Warners is a bit late showing this in my market, so there are reviews aplenty already out there for this J.K. Rowling sequel.

Will I be the one to tip the Johnny Depp “Potterworld” picture into positive or negative territory?

I have been lukewarm on this whole Wizarding World of Movies, with only a couple of the films made by very good directors (Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell) sticking in the mind.

There’s too much “Let’s pause and admire that beautiful digital dragon or gryffon ” in these movies, endless populating of the “Fantastic Beasts” and too much appreciation of them to let the film’s sing. But we shall see what we see when we see it, right?

Motoring the canals of Greater London provides a charming backdrop to “Anchor and Hope,” a generally pedestrian romance about a lesbian couple’s struggles to have a baby.

Carlos Marques-Marcet (“10,000 Km”_ has lovely locations and a good cast that you can’t blame him for the funereal saunter that he uses to pace their story. It doesn’t help that this general scenario has been the subject of lots of episodic TV (more TV shows than movies) so that every obstacle and setback feels familiar to the point of worn out.

We meet Kat and Eva (“Harry Potter” veteran Natalia Tena and Oona Chaplin of “Game of Thrones”) as they bury their cat. Chorizo was so beloved that they tie up for the burial, and get Eva’s “wacky” mother (Geraldine Chaplin) to chat some Native America/Buddhist mashup gibberish over the dear departed.

And that sets Eva off. She wants her children to know “the full extent of the madness” of her odd, funny and unique mother. She’s 30ish and figures the time is now. The plan? Get their mutual friend, the Barcelona babe-magnet Roger (David Verdaguer of “10,000 Km” and “Summer ’93”) to come stay with them a couple of weeks — and for ONLY a couple of weeks. A little artificial insemination, and voila, they’ll start a family.

But Kat, who pilots the boat, lives in her leather jacket and loves Eva madly, isn’t sure about all this — especially as “the plan” was discussed and approved in drunken reverie.

Roger? Hey, as long as there’s porn he can watch in the head (toilet) while doing his part, he’s along for the ride — for however long it takes.

Marques-Marcet, who co-wrote the script, gets the most out of this promising set-up and comically game cast in the film’s earliest scenes. Roger, the ladies man, wears a Wolverine beard and a leer that no mere Londoner can resist — apparently.

He speaks English to Eva (mostly) and Spanish to his old buddy and bar-cruising wing-woman Kat, and it’s rare that he’s not joking around, even about the job at hand.

“What’s funnier than a dead kid? A dead kid dressed like a clown.” It’s funnier in Spanish.

Want some food?

“English food? No thanks.”

There is drinking and inseminating and nostalgic sing-along and bump and grind sessions to Inner Circle among the festivities. Roger goes ashore to charm the local ladies, and his bubbly carousing sucks Kat back into an old life that Eva was sure she’d left behind.

But the fun fades as the film, broken into titled chapters — “I: We Can Get Another Cat,” “III, A Kidney Bean,” etc — and “Anchor and Hope” drifts and then runs aground. Cute moments of baby proofing the vessel (boats are built somewhat baby-proof), emptying the bar, for instance, are skipped past as Eva and Roger get “Oh, Susannah” sentimental at the piano.

The players are pretty good, with the Elder Chaplin and Tena standing out, and Verdaguer making a fine rascal to the extent the script lets him become one.

The boat-handling, including hand-turning the ancient canal locks, is a great detail, the shoreside scenery lovely even when it is tumbledown industrial.

And there are laughs in Eva’s political arguments for reproducing.

“Homophobes and religious fanatics are having babies. Reasonable people have to have them, too!”

Roger’s many conquests include Jinx, a black woman (Lara Rossi) who comes back to the boat only to see her lover disappear into the head for another shot at making a deposit for Eva. Jinx, who endures the Spaniard’s comparisons of her to chocolate, just rolls with it.

“Listen to him go!”

“You get used to it.”

The pre-insemination interview Eva carries out (“Do you have any psychopaths in your family?”) is a tired device in such movies and isn’t funny here.

That’s the case with too much of “Anchor and Hope” to make it worth recommending. Sure, there’s a novel setting and hot sex, here and there. But the talk turns toward the tedious and the jokes, the situations and the romantic longing never draw us in. The viewer isn’t so much a part of the story as a bystander, curious and occasionally titillated, but rarely moved.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity

Cast: Natalia Tena, Oona Chaplin, Geraldine Chaplin, David Verdaguer, Lara Rossi

Credits:Directed by Carlos Marques-Marcet, script by Jules Nurrish and Carlos Marques-Marcet. A Wolfe release.

Running time: 1:53

Imogen Poots never disappoints.

Whatever role she takes, whichever indie film project engages her passion, her signing on the dotted line always makes for a fascinating peek into an gritty world beyond most of our experience.

“Mobile Homes” joins “Sweet Virginia,” “A Country Called Home,” “Green Room” and and “Frank & Lola” among her recent walks on the down and out side. She plays Ali Dresden, a mom with a decade or more of ongoing bad decisions making her fear for the future of her little boy (screen newcomer Frank Oulton).

When we meet her, she’s at social services on the wintry day on the Canadian plains. She’s trying to place her eight or nine year old son in foster care.

Address?

“We don’t have one.”

She won’t admit to “abuse or neglect,” so the social worker’s hands are tied. And as she storms out, the receptionist says “Your kid just left.”

“He knows how to get home.”

“Home” is where the ancient Chevy van is. With boyfriend Evan (her “Green Room” co-star Callum Turner), who adopted Bone or so she says, they live on the road and on the run — cheap motels, breaking into empty houses and squatting, “dine and dash” meals at diners, transporting fighting cocks to the hinterlands where entertainment is scarce and fighting roosters, illegal or not, are valued.

Bone covets one rooster he keeps as a pet, shaving him for fights and generally learning the ropes from Evan, who never met a scam or hustle he didn’t like.

Ali is smitten, even if she knows that Evan’s bad news, that any given “Go check my brake lights” order could mean he’ll ditch her and leave them in the lurch. A kid needs more care than they’re giving him, but Evan just sees the boy as a gimmick for starting a cock fight, a decoy for their “dine and dash” adventures and a “safe” way of selling drugs to the truckers, farmers, drunks and low-lifes who show up for cock fights.

A police raid separates the “family,” and Ali and Bone make their escape hiding out in a manufactured house being delivered to the middle of nowhere. Grizzled truck driver and trailer park handyman Robert (Callum Keith Rennie) is furious at their stowing away, but sympathetic to a woman with a child. Could this be their second chance?

There’s a whiff of “The Florida Project” to writer-director Vladimir de Fontenay’s (“Memoria”) depiction of a free-range kid, making his own fun, making his own way and making us fear for the neglect or ill use that threatens his future and his very life. Young Oulton makes Bone introverted, a child who doesn’t know what he should fear and what could happen every time he grabs a fighting chicken the wrong way, dashes out of the van mid-fight or works a room with a bag of drugs to sell. It’s a guileless performance which gives us a taste of the life Bone might live when he finally gets to play with kids his own age.

Turner makes Evan manic, impulsive, potentially violent and predatory, with barely the native cunning needed to survive like this. He plays with the boy, but only to keep him happy and useful to him.

“We’ll just use Bone when we need’em.”  Handing him dime bags, he flatters the boy with his new drug dealing responsibility — “This is big boy stuff!”

He is drooling malevolence, but we kind of get what Ali sees in him. Poots lets us see the desperation in her, the judgment that vanishes from her face whenever her man gives her a look or makes his move — in the van, motels or motel pools.

And Rennie gives Robert an edge, too, a randy redneck who might not be all that noble after he’s had a few drinks. He makes a good tour guide and salesman for the trailers her transports when Ali mocks them as “Playmobil houses.”

“It’s a house. A home is what you build inside of it.”

Director de Fontenay has a great eye for detail — filling “Mobile Homes” with inside cock-fighting particulars and manufactured housing factory work, roadhouses and after hours “clubs” where the chicken fighting takes place.

And Poots, as always, makes a vivid impression of a fearful, impulsive woman playing out her string, pausing only now and then to consider how the consequences of her actions (predictable though they are) aren’t just something she will face. There’s a little boy growing up too fast, too wrong, too dangerously for the risks she’s taking not just with her freedom and life, but his as well. Poots makes Ali’s choices, impulsive to the last, gritty and believable, even when we can see what she cannot — how badly this all could end.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drugs, sex, profanity

Cast: Imogen Poots, Callum Turner, Frank Oulton, Callum Keith Rennie

Credits:Written and directed by Vladimir de Fontenay. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:45

Mark Wahlberg knows better than to do star comedies built around whatever character he’s playing. Buddy comedies are what work for him, mostly ones co-starring Will Ferrell. It takes the right “buddy” to get him wound up, antic and funny.

Rose Byrne takes on that role in “Instant Family,” an in-over-their-heads adoption comedy from Wahlberg’s “Daddy’s Home” team. And the two, playing overmatched adoptive parents, really wind each other up. The manic patter, voices rising in volume, the eyes bugging out hysterics generated by these two — especially Byrne (“Bridesmaids,” “Neighbors”) — deliver big laughs in between the warm fuzzies of what turns out to be a sentimental but sober look at adoption, with lots and lots of swearing.

Oh yeah, Hollywood’s reflection of the culture it works in has been free and loose with the PG-13 profanity, parents cursing around, cursing to and cursing-out their kids in screen comedies the past few years. It’s a reflection of what you run into in theme parks and fast food joints. It’s as if “The Bad News Bears” had replaced every child-rearing book on the market as the instruction manual for how to talk to your children.

In “Instant Family,” the cold slap of “This is what a FAMILY holiday comedy sounds like, now” sinks in when little first-grader Lita (Julianna Gamiz) turns to her adoptive mom, who is denying her a new cut-rate Barbie at the store because she already has a more “body positive” dolly at home, lets loose.

“You body positive whore!”

Kids cussing — low-hanging fruit, but always worth a laugh.

Ellie and Pete are successful California house-flippers, never giving much thought to kids until her competitive sister (Allyn Rachel) and obnoxious brother-in-law (Tom Segura) bait them into a fight over their latest too-many-bedrooms-for-them-to-need fixer-upper. That’s right, the Wagners are shamed into wanting kids.

And Ellie, trying to ease herself into this idea, makes the mistake of checking out “Who’s up for adoption” on a website, and next thing you know they’re taking “certification” classes from Octavia Spencer and Tig Notaro, making tactless cracks comparing kids to dogs (that website uses the “Adopt this Dog” website model), insulting their fellow prospective parents and swinging between petrified and “What’s the big deal?” with regard to the Big Change that is Coming.

Their parenting on a dare extends to who they zero in on at the local “adoption fair.” Yes, they’re totally a thing and yes, that’s exactly what shelters do with dogs in need of a home. Nobody else will talk to the teenage foster children, so that’s what Self-Righteous Pete and Ellie will do. That’s a cute running gag, that these two like how adoption makes them look generous, magnanimous even.

Sassy Lizzie (Isabella Moner of “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” and “Transformers: The Last Night”) doesn’t scare them off. Even the news that she comes with two younger siblings is just a doubling down on the dare. The Wagners bring home tantrum-tossing Lita and accident-prone, scared-of-his-own-shadow Juan (Gustavao Quiroz) and figure that love, generosity and civility will win over these traumatized-by-the-system children of a crack addict.

Right.

The producers figure they earn a pass on all the adult language and adult subject matter (Lizzie’s sexting flirtation with a 22 year-old) by giving a scruffy, rude picture a nice gloss of good intentions. Spencer and Notaro’s characters give solid statistics and blunt reality checks in between sarcastic riffs on adoption and how it’s not for everyone.

Moner’s Lizzie is quick to play the “poor orphan/hard life” card when her insolence is challenged. How do you pick a foster kid out in a crowd? Look for the child “carrying her whole life around in a Hefty bag.”

That may work on Granny Jan (Julie Haggerty, funny), but not on smothering Earth Grandmother Sandy (The Great Margo Martindale).

The grim keep-kids-for-a-paycheck foster parenting system earns a few shots, and there are slapstick accidents, dining disasters and department store meltdowns. The birth mother’s return signals court scenes — there’s a genuine effort to get a taste of the entire process in “Instant Family.” Too much effort.

But every so often, Byrne’s eyes bug out even wider than Wahlberg’s, her voice goes even higher and her patter outruns his in a sprint and she…just…loses…it. Goes off. She is hilarious in this, with a script that lets her lull us with how sweet and reasonable Ellie is, until she reaches her limit.

Or until somebody — sister, mother, adoption agent or out-of-control-kid — baits her.

“We could have had a little toddler who doesn’t have OPINIONS or THONG underwear!”

In the roller coaster between serious and silly that “Instant Family” bounces along on, Byrne is the Fast-Pass holder, and she makes this uneven dramedy a hoot, and more importantly, makes it work.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, sexual material, language and some drug references

Cast: Rose Byrne, Mark Wahlberg, Isabela Moner, Octavia Spencer, Tig Notaro, Margo Martindale, Julie Hagerty, Joan Cusack

Credits:Directed by Sean Anders, script by Sean Anders and John Morris. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:57

It wouldn’t be the holidays without a mildly inappropriate Mark Wahlberg “family” comedy.

And this year, there’s no Will Ferrell to cover for him.

So Mark has to bring his manic A-game.

“Instant Family” is about adoption, so a lot of the marketing they’re doing for it is emphasizing that, sort of a “Bring a kid you didn’t give birth to home for the holidays.” OK, not that crass. Not quite. But give them credit for grabbing a cause (teens in need of adoption) and running with it.

This is the last of the week’s releases to screen for critics (thus, reviews are tardy), but they’re showing it well before opening. And the trailers have had good timing and a laugh or three.

Their secret weapon? Rose Byrne. “Bridesmaids” straight-woman, give’em hell better half to Seth Rogen in “Neighbors,” funniest thing about “Get Him to the Greek.” That Rose Bryne.

I’m pumped. Are you pumped? Are you?

Galit Tsuk prepares dinner as her youngest daughter looks on.

And in the bathroom down the hall of their flat in the small Israeli coastal city of Nahariya, Amit Tsuk puts on jewelry and makeup. She brought their four children into this world as their father. But now she has come out as a woman and in macho Israel, we’re invited into this story of a “Family in Transition.”

The Tsuks eventually gained a certain notoriety in their home country (Galit got a couple of books out of this), but Ofir Trainin‘s intimate film captures this couple and the extended family surrounding them as Amit transitions and everybody around her adjusts with varying degrees of success.

There’s crying, but that’s often over this or that relative failing to acknowledge Amit’s change, or embrace Galit’s decision to stick with her. The rest of the time, it’s just Amit’s hormones supplements doing their worst.

Trainin’s film, in Hebrew with English subtitles, begins with home movies of their wedding, singing an Israeli pop song about “Don Quixote, wake up for me and stay my hero.”

But Amit, a wounded combat veteran with more than a few tattoos, has been living a lie. Now she’s out, and even if the couple now look like sisters — or at least burly-girly cousins — even if their kids’ friends (some of them) shun them, even if their Orthodox relatives renounce them, even if jerk teens on the street yell homophobic slurs their way, Amit is going through with changing her sex.

Whatever Amit is going through, Galit is her rock. She bucks her up before a “coming out” birthday party — “Be strong.” She promises her love is unconditional. “I will love until I reach a point I can’t take it any more.” And she changes the subject to “I should lend Amit my tights and thermal stockings,”

We even travel with them to Thailand where Galit is Amit’s moral support during the operation and the grindingly long recovery. Galit is there applying makeup before Amit wakes up after the operation. We see them laugh together and can feel the love.

But their teen son Yarden tells the filmmaker he sees trouble on the horizon, and youngest daughters Agam and Peleg giggle over the teasing they get from classmates, laughing at their burden even as their parents show signs that the strain is about to send them to rabbinical court, where one goes to divorce in a quasi-theocracy.

Having snippets of so many different points of view makes this shortish film’s turn towards disintegration feel abrupt, not properly set up. The kids could feel it, so they say. But Trainin gets this from them after the fact. Either we don’t have time to root for them as a couple or they’re not just warm and inviting enough for us to do it without prompting.

And Trainin’s in-your-face camera reminds us, every now and then, that whatever the strain the family is under, it can’t have helped to have the unblinking video camera sharing the most intimate (almost) moments of this trying and traumatic time.

We even catch Galit giving the camera operator the stink eye. We can sense that whatever love story Trainin set out to make, the one the Tsuk’s provide isn’t going to be the one expected.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast:Amit Tsuk, Galit Tsuk

Credits: Written and directed by Ofir Trainin. Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:10

It’s a fangirl/fanboy magnet based on a graphic novel/manga, just in time for Valentine’s day.

So naturally the digital teen girl created for it has “big anime eyes.” Rose Salazar voice-acted (and motion captured?) the title role.

With Oscar winners Mahershala Ali, Jennifer Connolly and Christoph Waltz, a script that James Cameron took a whack at and Robert “Sin City” Rodriguez behind the camera, this thing is engineered to OWN February.

“The Office” actor wasn’t a star on a series that produced several of them, but Paul Lieberstein is following in John Krasinski’s footsteps by writing, directed and starring in his own vehicle.

“Song of Back and Neck” has Lieberstein playing a lawyer with epic back pain (look for director Paul Feig in a cameo as his doctor).DeWitt’s a client with the acupuncturist on speed dial.

Clark Duke and Chelsea Cook also star in this modest farce, opening in limited release at the end of Nov. 

Ansel Elgort makes subtle work of Every Actor’s Dream, the chance to play two characters in the same movie, in “Jonathan.”

It’s a downbeat and curious sci-fi drama about a young man whose identical twin wasn’t so much in the womb with him as in his actual body.

Jonathan and “Jon” are trapped, but science and reason — in the person of Dr. Mina (Patricia Clarkson) — have found solutions.

They will live separate lives in the same tastefully Spartan apartment. One has dreams of a career, and will go to work and keep, rigidly, to a daylight-only schedule. The other will be the night owl/barfly, “having fun” until the wee hours.

They keep a shared video diary to keep track of who did what, and with whom, the day or night before. Neighbors, colleagues, women who might be interested are documented each late afternoon for one, each late night by the other.

“I ran into Sarah in the lobby and helped her with her groceries. So in case you see her, that’s why she loves you so much.”

Daytime Jonathan, called “Jay” by his sibling, is organized, studying French, a draftsman and rising star in architecture. Only he can’t put in the hours to make that big leap.

Slacker night owl “Jon” doesn’t do his share of the chores, doesn’t get in early enough for them to be rested and doesn’t share everything.

“Having a girlfriend’s against the rules,” and he knows it. But did he break it off as he said he would?

Enter the private detective. Organized Jonathan isn’t able to investigate on his own after hours, so enter Ross Craine (Matt Bomer). He’s puzzled about how one guy can be “both the client and the mark…a somnambulist or something?”

But he’s the one who figures out Jonathan’s being lied to. There’s a girlfriend, the bartender Elena (Suki Waterhouse). That’s upsetting to daytime Jay, because, well just because.

“Everybody has a routine.”

“Well, you run yours like a German train.”

First-time director/co-writer Bill Oliver takes this premise about as far as it will go, and in directions that we see coming the moment we meet Elena. A woman will come between them, seeing attractive traits in each despite their disparate personalities.

The melodrama that ensues only approaches something trippy and sci-fi in nature late in the third act. There’s no “Being John Malkovich” wit and whimsy to this, no “Dead Ringers” menace to raise the stakes and heighten the tension.

It’s almost entirely from straight-arrow Jonathan’s point of view, a mistake that dulls down the proceedings. The conflict feels low-stakes, even when life or death are involved.

“Jonathan” plays like an intellectual puzzle that isn’t challenging enough, an acting exercise that has everything but emotional connection and a tour de force robbed of its force by just lying there, inert when it should be picking up steam, cold when the characters and scenario should be heating up.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Patricia Clarkson, Suki Waterhouse, Matt Bomer

Credits:Directed by Bill Oliver, script by Gregory Davis, Peter Nickowitz and Bill Oliver. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:35

Love the music. Judy Collins singing  “Both Sides Now.”

But this teaser doesn’t do anything to tease, really, the “Toy Story” movie that Disney-Pixar decided to made after the warm, dire, face-death-and-oblivion-itself send-off of “Toy Story 3.”

Whatever you want to make of the “Toy Story” universe, it’s impossible to see this as anything other than cynical.  Existential? Umkaaaay.

In any event, June 21, “Toy Story 4” will open, dominate the box office for weeks if not a solid month, and that’ll be that, right?