Movie Nation

You’d think, in this still-pandemic-limited climate of fewer theatrical releases making it to theaters, and the slow return to “normalcy” as Hollywood and other corners of film culture gear back up, concocting a “ten best films” list would get easier.

Thanks to the ever-broadening range of streaming platforms, pretty much the opposite is true. I mean, I didn’t always review 1000 films a year, and if you think most titles don’t turn into a memory blur at that volume, you’ve not been inside my head lately.

Normal “prestige pictures” pouring out at the end of the year used to make this easier. But they’re struggling to get a foothold with the public and develop an “awards season” consensus these days. As the New Yorker helpfully points out, nobody’s going to such films grown-up fare post-COVID.

Woody Allen and The Weinstein in The Weinstein Co. are canceled. Great filmmakers are working less and winding down their careers. Netflix has also played a role, throwing huge sums at one indulgent “personal” movie after another, films that no one else would finance and nobody is going to see in a cinema.

Almost all of Netflix’s prestige pictures, save for the animated ones, are terrible busts this year, which feels like Noah Baumbach et al chickens coming home to roost. Was “White Noise” ever filmable? Did “Bardo” need to be made?

“All Quiet on the Western Front” is a fine picture, but is it on a par with “1917?” Being too late to the party didn’t help. And nobody is talking up “The Swimmers.”

Netflix’s animated offerings, “Pinocchio” in particular, are its true “For your consideration” considerations this year. Their “Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical,” dazzled as well.

Competing “personal” pictures, two film memoirs about growing up Jewish and becoming famous filmmakers, didn’t click with audiences. Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” should get an Oscar nominations bounce, but maybe not. James Gray’s “Armageddon Time” was never going to be as much “magic of making movies” fun, but had the potential to be more “Basketball Diaries” gritty and interesting. And it just isn’t. Why was this made, again?

Both films, “Fabelmans” in particular, drive a stake through the heart of the old notion that “famous directors sell tickets.” That goes for Sam Mendes as well. “Empire of Light” was a personal picture that just wasn’t very well thought out and scripted, much like “Armageddon Time.”

Oscar nominations may help Spielberg, and the lack of them would/will kill “Babylon.” And as far as directorial indulgences go, everybody who went that route with their 2022 film can be relieved that at least they’re not David O. Russell, at least their “hot mess” (a term I also used for “Babylon”) wasn’t the debacle titled “Amsterdam.” The best I can say about that disaster is that it made me hopeful that Nepo Baby Exhibit A John David Washington actually might make a decent actor someday.

The older audience required to prop “personal” films and adult dramas up is killing these higher-minded movies by having permanently gotten out of the habit of going out to the cinema.

But of course, “Elvis” was the exception to ALL of the above. The King is Dead, long live The King. Older viewers showed up for that one.

This fall produced plenty of worthy films that didn’t quite make it over the top for me. Park Chan-wook’s “Decision to Leave,” a fine basic training while gay drama “The Inspection,” a grand and understated turn by Bill Nighy in “Living,” “The Menu,” “Causeway,” “Aftersun,” and going back to the summer, Ron Howard’s terrific “Thirteen Lives” are all rightly considered Oscar contenders. “The Whale” is quite moving and doesn’t seem like the “fat shaming” exercise the blowback suggests, although I’m willing to admit I’m not the best judge of that. It’d be a shame to deny Brendan Fraser an Oscar nomination because of a disagreement over the best of intentions.

The “Top Ten” process this year involved scanning through my reviews by “rank” via Rotten Tomatoes, which is how I came up with twenty-two worth lauding again via this Top Ten list. As there’s no hedging allowed (really, if you can’t winnow it to “ten,” don’t bother), this week became teeth-gnashing time as one tries to prognosticate which movies moved me, made an impact, thrilled and will “matter” five or ten years from now.

I saw a lot of documentaries this year, and loved “Sidney” and the grimly moving “Cow.” Those standouts were not quite on a par with a documentary that did crack my Top Ten.

It was a stand-out year for horror, which produced both blockbusters and high quality genre entries such as “Black Phone,” “Smile” and the best of that lot, “Barbarian,” which was just shy of Ten Best-worthy.

International features that make it to theaters or onto streaming are always problematic because what “year” did they really “come out” gets in the way. Look at President Obama’s list. Half of the films are 2021 releases. The pandemic didn’t make that call any easier, but the Iranian “Hit the Road” is a most rewarding viewing experience, and the Danish-made Iranian serial killer thriller “Holy Spider” is a must-see.

It was a very good year for African American cinema, even as one notes what letdowns “Nope” and “Wakanda Forever” were. A couple of decent musical bio-pics — Jennifer Hudson as Aretha in “Respect,” and “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” — were joined by two very good takes on non-musical history, the Viola Davis hit “The Woman King,” and a Civil Rights story nobody saw, which made my Top Ten.

This past fall saw a string of Best Actress/Best Supporting-actress-loaded films, one of the best year’s for women in cinema EVER. From “The Woman King” to all-star-female-cast dramas such as Sarah Polley’s feminist fable “Women Talking,” and many others should ensure, for once, that the Academy has no trouble filling out the Best Actress/Supporting Actress fields.

The struggling box office this year was buoyed by big hits that I didn’t think were among the ten best. No, “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Glass Onion” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” weren’t all that great, “Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness” wasn’t awful and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was gonzo fun and should, by rights, close the door on “multiverse” movies, even though it won’t. Netflix’s “Bullet Train” was an action-packed hoot, and if viewers over 50, that elusive AARP filmgoing demographic, were going to the movies they could have made “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” a hit.

The hilarious anarchy of “Minions: The Rise of Gru” was underestimated by most critics, but not by your kids.

If you haven’t figured it out before now, lengthy Top Ten list “prologues” like this are both efforts to CYA, mention every title that by rights should at least be mentioned when considering the year in movies, and a next to last step in winnowing 22-30 memorable movie experiences down to ten. And in case you hadn’t noticed, every film mentioned here has a link to my review of it.

“A Night at the Kindergarten” is a dark dramedy about a committee of Polish parents gathering to consider a few matters concerning their semi-exclusive school, and rehearse and prep for the next night’s Christmas pageant, which they will perform for the kids.

The wild card tossed into their midst in Eryk, the pothead “sound engineer” who decides to come, as his nurse/girlfriend can’t make it and she really needs to make an appearance. Her kid’s in the Little Ray of Sunshine School via financial aid, and little Tytus is wildly unpopular because he’s acting out and constantly in trouble at home and at school.

It’s meant to be a broader comedy than it plays, with Eryk (Piotr Witkowski) ringing up his pot dealer/pal to babysit the kid for the night, with one parent bringing booze to the meeting and another quick to show off his pistol. The uneven movie that results doesn’t quite deliver, even when matters turn manic in the third act and make the inevitable turn towards soft and sentimental. But it’s worth a look.

Eryk figures he’s making a Grand Gesture by showing up in Dorata’s (Masza Wagrocka) stead. They need this school in his Tytus’ life because he’s on the cusp of “special needs” and kind of disturbing to boot.

But Eryk has no idea what he’s walking into. The eight parent executive committee is run like a semi-benign dictatorship by the organized and commanding Justya (Lena Gora), a severe blonde who is basically a mean girl turned martinet parent. And she’s ready to kick Tytus out.

“Sooner or later,” Eryk overhears her fume, that kid “is going to kill someone.”

Mr. “I came here just to show I care” finds himself on the defensive, almost sure to be blamed if the boy is tossed and their homelives are upended. But Eryk can read people, and starts lobbying, one-on-one, this shrinking violet mom, that oversexed couple of single parents who “met through the school,” and the older, drinking and a tad needy dad (Zbigniew Zamachowski) who keeps referring to himself in the third person, assuming he’s more respected and beloved than he actually is.

Tyrants are only effective when their subjects are compliant, and Eryk rattles starchy, callous Justya, whose sneering facade is just that.

“I just want to see the look on your face when you lose,” Eryk sneers back.

But as we hear about the boy’s many transgressions, how upset he’s making all the other kids, we wonder if all of Eryk’s charms, and his entreaties to the nearly powerless headmistress (Julia Wyszynska) will be in vain.

The broad caricatures within this nine parent sample size aren’t dizzy, testy, scared or randy enough to be instantly funny. The lobbying, back-stabbing and back-biting isn’t hilarious either, and the slack pacing means these other sins stand out and stare us in the face all through this “Night at the Kindergarten.” It’s a “romp” that doesn’t romp.

The bickering over what a “Christmas Pageant” should have in it (“A real TREE!”) and who should have more lines (the Virgin Mary’s odd-man-out husband, Joseph) is amusing, in that “Best Christmas Pageant Ever” seen-it-before way.

Still, it ends well, the leads are nicely contrasted and some of the twists manage just enough interest to keep you watching.

But even the madcap moments have a sort of “no rules in Poland” brittleness that work against its more melodramatic flourishes. When things finally go over the top in the moonshine-induced mayhem of the rehearsal that comes after their “meeting,” it’s a bit of on-screen sizzle that seems too little, too late.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, put use, profanity

Cast: Piotr Borowski, Lena Gora, Aleksandra Domanska, Masza Wagrocka, Dobromir Dymecki
Zbigniew Zamachowski and Julia Wyszynska

Credits: Directed by Rafal Skalski, scripted by Marek Baranowski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

The script is bad enough to make one pity the actresses saddled with role-playing this dog, seven women who might have found themselves envying the chap cast to play the unspeaking corpse. Not that their emotionally-dead, enervated performances are wholly free from blame.

The direction? Let’s just say “7 Women and a Murder” is so lackluster, so utterly lacking in urgency, whimsy or whatever the hell it was director and co-writer Alessandro Genovesi was going for that one can’t help but notice when he tries something cute.

But even a flashy 360 degree pan between two of the rival women in this tale of one dead husband/ lover/father/employer/son-in-law and his seven possible killers merely calls attention to how tedious everything surrounding it is.

What a waste.

Titled “7 donne e un mistero” in Italy, this winter-in-the-early-1930s yarn is set in a plush country mansion, which daughter Susanna (Diana Del Bufalo) returns to from Milan, where she’s been living and studying.

Mama Margherita (Margherita Buy) isn’t overly thrilled to see her. Granny Rachele (Ornella Vanoni) seems more interested in adding Susana back to her list of family members who consider her a “burden to everyone.”

Bitter unmarried Aunt Agostina (Sabrina Impacciatore) is eager to share her “ignored” unhappiness to the returning niece.

“Look Agostina, I’m paying attention to you this ONE time, and then I’m done,” her imperious sister Margherita fumes, in Italian with subtitles, or dubbed into English.

At least Susanna’s younger sister, Caterina (Benedetta Porcaroli) seems to bear up under all this friction and unhappiness well.

We’ve barely learned that patriarch Marcello has taken to sleeping in a guest bedroom when the new housekeeper, Maria (Luisa Ranieri) discovers him face-down in his bed with a knife in his back.

Margherita bemoans how unhappy he must have been to do this to himself, but Susanna cracks that “I don’t think he acted alone,” knife in the back and all.

The phone lines have been cut, the “car’s wires” as well. There’s nothing for it but to discern if there’s a stranger in the house who killed Marcello, or if one of the six woman there — one of whom just arrived and would seem to have an airtight alibi, another of whom is aged and in a wheelchair — did it.

But wait! The title mentions “SEVEN.” Let’s see how long it takes for the mistress, Veronica (Micaela Ramazzotti) to show up.

“7 Women” sets up as a farce, and taking place in a mansion, we might rightly expect it to be a door-slamming one. Don’t let the fact that it’s an all female cast chase sexual dalliances, jealousies and intrigues out of your mind.

But nothing remotely interesting happens. A character gets a makeover, another is robbed, there’s a pregnancy and a pistol. And none of it is fashioned into a “mystery” we want to solve, funny characters we want to spend time with or whose safety we fear for or catfights we’d pay cash money to see.

Nothing these “7 Woman” and the folks behind the camera conjure up amounts to a hill of fagioli.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, some profanity

Cast: Margherita Buy, Diana Del Bufalo, Sabrina Impacciatore, Benedetta Porcaroli, Micaela Ramazzotti, Luisa Ranieri and Ornella Vanoni.

Credits: Directed by Alessandro Genovesi, scripted by Lisa Nur Sultan and Alessandro Genovesi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:24

British editor-turned-director David Lean is most widely-known for his epics. Starting with “Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia,” on through to “Dr. Zhivago” and “A Passage to India,” he gave the cinema films of scale, scope and depth, and collected accolades and Oscars for his trouble.

His pre-epic career is best remembered for a couple of classic Charles Dickens adaptations. But even if “Oliver Twist” and “Great Expectations” managed a light moment here and there, the maestro was never known for comedy.

It’s not like he couldn’t manage it. “Hobson’s Choice” is proof of that. This 1954 farce, based on a comically timeless 1915 play, made a fine showcase for the great Charles Laughton, marked another successful teaming with Lean’s early career acting muse John Mills, and features the future Mrs. Basil Fawlty, Prunella Scales, in a role that would become her first big break.

It’s adorable.

The plot and character “types” are what make it timeless. It’s about a lazy widower (Laughton) who runs the most-highly-regarded bootery in 1880s Salford, suburban Lancashire — near Manchester. “Runs” is a tad generous as a description of his duties. Old Henry Hobson started the business and built it, but he’s got two cobblers in his employ, and when he’s not around, he has three daughters running the shop, his house and his life.

Maggie (Brenda de Banzie, also seen in “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and “The Pink Panther”) is the eldest, the one with the head for business. Alice (Daphne Anderson) is the middle daughter, the one who can cook. And Vicky (Scales, immortalized in “Fawlty Towers”) is the youngest and prettiest, trusted mainly with housekeeping.

Vicky and Alice have wary suitors who must time their visits to her father’s habits, his mid-morning and mid-afternoon treks down the street to the Moonraker’s Inn, his favorite public house, where he regales one and all about how he keeps his daughters under his thumb and his business thriving thanks to the underpaid wizard with leather in his employ, unassuming William Mossop (Mills).

But all it takes is one severe but enthusiastic and wealthy dowager (Helen Haye) to upset Hobson’s life of dipsomaniacal leisure. She compliments Mossop, and Maggie does the quick math and resolves “You’re for me, then,” deciding that they’ll marry, start their own shop and build their lives together, whether Mossop is amenable to this or not.

With the other two daughters already plotting their marital escape, what choices does that leave for our pint-happy capitalist?

Filmed mostly on Shepperton soundstages, “Hobson’s” relies on a mere handful of sets. But Lean and especially Lawton find funny things to do on them. Laughton’s drunken dash up the stairs, reminiscent of Teddy’s “CHARGE!” up San Juan Hill in “Arsenic and Old Lace,” is a stitch.

This is a comedy of classic set-ups, double-crosses, schemes and true love, with a generous peppering of witty one-liners — mostly delivered by Laughton — regarding Hobson’s situation, his growing exasperation and the daughters he finds less “manageable” by the hour.

On Vicky’s provocative fashion sense, he gripes about the “bump” on her rump (a bustle) that he notices as she walks the streets “with the kind of waist that’s normal in wasps, unusual in women.”

 On a lawyer he finds himself haggling with — “I’m not so fond of the sound of your voice as you are.”

His elbow-bending mates at the Moonraker’s hear why he is determined to foil that first marriage of his most indispensible daughter, Maggie.

“I’ve noticed that if you get one marriage in a family, it goes through t’lot like measles.“

Laughton was never funnier on screen. More sadistic, sure. But he makes a perfectly delightful blowhard drunk in his sole collaboration with Lean.

The film’s immaculately-framed compositions and perfect editing don’t make an effort to hide how slight this all is. The story is Shakespearean in its multiple daughters unable to easily marry their way out from under their father’s control. But the play and the film give them agency, especially Maggie, who sets all this in motion with an unflinching march towards the altar, dragging poor Mossop along because he plainly and amusingly doesn’t know what’s good for him.

Lean’s black and white films about Victorian Britain — Wilfred Shingleton did the art direction for “Hobson’s” and “Great Expectations” — have aged into what amount to historical documentaries of the era. If it didn’t actually look and feel like his, that’s still the way we expect even today’s gloriously colored versions of Dickensian London and environs to appear.

Shingleton won an Oscar for “Great Expectations.” Cinematographer Jack Hildyard would go on to win an Oscar for filming Lean’s “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

“Hobson’s Choice” has enough delights that while one would never wish Lean had forgone any of his later films for another out-and-out comedy (Well, maybe “Ryan’s Daughter”), perhaps he might have had a better go of it than his next film, the heavy and more wistful romance “Summertime,” with Katherine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi, also an adaptation of a play.

But if you’ve missed choosing “Hobson’s” in your survey of Lean’s 19 film (a few uncredited assists) directing career, it’s definitely worth a look. Laughton, the always warm and engaging Mills, de Banzie and the future and forevermore SYBILL!” of our nightmares seal the deal.

Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, with an “ass” here and there

Cast: Charles Laughton, Brenda de Banzie, John Mills, Daphne Anderson and Prunella Scales.

Credits: Directed by David Lean, scripted by Norman Spencer and David Lean, based on the play by Harold Brighouse. British Lion production on Tubi, Youtube, Amazon etc.

Running time: 1:48

And just like that, Gerard Butler’s back to making B and C movies?

Sure, he’s got the imaginatively-titled thriller “Plane” due out in January, and not everything Lionsgate releases is a B-movie. But is this it? Is “Last Seen Alive” is the end of his “Olympus Has Fallen” late-career bounce?

Butler still gives fair value, bringing the emphatic “Where’s my WIFE?” pleas, threats and beat-downs in this riff on “The Vanishing” and “Breakdown.” But it’s inferior material, with a script that does a poor job at deepening the mystery of a missing wife, never giving us enough misdirection to believe for a second that, as the cops always say, “it’s usually the husband.” The waypoints in the plot are laughably worn out, the direction is pedestrian, at best.

Butler plays Will, a New England property developer in what one doesn’t need to stay through the credits to recognize as Over-Filmed Rural Georgia and not New Hampshire. He and Lisa (Jaime Alexander) are “going through some things” and she “needs to take a break.”

He’s driving her to her parents’ (Cindy Hogan and Bruce Altman) place when that last “stop for gas” is where she disappears. We don’t even have time to wonder why she isn’t driving herself in her own car. Because this isn’t 1959, even if she did cheat.

Will goes through an increasingly frantic search, calls in a cop (Russell Hornsby), and when he doesn’t seem to “get” the urgency, or pick up on the fact that “broken” CCTV cameras at the gas station actually work, Will takes matters into his own hands.

The picture’s clumsiest scene is the contrived fight Will starts with her parents, who couldn’t possibly think he’s done something to their daughter. Its most predictable scene involves that trope of big city screenwriters who see romance in rural trailer park meth labs.

Aside from that, it’s interesting to see former child star Ethan Embry devolve into The New Clint Howard, not a bad thing to be if you want to keep working.

I remember posting the trailer to “Last Seen Alice” last June, and half-wondering what happened to it. Netflix is the answer, and that might be a good place for Butler’s agent to be door-knocking these days. He’s still good value, even if the movies he’s offered are no longer reflecting that.

Rating: R violence, drug content, profanity

Historical dramas are as much a reflection of their times as those they’re bringing back to life on the screen. That’s one reason why the many versions of the life and martyrdom of Joan of Arc play like harsh judgements on the character of France, especially in the “Joan” films made outside of France.

When French action auteur Luc Besson took on the subject in the late 1990s, turning it into a star vehicle for his then-very young wife Milla Jovovich, it promised to be something new. No heavenly light beaming down on the future “Saint Joan,” no saintly Ingrid Bergman or Jean Seberg, but with perhaps a touch of “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” Carl Dreyer’s silent masterpiece (starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti).

“Excalibur” had forever raised the bar on depictions of Medieval combat, so it was sure to be grim, bloody and personal as The 100 Years War played out here. And a Frenchman, albeit one with plenty of bones to pick with his native land, might go easier on the French crown and the French clergy in casting blame for the teenaged martrys’ fate in this international production. It’s the English who wanted her dead more than anyone else, lest we forget.

“The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc” became a sprawling, historical and occasionally ahistorical rendition of the character and her mercurial rise to fame and glory, and her execution for “heresy” at the age of 19.

Jovovich, then best-known for “Return to the Blue Lagoon” and Besson’s madcap sci-fi “The Fifth Element,” portrays Jeanne d’Arc as touched with madness, overwhelmed by the battles she was ill-prepared to find herself fighting. Her wild-eyed lashing-out seems even more pronounced by the ways she’s photographed, often in extreme close-up in the most extreme situations, a delusional schizophrenic trying to reconcile “the voice” she’s hearing with her faith and her homeland’s military and existential crisis.

Seen now, Jovovich’s take comes off as perhaps the best way to imagine Joan — pious, self-righteous and perhaps a tad deranged. She was a child “playing” a part, feigning bravado, a teenaged egoist grabbing her people’s attention and inspiring them because she believed so fervently that she made them believe, in turn. Jovovich, who aged into a decent actress trapped in a lucrative, long-running B-movie action franchise later, seems properly overwhelmed and overmatched as “The Messenger.”

The screenplay may fictionalize how Joan was “made” this way — witnessing her older sister’s rape and murder at the hands of the English (never happened). But this written and performed interpretation does a better job of explaining this historical figure without the gift of supernaturalism.

Take the way Besson, whose “The Transporter” movies and “The Fifth Element” gave him license to try his hand at “epic,” introduces Joan as a teen to the dauphin, the French King to be. There’s all this hand-wringing and worry by Charles (John Malkovich, terrific), his mother-in-law (Faye Dunaway, alarming) and the bishops and knights of his court about whether he should “receive” this already-famous teen.

Jovovich’s first appearance on screen here is a “star entrance,” and whatever her impact on the cynics of the court, the viewing audience and Charles are quite bowled-over by this confident, monomaniacal madwoman of faith. They’ve heard her reputation and respect it, they all say. She’s not having it.

“There’s nothing to hear! And why is there nothing to hear? Because I haven’t DONE anything! And why haven’t I done anything? Because none of you WILL LISTEN TO ME!”

Charles, with the English claiming the throne he can’t just take as his own, does listen and gambles on her charisma. Next thing we know, she’s running riot amongst the increasingly exasperated — and amusingly-resigned knights (the wonderful Tchéky Karyo and Vincent Cassel) who find themselves under her command, if not in her thrall the way their army is.

Besson depicts this signature siege of Orleans, so central to Joan’s legend, as result of a bit of luck, some pluck and ingenuity, and some genuine fanatical bravery. It’s an “El Cid” moment, Washington at Monmouth Courthouse, a battle turned by force of will and personality and a leader’s impact on morale.

It is spectacularly-rendered, and utterly believable here, with Jovovich showing us Joan’s confusion, grief and almost psychotic disconnect from what she’s unleashed.

But as with every telling of this time-honored story, we know this is the peak. Backroom politics, Catholic intrigues and backbiting and buck-passing, a public trial and a burning at the stake are to come.

Besson’s cleverest third act touch is putting a face on a “new” voice in Joan’s head. We haven’t heard what she’s said she hears, haven’t seen a miracle manifest itself in giving her this “mission.”

Dustin Hoffman’s casting as “The Conscience,” a cowled, bearded visitor who questions Joan using the Socratic Method, testing her faith, her memories and the illiterate’s knowledge of God as a means of questioning her motives, is telling. He is Jewish, and his appearance here screams “OLD TESTAMENT.” This is Joan’s true judgement, whether or not she passes muster with her own sense of piety and devotion, not the verdict of a compliant religious court.

That’s a self-consciously theatrical choice on the part of the filmmaker, something we’ve seen or picked up hints of in stage interpretations of this story. The difference here is that it’s the acting titan Dustin Hoffman bearing down on Milla Jovovich’s psyche and youth. It could have played as campy, but instead it is unsettling, dismantling, and it works.

The film’s bracing opening scenes let up a bit as Besson falls all over himself to build up that “star entrance” for his wife. But Jovovich shows up, takes over and carries the picture and herself as if she, like Joan, is unsure of what she’s doing, unfamiliar with the spotlight and unaware of how crazy the right lens can make her look. Not that either character or actress, often bathed in blood and mud and madness, seem to care.

I’ve always thought there was too much to admire in this somewhat (not as widely as you remember) maligned overreach of an epic to simply write it off. Judging from the “Joans” that have followed it (a two-part French film in 2019 that failed), “The Messenger” feels more and more like a classic, a modern twist on the sort of old-fashioned epic that occasionally thrills, and always invites us to lose ourself in another time with another take on a character we long ago figured was simply chiseled in stone.

Rating: R for strong graphic battles, a rape and some language

Cast: Milla Jovovich, John Malkovich, Faye Dunaway, Tchéky Karyo, Vincent Cassel and Dustin Hoffman.

Credits: Directed by Luc Besson, scripted by Andrew Birkin and Luc Besson.

Running time: 2:28

“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