Movie Nation

By the late 1960s, John le Carré was just coming into his own as the  the new Graham Greene, a sophsticated, subtle “thinking person’s spy novelist.” “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” had shown the former MI5/MI6 insider to be a writer whose work was in sharp contrast to the pulp fiction of most everybody else in the genre.

“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” had already been turned into a pretty good film, sort of an “anti-Bond” dose of the cold realities of this deadly business.

His tales were unsentimental, not particularly sexy and generally quite cynical about the Cold War and the spy game.

Frank Pierson was a two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter (“Cool Hand Luke,””Cat Ballou”) who had a little TV directing on his resume.

But the future Oscar winner and soon-to-be-lionized novelist weren’t a good fit on “The Looking Glass War,” a “send a man over the border” Iron Curtain thriller built around the estimable Ralph Richardson, rising-star Anthony Hopkins, blonde-du-jour Susan George and hunk-of-the-moment Christopher Jones.

It’s dark and cynical enough — wheezing old men playing old-fashioned, even by 1960s standards, spy games, gambling with a new recruit’s life. But the film is so choppy, uneven and abrupt in its shifts of focus and truncated ending as to make one wonder if they didn’t leave a reel out here and there in uploading it to stream.

The problem begins with the novel, widely regarded as one of John le Carré’s weakest. He even changed the ending of it in later editions just to get the damned thing to make sense.

Jones, a mop top in the Peter Fonda/Michael Sarrazin mold, makes a passable lead, and Richardson and Hopkins and most of the supporting cast are up to snuff.

But whatever le Carré was getting at, it’s pretty obvious Pierson had his sights set on Bond, James Bond — sending him up in a bloody account of a bungled bit of spycraft gone wrong. The picture is too serious to hit that shaken, not stirred target in this story of a brutish, catnip-to-the-chicks Polish sailor blackmailed into taking on a job of espionage to determine where the Soviets are parking their latest missiles, “700 miles from London.”

An agent (Timothy West) in Finland picks up a roll of film shot by an airline pilot he’s bribed to drift low and off course to get film of mobile “Sandal” missiles and where they’re being deployed, we later gather.

I’ve never read anywhere that this sort of spy flight really happened. If so, one can almost understand the Soviet attacks on commercial flights like the Korean Airlines flight 902 and KAL 007 shootdowns. If this sort of surveillance never took place via civilian airliners, le Carré may have very well put that idea in the Russians’ heads via this book.

Their tradecraft at the airport bar is laughable, an open conversation and public exchange. And we get our first hints of the impoverished state of British Intelligence after the spy scandals that its inbred, classist culture produced in the Guy Burgess era. The agent makes the pilot pick up the bar tab, and gripes about not having car-fare provided by his employers.

It’s on his ludicrous snowy trek home on a deserted road that he is run down. But his killers don’t get the film.

That murder is treated somberly by the junior man (Hopkins) at HQ. But it’s a confirming clue to his boss, LeClerc, given an old man’s gravitas by Richardson. The killing, added to grainy, blurry photos they got from a photographer in East Germany point to the deployment of these new missiles within range of London.

Memories of the fiery assaults of German V-2s of WWII have old men like LeClerc and and Haldane (Paul Rogers) waxing gravely about a terrible threat. For certain?

“I don’t deal in certainties, I deal in doubts,” LeClerc snaps.

That’s when they turn the screws on an impudent Polish drifter (Jones, of “Wild in the Streets” and “Ryan’s Daughter”) who jumped ship to be with this English lass he fancies and apparently impregnated. If he wants to stay in Britain to be with her (Susan George) and his child, he needs to do this little job for them.

“I think that heroes are only happy in parks, with pigeons sitting on them,” sailor Leiser sneers at his elders.

But he agrees. Why?

“Biology,” LeClerc says with the certainty of someone who’s done this scores of times. “Men change their politics. But sex? Sex is something you can depend upon.”

They get him out of immigration detention, set him up in a safe house and drill him on spycraft, radio protocols and self-defense.

The “never trust anyone” training includes Hopkins’ Avery jumping him, “Pink Panther” Kato style, for brutal punch-outs that have the feel of DIY fights to the death.

It’s all very old OLD school — the backpack Morse code “wireless,” shuttling this guy across the border by literally cutting through a fence and dodging a minefield, the limited training.

But Leiser, the multi-lingual ladies’ man of 23, can’t take a gun across a foreign border because “that would be an act of war,” you see. James Bond’s Walther must be left behind.

With a guy this green, this insolent, this hotheaded and careless, the “mission” goes wrong, pretty much from the start.

The juicy le Carré details here aren’t the misadventures of a Pole in Soviet-controlled East Germany. It’s the domestic disasters facing the married men of the spy agency — secretive workaholic and maybe alcoholic agents married to bitter, mistrustful women.

“Don’t try and RUN me like one of your wretched agents!”

The disastrously faithless marriage of George Smiley in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is prefigured here.

“I’m a patriot,” Avery declares to his snappish wife. “We’re fighting a war. We’re in the dark.“

Leiser and Avery are equally mercurial, taking their training fights to very personal extremes, cheerfully knocking back indiscrete drinks in the pub after Leiser busts out to see his girl, and slap her bloody for getting an abortion.

Yes, the movie is head-snapping like that. A truck-driver is killed and his body stuffed in the back, with his barking, whimpering dog. When the truck is stopped by man-hunting East German troops, the body’s gone. And the dog.

Another compliant blonde (Pia Degermark) throws herself at Leiser in Germany. Is she a spy sent to trap him? Is it all just a big Russian fake-out?

Perhaps that explains why the Brits rely on a method of gathering information so old fashioned it predates the first World War. The WWII “wireless” set, the cypher hidden in a tube of toothpaste, “it’s the last thing” the Russians would expect. And it’s cheap, the sort of thing you try when you’re not sure if your enemy is pulling one over on you.

The behavior of the communists once they first tussle with Leiser should provide us with our answers. As to the old men pulling the strings, who’s going to miss one more Polish hippy? They give up on him before they have any reason to.

“We never really knew him, did we? Like a waiter at one’s club. ‘Good morning.’ ‘Good evening.’ And a guinea at Christmas.”

The choppiness and lapses in logic, even if by design, ruin “The Looking Glass War.” But the tone, the cast, the cynicism and the deathly personal business of kill-or-be-killed spying tell us the movie this might have been.

The novel wasn’t great, but looking at the film and the way Leiser takes to violence and thinking of James Dickey’s marvelous American-airman-downed-in-1945-Japan thriller “To the White Sea,” one can imagine other changes le Carré might have considered for the book, or that Pierson, who’d go on to win an Oscar for scripting “Dog Day Afternoon” and be a guiding light in famous TV movies and the Emmy-honored “Mad Men,” could have added.

If only an under-funded, disgraced agency of tired old men had underestimated their Pole and dropped a pitless murderer behind the Iron Curtain. That would’ve been a lot more exciting than this.

Rating: PG for its day, violent

Cast: Christopher Jones, Ralph Richardson, Anthony Hopkins, Pia Degermark, Paul Rogers, Cyril Shaps, Timothy West, Paul Swanick and Susan George.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Frank Pierson, based on the novel by John le Carré. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:

He looks worn and weary from a bout…with something, we don’t know what.

The rumor that made the most sense to me was a “stroke” after a heated argument, but there’s little evidence of that in his speech, which would have been a good reason to stay out of the public eye while he recovered/rehabbed.

He dropped this video on his Instagram feed.

No idea what happened to him, and the void he’s left by not giving specifics isn’t helpful. You know what rumor mongers will fill a void with. “Stroked out” among them.

But it’s good to see him recovering, and good to see him killing it in “They Cloned Tyrone” on Netflix. Maybe he’ll tell Orpah what ailed him.

“Seasons” is a tedious, tepid and inane romance about a woman who toys with her boy “friend” and reaps the consequences.

It’s meant to be a rom-com, but it isn’t the least bit funny. The leads are pretty, and Lovie Poe sings and co-wrote the screenplay. But it limps along from one improbable turn of events to the next, all of it meant to “test” a couple who give us no “spark” to make us root for them. Ever.

That’s something that might be missing from the long-term coupling of Charlie (Poe) and beau Kurt (Carlo Aquino). They look good together. He’s a 30something bar owner always coming to her rescue, propping up the part-time singer/full-time something in advertising — I think — always there for her at friend and family events.

But the “spark” was never there for this relationship to progress. Now good time Charlie is turning 32, concerned that her friends are well into marriages and child-rearing. So why doesn’t she feel more for “my best friend?”

If he’s got an issue, maybe that’s reflected in her quick-to-out-them-as-mismatched sex-partners at a group gathering. Maybe the ways she takes him for granted play into it as well.

Sure, she’s beautiful and fond of the bare-midriff look, which she always pulls off. But even Kurt knows that the gal-pal who calls him “Uggo” and who answers to him calling her “Uggo” is permanently in the “friend zone.”

As Charlie narrates the story (in Tagalog/Filipino/English, “Tanglish?” with subtitles, or dubbed), she made “the worst decision of my life three years ago.” That was when she taunted Kurt into trying online dating — with someone else — and she let him talk her into submitting to the entreaties of her lovesick co-worker, Hans (Jolo Estrada).

Charlie got stuck with a work “buddy” never destined to be a beau. And Charlie went out of her way to hook Kurt up with a cute cake-baker, Jane (Sarah Edwards) at a local restaurant.

As Charlie watches Kurt fall in love, she figures out her mistake. Only a desperate move — faking a pregnancy — can stop that Kurt-Jane trip to the altar, or so she thinks.

Poe’s a passable singer and perky leading lady, but this character is bland and there’s little she can do to fix that. Aquino has almost no screen presence. Yes, he used to be in a boy band.

There are situations here that have worked in other rom-coms. But you’ve got to get more “com” and at least a hint of “rom” in there if you want this to play.

Director Easy Ferrer lets this handsomely-mounted production just mope along until it slows to a crawl, never wringing a laugh or big romantic moment out of it.

“Seasons” isn’t as chaste as the romances we see from much of the rest of Asia. But there’s no edge to it, no stakes to the love affair and little for the viewer to invest in or root for. It settles on “insipid” and never manages to rise above it.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations and profanity

Cast: Lovie Poe, Carlo Aquino

Credits: Directed by Easy Ferrer, scripted by Dwein Baltazar and Lovi Poe. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50

If you didn’t see “Glitter & Doom,” a wistful musical set to the songs of Indigo Girls, you should.

It’s damned adorable.

I saw it, but didn’t realize it was a harbinger of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers having ” a moment” this summer.

The ladies who rode into folk-rock immortality with this tune would see the song making another statement in a feminist “Barbie” movie that would become an unexpected blockbuster.

Having raised two girls who watched every cut-rate animated Barbie cartoon to come along, I’d never guess what Greta Gerwig would get out of A Doll’s Life.

But having interviewed the Indigos a few times over the years, I can say this couldn’t have happened to two cooler and nicer musicians.

Somebody re-release that single. Hey, it worked for Kate Bush.

“Closer to Fine” is even in the ads for “Barbie.”

Enjoy the ride, ladies. And take a bow.

“For a number of reasons, film buffs have long harbored the feeling that Orson Welles had a hand in directing some of — perhaps his own scenes — Carol Reed’s film noir masterpiece “The Third Man.”

The best arguments for that are Welles’ performance, his crackling good lines and big “cuckoo clock” speech, and the Wellesian camera placement and shot-framing of the inky-black post-war Viennese streets in that classic.

The best argument against Welles “co-directing” that film has to be “Odd Man Out,” made two years before “Third Man” by Reed, the first-ever BAFTA Best Picture winner and a film noir classic in its own right.

It’s another man-on-the-lam thriller and stars James Mason as a weary and wounded IRA section chief on the run after killing a clerk in a payroll robbery. Over the course of a day and a very long night, Johnny McQueen will drop in and out of consciousness, struggle to hide, meet a lot of folks on the fence about him and what he does, fans and friends hoping to help, bystanders fearful of IRA reprisals if they turn him in and those coveting the reward the authorities have slapped on his head to keep him from slipping out of Belfast.

Meanwhile his confederates, led by Denis (Robert Beatty) and egged on by Kathleen (Kathleen Ryan), who loves Johnny, are trying to find him, debating how to manage that, arguing over what went wrong in the heist and how to get Johnny — already a wanted escaped convict — out of town.

Neither the “IRA” nor “Belfast” are mentioned, mainly to avoid U.K. censorship. John Ford’s “The Informer” had also skirted the murky-bloody politics of rebellion against British occupation and colonization. But Reed’s film has a definite Brit-centric bias, one that mirrors the F.L. Green novel it is based on, with even Johnny questioning his and his accomplices’ actions.

“I believe in everything we’re trying to do. But this violence isn’t getting us anywhere.”

Johnny’s mention of winning “at the ballot box” is a glib bit of British propaganda that ignores how they’d colonized the northern Irish counties with generations of loyal Scots to “pacify” the Irish, rendering such electoral hopes futile, something any IRA man would have known.

Johnny hides in a neighborhood air raid shelter, in a horse-drawn hansom cab, is taken in by strangers who think he’s been hit by a truck (he’s been shot in the arm and is bleeding out), holes up in a “snug” in a pub and falls under the control of a demented painter (Robert Newton) and his failed-surgeon (tumbledown) flatmate (Elwyn Brook-Jones).

All night, as the rain changes to snow and the police inspector (Denis O’Dea) turns the screws on Kathleen, she implores the IRA-friendly priest (W.G. Fay) and Dennis to get her to Johnny.

“Sooner or later, the police will get to him,” she pleads. “Let me have him until then!”

It is a beautiful black and white film of lovely, tight compositions, nervy hand-held shots mimicking Johnny’s frame of mind and gloomy, damply-lit and narrow West Belfast (and some London exteriors) streets, flats and factories.

No, it’s not as gorgeous as “The Third Man.”

The chases are well-handled even as Mason’s place in the film — he has few lines to start with, and recedes into the background in the middle acts — means that most of those chases will involve those in on the robbery with him — men played by Cyril Cusack, Dan O’Herlihy and Roy Irving — and his comrade Dennis.

Those scenes have a polished competence and brio to them, but the action beats of “The Third Man” are next-level thrilling.

Reed’s use of natural sound — streets, bar scenes, crowded tram, etc. — adds to the reality of it all, something replicated with “Third Man,” which also leaned on “The Third Man Theme,” that unforgettable piece of zither music, to place the film in its locale and heighten emotions.

But the “Odd Man” narrative loses much of its urgency in the melodramatic middle acts as Johnny slips into the background and assorted folks — two sisters (Fay Compton and Beryl Measer), the priest, the cabbie (Joseph Tomelty), and a barman (William Hartnell) ponder what to do with him or about him.

The most vivid characters in these scenes are the cynical brothel madam and “chancer” (Maureen Delaney) and greedy, broke barfly Shell (F.J. McCormick), the one fellow willing to admit he’d love to have the reward, IRA reprisals be damned.

But it’s Shell’s stumbling across Johnny that invites the mad painter and his never-quite-a-surgeon friend in. And Newton, raving and ranting, trashing a bar and wild about capturing on canvas “the eyes” of a “doomed man” before he perishes, ensures the finale is both action-packed and layered with pathos.

Mason, despite his fumbled efforts to tone down the posh Received Pronunciation accent to sound like an Irish Catholic ex-con, would call this his favorite role and go on to decades of greater glory as a great character actor and leading man.

Reed was already a veteran filmmaker with a dozen years of directing credits on his CV. He’d made some prestige pictures (“Night Train to Munich,” “The Young Mr. Pitt”) before, but “Odd Man Out” heralded his arrival on the pantheon of his generation of British directors.

“The Fallen Idol” would be his next film, followed by “The Third Man.” But after this brief peak, his work fell off until he got to make Graham Green’s “Our Man in Havana” in 1960, after which he took big checks for the epic “The Agony and the Ecstacy” and the blockbuster musical “Oliver!”

Watching “Odd Man Out” now, it’s easy to see that discounting Reed at his peak artistry is unfair, even as the superior writing, acting, pacing and production values of “The Third Man” still make it the best film Orson Welles didn’t direct. But pretending Welles didn’t make that movie what it’s become is just as incorrect.

Reed lifted his game and plainly took suggestions on set. Welles must have camera-blocked and scripted some of his scenes.

And “Odd Man Out,” if not Reed’s very best film, certainly shows us that “The Third Man,” “Fallen Idol,” Our Man in Havana” and the Technicolor glories of “Oliver!” were produced by a singular talent who only suffers when he’s compared to the greatest directors of his era — Welles, Ford and Lean among them.

Rating: “approved”

Cast: James Mason, Robert Newton, Kathleen Ryan, Cyril Cusack, Denis O’Dea, Dan O’Herlihy, Robert Beatty, W.G. Fay, F.J. McCormick, Kitty Kirwan, Ann Clery, Joseph Tomelty, William Hartnell and Elwyn Brook-Jones.

Credits: Directed by Carol Reed, scripted by R.C. Sheriff. based on a novel by F.L. Green. A Two Cities/Univeral release available on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:56

We judge Mia, right from the start, because we’re invited to.

She’s very pregnant, pretty young and scrambling to get to her work, her classes and meeting her two children.

The classes are mandated by the state. There are drug tests to take. Her children are in foster care. And she’s late meeting them.

“I tried my best,” she says to her little boy, Tre. “This is not easy.”

Her daughter Shena isn’t speaking to her. Her child welfare case worker isn’t hearing it. Everything about Mia — starting with that instant-bad-impression neck tattoo, screams “impulsive” and “poor decisions.” We almost don’t need to learn that’s she’s a recovering addict.

“Earth Mama,” the debut feature of British born/Bay area filmmaker Savanah Leaf, is a “walk a mile in my shoes” drama of subdued emotions and intimate observations. She follows her heroine, played by rapper-turned-actress Tia Nomore, through the character Mia’s world — Oakland — struggling to keep a job, placate her religious, judgmental sister (Doechii), get her kids back from “the system” and bring her latest baby to term.

That sister isn’t dependable (I think she’s a sex worker, although that wasn’t made clear). There’s one friend, Mel (Keta Price) Mia can depend on. But with her mother and own family not in the picture, the baby daddies nowhere to be found, her support system is almost non-existent.

There’s one counselor’s she’s dealing with who might have be helpful. Miss Carmen (Erika Alexander) wants to help the single-mothers class of women who lost custody “get your kids back. But I can’t if you keep multiplying the household.”

It’s not just staying clean that will help her help them. She needs these women to stop having more babies while struggling with everything else life is throwing at them. And she’s the one who gently pushes Mia to giving up her unborn child for adoption.

“Earth Mama” is about Mia struggling with that decision, meeting prospective adoptive parents (Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Bokeem Woodine), keeping up with her classes and group counseling, hanging on to her portrait photography studio part time job and keeping appointments with the children she’s already brought into this world, kids who need “stability” more than anything else, the case workers and counselors insist.

Mia and we learn about the “anxiety” in addicts that “triggers” their need to use, and how job-one for every single one of these women is to “grow up.” That’s a big part of the solution to their lifetimes of bad decisions, even if it’s no guarantee they’ll earn an easier life by achieving that simple first goal.

Leaf intercuts snippets of “sharing” with the group moments, where women talk about their struggles and what keeps them going, adding authenticity to this fictional experience.

Nomore gives a documentary-real performance in the title role, showing us a flawed woman who is still young enough to blame others for her problems, and open to unhelpful suggestions about what “they” are doing when “they” take her children from her.

Leaf lays out the stresses facing Mia, but Nomore is the one who makes us feel them.

“I just don’t want to let anybody down” — her kids, her counselor, herself, her “family” and/or the people she can’t decide whether or not to give her baby to.

We never meet a baby daddy, and Mia declares she’s planning on living single from now on. Is this another rash decision, or a first step towards getting her adult footing?

That allows us to judge this “Earth Mama,” first encounter to last. But by the end, we’re a lot more sympathetic because this movie and this performance let us live in her shoes, just for a little while, and feel her burdens, grief, guilt and panic as we do.

Rating: R, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Tia Nomore, Erika Alexander, Keta Price, Doechii, Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Bokeem Woodbine.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Savanah Leaf. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:38

It plays like a rowdy, raunchy 1970s Blaxploitation period piece. Because aside from cell phones, what’s changed in “tha’hood” in the past 50 years?

Gang-bangers, pimps and “ho’s” riding around in Yank tank Buicks, aimless souls pumping iron, hitting the convenience store for a scratch-off and a forty.

But that’s the whole satiric point of “They Cloned Tyrone,” a noisy, funny and ever-so-quotable comedy about the vast white wing conspiracy to keep the brothers and sisters down. Nothing’s changed in 50+ years because “There’s something in the water.” Or the fried chicken. Or grape drink. Or hair-straightener. Or the music.

Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier’s script was Black Listed, deemed “one of the best unproduced scripts making the rounds in Hollywood” about five years ago. Netflix finally produced it, with Taylor behind the camera directing, and it’s hilarious.

It’s about low-tier drug dealer Fontaine (John Boyega) who clumsily injures a rival invading his turf, gets a bellyful of lead because he’s not smart enough to see a reprisal coming, and wakes up to the same life, the same routine — “Got Drank!” convenience store for a 40 and a scratch-off, a quick cruise in his ’77 Buick LeSabre to hit-up pimp Slick Charles (Oscar winner Jamie Foxx) for the drug cash he owes, same “ho’s” providing him information (Tamberla Perry) and sass, especially Slick’s favorite, Yo-Yo (Teyonnah Parris of “Dear White People” and “Chi-Raq”).

As Slick and Yo-Yo remember Fontaine getting ventillated, he starts to wonder just what’s going on in “The Glen” (Atlanta)?

With Yo-Yo doing some “Nancy Drew s—,” Fontaine stomping around like a grilled-teeth bull in an Atlanta china shop and Slick Charles casting out words of warning, they start to put it all together — the inane hip hop on every radio, the fried chicken that has folks lined up around the block.

“They say curiosity killed the cat. We some cats. COOL cats, but we still cats!”

The screenplay sings a song of silliness and conspiracy, start to finish. Like most “Black Listed” scripts, it’s movie-savvy — references to “Nancy Drew,” “Book of Eli,” “Training Day,” “Sophie’s Choice” and especially the Kevin Bacon thriller “Hollow Man” abound.

Screenwriters love referencing earlier screenplays via characters who speak movie shorthand.

“They ‘Clockwork ORANGING ni–as!”

The rolling tide of jokes and references includes a “Coma” inspired “Dexter’s Lab” filled with “Bill Nye-the-Science-Guy-looking-mother-f—ers.”

The world they create here is “Do the Right Thing” lived-in, complete with an aged, drunken sage, Frog (Leon Lamar) who cadges drinks in front of the Got Drank! and lets drop “There’s something in the water” and other pearls of wisdom about what’s really going on.

David Alan Grier, in a FULL Frederick Douglass wig, goes OFF as a singing, testifying and (spiked with mind-control drugs) grape drink communion preacher, a single scene that calls for a whole spin-off movie.

And if you need a conspiracy explained by one of the conspirators, you can’t cast better than Kiefer Sutherland. Maybe let the Canadian do a Southern drawl if he likes.

But Foxx, who had his “medical emergency” just before this production wrapped, is the life of the party, the pimp’s pimp and funnyman to Boyega’s stoic straight-up gangster straight-man. Foxx is on-fire, and you have to wonder how many of his one-liners he improvised, because as almost all of his lines land laughs, surely not not all of them can have been scripted.

“Just regale me the latest indignity suffered upon my ace boon coon.”

Our “Nancy Drew/Scooby-Doo” trio goes underground to the lab to find answers?

“We don’t spelunk! WHITE people spelunkers!”

Let’s hope Foxx gets his health, his voice and his wit back to full strength, because it’s impossible to imagine anybody else as funny in this role. And let’s hope the Writer’s Guild gets what it wants from Hollywood’s producers and studio execs. Writing this sharp deserves compensation and protection.

But once again Netflix giving a filmmaker final cut without sweetly-worded “notes” on pacing drags a movie down. Even the Oscar-nominated pictures from the streamer, from “Roma” and “Mank” on down to comedies, “Extraction” thrillers, the works, almost all play as long, as if “It’s on Netflix, nobody cares about ‘pacing'” when viewers are wandering into the kitchen, playing on their phones or taking toilet breaks.

The haste in rushing this out — supposedly, there were scenes Foxx didn’t finish before his health scare in April — may explain some of that. A little more editing time and maybe the filmmakers could have been convinced to tighten “Tyrone” and abandon a pointless anti-climax.

What we’ve got though, is a very funny movie with socially relevant bite, and the best “Get Well Soon” card Jamie Foxx could ever want.

Rating: R, violence, drug content, constant profanity

Cast: John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, Teyonnah Parris, David Alan Grier and Kiefer Sutherland

Credits: Directed by Juel Taylor, scripted by Tony Rettenmaier and Juel Taylor. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:04

“Cobweb” is a horror genre piece as simple and to the point as its title.

A child hears noises in the walls of the old house where he lives, and in trying to raise the alarm with his parents, comes to wonder what their true nature is and just what they’re capable of.

First-time feature director Samuel Bodin proves sure-handed in dealing with the basics and produces a few truly hair-raising joles from Chris Thomas Devlin’s script.

But the odd dissonant note in a performance and stumbles in the plotting and especially the finale point to failures in execution and, when the chips are down, a loss of nerve.

Woody Norman, another moppet with the “child actor hair cut” (long, unruly) plays Peter, a lad bullied in elementary school and rattled by noises in the walls of his room at night.

His mother (Lizzy Caplan) teases his “over-active imagination,” and while his Dad (Anthony Starr) might give credence to the racket, he’s passing it off as “rats.”

But “rats” don’t whisper in a girl’s voice. Rat’s don’t pass on warnings about his parents, who won’t even let Peter go trick-or-treating, and aren’t shy about telling him of a girl down the street who disappeared on Halloween a few year’s back. Rats don’t coach Peter how to deal with the bullies at school.

With the bruises piling up at school and Peter doing chilling drawings in class in which he pleads “Help Me,” it’s no wonder his new teacher (Cleopatra Coleman) takes it on herself to check out his living situation and worry about his safety.

Virtually everything that happens in the third act summons up dusty, cobwebbed memories of the movies this one borrows from — a skittering, hairy monster of “The Ring,” masked intruders, a bloody showdown.

Caplan is the stand-out in the cast, hitting just the right shrill notes of the “a little…off” variety. But the kid’s not bad, Coleman’s properly plucky and Starr has his moments.

For a modestly-ambitious genre pic, “Cobweb’s” not all that original. But not that bad, either.

Rating: R, for horror violence and profanity

Cast: Lizzy Caplan, Anthony Starr, Cleopatra Coleman and Woody Norman

Credits: Directed by Samuel Bodin, scripted by Chris Thomas Devlin. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:29

Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” is a movie of its moment, a brilliant bauble of female empowerment, scathing satire and genuine wit.

That “war on women” that is eating up so much of America’s bandwidth right now takes it in the gonads in a comedy that delights as it sends up the patriarchy and the plastic pastel parallel universe that the physically “perfect,” independent have-it-all over-achiever doll always taunted girls and women to live up to.

How Mattel ever agreed to this is anybody’s guess. But Gerwig (“Last Bird”) did two corporate behemoths proud in sending up men making toys for girls and Warner Bros for giving this hilariously smart movie maker final cut, and then some.

Gerwig gives us a feminist “Barbie” who’s pretty witty, and still pretty in pink.

Margot Robbie, the only woman who could have portrayed “stereotypical Barbie,” plays a toy who falls into an “existential crisis.”

What life is beyond Barbieland? There every woman is a Barbie and Barbies do every job –President (Issa Rae) to Supreme Court, with Nobel Prize winners (Alexandra Shipp) thrown in for good measure.

All those Kens played by Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu and others? They’re just here to “beach,” mere adornments for their respective Barbies.

But thoughts of death send Barbie to “Weird Barbie,” a wise doll (Kate McKinnon) who was played with a bit roughly. She surmises that Barbie is absorbing angst from “the girl who plays with her” and sends her into “the real world” to find that girl and set her straight.

As the “2001” prologue we’ve seen in the trailers to this film points out, Barbie was the first doll to suggest to girls that they were smart and independent and could do anything and make their own way in the world, that there are careers other than motherhood, Barbie figures she’ll be welcomed as an icon.

No dice.

“Aren’t there any WOMEN in charge?”

Body image, white privilege issues with this doll abound in girls like tween Sasha (Arianna Greenblatt). Her mom (America Ferrera) is the true Barbie believer.

Ken (Gosling), who tagged along on the trip, finds himself drunk on the “man’s world” he’s stumbled into, embracing the patriarchy even if his himbo status means he’s not qualified to do anything but look good on the beach.

He will go back to Barbieland and organize the boys for an electoral coup. A “Kendom” is born. Or might be, if the bro’s can stay focused.

And Mr. Mattel (Will Ferrell) from corporate HQ doesn’t have enough “Yes” men to set all this to right. Only Barbie and her feisty, feminist friend Gloria (Ferrera) are willing to take on the task.

They’re the ones who know “Ken is totally superfluous!”

There are layers of meaning and jokes by the dozens in this send-up of the sexual hierarchy in America. The “liberated” Kens start singing Matchbox 20’s “I Wanna Push You Around,” which spoils Barbie’s Indigo Girls sing alongs.

The soundstage-centric production design of Barbie Dreamhouses, Barbie 1950s Corvette convertibles and clothes clothes clothes is immaculate.

Robbie is, of course, the ultimate production design flourish, but she gives a great doll-out-of-water/doll awakening performance and is the heart of the movie.

Goslings sings and vamps and does it all with a straight face, adding to the camp value of the entire enterprise.

Ferrara is the film’s soul, preaching about the contradictions and “cognitive dissonance it takes to be a woman.”

And McKinnon has perhaps her best film role as the droll and sage wit who sees the problems and the injustice of “our” world invading Barbieland and points Barbie towards her quest.

“Hey, don’t blame me. Blame Mattel. They make the rules.”

Much of what’s here will go over the heads of any child tempted into begging a parent to take them to see “Barbie.” It’s a little edgy and “adult” without crossing into “ADULT.”

But it’s great fun for anybody who grew up with the doll, or who has a sister who did, and anyone wondering just how far women can be pushed by a misogynistic minority before they get their backs up, get into their best protest and go-to-the-polls pastels, pop into their Corvettes and make the society that this malleable, ever-evolving iconic doll hints that they might.

Rating: PG-13 for suggestive references and some profanity

Cast: Margot Robbie, America Ferrera, Ryan Gosling, Issa Rae, Alexandra Shipp, Simu Liu, Arianna Greenblatt, Dua Lipa, Rita Arya, John Cena, Michael Cera and Kate McKinnon

Credits: Directed by Greta Gerwig, scripted by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. A Mattel/Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:54

The “Beanie Baby Craze” of the 1990s silenced anybody who ever had a laugh when learning of the
“Tulip Fever” that gripped Dutch collectors, investors and ordinary folk in 17th century Holland. And no movie about the Clinton Era plush toy mania could fail to find the fun in remembering folks who made and lost fortunes hunting down and “investing” in cute, cleverly-marketed children’s toys.

“The Beanie Bubble” may be a tad conventional in its approach to this “origin story” and its “rise and fall” narrative arc. But it’s a fun, infuriating trip down memory lane thanks to the people traditionally left out of this “story,” the women who made it happen for the guy who got all the credit.

Zach Galifaniakis brings his disarming charm and a layer of “almost adorable creep” to his portrayal of Ty Warner, the “genius,” aka adult “child” who founded Ty Toys and spun his own myth out of it and the Beanie Mania it helped create.

But “Beanie Bubble” is about “Robbie,” the woman (played by Elizabeth Banks) who co-founded the company and became Warner’s partner, in and out of the office, only to have Warner cheat her out of credit and ownership. It’s about Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), the smart young college student who joined the company as receptionist and who masterminded internet marketing and helped Ty Toys surf the ever-shifting shape of a business that turned from toys for kids to collectibles for “investors,” only to have her value discounted by the dopey, infantile and sexist CEO.

And then there’s Sheila (Sarah Snook) a single mom and business woman whose daughters became the original test-market for Beanie Babies and even helped design them with Sheila seduced into agreeing to marry this charming, kid-friendly billionaire. No, that didn’t work out either.

Each of the three narrates a portion of the story — Banks/Robbie remembering her struggles through a failing marriage to a paraplegic husband whom she supported with shop clerk jobs, only to meet Ty Warner and have him change her life, Maya recalling her Indian-American family’s disapproval of her abandoning medical school to learn on-the-job and invent internet marketing and Sheila recalling the way she, too, was swept off her feet by this sometimes clever, sometimes screwy toy company tyro.

The film is based on a book by Zac Bissonnette but fictionalized here, with probable composite characters exaggerated to fill a larger function in teh story, as one can’t quite nail down who this “Robbie,” “Maya” and “Sheila” might be, although the Internet provides some clues.

In the first act, each woman gives great reasons for the company’s success and their attraction to Warner as a partner/lover, boss or just suitor.

“We didn’t set out to make America lose it’s mind, but that’s what happened,” Robbie remembers.

“If he liked the way you think, he’d listen to you,” Maya enthuses.

“Oh Sheila, I would DIE before I let you down,” Sheila was told.

Giddy business breaks and happy accidents and courtship are covered in giddy musical montages set to The Cranberries (“Dreams”) and INXS (“New Sensation,” of course) and others.

Ty and Robbie take over toy conventions with their flash and their increasingly hot plush toy products. Ty has little epiphanies, and in spite of his sometimes shortsighted moves, he latches onto big ideas when he hears them.

One of Sheila’s little girls complains that she can’t get his “understuffed” (his real breakthrough) toys into her backpack to take to school. Let’s make something SMALLER, he decies. The chocolate-milk-addict Ty then grills the kids on naming critters that become best-sellers.

They’re his co-conspiractors, learning to dance and lip-sync with him to “Oh Sheila” for his bowling alley proposal to their mom.

Maya takes it on herself to knock out tiny poems to put inside the tag on every Beanie Baby sold.

Let the good times roll, with the warning signs popping up even in the best moments.

By the second act, every woman is seeing the flaws in Warner’s mercurial personality, and in the role “luck” played in his “empire,” which blew up almost in spite of his often poor understanding of business and the karmet, his bad hunches and general backward thinking.

And by the third act they’re all paying the price for his shortcomings, especially in the way he treats women.

Origin stories and their “Eureka” moments are endlessly fascinating to some of us. I never owned a Beanie Baby, or bought one for a child (Furbys, on the other hand…) or played “Tetris,” but the history of a product, a fad or a movement is great fodder for a film.

Producer-turned-writer/director Kristin Gore and music video-maker and actor-turned-director Damian Kulash set us up for a lot of those “when it happened” moments — that first suburban Chicago outbreak of “collecting,” the name of that first Beanie frog.

Their script bounces through two periods in time — the ’80s and the ’90s — taking shots at the Reagan recession and Reaganomics and the heady, unfettered new ideas (the Internet, instant-collectible toys) of free-for-all of the Clinton years, setting us up for “the fall.”

But the players are the chief assets here, with Banks giving us a magnificent meltdown, Viswanathan (of “Blockers” and TV’s “Miracle Workers”) embodying the tech, marketing and fad-savvy young person who isn’t so good at reading The Boss and Snook (“Run Rabbit Run,” “Steve Jobs”) impressing as the Only Adult in the Room.

It’s almost unfair to point out how this women’s story hangs on the quirky charisma of that damned Zach Galifianakis, but he’s just great here — charming, inspiring, motivating and in the end infuriating every woman he comes into contact with, real victim or a composite of all the women Ty Warner used and gave little credit or cash to in his heady years inflating “The Beanie Bubble.”

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Elizabeth Banks, Geraldine Viswanathan, Sarah Snook, and Zach Galifianakis

Credits: Directed by Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash, scripted by Kristin Gore, based on the book by Zac Bissonnette. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:50