Movie Nation

It’s not quite worth waiting for the appearance of the late great Native American acting icon Graham Greene in “The Protector,” one of the last films he finished before dying last September.

As the reservation leader Brand, Greene is world weary and wise and sardonic, an old safe of the West presiding over the last aquifer in a region the locals have sucked dry. We hear him narrate the story, but he doesn’t show up until 68 minutes of really bad movie have passed before our eyes.

Writer-director Raul Gastreazoro’s debut feature — he made the doc “11-8-16” — is straight-up C-movie sci-fi, built around a grab bag of sci-tropes and cliches. It’s junk centered on a convict freed from prison to break into that reservation for a gangster who wants the water so he can rule what’s left of the ruined American West.

But Greene classes it up.

There’s also this silly sport of this not-that-distant-future, “Dirt Jousting,” featuring lance-armed riders standing on the hoods or roofs of vintage suicide-door Buick Rivieras hurtling at one another, a half-assed novelty worthy of George Lucas at his laziest.

The water’s all but gone. A plague called “The Rot” has spread through the land. The West is cordoned off, with Border Patrol merely shifting its checkpoints. The law is survival of the best-armed. And women are infertile, making this the “last generation” to live the American Dream.

Marguerite Moreau is Key, a veteran “dirt jouster” freed from prison by the finagling of Gael (Aryeh -Or, properly menacing) who wants Key’s knowhow about how to get into Brand’s reservation. The old man put minefields on all the routes in.

Moreau, whose credits go back to “The Mighty Ducks,” is credible as a fighting fury, often shot in silhouette, almost always in shoulder pads, mask or gas mask so we can’t tell if it’s a stunt woman doing the heavy lifting.

April Lee is Sona, the resentful sex worker Gael relies on as a lieutenant. Edgar Feliciano is Nayati, a Native-born hoodlum aiding Gael.

And Mark Keith Lane and Treci Lane play the nomadic (and real life) parents of Mark Lane III, that rarest sight in a barren land, a small boy. There’s a bounty on children who are wanted for scientific “study” to see if the human race can be saved.

Greene narrates this story of a place and time where there “ain’t much life to live.” We get it.

When another character cracks, “Those sci-fi movies, they got it right,” he’s merely pointing out that all the ideas stirred up here are stolen from better movies. Because “The Protector” gets pretty much everything wrong.

Rating: unrated, violence and profanity

Cast: Marguerite Moreau, Aryeh-Or, Edgar Feliciano, April Lee, Mark Lane III, Mark Keith Lane, Treci Lane and Graham Greene.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Raul Gasteazoro. A Vertical release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:43

Predatory? Sure. Nuts? Maybe. Supernaturally witchy? Could be.

This Jan. 2 release stars André Holland (“”42,” “Moonlight,” “Selma”) as the husband seduced into revenge sex on his cheating wife (Zazie Beetz) by temptress Kate.

The formidable Stephen McKinley Henderson is the marriage counselor out of his depth with “The Dutchman,” based on a play by Amiri Baraka.

“Jingle Bell Heist” is an over-plotted, under-charmed rom-com about robbing from the thieving, unaccountable rich and giving to the under-insured.

In soft drink terms, it’s a Diet Coke that’s gone flat — familiar, not particularly surprising or the least bit fizzy or satisfying.

Olivia Holt of “Heart Eyes” and TV’s “Cloak & Dagger” stars as an American living abroad with her English mum, picking pockets and pilfering her posh department store in a sort of rough justice against the insufferably rich.

Cell-phone-fixer and tech “security” wannabe Nick (Connor Swindells of TV’s “Sex Education”) is the Brit who spies Sophia on the Sterling’s store security cameras lining her pockets and occasionally punishing rude customers with her light fingers.

But Nick isn’t supposed to see that. He’s hacked his way in. He’s got a heist planned. Sophia may be coerced into joining him.

He’s got a grudge against the irredeemable “a–hole” who owns the place (Peter Serafinowicz). And she’s got a sick mum who needs a pricey experimental treatment to save her life, and doesn’t have time to wait for the National Health Service to get around to treating her.

But but “We moved back here for the free health care!”

Our mutually-mistrusting thieves consider one scheme, and then another and then a third when the first and second are complicated by the shady business practices of the Sterlings (Lucy Punch plays the libidinous Mrs.).

Attempts at “suspense” in the heist itself are ineptly handled.

The script and the leads strain to wring the “cute” out of this, but that’s in short supply.

I’d quote a funny line or two except there aren’t any. The capers involve attempted seductions — stage managed via microphone and earpiece — that fall flat.

Punch, one of Britain’s funniest, has nothing to play and Serafinowicz (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) has too few scenes to ma\ke his cruel cad funny.

Perhaps there’s entertainment value in swooning over our attractive leads or the assorted needle-drops that make up the score (Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concert in D has a certain action/comedy kick here).

But come on. Dressing a bad caper comedy in Santa suits doesn’t solve anything.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Olivia Holt, Connor Swindells, Peter Serafinowicz and Judy Punch.

Credits: Directed by Michael Fimognari, scripted by Abby McDonald and Amy Reed. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Everyday life in Gaza, pre-invasion, is vividly rememembered in “Yalla Parkour,” a documentary largely compiled from the climbing, backflipping and tumbling stunts of the Gaza Parkour Team, who captured their exploits on camera.

We see young Palestinian Arabs finding joy in a place of perpetual “death and destruction,” where Israeli reprisals and blunt oppression, occupation and violence were a miserable way of life and death long before the Oct. 7, 2023 lashout attacks on Israel, used as Israeli justification for the current slaughter, starvation and “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza.

The French-invented sport of “parkour” is this group’s means of escape. They practice their flips and backflips, beam-walking, clamboring and climbing among the ruins of this “war” or that one — a gutted, unfinished mall, an airport that never saw a take-off or landing, piles of concrete and rebar with only the sand surrounding them as a cushion should this latest climb or stunt go wrong.

They are “experts in turning pain into happiness,” Palestinian ex-pat filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter narrates from her Washington, D.C. home. She sampled years of clips of practicing stunts and actual stunts into her film, using a voice-over-narrated letter to her long-dead mother back in Nablus as the finished movie’s framework.

That hoary and sentimental framing device works against the movie’s impact, which is basically a story of young men taking risks with life and limb just to make attention-grabbing videos that will get them noticed and be their ticket out.

Zuaiter meets Ahmed Matar by phone, and their lengthy phone conversations over the better part of a decade tell the story of the Gaza Parkour Team — those who “got out,” those who wound up in the hospital, those who died (stay through the closing credits to see a shocking list of film crew and parkour athletes killed by Israeli violence) and Ahmed himself.

Ahmed longs to tour with the team, to get out at the invitation of people from outside countries, and battles endless red tape and near deliberate inefficiency as that “trip” — which could be one-way — is delayed again and again.

“There is no future in Gaza,” he says (in Arabic with English subtitles), stating the obvious.

In the early years of their phone calls, Zuaiter complains of her “outsider” status now, wishing she could return to her “magical place.” But the enormous risks of such a trip, even in the less conflict-torn intervals, kept her from seeing her late mother onele time and keep her from risking her status as an immigrant. Fear of being trapped back in a war-torn place with “no future” runs through the entire Palestinian diaspora.

But Matar’s footage from the early to mid 2010s captures the “beauty” of the beaches, neighborhoods and landscaped building developments. Endless conflict, periodic bombings and Israeli raids notwithstanding, those neighborhoods were teeming with life.

When Jinji, a ginger-headed Palestinian parkour climber gets badly injured in a fall, neighborhood life stops to get him help. And when he’s released from the hospital, he’s practically given a parade.

The parkour stunts that go wrong are more revealing than the underwhelming (by movie parkour standards) stunts they pull off. Painful, wind-knocked out or concussed “practice” is what it takes to learn these moves without helmets, safety nets or adult supervision.

Some will get out, some will stay and many will die when the vast escalation in violence of 2023 begins.

“Yalla Parkour” is most effective in showing us violence that has been visited upon these people for decades and the “toughness” it takes to survive and escape and even relocate to a place of relative safety and comfort.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Ahmed Matar, Areeb Zuaiter

Credits: Directed by Areeb Zuaiter, scripted by Areeb Zuaiter, Phil Jandaly and Johan Simonsson. A Kinana Films production

Running time: 1:30

A “Dog Day Afternoon” true story/period piece about a hostage situation with political and predatory lending overtones.

With that cast, I don’t see how this Jan. 9 release can go wrong.

This February release looks more dark than comic, which its “Kind Hearts and Coronets” set up might have promised.

Guys want to inherit a fortune but he has relatives to kill off to get it.

Bill Camp, Margaret Qualley, Topher Grace and Ed Harris have their supporting parts to playing this one.

Powell could use a hit right about now.

  https://youtu.be/dYwtiPvI3E4?si=NkmprskxgaWbvuLE

The great German character actor Udo Kier died last weekend in Palm Springs, where many of the movie famous (Liberace to John Schlesinger to Janet Gaynor to Alan Ladd to Howard Hawks to Darryl F. Zanuck) end their days. He was 81.

A brooding but playful presence, he worked with Warhol and Van Sant and Von Trier, popping up in junk like “Bloodrayne” (by the infamous hack Uwe Boll) and “Surviving Christmas,” but also in the gonzo trailer to “Werewolf Women of the S.S.” directed by Rob Zombie for inclusion in “Grindhouse,” piling up over 280 credits, from films and TV to video games.

He dressed up horror films like “Skin Walker,” and “The Painted Bird” and indie dramas such as “The Mountain.”

But gems like “American Animals” and “Swan Song” decorated his later years, an indie film icon who had many films in the can and a few awaiting distribution when he passed away.

“My Neighbor Adolf” is one of those and makes its way to theaters Jan. 9.