Movie Nation

The animation is a riot of colors wrapped around the graceful sway of South American dancers, some of the most glorious animated dance since Walt Disney’s “Fantasia.” “Encanto” is simply gorgeous to look at, almost from start to finish.

But I didn’t care for the film, and I’ve been struggling to process the reasons for two weeks since seeing it, trying to hit on exactly where it seems lacking.

Could it be Lin-Manuel Miranda fatigue? I haven’t been nuts about any screen musical he’s scored since “Hamilton.” And right from the jumbled, raced-through incoherence of the opening number, in which our heroine, Mirabel (voiced and sung by Stephanie Beatriz) is singing about her “Family Madrigal” at great speed because she doesn’t want to dwell on the fact that unlike every relative she’s named, she has no “miracle given to our family,” a “special gift,” the tunes are forgettable/forgotten before the notes have drifted off the soundtrack.

Perhaps the patchwork, not-about-anything story (five credited writers contributed, two tried to wrestle it into a screenplay “plot”) hung me up.

Dazzling voice casts don’t matter, and the Colombians, Colombian Americans and others represented here have to work with the script they were given. Just hiring someone who sounds like a matriarchal version of Salma Hayek seems a cheat.

But it’s still Disney. Even when they miss they don’t often miss by much.

Our story takes place in an unnamed corner of South America where somebody dies fleeing violence in a river crossing. Disney says that it’s “Colombia,” so why not? Like “Raya,” the culture celebrated here is more vague than simply defined. They’ll fix that with a press release. Again.

Mirabel and the Madrigal family live in an enchanted villa on the outskirts of a quaint town where the locals rely on their generosity and their “gifts.”

Sister Luisa (Jessica Darrow) is super strong, and sister Isabella (Diane Guerrero) is so “perfect” that she makes flowers bloom and trails blossoms where ere she goes.

Mirabel’s firing blanks.

There are also “gifted” aunts and a shape-shifting uncle (Wilmer Valderamma), cousins, nieces and nephews and a matriarchal Abuela – “grandmother” (María Cecilia Botero) who keeps traditions and family lore alive in their magical, helpful house where the table sets itself and the moment you see the prancing, dancing alarm clock you know where they got that idea from.

Vague events conspire to make Mirabel’s missing gift stand out and cause the house to lose its luster and magic. Her relatives start losing their “gift.” She must sift through family history, poke around the many rooms behind each gifted family member’s illuminated door to find a way to save them, perhaps one involving the missing uncle she’s never met, Bruno.

Is she “just as special as the rest of us” or is her special gift problem solving? Because maybe she could take a pass at the screenplay, if that’s the case.

The clutter of characters gives away a certain “Let’s just add more” flavor to the screenplay’s problem-solving. Let’s introduce a toucan sidekick for Mirabel’s “Heroine’s Journey,” and uh, decide we’re not going to do the usual Disney things with him. And that’s typical.

Some trippy visuals on that journey and the best efforts of funnyman John Leguizamo along the way don’t produce anything that I’d call a laugh. A few sight-gags with the muscle-sis and shape-shifting uncle just lie there.

Maybe this will play to the very youngest audience, but that’s what we say about animation that’s not anything anyone over eight will get much out of.

I found “Encanto” more aggravating than entertaining, felt I learned nothing about the culture Disney says it’s celebrating and felt the dread welling up for Lin-Manuel’s work in the upcoming “tick…tick…BOOM.”

Disney’s “Coco” and Netflix’s “Vivo” had it all over “Encanto” in terms of story, heart, gags and music. This film looks finished but plays as “We’re still working story kinks out.”

Rating: PG, for some thematic elements and mild peril.

Cast: The voices of Stephanie Beatriz, María Cecilia Botero, John Leguizamo, Angie Cepeda, Diane Guerrero, Jessica Darrow, Wilmer Valderamma

Credits: Directed by Jared Bush, Byron Howard and Charise Castro Smith, scripted by Jared Bush and Charise Castro Smith. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:39

He and his little sister just lost their dad, and Jules has decided “I hate Christmas” in the bargain.

Now his widowed mother’s moved them to Belgium, where Jules can keep Grandpa, his father’s father, company in his toy shop. When the sour, grieving kid stumbles across a magical snow globe on the shelves and figures out that it teleports the bearer to any place on Earth in an instant, Jules (Mo Bakker) does the math.

“Are you…Santa?” he asks his gramps (in Flemish with English subtitles, or dubbed into English).

“Now’s not the time,” Grandpa (Jan Decleir) grumps. Busy season and all that.

But he confesses, and the next thing we know, the kid who hates Christmas is drafted into helping his ailing grandfather cover his appointed rounds. Only reluctantly. Nothing less is expected of another generation of “The Claus Family.”

This shiny little Belgian bauble has more sparkle than spark, as the kid relapses into sullen sadness repeatedly, the “logistics” of The North Pole seem like a half-hearted cheat and the warm fuzzies never, for once second, set it.

The elves are tiny (forced camera perspective) people, and the North Pole is basically inside Santa’s snow globe. An elevator takes the kid into the complex’s subterranean warehouses, where the quartet of elves — or in this case Jules — help Santa stuff his sack and teleport from house to house, city to city, filling orders, if he can make out “this four-year-old’s handwriting.”

Broken-hearted Jules keeps pouting “I want to go home,” and can’t shake his grief. Santa’s “He just needs to believe in Christmas again” doesn’t sound therapeutic at all.

Meanwhile, mother Suzanne’s (Bracha van Doesburgh) new job is at a failing cookie factory is turning into a Cookie Revolution, as the workers try to get the tyrannical boss to try Suzanne’s dazzling Christmas cookie recipes.

There’s nothing wrong with a downbeat take on the holidays. Kids mourn, too, after all. The holidays are sentimental by nature, and wistful sadness can be a part of that.

But this gorgeous-looking Christmas card of a movie has all the action of a snow globe. There’s little that’s light or fun, even among the cranky, cracking-under-deadline-pressure elves.

Director Matthias Temmermans is content to let all of the limited action and muted emotions pass before our eyes as a tableaux, a movie that should bounce moves at the pace of a glacier made of cookie dough.

It’s so pretty that it almost fills the bill as holiday TV babysitting for little kids, and so slow that they’re almost guaranteed to not sit still for it.

Rating: G

Cast: Mo Bakker, Jan Decleir, Bracha van Doesburgh, Eva van der Gucht, Sien Eggers and Stefaan Eggand.

Credits: Matthias Temmermans, scripted by Matthias Temmermans and Ruben Vandenborre A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

Brian Wilson‘s never had much of a poker face. And the decades, the long battle with mental illness, hasn’t changed that.

In “Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road,” the Beach Boys icon and Hall of Famer can be frank and unguarded, even when he’s drifting into “scared” and anxious. Pushing 80, he forgets things he’s just heard but remembers an awful lot from “way back when,” many timelines of “way back when.”

Gently questioned, catered to, flattered and indulged in this uplifting and sweet-spirited documentary, he’s an inspiring sight to anyone who knows what he’s been through and knows others going through mental struggles.

“Long Promised Road,” taking its title from a lesser-known tune by the band, is a celebration of the glorious third act of a performer whose struggles became legend, whose victimhood became notorious and whose “genius” no longer requires quotation marks.

As the movie makes plain, his “auditory hallucinations” and anxiety attacks manifested themselves early, forcing him to quit touring just as his band was reaching its peak. So he threw himself into “turning the studio into another instrument” in the ensemble, and in a friendly, informal rivalry with The Beatles, produced some of the landmark albums of the 1960s, famous for their aural invention and musical complexity.

He fell into a spiral as the band’s relevance faded, a deadly blend of mental illness and drugs that could easily have killed him and made his problems sad tabloid fodder.

Then, in 2004, coming out the other side of his schizoaffective disorder and the loss of confidence that his relations with the band and an album he hadn’t finished brought on, he took up touring again — with a vengeance. And the concerts became love-ins, the music he started recording again was critically acclaimed.

Filmmaker Brent Wilson (no relation) follows Wilson and a friend, Rolling Stone journalist Jason Fine, as they take us into the routines of his life these days — meals at a familiar deli, studio time with his longtime band — and on a road trip around the Southern California landmarks of his life.

And fans, from Elton John to Nick Jonas, Springsteen to legendary producer Don Was, sing his praises.

“He had an orchestra in his head,” Elton John marvels. “The Beatles had George Martin to do (orchestrations, arrangements and producing) for them. Brian just had himself.”

Brian and the band’s masterpiece, “Pet Sounds?”

“In terms of musicality,” Bruce Springsteen opines, “I don’t think anybody’s touched it, since.”

Don Was, who has worked with Wilson in the studio, sits at a mixing console and hears a little of “God Only Knows.” “I don’t know what that is,” he says, confused about exactly what instruments were used in this arrangement. “Flutes? With reverb?”

That’s the first of several jaw-dropping musical moments in the movie, that one of the most storied music producers of our time can’t figure out what this “kid” of 22-24 was doing in a 1960s recording studio back in the analog era.

A half century of 1960s cheesy to achingly candid later TV interviews are sampled here. But the clever hook this film hangs on is seeing Wilson today, with a most sympathetic interviewer — Fine — driving him to Paradise Cove and Laurel Way, to old houses and bits of Brian Lore, setting the record straight and peeling away the image, gossip and fiction from his story.

“Everyone says you stayed in your bedroom for years,” Fine says of Wilson’s most infamous crack-up. “You didn’t do that.”

“Nooo. Just a couple of weeks.”

We see Wilson’s house back in the days when he made his music room a “sandbox,” literally — with a piano parked in the middle of the sand. In another room, he kept an Arabian Nights tent.

“What’d you do in there?”

“Smoked grass, ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

We see every hint of nostalgia, pain and regret cross Wilson’s face, just sitting in the front seat of Fine’s SUV. Waves of anxiety hit him without warning.

“What do you do when you get scared?” he asks his friend.

Fine probes the relationships Wilson had with his tyrannical dad Murry and controlling psychotherapist Eugene Landy, and gets the eldest Wilson brother to open up about his late bandmate siblings Dennis and Carl. Brian tears up upon hearing Carl’s vocals on the Beach Boys collection Fine keeps on his car stereo and the film cuts back back and forth between Carl’s concert rendition of “God Only Knows” and Brian’s version in concerts in recent years.

And when Brian reveals he’s never heard drummer-surfer-brother Dennis’ “lost jewel” solo LP “Pacific Ocean Blue,” Fine treats him to a bit of it.

“Wanna hear more?”

“I wanna hear it ALL!”

“You were really good friends with Dennis…”

“Because we used to snort cocaine together. He’d buy me cocaine…I like his song, ‘Forever,’ so beautiful…Big heart.”

The concert footage here reminded me of the warm Glen Campbell documentary, “I’ll Be Me.” Wilson fills the stage with musicians, and while he’s in fine voice and right at home, you get the feeling they’re there to ensure that everything comes off perfectly — supporting, admiring, protecting and performing with him all at the same time.

The portrait that emerges in “Long Promised Road” is that of a gentle soul who’s never been anything less than an open book. When he hears from Fine that Jack Rieley, the manager who brought the band back to relevance in the early ’70s before an acrimonious split, died a couple of years before, Brian breaks down into tears.

He is effusive in complimenting prickly cousin and lead singer Mike Love’s voice, and muted in his criticism even of those who wronged him.

And you realize that maybe the film biography of a few years back, “Love & Mercy,” didn’t wholly do him justice because really, who would believe anybody could be this gentle, upbeat and a bonafide genius to boot.

Rating: unrated, drug use discussed, profanity

Cast: Brian Wilson, Don Was, Bruce Springsteen, Linda Perry, Gustavo Dudamel, Melinda Wilson, Nick Jonas, Elton John, Jason Fine

Credits: Directed by Brent Wilson, scripted by Jason Fine, Brent Wilson and Kevin Klauber. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:33

This looks amusing, and comes out Nov.24

More engrossing that it has any right to be, “Repeat” is a “what lies beyond” thriller with a touch of pathos and a decent third act twist, and a lot of quiet discussion, debate and marriage breakdown preceding it.

It’s a low-tech “technology” tale from the UK, about a cognitive brain researcher (Tom England) whose studies on people’s theta waves make him wonder about the static he’s hearing from this transceiver he has hooked up to his brain study coil. At some point he decides he’s speaking to the dead, that “The end is just the beginning.”

The stumbling, non-linear plot takes us from his secretive, off-campus early work — paying students to be test subjects — to a year and a half later. His schoolgirl daughter has disappeared, his marriage (Charlotte Ritchie plays wife Emily) is in couples counseling and his university is fretting that he might bring shame to them all.

Because he’s still doing the research off campus. He’s holding public “demonstrations” at theaters and pubs. And he’s letting volunteers from the audience speak with loved ones who’ve passed.

The best effect in this Grant Archer, Richard Miller film is the crackly disembodied voices of the dead-and-somewhat-confused-about-where-they-are. The cheesiest special effect is the glowing, copper-covered magneto coil that is the source of most of the magic tech.

We know, just from the whole “missing daughter” plot point, that Ryan will use his gadget to try and figure out what happened to his little girl. What we can’t guess, not entirely, is what he’ll find.

England makes an effective, emotionally-repressed workaholic lead and Ritchie isn’t bad in support.

But their chemistry is tepid, the big emotional moments are all muted and the pathos of contacting missing daughter Samantha (Ellila-Jean Wood) lacks anything remotely like that “Ghost” punch in the heart.

And without that, all you’re left with is a cheap looking gadget, some chilling sound “from beyond,” and plot twists that feel like too much of the movie that’s played out before their arrival, a pulled-punch.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Tom England, Charlotte Ritchie, Joshua Ford and Ellila-Jean Wood

Credits: Directed by Grant Archer and Richard Miller, script by Richard Miller. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:35

Sitcom vet Lamorne Morris has the title role has the title role in this dark comedy about a disgruntled victim who seeks revenge on that one spam call that breaks the camel’s back.

Jackie Earle Haley, Haley Joel Osment and Alisha Wainwright star in this Dec. 3 release.

Posh enough for you?

March, it’s all yours, Abbeyists.

“A Cop Movie” is a gimmicky docu-drama about Mexican policing, a film that invites you to see through the gimmick and find its greater truth.

But that “truth” isn’t exactly a shock. And the gimmick impacts how we relate it to that “greater truth.”

In and out of Mexico, people have stereotypes in mind when they hear that phrase “Mexican police.” “A Cop Movie” tries to get at some of the reasons for the stereotypes, the degree to which they’re true and just how bad things are for uniformed representatives of the government whose duty is supposed to be keeping people safe.

We follow around two officers, 17 year veteran María Teresa Hernández Cañas, who joined the force as a teenager, and Jose de Jesus Rodriguez Hernandez. Both took up the work as “something to do” for a living after high school. She’s the daughter of a policeman, he joined at the same time as his brother.

After opening with a grabber of a scene, Teresa showing up in a bad neighborhood where a woman in labor has been waiting for an ambulance for two hours and is then forced to assist in a child birth with “no first aid training,” Alonso Ruizpalacios’s film practically clocks out. He treats us treats us to long, somewhat tedious voice-over narration about the internal debate within Teresa’s family about her decision, her father’s tough love efforts to dissuade her, then to keep her away from his precint.

While that goes on, there are recreations of her typical night on the job — cops napping in their cruiser, every stop fraught with fear over what might go down, car breakdowns and, in a story she relates hearing from her father, routine police shakedowns for traffic violations.

Yes, bribes supplement their income.

Similarly, we hear and see the other cop, whom we learn is her partner and who goes by “Montoya,” as he tells his story of taking a job just to earn a living.

At every turn — stopping to eat Mexican fast food, stopping to ask somebody to get out of the street, taunted at a gay pride parade — we see and hear the abuse hurled their way. The disrespect these poorly-paid, under-trained peace officers endure is enough to make the “Blue Lives Matter” lobby wince in shame. They don’t know what contempt and on-the-job danger looks like, by comparison.

The flood of unresponded to radio calls, the disorganization of the office, the petty corruption, “laziness” and rank cowardice plays down to every ugly stereotype that’s been the Mexican cop’s lot, from the Federales days onward.

There’s a fear of “getting involved” that plays out most nakedly in that opening scene. Teresa approaches the address of the police call and faces a faintly menacing looking fellow standing in the middle of the street. She watches him slow-walk towards her and slowly reach behind his back to retrieve…a cell phone.

Once she’s ascertained there’s a baby coming, but no ambulance, she frantically tries a work-around to get one to show up. And sitting in her cruiser, she has to decide whether to just drive off, or stay and try to help.

And just as we’re settling into the movie’s “true stories on the beat” vibe, with characters mouthing the voice-over narration coming from the other officer, Ruizpalacios (“Gueros”) reveals his first, obvious gimmick, and sets us up for the second. Is anything we’re seeing “real?”

The movie this brings to mind is “Midnight Family,” a superb documentary expose of Mexico City’s appalling freelance ambulance services, a nightmarish look into the lives of the under-paid, under-qualified hustlers most of the city relies on to get them to a hospital in an emergency.

“A Cop Movie” suffers in comparison because it’s not a documentary, not really an expose and not exactly “superb.”

But what we see the police go through and hear of the awful conditions they endure, with anyone Indigenous who wears a uniform hearing “”stupid dirty Indian” (in Spanish with English subtitles) and worse every time they try to enforce the law, is genuinely chilling.

In a place where petty corruption and that North American policing excuse for corruption, “officer’s discretion,” rules the day, petty anarchy is the rule.

“A Cop Movie” is a slick exploration/explanation of Mexican policing. But as the style drifts from first-person, dash-cam point of view “reality” to a laughably generic foot chase through the city and onto the subway, it becomes obvious that believing what we see and hear is meant to matter here. And the gimmicks undercut that too many times along the way.

Rating, R, for violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Mónica Del Carmen, Raúl Briones, María Teresa Hernández Cañas, Jose de Jesus Rodriguez Hernandez

Credits: Directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios, scripted by David Gaitán and Alonso Ruizpalacios. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

The make or break moment for me in any horror movie is that first time characters are confronted with the horror, be it supernatural or simple slaughter. And that’s pretty much where “Red Pill” goes wrong.

A well-cast old-leftists-go-Red-Stating thriller in the “Get Out/Red State/The Last Supper” vein, it lands its satiric political punches (sort of) but botches the “Cabin in the Woods” basics.

Veteran stage and screen (“Madame Secretary,” “Fear the Walking Dead”) actress Tonya Pinkins packs good players into a GMC Yukon for a jaunt South, to rural Virginia for a weekend of voter canvassing. Our first-time feature director and star takes her ensemble to “the slave breeding capital of the world” and gives them lots of politically-sharp banter for the drive down.

Cracks about “Flat Earthers” and “hillbillies” and “genocide” and “Ms.-ogyny” and how “people are loyal to groups built on lies” pepper the conversation.

“Could you get inside of their heads and destroy their believes with fact?”

But once they arrive at their small town off-brand AirBnB, the horror begins and the movie sputters like a deflating balloon.

It’s Halloween, just before the election, and Cass (Pinkins), Anglo-African husband Bobby (Adesola A. Osakalumi), Lily (Kathryn Erbe) and Jewish joker Nick (Jake O’Flaherty) Latin immigrant Rocky (Rubén Blades) and Croatian Serb Emelia (Luba Mason) sing the old Gospel protest song, “Marching Up to Freedom Land,” mutter about the “white supremacy” that the past four years has brought out from under a rock and even stop to pull down a one of those racist road signs yokels have been putting up all over the rural South since Trump gave them permission.

That’s their first “red flag.” But the viewer’s seen others — this pale redhead (Catherine Curtin) making bread with drops of blood in it, the bizarre symbol on her top. Even seeing local white women wearing that symbol in matching black cult suits as they roll into town doesn’t dissuade our travelers.

The bizarre decor of their old rental house, the Melania in a Bikini aiming a gun with a laser-pointer light embedded in it doesn’t chase them away. It won’t be too long before their endless debate about the legacy of slavery and ingrained racist beliefs and systems is interrupted by the inevitable “Did you hear that?”

That make or break moment comes shortly thereafter, and the cast and director Pinkin utterly blow it.

Something unimaginably horrific has transpired before their eyes. They have an instant to process it, what probably came before it and their dire situation. And nobody reacts in a way normal humans might, which is to freak the-f out. Numbed “shock” should come later. For the scene to work, we have to be as traumatized as the victims. They aren’t, so we aren’t.

Moments like this call for close-ups and quick edits, stunned, screaming faces intercut with violence, a “jumpy” camera to convey the mania of the moment.

“Red Pill” gives us bupkiss. And while there are later moments that get closer to the mark, most of the “pick-them-off, one-by-one” tropes come off flat.

The eye-rolling over-the-top finale doesn’t atone for these shortcomings either.

“Red Pill” — it cleverly takes its title from “The Matrix,” the “red pill” that conveys a willingness to learn the ugly truth about the world — has a decent cast, a potent message and a promising set-up packaged in a movie without much that passes for a decent fright about it.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Tonya Pinkins, Kathryn Erbe, Adesola A. Osakalumi, Luba Mason, Jake O’Flaherty and Rubén Blades

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tonya Pinkins. A Midnight release.

Running time: 1:26

An ex con who collects and sells scrap metals gets mixed up in human trafficking and money laundering via cartels of a different stripe.

If nothing else, the ethnic politics of this December release has a tetchy edge.