“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).

This summer’s hits and misses can seem like surprises if you go by things like reviews, muted fan buzz pre-release, limited feedback on reviews and stories about the films on blogs and the like.

But Hollywood creative accounting can balance those books, and that all-important international marketplace has saved many a dog this popcorn picture season.

Let’s start with Steven Spielberg’s biggest flop this millennium, his doddering, dainty CGI adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “The B.F.G.” It cost over $140 million, made about $50 in the US, and $60 overseas. As a film typically needs to pull in three times its budget for the studio to earn back its investment when they take their cut, this is a big money loser. Huge.

How Disney managed to spend $170 million for an “Alice in Wonderland” sequel with no Tim Burton is a mystery. The film earned $76 million in north America by rolling out before summer had really gotten going. Poor reviews didn’t help. It made over $210 million overseas. Still, nowhere near breaking even.

“Ice Age: Collision Course” tanked in the U.S. — $53-60 million will be all it finishes up earning, against a $105 million budget. Overseas, however, Fox earned $235 million and counting, putting this one into profit.

“Warcraft,” budgeted at $160 million, earned a fraction of that domestically. Under $50. But a staggering showing for this hashjob of a video game adaptation overseas comes close to putting it in the black — $380 million in less discerning parts of the world. 

“Independence Day” was way past the point where a sequel should have been attempted, but Fox spent $165 million to prove that wrong, and has earned about $390 million worldwide for its troubles. Not in the black, and it won’t end up there. But

A lot of people seemed to be rooting for the “Ghostbusters” reboot to fail. It’s earned over $116 million and counting, domestically, against a $144 million or so budget. Overseas isn’t rescuing this one, as this cast and this brand have little value in other markets. A $60-70 million take abroad added to its US total means this one’s a big money loser. How much depends on how creative the accounting will be. de

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” didn’t hit $100 million in the USdidn’t hit $100 million in the US (budget a head-slapping $133), but did $155 overseas. It won’t break even.

“Suicide Squad” did $135 US and $132 foreign on its opening weekend against a $175 million budget. Figure $225-300 US and smaller numbers overseas and this one seems sure to take a bath. It probably doesn’t need to earn the $750 million bandied about, but it needs to clear $500 and that doesn’t seem a sure thing, not by a long shot. “Batman v. Superman” cleared $800 million worldwide, by comparison.

“Star Trek Beyond” will be the third film in Paramount’s latest revival of the franchise. So they said pre-release. The latest film cost $185 million, has earned just over that, U.S. and foreign markets. It will not stay in theaters in this country long enough to put a dent in the $550 million or so it should need to turn a profit. Overseas, it is tanking. We may never see a fourth outing by this crew.

The best bets this summer were kids’ cartoons (“Finding Dory,” “The Secret Life of Pets” and even the cheaply made “Angry Birds” were fairly safe), with the live action half of “The B.F.G.” costing it dearly with that audience. Comedies and horror made on the cheap — another “Purge,” “Nerve,” “Bad Moms,” “Lights Out!” — did well, generally.

If two Marvel movies were to underperform in a row, the massive comic book movie bubble would pop. Because DC isn’t cashing the same consistent checks. But who knows when that will happen? Not in Stan Lee’s lifetime, I’d wager.

It started strong Thursday night, blew up Friday and didn’t tail off that much Saturday. Warner Brothers tinkered with the finished film for months, altered the marketing to make it seem more like “Guardians of the Galaxy,” Marvel’s version of “Bad Guys get out of prison and save the world/universe.”

And made a general hash of “Suicide Squad,” critics agree.

But hiding the film from critics until it was very late in the game kept this the most anticipated movie of the summer, and that paid off with an opening weekend of epic proportions. Fans ignored reviews and turned out to the tune of $135 million. That’s a bigger opening than “Signs,” than “Guardians of the Galaxy.” It probably doesn’t matter that projections had pointed to a $146 million weekend, and it fell off so much Sat and Sun that it won’t reach those numbers. It’s still got the August record.

Well-played, WB. They made a movie that “Batman v. Superman” made them realize wasn’t working, erred too far on the side of comic book dark. And they marketed the hell out of it to convince people it wasn’t that dark, and that it is better than “Batman v. Superman.” And the fans? They bought it.

“Bad Moms” held onto a bigger portion of its opening weekend audience than “Jason Bourne,” and is a surprise hit — over 40% now.

“Bourne” lost well over 60% of its opening weekend.

“Star Trek” continues to fall off, steeply, but it’s at $127 million now.

The distaff “Ghostbusters” cleared $116 million, but like “Trek” is losing screens and won’t clear its announced budget, domestically.

The kiddie cat comedy “Nine Lives” cleared $6.6 million.

It set a midnight showings record on Thursday — over $20 million. That helped the critically dismissed “Suicide Squad” blow up to an epic $63 million opening day — or opening day plus one.

And that sets the Warner Brothers DC Comics adaptation up for a $140 million weekend, the high end of expectations and an August opening weekend record. Will it be enough for it to break even? Estimates that suggest it needs to earn $750 million worldwide to make money seem a stretch, but it needs to earn and earn on into the school year to put the studio in the black on it. It could happen, but any steep Saturday fall-off could puncture that balloon.

Speaking of deflated, “Jason Bourne” took a pretty steep (64% Friday) dive on its second weekend. It will still clear $100 million by Sunday, but JB has no legs.

The middling “Secret Life of Pets” has them, and will be over $319 million by Sunday. You can’t go too far wrong with a kids’ cartoon. Even “Ice Age: Collision Course” is making money, though at $53 million after three weeks, it stands as one of the summer’s biggest flops.

“Star Trek Beyond” is losing theaters and losing audience, but is up to $127 million domestic.

“Ghostbusters” is also losing theaters and trailing off, but will have cleared $116 million by Sunday. It still looks as if $125-130 million will be its all-in total by the time it runs out of gas. Not a flop, but no sequel is guaranteed when “won’t quite break even” goes into the books.

Another kids’ newcomer, the imported “Nine Lives,” cracked the top ten. Cat videos on the web do great, why not a kitty movie for kids? $6 million isn’t a bad take.

“Bad Moms” and “Lights Out” have turned out to be two of the summer’s low-budget sleeper hits, both in the $50 million and counting range.

There’s much to love in the latest adaptation of the beloved Antoine de Saint-Exupéry novella “The Little Prince”, an animated marvel by Mark Osborne, whose “Kung Fu Panda” (the original) was more visually inventive than you might remember.

A stunning blend of styles, from hand-drawn sketches to computer-assisted visuals with flashbacks made in gorgeous, textured stop-motion animation with models and tactile sets, it does justice to the book while updating its messages for contemporary audiences.

It’s also as easy to see why no studio figured it would find enough of an American audience to be worth putting in theaters. It comes direct-to-Netflix in the U.S., after having been a modest hit overseas. Stripped of much of its allegorical context, it is more of a children’s story than ever. But it’s a bit dry and somber for that audience, without nearly as much for adults to chew upon as the book.

A fable written by a French pilot and expat who fled his country after it surrendered to Nazi Germany, the book has invited graduate student dissection for 70 years.

The film is framed in a contemporary story, a little girl (the voice of Mackenzie Foy) and her stressed-out single mom (voiced by Rachel McAdams) fail to get into the Werth Academie, where “worth” is measured by one killer entrance examination question.

“What will you be when you grow up?”

The answer? “Essential,” as practiced and preached by the Werth headmaster (Paul Giamatti).

The over-scheduling “life plan” Mom moves them to a boxy suburb filled with modernist box houses and shrubs chopped into boxes for a summer of cramming for another shot at Werth. But the one house available sits next to a high-gabled ruin where a whimsically eccentric aviator (Jeff Bridges) resides.

He interrupts their plans by flinging a paper airplane through little Violet’s window. It’s the first page from an illustrated book, “The Little Prince,” about the aviator’s encounter, after a long-ago plane crash in the desert, with a bracing, inquisitive little boy from another planet. She rejects it, at first.

“That’s OK,” Bridges’ best old-man voice says in comfort.”Nobody understands it anyway.”

But eventually Violet, as such tales dictate, simply must hear more about this Little Prince, about the stuffed fox (James Franco) who was his friend, about The Rose (Marion Cotillard of “La Vie en Rose”), the Snake (Benicio del Toro).

This slow and somewhat stately cartoon reminds me of the recent animated version of Kahlil Gibran’s poetic novel “The Prophet,” a last-ditch attempt to capture the magic in a meditative, allegorical and philosophical book by using that most malleable art form — animation.

“It is only with the heart that one can see right,” the aviator lectures. The body “is but a shell.” “What is most important is what is invisible.” The words of a writer whose country has fallen to a great evil, whose world is under threat, seeking solace in the garret of the mind.

The flashbacks, telling the story of meeting the prince and his visits to various other planetoids, where he learns life lessons, are simple and simply lovely examples of the stop-motion animated art. The contemporary story points the child away from life’s “essentials” — which her mother, The Businessman (Albert Brooks) and others hammer into her.

What is life once we’ve lost that child’s sense of wonder? Pretty empty, the aviator intones. Bridges was a good choice, as this character narrates the film as well.

“Grownups — they never understand anything by themselves.” They have forgotten “all about being a child.”

It was all more original when the book, translated into every language and still a best-seller, was new. Not so much any more.

Its remaining messages and its very style make “The Little Prince” more a nostalgia piece for adults than anything your kids would clamor to see and demand Happy Meals toys from. But Osborne’s film has its rewards, many of them our memories filling in what has been thinned out.

And in a weak year for adventurous original animation, it could compete with “Zootopia” for an Oscar, and actually have a shot.

MPAA Rating:PG for mild thematic elements

Cast: The voices of Jeff Bridges, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Paul Rudd, Albert Brooks, Ricky Gervais, Paul Giamatti, James Franco, Benicio del Toro
Credits: Directed by Mark Osborne, script by Irena Brignull and Bob Persichetti, based on the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry novella. A Netflix/Paramount release.

Running time: 1:48

“Tallulah” is just the sort of movie Netflix should be making. No box office stars, an unconventional story, it’s a “film festival” movie — one with little chance of finding its niche in the theatrical marketplace.

But a tale with tiny Ellen Page as a homeless, impulse-purchase mom  written and directed by an “Orange is the New Black” veteran? Netflixable, for sure.

Page has the title role, a drifter whose drifting is powered by an ancient panel van. She and boyfriend Nico (Evan Jonigkeit) dumpster dive for meals and use “any means necessary” to gas it up for the next leg in their journey. Tallulah enjoys their unbridled van sex and dreams of traveling to India.

Nico? He’d like something more stable. He’s in love. He wants a life together, with a future. That’s one thing Tallulah can’t abide.

But when Nico bails, where does “Lu”, as she calls herself, go? She hunts down Nico’s embittered, abandoned mom (Allison Janney) in New York. Nico hasn’t been home in two years, her husband is waiting for her to sign the divorce papers, and she’s not buying into any hustle the perky urchin is trying.

Circumstances put Lu in a swank hotel, where the room-service leftovers are best, and into the clutches of Bad Mom (Tammy Blanchard), a drunken, aging trophy wife in the mood for a fling. But she needs a babysitter, and without giving Lu her name or number or any real instructions, she leaves her naked toddler in the care of a stranger.

Lu, whose unsuitability for this role is obvious the first time the diminutive Page picks up little Maddie, bonds with the baby in a single evening. She decides to keep it, and she decides Nico’s mom would be the perfect helper/advisor in this scheme. All she has to do is pass the child off as Nico’s.

They clash.

“Were you raised by WOLVES?”

“I WISH!”

“What’s WRONG with you?”

“A LOT!”

We’ve been hard-wired by storytelling tradition to look for the character arc in a story, the “hero” and her quest. But writer-director Sian Heder brings elements of her TV work to this script. It’s not really Tallulah’s arc that we embrace. She is impulsive, damaged and immature at the beginning, and so she will be at the end.

It’s Margo (Janney) and the Bad Mom, a self-involved ditz who fails to convince us she sees her kidnapped baby as anything more than a lawsuit against the hotel, who make the hero’s journey here.

Heder gives every actress lots of close-ups, and that allows Page, in particular, to transcend what is more a “type” than a character. Lu is the sort of role she is drawn to — a bit of a loner, social misfit, off-the-grid.

Janney can change a scene with just a look in her eyes, and Blanchard (“Into the Woods,” “Money Ball,” “Blue Jasmine”) imparts pain and fear and longing in moments of drunken cunning (the way she “plays” the hotel staff).

The story is pure melodrama and more conventional than daring. But “Tallulah” makes a fine demonstration project to under-employed talent — in front of and behind the camera. Netflix has found its niche, and it need not include Adam Sandler.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with nudity, sexual situations, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Ellen Page, Allison Janney, Tammy Blanchard, David Zayas, Zachary Quinto, John Michael Hickey

Credits: Written and directed by Sian Heder

Running time: 1:51