Movie Nation

The first “Saw” movie had a minimalist sophistication — strangers, waking up together, presented with life-or-death choices as an unseen tormentor sat in judgement of whether they were fit to live.

Everything that followed, sequels and the whole “torture porn” genre they inspired, diluted that, lost much of what passes for philosophical in the themes and settled into “What creative ways can we come up with to torture/kill people THIS time?”

And maybe it was just me, but the movies also seemed to get caught up in “solving the mystery” of who Jigsaw — the generally disembodied voice offering up his captives their grisly choices; lose a limb, save your life, get HIM killed, save your life — might be.

Movies that generally split between the ticking clock of death for the victims and the hapless cops who can never seem to get there before Jigsaw has exercised his Darwinian revenge became procedurals — detective stories, with a lot of hacked up people in the end.

Then they killed off Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) and ran out of ways to revive him/pass on his legacy, etc. Until now.

“Jigsaw,” the eighth “Saw” film hurls five new hapless wrongdoers — whose sins we don’t know (at first) —  into a room, chains around their necks, code-locked death-helmets on their heads.

At the end of the chains — a wall of soon-to-be-whirring circular saws. Funny, “Jigsaw” never uses a jigsaw. Screenwriters almost never take shop class.

One by one, our victims (another generation of the Van Peebles acting clan among them) “confess” their crimes — a mugging accident here, a “sold bad mortgages, stole good coke” there.  There are increasingly baroque killing contraptions, the occasional “blood sacrifice” and a lot of “The truth shall set you free,” the great empty promise of all these pictures.

Meanwhile, the cops (Callum Keith Rennie, Cle Bennett) are puzzled about the dead guy who still can manage to set up these elaborate, expensive and murderous kidnappings/punishments, and having a hard time pretending they care. Their glib complacency is…disappointing.

Even the absurdly callous and well-equipped coroners (Matt Passmore, Hannah Emily Anderson) barely manage to wipe the smirks off their faces as they examine corpses.

Which is the Achilles Heel of this genre. The only character to generate pathos and interest of late is Jigsaw himself, and he’s only heard, pontificating about “justice,” asking for “simple blood sacrifice” and “revenge,” and seen in flashback.

“I ask you, what’s a life worth to you?”

We’re supposed to instantly loathe the mercenary mortgage broker (Ryan Braunstein) and, for no reason at all, to empathize with the younger and the prettier — hair over one eye, fishnet stockings, handsome young dude, etc.

The co-directing Spierig Brothers (“Daybreakers”) give the whole enterprise an expensive sheen — cool lighting, pricey torture gear, lots of close-ups and extreme close-ups.

Then they blow the most promising “How this character will die” bit — a bit of poisonous syringe Russian roulette.

That’s the “game” that all the “Saw” movies play, and it’s a dull one. Where’s the fun is Russian Roulette when you know, going in, that every chamber in the pistol is loaded?

MPAA Rating: R for sequences of grisly bloody violence and torture, and for language

Cast: Tobin Bell, Matt Passmore, Brittany Allen, Mandela Van Peebles, Callum Keith Rennie, Paul Braunstein

Credits:Directed byMichael Spierig, Peter Spierig , script by Pete Goldfinger, Josh Stolberg. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

Now that Halloween has passed, it’s not too early for Hollywood to unleash its first Christmas comedy. But there’s never a good time to release a bad one.

Nothing like celebrating the holidays with a puerile, sentimental and foul-mouthed slapstick farce for kids masquerading as “adult” entertainment.

The modest pleasures of “Bad Moms,” a farce about Chicago mothers who give up leaning in, trying to have it all and devoting their every waking second to ensuring the perfect home/marriage/childhood, are but a memory. Their profane, drunken escapades are all in the past.

How to top the tipsy hijinx of Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell and the ribald riot Kathryn Hahn? Bring in the moms’ moms for “A Bad Moms Christmas.” 

So mild-mannered homemaker Kiki (Bell) is smothered by her needy, clingy and bubbly to the point of inappropriate mother, played by Cheryl Hines.

Bawdy salon waxing specialist Carla (Hahn) gets a surprise visit from her ex-rock roadie/compulsive gambler of a mother (Susan Sarandon).

And freshly-divorced Amy (Kunis) loses her dreams of a “mellow” holiday when the rich and imperious Ruth who gave birth to her (Christine Baranski) returns to Chicago to school her on how a “proper” Christmas has to be managed.

“Mothers don’t ENjoy Christmas,” Ruth purrs, “mothers GIVE joy.”

Baranski, whose face is on the Wikipedia page defining “imperious,” was born to play Ruth — over-spending, over-decorating, leading a Catholic choir of “ringers” in a neighborhood caroling competition (Remember her in “Mama Mia?”).

She is pretty much the saving grace of this graceless romp through shopping, tree-stealing, grinding on a mall Santa and a fierce dodgeball fight at a kids’ zone entertainment complex.

The men — Peter Gallagher plays Ruth’s long-suffering husband, Justin Hartley plays a stripper getting his junk waxed by Carla, and Jay Hernandez just takes up space — are non-entities and the kids are nothing more than props; props who mug for the camera.

At least Wanda Sykes is here, as Kiki’s psychotherapist, ready to offer a rant on why moms of all ages go crazy. “YOU make them that way.”

Releasing studio STX rushed this out on a Wednesday without previews for critics because they, too, know that there’s no good time to release a bad Christmas comedy…unless you roll out so early that you postpone suffering by comparison to every other holiday movie to come this year.

And no, there’s not a “Madea Christmas Story” to take the pressure off.

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content and language throughout, and some drug use

Cast: Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, Kathryn Hahn, Christine Baranski, Cheryl Hines, Susan Sarandon, Jay Hernandez, Wanda Sykes, Christina Applegate, Peter Gallagher

Credits: Written and directed by  Jon Lucas, Scott Moore. An STX release.

Running time: 1:44

Lyndon Johnson was a tall man, 6’4.”

He had a habit of leaning into colleagues and subordinates, towering over them, intimidating even in the friendliest of circumstances. And as he had a temper and a mania for hard work, wheeling and dealing and getting his way, he didn’t hesitate to use this trick in touchier, testier situations.

That literal “larger than life” part of the Texan’s persona was fundamental to who he was, and there’s plenty of photographic evidence of him close-talking, leaning into and talking down to people he was trying to strong-arm into voting his way or measuring up to his standards.

So when you’re casting somebody to play him, they’d better be as tall as 6’5″ Randy Quaid (TV’s “LBJ: The Early Years”), or 6’4″ Donald Moffat (“The Right Stuff”) or at least be prepared to play him that big and intimidating (Bryan Cranston of “All the Way”).

The accomplished character actor Woody Harrelson plays an occasionally volcanic, sometimes strong-arming and always cunning and persuasive Johnson in Rob Reiner’s film “LBJ,” a drama framed in the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson became president. And although the physical resemblance — big nose, basset hound ears — borders on uncanny, the 5’10” Harrelson never quite carries himself like a big man with big ambitions and a bag full of bully’s tricks. He gives us a drawling, almost soft-spoken Johnson, not the way he’s typically remembered.

Cranston’s recent portrayal thundered, where Harrelson is content to growl.

Some of that falls onto the script, by “Project Runaway” (?!) vet Joey Hartstone. Reiner’s directing career since the wonderful “Flipped” flopped hasn’t commanded the best collaborators or big studio releases. But there’s merit in the ways this story shows us the “deal-maker” Johnson, frustrated by being muzzled and neutered by the conniving Kennedy brothers, bigger than them and forced to sit in the shadows until that awful day in Dallas.

“LBJ” is a mostly flattering portrait that ends before the tidal wave of Vietnam swallowed Johnson’s presidency. Harrelson’s LBJ wears out a vast staff, haranguing one and all for information, numbers of votes he can count on as Senate Majority Leader.

He ends phone arguments with a slam, mutters profane insults, hurls profane threats and even his fellow Democrat and Fellow Texan in the Senate, Ralph Yarborough (Bill Pullman), a liberal, cannot escape his contempt when he disagrees with a political stance.

“Spoken like a true one-term United States Senator,” LBJ growls.

The election of 1960 is approaching, and Johnson wants to jump from the most powerful post in Congress to the White House. But those rich, handsome young Kennedys, candidate Jack (Jeffrey Donovan of “Burn Notice,” quite good) and his sidekick and campaign manager Bobby (Michael Stahl-David, amusingly sinister) have the jump on him.

Johnson may believe “This country is NOT gonna elect a CATHOLIC president,” but he knows the callow but movie-star handsome JFK has the edge, and that plays into a homely country boy’s worst fears.

“He’s afraid people won’t love him,” wife Lady Bird (Jennifer Jason Leigh, spot-on) says.

The movie’s richest, juiciest scenes are between Harrelson and his equally talented fellow character player Richard Jenkins, as Richard Russell, elder statesman of the Senate, an old school Georgia racist and one of the most powerful politicians in Washington. As much as we can make out of the most famous of the LBJ White House tapes of Johnson browbeating the old man into serving on the Warren Commission, the real relationship must have played out more like this.

Johnson flatters, he charms, he begs. His role, upon taking the “most thankless job” in the Kennedy White House, as a nearly powerless vice president, is working as intermediary between the idealistic, Civil Rights-promising Kennedys and the Southern Democrats of Congress. He swaps racist jokes with Russell, then leans in on him to get concessions at a Georgia Lockheed factory where a billion dollar Air Force order might be fulfilled.

Harrelson brilliantly conveys Johnson bridling at the confines of the vice presidency, suffering the pointless, demeaning treatment of Bobby Kennedy, always the politician in front of other politicians, never losing his temper in a group setting.

But in private? On the phone? Nobody ever left a meeting (often in the toilet) with LBJ not knowing if he was pissed off.

Reiner’s picture, framed as it is within scenes of that fateful 1963 visit to Dallas, becomes quite the image-burnishing in the hours after Kennedy was shot — from chaos and Secret Service-inspired panic, to a big man who thinks through what he needs to do and in a snap, starts doing it — angling for “permission” from a testy Bobby to get moving, working the phones, begging everyone from colleagues and Kennedy appointees to ex-presidents for help.

“I need you more than President Kennedy EVER did” he says to one and all.

That’s the way this script and Reiner’s film lets Johnson have the last word, verifying Johnson’s backroom description of the primary campaign of 1960. Kennedy was “a show horse.” Johnson? Always a “work horse.”

The height and the way he used it should have been addressed. The film, like the player cast as its lead, is too short to do the subject justice.

But Harrelson’s “LBJ” comes off as the bigger man, smarter than he often let on, the one who could read the tides of change as he counted the votes in Congress, someone who could grow into the office and bend the nation’s moral will even if he realized it would take the long view of history to prove him right and finally recognize the titanic efforts it took to alter the course of that history.

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast: Woody Harrelson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richard Jenkins, Michael Stahl-David, Bill Pullman 

Credits:Directed by Rob Reiner, script by Joey Hartstone An Electric Entertainment/Castle Rock release.

Running time: 1:38

So Louis wants to do a Woody Allen homage, playing a movie director in a black and white comedy about a somewhat pretentious, arty movie director.

Ick.

So the guy’s got a nubile, bikini clad (often as not) teen daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz) just starting to look for romantic/sexual trouble.

Ick.

His idol, another filmmaker played by John Malkovich, has a “thing” for under 20 young women.

ICK.

And Charlie Day’s in it.

Gag.

Looks like that abortion “My Father the Hero,” where a teen Katherine Heigl tries to pass off her old man (Gerard Depardieu) as “my lover.” So, ick again.

“Lifetime Original Movie” is glib, pejorative criticspeak that no movie with a female protagonist and women-centric subject matter wants as a label. And I might add, that no critic wants to use when the movie’s subject is rape and its aftereffects on the victim.

But for too much of its length, Jessica M. Thompson’s “The Light of the Moon” flirts with that bland, predictable TV movie formula. It’s a point-by-unsurprising point “Special Victims Unit” depiction of events before the crime, the awful crime itself, the moment the police get involved and how Bonnie (Stephanie Beatriz) copes — or avoids coping — with what happens at work, in public and in bed with her boyfriend Matt (Michael Stahl-David) over the next month.

We’ve got the victim feeling accused by invasive police questions, the suggestion that going out by yourself, getting drunk and walking home with headphones on, late at night in Brooklyn, maybe wasn’t the smartest move Bonnie ever made.

There’s the ever-AWOL Matt, out late with “clients” one more time, the gay best friend (Conrad Ricamora) who snipes “I envy how much makeup sex you two must have.” Followed by enormous guilt, walking on eggshells around Bonnie and still managing to say the wrong thing, time and again.

But we can see Bonnie is troubled, fret over her refusal to “share” this awful thing that happened with others (“That puts it all on me,” Matt complains.) even if she’s not buying into whatever the rape victims’ support group she visits one time is selling.

A waitress wants to know if she’s “OK,” because she has a black eye, assuming her boyfriend beats her.

Then “Moon” gets better. A legal advocate for victims levels with her — “We’re not changing the criminal justice system in a single day.” Bonnie renewing her sexual relationship with Matt turns…weird — for both of them. Every conflict between them is wiped away, every thing that came easily turns tentative.

And everything she’s been pushing out of her mind, bottled up in her psyche, starts to erupt as she lays out every indignity this creep has added to her life, every self-doubt, every fear, every outrage over a system that doesn’t catch guys like that quickly enough visits upon victims.

It’s not a great film, but Beatriz grows in stature as Bonnie searches for firmer footing. She and Stahl create a relationship that feels lived-in and fragile.

And first-time feature writer/director Thompson finally gets to pieces of this story we haven’t seen dozens of times before…in a Lifetime Original Movie.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, sexual assault, substance abuse and a sex scene

Cast:  Stephanie Beatriz, Michael Stahl-David, Conrad Ricamora

Credits:  Written and directed by Jessica M. Thompson.  An Imagination Worldwide release

Running time: 1:34

Actor turned writer-director Jason Hall (he scripted “American Sniper”) returns to Iraq War veteran subject matter with “Thank You for Your Service,” an oddly unaffecting portrait of damaged soldiers trying to break back into civilian life.

He goes for veracity over novelty, telling an over-familiar story of traumatized men, survivor’s guilt and their struggles to make sense of a world that no longer involves hostile natives, IEDs, baking hot sun and endless sand. And it’s so unsurprising that when I tell you there are three veterans we meet, in combat and back at home, you can guess one of them will kill himself, one of them will be hellbent on going back and one will break just enough to recognize that he needs treatment.

It takes nothing away from the real men whose lives this based-on-a-true-story film is based on to say that by leaning on the over-familiar, by not getting more of an emotionally available turn from leading man Miles Teller (“Whiplash,””Only the Brave”), Hall has created a movie more intent on pandering to the sentimental than informing.

Teller is Sgt. Adam “Schu” Schuman, one of a trio of Topeka boys who went to war and came back men. We meet him on one of his most traumatic days in combat, when his instincts and intuition tell him there’s a roadside bomb ahead, only to see his convoy ambushed when they take an alternate route.

Solo (Beulah Koale) and Waller (Joe Cole) are on the plane with him as they return, to an enthusiastic welcome, to The Real World. Waller’s supposed to get married. Solo’s wife (Keisha Castle-Hughes) is pregnant. And Schuman’s got a wife (Haley Bennett), a daughter he barely knows and an infant he is a little slow to remember he has, waiting on him at home.

Each man copes, as best he can, with this re-adjustment. Each man, facing financial strain, post traumatic stress, disappointments and a lack of a workable plan to re-enter the workforce, fails.

Schuman may be content to get home with “all my limbs, all my pieces intact.” But he has a hard time facing the widow (Amy Schumer) of a comrade who didn’t get home. Solo, who can’t get past “I don’t belong here,” gets mixed up with guys he might have run with back when he was a teenager. Waller? His fiance moved out and emptied their accounts.

Hall zeroes in on military rituals — the unit roll-call after a soldier has been killed, dogtags, a military funeral back home. The guys slip back into their familiar friendship when their favorite song (it’s 2007) blasts out of a jukebox. Bennett does a wonderful job with her best scene, telling her soldier “Don’t underestimate me. I’m tougher than you are,” in an effort to get him to open up.

But lacking his “Sniper” director Clint Eastwood’s pen to X-out unnecessary scenes, overly obvious dialogue and cliched situations (just because “this really happened” does not mean you have to include it in the story), Hall’s movie bogs down.

And as familiar as all this ground is — “Stop-Loss,” “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” “In the Valley of Elah” and “Home of the Brave” got there first — Teller gives us too little for the emotional catharsis you want and expect from a story on this subject.

A few carefully observed rituals, good casting and noble intentions don’t make up for a morose tone and general lack of surprise. In the end, “Service” doesn’t do its characters or its subject justice.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violent content, language throughout, some sexuality, drug material and brief nudity

Cast: Miles Teller, Haley Bennett, Beulah Koale, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Amy Schumer, Joe Cole

Credits: Written and directed by Jason Hall, based on a David Finkel book. A — release.

Running time: 1:48

The ever-so-English charms of “Goodbye, Christopher Robin” aren’t spoiled by its abrupt shifts in tone and occasional sentimental cheats. But those failings do tend to render this Simon Curtis film about the little boy and his toys who inspired “Winnie the Pooh” into weak tea.

It’s a painterly picture of “England’s green and pleasant” woodlands, the area in Sussex where young Christopher Robin Milne played in his “Hundred Acre Wood.” The little boy playing him is an adorable English moppet, and the omnipresent Domhnall Gleeson (“American Made,” “The Wingman,” “The Revenant”) makes a properly droll, reserved and Great War-scarred A.A. Milne.

But so much of it plays like Brit-pop Psychology 101, from the closed-off dad and not-that-interested-in-her child flapper mom (Margot Robbie) to the Scottish nanny, played by Kelly Macdonald, who has played more women “in service” than a beauty of her talents should have had to. There’s the flip, light writer of stage comedies who only wants to write the serious book “that will prevent another war,” and the too-pat “Pooh’s name came from here, here’s who thought up “Eeyore,” here’s where “Piglet” came from, “Tigger,” etc.

Alan Alexander Milne has returned from the Great War trenches to his posh life and oh-so-posh wife (Robbie, of “Suicide Squad”) and publisher eager for him to get back to the business of writing humorous poems for “Punch” magazine, and making comedies like “Mr. Pim Passes By” for the stage.

But Milne (Gleeson) is haunted by what he saw in the World War. He is enraged at his class for its role in the slaughter, “for what?” It’s just that he’s stereotypically British upper class in his emotionless sharing of those experiences.

“I was at the Somme. It was a bad show.”

He isn’t “ready to put a smile back on our faces,” which disappoints his publisher and annoys his wife, Daphne, who can’t understand why he can’t just “get over” it all.

“You know, if you don’t think about a thing, it ceases to be true.”

She has a baby to please him, and never lets him forget the burden that was. She even agrees to move to the country to get him back to work.

But the little boy (Will Tilston) that their nanny (Macdonald) is raising for them captures his interest. Not right away, and no, the adorable child his mother insists on dressing in smocks (she wanted a girl) doesn’t melt his heart. But “Billy Moon,” as his parents call him, as wary as he is of his remote, stern and somewhat disturbed father, has this vivid imagination.

And when they’re forced together due to childcare issues, the tot with the stuffed bear, piglet and donkey enlists his emotionally unavailable dad on a healing tour of his world of nature and fantasy.

“Let’s be hunters in the snow!”

The script stumbles in making that transition from father-son bonding to best sellerdom. That’s because real events didn’t happen quite that abruptly. Milne started finding success with children’s verse before turning “Pooh” into an international icon, and his little Christopher Robin into “the most famous little boy in the world.”

“Goodbye, Christopher Robin” has an ungainly structure that suggests drastic editing, a father’s guilt over “using” his son to get rich and famous, a mother’s fearful mistrust of “boys” because of the trauma of not knowing if her best boy, her husband, was going to return from the war and her certainty that another war was coming for her son (treated as an afterthought even though it frames the story).

The adults don’t really reach out to us, as characters or performances. Too calm. Too insistent on just “carrying on.”

But there’s something almost ancient about Winnie the Pooh, something that resonates on a primal childish level, and “Goodbye, Christopher Robin” gets at that via the child who inspired him.

The film manages to move and touch us, revealing that the books are timeless due to their exquisite, English craftsmanship, their wit and warmth. Learning they were created by a troubled, serious father trying to capture the carefree mind of a boy who found escape was as near as a stuffed bear and another trip to Pooh Corner does nothing to ruin that. Not at all.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, some bullying, war images and brief language

Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie,Will Tilston, Kelly Macdonald, Alex Lawther, Stephen Campbell Moore

Credits:Directed by Simon Curtis, script by Frank Cottrell Boyce, Simon Vaughan. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:47

The conceit or gimmick behind “Loving Vincent,” a new Anglo-Polish film about the last days of Vincent Van Gogh, was to cast it and film it with live actors on real sets, and then paint-over those images in the Van Gogh style.

Flashbacks are often charcoaled-over sketches, and the rest of the film is in those twisting, loaded brush strokes of the Impressionist master — heavy raindrops, lurid yellow sunflowers drooping from the weight of the paint, windmill sails blurring in the liquid breeze, vivid blue backdrops to those starry, starry nights.

The characters are the many people Van Gogh painted, the settings familiar to anyone even passingly acquainted with his paintings.

The story is far more conventional, a “Citizen Kane/Rashomon” series of remembrances of the man — “mad…loving…interesting…normal…genius” — often conflicting and all part of a “Kane” styled “investigation.” It makes for a fine primer on Van Gogh’s last days, the heros, heroines and villains in his life, though nothing shown here amounts to a new “revelation” about how and why he died.

Armand (Douglas Booth) is sent in search of Van Gogh’s surviving family a year after his death, a quest he’s given by his father (Chris O’Dowd, painted into a beard). The old man was Van Gogh’s postman for a time, and his friend. He’s dismissive of his son’s glib characterization of the “crazy” man who once cut off an ear, and finally killed himself with a revolver.

“Live longer. You’re see life can bring down even the strong.”

There’s one last undelivered letter from Vincent to his art dealer brother, Theo, siblings who were “two hearts, one mind.” Armand must deliver that letter.

But it’s a year after Vincent’s death, and in those pre-Internet, pre-newspaper obituary days (1891), Armand doesn’t know Theo is dead. So he seeks the last folks to know Vincent, the doctor who treated him, the inn where Vincent died in Auvers-sur-Oise. And that’s where the mystery deepens. 

The story, built from letters and other Van Gogh history, sends Armand, in his yellow suit and omnipresent black hat, to this character or that one — people Van Gogh painted, actors dressed and made up as he painted them.

“He went everywhere. He liked the river. Ask the boatman.”

There’s a charming innkeeper’s daughter (Eleanor Tomlinson) to interview, and the doctor’s disapproving housekeeper (Helen McCrory) and his daughter (Saoirse Ronan) whom Vincent may have had a crush on.

Neither Armand nor we get definitive answers about Vincent’s troubles, his sudden decision to shoot himself, the lack of treatment from his “friend” and supporter, Dr. Gachet, a man who took Vincent’s best paintings as “payment” for the dead man’s bill.

It would all make for a passable movie — perhaps made for TV or Netflix — without painting over the performances. But the animation lifts “Loving Vincent” (he signed some of his letters with a hearty “handshake from your loving Vincent”) above the mystery, above mere biography, into something brilliant, revealing and unique.

What other animated film has hair-styling and costumer credits?

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic elements, some violence, sexual material and smoking

Cast: Douglas Booth, Saoirse Ronan, Chris O’Dowd, Helen McCrory, Eleanor Tomlinson

Credits:Written and directed by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman. A Good Deed/Silver Reel release.

Running time: 1:34

With “Suburbicon,” George Clooney at long last achieves one of his bucket-list goals as director, making a satirical misfire every bit as tone-deaf as the worst works of his movie-making mentors, the Coen Brothers.

It’s a darkly humorous murder farce set against the integration of a lily-white Connecticut suburb in 1959. And while there’s value in recalling that northeasterners declare, more than once, “We’re NOT Mississippi,” even as they harass and riot to chase out the first black family to move to the planned community Suburbicon, that the town’s REAL villains are the white Episcopalian monsters carrying out a murderous insurance scam next door, it’s not all that dark and not farcically funny, not in the least.

Matt Damon is upstanding citizen Gardner Lodge, a buttoned-down executive vice president at a local firm who goes home each night to suburban bliss. Except a Negro family (Karimah Westbrook, Leith M. Burke, Tony Espinosa) has moved in next door.

Not that this stands out as a “problem” to him or his wife Rose (Julianne Moore), and their son Nicky (Noah Jupe) just thinks that he’s got a new friend to play with.

Gardner has bigger problems, as in these two thugs who invade their house, menace them and kill Rose.

The film’s cleverest scenes are the starchy way Gardner copes with this loss, the emotionally-stunted “1950s” people in his office trying to comfort him.

“I’m glad we had this talk,” after nobody has talked. At all.

But little Nicky sees something else in Dad’s closed-off grief, in the haste with which Mom’s twin sister Margaret (Moore again) moves in because “Nicky needs a mother,” in the police line-up where Dad and Aunt Margaret refuse to ID the killers (Glenn Fleshler, Alex Hassell).

As the neighbors riot about the black family next door (NOBODY sticks up for them), Nicky sees the real “threat” right under his own roof. The arrival of an oily insurance claims investigator (Oscar Isaac) only confirms his suspicion.

“It all boils down to one word — ‘coincidence.’ Happens a lot in operas,” but not in real life, not in life insurance claims.

Clooney, who shares screenwriting credit with the Coens and his usual partner Grant Heslov, gives the picture no urgency, takes on the Coens’ mocking-contemptuous tone toward the characters, with their quaint 1950s sexual and emotional repression, and loses himself in their mania for finding laughs in the production design. The ugly brown appliances, dopey flashlight TV remote control, starchy 1950s clothes and dated “racism” on the TV news — hilarious.

Only it isn’t.

Damon has played this sort of amoral character before, but he can’t find the funny in Gardner, in his empty reassurances to his son that he’s “an adult” who “understands” things differently, reassurances that sound like threats.

Moore differentiates the two twins and gives us something to latch onto (Margaret is a little gullible, impulsive and panic prone). But it’s not an amusingly written character.

Clooney has no more idea what to do with African American characters than those Minnesota Coens. They’re just icons — plot devices, barely sketched-in — closely modeled on couples who endured this sort of abuse in the “tolerant” north during the Civil Rights era.

And while the message — “The REAL threat looks JUST LIKE YOU” — may sting on paper, in the movie it’s just lost. The abrupt escalation from social shunning to rioting against black neighbors without putting them under suspicion for the murder is more inept than you figure the director of “Good Night, and Good Luck” should be.

In trying to master his Coens impersonation, Clooney has done them proud. He’s made “The Hudsucker Miscarriage.”

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and some sexuality

Cast: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe

Credits:Directed by George Clooney, script by Joel and Ethan Coen, George Clooney and Grant Heslov. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:44

The “Thor” movies have always been the lightest, silliest installments in the Marvel money-minting machine. They’re more about the fun than the fights, and in “Thor: Ragnarok,” you know even the big fight — the God of Thunder vs. The Hulk, teased in the trailers – is going to be a hoot.

“Ragnarok” is a ridiculously random comic book movie, more about zippy banter and zany cameos than the Great Threat to the Home Planet, “Asgard,”which as characters point out, is pretty funny when you say it out loud. It’s self-mocking, which is refreshing in the dark, gravitas-imitating post-“Avengers” universe, though that undercuts its vitality and urgency at every turn.

“Ragnarok” is the first Thor movie to look like they spent serious money on it. The 3D is stunning at times. The visuals dazzle, the brawls dance along, the cameos sizzle and every scene is populated and set-decorated to the hilt. None of this Dull Digital Great Hall myopia of the earlier films.

It’s even dumber than the earlier installments, but it knows it. And the result is some good, clean kid-friendly fun, save for the odd profanity — Odin is known for his curses, after all. Even the killing seems to lack fatal finality.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth, swaggering, self-mocking and studly) sets the tone in the opening scene, narrating his own predicament — “Oh nooooo, Thor’s in a CAGE! It’s a long story, but, basically, I’m a bit of a hero.”

A satanic digital villain has him in his clutches, threatening to set off Armageddon in Thorland (Asgard). Thor thinks he can stop it. “That’s what heroes do.”

But maybe not.

He’s waylaid through wormhole space onto a Planet of Lost Toys — actually space junk — where he faces off with the “champion” of the Grand Master (Jeff Goldblum, hilarious), teams up with a drunken Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson of “Creed” and “Dear White People,” bringing her own swagger) and tries to calm Hulk down enough to become Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) while reconciling with his trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston).

No, they’re never really going to kill that guy off.

Meanwhile, Odin (Anthony Hopkins) has retired to Norway, Hela, the Goddess of Death (Cate Blanchett) is taking over Asgard and she’s recruited this poseur turncoat (Karl Urban) to help.

The settings are striking, the best effects are the morphing costume changes Hela shows off (Blanchett is quite the vamp) and the best visuals are a 3D flashback to the Ride of the Valkyries.

Yeah. Wagnerian.

Nobody but Goldblum could make a supervillain’s characterization of his gladiatorial fight-to-the-death — “my little harlequinade” — come off. And nobody but Hemsworth could turn the “tragedy” of Thor finally getting a haircut into farce.

Actor-turned-director Taika Waititi (“Hunt for the Wilderpeople”) makes this Down Under affair (so many Aussie and Kiwi actors) as much of a romp as one can manage in a two hour and ten minute overkill of a Marvel movie. Fights are set to Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” and the Mark Mothersbaugh score tosses a little Willy Wonka music at us for good measure (and ABBA?).

It plays longer than it runs, and it’s more about good lines than good story — “Are you a fighter, or are you FOOD?” More about characters getting chummy than creating suspense and raising the stakes.

Look for the cameos, listen for Hopkins reaching for the cheap laugh and wait, if you must, for the two post-credits teasers. Just don’t expect anything more topical, relevant or suspenseful here than Thor’s ever-annoyed waiting for that darned hammer to finally boomerang back into his hand in the “Ta DA,” nick-of-time.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief suggestive material

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Cate Blanchett, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Mark Ruffalo, Tess Thompson, Karl Urban, Idris Elba, Jeff Goldblum.

Credits:Directed by Taika Waititi, script by Eric Pearson,  Craig Kyle, Christopher Yost. A Disney/Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 2:10