Movie Nation

It may be a cliche, but there are few more “liberating” images in the cinema than having your heroine toss aside convention and decorum and dunk her head in the public village fountain in some eternally sunny corner of Provence.

When the woman doing the dunking is a shy, unhappy and more-uptight-than-average Swede, more the better.

That’s a payoff moment in “Je M’appelle Agneta,” an ever-so-slight, not really “funny” midlife crisis rom-com.

A repressed, depressed, newly-laid off empty-nest Swedish mom pops down to Provence to cure what ails her in this Swedish version of “It’s My Turn,” “Eat Pray Love,” “How Stella GotHher Groove Back” or “Under Tuscan Sun.”

The film is as predictable as a Swiss watch and as adventurous as a romance novel or its Hallmark Channel equivalent. But it’s set in Provence, so there’s that.

Eva Melander has the title role, that of a dowdy 50ish mom whose kids have reached an age where they only make contact if they want money and whose husband (Björn Kjellman) has become an exercise freak who always exercises with a cute younger neighbor.

She’s just lost her job and resents “my whole life of useless labor” (in Swedish or dubbed into English) as she ties one on and voice-over narrates her frustrations to the world.

Agneta is a serious Francophile. She adores, she narrates, all things French. But as she’s had a few, that narration is what she’s putting in an application for a job she’s seen in a classified ad.

An “au pair” is needed to “look after an older Swedish boy who needs help.” In small-town Provence. Cleaning and cooking are required. As is accompanying this “older boy” to the bar every Friday afternoon.

Sounds like heaven. Her husband laughs it off. Maybe he’s not having an affair with his exercise partner, but he’s a big source of Agenta’s oppresion. She won’t make it a week away from home, he scoffs. She LOVES France, but never tried to learn the language?

That criticism is what puts her on the next trains south.

Pan-Europeanism aside, there may have been some language barrier issues with that ad. Meeting the swarthy restaurateur who placed it, Fabian (Jérémie Covillault) underscores how out of her depth Agneta is. There are no English speakers in town, much less Swedish.

Except, that is, for the “Swedish” “boy” the ad speaks of. Einar (Claes Månsson) is an ever-shirtless bon vivant of advanced years. A Swedish expat, he lives in a former monastery, and has since the days when being gay could be illegal or called for “a cure,” thanks to the social mores of the ’60s.

He awakens each day with a shout at the sun. “Good morning, my libido!” Just the thing a menopausal mom from Volvoland wants to hear.

Einar doesn’t “need help,” he insists. And as he complains about her (Swedish) cooking and presence, he adds bits of judgemental interrogation that drive this aged gay blade to his own conclusion.

“Apparently, I’m not the one who needs ‘help.'”

What Agneta needs is a good “molting,” shedding her feathers and her Swedish obsession about “what others think of you.” Before you know it, she’s cooking French, standing up for herself, submitting to an undergarment makeover by the town’s aged undies seamstresss (Anne-Marie Ponsot), meddling in Einar’s estrangement from a relative, dunking her head in that fountain and entertaining thoughts of leaving her husband.

Unsurprising cinema like this adaptation of Emma Hamberg’s bestseller plays as comfort food to fans, and Melander and Månsson don’t make bad company in their performances. They’re just not novel enough to be surprising or particularly funny.

“Je M’appelle Agneta” takes us to Provence and lets us see that transformative dunk in the fountain. But it can’t make us feel it.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, smoking

Cast: Eva Melander, Claes Månsson, Jérémie Covillault,
Anne-Marie Ponsot and
Björn Kjellman

Credits: Directed by Johanna Runevad, scripted by Isabel Nyland, Emma Hamberg and Johanna Runevad, based on a novel by Emma Hamberg.

Running time: 1:53

That cast. That director. That gut!

This October, we’ve got ourselves a Hail Mary for an Oscar nomination for the movies’ Most Valuable Player.

A grab bag of thriller tropes and action beats is tossed at another “human trafficking” thriller, this one from Spain, in “The Marked Woman.”

We’ve got an amnesiac with Jason Bourne skills. Because one never forgets one’s martial arts training. Apprently. She uses “Memento” Post-It notes to piece together clues from bits of memory. We’ve got shipping containers stuffed with human beings, “coded” bank accounts, dirty cops and a dogged loner detective soldiering on despite recent tragedy.

The film’s big takeway is that this modern day slave trade is not just a North American cinematic obsession.

Women kidnapped to be sex workers, refugees smuggled from Africa and Asia and South America into Europe or North America at their own peril, Chinese smuggled to staff (in indentured servitude) the world’s Asian eateries and the whole Trumpstein scandal — enveloping America’s and the world’s richest in a conspiracy involving pedophilia and blackmail, with Israeli intelligence involvement — all point to a global problem and the most predatory practices of “capitalism.”

Director Gabe Ibáñez and screenwriter Lara Sendim, adapting a novel by Rosa Montero and Olivier Truc, never quite get this beast up and running. It takes 24 minutes to get to the first action beat, and when our heroine (Ana Rujas) isn’t fighting, the picture struggles to hold our interest.

Rujas plays a woman found chained and tortured in a shipping container at the port of Barcelona.

We’ve met our victim as she furtively talked to another woman (Kira Miró) just after that second one has given testimony against a trafficking task force cop. under suspicion for being a mob “mole.” All this took place in Algeciras, the Spanish city adjoining Gibraltar at the entrance to the Mediterranean, months earlier.

The smugglers and the cops — clean ones and dirty ones — are in a race to find and question this anonymous amnesia victim, covered in car battery torture burns, before she remembers things that will bring this crime ring down, dragging a lot of people with it.

She has “something valuable,” (in Spanish or English or subtitled), “somehing ‘they’ don’t want you to share.”

The formidable Candela Peña (“All About My Mother,””Princesses”) is the 50ish detective sergeant, fresh off a tragedy and too anxious to get back to work. She draws this “case that nobody wants” and starts to work the clues with a reluctant junior partner (Carlos Troya).

There’s DNA at the crime scene, phone records to vet and a survivor to interrogate.

Meanwhile, the accused cop from Algeciras (Pol López) elbows his way north and into the investigation, even though nobody seems to trust him. An impending Internal Affairs hearing will do that to a guy.

The under-protected survivor has to kill her way out of being kidnapped again, and we’re off on a movie that blends the implausible (the amnesiac is dragged along on stakeouts) with the cliched, all of it covered at a snail’s pace.

“The Marked Woman” finds some suspense by the third act. It’s well-cast and a couple of the fights are first rate. But if you haven’t figured this clunker out an hour before the characters onscreen do, you’re not seeing enough thrillers.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Candela Peña, Ana Rujas, Pol López, Luka Peros, Manolo Solo and
Kira Miró

Credits: Directed by Gabe Ibáñez, scripted by Lara Sendim, based on the novel by Rosa Montero and Olivier Truc. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

One of the cinema’s great talents, grand figures and a gentleman in full, Sam Neill has died. He’d fought a deadly cancer off, but that battle must have taken a terrible toll to get him to “cancer free.”

He was 78.

His iconic turn in the blockbuster “Jurassic Park” — mocked by he and his co-stars above — is what most people remember him for. I interviewed him when “Sirens” came out, a winking turn in a titillating comedy, and one or two other times in later years.

My favorite films of his might have been “Dead Calm,” but he never gave a bad performance on the big or small screen. He was in the Down Under thriller series “Untamed” last year, twinkled in “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” “Rams,” “A Cry in the Dark,” ‘Children of the Revolution,” “Sleeping Dogs,” My Brilliant Career,” devilshly regal in “Restoration,” Russian in “The Hunt for Red October,” “The Piano,” and more than one “Jurassic.”

Neill was latterly a rancher, a winemaker (Who wasn’t?), an acclaimed memoirist, a gentle soul and a real charmer. I recall Gabriel Byrne telling me the story of how he introduced his little boy to Neill somewhere in Hollywood once. The kid was overawed, and had just one question he sputtered out about “velociraptors.”

Neill grinned, pulled out a prop raptor claw he kept on his person during his Jurassic years for just such encounters, and demonstrated to the lad how a dinosaur like that would gut a little kid like him. Straight out of the movie. And then he’d wickedly chuckle, as Byrne rememembered it, giving a child a memory that would last forever.

Don’t meet your idols, they tell you. But what a bloke, what a twinkling talent. Whar a sweetheart. He will be missed.

On its surface or beneath that surface, “The Invite” is a date movie. So go with your significant other.

But speaking from experience, don’t be surprised if the whispered asides — in between elbows in the ribs — go something like this.

“This is why we never have people over.”

Olivia Wilde’s latest film in a sexy but acrid comedy about coupling and breaking up. And re-coupling, and “mixing it up.” And it’s about those “cool” neighbors you just know are having a better time of it than you.

“See? SEE?”

It’s based on a Spanish comedy titled “Sentimental” in its original iteration, “The People Upstairs” when it was remade in German, Czech or Korean. Wilde grabs a proven, can’t-miss premise, but hunts for something darker in this laugh-out-loud farce about other people’s sex lives and what our reaction to them says about us.

“Just shut up!”

Wilde — who also directed — and Seth Rogen are Angela and Joe, San Franciscans in a comfy, roomy flat they’ve just renovated.

We meet Angela shopping and prepping dinner, selecting meats and cheeses, consulting “The Joy of Cooking.” Joe is distractedly half-listening to a brass ensemble he’s teaching and rehearsing at a lesser Bay Area music conservatory, cursing half-under-his-breath as he takes another exhausting folding bike and bus ride home.

He comes in the door, hits the floor, and they go at it. He “forgot the wine?” They’re having “people over?” Wait, it’s “the people from upSTAIRS?”

Joe has issues with those two. She goes on about how “hip and cool” they are.” And “she’s so PRETTY.”

Joe is irritated by the “chatty” and “inquisitive” man of the couple, who makes “way too much eye contact” as he grills him in their brief encounters in the older building’s elevator.

But their “noisy” renovation created some obligation in their mind, some need to invite them to see what they’ve done with the place because they’ve said “We’ve GOT to have you over when it’s done.”

It’s not “done.” Completely, anyway.

Joe doesn’t remember the dinner date, and he plays every card in the deck to get out of it. And yet here “they” are, standing at the door, probably overhearing how heated Joe and Angela get over making an impression with food and forgotten wine.

The viewer gets her or his cringe-on as we all wait to see if Joe can get through the evening without complaining about the noisy “monster sex” their neighbors have many a night, always in the middle of the night, disturbing their piece and waking their 12 year-old daughter (not seen).

Piña, vamped by the Oscar winner Penélope Cruz at her most voluptuous, and her partner Hawk (Edward Norton) are truth speakers and truth seekers. They know who’s been fighting, and they’d like to “help.” The dears.

The fuming Joe and wild-eyed, manic and craving approval Angela do need help. But from these two?

Psychotherapist Piña marvels at how “mean” they are to each other. Hawk gushes in appreciation at how “speak your mind” “truthful” Joe can be. But Joe is quick to turn the questioning back around on these unconventional — even for San Francisco — and noisy love-birds.

Wilde keeps her camera tight and the takes long(ish), letting her stellar cast banter and riff and glower and grin, leer and lean into this evening-long squirm.

Cruz delights as her fizzy, blunt and unnervingly self-confident bombshell asks questions, tempts and teases them both.

“We would be crazy if we didn’t cry,” she reassures needy Angela. And Joe isn’t as dumpy looking as he thinks, she insists.

Norton’s “Hawk” half fends off Joe’s aggressive “NOBODY is named ‘Hawk'” insults and sets the tone for the self-censoring everybody falls into to try and get through this evening without incident. When Angela badgers Joe to open a valuable gifted bottle of wine they’ve had for years, as Joe admits “We’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to open it,” Hawk scores a direct hit with his reply.

“Are you sure this is it?”

Veteran “heh-heh-heh” comic Rogen kind of holds his own amidst a more formidable cast. Wilde goes at this tried-and-true material — on-camera and off — like her career depends on it, and Cruz and Norton just lean back and let Joe and Angela’s unease become the audience’s unease, picking their spots to put them and us on the spot with them.

Don’t wait to see this one at home. The feeling of being trapped with these four in this situation would be greatly lessened by hitting pause, ducking into the kitchen for a snack or comically arguing over what’s unfolding in front of you and making you fidget in your seat.

The familiar situation — neighbors you don’t know/neighbors you might like but have “issues” with –invites us in. But this cast and the characters they turn into punish each other and us at every turn — judging, goading, tempting and insulting with every breath through an evening that will have you staring at your watch in uneasy empathy.

Hey, we’ve all been there, right? Ok, maybe not “THERE.”

Rating: R, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, scripted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, based on the Spanish film “Sentimental” by Cesc Gay. An Annapurna/A-24 release.

Running time:1:47

A Korean classic of the pre K-pop explosion, flip-phone era returns to theaters as subtle, sweet and soulful as ever.

“Take Care of My Cat” is a young women’s coming-of-age tale, set in the 2001 present, a film that, synth-pop score or not — plays like a timeless period piece twenty-five years later.

Five devoted friends finish their vocational school graduation and celebrate on the docks in the port of Incheon. A couple of years later finds them still tight, but straining at the business of growing up and the shrinking dreams and frustrations of the working class young in an economy that doesn’t seem to offer them much.

At 20, Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won) seems to have it figured out and under control. She doesn’t exactly lord it over her mates, what with her office job, nicer clothes and whatnot. But we see her place within that brokerage firm before she does — dress nicely, serve at the boss’s beck and call, fetch a lot of coffee — before she does. Is she a “low wage earner” flunky for life?

Twins Bi-ryru and Ohn jo (Eung-ju Lee, Eung-sil Lee) have family to lean on and street jewelry to hustle on the side.

Ji-young (OK Ji-young) has quit a job and can’t find another, an orphan living with her grandparents in a hovel in abject poverty, something she hides from her former classmates. She stops borrowing money from them as she withdraws from them because she can’t keep up, or so she seems to figure.

And Tae-hee (Bae Doona) is the glue, the one who nags the others to get together, a smart young woman who volunteers as a typist for a disabled poet. Her trap is her family’s “Healing Stones” sauna, run by a boorish father who doesn’t pay her for her labors and who puts all his hope and attention on her student-brother.

Director and co-writer Jae-eun Jeong’s (“Butterly Sleep”) drama follows each 20 year-old through the trials of “just starting out” — the boyfriend who comes whenever you call (for now), the boss who makes you drop whatever you’re doing to run a personal errand, the sense that there’s a better life than handing out fliers for the family sauna, a newspaper-ceilinged dump of a shack to live in, a dead-end job or no job at all.

I love the way the narrative sets up shop in the interior lives of this quintet, the dynamic of clinging to friendships that are starting to bring you down, the battle over “We should get together at least once a month”(in Korean with subtitles) or “The past is the past.”

One character entertains the thought of trying to get in the merchant marine. Another figures working like crazy and meeting her boss’s demands will get her past the new college grads who come in the door, instantly higher status than she will ever be. One we worry about, because she’s given up.

There’s cat in the title and a cat in the movie. A stray that she stumbles over is all poor aspiring fabric designer Ji-young has to offer — in an elaborately hand-decorated box — to Ha- joo on her birthday. The social climber makes it through a day or three before giving it back.

Young-rock Choi’s score charmingly dates this picture the way New Wave/New Romantics pop dated such genre pieces in the ’80s.

The gifted cast lets us into those interior lives — well, most of them, anyway — with just an expression or a gesture capturing all they dream and all they dread about the moment and the future to come.

All involved serve up a sober-minded (not a laugh in it) “growing up/moving away” experience that is both timeless and universal, a classic of a Korean cinema about to emerge and then explode in the years to follow.

Rating: unrated, smoking

Cast:Bae Doona, Lee Yo-Won, Ok Ji-Young, Eung-ju Lee, Eung-sil Lee,

Credits: Directed by Jae-eun Jeong, scripted by Jae-eun Jeong, Kim-hyun Jeong and Lee Eon-hie. A Kani re-release.

Running time: 1:52

Somebody had the good sense to cut half an hour off the London romance “This Time Next Year” for its Amazon streaming release. They just didn’t finish the job.

It’s a sweet-and-scenic “Hallmark Channel” love story (chaste and slow and drawn out) that reaches for cute but never quite overcomes “inert.” Attractive leads, curious “obstacles” to overcome be damned, “Next Year” is where cinematic “Time” stands still.

Sophie Cookson is our lovelorn heroine, struggling in her 30s to make a go of it with her No Hard Fillings pie catering shop. She may make a mean pie, but selling to OAP (old age pensioner) rest homes isn’t going to make anybody solvent. not with inept or indifferent help and a partner (Mandip Gill) keeping the bad news in their books from her.

Our pie baker’s always been “unlucky,” she figures. Back in 1990, she was almost “the first baby born in the New Year” in London, with her embittered mother (Monica Dolan) narrowly missing out on a big cash prize.

The woman sharing her maternity ward (Golda Rosheuvel) somehow gave birth first. And she not only took mum Connie’s coaching and good advice and the prize money, she bloody well stole the name she had planned for her baby girl — Quinn.

“Quinn” Cooper never got over the second choice name that she ended up with — Minnie. Think about it, because that’s the only laugh out loud line in the film.

Minnie runs into birthday mate Quinn (Lucien Laviscount of “Emily in Paris” and “People We Meet on Vacation) on a particularly disastrous day. Quinn is a well-off management consultant who drives his Bentley to her rescue at work, after freeing her from a public restroom where she found herself locked on New Year’s Eve, the day before her birthday.

The two put the coincidences together, but whatever sparks might fly are dampened by her obligations to a “useless” lout of an influencer/”journalist” boyfriend (Will Hislip) and the grudge she and her mother still hold about their shared birthday.

“You stole my name!”

Cookson, of the “Kingsman” movies and “Stockholm Bloodbath,” has presence and a little spark about her. But the script and her too-pretty model/actor co-star give her and this romance nowhere to go.

“Four Weddings and a Funeral” alumnus John Hannah and Dolan make an interesting couple, and Charlie Oscar steals her scenes as Minnie Cooper’s lazy, multi-hued hair delivery driver.

Structurally, this leaden film is a TV movie with obvious points for commercial breaks and pacing designed to fill a two hour+ timeslot, not move us through obstacles — one mother has agoraphobia — on our way to True Love.

A few laughs and a lot more romantic heat might have made this endurable, but not at the one hour and fifty-five minutes the creators had in mind for its release length.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Sophie Cookson, Lucien Laviscount, Golda Rosheuvel, Mandip Gill, Will Hislip, Charlie Oscar, Monica Dolan and John Hannah.

Credits: Directed by Nick Moore, scripted by Sophie Cousens. A Radical release streaming on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:24

The summer camp comedy “The Floaters” makes its way to theaters after spending the past year making the rounds of the Jewish Film Festival circuit, where it probably should have remained.

Foul-mouthed, cliched and inane, it isn’t funny and adds nothing to the “summer camp” movie genre.

One under-developed plot thread is about the “camp experience” it can take decades for adults to shake off.

The film’s teen lead’s “journey,” from privileged, Yale-coveting “self-hating Jew” to one who embraces — if only at ironic arm’s length — the “Medieval crap” traditions and superstitions of “our people,” is barely brushed over.

It’s lost in the squishy side-stories and general vulgarity of an outdoor “safe space” for products of permissive Jewish parenting.

“Is it in the f—–g Bible, or not?”

Jonah (Judah Lewis) is leery of this whole idea of going to Camp Daveed,” the “JEWISH Jewish” camp his dad (Jonathan Silverman) went to, way back when. He’s got orders to kiss up to a kid whose mom runs Yale University’s admissions. Oh, and have fun.

Bullies will be confronted, “kosher” will be tested and mocked, loners like Judah and camp outcast Lindsay (Nina Bloomgarden) will bond and the “dweebs” of many ethnicities and pronouns of Camp Daveed will renew their rivalry with the “douche bros” of nearby Camp Barack.

That camp is run by Daniel (Seth Green who at least remembers what it was like to play something as “funny”). Steve Guttenberg‘s Manny is the figurehead director of Camp Daveed, a character played with an empty earnestness and a smattering of “Oy veys” who confesses to a lifelong obsession with “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Rabbi Rachel (Aya Cash) sets the tone for the teaching that goes on about “our people,” “our history” and “Israel.” She’s always looking for new ways to engage with the kids, “The Torah as fan fiction,” etc.

“Here at Camp Daveed, you leave a piece of you behind!”

Sarah Podemski plays Mara, the alumnus of the camp who has made it her mission — as the “real” director — to keep it afloat. She’s the one who recruits the 40ish former campmate Noni (Jackie Tohn) to join the ranks of her counselors.

Noni’s an over-the-hill “shock effect” rocker just canned from her latest band as they’re about to tour Europe. She’ll take on “The Floaters,” the kids who arrived at camp without signing up for any “activities.” Noni’ll give them a taste of freedom to create “art,” which turns out to be a kid’s juvenile idea of a Jewish identity skit for their big competition against Camp Barack.

One counselor’s suggestion that “We need to start talking about HARD stuff — guns, race, politics, ISRAEL” — is as close as this meandering misshapen mess gets to speaking to its moment, arriving in theaters two years into Israel’s Gaza genocide.

Well, that and the ice cream “historical maps of Israel” contest.

A subtext about the hurtful nicknames that stick and other downsides of camp chasing one into adulthood is promising.

“Camp” is either “the most important experience in your life,” or “It’s just camp.”

“GLOW” alumna Tohn sets the tone for all the performances here — competently unmoving and uninteresting. Rachel Israel’s direction is flat, unemotional and unamusing.

Campfire rap-alongs, “Ishtar” cracks kids won’t get, a little obvious grasping at inclusion (gay, Asian and Black Jews are in the mix of campers and counselors), punny T-shirts (“Ain’t no Challah Back Girl”) and a sentimental cinematic “skit” are all “The Floaters” serves up as “entertainment.”

Thus a “niche audience” movie further shrinks its niche as it becomes as dull as it is unrelateable outside of its specialty film fest run

Cast: Jackie Tohn, Sarah Podemski, Judah Lewis, Aya Cash, Nina Bloomgarden, Thani Brant, Steve Guttenberg, Jonathan Silverman and Seth Green.

Credits: Directed by Rachel Israel, scripted by Amelia Brain, Andra Gordon and Brent Hoff. A Brainstorm Media release.

Running time: 1:40