Movie Nation

“Christmas with the Campbells” is a soft-and-squishy Christmas rom-com that tries ever-so-hard to be “edgy” when it oh-so-obviously isn’t.

Yes, there’s amusement in seeing that effort. Some. I mean, Justin Long attempting a folksy drawl as the outdoorsy nephew to his randy aunt (Julia Duffy) is cute.

“Gawd, if you were two years younger we’d have to try NOT to get pregnant.”

Duffy, playing up the elderly hair-dresser determined to keep sex on a schedule with her retirement-ready accountant husband (George Wendt) but getting into this banter with the nephew, is just as cute.

“That Wrangler butt’a yours is driving me NUTS!”

The M.O. here is to take your typical sappy snowy holiday romance, park “Pitch Perfect” Brittney Snow in it as put-upon and just-dumped by a vulgarian (“SNL” and “Home Economics” vet Alex Moffat) damsel, and have her pursued by his more down-to-Earth cousin (Long), throw in a lot of off-color remarks and jokes at it to see what sticks.

Vince Vaughn is one of the credited writers here, so the dialogue’s flip and profane when it isn’t being all sad and stiff. But one wonders if, along with the f-bombs dropped for shock value, Moffat’s little out-of-nowhere stunt-fart was in that script.

The set-up — Jesse’s a Chicago photographer and Petco part-timer hooked up with accountant on the make Sean (Moffat) who dumps her right after his mother’s renewed her invitation to Christmas in Ketchum, Idaho. Sean’s ready to move to New York and move on, with his no-big-deal spiel all worked out.

“We kept the fights clean and the sex dirty, and neither one of us were unfaithful — as far as you know…”

But Mrs. Campbell adores her antiquing, cooking and kvetching buddy Jesse and insists she come to Idaho anyway. Her nephew from out of town (Long) shows up, with his pick-up and his adorable Australian shepherd. They’re all set to get tongues to wagging in this gossipy small town when Sean changes plans and shows up as well, not knowing Jesse’s there.

AWK-ward. But not really that funny.

And yet Long, sounding as if he’s improvising a lot of his cornponespeak, goes for it.

“No need to hang your laundry out here in front of me. That’s YOUR Dairy Queen!”

Complimenting Jesse’s sparkly party dress — “You like like a disco ball made sweet love to a shootin’ star.”

Why, it’s enough to make a gal blush.

Everybody here has been around long enough to create personas that they lean into even as they try to mix things up a bit. The twist here is that the oversexed Idahoans are the ones who put the “Ho” into “Ho Ho Ho,” and the city gal and the nephew are the outsiders a tad rattled by that. But it doesn’t really play or pay off with big laughs or light tugs at the heartstrings.

Still, I suppose nothing says “Christmas” like a lot of “small town” folks, including the 70somethings, flirting and propositioning and nagging each other about sex in the most explicit fashion. To some people anyway.

Rating: unrated, lots of profanity and sex talk

Cast: Brittany Snow, Justin Long, Julia Duffy, George Wendt and Alex Moffat.

Credits: Directed by Clare Niederpruem, scripted by Barbara Kymlicka, Dan Lagana and Vince Vaughn. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:28

A24 picked up this writing and directing turn from Eisenberg after it made a splash at Sundance.

A kid seeking online “validation,” a mother feeling cut off.

“When You Finish Saving the World” hits theaters in late January.

The great gamine, fashion icon, UNICEF ambassador and oh-by-the-way, film star Audrey Hepburn never worked with Alfred Hitchcock. Not blonde enough, I guess.

But she came close, flirting with Hitchcockian thrillers in “Wait Until Dark,” flirting with Cary Grant in a murderous comic thriller “Charade,” and carrying on with Peter O’Toole in the Paris of Earthly delights caper comedy “How to Steal a Million.”

The first joke that works in this William Wyler mid-60s wonder has Hepburn, in bed reading a paperback biography of “Hitchcock,” a sly dig that notes that while she never worked with “The Master of Suspense,” she did work with Wyler (“Ben Hur,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “The Big Country”), one of the great directors of his era, and not just once.

Together, they’d made Gregory Peck light and charming in “Roman Holiday,” and here, they reunite late in Wyler’s career to make a straight-up caper comedy/romance. “How to Steal a Million” is both adorably old-fashioned and a not-quite “swinging ’60s” time capsule that puts mid-60s Paris, fashion, wit and style under glass for future generations to marvel over.

Caper comedies were all the rage after “The Pink Panther,” and as Peter O’Toole had shown that he could be light and funny in the generally unfunny “What’s New Pussycat?” why not pair him with Hepburn and see what sparks they set off?

She’s Nicole Bonnet, the well-turned-out daughter of an art forger, played by the jolly character actor Hugh Griffith (“Start the Revolution Without Me” might have been his finest hour, but he was a larger-than-life Arab chieftain and horse lover in Wyler’s “Ben-Hur”). O’Toole is a thief she interrupts while stealing one of her father’s (fake) Van Goghs. She accidentally shoots him with one of her father’s antique (flintlock) dueling pistols.

“Well, it was pitch dark and there he was…Tall, blue eyes, slim, quite good-looking… in a brutal, mean way, Papa. A terrible man!”

She drives this “wounded” fellow, who goes by Simon Dermott, home to the Ritz in his “stolen” Jaguar — “I can’t drive a STOLEN car!” “Same principle, four gears forward, one reverse.” Eventually, when she realizes her father is about to be exposed as a forger, Nicole commissions the dashing Brit to help her steal a forgery from an ever-so-secure Paris museum to spare Papa from Prison.

 “Why must it be this particular work of art?”

“You don’t think I’d steal something that didn’t belong to me, do you?”

 “Excuse me, I spoke without thinking.”

The banter just sparkles here, and Wyler — not known for comedy — keeps it coming and keeps it coming at a sprint. The costume-designer turned screenwriter, Harry Kurnitz, wrote “Hatari,” the reincarnation comedy “Goodbye, Charlie” and the stage play which Blake Edwards and William Peter Blatty turned into “A Shot in the Dark.” He knew enough about comedy for the both of them, and Wyler had the good sense to do what he did best — get great takes and turn them into great performances, giving us a couple with crackling chemistry evident in all the antics they get up to trying to “steal a million.”

Eli Wallach plays a boorish American millionaire new to art collecting, hellbent on buying Papa’s forgeries and determined to have Nicole for his very own.

“Made up my mind. Man of action! Snap judgment. I bought a fleet of tankers that way once. One of the best deals I ever made.”

“But I’m not a fleet of tankers and I’m not getting engaged to a man I barely know.”

“Well, you’ll get to know me. Look me up in Who’s Who, Dun & Bradstreet!”

It’s so dated as to make you wince in a “#TimesUp” way.

Other complications include Simon’s secret agenda (that plummy-voiced “Gaslighter” Charles Boyer figures into the story), and the great French actor Marcel Dalio (“The Rules of the Game”) who fled to Hollywood to a lesser career in character roles (he was the croupier in “Casablanca”) turns up as an art-loving Spaniard.

There are infrared sensors (a new thing) to be foiled, art auctions to visit, nightlife and cafe society to be sampled and Chanel fashions and instant classic cars to be ogled.

And it’s all so light on its feet. Sure, it’s slight and entirely too long. But rarely have two rom-com hours skipped by as merrily as this, a comedy that’s what “we” mean when we say “They don’t make’em like this any more.”

Rating: “approved” (PG, a shooting)

Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Peter O’Toole, Hugh Griffith, Eli Wallach, Marcel Dalio and Charles Boyer

Credits: Directed by William Wyler, scripted by Harry Kurnitz. A 20th Century (Fox) release, now on Amazon, Tubi, Movies! etc.

Running time: 2:03

I used to be more sentimental about Christmas movies, how Santa came off on screen and all that.

“Bad Santa” cured me of that. Mr. Harbour has had a few shots at big screen glory. This one doesn’t have Marvel on its opening credits, but it could land.

“Violent Night” arrives Thursday night, here to save a foundering box office.

It was one of the BIG factors in this being the “worst Thanksgiving box office weekend ever.”

A Steven Spielberg movie opening with about $3.5 million over FIVE days is kind of unheard of, too.

A half-decent (but only half) Korean War movie, “Devotion,” pulled in a respectable $9 million.

But take away the $64 million or so “Wakanda Forever” pulled in, and theaters could have stayed closed and saved on electricity.

What a mess. Is there anything opening between now and Christmas that isn’t destined for Netflix and thus destined to make little if anything?

Bad news for theaters. Better hope “Violent Night” delivers the horror, the horror — and the fans. Seeing that one Tuesday night.

It takes a special kind of “creativity” to see this news story and think, “That smells like BOX OFFICE.”

How it took 38 years to make it to the screen is anybody’s guess.

Feb. 24.

“Reviewing” entails watching a movie, taking notes on it and then using those notes and your memory, your tastes, your idea of touchstone performances, screenplays, directing, editing and production design, to form an opinion of the film and its many components.

But that model kind of goes to pieces — or at least gets a thorough shaking — when you’re plowing all the way through the film and asking yourself “What the hell is going on?” and “What the hell is this about?”

So once again, we doff our hat to the Dutch master of misdirection, Alex van Warmerdam. The director of “Borgman” and “Schneider vs. Bax” lures us into “Nr. 10,” makes us ponder everything from what the title means to a beyond-abrupt third act turn that had me jotting down “Wait, what the hell just happened?” And then he leaves us with one of the more delightfully nasty shots at The Mother Church ever filmed.

I am sorely tempted to simply repeat my blurb for my review of “Borgman” and leave this at that.

“Maddeningly inscrutable, but it gets away with not playing by the rules. Somehow.”

“Nr. 10” breaks even more rules, most importantly the one in which we expect our screen storyteller to “play fair.” It’s not remotely as visceral an experience as “Borgman,” probably not as cerebral, either. It’s certainly more frustrating and less satisfying.

The opening acts are about a new play being rehearsed and kind of coming to pieces as it does.

Leading man Günter (Tom Dewispelaere) is somewhat at odds with distracted, older co-star Marius (Pierre Bokma). We’d feel sorry for Marius, who can’t remember his lines, because Günter and director Karl (Hans Kesting) are messing around with the blocking to put poor Marius in one “inferior” and submissive (overshadowed) position on stage after another. But we’ve seen Marius dismiss his dangerously sick wife’s concerns at being left at home alone.

Acting is a profession that lures the self-absorbed, and amplifies that absorption, after all.

Then we note that leading lady Isabel (Anniek Pheifer) has told her director/husband she needs alone time for “preparation,” and that’s she’s staying elsewhere until opening night. Turns out, she’s motor-scootering straight into Günter’s bed.

And self-involved Günter wants to keep this selfish affair from everyone, especially his adult daughter Lizzy (Frieda Barnhard), for reasons we can’t quite figure out.

Get used to that feeling. It’s van Warmerdam’s calling card.

Marius is about to up the stakes in his war with Günter by telling Karl what’s going on. Karl starts to spy on Isabel. Lizzy is following her dad around to see what Günter is up to.

Karl proceeds to sabotage his own absurdist play, yanking lines to punish this player and perhaps reward that one.

“There are no parts any more, just lines,” he declares (in Dutch with English subtitles). “It’s not a play, it’s a collage…an abstract collage without logic!”

The cast panics.

And there’s a spy in the company who is reporting back to this sports-addicted Catholic bishop (Dirk Böhling) who seems to want to know everything about everyone in this stage fiasco-in-the-making. He is pulling strings to manipulate one and all in service of some grand scheme that, as the headline to this review suggests, has more than a whiff of Kurt Vonnegut about it.

If you react to how this backstage backbiting builds towards something, and then is suddenly abandoned, with a “You have got to be kidding me,” you won’t be the first.

Warmerdam isn’t so much building a puzzle that he’ll solve, or invite us to solve, as grafting two wholly-formed, partly over-lapping long short films together and daring us to make sense of it all.

The third act’s turn towards theological debate seems utterly illogical, no matter how much about a character’s true past is explained and back-engineered. Mysterious strangers whispering mysterious words in your ear is nothing you want to burn through bandwidth on if you’re being forced to learn all new lines with opening night rushing at you so fast you’re sure to snap.

The theater scenes are so cleverly conceived — theater companies are notorious for such “Noises Off” shenanigans — and so well-acted that the film can only become a disappointment when this setting and story thread are abandoned.

As much as I like the challenge van Warmerdam’s satiric experiments always are, including this 1992 film I got into earlier this year, I found “Nr. 10” less coherent and much less satisfying than anything of his that I’ve seen.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Tom Dewispelaere, Frieda Barnhard, Hans Kesting, Anniek Pheifer, Dirk Böhling, and Mandela Wee Wee

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex van Warmerdam. A Drafthouse release.

Running time: 1:39

“EO” is an odd animal’s life odyssey that takes the point of view of its mute, occasionally-braying title character, a donkey. It’s a picaresque adventure never far from the dark shadow that hangs over domesticated animals in the service of humans.

Mistreatment, abuse and even death are often the grim realities of their short lives.

This Cannes award winner makes for a fine curtain call for its 84 year-old filmmaker, Polish writer-director Jerzy Skolimowski, still best known outside of Poland for his 1982 Polish emigres in Britain drama “Moonlighting.” He and his camera crew take a shot at seeing what a donkey would see, and letting the viewer imagine donkey memories, donkey depression and donkey reasoning as they do.

If 2022 is the year of cute donkeys in the movies, “The Banshees of Inisherin” probably takes the prize for the cutest. But as with that film, “cute” is no guarantee of a happy life, a treasured life or a particularly kid-friendly film, which this most certainly isn’t.

We meet EO in strobing darkness, an attraction of the tiny Cyrk Orion, a Polish circus where he is his co-star Kassandra’s (Sandra Drzymalska) pride and joy. But in between shows under the big top, EO is a draft animal used to haul scrap by a cruel Polish carny struggling to supplement his income.

And then the circus goes bankrupt and the animals are sold off. Just like that, EO’s torn from his performing mistress and packed off, staring out the window of the equine hauler at the thoroughbreds cavorting in vast pastures.

EO has landed in a great situation, or so we think. But all the animals work — horses training for equestrian events and shows day and night, rarely cavorting, mostly confined to a big stable and training facility. One wrong move by EO, who is used for both draft work and calming the skittish show horses, and he’s sent off again — this time to a sanctuary farm/petting zoo where donkey trail rides are part of his duties.

Skolimowski emphasizes several things about domesticated animals’ existence in “EO,” among them the drudgery of routine and the pull of memory. EO still dreams of Kassandra.

Before this tale is done, EO will be rescued from a horse and donkey “meat wagon” and exact revenge on an employee at a fur farm. He will heeHAW at just the right moment to throw a soccer match, and be lauded by one team’s players and brutally abused by the losers.

“EO” has a message, and it’s somewhat bleak and generally told in a decidedly oblique fashion. There is a linear narrative, but it is filled with blips and gaps, as if the donkey doesn’t exactly remember how he ended up in the hands of a murderer or waking up in a large animal veterinary hospital.

Seemingly random images — upside down shots of night skiing — break the spell that this is a donkey’s eye-view of his life and Europe today. A third act spent briefly in the company of Isabella Huppert seems more a distraction than a source of essential truths. Nevertheless, this film is quite affecting and touching at times.

The earlier films this downbeat drama brings to mind are “White God,” a Hungarian drama about a girl separated from her dog, Spielberg’s adaptation of “War Horse,” the Turkish street dog documentary “Stray,” Andrea Arnold’s revelatory and myopic documentary “Cow” or going much further back, Robert Bresson’s donkey’s life tale “Au Hazard Balthazar.”

All of these films, even the ones that allow for sentiment, impress upon us the inconvenient truths about human/animal relationships. Anderson Cooper’s dog may love him, but at the end of the day, this co-dependency cuts both ways only because we insist that it does, until it’s no longer “practical.” And then the relationship, the commitment and even one of the two lives involved ends, or is ended.

Rating: unrated, violence, animal cruelty

Cast: Sandra Drzymalska, Michal Przybyslawski, Lorenzo Zurzolo and Isabelle Huppert

Credits: Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, scripted by Ewa Piaskowska and Jerzy Skolimowski. A Janus Films release.

Running time:

Scrawny, cadaverous and creepy, actor Javier Botet has graced many a chilling moment in Hollywood horror films — “The Mummy” and “It” and “Conjuring 2” among them. The man has a marketable “look.”

But he achieves something like a break-out performance in a film shot and set in his native Spain. “Amigo” is a simple, chilling and sometimes grimly-amusing two-handed thriller directed and co-written by Óscar Martín, a video game and short film veteran finally making his feature directing debut. Its a film whose minimalism only heightens its suspense and narrows and sharpens the focus of its intensity.

A long, mostly dialogue-free opening shows us David (David Pareja) patiently loading his broken and emaciated friend Javi out of his old Fiat and into a wheelchair. It’s 1980 or thereabouts, and David has taken in his paralyzed childhood “amigo.”

It takes a while to establish that Javi is in this state due to an accident. It takes almost as long for us to figure out if he can speak. Even the visiting physical therapist (Patricia Estremera) has a hard time getting a peep out of him.

How noble of David to take him in, we think. How loyal he must be, accepting this responsibility and burden. I mean, sure, he can still carry on his affair with a married paramour. But David’s plainly giving up a lot, devoting himself to caring for this friend who could die soon, or could linger for years and years.

As the physical therapy kicks in, David locates a bell Javi can ring when he needs to go to the bathroom or wants something to eat or drink.

But the bell, the halting “You don’t get it, I want to die” (in Spanish with English subtitles), the Christmas blizzard that shuts down David’s supply of the pills that keep him sane, all merely set the table for the suspense to come.

And when it comes, who will turn out to be the more paranoid? Who will wonder if the other is faking paraplegia or faking sincere “caring,” and who will wonder if the supernatural is involved?

The chills are limited to the odd creepy moment — a passing shadow glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, when you think you’re the only person on your feet here, creaking floorboards in a remote country house, a bell that might be ringing by itself.

Botet and Pareja, who co-wrote this, play up the mistrust and the uncertainty in characters who have conflicting story arcs, each beginning at one point and evolving towards the other character’s starting point of view.

The surprises here aren’t that surprising, any more than the film’s tensest moment, which is brilliantly excruciating and beautifully shot and edited.

That helps the simple, understated “Amigo” achieve a jolt or two and a laugh or three as it takes us into the darker corners of guilt, revenge, friendship and commitment.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity, sex

Cast: Javier Botet, David Pareja

Credits: Directed by Óscar Martín, scripted by
Óscar Martín, Javier Botet, David Pareja. A Dekanalog release.

Running time: 1:23

Top tip for watching “Lesson Plan (Plan lekcji),” a new thriller available on Netflix in its original Polish (with subtitles) or dubbed into English. Don’t look away from the screen to check your phone or dash into the kitchen for a snack.

You won’t miss a fight, considering how long these brawls are. But you won’t know how it started.

Our hero, the undercover cop nicknamed Jiu Jitsu (Piotr Witkowski), is always getting into scrapes — jumped at the liquor store, intervening when some homophobes pick on a lesbian couple at a bar. Some of the punchouts are to be expected. After all, he’s on the illegal fentanyl beat. But even after he takes on a job as a high school history teacher, he’s tested. And tested again.

The “measly history teacher” is always taunted. And he’s always ready with a come-back. “You’re about to BE history!”

“You hit like a WOMAN!” “Clearly, we know DIFFERENT women!”

Yes, what we have here is a straight-up B-picture, the “plot” an excuse for getting into the next fight, and then the next one, the brawls always pausing for pithy one-liners and the fighting staged at fight-choreographer 3/4 speed.

But it’s got a few laughs, and the fights are fun if a tad telegraphed.

Our hero is outed as undercover, wholly capable of beating and shooting his way out of that jam, but not in time to save his wife. He crawls into a bottle, only to crawl back out when his high school teacher brother (Marcin Bosak) is murdered, possibly framed for being his school’s one-man fentanyl food chain.

He will be the “measly history teacher” at problematic Jan Sobieski High, the worst of the worst high schools, where bullying and drugs and shakedowns are on the curriculum, and the teachers and administrators all but helpless in the face of all this.

Jiu Jitsu, who has to go by Damian — his real name — tries to comfort his enraged nephew, a student there and a kid who knows his dad tried to get uncle Damian to help before he was killed. Damian also starts laying down the law to the bullies and goons who roam the halls and starts looking out for the cute fellow teacher (Roma Gasiorowska) who finds herself caught between students and drug dealers and gangsters and this history teacher who isn’t above teaching his students a little self-defense while quoting that historical figure Bruce Lee.

It’s a slick looking film, even if its plot points and “surprises” are as obvious as the low-speed head-butts, punches and kicks we see coming from a mile off.

Witkowski, a supporting player stepping into his first leading man role, has charisma to burn and decent comic timing — for the one-liners — and is more credible in the fights than the fights themselves. If he gets the handle on fight choreography — fighting at full speed in future films — he could be Poland’s Jason Statham.

Not a bad goal, because that from Portland to Portugal to Pyonyang, B-movie action pics play.

Rating: TV-MA, nonstop violence, drug content

Cast: Piotr Witkowski, Marcin Bosak, Roma Gasiorowska

Credits: Directed by Daniel Markowicz, scripted by Daniel Bernardi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39