Movie Nation

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

Ridley Scott looked at all the sordid, unscrupulous and deadly goings-on that ended the Gucci family’s days of running the “House of Gucci” and saw a cartoon. Watching his take on a fashion empire’s downfall, or change-of-ownership, you can sometimes see his point.

Yes, scenes of the unsubtle singer-turned-actress Lady Gaga manhandling poor Adam Driver are worth the price of admission. And yes, her performance as Milan trucking-firm daughter Patrizia Reggiani and her ravenous and avaricious pursuit of buttoned-down, out-of-his-depth Gucci heir Maurizio called for nothing less.

It may be mini-series length and feature a murder, but don’t confuse Scott’s “Gucci” with TV’s “The Assassination of Gianni Versace.” The over-the-top clothes, delusionally-overdressed women, backbiting, backstabbing and opulence may be similar. The innate Italianate qualities might be the same — effortlessly stylish, insufferably snobby. But the laughs here, many of which are intentional, give away Sir Ridley’s raised-eyebrow.

“All this melodrama over leather fashion accessories?”

Of course we all know ultimate-in-luxury Gucci brand is more than that, but I have to say, I’m with the director here.

“House” tracks Patrizia’s meeting and stalking of Maurizio, their marriage and eventual embedding with his father’s company, from the disco era through the “Greed is Good” ’80s to the mid ’90s.

We see how Maurizio’s polite but aloof and dashing ex-film actor father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons, perfect) tried to fend off this “match.” We meet the pampered cattle that produce their leather and hear the family and its brand’s ancient and legendary history (founded in “1410”) from a favorite blowhard uncle, Aldo (Al Pacino, fun). And we learn from the bookish, law-school bound Maurizio that it’s mostly bull.

“My grandfather was bellhop at the Savoy Hotel in London,” Maurizio corrects. Granddad just noticed the fancy leather luggage he was hauling for tips in the early 20th century, and figured there was a market in leather shoes, purses and luggage made exclusively for the richest of the rich.

Maurizio’s jaded take on the family business and choice of brides has his father disown him. In the movie’s most romantic moment, he shows up at Patrizia’s house in a taxi with a few belongings, states his newly-impoverished case to her dad, and with Patrizia giving a smitten side-eye — she has “plans” — the match is made.

The rich stiff’s “liberation” via washing dump trucks and playing football with the boys might be a “happiest I’ve ever been in my life” cliche, but Driver makes us buy in.

The palace intrigues are going to change all that. Uncle Aldo wants to take young Maurizio under his wing to obtain leverage with his partner-brother Rodolfo, whose health is failing. And Patrizia does her best to hide her eagerness to charm Aldo and seduce/nag Maurizio to make this happen.

Aldo’s own son, dopey, delusional would-be designer Paolo, is labeled “an idiot” and worse by one and all. With Gucci as my witness, I didn’t recognize Oscar-winner Jared Leto under all that makeup and facial prosthetic and cartoonish/buffoonish performance.

Thus the struggle for control of Gucci is launched well after we’ve gotten permission to laugh at some of the awful, overwrought and over-dressed shenanigans. It’s a pity they lost the nerve to make this an out-and-out tragic farce, because as Scott lets on, it sure as hell could have been.

The opulence — with Lady Gaga changing from overdressed secretary to her dad, driving a stylish but cheap Fiat Spider, to chauffeured Bentleys as a Gucci — is unending. The intrigue –, pitting sons against their fathers — are dastardly. And the accents — that affected Italian that movie stars have been trotting out since Chico Marx — tilt toward the comic.

Scott takes us to fashion shows, lets us see how staid and out-of-touch Gucci couture had become even as the leather brand backbone business remained vital, and catches the moment Texan Tom Ford (Reeve Carney) rode in to return it to runway relevance. He shows the cost of the power struggles

Yet as you’d expect from a film with an ungainly two and a half hours-plus running time, the boring financial strategizing takes over and drags the movie to a halt. And the big “break” within the family, despite being a long-time coming, plays as abrupt, a sort of “Wait, we haven’t done that yet, because there’s a murder coming in the third act?” afterthought.

A couple of films and several TV performances in, I’m still not certain Lady Gaga will ever hit that point where we’ll see her billed as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, and that acting will turn out to be her best destiny. She gets the technical superficials (kind of ) right, but her characters lack the interior life great actors let us see in their eyes.

Driver’s fine monied gentry turn here is somewhat undercut by that fateful accent decision made over his head. Irons is regal, dapper and Old World world-weary, the acting template for the film. Jack Huston‘s role as fixer/”consigliere” to the family is underdeveloped, so he can’t show us much.

Which is fine because Pacino and Leto chew the scenery like they’re at an all-you-can-eat pasta buffet. They’re as repellent as engaging when they’re going this far over-the-top.

Scott spared little on this film, which hints at there being enough detail that it could have been a mini series. He even cast stand-ins for everyone from Sophia Loren and Anna Wintour to André Leon Talley, Richard Avedon, Karl Lagerfeld and longtime Cafe Carlyle singer-in-resident Bobby Short.

And if you don’t know any of those names, “House of Gucci” might not be the movie for you.

But if you’re passing familiar with this world and that era, and intrigued by the very notion of the director of “Gladiator” and the superb period piece no one saw last month, “The Last Duel,” taking on a different sort of empire, sparing no feelings or glitzy expense, allowing Leto to let it all hang out and Gaga to pin Driver — best two-of-three falls — by all means have at “House of Gucci.”

It’s a bit mad and it doesn’t all work. But the upscale conspicuous consumption shimmers through even in its most down-market moments.

Rating: R, Some Sexual Content, Language, Brief Nudity, Violence

Cast: Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jeremy Irons, Salma Hayek, Jared Leto, Jack Huston and Al Pacino

Credits: Directed by Ridley Scott, scripted by Becky Johnston, Roberto Bentivegna, based on the book by Sarah Gay Forden. An MGM/UA release.

Running time: 2:37

This looks like another variation on one of the most remade plots of all time, “The Most Dangerous Game.”

It’s not hunting human “game” for sport. But something in that ballpark.

“Wild Game” stars Charlie Barnett, Matthew Daddario, Creed Garnick, Annie Wilson and others of the not-quite-there-yet league and opens Dec. 17.

Film fans got our first taste of what life was like in Spain after the death of the dictator Franco via the films of Pedro Almodovar, which captured an almost giddy liberation.

The new Catalan thriller “Outlaws,” “Las leyes de la frontera (Laws of the Border)” in Spain, offers us a vivid, dramatic and dramatically different take on those heady days. This adaptation of a Javier Cercas novel may be a bit drawn-out but it is a sometimes nervy, always beautifully immersive trip back in Spanish time.

As this Around the World with Netflix film opens with a lawyer (Javier Beltrán) visiting an old acquaintance in prison, we know the story has but two purposes. It will show us who from his past he’s visiting, aka “who survived,” and it’ll tell us how the lawyer, whom this “gang” he used to run one with nicknamed “Gafitas” (glasses), managed to avoid prison himself.

It’s a straight-up “coming of age” story, a “400 Blows/Breathless” mashup capturing a nerdy, bullied teen who has no “tribe,” so he falls in with the wrong one.

But “falls in with” suggests young Nacho (Marcos Ruiz) had some say in the matter. We’ve seen him picked-on, and watched him find a little oasis in the Gerona (north of Barcelona) arcade where he lives. The second time the older, harder Zarco (Chechu Salgado) strolls in with the curly-mopped siren Tere (Begoña Vargas) we see what’s coming, even if “Gafitas” doesn’t.

She turns on the sultry charm, an invitation is proffered and next thing he knows, timid Gafitas is hanging with “hooligans” at their favorite bar.

He’s introduced to street talk, beer, marijuana and a way to behave around the opposite sex. And not being stupid, he figures out pretty quickly that this gang of fellows named Gordo, Chino, Piernas and Guille want his help robbing the nice old man who gave him a job at the arcade.

Today we’d call it “grooming,” the teasing, testing, rewarding, seducing and punishing that charts his descent into crime.

“Outlaws” will test what Marco is willing to do and when, as it charts his deepening involvement in petty thefts, baiting snatch-and-grab candidates and using his command of Catalan to help pick houses to break into.

Young Ruiz occasionally oversells and at other times undersells Nacho’s journey to Gafitas. The character’s lack of resistance can be explained by the pitiless abuse he’s been getting from a quartet of gutless toughs at school, and his sense that there’s not enough help coming from his family. But the performance doesn’t pull us in so much as let us join Gafitas as he watches this flashback pass by his eyes as he waits to visit a prison inmate decades later.

Director Daniel Monzón has a lot of experience in heist pictures (“The Biggest Robbery Never Told,” “Yucatán”) and he stages the robberies that follow with skill and just enough verve. He and co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarría park the inevitable “Nacho faces his bullies after becoming Gafitas” moment late enough to make us wonder if they’ll skip that rite-of-passage scene such movies always deliver.

The love affair is similarly on slow simmer, which waters down its impact and accounts for the film’s tendency to dawdle and a finale that is a lot more a letdown than it should be. At least Monzón makes the most of the two police chases the film affords him.

It’s also a mistake to try and wedge in a separate point-of-view, that of a new and not-yet-corrupted cop (Carlos Serrano), showing us police efforts to cope with this “epidemic,” as they’ve “never had gangs here, before.” This thread is a distraction up to the point where it’s meant to pay off, and there we realize it isn’t developed enough to give us all the information we need.

Still, with every Seat, Peugeot or Citroen hot-wiring, every move the shy kid makes on the alluring Tere, every crime he participates in, we see this middle class boy stepping further away from the comfortable life his family has charted for him and toward one that even Zarco knows is not for him.

“You’ve seen what you had to see,” the ex-con tells him (in Spanish with English subtitles, or dubbed into English). “From now on, everything is the same…or worse.”

That’s as good a line as any thriller this year has managed. Not all the dialogue has that crackle or profundity.

But with a Catalan Gipsy Kings-flavored score by Derby Motoreta’s Burrito Kachimba and just enough action to get by, “Outlaws” delivers on its promises, even if nobody involved could figure out a graceful exit.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity, drinking/smoking, profanity

Cast: Marcos Ruiz, Begoña Vargas, Xavier Martin, Carlos Oviedo, Carlos Serrano and Javier Beltrán

Credits: Directed by Daniel Monzón, scripted by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and Daniel Monzón, based on a novel by Javier Cercas. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:07