Movie Nation

A fine finish and some good performances recommend “Fancy Dance,” a melodramatic mystery with coming-of-age touches set in and around the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation of Oklahoma.

It’s a solid star vehicle for Lily Gladstone, who has spun her “Killers of the Flower Moon” acclaim into status and some plum roles — TV’s “Under the Bridge” among them.

Gladstone plays Jax, a Seneca lesbian who has made theft and drug dealing her way of getting by, which becomes a problem when Indian Child Protective Services comes looking for her niece.

Rooki (Isabel DeRoy Olson) is staying with her auntie and waiting for her mother’s return.

But mother Tawi isn’t just absent. Like scores of Native women every year, she’s disappeared.

She was a stripper. This is oil country, where “man camps” of riggers are every bit as fraught as as depicted in “Wind River.” Roki may still hope Mom shows up in time for the mother-daughter dance competition at the Tulsa Pow-Wow, but Jax has her grim doubts.

The Feds and the local tribal police, in the person of Jax and Tawi’s half-brother, J.J. (Ryan Begay) keep kicking “jurisdiction” of the case back and forth. The locals have mounted repeated searches and Jax hands out photo fliers in all the worst places. She’s not going to let it go.

But when Child Services show up and custody of Roki is switched to the girl’s granddad, Jax and Tawi’s remarried father (Shea Whigham), getting that kid to the pow-wow takes precedence.

Maybe by dipping back into her old life and grabbing the kid for a road trip, Jax can solve two problems at once. Or make things a whole lot worse.

Gladstone and Olson click as aunt and niece, Seneca women who switch to the Seneca langauge whenever they’re trying to get out of a jam with white people or white authority.

But the white folks here seem nothing if not reasonable. Robbing a hapless fisherman of his money and truck, stealing from women in the changing rooms at stores, shoplifting gas and whatever else the convenience store offers is no “example” to set for a child.

Gladstone takes this character deep into unlikeable, but makes her mark via the mask of stoic doggedness Jax wears. She is human, craves the company of her favorite stripper (Crystle Lightning) and knows every pilfering, squatting and cop-dodging trick in the book. But damned if she’s going to ler her sister’s disappearance go unexplained.

Whigham brings that gravitas-with-an-edge presence to the grandfather figure, making us wonder about his motives and maybe how his fatherly failings impacted two daughters who both wound up on the wrong side of the law and the rough side of their culture.

The melodramatic moments start to pile up on that “road trip” — TV coverage of the “kidnapping,” the arrival of “the gun,” etc.

But with good players leading us into a fascinating cultural milieu, “Fancy Dance” comes off. Director and co-writer Erica Tremblay (TV’s “Reservation Dogs”) even manages to deliver tears just as the closing credits roll even if we can guess exactly where that finale takes place and some of what might happen there.

Rating: R, drugs, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Lily Gladstone, Isabael DeRoy Olson, Crystle Lightning, Ryan Begay and Shea Whigham.

Credits: Directed by Erica Tremblay, scripted by Erica Tremblay and Miciana Alise. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:32

A summer picture with old broads getting outta hand?

Gotta love the cast and the pitch. Gotta be better than “Summer Camp.”

A stylish bit of A-24 terror with Brandy Norwood squaring off against Kathryn Hunter, who played one of the witches in the Denzel/McDormand/Coen “Macbeth.”

Sept. 6.

“The Bikeriders” is hands-down the most pointless biker movie ever made.

With a narrative limping along on one training wheel, it mopes in an inane circle through the middle era of modern biker gangs, between the post-war “Wild One” birth of such “clubs” and ending just as the Hell’s Angels, The Outlaws, Bandidos and Mongols moved from traffic scofflaws and motorcycle theft into the drugs, extortion, prostitution and murder-for-hire of true organized crime outfits.

The best book about such gangs and this period was by Hunter S. Thompson, “Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.” “Bikeriders” is based on Danny Lyon’s 1968 photos and interviews book of the same “Bikeroders” title.

Based solely on the movie, Lyons’ must be the inferior piece of journalism and character study. Based on writer-director Jeff Nichols’ casting of the interviewer “Danny” in the movie, played without wit, color or the suggestion of intellectual curiosity by Mike Faist, Nichols wasn’t all that impressed with it or him either.

As the viewer waits for a point to creep in, something beyond romanticizing or demythologizing the original “One Percenters” as louts, dolts and drop-outs, one wished somebody had paid more attention to “Sons of Anarchy” back when it was on the TeeVee. This isn’t just bad. It’s fatally uninteresting.

Austin Butler is Benny, a reckless, heedless Illinois punk who says “You’d have to KILL me to get this jacket,” his beloved Vandals’ “colors,” in a biker-unfriendly bar in Greater Chicagoland.

Benny is tough, able to take a beating, and a masochist, more than willing to take it.

He’s also so stupid he can’t figure the odds, evaluate his own fighting skills, and work out a better battle to pick.

We see how Benny met “riders club” founder Johnny (Tom Hardy) and how the two came to depend on one another. Kind of. As the story is told by Benny’s on-again/off-again biker moll Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, every bit of the history is sketched in by a long-winded woman with no gift for getting to the point, or having one.

Nichols makes this Comer and Kathy’s movie, as her endless anecdotes and dull history lessons begin with the fateful night a girlfriend lured her into a biker bar “meeting,” where leering, “You got a man?” come-ons start out aggressive and take on real menace.

Benny was her savior that night. And he sat on his parked Harley all night in front of her house and all the next day until her working Joe boyfriend stormed out on her.

Johnny? His “Don’t worry…about nothing,” implies that he and Benny can protect her from the other Vandals, and that the Vandals can protect her from outside threats.

Here’s the neat thing about this script. The “outside threats” are few and far between, generic biker tussles in the “fists or knives” mid-60s. The gang rides to intimidate unfriendlies of every stripe, little motorized Nuremberg rally visuals for the awed locals.

Is there a political parallel for today, that the thugs the culture fears are nothing but empty Levi’s jackets on bikes? Nah.

I’ve been a big fan of Nichols since his “Shotgun Stories” debut, through “Mud” and “Loving.” But “Bikeriders” is an artless parade of closeups, waiting for the actors to get to the nub of a line, the movie to impress on us the necessity of a scene and the narrative to come to some sort of point.

Comer’s monologues are banalities sprinkled with cliches, none of them amounting to a nugget of profundity or a big theme about alienation, nihilism and “guys who don’t belong nowhere else,” they just “belong together.”

Any messaging about “The Golden Age” of motorcycle gangs, before they turned even more criminal, is laughable.

Comer is believable in the part, but like even the “types” in the gang — save for Michael Shannon, playing the doltish, foreign-born “Zipco” — Kathy is painted in colorless strokes. We don’t see an interior life, the dullness she might be escaping, the dead-end her limited future offers, the danger she stupidly ignores until the obvious happens.

Butler? He’s about as convincing a dangerous biker as Elvis was.

As my attention drifted into how one might have gotten a more compelling, entertaining or enlightening movie about this culture (adapt a BETTER WRITTEN BOOK) and era, bits of miscasting, scenes that defy cinematic convention and merely frustrate when they could titillate, terrify or what-have-you, I burned-out that rear tire down to the threads of one ugly conclusion.

This is a two hour waste of a lot of fine vintage motorcycles.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Boyd Holbrook, Norman Reedus, Mike Faist and Michael Shannon.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeff Nichols, based on a book by Danny Lyons. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:56

“Ghostlight” is an intimate, moving indie drama about the transformative power of art and the mental health benefits of the theatre.

An “actors’ picture” in the purest sense of the phrase, its players take us on an emotional journey that covers limited ground, but manages to be an enriching, deeply rewarding experience nevertheless.

Keith Kupferer stars as Dan, a gruff highway construction worker sleep-walking through his days jack-hammering streets and sidewalks in his corner of Illinois.

Dan, we quickly learn, is getting it from all sides. He’s got an out-of-control teen (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) at home, a passive, sometimes-impulsive wife (Tara Mallen). And every pedestrian wanting a little peace and quiet and every rude, rushed driver feels the need to yell at the 50something laborer in the orange vest.

Something’s going on, driving all that domestic dysfunction. Daughter Daisy might get kicked out of school. There are “depositions” to prep with a lawyer, and counselors to drag Daisy to.

It’s enough to make Dan snap. But just as he does, this pushy little woman (Dolly De Leon) who has been complaining about the noise drags him into a storefront.

“I need your help with something.”

That “something” is a theater company she’s in. They need warm bodies, and Dan? He has the look of a Capulet. Wait, what is this?

“Your salvation,” Rita assures him. She looked Dan up and down, saw him mel tdown, and figured “you might like being somebody else, for a while.”

“Ghostlight” scampers past that unlikely turn of events and hurls this Blue Collar Joe into breathing exercises, limbering-up techniques and the “Provocative Questions” game, something actors play to measure, improve and acknowledge “emotional intelligence,” put themselves in another’s shoes and be “available” “in the moment.”

Dan, bottled-up and burdened by a sea of troubles, starts to connect to himself, his family and their problems by rehearsing “Romeo and Juliet.”

“Isn’t the language gorgeous,” a castmate enthuses? “I just wish I knew what it meant,” Dan admits.

Actress-turned-writer/director Kelly O’Sullivan and co-director Alex Thompson (“Saint Frances”) manage to make a generally unsurprising melodrama into a life-affirming delight.

So much of this is “on the nose” and predictably-sweet that “Ghostlight” flirts with becoming maudlin.

The novelty of casting a real-life couple, veteran stage actors, and their daughter, in the lead roles is cute enough to almost overwhelm the slight story and its “We all saw THAT coming” twists.

It turns out that the fiery Daisy knows Shakespeare, has the play memorized and was — until recently — a regular thespian in her high school. She too might be “transformed” by this amateur production.

But the players make the sale, and make this picture sing. The performances are mostly-understated, with barely glimpsed simmering fury in scenes where it isn’t evident. The youngest Kupferer takes things believably over-the-top as a mouthy, volatile teen in crisis.

The play within the picture is also “on the nose,” as far as subject matter. But as anybody who appreciates the Great Works of the Theatre knows, even the most shambolic “Romeo and Juliet” can come off, if the performances allow it.

De Leon’s Rita is every pie-eyed dreamer who fell in love with the stage, never came close to making it and yet never can let it go.

There are plenty of theatre nerd chuckles in the stumbling rehearsals, the unconventional casting and the “drama” behind the drama — demands for “an intimacy coordinator” on set — small-timers with big egos, older actors finding the soul of teen love and impulsiveness, or the perfect song to contemporize a 430 year-old play.

The miracle of “Ghostlight” is that cast and crew here take the punch-lines associated with actors and acting, the dreamy delusions its often overly-sensitive practitioners are famous for, and turn them into the greatest gifts acting gives to actors.

Emotional availability and “healing” might be just down the street with a bunch of cockeyed dreamers who just want to “put on a show,” with or without an intimacy coordinator.

Rating: R, fisticuffs, profanity, adult subject matter

Cast: Keith Kupferer, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Dolly De Leon and Tara Mallen.

Credits: Directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, scripted by Kelly O’Sullivan. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:54

The Austrian thriller “The Devil’s Bath” is a patient, pitiless descent into madness, belief and the helplessness of a time and place where life was, as the philosopher put it, “nasty, brutish and short.”

Based on research of historical case studies of 18th century Austria, it’s about troubled women and the scanty support and comfort they’d receive from their families and their faith in a hardscrabble subsistence society from much more recent history than you’d think.

Filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala take us to a place and time where lumbering, communal fishing and farming were practiced, where life was unspeakably hard and when society and sanity’s margin for error were at their thinnest.

A new bride is tested by what she can’t understand, what the Church can explain or comfort her out of and what faith will not forgive.

That’s the world Agnes (Anja Plashg) has married into. Burly, grinning Wolf (David Scheid) from a nearby village has taken her in, spent his savings and her dowry on a farm, and invited her into this life.

Their wedding day might be their last happy day. Agnes is struck by the beauty of nature, so much so that she’s given to wandering reveries, collecting insects and shells and such. It’s not a lifestyle that can indulge such idleness.

Her stern mother in law (Maria Hofstätter) seems supportive, but Agnes is slow to pitch in on the fishing, the livestock tending, the cooking and house-keeping, and slower to catch on.

“The Lord won’t like it if you don’t cook for your husband!”

Her wedding night is a disappointment and her fervent desire for babies seems thwarted. Does Wolf play for the other team?

She sees the decapitated, ritualistically dismembered corpse of a woman who tossed her baby over a waterfall, witnesses the tragedy of a suicide and hears the words of the Catholic priest, who lectures one and all on what “crimes” can be forgiven and absolved, and those that cannot.

With her family insisting she stick with the marriage and live in the village where she has no friends, what options does Agnes have in this harsh, myopic reality?

Writer-directors Franks and Fiala immerse us in these brutish lives, underscoring just how limited the reach of The Age of Reason really was. Their film evokes “Midsommar” and “The Witch” in its blunt depiction of superstition as tradition and “primitive” ways and thinking.

Earthly suffering was a given, with heaven as the main promise of relief. Agnes and everyone else must struggle to eat, stay warm, avoid accidental death or grievous injury and procreate.

Survival is nasty business, and animal slaughter and cruelty are hard-wired into this illiterate, isolated culture.

All Agnes can do is lean on her faith, fretting over where “the altar” will go in their new house, and the more primitive shrine she can piece together in the root cellar. Her immediate experience and that of those surrounding her is all she has to guide her life.

It’s not enough.

Plaschg registers confusion and pathos in her performance. She lets us see the “problems” and “quirks” in Agnes’ personality, and fear for how they might be her undoing. Hofstätter’s mother-in-law seems harsh but rational and not all that unreasonable, given their circumstances.

Fiala and Franz give us a couple of scenes of heartbreaking grimness and unblinking cruelty, and a dozen other reminders of how unforgiving this world was to those struggling through it. The rituals, from weddings to executions, have an awful callousness that rattles modern sensibilities.

The film’s pacing is a tad too deliberate for its own good, spacing its shocks out, giving away its message and the direction it is going in long before it takes us there. But “The Devil’s Bath” (” Des Teufels Bad,” in German with English subtitles) is a reminder that then and now, the horrors of the supernatural can’t hold a candle to the terrors of reality at its ugliest.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity, sex

Cast: Anja Plaschg, David Scheid and Maria Hofstätter

Credits: Scripted and directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:01

Peyton List and Brianna Middleton are among the embattled offspring.

“Coming soon?”

“OutStanding: A Comedy Revolution” is one of the most informative and certainly the most entertaining historical documentaries about LGBTQ history on offer this Pride Month.

Built around Netflix’s earlier 2022 “Stand Out:An LGBTQ+ Celebration,” featuring legions of “out” gay entertainers performing, writer-director Page Hurwitz adds scores of intereviews with journalists, a historian and generations of gay comedians to tell the story of gay comedy.

Who inspired Lily Tomlin, Wanda Sykes, Bruce Vilanch and Billy Eichner, and who stuck up for whom as gay comedy took to the barricades of the ’60s, ’70s, 80s and beyond Culture Wars?

The film remembers assorted “sea change in America” moments such as Madonna joining Sandra Bernhard to flirt and joke around on the set of David Letterman’s first late night show, Ellen DeGeneres coming out on her sitcom — but first to her friend and fellow “Lebanese” Rosie O’Donnell.

When Wanda Sykes recalls seeing Jackie “Moms” Mabley on TV as a child, and thinking “I could do that,” a historian is here to remind us that Moms came out “in her 20s, in the 1920s.”

Lily Tomlin is widely-accepted as a gay comic trailblazer, breaking out on “Laugh-in,” but turning that fame into one-woman shows, a stage act and character “bits” that took even on gay bashers like Anita Bryant. But Robin Tyler beat Tomlin to the punch, the first openly-lesbian comic to appear on TV, get her own show and coiner of the early gay rights rallying cry, “We are Everywhere.”

“I don’t mind them being ‘born again,'” Tyler famously joked of the wave of homophobes summoned to activism by Bryant and Rev. Jerry Falwell. “But why do they have to come back as themselves?”

Tomlin inspired Bernhard. And Margaret Cho roared into prominence on their heels.

Scott Thompson’s place in “The Kids in the Hall,” where drag was performed to hilarious effect, let confused and/or closeted teens feel “seen.” A generation of comics followed.

And as comedians and gay culture faced the twin threats of AIDS and official Reagan era indifference, comedians found themselves taking on activism as part of their portfolio, facing “the fierce urgency of the now.”

“OutStanding” brushes on recent history, too, tracking the “acceptable” 1960s homophobia of Mel Brooks through Eddie Murphy, Andrew Dice Clay, Sam Kinison and on to Dave Chapelle, Bill Maher and others.

“Every word is a bullet,“ Marsha Warfield reminds us, and them.

“There’s no such thing as ‘just kidding,’ elder stateswoman Robin Tyler declares. When somebody tells transphobic jokes, assume “they mean it.”

“Outstanding” isn’t on a par with the great queer film history docs about “The Celluloid Closet.” But it’s a bracing, quick and funny survey of queer comedy history, from Moms to Wanda, Scott to Billy Eichner, from Eddie Izzard before the on-stage dresses and heels to “Dress to Kill” Eddie to Suzy Eddie Izzard in all her present day, marathon-running, makeup loving glory.

This time, this “revolution” was “televised.” All we need to do is remember it and laugh.

Rating:TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Lily Tomlin, Wanda Sykes, Scott Thompson, Marsha Warfield, Rosie O’Donnell, Robin Tyler, Bruce Vilanch, Tig Notaro and Eddie Izzard.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Page Hurwitz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

The setting is striking and ancient, with the unmistakable Bridges of Edinburgh used as a backdrop time and time again.

There’s no real reason for the Italian pan-national thriller “It’s Not Over” to set 20 or so scenes in front of, say, the Forth Bridge, and use it and other bridges dozens of other times as establishing shots. But then there are a lot of things seriously unexplained in this cinematic claptrap.

Perhaps the reason Edinburgh is never uttered is that the city sued to get their name out of this debacle. It’s certainly the worst movie ever filmed in Scotland.

It’s got an Italian star (Gianna Capaldi) doing his damnedest to manage a Scots accent. It’s got Frenchman Christopher Lambert playing his father and leaving any attempts to speak Scots to Craig Ferguson.

The femme fatale our young hero, Max, falls for is named Sarah, just buried her husband and mentions her childhood in “Colorado” — in the Polish-Italian accent of Weronika Rosati.

She’s been cheating on that abusive husband and assure her lover Max that she’ll break the news to him. But instead, Max shows up as the cops are tidying up after an “accident” that killed the creep and left Sarah a beautiful, rich widow.

Sarah loves to take Polaroids of freshly-killed animals as “art,” and speaks in foreshadowing “riddles” that are not riddles at all.

“You’re good with a knife.”

“I’ve had a lot of practice,” you know, as “a kid” growing up in “Colorado.”

Rosati is truly terrible on the screen, a Lake Bell look-like with no presence at all. Saddling her with an even less charismatic co-star seems fitting, as Capaldi’s lifeless performance matches the corpse Max is destined to become.

“It’s not over,” he gasps, unconvincingly, as he bleeds out. And so it isn’t. Curious/furious Dad, and visions of Max haunt our murderess as she goes about her Polaroid-snapping business in a city that refuses to left her call it by name.

The cop (Ian Reddington) who investigates Max’s disappearance? The one who keeps dismissing parental concern with “just a coincidence” and “people take off all the time” — repeatedly? He’s so indifferent you half expect an American accent out of him.

Writer-director Alessandro Riccardi makes his writing directing debut with this debacle. I swear I saw a “based on a novel by” credit, but didn’t jot it down and can’t find it mentioned anywhere.

Just as well. One and all will have her or his career scarred by this disaster. No sense adding to the body count.

Rating: R, violence, sex

Cast: Gianni Capaldi, Weronika Rosati and Christopher Lambert

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alessandro Riccardi, based on a novel by someone who’d rather their name was left out of this. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

Based on the Laura Lippman novel, this ’60s period piece (Dame Shirley singing the best song from “Man of La Mancha” in the trailer) is about a Baltimore housewife digging into an unsolved murder.

Y’lan Noel, David Corenswet and Mikey Madison also star.

This limited series comes to Apple TV+ July 19.