Movie Nation

“What’s wrong with you?”

Jersey islander Moll hears this often, and her reactions — wincing, wounded, resigned — make us realize she’s been hearing it for years, if not all her life.

Moll (Jessie Buckley of the recent A & E “War & Peace”) may sing in the art chorale, but the choir director (Geraldine James) seems to have it on the tip of her tongue…always. She’s her mother.

The cop (Trystan Gravelle) who fancies her doesn’t dare say it. But you know he thinks it.

Her oaf of a brother  (Oliver Maltman) might trot it out just to hurt her. And her prettier, happily married sister (Shannon Tarbet) works the hardest at avoiding using those words. But even she looks over, looks down on and pities Moll, and has for years.

It’s no wonder shy, brittle Moll falls for the first guy who sticks up for her, the one everybody says is “bad news,” the young man who might give her story its title, “Beast.”

The feature film debut of Michael Pearce, “Beast” is about the monsters we think we recognize and the ones we’re creating, unknowingly, by neglect, oppression and simple failure to act. It’s about a torrid, liberating love affair consummated in the middle of a horrid serial killer investigation.

And right from the start, we and everybody else suspect Pascal (Johnny Flynn, who was young Albert Einstein in TV’s “Genius). As the old song says, “He’s a rebel and he’ll never be any good.”

She meets him as she’s fleeing a birthday party that sister Polly has just upstaged, and after a night of drinking and dancing and letting a lout get overfamiliar. Pascal interrupts what might become a sexual assault with the unthinking bravado of a brute. He’s toting a rifle at the time.

He’s crude, coarse and fearless, careless about his grooming and his attire, careful not to give away his name right away, conspiratorial in letting her know what he was doing with a rifle by the beach. He’s a poacher.

Moll, downtrodden at home, her family the very model of repressed English emotions which holds manners uber alles, is smitten.

“I love the way he smells.”

He’s gauche, tactless and profane, everything Moll (a bus tour guide when she’s not singing) and her family are not.

As the affair kicks off, two lost souls tearing into each other like starving cast-aways, Mom’s disapproval grows, sister tries to be encouraging and the cops start asking questions. Another girl has been abducted and murdered. The entire island seems to be picking out suspects and coming after them hammer and tong.

Pascal, a solitary misfit and “craftsman” (good with his hands), has a record. He is Suspect One.

Moll is questioned, confronted left and right. She is his alibi. We know she’s not telling the truth. What does she see that we don’t? What’s in her past that could explain her deeper understanding?

Pearce cast this well, with Buckley glorying in bullied Moll’s growing defiance. Moll quietly, resolutely and unfeelingly revels in wearing the evidence of her roll in the grass all over Mom’s white carpeting and furniture. Give the stubbly, unkempt Flynn a motorcycle and not the ancient diesel Land Rover he rambles about in and he could be a Johnny playing another Johnny — Brando’s anti-hero of “The Wild One.”

The mystery is less interesting than the revealing set-pieces — Moll’s first trip out poaching with Pascal, the escalating confrontations with her family, cops and neighbors.

“Beast” is hard to watch at times, from its graphic crime-scene photos to the pitiless way a rabbit is dispatched. But as cryptic as it aims to be, it’s not hard to follow. And yeah, that rabbit is a clue. Good thrillers don’t explain the psychoses involved. They show them.

This one lets you keep up, encourages you to guess ahead, and then surprises you with what comes AFTER what comes next.

MPAA Rating: R, gory violence, somewhat explicit sex, gore, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Johnny Flynn, Geraldine James, Trystan Gravelle

Credits:Written and directed by Michael Pearce. A Roadside Attraction/Film 4 release.

Running time: 1:47

Actually, the first film of the day is a belated viewing of “Beast.” Then there’s “Hereditary,” the new Toni Collette horror piece from A24.

But STX is releasing this Shailene lost-at-sea adventure without previewing it for critics, and as I am on my fifth sailboat, third cruising sailboat, and I’m a Shailene booster from WAY back, “Adrift” is the one I’m most looking forward to.

Sure, Shailene damaged her brand with the damned “Divergent” movies, cut-and-paste YA sci-fi based on books that were more commodities than works of fiction. But “Big Little Lies” gave her back her mojo, holding her own with Nicole, Laura and Reese.

Now the first weekend in June isn’t prime movie release date real-estate, which is why Blumhouse cheery-picked South by Southwest fanboy praise reviews for “Upgrade.”

“Action Point,” a Johnny Knoxville non-Safety Inspected theme park comedy, wasn’t previewed for critics.

And “Adrift” is also lumped in there, its pre-release rep damaged by not letting critics see it. The trailers have been impressive, even if the story is fairly conventional (in sailing quarters, anyway, the “sailor” on board is hurt in a boat-crippling accident, the inexperienced mariner must get them to safety).

STX should spend a little money and preview these pictures, unless “Hurricane Heist” and “Bad Moms” and “The Circle” and “The Foreigner” and “Gringo” and “Den of Thieves” and “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” are sole ambitions. They did release “Edge of Seventeen,” “I Feel Pretty” and “Molly’s Game.” It’s not like EVERYthing they make is crap. Why let people think that if the movie’s good?

Well, this just looks daft.

In the Old West, R. Patts pines away for his long lost beloved. He’s brought a preacher with him to Tie the Knot when he catches up with the fair Penelope. And she’s not having it. Tough as nails, that Penelope.

Glad this screwball Western is getting released, by Magnolia, no less. June 22, limited release.

In the netherscape of Sword and Sorcery Land, a lad takes his training and his lessons from his father.

“You must draw from your surroundings,” the would-be warrior’s dad (Adam Gregory) counsels, dropping the tweenage kid again. Find strength on the ground you fight upon, in other words.

And so the boy knocks down his dad and grows up to wear the furs, leather and the facepaint, to wield a samurai sword and all manner of machete and battleaxe, to vanquish his enemies and spill blood.

He will save the princess and protect “The Veil.”

Well, first he slaps a princess (Alexandra Harris). The Warrior (William Levy) has his motives. And he has her dad’s “sacred” sword because he killed the old man rather than let him “save” his daughter from capture (by stabbing her to death).

“The Veil” is a mud and blood quest fantasy of the “Conan” school, and calling it a B-movie insults a rich tradition of cheap but entertaining Bs.

Left for dead by an opportunistic comrade (Nick E. Tarabay), The Warrior must survive his wounds, recover his health, recover the Desert Princess and have his revenge. On somebody. The Emperor, maybe? That’s how these things usually go.

I know. I’ve watched them all. Something about that pre-history “never history” of Conan the Barbarian and his ilk, tales set in a Dark Age of steel and sinew, lures me in. European or Chinese, Japanese or Indian, I dive into the leather, the big-haired maidens and witches, the stentorian comic book trash talk and prophesy.

“The world of war has given birth to a great warrior. His enemies shall fall by a sword not of man.”

Hallucinations, magic herbs and a second princess — “Zera didn’t mean to harm you. She only wants to know your soul.” — in a peaceful, “we do not kill here” land. Except “You are not welcome here.” Well, was his capture by Zera (Serinda Swan, straight out of the “Steel Magnolias” hair salon) foretold, or not?

A hero needs a sidekick, and Aysel (William Moseley) fills that bill. He’s a bit of a hippy with a “Teach me how to FIGHT them” Jones. Aysel has bigger-than-sidekick ambitions.

“Now KILL me” is his first lesson. “Or I will kill YOU.”

Yes, it’s an insanely silly, dippy installment in a generally dippy genre. Lots of romantic pauses by scenic streams and remote lakes. And this.

“All you’ve ever known is war. One self pitting against the self of another. It is the world of man. And to you, it’s real.”

That Zera could talk the stubble right off a dark-eyed warrior, I tell you what.

Love the gauntlets — sharp elbows for stabbing — love the tents, clever to include a herd of buffalo (filmed in strikingly barbaric Oklahoma), like the costumes, underwhelmed by the swords.

The Cuban Levy has that Christopher Lambert “Highlander” accent requisite to many a sword and sorcery C-movie. Of course, it’s not the accent, it’s the shirtless chest it murmurs out of that counts.

The acting in general isn’t anything to pack onto an audition reel.

They didn’t have a lot of money to make this thing, but the production values are solid, not quite up to the Dark Ages Vikings vs. Brits series, “The Last Kingdom,” but aside from the anachronistic haircuts and middling hardware, not bad.

But the script is a mish-mash of tedious prophetic nonsense, the fights humdrum and the scenes between the fights are unalloyed, uninterrupted tedium.

Where’s the villain? Tardy, or just AWOL? AWOL it is. For most of the movie.

And about this titular “Veil.” It’s a hallucinogenic mask that hides reality from the wearer, blinds him or her and incites visions of prophesies. Nobody calls it a “Veil.” Not that I heard.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: William Levy, William Moseley, Serinda Swan, Nadia Comaneci, Adam Gregory

Credits:Directed by Brent Ryan Green, script by Jeff Goldberg. A Toy Gun release.

Running time: 1:25

“You Get Me” is a spurned-lover thriller for teenagers, “Swimfan” with less swimming, “Fatal Attraction” without the bunny.

It offers model, bombshell and tabloid princess Bella Thorne the chance to play the bad girl  — REALLY bad — in a world of unearned affluence, casual beauty and consequence-free sex that yes, has consequences. But it’s tepid, generic thriller, and Temptress Thorne isn’t really up to the menace she’s supposed to generate here.

Tyler (Taylor John Smith) is a teen, spending the summer between his junior and senior years “living my California dream,” a poor lad close to the water in a coast California dreamscape of posh parties and sea views with no viable economic reality (Dude can afford Malibu environs on a part time job bussing tables? They’re broke? He drives a restored vintage Jeep Wagoneer?) attached.

He’s all about the gorgeous and rich Ally (Halston Sage).

“Ally? She ‘got me,” he narrates. “Love changes you. Makes you do things you’d never want to do.” Like tai chi.

But being a rich girl,  Ally has a past, and a rich Summer’s Eve named Chase ( Of course he’s played by a guy named Rhys Wakefield.) shows up to remind her of it, and slut-shames her to Tyler.

The party is a humiliating bust for Tyler. Ally doesn’t take his “You slept with THAT guy?” blast well. He’s dumped, and here’s Holly.

She tilts her head and flips her hair, fetchingly, alluringly. She bites her lip. She’s been working on that “come and get me, big boy/girl” for years. Wait, that’s Bella Thorne, the actress, who’s been “working” that. Holly, her character? She’s mysterious. She just knows how to work it without us knowing how she knows.

Holly drives a Jag convertible. “It’s not mine.”

She’s got the pills, and she passes them like a pro — with a kiss.

“I don’t know….”

“You swallow, I’ll swallow.”

Subtle. He is putty in her hands, etc. When they wake up in the hilltop mansion she’s “house sitting,” he is further bowled over. Wait until he finds out she’s “not really a house-sitter at all. I just…broke in!”

Sure, it’s all frolics and picnics by the pool and sex in the pool until…you know. He has to leave. And Ally wants to explain and patch things up.

“No more secrets. Ok?”

Um. Sure. You got it.

That’s when Holly shows up at their school, and is enrolled. And is all “Did you tell her about us? I can be VERY discrete.” Right.

Game on, kids. Ingratiate yourself with the girlfriend, show off your “art” photography, “date” Tyler’s pal Gil (Nash Grier) to be around them, make Tyler jealous and play Gil like a tuna on the hook.

The “stranger danger” signs are there — evasive about where she lives, her “parents,” no social media presence. But Tyler is slow to speak out. “Discrete.” Will anybody take him seriously when he does?

First time feature director Brent Bonacorso paints the “You Get Me” canvas in broad, generic strokes — teen wish fulfillment fantasy about the lifestyle, the locale, the fashions and “perfect” love and sexual encounters. It’s a soap operatic spin on a genre of thriller, light on suspense, heavy on the supposed foreboding.

Smith makes Tyler blandly stricken, upset but not wound-up enough at the growing evidence of Holly’s villainy. Tyler’s got to come clean and Smith has got to make that more of a struggle we see in his face. Like most of the players her, he was cast for his looks.

Sage has a leading role here, but she’s blander than she was in “Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” or “Before I Fall,” where her supporting parts had more meat to them. Her moments in peril are like a bad audition.

Whatever public image Thorne has cultivated, and you get the impression she’s capable of “whatever it takes” to get attention, headlines and job offers, she’s more at home suggesting a lying, hormonal schemer than she is at generating fear at what a predator like Holly might be capable of.

Whatever the script has her connive, her femme fatale could use a little work. Watch Erika Christensen in “Swimfan.”  She knew how to dial up the obsessive stalker with eyes that kill.

It’s not just about ensuring you get a lot of sex and swimsuit scenes, dear.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, adult situations, sexuality, profanity

Cast: Bella Thorne, Halston Sage, Taylor John Smith

Credits:Directed by Brent Bonacorso, script by Ben Epstein. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

Think of “Sara’s Notebook” as a “Heart of Darkness” for Africa in the age of Conflict Minerals and NGOs.

Stick with me, because I’m going to run with this conceit a while.

This Spanish film, acquired by Netflix, is a companion piece to “Beasts of No Nation,” an inferior sequel in some ways, but a harrowing if slooooooow moving odyssey about a Spaniard (Belén Rueda of “The Orphanage”) who comes to Africa to find out what happened to her sister, an aid worker lost in the war-torn Congo.

That’s a classic “Heart of Darkness” quest narrative.

Laura learns a bit about younger sister Sara (Marian Álvarez) through those who knew her, and from a notebook she left behind. Something in her sister changed as she witnessed and tried to help save Africans from each other in the brutal guerilla war that’s cropped up, not over diamonds or uranium, but to control coltan, a rare mineral that the warlords hang onto but which the government and the rest of the world covets. 

Yes, it’s a real  thing. 

The movie wastes a lot of time in the opening as Laura calls her broker to sell her stock so she can hire and then fire a shifty mercenary (Manolo Cardona) who promises to get her to the region where Sara disappeared, meets Sara’s onetime boyfriend Sven (Nick Devlin) and finally Father Salvio (Enrico Lo Verso), who might be of actual help.

She boards a bush plane and gets shot at, then a boat and finally Third World buses and pickup trucks in her heedless snake-bitten pursuit of a sister she is sure, thanks to instincts, tips and her own flashbacks with Sara, is still alive.

Sara had “gone native,” so identifying with the people she was trying to help that even passing a mirror shocked her. “How white I am,” she wrote. Again, very Conrad, straight out of “Heart of Darkness.”

Laura hasn’t evolved that way. When Father Salvia persuades a sullen African teen (Iván Mendes) to escort her on this dangerous journey, she thinks nothing of making him ride in the back of a truck while she sits in the cab, of cracking “They behaved like animals” in describing Jamir’s fellow Africans, fleeing soldiers or paramilitaries, were brutalized from both sides. 

Jamir is haunted, and as we hear and see accounts of child soldiers rounded up and “initiated” into this murderous world of minerals, slavery and genocide, we can guess where he’s been.

Director Norberto López Amado did the fine Spanish Civil War drama “The Time in Between,” and is most at home in the scenes of violence — raids, rampages, mass executions. But for a movie that is moving from point A deeper and deeper into the wilderness of points B, C and D, the damned picture is downright static.

There’s little urgency to the quest, and the payoff is a bit of a fizzle, too. Until, that is, you view this thing through the filter of Joseph Conrad and all the filmmakers who have made a pass through “Heart of Darkness.”

This isn’t a neat Conrad analog, but you can sense the “Darkness” bones here. Conrad and Coppola (“Apocalypse Now”) heightened the horror, waypoint by waypoint, and grasped the surreal loss of humanity that Europeans (and later the U.S. military) experience the further removed they get from civilization. Laura witnesses some of that, experiences a little of it too, but doesn’t make that same sort of personal journey.

She, unlike the Kurtz of Conrad, starts to see beyond the “this place will never change” primitive brutality of her locale. She can cling to the hope for redemption somewhere down the road.

In “Sara’s Notebook,” it’s everybody else (almost) who embraces the darkness and despairs at ever finding the light, even the aid workers and hands-off U.N. peace keepers who aren’t really helping.

As for the filmmakers, if they’d paid more attention to “Heart of Darkness” and less to “Blood Diamond,” they might have found their way out, not of the stunningly scenic jungle they were filming in, but out of the corner they painted this not-dark-enough/not-emotional-enough riff on a classic fictional quest tale into.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, implied rape

Cast: Belén Rueda, Iván Mendes, Manolo Cardona, Marian Álvarez, Nick Devlin

Credits:Directed by Norberto López Amado, script by Jorge Guerricaechevarría. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

It’s a credit to the makers of the soccer documentary “Nossa Chape” that they’d still have a decent film, even without the tragedy that underscores the one they made.

Chapecó is a relatively small, poor city in fútbol-mad Brazil, perpetual over-achieving underdogs whom the 200,000 residents — coincidentally, not much bigger than the Odessa, Texas of “Friday Night Lights” — rally around with a devotion that knows no bounds.

Chapecoense, to use the sports metaphor, is famous for punching above its weight.

But the team and the town, indeed the entire soccer world, took one to the gut when their plane went down en route to their date with destiny, the finals of the 2016 Copa Sudamericana, to be played in Medellin, Colombia, in November of 2016. Gone in a flash was the feel-good story of South American football, most of its players, coaches, administrators and even the journalists who covered them most closely.

And what followed, as the Fox Sports documentary “Nosse Chape” (“Our Chapecó Team”) recounts, is grief interrupted by outrage, mourning curtailed because “the beautiful game” must go on.

Filmmakers Michael and Jeffrey Zimbalist have a Pele film, “Favela Rising” and “The Two Escobars” are among their collective credits, so they know the turf. Their access is broad as they take us through the the tragedy, the emotional recovery and lingering grievances of those who lost loved ones to absurd, tightwad incompetence.

We see archival footage of the happy-go-lucky squad of tightly-connected players, joshing and joking on their last hours on Earth, kidding about the cut-rate airline (LaMia) that the team hired to fly them to their deaths. We see the worldwide mourning, including a prayer from Pope Francis, about this “fairy tale with a tragic ending.” And we meet the widows and wives of those who died and the four players who survived.

It’s a little jarring to see the speed with which the administration of the team is reconstituted, the fierce announcement that “We will rise from the ashes and start again from scratch! (in Portuguese with English subtitles).” It’s what the players would have wanted, we’re assured. As if they know, as if “We Are Marshall” is the only way to come to terms with such a tragedy.

Vagner Mancini comes in as coach, new players are rounded up, and his orders are to move on, don’t dwell on the past or carry it as a burden. But good advice like that isn’t freely accepted by all, and the ups and downs of a hastily-convened recovery season add to the strain.

Players like Alan Ruschel want to get back on the field, grim prognoses from doctors be damned. But when the reconstituted team doesn’t have that old magic, the grief moves back to the fore.

I like the way the Zimbalists keep the events here at enough distance so that we can see ourselves in this obsessive sports-uber-alles mindset that the city’s leaders buy into. It matters because of how we see ourselves, how our self-worth becomes tied up in that favorite team. “Underdog” towns and teams have this the worst. Rushing to get a squad together mere weeks after the crash, on the pitch less than six months later, when the city and team can’t even figure out how to memorialize the fallen or pay for a statue to them, is a head-slapper.

And I love the way the film doesn’t dodge the scandal of the crash, an airline cutting corners on safety (the damned plane ran out of gas, and the crew let it happen), a sports team that has to use them because of its own expenses. The most chilling moments in the movie might be when the team administration is grousing about flight options for a return to Medellin, and how much they must spend on the least unsettling option.

The most moving moments are when those survivors revisit the crash site, meet the first responders, doctors and others who saved them.

Sports documentaries, even ones built around tragedy, have a “highlight reel” element to them, and “Nossa Chape” doesn’t escape that. But it’s an eye-opening tribute to a story that, like the sport itself, the rest of the world was a lot more riveted by, as it happened, than we were in the U.S.

MPAA Rating: unrated, accident imagery, profanity

Cast: Neto, Jakson Fullman, Alan Ruschel, Leticia Padilha, Barbara Monteiro

Credits:Written and directed by Jeffrey Zimbalist and Michael Zimbalist. A Fox Sports Films release.

Running time: 1:41

There’s evidence of ambition in “The Yellow Birds,” a sober-minded Iraq War drama based on combat vet-author Kevin Powers’ novel.

It has a hint of “In the Valley of Elah” in its mysterious death of a soldier and Biblical undertones, of “Only the Brave” and “Stop-Loss” in its depiction of the scars veterans bring back from war.

The film attracted top-flight talent like Toni Collette and the under-employed Jennifer Aniston to play the mothers of the soldiers involved, and the New Han Solo, Alden Ehrenreich, and Tye Sheridan and Jack Huston play boots-on-the-ground, with Jason Patric signed on as a stateside military investigator looking into what went down over there.

And there’s it’s film-festival established running time, close to two hours, the length of serious drama, and bloated Judd Apatow comedies and Marvel movies.

But for all the vivid combat sequences, the gritty adjustment-back-home touches and a couple of genuinely emotional scenes, it feels incomplete, choppy and something of a cheat. Blame the screenplay, which shortchanges and over-sells its mystery, and the attempts at whacking the thing into releasable shape. Few pictures can cling to coherence after losing more than twenty minutes of run time, especially films which were cut for cause.

Ehrenreich and Sheridan (“Ready Player One”) are green Virginia boys who meet at boot camp. One may have enlisted because he’s adrift and the other as a life-experience craving artist planning on attending the University of Virginia afterwards. But their connection is a necessity.

Sergeant Sterling (Huston, of “Boardwalk Empire” and the recent “Ben-Hur”) ordains it. They’re to keep an eye on each other and “promise you’ll do what I say every f—–g time,” and they’ll be fine.

Private Bartle (Ehrenreich) is given further orders by Private Murphy’s mom (Aniston).

“Promise me you’ll take care of him over there.”

We don’t need to hear the film’s opening narration, that “The war tried to kill us in the spring, and the summer…It tried to kill us every day” to know that dramatic “take care of him” cliche will have its consequences.

Through the ambushes, the IEDs and the firefights, French director Alexandre Moors (the extraordinary “Blue Caprice” is his biggest non-music video credit) fails to get across the promises made and the sense that these guys are bonded and truly looking out for each other.

Except in the unit dance party, where Bartle urges Murphy to dance with a medic he’s got a crush on.

The combat sequences have the requisite fire and fury and gulping, weeping fear. They feature the usual incidents such movies inevitably include — a Humvee blown up by an improvised explosive device, a party interrupted by a mortar barrage, snipers who kill comrades and are then hunted down and killed, accidents in the heat of a firefight.

Something happened that shouldn’t have. That much is obvious when they get back home. One man is missing, others are cracking up and the Army’s sent an investigator (Patric), not a shrink, to help them cope.

Collette anchors this home front section of the film, an angry single mom who wants the Army investigator to answer her question first.

“What’d you people DO to him?”

Aniston manages a sympathetic portrait of a parent looking for answers to her questions, as well.

And Huston stands-out among the foot soldiers, bellowing orders in a nearly indecipherable drawl, blowing off the investigator with a beautifully bitter “I ain’t nobody’s sergeant no more.”

Ehrenreich is sympathetic and more suited to this role than the future-swaggerer Han Solo, but he’s still not a charismatic screen presence to hang your picture on.

It’s the film in toto that stumbles, a bungled march of fits and starts, scenes that  work as stand-alone moments, but connect more in our memories of the tropes of combat films than in anything the director and screenwriters manage.

The drastic editing can’t have helped in terms of coherence. Any explanation of “The Yellow Birds” is lost as the titular metaphor (and military marching cadence) that inspired it is the 20 minutes or more they whacked from this.

There have been too many good, bad and indifferent movies about the Iraq War to waste your time on a mediocre one, especially if there was probably a good movie in the book this one is based on.

MPAA Rating:R for war violence, some grisly images, sexual material, and language throughout

Cast: Alden Ehrenreich, Jack Huston, Jennifer Aniston, Tye Sheridan, Toni Collette, Jason Patric

Credits: Directed by Alexandre Moors, script by David Lowery, R.F.I. Porto, based on the Kevin Powers novel. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:35

“Maineland” is an underachieving documentary about over-achieving Chinese exchange students at a remote prep school in Maine.

It’s a culture-clash story where cultures don’t truly clash, where “America” doesn’t so much rub off on kids from Chinese megacities relocated to the boondocks, as intrigue them — the way science students peer at a petri dish under a microscope.

The two children of Chinese affluence followed here — Stella and Harry — may get a taste of prom, join the cheer squad and “boldly” take on the story and symbolism of “the man and the tank,” the lone protester who stood in front of a Chinese tank at Tienanmen Square for a student project.  But “America” doesn’t make much more than a superficial impact on them or their fellow exchange student classmates, director Miao Wang suggests.

And they make no impact at all, in the film’s eyes, on the locals and other U.S. nationals who are their classmates at venerable Fryeburg Academy.

Wang makes what plays like an official Chinese government sanctioned portrait of this diaspora of affluence — upwardly mobile families, stressed by their place in capitalism (marriages are strained or broken), sending their kids abroad to American prep schools for a leg up in the coming workforce.

The schools? They desperately need that overseas tuition money.

The families of these kids want them well-rounded, in the top tier of their generation, kids who might give them an insider’s edge in the American marketplace should they be able to stay on after prep school and college.

“When China is stronger, they’ll be back,” one father suggests. Meanwhile, their kids can indulge in the preoccupations of the children of families who have “made it.”

In the case of Harry, that means he can dream of working in music, composing, and not have to fret about pointing at a career guaranteed to give him a job. He’s fascinated by “capitalism” and its differences with Chinese “collectivism.”

Harry’s the introvert here, classmate Stella is the extrovert — bubbly, discovering boys, popular and cute. Her experience is a little broader than his, her hope is to continue to a U.S. college and maybe take a role in the family business in the U.S. market.

But the Chinese students are a clannish bunch, all the way through school, Wang’s film suggests. She confines her movie to the lives the kids leave behind, their families back home, and to the school grounds itself. Establishing shots of how tiny Fryeburg is, backwoods almost, lead to only one scene of the kids doing anything to interact with the community.

That scene? The Chinese kids all gather for meal at a Chinese restaurant where they, as they do when they’re not in class, speak Chinese to each other.

The most revealing scenes to an American viewer might be the gathered recruitment team from Fryeburg, sizing up the often gauche nouveau riche applicants with barely-hidden eye-rolls of how this kid or that one used his or her interview to talk about how he or she wants to make a “bucket of gold.”

The teachers don’t come off as elite so much as jaded, noting how the influx of Chinese is no different from the flood of Japanese kids when Japan was briefly ascendant, and Korean kids who still show up in numbers large enough to keep Fryeburg in the black.

A few classroom scenes capture a hint of teacher-xenophobia, but decades into this “import much of our student body” strategy keep the tactless cultural stereotyping to a minimum.

“Maineland” is informative in the most basic ways. But the big hole in Wang’s film is in failing to capture the disconnect, the true culture shock of children of neon bedecked skyscrapers, mansions and coddling parents packed off to the backwoods of Maine.

And the second biggest hole is missing the frison that must have been experienced by both sides in this exchange.

MPAA Rating: unrated, smoking

Cast: Stella, Harry

Credits:Directed by Miao Wang. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:30

The pre-weekend box office projections were based on studio estimates, market research based on franchise awareness, audience eagerness, yadda yadda.

And they ranged from $115 million to as high as $142. It wasn’t just Box Office Guru and Deadline.com, always iffy, that were off. Everybody was figuring “Solo” would do just fine.

I mean, “A Star Wars Story,” right? Another weekend of Disney making a mint.

Nope. Didn’t happen. By Saturday, estimates were spiraling down into the low of end the predicted range, by Sunday they’d bottomed out. No $95-105 for three days (plus Thursday night). No $125 for the whole weekend, more like $114.

And then Sunday deepened the dive. “Solo” finished three days with $83 million, and a healthy Monday (Why are they still expecting that?) could lift it to $101 million?

Let the wringing of hands begin. Did Disney kill the golden goose by overloading on “Star Wars” movies? Did the fact that this one plainly just isn’t very good, miscast, etc., hurt? Did viewers hear about the “troubled production” Ron Howard was brought in to fix?

Are audiences getting fatigued at more of the same-old/same-old from the Mouse and its Marvel  and LucasFilm Ltd. productions?

Yes, yes, yes and emphatically YES would be my guess. The “Deadpool 2” second weekend plunge suggests that all comic books and galaxies “far far away” are wearing out even the fanatics, and that the audience is outgrowing the repetitive piffle these movies have become. None of them have bombed, but over-familiarity is killing the sausage factory.

“Avengers” is still making money, but will it hold screens as long as “Black Panther?” “Deadpool” isn’t creating a vast expectation that “Yeah, we’re ready for the NEXT one,” even if it’s an “X-Force” R-rated action farce.

And “Star Wars” is way over-exposed, wrestled into new directions by J.J. Abrams and his acolytes, trying too hard to be younger and more diverse, when the stories and actors cast in them are lightweight and colorless, as in “bland.”

John Boyega? Daisy Ridley? Oscar Isaac? Alden Ehrenreich? Emilia Clarke? Donald Glover?

I am guessing they won’t learn from “Rogue One,” and fill the screen with experienced, Oscar nominated and experienced leads (Felicity Jones, Diego Luna) and surround them with Oscar winners and colorful genre veterans (Forest Whitaker, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen). “Rogue” wasn’t the big hit of this parade, it was just the best of the movies and the one that “holds up” as we say.

Even a better-cast “Solo” would have underwhelmed, but Disney has saddled us with a bit player from the Coen Brothers Universe, and he’s not got it. Why even consider making another with Alden?

Meanwhile, “A Quiet Place,” far more original, with great actors and genuine suspense and pathos, rolls on. “Black Panther,” a big cultural twist on the Marvel formula, endures.

“Breaking In,” “Life of the Party,” “I Feel Pretty,” and “Book Club,” all show up with less risk, an under-served audience and low budgets, and make bank (none of them were great, but hey, they were generally surprising and different)