Movie Nation

A scattering of early Awards Season honors have made “Spotlight” the picture to beat, and an early Oscar favorite.

“Mad Max: Fury Road” has traction, and honors are landing on George Miller as director, an overdue honor for the guy who did all the “Mad Max” movies, AND “Babe,” AND “Happy Feet.”

The LA Critics found some love for “Ex Machina” star Alicia Vikander, there’s a probable Michael Shannon supporting actor nomination for “99 Homes” seemingly in the works, Leo DiCaprio is earning early buzz from the earliest groups (NY Critics, LA Critics, Boston Critics) for “The Revenent.”

Kristen Stewart is a surprise contender, thanks to her work in the “Clouds of Sils Maria,” unreleased at this point.

“Room” and “Brooklyn” and “Carol” are scoring the expected actress nominations in both lead and supporting categories. No love for “Suffragette?” “Joy” likewise isn’t on any Oscar prognosticator’s radar.

“Beasts of No Nation” has some Idris Elba buzz, but no way Hollywood will honor a movie released in a few theaters AND on Netflix at the same time. Or will they?

Matt Damon (“The Martian”) and Michael B. Jordan (“Creed”) feel like outliers with a genuine chance to land a coveted Globe and/or Oscar nomination. Have to wonder if “Creed” will fade before that happens. “Martian” has legs, and it’s a terrific performance.

These results are tilted, early on, by the non-indicator groups “Boston Online Critics,” National Board of Review (humph), Gotham Awards, etc. Figure several titles will fade, a couple of others will rise. Those last two are notorious for honoring films that aren’t remembered come Christmas.

And let’s face it, journalist movie critics are going to LOVE a movie about heroic (print) journalists, so “Spotlight” might be earning the benefit of a little bias.

But attention is being shoved at “Love & Mercy” and some other little seen wonders at just the right moment. Some gold might emerge from this mid-December buzz.

“Chi-Raq” is Spike Lee’s most audacious film in decades. DECADES.

It’s as if he ignored everything after “Do the Right Thing,” which included a few very good films, a few mediocre ones and some dreadful “Spike is DONE” outings, and reached back to his outspoken youth.

A preachy, edgy riff on Aristophanes’ ancient Greek classic “Lysistrata,” “Chi-Raq” is as timely as the latest mass shooting, as topical as the gun violence body count on any evening TV newscast. It’s the best movie you didn’t get around to seeing last weekend.

Like “Lysistrata,” it’s a script built on topical rhymes — hip-hopped and slangy. Samuel L. Jackson, a veteran of Lee’s early films, dazzles as the foul-mouthed narrator Dolmedes.

He tells of Chicago, a town so riven by gun violence, so overwhelmed by murder that “the big money maker is the black-suit undertaker.”

He tells of the gang war — Trojans in orange, led by the one-eyed mobster Cyclops (Wesley Snipes, in his funniest performance in this century), vs. Spartans in purple, led by the charismatic rapper Chiraq, played and sung by Nick Cannon.

Yes, THAT Nick Cannon, the black Ryan Seacrest, the light comedian and game show host who married Mariah Carrey.

Cannon is the revelation here, giving a startling turn of menace, power and regret as the rapper/gang leader/lover whose charisma is never in doubt, whose morality is hidden deep in the recesses of his tattooed soul.

The one person who may have influence over Chiraq is Lysistrata, played with a searing sexual and intellectual dynamism by Teyonah Parris. She is the stiletto-heeled harpy who might be able to stop the violence. Once she’s been shown how.

Angela Bassett has the wise-old-woman of Englewood role here, the woman who points out to Lysistrata the example of Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee. Like the ancient Greek Lysistrata, Gbowee convinced the women of her troubled country to withhold sex until the menfolk dialed down the violence of Liberia’s civil war.

That is what Lysistrata talks Cyclops’ girl (Michelle Mitchenor) into joining her in — a “sex strike,” as in “no peace, no” um, sexual congress.

Lee and screenwriter Kevin Willmott (“The Confederate States of America”) stick close enough to the Greek source material to give this structure. But the fun stuff involves Lee revisiting “School Daze” and other earlier hits. The chaotic conflict of the sexes, of women on women, and its consequences dances off the screen. The humor can be low, broad, juvenile. Just as it was in “She’s Gotta Have It” and those earliest Spike outings.

Dave Chapelle  shows up as a strip club owner, rhyming and whining his worries about a lack of pole dancers during this strike. D.B. Sweeney is the comically embattled mayor. David Patrick Kelley is a Confederacy-loving National Guard general caught with his Stars and Bars underwear showing. There are references to Kelley’s defining role, in the classic gang film “The Warriors,” in other scenes.

And John Cusack yells himself hoarse as a white priest who hectors and lectures his mostly-African American congregation about their history, their leaders, the violence in their community and the National Rifle Association’s role in America’s culture of gun violence.

That last bit should have derailed the film, but it works. Lee plays things in alternating shades of seriousness and satiric silliness — a sexual “slow jam” sing-off, lots of choreography. And there’s Mister Senor Love Daddy reincarnated, Samuel L., donning suits of many colors, stepping out, front and center, to re-set the tale and reinforce the message of Lee’s most strident early films.

“Wake Up!”

Damn if it doesn’t still work.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content including dialogue, nudity, language, some violence and drug use

Cast: Teyonah Parris, Nick Cannon, Angela Bassett, Samuel L. Jackson, John Cusack, Wesley Snipes
Credits: Directed by Spike Lee, script by Kevin Willmott and Spike Lee, based on the play by Aristophanes. An Amazon Studio/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:58

Say what you will about Hollywood espionage thrillers, the Brits have them all beat when it comes to emphasizing politics over geopolitics.

It seems they never quite got over Tony Blair’s embrace of George W. Bush’s war. Thus, “maintaining our independence” is the ever-present under-current in most of their movies in this genre. “MI-5” is the latest. They don’t want the CIA and the USA running their intelligence service.

The British TV series “MI-5,” called “Spooks” across the pond, gets a big screen tale in “MI-5,” titled “Spooks: The Greater Good” in the UK.

It’s a heaping helping of somewhat polite terrorism, treachery within Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the unseen heavy hand of the CIA and bit of the old ultra-violence — TV friendly variety.

The language may be the most violent thing about it.

“I’ll cut your baby of her and drown it in a toilet,” the section chief Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) threatens the Arab American terrorist (Elyes Gabel) at one point. By phone.

“Was the baby (bit) too much?” he asks a subordinate after hanging up.

“No. It’s you.”

At its most basic, “MI-5” is a means of cashing in 0n the popularity of “Game of Thrones” hunk Kit Harington. He wears the same long curls and hurls himself into the role of a discredited agent summoned back to help when the boss (Pearce) suspects turncoats in the agency helped the wanted terrorist get away before being handed over to the CIA.

Will Holloway has ex-colleagues warning him to not get involved, that the boss is daft or turned himself. So there’ll be no rogue agent stuf, this time, right?

“Do NOT go dark. Do you hear me?”

Go dark is what Holloway does, down a rabbit hole, trying to do the disgraced boss’s bidding, root out the moles and prevent Islamists from carrying out a big attack on London.

It’s all over-the-top, in a TV series sort of way. Smaller terrorist acts happen, chases are rendered mundane and there is much pointing of guns at Will only to have Will take the gun from the crack agent pointing it at him.

Jennifer Ehle (“Zero Dark Thirty,” TV’s “Pride and Prejudice”) is the unflappable higher-up who never over-reacts, even when all hell breaks loose. Tim McInerny (“Notting Hill,” and Percy from TV’s “Blackadder”) over-reacts, here and there, as the boss presiding over this trainwreck.

David Harewood also stars, and an actress to be adored simply by virtue of her veddy-British name — Tuppence Middleton of “The Imitation Game” and “Trance.”

There’s little novelty to any of this, just a lot of scampering between Moscow, London and Berlin.

“You and Harry ever talk about Berlin?”

Standard issue spy stuff, a surprise or two, a shootout or three. Nothing you should pay money to see in a theater.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and some language

Cast: Kit Harington, Tuppence Middleton, Peter Firth, Jennifer Ehle
Credits: Directed by Bharat Nalluri, script by Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:44

Of course it didn’t happen this way. Not exactly. Not even remotely.

“A Royal Night Out,” about VE-Day, 1945, when the two British princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, slipped out of Buckingham Palace, “incognito,” and experienced the greatest celebration London had ever seen, is wish fulfillment fantasy.

But it’s bloody adorable.

We’d love to think those stuffy, in-bred royals cut loose, experienced a little of the common life. They’d flirt, dance the Lindy Hop, knock back a beer or two, and some champagne. They’d be treated like any other single young women present at a night-long baccianale.

The horror!

At its best, this Julian Harold (“Kinky Boots,””Becoming Jane”) comedy is a throw-back, a madcap romp set to a swinging, big band beat. The Brits apparently didn’t go for it, the sticks in the mud. They’re missing a laugh-out-loud riff on those Windsors they worship, before QEII discovered her fetish for hats.

Elizabeth is “Lillabets,” here, a dutiful daughter played with spirit and spunk by Sarah Gadon (“Spider-Man 2,””Dracula Untold”). Margaret is “Mags,” or “P2” as she quips, on occasion (Princess 2). Bel Powley (“Diary of a Teenage Girl”) brings a taste of hellion to her.

Which is just so…right. Bad decisions? She was infamous for them. Surely she started in her teens. She nags her sister into asking her parents to let them go out and experience the joy of a nation relieved from six long years of fighting the Nazis.

With every idiotically elongated vowel she utters as Mags, Powley is a stitch.

“Best be-HAAAAAVE-your. HONestly.” Her every greeting, drunk or sober, is worthy of Madea.

“Helll-AAAWwwwwwwwww!”

The girls get permission, dodge the underhanded formal party among aged nobility that their mother (Emily Watson, no fun in all the right ways) springs on them. And that’s how they lose their officer corps escorts, who figure they’re free to hit the brothels and the pubs until dawn. Until they drunkenly realize they’ve lost the lasses and will have to face their imposing father after he’s given another “King’s Speech” (Rupert Everett, nicely done).

“Lizzie” has no money and is rescued by a cynical, AWOL bomber gunner (Jack Reynor), a bloke who’s over the whole class system and the Royal Family. He doesn’t know who Lizzie is, but “Little Miss Tofeenose” has no business saying “My whole FAMILY served in this war!”

“Sandwiches. Maybe.”

It’s a comedy of goofy little grace notes — the two escort officers (Jack Laskey, Jack Gordon), drinking to their doom, singing a glorious duet of “God Save the King” in a toilet, Mags being slipped a spiked drink by a Naval officer who sweeps her into a brothel, only to see her rescued by the royalty-loving hustler-smuggler (Roger Allam, hilarious) who runs the joint.

“P2! In my knocking shop!”

Mags, drunkenly slurring “We’re GERMAN, you know. Mustn’t talk about it” about her Hanover-turned-Windsor family, is again, just so right.

The surprises are few, and none of it am0unts to a whole lot. But for those up to taking yet another British sentimental journey to “their finest hour,” “A Royal Night Out” manages something unheard of in the decades of Windsor wooliness since. It makes them cute, if only for one night.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some sexual content and brief drug elements

Cast: Sarah Gadon, Bel Powley, Rupert Everett, Emily Watson, Jack Reynor
Credits: Directed by Julian Harold, script by Trevor Silva and Kevin Hood. An Atlas Distribution release.

Running time: 2:36

Mother Teresa was still just Sister Teresa, a Catholic school teacher and head mistress in Calcutta, when she took on her “call within a calling.”

She resolved to stop teaching girls from privileged families and teach the poorest of the poor, India’s “untouchables,” instead. She learned to nurse and took care of the sick and served as a midwife. And when she finally saw one man left to die on the street too many, she founded a hospice, took the dying in and cared for them.

A Nobel Peace Prize was certainly deserved. That she is halfway to sainthood in the eyes of the Vatican should be no surprise.

But that also means she’ll probably never earn a sober-minded film biography, a movie that doesn’t cast her in halo light. Because it’s not just conservative India, which was shamed by the cultural inequities and callous home-grown religions that did not address the problems she pointed out, that is sharply critical of her. She founded a laughably inefficient charitable foundation, cozied up to dictators and was seriously doctrinaire in her attitudes toward birth control, abortion and the nature of suffering.

Even a film hagiography like “The Letters”, about her years of questioning her faith, cannot quite force itself to frankly depict her uncertainty. It’s just another shrine on the pilgrimage to her sainthood.

The wonderful British character actress Juliet Stevenson (“Bend it Like Beckham”) plays the Macedonian Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhi, who became a nun in Dublin, moved to India and experienced her second conversion there.

Veteran TV documentary maker William Riead, who built a career in “The Making Of” films — movies about the making of this or that feature film — tells Mother Teresa’s story in flashback.

The priest in charge of researching the first “miracle” associated with Mother Teresa — a cancer cure a woman credits to a photo of  Teresa — is played by Rutger Hauer. “We have to be certain,” his Vatican bosses tell him.

That puts the Great Rutger Hauer in the position of simply sitting and listening to the one priest who knew the late Mother way back when. The Great Max Von Sydow is that priest, Celeste van Exem. He is the one who tells the story of Mother Teresa, and relates lines from her letters of “doubt.”

“The Letters” bogs down in the years it took the church to give the woman permission to leave her “cloistered” status as teacher and go out among the poor. The Indian backlash at this “Christian woman” caring for their poor. She was trying to convert them, they claimed, which she denied. But it is also alleged that she baptized the dying in her hospice.

The film is riddled with repetitive dialogue and eye-rolling moments, which a pro like Stevenson manages to deliver without rolling her eyes. But her portrayal is consistently selfless and often moving, even as she is eagerly avoiding publicity for herself.

“I am just a pencil in God’s hand.”

Riead had a very good cast and plenty of authentic settings. But he never had a poetic script. Merely addressing the controversies (outside of India) that follow the woman would have lent credibility to this enterprise. He avoids that.

And in doing so, he creates a movie that won’t convert anyone, a film for the faithful who want to believe nothing but the best about Mother Teresa. Real life is rarely cut and dry, and dramatically flat, as this.

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic material including some images of human suffering

Cast: Juliet Stevenson, Max Von Sydow, Rutger Hauer
Credits: Written and directed by William Riead. A release.

Running time: 1:54

Viewers in the indie film loop will recognize “The Wannabe,” actor-turned-director Nick Sandow’s new mob drama, as telling the same story as the dizzier, sexier “Rob the Mob.”

Both are based on the life of Tommy Uva, a delusional young Italian  American whose hero is mob boss John Gotti, whose dream is to become a part of Gotti’s mob family.

But as befits a film with Martin Scorsese as a credited producer, “Wannabe” is more “King of Comedy” tragic, more sadly psychotic, than its 2014 predecessor.

Because Tommy Uva–who goes by “Thomas” here — is deep into his made-man fantasy. And there’s little funny about that.

Thomas (Vincent Piazzo of “Jersey Boys”) dresses in loud double-breasted suits and white leather shoes. He packs a piece, practices his shtick in the mirror, and hangs out in the courthouse where “The Teflon Don,” “The Hero of Ozone Park,” Gotti, is on trial. It’s 1992, and Thomas is enraged that Gotti is facing prison, furious at anyone who reports on his misdeeds — especially self-promoting “Guardian Angel” and radio vigilante Curtis Sliwa.

Thomas also hangs out in front of known Gotti haunts. Gotti’s crew knows him and barely tolerates him. But over-40 Rosie, the “Duchess of Queens,” is intrigued. And having impulse-control issues, she seduces him and is seduced by his Mafia mania. She’s into what he’s into.

And as Thomas naively tries to ingratiate himself with the Gotti mob, even schemes to buy a juror to get him acquitted and get credit for it, Rosie — who likes the cocaine and the sex — goes along for the ride. Gotti’s conviction sends them on a spiral that leads down a rabbit hole of denial and into to a string of robberies and even an attempted assassination.

“Rob the Mob” was more about the robberies, given a comical, inept amateurism and a “Bonnie & Clyde” feel. “Wannabe” is more about the mental state of its couple, attempts at interventions, and tragedy.

Here’s the biggest difference between the films. Oscar winner Patricia Arquette brings mileage, desperation and regret to Rosie, a woman who can no longer be choosy about who she beds in the back of her Taurus, if she ever was choosy.

Arquette makes a marvelous counterpoint to Piazza’s functional but foolish Thomas. Piazza doesn’t quite get across the twitchy energy you expect from this guy. Thomas is treated as a neighborhood “character,” someone always underestimated until he pulls out a gun. Guns are a great way for the dim-witted to buttress their delusions of grandeur.

Thomas/Tommy get slapped, pushed around and dismissed. Until the unmade man waves a Tech 9 or other handgun around at the “social club” card games. How d’ya like me now?

Not to belabor the comparison, but “Wannabe” lacks the breathless energy and romantic pathos of “Rob the Mob,” which paired up Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda. “Wannabe” hews more closely to the true story and avoids laughing at its anti-hero and heroine. But the characters are held at arm’s length, so our sympathies are more muted.

The different approach, the implied commentary on media-built mob worship and the presence of Arquette (“Boyhood”) make it worth your while. But as a general rule, you never want to be the second movie out on a particular piece of history. Even Scorsese’s name in the credits isn’t enough to make us forget the first film, or its virtues.

MPAA Rating:R for drug use, language, some sexuality and violence

Cast: Vincent Piazza, Patricia Arquette, Michael Imperioli, Jay Bulger
Credits: Written and directed by Nick Sandow. An eOne release.

Running time: 1:30

At the very beginning of my professional reviewing career, I joked that Sly Stallone needed to finish up this “Rocky” series now — before “Rocky IV” became “Rocky Needs an I.V.”

And damned if that wasn’t prophetic.

It’s amazing how this story, this character and this film franchise has endured. With “Creed,” it has transcended the need for Senior Citizen Stallone to get into the ring. And darned if the formula — the landmarks, the Stations of the Italian Stallion Cross (famous music,museum steps,  seedy gyms, training montages) — didn’t get to me a couple of times.

But let’s read to the end and see if I can force myself to endorse this. Because I left the theater very much on the fence.

“Creed” allows Ryan “Fruitvale Station” Cooglar to invert the Rocky Myth for a new generation. It stars Cooglar’s “Fruitvale” muse, Michael B. Jordan. He plays the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed, Rocky’s foe-turned-friend over the course of four “Rocky” movies, who died in “Rocky IV” back in 1985.

We meet the kid, apparently 13, in juvenile detention back in 1998. Apollo’s widow (Phylicia Rashad) takes the troubled boy home and raises him rich.

But Adonis Johnson — son of Apollo, the most famous alumnus of the Delphi Gym (All Greek to them) — has a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. He’s a college-educated financial analyst, but also a self-taught brawler who weekends in Mexico, boxing.

When he can’t get any of his dad’s boxing circle to train him, he seeks out Rocky Balboa, widowed restaurateur.

“Why would you pick a fighter’s life?”

Stallone strains, just a little, to find the working class pug deep inside of the Hollywood royalty he’s become. Stilted dialogue doesn’t help. It takes some effort to deliver an excuse for him to reprise Rocky’s most famous lines, “Yo Adrian” and “Yo Paulie.”  Rocky visits their graves and reads the newspaper to their headstones.

The kid wants to make his own name for himself, so he goes by Donnie Johnson up to the moment the world realizes he’s Adonis Johnson, son of Creed. And that name, that “Creed blood,” is how he leaps into the position of title contender, fighting a British thug (Tony Bellew) about to go to prison.

A love interest — a singer losing her hearing (Tessa Thompson of “Dear White People” and “Selma”) — gets the film’s best line, one that sums up Stallone, Rocky and the movie when she says it to Donnie.

All she wants is to “do what I love as long as I can.”

Stallone gets a couple of sentimental moments with some emotional punch to them.  They don’t add up to a lot without our previous investment in the character. Oscar nomination? I don’t see it.

Jordan is a fine actor who looks nothing like Carl Weathers, and even bulked up, is nobody’s idea of a boxer. These ,movies were never really about “the sweet science.” They’re burlesques of it, its practitioners and its milieu.

The movie doesn’t do enough to break the “Rocky” formula, and Cooglar does little to misdirect us away from realizing this. The “grit” of Philly seems digitally removed. Real ESPN and HBO sportscasters, real HBO voice over work by Liev Schrieber are supposed to add authenticity. As are the freeze-frames showing us each hulking opponent, his name and record.

Alas, this “Greatest Hits” is missing my favorite training trope. No, not the chasing chickens that Mickey made Rocky do. Rocky never takes the kid to punch sides of beef.

There’s a justly-celebrated “long take,” which follows Stallone and Jordan from the dressing room, into the ring and through an earlier fight. It’s a showcase scene and is impressive, if not quite dazzling.

But at this stage of this saga, you kind of know where it’s going and which emotional buttons will be punched, the ones I predicted way back in 1984 with my little IV-I.V.” crack. Another two hours and 13 minutes of it, even with decent “Rocky” style fights (roundhouse punch after roundhouse punch) is hardly merited.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, language and some sensuality

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Phylicia Rashad, Tessa Thompson
Credits: Directed by Ryan Coogler, script by Aaron Covington and Ryan Coogler. An MGM-Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:13

A father’s encouragement to his late-blooming son lies at the heart of Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur.”

“You’re me, and more,” Daddy dinosaur (the voice of Jeffrey Wright) tells his chicken-livered offspring, Arlo (Raymond Ochoa).

Arlo, we know, will have to prove that, to be brave to “make your mark.”

But along the way, he has to befriend — OK, adopt — a feral human boy, a growling bundle of teeth and moxie whom he names “Spot.” They have assorted random adventures, and in the end, some message about “family” is imparted. It is the Pixar way.

But “Dinosaur,”which boasts stunning, photo-realistic animation of water, trees, bugs and Pterodactyls, is a movie best described by that word — “random.”

It’s pretty, occasionally cute, but trippy — random. Yeah, there’s one credited screenwriter, but more than all but the worst Pixar product, it shows the signs of “written by committee.” Here’s a cute critter, here’s a cuter one, here are a couple that will make great fast food joint toy tie-ins.

Arlo was the runt of his litter, but Mom (Frances McDormand) and Dad love him anyway. Everybody else on the dinosaur family farm contributes. Arlo, not so much.

Then he gets lost. And the non-verbal human “critter” is his only help as he tries to make his way home.

When I say “Dinosaur” is “trippy,” I’m not just talking about the hallucinogenic scene where dinosaur — sort of a Saturday morning cartoon (cutesie, anatomically inaccurate)  version of a Brontosaurus — and human boy get into some fermented fruit and go a little loopy.

There’s their run-in with a cultist clan of Pterodactyls, led by Thunderclap (Voiced by Steve Zahn, who else?). They follow “The Storm,” because the “Storm giveth” and taketh away.

And then there’s the Texas-sized T-Rexes, in the middle of a “longhorn roundup.” Sam Elliott is their patriarch, and purt-much steals the picture, pardner.

“Hey kid, if you’re pullin’ my leg, I’m gonna EAT yours.”

There’s a touching moment or two, a maybe five laughs. And as I said, the best looking water and flora of any computer animated cartoon. It’s not “Monster University,” but it ain’t “Inside/Out” either. Not by a long shot.

“Good Dinosaur” is preceded by the very cute “Sanjay’s Super Team,” about an Indian boy who embraces the gods of his father’s religion, eschewing the caped superheroes of American TV.

MPAA Rating:PG for peril, action and thematic elements

Cast: The voices of Raymond Ochoa, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Sam Elliott, Anna Paquin, Steve Zahn
Credits: Directed by Peter Sohn, screenplay by Meg LeFauve . A Disney/Pixar release.

Running time: 1:40

Dry as a martini and as perfectly composed as a Christmas card, “Carol” is is the gay “Far From Heaven,” if that’s not redundant, another tale of “forbidden love” amid the polished Packards and crisp fashion lines of the 1950s.

Austere in its longing and soapy in its romantic sentiments, it benefits from a lovely, considered performance by Cate Blanchett and nicely understated work by Rooney Mara.

And if it generates little heat or longing between its characters and their relationship, at least some of that can be written off to its era and the once-notorious source novel. Patricia Highsmith (“The Talented Mr. Ripley”) wrote “The Price of Salt” in an age when when homosexuality was still called “the love that dare not speak its name.”

They meet at the toy department in a New York department store. It’s 1952, the terms “gaydar” hadn’t been coined. But when the immaculately turned-out Carol Aird (Blanchett) turns her posh locutions on shop girl Therese Belivet (Rooney), the younger woman picks up on…something.

Carol is shopping for a Christmas gift for her little girl. The shop girl recommends a toy train set, adds that it can be delivered. There’s a name and an address as part of that transaction. The suggestion, a “boy’s toy” for a little girl in the “I Like Ike” age? Another signal.

Conveniently, Carol forgets her gloves. Therese sends them with the train. And next thing you know, they’re meeting for martinis and creamed spinach, talking in code, looking each other over.

Carol is going through a divorce, and she has history. Her rich husband (Kyle Chandler) knows about her women.

Therese is an aspiring photographer, and is being courted by Richard (Jake Lacy of “Love the Coopers) who wants to take her to Europe, and flirted-with by others.

Director Todd Haynes (“Far From Heaven,” “I’m Not There”) makes much of the naivete of the era. Even in New York, there are New Yorkers too young or unworldly to know that there are women attracted to other women. Even the educated and sophisticated — lawyers, psychotherapists — wonder about phases, “crushes” and cures. Therese’s young men don’t even know what this is called.

Blanchett’s take on the title character feels filtered through the lens of gay icons Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Carol is regal, imperious, spoiled and guarded.

“Just when you think it can’t get any worse,” she grouses, striking another perfect pose, “you run out of cigarettes!”

The leads seem drawn together by mutual appreciation of beauty. Therese is inexperienced, put off by the butch lesbians she spies in parties, who also give her the once-over. But the chaste “chase” of the Carol-Therese courtship just adds to the feeling that this is missing a sense of real attraction and longing.

It’s far easier to believe that every guy in their orbit is somehow blind to the fact that he’s getting nowhere with this gorgeous woman who may be forced to be passive by the times, but who cannot muster the simplest feelings for him. And that is hard to swallow in itself. It helps to think of Lacy’s resemblance to Ben Affleck and remember “Chasing Amy” in those fruitless flirtations.

It might have been a coming-of-age story (Highsmith would never have had that), or as some gay columnists have suggested, an “initiation” tale. But it isn’t. Haynes never lifts “Carol” above over-dressed melodrama. And with every perfect bar where every perfect martini is served, every perfect dive of a motel on the “Lolita” roadtrip that the “just friends” abruptly take together, “Carol” betrays its true priorities.

We’re here for the drinks, the fashions and the smokes, not smokey looks and not passion.

MPAA Rating: R for a scene of sexuality/nudity and brief language

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kyle Chandler, Jake Lacy, Sarah Paulson, John Magaro
Credits: Directed by Todd Haynes, script by Phyllis Nagy, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel. A Weinstein Co.  release.

Running time: 1:50

“You know this story,” the sidekick soon-to-be-known as Igor narrates. Lightning, corpses, “a mad genius.”

But what if you didn’t? You know, “know the story”?

“Victor Frankenstein” is a madcap mashup of three stories — at least as they’re traditionally adapted for the screen — a re-introduction of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in a world that has seen Disney’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame” and the Robert Downey Jr. “Sherlock Holmes” movies.

And for about 30 sem-frenetic minutes, it works. No, hear me out.

Daniel Radcliffe is a hunchbacked mid-Victorian Era circus freak who pines for the aerielist Lorelei (Jessica Brown Findlay, Lady Sybil on “Downton Abbey”). Whatever his lot in life, this bright young man doubles as the circus medic. And when Lorelei takes a fall, he springs into action.

A cocky passing med student, played by James McAvoy, helps. They “see” the body the same way — through book-learning and training, muscles and ligaments and bones underneath the flesh. The med student frees — literally — the “freak.”

“You’re not a clown, you’re a physician!”

The med student — Victor Frankenstein — has his sidekick. He gives him the name “Igor,” gives him a makeover (a hunchback “cure”), and despite the younger man’s occasional call of “Master,” treats him as his colleague. They will use science and cadavers to make history!

Here’s what we’re to go along with — two of Britain’s most adorable and adored acting exports, in ’80s hair metal coiffures, engaging in staccato banter as they set out to prove that “death can be made a temporary condition!”

In the stunningly-recreated Victorian England here, anything seemed possible.

There’s a crucifix-packing Scotland Yard detective (Andrew Scott) who smells the “roots of an evil, sinful mischief.” And a disapproving Frankenstein-the-elder (Charles Dance, fatherly menace incarnate).

The “science” is a series of grotesque — OK, gross — fleshy experiments, all leading to exactly what we expect.

Treat the whole thing as a vamp and it kind of works. That first half hour of “makeover” crackles with as much wit as scripter Max “American Ultra” Landis can give it.

Alas, the film goes flat as it reaches for the familiar story beats and we realize that all we can recall from director Paul McGuigan’s “Lucky Number Slevin” is its overdose of production design.

Still, those who adore the two stars will find some fun here. And if you don’t “know the story,” you won’t be nearly as bored as the rest of us.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for macabre images, violence and a sequence of destruction

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, James McAvoy, Jessica Brown Findlay, Charles Dance, Andrew Scott
Credits: Directed by Paul McGuigan, script by Max Landis. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:49