Movie Nation

Say what you want, but I LIKE this version of Ellie Kemper.

The ever-sweetly-smiling plucky ditz of “The Office” and “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” goes kind of, well, bad-ass for “Home Sweet Home Alone.” And that’s fun because in this version of “Home Alone,” adults are definitely rooting for the house-breakers, and not the smart-aleck punk who’s barricaded and booby-trapped himself inside to defend it.

The topicality of this reboot is that a suburban family is about to lose its house. Father Jeff (Rob Delaney) has lost his job, and teacher-mom (Kemper) are hiding the “selling our house” news from the kids every way they can.

They even get a realtor (Kenan Thompson, funny as usual) to join their conspiracy and help them stage a secret Open House. That’s how British potty-break-craving Carol (Aisling Bea) and her Brit Brat of a kid (Archie Yates of “JoJo Rabbit”) end up dropping in. Just for a little trip to the loo, my darlings.

Smart-mouthed Archie takes entirely too much interest in the “ugly boy” porcelain dolls that husband Jeff inherited from his mother. When the most valuable one turns up missing, naturally they want to find the kid and get it back.

“Harry stinking Potter comes into our house” and swipes our financial lifeline? It’s on.

But a few blocks away, little Max has hidden himself from the mayhem in his stuffed-with-visitors McMansion, and that’s how he’s Left Behind. Sorry, left “Home Alone.”

Mum, Dad and the extended family are all in Tokyo, and Max has the place — with its “HouseBot” smart house gadget — all to himself.

Jeff is leery of breaking and entering to retrieve what’s theirs, but Pam isn’t having “Harry Stinkin’ Potter come into OUR house” and steal their future. Oh, it’s on.

A few misunderstandings later and Max is onto their efforts, and proceeds to plan accordingly — Hot Wheels hot-feet tricks, “Satan’s Heinie” hot sauce traps and a Nerf cannon repurposed to fire billiard balls. It’s going to get nasty in the middle of Chicagoland’s (Winnetka) latest “Snowmageddon.”

The original “Home Alone” is one of those films, like “Shawshank,” beloved beyond any actual merits seen on the screen. But that said, there’s no improving on it, only remaking it into a washed-out photocopy.

Little kids will appreciate the heaping helping of slapstick — again, no better than the Mac Culkin version. Parents will sympathize with the wisecrack, “Why’re they always remaking the classics?” uttered by a supporting character early on.

More could have been done with the “frantic” Mum, whose very English avalanche of “Sorry, sorry, sorry” apologies can’t get her onto a plane quick enough to get back to her child. The Irish comedienne Bea could have done a LOT more with this part, had the screenwriters let her.

Delaney, of TV’s “Catastrophe,” does his best Will Ferrell. It’s not bad, just not funny enough.

Kemper, I have to say, just brings it. Sure, there were stunt doubles on board, but the pratfalls, the fury of a woman wronged, the lie-on-the-fly cunning — this is a You-Don’t-Mess-With-Momma we can get behind.

Young Yates is obnoxiously written and he does what he can with what’s there.

But the original film had a lot more edge than this. There’s a hint of Max worrying Mum will go to jail for Child Endangerment, which keeps the cops (the one we meet is named McCallister) out of the picture and he battles the intruders. We feared for the kid, then. We root against the little creep, now.

A trip to church provided much of the heart of the first film. That trip doesn’t accomplish that here.

And the third act wraps up this not-quite warm and fuzzy enterprise in a smothering blanket of warm and fuzzy.

There it is. Nice snow, some very good pratfalls, Ellie K and Kenan T kill it and everybody else reads their script and wishes John Hughes was still around to fix it.

Rating: PG, for slapstick violence

Cast: Ellie Kemper, Rob Delaney, Archie Yates, Aisling Bea, Timothy Simons and Kenan Thompson.

Credits: Directed by Dan Mazer, scripted by Mikey Day and Streiter Seidel, based on the John Hughes films. A 20th Century film on Disney+.

Running time: 1:36

Wherever film satire has traveled in the past half century, there’s something seriously retrograde in Rada Jude’s film festival darling “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn.”

I wracked my memory banks while watching it, trying to summon up a film to compare its random, randy combination of cultural commentary and low comedy to. All I could come up with is the infamous “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” a satiric 1971 docu-comedy from Yugoslavia, and “Kentucky Fried Movie,” a hilariously vulgar 1977 sketch comedy with social commentary in its sophomoric content.

But what else could be analogous to a movie that uses a teacher’s home sex video, uploaded to the internet, and her “trial” by school parent-teacher committee for it as a scorched earth slapdown of national hypocrisy?

What other recent film has abandoned its story for a middle act titled “A Short Dictionary of Anecdotes, Signs and Wonders?” That’s a long, random-seeming interlude of short snippets of historical footage (WWII genocide and the day Romania switched from Nazi-backing to Stalin-loving), a taste of (dictator) Ceaucescu, animation, a present-day choir of nuns singing a fascist anthem to an approving, elderly Romanian Orthodox priest alongside a quick history of how the church has “always backed dictators,” as has the army. There’s a brief history of pornography, shots of Romanian redneckery’s lifted pickups, that infamous leaked footage of the U.S. airstrike-on-journalists footage in Iraq, video of oral sex and other “wonders” described in deadpan text aimed at making larger points about about modern times and modern life.

So yes, it’s a trifle hard to categorize. It has a light-enough tone that you feel it’s aiming for laughs, but those are few and far between. At least the message is clear, no matter how much meandering goes on as it’s being delivered.

“Bang” begins with a bang — the “sex tape” in question, a married couple going up, down and over-the-top in a sort of role-playing “porn star” romp in the boudoir, which they’re videoing. The WWII torch song “Lili Marlene” plays on the stereo, a relative keeps interrupting with childcare concerns and things start explicit and only grow more so.

We then jump to Emi (Katia Pascariu), an accomplished history teacher at an exclusive school, and see her grueling day of dealing with that video getting out. It even reached PornHub, at one point.

Writer-director Jude (“The Happiest Girl in the World,” “Scarred Hearts”) tracks her as she eggs on her husband’s efforts to get the video pulled (how it got online has a couple of explanations) by phone. She visits an open air market to buy flowers to flatter a possible ally in her “hearing” that night. She copes with traffic, sexual harassers, checkout line meltdowns and belligerent motorists, all on foot.

And as she walks, she and we overhear (in Romanian with English subtitles) snippets of mostly-masked conversations full of innuendo, rumor and ignorance — “It’s scientifically proven incense prevents cancer!”

Everybody is quick to curse as they complain about each other, about the government and an “organ donation” scandal. An older woman grumps that “No one ever got COVID from a Eucharist spoon.” Another walks straight up to the camera and drops the C-word directly to the viewing audience.

The mirror Jude holds up to his Borat-ish homeland and the portrait he presents for foreigners is never, for one second, flattering. We see decaying Soviet bloc housing, haphazard construction and anarchic traffic, overgrown, untended trees and shrubbery. And then there are the angry, short-tempered, broke, backward, blundering, gauche, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic people who probably have a lot more to worry about than whether their kids are accessing the same porn of their teacher than they are.

The factoid-packed middle act “explains” Romania via history, culture, physical examples (elevator doors in a nice building decorated with a “Doggie Style” couple), polls and the like.

The film’s third act returns to Emi’s plight with a long, nasty debate about her status at the school as parents judge and humiliate her and she tries to use her knowledge of history and privacy rights to fend them off.

There’s a universality to the messaging in the film that has become Romania’s submission for Best International Feature in this year’s Oscar competition (fat chance). People’s prejudices have come out into daylight in much of the world in the past few years, and a global pandemic didn’t push them back into the shadows.

Jude’s long line of snippets about Romanian attitudes about rape, examples of public homophobia, statements from historical figures about “robotic warfare” and Jesus, oral sex and the like enliven but don’t necessarily entertain or illuminate the simpler through-line story. I found that middle-act interlude heavy-handed and the jokey “three possible outcomes” for the film that Jude toys with clumsy, although it does deliver the film’s funniest (an anti-Semite’s “A-HA! moment).

Once we’ve heard from the virulently anti-Semitic soldier-parent (Nicodim Ungureanu), the shrill, rich Romanian “Karen” (Olimpia Malai) and the misogynistic, ultra-conservative anti-mask airline pilot (Andi Vasluianu) shout that masks are “the muzzle of slaves,” we get the point.

Rating: Unrated, explicit sex, racism, homophobia and profanity

Cast: Katia Pascariu, Claudia Ieremia, Olimpia Malai, Nicodim Ungureanu and Andi Vasluianu

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rada Jude. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:46

In a film era when too many filmmakers figure computer animation is the only way to make “Clifford” come to life, when “101 Digital Dalmatians” seems cheaper, when the only way to get Harrison Ford cto work with a dog is creating a computer-animated one, it’s always refreshing when a production chooses to go with real, fur-teeth-and-tails canines in a movie about dogs.

So kudos to the folks who hired cattle dogs, terriers, bulldogs, chihuahuas and their trainers to bring “Pups Alone” to life. Viewers can tell the difference, and generally, we prefer real dogs.

The movie surrounding them is nothing more than holiday TV-babysitting fare, something you park small children in front of while cooking, decorating or gift-wrapping. The dogs ae adorable. The movie? Not so much.

It’s an undemanding live-action “Secret Life of Pets/Home Alone” hybrid — bad jokes, middling human actors interacting with the critters and lots of canine slapstick involving defending a house with contraptions.

There are no adult-sophistication laughs in it. The simplistic story is cluttered up and almost overwhelmed by a first act is overwhelmed voice-over narration, animated with pop-up storybook images, just to get the kiddies up to speed on a plot that even a child should be able to follow.

But it’s harmless enough, and less of a commitment than gifting a child with a dog.

A widowed dog-gadget inventor (Tyler Hollinger) and the little girl (Isadora Lindsey) he’s too distracted to raise move to a “company town” where that company is a giant pet products conglomerate run by Eric Roberts.

Dad’s many gadgets, meant to simplify life in their house, are forever barking out “System Fail.” But maybe his dog “speech” translator collar will pay off.

Bitter work rival and neighbor Victor Von Manure (Dolph Lundgren) is out to sabotage that. And their dogs also take sides in the fight.

Smart and helpful Charlie the cattle dog (Jerry O’Connell) is desperate to mend fences between Dad and Grandpa Peter so that gramps can “bring Christmas back.” He has to intervene with the mailman to make that happen. And he’s got to defend their house from bulldog Vinnie (Danny Trejo), the “Dogfather,” and his gang of “Dogfellas” (Rob Schneider among them).

Victor has also hired two “Home Alone” cast-offs, low-rent mugs (Nicholas Turturro, Stelio Savante) who pose as homeless beggars at times, and as assistance-the-the-visually-impaired Christmas decorators (they ransack a little old blind lady’s house instead of setting up her tree). With all the Pet Tech employees at a corporate ski trip retreat at Big Bear Lake, the house and Robert’s many inventions will be easy pickings, right?

Charlie will need the help of the cute neighbor’s cute cattle dog (voiced by Jennifer Love Hewitt) and junkyard terrier Oliver (Malcolm McDowell) to “save Christmas.”

Little kids may be amused by the malfunctioning DIY gadgets that the dogs use to defend inventor Robert’s house full of inventions from the bad guys. They’ll probably laugh at the dog voices. And they might wonder that if Charlie can pick up packing paper and such and drop it in the trash can, why their dog can’t be similarly helpful.

The corporate retreat scenes, with their bonding-over-grownup-Twister and the like cut into montages, are unfunny tedium to all ages.

There’s nothing to this that would distract your average adult scrambling to get ready for the holidays. But the cute canines defending a house while they’re “Home Alone” might keep the tiniest tykes interested…for a little while, anyway.

Rating: unrated, mild profanity, dog poop gags

Cast: Dolph Lundren, Isadora Lindsey, Tyler Hollinger, Nicholas Turturro, Stelio Savante, Keith David and Eric Roberts, and the voices of Jerry O’Connell, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Danny Trejo, Rob Schneider and Malcolm McDowell

Credits: Directed by Alex Merkin, scripted by Brandon Burrows, Casey DeVargas and Jason Gruich. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:47

I don’t know, the pushback Kidman is getting over her turn as the “off camera” Lucille Ball in this biopic seems to miss the point.

Whatever her film career was before marriage and TV made her and her husband famous, Ball was a comedienne of her (TV) era, someone most famous for her various sallies into shtick — playing drunk, pratfalls, big broad braying laughs, exaggerated tears and even going toe to toe with Harpo Marx in a mime off, in one of “I Love Lucy’s” epic moments. Maybe she didn’t “do” vaudeville, but she was mimicking and upstaging the vaudevillians who were her TV contemporaries — Uncle Miltie et al.

The sitcom stuff was very technical — about timing, running gags and ensemble. Kidman has technique to burn. She makes these parts come off more with technique than personality.

Ball’s infamous mugging? Pretty much any actress who looks right with red hair could manage that.

So casting her and surrounding her with Oscar winners makes sense, and not just in an Aaron Sorkin appreciation of Towering Figure of the Tube/Businesswoman/Wife-struggling with a philandering husband sense.

I see enough here to think she “got” Lucy in her version of the Joan Crawford in the Pepsi boardroom scenes. Twitter is aflutter with complaints that Debra Messing didn’t get the gig. She’s certainly more experienced in sitcoms and shtick, but it’d be hard to see the movie as commercial or prestigious with her as the lead.

More “Lifetime Original Movie.”

Dec. 10, see Kidman as Lucy, Javier Bardem, whose career launched with him playing a gay Cuban, playing the under-rated tyro Desi Arnaz, J.K. Simmons as William Frawley and Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance, in theaters, sniffing around for Oscar nominations.

Jesse Metcalf , Chad Michael Murray (and was that Shannon Doherty?) star in this Dec. 17 release.

Maybe your first thought when People Magazine named Paul Rudd its “Sexiest Man Alive,” was “Say what?” OK. Maybe it was your second thought, after “People’s still around? And doing the ‘sexiest man’ thing?”

The reason, thanks to “recency bias,” is almost certainly the darkly humorous Apple series “The Shrink Next Door,” which premieres this week.

Over eight episodes, this series — based on the 2019 podcast of the same name — makes Rudd one of the great villainous charmers ever, a smiling, glib and glad-handing psychotherapist who takes on a pushover of a patient (Will Ferrell) and makes him over. OK, helps him — possibly — as he steadily milks the sap for all that he’s worth.

It’s light and infuriating, a show that episode-by-episode shows the manipulation, predatory billing and “normalizing” of a most “unconventional” doctor-patient relationship, one where the boundaries so vital to such arrangements are wiped away — and not by the patient, but by the shrink.

Rudd — funny, smiling, quick with a quip and “teachable moment” aphorism — is so adorable that it’s easy to lose track of the red flags we see and alarm bells we hear with every new entanglement of that doctor-patient dynamic.

We’ve heard of such things in the news and in the culture — Beach Boy Brian Wilson might be the most famous example. The true story podcast this is based on — which could easily be labeled “true crime” — could join it. I remember hearing it sampled on NPR and shouting at the car radio over the manipulations and predations mixed up with the “help”  Dr. Isaac Herschkopf, ask “Dr. Ike” (Rudd) was dispensing to sad, lonely and anxious Marty Markowitz (Ferrell).

“Shrink,” created and adapted by Georgia Pritchett (“Veep”) is deadpan funny and sometimes quite sad as we see first the “help,” then the cunning destruction, the wedges the healer/hustler employs over the course of the decades — from the ’80s, when much of it is set — to the 2010s, when it call came to a boil.

It’s also very Jewish, and not in that grating “Goldbergs” way. The series depicts an insular world of interconnections — rabbis, show folk, Dr. Ike’s “connections” and Marty’s long-established family fabric business. Rudd’s Dr. Ike is both observant, and practically a “pushy” stereotype. Marty, who has run from confrontation and let people walk all over him his entire privileged life, is putty in this knows-everybody/has-all-the-answers blowhard’s hands.

The dynamic is laid out in the premiere, “The Consulation.” Marty is reduced to near tears by a long-time customer who figures the son of the previous owner can play the insulting, threatening brinkmanship game that is haggling.

His “guard dog” is the only one who can save him, something sister Phyllis (the wondrous Kathryn Hahn) has been doing all her life, we realize. She’s the one who talks her unhappy, single and pushing-40 sibling to “see somebody.” She even picks the “somebody” out. We just know she’s going to regret it.

But his questions, suggestions and promises to Marty, drawing him out, getting him to say what’s underneath the surface, bucking him up as he tries to complete a break-up with a woman who wants a Mexican vacation for her trouble, is kind of thrilling and a little bit chilling.

The “time is almost up” and “let’s continue this on a walk” turns into a pick-up basketball game and a breezy stop at one of the many neighborhood businesses where they know “Dr. Ike” — the framing shop where his framed New York Times letter to the editor and photo of we gather a former client, Sly Stallone’s mom, can be shown off.

The advice is humane and rock solid. “The goal of life is to LIVE…You just lost your Dad, Marty. It’s fully within your rights to NOT feel ‘fine’…I think I could help you…I’m not going to let anyone USE you.”

But from the first hint we get that Dr. Ike isn’t off the clock on “let’s take a walk,” with every “F-word (fine) fine jar” violation (Marty has to fork over cash), with each offbeat suggestion — “Why don’t you have a second bar mitzvah?” — we see the hooks sinking in.

Rudd and Ferrell have a lot of experience in “buddy” pictures, and settle into this dynamic with ease — Ferrell playing the naif relieved to find someone who “really SEES me,” Rudd playing a guy whose sessions, and home life with his wife (Casey Wilson) drops hint after hint of his professional transgressions and the good doctor’s own “issues.”

Ferrell’s timid, clipped, kvetching voice and tentative body language is some of his most subtle work.

Hahn, just seen in “WandaVision,” brings the heart here playing the protective sister with a temper, somebody used to bowling over Marty but his Prime Protector up until now. We can’t see which status she misses most when the wedge is driven in and both are lost.

As the series opens with a 2010 weekend house in the Hamptons party where Dr. Ike’s excesses have him where gotten him where he most wants to be, we know this won’t end well. But even knowing that, “The Shrink Next Door” keeps us coming to see just how badly “won’t end well” turns out to be.

And if it’s not as cruel and cynical as the podcast it is based on, “The Shrink Next Door” can blame its intensely likeable cad cast in the title role. Even at his worst, Rudd could charm whiskers off Will Ferrell, or any co-star anyone cares to pair him with.

Rating: TV-MA, some violence, profanity

Cast: Paul Rudd, Will Ferrell and Kathryn Hahn

Credits: Created by Georgia Pritchett, directed by Michael Showalter and Jesse Peretz, based on the podcast of the same name. An Apple TV+ series.

Running time: 8 episodes @ :35-50 minutes each

The title — “Love Hard” — is a mashup of “Die Hard” and “Love Actually,” clashing visions visions of “the Best Christmas Movie Ever.” And truthfully, this piffle doesn’t get much deeper or funnier than that.

It’s a Hallmark Channel holiday movie on a Netflix budget. The characters are bland, the performances not much better and the writing almost instantly awful — tin-eared, clumsy ESL grammar and usage, the works.

If you can’t hear what’s teeth-grindingly wrong with the redundancy of “It’s been said, according to the ancient Greeks,” you’re not going to roll your eyes at “But yet” this and Thoreau bashing.

And the message? “Catfishing” isn’t a cardinal relationship sin? Come ON.

But hey, hold on. Take a breath and give it a chance. That First Law of Movie Reviewing, “That which starts badly doth not get better later” doesn’t necessarily wipe out this “swipe right” rom-com.

It’s about an online “Disaster Dates” columnist, played by Nina Dobrev, aka “Courtney Cox: The Next Generation.” She’s an Angelino (Angelina) who keeps looking for “The One,” and writing about her write-offs in “Always a Bridesmaid” for some film fantasy version of a webzine — a multi-floor enterprise with offices, cubicles, editors and enough online-only readership to sustain that real estate.

Her dates run the gamut of “LA ass—-s,” would-be actors, poseurs, Tinder busts and Flirt Alert (made up for the movie) frauds. Whatever their “profile” says, this could be “a guy who was featured on ‘Hoarders,’ that fellow is so much older than his profile pic “he could be a waiter for the Last Supper!”

Her cynical, bottom-line boss (Matty Finochio) loves her failures — “A disaster for you is a hit for me.” But cubicle-mate Kerry (Heather McMahan) shares her “perfect match” wish fulfillment fantasy, and she’s the one who suggests widening her “search” — to nationwide.

That’s how Natalie stumbles in the profile of stubble-bearded, sporty, soulful Adonis Josh, way up in Lake Placid, New York. Many “getting to know you” texts and a bubble bath chat or two later, he lets drop that “I wish you could be here for Christmas.”

That’s her column! She’ll fly in, surprise her dream guy, and maybe get a “Happily ever after” out of it.

Everything about the plan goes wrong, climaxing with…Amer-Asian Josh lives in his parents’ basement and looks like second-banana/comic relief actor Jimmy O. Yang. Girlfriend’s been “catfished!”

“I’m really good at Photoshop,” as the catfishers all say.

But that’s not where this script stops. No, Natalie stumbles into the “photo” Josh (Darren Barnet) at the local pub. And failing to make a good first impression there, wakes up one Epi Pen later in a veterinarian’s operating room with real Josh, where they stumble into a “deal.”

He’ll coach her, Cyrano style, on wooing his former classmate, the Prom King/Xtreme Sports town hunk. All she has to do is pretend to be his girlfriend through the holidays, impressing a family sure he’d never find anyone.

Hallmark Channel and now Netflix have made movies like this a mass-production, cut-and-paste product. The family is a collection of “colorful types”– complete with a raunchy-thirsty granny (Althea Kay), obnoxious, over-achieving and attention-hogging big brother (Harry Shum Jr.), his ditzy bombshell wife (Mikaela Hoover) and go-getter Dad (James Saito).

There’s a stoner Uber (and Lyft) driver, an auto-tuned and overboard family Christmas caroling venture and some “Love Actually” imitation.

City people, Nat included, are cynical, sarcastic and shallow, rural folk more “real” and real-world capable.

Throw in a little local color — Natalie gets a crash course in rock-climbing and fortifies herself with pot to take a run down the Olympic bobsled course. Pepper the dialogue with “Die Hard” vs. “Love Actually” Christmas movie debates, Henry David Thoreau and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as “rape-y,” Invisalign and Accutane plugs for the pursuit of physical perfection, and have the city gal slowly soften and “trust” the guy who connected with her under false pretenses.

The film made me sit up on that first meeting with the real Josh. Maybe this will be edgier than I thought, I thought. Maybe Natalie will face some sort of reckoning with her racism in addition to her superficiality.

Heaven knows, Hollywood is pandering and kowtowing to “The Asian Market” every way it can think of.

But that wasn’t to be. A couple of laughs and leads who aren’t particularly funny, charming or cute together and “Love Hard” goes bust. “With a Vengeance.”

Rating: TV-MA, pot use, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Nina Dobrev, Jimmy O. Yang, Darren Barnet, Harry Shum Jr., Rebecca Staab, Althea Kay, Heather McMahan, James Saito, Matty Finochio and Mikaela Hoover

Credits: Directed by Hernán Jiménez, scripted by Daniel Mackey and Rebecca Ewing. Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

A film of consequence and warning, Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” takes us back to the beginning of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland and lets us see them through the eyes of a little boy. A very personal story equal parts pathos and warmth, it sentimentalizes the region’s “Bad Old Days” even as it reminds us and “them” that nobody wants to go back there.

In cinematic terms, it’s starkly beautiful and achingly-dramatic, a showcase for Oscar-worthy performances by Caitriona Balfe and the great Irish character actor Ciarán Hinds and a victory lap turn by Dame Judi Dench. For director Branagh and his movie’s co-star Jamie Dornan, it’s a reminder of their gifts and robust, redemptive return to form.

The thesis is set up in a simple, symbolic opening — a tourism commercial drift through the colorful, vibrant Belfast of working shipyards full of cruise ships, high rises, memorials and museums for tourists. And the color drains from the screen and we return to the stark and white of August 15, 1969.

The streets are teeming with kids playing, parents shouting “Come home for tea,” and other adults and kids passing on the messages to children beyond earshot in Grove Hill.

Everybody knows everybody else, “It takes a village” is in the DNA, and Protestant and Catholic doesn’t matter.

Ma (Balfe, of TV’s “Outlander”) summons her sons, the tween Will (Lewis McAskie) and pre-tween Buddy (Jude Hill). Buddy is the one who tarries. He’s the one transfixed and then terrified by the sudden intrusion of masked men, hurling rocks and abuse, throwing Molotov cocktails and smashing select businesses and targeting people, houses and cars.

It was Northern Ireland’s Kristallnacht, only it happened in broad daylight.

The terror goes on after Ma plucks Buddy from the mayhem, the children cowering under the dinner table as Ma and her in-laws (Dench and Hinds) stare in disbelief. As news reports flicker on the TV and a journalist gives an Edward R. Murrow-styled account of what he saw on the radio, the locals — Protestant and Catholic — scramble to clean up and build barricades against the next, because “the police won’t protect us.”

It’s bad enough that Da (Dornan, putting “50 Shades” 50 years behind him), who does joinery in the London construction industry, rushes home to see to his family.

“I think you’ve got a few big decisions to make, son,” his Pop (Hinds) counsels, seated on the outdoor toilet in their backyard.

Little Buddy overhears this, asks Granny the who and the why of it all — “They’re friends, family, just like us” she says of both Catholic victims and Protestant perpetrators. This “nonsense’ll stop soon enough.”

“Was that our side?” Buddy wants to know.

“There is no ‘our side’ and ‘their side,'” his father corrects him. “Didn’t use to be, anyway.”

The family dynamic is established. The pull of family and community is strongest in Ma and the kids, who resist uprooting. Da and Ma argue about their crushing debts and circumscribed future and he pushes for “a new start” — in London, Sydney or Vancouver.

Buddy consults with whimsical Pop about “maths” and a girl he has a crush on in school, with Granny interjecting just as whimsically.

Da is threatened by the local Protestant ringleader (Colin Morgan) with a “You’re either with us or against us,” promising to involve even their children in this “cleanse the neighborhood” violence.

“It’s a mad world.” “Get used to it.”

And Buddy, picking up on real-life trauma and archetypal themes from Westerns like “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “High Noon” on the telly, struggles to make childish sense of it all as Van Morrison songs of the day waft out of radios and well up on the soundtrack.

A fire-and-brimstone preacher blazes away veiled references to the damnation of Catholics from the pulpit, a veritable call to arms that scares the kid and confuses him further.

Perhaps the cousin (Nessa Eriksson) who walks him to school can help. There’s comical misunderstanding and over-simplification of Catholicism everywhere. You can tell “us” vs. “them” by “their names,” Cousin Vanessa assures him. But as he swats down “But this” or that person in their own family has that name, she’s shut up and he’s dismayed.

“How the hell y’supposed to know them?”

And older folks, from aunts and uncles to Pop, rhapsodize away the trauma Ma sees in the very idea of “going over the water,” uprooting themselves from their community, their history and their lives at this bad situation that they all sense and history showed was just going to get worse.

“The Irish were born for leavin’.”

Young Hill brings the wide-eyed innocence you’d expect to his role as basically the audience’s surrogate, the innocent who has to have everything — love and women, geography and genealogy — explained to him. Balfe brings a mercurial fire to Ma, a woman truly torn even though they’re “drowning” here and living with her in-laws.

Dornan’s Da is both bluff and frightened at any turn of events he can’t protect his family from, brushing away his “do the horses” (gambling) and absentee parenting, flinty with this the guy everyone knew as a neighborhood goon and alarmed at the power the punk now has over them all.

Dench’s misty-eyed Granny is another grand, heartbreaking turn on her resume, a stoic woman whose ex-coal miner husband is sick with her son struggling to get his family out. And Hinds adds a glorious twinkle and sentimental spark to every scene he’s in. It’s a grand and warm showcase for an actor with a career (“Munich,” “In Bruges,” “Persuasion”) of hissable villains, conflicted heroes, tentative lovers and sturdy heroes.

Sometimes Branagh gets carried away with the sentiment, a little too on-the-nose with Van Morrison hear, a musical wake that seems more like a scene from “The Commitments.” But the personal nature of the story and the child’s point-of-view wash over that because this is the way memory works and childhood — even one as traumatic as living through “The Troubles” — becomes idealized.

“Belfast” is a moving, tense and yet often lightly comical experience. And as one of the best pictures of 2021 ends, you remember how good a filmmaker Branagh can be, and marvel at how he was able to pack all this warmth, wit and trauma into just 100 minutes.

Rating: PG-13 for some violence and strong language

Cast: Caitriona Balfe, Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Jude Hill, Nessa Eriksson, Lewis McAskie, Colin Morgan and Judi Dench.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kenneth Branagh. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:38

“Blonde. Purple” is a heist tale/hostage thriller with vague pretenses of Tarantino or Guy Ritchie and little of the style, panache, wit or adrenalin of either of them at their worst.

The odd moment of acting heat dissipates in a sea of words, too much of it set in a bank where a failed robber holds a teen singer hostage and they talk and talk and talk, never going for pithy, punchy brevity when 175 extraneous words are somebody’s notion of the minimum required for a “soliloquy.”

Writer-director Marcus Flemmings (“Palindrome”) lets it drone on for over two hours, at least 90 minutes of which feel wasted.

A sweaty, panicked young man (Julian Moore-Cook) with a battered pistol gets in shouting matches with “Aaron, your crisis negotiator,” who admits to a “temper” problem” with “toxic masculinity” issues. His partner was shot as they attempted their get-away, a dozen hostages in their hands and he’s flipping out.

Madison (Ellie Bindman) may be the most unrealistically relaxed, coy and confident hostage-held-at-gunpoint in screen history. Sure, she’s a “singer, kinda famous” or so she claims. Nothing but pretty white teen girl privilege could explain her temperament, and that’s not enough.

Through flashbacks, we get a taste of the heist as it was set up — the parole officer (Jennifer Lee Moon) leading the young man his “friendly hostage negotiator” calls “Mr. You” who plays a role in the planning, the verbose partner he’s set up with — Nath (Adam J. Bernard) — and his mouthy, cynical girlfriend (Jessica Murrain).

Scenes mimic Tarantino/Ritchie gangster banter, debating the relative merits of Nic Cage and Johnny Depp, “Scarface” and “Shawshank Redemption,” Julius Caesar and this one diner most everybody ends up in, repeatedly, screaming “Some SERVICE here” because there never is any.

“You seen ‘Wages of Fear? You see that film, ‘Straight Time?'”

Did I mention it’s British? The people inside the bank and the hostage negotiator lack accents, but most of the other characters do, and everybody’s English usages — “That last job went Hitchcockian (‘pear-shaped,’ as the Brits say)”give them away.

Ex-con Nath may counsel first-time-robber “Mr. You” that “It’s not about the job, it’s about the getaway.” But the long-winded clown brings a 1976 MGB convertible as their getaway car.

At several points, you snap to attention at the realization that this is so wordy it turns disorganized. The writer-director loses the thread. Scenes exist to just give extra actors a role in the larger, run-on conversation. The guys discuss “the job” with people who don’t have a damned thing to do “the job,” it turns out.

Hey, if you think a tiny, classic 50+ year old convertible is the ideal “inconspicuous” get away vehicle, maybe you don’t want to get away.

Or the writer-director had access to one cool looking car and made the best of it. The movie is a collection of indulgences, directing, screenwriting or acting.

All this abuse aside, there are some nice acting moments — rants and breakdowns, with Bernard, Moore-Cook and even a vampy, over-the-top Moon making impressions.

But even that’s a stretch. At some point, “Blonde. Purple” became all indulgences and nothing else.

Rating: TV-14, violence, near nudity, profanity

Cast: Julian Moore-Cook, Ellie Bindman, Adam J. Bernard, Jennifer Lee Moon, Jessica Murrain and the voice of Nicholas Gray.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marcus Flemmings. A 1091 release.

Running time: 2:09