Making art in the middle of the apocalypse is the literal and figurative ethos of “Grand Theft Hamlet,” one of the cleverest “What can we do during lockdown?” pandemic picture projects.

A couple of British actors — Sam Crane and Mark Ooosterveen –– stared into the same gutting void of everybody who was unable to work during the pandemic lockdowns. As they killed some time meeting in the online gamescape of “Grand Theft Auto,” they stumbled into the Vinewood (Hollywood) Bowl setting of that Greater L.A. killing zone. And like actors since the beginning of time, thought they’d put on a play.

As they wander and ponder this brilliant conceit, they wrestle with whether to attempt casting, setting and directing this play amidst a sea of first-person shooters/stabbers/run-you-over-with-their car. They face fascinating theatrical problem solving. How DO you make art and recruit an online in-the-game audience for Shakespeare in a world of self-absorbed, bloody-minded avatars, some of whom stumble upon their efforts and ignore their “Please don’t shoot me” pleas?

Crane and Oosterveen, both white 40somethings Brits, grapple with “what people are like in here,” as in “people are violent in the game.” VERY violent. But “people are violent in Shakespeare.” Pretty much “everybody dies in ‘Hamlet,’” after all.

Putting on a play in the middle of a real apocalypse set in a CGI generated apocalypse is “a terrible idea,” Oosterveen confesses (in avatar form). “But I definitely want to try to do it.”

Crane, struggling with the same mental health issues tens of millions faced during lockdown, enlists his documentary filmmaker wife Pinny Grylls to enter the game and film all this.

And as their endeavors progress, through trial and many many deaths (“WASTED,” the game’s graphics remind you), everybody interested in their idea trots out favorite couplets from Shakespeare as “auditions.” They round up “actors” from all over (mostly Brits, though), they remind us of the power of Shakespeare’s words.

“To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep…”

Dodging would-be gamer/killers and recruiting others, they will see how a marriage can be strained by work or video game addiction and fret over the futility of it all.

The film, co-scripted and directed by Crane and Grylls, with Crane playing Hamlet, and narrated and somewhat driven by Oosterveen, who portrays Polonius, is a mad idea but a great gimmick, one that occasionally transcends that gimmick.

We’re reminded of the visual sophistication of CGI landscapes — they try out a lot of settings, and use more than one, a scene staged on top of a blimp, seaside for a soliloquy. The limitations of jerky-movement video game characters, lips-moving but not syncing up to dialogue, are just as obvious.

And if all the gamescape’s “a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” some folks — MANY folks — need to buy better headset microphones. The distorted audio and staticky dynamic range of such gear spoils a lot of the dialogue.

In a production where the words matter as much as this, as “acting” in avatar form is a catalog of limitless limitations, one becomes ever more grateful that the film is a documentary of the “making” of a “Grand Theft Auto” “Hamlet,” and not merely the play. Because inventive settings and occasional murderous “distractions” aside, that leaves a lot to be desired.

Rating: R, video game violence, profanity

Cast: The voices/avatars of Sam Crane,
Mark Oosterveen, Pinny Grylls, Jen Cohn, Tilly Steele, Lizzie Wofford, Dilo Opa, Sam Forster, Jeremiah O’Connor and Gareth Turkington

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, based on “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. A Mubi release.

Running time: 1:29

Welcome Tim Allen back to the land of multicamera sitcom, for a third run in a form that has treated him well. “Home Improvement” ran for eight seasons on ABC and is arguably what allowed him to become a film star; “Last Man Standing,” which returned him to television after a decade in the movies, finished a nine-season run (six on ABC, three on Fox) in 2021. And here he is again, once more on ABC, with “Shifting Gears,” premiering Wednesday, which, if past is prelude, should just about see Allen — a fit 71, his tight T-shirt would like you to know — into his 80s.

Allen plays Matt, who — importing Allen’s own automotive interests — runs a garage specializing in vintage and custom cars. (Working here we find Daryl Mitchell as Stitch, a wise wisecracker, and Seann William Scott as Gabriel, handsome, amiable, a little dim.) Literally driving back into Matt’s life, in a filthy Pontiac GTO she stole from him 15 years before, when taking off pregnant with a musician boyfriend, is his daughter Riley (Kat Dennings). She’s getting divorced, musicians being what they are, and needs a place to land with her two kids, moony teenager Carter (Maxwell Simkins) and cheerful little Georgia (Barrett Margolis), who has a thing for inventor and “Shark Tank” panelist Lori Greiner and dreams of becoming a billionaire. (The kids are excellent.)

“Well, good luck finding a man who’s OK with his wife making more money than him,” says Matt, an old-fashioned sort of fellow.

“I don’t need a man to feel complete,” replies Georgia.

“You want to kill a spider, a man’s going to look pretty darn good.”

“I have a shoe.”

Father and daughter have been estranged, more or less — the kids do know their grandfather — since the death of Riley’s mother some indefinite years before; she was the bridge that allowed them to have a relationship. Riley, a former wild child, voted “Mean for No Reason” by her high school class, is trying to raise her kids with a sensitivity that Matt, who is all “in my day we were,” regards as coddling. And so they must learn to get along under the same roof. You get the picture.

When “Last Man Standing,” in which Allen played a not dissimilar character, went on the air in 2011, we were in the third year of the first Obama administration, and a show with a volubly conservative lead character played a little differently in the TV ecosystem; now, on the verge of heaven knows what, such a character reads as something like an adorable, almost moderate curmudgeon. Matt reads the Wall Street Journal and rails against television pundits “telling you what you’re supposed to think about the news, like I‘m too stupid to form my own angry opinion.” When Stitch, anticipating one of Matt’s rants, says, “Let me guess, we’re all going to hell in a hand basket,” Matt replies, “We don’t even make hand baskets in the U.S. anymore. We do make excuses, quitters and diabetes, and celebrities that use diabetes medicine to lose weight.” He describes Gabriel’s dirty hat as looking like “a normal hat that was left in Portland too long.”

The tenor of such softball japes can make “Shifting Gears” feel behind the times. There’s something sort of dutiful about the show’s sociopolitical humor, such as it is, which exists more to give the characters something to bat around than to say anything substantial about How We Ought to Live Now. And no one is batting very hard; this is, after all, a show about loving your difficult relations and putting differences aside. (Riley: “Can we try to talk to one another like rational adults? Matt: “Have you watched the news lately? That’s not a thing anymore.”) Classic stuff.

Allen and Dennings do quickly strike a satisfying mix of antagonism and affection. Both know their way around a filmed-before-a-live-audience sitcom. (Dennings spent six seasons on “2 Broke Girls.”) They’re very good talking over one another, and very good not knowing exactly what to say. In one tender moment, side by side on a couch, unsure how to reach out, he touches her … foot. To the extent that there’s a new Tim Allen here, it’s the one who, thinking of his late wife, and the flour sifter he has taken care not to clean, he cries, almost, sort of. But there has always been a soft center to his self-important characters. (And who, really, needs a new Tim Allen?)

“It’s been really different here, alone,” he tells Riley. “I think that’s why I watch the news in the morning, so I can hear a woman’s voice — even though it’s sometimes Nancy Pelosi.”

“Yeah, it’s annoying the way she’s trying to save democracy.”

The series was created by Mike Scully and Julie Thacker Scully, “Simpsons” writers and co-creators with Amy Poehler of the animated series “Duncanville.” They reportedly left after the pilot (directed by John Pasquin, who directed about a fifth of “Home Improvement” and more than a third of “Last Man Standing” episodes), which is perhaps why the second episode — only two were available to watch — feels less focused.

That there is nothing new to see here is not in the series’ disfavor. Political differences among close-quartered sitcom families go back at least as far as “All in the Family,” which had been off the air nearly a decade when Dennings was born; adult children moving in with parents or parents moving in with children (see “Lopez vs Lopez,” currently in its third season on NBC) is an old theme on television, which loves to pack as many generations into a three-walled set as possible. Formulas are formulas because they give consistent, reliable, unsurprising results.

This isn’t the easiest moment in history to be launching a film exploring its author’s Jewish heritage, thanks to the violent repercussions of events in the Middle East, but the historical baggage that comes with that heritage is all part of Eisenberg’s theme. Set to an eloquent and frequently melancholy soundtrack of Chopin’s piano music, A Real Pain is a bittersweet story about two Jewish cousins, Benji and David Kaplan (Kieran Culkin and Eisenberg), who take a trip to Poland in memory of their beloved grandmother, a recently-deceased Holocaust survivor. Beneath the wisecracks and one-liners there’s a subtle and penetrating analysis of family bonds and the burden of shared history.

The film’s gentle ripple of underlying sadness stems from the fact that the cousins were previously very close, but have drifted apart. They’re about as dissimilar as it’s possible to be, but glimpses of their odd-couple bond gradually resurface as the narrative develops. Eisenberg’s David is quiet and introverted, but is successful as both family man and in his Manhattan-based career in computing. On the other hand, we gradually learn that Benji is drifting rootlessly through his life out in the suburbs. He’s searching desperately for something meaningful, and is struggling to keep himself on the rails. He has been hit hard by his grandmother’s death, confessing that “she was just my favourite person in the world.”

In any event, the role gives Culkin carte blanche to charge recklessly through the gears, in a bravura performance which gives the film its centrifugal force. Some of the time he’s a babbling extrovert who effortlessly dominates any social gathering, for instance persuading everybody in their touring party to pose for selfies on a statue commemorating the Warsaw Uprising, but the flipside is that he can’t tell where the boundaries are (and has little interest in finding them). David is aghast when they’re heading for the boarding gate for their flight to Poland, and Benji cheerfully announces that he’s carrying a stash of dope (“I got some good shit for when we land”.)

One moment everybody loves Benji, then suddenly he becomes an insufferable asshole. He’s prone to wildly inappropriate outbursts, like the moment when the tour party are travelling in a first class railway carriage and Benji goes into an emotionally incontinent display of guilt about the contrast with his Jewish antecedents being transported to death camps in cattle trucks.

Fortunately their travelling companions (who include Dirty Dancing veteran Jennifer Grey, pictured top, and Kurt Egyiawan as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide) show superhuman patience, not least their English tour guide James (Will Sharpe), who graciously accepts Benji’s tactless critique of his guiding technique (Sharpe and Eisenberg pictured above). The fact that James is a scholar of East European Studies from Oxford University, not Jewish himself but “fascinated by the Jewish experience”, is a crafty little comic narrative all of its own.

It’s a difficult film to categorise, being part comedy, part road movie, part psychotherapy session and part personal memoir. Perhaps Woody Allen might have called it a “situation tragedy”. It’s a clever, complex piece, but Eisenberg has made it look breezily simple.