Movie Nation

Mel Gibson seeks cinematic redemption for his non-cinematic sins by going to his safe space with “Hacksaw Ridge,” a violent and visceral combat movie that doubles as a faith-based film.

His name isn’t on the advertising, but “Hacksaw,” the story of a conscientious objector who became a Medal of Honor winner, is being aggressively marketed to Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” audience. And it’s a vivid reminder of Gibson’s gifts as a storyteller with pictures, and of the fact he has few peers when it comes to staging convincing combat on the big screen.

Andrew Garfield stars as Desmond Doss, a skinny, gawky Blue Ridge Mountain Virginian so scarred by childhood violence that he’s uncompromising about the Bible’s “Thou shalt not kill.” He will not pick up a gun, will not take life. But he will go into battle with the rest of his generation — unarmed. He will be “a conscientious co-operator.”

The Andrew Knight (“Water Diviner”)/Robert Schenkkan (HBO’s “All the Way”) script gives us a great early scene establishing Doss’s resolve. He’s the sort who runs to a car accident, who doesn’t panic or flinch at gruesome injuries. His instinct is to save life.

Hugo Weaving plays his haunted, WWI vet father, a violent drunk who only has one lesson to impart to his two sons when war comes — and that lesson’s delivered in a veteran’s cemetery.

Desmond isn’t cut out for this. “You’ve gotta sit and think and pray about everything,” Dad says. He can’t make war “fit in with your ideas” and ideals.

His new gal, the nurse Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) is stricken by the decision. And the Army joins the chorus telling Desmond that his never-touch-a-gun philosophy just won’t wash in the Pacific. Vince Vaughn plays the drill sergeant who bullies and encourages company hazing to change Doss’s mind, Sam Worthington is the captain who doesn’t want this “coward” in his outfit. Doss is unshaken.

“While everybody else is taking life, I’ll be saving it.” He wants to be a medic.

The movie staggers to a halt in basic training, with Vaughn rattling through a stiff (high speed) recitation of DI (drill instructor) cliches and insults. He mocks guys nicknamed “Hollywood” and “Teach” and Tex, ridicules a darker skinned recruit as “Chief” and makes him do Indian war chants. Doss?

“I have seen stalks of CORN with better physiques.”

But the quicksand of corn dries up when “Hacksaw” gets to Okinawa. On one of the bloodiest pieces of turf of World War II, Doss, the movie and Gibson prove their mettle. As he showed in “Braveheart,” Gibson has a real eye for the grim tableaux of combat, and a real passion for showing how brutal, brutish and personal it is. He reminds us that “visceral” violence means you show viscera — guts and blood and exploding heads and severed limbs.

The mayhem will may you grimace, wince and avert your eyes. But not Doss. He plunges right in to do what he came to do, after risking abuse, beating and a court martial just to be able to do it.

Garfield, sort of this generation’s Tony “Psycho” Perkins, has the right rail-thin Depression Era look and sensitivity for this part, and he’s both sympathetic and convincing. Palmer (“Warm Bodies,””Point Break”) has perhaps her best supporting role ever and makes the most of this Southern Christian willing to go toe to toe over dogma with her man.

“This is pride, pride and stubbornness,” she snaps at Desmond’s determination to be in the Army on his terms. “Don’t confuse your will for the Lord’s!”

Weaving is terrific, as always, and Griffiths brings heart and soul to the mother. Worthington whisper-growls his lines.

But if all these Australians didn’t give away the game, the film never quite manages to convince us that its first half is set in Virginia. You may be able to recreate Okinawa in the deserts of Australia, but you can’t fake the Blue Ridge in New South Wales. Gibson returned not just to the safe space of familiar genres and his faith-based audience for this movie, but to the land where he grew up and started his film career.

That said, it’s a good-if-not-great movie, old fashioned but anachronistic dialogue, action that’s more impressive than inspiring, a combat film that like Eastwood’s Western “Unforgiven,” tries to have it both ways — a sermon against the violence of man delivered in a very violent story. Whether it brings a talented filmmaker back from the wilderness years after his various intolerances burst out in the open is up to the audience.

MPAA Rating:R for intense prolonged realistically graphic sequences of war violence including grisly bloody images

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Teresa Palmer, Hugo Weaving, Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, Rachel Griffiths

Credits:Directed by  Mel Gibson, script by Andrew Knight  and Robert Schenkkan. A Summit/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:25

“Sex,” the infamously twisted Woody Allen once joked, “is the most fun you can have without laughing.”

But he said that decades before the Korean film of Sarah Waters‘ “The Handmaiden.” It’s an erotic thriller of schemes, double-crosses, pornography and torture.

And there’s sex — explicit, over-the-top coitus in all manner of couplings. The only word for it is the one that the con man “Count” of this Park Chan-Wook (“Oldboy”) period piece uses for his mark, the moody, disturbed and rich young woman he’s trying to hustle — “ripe.”

In the years just before World War II, Sook-hee (Tae-ri Kim) is packed off to be handmaiden to a rich Japanese women living with her uncle in occupied Korea. Sook-yee has been recruited by “The Count” (Ha Jung-woo) to assist him in his latest caper — seducing the wealthy Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) out from under the nose of her covetous, perverse uncle (Jo Jin-woong).

Sook-hee will become Tamako, handmaiden, with recommendations, for Lady Hideko in the vast British/Japanese mansion her uncle keeps her and his vast book collection in. Hideko is fragile, given to nightmares involving the cherry tree her uncle planted out back, the one her aunt was found hanging from. Tamako narrates “Part One” of the story, vowing to “make my fortune and flee this country.” But she takes pity on hearing Hideko’s nightmares, sings to her, crawls into bed and comforts her.

And that’s when she starts to fall for her.

The cunning Count has inveigled his way into this world by mastering the art of forging classic Japanese pornography. The uncle collects it, summons groups of friends and has raised Hideko to read from these explicit texts to rooms full of proper Japanese porn lovers. There was no Showtime back then, remember, no peep shows.

Tamako/Sook-hee doesn’t let her sympathy deter her from her task — at first. She aids the Count’s courtship even as she pities Hideko’s fate — a quick marriage, a quicker trip into an asylum.

But plans and alliances change, and Park summons up delicious surprises in between long, overheated sexual encounters, “bells of passion” and primitive wooden sex-doll demonstrations and the like.

The stakes are dire, with poison pills present should any of those involved want to avoid a trip to the uncle’s “basement,” where unspeakable things are said to happen. He wants Hideko and her money for himself, the creep.

There are hints of other murderously sexy stories of this ilk in “Handmaiden’s” overlong (2:25, really?), Korean-and-Japanese subtitled chapters. Think “Wild Things” or the classic “Les Diaboloques”).

And amidst all the “ripe” scenes of nubile, nude characters, the sado-masochistic twists and turns of the plot and the startling, rich texture of the period detail Park brings to the screen, there are laughs — explosive guffaws at this sexual moment or that delightful twist.

The thriller is mildly thrilling, the intrigues reasonably intriguing. But it’s the sex that sells this. With apologies to Woody Allen, “Handmaiden” is the most fun you can have while laughing while watching sex on the big screen.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, drug use, explicit sex

Cast:Kim Min-hee, Tae-ri Kim, Ha Jung-woo, Jo Jin-woong

Credits:Directed by Park Chan-Wook, script by Chung Seo-Kyung, Park Chan-wook , based on the Sarah Waters novel. A Magnolia/Amazon Studios release.

Running time:2:24

Sony waited too long to roll out a third Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown film. The fizz has gone out of this series of page-turner adaptations, partly because the books are old news, Tom Hanks’ audience has aged and is far less reliable and Ron Howard is having a hard time finding a hit.

“Inferno,” with Hanks as Professor Robert Langdon, ancient lit/symbols expert, will open at a middling $15 million at the box office.

As Deadline.com points out, following “Rush,” “In the Heart of the Sea” (actually almost a hit) and “The Dilemma,” that makes for four films in a row for Howard that have failed to break even. “Inferno” was well-directed and edited, “Rush” almost dazzling and “In the Heart of the Sea” pretty good. But they’re movies aimed at audiences that aren’t showing up.

That leaves this weekend’s box office title to last weekend’s winner, “Boo! A Madea Halloween.” Tyler Perry’s new lease on life earned another $16.5 or so this weekend, putting it over $50, on the way to @$70 million, all in when it drops out of theaters.

“Jack Reacher” is done as a franchise, unless Europe or Asia saves it. Cruise & Co. turning the guy into a babysitter was the wrong move for the character and series.

Tim Burton’s another established star director looking into the abyss, as his “Miss Peregrine” movie won’t come anywhere near $100 million. Fading fast.

And Hollywood can probably close the door on Zach Galifianakis as a bankable comic star. He’s strictly cable/Netflix Original Series in his appeal these days, as “Keeping up with the Joneses” is dying a swift death and will be out of the top ten and forgotten by next weekend. Maybe $13-14 million all in. Not good news for Jon Hamm, either.

Why horror audiences avoided the well-reviewed “Ouija” sequel is a mystery.

The thing about Professor Robert Langdon is, he’s solving mysteries none of us has a prayer of solving before him. He’s not playing fair.

Novelist Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” “puzzle-master,” classics professor and antiquities expert, has information in his memory banks that can uncover an alteration to any painting, a clue within any line of ancient poetry, with just a glance. Like any of us has Dante memorized, or a photographic memory of mural-sized masterworks about epic battles of the Middle Ages.

Langdon’s wits and clue-connecting is unmatchable, even after he’s suffered a head wound and suffered days of memory loss, a plot device in “Inferno,” the latest Brown novel about Langdon’s exploits to make it to the Big Screen. Add to that the cheats and red herrings the story tosses our way, and we’re totally at a disadvantage. We can’t solve the puzzle before Langdon, because the pieces are changed to ensure that he’s the only one who could put all this together.

That said, Ron Howard, his star Tom Hanks and an A-list production team make this third “Da Vinci” film a solid page-turner, a travelogue that has a bit more logic about it and a more convincing villain than the truth-obscuring Catholic Church of the first two films. Really, if you think the Mother Church is fretting over any secret that doesn’t involve child-raping priests and dictator-coddling popes, you’ve got a richer imagination than Brown.

Hanks’ Langdon is found, in a Florence hospital, hallucinating nightmares ripped straight from the pages of Dante’s “Inferno,” a seven-hundred year old vision of Hell that Lagndon’s foggy short-term memory tells him is in danger of coming true on Earth.

Because there was this billionaire Zero Population Growth Messiah, a TED talk terrorist (Ben Foster) who just died and whose dying gift to the world was a global plague which only Langdon can prevent. Because, you know, the billionaire built this bio-engineered cataclysm on a ticking clock and a puzzle which his True Believers and a classics scholar would be able to decode and either launch or prevent.

An assassin (Ana Ularu) is after him. A “provost” (Irrfan Khan) seems to be pulling the strings from his offshore (ship borne) supervillain’s lair. And Langdon’s best hope is the English doctor (Felicity Jones of “The Theory of Everything”) who helps him escape assassination, the World Health Organization agent (Omar Sy) on his trail, and perhaps the CIA and others who might want to know what he knows.

And most paranoid of all, Langdon has no clue about who to trust and doesn’t know the black guy chasing him is a U.N. representative.

Hanks is as intrepid as ever as Langdon — no James Bond or “Terminator,” just a smart guy with a lot of experience in Florence’s museums, great houses and secret passages, just enough to keep him ahead of Sy (“The Intouchables”), who has only youth, strength, stamina and a World Government organization at his fingertips.

Foster makes a believable cultist, a smart guy taken way too seriously by virtue of his sudden wealth. He is TED Talks’ sins incarnate. Jones is plucky, a good character to have the plot points “explained to” by Langdon (who remembers little) and those who help him piece together the past few days so he can figure out what he’s looking for, and where in history he might find it.

The most interesting character and performance come from the great Indian actor Iffran Khan (“Life of Pi,” “Jurassic World,” “The Lunchbox”). He brings a wonderful world weariness to this “dark money” criminal mastermind.

“You people are a disappointment. I find they become tolerable around 35.”

Which is something like the selling point of this thriller, an old fashioned “mystery” with mostly over-50 actors and their yarn stealing the box office thunder from caped crusaders and their ilk for one week in the fall.

Brown is a forgettable writer and the films Howard has made from his books have lovely locations — Florence, Venice and Istanbul this time — and classic writers and painters (Dante’s “Inferno” and his death mask, Boticelli’s paintings — that rescue them from the simple hokum that he’s inclined to serve up.

On the whole, though, “Inferno” is less interesting because it’s a little more believable, at least in that “highly improbable/entirely possible” James Bond movie sense.

The puzzles are bigger cheats, the clues less striking (Da Vinci is hard to beat as a “puzzle master”) and the resolution as eye-rolling as ever.

And Langdon, that man of letters, simply has too much in his arts ed background for us to be able to keep up with him every time he recites this movie’s Latin mantra — “Cerca Trove — Seek, and ye shall find.” It’s just not fair that he’s the only one who has a prayer of finding what we’re all seeking, because the plot shifts to give him even more advantages than his prodigious memory and classics education should warrant.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, disturbing images, some language, thematic elements and brief sensuality

Cast: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Ben Foster, Irrfan Khan, Sidse Babett Knudsen

Credits:Directed by Ron Howard, script by David Koepp, based on the Dan Brown novel. A Sony release.

Running time: 2:01

“My Dead Boyfriend” forces us, once again, to consider the strange case of Heather Graham.

Perpetually perky, she’s a leggy former child star whose credits range from “Twin Peaks” and “Growing Pains” to “Drugstore Cowboys” and Boogie Nights,” “Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer” to many a sad hooker turn in films like “The Hangover”

She’s never quite broken through, and now, at 46, she’s playing a New York “type” whose personality traits and life achievements suggest the character is about half her age.

Narrator/heroine “Mary” has never come close to getting it together. She’s been in bands, she’s had dead-end jobs. And she’s been living with this “poet,” Primo (John Corbett, many miles past “Northern Exposure,””My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Sex and the City”). And she’s come home after getting fired from her latest job to find him dead, splayed out in front of the TV.

She jokes with the cops who come to investigate about how he “caught me on the rebound,” and was more of a “temp boyfriend like I was between gigs.”

Primo’s pushy and aged mother (Viola Harris) insists on his cremation and insists Mary dispose of the ashes. Her similarly hapless BFF Zoe (Katherine Moenig) has no solutions, and this creepy childhood “neighbor” (Griffin Dunne) who keeps showing up have no suggestions about how to handle all this.

So Mary digs into Primo’s past, visiting strip clubs, drag bars, tracking down some greater love of his life to give the ashes to. One former lover, the French art dealer Helene (Gina Gershon, having a laugh) has the most clues.

“How deed he die?”

“Had a bad heart.”

“Zas ees true.”

Primo was a faithless lover, a painter, a choreographer, maybe even a filmmaker. And as Mary digs and digs, she finds herself hurled into the band of one ex (Martha Millan, abrasively amusing) and totally thrown by this lazy lout whose death starts to feel more life another piece of performance art in a life spent dabbling and posing in the arts.

Andre Ward stands out as a drag queen with lots of answers and a vampy, cliched stage age — “If I could love…I would love you ALL.”

A laugh pops up, here and there, as surprised to be in the movie as we are to find it there. Mostly, though, one is struck by all these actors having a lark, playing versions of the sorts of roles they would have/should have played 20 years ago in an story that’s inexplicably a 1999 period piece.

And Graham? Still wearing the short shorts, the shorter skirts, the knee socks and the wider than wide eyes. She and “My Dead Boyfriend” aren’t exactly bad, they’re just out of place and out of time.

But at least she’s not playing another hooker.

MPAA Rating:R for language and sexual content

Cast: Heather Graham, Katherine Moennig, John Corbett, Scott Michael Foster, Martha Millan, Griffin Dunne, Gina Gershon

Credits:Directed by Anthony Edwards, script by Billy Morrissette, based on a novel by Arthur Nersesian. A Momentum– release.

Running time:1:27

The Brits and their leading acolytes, the Anglophiles of American public broadcasting, must be at their wits’ end, hunting up the next droll, costume-bedecked Brit dramedy of sex, class, wit and houses big enough to have names. But the next “Downton Abbey” might be in the non-fictional life of the author of one of the greatest earlier TV serials to cross from Brit TV to PBS — Evelyn Waugh, author of “Brideshead Revisited.”

Philip Eade’s new Waugh biography “A Life Revisited” is maddeningly cavalier with dates, and overly reliant on one having read the earlier Waugh biographies (and incomplete autobiography), too snooty to do a decent job of recapping the works that made Waugh famous, just concerned with the road to fame, and the infamy that followed.

He may not have been, as his son insisted, “the funniest man” of the 20th century. But Waugh came close, a middle class snob who idolized and ridiculed the Noel Coward classes like no one before or since. He was P.G. Wodehouse with a literary mien, a cultural observer/satirist who introduced all sorts of upper class “Upstairs/Downstairs” cliches into the zeitgeist, mainly the foibles of those who lived “upstairs.”

The son of an editor, a man to whom many a volume of lit from the early 20th century was dedicated, brother of a published author, descended from other writers, he took to “the family business” like no other, and produced “Scoop,” “The Loved One,” “Brideshead Revisited” and other classics of the ’30s-50s.

Eade recaptures the child’s annoyance at his theatrical father, his social striving, his boy buggering boys’ school boy school days (come to full flower in college). An academic under-achiever, Waugh built his novels on the sons of lords and dames and all the nonsensicals of British nobility. He observed, changed the names, and skewered one and all in books that made many a future House of Lords lout blush.

Waugh served in World War II rather the way “gentlemen” (like his love/hate pal, Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son) did, with posh appointments to elite units, leadership imposed by class, danger faced (on just a couple of occasions) with a stiff upper lip.

He married, divorced, converted to Catholicism, remarried, pursued women single and married, cozied up to a ditzy Pope to get an annulment, and fathered children like they were going out of style.He comes off as superstitious, a Catholic apologist who thought nothing of upbraiding peers who had the temerity to be atheists, and a loyal friend to the likes of Graham Greene and Ian Fleming, or at least his wife.

He was not quite a bounder, but a lousy parent, a mean and frequent drunk and part of a tiny elite that seemed to watch out for each other as they surfed the waves of war, woe and post-war “welfarism.”

And at every step of the way, the man was quotable.

“Of children as of procreation— the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.”

“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”

“There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable.”

“Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.”

“He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.”

“O God, make me good, but not yet.”

“His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.”

He’d make the great subject for a serial autobiography, weaving in and out of the history of WWI boys’ schools to fascist sympathizer/bigot/anti-Semite to WWII “hero” to Great Man of British Letters. I envision a “Man Who Came to Dinner” take, with say Eddie Marsan or David Wenham — nobody too pretty, mind you. None of this McAvoy or Garfield casting. Maybe Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne or Ben Whishaw.

Skewering, flirting, shocking and mocking. Waugh is a natural for a mini series. All his life experiences leading up to his “masterpiece,” “Brideshead,” which captures class, Catholicism, homo/bisexuality and WWII officer corps heroics in one tale.

What say you, PBS?

Reviews for both the second Jack Reacher movie and the first Tyler Perry “Madea” movie in three years aren’t giving them a boost.

But with Tom Cruise teetering on the brink of irrelevance — action stars lose their audience after 50, unless they’re named Eastwood — every misstep is a threat to his status as someone who can open a picture and his high-priced quote. I figured this potential franchise-killing “Reacher” bust might be it.

But by midnight Sunday, he’ll have pulled in maybe $25 million or so for Paramount. Novelist Lee Child fans were irate when Cruise got the gig (Reacher is described as being Liam Neeson-sized in Child’s books). Their fears seemed exaggerated, but this movie is a formulaic compromise, start to finish. It’ll probably earn under $50 in the US, when all is said and done.

Tyler Perry and his most famous creation were seriously overexposed by 2010. But a few years’ absence and some funny TV ads had fans hoping he’d deliver the goods with “A Madea Halloween.” We all went to check it out Thursday and Friday, and the film should clear $23 million by Sunday night. But his cheapness and credit hogging and the fact he’s simply run out of jokes for her work against the film, and his movies always have the steepest drop off the second weekend.  Figure he might clear $40 or so with this one by the end of its run.

The best-reviewed (perhaps a tad over-rated) film of the weekend is the “Ouija” prequel, which turns a pretty good cast loose on a back-engineered tale of how spiritual investigator Paulina Zander (Lin Shaye in the original film) was first exposed to the supernatural. It’s underwhelming the box office. Anybody who’s seen the trailers has seen the movie. A bit over $12 million for it on opening weekend.

“Keeping up With the Joneses” is proof that Zach Galifianakis can’t open a movie, Jon Hamm and Isla Fisher aren’t a help and the new Wonder Woman Gal Gadot isn’t yet box office. A poorly reviewed comic thriller, following the “Masterminds” debacle (also starring Zach, alas) it is bombing — $6 million this weekend.

Kevin Hart’s concert film days may be over as “What Now” is dying off faster than the honeybees. “Girl on the Train” is holding strong, “The Accountant” is headed to a $65-75 million or so take, all-in. “Deep Water Horizon” will clear $65 by next weekend.

Oh Madea, how we’ve missed you.

No. Seriously. Unless you are into getting your fixes direct-to-video, Tyler Perry’s alter-ego has been MIA from movie screens for three years.

And “Boo! A Madea Halloween” (Haller-ween?) has TV commercials that make you long for the big-boned gal’s heydays. Maybe a Halloween movie, a Madea “Scary Movie” with all sorts of slapstick, effects and big scary sight gags could breathe a little life into dude in a dress.

“You know black people scared of everything,” as Madea herself declares.

But the same problems curse “Boo!” as the last half-dozen Madea movies. Perry tries to get by without effects, without sight gags. It’s a comedy of words — rants, profane tirades, riffs. And Perry is running short on those. Funny ones, anyway.

He writes long, windy spiels and wordy old folks roundtables ranting about “kids today” and “back when I was strippin'” and the joys of medical marijuana — “I got me a PRESCRIPTION!” He works in his homilies about raising kids, the N-word, corporal punishment and avoiding religion while invoking “Jesus” in any situation of stress. “Boo!” is a “spare the rod, spoil the teen” life lesson from He who has Raised No kids.

Perry strains to put Madea into a college comedy about randy teens trying to get in trouble at a frat party on Halloween night, a cumbersome plot device that adds 40 clumsy minutes to the running time, and zero laughs.

In short, there is no truth in advertising. The only laughs are in the trailer. And Madea and her Crew get them.

Perry plays Brian, father of flirty-tarty teen Tiffany (Diamond White), who longs to run with Bella Thorne’s cut-off top/short skirt crowd at Catholic school. They’re all invited to an Atlanta frat party Halloween night. Brian summons his dad (Perry, as “Joe”), and his Aunt Madea, Madea’s pal Bam (Cassi White) and Joe’s crazy gal Hattie (Patrice Lovely) to babysit and keep the teens out of trouble.

And thank God he does, because they only show up 12 minutes in, and proceed to regale us with scenes about pot, accounts of their various surgeries and “kids these days.” Madea dominates the talk, goosing the conversation forward with “Go the hell on” and “Show some apolegection!” and”Little love tap never hurt nobody.”

Scary clowns are dominating the trick or treating, though the odd kid dolled up as a cow shows up.

“Got that kid dressed like chocolate milk in a box. He needs to be trick-or-treating for a damn treadmill!”

Misbehaving teens sneak out, Madea gets manhandled trying to rescue them, then mad, then scared, then MADDER. And frat boy pranks are played.

The group scenes with the bug-eyed White and racially ambiguous Lovely are loud and riotous. And everything that ties them together is cut-rate and in need of editing/workshopping/rewrites. Perry’s lack of effort in writing the scenes he isn’t in has become more obvious with each Madea movie.

All those years with Madea not on the big screen haven’t changed Atlanta’s mogul’s business model. He’s still doing everything cut-rate, still not sharing credit or spending money on joke writers. Sad thing, because the big guy with the cross-dressing fetish is fresh out of jokes. Madea is damn near played out.

Wish it wasn’t so, as I still find the character brash and cranky fun. But until Perry parts with a nickel and brings in funny people to goose his ideas into something wittier, Madea isn’t MIA, she’s DOA.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for drug use and references, suggestive content, language, some horror images and thematic material

Cast: Tyler Perry, Cassi White, Patrice Lovely, Diamond White, Bella Thorne

Credits:Written and directed by Tyler Perry. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:43

The only reason the X-Men franchise was never less than half-interesting was Hugh Jackman’s iconic — yes, that’s the right word — portrayal of Wolverine. From the very first X-Men film, he was the magnetic center, a very good actor turning a comic book character into flesh and bone and metal talons. Impossible to think of anybody else in that part, now.

I’ve enjoyed the iterations of Magneto and Xavier through the franchise films and its prequels, but Wolverine is still the draw. And letting him age out of the part is gutsy and inspired. They never let James Bond get old, world-weary and grizzled. Same with “The Terminator,” for that matter.

Wolverine deserves better. Fox is sending him off, it would appear, with some class. “Logan,” the furry one’s real name, opens March 3.

“Max Steel” isn’t the utter abortion that it’s terrible Metacritic/Rottentomatoes ratings suggests it must be.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some sci-fi action violence

Cast: Ben Winchell, Maria Bello, Andy Garcia, Ana Villafane, the voice of Josh Brener
Credits: Directed by Stewart Hendler, script by Christopher Yost. An Open Road release.

Running time: