Movie Nation

Woody Harrelson and Ray Romano also star in this ’60s period piece about a “back up plan” in case, you know, we don’t LAND on the Moon.

ScarJo plays the marketing whiz who “casts” and “sells” NASA and the Moonshot…or the faked one, to the public.

As if “Capricorn One” and Stanley Kubrick didn’t feed half a century of conspiracy crackpottery on the subject.

July 12, Apple and Sony and the director of “Love, Simon” try to find the fun in all that.

The Swiss drama “A Forgotten Man” is an intriguing if not wholly satisfying dip into a piece of little debated history, Switzerland’s dubious “neutrality” during World War II.

Writer-director Laurent Nègre, inspired by a play by Thomas Hürlimann, seeks to address Swiss “good for business” complicity and collusion with Nazi Germany. We engage in that debate through the story of two “forgotten” (especially outside of Switzerland) men whose fates were intertwined thanks to the opportunistic bankers and industrialists that “run” the country, and either turned a blind eye to crimes against humanity, or secretly goose-stepped along with it when the world wasn’t watching.

One man was Hans Frölicher, the Swiss ambassador to Nazi Germany and a figure who had a hand in facilitating Swiss business ties with the Third Reich. His name was changed to Heinrich Zwygart in the play “The Envoy” and for the movie. The other was theology student and would-be Hitler assassin Maurice Bavaud, whom the Swiss state and its German ambassador declined to help when he was arrested for not-quite-going-through-with-his-attempt to kill Adolf Hitler in 1938.

Bavaud’s Wikipedia biography details his family’s and later the Swiss government’s attempts to rehabilitate and Swiss-wash a disturbed young man’s dubious, Russian monarchist motives for attempting what he lost the nerve to try.

Zwygart, played with a growing resentment and secret torment by Michael Neuenschwander, is depicted as a man who dashes home from Bavaria — where the German government fled after Hitler’s death — covering his tracks and burning papers, but seemingly confident of his reception back in Geneva.

But in Nègre’s film, Zwygart is tormented by visions of the very young and silent Bavaud (Victor Poltier), the would-be assassin he took no steps to save or have transferred to Swiss custody.

As he renews his connection to family and takes visits from a Hitler-fan publisher (Dominik Gysin) who wants him to write his memoirs, Zwygart quickly picks up on the arms’ length that his own government is keeping between itself and its German ambassador.

A relative who got into business with the Nazis and others may be furious that an “unconditional surrender” will let the Germans off the hook for all they owe the Swiss, for raw materials, machine parts and the like.

“But you guaranteed Goering’s trustworthiness (in German with English subtitles)!”

But Zwygart starts to wonder if his own state is setting him up as the “fall guy” for Swiss sins ranging from supplying and feeding Germany to laundering German-looted cash and Jewish assets via their banking system, which isn’t touched on here.

Nègre’s script ably recreates the tightrope the Swiss walked to stay fat, rich and independent after Germany conquered most of the rest of Europe. In the Zwygart house, Heinrich and his aged military father (Peter Wyssbrod) converse in German, where the son rolls his eyes at the old man’s assertion that “Our army kept us free!” One and all treat that as a “myth” the Swiss told still tell themselves.

But Heinrich’s wife (Manuela Biedermann) and college-age daughter (Cléa Eden) speak French, as wife Clara wonders how “Berlin changed you” and aspiring London chiropractor Helene introduces a French-speaking boyfriend (Yann Philipona) who wants to “interview” Ambassador Zwygart, and perhaps even confront him.

Nègre — “Confusion” and “Operation Casablanca” were his — walks his own tightrope, angling towards a Swiss reckoning over its national guilt, but pulling his punches as often as not. He leans just hard enough on the whole Bavaud plotline to play the “But look, one of our guys tried to SHOOT Hitler” card. And he’s more than willing to have an American official reinforce the “you’re excused” attitude that dismissed any swift reckoning for Swiss complicity simply because they were “democratic” and stable on a now-half-communist continent.

But “A Forgotten Man” still makes for a most watchable account of a country that may have “gotten it from both sides” during the war, which acted out of self-preservation and self-interst, but which got an undeserved pass for its selective, opportunistic views of “neutrality.”

Rating: R, nudity

Cast: Michael Neuenschwander, Manuela Biedermann, Cléa Eden, Yann Philipona, Peter Wyssbrod,
Dominik Gysin and Victor Poltier

Credits: Scripted and directed by Laurent Nègre, inspired by a play by Thomas Hürlimann. A Sovereign release.

Running time: 1:25

Every indie film — if it’s “indie” enough — is a teachable moment in the sorts of story you can tell with very little money, a catchy conceit and the best assets you have at hand.

Sometimes those assets include “name” actors you’re able to talk into making your film, giving it visibility and cachet. And somethings it’s the locations.

“Permafrost” benefits from striking, snowy Utah settings and access to horses, ATVs and snowmobiles, which to writer, director and star Lenni Uitto, screamed “Ice Age Dystopia.” So he and co-star Rachelle Hardy dreamed up a new ice age where Russians, Russian gulags and bad Russian accents permeate a North America after — presumbly — the Bering Strait has frozen over and allowed Russianism to expand beyond its MAGA base.

The weather gives the film credibility, which the screenplay strips away, one limp cliche after another.

If you’re going dystopian, your future’s got to have bounty hunters. Because even if governments and techological infrastructure has collapsed, you’ll want to “employ” people to guard the gulags, and “loggers” (As in keeping a “log,” or “laggers?”) and hunters to wander the wasteland fetching or killing (and returning their tracking chips) escapees with electronic trackers.

Meat and apparently crackers will still be available, because anyone with a rifle can hunt and crackers will last long after manufacturing and distribution systems have broken down.

So loner James (Uitto) can get by, haunted by the ghost of a teen girl who gives him advice and urges him “Don’t shoot,” every now and then. Maybe she’ll talk him out of killing himself.

James shoots a lot, here. James stabs a lot, too, even after somebody’s apologized for shooting at him, or conked him on the head to rob him.

There’s a little girl (Riley Hardy) that someone is hellbent on tracking down. She’s on the run with her mom (Rachelle Hardy). James takes this assignment from his Boris & Natasha-accented bounty hunt booker and fights his way through (checks notes) “Somali pirates,” and the usual dystopian thugs, uniformed goons and over-made-up cult-gang members calling themselves “White Ghosts.”

He has to admit to the little girl that he kills people. Not that she can’t see that for herself.

“That’s a bad job! You need to get a new one!”

“Permafrost” has some arresting images, but the script is crap and the middling to mediocre acting, directing and general execution of it become more immaterial the crappier it gets.

“Phantom” gunshots extract our hero and the child from some situations. As in “Who fired that perfectly-timed shot to save them THIS time?” Sometimes, we never find out.

Continuity error?

One favorite moment occurs when two women bounty hunters come for little girl Meg, and one drops to the ground after a LOUD rifle report, only to have the other apparently NOT HEAR that and trudge on for several seconds, grabbing the kid, only for a second round to hit her, totally by “surprise.”

It’s not bad enough to prompt a drinking game over idiotic plot blunders, screwy dystopian “logic” no one thought through or Godawful Russian-accented “acting.” When you film an indie in Utah, at the very least you’d like to avoid drinking game prompts.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lenni Uitto, Riley Hardy, Ariel Dawn, Corey Dangerfield, Kalli Therinae and Rachelle Hardy.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lenni Uitto. A FilmHub release on Tubi.

Running time: 1:19

The stumbling French Netflix remake of “The Wages of Fear,” a 1953 thriller by Henri-Georges Clouzot, whetted my appetite for re-watching that touchstone tale of desperate men taking on a suicidal job, each for his own grim reasons.

But none of my streaming services had it available. Max has it, I think Criterion restored it and has it on their channel. (Tubi got it later). So I went in search of the second famous version of that classic story, William Friedkin’s epic “Sorcerer,” a 1970s updating that is as bathed in lore as any movie of that era.

Friedkin’s budget-buster opened a month after “Star Wars,” and the Internet is filled with hot-take reviews (many of them “performed” on youtube) about “the best movie you never heard of/saw” and the like. “Sorcerer” exists in a few versions, never got that much attention when it came out, and Friedkin lamented its fate every chance he got, right up to his death last August.

Poking around, I found a full-length cut used on European TV online and dove back into this world. Because if nothing else, “Sorcerer” is a half hour shorter than the original “Wages.”

“Sorcerer” is a film greatly-enhanced in memory by its signature scenes, down-and-out men driving huge, beater ten-wheeled trucks loaded with volatile nitroglycerine over an ancient, rickety rope and wooden plank bridge in the middle of the South American jungle. That iconic image made one helluva poster. I used to own one.

Hunter Schafer stars as a young woman who moves with Dad’s (Marton Csokas) to a resort in the Bavarian Alps, a place where people with Germanic accents (Dan Stevens, et al) use words like “experiments” a tad too often for comfort.

“Cuckoo” got a little genre fan appreciation at festivals, but mixed reviews. Another Neon title nobody sees? We’ll see.

But that “Downton” Dan Stevens? He’s everywhere!

“Rest in Peace” is a sturdy Argentian thriller with too many soap operatic touches and twists for its own good.

It’s a tale of escaping a messy life through a horrific but all-too-convenient historical event, the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

Novelist Martin Baintrub took that tragedy and imagined someone who used it to get away from ruinous debts and threats against his family. Director Sebastián Borenztein and co-screenwriter Marcos Osorio Vidal got a watchable if sometimes eyerolling, predictable and generally melodramatic movie out of that narrative.

Sergio (Joaquín Furriel of “Intuition”) is a Buenos Aires businessman who inherited the family factory but is struggling to keep it afloat, a fact that he keeps from his dental hygeinist wife, Estela (Griselda Siciliani, who was in “Bardo”).

He can’t have it burden his daughter Flor’s bat mitzvah, because her whole speech at the gathering is about how “He will make all my wishes come true” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English). He can’t let his worries color his little boy Matias’s opinion on his dad.

But the minute he says “Dad’ll always be there with you” to the boy, we know he won’t. It’s that kind of movie.

The celebration is marred by the presence of a collector from that one money lender Sergio cannot put off. Bruno (Gabriel Gioty) is impatient enough to tell him, when they meet again, that he wants “it all by Monday.”

Sergio has barely had a chance to bring Estela up to speed, beg a friend to buy their “country place” from him and fend-off an irate brother-in-law’s ugly accusations at a family dinner when that fateful day arrives.

And then a bomb goes off.

The narrative shifts back and forth between Estela’s concerned, then upset if-not-quite-frantic realization that her husband might have been in that blast. Authorities find his briefcase and the daughter’s new necklace which doting dad had just had repaired. She weeps.

But Sergio, his head ringing in the hospital, has survived. It’s just that as he gathers his senses, takes in the chaos and the scale of what he just lived through and he can’t complete that call “home.”

He runs away, making his way to Paraguay, South America’s version of “a place that doesn’t check ID that carefully.”

Sergio’s new life, working for an importer/trading firm of some sort, just requires that he make excuses any time he’s ordered to deal “with Argentines” or deliver something to another country.

Luckily, the boss’s wife (Lali Gonzálezi) is a fan. And when she’s suddenly widowed…

The tale is told with every moment of forshadowing underlined to ensure we notice it. The license of the driver on that taxi ride to the bus station to flee town is the perfect identity to steal. That heart-to-heart with his son in the bathroom at a big party is too good not to reprise, ironically, in the third act.

The performances are more adequate than compelling. Truth be told, I checked out of the picture at the moment where “seventeen years pass” and we see Sergio in a Robinson Crusoe beard and mop top, as if he hasn’t shaved in decades.

The time to acquire a permanent disguise might be the days and weeks after you make your escape and authorities might be looking for you.

Melodramatic touches — coindidences, old longings — pile up, so that by the finale, that’s pretty much all there is to “Rest in Peace,” a tale too self-consciously “dramatic” to feel “real,” too dramatically-pat to be all that entertaining.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Joaquín Furriel, Griselda Siciliani, Lali González and Gabriel Goity

Credits: Directed by Sebastián Borenztein, scripted by Marcos Osorio Vidal and Sebastián Borenztein, based on a novel by Martin Baintrub. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

Movies that look as if the cast had too much fun making them are often cursed. But “Repo Man,” a cult sci-fi comedy from 1984, has long been the exception to that rule.

Loopy to the point of gonzo, scruffy in every important way, filmmaker Alex Cox conjured up punk rock sci-fi, a film that was Reagan-backlash political, more energetic than polished, more mouthy and goofy than smart.

And everybody in it, from star-on-the-rise Emilio Estevez to veteran character actor Tracey Walter and Blaxploitation alumna Vonetta McGee, gives every indication that they’re having a blast in a movie that feels “We’re-making-it-up-as-we-go” rash.

That was the year Harry Dean Stanton became a cult “star” in his own right, graduating from small, Southern working class bit parts in decades of TV episodes and films, from “Cool Hand Luke” and “Straight Time” to “Alien,” to leading man in “Paris, Texas” and as the sketchy LA “repo man” Bud, who insists that even he lives by a “code.”

“I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof, nor through inaction let the personal contents thereof come to harm!”

Cox, a Brit not long out of film school, got the richest and “hippest” member of The Monkees (Mike Nesmith) to produce his low-budget script, rounded-up the seediest LA locations he could find (with the obligatory trek to the highway through Joshua Tree) and a low-cost but “cool” cast and he was off.

Because who wouldn’t want to be in an action comedy about a nutty scientist (Fox Harris) on the lam from Roswell in a ’64 Chevy Malibu with something strange and deadly in the trunk, a car that becomes the target of every Repo Man — car repossessors working for loan companies — in greater L.A.?

As competitors snatch and grab that Malibu, the movie becomes an amusingly deadly game of “Who’ll look in the trunk?” and “Who do we HOPE looks in the trunk?”

Estevez plays Otto, an earringed “punk” and stocker at a local supermarket, a rebel without a cause. He quits on a profane whim, and that leaves him vulnerable to a hustle from a guy who needs his “help” getting his car to the hospital because his wife is having a baby.

Bud (Stanton) tells the stupidest lies imaginable to convince gullible Otto to get this car and follow him in while stranger Bud drives “my wife’s car.” Otto’s spent too much time in the mosh pit to think much of anything through.

Otto “ain’t gonna be no repo man,” when he learns what he’s just done. But he’s taken cash and swiped a car on behalf of the Helping Hands Acceptance Corp.

“It’s too late. You already are.”

Walter, a character “type” who’d been in “Goin’ South” and “Raggedy Man,” is the repo lot mechanic and resident conspiracy nut Mitchell.

“You know how everybody’s into weirdness right now?”

McGee is the two-fisted office manager, with repo men Bud (Stanton) and Lite (Sy Richardson) serving as Otto’s mentors. Bud Lite will not lead him astray.

Otto picks up a fleeing young woman (Olivia Barash) who turns out to be a free spirit. Sex in a repossessed Caddy Eldorado? Don’t mind if I DO. But she’s on the run because “they” are after her, men in suits who want to know what she knows. Because the United Fruitcake Outlet (UFO) where she works is deep into UFOlogy and hip to the scientist, the Malibu and what might be in the trunk.

Otto keeps crossing paths with punk pals Archie (Miguel Sandoval), Debbi (Jennifer Balgobin) and Duke (Dick Rude) who are in the midst of a smalltime robbery/car-jacking spree.

“Let’s do some crimes!” “Yeah, let’s go get sushi and not pay!”

Forty years after its release, “Repo Man” plays like a snapshot of its era, from the punk nihilism that rose to the fore with Reaganism to the still-seen-on-punks haircuts and fashions and a fleet of aging-poorly hot-wireable cars from America’s “Malaise Motors” era.

Of course Otto is homophobic and not shy about slinging slurs. Of course the bad guys are “Men and Women) in Black” before “Men in Black” were a thing. Of course it’s more cinematic to not show us what’s actually in that Malibu trunk. Saved money, too.

Like many a cult film, “Repo Man” is meant to be watched with an audience of fellow cultists. Soberly seen outside of that cinema drafthouse environment, many of the jokes and gags still land, and some do not. When you’ve been imitated by many films and performers over the years, the “fresh” in your humor sours.

There are stretches when the only thing propelling this forward and giving it any pace is the Tito Larriva and The Plugz Latino punk/surf rock score, which sounds like Dick Dale went Tex Mex.

But that sense of the fun that the cast must have been having pops up in the odd improvised line or scene, and in moments that have a hint of “giddy” about them as various players pile into or out of this car or that one.

The best running gag isn’t about aliens, it’s about the guys this movie is built around — repo men facing off with the rival Rodriguez Brothers (Del Zamora and Eddie Velez). If Zander Schloss’s nerdy turn as a fellow grocery store stocker looks and sounds like the template for “Napoleon Dynamite,” Zamora and Velez prefigure “The Jesus” in “Big Lebowski.”

Cox was definitely onto something here, making a movie about an unsavory, careless and adrenalin-fueled profession which he’d worked in briefly to make ends meet. He’d go on to try his hand at something almost “mainstream” (“Sid & Nancy”) before settling into a succession of hit-or-mostly-miss cult films, more than one a pale imitation of this one.

Estevez would go on to lead “The Mighty Ducks” and start directing himself.

And Harry Dean Stanton? He’d roll down that dusty road towards “legend,” collecting a devoted worldwide following — including cool filmmakers — who’d ensure he’d always work, he’d get his share of big parts, and that fans would go hunting for him in everything he made before he donned a wrinkled suit, took a deep toot off some banned substance, and got to work.

“I don’t want no commies in my car! No Christians either!”

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity, homophobic slurs

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash, Sy Richardson, Fox Harris, Del Zamora, Eddie Velez, Jennifer Balgobin, Fox Harris and Vonetta McGee

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Cox. A Universal release now on Netflix, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:32

A Mother-Child coming-of-age drama about coming of age depressed, and a mother led out of depression by, perhaps, her little girl?

It’s a period piece set in 1991 and therefor a “personal” tale by actress, turned writer and now first-time feature writer-director Annie Baker, who is married to Noah Baumbach’s actor brother Nico.

You’d think Dev Patel’s Indian outing as a Subcontinental “John Wick” would be the fanboy film of the month, with epic action, bloody brawls and a wicked, droll humor levening it’s almost non stop beat downs.

Good reviews, great word of mouth, a popular Anglo Indian star and director, you’d think “Monkey Man” would blow up the box office. But I guess fanboys are as afraid of a few subtitles as everybody else.

“Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire” proves  they’ll show up with anything that has “Empire” in the title. Its digital monster mashing its way to a $31.7 million second weekend and an easy win at the box office.

Based on a so so Thursday night and a half decent  Friday and middling Sat. and Sunday, “Monkey Man” will manage only $10.1 or so.

What the hell? Get online, order your tickets and change that outcome, kids. It’s good and there aren’t that many subtitles, you big babies.

This “Ghostbusters” sequel has “Empire” in the title which means the lemmings are still showing up. Another $9 million or so this weekend.

“The First Omen” earned more generous reviews than mine, by and large. It’s considered and quasi-arty and not awful — very good cast and a top drawer performance by Nell Tiger Free from “Game of Thrones.” But it’s frightfully dull, and yet that “Omen” franchise tag means it is opening at twice what Neon’s bomb of a nun in horror peril thriller “Immaculate” managed –$8.3 million. “Omen” took away “Immaculate” screens. Sorry Sydney.

“Kung Fu Panda 4” is still fishing and serving to the tune of $7.85 million, although it has  limited release animated competition (“Epic Tails?”) this weekend. Title I’ve never heard of.

These figures reflect Sunday afternoon reporting from @TheNumbers or if you prefer the.numbers.com.

I’m not sure of the reaction “across the pond” to the journalism-in-action drama “Scoop,” an account of how the BBC landed its monarchy-rocking intervew that proved the utter undoing of then-Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.

On this side of the Atlantic, it seems well cast and well-acted, but fundmentally misguided, dry and heartless.

The analogies one can see here make it a lightweight “Frost/Nixon,” an emotionally adrift “The Queen” and a “Spencer” with performances but no punch. None.

Rufus Sewell‘s uncanny interpretation/impersonation of the 60ish (when he was interviewed) Andrew, friend of Jeffrey Epstein even AFTER his first conviction of crimes connected to connected to procuring underage girls for prostitution, is the chief recommendation of this bland drama from the director of TV’s “The Crown” and “Catherine the Great.”

Sewell makes the guy a charming, jokey creep, whose worst sin on camera might have been his aloof dismissal of the most pointed accusations, and his blithe disregard of the gravity of it all.

“I really don’t understand why everyone’s obsessed with my friendship with Jeffrey Epstein,” he cracks in the meeting made to set up the interview. “I knew Jimmy Savile so much better.”

Nothing like laughing off your association with an American pedophile by mentioning your connection with an infamous British one.

The film is based on a book by the show-booker for the BBC’s “News Night,” whose producer (Romola Garai) likes referring to their in-depth interviews, conducted by seasoned and self-serious Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), as “forensic.”

They’re that serious. It’s their brand.

The film’s fundamental flaw may be in its point of view, as it’s mostly told through the eyes of that booker-author, Sam McAlister/ She’s played by Billie Piper as a single mom who isn’t really fitting in at the stodgy, posh but budget-strapped and layoff-prone BBC.

“She’d very ‘Daily Mail,'” aka downmarket, argumentative and gossipy, a segment producer says of her. But Sam is the one with the contacts with the first “pap” (paparazzo) to stalk Andrew on “the last” of his New York visits to the brothel Epstein was running out of his East 71st townhouse. She’s the one with the contact “inside the palace,” the scandalized Duke’s press liaison (Keeley Hawes).

And she’s the palace contacts when the scandal, that simmers for a decade of “no comment,” seems to overwhelm the Duke’s “good works” and makes him want to tidy up his image. That’s exactly the moment that the authorities finally swoop in on the sex trafficker Epstein and Prince Andrew’s “problem that won’t go away” becomes a crisis.

The film shows Sam’s recognition that the teens on her double-decker bus-ride home are the same age as Epsteins “nubiles,” “warehoused” in Manhattan and on his “sex island. That’s supposed to raise the stakes of the crime, humanize the tragedy and generate revulsion. It falls flat.

The most exciting sequence opens the picture as that pap (Connor Swindells) stalks and struggles to get that one damning shot of Andrew and Epstein together in 2010, nine years before events lead to that infamous interview.

Anderson adds another fine real-life Brit characterization to her resume, capturing the privilege, ego and performative journalism of a quietly relentless interviewer who knows she has to get the questions right, and in the right order, to make this weakest of the Windsors hang himself with his words on camera.

But an American watching this is entitled to puzzle over why the “scoop” matters more than the allegations, and the press coverage — almost limited here to Britain’s state TV — minimizes the victims as it gins up outrage at that moment’s most infamous royal.

Sewell is the best reason to see this, if not the only one. He allows us to watch this interview as it unfolds and Andrew thinks he’s doing fine, even when he starts making denials based on claims that he hasn’t “perspired” since the Falklands War (valor shaming) and admitting nothing more than “bad judgment” in making and keeping friends.

Sewell’s Andrew isn’t an idiot. But he elevates tone-deafness to a cardinal sin, and gives us the impression that he might blame his beloved mother for the diffident creeper he turned out to be, no matter how good a “judge of character” his “mummy” always claimed to be, especially when it came to her “favorite.”

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Gillian Anderson, Billie Piper, Keeley Hawes, Romala Garai and Rufus Sewell

Credits: Directed by Philip Martin, scripted by Geoff Bussetil and Peter Moffat, based on a book by Sam McAllister. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42