If the winter blues have got you down, I highly recommend Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (Rating: ✭✭✭✭), Matt Johnson’s Toronto-centric gonzo comedy that acts as a love letter to the city, movies, creative ingenuity and friendship. Make sure you see it in a packed movie theatre in the GTA. It’ll really increase the fun.

Matt and Jay (played by Johnson and co-writer/composer Jay McCarrol) have long wanted to play the legendary Rivoli — a desire that pretty much fuelled the web and TV series Nirvana the Band the Show and Nirvanna the Band the Show. At the top of the film, they hatch a brilliant (to them) idea of jumping off the CN Tower’s EdgeWalk attraction and parachuting into the SkyDome to announce their gig just a few blocks north.

Never mind that they aren’t booked to play the Rivoli. They’ll figure that out when it comes. And never mind that the stadium’s retractable roof is about to close.

When the stunt backfires — and I’m still not sure how they captured it so convincingly, complete with security guards — they regroup. And what they come up with is something even more outlandish involving an RV, a spilt bottle of Orbitz (remember those?) and a home-made flux capacitor that, of course, acts as a loving homage to the Back to the Future movies.

This, in turn, takes them back to 2008, where they get to spy on their younger selves (thanks to the webseries footage), include lots of visual gags about male celebrities who are now cancelled (or news and entertainment weeklies that are now defunct) and tinker with the future by making a couple of changes.

The two actors have a blast both as their schlubby present-day versions and their slightly altered (in Jay’s case much altered) selves, sometimes improvising with people on the street and inserting themselves into real-life scenarios. One ingenious sequence was captured after the high-profile shooting last summer at Drake’s mansion in the Bridle Path.

Sure, they take liberties with the city’s geography a bit (oh for a movie theatre at Queen and University), but that’s to be expected when the comic and dramatic payoffs are so big.

The final act is too much fun to spoil. Let’s just say it’s extremely exciting and improbably moving. McCarrol, who wrote the film’s songs, is a great straight man to his extroverted on-screen partner. Johnson, decked out in his beige hat and crumpled sports jacket, is like some millennial Chaplin by way of Duddy Kravitz, capable of making you laugh one moment, cry the next.

The best thing about the film? Like those Back to the Future movies, not long after watching it you’ll want to see it again.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie opens Feb. 13.

Scarlet fever

So it turns out Hamnet isn’t the only feature film this season to draw on Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy.

There’s also Scarlet (Rating: ✭✭✭), Mamoru Hosoda’s anime epic that takes the bones of the play’s plot and places it in a completely different universe.

In war-torn 16th-century Denmark, King Amleth (Masachika Ichimura) would rather talk with his enemies than fight them. His brother Claudius (Kôji Yakusho) — who’s already sleeping with his wife, Gertrude — frames him for treason, and promptly has him executed. The young princess Scarlet (Mana Ashida) witnesses this, but doesn’t learn about her father’s final words until much later.

When she, Claudius and a bunch of the play’s dramatis personae die, they find themselves in a purgatory world, all in search of the “Infinite Land,” where they’ll presumably be able to live forever. Scarlet befriends Hijiri (Masaki Okada), a contemporary medic (also dead) whose pacifist stance contrasts with her thirst for vengeance.

Hosoda (Oscar-nominated for Mirai) fails to explain why so many Elsinore citizens died in the first place. (I guess something really was rotten in the state of Denmark.) Sure, Claudius and Scarlet drank poison, but how did the others meet their ends? Where is Laertes in all this? And why doesn’t Scarlet seek out her dad for some advice?

It also feels like a missed opportunity to ignore what happens to Gertrude (Yuki Saitô), who was left in the “real world” after her second husband and daughter died. Does she feel any remorse?

Still, some of the visual backdrops, particularly of crowd scenes and vast, cavernous landscapes, are impressive — you can appreciate them in IMAX this week. (The film extends to regular theatres next week.)

And there’s charm of a different sort in watching two characters from different universes learn about each other’s cultures. At last year’s Venice Film Festival, Scarlet and Hijiri won the Nave d’Argento for Best OTP (One True Pairing), an award celebrating fan-favourite couples.

So there’s that.

Scarlet is now playing in IMAX theatres and opens in more theatres Feb. 13

Coming soon: Winter review roundup #3: You, Always, Through the Eyes of God, Eureka Day; an interview with Eureka Day’s Jake Epstein and Sarah McVie; and more

Sharing with the 1989 Tom Hanks film a title, a vague premise, a little paranoid spirit and a Universal Studios backlot street, “The ‘Burbs,” premiering Sunday on Peacock, stars Keke Palmer and Jack Whitehall as newlywed new parents who have moved into the house he grew up in — his parents are on “a cruise forever” — in Hinkley Hills, the self-proclaimed “safest town in America.”

Well, obviously not. First of all, that’s not a real thing. But more to the point, no one’s going to make an eight-hour streaming series (ending in a cliffhanger) about an actually safe town. Even Sheriff Taylor had the occasion to welcome someone worse than Otis the town drunk into the Mayberry jail. In post-post-war American culture, suburbs and small towns are more often than not a stage for secrets, sorrows, scandals and satire. The stories of John Cheever, the novels of Stephen King, “The Stepford Wives,” “Blue Velvet” and its godchild “Twin Peaks,” “Desperate Housewives” (filmed on the same backlot street as “The ‘Burbs”), “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” last year’s “Grosse Pointe Garden Society,” which I mention in protest of its cancellation, are set there — it’s a long list.

Samira Fisher (Palmer) is a civil litigation lawyer still on maternity leave, a job reflecting her inquisitive, inquisitorial nature. Husband Rob (Whitehall) is a book editor, a fact referred to only twice in eight hours, but which allows for scenes in which he rides a soundstage commuter train to the big city (presumably New York) with boyhood friend and once-more next-door neighbor Naveen (Kapil Talwalkar), whose wife has just left him for their dentist. Samira, Naveen and Rory (Kyrie McAlpin), an overachieving late tween who has a merit badge in swaddling, a recommendation from Michelle Obama on her mother’s helper resume and a notary public’s license, are the only people of color in town, but racism isn’t really an issue, past a few raised eyebrows and odd comment. (“What a cute little mocha munchkin,” says a shifty librarian of baby Miles.) “It’s a nice area,” says Naveen, “and people like to think of themselves as nice, so they try to act nice until they’re actually nice.”

As we open, the Fishers have been tentatively residing on Ashfield Place (“over by Ashfield Street near Ashfield Crescent”), for some indeterminable short time. Apart from Naveen, neither has met, or as much as spoken to, any of their new neighbors, though Samira — feeling insecure postpartum and going out only at night to push Miles in his stroller — watches them through the window.

That will change, of course, or this will be one of television’s most radically conceived shows. Fascinated by a dilapidated, supposedly uninhabited house across the street — the same backlot where the Munsters mansion rose many years ago, for your drawer of fun facts — she’s drawn out into a mystery: The rumor is that 20 years earlier a teenage girl was killed and buried there by her parents, who subsequently disappeared. Rob says there’s nothing in it, and in a way that tells you maybe there is.

Out in the world, she will find her quirky Scooby Gang: widow Lynn (Julia Duffy), still attached to her late husband; Dana (Paula Pell), a retired Marine whose wife has been deployed to somewhere she can’t reveal; and Tod (Mark Proksch), a taciturn, deadpan “lone wolf” with an assortment of skills and a recumbent tricycle. (Their shared nemeses is Agnes, played by Danielle Kennedy, “our evil overlord,” the stiff-necked president of the homeowner’s association.) They bond over wine (drinking it) and close ranks around Samira after the police roust her on her own front porch. By the end of the first episode, Samira is determined to stay in Hinkley Hills, warmed by new friends, enchanted by the fireflies and in love with the “sweet suburban air.”

Weird goings-on in a creepy old “haunted” house is as basic a trope as exists in the horror-comedy mystery genre (see Martin and Lewis’ “Scared Stiff,” Bob Hope’s “The Ghost Breakers,” Abbott and Costello’s “Hold That Ghost” and assorted Three Stooges shorts). Suddenly there’s a “for sale” sign on this one, and just as suddenly, it’s sold. The new owner is Gary (Justin Kirk), who chases off anyone who comes around. Tod notes that the security system he’s installed is “overkill” for a private residence, necessary only “if you are in danger, you have something to hide — or both.” You are meant to regard him as suspicious; Samira does.

Created by Celeste Hughey, “The ‘Burbs” is pretty good, a good time — not the most elegant description, but probably the words that would come out of my mouth were you to ask me, conversationally, how it was. I suppose most of it adds up even if doesn’t always feel that way while watching it. It hops from tone to tone, and goes on a little long, in the modern manner, which dilutes the suspense. The characters are half-, let’s say three-quarters-formed, which is formed enough; everyone plays their part. The Hardy Boys were not known for psychological depth, and I read a lot of those books. A lot. Indeed, depth would only get in the way of the plot, which is primarily concerned with fooling you and fooling you again. When a character isn’t what they seem, making the false front too emotionally relatable is counterproductive; the viewer, using myself as an example, will feel cheated, annoyed. I won’t say whether that happens here.

That isn’t to say that the actors, every one of them, aren’t as good as can be. I’ll show up for Pell and Duffy anywhere, anytime. Proksch, well known to viewers of Tim Heidecker’s “On Cinema at the Cinema,” is weird in an original way. The British Whitehall, primarily known as a stand-up comedian, panel show guest and presenter, makes a fine romantic lead. Kirk is appealingly standoffish, if such a thing might be imagined. As Samira’s brother, Langston, RJ Cyler has only a small role, but he pops onscreen and, having the advantage of not being tied up in any of the major plotlines, provides something of a relief from them. And Palmer, an old pro at 32 — her career goes back to “Akeelah and the Bee” and Nickelodeon’s “True Jackson” — does all sorts of wonderful small things with her face and her voice. She’s an excellent Nancy Drew, and the world can never have enough of those.

Directed by G Prajith, the film relies strongly on a sense of “throwback” charm. It tries to recreate the light-hearted family atmosphere seen in Jayaram’s popular films. Written by Jude Anthany Joseph and Aravind Rajendran, the screenplay follows a familiar pattern of middle-class problems and situational humour. The film works mainly because it allows Jayaram (Hariharan) to play to his strengths and evoke nostalgia. For example, the widely trolled BGM and Jayaram’s famous expression as Major Sreekumar are used wisely here, bringing the theatre down with laughter. However, it does not offer much that feels new or surprising. The film openly talks about nepotism and the “godfather culture” in the film industry. This becomes ironic because the actors are a real-life father and son. However, this self-awareness works against the film as Kalidas Jayaram’s (Ajeesh Hariharan) performance feels weak. Rather than questioning the “nepo-kid” label, his acting sometimes reinforces it. The female lead, played by Asha Sharath, is perhaps the film’s weakest link in terms of writing. Portraying a frail, submissive housewife who exists solely to cater to the men in her life, her character lacks depth and agency. Her constant optimism despite severe financial hardship feels more annoying than moving. A late attempt to give her a strong dialogue does not help. Overall, the character feels disconnected from the reality of the modern woman. Although Sharaf U Dheen genuinely tries to carry the anti-villain role, the motives behind his character’s hostility feel weak. On a brighter note, the supporting cast including Ishaani Krishna, Ramesh Pisharody, Anand Manmadhan, Akhil, and Senthil Krishna etc delivers good performances that helps the film. As for the music, while the recreated version of “Dil Dil Salaam Salaam” hits the right nostalgic notes, the rest of the soundtrack fails to make any real impact. -Aiswarya Sudha