Movie Nation

A Westernized Amsterdam teen struggles with her Muslim identity in “Layla M.,” the Dutch submission for Oscar contention in 2016.

It’s a movie that squares off the pressure to assimilate with the teenage need to rebel as Layla, vividly portrayed by Nora El Koussour, wears a burqa, backtalks her “keep your head down and fit in” parents, curses like an American teen and shouts Koranic quotes at those parents to explain her actions.

A nose-ringed Muslim friend confronts her, mid-prayer, at high school — “Take that potato sack off!” — earning a blunt Koranic condemnation and a “You’re dead to me” brush off.

Layla watches radicalizing videos online, befriends a punk would-be Imam (Hassan Akkouch), rages at injustices and flips out and gets arrested when a ban on Muslim assemblies ends a soccer match by police helicopter.

“We spit on your democracy!” she says, repeating what she’s heard online. “Perverts” she curses the cops.

Dad (Mohammed Azaay), a native Moroccan who runs a shop, has had enough. Her soccer-crazed brother (Bilal Wahib) resents getting caught up in her protests. She needs a way out.

That would be Abdel (Ilias Addab), her fellow radical, the one she has eyes for. Her nightly Facetime with him is where they flirt, where she flings Koranic verses at him about equality of the sexes, and her insistent proposals get through.

They marry, she flees her family and they’re down the rabbit hole of what the authorities have been assaulting their rights over — jihadist training, and from there, to the Middle East.

Co-writer/director Mijke de Jong takes pains to show the role pressure to fit in plays in radicalization. Layla digs her heels in and doubles down, the way many a Trump, Hillary or Bernie voter does. She journeys from “I Chose How I Dress” selfie-videos to taking to falling for the fantasy of an Islamic Planet. 

Abdel romanticizes and sentimentalizes his former homeland, playing down the violence and repression that gutted his family and ran them out. “Layla M.” shows a genuine romance, an idealistic young people on the road East, very much in love, talking politics, Islam and their contribution to the struggle.

Of course, the sobering reality on the ground in the Middle East — a rigid patriarchy, put-up-or-shut-up involvement with groups that behead Westerners, the works — ends all that. Addab lets us see the lights go out in Abdel, and how quickly he accepts his new dictactes on how a Muslim man treats his wife.

Layla tries to live her life as before, but comes to the realization that she’s not in Holland any more. Mouthy, cursing, independent women have a place in this closed community, and that place is silently sticking to work in the kitchen.

“Layla M.,” in subtitled Arabic, Dutch and English, isn’t particularly revealing in it exploration of this subject. “Paradise Now” covered some of the same ground a dozen years ago.

What is new is the female point of view, the chilling contrast between the life her parents uprooted their family to give her and the process of her radicalization. There’s no chicken-egg cause-and-effect to this, no “THEY started it” sense of instigation.

Every grievance, every slur and instance of harassment is remembered, police raids just compound her resolve. Cops asking a group of women they’ve rounded up to remove their face-coverings earns a “We’re not asking you to remove your pants!”

The film goes to some pains to show a broader community where people like Layla are the minority. But if “The Arab Spring” taught us anything, it was that teens are going to rebel, no matter what the culture. Understanding that has to be the first step in any hoped-for intervention to keeping the Laylas of the world in school and not thinking Jihadist thoughts.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Nora El Koussour, Ilias Addab, Hassan Akkouch, Mohammed Azaay

Credits:Directed by Mijke de Jong, script by Jan Eilander, Mijke de Jong. A Topkapi/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

“Flock of Four” is a clumsily-titled but warm and likable amble through the 1950s LA jazz scene. Co-writer director Gregory Caruso conjures up a lightly amusing quest comedy that finds its edge in the subject of race, its warmth in the lost world of South Central and its novelty in a bunch of white Pasadena teenagers clinging to jazz when their peers, and most every black person they meet, is already talking about it in the past tense.

It’s 1959, and Joey Grover (Braeden Lemasters) has never given up the jazz his dad taught him at the piano. He’s the most talented guy in the little quartet that rehearses in his garage. Arch (Uriah Shelton) can never get his lungs around a winning sax solo, though the rhythm section, Bud (Isaac Jay) on bass and Louie (Dylan Riley Snyder) on drums, is solid.

Rock and roll is here to stay, but these guys are boats against the current, especially Joey. And a plug on the radio mentioning that legendary drummer Pope Davis is appearing that night at one of South Central’s last jazz clubs has Joey hellbent on dragging them all there to see The Pope “before it’s too late.”

Caruso treats us to scenes that have become pop culture tropes — the local diner, with its pop-hits-packed jukebox, the greasers — high school poseurs who all happen to be Italian American. It’s familiar, but try to remember the last time this “American Graffiti/Happy Days” cliche was trotted out in a feature film.

The lads dash off, even though South Central was scary to suburban kids, even back then. They go even though Joey’s older brother (Shane Harper) has forbidden it, and enlisted his girlfriend (Gatlin Kate James) and greaser Tony (Connor Paolo), who has a car, to track them down.

And the jazz quartet can’t be encouraged when the taxi dumps them off nowhere near where they want to be, and the first black kids they meet — Johnny Otis fans — laugh in their faces.

“These cats ain’t got any rhythm…OR blues.”

The night’s quest bounces from club to club, wending its way toward the famed Dunbar Hotel, historically the swankiest “colored” hotel in LA.

And we meet sibling jazz fans, friendly torch singer Ava (Coco Jones) and her testy, racially touchy brother Clifford (Nadji Jeter). Can they help? I mean, with Joey’s brother so determined to head them off?

“They’re trying to take us back to PASADENA!”

Clifford scowls, “Wow. That would be…so terrible.”

He’s the voice of Civil Rights era outrage, not all that happy to be helping out these guys who, 60 years later, would be assailed for “cultural appropriation.” He’s bent on exposing their unfitness to play the music.

You know how these stories play out. The kids end up on stage, tested. The racial tolerance of one and all is also tested, and some fail.

Inevitably, quests like this are let down when “the great man/woman” they’re seeking finally shows up. Either he’s a no show (“The Commitments”) or so poorly written and cast that one and all realize what a waste the quest has been.

Not here. Reg E. Cathey of “The Wire,” “House of Cards” and “St. Vincent,” a one-time jazz player, makes Pope Davis the weary, wary and grizzled survivor of jazz and racism in America that the movie absolutely needs him to be. His scenes bring weight to a movie that is otherwise light and inconsequential. Dude can even predict the future.

“Know what they’ll call the decade that killed jazz? The SIXTIES!”

Cathey’s little speech reminded me of something Michael Jai White noted when his cult blaxploitation spoof “Black Dynamite” came out. “Black people,” he opined, “when they’re over something, it’s DONE. Jazz, blues, blaxploitation movies.”

It’s these better-late-than-never suburbanites who “appropriate” the culture and keep it on life support.

“Flock of Four” never achieves the giddy highs of a “Diner” or the classics of this genre and period. But it varies the formula just enough to set up the finale. And then Cathey, maestro that he is, brings in on home with a killer solo.

MPAA Rating: unrated, racism, fisticuffs, mild profanity

Cast:Braeden Lemasters, Uriah Shelton, Coco Jones, Isaac Jay, Reg E. Cathey, Shane Harper

Credits:Directed by Gregory Caruso, script by Gregory Caruso, Michael Nader. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:20

A conventional coming-of-age-while-poor narrative serves up plenty of unconventional twists in “Lean on Pete,” a dusty, downbeat tale set on the margins of horse racing.

That’s a world 15 year-old Charley (Charlie Plummer) discovers one summer day while strolling past the local track. This isn’t “the sport of kings,” with Triple Crown winners and mint juleps. Portland, Oregon might be the highest profile stop on a circuit of fairgrounds and time-worn circuits that saw their best days pre-TV, tracks where quarterhorses race.

Charley’s dad (Travis Fimmel, terrific) may be good company and a reasonably attentive single parent. But he’s not a solid provider, drifting from woman to woman and job to job, and that does nothing for the kid’s well-being or his high school grades and high school sports ambitions.

Maybe Del, the sour old horse owner/trainer who offers Charley work — exercising horses, cleaning stables and transport trailer — would make a more promising father figure.

He’s played  by Steve Buscemi, and the string of expletives he unleashes as we meet him tell us, “Maybe not father figure material.” Del is an aged hustler running a handful of horses he drags from track to track, making stake money here and there, cheating when he has to.

This is what Charley learns from him, the “vitamins” slipped to horses, the illegal “buzzer” his jockey Bonnie (Chloe Sevigny) uses to goose her ride into contention. The ageing horse with the most promise in Del’s stable of losers? Lean on Pete, who takes to Charley as Charley, whose life hasn’t had room for pets, takes to him.

“You can’t get all attached to the horse,” Bonnie lectures. “They lose too much, they get sold.”

By “sold,” she means “to Mexico,” Del threatens. That’s where horses as meat is the most valuable.

This plot description has you thinking, “OK, I know where this is going,” as it did me. But writer-director Andrew Haigh, adapting Willy Vlautin’s novel, doesn’t take us there. Don’t get too attached to characters, because they leave Charley’s life as his odyssey takes a more depressing turn.

The greatest virtue of “Lean on Pete” is the world this kid inhabits, and not just the horse tracks gone to seed. This is how the working poor live, leases they can’t see through, under-furnished homes, a perpetually empty fridge and struggle. Violence is never far out of the norm.

Plummer’s performance is aptly matched to his appearance. He’s lanky, gawky and awkward, a kid who has moved too often to make lasting friendships. He’s shy to the point of standoffish. And he is absorbing lessons, about horses and life from Bonnie and Del, and about women from his Dad.

“The best women have all been waitresses, at some point.”

Buscemi, Sevigny and Steve Zahn (as a trailer-dwelling drunk) all give fair value in any film lucky enough to have them. The picture hangs on Plummer, and his blank face/blank-slate innocence haveto carry it.

“Lean on Pete” is a somber, quixotic trek through a modern West of limited horizons, finite opportunities and the sense that even the young are just playing out their string. It’s a long, unhurried drama with the odd flash of violence and tragedy.

Plummer, milieu and a fine supporting cast make it pay off, even as we keep our doubts about that right up to the finish line.

MPAA Rating: R for language and brief violence

Cast: Charlie Plummer, Steve Buscemi, Chloe Sevigny, Steve Zahn

Credits:Directed by Andrew Haigh, script by Andrew Haigh, Willy Vlautin . An A24 release.

Running time: 2:01

A “Jackass” take on the sort of old school Southern amusement park (not, um, OSHA compliant) with Johnny Knoxville in grandfatherly make up — at least for part of it.

No, it’s not “Bad Grandpa,” but it is slapstick of an R-rated “3 Stooges” variety. “Action Point” is due out June 1. 

Yes, there’s another “Black Panther” box office record, the one for highest domestic gross ever for a Marvel movie. It will have earned over $630 million by the time the totals are tallied Sunday night.

But “Pacific Rim: Uprising,” even though it’s a sequel nobody save for Universal asked for, pushed the Panther out of the way with a less than dazzling $26 million opening.

For a $150 million movie, that’s bad news. But remember, it wasn’t made for the U.S. market. It’s an international picture with a lot of China fluffing in it.

“Sherlock Gnomes,” not previewed for critics and a sequel to “Gnomeo & Juliet,” won’t bring Johnny Depp back into box office glory. A middling $9 million opening?

Likewise “Midnight Sun” isn’t going to ensure Bella Thorne of a future in the movies. That one, not terrible I thought, barely cracked the top ten with a $4 million weekend.

“Paul, Apostle of Christ” is an intimate Biblical epic launched right before Easter, but poor reviews aren’t helping it put a dent in that faith audience.

Because they’re still going to “I Can Only Imagine,” a lightweight bio-pic/drama that is managing 75% of its already-strong opening weekend audience. Not a great picture, but its giving its audience what they want and churches have been bulk-buying showings of it. A great Easter Weekend and it could hit $70 million by the time it’s chased off screens.

Steve Soderbergh’s quixotic journey from big box office director to explorer of the cinema’s fringe financing schemes (“Logan Lucky”) and smaller outfits that can’t market a movie to save their lives (“Unsane”) continues. Bleecker Street put his non-supernatural horror picture shot on an iPhone on 2000 screens, and created zero buzz for it. Little advance word that it was coming, almost no awareness in the general culture. Where did they advertise it? Why bother releasing them theatrically at all?

When the movie’s a picture from a popular genre, and gets good notices and nobody goes to see it, that’s incompetent marketing.

“A Wrinkle in Time” is creeping up over $70 million but will fall well below $100 by the time it loses screens.

“Ready Player One” figures to eat the box office for lunch Easter Weekend, but there’s not much buzz for that one, despite heavy advertising.

Apparently, in the future, getting your hands on good hot sauce is like having cigarettes in prison. The currency of the day. Even in Chinese future “Pacific Rim” films imagine and embrace.

Would never have recognized the stuff, as I avoid it. But the taste-buds-torched girlfriend has like a two year’s supply stocked up in the house.

No doubt a hoard stockpiled for the Chinese and kaiju takeover of global cuisine. “Pacific Rim: Uprising” was merely a warning. 

“Counterfeiters” is an ambitious, abridged thriller about a hustler who figures out a DIY way of making funny money.

A short, low-budget affair, it’s more of a prospectus than a polished, finished feature. Think of it as a calling card designed to advertise its remake potential, with a bigger budget, “name” cast and a rewrite or two.

Most film actors figure out the need to “make your own breaks” at some point. So there’s no such thing as a “vanity project” in the movies. Ask Ed Burns. Even when you write and direct it, have characters call your character “hot” and play with your luxuriant locks like a model told to “work it” by her favorite photographer.

Bryce Hirschberg wrote, directed and stars as Bridger, Mr. lives-with-his-mom and fusses at the way she does his laundry.

He’s got his reasons. Mom has been sick, and then she tells him “My cancer came back.”

They’re broke, but desperation joins inspiration when Bridger brushes his hair aside and notices what happened to the bills in his pocket. That’s how he can round up cancer-fighting cash. He’ll print his own money.

The script cleverly shows this process in a short opening montage, and only explains it “six months later” as Bridger’s operation has taken on lots of friends, a reasonably careful counterfeit laundering (Hah!) operation and a Carver motor yacht where the deed is done.

But “loose lips sink ships,” as they used to say in WWII. And “Sound travels on water, man.” These guys are getting greedy and sloppy. The idea is wash one dollar bills and re-print them into twenties. Because while bartenders, drug dealers, people selling used cars, etc., will check a hundo, “nobody” holds $20 bills up to the light.

True story — one of the few counterfeiters to ever utterly elude the Secret Service followed the same rule, way back in the 1940s. What was he copying and putting out as “legal tender?” Nickels.

Hirschberg squeezes a suspicious girlfriend, a flirtatious barmaid and a horny coke dealer into the mix as an old friend (Shawn Rolph) is added to the operation as “driver” of the boat.

Too many people know too much, and even the mastermind is prone to getting sloppy. It can’t last. It doesn’t.

“Counterfeiters” rarely builds up suspense, and Hirschberg the actor doesn’t register the panic that Bridger must be feeling as the walls close in. Decent sequences are followed with clumsy, amateurish ones — the worst stoned come-on scene in recent memory.

You may try to trip the viewer up with fake police stops and the like, defying expectations of this sort of movie’s formula. But there’s still the “I’m getting out after this” trope, the false promise of “I’m not gonna get caught.”

The chapter headings are cute, “Monopoly,” as in “We might have Monopoly money, but there’s no ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card,” “Jenga” (All comes tumbling down?). Are they really necessary in a 70 minute movie?

Which is why this feels more like a pitch for a longer, more polished remake. Maybe that first rewrite will work out some kinks, discard lines like “Those are some interesting words” and get this tale out of film festival purgatory.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sexual situations

Cast: Bryce Hirschberg, Shawn Rolph, Julie Simone, Bridget Avildsen, Annie Newton

Credits: Written and directed by Bryce Hirschberg. A Call It Pictures release.

Running time: 1:12

The trailer is freaking hilarious. The premise? A game of “tag” that lasts a lifetime? Through marriage cross-country moves, and childbirth, death and ruin? And it’s a true story?

Slapshticky, sentimental, great cast. Renner goes Action Jackson, Hannibal Buress puts the punch into the punchlines. Jake Johnson brings the high, hard stupid and Ed Helms takes the pratfalls. Damn.

Mark me “present” for “Tag.” June 15.

It’s a gimmick, a stunt, a filmmaking exercise.

Shooting your movie on an iPhone? That’s for aspiring filmmakers, somebody looking for a cheap way to shoot a movie and a headline-grabbing hook when you’re pitching it to film festivals.

Sean Baker makes “Tangerine” on the streets and seedy clubs of LA, he becomes a star director. “The Florida Project” comes next.

For a proven master filmmaker who likes to be his own cinematographer, Steven Soderbergh (he’s listed as Peter Andrews/Director of Photography in the credits) shooting “Unsane” on his iPhone had to be a fun, challenging exercise.

A paranoid (literally) thriller, he’d get the benefits of the intimacy you can achieve with a tiny camera, no bigger than your average video viewfinder on most digital cameras. He spends more time composing tight shots that get a lot of information in them, framing scenes in an arresting way that reminds the viewer, “Oh yeah, he did this with his cellphone.”

And if you watch “Unsane” on your cell phone, you’ll appreciate a picture of tight close-ups, natural lighting and action that’s right up in your face.

Does it serve the movie? Not really. The stunt is a false economy, an aesthetic “doing it one with arm tied behind your back,” a distraction. And it’s a way of reminding us of who a “star director” is or was in an era of cheap child labor age film school alumni and self-promoting hacks (Ava Duvernay and Steven S. DeKnight, this years’s Lee Daniels, Zack Snyder or Eli Roth) are studios’ preferred compliant employees.

Claire Foy, shorn of the attire, the accent and the regal makeup of “The Crown,” is the uncommonly-named Sawyer Valentini, a brittle, touchy investments analyst with a bank.

She’s new to Boston, and young — not so young that she can’t shrug off her boss’s suggestion that they attend a convention together by recognizing what he’s really pitching. Sawyer uses dating apps, and bluntly informs one bar meetup that “this evening is going to go the way you want,” but on her no-strings-attached terms.

The screenplay takes on the tint of a #TimesUp movie. And that’s before we figure out that she’s been stalked, that she moved to a new city, changed phones and uprooted her life to escape her tormentor.

And damned if she isn’t seeing his bearded, hulking presence in bars, her office, on the street. He’s gotten in her head, wrecked her sense of security and dinged her psyche pretty hard.

She reaches out to get some help, and damned if the mental health facility shrink doesn’t pull Big Mental Health Care Switch on her. Mention that yeah, maybe once you had thoughts of killing yourself, and that “boilerplate” paperwork she gives to you lets them “voluntarily self-commit” her.

Smiling, turning on the charm doesn’t work. Snapping “I have RIGHTS” to officious orderlies and nurses doesn’t work. It’s just “24 hours,” she’s assured. They have her — and her insurance — in their grasp, and bums-rushing her into a coed ward full of the genuinely disturbed where she’s threatened, bullied (Juno Temple is a belligerent psyche case who torments her) and medicated just ensures that those hours turn into seven days.

And so on.

We’re meant to wonder if Sawyer’s fears, her stalker-sightings, are all in her head. Maybe, for all the seeming shenanigans by this corporate facility, she’s in need of help.

But we’re seeing the damned stalker (Joshua Leonard) too. Her rage becomes our rage, even if her compliant reaction, almost accepting her fate even as she lashes out, fails to interest the doctors or cops in her dilemma (the stalker is now on staff there), can’t get rescued by her mother (Amy Irving, in a fierce and compact performance).

The system-wise fellow “prisoner” Nate (Jay Pharoah, cool and likable) tries to talk Sawyer through her crisis, assure her of the easiest path out. But she reacts the way any of us would. She’s enraged, humiliated. If she was bigger, she’d tear off a chair leg and try to beat her way out.

That’s an option I considered while watching her live through this nightmare. I’ve seen people use this sort of commitment to punish a wayward spouse, and it’s scary to think somebody can pull this on you.

But we don’t really fear for Sawyer, even as her stalker’s creepy fantasy unfolds and envelops her. She’s perfectly sane, we’re sure. And a smart cookie. She’ll extricate herself from this. Maybe.

“Unsane” makes a creepily watchable thriller, but it’s so light on thrillers and suspense that its Hitchcockian twist feels like an afterthought, a cheat not earned by the movie we’ve watched come before it. Listen for Soderbergh’s “Nespresso” joke. That’s for you, George Clooney.

As an exercise, it’s not as dull as an earlier Soderbergh no-budget experiment (“Full Frontal”), but it’s just as self-conscious. Film buffs will get more out of it than the casual viewer.

It’s a movie best left to Netflix, which you can stream on the same phone that the maestro filmed it on.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing behavior, violence, language, and sex references

Cast: Claire Foy, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple, Joshua Leonard, Amy Irving

Credits: Directed by Steven Soderergh, script by Jonathan Bernstein, James Greer . A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:37

Put it down to diminished expectations or what have you, but there’s a surprising delicacy to “Midnight Sun,” a teen weeper built around Bella Thorne.

You may know what to expect, if you’ve seen “A Walk to Remember” or “Everything, Everything” or even “The Fault in Our Stars.” But all involved give this picture a sympathetic shot, even if the script flails and fails miserably in concocting an ending that feels earned, honest and as graceful as what comes before it.

In this adaptation of a 2006 Japanese melodrama, Thorne plays Katie, a teen who has spent her whole life indoors — at least during daylight hours. She suffers from Xeroderma pigmentosum, “XP,” a rarer-than-rare genetic disorder that makes the sun deadly to her.

She grew up as “the vampire” next door, when the other kids in her corner of Washington thought of her. But that was years ago. The only people she spends time with are her doting dad, played by Rob Riggle at his sweetest and most PG, her BFF the irrepressible Morgan (Quinn Shephard, adorable) and the guy who runs the train station late at night, where she plays guitar and sings for passengers who get off the last commuter trains of the evening.

Then there’s Charlie, the hunky high school swimmer (Patrick Schwarzenegger) whom she watches go to school “every day, and yet he had no idea I even existed.”

Until that fateful night when she drops her songwriter’s journal and he picks it up.

It says something of Thorne’s skill that, as an almost certainly-jaded former child star (“Shake It Up”) who seems to court provocative web attention as a means of “building her brand,” that she’s able to summon up the awkwardness and under-socialized shyness necessary to pull off her early encounters with her dream boat.

“Holy pregnant cow!”

Schwarzenegger has barely a hint of his Dad in his looks and demeanor, and a disarming charm is the result.

The adaptation gives this story the expected high school touchstone moments — Katie’s first high school party, a post-graduation bacchanale cut into a montage as bouncy as a game of beer pong. A romantic trip to Seattle, a hint of how each gives something to the other, all tossed in for good measure.

Did I mention she doesn’t tell him she’s sick? She’s got her reasons. “When you tell somebody you’re sick, they stop seeing the real you.”

Director Scott Speer (“Step Up” sequels) and screenwriter Erik Kirsten don’t hide the inevitable and can’t get out of the drawn-out ending to save their lives. But they give Thorne some nice showcase moments, make her plaintive but pleasant singing voice fit the story and have the good sense to make Charlie’s summer job involve a marina.

What’s more romantic than a sailboat?

If you’re old enough to remember “A Walk to Remember,” there’s nothing here that will surprise you enough to warrant skipping this week’s “This is Us.” But if you’re still a dewy-eyed teen fresh out of going “Awwwww” at the out-of-date coming-out romance “Love, Simon,” there’s nothing wrong with stuffing a few tissues in your pocket and bracing for, if not a good cry, at least the sniffle or two “Midnight Sun” promises.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some teen partying and sensuality.

Cast: Bella Thorne, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Rob Riggle, Quinn Shephard

Credits:Directed by Scott Speer, script by Eric Kirsten ,based on the 2006 Japanese film screenplay by Kenji Bando . An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:31