Movie Nation

“Youth” is writer-director Paolo Sorrentino’s ode to old age, a reverie on memory and a fantasia on the last thing to go — “desire.”

He gives one last great role to Michael Caine, one more shot at not seeming streetwise to Harvey Keitel and two great scenes to the legendary Jane Fonda.

He reminds us that Rachel Weisz deserved her Oscar, and that even if he doesn’t score one for “Love & Mercy,” Paul Dano is pursuing just the sort of challenging, uncompromising roles that all but guarantee he’ll have one soon enough.

Caine is Fred Ballinger, an 80something conductor/composer who is doing his best to turn down a knighthood from the Queen. Politely.

“Oh no, I’m retired.”

Harvey Keitel is Mick Boyle, Fred’s lifelong friend, a great film director who has five assistants helping him polish his latest script.

Fred and Mick are at a spa in Switzerland, and in quieter moments, each has his alpine hallucination — the leading ladies one helped launch, the music (in cowbells, cattle lowing, birds and the crackle of a candy wrapper ) the other still hears.

Rachel Weisz is Fred’s daughter and assistant, who experiences a marital crisis that involves both men. Paul Dano is a an actor famous for playing a robot, using time at this exclusive resort to prepare for his next role.

And there’s also this morbidly obese South American so famous nobody has to say his name.

“Youth” plays like Sorrentino’s tribute to Fellini, with its langourus leering during nude swims (Miss Universe checks into the resort), its bemused drift into the indignity of a sauna, and the spa’s regimented routine of exercise, check-ups, sunbathing, meals and nightly entertainment. The filmmaker has been leaning toward Federico of late (“The Great Beauty”), pondering old age as he does.

He does this by contrasting the aged beauties of his cast with the far less attractive, but young and supple members of the staff at the spa, and a few jaw-dropping moments with the film’s Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea).

Ballinger’s vivid nightmares are about women and desire, his daughter’s are about a failed marriage and Mick’s are about a film ending, a “testament” project that cannot find a climax.

Ballinger is famous for music that he regards as trite, if personal. Dano’s actor observes, chats with Fred and mulls the fickle nature of his fame, a guy too good for the role that made him famous, dismissive of all that’s come since, but not so close-minded that he cannot figure that out.

The performances are subtle and sublime, with the exception of Keitel, who very much seems the odd man out here. His line-readings are metallic, stilted. The Cockney Caine can channel a lifetime among the rich and famous and play it posh. Not Keitel. His “street” moments work, his collaboration scenes with young writers and leisure ones rattle and jar. The lines, the entitlement, doesn’t roll off his lips.

But the surprises are rewarding, the irony expressed with the perfect touch of drollery and the climax beautifully handled, even if the film goes on one scene too long past that.

An old rule Sorrentino violates at his peril. If you spend an entire movie building up some beloved or climactic piece of music, you dare not ever show “Mr. Holland’s Opus” or “Mo Better Blues.” It will never live up to your own hype.

 
MPAA Rating: R for graphic nudity, some sexuality, and language

Cast: Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano, Jane Fonda
Credits: Directed by , script by . A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:04

They’re the funniest comic duo since Lemmon and Matthau.

Who cares if their best work was co-hosting awards shows? Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, ex-“Saturday Night Live” bandmates, funny women so utterly in sync as to be matching halves of “slap” and “stick,” simply click. Even when they’re out of character.

As they are in “Sisters,” a 40somethings-party-like-they-did-when-they-were-teens romp that casts each “sister” against type. The always-wacky Poehler is the lonely “responsible one,” the smart-downtrodden Fey tries her hand at ditzy party animal.

They make each of their creations real women with real issues and needs and a wild streak. Whatever the demands of the script (by SNL vet Paula Pell), they never become caricatures in this “Project X/Superbad/House Party” for the not-quite-menopausal.

Maura (Poehler) is a nurse, a do-gooder, all about helping and about self-help. The self-help? That’s because she’s divorced — two years and counting.

Kate (Fey) is the hellion. We can tell by the leopard print apron she uses as she applies toxic dye to a hair cut customer (Chris Parnell) whose brows she is tinting at home because she’s been fired. Again. From another salon. She’s one of those single-moms whose teen daughter (Madison Davenport) has to be “the grown-up.” Haley knows Mom’s anger-management/impulse control issues. Which sends her on vacations without Mom, without bothering to tell her where she’s going.

No wonder Maura is the one their parents (Dianne Wiest, James Brolin) trust with the news that they’re selling the family’s home — in Orlando.

Kate does not take it well. The tantrum includes some serious shots at the designer-couple who are closing on the house and cannot wait to redecorate.

“You know your cousin’s gay?”

“That’s not my cousin. That’s my husband.”

The Ellis sisters resolve — at Kate’s insistence — to throw one last “Ellis Island” party, like the ones they tossed in high school. Maybe Maura can make some time with the hunk (Ike Barinholtz) who has moved in down the street. Kate, however, has to be “the party mom” though, the one who doesn’t drink.

“I hate it when you make me the bummer.”

And they’re off — rounding up booze, decorating, sending e-vites to their old classmates, shunning those they always shunned.

Here’s where this movie’s “Saturday Night Live” content pays off. Maya Rudolph absolutely kills as the resentful shrew the sisters hated in high school.

“She looks like a fart that’s coming out sideways.”

Bobby Moynihan plays the dopey classmate who was sure he’d become a stand-up comic. Rachel Dratch has another Rachel Dratch role.

Even though there’s a drug dealer (John Cena, hysterical at underplaying) and some midlife crisis sex, this is never much darker than “Hangover Lite.” There’s little of the bitter bite of “Bridesmaids,” though a hint of “last stab at playing promiscuous party girls” ripples from the script to the actresses playing the leads.

How to dress? “A little less Forever 21, and a little more Suddenly 42.”

But the pleasure here is in catching our comic twosome in all their unfiltered Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time glory. Check out the two minutes or so set aside for Poehler and deadpan Greta Lee, as a Korean manicurist, to work out how to pronounce the nail-dresser’s name.

“Hae won.”

And for once, we  get to see the Fabulous Fey and the Peerless Poehler, cast as equals and delivering the comic goods without having to give OTHER people Golden Globes in the process.

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content and language throughout, and for drug use

Cast: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Dianne Wiest, James Brolin, John Leguizamo, Maya Rudolph, Ike Barinholtz, John Cena
Credits: Directed by Jason Moore, script by Paula Pell. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:58

All winning streaks must end, and you can’t say Jennifer Lawrence and David O. Russell (and Bradley Cooper) haven’t had a good run.

“Joy,” their third collaboration, is no “American Hustle” or “Silver Linings Playbook.” This is the Russell of “I Heart Huckabees” or “Nailed/Accidental Love.” Whatever he was going for here — a satire of the American “up by your bootstraps” myth, a twisted take on “build a better mousetrap” capitalism — he misses.

And it’s not a “Flirting With Disaster” miss, either. If not quite a disaster, “Joy” threatens, time and again, to take away your will to live.

Lawrence is charming and empathetic as Joy Mangano, a single mom whose entire disastrous family has come to depend on her, even if they no longer have the right. It’s the early ’70s when we meet her. Mom (Virginia Madsen, always good) has confined herself to her bedroom, locked in to her soap operas.

Long-divorced mechanic Dad (Robert DeNiro) is returned to the house by his latest wife. “He’s broken,” is all she’ll say.

Joy already has her own ex husband (Edgar Ramirez) living under her roof. He wants to be a singer, can’t support himself and soon is sharing a basement with her dad. The bills are piling up, but Joy doesn’t let the desperation show.

Only Grandma (Diane Ladd, radiant  in a bit part) has faith. She’s the one who sees great things in Joy. Joy could be “Joy the doer,” the one who lives up to that potential she glistened with in high school.

But Grandma only makes Joy mourn for the better life she should have had.  The tipping point comes when Joy makes her one grab for the Big Brass Ring. She has that one Big Idea. And there’s this new start-up, a TV network that does nothing but sell stuff, run by a sympathetic hunk (Bradley Cooper) with a mesmerizing, messianic spiel. Will she make it? Will he help, or merely be another weight, ransoming her joy?

This is a real woman’s life story, and all Russell can do to make it cinematic is to pile up the obstacles — the Dad, resentful sister (Elisabeth Rohm), Dad’s imperious and wealthy new lady-love (Isabella Rossellini) — who all doubt her– the business folk who cheat her. Because, it is implied, she is “just a woman.”

Lawrence does what she can with the material. But Joy is basically the Biblical Job, built to suffer. Even triumph won’t bring happiness, and at least failure has the advantage of familiarity.

So we may root for her. Just not that much. We may wish for this or that good thing to happen, but in business, family, ex-family and family friends will let you down.

And pairing her up with Cooper again is just a cruel tease. The last third of the film not only is about the infomercial business, it’s like an infomercial itself.

Russell sets out to frustrate, and he does. And “Joy” never rises above that, an aggravating, un-fulfilling and empty night at the cinema with great actors trapped in an overdue flop from people we were just starting to figure were flop-proof.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief strong language

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Virginia Madsen, Bradley Cooper, Isabella Rossellini, Diane Ladd
Credits: Written and directed by David O. Russell, story by Annie Mumolo, script by . A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:02

You knew that somebody was going to take the piss out of the pretentious king of movie mashups, Quentin Tarantino.

And you knew that it would never be Adam Sandler & Co. who managed that.

“The Ridiculous 6,” which major studios passed on and Netflix got made, is a parody of Tarantino’s talky/violent/n-word riddled “event” Western, “The Hateful Eight.”

Tarantino releases his movie in “70 mm” (in select cinemas). “Ridiculous 6” is in “4K.” Tarantino pushes a slight story into three hours, with overture and intermission. Team Sandler reaches for the two hour mark.

Tarantino serves of Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen — his “regulars.” Sandler brings Rob Schneider back from the Old Jewish Comics Home, and gives more work to David Spade, Vanilla Ice, Jon Lovitz and sports talker Dan Patrick, condemned to be Abe Lincoln in his most disastrous Sandler cameo in one of Sandler’s worst films.

Which is saying something.

The premise here — a movie basically inspired by the trailer to “Hateful Eight” (which opens New Year’s) — is that Sandler is “White Knife,” an orphan raised by Apache.

“I jus’ dress like this so’s I don’t get scalped out there on the prairie,” he drawls. Sort of.

His long-lost Desperado Daddy (Nick Nolte) shows up, offers him the stash from his biggest job, and is promptly nabbed by his old gang (led by Danny Trejo).

White Knife, or “Tommy,” must leave behind his intended, Smokin’ Fox (Julia Jones), find Daddy’s treasure and rescue him. Along the way, he discovers Pappa Was a Rollin’ Stone. Schneider plays a half-Mexican dolt sired by the outlaw, Taylor Lautner an utter dope fathered by him, Terry Crews, Luke Wilson and Jorge Garcia play the the other half-brothers.

Ridiculous.

Unlike Tarantino, whose movie has about a dozen “hateful” characters to be dispatched, Sandler and his crew at least can count. The ridiculous are indeed six in number.

Will Forte and Steve Zahn and Nick Swardson are among the members of a gang of one-eyed outlaws out for the same stash.

Vanilla Ice plays Mark Twain, Lovitz a governor and Blake Shelton is Wyatt Earp in a big poker game. John Turturro is Abner Doubleday, trying to teach the Chinese building the railroad how to play baseball.

The humor comes virtue of donkey diarrhea, bad-pun “Injun” names (“Never Wears Bra”) and elderly Native American actors cracking jokes in the modern vernacular.

“Wow, that was uncool,” the aged chief (Saginaw Grant) complains.

The production values are pretty high. A Western with good locations, horses, a stagecoach and an Indian village isn’t hard to manage.

There’s just nothing to this — nothing funny, at least. It’s hatefully long, has some bizarre violence (Harvey Keitel and Steve Buscemi are involved) and is built around another inept-and-doesn’t-care-that-he-is turn by Sandler.

Sure, he’s always creating work for his cronies. It’s become very apparent, over the years, that his real reason for doing this is that they’re the only ones to reassure him on the set that he’s funny. When he isn’t.

If you’re trying to take the piss out of Tarantino, and somebody needs to, you need to bring more game than this.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, violence and defecation gags

Cast: Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Danny Trejo, Julia Jones, Terry Crews, Taylor Lautner, Luke Wilson,Vanilla Ice, Nick Nolte, Jorge Garcia, Blake Shelton, David Spade, Jon Lovitz, Dan Patrick
Credits: Directed by Frank Coraci, script by Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

“Phoenix” is a dark romantic melodrama about the Holocaust, an intimate study of guilt — survivor’s guilt, and survive-at-all costs guilt.

Nelly (Nina Hoss) survived the death camps — barely. She only returns to Germany after reconstructive surgery to repair the grievous bullet wounds to her face, a wounds the Nazis were sure finished her as they evacuated the camp.

Her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) nurses her through this, gets her back across the border (from Switzerland) and brings her back to post-war Berlin.

Nelly regards her surgery as more “recreation” than “reconstruction.” All she wants is to find her husband, the man she had to leave behind when she was arrested. This is the thought that kept Nelly, a singer, alive when all around her were dying.

She’s not hearing Lene’s blunt warnings about “Johnny.”

“Johnny betrayed you.”

She searches as she heals, but when she stumbles into her piano playing husband, he does not recognize her.

Johnny does odd jobs at the Phoenix club, a sort of Weimar/”Cabaret” throwback that entertains the locals and the American troops who occupy that sector of Berlin. But something about this woman he doesn’t quite recognize clicks. He befriends her and enlists her in a scheme. She will impersonate his late wife, Nelly and he will split her inheritance with “Esther,” as she calls herself. After all, he says (in German, with English subtitles), “There aren’t many Esthers left.”

Co-writer/director Christian Petzold (“Barbara”) manages a subtle tension as his players try to hide a various obvious payoff that this premise promises. Zehrfeld’s Johnny is poker-faced, straining not to give away a flash of regret, remorse or longing as this woman reminds him more and more of a wife he is sure is dead.

Hoss (“A Most Wanted Man”) brings layers of ache to Nelly. As Esther, she questions and probes. She is trying to trip Johnny up, but only half-heartedly. Does she want to know that he betrayed her, can she left him off the hook or is he innocent of what Lene is convinced he did?

What trips this troubling and engrossing picture up are production values. It’s mere months after the war, and the street rubble is ever-so-neat, everybody is in nice clothes, and even the seedy bars and apartments feel production-designed to death. Every vintage car is in mint condition, freshly polished on the rubble-strewn streets, every GI has a German accent, not an American one.

The players and the situation (taken from a Hubert Monteilhet) novel make “Phoenix” an approachable, less-grueling Holocaust story than most. But the unreality of it all undoes some of that and makes this brief, smart and heartfelt story feel like a pulled-punch.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements and brief suggestive material

Cast:Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf
Credits: Directed by Christian Petzold, script by Christian Fetzold and Harun Faroki, based on the novel by Hubert Monteilhet . A Sundance Selects release.

Running time: 1:38

Did they widen the Oscar field, or shrink it? What the Screen Actors Guild taketh away, the Golden Globes returned to “It’s still got a shot at the Oscar.”

Right?

That’s the true purpose of the Golden Globes nominations.

Yesterday, “Hateful Eight” and “Joy” felt like Oscar write-offs. Today, “Hateful” has a Jennifer Jason Leigh nomination (deserving) and one for composer Ennio Morricone (meh) and screenwriter Quentin Tarantino (meh, again), and “Joy” gets more recognition for J-Law. “Creed” lands a sentimental Sly Stallone nomination. An overpraised “Rocky” recycling, I thought.

“Beasts of No Nation” got one nomination. Another over-praised pic, PC and topical and pretty powerful, but never once feels like something made for the big screen.  Best actor-drama nominee Idris Elba? He’s big time. The biggest thing about it.

So “Joy” gets into the mix, as does “The Martian.” Best Motion Picture–Comedy.

Lawrence and Matt Damon got nominations in “comedy” categories.

“Steve Jobs” landed two acting nominations, and a screenplay nomination and one for best score. So now it’s back in the mix.

Alicia Vikander got an “Ex Machina” Golden Globe nomination. Hurray for that. AND she got a supporting actress nomination for “The Danish Girl.”

Will Smith got a “Concussion” best actor nod, first big acclaim that film has won this Awards Season.

Paul Dano got a “Love & Mercy” nomination. The only one for that film.

“Mad Max: Fury Road” got George Miller an overdue best director nomination, and a best picture nod.

No Johnny Depp “Black Mass” nomination. No Carey Mulligan for “Suffragette.” And unlike the SAG awards, no love at all for “Straight Outta Compton.”

Love for “Room” and “Spotlight,” but more love for “The Big Short,” with multiple acting nominations.

“Trumbo” now officially feels like a contender — at least for Bryan Cranston.
“The Revenant” got best director, picture, score and actor (Leo) nominations and feels like a film to beat. “Spotlight” pulled no acting nominations. Mark Ruffalo got nominated for a little-seen comedy.

But “The Big Short” going into limited release Friday and wider release next week, seems like the BIG winner from both SAG and the HFPA. It will have Awards Bounce as it opens, fresh awards buzz. Can’t hurt.

But nobody is honoring the “Short” director, and best directors make best pictures, so “Spotlight” and “Carol” and “The Revenant” feel like Oscar front runners, right this minute. “Mad Max” is more of a “Let’s give George Miller his Oscar shot” pick I figure. Ridley Scott’s “Martian” nomination is much deserved, but Miller’s the overdue one.

McCarthy and “Spotlight” seem like natural Oscar night winners, to me.

As for the Globes? They’re handed out in mid-January (Jan. 10) on NBC. Yes, they nominate and honor TV programs, too (Netflix is the big winner among those nominations). But since TV’s Emmys are so much later in the year, and the Globes tilt so heavily towards new shows, their TV honors are even less relevant than the Oscar ones.

Here’s the complete list

So. The Screen Actor’s Guild Award nominations for 2015 are out.

Takeaway one — “I Smiled Back” (the Sarah Silverman nomination) and “Beasts of No Nation” suggest that SOME folks just sorta stayed at home and watched whatever was on VOD, and then nominated it.

Seriously. These nominations, for the most part, seem…small.

“Beasts” as “best ensemble,” a supposed predictor for a Best Picture Oscar nomination? I don’t see it. Good film, solid work by Idris and the kids. But small-scale and “issues epic” don’t work here.

Plenty of “three star” movies out there in the mix that are just as good, and didn’t co-premiere on Netflix.

“The Martian,” for instance. Big Hollywood hit. Well-acted, big (at Mission Control) ensemble. Left out.

“Love & Mercy,” AWOL. “Hateful Eight” and “Joy” are utterly omitted. The reason nobody is talking about these three — well, there’s a REASON. OK?

“Straight Outta Compton?” No critics’ groups have mentioned it. “Creed” comes up before this one, a forgotten gem from August. Well-played. “Creed” is piffle. “Compton” is a top ten contender. Kudos to the SAG folks for spotting that, anyway.

Rachel McAdams wasn’t all that in “Spotlight.” Best supporting actress? It’s like they weren’t even curious enough to see the great female performances of the year.

Much love for “Room” and “The Big Short,” the expected nominations came in for “Carol” and “Brooklyn.” The expected nominations — and no more, Cate and Rooney and Saoirse. “The Danish Girl” got two acting nominations — to be expected. “Bridge of Spies” only landed one. Kind of expected. Tom Hanks has enough.

“Trumbo” got some recognition  — good to see. THIS is the Helen Mirren performance of the year, not that “Woman in Gold” pic.

Johnny Depp in “Black Mass”? Why not?

Here’s their list. SAG Awards are handed out Jan. 30.

Golden Globe nominations are tomorrow.

“In the Heart of the Sea” is a tale of whales and wooden ships and the flawed flesh-and-blood men who hunted them.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s best-seller about the true story that inspired “Moby Dick” becomes a solid, beautifully-detailed but conventional screen adventure in the hands of Ron Howard.

It’s about Nantucket capitalism, greed, and the whale ship Essex, sunk by a whale in the middle of the Pacific at the height of the whale oil boom.

The Charles Leavitt script makes that “inspired ‘Moby Dick'” element literal. It presents this yarn in flashback, as a tale remembered by an old salt, Tom (Brendan Gleeson).  The young writer Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) is the one who sends Tom on that trip into memory, forcing him to recall the horrors of that one voyage.

The old whaler remembers that 1819 voyage, and the class struggle between an able and qualified first mate and the in-over-his-head captain born into Nantucket whaling royalty. And Melville smells his Great American novel in the making.

Chris Hemsworth, the cinema’s current ideal man’s man, is Owen Chase, a mate who was promised a command, but forced to serve under George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), son of a rich captain. Their every encounter is cutting, the “silver spoon” man of privilege dismissing the “landsman” whose family has not lived on Nantucket long enough to count.

Howard and the screenwriter set this “Mutiny on the Bounty” conflict on edge with a harrowing 3D squall. The brigantine Essex is tossed on her beam-ends, canvas flapping, every inch of hemp rope groaning, every wooden beam, plank and yardarm moaning and on the verge of snapping.

Howard takes us above and beneath the waves for a whale hunt, shows us the (digital) kill and the gruesome business of harvesting the blubber and oil. His arty touches include lots of extreme close-ups of men and metalworking, blocks and belaying pins, ratlines and rigging.

It was an unlucky voyage, with few whales and feuding commanding officers anxious to finish their deadly work and get home so they could never see each other again. In South America, they’re warned about a “white as alabaster” whale with a grudge. And they laugh.

Cillian Murphy makes a solid impression as a mate and friend of Chase’s. Young Tom Holland is an engaging younger version of Gleeson’s Tom Nickerson, a wide-eyed kid “learning the ropes,” as they say at sea.

Hemsworth is properly hunky and iconic. He looks studly in the stand-at-the-masthead shot (Russell Crowe in “Master & Commander”), and manfully does his best with the quasi-poetic dialogue.

“Look at him! Most fearsome creature ever to live on this Earth!”

Walker pretty much wilts in Hemsworth’s presence, which might be dramatically required but tends to deflate the sails, here.

The particulars of the “vengeful” whale are given plenty of Hollywood touches, the lost-at-sea/”custom of the sea” ordeal of the shipwrecked crew is more gruesome in the telling than the showing.

The digital storms and whales are beautifully rendered, and the 3D (broken lines whipping at you, harpoons and whales right in your face) tastefully used.

But what’s missing here is the overarching theme of Melville’s book, the sense that this story had more than just class conflict and that one account of a whale fighting back in common with “Moby Dick.”

John Huston’s famous 1950s version of “Moby Dick” was troubled and flawed, but a true epic poem that seems to grow in stature with the passing decades. If he’d had digital whales and storms, the “troubled” label that dogged that Gregory Peck/Richard Basehart/Orson Welles film would have been erased. He got at the Big Ideas and Big Themes.

Howard’s “In the Heart of the Sea” merely unravels the yarn that inspired the great book, a good-looking film that never sinks, but never really soars either.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action and peril, brief startling violence, and thematic material

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Brendan Gleeson, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Ben Whishaw
Credits: Directed by Ron Howard, script by Charles Leavitt, based on the book by Nathaniel Philbrick. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:01

Tom Hardy manages the brilliant trick of playing two physically, emotionally and intellectually distinct mobster brothers in “Legend,” a new film about Britain’s Swinging ’60s and the thugs who bloodied them up. They are played in different shades of brutality, and Hardy never lets us see them as one actor portraying two men, even if the effects occasionally give away the game.

It’s another movie about The Krays, the dapper, businesslike and mercurial Reggie and his psychotic and unfiltered brother Ronald.

Reggie was lean and clean, a sharp dresser you didn’t want to cross. Ever.

Ronnie was thicker featured (dental appliances help), wore glasses, might drop a bit of literature or mythology into a conversation. Before he’d flip out and toss a tantrum, commit assault or stab or shoot you.

Reggie was a lady killer. Not literally. Perhaps that’s what Frances Shea (Emily Browning, a pixie-cut/mini-skirted embodiment of Mod London) saw in him. She narrates this story of gambling, gang-wars and extortion.

Ex-Doctor Who Christopher Eccleston is the hapless cop, always tailing the lads as they slip into their gigantic 1960s American cars (Lincoln Continental, Ford Galaxy 500) on trips to their various “legitimate businesses.”

Ronnie is “homosexual,” and blunt about it. Freshly out of prison when we meet him, he keeps pretty boys with him. But he’s off his meds, and he needs his meds to stay sane. Without them, his demons get the better of him.

David Thewlis plays their manager and “fixer,” Chazz Palminteri shows up as an American mob lieutenant making business arrangements with these up-and-comers.

Writer-director Brian Helgeland (“42,” and he scripted “Mystic River”) delivers a handsomely-mounted mob period piece, conventionally structured with moments of flash. He got Paul Bettany (hilariously psychotic) to play the Krays’ London mob rival, and stages a somewhat bemused “gang war” that’s all fun and games, until Ron breaks the hammers out — literally. Ears are bitten off and heads are butted. These guys were savage toughs, no matter how much polish they tried to present.

Browning never quite gives us a clue about what made Frances look the other way at the evidence of she was dating a brutish gangster. There’s no morality here, but where’s the real allure? Her family was tied to the Krays, no matter how much her scolding mother (Tara Fitzgerald) protested.

It overstays the welcome its Point A to Point B narrative can support. But it’s a more ambitious film than the earlier, grittier “The Krays,” with more of a sense of class consciousness (the lads mingled with nobility, which liked hobnobbing with the mob) and features the odd poetic flourish in the script.

As in the line their “fixer” affixes to their name, cementing the legend of Kray.

“There’s an inherent threat in that one commanding syllable.”

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language throughout, some sexual and drug material

Cast: Tom Hardy, Emily Browning, David Thewlis, Christopher Eggleston
Credits: Written and directed by Brian Helgeland, based on the John Pearson book. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:11

“Krampus” is a holiday horror farce that teeters on the uneasy middle ground between “Gremlins” and the Finnish Santa-as-Monster movie “Rare Exports.”

Not that funny, not that scary, it falls somewhere between “Oh, why not?” and “Oh, why bother?”

It’s built around a German myth about Santa’s “dark shadow,” a hoofed, horned and bearded beast who shows up to punish kids who have been naughty around the holidays. Leave it to the Germans.

Omi, the grandma played by Krista Stadler (a Teutonic dead ringer for Sissy Spacek) knows this. But she doesn’t warn grandson Max (Emjay Anthony), in either German or English. Perhaps that’s because wishing the worst on his horrible extended family seems, well, justified.

Mom (Toni Collette) and Dad (Adam Scott) are stressed, and grown-up-too-fast older sister (Stefania LaVie Owen) rolls her eyes at Max’s lingering belief in St. Nick.

But it’s not until Aunt Linda (Allison Tolman) and Uncle Howard (David Koechner, the boss/neighbor/relative everybody loves to hate) show up with their redneck knucklehead brood that Christmas goes to hell.

Elderly Aunt Dorothy (Conchata Ferrell) is the indigestible nut at the center of this fruitcake.

“Looks like Martha Stewart threw up in here…Where’s the nog? I need to get merry!”

So much for Max’s wish for a “Christmas, like it used to be.”

One torn up letter to Santa later, a blizzard begins, menacing snowmen turn up in the yard, the power goes out and the family starts to shrink, one jerk at a time.

Co-writer/director Michael Dougherty (“Trick’r Treat”) tapped into an unknown horror goldmine here. But the monsters — assorted dolls, jack-in-the-boxes and gingerbread men come to life, — are more amusing than menacing. Nothing we haven’t seen in the “Insidious” sequels.

The laughs about gun-toting rubes, sugar junkies, bullies getting their comeuppance, are scattered and rare. Most of them come from unfiltered Ferrell (of “Two and a Half Men”), playing a cliche.

“Who doesn’t make a ham for for Christmas? What are you now, a Jew?”

Collette doesn’t give us much to cling to, and Scott barely registers. Koechner’s loser-lout doesn’t have enough funny things to say or do.

It’s better in conception than in execution, with all the energy hurled at the effects and murderous Krampus attacks. The actors fail to feel the fear.

And really, what’s Christmas without the horror?

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sequences of horror violence/terror, language and some drug material

Cast: Toni Collette, Adam Scott, David Koechner, Emjay Anthony, Conchata Ferrell.
Credits: Directed by Michael Dougherty, script by Todd Casey, Zach Shields and Michael Dougherty. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:38