He knows a good weeper when he sees it.

“I saw the play ‘War Horse’ in London back in January of 2010, and I was moved to tears,” he recalls. “The story rolled over me.”

Spielberg knew that a play that made him cry, a play which uses puppets as horses, would make for an epic film. All the things that the stage can’t give you — the vast canvas of World War I, real explosions, real horses – would come to the screen. He could picture it all, leaving the theater.

“On the Somme, in France, No Man’s Land was hundreds of miles across. Nothing grew there for years. It was just a blasted, burnt, defoliated and desolate land, made that way by four years of entrenched fighting – endless mortar and artillery fire. The lines there hardly budged, and the fighting was almost endless.

“It was a terrible war, and certainly a war that no one expected to last as long as it did. These young British boys would march off, smiling, and their parents would smile back and wave them off, everybody thinking they’d be home by Christmas. Everybody wanted to take part in the war, at first, because nobody wanted to be the one to see all their friends come home with all these glorious war stories and be the one who never served. So everyone served, a whole generation from Great Britain served. And for those young men, it was a tragic awakening.”

But the setting wasn’t what sold him, Spielberg says. “World War I is not the heart of the story. The principal players are the cast of characters that Joey the horse meets on his World War I odyssey, this nightmare dreamscape of war, and his first owner, the boy whose father takes the horse from him and sells the horse to the British cavalry.

“I wanted this to be a celebration of the empathy that people and animals share. And not just what people impose on animals, but what animals can give back. This animal gives every human being he encounters something. He changes that person forever.

“So my movie’s not about the heart of darkness. It’s about the heart of courage and tenacity. It’s a story of a rare relationship.”

It’s something of a specialty of one of the cinema’s master storytellers. Even the epics have intimacy, even the sprawl of war is made personal by a handful of characters.

“Even in the huge spectacles that he makes, the honest human stories are what you remember,” says Joseph Gordon Levitt, who has a role in the Abraham Lincoln bio-pic Spielberg filmed in Virginia this fall. “‘Jaws’ is good because of the people, not  because of the shark.”

But Spielberg is a realist. The shark, or the alien or horse, has to be good, too. He cast his war horse for the film first. Then he spent months finding the right young man to play the boy, Albert, whose father sells his horse to the British Army and who follows the horse, Joey, across the English Channel and onto the battlefields of World War I.

“I was looking for an unknown, and I tested all the boys who were finalists with the horse,” Spielberg says. “I’d put them in the barn with the horse and a video camera, just to see if they clicked. They weren’t going to get the job unless A) I liked them and B) the HORSE liked them. They couldn’t be afraid of the horse, first off.

“When we taped Jeremy Irvine, the horse gave Jeremy some good love. The horse helped me out a lot, there. He told me I had a match made in heaven.

“Kids don’t necessarily grow up around horses any more, which is strange, considering how long the world couldn’t get along without horses.”

Spielberg is competing against himself at the multiplex this holiday season, with his motion-capture animated “The Adventures of Tintin” (Dec. 21) opening just ahead of “War Horse” (Dec. 25). But “Tintin,” “a good ol’ fashioned adventure flick that harkens back to the filmmaker’s action-packed, tongue-in-cheek swashbucklers” (The Hollywood Reporter), is rated PG. “War Horse” is PG-13. “And that’s very accurate in terms of what it suggests parents watch out for,” Spielberg says.

Having two films out at once isn’t unusual for an actor, but it is for a director. Might Spielberg, who turns 65 in December, be feeling a little urgency in the work these days? He took years to finally get around to his Lincoln film, and he has a Martin Luther King Jr. bio-film and assorted science fiction projects in the works.

“It’s all about timing, for me…If something comes up and it’s vibrant and it needs to be dealt with, you’d better deal with it or you’ll lose that opportunity.”

So he couldn’t turn down “Tintin,” “because I have been a fan of the Herge comic books since some French film critic compared “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to a Tintin adventure. I picked up ‘The Secret of the Seven Crystal Balls’ back in 1981, and I knew that someday, the technology would exist to allow me to make it.”

And his Lincoln film, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” “is really a movie about the great work Abraham Lincoln did in the last months of his life – uniting the country, the political parties. But there’s no urgency to that one, either, The movie will be purposely coming out AFTER next year’s election. I didn’t want it to become political fodder.”

Brandon, played with a chilling allure by Michael Fassbender, is an old hand at this game — hands touching, not by accident, a gaze so nakedly predatory that a pretty woman might be moved to shift in her seat, cross her legs and get off at the next stop. But not always. Sometimes — oftentimes — there’s sex.

And when there isn’t, Brandon is compulsively going at it in front of his porn-playing laptop, in the shower or the restroom at the office. This isn’t sex. This isn’t normal. He knows it, and this is his “Shame.”

The latest collaboration between British artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen and Fassbender — their “Hunger” was as close to the IRA prison hunger strikes as anyone would care to get — is a creepy but poignant descent into sexual dysfunction. Brandon must have conquests, must find hookers he can hire by the pair, must have voyeuristic assignations in high-rise hotel windows. Sex is beyond compulsion, beyond obsession for him.

It’s interfering with work, causing him to prey on women who reject his womanizing boss (James Badge Dale), worried all the while about what manner of porn others will spy on his work computer.

We have barely begun to wonder how he got this way when the phone messages start — “It’s me. Pick-up. Pick-up.”

A jilted lover? No. It’s Brandon’s hard-drinking, loose-loving, lounge-singing sister Sissy, a broken young woman given a winsome, needy touch by Carey Mulligan. Few words are exchanged when she finally reaches him, finally talks him into letting her stay with him for a few days. But there is history here. As “normal” as she seems, we can’t help but think that’s just in comparison to her freak of a brother.

Rarely has a movie been so sexual without being remotely sexy. Rarely has a guy who might be admired in a sex comedy as a “playa” seemed more pathetic with each fresh conquest.

McQueen, who co-wrote the script to “Shame” with Abi Morgan, dwells on the sordid even as his film gets at the obvious. Brandon’s sick, he can’t commit and even thinking about connecting with someone who wants a relationship with him unnerves him.

“What’s your longest relationship?”

Four months.”

“You have to commit, actually give it a shot.”

“I did. For four months.”

It’s a fascinating, off-putting mystery of  a movie, with just enough hints of what binds Brandon and Sissy and what makes him keep her at a distance. And as Brandon, Fassbender lets us see the pain and sense the sort of earlier life that must have left him this damaged. It’s a riveting performance, one of the gutsiest of the year and not just because of the nudity. Fassbender has the courage to let us see this guy’s pain but never quite want to let him off the hook.

MPAA Rating: NC-17 for some explicit sexual content

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan

Credits: Directed by Steve McQueen, written by McQueen and Abi Morgan, a Fox Searchlight release. Running time: 1:41

With “Into the Abyss,” he looks at capital punishment. Ever the outsider looking in, Herzog examines it through the lens of one triple homicide and a man awaiting execution on Death Row in Texas. Herzog, interviewing from off camera (he’s never seen in this one), questions the killers, family members of those who died, a cop on the case and a former Captain of the Death Row team who finally, 125 executions into his career, snapped and came to the same conclusion that Herzog begins the film with — that capital punishment “is immoral.”

But it’s not a straight “death penalty is bad” issues documentary. Herzog examines the  slaying of a woman, her son and her son’s friend by a couple of low-lifes the son and his friend knew, all because the two killers wanted the family’ s Camaro.  Though our first views of the crime make it seem random, out of the blue, Herzog peels away the violent, ignorant working class culture that produced the killers and connected them to the victims.

Herzog has a European’s fascination with this Texas world of strip malls, abandoned service stations, trailer parks and McMansions. He doesn’t narrate, but the interviews with tearful survivors and the tearful repeat-offender dad of one of the killers shows a culture of brawling, violent, gun-crazed fundamentalists. Just living near a town named “Cut and Shoot”  seemed to doom the victims. Herzog is empathetic and non-judgmental, even as his interview subjects try to rationalize their lives, declare their innocence and the like.

And “Into the Abyss,” opening here Friday, shows the director of “Grizzly Man’s” uncanny eye for arresting images. As with that film’s “found footage,” Herzog makes great use of the chillingly-lit actual crime-scene video shot by police as they investigated the murders fresh back in 2001 — blood that hasn’t dried, on hastily wrapped body floating in the lake where it was dumped.

This isn’t a film designed to free the innocent, discover the “real killers” or even make buttress arguments against capital punishment. But Herzog has managed another strange and intriguing look at a culture and the sorts of people it creates — victims, cops and criminals.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material and some disturbing images

Cast: Michael Perry, Jason Burkett, Werner Herzog

Credits: Written and directed by Wener Herzog, an IFC Films release. Running time 1:45.

Their movie equivalent? Steve McQueen, the British artist turned filmmaker, and his muse, Michael Fassbender.

“It really is like making music together,” says Fassbender. “There’s not much dialogue. We seem to be on the same wavelength. And at the center of it all is trust.”

It isn’t every director an actor would lose most of his body weight for, but Fassbender took on true emaciation for McQueen’s “Hunger,” back in 2008. And it isn’t every filmmaker an actor would get utterly naked for – physically and psychologically, in their new film – “Shame.”

“When you’re moving in the dark, trying to find your way, you’ve got to be doing it with somebody you trust, totally,” Fassbender says. “I had to go to some ugly places with ‘Shame.’ But I believed in the character and the director.”

Both Fassbender and McQueen, 42, were relative unknowns when the experimental “art” filmmaker cast Fassbender in “Hunger.” That acclaimed drama put them both on the map. And as Fassbender’s career has exploded, he continues to find time between mainstream films to work with McQueen.

“It’s a true collaboration, the way we work together,” McQueen says. “We work fast. We surprise each other and challenge each other.”

Before “X-Men: First Class,” before Fassbender’s star turns in “Jane Eyre” or “Inglourious Basterds,” he and McQueen made noise with the scorching, hard-to-watch but little seen film about IRA hunger strikers – “Hunger.” Their latest, “Shame” is about sexual addiction and is almost as difficult to watch – sex and sexuality at their ugliest and most off-putting.

“I wanted to put humanity into a subject matter that people try not to think about,” McQueen says. “I wanted to make this man one of us. Addiction, whether it’s sex or drugs or whatever, is an enormous burden and I wanted to see how someone would navigate their way through it, through their working world, their private life, all of it. I wanted to put a mirror up to the rest of us with this guy. He’s not a freak. He is us.”

Fassbender calls Brandon, his sex addict character, “the toughest role I’ve ever had. The thing with ‘Hunger,’ playing [IRA hunger striker] Bobby Sands, at least I was dealing with somebody who was strong in his belief system and believed in himself. Brandon doesn’t like himself at all – self-loathing, punishing himself. That’s harder to live with, that darkness, than the very strict diet I was on with ‘Hunger.’”

McQueen says Fassbender’s co-star in the film, Carey Mulligan (“An Education”), pursued her role (as the sex addicts equally messed-up sister) “quite aggressively,” and compares her to Fassbender and himself in that “as an artist, you want to show us things that we don’t particularly like seeing in ourselves. It can be ugly. We can’t be ostriches and put our heads in the sand.”

“Shame” has already scored top prizes at the Venice and Hollywood Film Festivals — and early reviews have been glowing – “Fassbender and Mulligan both give massive, irresistible performances as people drowning in a hostile sea of commodified sexuality and self-hatred,” Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir raved.

Don’t put it past us. Michael, and Carey Mulligan, his co-star, are actors people think they have figured out. And then they do a film like this. Our next film together [‘Twelve Years a Slave’, filming next summer] could be a musical romance. Well, no. But don’t put it past us. I think Michael trusts me enough to try that, as I do him.”

George Clooney stars as Matt King, a lawyer and absentee dad living what “my friends on the mainland” assume is a “permanent vacation,” a life in paradise.  But he’s quick to tell us (by voice over narration), that they’re not “immune to life,” living in the land of the never-ending luau.

First, his wife’s in a coma, so brain-injured in a boating accident that she’s not likely to recover. Then, there’s his family’s landed-gentry status, the thousands of acres of Hawaiian farmland that they own in a collective trust which his many relatives want him to, as trustee, sell for development.

But about that coma wife. Matt’s been “the back up parent” for years, “the understudy” in that family role. Now he has daughters to communicate with — ten year old Scottie (Amara Miller)  has to be told her mom is going to die, and rebellious boarding school brat Alex (Shailene Woodley) has to be fetched, brought home and convinced to behave herself as dad breaks it to friends and relatives that his life-of-the-party spouse isn’t going to make it.

Matt, however, is so out of the loop that he’s missed the obvious. The wife (Patricia Hastie), glimpsed only in an unspoken, day-of-the-boating-accident flashback, was cheating on him. Alex knew. Others did, too. Now Matt wants to know who the guy is, wants some sort of closure. And he needs Alex’s help for that.

Payne stirs all this into a rich, wistful brew. “Descendants” has a wake, sad family get togethers and family confrontations and hopeless moments in which the only thing Matt has to cling to are thoughts of revenge on the guy his wife was cheating with, a man he’s determined to stalk.

Woodley, of “The Secret Life of An American Teenager,” beautifully gets across the child who has to take on an adult role but is nowhere near up to the task, despite her rude bravado. Nick Krause is agreeably goofy as her tag-along pal Sid, who has a gift for saying the wrong thing, especially in front of Alex’s grumpy grandpa (Robert Forster, terrific).  Also notable are Beau Bridges, as a laid-back floral-shirt wearing cousin whose slouch says “surfer” but who has scary business-face side, And the always wonderful Judy Greer brings a subtle sub-surface hurt to the wife of the “other man” in Matt’s wife’s life.

Matt King is, for the 50 year old Clooney, his first true-than-middle-aged-man role. Clooney has to play competent but confused, a man whose value system seems sound (he’s frugal, not spending his inherited wealth) until others question those values. It’s a tricky performance, conveying heartbreak and fury, poignancy and pragmatism. It’s some of his best work ever.

At times, Payne stumbles and takes us out of this engaging but slight tale. Early on, a stranger blurts out all the back story on the land deal, the media attention it has earned and native-born Hawaiians’ attitudes about it, a scene that screams “EXPOSITION.” The stalking of the wife’s lover seems like strained invention and Sid is a simple plot device. We’re all but waiting for this unschooled dolt to utter some profound insight, the way plot devices inevitably do.

But “The Descendants,” like the Napa Valley-set “Sideways” and the Nebraskan odyssey “About Schmidt,” lets Payne show us the Other America and the Other Americans — little lives caught up in small but epic problems far away from the La La Land of Hollywood hype, sex and violence.  In his hands, Hawaii seems a lot more than sun, surf, hula skirts and umbrella drinks and the people there as universal as anyone who works, loves, loses and struggles, united or not, in these United States.

MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references

Cast: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Robert Forster, Beau Bridges, Judy Greer.

Credits: Directed by Alexander Payne, co-written by Payne, Jim Rash and Nat Foxon, based on a Kaui Hart Hemmings novel. A Fox Searchlight release. Running time: 1:55

“Assorted Santas?” Why, yes. Santas in this version of North Pole Inc. serve for about 70 years and pass the job down to a son. The current Santa (voiced by Jim Broadbent) is a bit dotty, long-in-the-tooth, more of a “figurehead” in the intricate time-traveling incarnation of the family business that his red camouflage-suited son (Hugh Laurie, perfect) has turned it into. He has a huge stealth spaceship sleigh in which armies of technocrat elves and Fed Ex elves organize deliveries, which armies of commando elves make, with Santa showing up to provide that “official” touch on Christmas Eve. Steve is waiting for the old man to retire. He even has the Armani Santa suit all custom made, and a Christmas tree shaped goatee.

But the old man won’t go. Even a disastrous near “wake up” alert (a child wakes up with Santa in her room) isn’t enough to convince him. Even when the organization realizes that out of the billions and billions served, a little girl in Cornwall didn’t get her bike, a resentful Steve only dismisses that as a statistical anomaly, and Santa himself shrugs it off.

“Don’t worry, children are stupid,” one of the elves offers. They won’t realize they didn’t get a visit from Father Christmas.

Arthur, Santa’s klutzy younger son, winningly voiced by James McAvoy, is shocked. Arthur won’t hear of it. And in his ancient grandpa, Grandsanta, played with demonic glee by the great Bill Nighy, he finds a sympathetic ear. The old man wants to get his old sleigh out and make the delivery, with real reindeer.

“They said it’s impossible,” Arthur protests.

“They used to say it was impossible to teach women how to read,” Grandsanta mutters back. “We’ll be back home in the waddle of a reindeer’s buttocks!”

That’s when “Arthur Christmas” takes off — literally. With outmoded technology, a 136 year-old Santa with false teeth, a bad temper and no sense of direction, Arthur’s going to get little Gwen her bike. They encounter a gun nut in Idaho, a fierce chihuahua in Mexico and a marauding pride of lions in Africa, all in an effort to make sure no child is left behind on Christmas.

“It doesn’t matter how Santa’s gift gets there,” Arthur declares, “as long as it does!”

“Arthur Christmas” has many a madcap moment, many of them provided by the super-efficient gift-wrapping elf Bryony, who believes invisible tape can solve any problem — including that marauding pride of lions.

The Aardman animators know a thing or three about sight gags and throw-away lines, and they pile up quickly, here. Nighy’s wicked glee in every little bit of slang is hilarious, but the sheer invention is what gets you.

The movie’s energy flags at about the one hour mark, but we kind of need that break to catch our breath. In a genre — the animated holiday film — already overflowing with the sentimental, the silly “Arthur Christmas” is a most welcome treat to find stuffed into the cinema’s stockings this holiday season.

MPAA Rating:PG for some mild rude humor

Cast: The voices of James McAvoy, Jim Broadbent, Imelda Stanton, Hugh Laurie, Bill Nighy

Credits: Directed by Sarah Smith, written by Peter Baynham and Sarah Smith, a Sony Animation release. Running time: 1:30

British TV director James Bobin, a veteran of the wonderfully dry “Flight of the Conchords” comedy with music, and world’s biggest Muppet fan Jason Segel have concocted a winning walk down memory lane that’s about a walk down memory lane. Times have changed, character after character says in the film. “You’re relics.”

“I guess people sorta forgot about us.”

But they’re getting the Muppets back together for one last show, a telethon to save their tatty old theater and their old movie studio from a rapacious Texas oilman named Tex Richman, played without the requisite glee by Oscar winner Chris Cooper — “Maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh.”

Forget that subplot. It’s stolen from “A Prairie Home Companion.” What’s cute here is the frame that Segel (who co-wrote the script) built for it. He plays Gary, a goofy guy who grew up with a Muppet brother. Walter (voiced by Peter Linz) never really fit in, couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t growing like his brother, until the day when he saw his first “Muppets Show.” Here were his people. Here was his kind of entertainment — corny, dated, self-aware.

cut to their adult years, and Walter comes along with Gary and Gary’s longtime bestest gal Mary (Amy Adams, perfect) as they sing and dance their way to Hollywood for a visit to Muppet history. That’s where they see how forgotten they are, how their studio tour is a wreck.

“Is this Universal,” the clueless Japanese tourists want to know. “Yes, it is,” cracks the tour guide, played by Oscar winner Alan Arkin — one of scores of cameos in the picture.

Tex Richman diabolical plans and “maniacal laughs” must be foiled. Let’s get the gang back together. Which isn’t going to be easy. Well, actually, it is. Kermit’s almost a hermit, living in a fading mansion in Bel Air. Fozzie is fronting a tribute band, The Moopets, in Reno.

Gonzo runs a plumbing supply house, Scooter works at Google and Miss Piggy is plus-size editor at Paris Vogue with Emily “The Devil Wears Prada” Blunt. Animal, the drummer, is in anger management group therapy with Jack Black.

Along the way — they joke about the old movies, and the fact that they’re making a new one. “Wow, that was an expensive looking explosion. I’m surprised we could afford it.”

They tell the old jokes. Until it’s “time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights.”

But the giddiness that Jim Henson & Friends brought to the original Muppets is missing. The antic energy, the old vaudeville/TV variety show references are just plain alien to modern kids. It’s telling than in the big telethon scenes, the audience in the theater watching it (including Hobo Joe, played by Zach Galifianakis) is all old enough to remember the old TV series. there aren’t any kids.

The songs are amusing enough, and Adams and Segel make a cute duet.  And adult fans who grew up with the show will grin. You have to wonder, though, if kids will get the Muppets, and if this generation of Muppet performers is little more than a tribute band itself.

MPAA Rating:

Cast: Jason Segel, Amy Adams, The Muppets, Jack Black, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin

Credits: Directed by James Bobin, written by jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, a Walt Disney release. Running time: 1:39

It’s a charming and quite gorgeous exercise in thew few corners of the medium where the Oscar-winning filmmaker has next to no experience — children’s stories, comedy and 3D. And even though it is too long and the master has yet to develop much of a comic touch, this adaptation of Brian Selznick’s “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” is a stunning exercise in 3D and a delightful celebration of Scorsese’s lifelong love of the movies, something he, like Hugo, developed on childhood.

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) lives in the bowels of a Paris train station in between the World Wars. He is an orphan who hides out, carrying on the job a drunken uncle left him with — servicing the huge clocks there. He slips in and out of the station, getting by on stealing food and drink, hoping not to be noticed by the station inspector, Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen).

Hugo’s a tinkerer, something he picked up from his late father (Jude Law). His favorite project is an old clockwork automaton, a wind-up man he tries to fix with parts stolen from the toy shop run by a cranky old man played by the great Ben Kingsley. When the old man catches Hugo, he seizes the boy’s notebook, full of his father’s drawings and fixes for the automaton. Hugo must work in the shop to win the notebook back, and even then, the mean old man may turn him in to the meaner wounded war vet Gustav, who patrols the station with a Doberman.

Isabel (Chloe Moretz) calls the old man “Pappa Georges,” and even she finds Hugo dubious company, an excuse to try out her burgeoning vocabulary — “You’re nothing but a…reprobate!”

Hugo must win her over (He takes her to the movies to see Harold Lloyd in “Safety Last”), elude Gustav and get back that notebook — his last tie to his dead father.

Scorsese uses this vintage Paris railway station set to stage marvelous 3D chases, on foot — his 3d camera following Hugo up ladders, down alleys, weaving through crowds. “Hugo” is the best looking 3D movie since “Alice in Wonderland.” The director peoples the set with character players (Richard Griffiths, Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee), and sets in motion subplots about the lonely Gustav, the fate of Hugo’s drunken uncle (Ray Winstone of “The departed”) and clues to the automaton’s and Pappa Georges’ past.

Moretz, slinging an English accent, is her usual delightful self, showing Isabel’s love of words — “I think we have to be very clan-DES-tine!”

Cohen takes a number of scenes to make any sort of comic impression. And Kingsley makes the journey from ogre to charmer in his usual winning fashion.

But the story — period details and mysteries notwithstanding — is too slight to support this length. It’s an 80 minute bon bon struggling to break out of a two hour and ten minute souffle.

Still, movie buffs, especially fans of early cinema history, will be transfixed by scenes in the latter acts — movie-making, as it was being invented. It’s why Scorsese chose to make the film. It’s where his heart truly is with this material. And it’s no surprise that this corner of his wondrous little picture is where he chose to take a cameo, immortalizing himself in the history of the medium he grew up loving and mastering.

MPAA Rating: PG for mild thematic material, some action/peril and smoking

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Chloe Moretz, Sacha Baron Cohen, jude Law

Credits: Directed by Martin Scorsese, written by John Logan, based on the Brian Selznick novel. A Paramount Pictures release. Running time: 2:10.

But in scene after scene, Williams “gets” Monroe — the sex appeal, the vulnerability, the sense of fear of discovery behind all that out-there sexual bravado. When she’s singing about starting a “Heat Wave” by “making my seat wave,” friends you will believe it.

“My Week” is based on a memoir by Colin Clark, an upper class lad who used family connections to land a go-fer job on the set of Sir Laurence Olivier’s film, “The Prince and the Showgirl,” a 1956 comedy that co-starred Monroe, then at the height of her fame. He was 23, Clark (Eddie Redmayne) narrates, and “I wanted to be a part of their world.”

Clark ingratiates himself with Olivier, played with a flint-edged gleam by Kenneth Branagh. Olivier turns on the charm, puts on his most gracious face and fumes fumes fumes as his new co-star upstages him and keeps one and all waiting, on the set, while she works through her moods and is consoled by her enabling acting coach, Paula Strasberg (the wonderful Zoe Wanamaker).  Clark is willing to endure Olivier barking “Boy!” at him just for the chance to be near Monroe.

Next thing he knows, the director and fading star has brought him in as third assistant director. Over the course of the film’s production, Colin Clark became the go-to intermediary in various Brits’ dealings with the mercurial, difficult and neurotic blonde bombshell.

British TV director Simon Curtis (“Cranford”) and screenwriter Adrian Hodges concoct a fascinating milieu that gives us a minor revision of Monroe’s reputation. Every Brit Monroe encounters, on set and off, is just as charming and accommodating as can be. Co-stars such as Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench) shower her with compliments, despite her poor showing, late all the time, blown scenes, botched lines.Brits bitingly play supporting figures from her life — agents and managers (Toby Jones and Dominic Cooper), husband (Dougray Scott is the playwright Arthur Miller).

The clash of acting styles — Olivier’s “The character is on the page” vs. The Method, is nicely evoked.

But if you’ve read any biography of Lord Larry and his Blanche Dubois wife, Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond), you’ll be scratching your head at his patience and her sanity.  Neither seems accurate, although Olivier needed Monroe much more than she needed him and was most certainly solicitous, no matter how much he resented this.

The tale traipses down the primrose path to “trite” as it sets Clark up for a romance with the lovely wardrobe girl, played by Emma Watson with a self-confidence that all those Harry Potter pictures must have given her. The seamstress will be forgotten as Clark stumbles deeper into the crush that he develops on Monroe, that need so many men, even the very young ones, felt to try and save her from all this.

But Branagh and Williams are worth the price of admission, the former “wunderkind” of British stage and screen having a go at the pretentious, plummy Olivier, who referred to movies as “MO-see-un pictures,” whenever he felt the need to toy with a few syllables.

And Williams, recreating a few of Monroe’s magical moments from that movie, works the “dumb blonde” thing just the way Monroe did on the scene — “Gee Mr. Sir,” she says, not certain of how to address the knighted Olivier, “I could listen to your accent all day.”

MPAA Rating: R for some language

Cast: Michelle Williams,Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne, Julia Ormond, Dominic Cooper

Credits: Directed by Simon Curtis, written by Adrian Hodges, based on the memoirs of Colin Clark. A Weinstein Co. release.  Running time: 1:38

But he’s not forgetting where he came from. At 32, he’s starring in his fellow Brit Danny Boyle’s heist picture, “Trance.” And any time there’s a bit of animation to be done in the UK, count him present. From the sleeper hit “Gnomeo and Juliet,” which made him into a garden gnome Romeo, to the new 3D animated “Arthur Christmas,” which has him playing Santa’s passionate but accident-prone son, McAvoy is making his mark as just a voice actor, as well.

The film’s already opened in Britain, to great reviews, and The Hollywood Reporter praises it as “agreeably subversive.”

We caught up with McAvoy at his London flat.

Q: So is it your patriotic duty to sign on to anything animated in Great Britain?

McAvoy: Hahah! It’s my FINANCIAL duty, I think. But I’ve been dead lucky at picking these parts, haven’t I? I love doing movies that kids can watch [He and wife Anne-Marie Duff have a toddler].

Q: ‘Arthur Christmas’ is a particularly British cartoon, isn’t it?

A: Well, it’s Aardman Studios [the “Wallace & Gromit” movies]. They’re a fantastically idiosyncratic studio. I know they made this for Sony, but the film has their British heart –a very British sensibility. And even over here in the UK, their humor is just odd and distinct.

I think there’s an integrity to the characters, as well. The film is arguably about the fight to maintain the integrity of Christmas. That’s what Arthur stands for, making sure not one gift isn’t delivered.

Q: When animators come calling, what qualities do they tell you they’re looking for in your voice? Because you don’t do a Full Monty Scots accent in these.

A: I ask every time, and I don’t know. You don’t audition for them. They’ve auditioned you by taking some animation and putting your voice from other movies onto it. They look at a lot of actors that way, to see which one fits. You’ve got the job, but you don’t know how you got it. I always want to know “Which incarnation of my accent and voice are you wanting?”

Q: Holidays in America are all about the traditional movies and TV shows families re-watch during the season, from ‘A Christmas Story’ to ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas.’ Were there movies your family made sure to watch every holiday season way up there in Scotland?

A: Oh, I loved ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas.’ But you know, in Scotland, ‘Star Wars’ was on TV every Christmas. Loved that. And I don’t know if it was a good movie or not, but I loved ‘Santa Claus: The Movie,’ with Dudley Moore, when I was a kid.

Q: Do you finish “Trance” in time to be home for the holidays?

A: Oh yeah, I’ve got one more day, in France, on “Trance,” and then it’s home to the family, with too much food, lots of Christmas films on the telly and too much cheap chocolate!