Entertainment

Already there’s a huge range of reactions to “You People,” which debuted on Netflix Friday after a week in a few theaters for appearance’s sake. Hilarious? Riotous? Hackneyed? Annoying? Are comic sensibilities really so various that nobody can agree whether the laughs and the heart are there with this thing, or not?

LIMA — Something straight out of fantasy will make its way to Lima Sunday afternoon. “Dragons and Mythical Beasts,” a show featuring spectacular puppets,...

It should come as no shock that the great novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day,” “Never Let Me Go,” “Klara and the Sun”) has a beautifully delicate hand as a screenwriter — but nonetheless “Living,” directed by Oliver Hermanus and based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film “Ikiru,” arrives as a happy surprise. Not that it’s a happy movie, precisely, but this quiet tale of an ordinary 1950s London man (Bill Nighy) facing the end of his life is a joy: elegantly written, movingly performed, evocatively filmed. Like the best of novels — one of Ishiguro’s, for example — it creates a tiny world to get lost in, one whose faces and shadows and sunlight linger with you, even after you’ve returned to your own.

A pleasantly nutty thriller about a crafty, high-end toy, “M3GAN” exploits a child’s grief for the greater good of the killer-doll genre. That may be enough for 100 minutes of your early January.

The “Grumpy Old Men” era seems to come for all of our lovable movie stars, including Tom Hanks, who easily slides into this new phase with “The Man Called Otto,” a remake of the Oscar-nominated Swedish film, “A Man Called Ove.” It’s not easy to translate the famously dry and somewhat bleak Scandinavian humor to a sunnier, more optimistic American worldview, but writer David Magee and director Marc Forster manage to maintain the melancholy of the original film, which is based on the book by Swedish author Fredrik Backman.

An overacted, badly written, murder mystery dud, “The Pale Blue Eye” takes its title from a quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 Boston-set story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe himself is also a character in the film, an adaptation of the 2006 novel by Louis Bayard adapted by writer-director Scott Cooper (“Antlers,” “Black Mass”). The film’s action is set beneath an iron winter sky in 1830 at the United States Military Academy, West Point, where Poe is a cadet, in a snow-covered, densely-wooded Hudson Valley, New York. After an apparent suicide of a cadet, academy leaders Colonel Thayer (Timothy Spall) and Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) hire celebrated, detective Augustus Landor (a bearded Christian Bale) to get the bottom of the dark, blood-spattered mystery.

Eleven years after the “Shrek 2” spinoff “Puss in Boots,” the sassy Spanish feline voiced by Antonio Banderas has returned for another fairy-tale-busting adventure, directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, and written by Paul Fischer (with a story by Tommy Swerdlow and Tom Wheeler). Crawford, Mercado and Fischer all worked on the Dreamworks Animation favorites “Trolls” and “The Croods: A New Age,” and the trio bring a similar “chaotic good” energy to “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” which remixes a new set of familiar nursery rhymes and beloved children’s fables to entertaining ends.

“Avatar: The Way of Water” succeeds in one big way above all. It looks and moves and surrounds the way James Cameron wanted his underwater disappointment “The Abyss” to look, once upon a time in 1989.

Opening in select theaters last week before its Friday streaming premiere on Apple TV+, “Emancipation” is rated R for violence, and for “disturbing images and language.”

Sometimes the holiday season can just be a little too sweet. It’s why stories like “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” endure, or movies like “Bad Santa” find success — not everyone wants to gulp down saccharine sentiments at Christmastime.