Movie Nation

Glowing reviews (for the most part) and fan hysteria are driving “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”” to the all-time opening weekend record at the box office.

A staggering $250 million+ is projected, based on Thursday night/Friday’s numbers. Better than the best of the Potters, hungrier than any “Hunger Games.” It may pass the total take of the latest “Hunger Games” blockbuster on just its opening weekend. Big. Really big. Is everybody seeing it thrilled with it? Not likely. But some are going a second time already, so it’s reaching its audience. For sure.

That godawful “Chipmunks” sequel is hitting the mid-teens on its opening weekend.For God’s sake, think of the CHILDREN. $14 million? Ugh.

That’s just ahead of “Sisters,” which got decent reviews but is just getting the wind sucked out of it by the SW beast.

“Creed” may reach $100 million by year’s end. “Hunger Games” is at $254 or will be by Sunday night. Three grossly overrated rehashes making bank. No wonder J.J. Abrams didn’t do a damned thing with the “Star Wars” formula. People like their movie comfort food, especially this year.

“Spotlight” has been the biggest hit among the Oscar contenders, with “The Big Short” going into limited release and doing quite well per screen.

Above, please see the only decent sight gag in “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip.” Alvin, Simon and Theodore pose as exotic sports car hood ornaments to hide from a Federal air marshal chasing them between LA and Miami.

Cute.

Whatever slim charms were in the first film of this singing/chatting/pranks-pulling chipmunks revival have utterly been wrung out of it, at this stage. The comic pickings are slim, even by the reduced standards of movies aimed at the smallest of the small fry. There’s barely a laugh in this thing.

Jason Lee tries not to look humiliated to be taking money for playing “Dave,” the dad to the three orphaned critters. Dave’s producing a pop starlet’s new record. She’s played by the leggy Bella Thorne, and the record release party is in Miami. Dave can go. He takes his new girlfriend (Kimberly Williams-Paisley, years removed from “Father of the Bride”).

The chipmunks, and the girlfriend’s bully boy son (Josh Green) try to crash that party, but create mayhem on the plane and are forced to make their way to Miami by other means. Sounds like trouble.

“If by trouble, you mean irresistible, GUILTY as charged!”

A stop at a line-dancing Texas honky-tonk, a sing-along in New Orleans, chased by this vengeful Fed (Tony Hale, given nothing funny to do) every step of the way.

They sing “I like big BUTTS and a I cannot lie,” and “Iko Iko” and a few other tunes.

Alvin swaps insults with kinky filmmaker John Waters on a plane.

“Don’t judge ME! I saw ‘Pink Flamingos!'”

A fart joke, a rodent pellet gag, all harmless enough.

Why even bother reviewing these? Well, the first one had a few adorable moments and worked well enough for its tiny tots audience. Movies like this serve a function, raising a new generation of young filmgoers as they transition from cartoons to live action. I’m just not sure setting the bar this low is doing them, or their suffering parents, any favors.

MPAA Rating:PG for some mild rude humor

Cast: Jason Lee, Bella Thorne, Josh Green, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Tony Hale and the chipmunked voices of Justin Long, Jesse McCarthy, Kaley Cuoco, Anna Faris, Christina Applegate
Credits: Directed by Walt Becker, script by Randi Mayem, Adam Sztykiel. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:26

Flip, furious and hilariously chilling, “The Big Short” is a comical primer on the global financial meltdown, as engineered by the “idiots” and “morons” of Wall Street, and the toadies who failed to rein them in.

It explains, in deliciously campy side vignettes, the how and what of all these acronyms and euphemistically-named “instruments” by those we sometimes to remember to focus our outrage upon.

Based on the Michael Lewis (“Moneyball”) book and script, it features a compact and pithy supporting performance by Brad Pitt and scintillating star turns by Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, and Steve Carell, as the loud-mouthed outsider-insider who fumed and fulminated about the “fraud” he saw taking over Wall Street — even as he was hedging his bets about how to cash in on the collapse he saw coming.

Gosling’s swaggering Jared Vennett narrates the story, taking us back to when banking and bankers were boring and middle class. Ancient history by the mid-2000s, when greed that led to bad practices and spread from suddenly richer and hipper Wall Street, down to Main Street, where any schmuck could stack up loans to load up on real-estate, all under the lax oversight of the George W. Bush administration.

Christian Bale briliantly interprets the eccentric genius fund manager Dr. Michael Burry, who first realized that banks were heavily into bad home mortgages, and got those banks to invent and sell him credit swaps that allowed them to insure against the apocalyptic mass default that he was sure was coming, allowing him to “bet short.”  It doesn’t happen, they keep his premiums. It does, and he makes his reluctant –sometimes hostile — investors filthy rich. And the banks go bust.

Vennett was another bank employee in-the-know who peddled these credit swaps as a way to make money when the world was about to crash  down around their ears.

Carell is Mark Baum, a rude rageaholic and fund manager who blows his fuse at every fresh proof that evil banks are screwing over working people and ignoring the time bomb that they’ve created with these subprime mortgages.

And Brad Pitt is the ex-broker who helps a couple of young Turks (John Magaro, Finn Wittrock) play with big boy money at the same credit swap game.

“Talladega Nights” director Adam McKay was an odd choice, but the right one, to turn Lewis’s anecdote-and-economics book into a film. Gosling’s Vennett pauses the picture, here and there, to get “Margot Robbie, in a tub of bubbles” or “Here’s world famous Chef Anthony Bourdain” in a kitchen full of spoiling fish, or Selena Gomez at the blackjack table, to explain this or that arcane bit of financial tomfoolery — what those acronyms that brought down other acronyms (AIG) and famed banks (Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, etc.) are. It’s flippant, but it works as a device.

Diatribes are cut-off, mid-sentence. Montages serve up a blizzard of context, a post 9/11 America that was too distracted by Barry Bonds cheating, Britney Spears melting down and assorted reality TV shows, to say nothing of assorted wars, to “pay attention” to high finance.

Characters are forever saying “How come nobody’s talking about this?” and “They call me ‘Chicken Little,’ they call me ‘Bubble Boy,'” for pointing out “THEIR stupidity” and fraud. Carell is best at this name calling, Gosling smirks and takes abuse because he knows he’s right. Bale bangs on drums and suffers, patiently, as he waits for the ratings agencies to admit the market has collapsed and thus make his lucrative prediction come true.

There are no heroes here. Nobody goes to the Feds or the press until the rigged system threatens to mask its meltdown and keep them from cashing in.

Thus, “The Big Short” becomes not just amusing and explanatory, a real tour de force for its fast-talking cast. It’s an election year caution flag. “Nobody is talking about this” applied then, when the end was in sight. And it applies now, when few  of those who wrecked the world’s economy paid a price, and the lessons not learned seem to be re-inflating the bubble awaiting another handful of mavericks to see Doom and figure out a way to make it pay.

MPAA Rating:R for pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling, Marisa Tomei, Brad Pitt
Credits: Directed by Adam McKay, script by Michael Lewis and Adam McKay. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:10

The universe has gotten a lot more diverse in the decades since we first visited “A galaxy far far away.” And less sexist.

There’s a Republic, and plenty of reminders — crashed warships, grizzled veterans — of the war that brought it back.

But evil has reared its ugly head. The First Order is less subtle than the evil Empire about its affection for fascist optics, fascist storm troopers and fascist practices — massacring civilians and what not. But perhaps there are people with souls underneath those scary white (and black) helmets.

So a Resistance has formed, led by The Usual Suspects. And the war among the stars begins again.

J.J. Abrams’ “Star Wars” reboot,  “The Force Awakens,” begins with smuggled plans. OK, it’s a map this time. There’s an adorable droid entrusted with the map. He gets away on a desert planet. Advice from a sage of the desert — warmly played by the great Max Von Sydow — is taken.

Escaping from the planet involves a dazzling dogfight and the Millennium Falcon. Old friends show up, and the map makes its way toward people who might be able to prevent this big round thing from blowing up planets.

Sure, it’s still a fun ride — shootouts, getaways made via hyperspace, wisecracks. But pretending “The Force Awakens” is anything more than a glib facsimile of “A New Hope,” the original “Star Wars” movie, is delusional. It’s dull because it is achingly unoriginal. Abrams,  at every turn, plays it safe, with multiple “takes me right out of the movie” lapses.

In Disney’s hands, it’s a small galaxy, after all — billions of people, with a choice few just stumbling into each other in the most bizarre coincidences, fewer quest story plots to choose from (the same one), desert planets that have the same sorts of critters, bars with the same barflies, etc.

The new villains are  Kylo Ren, a black-helmeted brute who throws hilarious tantrums, shorting out all manner of electronics with his Crusader broadsword light saber. Adam Driver is Hayden Christensen reborn, in essence, a somewhat amusing menace with the helmet on, that tall, skinny, curly-headed funnyman from “Girls” and “This is Where I Leave You” with the helmet off. Miscast.

His best line? “We’re not done here.” Kind of lacks…something.

And there’s a Supreme Being, another digital creation acted out by Andy “Gollum” Serkis. At least he’s kind of scary.

The desert planet heroine, Rey, is a scavenger of Jakku played with pluck by Daisy Ridley. She’s waiting for “my family. They’ll be back, someday.”

She is no damsel in distress.

“I know how to run! Let go of my hand!”

The most interesting addition is the Storm Trooper with a heart. John Boyega shows the character’s humanity. Raised to blindly follow orders, the blood of his first combat makes him crack. Boyega lets us see the remorse, and maybe a little cowardice. He comes to be called “Finn,” because the First Order gave him no actual name.

The guy who names him that is crack Resistance pilot Poe, cartoonishly played by the normally reliable Oscar Isaac (“Ex Machina,””Inside Llewyn Davis”). Poe is captured and tortured, making feeble wisecracks all the while. He must sense that a Storm Trooper will turn traitor (for the first time EVER) and help him escape.

But the moment Han Solo shows up, this becomes a Harrison Ford movie. Han’s a single-again grumpy old man a little flattered that Rey quotes his legend (“the Kessell run”) back to him, still bickering with Chewbacca, still reluctant to get involved until the chips are down. Even if Leia (Carrie Fisher) is the one asking for his help.

Ford’s easy comfort with a cheesy line has never faltered, and Abrams leaves the picture in his able hands for the middle acts.

The effects are sharper, 40 years more developed. Why does Abrams do so little to show them off? The chases, dogfights and set-piece battles are static and recycled. The Big Pause for a Big Death is just an eye-roller.

Even the aliens are oh-so-familiar, right down to Admiral “It’s a trap!” Ackbar.

The earliest reviews of this are all glowing, as indeed they were for this past summer’s “Jurassic Park” clone — “Jurassic World.” This will certainly make billions. “Brand” above all, right?

But “The Force Awakens” boils down to a couple of genuine lump-in-the-throat moments, and those are due to nostalgia. The rest? Seen it, done it, been there, and remember it — even though it was “a long time ago.”

(UPDATE — Now EVERYBODY realizes “Force Awakens” is a “glib facsimile” of “A New Hope.”

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

Cast: Harrison Ford, Daisy Ridley, Jon Boyega, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Domhnall Gleeson, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis, Max Von Sydow
Credits: Directed by J.J. Abrams, script by Lawrence Kasdan, J.J. Abrams, Michael Arndt. ALucasfilm/Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:15

“Youth” is writer-director Paolo Sorrentino’s ode to old age, a reverie on memory and a fantasia on the last thing to go — “desire.”

He gives one last great role to Michael Caine, one more shot at not seeming streetwise to Harvey Keitel and two great scenes to the legendary Jane Fonda.

He reminds us that Rachel Weisz deserved her Oscar, and that even if he doesn’t score one for “Love & Mercy,” Paul Dano is pursuing just the sort of challenging, uncompromising roles that all but guarantee he’ll have one soon enough.

Caine is Fred Ballinger, an 80something conductor/composer who is doing his best to turn down a knighthood from the Queen. Politely.

“Oh no, I’m retired.”

Harvey Keitel is Mick Boyle, Fred’s lifelong friend, a great film director who has five assistants helping him polish his latest script.

Fred and Mick are at a spa in Switzerland, and in quieter moments, each has his alpine hallucination — the leading ladies one helped launch, the music (in cowbells, cattle lowing, birds and the crackle of a candy wrapper ) the other still hears.

Rachel Weisz is Fred’s daughter and assistant, who experiences a marital crisis that involves both men. Paul Dano is a an actor famous for playing a robot, using time at this exclusive resort to prepare for his next role.

And there’s also this morbidly obese South American so famous nobody has to say his name.

“Youth” plays like Sorrentino’s tribute to Fellini, with its langourus leering during nude swims (Miss Universe checks into the resort), its bemused drift into the indignity of a sauna, and the spa’s regimented routine of exercise, check-ups, sunbathing, meals and nightly entertainment. The filmmaker has been leaning toward Federico of late (“The Great Beauty”), pondering old age as he does.

He does this by contrasting the aged beauties of his cast with the far less attractive, but young and supple members of the staff at the spa, and a few jaw-dropping moments with the film’s Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea).

Ballinger’s vivid nightmares are about women and desire, his daughter’s are about a failed marriage and Mick’s are about a film ending, a “testament” project that cannot find a climax.

Ballinger is famous for music that he regards as trite, if personal. Dano’s actor observes, chats with Fred and mulls the fickle nature of his fame, a guy too good for the role that made him famous, dismissive of all that’s come since, but not so close-minded that he cannot figure that out.

The performances are subtle and sublime, with the exception of Keitel, who very much seems the odd man out here. His line-readings are metallic, stilted. The Cockney Caine can channel a lifetime among the rich and famous and play it posh. Not Keitel. His “street” moments work, his collaboration scenes with young writers and leisure ones rattle and jar. The lines, the entitlement, doesn’t roll off his lips.

But the surprises are rewarding, the irony expressed with the perfect touch of drollery and the climax beautifully handled, even if the film goes on one scene too long past that.

An old rule Sorrentino violates at his peril. If you spend an entire movie building up some beloved or climactic piece of music, you dare not ever show “Mr. Holland’s Opus” or “Mo Better Blues.” It will never live up to your own hype.

 
MPAA Rating: R for graphic nudity, some sexuality, and language

Cast: Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano, Jane Fonda
Credits: Directed by , script by . A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:04

They’re the funniest comic duo since Lemmon and Matthau.

Who cares if their best work was co-hosting awards shows? Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, ex-“Saturday Night Live” bandmates, funny women so utterly in sync as to be matching halves of “slap” and “stick,” simply click. Even when they’re out of character.

As they are in “Sisters,” a 40somethings-party-like-they-did-when-they-were-teens romp that casts each “sister” against type. The always-wacky Poehler is the lonely “responsible one,” the smart-downtrodden Fey tries her hand at ditzy party animal.

They make each of their creations real women with real issues and needs and a wild streak. Whatever the demands of the script (by SNL vet Paula Pell), they never become caricatures in this “Project X/Superbad/House Party” for the not-quite-menopausal.

Maura (Poehler) is a nurse, a do-gooder, all about helping and about self-help. The self-help? That’s because she’s divorced — two years and counting.

Kate (Fey) is the hellion. We can tell by the leopard print apron she uses as she applies toxic dye to a hair cut customer (Chris Parnell) whose brows she is tinting at home because she’s been fired. Again. From another salon. She’s one of those single-moms whose teen daughter (Madison Davenport) has to be “the grown-up.” Haley knows Mom’s anger-management/impulse control issues. Which sends her on vacations without Mom, without bothering to tell her where she’s going.

No wonder Maura is the one their parents (Dianne Wiest, James Brolin) trust with the news that they’re selling the family’s home — in Orlando.

Kate does not take it well. The tantrum includes some serious shots at the designer-couple who are closing on the house and cannot wait to redecorate.

“You know your cousin’s gay?”

“That’s not my cousin. That’s my husband.”

The Ellis sisters resolve — at Kate’s insistence — to throw one last “Ellis Island” party, like the ones they tossed in high school. Maybe Maura can make some time with the hunk (Ike Barinholtz) who has moved in down the street. Kate, however, has to be “the party mom” though, the one who doesn’t drink.

“I hate it when you make me the bummer.”

And they’re off — rounding up booze, decorating, sending e-vites to their old classmates, shunning those they always shunned.

Here’s where this movie’s “Saturday Night Live” content pays off. Maya Rudolph absolutely kills as the resentful shrew the sisters hated in high school.

“She looks like a fart that’s coming out sideways.”

Bobby Moynihan plays the dopey classmate who was sure he’d become a stand-up comic. Rachel Dratch has another Rachel Dratch role.

Even though there’s a drug dealer (John Cena, hysterical at underplaying) and some midlife crisis sex, this is never much darker than “Hangover Lite.” There’s little of the bitter bite of “Bridesmaids,” though a hint of “last stab at playing promiscuous party girls” ripples from the script to the actresses playing the leads.

How to dress? “A little less Forever 21, and a little more Suddenly 42.”

But the pleasure here is in catching our comic twosome in all their unfiltered Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time glory. Check out the two minutes or so set aside for Poehler and deadpan Greta Lee, as a Korean manicurist, to work out how to pronounce the nail-dresser’s name.

“Hae won.”

And for once, we  get to see the Fabulous Fey and the Peerless Poehler, cast as equals and delivering the comic goods without having to give OTHER people Golden Globes in the process.

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

Cast: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Dianne Wiest, James Brolin, John Leguizamo, Maya Rudolph, Ike Barinholtz, John Cena
Credits: Directed by Jason Moore, script by Paula Pell. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:58

All winning streaks must end, and you can’t say Jennifer Lawrence and David O. Russell (and Bradley Cooper) haven’t had a good run.

“Joy,” their third collaboration, is no “American Hustle” or “Silver Linings Playbook.” This is the Russell of “I Heart Huckabees” or “Nailed/Accidental Love.” Whatever he was going for here — a satire of the American “up by your bootstraps” myth, a twisted take on “build a better mousetrap” capitalism — he misses.

And it’s not a “Flirting With Disaster” miss, either. If not quite a disaster, “Joy” threatens, time and again, to take away your will to live.

Lawrence is charming and empathetic as Joy Mangano, a single mom whose entire disastrous family has come to depend on her, even if they no longer have the right. It’s the early ’70s when we meet her. Mom (Virginia Madsen, always good) has confined herself to her bedroom, locked in to her soap operas.

Long-divorced mechanic Dad (Robert DeNiro) is returned to the house by his latest wife. “He’s broken,” is all she’ll say.

Joy already has her own ex husband (Edgar Ramirez) living under her roof. He wants to be a singer, can’t support himself and soon is sharing a basement with her dad. The bills are piling up, but Joy doesn’t let the desperation show.

Only Grandma (Diane Ladd, radiant  in a bit part) has faith. She’s the one who sees great things in Joy. Joy could be “Joy the doer,” the one who lives up to that potential she glistened with in high school.

But Grandma only makes Joy mourn for the better life she should have had.  The tipping point comes when Joy makes her one grab for the Big Brass Ring. She has that one Big Idea. And there’s this new start-up, a TV network that does nothing but sell stuff, run by a sympathetic hunk (Bradley Cooper) with a mesmerizing, messianic spiel. Will she make it? Will he help, or merely be another weight, ransoming her joy?

This is a real woman’s life story, and all Russell can do to make it cinematic is to pile up the obstacles — the Dad, resentful sister (Elisabeth Rohm), Dad’s imperious and wealthy new lady-love (Isabella Rossellini) — who all doubt her– the business folk who cheat her. Because, it is implied, she is “just a woman.”

Lawrence does what she can with the material. But Joy is basically the Biblical Job, built to suffer. Even triumph won’t bring happiness, and at least failure has the advantage of familiarity.

So we may root for her. Just not that much. We may wish for this or that good thing to happen, but in business, family, ex-family and family friends will let you down.

And pairing her up with Cooper again is just a cruel tease. The last third of the film not only is about the infomercial business, it’s like an infomercial itself.

Russell sets out to frustrate, and he does. And “Joy” never rises above that, an aggravating, un-fulfilling and empty night at the cinema with great actors trapped in an overdue flop from people we were just starting to figure were flop-proof.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief strong language

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Virginia Madsen, Bradley Cooper, Isabella Rossellini, Diane Ladd
Credits: Written and directed by David O. Russell, story by Annie Mumolo, script by . A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:02

You knew that somebody was going to take the piss out of the pretentious king of movie mashups, Quentin Tarantino.

And you knew that it would never be Adam Sandler & Co. who managed that.

“The Ridiculous 6,” which major studios passed on and Netflix got made, is a parody of Tarantino’s talky/violent/n-word riddled “event” Western, “The Hateful Eight.”

Tarantino releases his movie in “70 mm” (in select cinemas). “Ridiculous 6” is in “4K.” Tarantino pushes a slight story into three hours, with overture and intermission. Team Sandler reaches for the two hour mark.

Tarantino serves of Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen — his “regulars.” Sandler brings Rob Schneider back from the Old Jewish Comics Home, and gives more work to David Spade, Vanilla Ice, Jon Lovitz and sports talker Dan Patrick, condemned to be Abe Lincoln in his most disastrous Sandler cameo in one of Sandler’s worst films.

Which is saying something.

The premise here — a movie basically inspired by the trailer to “Hateful Eight” (which opens New Year’s) — is that Sandler is “White Knife,” an orphan raised by Apache.

“I jus’ dress like this so’s I don’t get scalped out there on the prairie,” he drawls. Sort of.

His long-lost Desperado Daddy (Nick Nolte) shows up, offers him the stash from his biggest job, and is promptly nabbed by his old gang (led by Danny Trejo).

White Knife, or “Tommy,” must leave behind his intended, Smokin’ Fox (Julia Jones), find Daddy’s treasure and rescue him. Along the way, he discovers Pappa Was a Rollin’ Stone. Schneider plays a half-Mexican dolt sired by the outlaw, Taylor Lautner an utter dope fathered by him, Terry Crews, Luke Wilson and Jorge Garcia play the the other half-brothers.

Ridiculous.

Unlike Tarantino, whose movie has about a dozen “hateful” characters to be dispatched, Sandler and his crew at least can count. The ridiculous are indeed six in number.

Will Forte and Steve Zahn and Nick Swardson are among the members of a gang of one-eyed outlaws out for the same stash.

Vanilla Ice plays Mark Twain, Lovitz a governor and Blake Shelton is Wyatt Earp in a big poker game. John Turturro is Abner Doubleday, trying to teach the Chinese building the railroad how to play baseball.

The humor comes virtue of donkey diarrhea, bad-pun “Injun” names (“Never Wears Bra”) and elderly Native American actors cracking jokes in the modern vernacular.

“Wow, that was uncool,” the aged chief (Saginaw Grant) complains.

The production values are pretty high. A Western with good locations, horses, a stagecoach and an Indian village isn’t hard to manage.

There’s just nothing to this — nothing funny, at least. It’s hatefully long, has some bizarre violence (Harvey Keitel and Steve Buscemi are involved) and is built around another inept-and-doesn’t-care-that-he-is turn by Sandler.

Sure, he’s always creating work for his cronies. It’s become very apparent, over the years, that his real reason for doing this is that they’re the only ones to reassure him on the set that he’s funny. When he isn’t.

If you’re trying to take the piss out of Tarantino, and somebody needs to, you need to bring more game than this.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, violence and defecation gags

Cast: Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Danny Trejo, Julia Jones, Terry Crews, Taylor Lautner, Luke Wilson,Vanilla Ice, Nick Nolte, Jorge Garcia, Blake Shelton, David Spade, Jon Lovitz, Dan Patrick
Credits: Directed by Frank Coraci, script by Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

“Phoenix” is a dark romantic melodrama about the Holocaust, an intimate study of guilt — survivor’s guilt, and survive-at-all costs guilt.

Nelly (Nina Hoss) survived the death camps — barely. She only returns to Germany after reconstructive surgery to repair the grievous bullet wounds to her face, a wounds the Nazis were sure finished her as they evacuated the camp.

Her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) nurses her through this, gets her back across the border (from Switzerland) and brings her back to post-war Berlin.

Nelly regards her surgery as more “recreation” than “reconstruction.” All she wants is to find her husband, the man she had to leave behind when she was arrested. This is the thought that kept Nelly, a singer, alive when all around her were dying.

She’s not hearing Lene’s blunt warnings about “Johnny.”

“Johnny betrayed you.”

She searches as she heals, but when she stumbles into her piano playing husband, he does not recognize her.

Johnny does odd jobs at the Phoenix club, a sort of Weimar/”Cabaret” throwback that entertains the locals and the American troops who occupy that sector of Berlin. But something about this woman he doesn’t quite recognize clicks. He befriends her and enlists her in a scheme. She will impersonate his late wife, Nelly and he will split her inheritance with “Esther,” as she calls herself. After all, he says (in German, with English subtitles), “There aren’t many Esthers left.”

Co-writer/director Christian Petzold (“Barbara”) manages a subtle tension as his players try to hide a various obvious payoff that this premise promises. Zehrfeld’s Johnny is poker-faced, straining not to give away a flash of regret, remorse or longing as this woman reminds him more and more of a wife he is sure is dead.

Hoss (“A Most Wanted Man”) brings layers of ache to Nelly. As Esther, she questions and probes. She is trying to trip Johnny up, but only half-heartedly. Does she want to know that he betrayed her, can she left him off the hook or is he innocent of what Lene is convinced he did?

What trips this troubling and engrossing picture up are production values. It’s mere months after the war, and the street rubble is ever-so-neat, everybody is in nice clothes, and even the seedy bars and apartments feel production-designed to death. Every vintage car is in mint condition, freshly polished on the rubble-strewn streets, every GI has a German accent, not an American one.

The players and the situation (taken from a Hubert Monteilhet) novel make “Phoenix” an approachable, less-grueling Holocaust story than most. But the unreality of it all undoes some of that and makes this brief, smart and heartfelt story feel like a pulled-punch.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements and brief suggestive material

Cast:Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf
Credits: Directed by Christian Petzold, script by Christian Fetzold and Harun Faroki, based on the novel by Hubert Monteilhet . A Sundance Selects release.

Running time: 1:38

OK, that’s an exaggeration. Nobody figured a movie about a whale would make a fortune.

But as things stand now, a fictionalized film version of a non-fiction best seller about the true story that inspired “Moby Dick” may take down Katniss Everdeen and her band of YA warriors.

Friday night’s numbers show the Chris Hemsworth/Ron Howard adventure tale “In the Heart of the Sea” edging “Hunger Games PArt XVIII.” Or whatever. “Heart of the Sea” wasn’t helped by mixed reviews.

Neither film figures to pull in more than $12 million this weekend. “Hunger Games” has been out forever, but nothing that’s opened since has dented it too much (“Krampus” “Creed” “Good Dinosaur” all came close).

The other news is that this is the film that finally shoves “The Martian” out of the top ten. $222 million for the Oscar hopeful starring Matt Damon. “Hunger Games” is over $227, FYI.

“Krampus” is still making money, “The Good Dinosaur” sticking around, etc. etc.

“Star Wars” opens next week and it’s adios, “Hunger Games.”