Movie Nation

“Stolen Vacation” is a stumbling, slow-footed Mexican “vacation” comedy (titled “Viaje Todo Robado” in Spanish) that barely gets out the front door, fails to arrive at its destination and never once gets up to speed.

Comedy can be slow and deadpan and still pay off. But this is an intended “romp” broadly in the same category as “National Lampoon’s ‘Vacation'” and scores of its imitators. The one thing that makes it stand out might be how lifeless it is, first to last.

Bruno Bichir of “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” stars as a lazy lifer in an office job in 2004 Mexico City who stumbles across cash stuffed in a toilet paper roll in the bathroom who decides to use that cash to take the family on a spring vacation to the Outlet Malls of San Antonio, Texas.

It’s not wholly clear why they set this picture in that particular Mexican election year, which is acknowledged in a single scene in which Carlos, our hero, laments at the voting and the way nothing improves in their lives. But if it’s set in 2004, at least you can attempt flip phone gags and Compuserve one-liners.

I guess.

The hook here is that Carlos is under water, dodging collection calls from the note-holder on the family van. Wife and homemaker Lola (Ana Claudia Talancón, who co-starred with Bichir in “Perfect Strangers”) is in debt thanks to her addiction to bingo. Daughter Lolita (Irka Castillo) is endangering her private school scholarship by hustling “burner” CDs, which she gets her Jewish classmate and neighbor to pirate for her. And scholarship son Charlie (Germán Bracco) lies to his all-sexed-up-and-ready-to-go-to-Princeton girlfriend that he’ll be joining her there. Or maybe Harvard. Which he’ll never be able to afford.

The walls are closing in around all of them as Lola’s maid quits over non-payment, Carlos dodges an office investigation into missing funds which could put his promotion in danger, Lolita can’t deliver CDs she’s already accepted cash for and Charlie’s ability to get into any university is down to Mom paying for a placement test. Which she can’t because she’s already blown her household cash, the maid’s pay and her wedding ring gambling.

Nothing in all of that is particularly novel. Other “obstacles” to a happy family vacation include the van’s repossession and forgetting their passports. But even the simple possibilities are botched in this Diego Graue (he also directed) and Santiago Mohar Volkow screenplay. The passports turn up with a minimum of fuss, a neighbor conveniently leaves the keys to a van they can “borrow,” etc.

They run into a hostile Border Patrol agent entering Texas. His name is Rodriguez and he repeatedly demands that Carlos “address me in ENGLISH.”

Like everything else thrown at them and us, just as that might turn into an amusing if cliched episode, it’s abandoned. The shopping business is airlessly and humorlessly dizzy, the culture clash in the Tex-Mex corner of Texas comes to nothing.

The cast don’t rise above the thin material, and there it is, a “Stolen Vacation” that youd best avoid unless you’ve got 90 minutes you can afford to lose to theft.

Rating: TV-MA, a little sex, toilet humor

Cast: Bruno Bichir, Ana Claudia Talancón, Germán Bracco, Irka Castillo and Daniel Haddad

Credits: Directed by Diego Graue, scripted by Diego Graue and Santiago Mohar Volkow. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

The sweet sadness of “All of Us Strangers” envelops the viewer with the warm melancholy of memory, which makes it the best “holiday” movie to have little to do with “the holidays.”

It’s a tenderly-acted romantic fantasy about a lonely man finding love in the fictive present and closure with his long lost parents, burnishing his recollections of them by meeting them in his mind and being tearfully surprised by how “they” turned out. Because they turn out to be pleased at how he turned out.

The Irish actor Andrew Scott, of TV’s “His Dark Materials” and “Fleabag,” plays Adam, a solitary 40something screenwriter mining his memory for a script in a new, mostly-empty high-rise apartment complex in London.

A fire alarm sends him outside, and that indirectly introduces him to Harry (Paul Mescal), a young neighbor who approaches him because gaydar is totally a thing and this nearly-empty building is making him a bit mental.

The tentative nature of their early relationship seems formed by their pasts. Harry has had intermittent contact with his family. Adam lost his parents at 12, in the ’80s.

“Car crash. Not the most ‘original’ of deaths,” screenwriter Adam admits.

“I’m sorry,” Harry says.

“It’s all right. It was a long time ago.”

“I don’t think that matters,” Harry replies.

And that’s the movie, that simple, sad, compassionate exchange.

Because as Adam takes the train south to the suburban city and suburban house where he lived as a child to jog his memory and add details to this script he’s writing, he stumbles into his father (Jamie Bell), still in his ’80s wardrobestill smoking and hitting the liquor store on the way home. He recognizes his kid and brings him home where the same late ’70s Ford Cortina sits in the driveway.

“Is it him?” Mum (Claire Foy) wants to know, as if they’ve just lost touch.

And thus begins a brittle and bittersweet reverie of visits, reminscing and catching-up. Adam will “come out” to them. One parent is more instantly accepting than the other. An awkward bit of treating him like a child passes, then Adam gets to bring them both up to date on the changes in the Western world’s tolerance and the end of AIDS. And his folks learn about how he grew up and what he became, and reconnect him with his past and his roots.

“You look just like my Dad,” mum gushes at one point.

“All of Us Strangers” is based on a novel by Taichi Yamada, and shows the same sensitivity writer-director Andrew Haigh has brought to his best work (“45 Years,” “Lean on Pete”).

He bathes his film in ’80s era “new romantics” Fine Young Cannibals/Pet Shop Boys era pop, underlining Adam’s “stuck at age 12” status just as subtly as “Guardians of the Galaxy” has its Star-Lord lean on his late Mom’s favorite mixtape.

Although the story traffics in a few cliches — drinking and drugs and dancing at the club, each partner wrestling with personal demons — the romance is treated with tenderness and respect.

And the parental reactions to this “discovery” that their boy grew up to realize he was gay features expected responses and an unpleasant unexpected one balanced against an utterly charming, idealized, best-case-scenario parental affirmation of love, connection and a wish for their child’s happiness and success.

Scott effortlessly conveys the guarded solitude, the alone-with-his-thoughts demeanor of the garreted writer’s lifestyle. He and Haigh take us on this character’s journey and make us relish the emotional release Adam feels as he “researches” a script and fantasizes and writes his way to a happier life.

Mescal brings a nice mystery to the forward, overly-chatty and troubled Harry, a most humane man who respects Adam’s boundaries even as he’s trying to express an interest in him.

Foy is spot -n as a mother rattled by this long-delayed “catch -up” with her son, a vulnerable and limited person whose character arc may be the film’s most rewarding and emotional.

And the once-and-always “Billy Elliot” Bell is a marvel, a working class Joe who probably wasn’t the best parent for a gay boy to have, but who — in Adam’s mind — was self-aware enough to know his limitations and offhandedly reconcile this side of him so that reconnect with his kid. Bell makes this character idealized but wholly credible, an EveryDad every kid would love “closure” with.

There are bigger films and more entertaining stories coming to screens this holiday season. But there isn’t one more life and love-affirming than “All of Us Strangers,” a movie that reminds us that memory burnishes loved ones for a reason. If we love them and remember them, they’ve earned it.

Rating: R, for drug abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Andrew Haigh, based on a novel by Taichi Yamada. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:45

The rules on any adaptation of “The Three Musketeers” are that it’s got to be swashbuckling and that it must be fun.

Disney landed the latter and made a decent showing of the former in their 1993 “Young Guns” version (Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt et al). But the gold standard for this most famous, most filmed of action tales remains the early ’70s two-part all-star Richard Lester romp featuring Michael York, Richard Chamberlain, Faye Dunaway and Raquel Welch.

The latest French incarnation of this very French tale — the eighth French film version — leans more on the swashing buckles than the slapstick or witty repartee. But “The Three Musketeers — Part 1: D’Artagnan” is a lavishly-produced, full-blooded and entertaining take on the three-plus-one swordfighting team.

Director Martin Bourboulon (“Eiffel,” “Daddy or Mommy”) recycles some settings and finds a few new and novel places to have his duelists throw down. And he and screenwriter Mathieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière find a few surprises for François Civil, Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris and Pio Marmaï to act-out in their cliffhanger “Part 1.”

The four-billed-as-three musketeers are well-cast, with veterans Cassel and Duris lending gravitas and soulfulness, Civil the very embodiment of brash southern mountain “Gascon” hick come to join the King’s Musketeers in Paris, and Marmaï given a new wrinkle to play in the usually portly, food-and-fun-loving Porthos. This time, he’s a gay (Bisexual?) gastronome.

Human or edible livestock, “a thigh is a thigh,” Porthos bellows (in French with English subtitles).

Anbody who has ever seen a version of this tale remembers its waypoints. This time, the context — an heirless king of France (the excellent Louis Garrel of “Little Women” and “The Innocent”) is about to be cornered into a 1620s war with the Catholic country’s Protestants, who are backed by the British — is a bit clearer.

Louis tries to keep his court and his musketeers in line.

“I’ve never been,” he cracks, “but I hear it’s worse in England.”

The king’s double-crossing advisor/proxy Cardinal de Richelieu (Eric Ruf) is reduced in sinister scale in this production. But the Cardinal’s murderous henchwoman Milady is given a deadly edge by Eva Green, the real casting coup here.

The “meet cute” between the boyish would-be recruit D’Artagnan (Civil of “Rise” and “A Place to Fight For”) and droll, fatalistic Athos (Cassel of “Black Swan”), the chivalrous lady’s man Aramis (Duris of “Waiting for Bojangles”) and smiling, brawling Porthos (Marmaï, featured in “Yannick”) is more perfunctory than the usual “cute.”

D’Artagnan offends his three future comrades in turn, remember, and they all challenge the rural oaf to a duel.

“Three duels in three hours? If I didn’t have to kill you, I’d buy you a drink!”

A new ticking clock element is introduced into the countdown to an almost-cheating queen (Vicky Krieps of “Phantom Thread”) getting caught and outed with her British spy paramour, the Duke of Buckingham (Jacob Fortine-Lloyd). As always, D’Artagnan’s go-between landlady (Lyna Khoudri) is involved, maybe up to her neck.

There’s one seriously illogical bit of business set on a cliffside that may stick in your side the way it does in mine. But I like the prologue that introduces D’Artagnan and us to the “conspiracy” going on all around them straight from the start. The fights have a long-take choreographed brio about them. And the finale is so over-the-top that it plays, even if it plays like scores of modern thrillers, going back to Hitchcock, looking for a very public place to make a very bloody statement as a climax.

This version of the story has a few funny moments, but plays things straight and still manages to be a rewarding and enjoyable remake of this story of “Tous pour un” and “one for all.” Maybe they’ll find more of the “fun” in the second half/”sequel” — “The Three Musketeers — Part 2: Milady.”

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: François Civil, Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris, Pio Marmaï, Lyna Khoudri, Louis Garrel, Eric Ruf, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd and Eva Green.

Credits: Directed by Martin Bourboulon, scripted by Mathieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière, based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 2:01

Describing “Saltburn” in cinema shorthand terms is so easy it almost gives away the game. Not that the plot is any big inscrutable secret.

It’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” meets “Call Me By Your Name” — insidious, class conscious, with a bit of violence and a serious taste of the sexually kinky if not downright icky.

The latest feature from actress turned “Promising Young Woman” writer-director-to-watch Emerald Fennell is a slap-in-the-face assault on British classism and an uninhibited tour de force for star Barry Keoghan.

Taken at its dark-intended-as-darkly-funny face value, it’s a satire that crosses lines simply because they’re there and easily overstays its welcome. But it’s still a bracing depiction of ancient fault lines breached by an interloper which the inbred and posh are ill-equipped to reckon with.

The Irish actor Keoghan, last seen in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” is a hapless “scholarship boy” at Oxford, “Class of 2006.” He’s as out of place as his trying-too-hard, dated “Oxford” fashions, as helpless as the look on his face every time he asks “This seat taken?” at his college’s wood-paneled, chandeliered, ancient and venerated dining hall.

That may relegate him to sitting with the highly-strung, self-described “genius” Jake (Will Gibson) as a fellow outcast in this world. But we know from Oliver Quick’s voice-over narration that he aspires to greater things, chief among them the rakish, handsome and ever-so-rich Felix Catton, given a louche ease and comfort about the “station” he was born into by Jacob Elordi (Elvis in “Priscilla,” TV’s “Euphoria”.

A chance encounter leads to a Oliver doing a boon for his rich, entitled classmate. And it doesn’t matter than Felix is related to Oliver’s trying-too-hard-at-snobbery tutoring partner and nemesis Farleigh (Archie Madekwe of “Midsommer” and “Gran Turismo”). “Ollie” soon finds himself sharing pints at the pub, palling around with the effortlessly popular girl magnet Felix and ingratiating himself into his life.

Little details about Ollie’s hard luck life story seem to touch Felix, who is rich enough to be gallant about picking up a tab without sweating it, and touchy enough to not like being reminded of it.

“Get yourself a title and a massive ‘f–k-off castle,” and you don’t have to hear how “only rich people can afford to be filthy” and never clean their college dorm room.

“Saltburn” is the family’s “castle,” a massive, Tudor manor house “pile.” Oliver finds himself invited there over summer break, instantly out of place as he takes an earlier train, goes through multiple gates and crosses vast grounds to get to the towering front door, where butler Duncan (Pauls Rhys) is quietly disapproving of his arrival.

He’s not the only one. The venmous Farleigh is here for a long stay.

Felix’s nonchalant attitutude about this wealth and status is summed up on a long walking “tour” through ornately-decorated halls and rooms covered with portraits — “Dead relly (relative), dead relly, Shakepeare’s Folio…Henry VIII…” But we sense a kindness in him as well.

He may make “Ollie” a subject of gossip with his parents (Rosamund Pike, terrific, Richard E. Grant, spot-on), his strikingly beautiful sister (Alison Oliver) and ever-over-dresssed ne’er do well houseguest (Carey Mulligan). But that’s only to urge them to mimic his consideration to his classmate.

Farleigh won’t buy in. Duncan keeps an eyebrow raised. But that’s not an issue, and it becomes obvious that Ollie is an “innocent” among a wading pool-deep cadre of upper class twits and their seldom-challenged progeny and hangers’ on.

“I have a complete and utter horror of ugliness, ever since I was young,” trophy wife matriarch Elspeth (Pike) declares.

Titled patriarch Sir James (Grant) gushes over every film they watch on movie nights — “Superbad” among them.

And daughter Venetia (Oliver) is a rareified creature of rebellious tastes and eating disorders, who might just have something in mind to do with the peasant boy now in their midst.

But Ollie’s early warning system should be triggered when she refers to him as not quite the same as “last year’s ‘one,” And maybe the Cattons and their hangers-on should have their guard up to this unpolished, seemingly-roughcut lad who can’t quite fit in, but who seems like too quick a study to be underestimated.

Mulligan, Grant and Pike are the reliable laughs in this cast, hitting just the right “clueless” touch here, a spectacularly tone-deaf touch there.

Fennell’s wit includes from lightly mocking the champagne swigging swells who play tennis in evening wear, bottle in hand, who nude sunbathe on the grounds — the younger generation snorting coke and the older one “planning” parties for their huge staff to actually pull-off, many of them just too polite to cope with modern mores or anyone who overstays their welcome.

Keoghan, one of the most accomplished actors of his generation (“Dunkirk,””’71,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” “American Animals,” TV’s “Chernobyl”), impresses early on and turns downright dazzling in the later acts, accepting every challenge from a director prone to “Let’s just GO there” whims in this follow-up to the more focused and furious “Promising Young Woman.”

There hasn’t been much more to be said about upper class twits, filthy rich fussbudgets and entitled folk too polite and sheltered to perceive a threat in years, and Fennell doesn’t really change that.

And that “overstays its welcome” jab suits this picture to a T, as our clever filmmaker decides to linger past drop-the-mike moment and then over-explain it all in a draggy finale.

It’s the film’s sexual “daring” and its calculated shocks that stick with you more than the guessable narrative populated by assorted predators and prey.

But Keoghan — as innocent or cunning, oaf or graceful dancer-in-the-near-dark, will leave you amazed at this performance and startled at just what he was willing to do to fit in in “Saltburn” — the great house or the not-quite-great movie.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, “graphic nudity,” profanity and “strong sexual content

Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe, Carey Mulligan, Paul Rhys, Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emerald Fennell. An MGM/Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 2:11

There was an accident involving her husband, one that involved brain damage that has left him speechless and borderline catatonic. When we see it recreated in a flashback, we understand her loyalty, why she’s sticking with him, monitoring his symptoms, trying to trigger his memory to shock him back into speaking.

It’s not just taking those wedding vows seriously or scientific curiosity. She feels somewhat to blame.

He came from money, so that’s why they’ve come to the estate house in a small town where he grew up as the scion of the rich DuBose family.

But there’s a portrait in the attic of the great house, one so realistic it takes Sofia aback. It’s a perfect likeness of husband Alex (Ryan Kwanten). What really has Sofia (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) rattled by it is that it was a self-portrait by an infamous forebear of Alex’s, painted back in the 1930s.

And pulling the sheet covering it off the lifesize painting seems to set events in motion, as “things” start “happening” around the house — vases falling, furtive figures glimpsed in the shadows, odder-than-usual behavior from Alex.

“The Portrait” is a quiet and subtle debut feature from British director Simon Ross and British born screenwriter David Griffiths. It’s so understated and cryptic as to not quite come off,  a faintly chilling Gothic mystery with a modicum of suspense but a dearth of jolts and thrills.

A violent 1937 prologue sets up this place, this family and the subject of this portrait with a crime.

But that’s not information that Sofia has when she shows up, greeted by the caretaker (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), moving her routine with Alex — shaving, cleaning, talking to and questioning him, looking for that “one memory that could trigger” something in him — to surroundings familiar to him.

The creepy painting and things that start happening — nightmares, noises, etc,  — after she sees it don’t fit any science that Sofia understands. Hearing about the subject of that portrait, his sadism and abuse of the “wound birds” (women) he is drawn to, is more unsettling than explanatory.

Maybe the faintly sinister relative (Virginia Madsen, in fine form) who sneaks in on them has a clue.

The DuBoses, she riddles, “always come back. Even when you they don’t want us to.”

It’s all handsomely-mounted, even if the setting is rendered generic North American (female sheriff, US or Canadian style police uniforms, etc). There’s one pretty good twist involving a peripheral character, but little in the way of laying out just what’s going on here.

Cordova-Buckley (TV’s “Agents of “S.H.I.E.L.D.” and “The Mosquito Coast”) underplays Sofia’s response to the extraordinary things she thinks are happening and the rising threat level the character faces, undercutting the peril and urgency this short, slow simmer of a thriller might have produced.

“The Portrait” is a puzzle picture loses itself in that puzzle and portrait, and never quite delivers the punch that the easily-anticipated payoff should produce.

Rating:  R for violence, some sexual content, language and brief drug use.

Cast: Natalia Cordova-Buckley, Ryan Kwanten, Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Virginia Madsen.

Credits: Directed by Simon Ross, scripted by David Griffiths. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:26

Seeing the film adaptation of the stage musical based on an Alice Walker novel that Steven Spielberg filmed nearly 40 years ago, I found it helpful to remember that Taraji P, Henson can sing, and that David Alan Grier is an acting, joke-landing, singing and playing talent a par with Oscar winner Jamie Foxx.

“Our Son” is a child care/child custody soap opera about married gay couple who divorce and then fight over who gets primary custody of their son.

It’s a sensitively-mounted drama that bears more than a passing resemblence to “Kramer vs. Kramer.” And if “soap opera” seems a harsh way to describe “Our Son,” remember what Dustin Hoffman said when he finally got that first Oscar — “Well, the soap opera won!”

Billy Porter plays Gabriel, doting and spoiling “Poppa” to eight year-old Owen (Christopher Woodley), the one who takes him to school, picks him up, takes him to the park and reads him a bedtime story every night.

Luke Evans is husband Nicky, a small-imprint publisher who supports them in style and comfort. But as “Daddy,” he treats parenting as an afterthought. He kind of resents the kid being allowed into their bed at night, and is a little tougher about the indulged child’s upbringing.

We can see the imbalance, right from the start in this Bill Oliver (“Jonathan”) film. It’s not a subtle. But even if we can sense what’s coming, it’s a bit of a jolt.

“I’ve met somebody.”

It’s the stay-at-home father who says this, the long-unemployed actor who has devoted eight years to this boy — born via surrogacy — and kept a home in this 13 year relationship.

Although they’d talked of making theirs an “open” marriage, this is a shock to the system and abruptly ends things. Not in Nicky’s mind. He keeps hoping this can be fixed. Gabriel?

“When you live with somebody for a long time, sometimes they get on your nerves,” he explains to Owen.

“Our Son” is about these two and their escalating fight for primary custody. It’s plain that the boy prefers his Poppa. It’s just as obvious that the jilted Nicky — the film is mostly from his point of view — isn’t giving up the child without lawyers and a fight.

The best moment here might be when Nicky’s talking to his gay attorney (Robin Weigert), saying “Isn’t there anything I can do?” She wakes him up with a cold, dry slap of reality.

“No. He filed for divorce.” That’s it. Even if Gabriel’s fling turned out to be commitment-phobic, even if he’s wholly reliant on Nicky’s support, he is out of here and he wants their kid to live with him. After he gets a place. After he finds a job to pay for that place.

The film pushes each character’s grievances into the foreground, briefly, and finds each allies who support his victimhood in all this.

The story has a gentleness that plays well, and the leads click. I like the way Oliver & Co. create this gay world of (New York) dinner parties, gay lawyers and gay friends who try not to take sides.

Each character has parents (Phylicia Rashad and Kate Burton) who shake their heads and ask versions of “I hope you two know what you’re doing.”

But “soap opera” is a label that implied shallowness, and that’s another hallmark of this narrative. Gabriel’s lack of acting success and supposed lack of marketable skills can be magically solved with a connection. They’re not just a gay couple with “roles” mimicking the stoic, emotionally-stunted “father” figure and femine, nurturing “mother” with a touch of the dramatic and emotional about him.

“I, I, I ATTENDED to him,” Porter’s Gabriel huffs in tones that would make Joan Crawford proud.

They have pregnant lesbian friends and a demographically-correct pool of acquaintances in their world, which contributes to the feeling that is merely a gay variation on a tried and true divorce/custody formula.

“Sweet” and “sensitive” may win the day. But this fight over “Our Son” is a little bland and predigested, and even if that underscores the point that marriage and family and the dynamics that create dysfunction are all the same (“Open marriage” included.), that doesn’t give this affecting film much room for surprise.

Rating: R for some sexual content/nudity and (profanity).

Cast: Luke Evans, Billy Porter, Christopher Woodley, Phylicia Rashad and Kate Burton

Credits: Directed by Bill Oliver, scripted by Peter Nickowitz and Bill Oliver. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:44

Hungary’s bid for Best International Feature Oscar is a lovely and poignant animated environmental parable built on Native American mythology.

Director and co-writer Áron Gauder’s “Four Souls of Coyote” would also seem like a natural contender in a very weak Best Animated Feature field, so maybe it has shots at two different Oscar nominations.

Callous capitalists in suits show up to get their pipeline built over and through a sacred mountain, “environmental assessments” be damned. A tribal elder is summoned down from that mountain to join environmentalists and Natives/First Nation people protesting to stop it.

Grandfather (Lorne Cardinal voices the English translation) proceeds to tell his family and the protestors the Story of Creation, as His People understand it.

The Old Creator (Cardinal’s voice as well), directed by the unseen Great Spirit, visits the Earth and ponders its watery state. He is delighted to meet the “first creature,” the duck (Bill Farmer), chat about the place’s possibilities, and send the duck diving for mud, which Old Creator molds into The Land, shaped like a turtle.

He molds creatures, “brothers,” to populate it, as he’s sure he and the duck will run out of things to talk about. The mighty buffalo and others will live on it. And then he makes a mountain for himself to rest on.

But four coyotes, colored red, white, blue and yellow, torment that rest with greedy gripes about having something to eat, maybe someone to mate with.

That’s when the trouble begins. “Coyote” is banished, bashed to bits and burnt in the best Wile E. Coyote fashion over the course of the story. But the clever critter keeps coming back, stealing some of the magic clay to make company for himself — humans.

“Poorly designed and weak,” they may be. But we see human babies experience the Wonders of Creation, and fed meat by the coyote as they grow up, try to ignore the sin that killing is and rationalize their hunger. And we recognize how they gain dominion over the other species, largely through the teaching and intervention of the sneaky trickster Coyote (Diontae Black).

The Old Creator envisions the “progress” that the loin-clothed humans will build, a montage from pyramids to Greek temples onward. And he’s not pleased.

The Satanic “mongrel” Coyote is even blamed for the coming of the White Man, crossing the Big Water by canoe to invite the Spaniards, and by implication, the British, to our shores.

All this is laid out to reinforce the quote that opens the picture, “Only when the last trees have died and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.”

This “Coyote” tail is both connected to myth and visually reminiscent of a “Simpson’s” episode about a hallucinogenic Homer — he’s eaten the hottest chili pepper of them all — meeting his coyote spirit animal who gives him ideas about his “purpose.”

The animation here has its own color palette, which gives this the look of an Eastern European “Secret of the Kells.” Gauder (He did “Nyócker!”) & Co. have produced a festival award winner that compares favorably to some of the best animation coming out of Europe, including Cartoon Saloon, the people who made “Kells” and “Wolfwalker.”

Watching it in Hungarian (you will have other options when it goes into North American release) underscores the story’s universality and the way Native peoples in general and Native Americans in particular are seen as global guides to protecting the environment and bringing planetary ecology back into “harmony.”

Sure that’s stereotyping. But in this case, when a Hungarian film tells a universal story about how “greed” is dooming us, that stereotype becomes the iconography of change — oppressed, nature-connected people leading the short-sighted back into the light.

An Oscar nomination would earn this lovely and engrossing allegory a chance to reach a wide audience. Because most animation fans realize that another “Trolls” or “Chicken Run,” that “Super Mario Brothers” and the latest Pixar (“Elemental”) or Disney (“Wish”) misfires are not the best thing this medium has to offer in 2023.

Rating: TV-14, violence, nudity, childbirth

Cast: The voices of (English language version) Lorne Cardinal, Dionte Black, Karin Anglin, Bill farmer, Clé Bennett and Jonn Eric Bentley.

Credits: Directed by Áron Gauder. scripted by Géza Bereményi and Áron Gauder. A Juno release.

Running time: 1:46

My favorite Neil Simon play is probably “God’s Favorite,” a broad comic riff on a man tested by God…and an obnoxious family. It’s based on the Biblical “Book of Job.”

“The Shift” is a big screen sci-fi spin on that same source material, even more “loosely based” on The Book of Job. Here the faithful man (Krisoffer Polaha of lots of Christmas TV movies) isn’t all that faithful and is tested by Satan, not God, and not Satan bickering with the Almighty over punishing this most faithful servant to see how much he’d take before renouncing or at least rethinking his devout faith.

That’s the theology of writer-director Brock Heasley’s debut feature. The science fiction is a “Looper,” “Jumper” variation, with “the multiverse” referenced and multiverse style “shifting” of our hero from one “life’s choices” timeline to another, struggling to find the version of the wife (Eliabeth Tabish) he left behind or who left him who might take him back. Or even remember him.

It’s tricky and ambitious for a debut feature, and while there’s no shame is your grasp exceeding your reach, this “multiverse” faith-based film comes off as ponderous, glum and muddled. Much more accomplished directors have trouble keeping all the “timeline” nonsense straight and keeping the story compelling, and Heasley just doesn’t.

There’s all this exposition, trying to “explain” how this all happened and happens, weighing down the narrative. The “shifting” and “Deviators” and Vica Vision cinemas where characters glimpse at multiverses that might have alternate versions of themselves are practically sleep-inducing.

But Heasley scored the minute he got veteran heavy Neal McDonaugh to sign on the dotted line. The “Minority Report,” “Proud Mary” and “Yellowstone” alumnus brings the evil as “The Benefactor,” a Luciferish figure who torments our hero, Kevin, and wants recognition for being God’s equal in every way, and at every point.

The story opens with a downbeat “meet cute” in a bar. Kevin’s been sober for years, and losing his job in the Bear Stearns Bush Era economic collapse has him about to ditch his AA coin and sip a beer. Molly (Tabish) comes up, “on a dare” and flirts.

The scene has a montage or two of them thinking ahead, through the life they’ll have together, her pregnancy, etc. But it’s not sweet, well-written or romantically-played.

Next thing we know, they’re married, Kevin’s about to lose another job and then he’s in a car wreck. The last guy you want to see as you awaken out of the fog in a city that’s seemingly been emptied of people is the Face of Satan — aka, our “Benefactor,” McDonaugh.

The people? “They didn’t go anywhere. You did.”

“I’m here to help you, offer you a job.”

The Benefactor needs a “shifter,” for reasons that aren’t terribly clear. The Benefactor manipulates lives and folks in various timelines, sewing “chaos” with all this jumping people about, disrupting their happiness and overwhelming their faith via the multiverse.

Yes. As we all suspected. Satan is ALL about the multiverses.

It’s a somewhat cumbersome, comic book way of explaining in “The Devil Did It” terms how “I don’t know who you are anymore” happens in a relationship.

Kevin fends Old “Benefactor” Scratch off with a prayer, and next thing we know, he’s in a hellscape of a future city, going under another name, “infamous” for the “illegal” prayer he used to save his skin, typing away his memories of banned “scriptures” and befriending an ally named Gabriel (Sean Astin).

Posters of The Benefactor bill him as the Guy in Charge, “Unseen. Ever Present.”

And when that Benefactor comes back, he expects to find and finally corrupt Kevin, who only wants to get back to his wife, his life and maybe even bring back the little boy they lost through, they figure, Satanic intervention.

The puzzle has many solutions, most or even all of them “wrong.”

We’re asked to weigh abuse and bullying, gossip, guilt, grief and pathology, all told via five different points of view.

And whatever the viewer decides, on the screen all anyone cares about is the answer to a question posed by a childhood game — “Who’s the ‘Monster?'”

The latest film from Japanese filmmaker Kore-eda Hirokazu is a return to his “Shoplifters” form. It’s a densely-detailed character study that could pass for a cultural dissertation, a story of a school, a “problem” child, a concerned parent, an accused teacher and an “inhuman,” grief and guilt-stricken principal.

Sakura Ando of “Shoplifters” plays a widowed dry-cleaner raising fifth grader Minato (Soya Kurkawa) by herself. She dotes and indulges her sometimes dangerously impulsive boy, dealing with his questions about his dead father (they celebrate his birthday with a cake and a prayer) and wondering what happened to one of his shoes, where this or that bruise came from and where he got the idea that kids could have “pig’s brains.”

Jumping out of her moving car is the last straw.

“Are you being bullied?” she wants to know (in Japanese with English subtitles)? Is it this or that classmate whose name she’s heard? Or is it the teacher, Mr. Hori?

When she settles on Hori as prime suspect, Saori finds herself “handled” by a school, a system and a culture that practices conflict avoidance, not conflict resolution. The principal flees. A “guardian” council of male teachers meet, gang up on her and do a lot of bowing as they hear her out and dodge her questions.

Did he hit my son?

“We have confirmed that there was…contact between the teacher’s hand and Minato’s nose.”

A non-apology apology from this oddball teacher (Eita Nagayama) and rank lying and unemotional deflecting are all she gets from the principal (Yûko Tanaka). But behind the scenes, they scramble to cover this up and get rid of the teacher, who seems increasingly-unhinged in his dealings with the kid.

Then the story shifts to Mr. Hori’s point of view, and things take on a different tone. We soon see another viewpoint from Minato’s smaller pal from school (Hinata Hiiragi), whom mother Saori met and interrogated and whose hard-drinking, bullying single-dad (Akihiro Kakuta) Mr. Hiro unpleasantly encountered during his efforts to clear his name.

And we drift into the gutted despair of the grieving principal’s life, catching behind-the-scenes manouvering at the school as the faculty attempt to CYA and spare the institution punishment from above and spare the boy, who if he is labeled a “bully” will never be able to transfer into another school.

“Parents,” they all gripe. “They’re more trouble than the kids these days.”

But Mr. Hori’s problems, which escalate into media coverage and a fiance who ditches him over it, are the furthest from everyone’s mind save for his.