Movie Nation

An Ice Age tale of the “Quest for Fire” style, this family-friendly adventure pic uses plenty of CGI, but a real human and a real tame wolf to show how humanity might have come to embrace Man’s Best Friend.

“Alpha” comes out way in August.

The word “artisanal” has returned to common use.

“Slow food” is totally a thing. Cameras that take pictures on celluloid, music preserved on vinyl discs, “hand-crafted” and “hand-made” are valued now like they haven’t been in years.

Might letterpress printing, the sort of technology that Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, even Johannes Gutenberg recognized and dabbled in, be ready for its comeback?

“Pressing On: The Letterpress Film” is a sentimental exercise in print nostalgia, a documentary that tracks down those intrepid hold-outs, still printing in the pre-computer, pre-offset styles, with letters and images molded out of lead or carved out of wood, printed on machines built to last forever, printing the oldest of “old fashioned” ways.

Filmmakers Erin Beckloff and Andrew P. Quinn track down these folks — a few “master printers” still making a living doing posters, artwork, etc. the old (pre-1960s) way, hobbyists who have been rescuing the huge, heavy ancient “windmill” presses by Heidelberg, Line-o-Scribe, Kelsey and Sigwalt.

Most are old men like Dave Churchman and Jim Aiken, and many, the film suggests, are hoarding typeface collections, restoring relics from an obsolete technology and holding onto them in rural West Virginia, Iowa, Indiana and Wisconsin.

Then there are the new converts — graphic designer Stephanie Carpenter, Tammy and Adam Winn, who have collected a score of presses of many different sizes where they whip up posters and collectible printwork in their spare time, selling it at flea markets and farmer’s markets on the weekend.

The true believers marvel at the sturdiness of the machines, of how scratched and dented lead type letters give “authentic, hand-crafted” sheen to posters, cards, a quality a big portion of the public loves and values.

The veterans of the trade show off their scars — missing fingers, etc. — from this pre-OSHA industry, which was unforgiving of any distraction and prone to typographical errors by the bushel-basketful in the days before “spell-check.”

And young people diving into it revel in the tactile nature of the work, the handcrafted care that goes into making letters, carving art print plates and assembling into them timeless designs of concert and circus posters, revival meeting notices and the like.

A standout location — Hatch Show Print, the Nashville shop established in the 1870s that went from making minstrel show posters to documenting the rise of country music and the birth of rock’n roll, just through artist’s orders as they left on tour, and their distinct, eye-grabbing style.

Using AFL-CIO vocational films of the ’40s, recreations for flashbacks and lots of expert interviews with hobbyists, retired printers and new enthusiasts, Beckloff and Quinn have assembled one of those films that you stumble across at a film festival or on public or cable TV.

It tells you more than you need to know about something you didn’t know about or even have a desire to know about, and makes you feel richer for having stuck with it.

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Cast: Jim Sherraden, Richard Hopkins, Stephanie Carpenter, Jim Moran, Tammy Winn, Adam Winn and Dave Churchman

Credits:Directed by Erin Beckloff, Andrew P. Quinn. A Bayonet release.

Running time: 1:38

Another action pic about an outsider kid who “finds” a mechanical, superintelligent “friend.”

This time, it’s a military robot dog “lost” and then found by our young hero.

A kids’ movie released just in time to send kids back to school. “Launch the drones” this August.

From “Luxo Jr.,” the movie that served as a proof-of-concept for Pixar animation, the animation studio has made its bones on shorts.

They’re generally dialogue-free, little marvels of visual CGI animated storytelling  — “Geri’s Game,” “Piper,” “For the Birds.” They set a standard that is now company wide at Disney Animation, which produced the likes of “Paperman” in the Pixar wordless style.

“Bao” is the latest, is attached to “Incredibles 2,” and like most Pixar shorts, is the perfect appetizer for the noisy but family-centric action comedy to follow.

Canadian filmmaker Domee Shi’s sentimental ode to Chinese cooking (“Baozi” is a Chinese bun) and doting Chinese motherhood is simple, inventive and surprising, an utter under 10 minute delight.

A lonely woman prepares her dumplings each day with care, even if her rushed workaholic husband is too busy to notice.

One day, one dumpling isn’t eaten. It starts squalling, yawns and stretches its legs. Mom has a little dumpling, all her own, to care for and nurture.

She’s got to protect him from his rambunctious spirit, distance him from the soccer-playing boys he wants to join as he gets older. His little head get squashed flat every time he takes a header.

And just as he left the dumpling steamer, some day he’s going to meet a special someone and leave mom behind. She just knows it.

Disney and Pixar have long parked their cartoons outside Walt’s suburban Kansas/Missouri version of “Americana” — “La Luna,” and “Geri’s Game” for example.

“Bao,” a product of North America’s Chinese diaspora, stands out as an example of corporate outreach to what Hollywood sees as its dominant market of the near future. Disney might be pandering in green-lighting it, filming it and releasing it. But the writing is on the demographic and box office wall. China matters, Chinese content is important.

As “Mulan” and “Crazy Rich Asians” and other fare from the Far East takes to screens, more and more of Hollywood’s product will reflect that shifting priority. We can only hope it’s all as engaging as “Bao.”

It was “love at first sight,” they remember — particularly English period piece kind of love.

They’re both ever so prim and proper, a very young couple mimicking the manners ingrained by generations of observing, or in her case, living in the upper class.

“If we have a girl, she shall be called ‘Chloe,'” she declares. And he’s entirely too polite and smitten make that worth debating. He recoils from the very idea of contradicting her.

“Am I being a bully?” Perish the thought.

As they honeymoon in a posh coastal hotel, too young to know the etiquette of formal “room service” in a stately resort where two waiters attend to you, in your room, the well-mannered repression reeks like the scent of 1960s English cuisine. And on this blighted wedding night, we start to fear where this marriage is going “On Chesil Beach.”

This stately, intimate drama, adapted by Ian McEwan from his novel, puts two virgins in a hotel room in an age before sexual matters were widely discussed and understood pre-marriage, expecting them to work it out. Somehow.

They’re both smart. That’s how they met, the schoolmaster’s son (Billy Howle) and the upper class daughter (Saoirse Ronan) with plans for a subsidized career with a string quartet. He was bursting to tell even strangers he’d gotten “a first” in history, and she was the pretty young thing he met at a college CND meeting — “Committee for Nuclear Disarmament.”

She’s read up on the whole sex thing, though Florence and her sister (Bebe Cave) turned their noses up at the “revolting” textbook descriptions they were reading.

He is expecting shared enthusiasm will facilitate his completion of his husbandly duties.

And when that doesn’t happen, when everything from unzipping a dress to staring down an intimidating, crimson brocaded bedspread, with the pressure of sniggering waiters and everybody else knowing what they’re about to do gets the best of them, we fear that their wedding afternoon will never fold into a wedding night.

“On Chesil Beach” treats the romance that leads up to this crisis in glowing flashbacks with barely a hint of the trouble to come. Idyllic picnics, punting outings on a lake, her blushing dash to see him “in the country,” taking a bus and walking miles to his summer job, at the cricket grounds.

Her parents (an imperious Emily Watson, a sniffling snob Samuel West) may look down on his “class,” but Flo is the very picture of liberality. She meets his eyes, and kindness ensues.

But they both have secrets, other things “one simply doesn’t speak of” in the Britain of the day. His mother (Anne-Marie Duff) is given to painting and wandering the yard nude. She’s off in the head. Flo is nothing less than angelic to her, because Flo has family issues of her own.

Director Dominic Cooke (TV’s “The Hollow Crown”) keeps it all sedate and stately. Even the bitter argument that ensues, entirely too abruptly, takes on shades of class and decorum and lines that one must never cross.

Ronan gives Flo a brittle vulnerability in those argument, entrusting her powers of persuasion and her one trump card, “but we’re in love,” to save the day.

Howle, of “Dunkirk” and “The Sense of an Ending,” holds his own by showing bookish Ed’s defiant pride, backing their debate into a corner without even realizing it.

It’s kind of heartbreaking, the way what cannot be said aloud, their ignorance of what has happened and is happening, drives their actions. But I was put off by the third act’s abrupt brinkmanship, the soppy and unnecessary coda that leaves one feeling cheated.

Whatever the lovers are really fighting about, it’s the source novel the viewer may have quibbles with, not the production values (pristine) or performances (spot on). If you’re being cagey about characters’ tortured pasts, explaining those pasts and then abandoning those pitfalls for a future neither we nor the script can rationalize is as self-defeating as making a wedding day argument the make-or-break moment in a loving relationship.

The movie before it is rather undone by the third act that ends it.

MPAA Rating: R, explicit sexual situations

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle, Emily Watson, Anne-Marie Duff, Samuel West, Adrian Scarborough

Credits: Directed by Dominic Cooke, script by Ian McEwan, based on his novel. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 1:50

First of all, “Tag” was never going to be as riotously funny as the trailers.

The tale of an “epic” decades-long game of tag, begun in childhood and taken deep into adulthood, a jaw-dropping true story freely adapted to embrace the gonzo stylings of Jake Johnson, Jeremy Renner, Ed Helms, Jon Hamm and Hannibal Buress, it had the promise of a PG-13 version of “The Hangover,” boy-bonding gone terribly, hilariously wrong, with pratfalls, sucker punches and “You’re IT.”

Sadly, Warner Brothers decided to go all R-rated with it, littering the soundtrack with F-bombs, filling the screen with masturbation gags and sexual insults amidst the mayhem. Don’t tell me kids and families wouldn’t have eaten this up as PG-13. After all, what’s more juvenile than “tag?”

“Tag” still is, as promised, a cavalcade of slo-motion tumbles, crashes, slaps and tickles, filmed largely in comic close-ups and benefiting grandly from action star Jeremy Renner’s revelry as the ninja warrior of this game — the one who is too cunning, too lithe and athletic and entirely too ruthless to ever be “it.”

What the trailer doesn’t show you is how the under-employed funnywoman Isla Fisher all but steals the damned thing. As the spouse of one of the born losers who can never lay a tag on childhood pal Jerry (Renner), Fisher goes full Amanda Plummer in “Pulp Fiction,” a petite ginger shriek of rage and repressed violence, maybe the most competitive one of all, even though by rights, only her hubbie (Helms) is allowed to play.

We’re introduced to “the game,” played all over the country by guys who grew up together but moved on to have widely disparate lives in far flung locales, when Hoagie (Helms), a successful veterinarian, applies for a job as custodian at a “Fortune 800” insurance company. Turns out, that company is run by old classmate Bob (Hamm). Hoagie’s got a disguise that gives him access to Bob in the middle of a Wall Street Journal interview.

After one SERIOUS pratfall by Hamm, Bob’s “it. “And Bob and Hoagie have to explain to the reporter (Annabelle Wallis) just what the hell it is they’re doing. Rather than postponing the profile to another day, she decides to tag (ahem) along. Better story.

Yeah, this kind of really happened. More or less.

“This year we tag Jerry” is everybody’s mantra, as Hoagie and Bob chase down stoner divorce’ Chili (Johnson, OUT there, as usual) and kidnap overthinker Sable (Hannibal Buress, a deadpan stitch) away from his therapist.

Time’s a-wasting. Jerry is about to marry Susan (Leslie Bibb) back in Spokane. They’ve got mere hours before this Every May Game of Tag ends forever, as Jerry wants to retire untagged.

The four taggable guys plot and plan and carry a grudge about Jerry never ever being “it.” Then we see them take their first shots at him this time around.

Whatever it is they’re playing, Jerry is on a whole other “Bourne Ultimatum” level, smugly seeing their moves in stop-time, narrating his analysis and heroics as he dodges each reach and feint.

“Poor planning,” he grins to himself. “Poor execution.”

There are pre-wedding events to crash, plots to concoct, bruises to soothe, beers to drink and joints to smoke. And lots of head games tumble into the mix, involving old flames (Rashida Jones) and a bride (Bibb) who just isn’t having this s— messing up her wedding, you guys.

Renner’s physically cocky cool (he got hurt, here and there) is a great asset, the laconic observations of Buress always worth a laugh. And Johnson’s wild-eyed mania — his first chase is seen via a chest-cam, frantically flying down stairs, through alleys and into fences — can be hilarious.

But Fisher is fall-on-the-floor funny every time she opens her furious, foul mouth. She makes the stakes “epic” in this “epic” game. Bibb also gets into the antic spirit of things nicely, and Nora Dunn and Brian Dennehy turn up in VERY amusing cameos.

Yes, the script takes several entirely-too-predictable and sentimental pauses, much like “The Hangover” movies. Too many. But the message that one and all embrace resonates, especially with people like these characters, facing 40 (the game’s been going on since they were nine) and rationalizing “Why are you still playing a child’s game?”

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old,” they know, even if they misquote who said it. “We grow old because we stop playing.”

Let’s hope this crew, and the real-life crew (stay through the credits, people) who inspired them, never do.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, crude sexual content, drug use and brief nudity

Cast: Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Isla Fisher, Hannibal Buress, Ed Helms, Jake Johnson, Leslie Bibb, Rashida Jones, Annabelle Wallis

Credits:Directed by Jess Tomsic, script by Mark Steilen and Rob McKittrick. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 1:40

There’s a high tone sheen to the new “Superfly,” a gloss of drug-trade affluence that we haven’t seen in a movie since “Scarface.”

Designer clothes, fur-trimmed pimpwear, mansions, supercars. exotic firearms and elaborate hairstyles highlight a remake that’s a shiny Director X (Julien Christian Lutz) Atlanta updating of what’s regarded as a Blaxploitation classic.

The Alex Tse (“Sucker Free City,” “Watchmen”) script crackles with quotable cinematic street slang — “Get those commas up” (raise more money), “You almost got GOT” (killed), Get that BASS out’you voice!”  and “I won’t go NOWHERE where the ‘J’s’ are silent!” (south of the border).

But that script wallows in “Scarface” homages and sequences to the point where when you see the beginning of the scene, you already know how it’s going to pay off. Characters blurt out exposition, trite situations are forced into the proceedings, simply due to script requirements.

If you’ve plunged into one party where overdressed drug dealers are flinging Dead Presidents into the air, you’ve plunged into them all.

And the title character. Trevor Jackson of TV’s “Grown-ish” and “American Crime,” may be pretty — and we’re not just talking about that styled-to-the-max hair. But he’s a bit young to be this top dog in drugs, and the actor’s not quite there in terms of nailing this amoral Robin Hood of Coke’s charisma.

He has the trappings of Cool Gangsta — a Lexus supercar, two women who live with him in a menage a trois (Lex Scott Davis, Andrea Londo) and the easy respect of all who deal with him. It’s just that Jackson can’t carry himself in a way that sells the swagger.

This is a world of dueling dealers all trying to stay under the radar of the corrupt local police. Youngblood Priest (Jackson) and his lieutenant Eddie (Jason Mitchell) have kept their records clean, despite years of lucrative apprenticeship to Scatter (Michael Kenneth Williams).

That’s probably because the Snow Patrol, a preening, showboating gang obsessed with white leather, white cars, white sneakers, white furs and white guns, is the designer dominant drug supplier to the ATL. Their Grille King overlord, Q (Big Bank Black) leaves Scatter, Priest & Co. alone.

Save for the punk footsoldier JuJu (Kaalan Walker). He’s a Snow Patrolman out to stir things up.

That turns Priest’s thoughts from making himself “Superfly,” and toward escape. All he needs, and say the Drug Deal Movie Cliche with me, “is one LAST JOB.”

Everybody jokes about Priest’s “pretty hair” as he travels among the city’s hip, high and mighty, or downlow and fur-covered.

Naturally, there’s a Mexican drug lord (Esai Morales really should start turning these down at this stage) that must be dealt with. And we’ve seen variations of those “dealt with” scenes in a dozen other, better movies.

It’s all pretty to look at, but the sheen comes at the expense of character development among the most interesting players in the cast. The mentor/pupil thing with Williams gets a flashback or two, the menage a trois gets an explicit shower and sex scene and the perfunctory blunders and betrayals — drive-bys, drawling cops (Jennifer Morrison of “How I Met Your Mother”) looking for their cut — and “surprise” twists we see coming a mile off aren’t remotely as dazzling as the set dressing.

No, the star isn’t reduced to that — set dressing. Jackson’s good in the action moments and there’s presence in other scenes.

It’s just that whatever points the script wants to score on murder-by-police, African American affluence of the “any means necessary” variety and the like are undercut by the shiny surface of all this. The grunge and edge are scrubbed off the city, and with them, the desperation that made this bad guy who made The Man play by His Rules so appealing, is lost. He had the hair long before he had the Benjamins.

This “Superfly” is all pompadour and clothes and cars. There’s nothing beneath the surface.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language throughout, strong sexuality, nudity, and drug content

Cast: Trevor Jackson, Jason Mitchell, Lex Scott Davis, Andrea Londo, Michael Kenneth Williams, Kaalan Walker, Big Boi, Big Bank Black and Esai Morales

Credits:Directed by Director X, script by Alex Tse . A Sony Columbia release.

Running time: 1:50

All this “Conjuring/Annabelle universe” stuff. Warner Brothers getting deeper into that Lionsgate/Screen Gems/Summit/Blumhouse horror money is more what this is about.

What we’ve got here is your basic haunted convent, with scary ghost nuns. Taissa Farmiga and Demian Bichir are the big names in the cast. Sept. 7. 

Live action, with CGI elephant flying, a remake that relies on generations  of Disney kids growing up weeping to a genuine animated masterpiece.

Michael Keaton, Eva Green, Colin Farrell, Danny DeVito, Oscar winner Alan Arkin, all in the cast of “Dumbo.”

This teaser trailer pushes the right buttons, Burton. It does.

“Straight Into a Storm” is a tuneful, affable rockumentary about Providence, Rhode Island rockers Deer Tick, a band that celebrated its tenth anniversary with a rowdy New Year’s Eve show that mimicked many of the hundreds of concerts that preceded it.

Well, except for the balloons.

They’re a twangy guitar quintet (currently) who have, as their front man John J. McCauley III puts it backstage at that 2014 show, made the journey “from indie band to cult band.”

A more apt, less officially sanctioned label might be “best damned bar band around.” When your shows are known for drunken (and other forms of imbibing) revelry, and your fans greet you with “F— Deer Tick!,” and then sing along to “Let’s All Go to the Bar,” and when your sound is country-tinged rock-a-billy built for young white folks drinking, own it.

They wear their influences like tattoos, and in case you miss them, McCauley, bandmates Dennis and Christopher Dale Ryan and others will list them — John Prine, The Replacements, Hank Williams, Nirvana and certainly an uncredited Steve Earle, whose Appalachian drawl you can hear in a lot of their songs, not all of them sung by McCauley.

He comes off as the most unfiltered and the film focuses on him, as the founder of the group, a sleepy-eyed poet/folk rocker who came by “sleepy-eyed” honestly. The bottle is as omnipresent onstage as his guitar, and he brandishes LSD sugar cubes and jokes about his love of assorted hallucinogenics and how free-basing, etc. started to hurt the music.

Can it lead to baldness? Because he shows off his twice a day scalp treatment for that, too. As I said, “unfiltered.”

The film charts their rise, which is a lot easier to do with bands in this “video camera in every back pocket” era, shots of the grungy/snowy Providence they came up in, the bars they cut their teeth playing in, touring by van, breaking through at the Newport Folk Festival and hitting the liquor store before any recording session.

“Let’s go do a crappy album!”

The albums — “Negativity,” “War Elephant,” etc., made their name and their songs — “Twenty Miles,” “The Dreams in the Ditch” among them — gave birth to their cult.

It’s funny hearing their history and the wacky assorted bands various guys involved were in over the years — Haus, Androgynous Cowboys. Somehow “Deer Tick” stuck.

They’re still on good terms with members who bailed out along the way, and a lot of those guys (including the MC of their New Year’s Eve show) have the funniest anecdotes — being forced to harmonize to prove they’re a band to get out of a speeding ticket in Alabama, or McCauley getting a friend to walk him through his first LSD trip. The friend took him to Bed, Bath & Beyond.

“He thought we’d walk down the aisles and he’d make me name everything we saw as  belonging to ‘Bed,’ ‘Bath’ or, you know, ‘Beyond.'”

The drug material and humor is only funny when you get past McCauley’s self-confessed desire to join “that club,” the “27 Club,” famous musicians who died of drugs by 27. McCauley is now a father the film shows, happily married, a bit less inclined to get hammered, though not a boring teetotaller by any stretch.

Their fans, on tour, in their long engagements in and around Rhode Island, at Bonnaroo, SXSW, or at the Bowery Ballroom New Year’s Eve show in NYC, wouldn’t stand for it.

Films like this are generally for the faithful and are unchallenging at best,  onanistic and “inside baseball” at their worst. The stand outs in the genre have a news hook (“Shut Up and Sing,” about the Dixie Chicks) or other angle (“Buena Vista Social Club,” “Biggie & Tupac,” “I’ll Be Me,” “Dig,” “Anvil”).

But even simpler “Here’s who we are, check us out” pieces can be a fun introduction to the music and the people who make it, like similar films about Metallica, Jay Z, Flogging Molly or Pearl Jam I’ve reviewed over the decades.

And “Straight Into a Storm” manages that, I think. It did for me. Wonder if I can make that October Tampa date, or maybe…Dublin?

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug abuse, alcohol, omnipresent cigarettes, profanity

Cast: John McCauley III, Dennis Ryan, Christopher Dale Ryan, Ian O’Neil,

Credits:Directed by William Miller. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:41