Homage is a tricky thing — you can be full of love for the object of your tribute, and recreate its trappings with accuracy and sincerity, but that doesn’t mean your results will match the original.

Take “The Man with the Iron Fists,” the first film directed by RZA, founding father of legendary hip-hop combo the Wu-Tang Clan. From the name of his group to the look of his movie, this is a guy who has clearly watched a whole lot of vintage martial-arts movies. If I were on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and my multiple-choice answers were down to “Five Deadly Venoms” and “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin,” this is the guy I’d want for my lifeline.

I’d even hire him to create one of those fake trailers in “Grindhouse,” since he clearly appreciates the pacing and the acting style of the Shaw...

The devil is in “The Details,” but only in that this smug and airless comedy feels like 91 minutes in hell. The first few minutes promise a Rube Goldberg whirligig of bad behavior, unhappy coincidences and plain old rotten luck, but all writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes (“Mean Creek”) can deliver is a group of jerks acting like jerks.

If there were any recognizable human beings on screen, this might have delivered the sort of squirmy, uncomfortable laughs that have sustained “Curb Your Enthusiasm” through multiple seasons, but the perpetrators and victims here are all such smug, dull caricatures that none of the intended...

If you’ve suffered through “Super Mario Bros.” or “Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li” or almost anything from the oeuvre of Uwe Boll, you know that videogames have had a hard time transitioning to the big screen. What’s exciting and interactive on your home system somehow turns stiff and unengaging when adapted to a single-path narrative.

Perhaps realizing that the problem with videogame movies is that the characters are stuck in an overly proscribed scenario, the new Disney animated feature “Wreck-It Ralph” shakes out its characters and lets them interact, so that the heroes of various different arcade faves can meet over root beers in the Tapper machine while a Pac-Man ghost moderates a 12-step group for villains.

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Regarding legendary MGM bathing beauty Esther Williams, producer Joe Pasternak once famously quipped, “Wet, she’s a star.”

So it goes with “Chasing Mavericks,” a biopic that features not enough stirringly gorgeous surfing footage and way too many clunky biopic clichés in telling the story of surf legend Jay Moriarity. With a storyline as by-the-numbers as a square dance, the movie’s one surprise comes with the closing credits — namely, that this trite “inspirational” movie is the product of two world-class filmmakers, Curtis Hanson and Michael Apted.

After a prologue in which eight-year-old Jay, already obsessed with the big waves, is rescued from drowning by his ten-hanging neighbor Frosty Hesson (Gerard Butler), we meet our lead character at age 15 and played by Jonny Weston. A talented young surfer, Jay...