Movie Nation

Alexandre Aja, best known for “High Tension” but who also gave us “Crawl,” directs this thriller, a horror tale set for early fall release.Creepy enough?

A trauma survivor makes her move to the big city and meets and falls for a guy, and sees patterns that mimic her parents’ relationship. This Big Emotions summer romance features Justin Baldoni, who also directs, as the main love interest, with Jenny Slate, Brandon Sklenar and Hasan Minhaj in support.

“We break the pattern or the pattern breaks us.”

In theaters Aug. 8.

A good gimmick goes a long way in a romantic comedy, because basically, there’s been nothing truly “new” in the genre since “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Writer, director, actor and composer Rudy Mancuso borrowed the musical commentator on the action of “Musica” from “There’s Something About Mary.” We hear a busker singing about how our hero needs to “change” as young Rudy passes him on the way into the subway each day.

Instead of Jonathan Richman crooning “Mary Mary, there’s something about Mary,” we hear “It” and “Flash” director (and perhaps future “Batman” director) Andy Muschietti crooning and picking out the musical advice on a guitar.

Cute.

Mancuso “borrows” the lovelorn, comical “guy who just wants to work with puppets” subtext from Jason Segal’s “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” turn.

But what sells this autobiographical musical romance is the adorable touch of having our hero hear the music in everyday life, a distracted young man who imagines “Stomp” production numbers breaking out with the people rattling pots, pans, glasses and cutlery at a diner, in the activities at a street market, in a seafood shop and even in a hospital emergency room.

Mancuso’s picture pops right off the screen, right at the start, with such a number breaking out on a commuter train. He is the deadpan center of all this joyous mayhem, sullenly sitting and recognizing that maybe he does have a problem with focus and concentration.

The rhythm’s got him. Bad.

Every time this gimmick is repeated, it works. And that’s a lucky thing, but there really is nothing new about rom-com plots, situations and dialogue. Mancuso is a Brazilian American Greater Newark (Ironbound) college kid torn between the preppy college girlfriend (Francesca Reale) who is “making plans” for their lives together in “The City” (NYC) and the down to earth, laid-back fish market cutie played by Camila Mendes of “Palm Springs” and TV’s “Riverdale.”

Seriously, if you don’t know how all this will resolve itself, you need to get out more. Or, you know, stream more.

Mancuso, of “Rim of the World,” must’ve handed this script to his “Flash” director Muschietti to land that lovely cameo. Playing a version of himself — the story is pitched as “a true story, unfortunately” — he manages to be a little more than a forelock-flopping haircut and self-conscious lead. But not much more.

But he’s good looking and engaging enough in a part that can’t help but charm. Rudy’s a mama’s boy who talks to his hairdresser mother (Maria Mancuso, awwww) in Portuguese and can barely pay attention in marketing class, drawing page-animations in his notebook, ears perking up at every unusual sound.

The film’s chapters are labeled “Rhythm, “Dissonance,” “Dynamics,” “Melody” and the like.

Rudy must get dumped by his upper-classic girlfriend of four years, Haley, only to face her having “security” related second thoughts. He must be nagged by his mama that “Gringa women are no good,” and have her try to set him up with a Brazilian.

“You’re my mom, not my pimp!”

He confides in Diego, his subway puppet, and in Anwar, the go-with-the-flow food truck operator who serves everybody — Greeks, Muslims and Orthodox Jews — pandering to each customer base as he rolls up, changing menus and hats (yarmulke included) because to Anwar, “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re AT.”

He is played by by that Brigadier General of Banter, J. B. Smoove.

Mancuso cooks up one cute scene after another, with Rudy’s sense of rhythm and knowledge of “The International Language of Music” underscoring the gimmicks he trots out, and the jokes. Meeting college girlfriend Haley in a Brazilian restaurant, he and the house keyboards player swap messages about how badly he’s handling his two-girlfriend situation in rhythmic code.

Mendes and Reale are good, but Mancuso lets his mom steal the darned movie with one saucy, semi-offensive Portugeuse insult after another.

No, there isn’t much to “the story,” and certainly little in the basic situation that we haven’t seen in movies about Italians, Greeks, Spanish, gay or young or old characters.

But the musical novelty numbers absolutely make the featherweight “Musica” come off.

Rating: PG-13, one scene of gun violence, profanity

Cast: Rudy Mancuso, Camila Mendes, Francesca Reale, Maria Mancuso and Jay B Smoove

Credits: Directed by Rudy Mancuso, scripted by Rudy Mancuso and Dan Lagan. An MGM/Amazon release.

Running time: 1:32

Capaldi plays a guy who figures out that his girlfriend “has a very PARTICULAR personality” in this thriller.

Psychopath?

Lambert, showing his mileage, is the father who sets out to find “what have you done to my son?”

June 25

One of the most popular musicals of the last 25 years comes to the screen this Thanksgiving, a fairytale spun off of L. Fram Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz.”

Ariana and Cynthia Erivo and Michelle Yeoh and Bowen Yang with songs in their hearts for the holidays. Jeff Goldblum as “Oz, the Great and Terrible?”

Maybe you’ve seen a nature program that tells the story of the long migration of the Monarch butterfly, those beautiful, delicate orange and black lepidoptera that amazingly make their way over vast distances from all over North America, from as far north as Canada, to their winter hatchery in the sanctuaries of Mexico.

Maybe you’ve raised one from crysalis to flight in an elementary school class, or learned of the importance of milkweed to their existence.

But if you’ve ever heard of them referred to as “Brides of the Sun” carrying “the Souls of the Dead,” romantic nicknames for a creature whose vast egg-laying flocks cover the pine and oyamel trees of El Rosario and other forests of  Michoacán, you’ve absorbed the life work of Homero Gómez González, their greatest champion in Mexico, “The Guardian of the Monarchs.”

That’s the title of a Mexican documentary about Homero Gómez, who suffered the fate of many an environmental activist, journalist or citizen who dares to cross the many gangs spread across the country. He was murdered in 2020, and as Emiliano Ruprah’s film makes clear, just getting the government and the police to admit that pretty obvious fact has proven difficult.

The corruption runs deep, and the well-intentioned don’t have a chance.

Ruprah’s film sounds the alarm about this now-endangered species, “a world heritage” as Gómez often noted in videos promoting tourism to see the magic conclave of butterflies gathering near his home. “Guardian” doesn’t just memorialize Gómez. It lays out the threats to the butterflies, the interests that want the lumber that the butterflies flock to in order to lay their eggs, the land armed, police-protected gangs illegally clear cut and plant avocado trees on, the politicians they prop up and the locals and cops they intimidate and kill when somebody crosses them.

The entire police department around Ocampo, and El Soldado, where Gómez’s body was found in a well, was put under investigation after his disappearance.

And yet the police official in charge of the investigation, Mario Gerardo Pinedo, has the gall to sit on camera and insist there was “no evidence” of foul play, despite coroners, reporters and others bringing up all the evidence to the contrary.

Others who seem connected to the disappearance and murder mysteriously turned up dead in the months that followed.

The viewer can be excused for barking at the screen every time Pinedo shows up, “How do you sleep at night?”

Politicians, including a now-former governor, Silvano Aureoles, are implicated. Some defend their actions on camera, others — like politician Karina Alvarado — filed petitions that somehow immunize them from investigation, a pretty damning step to take.

It’s frustrating to see any injustice committed in plain sight and not dealt with, and that’s the feeling this solid, well-intentioned film leaves you with.

Ruprah uses interviews, coverage of festivals, the history of butterfly tourism (falling off due to violence and monarch decline) and reenactments to tell this sad, touching and infuriating story.

But “The Guardian of the Monarchs” leaves one with only glimmers of hope that justice will ever be done — exposing those who don’t tell what they know — or that anything will ever get better. As long as the poverty, the corruption and lawlessness that accompanies it and the avocado-mania that finances forest destruction exist, the monarchs are threatened. If they’re not doomed altogether, it’s because of brave activists like Homero Gómez González and people who demand that his sacrifice be avenged and not be in vain.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Homero Gómez González, Silvano Aureoles, Rebeca Valencia González, Mario Gerardo Pineo, Homero Gómez González IV and Amado Gómez

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emiliano Ruprah. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

Savi Gabizon remakes his Israeli mystery drama of the same title with an international cast including Gere, Kruger and Jessica Clement.

A summer release? Feels more like a fall title.

Taylor Russell and Lara Flynn Boyle also in this Film Movement oddity, built around Ewan McGregor, Rhys Ifans and Lara Flynn Boyle dealing with Mother Ellen Burstyn’s furniture bound meltdown.

“Adagio” is a classic 100 minute thriller in a 126 minute package.

Director and co-writer Stefano Sollima takes his sweet time setting the scene — which he never identifies as greater Rome, Lazio — and takes even longer letting us know what we’re diving into, a tale of blackmail involving mobsters, dirty cops and a young pawn trapped in two worlds.

Sollima takes a longer while introducing the disparate characters, and longer still to identify them by name and association. This slow, “make the audience come to you” mystery becomes seriously tedious, after a while.

Although there are grace notes and riveting touches in the later acts, the finale proves to be an anti-climax as Sollima draws things out some more. He doesn’t even know when to drop the mike.

But it’s all there in the not-exactly-ironic title. As any classical music fan can tell you, “Adagio” means “slowly” in Italian.

We follow the young, headphone-wearing music fan (Gianmarco Francini) into one of those lurid, over-the-top, over-designed movie versions of a disco, where the team of cops tracking “the puppy” have their orders, which they’ve passed on to him. Get something that incriminates someone on one of the many surveillance cameras they’ve planted there.

The kid is in over his depth, surrounded by drag queens and drugs, which he is more than happy to sample. Realizing he’s incriminating himself, he bolts.

That draws out single-father-of-two detective Vasco (Adriano Giannini), in a fury and using his team’s tech expert and “cleaner” (Lorenzo Adorni) and muscle (Francsco Di Leva) as he hunts their “puppy” down.

Whatever their credentials, tech and surveillance expertise, these cops are up to no murderous good.

The kid, Manuel, lives with his aged, addled father (Toni Servillo) whose gangland name — “Daytona” — he drops as he scampers about, trying to find “help” to save his skin and get him out of this jam. He turns to the blind mobster (Valerio Mastandrea) nickamed Polniuman. And Polniuman (say it aloud) sends Manuel to bald, scowling “I can’t help you” badman “Romeo,” played with a largely internalized menace by Pierfrancesco Favino.

“You know a lot of things you shouldn’t know,” “the puppy” is told (in Italian with English subtitles). The viewer? We know little, but we start to find things out, bit by bit as this Byzantine scheme unfolds.

There are old grudges and ancient alliances in play here, old mobster codes and big money and Italian politics being manipulated by dirty cops out for a payday.

A couple of twists remind us of true pieces of American gangland lore — the pose mob boss Vincent Gigante affected for his own safety, etc. And the film’s climax has a brute elegance that makes us long for the more streamlined story that should have led to it.

The Rome depicted here is threatened by wildfires which lead to constant power outages, often at dramatically opportune moments. Sollima (“Gomorrah,” “Sicario 2”) likes telling tales with sweep and allegorical darkness. But even taking that into account, this picture is slow right to the edge of dullness.

Nepo baby Giannini — son of Giancarlo — has the film’s showiest role, a cop who has lost the plot and crosses from “Get that money” to “Clean this up” to “Kill that kid, no matter what.”

But it is the old men and their old ways that carry this slow-footed thriller, with Favino (“Angels & Demons,” “World War Z”) and Servillo (“Il Divo”) lending their “old men still capable of violence” gravitas to a story that would have been better served by quicker pacing.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, drugs, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino, Toni Servillo, Gianmarco Francini, Adriano Giannini, Valerio Mastandrea, Lorenzo Adorni, Francesco Di Leva and Silvia Salvatori.

Credits: Directed by Stefano Sollima, scripted by Stefano Bises and Stefano Sollima. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

You can’t say the dark Spanish comedy “The Coffee Table” isn’t dark enough. It involves the tragic, accidental and bloody death of an infant. But considering the subject matter, maybe the “comedy” could have gone a little further.

Director and co-writer Caye Casas presents us with a “couple in trouble,” a hideous piece of furniture, the pathological liar selling it to them and a wife and new mother so hateful, right down to the 17,000 cigarettes Spanish timbre of her voice, that finding someone or some outcome to root for here is a chore.

There are deadpan laughs in this “How will I ever tell her about the accident?” comedy, but they are few and far between, and strained.

Maria (Estefanía de los Santos) and Jesús (David Pareja) are a long-married 40ish couple who just had a baby. When you see and hear their interactions in the furniture store, you pick up pretty quick on why it took so long for them — or him, at least — to take that step.

Maria is a bit argumentative. Short-tempered. And she calls the salesman (Eduardo Antuña) out on every lie he attaches to this two “fake” gold nude nymphs balancing a glass top table her husband is determined to buy.

Whatever decisions they’ve made as a couple, this one she’s left to him. And she sure as hell isn’t interested in letting him make it. Judging from the item in question, we see her point.

“I don’t want this table in our home,” she growls, in Spanish with English subtitles. But Jesús is still listening to the “Swedish design” and “Chinese” price and “bulletproof glass” claims by the BS artist salesman who hears a lot more about their marriage than would seem necessary as they bicker in the store.

She decided it was now or never on having a child. She dubbed the baby Cayetano, naming him for someone her husband bristles is “a fascist bullfighter.” But at least he gets to pick the table, right?

Imagine his horror when, after assembling the glasstop, noting a “missing screw” and being left alone with the baby for the first time, he trips and the baby bullfighter is killed. Blood everywhere.

Any man who has ever been married will pick up what might be the worst consequence of this. Maria’s justifiable flip-out over this is sure to include the ultimate “I TOLD you so!”

He tries to clean up the blood — he’s injured, too. He tries to secure cleaning products from the neighbor’s 13 year-old monster teen, Ruth (Gala Flores), who INSISTS that he “tell your wife about us.” The little psycho has apparently invented an attraction and “relationship” in her mind, which Jesús cannot talk her out of.

As our incompetent table-shopper struggles with his first babysitting nightmare, he re-encounters the salesman, fends off his younger brother (Josep Maria Riera) and the brother’s pregnant and much younger girlfiend (Claudia Riera) and tries to figure out how to tell his ill-tempered wife this terrible news.

The performances pay off. But the story elements with the funniest possibilities — the salesman, the crazed 13 year-old — dangle out there without any payoff. The biting banter in the opening scene is almost funny, in a cringey way. The building suspense is more pained than amusing, but as such it gives the picture a pathos that the script sets out to upend.

And the horror of what has happened, described in gory detail late in the third act, never quite plays as “We know we shouldn’t laugh, but we must.” Because we — or at least I — didn’t.

Rating: unrated, profanity, dead baby subject matter

Cast: David Pareja, Estefanía de los Santos, Josep Maria Riera, Gala Flores, Claudia Riera and Eduardo Antuña

Credits: Directed by Caye Casas, scripted by Cristina Borobia and Caye Casas. A Cinephobia release.

Running time: 1:31