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.

1/5 stars

Jackie Chan’s latest family-oriented action caper, Panda Plan, closes with a title card stating that “no animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture” before clarifying that “all the animal characters are visual effects”.

Wholly redundant to anyone who has just suffered the indignity of sitting through this abysmal excuse for family entertainment, the formal acknowledgement that the film’s animal star is a fabrication inadvertently confirms that the only vulnerable species on screen is its decidedly creaky leading man.

As he turns 70 years old, Chan has entered a chapter of his career where his public persona overshadows any attempt at performance. So much so that in Panda Plan the actor actually plays himself, and on more than one occasion is facilitated by characters because they are fans of Jackie Chan.

Along the way, Chan entertains half-hearted attempts at humility, confessing to one adversary that he might not be quite the fighter he appears to be on screen, or including a running joke about his big nose.

But ultimately Panda Plan portrays Chan as an affable, heroic figure who repeatedly puts his life on the line to protect a helpless symbol of Chinese sovereignty.

When Brandon Scott Jones was in seventh grade, his mother bought him a copy of “The Elements of Screenwriting.”

Spurred by his interest in actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, whose turn to writing resulted in the Oscar-winning screenplay “Good Will Hunting,” Jones says he had “one goal, which was to write a part for myself in something, whatever it was.”

Unfortunately, Jones’ first attempt at screenwriting didn’t include the same kind of realism and lived experiences as Damon and Affleck’s story of a South Boston janitor who also happens to be a math prodigy.

“It was about a pornography director and it was called ‘Whatever Happened to Darren Potter?’” Jones says, laughing during an interview this summer over smoothies at the Silver Lake Erewhon.

His interest in writing came about because he’d broken away from the rest of the family during an outing to the multiplex for a repeat viewing of “Titanic” and snuck into a screening of “Good Will Hunting” instead. Then, when they went back to see “Titanic” again, he left and caught a snippet of Paul Thomas Anderson’s porn-industry drama “Boogie Nights.”

“This was an impressionable time where you were [at an age when you were] taking things in, so I wrote this screenplay about this prodigy actor — like ‘Good Will Hunting’ — and this pornography director,” Jones says. “There was no sex or anything like that. It was just that they were both trying to claw their way back to the top of the game.”

This script, and other early material, were written on the typewriter Jones was given for Christmas when he was in fourth grade. He carried them in a briefcase. In eighth grade, the kid who sat next to him in math class would give him notes.

“Darren Potter” was, sadly, never produced (although Jones thinks he still has a copy of it somewhere in case anyone reading this is interested in setting up a meeting). Instead, his attempt at writing dramas has been parlayed into a career that utilizes something Jones has more familiarity with: self-deprecating humor.

Jones, a graduate of New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, got his start at Upright Citizens Brigade, where he was in the main cast of “Asssscat,” one of the improv house’s signature shows. He was then cast in Michael Schur’s NBC philosophical comedy “The Good Place,” winning critical praise for playing a Perez Hilton-like gossip blogger named John Wheaton. And in his film roles, he’s made meals out of small parts in “Renfield,” “Isn’t It Romantic?” and “Senior Year,” co-writing the latter, about a high school cheerleader who wakes up from a coma after two decades and becomes obsessed with returning to finish her senior year and reclaiming her popularity.

He achieved Notable Character Actor status when he was cast as Curtis, a struggling actor and best friend to Cary (Drew Tarver), in the Comedy Central and Max comedy “The Other Two.” It was a part he got literally at 6:30 a.m. one weekday while playing tennis. His friends, series creators Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, called him in a panic because another actor had dropped out of the series and they were about to begin shooting. An hour and a half later, he was on his way to the set. He’d eventually join that show’s writing staff as well.

Then came “Ghosts.” Created by Joe Port and Joe Wiseman and based on the British series of the same name, the CBS comedy falls somewhere between “The Good Place” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s dark existentialist play “No Exit.” As the show’s name suggests, it’s about spirits from different periods of American history who are, for reasons unknown to them, forced to spend eternity on the grounds of what is now a Hudson Valley estate.

In “Ghosts,” Brandon Scott Jones plays Isaac Higgintoot, who died of dysentery during the Revolutionary War.

(Bertrand Calmeau / CBS)

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Jones plays Isaac Higgintoot, a member of the American Continental Congress who — appropriately, given his last name — died of dysentery while serving as a captain in the Revolutionary War. Isaac, who always felt like an outsider in life, is now furious that his contemporary Alexander Hamilton has everything from money to a book to a musical commemorating him. Meanwhile, Isaac wants to set the record straight that “I was never at the Boston Tea Party. I was in Boston at a tea party, but it was at my Aunt Geraldine’s house.”

“I think about him being constantly one step to the left of history,” says Jones, theorizing that Isaac could have been at the signing of the Declaration of Independence but probably got there late because he’d spilled something on his shirt. Or that he and his wife, Beatrice (played in flashbacks by Hillary Anne Matthews), were “unsuccessful Machiavellians,” who took it personally when snubbed for a dinner party invitation.

Thus far in the show, Isaac has convinced Sam (Rose McIver), a clairvoyant writer who took over the estate with her husband, Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar), to write his biography because his Wikipedia page is severely lacking. Jones says that Isaac isn’t any different from one of TV’s more memorable (modern-day) political figures, such as Selina Meyer, the singularly focused politico played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus on HBO’s “Veep.”

“To retroactively want your life to have meant something, or to have been part of something, I think is really so fun and desperate,” Jones says.

Not that the afterlife has been too boring for Isaac. At least not in the last few years.

Each season of “Ghosts” has ended with major developments for Isaac. In the first, he realized that times have changed and it’s OK for him to come out as gay, some 250-odd years after his death. In the second, he gets engaged to Nigel (John Hartman), the ghost of a British soldier Isaac accidentally killed on the battlefield. In the third, he leaves Nigel at the altar and then is sucked into the ground by someone else he’d wronged: the ghost of a Puritan woman named Patience, who is played by Jones’ friend and “Senior Year” co-star Mary Holland.

In the Season 4 premiere of “Ghosts,” Brandon Scott Jones’ Issac faces a Puritan ghost named Patience, played by his friend and “Senior Year” co-star Mary Holland.

(CBS)

And now in Season 4 of “Ghosts,” premiering Thursday, audiences find out what exactly Patience has been plotting and whether any of the other estate’s living or dead inhabitants will even notice that Isaac is missing.

“I think the friendship [between us] helped it in a fun way because she’s such a great character actor and a great actor in general,” Jones says of Holland. “It was fun to be surprised by all the choices that she was making. At one point in the script, her character is described as, ‘unhinged and insane.’ So a lot of what you’re seeing, if I’m acting and I’m being terrified of her, it’s also an underlying level of delight watching my friend, which is really, really nice.”

Port and Wiseman stress that they mean no offense to other members of their extensive cast and that it’s merely a coincidence that each season has ended with a big Isaac storyline. They also say that there has been a conscious effort to not make Isaac’s queerness the defining thing about him or to push him into a flamboyant stereotype.

Brandon Scott Jones on playing Isaac Higgintoot in CBS’ “Ghosts”: “I think about him being constantly one step to the left of history.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“He’s much more than just that one trait,” says Port. “He’s a military man. He’s a guy from the colonial days. He’s got a bunch of different factors to his character and personality.”

Jones, who is gay, ponders the question when asked if he thinks queer characters should be played only by queer actors.

“My genuine, honest opinion is that the process of playing a character is the process of finding empathy for somebody that you don’t know,” Jones says, noting that he felt a connection to Eric McCormack, a straight actor, and his portrayal of Will, a gay man, on NBC’s “Will & Grace.” “If we’re denying people the chance to kind of step into those shoes, then that’s problematic to me. If a straight person wants to play gay or a gay person wants to play straight, and we feel like we can’t do those things, then, to me, it starts to feel like it’s a snake eating its own tail.”

Modern-day fandom can be intense, so much so that the minuscule details of an actor’s personal life are dissected — a topic that was skewered in “The Other Two.” Jones says he doesn’t like that actors, writers or casting producers could feel “a massive desire to appease a crowd of people instead of just [play] the character.” But he also doesn’t want casting directors to claim that there are no gay actors for these types of roles simply because they’re not looking.

“I just hope that the stories that are being told are being told authentically, whether that means from behind the camera or the writer or anything like that,” says Jones, adding that “there’s also a part of me where I’m like, if somebody wanted me to play a straight character, I would like to think that I could do it.”

This season will see Isaac plunge further into his post-life crisis as he (sometimes literally) loosens his colonial-era ponytail and lets his hair down.

“After a breakup, he’s trying to reinvent himself,” Wiseman says. “He takes his hair down to see if that changes his attitude.” (He says this fits within the rules of “Ghosts,” which doesn’t permit the deceased to change what they’re wearing but does allow them modifications).

And fans will learn more about that biography.

“There’s a part of you that wonders does he just want a book about himself, regardless of how factually correct?” Jones teases.

Maybe Isaac, like the person who plays him, just wants to create a part for himself.