Movie Nation

We can all stop fretting over Margot Robbie’s long-term cinematic prospects. She finally has a bonafide star-vehicle romance/blockbuster on her resume, a smash that isn’t the epic “movie of its moment” event that was “Barbie” or a “Suicide Squad” comic book fan film.

Three weeks into its run, Robbie’s remake of that romantic warhorse “Wuthering Heights” has cleared $200 million at the international box office.

But Robbie’s reputation for bringing sex and sin and skin to movies that beg for that level of commitment aside, a serious film buff can be forgiven for dawdling about getting around to this latest “Wuthering.” There’ve been something like 30 different film versions of the tale of the girl-and-boy raised as near siblings whose adult love takes a back seat to marrying money, with the attendant frustrations of passion denied.

What’s “new” about this take? Aside from the Charlie XCX soundtrack? What more can the gloomy moors hold for us?

This might feature the hottest pairing of leads in the roles ever, with Robbie’s sex symbol of her moment status. Co-star Jacob Elordi (“Saltburn,” “Priscilla”) is properly brooding and hunky, and certainly the furriest Heathcliff the screen has ever seen.

Catherine’s “Oh, you are handsome, you brute” never seemed more redundant. Nor does her “You are a dog in a manger” description of her true love, whom she abandoned when she married well to escape her “ruined” circumstances, the dank of her family’s Wuthering Heights mansion and the alcoholic gambler father (Martin Clunes) who brought them to that state.

Actress turned Oscar-nominated “Promising Young Woman” writer, director and producer Emerald Fennell has hyped her film as “hyper-sexualized,” with a lot of the palpable longing of Emily Brontë’s heroine and hero rendered in turgid tones and panting performances.

But watching “Wuthering” as the hype fades just underscores what a tease the entire tale has been turned into. More sensual than sexual and far less sexy than it seems to take itself for, this rainswept, fog-choked “Wuthering” withers on the production-designed-to-death vine.

It is an act of kindness attributed to the dipsomaniacal Mr. Earnshaw (Clunes, TV’s “Doc Martin”) that brings the sullen, silent and beaten down young Heathcliff (Owen Cooper) to Wuthering Heights.

The struggling household, led by housekeeper/companion Nelly (Hong Chau) may grouse about the extra mouth to feed. And they know their boss’s “kindness” is a mood, one dependent on how much alcohol he’s imbibed.

But young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) is delighted with this new “pet.” She attends to him tirelessly and are pair-bonded forever in their tweens and teens.

When years pass and Catherine is “well past spinsterhood,” their connection is tested. There’s a rich new neighbor in the mansion across the nearly-treeless moors, a Mr. Linton.

“I suppose he shall fall in love with me” the breathtaking blonde sighs. But when she can’t get a rise out of Heathcliff with that, and after one more sizing up of her dissolute dad?

“I suppose I shall have to throw myself at Mr. Linton after all!”

They marry. Heathcliff leaves, ostensibly for some final polishing into a “gentleman.” And when he returns, well-off, clean-shaven and groomed to Jane Austen’s exacting standards, it’s time to truly test the limits of their affection and the fear of “the fires” nipping at their feet from Hell as they give in to Satanic temptation.

Truth be told, as this latest “Wuthering” staggered along, failing to reach anything like new “Heights,” it wasn’t the Charlie XCX Muzak I was hearing. It was the coquettish Kate Bush singing her breathrough single inspired by this timeworn tale.

The 1978 Bush interpretation of Brontë was deep enough, although palpitating (male) critics of the day tended to cut the young Brit singer a lot of slack because she was 18, beautiful and hitting notes and striking poses like a theatrical high schoo baby doll as she sang.

That’s the tease that writer-director Fennell seems to be updating here, not so much historical Brontë as a Brontë fit for the Pornhub age. And while we can be relieved nobody went all that far here, there’s little reward in tarting up “Wuthering Heights” and then losing your nerve halfway in.

Fennell’s “Wuthering” is gloomy and gorgeous, breathlessly anxious to undress but unwilling to because that wouldn’t do for a film from the director of “Promising Young Woman/” And perhaps she also figured out that going carelessly carnal would leave her take on this story with no place to go.

Rating: R for sexual content, some violent content and profanity.

Cast Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver and Martin Clunes.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emerald Fennell, based on the novel by Emily Brontë.

Running time: 2:16

Unlike the kids who’re the target audience for most Pixar pictures, I’m supposed to know better.

I know that Pixar long ago lost its animation mystique, a combination of hype and media management that had unwary reviewers manipulated into singing the praises of even the early films that signaled Pixar was running out of jokes and ideas — the “Cars” movies, for starters.

They still turned out intellectually ambitious fare — “Inside Out,” the first one, anyway — and films that introduced the whole culture to little-explored subcultures (“Coco”). They still took chances (“Seeing Red”). But Disney Feature Animation films not labeled Pixar stole the march on them with “Moana,” “Wreck-It-Ralph” and “Encanto” in recent years.

Noting the limited appeal and very limited shelf life of reviews of animation, I’d pretty much decided to leave this parade of diminished ‘toons and the diminishing returns on reviews of “Zootopia 2” and “GOAT” to others.

But I fell for the “best Pixar movie in years” blurb (Indiewire, LOL) and “funniest Pixar movie ever” (I think Disney made that one up, LOL) hype and ducked into a “Hoppers” screening last night. I know, rookie mistake. Never buy the hype.

I think I chuckled once, maybe twice in the first 45 minutes. Things didn’t really improve much from there.

As the thin “preview night” audience of kids paraded in and out of the theater all through a movie that wasn’t holding their short attention spans all that well, I was reminded of the way the great Jerry Orbach told me that he decided to give himself a Disney career by taking the job of singing Lumiere in the original, traditionally-animated classic “Beauty and the Beast.”

“My wife and I took the grandkids to (a re-release of) ‘Snow White.'” Orbach said. “Before the credits, all the kids in the crowd were doing what kids do — fidgeting, running up and down the aisles, yelling and laughing.” And then, he said, “the movie started. And…silence. Rapt attention. They couldn’t take their eyes off it.”

That’s not going to be the case with “Hoppers.”

It’s the story of a little girl — Mabel — who grows up fanatically devoted to animals. The picture opens with her trying to pull off an almost-amusing jail-break of all the ill-used “class pets” in her elementary school.

She got this from her Grandma Tanaka (Karen Huie), who taught her to “be very still, watch and listen” to what nature has to show and tell her, that we’re all “part of something bigger” than our own simple lives.

Years later, in college, Grandma’s gone and her favorite glade in the woods outside of town is endangered by a politically ambitious mayor’s (Jon Hamm) plans for a bypass that will “save people four minutes” on their commute around town. College student Mabel (Piper Curado) is hellbent on saving that glade and pond, even though the mayor insists all the wildlife is gone.

It has. As Mabel’s professor (Kathy Najimy) explains, the beavers that once built a dam on the creek were the “anchor species” that held that ecosystem together. Mabel resolves to bring the beavers back.

But it’s only when she stumbles into the professor’s robotic beaver and her mind-hopping experiment — putting a person in a helmet that hops their mind into robotic animal form and sending the robotic critter off to study wildlife up close and even “talk to the animals” that Mabel’s plan has a prayer.

“It’s just like ‘AVATAR,” she shrieks in delight. “It’s NOTHING like AVATAR,” her prof shrieks back.

But swiping that robot and donning that avatar helmet lets Mabel meet beavers and bears, question the snakes and squirrels, learn where the wildlife has gone, how they have a hierarchy and a Beaver King (Bobby Moynihan) who leads everybody in “Madagascar” like beaver pond jazzercize.

And from the king, Mabel learns the “pond rules.” That’s how Ellen the Bear (Melissa Villaseñor) rationalizes her desire to eat a fish or a beaver or whoever.

“When you gotta eat, EAT!” So sayeth the Beaver King and The Pond Rules.

Mabel’s got to use what she learns and her own native cunning to figure out a way to motivate the woodland creatures into helping her save her granny’s glade from the shifty, ambitious mayor and his minions.

Veteran Disney artist (“Bolt”) and “additional crew” (“Lightyear”) member Daniel Chong directed and co-wrote “Hoppers,” which is next-gen gorgeous in the way the tall grass waves in the wind and the vivid colors of nature, which grows more hyperrealistic with every animated film set there.

The animals and the people are stylized and not all that realistic, but that’s a smart choice.

But the problems of these “comedies” are writ large in “Hoppers,” starting with its less than original premise and running through the characters and dialogue. There are funny people in the voice cast, with Villaseñor and Moynihan, two of the funnier people to have been on “Saturday Night Live” in recent decades, standing out .

Meryl Streep’s a voice, and Najimy and Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Laraine Newman were also recruited, people who know how to make a funny line FUNNY. And they don’t have anything all that funny to play or say.

Which begs the question, what does a Disney careerist from the background settings creation, image-cleanup, “in betweeners” animation department know about WRITING COMEDY? How about “Not much?”

The slapstick doesn’t slap — not that often, anyway. And the one-liners don’t land. Even the “funny” voices aren’t funny, and the wacky character design seems lacking in the wacky.

Is there no institutional memory at Disney that allows anybody to relay the story of how Robin Williams’ in-the-recording-booth riffing made “Aladdin” a blockbuster? Bring funny people in, give them a notion of what you want their character to be like, talk like and say, and let THEM make something funny for you?

Build and joke-up your movie by letting professionally funny people doctor your scripts.

There’s something wrong with Pixar’s “process” at this point. Even the “Inside Out” sequel was gassed and could have used a lot more Amy Poehler et al input on finding laughs within the insights about the human psyche.

Change your process. You’re never going to honestly earn “Funniest Pixar movie ever” or “Best Pixar movie in years” plaudits without making them up yourself otherwise.

“Hoppers” and the like may have wholesome and even important messages. But they don’t hop without the wit and the wit isn’t coming from scripts this tame.

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Piper Curado, Jon Hamm, Bobby Moynihan, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco, Melissa Villaseñor and Meryl Streep.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Chong, scripted by Daniel Chong and Jesse Andrew. A Disney/Pixar release.

Running time: 1:44

Job one, aka all Maggie Gyllenhaal had to do in her ambitious, inventive take on “The Bride!” of Frankenstein, was not stink up the screen so much that she blows Jessie Buckley’s best shot at an Oscar.

Not for this movie, mind you. Buckley’s up for “Hamnet” and might even be the favorite. Or rather “was.”

Because while edgy actress-turned-writer-director Gyllenhaal doesn’t do a full “Norbit” on her star, she damned sure doesn’t do her any Awards Season favors.

Buckley plays “the mad scene” pretty much from the first moment to the last in this chaotic, cacaphonous screech into the abyss. She rattles off strings of semi-related words and phrases like an early effort at AI trying to form a coherent thought out of randomly collected blurts in English.

“Shipmate, shipMENT…consummate CHECKmate,” her title character prattle-shouts, among her scores of ranted word-salads, all of them entailing constant shifts of accent — American flapper, British aristocrat, street-walker, novelist, all of them personalities trapped in her brought-back-from-the-dead mind.

She plays the part to the hilt, which doesn’t help the character or the utter hash of a movie around her make a lick of sense. Whatever random “madness” envelopes The Bride’s mind, Gyllenaal gives us a jumbled peek at her stream of consciousness, too.

A character mentions a movie and Marlene Dietrich’s name comes up and that unleashes a vamp of “Falling in Love Again (Can’t Help It),” complete with accent.

You can almost taste the indulged, self-destructive, gun-metal-in-your-mouth fatalism in this two hour stomp and stumble through the Great Depression, 1930s movie fandom, monster movies and monster “reinvigorations” of the dead. Gyllenhaal references #MeToo “Barbie” empowerment and every “Frankenstein” story ever told including “Young Frankenstein.”

Characters reprise “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from that Mel Brooks classic with a society ball that turns into a literal “Monster Mash” dance-off.

What’s worse, Gyllenhall slaps that ’60s pop kitsch on the closing credits. As if we didn’t get it. Or all the dopey film stars of the ’30s and ’40s references in character names — “Myrna Malloy (Myrna Loy), “Ida” and “Lupino” and so on — and newspaper headlines capturing feminine fury in recent pop music “movements” and bands — “Rrrrriot Girrrls!” and “Violent Femmes.”

No, that doesn’t make her movie “smart.” But nobody plays contemptuous and patronizing on the screen like Maggie G., so it’s no surprise that spills over into her directing.

Still, she got her brother Jake Gyllenhaal to play an early talkies matinee idol, showcasing his dancing and singing talents in clips from the films of Ronnie Reed — “The Dubious Detective,” and so on.

And Gyllenhaal’s husband Peter Sarsgaard plays a hardboiled Chicago cop on the trail of the “monsters” who catch official attention for being hideous as well as leaving a trail of bodies from Chicago to New York and back.

The movie may be an unfocused mess, but it’s got two Oscar winners, lavish production design and more fog than a century of cinema set in London towne.

The story — “Frank,” aka Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster (Christian Bale) has been wandering the Earth for over a century, a solitary and miserable figure reanimated from pieces of more than one corpse.

He hopes a Chicago scientist and theorist, Dr. Euphonious (Annette Bening) can help.

“Intercoursing” may be on both their minds. But “This is about loneliness,” Frank insists.

As we’ve met the mouthy sex-worker Ida (Buckley) breaking into mad rants in a public bar where her mob boss/trafficker hears his “Lupino” name dropped, we know she’s not long for this world. Her “accident” becomes the grave Frank and the not-quite-mad doctor dig up. And aside from multiple personality issues and tattoo-like stains she gets all over herself when she spits up the formula/elixer that brings her to life, their recreation of the late Dr. Frankenstein’s “work” works.

But Ida, the woman Frank eventually names Penolope Rogers — not Ginger — isn’t sure she’s down for this renewed life business. Where’s her choice, her free will, her agency as a female character?

She is “too beautiful,” Frank insists. She not only looks like Jean Harlowe, she’s got a sassy, foul mouth on her. And even as she warms to Frank’s company, that mouth gets her and them into trouble as Frank sneaks her out of the lab and into society, where mayhem and self-defense labeled “murder” by trigger happy cops puts them on the lam, skipping from city to town, hitting any cinema showing a Ronnie Reed (Gyllenhaal) film or location where a Ronnie Reed movie was set.

The cop and his secretary with sleuthing skills (Sarsgaard and Cruz) are hot on their trail. So’s a mob killer (John Magaro). We know the climax will be tragic. It’s just a question of what cinematic riff will inspire where it’ll take place — Kong climbing the Empire State building? A tumble over Niagara Falls? Or a parade of torch wielding villagers hunting them down?

The film comes to life in its New York sequence, where a 3D movie screening is interrupted by “real” monsters and a glorious riot ensues. That’s where the “Monster Mash” dance-off happens, too.

Other sequences summon up “Bonnie & Clyde” headstrong criminals on-the-road references and the like, our writer-director’s way of showing us she’s seen a lot more movies than the ones she’s been in.

Maggie G. has Buckley’s confused and furious character rage, rage at the dying of the light, at the patriarchy, at a corrupt system that features cops as deadly as gangster, at a woman’s limited options in those times and ours.

Buckley-in-character narrates the film as a combination of Ida the sex worker, “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley and others — fuming, fulminating, intoning, rhyming, over-enunciating, announcing and denouncing.

Frankly, the picture’s a lovely mess, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that Netflix got a gander at it and refused to raise its offer for Warner Bros. A studio recently famed for “taking care of talent” has had plenty of examples of “over-indulging” talent in its vaults.

And if Buckley doesn’t win the Oscar for her luminous turn as Shakespeare’s grief-stricken wife in “Hamnet,” Gyllenhaal’s second feature film as director — Remember “The Lost Daughter?” — just might be to blame.

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

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annete Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal,
Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard and John Magaro .

Credits: Scripted and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 2:06

“Runt” is a sweet and ever so slight Aussie farm country comedy in the “Babe” tradition.

There’s a drought. A family might lose their farm and sheep to it or the greedy old neighbor with the onomatopoeia name “Robert Barren.”

Then along comes a stray mutt of a terrier who happens to be a natural at agility trials. If only this adorable “Runt” can win the Big Prize…

Saying the formulaic script writes itself is a disservice to screenwriter Craig Silvey or the AI template he decorated with details like the Mum (Celeste Barber) who’s an awful cook, amateur botanist Dad (Jai Courtney) and the plucky, freckled little daughter (Lily LaTorre) he keeps taking out of school early because her inherited gift for tinkering means she’s the only one of the lot who can fix anything on this farm way out in the interior, a place playfully called Upson Downs.

Can daughter Annie “fix” the drought? How about their money problems? She’ll need Runt’s help for that.

There’s “breeding doesn’t matter” and “Sometimes it’s OK to tell a lie if you have good intentions” messaging. Nobody wants to be the one to tell Mum her humble pies are godawful, after all.

There are villains aplenty in this edge of the Outback town, starting with the dog catcher who never quite nabs the mutt Runt as he steals from the butcher’s shop. Oz film legend Jack Thompson is the robber baron “Earl Robert Barren.” Matt Day is the bedazzled “Best in Show” refugee Fergus Fink who has made winning the world agility trial title his dream.

The always formidable Deborah Mailman (“The Sapphires”) turns up as a former queen of agility trials whom Annie visits for advice.

The movie’s littered with cute running gags. Annie’s brother Max (played by Lily LaTorre’s brother Jack LaTorre) is a ten year old would-be daredevil. Mum is always cooking more pies. And there are all these names sound like what they are — Fergus Fink, Robert Barren, the sheep raising Shearer family, a town aptly named Upson Downs.

Director John Sheedy ensures that there’s just enough suspense between scenes with the cute bundle of personality who is the film’s title character to keep the young audience “Runt” is aiming for interested. And then one and all find their way to a finale that is almost shockingly touching and affecting.

“Slight” implies there’s not a lot to this “Runt.” But what there is should delight small children and give their parents a giggle or two, and maybe even a tear.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Lily LaTorre, Jai Courtney, Celeste Barber, Jack LaTorre, Matt Day, Jack Thompson and Deborah Mailman.

Credits: Directed by John Sheedy, scripted by Craig Silvey. A Samuel Goldwyn release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:33

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.”

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“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.”