From left: Will Sasso (Curly), Chris Diamantopoulos (Moe), and Sean Hayes (Larry) bring the trio back in the Farrelly brothers’ “The Three Stooges.”

The Globe's Ty Burr finds the Stooges never gets any respect, even in the new movie being released this Friday.

Where intellectuals and aesthetes embraced the Marx Brothers and Chaplin, the Three Stooges have remained a cultural no-fly zone.

They are the perceived province of the uneducated and the very young.

But the trio's films offer endless variations on the theme of awareness simultaneously attained and forestalled.

The Stooges are content to remain idiots. They are rigorously unprofound. That’s why they’re profound.