Movie Nation

French action auteur Pierre Morel of the “Taken” movies delivers a solid, tactically-fascinating Middle Eastern combat film with “The Ambush,” a United Arab Emirates -acked account of a firefight that really happened during the Yemeni Civil War.

It’s a movie that opens with a brief explainer that reads more like a UAE apologia about its involvement there, so the viewer — like the filmmaker — is best served by divorcing this action film from Byzantine Middle Eastern politics.

It’s got a lot in common with “Black Hawk Down” — soldiers trapped, others fighting to rescue them, obvious moments of foreshadowing, mistakes made, bravery celebrated, “hesitance” noted.

Here, when we meet the beefy, camo-clad GIs in the gym tent lifting iron (Concrete barbells?), there’s no cussing in the World Cup banter and all the bickering is in Arabic.

Here’s your World Cup analogy for the mission that two Humvees are about to undertake.

“The person who wins is the one who believes they can do anything.”

As with “Black Hawk Down,” true story or not, there’s always one guy who subs in for “my last chance” to hang with his guys on patrol before heading home. One trooper has a wife he’s concerned about and swapping urgent text messages with, another is feuding with him and getting an earful about “respect,” a third is responding to his little girl’s request for a “magical horse” gift by carving her one out of wood and they’re all going on about “just one more week before we go home.”

The foreshadowing ends when they load up and move out — two Humvees wrapped in cages meant to absorb rocket propelled grenade impacts, with remote-controlled machine guns so that no soldier is exposed to direct fire in a shootout, and a dashboard complicated with all sorts of comm, engine, nav and smoke-bomb mortars buttons.

A routine patrol, dropping off supplies and a soccer ball to a shepherd and his family, starts out routinely and turns tense almost right away. A lot of Arab nation allies have been involved in Yemen, and keeping them all straight is an ongoing chore.

The Humvees get separated, and the lead one is trapped by a large cadre of rebels armed with AK-47s, mortars, mines and RPGs. It quickly turns out that it’s going to take a lot more than that second Humvee and its crew to “extract” them.

“Do you need to call your wife to ask permission? GET GOING!”

Morel emphasizes the claustrophobic nature of fighting inside a vehicle that’s meant to take a beating…up to a point. We see how limited their field of vision is, note the improvements that have been made on such fighting vehicles since the American Afghan War and Iraq War, but otherwise see familiar combat conditions — trapped in a rocky canyon, surrounded — and familiar command dilemmas.

One thing you pick up on is the sophistication of the chain of command, and the capability and bravery of the troops. The first is no different from any American film about that corner of the combat world — a CO (Saeed AlHarsh) who stoically responds, in a flash, to the danger and leads a Quick Response convoy of Humwees and more heavily armored troop transports — and his CO (Mansoor Al-Fili), making snap decisions about drones, “the Falcons” (F-16s) and Apache attack helicopter support.

A woman is in charge of communications, and the Apache in question has a female pilot, something not every Islamic state would sanction. I got the feeling, at times, that there was image burnishing going on amidst the firefights, mortar barrages and “mortars neutralized” airstrikes. Make sure that women recruits are “seen.” And every tentative action, hesitation to dash into a dangerous situation, must be excused.

“We fear nothing but Allah!”

“The Ambush” immerses us in trained troopers improvising, commanders strategizing on the fly, and combat situations being faced and confronted.

A commanding officer recognizing the difference between 80mm and 120mm (unsurviveable in a Humvee), giving a “no easy way out” speech by radio and bitter rivals making up in the flush of combat is nicely contrasted with the sort of tough-guys-in-war exchanges Hollywood genre fans know and love.

“Are you OK?

“I’m in a flipped-over vehicle with you,” the most observant Muslim in the lot barks. “Get out of my face. You reek of TOBACCO!”

The performances are solid, insofar as there isn’t a lot you’d call “great acting” in most combat films, with most of the actors playing combat film “types.” But “The Ambush” works, even if there’s little about it that’s special save for this different point of view, something one suspects was the point in financing it.

That point of view has its value, even if you suspect the picture’s motives. Reverence for fallen comrades, a “leave no man behind” ethos, esprit de corps valued and a fondness for good ol’American made military hardware make this one worth checking out. Any film that reminds us how human beings are a lot alike in dire situations is a good thing.

Rating: R, violence

Cast: Omar Bin Haider, Marwan Abdullah, Kafliffa Al Jassem, Mohammed Ahmed, Saeed AlHarsh and Mansoor Al-Fili.

Credits: Directed by Pierre Morel, scripted by Brandon Birtell and Kurtis Birtell. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:51

The “Black Panther” sequel, “Wakanda Forever,” is still doing business. But the writing’s on the wall as it wins one final weekend before it starts to shed screens and give way to whatever December offerings have a prayer of challenging it.

A $15-16 million weekend, Deadline.com projects, will allow it to pass the $400 million mark at the North American box office sometime next week — Friday at the latest. It doesn’t have the legs or the culture-shifting buzz of the original film. Frankly, it’s just not as good. It’s done well, but it’s done, BO wise. Next!

“Violent Night” proves that yes, you can release a horrific Santa Claus slaughterhouse movie in America without the sort of push-back and outrage that “Silent Night, Deadly Night” (1984) once generated. This David Harbour star vehicle has a lot more in common with “Bad Santa” than anything else — a “Bad Santa” shoot-em-up in which “Santa is REAL, you guys! And he’s got these “particular skills” that he recalls from his first career, way back in the Olde Country. It is on track to come right up to the edge of the $12 million mark on its opening weekend.

“Strange World” opened badly and slips into an instant death spiral — a $4.4 million second weekend.

“Devotion,” “The Menu” and “Bones and All” make up the second three at the box office.

“Glass Onion” is leaving theaters $14.7 million richer. Netflix streams it Dec. 23, and expects to put it back into theaters (don’t be a sucker) that same day. As if.

Full disclosure here, I had to watch Netflix’s new take on the oft-filmed “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” twice. No, not savor the sex scenes one more time. But because director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s lovely, natural light and “outdoorsy” version of the most scandalous novel of the 20th century, whose very title became sitcom shorthand for coitus at its most carnal, put me to sleep.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

It’s a reductive adaptation, boiling the book down to British class barriers transgressed by ever-so-naughty-for-post-World War I era sex. An attractive if not exactly high-profile (not much “star power”) cast is put through its paces in a perfunctory take on a book whose notoriety is filmed, but not its subtlety.

Emma Corrin, the gamine who played Diana on TV’s “The Crown,” has the title role, a shallow young wisp of a woman who marries well, sees her officer-class husband (Matthew Duckett) off to The Great War and finds herself bereft when he returns an invalid, incapable of sexually fulfilling her in the bloom of their youth, incapable of siring an heir to the title and his estate, Wragby House and all its lands.

His casually dropped “Almost be better if you could have a son by another man” is what sets things in motion. “We ought to be able to arrange this thing as simply as a trip to the dentist.”

Yes, it’s all rather like that, cut and dried, “lie back and think of England.” Cold-blooded.

The rugged working class veteran of the trenches Oliver Mellors (Jack O’Connell of “Unbroken”), just hired as their gamekeeper, is the one who catches her thirsty eye. A stop by his cottage, weeping at pheasant chicks and the newborn she’ll never have is the impetus for all that follows.

“You all right, me lady?”

Corrin has the perfect look for a Jazz Age flapper — thin, fine featured, a Klimt chin and all. She seems right at home in the posh parties the Chatterleys throw in London, and intentionally out of place — a delicate thing — in the midlands country life, where more vigorous figures thrive in nature, a working farm and the rough and tumble and labor strife (miners) riven local town.

Duckett hasn’t much to play as Clifford, stiff upper lip, not resentful — at first — of the affair he all but invited but which he would never approve of due to the class divide. It’s not the most colorful character, and the performance makes it more colorless still.

O’Connell suggests little of the swarthy cliche “the groundskeeper” became, almost the moment the novel came out. His Mellors is fretful, deferential, a naive man with urges who cannot help but lose himself in this affair which she wants but needs to keep within certain boundaries.

It’s a handsomely-mounted production all around, if quite flatly shot and lit, British TV miniseries lighting, blocking and all that.

Joely Richardson plays the rugged, tough miner’s widow Mrs. Bolton, hired for the household staff, soon running it and these soft poshes through the power of persuasion. That’s a character and a performance that could take over an adaptation as soft and narrowly-defined as this one.

And for all the attention to the sex — “We’ll have to be quick!”– in a barn, rough and ready nudity in the woods, this “Chatterley” lacks the heat of the more sordid takes on the novel. The 1981 version starred softcore starlet Sylvia Kristel, “Emmanuelle” herself, after all.

All that said, Clermont-Tonnerre, who did the affecting convict training a horse drama “The Mustang,” hasn’t made a bad “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” just a somewhat drab and less interesting one than the source material promises. It’s as if this production accepts that people outside of college English departments no longer read the novel, and all involved can safely assume that all anybody wants out of it are the bare bones — and bare bottoms.

Rating: Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity and some language.

Cast: Emma Corrin, Jack O’Connell, Matthew Duckett and Joely Richardson

Credits: Directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, scripted by David Magee, based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:07

Really Disney?

You buy 20th Century formerly-Fox film studio for Marvel’s X-Men, “Avatar” and…remaking Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” movies on the cheap?

How cheap? Look at that shot posted above. THAT cheap.

Making the aesthetic choice to have the movie look like the kid-drawn art used to illustrate the books (and their covers) was…unfortunate.

This is third tier cable-channel for-kids level CGI 3D animation. And while one understands the need to create “new” content because that’s what this feed-the-beast pop culture demands., you’ve got to do better than this. Mining the new IP (intellectual property) that you now own is classic accountant-driven “content.”

So owning perfectly serviceable live-action “Wimpy Kid” adaptations from 10-12 years ago that you could cycle into your cable and streaming services would never do. That’s Walt Era Disney thinking, from the days when The House that Walt Built re-released animated classics every few years, cashing in on IP AND what you’d done with it –created a timeless animated masterpiece.

Home video killed that, but having your own channels and streaming services was plenty of consolation.

“Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules” re-imagines the bond-with/learn from Greg Heffley’s dopey, punk-band-drummer teenaged older brother Roderick, in 3D “stick” animation.

The hijinks begin with their parents leaving them on their own for a weekend, Rodrick planning a teen (“boy-girl,” as Greg’s wimpier pal who acts his age Rowley puts it) party, Greg and Rowley pitching in, only to have Rodrick trick them into the basement, locked in while the teen and his pals trash the house.

There’s an incident with little old ladies at the mall (Linda Lavin and Loretta Devine voice them), playing card games with grandpa (the late Ed Asner) and Greg making his mark at the middle school talent show.

The “learning” involves figuring out your older brother’s sensitivities, and being considerate of them, being loyal to Rowley (a running thread in these books/films) and Greg’s wimpy kid “diary” getting in the way of his dreams of status and fame.

Even if I could get past the (admittedly more-labor-intensive than it looks) cut-rate animation, this is thin entertainment.

Some marketing study must’ve told Disney that the real audience for “Wimpy Kid” content was pre-schoolers and first and second graders.

Nobody else would sit through this “Caillou/Arthur” on PBS level pablum. The lack of effort shows.

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Brady Noon, Hunter Dillon, Ethan William Childress, Erica Cerra, Chris Diamantopoulos, Loretta Devine, Linda Lavin and Ed Asner.

Credits: Directed by Luke Cormican, scripted by Kathleen Shugrue, based on the Jeff Kinney book. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:14

Norway can always be relied on to deliver a dose of dumb fun, with cool effects, when it comes to their mythic mountain monsters — trolls.

The worst thing you can say about the new Roar Uthaug (“The Wave,” “Tomb Raider”) thriller “Troll” is that “It’s no ‘Trollhunter.'” It lacks the wit and the mismatch peril of André Øvredal’s classic rock-bodied creature feature of 2010. So “dumb,” sure. “Fun?” Not so much.

But it’s got a couple of laughs and a little pathos and a lot of stuff blowing up by or being fired at the title character, who throws rocks and cars and such back. “Dumb fun?” Close. But no.

Something has happened in the middle of a mountain being tunneled through despite the protests of angry environmentalists. One dynamite charge too many caused the side of it to collapse, with workers buried and folks on the surface fleeing tumbling boulders.

There’s a big hole left behind, and “impressions” on the grey rock and lichen covered landscape.

“Those look like…footprints” (in Norwegian with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

That’s why the government’s fetched paleo-biologist Nora Tideman, played by Ine Marie Wilman, who starred in the Norwegian bio pic about legendary figure skater Sonia Henie a few years back. “The dinosaur lady” has just dug up something interesting down-country, when she’s plucked and parked in a crowded cabinet meeting about the crisis this “accident” has caused.

She’s the one who makes them slow-down the cell-phone video of the explosion, which was accompanied by an animalistic roar.

“What the hell is that?”

It’s standing on two legs. It’s bald, with a big nose. And everything about it screams “That’s a rock-man who walks!”

All the snide dismissals and “methane gas due to global warming” wisecracks, which the male wags in the cabinet figure is an excuse to crack jokes — “I guess we’d better call Greta (Thunberg) then!” — are slapped down.

No, nobody wants to use the word “Troll” any more than Elon Musk. But when Nora fetches her aged, crackpot father (Gard B.Eidsvold, the funniest thing in this), he isn’t shy.

Tobias taught Nora how to climb The Troll Peaks, who insisted “There’s some truth to every fairy tale” and “You have to believe in something to see it,” is sure it’s a troll, maybe one “looking for a gyger. “

Say what?

“An ogress,” aka “a lady troll.”

Cabinet ministers can scoff all they want, but the beasts that disappeared thanks to “the Christianization of Norway” over a thousand years before, according to legend, may be coming back.

What to do, what to do? Aside from air strikes, cannon fire and anti-tank rockets, I mean?

I have to say, there’s not a lot of invention to the “rules” of trolls and the “how to stop a troll” problem solving here.

Sjøgård Pettersen plays a straight arrow military man who strikes one pose — hand on the helmet strapped to his waist, the other hand on the automatic rifle trigger. Kim Falck plays the prime minister’s trusted aide, a kind-of-amusing foil for Nora and Captain Kris, who are never less than serious about all of this.

The amusing old man rants and aide Andreas’ fish-out-of-water reaction to anti-troll combat are the only real light touches here, and remind us that while the colorfully-named Roar Uthaug managed a sober ticking clock tsunami thriller, “The Wave,” with classic disaster movie pathos, he pretty much botched his “Tomb Raider” reboot for having too thin a sense of humor or feel for what was obviously meant to be lighter material.

The best joke here might be using Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King” music under the closing credits.

The effects are solid (ahem) and impressive enough, but you can say that about most any B-movie creature feature these days.

Funnier would have made “Troll” more fun. Once you’ve established that “fairy tales have some truth to them,” you’ve earned permission for characters to both embrace the grim realities of the situation, and mock it.
Most versions of “King Kong” and “Godzilla” get this. Why not these trollhunters?

You take this monster mash too too seriously, and next thing you know, Kyrie Irving’s tweeting about it and declaring that’s a new linchpin of his belief system.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Ine Marie Wilman, Kim Falck, Mads Sjøgård Pettersen and Gard B. Eidsvold

Credits: Directed by Roar Uthaug, scripted by Espen Aukan. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

Animation is the proper way for a kid to first experience Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Live theater performances and the “classic” film renditions — 1951 with Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge, 1984’s exceptional George C. Scott TV movie Scrooge — can wait.

But a sure sign that Netflix has more money than it knows what to do with, and more money than common filmmaking sense, is “Scrooge: A Christmas Carol,” a new animated musical that gives the grim, motion-capture-animated Jim Carrey version of 2009 a run for its soulless money.

About the best thing one can say about it is it employed for the last time screenwriter and songwriter/lyricist Leslie Briscusse, who gave us the musical “Scrooge” in 1970, after he’d done musical “Dr. Doolittle” and the classic version of “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”

With couplets like “Jingle bells are jingly, Christmas kids tingling with delight,” nobody will remember him for this spin on Dickens.

The animation is colorful, clean and lifeless. The voice acting adequate — save for Olivia Colman‘s Ghost of Christmas Past, Jonathan Pryce‘s Jacob Marley and Trevor Dion Nicholas‘ efforts as Ghost of Christmas Present, each of whom excel and as we say in the states, “Get it.”

Luke Evans is Scrooge, and yes he does his own singing. But those songs…

The story has been badly bowdlerized over the decades, so much so that it’s hard to figure out what is still Dickens and what got lost in “Mickey’s Christmas Carol,” “Scrooged!” The Muppets and all the rest.

During my child-rearing years, I had the good sense to make “Muppet Christmas Carol” the kids’ baptism in Dickens. But there are several animated versions on Youtube including the properly gloomy and brisk 1971 Richard Williams British TV film that resonates best through the ages, and takes up less time as it does.

It’s spooky and somber and touching. It is a GHOST story, after all.

But just about any other rendition of Dickens’ classic novella that you can hunt down is going to be better than this treacly humbug from Netflix.

Rating: TV-Y7

Cast: The voices of Luke Evans, Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Trevor Dion Nicholas and Jonathan Pryce.

Credits: Directed by Stephen Donnelly, scripted by Leslie Briscusse and Stephen Donnelly, songs by Leslie Briscusse, arranged by Jeremy Holland Smith, based on the novella by Charles Dickens. A Netflix release.

Running tine: 1:41

It was never going to be a horror film for everyone. And whatever its broader appeal, a teen cannibals in love story co-starring transgression-is-my-brand Timothée Chalamet was not something I particularly wanted to see.

But as a “Badlands” style outlaw odyssey with seal-the-deal-on-vegetarianism messaging, “Bones and All” beckoned. I went to see a late night showing well into the run and tried not to wonder too much about the denizens of the dark more eagerly sitting down for this two-hours-plus smorgasbord of gore.

I did not expect to like it. I didn’t like it.

I never really bought the romance of convenience set up here. Some of the subtexts director/provocateur Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your name,” “Suspiria”) suggests, in this adaptation of what is allegedly a more darkly comical novel (by Camille DeAngelis), have been given short shrift in creating a film of gruesome shock value, another startling performance by Mark Rylance, and little more.

We meet Maren (Taylor Russell of “Waves”) in a rural Virginia high school in the mid-80s. She’s forming a special friendship with a classmate at her new school, and sneaks out to join the teen’s slumber party.

The way Maren looks at Sherry (Kendle Coffey), how she drinks in her scent, suggests a fiercely hormonal attraction. Then she bites the girl’s finger off, the slumber party dissolves into screams, and bloodied Maren has to sprint to the latest ruin of a trailer home she shares with her father (André Holland).

“You DIDN’T,” is all he can say. That, and grab your things and be in the station wagon “in three minutes.” This isn’t the first time. This is some sort of “norm” with them.

But this family on the run isn’t vampires. Maren isn’t supernatural, even if we might properly label her a “monster.” As they relocate to Maryland, construction worker Dad comes to the conclusion he’s done all he can for her and bails, leaving a wad of cash and a cassette for her to listen to on which he tries to explain himself and gives now-on-her-own Maren a quest.

Her mother’s in Minnesota. She’s going to look for her and get some answers, she hopes. She’ll listen to Dad’s taped testament to her past as she Greyhounds her way west.

What DeAngelis sets up and Guadagnino films is a world of working class poverty, of “eaters” and their prey. Guadagnino and his favorite screenwriter, David Kajganich, make this a period piece — set in the pre-Internet Reagan era –and alter details of the quest that streamline it, render some situations more credible, and yet also dull its impact.

As is often the case in such journeys of self-discovery, Maren meets someone who can explain who she is to her. I can’t find mentions of a “Sully” character in reviews of the book. If he’s invented for the film, that’s a clever contrivance. Oscar-winner Rylance plays this quizzical, pony-tailed drifter in vest and jacket covered in broaches and stick-pins as a grandfatherly figure who discovers Maren by scent and who teaches her to “use your nose” the same way.

He has a seriously creepy vibe, but speaks in compassionate terms about their shared “appetite.” He feeds her — a little old lady who has fallen and will never get up again (they wait for her to die) — and teaches Maren a couple of rules.

“Never ever eat an ‘eater.'”

On her quest, Maren will scent-sense a chivalrous Ohio redneck, Lee (Chalamet) and fall in with him and seemingly in love with him, her new partner in dining crime. She will pick up on the human flesh diet of others (Michael Stuhlbarg of “Call Me by Your Name”) even as she wonders what made her like this, and what her mother’s genes held in them that sealed her fate.

And she will ponder what Sully told her, and what he didn’t say and she didn’t pick up on.

I’d say this movie has been redirected from the novel to focus on the devouring nature of young love, but that’s not true as text — the romance seems under-motivated — or subext.

Guadagnino and Kajganich instead lose themselves in food in all its forms, and in the details — of the era, and of the lifestyle. You have to able to identify a victim whom you can overwhelm and murder. Like vampires, nobody here seems to be a picky eater — the elderly, the belligerent-victim-had-it-coming redneck and a carny fall victim.

Prey must provide you with cash, transportation you can steal for temporary use, and ideally a place to lay low and clean up after every bloody meal. Our travelers are constantly on the move, not just because of who Maren wants to find. One slip up and their moveable feast will end with their arrest and/or deserved execution.

“I don’t wanna hurt anybody” is a strange thing for Maren, whose first kill came when she was three (!?) to declare. Lee isn’t having it.

“Famous last words.”

She’s young and into Tolkien and “Clan of the Cave Bear.” Sully, the “wise old man” of this world, has moved on to Joyce’s “The Dubliners.” As if.

One thing I picked up from reading reviews of the book is how lightly DeAngelis treated her meat-eating-is-murder subtext and how reviewers picked up on the humanity she gave victims, whom Maren remembers as first-person narrator. The only thing the movie does to give the deaths pathos is having the ghoulish old man Sully save the hair of kills, weaving it into a macabre rope he carries everywhere.

Mercifully, the title is merely a tease. Repellent and graphic as its violence is, we don’t have to get bone-sucking deep into “finish what’s on your plate” to get the gist.

Chalamet’s endless pursuit of being professionally and sexually undefinable continues with this role, a tattered jeans tyro who romances Maren and lures a gay man to his death like it’s not his first or fifth time. He makes Lee one of his most interesting characters, a restless young man very much in the tradition of Martin Sheen’s “Badlands” outlaw, projecting a youthful air of cocky competence in all things

But take away the shock value and “Bones and All” is just a drab road romance that isn’t that romantic, a crime spree that seems more inspired by “convenience” than hunger and a “food” movie that’s repellent enough to make “I’ll have the salad” the new mantra of anybody sensitive enough to discern its murky message, and buy in.

Rating: R for strong, bloody and disturbing violent content, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity.

Cast: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, André Holland, Jessica Harper and Mark Rylance.

Credits: Directed by Luca Guadagnino, scripted David Kajganich, based on a novel by Camille DeAngelis. An MGM release.

Running time: 2:11

Parenting is not for the faint-hearted or the disengaged, something every generation seems to have to figure out for itself. You don’t “need a license” to do it, the old joke goes, and even that might not help.

The new twist on that truism is that it’s not something you can assume you’re an expert in by virtue of DNA. You can be engaged and loving and nurturing and still screw up. You can be smart and/or educated and still be lost when you’re confronted by real issues beyond your understanding.

Measles is making a comeback, thanks to parents who “know better” than medical experts. COVID is doing a number on unvaccinated kids. And parents who now assume they know better than educators what their child needs to learn have been egged into mortally wounding public education as they rage at a changing psychological and social landscape they’ve been too distracted to notice and too narrow-minded to bother to understand.

That’s the climate that “The Son” arrives in. The latest from French playwright/filmmaker Florian Zeller and screenwriter Christopher Hampton — who gave us “The Father,” a guilt-ridden “fading memory play” — is a beautifully-acted but curiously-conjured slow-motion train wreck. Four different parents confront two different sons making cries for help and are both helpless in responding, and oddly removed from the tragedy they see unfolding right in front of their eyes.

It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that none of them — from two different generations — can separate what they believe and what they think they know about parenting from the facts staring them in the face.

Hugh Jackman plays a 50something, politically-connected New York lawyer with a much younger wife (Vanessa Kirby) and new baby in the house.

Of course this is Peter’s second-marriage. We don’t need the “We need to talk” phone call from the ex (Laura Dern) to figure that out. And that “need to talk” is also self-explanatory.

Their teenage son (Zen McGrath) has skipped school for the past month. Pricey and private and Manhattan-based doesn’t mean administrators will let you know right away that a kid is going off the rails.

That’s one of the “curious” plot contrivances that Zeller and Hampton build into their narrative, the convenient failures of institutional early warning systems and the inadequate responses of self-involved parents who have to deal with the emerging crisis.

Peter may be about to join a senator’s campaign staff in Washington. Ex-wife Kate has her own job and career that may have caused her to take her eye off the ball, something she seems to worriedly accept.

But Nicholas has gotten out of hand, and divorced or not, they’re going to have to respond in a united and best-information-available responsible way.

Each parent wears the guilt of “all that’s happened.” New wife and new life or not, Peter has to man up.

“I can’t pretend I’m not responsible for this situation.”

Their efforts to intervene in the life and direction of their aimless, silent and sullen child is up against the simplest pitfall imaginable. He can’t articulate what’s happened or what’s happening to him. He can no longer bring himself to return Mom’s “Love you” as he departs for the school he isn’t actually attending, can’t justify his behavior and can’t be relied on to provide his own solutions.

“It’s life. It’s…weighing me down.” Please Dad, let me move in with YOU.

This dynamic’s version of “tough love” comes from new-mom/second wife Beth, who has enough remove from the situation to ask blunt, direction questions of a kid who’s learned to deflect and guilt trip his mother and father about what ended their marriage and their ignorance over what that’s done to him.

He’s listless and depressed and can’t make himself go to school.

“Are you in pain? Are you unhappy? WHY are you unhappy?”

Beth gets nothing for her trouble but comeback questions about why she pursued his then-married father.

As Peter also stares-down the guilt which seems the kid’s only response to “why” this is happening, he finds himself reconsidering life choices and professional commitments in the face of what he sees as his real duty, something reinforced by a visit to his patrician, iceberg of a father. Paterfamilias is played by Anthony Hopkins in a steely single scene that will chill you to the marrow. Peter’s rich, power-brokering father was never there for his mother of himself. Can Peter interrupt that pattern of privileged neglect?

I think Zeller and Hampton’s most relatable scenes and situations are the ones they create that give the ever-upbeat Peter, and the viewer, cause for his sugar-coated optimism, and offer Kate and Beth hope.

Peter gets involved. They get the kid to smile. A single normal “happy” moment or two — teaching the boy to dance like Hugh Jackman imitating a guy who imitates Tom Jones — gives everybody that feeling that “this will blow over” and no further effort or alarm is necessary.

And when that optimism seems premature, Peter engages with the child with what we can see is firm and blunt laying-down-the-law, but backed by fatherly empathy.

The flashbacks to a memorable family vacation let him believe he was doing what he could to cajole a happy but fragile and fearful child’s development, even as we wonder what was happening in the marriage at that time.

Generations of experts and books and TV and film parenting have taught us “This is how you face that.” But a boy who cuts himself? A kid who refuses to answer a direct question about where he’s been? A child who lies about the life you’re constantly asking him about? What do you do with that?

I found “The Son” both relatable and a touch maddening as characters underreact to the warning bells and ignore the too-obvious foreshadowing engineered into the screenplay.

But there’s no quibbling with the performances, with Oscar winners Dern and Hopkins fleshing out fully-formed characters in limited screen time, and Jackman showing us a stunned, distracted and desperate man unused to any of those emotions, straining to do the right thing, but discovering that good intent, prescribed responses and earnestly caring are not enough.

Jackman gives a great performance at the center of a frustrating film that never quite lets us hope that anyone involved will find answers, and never lets its characters, or the viewer off the hook even if they do.

Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content involving suicide, and strong language.

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath and Anthony Hopkins.

Credits: Directed by Florian Zeller, scripted by Christopher Hampton based on the play by Florian Zeller, based on their play. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:03

Harrison Ford, John Rhys-Davies….Need I go on?

Ok then, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, Mads Mikkelson and Antonio Freaking Banderas.

A 1960s setting? New York, etc.?

James Mangold directs from a Jez Butterworth et al script.