Every Saturday morning, movie critic Francesca Rudkin joins Jack Tame to take a look at what is playing at the movies this weekend.

Stan & Ollie is a 2018 biographical comedy-drama film directed by Jon S. Baird and written by Jeff Pope. Based on the later years of the lives of the comedy double act Laurel and Hardy, the film stars Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. It premiered in October 2018 at the BFI London Film Festival. The film was released in the United States on 28 December 2018 and in the United Kingdom on 11 January 2019.

The film focuses on details of the comedy duo's personal relationship while relating how they embarked on a grueling music hall tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland during 1953 and struggled to get another film made. At the 76th Golden Globe Awards, Reilly was nominated for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, and at the 72nd British Academy Film Awards the film earned three nominations, including Best British Film and Best Actor in a Leading Role for Coogan.

Hollywood Reporter: James Caan, Rosanna Arquette, Tom Hollander and Jonathan Rhys Meyers headline French writer-director Amanda Sthers’ latest ensembler.

If you’re interested in a movie where James Caan plays a grumpy old retired cardiologist raising pigs in Israel, and one who used to be married to a younger woman, played by Rosanna Arquette, who now is stricken with terminal cancer, and who is also estranged from his playwright son (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), whose latest opus, titled Origins, punctuates the drama with several symbolic interpretive dance pieces, then maybe — just maybe — the film Holy Lands could be for you.

But for the rest of us, this treacly and overwrought piece of mishegoss from French novelist turned director Amanda Sthers is pretty much a chore from start to finish. In fact, a curmudgeonly Caan talking to his favorite little piglet may be one of the better things to see here, because at least there’s a tinge of sweetness to such a scene. The rest of the movie is mired by 12-ton clichés about family, love, death, God, religion, you name it — everything connected by portentous letters that the characters read aloud from separate continents. How this kind of film got made is a mystery; the fact that it has yet to secure U.S. distribution telling of its commercial prospects.