Tom Hanks launched into a playful tirade on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast in which he took listeners through the long and winding road that is a movie’s reception. At one point, the two-time Oscar winner humorously referred to movie critics as “cocksuckers” as it’s ultimately time that is the decider of a movie’s value and not the reviewers. Case in point: Hanks’ 1996 directorial effort “That Thing You Do!,” which was dismissed by critics upon release before time turned into a beloved cult classic.

“All of this stuff lives. Now what has happened is that time has become one of the metrics for how these things matter, right?” Hanks said about a movie’s reputation. “Back in the day it was just a fistfight. It was every movie you had coming out, are you going to make the playoffs or not? Guess what? No, kid, you ain’t going nowhere. Or, you got a shot.”

“It used to be you had these Rubicons that you crossed,” the actor explained. “First of all, do you love it or not? That’s the first thing. I read this [script] and I love it. The next Rubicon you cross is when the movie is completely done a year and a half later and you see it for the first time, and you might like it. It doesn’t matter if it works or not. You look at it and say, ‘Hey, I think we acquitted ourselves pretty good.’ That’s Rubicon No. 2.”

“Then the critics weigh in, that’s Rubicon No. 3, and that’s always up or down: ‘We hate it, we like it. This is the worst thing. … Oh hey, Tom, I saw you in a movie. It was cute.’ That’s when you ask the wife, ‘Hey, honey, could you take the revolver out of the glove box and hide it somewhere, because I think…”

After the critics comes the box office, and “then a ton of time goes by when none of that stuff matters anymore,” Hanks said. Time ultimately trumps whatever critics had to say about the film.

“The movie just exists exactly as it is outside of loser or winner status or thumbs up, thumbs down,” Hanks continued. “And that’s when this stuff comes around, where it’s like that this thing that didn’t work back then kind of does work now, or just the opposite, a thing that was huge back then is a museum piece and doesn’t really speak to anything.”

O’Brien then brought up “That Thing You Do!,” to which Hanks responded: “Let me tell you something about these cocksuckers who write about movies. Can I say that?”

Hanks remembered a critic who originally dissed “That Thing You Do!” by writing: “Tom Hanks has to stop hanging around with veterans of TV, because this is just like the shot on TV and it’s not much of anything.” As the decades passed and the film became a cult classic, the same critic weighed in and loved the movie. “They said, ‘All you need is 20 years between now and then, and it ends up speaking some words,’” the actor remembered.

“But that’s the thing we all signed up for,” Hanks concluded. “That’s the carnival, that’s the contest. I got faith in that. That’s okay.”

Hanks has been making the press rounds in support of his new movie “Here,” which reunites him with “Forrest Gump” director Robert Zemeckis and co-star Robin Wright. Listen to Hanks’ full interview on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast here.

“Starring Jerry as Himself” can be filed under “truth is stranger than fiction.” But it’s part truth and part fiction, or at least part drama, so it’s a bit of a slippery movie, in terms of both classification and credibility. 

The main character is a businessman named Jerry (Jerry Hsu) who came to America from China decades ago and became one of those people that politicians of every stripe like to single out during speeches as examples of the promise of America fulfilled: successful businessman, successful family man with many children, pillar of his community. Then one day he gets a call telling him that his bank account is being used to launder money, and that he’s going to need to participate in a sting operation run by two cops working for the Chinese government, Officer Zhang (Haosong Yang) and Inspector Ou (Fang Du). 

You could call this movie a “subjective documentary” if all documentaries weren’t already subjective in some way. What it mostly “documents” is one family’s version of a bizarre thing that happened to them. It’s loosely based on a true story, and most of the participants play themselves in what feels rather like a low-budget indie movie version of one of those true crime stories that appear on American television all the time. (Most of the movie consists of re-enactments, and once it kicks into that mode, the camera adopts an ominous low angle most of the time, and the screen shape becomes CinemaScope dimension, the official visual shorthand for “this is cinematic” whether it actually is or isn’t.) 

There’s a tradition in various world cinemas of people playing a version of themselves in stories that were based on things that really happened (Iran in the 1990s was especially good at these sorts of projects), but this one isn’t exactly a work in that tradition. It feels more like an incredibly elaborate home movie but directed by somebody who’s not actually part of the onscreen family: New York-based filmmaker Law Chen, who was also born in China. 

I don’t think it entirely works because documentaries that mold themselves after existing fiction film genres don’t truly satisfy unless the story being told could organically fit into that mold. James Marsh’s “Man on Wire,” a film about Phillip Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers, is probably the most successful example, relying heavily on re-creations that were shot and edited like pieces of a long lost 1970s heist flick.

This one is a pretty widely praised movie, so I guess I’m an outlier in saying that the re-creations are more clever than insightful, and that about halfway through the (thankfully brief) 74-minute running time, the determination to make the story fit into a certain prefabricated mold started to grate on me, because you can figure out what’s actually going on pretty fast, and after that, I didn’t find the “everyday person gets drawn into a police action” movie to be as inherently engrossing as a hypothetical straight documentary interviewing the participants would have been. 

But just because the movie is overthinking things, in a way, doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a great deal of thought put into it. A densely packed and propulsively edited montage of home video from the family opens the movie and sets up the re-enactments, and as “Starring Jerry as Himself” unfolds, you do start to realize that the film opened that way for reasons other than the almost guaranteed nostalgia-bath of seeing low-resolution video footage of actual people existing in a long-gone era. This is as much a movie about memory, psychology, and trust as it is an account of an event that seems pretty strange at first glance, but becomes stranger, deeper and sadder once you get to the bottom of it all.

Here’s the bad joke of Hollywood Christmas movies. They tend to begin, and end, with a blast of old-school Yuletide cheer. But that’s just a tease. In between, most of them make a point of straying about as far from the Christmas spirit as possible. Instead, they swap in the new American spirit: vulgar, violent, full of fake fun, celebrating their own crassness. To trace the genesis of the anti-Christmas Christmas movie (“Jingle All the Way,” “Violent Night”), you would probably have to go back to a couple of movies that are thought of as classics (though not by me): “A Christmas Story” and “Home Alone,” both of them glasses of eggnog spiked with misanthropy.

That said, I’m not sure that a Hollywood movie has ever kicked off the season with less true Christmas spirit than “Red One.” Sure, J.K. Simmons plays Santa Claus (who gets abducted), and Simmons is winning in his crinkly old wise innocence. Dwayne Johnson, as Santa’s bodyguard (who wants to retire because he’s having a crisis of faith), is his outsize amiable self. The odd thing about the movie is that while it’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek, it’s not really a comedy. Directed with charmless energy by Jake Kasdan, “Red One” is at once an action movie; a kidnap-rescue thriller in which the doors to supply closets in toy stores are mystic portals; and an exercise in Christmas world-building, as if that’s the thing that’s been missing from Christmas.

At the beginning, Simmons’ Santa is seated on his throne, greeting a line of children in a shopping mall, a location he finds to be the most soulful place on earth (which shows you how far we’ve come from “Jingle All the Way” — even Santa now digs the capitalism of it all!). The hot toy of the season, the one kids keep asking him for, is a video game called Vampire Assassin 4. We’re supposed to chuckle at how un-Christmas-sounding that is. But “Red One” could almost be the movie version of Vampire Assassin 4. It’s that busy and bumptious, that overstuffed with cheesy digital effects, that generically derivative a piece of violent kitsch.

The film’s first not-quite-trying-to-be-funny “joke” is that Santa Claus’s whole enterprise is run like a U.S. military operation. Santa’s code name is Red One. Johnson’s Cal works for ELF ­— which stands for Enforcement Logistical Fortification, and means that Cal darts around like a secret-service agent, barking orders into his wrist walkie-talkie. CF drones, Sno-Cats, a cargo plane: the film is light on tinsel but heavy on equipment. And the dialogue is tech-bombastic enough to sound like something out of a Dan Aykroyd comedy from 1986.

It is also — of course — a buddy movie. No, not Santa and his bodyguard. (Once Santa is kidnapped, which happens early on, he’s mostly out of the picture.) The buddies here, who start off hating each other, are Cal, who’s been tasked with hunting down Santa’s whereabouts, and Jack (Chris Evans), a degenerate sports gambler and derelict divorced dad who is also some sort of super-hacker. Disreputable powers from all over the globe hire him, through encrypted communications, to uncover the hidden location of people and things, which he does with effortless dash.

It was Jack’s handiwork that revealed Santa’s precise location in the North Pole (under a dome, it’s sort of like the Christmas-store version of the Pentagon). And that’s what allowed Santa to be kidnapped by Grýla, an ancient witch played by the always-welcome Kiernan Shipka, who ever since “Mad Men” I’ve thought (and still think) is going to be a major star — and this movie, in its blunderbuss way, shows why. Grýla is a standard nuance-free glowering nemesis, like something out of a “National Treasure” sequel. Yet the way Shipka plays her, there’s a tingle to her anger. Her evil dream? To punish everyone on Santa’s naughty list.

We meet Santa’s reindeer, who are interchangeable oversize digital creations, referred to as “girls.” Why would the reindeer be so tall? And why would they all be female? This is the sort of “whatever” conceit that dots “Red One.” Cal and Jack start off in Aruba, just because. On the beach, Cal, amusingly, changes size during a fight, and the two have to fend off an attack by ferocious snowmen. But that’s just one pit stop. They wind up in Germany in a medieval “Star Wars” cantina trying to save themselves from Santa’s estranged brother, the giant goat-man troll Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), at which point you’re either onboard or (in my case) starting to check your watch.

The villains are shape-shifters, but the key thing about “Red One” is that the whole movie is a shape-shifter: arduous action jape, low-kitsch Christmas fairy tale, buddy movie, family-reconciliation movie — every quadrant and demo must be served. At the movies, Christmas isn’t a holiday anymore, it’s a concept to be retro-fitted. Do you hear those sleigh bells jingling? Come on, it’s lovely weather for an over-the-top-of-the-North-Pole, through-the-supply-closet-portal, cargo-plane ride together with you.