Movie Nation

We tend to lump all of the musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Age into one warm memory. But of course there were lesser lights — forgotten gems — and big budget blunders, like “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

A Technicolor musical built around a Mark Twain classic and the reliable crooner Bing Crosby, with songs by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, who wrote the lyrics for the Crosby standard “Swinging on a Star,” which won the best original song Oscar for “Going My Way?” This should have been a laid back easy layup for Paramount.

But while it was by no means a bomb when it came out, it’s neither aged well nor connected with the collective memory of the the great, the good or even the adequate musicals of the day. “Yankee” is colorless despite being colorful, flatly-directed, soundstage-bound for the most part and so lacking in comic bits that work that we’re reminded that there’s never been a version of this Twain novel that truly came off. The Will Rogers take on it in 1931 at least has a laugh or three.

Maybe putting Tay Garnett, the director of one of the definitive noirs, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and several notable WWII pictures, behind the camera wasn’t the smartest move.

The half dozen songs have a generic, disposable feel, with one even cut from the film after its 1949 premiere.

Crosby, so funny in the bantering Bob Hope “Road” comedies, hasn’t got much that’s funny to say or do here. It’s as if the laid-back “Der Bingle” is too laid back even for a role that admittedly is more of a “reactor” than “antagonist” in nature. The pacing is slow, the comic timing even slower.

William Bendix and Cedric Hardwicke are Crosby’s sole comic foils. They’re usually funnier than this. The movie should have taken the tone of Twain’s 1889 novel, flippant and tart. It’ain’t.

Crosby stars as Hank Martin, an American tourist who drops in on present day Pendragon Castle just to reminisce about the place and contradict the nonplussed tour guide. No, that’s not a crossbow-bolt hole in that (period incorrect) suit of armor. Twas a bullet, my good man. I was there, Hank implies.

Meeting the cute old lord of the castle (Hardwicke), Hank tells the story of his first visit to the place, in the sixth century, when Arthur (Hardwicke again) was an aged grump under the thumb of the wizard Merlin (Murvyn Vye) and his sister Morgan Le Fay (Virginia Field).

Hank, then an early 20th century Connecticut blacksmith trying to adapt to an increasingly automotive America, took a fall off a horse and woke up way back when, with the hapless Sir Saggamore (Bendix) who takes him prisoner and marches him hither.

“That can’t be Bridgeport!” “It’s CAMELOT!”

Hank finds himself labeled “a monster,” under-reacting to anyone in an “iron union suit” (armor), smitten with the fair Lady Alisande (Rhonda Fleming) and having to escape the executioner (Alan Napier, butler Alfred to TV’s “Batman”) by relying on his Yankee wit.

Castle intrigues, jousting and songs follow. But fun? Not so much.

“If there were aught I could say, aught I could do to save thee…”

“Well, ain’t there aught?”

“Naught.”

One thing common to every version of this comic fantasy I’ve ever seen is a reliance on Twain’s long-out-of-date misreading of Dark Ages Arthur and Medieval “courtly love” chivalry, with its much more elaborate armor, jousting and what not. Not that anybody expects “period detail” to be a concern in this story.

It’s children’s entertainment, not nearly as droll as “The Innocents Abroad,” which it resembles more than Twain’s “Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn” masterpieces.

But that’s no excuse for not finding more funny lines than this, for not making even slam dunk “magic” sight gags (Hank uses his pocket watch crystal as fire-starting wizardry to effect his first “escape”) work.

Hardwicke is more than game, and makes a wry Arthur. Bendix, trapped in that squeaking “iron union suit” (long underwear jokes were the rage in the ’40s), seems puzzled at being here, and unable to find the funny in the film’s most comical character.

Crosby and Fleming are in fine voice, but there’s little chemistry in their shared scenes.

The villains are drab, the story limps along, and every so often there’s a song, a seriously forgettable song from one of the great song-writing teams of the era.

Lump this one among the lesser musical lights of The Studio Era, and move on.

Rating: approved

Cast: Bing Crosby, Rhonda Fleming, Cedric Hardwicke, Virginia Field, Alan Napier, Murvyn Vye and William Bendix.

Credits: Directed by Tay Garnett, scripted by Edmund Beloin, based on the novel by Mark Twain. A Paramount release, on Amazon, Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:46

A pull-out-all-the-cliches and throw in a few on-the-nose new ones script leaves Halle Berry’s directing debut, “Bruised,” a split decision.

As a showcase for the fittest 55 year-old in the cinema, one who masters fight choreography and is (mostly) convincing in the clinches, it’s a winner. But every time we just about lose ourselves in this solid genre picture, some theft from “The Champ,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight” or — this is new — “Personal Best” pops up and reminds us that it’s not the first-time director who’s making this one bleed out, it’s the first-time screenwriter.

Berry plays Jackie Justice, a UFC MMA contender we meet at her darkest hour. Losing an important fight in which she’s taking a beating, she tries to flee the octagon. Simply not done. But she is. Done, I mean.

Four years later, Jackie’s crawled in a bottle — so many bottles that as a housekeeper who drinks on the job, she’s taken to slipping her booze into spray bottles so that she’s never far away from a shot.

“You used to be thick and famous” the punks on the Newark Light Rail tease. But no more.

Her boyfriend/manager (Adan Canto, all testosterone and contempt) resents that his meal ticket refuses to fight any more. But the animalistic sex makes up for it, I guess.

Lured to an “unsanctioned” basement brawl, Jackie is goaded into mixing it up with a Russian behemoth she isn’t even sure is a woman. That’s where we see her secret weapon — rage.

In the octagon, Jackie is either fight of flight. There’s nothing in between.

A new promoter/manager (Shamier Anderson) sees some fight in the old broad and sends her to his favorite trainer, Buddhakan. And the former British fighter (Sheila Atim was in TV’s “Underground Railroad”) is a reluctant convert. She sees a quitter. She sees somebody who’s “old.”

If you’re walking the tightrope of scripting a Halle Berry movie, you’d best avoid using that word “old” with “woman.” So Buddhakan shows her contempt with “You’re DONE, Betty White!”

If she’s not “done,” Jackie’s got more distractions than she ever bargained for. Her drunken brute of a lover isn’t happy to not be managing her. And he really flips out when Jackie mother (Adriane Lenox, hatefully good) rolls up on her and drops off a little boy of six (Danny Boyd Jr.), reminds her that he’s her son and says the kid’s dad is out of the picture. Oh, and he’s silent. Manny doesn’t talk.

“This ain’t my mess, it’s YOUR mess! For once in your life, HANDLE your business!”

With promoter Immaculate imagining a title fight and live-in-lover Desi getting “physical,” with a kid who won’t speak needing to be enrolled in school and an aging body that needs to be training-montaged into condition, what IS Jackie Justice to do?

Read the character descriptions above and guess. No, not all of them behave according to ancient, tried-and-true screenplay tropes. But the surprises are as obvious as a roundhouse punch in “Bruised.”

Berry has always relished chances to dress down. Her breakout Spike Lee film had one of the cinema’s great beauties transformed into a haggard junky. She won the Oscar for “Monster’s Ball.” She isn’t bad as Jackie Justice. She’s just obvious, like the character’s cornball name.

Atim has a striking, imposing screen presence and is the most impressive member of the supporting cast. But stage and screen veteran Stephen McKinley (“Fences”) makes his mark as everybody’s fight-picture favorite, the “cornerman.”

The short fights are brutal, the final brawl never-quite as epic as we’re meant to think. Are we supposed to see the fighters throwing air punches out of fatigue, or is the punch choreography that far down the “protect the star’s good looks at all costs” rabbit hole?

Not to pick on Berry’s reputation, but you have to think a supporting player who boxes and draws blood, by accident, would pay an awful price if the blooded one was La Berry. She could make a bit player disappear faster than a Chinese tennis star.

In a season of over-long movies, “Bruised” plays long largely because of all the added wrinkles screenwriter Michelle Rosenfarb throws in. The fact that to a one, they’re all non-starters points us at the real shortcoming of “Bruised.” It’s on the printed page.

Rating: R, pervasive language, some sexual content/nudity and violence.

Cast: Halle Berry, Sheila Atim, Adan Canto, Shamier Anderson, Adriane Lenox and Stephen McKinley

Credits: Directed by Halle Berry, scripted by Michelle Rosenfarb. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:09

This one doesn’t go for laughs or pathos (“Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” was featured in a more moving earlier trailer).

But Christmas Day, all the kids will still want to sing along with…Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Scarlett Johansson, Taron Egerton, Tori Kelly, Nick Kroll, Bobby Cannavale, Halsey, Pharrell Williams, Letitia Wright, Eric André, Chelsea Peretti and Bono.

The end, when it comes, is never pretty. But can it be a thing of beauty?

That’s an unspoken premise of “So Late So Soon,” a portrait of two kind of cute/kind of quarrelsome Chicago artists as they close in on 80 and the big Final Act decisions that face everyone lucky enough to reach that age.

Jackie and Don Seiden were, for decades, mainstays of Chicago’s art scene, if never exactly household names. A couple of 1980s TV interviews capture them at their creative peaks — her, a roller-dancing mixed-media artist specializing in “decaying media,” him a welder and papier mache sculptor and sketch artist.

What they’re most famous for is teaching; at local schools, at the Art Institute of Chicago, in art therapy classes. But what “So Late So Soon” captures is lives lived artistically and a fifty year-plus marriage tested by the trials of old age.

Filmmaker Daniel Hymanson visits them in in their worn, dated and somewhat cluttered apartment, where the highly-strung chatterbox Jackie shrieks at this or that, and celebrates a mouse “turd” she finds in their cabinetry. Nothing for it but to set traps, and shriek as she sets them off by accident.

Don reacts to most every Jackie outburst. Just not right away. He might walk into the kitchen and see her stringing up dental floss between cabinets, suspending toy animals (a plastic cow) as she does, cursing mildly when she runs out of floss and needs Don to hold things in place until she returns from the bathroom.

She kvetches as she services their ancient toilet. “We’re gonna have to MOVE.” That seems like a conclusion she might be coming to.

“Being old, being elderly, is like a dirty trick,” she complains — 78 and still dancing as if no one is watching.

“I’m not making any more furniture or painting any more walls,” he gripes. So nertz to your idea of “moving,” missy.

We hear her aches and pains, witness his panic attack and find him in a hospital doing physical therapy.

In tiny dollops, we hear about their past, how their sisters were best friends from childhood, how they “got along” and were sort of thrown together, how he choked when questioned by the justice of the peace who married them, and how she never let him forget that.

Yes, we see them fight, with Jackie donning ear muffs to shut him out, Don pleading “How can we fix this?” and the viewer never doubting for a second that they will, nor that they’ll decide that being together is more important than living on “some place where we’re not together.”

In just 70 minutes, Hymanson has shown us what “soul mates” look like, and leveled with us about the best possible outcome for our final years, months and days. Not bad.

Rating: unrated, mild profanity

Cast: Jackie Seiden, Don Seiden

Credits: Directed by Daniel Hymanson. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:12

“Hobbit” filmmaker Peter Jackson invites his fellow “kids” into the candy store of Beatles archives for “The Beatles: Get Back,” a film compiled from the mountains of documentary footage shot as the band scrambled to make an album in London in January of 1969.

Over the seven-almost-eight hours of this three part streaming series, a project that was pitched as a single theatrical film pre-pandemic, Jackson shows us just what a fanatical fan would be up against, trying to edit 57 hours of often-candid film footage and 150 hours of audio into a project that says something new about The Beatles.

“Kid in the candy store” indeed. It’s as if Jackson couldn’t bear to leave this, that or the other out of his film appreciation of The Fab Four. That makes for an exhaustively-detailed but often repetitive and redundant illumination of their creative process, even as it is a telling documentation of the forces that broke them up. That happened shortly after this project climaxed with their iconic “rooftop concert” from their new and crowded Apple townhouse office and studio.

The album was to be called “Get Back.” It was to be accompanied by a couple of live shows — which they hadn’t performed in three years — and include another Beatles TV special.

They were attempting a deadline-pressing recreation of their earliest recording days — writing, re-writing, working out arrangements and solos, rehearsing and re-rehearsing on a soundstage, and then in a studio, and finally performing live-on-tape (no overdubs) for an album that might have been called “Get Back,” but ended up as “Let It Be.”

And that rooftop show, “taking over London” for a no-permit “free concert” that was busted up by the bobbies after a few tunes, turned out to be their last live performance as a quartet.

Jackson, working with film shot by a vast crew led by then-director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, shows us enough footage to rewrite or at least renew their legend. But watching a film this long, with this much banter, this many versions of “Get Back” and “Two of Us,” becomes the visual equivalent of panning for gold. Still, by the time that last take of “Let It Be” decays on the soundtrack, I think he’s turned up some shiny flecks in that panning.

Lindsay-Hogg, already by 1969 a veteran of music videos for the Beatles and Rolling Stones (he’d go on to film “Frankie Starlight” and “The Object of Beauty”), is very much a character in this project, explaining what he’s doing, clarifying with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr the direction things are going in the film he’s making, which seems to be “going to pieces” much like the band, at times.

Ringo had a movie production start date, “The Magic Christian,” pressing down on their plans. They begin rehearsing and filming on a soundstage at Twickenham Studios, where the movie would largely be shot (co-star Peter Sellers drops in to say “Hi.”).

Those early days, on a cavernous stage with a cyclorama backdrop, come off as a lot of goofing around, getting back in the groove, going in circles if they’re “going” at all. Stress fractures are glimpsed in that setting

Jackson shows us the countdown pages on the calendar bearing down on them. They had to have the songs composed and the album and the live filmed performances in the can before month’s end.

There’s no overt hostility to the presence of John’s new flame, Yoko Ono, who has injected herself into these proceedings, often literally sitting between John and Paul. Linda Eastman, soon to be Linda McCartney, also shows up and takes photos and her daughter Heather bounces around the studio, entertaining and then being entertained by each Beatle in turn.

When Paul jokes about “fifty years from now” the story that “The Beatles broke up because Yoko sat on an amplifier,” he seems prophetic. The worst you could say about Ono was that she was underfoot, mostly-silent but distracted and a little distracting, shoehorning her way into an intimate circle that formerly was just four.

There’s a little visible tension in Harrison, lacking confidence that he can do this or that to always-upbeat task-master McCartney’s satisfaction, unhappy at the backlog of songs he’s written or partially composed that he will never get on a Beatles LP. George, remember, walked out of the band at one point in these sessions.

Then they move to their more intimate, yet-unused (the gear installation was botched by a Beatles hanger-on) new Apple studios. Ray-of-light keyboardist Billy Preston starts sitting in and George comes back.

In one quietly magical moment, we and George watch as Ringo plays a bit of this lark he’s working out on the piano, “Octopus’s Garden.” George comes over to compliment what’s there and suggest what’s needed to turn that — lyrically and musically — into a pop single.

A Beatles fan might shed a tear over that. It’s a little fleck of gold, one of many Jackson found in all that footage. We hear the first rough idea of what “Get Back,” the song, will be, catching a literal “moment of creation.” Paul pounds away at it like the craftsman he is, getting a melody and a chorus by force of will. He envisions it as a protest tune for an LP that might have a little edge to it, commenting on the anti-immigrant backlash sweeping Europe…in 1969.

Paul gets into their “nervousness” about performing live and mentions that ultimate fear of the Fabs — repeating themselves. Gathered together, they’re “talking about the past like old age pensioners.” But as the series’ prologue reminds us, they’d been together for a dozen years, most of them. Liverpool to Hamburg to the Cavern Club to EMI and George Martin (always in the scene here, with producer Glyn Johns), to glory and superstardom and fame so overwhelming it became a trap and a cliche.

Yes, there’s footage of their trek to India, and George has a spiritual advisor/guru in studio with him at times.

But what Lindsay-Hogg preserved on celluloid and what Jackson wants us to see, throwing all this never-before (or seldom) seen footage at us, is their bonhomie, their good humor and musicianship and mutual support, even at what became “the end.”

George has this new tune, “Something in the way she moves me,” but can’t work out what comes next. “Just sing anything that comes to mind,” John coaches, something we’ve seen all of them do time and again as they work out songs like “Let It Be” in these sessions. “‘Attracts me like a cauliflower‘ — until you get the right words.”

“Attracts me like a pomegranate,” George offers.

Split screens and overlapping audio break up the straightforward “documentary” style. There are secretly-recorded conversations about the state of the band in the Apple commissary, endless cigarettes and tea and toast. “Let It Be,” “Long and Winding Road, “Something,” and others come together a little, then are dropped as the band backslides into their vast repertoire of Hamburg eight-hours-of-sets-a-night days, rock and pop classics from the late ’50s and early ’60s, just to break up the grind.

It’s all entirely too much, of course. Jackson copped out on cutting this into a tighter, more coherent “history.” Ninety minutes per show would have sufficed. But in this form, he really is asking “Well, what would YOU leave out?”

A Beatles buff won’t need any salesmanship to know Disney+ is the place to be this weekend. And even a more casual fan might want to drop in on “Get Back,” just to get a peek at what all the fuss was about and why they still seem relevant over fifty years later. Because “where they once belonged” is where they’ve always been.

Rating: smoking, profanity

Cast: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Linda Eastman McCartney, George Martin, Billy Preston, Glyn Johns, Mal Evans, Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Credits: Directed by Peter Jackson and Michael Lindsay-Hogg. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 3 episodes, 2-3 hours each, 468 minutes (7 hours, 48 minutes) total

Well, if nothing else, Vanessa Hudgens seems to be having a blast with these “Princess Switch” holiday movies for Netflix.

As the original and sequels have rolled out, she’s been called on to not just play a Chicago baker who switches places with lesser European royalty, a princess who looks just like her. She’s playing that royal’s “evil cousin,” the clothes horse Cruella knock-off, Fiona.

“Princess Switch 2” introduced Fiona as she attempted a coup. As she wasn’t punished for that — nobody is, really — she’s back for “3” where she takes over a “Romancing the Stone” tale where a piece of bejeweled Vatican decor, “The Star of Peace,” has been stolen by tycoon who adores such baubles.

“Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star” is a lame heist picture that traffics in the cliches of the genre, dumbed-down for a kiddie audience, and mainly a vehicle for America’s favorite “High School Musical” alumna to don designer wear, practice her catwalk and curl her lips around the plummy locations of a spoiled villainess.

You can hear a hint of Cruella, a dash of Mae West and a soupcon of Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter from “Rocky Horror” in the gulped, sneering insouciance she brings to every over-the-top line.

“I need to borrow a car, preferably a ‘rari that matches my Manolos!” “Let’s make some merry, shall we?”

Princess now Queen Margaret and look-alike pal Stacy, married and hanging with their hubbies (Nick Sagar and Sam Palladio) in scenic, fake-snowy Belgravia, need to take Fiona out of the convent where she’s been sentenced to “community service” because that Papal “Peace” star, meant to top their Christmas tree this year, has been swiped.

Nobody but dastardly Fiona and her minions (Florence Hall, Ricky Norwood) could possibly have the connections to know who took it, and how to get it back.

“No worries, Royal Sixpack. Good news has arrived!”

Fiona’s old Interpol lover (Remy Hii) will help out. That wealthy hotelier Hunter Cunard (Will Kemp) won’t know what hit him, a stolen star stolen back right in of the middle of the posh costume party he throws at his super-secure Belgravian mansion every Christmas season.

That’ll also give Peter the chance to hit on Fiona one last time, and maybe convince Fiona to re-connect with her absentee mother (Amanda Donahoe), the one who made her the greedy mean girl she is today.

Or course events conspire to require Fiona’s two less-larcenous look-alikes to impersonate her on the night of the party. So “The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star,” is really about Vanessa Hudgens playing Fiona, and playing Stacy and Margaret playing AT playing Fiona.

The script’s a poor facsimile of the movies it’s stealing from, and that includes the tepid, tinsel-covered treacle that was the original “Princess Switch” and its first sequel.

The money here went to the over-decorated sets, the costumes and Hudgens, who is used to much better effect in a smaller role in “Tick, Tick…Boom!” The “Princess” supporting players are relative unknowns in all of these movies — an economy measure that gives competent actors work, but robs the movie of star sparkle and the sense that anybody of “name” other than Hudgens would want to appear in them.

She may have a good time and suck up all the attention, costumes and plot threads. The little-knowns-to-utterly-unknowns around her? They’re just set dressing.

It’s nothing you blame Hudgens for, unless you figure she should tell her agent that she won’t sign for another sequel unless they spend cash on a co-star of at least some stature.

Donahoe’s the only other recognizable name actor here, and “L.A. Law” was a whole millennium ago.

Hudgens’ times-three star turn — underwritten as every character is — would be more fun if she was surrounded by a supporting cast that could bring laughs, pathos and a little more charisma to the party.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Vanessa Hudgens, Remy Hii, Sam Palladio, Nick Sagar, Will Kemp, Ricky Norwood, Florence Hall and Amanda Donahoe

Credits: Mike Rohl, scripted by Robin Bernheim Burger, based on characters created by Burger and Megan Metzger. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

Perhaps only Ryûsuke Hamaguchi could take a short story by one of Japan’s most acclaimed writers, Haruki Murakami, and get a three hour movie out of it.

But no one who saw his “Happy Hour” would be shocked at the patience-testing element of “Drive My Car.” After all, he got over five hours out of what might appear to be a simple tale of the emotional lives of four women over basically one long “taking stock” night in that 20015 film.

Not all Hamaguchi’s films go to such “slow cinema” extremes. But he likes characters who talk. And the many long monologues, along with repetitious driving scenes and extended table-reads of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” in rehearsal push the limits of audience tolerance even as they mesmerize.

He’s toying with narrative demands and narrative structure in an intimate portrait of grief, fidelity, of what you know and don’t about yourself and your partner.

His protagonist, the actor and director Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), endlessly prepares for roles by running lines against a cassette recording of whatever character has a scene with him, while driving his restored 1980s Saab 900 Turbo. He plans such rides to and from the theater so that they’re an hour long.

It doesn’t matter if the show is in rehearsals or already up and running, if he’s starring in “Waiting for Godot” in Tokyo or directing “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima. He has his “routine,” and he’s gotten famous in acting circles for this sort of pounding the text approach to acting.

We meet Yûsuke in the afterglow of sex with his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima). She’s naked, relating a story that unfolded in her head while she was in the throes of passion. Yûsuke listens, contributes and encourages this long tale of a kinkily-obsessed teenage girl who “used to be a lamprey.” His “method” is running lines ad nauseum. This is her creative “method.”

Theirs is a marriage of open “I love yous” and affection, until that day he comes home from a canceled flight to find her wearing out their bed with a young actor on a TV show she writes for. She doesn’t see him. He never tells her. And the frost barely has time to settle over this betrayal when he comes home one day to find her dead.

It was “natural causes,” of course. Because this story has barely a whiff of anything that could be taken as contrived or melodramatic. Even years later, when Yûsuke casts the young rake (Masaki Okada) whom he met when his wife brought him to a play of his, a fellow actor who then cuckolded him, there’s little that plays as “ulterior motive” in him doing it.

As this multi-lingual “Vanya” (actors speak Japanese, Chinese and even Korean Sign Language in it) grinds through reading after reading, with actors impatient to get it “on its feet,” adding physicality to their beyond-memorized vocalizing of the test, Yûsuke’s routine is altered by the requirement that a near-expressionless young driver (Tôko Miura) take the wheel of the Saab and do all his driving in Hiroshima.

The long drives, with lines from “Uncle Vanya” playing out underneath them, have a meditative quality. Yûsuke’s interactions with the actors, with a helpful multi-lingual assistant and with the sad and mostly-silent driver feel bitter, drained of emotion.

Something, we know or hope we know, has to give.

This Cannes and other film festivals’ darling plays as more dramatically flat than other rapturous reviews let on. The acting is heavily internalized, the inciting incidents few and very far between.

In fleshing out and dragging out the Murakami short story, Hamaguchi lets us know he’s not playing by conventional narrative plotting or film structure. The opening credits, coming after a relatively action-packed prologue — two sex scenes and a death — roll just over 40 minutes in.

Hamaguchi defies expectations, time and again, and forces the viewer to consider not just what we’re taking from this film, but what we bring to it. The guilt that goes hand-in-palm with grief in screen melodramas is here, but not in any openly identifiable or relatable way.

Yûsuke moments with the womanizing punk Koji (Okada) are deflating, with just a whiff of judgmental.

The many monologues — anecdotes from someone’s past, Oto’s script outline, a character revealing some secret — are immersive but drained of emotion.

One can’t pick on the actors not giving us much here. Pretty much everyone hits the same tone, as they were directed to do. A rare moment outside this Temple of Gloom — an actor, politely complaining about the constant table-reads, a dinner at home with another — feel like a movie Hamaguchi doesn’t want to let out of the bag.

And then there’s the daring treatment of “Uncle Vanya,” a show whose multi-lingual performance means that the cast must know what they’re hearing and reacting to even though they often don’t speak the language. Physicality and internalized-text is all. Hamaguchi fearlessly puts us in the audience for this challenging and gimmicky indulgence, where viewers in the theater who don’t know this warhorse play by heart must read subtitles (how opera is performed in many places) projected above the stage, not locking their eyes on the actors.

Is Yûsuke punishing the players? Is Hamaguchi mocking the theater?

The otherwise wholly consistent mood and vibe of “Drive My Car” give it a literary quality rare in films and explains much of its acclaim. It’s a movie of repressed characters living interior monologues not delivered, the cinema of droning along storytelling rebranded as “serene” or “patient.”

That makes this festival darling one of those films you ponder and appreciate, almost at arm’s length. It’s that afraid of moving you.

Rating: unrated, sex

Cast: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Reika Kirishima, Tôko Miura, Masaki Okada, Sonia Yuan and Yoo-rim Park

Credits: Directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. scripted by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe, based on a short story by Haruki Murakami. A Janus release.

Running time: 2:59

Lily James and Sebastian Stan lose themselves in the pre-Kardashians “reality” couple of choice.

“Baywatch” babe Pamela Anderson and rocker and tattoo template Tommy Lee dominated the tabloids for all the wrong reasons, and paved the way for sex tape fame for all who followed.

It reminds us of how unplanned it all was, that the loving couple were victim.

This series, also starring Seth Rogen and Nick Offerman, comes to Hulu next February.

“Agnes” begins as a droll but otherwise conventional troubled-priest-brought-in-for-an-exorcism thriller, a darkly comic take on Catholicism, demonic possession in the age of psychobabble and “the shame of the Church,” and we all know what THAT is.

But the fourth feature of director and co-writer Mickey Reece (“Climate of the Hunter,” “Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart”) takes an interesting, unpredictable turn at its midpoint. “Agnes” leaves its title character behind and follows a nun who leaves the order, traumatized by what she’s seen.

I can’t say it necessarily comes off, although I’m not out-of-line declaring that it doesn’t pay off — not in a horror movie or crisis-of-faith melodrama sense.

When your cynical, comical “horror” movie dips into dull standup comedy, working class poverty, the grief associated with loss and the Big Theological Question of how you make room for God in your heart, you’ve raised the bar. Although he’s made something provocative and unpredictable, I don’t think Reece crosses that higher bar.

The Sisters of Santa Teresa have a problem. One of their order has snapped, or been possessed by the Devil. Hard to say.

A mid-meal freak out — “You are all WHORES of Christ!” — rattles the pious, no-nonsense Mother Superior (Reece favorite Mary Buss) and scares the bejesus out of the other nuns, none more than Sister Mary (Molly C. Quinn), Agnes’ closest friend in the convent.

A weathered, tippling and skeptical priest (Ted Hall) with a shadow over his career is summoned to see the silent, Halloween-costumed Archbishop. Father Donahue is sent on this mission by the smirking attendant priests of the dioceses. He’s to be accompanied by his former student, seminarian Benjamin (Jake Horowitz).

Father Donahue doesn’t believe in “the Medieval ‘woo-woo'” that those minions of the Archbishop have sent him to perform. He doesn’t believe Benjamin, who hasn’t taken his vows, has any business staying with him at a convent, a “young unordained rooster loose in the hen house” is how he describes the kid to the Mother Superior. She doesn’t find that funny.

But the amateur shrink in him tells him these rituals help.

“Some people need to walk through darkness to get to the light.”

Agnes is violent, and objects are tumbling off shelves in her presence. Maybe the priest needs a stronger belief in the “Medieval woo-woo.” Instead, he summons a more punk rock TV-friendly priest with a traveling female companion, played by Chris Browning of TV’s “Bosch,” doing his best Billy Bob Thornton impersonation here.

We see things we’ve seen in scores of exorcism movies before, and as we’ve seen it all before, Reece keeps that sequence truncated. He’s more interested in “after the exorcism.”

The former Sister Mary’s odyssey takes her back into the “real world,” with no living wage, a creepy supermarket boss and a seemingly random encounter with a seriously unfunny (poorly scripted material) stand-up (Sean Gunn), a bit of morose soul-searching and some disturbing “signs” in her psyche that she might recognize.

The lighter touches outside of the comedy club are what stick with you in “Agnes.” Even the exorcism itself is made comical, with Agnes talking about Hell and smirking Father Black (Browning) suggesting he’s been there. Demonic Agnes doesn’t want to hear it.

“Hell wouldn’t HAVE you!”

And there’s an amusing priest’s analogy of life, theology and belief being like a crummy club sandwich.

“Most of this sandwich, most of this world, is just stuff to chew through, hoping that it ends soon.”

Deep. Or like “Agnes” itself, just a callow facsimile of deep — “horror movie” deep.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexuality, profanity

Cast: Molly C. Quinn, Haley McFarland, Ted Hall, Sean Gunn, Chris Browning and Jake Horowitz.

Credits: Directed by Mickey Reece, scripted by Mickey Reece and John Selvidge. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:36

What in Holy Hunan is this? A Chinese animated comedy about dashing dim sum, samurai sushi and nervy noodles facing down the evil, stinky Lord Octopus?

“Kung Food” is a Chinese import based on a Chinese TV series that plays with its food. Fancifully designed and decently animated by Yi Animation, I have to tip my hat to Level 33, releasing this kid-friendly/adult chuckles food-pun farce as America enters its “Turkey leftovers again? Let’s order CHINESE!” season.

It’s about a long-training young pork bun, Bao, kicked out by his teacher to “seek adventure,” and accidentally gifted with a long-ago master’s “Staff of Destiny.”

Bao, a faintly-dim dim sum, is going to need it where he’s headed. A brochure has enticed him to sign on for a military adventure, a grand armada that’s setting out in search of the long-lost “Fabled Five Flavor Stone,” the font of all food wisdom.

You can’t eat anything that doesn’t taste “sweet, sour, bitter, spicey or salty,” right?

But pirates let by Lord Octopus take Princess Choy (noodles) hostage, and Bao’s cooking scow is lost. He finds himself shackled to one of the Octopus’s hired samurai, “Salmon” (Ikura, salmon roe sushi). They must battle angry monkeys “(We have no time for monkey business!”), sudden fires (“Must…escape…heat and sushi do NOT mix!”) and make their way to a martial arts battle royale set during a salt storm.

The insults are of the “egg head” and “People who wear loin clothes (Japanese samurai) shouldn’t skip the underwear!” variety.

Expletives are limited to “Sweet GINGER” and “Let’s go kick some WHEAT grass!”

Oh, to have been in the writer’s room where English speakers bounced puns and zingers back and forth in translating this “wonton slaughter” that might’ve been better titled “Crouching Bun, Hidden Duck Sauce” or “Enter the Dim Sum.”

If your kids are Chinese menu savvy, just figuring out what this character/dish or that one is that this or that character is supposed to be. It’s “Veggie Tales in Sweet and Sour Sauce.”

For adults, it could play as a take-out dinner date drinking game movie, a 90 minute think-up-your-own-pun fest.

Because whatever its original intent, Western viewers will notice dim sum silly, silly noodles.

Rating: unrated, mild profanity, food fights, food puns

Cast: The voices of Koula Kyriaki Glyptou, Grace Samson, Barry Samson, Chris Hover and Jeff Schectman

Credits: Directed by Sun Haipeng, scripted by Sun Haipeng, Lin Jinglei, Ma Hua, Billy Casper, Barry Samson, Gace Samson, Sydney Gonzales, based on the TV series. A Level 33 release.

Running time:1:36