Movie Nation

“Getting to Know You” is “Up in the Air” without the air — or airline travel. Or “backpack” speeches.

This light, wistful Canadian romantic comedy clings to its longing and amuses in its awkwardness. Well-cast, well-acted, a touch melancholy and a tad overlong, it’s one of those movies that would have passed me, you and everybody else by if a pandemic hadn’t derailed the global movie-consuming model.

British actress Natasha Little (“The Night Manager”) is Abby, who has flown from London to northern Ontario for a funeral. Rupert Penry Jones (“Black Sails”) is Luke, a Canadian “big city” guy “home” for his high school reunion.

They “meet cute,” late at night, at the “best” hotel in town. The “cute” and memorable part is he’s standing there, wearing a lei, and she’s trying to check in, both of them overhearing two staff members going at it in the office behind the front desk.

“I don’t think it’ll be long now.”

Ahem.

“How long should we give them?”

“About a whole cigarette.”

The terrible service at the Bay Front will be a running gag, rude rude staff members who are more tied up in their own dalliances and melodramatic intrigues than they are in their work. Another running gag? How loud, boorish and indiscreet small-town Canadians are, to a one, in this corner of Ontario.

Abby and Luke? They’re thrown together by this incompetence, two lonely strangers who bond, talk of regrets and find themselves all mixed up in each other’s business.

Because as crushed as Luke was to learn his high school sweetheart married “the paper boy” and brushed off his heartfelt confession of unending love, he’s completely put-out when Kayla (Rachel Blanchard, brash and funny) shows up, drunk, throwing herself at him in his room.

“I haven’t had an orgasm since” is merely the beginning of Kayla’s coital full-court press. She’ll leave her husband and children and run off to New York with her first love!

Only Abby can save him. I mean, “I sympathize, but what can I do?”

That’s where this “Brief Encounter” turns daft. She’ll scare Kayla off, pretending to be Luke’s wife. Only Kayla is too drunk and desperate to scare.

“He loves me more than he loves you, bitch!”

And as pushy and obnoxious as she is, she’s not the worst “old friend” Luke collides with over the next day.

Penry-Jones and Little have a genteel, reserved (they’re both British) chemistry. The laughs come from their collision with assorted Luke classmates, the testier and testier staff at the Bay Front and the preacher/classmate (Duane Murray) who presides at Abby’s late-brother’s funeral.

“It was either this or real-estate — and I was never good on commission!”

Writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin, who’s been around since “Sleeping with Strangers” (1994), has a sure hand with this material, save for finding a graceful way to exit it. A melancholy sets in when Abby and Luke, two strangers, are left without loopy locals to bounce off of, lie about their “marriage” to on the fly, etc.

But if you’re looking for a little grown-up romance, adults with adult issues and complications that interfere with their chemistry, “Getting to Know You” more than fills the bill.

MPA Rating: unrated, with sexual situations, alcohol abuse and profanity

Cast: Natasha Little, Rupert Penry-Jones, Rachel Blanchard, Duane Murray

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joan Carr-Wiggin. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:43

Robert Towne couldn’t structure a script worth a damn, and he kept the fact that he used a collaborator and co-writer a secret from Hollywood.

So his “greatest screenplay ever” or “best script of the ’70s” reputation, based on a screenwriting textbook’s effusive praise for it at the time, is a fraud.

Roman Polanski solicited underage girls for years before Anjelica Huston caught him with the one he was charged with drugging, raping and sodomizing (at Jack Nicholson’s house) in the mid-’70s.

Pretty boy/studio chief/producer wunderkind Robert Evans “wasn’t a reader,” but he was a decent judge of talent (save for Ali McGraw), and held screenings with friends at his palatial hilltop mansion “Woodlands,” took their opinions and molded them into his own. Such a screening was where he scrapped the dissonant score Roman Polanski wanted for “Chinatown” and brought in composer Jerry Goldsmith.

Evans liked to say he “saved” pictures like “The Godfather,” but Coppola never thanked Evans in his many acceptance speeches. And Jerry Goldsmith “saved” “Chinatown” in just a couple of inspired days. Damn.

Once Jack Nicholson got his Oscar for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” right after “Chinatown,” he stopped choosing challenging material and made it all about “The doe-re-me, doll.” But we knew that.

Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye: ‘Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood” is an evocative, detailed account of the milieu “Chinatown” was created in, just after The Manson Family mass murders, just as cocaine was about to take over Tinseltown.

Think of “The Big Goodbye” as “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” with nothing but facts.

It’s a somewhat purple mini-biography of Nicholson’s Jack Pack, the friends he made when he came to Hollywood whom he stayed loyal to for decades, adding “the little Polack” (Polanski) to their ranks when they made what might be the best film of one of cinema’s best decades.

Towne and his lifelong sounding board/collaborator Edward Taylor, “the big mystery reader” (and Raymond Chandler fan) of the two, spent years building the untitled “Chinatown” out of memories of the LA that had mostly disappeared by 1970, but which both remembered from their youth. Towne wrote it for his longtime pal and muse Jack Nicholson, just reaching stardom after “Easy Rider.”

And then Polanski, still devastated by the Manson family murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, was lured back to a city that haunted him by Evans, whose studio made a mint off “Rosemary’s Baby.” Polanski stripped the bloated script down to its private eye basics, “made it make sense” and made damned sure “the girl dies at the end.”

“The girl” was Faye Dunaway, a diva hated on the set, bullied by Polanski, but understood by some of the other actors in the picture. She kept everybody waiting.

Jack? He had to be done by the time the Lakers were on TV. As always.

“The Big Goodbye” is a breezy, quick read — purple passages about “the eucalyptus” and everybody involved’s childhood/parent “issues” aside. Longtime Variety chief Peter Bart, Evans’ Paramount colleague/co-conspirator (the who one read and had taste) is here, very young Anjelica’s infatuation with Jack, Jack’s adoration of her dad, director and “Chinatown” co-star John Huston, all covered as Warren Beatty, Hal Ashby, Harry Dean Stanton and others drift around the edges.

Anecdotes abound, furious on-set fights, Dunaway shrieking when Polanski impatiently yanked out strands of her hair to make a prettier shot, Nicholson and Polanski squaring off over a Lakers’ game that went into overtime. But the many ways Anjelica Huston could be humiliated by her drunken dad whenever she visited the set stands out.

“So…” her father boomed across the (lunch) table to Nicholson. “I hear you’re sleeping with my daughter…Mr. Gitts!”

Wasson is astute in picking out the dates and ways Hollywood “ended” around this time, from “Billy Jack” turning the business into wide releases/make all the money the first weekend, to “Jaws” launching the blockbuster era to Jack’s selling out to play “The Joker,” which drove him, the broken outcast Evans and coke-addled Towne to finally get around to “The Two Jakes” sequel over a decade later.

The overarching theme, a loss of American innocence, connecting the “water theft” scandal of LA history from the movie to the Manson murders and Watergate, fits like a glove.

If you loved “Once Upon a Time,” here’s one of the better books about its context, built around one of the defining films of the era.

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. By Sam Wasson. 334 pages, $28.95, Flatiron Books.

In the last decade of the Soviet Empire, George Soros sent copying machines to Eastern Europe.

People like Václav Havel of Czechoslovakia, Lech Wałęsa of Poland and other dissidents behind the Iron Curtain got them. In that pre-Internet age, photocopying fliers, Western newspaper stories and calls to action was a cost-effective way to spread messages of dissent across totalitarian states.

In violent, racist and fascist 1979 South Africa, Soros underwrote a vast academic scholarship program for Black schoolchildren, reasoning that if anything there was ever going to improve, “educating the Blacks” would be behind it.

When the Bosnian Civil War broke out and with it the Serbian genocide against Muslims in the formerly multi-ethnic states of the former Yugoslavia, Soros charities shipped vegetable seeds and newsprint to the besieged minorities, sponsored concerts and the like, an effort to “let them hang on” until the international community finally took action against the aggressors.

And when the Serbian mass murderers were finally brought to justice, it was an in International War Crimes court backed by charities supported by George Soros.

Lucky and rare is the American who doesn’t have some Fox-addicted relative or high school classmate forwarding a chain letter literally demonizing — pictures with little Devil’s horns drawn on — or just blurting out the name “George SOROS” in the middle of a debate that they’ve realized they can’t win on the merits of their arguments.

He is the far right’s Bond Villain, financially responsible for everything they hate, from “Black Lives Matter” and the mythic “antifa” to COVID19 shutdowns and the pumpkin spice flavoring epidemic.

A quick and cringe-worthy montage of Fox News, Russia Today, Rush Limbaugh, Lyndon Larouche, Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck clips, of Britain’s Brexit backer Nigel Farage and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban cursing his name open “Soros,” a documentary profile of the Hungarian expat, hedge-fund billionaire and global philanthropist. Such hate-mongering montages also show up later in the film, directed by comedy director Jesse Dylan (“American Wedding,” “Kicking and Screaming”). It’s an ongoing caricaturization.

Then Soros himself appears, a very old man in a plain shirt, telling his story. He re-directs Dylan’s off-camera question about the beginning of his “political philanthropy” (the South African scholarships) and tells his life story — growing up in Hungary during the Holocaust, the ways his father kept the family alive, even if he couldn’t keep the Russians from raping his mother after the Germans were finally driven out.

Academics, journalists, non-profit NGO (non-government charitable) organization chiefs, and no less than THREE Nobel laureates then weigh in on Soros the man, his seemingly sincere motivations and his global impact on pushing the world’s repressive regimes towards more “open societies.”

And any sober-minded person who isn’t brainwashed can only wonder, “What on Earth are those people (Fox addicts) upset about?”

Dylan’s film’s interviews are mostly with people who know Soros, including his children and those in charge of the Open Society Foundation, which he backs, although others are here to take a more detached view of his philanthropy and impact on the world.

Fox’s Tucker Carlson lays out why people mistrust Soros, without accepting responsibility for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire’s anti-Soros mania. Oh no, the death threats and bomb sent to Soros’ house have nothing to do with O’Reilly, Beck and Carlson’s ceaseless “dog whistle” attacks on the Hungarian Jew.

Soros is seen in decades of interviews sampled here, typically promoting books that he wrote as he started spending the billions he’d earned as a high roller, betting on or against banks, businesses and governments heading into or emerging from each financial crisis that he had the foresight to anticipate. He talks of the big influences on his thinking, and what’s shaped his philanthropic philosophy.

He sticks up for minorities, like the one he belongs to that so many right wing critics are so very quick to bring up. And when he donates to support free speech, education, equal rights or what have you in Africa, Myanmar, Hungary or the Middle East, he wants to lead by example.

Soros understands the value of “not simply helping people like you.”

The film doesn’t significantly alter the picture of Soros that has emerged from a “60 Minutes” profile here or a CNN interview there. But those aren’t the media organizations lying about his background, exaggerating his influence or twisting his motives. They aren’t the ones drawing Satan’s horns on his head.

Then again, Nobel laureates, American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch and NAACP spokespeople aren’t nearly as credible as Anne Coulter, Rosanne Barr and loony Lyndon Larouche to the hopelessly venal and ill-informed.

As America starts the long process of recovering from the racist-nationalist ignorance of the last four years, an intellectual, moral and financial collapse that even Soros didn’t see coming, “Soros” could be a useful film to buy and send to relatives this holiday season.

The Fox-driven hatred of Soros comes off as many of Donald Trump’s tantrums do — “projection.” Fox oligarch Rupert Murdoch is the one not-so-secretly attacking free speech and disrupting free societies for personal gain. But blame George Soros.

Let the people you won’t be able to see thanks to an incompetently managed pandemic and the political ugliness that Donald Trump’s reign unleashed get a light dose of “fact” in place of the ignorance and hatred they’ve been spreading, one ignorant, Anti-Semitic chain letter at a time.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: George Soros, Leymah Gbowee, Kofi Annan, Jeri Laber, Leon Botstein, Joseph Stiglitz, Tucker Carlson, many others

Credits: Directed by Jesse Dylan. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:25

Well, it’s got to be worth a few laughs, right?

A martial arts sci-fi thriller with Nicolas Cage in the Nic Cage role — “He knows I’m crazy. There’s no HONOR in killing crazy!”

Set in Burma, “Jiu Jitsu” was filmed in Cypress, another dividend from that “Cypress: It’s not just for money-laundering any more” film commission campaign.

The first images are of a guy fleeing…something — with these digital Ninja throwing stars “zing zing” zinging by him.

The first words, when this wounded guy (Alain Moussi) is dropped off with the off-the-books U.S. Army group in country, are uttered by a Sergeant who sounds like Lindsey Graham’s less masculine Carolina cousin.

This indie nonsense staggers along, letting us know that our survivor has amnesia, that the Army has him but this other “team” led by Frank Grillo “had” him, that there’s something radioactive in Burma’s “Valley of the Temples,” and the guy’s actual name is “Jake,” and he has a martial artist mercenary girlfriend (JuJu Chan).

Brawls ensue. Tony Jaa is here, and Ricky Yune.

“Who WERE those Jedi Knights who just took out my unit?”

And then, Thank the Maker, Nicolas Cage Himself shows up, in full Dennis-Hopper-in-“Apocalypse-Now” regalia. Who’re you?

“I’m YOU…in a few years, if you don’t get your s–t together!”

“You look puzzled! ARE you puzzled? I get it. I’M PUZZLED.”

Cage is here to explain first, himself, how he gets along, living in a cave.

“I’ve got my hobbies. I make hats outta newspapers. It’s an art…AND a craft!”

He also pulls together all the snippets of story, the misinterpreted locals who fear what shows up every time a six year comet returns to Burmese (Cypriot) skies. Sure, we’ve seen first-person shooter point-of-view footage as Jake escapes one “unit” and stumbles into other. But then there’re all these heads-up infrared targeting shots. SOMEthing is hunting them. All of them.

It’s the Alien Predator who “brought the world jiu jitsu.” And he comes back, every six years, “looking for a fight.”

Only the best Jiu Jitsu warriors will do. A fight to the death, with the fate of humanity at stake. How’s the crazy guy know all this? Remember, “there’s no honor in killing CRAZY!”

The fights are reasonably well-choreographed, the stuntwork not totally obvious. The effects are adequate, there are half-assed “graphic novel” chapter breaks and titles — “The Rabbit,” and the like.

The story? Strictly wakkie nunu.

At least Cage is here for a few laughs. Heck, he’s even given the cleverest martial arts one-liner ever.

“Just remember the one thing you always have with Jiu Jitsu — LEVERAGE.”

MPA Rating: R, violence

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Frank Grillo, Juju Chan, Alain Moussi, Ricky Yune, Tony Jaa

Credits: Directed by Dimitri Logothetis, script by Dimitri Logothetis and Jim McGrath. A Highland Film Group release.

Running time: 1:42

There’s a Post-It note on the light on Dan Fisher’s bedside table.

“Home!”

That’s for when he wakes up in a nightmarish sweat, not knowing where he is. Sydney, Australia is home. But when he isn’t there with his partner Josie, Dan is going to places and seeing things that would give anybody nightmares. He’s what we used to call a “combat photographer,” renamed “conflict photographer” for our changed times, when “war” doesn’t quite describe the traumas sweeping the planet, when photographers like Dan shift their lenses from the combatants to the victims, to the collateral damage of conflicts.

“Hearts and Bones” is a touching, earnest account of a traumatized photographer getting to know immigrants from the conflicts he’s covered, one in particular, and how it changes both men’s lives.

The Great Oz Hugo Weaving is Dan, a high-mileage photographer facing up to a coming perspective of his work back home. He’s having fainting spells and nightmares. Josie (Hayley McElhinney of “The Babadook”) drags him to the doctor. “Any head trauma?”

“Mortars, artillery,” he says. You know, the usual. “Land mines, grenades.”

An opening scene has laid out the risks in Dan’s work. He tries to help an Iraqi child who’s survived a roadside ambush that wiped out her family. A working photographer could get killed in these places. And a professional has to give up a little of her or his humanity in trying to stay sane and alive while there.

“I photograph what my conscience asks me to,” he tells an interviewer. Keeping one’s distance, though, is a part of that bargain.

Sebastian, given a soulful humanity by screen newcomer Andrew Luri, has seen Dan’s photos and heard of the coming exhibit of his work. He’s a Sydney taxi driver and a South Sudanese immigrant. He wants Dan to meet his choir. He’d like Dan to photograph them.

Dan keeps brushing him off. Sebastian says Dan was in his village, photographing a massacre. Sebastian wants to see those photos. His family was murdered that day. He wants to see them, but after that, he wants Dan to put them away.

“They always judge us,” he says, “but they never understand.”

First-time feature director Ben Lawrence has a documentary background, and the lighting, blocking and settings here have a documentary reality about them. There’s nothing arty or brisk in the way he tells this story of the crushing burden of both men’s pasts.

Both have pregnant partners. Both have secrets. Emotions run high, memories are “full of holes.” But as Sebastian imposes himself on Dan’s life, each gives the other cause to revisit pasts that they’re trying to forget.

The film reaches for the heartstrings when Dan meets this “choir,” which turns out to be a conflict refugee support group. The men in the group give their homelands as if they’re reciting Dan’s Greatest Hits — “Ethiopia,” “Zimbabwe,” “Congo, “Syria, or what’s left of it.”

The bigger themes come off better than the scene-by-scene logic and flow of “Hearts and Bones.” Dan’s constantly trying to flee these various relationships, run back to work, avoid those heart-to-hearts never finished, dodge digging through all the trauma in all those career retrospective photos.

Luri and Weaving have an easy, not-quite-intimate rapport. You can see why each character would reach for the other, despite the vast differences in their backgrounds and views of the world. Sebastian is Muslim, for instance, who knows he’ll be judged because “for each of us there is an angel to record our good deeds.”

Dan is a self-described “infidel.”

“Angels are not deterred by your lack of faith,” the Sudanese man tells him.

“Hearts and Bones” isn’t particularly graceful in the way it unfolds, and it doesn’t hide one man’s secret well enough or give the other’s the weight it seems to represent.

But some very fine acting, a few poignant scenes and a general earnestness carry it off.

MPA Rating: unrated, still photographs of violence, sex

Cast: Hugo Weaving, Andrew Luri and Hayley McElhinney and Bolude Watson

Credits: Directed by Ben Lawrence, script by Beatrix Christian, Ben Lawrence. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:50

We don’t allow ourselves to think too deeply of the most heinous crimes, to look too hard at the ghoulish motives of a Jeffrey Dahmer or even an Adolf Hitler.

“Evil,” we say, as if that covers it, as if that’s enough when all that label amounts to is a decision to not consider pathology, the “how a person got to be that way.”

“Evil,” as Dr. Dorothy Lewis once said in shutting down talk show host Bill O’Reilly, “is NOT a scientific concept.”

She should know. She’s made the study of murderers, mass murderers, from Ted Bundy on down the infamy scale, her psychiatric specialty. And what’s she’s discovered, a link between abuse, brain damage or “abnormalities,” could be changing out understanding of the “monsters” among us.

“Crazy, Not Insane” is the distinction at the heart of the prolific documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney’s latest. It’s his third deep dive doc of 2020. And even though it’s narrower in focus than “Totally Under Control,” his film about the screwups in America’s response to COVID 19, or “Agents of Chaos,” about Trump/Russia collusion and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, compared with those works, Gibney’s made a less satisfying film on a more intellectually challenging proposition.

“Murderers are made,” Dr. Lewis maintains, “not born.”

Her decades of work covered sweeping changes in human understanding of the brain and in psychotherapy’s responses to that. Brain scans were brought into the courtroom, by her, to explain the damage this future serial killer suffered when an abusive parent ran over his head, or that abused murderer’s disconnect from reality, thanks to a brain cyst.

“The law has a lot to learn from psychiatry,” Lewis declares. “Instead, psychiatry accepts the law’s definitions” of things like “insanity” and “competence,” as in “competent to stand trial.”

In case after case, many of them in death-penalty-friendly states like Texas and Florida, convicted murderers that in earlier eras we’d have referred to as “barking mad” have been injected or rushed to the chair. Lewis consulted on many of them, most often in service of the defense, and discovered shattered minds and “multiples,” criminals whose multi-personality “dissociative disorder” was so severe that any idea that they knew right from wrong, much less what being executed meant, is laughable.

The killer who saved his dessert from his last meal because he was sure the fellow being executed was another person altogether, and that he’d be around to come back and finish, others whose disconnect from reality was just as vast, keep her awake at nights, Lewis says.

It’s not that she wants them returned to society. “Throw away the key” works its way into several diagnoses. Lewis has struggled to strike a balance between “what we discovered” about a criminal’s pathology “and what the law was willing to accept.”

Much of “Crazy, Not Insane” is Lewis reading from her longhand notes for an upcoming book, or Laura Dern reading her words from previously published work.

We see videotaped prison interview sessions. And Gibney uses animation to flesh out her encounters with “twenty-two serial killers” and “a lot of plain old murderers.”

We hear about the politicization of the death penalty, see her ambushed on the witness stand, unprepared by the tack a defense attorney has taken, hounded for her equivocating way of avoiding absolutes and simple “yes or no” answers.

And a frequent counter to Lewis, Dr. Park Dietz, calls some of her assumptions about the convicted “a hoax,” even as he himself sticks his foot in it as a professional prosecution “insanity defense” debunker.

Maybe he’s jealous because Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro didn’t come to him (they went to Lewis) in order for the actor to get a feel for the tics, expressions and interior life of a psychopath when prepping for “Cape Fear.”

Lewis describes her research as “like being a detective,” although the questioning of the many killers she’s interacted with (Arthur Shawcross, Joseph Paul Franklin) is rarely as convincing as the simple brain scans showing marked abnormalities.

That’s an issue with the film, too. Lewis, working with neurologist Jonathan Pincus, wrote “Guilty by Reason of Insanity,” making the case that politically ambitious prosecutors and the baying mobs at executions are in a rush to kill those we should be studying, if not sympathizing with. That’s a hard sell, as indeed is “Crazy, Not Insane.”

But the director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” has once again taken on a complex evil being done in our name, a subject no one really wants to think about, and forced us to consider the many ramifications of making a flippant and terminal judgment on something that demands attention and understanding, in light of what we now know.

MPA Rating: unrated, violent subject matter, profanity

Cast: Dr. Dorothy Lewis, Dr. Catherine Yeager, (attorney) Richard Burr, Dr. Park Dietz and the voice of Laura Dern

Credits: Directed and scripted by Alex Gibney. An HBO Max release.

Running time: 1:57

The JFK Assassination Conspiracy Industrial Complex won’t care for “Truth is the Only Client: The Official Investigation of the Murder of John F. Kennedy.”

Then again, will anybody watch a documentary defending the Warren Commission’s findings about the Kennedy Assassination? If there’s one thing the thousands of books, films and TV series and specials have made clear, it’s that the money’s in “conspiracy.” Even a film with the prosecutorial thoroughness of “Truth is the Only Client” will leave those deep down the rabbit hole unconvinced. They’ve been running with “alternate facts” too long to quit now.

I’ve gone back and forth on this subject, like many of us, swayed by this “revelation,” convinced by that recreation. It’s so omnipresent that the Kennedy Assassination has become a cultural punchline, doubt sewn by “Seinfeld” even as we laugh at the conspiracy nut archetype in Richard Linklater’s “Slacker.”

This film is an outgrowth of a touring lecture series run by former Commission counsel Judge Burt W. Griffin and his protege, Judge Brendan Beehan. Their access to surviving members of the legal staff involved in the investigation, to the survivors among those investigated as material witnesses to the murder and to staff of the 1970s House Select Committee on Assassinations allows them to make a convincing case for the Warren Commission’s successes and the slip-ups Chief Justice Earl Warren and others that allowed oxygen into the firestorm of conspiracies that followed the report’s release.

Manson Family prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi is also here, as a legal eagle who staged a famous mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in the ’80s, which utterly convinced him that “no credible evidence has surfaced” that contradicts the Warren Commission in the 57 years since JFK’s murder. His assertion, that “the reality” of the mundane nature of the “unstable…lone gunman” assassination simply didn’t fit what people want to believe about this sensational, epoch-altering crime, is the guiding mission statement of “Truth is the Only Client.”

“It’s not Shakespearean.”

Dissecting the Warren Commission’s makeup and history, from the first call to Bill Moyers at the White House (by Yale Law School Dean Eugene Rostow) the weekend of the assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder pitching the need for such a commission, on through those questioned, is fascinating in an of itself. You don’t need the conspiracy-backing slant for to be engrossed in this.

So, from Soviet involvement to mob planning to the “Magic bullet theory,” from The Grassy Knoll to the shooting of Officer Tibbets and mob-connected Jack Ruby’s shooting of Oswald, the film thoroughly explains the Warren Commission’s findings and its wariness of what it might learn from the FBI and CIA, which had their own agendas in the paranoid days, weeks and months following the assassination.

What I found most interesting was getting at the places where Warren himself screwed up — hiding the Kennedy autopsy photos — the leeriness of anybody wanting help from the notorious Dallas Police Department — and the efforts by the CIA and the FBI to cover their own screw-ups which allowed Oswald’s obsession to bear fruit.

Most Americans still don’t believe the Commission’s conclusions. A convincing TV series like the British-made “The Men who Killed Kennedy” from the ’80s, or Oliver Stone’s red herring-loaded “JFK” can have a lasting impact.

When a film sets out to address much of what conspiracy buffs have used to build their house of cards, it will leave some facts out. Evidence of things “concealed” from the Warren Commission might not help the investigation’s credibility. The House Select Committee, leaning heavily on a scratchy, misinterpreted police motorcycle radio recording of the shooting, didn’t help.

But as “Truth” shows, there was no “magic” bullet, nobody saw anyone shooting from The Grassy Knoll, and I might add, the three shots fired were replicated, from the Book Depository window, for a CBS Special hosted by Dan Rather decades ago (NOT impossible).

The film’s host/narrator, Beehan, may go overboard in his suggestions that “the system worked” in spite of evidence that shows the mistrust in government spawned by the Commission’s thorough, seemingly transparent but apparently not as thorough as they claimed and not transparent enough to not seem a “rush to judgement.”

But that doesn’t mean that “alternate facts” weren’t born in the pages of Mark Lane and other researchers’ truth-bending “investigations,” or that Oliver Stone didn’t do a grave disservice to the culture by celebrating New Orleans prosecutor/crackpot Jim Garrison.

MPA Rating: unrated, Zapruder Film violence

Cast: Vincent Bugliosi, Justice Stephen Breyer, Ruth Paine, Judge Burt W. Griffin, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, G. Robert Blakey, Howard P. Willens, narrated by Judge Brendan Beehan.

Credits: Written and directed by Todd Kwait, Rob Stegman. A Blue Star Media release.

Running time: 2:20

Here’s a laugh we didn’t know we needed right now, a light LEGO lampooning of “Star Wars,” just in time for the holidays.

All those jokes you share with your friends when watching the various trilogies in this over-saturated “universe,” “A New Hope” through “The Mandalorian?” They’re stuffed into “The LEGO ‘Star Wars’ Holiday Special.”

How would Darth Vader react to his first gaze upon the wonder of Baby Yoda?

“Awwww.”

Master Yoda’s comeback, if Luke Skywalker gives him backtalk about the Jedi credo, “Do or do not, there is no try?”

“ParTICipation trophies for Jedi, there are not!”

The Emperor’s patience is always ALWAYS wearing thin.

“Less talky talky, more FIGHTY FIGHTY!”

Jedi Rey (Helen Sadler) can’t seem to get the hang of training Finn. So she takes off for an ancient temple where she and BB8 acquire a key to…”Star Trek’s” “City on the Edge of Forever” time portal. They don’t call it that, but hey, if the portal fits.

She will bounce through the saga, from Yoda’s training of Luke to Qui-Gon Jinn’s training of Obi Wan to Obi Wan’s training of Anakin, taking notes.

Only, because it’s time travel, things get messier by the minute. How many Vaders, Lukes and Darth Maul’s can one 47 minute “special” squeeze in?

She’s got to accomplish all this before a big Life Day holiday party with Chewbacca’s family. Yes, they’ve booked the cantina band. Yes, only one member remains. Don’t ask. And yes, Yoda becomes “The Ghost of Christmas Past” because of course he does.

The overarching theme of the recent trilogy, that individualism is fine, but we’re stronger together, is underlined. And the emperor’s insistence on naming his planet destroyers gets on Vader’s nerves.

“It’s just that ‘Death Star II feels--kind of derivative!”

The animation’s digital LEGO sharp, the effects decent facsimiles of “the real thing” and no, that’s never what matters in Lego send-ups. Some of the voice acting substitutes are as lame as all the “holiday of friendship, of family and of CONNECTION” definitions of Life Day.

It doesn’t really take off until Rey does. Still, for any fan, all these riffs on classic scenes and goofs on the repetitive, formulaic nature of it all, will sting just enough to be funny.

MPA Rating: G.

Cast: The voices of Helen Sadler, Trevor Devall, Matt Sloan, Tom Kane, and Anthony Daniels, Billy Dee Williams and Kelly Marie Tran.

Credits: Directed by Ken Cunningham, script by David Shayne. A Disney+ release.

Running time: :47

That little dickens Anna Kendrick already did a Christmas movie. But “Happy Christmas” was a bit more naughty than…you know.

So here she is in a genuine Disney Christmas movie for kids, back on Disney+ for the holidays. Did you catch it last year? Do the kids want to see it again?

“Noelle” is sentimental farce that puts Miss “Pitch Perfect” in holiday tights and Christmas sweaters as Santa’s daughter, second banana to older brother Nick (Bill Hader), a woman who has never left the North Pole and who “majored in calligraphy and minored in popcorn stringing.”

But she’s sensitive, always looking out for others. And she “twinkles.” Nick is stressing about taking on the new job, so she suggests he “take a weekend off” have a little get away. Nick doesn’t come back. Even the North Pole puffins are peeved.

Noelle has to “borrow” the sleigh, with trusty nanny elf Polly (Oscar winner Shirley MacLaine) and track Nick down to whatever destination in the travel mag she gave him he might have ventured.

It’s Phoenix, and no, she doesn’t have to circle the globe hunting for him to other cities. That’s the first missed opportunity in a limp comedy that Kendrick has to carry all by herself.

They don’t have her sing, just a little “Tra la la” this and “fa la” that, summoning her animal buddy Snowcone, the (digital) white reindeer calf.

They do let her show off her language skills, which hints at a better comedy that might have been. She’s just as funny in French.

Track down Nick, or tech nerd cousin Gabe (a sadly subdued Billy Eichner) will take over, digitally crack down on the “Naughty or Nice” list and let Amazon Prime replace the sleigh, reindeer, etc.

Nerd.

This childish confection was cooked up by Marc Lawrence, who was once Sandra Bullock’s go-to guy (“Miss Congeniality” scripts, “Two Weeks Notice”), and it’s got a quest and a would-be love interest, the private eye (Kingsley Ben-Adir) Noelle hires to help her locate Nick. Can she afford him? Will he take North Pole gold (covered chocolate) coins?

“Bring non-edible money.”

It has Hader with very little that’s funny to play.

But there’s an elvish quintet who sing little commentaries on the proceedings like a Greek chorus.

“Joy to the world, except for YOU.”

That’s a gimmick worth running with. As with too many other mildly-promising tidbits, Lawrence doesn’t.

But the ladies sell this, with old pros MacLaine and Julie Haggerty (as Mrs. Claus, Noelle’s worrywart Mom) giving it their all.

And Kendrick? After 45 minutes or so of thin entertainment, Anna gets her groove back. Bubbly Noelle has no time for pessimism.

“That’s pretty stocking half-empty.”

She’s got to keep her true identity from the simple happy natives of Phoenix. Where’s she from?

“A little town…up north.”

“Canada?”

“Canada WISHES.”

And arguing with a sibling who’s found “yoga” is apt to bring tears.

“Oh! You! Better not pout, you BETTER not cry!”

In sum, Kendrick’s twinkles. “Noelle” doesn’t. Let her sing and get her a dozen more jokes and this one could have been a holiday keeper.

MPA Rating: G.

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Bill Hader, Shirley MacLaine, Kingsley Ben-Adir and Michael Gross.

Credits: Written and directed by Marc Lawrence. A Disney release on Disney+.

Running time: 1:40

“Playhouse” is a stylish British ghost story with a great, gloomy Scottish setting, and little else to recommend it.

It’s not frightening, rarely suspenseful and never comes close to the harrowing experience audiences have come to expect from horror movies these days. It’s all squandered opportunities and dull substitutions for our best guesses as to where it will go next.

But the set up is solid gold. A grumpy teen (Grace Courtney) and her Dad (William Holstead) have relocated from London to this seaside Scottish “castle.” It’s one of those homely manor houses that used to be a castle, victim of a drab Dickensian makeover or two over the decades.

But Dad, Jack Travis, has big plans for it. He’s the “horropreneur” of The West End, a successful playwright who has a mind to turn this place into an immersive theatrical experience, “the living play,” he calls it. He’s so deep into the idea that he’s talking to the dead son of the late laird of the manor.

“We’ll show them, won’t we, Alastair?”

Daughter Bee sees all the news-clippings on Dad’s bulletin board, even if she doesn’t overhear him improvising dialogue around the place’s unfortunate history. People have died, an aristocratic family left secrets and perhaps unfortunate members buried in the wall.

Bee, just finishing school, invites classmates over for a spooky evening of drinks, candles and wild tales of the place. They egg each other on until they’ve laid hands upon “the wall,” an exposed part of the older incarnation of the “castle,” where you can still “hear Alastair…the laird’s son” screaming if you touch it.

The girls might not have played this “game” had they known “Bee” is short for “Beleth,” one of the “Kings” (or queens) of Hell.

Can I mention what an utter bust this scene is, dramatically?

Jenny (Helen Mackay) is a curious neighbor who grew up down the lane. She and husband Callum (James Rottger) may be here to tidy up granny’s old place to sell it. But the history of “the castle” tugs at her, and pretty soon they’re having a tetchy dinner with the Travis’s.

What are the secrets this spooky place will draw out of our principals? And what secrets does the castle have for those who dare to dwell there as they hunt for actors and financing for a theatrical theme-park style spooktactular?

Holstead, of “The Burying Party,” has precious little to play here. Jack has to be off his rocker to think he’ll lure people to the middle of nowhere to experience his “living play.” He hints that he expects folks to want to move there just to be a part of this thing. Holstead doesn’t give us much that says “madness.”

Courtney’s “Bee” is all sullen and bangs, and the movie loses track of her for most of the second half. So no help there.

And Mackay and Rottger, playing a couple who aren’t on the same page, with ties to the spooky house that aren’t mysterious or shocking, don’t add much to the proceedings. Something draws Callum to Jack, but there’s no hint of the house putting him under its spell, just as there’s too little of that where Jack is concerned as well.

So what we’re left with is a fumbling, groping and almost wholly-unsatisfying thriller set in a towering old house near the water’s edge, where the wind howls and there’s a shock, fright or laugh behind every tree.

Except that it being Scotland, there’re no bleeding trees.

MPA Rating: unrated, horror imagery, profanity

Cast: William Holstead, Grace Courtney, Helen Mackay, James Rottger

Credits: Written and directed by Fionn Watts and Toby Watts. A Devilworks release.

Running time: 1:26