Movie Nation

And you thought the Swiss were the only ones famous for their cheese.

“Project Silence” hurls a disparate group of Korean strangers onto a fog-enshrouded bridge on the way to Seoul Airport, trapped by a mass traffic pile-up that includes a vehicle transporting deadly (CGI) attack dogs.

Our hero, Cha Jeong won, must protect his rebellious teen daughter, dodge the crashes and the possibly collapsing bridge, evade the dogs and the commandos sent to deal with them. And since he’s deputy director of state security, he’s doing all this while trying to maintain a media blackout, government spin and a coverup.

Of course, every daunting thing listed above — and I mean EVERYthing — is destined to bite him in the ass.

Director and co-writer Tae-gon Kim — “The Sunshine Boys” dramedy was his — does his best to let us in on the goof this picture is. But as striking as the foggy setting can be, as impressive as the scale of the pile-up turns out to be (rivaling “The Blues Brothers”) and as silly as one character and a couple of seriuously excessive moments struggle to be, “Project Silence” never quite finds a tone and rhythm that works.

Cha Jeong won, played by the late Lee Sun-kyun (“Parasite”), is an outspoken (by Korean standards) political insider who, whatever his government job, always has his eyes on the next election and his boss winning it. He’s a widower ready to send his bratty daughter (Kim Su-an), to study abroad, which might help him focus more on work. Not that he isn’t wholly into that already.

But a troubling hostage situation dominates the political agenda and serves as the backdrop to the off-kilter evening he and many others are about to experience. That fog, that bridge, and a lot of cars, buses and an anti-terrorist superdog transport are about to meet.

Cha Jeong won tries and fails to throw his weight around with military underlings and a mysterious “doctor” (Kim Hee-won) who stays glued to his computer and has Cha Jeong won handcuffed for being a nuisance.

Dr. “It Wasn’t My Fault” is trying to rein in — via computer chip commands — the anti-terror dogs he created, who seem to be in attack mode — coming after anybody in a uniform or otherwise in their way.

Comic relief is provided by sketchy “punk” tow-truck driver Jo Park (Ju Ji-hoon), who tries to cheat one and all, who complains and runs and yells “Cut the DOG crap!” (in Korean with subtitles), a fellow whom nobody seems all that intent on helping, but whose lapdog Jodie everybody wants to save.

And then there’s the cranky young golfer Yoo ra (Park Ju-hyu) and her hapless manager Mi ran (Park Hee-bon). At least one of them has a weapon at hand, if the other one didn’t wreck or lose those clubs.

The political intrigues take a turn in a direction we wholly suspect, the action beats run out of things to blow up and character types lean into type as all of this haphzardly comes to a head.

There’s just not a lot to make a lot of here, despite “Project Silence” being Lee Sun-kyun’s final film, despite efforts to give this CGI-bathed clunker a lighter touch, despite all the cars they crashed even as no “real” dogs were harmed in the making of this movie.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Lee Sun-kyun, Ju Ji-hoon, Kim Su-an, Park Ju-hyun and Park Hee-bon

Credits: Directed by Tae-gon Kim, scripted by Tae-gon Kim, Yong-hwa Kim and Joo-Suk Park. A Capelight release.

Running time: 1:36

A grieving husband tries to come to terms with his wife’s death through mentoring from a Dark Web guru in “The Secret Art of Human Flight,” a floundering blend of somber and silly that doesn’t work at either level.

It’s a dull indie with a little-known cast good enough to make the rounds of film festivals, a dramedy that reaches for “twee” and never gets off the ground.

Grant Rosenmeyer is Ben Grady, illustrator of successful self-published children’s books written by and publicized (online) by his wife, Sarah, played by Reina Hardesty of TV’s “Brockmire” and “The Flash,” the very picture of the “beautiful and dead” spouse a movie spends 100 minutes grieving over.

Ben can’t get out of the house, can’t work up the gumption to work and can’t shake the cop (Rosa Arrendondo) investigating his wife’s abrupt and perhaps suspicious death. The fact that Ben’s sister (Lucy DeVito) is dating another cop (Nican Robinson) doesn’t justify this clumsy, off-putting detour added to a sad story that never lets us believe he had a thing to do with that.

Then Ben stumbles into video of someone “flying” without mechanical, chemical or flying suit aid. And that sends him down the rabbit hole of the Dark Web, where an online guru (Paul Raci of “Sound of Metal” and “Sing Sing”) assures him “We all make mistakes, even the Egyptians,” suggests that learning to fly might offer an “out” and sends Ben a hand-written journal called “The Flight Handbook” to coach him through the process.

That process might be a build-up to suicide.

Clues that should leap out at Ben — the guru is weird and not in confidence-inspiring ways, sputtering vaguely mystical self-help gibberish. He asks for $5,300 for his book. And when he shows up, in an aged Winnebago, for “coaching,” we learn his assumed name is “Mealworm.”

Ben’s sister and the friendly cop warn him, the “bad cop” asks about life insurance policies and Dark Web intrigues. And Ben trudges through screwy instructions about ways to “clear your space” (unload all your possessions, repaint your house, and add cotton “clouds”) and “clear your mind” and practice, you know, jumping.

“Lose 18 pounds, no more, no less. Eat only vegetables one week, eat only meat the next.”

There is a point in every movie, especially the lightweight and problematic ones, where the viewer or critic, festival-goer or streaming buyer, decides whether to engage with the subject and the movie’s treatment of it and invest in the story it’s telling. Charitably put, “The Secret Art of Human Flight” didn’t make that sale for me.

The whimsical eccentricity of Mealworm’s life-coaching never elicited so much as a grin. And the plight of our hero never feels as sad as we’d expect, even comically sad. Rosenmeyer, one of the lesser “Royal Tenenbaums” and a lead in the indie remake “Come As You Are,” makes Ben so uncharismatic and uninteresting that he doesn’t generate the sympathy and empathy, amusing or otherwise, required to make one engage with the character.

And director H.P. Mendoza (“I Am A Ghost”) can’t find a work-around in “American Ninja Warrior” veteran Jesse Orenshein’s stumbling script that will allow “Secret Art” to get off the ground, or even out of its own way.

Rating: unrated, suicide subject matter

Cast: Grant Rosenmeyer, Reina Hardesty, Paul Raci, Lucy DeVito, Rosa Arrendondo, Nican Robinson and Maggie Grace.

Credits: Directed by H.P. Mendoza, scripted by Jesse Orenshein. A Level 33 Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:45

“Top Gun: Maverick,” “Oblivion” and “Tron: Legacy” director Joseph Kosinski is behind the camera for this story of a legendary driver who comes out of retirement to mentor a rising star in Formula One racing.

Kerry Condon, Damson Idris, Samson Mayo, Tobias Menzies and Callie Cooke also star in this summer 2025 release.

With Kosinski behind the camera and the screenwriter of “Dumbo,” “Top Gun: Maverick” and assorted “Transformers” and “Ghost in the Shell” and “The Ring” remakes and sequels on it, this could be a big hit, regardless of the dramatic and shelf-life qualities.

Next June, we’ll find out which.

For some reason, a lot of goose-stepping snowflakes are weeping and reading the French election results and tweeting their displeasure with #RIPFrance.

Victor Lazlo and Isla and Rick and Yvonne and The Band at the Cafe Americain have something to say to that.

Yes, “Casablanca” remains germane, because not all Nazis — as Elon and Bibi and LePen and Farage and DeSantis and Trump remind us — are Germans.

In late 1811/early 1812, four powerful earthquakes shook the little-settled center of the then-young United States of America near New Madrid, Missouri. They were strong enough to “reverse the flow” of the Mississippi, or at least give the appearance of it, liquify a village and flatten structures anywhere near it.

Bells rang in far-off Richmond, Va. and windows rattled in Washington, D.C.

Someday, scientists say, “the largest fault system” in North America will deliver another temblor or cluster of them just as powerful, with devastating consequences for at least seven states in the New Madrid Seismic Zone.

So that part of the “science” of the low-budget disaster movie “Continental Split,” an attempted “Twister” or “Twisters” of seismology, is sound. Calling for state-wide evacuations, interrupting earthquakes with nuclear bombs? That’s the nonsensical magic of the movies, kids.

It’s a disaster movie that hews to the proven formula — a scientist (Jessica Morris) splitting from her fracking-happy engineer husband (Chris Bruno), kids (Allison Gold and Crew Morrow) hurled into jeopardy, called on to do extraordinary things.

A cynical Missouri governor (Alison Chace) frets over how this will play in the press and takes advice from a “Bomb this quake” scientist-Lieutenant Governor (Joe Kurak).

Can Jefferson City, Kansas City, or the St. Louis Arch be saved?

The set pieces and moments of peril aren’t awful, and the effects — depicting a sinkhole lake suddenly disappearing, a tidal wave roaring towards St. Louis and assorted downtown collapses and “liquifactions” — are right on the cusp of acceptable.

But anybody who’s ever heard of the New MAD-rid quakes and the New MAD-rid fault knows how to pronounce the name of the town. Missourians and Tennesseans and Arkansans and hell, a whole lot of people with a casual knowledge of history/geography and geology don’t have to be local to know it’s “New MAD-rid,” and not “New MadRID,” like the city in Spain the town and fault are named for.

Nobody in the movie — not the locals, the scientists, the governor or lieutenant governor — pronounces it right. And nobody else and I mean NOBODY in this cheesy little B-movie did. Nobody on camera, nobody writing, directing, working on the set came forward to say, “Hey guys, it’s New MADrid, isn’t it?”

That’s not reason enough to pan a picture, but it’s close. The first time we hear the mispronunciation is when a geologist (Quintin Mims) rolls up on a good ol’boy fishing at a “newly formed sinkhole” lake in the middle of river flooding all over the region.

The “newly-formed” lake has been full of water long enough for somebody to build a DOCK for Bubba Hates-the-Gummint to fish from, a dock that looks old enough to have been around the last time St. Louis won the World Series.

So, dude is FISHING in a NEW sinkhole from an old DOCK, and he doesn’t correct the geologist who doesn’t know how to pronounce New MADrid. Damn.

We know everything that follows is going to be dumb. Sadly, it turns out to not be the “so bad it’s FUNNY” dumb.

The dialogue’s all mutual scientific respect — “The pleasure’s all MINE. I know your work!” — and mutual loathing.

“My predictive models don’t lie!” “You stole my mom’s research!”

The “blame” for the quake falls on fracking, which the governor damned sure isn’t going to accept.

“That fracking brought in MILLIONS.” Ask Oklahoma about that, “Show Me State.”

And the notion that quakes coming from the nation’s midsection will be “2012” level and “split the continent” in any sense just means that you don’t know the Mighty Mississippi already does that, and isn’t likely to widen into a mid-continental sea, even after The Big One.

“Continental Split” begins with a sinkhole — somewhere in the vicinity of New Madrid MADrid — and never for a second crawls out of it.

Rating: TV-14, disasters and death

Cast: Jessica Morris, Chris Bruno, Canyon Prince, Quintin Mims, Iman Mireille Kamel, Roxanne G.C. Brooks, Crew Morrow and Allison Gold.

Credits: Directed by Nick Lyon, scripted Gil Luna and Joe Roche. A Tubi release.

Running time: 1:27

A failing fishing town wrestles with the Big Developer future, a mute child born three months prematurely tries to find his voice through his “Camera,” with the help of a cute old codger of a photographer and camera shop owner, played by Mr. Bridges. Jessica Parker Kennedy and Bruce Davison also star in this one, which is finishing up its festival run and seems headed our way, if VMI releasing can get it before audiences.

Watching “Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot,” viewers are treated to a bit of a movie that’s apparently headed to theaters in the not-distant-future.

Not that we can tell this “David” musical clip that is attached to the front of the “Possum” picture is a “coming attraction.” Playing without an MPAA tag, this musical number, complete with David and his sheep, is based on the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my Shepherd,” etc). I thought that Angel Studios was giving us an animated short as a bonus feature for “Possum Trot,” the way Disney has over the years.

Looking for the trailer online just left me confused. Here’s an animated proof-of-concept reel from the work in progress.

But wait, Angel Studios is possum trotting out a “Young David” animated TV series, too?

Then there’s the STAGE production of this material, which I guess somebody has been planning to book as maybe a Fathom Events or church video feed or “select theaters” release next year as well.

Seems like Angel is awfully invested in this story of King David, the Early Years.

Back in 2010, a couple of children’s animated films came out with roughly the same message — that evil geniuses and criminal masterminds are misunderstood, sweet and salvageable as human beings.

“Megamind,” starring Will Ferrell, was a big hit. “Despicable Me,” starring Steve Carell, was a blockbuster that became a franchise, spawning sequels and spin-offs.

The biggest difference between the two films? Minions.

Fourteen years later, the animated movie world comes full circle as Carell and Ferrell unite for “Despicable Me 4,” with Will affecting a French accent to play the criminal over-achiever-turned-family-man Gru’s latest arch nemesis, “Maxime.”

“Eeet’s always SOMEthing! I can nev-air focus on just being EEEvil!”

And the only grins — “giggles” turns out to be too strong a word — in this still franchise come from the gibberish-spouting Minions. Listen carefully and you’ll hear what sounds like “Suppository!” from one as he takes a leap from a great height.

Cling to that, because aside from the odd moment of clever CGI slapstick, there’s noting else to cling to in this exhausted sequel. Good actors were hired to deliver funny voices, but not given anything amusing to say. Bland situations are recycled from other films. “Domestic life” in an evil genius household is about as entertaining as “Modern Family” without the gays or Sofia Vergara.

The plot — Gru (Carell) and Lucy’s (Kristen Wiig) — baby boy is kidnapped by the villainous Maxime and his sassy moll Valentina (Sofia Vergara) — and Gru must find the baby who seems disinclined to bond with his “Da-da,” even refusing to so much as gurgle “Da-da.”

The family of “leetle goils,” Lucy and Gru goes into AVL (Anti Villain League) witness protection, failing to bond with rich neighbors (Stephen Colbert, Chloe Fineman) and their bratty, Gru-suspecting daughter (Joey King).

Meanwhile, AVL chief Silas (Steve Coogan) is morphing Minions into Megaminions, superpowered superhero “agents” who resemble assorted members of “The Fantastic Four.”

That goes about as well as you’d expect.

Bringing Mike White in to co-write the script just reminds us how long ago “School of Rock” came out.

Putting Ferrell in the voice cast just makes one wonder if “Megamind” could have produced sequels.

And every time I see Coogan’s Silas, I wonder how the legendary Brit actor James Fox feels about being visually and vocally parodied by Coogan & Co.

Baby befriends badger thanks to an evil genius Hogwarts heist gone wrong — Gru is blackmailed into kidnapping the school mascot — kids adjusting to new school and new neighbors, nothing here yields funny fruit.

Yes, the animation sparkles. And yes, audiences are lining up around the block for something to take the kids to that isn’t “Garfield” or “Inside Out 2,” turning this into another big hit.

But are ticket-buying parents satisfied by any of this? “Despicable Me 4” barely rises to the level of “harmless. slaptsick distraction.”

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Steve Carell, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Joey King, Stephen Colbert and
Sofía Vergara.

Credits: Directed by Chris Renaud and Patrick Delage, scripted by Mike White and Ken Daurio. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:36

Cinemas that showed movies continuously, often around the clock, were called “grindhouses,” and back in the ’70s, these were the cinematic epitome of urban decay, moral drift and “alternative” movies.

It’s an American term most often associated with New York movie houses where one could watch Blaxploitation films, B-movies and the like, or just buy a ticket to get in from the cold or heat and nap through movie if it didn’t hold your interest.

But in Britain, there was once a grindhouse that transcended the label, an alternative cinema where classics, “out there” horror, gay films, porn and most any type of movie that had a following would be shown. At The Scala, cult films and their cultist fans could gather in a cult grindhouse of worldwide notoriety.

Of course John Waters was their patron saint.

“Scala!!! or, The Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits” is a messy, amusing and misshapen history of a theater that long predated its most notorious era — 1978-1993.

A portrait emerges of the place, the time and the people it served is created by interviewing scores of fans, filmmakers inspired to make movies, musicians who joined bands, comics who took to standing up at a mike and gays who decided to “come out” thanks to the decadent free-for-all that was this glorious and ancient movie house, sometimes music venue and social magnet for punks and anybody else who felt out of place in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

Ralph Brown, who played a punk’s punk in the quintessential big screen goof on that era, “Withnail & I,” shows up and suggests the Scala was the best place in Britain to find a lot of girls and boys like the characters in that movie, especially his — Danny.

Cinephiles, William Castle cultists, Derek Jarman worshippers, aspiring artists and filmmakers, teens misspending their youth and “just people who didn’t want to go to bed on Saturday night” haunted this cinema, which operated in a couple of locations — and hosted IggyPop, Lou Reed and Bowie shows at one time –before settling in seedy Kings Cross where it was meant to be all along.

Fans eagerly snapped up the colorful, forbidden fruit-laden monthly program calender, with its promise of “Eraserhead,” “Pink Flamingos,” “The Evil Dead,” “W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism,” its programmed celebrations of the Brit TV series “The Avengers” and “Shock Around the Clock” film festivals.

Drug abuse in the ticket line, cats wandering the auditorium, sex in the toilets, suicide out the windows — The Scala had it all, a venue where membership was required, “like joining a secret club,” “the Sodom Odeon” of British moviegoing.

It was a scene, man.

Waters leads the cast of interviewees, a delightfully deviant cheerleader who showed his films there, took friends and cast-members from his movies to experience the place and sets the tone here, reminding us of the importance in helping one find one’s tribe.

“The cinema was an important as the movies,” one interview subject notes, a big, dark old movie palace “that looked like an abandoned embassy.” Like such theaters in New York, and their later imitations (the indie Angelika Film Center), the subway was downstairs, giving the movies an aural rumble that wasn’t on the soundtrack.

For a film buff, “Scala!!!,” co-directed by a former programmer/manager Jane Giles, who wrote a book about the place, is a cinematic flash card, with every title — “King Kong” (the original) to “Koyaanisqatsi” to every kung fu movie of the “Bruce Lee LIVES!” era — inspiring memories of Russ Meyer smut, Waters before “Hairspray!” became a musical and inner city movie theaters before home video ruined the communal love-in that this sort of movie-going experience could be.

I got a taste of New York at the tail end of the grindhouse era. And many a big city indie cinema has at least dabbled in the Scala-styled program-for-the-aficionado, the “alt lifestyle” and just plain “weirdo” corners of film fandom.

But even if you missed all that, “Scala!!!” should amuse and confuse and titilate, providing a history lesson that reminds us that every time the culture tries to turn conservative, the fringe dwellers find the like-minded and strike back. There’s nothing more “punk rock” than diving into a movie some people warn you that you must never see with a whole bunch of like-minded free thinkers.

Rating: unrated, clips of films featuring nudity, sex and violence, with profanity, drug content

Cast: John Waters, Beeban Kidron, Mary Harron, Adam Buxton, John Akomfreh, Ralph Brown and Jane Giles

Credits: Directed by Ali Catterall and Jane Giles. A Severin Films release.

Running time: 1:36

A feel-good story first brought to light by Oprah and People Magazine, “The Story of Possum Trot” tells of a poor black town in East Texas where one small church’s congregation took it on itself to adopt as many unwanted foster children “in the system,” with testing but also inspiring results.

The film benefits from warm, confident performances from its leads and genuine lump-in-the-throat pathos in its situations and subject matter. It’s hard not to be moved by the sermons performed by Pastor W.C. Martin, played to great effect by Demetrius Grosse of “This is Martin Bonner” and “Rampage.”

And screen newcomer Nika King, as the preacher’s wife, “First Lady” Donna Martin, is just as good, and never more moving than when she makes the simplest, most compelling argument for churchgoers to add adoption to their ministry and their faith,

“How can we not do something?”

It seems like an impulse when Donna Martin, grieving over losing her mother, who raised her and 17 siblings, decides to drag her sister Diane (Jillian Reeves) to a seminar on adoption led by social worker Susan Ramsay (Elizabeth Mitchell). With her part time pastor husband struggling to provide for their two children — one of them with special needs — in between sermons at Bennett Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, it takes some convincing to bring him on board.

But when your wife tells you — “He spoke to me.” “Who did?” “The LORD.” — and you’re a pastor, you’re pretty much required to take heed.

And so they start taking in children. And others in their congregation, young and older, single and married couples, take up the call.

The viewer can sense trouble on the horizon when W.C. tells the social worker “We want the ones that don’t nobody else want.”

First Lady Donna reminds Susan Ramsay “The State ain’t no family.” Hey, it’s Texas. We get it.

To its credit, the script doesn’t sugar-coat the trials these earnest, well-intentioned decisions invite. It’s expensive raising kids, even with a stipend from the state for fostering them (I gather actual adoption cuts that off?). The entire church struggles, and Pastor Martin finds himself asking for help from the rich, building-fund/group cruise-taking megachurch across the county (director Josh Weigel plays that somewhat defensive pastor).

And the kids have issues — trauma, trust etc. Taking in Terri (Dianna Babnicova) means coping with a tween about to turn teen who pretends she’s a cat to cope, and who ignores guidance about how to properly manage her budding sexuality.

Still, when Donna and others in that congregation assure these new children they’re taking responsibility for “We YOUR people, now,” you can’t help but be touched.

But “Sound of Hope: The Possum Trot Story” often drifts between the pointed, emotional, spirit-moved sermons, without any pace or much of a sense of forward motion.

First time feature filmmakers Joshua and Rebekah Weigel’s film relies on the lazy screenwriter’s crutch, endless voice-over narration, to tell a story and shortchanges what most of us would consider interesting details as it circles towards an ending we see coming but feels only half-earned.

White filmmakers writing in Southern Black vernacular is by default, problematic. The film struggles to steer clear of being patronizing, at times.

They back away from giving our social worker much of an edge, but hint there’s one there as she brings up the fact that “religious guilt can’t fix a broken child’s hurt.” That whole side of the story is over-simplified, as the state’s responsibilities mean it can’t just sign over children to such groups, as the film suggests is “the solution.” A steady drumbeat of news stories about church abuse in the South underscores this.

And they soft-sell the “Why aren’t more churches doing this?” question by sitting on the fence about that megachurch pastor and his Osteen-lite ethos.

The film isn’t entirely artless, as Grosse and King tug at the heart in sermons and pleas shot in extreme close-up, and with a hand-held camera scene capturing the spirit moving the congregation to buck each other up and shoulder their burdens collectively.

Melodramatic touches and abrupt shifts in time and focus soften this Georgia-shot East Texas story’s impact.

But when the camera’s on Grosse and King, “The Story of Possum Trot” is never less than compelling and convincing in its argument that if ever there was any mission churches should attempt to take on, it is this one.

Let’s just hope this latest film from the “Sound of Freedom” studio — the “Sound of Hope” title ties the two films — is more scandal-free than their last one. Not that it’s without controversy.

Rating: PG-13, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Nika King, Demetrius Grosse, Elizabeth Mitchell, Jillian Reeves, Kaysi J. Bradley and Dianna Babnicova

Credits: Directed by Joshua Weigel, scripted by Joshua Weigel and Rebekah Weigel. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 2:07