LOS ANGELES, May 23 (UPI) — Dogma, returning to theaters June 5, comes from a decade where indie writer/directors were celebrated for the words in their screenplays. Kevin Smith was one of the major voices that emerged in the era of Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater and Sofia Coppola.

In his first film, Clerks, Smith had his convenience store clerks express all of his thoughts about Star Wars, retail and relationships. Dogma, his fourth film, was the work of a writer who grew up Catholic and had thoughts about faith.

Exiled angels Bartleby (Ben Affleck) and Loki (Matt Damon) find a way to get back into heaven. As part of a Catholicism outreach campaign, New Jersey Cardinal Glick (George Carlin) promises forgiveness to anyone who passes through his church’s arch.

If the angels gain forgiveness, then take human form and die, God will have no choice but to allow them back into heaven. What they don’t realize is that invalidating God’s decree will cause the end of all existence.

So God’s Metatron (Alan Rickman) visits Planned Parenthood employee Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) and gives her the task of preventing Loki and Bartleby from entering the church. Smith regulars Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are sent as prophets to help Bethany in her quest.

This is a story that adapts Catholic scripture into a modern apocalyptic story, but it is really a vehicle for characters to talk about religion, the way characters in other Smith movies talk about movies and comic books.

That dialogue is performed emphatically, and more subtly it’s well edited by Smith and producer Scott Mosier. Smith’s biblical figures would use the F word while making their profound points, but maybe they learned it from millennia of humans, or at the Tower of Babel.

The film’s messages challenge some of the oldest doctrines of Catholicism. No one has to base their values on a movie, but as an artistic exploration of this thesis, all of Smith’s questions are backed up by a creative interpretation of the scripture.

The message is ultimately that God doesn’t care which religion you follow as long as you believe. That would offend organized religion, but the film unabashedly believes in God.

Jesus’ unsung 13th apostle Rufus (Chris Rock) tells Bethany that God wants people to think for themselves. As bold a take on religion as that might be, it is ultimately optimistic.

Bethany is a character seeking to regain her faith. She remembers the feelings that church gave her as a child.

Yet she no longer feels that as an adult, which is understandable with painful life experience. But she’s open to restoring her faith and this adventure gives her a reason.

Of course, Smith has a mischievous spark. Loki likes to talk nuns out of their faith when he’s literally an Angel with knowledge of God herself (Alanis Morissette).

Smith speculates on eras of Jesus’ life that were not in the Bible as characters speak of their time with him. Those extrapolations show empathy towards the burden of being the son of God for a teenager.

They’re also not meant to be canonical. Smith’s point is to get viewers thinking as they laugh, not launch a religion himself.

Exposure to biblical figures certainly does not make Jay any more wholesome, but his ability to keep making vulgar sexual innuendo amid crises of faith of apocalyptic proportions is impressive.

There is a little bit of gay panic when Bethany mistakes Bartleby and Loki for lovers, and Rufus exposes Jay’s secret desires for men. Characters also use the R-word, because 1999 was unfortunately before many people learned it was a slur, but Smith has addressed both of those issues in subsequent work.

The complicated release history of Dogma, passing between several studios, has made it difficult to see since its Blu-ray release. Now out of print and not streaming anywhere, the re-release is a welcome return of one of Smith’s seminal works.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.

Mexican corrido singer Gabito Ballesteros has always been a hopeless romantic. His newest album, “Ya No Se Llevan Serenatas,” or “They No Longer Perform Serenades,” tugs at those delicate heartstrings.

Released Thursday, the album pays tribute to romance in the digital era of smartphones and social media. Invoking modern-day references, like sending Instagram DMs and going to Disneyland, he puts his own spin on the traditional serenade, a ballad one typically sings below the windowsill of their lover. It’s the kind of profound romance that regional Mexican acts such as Joan Sebastian, Vicente Fernandez and Juan Gabriel honed for decades.

“I like to sing to women, bring them roses, be romantic, and I want to convey this to my audience,” said Ballesteros in a statement to The Times.

Sprinkled across the 21 tracks is a roster of star-studded Mexican homegrown talents, including longtime collaborator Natanael Cano, Tito Doble P, Christian Nodal, Neton Vega, Carín León, Oscar Maydon and Luis R Conriquez.

Colombian reggaeton superstar J Balvin is also featured in the Latin-EDM fusion track, “La Troka.”

Ahead of its release, the rising star teased his sophomore album on Instagram with a clip of him driving a classic Ford Mustang filled with dozens of red roses. Once parked, Ballesteros pulls out his guitar from the trunk as his joint song with Carín León, “Regalo de Dios,” begins to unfold in the background — a sign that Ballesteros is ready to pour his heart out to whoever that fortunate soul might be.

The song is one of the few pre-released tracks of the album, alongside poetic singles like “Cleopatra,” which compares a woman’s beauty to that of the famed Egyptian queen, and the agonizing track “Perdido,” which looks to fill the void of true love lost with vice.

The already popular, anxiety-riddled “7 Diás,” featuring Tito Double P, is also included in the track list; Ballesteros also performs an acoustic rendition of this heartbreak song on YouTube.

“This is a very important album because it tells a very different story than what [I] have been doing],” said Ballesteros. “The audience will get to learn more about my love and heartbreak.”

Ballesteros, who is originally from Sonora, Mexico, first gained recognition in 2020 with his breakthrough conjunto song “El Rompecabezas.” After obtaining his degree in industrial engineering in 2023, he joined his longtime friend Natanael Cano and Peso Pluma on the chart-topping hit “AMG,” which debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 92, marking the trio’s first appearance on the chart. Ballesteros later appeared on the chart that same year with the megahit “Lady Gaga” with Peso Pluma and Junior H,” which remained on the Billboard Hot 100 for 20 weeks, peaking at No. 35.

The release of “Ya No Se Llevan Serenatas” comes a year after Ballesteros launched his critically-acclaimed debut album, “The GB,” which landed at No. 65 on the Billboard 200. The 25-year-old singer— who is under Natanael Cano’s record label Los CT and Peso Pluma’s Double P Management— has quickly become a force in the new wave of corridos tumbados, amassing more than 50 million monthly Spotify listeners.

“If you’re in love, I would like for you to dedicate a song to your lover [from this album]. If you’re going through a breakup, listen to it and heal with the music,” Ballesteros said. “Everything is guided by love.”

Some bio documentaries are carried mostly by the reflective, archival footage that send you back to the subject’s heyday.

But in Matt Wolf’s “Pee-wee as Himself” — as wonderful as much of the archival stuff is — nothing is more compelling than when Paul Reubens is simply himself.

Before his death from cancer in 2023, Reubens sat for 40 hours of interviews with Wolf. His cooperation is clearly uncertain and sometimes strained in the film — he stopped participating for a year before talking about his infamous 2001 arrest — and his doubts on the project linger throughout.

Reubens would rather be directing it, himself, he says more than once. The man many know as Pee-wee Herman is used to controlling his own image, and he has good reason for being skeptical of others doing so. But beyond that tension over authorship of his story, Reubens is also delightfully resistant to playing the part of documentary cliche.

“I was born in 1938 in a little house on the edge of the Mississippi River,” he begins. “My father worked on a steamboat.”

Talking heads have gotten a bad rap in documentaries in recent years, but in “Pee-wee as Himself,” nothing is more compelling than Paul Reubens simply sitting before the camera, looking back at us.

Pee-wee may be iconic, but Paul Reubens is hysterical. And Wolf’s film, with that winking title, makes for a revealing portrait of a performer who so often put persona in front of personhood. In that way, “Pee-wee as Himself,” a two-part documentary premiering Friday on HBO and HBO Max, is moving as the posthumous unmasking of a man you can’t help but wish we had known better.

Reubens was a product of TV. He grew up transformed by shows like “Howdy Doody,” “The Mickey Mouse Club” and, later, “I Love Lucy.”

“I wanted to jump into my TV and live in that world,” he says.

Part of the delight of the first half of Wolf’s film is watching the wide range of inspirations — the circus culture of Sarasota, Florida, where his family moved to; Andy Warhol; performance art — coalesce into a singular creation like Pee-wee. That name, he says, came from a tiny harmonica that said “Pee-wee” on it, and a kid named Herman he knew growing up.

“It was a whole bunch of things that had never really connected connecting,” says Reubens.

Wolf carefully traces the birth of Reubens’ alter-ego through the Groundlings in Los Angeles, on stage at the Roxy and then out into the world, on “The Gong Show,” on Letterman, in the 1985 Tim Burton-directed “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and, ultimately, on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

“I felt in a way I was bringing the character out into the wild,” he recalls. “I just stayed in character all day.”

That came with obvious sacrifices, too. For the sake of his career, Reubens stayed closeted as a gay man. He grew intensely private and seldom appeared in public not in character. Reubens also jettisoned some of his close collaborators, like Phil Hartman, as his fame grew. There’s tragedy, both self-inflicted and not, in Reubens’ increasing isolation.

When Reubens was arrested in 1991 and charged with indecent exposure, Reubens’ carefully guarded persona came crashing down. The scandal was worse because people knew only Pee-wee and not Reubens. There was also injustice in the whole affair, particularly the 2002 arrest that followed on charges of child pornography that were later dropped. In both cases, homophobia played a role.

When Reubens does get around to talking about it, he’s most resistant to painting himself as a victim, or offering any, as he says, “tears of a clown.”

Wolf, the director of films like “Recorder,” about Marion Stokes, who recorded television all day long for 30 years, and “Spaceship Earth,” about the quirky 1991 Biosphere 2 experiment, is better known as a talented documentarian of visual archives than as an compelling interviewer of celebrities.

“Pee-wee as Himself” would have probably benefited from less one-sided interplay between subject and filmmaker. But Wolf’s time was also limited with Reubens and just getting this much from him is clearly an accomplishment.

Above all, Reubens says he’s doing the film to clear a few things up. In the end, the full portrait of Reubens — including all his playful, self-deprecating charm in front of the camera — add up to a much-needed retort to some of the misunderstandings about Reubens.

The day before he died, Reubens called Wolf to say one last thing: “I wanted to let people know who I really was and see how painful it was to be labeled as something I wasn’t.”

“Pee-wee as Himself,” a Warner Bros. release is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 205 minutes. Three stars out of four.