Movie Nation

Sophia Loren has been a screen and fashion icon so long, famous as one of the most voluptuous women ever to grace the screen, that it’s easy to forget how brilliant an actress she’s been.

Earthy in Italian dramas, regal in costume epics and aloof and amusing in Hollywood romantic comedies, from “Scandal in Sorrento” to “The Millionairess” to “Man of La Mancha” and even “Grumpier Old Men,” Loren effortlessly wears the label her “El Cid” co-star Charlton Heston gave her to this very day — “a force of nature.”

She was never better than in her Oscar-winning turn in her frequent collaborator Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece, “Two Women.” Playing a widowed mother fleeing the air raids on Rome during the Allied invasion of 1944, she inhabits the role so throughly that one can barely see a “performance” in there.

Through her, the viewer experiences a WWII odyssey as her character, Cesira, and her daughter take to the rails and the road in a country about to undergo a coup, unleashing lawlessness and reprisals aheading of invading forces that took forever to march up the boot of Italy.

Titled “La ciociara” or “Woman of Ciociara” in Italian — named for the impoverished, mountainous region southeast of Rome — this gorgeous black and white classic exists in its original Italian or expertly dubbed by the multi-lingual Loren herself when it was released in the U.S. and Britain in 1960-61.

Cesira dotes on her tween daughter Rosetta (Eleanora Brown), who survives an air raid, causing her mother to vow to leave the Eternal City for the village where she remembers “sleeping in the chicken house…eating one meal a day.” Rosetta, she tells the neighbors, has a “weak heart.” But anything would be better than staying in a Rome under siege.

She talks the handsome Giovanni (Raf Vallone) into watching her store and apartment while they’re gone. She barely notices, as she lays out her reasons and plans, as Giovanni closes the doors and then the windows and curtains of his coal and firewood business, one by one, to seduce her.

Independent and contemptuous of mere male lust, the woman who married an older man simply to escape the poverty of the countryside eventually submits to Giovanni. But we can see the calculations beneath the desire in her eyes.

At least he’ll be inspired to guard her property, and escort her and Rosetta to the train the next day.

Their train ride is interrupted by bombing. She teaches Rosetta how to carry loads on her head, the way Italian women have for millenia, and they continue on, surviving an Allied fighter plane’s strafing, through the town of Fondi, where they’re hustled by the locals and threatened by fascist militia hunting for “deserters.”

And then they arrive at her home village of Sant Eufemia, and the dangers that hung over their picturesque and even picaresque journey subside. Or so we think.

Because although they’re among family and old friends — the “idealist” student Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo) pines for her — the war is still just down the boot of Italy, as the Allies landed “too far south” to make quick work of the crumbled Italian army and the Germans who supplanted them.

“I love you, Cesira!”

“With the troubles we have, you say THAT?”

We know what she knows, that civilians or ex-combatants in a now “occupied” country, Mussolini in or out, the war is coming for them, and a reckoning with it.

Veteran cinematographer Gábor Pogány (“Valdez is Coming”) frames such lovely images that “Two Women” can play like an “Italy as it Once Was” travelogue, with Loren our earthy, sensual tour guide. Mountain vistas, haystacks piled to the sky, every building old, bathed in shadows or stark sunlight, it’s as inviting a depiction of a war zone as the cinema has ever presented.

The simple struggle to buy food for herself and her daughter among understandably-hoarding neighbors in a collapsing economy is a daily grind. But as the seasons change and the debates about politics (Michele in a nascent communist, who just doesn’t know it), the just-ended fascist “empire” and chess matches, wine-drinking and Michele’s story-reading among his illiterate friends and relatives move indoors, the menace makes its way back into their lives.

“Anzio” is never mentioned by name, but referred to. British commandos ask for their help and hear every Italian excuse for not giving it. A German anti-aircraft officer (Curt Lowens) lectures any Italian within earshot about unmanly “Italian cowardice” and the injustices borne by a country that still has “peasants.”

And then the worst happens, a sequence still shocking over 60 years later, still poignant even if you don’t buy into Italian victimhood, still realistic and historically-defensible even if the modern viewer’s first instinct is to wonder if Italy’s infamous racism plays into its depiction.

Through it all Loren is defiant but human, always nurturing, pragmatic, canny and wary yet capable of letting her guard down, a strong woman with one maternal priority and yet a simple helpless refugee swept up in the tides of war.

Thanks to his long collaborative friendship with Loren, De Sica, already a legend for “Bicycle Thieves” and “Umberto D.,” added a third classic to his Holy Trinity of Italian masterpieces. Hers is a great performance anchoring one of the true masterpieces of the filmmaker who made “neo realism” the benchmark of all dramatic cinema.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Sophia Loren, Eleonora Brown, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Curt Lowens and Raf Vallone

Credits: Directed by Vittorio de Sica, scripted by Cesare Zavattini, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia. An Embassy Pictures/MGM release on Tubi, Mubi, etc.

Running time: 1:41

You scroll through your Amazon Prime queue and notice that there’s an Emma Roberts comedy called “Space Cadet,” a film that she just made it and that it’s not some project you missed from her teens and 20s (she’s 33).

You remember she was Ms. Perky Blonde in the past, and see that spitfire Gabrielle Union is a co-star. You notice that “News Radio” alum and UFO buff Dave Foley plays a NASA administrator.

But whatever your curiosity, your glance at the running time makes you ponder how anybody got a 110 minute movie about sending Emma Roberts to what is, in essence a “SpaceCamp” reboot.

You’re right to wonder. This latest feature from TV producer (“Cold Case”) turned writer-director Liz W. Garcia (Remember Kristen Bell as “The Lifeguard?”) stumbles as much as it dawdles, and it dawdles — a lot.

It takes an hour for the first laughs to show up in this tale of a one-time academic high flyer who got hijacked by life and ended up a too-cute Cocoa Beach barmaid (“MixOLOGIST”) who gets one last shot at her NASA dreams.

And yes, somebody calling her character the ultimate “Florida Gal” insult (“Floribama”) is one of those laughs.

And yes, after a brief burst of life, Garcia’s script settles into a “SpaceCamp” meets “Gravity” third act that is as dumb as it sounds.

But Roberts, who has talked of quitting acting more than once, hurls herself at this role with “legs,” as Susan Sarandon used to call such parts. Bikini bottoms, belly shirts, beaded braids, Roberts dresses to impress as a free spirit whose bestie (Poppy Liu of TV’s “Hacks,” the life of the party here) lies on her application for astronaut training.

That’s how Tiffany “Rex” Simpson gets into Houston’s astronaut testing pool. That’s where the high-school-obvious smarts that were supposed to take her to Ga. Tech might not be enough to get her past the science, flying and math it takes to make the cut for astronauts ready to try and reach Mars.

And that’s where smarter/legit-candidate roomie Violet Marie (Kuhoo Verma of “Plan B.”) discovers her secret and makes her that quid pro quo deal — science coaching in exchange for…

“I need to get in shape.”

“And you’ve seen my butt?”

Union and Tom Hopper play NASA training program directors, one of whom Rex isn’t shy about hitting on. A lot.

As Rex tries to bond with her much-more-qualified applicant/competitors, only one stands out from the pack, the hard-driving ER doc (Desi Lydic) and mother of four. Cross her and she’ll drop a “Floribama” on you every time.

There’s also that one high school classmate (Sebastián Yatra) who took the MIT hard-working nerd’s route and made himself accomplished, rich and famous, running a space tourism spaceflight business.

The movie’s timing could be better, with NASA having quality control issues with a spacecraft currently in orbit and space tourism and one space entrepreneur in particular giving democracy a hard time, and paying for it.

But that’s the grim reality of life outside the escape of a movie.

Roberts and Union pull out the stops trying to find laughs in this script, mostly failing. Scene after unoriginal scene drags on the picture — a karaoke montage with no singing, until Roberts’ Rex dives into Counting Crows’ “Mister Jones” — sucking it right out of orbit.

Only Liu’s spirited impersonations of various “references” which NASA gets around to checking come close to clicking. And that’s not enough or all that original, either.

Foley? He’s out there. Somewhere. Barely.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, boozing

Cast: Emma Roberts, Tom Hopper, Gabrielle Union, Poppy Liu, Kuhoo Verma, Desi Lydic, Sam Robards, Yasha Jackson, Sebastián Yatra and Dave Foley

Credits: Scripted and directed by Liz W. Garcia. An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:50

Look at the sight gags, reason out the plot, read the jokey subtitles.

Aug 30.

Melanie Thompson, Bryce Harrow and Marisa Hood are part of a”Surprise!” Birthday party where things go wrong. And romantic?

August 13.

“The Beautiful Summer (La bella estate)” is a sumptuous Italian period piece, a “discovering my sexuality” romance that’s gorgeous to look at, frame by frame.

But when the frame moves, the story those images slowly tell is shallow and slight, melodramatic and conventional. It’s an interesting portrait of everyday people trying to get by, figure out their sexuality, live their lives and dream their dreams, and a portrait that barely mentions all this “real” life is going on in fascist Italy under Mussolini, with World War II a year away.

Writer-director Laura Luchetti (“Twin Flower” was hers), adapting a novel by Cesare Pavese, goes for the sensual in this story of a seamstress from “the countryside” who falls in with the fast and loose art crowd — painters and their favorite model — in Turin, with pretty much pre-ordained results.

Ginia (Yile Yara Vianello) and brother Severino (Nicolas Maupas) share an apartment. She works for a demanding designer and custom dressmaker (Anna Bellato) who sees her eye, talent and dedication. He is a onetime student and aspiring writer who has lost interest in most everything.

Severino has decided to take a job so that they can come up with the money to go home. Ginia has no notion of that. And one day, on a group picnic, she finds another reason to stay.

Amelia (Deva Cassel) is a ravishing, raven-haired beauty who impulsively dives off a rowboat and joins Ginia and Severino’s crowd of young people more or less from the same rural-to-city background. And even though others warn Ginia away from free-spirit Amelia, Ginia is too smitten, or at least fascinated, to resist.

Amelia is an artist’s model who poses nude for old painters and young ones. The younger ones she also parties with and sleeps with. Ginia would like to go and “watch” — the painting, we assume.

Our heroine is a virginal country girl with lots of questions and new feelings. As she falls in with this crowd, sewing that customer’s wedding dress becomes a lot less important and Severino’s “She’s not like us” concerns and issues never come into consideration.

Ginia may act on her desire to pose for one of the rakes in Amelia’s circle of painters.

“I want someone to look at me and show me who I am,” she says (in Italian with English subtitles).

Luchetti’s screenplay drifts and stumbles through melodramatic twists even as her players and her camera never break the dreamy spell of an idealized memory the film casts on us.

We hear Mussolini on a radio, which Ginia closes a window to avoid hearing, and she witnesses uniformed fascist bullying on a street car ride. Nothing is done with this subtext, as we hear nothing of fascist threats to homosexuals and no one considers what might happen to all these young men when the war they should all know is coming begins, especially aimless young men like Severino.

And though we “see” the attraction between the two young women, we rarely feel it. Luchetti makes her beautiful looking film about this budding summer romance, but never quite convinces us of her passionate interest in it, or in much else that was going on in Italy in 1938.

Rating: sex, nudity, smoking

Cast:Yile Yara Vianello, Deva Cassel, Nicolas Maupas, Adrien Dewitte, Cosima Centurioni and Anna Bellato

Credits: Scripted and directed by Laura Luchetti, based on a novel by Cesare Pavese. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:53

“My Man Godfrey” struck a nerve when it opened in the middle of The Great Depression. It’s a nerve that it strikes to this very day.

A movie that presents the idle rich as “empty-headed nitwits,” with even the more self-aware among them admitting “All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people,” was bound to resonate in a country where breadlines and “hobo towns” and high unemployment had settled in and proven hard to shake.

Whatever the message or twists of Eric Hatch’s novel “1101 Park Avenue,” he and screenwriter Morrie Ryskind knew that a film that reminded America “The only difference between a derelict and a man is a job” would play.

It stars divorced couple Carole Lombard and William Powell, who knew how to banter, flirt and fend off flirtation from personal experience.

Comic mainstays Alice Brady (“The Gay Divorcee”), Mischa Auer (“Casablanca”), Eugene Pallette (“Steamboat Round the Bend” and later “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”) and Jean Dixon (“Holiday”) surrounded the leads.

And former cartoonist Gregory La Cava, fresh off the Claudette Colbert/Melvyn Douglas romp “She Married Her Boss,” directed what would turn out to be his masterpiece — a sassy, satiric screwball farce that earned six Oscar nominations, including the only one screen legend Lombard would ever earn.

It begins with a “scavenger hunt,” a bunch of over-dressed swells playing a party game at the Waldorf pile into a homeless encampment on a city dump beneath the Queensboro Bridge. That’s where insufferably rude and snobby Cornelia Bullock (Patrick) offends down-on-his-luck Godfrey (Powell) with her “Want to make $5?”

After he’s insulted her and her wimpy date and given her a shove into the ash-heaps, her younger, dizzier sister Irene (Lombard) arrives and tries to explain away the frivolity. A scavenger hunt is just like a treasure hunt, she reassures the dirty but dapper Godfrey.

But “in a scavenger hunt you try and find something nobody wants.”

Charmed, and chivalrous enough to want baby sis to beat Cornelia, Godfrey agrees to be taken to the swank ballroom and showed off to the swells as one of New York’s “forgotten men.”

Irene is so thrilled that she decides to make Godfrey a project, with her his sponsor.

“Do you butle?”

Next thing we know, our “Man Godfrey” has cleaned up, donned the tie and tails of a Park Avenue butler and waltzed into the world of the Bullocks, presided over by dizzy and dipsomaniacal “lioness” Angelica (Brady, an absolute stitch) and ever-grumping old money Alexander (Pallette, who’d go on to become the perfect Friar Tuck in “The Adventures of Robin Hood”).

The plot takes some pretty bland turns in the third act that spoil the film’s perfection. But the hallmark of the then-new screwball comedy genre was the banter, and it flies by in this, perhaps the finest example of the breed.

“Just a minute, sister!” a detective barks at maid Molly.

“If I thought that were true, I’d disown my parents!”

The never-funnier Auer plays the protege of the lady of the house, a Russian musician who sings laments and plays downbeat ditties at the keyboard and does party tricks to earn his keep.

Godfrey has to prove his worth by whipping up a hangover cure that works for the lady of the house, fend off the attentions of Irene, mollify the man of the house and keep Cornelia’s fangs at arm’s length.

“People who take in stray cats say they make the best pets, madam.”

Few comedies of this or any other era are performed with the panache of this one, with the players making scores upon scores of one-liners, insults and casual remarks worth a chuckle.

“See you in church!”

And if you wonder why all of Hollywood mourned Lombard when she died in a plane crash during a war bond drive six years later, watch her manic pixie rich girl here — hair flying, head bouncing with every utterance, the perfect impulsive ditz who might have to take a breath and show she can have a serious thought if she wants her crush to pay off.

“Oh, it’s a lovely view, the bridge and everything – Is it always there?”

And “Thin Man” icon Powell, the drollest and wisest of the ’30s wisecrackers, holds it all together by being the calm in the center of the silly storm, the “forgotten man” who gave even moviegoers looking for Depression Era escape a reminder that a country cannot and should not discard such worthies, especially with so much money in the hands of the idle and often idiotic.

Rating: “approved”

Cast: William Powell, Carole Lombard, Alice Brady, Gail Patrick, Eugene Pallette, Mischa Auer, Jean Dixon and Alan Mowbray

Credits: Directed by Gregory La Cava, scripted by Morrie Ryskind and Eric Hatch, based on a novel by Hatch. A Universal release on Roku TV, etc.

Running time: 1:34

This low-budget kid-friendly thriller features Mel as a “retired” detective named “Old Man” something or other, summoned by tweens and teens who think something monstrous is going on this season in Martha’s Vineyard.

Lorraine Bracco and Kevin James (?) also star.

Think they really filmed this on Martha’s Vineyard? Is Mel even allowed there? Naaah, I was thinking Hilton Head, from the trees, water and terrain. But it’s even more downmarket than that. I used to sail out of Southport, N.C. Cute and quaint. Why make the setting “Martha’s Vineyard?”

Oct. 2, Pastime Pictures will try to place this in a few theaters.

It often seems to me that when it comes to “on the spectrum” characters, the movies have never managed to progress beyond the Hugh Dancy/Rose Byrne Asperger’s romance “Adam,” which came out some 15 years ago. Screenwriters take liberties, making symptoms/behavioral quirks fit the contrivances of the plot, almost always showing themselves at the most convenient moment, shoved into the background much of the rest of the time.

But there’s a line in the new Argentine romance “Goyo” that echoes one I heard and reported from an “Asperger’s Wife” (support group member) I interviewed for a story about how “accurate” “Adam” was back in 2009.

“Have you never dated a man who never seems to lie?”

That doesn’t make this tone-shifting melodrama come off. But it does go a ways in explaining “how” people fall for someone who, for instance, counts the steps of every staircase he encounters, freezes-up or over-reacts to any change in routine, who’s afraid of the subway, leery of being touched and alarmed at the loud noises of any crowd, especially soccer games.

Argentine Nicolás Furtado of “The Big Love Picture” has the title role, a facts-filled/college-educated thirtysomething tour guide at Argentina’s National Museum of Art. If you need someone to deconstruct the South American masterpiece “The Return of Malón,” he’s your guy.

He lives in luxury with his concert pianist sister, Saula (Soledad Villamil) and occasionally hangs with his older brother Matute (Pablo Rago), and his routine includes daily swimming therapy with a “special needs” group that he avoids by holding his breath on the bottom of the pool.

But from the moment he spies “her,” cursing an unwieldy umbrella, her face bathed in the rain, Goyo has a new infatuation. It turns out Eva Montero (Nancy Dupláa) is new security guard at the museum. Goyo can’t stop staring at her.

He stalks her onto the subway, where he freaks out (he never rides the subway) and she freaks out over his creepy stare. But taking romantic advice from the crude, locker-room-talking Matute, he manages an apology and gets his shot at “getting to know” her. And hopefully, as he and Matute crudely and comically make clear, that’ll lead to something else new for Goyo — sex.

Veteran writer-director Marcos Carnevale has worked a LOT in South American TV, and that informs and hobbles his script, which veers from cloying and coarse to sensitive and brittle. Like a lot of TV folks making feature films, he’s overstuffed and cluttered his melodrama, tossing in spousal abuse, mommy issues, alcoholism and the blunt fact that the college-educated docent and the “much older”(not really) middle school drop-out guard have “nothing in common.”

But when Goyo — short for Gregorio Villaneuve — tells Eva Montero of what drew him to her, the way the “light” becomes “chrome yellow…like in Vincent’s paintings” when it hits her cheeks, we’re allowed to swoon, if only for a moment.

Matute’s “MILF” cracks and Saula’s constant boozy rehearsing and Goyo’s noting that the woman he always calls by her first and last name — “Eva Montero” — “Rain Man” style, “smiled 17 times and laughed eight times” on their first date provokes more than a little teeth-grinding.

But Dupláa (“The Retirement,” “10 Palomas”) is almost able to make us buy into this “connection,” showing us common sense reluctance in a mid-divorce mother of two flattered by the attentions of a young, handsome man, “weird” or not.

And when she sees the painting of her she’s started, well, who could resist?

The roiling emotions of love or at least infatuation are heavy-handedly “captured” for Goyo’s hallucinatory reaction to possible rejection. And Furtado and his English language counterpart (you can listen to this in Spanish, or dubbed into English) play Goyo in that standard “on the spectrum” monotone of film characterizations.

So anyone expecting this depiction of Asperger’s/”on the spectrum” autism to advance the medium will be sorely disappointed. The artistic milieu and tentative attempts at making a connection shine, but too much of what’s here is just genre cliches.

Rating: TV-MA, sex talk, profanity, alcoholism

Cast: Nicolás Furtado, Nancy Dupláa, Soledad Villamil and Pablo Rago.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marcos Carvenale. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50

Jay Pharaoh and Jim Gaffigan are in the supporting cast of this Lionsgate farce about people learning exactly how many days they have left on this Earth, and making their love-life/future-life decisions based on that.

This is clumsy trailer that struggles to explain that concept and waits too long — with almost no laughs — to get to pairing up Hale with Gilchrist.

Could be cute, though, reinforcing that “live while you’re alive” ethos and all.

This one comes out Aug. 9.

That “magnificent” hulking, “talking, pratfall-taking sight gag that is Dave Bautista” didn’t get the lesson that maybe a violent action film pairing him with a little girl wasn’t the best idea after “My Spy.”

It wasn’t a box office hit, for STX and I’m damned if I can remember how I actually got to review it. Was it even released in the U.S.? Must have blown up on streaming.

But “Spy” Dave is back, with four-years-older teen Chloe Coleman, Ken Jeong and Ms. Vulgar Double Entendre Kristen Schaal for “My Spy: The Eternal City,” which MGM/Amazon picked up for streaming on Amazon Prime.

It’s a dull European travelogue that takes us to Venice, Tuscany, Austria, Florence, and Rome — sometimes only in “establishing shots” — and a thriller that climaxes in Rome with a spirited chase that puts Dave on a motorcycle hurtling through “The Eternal City.”

Little Sophie at the wheel?

“I’m taking driver’s ed soon!“

“In TWO YEARS.”

The plot — CIA spies led by Kim (Jeong) have tracked down Russian info on where 100 long-ago-lost “suitcase (nuclear) bombs” are hidden, and a bad guy (Flula Borg) takes that data from them.

Teen Sophie, years-into her “training” under “You’re not my Dad” J.J. (Bautista) gets entangled in this on a tour of Italy with her high school choir with her crush, Ryan (Billy Barrat) and nerdy Colin (Taejo K), who crushes on Sophie and thinks his dad (Jeong) is a pediatric nurse, and not the head of a counter-intel division at The Agency.

J.J.? With Chloe’s mom off with Doctors Without Borders (we assume) in Africa, he’s wrangled into chaperoning.

Can he handle the “raging hormones” and “poor impulse control” of the horny teens in his care, the head chaperone (Anna Faris) wants to know?

“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail” is still J.J.’s motto. Sophie? She’s trained in martial arts, knife-throwing and parkour for years. When somebody on their trip is kidnapped, she springs into action, “ready” or not.