Movie Nation

If you travel to dive or snorkel around coral reefs, you probably hear the same refrain I do when I hit the water in Key West, St. Croix or Curacao.

“You should’ve seen it 20 years ago!”

Actually, the guide or dive boat operator missed out, too. They and we should have seen the world’s reefs 50 years ago. In that time, Peter Coyote narrates in “Saving Atlantis,” “more than 50% of them have vanished.”

“Saving Atlantis is a documentary that takes us around the world for a State of the Coral report, and a survey of some of the efforts being made to study and save the “vanishing” bleaching reefs.

We’re shown the Great Barrier Reef off Australia, reefs in the Red Sea, in French Polynesia, reefs off Oregon and a huge one in the mouth of Cartegena Bay, Colombia.

Fishermen talk about how important they are to their livelihood and the world’s fish stocks. Scientists talk about their role in fostering healthy life in the sea, and in protecting shorelines from destructive shore erosion during storms.

The water’s getting too hot, too acidic, for reefs. But some corals can withstand it, and if enough is done to combat pollution and climate change, others say, the reefs will come back.

That’s the hopeful part of “Saving Atlantis,” the scientists around the world mapping the coral gene pool to help determine which corals are the hardiest in this warming climate, capturing samples of corals that might go extinct before we do enough to save them.

“We should continue to act until it’s too late,” one marine biologist declares. “You should never give up on reefs.”

This Oregon State University coral reef documentary doesn’t have the impressive visuals of the BBC’s “Nature” series, or that of the gorgeous films shot in large format video for IMAX movies shown in science museums and the like.

But it’s a fairly thorough survey of all that’s going wrong, and many of the efforts underway worldwide to save, seed and repopulate eco systems that are vital to our diet and the safety of our shores as the seas rise and the storms surge.

Oregon State — it’s not just about football.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Narrated by Peter Coyote.

Credits: Directed by David Baker and Justin R. Smith, script by David Baker. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:30

Writer-director Rian Johnson, of “Brick” and “Looper,” briefly escapes the stranglehold the “Star Wars” universe has on him with “Knives Out,” a cutting and clever “Clue” murder mystery treated as a lark and played for laughs by a Big Name cast.

It’s the kind of movie where the cinema’s James Bond, Brit Daniel Craig, slings one of those “MO-lasses” Southern accents that Brit actors adore, and is openly mocked for it by others in the movie. On camera. In character.

Playing “the last of the gentleman sleuths,” a private investigator with the unlikely (except in New Orleans) name Benoit Blanc, he is called “CSI: KFC” and “Foghorn Leghorn” by the rich New Yorkers he’s treating as suspects in the murder of their family patriarch. To his face.

The indulgent cop (Lakeith Stanfield) who is ostensibly in charge of the case announces, at the end of a hot pursuit, “That was the DUMBEST car chase of all time.” Yes, there’s a Hyundai Elantra involed, and yes, he is correct.

The patriach’s nurse (Ana de Armas of “War Dogs” and “Blade Runner 2049”) has this condition, a “regurgative reaction to untruths” is how Benoit Blanc puts it. Ask her a question, and if she tries to lie or let another’s lie stand, she throws up.

That may be the silliest plot device ever parked in a whodunit — and the funniest. Johnson deposits a human lie detector in the midst of a family with motives for murder, and an aversion to the truth.

And for politics, there is the pale, Hitler-haired grandson (Jaeden Martell of “St. Vincent”) who sits in the background, staring at his phone, trolling the “snowflakes” and every so often hissing a little anti-immigrant rhetoric — “Dirty ‘anchor baby!'”

Famed mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer, of course) had gathered his family in his suburban Massachusetts mansion, a Victorian estate decorated with all manner of lethal bric a brac and other souvenirs from his decades of publishing.

The centerpiece might be his “throne” of knives, a chair with a gigantic fan of cutlery spread out behind it. Nobody points this out. It’s just there.

Harlan was found in his bed with his throat cut the morning after the party. And even though son (Michael Shannon) and daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis) might have motives, and his son-in-law (Don Johnson) and widowed and dependent daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) and her daughter (Katherine Langford) could as well, the police have ruled the death a suicide.

But I guess when the famous (thanks to a New Yorker profile) Benoit Blanc shows up, it’s “Let go through that night once more” time.

A clever touch — Johnson gives Craig’s sleuth a hidden “star” entrance. He is in the background of the re-interrogations conducted by Lt. Elliott (Stanfield). Every time the questions or the answers drift off topic, we hear a single note struck on the piano. Benoit is interrupting without interrupting, disapproving and redirecting the questioning.

“Who IS this guy?”

As motives start to pile up and various members of the family cast suspicion on each other, we see Nurse Marta — “like a member of the family” the family insists, although each has her or his own idea of where she moved to this country from — Paraguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay. She’s a walking ball of nerves, and her immigrant mom watching “Murder, She Wrote” in Spanish isn’t calming her at all.

It’s “Columbo” that Johnson takes his story structure from. Flashbacks show us what REALLY happened that night. We know “whodunit,” and what we’re watching is the famed detective, who could be a dolt, try to figure this out via interrogations and magnifying glass walks around the grounds of a writer “who practically lived on a ‘Clue’ board.”

Blanc is forever drawling about “the inevitability of truth” and the “trajectory” of how the crime unfolds as he ever-so-politely grills the gathered family.

“Ah’m sorry t’press, buuuut…”

The plotting here is iffy, and it takes a whole new level of suspension of disbelief to accept the reality (ish) of this scenario. But the cover-up, as with most crimes, is far more interesting and suspenseful. The flurry of jokes, delivered as a blizzard of throw-away lines about what “the reading of  (a) will” is REALLY like, for instance, tickle.

And Johnson keeps finding new players to sprinkle over the proceedings and deliver a smirk or chuckle.  M. Emmet Walsh plays a technophobe caretfaker and Frank Oz a comically-dismayed but firm-handed lawyer.

He’s managed a couple of neat tricks, luring us in and amusing us so that we don’t notice over two hours have passed, letting us see “the crime” and puzzle out how it will be covered up, exposed or unraveled implicating others.

And he’s given free rein to our once and future Bond, who wrings every laugh he can out of a detective trying to find what fills not just “tha hoooole at the center of this donut” of the mystery, but the “hole in the middle of the DONUT hole,” to boot.

That adds up to “Knives Out” as a proper whodunit, as twist-turny as you might expect, and as amusingly edgy and cutting as its title suggests.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements including brief violence, some strong language, sexual references, and drug material

Cast: Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Lakeith Stanfield, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Katherine Langford and Christopher Plummer

Credits: Written and directed by Rian Johnson. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:10

Here it is, that “lost” chapter of “Love, Actually” that we’ve been rummaging through the vaults for. “Last Christmas,” they’re calling it. “Dull, Actually” is more accurate.

It’s a mopey holiday romance leaning heavily on the “Game of Thrones” charms of Emilia Clarke and the music of George Michael.

And if you’re not ready to question her ability to play comedy and second guess the value the world puts on the George Michael songbook by the time this has burned through 102 minutes you’ll never get back, you never will be.

Clarke tries to sparkle every line the Emma Thompson/Bryony Kimmings screenplay gives her. She laughs. A lot. But she’s the only one guffawing and showing a lot of teeth as she does, because there’s virtually nothing here that will tickle anybody else.

Clarke stars as Kate, “Katerina” to her Croatian family. She’s 30ish, has just moved out of her parents’ duplex and is schlepping her suitcase all over London Towne, still wearing her costume for work. She’s unintentionally made a career out of being an elf-clerk at Yuletide Wonderful, owned by the Chinese emigre who goes by the name “Santa” (Michelle Yeoh).

“Time to sparkle,” Santa growls.

It’s a tacky yet quirky shop, and it doesn’t pay enough to let Kate set up housekeeping on her own. So she imposes on one friend after another, thoughtlessly and clumsily breaking this and sullying that, and picking up guys in bars that she brings “home” for a little pre-Christmas coitus.

We’ve seen her as a child, warbling a George Michael song with her choir back in pre-breakup Yugoslavia. That’s her goal — singing on the London stage. The auditions she tumbles into suggest how unlikely that dream is — pleasant (ish) but untrained voice, pathologically tardy, self-absorbed. Maybe delusional.

Hell, she should try New York.

Santa seethes at Kate’s carelessness on the job. Her thick-accented mother (Emma Thompson) leaves her voice mails by metric tonne. And losing one more set of friends by being the roommate from Hell might be her wakeup call.

Ours? Well, we’re going to stick around to see how she ever made friends in the first place.

Then the tall handsome stranger, Tom, strolls into her life. Henry Golding of “Crazy Rich Asians” plays this patient, eccentric and very-interested-in-Kate Londoner. He’s obsessed with getting her to take a walk with him. She chuckles how much he’s “not my type” and how the places he wants to walk have a “serial killery” vibe.

But he’s always looking up. And as she looks up with him, she notices the glories of London in all its holiday splendor, and its quirky architectural history. He shows her his secret garden. And even though she’s still doing the barfly-hookup thing after they meet, she continues to take walks with Tom — appreciating the beauty, checking in at the homeless shelter where he volunteers.

“Might as well have ‘SAINT’ tattooed on your forehead!”

She takes an interest in the only way she knows how. She comes on to him. Tom brushes that off in a “we just met” way, and the walks continue.

Kate, of course, has a secret. She’s been sick, we’re told. She meets her doctor with her mum and gets read the riot act over her unhealthy lifestyle.

Tom has his own secrets. And if you sit there pondering, as I did, “WHY are they together?” well, you’ll figure both secrets out before the first one is revealed.

Golding has an effortless charm here that we haven’t seen in his other performances. But his inability to spark chemistry with any leading lady is an ongoing issue, and that makes the gears grind in this syrupy Paul Feig (“Bridesmaids,” “Ghostbusters”) confection. It’s why we sit and wonder why these two are “together,” because the script and performances don’t make their connection organic or believable.

Clarke’s character arc is that she develops compassion being around Tom, starts helping with the shelter, going easier on her mom, matchmaking for her lonely boss. She’s not awful as Kate, but the strain shows. At least her green eyes match her elf costume, damn near perfectly.

But like a lot of Feig’s recent work, it’s the “woke” elements of “Last Christmas” that seem to get more attention than the BASIC dramatic/romantic/comic/sentimental stuff. Anti-immigrant bigotry (a subtext in a couple of movies this holiday season, “Knives Out,” for instance), the ugly underpinnings of Brexit, and a gay couple just needing family acceptance, all are here and designed to deliver the warm fuzzies.

So is the heavy reliance on the George Michael Songbook. Repeating his “Last Christmas” title tune ad nauseum does him no favors, and removing his performance from many of the songs emphasizes his inadequacies as a lyricist — with that song, in particular, standing out as insipid. And the ultimate spoiler.

After a while, though, we get ahead of the editors, recognizing “Oh, this’d be the PERFECT place to use ‘Faith,'” etc. Kate, of course, dozes off and we ALL know what song will awaken her before she go goes.

The banter is, first scene to last, awful. Delivering bad dialogue at top speed doesn’t make it better, Ms. Clarke. Why does she keep saying she’s from “The Former Yugoslavia?” NO emigre would refer to her homeland that way. Her mother doesn’t.

Yeoh looks perplexed enough to mutter “This is supposed to be FUN?” between takes.

Still, there’s one great thing Tom and “Last Christmas” have to teach us. Kate wants to give him her digits. “Where’s your phone?”

He locked it in a cubbard, he says. And once he did, he stopped looking down and started looking up at the city. A lovely sentiment. Not the only one in the film, mind you. But the only one that stuck with me from this instantly forgotten treacle.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and sexual content

Cast: Emilia Clarke, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Emma Thompson

Credits: Directed by Paul Feig, screenplay by Emma Thompson and Bryony Kimmings. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:42

Yeah, Starz cable channel is a part of the equation. But cheap movies that out perform expectations do, too.

A winning formula.

Via Variety.

Lionsgate Beats Wall Street Forecasts for Revenue, Operating Income https://t.co/28E5kjUQUu https://t.co/I5eOLcbCem https://twitter.com/Variety_Film/status/1192558113317982208?s=17

We never like to see our movie stars “trying too hard” in a screen comedy. But sometimes, the effort itself is worth a few laughs.

I mean, they’re suffering for their art, trying to wring laughs out of thin material, adding value, giving the studio paying them fair value, no matter how silly they look doing it.

“Playing with Fire” takes wrestler turned action star (“The Marine”) John Cena where Vin Diesel (“The Pacifier”) and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (“The Game Plan”) have gone before.

Put this prime slab of action hero machismo in a scenario that forces him to deal with little kids, and fail. Haplessness and hilarity ensues, right? Except that it rarely does.

It’s a topical comedy about the heroes of the moment — Smoke Jumpers, the elite parachutist firefighters deployed into blazing forests, saving lives and homes as they struggle to contain the consequences of drought-stricken forests in a hotter, dryer and “changed” climate, and people who like to live in the middle of such tinderboxes.

Jake Carson (Cena) is station superintendent (“Sup”) in the woodlands of Redding, California, a no-nonsense firefighting son of a legendary fire fighter who died in the line of duty.

He’s got no time for flirting with the cute biologist (Judy Greer) obssessively studying toads by the lake down the mountain, and no time for shenanigans, even though Keegan-Michael Key, John Leguizamo and the lumbering “Lurch” of a fireman, “Axe” (Tyler Mane) are his kinda-goofy crew.

“Where’s my REDDING CREW AT?” he bellows.

“EVERYWHERE!”

That changes when he has to airlift three kids out of a blazing cabin, and the weather and the weekend means nobody can come take them off he and his Redding crew’s hands until Monday.

He’s just had the other half of his crew quit on him. There’s a big promotion coming, with the super-hero-sized division commander (Dennis Haysbert, having a laugh) about to retire. The last thing Jake needs is unruly, unmannered kids messing up his firehouse, playing with his fire extinguishers and flare guns, demanding bedtime stories.

The kids — played by Brianna Hildebrand, Christian Convery and Finley Rose Slater — are unrestrained, unschooled, prone to pilfering and petty vandalism. Well, not little Zoey (Slater). She’s the lovable one.

He may think of himself as “a father figure, only way cooler.” But Jake’s about to learn a hard lesson.

“Kids. You can’t control them. You can only contain them until they burn themselves out.”

“Race to Witch Mountain” director Andy Fickman finds most of the movie’s laughs via slapstick — detergent accidents, oil spills, flares and fire extinguishers used IMproperly.

The funniest sight gag might be Jake’s attempt to pull the kids out of that burning cabin via helicopter. Rodrigo, the pilot (Leguizamo) keeps misunderstanding Jake’s commands, yanking him up into the ceiling — hard — over and over again.

Key and Leguizamo mug for the camera and trip through some grownup one-liners. Rodrigo is from “San Quentin.” Can’t tell the kids what that really is. “A small college in Vermont” is the quick explanation Mark (Key) comes up with.

A running gag is Rodrigo’s quick way with a homily or anecdote, and inability to process the facts of his quotes.

“As Lance Armstrong once said, ‘That’s one small step for man. And WATCH out for the next one!”

Cena is a funny guy, as he’s proven in “Trainwreck” and those kiddie “Fred” movies of about ten years ago. Here, he’s got too little to work with, even if the poking the uptight guy is the surest way to laughs that there is.

Attempted one-liners aside, the only character and performance to generate giggles is Mane’s turn as the always axe-toting “Axe,” a lumbering menace who turns out to be a soft touch around toddlers.

Everybody else — the sprightly Greer included — tries too hard. Because they have to.  Every wrinkle in the plot is nakedly contrived, an obvious screenplay convenience. Every gag is given away. Every one-liner vanishes into the void.

Kids may love projectile poop gags, but even they should be able to smell the odor “Playing with Fire” puts out there.

MPAA Rating: PG for rude humor, some suggestive material and mild peril

Cast: John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Brianna Hildebrand, Dennis Haysbert, John Leguizamo and Judy Greer

Credits: Directed by Andy Fickman, script by Dan Ewen, Matt Lieberman. An Nickelodeon/Paramount release

Running time: 1:36

The Big Race didn’t finish exactly the way it’s depicted in “Ford v. Ferrari.”

And the Money Moment, the hilarious scene previewed in the trailers and TV commercials where racing driver and race-car building legend Carroll Shelby delights and then frightens to the point of tears the Ford heir and CEO of the Motor Company on a mad lap in the company’s Ferrari-fighting GT40 racer? Never happened.

But damn, it feels right — dramatically, comically and thematically. And in James Mangold’s epic, bracing and breezy spin around a piece of motorsport legend, if it didn’t happen, it sure as hell should have.

Want a lesson in how a two and a half hour period piece can just fly by? Mangold (“Walk the Line,””Logan”) gives a master class in it, using the struggle, the titanic figures engaged in it and the pedal-to-the-metal setting to plunge us into American motorsport’s equivalent of The Moon Landing.

Here’s Shelby, a hustling hard-selling Texan given a compact, cunning and comic understatement by Matt Damon. He was the first American to win the prestigious 24 Hours of LeMans, and when he was forced to stop racing himself, he put a Ford V-8 into tiny British AC Ace sports car and created a world beating racer, and one of the most valuable collectible automobiles in history — the Shelby Cobra.

At Ford in the early ’60s, Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) has just innovated the company out of the doldrums with the young-motorist-magnet Mustang, and convinced the boss, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), amusingly nicknamed “The Deuce,” that what Ford REALLY needs, image-wise, is to buy the great European sports car builder Ferrari, which runs the fastest cars in the races that have cachet among the young — sports car races.

Bernthal gives us a taste of the Great American Salesman and cheerleader that Iacocca would become.

“James Bond does not drive a Ford, sir!”

The Deuce is sold. Sure, let’s cut a check. Even if the CEO thinks James Bond is “a degenerate.”

But the Italian-American Iacocca gets hustled by the real Italian, Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone), who finishes his “NO deal” tirade (Fiat bought an interest in Ferrari instead) with a flurry of insults about the “fat” Ford and his “ugly factory” putting out millions of “ugly cars.”

The bluff and deadpan Ford — we’re introduced to him shutting down an assembly line to chew out and motivate the work force during a downturn — has had enough of “getting it in the tailpipe from a Chevy Impala.” And he’s not going to take this insult from some snooty Italian slur. Oh no.

Build a car. Form a team. Win LeMans. And do it quick.

That’s how they come to Shelby. But Shelby comes with baggage, an ornery Brit who owns a garage that services British sports cars like the MGA in Southern California, a champion SCCA race car driver with a test pilot’s feel for tweaking, adjusting and turning a car into a world beater.

“Brilliant, but difficult” is the label Ken Miles wears. Christian Bale wouldn’t be insulted by noting how on-the-nose casting him as Miles is. Yeah, they have a few things in common.

Shelby has to “handle” Miles and please his Ford masters, including Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), Director of Special Vehicles at Ford, basically the “suit” in charge of its racing teams, set up as the villain of the tale.

The Italians are the exotic foreign menace, arrogant again a mere two decades after their World War II humiliation. But the “enemy” in this 90 day sprint to put a car on the track that will humble them is ponderous American Corporate Culture, and Beebe becomes a thorn in Shelby and Miles’ side — hated, always putting “the company” and its culture and “image” first.

We don’t see the Brits who hastily designed the GT40, just them delivering it to Shelby and Miles and Shelby’s ace in the hole, engineer Phil Remington (Ray McKinnon). The movie focuses on that trio’s efforts make this burly beast hold the corners, hug the track and “go like hell” when she does.

The car is iconic, and gets that “Right Stuff” sort of star entrance here. Brits designed it, but it feels American — bluff, muscular and aggressive. Put a Ford V-8 in it and you can’t wait to hear her get angry.

Casting Bale pays dividends in all the scenes with the car being tested, through Remington’s DIY wind-tunnel on-the-track idea of figuring out why it’s trying to go airborne, through engine changes, brake issues, all the racing failures leading up to “The Big Race.”

Bale’s Miles is in the car for all this, thunking through gears, talking to himself and the car in his no-nonsense Cockney cheerleader accent. “Oh YES,” at everything he likes in the set-up. “I’ll have some more of THAT, if you please!” Inevitably punctuated with a disappointed “Bloody hell!”

Characters show their emotions in “Ford v. Ferrari” in fits of recklessness — ex-Air Force pilot Shelby taking the controls of a Ford company plane to land at the big announcement ceremony, Miles’ venting his fury at Shelby on the track, Mrs. Mollie Miles (Caitriona Balfe) scaring Ken half to death careening their Ford station wagon through backroads as she chews on him for not telling her he’s getting back into racing.

And then there’s that Shelby drives Hank the Deuce in the “$9 million car you paid for” moment.

Letts, a playwright and actor who has made deadpan authority figures something of a specialty in his film career, gets a laugh every time he turns up in the film. He’s got Ford-during-World-War II anecdotes to underscore his “just win” lectures. He’s peevish at failure, and you could believe this man would spare no expense just to get even with somebody who insulted him. This is a great supporting turn.

Damon’s take on Shelby is colorful and canny, letting us see the wheels turning as he sizes up people and summons up the appropriate, drawled “My Daddy used’t tell me” anecdote to get what he wants — from Miles, Remington or Ford. His Shelby is a compromised hero, never quite living up to “larger than life,” but still a Western archetype whose laconic narration puts the film on a man-finding-out-what-he’s-made-of footing.

Bale’s Miles has just enough manners to not tell off customers who don’t know how to drive the British sports cars they bought and that he services. He never loses his suffer-no-fools-gladly demeanor, even as he faces corporate shunning and other disappointments.

Mangold and his screenwriters didn’t make this movie just for gearheads and racing fans. Including Miles’ son Pete (Noah Jupe) lets Ken explain to him and the audience the danger, performance requirements and other tests of LeMans.

The racing sequences are low-camera-angle montages passing by at a whiplash-quick blur. Suspense builds, humor defuses it, and the thrills feel hard-earned, deserved and well, patriotic.

It stands with the greatest racing movies ever, and it’s certainly the most entertaining. But there is no doubt about one last superlative. “Ford v Ferrari” is one of the best pictures of the year.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language and peril

Cast: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Caitriona Balfe, Tracy Letts, Jon Bernthal, Josh Lucas

Credits: Directed by James Mangold, script by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Henry. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:32

“Crown Vic” is a grounded and gritty cops-on-the-night-shift melodrama built around a tightly-coiled turn by Thomas Jane.

He plays a 25 year LAPD veteran assigned to FTO (Field Training Officer) duty, mentoring a “transfer cherry” (Luke Kleintank) through his first night on the job.

And that set-up inevitably forces a comparison to “Training Day,” because a century of cop films and seven decades of PD-TV demands it. There have been so many police procedurals that it takes a lot to make such a story stand out, to avoid the label “Training Day Lite.”

On a night when the duo deal with a belligerent drunk BMW princess, a punk who throws something at their Crown Victoria cruiser, a domestic disturbance call, a manic mouthy meth-head, a convenience store theft, a burning SUV (with a “crispy” body in it) and lots of “personal” business, all while two armed and trigger-happy bank robbers are working their way across the city to their patrol zone, we see how difficult it is for writer-director Joel Souza’s film (“Break Night”) to break formula. And it’s impossible for it to avoid melodrama.

Jane is Ray Mandel, a twice-divorced loner whose razzing of the “cherry” is profane and not at all good-natured. It’s “I ain’t your f—–g valet, sweetheart” when the rookie from Oakland makes him wait, “genius” this and “rookie” that.

Nick Holland (Kleintank) is the son of a cop, married, with a baby on the way. Everything he says to anybody else in uniform gets him cussed out. Every bit of “us vs. them” advice from Ray seems confrontational.

“Somebody looks guilty? Watch’em. They look innocent? Watch’em closely!”

Ray’s ethos? This car is “home,” dividing the world between “in here” and “out there.”

Their philosophical debates, common to the genre, reveal Ray’s cynicism — “Married? That’s…optimistic.” — and “dark” and defensive worldview.

“The world was dark when I got here,” he grouses.

He orders the kid to watch him, stay behind him, follow his lead. And the kid does.

Even when they see the roid-and-speed-raging plainclothes detective Jack (Josh Hopkins, way over the top) start the evening amped up, and take things to illegal extremes with a suspect — his partner (David Krumholtz) egging him on.

Even when Ray starts dealing with personal matters having to do with his dead partner’s junkie widow (Bridget Moynahan).

The highlights here are a nervy opening sequence, a bank robbery as seen from inside and outside of the getaway car (shots fired out, and into the vehicle), and Jane’s flinty performance and smooth mastery of world weariness.

“There’s the person you want to be when you’re young. And there’s the person you wind up being.”

Jane’s Ray Mandel is resigned to that, a lifetime of being most comfortable on the job, most at home in his Crown Vic.

A few moments like the roid-raging detective and a couple of other encounters took me right out of the picture, which is largely a straight-arrow “Adam-12” (this team is “20-Lincoln-14”) dangers and drudgery of the job drama.

Ray can complain that “They think it’s take-a-free-shot-at-a-cop night,” but we see lots of police restraint, none of this shoot-on-suspicion nonsense that has dominated the news about police killings nationwide. “Blue Lives Matter” doesn’t figure into the thinking either.

But Souza’s film reminds us that being apolitical is a political statement, too.

And after all the movies and TV shows, “Training Day” and “Rampart,” “End of Watch” and “Blue Knight” and years and years of “Cops” and “Live PD,” it’s not just the cops who’ve “seen it all.”

“Crown Vic” isn’t a bad picture. It’s just too unexceptional to stand out.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and pervasive language, disturbing content, sexual references, drug material and brief full nudity

cast: Thomas Jane, Luke Kleintank, Josh Hopkins, David Krumholtz and Bridget Moynahan

Credits: Written and directed by Joel Souza. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:50

Bound to happen. Cheaper than casting the real thing,beceb the ones who aren’t dead?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/afm-james-dean-reborn-cgi-vietnam-war-action-drama-1252703

One way to get past that seasonal “holiday movie phobia” thing more than a few of us suffer from is to throw in some Italian-Americans, as writer-director Robert Tinnell does with “Feast of the Seven Fishes.”

Make it a period piece, nostalgic for the days when a lot of your relatives were World War II vets, and one was at D-Day.

Make’em cook, you know, the “seven fishes” of this Italian Catholic Christmas Eve dinner tradition — bacaloa, smelt, whiting, shrimp, oysters, eel and calamari.

Let’em grab each other by the neck, for hugs and brother-on-brother wrestling fights.

Give’em plenty of sassy banter, throw-away lines that are the garlic of any dishy Italian-American comedy.

“What am I, Kojak?”

“You’re an idiot. Not your fault. You take after Uncle Carmine’s side of the gene pool!”

“Very funny. Tell me when to laugh!”

A little wistful romance, a touch of leaving the cozy family nest, all set against a holiday feast — prepping for it, cooking it, bickering, chasing the womenfolk out of the kitchen — that’s a winning combo for a holiday rom-com.

No low-hanging comic fruit is left unplucked in this sentimental easy-going and at times adorable entry in the seasonal comedy onslaught.

“On Christmas Eve in this town, EVERYbody is Italian. Or thinks they are!”

Tony Oliverio (Skyler Gisondo of “Booksmart”) is college age, but stuck at home in Greentown, West Virginia (actually Rivesville and Fairmont, West Virginia). He’s a painter who works in the family meat market his parents run. No chance of accepting admission to a “pretty good art school” in Pittsburgh.

It’s 1983 and his big Italian family is one generation removed from working in the coal mines. They’ll never go for anything as seemingly frivolous as “art school.”

He’s just broken up with his girlfriend since elementary school, and Katie (Addison Timlin), isn’t taking it well.

Cousin Angelo (Andrew Schultz) reminds him that “the chicks that went away to college, the ones we NEVER get to see? They’re back…and horny for the holidays!” That’s how Tony meets Beth (winsome Madison Iseman of the “Goosebumps” movies), a pretty blonde coed who went straight from prep school to the Ivy League.

It being 1983, Beth is resisting her parents’ push toward making more concrete plans with rich preppie Prentice (Allen Williamson), who’d rather be skiing this holiday.

Beth and Prentice, or Beth and Tony? If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, right? Que sera sera and all that.

There’s a mouth-watering comic montage of fish cooking as Tony explains the day’s cuisine to Beth.

But a comedy like this lives or dies on its supporting characters and the supporting cast you get to play them, and “Feast of the Seven Fishes” has a terrific one. Sure, they’re playing “types” — the lazy great uncle, the lazy little brother, the grousing patriarch (Paul Ben-Victor of TV’s “Goliath,” shining in a rare comic turn), the gambling, hustling “businessman” brother, given a “Paisano!” twinkle by Joe Pantoliano.

The grumpy great-grandmother (Lynn Cohen) doesn’t approve of the pretty blonde non-Catholic. Beth, one and all agree — when they switch to Italian when talking about her in front of her — is a “Mangia-cake,” a cake-eater. Rich. And the Oliverios? “Not OUR kind of people” Beth’s mother reminds her.

Naturally, she’s dragged into the holiday feast, old men in their t-shirts peeling shrimp, stuffing calamari and frying bacaloa.

Naturally, everybody they know drops by, including Juke (Josh Helman), a bookish, bespectacled philosopher/psychoanalyst who just happens to be a mechanic. “Feast of the Seven Fishes” has a little bit of every family holiday comedy about it, a touch of “Big Night” thanks to the food, and in this one character — Juke — a hint of “Diner.”

Most of the players have their moment or two, but none rings more true than Katie’s, a young woman devastated by her break-up, acting-out to try and win him back — adrift.

“I didn’t just lose Tony. I lost the whole family!”

I can’t stress enough how undemanding, easy-going, predictable and familiar this comedy is. Nor can I stress enough how well its tried-and-true ingredients blend, how much it feels grounded in a place and the people there.

Call “Feast of the Seven Fishes” what it is, Christmas comedy comfort food. And bring your appetite.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with a little fisticuffs, a little pot, a little profanity

Cast: Skyler Gisondo, Madison Iseman, Josh Helman, Paul Ben-Victor, Lynn Cohen, Addison Timlin, Jessica Darrow and Joe Pantoliano

Credits: Written and directed by Robert Tinnell. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:37

It takes forever to get going.

“Doctor Sleep” has to give us all this backstory, remind us who Danny Torrance, the kid with “The Shining,” was. It has to recast the kid from that movie, and more famously, his “Here’s JOHNNY!” dad — Jack Nicholson then, Henry Thomas now.

Alex Essoe replaces Shelley Duvall as Mom, Wendy Torrance.

And Carl Lumbly has to fill the shoes of the formidable Scatman Crothers as Danny’s friend, the handyman/cook with “The Shining” himself, Dick Halloran.

They had to recreate the Overlook Hotel (digitally), and put Danny back on a big wheeled trike, tooling down its scary halls, filled with iconic haunted twins and the Walking Dead cadaver in the tub.

But once all that stuff is out of the way, once that ominous Wendy Carlos/Rachel Elkind “Shining” theme has returned to the soundtrack, once the adult Danny (Ewan McGregor) has let us see the miserable, drifting and substance-abusing life he’s lived in the intervening 40 years, Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel-novel gets on its feet.

And once it (finally) gets going, it has us going, too.

Flanagan, the director of “The Haunting of Hill House” and that Netflix evergreen “Gerald’s Game” is no Stanley Kubrick. His film lacks the stateliness of Kubrick’s tone poem in horror. Nobody’s going to be obsessing over the mise en scene, every minute detail, and turning up in a documentary about such obsessives and their fixation on the Overlook Hotel’s “Room 237.”
But with a good cast, a great villainess and some absolutely stunning and horrific effects, he delivers a perfectly frightening, if ridiculously cluttered, simple confrontation between good and evil.

The set-piece moments — “Shining” practitioners tilting the building they’re in until they slide down the walls and into a precarious situation in another location, characters screaming and gurgling and shriveling and dying and turning to dust right before our eyes — aren’t the real selling point. What sticks with you are the story’s heartbreaking, pitiless and excruciating crimes against children.

That’s what’s giving young Abra (Kyliegh Curran) nightmares. She and her parents have known about her “gift” for years, but in her tweens, she’s shining too much, seeing too much. Children like her, who can read minds, communicate without speaking and see future events, are being hunted and slaughtered.

We’ve already met Rose the Hat (“Mission: Impossible” villain Rebecca Ferguson, silkily scary). She and her “family” (think “Manson” family, with RVs) travel the continent, hunting gifted kids, murdering them and stealing their “steam” — a vaprous representation of the soul exiting the body on death.

Abra’s distress has pierced the ESP void and found 40something Danny. He’s found sobriety and purpose, thanks to AA friends (Cliff Curtis, Bruce Greenwood) in this New Hampshire village where he’s settled.

“Do dying people bother you?”

Noooo, he insists. Everybody’s dying. “The world is one BIG hospice!”

That’s how he’s become “Doctor Sleep,” an after-hours custodian at the local hospice who follows the house cat who “senses” who will be the next to go, comforting the dying as only a man who can see “the other side” can.

Abra reaches out to Danny just as she’s detected by Rose the Hat. Can he protect her? Is she strong enough in “The Shining” to defend herself?

Flanagan’s film rarely bogs down after the long, establishing opening acts, but labors when his script tries to cram in a Hogwarts School Year’s worth of names for types of “Shining,” always brought up in debates between Rose and her chief lieutenant, Crow Daddy (Zahn McClarnon).

Their best moment as characters driving the plot is their “recruitment” of a Jedi Mind Trick teen (Emily Alyn Lind) who has been luring sexual predators into her trap, where she uses psychosomatic suggestion to disable and punish them.

And sure, while some of her glory is just the empathetic badass role she was cast in, young Miss Curran’s screen debut as Abra is a dazzler.

McGregor has a few moments of his own and is most impressive in the early scenes, Danny as down and out drifter, brawling in bars, picking up fellow addicts and irresponsibly stealing from them and abandoning them. That might be the reason old Dick (Lumbly) is still visiting him, years and years after Danny’s dad killed him with an axe at the Overlook.

There’s a lot going on here, none of it terribly deep. But “Doctor Sleep” still makes a worthy successor to “The Shining,” that rarest of sequels driven by genuine curiosity and fascination with characters and their continuing story and not by corporate bean counters and their bottom line cynicism.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing and violent content, some bloody images, language, nudity and drug use.

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis, Zahn McClarnon, Henry Thomas and Bruce Greenwood

Credits: Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, based on the Stephen King novel. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:31