Movie Nation

A beloved Australian tale about a boy, his pelican and preserving and respecting nature earns a sympathetic new telling in “Storm Boy,” which could be called a remake, a reboot and a sequel all at once.

Colin Thiele’s novel was most famously filmed in 1976, but has turned up in animated form as well. The new film is structured as a long flashback, a story remembered by the old man who lived it, its lessons worth passing on to a new generation.

It’s not a thrill-a-minute piece of children’s entertainment, but winning performances by young Finn Little, by Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush as the adult “boy,” and by Trevor Jamieson and Morgana Davies, lift it.

As do the birds. It was jarring seeing “Storm Boy” on the morning after sitting through Disney’s live-action (CGI assisted) “Dumbo” remake. As we watch Finn Little and Jai Courtney (playing his father, and playing him well) interact with naked, featherless chicks and adult white pelicans, the difference between what digital critters don’t give you and the surprise and delight real ones do is a pleasant shock to the system.

The actors seem as tickled by these birds as we’re meant to be.

When you’re making a movie about children and animals, “Fly Away Home” is your template, not “Jurassic World.” “Dumbo” director Tim Burton learned that the hard way.

Rush plays a retired tycoon who has been summoned home to help his son see to a transfer of traditional farm (natural) land into hands that will develop it. Son Malcolm (Erik Thomson) has upset his teen daughter (Morgana Davies) with this decision. She’s gone into “I HATE him” mode over the whole cynical “ruin the waterways and destroy their original homelands” debacle.

It’s up to grandpa to smooth troubled waters. A storm and a taste of candy from his childhood put him in mind of a flashback. So let Maddie be late for school and the board meeting can wait. Let’s take a walk on the beach and remember “the beach I grew up on.”

It was called “Ninety Mile Beach” outside of Adelaide. That’s where young Mike (Finn Little) and his father, whom the locals nicknamed “Hideaway Tom” (Courtney) moved.

There was a tragedy that turned Dad into a hermit-like waterman, home-schooling his son, raising him on fish and whatever else he could scrounge up. So Mike grew up “cut off from the world. Then one day, the world came to me.”

It’s the 1950s, and Mike’s life is wading in the shallows and wandering among the placid flocks of white pelicans. But there’s a tug of war over this remote piece of land, a local battle between hunters and those who want to declare the place “a sanctuary…” his father tells Mike. “Who cares about a bunch of birds?”

Not the beer-swilling jerks who wander in and shoot up the place from time to time, that’s for sure. After one such massacre, Mike finds three orphaned chicks. The aboriginal man Fingerbone (Trevor Jamieson of “Rabbit-Proof Fence”) figures they’re goners. And that there’ll be a storm. Soon.

“When a pelican is killed, there’ll always be a storm.” As he and the boy debate caring for the chicks, he delivers a shorthand history lesson about this land.

“No white fellas. For thousands of years, just black fellas.”

After a bit of pre-integration wariness between Dad and Fingerbone, the men pitch in to help save the pelicans.

There’s a warmth to these DIY, making it up as they go scenes — Dad donating a scarf to keep them warm, Mike, whom Fingerbone gives the Aboriginal name “Storm Boy,” improvising a fish guts food processor with an outboard motor.

Yeah, that’s funny.

And there’s a single line that has more heart in it than the entire screenplay of “Dumbo” manages, a little boy’s whispered “please don’t die” to a living thing (three of them) he has in his care.

Australians reviewing this seem to have a little of that “doesn’t measure up to the original film” thing going, and as I have been beating up on “Dumbo” this AM, I feel their pain.

But as someone who hasn’t seen the 1976 “Storm Boy,” I can endorse this movie’s occasional flash of emotion, the clever if slightly sterile way the past and present (Rush’s character revisiting his tweenage self) are blended and the Big Action Payoff, which is both far-fetched and analog tactile.

There are real birds in these scenes, and the movie, slight as it is, is richer for it.

For old men remembering the magic of childhood and filmmakers caught up in the cinema’s digital revolution, that right there is the lesson in “Storm Boy.”

“Sometimes you forget the best thing you ever learned.”

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements, mild peril and brief language

Cast: Finn Little, Jai Courtney, Geoffrey Rush, Morgana Davies, Trevor Jamieson

Credits:Directed by Shawn Seet, script by Justin Monjo, based on the Colin Thiele. A Good Deeds release.

Running time: 1:38

Gloom and doom hang over Tim Burton’s live-action (ish) remake of “Dumbo,” a classic in the Disney cartoon canon.

You knew from the source material and the trailers to this remake that he was going for a sweet, sentimental fable, tinged with sadness.

But hiring the screenwriter of “Arlington Road” and “The Ring” should have been a bigger give-away. Burton has blown up Disney’s ode to magic, misfits finding their gift and a mother’s love into a shiny but bloated, glum affair that feels “BIG EVENT” in scope, and depressingly heartless in execution.

The soaring, Disney-esque non-verbal choir oooing, ahhing and tra-la-la-ing over much of the score is the only nostalgia to it. Every other scene — of mistreated animals, parents separated from their offspring, an ancient industry in its death throes and the physical cost of war, just underscores how the “good ol’days” were nothing of the sort.

I expected Burton to make me cry. I didn’t expect him to utterly bum me out.

“Dumbo” opens in 1919, with a circus about to leave its Sarasota winter quarters for its annual tour by (digital) train. A threadbare showman, Maximilian Medici (Danny DeVito) presides, his vastly-reduced “family” of performers who are forced to handle many off-stage jobs, thanks to years of layoffs and “The Spanish Influenza.”

A father, Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), formerly a star horse trainer/stunt rider, returns from World War I to his motherless children (Nico Parker, Finley Robbins). He lost an arm in France, the horses were sold after his wife died (the flu). And little Milly has dreams of being the next Marie Curie, or a veterinarian, not “a show-off” in the circus.

Max gives one-armed Holt the job of tending to the elephants, and shows off Mrs. Jumbo, his most prized recent purchase. She’s not performing. She’s pregnant.

And no sooner has she given birth than her baby becomes an attraction, “freak show” ears be darned.

Much of the movie is about Dumbo — as jeering, pelting audiences name him — being separated from his mother and trying to get back to her. Max sells her off.

But the kids figure out the big-eared babe has an odd reaction to feathers. He can fly. And they promise Dumbo that if he performs this feat in public, he’ll earn enough money for the circus to buy mom back.

Michael Keaton plays a New York impresario who wants Dumbo for his new theme park. Eva Green is Collette, his seemingly callous aerialist who shows a softer side when she has to work with the baby elephant.

Alan Arkin has several pointless (one laugh among them) scenes as a banker backing Dreamland, only if its new star attraction, a flying elephant, pays off.

The performances lack anything like the pluck, wit and spark they’d need to stand out and lift this. Some of that can be parked at the feet of having to act with digital animals. DeVito tries too hard for laughs, and even a dumb gimmick (having Michael Buffer, the WWE’s “Let get ready to RUMBLE” announcer, introduce Dumbo’s act) falls utterly flat.

The script’s idea of a running gag is Medici’s “rules,” which consist of only “Rule Number One: Keep the cages LOCKED.” “Rule Number One: Always have a BIG FINISH!”

This version of the story is overrun with villains, people not doing right by the animals, the kids or the basics of kindness. But none of them interesting enough to be worth hissing at.

The big “ooh” and “ahh” flying moments have a hint of magic, and the touching mother-baby stuff almost yanks a tear.

But those scenes are robbed of any payoff by the surrounding scenes, which offer no contrast — Burtonesque gloom becomes a pall that hangs over the entire enterprise.

There are half a dozen songs in the sixty-eight minute original 1941 animated film — and quite a few laughs, some of which came from the racist stereotypes playing the crows, which were never going to remain in a 2019 Disney remake. But when you strip away that, and almost all of the songs, save for the sweet, sad lullaby “Baby Mine,” and don’t replace them with anything the least bit light or funny, what are you left with?

Burton’s “Dumbo” is dark, digital and only weakly humorous. Kids may laugh at the digital Capuchin monkey who gets in Medici’s hair (and in his desk drawers, etc.) and coo at the baby elephant with the oversized ears. But the movie surrounding that is relentlessly sad, a picture that plays up the cruelty in this imaginary but sometimes too-real world.

And what the man who owes his career to Disney does to “Dreamland,” the theme park setting for the film’s final act, should have given the folks who write his checks pause.

Burton’s place within cinema culture is built on his ability to make the sad and morbid palatable, to play up the darkness in fables (“Edward Scissorhands,””The Corpse Bride”) and the gloom in what we used to call “comic” books. His “Batman” movies set the tone for the genre that has taken over the entire industry.

But in spite of that, the whimsy of “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” “Edward Scissorhands,””The Corpse Bride” and even his daft “Dark Shadows” and downbeat “Alice in Wonderland” still made this seem like a movie Disney could trust in his hands.

He remade it twice as long, with half the heart.

MPAA Rating: PG for peril/action, some thematic elements, and brief mild language

Cast: Colin Farrell, Danny DeVito, Nico Parker, Michael Keaton, Eva Green, Alan Arkin, Roshan Seth, Joseph Gatt

Credits:Directed by, script by Ehren Kruger , based on the Helen Aberson/Harold Pearl novel. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:52

There’s almost certainly market research backing up Nickelodeon/Universal’s decision to put “Dora the Explorer” in high school, strip the “boots” off “Boots” — her digital monkey pal, and generally “Tomb Raider” the daylights out of this adorable pre-tween character, her singing map and handy talking backpack and annoying fox-villain “Swiper.”

Eva Longoria and Michael Peña are good choices for the parents. Benicio Del Toro is Swiper in this version. Not a fox, which is fine.

Isabel Moner of “Instant Family” is plucky, but 18 — ready for teen magazines, a record deal (if she doesn’t have one already) and unwanted tabloid attention (at least in today’s culture).

This trailer grates in its wrong-headedness. She’s too old, the whole set-up is too grown up. There’s no childish magic, childish innocence or childish childishness to this Aug. 2 release.

The one nod in that direction is casting Eugenio Derbez, who sets a different tone (overly dramatic adult in a child’s “action” adventure) and I think, the right one.

Younger Dora, younger kids around her, take teen/tween pinup appeal out of your decision making and maybe you can do right by an admittedly infantile TV show, but one which little kids just loved.

I say, not very sporting, wot wot?

Calling your movie “Pet Graveyard” when it has nothing to do with pets, and barely visits the graveyard, or as the neighborhood kids misspelled it to Stephen King, “Sematary?” That’s not cricket.

But here stands “Pet Graveyard,” a limp, limey “Flatliners” with nothing but a misleading title to connect it to the latest remake of Mr. King’s work to trot into theaters. Shameless. Cheap, not really scary, but “shameless” is what stands out about this British production.

There’s this young guy, Jeff (David Cotter) who is feeding traffic to his daredevil vlog by taking the occasional daft risk.

And he’s heard about this thing, “brinking,” which the Brits think means taking your life long enough to commune with the dead, which he wants to try out.

Judging by his accent, Jeff and his nurse-in-training sister Lily (Jessica O’Toole) are Americans, living in the UK. That doesn’t explain how they don’t know “brinking” has a different definition here in the states.

He’s got other folks interested in this process, and he figures they can make a joint journey to the afterlife and he’ll get at least the “died and passed on” part of that on video for this vlog. He’s also got it in his head that he can finally “say goodbye” to his dead mother in the process.

It’ll be “safe,” he’s sure. “Worst case, we just get woken up,” re reassures Zara (Rita Siddiqui) and Francis (Hindolo Koroma).

The “waking up” part will be handled by sister Lily. As we’ve just seen her urged, by her faculty advisor, to “take a gap year” because maybe nursing isn’t for her, there are flaws in Jeff’s plan.

But Francis is torn by guilt over the girlfriend who died when he was behind the wheel, and Zara mourns the brother who died when they were little. So it’s off to an empty church with sheets of clear plastic to suffocate themselves with. Nothing to it, right?

Right. Egg timers at the ready, because we don’t want them staying “dead” too long.

The suffocating requires “help” and those scenes are the creepiest thing director Rebecca J. Matthews manages here.

The “afterlife,” a pool of blackness where the living reconnect with lost loved ones, only to see a tall dude in the worst “Mr. Death/Devil/Demon” costume (robe) in the bargain, isn’t much.

And the creepy hairless cat who is a harbinger of death and perhaps Old Scratch in another form is just here to make that “Pet Sematary” connection.

Which feels like an after thought.

The ritual that they recite before “dying” is Ouija board silly.

“The powers that see, the powers that be…let us cross over in peace and return in light.”

And the dead? They’re not the most articulate at expressing what life in the hereafter is anything worth coming after.

“It’s always dark here…I’m always alone. Are you staying?”

The disasters that befall our quartet when the dead follow the living back from “the other side” are predictable and fail to frighten on any level.

But maybe somebody will see this offered, video on demand, and forget the “REAL” title and that’s what they had in mind, if not all along, at least once they realized “Pet Sematary” was coming out in early April, too.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Rita Siddiqui, Jessica O’Toole, David Cotter, Hindolo Koroma

Credits:Directed by Rebecca Matthews, script by Suzy Spade. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:38

This Indian melodrama and dance fantasia opens April 19. The trailer doesn’t give much away, save for the dance, the setting and the fact that “His Father’s Voice” is in English.

They still eat spaghetti in Italia. And they still make Westerns, though not like in the old “spaghetti Western” days — not with horses, six guns and Sergio Leone theme songs.

“Dogman” is a grim to the point of bleak tale of Italy built on classic Western tropes. A little man is beaten down by the bully who terrorizes his town, ostracized, humiliated. In the Old West, Marcello (Marcello Fonte) would have gotten his gun. What remedies does a man of modern Italy have? Italian justice? That’s an punchline laughed at the world over.

The director of director of “Gomorrah” and “Tale of Tales” (Matteo Garrone) paints a frustrating, harrowing portrait of violent intimidation and the price one pays living under it. We can sense what’s coming, but there’s no guarantee Garrone will give it to us.

Marcello is homely, short, nasal-voiced and vulpine, a 30something dog sitter, dog groomer and animal lover.

“Dogman” is the name of the window of his shop of this run-down coastal town (Castel Volturno, Villaggio Coppola, Caserta). And as we watch his coo and calm a vicious and perhaps frightened pit bull into accepting a bath, it seems apt.

He whistles “Amore!” (“sweetie pie”) at every dog he sees and dotes over the one he lives with and the dogs in his care.

“Everyone in the neighborhood likes me,” he says. “That’s important to me.”

Yeah, he’s a pushover. The other shopkeepers, who play soccer with him, tolerate him but have limits to the respect they give him. He doesn’t merit a second thought.

His sweet little girl (Alida Baldari Calabria) helps dad with his grooming business, feeds him pointers at groomer contests, and loves scuba diving. Divorced dad lets her decide what expensive diving location he must pay for next.

Dog boarding and dog grooming won’t be enough for the Maldives. It’s a good thing he deals a little coke on the side.

But Marcello, like everyone else here, lives under a cloud, a hulking impulsive brute named Simone (Edoardo Pesce, perfectly cast as a brooding behemoth). And the little man’s years of placating the town’s “Mad Dog” with arm-twisted “favors,” saying “Yes” after insisting, pleading and begging to say “No,” and with cocaine, haven’t exactly paid off.

He’s still bullied into driving Simone and a pal to a robbery, still forced to surrender cocaine whenever Simone insists he give it up.

Marcello may realize he’s a victim, but he’s slow to embrace how ridiculous and small Simone makes him. When his soccer buddies suggest hiring somebody to take care of this “problem,” he’s silent. When Simone flips out on his coke supplier, Marcello is complicit. When Simone is hurt, Marcello tends to him.

That’s got to be worth something, right? He’s a “friend,” right?

Garrone makes wonderful use of his diminutive leading man (best known for the film “Asino vola”), and Fonte manages to be both empathetic and pathetic here. The director/co-writer sketches in the moral code of this story in shades of grey. Yes, Marcello cowers. He tries to do the right thing, saving a dog that the robbers joke about stuffing in a freezer.

But unlike your classic Western “hero,” Marcello has few options and no simplistic recourse at his disposal. This is what a kind man trapped on the horns of this ancient  dilemma in modern times looks like — lost.

Garrone makes us see that when head-butting might exists without legal restraint, might makes right. It’s not cowardice if you have know for a fact and have plenty of evidence that you’re facing physical injury or death for resisting.

The town has a stark, worn beauty about it — half-abandoned boats, apartment blocks that haven’t been maintained, living space without landscaping or decorating.

And  trapped within it, losing his place within it with every shove against the wall, every thuggish demand, is a tiny, simple man with ever-diminishing options.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse

Cast: Marcello Fonte, Edoardo Pesce, Adamo Dionisi, Alida Baldari Calabria

Credits:Directed by Matteo Garrone, script by Ugo Chiti, Matteo Garrone and Massimo Gaudioso. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:43

She gets the life-threatening menace across, just with a glare.

As the actress making this threat, in the guise of abused-woman turned avenger, is that skinny slip of a thing Olivia Wilde, that glare had better be lethal. And in “A Vigilante,” it is.

Wilde first gained great fame as the super-humanly beautiful, digitally perfect “Quorra,” in “TRON: Legacy.” And it sometimes seems as if she’s spent the intervening decade trying to rub that image right out of our eyes.

Movies like “Deadfall,” “Butter” and “Drinking Buddies” played up an earthier, if not always deadlier image. But if you’re tackling an indie American “Girl Who Never Got a Dragon Tattoo,” scary is part of the package.

Sadie is the sort of woman other women call. When we meet her, she’s sitting in the house of a mother cooking dinner, one arm in a sling. The overhead part of the phone call included “He’ll hurt them…if I leave” and a Kingston (New York in winter) address.

We’ve witnessed that woman (Betsey Aidem) help her husband get his coat on as he leaves in the morning. Again, she has her arm in a sling.

We’ve seen Sadie working herself breathless on a punching bag. And as the spaghetti bubbles on the stove that evening, she’s the one there to greet the abusive husband (C.J. Wilson) when he comes home that night.

Her orders are calm, firm and steely-eyed. He is to transfer his assets, put the house in his wife’s name, and following that “you will leave.”

He glowers. She glares.

“I know what you do to her.”

Any hint of objection, any sudden move with the threat of violence is met with a karate chop to the neck. It happens mostly off camera (saving on fight choreography and sparing the actors the risk of injury). But the results are unmistakable.

Sadie beats the living hell out of him.

changing her looks with a wig and bright blue contact lenses

“If you bother her, or the kids, in any way, I will kill you,” she warns her bloodied foe as he sulks out the door. Followed by a whispered “I WANT to kill you.”

Wilde and first-time feature writer-director Sarah Daggar-Nickson have cooked up a strip mall/truck stop Lisbeth Salander for rural New York state, a female vengeance fantasy which, scene by scene, fills in Sadie’s back story, her self-trained bonafides (learning martial arts from books and videos), the big hole in her life that violence against abusive men can barely hope to fill.

Sadie has been doing this enough to have a modus operandi — contact lenses to change her eye color, dye or a wig to alter her hair, blue collar working clothes, black leather assassin gloves, a Honda coupe she keeps under a tarp in the woods.

Payment?

“Food, or money if they have it.”

She is covered in scars. Haunted. Manic panic attacks, at times, tumbling into paroxysms of grief.

“A Vigilante” is a film that revels in the icy quiet of a New York winter, the chilling testimonials of support group women giving details of what happened to them, how it happened, how it continues and the utter horror of it.

Sadie sits in these meetings at a shelter.

“We recognize that we have value…it’s how we got here.”

She isn’t sharing “your ‘leaving story,'” but we can guess she will.

She hits a redneck bar on the way home. “Well whisky, on the rocks.” No makeup, camo jacket and baseball cap, she’s still hit on. She’s pursued into the parking lot. But she expected that. Her pursuers/prey are about to get a nasty, bloody surprise.

Daggar-Nickson fills Sadie’s life with Spartan details — a TV always on, maps on the wall, the odd moment of dancing by herself, sleeping with a bayonet under her pillow. She’s still afraid of something, someone, and not just the men she’s beaten up.

Even though she only reveals Sadie’s back story in the last third, the narrative Daggar-Nickson cooks up is familiar, predictable, even in the way it stumbles off track in the third act. She spares us the worst horrors — violence committed against children, the beatings that bring Sadie to a family’s door. Sadie is the one she doesn’t spare.

But Wilde gives this woman her all. We see her with every freckles and imperfection showing on her cover girl face. And in the couple of scenes that require fight choreography, she handles herself well enough to be convincing.

She puts this generic picture over with a performance that has baggage, damage, history and compassion packed into it — motherly concern for a child she’s just met, wearing the group therapy advice she took to heart and let change her life, advice the Swedish avenger Lisbeth Salander could have given her, dragon tattoo or no.

“You have to fight back. Even if it kills you.”

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Olivia Wilde, Morgan Spector, Tonye Patano,

Credits: Written and directed by Sarah Daggar-Nickson. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:31

The pitch has a hint of “madcap” about it.

A teenage spitfire and future rebellious movie starlet goes to New York at 16, accompanied by an older and over-matched chaperone.

But even though “The Chaperone” is coming to theaters, it’s a PBS/Masterpiece Films production. PBS doesn’t do madcap. Nor does esteemed screenwriter Julian Fellowes, of “Downton Abbey” and such films as “Shadowlands” and “Gosford Park.”

What “Masterpiece Theatre” does well is “starchy” and “soapy,” and that’s what this melodrama, “inspired by true events,” manages. It’s a handsomely-mounted, pleasant but dry and almost dull trip back to the Roaring 20s, “Masterpiece” style. Which is it say “Roaring” isn’t really allowed.

The “Downton” connection is underlined by parking Elizabeth McGovern in the lead role. She is Norma, a Wichita housewife who overhears a conversation at a charity benefit and offers to act as chaperone for the talented and vivacious 16 year-old Louise Brooks, played by the effervescent Haley Lu Richardson (“Five Feet Apart,””Split”).

Norma’s husband (Campbell Scott) has no say in the matter, which practically shouts “FORESHADOWING!”

“I hope you won’t go…digging around, when you get there,” is all he says in protest.

And Louise is sell hell-bent on getting out of Wichita that she’ll say anything that placates her indulgent but mistrusting parents (Victoria Hill, Jonathan Walker).

It’s the Prohibition Era, the Jazz Age. And Brooks, with just a hint of the bangs that would anchor her iconic much-copied “bob” when she became the quintessential “flapper,” and a star of such films “A Girl in Every Port,” Pandora’s Box” and “Miss Europe,” is desperate to, as the poet put it, “gather” her “rosebuds” in the big city.

“I don’t intend to live the way I was brought up,” the cocksure dance student declares to Norma. She eschews corsets and is straining at the leash to flirt, drink and romance her way into New York.

“I never worry about anything!” Especially men willing to buy her this or that. Whatever it costs them, “They get the pleasure of my company.”

She’s been accepted at the modernist Denishawn dance school and company, which the real Brooks actually joined — though in Los Angeles, not in New York.

Norma? She’s cautious and provincial. “I have not come here to harass you. I am here to protect you.”

She’s there to put the brakes on whenever Louise, who came to be known as “Lulu,” kind of the first “modern woman,” is about to get out of hand. “It isn’t done…because of the appearance of impropriety.”

And sex?

“Men don’t like candy that’s been…unwrapped,” dear. “They don’t know where it’s been!”

Louise cackles at that. “We’re not all like Marmee in ‘Little Women’ you know.”

But that’s as far as that conflict is developed, really. “The Chaperone” is about the title character’s journey. Norma’s “digging around” is about her past. She was an orphan, from back in the days when nuns ran orphanages and children were loaded onto trained to be adopted out to who knows who in the far reaches of America. Norma wants to know who her birth mother was.

There’s a helpful caretaker (Géza Röhrig ) at the orphanage where Norma wants to get some answers.

The dizzy “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day” direction this film might have taken might be light and trite, even. But Louise Brooks is a fascinating figure, and Richardson — seen dancing quite capably in that “Rite of Spring” era style — might have the spark to make that work.

What Fellowes elected to show us instead was a drab melodrama with a few big emotional moments where McGovern gets to show us some fireworks.

Fellowes does his homework and like many a TV screenwriter, “shows his work”  with carefully placed historical references to “speak easies” and the “I support Prohibition!” climate of the time.

“Did I tell you? Jack and I are joining the Klan!”

“What clan?”

“The Ku Klux Klan!” a Wichita friend chirps to Norma, complaining about the social changes that have come “since the war” — “laws, customs, morals…Everything’s falling apart!”

Louise and Norma experience their first integrated theater audience (the show is meant to be 1922’s “Shuffle Along.”).

There are revelations — each woman has a painful secret or three — love interests, all rather pallid ingredients to a formula that plays better on Fellowes’ famous Anglo-American PBS soap opera.

The scenes that delight are often in the dance studio, where wife Ruth St. Denis (Miranda Otto) and Ted “Papa” Shawn (Robert Fairchild) lecture their students on dance, movement and propriety — which Louise isn’t hearing.

“”From this moment, you are ambassadors…for DENISHAWN!  No drinking or smoking…wear hats and stockings and NEVER roll down (your) stockings!”

Otto, still best known for her ferocious youthful turn in the “Lord of the Rings” movies, is imperious and almost funny — the embodiment of the pretentious artiste.

“Art is not tinsel. It is gold. And it must be handled by the worthy…DAHNCE is…a visualization of divinity!”

It’s pointless to wish for more of this, because that’s not what Fellowes does well. But those flashes of fun might have given the great screenwriter an unsettling moment or two in the editing.

He had to realize he was telling the wrong story, a duller one by design, even if it does star his beloved Lady Grantham.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, alcohol abuse, mild profanity

Cast: Elizabeth McGovern, Haley Lu Richardson, Miranda Otto, Campbell Scott, Blythe Danner,

Credits:Directed by Michael Engler, script by Julian Fellowes, based on the Laura Moriarty book. A PBS/Masterpiece Films release.

Running time: 1:43

Alarming, inspiring and yes, laugh-out-loud funny, “Hail Satan?” is a delightful documentary dissection of America’s favorite anti-religion, The Satanic Temple.

Director Penny Lane (“Our Nixon,” “Nuts!”) traces the group from its hoaxer origins, coming to life as political protest performance art, growing into a national movement battling the ever-blurring lines between church and state advocated — adherents say — by evangelical activists intent on creating an American theocracy.

It might be the funniest civics lesson you ever see on the big screen, as clear an assertion of American freedoms as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” — and with more laughs.

Lane captures moments of origin, the “church” forming as Florida’s “Tea Party” governor, Rick Scott, called for bringing religion into the state’s schools.

Fine, the future Satanists said. We see them find an actor to be their spokesman, with an earpiece allowing founder Lucien Greaves (not his real name) to feed him lines. They dress him and several followers at a costume shop.

We watch the actor rehearse lines and a special effect (fire flying out of his fingers) for a rally at the Florida State Capital in Tallahassee. A PR person alerts the Florida media.

And then the big day — “Hail Satan! Hail Rick Scott!” It is, our actor declares, “a Great day to be a Satanist!”

Sure, a heckler yells, “You’re gonna go to HELL!”

“I believe it,” our spokes-model improvises. “And I’m very excited about it.”

The idea was to “show the hypocrisy of what Rick Scott is doing,” singling out a religion his backers support for special treatment and enshrinement in Florida law.

Scott, already nicknamed “Governor Voldemort” by much of America, did not realize it. But his efforts to “bring prayer back to public schools” had just launched a global political movement that mocks superstition and super-naturalism, appeals to reason, civil rights and the “religious pluralism” that America’s founding fathers decreed.

All this as they rally, stage self-invented rituals, file civil rights lawsuits and stick a joking thumb in the eye of Evangelical America.

Lane uses interviews, images of protests and rallies, snippets of religious and patriotic films and archival news footage to tell this admittedly lopsided story of The Satanic Temple’s quixotic pursuit of the secular America that, as scholars and historians remind us, only was seriously unraveled by the rise of Billy Graham and political evangelism in the 1950s.

The Satanist’s secret weapon? Demanding, and getting equal time and the equal treatment ensured under the law. Here’s Chris Hayes of MSNBC summing it up nicely with, “Basically, the argument being ‘You open the door to ‘God,’ you open the door to ‘Satan.'”

Want to put prayer in your schools? The Satanists want to lead the prayers, on occasion. Allowing Bible study clubs to hold meetings on campus? The Satanic Temple has comic book reading matter your kids would just love. A prayer opens Phoenix city council meetings? Let a Satanist into the rotation of religious leaders brought in for that.

Lane’s film traces the “Satanic scares” of the 1980s and 90s, when “Satanic rituals,” sacrifices and other boogeyman threats were trumpeted in the supermarket tabloids and local and national news (and didn’t actually exist) to the invention of this new “church” as “a counter-balance to the dominant religious privilege in America.”

Christianity’s Satan, whom the group’s members allow they don’t actually believe in, “is the symbolic embodiment of the ultimate rebel against tyranny.”

“Blasphemy is a declaration of personal independence.”

Satan, in other words, “was the original ‘troll.'”

And they’re out to puncture superstitions, expose hypocrisy and ridicule religious groups that inject themselves into American life and American politics. That “Satanic scare?” “Transference” and projection, one interviewed member declares, comparing it to the then-ongoing Catholic Church pedophilia scandal, covered-up until about the time the “Satanic scare” withered away.

The group, many of whose members appear interviewed in shadows or with their faces blurred, admit to quickly learning how to grab media attention — a rally here, a “pink mass” right there.

That’s how they went after the Westboro Baptist Church’s hate-mongering leader by performing a ritual at the grave of Fred Phelps’ dead mother. Twisting Mormon reasoning, they declared her a “lesbian in the afterlife” announcing that “Satanists…turn the dead gay.”

A Salem, Massachusetts headquarters and gift shop, and bigger protests against a sudden mania for installing religious monuments in state capitals all over the Bible Belt followed.

“I don’t mind when people are offended,” Greaves, the face of an organization of former Goths, outsiders, tattooed metalheads and agitators, says. They want to “force people to evaluate their notions of the United States as a Christian nation. We’re not.” We are, he reminds us, and a scholar or two backs him up, a “secular nation of religious tolerance.”

Where Lane’s film and the group morph from amusing to moving is in their biggest ongoing fight, attempts to put The Ten Commandments into statehouses and courthouses, something a historian traces back to Cecil B. Demille’s promotional efforts for his movie, “The Ten Commandments,” in the Billy Graham-mad, anti-communist 1950s. The producers of the modern “God’s Not Dead” movies would like to do the same.

As we meet cynical legislators and devoutly monomaniacal true believers — some toting Christian and Confederate flags to rallies, and hear the shouting from Christians who get neither the joke nor irony, it’s hard not to take Satan’s side in all this. The alternative just might be, as the Satanists say, submitting to “Christian Supremacy” and the theocracy that implies.

As they create statues of Baphomet (see the photo at top), modeled on the punk rocker Iggy Pop (not the goat’s head, mind you) and demand equal billing next to whatever Ten Commandments this or that cynical politician wants to arouse his base with by placing a religious monument in a public space, as they deal with shouting, protesting mobs at every public appearance, “Hail Satan” gives you a stark choice — the devout, or the jokers who have a point.

“The more hate that was thrown at us, the more important this seemed,” lawyer Stu DeHaan realized.

However it began, whatever some of its more loopy adherents “believe,” American democracy needs the outliers, the agitators, to evolve and weather the regressive changes in the political climate.

As one wag in this church of wags reminds us, “The Devil’s work is never done.”

MPAA Rating: R for graphic nudity, and some language

Credits:Directed by Penny Lane. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:35

Take every movie or sitcom gag about the trials of trying to conceive and put them in one movie, and you’ve got “Making Babies.”

It’s a perfectly pleasant sit-through of a couple-trying-to-become-a-triple comedy, even if pretty much every single situation, from first scene to its last, slaps you in the face with “Where’d I see THAT before?”

Eliza Coupe (TV’s “Happy Endings” and “Casual”) and Steve Howey (TV’s “Shameless”) make a genial if not exactly must-see-Moo-vie married pair we follow through the ordeal of a “difficult” conception.

Supporting players Ed Begley Jr. and the late Glenne Headly (in her final film) give better comic value as a fertility doctor and Catholic mom respectively, and first-time writer-director Josh F. Huber creates a few conflict points that show promise.

That it never amounts to much, or anything surprising, is a bit of a shame.

Katie and John take on a new home that’s “a LOT of house” for just two, Katie observes. Let’s do something ABOUT that, John responds. And we’re off — sex (off camera), home pregnancy tests.

He’s a software engineer whose dream is to open his own craft brewery, following “500 year old German beer laws.” Good luck with that, older brother Gordon (Bob Stephenson, never quite funny) grumps. He’s mid-midlife crisis, taking on a motorcycle, joining a dojo.

His wife Maria (Elizabeth Rodriguez) urges Katie and John to go camping and make “a sleeping bag baby,” reassuring them that if that or a fertility doctor can’t help, “I’ll give you one of my kids.”

The first comic spark of life comes from that doctor,, an eccentrically indiscreet California cliche played by Begley.

“Katie, let’s talk about your uterus,” he says,, solemnly. Oh, not to worry, “It’s a real SHOW stopper.”

Thus begin assorted tests and treatments, discussions of IUI vs. IVF, more frustration, consulting a “healer” (Jon Daly, not that funny in a slam dunk part) creating a whole doctor-“witch doctor” conflict. Meanwhile, John is laid off and takes on an Uber job and Katie finds herself confronting “working mom lunch” conflicts at work and a Catholic mom she has to hide their pursuit of scientific solutions to their inability to conceive from.

“A life isn’t something that should be ordered from a CATALOG or online!”

There’s potential all over this picture, but the only real laughs are the “leprechaun” accent Katie/Coupe affects when “assisting” John’s “sampling.” Huber doesn’t do much with the doctor vs. healer conflict, does too little with the sibling rivalry and probably too much with the comically graphic indignities of sperm donation.

That and the general over-familiarity of the topic make “Making Babies” more of a chore than a joy, pun intended.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex jokes, masturbation scenes, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Eliza Coupe, Steve Howey, Ed Begley Jr., Glenne Headly

Credits: Written and directed by Josh F. Huber. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:26