Movie Nation

Jodie Foster’s native intelligence and intellectual curiosity  made her seem like the ideal candidate to interact with aliens in “Contact.” Amy Adams’ innate ability to generate instant on-screen empathy makes her just as perfect for such a task in “Arrival,” a serene and cerebral science fiction film about the nuts and bolts of language and the fluidity of time.

Director Denis Villeneuve, of “Prisoners” and “Sicaro,” gives us a moody, challenging and somewhat optimistic tale about another “Day the Earth Stood Still.”

That’s what happens when the gigantic “shells” comes. They land in a dozen locations all over the Earth, creating anxiety, panic and something for the 24 hour news channels to obsess about between elections.

Adams plays a language specialist, a theorist and master translator and sought out by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) because, if such an event were to occur, we’d have a few questions. “Why are they here?” and “What do you want?” for starters.

And communication with a vastly more advanced civilization would be a problem. Dr. Louis Banks (Adams) might not have been their first choice. Others have failed because “Not everyone is able to process something like this.”

Banks is paired with a theoretical physicist (Jeremy Renner) as part of a military heavy/CIA (Michael Stuhlbarg) overseen effort to talk to the visitors. But they’re not alone. Alien shells hover over China, Russia, Pakistan, Sudan and other less stable, more trigger-happy parts of the world. The effort to figure out the intentions of the squid-like “heptopods” is very much a race, and one with potentially lethal consequences should even one translator get it wrong. We all think we know what “To serve man” means. But do we?

Villenueve treats us to another version of “government protocols” for this sort of event, and “Arrival” hews closer to the “E.T.” model than the sunnier “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” “Gravity” plays a role — both in the aliens’ ability to control it within their dark, mist-shrouded spaceships and in Dr. Banks’ mind. Like Sandra Bullock’s character in the Alfonso Cuaron film of that title, Banks has lost a child. But flashbacks to that little girls’ short life are instructive when you’re trying to teach somebody to talk like you.

Renner’s physicist may have the trappings of “The Jeff Goldblum role,” a scientist who explains stuff to the audience with a humorous twist. But he’s very much in the background, his mathematics and knowledge of the physical universe subservient to Banks’ understanding of the many levels of “communication.” Adams gets to break down the enormous consequences and difficulties in sharing the simplest thought — “What do you want?” — to Whitaker’s Army man. Renner is limited to the odd amazed one-liner.

“Well, THAT just happened.”

Like every sci-fi blockbuster since “2012”, there’s a heavy dose of Chinese pandering, a regular ingredient of Hollywood fare in this global marketplace. Lest they get too smug about this, I’d suggest Chinese filmgoers rent “Contact.” Once upon a time, Hollywood pandered to the Japanese and expected their money, science and national will would always be a part of any global negotiation at First Contact.

This is science fiction where the effects are simple and generally subtle. The film’s quiet urgency is underscored by soft voices and gloomy lighting. “Arrival” demands our full attention even as it is threatening to invite a nap. The urgency here is subdued and subtextual , the story itself entrancing to the point of mesmerizing.

“Arrival” puts Villeneuve, who first came to attention with “Incendies,” firmly in the first rank of filmmakers, a director capable of not just entertaining, but challenging. And the wide-eyed Adams, near the top of the list of the best actresses never to win an Oscar, delivers another riveting, melancholy and life-affirming performance that threatens to change that, maybe as soon as next February’s Academy Awards.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief strong language

Cast: Amy Adams, Forest Whitaker, Jeremy Renner

Credits:Directed by Denis Villeneuve, script by Eric Heisserer, based on a story by Ted Chiang . A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:56

The Devil is in the details, the old saying goes. And that applies to movies as well as the plans we make in life, and how we execute them.

“The Monster” is sort of a Son (actually Daughter) of Babadook, a mother and child vs. beast thriller that never ratchets up much in the way of tension or suspense, a monster movie whose frights wash away in the rainy night once we see the guy in the rubber suit with big teeth.

Mom (Zoe Kazan of “Ruby Sparks”) is a wreck, an alcoholic whose tweenage daughter Lizzy (Ella Ballantine) is the one who cleans up the vomit and picks up the bottles after every beer bust.

Lizzy is young enough to still have nursery-rhyme singing dolls, to still be into TV cartoons. But she’s kind of the adult now that her dad (Scott Speedman) has checked out. She and her mother exchange curses and “I hate yous” at every turn, and Mom, when we meet her, has had enough.

She’s delivering Lizzy to her dad. But they hit something in the road — “I think it’s a wolf.” And even though they’re wrecked under street lights and there’s plenty of cell service, with a wrecker and an ambulance on the way, they’re going to be stuck in that car until the boogeyman comes out of the shadows — until we’ve seen the hell of their lives together in a series of flashbacks.

“The ambulance will be here soon!”

Mother and child are slow to awaken to the danger, stepping out into the rain, sticking their noses past the edge of the woods, putting their hands on the wolf corpse long enough to see that something was in the process of eating it when they hit it. A giant tooth was left behind.  That always happens.

When awful things start to pile up, Kazan manages to feign a little abject terror. Ballantine? A little less so. Maybe she’s seen the “Star Trek” episode where the Gorn suit that this beast resembles is featured — kind of a mini-Godzilla, all teeth and glistening skin and scary eyes.

Writer-director Bryan Bertino was onto something with the whole hate-filled mother-daughter dynamic. Its a brutal relationship that hits a lot of wince-worthy notes.

But “The Monster” is a slow-moving clunker of a thriller, with the pace so funereal you have time to wonder “This isn’t that remote. Why isn’t there a cop/tow truck/ambulance here already?”

The Australian thriller “The Babadook,” the most apt comparison here, hides its beast and assaults the viewer several times in its much-faster-paced 93 minutes.

“The Monster” is as dull and predictable as its title, a creature feature in which the melodramatic flashbacks are the only bits with bite.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some violence/terror

Cast: Zoe Kazan, Ella Ballentine, Scott Speedman

Credits:Written and directed by Bryan Bertino. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:31

There’s this almost-forgotten Keanu Reeves movie, a formulaic kids’ sports comedy called “Hardball.” It had the great fortune of being the first lightweight film to arrive in theaters after the tragedy of 9/11, and audiences embraced it because it gave us permission to laugh and forget about the news for 100 minutes.

“Almost Christmas” is such a movie. It opens the weekend after the ugliest presidential election in living memory, a toxic year and a half of rising rage and divisiveness — racial, intellectual, moral and social. It’s not all that, but as holiday movie comfort food, it more than fills the bill.

Aside from the occasional blast of profanity and the odd risque moment, “Almost Christmas” sticks to the “Christmas Comedy” formula like, uh, white on rice.

Big family? Check. Everybody has a “secret”? Check.

A chance for romance? Check.

Tragedy hanging over the holidays, making everybody extra sentimental? Check.

Touch football game that gets out of hand? Check. Bad cooks clash with supposedly better cooks? Check. Awkward “one time a year we all go to church” scene? Check.

Uproarious Christmas Day dinner where it all comes to a head, comes apart before they can all come together? Check.

And does this variation on “This Christmas/The Family Stone/Christmas with the Kranks” play? Pretty much.

Fortuitous timing makes this, the first “holiday” film of 2016, a welcome release from the round-the-clock hype of Decision 2016. All we have to decide, for the David E. Talbert film’s 112 overlong minutes, is just how badly we’ve needed the release of a few laughs, how much we’ve missed the Oscar-winning rants of sassy loose-cannon Mo’Nique.

Danny Glover is Walter, the Birmingham, Alabama patriarch of the Meyers family. He buried his wife this year. He’s got the contract to sell this big two-story wood-frame house they raised their children in. But he’s not told anybody that as he rounds up his brood for one big five-day blast of togetherness and tetchiness.

Gabrielle Union and Kimberly Elise are the two sisters who never quite got along. One (Union) is divorced, with a kid and law school putting her in the red. The other (Elise) is a dentist, with an insanely flirtatious dead weight husband (JB Smoove) who uses his single season in the NBA and Croatian League championship ring as a come-on to anything in a skirt.

The oldest son (Romany Malco) is running for Congress, and can’t leave his campaign manager (John Michael Higgins) behind, even for the holidays. His wife (Nicole Ari Parker) is not amused.

The youngest Meyers son (Jesse Usher) is a college footballer with draft day dreams and a serious painkiller addiction he’s hiding.

And then there’s Aunt May, a larger than life backup singer to the stars given a larger-than-life (and hoarse) energy by Mo’Nique.

Aunt May has been exposed to the world’s great cuisines by the likes of Ike and Tina, Mick and Chaka. And her family isn’t having it.

She’s fully aware that five days is entirely too long for this much togetherness, but Walter has a liquor cabinet. Just the clear booze, thank-you.

“Dark liquor make a bitch wanna fight.”

She’s not going to let all these folks, some with bratty kids given to live-streaming the family’s more unpleasant moments, spoil her holiday. With a “kiss my” this or “you stupid” that, May, sister Walter’s sainted late wife, fends off her greatest fear this holiday season.

“This gon’ blow my buzz.”

You’ve seen Mo’Nique’s funniest lines in the film’s trailers, though there are outtakes over the credits that suggest other moments hit the cutting room floor.

It’s still amusing to see the gorgeous Union throwing herself into physical comedy, Elise and Smoove going at it and Omar Epps as the guy next door Rachel (Union) won’t have anything to do with, no matter how charming he tries to be or how available she allegedly is.

Talbert (“First Sunday”) never gets in a hurry and waits to bring all that’s going on here to a boil. “Almost Christmas” never comes close to being a romp, and the sentimental scenes outnumber the funny ones, with most of the funny-ones predicated on comic low-hanging fruit. Kids used as guinea pigs for Aunt May’s latest culinary experiment, Uncle Larry (Smoove) bungling a repair on the rooftop Santa, sexy Rachel getting locked out of the house in lingerie.

But timing, in comedy, is everything. And even if Mo’Nique is the one member of the cast capable of putting on a clinic in whiplash-quick one-liners, “Almost Christmas” has this going for it.

At least it’s not about Trump. Or Clinton. Or racism, sexism, e-mails or orange wigs.

Well, aside from Aunt May’s “Chaka Khan! Chaka Khan!” hair.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for suggestive material, drug content and language

Cast: Danny Glover, Mo’Nique, Gabrielle Union, JB Smoove, Kimberly Elise, Romany Malco, Omar Epps, Nicole Ari Parker, Jesse Usher, D.C. Young Fly

Credits:Written and directed by David E. Talbert. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:52

Few of us can imagine the awfulness of losing a child in one of America’s ever-growing list of senseless mass shootings at school. And if the parents of Rachel Joy Scott, the first victim of 1999’s Columbine High School massacre, want to see her as a girl steadfast in her faith and a moral example to others for her compassion as a way of coping with her death, you’d have to be pretty small to begrudge them that.

Sure, some of what they would have us know about her is myth and other parts of the movement she inspired seem more a conservative Christian misdirection aimed at deflecting criticism of the gun lobby. But the real Scott, like Anne Frank, was first and foremost a “normal” teenager — questioning, stumbling, hormonal and passionate about views every teen feels as if they’ve discovered before anybody else.

“I’m Not Ashamed” is a big screen attempt to put a human being inside a dead teenager who’s become a movement. Rachel was a sometimes bubbly/sometimes moody, PBR-drinking 17 year-old who seemed to accept the role she took on at Columbine — the school “Christian girl.”

The film suffers from abrupt, under-motivated transformations and has the pall of death hanging over it since we know what’s coming.

And it seriously stumbles in its attempt to portray the mass murderers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as fans of Hitlerian “natural selection,” an agenda-driven interjection of creationist criticism that casts a cloud of doubt over every other belief passed off as fact here.

Rachel ( Masey McLain) is a pretty girl who just wants “a real boyfriend,” and complains to her quasi-“mean girl” posse that “Guys never think of me that way.” Prettier and more popular Madison (Victoria Staley) promises to fix that for her, to set her up with the drama club dreamboat, Alex (Cameron McKendry) who ends up being the aspiring actress’s “mentor.”

But Rachel has a credo, a word of warning for Maddie and eventually Alex — “I can’t really be fake…I’m not a social plastic person.”

The fact that she’s been wearing hats to school every day for a decade, that she covets the stand-out-from-the-crowd attention that most kids her age crave? Well, nobody ever said kids weren’t self-delusional about “fake” poses like that.

Rachel hangs with the cool kids/the smoking kids/the kids who drink PBR just long enough to get into trouble with her strict Christian mom (Terri Minton). She’s shipped off to an aunt and cousins in rural Louisiana. And that’s where she abruptly (on screen, at least), becomes devout, and keeps a journal of her struggles to become a Christian example to herself and others.

Brian Baugh’s film is on surest ground as it captures high school — the over-the-top bullying that anybody who’s “different” faces. Not so much Rachel, but Harris (David Errigo Jr.) and Klebold (Cory Chapman) endure humiliations from the jocks who are the coolest of the cool kids Rachel aspires to fit in with. She feels guilty and conflicted over this.

The family dynamic at home is circumscribed, but telling. Dad, who later testified before a Congressional committee, left them and isn’t even in the movie except as the cliche “Dad can’t take you for the weekend” absentee father. An older sister has become a short-skirted Goth, a younger brother turns jock, hanging with the bullies.

Rachel’s posse at school includes a “sensitive” (read “gay”) pal, and the beautiful, pierced and dangerous Celine (Emma Elle Roberts), whose promiscuity and hidden cutting suggest her own private torment.

Rachel’s reluctance to give up her “go with the crowd” mentality, pursuing her free spirited “spiritual” actor-hunk without opening up about her Christianity, feels real. In her other life, at night she hangs with a Christian youth group and relentlessly recruits a hunky homeless young man (Ben Davies) to join.

There’s a flirtatiousness to McLain’s performance that strips some of the saintliness off Rachel. She dresses with a certain sexual allure and bats her eyes to get her way, with boys and with her stepdad — who has a car she could really love to drive. Her other flaws pop up as “Pray I won’t drink this weekend” diary entries, and her determination to “kick” her relationship with Alex “up a few notches.”

The label “Little Miss Perfect” doesn’t quite fit.

After her abrupt conversion, Rachel slowly comes out of the closet about her faith, which rattles her friends in the most predictable way — “I will be SOooo glad when you get over this whole ‘Jesus Freak’ phase.”

But the film’s insistent pre-movement foreshadowing — “I’m gonna make a difference in the world somehow” — undercuts an earnest essay, delivered in class, about her ethos of “compassion.” The former feels like her family’s determination to make moral hay out of the latter.

And the grim climax to this overlong and somewhat convoluted picture points out the fallacy of the myth that grew up about Rachel, that she would not deny her faith when facing her death. It does seem to fit her personality, but real life rarely gives the noble such perfectly pat moments.

Dying on the lawn next to a grievously wounded friend who heard no such avowal of faith (the only surviving witness) seems senseless and the best argument for restrictions on gun ownership (and more attentive parenting) that the movie, and movement, are trying so very hard to avoid.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic material, teen drinking and smoking, disturbing violent content and some suggestive situations

Cast:Masey McLain, Ben Davies, Cameron McKendry, Emma Elle Roberts,David Errigo Jr.,  Cory Chapman

Credits:Directed by Brian Baugh , script by Phillpa Booyens, Robin Hanley, Kari Redmond,Bodie Thoene  A Pure Flix release.

Running time: 1:52

There’s a lot to be said for movies that use the ever-improving state of the digital art to recreate historical events too expensive to film in the old fashioned way.

And the digital Japanese kamikaze planes, submarine and the recreated heavy cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis are convincing enough in “U.S.S. Indianapolis: Men of Courage.” So are the shark attacks that animate this awful “true story” of the sea.

But a melodramatic, overreaching and sometimes just inaccurate script by Nic Cage’s go-to screenwriters undermines director Mario Van Peebles’ World War II epic.

Cage stars as Captain Charles B. McVay, skipper of the battle-scarred warship selected to deliver the atom bomb to the island airbase where it will be flown to Hiroshima, a mission that will “shorten the war” and save “millions of lives,” his commanding officer (James Remar) tells him.

It’s the sort of role that Cage sees too seldom here in the C-movie stage of his Oscar-winning career. It’s a pity the part is wasted in a film that fails to measure up to its subject.

The Indy, if you remember your history or your “Jaws” speeches, delivered that A-bomb in pieces to be assembled on Tinian, where the B-29 Enola Gay would take it into history. The cruiser’s mission was top secret, and in an effort to keep the number of people who knew about it small and the chances the enemy would know something was up, she was sent alone, without destroyer escort, to make that delivery.

Afterwards, on the way back east, she was sunk by a Japanese submarine. The Navy, having hidden her trip from one and all, didn’t realize she’d been sunk. Rescue for the survivors was slow in coming. But not the sharks.

Writers Cam Cannon and Richard Rionda Del Castro (“Rage”) pepper the tale with anecdotal scenes, giving us a story that cuts far wider than it needs to and reaches for metaphors it never grasps.

Sailors on leave, drinking and brawling, the guy with the lost engagement ring to a girl whose daddy doesn’t approve of him, the racial tensions on board, the aspiring African American writer (Craig Tate) stuck in the galley (kitchen), the spoiled Admiral’s son (Callard Harris) whom every member of the crew hates — a lot of this background material isn’t necessary, and just as much of it isn’t true.

A quick online perusal of the list of survivors points out more than one bit of invention in the cause of “dramatic license.” If these were real people and not “characters,” why change their names at this late date?

Some of the “types” make an impact, on screen. Tom Sizemore is well-cast as the Chief Petty Officer whose job it is to point out that the ship is an unlucky 13 years old, and that sharks are the “top of the food chain” in the world where they’re operating. His speeches may be peppered with anachronisms, but he makes them work.

The screenplay finds villains, and makes some more up. Any film on this story is going to second-guess the Navy, the captain (who was court-martialed and posthumously  exonerated).  But if real people committed the various acts of cowardice, classism and racism depicted here, why not name them instead of inventing a Lt. Standish?

The shark attacks are jarring, the recreation of the moment of torpedo impact well-handled and vividly recreated. But the whole affair lacks a coherent point of view. When you start with backroom politics about the decision to drop the bomb, when you take the time to ennoble the Japanese foe, when you suggest dog eat dog survival situations and you jab officious mid-level shore officers for ignoring the SOS, and then devote the third act to the court case, you’re biting off more story than you can do justice to.

The 1991 Stacy Keach TV movie “Mission of the Shark” wasn’t as ambitious, but the focus was sharper and it held together better. With genuine heroes on board who survived the tragedy, why invent sailors and back-stories and melodramatic cliches that play as “Hollywood” corn?

As “The Greatest Generation” dies off and the number of films that tell their stories dwindles, it’s important for every outing to be as accurate as you can make it within the limitations of the form. “Men of Courage” doesn’t do justice to those men by being as half-hearted and clumsily-scripted as this film is.

MPAA Rating:R for war-related images and brief language

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Tom Sizemore, Craig Tate, Adam Scott Miller, Callard Harris, James Remar, Yutaka Takeuchi, Thomas Jane

Credits: Directed by Mario Van Peebles, script by Cam Cannon, Richard Rionda Del Castro. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 2:10

The vast majority of us are so far removed from any common farming past that we idealize it and the people who live that lifestyle. “Peter and the Farm” is a sober reminder of how hard and callous that life is, and will come as a shock to anybody with romantic dreams of “chucking it all” to live off the land.

Peter Dunning is living in “paradise,” as he himself puts it. He’s been working the same 187 acres of Mile Hill Farm in Vermont for over 35 years. It’s a small farm, and he’s a smart, articulate guy who has adjusted to doing what it takes to make a small farm work in this era of corporate farms, Monsanto and producing for mass consumption.

He’s tailored his acreage to raising and selling “organic” lamb, chicken, pork and beef. It was a natural transition for a college art major who joined the “back to the land” movement of ex-hippies in the ’70s.

He manures instead of buying fertilizer, saves legacy seed so that he doesn’t feed the livestock genetically=modified corn or beans, and when it’s time for “culling,” he does much of the slaughtering himself.

But Dunning has had enough. He’s embittered, takes no pleasure in the routine and doesn’t allow himself any kindness to the animals under his care. “Stupid jerk” is the nicest thing he’ll saw to an errant milk cow, he curses and manhandles the sheep with all the brute force his 68 year-old body can manage and doesn’t dare show affection even to the loyal sheep dog who stays by his side.

As he fills giant bottles with new batches of home brew, we start to understand. He drinks, and he’s a mean drunk.

“I could, in front of you, call ALL of my children,” he says to filmmaker Tony Stone. “Not ONE would answer the phone.”

He’s chased off wives and kids, insulted too many apprentices to count. And he knows it. Around him, all he sees is entropy. The farm peaked in 1998, and it’s been in “decay and decline ever since.” Every board of the house that hasn’t seen paint in this millennium, every tumbledown out-building, every gate or fence that shows signs of “that’ll do” repairs backs him up.

Even shooting the coyotes who slaughter his sheep gives him no pleasure.

He talks of “suicide notes,” and suggests on camera that what Stone will capture in the end is “my suicide.” Yeah, this is the life, eh?

Dunning is as articulate as you’d hope a college graduate to be, and as self-aware. He spent his life and his inheritance on this farm, and gave up his calling — painting and sculpture — to keep it. He’s nimble and fit, but scarred in ways we can both see and simply sense.

The life has hardened him to suffering. Botching the killing of a ewe by using a rifle when a pistol is called for earns the barest shrug. But memories of his lowest points are often punctuated by some circle-of-life moment that pulls him back to those he’s responsible for.

“Life announces itself with force,” he rhapsodizes. “Death slinks off.”

The graphic slaughter footage will rattle the squeamish just as it did with an earlier trouble-on-the-farm documentary, “Brother’s Keeper.”

But the restorative power of working beautiful land with your hands, your heart and a John Deere tractor can be inspiring.

In a country whose city dwellers have less in common with their country kin than at any point in our social or political history, it’s good to be reminded of where that meat comes from. There’s a toll taken in season after season of harvesting it, and that sometimes-idyllic, sometimes grim and gruesome grind of getting their food onto out tables is worth understanding and appreciating.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with animal slaughter, alcohol abuse and profanity

Cast: Peter Dunning

Credits Directed by Tony Stone. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:31

Think nothing of the fact that what is, in essence, the first weekend of the holiday movie season is being hailed for saving the “fall” box office. Things have been that bad since August.

When another lame “Madea” movie and a couple of won’t-hit-$100 million “hits” (“Girl on the Train,” “The Accountant”) have strained to get attention and traction, Hollywood will take what it can get.

Critical raves and the fact that comic book movies are the only guaranteed make-bank hits in the repertoire is driving “Doctor Strange” to an $82 million opening weekend. Nice.

He’s relied on his “Cumber-bitches” for his previous success, and that hasn’t done much for Brit Boy Benedict. But put him in a cape and give him a decent villain and there you go. I wonder if word of mouth will drive this one closer to $90 or $100, as I see this dazzling piece of eye candy as Marvel’s “Avatar,” a special effects treat (see it in 3D) that could own the holidays.

Maybe not.

“Trolls” is the only animated film since “Storks.” It’s not Dreamworks’ best — not by a mile. Middling reviews greeted it. But it is very small kid friendly, it’s tuneful and is seriously besting estimates ($36-39) by rolling well north of $40 million on its opening weekend.

Mel Gibson went on “Today” and got cuddled by Kathie Lee, tactfully ignoring the anger/anti-Semitism and abuse that made him box office poison. Colbert also gave him “safe space,” and let him make jokes about his drunken and then sober tirades that made him sound unhinged and not a big fan of Jews.

But “Hacksaw Ridge” was always going to succeed or fail by waking up that Clint Eastwood war movie audience — older, whiter, more forgiving of anti-Semitism than say, an actor who tossed a telephone at a hotel clerk. It’s doing just under $15 million this weekend, and “Hacksaw” may have legs. It takes older audiences a while to get around to an “American Sniper” or “Flags of Our Fathers.”

“Boo! A Madea Halloween” is having a life after Oct. 31. It’ll top out near $90 million. That’s better than “Jack Reacher,” “Inferno,” and “Girl on the Train” or “The Accountant.”

So this holiday film season will get a nice goosing from “Doctor Strange,” Marvel’s origin story for another character in the Marvel universe, a spare-no-expense dazzler of the eye candy genre.

A desultory fall film season desperately needs this to be an “Avatar” sized hit, as nothing that’s been released since summer has ignited the box office. Several modest hits (“Accountant” chief among them, “A Madea Halloween” is the only other bright spot) and a lot of bombs means exhibition needs a winner, and “Strange” is that. Great reviews will help. Everybody but everybody is endorsing this one.

Will it make $80 million between Thursday and Sunday night? Box Office Mojo seems to think so. Box Office Guru thinks Benedict isn’t Box Office — $71 million opening for the 14th Marvel title to come down the pike.

Mel Gibson has been marketing the hell out of his faith-based combat film, “Hacksaw Ridge.” Will his “Passion of the Christ” audience forgive him and show up? What about everybody else? Very curious to see if this one hits with an older, more anti-Semitism sympathetic crowd. Very good reviews will help and could signal Gibson’s behind-the-camera comeback. But $16 million, the high end of expectations (Box Office Mojo) or $11 million, the low end (Box Office Guru) won’t do it.

There’s a lot riding on every animated film to come out these days, and Dreamworks Animation can ill afford a flop. “Trolls” got better reviews from others than from me, a middling effort aimed at tiny tots with nothing absolutely nothing for anybody older than 6. It should earn $36-39 million, bettering “Storks” but not in Pixar territory.

“Doctor Strange” is Marvel’s “Avatar,” the “Inception” of comic book adaptations.

The effects are that dazzling, the images so trippy, eye-popping and ground-breaking that one is tempted to scrap the normal “credits” for a recitation of the unsung architects of its visual splendor.

Industrial Light and Magic, RISE Visual Effects, luma pictures, Crafty Apes, Base FX, Framestore CFC, Method Studios Vancouver — Marvel and its Disney check-writers spared no expense, hired everybody who could make this the marvel of all Marvel movies.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays the arrogant neurosurgeon with an encyclopedic brain in this origin story.

After playing Sherlock Holmes, Julian Assange and Alan Turing, “arrogant” has kind of become his thing.

And as far as comic book movies go, origin stories are the best, aren’t they?

The rich doctor’s car accident takes away his gift, and when surgeries and the support of a loving woman (Rachel McAdams) can’t bring him back, he seeks unconventional therapy in the exotic East, in Katmandu.

“The Bob Seger song?”

“Beautiful loser album, 1975, A-side, third cut? Yes. In Nepal.”

And that’s where he falls in with Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a mystic warrior, disciple of “The Ancient One.”

That would be the great Tilda Swinton — bald, wise and wizardly, like Yoda and Professor X. She humbles the Doctor, whom she insists on calling “Mister Strange,” with her lectures in “the mystic arts,” “the astral” plane and “the mirror dimension.” She leads a cult of warriors who defend Earth from threats from other dimensions. Magic, she mumbo-jumbos, “is the source code that shapes reality.”

Chief among those threats is Kaecilius, a “zealot” among her students who went rogue and has stolen an ancient incantation that can bring doom on us all. Mads Mikkelsen, so weak and uncertain as the first Daniel Craig Bond villain, devours the screen with this guy. The towering Dane is surer of his English and pulls out all the stops here.

Director Scott Derrickson (“Sinister”), who had a hand in the script, never lets the effects take over the picture. Nobody on screen gawks at them, as dazzling as the mirror dimension, “the sling ring” electro-lasso, or the clockwork Escher lithographs that fold cityscapes, ancient libraries and the like in on themselves might be. They’re just accepted as this world’s reality.

The jokes land lightly, and the best physical gag seems straight out of a Disney cartoon — the “Cloak of Levitation” that finds the Doctor, bonds to him and yet has a comical mind of its own.

Cumberbatch doesn’t so much stretch or dazzle us here as solidly step into the cloak (turned up collars are kind of his thing) and look cool doing it.

The film sags in the middle acts, lost first in the broken Doctor’s self-pity, then in magical gadgets and exposition and too much time in the Katmandu library. The “teases to the next Marvel movie” coda after the credits (there are two) is the worst-played, least logical scenes in the movie.

But everything around that is eye candy of the first order, comic book movie comedy at its drollest and Cumberbatch at his bitchiest. “Doctor Strange” doesn’t break formula, and no, they will never ever be able to surprise us with his origin story again. It’s still head, shoulders and cloak above so much of what’s being churned out the seemingly bottomless vaults of Marvel and DC Comics.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sci-fi violence and action throughout, and an intense crash sequence

Cast:Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Mads Mikkelsen, Benedict Wong

Credits:Directed by Scott Derrickson, script by Jon Spaihts, Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, based on the Marvel comic book by Steve Ditko. A Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 1:55

Proto-punks Iggy and the Stooges were once and have remained an acquired rock taste, and “Gimme Danger” won’t  change that. Jim Jarmursch’s History of The Stooges won’t convert many. But you will walk away with an appreciation that goes beyond the band’s anarchic legend and the lead singer’s seemingly ageless physique.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members mostly thanks to their influence over the punks that followed, from The Dictators and The Ramones to Sonic Youth and so on down the line, The Stooges brought a sometimes violent, flip-the-bird-at-the-world energy to the generally staid and corporate music scene of their era.

They burned bright, but never broke through, endured much but broke up. Iggy (real name Jim Osterberg) went on to outlast his most closely allied contemporaries, Lou Reed and David Bowie.

And then the world got around to the band that he made and that made him, decades after their supposed expiration date.

Jarmusch (“Coffee and Cigarettes,””Broken Flowers,””Mystery Train””Night on Earth”) builds his film around the founder/singer, whom he insists on crediting by his real name, Jim Osterberg. The future Iggy was a “Howdy Doody” fan child of the 1950s who fell in love with the chaos and unpredictability of Clarebelle the Clown from that show, and the anarchy of social misfit kids’ show star Soupy Sales.

From there, a punk showman was born.

Sitting in his living room with a self-portrait (I assume) behind him and a skull on the pedestal beside him, Iggy regales us with his music history, the bands and stunts that led him to form The Stooges.

In his first band, he’d perform on top “of the biggest drum riser” (sixteen feet above the stage) as a gimmick. That was his instrument, the drums. But he got “tired of looking at other people’s butts” and became a singer.

And eventually, the Asheton brothers, Ron and Scott, joined up. And Mike Watt. And sax player Steve Mackay. And later guitarist James Williamson, who went on to a successful career at Sony Music, only to dump the suit and the haircut the minute Iggy said, in the early 2000s, “Let’s get the band back together.”

We see, or rather hear about, the scary, bottles-hurled-at-the-stage violence of the shows, driven by Iggy’s manic, crowd-working energy and frenzied, spastic dancing (while his backing band stood stock-still, staring at their instruments or the floor).

We experience the inventing of “stage diving.”

And we hear about influences, from James Brown (of course) to their Detroit area contemporaries, the furious punk progenitors, The MC-5 (“Kick Out the Jams”).

The most fascinating material is anecdotal — Iggy talking about growing up in a trailer, wanting to “show up” the high school kids who looked down on him for that. The evolution of The Psychedelic Stooges (Iggy in pre-glam white-face makeup) to The Stooges makes a funny story. A band member called Moe Howard of The Three Stooges to ask permission if they could use that name.

Howard’s reply is perfect, and profane.

There are reasonably fresh interviews with members of the band who have recently died, some archival interviews with those who passed away earlier, and brief descriptions of the drug-addled lifestyle that put them all in danger of not outliving their legacy.

Music taste-maker and impresario Danny Fields, subject of his own recent documentary (“Danny Says”), talks about “discovering” them.

What’s missing from the film is context, both contemporary to the band’s formation and rise, and words from those plainly influenced by them. Iggy talks about the “political industrial complex of corrupt performers and managers” making soulless “corporate” music that The Stooges burst out in contrast to, but we only glimpse Graham Nash and David Crosby crooning a ditty to illustrate this.

Iggy wasn’t the first shirtless rocker to prance around in leather pants (The Doors, whom Iggy has acknowledged elsewhere). And Iggy’s signature tune came decades after The Stooges tried and failed (“Lust for Life”).

There are no testimonials from The White Stripes, Dead Boys, the Damned, or Sonic Youth or any grunge or punk acts that owe a debt to The Stooges. Bowie, still living while this was being filmed, isn’t here.

Conversely, “Gimme Danger” does its greatest public service by pointing out that these dudes could play. The songs, from “I Wanna Be Your Dog” to “1969,” to “Search and Destroy” and “No Fun” have been covered and rediscovered by major acts in every succeeding decade. Maybe not “the greatest band ever,” as the opening titles tell us, but certainly a big deal band that has rippled through time.

No 108 minute music history can hope to be complete, and the circumscribed “Gimme Danger” is very much a mixed bag in that regard. But Jarmusch gets a lot right and a lot documented on film in this winning and sometimes amusing musical history tour.

MPAA Rating: R for drug content and language

Cast: Iggy Pop/Jim Osterberg, James Williamson, Mike Watt, Danny Fields, Ron Asheton, Steve Mackay, Scott Asheton

Credits:Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. A Magnolia/Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:48