Movie Nation

The chief appeal of a “Calendar Girls,” “Poms,” or “80 for Brady” movie is the chance to see venerable and venerated film stars taking themselves on a trip down memory lane, and us along with them.

Such movies are an outreach to older audiences, who rightfully feel left out of the movie-going conversation as Hollywood has, at least recently, been all about the youth movie market with little time for anything else.

If only “The Magic of Belle Isle” or “And So It Goes” or that Oscar winners chasing Tom Brady ego trip were any good, maybe that audience could be lured back, if only out of nostalgia. They showed up for “Brady,” at least.

“Queen Bees” is another missed opportunity. An almost laughless “Mean Girls in a Retirement Community” comedy built around Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn, Emmy winner Jane Curtin and screen icons James Caan, Ann-Margret and Loretta Devine, it has possibilities baked into it, and little to show for them.

Burstyn plays Helen, an elderly widow whose latest kitchen “accident” gets her booked into Pine Groves Senior Living community, run by Ken DeNardo (French Stewart) but “ruled” by the “Mean Girls with Medic-Alert bracelets.”

That would be snippy, bossy martinet Janet (Curtin), with her running mates Sally (Devine) and Margot (Ann-Margret) by her side.

They save seats in the cafeteria, stick their noses in other people’s business and generally get their way in every way. Helen resists them with a “What is this, high school?” But soon she’s fallen in with them.

And then the complication of a man (Caan) enters her life, and she and we wonder if she’ll ever get out of here and back into her home?

Christopher Lloyd plays a leering local “character in the community. Just add his name to the talents pretty much wasted on this enterprise, apparently inspired by a producer’s mother’s retirement community.

As with most films in this sort, the big mistake is assuming that putting good, proven actors into that setting is enough to get a movie out of it. There’s got to be more to the tale than “cute old folks in a quirky old folks home.”

It doesn’t have to be “Cocoon” or “The Comeback Trail” or “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” but there has to be more to the STORY than this, more to the movie than just little pearls of wisdom from those who have lived long enough to acquire that wisdom.

“Life is 10 percent what happens to you, and 90 percent how you react to it.”

Indeed it is. And?

Rating: PG-13, innuendo, profanity

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Jane Curtin, Ann-Margret, Loretta Devine, Alec Malpa, French Stewart, Christopher Lloyd and James Caan.

Credits: Directed by Michael Lembeck, scripted by A Gravitas Ventures release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:40

“Blueberry” is a drab indie “film festival movie” about a young gay woman who meets someone who might get her out of BFE, Indiana, and the conflict this creates with her sister, who sees the newcomer as a bad influence.

A low-stakes tale filmed in that vast swath of the country (Iowa, actually) where the local grain elevator is the only landmark of note, it is boredom incarnate, stale in execution and acted with a hint of empathy, but only a hint.

Maya Danzig and Kristen Abate play sisters who have inherited their mother’s home. Molly (Abate) is older, hooked up with aspiring rural rapper Gavin (Daniel Slottje) and seriously disapproving of sister Maya’s infatuation with the new Latina (Amina Nieves) in town.

Elsa is a stripper down at Dave’s Ranch, the local bar, exotic in every way to the frumpy, mopey Maya. No, she won’t be taking Elsa’s “amateur night” “fake it till you make it” advice about taking up pole dancing. Probably just as well.

The situations have little drama and no energy to them, the performances are generally lifeless and the title is taken from “Blueberry” lip gloss that somebody fancies. Exciting stuff.

I’ll not “spoil” the movie by revealing who that is.

Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Maya Danzig, Amina Nieves, Kristen Abate and Daniel Slottje.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Stefanie Kay Sparks. A Leomark release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:11

“Boy Kills World” is a gonzo, video-game-violent/splatter-film-bloody “Hunger Games” for fanboys.

It is “Oldboy” meets “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” pandering and slaughtering in equal measure, a movie with jaunty, genre-spoofing possibilities that descend into into lethargy and wind-up in stomach-turning savagery before all is said and done.

And star Bill Skarsgård’s character and leading man turn is just similar enough to brother Alexander Skarsgård’s work in Netflix’s “Mute” to be worth mentioning.

Skarsgård (“It”) plays the titular Boy, raised since childhood by a martial arts shaman (Yayan Ruhian of “The Raid” movies and “John Wick 3”) who trained him in all the martial arts movie cliche ways.

The deaf-mute boy lost his family. And the fascist oligarchs who run this dystopia, , the Van Der Koys, are the reasons for his training, his motivation to succeed.

He is “an intrument built to kill Hilda Van Der Koy,” he narrates. That would be the ruthless matriarch played by Famke Janssen.

After reaching adulthood, Boy will have to kill his way through other members of the family, played by Sharlto Copley, Michelle Dockery and others, if he’s to have any prayer of fulfilling his “mission.”

The gimmick here is that our anti-hero can’t remember what his voice, when he had one, sounded like. So in his head, he narrates the story in the voice of his favorite video game hero (H. Jon Benjamin), who also happens to be a voice-over mainstay and the heart of animated series from “Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist” to “Archer,” “Family Guy” to “Bob’s Burgers.”

His intererior monologues dominate the first half of the picture, telling us bits of Boy’s back story, imagining conversations with the kid sister (Quinn Copland) he lost, a child apparition who is both his guide and his conscience.

He likes to finish his fights with a “Player One WINS.” Except when this or that “Player Two” fights back, or won’t “die.”

Copley plays a dye-jobbed blowhard, perfect as the in Face of the Family on TV. Dockery is the schemer who props him up, Bret Gelman is the violent fixer who fancies himself the screenwriter of all the TV appearances.

And fanboy fave Jessica Rothe (“Happy Death Day”)? Well, you’ll see.

The fights, with fighter, stunt-man and sometime stunt coordinator Ruhian on set and “District 9” stunt director Grant Hulley in charge, are mayhem incarnate — head-butts, fists and knives and other sharp objects thrown in with the pistol and assault rifle fusillades.

First-time feature director Moritz Mohr tries to keep this beast on its feet and fighting with its feet and hands and head and anything else. But the action falls off steeply as we drift into the middle acts, and a “team” (Andrew Koji and Isaiah Mustafa) is comically drawn in.

And the finale is so violent and drawn-out as to be excruciating, enough to make you forget the genre-spoofing whimsy of having H. Jon Benjamin ironically voice-over a sadistic and gory vengeance fantasy.

There are clever ideas and casting flourishes at the heart of “Boy Kills World.” But in execution, one keeps coming back to the phrase “Less is more,” even in a hyper-violent action comedy where the excess is kind of the point.

Rating: R, graphic violence and lots and lots of it.

Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Michelle Dockery, Sharlto Copley, Yayan Ruhian, Andrew Koji, Isaiah Mustafa, Jessica Rothe and Famke Janssen, featuring the voice of H. Jon Benjamin.

Credits: Directed by Moritz Mohr, scripted by Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers, based on a short film by Mohr and Remmers. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:51

“We Grown Now,” the third feature of writer-director Minhal Baig, is a sentimental coming-of-age tale, a period piece nostalgic for Chicago’s stigmatized and long-gone Cabrini Green high-rise housing project.

That’s just the first way this lovely and intimate film upends expectations and challenges the viewer to see the world differently.

The two tweens who grow up in “the projects” — Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) — are not overtly victims of their circumstances. Each lives in a single-parent household, but Malik’s mom (a radiant Jurnee Smollett) and grandmom (S. Epatha Merkerson, earthy and nurturing) and Eric’s dad (Lil Rel Howery, wholly serious for once) are wholly engaged in their lives and invested in their futures.

Mother Dolores may just be “trying to hold onto to the little we’ve got.” Dad Jason might be struggling to make ends meet with a pizza joint job and teach his Eric the math of home economics — how much it takes them to just get by.

But these kids are well-cared for, curious about the world to the point of being idealized “screenwriter” creations. Middle schoolers of any race and any locale aren’t known for skipping school to check out Walter Ellison paintings and a Georges Seurat exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

There’s little of the street argot and pervasive cultural rot often depicted in stories in such settings. When violence intrudes on their world, it may be a part of a trend that is politicized as it is presented on TV — drugs, guns and the random, murderous violence that connects them.

So Malik and Eric have room to dream, to pile old mattresses in the playground to “jump” and bounce into the sky with, DIY trampolines aimed at the heavens and a better future.

They swap jokes — “How do you make a tissue dance? You put a little ‘boogie’ into it.” They imagine the cosmos in a water-stained ceiling. They revel in a rare ride on The El. And they tell each other of their pasts, and a little about their hopes for the future.

Malik’s grandma reminds him he is one generation removed from Tupelo, Mississippi, and the racism his mother and grandparents fled. Eric’s dad passes on sage advice about grudges and the “life’s too short” reasons for letting go of them.

Baig — “Hala” was her break-out film — tests these lives and this friendship in a lot of conventional ways, a random shooting death, a police crackdown that upends ordinary, working class lives. The story’s turn towards a climax is yet another way it gives in to the tried-and-true of tales in this setting.

Everything’s a tad neat and scrubbed — including the child actors, their characters’ spotless Adidas and Chuck Taylors, and their dialogue. But the sweetness, the lived-in feeling of the characters and their world lift this gentle drama and recommend it.

It’s not a gritty recreation of a pretty grim place that was knocked-down for a reason. “We Grown Now” lets us see Cabrini Green and its people through the rose-colored glasses of memory, and reminds us of how universal that sentimentalizing process is. It wasn’t the buildings and the politics that created them and knocked them down that’s worth recalling. It’s the lives lived there, their hopes and dreams — realized or deferred — that matter.

Rating: PG, adult themes

Cast: Blake Cameron James, Jurnee Smollett, S. Epatha Merkerson, Gian Knight Ramirez and Lil Rel Howery

Credits: Scripted and directed by
Minhal Baig. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:34

South African writer-director Brad Katzen puts extra effort into trying to make his stoner comedy “Soweto Blaze” look and sound new and “fresh.”

The setting is a post-Apartheid Soweto, more affluent and generally unrest-free, with nicer homes and just a scattering of ruins.

The dialogue is mostly the local patois, some blend of Zulu and Sotho, some of it given the International Accent of Cannabis — “Rastafarian.”

Katzen uses split screens, simulated phone screens and jump cuts so often that when the film stops cold — freezes up — you wonder if that’s a stylistic choice, or a technical glitch via Netflix (the likely culprit).

And the closing credits are Indian cinema-inventive — still shots of the crowded set ID’ing every member of the crew and their job, as well as the mostly-unknown cast.

But all our intrepid filmmaker has done is revisit what one might assume are the American films of his 1990s childhood — “Friday,” the Urtext of modern stoner comedies, and the Alicia Silverstone kidnapping comedy “Excess Baggage.”

There are a couple of laughs in this one, mostly from the inept gunplay, the loopy situations, the characters and the stoner philosophy espoused by He who is the Most-stoned — “What if time is just an artificial construct?”

Yet the best praise one can summon for this South African stoner comedy is “Hope you do better next time.”

Mo (Matli Mohapeloa) is a low-rent pot dealer beloved for his wide and exotic selection of smokables — Dutch Treat, Skunk, etc.

Dill (Sydney Ndlovu) and his gal Pickle (Nyeleti Khoza) might be his most reliable customers. Aside from the local Rastafarian. But they never seem to pay.

That is an issue for the corrupt cop (Nhlanhla Mayisa) who has been shaking Mo down for years. The payoffs cut into Mo’s efforts to save up for his dream business, a mellow, maybe even cannabis-infused smoothie-dispensing food truck.

When he and Dill and Pickle lament their cash-poor status, and watch an interaction involving mobster Lebo the Lion (Sello Sebotsane), his albino henchwoman (Palesa Mosia) and his rebellious hottie of a daughter Thandi (Dimpho More), they joke about a ransom that could solve all their problems.

Next thing poor Mo knows, he comes home to find the two short-attention-span potheads have gone through with a kidnapping and stashed rash and furious Thandi in his house. As her daddy is a murderous thug, and as she’s stolen money from him in an effort to escape that life, Mo is in over his head, and we don’t have to ask “Deep what?” as to the substance he’s buried under.

Katzen tries to bedazzle this simple-enough set-up with interludes where Dill and Pickle put ads on TikTok that they’re looking for a short term rental (to stash Thandi), split screens that show us text messages but which never add up to an “LOL” and the point of view shifts as the dirty cop and the mobster’s apprentice hunt one and all down.

Dill & Pickle are the heart of the picture, but even together they don’t add up to one Chris Tucker, to use the “Friday” comparison.

The third act violence is (supposedly) non-lethal, and involves pistols and an AK 47 and “accidents.” Kind of funny.

I like the idea behind “Soweto Blaze,” and the attempts to give it all a little pizazz. And the setting and characters are novel. There just isn’t enough here that’s funny enough to carry this cannabis caper comedy across the finish line.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse

Cast: Matli Mohapeloa, Dimpho More, Sydney Ndlovu, Nyeleti Khoza, Palesa Mosia, Nhlanhla Mayisa and Sello Sebotsane

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brad Katzen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

“The Roaring Twenties” is a summation of the classic “gangster movie” era, all rolled up into one swift, sprawling narrative.

Produced by THE gangster movie studio, Warner Brothers, released in that pinnacle cinematic year of 1939, we can look back at it now as heralding the end of one crime thriller era, with the more subtextual and highly-regarded film noir genre about to emerge.

It’s the final teaming of two of the great screen gangsters of the age, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. It has themes and threads that run through the cinema of that age and ages to come — social circumstances creating a criminal, a career and a “business” in the making, corruption and shifting values minimizing the nature of the crime and a powerful man trying to win a beautiful woman by making her a star.

Director Raoul Walsh would come to be seen as one of the masters of genre after this film, and the later “High Sierra” and “White Heat,” the latter Cagney’s greatest gangster picture, the former one of Bogart’s.

But compared to them, “The Roaring Twenties” can seem stodgy and dated — almost quaint. It has more in common with “Little Caesar” than the classics to come, a movie of newsreel/newspaper montage “history lessons” underscored by stentorian, lecturing voice-over narration.

“An era of amazing madness. Bootlegging has grown from small, individual effort to big business, embodying huge coalitions and combines.”

The sound-staginess of it all, with even World War I battlefields recreated indoors, and the sprint-through-the-era nature of the narrative seriously date the picture, dulling some of the impact of the tight performances and crackling dialogue.

But Cagney and Bogie, nearing equal stature and both behaving like it, pop off the screen, two movie tough guys going toe-to-toe one more time.

Eddie and George meet in a shell crater in France, one a working class New York guy “doing my bit,” the other a hardened mug, a cynic who may be figuring out he doesn’t mind this killing thing. “Harvard boy” Lloyd (Jeffrey Lynn) winds up in that hole with them, and all three characters are established with a few words and actions.

“Harvard” is rattled and gun-shy. George (Bogart) is harsh in his manhood/class-warfare judgments of him. Eddie (Cagney) isn’t having it.

“I don’t like heroes OR big mouths!”

Back home, Eddie finds an economy that isn’t adjusting in time to help returning doughboys. His female pen-pal (Priscilla Lane) turns out to be a high school girl who dresses older for roles in school plays.

His cabbie pal Danny (character player Frank McHugh) is the only one who might help with both his problems — a driving job, and a “maybe you can help her with her homework” crack about Miss Underage.

“Prohibition” is arriving, our narrator reminds us, without a hint of the moral and wartime logistical arguments that made banning liquor attractive in the late teens. Eddie, driving a cab, gets suckered into making an illegal booze drop-off. The club owner, Panama Smith (Gladys Smith, portraying a version of New York actress, “entrepreneur” and speak-easy owner Texas Guinan,) mixed up in the arrest gets off.

And that’s how Eddie gets a rap sheet and a foot in the door of the budding bootlegging business, which leads to an empire of “taxis” at his command, which leads to illicit hooch manufacturing, which puts him back in touch with hardened criminal George, who becomes a partner and rival, and not exactly in that order.

Eddie’s clout means he can seriously court the older but still young chorine Jean (Lane) and pay some people off to make her a star, even if the street-savvy and slightly older Panama might be more his speed. Panama thinks so.

“She seems like a nice kid,” a speak easy wag notices. “I hope she can out-talk him.”

“I hope she can outrun him,” Panama cracks with a sigh.

And that “Harvard” guy from the trenches of France? He’s a lawyer, a handy guy to know when you’re setting up a complex illegal business, not quite as handy when he crosses-over to the badly-corrupted law’s side, and starts making eyes at Eddie’s arm’s-length girlfriend.

A trio of writers took New York critic turned studio exec Mark Hellinger’s notion for a “Roaring” era gangster saga and peppered it with enough snappy dialogue to pass for a screwball comedy.

George complains about the partnership. “First, you used to ask me about things, then you began to tell me, now you ignore me. My feelin’s is gettin’ hurt.”

“Oh, my poor delicate little rose bud,” Eddie snarls.”Ain’t that a shame. Just as long as your bank roll ain’t hurtin’, you got nothing to squawk about.”

The best recommendation of this dated but very entertaining picture is the battle-among-equals nature of the Cagney/Bogart billing. Bogie was finally getting a foothold of stardom, and while Cagney was the energetic, charismatic dynamo of a lead, Bogart’s more internalized intensity draws attention to him in their scenes together.

The power imbalance of their earlier pairings, and much of Bogart’s supporting player career, is vanishing right before our eyes.

“The Roaring Twenties” was made just when this history was fresh, further removed from the Jazz Age than “Little Caesar,” arriving well into the Depression and end of Prohibition which unraveled some of the power of the booze-built gangs.

But Hellinger’s idea and Walsh’s riveting film based on it ensured that the narrator’s opening words would be the least prophetic ever uttered on screen.

The Twenties will never be “An era which will grow more and more incredible with each passing generation until someday people will say it never could have happened at all.”

Rating: approved, “TV-PG,” violence

Cast: James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Priscilla Lane, Gladys Smith, Paul Kelly, Jeffrey Lynn and Frank McHugh

Credits: Directed by Raoul Walsh, scripted by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and Robert Rossen. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:46

The blood flows, “Swan Lake” plays on 78 rpm records and “tiny dancer” jokes abound in the revolting and funny “Abigail,” a “dead before dawn” thriller about a kid ballerina kidnap victim who turns out to be a vampire.

One and all mutter and even sometimes shout “WTF?” or the words that acronym stands for, and repeatedly, as that’s a natural human response to “What do we know about vampires?”

“That they aren’t real.”

Entirely too much of the tale is given away in the trailers, which causes this Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett film, scripted by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, to lumber out of the gate and take a while to get going. And there’s a lot of momentum-killing “explaining” in the second and third acts that stops the gory fun in its pointe-shoes tracks.

But as little Alisha Weir jetes and pirouettes through a kidnappers’ hide-away mansion that has become “a trap,” a mansion supposed to be somewhere in New York state but which the six kidnappers (Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, William Catlett and the late Angus Cloud) plainly race by the unique Samuel Beckett Bridge (in Dublin) in their getaway van to get to, one and all are reminded of the simple fact that there are few things on this Earth as terrifying as an entitled twelve year old girl.

And this one can’t be killed, or so it is said of the toothy undead.

We meet the kidnappers, “professionals” of varying degrees of professionalism, as they pull off the complicated kidnapping of a child, all alone in her mansion after she’s been deposited there by her chauffeur-driven Rolls after an evening of dancing “Swan Lake” in an empty and ornate opera house.

The man who hired them (Giancarlo Esposito) gives these “rats” “Reservoir Dogs” style nicknames — straight out of Sinatra’s “rat pack.”

There’s the “brains,” Frank (Stevens, just seen in the “Kong X Godzilla” movie), the blonde hacker Sammy (Newton, “Ant-Man’s” daughter, all grown up), the cluelessly hitting-on-the-women driver Dean (Cloud, of TV’s “Euphoria”), the dim-witted French Canadian muscle Peter (“Locke & Key” character actor Durand) and the sniper Rickles (Catlett of “Constellation”).

The only one with empathy has to be the ex-Army nurse, Joey (Melissa Barrera of the recent “Scream” reboot), in charge of sedating their quarry.

“It’s a 24 hour job,” Lambert (Esposito) reassures one and all. That $50 million ransom is as good as in the bag as “the hard part’s over.”

But we know it is. Oh yes we do. We’ve seen the trailers.

Referencing the Agatha Christie book originally titled “Ten Little Indians” is a cute inside joke, as all thrillers of this sort spin out of that killing-off-the-kidnapper/victims one by one, “And Then There Were None” formula.

The overarching joke is how this “tiny dancer” is such a monstrous, unstoppable killing machine. Kudos to Ms. Weir for getting across a personality in between the effects that give her oh-so-many teeth and cover her in gore. She’ll never be unemployed, from this day forward, so long as there are fan conventions where she can sign autographs and grin for selfies.

“I’m sorry about what’s about to happen to you.”

Stevens, the most oft-employed of the class of “Downton Abbey,” brings a snippy impatience to his “leader” role, with Durand grand at playing “dumb” muscle and the late Mr. Cloud rendering another version of an amusingly-dopey and tone-deaf stoner-villain.

Newton, Catlett and Esposito deliver what limited goods their characters are charged with carrying.

But Barrera, bringing back the ’70s shag haircut all by herself as “Joey” accidentally sets the horror in motion, and then tries to work-the-problem their way out of it, carries the picture. She is an arresting presence and a serious candidate for horror’s new “Scream Queen.”

Out of all the comical, panicked and despairingly serious “WTFs” delivered in this revolting romp, even after it stops romping, Barrera’s are the ones that make you go “indeed. What the eff can they do now?”

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Kathryn Newton, Giancarlo Esposito, Alisha Weir, Kevin Durand, Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Will Catlett, Matthew Goode and Angus Cloud.

Credits: Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, scripted by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick. A Univeral release.

Running time: 1:49

A driven and heartless tabloid photographer finally grasps why some cultures believe a photograph steals part of your soul in “Disappear Completely,” a cerebral and seriously stylish thriller from Mexico.

It’s a tale of supernatural comeuppance for a do-anything-for-the-shot mercenary who takes one scandal/tragedy/crime-scene photo too many.

Santiago (Harold Torres) is the first guy the cops he bribes calls when there’s a gory traffic crash, a murder with the corpse still warm or a scandal involving a public figure.

Their rule, thanks to the palms Santiago keeps greasing, is call Santiago, and once he’s on site THEN “call it in.”

He’s the guy who ducks under the crime scene tape, or climbs in through a window. Because even when he’s late getting there, he’s not leaving without a shot, the gorier the better.

His glib labels for the photos often make it into the headlines on the cover story his photos generate. An aged senator finds himself eaten alive by rats? Senator “Cheese Man” (in Spanish, with English subtitles) it is.

Nurse Marcela (Teté Espinoza), his live-in love of 14 years, can’t break his mania for staying on call, even on a supposed date night. Even their dog Zombie takes a back seat to Santiago’s hours sitting overnight in his VW Golf, listening to the scanner or waiting for cops Lupe or Catoche (Vicky Araico, Fermin Martinez) to call.

Sometimes, he’s beaten-up for doing his job. As long as he’s got the negatives — he shoots on film and digitally — that’s no great bother.

But that senator? That’s a body, a story and a scene that haunts Santiago. His first hallucination about it happens while he’s shooting it. That’s his first clue that it’s all about to come apart for him.

Director and co-writer Luis Javier Henaine (“Ready to Mingle” was his) puts a lot of craft and ambition on the screen with this story, which immerses us in Santiago’s twisted soul. He spies on Marcela at work comforting a teen suicide survivor, and photographs them. Then Henaine shows Santiago grappling with the consequences for what he’s done, that one photograph that he never should have taken — one of many he shouldn’t have taken.

When the police can’t help and the medical profession has no answers, Santiago takes advice from a superstitious policeman. And that’s when things turn seriously weird.

Henaine treats this entire tale as an odyssey, following Santiago through the looking-lens and into the dark corners of his psyche and the worst things he imagines might happen to him, some of which really do happen to him.

Torres (“Silent Night” and “Memory” were two Hollywood credits) makes Santiago compelling without being sympathetic, an ambitious man consumed by his art and his competitive drive, a guy who doesn’t want children but who doesn’t screw around when his livelihood — to say nothing of his physical well being — is threatened.

One clever conceit — an assault, by bug or “beast,” on his hearing is accompanied by an increasingly distorted and eventually even silent soundtrack.

The film, titled “Desaparecer Por Completo” in Mexico, mimics its director/co-writer’s ambition as Santiago dreams of his lurid night shots of the dead being shown in a gallery. Henaine has made a self-consciously artsy thriller, a Mexican “Night Crawler” with the supernaturalism and search for a “cure” a nasty new wrinkle in this study of the media creatures of the night.

Is “Disappear Completely” art? Sure. Kind of. Close enough.

And if its jolts are few, the chilling tone sells it as one of the smarter horror tales to come along of late, north or south of the border.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, horrific images, sex

Cast: Harold Torres, Teté Espinoza, José Manuel Poncelis, Vicky Araico, Fermin Martinez and Norma Reyna

Credits: Directed by Luis Javier Henaine, scripted by Ricardo Aguado-Fentanes and Luis Javier Henaine. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

“The Big Bend” is a classic “film festival movie.”

That’s a quirky indie with several elements that land it in lots of film festivals, where audiences who are down for anything new and novel might find and embrace it. Such movies often lack “name” stars, and generally find it hard to get the public’s attention outside of the rarefied air of Festival World. Many can’t even find distribution. But within their natural environment, word of mouth about their novelty gets around.

Brett Wagner’s movie has an arresting setting, the titular “Big Bend” region of Texas, a bucket list National Park for those of us into nature, scenic vistas and quiet. Into that gorgeous, forbidding and dangerous world, our writer-director tosses two families, each with their own “crisis,” and an escaped convict.

What Wagner finds to do with all this can be predictable and almost too-patiently presented, or surprising enough to make you go, “Wait, THAT’S an interesting turn. Where IS this headed now?”

Jason Butler Harner and Virginia Kull play Cory and Melanie, the “city” parents of two little girls, driving to the Big Bend to meet up with old college friends, Georgia (Erica Ash) and Mac (David Sullivan).

They’re all in their 30s, with Cory and Mel parenting two little girls and Mac and Georgia trying to tame two little boys.

Mac has fixed up a remote homestead in the park-adjacent middle of nowhere, with big dreams of renting it out, buying more land and duplicating that “off the grid” vacation experience “for Austin hipsters.” Mac has a lot of “big dreams,” we gather.

Cory and Melanie have a secret or two they’ve decided not to share as it might spoil this pleasant visit. Georgia and Mac might have a secret as well.

Unbeknownst to them all, a bearded convict (Nick Masciangelo) has escaped from prison, wounded and on the run, or on a canoe, which is where we first see him. There’s a region-wide manhunt underway.

Foreshadowing? Well, this very nice remodel is hobbled by an ancient, thumping water heater. There’s “no cell” out here, which is why when they venture out, walkie talkies are the comms of choice.

“Is there a gun in the house?” Melanie asks, a tad too obviously thanks to the screenplay.

And then there’s the list of all the things to “watch out for” in the desert. “Snakes and cacti,” Mac’s list begins. “Scorpions,” a child pipes up. “Mountain lions” another adds. “Black bears!”

This screenplay is textbook — create characters, flesh them out, set up a smorgasbord of jeopardies facing them, then picking and choosing which ticking time bombs to set off.

Not every idea pans out and not every scene reaches a payoff that we see on camera.

But this film’s slow, deliberate opening acts immerse us in this beautiful place and the somewhat troubled people in it, and then finds a way to throw into crisis and conflicts that can be surprising, or at least narratively defensible and somewhat satisfying.

Not bad. And now you don’t even have to go to a film festival to visit “The Big Bend.”

Rating: unrated

Cast: Jason Butler Harner, Virginia Kull, Erica Ash, David Sullivan and Nick Masciangelo.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brett Wagner. An Eammon Films release.

Running time: 1:43

Guy Ritchie’s “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a jaunty burlesque of the conventions of the combat commando film.

Peopled with genuine characters, in every meaning of that phrase, and a piece of the real history that inspired Ian Fleming to create James Bond, it’s a light, bloody-minded vamp of 007, and maybe the closest we’ll ever get to seeing Henry Cavill, at his dashing, flippant best, in a James Bond film.

The history is, well, close enough to get by. The militaria is just off enough for ordnance and tactics buffs to turn the anachronisms and far-fetched derring do into a drinking game.

Think of it has a more lighthearted “Dirty Dozen,” a “Navarone” tale with laughs, a “Kelly’s Heroes” with a character who likes to carve the hearts out of his Nazi prey.

Set in early (but never wintry) 1942, the last year the outcome of the war was really in doubt, it’s about a Churchill (Rory Kinnear) backed acknowledgement that “Hitler does not play by the rules, so neither are we.”

Over the objections of defeatists in his war cabinet (?), he pushes Brigadier Gubbins, aka the first “M” (Cary Elwes) to form a team to disrupt the Germans’ plans to resupply their U-Boats and turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic.

There’s this Spanish possession off West Africa, Fernando Po, where a merchant ship, the Duchesa, and two tugboats are stocking up to head out to resupply wolf packs of submarines. “M” figures he has just the man for the job…in prison.

Captain Gus March-Philips (Cavill) is a bearded rogue and a charmer, who cadges cigars and good whisky and the privilege of hand-picking his team from M and M’s assistant, young Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox, of “Black 47,” son of famed British actor Edward Fox of “Day of the Jackal”).

He’ll need an arsonist-turned-underwater-demo expert (Henry Golding), an Irishman with sea experience (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and a hulking sadistic brute of a Swede (Alan Ritchson, who all but steals the picture).

That guy with inside knowledge of U-Boat ops and this resupply mission (Alex Pettyfer)? They’ll have to break him out of a German jail on the Canary Islands on their way, sailing a two-masted schooner south to the equatorial island.

March-Philips is so persuasive he has but to note “I’ve got to get a coat like that” for it to magically turn up in his possession. Friend or foe are helpless to his persuasion, whatever form it takes.

Eiza González of “Baby Driver” is a female spy of allure and nerve, and Babs Olusanmokun of the first “Dune” movie and TV’s “Star Trek” Strange New Worlds” is the African casino/club owner who works with her on the island to pave the way for the commandos.

Til Schweiger is the particularly sadistic German in charge of the resupply base.

“The only thing worse than a Nazi is him.”

This crew must shoot, with silenced Bren guns and bow and arrow, and punch and kick and stab-stab-stab their way through a lot of Nazis. Somebody’s going to sultrily croon “Mack the Knife” to entertain the “sausage and sauerkraut and black bread” eaters. And somebody’s on the lookout for a Gestapo overcoat in just his size.