Reel-View Ratings: The Bigger The Beard, The Better The Movie

CHONMAGE PURIN

A Boy and His Samurai (as this film is known in Western markets) finds a samurai from the 1800s somehow traveling through time to modern-day Tokyo, where he is found and adopted by a working single mother and her son. To repay her kindness, he puts his sword skills aside to take over her housework and child-rearing — and inexplicably becomes a genius pastry chef along the way. It’s heartwarming, though logic-defying at times. Don’t expect social commentary here: The film is as sweet and inoffensive as the pudding that samurai Yasube loves so much.

Plays 1:45, 3:45 and 5:45 p.m. Jan. 2 at the Movie Museum

THE TRIP TO ITALY

Enjoying improv comedy — especially in film form — requires a certain kind of humor, and a degree of forgiveness when things fall flat. Actor-comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Bry-don play sort-of-not-really caricatures of themselves in this sequel to their culinary escapades in The Trip, wining and dining their way through Italy while swapping stories and attempting to perfect their hoarse Christian-Bale-as-Batman whispers. Two white guys living it up while lamenting (if subtly) their mortality isn’t exactly innovative fare, but the food porn is gratuitous, the humor is intensely British and the result is, well, delicious — if still a bit directionless.

Plays 2 and 6 p.m. Jan. 1 and noon, 3:45 and 7:30 p.m. Jan. 5 at the Movie Museum

THE WOMAN IN BLACK 2: ANGEL OF DEATH

Horror movie sequels are almost always pale shades of their predecessors, barely fit to even be called “ghosts,” and this sequel to The Woman in Black does not fail to disappoint in that regard. The British setting has traded in its Victorian sensibilities for the chaos of the Blitz in 1941, a promising scene change that, unfortunately, is never quite utilized to its full extent. Instead, some pleasant-faced British actors find themselves trapped with a vengeful spirit in a haunted house. Things go as you’d expect them to. Let’s hope The Woman in Black decides not to come back a third time. Opens Jan. 2 in wide release