“If you want to send a message,” legendary Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn once sagely noted, “call Western Union.”

Not that vintage Hollywood movies didn’t have all kinds of social agendas, whether they were about fighting racism (“The Defiant Ones”) or mob justice (“The Ox-Bow Incident”) or anti-Semitism (“Gentlemen’s Agreement”) or war (“All Quiet on the Western Front”). The trick has always been to disguise the heartworm pill of your message with the tasty bologna of drama or satire or whatever else people actually want to see. (John Waters devilishly parodied racial-...

Truman Capote legendarily dismissed Jack Kerouac’s influential roman à clef “On the Road” with, “That’s not writing; it’s typing.”

Capote’s insult might have been referencing the legend that Kerouac banged out a first draft while hopped up on speed and feeding his typewriter with one gigantic roll of butcher paper, but Capote could also have referred to the stripped-down, descriptive prose of the book, which chugs along with the cool, spare poetry of jazz.

But the beat of the Beats is sadly lacking in the movie version of “On the Road,” a handsomely mounted adaptation of Kerouac’s book that...

When sitting down and watching movies for work, I do my best to keep an open mind and to remain receptive to films as they present themselves. It’s difficult sometimes, but I always try not to make up my mind one way or another until the final credits roll.

But then you get a movie like “Jack Reacher,” which makes you hate it. And then love it. And then hate it again, going back and forth like some crazy tennis match until all that’s left is to make a list of pros and cons to see how it all shakes out:

I hated … the fact that the movie opens with a mass shooting. Yes, it’s not the fault of writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (adapting Lee Child’s novel...

The trailer, the casting, even the title of “The Guilt Trip” sets us up for a specific kind of movie: Nice neurotic boy henpecked by his nagging, smothering Yiddishe mama. It’s a dynamic we’ve seen everywhere from the novels of Philip Roth to Woody Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks” and countless other movies and sitcoms over the last half-century or so.

But “The Guilt Trip,” starring gravelly voiced everyslacker Seth Rogen as the son and Barbra Streisand as the mom, has its own agenda that goes far beyond cheek-pinching and boiled chicken.

The movie, directed by Anne Fletcher (“The...