Movie Nation

Well, God and Gromit bless Netflix for signing checks and putting Aardman Animations on the task of serving up fresh stop-motion animated whimsy for us all.

But “fresh” doesn’t really figure in their laugh-starved, half-hearted sequel to 2000’s “Chicken Run.” That movie’s twee delights are sorely missed in “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” another chickens-take-on-Big-Poultry action comedy.

They’ve recast the voice leads of the first film, with Mel Gibson and Julie Sawahla replaced by Thandiwie Newton and Zachary Levi. And instead of the first film’s plucky riff on British WWII POW escape pictures like “The Colditz Story” and “The Great Escape” we get a gadgety spoof of “Mission: Impossible.”

While those changes aren’t deal breakers, they do portend a picture that lacks the verbal and visual wit, the spark and the edge that made the original film a classic.

Directed by Sam Fell (“Flushed Away,” “ParaNorman”) and scripted by “Chicken Run” alumni Karey Kirtkpatrick and John O’Ferrell, with “Adult Life Skills” writer-director Rachel Tunnard brought in to jolt the jokes, it never quite finds its footing or manages to string together sight gags that made the original film cluck along.

Leader-of-chickens Ginger (Newton) and blowhard/big-talker Rocky (Levi) hatch their daughter Molly on the idyllic, uninhabited and KFC-free lake island paradise they settled on when they and their entire chicken farm flew the coop all those years ago.

But idyllic chicken village aside, Molly (Bella Ramsey) longs to see the big wide world. When a massive new operation, Fun-Land Farms, sets up shop across the lake, brave Ginger advises they all hide. Tweenage Molly makes a break for it to see for herself.

She hooks up with a ditz named Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davies) who is determined to get into “the happy chicken truck” to Funland, and next thing they know, they are in the truck and processed into the candy-colored theme park of a poultry farm.

This “farm” seems idyllic, until they notice the way everything looks like a stage set, all the chickens are wearing control collars and they spend their day frolicking on slides and gorging themselves on the feed.

And the two can’t help but notice the Bond villain lair where the humans in charge, Dr. Fry (Nick Mohammed) and his wife, our old nemesis Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) manipulate one and all in pursuit of the perfect place to raise and produce chicken nuggets.

Ginger, Rocky, Fowler (David Bradley), Babs (Jane Horrocks) and Bunty (Imelda Staunton) and their scavenger rat-pals (Romesh Ranganathan and Daniel Mays) conspire to “This time, we break IN” and free Molly.

Part of the charm of the films from this very British studio (“Shaun the Sheep” and “Wallace and Gromit”) has always been the oddly English world and worldview they capture and the quirky accents — Scots and Scouse and what have you — that the characters speak in. It makes the zingers quirkier.

“It’s GO time!”

“Oh, it’s all right. I went before we left.”

Levi has little funny to say and seems to have been cast because he can sound vaguely like Mel Gibson at 40. Newton’s playing the straight-woman here, and whatever sight gags the character experiences, it’s the “message” of the movie that Ginger must convey.

“Just because where we live is cut off from the world doesn’t mean we are too” is as nice a slap at Brexit as any animated film will ever manage.

But the most colorful, twinkly voices here belong to Horrocks, Staunton, Mays and the versatile Peter Serafinowicz as a poultry restaurateur.

The animation has a stop-motion with CGI-smoothed-out feel which makes this look more like “Flushed Away” than “Chicken Run.”

Which is to say there’s nothing here that’s actually bad. But every element is measurably inferior to the original film — plot, jokes, sight gags (a clever optical eye-scanner joke lands), voices and design.

Love Aardman. Glad Netflix helps keep their lights on. But let’s hope they can rediscover the DIY hand-made whimsy that made them famous next time out.

Rating: PG, the odd rude Britishism

Cast: The voices of Thandiwie Newton, Zachary Levi, Imelda Staunton, Bella Ramsey, Nick Mohammed, Jane Horrocks, Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays, Peter Serafinowicz and Miranda Richardson.

Credits: Directed by Sam Fell, scripted by Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell and Rachel Tunnard. An Aardman film, a Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

We’ve all seen the ads that litter broadcast TV, law firms pleading for potential clients to come forward and join class action lawsuits against Big Pharma, Big Investment, Big Credit Card, Big Chemicals and about the “water” at Camp LeJeune.

Even if you’ve agreed to participate in such cases (and shaken your head over a pitiful payout). you probably mutter “ambulance chasers” at the TV every time another such suit ad pops up.

“Into the Weeds” is a documentary that could change your point of view of the “billable hours” boys and girls.

Canadian documentary Jennifer Baichwal’s film is about the long-gestating, fiercely-litigated case about chemical conglomerate Monsanto, its weed killer Roundup and its “commercial” cousin, Ranger Pro.

Interviewing cancer patient farmers and a California school system caretaker, Dewayne Lee Johnson, lawyers, experts on chemicals, experts on insects and lots and lots of lawyers, Baichwal paints a picture of a “system” designed to protect “us” that’s broken and a company that sold a poison invented to strip metal machine parts that turned out to be deadly to weeds.

Monstanto knew for decades Roundup could cause cancer.

It’s a film almost buried under facts and figures, all the places Roundup is applied — from the clueless labor saving neighbor to Big Power companies that turn thousands of miles of “utility corridor” land underneath power lines into a brown, nearly lifeless desert rather than trimming trees and mowing. All through the food chain, on forests, farmland and on crops, sprayed by hand, by machine or dumped by helicopter all over, Roundup’s active chemical is a nasty ingredient in our eco system and our lives.

But Baichwal — the Tragically Hip music doc “Long Time Running” was hers — finds drama in the courtroom. Monsanto figures are grilled in depositions, caught in lie after lie, researchers bought and paid for (Dr. Marvin Kushner in the ’80s), EPA corruption in the mid-2010s (Jess Rowland, take a bow!).

“EPA has been captured by an industry,” one lawyer fumes, calling Big Chem a “cartel” that is overseeing its own oversight thanks to lax government intervention.

There is a lot to be outraged about as Canadian First Nation natives complain about tree plantation spraying that wipes out forest ecosystems, entomologists tie insect declines (bees, butterflies, etc) to these chemicals, and farmers and Johnson mutter about how they weren’t warmed.

Lurid and tacky enough to be ripped from real (American) life and packaged and scored right up to the edge of campy soap opera, Todd Hayne’s “May December” has that air of sexual transgression that has characterized his most memorable work.

But unlike “Carol” and “Far from Heaven,” the object in telling this story of an actress researching a couple that coupled when she was 36 and he was 13 is almost mocking — equal parts self-serious and ludicrous.

Recycling the unforgettably over-the-top and melodramatic piano score Michel LeGrand composed for the 1971 classic “The Go-Between” kind of gives away the joke.

Built on another fine, brittle performance by Hayne’s muse, Oscar winner Julianne Moore (“Safe,” Far from Heaven,””Wonderstruck”) and a cleverly imitative and “actressy” turn by Oscar winner Natalie Portman, it’s clever in its creepiness even if never quite escapes “soap opera,” to me at least.

And the “camp” only rears itself just often enough to remind us it’s there, adding to the emotional remove of it all.

Moore’s Gracie is a busy bee when we meet her, baking and prepping food to cook at an extended family and friends cookout. We’re bowled-over by the whirl of activity, the children praised, questioned and corrected, the meats handed over to the young grillmaster, Joe (Charles Melton of TV’s “Riverdale”).

Nothing weird here, right?

But Gracie’s conversations, to friends in person and on the phone, give away what’s coming and what happened long ago, at least some of it.

“I told you what happened when I met ‘Judge Judy,'” she burbles. And as this rambling, bayside house is on a coastal George island, we know that “meeting” wasn’t at Ralph’s supermarket.

Elizabeth Berry, a TV star (Portman) is coming, and everybody’s all atwitter. Elizabeth is finishing off a little homework before showing up to chat up, shadow and observe this most unconventional family. And “homework” entails tabloid clippings, book covers, accounts of “giving birth in jail” and everything these two endured — statutory rape charges among them — because then-married Gracie fell for seventh grade hunk Joe when she was 36.

Before playing her in a TV movie, Elizabeth wants to meet them, spend time with their family, question and study them and maybe find “something true” to say about their notorious coupling.

If nothing else, streaming has provided a welcoming home to a lot of holiday films in recent years, with movies ranging from bad to Hall Mark Christmas romance mediocre typically skipping theaters altogether.

Cramming these seasonal-shelf-life pictures in theaters makes less sense with consumers “consuming” this tinseled content at home mostly, anyway.

Eddie Murphy‘s “Candy Cane Lane” isn’t good enough to make its way in the multiplex. It’s of a “Deck the Halls,” “Christmas with the Cranks” quality, not even aspiring to “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey” or “Spirited” time-killer status.

Amazon Prime is the perfect landing spot for this MGM-produced bore over the holidays, kiddie slapstick with scatterings of (director) Reginald Hudlin rudeness, lots of effects and not a single drop of heart.

It’s a supernatural “magic of Christmas” riff on El Segundo, California’s famous (actually a real thing) competitive holiday decorating mania.

Murphy plays a newly-laid-off plastic salesman who wants to go all-in on decorations and finally beat his obnoxious neighbor’s (Ken Marino) store-bought inflatables display, which, with added live-music touches, has won four years running.

Murphy’s Chris Carver makes wooden decorations by hand, even if his two older kids have outgrown all this and the youngest can’t help with the decorating — because he won’t let her.

But he does take the almost-tween (Madison Thomas) shopping for new ideas, which is how they stumble into the freeway underspass “pop up” store Kringle’s. Little do they know that Dad’s about to sign away his immortal soul for that one flashy “12 Days of Christmas” tree sure to win the battle of Candy Cane Lane.

His Kringles-bought tree might be a winner, but he should be getting a bad vibe from the “ignore the fine print” sales elf, Pepper (Jillian Bell, kind of funny).

She asks him “the true meaning of Christmas,” and he rattles off assorted kids’ TV special bromides, “Rudolph” included.

“Unless you wanna go with the religious angle,” he adds.

Pepper, whose real name ought to be “Satan’s Little Helper,” blurts out “Jesus Christ, NO.”

Hannah Arrendt’s famous phrase “The Banality of Evil,” gets beaten to death by anyone trying to describe the ordinary folk who commit extraordinary crimes, be they fictional villains or political, military or historically genocidal figures who shock the world both with their psychopathy and their everyday, “quiet next door neighbor” dullness.

But it’s best applied as she intended, to the monsters who perpetrated the Holocaust. That routine heartlessness, cruelty and widespread complicity is at the heart of Jonathan Glazer’s quietly horrific “The Zone of Interest.”

Very loosely based on the Martin Amis novel, which fictionalized the family life and sexual shenanigans of the commandant of Aushwitz, “Zone” is a cryptic, underexplained tale that buries us in banality and educates us about evil.

Simply put, we see a company man — SS camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) try to come off as a casual careerist, hobnobbing with industrialists looking to improve their profits in the “manufacturing” side of the vast German concentration camp, looking for efficiencies from contractors who have designed a quicker, faster, mass-extermination-ready crematorium, pocketing stolen loot from the Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and Jews and enjoying the comforts of slave labor, not just for the camp, but for keeping his comfortable home just outside the gates.

I kept thinking of the late Tom Wolfe”s lampoon of Southern affluence and gentility, “A Man in Full,” as Höss dons his boots and mounts his horse to ride through the “Arbeit macht frei” gate to work each day, as he took a smoke while removing the boots for an Auschwitz inmate to clean and polish or blithley wanders the large, immaculate garden that another inmate was responsible for keeping.

Sandra Hüller of “Toni Erdmann” and the recent “Anatomy of a Fall” is Hedwig, the matriarch of the household, mother of five Höss children, who jokes to her visiting mother that the officers’ wives and perhaps even the inmates, refer to her as “The Queen of Auschwitz (in German with English subtitles).”

She may be the most monstrous figure here. The British director of “Sexy Beast” and “Under the Skin” makes Hedwig EveryGerman who “doesn’t want to know,” but we know does. She parcels out confiscated clothing, tries on a stolen fur coat, and when a young servant is clumsy, inattentive or otherwise provocative, Hedwig lets drop that she could have “your ashes” scattered over the fields and forest surrounding the death camp that sits on the other side of that wall topped with barbed wire.

She knows exactly what’s happening, and what her entire lifestyle is built on.

One chilling moment has their Hitler youth tween son sorting “teeth” with gold fillings at bedtime, something he admits to when his much younger brother wants to know what he’s doing under the covers.

Action auteur John Woo returns to the sort of gangland tale that made him for “Silent Night,” a holiday shoot-em-up with a pun for its title.

A month or so back, David Fincher made a hit-man thriller that was so buried in self-serious voice-over narration that it talked itself to death. Woo’s “Silent Night,” his first Hollywood release in 20 years, is the anti-“Killer.”

Nobody talks. Not our hero, a father (Joel Kinnaman) who loses his little boy in a drive-by and his voice when an equally silent killer (Harold Torres) tries to execute him. Not the hero’s wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno, excellent). Not the cop on the case (Kid Cudi).

Robert Archer Lynn’s script touches on one of the guiding principles of Woo World gangland — “No women, no kids” must be harmed. That’s the jumping off point for a father’s voiceless resolve to avenge his kid, murdered as he took a ride on his new training wheeled-bike on Christmas Day.

“Brian” (Kinnaman) gets a calendar for the next year, and on Dec. 24, scrawls “Kill them All!” with his sharpie.

The film shows us an exhaustive year of prep–physical conditioning, buying and customizing for war a weathered Mustang, taking Youtube tutorials on how to kill with a knife, visiting the firing range to master the art of pistol marksmanship.

We glimpse the beginnings of his hunt in fictional Las Palomas, New Mexico (Texas plates on some of the cars), and skip over the hard stuff like how our hero finds his quarries, his net-searching knowhow left unseen as he magically finds the “most wanted gangsters” in this metropolis while the cops never do.

Brian stops to mourn, here and there. Quietly weeping, he is the embodiment of Harlan Ellison’s famous phrase, “I have no mouth and I must scream.”

And then, let the vengeance begin.

“Godzilla Minus One” is an ambitious reset of the famed Japanese movie monster, a reboot of the franchise and the character introduced in the 1950s as an allegory of Japanese victimhood in in the nuclear age.

Writer-director and effects supervisor Takashi Yamazaki (“The Fighter Pilot”) gives us hints of the parable he’d like this new film, set much sooner after World War II, to be. It’s a tale told on the cusp of the moment when Japanese guilt for a war that country’s government started and prosecuted with fascist barbarity for a dozen years would morph into a populace that embraced victimhood as easier to swallow.

“Tokyo! I don’t want to see it in flames again!”

This film’s characters have moments where they speak to the modern Japanese audience, a top-down culture compliantly led into in economic stagnancy, declining population and unaddressed war guilt, racism and the like.

“This country never changes,” a character mutters, in Japanese with English subtitles. “Perhaps it can’t.”

The effects are terrific, even if the assault of ravaged post-war Toyko looks a lot less firebombed than it should, even if the marauding monster marauds less on land than on sea despite amble evidence of Godzilla’s dislike of trains. The sea battles are borderline awe-inspiring.

But change in emphasis and subtexts aside, Yamazaki’s film lurches into “Same old Godzilla, same old response to her/him” silliness, with old grievances barely sublimated, silly science and old themes such as self-sacrifice watered down for modern consumption.

In the last days of the war, a kamikaze pilot (Ryunosuke Kamiki) abandons his mission on the pretext of equipment failure. Koichi Shikishima lands on an island where he and the locals face a new threat, a monster who shows up who Koichi has a chance to fight, and again he shows cowardice.

Meek Koichi returns to Japan and forms an informal “family” with Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and a little girl. But American nuclear testing in the Pacific has awakened the beast the folks on far off Odo Island called “Godzilla.”

Koichi and the ex-Navy crew he serves with on a wooden trawler used to clean up Japan’s seaborne minefields, and a plucky scientist (Hidetaka Yoshioka) will be among those called on, in a demilitarizing Japan, to save Tokyo and the country from this new threat.

The Americans? They’re taking their lumps further off in the Pacific, but they’re worried about stirring up the Soviets (who had nothing resembling a real navy, and didn’t yet have The Bomb). So Japan will have to use its cultural cohesian and communal knowhow and bravery to save itself.

For long stretches, “Godzilla Minus One” concentrates on relationships and conversations, which despite their intent, do little to advance the plot or illuminate simply-drawn characters.

The acting is affecting, not helped by an unemotional script. Whatever human stories are attempted here, they’re never more than distractions in what still is “just” a “Godzilla” movie.

The coward must redeem himself. The scientist must use his out-of-my-lane expertise to save the country, not arm it. Assorted Navy veterans must move on from years of hubris followed by humbling defeats to rally against a new foe.

Self sacrifice will be called for.

We get it.

But it’s all a tad less satisfying as this and new take lowers the stakes in many ways, ones that rob the picture of much of its potential pathos.

A first trailer that has exposition/back story, the cinema’s “It Girl” Anya Taylor-Joy, and a WHOLE lot of stuff we’ve seen in other Mad Max movies. I mean, a lot.

Looks very good and all. But will it show us anything new?

Summer of 2024?

“In Your Dreams” is a shiny but drab Turkish romantic fantasy about two people who “dream” they wake up married, have a child and lives together, and spend much of their time together trying to figure out how this mystery happened to them.

Of course, this being a screen romance, what wedding planner not-planning-on-marrying-soon Pelin (Burcu Özberk) and playboy developer Engin (Murat Boz) are really doing is slowly falling in love with the idea of being in love and married. Very slowly, it turns out.

Pelin spends much of the film’s first act talking her marriage-mad sister Merve (Hivda Zizan Alp) into the idea that her mania is misguided, that she’s got “time” to find Mr. Right, and that her calculations — that these two over-scheduled wedding planners have about “2:41” each day to devote to finding a mate — are wrong.

Rich, over-dressed Lexus-loving Engin is busy knocking down traditional neighborhoods in the same of “progress,” and convincing his best mate Cihan (Ugur Uzunel) that marriage is “the biggest con job” of them all.

He’s got a rule, and any woman who asks “the forbidden question” (“Where is this relationship going?”) is sure to get her walking papers.

Events conspire to toss them together in a specific two minute and 41 second time frame at a restaurant where the ladies’ man shows off his acumen in the kitchen, and next thing we and they know, these two lovely creatures wake up in bed together.

But “nothing happened,” not that they remember, anyway. And well, this is a Turkish film. Sexy outfits and bare chests are about as far as things go on Asia Minor.

They try to figure out what happened, confirming their marital status with relatives (“TWO YEARS?”), pondering a scar that indicates he had some sort of accident, consulting a therapist, insulting each other (“We’re married? In your dreams!”), eventually finding her diary which allows them to try and recreate their first meeting, first date, first kiss, etc.

Every time they think they might be getting somewhere, night falls. Waking up nine months pregnant is one consequence of that. Child-rearing is another.

Just another portrait of a German family, carrying on with life and work as World War II and “The Final Solution” roil around them.

But this is the family of Rudolf Höss, and he and his know that the “solution” is right next door, where he’s commandant of Auschwitz.

“The banality of evil,” as Hannah Arendt put it, is in the details.

This film is an awards contender that will roll out into most markets in February, in an election year where Naziism is once again on the ballot.