Toward the end of Rebel Wilson’s “Girl Group,” a fizzy, gaudy clone of “Pitch Perfect” sculpted from the mentor formula of “Bad News Bears,” the movie spirals into an interminable sequence of pop music performances. The song-and-dance numbers are so awkwardly endless that they call to mind the denouement of a very different pop spectacle: Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux,” in which Natalie Portman’s megastar becomes a tragic emblem of the emptiness of the celebrity industrial complex.

“Girl Group,” which follows a band of misfits competing to become signed music artists, could not be further removed from that type of cynicism if it were set on a different planet, and Wilson, starring as the group’s coach, seems hardly to know the meaning of the word. A comedy whiz who became famous for playing — as she wrote in her memoir — “the fat funny girl,” Wilson has little on her mind here beyond sparkly merriment, and “Girl Group” is an accordingly flamboyant extravaganza designed to have audiences humming and nodding along without thinking a single thought.

There are occasions that call for this sort of broadly comforting trifle, on airplanes or in late-night popcorn sessions. “Girl Group” seems even to nod to its position on the feel-good shelf when, after a trying day, a character suggests to her sister that they head home to snuggle and rent “Pitch Perfect.” This movie — despite performances from a veritable diva corps d’elite, including Nicole Scherzinger and Ashley Roberts of The Pussycat Dolls, the Spice Girls’ Mel C, and All Saints’ Shaznay Lewis — never reaches the emotional heights of that rewatch-ready franchise, nor does it really strive to. It’s instead at ease as a second-stringer, a congenial romp that exists only as it unspools before you, then dissipates like stage fog the moment it’s over.

The story opens in 1997, as five friends at a London girls’ school prepare to perform in their auditorium. Backstage, a member of the crew frets to her teacher (a brief but keen Sally Hawkins) about the pressure, before the pals — who perform under the name Gurlfriends — head onstage and bring the house down. The overture gives way to a whirlwind montage of the group’s ascent, culminating with a member named Tassie (played in the present day by Wilson) ditching the gang to try and make it as a solo act. The effort fails, and Tassie sinks into an alcoholic stupor from which she emerges, years later, to find that she’s been replaced for the reunion tour by a warbling prima donna.

This is where the real story starts, and where Wilson might have been better off centering the movie all along. Sentenced to community service at a youth center, Tassie meets a group of Gen Z-ers whom she’s assigned to mentor ahead of an upcoming competition. The washed-up star sees their talent as a chance to rehabilitate her own image, but the peppy, ambitious teens have aspirations of their own, and as Tassie sets about molding them into a glossy vision of millennial pop stardom, her narcissism increasingly becomes a liability to their success.

There are feeble gestures at a generational divide over female sexuality and pop-star image, as when one of the younger crew exclaims that Gurlfriends were “totally playing into the male gaze.” But such moments are so few and far between that it feels as if Wilson forgot about the theme halfway through, or, more likely, found it too thorny to properly unpack. Fair enough: prickly questions about how famous women can or should display themselves are unlikely to be settled by a broad comedy more interested in cramming in mile-a-minute jokes.

Much of the film’s humor consists of bawdy clowning, with a handful of contemporary reference-laden jokes thrown in for good measure. And despite Wilson’s frank discussions of weight and weight loss in her memoir, there’s a curious abundance of size-related gags. At one point, a child accuses Tassie of looking like she “ate” Sabrina Carpenter. Elsewhere, Jennifer Coolidge, gamely playing Gurlfriends’ manager, encourages Tassie to promote Splurt, a nutrition bar with a laxative effect. Its potential to induce sudden bowel urgency in front of a crowd does not go unnoticed.

Amid the slew of tired gags, the harmony among the younger cast is the film’s greatest asset, and their easy rapport and naturalism help cut against the run-of-the-mill story. The standouts are Chabely Ponce, as an acoustic guitar-slinging crooner, and Lilah Pate, who excels as the group’s leader, despite having to suffer through one ill-conceived scene involving an aggressive, nonconsensual kiss.

Their enthusiasm as an ensemble suggests a warmer movie, one in which the nonconformists take center stage as they blossom into more confident versions of themselves. But lost in the surrounding muddle and often eclipsed by Wilson’s relentless mugging, their stories wind up playing second fiddle. Their vivacity may be enough to break through Tassie’s vanity, but it can’t wholly elevate the movie around them.

Roshan Sethi has a résumé that could make the most accomplished among us feel like underachievers. His three previous features include the thoroughly charming 2024 rom-com A Nice Indian Boy. Two months ago his novel, The Simp, a funny Hollywood satire, was published. He was the co-creator of the Fox series The Resident. And as if that’s not enough, for a couple of months a year he still works as a radiation oncologist at a Boston hospital.

He puts all those experiences to good use in The Surgeon, a genre-bending swirl that is part The Pitt (but gorier), part tense crime thriller, part action movie and part midnight movie, all infused with witty touches. It is wildly entertaining.

As clever as Sethi’s screenplay is, the film’s greatest asset is Michelle Yeoh as Eliza Lim, a recently retired surgeon who is kidnapped by criminals and forced at gunpoint to operate on one of their colleagues. No one else could have brought the same serene presence, quiet intelligence and flair for action, a combination that is ideally suited to the character. Sethi’s film is perfectly in sync with Yeoh’s strengths.

The film swiftly establishes Dr. Lim’s character in a few brief scenes that chart her single-minded dedication to her job and the boring, empty retirement she has reluctantly entered. The Surgeon isn’t a character study, but we instantly know who that character is.

Out of nowhere, it seems — but actually for reasons revealed much later — she is abducted and finds herself in an abandoned hospital, surrounded by men with guns. An operating room is ready for her, and the patient’s face is covered. The operating scenes are not for the squeamish, but it’s worth covering your eyes to get to the real action. Lim realizes the kidnappers have no reason to keep her alive after the surgery, so she has to outwit them using her mind, medical knowledge and a few hidden scalpels.

Sethi often holds the camera on Yeoh’s face, expressive even at its most passive. Lim speaks softly as she proves the thugs are no match for her. “You can stop pointing that gun at me,” she tells one of her minders after the surgery. “I’m an old woman, half your age, half your weight. There’s nothing I can do to you.” Part of the fun of watching is that we can guess that line is a ruse, but we don’t know what she’s planning.  

Yeoh, of course, started out in martial arts films, but that is not the kind of action displayed here. Lim knows just where on the body to attack her kidnappers and goes for their most vulnerable spots with swift jabs and great precision. As in the best action films, we never lose sight of how the hero’s personality drives it. “You’ll never shoot a gun again,” she calmly tells one of her captors after severing some cartilage in his wrists. “That’s not snot, that’s your brain fluid dripping out,” she says to another after ramming an instrument up his nose. One of the weirdest, wittiest touches is that whenever she attacks, we see the body beneath the skin, viewing the bones she’s breaking or tendons she’s cutting as if a medical textbook had come to life.

Sethi loads the film with noir tropes, including a ticking clock that counts down how much time the patient has to live after Lim threatens to kill him. What has she got to lose? But even at its most noirish, visually the film is filled with light and color. A major action scene takes place in the former hospital’s chapel, full of bright stained glass. And she lives in a spacious, light-filled house with a large garden, which we see before and after the kidnapping. The Surgeon is taut and suspenseful, but never claustrophobic. The editing smoothly keeps the momentum going and the genre touches blend easily.

Martin Freeman enters the film fairly late in a supporting role as the crime boss who masterminded the scheme. As always, he is expert at looking meek while sounding deadly. And Joseph Mydell adds a welcome, sweet touch as a man who brings warmth and emotion to Lim’s life.

With a nod to genre conventions, the final shot leaves room for a sequel. But wherever Sethi’s varied career takes him, he has already established himself as one of the most exciting filmmakers around.

The dark days of Argentina’s dictatorship return to haunt a man 30 years later in Back to Buenos Aires (Ritorno a Buenos Aires), director Marco Bechis’ brooding portrayal of the deep wounds left by a military junta that tortured and killed thousands of people during its brutal reign over the country. Powerful and well-played, if sometimes lacking in tension and plausibility, this Venice competition premiere should find additional slots in festivals and arthouses throughout Europe, as well as in Latin America.

Inspired by the Chilean-Italian filmmaker’s own personal histroy as one of the rare desaparecidos (victims of forced disappearance) to survive kidnapping and imprisonment in Argentina after the military coup of 1976, the movie is bolstered by a psychological and historical verisimilitude that reflects how intimately Bechis knows his subject. Where Buenos Aires occasionally falters is in a narrative that slowly but surely moves ahead without much suspense, while losing its way in a few unnecessary plot contrivances.

The film begins in Torino in 2008, during which we see 50-something paramedic Mariano (Adriano Giannini) working hard to save the life of a patient, then floundering at home afterwards. Solitary and taciturn — the man barely utters a full sentence until the third act — he keeps receiving messages on his answering machine about a court appearance back in Argentina. We soon learn that he’s been asked to fly to Buenos Aires and testify against members of the junta who, 30 years after the fact, are finally facing criminal prosecution. Reluctant at first to accept, Mariano decides to hop on a plane and return to the site of his torments.

The rest of the movie takes place in the confines of a worn-down Buenos Aires courthouse, where Mariano and a handful of former captives are waylaid while waiting for the trial to begin. It’s immediately apparent that the other survivors regard Mariano with a fair amount of disdain, and we begin to understand why when a series of chronological flashbacks takes us back to the coup of 1976. There, we see young Mariano (Eduardo Hoy) going from armed rebel on the run with other student leftists to being a prisoner held and tortured at Buenos Aires’ notorious Garage Olimpo (also the subject and title of Bechis’ 1999 award-winning feature, which played in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar).

Why the others hold Mariano in such contempt becomes clear when we learn he was something of a kapo in the infamous prison, surviving for years as both the in-house medic and a pawn for guards who practiced torture and rape on a regular basis. The film’s standout sequence has him returning to the location of his internment along with Evelyn (Verónica Gerez), the daughter of one of his former comrades, wandering through a massive empty garage in which tiny individual cells are still marked off on the ground.

During this and other scenes, Mariano looks physically sick from the guilt he holds vis-à-vis the others, as well as the scars he still bears after being tortured and humiliated for over two years. Giannini is strong in a role that has him drenched in sweat and silently suffering for most of the movie, although a little more dialogue might have helped round his character out. A love affair that Mariano has with fellow survivor Amalia (Ana Celentano) adds something extra to the plot, while another thread involving an evil doctor (Adrian Fondari) feels a bit phony, lacking the realism of the main storyline.

The film’s most disturbing moments make reference to some of the horrific acts of the junta, including the “death flights” during which captives were drugged, loaded onto a plane, stripped naked and tossed into the sea from high altitudes. The pain of that period seems like too much to bear for Mariano, who also risks prosecution if the court determines he was a willing participant in the barbaric regime, even if he was a prisoner himself.

In its last act, Back to Buenos Aires settles into a courtroom drama in which Mariano faces the demons he’s been harboring for decades. If the film’s ending ties things up in ways that don’t quite reflect the complexity of what’s happening, Bechis earnestly tries to show how someone like Mariano could perhaps find a way forward — not necessarily by getting past his traumas, which will always be there, but by learning how to live with them.