Movie Nation

“Downhill” is a reminder that one isn’t required — by cinematic law — to faithfully remake a Scandinavian darker-than-dark comedy about a marriage buried when a husband flees an avalanche that might have killed his wife and family.

“Force Majeure” was so Nordic, bleak and soul-searching that you could be forgiven for wondering, “Wait, this is a ‘comedy?'” at any point in its two squirm-inducing hours.

When you cast Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell in your remake “Downhill,” and make it half an hour shorter, plainly you’re going for a lighter touch. “Downhill” suffers mightily in direct comparison to the intensity, physical and emotional peril of “Force Majeure.”

But it’s funny. Dark and funny. That it still hits, however lightly and more hopefully, the dark undercurrents of a marriage derailed by selfishness, distracted lack of commitment and the shocking realization that he’s not born to self-sacrifice the way she is — and she now gets that — is almost a bonus.

Pete is a real estate agent glued to his phone even though he’s arranged this stupidly expensive trip for Billie (Louis-Dreyfus) and the kids in the Austrian Alps. It’s not like he’s distracted by work. There’s a younger colleague out living it up with his new girlfriend, traveling in Europe at the same time.

Pete must be envious, even though he’s got the beautiful lawyer-wife and two sons who got their mom’s good looks. Even though they’re in one of the most beautiful winter wonderlands on Earth, ‘”the Ibiza of the Alps,” their bawdy, too-helpful concierge (Miranda Otto, hilarious) tells him.

Pete’s in mourning for his dead father and Billie is being super-understanding. He’s booked them into a not-that-kid-friendly resort, which is worth an eye-roll. He’s dismissive of how dangerous the steep slopes are, at the soft European grading system for them — “their ‘black’ (most difficult) is our ‘blue.'”

She indulges him. That’s what couples do.

But those avalanche cannons that are the opening image of the film are there for a reason. They trigger avalanches in a controlled fashion so that snow buildup doesn’t bury the paying, skiing customers. It’s just that one lunchtime cannonade brings snow all the way down on the Stanton family as they’re dining, apres le ski, al fresco.

All of the other tourists “ooh” and “ahhh.” They’re snapping pictures. “Perfectly normal” Pete shrugs. Until the tidal wave of snow bowls them all over. Well, not Pete. He’s grabbed his phone and ducked out of danger while she had the presence of mind to try and shield their sons (Julian Grey and Ammon Jacob Ford).

One unfortunate departure from “Force Majeure” here is the level of peril. It is lessened. We’re allowed to consider that Billie, shocked and appalled, might be over-reacting.

But Pete knows what he did. And over-reaction or not, she is simply gobsmacked at what she’s witnessed. She doesn’t have to coach the kids into reacting the same way. They saw it, too.

“Dad ran away!”

The vacation then becomes a “Where do we go from here?” experience, Billie reaching for “We need some time” to talk this through, Pete reaching for any distraction — dining with the unfiltered concierge and her — husband? Latest ski resort pick-up?

Dreyfus has a lifetime of sitting on eye-rolling fury just long enough for it to utterly boil-over. Ferrell’s got the nervous, beady-eyed panic thing down pat.

Actors turned writer-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (“The Way Way Back”) let us revel in the transition these two play out, from herding the kids and optimizing the trip, to grasping at distractions and/or exit strategies.

Watch the way Billie takes hold of the “This idiot is cavalier about our safety” thing when Pete has them on the pad, rushing them off to go heli-skiing. “Hurry,” the copter’s booking agent tells them, the rotors turning. “The weather’s changing.”

“The weather’s changing? WAIT! Changing to WHAT?”

Louis-Dreyfus bores laser-bolts through Ferrell in these later scenes, until the outrage finally can be contained no longer.

Hashing this out in front of Pete’s young work pal (Zach Woods) and his “hashtag” crazed hippy girlfriend (Zoe Chao) is less than ideal. But Rosie GETS it and shares her outrage.

Giving Otto several scenes, with her every loopy Teutonic locution laugh-out-loud funny, pays off. Pairing up sexually-frank Charlotte with PTSD Billie on a ski-lift is worth the price of admission — “Zo, zexually, you have been all ze blocks around?”

You have to judge what’s on screen in front of you in a remake, and “Downhill” is no doubt not the movie “Force Majeure” was. The shorter run time makes for a brisk choppy story that skims over the gradual meltdown and gets straight to it. Nuance is lost.

Some of the “Hollywood” touches are funny, kind of in-character, but jarring.

But there is real pleasure is watching these two interacting, the chaotic banter that both Louis-Dreyfus and Ferrell have mastered, the shorthand they bring to “long-married couple” and shock this “incident” has given them both.

If you want to see “Force Majeure,” rent it and stream it. If you want to see two terrific comic talents circling around it in something lighter and funnier, then “Downhill” it is.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual material

Cast: Will Ferrell, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Miranda Otto, Zoe Chao, Zach Woods

Credits: Directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, script by Jesse Armstrong, Nat Faxon, Jim Rash, based on “Force Majeure” by Ruben Östlund. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:26

Issa Rae meets Lakeith Stanfield — two actors on the rise, her personal family history…and sparks.

Universal hasn’t been previewing this one, no reviews are up yet.

But it looks promising, so maybe they’re saving the surprise. “The Photograph” opens Friday.

“Ford v. Ferrari,” my favorite picture of last year, won two Oscars Sunday night — for editing and sound editing.

It deserved them.

And watching it again Monday night, before it and most of this year’s Oscar contenders lose their cineplex screens this weekend, I was struck by not just the sound, but the entertaining touches that put this on my “I know I will see this one again, many times, over the years” list — the true test of a “best picture” on the personal level.

Tracy Letts was a GD delight as Henry Ford II, best supporting actor-worthy. Bluster and childish bullying, weeping like a nursery schooler after the lap from hell that Carrol Shelby (Matt Damon) put him through.

Damon was in the pocket, sharp as always. Ray McKinnon had the bit part of a lifetime as Phil Remington, the engineer/pit-man/voice of reason in the crew.

And there is stuff going on in Christian Bale’s usual immaculate turn as Ken Miles that you can feel as much as see. Hunched over, a little hitch in his gait (A WWII vet jogging through sunny SoCal? I doubt it.), he wears the “miles” like a veteran driver.

The soundtrack — Nina Simone and Link Wray and Buck Owens and The Byrds and original music by Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders — is worth having just for this Elvis band-leader, Rock Hall of Famer James Burton cover of “Polk Salad Annie” that gives the movie it’s jaunty, driving bounce.

“Pandora” is a Korean thriller plainly inspired by Japan’s Fukushima tsumani and nuclear plant meltdown.

It’s nicely-detailed, with decent effects, moderate suspense and a distinctly Korean approach to how this sort of calamity might go down in an Asian country where saving face, keeping “order” and maintaining authority play havoc with the public safety. More than once in “Pandora,” you’re invited to remember Korea’s occasional lapses into authoritarianism, and how much worse this worst-case-scenario would be in a place like North Korea or China.

But what first-time director Jong-Woo Park has in mind here is straight-up disaster movie — by the book, paint by numbers, every character a “type,” every wrinkle in the plot a “trope.”

A grainy “flashback” prologue shows children playing in the shadow of Hanbyul Nuclear Power Plant. “It will make the country rich!” one squeals. “Jobs” for their parents say the others.

But one little girl says (in Korean, with English subtitles), “Wait. My teacher said this was opening some kind of, ah, box.”Might that be “Pandora’s” Box?

In the story proper, we track four different story threads. There’s the family that runs the restaurant in town, with its bossy matriarch (Yeong-ae Kim). Her lazy, beer-swilling son (Nam-gil Kim) is late getting up, late for work again. His girlfriend (Kim Joo-Hyun) barely tolerates his indolence.

But they work in the same place. He’s an overalls-wearing blue collar tech, she’s a tour guide for all the folks who want to visit the 40 year old plant.

The control room inside the plant is “China Syndrome” stuffed with engineers, new staff and old. They josh about the maintenance and upgrades they’ve been able to put off.

Then there’s “The Blue House” as they call it in Korea, where the young president (Myung-Min Kim) gets a report on the shortcomings of the plant just in time to start a movie-long argument with the seasoned, “wait and see” prime minister (Kyeong-yeong Lee).

The “wait and see” thing comes up after the earthquake. That’s what breaks the “earthquake proof” plant’s plumbing and sends people at ground zero — inside and outside of the plant — into panic.

“Does it LOOK like a ‘minor accident’ to you?”

“Should we inform the president?” “He has no time for this!”

Workers heatedly debate managers about going inside the reactor — a fatal task — to save the town. None of this “Chernobyl” noble sacrifice. Engineers panicking is not a pretty sight. But imagine the low workers on the totem pole, freaking out over doors sealing the plant tight, running hither and yon trying to figure out what they’re not being told — how to save themselves.

“I want to die with my family!”

The PM is the villain of the piece, Mr. “The whole nation will panic” so “I’ll take care of this quietly.” The president makes decisions to give those closest to the disaster a chance, but that creates delays that could doom much of the peninsula.

That’s the “message” here — there are no “right answers” when things go wrong and go nuclear.

The earthquake and nuclear meltdown effects are solid, the performances properly fraught.

The grimmest scenes aren’t the hospital radiation triage tents, the police blocking civilians from fleeing the sports stadium they’ve been evacuated to with a radiation cloud approaching or those panicked — misinformed by their government — women, children and men. It’s seeing firefighters fight to douse blazes and dropping in ones and twos as the radiation they haven’t been warned or given a choice about takes them.

There aren’t many surprises or alterations in a genre formula that hasn’t changed since the heyday of Chuck Heston. But “Pandora” dramatically reminds us of the box we tend to forget about until some blunder, cost-cutting measure or Force of Nature reminds us you can’t close it once it opens.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody injuries, radiation burns, profanity

Cast: Kim Joo-Hyun Nam-gil Kim, Myung-Min Kim, Yeong-ae Kim,

Credits: Written and directed by Jong-woo Park

Running time: 2:16

The 2011 Belgian comedy “Hasta la Vista” earns a chuckle-out-loud remake with “Come as You Are,” a tale of two wheelchair-bound guys and their blind pal road tripping from Colorado to Canada.

They’re disabled and they’re virgins and you guessed it — or read the headline — it’s a “Sex Trip” to a “Sure Thing” in Montreal, a bordello that caters to those with physical impairments.

We’re treated to testy, disabled-savvy wisecracks, little whiffs of drama, a dollop of romance, pathos, slapstick and a “Dirty Sanchez” fueled bar fight. Yeah, that’s a bucket-list of adventure, and we’d expect no less from a road comedy that works.

Scotty (Grant Rosenmeyer of “My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”) has been quadriplegic since childhood. His talkaholic long-suffering mother (Janeane Garofalo, outstanding) just prattles past his morning erection and endures the occasional profane complaints from her “Bug” as she copes with every humiliating thing he can’t do for himself.

He’s an angry punk with a hair-trigger temper, which he flashes at the new guy, Matt (Hayden Szeto of “The Edge of Seventeen”). Scotty is too quick to teach “Biceps” as he calls him “the pecking order,” and his choice of ride.

“That’s a grandma chair, by the way.”

Mo, played by Ravi Patel (of “Master of None”) is practically the only guy at the rehab clinic who will put up with Scotty’s abuse. Mo’s just blind enough to have no clue who he’s complimenting on the bus for having “lovely hair.” He’s talking to Thor, or his twin brother, BTW.

Scotty raps, the cleverest “Hollywood” improvement on the original film this is based on.

“Half-man, half machine, girl you don’t need to be quick. Come and get you some of this quadriplegic!”

It’s when he gets a business card from a stranger also living the wheelchair life that Scott has to tamp down his inner-and-outer jerk. There’s this brothel, Le Chateau Paradis, in Montreal. It’ll cure what ails him.

But to get there, Scotty’s going to need friends — accomplices. Cozy up to Matt, arm-twist Mo. Beg if you need to.

Hire a nurse-driver with a van, and keep it “totally black ops.” As Mo puts it, “I’m 35 years old and I’ve never been anywhere without my Mom.” They won’t tell their smothering parent caregivers what they’re up to.

Cinematographer turned director Richard Wong (“Yes, We’re Open”) and screenwriter Erik Linthorst (the stoner comedy “High School” was his) take care to let us see the machinations Scotty the Quad must go through to pack and prep and just get out the door without getting caught.

A funny touch? Matt’s tweenage sister (Martha Kuwahara) is enlisted to round up their “supplies” for the quest  — at the um, drugstore.

Casting is what makes all this come off, as Rosenmeyer’s caustic Scotty is balanced with the soulful, timid Mo that Patel gives us and the “good son” rebellion Szeto has to play. Throw in “Precious” Oscar nominee Gabourey Sidibe as the take-no-crap driver-nurse and it’s game-on.

There’s a lot that can happen between Littleton, Colorado and Montreal, but “Come as You Are” isn’t overstuffed with incidents. Most of the standard-issue road-trip comedy scenes dreamed up here have decent comic payoffs.

Sidibe is alternately brassy and charming, Patel brings hidden sensitivity to Mo, Szeto has a moment or two and Garofalo makes her character’s depth a surprise payoff here.

Building the picture around Rosenmeyer scores with the scripted white-guy-who-types-with-his-teeth rapping scenes. Those raps give vent to the frustrations and inner resources of the disabled, and do it with comic panache.

“I’m sittin’ here stuck in cement, like Christopher Reeve long after Clark Kent!”

Yeah, it’s on-the-nose and plenty of the laughs are low-hanging fruit. But for guys with limited reach, this crew makes those easy laughs come easily, and unlike the film’s title, no pun intended.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Grant Rosenmeyer, Hayden Szeto, Ravi Patel, Gabourey Sidibe, Janeane Garofalo , Jennifer Jelsema and C.S. Lee.

Credits: Directed by Richard Wong, script by Erik Linthorst.  A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:47

I loved the dark Swedish/Norwegian/French film this is based on, “Force Majeure.”

So even though this Hollywood remake is warning mixed notices I early reviews, I am cautiously optimistic. Will Farrell is a master at cringe worthy, and Dreyfuss is no slouch at put upon and pissed.

Ski holiday, avalanche, husband saves his own butt in a panic and there are “repercussions.”

Netflix really only has itself to compete with in the newly-revived teen romantic comedy genre. Theatrical studios gave up on making such films and getting them right a generation ago.

But young fans of Netflix’s bubbly (“The Perfect Date”) or bawdy (anything with Joey King) entries in the field will learn a hard lesson with the sequel to the very best film the streaming service has made for teen romantics.

It’s damn near impossible to catch lightning in a bottle twice.

The adorable and bubbly “To All the Boys I Loved Before” earns a sauntering, meandering and much less fun second chapter with “To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You.” Not only does the title kind of give the whole game away, but it dawdles so much and throws up such contrived obstacles to love that it darkens some of the glow of the original comedy in the process.

Lana Condor still makes a lead so cute you want to pinch her cheeks. Go-to “teen” hunk Noah Centineo (“The Perfect Date,” TV’s “The Fosters”) still has that offhand, jockish charm.

The soundtrack still sparkles with hits ranging from “Then He Kissed Me” to tunes to CYR, Lola Marsh, Anna of the North and Bora York and covers of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “I Want it That Way.”

We pick up the story (there’s a refresher video of the first film) with virginal Lara Jean (Condor) trying to get a grip on her giddiness and wrestle with “this relationship thing.” She’s got her first real boyfriend and he takes her on their first real date — dinner at a fancy eatery, a magic lantern launch afterwards.

Perfect, right?

“I just don’t want us to break each other’s hearts!”

Trouble comes from that first date, from those “other” love letters than lonely Lara Jean sent to all the boys she crushed on throughout her young life in the original “To All the Boys,” from beau Peter’s “reputation” and Lara Jean’s inexperience at all this stuff.

As in, he’s smooth, but he takes her places he’s taken other women. He reads her a poem for Valentine’s Day and she thinks he wrote it just for her. And she gets a reply from a letter to a middle school crush (Jordan Fisher), which “complicates” things like, you know, her feelings.

Lara Jean’s still living too much in her head (endless scripted interior monologues), and uncertain as to how to navigate these complicated feelings. Holland Taylor plays Stormy, the retired flight attendant at the nursing home where Lara Jean volunteers, the older woman who gives this motherless teen romantic advice.

But that nursing home is also where John Ambrose (Fisher), that middle school crush, is volunteering. Sparks fly! Or, um, should. He’s musical, thoughtful, a lot of things Peter is not.

Some scenes color in around the edges of the movie even if they don’t advance the plot — dissecting octopi in biology class, a Korean New Year celebration with Lara Jean’s mother’s family. There’s a middle school time capsule, tree-house confessions, and a possible new romance (Sarayu Blue) for widowed Dad (John Corbett).

But really, this movie plays like the middle picture in a trilogy — a romance in a holding pattern. The arguments are realistic but inserted as mere plot requirements. The spark between the leads fizzles, new sparks don’t replace those and the slight edge the first film had — his mean girl ex (Emilija Baranac), her obnoxious meddling little sister (Anna Cathcart) have lost their sting.

Which isn’t surprising, because in rom-coms, you only get to surprise us once. God help them if Netflix is indeed planning a third film in this story, because they’ve wrung most of the delight out of it.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, teen partying, discussions of sex

Cast: Lana Condor, Noah Centineo, Jordan Fisher, Anna Cathcart, Madeleine Arthur, Emilija Baranac, John Corbett and Holland Taylor

Credits: Directed by Michael Fimognari, script by Sofia Alvarez and J. Mills Goodloe, based on the Jenny Han novel. A Neflix release.

Running time: 1:42

Danish director Lone Scherfig throws half a dozen Manhattan lives together, using infamously callous New Yorkers to try and make a point about “The Kindness of Strangers.”

It doesn’t wholly come off, with back stories too thinly developed, pathos and cruelty blending with the whimsy of a New York con. But she filmed “An Education,” “Italian for Beginners,” and “Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself.” So even if we’re doing some of the work for her, she can be relied on to make certain we get more than a little something out of the trip.

Andrea Riseborough plays an ER nurse who has let her job get to her. Nurse Alice hasn’t gone down the “Nurse Jackie” route. She’s not doing drugs. But she’s filling her days and nights with extra work at a soup kitchen or running a self-help group called “Forgiveness.”

It’s just the ER that makes her weep and slip out back to throw up.

Zoe Kazan is Clara, a young mother of two boys (Jack Fulton and Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) who stuffs them into their old station wagon and flees to the city “for a vacation.” She’s in a troubled marriage but struggling to put a smiling face on this trip — broke, just a few clothes, a car and the most expensive city in North America in winter.

“Are we homeless? ” the oldest wants to know. “No more homeless than anybody else here.” As Mom says this in a soup kitchen, well.

Caleb Landry Jones is hapless Jeff, a “slow” and clumsy young man who cannot keep focus or keep even the most menial job.

“Firing me is all you can ‘do for’ me?”

And Jay Baruchel and Tahar Rahim play a sensitive attorney and a client who has just gotten out of jail. John Peter (Baruchel) drags Marc (Rahim) to “Forgiveness” meetings, each expecting the other to get something out of the “learn to forgive yourself” (a little hazy) ethos of Alice and the group.

In this little corner of Manhattan, pretty much everybody stumbles across the proud old Russian tea-room/restaurant where Timofey (Bill Nighy) presides. It’s an ineptly-run place that doesn’t measure up to the Czarist decor and Timfey’s mild-mannered if sketchy accent.

Marc, it turns out, has restaurant running experience. “Tim” can drop the “fey” and the phony accent. Marc can save the place.

Scherfig’s inter-related stories fold in on each other through the restaurant, the soup kitchen, the ER and the streets. Needless to say, it is Clara’s plight that drives “The Kindness of Strangers.”

Their dilemma is compounded by the home life they’re fleeing. The abusive husband/father (Esben Smed) is a cop. If they get identified in a shelter or hospital, if they get parking tickets, he will be able to track them.

Kazan, of “The Big Sick,” “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” and “Ruby Sparks,” plays a tour-guide to DIY out-of-towner survival in the big city. Yes, she cadges drinks and leftovers from a wedding at the Russian eatery. She wanders the halls of a hotel picking up room service leftover trays as well. They duck into libraries, Grand Center Station and churches to get warm.

“What do other people do?” her oldest asks. “Where do they go?”

“Other people have folks. We don’t.”

Most desk clerks, shelter admissions officers and hotel security folks are New York stereotypes — won’t get involved. But ducking into the church where Alice’s group meets changes their fate.

The little slices of street life, restaurant trickery and ER grind are familiar. The story takes the occasional melodramatic turn for the worse.

But Jones makes an affable, perhaps “on the spectrum” goof — good-hearted, with a temper. Baruchel does the hangdog thing well, and Nighy is the most effortlessly charming presence in any movie he turns up in.

Zazan is marvelous at playing desperation that Clara most desperately wants to hide. And Riseborough, most recently seen in “The Grudge” but famous for “Birdman” and “Battle of the Sexes,” makes Alice the hollowed-out rock here, a broken soul whose deep wound we can only guess at, but who wears her humanity on her care-worn face.

“Why can’t you just be kind?” she pleads, at one point. Some hear her, others turn a deaf ear.

This isn’t on a par with Scherfig’s best films, but the milieu and situations are immersive and the characters just colorful enough to hold our interest.

If you’re a non-New Yorker like myself, maybe it’ll remind you of your first trips to the city and how lucky you felt if you got through the visit without depending on “The Kindness of Strangers.” It’s always in short supply there.

MPAA Rating: unrated, one scene of violence

Cast: Zoe Kazan, Andrea Riseborough, Caleb Landry Jones, Tahar Rahim , Jay Baruchel and Bill Nighy

Written and directed by Lone Scherfig. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:52

I have seen “JoJo” and “Little Women” twice. Think I’ll hit a second run house showing “Ford v Ferrari” late today.

Win or lose, they are worth seeing on the big screen.

The countdown has begun.

“Richard Jewell” is about to vanish until it turns up on streaming, same with “Bombshell,” “Beautiful Day” (already gone from most screens) and “JoJo” and “Little Women.”

These films will disappear from screens in a week or two.

If you didn’t think “Parasite” was the likely best picture winner, you probably didn’t think Bong Joon Ho was going to win best director.

But that was the give away. That old Oscar saying, the one that doesn’t hold true most years in this millennium, “Best Directors direct Best Pictures” called it.

First Best Picture winner in a language that isn’t English. Even “Crouching Tiger” didn’t manage that.

It was a movie about something — global income inequality, one of a handful of best pic nominees that could make that claim.

It was also one of the two or three best films of last year, according to critics, even those who might not think it was the Very Best. It was the Hollywood consensus pick on a night that a lot of pictures picked up an award or two –“Judy” and “Bombshell,” “JoJo Rabbit”and “Ford v Ferrari,” with “1917” and “Little Women” and “Once Upon a Time” and even “Marriage Story” collecting a little Oscar glory.

Netflix won best documentary, and not much else. “Honeyland” was the better film in category, in my opinion.

Laura Dern finished a well deserved victory lap, Renee Zellweger had another moment.

Do you expect that to lead to a comeback? Doubtful.

Dern had the speech of the night, Joaquin was appropriately out there, Zellweger did the last laundry list of agents and managers — ever.

Elton John almost croaked/sang his way OUT of an Oscar, a musical low of the night. The clock is ticking on Jillian Michaels going after Diane Warren.

Eminem didn’t show up to collect his Oscar way back when. Now that he’s as “over” as his pal Moby, he gets a pointless spotlight performance…of that same song?

Hildur Gudnadottir won the best score Oscar, for “Joker.” First time a woman has won that combined category.

“Toy Story 4” was the worst call of the evening, I thought. Lazy.

Scorsese got to take a bow as the most graceful of losers, “no host” moved the show along faster, “In Memoriam” left out TV star Robert Conrad, Luke Perry, Cameron Boyce and Sid Haig and others.

Loved the “Recap the Show in Rhyme.” The “Frozen” multilingual thing fell flat.

Joaquin rambled, although not as much as Renee, Laura gushed and Brad got emotional.

Whenever “Oscar so white,” the Oscars compensate with a vigorously diverse telecast.

Best presenters? Maya and Kristen. Aced it.

Worst. Well, leaving your costar out to dry like that wasn’t a good look for Shia.