In theaters

THE LADYKILLERS, written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 104 minutes, rated R. Now playing, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

The new Joel and Ethan Coen movie, “The Ladykillers,” is a loose remake of the 1955 Ealing original starring Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers.

As written by William Rose, that film – a comedy of manners set in London – found Guinness and company using a sweet old lady’s house as a base of operations to pull off a daring heist. The nerve of them, I know, but the movie worked.

In the Coens’ hands, that story – a comedy of grotesque manners set in southern-fried, rural Mississippi – follows a group of eccentric crooks using a God-fearing old lady’s house as the base of operations to steal $1.6 million from a riverboat casino. The nerve of them, I know, but the movie works.

Just as in the original, the plot turns to getting rid of the woman, here played by the marvelous Irma P. Hall (“Soul Food”) in a great comic performance, when she proves to be more trouble than she’s worth.

The film, which the Coens wrote, offers several big laughs, some of which are so outrageous – the untimely demise of a dog, the botched holdup of a doughnut shop – that audiences will likely be talking about them after the show.

The movie also allows Tom Hanks to further remove himself from his American Everyman persona, which he’s been pushing away from since 2002’s “Road to Perdition” and later that year in “Catch Me if You Can.”

Hanks, as the frothy, melodious Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D. – the chief crook with a high-end vocabulary who heads this operation- is a snorting, lascivious fraud with a Vandyke beard and a dingy white suit that would look like a Tom Wolfe knockoff if it weren’t so obviously cheap.

With his pudgy face and piggish eyes, he recalls Tennessee Williams by way of Foghorn Leghorn. He’s a caricature – as are all of the characters in this movie – and he’s obviously having a great time hamming it up in the role.

Supporting players include Marlon Wayans as a gun-wielding casino janitor, Tzi Ma as a smoky, former Vietnamese general who sports a Hitler moustache, Ryan Hurst as a hunk of beef who is somehow dumber than he looks, and J.K. Simmons as gung-ho bomb expert Garth Pancake, a man whose love for the mountainous Mountain Girl (Diane Delano) apparently knows few limits.

The movie is filled with great, intentionally repetitive touches, and a gospel soundtrack by T Bone Burnett that could raise the dead.

This isn’t the Coens’ best movie – that still belongs to “Fargo.” But it is what it is and it does what it does well.

Grade: B+

On video and DVD

SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE, written and directed by Nancy Meyers, 124 minutes, rated PG-13.

In the funny sex comedy, “Something’s Gotta Give,” Jack Nicholson is Harry Sanborn, a single, 63-year-old hip-hop record-label owner who has been dating younger women for the better part of 40 years. Not unlike Nicholson himself.

Harry loves younger women, he loves to love younger women, he loves it when they love him, and he loves it when everyone is happy with the loving.

He would be thrilled to keep this love train going if it weren’t for two major pit stops recently halting his life – his heart condition, which might be serious, particularly during sex, and the alarming intrusion of Diane Keaton’s Erica Barry into his life.

Mother of his current girlfriend, 29-year-old Marin (Amanda Peet), Erica is a famous playwright who has stopped Harry cold with a personality and a body that are far more fetching than he believes they ought to be for a woman “of a certain age.” Still, Erica is such a refreshing change from what Harry is used to dating, she literally shocks him into adulthood, single-handedly making him question his shallow life.

Set in the Hamptons, New York City and Paris, the movie benefits enormously from the casting of its leads, who turn in great, crowd-pleasing performances.

There are scenes in this movie that people will talk about, such as the extended period in which Keaton can’t stop crying, which is masterful in its unbridled escalation. But what makes the movie so good are those moments when the characters realize they must come to terms with the depth of their feelings and take risks that involve revealing their unexpected love for each other.

At this point in their lives, with second chances at love not as plentiful as they were in their youth, there is something very much at stake in such an admission. Keaton and Nicholson, both at the top of their games, know this and make us feel the pressure, the excitement, the potential heartbreak and the fear that accompanies falling in love at any age.

In “Something’s Gotta Give,” they’re as good as Hepburn and Tracy, and they give plenty.

Grade: A-

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Thursdays at 5:30 p.m. on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived on RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.