Movie Nation

“Black Panther” star Leticia Wright turns off any hint of glamour or “extrovert” in “Aisha,” a sublimely-understated drama of a young woman struggling with her past, her family obligations and “the system” as she tries to obtain emergency “self protection” status so that she can stay in Ireland.

She is living in a refugee hostel, working as a sympathetic hairdresser’s assistant, hoping her solicitor (Lorcan Cranitch) can deliver some good news about her efforts to make her move to Ireland permanent.

Something happened back in Benin City, and her mother back in Nigeria needs money. But even with a job, a lawyer and an ever-changing community of fellow immigrants who are shuffled in and out of the hostel as support, she can’t get her hopes up. And the unit director (Stuart Graham) is a stickler for rules and who doesn’t like back-talk when others lose their appeal and Aisha sticks up for them as they’re deported.

That could be trouble. The fact that she doesn’t trust the hostel’s “Halaal” certified meats also could get her labeled a trouble-maker.

But the new security guard (Josh O’Connor of “Challengers”) takes pity on her and lets her use the kitchen, after hours, to prep meals that conform to the tenets of her religion. .

As Aisha’s prospects dim, their bond grows stronger, although it may all come to naught if her “status” is denied.

Writer-director Frank Berry (“I Used to Live Here”) shows us his “homework” in one sequence of this “inspired by true” cases story. We and Aisha hear testimonials in conversation form from others residing at her hostel. The film makes it easy to sympathize with migrating people and their plights, but also appreciative of the lengths the EU — at least — has gone to treat people humanely and legally, providing them with legal counsel, housing them and propping them up until they get the chance to plead their cases.

Berry gives Wright and O’Connor some quietly wrenching moments, long interludes where Aisha is silently fighting back the tears and the guy who is sweet on her despite being unable to make eye contact struggles to say or do something to comfort her.

The script lets Wright hide her cards, not revealing everything about Aisha and her situation at once, letting us see the comfort of a new routine in an alien land, even if that “routine” is mere weeks or months old.

O’Connor is likably humble in the presence of this beautiful woman who has been tested in ways Conor could never imagine. But Conor the security guard has his “story,” too. Is she interested enough to let him tell it?

The stakes could not be more intimate and personal here, but as reassured as we might be that something like “due process” and “common sense” will prevail, Wright and O’Connor do a good job of playing people who aren’t so sure, whose faith in people — not the state — to show compassion has its limits.

The journey “Aisha” takes after the more perilous one our heroine undertook doesn’t cover a lot of ground. But Wright makes us, Aisha’s lawyer and Conor the security guard invest in this story and hope for an outcome out of step with our xephobic. immigrant-bashing times.

Rating: unrated, discussion of rape, other violence, smoking

Cast: Leticia Wright, Josh O’Connor, Stuart Graham, Lorcan Cranitch and Denis Conway

Credits: Scripted and directed by Frank Berry. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:31

Critics use the term “film festival movie” to describe an indie title too narrow in appeal or twee in nature to ever thrive in the big bad world of studio-marketed, wide release cinema.

“East Bay” is such a movie, a Frisco film about a frustrated Korean American (writer-director Daniel Yoon) working out his “not a success” by 40 and Asian-but-maybe not-Asian-enough angst making film festival movies that at least some film festivals would accept, even if no studio deal is ever put on the table.

It features a few ironic laughs, a couple clever conceits, some fun amateur hockey action, and a pair of showcase roles for the female leads. But its mopey, meandering narrative isn’t helped by a choppy, navel-gazing nature, and its black-and-white-flashbacks and shifts in point of view slow its forward motion to a crawl.

Jack Lee’s biggest fear, he confesses in narration to a short-film-in-progress, is “failure.” He doesn’t want to let his Korean immigrant parents down. As they (Chung-Bin Yoon and Taek-Soon Yoon) are always dropping the “grandchildren would be nice” hint, he is reminded that he is not a “success” in their eyes.

Showing up for work in the “custodian” corner of computer programming, hanging with his similarly self-absorbed and at-a-dead-end colleagues — the stoner (Edmund Sim) and the tuned-out video game addict (Destry Miller) — underscores the extent of his “failure.”

But at least he makes his short films, about hockey or fake TV hunting show hosts, with a highlight an “ironic” zinger titled “Korean Comfort Man” that sends-up Japanese aggression and sexual predation during World War II. Such films sometimes get into festivals.

And at least he has a cute girlfriend (Melissa Pond) some slim hopes for the future. Then she gets pregnant. It’s not his. His new film may not make any sense.

If Jack isn’t going to resign himself to his fate — he fantasizes suicide — he’s got to reach out, aim higher with his feature length film, get into festivals, especially the Dim Sum Dance (Get it?) Film Festival, presided over by the fetching fangirl Sara (Constance Wu of “Crazy Rich Asians” and TV’s “Fresh off the Boat”).

And then there’s this distracting “guru” he’s been interviewing about happiness, success, “god” and the like, for a film. Vivacious Vivanti (Kavi Ramachandran Ladnier) bubbles over with affirmations, the kind of dizziness that passes for profound in your lesser known cults, especially ones led by self-help goddesses.

“She is not completely bonkers, unless you take everything she says 100% literally.”

“East Bay” pokes fun at racial and cultural stereotypes, and at how film festivals can seem to prefer films that reinforce those stereotypes.

It’s about family and professional expectations, with Yoon the very face of disappointment as Jack cannot see how he sabotages his possible paths to success in life and work. Wu sparkles, and Ladnier plays the hell of out “hot, dizzy, self-important mess.” Sim also stands out as a classic stoner — using a bear-shaped honey bottle as a bong, etc.

But a lot of what we’re taking in here is surface gloss — the unexplored lives of Jack’s ancestors, the cultural emnity that much of Asia holds against Japan, the cliched “nerds” who play hockey to escape that label, only to get bullied as they do, the shallow pursuit of the exotic when the more apt love connection that’s right there, championing your films in the face of public and selection committee disdain.

Whatever existential angst this slight, perhaps semi-autobiographical story — his first film, “Post Concussion,” hit festivals in 1999, “East Bay” is his second — beats around the bush addressing, “East Bay” never quite crosses that line between “I didn’t mind it” to “I liked it.”

Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Daniel Yoon, Constance Wu, Kavi Ramachandran Ladnier, Destry Miller and Edmund Sim.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Daniel Yoon. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:31

They figure this out a tad too late in this horror tale, releasing May 31.

Genre thriller, B movie all the way, unknown cast. It still could be fun.

I always got a kick seeing Bernard Hill on the screen.  A late bloomer, he brought gravitas and pathos to his most iconic performances, as the shocked and dumbfounded Captain Smith of the doomed “Titanic,” and as brooding, manipulated King Theoden in the “Lord of the Rings” movies.

He broke out on Euro TV with “Boys from the  Blackstuff” in the ’80s, acted for Clint Eastwood on “True Crime”and classed-up many a series and feature in his later years, “Forever Young” and “Wolf Hall” stand out.

He was a fun follow on Twitter, raging at Tory misdeeds and incompetence like Gandalf in a fury.

I got to interview Hill when The LOTR movies came out and remember him beaming with gratitude and pride at the big speeches slumbering, drugged Theoden makes to rally the troops, “Tolkien’s “Henry V” moment, he called it.

“That’s  the stuff,” I remember him saying. Aye, it was. Well done. Rest in peace.

 https://youtu.be/GgZ74npEqRM?si=k5flwLl2Q_ecgNff

And you and I thought “Dune” was sci fi eye candy of the first order.

I do not care that some studio execs were lukewarm on picking this up. I am trying to forget how meditative and obscurant Coppola’s last 20 years of movies have been.

This looks amazing.

Mr May the Fourth Be With You” suggests the SlDC press corps should be reminding voters of re Nov. Fifth.

The Scott Turow novel made for a pretty good Alan Pakula big screen thriller back in 1990, a rare villainous turn by Harrison Ford, with Greta Scachi and Raul Julia on board.

June 4, Apple TV+ gets a deeper dive into this murder mystery, whose mystery might be “Will he get away with it?”

“Unfrosted” is “The Right Stuff” filtered through the “Bee Movie” and TV-honed shtick of Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld’s comic riff on “the breakfast wars” that Post and Kellogg’s fought in his youth is an amusing wallow in boomer nostalgia, a broad farce about the mostly-fictionalized battle to be the first to get a “shelf stable” (Yummm, extra PRESERVATIVES!) breakfast pastry to the market.

Maybe you have to be a baby boomer to get into a Pop Tarts lampoon. But as we watch a “Barbie” colored send-up of everything from the space program to JFK — the president and the Ollie Stone movie — with a tipsy Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan), cereal mascots and a fanciful Hugh Grant take on Tony-the-Tiger voice Thurl Ravenscroft as a Master Thespian, I laughed.

Hey, anything to keep Old Man Seinfeld from whining about “woke culture” or he and his cookbooks-for-fellow-goldiggers wife from financing “counter” protests against anti-genocide protests, right?

Yeah, Jerry has aged into Uncle Leo, looking for anti-Semites under every contrary opinion and laughs in the diabetic coma of 1960s breakfast cereals.

Where “Barbie” made a modern feminist statement out of a ’60s doll, “Unfrosted” wallows in the “Mad Men” ethos and tooth decaying breakfast offerings of the mid-century-modern past.

Director and co-writer Seinfeld stars as Bob Cabana, a Big Ideas Man at Kellogg’s, reveling in the company’s dominance of arch-rival Post at the 1963 Bowl & Spoon Awards, honoring Battle Creek, Michigan’s industry town industries.

But Bob doesn’t rest on his laurels or dream of a “sod” lawn as he drives that Car-that-Killed-Ernie-Kovacs to and from work. Post, and its crafty chairwoman Marijorie Post (Amy Schumer), are onto something new. He’s sure of it.

Bob soon figures out what it is, a stolen abandoned idea that he himself pushed, a “shelf-stable” fruit (ish) filled toaster pastry.

The race is on, with Bob begging Edsel Kellogg (Jim Gaffigan) to let him lure his old ideas-partner (Melissa McCarthy) back from NASA.

“Men on the moon? Hah!”

They assemble an all-star team of “Taste Pilots” — guys like a Schwinn (Jack McBrayer), a Carvel (Adrian Martinez), Chef Boy-ar-dee (Bobby Monaghan) and a “Never a member of ze Nazi Party” type German fop (Thomas Lennon, a strudel-accented hoot).

They bring in “Mad Men” to help sell it. Real “Mad Men.” You know, Hamm and Slattery.

But Bob’s got unruly mascots to contend with — quarrelsome Snap, Crackle and Pop, that pretentious Ravenscroft squeezing in “King Lear” rehearsals between appearances in the Tony-the-Tiger felt suit.

He’s getting pressure from “The Milk Syndicate,” with Christian Slater playing the muscle and Peter Dinklage stealing the movie as the ruthless dairy mafia don.

And there are these two precocious, dumpster-diving Post sugar-junkie moppets (Eleanor Sweeney and Bailey Sheetz, insufferably fun) who might be his ace in the hole at this pivotal moment in America’s breakfast wars. They’ve tasted “the hot fruit lightning that THE MAN doesn’t want you to have” that Post has cooked-up. So Bob knows what he’s up against.

Seinfeld recycles his best acting tricks from “Seinfeld. Every time a new ingredient is discussed — barking “PECTIN!” “Xantham Gum!” and “RIBOFLAVIN” like he’s seen his nemesis “NEWMAN” one more time.

The cameos pile up like the one-liners about “There’s always a surprise in the box” and “Vietnam? That looks like a good idea.” Bill Burr plays JFK, Cedric the Entertainer is the Bowl & Spoon Awards emcee, and “Seinfeld” regulars and many an unemployed “Saturday Night Live” alumnus shows up for a scene or two.

Yes, most every joke churned out here has a “low hanging fruit” or “fruit food colored” air about it. But Gaffigan, Schumer, McCarthy, Grant and most everybody here has a chance to score. And so they do.

There’s also whimsy in the casting — Grant as a strike-leading mascot actor quoting Shakespeare, James Marsden as “bulging” fitness guru Jack Lalanne, Dan Levy as Andy Warhol?

That’s GOLD, Jerry! Or, you know, a honey-shaded high fructose food coloring version of it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, “Uncle Leo.”

Rating: PG-13, profanity, innuendo, smoking

Cast: Jerry Seinfeld, Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, Jim Gaffigan, Cedric the Entertainer, James Marsden, Jack McBrayer, Adrian Martinez and Hugh Grant

Credits: Directed by Jerry Seinfeld, scripted by Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten and Andy Robin. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Not sure of the release date, yet. But this looks solid and speedy.

Gabriel Leone has the title role, Brazilian driver Aryton Senna, with Kay Scodelario in the supporting cast.

It’s great that after all his years before the camera, Aussie actor Eric Bana is finally in a franchise that plays to his considerable strengths as an actor and a screen “presence.”

“Force of Nature” is a sequel to “The Dry,” a top knotch mystery thriller from a couple of years back set in the Outback. Bana reprises his role as Federal Detective Aaron Falk for a jungle Australia story of women lost in the rainforests of Giralang in this latest Jane Harper novel to be made into a movie.

As in “The Dry,” which took the character to his hometown during a drought to solve a crime, Falk has a past connection to this place — a childhood trauma. As in that film, there is a crime to unravel in classic mystery novel adaptation fashion, a few hoary tropes included.

And as in that film, we see Australia at its most tourist brochure-striking — scenic forests, clouds of bats, lovely waterfalls, and a “raging” river for somebody to fall in while trying to retrieve a map that will get her and her “Executive Adventures” retreat group out of the woods and out of a jam.

Falk and partner Carmen (Jacqueline McKenzie) show up after four women come out of the woods, wet, lost and in one case — spider-bitten. But one of their “team building exercise” participants did not get out.

Alice (Anna Torv), we learn, wasn’t popular. She was high up in the Bailey Tennants development (just guessing) firm, an ill-tempered bully. She might be romantically involved with the company founder (Richard Roxbourgh). Alice’s boss and wife of the founder Jill (Deborra Lee-Furness) might have known about it. Lauren (Robin McLeavy), the one backpacker with “bush skills,” has “history with Alice. And sisters Beth and Bree (Sisi Strong and Lucy Ansell) had their issues with her as well.

“Alice didn’t like me, and she never pretended to hide it.”

Even Falk wasn’t all that crazy about Alice. But he had to deal with her. She was his “inside source” at Bailey Tennants, which Falk and his partner were investigating for financial crimes. That’s why they’re there to “assist” with the search. Strange coincidence, their source being the only one to not make it out of the woods.

Falk knows this remote place, with its lovely Mirror Falls, is forbidding, where “one small mistake could change everything.” He knows it because of something that happened during his childhood.

So as he and Carmen question the women, and almost question Bailey himself, we see not just the flashbacks of that ill-fated hike for “problem employees,” and the melodramatic chain of events that put them all in peril, we glimpse young Aaron’s (Archie Thomson) experience there with his parents (Ash Ricardo and Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) decades before.

The script throws in a storm, a complication that’s treated as an afterthought. Another complication is that the woods were long ago the haunt of an infamous Aussie serial killer. The Robert Connolly film — he did Bana’s “The Dry” and “Blueback” — is a bit by-the-numbers in terms of those complications and the nature of the withheld details later revealed in the many interrogations.

“That’s why I wasn’t surprised when she lied to us,” lines like that, abound.

At one point, Falk gathers the women in the lobby lounge in front of a resort hotel fireplace for a group questioning to “Reveal what REALLY happened,” a gimmick straight out of Agatha Christie and all who would film her books or imitate them.

But through it all, Bana is a brooding, soulful presence, a man who takes this situation seriously, who is more interested in saving his source’s life than whatever information she can provide their investigation, someone who doesn’t let the local cops’ mission creep — Hey, we could wrap up more of this serial killer story with this “search!” — go unchallenged.

“Force of Nature” is more solid and perfunctory than the even more exotic and atmospheric “The Dry.” But the players, the situations and the twists, which are pretty good, recommend it.

And Bana as Aaron Falk? Good on ya, mate. Hang on to this franchise as long as they’ll let you.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Eric Bana, Anna Torv, Lucy Ansell, Deborra Lee-Furness, Robin McLeavy, Sisi Strong, Jacqueline McKenzie and Richard Roxbourgh

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Connolly, based on a novel by Jane Harper. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:52