Fee-fie, ho-hum.

“Jack the Giant Slayer” is only incrementally more fun than a spate of other recent action-fantasy movies based on classic fairy tales. It has too much of a whiff of the familiar to stand very tall.

This 3D “Jack” follows in the once-upon-a-time footsteps of “Red Riding Hood” (2011), “Snow White and the Huntsman” (2012) and last month’s “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters,” as well as “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012).

It, too, offers a variation on an oft-told tale and peoples it with a mix of live actors and computer-generated digital monsters. (“Jack” was originally slated for a June 2012 release but was pushed back to 2013 early last year.)

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One either sparks to Nicholas Sparks, finding his melodramatic love stories to sigh over, or one doesn’t.

Sparking to “Safe Haven,” the latest film based on one of the bestselling author’s swoony novels, requires a high tolerance for a mighty sappy love story and the ability not to see a mile ahead for the supposedly surprise plot points, though they’re as obvious as bright red buoy markers bobbing in the water.  

None of which seems to have hurt the box office appeal of seven previous film adaptations of Sparks’s books, including “The Notebook,” “Nights in Rodanthe,” “A Walk to Remember.” There’s a reason this movie is opening on Valentine’s Day.

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The  classic Jewish joke asks, “Why does a Jew always answer a question with a question?”

The answer: “Why not?”

There are lots of questions and more questions, along with some answers, in “The Gatekeepers,” a thought-provoking new Israeli documentary about Shin Bet, the nation’s secret service.

Director Dror Moreh (“Sharon”) convinced all six former heads of Shin Bet to appear on camera for solo interviews in which they discuss the agency’s role in the nation’s history and reflect on its, and their own, successes and failures.

What they have to say is, by turns, fascinating, provocative and sure to reverberate both in Israel and...

There are mash-ups -- and there’s just mashed.

“Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” is the latter, a squashed-together mess that tries to cram too many different types of movies into one and instead ends up as a pointless, steaming pile of cinematic detritus.

It must have sounded good at the pitch meeting. Take the Grimm Brothers’ classic tale about a brother and sister who are taken prisoner by a witch after nibbling on her candy house and cross it with a really badass action picture. Have the siblings grow up to become skillful bounty hunters who save medieval towns from marauding witches. Give the pair some seriously cool weapons, including giant hulking automatic guns and crossbows, with which to mow down the witches in as bloody a fashion as possible. ...