Movie Nation

Nat Wolff is a young infantryman in Afghanistan who finds himself at odds with his sergeant (Alexander Skarsgård) and the rest of his platoon in “The Kill Team.”

Writer-director Dan Krauss has turned his documentary of the same title, about Army soldiers who called themselves “The Kill Team” for torturing and murdering civilians in the endless Afghan War that began after 9/11, into a feature film. Yes, it really happened, although this version is fictionalized. Names were changed, etc.

Andrew Briggman (Wolff) has enlisted and is about to deploy when we first meet him. Dad (Rob Morrow) couldn’t be more proud, and Andy grins at the smiles and thumbs-up he gets, just for passing through the airport in uniform.

Afghanistan is a real eye-opener, of course. Hot, dirty and dangerous work, house to house searches for men with the gear to build IEDs (improvised explosive devices). Andy follows the rules, tries to give orders to the civilians with respect, and finds himself humiliated by an outraged local.

Not to worry. His sergeant (Tunji Kasim) is a real “hearts and minds” guy, forcing his men to wave at children, handing out candy. It’s when that sergeant gets killed that the war takes a turn to an even darker side for Andy and his comrades.

Skarsgård is the replacement, Sgt. Deeks, a hardended veteran with three tours under his belt and a promise. “Give me your loyalty” and he will make them warriors,” men who will “be a part of history.”

Skarsgård plays this guy with his usually flinty intensity, speaking in an always menacing near-whisper, especially when the men get a taste of Deeks’ methods.

“Who’s ready to have some fun?”

Taking a prisoner, hiding him from command and torturing him, summary executions in the field, “incidents” that are explained away with lies. Deeks has his own playbook, his own idea of “fun.”

Most eagerly go along with it. As with any war, they have an abiding hatred of “the enemy.” As in every guerilla war, that enemy could be anyone. As in any war in a foreign land, racism finds easy acolytes among the combatants.

Andy finds himself apalled, thwarted or intimidated from reporting what he’s witnessed, coerced into participating. And with every minute that passes, we see the danger he feels for himself, a man at odds with armed men who know how to deal with “rats” and a Sgt. who seems to have getting away with all this worked out.

Krauss knows the territory, the standard operating procedures of men on and off duty, the jargon. He does a decent job at building suspense, and Wolff (“The Intern,” “The Fault in Our Stars”) gives a solid performance as a young man desperate to tell somebody what’s going on, and fearing for his life as he does.

But this is Skarsgård’s movie, and his whispered menace and gimlet-eyed stare informs his every scene. Deeks isn’t a caricature of evil. He has taken “duty” and “mission” into off-the-books and off-the-deep-end sadism.

He’s cunning and manipulative. Andy wants a promotion? He makes him fight a more qualified comrade (Brian Marc) for it in front of the entire platoon.

The big and small screens have been awash in military features and documentaries since 9/11, and there’s not a lot to “The Kill Team” that qualifies as new or surprising.

But a decent level of suspense and the genuine dread Skarsgård casts, like a shadow, inform it and make it stand out in a genre that may not outlive America’s endless military involvement in that corner of the world.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, violent content and drug use.

Cast: Nat Wolff, Alexander Skarsgård, Brian Marc, Adam Long, Rob Morrow

Credits: Written and directed by Dan Krauss.  An A24 release.

Running time: 1:27

Dev Patel has the title role, and Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw are among the many many Great Brits peopling this Armando Iannucci (“In the Loop,””Death of Stalin”) dance through Dickens.

“The Personal History of David Copperfield” opens in the UK in January, and with Lionsgate having it, should reach North America in the spring.

Unless they think they have a rare Oscar contender on their hands.

For a screen romance to work, we have to believe in the couple. Why are they together? Why are they fated to be together?

“Operator” is a love story that doesn’t explain that away in a flash. The film makes us work for that understanding, read beyond what is obvious right there on the screen. Because whatever the different financial circumstances/career trajectory that pulls Emily (Mae Whitman) to Joe (Martin Starr), the love connection isn’t obvious.

He’s in tech, the programming/data analysis whiz at a small company that creates Interactive Voice Response Systems, the fake operators that most firms have you talk to so they don’t have to pay people to solve your health care, banking, cell service, credit card or IRS problems.

She’s the concierge operator at a swanky Chicago hotel, with dreams of fitting in with one of the city’s famed improvisational theater/comedy troupes.

It’s never articulted, but Joe is “on the spectrum.” He speaks in a near monotone, is data obsessed, brusque to the point of rude, doesn’t joke, never laughs or smiles.

Perhaps there are people who find that warm, charming and attractive.  But Emily? Who wants to be treated as the sum or her statistical biases, especially in an argument?

“You’re only as predictable” as the data makes you “appear,” he explains.

“I’m sure you’re right,” she offers, avoiding an argument over being reduced to an algorhythm.

“I have the data.”

Their marriage remains a head-scratcher when he is up against a deadline and decides his wife’s disarming, empathetic “work voice” would be the perfect for a healthcare system’s rebooting IVRS. His boss (Nat Faxon) agrees, and soon work and home life are colliding as Joe puts Emily in the studio, recording thousands of greetings, exchanges and phrases, reducing her to a contract employee and just ” voice.”

He also puts an app on her phone that allows him to record and analyze the sounds she makes in degrees of “professionalism” and “empathy.” He’s way into her life,, violating her privacy in ways she doesn’t even realize.

The payback for her is “real money, money with commas” that could allow her to quit serving hotel guests and stick to serving her fellow actors in improvisational sketches — “30 plays in 60 minutes.”

And then we see Joe interact with his mother (Christine Lahti), walking her through city regulation issues, and having a fall-on-the-floor panic attack when she has a health scare.

That’s the connection. Emily is drawn to people who need her, people she can be of service to. It’s either that or she’s way into scraggly hipster near-beards.

Starr, a veteran character actor (“Veronica Mars,” “Spider Man: Far From Home”) maintains a nearly unemotive poker face throughout “Operator,” getting under the skin of a guy who recognizes Emily’s unique qualities, and breaks them down to the point where her voice alone is almost enough.

The script builds that hard shell for a reason, of course. We’re going to see it crack, and Starr also manages that with touching skill.

Whitman, a former child actress turned starlet (“The DUFF”  and “Perks of Being a Wallflower”) has the harder job — convincing us of the attraction here. I’m still not sure I buy it, but her scenes with the improv ensemble are a stitch, an eager young writer/comedienne getting a little too much pressure from home, and a bit too much scrutiny by the comedy company’s leader (Cameron Esposito).

Whitman, fortunately, conveys enough warmth and charm (especially in a great scene with Lahti) to carry the picture.

There’s little that I’d call hilarious here, as “Operator” is more smart, smooth and droll than laugh-out-loud funny. And there two significant betrayals that test the relationship, and one of them is left annoyingly unacknowledge and unresolved before the credits roll.

It’s still an intelligent and yes — with a bit of a strain — believable screen romance, a picture with heartfelt moments and an interesting chilly, inhuman technology debate as subtext. Ignore the fact that she seems out of his emotional league and you’ve got a winner.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, sexual content

Cast: Martin Starr, Mae Whitman, Christine Lahti, Nat Faxon, Cameron Esposito

Credits: Directed by Logan Kibens, script by Logan Kibens and Sharon Greene. An Orchard release, on Netflix

Running time: 1:30

The standard rule of thumb is that film is a director’s medium and TV belongs to producers.

The theater? It belongs the writer and the actor.

“Camera Store” is a film that feels like a play. It’s littered with showy bits of performance, archetypal characters delivering cutting monologues, episodes built around entrances and exits and a simple, over-arching theme.

It’s got “Death of a Salesman” pretensions and a road show/regional theater cast biting off chewy anecdotes, homilies and memories. And if I can’t say it’s all that good, I can at least vouch for its ambitions and virtues.

It’s a middling movie but a fascinating, well-acted essay on changing times, lost opportunities, little lives shrinking in traps of their own making.

Writer-director Scott Marshall Smith had a hand in “The Score” and scripted “When the Game Stands Tall.” And if we take nothing out of this “memory play” of a movie, it’s that he loves words.

A lot of them come out his leading man. John Larroquette plays Ray LaPine, an embittered mall camera store manager who has to say “Let me finish” more than most of us, because he’s long-winded, old school (foul mouthed and racist) and won’t brook interruptions.

Ray’s life, like most lives nearing 60, has been a never-ceasing parade of loss. It’s 1994 in Nanuet, New York, and malls and camera stores and Ray are all endangered species. Here’s how he takes that out on the pissant mall manager (Joey Folsom).

“You are a ‘functionary,’ which is one step above ‘lackey,’ which is a first-cousin to ‘flunky,’ which is only a GNAT’S eyelash from being the ‘chief counter monkey’ at a Kentucky Fried Chicken!”

That’s some fine ranting, there. Ray rants a lot.

He’s been told by a former colleague (David James Elliott) whom he hates for moving on to bigger, better things that “digital” is here, and he’d better get out now. If he’s ever going to get his own One Hour Photo booth business, which he has been telling the cute co-owner (Laura Silverman) of the Italian restaurant in the mall, his ex-actor assistant manager (John Rhys-Davies), the security guard (Theodus Crane), the mall manager and everybody else about, he’d better get on the phone to Fuji — today, right now.

It’s Christmas Eve, and what used to be the busiest day of the year for the store is still pretty busy. Good thing the boss hired a friend’s Wharton School of Business kid (Justin Lieberman) to help out, without telling anybody.

Pete’s supposed to “learn a little something about business” while there, but Pinky (Rhys-Davies), once a rising star of the British musical theater, distracts him with theater anecdotes and his salesmanship secret — “You invite them to fall in love!” Pinky always has his hand out, is always taking a detour to the tiki bar across the hall from them.

Young Pete also has his head turned by the forward, flirtatatious and buxom young woman Penny Wednesday (Maddie McCormick) whom he gawked at on the bus on the way to work.  She doesn’t work there. Yet. She seems to be a sexy drifter who invites the attentions of men to get by.

During the course of a very theatrical day, cheapskates and sob stories make their way into the store. It may be only the preamble for the REAL hard week ahead — “returns.” But competing agendas, dying dreams, blossoming love and Big Secrets add weariness to the grind of the march towards Close of Business, with lots of speeches by Ray along the way.

Everybody’s got a sad story, and we hear a lot of them.

It’s a ham-fisted, sentimental and downbeat script that provides far too many opportunities for hammy performances. And as I averred, “Camera Store” doesn’t really work.

But it’s as interesting a failure as I’ve run across this year, a hollowed-out holiday wallow in regrets that wear into scar tissue, the only thing that dulls the depression and justifies the fatalism of seeing all your deferred dreams and delusions, bad bets and poor choices come home to roost in a single day.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: John Larroquette, John Rhys-Davies, Maddie McCormick, Justin Lieberman, Joey Folsom and Cheryl Ladd

Credits: Written and directed by Scott Marshall Smith.  A Freestyle Release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:44

So, it’s about elvish teens in an elvish suburbia who are gifted with a wizard’s staff which might bring their late father back, but only delivers half of him.

A “Weekend at Bernie’s” road trip ensues.

I dunno about this.

It’s daft, but not nearly daft enough.

The guys who made Seth Rogen’s “Sausage Party” directed the new animated “The Addams Family,” but there’s little of that anarchy here and (thankfully) none of the vulgarity.

MGM/UA and Vancouver’s Cinesite animation studio made the classic blunder of casting big names — TWO Oscar winners — instead of funny voices for their characters. So Charlize Theron’s slinky turn as Morticia and Chloe Grace Moretz’s deadpan take on Wednesday don’t work without them on camera, trying to top Anjelica Huston and Christina Ricci.

And the things an adult finds amusing in this latest big screen version of “The Addams Family” aren’t the ones the little kid audience it’s intended for will giggle over. It’s got more than a hint of New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams’ look about it. Most of the voice actors take a shot at mimicking the performers in the 1990s Barry Sonnenfeld films, starring the irrepressible Raoul Julia, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd and Christina Ricci, which only pays off in Oscar Isaac’s amusing Latin lover version of Raoul Julia’s version of Gomez.

But if you’re pressed for something to do with children who love going to the movies, I have to say it’s funnier than “Abominable,” even if the animation (by the Vancouver Cinesite Studios) doesn’t have that Dreamworks polish or heart.

And who among us can resist that finger-snapping theme song, the one Tin Pan Alley veteran Vic Mizzy composed, so very long ago, for the black and white TV series that made “The Addams Family” the touchstone Gothic farce it remains to this day?

This take on the tale gives us the origin story, takes us back to the Old World wedding of Morticia (Theron) and Gomez (Isaac), nuptials interrupted by cries of “MONSTERS” from villagers wielding pitchforks and trigger happy with their catapult.

The newlyweds must find somewhere just as “horrible” and “awful,” perhaps a tad more tolerant. New Jersey it is. That’s where Thing (A disembodied hand, remember?), their driver, runs over Lurch, and they discover their future butler’s been living in an abandoned asylum. Home sweet home!

Everything’s gloomy and decaying, just the way they like it, as they have two murderously competitive kids, morbid, morose Wednesdsay (Moretz) and explosives fan Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard).

“They blow up so fast!”

Then a development overseen by a cable TV home makeover queen (Oscar winner Allison Janney) drains the swamp that gives the place its lovely murk and fog, and the Addams — with a big family gathering coming up — have to make nice with the suburbanites who’ve moved into “Assimilation,” where the town choir sings “It’s easy to be happy when you have no choice!”

A clever line? Gomez wanders into the quaint planned community diner — “Enjoy your cuppa Joe, or whoEVER you have in there!”

A funny running gag, cribbed from the TV show? Lurch (often “conducted” by Thing) sets the mood at the ancient pipe organ, inventing the theme song, riffing through “Green Onions,” “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and a cover of a certain R.E.M. ballad.

One great scene? That would be with Wednesday, who no longer wants to be “cage schooled” and heads to junior high where frog dissection day becomes a tribute to James Whale’s “Frankenstein.” That’s an absolute stitch. Ahem.

This “Family” needed a lot more moments like those, a zanier voice cast (Nick Kroll’s not bad as Uncle Fester) and more of the bug-eyed, wrong-headed enthusiasms — financial and martial to parental and romantic — of Gomez, always the key to versions of this endlessly reincarnated franchise.

Little kids will snicker and snap their fingers in time to the tune. Parents? You might might grin at the nostalgia of it all, an inventive moment or two, but little else.

MPAA Rating: PG for macabre and suggestive humor, and some action.

Cast: The voices of Charlize Theron, Oscar Isaac, Chloe Grace Moretz, Snoop Dogg, Allison Janney, Titus Burgess,  Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara and Bette Midler.

Credits: Directed by Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon, script by Pamela Pettler and Matt Lieberman, based on characters created by Charles Addams. An MGM release.

Running time: 1:27

Never ever should the many ask, “How, if I may ask, did the parents die?”

Any more than one asks “What happened to the LAST nanny?”

January chills from scary scary kids.

Mackenzie Davis is the nanny, Finn Wolfhard and the little girl from “The Florida Project,” Brooklyn Prince, are the kiddies

Anthony Hopkins as scandal-ignoring Anglicized German Pope Benedict, Jonathan Pryce as a most English take on the Argentine Pope Francis.

Fernando Meirelles of “City of God” directed this two-hander, which seems to have the polish and the pedigree to be a contender.

However cartoonist Charles Addams is remembered, it’s the 1960s TV series based on his work that has real cultural currency.

That show, starring Sean Astin’s dad, bug-eyed John Astin, Carolyn Jones and Jackie Coogan, inspired the hilarious 1990s Barry Sonenfeld films starring the great Raoul Julia, Oscar winner Anjelica Huston, introduced Christina Ricci to the world and gave Christopher Lloyd his third iconic character role.

And now there’s a cartoon, with the voices of Oscar winner Charlize Theron, Oscar Isaac, Snoop Dogg, Chloe Grace Moretz, Oscar winner Allison Janney, Titus Burgess, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara and…drum role please — the Divine Miss M., Bette Midler.

One thing animation does is allow the characters to get close to the way Mr. Addams himself drew them. See what I mean?

It opens Friday. The old rule used to be, “Be suspicious of any cartoon with TOO dazzling a voice actor cast.”

The preview is a bit late — Wednesday night is a mere 24 hours before OPENING night,.

And then there was this last minute embargo on reviews. Late Thursday afternoon.

You’d think thet’d catch on that these are “warnings” that color the perception of their film pre opening as surely as mixed or negative reviews. But we will see.

The short answer is “No, it’s not ‘Netflixable.'”

The novelty of sampling the work of “Nollywood,” Nigeria’s lively film industry, of seeing the rare film (in the West) that looks at the country from an insider’s point of view, wears off far too quickly in this tale of a demonic diety possessed statuette.

“The Figurine” as it was titled for export, “Araromire” for domestic consumption, is a 2009-2010 slow-walk soap opera masquerading as a horror film. It finally gets around to supernatural violence — only hinted at in a long prologue — in its final act.

It is too little too late.

The tale follows two friends, Sola and Femi, played by actor and sometime director Kunle Afolayan, and Ramsey Nouah, who stumble across a wooden idol in a hut when they’re doing their young Nigerians’ national (civilian-ish) Youth Corps training.

Sola hasn’t been able to land a job because he’s put off doing this service. Femi seems destined for greater things in the world of Lagos finance.

But the moment Sola steals that statuette, both of them have a change of luck. Sola impregnates and marries the coquettish Mona (Omoni Oboli). He lands a plum job.

Femi? He doesn’t exactly fall on hard times, but he is left unhappily alone.

What we’ve been told in the prologue, which nobody in the story figures out until late in the second act, is that the “figurine” is of an ancient spirit, “Araromire.” We’ve seen how she was summoned by a native priest almost 100 years before. Her rep? She is the goddess “of luck and good fortune.” She bestows it upon her master for seven years.

But there’s a catch. At the end of those seven years, “It takes it all away!”

The pacing, and the almost punishingly roundabout way Kunle Afolayan’s film sidles up to “the plot” will be a turnoff to many.

And whatever the maturity of Nigeria’s film industry, there are things First World films and film fans take for granted that “Figurine” stumbles over. Actors talk off-mike (No looping?). Takes go on too long, after their payoff. That leads to scenes that meander.

The few exteriors liven the picture up, with only one set really giving us the feel of the place, how people live and decorate their lives there.

Contrast this with the comparitively over-produced “Half of a Yellow Sun” with Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose and Chiwetel Ejiofor, a period piece that felt more like “real life” despite the “Hollywood” casting and design touches.

The face-slaps and corny dialogue (in English, and Nigerian pidgin) — “Don’t tell me you believe such superstitions, too!” — do the players, who aren’t bad, no favors.

In the U.S., only the exceptional film from a culture not known for film as an export typically merits a showing. “Araromire/The Figurine” isn’t exceptional in any way — a pedestrian horror plot, timidly and languidly acted, filmed and edited, its only recommendation being “Well, it’s not EVERY day we see a ‘horror’ movie (even a soapy one) from Nigeria.”

MPAA rating: Unrated, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Kunle Afolayan, Funlola Aofiyebi, Ramsey Nouah, Omoni Oboli

Credits: Directed by Kunle Afolayan. A Golden/Netflix release.

Running time: 2:01