotta have a gimmick!”

Blaustein takes us to a training school for would-be WWF stars, where part-time wrestlers who make $25 a fight and live over the gym dream of getting their big chance. The two best students travel to the WWF for a try-out. And we see the upstart ECW –- Extreme Championship Wrestling, so low budget that, “Wayne’s World”-style, their promos are taped in the basement while Mom irons out of camera range.

They all hope to achieve the heights of superstars like Terry Funk, in his third decade of wrestling, and Mick “Mankind” Foley, who fights in a shirt, tie, and leather mask. And they hope to avoid the fate of Jake “The Snake” Roberts, whose family would make the Jerry Springer Show seem like Little Women, and who is at peace only in the ring (“In the ring, nothing hurts and everybody’s glad to see you.”). His erratic behavior and drug use have isolated him from everyone but the hard-core fans. But Funk and Foley are a part of deeply loving families who worry about them. Funk sits in his doctor’s office, gazing balefully at his x-rays as his doctor tells him that he needs a new knee. Foley tells his children that Daddy is only pretending (“They can’t hurt Dada”), but the children become hysterical when they see him get whacked repeatedly on the head with a folding chair, blood gushing from his forehead.

Even the superstars have dreams. Jesse “The Body” Ventura leaves pro wrestling for a successful run for the governor of Minnesota. He says, “Politics is way more cutthroat than wrestling.” And a black wrestler called “New Jack,” who claims four justifiable homicides, tries out for “Denzel’s pal” in Hollywood. Terry Funk just dreams of being able to stay in the game –- as an unsuccessful wrestler says, “I’d rather be in the main event than breathe.” But Mick dreams of a way out that will make it possible for him to take care of his family.

Parents should know that, like the WWF shows, this movie is violent and profane. Unlike the WWF shows, this is the truth, and scenes showing Jake with his estranged father and daughter and Mick’s wife and children horrified by a fight may be far more upsetting than the fights themselves. Parents whose children or teens see this movie should talk about the enduring appeal of a violent sport and about the ways that the wrestlers do and don’t communicate with their families. After all, even “Puke’s” first reaction on being hired by the WWF is to call his mom to tell her how proud she will be.