Movie Nation

The Venezualan drama “Lost Chapters” is a meditation on memory, both family and national history.

Its slight story about a student’s homecoming to her book-dealer dad to finish up research on a mysterious, “fake pseudonym” hustling Venezuelan novelist of the first half of the 20th century, returning to a “home” she barely knows and getting reaquainted with a grandmother who is losing her memory.

It might be easy to see this film through a Venezuelan political lens — people giving up on the country and moving away, giving away books they cannot sell, with those educated Venezuelans left behind losing themselves in the lost worlds of books.

But politics are never directly addressed, just the closing of a bookstore due to “the state of the country right now.” And it was filmed and released at home before the Trump administration took power, kidnapped the country’s president and took over its oil industry.

First-time feature director Lorena Alvarado, using a couple of family members as her “stars,” takes us into the edenic garden of her heroine’s (Ena Alvarado) grandmother’s verdant, whimsically-named house, La Ventolera, in Caracas.

Spending the summer there, 25 year-old “Eni” reconnects with that contemplative place, where everyone reads, where grandmother (Adela Rodriguez) drops pearls from half-forgotten poems and Dad (Ignacio Alvarado) plans the next’s day’s hunt for rare titles by Venezuelan and “only Venezuelan” authors.

We rarely hear so much as a radio. We never see a TV. Whatever Lorena Alvarado’s real experience is in her home country, it’s obvious she’s seen lots of French cinema, where TV sets are just props and only turned on when the protagonists are guests on literary, political or cinema-dissecting chat shows.

Plowing through her father’s warehouse packed with books, Eni’s obsession is finding one title — “Elvia” — by long lost to history writer Rafael Bolivar Coronado, one of the many psyeudonyms taken up by an early 1900s imposter novelist who’d steal the names of famous writers just to sell a book to a publisher, moving on to another famous name and we assume another publisher time and again as he built his “career.”

The shoe-leather element of the story is Eni and “Nacho,” her father, haunting the cluttered book stalls of street markets, visiting all of Dad’s fellow book-dealer contacts in their jammed stores that feel like archives to reading, publishing and Venezuelan history. The elusive “Coronado” and his many noms de plume is always her quarry.

Dad’s still keeping a foot in the business, hoarding every Venezuelan book he can, “antiquities of a past that never existed,” getting them from collectors who have died, families packing to leave the country and the like, every so often finding something rare enough to re-sell.

“Mamana” (granny) fades all through this, her one sure connection to the past a poem that begins with “Everything is the same.” But nothing is.

There’s not a lot for the viewer to grab hold of here. I was most fascinated by the hunt for a sort B. Traven figure — a writer who “covered” the Spanish Civil War simply by questioning sailors in Spanish ports, who wrote because he must and sold, by hook or by crook, anything he could.

The performances are “natural” in that untrained actor way, and emotionally flat as a consequence.

What attention “Lost Chapters” has earned has largely focused on the filming conditions — Alvarado used a crew of just two — and the fact that her sister and father have the starring roles. But as the stars of “Ishtar” long ago noted, “a baby doesn’t know how rich his parents are,” and degree-of-difficulty in making a movie never excuses its quality.

While what Alvarado puts on the screen is too polished and intriguing — at least in terms of possibilties — to dismiss, there’s no getting around the lightweight, incomplete and in the end inconsequential feel of “Lost Chapters.”

Another thirty minutes of movie and she might have told a richer story about memory, identity, a troubled country and the liberating isolation of tuning out and losing oneself in work in the arcane world of letters and lost authors.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Ena Alvarado, Ignacio Alvarado and Adela Rodríguez

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lorena Alvarado. A Several Features release.

Running time: 1:08

In his latest comedy, Kevin Hart plays an over-40 ad/marketing man who joins four Gen Z bros for a Miami bachelor party/bacchanal in order to touch base with “the youth market” and stay relevent in his business.

So “72 Hours” is a condensed version of what any superstar comic goes through as she or he ages and their audience shrinks as they age with them. What’re “the kids” thinking, doing and laughing at “these days?”

Hart, one of the hardest working people in show business, and one of the richest — just ask him — is 46. His stand-up specials devolved into showcases for excess as he paced the vast, torchlit stage, motor-mouthing mostly about having way too much money to have “normal” problems any more.

So here he is, snorting coke for jokes, projectile vomiting his punchlines, tossing cameos to a couple of pals (Mike Epps and Kat Williams), doing a more unfunny than offensive Tony Montana from “Scarface” impersonation and lending his heat to up-and-coming players, especially “Saturday Night Live” standout, Marcello Hernandez.

But from its used-to-death title to the jokes to the “messaging” about knowing your heart’s desire when you connect with her, “72 Hours” adds up to maybe the laziest movie of director Tim Story’s career. And he just did Eddie Murphy no real favors with “The Pickup.”

Hart plays Joe Nixon, a Madison Avenue marketing “star” who’s lost his fastball. He can’t figure out a way to sell this “Unlimited” vodka to the masses, and the clients and his boss (Kevin Dunn) know it. Kiss that promotion good-bye. Those efforts to get his doctor/fiance (Teyana Taylor) to stay in New York and turn down a better gig may be out the window, too.

But these Gen Z doofuses accidentally included him on their obscene, lewd, loud group chat planning for a bachelor party in Miami. As their videos are “out there” — as is their energy — Joe takes them up on their jokey suggestion that he join them.

He’ll pick up the tab. He’ll secretly stage, finnace and record their clubbing, party bussing and beach babe pursuing as market research. He’ll crack open endless bottles of Unlimited Vodka.

If he can only get them to stop calling him “old.” And “Unc,” short for “Uncle.” If only his Just for Men hair dye bottle hadn’t spilled all over his clothes in his luggage.

Not to worry, he’ll borrow clothes from the closets of the Miami mansion he’s rented. But the guys watching all this on the property’s closed circuit TV are Made Men. “The boss” won’t like that.

And all of Joe’s outdated partying strategies — drinking bottles of Pepto B before tying one on, womanizing, trotting out dated gender and racial stereotypes for fun — run up against kids who are sensitive to all those things. Well, some of them.

As Joe misguides the groom (Mason Gooding), his over-the-top bestie (Hernandez), the towering redhead with a broken heart (Ben Marshall) and the smarter-than-he-looks dope nicknamed “Freshman”(Kam Patterson), the weekend goes off the rails in pretty much every way possible.

“Unc” can’t hold his liquor. No, he doesn’t do coke — unless a mobster (Michael Mando) insists.

That’s where “Riccardo Montana” comes out, as Joe can’t stop speaking Pacino-styled Cuban Spanglish, and the weekend’s bad decisions turn dangerous. Running afoul of the Miami mob is one thing. Dumped on a beach where a bearded smuggler (Scott Adsit of “30 Rock”) is their only hope of “rescue” is another altogether.

Objectively speaking, projectile vomiting taken to the cinematic extremes it is here and in earlier films, can’t help but be funny. Hart’s stumbling Cubish/Spanglish efforts — fears of “being canceled” aside — are almost amusing.

And Kevin Hart’s stung-by-a-jellyfish-face is a triumph of CGI exaggeration. His throwdown on a mobster’s gigantic party yacht with fellow partygoer and comic contemporary Kat Williams is over-the-top and hilarious.

But the movie? Not in the least.

It groans out of the gate, takes too long to set-up and the eventual (VERY eventual) payoffs are nothing to look forward to. The wedding party is lame, with only Hernandez sticking the punchline and nobody really able to overcome the thinly-sketched “types” that the script gives them to play.

Most of the supporting players add nothing — Dunn and Taylor stand-out as wasted paychecks, but those are legion.

The best “old” joke, after the guys have surmised that Joe must be 50, with him insisting that he’s “only 40,” feels improvised coming from Hernandez.

“That’s…so many years to be, man.”

Netflix has been in the Kevin Hart business for a few years now, and while he’s a natural fit for the streamer — his audience generally isn’t going “out” to the movies anymore — you can’t help but wish he’d reduce his vast number of side projects and focus on giving us a really funny movie or series.

Because Netflix is a paycheck, sure. But look at the crap it’s making with Adam Sandler. Look at that godawful Will Ferrell series they cooked up for him, “The Hawk.” They made Will Ferrell an Adam Sandler character, a seriously crude and unamusing one.

Another half-assed movie or two like this one, and even Netflix won’t be calling. Because Hart’s own Gen X audience won’t bother to watch, much less Generations Z, Alpha and beyond.

Rating: R, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, profanity, nudity, sexual situations

Cast: Kevin Hart, Marcello Hernandez, Teyana Taylor, Mason Gooding, Kam Patterson, Ben Marshall, Zach Cherry, Mike Epps, Kat Williams and Andy Garcia.

Credits: Directed by Tim Story, scripted by Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, Kevin Burrows and Matt Mider. A Sony Pictures production on Netflix.

Running time: 1:45

Humor is subjective, the epitome of “to each his/her own” in terms of taste. But I can’t recall a recent caper comedy that’s made me laugh as hard as “A Family of Bastards.”

The setting is Paris, characters are Algerian Muslim in origin and the jokes are in French. There are surprise laughs in situations that don’t play out by formula, in characters you under or over-estimate. And the dialogue — in French with English subtitles — is off the wall droll, sometimes even hilarious.

“Did the circumsion take your balls, too?” Funny in any language. A lightly-regarded shrimp of a school teacher (Benjamin Tranié) interjects, mid-shakedown, “Give me the sign and I release the BULLS!”

A supermodel class prostitute comes on to the new Muslim (Hakim Jemili) in the bar. “Not before marriage,” he insists.

“Was it Oprah (pause), or Saint-Exupéry who said, ‘To love isn’t to look at each other. It’s seeing the same thing?”

And “Debt is like baldness. It’s passed down from the father.” The funniest thing about that is that it’s incorrect. Male pattern baldness is passed down from the grandfather via the mother. But who’d expect a Corsican mobster (David Ayala) to know that?

“A Family of Bastards” is about “family,” sure. It’s about community, crime and loopholes in Parisian laws that give Algerians an edge in opening pubs and cover for other vices that this immigrant class is in line to take over.

A 1997 shooting at Momo’s Bar (Chez Momo) leaves its titular owner in a coma. Son Mohamed (Jemili) comes there and stumbles into a sister, Morgane (Laura Felpin) he never knew he had. And both of them are flummoxed when squirrely, subversive school teacher Maurice (Tranié) rolls in and is more shocked at the family business than he is about new siblings that he, too, didn’t realize he had.

Maurice is down for pitching in and changing careers, running the family bar. But there are complications — debts — that may have been behind Dad’s shooting. Morgane knows about this, but the two out-of-their-depth lads aren’t prepared for the instant shakedown.

The violently amusing outcome of that threat initiates them both into this new life, of illegal slot machines, the brothel that runs upstairs and the rivalry between aged Corsican mobsters like Patrick (Ayala) and the skinny, younger and just-as-deadly Algerian gangleader Kamel (Ouassini Embarek).

Director Mourad Winter (L’amour c’est surcoté) co-wrote the script with Elias Belkeddar (“The King of Algiers”), and they paid special attention to the Algerianness of it all.

Kad Merad plays the inscrutable, all-seeing/all-knowing Djilali, or “Mole,” so-nicknamed because he can’t see but he takes everything in,. He’s one of a narrators who (briefly) take over the story, and the first. He nimbly explains the nature of this world that the two new “brothers” have entered, underscoring what their new “sister” lays down.

There’s a whiff of early Guy Ritchie in the violence and the best way to dispose of a body, in the general jokiness set to the beat of French covers of “Family Affair” and “Rock the Casbah.”

Some mobsters (Ray Mendes) aren’t quite what they seem, some prostitutes (Florence Foresti, Hanaa Mansour) have hidden resouces no one can guess. And the film’s ideas on money-laundering are eye-opening in their novelty.

I was amused by the general DIY-on-the-fly haplessness Jemili and Tranié pull off, at the film’s jauntiness (best-embodied by Maurice) about all this violence and vice, with Mohamed the only one who seems to get that doing what mobsters before them have done is just plain wrong.

A wife and mother drops off her kids at the bar since the Akrour family has been benefiting from the fool’s gambling addiction. Visits back to the Motherland (Algeria at its loveliest) underscore what they owe to their past and to their community.

I don’t know what else to say about this formulaic but witty caper comedy aside from this — it plays.. And how. Don’t let the subtitles scare you away from a good one.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Hakim Jemili, Laura Felpin, Benjamin Tranié, Florence Foresti, David Ayala, Ouassini Embarek, Hanaa Mansour and Kad Merad.

Credits: Directed by Mourad Winter, scripted by Elias Belkeddar and Mourad Winter. An MGM/Amazon release on Apple TV, Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:45

The Tony Award-winning musical “Hadestown” comes to the big screen as “Hadestown: The Musical,” a filmed version of the show, earns a one week theatrical run.

It’s a kind of whitebread New Orleans juke joint musical, a 1930-set retelling of the myths of Eurydice and Orpheus and Hades and Persephone, a sung-through (mostly) crowd pleaser in the modern fashion.

A very good original Broadway-leads/London production cast makes it come off, although non-theatre nerds may have some difficulty discerning what all the whooping and hollering over this simple if showy gesture or that big, belted anthem, courtship tune or menacing musical threat of a life enslaved in hell is about.

What’s undeniable is the musicality and musicianship of this piece of musical theater. The voices are grand, the on-stage band of seven — augmented by a fiddle here, an accordion there, played by singing cast members — can be lovely to hear and look at, even if the story leaves you as cold as it did me.

A regal André De Shields is Hermes, our “chorus” and MC for the evening, introducing the characters and playing his part in realizing or simply recognizing their Fates. Literally.

The “Road to Hell” is an “old song,” he sings. But it’s the “railroad line” that dominates the lyrics as he introduces The Fates (Bella Brown, Madeline Charlemagne and Allie Daniel), who participate, in a sort of “Watch your step” way, in the stories of Orpheus (Reeve Carney), a lilting, pop-star-pretty songwriter who wants to compose a tune “so beautiful it brings the world back in tune!” He also wants Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) the moment he sets eyes on her.

Her name has a whiff of “judgement” in its Greek translation. But that’s not what gets the attention of Orpheus.

“Come away with me!”

“Who ARE you?”

“The man who’s going to marry you!”

Interfering with that union are the machinations of Hades, sung and performed by the impossibly-deep-voiced baritone Patrick Page. With his “queen” Persephone (show stealer Amber Gray), he might sing Eurydice into taking up work in the “factory” of the underworld and signing on the dotted line.

If pursuing her after death is what it takes, and if you know your Greek mythology it is, sweet-voiced Orpheus will go down down down “Way Down to Hadestown” to try and fetch her back.

There’s a clever enough conceit to the book — the narrative — here. But the big themes of poverty, Satanic capitalism and the like didn’t really land for me.

But the play’s anti-authoritarianism, preached in Hades’ most overtly authoritarian song, “Why We Build the Wall,” is chilling, mainly because of its prophetic nature. It was composed in 2006.

“Why do we build the wall, children?”

“We build the wall to keep us free,” the enslaved inhabitants of Hadestown sing back.

The love story is an unemotional non-starter. The tunes don’t ache or uplift. Not for me, anyway.

The songs are from branch of music I’ve loved forever, but they’re not exactly hummable, When every tune is put over in a sort of grandiose Patti-Lupone-as-“Evita”/Taylor Swift’s Greatest Hits fashion, it’s hard to gauge the place in the plot this song services as they’re all rendered as “showstoppers.”

Which suits Gray’s BIG turn and the voices of Page, Noblezada and De Shields, but the not the higher-voiced, not-quite-funny/never-really-“tragic” leading man. The performances have a “‘Les Mis’ in Concert” presentational quality, more “performed” than acted.

The London audience for this certainly ate that up. The feel of the piece as performed is of an ambitious pop jukebox musical rendered in imitation blues, with no one song standing out as one you hum leaving the theater.

I like the cinematic approach of the filming and editing, catching close-ups, cutting to musicians for solos and the like. And I like musicals, even as I recognize that Tony winner or not, the true culture-shifting/Broadway-or-London-or-Paris theatre blockbusters are once a generation. It’s “of its moment” in the sense that the moment came after it was written, fun enough while it lasts (it’s overlong), but didn’t really stick with me past the closing credits.

“Hadestown” isn’t “Urinetown” or “Waitress,” but feels kind of forgettable the way too many shows “of their moment” do. It’s decently if not dazzlingly danced and well-sung. But it lacks the novelty, pizzaz and wit of “Hamilton.”

It does, however, have that “theatre nerds will love it” cachet, which had a hand in turning “Rent” into a phenomenon. And if you’re looking for an excuse to write off this review because you disagree with it, I wasn’t nuts about “Rent” either.

Rating: unrated

Cast:André De Shields, Eva Noblezada, Reeve Carney, Amber Gray and Patrick Page.

Credits: Directed by Brett Sullivan, staged by Rachel Chavkin, scripted and composed by Anais Mitchell. A Bleecker Street (CrossWalk) release.

Running time: 2:21

Ken Loach is a filmmaker renowned for the working class naturalism of his films, for making sweeping dramas and intimate melodramas with political, economic and social justice (or injustice) subtexts.

“My Name is Joe” (1998) is one of the more conventional titles on his long resume, a tale of underclass struggles, addiction and recovery and the obligation those clinging to their “Twelve Steps” feel to others facing the same challenges.

It’s a straight-up melodrama with bursts of violence and one of the grimmest “shooting up” scenes ever filmed. There are lighter moments, laughs mostly provided by working class Joes playing club soccer — ineptly. But it’s mainly a character study, one man’s journey and one woman’s wariness in binding herself to his fate.

The film is built around the great Scots character actor Peter Mullan in the title role, and he won Best Actor honors at Cannes the year the film came out. The film makes that easy to understand, and reminds us that every so often, Cannes gets it right.

Mullan’s Joe is a happy-go-lucky lump on the dole, a fellow who puts some effort if not a lot of planning into his one remaining passion, his Dream Team local social club soccer squad.

The pleading and joshing around manager Joe gives them from the sidelines is all in good fun. No, nobody thought to wash their jerseys. No, they didn’t know as the “away” team it behooved them to not have the same black and white colors as the “home” team. Shirts vs. skins it is!

But with Joe, as you might expect from a character played by Mullan (“Shallow Grave,” “Trainspotting,” “Baghead”), “happy go lucky” has an edge. Joe might turn on the charm to the nurse/social worker Sarah (Louise Goodall of “Not Another Happy Ending”) and even offer to wallpaper her flat with his mate Shanks (veteran character player Gary Lewis, who went on to “Gangs of New York” and “Billy Elliot”).

But that “social” service investigator snapping his photo on the job lets us see another side. Joe flips out and faces the loss of his unemployment benefits for sneaking around doing jobs like Sarah’s.

When Sarah backs up Joe’s “no charge” story, a romance begins. As we’ve met Joe narrating and sharing at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, “ten months sober” and all, we know the path to true love won’t be smooth.

How much will he share with her, and what corners of his life will he pass off as “just another one of life’s wee adventures?” As it turns out, he shares a lot.

But their neighborhood paths cross in another way. One of Joe’s players, Liam (David McKay) is a not-quite-recovered addict and ex-con. His wife, Sabine (Anne-Marie Kennedy at her fiercest) is a full-blown junky.

Sarah, who teaches parenting classes, has dealings with the insulant and belligerent Sabine. But Joe is the one burdened with whatever his mate’s and his mate’s wife’s obligations are to the mobster/drug dealer McGowan (David Hayman of “Macbeth,” “Sid & Nancy” and “The Jackal”).

“My Name is Joe” summed up is a take-stock-of-one’s sobriety drama immersed in the Scots underclass.

“I’m 38 this year and I’ve got f— all,” is how Joe puts it.

He has obligations to Sarah and to his fellow addicts. How can he make himself useful to both without hurting both? Mullan lets us see and feel this struggle, a damaged, short-tempered man trying to be worthy of a good woman, a “got-your-back” friend struggling to help people drowning in addiction and its underworld consequences.

Mullan never gives a bad performance and is in rare form here — fuming and fretting, pranking and playing out the hand he figures life has dealt him. He’s funny as he and Shanks pass themselves off as wallpapering professionals, novices who talk Sarah out of the more demanding parts of the job she’d like done. He charms when he and Sarah bowl or swap lyrics to songs that they sing on an early “date.” And Mullan makes Joe a fury in a temper, a head-butting Scot who could clear most bars, even the ones filled with mobsters.

“My Name is Joe” is predictable in its story beats and in the directions Loach takes with this timeworn “in hock to the mob” drama. But the cast make it play, give it heart and pathos. Whatever the limitations of Loach’s longtime collaborator Paul Laverty’s script or in Loach’s own spare direction, Mullan, Goodall, Lewis, Kennedy, McKay and Hayman animate this story, make us believe in its stakes and consequences and force us to invest in their fates.

AA meeting movies have long been a cinematic cliche, but “My Name is Joe” digs deeper into the obligations of those who know what those not in recovery are doing and going through, cannot avoid getting involved and can’t escape the need to pay forward the debt they feel they owe.

Rating: R, violence, substant abuse, nudity/sex, profanity

Cast: Peter Mullan, Louise Goodall, Gary Lewis, Anne-Marie Kennedy, David McKay and David Hayman.

Credits: Directed by Ken Loach, scripted by Paul Laverty. A FilmFour/Artisan release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:45