Movie Nation

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” 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.

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 his Actor’s Studio classmate Dustin Hoffman. De Niro must have gne 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 became shorthand for a character’s sadism — or just someone not shy about laughing at a joke only he got.

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 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

It’s a cruel fact of box office life that actresses have a much shorter window to make a mark, become a “name” and ensure themselves an enduring career in Hollywood.

But any fretting over Margot Robbie clearing that hurdle with a star vehicle — preferably a romance — all on her own, without a “Barbie” or Harley Quinn to get the credit ends now.

That Colin Farrel romance that failed last fall — Who can remember the title? (“Big, Bold,” etc. my arse) — the underwhelming “hit” that was the lurid and oversexed “Babylon” are in the rear view mirror now.

Because a new, sexy and flashy “Wuthering Heights” closes the deal for Robbie, a $34.8 million+ President’s Day/Valentine’s Day weekend smash. That’s a tad below projections based on Thursday and Friday and pre-release/Valentine’s Day “date” presales.

Robbie’s the biggest name in the production — aside from Bronte. Reviews haven’t been over the moon, but a hit is a hit is a hit. Sexed-up pre-release hype didn’t hurt, a lot of it coming from pop starlet Charli xcx, who did the non-period music score.

I’m making V-Day date time for this one. You might want to as well.

The animated hoops movie “GOAT” is finally offering competition to “Zootopia 2,” but opened with a low-for-animated-fare $26 million take on a long holiday weekend, with kids out of school and all of that.

Chris Hemsworth‘s star vehicle — with a healthy dose of Halle Berry, Mark Ruffalo, Barry Keoghan and Monica Barbaro — “Crime 101” isn’t setting the world on fire. But paying the players pays off for this one, which is opening over $15 million. That’s not great, but hardly a flop and it should enjoy a decent run, thanks to good reviews.

Small distributor Briarcliff’s dalliance with Gore Verbinski and Sam Rockwell, “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” is a winner that deserves to crack the top five, but won’t. It earned over $3 and will come in seventh.

“Send Help” is heading for fourth ($9 million) a nice career bump (it’s closing in on $50 milllion) for Rachel McAdams and Sam Raimi. And “Solo Mio” (which will clear $15-18 before losing its screens) took fifth with $6.8.

“Zootopia 2″ took sixth with $3.7, “Iron Lung” cleared $3 to take eighth, “Avatar Fire & Ash” is right at $3 for month and “Dracula” should finish 10th, also over $3 in a close race with “Mercy,””Melania” and “The Moment” dropping out of the top ten this week.

At some point in the middle of his “Pirates of the Caribbean” “commitment,” I interviewed the director of that blockbuster franchise, Gore Verbinski. I remember noting that I’d seen ads in sailing magazines I subscribed to casting extras to play the scurvy dogs of the various ships in that series, and expressed regret that I hadn’t answered those ads.

“Oh no, you wouldn’t want to do that,” GV blurted. Think of the pay, the conditions and the long term implications, he sputtered.

“I mean, look at ME,” he finished with a laugh.

Like a lot of critics, I had already started to bemoan the Gore Verbinski that Disney and Johnny Depp took away from us in the prime of his career. A music video director-turned-feature-filmmaker, he’d burst on the scene with “Mousehunt,” kept the all-star action comedy train running through “The Mexican” and launched a horror franchise with his Hollywood remake of “The Ring.”

All that promise was back-burnered for a decade of increasingly unsatisfying and supernaturalish pirate movies. Verbinski’s “franchise” fate was sealed as nothing he made during those movies or since (“The Lone Ranger,” “A Cure for Wellness”) has lived up to that early promise.

Behold, dear reader, the tragic fate of James Cameron!

But Verbinski makes a striking return to risk-taking form with the ambitious, sometimes dazzling and even heartfelt Jeremiad “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.”

Scripted by the author of “The Invention of Lying” and “Love and Monsters,” its a sci-fi action farce/satire built around the screwball charms of Oscar winner Sam Rockwell. He leads an ensemble piece about an oddball crew assembled to “save the world” by a time-traveling hobo from the future.

“All of this,” he prophesizes to a stupefied Southern Cal Norms Diner crowd,” goes horribly wrong.”

Two “inevitables” about our present day must be fought to the death — AI and the rising tide of “fascism” that benefits from the social disconnection it causes.

Talk about a “movie of its moment.”

The flashback-packed narrative may slow the story to a crawl, but this “Mystery Men” or “Suicide Squad” of working class losers out to spare the planet a “Terminator: Judgement Day” can be rambunctious, raucus and riotous, a picture that takes its queue from today’s headlines and its tone from Rockwell, a reliably gonzo leading man whom anybody would follow off a cliff or into a suicide mission. Reluctantly.

The guy in the see-through plastic poncho and haphazardly-wired stocking cap, breastplate and such looks “homeless.” But he says he has a bomb, and as his finger is on the trigger to an elaborate timer lashed to his arm, he has the eatery’s attention.

He knows everybody by their name, down to who will call the cops, who has a gun and how much change this or that character has in their left pocket. It’s not a “trick.” He’s “from the future,” remember?

And this isn’t his first “Groundhog Day” at Norms’ He’s visited 117 times, recruiting a team out of the motley crew of 40 or so patrons and employees, looking for the right combination of “players” to stop the ultimate incarnation of AI from being invented and ending humanity by luring us all into cyberspace utopia.

No, Zuckerberg et al are not mentioned by name. But the title is a phrase any video game addict can identify with, words of encouragement before undertaking any CGI “quest” — GLHF and DD.

Every time our unnamed time-traveler arrives, he tries a different combo of folks for his “team.” One assemblage, statistically, will be the right group to help him finish his quest. Some who volunteer are rejected for failings that became obvious in previous quests to escape the diner, flee across town and intervene in the AI inventing process. Some who participated before may work out in a different combination. Some have to be threatened out of their terror.

A Scout leader, a middle-aged working woman who “just wanted a slice of pie,” a rideshare driver, a single mom, a school teaching couple and a young woman dressed as a Doc Martens’d Goth prom queen are corraled into attempting to escape from a police cordon, pig-masked bounty hunters and the cell-phone-zombie “mob” that is Gen Alpha to complete their quest.

Flashbacks creatively fill in the back-stories of our principals and explain the hell-world we’ve let our online lives turn into, and enivtably slow the movie to a halt. But without them, how can we see the zombieland of cell-entitled punks that high school has become, how avoiding cell tech when it literally makes you ill is nigh on impossible, how American culture would rather come up with a cloned-kid work-around than make the effort to stop school shootings and just what the end game of living-a-life-online might look like?

The social satire of it all stings. But the picture plays like “One Battle After Another” with less hope, a glum struggle Verbinski fights with all the skill and brio can bring to the table after too long hanging out with Johnny Depp.

“It’s going to be OK, or it’s not,” our prophet/warrior from the future warns. “You’re in for a rough night.”

Rockwell is his most manic here, shouting “Where did all the BOOKstores go?” He wants to know what “We” did to try and stop that. “Pop quiz, anyone here remember a PHONE NUMBER?”

Michael Peña, paired up with Zazie Beetz as the hapless and overwhelmed teacher couple, stands out as a paranoid, oft-fired lit educator who doesn’t “like people” but who has even less tolerance for the insolent teens who won’t look up from their phones to learn about “Anna Karenina.”

“Did they make a movie of it?” they smirk to one another. Yeah, another answers — “Keira Knightley was in it…”

Juno Temple sympathetically plays the single mom whose trauma in the School Shooting Capital of the World and the Stepford Moms who urge her to keep calm and get a clone informs her decision to take on the quest. And Haley Lu Richardson (of “The Chaperone,” “Love at First Sight” and TV’s “White Lotus”), made up to look like an Americanized Florence Pugh Riot Grrl facing the apocalypse, brings pluck and pathos to her part.

Rockwell — sometimes deranged, sometimes quietly cautionary — carries this bracing but uneven prophecy across the finish line. “AI” maybe be “inevitable,” thanks to technology. It may “promise to give you everything.” But when a manic messy Jeremiah in electronic gear and a poncho shows up to warn us — stoner-hobo vibe or not — you’re damn well going to listen to him.

“Otherwise, that’s a wrap on people.”

Rating: R, graphic violence, sex scene, profanity

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Juno Temple, Zazie Beetz, Michael Peña, Asin Chaudry, Georgia Goodman and Haley Lu Rchardson.

Credits: Directed by Gore Verbinski, scripted by Matthew Robinson. A Briarcliff Entertainment release.

Running time: 2:14

“Crime 101” is a slick, smart, well-cast and well-acted heist thriller about taking and getting yours in a world that’s taking “yours” every day and in every way.

It makes a fine star vehicle not just for hunky Chris Hemsworth as the thief, but for Halle Berry as a high-end insurance agent, Mark Ruffalo as a rumpled, maverick police detective, Barry Keoghan as a violent and impulsive junior thief, with chewy roles for Nick Nolte, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tate Donovan and Monica Barbaro to boot.

The latest from “American Animals” director Bart Layton, based on a novella by crime fiction icon Don Winslow, has a pun for a title — the crimes are committed within getaway distance of Southern Cal’s 101 freeway — and some pretty good antecedents referenced in its world, its characters, its story and its style.

“The Thomas Crown Affair” is mentioned in a chat between cop and robber over favorte Steve McQueen movies. But “The Getaway” also comes to mind in this story of a crook being double-crossed by the guy who commissions the jobs.

And the production design and Erik Wilson’s cinematography suggest the sheen of affluent LA, with layers of working class and underworld grit underneath, propping the whole “La La Land” illusion up.

The patient pacing and low-simmer suspense is reminscent of Michael Mann’s genre classic “Heat,” but the martial drums and rhythms of the Blank Mass’s pulsing, pounding score give this generic tale with twists a flavor all its own.

Hemsworth stars as our brooding lone robber, a guy who hits high end jewelry couriers on their way between stores, or from the airport on their way to a store. He gets his hands on various black Dodge Chargers, puts on his gloves and ski mask and dashes to work. The threats at gunpoint are obvious, but nobody gets hurt so long as they follow his “Get in the trunk” instructions.

“Personally, I wouldn’t die for the insurance company.”

Grizzled Nolte is the veteran crook who sets these robberies in motion. Ruffalo is the never-promoted detective “obsessed with this Lone Ranger/Lone wolf” modus operandi he alone recognizes in a police department obsessed with numbers — “clearance (cleared cases) rates.”

Berry plays the veteran closer at a high end insurance agency “for people who have more money than they know what to do with.” Her sex appeal has been a key to her rise up the ranks. But she’s over 50 and that “partnership” still hasn’t happened.

The carefully-planned heist that opens the picture goes just wrong enough to make our thief take stock of his empty life of beachside apartments, fancy wardrobe, $12,000 watches, call girls and collectible Camaros. Maybe he’s close to “a number than I have in mind” that’ll let him “retire.” Maybe that PR agency employee (Monica Barbaro, who played Joan Baez in “A Complete Unknown”) who rear-ends him in traffic could be more than a one-night stand.

But his fence/heist-arranger (Nolte) won’t like that. He brings in a bleached-blond punk (Keoghan) to take on jobs the “101 Thief” won’t. The violent dirt-bike robber will also spy on his predecessor with an eye towards stealing from the jewel thief.

“Clovers” is a documentary parked somewhere between the quaint and goofy charms of “Vernon, Florida” and the toxic redneck stupidity of “Red, White and Wasted” on the movie map of America’s real “Americana.”

It started out as an essay on “the fastest dying town in America,” Asheboro, N.C. and evolved into a portrait of the denizens of a strip mall “internet cafe” aka “trailer park casino” named Clovers.

The movie isn’t about race, as Black and white women and white men mix and mingle and gamble and hit the honky tonk biker bar to dance to a cover band playing Nazarethe’s “Hair of the Dog.” It’s about class, the self-destructive Southern white lower classes in particular.

We meet low-stakes/low-rent gamblers whose latest bad impulse and life-worsening decision has drawn them to the video games and digital slot machines of the “might be illegal” gambling parlor Clovers, a joint that’s the temporary beneficiary of the sort of lax enforcement infamous in rural Southern policing.

The film follows Jennifer Paschal, a Randolph County corrections officer, as she jokes around with inmates and lets sexist insults, bizarre and threatening behavior roll off her back in a job that she loves.

“Y’all QUIT,” she orders the men behaving badly in the orange jumpsuits.

Jennifer is just shy of 40, bubbly and quick to draw a contrast with her colleagues whom she says “hate” this job in “hell.” Not her. She likes the paychecks, keeps the peace her own way and has support at home.

“My husband’s been to prison,” she explains. “He knows what happens here!”

We never learn why she’s “let go” from the best job somebody with her education and circumstances could hope for, but we can guess. We can even guess Jennifer’s story before she starts to reveal it — pretty enough for beauty pageants, pregnant at 15, courting others at Rider’s, the local biker bar, “trapped” in dying Asheboro.

You feel for her even before you realize she’s the most self-aware person we’ll meet in this world of Harleys, tattoos, unwed mothers and hardscrabble, low wage work.

J.D. Cranford’s story is written all over his face. Literally. When he gets off his Harley and cranks up his “Ever tell you about the time I was on ‘Divorce Court'” story we note that he has tattoos seemingly everywhere. By the movie’s end, he’s over 50 and his “everywhere” tattoo collection is complete as he takes on an old Native American hung-by-hooks-in-the-skin spirit quest ritual.

It’s the “pain” he’s addicted to, the machismo. “I did it, could you?” He’s so wasted most of the time we never learn the limits of his substance abuse, just the fact that he fathered another substance abuser with Sharon McNeill.

Sharon is a few years older, was “with” J.D. “just long enough to get pregnant” by him before he ran off and married “some girl down in Albemarle.” Sharon’s a regular at Clovers, trying to pick up pocket money to supplement a lifestyle that has her living with an older man “like we was married” who covers her expenses as he requires her housekeeping and care-giving.

She’s buried one ex, and is on contemptuous but half-decent terms with J.D., who hangs with their adult son at the campsite where that addict son lives.

Whatever else what can say about any action A picture (“Avatar,” “Sisu,” “Don’t Breathe”) or slew of B and C-movies that have filled the post AARP membership career of the formidable Stephen Lang, you have to give it up for his stunt double, his stunt team, stunt coordinator and (guessing here) his pilates instructor.

For 73, the dude gets around, busts heads and kicks tail. In the movies, at least.

“Hellfire” is another never-underestimate the “Old Man” vengeance thriller of the B movie variety. It’s not remotely as good as the best of his recent Bs, “VFW.” But he’s playing another veteran, “ex-Special Forces,” the wrong sort of drifter to cross even if you’d just as soon he drift right out of town — no stop for drinks, no meal, no night in a motel.

Screenwriters have it in their heads that this “violent veteran” characters matter to anybody who would elect to stream titles like “Hellfire.”

This being 1990s Texas, our nameless drifter gets gets nicknamed “Nomada” (nomadic) by the wheelchair-bound owner (Chris Mullinax) of the local saloon. Hey it’s catchy enough for everybody in town to adapt it.

There’s the saloon owner’s daughter Lena (Scottie Thompson), the aging hulk of a sheriff (Dolph Lundgren) and even the bad guy Clyde (Michael Sirow) who travels with two goons to make sure he properly intimidates one and all he meets. “Nomada” also crosses the lips of Clyde’s Beethoven-loving, piano-playing father (Harvey Keitel) who “runs this town” from his fancy antebellum mansion.

We hear that nickname almost as often as the phrase “We don’t care much for outsiders” and “Ex-Special Forces, huh?”

The entire town is in the clutches of drug-importer Jeremiah (Keitel), who has his minions threaten and break hands of any who disobey his edicts about “outsiders” and the operation all are required to pitch in on. We’ll see what Mr. Ex-Special Forces has to say about that.

Stunt man turned B-movie director Isaac Florentine (“Seized,” “Acts of Vengeance”) protects his star and showcases him as best he can. But it’s a slow, stumbling and stupidly predictable film, save for one plot turn.

Our hero has what we take are Vietnam combat flashback nightmares, suggesting survivor’s guilt and a hunger for revenge. But whole gunfights are predicated upon the idea that Latin cartel gunmen and “ex-Special Forces” veterans can’t hit the broad side of a barn with the broad side of another barn.

And there’s a fatal flaw in Richard Lowry’s script that I won’t give away except to note how similiar it is to the Indiana Jones/”Raiders of the Lost Ark” “necessity” quandary.

Not every movie can be an A-picture, and whatever his “Avatar” paydays, that can’t be the most rewarding work Lang does as his career winds down (not nearly as fast as Keitel’s, from the looks of things).

My coping mechanism for enduring merit-free trash like this is to remember an actor’s better moments — Lang’s affecting, emotional turn as General Pickett of “Pickett’s Charge” infamy, the best performance in “Gettysburg,” his Ike Clanton in “Tombstone” and his menacing blind crime victim who won’t be “victimized” in “Don’t Breathe.”

“Hellfire” is exactly the sort of movie you’d expect Dolph Lundgren to wind down his career with. Keitel and Lang deserve better.

Rating: R, graphic violence, drug content

Cast: Stephen Lang, Scottie Thompson, Michael Sirow, Chris Mullinax, Dolph Lundgren and Harvey Keitel.

Credits: Directed by Isaac Florentine, scripted by Richard Lowry. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:35

Innocuous to the point of insipid and unfailingly inane, “Relationship Goals” is exactly what you’d expect of a rom-com based on a self-help book by a self-promoting preacher.

It’s the sort of romance where we wait for close to 90 minutes for a character to blurt the obvious — “Have you never seen a ROM COM?” Because whatever the challenges of turning self-help into cinema, the screenwriters of this faith-based romance may have seen a romantic comedy or two, based on the formula they try to shove this into. But they didn’t take those movies’ lessons to heart. Every character is a cliche, every snippet of “advice” a weary bromide.

You need to “unpack” a relationship that isn’t giving you what you need so that you can “repack it,” etc. STOP the presses!

Kelly Rowland of Destiny’s Child and TV’s “Grown-Ish” stars as Leah, a go-getter TV producer angling for the job of show runner for a New York-based “Better Day Today” AM news program.

Leah writes herself affirmations on Post-It notes she pastes to her bathroom mirror. Relationships? She’s got that down to a “list” of requirements and deal-breakers that she’s spent years “curating.”

“No kids,” she demands of her prospective mate. “No cheaters.” “Nice style.”

She’s awaiting her big promotion with her obligatory gay assistant Roland (Ryan Jamaal Swain), co-host/bestie Brenda (Robin Thede) and “swipe right” addict makeup queen Treese (Annie Gonzalez)

Leah has no time for her dad (Dennis Haysbert), who’s pushing her to visit her mother’s grave because “You can’t outrun grief.” But her wait for the “big news” from her retiring boss and mentor (Matt Walsh, barely registering in a generally bland cast) doesn’t pay off.

“The network” has poached a rival network’s rising star to try him out as show runner. Jarrett Roy (Method Man) gets everything but wolf whistles from the female staff when he waltzes in to “Whatta Man Whatta Man Whatta a Mighty Good Man.”

But he and Leah “have history.” He cheated. Now she’s got to fight for a job she figures she’s earned against a heel she’s avoided for years. And he’s telling her “I’ve changed.“

In Jarrett’s case, he’s found his sacred text — “Relationship Goals” — and his guru out in Tulsa, Pastor Michael Todd (as himself). That cheating “happened,” but “it’s not who I am.” Maybe Leah’ll give him another chance? Before or after he steals her job out from under her?

The story’s “dating with a purpose” (matrimony) messaging is hit harder than the religious themes. Characters in this alternate reality of network news drop “I just need to pray on this” and “God’s plan” into conversation and bicker over how to produce a video profile of this hot new book and the preacher pushing it into the public eye.

None of the narrative’s three storylines — Leah’s, Brenda’s frustrations with her failure-to-commit basketballer beau (DeVaughn Nixon), Treese’s hapless loneliness, or Leah’s trials — hold the screen or the viewer’s interest.

The production is polished but bloodless, and nothing the bland cast and veteran TV director Linda Mendoza (“Scrubs,” “Grown-Ish”) do brings it to life.

“Relationship Goals” is as generic as a self-help book cover, and doomed to be forgotten as quickly as the book it’s based on will be.

Rating: PG-13, adult situations, mild profanity

Cast: Kelly Rowland, Method Man, Robin Thede, Annie Gonzalez, Dennis Haysbert, Matt Walsh and Pastor Michael Todd

Credits: Directed by Linda Mendoza, scripted by Michael Elliott, Cory Tynan and Laura Lekkos, based on the book by Pastor Michael Todd. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:33