Unexpected phone rings received in the middle of the night aren’t usually the bearer of good news. In “Home Again” writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s middling LA-based dramedy “Goodrich,” the title character (played by Michael Keaton) learns it the hard way. A call from his wife wakes Andy Goodrich up in the wee hours, informing this shocked, aloof husband (who hasn’t even noticed that she wasn’t home) that she’s checked into a Malibu rehab for 90 days to address her addiction problem, leaving Andy to care for their 9-year-old twins. Also, she tells him she’ll be leaving him as soon as she’s out.

Affecting with his mournful gaze, expressively arched eyebrows and the signature mystique of his husky voice, an understated Keaton carries this insightful and generously composed opening, proving that the septuagenarian actor is as game for material grounded in earthly concerns as he is to re-create his frisky “Beetlejuice” flamboyance. This opening also happens to be among the best pieces of writing that Meyers-Shyer (daughter of renowned filmmakers Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer) has in store throughout “Goodrich,” charged with the kind of narrative economy that intrigues the viewer about the juicy story to come.

Through these moments of tracing Andy’s escalating attempts to understand the seriousness of the situation, we learn that he hasn’t exactly been a model husband or father — not to his young twins Billie (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Mose (Jacob Kopera), and certainly not to Grace (a wonderful Mila Kunis), his daughter from his first marriage, who’s now expecting her own child. Having always prioritized his work in the art world as a gallery owner, Andy still mixes up his kids’ names and doesn’t have a clue about his wife’s drug dependency, when everyone else in his circle seems way ahead of him in sensing that something was up with her habitual pill-popping.

The caliber of the writing “Goodrich” fluctuates considerably after this arresting introductory segment, as scenes unfold like mini episodes — some, skillfully rendered, others, flat and trite — that Meyers-Shyer’s script unevenly steers. At its core, her story feels like an ode to ensemble-driven domestic fare (picture an R-rated “We Bought a Zoo”), honoring the importance of family and communal camaraderie as Andy finds his true place amid the many roles he’s expected to play. In some sense, it’s the kind of thoughtful cinematic comfort food we don’t get much of anymore: a movie with a reliable cast you’d casually stroll into on a whim, and leave satisfied. Except, a rambling impression hampers the good intentions of “Goodrich,” making one crave for something leaner, with a firmer handle on pacing.

Instead, the film frequently drags and begs for some compact montages, the kind that punched up many a Shyer-Meyers movie, like “Baby Boom.” Here, an excess of material diminishes the film’s humor and poignancy, though many of the story’s characters are colorful enough, when they aren’t written too artificially.

Young Billie (and the guiltless Blair, who’s stuck with some impractical lines) gets the short end of the stick here, with an over-precocious vocabulary and mannerisms that are cringingly beyond her years. (An example? “Dad, if you don’t want me to talk like I live in LA, then don’t raise me in LA,” the little girl sarcastically snaps when Andy critiques her erroneous usage of the word “like.”) Thankfully, the more elegantly written Grace negates some of this miscalculation, as the fish-out-of-water Andy comes to depend on her with the twins, to help with chores and as moral support when his ultra-chic independent art gallery’s financial problems intensify. Elsewhere, Terry (Michael Urie), a recently single aspiring actor and dad who’s heartbroken after his husband’s departure, joins Andy’s circle of friends, infusing the movie with a lighter feel.

A major plot point of “Goodrich” revolves around whether Andy could win over the estate of a recently deceased Black artist, now managed by her feminist, New Agey daughter Lola (an alluring Carmen Ejogo), and save his cherished gallery from closing. This struggle happens alongside Andy’s attempts to make good with a rightfully ambivalent Grace, who’s never experienced the kind of present father that Billie and Mose now seem to enjoy. Meyers-Shyer is specific and articulate about the relatable disappointments of Grace, who nonetheless supports her father’s final shot at saving his career while navigating the challenges of her pregnancy and her iffy future in entertainment journalism. The writer-director also displays some dexterity in portraying Grace’s fulfilling marriage with Pete (Danny Deferrari), giving the couple one of the loveliest marital harmony scenes since Pixar’s “Up.”

Meyers-Shyer’s on-the-page precision sadly doesn’t extend to some other parts of her film. We meet the staff of Andy’s gallery through several disjointed scenes that don’t add up to an emotional whole. Her occasional comic-relief treatment of Terry comes dangerously close to a dated gay-best-friend cliché at times, while the Lola storyline feels like an elongated plot device generated to serve Andy’s self-discovery. Though it’s refreshing to see a powerful Black woman unafraid to articulate and demand her (and her mother’s) worth, Lola exits the story too harshly and abruptly.

On the whole, “Goodrich” is all ups and downs — a lot like Andy’s life — making you stick around for the much better movie it frequently teases, but never quite becomes.

Smile 2 has one genuinely good idea, which is that the everyday life of a messed-up pop megastar is indistinguishable from the shrieking terrors of a supernatural horror movie. Whenever director Parker Finn runs with that thought, the film has a nice, disorienting punch. The victims of horror movies usually suffer in private, stalked through dark empty houses or remote forests or abandoned corridors. Smile 2’s superstar protagonist, however, is constantly surrounded by people: hangers-on, assistants, fans, and gawkers. She suffers in full view of the public, with people all around her who could presumably help. That turns out to be just as unsettling as an eerie lake or a cabin in the woods, and more metaphorically potent to boot.

The film follows a few days in the life of global pop icon Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who is returning to performing after a period in rehab and a lengthy hiatus due to a gruesome car crash that scarred her and killed her actor boyfriend Paul (Ray Nicholson). But when her old friend and dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage) cracks a sinister smile before gleefully bashing his own head open with a 35-pound weight plate, things start to go truly haywire. Skye begins seeing Lewis’s figure lurking around her, as well as that of the long-deceased Paul. Most importantly, she starts to see the smiles — those unsettling, unnatural, wide grins from the first movie that tell us that demonic possession may be afoot.

At its best, Smile 2 keeps us guessing as to whether Skye is being haunted or simply dealing with the craziness of fandom. Is the sweaty, clingy creep who wants her to sign his T-shirt and won’t leave her alone a monster from the beyond, or just your average stalker? What about her incessantly supportive mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) or her obsequious assistant (Miles Gutierrez-Riley)? Then there’s the fact that Skye is a recovering addict. (The only reason she visits a dealer is because she’s not allowed prescription-strength pain meds but is still in agony from all her post-accident surgeries.) Could these things following her be drug-induced hallucinations? Okay, maybe “keeps us guessing” is overstating it: We know the true answer to all these questions, even if Skye doesn’t. But while the film is too much of a standard-issue horror movie to keep things ambiguous, it does make us think about how the phony smiles that surround celebrities aren’t too different from the evil smiles that surround the protagonist-victims of the Smile franchise.

Director Finn has clearly given this some thought, and he wisely doesn’t just revisit the narrative stations of the first picture. He made his feature directorial debut with that film, a surprise hit in 2022 that was an expansion of a short he’d made two years earlier. But Smile ran out of steam after establishing its nifty premise of an unseen viral demon that plastered disturbing grins on people’s faces before making them kill themselves. A world in which other people’s smiles became monstrous threats was a brilliant visual idea, one of both eerie immediacy and symbolic charge, but the movie eventually lost itself amid the predictable requirements of a genre picture.

Unfortunately, Smile 2 is similarly torn between its novel premise and the base demands of horror. It’s hard not to watch Skye’s spiraling reality and think of all the young nonfictional celebrities who’ve melted down in front of our eyes over the years: the Britneys, the Lindsays, the Amandas and Aarons and others. And yet while Scott’s appropriately freaked-out performance helps, the film never quite manages to make us care for Skye, in part because she’s a victim right from the start and things never settle down long enough for us to get any sense of her as a character. The film’s empathy exists mostly in the abstract, as Finn overdoes Skye’s fraying consciousness. Right as we should be feeling something for her increasingly helpless situation, he bludgeons us with ineffective jump scares — cheap, haphazard ones, awkwardly telegraphed and accompanied by loud booms and crashes on the soundtrack — and increasingly meaningless dream visions.

Like he did in the first film, the director has one go-to move that he relies on over and over again: to follow one particular narrative path before revealing that — psych! — it didn’t really happen. He wants it to be a rug-pulling mindfuck, but the more it occurs, the more it devalues everything we’re seeing. As Skye becomes increasingly unable to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a waking nightmare, we should feel more for her, and we should feel more with her. Instead, we lose interest, as the whole thing becomes pointless and even a little cynical and cruel. The movie ultimately scuttles its own ambitions.

“The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh,” premiering Thursday on Prime Video, is a funny, splendid, oddball new series from Vijal Patel, whose own family experience it reflects and whose writing and producing credits include “The Kids Are Alright,” “black-ish” and “The Middle,” among the century’s best family comedies — which is to say it comes from a place of professional knowledge and lived experience.

That it’s generic on a couple of counts — culture clash comedy, battling neighbors comedy, crazy family comedy — says nothing against it, since you have not seen these characters before, and the writing and acting are consistently top flight. If I say it reminds me of Jason Jones’ great “The Detour,” whose framing (it’s a story being told to investigators), family dynamics and hectic attitude it calls to mind, I don’t expect it to mean anything to many readers; but those who know, know.

We begin in the offices of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, where the five Pradeeps, who arrived from India two years earlier, are being interviewed by two agents identified in credits only as Dark Suit (Pete Holmes), the friendly junior, and Light Suit (Romy Rosemont), his super-serious superior. They’re trying to get to the bottom of a couple of mysteries — who burned down a house, and something illegal that happened in Ohio — which might or might not end in the family’s deportation.

Father Mahesh Pradeep (Naveen Andrews) is behind the move to Pittsburgh (played by Toronto, and snowing when they arrive). He has a contract with SpaceX to make some sort of rocket part and a space to make it in (formerly a sex toy factory, with some inventory still on site). Wife Sudha (Sindhu Vee), the power in the family, is a surgeon who expects that Americans’ poor eating habits will keep her busy in the new country. Eldest child and only daughter Bhanu (Sahana Srinivasan) sees America as a chance to break free and live; middle child Kamal (Arjun Sriram) is freakishly attached to his mother and afraid of everything; and youngest Vinod (Ashwin Sakthivel) is, in his mother’s words “an optimistic dufus” who worships the garbage man.

“It’s OK, we have two others,” Mahesh says to Sudha, when Vinod declares his intention to follow that profession.

“Do we?” she ruefully wonders.

Two houses over live the Mills, Janice (Megan Hilty), Jimbo (Ethan Suplee) and son Stu (Nicholas Hamilton); Sudha describes them as trash, but they do have a thing for TV show “The Good Fight.” Janice, who makes velour Bible covers she hopes to sell on QVC and has a sideline selling nutritional supplements, is also Kamal’s English teacher, on whom he has an all-consuming crush. Jimbo, who coaches basketball at Vinod’s school, is friendly and nonjudgmental, and he and Mahesh, who is also friendly and nonjudgmental, easily bond. (Which is not to say there won’t be hiccups.) Stu, a sweet lug Bhanu first sees doing pull-ups in his garage, will become the focus of her romantic aspirations, and she his. Vinod will later be smitten with Stu himself, when he discovers his online stunt videos.

Naturally, things will not go smoothly. The story is developed through interviews with all the main and some minor characters who pass narration on to one another like a basketball, each bringing a different point of view, reflected in what plays out onscreen. (Sudha and Janice’s visions of each other’s children as corrupting influences on their own is especially funny.)

Ethan Suplee and Megan Hilty star as the Pradeep’s neighbors, Jimbo and Janice.

(Ian Watson / Prime Video)

There are more jokes about (white) Americans from the South Asian point of view than about South Asians from the (white) American point of view. On first stepping on to the school bus, Bhanu gasps as she’s “blinded by the Caucasians.” Sudha explains that the denial of a medical license is a matter of “accreditation and compatibility, a.k.a. America hates brown foreigners.” Still, though race is a subject for humor — “I don’t even see color,” says Janice, “to me everyone’s white” — it’s not the subject of the series.

There are weak spots. The question of Mahesh’s business is so far in the background, except as a shadowy motivating force, or a threat to stability, that it barely exists at all. (A late scene reveals some random equipment in his factory, but there is no one to work it.) Indeed, one wonders how the Pradeeps have survived for two years. A drug dealing storyline, portrayed as innocuously as drug dealing can be, fades away to nothing, and makes no great sense for the characters involved — though it does produce some funny scenes in Janice’s imagined retelling.

The central mysteries are strung out across the season’s eight episodes, as the agents pursue — but practically speaking, put off — answers. (Their evolving relationship is its own amusing arc.) Episodic events involve bullies, basketball, bankruptcy, a bad grade, a Halloween party, a hunting trip. Vinod makes two friends, Willa (Beatrice Schneider), who stutters, and Mo (Zachary Rayment), who walks with two canes; a sort of pee-wee “Jules & Jim” scenario develops.

Indeed, you may have stopped caring who burned down the Mills’ house long before you realize it’s nothing you’re going to learn this season. All that matters is how our heroes — and they’re all heroes, each in their own way — get along. Deep down, every dysfunctional family comedy is about togetherness.