In this watchable but routine overview of the classic California band made up mostly of relatives, the more uncomfortable-making elements about the group get addressed rather than explored.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 29, 2024

It’s a strange lasagne of wonderful, mad musical moments and inexplicable talking heads (Janelle Monáe - why?) all deliciously poisoned by the seeping resentfulness of Wilson’s cousin Mike Love, who says it is unfair Wilson got all of the “genius label”.

| May 29, 2024

“The Beach Boys” is a breezy CliffsNotes version of the band’s ups and downs and cultural relevance and should interest established fans — even if they know it all already — and younger music enthusiasts who are looking for a window in.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 29, 2024

Yet the tone is almost relentlessly upbeat and reverential, drawing on glorious music and brilliantly curated and edited archive footage to put a positive spin on events.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 28, 2024

Taken together, the documents have a chance of re-creating what Endless Summer, the group’s ubiquitous greatest-hits collection, did in 1974 and beyond: Introducing the music of the Beach Boys to a new generation of fans. Not a bad result.

| May 28, 2024

I wondered how, exactly, the movie was going to pack the Beach Boys’ vast career into an hour and 53 minutes. But in its unabashedly conventional and fan-friendly way, it brings this off with a tasteful clarity and showmanship.

| May 28, 2024

It’s entirely palatable, watchable material. But somehow it feels as though the band deserved better.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 25, 2024

[The documentary] offers melancholy and nostalgia, and more than anything heightens appreciation for all those lingering vibrations, good and otherwise.

| May 24, 2024

[Y]ou’d get nearly as much from a marathon of Beach Boys recordings as you would from watching this two-hour film.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 24, 2024

And for the pop romantics among us, the Beach Boys can still cast a spell with those four little words: Wouldn’t it be nice?

| May 24, 2024

Crisply chronicles the rise and fall of a sun-splashed act that was as American as apple pie and rise-and-falls. The band’s “Wouldn’t it be nice” notion was fantasy.

| May 24, 2024

The Beach Boys were seldom the band they gave the impression of being. Frank Marshall’s documentary is good on the disparity between the myth of gilded Californian youth that their music sold to the world and the people who made it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 24, 2024