Movie Nation

The American cinema of the ’70s is justly celebrated for daring and intellectually challenging film, cynical cinema that pointed the camera at urban and rural decay.

The skepticism of the “Hud” and “Midnight Cowboy” 1960s curdled into grim portraits of a nation in decline just past the cusp of its greatest triumphs.

John Huston’s film of Leonard Gardner’s 1969 novel “Fat City” is a classic of this seedy cinema of the underclasses, a compelling drama of “the fight game” that grappled with bitterness and a generation facing the disappointment of the dashed American Dream.

It’s a boxing picture that isn’t about the boxing, save as a metaphor for the violence of lives at the bottom with little prayer of escaping their fate. Hardboiled and booze-fueled, it was a career-maker for Stacy Keach, an Oscar-nominated revel for Susan Tyrell and a great stepping stone for Lloyd Bridges’ younger son, Jeff Bridges, long and lean and hungry in his “Last Picture Show” years, here playing a lanky kid proclaimed as a “natural” by people we realize are grasping at the same straws that he is and kidding themselves as they do.

We meet Tully (Keach) as he staggers out of bed, takes a sip from a bottle in the Stockdale, California flophouse hotel room’s nightstand, and saunters into the street. Maybe today’s the day he’ll get back in shape. So he visits the nearly empty YMCA. That’s where he meets “the kid” mastering the punching bag.

Ernie Munger (Bridges) is muscular but lean. He agrees to “spar a little” with grizzled Tully, a fighter he recognizes but who hasn’t fought for a year and a half.

“I think you got it, kid.”

That’s enough to send 18 year-old/no-prospects Ernie to meet with Tully’s old trainer, Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto, a decade before “Cheers”). Ruben repeats Tully’s compliments. They’re all impressed by the length of the kid’s arms, his “reach,” and figure Ernie could “make a lotta money, if he’s handled right.”

Keach’s Tully is the focus in a narrative that introduces our two protagonists to each other and separates them for much of the picture before a bitter-with-barely-a-hint-of-sweet reunion. Huston, who took boxing seriously for a stretch of his youth, knew this world and brings a romantic fatalism and grit to his only film set in that milieu.

Tully cadges drinks and closes the bars down, talking with the deluded chatterbox Oma (Tyrell) and her man Earl (Curtis Cokes). There’s a tolerance and affection between them that suggests maybe our hooker/pimp guess about their relationship is wrong. When Earl goes to jail, Tully takes up with her, another obstacle to him ever putting the gloves on again. Then again, maybe he’ll swallow his pride and bitterness and reunite with Ruben.

Ernie’s got a girlfriend (Candy Clark) who clings to her first lover, not because she thinks he’s her ticket out, but because that’s the only life she can see ahead of her. Ernie’s earliest bouts don’t have him convinced that boxing is their salvation, but with a baby on the way, he marries her and their fates are sealed.

“Refuge” is a frankly stupid and formulaic “whodunit” wrapped in torture, retribution and guilt from all the dirty secrets men keep.

Four friends since high school head off to a hunting/fishing cabin in the woods, rounded-up and driven there by Sam (Adam Sinclair).

We’ve heard Sam’s voice, frantically calling 911 years before when his 10 year old daughter was abducted. We saw him acquire a revolver. And you know what Chekhov said about guns in the first act.

Sam is certain one of his old chums was involved in his Sophie’s disappearance. And he’s got drugs to knock them out while drinking, duct tape to tie them down and an incriminating piece of evidence that somehow escaped the cops and which Sam apparently didn’t bring to their attention.

One of the men in this cabin knows more than he’s been willing to admit.

Could it be stoner, ex-con and perpetual screw-up Jay (Christopher Dietrick)? Could it be his short tempered teacher/older brother Mike (Adam Dorsey) ?

Or maybe the successful Barry (Donald Paul), the one with the sketchiest sexual past?

Through a long afternoon, evening and next day, Sam will drug and torture these three, rooting through their shared pasts, character traits, foibles and alibis to get to the truth.

“What IS this? Something out of a f—–g ‘Law & Order’ episode?”

No, the dialogue isn’t anything to quote or highlight on the resume of our Icelandic writer-director, Anton Sigurdsson. Not that his earlier credits — “Full Pockets,” “Graves & Bones” — are anything to brag about, either.

The acting isn’t good enough to steal attention from from the dialogue, broadly-drawn characters or the simpler-than-simplistic plot. Painting yourself into a corner with a four-character tale can be disastrous when you further reduce who might truly be to blame, and when you give your most thinly-developed character, Mr. “I have never felt more sane in my entire life” Sam, the torturer, to the least interesting actor in the lot.

There’s some novelty to the editing, little of it good.

The opening credits SLOWLY roll underneath an opening montage about the crime and the media aftermath of it. Right from the beginning, exposition and back-story are being presented with a screen covered with eight credited producers rolling past, distracting us from taking it all in.

Frankly, things don’t improve after that.

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity, sexual subject matter

Cast: Christopher Dietrick, Adam Dorsey, Donald Paul and Adam Sinclair

Credits: Scripted ad directed by Anton Sigurdsson. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:26

“Watching Mr. Pearson” is an indie outing with “Sunset Boulevard” as its original mailing address.

A drama about an aged actor lost in his old roles, with two caregivers indulging his “harmless” dementia and acting out his old scripts with him, it lacks anything in the way of wit and much that would make it dramatic.

It begins with a seriously unconvincing black and white film-within-film and leans on that device for flashbacks-that-don’t-look-like ’40s and ’50s cinema as it quickly stalls out. It’s essentially a screenplay pitch that needed workshopping that would polish dialogue, raise the stakes, flesh out characters and sharpen agendas and motivations.

Robert Pearson (Hugo Armstrong) is an old man in the hands of caregivers at his seaside mansion. But back in the day, if you needed a hardboiled private eye, a hero fighting oceanic “evil” in “The Beast from Below” or a flinty Western gunslinger, he was your man. Sam Bullington plays Avery the gumshoe and Robert in the other guises of his youth.

Miguel (Luis Rizo) has the night shift “Watching Mr. Pearson.” Polish immigrant Caroline (Dominika Zawada), anxious about her Green Card renewal, keeps him company during the day. She’s the one who sees the old props around the house and the old screenplays lying about and starts indulging Robert as he dementedly drifts off into a role from his past.

“I’ve got alarm bells for broads like her,” he once said on the silver screen. “And they were ringing like a Christmas hymn.”

Today, he’s still a diva.

“Are you just gonna STAND there? It’s YOUR line!” “Can you see me?” Yes. “That means you’re in my SIGHT line!”

Miguel has his doubts about this indulgence of Caroline’s. But it turns out he’s an aspiring screenwriter, and there’s a couple of years of film schools in all these scripts for “Ranger on the Bluff,” “The Captives,” “Avery” and “Truer Odds.”

Pearson drifts in an out of reality, fretting over finances (Zainab Jah plays his financial advisor) — “They want to cut me apart and sell me piece by piece.” Much of the time, no one can tell if he’s expressing real feelings or just parroting old dialogue.

“My life is over when I SAY it is!”

Armstrong — who has bit part screen credits going back to about 2000 — is meant to be the anchor here, a colorful curmudgeon of the old school. That’s a tough assignment as the film rarely gives us the human being underneath the scripted creation. The other performances range from adequate to eye-rolling in the movie clip flashbacks.

There’s no hint that this suburban LA story was filmed in Connecticut, but the editing doesn’t build suspense or sustain pace. The production values are decent enough. But an opening scene of a PI back in the black and white cinema heyday includes a student film level blunder — a highway speed limit sign is reversed as our anti-hero drives past it.

As we wrestle with the lack of pathos, the point of it all and how this story sets up that low-stakes resolution, the most hopeful words of encouragement for all this work — all those graphics of fake-movie posters, renting that mansion and a quarter million dollar+ collectible Porsche convertible — is “better luck next time.”

Rating: unrated, some violence

Cast: Dominika Zawada, Hugo Armstong, Zainab Jah, Sam Bullington and Luis Rizo.

Credits: Directed by Dillon Bentlage, scripted by Dillon Bentlage and Simon Kienitz Kincade. A KT Pictures /Hedy Films release.

Running time: 1:24

Magical realism curdles into magical futurism in “The Blue Trail,” a parable about the hell of growing old in a society that claims to worship the elderly, but which reallys wants them warehoused and out of the way.

Amazingly, this dystopian odyssey — a kitchen sink realism mashup of “The Trip to Bountiful” and “Logan’s Run” — is set in Brazil and not further north.

In this future-that-could-be-the-present, banner planes pull “The Future is for Everyone” messages and broadcast “Taking care of our elderly is not a choice, it’s a patriotic duty” (in Portuguese, with English subtitles).

Aged slaughterhouse worker Tereza (Denise Weinberg) thinks nothing of this endless propaganda and sloganeering until the day when young state employees show up to put a gilded laurel hoop around the doorway of her modest riverside stilt house. They give her a medal, too.

“You are now a national living heritage!” they crow. But what this means is that she’s about to lose her job, gutting alligators. At 77, “the government wants you to rest.” In mere days, the People Patrol will ensure that she’s on a bus, headed to “The Colony.”

“Don’t cause any trouble,” the daughter (Clarissa Pinheiro) she raised by herself while working two jobs demands. She’s not allowed to “sabotage national productivity.” Tereza quickly grasps that she now needs her daughter’s permission to do anything.

“I still want to live,” Tereza pleads. Whatever this “colony” is being sold as, she’s not having it. Every business — bar and pub to airline booker or freight boat skipper wants to see her “papers.” If you don’t produce them, it’s “The Wrinkle Wagon” for you.

The retirement age keeps going down and shuttling off people. She needs more time, she insists. That dream of “going up in an airplane” dies hard.

The travel agent who foils her first flight and warns her daughter and blames “the system” for the end of Tereza’s rights and indepedence just shrugs. But there is a place, way up river, where they still give ultra-light airplane rides, he’s heard.

Tereza keeps running into “Papers please” and calls to her daughter when she tries to book passage inland. But this one sketchy skipper (Rodrigo Santoro) will take her. For a price.

An “African Queen” journey up river ensues, the first stage of a quest that will take her further and further into a dystopia where entropy — the end game of oligarchal tolitarianism — has set in. The only escape Captain Cadu can offer is stumbling across the “magical” blue drool snail,” whose defensive bright-blue ooze “can tell you your future” if you drip it in your eyes and trip.

The film’s scenic idyll gives it a working-poor travelogue quality, with the sinister reminders of “The Colony” summoning up fears of “Logan’s Run” and even “Soylent Green,” for those who know their dystopias.

Weinberg is documentary real in this role of a woman forced to wear diapers when she doesn’t need them, independent and defiant enough to take her future into her own hands without talking about why or the injustice of it all.

Santoro makes a fine rogue riverboat captain. And Miriam Socarrás stands out as another elderly river rat, a “nun” who steers clear of the authorities as she runs her mission from a “digital Bible” selling riverboat named “Caridad” — “Charity.”

Director and co-writer Gabriel Mascaro (“Neon Bull,” “August Winds”) keeps his film anchored in harsh realities of a present doomed to drift into an even uglier future, even as he traffics in allegories and parables and tropes of mythic trips of self-discovery dating back to Homer’s “The Odyssey.”

“Drift” describes the pacing, too, in this film that maintains a fantasy tone despite the ugly realities of hard lives ruled over by the pitiless state. The reach for something optimistic at the end of this rainbow is about the only thing that feels like a pulled-punch. There is no “Soylent Green is PEOPLE” outburst, little sense of futility or finality. That makes “The Blue Trail” end with a fizzle rather than a pop.

But it’s still a long, strange and sometimes magical trip and one well worth taking.

Rating: unrated, adult themes, substance abuse, gambling, smoking

Cast: Denise Weinberg, Miriam Socarrás, Rodrigo Santoro, Adanilo and
Clarissa Pinheiro

Credits: Directed by Gabriel Mascaro, scripted by Gabriel Mascaro, Tibério Azul, Murilho Hauser and Heitor Lorega. A Dekanalog release.

Running time: 1:25

The Brits may have popularized the feminine fury as assassin/secret agent via the James Bond films and the Diana Rigg-led “Avengers” on TV. World cinema — from America to Asia — took inspiration from that.

But it was the French, led by action auteur Luc Besson, who built a whole genre around such characters, thanks to “La Femme Nikita,” “Anna” and “Columbiana.”

“Agent Zero” is a sturdy, action-packed and seriously predictable outing built around the model-turned-actress Marine Vacth. She plays a killer of few words, an agent of Alpha, an elite unit of the French security forces sent in whenever and wherever “enemies of France” must be taken out.

We meet Badh (she’s almost never called by name) when she’s sent into Syria to kill an arms dealer, and the many ISIS minions he has protecting him from the world. She kicks, clubs and pistols her way through them, and past their families — women and children — to complete this solo slaughter.

But she seems to ignore the “clean the zone” orders from her boss Joanna (Emmanuelle Bercot), who is watching all this with her satellite surveillance team back in Escargotvia. An agent in Arabic attire exchanges a look with black body-suited Badh in the street before he blows up the place to “finish the job.”

Seven years later, Badh’s happy, kite-surfing life with a cop-husband (Salim Kéchiouche) in Morocco is derailed when a Moroccan mob family tries to kill her husband. Her past has circled back around on her, and her “particular skills” will be needed again as she sets out to wipe out the family and its patriarch (Slimane Dazi), no matter what her former bosses think of her “going rogue” (in French with English subtitles, or dubbed) and the blowback that could lead to.

Vacth’s brief online biography makes note of a teen passion for judo, which makes the French beauty uniquely suited to this role. But when you’re given little dialogue and you’re playing a trained killer, there isn’t much room for emoting, human frailty or sexuality. The character delivers beatings and takes them, but there’s no sign of an interior life.

The villains — French, Syrian and Moroccan — are similarly stone-faced. A captured snitch may snivel and a French rug-merchant/go-between (Lionel Abelanski) may plead for his life as they’re “questioned,” but as a general rule, director Guillaume de Fonatanay is more interested in the next brawl, motorbike chase or shootout.

The “situation room” scenes of spy satellite images and the like have become a cliche of the spy genre, as has the enduring myth of the “surgical strike” and how they’re portrayed.

Taken at face value, “Agent Zero” isn’t bad, but it is heartless. The stakes are low and our we never really fear for our heroine as she seems invulnerable, if not exactly invincible. With this one, you come for the fights, sniping and shootouts and not much else.

Rating: unrated, violence and lots of it

Cast: Marine Vacth, Emmanuelle Bercot, Slimane Dazi, Niels Schneider, Grégoire Colin and
Lionel Abelanski

Credits: Directed by Guillaume de Fontanay, scripted by Alexandre Coquelle and Matthieu Le Naour. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:25

Ryan Gosling & Co. have given Amazon/MGM its best opening weekend ever, as “Project Hail Mary” is already a blockbuster. It did $12 million Thursday night and added another $19 Friday for a sizzling $33 million “opening day.” That put it on track to an $80.5 million weekend, the best of 2026 so far.

It’s been hyped to the heavens, reviews have been more appreciative than enthusiastic and apparently the public is in the mood for a cute, quasi-hopeful bit of sci-fi starring one of the most popular and accomplished leading men of his era.

I found it a real teeth-grinder, two and a half hours of “cutesie” masquerading as an essay on loneliness and sloppy, fantasy “science. But that’s just me. Still, note that the gap between Metacritic and the less experienced, studio-cheerleading RT review crew is rather pronounced on this one.

On the subject of the weekend’s other wide opening, “Ready of Not 2: Here I Come,” that review consensus gap is a chasm. A modest budget-to-box-office ratio “hit” of 2019 ($28 million, all in) would hardly seem like a sure box office thing. But here it is, a repetitive sequel that Searchlight wishfully put out to indifferent reviews (like mine), a middling opening day a $9.1 million opening weekend.

Considering the original earned $8 million pre-Trumpflation, that’s not “progress” or any sort of sign of pent-up demand. Still, Samara Weaving returns to her most successful role and Sarah Michelle Gellar is here for the Gen X fans. That’s $10 million is only good enough for fourth place.

“Hoppers” fell off more than expected ($21 million was the projection) but managed an $18 million weekend, climbing over $120 million, all-in by midnight Sunday. That’s good enough for second place, with families starved for fresher animated fare than “Zootopia 2” and “GOAT,” winding up their runs.

An Indian action sequel,  “Dhurandhar: The Revenge,” cleared $9.4 and kept”Ready or Not 2″ in fourth place. It did almost $4 million Thursday night.

“Reminders of Him” did $8 million for fifth.

“Scream 7” ($4.3), “GOAT” ($3.5), “Undertone”($3), while “Wuthering Heights,” “Avatar: Fire & Ash,” “The Bride!” and “I Can Only Imagine 2” picked up the less than $500k scraps to prove there’s no bragging rights for coming in tenth this weekend.

And now for something for those who like their comic horror thrillers to deliver “more of the same, please.”

“Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” takes us deeper into the worst “marry money” mistake of a young blonde’s life. Sequel to an also-ran hit of 2019, it’s more violent, with double the blondes — sisters, this time — in bloody peril, more Satanic, less inventive and a lot more repetitive.

Tossing Sarah Michelle Gellar into the villainous mix, along with veteran heavy Kevin Durand and Elijah Wood as the biggest villain of all — the lawyer — is what passes for “fresh.” But after a while, the shooting-and-miss, shooting-and-hitting, stabbing, strangling, bludgeoning and body-exploding (Satan punishes his own) gets to be a drag.

“Here I Come” zooms in on Grace (Samara Weaving), covered in blood, battered and punctured, in front of the burning manor house full of dead in-laws and her new husband. “Ready or Not,” she survived their murderous game of “Hide and Seek,” and now the cops want to know what happened.

Her next of kin — estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton of the “Ant-Man” franchise) visits her handcuffed in the hospital, recovering just for a few hours before all hell breaks out all over again.

The High Council which “runs everything” has a leadership vacancy to fill. Their lawyer (Wood) is getting the word out. The aged head of the Danforth clan (horror director David Cronenberg) summons his remaining offspring (Sarah Michell Gellar and Shawn Hatosy), but others in Spain (including character actor Nestor Carbonell), China (Olivia Cheng) and the Desi diaspora in North America (Varun Saranga of TV’s “Wynonna Earp”) will be vying for that seat as well.

The stakes?

“The world will go to hell faster than it already is.”

Hey, when Satanists already run the show, it’s not like a new gilded age is underway.

The two-feuding sisters will have to put aside their differences and team up if they want to dodge the sniper rifle rounds, kanda swords, bazooka shells, daggers and the like wielded by this playing-for-keeps crew of almost a dozen would-be murderers, whose skills range from seasoned to inept.

One thing that bogs the picture down is the constant presentation of “rules,” which are basically exposition delivered in heaping helpings start-to-finish. Competing families can’t kill each other, only the quarry. Blood-oaths have to be taken by each succeeding family member as they step up to replace “hunters” who have fallen before them.

The junky jumble of a narrative limits the location to an ancient Rhode Island mansion/casino-resort with a golf course as a killing field and golf carts as getaway/pursuit vehicles, with lots of laughably convenient weapons turning up at just the right time for hunters and the hunted.

Peripheral characters serve a momentary function and then are dispatched or simply vanish from the story or worse, hang around for the underwhelming over-the-top finale.

Weaving’s character has barely had time to catch her breath from the last trauma when she’s hurled into the new one. She’s learned “the game,” but can’t get her sister to respect her newly-acquired survival skills and can’t cadge a smoke off anybody.

I kept waiting for punchy, profane one-liners that four credited screenwriters never deliver. There is no “I’m here to smoke Virginia Slims and kick ass,” and more’s the pity.

Because while there are a couple of laughs and comical come-uppances, the picture drowns in its own gore. And there’s little satisfying about dispatching villains who fail in their family’s quest to kill Grace and collect the coveted “seat” by simply having them explode.

Rating: R, strong bloody violence, gore, profanity, drug abuse and smoking.

Cast: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Elijah Wood, Olivia Cheng, Varun Saranga, Nestor Carbonell, Shawn Hatosy, Kevin Durand and Sarah Michelle Gellar

Credits: Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, scripted by Guy Busick, R. Christopher Murphy, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:48

His misses are so rare between his many hits that we don’t think of Ryan Gosling as ever taking an errant step on his rise ro stardom. But a “Gangster Squad,” “Song to Song” or “The Gray Man” turns up just often enough to remind us he’s human.

I am mystified about his need to dabble in “cutesie” with the sci-fi misfire “Project Hail Mary.” Yes, he’s got kids, and an alien stone-crab (literally stone) FX sidekick in a “Silent Running/The Martian” mashup from two filmmakers best known for getting their start as an animation directing team (“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”) seems almost understandable.

But I went out of my way to avoid adding “adorable” to the “alien sidekick” description. It’s not, no matter how many times the critter’s translated “Fist me bump” or “You are dumb” or “Do puppet show” burblings — James Ortiz provides the nondescript voice — aim for laughs.

I see a lot of lightweights and critic-come-latelys are endorsing this, and maybe I’m too reluctant to let go of my reactions to the first trailers for it. But “cloying” is a hard sell at 156 often interminable minutes.

Gosling plays a middle school science teacher who runs a fun and delightfully encouraging class. That’s not quite a running thread through the movie, but it has or had promise.

One day, the ex-college researcher/professor Dr. Ryland Grace (a tad on the nose, that name) is challenged by his students to talk about the “red dots” that scientists have announced seem to be eating the sun in a giant arc of a solar system buffet table that ends on Venus.

Even Grace isn’t convinced when he insists “They’re gonna figure this out,” “they” meaning the world’s best and brightest astrophysicists, biologists and the like.

Then he’s confronted by “they” in the form of scientist/project leader Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller of “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Toni Erdmann”). Her bluntness gets right to the point of his one-time expertise. She will accept no argument from a teacher and onetime researcher who lost his career over his theory that “water is not necessary for life” in the universe.” She needs him and that’s that.

Her humorlessness is her humor. Yes, those black SUVs are full of guys who will kidnap him because that’s what she needs and orders.

And as we learn about that class, that school and this now-renewed research through flashbacks Grace experiences after waking up from cryo-sleep on a spaceship, we can guess how he ended up there, too, a turn of events as ludicrous and unlikely as a vacuum-of-space virus that is eating stars all over the galaxy.

Grace is all alone on a ship traveling over eleven light years to study a star that isn’t being eaten, or so everybody thought when he took off. That’s where he runs into an alien vessel also studying this star. And that’s how he meets just-as-lonely “Rocky.”

The science in this “sun is being eaten” story — such as it is — is a word salad of chemical elements grasped just long enough to let it slip into “fantasy,” with energy sources that seem more Tony Stark and “Avatar” “Unobtainium” than Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The “learn to communicate” scenes involving a vacuum tube passed between spaceships, DIY models and yes, “puppet shows,” and are grossly inferior to earlier takes on that trope — “Close Encounters,” “Contact” and “The Martian.” Sci-fi films are readily referenced with “Shields’ UP!” the only joke that works.

The narrative’s “work the problem” business is flat-out gobbledegook, as the movie feels more production designed than Phd-in-chemistry approved.

And the pathos derived from the Big Themes of loneliness, sacrifice and fighting through fatalism left me cold –deep space cold. When even “Am I expendable?” is played for laughs, and lands with a thud, it’s not just gravity that’s to blame.

Gosling can be forgiven for taking the Bezos bucks, and he has earned such goodwill that he’s almost become bad-review-proof, especially since “Barbie.” But “Project Hail Mary” doesn’t make the pass, much less complete it in the end zone when time FINALLY expires.

Rating: PG-13, “thematic meterial” and “suggestive references.

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, Ken Yeoung and the voice of James Ortiz as “Rocky”

Credits: Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, scripted by Drew Goddard and Andy Weir An Amazon MGM release.

Running time: 2:36

I am at a loss when trying to come up with an Oscar nominated short film that I’ve ever felt was unworthy of being in the field.

Something about the process of submission, how seriously those who vote to winnow the possible nominees down to an elite few via film festivals and the like always makes this the March Madness category of the Academy Awards. Winners, working within the confines of a short running time, limited story, set-up, plot complications and punch line, polish their pictures to a fine gleem.

Sometimes, as with “Sling Blade” or “Before I Disappear,” these jewels become feature films. Before music videos, commercials, “Reels” and Youtube, short films were the pathway to feature film careers.

I can’t imagine “The Singers,” based on a short story by Ivan Turgenev, being expanded to anything longer than the 18 nearly-perfect minutes Arizona State U. alum Sam A. Davis put on screen. But it’s a minor marvel — atmospheric, dark, forlorn, funny and joyous. You’ll laugh and you’ll cry at the simple humanity of it all.

It’s about a bar where almost everybody got old. It’s still packed, with old men, smokers and a geezer on a ventillator, a passed-out priest, the homeless, the helpless and the hopeless.

It’s the sort of gathering place for alcoholics that only exists in the movies these days, right down to the disused piano in a corner. Serious drunks often drink alone, buying cheaper liquor at the convenience store.

But here, a grizzled owner, a broke barfly cadging drinks, the sad and the sullen, gather and are goaded into a singing contest.

There’s really nothing more to say than “WATCH this.” There’s more humanity in it than most of the Best Picture contenders, and less embarrassment in its honors than in that disastrously artless sell-out-to-undiscriminating fankids Best Animated Feature “winner.”

Rating: TV-MA, alcohol abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Will Harrington, Chris Smither, Mike Young, Judah Kelly, Leroy Griffith, Muffin and Matt Corcoran.

Credits: Scriptd and directed by Sam A. Davis, based on a short story by Ivan Turgenev. A Netflix release.

Running time: :18

The brawls have to do most of the heavy lifting in your typical martial arts genre picture, even the ones in a scenic setting. That’s doubly true in “The Forbidden City,” a stumbling and generally indifferent kung fu thriller with comic touches set in The Enternal City — Rome.

“Rome” is limited to an out-of-place one night motorbike ride past the historical landmarks. And the tale of two sisters, raised to be martial artists in the “Only One Child Per Family” era China but separated by human trafficking in adulthood, misses as many plot points as it hits.

When they were little, Yun and Mei trained together with their dojo master daddy, with Yun forced into hiding every time a neighborhood spy dropped by to catch the family raising two daughters instead of the requisite one.

Adulthood sees tough-as-nails Mei (Yaxi Liu) pursue “always there for me” sister Yun (Haijin Ye) through the Chinese mob’s global human trafficking pipeline.

Imagine the dragon lady in charge’s surprise when she walks down a line of trafficked young women whom she assigns to “brothel,” “massage” work and the like, and that one furious immigrant who demands to know “Where is YUN?” and proceeds to kick the ass of everybody who fails to give her a quick answer.

Mei is focused and furious. If she has to bust up every Chinese mafia crew and Italian mobster in Rome, where Yun has ended up, she’s going to fetch that missing sister. Where most cities label their Chinese district “Chinatown,” in Rome they prefer “La città proibita,” aka “The Forbidden City.” Or so this Gabriele Mainetti movie asserts.

Mei is never scarier than when she yanks out her phone, barks a threat (in Chinese with English subtitles) into it and has it translated into Chinese-accented Italian (with English subtitles). Because most of the people she’s going to have to punch, kick, stab and slice (a CD broken in half makes a nasty weapon) are locals.

Annibale (Marco Giallini, flinty) is the neighborhood mafioso, 60something, with two bearded goons nicknamed “Chip n Dale” always by his side. He’s big on putting the squeeze on immigrants. He’s got an interest in Ristorante Alfredo. Alfredo’s son Marcello (Enrico Borello) is the star chef there. But the ever-philandering Alfredo (Luca Zingaretti) is where everybody is led to believe that the sex-trafficked sibling Yun wound up.

That puts Mei in conflict with hapless Marcello and on the warpath for Wang (Shanshin Chunyu), the new Chinese muscle in town, running his growing empire through Chinese restaurants, brothels and massage parlors.

As Mei makes mayhem, everybody keeps an eye out for “the Chinese girl,” who kidnaps Marcello at one point and sets out to rescue or avenge her sister, no matter who’s involved.

The cultures in collision plot mean that the Stefano Bises, director Mainetti and Davide Serino script is cluttered with filler. Subplots involving Marcello’s cheat-customers-on-their-bill mother (Sabrina Ferelli), Wang’s Sino-Italian hip hop star son (Roberto He) are side alleys that reach an instant dead-end.

Yun is transformed from a child trained to defend herself into a passive character in love or merely in the clutches of a much older man.

The “filler” stops the movie’s forward momentum every few minutes as we’re treated to chatty interludes meant to prolong how long it takes us to reason out the plot — which takes no time at all as long as you remember “reason” has little to do with it.

But stuntwoman (“Mulan”) turned star Liu is a formidable lead, selling much of the impossible Bugs Bunny physics of the fights as she and everybody else hopes that we don’t notice her quick recovery from gaping knife wounds and the like.

Borello can’t quite make the sale of sister-of-his-father’s-paramore-turned-love interest. But who could? The finale to “The Forbidden City” is the sort of reality only a trio of screenwriters could irrationally cook up, with nary an Italian Chef Academy alumnus in the lot.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Yaxi Liu, Enrico Borello, Marco Giallini, Shanshun Chunyu,
Sabrina Ferilli, Luca Zingaretti and Haijin Ye

Credits: Directed by Gabriele Mainetti, scripted by Stefano Bises, Gabriele Mainetti and Davide Serino. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:19