Writer-director-star Michael Angelo Covino and his co-screenwriter and co-star Kyle Marvin have now made a second movie about a man who has sex with his friend’s romantic partner. In their last film, “The Climb,” a character confesses he has slept with his friend’s fiancée. In “Splitsville,” Carey (Covino) confesses he has slept with his friend’s wife. In both films, the focus is on the impact this has on the friendship of the two men, and it is mostly played for goofy comedy based on the cluelessness of the characters in various categories of adulting.

Carey and Ashley (Adria Arjona), his wife of 14 months, are driving to the beach house owned by Paul (Marvin) and his wife, Julie (Dakota Johnson). They are happily singing along to “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers when they witness a terrible accident. This prompts Ashley to reach for a letter she has been working on (as she reads it aloud, she has to correct herself from the text’s “13 months”) telling Carey she wants a divorce and that she has repeatedly been unfaithful.

He is devastated. Paul and Julie do their best to comfort him. And they tell him they have an open marriage and allow each other to have sex with anyone they want, and Paul casually says he’d even be all right with it if Carey and Julie had sex. The next night, when Paul is away, Carey and Julie do. The next morning, Carey confesses and Paul is not all right with it. They get into a ridiculously chaotic scuffle, getting hurt and causing a lot of damage in the house.

Like the earlier film, “Splitsville” separates its chapters with mildly arch title cards, which occur over some indeterminate but apparently years-long period. Russ (Simon Webster), the son of Paul and Julie and a student at the private school where Casey is a PE teacher, does not get any older during this period, but this is not a movie where details like this matter. It’s more a “you know what would be funny?” kind of film, sketchy in both senses of the word.

Casey and Paul have been friends since childhood apparently out of inertia and the inability to make any other friends. Casey is good-hearted, considerate, honorable, and kind to a fault. Paul is none of those things. When Russ gets in trouble, his father tells him to lie and Casey advises him to tell the truth, then lies himself to take the blame. A lot of the humor in the film comes from the oddball slacker quality of the two leads. One example is that fight scene, which goes from slaps to low-level martial arts to a pause to rescue Russ’ fish after they crash the tank. They are very low key about situations most people would consider very high-intensity. The female characters are under-written, really there just to provide something for the men to react to.

Carey persuades Ashley not to get divorced, but continue to live together, with him sleeping on the sofa, she in the bed with a series of sexual partners. Casey is so agreeable, he invites them all to stay on in the house, scheduling movie nights (“Lorenzo’s Oil” is popular). While Ashley is a life coach and has a life coach of her own, it is Casey who is becoming something of a mentor to the discarded lovers. There are a bunch of very funny situations and comments. It just does not amount to much.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong language, explicit sexual references and non-explicit situations, graphic nudity, drinking, adultery, crimes, bullying, and adult themes.

Family discussion: What will happen to the couples after the movie? If you wrote a script with your best friend, what would it be about?

If you like this, try: “The Climb” and “Oh, Hello”

There’s a reason romantic fairy tales end with the wedding, assuring us that the couple lived happily ever after but not taking on the difficult task of showing us what that looks like. Very few movies attempt to show what happens after love is declared and the wedding cake has been served to the guests, when the couple has to figure out how to hold onto the stardust while sharing the grubbier and surprisingly controversial tasks of operating a household and, for many, raising children.

“The Roses,” like the 1989 Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner “War of the Roses,” is based on a book by Warren Adler. Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn calls that book “Terrifying, black-humored, black-hearted and bristling,” a description many people might apply to her own work. The book and the two movies are about a once-loving marriage that curdles into scabrous loathing.

This lightly adapted version, changing some details but retaining the vitriol, stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Theo, an architect, and Olivia Colman as Ivy, a chef. The movie opens in a disastrous session with a counselor, as the couple tries to come up with what they love about each other but cannot resist the temptation to insult each other as viciously as possible instead. The counselor tells them there may not be a way to move forward and we get a glimpse of the underlying connection between them. They cannot help laughing at the brutality of the insults. You know the song lyric, “too hot not to cool down?” This is “too hot to ever get irretrievably icy.”

We go back in time to see their meeting in London, both of them unhappy because their ideas are not appreciated by their employers. Their immediate attracting is electric and speaking of too hot not to cool down, minutes after meeting they are having sex in the refrigerator closet.

A few years later, they are in California, parents of twins. Theo is excited about the unveiling of his dream project, a maritime museum and Ivy enjoys her barely-breaking-even crab restaurant near the water. They disagree about some parenting choices; Ivy loves to give them sugary treats and Theo is all about eating healthy and working out. But they are endearingly supportive of one another.

And then, their fortunes turn upside down. Theo’s building collapses, along with his future in the profession, the same night Ivy’s 30 covers a day restaurant instantly becomes impossible to get a reservation following one rave review. Ivy takes over as breadwinner, and Theo takes over as full-time dad, housekeeper, and physical trainer for the twins, who are as into it as he is. This is when Theo and Ivy begin to resent and then feel like they loathe each other. They separate

Colman and Cumberbatch are so endlessly watchable that it’s almost easy to overlook that this is essentially a one-joke movie, the same one over and over as Ivy and Noah get increasingly more frustrated and hurt and lash out in increasingly more lacerating ways. Comedy often comes from seeing someone burn bridges we do not dare to. The brilliant supporting cast is woefully underused, except for Allison Janney, transcending the limits of the script as Ivy’s divorce lawyer, and it just gets exhausting. The ending tries to have it both ways, likely to leave audiences saying, “Wait, what?” On the way there, depending on your tolerance for people saying terrible things to their spouses, you may find it funny.

Parents should know that this movie includes very crude and graphic language and sexual references, extreme insults and pranks, and drinking, drunkenness, and drug use. While presented in a heightened comic tone, the underlying hostility may disturb some audience members.

Family discussion: Did you find yourself taking sides over the course of the film? Whose side? Did you switch sides?

If you like this, try; “The War of the Roses” and the book by Warren Adler and, for a more dramatic and romantic look at marital discord over the years, “Two for the Road”

I liked “Drive Away Dolls,” Ethan Coen’s previous film starring Margaret Qualley as a free-spirited queer woman who has a series of crazy adventures involving gangsters and a mysterious suitcase many people are interested in. “Honey Don’t!” is not a sequel, more an offshoot that aims for the same sort of vibe, this time with Qualley as a queer private detective in Bakersfield, California. Qualley is mesmerizing but the movie is too meandering, more a series of set-pieces than a story.

Qualley is the title character, independent, confident, direct, and quippy. She is a female version of the classic movie detective, a loner (we see her casually dismissing a one-night stand) but resolutely honest. A man wants to hire her to find out if his boyfriend is cheating and Honey tries to talk him out of it because if he wants to hire her, it means he already knows. A woman who made an appointment to consult Honey ends up dead and in a car that overturned rolling down a ridge on the side of the road. Her prospective client never made it to the hiring point, but Honey investigates.

Others have gone to the upside down car before her. Marty, the local homicide detective (Charlie Day), who keeps trying to ask Honey out on a date, is there with the forensic crew. Before they got there, a mysterious woman with a Lulu bob arrived on a motorcycle, reached into the car to pull a ring from the dead woman’s finger, took time to go skinny dipping in the lake, and left.

This is not the kind of film where everything ties up at the end. It is the kind of film that lurches from scene to scene as though it is one of those Pass the Paper/Exquisite Corpse drawing games where no one knows what the first and second part of the picture looks like when it is their turn to draw the third. The individual set-pieces are very entertaining, especially Honey’s meeting with an aspiring mega-church preacher (Chris Evans) whose pulpit is between two giant portraits of himself and who tells his congregation to “submit and serve the lord,” often meaning having submitting to serving him by having sex.

The actors and filmmakers are clearly having a blast, especially costume designer Peggy Schnitzer, whose ensembles for Qualley are all knock-outs. The movie features the slightly surreal dialogue that is beloved by the Coen brothers and the love for female bodies and sexuality that we saw in “Drive Away Dolls” continues to be sigh-worthy, no matter what your pronouns or orientation. There are moments of inspired derangement. Overall, though, there’s more style than substance, a hollowness that even Qualley’s star quality cannot make up for.

Parents should know that this film has peril and violence with many characters injured and killed and some graphic and disturbing images. It also includes nudity and very explicit sexual situations including a threesome and bondage. Characters use strong language and drink alcohol.

Family discussion: Why did Honey feel obligated to investigate Mia’s death? What questions did she ask that made a difference?

If you like this, try: “Drive Away Dolls”

I’m not going to spend much time on the storyline of “Ne Zha !!” because it is extremely convoluted and because it is not really that important. “Ne Zha II” is a sequel, continuing the saga based on the Investiture of the Gods book written during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), itself based on folklore, myth, and real-life historical characters. The first film is now on Netflix. I’m not sure it will clear things up for you, though, unless you already have some familiarity with the underlying stories told over generations. I overheard some older Chinese-Americans in the audience laughing as they admitted they remembered hearing the stories as children but had a hard time muddling through the first film.

That doesn’t matter too much, as long as you can figure out who the good guys are and why they are fighting the bad guys, because you will be spending most of the time looking at what’s best in this film, the spectacular and stunning background and secondary character visuals, especially the monsters. The design of the main characters is not close to that level, the voice talent other than Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh, is lackluster, and the convoluted storyline becomes more distraction than narrative.

The two characters at the heart of the story are the impish child demon Nezha (Yanting Lü) and the more mature Ao Bing (Mo Han). They were created together as a Chaos Pearl, birthed from the primordial essences of heaven and earth. In the first movie, they joined forces and their bodies were dissolved. As this one begins, Nezha’s teacher, the immortal Taoist deity Taiyi Zhenren (Jiaming Zhang), portrayed here as a foolish but devoted character, is creating new bodies for them from the petals of the sacred lotus, a difficult process that almost immediately goes wrong when Ao Bing’s still very fragile body is destroyed. Because it takes a while to re-create the lotus petal material for bodies, Ao Bing’s soul will dissolve unless he can find a temporary host, so Taiyi puts him inside Nezha’s body.

This leads to some complications as Taiyi takes the combined boys to get the potion needed to give Ao Bing a new body. The boy(s) will have to pass a series of tests to be given the potion by Wuliang (Deshun Wang), Taiyi’s brother. Brother and father-son relationships are very important in this story.

Taiyi gives Nezha pills to put him to sleep and let Ao Bing’s powers take over to pass the tests. Meanwhile, various conflicts and reunions happen with many other characters. And many, many fight scenes, one with a funny exchange involving characters disguising themselves as each other and — an issue everyone can relate to — the inability to remember a password.

NOTE: Stay for the credits for an extended extra scene that is one of the film’s best moments.

Parents should know that this film includes extended fantasy-style peril, action, and violence, with monsters. Characters are injured and some are killed, including beloved parents and a beloved young brother and family members who sacrifice themselves and an entire village burned down, with dead bodies turned to ashes. There are a few schoolyard-style bad words and some graphic potty humor and gross-out moments. Characters take pills to manipulate their powers.

Family discussion: Nezha is given an impossible choice. What should he have done? Were you surprised at who the villain turned out to be?

If you like this, try: the first film

The first “Nobody” (2021) was a surprise, with Bob Odenkirk, who was not an action movie star, playing a guy no one would expect to be willing and very, very able to fight lots of intimidating guys with many weapons. It was popular enough for a sequel, based on the same kind of “who is that guy?” expectations. Basically, it’s a cartoonish but extremely violent series of fight scenes, but the dark humor, improvised weaponry, and good spirits make it very entertaining. If you don’t get too rattled by the very graphic and disturbing images.

Like the first film, this begins with Hutch (Odenkirk), bloodied and bruised and, this time, apparently missing part of a finger, being interrogated by a pair of FBI agents. Then we go back to find out what happened.

Following the events of the first film, Hutch (Odenkirk) is in debt to a criminal kingpin known as The Barber (Colin Salmon). His wife, Becca (Connie Nielson) knows that his “job” is paying off that debt by undertaking tasks that involve grave danger. After a brief scene with Hutch waiting in a hotel lobby, wearing a badge from some kind of conference (clearly camouflage), we see him follow some guys in dark suits into an elevator. And then, jump to another rewind as he explains to The Barber what happened, setting the heightened tone for what is ahead, basically: extreme violence along the lines of a Looney Tunes cartoon, if Hutch was Road Runner AND Wile E. Coyote AND all the blow-up equipment from Acme.

As Hutch’s family gets up in a series of mornings, we can see that like many families they are stressed and feeling disconnected. Hutch’s wife, Becca (Connie Nielson) and son Brady (Gage Munroe) resent Hutch for being gone all the time. His younger daughter, Sammy (Paisley Cadorath) is just glad to see him when he’s there. Hutch decides the solution is a family vacation. He tells The Barber he’s taking a break, and books a visit to the place where he was happiest as a child, a small tourist town with a water park. They swing by to pick up Hutch’s father, David (Christopher Lloyd).

It’s rickety and cheesy, especially the “honeymoon suite” festooned with fake palm leaves, but Becca appreciates the effort and the family is determined to do their best to enjoy it. But at an arcade, Brady gets into an altercation with a teenage townie and that brings the family to the attention of the cruel and corrupt local sheriff (Colin Hanks) and the businessman who runs the town, Henry (John Ortiz).

This leads to a series of one-upping fight scenes, building to a confrontation with a small army working for the evil crime boss known as Landina (Sharon Stone, having a blast dancing in a pants suit and stabbing a cheating gambler in the hand). A most-welcome RZA shows up again as Hutch’s katana-master brother.

Director Timo Tjahjantoo, taking over from Ilya Naishuller, makes the best of the fight scenes, with a “John Wick” level of balletic movement. Hutch’s specialty, in addition to a John Wayne-category punch, is his ability to improvise with whatever is around him, and this movie gives him plenty to improvise with, from the emergency phone in an elevator to the pieces of the games at an arcade, equipment on a boat, and the final confrontation, boobytrapping an old-school water park like it’s Kevin’s house in “Home Alone.”

The premise of conflict between Hutch’s commitment to his family and the roiling rage that makes him good at killing plays out well as it echoes with his father, brother, and son, thanks to a strong script by Derek Kolstad and Aaron Rabin and a fine performance by Odenkirk. It’s easy to overlook how good he is because of all that is happening on screen, but it would just be cartoonish without Odenkirk’s ability to make us understand Hutch’s layers of emotion. It’s nice to get a glimpse of Becca’s side of things. She gets to be much more than the usual “Oh, honey, don’t do anything scary or dangerous” female role, making us wish for a prequel to fill in the details behind her story about how they met.

Parents should know that this is an exceptionally violent film with guns, knives, fire, and explosions. Many characters are injured and killed and there are many graphic and disturbing images. Characters are criminals who deal in drugs and bombs. Characters use strong language, drink and get drunk. There is some marital kissing and mild sexual references.

Family discussion: What are the parallels in the stories of the father-son relationships of Hutch, Brady, and David and Henry and Max? In what way to David, Hutch, and Henry want their sons to be better than they are?

If you like this, try: the first film and “Shoot-Em Up”