Movie Nation

Catherine Walker, Cillian Murphy, Andrew Scott and Eva Birthistle star in this Irish melodrama from the writer of “Boy A” and “Intermission.”

John Carroll Lynch, Matt Bomer and Maura Tierney star in this story of loss, grief, compassion and that LGBT neighbor who gives a man who has given up purpose.

It’s set in West Hollywood, kind of ground zero in the world this story presents. Sweeter than “Tangerine,” less challenging perhaps. But a grasp at tolerance in increasingly intolerant times.

“Anything” is still making the rounds of film festivals, at the moment. But with that cast, it’ll land somewhere we can see it.

This is based on the best-selling memoir about “The Disease that Almost Killed Me.”

Oops. Spoiler alert? Moretz, Jenny Slate and Tyler Perry are New York Post colleagues, with Moretz playing Susannah Calahan, whose nightmarish, little known autoimmune illness was the subject of her 2012 book. 

Good cast, probably not a feature with box office potential, so Netflix is a better place for it than say “Lifetime.”

Chinese expat filmmaker Nanfu Wang came to America sometime after stirring up trouble with her documentary “Hooligan Sparrow,” in which she followed an activist trying to get justice for six girls abused by their school principal in a totalitarian state where such things officially do not happen.

So the idea of “freedom” to her is intriguing, intoxicating and malleable. Upon coming here, she stumbles across a handsome young “homeless by choice” blond and decides to follow him on his travels, sampling his lifestyle.

Dylan Olsen is just like anybody else, he insists. “I Am Another You” is a line from a poem he’d written based on what he thinks is a Mayan form of greeting. Wang had the subject of her next movie, a documentary with an open-minded approach to freedom and homelessness, and Olsen, a fresh-faced ex-Mormon of about 20, had given her its title.

“Getting lost is where I’m found,” he preaches, and she wants to taste that.

She shows Dylan how to use her gear so that she can be a part of this personal essay. But as they wander coastal Florida, sleeping in parks, eating from trash cans, charming people on the street, restaurant patrons and bagel bakery employee, conning vacation time share operators (who will pay you to sit through a presentation), “I Am Another You” changes subjects, even though Wang is slow to figure that out.

It is only later that she notices that this extremely affable young man, always cadging smokes, is also always having a drink — beer, wine, whisky, vodka.

She conducts little tests, experiments to see how Dylan charms his way through life without work or purpose beyond “eating, happiness and community,” she hides with her camera and sees him work his magic on strangers without her camera egging them on. People offer him/them rides, meals, take them home to put a roof over their head for the night.

But Wang, and most reviews of “I Am Another You,” miss the obvious — the reason for Olsen’s dazzling “success” at homelessness. Track back to that second paragraph above, “handsome young ‘homeless by choice’ blond.” Strangers are drawn to Dylan for the same reason she was — he’s beautiful, with the teeth and articulation that suggest he had a solid childhood, some education and proper health care. He is a walking advertisement for free-spirit, hoboing as a lark. And in North America, if you’re blond and pretty, the world, even the homeless one, is your oyster.

You don’t even have to be blond. Google “hot homeless guy” and revisit that meme of a few years back.

“I Am Another You” seeks answers, years later, from Dylan’s family, and through his parents and siblings, we and Wang pick up on the substance abuse, the mental illness that his parents might not have been aware of when they indulged his need to “see where the road takes me” impulses.

“I Am Another You,” now streaming on Amazon, is never judgmental, although Dylan gets a tiny taste of that from one (among many) religious stranger. And that’s about his lifestyle. The film never judges him for his drinking, his mooching or his illness and accepts his diagnosis and acceptance of another reality at face value.

Part of the entertainment value here is smirking at the naivete of the filmmaker. Wang confesses to being emboldened by her “sampling” of homelessness, the liberating notion that there are survival skills (sneaking into locked parks to sleep, figuring out which bathrooms will give you time to get wholly cleaned up) which, once acquired, reassure you that you can always survive.

But seriously, don’t try this at home unless home is Florida, Southern California or Hawaii. And don’t even think of it if you don’t have the good looks and confidence that comes with pretty white boy privilege. Because the wrong hair, the wrong skin and bad teeth wipe away the charm and let the desperation show.

MPAA Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, mental illness, smoking

Cast: Dylan Olsen, Nanfu Wang

Credits: Written, directed and narrated by Nanfu Wang. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:20

They are the foot soldiers of the affluent, the safety net of the successful.

They are routinely humiliated, some of them. They are anonymous, have credit for whatever miracles they perform stolen and get no respect at all.

“Set It Up” is another comedy that sends up the rage, hysteria and petty indignities of executive assistants  — lives that are not their own, hours that are ungodly, endless errands, hours spent “on hold,” in lines, wrangling and cajoling.

They should have their own hashtag — “#ourlivesdontmatter.”

They endure the rage, hysteria and humiliation of their bosses, their “betters,” tirades that they pay forward on down the line, berating and begging service sector drones and interns who are not impressed with the punch line to every request/demand that their petulant, bratty imperious bosses insist they pass on.

“I will get fired!”

But that’s just the setting, the milieu, the icing on the cake. This is a romantic comedy, and as rare as it is for the big screen to give us one of those that works, it hurts doubly when one finally comes along, and it’s on Netflix.

Harper (Zoey Deutch) works for dragon lady and Dartmouth snob Kirsten (Lucy Liu) at a sports web start up.

Charlie (Glen Powell) is the put-upon exec assistant to volatile venture capitalist Rick (Taye Diggs). He must have pledged the right fraternity at the right Ivy League school to be standing outside an exclusive club, missing another meal waiting like a peon, putting his girlfriend on hold, for this jerk.

No, you don’t get to go home/go on a date after this long wait. You’re coming back to the office with Rick.

“Should I order you some dinner?”

“Of course not, I just had my damn dinner. Hold my juice. Open the damn door.”

Ten minutes later, “Where’s my dinner?”

That’s how Charlie and Harper “meet cute.” Kirsten and Rick both want food delivered, “or else.” Harper ordered it but has no cash, Charlie followed orders and did NOT order food. They work in the same building, two desperate, exhausted assistants, one deliver guy with two meals.

“This is DEF-CON 5!”

“You know ‘DEF-CON 5 means everything is like, totally safe?”

“You’re a MONSTER!”

His date’s given up, his roomie is a mouthy, salty gay guy (Pete Davidson) who, of course, closed the deal this night — again.

And Harper? Her roommate gets engaged later that night. Life is literally passing both of them by.

“I can’t leave until she leaves.”

“I’m always here. I NEVER leave.”

What they need, what they figure out, aside from the fact that they’re both 28 and have no lives, is that their bosses have no lives. Unless their dream is to become just like them, action must be taken — drastic Cyrano de Bergerac action.

“Cyrano? We are full-on ‘Parent Trapping’ them!”

They know their bosses too well, every phobia, quirk and predilection. They will never know. Charlie won’t hear it. Until Suze his perpetually disappointed model/girlfriend, bails. He’s in.

And without remembering how they met and not knowing the future, they plan their moves.

“We need a MEET CUTE.”

The game is afoot and the plot is hatched, spying, intervening, etc. Enlisting other underlings like the building maintenance man (Titus Burgess of “Kimmy Schmidt”) might help. Or not.

“Set It Up” runs with this sitcom set-up as far as it can, and then some. It gets by on witty banter, crackling-cute leads and not-wholly-overfamiliar NYC locations.

Liu is an old hand at doing “cruel” and self-absorbed. Diggs finds that it’s not a stretch for him, either. He throws an epic tantrum. What is adorable here is the suggestion that this “gotta find her a man/him a woman” conceit strips the rude right off their characters. They play the hell out of both extremes.

“Why are you still talking?”

Deutch, of “Before I Fall” and “Everybody Wants Some,” gives this the spark it needs, and Powell, of “Sand Castle” and Deutch’s  “Everybody Wants Some” co-star, catches that spark and runs with it. This is tetchy, testy chemistry, even if each is dating somebody else now that they finally have free time.

Davidson, of “Saturday Night Live,” lands a couple of laughs, only when he interacts with Deutch. He serves as father-confessor/voice of reason to Charlie. Who has to figure out how important his own “meet cute” could be.

Katie Silberman’s script has a flip, zingy quality at its best. But like any rom-com that works, it takes at least one time-out to reach for the heart. Listen for the “Like because, love despite” speech. Good writing.

These hazing ritual/torment your assistant stories have been around since “Swimming With Sharks” and “The Devil Wears Prada.”

But the romantic twists here, the sharp on-the-same-page cast and sparkling banter — “It’s been so long since I drank, I have the tolerance of a fetus” — lift “Set it Up” beyond the wish-fulfillment fantasy banal, a rom-com real winner.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Lucy Liu, Zoey Deutch, Glen Powell, Taye Diggs, Pete Davidson, Titus Burgess

Credits:Directed by Claire Scanlon, script by Katie Silberman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

Gal G posted this on Twitter, giving her fans a peek at the no-longer-WWI-era costume.

“Wonder Woman 1984” opens in Nov. of 2019, and then there are the “Justice League” and other DC appearances, etc.

“Incredibles 2” made it an incredible weekend at the box office, blowing up with a family-friendly $180 million+ take, when all is said and done Sunday night.

Deadline.com, which consistently underestimates the Saturday take of kids/family films, was very close to the mark this weekend after earlier prognostications of $175.

For those who haven’t heard, “Incredibles” is a dazzler and loads of fun, but it may be a downer to at least one corner of the audience. It has some pretty serious strobing effects related to its villain, “ScreenSlaver.” Viewers diagnosed with epilepsy, consider yourselves warned.

“Tag” did a little better than expected Saturday and may be close to $15 million, when the weekend’s done. A PG-13 “Tag” could have cleared $20. Just saying.

“Superfly” is slick and amoral and glossy and damned quotable, but the no-name cast hurt this one and the lack of star sizzle is most keenly felt in the leading man. Might stick around and make its money in future weeks, but it’s earned $8 since opening Wed., and the weekend was a serious bust.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor” is winning that per-screen race, still on fewer than 100 screens. We’ll see how Mister Rogers does when he’s on 500 or so.

“Gotti,” a kicked-around, supposedly unreleasable John Travolta mob bio-pic, didn’t crack the top ten. I’d better see that Tuesday, as that dog will be gone in a flash.

Mia Wasikowska has often had a light touch, but Robert Pattinson?

Take away the (literal) glitter in his makeup from the “Twilight” movies, the need to be serious most any place else, and he can do deadpan with the best of them. Yeah, he’s done comedy before, but seriously, you have never seen “R Patts” like this.

Wasikowska and Pattinson took a flyer with “Damsel,” a comic Western by actors turned first-time feature directors, the Zellner Brothers. And for 75 minutes or so, their leading man and leading lady are a sagebrush-and-saddle-sore delight.

It’s just that the inexperienced Zellners turned that into a 113 minute movie, one with too little shared screen time between the co-stars and a protracted and far less whimsical third act.

Pattinson plays Daniel Alabaster, and his screen entrance here is one of the ages. He rows to a foggy, scenic Western show, opens the crate he has on board and the cutest miniature horse ever trots out.

No, he doesn’t ride it. When Daniel gets into “town,” a veritable freak show of drunks, murderers, bad wigs, bad teeth and a short-armed piano player, he spends a lot of time explaining the horse, wincing at whisky (which he doesn’t like) and brushing off insults to his manhood.

He’s a man with a mission. He’s looking for Parson Henry (David Zellner). And once he’s sobered him up, they set to honoring their contract.

The Parson is to accompany Daniel as they travel to meet his intended, the fair and dainty Penelope (Wasikowska).

I should mention that the opening credits of “Damsel” are set at a square dance and “cake walk,” and we have rarely seen two actors on a no-budget Western dancing and interacting with more unalloyed delight.

It’s also worth mentioning that the first scene after that is between an embittered old preacher (Robert Forster) and a “Go West, young man” (Zellner) greenhorn, with whom he inveighs about trying to “spoon feed religion to the savages” as they wait for a stagecoach in the scenic netherworld of Monument Valley. The crazy old man passes on his profession, and Bible and raiments to the kid.

Daniel? He’s got a picture of Penelope in his watchcase, a guitar (he’s written her a song, “My Honey Bun,” the funniest moment in the movie), a rifle, a six-shooter and a miniature horse he knows she’ll love, a horse named Butterscotch.

“I’m just a man who believes in love.”

The preacher, in his enforced sobriety, starts to wonder what this dude’s deal is. And then a shootout and chase give away the game. Penelope’s been “kidnapped.” Daniel is hellbent on getting Penelope back. The Parson isn’t just his preacher. He’s to be his posse.

The filmmakers lean heavily on the sardonic here. This is “Raising Arizona” without the breathless pace and unrelenting dimwit buffoonery. The leads dazzle, but the film around them tests your patience, after a while.

Seriously, tighter cutting, maybe workshopping the script with folks who know Westerns could have rendered this into the bouncy, edgy delight they were going for.

The anachronisms in their speech are funny, and the supporting characters, the ones rendered into “types,” pay off. But both Zellners wrote themselves acting roles in it (Nathan plays a fur trapper/mountain man whistling “Aloutte” when we meet him). Both parts should have been smaller.

It’s the tale’s dark twists and the characters’ quirky deviations from Old West cliche that must have drawn in Pattinson and Wasikowska. But if there’s one thing those giddy opening credits show us, they needed more screen time together — preferably flashbacks.

“Damsel” could have joined the ranks of, if not great Western comedies (“Destry Rides Again,” “Support Your Local Sheriff”), at least pretty good ones (“Cat Ballou,””Support Your Local Gunfighter”).

As it is, we can guffaw at the characterizations and situations for a good hour before that horse is plum played out.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence, language, sexual material, and brief graphic nudity

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson, David Zellner, Robert Forster

Credits: Written and directed by David and Nathan Zellner. A Magnolia  release.

Running time: 1:53

You always knew Moe Berg, the big league catcher and quiz show king turned OSS spy during World War II, would make an interesting movie.

And that’s what “The Catcher was a Spy” is — interesting. That it’s not riveting or fascinating or edge-of-your-seat dazzling may owe as much to the man who was the subject of that titular biography and the film built around him.

He “knows how to keep a secret,”  Berg (Paul Rudd) assures the pre-CIA OSS chief “Wild Bill” Donovan (Jeff Daniels) in an interview for what he hopes will be an interesting post-baseball career. The real Berg, smart but close-mouthed, famous but not that famous, held a lot close to his vest. The film implies this was because he was a closeted homosexual. And there’s nothing conclusively factual in that regard.

So maybe he dressed up in Japanese garb and smuggled a film camera to the roof of a building during an all-star baseball tour of Japan in the late 1930s because he was a patriot. Or maybe he liked keeping secrets from people, including the friendly college professor (Hiroyuki Sanada) who approached him and might have bedded him.

The Japanese didn’t develop radar. But gaydar, apparently, was no problem.

The film’s Berg maintained a torrid relationship with a piano teacher (Sienna Miller), never more torrid, the film suggests, than when homophobic teammates on the Boston Red Sox assumed he was “queer.”

A smart baseball player, a lifetime .250 or so hitter, so educated (with a PhD, with degrees from Princeton and Columbia) that he was known in sports columns, on radio quiz shows and around the league as “the Professor,” that sort of slur was almost bound to happen in the 1930s.

But “The Catcher was a Spy” loses some of its edge over that very mystery, the uncertainty about who this man really was. Whatever Rudd, the screenwriter and director have to work with feels circumscribed by how closely they want to hew to the historical facts of his story, handcuffed by the gay life they cannot prove he had.

What “Catcher” does best is recreate the period, the sense of a man who was much more than this game he loved and clung to beyond his prime. Even as his Sox manager Joe Cronin (Shea Whigham) insists it’s time to “hang up the cleats and coach,” Berg is hellbent on maintaining a toehold in the playing part of the game.

He shows off his multi-lingual skills in Japan (amusingly), and in tracking down the one Princeton colleague he knows can get him into Washington, post Pearl Harbor. Japanese, German, Italian, French, he speaks them all.

And when the time comes and somebody with his athletic prowess, focus and linguistic adaptability is needed, he’s off that boring desk job and in the field, trying to help figure out if the Germans are close to having an atomic bomb.

Berg’s compelling story — not quite as sizzling as most spy fiction (again, they were sticking close to the truth) — lured a dazzling cast to the film. Tom Wilkinson, Guy Pearce, Daniels and Miller, Paul Giamatti (as a scientist) and Mark Strong, playing the Nobel Prize winning German physicist Werner Heisenberg, Berg’s quarry, all signed on.

That wasn’t the case in terms of writer and director. Ben Lewin may be a veteran of decades of character dramas (“Georgia,” “Please Stand By”), but this isn’t his bailywick. He handles the limited combat sequences well, but there’s no tension or urgency to any of this.

The stakes are explained, and anybody who knows anything about Berg or World War II Nazis-and-the-Bomb movies will know the shorthand — splitting the atom, “heavy water”  and the like.

But he’s no Spielberg and this is no “Bridge of Spies.”

Rudd’s turns as “Ant-Man” underscored his physical suitability to the role. He’s a convincing, squat catcher-type big leaguer, and a somewhat interesting (short of fascinating) “man of mystery” who holds his own with the heavyweights he co-stars with.

It’s just that “Catcher,” in the end, is as superficial and glib as the punned title of Nicholas Dawidof’s biography, which became the title of the film. Here are some (not all) highlights of Berg’s storied life, here’s his Big Moment, here’s what we think underscored his personality.

The movie is imminently watchable, and the surface sheen is fine, but the real Berg remains more mystery than man with a mission.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality, violence and language

Cast:  Paul Rudd, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels, Paul Giamatti, Mark Strong, Hiroyuki Sanada, Guy Pearce, Jeff Daniels, Connie Nielsen

Credits:Directed by Ben Lewin, script by Robert Rodat, based on the Nicholas Dawidof biography. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:38

Nicolas Cage has played a few cops in his time.

Nowadays, when his character says “I’m about to retire,” we can believe it. He’s put in his time and the miles show.

“211” is a low-budget heist picture based on a real bank robbery, with Cage’s cop taking a high school kid on a “ride along” and stumbling into a long and bloody siege at that bank.

I have a soft spot for Cage and his many films in the B, C and D movie wilderness. This one could be all right, and at least isn’t cheesy sci-fi or some Bangkok-set fiasco.