Movie Nation

Nicholas Tse stars in and choreographs the fights of “Customs Frontline,” a big budget Chinese shoot-em-up that features arms smuggling, a submarine, air raids and an African war fought over fishing rights.

The only people who stand in the way of these escalating hostilities are the intrepid and heroic customs cops of Hong Kong, chasing down unflagged merchant ships, intercepting weapons shipments and hunting for the elusive Westernized Asian supervillain, Dr. Raw.

The fights are impressive, the set pieces — involving that sub for sale, a V-22 Osprey used to grab a coveted navigation device, a ship crashing into seaside condos and chases, carjackings and running gun battles, have a James Bond movie sheen, as well as plot points borrowed from Bond and a lot of other generic action pics.

But in between the action beats, director Herman Yau’s (“Moscow Mission,” the “Shock Wave” movies) gives us a sluggish soap opera of intrigues, “a traitor in Hong Kong Customs,” illness, office romances and customs cop funerals. It’s enough to make one question how and why this picture was financed.

Tse, a sometime singer, often a supporting player and too-often cast in middling thrillers (“Raging Fire”), is Chow Ching-lai, a loyal “respect the uniform” HK Customs superstar.

Sure, he’s never gotten over the colleague (Michelle Wai) who ditched him. But when he and his customs boat team run up on a grounded, unflagged freighter in the vast Hong Kong anchorage, washed up by a storm, everybody stands aside as Lai dives into a racing inflatable to bring the lone survivor of that arms smuggling vessel to heel. His fellow officers literally (and comically) gawk at his bravado all the way through the long-fight with the murderous, pistol-packing young skipper of the rogue vessel.

With war errupting in East Africa between two fictional states, arms theft (out of Thailand) and arms smuggling are a new priority of the Customs crew. Lai’s mercurial, highly-strung boss Nam (Jacky Cheung) is adamant they interdict and arrest. Nam’s angling for a promotion, anything to please his new lady love (Karena Lam), who outranks him in the department. Oh, and he’s sick.

Dr. Raw (Amanda Strang) and her minions — chiefly Leo (Brahim Chab) — stage brazen heists right from Customs’ dangerous materials storage facility (they have access to an American Osprey), show their wares at Persian Gulf arms shows and supply both sides in the African war.

A Thai Interpol agent (Cya Liu) joins Lai undercover as they pose as reporters in Africa — “NO one’s trustworthy in a war zone!” — and talk the hulking strongman (Solomon Cutler) in charge of one of the warring states into revealing his blood diamonds and ivory for arms deals with Dr. Raw.

“Traitor” in the ranks, shady Hong Kong shipping interests, car-jackings and “suicides” meant to hide the truth, or point to it, further muddy the plot.

There isn’t a stand-out performance in this Chinese-and-English language production, which considering all the troubled, dating-each-other customs cops, the African blowhard and Parisian dragon lady, is both a surprise and a disappointment.

As Tse is more an adequate action lead than a charismatic star presence, and hasn’t anchored a hit, near as I can tell from his resume, how’d this picture get financing?

China has a LOT of interest in Africa, especially East Africa. The film’s opening scene is of the beginning of that fishing war. Two African nations come to blows over fishing rights. There are no real causes of fishing squabbles, the huge Asian (Chinese, Korean, etc.) floating fish factories vacuuming up vast catches, impoverishing the locals. Here, it’s those violent Africans who can’t work such matters out.

The arms that supply this war are stolen from Western-backed Thailand, and the smugglers, smuggling ship crews and armed mercenaries are all of European ancestry.

The Chinese? Why, they’re fighting for peace, justice and free trade.

Yes, Western and Indian and Japanense and Korean films often fall in line with their national image, points-of-view and foreign policy. But whatever this noisy, clunky dog cost, I hope getting that People’s Republican “We’re above it all and we’re your FRIENDS” message out was worth it.

Rating: unrated, violence, a high body count

Cast: Nicholas Tse, Jacky Cheung, Karena Lam, Yase (Cya) Liu, Brahim Chab, Amanda Strang and Francis Ng

Credits: Directed by Herman Yau, scripted by Erica Li. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:55

A fin de sicle Western,, with horses and murder and snow and Tin Lizzies? Dinklage is a bounty hunter?

Juliettte Lewis and Arliss Howard also star in this Tarantinoesque stomp through snow and violence, due out from Samuel Goldwyn Sept. 6.

The Woke Wars are far from over. Ask any white-wellies Nazi runt in Florida about that.

But if the defiantly queer, teasingly trans indie drama “National Anthem” accomplishes nothing else, it seizes “patriotic” iconography from the pick-up truck decoratin’ rednecks of Vanilla ISIS.

The film’s LGBTQ performers expertly parade the stars and stripes around New Mexico rodeos on horseback, along with the rainbow flag, of course. They compete in many of the same rodeo contests. They show the diehards in red caps a trick or two when it comes to flag-themed cowboy-cowgirl-cowpronoun wear.

And trans performer D’Angelo Lacy delivers what might be the definitive rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” to start one of those rodeos. No Beyonce/Underwood/Reba flourishes. Just a pure voice delivering those learned-by-rote lyrics with feeling we haven’t heard in ages.

Luke Gifford’s film is yet another “You just haven’t met your people” coming-out tale, this one set in the desert southwest . A lonely twentysomething day laborer (Charlie Plummer) escapes the trap of his life when he falls in with a sort of you-should-pardon-the-expression “dude” ranch for gay and transgender folks somewhere in more-tolerant-than-you-think New Mexico.

Dylan has a little brother (Joey DeLeon) to look after, no steady job, no benefits, no wheels and a dream — to buy an RV and travel the country. Accepting that “two weeks of work” offer from Pepe (Rene Rosada) may not get him any closer to that dream, seeing as how his self-absorbed beautician mom (“Karate Kid” and “9-1-1 Lone Star” vet Robyn Lively) cadges his cash, even when she swears she’s quit drinking.

Digging fence post holes, hauling hay and the like for a gaggle of gays with no visible means of support can’t help but seem attractive. The aggressively flirtatious horse-lover Sky (Eve Lindley) all but closes the deal.

“Just not really my scene, you know,” Dylan mumbles at this or that invitation to hang with the gang, party and what-not.

But when “the gang” raids the local discount store and grabs him for a little wig and eye shadow makeover, Dylan doesn’t fight it. Maybe he’s found his “people” after all.

Music video veteran turned first-time feature director Luke Gilford’s film breaks new ground only in the novelty of its setting, in the tropes and “truisms” of gay life as it’s depicted it leans into, and the ones it eschews.

Yes, there’s promiscuity and even when the “beach” is only on a drought-shallowed river, that’s an excuse for a polyamorous romp by the dozen or so House of Splendor ranchers to skinny dip and pair up or thruple up.

The only intolerance Dylan’s problematic mother displays is when she warns him off this job and “scene” because “They have one of those flags, you know.” A mother who knows she hasn’t done all she can for her kid and feels guilty about it isn’t likely to judge what he figures out about himself the first time he dons mascara.

Because Dylan realizes, at 21, what they’re showing him that he’s never been able to figure out.

Rare is the vintage French history-of-champagne romance that winds up in the loving hands of tiny distributor Vertical Releasing. So when a “Widow Clicquot” comes along, one simply must pop a cork and indulge. One must.

Director Thomas Napper earned his period-piece bones as second unit director on Keira Knightley’s “Pride & Prejudice” and “Atonement,” and he gives American Haley Bennett (“Swallow,” “The Girl on the Train”) the full Keira treatment in this melodramatic story of undying love, fine wine, property and madness during the Napoleonic Wars.

Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin fell madly in love in her arranged marriage with the mercurial vintner and heir François Clicquot (Tom Sturridge, magnetic and disturbed) in this story’s telling, a woman swept up in her manic husband’s experiments to select and nurture the right vines, and bottle the perfect the wines from his Champagne region winery.

For reasons not made completely clear, he wants to call her “Emily.” But then, he sings to the grapes on the vine, strolls about barefoot and his mop of unruly hair always seems ’80s-album-cover soaking wet.

Perhaps he died of pneumonia or “consumption.” Ah, there lies a tale.

So the story of their love and is told in flashbacks in this film, which follows his widow through her trials — figurative and literal — trying to keep the vineyards and winery because “François lives through his vines.”

It’s the early 1800s, and women simply did not run businesses in Napoleon’s Imperial France. But Barbe-Nicole was there, tasting and testing wines with her husband, offering opinions and absorbing some of his “radical” liberated ideas of how to produce great wine and to manage a successful business, and bringing her own to the table, once she has the chance.

She does this over the objections of her huffing father-in-law (Ben Miles at his prickliest), who has designs on selling the vineyards to the Champagne-dominating tycoon Moët (Nicholas Farrell of “Chariots of Fire”).

Besides, a broker snipes, with other snippy men present, “It’s not your place” to do this work.

But she will not surrender her rights to what her husband promised her was “the most beautiful vineyard in all of Champagne.” With a little help from her former nurse, now maid (Natasha O’Keeffe, luminescent) and her husband’s confidante, his wine broker pal Louis (Sam Riley, giving the man dash, sensuality and edge), she will get around Napoleonic sexism, Napoleonic trade embargoes and Napoleon’s destiny to blend, bottle and market the finest wines in all of Champagne, famous all over the world.

A terminally ill American in search of a phantom massacre of WWII.

Josh Hutcherson and Danny Huston are among the co stars. A much delayed drama finally making it our way.

Willa Fitzgerald finds a one night stand that goes ever so wrong in this demonic serial killer thriller.

Kyle Gallner is “The Demon.” With Barbara Hershey and Ed Bagley Jr in support.

Aug. 23.

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.