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It’s the phone call no one wants to answer. A relative has been hospitalized. He tried to kill himself.
Most inconveniently, when Maggie answers the phone she has to discard the fatal fistful of pills she was about to pop. She has to go deal with brother Milo.
That’s the curtain raiser on “The Skeleton Twins,” a brittle and bruised comedy that manages to find something funny in a damaged, estranged brother and sister who can’t see that if they stop leaning on one another, they’ll both fall down. Again.
Maggie (Kristen Wiig) hasn’t had much to do with Milo (Bill Hader) in years. But his “To whom it may concern, see you later!” note has the L.A. hospital insisting that she bring him home to Nyack. Plainly, she is put out. And just as plainly she’s in no shape to prop up somebody else thinking of ending it all.
This Craig Johnson film starts tripping us up, right from the first. Maggie answers the phone with a furious “I’m on the National ‘Do Not Call’ Registry!” Whatever gay cliche failed-actor Milo was playing out, his sister seems to have it together. She has a house. She’s married to an ever-upbeat, outdoorsy park service employee (Luke Wilson) in their corner of upstate New York. They’re trying to have a child.
Well, her husband is. That’s our first clue about her passion for pills. Then, there’s the mania for self-improvement classes — scuba is the latest. What she does in those classes — hooking up for heated sex with the younger instructor (Boyd Holbrook), with a sad, helpless fatalism — defines her. She’s unworthy, living a lie, trapped.
Milo uses his return to their hometown to confront or rekindle a part of his past, with Rich (Ty Burrell). Bringing their self-absorbed mom (Joanna Gleason, very good) in just completes the picture.
They used to be “the gruesome twosome,” “The Skeleton Twins.” They loved their dad, and each other, playing dress-up, watching bad ’80s romances and lip-syncing to Jefferson Starship.
Now, their fights draw blood and no one around them can predict their mood-swings. They seem to have avoided each other simply because they know each other too well.
“Some of us have our secrets, and some of us have our reasons.”
Former “Saturday Night Live” castmates Wiig and Hader tumble into siblingdom with comfortable ease, which gives their characters — variations on caricatures they’ve played elsewhere — weight. She’s the funny, mercurial “ugly duckling” overcompensating with promiscuity. He’s the (toned-down, here) flamboyantly gay man who isn’t quite managing a life out of the closet.
Wilson, Glee son and Burrell are also a bit on-the-nose, in terms of casting.
So the surprises in Johnson’s film come from the jarring shifts in tone, as abrupt as any manic depressive mood swing, from giddy nostalgia to brutally blunt confrontations over missteps and traumas.
“Skeleton Twins” may not be a wholly fleshed-out character study, and nobody here takes a flying leap out of his or her comfort zone. But the timing of this tale of depression, suicide and how vulnerable we all are to our past, our demons and our shortcomings, is enough to recommend this engagingly melancholy comedy.
　
MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexuality and drug use
Cast: Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Ty Burrell, Luke Wilson, Joanna Gleason, Boyd Holbrook
Credits: Directed by Craig Johnson, written by Mark Heyman and Craig Johnson. A Roadside Attractions release.
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Screen Gems, which tends to cower rather than preview most of its releases, is being unusually Screen Gems-ish about “No Good Deed,” a thriller with Idris Elba as the possible home invader and Taraji P. Henson as a woman he terrorizes.

Screen Gems would not show it well in advance. They only scheduled screenings of it on Wed. night, tonight.

This AM, I get notice that they have suddenly and abruptly canceled those. Nationwide, they claim.

“Plot twist protection” they give as their excuse. No studio EVER does that. Maybe an email to critics asking us not to give this or that away (“Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” was one time that happened).

Damaged goods that won’t be helped by reviewers reporting that is far more likely. They never hide a movie they’re proud of. UPDATE: They have even canceled the Thursday night paid showings of this that Fandango was advertising Tuesday and Wed. Man.

This is a bush league move by Screen Gems. They’ve marked their film (again) as cursed before it even opens. Considering how rarely they preview their product, thus staining every film they release as crap before anybody’s seen it, you’d think they’d catch on.

Serenely melancholy but unfailingly melodramatic, “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” is a tone poem to love and loss that goes on too long and is more intent on creating a sad mood than with breaking your heart or bringing you to tears.
Writer-director Ned Benson shows us a happy couple in an opening moment, an attempted suicide in the next. And for the rest of the movie, we see these two — played by Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy — unhappily separated, broken and on edge. And we see a small circle of lovers, family and friends who struggle to make eye contact, to avoid “the big conversation” with a couple that has split up for reasons that only become clear well into the story.
Eleanor grew up named for the anti-heroine of the Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby.” She shrugs that off as a whim of her parents (Isabelle Huppert, William Hurt). But we can’t help but notice “all the lonely people” around her.
She survives her suicide attempt, but as far as husband Conor is concerned, she has disappeared. Her cell is shut off, her family won’t let him contact her. We figure they have their reasons.
Conor is a failing young restaurateur running “a bar with uninspired food” with his chef-pal, Stuart, played by Bill Hader. Conor has a temper, brawling with customers, tustling with Stuart in the kitchen. His depressed restaurateur-father (Ciaran Hinds) is full of cryptic, wise-sounding advice.
“You shouldn’t be interested in regretting things.”
Eleanor’s psychology-professor dad is even more lost.
“None of us knows how to help you.”
We see her French mother, wine glass always in hand, and we watch Conor’s stumbling efforts to move on or at least keep moving. Eleanor goes back to college where Viola Davis plays her world-weary “philosophy of identity” professor, who can’t offer decent advice because she doesn’t know Eleanor’s tortured history.
And in flashbacks, we start to piece together how they all got here, a low-heat love affair that doesn’t predict, at all, where this story might go.
“Disappearance” is an interesting stunt — three films that tell this circumscribed story from two points of view. Benson created “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him” and a “Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her,” for festivals and such. The U.S. release combines those two for “Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them,” an act of common sense and mercy.
Because this story manages to be sad without ever quite achieving “moving.” The performers are all aces, and McAvoy and Chastain are able anchors, with Chastain a bit flat here, enervated being the crippled state Eleanor is supposed to be in.
But Benson drifts along on mood, giving very good actors lovely things to say, but rarely surprising us with novel treatments of this sort of break up, rarely raising the stakes.
Barmaid throws herself at Conor? Dance club pick-up tries to bed Eleanor? Even the secret source of their grief is something of a cliché.
The thing that “Disappearance” does perfectly is, unfortunately, its most anti-cinematic trait. Grief and a romantic break-up have never been more deflatingly, depressingly captured. But that’s something more to be recognized and endured than relished in a movie.
　
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity and sexual situations
Cast: Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Viola Davis, Isabelle Huppert, William Hurt, Ciaran Hinds, Bill Hader
Credits: Written and directed by Ned Benson. A Weinstein Co. release.
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The US version of this romance is one film, not two, a love story told from two different points of view. But in festivals, in Europe, they got “Her” and “Him” versions of the tale. Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy pair up for this Ned Benson experiment in POV, perhaps a bit less indulgent in its 2 hour long U.S. form.

“The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” opens in limited release this Friday.

It took Australian journalist/filmmaker Genevieve Bailey six years of travel to 15 different countries, from Thailand to the U.S., Sweden to Morocco, to film “I Am Eleven,” her documentary about the state of eleven-year-olds the world over.
She wasn’t wasting her time. But diving into a corner of film in which Michael Apted’s “Seven Up Series” has long been the gold standard, with the award winning French documentary “Babies” (2010) coming out long before she finished hers, had to be daunting. She doggedly went on, filming scores of kids, more than 20 of whom her movie mentions by name.
“Eleven” turns out to be an overreach, with too many voices to be anything but superficial, too few (she skipped sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America) to be thorough. It never touches the heart the way those earlier documentaries did, even if it is informative and picturesque, as good travelogues always are.
She says in the film’s introduction that she was trying to capture the most magical year of her youth. At 11, she says, a child is learning about the ever-widening world he or she is a part of, and yet still can feel it’s “at our feet.”
“Are they having as much fun as I did?”
Then she visits an orphanage in India where the little girls are doing chores and taking care of the younger children at the home. They smile, shyly, and talk about their lives. But they’re more grateful to have a home, friends and a decent diet than concerned with “having as much fun” as Bailey.
Sihan, a girl in Morocco, takes coaching from her mother, off-camera, about the hardships of their lives (women “not allowed to work” and the men often unemployed). A stylish, introspective French kid, Remi, loves “snakes and I don’t like racist people at all.” Politically correct, even at 11.
Billy, the plump working class Brit, needs subtitles, partly because of his thick accent, partly because we learn he had learning/socializing issues when he was younger.
An Asian American smart aleck declares, “I’m going to be a tree for Christmas. Because we’re like, messed-up financially.”
Rika, the Japanese child, demonstrates the customs of her country and the pressures. She’s 11 and attending “two cram classes a week,” in addition to school, to prep her for all-important, life-altering exams.
Several children are of mixed race. Others are transplants, part of this era’s ease of movement. There’s a Swedish/Iraqi rapper and an Aussie kid living and working with a Thai one in an elephant compound in Thailand.
German and Georgian, Jewish and Aboriginal, none of the kids have anything important to say about religion, love and their hopes for the future. Because they’re 11. But Bailey asks them anyway.
The whole enterprise is beautifully shot, but feels haphazard with bits of back story filled in here, ignored there. She revisited some of the kids a few years later and we see how Grace, the British poetess is turning out, and how Sahin, the Iraqi rapper who talks a thug’s game, is settled into Sweden.
None of which adds up to much of a thesis, just an interesting skip across the surface of the planet and kids living on it.
　
MPAA Rating: unrated, would have earned a G or at most a PG.
Cast: Riko, Goh, Billy, Remi, Siham and many other children, age 11, from all over the world.
Credits: Written and directed by Genevieve Bailey. A Proud Mother/International Film Circuit release.
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It had been three long years since Nathan Gamble and Cozi Duehlsdorff, the two kids who befriended Winter the injured dolphin, made “Dolphin Tale” with the world’s first dolphin with a prosthetic tail.

Would Winter remember them for the sequel? You really don’t know for sure, Cozi says. But she and Nathan want to believe.

“There was a time when we were filming a pool scene where me and Winter were just chilling, between takes, in the water with a trainer,” says Nathan, already a veteran child actor (“The Dark Knight”) when he was cast in the original film. “I tilted my head to the left, and Winter bubbled and let herself sink way down in the pool. I thought that was weird, but her trainer said ‘Oh my gosh, Nathan, that was one of the commands we taught you to give her in the first film! You tilt your head, she bubbles and sinks to the bottom.’ So she remembered this thing we’d had her do in the first film, years before. Isn’t that cool?”

The two young players — just 12 when they made the first film, 16 now as “Dolphin Tale 2” comes out — sound perfectly sincere when talking about Clearwater Aquarium’s little disabled dolphin and how the movie they made about her changed their lives. It has nothing to do with their careers as child actors, but everything to do with Winter and what she means to the disabled who travel to the Gulf Coast of Florida from all over the country to see her.

“After the first film, we signed on as spokespeople for the aquarium,” Cozi says. “We get to come back there, three times a year, and meet a lot of the kids that Winter and ‘Dolphin Tale’ inspired. So I’ve met many children with disabilities. It’s a special privilege, but it’s so hard, because so many of these kids don’t have much time left. It puts your life into perspective, and in my case, I think it’s made me more mature and more empathetic, hopefully.”

It’s not every child, much less a child actor, who meets hundreds of people with injuries or cancer patients who have lost limbs, at such a young age. But when “Dolphin Tale” became the sleeper hit of 2011, that responsibility came with the territory. Nathan says that “When I was filming ‘Dolphin Tale,’ I really didn’t see, first-hand, the larger impact that this little injured dolphin has had on people. But after the movie came out, I had people coming up to me, telling me how inspired they’d been, how it touched on something their family had been going through. Very emotional. It got me pumped up to do the second film, because I realized how important Winter is to a lot people, and how these movies get that message to more people.”

“Dolphin Tale” opened to tear-stained reviews written by jaded movie critics shocked to be touched by a very simple kid-friendly film about an injured dolphin, taken to Clearwater Marine Aquarium’s hospital, where dedicated staff and a prosthetic limb designer willing to think outside the box concocted a replacement tail for the one she’d lost in a crab pot (trap). The true story was fictionalized, and the most important fictional elements were the two kids who devote themselves to Winter, Sawyer and Hazel, played by Nathan and Cozi.

They were “the toughest roles to cast,” opined Chris Hewitt of the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, “but both young actors are terrific.”

“I think we were all shocked at how much that film touched people,” Nathan says. “You hope you’ve made a hit, but this one connected in a way I hadn’t expected.”

“I was talking about this with Nathan, and not one of these children has a frown on their face when they come there,” Cozi says.” They’re all so special, and so grown up. It’s an odd thing to get used to, meeting people even younger than me who are so mature. It has to be their perspective. They’re going through such horrific things. It makes you grow up. Just being around them makes me grow up, a little, too.”

The sequel reflects the celebrity bestowed on Winter and the little aquarium in Clearwater, the big crowds for Winter, the improved financial state of the aquarium and its turtle and dolphin hospital. But “Dolphin Tale 2” is “more serious, because everybody’s grown up some and Winter’s problems are different this time (a companion dolphin dies in the film),” Nathan says.

“As you grow up, relationships grow deeper,” Cozi adds. “So the second film is just as much about the humans as it is the animals.”

And the young players, like their characters in the film, are facing big life decisions themselves. Do they want to attempt the transition from child actor to young adult roles, or take the time off to go to college? Nathan, a Tacoma, Washington native, seems more committed to the career at this point, “but you never know.”

But Cozi, who sings the closing credits song (“Brave Souls”) for the movie, is already talking about going to college to pursue a teaching degree, perhaps staying active in theater. “I’d love to make it to Broadway, someday!”

And both say they are as committed as ever to the plucky dolphin and the aquarium that saved her.