Movie Nation

The formula for a screen musical biography was already established by the time “Rhapsody in Blue,” which celebrated the brief, brilliant life of George Gershwin in a 1945 film that came out just a couple of years after his death.

Such movies typically hit the spine-tingling moments of epiphany, acts of creation that show us why a Gershwin, Tina Turner, Ray Charles or Elton John are remembered.

There will be the telling details of what formed them, that first inspiration, that first love or that abusive husband.

And we’ll see the artist’s sad end foreshadowed, or final triumph against the odds heralded.

Let the record reflect that you don’t have to deliver a “Ray” or “Walk the Line” every time out, recent films that set the bar high. You don’t have to spend Baz Luhrmann money and give us “Elvis.” All you have to do is recreate the joy an artist brought to people’s lives, and if they died too soon, remind us of the ache their passing brought to their fans and the culture.

“I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” the new Whitney Houston musical biopic, absolutely nails those fundamentals. Director Kasi Lemmons, who made “Black Nativity” and “Eve’s Bayou,” and BATFA-winning English actress Naomi Ackie (“Small Axe,” “The Score”) conjure up a lovely gloss of Houston’s meteoric rise and the music and made her, followed by her tragic fall.

It’s a little more “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” than the most dramatically powerful films the genre has produced. But if you’re even a casual fan of “the greatest voice of her generation,” you cannot and should not miss it.

Anthony McCarten’s screenplay gives us a much more candid Whitney than Oprah and other TV interviewers or tabloids every did, starting with her first serious teen romance — with college basketballer Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams, superb) , who remained her confidante and paid “consultant” for the rest of her life. Even though we have to figure that the Houston family, which had a controlling hand in the production, rubbed some of the rough edges off her parents, and music impresario Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci at his most regal — perfect), another producer on the film, makes sure we realize Davis was her greatest champion — we’re still getting an intimate-enough portrait informed by Houston’s little-publicized sexuality.

Ackie and the late Whitney Houston share the singing duties, although even paying careful attention to the soundtrack, I was never sure I was hearing The Real Whitney’s distinct and BIG three-octave-range mezzo-soprano on tracks that if you were alive in America in the ’80s and ’90s, became a permanent part of your musical memory.

We see what an exacting taskmaster Whitney’s legendary but not-nearly-as-famous soul-singing mother Cissy Houston (Tamara Tunie of “Flight,” fiery and fun) was, drilling her daughter after church choir practice on breathing, projecting, getting the melody right, “enunciating” and learning to “tell a story” with a song.

“God gave you a gift. You’ve gotta use it right.”

And we watch Cissy feign illness so that her back-up singer daughter can take the solo in “Greatest Love of All” at a club date that the famous producer Davis was invited to attend.

“I think I might have just heard the greatest voice of her generation,” he supposedly declared that night, a legend repeated here. Davis will be her collaborator, finding her songs to consider, masterminding — always deferring to her tastes and wishes — a recording career for the ages.

We see the day Whitney met Robyn, the blind eye her parents turned to these “roommates” until stardom beckoned and her bossy, stern and power-tripping father (the splendid Clarke Peters of “Three Billboards” and “Da Five Bloods”) intervened.

“You get out there and be seen with young MEN!”

If Houston was unhappy, taking drugs for “a vacation” because she was being worked to death, some of misery might have been, the film suggests, caused by not having the freedom to be wholly herself. We see the drinks offered her at every turn from the beginning of her career, which the film underscores by having Houston herself let her co-dependent, unfaithful husband Bobby Brown (Ashton Hudson) off the hook for addictions.

“The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” is a simply-animated, elegiac parable about a lost child and the friends he makes among the talking wildlife who try to help him. It’s based on a best selling book by British author and illustrator Charles Mackesy, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, ensuring that his pride and joy made it to the screen with a sense of seasonal melancholy, and its hopeful heart intact.

It’s fair to say that this “Charlie Brown Christmas” length film is pretty much an instant classic.

A young lad finds himself lost in the snowy woods one winter’s day. But he lucks into encountering a helpful, philosophical Mole. It’s just that being a mole, he’s near-sighted. And having an obsession, he’s a little thrown off by the snowscapes and snow and ice covered trees.

“Cake!” Mole exults, in Tom Hollander’s voice. “Oh,” he mutters, after they’ve tromped halfway up a hill. “It’s…a tree.”

The voice casting here is key, as Jude Coward Nicoll has a touch of the old-fashioned, angelic Every English Boy about him, Oliver Twist to Christopher Robin on down the line.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Mole asks of the boy.

“Kind.”

The Mole opines that this is a good ambition, as “kindness…it sits quietly beyond all things.”

They undertake an effort to get the lost boy home, endeavoring to find and then “follow a river” until they do. They have mishaps, missteps and accidents. But along the way, they meet a mole-craving Fox (Idris Elba) who gets caught in a snare. It is the Mole who frees him.

“I am not afraid, I am not afraid,” Mole vows. And as he frees the snarling carnivore, the Mole seizes a teachable moment.

“One of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things.”

The Fox will eventually perform an act that reveals his compassion, and kindness’s way of inspiring a “pay it forward” way of thinking. And when they meet a horse, the teaching continues.

“Asking for help isn’t giving up. It’s refusing to give up.”

Yes, it’s a tad treacly and pithy enough to produce many a profundity that would fit on a t-shirt or coffee mug, for those who haven’t finished Christmas shopping. It’s aimed at children eight or nine and under, lest you get carried away.

And if there’s a better message to send a child in a sweet, half-hour long holiday film than “You are loved. You bring this world things no one else does,” I’m sure I haven’t heard it.

Rating: G

Cast: The voices of Tom Hollander, Jude Coward Nicoll, Gabriel Byre and Idris Elba

Credits: Directed by Peter Baynton and Charlie Macskesy, scripted by Jon Croker and Charlie Mackesy. A BBC film on Apple TV+ release.

Running time: :34

Disappearances, a connection to the comic book world, a deadpan anti-heroine, a fangirl/fanboy fave or two in the cast.

Hayley Law (“Riverdale), Famke Janssen, Donal Logue, Keith Powers, with writer-director Avan Jogia as a heavy.

Jan 13.

The casting seems solid, even though there could only be one supernaturally beautiful woman with that one of a kind voice. She’s grown on me.

Could be emotional. They’re waiting late enough to show it and we just had an Aretha biopic a couple of months back.

But as musical biopics have been one genre Hollywood seems to have down cold, guarded optimism is out vow, right?

“Who’s a Good Boy?” is a Mexican variation on the “last guy to lose his virginity” teen sex comedy, one that takes its title from the label for guys who end up in “The Friend Zone,” aka being someone’s pet “dog.”

Director and co-writer Ihtzi Hurtado did the female classmates who switch bodies at the reunion romp “Crazy for Change” for Amazon. Which makes her an...interesting choice for this partially pigish boys-eye-view of high school, girls and sex.

Chema, the nickname of high school senior Jose Maria (Sebastian Dante), is a tall, awkward and lovelorn kid staring down his senior year with his best buds Hugo and Ruben (Diego Meléndez, Harold Azuara), plotting out his timeline — class Christmas party, class trip, applying to engineering schools.

But the closest thing he has for a love life is an online video of “beach girl,” which he masturbates to every chance he gets.

He’s too shy and inexperienced to ask anybody out, something we see him demonstrate in class to more than one classmate.

Eli? She (Luisa Guzmán Quintero) is into music, like him. They’ve been friends since childhood. They should totally apply together for that teen DJ job they see advertised in school. So. Sure.

But, you know, she’s his “cousin,” as everybody knows. And then he gets distracted when a school administrator assigned him to welcome and escort around, show the ropes to, a goddess from Acapulco, Claudia (Sirena Ortiz).

All Claudia has to do is show up in something revealing and let him take her around, then drive her to and from school, and buy her a coffee from a trendy chain because “I’ve seen influencers” drinking that, and he’s putty in her hands.

When she starts calling him “baby,” that seals it.

But we’ve seen how teachers and the same administrator who gave him this “show her the school” duties regard Chema. He’s a “softy,” a pushover, the guy others impose on and walk all over.

He won’t hear it, even when his pals finally get around to tell him he’s a “dog with an ‘o'” (in Spanish, subtitled or dubbed into English). Chema is fast becoming Claudia’s “pet.”

His semi-clueless friends aren’t the only giving him advice. There’s his “uncle” Jaime (Adrián Vásquez), a salty friend his Chema’s late father who “made him a promise” to look out for Chema, his little sister and their mother (Grettell Valdez). He’s always coming south from El Paso to “help out” and dispense something “I really really hate to” give — “advice.”

“If the broad comes in for a hug, say good-bye, son.”

The movie is about Chema ignoring all the advice and all the warning signs, trying everything he can to win the fair Claudia, and hilariously humiliating himself all along the way.

Well, maybe not “hilariously.”

Intriguing world building here, as you might expect. Starving artists are a fascinating self absorbed community, here peopled by believably cute eccentrics.

Judd Hirsch is the big name in the supporting cast. “Showing Up” shows up in late spring.

“Waking Up Dead” is an emotionally flatlining romantic dramedy that can’t decide if it would rather be a glib gloss of shallow actors and their shallow lives, or a glib gloss of the struggles that might be hidden beneath all that.

The attempts at humor come closer to the mark, but even they are undercut by drab acting, tepid jokes and pedestrian blocking, direction and editing. The fact that the lighter scenes are mostly music-free forces us to consider the impoverished nature of the production.

Gabriel Sousa plays Danny Maldonado, a hunky gay actor who’s cut a wide swath through Hollywood — sexually. He’s always cheated on his longtime beau Eddy (Caio Ara), hooking up at that gym, scrolling Grindr when he isn’t dodging creditor’s calls.

His professional frustrations might be embodied by that one time someone thinks she recognizes him on the street. She keeps ticking off credits, and he knows exactly who she’s talking about — a different Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American actor than him. He’s going crazy that there’s basically “one other Dominican actor in town,” and he’s the one who keeps getting the call-backs.

But at least casting people know how to buck a guy up. They remember roles.

“Everyone still talks about your arc as a narcoleptic rapist on ‘S.V.U.'”

“Epileptic rapist.”

Phyllis, his agent, sees him as “35” trying to pass for “in my 20s” and is ready to hang up and just give up.

And then, the house of cards, the illusion that is his “life,” comes crashing down around him. Eddy kicks him out, he resorts to house-sitting for friends who didn’t leave the place stocked, so he’s stuck arranging Grindr hook-ups who will “Send me an Uber” to get o deliver him, or who must show up with “Toilet paper and a snack.”

His life coach friend (Patricia McKenzie) struggles to help. This British ex-pat real estate agent (Judy Geeson of “To Sir With Love”) who used to act tries to buck him up, and fellow actress Ilana (Cody Renee Cameron) focuses on the positive.

It’s just that the work isn’t coming and the calls keep pouring in collection agents and from the sister “who raised me” (Angelic Zambrana) that their ex-junky mother is dying.

What’s a lad to do? Aside from swiping left or right, vaping a little weed and sharing some more blow?

A call telling him that the queen of soapy/sexy episode TV, Shonda Rhimes, wants him for a pilot comes just in time. Danny was ineptly trying to hang himself.

All he has to do is master the finer points of playing a pre-operation transgender surgeon with multiple lovers and he can turn it around, clean “up my life,” give back, “make some changes” and all that.

“Just don’t go into recovery,” his coke-sharing agent (ex porn star Traci Lords) quips. “It makes people boring.“

The flippant dialogue and running gags are what could carry the day here. Danny runs out of soap and shampoo at the place he’s house-sitting, and everybody wants to know why his cologne smells like “Cascade,””Palmolive” or “Ajax?”

“It’s DAWN!”

But the picture’s sharp turn towards shame, despair and “karma” punctures that balloon. Whatever truths are tapped into about broken people desperate to perform are lost in tearless cliches about difficult childhoods excusing destructive narcissism as adults.

The editor turned writer-director Terracino doesn’t have the budget to show much flair behind the camera. And the dialogue and plotting have a clumsiness that makes one wonder if the camera set-ups and blocking are indeed give-aways that we’re watching a student film.

“Waking Up Dead” is a bit better than that. And if the entire enterprise had been a dark comedy, it would certainly have played more smoothly and consistently, even if “hilariously” was always out of reach.

Rating: unrated, drug abuse, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Gabriel Sousa, Traci Lords, Angelic Zambrana, Judy Geeson, Caio Ara, Cody Renee Cameron, Patricia McKenzie

Credits: Scripted and directed by Terracino. A Breaking Glass release.

Running time: 1:17

Noirish thrillers aren’t wholly unknown in mainland China, but so few have been exported over the years that they’re still unicorns.

This is Xiaofeng Li‘s follow up to “Ash,” which covered similar genre territory. Jan 17, it’s available in the US.

A moment, if you please, for one last bow and sword-sweeping flourish from Antonio Banderas in the guise of perhaps his greatest screen creation, that swashbuckling catnip-to-the-kitties and the kiddies, Puss-in Boots.

The star of “Puss-in-Boots: The Last Wish” is so glorious in the part that I’d put the Most Special Spaniard right up there with Robin Williams as giving one of the finest vocal characterizations ever to grace an animated film.

“PRAaaaaaay for mercy from… Puss in Boots!”

With every verbal curlicue, every sexy growl, every rrrrrollled R, the man makes this Dreamworks version of the fairy tale figure a work of art and a tutorial in committing to the character with the best instrument in your acting tool kit — your voice. Banderas brings it in every scene, with every line, as if this is the audition that will make him. As if he wasn’t already a legend.

For his third outing as the the cavalier cat burglar, Banderas and a star-studded ensemble including Salma Hayek (Kitty Softpaws), Florence Pugh (Goldilocks), Oscar-winner Olivia Colman (Mama Bear), Ray Winstone (Papa Bear) and John Mulaney (plum on his thumb Jack Horner) fight with or help the cat cope with his fear of mortality, fear of commitment and ego as Puss stares death right in the face…and runs like a scaredy cat.

The film throws our hero into another epic “I LAUGH at death!” throw-down with a giant whose peace he disturbed with his latest self-celebratory fiesta. But his big finish doesn’t lead to another serving of his favorite dish, “gaassssssssssss-pacho.” Puss gets good and conked.

And the town veterinarian has some bad news for him. He’s used up all but one of his “nine lives.” He’s told to retire. But but… “A legend NEVER dies!” Or so he’s always believed.

When a sinister wolf (Wagner Moura, terrific) shows up in a hooded cloak, armed with scythes, Puss finds himself literally fighting for his life for perhaps the first time in his life.

He runs off to live out his days sans hat, sword and boots with a cat lady (Da’Vine Joy Ranolph, a hoot) and her ever-growing brood. The nameless outcast mutt (Harvey Guillén) who disguises himself as a cat just to have a home, only knows him by his Puss’s new name, Pickles. “Puss” must disappear forever, as he grows his beard, eats and eats, learns to use a litterbox and probably wishes the producers had bought the rights to “Memory” for him to sing.

When it comes to Byzantine scheming and plots, those ancient Eastern Roman Imperialists had nothing on the Japanese yakuza.

The back-stabbing, front-stabbing, neck-snapping, hit-man/hit-woman intrigues of the new thriller “Hell Dogs” bears that out. It’s a movie of huge, murderous gangs and undercover cops killing their way to the top of them, of betrayals and corrupt Christian cults tied to “far right American politics,” of drugs and prostitution and ivory smuggling and homoeroticism.

And if it doesn’t simply wear you out, it’s not for lack of trying. The opening act’s mountain of exposition, skipped-through backstory and tsunami of names of mobsters and molls and allegiances and complications are a LOT of clutter to plunge through, especially on a movie Netflix hasn’t gotten around to creating an English language soundtrack for.

Lots and lots of subtitles, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

It’s damned near impossible to figure out who is relating to whoever and wherever this unwieldy beast is set.

But focus on the performance of Jun’ichi Okada, who has aged out of his J-pop years into a properly grizzled screen samurai, cop or brawler who punches above his (modest) height. He is a riveting presence who holds this movie together when it is talking and back-storying us to death, just the guy you want to answer the question “Why?” near the end.

“You want the long or the short version?”

We meet him as an unassuming, muscular slob strolling into a rural chicken farm, identifying a former yakuza (Japanese mafia) killer named “Mad Dog.” He’s there to expose, confront and with a shrug, suggest “You must atone” for that tattooed body-count of kills inked onto his arm.

But the guy making this suggestion has a body-count tattoo, too. Mad Dog never knew what hit him.

It turns out this avenger’s name is Goro Idezutsi (Okada), and he used to be a cop nicknamed “G.I.” He’s long off the force, just a man wandering the land like a samurai, settling scores. An undercover unit’s chief (Yoshi Sakô) grabs him, shames him with “No cop has fallen lower than you,” and offers him a deal — a well-paid undercover job to infiltrate one of the country’s most mob-infested regions.

They’ve got computer personality read-outs on which young made mob man he’d be best suited to partner up with, Muro (Kentarô Sakaguchi). He’s to work his way into the elite squad of the Kozu family, the Hell Dogs. He will have to kill his way to the top by wiping out “The Expelled” (outcasts forming their own gang) and bringing down those top gangsters who have gotten cozy with the police.

As “Tak,” his undercover alias, he will mix and flatter and impress Pops, Bear, Nas-Teeth, Slick and others, working his way towards towards the runway-model slim pretty boy in charge, Toako, played by pop star/actor Miyavi.

And if Pops’ woman, Emiri (Mayu Matsuoka), takes a shine to him, he’ll just have to finesse his way around that, too.

It takes a good, long while for this narrative to weed through the early slaughter — a prologue that sets-up what is being avenged — and get to a point where it’s lean enough to grasp. But the charismatic Okada drags us along as we see double and triple crosses, mass murder and fights involving all sorts of ordnance — a 1935 Manville revolver shotgun, for instance, just the thing you want when you’ve become this or that boss’s bodyguard and they’ve wandered into an abandoned factory trap, with platoons of rival gangsters storming in, wearing face shields and rain slickers to keep from getting all splattered with blood as they shotgun everyone in sight.

“Hell Dogs” is a deep dive into yakuza genre thrillers, featuring locations Westerners never see (ruined bottling plants, etc), exotic, pimped wing-doored SUVs that Japan doesn’t export and police ethics (killing your way through a mob) not common in Western cinema and Western policing.

Writer-director Masato Harada (“Baragaki: Unbroken Samurai”) and his fight choreographers manage to up the ante, brawl after brawl, shootout after shoot-out. These escalate, sometimes in scale — sheer numbers — sometimes in simple shock-value and intensity. One involving a hit-woman made my jaw drop.

It’s not a film for the faint-hearted, with torture and yakuza finger-lopping and fights to the death so intimate we feel the high stakes and desperation.

But it’s also goofy. The gangsters speculate on Toake’s sexuality. I mean, who wouldn’t? But there’s no judgement here, because when you’re naked around other guys so much you’ve memorized their full body tattoos, who knows who swings which way? You’d be surprised. You will be surprised.

Mobsters, as in accurate depictions of their “class” in other countries, are seen as gauche, callous and stupidly careless. One higher-up makes his karaoke choices straight out of the Andrea Bocelli songbook. Another drags his wife onstage to duet the workers of the worlds anthem, “L’Internationale.” Damned commie. Probably Chinese. These yakuza have their fingers in lots of countries and all sorts of illicit trade.

“Hell Dogs,” whose full title is “Hell Dogs: In the House of Bamboo,” is a lot to take in and a movie that takes too long to give us our bearings.

But our tour guide through it all is the dogged, scowling, undeterred Tak, aka “G.I.,” a hard man with a secret inside of a ploy buried behind a bigger secret. Okada’s violent world-weariness in the part makes this guy the only one who, in mid-slaughter, can give anybody on screen or off, the answer to “why” all this is going on.

“You want the long or the short version?” Let’s take the long one and see how often it makes our jaws drop.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Cast:Junichi Okada, Kentaro Sakaguchi, Mayu Matsuoka, Miyavi and Yoshi Sakô

Credits: Scripted and directed by Masato Harada, based on a novel by Akio Fukamachi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:18