Movie Nation

Africa saves “Black Panther,” Marvel’s Black History Month gift to Afro-centric fangirl and fanboydom. Africanness defines it and sets it apart from the many comic book adaptations that preceded it.

And that’s a necessary distinction, because these Marvel marvels aren’t so much scripted and directed as focus-grouped and engineered. The story beats, hero or heroine hurdles and fights and effects are so familiar as to be budgeted down to the penny. Broadening the appeal of your franchise ethnically is just smart business. In story terms, in character inclusions, in casting, pandering pays. You’d expect no less from Disney.

So you’ve got another cool costumed-hero tested with dead daddy issues, another “sibling” (or close relative) rivalry, another hidden world where superhuman heroes lay low.

But speaking of ideas borrowed from scads of predecessors, especially DC’s “Wonder Woman,” we’re shown the toughest, most interesting and fiercest female characters ever to grace a Marvel movie, a most welcome upgrade.

Chadwick Boseman brings a self-assured swagger to the title character, T’Challa, Prince of Wakanda who becomes king of his “poor, Third World” African nation when his father is killed by terrorists.

Wakanda, we have been told, is more than meets the eye. It’s not just huts and shepherds, tending their flocks under African skies. For millennia, its people have masked the true nature of their advanced, refined civilization. Another magic Marvel metal is in play here (yawn). “Vibranium” explains their mag-lev trains, their force-field shields and sonic boom spears, and young King T’Challa’s superpowered Black Panther suit and African mask-shaped spaceship.

And as the “Unobtainium” of Avatar is…unobtainable, bad guys are hellbent on getting this glowing blue Vibranium. First among them is the Afrikaner racist Ulyssees Klaue, played by Andy Serkis with an “I’m not stuck in a motion capture suit” glee. He flings the South African accented “You savages don’t deserve it” around a little too freely when talking about Wakanda and Vibranium.

His smarter but equally sadistic sidekick is Erik, aka “Kill Monger” (Michael B. Jordan of “Creed”), a trained American agent/assassin with the fighting and technological skills to get what they want, and the ruthlessness to not share it when they do. He’s got a bone to pick with the colonialist culture of Western Civilization, and Wakanda’s refusal to engage with it.

That’s the core conflict of the film. Director/co-writer Ryan Coogler, of “Fruitvale Station” and “Creed,” fleshes out the picture with glorious texture — a fresh color palette, striking settings, costumes, hair styles and gloriously African standards of beauty, and cute set pieces that give novelty to the well-worn Marvel version of the hero’s journey.

The many tribes of Wakanda get to challenge fight the heir to see if they can place one of their own on the throne, a throw-down staged before a vast multitude at the edge of a vaster waterfall refereed by Forest Whitaker.

The palace guard of Wakanda could give Wonder Woman’s Amazons a fair fight, if the chips are down. They’re statuesque, bald and wild-eyed women warriors, led by General Okeye, ferociously played by Danai Gurira of “The Walking Dead.”

T’Challa’s version of Q, his James Bond gadget-guru, is his smart alec baby sister (Letitia Wright). When they all get tangled-up in a South Korean Vibranium buy gone wrong and a CIA agent (Martin Freeman of TV’s “Sherlock”) is hurt, sister Shuri has just the one-liner for that occasion.

“Great. Another broken white boy for us to fix!”

The script has few zingers as good as that, surrounded by verbal banalities. There are battles and brawls that offer few surprises and a whole lot of filler. Sacrifices are made, Black Nationalist speeches about the white West’s plundering of the art, culture and human beings of the colonized Third World have a righteous sting.

This has the attempted gravitas of “Logan,” the myth-building of “Wonder Woman,” and the same pacing problems as those two consequential, worthwhile but only occasionally fun additions to the genre.

Because “Panther” is awfully slow on the prowl. The two hours and fourteen minutes just amble by. There’s little urgency to any of this, even the finale.

I’ve loved Boseman in his survey of American Civil Rights heroes (Jackie Robinson in “42,” Thurgood Marshall in “Marshall”) and in his larger-than-life turn as James Brown in “Get On Up.” Here, he’s well-cast but somewhat unchallenged.

Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o brings a radiant, competitive spark to her scenes with him, playing the Panther’s “ex” who happens to be the country’s most brilliant spy. Gurira and Wright dazzle, and Angela Bassett brings her regal presence to the Queen Mother. For all the fussing and fighting and grudge-settling among the guys, the women pretty much steal the picture. Jordan? All haircut, street “Creed” sneer and muscles. The character called for more of a Malcolm X turn, a lot less sneer and a lot more polish and intellect. This guy’s a one-dimensional villain treated as such by the Wakandans.

You can praise “Black Panther” for being a movie that embraces vast corners of the American and global audience through the simple act of “representation,” something comic book movies have neglected. You can praise it for being, like “Wonder Woman,” a movie of its moment, a genre picture whose demographic and political time have come.

But whatever its cultural significance, it’s just passable entertainment, a noble attempt at waxing mythical that never, for one second, delivers that out-of-body giddiness that makes popcorn pictures of its ilk burst to life.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for prolonged sequences of action violence, and a brief rude gesture

Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, Michael B. Jordan, Martin Freeman

Credits: Directed by Ryan Coogler, Joe Roert Cole, based on the Marvel comics. A Marvel release.

Running time: 2:14

Yeah, it feels like an epic episode of “Broad City,” or maybe “Portlandia.”

A “Saturday Night Live” sketch run amok.

But this comedy from New Zealand has maybe four out-loud laughs, JUST in the trailer.

The folks who brought us “What We Do in the Shadows,” “Eagle vs. Shark” and “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” are involved. So there’s a good chance this won’t just be a “film festival comedy.”

A Budapest abattoir makes the unlikely backdrop to romance in “On Body and Soul,” Hungary’s best foreign language film contender at next month’s Academy Awards.

Equal parts cryptic and disturbing, Ildikó Enyedi’s film pairs up two lonely souls — an older manager, self-conscious over his age, his loneliness and his disabled arm, and the on-the-spectrum young “quality specialist” doctor (Veterinarian? Agricultural researcher?) whose arrival haunts his dreams.

Oh no, it’s not)  THAT kind of movie. The dreams are something they share, an un-erotic pairing where they’re both deer, wandering the wintry woods, silently connecting by a stream, a lake or hunting for grass beneath the freshly fallen snow.

Endre (writer, playwright and dramaturg Géza Morcsányi) is a sixtysomething financial director/manager at the slaughterhouse. He’s gone years without visiting the slaughterhouse floor. The film spares few gory details from us, the camera lingering over the sentient-enough eyes of cattle being led in to their deaths.

He won’t say he’s bothered by this, but a smirking new hire gets a sobering reminder that this is not a job for insensate brutes.

“If you don’t feel sorry for them,” he says (in Hungarian, with English subtitles), “it’s not going to work out.” He is warned, more than once, that if he doesn’t have empathy for the animals, he’s going to have a breakdown.

Maria (Alexandra Borbély, a Slavic Saoirse Ronan) is equally new, a stickler for regulation and a tad robotic. She isn’t blind to the blue collar workforce’s chilly mockery of her. She simply doesn’t know or have the impulse to fit in, to warm up to others and make them want to befriend her.

“Asperger’s,” you think. Not that anybody here mentions that.

It takes a crime to connect the brusque and somewhat tactless Maria to the twice-her-age boss. Something was stolen at the office. Cops are involved.

And the annual “mental hygiene” check-up — a safeguard against the very breakdowns Endre warns others about — becomes the device the police plan to use to narrow their list of suspects.

The interviews with the pretty shrink (Reka Tinki) turn testy almost straight away. And when Endre and Maria, barely on speaking turns, reveal something they have in common in those interviews, the evaluating psychotherapist violates their privacy by confronting them about it.  That, eventually, arouses Maria and Endre’s curiosity.

Writer-director Enyedi is making a larger statement about sentience, compassion and empathy, with her many lingering close-ups of cattle and deer faces and eyes. She ties that to Maria’s autistic disconnection from people, which while not severe enough to keep her out of work, is something she’s aware of, an aching need to connect even as she shuns the human touch.

Maria will try anything — music (which fails to move her), a budding friendship with this odd colleague with the shared dreams, or even an affair — to break out of her loneliness, the communication barrier facing those cattle who may have more going on in their heads that beef eaters would care to know.

“On Body and Soul” isn’t as linear in its storytelling style or as results-oriented in its plot as a Hollywood or Western European film wrestling with these themes might be. That’s why the foreign language Oscar category is so valuable. It insists that viewers at least take a shot at seeing the world through another culture’s eyes via challenging films.

The storytelling lacks urgency and the film lacks pace. And for such a talkative movie, the subtitling is maddeningly indifferent, inconsistent and incomplete. Thanks, Netflix.

But in perhaps the most adventurous foreign language field of competitors in years, this Hungarian work makes for a fascinating conversation starter and intellectual debate.

Just don’t plan on having that argument over steaks or burgers.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with scenes of cattle slaughter and discussions of sexuality

Cast: Géza Morcsányi, Alexandra Borbély

Credits: Written and directed by Ildikó Enyedi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

What does it take for a chef, a restaurant, to earn that coveted “Michelin star?”

Attention to detail, fanatical care put into every stage of food preparation — from recipe experimentation to produce and meat selections —  insane hours, ridiculous stress and the patience of all involved to put up with this.

“42 Grams” follows a Chicago couple, from running an “underground” (illegal, off the books, unzoned, unlicensed, uninspected) restaurant out of their apartment, which they cheekily name Sous Rising,, to their opening a real restaurant and vigorously pursuing a Michelin restaurant guide star rating. Or two.

Jake Bickelhaupt and Alexa Walsh figure that since, as tradition (weighing someone just before and after death) and movies have taught us that the soul weighs 21 grams, they will call their intimate eatery “42 Grams.” They’re putting everything they’ve got, body and soul, into it.

Filmmaker Jack C. Newell only focuses on them, and we only hear about the life that’s passing all around them off camera. Three parents have died during their pursuit, a weeping Alexa says at one point. Jake is drinking too much. Their marriage is strained. There’s no time to start their own family.

Not when chef Jake, working class, largely self-taught and ego-centric (he knows all the words to the country music spoof, “You Never Even Called Me By My Name”), is furiously concocting ornate dishes, pureed baked banana topped with tamarind gelato, shaved hazel nuts and this and that, tiny salads you finish off with tweezers, itsby bitsy servings of duck surrounded exotic delights, caviar served inside hollowed quail eggs.

The food detail in Newell’s film is unsparing. Assorted assistants, “stages” (pronounced “stahje” in French, essentially unpaid interns) mostly, Jake and Alexa taste and re-taste versions of every absurdly labor-intensive dish.

Well-heeled customers, from the pretentious, adventure-seeking “foodies” who frequented their infrequent supper club evenings — a dozen seats in a tiny apartment right next to Jake preparing each meal, Alexa and a hired waitress serving them — to the patrons of 42 Grams, a failed fast food chicken joint underneath Chicago’s El they remake in their Sous Rising image (intimate, with the chef right in front of you) dine in wide-eyed, lip-smacking (and food “selfie” taking) delight at the taste sensations Jake serves up.

Both are quiet eating experiences, no music, with food and conversation all that’s there to cover up Jake’s short-tempered exasperation with his staff (sotto voce, maybe not sotto enough) in an open-plan kitchen.

Newell’s focus on the couple, their dreams, the prep and the food shows them leaving it all on the plate. This is taking everything they have to pull off, and Jake is hellbent on opening to a two star Michelin rating.

Jake is quick to point out what he regards as short-cuts, sell-outs, ennobling the pursuit of serving others great food while eschewing the “Food Network star” chefs who leave their restaurants in the care of others while they do TV, book tours and the like.

He never seems to consider that’s how Anthony Bordain developed a drug problem (and never became famous for his cooking) or Gordon Ramsay, Emeril and others were able to live life rather than letting the obsession eat every hour of their lives.

And Newell’s myopic focus on the couple leaves out the obvious — the business model. How much does it cost, per plate, to make a profit. Alexa glibly dismissing “commercial success” (i.e., rewards for your labors) just makes me that much more curious about prices, the evening meal turnover necessary for them to be able to afford to keep all this going.  (If you want to know what happened AFTER the credits, google Alexa Walsh.)

Thus “42 Grams” is eye-opening and engrossing, but no more so than your average episode of Ramsay’s old “Kitchen Nightmares” show. Less faked conflict, perhaps, but less revealing as well.

MPAA Rating: unrated, lots of profanity

Cast: Jake Bickelhaupt, Alexa Walsh

Credits:Written and directed by Jack C. Newell. A Gunpowder and Sky/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:22

A dogmatic Orthodox with a capital “O” community, an estranged daughter back to bury her father, an old romance within the confines of what the Brits used to call “the love that dare not speak its name.”

It looks and feels fraught. And the couple is age-appropriate, without the necessity of experimentation with peaches.

Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, April 27.

An accident of timing puts “Submission” into theaters just as the American sexual harassment reckoning hits peak outrage.

And for those looking for the bits and pieces that add up to “blowback,” it makes a convenient cinematic starting point. The harassment as a double-edged sword argument is trotted out and given a “Disclosure/Oleanna” spin, decades after the “trial by accusation” culture those earlier tales taught us to be on our guard about.

Stanley Tucci is our narrator and “hero,” a one-critical-hit-wonder novelist long-trapped in the velvet coffin of academia, a college professorship in Vermont. Ted wrote a revealing, inventive novel that took in his own phobias and demons growing up as the son of a martyred Vietnam War protester.

He’s still got a nagging publisher, still has a sliver of reputation among his fellow academics, still has a two story New England house that he shares with his doctor-wife (Kyra Sedgwick). But for all the comforts of routine, he’s wondering what happened to his future promise.

Early scenes have the playful Tucci letting us sense his inner eye-roll as student after student offers up variations of bestiality in their fiction writing workshop (no doubt inspired by “The Shape of Water”).

He gently takes their defense/descriptions of the work and tries to steer them to more grown-up ground.

“Always quote the student when possible,” he narrates. “It makes them feel you take them seriously.”

But the most outspoken young woman in class, the harshest critic of the others, has promise. Not that she’s willing to share it with her “inbred” classmates. She wants Professor Swenson to “read my novel.” Angela (Addison Timlin of “Fallen” and TV’s “StartUp”) has a complicated past, which Ted begins to suspect she’s made up.

A colleague (Janeane Garofalo) mentions how “obscene” the kid’s poetry is, and that the coed insisted a self-published bound volume of it be added to the school’s library. It’s poems in the guise of a phone sex operator. Ted’s curiosity, abetted by the sexual fantasies her writing inspires, gets the better of him.

As we’ve already seen a faculty dinner party devolve into a heated debate over the delicate, easily-offended “safe space” craving snowflakes that populate college campuses, far and wide, we know where this is going. Or we might.

Because “Eggs,” Angela’s novel-in-progress, is good. Good enough for a teacher with a publisher to steal? Even though it’s about a teenage girl lusting after her teacher?

Writer-director Richard Levine (“Nip/Tuck”), adapting a Francine Prose novel, lets the viewer see the honey trap long before it is sprung. In a culture where his peers are cautious enough to never meet with a student without leaving the office door open, where the female faculty is champing at the bit to believe any student who complains that something/someone made them feel “uncomfortable,” how is Ted not hearing the alarm bells we do?

Angela pushes beyond “Please read my pages” to “CALL me when you’ve read them” to “My computer’s broken. Could you drive me to Burlington to get a new one?” to “Could you help me set it up in my (dorm) room?”

And Ted is led, like a sheep to the man-eating slaughter. Here’s a hint. Take that pun of a title, “Submission,” seriously.

Timlin doesn’t make Angela vulnerable enough to cloud our or Ted’s judgment. Maybe “mid-list middle-aged” academics and writers are suckers to a pretty face with a yen for sexually explicit subjects. She’s got “femme fatale” written all over her before we and he notice she’s watching the film that made Marlene Dietrich infamous — “The Blue Angel.”

Tucci gives Ted a light charm, even as he’s playing what we, he and his wife must know is a cliche. From the tastefully hip glasses beneath the hairpiece (he’s playing 49 in this) to the Subaru he drives (in years past, professors in movies and real life always drove Saabs), he has to know this is what he’s become.

That self-awareness gives the story a passable twist, and Levine writes and shoots enough scenes in inventive ways to make this mildly-frustrating melodrama work. More or less.

It’s the players,  Tucci, Timlin, Sedgwick and Peter Gallagher (as Ted’s amusingly blunt publisher) who hide, in varying degrees, their motives, agendas and schemes, who make it worth watching.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Stanley Tucci, Addison Timlin, Kyra Sedgewick, Janeane Garofalo, Peter Gallagher

Credits: Written and directed by Richard Levine, based on the Francine Prose novel . A Great Point Media release.

Running time: 1:46

Early Sat. AM projections are always iffy, especially from these guys, especially when it comes to kiddie pictures.

So that early start that suggested “Fifty Shades Freed” would do oh, half what the best of the “Shades” pictures did on its opening weekend? A tad high. “Freed” won’t reach $39. The first film raked in $85 million on opening.

“Peter Rabbit” was over 10% low in its Deadline projections. It will hit $25. Not a bad movie, just antic and skewing very young in its story, characters, etc. Just British enough, I thought.

“The 15:17 to Paris” is going to be lucky to clear $11 million. Eastwood’s aging/shrinking audience may be a little slow to get around to it, but terrible reviews mean it’ll make whatever it does in only the reddest of red states.

“Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” is still in the top five, still making money weeks after “The Last Jedi” ran out of gas. It won’t earn as much, but if Disney isn’t looking at their tentpole’s quick collapse as anything other than “How long can we feel everybody into checking it out opening weekend?” and “We may have a problem,” well.

“The Greatest Showman” just rolls on and on. People love that Hugh Jackman, singing, dancing or Wolverine slashing.

Some of us are leery of letting valets park our cars. Because, you know, they’re careless. They scratch and dent. They rummage through your glove compartment.

Or they take the car to your home address, use your keys and steal stuff there.

“Bad Samaritan” is about some thieving restaurant valets who stumble into the ugly secret the sinister looking ex-Doctor Who with the Maserati is keeping. He’s kidnapping and maybe/probably killing women.

Tell the cops, fess up to save the woman? It’s never that easy in “Bad Samaritan,” which opens March 30.

A paranoid schizophrenic (Quinto) tells his shrink (Jenny Slate) that he’s anxious about his brother (Jon Hamm) returning to town.

The brother meets the shrink expressing concern for his disturbed sibling. And as the shrink is played by Jenny Slate (see “Gifted”), she sleeps with the guy.

So who exactly is the paranoid one? Very tricky looking indie thriller that is finally headed for distribution, though the date isn’t firm yet.

As Quinto has dropped off the screen and Hamm is doing tax commercials on TV, let’s hope that is soon.

STX and a bunch of Chinese money are gambling that Amy Schumer’s connection to every woman who isn’t a size 4 is huge and that “Trainwreck” was no fluke.

Here’s another Schumer comedy in which she owns who she is, and expects everybody else to deal with it/lust after it, etc.

Looks funny and empowering and all that. Raunchy? I’m guessing “Yeah.”