Movie Nation

Ambition and dreams of soccer (football) glory crash into hormones and love in “Mario,” a brittle gay romance from Switzerland.

That’s where Mario Lüthi is an up-and-coming striker, playing for an Under 21 in a developmental league. He’s a striker that the big clubs have their eye on.

But as the YB club would love to jump to the upper division next year, they’ve brought in a hot talent from Hanover. Leon Saldo is also a striker, a bit of a ball hog. But the boys can make beautiful music together, the team realizes. So they make them roommates as well as teammates.

Then a hot night, video games in their underwear, horseplay. A smooch and an apology, and then No apologies NECESSARY, and the two young men — one tentative and inexperienced, the other Grindr-savvy — fall hard.

Can they play together and sleep together? Can they keep a secret, because as progressive and “politically correct” as the club wants to be, their teammates are teenage boys, after all — cruel by default.

“What a gay shot!” (in German, with English subtitles) is the go-to put-down when the ball doesn’t come your way. We know what’s coming if they find out.

Swiss director Marcel Gisler specializes in portrayals of gay life (the documentary “Electroboy” was his, and the feature “A Man, his Lover and His Mother”). Here, he patiently –almost too patiently — develops the footballers’ milieu — training routines, the dynamic of multi-cultural team, their music and group social life, as well as giving us a taste of Mario’s family.

Max Hubacher gives us a Mario who has had soccer drilled into him since he was very young by his frustrated baller dad (Jürg Plüss). Mario hasn’t been in charge of his own life, ever. Soccer is all he has — soccer and his BFF Jenny (Jessy Moravec)

Leon, played with a smoldering swagger by Aaron Altaras, is a shock to Mario’s system. As they connect as a couple, they have to fret over public displays of affection as they hire agents and plan for their football future. They’re young, but they have to know that coming out as a couple will blow up everything they’ve been working for their whole lives.

I like the fact that they’re portrayed as equals, none of this experience meets naive youth of “Personal Best,” still the most famous film on this subject.’

The film is sober and humorless to a fault. Knowing looks pass back and forth when Mario’s Dad says “They make the perfect couple on the field” is about it.

Much of what is here is soap opera predictable — the step by step first seduction, the signals each gives the other — “She’s not my girlfriend.”

It’s the “jig is up” second half of the film that offers a few surprises along with the overly familiar. Teammates suspect, rumors and taunting ensues, the agents and franchise try to “manage” the situations.

“To be clear, no one here or on the board has a problem with this issue…it’s the sponsors!

The soccer is solid, three-quarters-speed proficient, the locker room atmosphere convincing and the story’s resolution touching if somewhat pre-ordained. But the engaging leads, stumbling through a romance they’re too young to temper, finesse or control, give “Mario” the spark of life and make it another ground-breaking genre film that eventually Hollywood will get around to remaking.

MPAA Rating: unrated, explicit sexual content, profanity

Cast: Max Hubacher, Aaron Altaras, Jessy Moravec

Credits:Directed by Marcel Gisler, script by Thomas Hess, Marcel Gisler and Frederic Moriette. A Wolfe release.

Running time: 2:04

By Nov. 16, two films about the famous, daring and one-eyed war correspondent Marie Colvin will have opened.

The History Channel produced the documentary version — her real words, facts, real footage and real people talking about Colvin, who died covering one last civil war, in Syria. That’s called “Under the Wire.” Here’s the trailer.

The other film is an awards season bio-pic starring Rosamund Pike, Stanley Tucci, Jamie Dornan and Tom Hollander — “A Private War.” 

Here’s the trailer to that one. It opens in select cities Nov. 2. It’ll be fascinating to weigh them against each other, even though the doc appears to have reenactors/voice-over people. And The History Channel is best know these days for being an “Ancient Alien Astronauts” conspiracy delivery system.

He has long been placed within the cinema’s pantheon, a revered, lionized filmmaker, his name dropped every time Woody Allen does an interview because Woody Allen, more than anything else, wants to be compared to Ingmar Bergman.

What filmmaker wouldn’t? Not Margarethe von Trotta. The German actress-turned-director (“The German Sisters”) works a little too hard at making that connection in “Searching for Ingmar Bergman,” a fine overview of the Swedish filmmaker built upon his movies, interviews with those who worked with him and filmmakers influenced by him.

The director von Trotta occasionally pulls Bergman so close to herself that she takes attention away from her ostensible subject.

She begins by visiting the beach where “The Seventh Seal” was shot, reciting details she remembers from the movie and analyzing those details as she strolls through the gravel and clips from the film play out.

She treasures a film festival program in which Bergman named her most famous film as one of 11 he regards as “important,” including her “German Sisters” with “Rashomon,” “La Strada” and “Sunset Boulevard” in his personal all-time “best list.” OK.

And when she interviews Bergman leading lady, muse and ex-wife Liv Ullmann, she burns screen time with pictures of when they first met — “You remember? This was back in ’81 in Venice when I got the Golden Lion!”

But get past von Trotta’s early egotism and “Searching” provides a solid overview of the Swedish master’s career, films, life and ambitions.

Bergman greatly appreciated having his films adapted for the stage, because “one thing he always wished was that they really regard him highly as a writer,” fellow filmmaker Stig Bjorkman remembers. He takes von Trotta around Bergman’s Stockholm and shows her an apartment Bergman took because the famed Swedish playwright August Stringberg once lived there.

“Theater is my life,” he said. “Film is my mistress.”

As a boy, he admired Hitler, and “strong, brutal men” turned up in many of his films over the years.

When he directed children, one of his actors notes, he didn’t treat them like his children but as a peer — a child himself. His own children? Neglected, ignored.

Another actress, Rita Russek, hints that he was coming on to her and remembers seeing him as “phobic…brooding…a poor sod.”

He fell in love with many a leading lady, married and/or impregnated several.

“He said to the ladies when they were pregnant, ‘Now I know you love me,” his son, filmmaker Daniel Bergman recalls. “And then he left them.”

We see archived TV interviews from the ’60s and ’70s, with Bergman confessing the heart of his technique and his main obsession as a director — “Film is a distributor of dreams.”

There’s behind the scenes footage of his working on “Fanny and Alexander,” and being rather jolly about it as he does. Then future producer Katinka Farago recalls the dread that faced her as she was assigned to work for him as a script girl. “Nobody wanted that job,” she says. “He threw script girls and assistant cameramen out the door every day. He had a method, ‘Never argue with an actor.’ So he took it out on other people on the set.”

“He never thought that he was good enough,” she adds.

He worshiped the Swedish silent era director Victor Sjöström — “Every summer, I see ‘The Phantom Carriage’ in my cinema,'”  he told one actor. “He must have seen it 50 times.” He immortalized Sjöström by casting him in “The Wild Strawberries.”

But he was jealous of Bo Widerberg, the first Swedish New Wave director. And Swedish directors who came after him, like Ruben Östlund (“The Square,” “Force Majeure”)  tried to ignore him.

“He had to die before we (his generation of Swedish filmmakers) started to watch his films.”

Screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”) notes the man’s upbringing — he was the son of a Lutheran pastor — and sees Bergman’s films as “preoccupied with religious guilt.”

Critic-filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of Sils Maria) sees Bergman as the forerunner of auteur cinema, a pioneer in “modern, free filmmaking” whose main work was “exploring the unconscious” as he “searches for the light” in his leading ladies.

Spanish director Carlos Saura (“Carmen”) speaks, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, of what “must have been a rigorous process” in selecting “actresses and lovers,” as beautiful and talented as they all were.

The most revealing interview is with Bergman’s filmmaking son Daniel, a man who confesses no real sentimental attachment to either of his parents, just as they showed none to him. He shows von Trotta around Bergman’s study, noting the autographed books from the pianist Käbi Laretei, who consulted on his “Autumn Sonata” and became his lover and then wife and Daniel’s mother.

“They were both narcissists and they were fond of their art history,” the son acridly observes. He later collaborated with his father on the autobiographical “Sunday’s Children.”

“You should never trust Ingmar’s stories,” Daniel says, and von Trotta comforts him by telling Daniel, “He was much closer to his own childhood than to his own children.”

We see photos of a vast brood of children Bergman cared little for, who didn’t know each other until later in life.

He’s sounding more like Woody Allen’s role model all the time, isn’t he?

von Trotta is most interested in Bergman’s furious tax exile in the mid to late 70s, police raiding his set, TV denunciations of his homeland and exile in America, followed by “banishment” in Munich, where his dark (even by Bergman standards) “The Serpent’s Egg” and “From the Life of Marionettes” were filmed.

If you didn’t know “Scenes from a Marriage” was inspired by TV’s “Dallas,” that he was no “film snob,” his grandson is here to recall hanging out with him on Farö, the island where he spent his last years, sitting in the screening room watching “Pearl Harbor” with a guy who was never really “a grandpa.”

Once she gets out of her own way, von Trotta provides a generally breezy overview, appreciation and dissection of one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived.

“Searching for Ingmar Bergman,” with interviews in English, and German, French, Swedish and Spanish with English subtitles, touches on most of what was important about Bergman and why his films still matter to cineastes and aspiring filmmakers, even if the memory of these often self-consciously “arty” works has faded in a culture that is always most interested in the new and the now.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Liv Ullmann, Ruben Östlund, Olivier Assayas, Stig Bjorkman, Margarethe von Trotta

Credits:Directed byFelix Moeller, Margarethe von Trotta, Bettina Böhler. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

Running time: 1:39

A big big second week falloff isn’t preventing “Halloween” from dominating the box office on Trick or Treating weekend. A 70% drop Friday to Friday and Deadline.com is still figuring it’ll hit $33 million by midnight Sunday.

A bit generous. I figure $30 is within reach and that Friday was telling us something. Word has gotten around, and repeat business for a repetitious thriller with few frights isn’t a factor.

The only wide opening offering any competition might have been “Hunter Killer,” a submarine thriller starring Gerard Butler as a commander with orders to save the Russian president. The fellow giving those orders probably has orange hair.

That’s not drawing any audience, maybe $6-7 million. Butler’s a draw in the right vehicle, but those are few and far between, and are mostly ensemble thrillers these days.

“A Star is Born” is managing another $13-14, “Venom” adds another $10 (It’s over $300 million, worldwide), “First Man” and “Hate U Give” are sticking around, waiting for those first award’s season honors to give them a boost. “First Man” may hit $50, all in, if that acclaim doesn’t lengthen its release. “Hate” won’t clear $30 without help.

Universal didn’t park “Johnny English Strikes Again” on a lot of screens. Rowan Atkinson is a much bigger deal in the REST of the former British Empire, and the rest of the world. It’s already over $100 million abroad, but on 652 screens here, it did not even crack the top 12 — 13th at about $1.5 million.

That’s less than the superior (still a bit of a slog) “Indivisible,” a faith-based drama with an Iraq War backdrop.

And A24’s “Mid90s” cracked the top ten in its first week of wide (ish) release.

Actor Jake Short on the movie set at Riel Recreation Park in St. Albert on Thursday July 7, 2016. Mosaic Entertainment is filming a feature film called #ROXY, a teen romantic comedy, this week in and around Edmonton and St. Albert. (Photo by Larry Wong/Postmedia) Story by Alexander Sorochan Story by Alexander Sorochan will run in the Edmonton Journal (and possibly the Sun), most likely on Saturday July 9.

A high school “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the age of tweets, texts and the romantic gravitas of a proffered “‘S’up?”

That’s “#Roxy,” a flip and funny rom-com from north of the border that, when it works, reminds us that words can woo, win or wound with their power. And that hope springs eternal for the big heart and beautiful soul, no matter how nasal the packaging.

Roxy Rostand (Sarah Fisher) is the pretty, bookish object of every boy’s desire at Bergerac High. She’s “totes” tight with her BFF Deana (Hannah Duke), even though they aren’t on the same wavelength. As in, you’re coming to the secret party tonight, right?

Can’t. “I have a date with ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge.'”

“OMG ewww. Is he like, what, 40?”

Roxy has eyes for the new boy, who looks like he fell off “Twilight” and onto the football team. That would be Christian Newville (Booboo Stewart of “The Twilight Saga”). She has no way of diplomatically showing her interest.

Surely her best boy bud, Cyrus (Jake Short), the witty, super-smart tech nerd with the gigantic schnoz can help. He’s just hack/humiliated a cruel jock at the school pep rally and the administration is on his case. And he’s had this epic, love-to-end-all-loves crush on Roxy since like forever.

“Do I LOOK like Tinder?”

But sure. He’ll be the go-between. Christian gets advice from his bud Lee (Jake Smith, a dead ringer for Jake Short, save for the nose). Whatever you do, don’t talk about Cyrus’s nose. Don’t mention it. He’s got a temper.

“C’mon, how big can it be?”

Short’s Cyrus has to hide how disappointed in Roxy he is. She has him in the friend zone because of his nose, he’s sure of it. He will do his damnedest to make her fondest wish come true, gambling that the guy she’s sized-up by virtue of his looks won’t be a jerk, will be into literature and the fine arts, mooning over poetry, just like her.

She’s into Russian lit right now, Cyrus notes. “Quote Chekhov to her!”

“The ‘Star Trek’ guy?”

He cannot believe he has to hand-hold this jock through love notes as texts (“Give me your phone!”) and woo her with his words on behalf of a himbo. His cousin and partner in pranks Bronwyn (Pippa Mackie) sums it up for him, in case he’s missed the point.

“You get to do the work, he gets to do...her.”

But he wants Roxy to be happy, wants to give her a version of himself that is smart, romantic AND handsome.

If you know “Cyrano,” you pretty much know how this goes.  Sooner or later Roxy and Christian end up alone, she asks “What’re you reading right now?”

“Like, a book?”

Sure. Impress her. Well, “This one had Archie in it.”

The first laugh in “#Roxy” is seeing the high school principal, the guy who barks into the PA system to silence everybody, then barks again to get some “school SPIRIT.” He keeps a framed photo of “Machete” in his office. The principal is Danny Trejo, and he summons a giggle in every scene he’s in.

For instance, Bronwyn and Lee are engaged in an epic practical jokes battle. Principal Castillo looks at her and makes a veiled, out-of-line threat. “Are you going to finish this, or am I?” Challenge ACCEPTED.

Stewart makes an amusingly dim Romeo, who doesn’t know what to do with a girl who greets him by quoting from “Romeo and Juliet.” He’s just thinking he’ll “Hit that booty,” and all will be well.

The smart kids are forced to watch football practice, and are of course, confused.

What’s the object of this game again?

“The object of the game is to reestablish the patriarchy and identify alpha males in a social setting, such as school,” Bronwyn says.

There’s a Cusack “Say Anything” re-creation, with a garden sprinkler and a cell phone and no Peter Gabriel, and of course a LOT of nose jokes — most told by our Cyrano, Cyrus, because he’s had to live with it and he has all the best material.

“With you, it’s not nose-picking. With you its spelunking.” “That’s no nose! It’s a SPACE station!”

Short, of that kids’ comedy “Shorts” of a few years back, makes a convincing wit, standing up to bullies, defending a lady’s honor.

Fisher, a “Degrassi High” alumna like generations of Canadian actresses before her, is winsome enough, even as she’s overshadowed by everybody around her because they have all the funnier lines.

All the performances are lifted by screenwriter Tony Binns (“Truckstop Bloodsuckers”) clever dialogue, and Mackie and Jake Smith have cute chemistry largely due to his writing as well.

“#Roxy” hews a little too closely to the original “Cyrano” when it reaches a moment of violence and goes on and on beyond that in attempt to find a payoff.  It’s an 85 minute movie wriggling out of a 100 minute sack in its final act.

But it turns out that Netflix isn’t making all the clever teen comedies that come out these days, even if “#Roxy” only finds its audience when it finally makes its way to the streaming service sometime next year.

MPAA Rating: unrated, a beating, mild profanity

Cast: Jake Short, Sarah Fisher, Booboo Stewart, Pippa Mackie and Danny Trejo

Credits:Directed by Michael Kennedy, script by Tony Binns. A Mosaic release.

Running time: 1:45

Far away from the spotlight of NASCAR, IMSA, Indie Car or F1 racing, there are still people who race because they love it, work on their own cars because they have to and spend their Saturday nights at a tiny tracks, pursuing local glory and a cheap trophy to add to the decor in their (mostly) Man Cave.

One of the places that happens is the last race track in the area that claims itself as “where stock car racing was born, in 1927” — Long Island.

“The Last Race” is about those drivers and that track, Riverhead Raceway, a quarter mile paved circle in Riverhead, Long Island.

Filmmaker Michael Dweck cheerfully channels the wry, eccentric early documentaries of Errol Morris (“Vernon, Florida,” “Gates of Heaven”) in crafting this would-be eulogy for a way of life and the people living it in this working class corner of suburban New York.

Dweck mixes cheerfully amateurish interviews and staged moments with the driving community and track eco-system with poetic and visceral footage of the action on the track, racing sequences often set to sacred choral music by Mozart.

There’s nothing the least bit fancy in play here — no dazzling drone shots, nothing that would make Fox Sports track him down to work on their whizzbang NASCAR coverage. The technique fits the setting, a tiny 69 year-old track with an “infield” barely big enough for the ambulance and two wreckers that stand by, always at the ready, when the action is underway “Every Saturday Night!”

The people aren’t identified on camera — not the honking “New Yawk” good ol’boys grousing about “Jessica’s here. She thinks she’s a racecar driver.” Not the aged fan who shows off memorabilia from the scores of tracks Long Island used to have, ticking off their names — “Islip, Juniper Valley, Oakwood Park, Roosevelt Raceway, Sheepshead Bay, Freeport…”

Not even the young driver, captured by a GoPro camera in the cockpit of his late model beater, silently psyching himself up, putting on and adjusting his helmet, crossing himself and rolling forward as a “blunderbuss start” kicks off another 20 lap event at Riverhead.

Barbara and Jim Cromarty owned the track when this was filmed, one of the reasons Dweck & Co. came to document the track’s imperiled status (there have been many newspaper stories about Riverhead’s survival over the years). The Cromarties show up on race day with walkers, both of them.

They were hanging on as long as they could, holding out in the face of a crush of surrounding, soul-sucking development.

That’s one of the things that Dweck uses to set the ironic tone he was going for here. Realtors and avaricious developers are posed in front of earth moving equipment or in parking lots, reveling in all “that used to be just trees” which have been cleared for “a new Costco…a Super Walmart.”

One of them even agreed to chat on the golf course. Nothing says “thoughtless greedhead” like that sort of arrogant cluelessness.

As with drive-in movie theaters and small farms, “the land is worth a lot more” than what it’s being “used” for, in this case, more than $10 million.

More amusingly, Dweck drops in on a racing preacher using racing metaphors and caution flags in his sermons.

“This flag, God’s been waving at our lives since we were teenagers. Racers, like the rest of us, do we want to be pulled off to the side…We wanna keep racing. God is telling us, ‘The tire’s falling off. Your CAR is on fire!’ Nooo! I wanna keep racing!”

Because the rest of us need reminding that if you get far enough off the Interstate, there isn’t that much difference between Riverhead and Brainerd, Minnesota, McCool Junction Nebraska and North Wilkesboro or Rockingham, N.C.

We hang out with the drivers, again unidentified, and lip-read “Crazy” Eddie Mistretta cursing a fellow driver, then hear him screaming profane threats, followed by him driving over to the officials and innocently claiming the other fellow was the one threatening to “beat my ass.”

His house is just a storage place for his trophies, something his new-ish wife is having a hard time reconciling.

Another driver shows off the extra junkyard fenders for his ’80s Chevy. “I got plenty’a spares,” he brags, “which is why I don’t mind hitting somebody out there.”

Fights break out in the parking lot that doubles as pit row and the garage. Even with stakes this low, tempers run hot.

One driver fires a few rifle rounds into a junker he’s about to convert into a race car. Another test fires his motor and tamps out his latest carburetor fire — with his hand.

Even though there are young drivers, here and there, Dweck suggests he’s capturing a vanishing subculture and a sport that is going away faster than the internal combustion engine. It might just fade out of sight, the bulldozers rolling in during the off-season.

But not if these folks have any say about it. Not without a fight, or a blaze of carburetor fire glory.

MPAA Rating: unrated, fistfights, profanity

Cast: Marty Berger, Mike Cappiello, Jim and Barbara Cromarty

Credits:Directed by Michael Dweck, script by Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw . A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:15

Well I do. But then, I’m a huge Stellan Skarsgård fan.

Back in 2014, “In Order of Disappearance” made my “Ten Best List,” a brutal story of a snowplow operator whose airport baggage claim son has been murdered. Mixed up in smuggling, or just a bystander snuffed out because of what he sees, dead is dead.

His father (Skarsgård) isn’t one of those “Taken” Liam Neeson types — a fellow “with very particular skills.” He drives a snowplow, knows his part of the world and hunts. So yeah, he has a gun.

He’s not somebody the mob he’s dealing with would take seriously or have any connection with. And he mows through those mo-fos, whose passing is detailed “In Order of Disappearance.” A righteous, visceral, pulse-pounding picture.

Neeson, a man of action in most every film he does these days, won’t be the sort of guy you underestimate that Skarsgård pulled off. Stellan was a “Dragon Tattoo” villain and does the occasion world weary cop. Seeing him figure out how to punish those who killed his kid and broke his wife’s spirit was thrilling.

This trailer? It’s got MORE COWBELL! Best use of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” since, oh, “The Stand?”

Feb. 8, we see if Liam and “Cold Pursuit” pull this off.

She’s playing a pop queen, with sexuality and outrageousness part of her brand.

But she’s got a teen daughter. Not the stage in life when you conquer the charts these days. Younger younger — Lordes/Ariana young. That’s the law.

“Vox Lux” hasn’t shown us much in its earlier trailers. If they want this Dec. 7 release to pull them in, give us something to go on.

“Indivisible” is an earnest, heartfelt and often touching story (based on real people and events) about an Army chaplain on duty in Iraq and his wife at home struggling to maintain sanity and family after a rough tour in Iraq.

It’s lumbering — with episodic TV series pacing. The story slow-marches from its opening to its drawn out conclusion. But the acting is good, the production values solid and the depiction of stresses, in combat and at home, is a modestly realistic rendition of Army life.

No, there’s no real blood and the soldiers depicted here — from the chaplain to the women and men in arms, ranging from cynics to skeptics — are the first in history to never curse like, well, soldiers. It’s still a refreshingly upbeat faith-based drama, one anchored in the real world.

We meet Chaplain Darren Turner (Justin Bruening of “Grey’s Anatomy”) in Fort Stewart, Georgia, a doting dad who plays with his three kids and partners with wife Heather (Sarah Drew of “Mom’s Night Out”) in the marriage and in his ministry.

He used to be a college campus pastor, but he joined up and in 2007 he’s about to deploy as part of a “surge” in occupied Iraq. Back on base, Heather will raise their kids on her own and together with Army wife neighbor Tonya (Tia Mowry-Hardrict of “The Hot Chick”), is part of the Family Response Team. When the shooting starts, they’ll go comfort the families whose soldiers are killed or wounded.

Tonya’s married to a multi-tour veteran, and a drunk (Jason George of “Station 19” and “Grey’s Anatomy”). A guy who shows up at the chaplain’s cook-out and asks for “a cold one,” only to get a juice box, isn’t diving into this Jesus thing.

Nor is young rifleman Lance Bradley (former child actor Tanner Stine). He’s leaving behind his pregnant wife (former child actress Madeleine Carroll of “Flipped”), their little girl. And he doesn’t take that first IED that kills soldiers and an Iraqi girl well.

“You’re peddling a God who could take my life tomorrow!”

Air Force vet and “Black Lightning” co-star Skye P. Marshall is Sgt. Shonda Peterson, aide to the chaplain, crack shot with Atlanta SWAT and a National Guardswoman and single mom deployed in the surge as well. She’s so disconnected from motherhood she’s relieved to be overseas.

The chaplain and his faith are tested as he tries to have an impact in each of their lives, win converts (symbolized by accepting what the guys call “a good luck charm,” a religious medallion “so that you know you’re not alone out there”). He leads prayers before missions and on occasion goes on those missions. And when men don’t come back, he comforts the survivors.

Back home, Heather is coping with her oldest daughter’s asthma and the stress of “holding wailing, sobbing wives and children and felt their hearts being torn to shreds!” It’s not easy on either of them — distracted phone calls, him keeping the dangers of his work from her, her needing help with all that she has to juggle at home.

That early scene where the commanding officer shows Turner a stack of divorce filings from their unit in just the past few months isn’t the only foreshadowing.

There’s the trauma of loss, what it means if he tells Heather “I lost three more soldiers today” (more awful duty on her end as well). The soldiers record “farewell” videos to their families, and the Georgia base full of spouses grows more traumatized with each widow added to their ranks.

And then deployment ends, and yes Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is added to the mix.

“Indivisible” is ambitious for a faith-based film, and “The Grace Card” director David G Evans handles the generic combat sequences with skill, if not a lot of flair.

One sequence has little Ellie Turner (Samara Lee) urgently summoning her brother and mommy with “Let’s pray for Daddy” on a day when the base in Iraq just happens to be under mortar attack. She’s clairvoyant! Another has her lost and asthmatic in a maze at the local fair while her father’s convoy weaves through a maze of narrow streets on its way to an ambush.

The movies “Indivisible” compares to are “We Were Soldiers” and “The Best Years of Our Lives,” and both should have given Evans (he co-wrote the script) an idea for how to tighten this up and move his movie along.

Sure, everybody wants to try a “combat” film, but the most interesting and wrenching material comes back on base — Army wives following a chaplain and the Army team who inform spouses that their loved one has fallen in battle. That part of “We Were Soldiers” and the Woody Harrelson/Ben Foster drama “The Messenger” revealed the emotions of that situation as fraught and the stuff of very good drama.

Why make a middling combat film (half a film, actually) when you can make a powerful, faith-based picture about those left behind whose faith and marriages are tested just as severely, even though we don’t see the combat that leads to the issues?

It’s not bad, and there’s always the argument that “your reach should exceed your grasp.” But “Indivisible” lumbers along too slowly to sustain interest via the seen-it-before combat scenes before getting to the REAL story — what the experience does to those who survived it and those they left behind.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material and war violence

Cast: Justin Bruening, Sarah Drew, Jason George, Skye P. Marshall. Madeleine Carroll

Credits:Directed by David G. Evans, script by David G. Evans, Cheryl McKay  . A Pure Flix release.

Running time: 1:59

The lurid absurdity and arch characters of novelist/satirist  Martin Amis drip off the screen in “London Fields,” an adaptation of his work that will be remembered — if at all — for being the final on-screen collaboration between Amber Heard and her ex, Johnny Depp.

It’s a neo-noir murder mystery capturing Heard at peak femme fatale in a tale observed, manipulated and told by a struggling writer (Billy Bob Thornton) for “the chaos.”

“Chaos” doesn’t quite sum up the movie. But almost.

Thornton’s writer Samson Young cuts right to the chase with one line to the femme fatale, Nicola Six (Heard), a fortune teller who has seen her impending death and has agreed allowed him to watch with, “I’m pretty worried that the critics are going to call you a ‘male fantasy figure.’”

You think?

Heard is dressed or undressed provocatively from first scene to last, a woman conning and seducing a hapless pretty boy (Theo James), a darts pro/cabbie-gambler (Jim Sturgess, over-the-top and never worse) and perhaps the novelist desperate for his first murder mystery  to be a hit. Samson’s narration is the only quotable portion of the dialogue, partly because it’s chewy and mostly because it is omnipresent — incessant.

“I know the murderer. I know the murderee. I know the time. I know the place. I know the motive and I know the means.”

London is in steep decline, Keith the gambling cabbie is in hock with every bookie in town, the deadliest of whom has Elton John’s 1970s wardrobe and Johnny Depp’s best English accent.

Nicola wants money for this “get a kid out of Burma” scheme and Guy Clinch (These NAMES), played by James, is putty in her hands.

As indeed are they all, as Keith’s darts game future is on the line, Samson’s novel and whatever the hell Nicola REALLY wants and whatever Guy’s angle is.

Jason Isaacs is the posh Martin Amis surrogate novelist who does an apartment swap that that put Samson in London in the first place, model Cara Delevingne dresses WAY down and lets us see she still cannot act and a cool druggy effect gives Depp Big Eyes for a moment.

You can’t top that with anything but sodomy with a night stick.

This is something of a hi-toned Guy Ritchie knock off, and what the script and director make the actors do does no one credit.

Sturgess is at his most over the top, in your face, brown teeth — dancing -air-guitaring to Dire Straits, wearing a ridiculous

Thornton isn’t blameless, warily underplaying the over-eager, unscrupulous writer cliche.

“If London is a spider’s web, maybe I’m a fly”

A clever conceit — Samson doesn’t just observe and wiretap his book, which Nicola refers to as “MY” book. He is imaging, editing and rewriting scenes that the others are acting out as it goes along. That idea is abandoned after one go.

A particularly stupid scene, grisly Keith putting the moves on Nicola as Guy follows a few steps behind and Samson follows them all a few further steps back.

Director Matthew Cullen is best known as the director of Katy Perry, Modest Mouse and Weezer music videos, and doing effects for “Pacific Rim.” He had the cheek to sue the producers for this 2015 project for messing with whatever cut he’d come up with. The film has a look, but little coherence, logic or connection.

Amis playing around with the decline of Western Civilization seemed timely in the early ’80s, even more so now. But the nihilism of it all, the sheer nonsense, is hard to swallow. Sex kitten come-ons, sex scenes and a finale built around darts?

If Heard had a hard time getting people to believe her version of the Depp breakup, it’s probably because she keeps playing variations of this man eater on screen (often with “Six” in the name) and doing it so darned convincingly.

She’s sexy as all get out in the role, just not interesting here, and the rest of the players act as if they smell “troubled production” in the film’s future — big name cast be damned. They’re tentative, hedging their bets, save for Sturgess. Who could have used a bit of restraint.

It’s just that our narrator never spoke truer words than these — “You can’t stop somebody once they’ve started.”

MPAA Rating:R for sexual content/nudity, language throughout, some violence and drug use

Cast: Amber Heard, Theo James, Jason Isaac, Billy Bob Thornton, Cara DeLevingne, Gemma Chan, Jim Sturgess, Lily Cole

Credits:Directed by Matthew Cullen, script by Roberta Hanley, based on the Martin Amis novel. A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:45