Hirokazu Koreeda‘s “Our Little Sister” is a subtle, almost painfully slight character study about three young women whose opinions of their parents are enriched and polished when, after their wayward father dies, they take in a half-sister they never knew.

Koreeda also somewhat unwittingly shines a light on a Japanese cultural cliche with this film, based on a manga (adult comic book). As the “little sister” of the title (Suzu Hirose) is a pretty 13-year old and almost always seen in a particular costume, we see another example of a particular Japanese predilection. They will watch (or read an illustrated book) most anything with a uniformed Japanese schoolgirl in it.

Their father has just died, and Sachi (Haruka Ayase), Yoshino (Masami Nagasawa) and Chika (Kaho)  don’t seem at all torn up about it.

Ranging in age from late 20s to about to turn 20, they live together in their grandmother’s house. Their father leaving their mother for another woman forever darkened their opinion of him and had a lasting impact on their lives because Mom, in turn, left them with grandma when she herself moved on to a new husband and new life.

Yoshino works in insurance customer service and, even though we meet her as she gets out of her latest lover’s bed, has no luck with men.

Young Chika dates a mountain-climbing-obsessed colleague at the sporting goods store where she works, a guy who wants to show one and all the toes he lost to frostbite on Everest.

Responsible, organized Sachi is the oldest, a lonely head nurse with a tentative and secret relationship with a married doctor.

At the funeral in Yamagata, they’re greeted by Suzu, their dad’s daughter by one of his other two marriages. She is lovely and sad. Dad’s last wife will only reluctantly raise her, so Sachi, reasoning that the widow didn’t care for their dying dad — Suzu did — impulsively offers to take her home to Kamakura.

And there they settle into routine, with each sister, in turn, preparing meals, doing chores, getting Suzu to school and getting on with life. As they cook together, clean together, pray to their ancestors together or walk together, one-on-one, each starts to pick up on something they didn’t realize about their father and still-living mother.

Not that there aren’t suspicions — that the girl was coached to behave a certain way so that the widow could get an unwanted reminder of her late husband out of the house, that the sisters don’t realize what they’re in for, essentially raising a teenager on their own.

“She’s not a pet, you know,” a wise old auntie advises them (in Japanese, with English subtitles).

The book it was based on had the title “Umimachi Diary,” and that’s very much what Koreeda has given us here, tiny slices of life presented in almost static scenes and vignettes.

Suzu plays soccer and meets a boy at her new school, and gets into the plum wine — typical teen stuff. There’s a favorite neighbor and friend who runs a diner and is facing legal, sibling and health issues. Yoshino is dumped, by phone, again. The sisters pass judgment on each other’s lovers, though Sachi is keeping hers under wraps.

Nothing much happens, and “static” scenes render the sympathetic performances into inorganic action-reaction moments. There’s little flow, which explains the film’s funereal pace as well.

But each sister, in coping with a new sibling and new revelations, comes to tiny new self-awarenesses — nothing overtly expressed, just a tiny flicker of recognition in each actress’s eyes. Oh yeah, that’s why I am the way I am.

It’s easy to confuse “subtle” with depth, and it’s helpful to remember this director did “Air Doll,” a fantasy about another cliched Japanese contribution to world culture — blow up sex dolls.

But “Our Little Sister” is just engrossing and revealing enough to be worth your time and make you glad you invested in it when it’s done.

MPAA Rating:Rated PG for thematic elements and brief language

Cast: Haruka Ayase, Suzu Hirose,Masami Nagasawa, Kaho 
Credits: Written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, based on the magna (comic book) by Akimi Yoshida . A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:07

I won’t go so far as to call this the most disappointing summer for cinema in decades, but I think you could make the case for that.

“Dismal”? Almost. “Desultory”? Most certainly.

If you didn’t wet your nappies over “Captain America and His Avenger Friends,” you’re going to be hard-pressed to grab hold of anything to point to and say, “Now THAT was a summer movie.” And I defy anybody to summon up a memory of it that one doesn’t include the Big Cameo Moment with Antman, Spider-Man the Latest, et al.

“Star Trek Beyond” showed the franchise’s age — nothing new to say.

“Ghostbusters” lacked the laughs necessary to beat back the wave of abuse that greeted its release from delusional fans of the original. Less money on effects and a few bucks on script doctoring/joking up might have helped.

“Bourne” again? Matt Damon wasn’t the only one yawning.

“Warcraft” found fans only among movie-savvy cultures, and “Suicide Squad” put Warner Brothers gamblers on suicide watch.

But this weekend, THIS weekend, things are different. It’s a transitional one, featuring movies that would be right at home in September of October.

Here is Meryl Streep delivering the season’s best comedy and bringing High Grant back from the movie dead with the delightful, sentimental and hilarious “Florence Foster Jenkins.”

Jeff Bridges bites off a plug and drawls his way through a wily pursuit of farmhand bank robbers Chris Pine and Ben Foster in “Hell or High Water”, a great genre picture and one with biting social commentary — both about the America “left behind” in the current economy, and about Texas and Texans.

Not everybody bought into “Anthropoid” the way I did, but a World War II thriller about Czech ex-pats on a suicide mission that will get a lot of their countryment killed, ugly facts that Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dorman wear on their faces in every scene? War with consequences, grown men old enough to know their fate and face it not knowing if their actions are futile, even if they succeed? That’s a great story to tell, and it’s artfully told, war without sugar-coating.

“Sausage Party,” an animated dirty joke turned into a feature length cartoon by Seth Rogen & Co., is hilarious and lowdown and dirty and downright daring. If you see but one R-rated animated comedy about groceries, sex, pot and atheism this year, this is it.

Will anything else this summer measure up? Yeah, “In Order of Disappearance” opens in a few weeks. And then comes September and the Oscar contenders of fall.

But in a summer that could only boast of the occasional moment of heart (“Captain Fantastic”) or originality (“Swiss Army Man”), a summer where the jig finally seems up for Woody Allen and only the aged “Ab Fab” gals and Kathryn Hahn (“Bad Moms”) and Aubrey Plaza (“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates”) delivered real laughs, we’ll take it.

The animation sparkles and delights in its detail, caricatures and computer-generated colors and craft.

The setting is novel and seriously silly — a supermarket, where the food and household items can only live their lives — out in the open, anyway — after hours.

But then, they open their mouths. The first word is an S-bomb, followed by many others. Then a B-bomb or two, and finally, hilariously, an F-bomb. And who delivers it but that Prince of Profanity, Danny McBride.

Welcome to the “Sausage Party,” the most profane animated film since “Fritz the Cat,” the perverse product of that vanguard of vulgarity, Seth Rogen and his Lewd Crew of (mostly) Jews..

It’s demented, and it’s damned-near brilliant.

It’s about groceries who begin each day with a hymn to “The Great Beyond,” one composed by the Maestro of Animated Music — Alan Menken. They sing of leaving this Earthy coil, named “Shopwell’s”, for “the promised land.” The Gods will buy them and take them home and care for them.

Once in paradise, they can mate and, it goes without saying, “bake,” because this is a Seth Rogen project, after all. It’s all the wieners (Rogen, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill among them) can think and talk about, likewise their sexual opposite numbers, the nubile and ever-inviting buns, who include the shapely and chaste Brenda (Kristen Wiig), girlfriend and perfect mate for Frank (Rogen).

They don’t question the order of things, the way their world is. Because they don’t know and they don’t really want to know.

“We’re not SUPPOSED to understand the Will of the Gods!”

Then an item, a simple jar of honey mustard (Danny McBride), is purchased and then returned. And he’s just the profane prophet to set them straight.

“You’re celebrating your DOOM!”

Only he can’t. There are powers that keep the Big Lie safe. We call them the Non Perishables. Frank and Brenda, and Frank’s pal Barry (Michael Cera) must undertakle a quest to find the truth, find true love (or lust) and warn their world about the Gastronomic Apocalypse they face.

Rogen and his co-creating team conjure up a universe of Nazi sauerkraut (“Ve vill KILL all de JUICE!”) and feuding Middle Eastern breads — a Woody Allen-impersonating bagel debating a “77 extra virgin olive oils” believing lavash (Muslim bread).

The horrors of a “cleanup on aisle three” become a scene out of “Saving Private Ryan,” the sage stoners among the Non Perishables include Fire Water (Bill Hader), “They call me MR. GRITS!” (Craig Robinson) and Twinky.

Yeah, the snack with an infinite shelf life gets a nod. And these guys pass the pipe, a kazoo filled with you-know-what.

The gags range from gleefully gross —  defecation and feces sight gags, a vengeful douche (Nick Kroll) is the Master Villain — to light and goofy puns.

“How ya like THEM apples?”

“Who, US?” a chorus of Granny Smith’s chirp.

There’s a lesbian taco (Zing!) voiced by Salma Hayek and a brilliant, wheel-chair bound Great Thinker (a gummy Stephen Hawking impersonator).

And if you listen carefully, you can catch the voices of James Franco, Edward Norton and Paul Rudd amidst this sophomoric boys’ club of crude.

But get past the drug jokes (intravenous drug use  — “Bath Salts!”) –and grocery store marijuana. Tune out the river of raunch — there’s an orgy here that could warp the easily warped — and you’re left with “Sausage Party’s” not-so-subtle subtext.

Religion lies to us, cons us and separates us. It twists and torments our sexuality and turns bread against bread and lets us lead lives of delusion.

And you’re never going to persuade anyone to take a cold, hard look at it by “attacking their beliefs.” You want to change minds about sacred cows (and other edibles), maybe you do it with a cartoon.

That makes “Sausage Party” the gutsiest comedy since, well, “The Interview.” And whatever else this half-baked band of merry band of bakers cook up, you have to give them that.

MPAA Rating:R for strong crude sexual content, pervasive language, and drug useCast: The voices of Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Michael Cera, James Franco

Credits: Directed by Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon, script by .Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg.  A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:29

In all her years of making movies, the one thing the undeniably brilliant Meryl Streep has never attempted is playing dotty — a dope. So now that she’s nearing that certain age, why not try her hand at a sort of Margaret Dumont, the daft foil to the Marx Brothers?

After making a couple of musicals, why not take a shot at singing badly, on purpose, as a character who has no idea how bad she is?

And as a co-star, why not make Hugh Grant relevant again in his best role this millennium?

“Florence Foster Jenkins” is the sort of real-life upper class twit that Monty Python suggested only could come from Britain. She didn’t. She was an heiress who married money, a New York patroness of the arts, a woman who lived “for music,” as she, her husband and everyone who knew her proclaimed.

She sponsored orchestras, underwrote concerts and, because she REALLY loved music, turned her wobbly contralto loose on arias, art songs and airs in public recitals.

And as Florence, Streep fearlessly fights off pitch, tortures tone and shatters nerves, joyously and cluelessly. Streep revels in this role like no part she’s had since her dead-on Julia Child impersonation in “Julia & Julia.”

Florence’s famous singing Metropolitan coach (David Haig) thinks nothing of taking her money and feeding her delusion. The great conductor Arturo Toscanini (John Kavanagh) praises her art with his hand out — for this upcoming concert or that one, you see.

Come to her recital? Oh, I would, darling, but I will be vacationing in Florida that day. Whatever that day is. Or rehearsing. Yes, the orchestra loves to rehearse Saturday nights.

Her champion is her common law husband, St. Clair Bayfield, an actual Brit, an aging actor of little talent, measured charm and a mistress. Grant plays this faded, defeated thespian with a light theatricality that suits the man to a T. His gestures are broad, onstage, where he recites poems and monologues and emcee’s Florence’s musical “tableaux” at her arts club for socialites, The Verdi Club. And offstage, Grant gives him the same wide, embracing sweep of the hands, the same nurturing embrace he gives Florence and other outcasts.

For a ne’er do well, St. Clair is a real swell.

That’s how he comes off to young pianist Cosme McMoon. St. Clair is just another leech living off her largesse, McMoon — yes, that’s his real name — plainly thinks. Simon Helberg, the piano-playing nerd of TV’s “The Big Bang Theory,” gives McMoon a high-pitched wisp of a voice and the shyness of a closeted mincing man of the World War II era, a sort of sitcom actor’s take on an old stereotype. But he’s sweet and it kind of works. Cosme will happily take the overpaying job as Florence’s accompanist, even though the strain of keeping a straight face shows in every musical moment.

What Cosme and we discover is that St. Clair is “utterly devoted” to Florence, that there’s a reason and pathos to her dottiness that goes beyond inbred wealth, and that there’s an audience for her singing. It’s hand-picked by St. Clair, delicately deciding who gets into her musicales like some latter day pol filling the hall with supporters of his candidate, and no dissenters, “true music lovers, not mere mockers and scoffers.”

He even greases the palms of a few New York reviewers to ensure Florence never reads a bad notice. Florence need never know.

The columnist Earl Wilson (Christian McKay of “Me and Orson Welles”) is just the sort of hack St. Clair keeps out of reach of a Florence Foster Jenkins concert. But the brassy and coarse exotic dancer (Nina Arianda) slips through his fingers. Will she have the good manners not to laugh his wife off the New York stage?

The Englishness of it all is nicely buffed and shined by  the British director Stephen Frears and the film’s Brit-TV screenwriter, Nicholas Martin. The muted colors and broad but believable characters give this wartime homefront tale a touch old school Ealing comedies, the label of many a low-and-silly British farce in the years after World War II. Streep’s screeches are caught in rapturous close-ups, as are Grant’s graying, wrinkly twinkle and Helberg’s slack-jawed incredulity.

No need for subtly here.

But Florence is hilarious, and sadly fragile, and Streep makes her pain both funny and poignant. We wince on her behalf, wondering who will be cruel enough to tell her the truth first? A critic? Real musicians, like Cosme? St. Clair’s live-in lover (Rebecca Ferguson)? The abrasive Agnes? The gays? The soldiers and sailors who fill every spare inch of New York in 1944?

This is one area where the film strays from the literal truth. Even her “fans” were more self-aware than her.

But that diversion from reality is how the film’s true forebear makes itself clear. Frears & Co. have transformed New York during the war to the Mayberry, N.C. of Andy Griffith, a small town where, if necessary, every breathing soul can be enlisted in a vast, good-hearted conspiracy to protect somebody’s feelings.

Florence, like Aunt Bee, need never know how awful her pickles are. And Meryl Streep, in the Don Knotts role, can never realize just how tone-deaf and talent-free she is. Because that would be hurtful, unnecessary and simply bad manners.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief suggestive material.

Cast: Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg, Christian McKay
Credits: Directed by Stephen Frears, script by Nicholas Martin. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:49

The Texas Dilemma is a delicious subtext lurking just beneath the surface of “Hell or High Water,” a terrific heist picture about brother-bankrobbers out to save-the-family-farm.

Everybody in this “Last Picture Show” corner of West Texas hates the banks. “Been robbin’ me for 30 years.” Until you become the robber.

“We ain’t stealin’ from you, we’re stealin’ from the bank,” falls on deaf ears.

Yeah, folks left and right have fallen victim to the “reverse mortgage” schemes of the type that conservative icons Rudy Guiliani, Fred Dalton Thompson and now Tom Selleck pitch on TV. That doesn’t mean you let robbers get away without loading up the pickups and forming a well-armed posse to hunt them down.

Old timers cling to their bolo ties and casual racism on the grounds that it’s tradition, and it’s all in good fun.

“You boys ain’t even MEXICAN!”

Most everybody in this white-but-browning enclave romanticizes the lanky, lean working class cowboy type. Until two of them rob the local bank.

And most everybody — in the diners, in the nearly empty bank branches — is packing. “Concealed carry” makes every outing that brothers Tanner and Toby Howard undertake a little too “interesting.” Fortunately, for them, the lionized “good guys with guns” can’t shoot straight.

Ben Foster is Tanner, the Comanche-revering fatalistic ex-con trying to help brother Toby (Chris Pine) save the farm from Mom’s reverse mortgage troubles. Fatalistic?

“I ain’t ever known anybody to ever get away with anything.”

Toby is the responsible one — divorced, unemployed and unemployable. If he can just save the farm… So they undertake a reasonably well-planned series of hold-ups — sadistic, trigger-happy Tanner occasionally misusing a bank employee, handsome Toby trying to get together the farm-saving cash just as sweetly as he can manage.

But we know bank robbers don’t get away these days. Not every Bug Tussle branch will have its security cameras turned off, not every one-horse/one-stoplight hamlet is going to meekly stand by and let them make off with the cash.

Jeff Bridges dials up his thickest drawl since “Wild Bill” as the about-to-retire Texas Ranger on their trail. Gil Birmingham is the half-Mexican/half-Native American partner who has to endure his instincts and hunches, and his good ol’boy racism.

British director David Mackenzie stages this as a series of biting, sometimes funny, sometimes edgy, vignettes. There’s the cute, plump waitress (Katy Mixon) whom Toby can’t quite make eye contact with, but can’t resist over-tipping. Dale Dickey (“Winter’s Bone”) is hilariously small-town and put-out as a bank teller who makes the “ain’t even MEXICANS” observation.

Every robbery is a jolt of energy and accidents/miscalculations waiting to happen. Every meal is a sashay into “Down Home” sarcasm and “local color” — that color coming from sassy non-actor waitresses and diner patrons, usually.

“Hell or High Water” is good enough to take the bad taste that summer cinema 2016 should have left in your mouth. It’s good enough that you can forget the always formidable Foster was in that early summer abortion “Warcraft,” and that Pine is wasting away in “Star Trek,” a franchise “beyond” its expiration date.

And it’s Texan enough that you understand more about the state and the American zeitgeist in this election year, a film that dares venture into places where opportunity is drifting away, demographics are shifting and the aging Waylon Jennings fans living there have become one of his songs. They’re lonesome, ornery and mean, and well-armed. And they’re reaching the point where they aren’t going to take it any more.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, language throughout and brief sexuality

Cast: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges, Gil Birmingham, Dale Dickey, Katy Mixon
Credits: Directed by David Mackenzie, script by Taylor Sheridan. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:42

“Anthropoid” is a historical thriller about the efforts of a handful of Czechs to kill the murderous Nazi overlord of their country during World War II.

It’s a riveting story artfully told, a magnificent movie about brave men undertaking a suicidal, possibly futile mission which they knew would have dire consequences for themselves and untold thousands of their countrymen.

Cillian Murphy of “Peaky Blinders” and Jamie Dornan of “Fifty Shades of Grey” play two Czech expats air-dropped into their homeland in December of 1941. They must evade capture by Germans or Czech collaborators and make contact with the Czech resistance — what’s left of it, anyway.

“What is your mission?” one of the last living resistance leaders (Toby Jones) asks.

“Operation Anthropoid.”

And what is that? Well, it’s the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the top men in the Third Reich, assigned by Hitler to pacify the Czechs after the Allies ceded the country to Germany in the most infamous act of appeasement leading up to the war.

Heydrich, “The Butcher of Prague,” must die. It’s not murder, it’s an assassination, operation leader Josef Gabcík (Murphy) reminds one and all. “‘Murder’ implies he has a life worth living.”

He and his team will kill Heydrich with no real escape plan of their own. They’ll do it even though their country will pay an awful price, because the Allies need to be convinced the Czechs, whom they sold out three scant years before, “will fight” and will fight on the same side.

There’s a futility and fatalism about it all which Murphy and Dornan play just below the surface, men who (mostly) don’t allow themselves to think too far into the future. Some reviewers have criticized performances that are, like the men the actors are portraying, tentative. But that is how they should be played. Every moment of great courage is balanced against one of incredulous fear.  At times, Jan (Dornan) cannot actually believe he is going through with this, a sane man’s reaction to an insane demand placed upon a very young man.

The script, by co-writer/director Sean Ellis (“Cashback”) and Anthony Frewin (“Color Me Kubrick”) captures the loose planning and the massive effort it takes just to gather intel on Heydrich’s habits, just to blend into Prague.

They take on girlfriends (Charlotte Le Bon of “The 100 Foot Journey” and the wonderful Czech actress Anna Geislerova), women who have only the vaguest idea of just what will be asked of them.

And they wait.

Ellis, who also served as director of photography, filmed this in the muted browns of a faded color photograph. This is a memory painfully recalled, with all the dread the colors, the music and the paranoid twitchiness of one and all hanging over it like doom itself.

He stages the historic ambush with brio, capturing the confusion and the collateral damage that but scratches the surface of the bloody price that will be paid with this attempt. And as the aftermath explodes, he has the presence of mind to film the first interrogation focused on the head and shoulders of the Gestapo interrogator. More explicit torture follows.

Nobody living through history, the great American historian David McCullough is fond of saying, “knows how things will turn out.” But these brave men and women had a pretty good idea. Mass executions, nationwide reprisals. Some will find new inner resolve, others will crumble, and we don’t know who will take which path.

No, they didn’t know these Allies they were trying to impress, the very folks who sold them up the Moldau in 1938, would allow Russo-Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia after the war for another 40 oppressive years.

But it is the triumph of “Anthropoid,” one of the best pictures of the year and the best movie of the summer, that we believe it wouldn’t have made a difference.

They weren’t killing by remote control drone strike or assassinating out of vengeance. They were facing the ultimate sacrifice like the flawed human beings we all are, and that was the true measure of their heroism.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and some disturbing images

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Jamie Dornan, Charlotte Le Bon, Toby Jones, Anna Geislerová
Credits: Directed by Sean Ellis, script by Sean Ellis and Anthony Frewin. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 2:00

Disney’s re-imagining of its lightweight 1977 kids’ film “Pete’s Dragon” high-mindedly aims high — for a movie about an orphan boy raised in the woods of the Pacific Northwest by a dragon.

Co-writer/director David Lowery is no Steven Spielberg (Who is?), but the director of the somber, meditative thriller “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” takes his shot at making this an “E.T.” for a new generation.

He stages the most touching Disney death scene since “Bambi,” cast Robert Redford and makes him the narrator, too. He dwells on the trees, a great forest under threat from rapacious loggers.

He lets his camera linger on the dragon himself — a big, winged, furry beast about 30 feet long. Furry? Yes, like a great green Great Dane, to make him more cuddly.

Lowery brought in his “Bodies Saints” composer Daniel Hart to fill the screen with soaring, stirring strings to tug at our emotions.

It’s a lovely film, stately, sylvan and slow. It would take an insensate child and a very cynical adult to not fall for at least some of its charms.

Pete was just learning to read  when, on his way to his first big “adventure” in the woods with his family, their station wagon wrecks. Weeping, with only his favorite new-reader book about a boy and his puppy, Elliot, he flees into the forest, the sole survivor of the crash. And just as the wolves are about to get him, he is saved by this dragon, who can make himself invisible at will.

Six years pass with the boy making his life with the friendly dragon, years of soaring over the Douglas firs, fending off bears and nightly storytelling, with Pete reading and embellishing his book to Elliot, which is what he’s named his furry best friend. Elliot, for his part, is a little ungainly. He flies, but never “sticks the landing” and he is given to sneezing fits that snot all over whoever is in range.

But then the loggers invade their corner of paradise, led by Gavin (Karl Urban of “Star Trek”). He and his more sensitive brother Jack (Wes Bentley) own the company. Jack is sensitive because his second wife (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a Forest Service ranger. And she’s sensitive because her dad (Redford) taught her about the woods and still spins his wild tale about the mythic “Millhaven Dragon.”

“Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there,” he preaches. If you only see what’s right in front of you, “you miss out on a whole lot.”

Her stepdaughter (Oona Laurence) believes. And when she spies the forest boy Pete, she believes even more.

Lowery was an odd choice to tackle this last blockbuster of the summer, but he handles most of the waypoints of the story, freely adapted from the 1977 film, with skill. Pete’s quizzical first glimpse of a girl, his feral-boy totally flummoxed by cars, record players and other people, all pay dividends.

Pete doesn’t know what to call clear-cutting, but he is sad about the place “where all the trees ran away.”

The mop-topped kid, Oakes Fegley (a bit player in “This Is Where I Leave You”) is good. Not Henry “E.T.” Thomas heart-tugging “Elliot” good, but good enough.

Howard’s character is the warmest she’s ever played, although she still has icy traces of “Jurassic World” in her inability to interact easily with kids.

Urban digs his teeth into his villainous role, Redford manages a twinkle or two and Bentley handsomely takes up space.

The new “Jungle Book” put Disney in the business of competing with itself again as the gold standard for children’s entertainment. “Pete’s Dragon” falls short of that. But the mature emotions, something the studio abandoned in the decades after “Old Yeller,” have made a welcome return.

And in aiming for the top — “E.T.” — knowing their reach would exceed their grasp, they’ve glossed a sweet, sentimental and middling story into something almost, but not quite magical, a charming kids’ film that could be the biggest box office hit of Robert Redford’s long and storied career.

MPAA Rating:PG for action, peril and brief language

Cast: Oakes Fegley, Bryce Dallas Howard, Robert Redford, Karl Urban, Oona Laurence, Wes Bentley, Isiah Whitlock Jr.

Credits: Directed by David Lowery, script by David Lowery and Toby Halbrooks, based on the script to the 1977 film, “Pete’s Dragon,” by Malcolm Mamorstein. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:42

In “Nine Lives,” the director of the “Men in Black” and “Get Shorty” movies turned filmdom’s special effects wizards loose on the most challenging bit of fakery ever attempted in a movie.

They digitized a cat so that they could show it peeing on the rug. And in a purse.

Barry Sonnenfeld cast Oscar winners Kevin Spacey and Christopher Walken, along with Jennifer Garner and Cheryl “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Hines in a kiddie film about a testy, ruthless businessman and neglectful dad (Spacey) transformed into a cat so that he can become a better person.

Yeah.

So we’re treated to a couple of scenes featuring two of the greatest character actors in the modern cinema in which one tries to buy a cat from the other. Tom Brand (Spacey) of the Firebrand conglomerate needs a birthday gift for his daughter and Purrkin’s Shop run by the inscrutable green-suited Perkins (Walken), or “Purrkins,” a real cat whisperer.

“You don’t pick a cat,” he purrs. “The cat picks you.”

But one last mid-thunderstorm emergency trip to his new high-rise, “the second tallest building in North America,” puts Brand in a coma and his mind in that of Mister Fuzzpants, the pet he’s bought for his kid.

Only Perkins can talk to him in feline form. And he’s got just one line of advice, and it’s not “How do I get OUT of this?”

“‘How did I get INTO this?’ Keep asking it.”

It took five credited screenwriters to figure out ways for the Tom cat to try and communicate who he is to his grieving second wife (Garner), daughter (Malina Weissman), if not his adult son from his first marriage (Robbie Amell) trying to fend off a treacherous company vice president (Mark Consuelos) who caused Tom’s accident and is now trying to take over the company. You’d think the old jazz number “Kitten on the Keys” would be an easy out, but touch-screen computers aren’t exactly cat paw friendly.

Hines plays the snippy, tippling first wife.

“Scotch, chicken soup for grief!”

That’s something she had in common with Tom, because sure enough, as a cat he makes a bee-line for his liquor cabinet and gets cat-drunk, first chance he gets.

So we’ve got an attempted murder, a wife signing a DNR waiver (because children need to know what “Do Not Resuscitate” means), hints of suicide, alcohol abuse and kitty littering, all in one movie.

But truthfully, as crass as it is, I’ve seen worse.

It aims low and young, an attempt at making the big screen version of any one of a million cat videos that have blown up the Internet. The sea of real cats (and a couple of Jack Russell terriers) along with the digital help it takes to make cats do outrageous things on camera give it small child appeal.

And at least it’s mercifully short. Five screenwriters, a director who knows his way around comedy and an Oscar winning cast don’t add up to much, in this case.

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements, language and some rude humor

Cast: Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Garner, Malina Weissman, Christopher Walken, Cheryl Hines, Mark Consuelos
Credits: Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, script by Matt Allen, Dan Antoniazzi, Gwyn Lurie, Ben Shiffrin, Caleb Wilson. A EuropaCorp USA release

Running time: 1:25.

“Edge of Winter” enters my field of vision with a natural advantage. It’s my kind of story — gritty, woodsy, with a hint of survivalism about it. There’s still a vicarious thrill in experiencing wilderness through those trapped in a life or death situation in it.

And Joel Kinnaman, of “House of Cards,” is much better at channeling rawboned working class qualities here than whatever he was supposed to get across in “Suicide Squad.”

In director Rob Connolly’s feature debut, Kinnaman stars as a man out of sorts, with no control of his life or his temper (his hand’s in a cast and he’s unemployed, do the math). He seems like  a man out of his time.

He’s lost his wife (Rachel Lefevre of “White House Down”) and feels his two sons (Tom Holland of “The Impossible” and Percy Hynes White) may be slipping away as well. Mom and new hubby are off on a cruise, so a little “real dad” and sons bonding is in order.

But a tussle over a carelessly kept shotgun gives Elliot an idea for a teachable moment. He’ll pile the boys into his old Jeep Cherokee and make for the remote North Woods. They’ll learn to shoot. He’ll make men out of them because “Every man should know how to safely use and respect a gun.”

Teenage Brad (Holland) and tweenage Caleb (White) first take their first toilet break out of doors, get their first feel the kick of a 12 gauge, sip their first beer and kill their first bunny.

Yeah, they’re “soft.” But that’ll change. Not before Brad gets his first experience behind the wheel.

A badly-timed moment of sibling rivalry gets them stranded, in the snowy woods, with only the would-be outdoorsman dad and his temperament to save them.

The Jeep getting stuck is not the first melodramatic flourish in the script. Dad’s decision making, addled by beer and the fear that he’s losing the boys, grows more and more questionable as the characters blunder through every lost-in-snow cliche ever filmed.

And there are others lost out there (Shiloh Fernandez and  Rossif Sutherland). Friend or foe? 

Connolly’s film, formerly titled less poetically, “Backcountry,” has a lovely, wintry tone and a few minor surprises. The action sequences are competently handled, even if there’s little real suspense about what is coming and where this is going.

A more challenging film would have grappled with this gender ennui that a generation of working class American men are experiencing. Connolly and co-writer Kyle Mann also fail to give us a lot of woodlore and never come to grips with just how at home in the woods Elliot is supposed to be.

He is just an Average Joe, who probably hunts twice a year and doesn’t let those trips impact his beer intake. Movies about “Average Joes” usually lean toward dull.

Kinnaman holds the picture together well enough, but this needs to be about more than just kids learning Dad’s dirty open secret — that he has a violent, immature temper, that maybe he’s not the sort of guy to “make a man” out of kids, even his own.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some violence

Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Tom Holland, Percy Hynes White, Rachel LeFevre
Credits: Directed by Rob Connolly, script by Rob Connolly, Kyle Mann. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:28

When British theatre critic Michael Coveney first published “Maggie Smith:  A Biography,” back in the mid-90s, he and she must have had every reason to believe he was summing up an acting life well-lived, and fully lived.

But that was before Harry Potter, and long before “Downton Abbey.”

Smith, who turns 82 in December, had a couple of Oscars and a celebrated status, built over decades on the London, Broadway and Stratford, Ontario stages, as one of the most magnetic actresses of her generation. She had gone toe to toe with Olivier and the lions of the British acting profession, co-starred with legions of the great leading men and made a dazzling mark in character leads from “The Prime of Miss Jean Brody” to “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn,” “A Room With a View” and even, opposite Michael Palin, in “The Missionary.”

A bit press shy, modest enough to avoid the very idea of an autobiography, she was lucky enough to have Coveney as her Boswell, a newspaper drama critic who has followed her work — mainly on the stage — since the early 1960s.

Years of interviews, the later ones facilitated by her worshipful late husband Beverly, who saw the need to have her life’s work immortalitized and appreciated, and tracking down folks who worked with her produced a delightfully thorough, if well-scrubbed, life story.

Coveney spends a lot of time appreciating her trademarks, the nuances of the wide range of performances she undertook in her prime — her first and second primes. There are plenty of anecdotes from friends and colleagues, capturing her droll off-stage wit, her skill and willingness to (quickly) deliver a put-down when she figures one is in order.

Olivier resisted working with her again after a few co-starring gigs in which he tried to dominate her and failed. But when he founded he National Theatre, he brought her in, intimidated or not. Maggie has had the last laugh, outliving Lord Larry and presenting wonderful work well past her “OAP” (old age pensioner) years, on TV, in films such as the one that inspired “Downton Abbey”, Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park,” and the Potter franchise, the Nanny McPhee sequel and this year’s “The Lady in the Van.”

Coveney glosses over Smith’s against-the-grain-of-her-era morality, taking up with married men, marrying her soul mate only because he was willing to wait out earlier marriages — hers and his.

He quotes from a Golden Age of British stage acting and British criticism in discussing her films and plays, and comes up with gems such as the reviewer who suggested her hands are “made of sand. They get into everything.” But it’s not a comic crutch if it works, pretty much every time. Even if she’s clinging to a cane to keep her from flicking those wrists hither and yon in “Downton.”

Smith has built a repertoire of fussy tics, gestures and dead-pan long takes which made her a comedienne in demand decades after Coveney’s “definitive” biography was published.

And “Maggie Smith: A Biography,” makes for a smart, dishy delicious read. (St. Martin’s Press/$27.95).