Movie Nation

“Crooked House” made little to no noise when it came out theatrically in 2017-18. Labeling something “Agatha Christie’s Crooked House” should have helped, considering Kenneth Branagh revived her ancient murder mystery “brand” with his remake of “Murder on the Orient Express” over Christmas of 2017.

“Sarah’s Key” director Gilles Paquet-Brenner doesn’t have Sir Ken’s polish or witty way with the material, and the film’s “all-star cast” is slightly less glittery. But this rich patriarch’s suspicious death amid-a-house-full-of-suspects tale still works, showing off Christie’s genius for plotting and creating characters. If it’s not as much fun as “Knives Out,” it still has its moments, and plainly was one of the inspirations of Rian Johnson’s comic jewel.

Max Irons, you-know-who-and-you-know-her’s son, stars as Charles Hayward, the posh-enough offspring of a Scotland Yard legend, a onetime member of the “diplomatic service” (a spy), now a private detective visited by an old flame (Stefanie Martini of TV’s “The Last Kingdom”).

Femme fatale-ish Sophia insists her rich grandfather — a hotel, restaurant and “Associated Catering” tycoon and Greek immigrant who married into the British upper class — was murdered in his great house, Three Gables.

“I believe the killers may still be in there,” she declares, meaning the extended members of the late pere Leonides, his children, grandchildren and in-laws.

After dismissing her with extreme prejudice — Charles still carries a grudge about “Cairo” — he reconsiders, consults with an old Scotland Yard colleague of his father (Terrence Stamp) and motors into the country.

It’s 1957 or so, “the war” is fading into memory, rock and roll is just now arriving in Britannia and Charles drives a stylish Bristol to “pass” for posh, because that’s what you did back then.

But questioning this lot is going to be tricky.

“How does it work, all of you living in this house together?” “Who told you it works?”

Not Chief Inspector Taverner (Stamp). “These people relish their privacy as much as their money.”

Sophia isn’t really a suspect…at first. Then there’s her grandfather’s “favorite” son (Christian McKay) who runs the business empire, that son’s biologist/poison expert wife (Amanda Abbingdon). An older brother/historian (Julian Sands) who used to gamble and married a high class/no success actress (Gillian Anderson) resent the hell out of them.

“Ruin the family business and bugger off to Barbados, how LIKE my brother!”

Better than “losing everything playing baccarat on the Riviera!”

There’s a nanny and a tutor, bratty younger children, and the sister (Glenn Close) of old Leonides’ lesser-nobility first wife. And of course, there’s the Vegas chorine second wife, now a widow, given a jaded bombshell as “common” touch by Christina Hendricks.

The film has just enough glossy period detail, just enough intrigues, deaths or near-deaths and twists to pass for Christie and keep us interested.

The supporting cast ranges from good to downright delicious (Close, Anderson), with its leading man (Irons was in the “Condor” and “The Little Drummer Girl” and “Tutankhamun” TV series) standing out mainly by not standing out.

Young Irons hasn’t learned or aged or what-have-you enough to know how to embrace the camera and seize our attention. It may be a charisma thing and he may never get there, but he’s merely adequate here, and that dampens the fun of the film.

Similarly, Martini is reminiscent of Ruth Wilson/Natalie Dormer in that “manipulator of men” screen bombshell way, but doesn’t quite get there in this performance.

The bratty children (Honor Kneafsey and Preston Nyman) make far bigger impressions in tiny roles. And Close, often wielding a shotgun as her Lady Edith takes on the estate’s moles, devours the scenery, but with effortless great humor.

Perhaps Sir Ken will bring her round for the next Agatha he does and win the lady her Oscar. This film’s slack middle acts and smaller-than-life performances remind us, almost constantly, that he’s not behind the camera at “Crooked House.”

But Christie’s mastery of the genre survives even lesser adaptations, and she and the best bits of casting rescue “Crooked House,” even if they couldn’t make it much of a hidden gem.

Rating: TV-14, murder most foul

Cast: Max Irons, Stefanie Martini, Gillian Anderson, Christina Hendricks, Julian Sands, Christian McKay, Terrence Stamp and Glenn Close

Credits: Directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, scripted by Julian Fellowes, Tim Rose Price and
Gilles Paquet-Brenner. A Sony release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:55

“A Journal for Jordan” is a sweet, sad holiday weeper about a soldier who kept a diary filled with life lessons for his newborn son, just in case “the worst” happened. Which it did while First Sgt. Charles King was serving in Iraq.

It’s a glossy, sentimental star vehicle for Michael B. Jordan and another feather in the cap of Chanté Adams (“Bad Hair, “The Photograph”) who plays the single mom left behind to raise that son and pass that journal on to him when he was old enough to understand.

But it’s an ungainly film that loses focus time and again, drifting off to indulge its stars with extraneous scenes and badly-handled or simply unnecessary story threads. That makes it play longer than its two hour and 11 minute runtime, and makes it that rarest of movie “unicorns” — a misstep by director Denzel Washington.

Whatever the messaging and emphasis of the memoir it’s based on, the movie reaching theaters needed a serious re-edit.

Adams plays Dana Canedy, a hard-driving New York Times reporter and Army brat with “daddy issues” who nevertheless lets Daddy (Robert Wisdom) put a handsome, courtly and honorable “tanker” that he trained in her path, plainly match-making for the 30ish, sophisticated Big City Dana.

First Sgt. King always introduces himself that way, always says “ma’am,” and is blunt about picking the Army as a career. But he’s into art, painting in the style of his French favorites — the pointillism of Georges Seurat, the impressionism of Claude Monet.

Dana has a New York apartment, a New York career and that hard-won New York sophistication, and Adams lets us see both a ravenous attraction to this new hunk her dad’s introduced her to and her reluctance to fall for someone so potentially like her father.

“Journal for Jordan” may hang on the hook of “fallen father writes timeless advice to his son” hook, but it’s about “How Dana Canedy Fell for Charles Monroe King” — from set-ups (Dad even provides her “excuse” for asking for a ride) to slow-moving courtship to love, sex and a baby.

The script and the star let us see Charles as ramrod straight, chivalrous and “corny,” a man of few words “unless I’ve got something to say,” unpolished in his ratty “grandpa” tennis shows and ignorance of what the phrase “off Broadway” means, but the sort of straight arrow father figure who passes on “live by your convictions” because that’s the way he lived.

He serves because he wanted “the discipline” the Army had to offer his life, and because he’s a real “patriot.” “I love my country.”

It’s worth noting how startling that line plays here, when that word has been so devalued by Americans unfit to claim it as a label.

The film frames their love story as a flashback, drifting through years of their relationship as seen by Dana in the years after his passing when she’s raising Jordan, eventually played by Jalon Christian as a teen.

But it’s that cumbersome flashbacks/flashforwards and flash around the edges structure that lets “A Journal for Jordan” down.

With every lingering tracking shot down up Adams’ curves or Jordan’s shirtless six-pack during “patient” scenes of banal phone conversations, every “over-sharing” chat between Dana and her “variety-pack casting” co-workers (Susan Pourfar plays her best Times friend), every jump backwards and forwards in time, delaying what the overlong prologue has told us is coming, “Journal” loses the thread.

That lost thread is “What’s IN that Journal that’s important enough to pass along to my boy.”

It finishes so well, with such a grand lump-in-the-throat scene, that one might be fooled into thinking it’s a better movie than it is. Then you remember there should have been moments like this all along, that saving it for “a surprise” that is no surprise at all, is a miscalculation, “the Journal” should have been the point.

Long before we get to that break-out-your-hankies moment, it has to hit even the most enthusiastic fan that “was this scene/exchange/overlong shot really necessary?” Washington squanders some of the viewer’s good will and attention with a lot of extraneous moments and even entire scenes.

It’s tempting to suggest “He should’ve done this by the book,” but it’s most likely that the memoir itself, full of the messiness and minutia of real life, created this problem. Director Washington and screenwriter Virgil Williams (“Mudbound” was similarly scattered) failed to correct it.

Rating: PG-13 for some sexual content, partial nudity, drug use and language

Cast: Chanté Adams, Michael B. Jordan, Jalon Christian, Robert Wisdom and
Susan Pourfar

Credits: Directed by Denzel Washington, scripted by Virgil Williams, based on Dana Canedy’s memoir. A Sony/Columbia release (Christmas Day).

Running time: 2:11

I’ll bet they remember an episode of “Community” done with stop-motion animation, or the unfulfilled dream of Jerry Seinfeld, to do a stop-motion episode of his series way back when.

Ted Lasso in plasticine? Here it is.

Did they pitch the script to MBJ knowing he’d be curious, seeing as how his father figure is writing a booklet to his unborn child, to be named Jordan?

Or did they change the name once he signed on?

Just kidding. Denzel directed this one, based on a memoir (true story) by Dana Canedy.

A weeper for the holidays.

If you’ve watched any movie with even a trace of Japan about it, you’ve probably stumbled across the work of actor and sometime director “Beat” Takeshi Kitano. He was in the “Battle Royale” movies, “Johnny Mnemonic,” did a definitive version of “Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman.”

He’s been pretty much the elder statesman of Japanese show business since the passing of Toshiro Mifune, which makes the “How he got his start” story one worth telling — at least in Japan.

“Asakusa Kid” is a slow, sentimental walk through Kitano’s origin story. It only truly comes to life in a finale that includes a long, reminiscing tracking shot through the venue where the man learned everything he needed to get his start in show business. Too much of what comes before that is static, with a hint of not-that-funny comedy set against a funereal elegy for a lost era of show business.

This Around the World With Netflix tale takes us to early ’70s Tokyo, to the music hall where “Take,” as his friends called him, learned to be an entertainer at the feet of “the master,” and from the strippers who performed in the France-za, a dying, mostly-empty burlesque palace run by Senzaburo Fukami (Yô Ôizumi).

Yûya Yagira plays the gawky 20something cleaning the place, fixing stuff he had no idea how to repair and running the lights, an aspiring “entertainer” with just a crooked smile and a little ambition to work with.

He sees the MC and owner tap dance, do stand-up and comic sketches between strippers and scantily clad chorus liners, a master of “manzai,” Japanese “double act” comedy. His killer bit? That would be the samurai “scene” that he and his co-star act out, with Fukami interrupting his own “performance” to critique and berate his co-star, much to the amusement of the guys-there-to-see-strippers.

Television has killed their bottom line, but this is where Take hopes to learn something that will put him on film and TV.

“Any skills? You can’t be a performer without any skills.”

Take has none. But his first lesson is “Get some” and the second one is essentially “always-be-on,” be prepared to do something entertaining, and dress well to ensure you get noticed and people believe you’re doing well because you’re good at what you do — entertaining.

Tap-dancing is something the kid can practice on his own. Constantly. Flirting with the stripper Chihura (Mugi Kadowaki) is instructive…for her dance steps. She’d love to be a singer, but nobody comes there to see women sing. And no, she won’t sleep with him.

There’s a whole backstage world that keeps this place going — aspiring writers who also clean or serve customers, dancers, costumers.

Fukami is generous with all, but especially the no-talent with the crooked smile he takes under his wing. His passes on the lessons that will serve Beat Takeshi his entire life, something the film’s flashback structure makes clear.

Before coming onstage or stepping into a scene, Take learns to tapdance away the jitters, standing in the wings, just like Fukami.

“Don’t get laughed at. Make them laugh with you.” “Don’t suck up to the audience,” he’s told (in dubbed English, or Japanese with subtitles). “You tell them what’s funny.”

The tapping is what gets his “hold the audience” abilities out there. Fukima breaks him in on stage, making him the stooge in sketches. And eventually, Takeshi and a writer-pal form a double act of their own, eventually taking on the names “Two Beats.” That’s why he’s called “Beat” Takeshi to this day.

The Franze-za scenes are wholly about relationships and attachments that form in the theater, with “Beat” being born on the road, abruptly pushing their act closer to “edgy” by drawing inspiration from American Lennie Bruce and American jazz. Some jokes are set to four beats, some to eight.

“Two Beats” is born. Edgy?

“My grandma buys tampons just to show off!”

A fundamental flaw of this Gekidan Hitori bio-pic is that moment. It is explained to us, but not really shown. We see a comic learning timing, “quickness” and “entertaining” from Fukami. We aren’t shown him studying his real influences, or much beyond the venue in terms of outside life, touring and the like.

That makes the film stagebound and all but locked in place.

Takeshi is a beloved figure, and seeing his formative years is informative even if this film is somewhat subdued, almost in reverence to the man.

But at some point this movie needed to make that extra effort to “entertain,” just like our learning-permit comic. It rarely does.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity, near nudity

Cast: Yûya Yagira, Yô Ôizumi, Mugi Kadowaki

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gekidan Hitori, based on the memoirs of Takeshi Kitano. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

The screenwriter who gave us “Whiplash” makes her splashy (sorry) directing debut with “The Novice,” a movie about an insanely competitive college coed who takes up competitive rowing, where the competition takes over her.

Because if there are two things that Lauren Hadaway knows, it’s youthful obsession and anything that you practice until your hands bleed.

Her film defies easy categorization, a sports movie that immerses us in the sport without really being “about” the sport, with a freshman year same sex romance that isn’t romantic and a heroine who is anything but.

So no “‘Personal Best’ in Boats” headlines, here. This tense tale doesn’t invite us to root for Alex Dall (Isabelle Fuhrman, “Orphan,””The Last Thing Mary Saw,” TV’s “Masters of Sex”) or fear for her health and wellbeing. And that’s kind of the way she wants it.

We meet the twitchy nail-biter as she’s finishing up a test. “You finished first,” her teaching assistant (model turned actress Dilone) complains. “Why’d you take it twice?”

Alex sprints across campus to the “novice rowing” class at Wellington U. She just took a physics class test twice “because it’s my worst subject,” even though it’s her major. She knows nothing of boats, oars and rowing crew. Something else she’s not good at? Welcome to her new obsession.

After hearing how very hard it is for “novices” looking to learn and get some exercise “to move up to varsity,” the die is cast. Alex will be the first at practice and the last to leave. She will skip college breaks. She will row, either on the water or on the rowing machines, until her fingers and hands bleed, until she collapses, once even wetting her pants in front of her teammates from exhaustion.

Coach Pete (Jonathan Cherry) notices, and is disturbed. “Relax” and “have fun” and “shouldn’t you be stuffed in a library (during exam week) fall on deaf ears.

Because Alex has been told of the long odds. Because there’s been a little hazing from the varsity scholarship rowers. Because a high school jock (Amy Forsyth, a supporting player in “CODA”) is also a novice here, determined to make varsity and score a needed scholarship.

Writer-director Hadaway and her stars create marvelously contrasting characters, the confident, swaggering athlete and the chronic over-achiever determined to do what she always does — outhustle the competition.

Because Alex is all about competition. And as we learn in this quite-clever screenplay, “competition” is just the first sign that Alex’s obsessions go beyond scholarship, physics and applying physics to rowing. She and a fellow student, a friend since high school (Jeni Ross), show up at a fraternity mixer.

“I just wanted to get the drunk college one-night stand out of the way,” Alex confesses.

That teaching assistant Dani? She’s like another “experience” to check off a life list as Miss OCD tallies up all she’s up to her eyeballs in this freshman year.

Hadaway, who also edited “Novice,” serves up montages aplenty — Alex’s notetaking, coach-stalking and “out-working” everybody, this “seat race” (competing for a spot on a varsity boat) or that racing regatta.

Fuhrman’s polished intensity draws us in, even if we’re repelled a bit by this young woman who will not give herself “a break,” at anything.

And Hadaway, as she did with college jazz band drumming in “Whiplash,” immerses us in the jargon, banter and brittle women-being-women-among-other-women dynamic of this collegiate combat among coeds.

It’s enough to make you glad you took up sailing instead.

Rating: R for language, some sexuality and brief disturbing material

Cast: Isabelle Fuhrman, Amy Forsythe, Dilone, Jonathan Cherry, Kate Drummand and Charlotte Ubben

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lauren Hadaway. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:37

This Jan 28 “high school reunion afterparty where the shallow, influencer host gets murdered” has no “true crime podcast hook, thank heavens. But Tiffany Haddish is the cop looking over a whole lot of suspects.

Zoe Chao, Sam Richardson, Ike Barinholtz, Ben Schwartz, Ilana Glazer and many others might have been the murderer of Xavier, aka Dave Franco.

Hard to tell if this will click. More characters means less character development.

This Michelle Yeoh star vehicle about an immigrant who is “the only hope” opens in March. Pretty dazzling trailer. Jamie Leigh Curtis and James Hong star in this A24 release.

I can’t recall ever dumping on a “Spider-Man” movie, and I see no reason to start now.

Yes, they’re as repetitive and formulaic as the other franchises in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But they never fail to find the cute or deliver a little warmth and laughs amidst all the increasingly impressive effects and fan service.

“Spider-Man: No Way Home” takes its inspiration from the blockbuster success of the animated “Into the Spider-Verse,” which toyed with the physics concept, sampled on “Star Trek” and embraced like the Holy Grail in comic books, that there are infinite universes, infinite versions of life on Earth and in the cosmos and infinite Spider-Men.

In modern memory, there have been three Peter Parkers, so the gimmick here is to create a worst-kept-“secret” situation that puts all three — Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and the fellow who succeeded them, Tom Holland — on the screen at the same time, joining forces to fight some fresh threat to the order of things.

And when you go down that multi-verse rabbit hole — or worm hole — you can toy with the possibilities of villains of the past. A little digital-de-aging, and Alfred Molina, Willem DaFoe, Thomas Haden Church and Jamie Foxx can collect a fresh check for bringing us “Spider-Man’s Greatest Hits.”

The fact that “No Way Home” hits during the holidays points to another inspiration. It’s like a “Doctor Who Christmas Special,” a reunion of many of the actors who’ve played a character over the decades — and it has indeed been nearly 20 years since Maguire and director Sam Raimi made Marvel the dominating Doc Ock of cinema and video culture, jamming its metal tentacles in everything.

These gimmicks don’t electro-shock the moribund storytelling, the not-quite-witty dialogue, don’t create chemistry between our romantic leads Holland and the latest MJ, Zendaya. But the effects are off-the-chart dazzling, and it nothing else, the picture jumps out of the gate and sprints until one and all get good and winded entirely too quickly.

Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) lashed out and “outed” Peter Parker as he met his doom in the last “Spider-Man,” “Far from Home.” Yes, even the title-writers are out of new ideas these days.

The opening of Holland’s third outing in the spider suit has him coping with the awful blowback over that confrontation, that “murder,” and that exposure as the formerly unknown masked do-gooder vigilante.

Oscar winner J.K. Simmons brings Limbaugh, Alex Jones and Hannity-style hype and fake vitriol to the devolving newspaper editor J.J. Jameson, now fulminating furiously about this “murderer” and “menace” on The Daily Bugle’s web channel show, The Daily Fix.

Peter is stalked, baited and mobbed.

With handheld cameras, extreme close-ups and next-gen web-slinging, skyline-hopping effects, director Jon Watts, who did all three films of this trilogy, puts this action IN YOUR FACE, and how. See this in IMAX and you’ll be utterly bowled-over by how far the CGI assistance puts Spidey and MJ on the Roosevelt Island tram towers, hunted by the paparazzi and TV news helicopters.

The new “exposure” and negative publicity makes Peter controversial and leaves him imprisoned in his own apartment. And it isn’t just Aunt May (Oscar-winner Marisa Tomei) and her just-ended love affair with Tony Starke’s man Happy (Jon Favreau) that suffers. MJ and Peter’s pal Ned (Jacob Batalon) all see consequences when it comes to where they can all go to college together. The trio is basically black-listed.

That makes Peter wonder if there’s a way to undo his “outing,” maybe make the world “forget” who he really is so that they can go back to the way things were and maybe get into a decent Boston school.

And that’s why he visits his friendly, neighborhood wizard, Doctor Stranger (Benedict Cumberbatch), looking for another Marvel “reset,” like the one that brought the world and the Avengers back to status quo ante.

That spell is where all the multiverses colliding comes from.

One sweet touch to the script is the way each “Spidey,” when they all come together, plays around with the “strengths” and peculiarities of their version of the character — Maguire’s wide-eyed earnestness, Garfield’s Peter’s lack of confidence, Holland’s much more manic take.

A few laughs are to be found in each’s ignorance of the other’s story and “universe.”

“I was in the Avengers!”

“Cool. Are they like a band or something?”

The villains remind us why Marvel is always best served when it cares enough to send for the very best. Dafoe’s scientist/Green Goblin Jekyll & Hyde thing is a winner, Molina’s Doc Ock in a fine lather, Thomas Haden Church’s working class Sandman eager to please and help out, until he senses he’s chosen the wrong side. And Oscar-winner Foxx’s Electro gives new meaning to the phrase “power mad.”

The multiverse rift means that even the dead villains are brought back for another round here. Apparently though, there is no spell for uncanceling James Franco and his Son of Green Goblin.

There are renewed efforts to get back to the Big Statement of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man pictures, the consequences of violence and revenge.

But the message to this movie, the line repeated by MJ time and again to tamp down her own expectations from life, is “If you expect disappointment, you can never be disappointed.”

That applies to colleges you want to get into, and Spider-Man movies. The breathless hype surrounding this one only applies to the augmented cast and some first-act chase sequences. It’s a perfectly ordinary arachnid installment starring your “friendly neighborhood” you-know-who, with a little wit (not a lot) and a nice dollop of pathos, good effects, limp dialogue and a great big gimmick.

It ends one trilogy with an almost-bang, and opens the door to more movies without the traditional Spider-Man reset and change of actors. Could Tom Holland become the Sony/Marvel James Bond, serving for a decade or more, barring a belated growth spurt?

That’s the ultimate “fan service.”

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbacth, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, J. K. Simmons, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Benedict Wong, Jon Favreau, Jamie Foxx and Marisa Tomei.

Credits: Directed by Jon Watts, scripted by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. A Sony release.

Running time: 2:30

It’s animated and out in April.