Movie Nation

The novelty here, aside from the Louis Prima tune on the trailer, is that Bob punched back this time. Feb 26.

This has possibilities. A mercurial dude, a rising star in publishing.Feb. 5

The most ambitious holiday movie this year isn’t this Hallmark one or that animated one, a gay romance or a kiddie farce.

It’s “Just Another Christmas” and it comes from Brazil, where it’s titled “Tudo Bem No Natal Que Vem.”

Yes, it’s a comedy and the laughs are a bit broad — pratfalls, cakes in the face, mustache gags. And as is often the case, the giggles are too few in number.

But consider the themes and movies this mash-up is mashing up. There’s a little “It’s a Wonderful Life” and a lot of “Groundhog Day,” with just a hint of “Memento” without the violence and with (somewhat) less profanity.

Jorge (Leandro Hassum) is a middle class galoot who’s doing all right by himself, and by his family. Every year, all his wife’s relatives — and a couple of his — gather for Christmas dinner. Every year, he struggles to remember what his kids want, what wife Laura (Elisa Pinheiro) expects him to brave the mob scene at the stores to buy.

And he hates Christmas. He tolerates it for the sake of others, but just barely. Why? He’s told us in the opening narration.

He was born on Christmas Day. And “Everybody born on Christmas Day knows, we never get a decent birthday party,” as he notes (in Portuguese, with English subtitles — or if you choose, dubbed into English, German, etc.). For whatever reason, that blunts the “magic” of the day and leaves one an excuse to sour on it. When you hit your late teens, a lot of people “stop celebrating it.”

But when you get married and have kids, you have to go with the flow and at least pretend to enjoy it. And yes, this is totally a thing for many of us born on the same day as Jesus and Jimmy Buffett.

But on a typically raucous and dysfunctional Christmas eve, his brother (Rodrigo Fagundes) taps him for another cash “loan,” Uncle Victor’s insulted Laura’s sister for her “whorelike” cleavage and taken offense at being called a “senile jerk” and is taking the turkey he brought and leaving in a huff — again — and Jorge irks his mother-in-law — again.

Then Jorge suits up as Santa and takes a fall from the roof. He’s had enough of pretending. These people, young and old, are exhausting and it’s just not worth it.

That’s when catatonic grandpa Nhanhão (Levi Ferreira) speaks so that only Jorge will hear.

“You will find out what Christmas is good for,” he intones.

Sounds like a “curse?” That’s what Jorge figures, too, when he wakes up the next day, and it’s Christmas all over again. Only a whole year has passed. And he missed all of it.

That’s the gimmick here. Jorge, who hates Christmas, experiences nothing but a succession of Christmases. It’s “schizophrenia” or “amnesia” or what have you, but he even misses the brain scans and various diagnoses he’s gotten over the course of the year.

And what he misses multiplies each and every year, jumping ahead occasionally by several years at once, when he wakes up and discovers a kid who’s gotten taller, a mustache he can’t believe he’s grown or the open heart surgery scar from his “latest” bypass.

His family life is passing him by, the connection with them loosens and tears over his dismissal of the holiday. He misses funerals, doesn’t remember when the kids start dating, and who they’re dating now. Heck, there’s even a mistress (Danielle Winits) he doesn’t realize he’s decided he prefers to all this togetherness.

As somebody who figures a Christmas movie should be about something, and something to say about the holidays and family, etc., I have to say “Just Another Christmas” passes the test at least as well as “Happiest Season,” something “Jingle Jangle” failed completely.

Hassum is a pleasantly amusing lead, if entirely too prone to mugging. His reactions to his dilemma and what he’s supposed to learn from it are spot on. His “journey” takes him from “Whatever” to “Why me?” to “Why did you wake me up this year?” Jorge may not be a George Bailey in terms of jerking tears at the sentiment expressed. But he’s a step above Fred Claus and at least on a par with Tim Allen trapped in “The Santa Clause.”

The pacing is a bit pedestrian, even for an imitation “Groundhog Day” or (closer) “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The slapstick is “meh” and too many of the laugh lines are a blurt of profanity when you half-expect it.

And of all the Brazilian films I’ve seen over the years, “Just Another Christmas” is the least Brazilian — from the decor and “traditions” to many of the items on the Christmas meal menu. This picture has been totally Americanizado.

It’d be a candidate for a Hollywood or North American Netflix remake. But all they’d be changing was the actors and the language spoken. I wouldn’t mind the same crew taking another crack at this clever story, one with about twice as many jokes and sight gags to give it its due.

MPA Rating: TV-PG, profanity scattered throughout

Cast: Leandro Hassum, Elisa Pinheiro, Louise Cardoso, Danielle Winits, Rodrigo Fagundes, Lola Fanucchi

Credits: Directed by Roberto Santucci, script by Paulo Cursino. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

A smart cookie on screen, now she’s taking a shot at directing.

Taraji P. Henson will be making her feature directorial debut with “Two Faced,” which has nothing to do with the Batman universe. As the Hollywood Reporter tells us, it’s a high school comedy.

https://t.co/CXE4InrAvd https://t.co/SmLfWxYYPY https://twitter.com/THR/status/1337079731905236995?s=20

The attack was brazen, and because it was captured on video and involved North Korea, it dominated the news for months back in 2017.

The exiled brother of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s latest dictator for life from the Kim Dynasty, was approached by two pretty young women in Kuala Lumpur airport who suddenly smeared something in his face and skipped off. One even looked up at a CCTV camera and smiled on her way to a restroom to wash her hands.

The victim? He talked to police, was taken to the airport clinic, and was dead within an hour.

Who were these two murderously amoral black widows? And who put them up to it?

The answers seemed simple back then, as they do in the first act or Ryan White’s gripping investigative documentary, “Assassins.” Yes, this Indonesian woman in the LOL t-shirt and her Vietnamese colleague did it. But did they know what they were doing?

White talks to their families, and the lawyers for Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong. At first, they fret over daughters were “seduced” by the world outside a Vietnamese farm or Indonesian town. “Confess, if you did it,” Doan’s brother writes her.

The lawyers seem, at first, resigned to their clients’ murderous intent or at least complicity.

White interviews journalists, both inside press-restricted Malaysia and outsiders, to reveal an ever-widening web of conspiracy, complicity and the diplomatic entanglements that the case uncovered and trumped “justice” in the case at almost every turn.

But Malaysian police, snappish and defensive in press conferences, are exposed as “shallow” and not eager to stand up higher-ups who see relations with North Korea, Indonesia and (to a lesser degree) Vietnam as more important than a mere political murder in a public place, with video cameras that ensured the world could see their shame.

That footage, by the way? Leaked to the international media, but kept from the defense attorneys.

The film also gets into the Kim family history, the younger brother/dictator’s need to “keep them (others in government, in the country and in his family) terrified.” For a laugh or two, watch the “outraged” North Korean ambassador declare (in English), “The Malaysian police are desperate to shift the blame to us!” after we’ve seen the cluster of North Korean agents in video at the airport laying the groundwork the day of the murder.

The North Korean “mastermind” and “the godfather” and “the chemist” are identified by Malaysian journalist Hadi Azmi as, in scene after scene, he walks us through the crime’s set-up and the moment by moment events that the CCTV footage document.

We’re allowed to take the lawyers lightly — at first. With clients facing the death penalty, they chuckle inappropriately over the irregularities of the done-deal court and can seem disorganized. But they doggedly pursued the women’s back-stories, that this was a “prank” for a Japanese TV show, that they’d been groomed by doing these very sorts of stunts on strangers for a year by virtually every Korean agent the police ID’d and in some cases arrested and then let go.

White, who did “Ask Dr. Ruth” and a “Serena” documentary, is very good at getting the blood boiling over the injustices at every turn, the feigned outrage of North Koreans trying to bully their way out of blame and Malaysians who let the world know that they know who was involved and how, and just what they were willing to do about it.

The larger theme of “Assassination” is one of the unjust “justice” of press-restricting/oppressive states. When state actors are allowed to get away with murder, who else makes it to the regime’s “immune to prosecution” list? What chance does “the rule of law,” under strain even in democracies, have under such conditions?

It isn’t the Washington Post or New York Times that sticks its neck out in cases like this. It’s the reporter who knows the state’s blind spots and what they’re capable of willing to tell her or his people what’s going on who becomes the hero of a sordid story like “Assassins.”

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast:  Siti Aisyah, Hadi Azmi, Anna Fifield, Doan Thi Huong

Credits: Directed by Ryan White. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:44

“The Father” is as close to dementia as any of us would ever care to get. And yet, thanks to longevity that has turned recent generations into the longest-lived in history, it is touching more lives than ever.

French playwright Florian Zeller, adapting his play, and his peerless star Anthony Hopkins visualize the confusion, paranoia, panic and flashes of sentience that characterize Alzheimer’s and senility’s other variations, both from outside and within.

Oscar winner Olivia Colman is the daughter witnessing this collapse from outside, struggling to prepare her widowed, solitary father for the idea of a nursing home. At the very least, Anne wants him to go easier on the in-care help she keeps arranging and whom his tirades chase away.

“Anthony” is raging against “the dying of the light.” “I don’t need her. I don’t need anyone!” He’s at home in his large, comfy flat with his opera
CDs and his books. Why all the fuss?

“She’s stealing from me!” he hisses about the latest caregiver he’s run off.

But no matter how focused his fury, how articulate his defenses, he’s losing his memory. He’s mixing up conversations and people. He’s even confused, here and there, about what Anne looks like. Olivia Colman? Or is she another woman played by Olivia Williams? He tries to hide it, but we see his panic over this.

This “man” she’s met and planning on leaving London to live with in Paris — does he look like Rufus Sewell or this other fellow (Mark Gatiss)?

Is Anne leaving at all? Is she still with her husband? Did this conversation happen? Or that one? Is she gaslighting him, even if he can’t recall the term or the movie that it’s from?

From Anthony’s point of view, things he remembers that day or a day or two ago are being altered.

“She told me the other day. I’m not an idiot!”

Time is running in an ever-changing loop. Has he chased away his last in-home nurse, or are they just now interviewing another (Imogen Poots)?

“Can I ask you a question? Are you a nun? Then why are you speaking to me as if I’m retarded?”

Of course Hopkins can make us sense the panic, the long-retired engineer capable of mood swings of great charm, losing it, panic-stricken as he tries to hide that fact by covering up that he doesn’t know who this person he no longer recognizes is. And what about younger daughter Lucy, “the artist?”

“I hardly ever hear from the other one.”

Colman gives us glimpses of the heartache and guilt a child feels over being unable to do more for a parent that has become more than a mere relative can handle.

Other characters give us flashes of patience and compassion, and withering cruelty and callousness. Is Anthony imagining these, or are some of his grievances against the world legitimate?

Zeller uses the confines of a couple of sets well, revealing a few more square feet here and there as he goes along, letting the real estate reveal Anthony’s real state. It’s not a play that’s been “opened up.” “The Father” is all about a world closing in.

Demographics and the slow pace of medical improvements in gerantology make “The Father” a story with universal appeal. It’s universally chilling and sad, because no one would wish this on themselves or anybody else.

And Hopkins, Colman, Williams, Sewell and Poots give us an eyeful and and earful of a fate awaiting far too many of us in this quietly gripping and intimate drama.

MPA Rating:  PG-13 for some strong language, and thematic material 

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams, Imogen Poots, Ayesha Dharker and Mark Gatiss.

Credits: Directed by Florian Zeller, script by Christopher Hampton and Florian ZEller, based on Zeller’s play. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:37

A deep bow, from the waist, for any actor who takes a flier on a crazy idea of a movie, on a nutty dreamer with a screen-written dream, on a cracked visionary with the unlikely name Adam Egypt Mortimer.

That’s what Joe Manganiello did. He’s the “name” who signed on the dotted line and got the lunacy that is “Archenemy” made.

He plays a hulking, Letterman-bearded drunk, raving and weaving stories of his life back on “Chromium,” the world where he used to live, where his blood was blue and he was like “a god” who “used to punch holes through space and time,” and who once saved that world by stopping the evil Cleo and her “void machine.”

But…hiccup…”it was the last thing I ever did.”

Now he’s here, telling these tall tales, inventively visualized as lurid hot pink and Slurpee blue comic book animation in his mind or the minds of his listeners. Don’t underestimate this rummy, friends. He’s a superhero!

“I’m not a f—–g superhero!”

And he didn’t fly here from Chromium. Oh no.

“I didn’t fly through space. I came through the membranes of reality.”

OK. The one guy to take this flake he labels “Max Fist” seriously is Hamster (Skylan Brooks of “The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete”). He’s a manic reporter-wannabe, weaseling his way into a job with an online news organization through his stories on Max Fist, his life on Chromium and his plight now.

Hamster’s sister is trying to support them by drug dealing. Indigo (Zolee Griggs of that recent Wu-Tang Clan TV series) wears her dreads long and blue and her nerve on her sleeve when running errands for the wisecracking villain who calls himself The Manager (Glenn Howerton).

He’s fond of wearing tennis gear, and down for pushing his target market for street drugs younger — “the sippy cup crowd. If they’re old enough to download porn on their iPad, they’re old enough to get high!”

He’s joking. He just makes the self-described “sugarplum fairy interstellar princess” more nervous every time they meet.

Threats are both real — from the heavily-armed drug dealer and his minions — and maybe imagined. There’s this Cleo (Amy Seimetz) that Max rants about, the SuperVillain on Chromium whom he defeated but did not vanquish. Might she be just a figment of his stories?

As “Archenemy” flips back and forth from the bloody, violent, lawless “reality” of “Edge City,” its fantasy-“present” and the animated Chromium of Max’s fever dreams, a fundamental flaw drags on any notion of reveling in its gruesome violence and deranged archetypes, in the “story” that isn’t much of a story at all.

There’s no “reality” to ground this in, no baseline that feels real. So there’s no doubt about Max’s true background. None.

The dialogue has its moments, but the jokes are too sparse to buttress the arch, comic book camp tone Mr. Adam Egypt Mortimer was going for.

And while the wigs are fabulous and the effects interesting, it’s all something of a hash. Coherent enough, sure, but making sense of it seems like a fool’s errand, start to finish.

But take heart. More drugs are legal in a lot more places now. And nothing converts a loopy, trippy over-reach into a “cult” film better than hallucinogens, shared by the watch party.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Joe Manganiello, Zolee Griggs, Skylan Brooks, Glenn Howerton and Amy Seimetz

Credits: Directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer, script by Adam Egypt Mortimer and Luke Passmore. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:31

There’s a melancholy magic about “Farewell Amor,” a story of Africans come to America, cultures clashing and a family tested by the shock of reunion after a long separation.

Watching Ekwa Msangi’s debut feature, a remake of a short film she did a few years back, we can feel as dislocated as the Angolan trio portrayed here, lost in a strange culture and exotically beautiful Afro-Portuguese music, caught up in a family that’s been tested by civil war and years and years apart, a family that may not survive the jolt of finally reuniting in New York.

They reconnect at JFK where Esther (Zainab Jah) gushes “Amor!” at the husband she hasn’t seen in 17 years. Their daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) is more wary, reserved.

And husband Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine)? It’s like he doesn’t know what to do. They’re all but strangers to each other, and he and Sylvia are the only ones who get that.

In three chapters named for those three characters, we see this “adjustment” from each person’s point of view. The first sign of trouble is Esther’s fervent prayer of thanksgiving at their first meal.

“The Devil is shamed and DEFEATED,” she declares. From just the look on Walter’s face, we know this is a new development in the woman he met in college and married shortly after.

Walter, a taxi driver, humors Esther’s passion, attending church with gritted teeth, hearing out her reciting her pastor’s advice in how to “rebuild our family.”

But his passion? There’s something wrong, something beyond “needing time to adjust.” And we can guess what that is more quickly than she can. Her “I haven’t been with another man” isn’t met by his matching declaration of devotion.

We’d wonder if Sylvia has her own suspicions, but she’s too caught up in a new school, homesick texts back home and wondering if she’s got what it takes to crack the step dance team at her Brooklyn high school.

Esther, ardent faith or not, isn’t that slow. She can see mail addressed to somebody else mixed in with theirs. Can she learn anything from their hip, sassy neighbor (Joie Lee)?

The conflicts set up are Walter’s attack of conscience and desire to maintain some connection to “the other woman” (Nana Mensah), Sylvia’s desire to fit in, get away from her pious and controlling mother, overcome the self-consciousness she feels in this new scene and impress the attentive classmate DJ (Marcus Scribner). Esther wants to “rebuild” the family, get them into church so that she will “NOT lose my daughter to this country.”

The script is a passing parade of grace notes, most delivered with a light touch. The father-daughter connection is particularly strained, and Walter is unsure how to remake a bond that was never there. Esther’s not quite blind to what may have been going on while Walter was abroad, but she’s totally deaf to how her religious fundamentalism is rubbing everybody else the wrong way.

Sylvia’s step-dance ambitions is a seriously played-out direction for the story to wander, and Walter’s options don’t seem like options at all.

The cutest scenes pair up Jah, playing fish-out-of-water to New York savvy Nzingha (Lee, Spike’s sister), who brings a little Brooklyn Black Girl magic to their bonding.

“Pleased to meet you, Queen!” sets up instant familiarity. And you just know a New York makeover is coming, because that church-bound African attire — “Is that really what White Jesus wants?”

But no teen dance/mom-makeover tropes break the sad, wistful spell Msangi casts in “Farewell Amor.” There’s dread built right into the title, and the hints of the family’s history make us root for them — and fear for them — first scene to last.

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual situations

Cast: Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah, Jayme Lawson, Joie Lee, Marcus Scribner and Nana Mensah

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ekwa Msangi. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:41

This month’s version of “Assassins who primp” is Jessica Chastain, pale and perfectly put-together murderess for hire as “Ava.”

She’s a woman of mystery whose job is “closing” targets for “management,” getting striking little splashes of blood on that immaculate makeup that’s been a trademark of the genre since Nikita the femme gave birth to it.

Only she’s not a woman of mystery, and that’s the first way this action pic goes wrong. Her resume, pretty much all of it, is splashed in montage form in the opening credits.

That’s after she’s play-acted as driver to a financier (Ioan Gruffudd) and broken every protocol in the book by questioning him instead of just simply “closing” him.

“What’d you do? Why would someone not want you to be alive any more?”

Her end of the bargain? “A good death.” She quotes Croesus, for Pete’s sake.

“Count no man happy until the end is known.”

How that jibes with the high school athlete/junkie/ex-military killing machine the background montage lay out is anybody’s guess. Maybe that’s where “Ava” teeters into self-parody.

John Malkovich, in a bit of on-the-nose casting, is Ava’s handler, the former agent now handing her assignments and arranging logistics. Yeah, he can still do fight choreography. Colin Farrell is “management,” the promoted-from-the-ranks higher up calling the shots.

And then there’s the messy “past” and home life that’s back in Boston, where Ava’s mom (Geena Davis, who played a female assassin in “The Long Kiss Goodnight”) has angina and her singer/songwriter sister (Jess Weixler, who played Chastain’s sister in “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby”) has taken up with Ava’s ex (Common).

Another complication? The mysterious Chinese entrepreneur/bookie (Joan Chen) running a hot night club that Ava finds the time to bust up.

Girlfriend’s got…issues. But she can take a punch and Chastain can take a fall, even if she’s not the best at disguising the throw-weight physics of a to-the-death brawl.

Tate Taylor, the director who made Chastain a star in “The Help” is behind the camera here, and while he’s dabbled in violence with “Ma” and intrigue with “The Girl on the Train,” he’s out of his depth. Not so much as actor turned screenwriter Matthew Newton (“Who are We Now,” “From Nowhere,””Three Blind Mice”). They’ve teamed up to clutter up what is, by genre necessity, meant to be mean and lean.

Setting some of the violence to dreamy synth pop? Not

After that first “closing,” things progress on such a predictable path that the only enticement to continuing is the notion that we’ll get to see many a “good death.”

But…but…those ISSUES.

Here’s a tip. Try not to bore us so much next time.

MPA Rating: R for violence and language throughout, and brief sexual material

Cast: Jessica Chastain, John Malkovich, Common, Jess Weixler, Joan Chen, Diana Silvers, Ioan Gruffudd and Colin Farrell.

Credits: Directed by Tate Taylor. A Voltage Film/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Say what you will about the somewhat hokey supernatural love story that they’re trying to put over in “Wander Darkly.” But Sienna Miller and Diego Luna put on a clinic in screen chemistry in this melancholy puzzle-picture romance.

Writer-director Tara Miele’s debut feature may be unduly concerned with the “puzzle” part. But her leads are stars who light it up and kind of break your heart, and if Luna and Miller aren’t on your short list of “my favorites,” here’s a movie to remind you of your poor choices.

They’re fighting when we meet them, or at least not getting along all that well. Adrienne and Matteo have a new baby and a new house and “We’re broke.”

And SOMEbody just forgot “date night.”

The evening, meeting friends for dinner, is tense and terse — something about the way Adrienne spits out “We’re not married” when people make that mistake. And right in the middle of the “Why are we even together any more?” fight on the way home, they crash.

She wakes up bloodied, confused, chasing a gurney down the hall in the hospital, watching a body slid into a freezer in the morgue.

It is drugs? Is she dead? Or is she merely “concussed,” Matteo’s answer? Because Adrienne is convinced “I died.”

Sounds are muffled and Miele’s camera is canted, flipped, as woozy as Adrienne’s state of mind as she steps out of a corridor and into another location, then another, fades out and wakes up on her own sofa, overhears her mother (Beth Grant, terrific as usual) talking about “taking the baby home with us.”

Adrienne sees Matteo eulogizing her at her funeral, jumps ahead and sees her daughter growing up with her parents.

“I’m dead…What is this, Purgatory?” Only Matteo is there to comfort her, correct her — “You’re confused.”

He resolves to “help you remember…I’m gonna tell you our story, OK?”

“Wander Darkly” sees them doing exactly that, stepping into and out of scenes from their not-a-marriage — first date, first kiss, first jealousy. The conceit here is that they’re not just observing their history in the manner of a hundred similar romances. They’re in the situation, as they were then, but commenting on it from within to reinforce his reassurances, or her doubts.

“Hey, I love you.” “No, I was the one who said it first.”

Adrienne gets over her anger at a possible “other woman” — “Even me dying isn’t enough to make you step up.” The “I’m a good ghost” cracks fade away. And as they do, you might feel the picture slipping away, the filmmaker losing the thread or at least getting away from what works — the give and take between her stars.

There are tips and too-obvious clues about what’s really going on here. And Miele drags out the finale, too, trying to bring on the tears.

But Miller and Luna give this romance a history, weariness and testy spark that keeps “Wander Darkly” going even after we’ve guessed what its destination is.

MPA Rating: R (Language|Some Sexual Content/Nudity)

Cast: Sienna Miller, Diego Luna, Beth Grant

Credits: Written and directed by Tara Miele. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:37