But with Russell Brand, the peculiar English comic who plays Arthur with an ultra-twee, almost girlish accent that seems like a Martian imitation of Dudley Moore’s original, you really don’t know what you’re getting at all. Very late in the film, after Arthur has gotten sober and manned up to life and so on, he invades the children’s room of a public library to win back his lost lady love, Naomi (Greta Gerwig). While he’s pitching woo, a kid interrupts him to ask, “Are you a boy or a girl?” This does not deter Arthur, who barks, “Doesn’t matter,” but the question reverberates a whole lot more than it ought to, maybe. With his enormous head, enormous feet and cascade of black ringlets, his impressive but strangely proportioned physique and his ability to look beautiful and ugly at the same moment, Brand does not quite appear male or female or even exactly human. He looks like a member of a related species from elsewhere in the galaxy, or perhaps an Afghan hound who’s been changed into a person by a wicked sorcerer.

I suppose “Arthur” represents Brand’s biggest attempt to become an American movie star, but he’s once again playing a fish-out-of-water alien, different in flavor but not in kind from Aldous Snow, the over-the-hill Anglo rock god he portrayed in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Get Him to the Greek.” And while Brand is undeniably an intelligent, charismatic and physically pliable screen presence, something like the unholy love child of Charlie Chaplin and David Bowie, he doesn’t exactly ooze big-screen testosterone. (Yes, I know: He was No. 1 on Salon’s Men on Top list this year, and let’s just say that remains a topic of internal debate.)

Brand’s coupling here with Gerwig, the one-time indie heroine who appeared in Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg” and several Joe Swanberg films, is supremely awkward and nearly devoid of sexual chemistry. Gerwig is poorly served by this underwritten ultra-pixie role (those outfits! My eyes!), and Brand needs to butt against someone with harder, weirder edges. He’s much funnier in his scenes with Jennifer Garner, who plays the conniving power-bitch who conspires with Arthur’s mother (Geraldine James) to coerce him into an unwanted marriage.

One could write a dissertation — indeed, I bet somebody has — about why the sardonic, satirical mode of British comedy often translates so poorly into the Amurkin idiom. It’s not that we unwashed colonials can’t tolerate a joke at our own expense and fail to grasp irony, or that British audiences are a bit better educated, more cosmopolitan and more aware of the absurdity of history. Well, OK, it is those things, a bit. But it also has to do with scale and sheer bigness. To succeed in American pop culture you have to broadcast a clear, strong and dominant signal, and comedians like Brand or Steve Coogan or Ricky Gervais or (insert your favorite Brit performer here) have prospered at home by delivering deliciously contradictory simultaneous signals.

To find a contrary example, you might have to go back to — well, to Dudley Moore, who was once part of a legendarily profane and drunken comedy duo in 1960s London (with Peter Cook) before becoming the star of insipid Hollywood comedies like “Arthur.” I strongly encourage Russell Brand not to push the analogy any further and get himself cast in a remake of “10.” (Still, I can’t help myself: Nominations for his co-star, please?) I’m not sure he should try to be a leading man at all, except in A) remakes of “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” “Brother From Another Planet” and “Stranger in a Strange Land,” B) Tarzan movies or C) Anne Rice rip-offs featuring queeny vampire lords.

Oh, yeah. The movie: Do you really care? Helen Mirren is pretty funny in the John Gielgud role (transposed from butler to nanny), although it’s depressing to see her play characters who are actually old. Jennifer Garner is enjoyably mean, which complicates things, because I wanted Arthur to spend more time with her instead of with milquetoasty Naomi. Nick Nolte has finally completed his transformation into a bear. 

Which is not to say it’s, like, amazing or anything. Taymor approaches Shakespeare’s last play (unless it isn’t; that issue, like everything else about the greatest dramatist of the English tradition, is disputed) with great respect, staying largely true to its impressive text and general narrative outline. Her interpretations and interpolations range from brilliant to indifferent to extremely silly; as Taymor surely knows, there’s nothing especially revolutionary in asking Helen Mirren to play the central role of Prospera (i.e., Prospero), the deposed duke/duchess of Milan turned white-magic practitioner. (Vanessa Redgrave played a gender-neutral Prospero on the London stage 10 years ago.) What it does get you is, well, Helen Mirren performing one of Shakespeare’s most complicated characters, which can make up for a lot of other problems.

The thing about “The Tempest” is that there’s almost no way to bring something new to this tremendously allegorical and ambiguous play, which is highly self-conscious and very much unlike anything else Shakespeare wrote — is it a comedy? a romance? a “masque”? — and may be the most reinterpreted, overanalyzed and deconstructed literary work in the Western tradition. Since the play was first performed in the 17th century, viewers have seen Prospero’s final decision to abjure his “rough magic” and break his staff as a metaphor for Shakespeare’s own decision to end his playwriting career. More recently, Prospero’s relationship with Ariel, his “airy spirit” servant, and Caliban, his deformed, island-born slave, have been understood in terms of colonial and/or psychoanalytic theory: love/hate, black/white, North/South, ego/Id.

I suppose in offering a traditional rendering, or nearly so — it’s set on an island, with characters more or less in Elizabethan dress, Ariel (Ben Whishaw) as a naked holographic sprite and Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) as a near-naked, mud-encrusted African — Taymor is allowing us to pick up the story and run in whichever direction we choose. But I can’t help wishing this “Tempest” had more of a distinctive personality. Instead, it waxes and wanes with its cast, some of whom are fully up to the task posed by Shakespearean dialogue and some of whom just aren’t.

Hounsou gives a powerful physical performance, but simply can’t be understood speaking Caliban’s difficult blank verse about half the time. It’s no good being a proto-Frantz Fanon colonial rebel if we can’t make out what you’re trying to say. (He’s better when quieter, as when reassuring newcomers: “Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises/ Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”) Felicity Jones and Reeve Carney, as the young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand, are merely dull. Some of the best scenes in the movie involve stage veterans like David Strathairn, Chris Cooper and Alan Cumming, playing the nefarious if subsidiary trio of King Alonso of Naples, Prospera’s brother Antonio and the Iago-lite Sebastian.

If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ll know that English comedian and not-quite movie star Russell Brand shows up as the buffoonish Trinculo, playing him as yet another of Brand’s Cockney rock-star caricatures. Thing is, that fits pretty well with the dimwit character, who briefly becomes — along with his drunken buddy Stephano (Alfred Molina) — an instrument in Caliban’s planned insurrection against Prospera’s rule. Those enjoyments aside, this “Tempest” is all about Mirren, who plays the aging female mage with a mixture of conqueror’s arrogance and motherly sadness, lending her final words about the rebellious Caliban — “this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” — a tragic ambivalence. (She does not call him a “demi-devil” and “bastard” in the same breath, as Prospero does in the play.)

Lovely as it is to hear Mirren read some of the most challenging lines ever written in our language, Prospero does not look, to our eyes, like an entirely sympathetic figure (not that he necessarily did 400 years ago either), and making him female does not relieve him of the white man’s burden. Ultimately Taymor’s reading of “The Tempest” is more dutiful than exciting, and it’s strangely bereft of the visual imagination and diabolical machinery for which her theatrical productions are known. Perhaps more than any other Shakespeare play, this one has evaded successful translation from stage to screen. Derek Jarman’s homoerotic reimagining from 1980 and Paul Mazursky’s lightweight modern-language version made two years later are all but forgotten. I admire Peter Greenaway’s “Prospero’s Books” for what it is, which is a self-referential digital art project using Shakespeare’s text as one of its elements (along with lots of naked flesh). But none of those films really comes close to capturing the dense and nettlesome mysteries of “The Tempest,” and this earnest effort doesn’t either. Is “Forbidden Planet,” the 1950s sci-fi reworking, with Robbie the Robot as Ariel and an invisible, perhaps imaginary Caliban, still the best movie version?

“Red” features Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren as an improbable quartet of ex-spooks who break out the costumes and hardware for one last go-round against the powers of darkness, those being represented by the United States government. (The title is a supposed CIA acronym: Retired and Extremely Dangerous.) Whether you see screenwriting duo Erich and Jon Hoeber’s anti-government paranoia as left-wing or right-wing probably depends on your own perspective, but either way it’s a highly contemporary blend of cynicism and idealism.

But the cheerful nihilism of the plot, which involves buried atrocities from the 1980s “dirty war” in Guatemala and at one point sets former CIA hit man Frank Moses (Willis) on a quest to assassinate the vice president, is just a frame for the cast of aging cut-ups and director Robert Schwentke’s lovingly rendered gunplay and explosions. The Hoeber brothers’ list of gags range from the totally canned to the cackle-inducing, but their script is just good enough that the actors can follow its idiotic twists and turns with aplomb.

Frank Moses is one of the better ultra-deadpan tough-guy characters of Willis’ mid-late career (or is it late-mid career?), and Willis finds a terrific screwball partner in Mary-Louise Parker, playing a customer-service agent he abducts into a life of dazzling espionage and violence because … well, just because. Because he digs her, I guess. Freeman’s character is an elderly lech, who’s busy dying of liver cancer and ogling the female staff in a New Orleans nursing home, Malkovich plays a stereotypical off-the-grid nutjob (although he has a vastly better time here than he does in “Secretariat”) and Mirren runs a B&B in rural Maryland, when she’s not doing freelance assassination gigs on the side.

All those guys are a blast, and the dark-hearted idiocy of “Red” is mostly quite enjoyable. But in a sense they’re all upstaged by 93-year-old Ernest Borgnine, who gets two brief scenes as a record-keeper deep in the bowels of CIA headquarters. He’s seen spooks come and seen ‘em go, and has no hesitation in aiding the aging renegades against the blow-dried new generation (nicely represented by Karl Urban and Rebecca Pidgeon). He clearly sends the message at the heart of all the violent and silly fun in “Red,” which may not be historically accurate but is nonetheless widely shared: Things have really gone to hell, and this place ain’t what it used to be.

In the accompanying interview, Mirren discusses her new film, “Love Ranch,” wherein she plays a Nevada madam who has an affair with a man 30 years her junior, and explains, “I much prefer overt sexuality to sleazy, vulgar prurience.” Overt sexuality – always one of Dame Mirren’s strong suits.

Though one or two of the story’s accompanying commenters insisted that “Nobody is interested in your tits anymore” and to “Leave that to Kelly Bensimon and other air heads,” the bulk of the Web response seems to be in line with the enthusiastic “Go Helen!” It helps that Mirren is a dish and a half, but her reliable hotness doesn’t mitigate the gutsiness of her continuing to go full monty. (Take it from me, taking it off for the camera is pretty humbling even well before retirement age.) While the image is provocative, it’s certainly no slick, heavily retouched attempt at titillation.

You don’t stop being a woman when you hit 35 – or even, as Mirren proves, 65. Everything that’s spirited and challenging and sexual in you remains, albeit in varying degrees, even when the lines and creases show up. And what’s exhibitionism in your 20s can be downright political in your golden years. Maybe that’s why, although her breasts are certainly an attention getter, it’s the defiant look in her eyes in that bathtub photo that really makes an impact. This is me, right here and now, she seems to say. You still want to look, don’t you? You bet we do.

I’ve watched “The Last Station” twice, the first time as part of a rushed, drive-by flurry of pre-Christmas viewing, the second in a more leisurely capacity, to focus specifically on Mirren’s performance. The picture hasn’t much grown on me, I’m afraid: It could be that in trying to keep this period piece lively and modern, Hoffman (“Restoration,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) instead nudges it too far into slapstick territory. Its notes of gaiety feel forced, its moments of sorrow even more so.

But my second viewing did make me realize that Mirren’s performance is more slippery and more complex than I’d originally thought it to be. Mirren just is, and always will be, a sexy actress. Although an individual guy will often claim to be attracted to a certain type — one may like brunettes, another blondes; some like ‘em skinny, others prefer more ballast — I have never met a straight man who didn’t find Mirren hopelessly sexy. (I’m sure there’s someone out there, but I have yet to meet him personally.) Mirren’s role in “The Last Station” is, on the surface, about as unsexy as it gets: Her wardrobe consists largely of high-necked lace-trim blouses; she’s often swaddled in cozy but nondescript shawls, the Russian turn-of-the-century equivalent of Eileen Fisher; and her demeanor, as a demanding, difficult wife, is often hard to take, and not just for us, the audience. Paul Giamatti’s Vladimir Chertkov, the rather conniving Tolstoy disciple who’s doing his damnedest to get that new will into action, hurls these words at her in a fit of frustration, loathing and barely disguised misogyny: “If I had a wife like you, I would have blown my brains out. Or gone to America.”

We can see why he feels that way. At times Sofya surveys her husband — Plummer plays him as a still-sharp but somewhat doddering presence — with suspicious feline eyes. She’s driven by practicality; she knows she has to look out for her own best interests and those of her family. But there are times you wonder if she isn’t somewhat motivated by greed as well. Mirren vests the character with unrepentant haughtiness: Sofya carries herself like a princess, with the attendant expectation that she naturally ought to be treated like one. Her movements are precise and businesslike; she has the resolute, straight-backed gait of a once-great beauty who has had to adjust, graciously if reluctantly, to the realities of aging.

Sofya simpers and coaxes, complains and cajoles. She drives her husband nearly to madness. And then, just when you think you, let alone he, can’t possibly take any more nonsense from this infuriatingly high-strung creature, Sofya turns kittenishly tender. And that’s the secret power, the double whammy, of Mirren’s performance here. Her Sofya is a manipulator all right: We can see how sometimes she might act perplexed and fragile as a means of getting her way. But Mirren shows her character from both sides of that mirror: At times Sofya really is confused and vulnerable, and with just a coquettish glance or a hint of a weary smile, Mirren somehow defines the difference between the reality and the manipulation — or, more accurately, shows how they blur into a maddeningly human whole.

There are places where the performances in “The Last Station” — even Mirren’s — feel oversized in a faux-Russian way, the acting equivalent of a cartoonishly furry Cossack hat. (Plummer is a consistently fine actor who at last has his own supporting-actor Academy Award nomination for his role in this movie. It’s a perfectly adequate performance, but not nearly as stunning as the one he gave in, say, Michael Mann’s “The Insider.”) But Mirren is always pleasurable to watch, and though this role perhaps qualifies as one of her more stately roles (à la her Oscar-winning turn in “The Queen”), as opposed to a sexy one (this is no “Calendar Girls”), it does offer a sense of her complexity and her range. When Sofya, hoping to coax her grumpy, frowning husband into bed, reaches out to him from amid the bedclothes, the curve of her bare arms suggest the freshness of a young ballerina. “I’m still your little chicken!” she implores, momentarily shrinking the distance between the eagerness of young love and the resigned negligence that aged couples too often settle into. And in that moment Mirren, who is 64, is a sex symbol once again.