“The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” is a dull placeholder pic rolled out by Warner Animation to keep the company’s intellectual property rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth current in the public’s mind.

Streaming series aside, it’s been years since Peter Jackson turned over his entire career to Gollum, Gandalf, Galadriel and the gang. So why not a fresh animated addition to the canon, a prequel to the books and films built out of asides, references and footnotes from Tolkien’s fertile efforts to flesh out this simulated ancient history of an ever-so-English fantasy?

Kenji Kamiyama, a veteran of Japanimation — Japanese animated TV series such as “Ghost in the Shell,” “Ultraman” and “Blade Runner: Black Lotus” — was commissioned to turn in a modest-budgeted ($30 million?), colorful and striking but somewhat under-animated visit to this universe.

The ancient lands of Gondor and Rohan have long struggled to get along, and to force themselves to come to each other’s aid in crisis. The alliance has been tested since even more ancient times, Tolkien wrote. Here’s an earlier clash.

A few familiar voices from the Jackson films — Miranda Otto, the late Christopher Lee (wizards really are immortal), Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan — turn up, sometimes as the long-lived characters they played in the many “Rings” and “Hobbit” films.

The action starts out brisk.

But I have to say, the sizzle has gone out of this series of projects. As someone who used to drive cross-country listening to CDs of BBC/NPR series based on Tolkien, who recorded for broadcast a friend’s symphonic poem based on “The Silmarillion” and who is old enough to have seen the beautiful but abortive Ralph Bakshi attempt to animate “The Lord of the Rings” for the big screen, most of what’s come along of late has left me cold.

And a deritive, character-cluttered (in the Old Testament Tolkien style), exposition-heavy and voice-over narrated to death anime (ish) treatment of events ever-so-similar to all that transpired in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy seems more cynical than inspired, more exhausted than fresh.

A couple of hundred years before a hobbit came upon “the one ring,” King Helm (Brian Cox) of the Rohirrim finds himself pressured to marry his princess daughter Hera (Gaia Wise) off to a prince of Gondor to ensure the security of his realm (Rohan).

But an opportunist at court, Lord Freca (Shaun Dooley) of the West Marches wants his lad Wulf (Luca Pasqualino) considered as a suitor, angling the family’s way to the throne. Princess Hera and Wulf used to play together as children. Maybe even “play house.”

That disagreement leads to a trial by combat that is the film’s first monumental let down. One combatant kills the other with a single punch.

Alliances crumble, schemes erupt and Rohan — its wooden palisaded strongholds and ancient stone fortresses — is threatened. The headstrong king won’t listen to nephews who beg him to “light the beacons, call for aid from Gondor.” And disasters strike.

There are kidnappings and cavalry charges, betrayals and battles, and giant sentient eagles, giant four-tusked war elephants and an even larger tentacled swamp monster figure in the proceedings.

None of it moved me, or moved the needle.

Once you get used to the anime style and color palette, beautifully rendering the ruins of ancient Gondor’s Isengard, scaling the icy peaks of winter in Middle Earth and the like, there’s little to grab hold of and embrace as visually “new” or “expanding the canon” or for that matter moving or entertaining. Comic relief characters aren’t funny, potential romances aren’t romantic and the action beats are jumpy and jerkily animated and not immersive at all.

“The Lord of the Rings” is classic fantasy literature, and there’s a richness to the detail and emotional connection with the characters that leaps from the page to whatever other medium this saga moves to.

But “The War of the Rohirrim” is narrated to death because it has to be, otherwise it would be impossible to follow. And it’s dull and simplistic as narrative, more of a “comic book” take on Tolkien than an actual adaptation of anything Tolkien would have allowed to be published.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: The voices of Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, Lorraine Ashbourne, Benjamin Wainright, Bilal Hasna, Miranda Otto many others

Credits: Directed by Kenji Kamiyama, scripted by Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou, based on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. A New Line/Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 2:14

In the opening scene of A Conflict of Love Interest, Scarlett (Hedy Nasser) walks out of a man’s apartment as he pleads for her number. Her sharp, dismissive response—“I know”—paired with an effortlessly cool adjustment of her sunglasses as she steps into a cab, sets the tone for her character. Scarlett is someone who is on a dating spree and avoids commitment, exuding the self-assured main character energy reminiscent of Lindsay Lohan in Just My Luck.

Wherever she goes, opportunities seem to follow, and emotions remain at a safe distance. The film promises a journey of self-discovery and emotional reflection but ultimately fails to immerse us in Scarlett’s transformation or make her someone we can root for.

Scarlett’s primary goal is to land a photographer’s role with Joan (Midori Nakamura), the mother of her boss Jenny (Rebecca Lee Lerman). To get there, she takes on the task of playing wingwoman to Jenny in her quest for love.

The 88-minute film unfolds like a soap opera—occasionally engaging but largely perplexing. While director Andrew Rasmussen deserves credit for crafting Scarlett as a flawed and sometimes frustrating protagonist, the narrative doesn’t allow these traits to add much depth. For instance, Scarlett quips about her fears: “Chipped nails, wrinkled clothes, and everything that stops you from looking perfect.” It’s an amusing moment, but it feels hollow, leaving her internal struggles underexplored.

The supporting characters—Jenny, Lisa (Deanna Ott), and Scarlett’s love interest Lucas Sharpe (Logan Schmucker)—are not fleshed out in ways that add much to the story.

While the film raises intriguing questions about personal growth and decision-making, these themes are quickly drowned in a shallow and predictable narrative. There are, however, moments of brilliance.

A confrontation between Jenny and Scarlett at Lucas’s apartment is the highlight, evoking the chaos of Friends when secrets come tumbling out. Similarly, the recurring ‘cacao ceremony’ and sound therapy scenes involving Lisa and Scarlett spark some genuine laughs. Yet, these moments are fleeting, overshadowed by a script riddled with cracks.

The climax, predictable and unremarkable, does little justice to the story or the audience’s investment. Even the seemingly poignant escapade to Coney Island with Lucas feels derivative, reminiscent of Begin Again but lacking the emotional resonance.

There is no real conflict to engage the viewer or a love story compelling enough to evoke warmth. The result is a forgettable film that falls short of its potential.

Ultimately, A Conflict of Love Interest might hold some appeal for those seeking a light, surface-level romantic drama. However, it offers neither the emotional depth nor the narrative intrigue needed to leave a lasting impression.—Narayani M

“You sound like a poet.”

When Nikki Giovanni uttered these words in January 2007 at the end of a two-hour interview, she shifted my life’s focus from covering the news to making art with it. Her matter-of-fact declaration offered me what she gave millions of readers, students and fellow artists for nearly 60 years: faith.

On that day, I followed Nikki’s careful instructions to type and collate the lines of poetry I’d scrawled in composition books and notepads for years and leave the rest to her. Less than three months later, I confronted my fear of my artistic shortcomings and chose faith in what I could accomplish outside that Atlanta newsroom, enrolling in the nascent MFA program at Virginia Tech, where Nikki — always, she insisted, just Nikki — was a distinguished creative writing professor for more than three decades.

I accepted admission three months later, on April 16, the day that Tech — and the world — was stunned by horrific violence committed by a student Nikki had banned from her class. While reporting about that student killing 32 Hokies and himself and wounding 17, I decided I would believe in her faith in my Southern-bred listening and wordcraft to make a career of writing poems informed by my journalism training, her take-no-prisoners honesty and boundless compassion my compass. Somehow, she knew I’d also gained the tools I needed by, like her, observing the women and the men in Baptist churches step out on faith to share their testimonies.

“The answer is always yes,” she’d intone when I’d call. “You can always change your mind later if it’s not working out.”

This infectious, uncompromising faith in humanity’s potential to choose good and embody the power of divined words made flesh, coupled with unapologetic self-possession and a generosity of spirit, heralds our Nikki as arguably America’s most accessible voice and certainly one of the most prophetic of this millennium. For Nikki, who died Monday at 81, our future depends upon our willingness to learn from everyday Black folks’ refusal to accept status-quo cruelties as incontrovertible realities. Time and again, her poems land on faith as the fuel to catapult us to a yonder she’s dreamed of exploring since her girlhood in Knoxville and Cincinnati.

Since I left the mad-dash newspaper assembly line, Nikki has remained my North Star. When a car accident threw my grad school budget into a tailspin, most friends shrugged, but without my asking, she saw to it that, within hours, I got a call from an administrator about a grant that would cover the repair cost. When my mother was stricken with cancer and I told Nikki that I’d need an academic leave, she offered an independent study on the Black Arts Movement she’s helped define and scheduled our meetings around Mama’s care. (She’d made sacrifices for family, too, and didn’t want me enduring any of the delays she had.)

After I graduated from Tech, earned a doctorate in literary, gender and sexuality studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and became a professor at Wake Forest University, hatemongers sent threatening emails to faculty of color. I wanted to leave the university, where her sister-friend Maya Angelou had taught for decades, but Nikki texted via her partner of nearly 40 years, Virginia “Ginney” Fowler, that I should reconsider: “Take your smile and your love to the folk who love you. Maya was your aunt and I am your godmother … let’s be strong on this one ❤️ .”

You may be wondering why so many from all walks of life are grieving so intensely this week. It’s that stories like mine are at once remarkable and ubiquitous. We’ve watched Nikki appoint, anoint and empower so many, always saying yes and wanting to know: Who should the world be reading, watching and listening to next? As we, her colleagues and literary children, gave her the early works of Terrance Hayes, Jericho Brown, Remica Bingham-Risher and others known primarily in academic circles at the time, she called them into her orbit, too, putting the everyday people she’s engaged for three generations on notice to look out for who’ll next storm the castle and put a mirror up to the naked emperor while shimmying and wisecracking as only the folk can. Look at what our grandmothers’ prayers have wrought, she beamed in anthologies she curated and massive group readings she coordinated to give writer-friends Angelou, Toni Morrison and E. Lynn Harris and actors Ruby Dee and Novella Nelson their flowers while they lived and to comfort those left behind when beloved poet Lucille Clifton departed too soon.

Nikki Giovanni, second from left, at the unveiling of the Maya Angelou stamp in 2015. With her are, from left, Howard University professor Eleanor Traylor, First Lady Michelle Obama, Postmaster General Megan Brennan, Oprah Winfrey and artist Ross Rossin.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

Wherever Nikki alights is a space to laugh, play the dozens (preferably over bid whist), celebrate and, yes mourn and sing with these and other giants. And she’s brought along as many of us who would trust her to lead the way she’s blazed unassumingly, Ginney at her side, their love a model for our beleaguered LGBTQIA youths, unashamed but fiercely protected until it was time for the world to know. “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” which won an Emmy this year, leaves few relevant questions unanswered, so if you’re just taking note of the Nikki rocket ship, start there to fine-tune your own voices.

Nikki loved a good song, preferably jazz, with some Champagne and a meal seasoned with the lavender she grew in her garden. But let’s not forget: She was down with hip-hop when Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was a tot and others decried the music as earworm “gangsta rap” that would kill and destroy, not galvanize, the coming generation for whom he — like she — is a folk hero. “I’m a thug,” she’d tell anyone who would listen, showing off the “Thug Life” tattoo emblazoned on her left arm after Lamar’s predecessor, Tupac Shakur, was murdered in 1997, just as hip-hop began topping pop charts and commanding the zeitgeist. In one memorable moment in 2013 I’ve been replaying to hear her alto lilt and girlish chuckle, she tells tastemaker radio DJ Sway Calloway she’s happily at once “a little, old lady” and all that “I’m a thug” encompasses. For those who might become prodigal, choosing to go our own way, Nikki is always waiting with seats at her welcome table when we’re ready to embrace the good sense she and other elders and ancestors impart.

For, like poets Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks and another singular supernova, Prince, the latter two of whom shared her birthday, Nikki has always communed with like-minded iconoclasts and what she called “space freaks,” those who understand that our songs of rage, rapture, irreverence and yearning are our greatest, Blackest weapons. From her earliest collections “Black Feeling, Black Talk,” and “Black Judgement” in the late 1960s to her most recent ones, “A Good Cry” (2017) and “Make Me Rain,” published in 2020, that annus mirabilis of pestilence and prosperity, her refusal to surrender to despair kept her going — and current.

When we phoned for that 2007 interview, she was promoting “Acolytes,” which she’d written as first her mother, then her sister and aunt, lay dying within months of one another. Amid her own journey with illness, including the one that’s ended her physical journey on this side of forever, Nikki has found in grief and pain an exacting clarity to declaim that faith, like the unconditional love she gives to those who choose her back, only dies when we stop believing. Anticipating our grief, she leaves us this conversation on unconditional love’s liberating power with the New Yorker’s Doreen St. Felix and host Bianca Vivion and her biographical documentary as an example of how to live a freer life of constant evolution, its title drawn from a poem in “Acolytes,” “Quilting the Black Eyed Pea,” in which she presaged “we’re going to Mars” long before billionaires contemplated colonizing outer space.

Now it’s our turn to join Nikki’s song as her spirit, finally boundless and fully free, soars into the cosmos. Even as Octavia Butler’s dystopian vision in “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talent” unfolds, with the unhoused and most vulnerable criminalized and Earth’s hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis giving us a hard look in the mirror of what we’ve done, we should not run from fear of what we’re forced to face. Nikki’s poem “Fear: Eat in or Take Out,” which she read during a 2017 TED Talk, teaches us “to distill fear,” rather than let any powers-that-be persuade us to mix our fear with the hate that empowers them to divide and conquer us all. We must, as Nikki told us in that TED Talk, “learn to distill fear,” rather than let any powers-that-be persuade us to mix our fear with the hate that empowers them to divide and conquer us all.

Defying the unconscionable indignities that loom, I’ve been clinging to Nikki’s voice, and it’s everywhere, y’all.

Search for her online and heed her call: Take your smile and your love to the folk who love you. You and you and you sound like a poet, too.

L. Lamar Wilson, the 2024-2025 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University, is a professor of creative writing, literature and film studies at Florida State University. He is the author of “Sacrilegion” (Blair, 2013) and the associate producer of “The Changing Same” (PBS/POV Shorts, 2019), a collaboration with Rada Film Group, the director-producers of “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.”