Movie Nation

The Ohio high school’s class trip to Washington, D.C. was a bit of a bust. Until, that is, one classmate had the chutzpah to get on a pay phone, make a call and make a pitch.

Before they know it, he and a handful of his classmates are shaking hands and sharing a a few life-goals with the vice president of the United States.

Cute story, something to tell your own kids decades after it happened, right? That day in 1978 when you met Vice President Walter Mondale. And the class joker who made it happen? That would be the weird kid in school, the solitary blond named Jeffrey Dahmer.

“My Friend Dahmer” is a “Dazed and Confused” look back at high school in the ’70s — the hideous fashions, the ugly decor, the high school hijinx that a group of band nerds/tennis team pals got into.

But hanging over it all is the darkest of shadows. That awkward kid who never quite fit in, who got attention by faking spastic fits for laughs in class, in the halls and at the mall? He become one of the most notorious and gruesome serial killers in American history. It’s “Dazed and Confused” with a chilling true-crime edge.

Every mass murderer makes us reach for answers. The spree killer who shoots up a church, a concert, a nightclub or an elementary school, the methodical, one-murder-at-a-time serial killer who develops a taste for taking lives, the genocidal freak who oversees the slaughter of thousands or millions — there has to be a “reason,” right?

“My Friend Dahmer” gives us one of the most fascinating portraits of a serial killer, ever. We meet young Jeffrey (Ross Lynch of Disney Channel’s “Austin & Ally) his junior year. He sits alone on the bus. The only kid who speaks to him in school is also the only kid more bullied than him.

Hey, you didn’t let the fact you were a Neil Sedaka fan get around in the ’70s.

His father (Dallas Roberts) frets over the kid’s lack of friends, the time Jeffrey spends in the shed out back, his “lab.” Because Jeffrey’s become engrossed with picking up road kill and dissolving the flesh off it with chemicals dad brings home from work.

When we meet Jeff’s mom (Anne Heche), we understand the father’s worry. She’s flighty, flaky and impulsive. And she’s just a month out of a mental hospital.

But maybe environment can trump genetics. If Jeff would just join different clubs, “get out of your shell,” make friends, perhaps this story could have a happy ending.

“My Friend Dahmer,” based on a memoir by a guy who knew the killer as a kid, reconstructs that last year, when Dahmer became a prankster — inviting kids to laugh at his “fits” (fake), forming friendships when they pick up on his ingenious performance-art style stunts.

The new pals (Alex Wolff, Tommy Nelson, Harrison Holzer) work on the yearbook. “What if I…was in every (club) photo?” The image of the creepy, blank-faced Dahmer staring out of Honor Society, Spanish Club, Debate, etc. shots for all eternity is too hilarious to pass up.

Marc Meyers’ film zeroes in on speculative material about Dahmer’s home life — an unstable mother, a father overwhelmed and ready for divorce, both parents’ preference for Jeffrey’s more “normal” younger brother.

His sexual awakening is a confused blend of peer-pressure girlie magazine ogling, seeking acknowledgement from female classmates, contempt for mother’s effeminate (and spastic) decorator, and a growing obsession with his fit, jogging doctor (Vincent Kartheiser).

Nothing here suggests someone who has “just snapped.” We witness a deepening, disheartening antipathy for life, human or otherwise. God forbid this kid should come into contact with pets.

Lynch is deadpan perfect in the title role, an academically under-whelming, socially-awkward and musically mediocre trumpet player battered from all sides, with no help in sight. High school eventually gives him a quantum of solace, but whatever inroads he makes socially (even bullies appreciate a good fake spastic fit), the pall that hangs over the picture ensures that we know it’ll never be enough.

Heche doesn’t let us hate the mother. Madness isn’t something you can blame somebody for. Roberts’ father-figure has the right worries even if he prioritizes his own happiness. And Dahmer’s high school experience isn’t a “Carrie” horror that aptly explains what he became.

Which, in the end, hamstrings this thriller. We can only know so much, and the guesses don’t quite add up to anything “textbook.”

But “My Friend Dahmer” tallies a bleak scoresheet in the “nature (crazy mom, crazy kid) vs. nurture” (bullied kid, absent father, morbid hobbies) debate.

Whatever path Young Jeffrey was headed down, a lack of competent, unquestioning love — from parents, from any healthy romantic interest — made certain he never strayed from it.

MPAA Rating: 

Cast:Ross Lynch, Anne Heche, Alex Wolff, Dallas Roberts, Vincent Kartheiser

Credits: Written and directed by Marc Meyers, based on a Derk Backderf memoir. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:47

“Last Flag Flying” is Richard Linklater’s homage to “The Last Detail,” a dark service comedy that was an early screen triumph for Jack Nicholson.

But Linklater’s film, about old comrades-in-arms traveling to bury the just killed-in-action son of one of their number, is a sentimental slog of a movie, more “Bucket List” than “Last Detail.” It ambles along, with a full hour of preliminaries, and flies or flops on the endless, over-eager mugging of Bryan Cranston. 

It’s fitting that the “Breaking Bad” star plays a retired Marine running his own bar in Norfolk, Virginia, and not just because Norfolk is a military town. It’s damned closed to Smithfield, and home to the sort of ham Cranston morphs into for this.

Sal is a true hale-fellow well-met barkeep, a big drinker and bigger talker. But he doesn’t recognize the quiet, sad-faced man who parks himself at the far end of “Sal’s Bar & Grill.”

“DOC!”

It’s a long-discarded nickname. They served in Vietnam together, and Doc (Steve Carell) was a Navy Corpsman (medic) with Sal’s Marine platoon.

“I saved his LIFE once!” Sal brags to a rummy.

“You never saved my life.”

Whatever happened “over there” was long ago (the film is set in 2003). Doc, whose real name is Larry, spent time in military prison afterwards. Sal was a lifer who has run this bar for years and years. They share a past and a big secret.

Whatever that is, it’s compelling enough to make Sal take Doc on a road trip, no questions asked. To church. Sal’s “What’d you get me into, Doc?” is still hanging in the air when he realizes who the compelling, popular village preacher is. Rev. Mueller (Laurence Fishburne) was once “Mueller the Mauler,” a bonafide hell-raiser (with Sal) back when he was in the Corps.

He’s a pious, compassionate man. And he’s the other companion Doc wants for his real purpose for showing up. His son, a Marine, has just been killed in Iraq, “a hero.” And he wants these two guys he hasn’t seen in 30 years to accompany him as he attends his son’s funeral on the hallowed ground of Arlington.

If you know your geography, that’s a very short trip. And if you’re going to build days of feuding, bonding, guilting and grieving into your movie, things have to get complicated. You need a much longer journey if you’re going to convince the preacher to take up swearing again, give Sal time to sober up enough to think about someone else  for the first time in his life and Larry time to grieve, and maybe have a strained laugh or three with guys who treated him like the gullible kid he was, back in the day.

Fishburne is perfectly cast as the stern, sensitive true believer in the room.

“We pay for what we say, Salvatore,” he lectures.

“PUT it on my TAB!”

Carell is largely silent for long stretches, his character stumbling into the background of a movie that’s supposed to be his quest.

Because we need all this screen time for Cranston’s blowhard to blow. Hard.

“The worst thing that can happen to anybody just dropped on you” is as soft as he gets with Larry. “You’re just going to have to deal with it.”

J. Quinton Johnson plays a colorlessly written comrade of the dead Marine. Yul Vazquez shines as a “He’s a hero and I’m sticking with that” Marine Lieutenant Col. who tries to convince Larry his son’s death meant something, and that he should stick to the Corps’ Bush Era protocols.

Linklater’s film finds its truth and its virtues in the same places as the equally-flawed “Thank You for Your Service”  — in the rituals of grief, honor and mourning within the service. The Dover Air Force Base hangar where caskets arrive, out of the public eye (a “control the message” bit of Bush/Cheney censorship), is empty save for a few mourners, coffee and a box of Krispy Kremes.

But the honored dead earn formal, compelling escort by the Corps and anybody else who served, from an impromptu gathering of Marine pallbearers to the Amtrak baggage handler who won’t leave a casket alone during transport.

Linklater is still able to move us, even after he’s bored us half out of the movie with his long set-up, even after Cranston has sucked all the oxygen out of the picture with his hernia-inducing twinkle, even after we’ve given up on “Last Flag Flying” as too damned cute for its own good.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout including some sexual references

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, Steve Carell, Yul Vazquez, J. Quinton Johnson

Credits:Directed by Richard Linklater, script by Richard Linklater and Darryl Ponicsan. An Amazon/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:04

Meh, I’ve seen worse.

Every year exposes the movie reviewing fellowship to a couple of delusional, talent-free putzes with the family money and the chutzpah to get a movie made and “distributed.” I saw one back in September, “Mike Boy,” that may be the best illustration ever of the maxim, “Not everybody who can get a movie made, should.”

But “worst” isn’t really the label those who have turned “The Room” into a cult film have embraced. “Best worst film ever made” is what they see in it. And that’s harder to debate. As awful as “Mike Boy” is, nobody will remember it. It takes a special madness and singular, delusional sense of self to conjure up a “Plan 9 from Outer Space” or “Tusk.”

Tommy Wiseau, whose proud, dedicated ineptitude is the subject of an awards season favorite, James Franco’s “The Disaster Artist,” is just such a crank.

A big dreamer with dyed Geddy Lee hair, a Gene Simmons yen for sucking in his cheeks and the accent (Polish?) of Borat’s hair-dresser, Wiseau raised millions (Hah!) for what amounts to a dreadful softcore porn melodrama.

He wrote, directed and stars in this story of sex and infidelity in San Francisco. And every single thing about it is stunningly, hilariously off.

The sets reveal their plywood-flimsy construction. The lighting screams “My last job was on a ’70s soap opera, and I got fired.” The film stock and color correction — endless establishing shots panning down the San Francisco Bay Bridge — doesn’t match from scene to scene.

The staging is off, with camera placement so clumsy every edit reveals the actors aren’t on the same visual plane. Continuity errors such as having a character serve herself and her fiance a glass filled with bourbon, and pouring what looks like vodka into it as if it’s empty, abound. “Never been to America” blunders (infamous “tossing the FOOTball” scenes) turn up.

The crew’s contempt for Wiseau shows in every shot.

And the writing. “Johnny” (Wiseau) is engaged to “Lisa” (Juliette Danielle). They’ve been together “five years.” Or is it “seven years?” She’s cheating with “Mark” (Greg Sestero), “but he’s my BEST FRIEND.” Mark must say that line 30 times. Lisa? Maybe half a dozen more. Johnny? At least three or four times himself.

“I’m going to do what I want to do, and that’s it. (Pause) What do YOU think I should do?”

Characters make more entrances into the soundstage-built apartment Lisa and Johnny share than you’d see in a season’s worth of “Friends.” Lisa, Johnny, Mark, Johnny’s inappropriate young ward (Philip Haldiman), Lisa’s friends, all perplexing Lisa’s mother (Carolyn Minott), who finally speaks up on behalf of the audience.

“How many people come into this apartment every day?”

Characters don tuxedos to play a game of catch, confessional scenes are staged on a plainly-fake rooftop with process shot images of San Francisco in the background, and everybody arrives at the same piece of fake alley, and crowding into the frame only heightens the surreal/unreal coincidence of it all.

And half the time, Wiseau’s lines sound and look dubbed.

“You are TEARING me APART, Lisa!”

That’s the trick to making a cult film. It can’t just be bad, it has to be memorably so, and “The Room” is. Fans shout at the screen, wait for the aged pug dog’s first appearance and throw spoons.

So there’s no point further panning this cult calamity (again) now, 14-15 years after “the best worst film ever” was made. You already know what Wiseau and his adherents say to that. It’s in the script.

“Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!”

(Roger Moore’s review of “The Disaster Artist” is here.)

MPAA Rating: R for sexuality, language and brief violence

Cast: Tommy Wiseau, Juliette Danielle, Greg Sestero, Philip Haldiman, Robyn Harris

Credits:Written and directed by Tommy Wiseau. A Wiseau Films release.

Running time: 1:39

It’s an enduring myth of screen comedies that directors who know their material isn’t all that can somehow wring laughs out of it through retakes.

Their instructions to the actors in such cases are an inside Hollywood cliche.

“Again, but FASTER.”

Sean Burns was saying that — a LOT — on the set of “Daddy’s Home Two.” He had that winning pairing of Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg back for their second “Daddy’s Home” (they also did “The Other Guys”). And Burns went for on-the-nose casting in bringing in these two step-dads acting as “co-dads” to their shared brood of second marriage kids.

John Lithgow plays the silly, touchy-feely father to sensitive helicopter parent Brad (Ferrell). And Mel Gibson growls onto the set as macho estranged pop to rough-and-ready Dusty (Wahlberg).

But the script is so starved of originality, jokes and slapstick laughs that Burns pushed his actors to deliver lines faster and faster. Wahlberg, always antic on the set with Ferrell, hurtles through his dialogue in a near-slurred blur.

It rarely pays off, as the jokes are just lame. Well, there is the odd moment where Dusty, rendered more sensitive (he’s still a hothead) by endless exposure to kind but wussy Brad, suggests his cranky, womanizing ex-astronaut old man could learn by example, maybe take up improv comedy like Brad’s dad.

“You should look into that.”

“I’d rather look into a loaded gun.”

That’s the dynamic here, the emasculated Whitaker son-and-father (they greet each other with long kisses — on the mouth) baited and bullied by Dusty’s brute of a dad, a man who sets them all up in a family mountain lodge Christmas holiday just to see the “sensitive” Dusty man-up and blow up at these guys who seem like PBS Kids versions of male role models.

Guns figure into it, and drinking. The families go to the movies on Christmas and make fun of a Liam Neeson picture with “kids who curse” — just as they do in their movie.

Dusty’s bratty mean girl daughter (Didi Costine) by marriage is a terrible influence on his own daughter (Scarlett Estevez), and they’re both tormenting Dusty’s super-sensitive son (Owen Vacarro) that Brad is raising to be a pushover.

Little Dylan is interested in girls for the first time, so Brad has the talk — about the best ways to get yourself into “the friend zone” with a girl who will then run off and marry somebody else.

The one gag that Chevy Chase would have been thrilled to have in “National Lampoon Christmas Vacation” involves a snow blower and a tangle of installed and lit Christmas lights.

Gibson parrots a bunch of Fox News talking points to “Mr. War-On-Christmas,” his endless come-ons playing like sexual harassment suits waiting to happen.

None of that is funny, and the glee hinted at when we saw the first trailers to this, the perfect casting of Lithgow, fails to live up to its promise. His introduction in the movie trailers is set to “Love Will Keep Us Together” (Gibson arrives to AC/DC). But the final cut of the movie is a limp Barry Manilow substitute.

They look right as fathers and sons, but the chemistry isn’t there and the conflicting parenting styles and relationships that “grow” set off zero sparks.

Attempts to make the poor wives (Linda Cardellini, Alessandra Ambrosio) more than after-thoughts fall flat, and the return of John Cena (Dusty’s wife’s ex) has no payoff.

At least it’s got Wahlberg, sputtering out lines as if he’s in a save-my-cell-phone-minutes rush. But faster, in this case, doesn’t add up to funnier.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for suggestive material and some language

Cast: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Linda Cardellini, Mel Gibson, John Lithgow, Alessandra Ambrosio, John Cena

Credits:Written and directed by Sean Burns. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:40

“Devil’s Whisper” is a demonic possession thriller with a Spanglish twist. This time, the family under threat has history with this demon, has a kid aspiring to become a Catholic priest under its own roof, and the curses and warnings about that demon are in both Spanish and English.

It’s not terribly scary, though the money spent on this version of the ghoulish, ghostly “Slenderman” monster (they’re always skinny) was worth it.

Alex (Luca Oriel of TV’s “Shamesless”) seems like the perfect son. He’s taken to his fireman stepdad (Marcos A. Ferraez) and idolizes his hip, war-vet priest (Rick Ravanello), so much so that his upcoming Confirmation could very well be his first step toward the priesthood. Even his confessions are PG, PG-13 at best.

“Bless me, Father. I snuck into an R-rated movie with my friends.”

“Why movie, my son?”

“Mad Max.”

“Yeah, I LOVED that.”

But the move to their new house got Alex poking around grandma’s old armoire. That’s where he finds the box with no lid. And after he and stepdad almost short out the lights trying to saw it open, a crucifix pops out. Alex puts it around his neck.

You don’t have to be Catholic to know there’s trouble coming. He sees a specter in his closet, streetlights pop on and off. He hears the “Devil’s Whisper.”

I like the way the film presents the kid as idealized — so devout he won’t “Swear to God” as a teen promise — and then humanizes him. He, like stepdad, lets the occasional cussword out. He lusts after the slightly older Lia (Jasper Polish), a girl who could…teach him things.

Teen drinking, peeping tom exploits with his pals (Don’t try this at home, kids.), kids flipping each other off in church, and all this is BEFORE he gets those Satanic circles under his eyes, before he goes bad.

The story’s secrets are dull, the remedies (priest, shrink) duller, the resolution is tried and true and trite. The lead is more adequate than charismatic.

That applies to the picture, as a whole — almost adequate.

But the depiction of a child turning into a rebellious teen, with a demonic twist, works.

If you’re a demonic possession movie completist, if you simply must see everything in this worn genre that crosses your path as it crosses itself, you could do worse.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, demonic frights, alcohol abuse by teens, and profanity

Cast: Luca Oriel, Rick Ravanello, Tessie Santiago, Marcos A. Ferraez, Jasper Polish

Credits:Directed by Adam Ripp, script by Adam Ripp, Paul Todisco, Oliver Robins. A Vega, Baby!/Sony Home Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:25

He’s been champion of the actor’s art, a great interview and on chat shows from late night TV to “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” a charming and hilarious mimic.

His Oscar-winning career got a third act streaming-TV boost from the Netflix remake of “House of Cards.” Check out his credits. They’ve been piling up in the years since that viperous turn altered his profile.

But it’s all ending, and with shocking abruptness, for Kevin Spacey. The accusations are piling up faster than Larry David can say “He’s the Gay Goy Weinstein.”

I have no take on what the legal implications of his actions — civil or criminal — might be.

But chatting with film buff friends, my first thought on all this was, “It’s going to end him.” Whatever the sins of others, this involves minors, and his “apology” offended every gay person who has fought the lingering image of the gay pedophile who only wants to give boys “experience” (Netflix “L.I.E.” if you want to see that endorsed).

Netflix pulled the plug on Spacey’s hit DC power/sex/intrigue series.

Will his Gore Vidal bio-pic “Gore” ever see the light of day?

And now he’s even being edited out of movies he has in the can. “All the Money in the World” has recast Christopher Plummer in the part and is reshooting Spacey’s scenes.

I’ve interviewed him several times over the years and never noticed anything untoward in his behavior. He puts on his “press face” with the best of them, telling stories of taking his dog to out-of-town tryouts for a play in Winston-Salem, where I used to live, laughing at how he would sneak the dog into the nice hotel where the production put him up. He propped up a failing British theater company, has always been complimentary about co-stars (whatever one heard about power-struggles on the set) and never tired of talking about the craft.

Charming, chilling (he’s made a great villain over the years), he’s always seemed an urbane, acting version of his character in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” cultured — but with secrets.

As in almost every case in this current flood of sexual abuse scandals, “patterns” and “power” are the common threads. Weinstein, Toback, Polanski? Not isolated incidents, but patterns of predatory behavior — many victims.

And Spacey is facing the death penalty his profession, so dependent on public goodwill, metes out.

The only problematic part of that punishment is the way some have dodged judgement — until now.  As any doubt evaporates, with multiple accusers emboldened to come out now that the world will listen, some longtime whispered-about (or accused) alleged offenders are paying the price and others, not yet.

When will Switzerland and France get a clue about Polanski? Don’t give me the “He’s too old to assault underage girls any more” defense. Lame. And Woody Allen? All those stars lining up to make his increasingly tone-deaf pictures?  How is that justified in this climate?

Spacey’s career might be justifiably over, but if Hollywood is finally addressing this cloud (Why was convicted offender Victor Salva repeatedly re-employed?), Toback’s, Polanski’s and yes, Woody Allen’s careers are worth questioning. Power and patterns of predatory behavior are what you look for. Will they have the guts to treat every offender the same, at long last?

Long before “Seinfeld” gave us “Festivus,” “feats of strength” were a regular feature of vaudeville, touring circuses and The Roaring ’20s.

That was the heyday of  “The Mighty Atom,” a steel-bending, car-pulling (with his teeth, or his hair), chain biting (in two) 5’4″ 148 pound dynamo whose story is classic “98 lb. weakling” legend.

His exploits alone made him worth remembering, but the fact that he was Jewish has made Joseph Greenstein’s life the subject of magazine articles, books and documentaries.

After all, jokes his grandson Steven Greenstein, “The list of Jewish superheroes is kind of low,” in the documentary he made about his grandpa.

“The Mighty Atom” is an engagingly adoring film featuring lots of interviews with other Greensteins (Joseph’s fellow-strongman sons) that takes a lot of what Joe did and said at face value. And even though, in the film’s closing act, they admit that Joseph lied about his age to make his feats seem even greater than they were, you accept their credulity at face value.

The unquestionable claim they make, as a family, is that “there was a touch of P.T. Barnum” in the man.

And yet there’s film footage of Joe stopping an airplane from taking off, yanking a car down the street by his teeth or hair, bending railroad spikes and turning steel bars into “scrolls,” curls of metal.

An expert on biomechanics from Texas State U. talks about the parameters of human physical strength, and how Joe might have done what he claims he did.

A team from Bradenton, Florida’s MOTUS Academy may show how difficult it is to replicate Joe’s stunts (using a modern day strongman and motion-capture technology to measure the power generated by hands, thumbs and grip necessary to bend a horseshoe.

And a higher-up from Ripley’s Believe it Or Not, where The Mighty Atom’s exploits were heralded in print and in their “Odditoriums” all over the world, recounts their verification.

“If it’s in Ripley’s, it’s real.”

Still, the more skeptical among us can question the man’s origin story, running away to join the circus as a tubercular shrimp, mentored by a circus wrestler, learning (on location) the secrets of diet, training and focus of India and Asia, getting his “big break” by changing the tire on Harry Houdini’s car in 1920s Galveston, Texas.

“Did it without a jack,” his son Mike (also an elderly strongman) marvels. Joe just “picked the car up, with Houdini in it,” pulled one tire off and put another on.

“The Mighty Atom,” largely built around those interviews and a 1967 radio talk Joe gave to WNBC in New York, wanders off topic from time to time. Other strongmen show off their specialties, a young woman relates how she lifted a car that had fallen on her father. There’s speculation that the Jewish creators of “Superman” might have been inspired by The Mighty Atom’s well-publicized exploits.

But even if you take all this as pure hokum with a heaping helping of hype, Greenstein’s documentary about his grandpa (and still muscular Uncle Mike, pulling cars on TV at 91) can be savored for its recollection of American live entertainment during the Jazz Age, and for a family legend that, if it isn’t the literal truth, is still too colorful and entertaining to not repeat.

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Cast: Joseph Greenstein, Mike Greenstein, Steven Greenstein

Credits: Written and directed by Steven Greenstein. A Squad 47 release.

Running time: 1:15

Not everyone who survived the Holocaust is cut out to bear witness on it for the rest of us.

Some never got over the trauma, never wanted to mention it, even to family, never wore short sleeves so that others could see the numbers tattooed on their arms.

“A normal person would not understand” these “horrible, horrible things,” many might say.

That was Sonia Warshawski for much of her life. A Polish Jew who survived three death camps, as a teen, she married another survivor, emigrated to Kansas City and with her husband, John, ran a tailoring shop there.  They raised their kids, who didn’t want to ask about the “hell” they’d been through, even though John would wail in his sleep.

“I keep myself busy,” Sonia says to this day, 92 and still driving her ancient Oldsmobile to work, tailoring to fiercely loyal customers. The work “keeps me from thinking about it.”

But as Sonia became “the last Holocaust survivor in town” able to speak, she took it on herself to do just that. The tiny Polish woman whom her granddaughter (filmmaker Leah Warshawski) nicknamed “Big Sonia” is the subject of a moving, engaging documentary that asks a very hard question. As the last of these survivors is silenced by age and death, who will bear witness?

Leah and co-director Todd Soliday build this genial, unsurprising film around a long public radio interview with Sonia, their own interview with her, animated needlepoint illustrations inspired by Sonia’s way of using that hobby to remember, and her many public speaking engagements, in and around Kansas City.

We meet fellow survivors and her children, who recall how ashamed they could get when they realized they were giving a parent who had been “in hell” a hard time. And we see Sonia speak to high school kids, who break down in tears, to prison inmates who admit, “She’s a LOT tougher than I am.”

Sonia figures “if I can reach their hearts,” maybe some of these touch-and-go audience members will “make a change in their lives.” Whatever else she offers in her stories of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Majdanek, she stands as a testament to human survival, the ability to recover and carry on.

Conveniently, the film offers one last struggle facing this woman who has literally seen it all. The last tenant in a dead shopping mall, she faces eviction. If you think that can stop her, you haven’t been reading along as carefully as I’d hope.

The animation is the one novel element to this, a familiar sort of film on a most familiar subject. But the movie lets its subject — Sonia —  be its strength, and if you’ve ever had the privilege of meeting a survivor willing to talk about what they experienced, you know how smart that decision was.

I’ve interviewed several over the years, and like Sonia, it seems like every city I’ve lived in had that one person willing to talk, in heavily-accented English, and could hold you spellbound with just an image painted with words.

As the last of these, the toughest humans among us, finally die off, films like this will be our main resource against deniers, our last reminder that tiny women like “Big Sonia” experienced the unbelievable, and lived only to tell the future what happened.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with Holocaust descriptions and imagery

Cast: Sonia Warshawski, her siblings, children and grandchildren

Credits:Directed byTodd Soliday, Leah Warshawski. An Argot release.

Running time:1:33

Before Watergate, the story that made the once-sleepy, provincial Washington Post’s political reputation was the publishing of “The Pentagon Papers.”

Steven Spielberg has rounded up Oscar winners Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, and vast collection of top flight character actors (Hey now, Bob Oedenkirk!), naturally including Bruce Greenwood (Can’t do a political movie without our favorite Kennedy look-alike) to tell this dramatic, timely story about a newspaper that now has “Democracy dies in Darkness” as its motto.

Christmas.

Kenneth Branagh’s “Murder on the Orient Express” shimmers off the screen, a film that luxuriates in luxury. It has scale and detail, “Zhivago” lush in every frame, care in every dazzling and perfectly appointed camera angle.

We may have forgotten that people used to compare Branagh, with his love of Shakespeare and flair for camera technique, with Orson Welles. Here’s an eye-popping reminder that the director of “Henry V” and “Thor” knows how to have fun with an Agatha Christie whodunit.

But silly? Old fashioned? Oh my, yes. From its stock characters, who reveal everything we need to know about them in a perfectly-coiffed and costumed look, to the epic melodramatic flourishes that curl through the picture like hero detective Hercule Poirot’s immaculate mustache, rest assured that here is that holiday movie you can take mom — and grandmom — to on Thanksgiving.

Branagh plays Poirot like a fine Christmas ham, from Smithfield by way of Brussels.

“Forgive me, I am Bel-JEE-un,” he purrs, correcting everyone who mispronounces his first-name. No, not Hercules.

“Err-CULE Poirot. I do not SLAY the lions.”

He sees all, but he isn’t just some human databank like Sherlock Holmes. “I can only see the world as it should be.” Anything else stands out, imperfection — alteration — those add up to clues.

The film opens in delight and wonder as Poirot puts on a quick show at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. A rabbi, an imam and a priest are accused of a theft, and “only the (self-described) greatest detective in the world” can crack the case (and the groaning joke about those three) in an instant and placate the city’s quarreling religious factions with his solution.

He’s off to Istanbul, soaking up the pastries and great kitchens of the finest hotels that 1934 has to offer. Then, his scoundrel of a young friend (Tom Bateman) secures him a place on the world’s most exclusive train — the Orient Express. The ever-“exhausted” Poirot can restfully ride the rails through the Balkans, Austria and France in style with a crowd of only the best sorts of  people.

Well, not exactly.

An American “art dealer” who fears for his life (Johnny Depp, scarred and Capone-ish) tries to hire Poirot for protection. Poirot demurs, and the aptly-named Ratchett turns up dead in his sleeper car.

Who did it? His private secretary (Josh Gad), valet (Branagh’s good-luck charm, Derek Jacobi), the governess (Daisy Ridley of “Star Wars”) or her doctor/lover (Leslie Odom Jr.)? Or was it the racist Austrian engineer (Willem Dafoe), the aging, oft-married socialite (Michelle Pfeiffer), the pious but two-fisted missionary (Penelope Cruz), the Russian princess (Judi Dench), the Latin chauffeur (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), the hotheaded dancer/count (Sergei Polunin)?

Branagh, to his credit, doesn’t force us to mull over the possibilities. He runs us past them at a near gallop, dealing with each necessary interrogation scene briskly, with witty banter and extreme close-ups glossing over the cliched “My life story” semi-confessions.

Everybody lies, everybody has a secret and intrigue piles upon intrigue, with the odd bit of flirting, even though Poirot knows “ROMANCE nev-airrrrr goes un-PUNISHED.”

The ending is laugh-out-loud ludicrous, and the stops (the train gets snowbound — imagine that) dictated by a very old formula.

But it is the stylish journey, mon amis, that matters , not the destination.

The players, to a one, play this as the lark it is, with Pfeiffer, Gad, Jacobi and Cruz standing out. Branagh, the rake, lets his camera develop a crush on Ridley.

But if Sir Kenneth doesn’t make you laugh as your plummy tour guide through all this coincidence, melodrama and holiday ham, turn to mom. She’s the one who’ll get the hoary archetypes from the day when literature, at least, gave us celebrity detectives. She’s the one who’ll appreciate crime-solving braggadocio, Agatha Christie-style.

“Eef it were EAS-ee, I would not be FA-mous!”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence and thematic elements

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Judi Dench Penelope Cruz, Daisy Ridley, Willem Dafoe, Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi

Credits:Directed by Kenneth Branagh script by Michael Green, based on the Agatha Christie novel. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:54