Movie Nation

Did they widen the Oscar field, or shrink it? What the Screen Actors Guild taketh away, the Golden Globes returned to “It’s still got a shot at the Oscar.”

Right?

That’s the true purpose of the Golden Globes nominations.

Yesterday, “Hateful Eight” and “Joy” felt like Oscar write-offs. Today, “Hateful” has a Jennifer Jason Leigh nomination (deserving) and one for composer Ennio Morricone (meh) and screenwriter Quentin Tarantino (meh, again), and “Joy” gets more recognition for J-Law. “Creed” lands a sentimental Sly Stallone nomination. An overpraised “Rocky” recycling, I thought.

“Beasts of No Nation” got one nomination. Another over-praised pic, PC and topical and pretty powerful, but never once feels like something made for the big screen.  Best actor-drama nominee Idris Elba? He’s big time. The biggest thing about it.

So “Joy” gets into the mix, as does “The Martian.” Best Motion Picture–Comedy.

Lawrence and Matt Damon got nominations in “comedy” categories.

“Steve Jobs” landed two acting nominations, and a screenplay nomination and one for best score. So now it’s back in the mix.

Alicia Vikander got an “Ex Machina” Golden Globe nomination. Hurray for that. AND she got a supporting actress nomination for “The Danish Girl.”

Will Smith got a “Concussion” best actor nod, first big acclaim that film has won this Awards Season.

Paul Dano got a “Love & Mercy” nomination. The only one for that film.

“Mad Max: Fury Road” got George Miller an overdue best director nomination, and a best picture nod.

No Johnny Depp “Black Mass” nomination. No Carey Mulligan for “Suffragette.” And unlike the SAG awards, no love at all for “Straight Outta Compton.”

Love for “Room” and “Spotlight,” but more love for “The Big Short,” with multiple acting nominations.

“Trumbo” now officially feels like a contender — at least for Bryan Cranston.
“The Revenant” got best director, picture, score and actor (Leo) nominations and feels like a film to beat. “Spotlight” pulled no acting nominations. Mark Ruffalo got nominated for a little-seen comedy.

But “The Big Short” going into limited release Friday and wider release next week, seems like the BIG winner from both SAG and the HFPA. It will have Awards Bounce as it opens, fresh awards buzz. Can’t hurt.

But nobody is honoring the “Short” director, and best directors make best pictures, so “Spotlight” and “Carol” and “The Revenant” feel like Oscar front runners, right this minute. “Mad Max” is more of a “Let’s give George Miller his Oscar shot” pick I figure. Ridley Scott’s “Martian” nomination is much deserved, but Miller’s the overdue one.

McCarthy and “Spotlight” seem like natural Oscar night winners, to me.

As for the Globes? They’re handed out in mid-January (Jan. 10) on NBC. Yes, they nominate and honor TV programs, too (Netflix is the big winner among those nominations). But since TV’s Emmys are so much later in the year, and the Globes tilt so heavily towards new shows, their TV honors are even less relevant than the Oscar ones.

Here’s the complete list

So. The Screen Actor’s Guild Award nominations for 2015 are out.

Takeaway one — “I Smiled Back” (the Sarah Silverman nomination) and “Beasts of No Nation” suggest that SOME folks just sorta stayed at home and watched whatever was on VOD, and then nominated it.

Seriously. These nominations, for the most part, seem…small.

“Beasts” as “best ensemble,” a supposed predictor for a Best Picture Oscar nomination? I don’t see it. Good film, solid work by Idris and the kids. But small-scale and “issues epic” don’t work here.

Plenty of “three star” movies out there in the mix that are just as good, and didn’t co-premiere on Netflix.

“The Martian,” for instance. Big Hollywood hit. Well-acted, big (at Mission Control) ensemble. Left out.

“Love & Mercy,” AWOL. “Hateful Eight” and “Joy” are utterly omitted. The reason nobody is talking about these three — well, there’s a REASON. OK?

“Straight Outta Compton?” No critics’ groups have mentioned it. “Creed” comes up before this one, a forgotten gem from August. Well-played. “Creed” is piffle. “Compton” is a top ten contender. Kudos to the SAG folks for spotting that, anyway.

Rachel McAdams wasn’t all that in “Spotlight.” Best supporting actress? It’s like they weren’t even curious enough to see the great female performances of the year.

Much love for “Room” and “The Big Short,” the expected nominations came in for “Carol” and “Brooklyn.” The expected nominations — and no more, Cate and Rooney and Saoirse. “The Danish Girl” got two acting nominations — to be expected. “Bridge of Spies” only landed one. Kind of expected. Tom Hanks has enough.

“Trumbo” got some recognition  — good to see. THIS is the Helen Mirren performance of the year, not that “Woman in Gold” pic.

Johnny Depp in “Black Mass”? Why not?

Here’s their list. SAG Awards are handed out Jan. 30.

Golden Globe nominations are tomorrow.

“In the Heart of the Sea” is a tale of whales and wooden ships and the flawed flesh-and-blood men who hunted them.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s best-seller about the true story that inspired “Moby Dick” becomes a solid, beautifully-detailed but conventional screen adventure in the hands of Ron Howard.

It’s about Nantucket capitalism, greed, and the whale ship Essex, sunk by a whale in the middle of the Pacific at the height of the whale oil boom.

The Charles Leavitt script makes that “inspired ‘Moby Dick'” element literal. It presents this yarn in flashback, as a tale remembered by an old salt, Tom (Brendan Gleeson).  The young writer Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) is the one who sends Tom on that trip into memory, forcing him to recall the horrors of that one voyage.

The old whaler remembers that 1819 voyage, and the class struggle between an able and qualified first mate and the in-over-his-head captain born into Nantucket whaling royalty. And Melville smells his Great American novel in the making.

Chris Hemsworth, the cinema’s current ideal man’s man, is Owen Chase, a mate who was promised a command, but forced to serve under George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), son of a rich captain. Their every encounter is cutting, the “silver spoon” man of privilege dismissing the “landsman” whose family has not lived on Nantucket long enough to count.

Howard and the screenwriter set this “Mutiny on the Bounty” conflict on edge with a harrowing 3D squall. The brigantine Essex is tossed on her beam-ends, canvas flapping, every inch of hemp rope groaning, every wooden beam, plank and yardarm moaning and on the verge of snapping.

Howard takes us above and beneath the waves for a whale hunt, shows us the (digital) kill and the gruesome business of harvesting the blubber and oil. His arty touches include lots of extreme close-ups of men and metalworking, blocks and belaying pins, ratlines and rigging.

It was an unlucky voyage, with few whales and feuding commanding officers anxious to finish their deadly work and get home so they could never see each other again. In South America, they’re warned about a “white as alabaster” whale with a grudge. And they laugh.

Cillian Murphy makes a solid impression as a mate and friend of Chase’s. Young Tom Holland is an engaging younger version of Gleeson’s Tom Nickerson, a wide-eyed kid “learning the ropes,” as they say at sea.

Hemsworth is properly hunky and iconic. He looks studly in the stand-at-the-masthead shot (Russell Crowe in “Master & Commander”), and manfully does his best with the quasi-poetic dialogue.

“Look at him! Most fearsome creature ever to live on this Earth!”

Walker pretty much wilts in Hemsworth’s presence, which might be dramatically required but tends to deflate the sails, here.

The particulars of the “vengeful” whale are given plenty of Hollywood touches, the lost-at-sea/”custom of the sea” ordeal of the shipwrecked crew is more gruesome in the telling than the showing.

The digital storms and whales are beautifully rendered, and the 3D (broken lines whipping at you, harpoons and whales right in your face) tastefully used.

But what’s missing here is the overarching theme of Melville’s book, the sense that this story had more than just class conflict and that one account of a whale fighting back in common with “Moby Dick.”

John Huston’s famous 1950s version of “Moby Dick” was troubled and flawed, but a true epic poem that seems to grow in stature with the passing decades. If he’d had digital whales and storms, the “troubled” label that dogged that Gregory Peck/Richard Basehart/Orson Welles film would have been erased. He got at the Big Ideas and Big Themes.

Howard’s “In the Heart of the Sea” merely unravels the yarn that inspired the great book, a good-looking film that never sinks, but never really soars either.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action and peril, brief startling violence, and thematic material

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Brendan Gleeson, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Ben Whishaw
Credits: Directed by Ron Howard, script by Charles Leavitt, based on the book by Nathaniel Philbrick. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:01

Tom Hardy manages the brilliant trick of playing two physically, emotionally and intellectually distinct mobster brothers in “Legend,” a new film about Britain’s Swinging ’60s and the thugs who bloodied them up. They are played in different shades of brutality, and Hardy never lets us see them as one actor portraying two men, even if the effects occasionally give away the game.

It’s another movie about The Krays, the dapper, businesslike and mercurial Reggie and his psychotic and unfiltered brother Ronald.

Reggie was lean and clean, a sharp dresser you didn’t want to cross. Ever.

Ronnie was thicker featured (dental appliances help), wore glasses, might drop a bit of literature or mythology into a conversation. Before he’d flip out and toss a tantrum, commit assault or stab or shoot you.

Reggie was a lady killer. Not literally. Perhaps that’s what Frances Shea (Emily Browning, a pixie-cut/mini-skirted embodiment of Mod London) saw in him. She narrates this story of gambling, gang-wars and extortion.

Ex-Doctor Who Christopher Eccleston is the hapless cop, always tailing the lads as they slip into their gigantic 1960s American cars (Lincoln Continental, Ford Galaxy 500) on trips to their various “legitimate businesses.”

Ronnie is “homosexual,” and blunt about it. Freshly out of prison when we meet him, he keeps pretty boys with him. But he’s off his meds, and he needs his meds to stay sane. Without them, his demons get the better of him.

David Thewlis plays their manager and “fixer,” Chazz Palminteri shows up as an American mob lieutenant making business arrangements with these up-and-comers.

Writer-director Brian Helgeland (“42,” and he scripted “Mystic River”) delivers a handsomely-mounted mob period piece, conventionally structured with moments of flash. He got Paul Bettany (hilariously psychotic) to play the Krays’ London mob rival, and stages a somewhat bemused “gang war” that’s all fun and games, until Ron breaks the hammers out — literally. Ears are bitten off and heads are butted. These guys were savage toughs, no matter how much polish they tried to present.

Browning never quite gives us a clue about what made Frances look the other way at the evidence of she was dating a brutish gangster. There’s no morality here, but where’s the real allure? Her family was tied to the Krays, no matter how much her scolding mother (Tara Fitzgerald) protested.

It overstays the welcome its Point A to Point B narrative can support. But it’s a more ambitious film than the earlier, grittier “The Krays,” with more of a sense of class consciousness (the lads mingled with nobility, which liked hobnobbing with the mob) and features the odd poetic flourish in the script.

As in the line their “fixer” affixes to their name, cementing the legend of Kray.

“There’s an inherent threat in that one commanding syllable.”

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language throughout, some sexual and drug material

Cast: Tom Hardy, Emily Browning, David Thewlis, Christopher Eggleston
Credits: Written and directed by Brian Helgeland, based on the John Pearson book. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:11

“Krampus” is a holiday horror farce that teeters on the uneasy middle ground between “Gremlins” and the Finnish Santa-as-Monster movie “Rare Exports.”

Not that funny, not that scary, it falls somewhere between “Oh, why not?” and “Oh, why bother?”

It’s built around a German myth about Santa’s “dark shadow,” a hoofed, horned and bearded beast who shows up to punish kids who have been naughty around the holidays. Leave it to the Germans.

Omi, the grandma played by Krista Stadler (a Teutonic dead ringer for Sissy Spacek) knows this. But she doesn’t warn grandson Max (Emjay Anthony), in either German or English. Perhaps that’s because wishing the worst on his horrible extended family seems, well, justified.

Mom (Toni Collette) and Dad (Adam Scott) are stressed, and grown-up-too-fast older sister (Stefania LaVie Owen) rolls her eyes at Max’s lingering belief in St. Nick.

But it’s not until Aunt Linda (Allison Tolman) and Uncle Howard (David Koechner, the boss/neighbor/relative everybody loves to hate) show up with their redneck knucklehead brood that Christmas goes to hell.

Elderly Aunt Dorothy (Conchata Ferrell) is the indigestible nut at the center of this fruitcake.

“Looks like Martha Stewart threw up in here…Where’s the nog? I need to get merry!”

So much for Max’s wish for a “Christmas, like it used to be.”

One torn up letter to Santa later, a blizzard begins, menacing snowmen turn up in the yard, the power goes out and the family starts to shrink, one jerk at a time.

Co-writer/director Michael Dougherty (“Trick’r Treat”) tapped into an unknown horror goldmine here. But the monsters — assorted dolls, jack-in-the-boxes and gingerbread men come to life, — are more amusing than menacing. Nothing we haven’t seen in the “Insidious” sequels.

The laughs about gun-toting rubes, sugar junkies, bullies getting their comeuppance, are scattered and rare. Most of them come from unfiltered Ferrell (of “Two and a Half Men”), playing a cliche.

“Who doesn’t make a ham for for Christmas? What are you now, a Jew?”

Collette doesn’t give us much to cling to, and Scott barely registers. Koechner’s loser-lout doesn’t have enough funny things to say or do.

It’s better in conception than in execution, with all the energy hurled at the effects and murderous Krampus attacks. The actors fail to feel the fear.

And really, what’s Christmas without the horror?

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sequences of horror violence/terror, language and some drug material

Cast: Toni Collette, Adam Scott, David Koechner, Emjay Anthony, Conchata Ferrell.
Credits: Directed by Michael Dougherty, script by Todd Casey, Zach Shields and Michael Dougherty. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:38

A scattering of early Awards Season honors have made “Spotlight” the picture to beat, and an early Oscar favorite.

“Mad Max: Fury Road” has traction, and honors are landing on George Miller as director, an overdue honor for the guy who did all the “Mad Max” movies, AND “Babe,” AND “Happy Feet.”

The LA Critics found some love for “Ex Machina” star Alicia Vikander, there’s a probable Michael Shannon supporting actor nomination for “99 Homes” seemingly in the works, Leo DiCaprio is earning early buzz from the earliest groups (NY Critics, LA Critics, Boston Critics) for “The Revenent.”

Kristen Stewart is a surprise contender, thanks to her work in the “Clouds of Sils Maria,” unreleased at this point.

“Room” and “Brooklyn” and “Carol” are scoring the expected actress nominations in both lead and supporting categories. No love for “Suffragette?” “Joy” likewise isn’t on any Oscar prognosticator’s radar.

“Beasts of No Nation” has some Idris Elba buzz, but no way Hollywood will honor a movie released in a few theaters AND on Netflix at the same time. Or will they?

Matt Damon (“The Martian”) and Michael B. Jordan (“Creed”) feel like outliers with a genuine chance to land a coveted Globe and/or Oscar nomination. Have to wonder if “Creed” will fade before that happens. “Martian” has legs, and it’s a terrific performance.

These results are tilted, early on, by the non-indicator groups “Boston Online Critics,” National Board of Review (humph), Gotham Awards, etc. Figure several titles will fade, a couple of others will rise. Those last two are notorious for honoring films that aren’t remembered come Christmas.

And let’s face it, journalist movie critics are going to LOVE a movie about heroic (print) journalists, so “Spotlight” might be earning the benefit of a little bias.

But attention is being shoved at “Love & Mercy” and some other little seen wonders at just the right moment. Some gold might emerge from this mid-December buzz.

“Chi-Raq” is Spike Lee’s most audacious film in decades. DECADES.

It’s as if he ignored everything after “Do the Right Thing,” which included a few very good films, a few mediocre ones and some dreadful “Spike is DONE” outings, and reached back to his outspoken youth.

A preachy, edgy riff on Aristophanes’ ancient Greek classic “Lysistrata,” “Chi-Raq” is as timely as the latest mass shooting, as topical as the gun violence body count on any evening TV newscast. It’s the best movie you didn’t get around to seeing last weekend.

Like “Lysistrata,” it’s a script built on topical rhymes — hip-hopped and slangy. Samuel L. Jackson, a veteran of Lee’s early films, dazzles as the foul-mouthed narrator Dolmedes.

He tells of Chicago, a town so riven by gun violence, so overwhelmed by murder that “the big money maker is the black-suit undertaker.”

He tells of the gang war — Trojans in orange, led by the one-eyed mobster Cyclops (Wesley Snipes, in his funniest performance in this century), vs. Spartans in purple, led by the charismatic rapper Chiraq, played and sung by Nick Cannon.

Yes, THAT Nick Cannon, the black Ryan Seacrest, the light comedian and game show host who married Mariah Carrey.

Cannon is the revelation here, giving a startling turn of menace, power and regret as the rapper/gang leader/lover whose charisma is never in doubt, whose morality is hidden deep in the recesses of his tattooed soul.

The one person who may have influence over Chiraq is Lysistrata, played with a searing sexual and intellectual dynamism by Teyonah Parris. She is the stiletto-heeled harpy who might be able to stop the violence. Once she’s been shown how.

Angela Bassett has the wise-old-woman of Englewood role here, the woman who points out to Lysistrata the example of Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee. Like the ancient Greek Lysistrata, Gbowee convinced the women of her troubled country to withhold sex until the menfolk dialed down the violence of Liberia’s civil war.

That is what Lysistrata talks Cyclops’ girl (Michelle Mitchenor) into joining her in — a “sex strike,” as in “no peace, no” um, sexual congress.

Lee and screenwriter Kevin Willmott (“The Confederate States of America”) stick close enough to the Greek source material to give this structure. But the fun stuff involves Lee revisiting “School Daze” and other earlier hits. The chaotic conflict of the sexes, of women on women, and its consequences dances off the screen. The humor can be low, broad, juvenile. Just as it was in “She’s Gotta Have It” and those earliest Spike outings.

Dave Chapelle  shows up as a strip club owner, rhyming and whining his worries about a lack of pole dancers during this strike. D.B. Sweeney is the comically embattled mayor. David Patrick Kelley is a Confederacy-loving National Guard general caught with his Stars and Bars underwear showing. There are references to Kelley’s defining role, in the classic gang film “The Warriors,” in other scenes.

And John Cusack yells himself hoarse as a white priest who hectors and lectures his mostly-African American congregation about their history, their leaders, the violence in their community and the National Rifle Association’s role in America’s culture of gun violence.

That last bit should have derailed the film, but it works. Lee plays things in alternating shades of seriousness and satiric silliness — a sexual “slow jam” sing-off, lots of choreography. And there’s Mister Senor Love Daddy reincarnated, Samuel L., donning suits of many colors, stepping out, front and center, to re-set the tale and reinforce the message of Lee’s most strident early films.

“Wake Up!”

Damn if it doesn’t still work.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content including dialogue, nudity, language, some violence and drug use

Cast: Teyonah Parris, Nick Cannon, Angela Bassett, Samuel L. Jackson, John Cusack, Wesley Snipes
Credits: Directed by Spike Lee, script by Kevin Willmott and Spike Lee, based on the play by Aristophanes. An Amazon Studio/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:58

Say what you will about Hollywood espionage thrillers, the Brits have them all beat when it comes to emphasizing politics over geopolitics.

It seems they never quite got over Tony Blair’s embrace of George W. Bush’s war. Thus, “maintaining our independence” is the ever-present under-current in most of their movies in this genre. “MI-5” is the latest. They don’t want the CIA and the USA running their intelligence service.

The British TV series “MI-5,” called “Spooks” across the pond, gets a big screen tale in “MI-5,” titled “Spooks: The Greater Good” in the UK.

It’s a heaping helping of somewhat polite terrorism, treachery within Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the unseen heavy hand of the CIA and bit of the old ultra-violence — TV friendly variety.

The language may be the most violent thing about it.

“I’ll cut your baby of her and drown it in a toilet,” the section chief Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) threatens the Arab American terrorist (Elyes Gabel) at one point. By phone.

“Was the baby (bit) too much?” he asks a subordinate after hanging up.

“No. It’s you.”

At its most basic, “MI-5” is a means of cashing in 0n the popularity of “Game of Thrones” hunk Kit Harington. He wears the same long curls and hurls himself into the role of a discredited agent summoned back to help when the boss (Pearce) suspects turncoats in the agency helped the wanted terrorist get away before being handed over to the CIA.

Will Holloway has ex-colleagues warning him to not get involved, that the boss is daft or turned himself. So there’ll be no rogue agent stuf, this time, right?

“Do NOT go dark. Do you hear me?”

Go dark is what Holloway does, down a rabbit hole, trying to do the disgraced boss’s bidding, root out the moles and prevent Islamists from carrying out a big attack on London.

It’s all over-the-top, in a TV series sort of way. Smaller terrorist acts happen, chases are rendered mundane and there is much pointing of guns at Will only to have Will take the gun from the crack agent pointing it at him.

Jennifer Ehle (“Zero Dark Thirty,” TV’s “Pride and Prejudice”) is the unflappable higher-up who never over-reacts, even when all hell breaks loose. Tim McInerny (“Notting Hill,” and Percy from TV’s “Blackadder”) over-reacts, here and there, as the boss presiding over this trainwreck.

David Harewood also stars, and an actress to be adored simply by virtue of her veddy-British name — Tuppence Middleton of “The Imitation Game” and “Trance.”

There’s little novelty to any of this, just a lot of scampering between Moscow, London and Berlin.

“You and Harry ever talk about Berlin?”

Standard issue spy stuff, a surprise or two, a shootout or three. Nothing you should pay money to see in a theater.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and some language

Cast: Kit Harington, Tuppence Middleton, Peter Firth, Jennifer Ehle
Credits: Directed by Bharat Nalluri, script by Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:44

Of course it didn’t happen this way. Not exactly. Not even remotely.

“A Royal Night Out,” about VE-Day, 1945, when the two British princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, slipped out of Buckingham Palace, “incognito,” and experienced the greatest celebration London had ever seen, is wish fulfillment fantasy.

But it’s bloody adorable.

We’d love to think those stuffy, in-bred royals cut loose, experienced a little of the common life. They’d flirt, dance the Lindy Hop, knock back a beer or two, and some champagne. They’d be treated like any other single young women present at a night-long baccianale.

The horror!

At its best, this Julian Harold (“Kinky Boots,””Becoming Jane”) comedy is a throw-back, a madcap romp set to a swinging, big band beat. The Brits apparently didn’t go for it, the sticks in the mud. They’re missing a laugh-out-loud riff on those Windsors they worship, before QEII discovered her fetish for hats.

Elizabeth is “Lillabets,” here, a dutiful daughter played with spirit and spunk by Sarah Gadon (“Spider-Man 2,””Dracula Untold”). Margaret is “Mags,” or “P2” as she quips, on occasion (Princess 2). Bel Powley (“Diary of a Teenage Girl”) brings a taste of hellion to her.

Which is just so…right. Bad decisions? She was infamous for them. Surely she started in her teens. She nags her sister into asking her parents to let them go out and experience the joy of a nation relieved from six long years of fighting the Nazis.

With every idiotically elongated vowel she utters as Mags, Powley is a stitch.

“Best be-HAAAAAVE-your. HONestly.” Her every greeting, drunk or sober, is worthy of Madea.

“Helll-AAAWwwwwwwwww!”

The girls get permission, dodge the underhanded formal party among aged nobility that their mother (Emily Watson, no fun in all the right ways) springs on them. And that’s how they lose their officer corps escorts, who figure they’re free to hit the brothels and the pubs until dawn. Until they drunkenly realize they’ve lost the lasses and will have to face their imposing father after he’s given another “King’s Speech” (Rupert Everett, nicely done).

“Lizzie” has no money and is rescued by a cynical, AWOL bomber gunner (Jack Reynor), a bloke who’s over the whole class system and the Royal Family. He doesn’t know who Lizzie is, but “Little Miss Tofeenose” has no business saying “My whole FAMILY served in this war!”

“Sandwiches. Maybe.”

It’s a comedy of goofy little grace notes — the two escort officers (Jack Laskey, Jack Gordon), drinking to their doom, singing a glorious duet of “God Save the King” in a toilet, Mags being slipped a spiked drink by a Naval officer who sweeps her into a brothel, only to see her rescued by the royalty-loving hustler-smuggler (Roger Allam, hilarious) who runs the joint.

“P2! In my knocking shop!”

Mags, drunkenly slurring “We’re GERMAN, you know. Mustn’t talk about it” about her Hanover-turned-Windsor family, is again, just so right.

The surprises are few, and none of it am0unts to a whole lot. But for those up to taking yet another British sentimental journey to “their finest hour,” “A Royal Night Out” manages something unheard of in the decades of Windsor wooliness since. It makes them cute, if only for one night.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some sexual content and brief drug elements

Cast: Sarah Gadon, Bel Powley, Rupert Everett, Emily Watson, Jack Reynor
Credits: Directed by Julian Harold, script by Trevor Silva and Kevin Hood. An Atlas Distribution release.

Running time: 2:36

Mother Teresa was still just Sister Teresa, a Catholic school teacher and head mistress in Calcutta, when she took on her “call within a calling.”

She resolved to stop teaching girls from privileged families and teach the poorest of the poor, India’s “untouchables,” instead. She learned to nurse and took care of the sick and served as a midwife. And when she finally saw one man left to die on the street too many, she founded a hospice, took the dying in and cared for them.

A Nobel Peace Prize was certainly deserved. That she is halfway to sainthood in the eyes of the Vatican should be no surprise.

But that also means she’ll probably never earn a sober-minded film biography, a movie that doesn’t cast her in halo light. Because it’s not just conservative India, which was shamed by the cultural inequities and callous home-grown religions that did not address the problems she pointed out, that is sharply critical of her. She founded a laughably inefficient charitable foundation, cozied up to dictators and was seriously doctrinaire in her attitudes toward birth control, abortion and the nature of suffering.

Even a film hagiography like “The Letters”, about her years of questioning her faith, cannot quite force itself to frankly depict her uncertainty. It’s just another shrine on the pilgrimage to her sainthood.

The wonderful British character actress Juliet Stevenson (“Bend it Like Beckham”) plays the Macedonian Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhi, who became a nun in Dublin, moved to India and experienced her second conversion there.

Veteran TV documentary maker William Riead, who built a career in “The Making Of” films — movies about the making of this or that feature film — tells Mother Teresa’s story in flashback.

The priest in charge of researching the first “miracle” associated with Mother Teresa — a cancer cure a woman credits to a photo of  Teresa — is played by Rutger Hauer. “We have to be certain,” his Vatican bosses tell him.

That puts the Great Rutger Hauer in the position of simply sitting and listening to the one priest who knew the late Mother way back when. The Great Max Von Sydow is that priest, Celeste van Exem. He is the one who tells the story of Mother Teresa, and relates lines from her letters of “doubt.”

“The Letters” bogs down in the years it took the church to give the woman permission to leave her “cloistered” status as teacher and go out among the poor. The Indian backlash at this “Christian woman” caring for their poor. She was trying to convert them, they claimed, which she denied. But it is also alleged that she baptized the dying in her hospice.

The film is riddled with repetitive dialogue and eye-rolling moments, which a pro like Stevenson manages to deliver without rolling her eyes. But her portrayal is consistently selfless and often moving, even as she is eagerly avoiding publicity for herself.

“I am just a pencil in God’s hand.”

Riead had a very good cast and plenty of authentic settings. But he never had a poetic script. Merely addressing the controversies (outside of India) that follow the woman would have lent credibility to this enterprise. He avoids that.

And in doing so, he creates a movie that won’t convert anyone, a film for the faithful who want to believe nothing but the best about Mother Teresa. Real life is rarely cut and dry, and dramatically flat, as this.

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic material including some images of human suffering

Cast: Juliet Stevenson, Max Von Sydow, Rutger Hauer
Credits: Written and directed by William Riead. A release.

Running time: 1:54