A little holiday cheer is expressed and even more is shown, or at least sampled, in “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.” And almost nothing is explained.

The idea behind Tyler Taormina’s (“Ham on Rye”) warm, aimless and largely laugh-free Christmas Eve wallow in nostalgia is the selectivity of memory, and perhaps how drab the “colorful” memories our director and co-writer decides to show us turn out to be.

Unexplained, disorganized and cluttered with characters we strain to identify in banal situations that go nowhere, this isn’t one that’s going to replace “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Story” or even “The Family Stone” or “Feast of the Seven Fishes” on anybody’s holiday movie list.

What we figure out — eventually — is that this extended family is gathering on snowy Long Island for what could be the “last Christmas” with Grandma Antonia (Mary Reistetter). Eventually, a “Carmine” is mentioned and a couple of other names that suggest this is an Italian American clan.

We see a flip phone, a ’90s Buick wagon and a ’92 Jeep Cherokee and piece together that this an “Eve” in the early 2000s.

A couple of siblings bicker with a couple others over “Sunrise Nursing Home” or “live in aid” options for their mother, over who is not doing enough to help this situation and who is.

The little kids are kind of passed-over — merely underfoot — as the adults cook, smoke cigars, kvetch and reminisce, and the teens and tweens experience traditions such as “the walk,” “the bird” (cooked) and “the parade” — decorated fire engines that pass in a blur. Some kids borrow a family Cherokee for a run out to a cemetary, a little drinking and carrying-on shared in dark close ups and hook ups.

“Car equals FREEDOM!”

We assume they’re not kissing cousins, but hey, when you don’t explain Jack, there is is some doubt.

A couple of local cops (Gregg Turkington and Michael Cera) gawk at some of this while on duty and get into one awkward conversation meant to be comical.

And the soundtrack to it all is early ’60s doo-wop and pop, perhaps for its Italian-American connotations.

I found the entire experience a dissonant disconnect as there is barely anyone to identify, much less identify with, there’s little novelty to anything presented here and nothing to root for because basically a lot of nothing or nothing much is all that happens.

Save yourself the drive. Rent “Feast of the Seven Fishes” and get a load of THOSE Italians if you want to see a memorable period piece about a memorable Christmas.

Rating: PG-13, smoking, teen drinking, sexual situations, profanity,

Cast: Elsie Fisher, Maria Dizzia, Francesca Scorsese, Ben Shenkman, Matilda Fleming, Sawyer Spielberg, Leo Chan, Gregg Turkington and Michael Cera.

Credits: Directed by Tyler Taormina, scripted by Eric Berger and Tyler Taormina. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:47

Hungarian actor Robert Bronzi has made a nice action movie career for himself based in no small part on his resemblance to the late, great Charles Bronson. Following up on his over the top, Bronson inspired gems, Death Kiss and Escape From Death Block 13, Bronzi returns in Mark Savage’s 12 To Midnight. This time it’s personal? Well, yes. But also, this time we have werewolves!

As both a Bronson fan and a werewolf afficionado, I was grinning from ear to ear when I first saw the trailer for this one. It goes without saying I was ecstatic for the opportunity screen and review this film. Did it live up to my lofty expectations?

Read on for my review!

Synopsis

A detective, despondent over the murder of his wife and forced to resign, is brought back to the force when a new serial killer begins taunting him … who turns out to be a werewolf.

Mark Savage directed the film. It stars Robert Bronzi, Tito Ortiz, Sadie Katz, and Daniel Roebuck.

Check out the trailer below!

The Setup

The first ten minutes of 12 To Midnight will have you flashing back to some great action films of yesteryear. Think Cobra or Dirty Harry  or any number of classic 80’s buddy cop movies. We’re off to a good start! Bronzi is introduced as a no nonsense, tough as nails cop, who may or may not have time to bother with the rule book. Already mourning the loss of his wife – victim to brutal murder – some bloody convenience store heroics land him a fat suspension to boot.

Down and nearly out, Bronzi finds comfort in boozing and brooding. But when bodies start piling up, the police can’t afford ot keep their best detective sidelined…even if he does appear have a personal connection to the killings. Bronzi’s back on the case. Can he solve the mystery of his wife’s murder and stop the killer before he…or it…kills again?

A Fun Mashup

Let’s face it: this isn’t Ghandi or Gone With The Wind. If you’re scouting for Academy Award winners or the next indie arthouse film festival gem you’re barking up the wrong tree. However, if you love a good action yarn reminiscent of the old Cannon Films days, there’s a lot to love here. Bronzi, for his part, dopplegangers Charles Bronson nicely. Like many Bronson characters, he’s a man of action and few words, and that suits him well in 12 To Midnight. He says what needs to be said and gets some good one liners in along the way. Bronson would be proud.

Werewolf films are a dime a dozen and you can probably get fifty cop films for that same ten cents. But a hard boiled cop film that’s also about werewolves? Now we’re on to something! It’s a fun concept. There’s not much of a budget here, but they make the most of it. Bronzi is obviously front and center, but you also have some nice supporting performances from Daniel Roebuck (Stream, Rob Zombie’s The Munsters) and Sadie Katz (Wrong Turn 6). Tito Ortiz, ex MMA fighter and action film mainstay, also makes a memorable appearance.

Not Quite A Classic

As fun as this movie is on the base level, it’s also somewhat frustrating because of some potentially great, missed opportunities that could have been. Revenge should be the driving force behind a film like this. Revenge for Bronzi’s wife’s murder. Thematically it doesn’t really materialize, even though it’s implied that these are serial killings. Daniel Roebuck’s character even comments that the killer wants Bronzi in play, but these connections between cop and killer are never fully made. Properly executed, this could have been epic.

Along similar lines, Bronzi plays a detective here and you see him gathering evidence in various scenes, but his character never really gets the chance to put it all together in a satisfying reveal for the audience. It’s a shame, too, because the mystery of who the werewolf is hangs out there like an itch just waiting to be scratched. Unfortunately, that reveal also falls flat.

The creature design is somewhat disappointing. The initial transformation you see is pretty cool, but overall the makeup and costume would have been much better kept in shadow and left to the viewer’s imagination. The creature’s not quite cool enough to be front and center, so you wind up seeing much more than you want or need to here, unfortunately.

Final Thoughts

12 To Midnight is an enjoyable, mockbuster action romp, that harkens back to the glory days of video stores past. If you ever kicked back and enjoyed the latest Seagal, Van Damme, Chuck Norris, or Charles Bronson offering on a Friday night, you’re going to dig this. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

Charles Bronson may be gone, but his spirit lives on in the form of Robert Bronzi. Pass the popcorn!

It’s hard to build dramatic momentum out of scientists hunched over microscopes peering at petri dishes. Indeed, director Ben Taylor struggles to clear that hurdle in his conventional but watchable enough account of the development of what became known as in vitro fertilization. While it’s more compelling as human drama than science, the film benefits from timeliness, given right-wing efforts to curb women’s reproductive freedoms and recent moves by Senate Republicans to block a bill protecting the right to IVF. That factor, plus the very capable cast, should help Joy find an audience on Netflix, though anti-choice extremists won’t be among them.

If the production looks and sounds like a movie but plays more like dated television, the fault lies mainly with Jack Thorne’s by-the-numbers script. The writer takes Brit historical dramas like The Imitation Game as his model to map a breakthrough in 20th century medical science that gave hope to countless women unable to conceive a child. But the stodgy familiarity of the inspirational, based-on-a-true-story template gives Joy a halting rhythm that echoes the stop-start progress of the fertility treatment pioneers.

That team is formed when Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie), a nurse and future embryologist, is hired as a lab manager in the Department of Physiology at Cambridge, working under Robert Edwards (James Norton). After making initial headway with the study of human fertilization in the late ‘60s, they take their findings to obstetrician and gynecologist Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy), at that time considered something of a pariah by the British medical establishment for his championing of laparoscopy.

Patrick is crotchety and dismissive of their overtures at first, but Bob and Jean talk him around with their passionate belief in the project and intriguing early research. They agree to set up operations in a disused wing of Oldham General Hospital, a four-hour drive from Cambridge. Patrick warns them they will have the Church, the state and the whole world against them. “But we’ll have the mothers,” counters Bob.

As work on the project inches forward, the three dissimilar personalities — along with Muriel (Tanya Moodie), the brisk, no-nonsense senior nurse who insists on being addressed by her job title of Matron — gradually build a harmonious professional relationship.

But the focus tightens on Jean as the central figure. A churchgoing Christian cut off by her loving mother Gladys (Joanna Scanlan) when she refuses to abandon the controversial work, Jean is revealed to have a personal investment in women’s fertility issues. This becomes especially relevant for her when her unintended romance with Cambridge lab colleague Arun (Rish Shah) gets serious and he proposes, making it clear he’s eager to start a family.

One of the more enjoyable parts of the movie is Jean’s rapport with the disparate group of women signing up for the experiment, who forge a sense of community during their hospital visits. Jean’s manner of dealing with them as she administers regular hormone injections is detached and clinical at first — much like her earlier consent to have sex with Arun, on the condition that he form no attachment.

When a member of the Ovum Club, as they’ve dubbed themselves, points out that Jean could stand to work on her people skills, she immediately softens, learning to put the women at ease. It’s through those interactions that Thorne’s screenplay shows deep compassion for the many childless women yearning for a baby, grounding the drama in basic human need as much as science. There’s poignancy also in the participants’ knowledge that most of them will not get pregnant, but that they are laying the groundwork for future mothers who will.

A heated scene in which the Medical Research Council declines to provide development funding, arguing that the research will benefit only a small handful of the population, underscores Jean, Bob and Patrick’s frustration as they try to make people grasp the concept of infertility as a treatable condition.

The one-step-forward, two-steps-back pattern of positive results followed by disappointment becomes a bit static. But after Jean learns that her still estranged mother is dying, she breaks with the group, dismissing their efforts as a failure and parting on bitter terms with Bob. That allows for the inevitable resumption of work when stinging loss galvanizes Jean back into action.

The final stretch leading up to the first successful “test-tube birth” in 1978, acquires welcome notes of suspense and emotional power — the latter amplified by text at the end of the film revealing that 12 million babies have been born thanks to IVF in the decades since. We also learn that Edwards, the last surviving member of the team, was awarded the Nobel Prize for their work in 2010.

Thorne frames the story with Bob’s letter, heard in voiceover, lobbying for the inclusion of Jean’s name on a plaque at the hospital honoring the IVF pioneers. What the script doesn’t address, somewhat mystifyingly, is the decades during which Purdy’s vital contribution went unacknowledged, no doubt due to her gender and the reductive view of her role as that of a mere lab technician.

The screenplay also fails to make much of the public hostility directed at the research team. The handful of press and protestors outside the hospital shouting “Dr. Frankenstein,” a bit of graffiti and one instance in which Jean is shown receiving a hate-mail package don’t exactly solidify the idea of a wall of opposition. A TV appearance in which Bob is shouted down by an angry studio audience is more effective.

Taylor, a seasoned TV director best known for the streaming series Catastrophe and Sex Education, does a competent job with his sharp-looking first feature, even if the narrative flow is erratic. The movie leans heavily on Steven Price’s score for dramatic weight and on a very random selection of ‘60s and ‘70s needle drops for energy. Only Nina Simone’s gorgeous cover of “Here Comes the Sun” over the opening credits makes thematic sense in terms of the story’s ultimate outcome.

Fortunately, the actors lift the material. McKenzie creates an appealing contrast between Jean’s mousy voice and her grit and forthrightness, shaded with an understated vein of melancholy. Nighy brings his usual economy of means to a veteran medical professional whose formality gives way to reveal his warm, caring nature; Patrick’s approaching retirement age incentivizes him to make a difference. Norton, nerded out with glasses and Michael Caine’s old hair, has the charm and sincerity necessary to put across Thorne’s frequently hackneyed declarations — “We’re making the impossible possible,” “Everything changes from here.”

Scanlan as Jean’s mum and Moodie as Matron both make strong impressions, though even those smaller roles are not entirely spared moments of speechifying. For instance, when Jean is distressed to learn that Patrick has been performing abortions at the hospital — which were legal by that time but still strongly opposed by the Church — Matron thunders back: “We are here to give women a choice. Every choice.”

Joy may not represent the height of sophisticated storytelling, but it has the advantage of an interesting story rescued from historical obscurity. It will touch the hearts of many parents whose lives have been changed — and in the case of their children, made possible — by those ten long years of dedication that led to the IVF breakthrough.