Movie Nation

“My Father’s Dragon,” the new film version of Ruth Stiles Gannett’s beloved 1940s children’s books, is an adorable and engaging fantasy and, in this interpretation, something of a parable.

Animated by the Irish Cartoon Saloon team that gave us “The Secret of Kells” and “Wolfwalkers,” its about taking responsibility for others, thinking through problems and figuring out that no one person, deity or whatever is going to have “the answer.”

An older woman narrates this tale of “my father” when he was a little boy. He grew up helping his mother run their rural general store until business dried up and they had to move to NeverGreen City. Elmer (Jacob Tremblay) is out of sorts there, and Mom (Goldshifteh Farahani) struggles to find work and feed them. Even Elmer’s ingrained salesmanship is of no use.

But when a stray cat follows him home he at least has someone to vent to. Why is everything so HARD?” She has some thoughts. And as she sounds like Oscar winner Whoopi Goldberg, she’s worth hearing out. She suggests he go fetch this dragon she’s heard of.

Next thing he knows, Elmer’s riding a giggly/ditzy/chatty whale named Soda (Judy Greer, of course) to Wild Island. But upon arrival, the boy learns the dragon in question is enslaved, forced to periodically fly and tow the island airborne, because it’s steadily sinking into the sea.

Elmer frees the dragon, whom we learn is named Boris (Gaten Matarazzo) and who is quite young a tad silly himself. But the apes of Wild Island are thrown into a tizzy. Gorilla leader Saiwa (Ian McShane) is the one who dreamed up that desperate measure of enslaving Boris to lift the island out of the water so that everybody else — monkeys to rhinos, crocodiles to tigers — won’t drown.

Saiwa counsels that “This is not the time to panic,” but from Kwan the macaque (Chris O’Dowd) to the tiny tamarin Tamir (Jackie Earle Haley), they do. Saiwa tries to balance the understandable need to change an unsustainable status quo. But the howler monkeys around him just want to recapture the dragon and save themselves.

Elmer has to reconcile what he’s done, because his main interest was in having a dragon to display for profit in NeverGreen City, with his responsibility to all the creatures he meets on the island. Saiwa has to admit he kept the dragon hostage for equally selfish motives and figure out something new, maybe tying the dragon back up until a solution is discovered.

That said, the film goes easy on the messaging, as younger viewers (I’d say this was an eight-and-under cartoon) will more interested in the many chatty creatures young Elmer and younger Boris encounter on their quest to see the all-wise old tortoise, Aratuah, who surely will have an answer.

Alan Cumming plays a crocodile and Oscar winner Diane Wiest voices a rhino, for instance.

It’s all very cute and simple and childish in all the best kid-lit ways, with a star-studded voice cast that includes a third Oscar winner, Rita Moreno, playing a cranky landlady.

And thanks to the distinct look of films from Cartoon Saloon, this Nora Twomey (she also directed “The Breadwinner”) project plays and feels like a fairytale that has a bit more going on than sight-gags and punchlines.

Rating: PG, animated peril

Cast: The voices of Jacob Tremblay, Rita Moreno, Judy Greer,
Gaten Matarazzo, Ian McShane, Chris O’Dowd, Jackie Earle Haley, Alan Cumming, Leighton Meester, Golshifteh Farahani, Yara Shahidi, Diane Wiest and Whoopi Goldberg, narrated by Mary Kay Place.

Credits: Directed by Nora Twomey, scripted by Meg LeFauve, based on the book by Ruth Stiles Gannett. A Cartoon Saloon production for Netflix.

Running time: 1:39

However lightly-regarded it might be in the canon of the filmmaker who gave us “The Red Shoes,” “Black Narcissus” and “The 49th Parallel,” Michael Powell’s “Age of Consent” seems something of a landmark,now. It’s a movie that had a reputation in its time, and that impacted the reputations of many of those involved with it, directly or indirectly.

Powell’s lush Technicolor pictures of the ’40s and ’50s kept their sex mainly in the realm of sublimated psychology. But “Consent” and his most scandalous film, “Peeping Tom” (1960) were movies that coated his career with a more lurid brush, in reflection.

Long before I started reviewing films with Helen Mirrren in them, she had a reputation for daring nudity on the screen, something chiseled in stone, willingly or exploitatively, with this her breakout feature. “Excalibur,” “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” — by the time “Calendar Girls” rolled around, she was ready to mock that rep.

And if you never made the connection between the Irish-born, Kiwi/Aussie actor actor Sam Neill and James Mason, this film makes it stunningly obvious. Mason plays the lead, a character the Australian painter and novelist Norman Lindsay based on himself, an artist who loved being surrounded by gorgeous models. Neill gave us his version of Lindsay in “Sirens,” his first Oz film after his “Jurassic Park” breakout.

The accents are different, with the non-Irish Mason more posh and patrician by nature. But the timing, intonations and understated “animation” of eyebrow expression are damned near uncanny. I wouldn’t be surprised in Neill saw this film as a lad and got into acting because of this Down Under story.

No doubt the sight of Helen Mirren skinny-dipping would drive a lot of lads into acting.

The story’s not quite as creepy as the titles suggests. Not. Quite. But it wouldn’t be set up and cast this way today.

Mason plays Bradley Morahan, a famous Aussie abstract artist who has experienced about as much of New York as he can stand. He flies home, and is immediately hooked up with a former lover (Clarissa Kaye-Mason, who married Mason after they met on the set) and hunted down by a mooch of a former mate, Nat, played by veteran character actor Jack MacGowran (“The Quiet Man”).

Luckily for “Brad,” he’s set for a little enforced isolation. He’s headed for Checkabaronie, an island so far from everything “it’s a morgue, a dump, a desert island” Nat insists. And it’s off season.

Brad moves into a shack there, with a dog he’s named Godfrey, after his last New York art dealer. He starts decorating the place with dabs of color and found objects.

But he’s being watched, and robbed. Godfrey spied her first, hiding under the dock, stealing Morahan’s eggs. Cora (Mirren) is local, primitive and untamed, and below “the age of consent” her hateful drunk of a granny (Neva Carr-Glynn) reminds her.

Morahan starts buying her fresh catch — “crayfish” (lobsters) — and other seafood (and chicken) she can provide. And the greying, bearded painter takes a fatherly interest in her efforts to escape from her miserly grandmother and the isolation of this island.

He talks her into modeling for him.

Mirren, credited here as a member of “The R.S.C., The Royal Shakespeare Company,” is at her most playful in this film, striking coquettish poses such as Cora might have seen in magazines the tourists leave behind.

As Morahan is paying Cora to model, money which she can add to “escape from this island” kitty, she can reluctantly be talked into posing nude. But soon she figures out his regard for is strictly professional and starts to take on that air herself. Not that she likes that.

Mirren brings a youthful confusion to the performance of this arrangement, a girl bruised by her grandmother’s greed and drunken “You little slut!” labels. Cora’s late mother went wrong at about her age, turning into “the town bicycle,” who might give “anybody” “a ride.”

Mason, having a go at the accent and the Oz slang, embodies something Neill’s later mirrored in his interpretation of the painter who was writing a fictional account of his own life in this novel, Lindsay’s casual regard for female nudity. Mason’s Morahan has plainly has compartmentalized his interactions with this girl and doesn’t need the leering threats from her grandmother to behave like a detached adult when dealing with her, taking care to respect her privacy and even her reputation when his piggish pal Nat tracks him down again.

When the (somewhat) more age appropriate local fisherman/ferryman Ted (Harold Hopkins) tries to figure out the nature of their relationship, Morahan’s mind is anywhere but in the gutter.

“She’s all right, you know,” the young man chirps. “Glad to hear it” the older man distractedly agrees.

Powell put a lot of things on film he wasn’t known for in “Age of Consent,” from sex and nudity to underwater scenes and lots of genuine, Great Barrier Reef island (Dunk Island) local color. There’s virtually nothing here that smacks of “soundstage,” although the New York scenes had to be faked, and there are interiors that were most certainly sets.

I was surprised that the only real offense to modern sensibilities is fairly tame and confined to the faintly-icky finale. That can be read as a teen girl’s first serious “daddy issues” crush, or more transactional, “This is the geezer that can take me places.”

In any event, its sense of inappropriateness is more of a modern thing that would have merited no more than a raised eyebrow at any earlier point in history, from Jane Austen’s England to the “Swinging ’60s” in New York, London or Brisbane.

The film itself can be seen as the fine, lightweight curtain call it was, even though Powell made a couple of TV films before fully retiring by 1980. The story has a text and a lively sub text — everybody seems to be stealing from the artist, and he in turn, is stealing Cora’s ephemeral youth and immortalizing it on canvas.

It isn’t “The Red Shoes,” but even the great Michael Powell could only manage one or two those.

Rating: R, nudity

Cast: James Mason, Helen Mirren, Neva Carr-Glynn and Jack MacGowran.

Credits: Directed by Michael Powell, scripted by Peter Yeldam, based on the novel by Norman Lindsay. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:40

A horror movie parable, adapted from a novel, with a “Sophie’s Choice” dilemma.

A February release.

He didn’t write it as a musical, but Roald Dahl might approve of the dark, mean yet sentimental and sweet confection that rolls off the screen as “Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical.”

Writer Danny Kelly and composer/adaptor Tim Minchin’s stage hit, filmed to maximum choreographed effect by “Pride” director Matthew Warchus, bowls us over from the start, a dazzling romp that can’t possibly keep up the infectious energy of its joyous opening acts.

Ellen Kane, opening up Peter Darling’s choreography of the Tony winning stage musical to cinematic dimensions, gives the delightful in-your-face dancing the energy and currency of a Tik Tok video.

And an almost-unrecognizable Emma Thompson makes the perfect villainess as Agatha Trunchbull, the Olympic hammer-thrower headmistress at Crunchem Hall, a Dickens-meets-Orwell private school where smart, irrepressible and unwanted Matilda (Alisha Weir) is sent by her self-absorbed, incompetent parents (Andrea Riseborough and Stephen Graham).

Her birth may have inspired a big production number sung and performed by her mother’s OB-GYN (Matt Henry). But her mother, the last to realize she was pregnant, and her father, who shows up with blue balloons and can’t countenance the fact that they’re not having a boy, never embrace the idea. Matilda realizes, through them, that “kids like me should be against the law.”

Reading is her salvation, and the helpful bookmobile librarian Mrs. Phelps (Sindhu Vee) encourages this by lending her every novel, history and textbook she has. Matilda is just starting to spin her own story, about an “escapologist” — a word she’s heard bandied by her parents — and an acrobat, their love, pregnancy and increasingly dangerous act, when child welfare intervenes and makes Matilda’s parents put her in school.

The escapologist (Carl Spencer) and high wire acrobat (Lauren Alexander) and their story will have to wait, with daily installments related to Mrs. Phelps before school every day.

Because once at Crunchem Hall, Matilda faces the same oppression and terror as her pint-sized classmates. Any school whose Latin motto is “Bambinatum est maggitum,” (“Children are maggots”) is going to be a trial.

Trunchwood believes “To TEACH the child we must first BREAK the child,” and no coddling by the sympathetic and nurturing teacher Miss Honey (Lashana Lynch of “Captain Marvel” and “No Time to Die”) will be tolerated.

Matilda will be the square peg who tests all that, and bests their shared tyrant in the process.

Tim Minchin’s songs are bubbly and bouncy, and ever-so-“Oliver!” in their British schoolkid choruses. “Revolting Children” is the showstopper, with Thompson vamping through the life-lessons one learns throwing “The Hammer,” and every aspect of English schooling that the acrid kid-lit king Dahl hated is lit up in music.

There are echoes of “Annie,” even Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in the music, which isn’t likely to contribute any “standards” to the pantheon of great pop musicals, but which convey the emotions and capture the tone of what book writer Danny Kelly, Dahl and Minchin were shooting for.

Young Miss Weir is all a magnetic moppet should be, and the show’s deliriously affecting diversity — perhaps the one thing that would’ve annoyed the dyspeptic Dahl — opens it up and populates it to look and sound like modern Britain.

The kids are collectively adorable and talented. The adults could not have been cast better, with Riseborough and Graham relishing every over-the-top moment as the Parents from Hell — or at least Hemel Hampstead — Lynch shimmering as a teacher with a heart and Thompson giving us a seriously Soviet vibe as the fireplug-shaped ogre Trunchbull.

The film sputters a bit after that breathless opening, and takes a while to rope us back in for the finale. It is hardly alone in the musical theater canon in that “sags through the middle” regard. Here, a touch of supernaturalism means added effects in the late second act that further bog down the proceedings.

But pair this with Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” and you have to hand it to Netflix. Their “no expense spared” style of filmmaking has two produced of the best two movies for kids of 2022. “Matilda” is gloriously, musically macabre fun.

Rating: PG

Cast: Alisha Weir, Emma Thompson, Lashana Lynch, Stephen Graham, Sindhu Vee, Carl Spencer, Lauren Alexander and Andrea Riseborough.

Credits: Directed by Matthew Warchus, scripted by Danny Kelly and Tim Minchin, based on their musical adapted from the Roald Dahl novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

Israeli actress turned director Hadas Ben Aroya continues her exploration of the love and sex lives of young Israeli Jews with “All Eyes Off Me,” her follow-up to “People That Are Not Me.”

Her debut feature explored the curiosity, longing and sexual thrill-seeking of a young woman unwilling to commit, unable to satisfy her urges in any way that doesn’t render every relationship “casual,” to the point where she adds strangers she’s just met to the ex and the new guy she keeps around as part time partners.

The new film follows three people whose interlocking love lives would make things terribly complicated if everyone know all about everyone else.

Ben Aroya tells us their stories in three episodes. In the first, bisexual and bedazzled Danny (Hadar Katz) makes her way into a party, somewhat dazed. She smiles, asks for “Max” and takes a break from her poking around from room to room to have a random, long makeout session with a woman who seems drunk enough to have decided this is how she will spend the evening.

But Danny eschews drink and lets a group of intimates know why. She’s just tested pregnant. So we can guess why she’s looking for Max.

Seeing him with another woman doesn’t throw her completely. That’s the vibe we get from this crowd — young, not committing to anyone, “exclusivity” or even a single gender. But when she finally gets Max (Leib Levin) alone, Danny can’t bring up the topic at hand. She finds herself deflecting by giving dating advice, which he seems to take.

Episode two is Max, all smitten with Avishag (Elisheva Weil), confessing his almost instant “love” for her and his attraction to men, as well, “but not ‘manly men,'” he hastens to add (in Hebrew with English subtitles). “Feminine ones.”

The vivacious Avishag rolls with this, and might even take it as a major selling point of this insatiable new lover. Avishag has been around enough to know what she likes, and she has very particular cravings in bed. She’d liked to be choked, choked like he’s serious. And she wouldn’t mind the occasional pre-orgasmic slap.

And the third episode gets at the consequences of those predilections, Avishag’s avoidance of her latest dalliance and eagerness for a next distraction, literally the first guy who comes along.

Ben Aroya tells these stories in long, slow and conversation-heavy takes, each episode a lingering, slowly-unfolding sequence with monologues and sexual encounters ranging from light and casual to heavy and revealing.

Danny’s revelation to friends at the party earns her a long discourse of how abortion is “granted” in Israel, the drawn-out physical and psychological pain of “the pills,” vs. the single-visit surgical options from women who know.

Max’s suggestion that he’s ready to dash into a weekend away with new love Avishag earns a lecture on rushing things from Danny.

Avishag’s pointed requests for sexual activities are noted and turn into “appointment” sex talk with Max, who has to “schedule” this in.

The film’s middle act is nude and sexually explicit enough that it takes over the film and narrow its interpretations. The third act seems a disheartening reaction to “taking things too far,” with no learning from the previous experience.

The “So, that’s it?” structure undercuts, somewhat, the promise of its title, that we’re seeing young people who need to be beyond judgement and scrutiny during their “I’m working this out” years of experimenting. That lowers the stakes and strips the pathos from the performances, flattening out the movie watching experience.

And the second act’s length and explicit nature suggest the filmmaker got lost in the particulars of filming intercourse and titillation and decided to make a primer on rough sex, Israeli style.

“Eyes Off Me” is more carnal than emotional or particularly psychological. But I guess Ben Aroya has her brand and she’s just going to stick with it.

Rating: unrated, sexually explicit

Cast: Hadar Katz, Leib Levin, Yoav Hayt and Elisheva Weil

Credits: Scripted and directed by Hadas Ben Aroya. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:28

Long before Nicol Williamson broke character and fight choreography the sacred vows of the theater and went after a co-star, mid-performance, in “I Hate Hamlet,” he had a reputation. Scary. Dangerous. Volatile. Did not give a f—.

I remember interviewing that co-star, Evan Handler, when Handler’s memoir “It’s Only Temporary” came out some years later. Handler quit the Broadway production on the spot, even though some corners of the press (the Brits) played down the incident with a prop sword as a “swat on the bottom.” Pressing him on the matter, Handler set me straight and gave one an appreciation of what terror it was, being on stage with a deranged and armed co-star in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Williamson, one of the most acclaimed British stage actors of his generation, was difficult on sets, theatrical and cinematic. He could be a bit of a loose cannon after hours. But he rarely got across that scary, psychotic, anger-mismanagement quality on screen.

Stumbling into the 1969 tour de force “The Reckoning,” there it all is. He’s downright alarming in this blunt instrument of a thriller. Williamson lets us see a man of violence who represses that violence as best he can, until that moment when his past demands that he “do something” when one of his own is wronged.

Williamson plays Michael “Mick” Marler, a raging, on-edge mid-level manager at an adding machine manufacturer that was too late getting into the computer game. He toxic testosterones his secretary and bullies subordinates, but saves his most intense “management” for his reserved, timid boss (Paul Rogers), whose path to the top Michael defends as if his own manhood is threatened.

“I couldn’t give a pennyworth of COLD TEA what you ‘feel,’ Mr. Berham!”

At home, he’s a drunken brute of a “paddywhacker,” a trait barely tolerated by his “English bitch” of a wife (Ann Bell). But the upper class minx lets lust be her guide when considering her mate’s rougher qualities.

Then Michael gets the phone call that makes him “Mick” again. His father up in Liverpool is on his deathbed. And no amount of reckless Jaguar driving will get him there on time. But he notices bruises under the old man’s ribs. No matter what the go-along-to-get-along Irish doctor (Godfrey Quigley) says, Mick can guess what’s happened.

Meeting with one of Da’s mates (J.G. Devlin) confirms it. And as old Cocky tells of that night at The Bricklayer’s Arms, of Mick’s dad singing mournful Irish ballads only to get beaten up by “Teddy Boys,” it’s plain that there’ll be no calling “the English PO-lice,” “the bogeys.” Something will have to be done, and it’ll be businessman/suburban estate gentleman Mick who’ll have to do it.

The neglected and abused elderly become avenging zombies in the German thriller “Old People,” a film with a clever hook, grisly details and a motivated, some would say justifiably so, “villain” class.

Writer-director Andy Fetscher’s depiction of the horrors of old age has its sad, universal truths, even if it uses them to trot us through the same old genre tropes, even if it stumbles from its initial premise.

In the opening tease, a fictional “present” a young, distracted elder-care nurse hangs up her phone, checks in on an aged client and is promptly murdered by him.

The implication is that this has been going on for some time, that seniors started turning into the “Living Dead” the previous summer in a rural nursing home visited in a long flashback that is the movie’s primary focus. Yet somehow, this front line worker in the present day’s social safety net is unaware of the threat that every home visit now carries with it.

That summer before, Ella (Melika Foroutan), her teen daughter (Bianca Nawrath) and younger son (Otto Emil Koch) return from Berlin to the rural hamlet where she grew up. They’re back because her sister (Maxine Kazis) is getting married.

Ella figures she and the kids will drive her dad to the wedding and reception, celebrate the ceremony and head back to the city. But sister Sanna notes “you haven’t called” or been back in quite a while. She doesn’t know Dad’s in a nursing home? Wait, the head nurse there (Anna Unterberger) turns out to be the woman Ella’s husband (Stephen Luca) left her for. How’d that hap…never mind.

Ella’s guilty neglect is all over her face as she visits the chillingly quiet Saalheim Home and sees the nearly catatonic residents there, the more active among them “restrained” in their beds. This Nurse Kim gives a “What can you do?” (in German with subtitles, or dubbed) and strikes us as a real piece of work. And she might be one of the “good” nurses there.

Because as the family dresses for the wedding, and Ella and Sanna’s silent father (Paul Faßnacht) is taken out for the evening, the impersonal cruelty of such warehouses for the very old becomes clear. They’re kept to a schedule, lightly taunted that they weren’t “invited” to the wedding festivities in this aged, dying village they’ve spent their entire lives in, but which they can hear across the way — until the windows are unceremoniously closed.

They snap. There’ll be no “happily ever after” for the newly-married couple or for Ella and her obviously-conflicted ex, who never wanted to leave this town. The mob may be old and largely quiet. But they’re motivated.

One way to get past that seasonal “holiday movie phobia” thing more than a few of us suffer from is to throw in some Italian-Americans, as writer-director Robert Tinnell does with “Feast of the Seven Fishes.”

Make it a period piece, nostalgic for the days when a lot of your relatives were World War II vets, and one was at D-Day.

Make’em cook, you know, the “seven fishes” of this Italian Catholic Christmas Eve dinner tradition — baccaloa, smelt, whiting, shrimp, oysters, eel and calamari.

Let’em grab each other by the neck, for hugs and brother-on-brother wrestling fights.

Give’em plenty of sassy banter, throw-away lines that are the garlic of any dishy Italian-American comedy.

“What am I, Kojak?”

“You’re an idiot. Not your fault. You take after Uncle Carmine’s side of the gene pool!”

“Very funny. Tell me when to laugh!”

A little wistful romance, a touch of leaving the cozy family nest, all set against a holiday feast — prepping for it, cooking it, bickering, chasing the womenfolk out of the kitchen — that’s a winning combo for a holiday rom-com.

It’s a holiday movie that gets better with every showing. No low-hanging comic fruit is left unplucked in this sentimental easy-going and at times adorable entry in the seasonal comedy onslaught.

“On Christmas Eve in this town, EVERYbody is Italian. Or thinks they are!”

Tony Oliverio (Skyler Gisondo of “Booksmart”) is college age, but stuck at home in Greentown, West Virginia (actually Rivesville and Fairmont, West Virginia). He’s a painter who works in the family meat market his parents run. No chance of accepting admission to a “pretty good art school” in Pittsburgh.

It’s 1983 and his big Italian family is one generation removed from working in the coal mines. They’ll never go for anything as seemingly frivolous as “art school.”

He’s just broken up with his girlfriend since elementary school, and Katie (Addison Timlin), isn’t taking it well.

Cousin Angelo (Andrew Schultz) reminds him that “the chicks that went away to college, the ones we NEVER get to see? They’re back…and horny for the holidays!” That’s how Tony meets Beth (winsome Madison Iseman of the “Goosebumps” movies), a pretty blonde coed who went straight from prep school to the Ivy League.

It being 1983, Beth is resisting her parents’ push toward making more concrete plans with rich preppie Prentice (Allen Williamson), who’d rather be skiing this holiday.

Beth and Prentice, or Beth and Tony? If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, right? Que sera sera and all that.

There’s a mouth-watering comic montage of fish cooking as Tony explains the day’s cuisine to Beth.

But a comedy like this lives or dies on its supporting characters and the supporting cast you get to play them, and “Feast of the Seven Fishes” has a terrific one. Sure, they’re playing “types” — the lazy great uncle, the lazy little brother, the grousing patriarch (Paul Ben-Victor of TV’s “Goliath,” shining in a rare comic turn), the gambling, hustling “businessman” brother, given a “Paisano!” twinkle by Joe Pantoliano.

The grumpy great-grandmother (Lynn Cohen) doesn’t approve of the pretty blonde non-Catholic. Beth, one and all agree — when they switch to Italian when talking about her in front of her — is a “Mangia-cake,” a cake-eater. Rich. And the Oliverios? “Not OUR kind of people” Beth’s mother reminds her.

Naturally, she’s dragged into the holiday feast, old men in their t-shirts peeling shrimp, stuffing calamari and frying baccaloa.

Naturally, everybody they know drops by, including Juke (Josh Helman), a bookish, bespectacled philosopher/psychoanalyst who just happens to be a mechanic.

“Feast of the Seven Fishes” has a little bit of every family holiday comedy about it, a touch of “Big Night” thanks to the food, and in this one character — Juke — a hint of “Diner.”

Most of the players have their moment or two, but none rings more true than Katie’s, a young woman devastated by her break-up, acting-out to try and win him back — adrift.

“I didn’t just lose Tony. I lost the whole family!”

I can’t stress enough how undemanding, easy-going, predictable and familiar this comedy is. Nor can I stress enough how well its tried-and-true ingredients blend, how much it feels grounded in a place and the people there.

Call “Feast of the Seven Fishes” what it is, Christmas comedy comfort food. And bring your appetite.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with a little fisticuffs, a little pot, a little profanity

Cast: Skyler Gisondo, Madison Iseman, Josh Helman, Paul Ben-Victor, Lynn Cohen, Addison Timlin, Jessica Darrow and Joe Pantoliano

Credits: Written and directed by Robert Tinnell. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:37

I don’t recognize the players here, but making the main effect a simple trick of eye color and the magical time travel gimmick a chrome colored pill is a novel B or C-movie approach.

Jan. 17, feast your eyes on “The Tomorrow Job.”

Sub-freezing temps and high winds covering much of North America are doing a number on the second weekend of “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

With a holiday weekend, decent word of mouth that’s kept the take high all week (It has the best Wednesday of 2022), one might have expected the super-expensive 20th Century/Disney release to come closer to matching its $134 million opening weekend. Nothing doing. It’s down about 60%, with a $55 million weekend, $82 million through Monday take, per Deadline.com.

“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” is seriously underperforming, as smart parents know better than to freeze their kids in this weather. A $3.8 million Friday (It opened Wed.) points to an $11 million or so weekend. Ouch.

“I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” the Whitney Houston bio-pic, is angling for a $6 million weekend, maybe as much as $10 million by midnight Monday.

“Babylon” opened wide this weekend, and this long-as-“Avatar” Hollywood history lesson will be lucky to make it to $3.5 million by Sunday night, $5 million by Monday night.

“Violent Night” is racking up another $3 million this weekend.

And “The Whale,” an Oscar contender opening wide-ish, cracks the top 10 with a $1 million or just under three day weekend opening.