“Red One”

(Action/Comedy: 2 hours, 03 minutes)

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu and J.K. Simmons

Director: Jake Kasdan

Rated: PG-13 (Action, violence, and language.)

Movie Review:

Not everything that is gift-wrapped is a good present. Despite being about Santa Claus, “Red One” is more of a summer action movie than a holiday debut. It is good on action, costumes and visual effects. It is also entertaining. However, it also involves too many extras, weighing down an otherwise interesting story.

Santa Claus, Code Name: Red One, is abducted just hours before Christmas. Commander Callum Drift (Johnson), the North Pole’s Head of Security, must find Saint Nicholas to save the holiday. To do so, he enlists the world’s most infamous bounty hunter and tracker Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans).

Jake Kasdan (“Jumanji: The Next Level,” 2019) directs this movie, which gets bogged down in its attempt to show too much. A simple, straightforward story would have worked. The movie gets carried away with action sequences and eye candy that it forgets to tend to its story.

Grade: C+ (a jolly one until it overloads with surpluses.)

“Memoir of a Snail”

(Animation/Drama: 1 hour, 35 minutes)

Starring: Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Jacki Weaver

Director: Adam Elliot

Rated: R (Sexual content, nudity, violent content and language)

Movie Review:

“Memoir of a Snail” appears a family movie at first glance, but it is an animated movie for adults. It is an interesting recounting of a young woman’s life and obsession with snails. Although it leans on the depressing side of life, it offers a beautiful ode to the beauty of living through endurance.

Grace Pudel (voiced impressively by Snook) details her tragic history to a snail named after Sylvia Plath. Her twin brother is Gilbert Pudel (an engaging Smit-McPhee). She likes hoarding, snails and anything relating to them, guinea pigs and books by well-known authors, and she is an introvert. Gilbert likes fire, magic, and rescuing animals, and he is a bit of a daredevil. In a 1970s Australia, Grace and Gilbert’s lives consist of one misfortune after the next. This becomes even more so when the twins are orphaned and separated after the death of their father Percy (Dominique Pinon).

“Memoir of a Snail” is captivating, even while the main characters face horrific events that are saddening. Stop-motion animation adds to its beauty by making one feel you’re looking at a classic in the making. It plays like a melancholic female version of Tom Hanks’ “Forrest Gump,” and director-writer Adam Elliot (“Mary and Max,” 2009) makes his characters endearing enough to care about their plights.

Again, this is not an animated movie for children. The themes presented are for mature audiences. Grace’s narrative is intriguing, although it thrives on the most negative points of her life until she sees the beauty of existing through the perspective of an aging friend called Pinky (Weaver).. Applying the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, Pinky says, “Life can only be understood backwards, but we have to live it forwards.”

Audiences should look forward to seeing Grace’s story. It is a masterful production about understanding and living through marvelous and dire circumstances.

Grade: B (A worthy memoir, this is.)

“A Real Pain”

(Drama: 1 hour, 30 minutes)

Starring: Kieran Culkin, Jesse Eisenberg and Will Sharpe

Director: Jesse Eisenberg

Rated: R (Language throughout, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use)

Movie Review:

“A Real Pain” is painful for a moment because the main characters do not act like adults. They exist in a tale of exploration and historical fact-finding, but they do not live up to their family’s inspiring history for nearly an hour. After that point, the men become grownups, and this screenplay by Jesse Eisenberg (“When You Finish Saving the World,” 2022) develops into a nice tale of self-exploration via reflections on the past.

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play cousins, Benjamin and David Kaplan. The two mismatched cousins travel to Poland to honor their late grandmother on a tour with four other Jews and their tour guide James (Sharpe). Soon, emotions bubble to the top almost derailing the tour.

Nearly an hour passes before Benji Kaplan stops being obnoxious. Culkin plays the role irritatingly well. Opposite him is his more reserved family man, his cousin David, played by Eisenberg in his typical nerdy fashion.

“A Real Pain” follows this year’s father-daughter movie “Treasure” starring Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry. The two movies play out similarly. Both are interesting takes on a family trying to explore and understand their Jewish ancestry while facing intrafamilial strife.

“A Real Pain” is captivating but, yet again, painful because of Eisenberg and specifically Calkin’s characters’ immaturity. One waits for the grownups to appear, and they do eventually where Eisenberg and Culkin shine. Then, the movie takes on a more dramatic tone and leaves the childish comedic bits behind for a worthwhile drama about one of history’s darkest chapters, the Holocaust.

Grade: B- (It becomes a touching film after it goes from boys to men.)

“The Outrun”

(Drama: 1 hour, 58 minutes)

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Paapa Essiedu, Saskia Reeves and Stephen Dillane

Director: Nora Fingscheidt

Rated: R (Language, sexuality, nudity, and violence)

Movie Review:

An adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir, “The Outrun” is another adequately done movie about a person suffering from alcoholism, which thrives on its main star’s talents. Like other movies of this type, “Outrun” spends a lot of time showing how alcoholism affects a person’s daily life. How these types of photoplays jump around from flashbacks to flashforwards makes one feel intoxicated too.

Saoirse Ronan plays the lead, Rona, an alcoholic. Rona leaves her partying life in London and returns home to the coasts of Scotland’s Orkney Islands. In between, we see her on-and-off relationship with her boyfriend Daynin (Essiedu), her estranged father Andrew, who suffers from bipolar disorder, and her constant stay at bars and other dives each time she relapses. Along the way, she learns how to deal with her alcoholism, although the strategy is not always foolproof.

Again, most of these alcoholism movies use asynchronous storytelling as a way of showing how a person deals with addiction. In “Outrun,” the process is repetitive to the point of exasperation. These constant flashbacks or flashboards often interfere with the storytelling. A chronological story would suffice.

So, this movie directed by Nora Fingscheidt (“The Unforgivable,” 2021) rests on the acting talents of Saoirse Ronan. She is exceptional here as in her other roles, happening since she was age 12 when she impressed audiences in “Atonement” (2007).

Grade: B- (A tediously repetitive addiction is difficult to outrun, but Ronan is superior as always).

“Bird”

(Drama: 1 hour, 59 minutes)

Starring: Nykiya Adams, Franz Rogowski, Barry Keoghan and Jason Buda

Director: Andrea Arnold

Rated: R (Language throughout, violence, brief nudity and drug content.)

Movie Review:

“Bird” is an intriguing hard-core drama that slightly teeters on being a fantasy. Through its coarse realism of urban life, a young tween blossoms into a responsible young woman.

Bailey Taylor lives with her father Bug (Keoghan), her half-brother Hunter (Buda), her father’s fiancé Kayleigh (Frankie Box) and her young children. Meanwhile, 12-year-old Bailey is concerned about her mother’s household, where her three younger siblings still live in a grim living situation with Bailey’s mother Peyton (Jasmine Jobson), who is mentally and physically abused by her live-in lover Skate (James Nelson-Joyce). Enter a gender-neutral-attired man simply known as Bird (an engaging Rogowski). He mostly watches Bailey from rooftops. Bailey and Bird become good friends despite a glaring age difference.

Bailey’s family, both her father’s and her mother’s households, are dysfunctional to the point the groups are almost depressing to watch frequently. The families depicted may live in the United Kingdom, but the poverty presented appears like a third-world country in their homes.

The blight conditions of these characters’ neighborhoods pose a gritty real-life setting. The drama is hard-hitting, but it is difficult to determine what is real sometimes. Bailey and Byrd have a type of relationship that borders on the supernatural. This aspect makes “Bird,” a hard-core drama, somewhat a fantasy also.

The movie has multiple scenes at its beginning featuring people yelling at each other, mainly Baley and Bug. Yet, those loud disagreements are what sets this movie in motion. The main is Bailey’s nonacceptance of Bug’s announcement of his marriage to Kayleigh.

Ultimately, the movie finds a sweet spot and becomes an emotive coming-of-age narrative. Bailey, played by an outstanding Nykiya Adams, finds her way as she enters womanhood thanks to Bird, who Franz Rogowski makes intriguing and refreshing as a non-binary character.

Grade: B- (Something to tweet about).