Movie Nation

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

A story suffused with the idealism of youth, “23,000 Lives” is about young people acting on their best impulses to help during a crisis that governments — fretting over public opinion — were trying to keep at arm’s length.

It’s a sturdy, largely unembellished German (in English) film of young Germans teaming up to raise funds for a small ship that they could use to rescue refugees fleeing conflict, the rising climate crisis and general unrest in Africa and the Middle East for better lives in Europe.

If it lacks many melodramatic “Hollywood touches,” that’s in the interest of veracity. As it’s about a hot-button issue, xenophobes, racists and other conservatives have their lederhosen in a twist over these moral, idealistic young people taking matters into their own hands. No sense giving them grounds to complain. Which they were bound to do anyway.

The film sticks to the facts, with issues of human trafficking, government policies that exacerbate or alleviate the conditions that drive people to flee their homes to survive and that “better life” addressed, but largely left for another debate.

Because this story began with just one college-age kid and a simple statement of principle.

“Can we just let people drown?”

Louis Hoffman plays Lukas, a character based on Jacob Schoen, a German 19 year-old who finds direction and purpose when he hears of a tragic refugee raft sinking in the Mediterranean in 2015. His supportive college student girlfriend (Mala Emde) may not drop everything she’s doing to pitch in. But plenty of others do as the group, cause and project to be named “Jugend Rettet –– “Youth Saves” — organizes.

They need to buy a workboat/trawler/tug of some sort, vessels which turn out to be relatively cheap — at least in a Bezos/Zuckerberg yatching sense. They need to raise the hundred and fifty thousand Euros needed to buy it, more money to renovate it and refit it for their purposes and hire some professional seafarers to join their volunteer corps.

They need attention and they get it, as Lukas narrates about Europe’s generally compassionate attitude towards migrants at this moment. But attitudes will change as images of a sea of humanity flooding out of North Africa and the Middle East start to dominate international news.

“The world won’t change if no one does anything,” is how Lukas sees it.

We see them rebuffed by bankers, charities and governments, and take hard questions about their qualifications for doing any of this. And yet they persist.

As money comes in and the movement/team grows, we’re treated to the training these NGO (Non-government-organization) dreamers realize they need before putting to sea.

They round up a volunteer medical professional (Sabon Wang), a captain (Maria Dragus) and a others (Frederick Lau) with the expertise they need to organize rescues at sea.

“We’re really scared of messing up,” Lukas confesses. But as they start this dangerous work, contending with rubber rafts overfilled with panicked, traumatized refugees, most of whom speak no language their rescuers know, they don’t.

And right from the very first mission, they see the rewards in their “We can’t just wait for a just world” ethos. Trevor Magaya plays an English speaker in that first boat filled with Africans from Nigeria, Mozambique and Eritrea, a young man fleeing violence and marveling that people his age are coming to their rescue and taking care of a business.

The obstacles change as European and global public opinion shifts and the crew of the good ship Iuventa (“Youth”) contend not just with Libyan pirates or “militia,” but official European blowback that lands them in court.

Co-screenwriter Michelle Cinque did a documentary about this group’s efforts and Italian attempts to shut them down and scare off similar NGOs via the infamous Italian “justice” system. Cinque keeps the adaptation direct, not sensationalized or over-dramatized, with names changed and a few minor cinematic liberties.

Everything “factual” must be covered, even if only cursorily. But the film makes time to wrestle with the psychological scars of very young people leaving comfortable lives to face life and death situations without professional training or military indoctrination to guide them.

You have to be pretty far removed from your own humanity to not be touched by the desperate, often otherwise doomed refugees. And it’s easy to be inspired by the story of youth brought up to “do the right” and moral thing deciding to save lives and alleviate suffering, no matter what governments, haters and social media trolls think of you.

Rating: TV-MA, scenes of peril, threats of violence, profanity

Cast: Louis Hoffman, Mala Emde, Katharina Stark, Trevor Magaya, Maria Dragus, Kathy Etoa, Frederick Lau and Sabon Wang.

Credits: Directed by Markus Goller, scripted by Michelle Cinque and Oliver Ziegenbalg. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

The Canadian indie thriller “Son of Sara” is the goriest “Rosemary’s Baby” homages to come along in years.

Childbirth at its most bloody, a graphic throat-slitting opening scene determined to make us watch somebody bleed out in real-time, a Lin Shaye look-alike as a villain and full frontal nudity are part of the package. But maybe the cheekiest thing about writer-director Houston Bone’s follow-up to “I Don’t Know Who You Are” might be its full title — “Son of Sara: Volume 1.”

Really? OK then. It’s not like he’s painted himself into a corner with this plot. And why should Hollywood be the only place where every horror tale is treated as “franchise” material?

“Sara” is a thriller that promises zero surprises right from the start, and then half-dashes its way to an utterly pre-ordained ending.

A prologue features a screaming, chained young pregnant woman pleading “Don’t take my baby!” before she gurgles her last. Some entity with bright red eyes that glow in the dark is involved, we’re sure. And sure enough…

“Three Weeks Later” we meet Sara (Chloe Van Landschoo of TV’s “From”), very pregnant and very much in love with bartender Carol (Tymika Tafari of TV’s “Slip”). Maybe a little sex will induce our overdue mom-to-be. A song by Cigarettes After Sex — you know the one — sets the mood.

The baby daddy? “Troy” isn’t in the picture. A chance meeting on the street reveals why he never called. But hey, she’s pregnant. Maybe she’d like to visit him (Garrett Hnatiuk) on his mom’s farm? As we all know that “babies are expensive,” Sara accepts the invitation with the possibility of child support, over Carol’s furious objections.

Troy’s evasions about giving Sara the address as he drives her there are a “tell.” Meeting Troy’s mom (Jane Moffat) is another. The lady could be horror icon Lin Shaye’s kid sister.

A tour of the thirty acre spread is in order. Troy’s in charge of the farm’s operation, and seeing an old barn, Sara asks “It this where the magic happens?” His answer should give her pause

“You could say that.”

As we’ve seen Sara’s appetite for raw meat — the bloodier the better — we can hardly wait for dinner, much less the weary, bleary calls to Carol’s voice mail pleading for her to join them. We’ve leapt to the ritual and on to the finale long before things go over the top.

That bloody birth foreshadowing prologue has less to do with the narrative than you’d expect. And its “spoiler alert” inclusion robs the picture of any mystery at all. Lacking that, all we have to cling to is the suspense, and even that’s slack and lacking.

The acting isn’t bad, as such messes go. And to be fair, “Rosemary’s Baby” was a LONG time ago, even if “Devil’s Due,” “Blessed” and “Deliver Us” aren’t. Maybe some potential viewers won’t know the worn out tropes of such films.

Still, there are audience participation options here. Every bloody vomit and kiss the messy vomiter bit of business could prompt a collective “Ewwwwwww.”

But “Volume 1” seems most ambitious in its titling. I guess the surprises are all saved for the sequel?

Rating: unrated, graphic, gory violence, full frontal nudity, sex, profanity

Cast: Chloe Van Landschoot, Tymika Tafari, Garrett Hnatiuk and Jane Moffat.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Houston Bone. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:28

We all use cinematic shorthand when describing a new movie to friends or review readers. It’s not unreasonable to expect a certain cinema literacy among fellow movie lovers.

So pitching the French sailing thriller “Tout le monde m’appelle Mike” — “Everyone Calls Me Mike” — as a tight and tense variation on “Dead Calm,” one of the just-passed Sam Neill’s finest hours and Nicole Kidman’s early break, puts everybody on the same page. “Dead Calm” is a classic.

But “Mike’s” also got a lot in common with Roman Polanski’s early classic, “Knife in Water,” with a taste of “Captain Phillips” thrown in.

There’s piracy off the Somali coast, and an uneasy, not-wholly-trusting triangle of sailors — one of them a pretty woman — giving the film a sexual edge. The violence that comes begins with a Somali pirate kidnapping, but doesn’t end there.

So it’s as immersive as its antecedents, in small boat at sea terms, and just different enough from “Dead Calm” to keep one guessing where it might go.

She and her pre-school son met dashing Jean (Pierre Lottin) in the French port of Toulon, Isabelle (Daphné Patakia) narrates. As he looks like a young David Thewlis and has a 44 foot ketch, the Monika, she takes him seriously when he suggests they sail off together.

Yes, they’re broke, but “We’ll find jobs on the road,” he’s reassured her. He seems a competent and confident mariner, and since she “didn’t want to think through” the possibilities of skipping this chance to ditch her French life and go on an adventure, she took the plunge.

Five year old Damien (Thibault Dierickx) is along for the ride, and the experience of a lifetime.

They’ve crossed the Med and transited the Suez Canal and the Red Sea when we pick up their story in the former French colony of Djibouti, where they’re having engine trouble. That’s not the only potential trouble, they know. But perhaps someone should have read the name of the strait offshore to them on their charts, “Gate of Tears.”

But they’re wary enough as it is, not leaving without that engine water pump repair because it wouldn’t do to be off of “Aden without a motor.” It’s not just tides, winds and currents that worry sailors in that part of the world. Jean listens to the radio chatter between sailboats, ships and the Task Force guarding against piracy in those waters.

That nighttime taxi ride back through town to the boat has them alarmed.

“Where are you taking us?”

An accident makes naive, idealistic Isabelle demand they stop and help. The driver is reluctant. And sure enough, the mob that forms in the dark blames the “white woman” for all this. They escape with only a busted windshield.

But the driver needs them to pay for that. And they still need that water pump. “Everyone calls me Mike,” he says. And Mike (Abdirisak Mohamed) takes Jean hither and yon to find a replacement or a repair among acquaintances, friends and relatives.

Mike seems friendly enough. But Mike doesn’t want to stay here. He wants to sail with them. He can swim, he assures them, and he has useful skills beyond his ability to translate between local languages and French (with English subtitles). Or so he says.

As one of his local contacts has rattled Jean with the offer to sell an AK-47 assault rifle “because you’ll need one, where you’re going,” non-violent Jean gives it some thought. Mike eventually talks Jean into it.

But he hasn’t seen Mike pack a pistol and disguise his goodbyes to relatives. The viewer has.

The first signs of trouble come when we see Isabelle engage in that favorite French pastime of topless sunbathing as she takes in the dolphins riding the Monika’s waves. Mike is Muslim.

“Why don’t you wear a shirt,” our poker-faced novice sailor wonders as she grabs the wheel from him to evade obstacles in the water?

It won’t be long before opportunistic Somali fishermen, bitching about foreigners fishing out their coast, spy them and do what their AK-47 and nerve allows them to do. That “Task Force” is unreachable by radio. Will Mike help, or is he in on this?

First-time feature writer-director Guillaume Bonnier makes great use of the confines of a small (ish) boat as a setting and DP David Grinberg serves up lots of seascapes, sunsets and dolphin chases in the azure blue sea to put the viewer in that world with these four people.

The film’s brevity limits the incidents and the suspense that should build in them. But that doesn’t prevent “Everyone Calls Me Mike” from paying lip service to the grievances of the long exploited and colonized as it shows the futility of naive idealism that puts the Westerners at the mercy of desperately poor people with guns and dreams of riches and/or “escape.”

The subtexts of idealism, racism and simple race hatred are tinged with just enough sexual tension to merit mentioning, which maintains the “Where is this going?” mystery of the narrative. Isabelle’s impulsive nature compounds that. What’s she capable of?

This indie French thriller isn’t “Dead Calm” or even “Knife in the Water.” But it serves up suspense and violence and how no difficulty at all in putting us in “their” shoes — the French “their” or the Horn of Africa “their.”

Rating: violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Pierre Lottin, Daphné Patakia, Abdirisak Mohamed, Thibault Dierickx and
Saïd Helaf

Credits: Scripted and directed by Guillaume Bonnier. An Indiepix releasse.

Running time: 1:28