Movie Nation

In the realm of “I TOLD you so,” but you’d rather send hate notes because I pan a movie with murky “seizure inducing” visuals than consider that somebody with 35 years reviewing experience knows what he’s talking about — there’s THIS.

It’s the sort of placard you’re finding at the windows of cinemas across America, warning patrons of the headache inducing focus issues and action flashing imagery in “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”

I ran across this one at the Regal Swamp Fox 14 in Florence, SC.

The studio was pretending it wasn’t happening, so fans started spreading the word. 

They’re doing it on message boards, etc. 

I of course warned viewers off with my review, and was criticized by the unwashed and wet behind the ears.

I polled a few friends in the reviewing profession when the hate mail started pouring in. One noted that he’d warned the studio about “seizures” and yet failed to note that in his review. Another, like me, was wondering if “they’d forgotten to give us 3D glasses” for his showing. Murky. Seizure-inducing or at least headache-inducing. Again, he did not note that in his review.

Cowards. If you fear fanboy/fangirl wrath, you have no business reviewing movies in this millennium.

I know what I saw and I don’t let “You’re RUINING our JUVENILE comic book movie’s PERFECT RATING on Rotten Tomatoes” hate mail and ugly comments sway me. Because I know the fervent comic book fans never let facts or a higher aesthetic get in the way of their fandom. And I never get tired of being right.

I looked around on opening weekend for evidence supporting my thesis — that Sony had screwed up. It took a week or two longer for this blowback to roll out.

And there you go. It’s a movie that runs out of wit and good ideas after 55 minutes (and goes on another hour). And to some viewers, it’s physically painful and or-dangerous to watch. Theaters are warning patrons off. Whole CHAINS are doing it.

Toldya.

Any worries — expressed in other reviews — that “Vice” would render the monstrously Machiavellian Dick Cheney “sympathetic” in an effort to understand him seem misguided.. The title of Adam McKay’s broad-based take-down of the ruthless ex-vice president is “Vice,” not “Nice.”

But there isn’t any confusing of McKay, “SNL” veteran, comic scribe for Will Ferrell, “Anti-Man” and “Drunk History” for the new Oliver Stone, either. “Vice” a mad grab bag of styles, scandals, fact and myth that shows post “Big Short” ambition if not a lot of polish.

“Vice,” using a variety of techniques — audio that sounds like secret surveillance recordings, an invented narration, meetings recreated from the record or reconstructed since the Bush White House erased millions of emails to cover Cheney’s tracks, even a faux Shakespearean Lady Macbeth and her Lord in bed — builds the case that the wildly unpopular, power-drunk blunderer Cheney is the linchpin that ties GOP “theories” of the limits of Constitutional power and its fervent misuse in the hands of a corrupt, venal and wrong-headed King of the Chicken-Hawks.

Christian Bale plays Cheney from his “ne’er do well” youth — a wasted Yale admission lost because he was wasted all the time –through the blue collar early days of his marriage to the Born to be a DC Wife Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams, fierce), who fumes at his power company lineman work and after-hours drunken bar brawling “I’ve picked the wrong man.”

Being from a tiny state, Wyoming, meant that just a little enterprise and a few connections could get him into the Congressional Internship program, and hitching his star to swaggering, salty Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell, terrific) . Cheney learns the secret to success in the 1960s-and-onward GOP.

“Be loyal.”

He follows “Rummy” into the Nixon White House, but not when he’s demoted overseas. Cheney shifts between the public and private sectors — energy, Halliburton — climbs the ladder in the Reagan and Bush I White Houses, angling his way toward that fateful day when guileless goof Bush II (Sam Rockwell, perfect at conveying the confidence that doesn’t quite hide stupidity) lets Cheney steal the store to take the “thankless” job of Vice President.

Bush is a “decisive” know-nothing in “Vice,” Rumsfeld a better operator and turf warrior than big thinker — “I’m like bed bugs. You have to burn the mattress to get rid of me.”

The other neo-cons of the 9/11 debacle and its Iraq War aftermath — Wolfowitz (Eddie Marsan), Scooter Libby (Justin Kirk) float by like caricatures of the venomous reptiles who “engineered” the unwarranted invasion of Iraq and the rise of ISIS.

Cheney? He was “the quiet man,” currying favor, garnering power — “authorizing” the Air Force to shoot down any jetliner being used as a weapon, personally ordering the leak of the name of a CIA agent (Valerie Plame) to “punish” her critical husband, bulldozing differences of opinion and covering up former employer Halliburton’s rapacious billing of the US for the war Mr. Cheney ginned up.

Jesse Plemons plays the narrator, a character whose identity is one of the many surprise twists McKay cooks up. As a device, he has to be omnipotent, carrying the point of view of the filmmaker. As a device he’s clumsy. Naomi Watts comes off better as EveryFoxBlonde in a more biting invention, mimicking the echo chamber that turns its viewers further and further into the darkness.

Bale, bulking up to the weight that kept the inert Cheney in and our of heart attack wards (also covered up), speaking in the measured cadences of a man taking his time, speaking for shock value (an early Cheney trait, making outlandish suggestions, which he’d then reel in to something “reasonable”), gives an unerring portrayal of political manipulation.

What Hannah Arendt famously said of “The banality of evil” when talking about perpetrators of The Holocaust fits here. He’s a boring cutthroat with empathy issues (save when it comes to his gay daughter -played  Alison Pill), a self-confident bully who gives no more thought to second guessing his litany of blunders and crimes than he’d give that second helping of pork ribs.

McKay’s gimmicky movie doesn’t obscure the wonderful job of casting that he did and the Oscar worthy performances. Adams plays Lynne Cheney, given chairwomanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities during Ronald Reagan’s Culture Wars, as the no-nonsense spine who gives Dick his purpose and his marching orders, a partisan loyalist every bit as fierce as her husband. Tyler Perry makes a solid Colin Powell, Bill Camp is all wrong as Gerald Ford.

McKay overreaches as he brings in partisan hack Antonin Scalia as the legal justification of Republican high-handedness, Roger Ailes and Karl Rove for the roles they’d play in the rise of the Right Wing State, and all the rest.

It’s too much to squeeze in, and in truth, it’s too disheartening to think about. A system that’s been rigged for the super rich to do what they want, the will of the people be damned, is not fit for light comedy.

And Bale, Adams, Carell and Rockwell don’t so much leave us in awe at how their characters were able to get us to today, and make us despair at ever being smart enough to see through them and their ilk.

If this is the only consequence these America-breaking goons face for their crimes, I only wish a better puncher than McKay had been raining down the blows upon their heads.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some violent images

Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carell, Tyler Perry, Bill Camp, Allison Pill, Lily Rabe

Credits :Written and directed by Adam McKay. An Annapurna release.

Running time: 2:12

Documentary director turned feature filmmaker Ondi Timoner (“Dig!”) directed this controversial bio-pic about the controversial photographer who created controversy wherever he went in the ’80s — especially Cincinnati.

It stars former Doctor Who (Matt Smith) in the title role, with Marianne Rendón as his lover, muse and foil Patti Smith. Robert Mapplethorpe specialized in homoerotic art, documenting the dark leather-laced gay life of NYC of the ’60s and 70s before emerging as a major figure and lightning rod in the late 70s and early 80s.

Samuel Goldwyn picked it up, and now that it’s finished its year in festivals, everybody can see it. “Mapplethorpe” is coming soon.

The third time doesn’t prove to be the charm for the funnyman pairing of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. The “Step Brothers” struggle to find much in the way of laughter in being the latest to send up that Victorian England smartypants, Sherlock Holmes.

Ferrell’s “Get Hard” co-writer/director Etan Cohen proves as comically out of step as his leads in saddling two of the cinema’s most reliable jokers to a gasping nag of a comedy.

He wasn’t the first to think of Dr. Watson (Reilly) as the true brains of “Holmes & Watson,” though perhaps he is breaking new ground in hunting for giggles in the Good Doctor’s offering of “Cocaine?” or “Heroin?” to Holmes (Ferrell) and those he and the World’s Greatest Detective enlist in their pursuit of Moriarty. That’s cutting edge comedy, there.

And the autopsy shared by Dr. Watson and “The Lady Doctor from America” (Rebecca Hall) turned into a send-up of the potter’s wheel scene in “Ghost” (“Unchained Melody” on the Victrola) kind of works — in a 1990s way.

It’s an old fashioned broad character comedy of the type Ferrell generally avoids, seeing what the genre did to earlier “Saturday Night Live” comics like Mike Myers. It’s more scripted than riffed, and the script is weak tea indeed.

We meet the adult Holmes as he practices his entrance to court, where he proceeds to find every excuse under the sun to excuse the accused Professor Moriarty (Ralph Fiennes, utterly wasted in a role with almost no lines and nothing to play) of his assorted crimes.

Moriarty is freed, to the fury of Inspector Lestrade (Rob Brydon). It’s only when a threat is delivered about destroying “a London marvel,” “changing history” and killing Queen Victoria (Pam Ferris) to boot, that Holmes springs into action. Not that he admits his blunder or anything.

Watson? He’s angling for “co-detective” status. And upon meeting The Queen, he goes to goo. They both do.

“What a looker, eh?”

“STUNNING.”

A corpse stuffed in a cake might contain clues, but Watson can’t examine it on his own. Dr. Grace Hart from America (Hall, game for anything that’ll get a laugh) will lead and he will assist.

“A LADY doctor?”

“Does ‘DOCTOR’ mean the same thing in America?”

She is a pioneer in her field, and already makes “30 cents to every dollar a MAN makes.”

Cohen — and yes, this is pretty much all on you, dude — sends up the Robert Downey/Jude Law “Sherlock” films by having Ferrell’s dimmer Holmes graphically work out how he’ll best a brawler twice his size, defuse a bomb etc.

And he hires many of Britain’s best character actors to play unfunny bit parts — Steve Coogan as a one-armed tattoo artist, Coogan’s comic foil Brydon as Lestrade, Kelly Macdonald as Holmes’ housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson, Fiennes and Hugh Laurie as Sherlock Holmes’ smarter brother (another unfunny attempt at sending up Holmes had that title).

Ferrell and Reilly sing a love duet, sling euphemisms for masturbation — “These are the wages of WANKING!” — and take us through the “London in a Day” tourist attractions as their locations.

The prologue — Holmes and Watson in boarding school — almost works. The future detective was bullied, but clever enough to get every single other student expelled so that he’d have every teacher all to himself.

“Holmes & Watson” drags the Titanic (reusing footage from “Titanic,” and one of the stars) into Victoria’s reign, hurls a comic blast or two at America’s current president and takes shots at American junk food.

“Go back to America, with your ham-dogs and hot burgers!”

It’s just not funny. The material isn’t worthy of the great comic duo of our time.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude sexual material, some violence, language and drug references

Cast: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Rebecca Hall, Kelly MacDonald, Pam Ferris, Ralph Fiennes, Steve Coogan, Hugh Laurie

Credits: Written and directed by Etan Cohen, based on the characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:29

Mr. Peele has found his sweet spot — horror — and his sweet spot time to release — March.

This “Us” trailer has a couple of jolts, one provided by rabbits.

Damn.

Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Elisabeth Moss headline the cast of this March 15 release.

Major chutzpah points to the creators of the award-winning 2016 sex offenders’ rights documentary “Untouchable” for putting their movie into theaters post #MeToo.

A film criticizing the endless parade of laws, often named for children whose molestation, kidnapping, assault and sometimes murder they are aimed to prevent, piling up on the legal system’s books and piling punishment upon convicted offenders was never going to find a big audience. But in January (Jan. 15) of 2019?

And starting your film not just with a montage of governors and presidents signing such laws, but with the disgraced comic Louis CK doing his infamous “child molesters” monologue on “Saturday Night Live?” Wow.

David Feige’s film aims for nuance — aside from that jolt of an opening. Activists — often the parents of victims — the public at large and legislatures have parked a wide range of offenses under the umbrella “sex offender.” That’s tied the legal system’s hands and created punishments, Feige’s film argues, that do not fit the crimes.

So the aged Army veteran John Cryar, a self-described “pedophile” from Oklahoma, is lumped in with Shawna Baldwin, a 20something mother of two who got drunk as a teen and had sex and with an enthusiastic, also drunk 14 year-old boy — both of them on the national sexual offender registry for life.

Child rapists, abductors and murderers are lumped in with child porn collectors and peeping toms.

And all the laws, about where these people who go through “the system,” hopefully (but not always) receiving treatment, counseling, can live, work, congregate, etc. are further blurring any distinction in the nature of the crimes and erasing any leeway the courts might be prone to exercise.

We meet a Florida crusader for such laws and his daughter, abused by a nanny, who as an adult has joined him in that crusade. Ron Book is a big time Miami lobbyist who, on realizing his daughter Lauren had been abused by a Honduran nanny he hired, decided — “I’m a guy with access, a guy with resources,” that he could “fix” this.

For years, he’s pushed for laws, local statutes, etc., often with daughter Lauren’s name on them, adding punishments, work and residency restrictions to convicted offenders’ post-prison lives, a practice that can only be called revenge, not deterrence.

Judy Cornett is another Florida crusader, driven by the sexual assault on her son to form “Predator’s Patrols,” using the National Sex Offender Registry as a place where her “vigilantes” (her word) can monitor, harass and turn in to law enforcement registered offenders they see breaking any of the conditions of their parole.

It’s no wonder Florida is the safest state in the country for children. Only it’s not. I know. I live here and work in the media. The crimes continue, gain maximum TV exposure, and fresh rounds of prompt action by the legislature — to the exclusion of far more common crimes and injustices which could use that money and attention.

It’s a subject that draws instant passion and unanimous support. And as Feige’s film digs into the lobbying, the laws that result, and the damning statistics that utterly undercut all this attention on “recidivism” among the range of people classified as “sexual predators,” you have to wonder why.

It’s a self-feeding “punishment machine” one retired judge calls it. And it’s all built on myths, erroneous pre-conceptions, such as when retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cited an utterly unsupported 1980s “Psychology Today” story by a self-serving counselor to buttress the view that the vast majority of sex offenders become repeat offenders.

Not true. And these laws, such as Miami statutes that so restrict where convicted offenders can live that many — with again, a wide range of offenses putting them under this umbrella punishment — have been rendered homeless, unable to work, camped in a handful of vacant lots or under this or that particular highway underpass? They don’t have any impact at all in child sexual assault rates.

When your kid is most likely to be molested by a family member, family friend, clergy member, coach or scout leader — moving people who have done their time and are on probation — for life — into a tent in a parking lot doesn’t help.

Feige can be accused of cherry-picking the offenders he wants to profile, using only montages of TV coverage to show the “monsters” — loners, vagrants, often with “Duck Dynasty” grooming — who are the demonized reasons for the laws’ existence.

But Federal, state and academic studies are jammed with statistics that back up his thesis. The controls and punishments of those already convicted are effective. Adding on to that is misplacing resources and papering over the problem and preventing people who have served their time from making a contribution to society.

Ironically, shaker-and-mover Ron Book comes off as the villain of the piece — dogmatic, bellicose, a bully who will not consider the fact that he’s not helping matters. He admits, late in the film, that no, not one law he’s jammed through the Florida legislature would have protected his daughter. It’s a pity Feige doesn’t ask an even harder question.

“Are you doing this out of guilt for not vetting or monitoring the Honduran nanny you hired to take care of your precious child?”

Feige added footage to “Untouchable” after the film’s festival tour of 2016, which offers an added topicality — the Weinstein, Cosby, Louis CK, Lauer and Trump sex abuse scandals folded into the conversation.

The film has a little hope that if Book won’t bend, maybe his daughter (who rode her notoriety into the Florida State Legislature) will. The vigilante nature of the way the laws have been “hijacked” has filled the mother of Jacob Wettinger, the child whose abduction led to the national registry, with regrets and even given the “vigilante” Cornett pause. The intention was for this information to be available to law enforcement, not law-unto-themselves-civilians.

But “Untouchable” is yet another dispiriting reminder that Americans are ruled by passion, not science or reason, when it comes to crime and punishment.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic sex crime descriptions, profanity

Cast: Ron Book, Lauren Book, Shawna Baldwin, John Cryar, Eric Janus

Credits: Directed by David Feige. A Meerkat Media release.

Running time: 1:43

A little novelty goes a long way in “Buffalo Boys,” a, violent, slow-moving East Meets West Western from Indonesia.

What do we call this sort of mash-up? A Ramen Noodles Western? 

The set-up promises gun play mixed with unconventional martial arts, Western movie tropes jammed into the colonial era Dutch East Indies. Director and co-screenwriter Mike Wiluan delivers on these, but in a humorless movie with payoffs and pacing that are more wearing than entertaining. 

We meet the brothers Suwo and Jafar on a freight car in 1860 California, staging a prize fight against the biggest brute they can find. Suwo (Yoshi Sudarso) is the pretty, younger sibling. He hypes the fight. Brother Jamar (Ario Bayu) does the fighting.

You know how this goes. The locals underestimate the little foreign guy, the miracle of martial arts astounds one and all. Then the white guys want their money back.

Jamar, it turns out, has learned to be handy with a gun, too. Suwo? He’s a lover, not a fighter. The old man (Tio Pakusadewo) who raised them has been their guide and companion Out West, and he reminds them of how their father died (via flashback). 

“I don’t want to die before we set things straight,” he counsels with his dying breaths (in Malay/Indonesian, with English subtitles). Go back, find the evil Dutchman Van Trach. “Revenge is a right!”

The brothers vow to do just that. They journey home, lay low, hide their identities and remember Van Trach.

“We will find him, wherever he is! And this time we’ll be ready!”

The Dutch East Indies is exotic and primitive, with vast ancient temples and scorpion elixirs to cure what ails you. The land they return to is still under the thumb of colonialism. Villages are raided to force locals to register for forced labor, “cash crops” like sugar cane, tea, tobacco and opium displacing food crops.

The most racist colonialist of them all is Van Trach (Reinout Bussemaker), given to branding his “registered labor” with a “VT.”

The brothers seek out long lost relatives, learn how to handle the local tool/weapon of choice — the machete, although any knife — especially those wavy-bladed Javanese daggers — will do if you just want to stab a guy in the eye.

Indignities and injustices pile up. Beheadings are the favored form of execution, hanging corpses until they rot is the “deterrent” the Dutch use to keep the natives in line.

As the Wild West comes to the Wild East, carnage ensues.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Kiona (Pevita Pearce) is a veritable warrior princess and ally, a deadly archer, even when galloping along, bareback, on a water buffalo. There’s a damsel (Mikha Tambayong) for one brother to fall for, a tortured sex slave (Happy Salma) to try and free and the villain’s towering henchman (Daniel Adnan) to stare down on their way to a final showdown at the Batavia Corral.

“Are you ready?”

“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be!”

There are a lot more colonialist outrages presented here than righteous beatdowns, brawls and shootouts.

Wiluan delivers the fights — stabbings, shootings, dismemberments — with heavy doses of slo-mo and just enough blood to be convincing in their consequences. 

But “Buffalo Boys” is rather tedious going in between the fights, and those action beats are spaced too far apart. All this stuff about Suwo feeling “the pressure” to “be braver,” “be a hero,” all these horrific injustices the brothers witness before finally striking back make the picture kind of a joyless drag. 

The story beats are the same as many a revenge Western, but they feel mishandled here. We know the good guys will be goaded into fighting back before they’re ready, and that they’ll be bested in that first fight, but even that convention feels off.

What’s fun is the novelty of it all, the ride in a covered wagon in the ancient, tropical East is familiar yet exotic. A saloon, what it serves and the manner of bar fight it offers, is kind of a hoot. 

Wiluan’s idea of comic relief is the character Fakar (Alex Abbad), here to show us you can survive getting stabbed in the eye.  “Cyclops” shows up, with the bad guys, again and again as the story builds towards its climax. Which isn’t much of one, as the venal villains (and the actors playing them) register, but not enough to inflame the viewer. 

That finale has the tone the entire movie should have aimed for. It’s over-the-top, with ridiculous firearms (grenade launching shotguns in 1860 Indonesia), heroes surviving mortal wounds, the works.

But the grim performances and general humorlessness of the enterprise let the “Buffalo Boys” down long before they have their moment at high noon.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence, rape 

Cast: Ario Bayu, Yoshi Sudarso, Tio Pakusadewo, Pevita Pearce, Reinout Bussemaker

Credits: Directed by Mike Wiluan, script by Raymond Lee and Mike Wiluan. A Samuel Goldwyn release. 

Running time: 1:42

Better question, SHOULD there be a “Hellboy” reboot without Ron P?

Truthfully, this April 12 Summit release features Ian McShane, Milla Jovovich, Sasha Lane, Thomas Haden Church and David Habour (of “Stranger Things”) as…HELLBOY…looks fun.

Helluva trailer.

The “weekend” part of the “Christmas Holiday Weekend” at the movies is over.

And “Aquaman,” as expected, as projected, is finishing it with a healthy $67.4 million at the box office — since Thursday night.

Will it hit $100 million by midnight Christmas Day? Earlier projections pointed to as low as that, and as high as $121. Now everything’s a tad scaled back in terms of expectations.

Warners has already earned over $400 million from the movie overseas, so North American money is just icing on the cake. We will see more of Mr. Momoa shirtless and swimming, so it would seem.

“Bumblebee,” a puerile but generally inoffensive reboot of the “Transformers” franchise –could not beat Disney’s reboot of the 54 year old “Mary Poppins” franchise (Hah!) on its opening weekend, with Emily Blunt’s “Poppins,” which opened Wednesday, still having enough juice to clear $22 million ($31 million since Wed.).

“Bumblebee” — with stiff competition in the fanboy films category (“Into the Spiderverse,” “Aquaman”) — managed $21.

Jennifer Lopez cashed that STX check but only gave the newish-startup studio a $6.5 million opening weekend. Poor.

“Welcome to Marwen,” Universal’s $39 million gamble on Robert Zemeckis and Steve Carell and Leslie Mann, is a complete bust — $2.35 million. 

“Mary Queen of Scots” opened wide enough to finally crack the top ten. “The Favourite” was forced out of the top ten because of that. 

A little awards heat from one film or the other could change that. Both deserve acting Oscar nominations, I figure. “Favourite” more than “Mary.

“The Mule” is settling in for a long run, with Clint’s fans finding it — slowly. “Green Book” needs an Oscar bounce to get above $30 million, “If Beale Street Could Talk” is winning the per-screen average wars in VERY limited release. A little awards bounce would do wonders for that one.

His smile doesn’t phase his sister or stepfather.

Saying all the right things just makes them, and us, question his sincerity.

But “This time will be different” and “I’ve got a good feeling about this” means different things to his mother. She wants to believe. And she and she alone has not given up.

“Ben is Back” is domestic drama that brings America’s opioid crisis home, that captures the whirlwind of destruction that one addict brings to a family and a town.

Through vivid, wrenching performances by Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges, it personalizes the statistics, and personalizes the glib talk show therapists who counsel “Let them go, you can’t save them.” Not if it’s your kid.

Even if he’s lied to you, repeatedly. Even if he’s robbed you. Even if his many treks to rehab have all but bankrupted you. Even if he got a nice girl from town hooked with him, and she died.

Roberts’s performance of wavering faith, veering from tough love to extreme nurturing, makes “Ben is Back” one of the best pictures of 2018.

Roberts plays Holly, the amusingly unfiltered mother to three kids from two marriages, prepping them for the church Christmas pageant in suburban New York (Sloatsburg Village).

Ivy (Kathryn Newton) will sing a solo. The younger kids will be an angel and a sheep. But all bets are off when they get home from rehearsal and there’s Ben (Hedges), sitting on the icy stoop.

The younger siblings are delighted, but Ivy all but flips out, frantically yelling “Mom MOM,” texting her stepdad (Courtney B. Vance) to “Come home NOW.”

Mom?

“He’s got the sparkle back in his eyes.”

Writer-director Peter Hedges (“Pieces of April,” “Dan in Real Life”) runs us through a textbook “coping with an addict” regimen. Holly tells Ben he is to “not leave my sight.” She will drug test him. As he plays with the little kids, she hides jewelry and prescription drugs, going room to room, methodically junky-proofing the house.

Her husband might implore Ben, who has left rehab 77 days into treatment, that “there’s too many triggers here,” this isn’t a good idea. Mom is hellbent on making it work, sure that this will NOT be another Christmas ruined by charming, stealing, using and abusing Ben.

Manipulator that he is, Ben gets their trepidation. “You’re all still scared of me.”

Just what an addict about to be chased away from the house would say. It seals the deal, and before we know it, Mom is taking Ben out shopping for gifts for the family, a trip where his past — and hers — catch up to them.

He runs into a couple of fellow users. And she has a mall food court encounter with a senescent family physician, who doesn’t remember her or Ben or assuring her that the pain meds he was prescribing weren’t addictive. Her furious, “I hope you die a painful death” (smiling all the while) is the first great jolt of the movie. Dragging Ben to the cemetery and asking where he wants to be buried is the second.

As Holly shows us inner strength we haven’t suspected she has, Ben gives away the genuine struggle that the charm offensive obscures. He’s trying.

“I’ve gotta find a meeting — now!”

As “Ben is Back” takes us from that confessional AA meeting (presided over by Tim Guinee) towards the chickens-come-home-to-roost third act, the grim reality of it all sinks in. If it can happen to this family, it can happen to anyone.

And if it can happen to anyone, how many families would have the strength, patience and faith to fight the good fight, long after most of us would have given up?

There’s a melodramatic turn in the third act of “Ben is Back” that is less convincing than everything that’s come before. But it’s not a deal breaker for me — within the realm of the possible, if not the most obvious and logical resolution to that “reap what you’ve sewn” direction the movie reaches for.

That takes nothing from the moving, emotionally harrowing moments, the stellar performances and the intensely personal story that “Ben is Back” is.

At a time of year when finding a movie that’s “about something” is a chore, here’s one that fulfills that promise.

And If Julia Roberts doesn’t make you cry with her here, you might want to work on that empathy thing.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and some drug use

Cast: Julia Roberts, Lucas Edges, Courtney B. Vance, Kathryn Newton, Tim Guinee, David Zaldivar

Credits: Written and directed by Peter Hedges. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:43