Movie Nation

My utter disillusionment with the Oscars started early and has rarely been given cause to turn back to hope in the ensuing decades. This week, TCM showed a couple of classics, back to back, that took me right back to the moment my “Oscars shmoscars” disdain began and the later confirmation that Hollywood was rather missing the boat, or the point, when it came to who to honor and when.

“Being There” (1979) was the late, great Peter Sellers’ last shot at an acting Academy Award. My favorite comic actor lost to the always-worthy, slow-to-be-honored Dustin Hoffman in a movie even he realized was a “soap opera” (“Kramer vs. Kramer”). Sellers died mere months later, one of the funniest screen actors ever never honored for his brilliance.

Then and now, Oscar has barely a grudging respect for comedy.

Then, in the spring of ’83, Peter O’Toole completed a comeback with an Oscar nomination for his decade-erasing, self-depracating turn in the greatest comical performance of his screen career,“My Favorite Year.” He was nominated for playing an aging, boozing, shallow matinee idol who realizes his limitations better than most.

“I’m not an ACTOR, I’m a MOVIE star!”

He lost to Ben Kingsley’s mesmerizing, also larger-than-life performance in the title role in the lovely but too-stately “Gandhi.”

O’Toole was already in the midst of a “comeback” thanks to his Oscar-nominated turn in “The Stuntman.” “My Favorite Year” wasn’t O’Toole’s last shot Oscar nomination, and he’d eventually earn an honorary Academy Award late in life. But the sting of Oscar voters not grasping what a perfect little bauble of showbiz lore “My Favorite Year” is colored my view of “Awards Season” from thence onwards.

Awards be damned. It’s the movie that matters. And its timeless appeal is ageing like fine wine. Based on a piece of Hollywood lore, and taking us inside production and the “writer’s room” during “The Golden Age of (Live) Television,” “My Favorite Year” is nostalgia and myth, warmth and wit wrapped up in a tale of a fading, flawed “legend” living up to that honorific one last time.

The story was very loosely inspired by the real-life appearance of high-mileage swashbuckler and notorious playboy Errol Flynn’s appearance on the variety revue series “Your Show of Shows” in the early ’50s. Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and Woody Allen were writers there. Brooks produced the movie that would lampoon and exaggerate “what might have happened” into a comical romp.

“Your Show of Shows” became “Comedy Cavalcade.” Star Sid Caesar became King Kaiser, vamped and bullied to life by Joseph Bologna. Errol Flynn became Alan Swann, a Great Brit ham and swashbuckler on screen (in his day), a rake and incurable drunk off screen, played by O’Toole as a man who knew how to embody both.

The writer’s room mimicked “Your Show of Shows,” too, with braying Bill Macy scripting the show with Alice De Salvo as a sassy version of writer-actress Selma Diamond (the future “Night Court” stars herself cast as the hilarious wardrobe mistress) and Basil Hoffman as a thinly-disguised version of “shy” writer Neil Simon.

Newcomer and future “Perfect Strangers” star Mark Linn-Baker plays a more Brooks than Allen archetype, the Jewish “kid” from Brooklyn who worships the problematic Swann, is assigned to be his “minder” and get him on set sober enough to rehearse and to play his part “live,” and who narrates the story.

“Asked to leave” college kid-writer Benjy and co-babysitter Alfie (Tony DiBenedetto), “Mr. Swann’s favorite driver” are charged with hiding the liquor and limiting the intake when the hiding doesn’t work, enabling Swann’s womanizing, “controlling” his hell-raising and basically tracking him down after any and all benders.

“Alfredo, you needn’t wait. We shan’t need the car any more. We’re going to throw up in the park and then walk home.”

Benjy’s idol will teach him about “women” (Jessica Harper plays Katherine, Benjy’s disinterested love-interest at work), how to cut a dashing figure in The Stork Club, in a limo or on a purloined police horse in Central Park. And Swann will be exposed to the Big Jewish Family (headed by the great Lainie Kazan), the perils of “live” television and his own personal and professional limitations in the weeklong run up to showtime.

There’s even a union racketeer, played by veteran heavy and TV cowboy Cameron Mitchell, to be contended with and imitated to a T by Bologna’s brash and gauche King Kaiser.

The jokes are a steady stream of sitcom zingers, ranging from lukewarm to sizzling.

“Katherine, Jews know two things: suffering and where to find great Chinese food.”

Swann’s headfirst tumble “entrance” into the show’s offices infuriates the head writer.

“He’s plastered!”

“So are some of the finest erections in Europe,” O’Toole intones, with an eyeroll as Swann passes out.

Swann recognizes Benjy’s mom’s Filipino boxer/spouse.

“Are you still in the fight game?”

“In a way. I married Benjy’s mother.”

“Accused” is a “#MeToo” thriller set in the world of medicine, a mystery built around a married doctor accused of sexual indiscretions and the tests that imposes on her same sex marriage.

It barely has a pulse as a thriller, the romance flatlines and the mystery unravels in the least interesting way imaginable. Polished production values — costumes, settings, food, etc. — can’t fix any of those.

Netflix gave director Anubhuti Kashyap and screenwriters Sima Agarwal and Yash Keswani the cash to shoot a sleek, sophisticated and sexual Western thriller set among the Indian diaspora in London. But it’s as if none of them ever saw 2002’s “Bend It Like Beckham.” Their main character is a testy lesbian stereotype and the “romance” is tentatively treated as “forbidden fruit” that can’t even be discussed.

Kids, there’ve been TWO versions of “The Wedding Banquet,” now — the first was over 30 years ago. Try and keep up.

And this bubble world of Anglo-Indians doesn’t just have one and all speak Hindi. A parade of the most basic facts and protocols of Western/London working life aren’t so much researched as just “imagined,” as if nobody involved has a clue about hiring practices, HR procedures, legal pitfalls or social media smearing.

Dr. Geetika Sen (Konkona Sen Sharma) is a rich, successful surgeon who rose to the top by not being shy about publicly calling out subordinates’ mistakes and blunders. We catch this surgical OB-GYN humiliate a colleague who’s bungled an operation in an opening scene, calling his work “a bloody disaster” and “this mess” she has to tidy up.

She’s late to the dinner party younger pediatrician wife Meera (Pritibha Ranta) has arranged and later misses dinner with Meera and a cousin who is to be, we gather, the one member of Meera’s family they’ll reveal their marriage and indeed Meera’s sexuality to so that he can return “home” and break the news to everybody else.

But that’s the price you pay when if you want to run a hospital surgical department and get promoted to dean of the school associated with it.

Then comes the accusation, a patient who says she was sexually molested during an examination. Social media gets hold of it and other accusations pop up. Racist, sexist and homophobic commenters chime in.

All these employees and colleagues who quit rather than deal with Dr. Sen come to light, and that’s before the hospital hires an ex-journalist (Mashhoor Amrohi) to do an independent investigation (!?) as the HR director (Monica Mahendru) is entirely too tolerant of her fellow Indian’s abusive bitchiness to one and all.

The secretive Geetika’s got to figure out who the “anonymous accusers” are, and cover the messy tracks of her work and romantic life, pre-Meera.

Her restaurateur ex (Kallirroi Tziafeta) is merely the tip of the iceberg, or so Meera learns even before she’s talked into hiring a comically obvious private eye (Sukant Goel) to see who is coming for Geetika, and maybe what Geetika herself is up to.

The film gets the “piling on” nature of social media shaming right as we see a promotion, plans to adopt a baby and personal privacy vanish in a flash. But “#MeToo” started a decade ago, and unwanted social media attention has been cinematic fodder for going on twenty years now.

As “Accused” wallows deeper and deeper into melodrama, with one-note performances almost making every character a caricature, the inescapable conclusion one leaps to is that this film’s late-to-the-game subject matter and quaint treatment of it was made by some seriously unsophisticated filmmakers.

The tentative nature of any “daring” Indonesian or Malaysian film on similar subjects might be expected. But Indian cinema has a century of polish, edgy social relevance and global appeal that make one expect better from a movie ballyhoo’d as “ground breaking” Bollywood “queer cinema.”

“Accused” lets down the side in most every regard. If you don’t have the nerve to grapple with same sex romance and marriage, and refuse to research your setting and the protocols of the world you put your characters in, why bother?

Rating: TV-MA, adult subject matter, profanity

Cast: Konkona Sen Sharma, Pratibha Ranta, Mashhoor Amrohi, Aditya Nanda, Monica Mahendru Sukant Goel and Kallirroi Tziafeta

Credits: Directed by
Anubhuti Kashyap, scripted by Sima Agarwal and Yash Keswani. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

As more than one wag has put it, there were something like “300 people” who made the “Swinging Sixties” era in London swing. But for all the complaining about “Boomer nostalgia” in describing that watershed age, bloody few of the folks who drove the Western culture sea change that era is famous for were post-World War II baby booomers.

Michael Caine (born 1933) became a film star in that decade. He was at the center of the action, one of those “300 people” singer/model/actress and former Mick Jagger lover Marianne Faithfull (born 1946) reminds him in the charming, immersive historical documentary “My Generation.”

The film’s conceit is simple. Have Caine, then 84, sit down with his Swinging London contemporaries — Roger Daltrey of The Who (born 1944), Paul McCartney (born 1942), Faithfull, Eric Burdon of The Animals (born 1941), fashion designer Mary Quant (born 1930), model and icon of the age Twiggy (born 1949), photographer of the era David Bailey (born 1938) and singer Lulu (born 1948).

They tell their story and “the” story of that time and place — what led to it, what came from it and what it was like to be in the middle of that social and societal whirl.

“My Generation” is part Sir Michael memoir, part history of a transformational decade and all about class and a generation that broke through staid, classist Britain’s “literal black and white” post-war gloom to liberate the possibilities of their lives.

Sir Roger Daltrey recalls seeing Elvis on 1950s TV.

“For the first time in my life, I’d seen someone who was ‘free.'”

McCartney and Burdon back that up and provided the soundtrack (along with The Kinks and Cream). Faithfull and Caine ruminate on how a better “free education” “set us up for the ’60s,” as she puts it. And designer Quant spent her 30s picking the colors and raising the hemlines of the age, with the stick-thin Twiggy as model and role model to all.

Caine’s jovial chats with one and all — every one of them off-camera so that director David Batty and his editors could fill the screen with news footage, archival interviews with “The Establishment” of the age and Jagger, among others cut into a blur — set the tone. Here are pop culture figures from “their” era, chummy back then and chummy in their dotage.

Caine remembers dropping into Liverpool’s Cavern Club over lunch while on tour with a play at catching The Fab Four before they were Fab, inviting Sir Paul to share his version of the working class accents that wouldn’t hold the Beatles back.

For Caine, it was all about breaking the class barrier, Cockneys cutting around the bowler-hatted gatekeeper/stiffs of “my parents’ generation” to rise as high as their talent and ideas would take them. Most of those he interviews have similar working class-to-riches stories. But not all.

It’s no surprise that Caine makes a light-hearted tour guide, as he laughs as easily as any celebrity of his generation. He jokes about photographer Bailey’s early interest in “birds” — the flying ones, not the ladies they chased in the sexist argot of the day. He chuckles at Faithfull and singer Donovan’s recollection of “the first” big drug busts and its conspiratorial, Establishment orchestrated repercussions.

“It’ was like one of your (spy) films, Michael,” the posh-accented, well-educated Faithfull jokes.

Director Batty incorporates lots of clips of archival Caine interviews from his earliest years of success, where British news producers would take him back to the old neighborhood, meeting former neighbors still there, the fish market where his father worked, reminiscing to U.S. chat show host Merv Griffin about the “accent barrier” he and contemporaries like Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay erased.

And there’s a lot of footage of Caine in screen star mode — clips from his films, showing him walking down those same streets in his prime and in character in “Alfie” and other movies. The producers here put Caine behind the wheel of an Aston Martin (he drove one in “The Italian Job,” when he wasn’t behind motoring in a Mini Cooper) to have him drive around the London of today.

The film can be faulted for being sentimental and perhaps self-aggrandizing. It’s also too monochromatic for its own good. Racial liberation came to Britain later, but as director Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” reminded us, there were plenty of Black, Asian and Caribbean people in the country and in London, some of them — like Ben Kingsley — starting to make their marks in the Swinging ’60s.

But if you’ve never read one of Caine’s lighthearted memoirs — which read the way he comes off in interviews (I’ve had the pleasure a few times) — “My Generation” is a treat, one Cockney’s rise above his circumstances, a tale that encompasses class, casting luck, a “Caine Mutiny” whim (how his name became “Michael Caine” and not “Maurice Micklewhite”) and an era that he was very lucky to have been born in time to live through.

Rating: TV-PG.

Cast: Michael Caine, Marianne Faithful, Lulu, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Twiggy, Roger Daltrey, Donovan, David Bailey, Joan Collins, David Puttnam and Mary Quant.

Credits: Directed by David Batty, scripted by Dick Clement and
Ian La Frenaiso. An IM Global/Lionsgate release on Tubi, other streamers,

Running time: 1:25

Kristin Scott Thomas lends her serene upper class sheen and effortless elegance to “My Mother’s Wedding,” her directing debut about three wildly different daughters showing up for Mum’s late life nuptials.

She persuaded her “Horse Whisperer” and “The Other Boleyn Girl” co-star Scarlett Johansson to sign on, and convinced the formidable Sienna Miller and Emily Beecham (TV’s “King & Conqueror”) to play her other daughters in a semi-autobigraphical romance about a mother whose first two husbands died in the service of their country and left their three children with unresolved “daddy issues.”

The script — co-written by Thomas and her new (2024) husband John Micklethwait — isn’t much.
But the thoroughbred cast and the odd moment of wit and grace lift this film of slight delights enough to recommend it.

Radiant 60something Diana (Thomas) is getting married in the cozy nearby church and idyllic garden near her roomy, quaintly decorated country cottage. It’s her third marriage, to a sweet and quirky bird watcher (James Fleet, Thomas’ co-star in “Four Weddings and a Funeral”). But her daughters, their partners and grandchildren are sure to be there for the ceremony.

Famous daughter Victoria (Miller) is a never-married single mom/film star in America, who regularly trots out the “tragic” story of her twice-widowed mother raising three strong girls on chat shows.

“Older sister” Katherine (Johansson) followed her dad and stepfather into the Royal Navy. She’s a captain (perhaps the RN’s shortest) and duty comes first, even though she has a young son and partner.

And Georgina (Beecham), the youngest, is a conscientous nurse, mother of two little girls of her own and a woman certain that her gregarious dandy of a husband, Jeremy (Joshua McGuire) is cheating on her. He drives a Porsche convertible and goes by “Jezzer” — dead give-aways.

Georgina has nurtured her lesser status in the family into full-blown “doormat” wife, and has to be badgered into hiring a private eye (Samson Kayo) to catch Jezzer in the act.

Victoria’s a happier-abroad (“This BLOODY country!”) expat whose life choices make her wistful for what she’ll never have. “Normal” men won’t bother to approach her. “Creeps” and delusional richies, like the much-older French sugar daddy she’s nicknamed “Grand Fromage” (the big cheese) who just wants “to take care of” her” are her only suitors. Reconnecting with a childhood crush (Mark Stanley) at the wedding could be trouble.

But Captain Katherine is the one who has (animated charcoal sketch) flashbacks. She has anxiety about her work, her reluctance to commit to her partner and the son she barely co-parents.

Miller’s on-the-nose casting as a louche film actress content to make a living on crappy sequels extends to the film’s lone nude scene. Because that’s how louche film actresses sleep, no matter who might stumble upon them.

“People pay GOOD money to see this!”

Beecham makes the most of her slow-to-anger woman wronged.

And Johansson impresses by carrying herself with a commanding officer’s bearing, posture and hands-behind-back poses.

Thomas and Micklethwait’s script may be obvious in the most eye rolling sense. They wrote and Thomas stages the least-convincing “late night chat show” scene ever. She’ couldn’t convince Graham Norton to pitch in?

There are five principal actresses here (Freida Pinto is the fifth) and each has a Big Scene/Big Speech/Big Moment of self-confession, self-analysis, self-defense of self-aggrandizement.

But the ever-dorky Fleet delights as his latest underestimated character charms the wedding brunch by serenading his new bride — in FRENCH.

Sindhu Vee steals a couple of scenes as an archetypal overbearing Indian mother (to Pinto’s character) with a whiff of “cool” about her.

“CBD,” her character offers Diana. “God’s gift to granny brides.”

And Thomas shows flashes of her fiery wit in a speech meant to explain how she raised these “girls” to be tougher than this.

The screenplay almost lets everybody down, and referencing Chekhov (“Three Sisters”) doesn’t amount to anything if you don’t inject more depth into the characters and situations as a consequence.

But the settings are gorgeous. Some situations bear fruit and others deliver laughs.

And in the end, Thomas saves the day with the casting — calling in favors, arm-twisting or begging her film into relevance thanks to its players bringing flesh and blood to characters barely worthy of them.

Rating: R, sexual situations, nudity, teen drinking, profanity

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller, Freida Pinto, James Fleet, Mark Stanley, Joshua McGuire and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Credits: Directed by Kristin Scott Thomas, scripted by Kristen Scott Thomas and John Micklethwait. A Vertical release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:35

The little girl repeats her grandmother’s directions as she writes down the recipe.

“Three eggs for fertility,” she says. “One kilo of fliur for life. Five hundred grams of sugar for a sweet life. And baking powder…for a fluffy cake.”

Because in 1990 Iraq, no one dares not bake “The President’s Cake” for Saddam Hussein’s birthday. His name and his photo are everywhere, because that’s what dictators do. His birthday, April 28, is a national holiday, celebrated under the dire international sanctions and air raids of the run-up to the Desert Storm invasion that coming summer.

Writer-director Hasan Hadi’s film — titled “Mamlaket al-qasab” in Arabic — is a child’s picaresque quest to round up the ingredients for that mandatory baked good for the mandatory party set to take place after the mandatory street rallies and marches.

“With our blood and with our souls,” the people chant (in Arabic with English subtitles), “we sacrifice ourselves for Saddam.” And so some 50,000 Iraqis did.

But Hadi’s debut film, which was shortlisted for the Best International Feature Oscar this year (it didn’t make the final cut) finds sweetness and even humor in a child’s eye view of repression and the life-or-death consequences of living under an outlaw military dictatorship in a place where there’s oil the more developed world wants.

Hadi immerses us in the riverfront lives of nine year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) and her “Bibi” (granny, played by Waheeda Thabet). Life’s basics aren’t easily had as price hikes hit the poor the hardest.

Lamia’s mustachioed martinet of a teacher (Ahmad Qasem Saywan) reminds one and all that he can “turn your whole family in” and make you disappear if you don’t toe the line. As he draws lots to determine who will bring the fruit, who will clean the classroom and who brings the juice, Lamia learns the value of prayer. She gets chosen to take on the ruinously expensive cake.

“I prayed, but it didn’t work.”

She takes her pet rooster Hindi and joins Bibi as they row their canoe up to a spot where they can hike to the road and then hitchhike to the city.

Her bestie Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) is already there, but his quest involves picking pockets for his one-legged war-vet dad. Still, he’s a handy kid to know when it turns out her broke, exhausted granny has brought Lamia here to give her to another family. No cake burden, and her fascist teacher can stuff it, or it’s closets Arabic equivalent.

Lamia flees and she and Saeed have a day of encounters both friendly (a helpful mailman played by Rahim Al Haj) and fraught, as the military is everywhere and ignores “peasants” only when it’s not interested in repressing them, and the city is full of thieves, hustlers and pedophiles.

A pot-bellied grocer sexually bargains with a very pregnant young woman over her bill. Stall-operators in the bazaar are threatened with eviction and pass on their irritation to would-be customers.

Money changes hands, but is it real or “forged?” The bakery the kids flash cash to declares it “forged” and takes it and keeps it. They’re just kids, after all. What can they do?

And Hindi the rooster is constantly under threat from thieves and butchers.

Young Nayyef makes a fine embodiment of an innocent in the big city, learning the take-or-be-taken ethos and how useless an unchallenged military police is at everything other than hanging Saddam posters.

“You think you’re the president’s daughter?”

Hadi lets us fear for her, for Saeed, her Bibi and her rooster. And even if the surprises are few, the plot twists have a comforting subtext that leaves us with the hope that for Lamia, things might just come out all right — with or without baking “The President’s Cake.”

Rating: PG-13, sexual situations, children imperiled, profanity

Cast: Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, Waheed Thabet Khreibat, Sajad Mohamad Qasem and
Rahim AlHaj

Credits: Scripted and directed by Hasan Hadi. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:44

Way back in olden times — mere months after Australia’s plot to destroy America was set in motion — I trekked to Hollywood for a holiday season chat with the folks who had this new horror film they were ready to unleash upon the world.

It starred a young actress from TV’s “Party of Five,” with one of TV’s “Friends” in support, although she couldn’t be bothered to promote this mere horror movie to the press. Drew Barrymore had a killer opening-scene cameo.

And it was presided over by the realtor from “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Wes Craven, who admitted that yes, when he first read Kevin Williamson’s script, he sent it back to him all marked up like junior college term paper — grammatical corrections by the score.

Williamson, soon to a be force in horror cinema and evening TV soaps (“Dawson’s Creek”), dished on how funny (and embarassing) that was, and on the “real age” of his East Carolina University drama classmate, Ms. New to Stardom Sandra Bullock,

Simpler times.

And here we are, 30 years later, still talking about “Scream” and Ghostface masks and Neve Campbell’s Sidney and phoned in threats and Kevin Williamson’s bank account and whatnot.

“Scream 7” did a robust $7.5 million Thursday night and that folded into  Deadline.com is calling a $28 million Friday. That added up to a $64 million opening weekend , the best-ever for this 30 year old franchise.

The Gaza-supporting stars of the most recent “Scream” outings were ditched, and there have been calls for a boycott. That isn’t happening. Young folks would rather skip voting over a genocide than miss a an ever-recycling slasher picture sequel when the people who run Paramount fire the Gaza-protesting stars. Apparently.

And reviews be damned, because this nut-with-a-knife-and-mask franchise hasn’t had a new idea in forever. Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox are back, after all.

That’s the only wide opening this weekend, so the animated holdover “GOAT” ($12) is set for second, with “Wuthering Heights” ($$6.95 million will take it over the $70 million mark), the concert doc ($3.6),”EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert” ($3.5 — well over $7 million now, because Elvis is still the King), “Crime 101” ($3.4) and “I Can Only Imagine 2” ($3.1), with Sam Raimi’s “Send Help,” ( $2.3), “How to Make a Killing”($1.56),  “Zootopia 2″($1.48) fleshing out the top 9.

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” did not exit the top ten ($1?24). It just cleared the $400 million mark.

Adios “Solo Mio.”

Flashes of anarchic wit and the odd zinger or sight gag brighten up “Operation Taco Gary’s,” an indie sci-fi farce in the tradition of “Safety Not Guaranteed” that plays like a redneck “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

The debut feature of writer-director Michael Kvamme — who’d rather go by “Mikey K” — borrows from everyone from John Waters to John Wick and stars “Red Rocket” fireball Simon Rex and Jason “American Pie” Biggs as himself.

And if it all that promise doesn’t come together or amount to much more than the occasional laugh, so be it.

“Schitt’s Creek” alumna Dustin Milligan is the mild-mannered paleontologist Luke whose moving-day is interrupted by a visit from his crazed, medicated and ever-so-estranged brother Danny (Rex). As we’ve met Danny in a neck brace and cast/boot staring down some unseen menace about to run him over, we expect the worst.

Luke’s moving to Ottawa, Canada. Danny’s off his meds and looking for an excuse to tag along. He’s the conspiracy nut’s conspiracy nut. Danny knows that things are not as they seem and that the strange slew of deaths of celebrities — Jason Biggs is the latest — is not what it seems.

“The ‘boy who cried wolf’ was a pesonal hero of mine!”

Next thing Luke knows, he’s been kidnapped and dragged to a Taco Gary’s because they’re a “neutral” zone where the aliens won’t get you, where the reconnection with even-crazier Klyle (Tony Cavalero) must be made because he has a van, and any guy who spells his name “Klyle” “because it’s harder to trace” knows what he’s doing.

God knows, Danny doesn’t.

“As you can see, he has either been dragged off by several people, or one perso who’s really good at break dancing!”

Tag-along Allison (Brenda Song of “The Last Showgirl” and TV’s “Dollface”) is here to keep the peace between the crazies and Luke’s understandable meltdowns over their craziness.

There are tall, John Waters-skinny aliens called “The Elders” who’re running some sort of scam with the world’s elites, which gives the picture a timely Trumpstein Files appeal. And they’re in on the joke, too.

“We travel… by SILVER Sonic,” one elder (Doug Jones) declares.

Yes, it’s an off-the-lot Chevy econobox.

Bits of pieces of this “accept the absurd” farce play, but it never adds up to “romp.”

Cheesy Charlotte, North Carolina locations come nowhere near mimicking Canada, so the “border crossing” one and all fret over is minimized if not utterly abandoned.

The “No one believes the truth any more” messaging may be timely, but this isn’t satire or even “high concept” silliness. It’s just an antic collection of almost-random scenes not-quite-sprinted-through by Rex, Cavalero and Milligan and slow-walked by Biggs, who is, as always, a good sport about it all.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, lewd humor

Cast: Simon Rex, Dustin Milligan, Brenda Song, Tony Cavalero, Arturo Castro, Doug Jones and Jason Biggs.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mikey K. (Michael Kvamme). A Chroma release.

Running time: 1:25

Priyanka Chopra Jonas furies through fight choreography and Karl Urban makes a worthy villain even if all the CGI in the world can’t make Australia look like “the Caribbean” in the the brutish, humorless pirate picture “The Bluffs.”

Co-writers Joe Ballarini and Frank E. Flowers (who also directed) cobble together characters and cliches from many a pirate tale for this ham-fisted affair, which sacrifices fun for fighting and sinks like a stone.

Set a dozen years after “Pirates of the Caribbean” had been wiped out — the 1840s — the film’s novelty is draping murderous cutthroats in ninja black and giving a few of them scoped sniper rifles and revolvers.

There was a time when the only pirate whose (single shot muzzle-loading) pistol fired repeatedly was Errol Flynn. But not here.

The dread pirate Connor (Urban) lost his treasure and is damned determined to find it. His multi-national crew (Temuera Morrison plays his “quartermaster”) is content to ride down tiny merchant ships and capture Captain Bodden. But when Bodden appears to have a sample of Connor’s gold in hand, Connor knows the island paradise of Cayman Brac is where his booty is hidden.

That’s a multi-cultural “emancipated British colony” of peaceful folks with barely the wherewithal to defend themselves save for a plan to summon British help with a signal fire on “The Bluff.” Fat chance of that, with snipers and scouts leading the slaughter on Captain Connor’s behalf.

But Ercell (Chopra Jonas), Bodden’s wife, stops fretting over his sister’s (Safia Oakley-Green) plans to sneak off with a sailor and gets her “hobbled” (on crutches) son (Vendante Naidoo) hidden. In a flash she’s kicking ass and letting one and ll know that “Aye” and “arrrr,” she used to be a pirate herself.

There’ll be no “booty” surrendered here, mates. Let the body count begin, “Captain.”

“Don’t ever call me that again!”

There are plot points — an attack on the homestead, a cave full of treasure, etc. — borrowed from every swashbuckler from “Treasure Island” to “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

But the blood-spattered Indian superstar isn’t in it for fun.

“Are you injured?” “Not as bad as them!”

Landscapes and ships at sea alike are faked and obviously so for the settings.

The subplots are even less interesting than the plot, and not allowing Urban a few moments of quipping, glint-in-the-eye villainy is as big a shortcoming as not scripting India’s most popular actress better one-liners.

Director Flowers doesn’t allow himself or anybody else the leisure to stop and smell the roses or crack wise. He wrote the “Bob Marley: One Love” movie, but there’ll be no accurate history here. And the director of “I Wish I was Gay” appears to have no sense of humor.

The only “playful” thing about this bloody-minded bore is the title, an intended “play” on words. And even that doesn’t play.

Rating: R, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Karl Urban, Temuera Morrison, Safia Oakley-Green and Ismael Cruz Cordoba.

Directed by Frank E. Flowers, scripted by Joe Ballarini and Frank E. Flowers. . An MGM release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:43

Impressive stunts, car chases and crashes and creative ways of killing compete with a laughable collection of cute action “comedy” cliches in the French thriller “The Orphans” (“Les orphelins”).

It’s essentially an Alban Lenoir/ Dali Benssalah “buddy” picture in the “buddies who don’t get along” genre — “48 Hrs.,” “Midnight Run,” etc. It flips from momentarily plausible to formulaic and ridiculous early in the first act and a parade of tropes of the genre trip it up every time there’s even a hint that this sometimes entertaining pursuit picture could recover.

Driss (Bensallah of “No Time to Die” and the “Street Flow” thrillers) and Gabriel (actor and writer Lenoir of “The Wages of Fear” and the “Last Bullet” thrillers) grew up in an orphanage, but had a falling out “twenty years” ago.

“Eighteen.”

One became an undercover cop, the other an “ex special forces” freelancer on the other side of the law.

The only thing that could bring them back together to The Wild Broom Children’s Shelter is an urgent plea from the woman there who raised them, Fanny (Anouk Grinberg).

There’s been an accident. Their shared orphange crush, Sofia, died. Her 17 year-old daughter Leïla (Sonia Faidi) — who was driving — survived.

Complications? Only she saw the face and car of the driver who caused the wreck. She’s reckless, a fury in her martial art of choice, the French sticks-as-swords dueling of “Canne de Combat.” As she’s 17, the two orphan “brothers” each wonder in they could be her father.

And then she figures out who the stoner/punk (Guillaume Soubeyran) was who caused her mother’s death. She steals the cop brother Gabriel’s service pistol and slips past a cadre of armed guards in a Riviera mansion owned by a private security firm dragon lady (Suzanne Clément) to get her revenge.

Let the wild rumpus — and the kidnapping, threats, gunfights and chases — begin.

The problem with formulaic films of this genre is that it all plays as pre-ordained, with most every character and plot element cut and pasted from an outline cluttered with cliches.

The brothers and the now-orphaned girl have “special skills.” There’s a cop “car with character” (a ’70s Capri), a handy “cottage/cabin/safe house” where the chased can hide out, convoys of black SUVs (OK, ONE is grey). a hidden arsenal to be opened and a succession of gunfights with their endless-shot ammo clips that all magically empty out at precisely the same moment.

Minions are mowed down and the Mother of All Evil Oligarch Mothers leans on her minion-in-chief (Romain Levi) to kill or capture one and all before we or they or this movie of moveable mayhem ever catches the eye of French police.

Benssalah and Lenoir have great “You and me against the world” chemistry, especially in the brotherly brawl scenes, so you can bet your last Euro they’re thinking “sequel.”

Four credited screenwriters flash a few “She looks like ME” and “She got it from ME” jokes about who
Leïla’s father is. Even the dialogue is rotten with cliches.

“I have an idea,” Driss purrs, in French with English subtitles, or dubbed. “You won’t like it.”

Actually, you might. The leads make it all likable and the stunts and editing are first rate even as stuntman-turned-director Olivier Schneider (“GTMax”) fails to deliver a single surprise or even delay this or that inevitable cliche.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, smoking and teen smoking

Cast: Alban Lenoir, Sonia Faidi, Dali Benssalah, Suzanne Clément, Romain Levi and Anouk Grinberg.

Credits: Directed by Olivier Schneider, scripted by Alban Lenoir, Nicolas Peufaillit, Jean-André Yerlès and Olivier Schneider. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And shots are fired, usually to amusing effect.

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

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

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

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

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

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

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

Running time: 1:47