Movie Nation

“Hard Miles” is a sweet, unassuming and generally unsurprising dramedy about changing lives via cycling and seeing The Grand Canyon.

This “inspired by” a true story stars Matthew Modine as a social worker/counselor who hits on the idea that his road biking obsession could be transformational for the “delinquents” he’s trying to keep out of the Colorado prison system. Director R.J. Daniel Hanna and co-writer Christian Sander find an inventive, roundabout way to may this happen, throw in assorted conventional “obstacles” along the way and get a pleasant if slack feel-good movie out of it.

Modine plays Greg Townsend, long and lean and well over 50, a man who has devoted his life to interrupting the downward slide of boys “in the system” who might be saved if they learn the right lessons at Ridgeview Academy.

With hotheads, car thieves and gang members “processed” back and forth between the boarding school and the prison system, it’s an uphill climb. But Greg knows something about those. His long bike rides through the mountains build character.

Hey, howabout redirecting kids from a backpacking trip where they can be “rehabilitated by tall trees,” and taking them on a long cycling/camping trip throught the Grand Canyon? The boss’s dream, because they’re always about to lose their funding and certification, is doing any activity “looks great on Facebook.”

Boss Skip (Leslie David Baker of “The Office”) is sold. But if he knew this was just so Greg can combine work, get in his long-planned 762 mile ride in, and maybe drop by the hospital where his abusive father is about to die, he might not be.

Greg’s avocation training responsibilities include welding class. Great. They can “build their own bikes.” He’s pals with the bike-shop owner who gets all his business (Sean Astin). Maybe he’ll “sponsor” the “team.”

Get some donated wheels and brakes and seats and gears, acquire helmets, shorts and “Banda di Catene” (“Chain Gang” in Italian) T-shirts, convince co-worker Haddie (Cynthia Kaye Williams) to drive the support van, aka “The Slack Wagon,” and they’re off.

Well, the four metal shop kids Greg has in mind for this “Outward Bound on Bikes” experience will have to be convinced. But what else are car-thief Woobright (Jahking Guillory), gang-banger Atencio (Damien Diaz), brawler Rice (Zachary T. Robbins) and eating disordered head-case Smink (Jackson Kelly) going to do with those nice frames they’ve brazed together?

Greg will pass on maxims like “You know what overcomes hard luck? Hard work.” And the lads will learn to work as a team, a peloton of riders, each with his role in the pack.

Flashbacks will give us a taste of Greg’s past. Phone calls from prison tell us how his life might’ve gone. And a lone flashback suggests what one of these boys lived through.

Mainly this is about the riding, the scenery and the foul-mouthed insults and wise-cracking.

Maybe I missed it, but the last time I checked, an eating disorder won’t land you in a juvenile detention/boarding school. A detail missing from an incomplete yet overlong tale. The kids are barely sketched in, the obstacles they overcome are skimmed-over and Greg’s personal issues are perfunctory and arrive, like clockwork, to prop up the drama of it all.

There’s nothing all that “hard” in these “Hard Miles.” It passes the time with some pretty sights, fairly worn cliches and semi-serious cycling, a pleasant-enough dramedy that never gets out of the low, easy gears.

Rating: PG-13, some violence, profanity, teen drinking

Cast: Matthew Modine, Jahking Guillory, Cynthia Kaye McWilliams, Jackson Kelly, Damien Diaz, Zachary T. Robbins, Sean Astin and Leslie David Baker.

Credits: Directed by R.J. Daniel Hanna, scripted by R.J. Daniel Hannah and Christian Sander. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:50

“Challengers” is a sleek and sometimes sexy “Jules and Jim” menage a trois set in the world of professional tennis.

The (digitally augmented) tennis is quite good, the romantic entanglements sophisticated and the story narrowly-focused on our three leads in this new film from the director of “Call Me By Your Name.”

The picture’s backdrop is almost as richly-detailed as “King Richard,” depicting the grinding life sought by the (literally) privileged few as two “bunkmates since we were twelve” tennis academy alumni compete for the rising star who is the most beautiful woman either has ever seen pick up a racket, and incidentally “the color of” America today, as one of our paramours notes.

Zendaya is here to carry the picture as the talented, somewhat mercenary Tashi who starts toying with focused workaholic Art (Mike Faist of “West Side Story”) and devil-may-care talent Patrick (Josh O’Connor of “God’s Own Country” and “Emma.”) when they’re all rising “junior” in the tennis heirarchy.

They become her “two white boys,” despite her joking suggestion that “I’m not a homewrecker.” These besties since boyhood are that tight.

But after a bit of polyamorous play and teasing, a romance settles in, only to be disrupted by the pitfalls of any athletic career — injuries, limits to talent, lack of discipline. The coolest thing about this Justin Kuritzkes screenplay is how the power dynamic never really shifts. Whatever goes right or wrong for each of them, however she’s involved in that success or failure, the gorgeous woman with the polished groundstrokes and killer instinct on and off the court is the one true “tennis player” in the trio.

That phrase is a distinction that’s kicked around the sport for decades, a measure of one’s level of focus and sacrifice for the sport, struggling to be the complete package on the court even if off the court.

Vitas Gerulaitis might be the poster boy for “tennis player” as defined here. He pretty much died for the game. That’s why Tashi opts for Stanford instead of turning pro as a teen because “I don’t want my only skill to be hitting a ball with a racket.”

Patrick, when we meet him, seems as committed as any “tennis player” who ever picked up a racket. He’s living in his aged Honda CRV, struggling to collect wins and motel money at a “challengers” (qualifying/rank-raising) tourney in 2019 in New Rochelle, New York. At this “up and comers” level of the game, a local tire distributor is the best sponsor available. Over 30, Patrick is too damned old to be playing here, and not too proud to “swipe right” to pick up someone who might allow him to sleep over after sex so that he can be sharp for his next match.

Art is too big a deal to be playing here. He’s also over 30, but he’s had a lot of success, lacking only a U.S. Open title to complete “a career Grand Slam,” titles in all four major international tourneys — Wimbledon, the Australian, French and U.S. Opens. But he’s coming back from an injury, and while the Aston Martin endorsements might still be there, the confidence is not.

The beauty paired-up with him on those Aston Martin billboards is his coach and his wife. That’s Tashi. And she’s determined to get him that last “slam,” otherwise “What’s the point?”

“Challengers” is framed by Art and Patrick colliding in that New Rochelle tire distributor tourney finals, with flashbacks showing up how these three beautiful people met over a decade before, their taste of the real affluence surrounding this “country club sport,” their predictable personality differences and the soap opera that’s played out over the years of their on-and-off relationships.

As director Luca Guadagnino is involved, you know the sexuality depicted will be fluid and somewhat unconventional. As Zendaya is the star, the object of desire, the woman who cautions both paramours about falling “in love with me,” when the two lads in question can only answer “Doesn’t everyone?” you can also guess that the sex is a lot more PG-13 than R-rated. So Guadagnino treats us to a little full-frontal in the men’s tennis locker rooms to up the “sexy” ante and earn that R rating.

The tennis seen here has a screaming, racket-smashing volatility that seems superficial and extreme. And there’s a cynicism to this over-praised drama that comes through in the situations, the characters and their racial/sexual makeup that seems to count more than compelling performances or nuanced conflict.

Zendaya is a convincing tennis pro, if a tad slight of build to be a star in the making. And she’s a little less convincing as the mature-for-her-age woman trying to play the angles, find or follow her heart after she finds it. She isn’t helped here by Guadagnino’s seeming disinterest in romance or heterosexual sex.

O’Connor’s character is set up as a gauche lout, seeking sexual conquests and easy money and easy fame, and not getting two of the three things he seems to feel entitled to. Faist has the more complicated character to play, someone lucky to be married to that person who gives him the heart, strategic tips and motivation to succeed, a charismatic beauty who opens all sorts of doors for him, and yet uncertain in her fidelity or romantic commitment.

Structurally, that “framed by the pivotal tourney” format begins to grate and the picture, headed for a conclusion was can see from some distance off, is drawn-out like a tie breaker that has no “sudden death” about it.

But the tennis, with augmented sound, shotmaking, balls-eye-view camera work and the like, dazzles. And whatever the strengths of the leads, the sexual dynamics of this relationship are every bit as of America at this “moment” as the beautiful biracial player’s “color” that the script takes pains to point out.

“Challengers” is just challenging enough as it is wearing out its welome and trodding past its obvious climaxes and towards the “final” one, even if we see it coming.

Rating: R profanity, some sexual content and graphic nudity

Cast: Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor

Credits: Directed by Luca Guadagnino, scripted by Justin Kuritzkes. An MGM/Amazon release.

Running time: 2:11

Whatever their shifting status in the minds of the public — and school children forced to study them –the best proof of Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens’ enduring popularity is their durability on the silver screen. Every few decades, each of these masters of plot, character and witty dialogue are revived in a run of films that covers each writer’s Greatest Hits.

Suddenly, somebody rediscovers what delights their best works remain and a remake is attempted. And then others take up the mantle and much of this or that writer’s canon is revisited in new big screen versions.

Dickens is particularly susceptible to this, as we’re never more than a couple of years between fresh takes on “A Christmas Carol,” “Great Expectations” or “Oliver Twist.”

But perhaps his greatest tribute was paid in a 1940s and ’50s run that included definitive versions of “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist” by the great David Lean, the most beloved “Christmas Carol” of them all, starring Alistair Sim,” and a delightful 1952 version of Dickens’ first novel, “The Pickwick Papers.”

Lean was an acclaimed editor relatively new to directing when he made his Dickens classics, two of the most visually-striking period pieces of the monochromatic cinema. Noel Langley was a screenwriter whose credits included adapting “The Wizard of Oz” and the best “Christmas Carol” of them all. Langley is a fine example of why we list “writer” first in describing someone as a “writer/director.” His “Pickwick Papers” is period-sharp, with Oscar-nominated costumes, but hardly the eye-popping enterprise that every Lean film was. Filmed indoors and on backlots and a few select country locations, it’s a tad drab looking, to be honest.

But the man loved the language, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a Dickens adaptation that plays as witty and chatty as Langley’s “Pickwick.” And a sharp cast vamps up the broad, colorful and colorfully-named characters which instantly became Dickens’ trademark in this, his debut novel.

Character player Nigel Patrick — later seen in “Raintree County,” “Battle of Britain” and already famous thanks to “The Browning Version” — dazzles as Mr. Jingle, a “roaming actor,” confidence man and amusing scoundrel, a fast-talker who talks so fast that he leaves unnecessary words out of his boundless, breathless patter.

Consider the way his Jingle weasels his way into the affections of a dizzy “spinster” (Kathleen Harrison) who has just been scandalously seen in the arms of a man without a chaperone to maintain decorum.

“Miss Wardle… forgive intrusion... no time for ceremony… all is discovered! Come to warn you… dreadful danger… tender my services… prevent hub-bub… other hand… think it an insult… leave room.“

Then he makes his own dubious case with a torrent of lies in sentence fragment form.

“A worship from first… devoted slave… in a torment… sleepless nights… fortune of my own…”

Poor Miss Wardle, to say nothing of her would-be paramour, portly “romantic” Mr. Tupman (Alexander Gauge) never stand a chance.

Jingle is not the first “character” our quartet of “Pickwick (Travel) Club” members encounter on their “adventures” “exploring” 1830s Britain. But he becomes an instant thorn in the side of oh-so-proper Pickwick (James Hayter of “Tom Brown’s School Days” and “The Crimson Pirate”), introverted Winkle (James Arnold of “The Great Escape” and “Bridge on the River Kwai”), Tupman and perpetually perplexed Snodgrass (Lionel Murton).

Their quite commonplace travels and “studies” of the human condition are wholly-upended by the dashing, confident, fast-talking scoundrel, “rogue” and “blackguard” who takes them, assorted womenfolk and others for a merry ride.

Mistaken identities, misunderstood intentions and Jingle’s manipulations get our hapless travelers into glove-slapping duels, “breech of promise” lawsuits and the like. It’s as if one can’t check into a friendly inn, dress for a costume fete or hire a horse and carriage without mishap, and without Jingle somehow showing up to “save the day” and eventually make everything much worse.

Fops, twits, schemers, widows and wiseguys abound, and in its best scenes, many of them out of doors, “Pickwick Papers” proceeds at a prance.

Character actress queens Hermione Gingold and Hermione Baddeley make a rare appearance in the same picture together, Donald Wolfit, Harry Fowler, William Hartnett, Noel Purcell and Gerald Campion — a manservant made to look the spitting image of silent star Fatty Arbuckle — impress with broad turns and wildly eccentric facial (eyebrow) hair.

Dickens was just starting his serial-magazine-story-to-novel career, and while not every complication he invented for this crew was a dazzler, populating the scenes with a Jingle, Fogg, Buzfuz, Slammer and Nupkins all but ensured that the characters would be as funny as their names.

The middle acts are eaten up with court intrigues that tend to slow the picture to a crawl. But the colorful characters and punny, stacatto wordplay suggest this less-filmed novel is ripe for a remake. Something period perfect but with a modern “This is Britain Today” cast and feel like the recent Dev Patel “David Copperfield” seems in order for the perfect Dickens “adventure” and “exploration” of British character and the twee eccentrics who make it what it is.

Rating: TV-PG, “Approved”

Cast: James Hayter, James Arnold, Nigel Patrick, Joyce Grenfell, Hermione Gingold, Hermione Baddelely, Alexander Gauge, Lionel Murton, Donald Wolfit and Harry Fowler.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Noel Langley, based on the novel by Charles Dickens. An Arteflm release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:49

For me, Zendaya’s screen stardom has always been something just in the offing. She’s gotten roles in big films since “The Greatest Showman.” They offered her the chance to make a mark in subordinate, supporting parts as “Spider Man’s” squeeze, or the tough teacher to “chosen” leader Paul Atreides in “Dune.”

“Euphoria” reminded us she can act.

Put her in a picture where she plays a sexy and sexually active tennis player and we’ll see if she can carry a movie with lesser known Co stars.

Horror movies are, as John Carpenter once broke down for me, a teachable series of practical effects and learnable basic knowledge of human psychology.

So sure, somebody who is the child of a famous director who is still a big deal, but who jumped the shark, aesthetically, during Obama’s first term, can master the “skills” to make a scary creature feature.

The jolts and effects are pro forma, so this could work.

This should give hope to Dakota Johnson and all the other Dakotas out there, hoping for another chance at a hit. Someday, a nepo baby movie maker will give you a big break, too.

June 14.

The chief appeal of a “Calendar Girls,” “Poms,” or “80 for Brady” movie is the chance to see venerable and venerated film stars taking themselves on a trip down memory lane, and us along with them.

Such movies are an outreach to older audiences, who rightfully feel left out of the movie-going conversation as Hollywood has, at least recently, been all about the youth movie market with little time for anything else.

If only “The Magic of Belle Isle” or “And So It Goes” or that Oscar winners chasing Tom Brady ego trip were any good, maybe that audience could be lured back, if only out of nostalgia. They showed up for “Brady,” at least.

“Queen Bees” is another missed opportunity. An almost laughless “Mean Girls in a Retirement Community” comedy built around Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn, Emmy winner Jane Curtin and screen icons James Caan, Ann-Margret and Loretta Devine, it has possibilities baked into it, and little to show for them.

Burstyn plays Helen, an elderly widow whose latest kitchen “accident” gets her booked into Pine Groves Senior Living community, run by Ken DeNardo (French Stewart) but “ruled” by the “Mean Girls with Medic-Alert bracelets.”

That would be snippy, bossy martinet Janet (Curtin), with her running mates Sally (Devine) and Margot (Ann-Margret) by her side.

They save seats in the cafeteria, stick their noses in other people’s business and generally get their way in every way. Helen resists them with a “What is this, high school?” But soon she’s fallen in with them.

And then the complication of a man (Caan) enters her life, and she and we wonder if she’ll ever get out of here and back into her home?

Christopher Lloyd plays a leering local “character in the community. Just add his name to the talents pretty much wasted on this enterprise, apparently inspired by a producer’s mother’s retirement community.

As with most films in this sort, the big mistake is assuming that putting good, proven actors into that setting is enough to get a movie out of it. There’s got to be more to the tale than “cute old folks in a quirky old folks home.”

It doesn’t have to be “Cocoon” or “The Comeback Trail” or “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” but there has to be more to the STORY than this, more to the movie than just little pearls of wisdom from those who have lived long enough to acquire that wisdom.

“Life is 10 percent what happens to you, and 90 percent how you react to it.”

Indeed it is. And?

Rating: PG-13, innuendo, profanity

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Jane Curtin, Ann-Margret, Loretta Devine, Alec Malpa, French Stewart, Christopher Lloyd and James Caan.

Credits: Directed by Michael Lembeck, scripted by A Gravitas Ventures release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:40

“Blueberry” is a drab indie “film festival movie” about a young gay woman who meets someone who might get her out of BFE, Indiana, and the conflict this creates with her sister, who sees the newcomer as a bad influence.

A low-stakes tale filmed in that vast swath of the country (Iowa, actually) where the local grain elevator is the only landmark of note, it is boredom incarnate, stale in execution and acted with a hint of empathy, but only a hint.

Maya Danzig and Kristen Abate play sisters who have inherited their mother’s home. Molly (Abate) is older, hooked up with aspiring rural rapper Gavin (Daniel Slottje) and seriously disapproving of sister Maya’s infatuation with the new Latina (Amina Nieves) in town.

Elsa is a stripper down at Dave’s Ranch, the local bar, exotic in every way to the frumpy, mopey Maya. No, she won’t be taking Elsa’s “amateur night” “fake it till you make it” advice about taking up pole dancing. Probably just as well.

The situations have little drama and no energy to them, the performances are generally lifeless and the title is taken from “Blueberry” lip gloss that somebody fancies. Exciting stuff.

I’ll not “spoil” the movie by revealing who that is.

Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Maya Danzig, Amina Nieves, Kristen Abate and Daniel Slottje.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Stefanie Kay Sparks. A Leomark release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:11

Sterling Brown and Mark Strong are among the co-stars in this topical, FX-laden but possibly empty-headed actioner slated for release on Netflix May 24.

It looks slick and really dumb.

“Boy Kills World” is a gonzo, video-game-violent/splatter-film-bloody “Hunger Games” for fanboys.

It is “Oldboy” meets “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” pandering and slaughtering in equal measure, a movie with jaunty, genre-spoofing possibilities that descend into into lethargy and wind-up in stomach-turning savagery before all is said and done.

And star Bill Skarsgård’s character and leading man turn is just similar enough to brother Alexander Skarsgård’s work in Netflix’s “Mute” to be worth mentioning.

Skarsgård (“It”) plays the titular Boy, raised since childhood by a martial arts shaman (Yayan Ruhian of “The Raid” movies and “John Wick 3”) who trained him in all the martial arts movie cliche ways.

The deaf-mute boy lost his family. And the fascist oligarchs who run this dystopia, , the Van Der Koys, are the reasons for his training, his motivation to succeed.

He is “an intrument built to kill Hilda Van Der Koy,” he narrates. That would be the ruthless matriarch played by Famke Janssen.

After reaching adulthood, Boy will have to kill his way through other members of the family, played by Sharlto Copley, Michelle Dockery and others, if he’s to have any prayer of fulfilling his “mission.”

The gimmick here is that our anti-hero can’t remember what his voice, when he had one, sounded like. So in his head, he narrates the story in the voice of his favorite video game hero (H. Jon Benjamin), who also happens to be a voice-over mainstay and the heart of animated series from “Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist” to “Archer,” “Family Guy” to “Bob’s Burgers.”

His intererior monologues dominate the first half of the picture, telling us bits of Boy’s back story, imagining conversations with the kid sister (Quinn Copland) he lost, a child apparition who is both his guide and his conscience.

He likes to finish his fights with a “Player One WINS.” Except when this or that “Player Two” fights back, or won’t “die.”

Copley plays a dye-jobbed blowhard, perfect as the in Face of the Family on TV. Dockery is the schemer who props him up, Bret Gelman is the violent fixer who fancies himself the screenwriter of all the TV appearances.

And fanboy fave Jessica Rothe (“Happy Death Day”)? Well, you’ll see.

The fights, with fighter, stunt-man and sometime stunt coordinator Ruhian on set and “District 9” stunt director Grant Hulley in charge, are mayhem incarnate — head-butts, fists and knives and other sharp objects thrown in with the pistol and assault rifle fusillades.

First-time feature director Moritz Mohr tries to keep this beast on its feet and fighting with its feet and hands and head and anything else. But the action falls off steeply as we drift into the middle acts, and a “team” (Andrew Koji and Isaiah Mustafa) is comically drawn in.

And the finale is so violent and drawn-out as to be excruciating, enough to make you forget the genre-spoofing whimsy of having H. Jon Benjamin ironically voice-over a sadistic and gory vengeance fantasy.

There are clever ideas and casting flourishes at the heart of “Boy Kills World.” But in execution, one keeps coming back to the phrase “Less is more,” even in a hyper-violent action comedy where the excess is kind of the point.

Rating: R, graphic violence and lots and lots of it.

Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Michelle Dockery, Sharlto Copley, Yayan Ruhian, Andrew Koji, Isaiah Mustafa, Jessica Rothe and Famke Janssen, featuring the voice of H. Jon Benjamin.

Credits: Directed by Moritz Mohr, scripted by Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers, based on a short film by Mohr and Remmers. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:51

Tatum stars as a tech tycoon with his own private island, Naomie Ackie is a cocktail waitress with gold digging on the brain. Oscar winner Geena Davis, Kyle MacLachlan, Christian Slater and Haley Joel Osmebt also star.

This MGM/Amazon comic thriller is being tucked into the tail end of August, a traditional dumping ground for movies with limited prospects.

It’ll be on Amazon soon enough, because “Blink Twice” and it’ll be here (Aug. 29) and gone from theaters.