Movie Nation

Only Zhang Yimou would have the guts to bring an umbrella to a sword fight.

One of the great stylists of Chinese cinema returns to the past and returns to something like his form with “Shadow,” a by turns austere, chatty and gonzo martial arts epic in the tradition of “House of Flying Daggers” and “Hero.”

Its opening acts are so convoluted, intrigue-charged and well, dull, that it’s easy to say that Zhang lost a step or two making that Godawful “The Great Wall.”

Its action climax is so over-the-top that one longs for the simple silliness of wire work — flying fighters, swordsmen and swords women, of decades of martial arts quickies and the Oscar winning “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

But “Shadow” is still vintage Yimou, with style and brio and a production design that has been his signature since his career’s beginnings — “Red Sorghum,” “Ju Dou” and “Raise the Red Lantern.”

In China’s mythic past, three kingdoms fought over Jing City. The Yang and Pei dynasty’s teamed up to oust the third rival.

But the Yang kept Jing City, a source of friction. Fortunately, or unfortunately the Pei ruler (Ryan Zheng) is determined to keep the peace at all costs.

“Never speak of a war you can’t win!”

His great commander (Chao Deng) suffered grievous wounds in the war, but he’s all for stirring it up again to win back Jing City.

“No ruler can oppose his people’s will.”

The king won’t hear it, but won’t behead his favorite commander for his insubordination. He just humiliates him, forcing him to cut off his symbolic topknot, taunting him to join his wife for a zither duet and them demoting him to commoner, where he can scheme about doing things his way and actually go play zither duets with his wife (Li Sun). Or so we would believe.

The commander, it turns out, was more seriously hurt than we’d thought. Damned if he hasn’t trained a healthy commoner look-alike to take his place at court and beat the drums of war.

The “real” commander looks like a prophet as the young king promises his sister in marriage to a member of the Yang dynasty, only to get the counter-offer that she (Xiaotong Guan) come on over and become his concubine instead.

The gall of those Yangs. They’ll pay for this in blood, right?

Director and co-writer Zhang burns through over half of the picture with these intrigues, which are both complex and time consuming. It’s almost more fun to focus on the stunning color palette Zhang has chosen for the film. “Shadow” looks like a shadow, a charcoal drawing etched in blacks, greys and whites, with greenery in the exterior shots muted and masked in perpetual rain and fog.

It’s every bit as gorgeous as the greens of “House of Flying Daggers,” the symbolic red and gold of “Ju Dou” and scarlet and black of “Raise the Red Lantern.”

Just as that design and all those subtitles (for non Chinese speakers) come close to putting one to sleep, Zhang springs the action beats of the long third act on us. It is, frankly, nuts, overloaded with ancient Chinese bamboo tech — wrist-crossbow Uzis, Scuba tanks and the like.

And those umbrellas, a way to curve and “bend with the rain” in battle, so “feminine,” yes? What a secret weapon!

I fell in love with Zhang’s films way back when “Ju Dou” debuted at the New York Film Festival back in the last millennium, and “Shadow” does nothing to shake that fandom. It’s not one of his very best, not on a par with “Hero” (Jet Li’s finest hour) or “House of Flying Daggers” even.

But it still becomes a rousing, stately entry in the martial arts genre. Eventually.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody as all get out

Cast: Chao Deng, Li Sun, Ryan Zheng, Xiaotong Guan

Credits: Directed by Zhang Yimou, script by Li Wei and Zhang Yimou.  A Well Go release.

Running time: 1:56

Here’s a sentimental family dramedy about a dying woman and the family that lies to her about it and takes her back to China to visit relatives one last time, hopefully without her figuring out the purpose of the trip.

This Sundance film was picked up by A24, so you know it’s good.

And Lulu Wang’s film features goofy rapper/comedienne Awkwafina (“Crazy Rich Asians,””Ocean’s Eight”) as we’ve never seen her before.  Look for “The Farewell” to roll out in limited release later this summer.

Cerebral science fiction is almost by definition pessimistic.

For all that we can speculate and imagine and conceive as within the realm of the possible, that nagging knowledge of human nature, almost unshakeable if not immutable, casts a shadow over hope and puts a dent in dreams of “boldly going where no one has gone before.”

“Aniara” is science fiction cinema from the land of Bergman and Strindberg — sharply observed, just brittle enough to fend of sentiment, bleak when bleak is what is called for.

The Swedish drama — aptly-enough based on a poem — is about a space ship cast adrift, a slow-motion disaster film where pluck and hope get shouted down and human nature is laid bare via “Lord of the Flies” and “Mutiny on the Bounty” touches.

It’s hard not to see this quietly compelling picture as a metaphor for life on Earth today. Heaven knows it’s an easy case to make.

The Aniara is a vast space transport ship, loaded by Space Lift, the space elevator concept we’ve been reading about in recent years, wholly realized.

Cataclysmic opening credits show us an Earth in environmental collapse, and many of those riding Space Lift skyward wears scars. A toddler is asked (in Swedish, with English subtitles) “Want to wave goodbye to Earth?”

“NO.”

They’re leaving behind a failed planet, boarding a vast cruise ship with 21 restaurants, a sauna, bowling alleys and pitching cages, a mall in space — clean, uncluttered and white in the soft glow of artificial lighting.

A motherly figure (Anneli Martini) welcomes all aboard, a video tour guide to the amenities of this Viking Line version of a space ark.

“We wish you a pleasant voyage and a happy new life on Mars.”

Off camera, in her cabin and talking to her roommate (Emelie Jonsson), she is less sanguine.

“I’ve never been all that impressed with people…I hope they all melt into the tarmac.”

The 23 day trip on a roomy ship with algae-cleansed air and an experienced crew should be a breeze. But if it isn’t, the roommate, MR (Jonsson) is hostess for Mima, a “travel to a happy place in your mind” auditorium which customizes VR/”Star Trek” holodeck experiences, allowing MR, for instance, to retreat to the woods near a Swedish lake, walking barefoot, skinny dipping.

She has few takers on Day One of the voyage. That will change.

We’ve seen bits of space junk, and sure enough there’s a collision. The uniformed staff order everybody to “Just lie down,” and when the sharp maneuvers end, offer a reassuring “Now all is in order.”

On the bridge, they’re seeing the point of impact and flashing “Meltdown Imminent” (in English) warning lights.

Whatever the captain (Arvin Kananian) tells them, that they’ve been knocked off course and have lost propulsion, that they’re merely delayed, finishing with “Be thankful for what we have” and “Be there for one another” is a lot less assuring.

Passengers, being human, focus only on the positive, gripe about not being on Mars “for my son’s birthday” and let “Have some snacks, courtesy of the captain” placate them.

MR, sharing her room with the motherly cynic who turns out to be an astronomer, gets the unfiltered truth.

Co-writers/directors Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja break “Aniara” into chapters covering the passage of time — “Day One: A Routine Voyage,” “Week 3: Without a Map.”

We see the hapless ride guide hostess MR grow in importance as passengers flock to her “happy place” experience to cope with the stress of the extended voyage. And they don’t even know how extended it may be.

“We’ve built our own little planet,” the captain tells her privately. Help them get used to it.

And they, including MR, do — meeting and mating at the techno-discotheque, training for new “jobs” on board, doing their best to tamp down fatalism and despair.

MR finds sex and love, but The Astronomer — SCIENCE in big letters, in case you miss the metaphor — isn’t sugar-coating anything. Whatever the company-appointed leadership says, she’ll pass along the straight dope to anybody who asks.

Jonsson, the downbeat ship’s officer Isagel (cq) played by Bianca Cruzeiro, Kananian and  Martini each shine in giving us narrow pieces of human expression — optimistic but frightened (Jonsson), determined-to-maintain a facade (Cruzeiro), fatalistic and power drunk (Kananian) and just fatalistic (Martini) get their moments in the spotlight.

“Anaira” shares its plausibility, story arc and much of its tone with the bloodier and more melodramatic “High Life,” which is winding down its limited release run just as this one opens. But the Swedish film scores over the earlier one in its straightforward treatment of the subject, its production design and in more ambitious dissection of human nature.

But both are parables, microcosms of isolated society parked in the uninviting vastness of space. “Aniara” may have a dour Swedishness about its outlook, but with every day’s dire warnings about mass extinctions, dying oceans and a grim future chased off the front page by royal births and moronic tweets, you have to figure they’re onto something.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing images, and drug use

Cast: Emelie Jonsson, Bianca Cruzeiro, Arvin Kananian, Anneli Martini

Credits: Written and directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, based on a Harry Martinson poem.  A Magnet/Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:46

This is how the future looks — ScanDesigned, Strindberg-dark and bleak.

Oh yeah.

“Aniara” opens next week.

The key to Pokémon, we’re told in “Pokémon Detective Pikachu?”

“You have to be open to the experience.”

So say this about the live-action-plus-the-voice-of-Ryan Reynolds take on the game, the characters, the “universe.” This “Pokémon” does a better job of revealing the enduring appeal of it all, the treasure hunt, collecting, competing and “companions” (pet/helper) and never-ending supply of new and different characters to discover, pursue and “fight.” It’s built to be addicting.

No wonder a generation of Japanese stopped having sex. Who has the time with Pokémon and all the other bubbly distractions that pop culture has to offer?

This “Detective Pikachu” has impressive effects — a topographical terra firma-bending “earthquake” that stuns, an eye-candy-filled finale that revels in the digital production design of this alternate reality, “Ryme City” a neon and primary colored splashed combination of Tokyo, London and FAO Schwartz.

But the movie? Stuffed and overstuffed, a crushing bore that’s not nearly as cute as casting Canadian cut-up Ryan Reynolds as the voice of Pikachu suggests it might be.

Fanatics may embrace the endless parade of “Pokémon” — tiny gators and geckos, ducks, monkeys and dinosaurs with names like Psyduck, Mankey, Mewtew and many, many others, more than most of us could possibly imagine.

But this limp “story” will put the sentient to sleep, and there’s just not enough Reynolds wisecracks to stave it off.

In a world where people “catch” pokémon (“They have to choose you, too!”) as companions young Tim (Justice Smith) has outgrown that. He’s in insurance.

But a car crash claims the life of his estranged dad, so he has to travel to Ryme City to collect his things.

Dad was a cop, “one of the best” his boss (Ken Watanabe, collecting a check) insists. Dad was onto something. The only clue is in his apartment, a vial with an “R” on its label containing purple gas. Naturally, Tim opens it and gets a whiff.

That’s when he sees the Pikachu in a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat. But when this Pikachu talks, Tim doesn’t hear the “Pika Pika” burps and bleeps the rest of the human world hears. He picks up the dulcet, sarcastic tones of Ol’Deadpool himself, Ryan Reynolds.

“There’s no such thing as ‘Daddy issues’ without ‘Daddy.'”

He’s determined to solve Tim’s éut he’s determined to make the kid join him in his search for clues. Let’s get started, and no “bad case of the frightsies” can stop us!

Smith is blandly game enough, interacting with a digital furry plush doll on his shoulder. Kathryn Newton underwhelms as a reporter-wannabe who is ALSO on the case, Bill Nighy is the oligarch who runs the TV network and the rest of Ryme City.

And all of them are just devices to get us to another scene jammed with all manner of pokémon, with a few fights, a few critters showing off their strengths and weaknesses and some nice explosions.

Reynolds presold this movie in the trailers and TV commercials — Deadpool wise-assery dressing up game contorted into a movie plot.

But his lines aren’t funny enough or numerous enough for that to be truth in advertising. Effects aside, irrespective of Reynolds, Pokémon is what Pokémon has always been on the big screen — pablum.

MPAA Rating: PG for action/peril, some rude and suggestive humor, and thematic elements.

Cast: Justice Smith, the voice of Ryan Reynolds, Bill Nighy, Kathryn Newton, Ken Watanabe

Credits:Directed by Rob Letterman, script by Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, Derek Connolly and Rob Letterman. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:44

Oh I can hardly wait…hey, just lowering expectations to leave more room for “surprise” and “delight” right?

“Non-Fiction” is a chatty French comedy peopled with effortlessly thin, effortlessly stylish, witty, sophisticated and oh-so-dry members of the monied, educated and literary classes.

They lunch and debate, cocktail party, attend readings and appear on chat shows and discuss everything from Twitter (“People sharing witticisms. It’s very French, very ancien regime.”) to politics and the brave new world in which Amazon might be the curators of all future literary prizes and “Google has taken our entire literary memory hostage” selling user data to advertisers, a form of “appropriating the circulation of knowledge.”

Yes. Dry.

One thing they prefer to leave “unspoken” is the most French ancien regime of all. They’re pretty much all having affairs in that stereotypical French way — in French movies, at least. There’s lots and lots of “run its course” and “bored” and “ennui.”

Funny thing about this Olivier Assayas (“Something in the Air,” “Clouds of Sils Maria,” “Summer Hours”) film. It doesn’t actually get funny until the third act, and its generally parched feel in no way matches the jaunty Jonathan Richman tune tucked into the closing credits.

We meet the jaded Alain (Guillaume Canet) as he takes writer-friend Leonard (Vincent Macaigne) out to lunch. They banter over audio books winning the war with E-books, the World Wide Web and the state of their business.

Alain tactfully jokes that “we didn’t kill many trees” with a previous novel. He’s so tactful that Leonard doesn’t get that his new book isn’t being picked up.

Leonard’s specialty is autofiction, the newish term for writers who mine their own lives for their fiction, changing the names and situations just enough to avoid legal problems, but bruising those in the know who know that this form of roman a clef is really talking about them.

Alain’s TV actress wife, Selena (Juliette Binoche) is more of a fan of the manuscript, more tolerant of this “narcissist with a human being” buried deep inside. Alain’s mind is made up, and no gentle persuasion from the star of TV’s “Collusion” moves him.

His new “digital transition” director Laure (Christa Théret) is a personal and professional distraction, somebody else to bat ideas about the shifting sands of publishing with. But she’s young and beautiful. And when he tries to explain his position on the changing world by referencing the pastor preaching to an empty church in Bergman’s “Winter Light,” she shows it.

She’s never seen a Bergman film.

Valerie (Nora Hamzawi ) is Leonard’s wife, so wrapped up in her work for an idealistic socialist politician that she doesn’t take his hint to “Stand by me” with his editor’s rejection seriously. She has a tablet and three phones to load up before she’s out the door.

Leonard has challenging reader Q & As to talk about his sometimes scandalous work and brittle broadcast interviews where it’s plain that he didn’t do enough homework before changing the title of the film a character meant to be him had sex with a well-known woman in at the cinema. Dinner parties carry on these adult debates and conversations, essentially about the dire present and fraught future of art as commerce.

There’s a lot of frankly repetitious muttering that “Nobody reads books any more” and how online is “democratizing reading” and by extension, publishing, and hissing at the villains of every form of publishing. “The real pirates are the internet providers.”

“We can peacefully leave books behind,” this or that character says, but no one really wants to believe it. Even “digital transition” empress Laure.

There’s a lot going on, and every character is juggling something and they all harbor a little fear — or should harbor it — that the twitchy, cynical Leonard will use everything he sees, experiences of suspects in his next novel.

It reads livelier than it plays, I must say.

But the sophistication of it all, the provocative disagreements of the many long conversations, pulled me in.

Of the cast, Canet, who wrote, directed and starred in the cerebral mystery-thriller “Tell No One,” is almost too poker-faced to embrace.

Not so Binoche, who is the life of the picture, especially in the many scenes leading up to the lighter moments that wrap everything up. She makes Selena flinty and vulnerable, sneaky and subversive, a cynic quick to label others “cynics.”

The Frenchness, the level (and amount of) conversation and droll situations give “Non-Fiction” the feel of a fall film, that season when movies demand more attention because they’re ostensibly more serious. This one isn’t that serious, and its demands aren’t necessarily warranted.

But it’s still nice to be challenged by a picture whose subtext is all about the rise of “content” displacing “art” in literature, film, on TV and on our smart phones.

MPAA Rating: R for some language and sexuality/nudity

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, Vincent Macaigne, Nora Hamzawi , Lionel Dray, Sigrid Bouaziz

Credits: Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. An IFC/Sundance Selects release.

Running time: 1:47

The great Dame Judi Dench has all but retired from acting, her eyesight not allowing her to memorize scripts the way she once did. So so you’d better take care to use this resource wisely, surrounding her with stellar supporting players and a worthy film.

“Red Joan” is a run of the mill espionage thriller, another period piece spy tale about those young, educated British idealists who sold out the West to Stalinist Russia at the very beginning of the Cold War.

Dench plays a spy uncovered decades after the fact, a “Cambridge Spy Ring” member caught and interrogated in her dotage, remembering the romance, recruitment, the ideological debates during those heady days when the world teetered on the brink of fascist conquest.

Dench’s is the first face we see, a little old lady in a row house, tending her shrubs, noting a government figure’s death in the news and abruptly arrested that same day. “Red Joan” is framed within her interrogation, her flashbacks taking us back to a time when “The world was so different, then. You have no idea.”

Present day Joan may be stonewalling her interrogators, and even her unknowing barrister son (Ben Miles). But we see it all, in depressingly familiar and melodramatic story beats.

Young Joan (Sophie Cookson of the “Kingsman” movies) was studying physics in Cambridge in 1938 when she fell under the influence of Sonya (Tereza Srbova), glamour puss bad girl on campus, a Jewish emigre who ducks into her room and invites her to a communist meeting where they show Eisenstein propaganda films.

“Everybody did it back then,” she explains to the intelligence officers questioning her. “It was the ‘in thing.’

In her memories, she was skeptical to the point of cynical about Stalin and Stalinists. But in Sonya’s “cousin” Leo (Tom Hughes), a compelling speaker and a true believer, Joan becomes “Jo Jo,” and is at least willing to hear his arguments.

Not when he brazenly suggests she steal secrets for “our Allies, the Russians.”

He’s preached communist idealism, “the chance to rebuild civilization from scratch” while she was going as far as a woman could in the scientific ferment of the race to build “The Super Bomb” during World War II. Her education put her in the charge of a researcher (Stephen Campbell Moore) in the front lines of the research.

The novelty here is that is no novelty at all in packaging this as a love triangle, the “bad boy” spy, vs. the unhappily married scientist, competing for Joan’s affections and ideology.

Joan struggles with that in the past and with her son’s disillusion in the present, rejecting entreaties to “Follow where Stalin leads” and “saving the Revolution” but somehow jolted into abandoning those doubts when America acquires the bomb first.

“It’s like I don’t know you,” is one of many pedestrian lines the cast must deliver (by Miles). Only Moore’s Max, the scientist, has anything poetic to say, inviting her into the secret world of A-Bomb research “break the machine, touch the ghost of matter.”

Dench gives a knotty, empathetic performance, reluctantly self-righteous. And Crookson is a perfectly serviceable, fiery younger Joan. The men? They’re just archetypes, and rather drab ones.

The script’s one clever touch is jabbing at the sexism of the times, the patronizing way even a woman of science could be treated by the war machine of the 1940s. Not that this motivates Joan, who is based on Britain’s “Granny Spy,” Melita Stedman Norwood.

If the film does her and her generation any service, it is in bringing up the context of the times, the idealism and lack of hindsight that today we treat as naivete. No, she and the Cambridge Spy Ring don’t get a pass. Stalin’s depredations were pretty widely known and there really was no excuse for swallowing agitprop from a good-looking recruiter.

But “Red Joan” doesn’t do much with this promising story, content to skim the surface and accept Joan’s as the only narration or version of events worth accepting at face value.

That doesn’t do her, her crimes or Dame Judi justice.

MPAA Rating: R for brief sexuality/nudity

Cast: Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Laurence Spellman, Ben Miles, Tereza Srbova and Stephen Campbell Moore.

Credits: Directed by Trevor Nunn, script by Lindsay Shapero.  An IFC release.

Running time: 1:41

Ick.

Too short? Well, let’s see if we can further do justice to the surreal, serio-comic acid trip afterbirth that is “Saint Bernard.” You can’t say you weren’t warned, any more than I wasn’t.

It’s an unreleasable, indulgent exercise in cinematic absurdity, a daft blend of Terry Gilliam and Luis Bunuel grotesques and second year film student horror.

The sets have a DIY feel — pipes and lumberyard scraps, workshops and churches, empty concert halls and interstate on-ramps.

And hell, right in the middle of it, a sprint past Notre Dame — the recently torched Paris cathedral, not the football college.

It makes not a whit of sense, populated by a sea of bit players and C-actors — and veteran character actor Warwick Davis, who makes an appearance in the third act and only in the third act.

And yet, here it is, a nonsensical film “completed” in 2013, earning release. Somehow.

And it’s…well, if not fascinating, it at least holds the eye. When you’re not averting the eye at this or that bit of gross.

The story? Or “story?” Bernard (Jason Dugre) has always wanted to be a conductor. Not a musician, just the guy who waves a baton in front of them. ‘

He’s wanted since he was a teen (Albert Strietmann plays him at that age). He’d don his white tux with tails, pick up a baton and “play” (ineptly) concerts emitting from his iPod for indulgent family and friends.

And now he’s an adult, with this handmade baton carved and whittled by a handyman in a gas mask (Satan?), unfulfilled, but still dressed to conduct.

The next 85 minutes are an ad hoc acid trip of a journey, from the embarrassment of a botched “performance” (“You call yourself a CONDUCTOR?”) to discovering “my saint. Saint Bernard!”

It’s a decapitated  dog’s head procured on the roadside.

Bernard is stalked, chased, hounded — dressed in a tux covered in dollar bills, which is how he thinks this greedy preacher (Bob Zmuda) sees him, or encased in a walking patchwork packing crate “prison” in Paris, where a French lumberjack chainsaws him free.

Lincoln and Andrew Jackson (incompetently costumed in clothes that were in fashion when George Washington was president) line up in a slow-mo rainy day football scrimmage against a kite-clutching Ben Franklin.

A store-bought chicken, plucked and gutted, parachutes out of an airplane.

I won’t go into any more detail because that would be like emptying a sack of salt on a freshly dismembered woman’s stumps. Which we also see.

The presence of Andy Kaufman’s longtime foil Bob Zmuda in this sort of tips off the tone. Surreal, inside jokes wrapped inside of other inside jokes, if indeed one credits special effects maestro turned director Gabe Bartalos (“Happy Hell Night,” etc.) of thinking or scripting this through.

I don’t.

It feels improvised on the fly.

“Saint Bernard” is surreal to the point of performance art obscure, with an endless parade of C-movie horror masks, exploding heads, geysers of blood and a Fellini film’s worth of bit players cast for their homeliness.

Might it be a cult film, enjoyed by the imbibing midnight movie classes? Maybe. But there’s a point where your mind-altering substance consumption crosses from loose and funny to nauseating.

“Saint Bernard” lives on the wrong side of that line.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence and sex, all of it gross

Cast: Jason Dugre, Katy Sullivan, Peter Iasillo Jr., Bob Zmuda and Warwick Davis,

Credits: Written and directed by Gabriel “Gabe” Bartalos.  A Severin Release.

Running time: 1:39

Ok, Warwick Davis was in “Leprechaun.” So he’s almost certainly seen the likes of “Saint Bernard” before.

This promises to be something to see, man. Horror projects directed by SFX guys (Gabriel Bartalos) generally are.

“Saint Bernard” was completed in 2013, and is just now earning theatrical and VOD release.

Beware!