Grade: C+

If one panda brings in crowds, whether at a zoo or the multiplex, the more the merrier. That seems to be the philosophy behind “Kung Fu Panda 3,” a visually stunning but story-wise pretty threadbare entry in the popular series. It not only brings the animated franchise to trilogy level, but gives us not just one or two of the bears but a whole rollicking village of them. Some might well find that too much of a good thing.

The script by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger finds Po (again voiced by Jack Black) being advanced, beyond his abilities, as the so-called Dragon Warrior by his mentor Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman). But he’s still unable to locate his chi, which he believes he can achieve only through inheritance from his own rare kind. Fortunately, his biological father Li (Bryan Cranston) shows up and invites him to the hidden mountain village where pandas have congregated after the disaster that befell their race, as the second installment recounted. Li’s arrival—and Po’s decision to leave with him in an effort to fulfill his destiny—upset Po’s biological father, goose restaurateur Ping (James Hong), who tags along and eventually makes peace with the situation, and with Li, as a means of helping their son.

Meanwhile Po’s mission to become all he can be is made more urgent with the entrance into the Real World of the malevolent Kai (J.K. Simmons), who has been systematically stealing the chi of the masters in the Spirit World, including that of the tortoise Oogway (Randall Duk Kim). Having accumulated such enormous power in the jade amulets he wears and can summon at will, he defeats all of Po’s friends—Shifu, Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Viper (Lucy Liu) and Crane (David Cross)—and absorbs their powers as well. He then sets his sights on Po and the entire panda village.

Up to this point “Kung Fu Panda 3” has vacillated fairly equally between sumptuous but overextended fight sequences, staged with near-balletic precision and lots of visual pizzazz, and the more personal scenes involving Po, Li, Ping and the other pandas, like the dancing princess Mei Mei (Kate Hudson) who obviously has her eye on Po (Kate Hudson). With Kai’s arrival at panda village, however, it swings into full battle mode. Of course, the inevitable victory of good over evil will require more than martial-arts knowhow; a film of this sort can’t get by without recourse to extolling the virtues of family, community, teamwork and self-sacrifice. But for all its lip-service to such matters (or, in the case of Ping, who’s the most eloquent about them, beak-service), the movie really does devolve into somewhat of a martial-arts explosion, which frankly can’t get a mite tiresome before it’s all over, though the leavening of humor makes it go down more easily.

And it must be admitted that even when the fighting goes on, directors Jennifer Yuh Nelson and Alessandro Carloni keep things moving, and the voice work is excellent, with Black, Hong and newcomers Cranston and Hudson providing especially strong contributions. (The other members of the secondary cast, however, are reduced to little more than walk-ons, and some will miss the camaraderie that was so big a part of the earlier installments.)

All that would mean little, though, if it weren’t for the exceptional work of the DreamWorks animation team, who create a succession of widescreen images that are literally feasts for the eye, in ravishing colors. The 3D format, as usual, dulls the vividness of the visuals, but it also adds texture to them, making for a fairly equal trade-off.

The “Kung Fu Panda” series has never attained the quality of the best Pixar product, or of some other one-shot animated pictures of recent years. But its mixture of warmhearted comedy, slapstick and action have managed to entertain legions of younger viewers, and this latest installment won’t disappoint them. And uneven as it is, it certainly puts the other animated bear flick out there—the dreadful “Norm of the North”—to shame.

Grade: C+

The atmosphere is the real star of this new screen version of Shakespeare’s Scottish play, in which even Michael Fassbender’s ambitious thane and Marion Cotillard’s manipulative Lady Macbeth—as well as the Bard’s text—play second fiddle to the graphic-novel mood of gloom, blood and fatalism favored by director Justin Kurzel and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw. The result is not without its impressive moments, but like so many of the earlier screen adaptations, this “Macbeth” falls short.

One intriguing element of the much-edited screenplay fashioned by Todd Louiso, Jacob Koskoff and Michael Lesslie is its emphasis on father-son relationships. The play alludes to Lady Macbeth’s having given birth, but Kurzel’s film expands on that by beginning with a scene in which the couple presides over the funeral of an infant, presumably theirs, and then spotlighting the death of an older boy—either Macbeth’s older son or a favored squire to whom he’s become a surrogate father—in the initial battle sequence. Later the film makes a point of placing special focus not only on Duncan (David Thewlis) and Malcolm (Jack Reynor), but on Banquo (Paddy Considine) and young Feance (Lochlann Harris), the lad who here takes up the sword of vengeance at the very close. It also takes pains to show us the fiery execution of Macduff’s (Sean Harris) children along with his wife (Elizabeth Debicki).

The fire motif is also an element of the red hue that Kurzel and Arkapaw add to the final reel: they have Macduff set the timbers his soldiers are carrying from Birnam Wood aflame. That might not make much sense in the context of the narrative, wherein the branches are intended to conceal the approaching invaders, but it certainly does exhibit extravagant visual flair.

These are interesting interpretive touches, but this “Macbeth” is, despite its love of gore and swordplay (though, to be sure, it doesn’t match Polanski in that respect), mostly a grimly lugubrious, and not terribly compelling, affair. One can understand Kurzel’s desire to avoid the sort of declamatory style that Orson Welles brought to his threadbare 1948 film (or Olivier would surely have brought to his, had he made one—Branagh probably will when he gets around to it), but the solution he’s adopted—of having a good deal of the text whispered or mumbled, often against montages of extraneous visuals—has the effect of muting its effect. (Another choice, in which one of the most famous soliloquies is delivered straight into the camera, as if it were the equivalent of an interview, doesn’t work much better.) The result is a version of “Macbeth” that comes across as a prolonged dirge interrupted occasionally by spurts of action—mostly at beginning and end, though at a few points in between as well.

Nor do the cast make up for the directorial choices with overpowering performances. Fassbender brings a leonine gruffness to Macbeth, but doesn’t capture the character’s emotional descent following the death of Duncan in much more than a generalized way, and his recitation of the dialogue has little poetry. Cotillard is similarly hampered by Kurzel’s vision. She’s very good in the scene showing her cunningly covering up the evidence of her husband’s guilt in Duncan’s death, and is aided by the addition of situating Lady Macbeth as a witness to the killing of the Macduff clan. But while she registers strength in the sequence in which her husband sees Banquo’s ghost during a celebratory feast, her later scenes—even her big mad moment—are less persuasive. The remaining cast is good without bringing any special insight.

In fact, throughout Kurzel appears less interested in the actors than the settings in which they’re placed. He and Arkapaw certainly employ the Scottish locations to good effect, fashioning windswept vistas that emphasize the unforgiving harshness of the environment. And Ely Cathedral is an imposing stand-in for Macbeth’s castle. Fiona Crombie’s production design, Nick Dent’s art direction and Alice Felton’s set decoration are all excellent, and costume designer Jacqueline Durran has provided garb that adds a touch of imagination to authenticity.

But in the end the film has the feel of being more Kurzel’s “Macbeth” than Shakespeare’s. One could make the same observation about Welles’s and Polanski’s versions (or Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” of course), but in each of those cases there are more compensatory elements than one finds here.