Movie Nation

Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” comes to the screen as a laugh-out-loud comedy that will be nostalgic to those who grew up with the books, and a rare girl-powered tween tale with edge for everybody else.

The laughs can be cringe-worthy, but when the focus of a book is “the magic of being a girl,” the messy side of entering puberty and questioning religion, that’s kind of a given. I mean, when you get the writer/director of “Edge of Seventeen” to adapt it, what’d you expect?

And besides, it’ll be mostly the boys and the book-banners who’ll be doing the cringeing.

Abby Ryder Fortson of “Ant-Man and the Wasp” makes the title character appropriately wide-eyed and naive, an indulged eleven year-old only-child who moves to a new school in the Jersey suburbs at the age girls are forming into “packs” and boys are popping up on their radar.

The family hasn’t even unpacked when pushy biggest-house-in-the-neighborhood Nancy (Elle Graham, terrific) shows up and selects Margaret for inclusion in her “secret girls club.”

Margaret, Nancy, Janie (Amari Alexis Price) and Gretchen (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) may be gossipy and childishly callous. And we could see Nancy morphing into a genuine Mean Girl. But it’s pre-social media 1970. They’re just an innocent quartet determined to be get on with growing up.

Their peer-pressuring club “rules” include keeping a “boy book” of their crushes, and an oath to share when each gets her first period “and tell us all about it.” “No socks” are one of Nancy’s fashio “rules.” And having a bra is a sixth grade “must,” whether you need it or not. Nancy has just the exercise for that.

“I must I must I must increase my bust my bust my bust!”

Mom (Rachel McAdams, excellent as always ), who gave up her career for this move, has to take Margaret through that amusing rite of passage, buying that “trainer” bra, an experience that wouldn’t be complete without a tactless sales lady. But Mom is there for the initiation and for support.

“How’s that feel?”

“I cannot WAIT to take it off!”

“Welcome to womanhood.”

Margaret grew up in a religiously “mixed” marriage. Ohio Protestant Mom is an artist and art teacher, estranged from her family because she married a Jewish New Yorker (Benny Safdie). So, “no religion” is the rule in their house. It’s a matter for Margaret to make up her own mind about “when you’re older.”

Her overbearing, widowed, well-off Jewish granny (amusingly larger-than-life Kathy Bates) is the only grandparent in her life, and she isn’t exactly neutral on that subject.

Margaret has taken to conversational prayers to an unseen deity who might save her from having to move (no dice), embarassment (ditto), and help her fit in.

“Are you there, God?”

That subject moves to the foreground when Margaret’s first-year teacher (Echo Kellum) decides that would be her perfect sixth grade “project,” a subject she’ll study all year and make a report on at year’s end. Granny can take her to synagogue in “the city,” her parents can make a Christmas Eve visit to a local church, club pal Janie can take her to a predictably energetic and musical Black church and the Catholic church she’ll stumble into.

Everything addressed here, from religion and puberty to girl-bullying, that first “real” boy-girl party and that first crush operates on a higher, funnier plane than your average “Wimpy Kid” and its ilk.

“Margaret” can seem a tad adult for younger kids. And as nostalgia, wallowing in ’70s fashions and often ugly “mid-century modern” decor, all aimed at luring the first generations of fans of the Blume books, the film falls short. Fortson makes a solid lead. But Oscar winner Bates and McAdams are the only “big names” and players with real pop in the cast, with Safdie — co-writer/director of “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” — having so little screen presence that one question that pops to mind every time we see him paired with McAdams.

How’d he end up with her?

But people have been talking about adapting “Are You There God?” for the big screen for decades, and the arrival of this picture, shortcomings and all, could not be timelier. With red state libraries under assault and reactionary book-bannings by the least literate “parents” and school boards and every day’s headlines featuring some new ultra-conservative assault on women’s rights and girls’ rights to their girlhood, “Margaret” has a timeliness that Blume could barely have imagined when her break-out book was published back in 1970.

Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s film is funny, cutting and true to its source material, an amusingly unblinkered look at girlhood that may be a bit budgetarily-malnourished but could not show up on screens at a better time. The shock of “Why have there not been more realistic girl-centered stories like this before now?” just underscores that.

Rating: PG-13, for thematic material involving sexual education and some suggestive material

Cast: Abby Ryder Fortson, Rachel McAdams, Benny Safdie, Amari Alexis Price, Elle Graham, Katherine Mallen Kupferer and Kathy Bates

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, based on the novel by Judy Blume. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:45

The state of the art in the “artificial intelligence” debate is packed into a 90 minute indie drama just now making its way from the film festival circuit and into the reach of the general public.

“The Artifice Girl” is a polished, startlingly-smart riff on AI delivered in three crisp acts, the first of which might be deemed The Present Day.

Writer-director Franklin Ritch’s modest, smart and compelling film considers the moral quandaries of the present, the near future and the future beyond that not with apocalyptic prophecies or a fundamentally-rewired world. His movie jumps from “It’s here and we didn’t know it” to “It’s here, are we managing it well?” to “It’s here and where do we go from The Singularity?”

And to think it all begins with a “bad ass online vigilante.”

A zealous FBI agent and single mom Deena (Sinda Nichols) who runs a “We catch pedophiles” task force lures a tech nerd with CGI skills into an interrogation. Gareth, played by writer-director Ritch, is a deer-in-headlights for this impromptu interrogation. Deena and her colleague (David Girard) wonder if secretive Gareth is some sort of online predator, or if he’s that “vigilante.”

And if he’s the guy passing on leads about all these soliciting online pedophiles to authorities, who exactly is his “bait?” They want to meet Cherry, the blonde, blue-eyed 11 year-old that Gareth is using to lure suspects, to check on her well being.

But the computer whiz and movie digital special effects guy made her up, invented her and turned her (sort of) loose. Cherry (Tatum Matthews) is a machine-learning-assisted online prowler for pedophiles, an AI tween showing up in jerky, low-grade-video chat rooms and cheerfully, innocently luring the perverted into her trap.

The first act of “The Artifice Girl” is about processing this shocking news, getting a sample of Cherry’s interaction abilities and enlisting Gareth in this ICWL (International Child Welfare League) front for ongoing investigations, ostensibly a group that does advocacy and helps victims but actually a clearinghouse for predator hunting.

Our biggest clue about what is to follow is learning Gareth’s reasoning, after a testy, threatening, “invasion of privacy” interrogation with Deena a near-hysterical “bad cop” and her partner Amos playing the might-be-on-your-side “good cop.”

Gareth officially joins up because Cherry “thought it would be good idea.”

The two acts that follow show us where Cherry and her human colleagues go from this almost accidental unleashing of AI onto the multiverse.

I love the way the film opens with Deena questioning her Apple virtual assistant Siri on moral choices and existential matters, more out of despair than anthing else, and seamlessly transitions into the Next Logical Step — an online AI presence that can think and learn.

Ritch knows his stuff, not just having Gareth rattle off details of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, but citing the ancient antecedents that identify sentience.

The film tends to drag a bit, and that “bit” turns into a melodramatic “lot” as we hear many speeches and declarative monologues and see artificial conflicts generated to force unfeeling Cherry’s hand.

But I was bowled over by how up-to-the-minute topical this take on this genuine moral and human-survival-oriented debate is. It’s not just the AI issues, but the culture’s obsession with childhood victimization and inability to make kids safe despite decades of warnings and vast efforts to ferret out the perverse predators among us is also so current it’s probably being discussed on a TV news program somewhere as I type this review.

Ritch has been making shorts and unheralded features for a couple of years. But “The Artifice Girl” shows just how good sci-fi and drama can be with a modest budget and only a single “name” — horror/sci-fi icon Lance Henricksen, who enriches the third act — in the cast to help secure financing and the attention of film festivals.

Ritch has made a no-budget indie they should screen and use as instruction and inspiration in film schools.

If the script is smart enough and the players good enough to be believed, your indie picture’s got every chance to make a mark, with or without maxing out a lot of family members’ credit cards.

Rating: unrated, violence adult subject matter

Cast: Tatum Matthews, David Girard, Sinda Nichols, Franklin Ritch and Lance Henricksen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Franklin Ritch. An XYZ Films release.

Running time: 1:33

I’m not a huge horror buff, fan or aficionado. But when I sit down to watch one I do like for it to be smart.

“Clock” is a childbirth/”biological clock” thriller that has modern medicine playing God, The Holocaust and Human Evolution itself as its subtexts.

Smart? Writer-director Alexis Jacknow’s debut feature borders on brilliant.

Dianna Agron plays Ella, our protagonist, a 37 year-old doctor’s wife whose interior design business is just blowing up, so she’s just a tad touchy if not downright testy when her pregnant-or-already-a-mother girlfriends gang up on her at a friend’s baby shower.

Wanna feel the baby kick? Erm, no.

“It’s a BABY, Ella, not an ALIEN.”

Their “Don’t worry, your biological clock will kick in” assurances fall on deaf ears. She’s not sure she has one. Especially with her aged, widowed father (Saul Rubinek at his nudnik best) badgering her about the family that almost didn’t make it through the Holocaust, a genetic line that “ends with you” if she doesn’t ante up.

Her new OB-GYN is quick to turn her “I don’t think I’m ready yet” upside down with the news that womb-wise, she’s now officially “geriatric.” But there’s this “clinical study.”

Ella gives it some thought, notes the friction it’s causing in her otherwise happy/sexually-fulfilling marriage (Jay Ali plays her husband) and rashly cancels her biggest-ever contract, tells her husband she’s got business out of town and submits to the pills and “cognitive therapy” of Dr. Simmons, played by Melora Hardin of TV’s “The Office” and “Transparent.”

Let’s get that “clock fixed,” the good doctor says. Side effects? Of course. This is a horror movie, after all.

Ella gives Agron a character with edge and just a whiff of vulnerability, and she is fierce and frightening in the part. Ella pushes back against pushy parent and pushy friends, snaps at the good doctor and Agron lets us see hallucinations she pretty much shrugs off because this broad is tough. It’s a terrific performance.

A funny moment — Ella sees a tree-climbing child whose distracted mother hasn’t noticed and then distracts her with more kvetching about “You WANT a baby!” Mom’s one-track-mind lobbying means no one intervenes and the kid takes a terrible fall.

Stephen Lukach’s unsettling score, the gloomy-doomy production design of Kristin Gibler and Jacknow’s lean script and focused direction build the mood, so that when this “Let’s get you pregnant” picture turns dark, we’re braced for it.

The veteran character actor Rubinek brings an alarmingly cruel edge to this needy aspiring grandad, leaning into “type” and crossing several lines as he guilts his daughter with “Your mother and I loved each other THAT much” (a dig at the husband, sitting right next to Ella) and launching into a lecture that includes “the camps (Bergen-Belsen)” and decrying the “empty chairs at the table” because Ella hasn’t been fruitful and multiplied.

“Evolution” and “procreation” seems to be on everybody’s lips. It’s no wonder our Ella is ready to go off the deep end.

Nightmarishly gory visions of childbirth rattle her. Drugs and an isolation tank and Rorsach tests that animate suggest that she’s got good reason for doubts.

Frights? There are a couple. But this is mostly a thriller about Ella, a surrogate for generations of women, battling against peer pressure, family pressure and the politics of stealing a woman’s bodily autonomy, fighting to live her best life, one that she chooses, one that won’t include a baby.

Rating: unrated, violence, gore, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Dianna Agron, Melora Hardin, Jay Ali and Saul Rubinek.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alexis Jacknow. A 20th Century Studios/Hulu release.

Running time: 1:31

Harry Belafonte, who brought music from “The Islands” to the masses and helped integrate American pop music, film and television, an activist who never lost that passion for justice and equality, has died at the age of 96.

He outlived his friend and fellow Caribbean islander who made it in Hollywood Sidney Poiter. But each man’s passing has brought back the flood of memories that connected them through each’s long and storied careers.

Belafonte got his start in The American Negro Theatre, which is where he met and befriended Poitier. They became two of the most important figures in American popular culture, each man breaking segregation barriers in his primary field, often swapping places by being this or that “first” in film.

You read the biography of one, and the other figures most prominently in it. Harry would turn down roles (“Porgy and Bess”), Sidney would take the job instead. Sidney wins his first Oscar for “Lilies of the Field,” Harry rides him for not doing his own singing.

They’d pal around, make movies together, and fall out — Belafonte always the more outspoken and fiery, Poitier always the more courtly and genteel.

I got to interview them separately, and each joked about the absent other in ways that had this cute edge to it. I recall Poitier getting a guarded look on his face when I started to talk about what Harry had said jokingly about him when Belafonte was honored at the National Black Theatre Festival, which I used to cover for the newspaper in the city where it was founded.

And I remember Belafonte leaning forward with a teeth-baring smile when I threw something that Poitier had said jokingly about him in an earlier interview.

Both men lost their wariness and roared at each other’s loving barbs when the punchlines arrived, plainly delighted that they’d come up together and yet taken different paths towards the same personal and universal goals.

Loved Harry in “Uptown Saturday Night” and “Buck and the Preacher” with Sidney, and he classed up “BlackKklansman” in ways Spike Lee was certain he would. “Odds Against Tomorrow,” “The Angel Levine,” Altman’s “The Player” and “Kansas City,” “Bobby,” he was damned good on the screen.

Poitier had the grander film career. But only Harry could teach the world to love Caribbean music and the island lifestyle. Lifelong fan Jimmy Buffett used to cover this one, in tribute and to give thanks.

96 years. Well done.

Inutterably gorgeous and inexpressively sad, “The Eight Mountains” is an Italian journey of male self-discovery, a “Razor’s Edge” without a war, “Eat Pray Love” with a little less indulgence.

Based on a novel by Paolo Cognetti, it wrestles with a man’s fate and the ennui that comes with recognizing your destiny. These existential themes are seen through the eyes of a man who remembers his lifelong friendship from the days when Pietro was a city boy, curious about the world, bristling at life’s boundaries and the role he is ordained to take, and his new “montanero” friend, Bruno, whose life path seemed set from birth.

Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) grew up in Turin. He was 12 when he spent that first summer in the Grenan Mountains, in a once-thriving cheese-making village that in the ’80s had shrunk to just 14 inhabitants and only one child, Bruno (Cristiano Sassella), who also happened to be his age.

They became fast friends, wandering the Alpine meadows, swimming in an Alpine lake with Pietro, given the dialect nickname “Berio” (both mean “rock”), helping with Bruno’s chores with the dairy cattle and goats.

Bruno is smart, with a natural engineering inclination. But he is trapped there, or so Pietro’s parents think. He’s also more athletic, something Pietro resents as his engineer father (Filippo Timi) likes to take vigorous hikes up mountains and glaciers when he visits and Bruno is better at it.

Dad seems to prefer the more robust Bruno, which causes Pietro to toss a tantrum when his parents try to arrange for the country boy to come live with them and get a proper schooling in the city. His mother speaks of giving Bruno “choices” in life, which Pietro resists. He wants his summer-in-the-mountains friend.

But Bruno’s absent, construction-worker dad vetoes this, and instead takes Bruno with him to work on a distant project. Pietro’s parents sealed Bruno’s fate by interfering, and Pietro lost his playmate.

“His adult life started at 13,” the adult Pietro (Luca Marinelli) laments in voice-over.

They’re separated, with Bruno the brick-layer working away and indulged only-child Pietro (Andrea Palma plays him as an adolescent) drifting through school, unfocused about what to do with his life, leading to a serious teenaged estrangement from his highly-strung careerist Dad.

“I never want to become like you,” Pietro lashes out, in Italian with English subtitles.

Only after Pietro’s father dies does he renew his relationship with Bruno as his friend is determined to rebuild a long-ruined cabin in the alpeggio — the high pasture — that Pietro’s dad bought and made Bruno promise to fix up.

As they reunite to accomplish this, Pietro realizes Bruno was in closer touch with his father than he was, and may have even understood him better. As more years pass and Pietro wanders the Himalayas in between returns to the alpeggio adn the life Bruno makes there, he and we see, compare and measure two divergent life paths and the barriers to happiness and fulfillment in each.

There’s a little of Winston Groom’s “Forrest Gump” theme underlying “The Eight Mountains.” The title, an Eastern metaphor, suggests two paths to fulfillment — one wandering, climbing assorted peaks, the other, staying close to where you grew up and mastering that environment, that one mountain.

Husband and wife filmmakers Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, teaming up for the first time (he directed “Beautiful Boy,” she used to be an actress), tap into the story’s existential angst, that finding-one’s-way/finding-one’s-place that every generation faces in accordance with the world they grows up in.

The performances are subdued and sublime, highlighting each character’s efforts to reject or embrace his fate, or both. Masculine silence, the things men don’t say out loud to each other, underlies every conversation.

The filmmakers perfectly set the tone for the film by scoring it to the music of Swedish singer-songwriter (in English) Daniel Norgren, whose DIY instruments and simply-produced laments unerringly put us in the characters’ frame of mind.

I don’t think “The Eight Mountains” is exclusionary or gender-specific enough to be inscrutable to women, any more than “Eat Pray Love” was for men. But you may have to be a grown man to wholly appreciate what this exquisite, heartbreaking movie is getting at, the melanchly nostalgia that hangs over it.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Luca Marinelli, Alessandro Borghi, Lupo Barbiero, Cristiano Sassella, Elisabetta Mazzullo, Andrea Palma and Filippo Timi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, based on the novel by Paolo Cognetti. A Janus Films release.

Running time: 2:27

Ben Milliken the actor more or less holds his own as a seemingly unkillable bouncer, drug mule and factotum for another Mexican Reina del Sur in “Snag,” an indie thriller in the “El Mariachi” mold.

As a director and co-writer and probably overseer of the editing of this picture, he can’t get out of his own way.

It’s the story of a bloke the locals can’t stop calling “gringo,” even though he’s not a Norteamericano. Those who do grasp that he’s merely an Australian just label him “blanco,” which is somehow almost worse.

He came to Mexico on “business” some while back, fell in with the beautiful Valentina (Sofía Castro), who saved his arse in a Cantina brawl. But that just gets him further in Dutch with her mob queen mom (Jeanette Aguilar Harris).

Bullets fly and blood flows and it comes to pass that the mother is hiding the daughter from the not-actually-a-gringo. And by Jesús, this tyranny/blanco-blocking will not stand! 

Simple, lean little quest story, with pistolas and ametralladoras and brawls that get ugly and then turn out to be personal and good-natured.

“Good to see you too, man.”

Cute. But here’s where Milliken gets too cute and outsmarts himself. He’s broken the thin narrative into two timelines, “Then” and “Now.” “Then” tells us how he got here, first meetings with this character or that one. “Now” is his quest to get to the woman he loves.

As the movie progresses, it jumps back and forth in time so often it happens in mid-shootout, mid-meeting, watering down suspense, removing any sense of mystery and slowing things down no matter how fast the edits.

It’s a stupid, showy blunder. And it does this marginal script and uneven-in-skill-and-charisma cast no favors.

You’ve got torture scenes, shifting alliances and an old friend (Jaime Camil) maybe hired to deal with our hero telling us that “Honor is something you show up for.” You’ve got great locations, like a cantina in the literal middle of nowhere (New Mexico locations) that becomes the setting of the first furious brawl.

A running gag is the Man from Oz’s “I don’t understand Spanish.” But with a beautiful woman as his incentive, he’ll work on it.

“Im halfway through Rosetta Stone.”

“Who’s SHE?”

The title is a piece of fishing parlance, meaning that your baited hook didn’t go in the fish’s mouth, but “snagged” it in the back, a fin or something. “Cheating” is how some sportsfishermen (not in Alaska when I lived there) see it.

It doesn’t neatly line up with the theme and the story here. But with all the hired killers — “The Twins,” “The Reaper” — and other characters, not all of whom have an actual dramatic purpose, and all the cutting back and forth between “Then” and “Now,” it’s not like the title is the problem most desperately in need of correction, as far as “Snag” goes.

Not terrible, could have easily been better had our director, co-writer and star not tripped over all his many jobs along the way.

Rating: unrated, violence and lots of it

Cast: Ben Milliken, Sofía Castro, Jeanette Aguilar Harris, Jonny Beauchamp, Jaime Camil and
C.J. Perry Barnyashev

Credits: Directed by Ben Milliken, scripted by Brent Tarnol and Ben Milliken. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:27

As comic thrillers go, “Andy Somebody” isn’t much.

It’s about a put-upon accountant who steals from a loathesome, abusive and thoroughly crooked California plastic surgeon and said surgeon’s efforts to recover his ill-gotten gains.

There are no thrills in this pursuit or the assorted “showdowns” that fold into it. There’s nothing funny about it, either. Proof? Two cops are staking out the shady surgeon (Jonathan Buckley) and notice Andy (Jeremy Evans, who co-wrote this) have a little private tantrum to himself on a fire escape.

“He seems mad…like IKEA’s having an online sale but the shop floor’s not matching what the online ad says.”

A hired-goon (Jacob Bruce) catches up with Andy, his writer-pal Joy (Leslie Wong) and a couple of other folks in a seedy motel. The goon needs to search the room for the missing loot, so he sends his hostages elsewhere.

“All right, into the bathroom. EVERYbody. Fred, Daphne, Shaggy…Velma.”

Hilarious, right?

The production values are student film “indie,” a couple of decent compositions, a lot of other “ugly” shots, with continuity errors (Andy’s beard comes and goes, and not just in scenes after he’s supposed to have shaved it off) and the like. The acting rarely rises to the level of “middling.”

The plot is cut-and-pasted from a thousand better thrillers, only dumber, with scenes that serve zero purpose and jokes nobody would find funny.

And there’s nobody in it you’ve ever heard of or seen before.

But it’s still somebody’s bargain basement baby, so the polite thing to do is wish them all well, “better luck next time” and all that. I’m not getting those 90 minutes back, so no sense belaboring it.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Jeremy Evans, Leslie Wong, Jonathan Buckley, Jacob Bruce

Credits: Directed by Jesse David Ing, scripted by Jesse David Ing and Jeremy Evans. A Launch Release on Vudu, et al.

Running time: 1:23

“A Tourist’s Guide to Love” is a lovely Vietnamese travelogue in search of a romantic comedy that would transform the trip into a movie.

It’s a Rachel Leigh Cook star vehicle so inane that even she seems more interested in showing us the sights than focusing on the “just broke up with her boyfriend” and “flirts with the Vietnamese tour guide” story.

Calling it “cute” is as strained as the efforts at humor. “Insipid” just sounds mean, but is closer to the mark.

It’s about that old Paul Bowles/”Sheltering Sky” difference between “a tourist and a traveler.”

“A tourist wants to escape life,” tour guide Sinh (Scott Ly) enthuses. “A traveler wants to experience it.”

The woman he’s explaining that to (Cook) is Amanda Riley, a “secret shopper” from her LA travel agency taking a guided Vietnamese tour with a tiny local company that her boss (Missi Pyle) might want to buy.

She and her boss overshare a bit, which is why Amanda thought her beau of five years (Ben Feldman) was about to propose, when really he just wanted to tell her he was moving to Ohio.

Now she’s in the Exotic East, scouting “the hottest tourist destination” on the planet, trying to decide if Saigon Silver Star Tours — which ignores Ho Chi Minh City’s real name — is worth buying to give their company an entrée to the market.

Sinh and his cousin/driver Anh (Tranh Truc) take have a dozen tourists from Ho Chi Minh City to Da Nang and elsewhere “off the beaten path” “to show visitors the best possible Vietnam.”

They do. It’s gorgeous, from the Tet Lunar New Year celebrations, lantern-lined streets and water candles to Champa Empire ruins.

But the movie makes little attempt to flesh out the other tourists, blandly presents even the “visit to my grandmother’s village” sequences, and is so blandly cast that Missi Pyle on the phone is the most entertaining person in it. And even she’s watered down for this outing.

Sinh, who grew up in the U.S., flirts by saying her full name repeatedly — “Is Amanda Riley being impulsive?” “Is Amanda Riley learning to relax?”

Is Amanda Riley as bored as I was watching this?

Travel rom-coms are an ancient genre (“If it’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium,” “My Life in Ruins”), and it’s laudable that they’re trying for something a little different here. But are they?

Top tip, if you find yourself so compelled, don’t forget Netflix has a playback speed adjustment on the lower right of the screen. At least the blase pauses between locations will pass by faster this way.

Rating: PG

Cast: Rachel Leigh Cook, Scott Ly, Thanh Truc, Ben Feldman, Nsut Le Thien and Missi Pyle.

Credits: Directed by Steven K. Tsuchida, scripted by Eirene Donohue. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

“Broadway” is a solidly suspenseful Greek film noir set among Athen pickpockets, men and a woman laying low by night, putting on “shows” to distract their marks during the day and slowly figuring out the trap this life is, one set for these “artful dodgers” by the Fagin in charge.

It’s not as clear about what transpires as it might be, and writer-director Christos Massalas has his heroine voice-over narrate the picture to death. But it’s not bad.

Nelly is a dancer and the daughter of a dancer. But her mother, she tells us, was a ballerina who married money and her husband was not Nelly’s dad. That explains, in her mind, where we see her dancing.

Nelly, played by Elsa Lekakou, needs a pole for her act.

Her family hired men to hunt her down and bring her home. But Nelly doesn’t worry. She has a habit of being “rescued” by strange men, she assures us in voice-over.

Markos “was an artist, or so he said,” and she let him think she believed him. But any mug tough enough to clobber a detective who tracked her down to the club isn’t a painter or sculptor. Markos is another kind of artist. She finds out the particulars when he takes her to his hide-in-plain-sight hideout.

There’s an abandoned live theater with a rooftop cinema complex called “Broadway,” filled with cockroaches and underworld rats like Markos (Stathis Apostolou), Rudolf (Rafael Papad) and Mohommed, aka “Mojito” (Salim Talbi). The guy they call “Locksmith”(Hristos Politis) lets them stay there.

Locksmith takes his cut whenever they go out picking pockets. “Thieves are like magicans,” Markos says (in Greek with English subtitles). “They work with ‘distractions.'”

And now that they have a trained exotic dancer with access to the old theater’s abandoned costumes, they have their “distraction.”

Things are just getting good when another tenant of Broadway, a badly-beaten man (Foivos Papadopoulos) hiding out from the Big Gangsters in town, gets well enough to become a liability. He has to maintain the illusion that he’s dead, and yet somehow be useful.

Nelly’s access to costumes and makeup gives her inspiration. The “corpse” they realize is called “Jonas” becomes “Barbara.” Nelly choreographs Barbara into the act and the crowds they can pickpocket grow larger.

But as the opening scene to “Broadway” showed us Nelly visiting Markos in prison, we know it can’t last. And the dancer dressing as a woman is too pretty for Nelly to not to take up with him when the dangerous Markos is away.

Writer-director Christos Massalas dreams up a fascinating milieu and fills it with just-colorful-enough characters. Rudolf and Mojito are a couple, Jonas’s sexuality seems a bit fluid and Nelly is a straight-up opportunist who is just waiting on that next dance and that next “rescue.”

The film’s lone light touch is a scene in which the cops are onto them, but Barbara’s instant acceptance by the Athens drag community — and its speed-dial network of allies — effects their escape, hilariously.

The deadly love triangle that’s set up is engrossing, but all these mysterious underworld figures who seem to be pulling a lot of the strings are merely mentioned and never seen. There’s a “How’d THAT happen?” explanation or two lacking in the film’s affecting finale.

But Massalas immerses us in this pole-dancing “Oliver Twist” tale and the cast goes all-in to show us a Greece beyond the migrant headlines and the tourist sites, one where you’d better watch your wallet, because not everyone can count on a stampede of drag queens to bail you out of a jam.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Elsa Lekakou, Stathis Apostolou, Foivos Papadopoulos, Rafael Papad and Salim Talbi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christos Massalas. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:37

Ken Loach is Britain’s great social justice filmmaker, a chronicler of labor struggles and Irish uprisings and working class folks just trying to survive every fresh assault on their way of life.

Films like “Kes” and “Land and Freedom” and “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” and “Jimmy’s Hall and “I, Daniel Blake” could be period pieces and might be history lessons or sociology lectures, but they were consistently compelling leftist cinema and great favorites at Canned

Now he’s showing what he says will be his final film at Cannes. “The Old Oak” is about a dying rural village’s age old pub facing closure and becoming a flashpoint for blowback against the arrival of Syrian refugees.

He’s 87, and he says considering the time it takes to get a film together and fear of “declining facilities” means it’s time to hang it up. He’s tried to retire a few times before, but social injustices always enraged him enough to come back. Not this time.