Movie Nation

An aspiring actress, formerly an aspiring dancer, considers mortality and the end of human existence — but not who will be keeping records once the human race itself has ended. It’s the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were frightened and the disease was running rampant and “the system” itself seemed to be crashing. A lot of us were having these not-wholly-reasoned-out thoughts.

“If the world ended tomorrow, I wouldn’t even be a footnote.”

Just as someday, if the cinema survives, the run of “COVID” romances, dramas and comedies that people made during and after lockdown — limited cast, a couple of sets, “COVID protocols,” the works — will be but a footnote.

Writer-director-star Chris Leary‘s “Footnotes” is about two late 20somethings thrown together in big, impersonal Greater LA just as the worst pandemic explodes. He’s living at reduced rent in the small complex, because he’s sort of the “super” there. Will (Leary) gives Apurna (Sharayu Mahale) her keys when she moves in.

He takes care not to flirt. No sense giving her a “creeper” vibe. She goes out of her way not to flirt back.

Then comes COVID, and a simple “Do you have any toilet paper?” plants the seeds of a “platonic” “Hey,” Im not gonna SLEEP with you” relationship.

As their friends-by-necessity conversations, dinners, drinking and drug consumption (played for comic effect) go on, the topics turn intimate, the “platonic” thing is accepted, grudgingly, then tested. By the time the lockdown ends, they’re both right to wonder if what they experienced with each other merited a “footnote,” or something more.

A couple of moments turn on the charm, a couple of scenes carry the weight of reality, expectations and longing. And then this lockdown dramedy drifts away from “just us two.” As it does, it becomes more complicated and progressively less interesting than the “almost interesting” it once was.

Their connection, the banter, a couple of outside characters and situations, none of it lingers in the memory beyond the closing credits or in my case, was clever enough to merit being added to my notes.

Critics “grade” the many COVID romances like this on the COVID curve, or we did as the pandemic was fresher in the mind. It took some doing even to make a simple “two-hander” like this, and everyone gets an A for effort for trying.

But even as I run quick searches to refresh my memory about “memorable” COVID comedies like this (“Getting to Know You,” “The End of Us,” etc.) there’s no escaping the sad reality that they all ran together pretty much the minute the third, fourth and twenty-fourth one came out.

And most of them, unfortunately, barely merit a footnote.

Rating: unrated, drug use, profanity

Cast: Chris Leary, Sharayu Mahale

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chris Leary. A Buffalo 8 release.

Running time: 1:32

“Sight” is a pleasantly bland bio-pic about the Chinese-born surgeon who came up with a treatment that has restored the sight of millions around the world.

Dr. Ming Wang’s story, growing up during the unrest in the last years of China’s Cultural Revolution, battling anti-education/anti-intellectualism at home, prejudice and limited resources in college in the United States, only to become one of the most celebrated people in his field, is the stuff of many an uplifting biography or autobiography.

It’s rather blandly-handled in this somewhat old-fashioned bio-pic, with the big twist in the story having to do with not just what drives someone, but how one takes inspiration from failure.

Director and co-writer Andrew Hyatt did “Paul, Apostle of Christ” and that “Duck Dynasty” biopic “The Blind.” He’s not out of is element, but not having a hard “faith-based” message to anchor the picture causes his movie to drift by, never unpleasant, but not particularly compelling either.

Ming Wang (Terry Chen) is a press-conference-after-surgery-famous Nashville eye surgeon known for restoring sight to “impossible” cases, and noted for his worldwide philanthropy — accepting cases from the young and the blind, or their advocates, from all over the world.

An Indian child (Mia Swamination) becomes a great test for him. Blinded by her mother to give her an edge begging in her corner of Calcutta, Dr. Wang’s skills, invention, and that of his colleague, Dr. Mischa Bartnovsky (Greg Kinnear) are pushed to their limits with this case.

That causes the obsessed surgeon to hallucinate a tween girl from China back into his life. That leads to flashbacks, a crisis in confidence and confiding in a pretty Chinese-American bartender (Danni Wang) as he struggles to remember why he’s driven to do this, and to find a way around the damage this little girl suffered to her eyes.

We see Ming’s 1970s Chinese childhood — Jayden Zhang and Ben Wang play younger versions of him — a doctor’s son growing up in Mao’s People’s Republic, facing assaults on his school, his person and his adored childhood friend, Lili (Sara Ye), whose grandfather happens to be blind.

Bits of Wang’s back story are filtered into his present day dilemma as we learn the trauma of his youth, the fate of those who knew him and his roundabout path to America, college and success.

Hewing to what we can assume is pretty close to the truth doesn’t rob the film of its drama. But the lack of highs and lows become a real issue as tiny conflicts are blown out of proportion and the big one — dealing with the anti-education “uprising” of the Cultural Revolution — is watered-down to a frustrating degree.

The “true” story seems more compelling than how it is presented on screen. The picture’s old-fashioned nature suggest we’d get more conventionally “Hollywood” triumphs and turnabouts than are served up here.

Chen is stoic in the lead role, and Kinnear — “faith-based” is kind of his brand now — is reliably supportive in a co-starring role.

But there’s little sizzle to any of this. The performances are flat, top to bottom and the script struggles to wrong pathos out of even the saddest plot elements.

We’re all heroes of our own story, and Dr. Wang’s took a more trying journey than most, or so the film suggests. Overfamiliarity with this sort of immigrant’s journey and the tentative nature of the storytelling — even keeping the “faith-based” elements at arm’s length (Fionnula Flanagan plays the nun who brings the Indian child to America) — mute the impact of “Sight,” which is a shame.

Even the Chinese sequences (in Chinese with English subtitles) have their edges rubbed-off as the script goes to some pains to avoid criticizing the government there, past or present. Lacking that edge, any “miracle of faith” or a story arc with obvious ups and downs, “Sight” fails to move, with only the closing credits — showing the real Wang’s achievements — coming anywhere near to living up to what we’re assured, in the opening credits, is “an incredible true story.”

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Terry Chen, Greg Kinnear, Ben Wang, Danni Wang and Fionnula Flanagan,

Credits: Directed by Andrew Hyatt, scripted by Andrew Hyatt, John Duigan and Buzz McLaughlin, based on the autobiography of Dr. Ming Wang. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:42

Based on a manga that has led to several anime treatments in recent years, “Golden Kamuy” struggles onto the screen in live action feature film form as a cartoonish curiosity.

A post Russo-Japanese War period piece about a treasure hunt involving tattooed ex-convicts, with soldiers, an ex-soldier, an aged ex-samurai, mobsters and an Ainu huntress, it features action and supernaturalism and enough exposition and characters to fill three two hour movies.

Ainu mores and customs are glimpsed in the midst of a lot of chasing and fighting in pursuit of 24 convicts, each of whom has clues from a puzzle tattooed on their torsos by an inmate who hid a cache of “cursed” gold after that 1904-1905 war.

It’s very “manga” in look and feel, more steam punk than period-perfect. Despite efforts to recreate the battlefields of northeastern China, near the Russian-held city of Port Arthur, and the wilds of wintry, primitive Hokkaido, this Shigeaki Kubo film never shakes the feeling of “fan service” in its plotting and a not-quite-whimsical enough “anime rendered into live action” tone.

Being ever so Japanese, there are pauses for food and discussions of food at the damnedest times — minced squirrel here, skewered dumplings there, otter served the traditional Ainu (a hunter-gatherer subculture) way, and miso which the main Ainu character amusingly describes as having the texture and smell of “feces.”

We get a taste of the origin story of our hero, the battle-scarred Saichi (Kento Yamazaki) who labeled himself “Immortal Sugimito” after his supernatural survival of battle wounds in the war.

“I just can’t seem to die!”

He hears tell of this gold treasure from a traveling companion as he pans for gold in Hokkaido. That’s when he realizes that 24 escaped prison inmates collectively carry the map to this treasure horde.

Saved from a brown bear attack by the young Ainu huntress Aspira (Anna Yamada), she becomes his new traveling companion guide to all things Ainu on this quest to track down the various inmates — brutes, escape artists, etc.

Meanwhile, The Seventh Division, led by Toshizô Hijikata (Hiroshi Tashu) has turned its post-war mission into one of finding those inmates and that treasure. And he’s not alone.

The story is relatively straightforward, or would be if we weren’t pausing for the inclusion of every supporting character, some of them quite minor, who must be introduced and identified by (inter-titles) name.

That’s “fan service” that does the movie no service.

Still, it’s an interesting peek into a part of Japan, Japanese history and culture — especially the forcibly “assimilated” Ainu — that the movies seldom visit even if the story is pieced together between chases, fights and standoffs.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, off-color humor

Cast: Kento Yamazaki, Anna Yamada, Hiroshi Tashi, many others.

Credits: Directed by Shigeaki Kubo, scripted by Tsutomu Kuroiwa, based ont he manga by Satoru Noda. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:07

As pointless as it is pitiless, “The Strangers: Chapter 1” is one of the most cynical horror reboots in recent memory.

But it’s outperforming the far more entertaining “Abigail” and far better crafted “The First Omen,” and even puts Sydney Sweeney’s “Immaculate” out to pasture at the box office. Just underlines what every new “Planet of the Apes” and “King Kong” and “Fast and Furious” picture says about today’s cinema audience.

They only want to see what they’re already familiar with. So let’s serve up another helping of comfort food.

Two East Coasters (Madelaine Petsch, Froy Gutierrez) are crossing Oregon for a job interview in Portland, when their car breaks down in tiny Venus, a one diner, one drive-in, one garage village in “the literal middle of nowhere.”

The judgmental way the folks in the diner (Janis Ahern and Ema Horvath play the staff) treat Maya’s “vegetarian” menu questions, the supremely sketchy mechanic (Ben Cartwright, there’s a name out of Western lore) who just happens to be grinning at the window when their car won’t start should tip them off that this place is nowhere you want to “spend the night,” especially at “one them them Internet houses (AirBnB).”

Once in that remote, rustic rental, things go from bad to worse, but so slowly you almost forget this is a horror film.

Not really. Of all the ways this Renny Harlin (“Cutthroat Island”) thriller lets down the genre, maintaining a feeling of dread isn’t one of them.

The jolts — three masked intruders glimpsed in silhouette, INSIDE the house, in the dark outside, asking “IS Tamara here?” or cutting to the chase and waving an axe/machete/butcher knife — are a bust.

There’s a little suspense, but one can’t help but feel these two, slow to respond to the real threat, slow to put on pants or shoes, slow to “We should find a weapon” and start working the problem, are a lost cause.

Maybe a knife, or sticking together instead of splitting up, or stumbling across a shotgun or a trusty Jeep Cherokee will help. You think?

I remember liking the original “motiveless torturers/murderers” “Strangers” movie, but probably not a lot. The first sequel wasn’t much. But it was better than this.

Sometimes the over-the-top violence can be a saving grace in such genre films. Sometimes the villain makes them worth watching. Occasionally, the suspense atones for a world of shortcomings.

Not here. By the time “Chapter 1” offers up “To Be Continued,” we can’t say we weren’t warned. About the next one, any way.

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Madelaine Petsch, Froy Gutierrez, Ema Horvath, Janis Ahern and Ben Cartwright

Credits: Directed by Renny Harlin, scripted by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland. A release.

Running time: 1:31

It takes some getting used to the idea of Paul Henreid, icon of indomitable Europe in “Casablanca,” in a Gestapo uniform.

But in “Night Train to Munich,” filmed a couple of years before “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” he’s billed as “Paul von Hernreid,” the shortest version of his Viennese birth name — Paul Georg Julius Hernreid Ritter von Wassel-Waldingau. So…it didn’t count?

The trains are mostly models, as are a Prague factory, Hitler’s “Berghof” lair and a model ship in a not-foggy-enough sea. The sets are mostly soundstage constructions, blended in with lots of documentary footage of events happening in Europe in the months leading up to the movie’s July 1940 release.

The uniforms are of a “That’ll do” variety, as the film was shot during “The Phony War,” just after the invasion of Poland, just before the fall of France. German officers wave pistols about, but only one Luger was available, so it went to co-star Henreid. And the revolvers were of the “almost never need reloading” variety.

Of course they sent Rex Harrison, playing a British agent disguised as a Wehrmacht major, traipsing around the offices of Nazi Berlin wearing a ceremonial sword.

All the Brits — including actors playing Germans — refer to the Kriegsmarine (German navy) command as “The Admiralty.” Old habits die hard.

And the plot borrowed so heavily from Hitchcock’s comic mystery “The Lady Vanishes” that director Carol Reed & Co. re-enlisted that film’s new screen comic duo, those cricket-obsessed fops Caldicott and Charters (Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford) as a couple of Old School alumni golfers who picked precisely the worst moment in history to have a spot of golf in Berlin.

“I bought a copy of ‘Mein Kampf.’ Occurred to me it might shed a spot of light on all this… how d’ye do. Ever read it?”

“Never had the time.”

“I understand they give a copy to all the bridal couples over here.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s that sort of book, old man.”

For a movie that takes us inside a “concentration camp,” for perhaps the first time in a mainstream motion picture, a film packed with newsreel footage of Nazi domination’s near inevitability, the future director of “The Third Man” manages a to serve up a fun and lightly frightening rail-bound romp.

It’s a film that makes its Czech heroine’s claim that Britain is still a place “where people can laugh and be happy” its ethos. That the Nazi Germans were the era’s villains and humorless “sauerkrauts” to boot is left unsaid.

But from the moment Harrison’s vain, cocksure singing secret agent shows up — he’s posing as a sheet-music plugger in a seaside British resort town — most thoughts of the “real” war going so badly outside the cinema had to recede into the background.

 “You know, if a woman ever loved you like you love yourself, it would be one of the great romances of history!”

It takes several alarming scenes for this tale of a Czech expert in armor plating (James Harcourt) struggling to escape the Germans with his daughter (Margaret Lockwood), complete with a Hitler stand-in smashing his fist down on a map every time he covets another piece of Europe, to turn into a comedy of Gestapo jokes, sexual innuendo and cricket obsession. But it gets there.

The greatest propaganda picture of the era was “The 49th Parallel,” but whatever “Night Train” lacks in pathos and “Keep calm and carry on” patriotism it more than makes up with suspense and gamesmanship and a generous helping of chuckles.

Set in the months leading up to the Germans invading Poland, it opens with scenes of our armor expert and his well-turned-out (a beauty in furs) daughter trying to flee as the Germans occupy Czechoslovakia. He is hustled out, she is captured and tossed in a camp.

Luckily, Anna Bomasch (Lockwood, also borrowed from “The Lady Vanishes”) manages to escape this concentration camp with the help of a too-helpful fellow inmate (Henreid, Victor Lazlo in “Casablanca”) a brave voice of freedom figure whom she sees the Germans torture.

The escape is skipped-over, their rowing ashore in pre-war Britain is not. But handsome escapee Karl Marsen, who insists on laying low, not letting the authorities know they’re here, is not who he seems. He can “Sieg HEIL!” with the worst of them.

Harrison’s seemingly dizzy, self-absorbed singing sheet music salesman is who Anna is sent to in order to track down her expat father. Gus Bennett — not his real name we learn — is in this resort town next to a naval port to “look after” her father for the British government as Mr. Bomasch consults on British armor and ways to improve it.

Marsen’s spies foil those efforts by nabbing father and daughter, taking them aboard a U-Boat and back to Germany.

Agent Gus, aka Dickie Randall, gets permission from the relaxed, distracted professionals of the British Secret Service to “have a go” at getting them back out.

Dressed as a Wehrmacht engineer and armor expert “from the Siegfried Line,” Dickie will play a former paramour of Anna and “seduce” her into persuading her father to work for the Germans. What he really has in mind is getting them out — by plane, train or automobile.

The Germans are portrayed as officious, almost inept thought police, fussing over the way a Good German should avoid turns of phrase that can be misinterpreted.

“This is a FINE COUNTRY to live in” could be heard as “This is a FINE country to live in,” or “This is a bloody AWFUL country to live in!”

Nazi double-speak is ridiculed for the lie that it is.

“We don’t hate Czechs! We only want to PROTECT them!”

“As you’re protecting the Poles?”

Harrison is in fine form, fresh off the Orient Express thriller “Continental Express” and never-missing a rail travel beat. Lockwood is sexy, intrepid and properly put-out about all of Dickie’s “spend the night together” espionage innuendo.

And Henreid, an Austrian Jew working his way west to Hollywood and screen immortality, makes a perfectly refined, perfectly vile Nazi, an archetype that was chiseled in stone by the time Conrad Veidt played Major Strasser hunting Victor Lazlo all the way to “Casablanca.”

“Night Train to Munich” isn’t one of the great films of its day. Its effects, characters and situations can seem quaint, hasty and cut-rate. There’s an air of “artifact” about it, thanks to its production and release timing.

But Reed showed Britain that he could manage a Hitchcock thriller almost as well as the master. The framing, editing and conspicuous use of shadows sampled here would be put to great use on the streets of Vienna, and below them, in his “perfect thriller,” “The Third Man.”

What makes this an early classic on his resume is his sure hand with comedy and the graceful way he begs, borrows and steals from Hitchcock and even shoehorns in characters from “The Lady Vanishes” into a version that lands bigger laughs as it aims its barbs at the Nazi menace, even as a backs-against-it Britain braced to face that menace alone.

Rating: “approved,” violence, innuendo

Cast: Rex Harrison, Margaret Lockwood, Paul Henreid, James Harcourt, with Basil Radford and Nauton Wayne.

Credits: Directed by Carol Reed, scripted by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. A 20th Century Fox release streaming on Tubi, Criterion, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:33

“Noryang: Deadly Sea,” is a slow-start/big finish epic about Korea’s years-long 16th century conflict with Japan, the Imjin War.

Director Kim Han-min’s CGI-aided sea spectable is the third film in a trilogy about that struggle, following “The Admiral: Roaring Currents,” and “Hansan: Rising Dragon.” This is top-down history that evolves, over the course of this long final film, into combat at its most personal.

We view the conflict from on high, through the Byzantine intrigues of the Japanese court, an uneasy Korean (Joseon) alliance with the Chinese Ming Dynasty. We see the sea battle from the bridge as the commanders test each other over a night-long climactic action in rowed war galleys, which by the time of this conflict — the 1590s — were being superceded by warships powered exclusively by sail, in Europe, at least.

The recently unified Japanese, here referred to by their ancient name, the Wae, invaded Korea with an eye towards marching directly on the Ming on the Chinese mainland. That didn’t work out, and the unifying Japanese warlord, “chief counselor” realizes this on his deathbed.

“Withdraw” their last remaining garrisons on the south of the peninsula is among his final words.

But with the passing of the “unifier,” Japan has both an inherited ruler, and factions vying for power. That “withdrawal,” it is implied, would change the status quo. Some want to fight on, some want to negotiate an exit to preserve land and sea forces, and depending on which day you’re asking them, the Chinese and the Joseon Koreans are willing to listen or are more interested in playing the angles.

That scheming and negotiating eats up the first hour of the film. And for all that, little is made as clear as that last paragraph’s summary.

Putting fleets to sea, plotting strategy, setting traps and springing them on each other takes up most of the latter two acts of “Deadly Sea,” which is a good thing. The swirl of characters and the chaos of combat is where this historical thriller gets its sea legs.

Our three antoganists are the celebrated Korean Admiral Yi Soon Shin (Kim Yoon-seok), the Japanese fleet commander Shimazu (Baek Yoon-Seok) and the Ming military leader Chen Lin (Jeong Jae-yeong).

Complicating matters, Yi Soon Shin lost his son to a Wae massacre, and everybody is sure he and his surviving family want “revenge.” Shimazu is depicted as cagey, determined not just to arrange an evacuation of Japanese invaders, but to “win the war” at sea, gambling that an allied Japanese fleet will join the action in time to impact the outcome.

And Chen Lin has decided that the war is over, the Wae/Japanese have lost, and that no more bloodshed will be necessary. A mere “show of force” will do.

The battle to come will be fought with gigantic armored “turtle ships,” and smaller galleys, with cannons and rockets and muskets and bombs and archery and swordfighting. And drums. There was lots of drumming in rowing galleys, if you remember your “Ben-hur.”

Kim Han-min lets us see maps and war planning, and uses establishing overhead (CGI) shots of fleets in action to recreate the flow of battle in the inky darkness, and then zeroes in on commanders waving swords and shouting “Charge” (in Korean, mostly, with English subtitles) or “ROTATE” or “Withdraw!”

We only glimpse the rowers once, but there’s fierce deck combat — fires and explosions and hailstorms of musketballs or arrows — and all that’s before the order “Prepare to BOARD the enemy!” is barked.

The action sequences make the movie, but it’s also interesting for a non-Asian viewer to take in this picture’s attitudes about its source culture and its neighboring rivals. The Koreans are intrepid, brave and sage, recognizing that the Japanese cannot be trusted and that they will never surrender. The Japanese are cunning, stoic and arrogant, with the battle perhaps avoidable if they’d just “apologize” for their first and not last invasion of Korea.

The Chinese? They’re cagily playing the odds, willing to listen to bribes, honoring their alliance with Korea only up to a point. No, the Koreans can’t trust them, either. Neither can the Japanese.

Performances tend to get lost on canvases this broad, but the leads register, even if the heroic or cowardly offspring and members of the lower ranks get short shrift.

And that first hour and eight minutes of backstory, debates and scantily-detailed planning burdens “Noryang” to an almost unforgivable degree.

I don’t recall whether I reviewed the first film in this trilogy when it came out. But remembering the “turtle ships/secret weapon” nature of “Hansan,” this film’s shifting fortunes, surprise turnabouts and sheer spectacle make it a fine finale, not so much an argument for Korean nationalism as a call to arms to resist the Chinese and Japanese versions of it in a roiled world whose politics are in flux.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Kim Yoon-seok, Jeong Jae-yeong, Baek Yoon-Seok, Yeo Jin-goo, many others

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kim Han-min, scripted by A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:32

A good gimmick goes a long way in a romantic comedy, because basically, there’s been nothing truly “new” in the genre since “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Writer, director, actor and composer Rudy Mancuso borrowed the musical commentator on the action of “Musica” from “There’s Something About Mary.” We hear a busker singing about how our hero needs to “change” as young Rudy passes him on the way into the subway each day.

Instead of Jonathan Richman crooning “Mary Mary, there’s something about Mary,” we hear “It” and “Flash” director (and perhaps future “Batman” director) Andy Muschietti crooning and picking out the musical advice on a guitar.

Cute.

Mancuso “borrows” the lovelorn, comical “guy who just wants to work with puppets” subtext from Jason Segal’s “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” turn.

But what sells this autobiographical musical romance is the adorable touch of having our hero hear the music in everyday life, a distracted young man who imagines “Stomp” production numbers breaking out with the people rattling pots, pans, glasses and cutlery at a diner, in the activities at a street market, in a seafood shop and even in a hospital emergency room.

Mancuso’s picture pops right off the screen, right at the start, with such a number breaking out on a commuter train. He is the deadpan center of all this joyous mayhem, sullenly sitting and recognizing that maybe he does have a problem with focus and concentration.

The rhythm’s got him. Bad.

Every time this gimmick is repeated, it works. And that’s a lucky thing, but there really is nothing new about rom-com plots, situations and dialogue. Mancuso is a Brazilian American Greater Newark (Ironbound) college kid torn between the preppy college girlfriend (Francesca Reale) who is “making plans” for their lives together in “The City” (NYC) and the down to earth, laid-back fish market cutie played by Camila Mendes of “Palm Springs” and TV’s “Riverdale.”

Seriously, if you don’t know how all this will resolve itself, you need to get out more. Or, you know, stream more.

Mancuso, of “Rim of the World,” must’ve handed this script to his “Flash” director Muschietti to land that lovely cameo. Playing a version of himself — the story is pitched as “a true story, unfortunately” — he manages to be a little more than a forelock-flopping haircut and self-conscious lead. But not much more.

But he’s good looking and engaging enough in a part that can’t help but charm. Rudy’s a mama’s boy who talks to his hairdresser mother (Maria Mancuso, awwww) in Portuguese and can barely pay attention in marketing class, drawing page-animations in his notebook, ears perking up at every unusual sound.

The film’s chapters are labeled “Rhythm, “Dissonance,” “Dynamics,” “Melody” and the like.

Rudy must get dumped by his upper-classic girlfriend of four years, Haley, only to face her having “security” related second thoughts. He must be nagged by his mama that “Gringa women are no good,” and have her try to set him up with a Brazilian.

“You’re my mom, not my pimp!”

He confides in Diego, his subway puppet, and in Anwar, the go-with-the-flow food truck operator who serves everybody — Greeks, Muslims and Orthodox Jews — pandering to each customer base as he rolls up, changing menus and hats (yarmulke included) because to Anwar, “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re AT.”

He is played by by that Brigadier General of Banter, J. B. Smoove.

Mancuso cooks up one cute scene after another, with Rudy’s sense of rhythm and knowledge of “The International Language of Music” underscoring the gimmicks he trots out, and the jokes. Meeting college girlfriend Haley in a Brazilian restaurant, he and the house keyboards player swap messages about how badly he’s handling his two-girlfriend situation in rhythmic code.

Mendes and Reale are good, but Mancuso lets his mom steal the darned movie with one saucy, semi-offensive Portugeuse insult after another.

No, there isn’t much to “the story,” and certainly little in the basic situation that we haven’t seen in movies about Italians, Greeks, Spanish, gay or young or old characters.

But the musical novelty numbers absolutely make the featherweight “Musica” come off.

Rating: PG-13, one scene of gun violence, profanity

Cast: Rudy Mancuso, Camila Mendes, Francesca Reale, Maria Mancuso and Jay B Smoove

Credits: Directed by Rudy Mancuso, scripted by Rudy Mancuso and Dan Lagan. An MGM/Amazon release.

Running time: 1:32

Maybe you’ve seen a nature program that tells the story of the long migration of the Monarch butterfly, those beautiful, delicate orange and black lepidoptera that amazingly make their way over vast distances from all over North America, from as far north as Canada, to their winter hatchery in the sanctuaries of Mexico.

Maybe you’ve raised one from crysalis to flight in an elementary school class, or learned of the importance of milkweed to their existence.

But if you’ve ever heard of them referred to as “Brides of the Sun” carrying “the Souls of the Dead,” romantic nicknames for a creature whose vast egg-laying flocks cover the pine and oyamel trees of El Rosario and other forests of  Michoacán, you’ve absorbed the life work of Homero Gómez González, their greatest champion in Mexico, “The Guardian of the Monarchs.”

That’s the title of a Mexican documentary about Homero Gómez, who suffered the fate of many an environmental activist, journalist or citizen who dares to cross the many gangs spread across the country. He was murdered in 2020, and as Emiliano Ruprah’s film makes clear, just getting the government and the police to admit that pretty obvious fact has proven difficult.

The corruption runs deep, and the well-intentioned don’t have a chance.

Ruprah’s film sounds the alarm about this now-endangered species, “a world heritage” as Gómez often noted in videos promoting tourism to see the magic conclave of butterflies gathering near his home. “Guardian” doesn’t just memorialize Gómez. It lays out the threats to the butterflies, the interests that want the lumber that the butterflies flock to in order to lay their eggs, the land armed, police-protected gangs illegally clear cut and plant avocado trees on, the politicians they prop up and the locals and cops they intimidate and kill when somebody crosses them.

The entire police department around Ocampo, and El Soldado, where Gómez’s body was found in a well, was put under investigation after his disappearance.

And yet the police official in charge of the investigation, Mario Gerardo Pinedo, has the gall to sit on camera and insist there was “no evidence” of foul play, despite coroners, reporters and others bringing up all the evidence to the contrary.

Others who seem connected to the disappearance and murder mysteriously turned up dead in the months that followed.

The viewer can be excused for barking at the screen every time Pinedo shows up, “How do you sleep at night?”

Politicians, including a now-former governor, Silvano Aureoles, are implicated. Some defend their actions on camera, others — like politician Karina Alvarado — filed petitions that somehow immunize them from investigation, a pretty damning step to take.

It’s frustrating to see any injustice committed in plain sight and not dealt with, and that’s the feeling this solid, well-intentioned film leaves you with.

Ruprah uses interviews, coverage of festivals, the history of butterfly tourism (falling off due to violence and monarch decline) and reenactments to tell this sad, touching and infuriating story.

But “The Guardian of the Monarchs” leaves one with only glimmers of hope that justice will ever be done — exposing those who don’t tell what they know — or that anything will ever get better. As long as the poverty, the corruption and lawlessness that accompanies it and the avocado-mania that finances forest destruction exist, the monarchs are threatened. If they’re not doomed altogether, it’s because of brave activists like Homero Gómez González and people who demand that his sacrifice be avenged and not be in vain.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Homero Gómez González, Silvano Aureoles, Rebeca Valencia González, Mario Gerardo Pineo, Homero Gómez González IV and Amado Gómez

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emiliano Ruprah. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

“Adagio” is a classic 100 minute thriller in a 126 minute package.

Director and co-writer Stefano Sollima takes his sweet time setting the scene — which he never identifies as greater Rome, Lazio — and takes even longer letting us know what we’re diving into, a tale of blackmail involving mobsters, dirty cops and a young pawn trapped in two worlds.

Sollima takes a longer while introducing the disparate characters, and longer still to identify them by name and association. This slow, “make the audience come to you” mystery becomes seriously tedious, after a while.

Although there are grace notes and riveting touches in the later acts, the finale proves to be an anti-climax as Sollima draws things out some more. He doesn’t even know when to drop the mike.

But it’s all there in the not-exactly-ironic title. As any classical music fan can tell you, “Adagio” means “slowly” in Italian.

We follow the young, headphone-wearing music fan (Gianmarco Francini) into one of those lurid, over-the-top, over-designed movie versions of a disco, where the team of cops tracking “the puppy” have their orders, which they’ve passed on to him. Get something that incriminates someone on one of the many surveillance cameras they’ve planted there.

The kid is in over his depth, surrounded by drag queens and drugs, which he is more than happy to sample. Realizing he’s incriminating himself, he bolts.

That draws out single-father-of-two detective Vasco (Adriano Giannini), in a fury and using his team’s tech expert and “cleaner” (Lorenzo Adorni) and muscle (Francsco Di Leva) as he hunts their “puppy” down.

Whatever their credentials, tech and surveillance expertise, these cops are up to no murderous good.

The kid, Manuel, lives with his aged, addled father (Toni Servillo) whose gangland name — “Daytona” — he drops as he scampers about, trying to find “help” to save his skin and get him out of this jam. He turns to the blind mobster (Valerio Mastandrea) nickamed Polniuman. And Polniuman (say it aloud) sends Manuel to bald, scowling “I can’t help you” badman “Romeo,” played with a largely internalized menace by Pierfrancesco Favino.

“You know a lot of things you shouldn’t know,” “the puppy” is told (in Italian with English subtitles). The viewer? We know little, but we start to find things out, bit by bit as this Byzantine scheme unfolds.

There are old grudges and ancient alliances in play here, old mobster codes and big money and Italian politics being manipulated by dirty cops out for a payday.

A couple of twists remind us of true pieces of American gangland lore — the pose mob boss Vincent Gigante affected for his own safety, etc. And the film’s climax has a brute elegance that makes us long for the more streamlined story that should have led to it.

The Rome depicted here is threatened by wildfires which lead to constant power outages, often at dramatically opportune moments. Sollima (“Gomorrah,” “Sicario 2”) likes telling tales with sweep and allegorical darkness. But even taking that into account, this picture is slow right to the edge of dullness.

Nepo baby Giannini — son of Giancarlo — has the film’s showiest role, a cop who has lost the plot and crosses from “Get that money” to “Clean this up” to “Kill that kid, no matter what.”

But it is the old men and their old ways that carry this slow-footed thriller, with Favino (“Angels & Demons,” “World War Z”) and Servillo (“Il Divo”) lending their “old men still capable of violence” gravitas to a story that would have been better served by quicker pacing.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, drugs, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino, Toni Servillo, Gianmarco Francini, Adriano Giannini, Valerio Mastandrea, Lorenzo Adorni, Francesco Di Leva and Silvia Salvatori.

Credits: Directed by Stefano Sollima, scripted by Stefano Bises and Stefano Sollima. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

You can’t say the dark Spanish comedy “The Coffee Table” isn’t dark enough. It involves the tragic, accidental and bloody death of an infant. But considering the subject matter, maybe the “comedy” could have gone a little further.

Director and co-writer Caye Casas presents us with a “couple in trouble,” a hideous piece of furniture, the pathological liar selling it to them and a wife and new mother so hateful, right down to the 17,000 cigarettes Spanish timbre of her voice, that finding someone or some outcome to root for here is a chore.

There are deadpan laughs in this “How will I ever tell her about the accident?” comedy, but they are few and far between, and strained.

Maria (Estefanía de los Santos) and Jesús (David Pareja) are a long-married 40ish couple who just had a baby. When you see and hear their interactions in the furniture store, you pick up pretty quick on why it took so long for them — or him, at least — to take that step.

Maria is a bit argumentative. Short-tempered. And she calls the salesman (Eduardo Antuña) out on every lie he attaches to this two “fake” gold nude nymphs balancing a glass top table her husband is determined to buy.

Whatever decisions they’ve made as a couple, this one she’s left to him. And she sure as hell isn’t interested in letting him make it. Judging from the item in question, we see her point.

“I don’t want this table in our home,” she growls, in Spanish with English subtitles. But Jesús is still listening to the “Swedish design” and “Chinese” price and “bulletproof glass” claims by the BS artist salesman who hears a lot more about their marriage than would seem necessary as they bicker in the store.

She decided it was now or never on having a child. She dubbed the baby Cayetano, naming him for someone her husband bristles is “a fascist bullfighter.” But at least he gets to pick the table, right?

Imagine his horror when, after assembling the glasstop, noting a “missing screw” and being left alone with the baby for the first time, he trips and the baby bullfighter is killed. Blood everywhere.

Any man who has ever been married will pick up what might be the worst consequence of this. Maria’s justifiable flip-out over this is sure to include the ultimate “I TOLD you so!”

He tries to clean up the blood — he’s injured, too. He tries to secure cleaning products from the neighbor’s 13 year-old monster teen, Ruth (Gala Flores), who INSISTS that he “tell your wife about us.” The little psycho has apparently invented an attraction and “relationship” in her mind, which Jesús cannot talk her out of.

As our incompetent table-shopper struggles with his first babysitting nightmare, he re-encounters the salesman, fends off his younger brother (Josep Maria Riera) and the brother’s pregnant and much younger girlfiend (Claudia Riera) and tries to figure out how to tell his ill-tempered wife this terrible news.

The performances pay off. But the story elements with the funniest possibilities — the salesman, the crazed 13 year-old — dangle out there without any payoff. The biting banter in the opening scene is almost funny, in a cringey way. The building suspense is more pained than amusing, but as such it gives the picture a pathos that the script sets out to upend.

And the horror of what has happened, described in gory detail late in the third act, never quite plays as “We know we shouldn’t laugh, but we must.” Because we — or at least I — didn’t.

Rating: unrated, profanity, dead baby subject matter

Cast: David Pareja, Estefanía de los Santos, Josep Maria Riera, Gala Flores, Claudia Riera and Eduardo Antuña

Credits: Directed by Caye Casas, scripted by Cristina Borobia and Caye Casas. A Cinephobia release.

Running time: 1:31