Movie Nation

The mere presence of Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a Manhattan movie creates expectations even though we’re decades-removed from her “Seinfeld” stardom.

But this time she’s working for that indie icon Nicole Holofcener, a writer and director known for intimate and sometimes lighthearted portraits of characters in a particular world and a distinct, instantly-recognizable stage and status in life.

Remember those poor souls coping with “Friends with Money,” featuring “Friend” Jennifer Aniston, or the New Yorkers wrestling with neighbors and living space and the appearance of charity in “Please Give,” or the odd couple at an odd time to be dating again (Louis-Dreyfus paired with James Gandolfini) of “Enough Said?”

This time Louis-Dreyfus is playing someone much older and no wiser, still craving status, still insecure enough to let a little white lie, tactlessly revealed, move her to admit “You Hurt My Feelings.”

Beth teaches fiction writing for one of the colleges in town, an intimate workshop of five slightly off-center “over-sharers.” She’s published a well-received memoir that reached a tiny audience, an audience she is deflated to learn doesn’t include her students. Maybe if the fatherly “abuse wasn’t just verbal” it’d have sold better, she tells herself, her agent, her mother (Jeannie Berlin) and others. And she has been wrestling with draft after draft of her first novel.

Her agent is cool on it. Her adoring husband of several decades, Don (Tobias Menzies, Prince Philip in “The Crowne”) gushes with encouragement. But she might want to consider what Don does for a living — he’s a psychotherapist — when she hears that from him. Because when she overhears Don candidly complaining that he doesn’t “like” the book, or being subjected to reading draft after draft of it, Beth is shattered.

In an instant, she tells her sister (Michaela Watkins, terrific), she goes from affection and a tendency to share food and ice cream cones with her soul mate to “I am NOT going to be able to look him in the face again!”

Even among the fragile family circle/bubble Beth has ensconced herself in, that seems extreme.

But consider her sister, an interior decorator who has to keep a smile on her face as she shows one wall-mounted light fixture after another to a shallow, demanding client and hold her tongue when her semi-successful husband (Arian Moayed) struggles to get acting roles and not lose them because he’s not very interesting in the spotlight.

Consider Don’s practice. If Beth could spy on him with patients, she’d hear the inane, ineffectual advice he passes on, see how forgetful he’s getting with age and hear clients muttering “Idiot” when they leave or sign off a Zoom session.

One feuding couple (Amber Tamblyn and David Cross, hilarious) set aside a little time from tearing into each other in every session to chew on Don’s competence or seeming unwillingness to help.

And then there’s Beth and Don’s pot-store manager son (Owen Teague), a 23 year-old playwright wannabe who lashes out at his privileged, only child upbringing and those who supervised it and their little white lies of encouragement.

“You always expect the BEST from me!”

What can a mother say to that but “You’re WELCOME!”

“You Hurt My Feelings” and its characters are caught up in a low stakes game built on petty complaints, and that impacts our appreciation of it. It’s lightly funny, but only occasionally. It’s sharply-observed, but like “Seinfeld,” its populace is caught up in New York minutia.

The broad nature of sitcom structure and laughs allowed that earlier TV show to explain Manhattanites (with a dose of Queens) to America, and mock them to great success. Holofcener is shooting fish in a much smaller barrel here.

“You’re Hurting My Feelings” feels confined by geography, claustrophobic in its concentration on a few city blocks and a tiny number of annoying people within them. It’s a twee comedy, well-played and mostly close-to-the-vest, but lacking much in the way of novelty and the sharper observations Holofcener is famous for.

Her surehandedness with comedy — it’s not wholly her thing — can also be questioned in the tightassed academia farce “Lucky Hank,” which she directed and which never quite delivers in a way you’d hope.

But Louis-Dreyfus is an always-engaging screen presence, most entertaining when she’s most exasperated. And Holofcener has parked her in a cute if slight sociological study that takes navel-gazing New Yorkers into their AARP years, still comfortably discomfitted by the littlest things, still making mountains out of lives littered with molehills.

Rating: R, (profanity)

Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Arian Moayed, Owen Teague, Amber Tamblyn, Jeannie Berlin and David Cross

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicole Holofcener. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:33

An elderly man walks into the frame and sits on a park bench, a ritual repeated tens of millions of times every much day pretty everywhere in the world.

This little old man with a Spanish accent isn’t talking about retirement, winding down his days or anything like that. He’s got purpose, a lifetime of work behind him and years — as many as he has left — to carry on.

After all, Enrique Medina says. “You don’t want to let down Voyager.”

Two matching NASA spacecraft were launched in 1977, in the middle of America’s “national malaise.” A culture famed for inventing disposability and “planned obsolescence” produced engineering that would dazzle science fiction fans and impress even Medieval cathedral builders or Victorian engineers with its durability and ultility.

And now, 45 years-and-counting on, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still out there, traveling well beyond our solar system, adding to the breadth of human knowledge with instruments and tech designed before Ford Pintos were pulled off the road.

“It’s Quieter in the Twilight” is an elegaic documentary about the aging, shrinking Jet Propulsion Laboratory team that keeps track of, in touch with and maintains and monitors what these two intrepid spaceships discover.

As we meet the dozen scientists and engineers still on the job (this was filmed from 2019-2021/22), they get emotional over the job, the spacecraft and how they and their two starships are nearing the end of the the line.

“Age casts a shadow over everything we do,” one engineer notes.

Billy Miossi’s film speaks to most everyone on that shrinking team, some of whom have been around since launch, all of whom sing the praises of the “forgotten hero” of America’s space program, how it was envisioned, the optimism and excitement that greeted this first effort to hit a grand slam — visiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, all in one trip. And they talk about the ongoing mission as both craft left the Solar System, passed through the heliosphere (the edge of the sun’s “solar wind”) and the project settled into “out of sight, out of mind” status, as far as NASA has been concerned.

The team wrestles with repairs to the one Deep Space Network communication dish that can reach one of the craft, in Australia, fretting over everything they can do to keep their baby alive enough to re-awaken when the dish comes back online. And they struggle with everything that could and did go wrong during COVID.

That part of “Twilight” is more technical and a tad duller than the rest.

But early on, Miossi fills the screen with images of the prep and the launch, montages of long ago headlines, reports by long dead TV news reporters and anchors waxing rhapsodic, many of them landing the Big Interview on this subject, science superstar in the making Carl Sagan.

The bulk of the film is about the work today, an aging workforce of the usual NASA “pocket protector and glasses” white guy nerds, but also immigrants from South America and Korea, a Black engineer who grew up during segregation and had to carve a new path just to get into science.

In that regard, “It’s Quieter in the Twilight” is both an elegy and a film infused with a dewy-eyed optimism. We’re looking back and remembering an era where science and achievement and diversity were lauded and lionized, when national pride was based on swinging for the fences, and we’re looking back from an age when every value epitomized by Voyager and the America back then is under assault.

Maybe, this film suggests, it is “Twilight.” But if we remember what we did then, a new dawn will be just as bright.

Rating: unrated, G-worthy

Cast: Suzanne Dodd, Chris Jones, Jefferson Hall, Sun Matsumoto, Enrique Medina, Todd Barder, Lu Yang, Fernando Peralta, Andrea Angrum and Ed Stone

Credits: Directed by Billy Miossi. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:24

One of the great gifts the cinema has bestowed on us has been the lovely third act comeback afforded writer-director Paul Schrader.

A figure from the “Taxi Driver,” “Hardcore” and “Raging Bull” era of iconoclastic American cinema, he was all but left for dead in the age of “content” and comic book cinematic juvenalia.

But here he is, Scorsese’s greatest screenwriter and a damned fine writer-director (“Cat People,” “Light Sleeper,” Light Sleeper”) in his own right, serving up stories with patience, depth, metaphor and moral and cultural topicality, our most Christian filmmaker plumbing the depths of our modern mortal souls.

Religion isn’t in the foreground of the latest from the writer/director of “First Reformed.” But it’s a subtext lying just beneath the surface of “Master Gardener,” a story of redemption and cultivating one’s way towards the renewal that every growing season promises.

The Aussie Joel Edgerton (the film “Animal Kingdom,””The Great Gatsby,” “Loving”) gives one of his finest performances as our narrator and protoganist, a true believer in the nobility of the garden and the power of working with plants to restore the soul.

“Gardening is a belief in the future,” Narvel Roth narrates, floridly filling pages of his journal with reveries of flora and pedantic asides on the history of this hobby, which he treats with the reverence of one newly-converted to the faith that saved him.

The way he talks, we might think he’s a college lecturer on the subject. But the way Narvel carries himself, the cut of his hair and the slicked-down way he wears it, suggests something harder. Narvel is a man with a past, and we know it long before he compares a particular floral scented “buzz” as “like that you get just before pulling the trigger.”

Sigourney Weaver plays his old money boss, the owner and steward of Gracewood Gardens on her family’s estate, where “four generations of curated botany, horticulture and display” is nothing to sneeze at.

Norma is patrician without being patronizing, devoted to an annual charity auction that lets her gardens raise money for Meals on Wheels, and informal enough to relish Narvel’s sarcasm about watching “grown men in pastel pants outbid each other for a flower,” even calling Narvel “Sweet Pea” with more affection than we’d think possible, considering the diffence in their classes.

But Norma needs a favor. Her troubled grandniece, daughter of an addicted daughter of her late sister, needs help straightening out her life. Maya is 20ish, “of mixed blood,” and Narvel is to take her on as a an apprentice.

Narvel asks questions of Norma, and when Maya (Quintessa Swindell of “Black Adam”) arrives, he asks more. He sizes her up, senses her past and her present. He embeds her with the garden staff, teaches and mentors her. And when her messiness cannot be hidden, he asks her a question everyone could stand to hear on occasion.

“Are you satisfied with your life?”

If you’ve read or heard anything about “Master Gardener,” you’ve figured out the pun in its title. Narvel’s big secret isn’t a secret to Norma, his U.S. Marshal Service handler (Esai Morales) or the viewer, the first time we see him peel his shirt off in the comfort of his garden cottage.

Narvel’s swastika tattoos connect with his camo-clad militant white supremacist past which we glimpse in flashbacks. This was who he used to be, a cruel “master race” cultist consumed by hate and the violence that spins out of that.

“I found a life in flowers. How unlikely is that?”

But this isn’t just his road to redemption story. “Master Gardener” is about planting seeds, culling dead or dying branches and making room for new growth. Whatever he’s held onto from that past life, he’s cultivating something in Maya that could save her.

Edgerton gives one of his most compact and introverted performances as this man “saved” by “manure” and what can grow in it. Weaver is similarly quiet, almost subdued, the very embodiment of a widowed woman of property. And Swindell slides easily into the rhythms of the world Schrader conjures up, where even the arguments have a gentility about them.

The grandniece is “impertinent,” a deadly sin in a world this ancient and ordered.

Schrader makes more melodramatic choices in the film’s later acts, some of them unfortunate. Every time you see a 50ish leading man linked romantically with a 20something beauty, the viewer is free to consider that the aged writer-director’s wish fulfillment fantasy.

But he still manages to trip up expectations, leaning into “man of violence returns to violence” genre conventions, even casting his hero and heroine into the wilderness, but letting them and his movie find their footing and their core values as they do.

There can be no renewal, after all, without a periodic and brutally unsentimental cutting, killing or trimming.

Rating: R for language, brief sexual content and nudity

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, Quintessa Swindell, Esai Morales

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Schrader. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:51

I could not WAIT to get to the Norwegian “Royalteen” sequel, “Royalteen: Princess Margrethe,” (he lied). I mean, what could top that soapy “going to high school with royalty and falling for a prince” fairytale with “real teen” sex and profanity and every other “issue” under the sun complicating the affair?

“Princess Margrethe” leaves young lovers Lena (Ines Høysæter Asserson) and the curly prince Kalle (Mathias Storhøi) behind to tell the story of the Mean Girl half of the royal Norwegian high school twins. What made her mean? What keeps the meanness going? Let’s find out!

This sequel, also based on the YA novel by Randi Fuglehaug and Anne Gunn Halvorsen, is marginally more interesting because of all the things that hang over someone labeled “Miss Perfect” and “The Most Beautiful Woman in Norway” by the European press.

Margrethe, as interpreted by Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, has family responsibilities and a paranoia borne of a press and culture that’s just waiting for her and others in her family to take a wrong step.

That’s one reason why she was so freaked out by her brother’s crush on the “experienced” and complicated commoner Lena. But that’s not why Margrethe fainted at the prom in the last scene of “Royalteen.”

The opening of “Princess Margrethe” shows her being wheeled into the hospital and a doctor telling her and her parents about all the drugs in her system.

“Keeping this quiet” is only going to cover up so much. Flashbacks to that night remind Margrethe how she got so messed up, and the overly-attentive boy who got her that way.

Margrethe spends this sequel fretting over video that creep recorded that might get out, over the flirty Prince of Denmark not named Hamlet (Sammy Germain Wadi), whether to carry on with aspiring DJ Arni (Filip Bargee Ramberg), her brother’s pal and a guy who knows her better than anyone and pondering the state of the monarchy, her image and what is going on with her parents’ marriage.

Margrethe feels pressured by the one friend she has in the world (Amalie Sporsheim) to do what teenagers do and lose her virginity. But to whom? Prince Alexander of Denmark? Arni? Gustav the possible blackmailer?

Getting drunk widens her playing field to a stranger who protectively takes her home.

“You know, you HAVE to sleep with me,” she hiccups. “It’s in the con…consti…constiTUtion.”

Through it all, her depressed and often bedridden mother’s (Kirsti Stubø) words of warning hang over her (in Norwegian with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

“It’s not like we’re normal people.”

But in most ways, they are.

The misunderstandings are just as lame as in “Royalteen,” the “mysteries” are just as contrived and guessable.

But there are a few cute, if seriously cliched moments. As blah as it all seems to the jaded adults in the room, “Margrethe” might fill the bill for teens who want to see that “royalty has the same issues everybody else does” and live vicariously in this milieu, a “teen princess” movie with a profane, sexual and pharmaceutical edge.

Rating: TV-MA, substance abuse, sexual situations, a little nudity, profanity

Cast: Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Filip Bargee Ramberg, Sammy Germain Wadi, Frode Winther, Amalie Sporsheim, Kirsti Stubø, Mathias Storhøi and Ines Høysæter Asserson.

Credits: Directed by  Ingvild Søderlind, scripted by Marta Huglen Revheim, Ester Schartum-Hansen and Per-Olav Sørensen, based on the book by Randi Fuglehaug and Anne Gunn Halvorsen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

“Knights of the Zodiac” is an adequately-budgeted action fantasy about young warriors recruited to protect or attack the reincarnation of the Greek goddess Athena, warriors identified by their connection to an inner power/”Force” called Cosmos.

No, it has nothing to do with the science TV series based on the book by Carl Sagan. Yes, it has a lot of similarities to every other YA sci-fi/fantasy thingamabob that’s ever come down the pike.

Based on a manga/Japanese comic book series, it isn’t cast and played as “young” as say “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.” But it’s still pretty childish in its setting, derivative plotting, actions beats, heroines and heroes.

Japanese American singer-actor Mackenyu — please don’t make fun of the name, or the fact that this chap figures he gets to go by one name when his level of fame suggests maybe that’s an overreach — stars as Seiya, whose older sister was snatched when he was a child.

He got a hint of her “Cosmos” power when he grabbed at her magic medallion necklace one time. As a haunted adult, he’s still looking for her, and of course cage-fighting in an underground octagon to make ends meet.

Just as he’s getting his butt whipped by the brute Cassios (Nick Stahl), he summons up that dormant power. That alerts rich-guy recruiter Alman Kido (Sean Bean) to his existence and whereabouts, and summons the minions of Alman Kido’s sinister ex-wife Vander Guraad (Famke Janssen).

In a flash, our hero has to choose a side, which of course means he’ll be taken in by the guy protecting the new goddess Athena, born Sienna (Madison Iseman), a spoiled “rich girl” to Seiya. He’ll have to train, learn to use his powers, ponder the mystery of his missing sister, resist the temptations of Vander Guraad and eventually “save” Athena when the chips are down.

Or not.

The fight scenes have cool slo-mo effects, and the best of them come from the pre-“Knights of the Zodiac” armor that Seiya acquires as he masters his powers. The octagon action has some decent wirework — spinning, floating kicks and what not.

The acting is never really bad, just indifferent. Even old pros Bean and Janssen can’t summon up much enthusiasm for this silliness. Mackenyu shows off a few martial arts moves early on. But once you’ve got magic powers and armor, the brawls turn “Transformers” dull and CGI.

The running “gag” is “You don’t know when to quit, do you?” And the rest of the dialogue is either too bland to bother quoting or standard issue “You should have DIED when you had the chance!”

The limited sci-fi “tech” we see is mainly this Opsrey-styled jet-powered transport.

Fans of the comics will certainly get more out of it than newbies like me. All we see is all the other middling YA sagas it resembles, borrows from and fails to match or improve upon.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Mackenyu, Famke Janssen, Madison Iseman, Nick Stahl, Diego Tinoco, Caitlin Hudson and Sean Bean

Credits: Directed by Tomasz Baginski, scripted by Josh Campbell, Matt Stueken and Kiel Murray based on the manga/comic series by Masami Kurumada. A Sony release.

Running time: 1:5

“Faithfully Yours” is a Dutch thriller about wives who cheat and what the almost-as-dishonest mistrusting men who married them might be capable of if they find out. It’s a subtly-acted slow-starter, with a fine, flashy finish, a “solid” genre piece that never quite crosses over into riveting.

Bracha Van Doesburg plays Bodil, a no-nonsense domestic court judge who lives for her weekend’s away from it all. Or so we gather.

She’s got a little boy she dotes on and a husband who indulges (Nasrdin Dchar) her getaways. They drop her off at the train station, and we start to figure out something is up.

She and her pal Isabel (Elise Schaap) go over their elaborate schedule for this little Belgian (Ostend) get away. But as they pass intructions over this lecture, that play, etc., they share burner phones. They discuss timing, places where “I’ll do your social” media while “I’ll be seen” here.

They’re plotting their latest little “fling.” Or “flings.” They’re supposed to be in the beach house Bo inherited from her aunt. But Isa checks into a hotel, bedazzles herself and hits the club for a little easy interaction and uncomplicated intercourse.

Bo? The judge who decides who is “fit” to have child custody, and the like? She picks up strangers, including the somewhat famous “philosopher” (Matteo Simoni) who gives a talk about how “To Lie the Truth” which she attends.

It’s all modestly kinky right up to the moment Bo comes in from a swim and finds a bloody crime scene — with no body — in the beach house.

Yes, she calls the cops. No, she doesn’t tell them the whole truth, or really much of it all. The blood was Isa’s, and when her clingy and neurotic novelist husband (Gijs Naber) and Bo’s other half Milan show up, keeping her story straight with each of them, and with the leery lady cops (Sofie Decleir and Anna De Ceulaer) is going to be a challenge.

When will she have the time to figure out what’s happened to her friend, and if it was something awful, whodunit?

Director and co-writer André van Duren — “The Fury” and “Gang of Oss” were his — doesn’t get all the paranoia he might have wrung out of this material and Doesburg’s performance of it. Bo doesn’t seem much more than puzzled by all this confusion, all the fingers pointing in this or that direction.

If this poker-faced turn is meant to keep the viewer confused about what she’s confused by, and what she might be in on, it doesn’t allow for much viewer investment in the character or rising suspense in fear for her fate.

We never get a hint that she’s frantic to keep her secret, and her friend’s, never fret when she’s a suspect, when the menfolk seem to start figuring out what’s really been going on during these junkets to Belgium.

That softens the impact a bit when the film’s third act starts to deliver some real punches.

Still, “Faithfully Yours” is mysterious enough and thoughfully plotted enough to hold one’s interest. I know it held mine.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Bracha Van Doesburg, Elise Schaap, Nasrdin Dchar, Gijs Naber, Matteo Simoni, Hannah Hoekstra, Anna De Ceulaer and Sofie Decleir

Credits: Directed by André van Duren, scripted by  Elisabeth Lodeizen, Paul Jan Nelissen and André van Duren. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Aspiring novelists start and abandon many a book about a writer trying to write her or his first novel. Aspiring filmmakers do the same. But as movies cost a lot more than a simple word processing program, those that are finished are sure to turn up somewhere.

That’s nobody’s idea of a ringing endorsement to open a film review with, and “On Our Way” is too interesting to dismiss, if entirely too slight, too repetitive, self-absorbed, pretentious and wandering to endorse.

There is no “directed by” opening credit to the film, so going in cold, I didn’t realize the leading lady, Sophie Lane Curtis, also scripted and directed this story of a filmmaker who finally gets a serio-tragic love story based on his life and love affair on film.

That tale is told from the point-of-view of Henry (Micheál Richardson), a young filmmaker whose troubled youth is the fodder for a script he’s labored over for years, even before he met Rosemary (Curtis). When we first encounter him, the walls of the French farmhouse he’s staying in are covered with pages of the screenplay and he’s playing and replaying a phone message from Rosemary and he’s suicidal.

So we’re guessing…something happened to “them,” to “her,” that his script was rejected for the last time, or worse, the picture was greenlit and then put in turnaround before they rolled camera?

Curtis uses an opening montage to foreshadow the entire story — “It’s just a movie!” “It’s my LIFE!” — and flashbacks to backfill the memories of Henry’s mother (Jordana Brewster) spiriting them away from her husband/his “lost boy” dad (James Badge Dale), of the origins of the screenplay “The Lost Boy of Southfork,” his childhood pal (Keith Powers) coming on board to produce the film, Henry’s fateful SoHo meeting with aspiring actress and antiques shop clerk Rosemary and more.

Rosemary gets some of the narrative’s “profound” lines. “People’s truths tend to come out at night.” Henry recites the others.

“I want the world to stop before my memory becomes unfocused,” is an eloquently romantic justification for suicide.

The story’s arc turns into something of a jumble as producer David talks his hardcase hedge fund manager dad (veteran character heavy Paul Ben-Victor) into investing, and the old man — this part of the story taking place in SoCal — knows enough about movies to demand the rights to everything, including the final cut.

“I only invest in things I can control.”

The tepid imitation of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” that the love story aspires to be takes a back seat as players audition for that movie, Henry is cast as his alter ego and somehow, pretty but dramatically-uninteresting Rosemary is cast as the romantic sprite basically based on her.

Ouch. Not knowing the director’s playing her leaves one wondering, until the closing credits, how anybody would think that “audition” was a game changer, and that this performance was ever going to be strong enough to carry a Great Romance and a movie based upon it.

Writer-director and co-star Curtis uses the editing and jumbling of the story order (lots of repetition) to cover up the thinness of the material, and perhaps hide the milquetoast nature of the performances.

Because wrestling with how interesting this might have been, had it reached its full potential, one is inclined to poke around the closing credits for clues.

Micheál Richardson is the son of the late Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson. His grandmother, Vanessa Redgrave, and her husband Franco Nero play the French grandparents in the film.

That’s not a bad hook to trot around Cannes when you’re looking to finance a film starring yourself and your “longtime friend” Micheál Richardson.

And those names might get the attention of Brewster and Dale to play the “other” parents in the picture, and ensure you can sign Ben-Victor to play the ball-buster/financier who makes himself the studio chief on this production.

If it wasn’t for the fact that the story is so thin it begs for mobius strip editing and the leads are bland and adequate at best, “On Our Way” might have been a movie worth discussing on its own merits, and not simply a movie you “nepo baby” gossip about.

Rating: unrated, suicide subtext, profanity

Cast: Micheál Richardson, Sophie Lane Curtis, Jordana Brewster, Keith Powers, Paul Ben-Victor, Franco Nero, Vanessa Redgrave and James Badge Dale.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sophie Lane Curtis. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:31

The best sports movie director of recent times, Ron Shelton, who gave us “Tin Cup,” “Bull Durham” and 1992’s “White Men Can’t Jump,” developed one rule for casting such films after the efforts it took to make a certain future Oscar winner look like an actual major league pitching prospect in his breakout film, “Bull Durham.”

“They’ve got to be able to ‘play.'”

That doesn’t seem to have tripped-up the director who goes by “Calmatic” and the stars of the remake of “White Men Can’t Jump.” Sinqua Walls was a convincing footballer on TV’s “Friday Night Lights,” and singer and composer Jack Harlow has a credible jump shot.

A lot of rehearsal and some sympathetic editing and they’re perfectly credible as a new version of a salt-and-pepper LA street-hoops hustling duo.

But lacking real chemistry — Harlow’s never acted in a movie before — and with little of the witty way with banter and amusing showmanship of the original film, this re-imagining of Shelton’s work — which had Wesley Snipes at his flamboyant, mouthiest best and Woody Harrelson as his slow-talking lesser half of a hoops dream team — is flat-footed, pretty much start to finish.

And lest we let the players take all the heat, the Grammy winning music video director Calmatic also remade a “House Party” that no one wanted to see, especially critics.

The story’s been changed, giving one baller, Kamal (Walls) a troubled back-story to explain hy he’s pushing 30 and “never made it,” and a now-sickly Dad (the late Lance Reddick) who pushed him. The “white man” half is a Gonzaga alum who still has NBA dreams, a bum knee and a juice-cleanse/meditator shtick that’s almost funny.

But the stakes seem both lower and more serious. There’s no Rosie Perez, training for “Jeopardy” glory and raising her voice to a pitch only dogs can hear when her man messes up. The hustlers hustling each other bits are lacking and the supporting “players” (Myles Bullock, Vince Staples) have less amusing characters and less amusing lines to play.

There’s no delusional Kadeem Hardison, no hardball-roundball hustler akin to the original film’s Cylk Cozart.

Here, the broke white guy is a would-be influencer nerd named Jeremy who drives his dancer-choreographer girlfriend’s (Laura Harrier) Porsche. Kamal and wife Imani (Teyani Taylor) have a family and dreams, and he has a delivery truck driving job and anger management issues, on and off the court.

Outdoor court locations from the original film are recycled, but the lean, clean “This could be our big payday” tournament is diluted with multiple tourneys. A white NBA star is set up as a “meh” villain.

The insults include “I don’t wanna take your money, gentrifier” and “Hope you can shoot, Sherman Oaks.”

Wake me when you’re done, kids.

Here’s what works. Harlow is very good at playing the passive aggressive trash-talker who zeroes in on other player’s on-and-off-court insecurities in semi-subtle ways.

“I’m like the P.T. Anderson (“There Will be Blood”) of basketball psychological warfare.”

And there’s no sense in countering that with “Spike” is a better filmmaker.

“Spike isn’t even a good KNICKS fan!”

But take away the point-by-point comparison, even accepting the jump shots and backdoor cuts on the court, this remake still never gets off the ground.

Harlow may be funnier in other (smaller) roles, and Walls may have other chances to play the straight man. But there is no “Woody and Wesley” four-films-together future for these two.

And if Calmatic wants a movie making career, maybe it’s time to turn down remakes.

Rating: R for profanity, and some drug content

Cast: Sinqua Walls, Jack Harlow, Laura Harrier, Teyana Taylor and Lance Reddick.

Credits: Directed by Calmatic, scripted by Kenya Barris and Doug Hall, based on the Ron Shelton script for the movie “White Men Can’t Jump.”

A 20th Century/Hulu release.

Running time:

Jason Momoa IS “The Greatest Showman!”

Who knew?

With his every peacocking gesture, every grand spreading of his epic arms and epic smile, every flounce, prance, steely-eyed threat — “You want to control the world, I just want to punish it!” –and every darker-than-dark joke, Momoa becomes the villain’s villain in “Fast X,” the tenth film in the never-ending franchise that began waaaay back in 2001.

“Hey dorks, what’re we blowing up? WHAT? The Vatican? Ok, but you’re going to HELL.”

But let’s not mince words. “Fast X” is a stunningly stupid movie, reviving more “dead” characters than every NBC soap opera ever, “fan servicing” the crap out of a crap script, wrecking more cars (NOT those indestructable Product Placement Dodges) in more digital crashes than one can count, and featuring more scenes demanding the impossible from Vin Diesel — acting.

Yet Momoa makes it fun, all by his Larger than Life self.

Momoa plays the aptly-named walking/talking “inferno” Dante, son of the villain played by Joaquim de Almeida a few movies back.

Dante learned one and only one thing from his dad (de Almeida returns to reenact his death scene, and so that Dante can be inserted into the story).

“Never accept death when SUFFERING is owed!”

So Dante starts setting up “The Family,” which has grown (EGOT winner Rita Moreno comes in as a matriarch) so much it’s “a cult, with cars.”

And stuff starts blowing up — in Rome, in London, in and around Rio.

Characters and cars magically bop from locale to locale. Hey, Dominic Toretto (Diesel) wouldn’t be caught DEAD without his indestructable supercharged vintage Charger.

Brie Larson shows up as an “Agency” connected maniuplator, too Taylor Swift-thin to be convincing in a fight.

Another past rival (Oscar winner Charlize Theron) becomes an ally, but not without an epic girlfight, co-starring “Girlfight” alumna Michelle Rodriguez, still the baddest bad-ass in these films.

Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris carry their characters’ ongoing “family” feud to Rome and London, and Brit-fam member Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) can barely keep the peace. John Cena, playing Dom’s brother, provides more comic relief as the “sensitive” but bulked-up uncle who needs to hide Dom’s kid from Dante’s fury.

Oscar winner Helen Mirren and Jason Statham and Sung Kang are also here. The credits for these movies are eating up half the screen time these days. The collection of cameos or return “appearances” is well beyond “cluttering up the narrative.” “Transporter” director Louis Leterrier and the screenwriters can’t keep it all straight. Why should we?

There’s a high-stakes drag race scene in Rio, rendered ludicrously over-the-top like everything else, but which reminds of us of how this saga began — a simple undercover cop and drag-racing thieves tale that morphed into a “family,” with the only character truly “gone” and not forgotten was played by the late Paul Walker.

Diesel, years past getting that AARP card in the mail, is still in shape but his action beats are mostly limited to changing gears…with authority. He’s the one who uses “family” the most. And Dom is the guy who seems to be “extending” this extended family with every film, every moment Dom turns protector for someone new, generally some old friend’s kid these days.

Impossible digital explosions, scene after scene of digital “fire,” impossible plunges into “Bugs Bunny Physics” time and time again, “Fast X” wraps no storyline up, gives up on NO one (save for Walker) who has ever appeared in this series, and no character receives her or his just deserts.

Again, stunningly stupid, and a lot more digital than one would like.

But every time Man Mountain Momoa gives a pedicure to some dead victim, every time he flips that manly mane, he makes this mess worth all the eye-rolling it takes to sit through it.

“I’m Dante,” he says, by way of introduction. And then he CURTSIES! “Enchante!”

Rating: PG-13 (Intense Sequences of Violence|Action|Language|Some Suggestive Material)

Cast: Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Nathalie Emmanuel, Charlize Theron, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno, Brie Larson, John Cena, Jordana Brewster, Scott Eastwood, Alan Ritchson, Joaquim de Almeida and Jason Momoa.

Directed by Louis Leterrier, scripted by  Justin Lin, Zach Dean and Dan Mazeau Universal release.

Running time: 2:21

Boy, talk about dodging a bullet. I almost reviewed “Royalteen: Princess Margrethe” before watching the prequel about a troubled Norwegian girl who moves to a high school that includes members of the Norwegian royal family.

Sure, “Royalteen,” the first film, is choppy, episodic and soap operatic in that Young Adult fiction way. It feels incomplete because it pretty much is.

But as the sequel is about the bitchy meangirl princess twin of Prince Karl Johan, who goes by “Kalle (Mathias Storhøi), I guess you pretty much need to see Margrethe (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne) at her worst, which lets us judge the dickens out of her as she picks on traumatized Lena (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne) before whatever secret shame/pain Margrethe reveals about herself in the sequel which is all about her.

Or maybe she just gets what she has coming to her. I can’t wait to find out.

Lena is 17 and starting at a new school which the children of the royal family attend. Dad (Petter Width Kristiansen) grumps about “tax dollars” going to pay for extra security and what not for kids his wife, Lena’s mom (Veslemøy Mørkrid) insist her daughter address as “Your Royal Highness.”

Lena seems self-possessed enough not to be bowled over by their celebrity. Kalle, who has class with her, has a social media rep as a party animal and “f—boy.” And friendly school influencer Tess (Ina Dajanna Ervik) is persona non grata to the snooty Margrethe.

Lena should be hearing alarm bells.

But the charming, easygoing Kalle starts flirting and “paranoid” Margrethe starts fuming. What’s Lena getting herself into? Aside from social media celebrity, hedonistic pool parties or rides on the very expensive royal motorboat?

Not a euphemism, BTW.

Lena finds herself sabotaged (we suspect) by Margrethe in one instance, and cruelly set up by her in another.

The behavior of one and all in this teen dramedy seems a tad off. Perhaps they’ve read the script to the sequel and know better than to get too worked-up over an assault, a big revelation, a royal threat that would, in a democratic country’s public school, invite an ass-whipping.

The Around the World with Netflix culture clash here is how relaxed Lena’s parents are about her motoring off for a sleepover weekend with the Future King and how her Dad is concerned but cool when she comes home blitzed and vomiting. He gets an inventory on what she’s imbibed.

“Are you on anything else?” he asks, matter of factly, in Norwegian with subtitles, or dubbed into English.

The players are pretty and rather blase, I have to say — adults and children — save for Margrethe, who is a real rhymes-with-rich-and-witch.

Serious subjects like anxiety, birth control and teen pregnancy are discussed but not actually addressed.

And then, despite all the threats and ill-use and cruelty, everything is painted-over for an abrupt finale that leaves nothing resolved, no lessons learned and more questions than answers about the sequel to come.

As I said, and as you can see from the star rating below, I can hardly wait for that. No. Seriously.

Rating: TV-MA, teen sex, teen drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Ines Høysæter Asserson, Mathias Storhøi, Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Ina Dajanna Ervik, Veslemøy Mørkrid, Frode Winther and Petter Width Kristiansen

Credits: Directed by Per-Olav Sørensen and Emilie Beck, scripted by Ester Schartum-Hansen and Per-Olav Sørensen, based on the novel by Randi Fuglehaug and Anne Gunn Halvorsen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47