Movie Nation

Actress turned director Eva Longoria’s “Flamin’ Hot” is a lightly charming love letter to Mexican-American pluck, resolve and grace in the face of every obstacle that one’s adoptive country throws in your path.

Longoria and screenwriters Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez package that positive message of achievement against the odds in a story about the transformation of an American snack food and a Latino triumph in the war for the American palate.

And as I like to say when a movie is warm and cute and not literally the Gospel historical truth, if it’s not the way it really was, it’s the way it should have been.

Richard Montañez didn’t “invent” Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and the the world of “picante” food and drinks that swept the country years back and shows no signs of abating. “Flamin’ Hot” is not a true story in that sense.

But seeing as how the snack food giant Frito-Lay gave permission to use their brands, logo and factory processes in the film, I think they’re OK with this adorable mythologization of that “Eureka” moments in junk food. The product placement sealed the deal.

Jesse Garcia of TV’s “Snowfall” and “Narcos: Mexico” gives a charismatic performance playing a man who grew up farm labor poor, struggled to be accepted in school and when life wasn’t working out, got into drug dealing in his corner of SoCal.

Abused and put-down by his dad, profiled by white police and bullied at school, Richard learned an important life lesson in his elementary school cafeteria. If they’re calling you by ethnic slurs and berating your food, let the Palate of Your People speak for itself.

“Show them what the burrito’s worth.”

What child, biting into a savory Mexican delicacy for the first time, will ever settle for a bologna sandwich again? Maybe he’ll even figure out what the ingredients are and realize “Beaner” isn’t the insult he thinks it is.

“Flamin’ Hot” depicts Richard as a hustler from childhood, and a guy who made the right choices when the right girl — childhood sweetheart Judy — becomes the right woman and demands it of him.

A former fellow drug dealer (Bobby Soto) helps him land a job at Frito-Lay — with Judy (Annie Gonzalez, good, and in one magic moment, great) helping the high school drop-out fill out an application. His reading and writing in English isn’t up to par.

Once on board at the Rancho Cucamunga plant, janitor Richard makes the most of the opportunity by making a pest of himself. He “breaks the chain of command” by badgering and befriending (and bringing burritos to) the plant’s equipment engineer (Dennis Haysbert). Bigotry and the low expectations of his superiors don’t discourage him.

And when that plant is endangered during the Snack Wars of the ’90s, Richard shows his loyalty and pluck by enlisting his wife, their kids, his colleagues and his community in a Big Idea that might save it. He’s not shy about getting the president of the gigantic Pepsi/Frito-Lay parent company (Tony Shalhoub) on the phone to make his pitch.

Market to Mexicans! And give them red-hot chile chip options!

A clever touch in the screenplay has the ever-narrating Richard imagine board room battles at the company, translating those fights into cholo/gangster speak. Shalhoub is hilarious mouthing these “pendejo” throwdowns.

The voice of authority Haysbert plays the mentor who puts up with our irritating lead, bucks our hero up when he’s down and gives the movie a bit of gravitas.

And Gonzalez plays the woman of faith — in Richard, in the candle she lights and keeps burning after he lands the job that will transform them from poor-and-food-insecure to the working class. She stands up for him when he stands up to his found God/still-a-bully Dad (Emilio Rivera, excellent).

Longoria keeps her directing eyes on the “feel-good movie” prize, which limits the film’s ambition as we bounce from scene to uplifting scene, many of them involving adorable moppets taste-testing very hot chili sauces to bake into the Cheetohs.

The one real failing behind the camera is the film’s over-reliance on voice-over narration, the lazy screenwriter’s best amigo. Quotable, amusing and authoritative at times, here it’s so incessant that it practically turns “Flamin’ Hot” into a 100 minute version of those patriotic/ethnic-pride restoring Modelo beer commercials.

I mean, I love those commercials, with their proud and sentimental push-back against conservative prejudice and xenophobia. I even love the beer. But 100 minutes of that? Aye mami!

Rating: PG-13, profanity and brief drug material

Cast: Jesse Garcia, Annie Gonzalez, Emilio Rivera, Vanessa Martinez, Dennis Haysbert and Tony Shalhoub.

Credits: Directed by Eva Longoria, scripted by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez. A Searchlight release on Hulu and Disney+.

Running time: 1:39

“The Tank” is a polished period piece thriller set in the 1970s Pacific Northwest, but filmed in New Zealand, with a mostly-Kiwi cast-and-crew. Because nothing looks like the undeveloped past of Washington and Oregon’s coasts like the rocky shores of “The Land of the Long White Cloud.”

The film is a creature feature, just the sort of thing New Zealand has a natural advantage in producing, with all those special effects shops that spun out of the “Lord of the Rings” universe. The creature, when we see it, is pretty good. We’d expect no less.

But film schools far and wide should pick up copies of this Scott Walker (the Cage and Cusack thriller “The Frozen Ground” was his) B-picture, just to demonstrate how you should never wait this long to get a genre piece like this going, and to point out the perils of too much foreshadowing.

Our heroine, Jules (Luciane Buchanan) is in veterinary school and running a pet store with her husband Ben (Matt Whelan). Their seven year-old daughter Raia (Zara Nausbaum) is here for her screams, later. But her function in the first act is to give somebody for mum to explain the animals to, and to get into the details of just what sort of creature they’re going to find themselves confronting when they drive north to check out some coastal property Ben’s inherited from his mad-but-now-dead mother.

But we’ve seen a 1946 prologue in which a man was snatched and dragged into a huge cistern on the property, the “Tank” of the title. I dare say that word was chosen because who remembers what a cistern is these days?

An endless build-up towards the bloody finale includes Ben’s share of the foreshadowing, laying out in detail what he’s found in the old shed on the long-abandoned property. “Convenient” items, to say the least.

And then WHAMMO, we’re in the action and hanging with Ben as he tries out some silly man stuff and with Jules as she identifies their threat and works the problem towards a way of fighting and defeating it.

The dialogue is bordeline Bot-created — generic in the extreme.

“Doesn’t this place make you uneasy? Are you SURE about this?”

There’s an old diary, a too-helpful real-estate agent, no phone service and on and on the checklist of weary horror tropes goes.

But “The Tank” wouldn’t have been half-bad if they’d moved the imminent peril to earlier in the second act, wouldn’t have been borderline-awful if Walker had worked out a more original or exciting finale, if somebody’d talked him out of trying to give his starlet a Sigourney-in-“Aliens” catchphrase.

At least New Zealand, the specialest special effect of them all, comes out of this lovelier and more rainforest lush than ever.

Rating: R for some violence/bloody images and (profanity)

Cast: Luciane Buchanan, Matt Whelan, Zara Nausbaum and Ascia Maybury

Credits: Scripted and directed by Scott Walker. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:32

Crowd-funded and Swiss-made, “Mad Heidi” is a straight-up old school “grindhouse” splatter film, a blood-in-the-lens, naked babes in the prison shower frolic through Swiss stereotypes and Swiss cheese Nazis.

And if it was as good as its fundraising pitch and its crowd-pleasing premise, it’d be something to see, a B-movie of the “Surf Nazis Must Die” Troma Films school. As it is, it sprints out of the gate for 15 minutes, spills blood and settling scores in the finale and is boring as brie in the middle acts. Still, it should play to the Midnight Movie crowd, those not shy about going out earlier for a Fathom Events showing in cinemas all over the country June 21.

The first laugh is the Swissploitations Films production company logo, a Paramount-spoofing shot of the famed Matterhorn — the Swiss Mountain, not the Disney theme-park ride — bedecked with a crown of swirling wheels of Swiss cheese.

The cheese Nazis of the Meili Cheese monopoly have taken over Switzerland, with jackbooted militia led by Kommandant Knorr (veteran Swiss actor Max Rüdlinger) machine-gunning protestors and enforcing the country’s new anti-lactose-intolerant crackdown.

The uniformed, cheese-obessed President Meili (“Starship Troopers” veteran Casper Van Dien), “our very Swiss leader,” has made those who refuse to eat his cheese his country’s version of drag queens, transgenders, Hispanics, Blacks or Jews. They’re the minority who must be stamped out.

“Lactose intolerance is a threat from within,” all the punny public service announcements insist.

Mountain Girl Heidi (Alice Lucy) hasn’t noticed. She’s too much in love with her goatherd/goat-cheese smuggling-lover, Goat Peter, played Kel Metsena, garbed in Swiss Alpine folkwear and a Tarantino–pimped fur (ish) coat when he sneaks out to sell his cheese in bricks treated like the priciest cocaine.

All that is funny, which is why it’s so disappointing when Goat Peter meets a very Swiss end as punishment for goat cheese dealing — death by crossbow.

But we’ve got to have a reason for Heidi to be radicalized. Heidi becomes Mad Heidi just long enough to get arrested and for her eyepatch-wearing grandpa (David Schofield) to be trapped in the barn the militia burns down around him.

Time for “Mad Heidi” to turn into a Women in Prison movie, complete with weak, lactose intolerant friend Klara (Almar G. Sato) and assorted wrestler-sized inmates under the thumb of warden Fräulein Rottweiler (Katja Kolm).

That could be promising, but this is where “Mad Heidi” loses its mojo.

Only van Dien and Rüdlinger, and to a lesser extent Lucy, seem willing to as far over the top as this material demands.

The jokes about Swiss cheese, Swiss chocolate and Swiss time are amusing enough.

“Ziss iss NOT Swaziland, this iss SWITZERLAND,” van Dien’s cheddar dictator rages at tardy subordinates.

Swiss cheese is an instrument of torture and a test of patriotism. Swiss accordions are for shoving down cheese-Nazis throats.

The plot has a mad scientist (Pascal Ulli) concocting “super-Swiss cheese” that strengthens warriors and makes the populace dumb, and the script throws in a mystical “Guardian of the Motherland” (Andrea Fischer-Schulthess) whose rebel ninjas train Heidi to be a yodeling (not really) killing machine.

“Yodel me THAT!” Heidi snaps, after dispatching another German-Swiss accented Nazi.

The real Swiss locations and real Swiss in the cast give this picture the primary ingredients of a first-class lampoon, with as many opportunities missed by the screenwriters as those they grab for.

You can’t grade an indie film on the curve (an opening credits begs for that as it mentions how this was financed), and honestly, “Mad Heidi” is a bit of a disappointment.

But in the right setting, a theater full of blood-stained cinematic cheese aficionadoes, I could see it coming off — with a lot of help from the audience.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Alice Lucy, Casper Van Dien, Max Rüdlinger, Almar G. Sato,
Pascal Ulli, Katja Kolm and Kel Matsena

Credits: Directed by Johannes Hartmann and Sandro Klopfstein, scripted by Johannes Hartmann, Sandro Klopfstein, Trent Haaga and Gregory D. Widmer. A Swissploitation Film, a Fathom Events (June 21 at a theater near you) release.

Running time: 1:33

First off, know this about “Passport,” a Nigerian “comedy” about a stolen passport and the neighborhood hustlers who must be cajoled into giving it back. Not all Nigerian films are this bad.

If like me you like to travel Around the World with Netflix, just for the chance to sample other cultures, storytelling styles and exotic foriegn stories, you’re going to tuck into the occasional Nigerian (“Nollywood”) film industry production. Some are quite polished, some are topical, a few are pretty well-acted and almost all of them can be revealing about the culture they come from.

But “Passport” only has a hint of any of that. A meandering, static, chattery “comedy” about a wealthy expat living in London who comes “home” to propose, it mixes experienced actors with amateurs. And everybody involved is sentenced to performing this script in a story written, acted, filmed and edited in the most painfully slow and clumsy fashion.

Many scenes cannot justify their existence. Even the ones that can go on well past any point that they make any point that advances the plot.

If the intent is to put the viewer in our anti-hero Oscar’s exasperated, insulting and exhausted shoes dealing with the predatory corruption and the performative sermonizing of almost every encounter, then well done. But make it funny, man. Here, it never is.

Oscar (Jim Iyke) is introduced in the club where he’s stuck with the bill by his “friends,” a staggering sum because “alcohol costs more here than in any city in the world.”

He’s part of a family business “empire” in London, but his cash panic turns off his avaricious intended Queen (Caroline Igben) who wants nothing to do with a guy who is on a family allowance.

When his aggravated sister stops begging him to fly home for a business meeting and starts badgering him to return because his Mom is in the hospital and on her last legs, there’s nothing for it but to book a flight, broke and defeated.

But when his uncle’s (Jide Kosoko) ancient Mercedes has a flat and “This is Nigeria, nobody carries an extra tire,” that sets Oscar up to have his man purse snatched by Mighty (Lina Idoko) and her running mate (Emeka Nwagbaraocha).

At this, the midpoint of the picture, we finally get to what “Passport” is all about. That whole bar-tab debate, courtship of a golddigger prologue is rendered pointless. Coupled with the static, insult-and-argument scenes that follow — each dragging on past its payoff, “Passport” never overcomes the impression of a movie that’s literally sitting still.

Oscar’s uncle points him to local agitator Kopiko (Mercy Johnson Okojie), a mouthy talks-your-ear-off type trying to run for neighborhood chairwoman against the crooked Prof (Emem Ufot), basically a “fence,” and his gangster boss “Terminator” (Zubby Michael).

“Passport” invites us to grind our teeth over Oscar’s frustration at dealing with talkative villains at every turn, because Kopiko’s sister was the thief, Mighty, and Mighty will have to use the fence and that puts Oscar’s man-purse, his credit cards, phone and passport in the hands of Terminator.

The insults can be amusing. Kopiko’s “fashion suicide” attire and “last week’s weed” scent are brought up, and one and all gripe about Oscar’s “grammar,” his London-polished English and Yoruba.

Oscar’s city slicker making threats could have been funny. No, not “everybody can be ghetto.”

But the laughs, if there are any, must be culturally specific as these talkative “types” are not played by natural comedians (aside from Okojie, who wears out her welcome in her first scene) and the direction doesn’t point us to what’s funny in any situation.

Only a couple of chase scenes give us a view of the poor “Brown Street” neighborhood this is set in. The set design — crook’s lair, fence’s “office, a dumpy house or two, a police station, clinic and club — is better than anything that takes place on those sets.

There are good films that come out of Nigeria. But as we’ve seen with Spanish, Indonesian, Italian and Brazilian pictures financed or purchased with Netfix cash, a lot of hustling film producers are treating the streaming service like a rube that answers a cash-offer email from a Nigerian “prince.”

Rating: TV-MA, fisticuffs, profanity

Cast: Jim Iyke, Mercy Johnson Okojie, Lina Idoko, Emeka Nwagbaraocha, Jide Kosoko, Emem Ufot and Zubby Michael.

Credits: Directed by Dimeji Ajibola, scripted byAbosi Ogba. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

Ezra Miller turns out to be every bit as on-the-spectrum manic, antsy, and impulsive as you’d expect in a stand-alone film about “The Flash.”

He gives us a comic book character with issues and an agenda, two distinct and noticably different versions of that character in a movie that’s an origin story without being an origin story, and a multiverse movie that’s actually about time travel as well as timelines.

This history-altering, Butterfly Effect-impacting, consequences of changing the past tale is as loaded with pandering fan-service as any recent comic book adaptation. It’s jokey, but a pretty good percentage of the laughs don’t land. Some of the casting is gimmicky and other pieces don’t quite fit in the puzzle — yet.

But Miller times two, complemented with a bracing, world-weary turn by Michael Keaton as a Batman who’s moved on but not traded cars, and a story with consequences and pathos give this genre outing an edge your typical DC Universe picture lacks. It’s damned interesting, and that goes for the characters, too.

Barry Allen’s an impatient coffee shop customer, impatient forensics researcher and resigned to being “the janitor of the Justice League,” the guy Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons) phones when Batman (Ben Affleck) is busy, in mid-motorcycle chase, when Superman’s otherwise engaged and when Wonder Woman is running late.

“SOMEbody has to save the rest of the world” when the grownups are Busy, Batman tells him.

As The Flash, Barry can bolt between his native Central City to Gotham or Metropolis when the need arises. And with a hospital falling into a sinkhole and a maternity ward collapsing, sending babies and the on-duty nurse tumbling (“Baby Shower!”), The Flash is the only guy who moves fast enough to stop time and pluck babies, nurse and a support dog from the air before they tumble a hundred feet to the ground.

Barry’s particularly distracted these days, struggling to prove his father’s (Ron Livingston) innocence in the murder of his mother. That preoccupation is how he stumbles into his ability to run so fast that time doesn’t just slow down and stop. It can go backwards, allowing Barry to travel back in time to concievably save his mother’s life, his father from prison and himself from growing up motherless and under the cloud of his father’s imprisonment.

Bruce Wayne can warn him all he wants about the nature of time, The Butterfly Effect and all of that. Barry figures saving three lives is worth the risk.

But the moment Barry intervenes in the past, his “present” is out of bounds and he finds himself trapped in a timeline where Mom is alive, and he can’t help but run into his chattering, dopey and annoying college-freshman self.

He’s messed up. There is no Justice League. Batman’s disappeared. Superman is unknown. And the Man of Steel’s Kryptonian menace, General Zod (Michael Shannon) and his minions have shown up to find Kal-El and destroy Earth in the process.

There’s nobody to stop them but The Flash, and Barry and General Zod have shown up at the point in time where Barry “gets his powers.”

So we’ve got flashbacks that not only show us Barry’s childhood. That’s where this script hides the “origin story” in plain sight. And now Barry has to rewrite that origin story following the original script of his life as closely as he remembers it he wants other Barry to be of use in the fight to come.

The Flash sprinting effects are impressive, and the learning curve scenes — Barry instructs “Barry” on how to be a Flash — means lots of sight gags and stumbles as somehow, they must reconstruct as much of the Justice League as possible on an Earth that never enjoyed the full benefits of superheroes, and that embraced Eric Stoltz as the original Marty McFly of “Back to the Future.

Even as the movie bogs down in effects and exposition in the middle acts, Miller keeps us amused and engaged with two versions of this clumsy, foul-mouthed kid and adult trying to do the right thing, and reason out what the right thing might be.

Affleck, Keaton and Irons are the supporting players who make an impresssion. Kiesey Clemons, playing the Flash’s college-classmate love interest, in wasted in this film, as is Shannon reprising a villain we’ve already taken the measure of.

The hard, unbending truth of this summer’s critical mass of recycled popcorn pix is that unlike the enduring representatives of that genre, these don’t merit of stand up to a second viewing. Marvel, DC, “Transformers” Freightliner of “Fast X” Diesel, once the novelty of being pandered to has worn off, that’s it for anybody who isn’t deep into their subcultures.

Director Andy Muschietti of the “It” movies tries to keep “Flash” moving and generally succeeds, although one gets the impression he and the suits were so overwhelmed at how cool the effects look that they wouldn’t cut a minute, and this blinkered narrative — as novel as it is in its approach to well-worn comic book plot points — could stand some trimming.

With Miller, the viewer can’t really separate the art from the troubled artist because the performance and the characters he’s playing won’t let us. But that never takes you out of the movie, and the film’s earnest “Save others” ethos and “Don’t relive your past, live your life” messaging resonates.

The cameo gimmick sweeping over comic book moviedom these days is played to the max here, with actors making an appearance, often without their physical presence on the set. No, the fascimiles of earlier incarnations of superheroes aren’t the most convincing CGI replicas ever.

But “The Flash,” while it never comes close to the gee whiz “I can do THIS?” novelty of the many Spider-Man “origin” iterations, makes a charming, nostalgic and sometimes touching addition to the genre, and lets us hope Miller will recover enough to return to acting this character and others.

If Robert Downey made the most of a second chance, anybody can.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some strong language and partial nudity

Cast: Ezra Miller, Kiersey Clemons, Michael Keaton, Michael Shannon, Sasha Calle, Antje Traue, Ron Livingston, Jeremy Irons, Temuera Morrison and Ben Affleck

Credits: Directed by Andy Muschietti, scripted by Christina Hodson, based on the DC Comics character. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:24

Well who knew what the summer 2023 needed was a sweet, fluffy-with-some-complications musical romance set to the tunes of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, aka The Indigo Girls?

That’s “Glitter & Doom,” an indie gem making the rounds of a few festivals and begging for somebody to pick it up — Pride Month or Pride Year — and turn this singing, dancing romance loose on the masses.

Canadian-Filipino actor Alex Diaz and Brit Alan Cammish have the title roles and the most solos and duets. But a Who’s Who of gay and gay-friendly performers populate the supporting cast, some of them singing as well.

“Glitter” (Diaz) is an Ivy League graduate whose studio exec Mom (Ming-Na Wen) is ready for him to take a job — any job — she can arrange “at the studio.” But all he wants to be is a clown — foam rubber nose, floppy shoes, juggling fire and whatnot. And there’s this renowned clown college in Paris…

“Doom” (Cammish) is a singer-songwriter who can’t get on the stage at his favorite gay bar, La Fountaine, because the manager (Lea DeLaria) wants “something lighter.” He has Mom (Missi Pyle) issues as well.

Can these two meet cute and start a love affair that will last? Well, the “meet cute” isn’t very cute. But the romance is a charming slow-starter, not some hook-up-and-move-on thing. One might help the other stand up to his mother and follow his clowning dream. The other might help his new beau grow the spine it takes to go into the studio and try to make his music commercial.

The set-up is a bit weary and the dialogue only has a few memorable lines.

“What if I never get good enough at any one thing for inertia to set in?”

But the conceit here is a winner. Every song Doom writes or duets with Glitter or that we hear on a radio or mixtape (CD) or see as the reason for a big dance number is by the if not under-rated than at least somewhat under-appreciated Indigo Girls.

“Galileo,” “Touch Me, Fall” and “Prince of Darkness” have their moments. The lads are taking a camping trip? “Get Out the Map.” And you know “Closer to Fine” will be a featured showcase number for The Big Scene.

Director Tom Gustafson and his cast and crew filmed in and around Mexico City finding colorful, historic and gorgeous natural settings for scenes and production numbers, most of which are simple delights.

Yes, we tend to forget Missi Pyle’s a pretty good singer. Yes, Tig Notaro lands all the laughs. By herself. And yes, Ming-Na Wen looks good in an eye patch. Look for the “Girls,” and Kate Pierson from the B-52s among others in cameo or bit part roles.

The picture was conceived as a full-length, full “complications” musical and plays a bit long accordingly. They probably cram too many songs in here and too many scenes for this to skip by.

But it works, and one of the great pleasures in it is seeing how well The Indigo Girls’ songs — thoughtful, polished, reflective and occasionally ebullient — fit into a sort of jukebox musical.

When you jump your musical straight into the screen — no theatrical production — you land all these famous Indigo fans for a day or two’s work, players who give your production a little added cachet.

Well done, or as Amy and Emily might say, “Closer to Fine” than anybody would ever expect.

Rating: unrated, PG-13ish.

Cast: Alex Diaz, Alan Cammish, Ming-Na Wen, Missi Pyle, Lea DeLaria, Amy Ray, Emily Saliers and Tig Notaro.

Credits: Directed by Tom Gustafson, scripted by Cory Krueckeberg. a Verve Productions release.

Running time: 1:55

A child of “the projects,” she has grown up immersed in tragedy. Drugs, pan-generational poverty and guns saw to that.

“I heard my Mom’s heart stop beating when I was eight,” Vicaria narrates. “Death is the disease that broke my family.”

Being a sensitive child, she’s become obsessed with the subject. Being a smart kid, she’s resolved to spend her life doing something about it.

And this being a horror movie with sci-fi undertones, electricity and the Frankenstein story are her guide. That’s how she reanimates her “monster.”

“The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster” is a sharp, clever twist on the Frankenstein plot, one with a racial and political edge. The entertaining debut feature of writer-director Bomani J. Story benefits from that edge, some smart casting and a fresh setting for depicting Black disadvantage, the trees and grassy lawns and run-down duplexes of Charlotte, N.C.

That’s where gunshots alarm every resident and flashing blue police and red ambulance lights never arrive in time to help.

As her brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) just joined the ranks of shooting victims that also included her Mom, this time teenaged Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) is going to do something about it.

“Consequences?” What teenager ever worried about those?

Like the best sci-fi on a budget, our writer-director here doesn’t dwell on the “science” of it all.

We see how Vicaria has channeled her obsession, but not a lot of details. She’s “body snatching” the endless supply of fresh corpses her violent, drug-and-gang infested neighborhood supplies. We don’t see how she does that. She’s dissecting and and applying electrical shocks to hearts and body parts. We DO see that. This is a horror movie, after all.

But the power-grid-sapping tech, the scribbled note-taking “discoveries” and advances in her work are covered in montages.

The “PWI Princcess” may interrupt and mouth off in her white high school and earn the nickname “Mad Scientist” from little neighbor girl Jada (Amani Summer). But all “details” about what’s she’s learned and reasoned-out on this subject would do in undercut the story’s credibility and bog down the movie, which is really about something else.

The screenplay has characters debating race, the power structure, racist, heavy-handed policing, “erased” history and unknown Black and/or female pioneers in science.

A curious, opinionated child who won’t stop interrupting her always-gets-her-name-wrong teacher, so “security” is called.

And the neighborhood drug kingpin, given a career-changing charismatic flair by Denzel Whitaker, must have minored in sociology.

“Addiction is an emotional issue, not a ‘substance’ one!”

Chad L. Coleman brings a defeated pain and angry “support my child, no matter what” defiance to his performance as Vicaria’s dad. Reilly Brooke Stith (“Orange is the New Black”) makes an interesting big-sister/role model for Vicaria, playing her dead brother’s smart and very pregnant girlfriend. And Keith Holliday brings the hulking, wild-card menace to the tale that Whitaker’s more calculating kingpin Kang lacks.

But Hayes, a veteran of the Queen Latifah TV series “The Equilizer,” does most of the heavy lifting. Vicaria is numbed to death and loss, until that moment she isn’t. Even seeing the life ebb from a just-shot pesky younger kid she’s been trying to mentor barely brings a tear.

But when it all hits her, we believe it.

Writer-director Story tries to err on the side of not telling us enough. Yet the finale has a metallic clunk to it that is less satisfying than he thinks and less narratively defensible given what’s transpired before.

But put “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster” on your list of must-see/won’t-be-here-long summer thrillers, crowd-pleasing movie comfort food that embraces an old formula and manages to do something smart, insightful and topically relevent with it.

Because that “Frankenstein” tale is the allegorical gift that keeps on giving.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse context, profanity

Cast: Laya DeLeon Hayes, Denzel Whitaker, Reilly Brooke Stith, Amani Summer, Ellis Hobbs IV, Chad L. Coleman and Keith Holliday

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bomani J. Story. An RLJE/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:31

One cannot help but marvel (cough cough) when pondering how far popular culture has come and how much more visually sophisticated the “Transformers” franchise has grown over the decades.

Generations have literally never outgrown this.

Toys that first inspired a 1984 TV show, revived on the small screen and then Michael Bay’d to the big screen in 2007, movies and billions of box office dollars later and the robots have a metallic CGI sheen and their brawls a visual coherence that far exceeds anything Bay was able to do in the past.

In “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” you might actually believe a transforming robotic Fairchild Flying Boxcar plane like the one used in “Flight of the Phoenix” lands at the base of the Machu Picchu World Heritage site, that Autobots and Maximals (robotic animals) battle sinister Terrocons in the Peruvian Andes.

Real stunt drivers barreling about in a Freightliner semi, a Porsche 964, a ’70s Camaro, a Ducati 916 motorcycle and a 1970ish TV Microbus are seamlessly blended into those machines transforming into sentient, armed and armored robotic knights, battling evil to save themselves and prevent the world or the universe from ending, I forget which.

But oh my God these pictures are stupid and getting dumber and more derivative by the installment. Even by empty summer popcorn pic standards, stupid.

Five credited screenwriters and the director of “Creed II” tackled the “new” origin “story” of how the Maximals — robotic apes, cheetahs, eagles and rhinos — and Autobots were run off of their planet Cybertron, hiding out on Earth until 1994 when this magical “transportal key” thingy is uncovered inside The Maltese Falcon, and coveted by a new planet-consuming threat — Unicron — and hunted by his robotic lieutenant Scourge (voiced by Peter Dinklage) and Scourge’s minions deep into the heart of Indiana Jones South America.

You’d think the writers were struggling to make an original (fat chance), compelling, witty and emoptional movie out of a line of toys or something. And yes, they make it look…as hard as it no doubt was.

The human elements in these stories have become more and more of an afterthought. Humans are the ones who are “more than meets the eye,” here. Perhaps because these movies aren’t bothering to cast the likes of Shia and Megan and The Artist Formerly Known as Marky Mark, Josh Duhamel et al. There’s no cachet to being in a “Transformers” movie. Just cash.

Here, Anythony Ramos of “In the Heights” plays an unemployed ex-GI conned into trying to steal the Porsche that turns out to be the Autobot Mirage (Pete Davidson). Dominique Fishback of “The Hate You Give” and “Judas and the Black Messiah” plays an archeological intern at a New York museum who is handy to have around when ancient texts need translating.

They take a back seat in most scenes, some more than others.

Oscar winner Michele Yeoh and Ron Perlman now adorn the voice cast, with the Liam Neesonesque tones of the Canadian Peter Cullen being the one and only Optimus Prime, the idealistic leader always sacrificing himself for his kind, or our kind, in most of these pictures.

The jokes are the usual Bumblebee blurbs from movies — “You can’t HANDLE the truth” and “I came here to Kick Ass” — and Optimus complaining “I don’t want you to go to that drive-in theater any more.”

Pete Davidson goes after that PG-13 rating once or twice.

The violence is cartoonish and make-believe, with the occasional machine-beheading or impaling to give the fights some edge.

And it’s harmless enough, just noisy, jokey robotic mayhem beloved by going on three generations now.

But the half-hearted attempts to build a hero’s quest story about these increasingly collectible toys and ongoing campaign to wash the humanity right out of the franchise is something all the shiny, tactile and identifiable Freightliner, Porsche or Ducati parts in humanoid robotic form cannot hide.

They’re still just selling toys, kids.

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and language

Cast: Anthony Ramos, Dominique Fishback and the voices of Michele Yeoh, Ron Perlman, Pete Davidson, Peter Dinkage, Liza Koshy and Peter Cullen.

Credits: Directed by Steven Caple Jr., scripted by Joby Harold, Darnell Metayer, Josh Peters, Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber, based on the Hasbro toys, the TV show based on the toys and the earlier movies based on the toys. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:07

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and language

Cast: Anthony Ramos, Dominique Fishback and the voices of Michele Yeoh, Ron Perlman, Pete Davidson, Peter Dinkage, Liza Koshy and Peter Cullen.

Credits: Directed by Steven Caple Jr., scripted by Joby Harold, Darnell Metayer, Josh Peters, Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber, based on the Hasbro toys, the TV show based on the toys and the earlier movies based on the toys. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:07

Every night this week, it seems, something else is previewing that’s expected to dominate at least its opening weekend.

“Operation Mayfair” is an Indian serial killer thriller set in London, a film meant, no doubt, for domestic consumption on the Subcontinent and never really intended for prying, judging, non-Hindi-speaking eyes and ears.

It’s dreadful by most any measure — violent, tin-eared, clumsily-staged and uncertainly-acted. And it’s head-slappingly stupid as a police procedural. Honestly, I think all the “research” the screenwriters did was watch old serial killer episodes of 1970s TV.

But there are times it is amusingly quaint in conception and execution, a film in English with generous helpings of Hindi that has the great Indian diaspora in British policing take over a high profile mass-murderer-on-the-loose case, with the bloody butcher also one of the British investigators of Indian descent.

The film opens with a murder straight out of a ’70s porno — a hooded killer slips into the unlocked home of a model, takes her hostage, paints “black teardrops” (think Tammy Faye Baker after a crying jag) on her face, whips her to score her back, snaps her neck and lops off a finger.

All the time, he’s raving, flashing back to some unpleasantness from his youth, letting us see the stepmom (we learn) who abused him and called him a “MORON!” so many years before create this monster.

The nature of the crime, the “pose” of the victims, means there’s a previous Mayfair murderer back in business. Or a copy cat. Detective Chief Inspector Lisa Varma (Vedieka Dutt) begs her boss (Bryan Lawrence) to “bring back Det. Amar,” who failed to crack the first case and now teaches architecture at Oxford.

Sure. That scans.

Veteran Sikh actor Jimmy Shergill (Indian TV’s “Your Honor”) plays Amar, a sleuth who can read a crime scene or a crime scene photo for clues like no one else, although we see little evidence of this. Again, he had one crack at this supposedly dormant killer who has become “active” again. Perhaps Amar, with a wife and child at home, was distracted. You know, by the subordinate cop Sonya (Hritiqa Chheber) he was having an affair with.

Now that he’s abandoned academia (!?) to return to the case, he’ll need lots of chaste, non-case-related meetings with Detective Constable Sonya just to reminisce over their affair. Apparently.

That’s a shame, because he needs to focus on the case. And as we’ve seen who the killer is in the opening scenes, we know he’s the FORENSICS expert (Ankur Bhatia) assigned to the “operation” task force. Catching this guy will take a Sikh/British Columbo.

“I think the killer is doing all this to deviate our attention,” Amar suggests. “This is a MURDER case, not some petty pickpocket stuff!” he rages.

“”I’m sorry sir, but if I’m not allowed to flex my muscles, then what is the use of bringing me down over here?” he complains.

The picture’s never quite what one would call incompetent, just off in ways anybody who’s ever seen a serial killer thriller or a movie set in London will recognize.

An assignation scene uses what looks like a storefront to pass for a cafe, with an outdoor table and the inclusion of a paper Union Jack in the window the only decor the budget would allow.

Bhatia renders every murder lurid with silent cinema-styled eye-bugging, eye-rolling hysterics. Every “clue” seems invented, every argument or obstacle contrived, every interlude with the lovely Sonya a tease.

A multi-cultural society like Britain should certainly portray a police force with senior, accomplished Sikh, Pakistani and Hindi cops. But running off to teach architecture at Oxford after a falling out over a case, “joining” an investigation without being hired or sworn back into the force, quibbling over working for “my former” junior colleague, there have to be more graceful ways of introducing characters, more believable plot points and an effort made to avoid laughable “plainly an out of town production” blunders.

What a debacle.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, suggestion of sex crimes

Cast: Jimmy Shergill, Vedieka Dutt, Hritiqa Chheber, Bryan Lawrence and Ankur Bhatia

Credits: Directed by Sudipto Sarkar, scripted by Anthony Khatchaturian and Sudipto Sarkar. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55