Marvel creator Stan Lee hasn’t put in a lot of appearances lately since his death.

But he’s back, in “Spider-Man: Across the Spider Verse.” He’s got a comic book store in this very animated cameo. When he was alive, Stan was always making cameos in Marvel movies. Nice to see death hasn’t stopped him!

BTW, the word “verse” is changing its meaning thanks to Marvel. Now when kids sing “Second verse same as the first” on camp buses, they’ll think they’ve crossed into another world.

Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” starts on Netflix this week after a weeklong run in theaters to gin up interest. It made a lot of money in the latter run and sold out its houses. A lot of movie bloggers through Netflix made a mistake not letting it run longer in theaters, but I think the plan is right. “Glass Onion” may have worn out its welcome in a wider release.

The reason is it has no third act. The first act, with Daniel Craig returning as Benoit Blanc, is a bit of genius. Benoit turns up in Greece as the uninvited guest of the Elon Musk-ish Miles Bron played with slithery self-satisfaction by Edward Norton. Miles has invited a bunch of friends and one enemy for a weekend of murder mystery. Someone will “die” — probably him — and the group will have to figure it out.

The group of friends includes Kate Hudson, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, and Dave Bautista. Unfortunately for Bron, Benoit guesses the whole thing, the weekend plans are shot, or so it seems. (There are a lot of humorous things going on including Johnson’s friend, actor Noah Segan, wandering around the set completely divorced from the plot.)

Act Two is pretty much an extended flashback, one of the weirder screenplay tricks in some time. It’s almost all about Benoit and Janelle Monae as, as, well, you’ll see, the actual story is explained: all the friends met when they had no money. Monae and Norton hit it big in some kind of tech and bankrolled the others in their pursuits. But Monae and Norton have had a falling out, which affects the friends, or “The Shitheads,” as Monae calls them.

As I said, Norton’s Bron has rented a Greek island with a mansion on it. No expense has been spared, in real life or in the movie. Unlike the first “Knives Out,” all modesty is gone, from a reproduction of the Mona Lisa to all kinds of gizmos including laser beams. The set is a character, and a forbidding one at that.

But the second act works, and is the tightest part of this long movie. Craig and Monae seem like they’re in a two-hander by Pinter, and I actually sat forward in my seat both times I watched the film just to see what they were up to.

The third act is where Johnson’s road runs out. Once Benoit solves the murders and explains them in his Southern drawl, you can feel Johnson saying to himself. Now what? Well, he had a big budget this time, so there are explosions and chases and a lot of running around. There’s a lot of shark jumping, and then the Beatles’ song “Glass Onion” wraps it all up.

We do learn in this movie a tiny bit about Benoit Blanc’s personal life where he sleeps, and with whom (it’s a surprise). The screenplay is full of meta bon mots so we know our detective is at least somewhat aware of the world around him. Craig is just sublime and so is Monae. But I do wish the whole Onion, when it was peeled away, revealed something a little more profound. Plus, in the first movie, a family is rocked by the murder of their patriarch. In this one, the murder victims are not terribly sympathetic. Johnson seems more concerned with the plot mechanics than the souls of his characters.

Still, “Glass Onion” is a satisfying entertainment for a cold winter night.

Cillian Murphy plays J Robert Oppenheimer in next summer’s blockbuster about the development of the atomic bomb. Christopher Nolan is the director and if this movie is told in a straightforward way, it will be great.

Let’s hope there’s no playing with time. This trailer looks amazing.

Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr. and Florence Pugh co-star.

Welcome to “Babylon,” an homage to Kenneth Anger’s infamous book, “Hollywood Babylon,” filled with scurrilous stories — almost all untrue — describing the film capital of the world in the late 1920s as Sodom and Gomorrah.

Director Damien Chazelle, with three really great movies behind him (“Whiplash,” “La La Land,” “First Man”), seems to have taken all this imagined bacchanalia too seriously. So he’s applied his generous sense of art production and cinematography to invent a mostly bogus world that goes way over the top and collapses in a heap of incoherence.

At three hours, “Babylon” has a lot of different plots that don’t come together. Their one common thread is sewn by Margot Robbie as a flapper who is styled, for some reason, a like an 80s disco queen. She looks nothing like the other women of the film, and sounds like Amanda Seyfriend‘s Marion Davies from “Mank.”

Robbie’s Nellie escapes her restrictive home for the lights of Hollywood. She’s determined to be a big star in the silent films. She makes a friend who becomes her manager and lover (Diego Calva as Manny), They are just the beginning of a long list of studio executives, actors, and hangers on, some real, some fictitious, who are at the center of a debauched world that makes “The Great Gatsby” look like a horror movie.

Nellie and Manny, you see, navigate Hollywood’s sinister waters through wild parties, secret orgies held in tunnels beneath the city, and so on. This is Anger’s fantasy now filtered through Chazelle’s camera. None of it makes any sense or connects to anything in the way of a coherent movie. Remember Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in “La La Land”? Well, they’re not here.

I can’t say even Nellie and Manny are sympathetic characters. The only one who is is Brad Pitt as fading silent actor/director Jack Conrad. Sound familiar? Conrad is similar to Pitt’s Oscar winning character, Cliff Booth, who also sensed his time was up as stunt man and coat carrier to Leonardo DiCaprio’s middling TV star, Rick Dalton, in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” With everything else so completely out of control in this movie, Pitt gets quite zen. He makes himself the magnetic center of the film, and we’re willing to follow him to his tragic fate.

The only other character in “Babylon” who conveys Conrad’s self-knowledge is Jean Smart‘s gossip columnist, Elinor St. John. She’s pre-Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, visiting sets, trying to control lives, make or break careers. Smart is having some big moment right now with “Hacks.” Elinor is not so different from Deborah Vance, the world weary comedian. She’s seen it all. And in the dead center of this three hour carnival, Elinor and Jack have the best scene of “Babylon” as if Cliff and Deborah meet in a time warp. I think they deserve Oscar nominations just for that.

The rest of “Babylon.” though is a Mixmaster, a Cusinart, a kaleidoscope. It’s too much money, no restraint, everything but the kitchen sink. Or, and the kitchen sink. It’s Chazelle’s “Heaven’s Gate.” He’ll recover from it, and so will we. But like David O. Russell’s “Amsterdam” — another all star cast and creative bloat — it’s a major disappointment in a year when we needed each of them to be successes so badly. Disappointment is all you get here.