Movie Nation

Jessica Alba just sold off her health and beauty company for a nice piece of change. It wasn’t that long ago that the “Dark Angel” alumna finished a run on her latest series, “L.A.’s Finest.” So it’s not like she needs the work.

But when Netflix comes calling with a check and ther offer of another thriller for the veteran action heroine to brawl, stab and head-butt her way through, it’s limber-up time.

“Trigger Warning” is a time-tested vengeance Western given modern combat, arms-smuggling and right wing politics trappings.

Alba plays a special forces commando of some sort, a woman we meet when her team is chased across some piece of Syria because the locals “figured out were aren’t aid workers.”

Parker is a tough broad you want on your side in a scuffle. She’s the type who has to be reminded “You can’t solve every problem with a knife.”

The moment we hear that, we figure that’s exactly what she’s about to do. A call from “back home” tells her that her father died in an accident in an old mine he owned next to the family cantina, Maria’s.

Returning to the desert Southwest, Parker’s old love, the sheriff (Mark Webber) has more doubts about the cause of death than she does. But the suggestion that Dad (Alejandro De Hoyos) might have killed himself, or died because he was clumsy at using grenades to open mine shafts, gets her back up.

Father Frank was a former Green Beret. He knows which end of a grenade to toss and which to keep as a souvenir.

Elvis (Jake Weary), the scumbag brother of our sheriff, drops hints and sets off alarm bells in his belligerent come-ons and Big Man in Town bluster. And since he’s not just the sheriff’s punk sibling, but they’re both the sons of a MAGA Senator (Anthony Michael Hall) running for re-election, Parker starts to piece together clues and connections and wonder what this right wing cabal with a stranglehold on the town and local “justice” is up to, and is capable of.

Alba’s still in fine fighting form and the sound effects team makes every stab, slice, hack and cut “thwick thwick shtick” through flesh with authority. Because Parker’s going to have to blade her way through a lot of minions to get to the truth.

But the story’s “twists” don’t merit the use of the word, and the action beats are generic in the extreme — big explosions here and there, shoot-outs, sniping and fist-fighting and pissed-off beat-downs.

There’s no reason the willowy Alba shouldn’t enjoy a long, two-fisted career thanks to her mastery of fight choreography. She’s more credible in a brawl than “Resident Evil” model/actress Milla Jovovich, if perhaps less convincing than the brawnier Gina Carano.

But Alba’s been around long enough to know good scripts from crappy ones. And she’s rich enough to be choosier — getting better writers, seeking out the best fight choreographers, insisting on bigger name co-stars.

Why have the clout and the luxury of a big bank account if you’re not going to use it to up your game?

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Jessica Alba, Mark Webber, Tone Bell, Jake Weary and Anthony Michael Hall.

Credits: Directed by Mouly Surya, scripted by John Brancato, Josh Olson and Halley Wegryn Gross. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

No household names star in this upcoming disaster movie. And the trailer doesn’t show everybody as alarmed as they might be as the Earth opens up in the middle of the continent, the famed overdue-for-a-quake New Madrid fault that changed the course of mighty rivers and knocked the few buildings in America’s midsection back then down, some 200 years ago.

But you never know with a B-movie. Novel idea, decent effects. Maybe a few folks look more terrified in the full movie.

“Young Winston,” an epic of the “Patton” and “A Bridge Too Far” era, was a big hit in 1972 Britain, where nostalgia for “The War” was nearing its peak and the memory of the titanic figure, Winston Churchill, was still fresh as he’d only passed away seven years before.

The story goes that Churchill was a fan of writer-producer Carl Foreman’s “The Guns of Navarone,” summoned him for an audience, and pitched him on how good a movie his swashbuckling memoir of his youth, “My Early Life: A Roving Commission” would make.

And whatever Winston wants, Winston gets.

Actor turned director Richard Attenborough had impressed with his own blast of WWII remembered, “Oh! What a Lovely War.” Foreman pitched him this project and offered him the role of Churchill’s father in the bargain. Attenborough turned down the acting gig, recognizing the responsibility of his first real “epic” and first historical biography.

The list of actors who turned down leads in the film is legion — Malcolm McDowell was offered the title role, Albert Finney as well. Attenborough and Dirk Bogarde were the first choices to play Lord Randolph, Churchill’s quixotic and syphilitic father, a role eventually taken by Robert Shaw.

But it all came together, a sprawling, “Zhivago” length epic with a star-littered cast (Oscar winner Anne Bancroft is Lady Churchill, Winston’s American mother, with John Mills, Jack Hawkins and Anthony Hopkins in support, and future stars Ian Holm, Edward Woodward, Nigel Hawthorne and Jane Seymour also on the payroll).

Yet box office success aside, “Young Winston” was always a stiff, a movie too stately, choppy and staid in its first half (pre “intermission”), a picture that picks up with more action in its later acts only to peter out by the finale.

The aim was to tell of a privileged-birth-to-more-privileged rise to immortality tale, setting up our nanny/boarding school Winston as the victim of a neglected childhood and unremarkable, distracted academic career that turned into a driven pursuit of fame, military and political glory, all to atone for the fall of his father.

Relatively unknown Simon Ward plays Churchill from his college years, through service (usually as a “correspondent” in uniform) in three conflict zones in the late 19th century. Ward’s not bad, and he also convincingly narrates as the elderly Churchill, discounting his “bravery,” admitting his need for attention and “medals medals medals” with which to launch a political career.

But that narration, almost incessant, weighs on the film and just kills its narrative momentum and any sense that the visuals and actions are “telling” the story. No, it’s just a young actor doing your standard issue Winston impersonation. Attenborough would later include such narration in “Gandhi” and “Chaplin,” but never to the degree he lets this script rely on it here.

Young Churchill relies on his father’s influence to get him into schools, sometimes taking two or three attempts to succeed, and family connections to get him an Army commission in the last epic overreaches of British imperialism of the late 1890s — the Indian frontier, Sudan and the Boer War in South Africa.

We see a young man whom other officers sniff “wants to get noticed,” and hear Churchill admit as much. His father was a second son of an aristocrat, and thus he grew up in a family on a lower tier of “rich” and “privileged.”

Taking “Young Winston” from age 7 to 27 — 1881-1901 — required three actors (Russell Lewis and Michael Audreson precede Ward) — as we’re treated to that challenging childhood, school canings, a speech impediment to overcome if he ever wants to be an orator in Parliament like his father. All of this is cast as under the disinterested disapproval of that House of Commons Tory tyro father who almost reached the very pinnacle of British government before a rapid, self-induced fall.

The most interesting material in this epic has to do with Churchill’s early mastery of self-promotion and burnishing his brand. As a correspondent, he could cover military actions and write about them from a first person perspective. As an officer, he could inject himself into that action and ensure he is “mentioned” in the dispatches. And as a child of privilege, he can get a book about his exploits into print, with a few criticisms of military leadership adding to his notoriety.

But for all that, all his hustling and medals-craving comes to little. The fortunes of war — a timely capture and prisoner-of-war imprisonment after some admittedly heroic derring do — accomplishes what all his scheming and publishing never could, giving him notoriety and a fame based on heroism that he can ride into public office.

Foreman’s script delicately dances around honorarily-titled Lord Randolph Churchill’s fatal sexually transmitted disease and the fact that Winston was born somewhat less than eight months after his parents’ marriage. He manages to squeeze in a blunt suggestion of Jeanette Jerome Spencer-Churchill’s indiscretions. A bit sexist, actually.

Hopkins makes a dark impression as the future PM and Lady Churchill-ogler David Lloyd George. Holm plays the Conservative newspaper editor who advises and declines to support Lord Randolph Churchill in a final gamble on “Tory Democracy” re-branding. Seymour plays Winston’s first love, an actress a year away from her James Bond “Live and Let Die” big break, and Attenborough’s daughter-in-law at the time this film was made.

The pre-blockbuster cinema got a tad drunk on epics in the ’50s and ’60s, trying to lure back moviegoers from their new TV-addiction with long, historical, Biblical or literary epics filmed in wider, wider and widest screen processes. But for every “Sound of Music,” “Doctor Zhivago” or “Patton,” there were plenty of “Cromwell,” “Star!” and “El Cid” overreaches.

“Young Winston” was too close to its subject, too trusting of its narrator and too serious to find the silliness of some vainglorious striver risking his neck on the battlefield to ensure future immortality. “Oh! What a Lovely War” hints at the touch Attenborough might have been hired to deliver, but didn’t.

But taken as another bit of on-the-job training from the epic actor (“The Great Escape”) turned director Attenborough, one can see this big cast, scenic vistas, sprawling humanity (and combat) period piece as one more trial run — he’d also helm “A Bridge too Far” — on the road to making the movie he devoted years to planning, the one he’d be most remembered for as a filmmaker, his long-planned life of “Gandhi.”

I dare say he could never have pulled that off without the lumbering stumbles that led up to it, “Young Winston” included.

Rating: PG, violence

Cast: Simon Ward, Anne Bancroft, Robert Shaw, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, Patrick McGee, Jane Seymour and John Mills.

Credits: Directed by Richard Attenborough, scripted by Carl Foreman, based on “My Early Life” memoir by Winston Churchill. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:04, 2:25 or 2:37

This “true story” caper comedy set on the rough side of the music business in Northern Ireland is sung and joked mostly in Gaelic, the Mother Tongue of Ireland.

Fassbender trying comedy again? This looks daft enough to play, and too esoteric to get theatrical distribution outside of Old Eire.

But we’ll see. Surely it’ll come to streaming.

I have little memory of watching the Italian “empty nest” comedy “The Price of Family.” I reviewed it, but it left little to no impression at all.

I dare say in a week or two I won’t remember much about the sequel “The Price of Nonna’s Inheritance,” a “Granny’s gonna marry a lout who’ll steal all her money” caper comedy, in which the “caper” is killing Nunzio, Nonna’s ne’er do well actor, mooch and possible “Merry Widow Murderer” fiance.

Yes, writer-director Giovanni Bognetti is borrowing from Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” for this one. Just a little.

Anna (Angela Finocchiaro) is buttonholed by boorish Nunzio (Antonio Bruschetta, funny) at a class reunion. Nunzio goes on and on, an aged actor on the make remembering their time as lovers back in high school, that “loser” Anna wound up with, regaling her with exploits as a Gypsy thespian, touring the world, in and out of jails as he goes.

By the way, your mother, Giulana. “Is she still acting? Could I have her number?”

Next thing Anna knows, Nonna Giulana is in love, ready to marry Nunzio on Spanish Menorca in the Balaeric Islands. That six million Nonna inherited? It’s as good as gone.

Nunzio’s heading for his third wedding, both of the earlier outings were short South American marriages. His brides died…suddenly.

There’s nothing for it but to stop this wedding. But not just by warning the smitten Nonna.

“We must MURDER Nunzio,” Anna declares. Pushover husband Carlo (Christian de Sica) goes along. He, like 30something daughter Alessandra (Dharma Mangia Woods) and lives-with-his-parents Emilio (Claudio Colica) already has that six million spent.

They’ll do the deed on Menorca.

“We haven’t done anything together in so long,” Mama Anna enthuses. As Alessandra and Carlo scheme up plans and Emilio brings his cowardice and morality into the conversation, the boorish Nunzio keeps giving us more reasons to hope they “save” Nonna by “killing” Nunzio.

As if this dysfuctional quartet of quarelling, buck-passing slackers ever follows through on anything.

There is one clever visual bit of business in this comedy, which tries to wring laughs out of a blind Serbian wedding planner and best man, and the euphemism “moving the furniture” to describe Nunzio and Nonna’s noisy love-making.

The family figures they can make it look like Nunzio is depressed and suicidal as a cover for his coming death. So they con him into diving into the pool and holding his breath. It’ll look like a suicide attempt to the rental villa’s CCTV cameras, which they figure will record the incident and back them up.

The silent movie miming Ale, Emilio, Anna and Carlo engage in to make that CCTV footage convincing is straight out of “The Perils of Pauline.”

The rest of the movie? Barely a grin in it, much less an actual laugh. Considering the effectiveness of the one mimed comic scene, perhaps the insults, inept scheming etc. lose something in translation (in Italian, or dubbed into English).

Either way, Nonna’s “price” is marked down and the movie about it is as instantly forgettable as its predecessor.

Rating: TV-MA, attempted murder subject matter, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Christian de Sica, Angela Finocchiaro, Dharm Mangia Woods, Fioretta Mari, Claudio Colica and
Antonino Bruschetta

Credits: Scripted and directed by Giovanni Bognetti. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

A fine finish and some good performances recommend “Fancy Dance,” a melodramatic mystery with coming-of-age touches set in and around the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation of Oklahoma.

It’s a solid star vehicle for Lily Gladstone, who has spun her “Killers of the Flower Moon” acclaim into status and some plum roles — TV’s “Under the Bridge” among them.

Gladstone plays Jax, a Seneca lesbian who has made theft and drug dealing her way of getting by, which becomes a problem when Indian Child Protective Services comes looking for her niece.

Roki (Isabel DeRoy Olson) is staying with her auntie and waiting for her mother’s return.

But mother Tawi isn’t just absent. Like scores of Native women every year, she’s disappeared.

She was a stripper. This is oil country, where “man camps” of riggers are every bit as fraught as as depicted in “Wind River.” Roki may still hope Mom shows up in time for the mother-daughter dance competition at the Tulsa Pow-Wow, but Jax has her grim doubts.

The Feds and the local tribal police, in the person of Jax and Tawi’s half-brother, J.J. (Ryan Begay) keep kicking “jurisdiction” of the case back and forth. The locals have mounted repeated searches and Jax hands out photo fliers in all the worst places. She’s not going to let it go.

But when Child Services show up and custody of Roki is switched to the girl’s granddad, Jax and Tawi’s remarried father (Shea Whigham), getting that kid to the pow-wow takes precedence.

Maybe by dipping back into her old life and grabbing the kid for a road trip, Jax can solve two problems at once. Or make things a whole lot worse.

Gladstone and Olson click as aunt and niece, Seneca women who switch to the Seneca langauge whenever they’re trying to get out of a jam with white people or white authority.

But the white folks here seem nothing if not reasonable. Robbing a hapless fisherman of his money and truck, stealing from women in the changing rooms at stores, shoplifting gas and whatever else the convenience store offers is no “example” to set for a child.

Gladstone takes this character deep into unlikeable, but makes her mark via the mask of stoic doggedness Jax wears. She is human, craves the company of her favorite stripper (Crystle Lightning) and knows every pilfering, squatting and cop-dodging trick in the book. But damned if she’s going to ler her sister’s disappearance go unexplained.

Whigham brings that gravitas-with-an-edge presence to the grandfather figure, making us wonder about his motives and maybe how his fatherly failings impacted two daughters who both wound up on the wrong side of the law and the rough side of their culture.

The melodramatic moments start to pile up on that “road trip” — TV coverage of the “kidnapping,” the arrival of “the gun,” etc.

But with good players leading us into a fascinating cultural milieu, “Fancy Dance” comes off. Director and co-writer Erica Tremblay (TV’s “Reservation Dogs”) even manages to deliver tears just as the closing credits roll even if we can guess exactly where that finale takes place and some of what might happen there.

Rating: R, drugs, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Lily Gladstone, Isabael DeRoy Olson, Crystle Lightning, Ryan Begay and Shea Whigham.

Credits: Directed by Erica Tremblay, scripted by Erica Tremblay and Miciana Alise. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:32

A summer picture with old broads getting outta hand?

Gotta love the cast and the pitch. Gotta be better than “Summer Camp.”

A stylish bit of A-24 terror with Brandy Norwood squaring off against Kathryn Hunter, who played one of the witches in the Denzel/McDormand/Coen “Macbeth.”

Sept. 6.

“The Bikeriders” is hands-down the most pointless biker movie ever made.

With a narrative limping along on one training wheel, it mopes in an inane circle through the middle era of modern biker gangs, between the post-war “Wild One” birth of such “clubs” and ending just as the Hell’s Angels, The Outlaws, Bandidos and Mongols moved from traffic scofflaws and motorcycle theft into the drugs, extortion, prostitution and murder-for-hire of true organized crime outfits.

The best book about such gangs and this period was by Hunter S. Thompson, “Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.” “Bikeriders” is based on Danny Lyon’s 1968 photos and interviews book of the same “Bikeroders” title.

Based solely on the movie, Lyons’ must be the inferior piece of journalism and character study. Based on writer-director Jeff Nichols’ casting of the interviewer “Danny” in the movie, played without wit, color or the suggestion of intellectual curiosity by Mike Faist, Nichols wasn’t all that impressed with it or him either.

As the viewer waits for a point to creep in, something beyond romanticizing or demythologizing the original “One Percenters” as louts, dolts and drop-outs, one wished somebody had paid more attention to “Sons of Anarchy” back when it was on the TeeVee. This isn’t just bad. It’s fatally uninteresting.

Austin Butler is Benny, a reckless, heedless Illinois punk who says “You’d have to KILL me to get this jacket,” his beloved Vandals’ “colors,” in a biker-unfriendly bar in Greater Chicagoland.

Benny is tough, able to take a beating, and a masochist, more than willing to take it.

He’s also so stupid he can’t figure the odds, evaluate his own fighting skills, and work out a better battle to pick.

We see how Benny met “riders club” founder Johnny (Tom Hardy) and how the two came to depend on one another. Kind of. As the story is told by Benny’s on-again/off-again biker moll Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, every bit of the history is sketched in by a long-winded woman with no gift for getting to the point, or having one.

Nichols makes this Comer and Kathy’s movie, as her endless anecdotes and dull history lessons begin with the fateful night a girlfriend lured her into a biker bar “meeting,” where leering, “You got a man?” come-ons start out aggressive and take on real menace.

Benny was her savior that night. And he sat on his parked Harley all night in front of her house and all the next day until her working Joe boyfriend stormed out on her.

Johnny? His “Don’t worry…about nothing,” implies that he and Benny can protect her from the other Vandals, and that the Vandals can protect her from outside threats.

Here’s the neat thing about this script. The “outside threats” are few and far between, generic biker tussles in the “fists or knives” mid-60s. The gang rides to intimidate unfriendlies of every stripe, little motorized Nuremberg rally visuals for the awed locals.

Is there a political parallel for today, that the thugs the culture fears are nothing but empty Levi’s jackets on bikes? Nah.

I’ve been a big fan of Nichols since his “Shotgun Stories” debut, through “Mud” and “Loving.” But “Bikeriders” is an artless parade of closeups, waiting for the actors to get to the nub of a line, the movie to impress on us the necessity of a scene and the narrative to come to some sort of point.

Comer’s monologues are banalities sprinkled with cliches, none of them amounting to a nugget of profundity or a big theme about alienation, nihilism and “guys who don’t belong nowhere else,” they just “belong together.”

Any messaging about “The Golden Age” of motorcycle gangs, before they turned even more criminal, is laughable.

Comer is believable in the part, but like even the “types” in the gang — save for Michael Shannon, playing the doltish, foreign-born “Zipco” — Kathy is painted in colorless strokes. We don’t see an interior life, the dullness she might be escaping, the dead-end her limited future offers, the danger she stupidly ignores until the obvious happens.

Butler? He’s about as convincing a dangerous biker as Elvis was.

As my attention drifted into how one might have gotten a more compelling, entertaining or enlightening movie about this culture (adapt a BETTER WRITTEN BOOK) and era, bits of miscasting, scenes that defy cinematic convention and merely frustrate when they could titillate, terrify or what-have-you, I burned-out that rear tire down to the threads of one ugly conclusion.

This is a two hour waste of a lot of fine vintage motorcycles.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Boyd Holbrook, Norman Reedus, Mike Faist and Michael Shannon.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeff Nichols, based on a book by Danny Lyons. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:56

“Ghostlight” is an intimate, moving indie drama about the transformative power of art and the mental health benefits of the theatre.

An “actors’ picture” in the purest sense of the phrase, its players take us on an emotional journey that covers limited ground, but manages to be an enriching, deeply rewarding experience nevertheless.

Keith Kupferer stars as Dan, a gruff highway construction worker sleep-walking through his days jack-hammering streets and sidewalks in his corner of Illinois.

Dan, we quickly learn, is getting it from all sides. He’s got an out-of-control teen (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) at home, a passive, sometimes-impulsive wife (Tara Mallen). And every pedestrian wanting a little peace and quiet and every rude, rushed driver feels the need to yell at the 50something laborer in the orange vest.

Something’s going on, driving all that domestic dysfunction. Daughter Daisy might get kicked out of school. There are “depositions” to prep with a lawyer, and counselors to drag Daisy to.

It’s enough to make Dan snap. But just as he does, this pushy little woman (Dolly De Leon) who has been complaining about the noise drags him into a storefront.

“I need your help with something.”

That “something” is a theater company she’s in. They need warm bodies, and Dan? He has the look of a Capulet. Wait, what is this?

“Your salvation,” Rita assures him. She looked Dan up and down, saw him mel tdown, and figured “you might like being somebody else, for a while.”

“Ghostlight” scampers past that unlikely turn of events and hurls this Blue Collar Joe into breathing exercises, limbering-up techniques and the “Provocative Questions” game, something actors play to measure, improve and acknowledge “emotional intelligence,” put themselves in another’s shoes and be “available” “in the moment.”

Dan, bottled-up and burdened by a sea of troubles, starts to connect to himself, his family and their problems by rehearsing “Romeo and Juliet.”

“Isn’t the language gorgeous,” a castmate enthuses? “I just wish I knew what it meant,” Dan admits.

Actress-turned-writer/director Kelly O’Sullivan and co-director Alex Thompson (“Saint Frances”) manage to make a generally unsurprising melodrama into a life-affirming delight.

So much of this is “on the nose” and predictably-sweet that “Ghostlight” flirts with becoming maudlin.

The novelty of casting a real-life couple, veteran stage actors, and their daughter, in the lead roles is cute enough to almost overwhelm the slight story and its “We all saw THAT coming” twists.

It turns out that the fiery Daisy knows Shakespeare, has the play memorized and was — until recently — a regular thespian in her high school. She too might be “transformed” by this amateur production.

But the players make the sale, and make this picture sing. The performances are mostly-understated, with barely glimpsed simmering fury in scenes where it isn’t evident. The youngest Kupferer takes things believably over-the-top as a mouthy, volatile teen in crisis.

The play within the picture is also “on the nose,” as far as subject matter. But as anybody who appreciates the Great Works of the Theatre knows, even the most shambolic “Romeo and Juliet” can come off, if the performances allow it.

De Leon’s Rita is every pie-eyed dreamer who fell in love with the stage, never came close to making it and yet never can let it go.

There are plenty of theatre nerd chuckles in the stumbling rehearsals, the unconventional casting and the “drama” behind the drama — demands for “an intimacy coordinator” on set — small-timers with big egos, older actors finding the soul of teen love and impulsiveness, or the perfect song to contemporize a 430 year-old play.

The miracle of “Ghostlight” is that cast and crew here take the punch-lines associated with actors and acting, the dreamy delusions its often overly-sensitive practitioners are famous for, and turn them into the greatest gifts acting gives to actors.

Emotional availability and “healing” might be just down the street with a bunch of cockeyed dreamers who just want to “put on a show,” with or without an intimacy coordinator.

Rating: R, fisticuffs, profanity, adult subject matter

Cast: Keith Kupferer, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Dolly De Leon and Tara Mallen.

Credits: Directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, scripted by Kelly O’Sullivan. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:54