Movie Nation

“You, Me & Tuscany” is a featherweight romance with a pretty cast, lovely scenery, fabulous food and just a hint of charm under all the cliches.

It’s a Hallmark Lite rom-com built around live-action “Little Mermaid” star Halle Bailey, who struggles to sparkle in a drab script and a role that demands screen presence and vulnerability more than singing.

She is turned-out, made-up and perfectly coiffed in every shot “Under the Tuscan Sun.” And damned if everybody else in the cast doesn’t upstage her in scene after sunny scene.

Director Kat Coiro’s barely PG (It’s rated PG-13) romance concludes with outtakes of bit players cast as tourists scoring the movie’s only laughs. They riff lines about the fine hunk (“Bridgerton’s” Regé-Jean Page) our heroine has gotten soaked with in an irrigated vineyard.

“You can Diane Lane ME ‘Under the Tuscan Sun,’ if you get my drift.'” “You can ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ me anytime, Baby!”

Cute. And not exactly a vote of confidence in your star.

Bailey stars as Brianna, an aspiring chef who gets by house-sitting in New York, “borrowing” the clothes, jewelry, designer pets and lifestyle of her clients. Nia Vardalos of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” plays the one client who blows up when she catches her in the act.

Brianna’s obligagory sassy-mouthed bestie Claire (Aziza Scott, funny) orders her to “Stop borrowing other people’s lives and start living your own.” She underscores every bit of life advice with “Bitch!” Because of course she does.

Broke, still mourning her late mother — a chef — but into high living, Brianna treats herself to a drink and burger at the bar in the hotel where Claire is concierge. That’s where the handsome globetroter Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) meets her, charms her and invites her up to his room.

Him dozing off pre coitus isn’t a complete waste, she figures, as she reasons that he “Pretty much invited me to stay” in his empty villa in his hometown of San Conessa. A flat-broke fish out of water, naturally she tries on a wedding ring she finds in a dresser once she gets there. That’s how Matteo’s family, estranged from him since he took off to make his fortune in real estate, decides she’s his fiance and that he’s coming home for a wedding.

“Anna” lies just enough to encourage this.

Mama (Isabella Ferrari), cranky granny (Stefania Cassini) and ribald cousin Francesca (Stella Pecollo) spring into wedding planning, gushing over and bowling over the bride-to-be, who speaks Italian and knows Italian cuisine, which could come in handy at the family ristorante. You think?

And then the “other” son in the famiglia, vineyard owner Michael (Page) has his “meet cute” with the American, and things get complicated in the most trite and predictable ways.

The film’s setting is the Italy and the Tuscany of Italian cliche — vineyards and postcard-perfect villages and fine food and laughing, friendly locals, a place where a romantic gal .awakens each day to the groundskeeper’s perfectly passable rendition of “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici.”

Its script is packed with lazy devices, worn-out plot contrivances and dialogue crutches. “In EEEEtaly, we have a saying…Those who know food, know life.” and “In vino veritas.” And so on.

Bailey struggles to give “Anna” in Italy a personality to go along with the lovely wardrobe, Rapunzel-length braids, lush settings and spritely co-stars. But when even her taxi-driver/confidante Lorenzo (Marco Calvani) has more personality, you start to grasp the film’s central failing.

Our star is content to be the pretty ornament whom all the funny and often more fleshed-out characters spin around. And she doesn’t have the screen presence for that.

Films fail for a lot of reasons, almost all of them behind the camera — weak script, lackluster direction, poor pacing, etc. But every now and then, miscasting or an out-of-her-depth lead performance also takes some of the blame. I hate to say this, given the nonsense she went through when she was cast as “The Little Mermaid,” but Bailey isn’t up to carrying this off.

When she finally breaks into song near this bland tale’s bland finale, you can sense her relief and ponder the muttering her director must have done behind the camera.

“Why didn’t we have her sing from the start?”

Rating: PG-13, profanity

Cast: Halle Bailey, Regé-Jean Page, Lorenzo de Moor, Marco Calvani, Isabella Ferrari, Stella Pecollo, and Aziza Scott

Credits: Directed by Kat Coiro, scripted by Ryan Engle and Kristen Engle. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:4

The hard-luck brawler of the Aussie mixed-martial arts thriller “Beast” finds himself working for next to nothing on a Sydney harbor trawler at his low point in the movie.

He’s a “Jonah,” his jerk skipper insists. Bad luck. No “fish” in their traps.

And I couldn’t wait to get home to see what “fish” those Aussies catch in what look like your average crab trap. Hey, I did a year in Kodiak, Alaska. That makes me an expert.

But yes, they do catch “fish” in such traps down under. So much for making fun of the screenwriters not doing their homework.

Ah, but not so fast. Russell Crowe and David Frigerio co-wrote this generic to the point of tears “fight picture.” And for the life of me, I can’t find much that passes for “homework” in it.

Crowe plays the bulky, crutches-using old trainer who teaches his charges one credo.

“If I am breathing, I can think. If I can think, I can WIN.”

The “Cinderella Man” veteran wrote himself (I’m guessing) a couple of pithy lines. Time is “moments and memories,” his grizled trainer Sammy philosophizes. “If you don’t take the moment, you don’t get the memory.”

That doesn’t compensate for a movie whose Big Third Act Fight sees the Oscar winner watching the brawl on a TV set, muttering “He’s GOT him!” at the screen several times, earning his writing and acting credits the easiest way possible.

It’s difficult to do much new with a fight picture — be it boxing, wrestling, kung fu or MMA — as the genre grinds through its third century on the screen. And the Australian MMA milieu of “Beast” is about all that sets it apart from the hundreds of fight films that preceded it.

There’s a pregnant wife (Kelly Gale) who cries “You PROMISED” when her long-in-the-tooth and retired fighter Patton (Daniel MacPherson) elects to take off his shoes and put on the tiny gloves and strut into the octagon again.

There’s the kid brother (Mojean Aria) who followed Patton into the sport, and pays a high price. An unscrupulous promoter (Luke Hemsworth) sleazes our broke trawler deck hand into fighting aagin.

The foe, the Warrior Xavier Grau (Bren Foster) is a dirty eye-gouger/late hit thug seemingly two weight classes above our hero, and several classes more above his skinnier kid brother.

And Crowe plays the old trainer whom Patton once let down, the guy who won’t train him because “He’s not no engine. He’s got no urgency. You can’t coach heart.”

Which is why the trainer’s scrappy, tattooed ex-fighter daughter (Amy Shark) takes the job.

The fights are savage enough. But if you’ve ever seen one or two ring or octagon movies, there’s nothing at all new here. I don’t know how to be more blunt than director Tyler Atkins and crew don’t show us anything that might hold ones’ intellectual or empathetic interest.

You can count the roundhouse swings-and-misses in the fight choreography, because that’s what the brawlers do — “One, two, three, four, NOW I hit YOU, right?”

MacPherson, Crowe’s co-star in “Poker Face” and “Land of Bad,” has the right look and sound, but lacks the presence to carry a movie, at least the way this one is plotted and characterized.

I thought I was settling in for something fresh, but the working class poverty is well-furnished and familial and entirely too tidy compared to “Rocky,” the underdog reaching for revenge and/or glory underwhelms and the darkest moments don’t move or touch the viewer in any meaningful way.

But Crowe’s here, and he got the film made. Frankly, he’s more interesting as an epicurean exorcist on a Vespa than he is lurching into and out of scenes here.

Rating: R, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Daniel MacPherson, Bren Foster, Kelly Gale, Mojean Aria, Luke Hemsworth and Russell Crowe.

Credits: Directed by Tyler Atkins, scripted by David Frigerio and Russell Crowe. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:53

There was critical blowback that rather spoiled the welcome of George Roy Hill’s last classic of the ’70s. Then again, the director of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting” and “Slap Shot” was never what we’d call “a critics’ darling.”

Audiences? The Academy? They loved the guy, an Oscar winner for directing “The Sting,” a crowd-delighting filmmaker who made plenty of hits, and was willing to take a shot at Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” and Irving’s “The World According to Garp.”

“A Little Romance” saw Hill at his best and most full of himself, making a young teen (13 year-olds) romantic comedy set in Paris, Verona and Venice, a movie about a smart American girl and the movie-loving French kid who particularly loves the movies of…George Roy Hill.

This adorable 1979 travelogue features Laurence Olivier, whose hamminess simply twinkles off the screen, introduced the world to the talented child who’d become an Oscar nominated adult, Diane Lane, and lets Broderick Crawford be Broderick Crawford one last time.

Whatever its reception in 1979 — mixed reviews, not a blockbuster — the picture shimmers in the memory. For me it’s a benchmark movie, one of the gold standards for Hollywood to fall short of as it rarely attempts cute, innocent and moist-eyed romances like this these days.

The kids act like kids — smart kids, smart-ass kids, and young people too inexperienced to consider the consequences of their actions. Dumb adults miss this. The smarter adults meet them on their own level; not insulting their intelligence, not demanding that they grow up too fast, giving them the benefit of doubt thanks to their innocence.

Throwing two mature-but-not-THAT-mature-for their age tweens together in Paris makes for an achingly sweet and idealistic teen-wish-fulfillment fantasy and travelogue.

Lane plays posh American private schoolgirl Lauren, stuck on a Paris movie set because that’s where her vivacious but self-absorbed and shallow Mom (Sally Kellerman, perfect) wants to be, idolizing a filmmaker (David Dukes, terrific) who is her latest crush — she’s on her third marriage — and the glamor of filmmaking at Versailles and in the Louvre.

Crawford plays an irrascible version of himself as the star of his “hack” actioner.

Screen newcomer Thelonius Bernard is a streetwise son of a Paris cabbie, a kid who — with his sketchy pal Londet (Graham Fletcher-Cook) — cuts class to see any Redford film he can get into. He spies the gangly girl his age off camera, reading Heidegger no less, who could not be more bored by something that fascinates him — making movies.

Lauren’s her name? “Call me Bogie,” he insists. He’s forced to explain the joke to the non-cinephile.

Daniel (his real name) learned a little English from school and a lot from the movies, “Shweeheart.” His Belmondo-lite swagger impresses her. They meet up and flirt and have little cinematic adventures (ducking into a porn theater is treated as cringey as you’d hope) and run afoul of her mother.

The charming old boulevardier Julius (Olivier) makes their acquaintance and regales them with tales of his life and a great love and Venice’s Bridge of Sighs, the best place to share the kiss that bonds a couple for life.

With her rich and understanding but “what’s best for Lauren” obsessed stepfather (Arthur Hill) — “my third,”Lauren cracks — determined to move the family back to the States, the first-loves plot their escape — temporary or not — to that Venetian bridge.

As they’ll need an adult to accompany them to the racetrack and later across the border, yarnspinner Julius is recruited. And they’re off.

There’s humor in mistranslations, in Crawford’s curmudgeonliness, in Olivier’s florid fluttering, in the kids’ precocious fascination with the philosopher Heidegger and in Lauren’s leg-pulling wisecracks about her sexual experience with her dorky school friend Natalie (Ashby Semple, who only made one movie and was hilarious in it).

Natalie knows all about first crushes.

“You don’t know what love is like until you’ve fallen for your cousin!“

Daniel? He knows all about movies, and when Lauren’s mom’s would-be director-beau makes a crude remark about what these kids have been up to, he does what Bogie would have done — punches the pig in the stomach.

The script treats money issues with feather-light wish-fulfillment fantasy twists (gambling on the horses, Julius’s “real” profession, etc.). The sights are spectacular, but skimmed past, gauche American tourist cliches abound and never for a moment do we doubt our lovers’ quest or its outcome.

All of which adds to the delight of it all.

The French kid spoke no English before Hill took him on and helped him learn it for the movie. Young Mnsr. Bernard scowls daggers at Julius for charming his girl and summons up testy outbursts about “Damn rich American girls…keep you waiting.”

His character plays like the tween years between the anti-heroes of “The 400 Blows” and “Blowup.” But his chivalry — he is properly embarassed by exposing his new crush to a porn cinema — and his gallantry are never in doubt.

And Lane, bursting on the screen with impossibly long “Marcia Marcia Marcia” hair, is a natural. Whatever direction Hill gave her, she sits, sprawled, like a child who hasn’t learned any better and takes charge with agency and ideas and smarts because the world hasn’t had the chance to smother that out of her. It’s a dazzling debut and a tribute to her dad, an acting coach, who taught how even a sophisticated child might act her age.

Composer Georges Delerue won an Oscar for adapting Antonio Vivaldi’s 18th century masterpiece, the “Concerto for Lute, Violins and Basso Continuo,” into a simple plucked melody of such romantic longing it turned up in every other wedding one attended in the ’80s. For those of us of a certain age, hearing it is still downright triggering.

But that’s what we want at weddings, and from romances, from the innocent to the most “mature.” And if you can’t take delight in being moved to tears or be tickled by the sight of aged trouper Larry Olivier hopping on a bicycle for a dash through Verona — yeah, he really DID that — more’s the pity.

Nearly 50 years after its release, Hollywood could still go to school on “A Little Romance,” a reach for romantic innocence in a jaded, coarse “adult” age back then, and even moreso now.

Rating: PG, mild profanity

Cast: Diane Lane, Thelonius Bernard, Laurence Olivier, with Sally Kellerman, David Dukes, Arthur Hill and Broderick Crawford.

Credits: Directed by George Roy Hill, scripted by Allen Burns, adapted from the novel by Patrick Cauvin. An Orion Pictures release available on Youtube, Apple TV, other streamers.

Running time: 1:50

“It Takes a Village” is a frustrating Polish farce that opens its arms to a world of comic possibilities only to let them all slip through its fingers, one by one.

Titled “Podlasie” in Polish, after the region the village of Bodzki is set in, it’s a romantic comedy about pride, last chance romance, country rubes having one over on gullible city slickers and “alien” crop circles.

Every character “type” introduced is a lot less than she or he should be. Every “wacky” twist in the “Let’s pretends aliens are landing” plot falls about six whacks shy of wacky and the few one-liners attempted lose something or nearly everything in translation (in Polish, or dubbed into English, Spanish, etc.).

A lame fake-out-the-audience wedding opens the film, as the young couple that everybody in the village, including the brass band imported for the occasion, rushes to see “the young couple” exchange their vows only to have Oliwka (Anna Szymanczyk) and Kuba (Matuesz Janicki) stand aside as widowed Halina (Anna Seniuk, whose credits date back to the Soviet Empire) and Jan (Artus Barcis) almost take their vows.

The “almost” arrives when Halina gets cold feet. But we don’t buy “I’m about to abandon my widowhood” as her excuse. Something about her pleas to her granddaughter and others — “Help me get OUT of this!” — tell us there’s more going on.

There is. She’s another dupe in the vast Bitcoin pyramid scheme and she’s too embarassed to admit she lost all her money.

After Halina lies to and humiliates Jan at the altar, she scrambles to get cash out of her goat cheese business and farmland, and when her artist-daughter (Joanna Trzepiecinska) shows up, Jan figures out the real reason all this happened and a scheme is hatched.

They’ll pretend aliens are making crop circles, and the notoriety will help Halina sell her cheese and everybody else sell whatever to the gullible “believers” who show up to raise the money to cover her losses.

A teensy little bit of fun is had by the faction we see making the crop circles, Wojkek (Flip Gurlacz) creating the viral “I don’t want to get ABDUCTED by aliens!” videos for his “What the SHOCK?” Youtube channel, the cop (Angelika Cegielska-Swiatek) out to expose “the hoaxers” and the priest who tolerates all this scamming and distracting from his Holy Mother Visitation (long ago) Shrine.

But there’s no edge to any of this. The stakes are low and treated as no big deal. It’s not cultural differences that hold the film back, as there have been Polish comedies on Netflix that translate to laughs west of the former Iron Curtain.

The performances are broad, but not remotely broad enough. The “colorful” local characters are colorless.

Worst of all, if a lot of people watch this debacle, you know Netflix will turn that intellectual property into Italian, Spanish and Filipino versions of “It Takes a Village.”

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Anna Seniuk, Artur Barcis, Joanna Trzepiecinska,
Filip Gurlacz, Mateusz Janicki and
Angelika Cegielska-Swiatek

Credits: Directed by
Lukasz Kosmicki, scripted by Katarzyna Frankowska and Katarzyna Golenia. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

The animated “Super Mario Brothers” sequel, “Super Mario Galaxy,” opened big and debuted midweek.

And it’s rolling to a whopping $130 million opening weekend, maybe $190 million since Wednesday when all the dust settles at midnight on Sunday.

For those keeping score at home, that’s a tad behind the “Super Mario Brothers” movie ($146 million over its first three-day weekend), and further behind the most recent empty-headed video game adaptation blockbuster, “The Minecraft Movie” (over $160 million over its first weekend).

A $34 million Wednesday, a $24 million Thursday, just over $48 million Friday with a $55-60 million Saturday in store? It adds up.

Reviews have been poor, and really, you couldn’t drag me to this at gunpoint. The video game adaptation crowd is a different beast — “characters” and “story” are of limited importance — and without a Jim Carrey or Jack Black or some human element as a lure, well, you kids have your fun.

“Project Hail Mary” has struck a chord with many (not all) and is holding audience, weekend to weekend. Another $33 million this Easter will push it well over $200 million in just the North American market, closing in on $400 million worldwide.

The smartest movie in theaters this weekend is the corrosive romance “The Drama,” a darker-than-dark comedy that underscores the star power of Zendaya. Pairing her up with Robert Pattinson for an edgy story of a wedding derailed by a pre-nuptials revelation — the bride had plans to stage a school shooting as a teen — it’s earned decent reviews and makes a nice, cerebral counterpoint to the popcorny pictures that are packing them in. It’s on track to clear $14 million, good enough for third place on this bloated April holiday weekend, which is quite good by mid-major studio A24 standards.

“Hoppers” is hopping along in sixth place, adding $5.7 million to Disney’s coffers and taking away the sting of not having “Super Mario Bros.” rights.

The romantic melodrama “Reminders of Him” is hanging in there, claiming a top five spot for one last weekend with $2.3 million in ticket sales.

Wide release “specialized audience” films such as “The Secret Between Us” (meh) and “A Great Awakening” (oy) are opening, with”Awakening” clearing $2.1 and making it’s mark in sixth place.

“They Will Kill You” is on track for 7th with $1.7 million.

“Dhurandar: The Revenge” is collecting leftovers for eighth. 

“Ready of Not 2: Here I Come” will take ninth.

“Scream 7” has tenth, pushing  “GOAT” out of the top ten. We’ll know as more data comes in later Sat. and Sunday.

An impending wedding reels towards going terribly wrong and right off a cliff in “The Drama,” a dry and ever-so-dark romantic comedy starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.

The latest from the writer-director of “Dream Scenario” begins awkward, with a “meet cute” right on the cusp of cringey, and staggers into one even more uncomfortable situation/turn-of-events after another.

You want to know why marriages rates continue to fall in the Western World, here’s a worst-case-scenario comedy that kind of explains it and makes you squirm and sneak peeks at your watch as you do.

“Man,” I muttered to myself more than once. “I cannot wait for this to be over.” And in this case, that’s not a bad thing.

Robert Pattinson is our leading man, a tossle-haired and awkward museum curator who takes a fancy to a pretty woman (Zendaya) sitting by herself in a coffee shop. She’s reading, in her own world.

When she steps away from her seat, he snaps a photo of her book. By the time she’s sat back down, he’s researched it just enough to attempt to strike up a conversation. But when he attempts to apologize for his attempted pick-up, he finds out she’s deaf in the ear he was talking to.

“Let’s start over,” she offers.

He laughs. Awkwardly. But a date is made and a relationship begins. And we know that whatever happens, we’re in capable hands. R. Patts has always done tossle-haired and awkward well. And Zendaya is the physical embodiment of smart and beautiful but possibly approachable.

Getting past his not-apologetic-enough admission that he hasn’t actually read Harper Ellison’s “The Damage” (a non-existent novel) and her lightly-caustic comeback to that confession, they seem well-matched. It’s no shock that we pick up their story as he is composing his wedding speech and she is putting off doing hers.

But Sartre’s famous observation that “Hell is other people” could be this couple’s credo. A tipsy night of sharing “the worst thing I’ve ever done” with the married couple Rachel (Alanna Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), who are their maid of honor and best man, respectively, is where it really goes wrong.

Because whatever awful admissions Rachel, Mike and Charles make, sweet and sweet-faced Emma’s announcement that she put serious thought into planning and practicing for her own mass shooting at the Louisiana high school that made her miserable is downright triggering.

Mike is taken a bit aback and Rachel flips out. “Emma, what the F—!” Charles, who “obsesses over things,” responds as much to their mania over this psychological “tell” as the actual thing-that-didn’t-happen as related by the woman he loves.

Emma and he might endure the pushy choreographer’s dance lessons for their “first dance” at the wedding as a team and support one another over the meal selection and wines. But every other detail the Brit and the American have to take care of is downright fraught from here until the finish line.

If there is to BE a finish line.

Trouble at work, issues with the DJ, a disheartened follow-up with the florist, a painfully wounded meeting with the wedding photographer because the camera-doesn’t-lie and dire warnings masked as “support” by Rachel and Mike — total DISASTERS as maid of honor and best man, BTW — all point to a fiasco waiting to happen, and catered, to boot.

“I love you so much it hurts” has never seemed more literal.

Writer-director Borgli has some chilling takes on what inspires school shooters. As his hero won’t let this go and as his heroine recounts her past (illustrated in flashbacks), we get confirmation of what many of us suspect.

“I liked the aesthetic” of being a school shooter, “the character I was playing,” Emma blurts out at one point. It’s the camo, the military rifle with its big ammo clip, the scowl for the computer camera as her teen self (played by Jordyn Curet) dresses up menacingly and tries to record her “message to the world” before doing the deed.

But she’s 15 and she has trouble. The PC wants to “update” rather than record. And a blue screen of death provides that punchline. Windows, am I right?

It’s all lightly or terribly dark — the weeping jags (his), her fury at others’ interfering even as she revisits that grim teen period and its comically-twisted aftermath.

The leads are terrific, the bit players biting and distinctly believable “types.” Athie (of “Jurassic World” Dominion,” “The Burial” and TV’s “The Get Down”) is convincingly unsteady at being “steady” and Haim (“Licorice Pizza” and “One Battle After Another”) has made fingernails-on-a-blackboard “grating” her brand.

They and their director build “The Drama” as you squirm in your seat and count the minutes and scenes to come, desperate for the nearly perfect finale because you’ve figured out that Borgli’s kink is making you uncomfortable.

Which he does. The smug bastard.

Rating: R, a bit of violence sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Zendaya, Robert Pattinson,
Mamoudou Athie, Alana Haim and Hailey Gates.

Credits: Scripted and directed by
Kristoffer Borgli. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:45

An imposing and impressive lead performance somewhat atones for an awkwardly structured script and a charisma-starved supporting cast in “A Great Awakening,” the new film biography of the 18th century English preacher who lent The American Revolution some of his values and forward-thinking turns of phrase like — the film suggests — like “All men are created equal.”

Jonathan Blair of “Found on South Street” has the vocal and physical presence to put over the rock star appeal of Anglical pastor turned ardent revivalist George Whitefield, who founded the evangelical Christian movement during his British and American preaching tours that popularized “The Great Awakening” of the 1700s.

He is remembered by the aged Benjamin Franklin (John Paul Sneed, who was “Covenant Rider” back in the ’90s) as he and his printer/grandson Benjy (JT Schaefer, making his film debut) rummage through old copies of Franklin’s “Pennsylvania Gazette” during a break in the fractious and quarrelsome Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia.

Seeing Whitefield’s name and writings and sermons among Franklin’s mementos, Benjy is told “George Whitefield WAS the Revolution!”

The story then flashes back to working poor Whitefield’s childhood interest in acting, his work study arrangements that got him into Oxford and his meet up with men of faith who put the idea in his head that with his voice, he’d make a fine pastor and an even better “preacher.”

We see his rising zeal, his attempts to fast his way to Godliness in the manner of Christ (“It almost killed me.”), his soaring popularity as a preacher who attacked not just sins but injustice and a hidebound, dull Anglican liturgy.

He was an Anglican outcast and star before he ever came to America. When he arrived, his tour was as heralded as the later British Invasion pop stars, with the not-remotely-Anglican Franklin becoming his “partner” in publicity, selling thousands of newspapers, a shrewd journalist and marketer hyping the preacher’s vast crowds (We see Franklin calculting an educated guess, one that’s larger than the population of Philadelphia).

But the film does a middling job at tying this religious figure to The Revolution and revolutionary thought.

I can find no reference to Whitefield using the “created equal” phrase, which predated him and Thomas Jefferson, who made it famous in the Declaration of Indepedence.

The clumsily-organized script (no opening credits or “title” to reassure you that you’re in the right theater) hints at a complicated life of protest against the “dead preachers” of the Anglican Church hierarchy, of a man who chastised the American South for its rationalization of “slavery” and who then owned slaves to run a Georgia orphanage he founded and financed, but also — the movie leaves this out — later lobbied Georgia to legalize, accept and embrace slavery.

The film’s squishy agenda thus feels like an attempt to shoehorn in a religious figure as a spiritual “founding father” amongst all those landed gentry humanists like Jefferson and outspoken deists like Benjamin Franklin. The movie implies that evangelical zeal both inspired the revolt and — thanks to Franklin — motivated the later Constitutional Covention.

Divine intervention created the Electoral College?

As a preacher who plunged into ministering to the poor, the incarcerated and the enslaved Whitefield would open his sermons with thunder and brimstone.

“AWAKE, oh sleeper! The Son has Arisen!”

That’s about as “woke” as a preacher gets, for those looking to rationalize Christian nationalism.

Blair stands out in the cast, but this is a pretty inexperienced lot in front of the camera, and it shows.

Director Joshua Enck (“I Heard the Bells”) and his crew give the film a polished look — Whitefield “crossing” to America in a period-correct sailing ship, and convincing streets, prisons and what later came to be called “Independence Hall,” where the state representatives bickered over small-state/big state, free-state/slave state issues add to the film’s credibility.

But seeing Franklin take Whitefield out kite-flying in a thunder storm is trite, and it’s not the only scene that plays that way.

Accounts of “The Great Awakening” may focus on the man and his works and contradictions. But series like “The American Revolution” barely touch on that phenomena setting the stage for revolt. Perhaps that’ll change. But it will take a better movie than “A Great Awakening” — perhaps also starring Blair — to make that case, back it up with facts and make it stick.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: John Paul Sneeds, Jonathan Blair, Alana Gerlach, JT Schaefer and Russell Dean Schultz.

Credits: Directed by Joshua Enck, scripted by Jeff Bender, Jonathan Blair and Joshua Enck. A Sight & Sound Production released by Roadside Attractions.

Running time: 2:09

The Chinese thriller “731” is a wildly ambitious attempt to get a heroic horror movie out of an infamous crime against humanity.

By turns macabre and moving, historical and fantastically, spectacularly over-the-top, it can’t be dismissed as simple anti-Japanese “propaganda” even if the clumsy structure underscores just how far writer-director Zhao Linshan (“Empress Wu,” “The Assassins”) — with the help of a dozen co-writers — overreaches.

The narrative jumbles and stumbles back and forth through the end game years of the Sino-Japanese War that had morphed into WWII. Zhao — with the help of a dozen co-writers — buries us under characters, and dips into the Japanese point of view via the Emperor’s most monstrous war criminal, Gen. Shiro Ishii, played here by Yasuyuki Hirata.

Yes, the script reminds us the U.S. granted Ishii immunity for help with its own post-war biological warfare experiments.

And Zhao’s film reaches a climax, then another and then grasps at postscript after postscript, suggesting a movie made by People’s Republican committee or a director who napped through a few important classes in film school.

Our protagonist is a Chinese “businessman” hustler (Wu Jiang) scrambling to make deals with all sides in the world war and the Chinese civil war that Japan interrupted by invading. He takes the name of a famous Chinese anti-fascist, which may be why the Japanese authorities nab him. Attempts to correct the “error” — “No no, I’m Wang Zhingyuan!” — can’t save him from arrest, being hooded and loaded onto a train to the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, occupied Manchuria.

Wang’s facility with languages and eagerness to appease his captors makes him “useful” enough to be made a trusty — translating Chinese and Russian into Japanese, and vice versa, for the many prisoners.

Being crafty and eager to save his own skin, he observes this white-tiled (with entirely too modern lighting and tech) “hospital” which thousands have been sent to. Despite the best Japanese efforts, he memorizes the rabbit warren of halls. He endures beatings from his captors and fellow prisoners, who regard him as a traitor. And he pays attention.

“The Emperor is benevolent,” Ishii’s tween twin daughters chirp over the public address system (the film is in Chinese and Japanese with English subtitles). “Food is precious. Once you’re cured you’ll be free.”

Wang is the first inmate in Unit 731 to figure out that “cured” and “free” are the most Orwellian lies in the fascists’ playbook.

We’re treated to an encyclopedia of “medical” human depravity as legions of hazmat-suited or white-coated “doctors” mistreat, torture and dissect “patients,” breeding rats and fleas for the Japanese Empire’s last throw of the dice, Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night.

Balloon bombs will float over America, dumping Bubonic plague-infected fleas on the country. As no one involved knows the war is fated to end with atomic bombs, they all proceed with this years-long monstrous plan and the human carnage their “experiments” create right to the bitter end.

There’s a worthy subject here and moments of pathos intrude on all the sadism — Wenjuan Feng plays a particularly barbaric female Japanese officer — and humanity (children are included in the experiments, and many of the guards are very young Japanese) and inhumanity we see.

But the film is needlessly hard to follow, pointlessly drawn-out and nakedly propagandistic when it deviates from histoty. The latter is somewhat excused, as Japan has been reluctant to accept the crimes against humanity its leaders, starting with the untried war criminal emperor, and their countrymen carried out amidst their wars of imperial aggression.

We see many European prisoners, but only the Russians get to speak. Japan was not at war with Russia. China’s using cinema to cozy up to their longtime Axis of Evil partners.

Yet it’s the “hard to follow” that’s less excusable.

At one point, a gathering of Japanese war criminals is framed like Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” Why? Production design flourishes — the film looks anachronistically modern — include a scene in a vast, towering herb library storage silo that comes straight from “The Wizarding World” or “Brazil.”

Its myriad flaws and dramatic shortcomings mean I can’t recommend “731.” But the history is worth looking into, even it doesn’t render itself suitable to horror/history mashup this botched film attempts.

Rating: unrated, graphic, gruesome violence, nudity

Cast: Wu Jiang, Irene Wan, Zhiwen Wang, Qian Sun, Wenjuan Feng, Zun Wang and Yasuyuki Hirata

Credits: Directed by Zhao Linshan, scripted by Zhao Linshan and 12 “assistant writers.” A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:05

Of all the pictures one has come to expect “Black Dynamite” and B-and-C movie action star Michael Jai White to turn up in, a soapy, faith-friendly melodrama trotted out for Easter has to be the most “out there.”

“The Secret Between Us” is a static, turgid and low-stakes tale about lives disrupted by “secrets” plural, any and all of which have been potboiled to death on daytime soap operas going back decades.

White plays Jack Frazier, an Atlanta-based airline pilot with a daughter (Lisa Arrindell) finishing her medical residency who figures tonight’s the night longtime love (Denzell Dandridge) will propose, and an adoring wife (Lisa Arrindell) who’s arranged for all this to come about on husband Jack’s birthday.

But their dueling celebrations are interrupted by a knock at the door. A stranger stands before them. He (Tre Ryan) is 28 years old. And he’s the son flyboy Jack never knew he had. Apparently.

Nothing is quite worth taking at face value as writer-director Tamera Hill tosses secrets within secrets at us in a cascade of coincidences that range from “give me a break” to ludicrous. I mean, things get so bad that wife Lisa has to blurt out what she does for a living.

“What makes it worse is I’m a clincal psychologist!“

Things start off lax and flail away as health crises, hidden family history and lies within lies unravel and “God’s will be done” seems like everybody’s best response to it all. Including the editor.

The script is clunky and writer-director Hill, a few credits removed from “she’ll figure this out, eventually” status, serves up static scene after scene where nothing much happens save for a bit of empassioned conversation. There’s no pace as the editing leaves in footage before anybody should have called “Action” and scenes go on past the point where a “CUT!” was called for.

We don’t need to see that Torrance Frazier, the “son Jack never (sure) knew he had,” hired a “private investigator” to ID a man whose NAME AND PROFESSION HIS MAMA TOLD HIM BEFORE SHE DIED. The kid even has the man’s last name. Dude, Google much?

Dead weight like that abounds as characters that serve no dramatic purpose are introduced and a pause for a Stokley Williams concert — augmenting the silky, romantic R&B that laces the score (Keith Sweat was a producer) — delays new “secrets” that are kept when Torrance, who has health issues, meets a nurse (Destinee Monét) when a morning jog goes wrong.

“Fate is totally in control, I’m just here for a ride” is just a line of dialogue, not an editing strategy. This lump needed more shaping in the screenwriting/workshopping process, for starters. The final cut (IMDB suggests it was even longer at one time) is dawdling and lifeless.

White may be rock steady in the middle of all this. But with every new “secret” Jack springs on Lisa, all the way into the third act, each one to be brushed off without dramatic measure being taken of it, one can sense the eye-rolls that were merited, even if he was too polite to do that on set.

Rating: unrated, PG-ish

Cast: Michael Jai White, Lisa Arrindell, Dominique Wilson, Tre Ryan, Denzell Dandridge and Destinee Monét

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tamera Hill. A Hidden Gems Entertainment release in AMC theaters

Running time: 1:46

“Pretty Lethal” is another Pretty Young Things Imperiled of the “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” “Ready or Not” and so on genre.

Ho hum, right? There are only a couple of those in theaters at any given moment.

But it scores major style points for making the young women scrambling for their lives ballerinas, veritable terrors in tutus, incorporating dance into their desperate fights and box cutter knives in their toe-shoes.

The brawls have a certain brio, the villains are many and headed by a venomous Uma Thurman. And their peril is faced in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Europe’s newest dictatorship. So that’s something.

Dancing actress Maddie Ziegler of “West Side Story” and “My Old Ass” is the scruffy streetwise Bonnie Jones, “Bones” to the ballerinas in her class who like her.

“Rich bitch” mean girl Princess (Lana Condor of the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” movies) isn’t one of those. But fundamentalist Grace (Avantika), deaf dancer Chloe (Millicent Simmons) and her sister Zoe (Iris Apatow) are on friendly terms with “the orphan.”

Brit Ms. Thorna (Lydia Leonard) has been prepping for a big Budapest ballet showcase that could launch their careers. But getting there by re-directed flight and clunky, ancient Eastern Bloc era bus proves daunting. They have to hoof it to a small town, where the Teremok Inn isn’t as inviting as one might hope.

Goons and thugs abound. Threats are everywhere. And when the son of the local mob boss (Tamás Szabó Sipos) kills their teacher on a whim, the five tiny dancers are witnesses, messiness that the ex-dancer/owner of the inn (Thurman) must tidy up.

The foreshadowing is plentiful and laid out right from an opening monologue. Ballerinas have to be tough to “turn pain into beauty.” They keep box cutters handy to break in their new slippers. And they’re in spectacular physical condition.

As the Hungarian minions come for them and the chips are down, Bones delivers screenwriter Kate Freund’s tagline for the movie.

“These guys are drunk and out of shape, and we’re prima f——g ballerinas.“

Pavlova, Fonteyn or Misty Copeland could not have put it better.

The novelty of dance choreography bent into fighting form makes the movie more fun than most recent iterations of this formula. Kudos to stunt choreographer Shahaub Roudbari and director Vicky Jewson for making all that play out.

Ziegler and Condor are well-matched leads.

But Thurman, aptly cast as a former ballerina with a chip on her shoulder, doesn’t exactly “bring it.”

And the script runs out of fresh ideas and novel ways to challenge the dueling dancers quickly, and soon trips over its own tropes.

I certainly enjoyed this more than “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.” But I can’t say it’s any better.

Rating: R, bloody violence, the threat of rape, profanity

Cast: Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Lydia Leonard, Avantika, Millicent Simmons, Iris Apatow, Tamás Szabó Sipos and Uma Thurman.

Credits: Directed by Vicky Jewson, scripted by Kate Freund. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:31