Movie Nation

The great Irish character actor Brendan Gleeson was a mere lad — a slip of a thing — when he “burst” on the cinema scene in the mid-’90s.

Ah, who’re we kidding? He was a great, grand and jolly galoot of 30 years with sideburns long enough to make Elvis weep when he took over “I Went Down,” an Irish action comedy that prefigured the roles that would forever fix his image in the public eye.

John Boorman’s mob drama “The General” would “make” Gleeson’s big screen reputation. He’d played Irish revolutionary Michael Collins for Irish TV and had a supporting role in the Liam Neeson star big screen vehicle “Michael Collins.” But Gleeson had stolen a scene or two from that mug Mel Gibson in “Braveheart,” and “I Went Down” would very much cement the big, burly redhead with range’s sweet spot.

As the 2000s would prove, from “In Bruges,” “The Guard” to “The Banshees of Inishirin” and a few turns as Mad Eye Moody in “Harry Potter” pictures, nobody’s better at big and menacing, amused and amusing than Gleeson.

“I Went Down” is a gangland road comedy/buddy picture set in Ireland, a wisecracks-and-violence tale that prefigured the sorts of movies that Guy Ritchie would be making in the UK two years later starting with “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.” It’s not as violent, jumpy and antic as anything Ritchie made. Slack pacing and a general cheerfulness in its thuggery marked it as distinctly Irish. And if nobody heard much from director Paddy Breathnach afterwards, that wasn’t just because most couldn’t pronounce his name.

But the droll tone and the inspired casting of Gleeson as a lazy, reluctant hunk of mob muscle recommends this 1996 Dublin to Cork odyssey.

Peter McDonald (“The Batman,” TV’s “The Penguin”) is the unfortunately-named Git Hynes, nobody’s idea of a hardened criminal but just finishing up a prison sentence he accepted out of duty.

His girl (Antoine Byrne) is determined to convince him to accept that she’s moved on — to his best mate, Anto (David Wilmot). So that’s just what Git does — accept it.

And as Anto’s in hock to a local mobster Tom French (Tony Doyle), Git is obliged to defend him from French’s goons. It’s just that poking out a goon’s eye puts him in French’s debt.

That’s how Git comes to be sent south to Cork to meet with a “friendly face” who’ll help put French in touch with a bloke named Frank who also has some sort of obligation to the mobster. Nothing about this task proves easy, as the big mug Bunny Kelly, played by Gleeson, will be Git’s minder-driver-enforcer on the quest.

Bunny dresses the part — oversized black leather sports coat, ugly shades and epic sideburns, with a pair of white two-tone loafers he’s curiously fond of. The cars he drives are mostly beaters, and as he can’t even get the gas cap open, it’s obvious he’s stealing them.

Bunny’s the unsentimental sort. In this world, anybody’s “word’s no good. ‘Truth’s’ not important.” Don’t overthink this, he advises. Don’t listen to the guy they pick up and stuff in the trunk. “Just a job.”

You take Bunny seriously even though too much about him says not to, starting with his name. Sure, he has a revolver. He’ll even show you how to work the thing, load it with bullets and such. But he’ll charge you for every shot you fire.

“You’ll know when I’m jokin’,” he cracks. “Cuz it’ll be REALLY funny.”

The unlikely duo misses meetings and misreads signals. This earns Git a busted nose and forces Bunny to do what he never does — put down the paperback he’s always reading and question “the job” and listen, however reluctantly, to the mark (Peter Caffrey) they pick up, or rather fetch from others holding him hostage.

And shots are fired, usually to amusing effect.

Connor McPherson’s script doesn’t reinvent the wheel, or the mob-buddy/road comedy. Breathnach’s direction is unfussy even as he shows few signs of knowing when to get out of his own way. This material is a 90 minute movie in a 107 minute package.

And yet it works and it plays, largely thanks to its garulous co-star. For Gleeson, a die was cast.

He continues to be terrific in dramas — winning an Emmy for playing Churchill (“Into the Storm”), adding heft and pathos to “28 Days Later,” gravitas to King Duncan in the Denzel/McDormand/Joel Coen “Tragedy of Macbeth” and star in Stephen King’s “Mr. Mercedes.”

But his Oscar nomination came from “The Banshees of Inishirin,” and his work with Martin McDonagh and his brother John Michael McDonagh (“The Guard,” “Calvary”) showed off not just Gleeson’s range, but his ability to find wry fun in even the most deathly serious characters and turn that Irish brogue loose on lines made all the more amusing for the way he says them.

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Brendan Gleeson, Peter McDonald, Antoine Byrne, Tony Doyle, David Wilmot and Peter Caffrey.

Credits: Directed by Paddy Breathnach, scripted by Connor McPherson. A BBC Films/Lionsgate release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:47

If you’re hell-bent on seeing at least one cast away samurai fights off 13th century cannibals this year, you might as well make it “Lone Samurai.”

Writer-director Josh C. Waller’s action picture has polished production values, striking locations and a cryptic vibe that suggests maybe all this head-chopping that we’re watching is all in our hero’s head.

Misleading one into thinking “This is a Japanese samurai take on Ambrose Bierce” is giving the film too much credit. But the first act is mythic and mysterious enough to lure us in, before the cannibals show up, the implausibilities pile up and the holes in the plot turn out to be a lot bigger than anything a katana sword would make.

The Okinawan model-turned-actor Shogen is our samurai, a survivor of a suicide mission to save Japan from one of the attempted naval invasions of Kublai Khan and his Yuan Dynasty minions. World War II buffs will recall that the kamikaze pilots deployed at the end of that war were named for the “divine wind” storms that kept the Mongols from coming ashore.

Our unnamed samurai was interrupted in his savage attack on an invasion ship when it foundered. He was impaled by a plank as it sank, so job one when he washes ashore is a little self-surgery to get the wooden shard out and the spurting wound bandaged and all but forgotten.

He’s on a deserted island with no hope of rescue and only komodo dragons for company. He hallucinates two “samurai pirate” boys that we take to be his sons, and has visions of his wife (Yumari Ashina). He write poems, first in his mind, then in charcoal on the stones beneath waterfalls and the like.

He finds half a sword embedded in a piece of flotsam and strains to fetch logs. Is he a Robinson Crusoe setting up housekeeping on this island? No. He builds a Torri gate which he plans to commit seppuku under.

Perhaps he doesn’t know his “suicide mission” succeeded.

But primitive islanders capture him and take him to their lair in the caverns of a nearby archipeligo. Their war leader (stuntman/actor Rama Ramadhan) crows to one and all that “There is no escape but through my stomach!”

Our hero ponders his fate, scrawls a little poetry, and settles on his play “pirate” sons’ edict.

“Nothing less than their heads” will do. His guards are the ones who find out the hard way.

“Those heads on your shoulders are mine!”

A lot of things are disorienting about what should be a fairly straightforward action picture here. Nobody is called by name. The subtitled languages appear to be Indonesian and Japanese.

And the slim, Keanu/Eddie Redmayne-bearded Shogen doesn’t look like your stereotypical samurai. He’s willowy and doesn’t carry himself in the classic balls-of-your-feet, arms exercised to wield a blade stance. Shogen looks less Japanese here than Keanu Reeves did in “47 Ronin.”

That’s intentional, as this movie invites “John Wick” comparisons no matter how unworthy of those it is.

The Indonesian locations — sinkhole waterfalls leading into caverns, solitary beaches — are terrific and the production design is generally spot on.

But the fights let us “see” the stunt choreography as blades clash and clang and nobody thinks to just aim for the gut. Our shipwrecked warrior has weapons magically appear that we’ve not seen salvaged from the shipwreck or listed on a video game pop up menu on the screen.

B-movie writer-director Waller (“McCanick,” “Camino”) has never made a movie that’s been widely-seen or praised, and “Lone Samurai” doesn’t change that.

But he’s tapped into Indonesia’s dazzling locations and action production bonafides. Maybe somebody with a better idea and more skills to realize their “vision” will follow him there.

Hopefully with no painted-up Pacific islander cannibals in tow.

Rating: R, graphic violence and lots of it

Cast: Shogen, Rama Ramadhan, Yayan Ruhian, Fatih Unru and Yumari Ashina,

Credits: Scripted and directed by Josh C. Waller. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:35

The only new movie to open wide this weekend, the sequel faith-based music drama “I Can Only Imagine 2,” did passable Thursday night numbers and a middling Friday and appears headed towards an $8 million opening weekend.

The Sunday audience is often make-or-break for faith-based fare, and as this one features Dennis Quaid and Milo Ventigmilia, Arielle Kebbel and Sophie Skelton and John Michael Finley and is based on the further adventures of a Christian pop singer, we’ll see.

So the weekend will belong to the animated basketball comedy “GOAT” which held audience share and added $17 million. It overcame the second weekend of the Margot Robbie “Wuthering Heights ($14) and will surpass “Wuthering” — which finishes the weekend at $58 — by Tuesday or Wed.

“Crime 101” came in fourth with a $5.8 million take.

The Rachel McAdams star vehicle directed by Sam Raimi, “Send Help,” is set to finish fifth, adding $4.5 million,  pushing it over $55 million since it opened in January.

“How to Make a Killing” did over $3.5 million on limited release and finished sixth

A newly packaged Elvis concert film earned over $3 million in limited release and finished seventh .

“Solo Mio” leaves Kevin James out of the top five, it finished 8th.

“Zootopia 2” added over $2 million and inches closer to $425 million, finishing ninth and nearing the end of its theatrical run.

“Avatar: Fire & Ash” finished tenth.

“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” got pushed out of the top ten.

Documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville’s breakthrough film, “Twenty Feet from Stardom,” gave voice to those in the shadows of pop music, the backup singers who made good records great in the ’60s and ’70s. He’d been making music docs for over a decade when he discovered that magic formula and won an Oscar for the film.

He showed us Pharrell Williams’ life story in Legos, but the joy of “Piece by Piece” was Williams’ voice — the candid face Williams was able to show when all he had to do was tape record his story, home life and conversations with friends, family and collaborators.

That’s what he does with his latest film, telling the oft-told-tale of The Beatles through Paul McCartney, off-camera and candid in fresh audio-interviews. And we hear Linda Eastman, who married Paul and joined his second band, via lots of archival interview footage and home movies. As Linda McCartney, she inspired him to step back from Beatlemania to make time for family. He summoned her onstage to sing and play keyboards in Wings.

The revealing, entertaining and touching “Man on the Run” covers the decade between The Beatles’ breakup and the murder of John Lennon.

McCartney begins with a candid quip about any time he hears someone dragging on Paul McCartney.

“I tend to agree with them.”

So he allows himself to be self-critical. He admits that his years of telling journalists and the various members he recruited for Wings that he “just want to be in a band again” wasn’t entirely true. A collection of the players treated and paid “like sidemen” and who quit Wings verify “the kind of bastard I am,” McCartney jokes.

Neville’s first McCartney tune on the soundtrack is a dig in that direction, too. Not many would claim “Silly Love Songs” transcends its title or would be a tune that might lead off a McCartney tribute.

In giving Linda McCartney “voice,” we’re treated to her utterly tone-deaf sing-alongs — not the infamous mike-feeds on stage reputing to mock her musical shortcomings that made the rounds, just her and Paul singing at home or in the rehearsal studio at High Park Farm, where they moved when he followed Linda’s post-Beatles-breakup advice.

“Let’s just go get lost.”

The rich American Eastman, whose marriage to “the cute Beatle” filled British streets with weeping girls and young women, is humanized and appreciated — a trouper who pitched in at her husband’s insistance and joined his band, but who had four children and toured without nannies, took photos and “made it all feel like family” even the members of Wings who quit admit.

She was there when he went on a post-Beatles drinking bender and when he stupidly packed pot in his luggage for Wings’ last-shot (he’d been banned after an earlier drug conviction) at touring Japan in 1980.

McCartney can laugh at “what an idiot” he was then (1980). But he settles more scores on the myth-vs-reality front about his lifelong friend John Lennon, who called The Beatles “a museum,” and quit the band.

“John broke up The Beatles. But I got the rap.”

Lennon’s insistence on the band’s hiring of shady operator Allen Klein to run their finances is rehashed and simple clips of Yoko Ono interrupting John in interviews about Klein and the breakup reinforce other theories for the split.

George and Ringo’s thoughts about all that aren’t covered here. They’re are all but invisible in this documentary.

But a subtext of this new account of an oft-told story emerges from the ’70s obsessive execessive cash offers, the endless reporting and (on Lorne Michaels’ “Saturday Night Live”) the begging and joking around about the elusive “Beatles reunion” so many craved.

“Man on the Run” lets McCartney underscore his case that it wasn’t necessary. He made some great music and his share of bubbly pop piffle in between long breaks. John created a handful of great songs despite his long sabbatical from recording and performing. George turned out classic tunes, and all of them pitched in to ensure Ringo had classics to sing and keep him on the pop charts.

The film resurrects little-remembered Wings hits — the Scottish-pipes flavored “Mull of Kintyre” — and revisits the glorious creation of “Band on the Run,” a whim inspired by a casual perusal of all the places EMI Music had recording studios in operation.

Lagos? Nigeria?

Concerts, TV specials, “sidemen” and music videos tell the story of Wings.

The most revealing biographical tidbits are culled from home movies and TV interviews from the farm after The Beatles dissolved, resurrecting the simple “family” life Paul and Linda craved and made their reality. Their children speak and honor their late mother and all she accomplished and everything she had to put up with when she joined his band.

“What am I doing, singing with Paul McCartney?” Linda herself asked, echoing the abuse she took from fans. As we hear her sing along with Paul and Denny in intimate, offstage moments late in the Wings run, you have to admit she got a lot better.

McCartney eventually outlasted his ’70s label as “the uncool Beatle” — a businessman, musician with a work ethic and sentimentalist whose music stumbled through maudlin and inane periods as he kept churning out the hits.

Thanks to Linda’s voice, and those of her daughters the sweeter portrait of Paul that emerges from “Man on the Run” goes beyond the “loving husband,”  “accomplished craftsman” and “songsmith” reputation and explains his prolific musical output from the ’60s onward. He works at it. But he’s never been a “workaholic.”

“We don’t ‘work’ music. We PLAY it. I’m a playaholic!”

Rating: R, drug content, profanity

Cast: Paul McCartney, Linda Eastman McCartney, Mick Jagger, Mary McCartney, Stella McCartney, Sean Ono Lennon, Nick Lowe, Denny Seiwel, John Lennon, Chrissie Hynde and Denny Laine.

Credits: Directed by Morgan Neville. An MGM/Amazon release on Amazon Prime Feb. 27.

Running time: 1:55

It comes as no surprise that the debut feature film of Werner Herzog had madness as its overarching theme. The half a century (and counting) of films that followed 1968’s “Signs of Life” would almost to a one show somebody cracking up or thinking about it.

Herzog would eventually settle on Klaus Kinski as his madman-muse, and travel to the ends of the Earth to show real people and fictional characters facing extreme situations. But there are themes, tropes and even character names (“Stroszek”) that would turn up in much of his later cinema in this award-winning debut.

“An artist is someone who pounds the same nail over and over again,” after all.

The film’s promising elements, themes and subtexts no doubt played into Herzog’s ability to get this take on German troops occupying a sleepy Greek island during World War II financed and filmed. But the fact that he won a prize for the script years before it was made speaks to more than just his youth and producers’ reluctance to trust him as a director.

Herzog challenges the viewer as he must have daunted any financier with a film that damned near bores one to tears before its central character flips out and the endless reliance on tedious voice-over narration is finally abandoned.

A dozen minutes pass before the first banal words of dialogue interrupt the expositon-loaded narration. More than an hour goes by before we see the inciting incident that kicks off the action that takes up the third act. But Herzog uses those early acts to meditate on life and the human psyche and its capacity for compassion, and all but reinvent the image of the German soldier in WWII.

Gone are the barbarous, racist sadists (amped up on amphetimines) common in Western and Russian cinema in the half century after the war. Herzog takes us inside the boredom of occupation duty, the sleepy leisure of backwaters that the war passed by and the longeurs of enforced inactivity that might fuel madness among men in uniform.

Stroszek (Peter Brogle) is a paratrooper gravely wounded at the end of major combat in the invasion of Crete. He’s transported to Kos in the Dodecanese Islands to recuperate with light duty at the end of his hospitalization.

He falls for and marries his islander nurse Nora (Athina Zacharopoulou) and is assigned to guard the ancient, sprawling and empty fortress at the entrance to the harbor. He and the former scholar and academic Becker (Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg) and the ex-barkeep Meinhard (Wolfgang Reichmann) wander the ruins and Greek statuary broken up to build the walls of this Knights Hospitaller stronghold, contemplate the inscriptions on stones and eat and have “if the war lasts long enough” chats.

“If the war lasts long enough, I might have a baby here,” Nora offers (in German with subtitles).

But the dry, sundrenched island’s ruins, the fishing, its friendly-enough Turkish and Greek locals and a Roma (“Gypsy”) organ grinder offer only so many distractions. With only an arms cache captured from the local partisans to guard, inactivity has them all bored.

Meinhard starts muttering to himself. Stroszek is the one who snaps, and when it happens it’s abrupt and the consequences are pretty much immediate.

The performances are understated and subtle in the hour leading up to that psychotic break. And there’s a calm to the response of the 60 soldiers of the German garrison and their commanding officer (Wolfgang Stumpf) who have to deal with an armed madman with enough explosives to blow up this whole end of town, and any boat or ship trying to pass the fortress.

Herzog suggests the tedium of a long “patrol” in which Stroszek spies a valley filled with fanciful windmills triggers the final break. Windmills have turned up in later Herzog films as he’s admitted this island’s collection of them are among his favorite sights in all the film locations he’s worked on over the decades.

In adapting a story set in the 18th century’s “Seven Years War” — “‘Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau,” “The Mad Invalid of Fort Ratonneau” — the romantic Herzog moved the setting to Kos because his archaelogist grandfather had spent time excavating the ruins before WWII.

There’s a musing quality to the film’s oft-action free shots of sunbaked hills and valleys and the long sections of dialogue free vistas allow the mind to wander and wonder what Herzog was thinking of as his story took shape.

As he doesn’t show us the combat on Crete or how Stroszek was wounded (Herzog plays a soldier carrrying the stretcher in an early scene), there’s no convenient contrast between the extreme stress of combat and the shock of enforced idleness and tranquility.

Is there a larger parable about Germany in WWII discernable? That’s not obvious either, despite the implied rush of combat and early victories and the deathly dull wait on an island Purgatory for the reckoning to come. We learn Stroszek tried to emigrate before the conflict started and failed.

Herzog’s later and more celebrated films had a hand in burnishing the reputation of this Berlin Film Fest award winner. But there’s no getting around the dulling nature of the early acts, the abrupt “break” and the perfunctory ending, or the empathetic reinvention of German soldiery that might have impressed the Berlin fest judges way back when.

And thank God Herzog outgrew the student filmmaker crutch of loading all the exposition of the picture into voice-over narration. The pictures and situations are supposed to tell the story, not some chap in a recording booth spoonfeeding us backstory and narrating explanations over the scenes we see play out.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Peter Brogle, Wolfgang Reichmann,
Athina Zacharopoulou,
Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg and Wolfgang Stumpf.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Werner Herzog, inspired by a short story by Achim von Arnim. Tubi.

Running time: 1:31

Just when you think you’ve got a performer all figured out, they go out and surprise you with a sweet and sentimental story of love and loss and dogs.

Margaret Cho built her career on identity comedy — life as a Korean-American, complete with pidgin accented zingers that landed her a sitcom, way back when, and when that well went dry, life as an edgy lesbian famed for her tattoos and pantomimed “fisting,” among other shtick.

In “All That We Love,” we meet her comforting a beloved dog’s last hours. Cho doesn’t even sound like the “herself” we’ve become used to over the decades as she whispers, “You can go, Mommy’s here.“

In the narrative that follows, we learn that Emma is a catalog editor for a high-end home furnishings company, that her actor-husband left her to raise daughter Maggie (Alice Lee) herself and that her cliched “gay best friend” (Jesse Tyler Ferguson of “Modern Family”) is into “throuples” now.

But every now and then Emma shakes a dogfood bag or rattles a leash, expecting her beloved Tanner to trot up to her. He was that ingrained in her life.

Director and co-writer Yen Tan’s narrative follows Emma’s vulnerable journey through that grief, the realization that her ex (Kenneth Choi) is back in town after losing his gig on a popular Indonesian TV show and that her daughter’s Australian beau (Devon Bostick) may be taking her to Oz for more than just a vacation.

We glimpse Emma’s exacting catalog-editing work life and hear a subordinate (Missi Pyle, terrific as always) confess that she’s eager to be laid off and take the next buyout. Why?

“To better serve the Lord!”

Kayla is also a dog foster parent, and tries to place the cutest Jack Russell, “Sal,” with the boss.

“Too soon.”

The ex husband’s return brings up old hurts and thoughts of a second chance. Naturally, the gay BFF gets all judgy and testy over that.

The plot may be so predictable that you can guess the outcome of all those first act “complications.” But the sweetness and gentle touch — even with tired character “types” — put this one over.

Cho may still be a walking tattoo advert, but she auditions for a broader range of later midlife parts with this subdued, touchy and touching turn. Pyle, Ferguson, Lee and Choi (of TV’s “9-1-1”) shine in support.

And our director and co-writer sensitively taps into an experience beyond the gay melodramas (“1985,” “Pit Stop”) that have been his niche. Cho fans and Ferguson “fam” will want to see this. But no dog lover should miss “All That You Love.”

Rating: TV-16, sex, profanity

Cast: Margaret Cho, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Alice Lee, Devon Bostick, Kenneth Choi and Missi Pyle.

Credits: Directed by Yen Tan, scripted by Clay Liford and Yen Tan. A Vertical release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:30

The first time I read the phrase “an actor’s actor” about the great Robert Duvall was in the first issue of “American Film” magazine that I subscribed, way back in the Dark Ages when there magazines.

It’s not as though he was unheralded before he followed “The Great Santini” with “True Confessions.” But his emergence, nearly 20 years after an iconic cameo in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” indelible villainous turns in “M*A*S*H” and “True Grit,” and years after holding his own in the all-star “Godfather” movies and then stealing “Apocalypse Now” as curtain call for Coppola, still seemed sudden.

Oh yeah. THAT guy. Yeah, he’s as good as it gets.

Balding, serious-seeming even when he was being funny — which was rare — he was a generational talent, a character actor of range whose unfussy technique seemed a grand contrast to Brando or Pacino or Duvall’s Actor’s Studio classmate Dustin Hoffman. DeNiro must have gone to school on Duvall’s acting.

He had presence rivaling Sidney Poitier, Hackman or Gregory Peck, and he turned it and that “actor’s actor” label in an Oscar and a career that often saw him as a tipping point in terms of casting.

Sign yourself some “names,” rising stars or old timers with no more box office appeal, add Duvall to class the joint up and Jeff Bridges gets his Oscar for “Crazy Heart” and Bill Murray came close one last time in “Get Low” because Duvall got the project made. “Sling Blade?” Ask Billy Bob about how landing Duvall became a life changing event for him and an indie film turned motion picture “event” in cinema history.

A military brat and San Diego native, he became an adoptive Southerner who played a string of iconic characters in films with Southern settings — Alabama and Arkansas to Texas, “Lonesome Dove” and “Tender Mercies” (his Oscar winner), “Broken Trail” and “Open Range” to “A Family Thing” and “The Apostle.”

At times, it seemed as if he was putting on an acting clinic, committing to celluloid an understated way of finding the emotional truth of a character, a scene and the movie the envelopes them. This moment in “Tender Mercies” is going to be rewatched by those in the know more than a few times over the next day or two, and until the end of cinema as we know.

At home on a horse for much of the “famous” and “icon” part of his career, he moved to Virginia horse country and stayed in the saddle years past any comparable Western star. Who wouldn’t?

Rewatching “The Godfather” films you see the quintessential Duvall performance emerge — quiet, with flashes of temper. That upside down smile he flashed as Col. Kilgore or the soulless “Network” functionary became shorthand for a character’s sadism — or just someone not shy about laughing at a joke only he got.

They only gave him one Oscar? Silly Academy.

I interviewed him many times over the years, because one does NOT turn down a studio’s pitch of a chat with the “actor’s actor.” He was always quiet, serious, modest and self-effacing. The only jokes one ever heard from him were in screenplays in movies like “Second Hand Lions” and “A Night in Old Mexico,” or any time he needed to make uptight Tommy Lee Jones a little less of an entitled Yale man (“Lonesome Dove”).

Our most memorable and revealing chat came when he was promoting his then-new film — “Assassination Tango” — and his then new and much younger new wife and tango partner, Luciana Pedraza. He wanted and almost needed that movie to work and we spent a long lunch in Miami discussing the dance, the “assassin” cliche and his new life.

The star vehicle he directed, at Billy Bob’s urging, “The Apostle,” might be his very finest performance — a searing depiction of honesty and hypocrisy and the search for salvation between those two poles. He broke Southern Protestantism and Southern “types” down like a New Deal sociologist sent “back home” to study the folks he’d come to know through his work.

But he was just as great to talk with right after speaking to another now-passed icon, James Earl Jones, for their folksy and flinty take on the silliness of the Southern obsession with “race” — “A Family Thing.” Duvall was brittle in the movie, rarely warmer in talking about it and the chance to act with Jones. That’s one I may have to rewarch tonight.

I loved most of the movies he made, and cherished any excuse I’ve had I’d to rewatch “Rambling Rose” or “Tender Mercies” or his turns in Westerns. He made it to 95 years of age, a fine seasoning for the greatest actor most of us will ever see to achieve.

Adios, pardner. And well done.

Let’s see if we can unravel the convoluted lineage of the turgid Mexican melodrama “A Father’s Miracle.”

The story of a mentally-disabled man’s unjust imprisonment for an accident that wasn’t his fault, a man locked-up in a police state but sustained by his undying love for his little girl and her plucky determination to get him out came to life in Korea under the title “Miracle in Cell 7.”

The 2013 Korean weeper was directed and co-written by Lee Hwan-kung. That led to a 2019 Philippine remake, a 2022 Indonesian film also with that title, and now this Mexican version.

This is a way Netflix maximizes the value of intellectual property it gets its hands on — remaking scripts for different audiences and new Netflix markets.

That’s all well and good for their bottom line. But this eye-rolling, overwrought and ungainly blend of the cloyingly cute with the criminally unjust and the far-fetched with the farcical is a hard watch outside of the Third World. Lurching between the grim ugliness of its reality and the wish-fulfillment fantasy twists in the plot left me slack-jawed.

North American audiences might appreciate it for its depiction of what life in a corrupt, unaccountable-to-anyone police state dictatorship is like, which is sobering to say the least. Whole sections of the American public are coming to understand what “due process” is and how the lack of it means the end of democracy. But that’s cold comfort in a movie that forces one to appreciate the sophistication gap in mainstream movies from the First World and what was once labeled The Third World.

Hector (Omar Chaparro of “Blackout” and “Como Caido del Cielo”) is a simple, happy widower who works in an animal shelter — optimistically scrubbing up every dog in the hope someone will adopt even the oldest of them, and never hesitating to take dogs that can’t be adopted home.

That’s the small farm where he lives with his elderly mother (Sofía Álvarez) and beloved little first-grader Alma (Marianna Calderón). Special Needs Hector doesn’t earn much, but as tiny tyke/shortlegged Alma is a school sprinting champion (the first ridiculously far-fetched plot element), he’s determined to buy her new sneakers for The Big Race.

But the intimidating captain of the military police (Jorge A. Jimenez) buys the pair of white sneakers for his own first-grader and pushes Hector around when he insists Alma must have them. That leads to the captain’s child following Hector and two refugees passing through to an abandoned factory.

The kid wants to give up the shoes. But one accident later and the captain’s kid is dead and he’s hellbent on unleashing the murderous power of the police state on the harmless and simple man who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Prison beatings by inmates led by convict Tiger (Gustavo Sánchez Parra), elaborate arrangements for Hector’s death by torture or summary execution by the captain and a Pontius Pilate of a prison warden and a mad scramble by Hector’s mom and Alma’s teacher (Natalia Reyes) to save him ensue.

“Every day the sun rises, your father’s one day closer to coming home,” Maestra Ingrid reassures her student (in Spanish, or dubbed into English, et al).

There are story elements to grab hold of even in the most clumsily simplistic plots. The sinister forces of the state only seek control and revenge. When the captain’s daughter is hurt and Hector frantically flags an army Jeep, no soldier lifts a finger to help her or call an ambulance.

They summon the captain, who also fails to reach out for medical help. The sunglassed goon has a Trumpian lack of compassion or any human emotion, much less grief. All he wants is revenge.

The prison inmates are murderously hard on “child killers,” but they let Hector live long enough to win them over with his simple-minded positivity and peace-making skills.

And somehow, tiny kids including an immigrant child are the perfect champions for saving Alma’s dad from state sanctioned murder.

Director Ana Lorena Pérez Ríos and screenwriter Patricio Saiz set their tale in a dictatorial corner of Mexico’s recent past, but never wholly commit to the “period piece” of the production.

The picture will test the patience of anybody who’s ever seen a melodrama, with its emotional manipulations as obvious as every “They wouldn’t go THERE” turn in the narrative.

At every point in ther plot, imagine the most far-fetched turn of events and that’s where the movie goes, over and over again.

The kid is cute, Chaparro and the adult cast believable within the story’s fantasy version of the Mexican prison and justice system.

But “A Father’s Miracle” is so corny and klunky that one wonders if any of the other versions have been the least bit believable. We know they were crowd pleasers, and this one might have an audience, too.

One wonders just who might buy into something so tooth-achingly sweet yet darkly dopey at the same time.

Ratung: TV-14, violence, some of it involving children, profanity

Cast: Omar Chaparro, Gustavo Sánchez Parra, Natalia Reyes, Jorge A. Jimenez and Mariana Calderón

Credits: Directed by Ana Lorena Pérez Ríos, scripted by Patricio Saiz, based on the Korean film “Miracle in Cell 7” by Lee Hwan-kung. .: A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

Streaming cinema of the past decade has been littered with wish fulfillment fantasy teen romances. Netflix perfected the formula — affluent settings, carefree partying and hooking up in the clubs, on beaches and in mansions while “my parents are out of town.”

As Hollywood theatrical studios abandoned this genre and the international cinema never bothered to compete for that audience, Netflix found itself a winning niche. They proceeded to clone this formula in films made in Spain, France, Italy and elsewhere.

It’s the Italian titles that stand out in my mind. Movies like “The Tearsmith,” “Under the Amalfi Sun,” “Out of My League” and “Still Out of My League” upped the lurid ante in terms of sex and skin and sin.

But MGM/Amazon proves it can be just as trashy with the Milan-set private school romance “Love Me, Love Me.”

It’s got sex, MMA fighting, a multi-national cast of “kids” and cliques and nightclubs and clueless parents and steroid abuse.

Time and again, the screenwriters and director give us a hint that “reality” doesn’t figure into this school or its Shakespeare-quoting/street bike wheely-popping coeds, and that maybe they don’t know how steroids work and how long it takes for “roid rage” to kick in either.

Mia Jenkins plays June, a Brit abroad, new to Saint Mary’s International School and new to Milan, where her  artist-single mom (Elizabeth Kinnear) has moved them.

June falls for tall, attentive Will (Luca Melucci). But his hunky bestie James Hunter (Pepe Barroso) is rude, arrogant and sexually aggressive. The last straw with him should be her accidentally spilling her macchioto on him and his brusque way of grabbing her and dragging her into the boy’s locker room — showers included — where he strips and demands she wash his clothes.

That blast of Italian sexism comes from the English-speaking Spaniard who has absorbed Italian cultural machismo, and June is repelled.

“You disgust me!”

But a kinky bit of grinding on Mr. “I’m a lover, not a fighter” Will while James stares her down sets up the inevitable. James is who she’ll fall for.

Well, she is British and Italian Will is a “ginger,” after all. Hey, I don’t make the rules.

James takes her for a ride on his bike, but it turns out she’s a skilled rider herself. She witnesses the steroid abuse and is shaken because she “knows” this problem first hand. Their romance staggers through the dark subtexts of the plot and towards intimacy, but not through any mutual attraction that isn’t simply physical.

She can quote “Othello” to their teacher. James can’t be bothered.

The narrative slimes its way past premature ejaculation into fights in the octagon with James’ “manager” (Tommaso Caporalli) dutifully injecting him before each fight, which he then wins in a roid rage, no matter how big the foe.

The night life scenes are production designed prettiness that resembles few clubs that exist in the real world. The fights are nasty, brutish and short and the intrigues are obvious and hamfistedly-acted by one and all, because whatever the setting and the sexy costumes (makeover scenes with a new cliched gay BFF and his running mate), this is pure Netflix-variety trash with an MGM/Amazon label on it.

But at least everybody got a working vacation in Italy out of it.

Rating: 16+, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Mia Jenkins, Pepe Barroso, Luca Melucci, Andrea Guo, Tommaso Caporalli and Elizabeth Kinnear

Credits: Directed by Roger Kumble, scripted by Veronica Galli and Serena Tateo. An MGM release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:40

The last time I interviewed the late actor turned director Rob Reiner was when “Flipped” came out, back in 2010. AARP brought him to Orlando to talk up his nostalgic romance to an audience of mostly retirees, and I dropped by for a chat.

And as I remember our conversation, it was mostly about how to convince filmgoers to show up for an ever so slight 1950s-early-’60s period piece with no big names in the monocultural cast, a suburban, sentimental streak a mile wide and little that one could call novel or edgy about it.

They didn’t. Reviews were mixed, with the very youngest critics dismissing it outright. “Flipped” flopped, and while that didn’t signal the end of Reiner’s long association with Warner Bros., it did herald the winding down of his “major motion picture” career.

Rewatching the film now, I was struck by how cute the very young leads were and how moving this story remains.

It’s a rom-com told in voice-over flashbacks, always a tricky crutch to rely on. But it’s got a wonderful humanity thanks to lovely acting turns by the grownups — Penelope Ann Miller and Rebecca de Mornay play mothers, Aiden Quinn and an uncharacteristically vile Anthony Edwards play the play the parents, with the terrific John Mahoney as the grandfather who lets his grandson know he’s going to have to grasp kindness and compassion on his way to figuring out that he’d be lucky to be worthy of the very special little girl across the street who has a crush on him.

It’s been 16 years since this movie came out. Reiner and his wife’s lives were tragically cut short this year. And “Flipped” is on Netflix and trending this Valentine’s Day Weekend. So here’s my original review of the film from way back when. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did and still do.

She’s mad about the boy. But boys being boys, he doesn’t share her enthusiasm. Not at first. She’s a tween stalker, if they’d used that word for needy, pushy, too-interested suitors back in the early ’60s.

But she has a quality that makes them seem destined to be together. If only he could see that quality. If only he’d start passing those character tests life tosses in front of him. If only he could stop letting her down.

“Flipped” is Rob Reiner’s sad, sly and witty might-be-romance between Juli (Madeline Carroll) and Bryce (Callan McAuliffe), a tale told, in alternating chapters, from each person’s point of view.

Juli is working her way toward getting “my first kiss.” And she’s decided it’s to be with Bryce. Bryce, from the instant he moves into her neighborhood, deals with Julie with “strategic avoidance.”

As we see the way each one sees the landmarks in their young suburban lives in the early 1960s, the often-sentimental Reiner (“The Bucket List,” “Stand By Me’) ladles out genuine moments of heart, and genuine doubts. We sympathize first with Bryce’s resistance — just because SHE wants something doesn’t mean he has to give it. Then we grasp Juli’s growing disappointment at Bryce’s rejection and peer-pressured hostility.

Life doesn’t have happy endings and Reiner, who co-wrote this adaptation of a Wendelin Van Draanen novel, never lets us take for granted that “Flipped” will deliver one. It’s the bittersweet touch that makes this unusual film stand out.

The kids are spot on, with Carroll playing the tougher role. Is Juli annoying, stubborn or just mature for her age?

It’s a bit too “Wonder Years” at times, but the odd two-narrators gimmick plays right into the film’s “flip” in structure. Sooner or later, we know Bryce is going to wake up. The way this story plays with our expectations, there’s a very good chance it’ll be too late.

And after appreciating each person’s point of view, seeing the pros and cons of this potential relationship, it’s that marvelous uncertainty, doubt and potential for dashed hopes that give “Flipped” its novelty, a flipped take on tween-to-teen romance that make it a gem.

Rating: PG, some profanity

Cast: Madeline Carroll, Callan McAuliffe, Penelope Ann Miller, Aiden Quinn, Anthony Edwards, Rebecca de Mornay and John Mahoney

Credits: Directed by Rob Reiner, scripted by Andrew Scheinman and Rob Reiner, based on a Wendelin Van Draanen novel. A Warner Bros./Castle Rock release now on Netflix, other streamers.

Running time: 1:29