Movie Nation

Cute and cuddly as a Shaq Bear, and about as competitive as the past couple of NBA seasons have been, “Uncle Drew” is a kid-friendly b-ball fantasy, “Space Jam” without the space or the Looney Tunes.

It’s a feature-length comedy built around those Kyrie Irving-in-old-man-disguise Pepsi commercials from a while back, basically a film of him and a bunch of NBA retirees in old-age makeup, hustling “Young Bloods” at New York street ball.

But it hangs on the comic straight-man stylings of Lil Rel Howery, “coach” of this geezer hoops team.  And Lil Rel, ridiculed as “Hobbit” and “Tiny Tim” by one and all, is basically Kevin Hart lite (only plump), Cedric the Rarely Entertaining.

Howery plays Dax, a Footlocker salesman whose hoop dreams ended in middle school, a game-winning shot blocked by is lifelong nemesis (Nick Kroll). Now he’s gambled everything he has on  team he’s pulled together for the world famous $100,000 Rucker Playground outdoor tourney in New York, only to have Mookie, “the ghost of white boy past” show up and steal that from him, too.

Mookie even steals his gold-digging girl, Jess (Tiffany Haddish, of course).

Now, Dax’s last hope may involve listening to the geezers in the barbershop (J.B. Smoove and Mike Epps). He needs to track down the man of myth, the baller of legend, Uncle Drew (Irving). He had mad game back in the ’60s, but dissension broke up his crew back then. Can he and his 70something teammates still play?

Only a road  trip in Drew’s 1970s vintage Love Wagon (van) to reassemble that team will tell.

The Big Man (Shaquille O’Neal) is running a Deep South martial arts dojo and looks “like Wolverine’s granddad.”

“Pass the ball, Kobe.”

“That sucker punch is the only ‘free throw’ you ever made.”

Shooting guard “Lights” (Reggie Miller) is blind.

“Legally? Or actually?”

Boots (Nate Robinson) is catatonic and in a wheelchair, until the ball is passed his way. And Preacher (Chris Webber) is serving his flock in “Chocolate City” (D.C.) and about to dunk — literally — a baby he is christening when we meet him. His wife (Lisa Leslie of the WNBA) doesn’t approve and chases the van all up and down the Eastern seaboard to rein Preacher in.

We’re set up for a “Blue Brothers” style odyssey, with every player getting the chance to show what they can do, off the court, on the court and on the dance floor. The Old School dance-off is a hoot, but the many, many dead spots deflate that idea, and the endless short guy/old guy/trash talk-pep talks don’t compensate for wit or pace, all this stuff about  “playing the game the way it was meant to be played,” and the only shot you never miss is the one you never take, “mistake that defines your life” lessons.

Believe it or not, they lean hard on the same mantra “Tag” did — “You don’t stop playing because you get old. You get old because you stop playing.”

Erica Ash plays the doting granddaughter/Dax love interest, ESPN takes a co-starring role as this tale is set up by a “30 for 30” documentary and the network’s last “star” pops up, here and there.

And we all wait and wait and josh around with prostate jokes and heart-attacks until “the big game.” If it wasn’t for Webber, given the funniest part to play (over the top pastor) and playing it to the hilt, the dead spots and blase leading man would dull this to the point of distraction.

Howery is funniest in the outtakes over the closing credits, breaking up at what everybody else is doing.

But if nothing else, Irving & Co., with some sympathetic filming and editing, make a great case that basketball, not soccer, can be the world’s “beautiful game,” even if you can’t really play at this level past, oh, 38.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for suggestive material, language and brief nudity

Cast: Kyrie Irving, Lil Rel Howery, Shaquille O’Neal, Lisa Leslie, Chris Webber, Reggie Miller, Erica Ash, Nate Robinson, Tiffany Haddish, Nick Kroll

Credits:Directed by Charles Stone III, script by Jay Longino. A Summit release.

Running time: 1:43

Here’s a little homework, all the Pepsi commercials that feature a certain age-disguised NBA star owning lesser mortals on the playground b-ball courts of America.

Let’s keep expectations for this low, and hope for the best. When the most experienced jock “actor” on board is Shaq, that’s the safe way to approach “Uncle Drew.”

I mean, sooner rather than later, Tiffany Haddish is going to press that “OVER-exposed” button too hard, and it’ll be time’s up. Not yet, but you can see it coming.

The TV spots for Pepsi were a hoot, so fingers crossed.

John Travolta began his latest “comeback” with TV’s “American Crime Story,” playing the canny, dapper, eventually out-of-the-loop defense attorney Robert Shapiro in the O.J. Simpson trial. He was too tall for the part, but he brought pride, vanity and vulnerability to Shapiro and won kudos for doing it.

The best one can say for his newest attempt at returning to relevance, “Gotti,” which staggered onto the big screen this month after months of delays, distributors chickening out, etc., is that he should have stuck to TV. The script isn’t great, the production values New York seamy and there are a couple of supporting players who act well enough to belong here. But Travolta delivers what there is to deliver. The tone, direction and crack-addict editing all let him down.

Seriously, if you didn’t live through this “Teflon Don” era in New York crime and crime headlines, keeping track of the flaccid, choppy and anecdotal flow of the story is nigh on impossible.

You might remember “The Chin,” and “The Bull” and “Gaspipe” and all the Gambinos, Rosellis, Bilottis, DiCiccos, Ruggieros, Castellanos, Cassos and Boriellos involved in one of the noisiest and bloodiests eras in “La Cosa Nostra” history. But chances are, you don’t, no matter how many headlines you read or how many vowels are in your last name.

Kevin Connolly, who finished “Entourage” with the thought, “I want to direct,” finds this feature way beyond his grasp, creating a muddled movie that cannot find the balance between lionizing Gotti as a “Robin Hood,” a man of honor and fierce family devotion, recognizing that whatever New Yorkers chose to see in him, and the brutally simple fact that he was a murderous, overdressed psychopath, a well-dressed mug and a thug.

The first mistake is right before the opening credits, having Travolta, in character and defiant, address the camera directly — “This life ends one of two ways, dead or in prison. I did both!”

The second mistake is those credits, a montage of the real John Gotti’s many headlines, court appearances and smiling TV “perp walks” during his years running the Gambino Crime Family, and facing the justice system for doing it. Travolta looks a bit like him, but this cheapskate blunder takes you right out of the movie.

It’s a tale told in a disorganized, illogical narrated flashback, where the aged inmate Gotti tries one last time to impart “the life,” its code and “manhood” to his son (Spencer Rocco Lofranco, not really living up to his “big break).

John Jr. is thinking of copping a plea. So the dying Don tells him how he became a “made man,”about men he killed, women he threatened. He became “an earner,” the highest praise for the “soldiers” of the pyramid scheme that is mob management. He figured things out.

“Never do anyone a small injury,” he counsels. Don’t trust anything you hear from “New York’s Finest.” The cops? They “serve two masters,” and sometimes, that second master is a rival mob. And lastly, “I don’t trust any man who never did time.”

Stacy Keach deftly plays Gambino family underboss Neil Dellacroce, the mobster who knew his place, let the family pass to weaker, less deserving leadership than him and didn’t create a fuss.

“The boss is the boss is the boss,” he says. “That’s La Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”).”

Gotti wasn’t hearing it. In the tradition of a thousand mob movies before this one, younger John angles his way to power, and when the closing circle of prosecution and exposure forces his hand, he takes action — bloodily and ruthlessly.

Connolly and the screenwriters get lost in red-letter dates, this “hit,” that “meeting,” and the Great Ceremonies (a wedding, a “made man” takes his oath) of “the life.”

And they wallow in the coarse, crude and ugly vernacular of these creeps, the murderous threats that pepper “loving” conversations with the wife (Kelly Preston, Mrs. Travolta), the endless F-bombs, the colorful “Lemme AX you this” and “I made youse a tuna sandwich for the road!”

The man loved his wife, loved his kids, loved to gamble and never forgot an offense. He was “Twenty-four hours, seven days a week STREET,” and proud of it. Worth celebrating? Meh.

It’s a movie of impressionist sketches of Gotti, always dressed in Travolta’s permanent scowl. That’s how this vexing picture works best, as little impressions here and there, the fixed image (from police surveillance footage, immortalized in scores of movies and “The Sopranos”) of a bunch of paunchy, homely middle-aged tough guys, standing around some dumpy storefront, restaurant or “social club” entrance, smoking and making veiled threats, the endless back-stabbing, the liberal application of angry Italian, like it’s a code nobody else knows.

“Gotti” doesn’t really have a point, but there is the suggestion that if he was lionized locally, it wasn’t for the occasional “lemme take care of that” favors — a boxing gym’s rent “fixed” here, neighborhood fireworks sponsored in defiance of police there. The NYPD and local prosecutors, a lot of Italians among them as well (including Rudolph William Louis Giuliani) were in their post-“Serpico” funk, infamous for corruption, doing the mob’s bidding and not worthy of unearned respect. No wonder people mobbed Gotti’s trials and tried to riot and free him when he was finally convicted. He came off as “a stand-up guy,” by comparison.

It’s a bad movie, but it has hints of the simplest failing of a lot of movies made by folks who come from long-form TV. It’s episodic to a fault, with no episodes fleshed out and developed, characters played by actors at least as interesting as Chris Mulkey (as underboss Frank DeCicco) and not the generic goombahs rounded up here.

If they’d sold this to cable — and this film sets the World Record for credited producers, at least ONE of whom should know somebody in TV and made the suggestion — it might have worked, another “American Crime Story,” with a lot fewer F-bombs.

It’s just a mess as is, and the only thing we can be sure it will accomplish is killing off MoviePass, a foolish heavy investor in it, and giving Kevin Connolly’s directing career the old Italian Rope Trick. As in, “Fuggedaboutit.”

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and pervasive language

Cast: John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Stacy Keach, Spencer Rocco Lofranco

Credits:Directed by Kevin Connolly, script by  Lem Dobbs (screenplay), Leo Rossi. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:44

“To Each, Her Own” is a French romantic comedy about a long-together look-alike lesbian couple, one of whom still hasn’t come out to her observant Jewish family.

Simone (Sarah Stern) may celebrate her anniversary with Claire (Julia Piaton) at a lively, gay-friendly party with all her friends. But her giddy, in-the-moment promise to “finally come out” to her folks is quickly abandoned when she heads to home for the High Holidays dinner with her family. 

It’s bad enough that she’s non-observant.

“You think the Nazis asked if you were a practicing Jew?” her mom (Catherine Jacob) bellows, before making a racist crack about the maid. “If you’re going to die for being a Jew, you might as well be a Jew!”

She’s already got a gay brother, and that leads to “what the Torah allows” debates at the dinner table. Her boorish other brother (Arié Elmaleh) is about to marry, and nobody can understand why Simone can’t find someone. He offers to set her up with somebody from work, “They’re all great Jews with good jobs.”

But Claire is who she’s bringing to the wedding, she declares. And then she stammers (the film is in French, with English subtitles), “She’s my, my my…best friend!”

The infuriating David proceeds to set her up via the obnoxious Jewish dating site he manages. That’s a quaint gag for a gay romantic comedy in 2018, but some things move more slowly in the Old World. And the movie has a lot of that — quaint.

Simone talks Geraldine, a co-worker, into accepting in her stead. Again, cute and unrealistic — quaint. A few words of advice about ordering kosher (kosher-ish) and topics to avoid at dinner, and she’s set.

If only Geraldine (Clémentine Poidatz), whom we’ve established is a food sensualist, didn’t forget those instructions the moment she sits down to eat. If only she and the near-Orthodox Eric (Stéphane Debac) hadn’t hit it off — big time.

“He has a JAG!”

Simone has also set off sparks with her favorite hunky Senegalese chef (Jean-Christophe Folly), whom she hasn’t come out to either. All this not-coming-out-to-people is creating a mess, and confusing sexual attractions for Simone.

Maybe impulsively proposing to Claire wasn’t the right move.

“He’s a guy! It doesn’t count.”

The “closet het” (heterosexual) accusations fly and it all comes apart. How WILL Simone get it all back together?

“To Each, Her Own” traffics in stereotypes — treading lightly here, stomping through them in Army boots there.

Simone interacts with three tribes as she seeks her answers. Her lesbian tribe is outraged. Wali, the Senegalese chef, lets her into his community of ex-pats, Senegalese pals who reject going to this or that club because it only has Senegalese women in it. Muslims aren’t crazy about Jews. If they find out….

And Simone’s Jewish family/tribe is sure to the last to know about her sexuality, as if she’s got a firm grip on it herself.

One thing all these tribes seem to have in common, a form of “arranged marriage” hangs over members, expectations.

Confusion reigns and misunderstandings abound as Simone’s on récolte ce qu’on a semé, or as we say in the States, “chickens come home to roost.”

Homophobic white working class men, black women who bark at how white women and black men “never work out,” food-obsessed females moan in ecstasy over sensual meals, lesbian couples who match their hair color, racist bank managers sneer at “Africans,” clannish racist Jews whip out the Holocaust card at the beginning of every argument, clannish African Muslims eschew pork, lust after white French women and recoil at Jews, and composting big city lesbians look on any coupling outside their community as a personal, sexual and political betrayal.

Those are all stereotypes and cliches, kids. Let’s not even get into the comical foreplay practices of the gay brother (Lionel Lingelser) whom Simone needs to comfort her.

Director Myriam Aziza’s film scores points with its funny family angst, amusing generational differences within the gay community (talk of marriage, settling down, babies, which older lesbians see as “boring” and “straight” and selling out).

The title “To Each, Her Own” points of a relaxing of rigid “norms” — based on religion, prejudice, stereotypes and cliches. But Aziza is too busy recycling stereotypes, complicating, recomplicating and building toward a massive toppling of the tower of quaint little lies to really get around to that.

You just know somebody’s going to have a heart attack when the truth — or a version of the truth — comes out. Will it be because she’s with a black guy, or she’s with a gay woman, or that neither of them is Jewish?

The performances are perfectly serviceable, but building this thing around a passive, pathological liar, a literal “love the one you’re with” butterfly, might be the most quaint thing about it. It’s more maddening than “motivated,” more eye-rolling than funny.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexuality

Cast: Sarah Stern, Catherine Jacob, Jean-Christophe Folly, Julia Piaton

Credits: Written and directed by Myriam Aziza. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

As bubbly-gummy and forgettable as a Katy Perry pop confection, and just as forgettable, “SPF-18” is one of those high-gloss “When you grow up in L.A.” summer teen comedies that bear about as much resemblance to real life as oh, “Grease.”

Beautiful young people,  perfectly coiffed, not famous yet, pining over one another, idling away the days in glittering wardrobe changes in between strolls on the beach at Malibu and glimpses of their away-from-LA college futures, and prom night virginity loss

“Why does my first time have to be on prom, anyway?”

Penny (Carson Meyer) is the well-heeled daughter of a “kind of famous” actress. That would be soap actress Linda Cooper (Molly Ringwald), whose “raging self-absorption” comes with the job. Vampy, over-sexed cousin Camilla (Bianca A. Santos) is Penny’s BFF, and her guide to the whole losing your virginity thing.

“So, you do a lot of rolling around?”

Penny’s boyfriend is hunky Johnny (Noah Centineo) who lost his dad in a surfing accident, drives his dad’s motorcycle and has been invited to house-sit his Malibu mansion by dad’s surfing pal Keanu Reeves. Not if Mom (Rosanna Arquette) has anything to say about it. She doesn’t.

They’re what passes for working class out there.

“Somebody call a doctor? Cuz this house is SICK!”

Ash (Jackson Baker) is an aspiring singer-songwriter from Nashville. He shows up to skinny dip in the surf behind Keanu’s house. And camp and play the sax in his tent.

“Where did YOU come from?”

Camilla’s little affluent LA-isms about “state property” and the poor but pretty (and thus entitled, like her), “lucid dreaming” and the “awareness” she substitutes for religion (Ash is Christian) have a hint of vapid Brett Easton Ellis about them. As does the whole air of aspirational affluence and beautiful young people spending money. Ellis is pals with the “director.”

“Your dad taught me that surfing’s like making love. Feels good no matter how you do it.”

Goldie Hawn narrates the damned thing, incessantly. Maybe she’s here to speed things along, “Gold-spain” the simpler-than-simplistic script to the target audience and add gravitas. “SPF” is 75 minute movie that grinds its gears, scene after scene after scene.

Everybody’s just colorless and bland and “nice.” Conflict? Dispensed with entirely, even a potential love triangle is wiped away in some irrational fear of “drama.”

The acting is pretty bad across the board, though Ms. Meyer stands out with her bloodless line readings underneath voluminous hair — “My God, are you bleeding?”

There are cameos from Keanu and “Was that Pamela Anderson?” “Welcome to Malibu!”

And I dare not quote any more dialogue from this lest my computer explode in protest.

Lots of swimsuit scenes, montages set to “Video Kill the Radio Star,” “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Pop Goes the World,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere” and “Magic” by the Cars.

With the cameos (Ringwald and Arquette included), lush locations and music clearance fees he got his backers to shell out for, LA painter and Ellis pal turned director/co-writer (LOL) Alex Israel plainly has more access to money than talent.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sexual material, nudity, language and some drug references

Cast: Carson Meyer, Noah Centineo, Bianca A. Santos, Jackson White, Sean Russell Herman, Molly Ringwald, Rosanna Arquette, narrated by Goldie Hawn

Credits:Directed by Alex Israel, script by Michael Berk. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:15

This October, in theaters, for two nights only, a faith-based movie embracing the faithless, truthless, feckless, sexist, racist, Godless Russian puppet who “at least isn’t that WOMAN.”

No, churches don’t play political kingmakers. Nooo. OK they do. Praying for Obama’s death over the years has them relieved they have a “leader” more like themselves.

You know, stupid white and bigoted, unable to spell “hypocrisy.”

And churchgoing conservatives don’t understand “cognitive dissonance,” or the irony of making a “pussy grabbing,” “pee-pee tape” treasonous cheat and vulgarian as their champion. And never will, until the last meth lab burns down around their ears.

This movie might have offered something to the debate, but the filmmakers were too gutless to argue that “hastening Armageddon and The Rapture” is their end game.

Sorry, I stumbled across this abomination today and after I stopped laughing, I just had to share it.

Sure looks like it.

This George Tillman drama is based on the Angie Thomas novel, a ripped-from-today’s-headlines story of a shoot-on-suspicion police killing and the prep school girl (Amandla Stenberg of “Everything, Everything”) who witnesses it and decides to speak out as unrest over just this sort of shooting breaks out.

Common, Regina Hall and Anthony Mackie are the big names in the cast. “The Hate U Give” looks topical, touching and very good, and opens Oct. 19.

Some people have an eye for it, a grasp of someone so different the zeitgeist changes overnight, that quality that makes a star. And those folks don’t all work for movie studios, publishers, TV networks or record companies.

Sometimes, they’re journalists.

“Life” makes for an unusual take on the stardom of James Dean. His arrival on the scene just as youth culture, The Beats, rock’n roll and “The Method” were about to roll over America like a just-started-shaving tsunami, might have been foretold by Brando, who preceded him, or Elvis, who blew up at the same time.

But this brooding, proto-“Beat” punk “artist” “discovered” by the last great days of “the studio system” was no sure thing.

Until he met the photographer who carved his image in ice — iconic still photographs that captured his insolence, his disaffected youth, his uncompromising cool.

Robert Pattinson is Dennis Stock, that photographer. We meet him at a 1955 Hollywood party, just another ambitious shutterbug dreaming of fame, gallery shows and respect, because “nobody respects photographers in Hollywood.”

Nicholas Ray (Peter Lucas) is showing off Natalie Wood (Lauren Gallagher), a child star about to transition to adult roles in Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause.” The director still hasn’t found his leading man, though. Even though he’s sitting at the bar at the party, bored.

That would be young Mr. Dean, gawky, bespectacled, just wrapped on “East of Eden.” Dane DeHaan, long-hyped as another “next James Dean,” and widely ridiculed for it, with bombs from “Valerian” to “Tulip Fever” to “Knight of Cups,” to his credit, takes on Dean.

Pattinson is spot-on as a striver, an ambitious divorced husband and negligentm workaholic dad who recognizes, after the semi-flirtatious and always casual Dean invites him to a preview of “Eden,” that this guy is the Next Big Thing.

“It’s Hollywood,” Dean mumbles, dismissively.

“What you’re doing isn’t Hollywood.”

Stock can’t sell his “photo essay” pitch, maybe for “Life Magazine,” to his agent/editor (Joel Edgerton). But he will.

“There’s an awkwardness” he can’t quite articulate. The kid is “very pure,” and “Something’s changing, Jimmy’s a part of that.”

DeHaan? I’m going out on a limb here and saying he grows on you. With his friendly, laid back Indiana drawl, he comes off as vaguely flirtatious (to both sexes), sleepy, with a kind of high, soft voice — annoying, inventive, insistently passive and intent on Devil may care cool — kind of like Dean himself. DeHaan took a bit of a pounding when “Life” came out, and frankly, it’s undeserved.

The picture may meander even as director Anton Corbijn (“The American,” “A Most Wanted Man”) plunges into not just recreating an era, but over-indulging in the complex, teasing, begging relationship between the about-to-be star and the needy photojournalist condemned to shoot press conferences, parties and studio-sanctioned still images as a set photographer.

“Wow, they let you on the set? You must be well-behaved!”

But I think DeHaan is a good-enough Dean, as good a Dean as Dean himself deserves, a bongo-playing hipster, affecting while pretending not to use affectations, unguarded enough to insult the producer of “Eden” when the press asks him if he’d have jumped at the chance to make “The Boy From Oklahoma,” a Jack Warner bomb starring Will Rogers Jr.

“Didya SEE it?” he boyish giggles to the reporter who asks the stupid question.

Corbijn leads us through this world, letting us meet the stars ( Eartha Kitt, Julie Harris, Raymond Massey, Natalie Wood) of the age, including the Italian bombshell Pier Angeli (Alessandra Mastronardi) who was involved with Dean at the time.

“Who do you think will be beeeeger?” she demands of Stock, “Jeemy or Poll (Paul Newman, with whom she co-starred in a couple of films)?”

The minx. It wouldn’t matter. She was still going to marry Vic Damone.

The dazzling impersonation here is Ben Kingsley, playing the powerful and grudge-carrying Warner brother, Jack Warner, one of the Last Titans of Old Hollywood.

“You’re an intelligent boy, right? Follow certain rules…I’m not sure we should emphasize the rebel in you, Jimmy.” And then the naked, brutish threat — “Do you want to be working back at the CBS parking garage?”

Corbijn and the script string out the “courtship” between photographer and future star. “I’m going to make you a star!” Dean is evasive, “Do I like the sound of that?” He isn’t sure he wants that, or that he wants “to rush it. ”

Pattinson’s Stock grows more frantic as Dean prevaricates, dances off with Eartha Kitt (Kelly McCreary) and lets some flirtatious pal at the Actor’s Studio introduce Stock to “uppers.” Stock’s deadline approaches and his agent/editor tears apart the shots he’s taking.

There’s no guile to this James Dean, which may be inaccurate. But this “friendship” seems damned one-sided. And Stock’s editor is more blunt.

“You’re chasing a nobody who likes to be chased.”

Then, a rainy day on Times Square, he’s hungover. The “talent” is late and the photographer has lost all his confidence. And hell, let’s just get this over with.

If “Life” has a point, it’s about images and how they are crafted — by the artist on either side of the camera. Dean, for his feigned disaffection, “performed” for Stock. And Stock might have pictured “a sunny day,” but sunny days are never as arresting as the dull grey hues of a rainy, chilly late winter day in Manhattan. He lucked into an iconic image.

Pattinson may not be the best actor to convey naked, craving desire (for fame), but he’s pretty good at matching what Stock must have done when confronted by Dean — caring without letting on he cares. And the “Twilight” star absolutely nails Stock’s first-ever experience of “uppers” — chattering complaints and hopes and disappointments without taking a breath.

DeHaan has snatches of Dean the way he was, and the way we remember him, which aren’t always in sync. Put the glasses on him and he’s “the artist,” deep, sensitive, visiting home in Indiana or his “happiest place” The Actor’s Studio. Take the glasses off and he’s a Hollywood star, whether he welcomes that or not.

The biggest problem with “Life” might be how long it goes on past its climax, trips to Indiana, the “East of Eden” premiere, soul-searching and tears for the life Dean (and to some extent Stock) will leave behind.

But if you’re a Hollywood history junky like me, you won’t mind this excess, or the film that Corbjin, with each artful visual composition (filmmakers do that in movies about artists) builds around this little known relationship and the seminal moment in culture that it produced.

MPAA Rating:R for some sexuality/nudity and language

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Dane DeHaan, Lauren Gallagher, Alessandra Mastronardi, Peter Lucas, Ben Kingsley

Credits:Directed by Anton Corbijn, script by Luke Davies . A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:51

Nobody in this corner of the woods around Mount St. Helens, in Washington State, wants to acknowledge it. They don’t want to call it by name.

Your fiance got snatched, tent and all dragged off in the dark of night? Your pickup got pounded to pieces?

“Could’ve been a grizzly.”

They haven’t heard the rumbling moans, the knocking in the dead of night in the middle of the endless forest. They haven’t seen skulls dangling from trees. Hell, they haven’t seen the footprints.

“Big Legend” is a slow-footed bigfoot horror tale, a story of an unprovoked attack and the survivor’s guilt that sends the “ex-Special Forces” woodsman Tyler (Kevin Makely, a Bradley Cooper look-alike) black into those forbidding woods “looking for answers.”

Yes, he is armed to the teeth. No, he doesn’t have a cell phone, sparing us the “No bars, NO BARS!” wilderness thriller cliche.

Writer-director Justin Lee has lulled us, almost to sleep, with a sedentary, lovey-dovey prologue as Tyler delivers his “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you” lies to the woman (Summer Spiro) he wants to marry.

Her “If we get eaten, I’m gonna KILL you” is the film’s lone funny line.

Tyler doesn’t want to believe in legends, and spends a year in the psyche ward afterward dealing with his and society’s refusal to accept what he heard — knocking, moans — and saw — rock cairns, a gigantic flash of grey fur in the dark, yanking a tent with the screaming Natalie inside.

But Mom (Adrienne Barbeau) taught him never to leave big questions unanswered. And once he runs into the beer-swilling poacher (Todd A. Robinson), he figures out he’s not crazy after all. The new guy just calls what’s out there “The Big Man.”

“Big Legend” settles into a deadly stalk and a survivalist quest. Guns and military training may not be enough to take down, or evade, “The Big Man” in his own element.

Lee, a screen newcomer with three low-budget pics slated for release this year, manages a few hair-raising moments and stages good attacks and fights. Plotting, dialogue, characterizations and coda would be his weakest skills, at this point.

“Big Legend” delivers “Revenant” scenery and generic monster-in-the-dark fights, but just lumbers along, barely suggesting forward motion at all.

Makely is adequate, but not an arresting screen presence. The script gives no one a moment to shine, though Robinson had a potentially fun cliche to play, the grizzled backwoods sage who calls Tyler “Chief” in between belts from his flask. Pity he couldn’t do more with him.

That’s the over-arching knock on the picture — lack of invention and effort. It’s not enough to pick your setting and select your monster. You’ve got to make more of it, get more human interplay, create more suspense. The odd chill is never enough, not in this crowded horror marketplace, especially if you’re deluded enough to think you’ve got a franchise on your hands.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast:  Kevin Makely, Summer Spiro, Todd A. Robinson, Adrienne Barbeau, Lance Henriksen

Credits: Written and directed by Justin Lee. A Vega Baby.Sony release.

Running time: 1:28

Monique is a mess.

We get an earful of that the moment we meet her. Her clothes are being hurled out a window and the profanity comes fast and furious — from her, a wiry, raging teen with dyed coppery hair, and from the foster parent who is doing the hurling.

Monique has been “messing with a man twice” her age — her stepfather. Another inner city foster home bites the dust.  The entire housing project has to hear about it, through a torrent of curses about how “your ass about to learn” what happens when you pull that. At 17, no less.

“Ain’t my fault she ain’t learn how to please her man,” Mo’ sniffs.

Mo (Elvire Emmanuelle)  steals. She defies whatever foster parent is saddled with her. She skips school. She comes on to men, uses men and boys. She even misuses her childhood pal Omari (Jharrel Jerome), the one her junky/ex-con dad taught to wrestle, by staging matches for Happy Meal toys between them when they were tykes.

Now, Dad (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is out of jail with no interest in resuming fatherhood.

“What you need me for anyway? You’re a grown woman. You go your way, I go mine. See each other along the way.”

And Monique, fighting in school, punching the world when she isn’t giving Omari (and his coach) an earful about tactics and technique, has just one way out, one way to get her dad’s attention, one place to channel all this fear and rage and aggression into — wrestling.

“First Match” is a gritty streetwise high school wrestling tale and coming of age/finding your “thing” drama. Emmanuelle makes a fearsome first film impression as Mo, a kid worth giving up on, which is why almost everyone has.

Coach (Colman Domingo) isn’t interested in her “outlet for my anger” needs. But he’s not above challenging her, himself and the lackluster kids already picked for the squad with Monique’s skills and psychotic temper.

“Practice starts at three, which means you’ve got four minutes to stop wasting my time.”

Domingo’s tough love take on that role gives us the first likeable character in “First Match,” built around an intensely unlikeable, promiscuous, trash-talking punk who sexually shames the boys who pair up with her at practice.

“You never touch a girl before?”

Even sweet Omari gives us a dose of “It ain’t right” for her to be on the team.

“Get your girl in line, Omari.”

Weight mismatches just piss her off. She may have sucker-punched Malik’s girl, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to let the star of the team pin her, even in practice.

The father-daughter scenes writer-director Olivia Newman cooks up have a flinty authenticity, the one thing her ex-con now janitor Dad could teach her was to not care what anybody else thinks of her, and not take anything off anybody. She wins a match? Maybe a hug is in order. Maybe a love-tap to the side of her helmet. Mateen sells this relationship, from disinterest to toothy enthusiasm.

Emmanuelle hurls herself into the physicality of the role, a bit obvious with her indicators — temper, disappointment, focus, fear — but dazzling in her mat savvy.

Her confidence with the cutting comebacks betrays a spitfire sure she can hold her own, with or without rules.

Wrestling is her lifeline, the “discipline and all that” thing she can throw back at her social worker (Eisa Davis) who must explain that, in turn, to the not-much-English “Spanish Lady” (Kim Ramirez) who is her last shot at sticking with a foster parent, which becomes the film’s funniest scene.

“La lucha libre?”

And damned if — don’t be shocked — this hardboiled hood rat doesn’t start to soften up and connect, with teammates, her father and herself. Not right away, not so quickly she doesn’t spread more hurt.  People don’t change overnight. And everything off the mat is more likely to be a let down than anything that happens after the whistle blows.

Newman, making her feature film directing debut, stages the matches in tight closeups, foggy wrestler reactions to slams and eyes narrowing into inner resolve. She’s not above doing the whole match montage set to hip hop, the hoary cliche of every sports movie — ever.

And the picture veers into a seriously hackneyed sidetrack or two late in the third act. You kind of wish it wouldn’t, but there’s not enough here without some other story wrinkle, some extra set of obstacles.

“There is no losing, only winning and learning,” coach preaches. But the “learning” peripheral distractions hurt the film.

The film “First Match” parallels most closely is “Girl Fight,” and it’s not in that film’s brutal league. But the petite Ms. Emmanuelle, fierce as she is, can’t carry her film to that level.

But she can take compensation from this. “Girlfight” made Michelle Rodriguez a star.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, fisticuffs, profanity, substance abuse discussed.

Cast:  Elvire Emanuelle, Jharrel Jerome, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Colman Domingo

Credits: Written and directed by Olivia Newman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42