Movie Nation

“Furies” is a lurid, ultraviolent Vietnamese thriller about a quartet of women assembled to take down a Saigon crime lord by hitting him where it hurts — killing off his henchmen in ones, twos, or big bunches.

Yes, characters refer to what is still officially known as Ho Chi Minh City as Saigon. And no, it probably never occurred to them that an alternate title might occur to anyone watching these female avengers in the U.S.

“Charlie’s Angels,” anyone? I kid.

But there’s no messing around in actress (“The Old Guard,” “Furie,” “Da Five Bloods”), co-writer and director Veronica Ngo‘s blistering underworld bloodbath.

It’s the sort of film that opens with a child’s rape, and serves up enough such scenes that one is inclined to mutter, “How many damned rapes are in this thing?”

Little Bi, who stabs her attacker to death, survives that moment on her sex-worker/mother’s houseboat, but Mom does not. Bi (Dong Anh Quynh) grows up homeless and never far from her next victimization, until she is rescued by Jacqueline, “Aunt Lin” (Ngo), a tough-minded matriarch with an idea for “ending” the rampant sex trafficking and sexual assaults that come with it.

“We have no one to protect us,” Lin intones (in subtitled Vietnamese or dubbed into English). “We’ve all lived and lost. We were like wild daisies, trying to grow out of the darkness.

Bi will join Jacqueline’s petite tyros Hong (Rima Thanh Vy) and Than (Toc Tien), “Wolf Sisters” their foes call them. She will train with them. And they will, together, go after the drug smuggler, human trafficker and crime boss Hai (Thuan Ngyen), a venal predator with many minions and one kryptonite — women.

This formula thriller, not really a sequel to Ngo’s breakout action pic in the West, “Furie,” is packed with punch-above-their-throw-weight brawls and knife-fights, climaxing in a big shootout.

Asian actioners in general and Southeast Asian films of this genre in particular often feature that moment when a huge gang assembles to attack the hero or heroines, and either visit their stash of machetes or grab one each as they steal from the cutlery stall at a street market.

It’s a blunt statement of what’s obviously on the way — machete mayhem.

The plot? Well, it’s predictable, right down to its twists and turns. People on both sides will die. A lot of blood will be spilled. The only cops we meet are in the coda. Twas ever thus in underworld sagas filled with “Furies.”

But one trope that “Furies” tops is a stylized, effects-packed motorbike chase through the narrow alleys and streets of the old city late at night, a furious fight-and-flight without firearms that will pin your ears back. Seriously cool.

And even if “cool” is prioritized over logic or novelty in this bloody battle to the death, it’s still enough to recommend Ngo’s bracing, kinetic and beautifully shot and edited tale of life and death, rape and revenge in Old/New Saigon.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sexual violence, drug abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Veronica Ngo, Rima Thanh Vy, Toc Tien, Dong Anh Quynh and Thuan Nguyen

Credits: Directed by Veronica Ngo, scripted by Nha Uyen Ly Nguyen, Nguyen Ngoc Thach, Nguyen Truong Nhan, Aaron Toronto and Veronica Ngo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

The most common image in “In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis,” is the one represented in two photographs above.

We see the Argentinian pope, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in scores of over-the-shoulder shots, filmed from behind as he rides, waves from and stoops to kiss babies from the Popemobile, rolling into the Central African Republican, mobbed by throngs in Mexico and Malta, greeted with a lot more indifference on the streets of Havana.

“What sort of documentary would that add up to,” the wags among you might ask — lots and lots of shots of crowds waving at the pontiff, mixed with samples of his seriously undynamic multi-lingual public speaking? “A pretty boring one” is the answer.

Vatican-approved writer-director Gianfranco Rosi plumbs the archives of this activist pope’s decade of travel, the 53 countries he’s visited — Japan to Brazil, and many points in between. The sequences Rosi chose to include aren’t exactly animated. But then, neither is this Pope.

The popular, humble and soft-spoken Francis — who took his name from St. Francis of Assisi — makes his mark in this film with his choice of subjects. He speaks often of the tragedies accompanying assaults on human migration, the world’s poor and how they bear the burden of unlivable living conditions, putting them at risk in conflict zones and places vulnerable to a changing climate, doomed to drown as they try to cross the Mediterranean, other seas, deserts and war zones.

We see his speech to the College of Cardinals about the Catholic Church’s shameful abusive priests scandals, hear him apologize for this more than once, hear his “Never again” reflection on the Holocaust in Jerusalem and other genocides (Speaking truth-to-power re: Turkey and the Armenians), express sorrow for the fate of Native Americans/First Nations peoples in Canada and fret over the nature of violence, nationalism and militarism and greed.

The result can’t help but be a film that’s never much more than a sketch, a gloss on the guy in the layers of Papal white whose heart and message seem pro humanity in all the most righteous ways, but whose “leading by example” isn’t always the most cinematic.

Rosi can’t make the man a fire and brimstone preacher or even a Pope John Paul II scold, because it just isn’t in him. But he can capture an emotional moment when Francis enters a poor household in a Brazilian favela where he’s about to speak, a meeting where he tries to mend fences with the assorted Orthodox Church patriarchs, and sits mostly-silent with Muslim imam in Iraq, his mere presence in many of these places speaking volumes.

Francis is at his most enthusiastic in Madagascar, lauding the work Father Pedro Opeka, an Argentinian like the Pope himself, and one dedicated to improving the lives of that island nation’s poorest of the poor, those literally living at the largest garbage dump there.

Those moments, and the spooky scene of Francis crossing the empty St. Peter’s Square, going up the steps of the Basilica at twilight to give a speech mid-COVID lockdown, are all that give much life to this pretty but staid and colorless documentary.

One can’t help but think this Pope deserves more than a simple, stale travelogue.

Rating: unrated, scenes of conflict, poverty

Cast: Pope Francis.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gianfranco Rosi. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:26

“The Fist of the Condor” transports the basic elements of your typical Bruce-Lee-in-Hong-Kong era martials arts “epic” to the beaches, biker bars and Andean mountains of Chile, and gives us all the archetypes of the genre speaking Spanish.

This old-fashioned “quest” reteams “Redeemer” director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza and his martial arts muse, Marko Zaror for more wirework, more slo-motion, more training sequences and more “challenge” fights with a series of warrior foes, all of them in pursuit of the Condor fighting “manual,” a book pieced-together from the martial arts of the ancient Incan Empire.

Not that it did the Incans a bit of good.

It’s a film so wrapped up in “homage” that the story never amounts to much more than cut and paste, ahistorical, neo-mystical nonsense. About the only “Dragon” trait they didn’t replicate is the hilariously inept dubbing of the principals into English. This baby is Spanish, all the way.

But while it begins with “Oh BOY” promise and finishes with a half-hearted flourish, the back-story stuffed middle acts (Our bald hero in a bad wig, and our villain in a black feathered condor suit) are tedium itself. And the effort to set this up as a continuing saga leaves it amusingly, obviously and frustratingly incomplete.

Zaror, one of the fiercest figures in “John Wick Chapter 4,” has the vulpine look of a muscle-bound Mark Strong when he’s shaved his head to look like a martial arts monk. We meet “The Warrior” (El Guerrero) on the beach, challenged by a random young buck seeking what our hero does not have, the “Fist of the Condor” manual that helped him master his form of martial arts.

The kid is looking for the wrong guy. Who is the right guy?

“My twin.“

What’s his “Achilles heel?”

“Photophobia.” You can foil the fiercest fighter this side of Donnie Yen with…a mirror and a little blinding sunlight.

Oh. It’s like that, is it? Why yes it is.

Wernher Schurmann (“Too Late to Die Young”) was fight choreographer here, and he stages several positively balletic brawls — pirouettes and jetes, punches thrown and dodged, somersaults by the score.

Our hero is constantly facing foes he has to tell “for the last time, I am NOT the ONE,” in growled Spanish with English subtitles.

He can’t park his motorcycle without getting challenged. But the places he parks are some of the most striking locations for a martial arts genre piece since those Golden Age Honk Kong classics of yore.

One villain wears too much eye shadow, because there’s one in every crowd, and every martial arts film. The training bits include the Wisdom of the East being handed down by Master Wook (Man Soo Yoon)…in Spanish, and the challenges of “The Condor Woman” (Gina Aguad), who takes a back seat to no one when it comes to inscrutable words to live by.

“See not with your eyes, but with your whole body!”

Director Espinoza does a fine job with the action beats and the epic settings. But every time this brief but not brisk genre thriller breaks into a new “Chapter,” aka “Chapter III: The Evil Guest,” he crosses from homage into parody and from master genre filmmaker into somebody whose “Achilles heel” is his screenwriting.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Marko Zaror, Gina Aguad, Eyal Meyer and Man Soo Yoon

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ernesto Díaz Espinoza. A Hi-Yah!/Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:22

“Colorblind” is a heavy-handed melodrama about race that never overcomes the air of “student film” that its many ways of underscoring its lone metaphor provide.

It’s about a Black artist who suffers from colorblindness, a trait she has passed on to her son. Her life lessons to him include “You don’t want to show anyone your weakness.”

So we’ve got a painter who can’t distinguish most colors — something underscored with visuals seen from her almost-monochromatic point of view — who tries to hide that from those who might buy her canvases, and a child who learns to keep their shared secret.

They face overt racism in the unnamed big city they’ve just moved into, harassment from profiling cops and overt hostility from their new landlord, a retired firefighter who rented to them, sight unseen, and takes an instant dislike to them both.

He’s the sort of retired firefighter who plays romantic classical etudes on his piano and keeps a dead cotton plant as decor, so he can pluck off cotton balls to give our working mom to underscore a racist point.

Watermelon isn’t on-the-nose-enough for him, I guess.

And let’s name our heroine Magdalene because everything else here points to judging someone by appearance through one’s own warped view of the world.

Every lesson Mom (Chantel Riley) has to teach her boy Monet (Trae Maridadi) about race and how to manage their sight limitations and keeping their distance from the bigot upstairs hews to the film’s narrow, broken-record messaging.

Every moment the kid spends with the “Giant” racist makes you wince at its obviousness.

“So, paint can mix, but not people?”

“Well, they can, but they shouldn’t.”

Every misunderstanding is foreshadowed as if a student screenwriter has just learned the term in Screenwriting 201. Every “coincidence” is worth a grimace.

The characters are archetypes, the performances similarly one-dimensional or, in a couple of cases, seriously inexperienced.

“Colorblindness” is the sort of well-intentioned picture on a heavy subject that could make the rounds of little-known film festivals and collect awards, which it has. But if it isn’t a simplistic, ham-fisted student film, it sure as hell plays like one.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Chantel Riley, Trae Maridadi, Garry Chalk and Mike Dopud

Credits: Directed by Mostafa Keshvari, scripted by Mostafa Keshvari and Selina Williams. An Eldon Road release.

Running time: 1:28

“Johnny” is about one inspiring priest’s efforts to create a Catholic hospice to give Poles facing death a compassionate end of life experience, battling a foul-mouthed archbishop over the idea even as he himself battled the cancer that would kill him.

It’s based on the true story of Father Jan Kaczkowski and his relationship with the troubled ex-con forced to do community service under his charge, Patryk Galewski.

But the debut feature that music video director Daniel Jaroszek serves up is a classic “dry-eyed weeper.” We know what it intends to do, but damned if the only time it really does it is with that Pavlovian emotional footage of the “real” priest and real ex-con that such movies always pack into the closing credits.

Slow-footed, more downbeat than sad and endlessly-narrated in voice-over, first by the drug-dealing mug, then by the priest (in Polish with subtitles, or dubbed into English), it left me as cold as a Warsaw winter.

Dawid Ogrodnik of “Ida” and “Silent Night” is the good father, an earnest “outsider” who takes over a local congregation near Puck, sees the real need in his parish and sets out to fund and build a hospice for the many elderly and the dying.

It’s an earnest performance of a recognizable screen “type,” the “cool” problem-solving priest who ruffles feathers while doing good.

Piotr Trojan plays Patryk, breaking and entering, getting his ass beaten, tossed in prison and after all he’s done, the beneficiary of a “suspended sentence.” It’s obvious, from the start of his narration, how much he admires this priest who (eventually) changed his life.

“He limped where no one walked before,” he says of the priest with the cane, the thicker-than-thick glasses and matter-of-fact determination to do something for his people.

The film flatly skims over the efforts to launch the hospice, drably gets around to Father Jan’s own illness and skips through much of the hard work of evolving that Patryk must undertake to become a decent human being.

Patryk is reluctant to do the work, flippant about the geezers he cares for — indirectly, at first, as a handyman — until he meets someone much younger, entirely too young to be making videos for her little boy’s well-into-the-future 18th birthday.

At least Trojan gets to play a few emotional moments. Ogrodnik’s Father Jan is even-tempered and effortlessly famous and popular for what he’s doing, eventually.

I appreciated the daring of showing an archbishop resorting to longshoreman speech — F-bombs galore — to express his displeasure at this hospice. I missed why this old coot was against the idea. Maybe there’s an explanation, but the flatness of the film buried it in the mundane and people who refuse to be moved or excited by it.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Dawid Ogrodnik, Piotr Trojan, Marta Stalmierska

Credits: Directed by Daniel Jaroszek, scripted by Maciej Kraszewski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:00

Put the French thriller “Rodeo” in enough theaters, and the main thing greeting the next “Fast/Furious” iteration — along with tens of millions at the box office — would be hoots of laughter.

“Rodeo” is an unblinking, gritty and nervous thriller about a young hothead who only comes alive or feels at peace enough to smile when she’s on her bike. It’s a “Gone in 60 Seconds”/”Bicycle Thieves”/”Fast and Furious” mashup with heat and fear and fury and not even the barest hint of sentiment.

There’s novelty in the fact that Julie (Julie Ledru) is a tough-as-nails young woman who knows how to check out any new-to-her motorcycle, assessing the clutch, the brakes and throttle, holding her hand over the exhaust to see if it is “missing.” Details like that make or break a gearhead tale wrapped in a character study like this one.

Julie rages at the world, a Guadalupe-born high-mileage 20something still living at home with her student younger brother and never-seen mother in a housing project.

We meet her mid-rage. Somebody’s stolen her latest bike, and no one can calm her from her fury. When she collects herself, she makes a call, pulls herself together, fills a filched purse with rocks and shows up to test ride another dirt bike.

We see what someone who knows her means when he tells her “S–t sticks to you.” She’s trouble, and troubled.

Julie can manage a disarming smile through her cut-rate dentistry, tame her unruly hair just a smidge and lie without compunction. Julie’s an old hand at test-ride-and-fly thefts.

“I was born with a bike between my legs,” she boasts (in French with English subtitles).

“Rodeo” is about what happens when she finds her “tribe,” the reckless, outlaw, stunt-riding and traffic disrupting “B-Mores.”

Yeah, the name could use some work.

Things go wrong at an impromptu rally/gathering, but “the noobie” keeps her cool.

Next thing we know, she’s in their shop, recruited to help in the “steal, modify and re-sell” side of the allegedly legitimate business they run at the behest of Domino, who directs and controls one and all from his prison cell.

Next thing she knows, she has a wary ally (Yanis Lafki) and a sexist creep nemesis or two, guys in the gang who don’t want her around and aren’t squeamish about how they get their wish.

Director/co-writer Lola Quivoron’s debut feature quivers with indie film energy — on foot, in fights and on bikes. We’re treated to a tribute ride for a fallen comrade, a parade of stunts by riders showing off and the measures taken when “The cops! The cops!” show up (smoke bombs, chaos, and a few bikers get hurt). The film rocks along on lots of hand-held camerawork and close-ups of her unconcerned-with-her-looks heroine.

Ledru, making her big-screen debut, is unaffected naturalism defined. She doesn’t dress down. She takes it to extremes. The dark circles under her eyes have dark circles under them.

Antonia Buresi plays Domino’s wife, trapped in her apartment with an acting-out 4-year-old by a control-freak husband who rules her life with an iron fist, and does it from behind bars.

Buresi co-wrote the script with Quivoron, and they manage to set up expectations and sweep them aside more than once. We think we know what the big action beats will be — conditioned by the early “Fast and Furious” movies — and sometimes, they’re simply checked-off to make way for the next twist.

“Rodeo” is so good it’s almost sure to inspire a Hollywood remake. Catch it in the original French grit, because while we know Zazie Beetz can ride, who knows if they’ll meet her quote?

Rating: unrated, violence, gruesome injuries, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Julie Ledru, Yannis Lafki, Antonia Buresi, Louis Sotton and Junior Correia

Credits: Directed by Lola Quivoron, scripted by Antonia Buresi and Lola Quivoron. A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:46

Imagine “Weekend at Bernie’s” as a caper comedy directed by John Waters’ Filipina sister.

That’s “Partners in Crime,” a campy Filipino romp filled with drag performers, only because they’re Filipino, they’re of a culturally accepted “third gender,” baklâ.

Watching the film, you never entirely forget who and what the characters and often the folks playing them are. Because “drag” is funny, something humorless American homophobes fail to appreciate. But seeing baklâ accepted in different careers, guises and walks of life lets us move on from the femine-identifying thing and concentrate on what’s important. In this case, that would be, “Are they funny?“

“Crime” is about a popular TV presenter, Jack Cayanan, played by the award-winning and perfect-drag-named Vice Ganda. Campy and over-the top, “Madame” Jack hosts his own game show, which of course calls for production numbers and the like.

But Jack faces a crisis every performer dreads. Years of using and over-using his voice, pitching it towards a more feminine sound, wreck it. His bitchy rivals grab the chance to kvetch about how “haggard” and “old” Jack is looking. But just as he’s losing it all, a bubbly young beauty, Barbara Nicole Rose Albano (Ivana Alawi) comes to his rescue.

Working as a “team,” they relaunch his career as “their” career, making public appearances, hosting contests and the like. “JaBar,” as they bill themselves, are a winning combo. But she’s kind of in love with Jack, and he has to explain the facts of attraction to her, whom he loves as a “friend” and “colleague” and nothing more.

The real test of this team is when the network lady comes a calling with new offer. Jack is back, and time without Barbara, who is enraged at the betrayal.

When the rating-obsessed boss wants a show-stopper interview with the reclusive Don Bill, “the richest man in the Philippines” (in Tagalog and Filipino with English subtitles), who has survived “99 assassination attempts,” Jack resolves to get it. So does Barbara.

With each accepting the help of their baklâ or simply over-the-top female sidekicks, they pose as wait staff for Don Bill’s (Rez Cortez) birthday party.

That’s where death and blackmail and a deadly contest to “find the Don’s ‘coins'” ensues.

Unfortunately, one thing that doesn’t ensue is “hilarity.” A few stretches work up a spirited campy head of steam, and the tale finishes with a flourish. But the movie bogs down in a lot of inane, unamusing chatter and comic bits that don’t quite land.

Yes, the ex-teammates are forced to sneak around Don Bill’s estate hauling his body around as if he’s merely drunk or napping or not particularly talkative today. That delivers some laughs but wears thin.

The comical caper problem solving is inventive exactly once. But for the most part this script struggles to find what should be obviously funny in all this, as the performers, especially Ganda, strain to make the limply-written shtick outrageously amusing by camping it up.

“Partners in Crime” never manages to be more than a hit or miss affair, a one-day “Weekend at Bernie’s” that doesn’t have nearly as much fun with its best sight gag — a corpse — and can’t find enough laughs in that parody of femininity that drag often is to make up for it.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity, adult situations

Cast: Vice Ganda, Ivana Alawi, Rez Cortez, MC Calaquian and Kenneth Ocampo

Credits: Directed by Cathy Garcia-Molina, scripted by Jonathan Albano and
Cathy Garcia-Molina. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

“A Handful of Water” is a feel good immigration tale that doesn’t quite the deliver the feels.

A choppy, untidy narrative, abrupt shifts in temperament and a vague grasp of right, wrong, morality and the law drag this slight, sentimental drama off course.

Jürgen Prochnow plays Konrad, a sad, solitary widower in a suburban semi-detached whose days are a drab routine of loneliness. He’s got a huge tropical fish tank and busybody neighbor and a car he longer drives. And every few days, his daughter (Anja Schiffel) checks in on him and nags him about this adoption ceremony that’s coming up.

She’s married a woman, and the 80something Konrad has had to get used to that. Now, she’s adopting her wife’s children from a previous marriage, so there’s another thing the old grump has to accept.

He’s not big on immigrants and “gypsies.” So, as is the way of such stories — “A Man Called Ove,” “A Man Called Otto” — let’s hurl some into his life.

We meet Thurba, her mother and two brothers just as German authorities are knocking at the door to deport them. Tweenage Thurba (Milena Pribak) bolts. When we hear a cop mutter “We can’t deport them” without all of the children in hand, we’re allowed to wonder if mother and child know that and are gaming the system.

When Thurba visits a couple of her countrymen involved in human trafficking for help and one asks why her mom didn’t “just break her arm” (in Arabic and German with English subtitles), that’s reinforced. You can appreciate and sympathize with the desperation of migrants fleeing violence (they’re from Yemen) and cringe at the ways tolerance and “official” compassion are twisted by those who would manipulate the rules as just another means to their end.

Thurba breaks into Konrad’s house, but the cops aren’t coming because someone stole some of his cookies. When she slips in again, he shoots her in the arm. And hen he tries to throw the shrieking child into the night, she passes out.

Konrad instantly softens. Thurba, freaking out when he locks her in, breaks out and takes longer to make a connection. But eventually she’s back, “helping with the fish” he tells his nosy neighbor. He gradually pieces together their story — her dad died, they were “imprisoned” in Bulgaria on their trek, and they’re just trying to get to the UK, where her uncle lives.

And there’s one more problematic element to this. This isn’t about a German coming to accept someone from another culture and empathize with their plight, welcoming them as neighbors. This is about a German resolving to help these Yemeni refugees reunite in Germany and aid their further travels so that they become Britain’s “problem.”

Konrad’s favorite saying is “Enemy is on the rise,” denoting how things are changing and never will be what they were (his explanation of the phrase). That metaphor is as slippery as the “handful of water” usage in this script. Something got lost in the translation.

The kid is unaffected and believable in the part. And it’s always great to see Prochnow as a leading man, over 40 years since “Das Boot” made him a star.

But “Handful of Water” just reminds us of how slippery the broad issue of human migration is, once you get past the emotional, compassionate points and into the ethics, moral obligations, rights and entitlements of it all.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Jürgen Prochnow, Milena Pribak, Anja Schiffel and Pegah Ferydoni.

Credits: Directed by Jakob Zapf, scripted by Ashu B.A., Marcus Seibert and Jakob Zapf. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:34

Today’s trip “Around the World with Netflix” is a nostalgic and cute Italian comedy the tells us “You can go home again.” Or as the Neopolitans put it, “The happy bird makes its next in its own valley.”

“A Breath of Fresh Air” is a star vehicle co-written by Italian comic Aldo Baglio, known for such seasonal farces as “I Hate Summer” and “The Santa Claus Gang.” In this comedy, titled “Una boccata d’aria” in Italia, he plays a frazzled Milan pizzeria owner about to lose his restaurant and his mind over the obligations piling up around him.

Salvo’s supporting a grad student daughter (Ludavica Martino) in Amsterdam who hasn’t told him that she’s quit her MBA program, or that she’s pregnant by her musician boyfriend.

His dead-weight son Enzo (Davide Calgaro) goofs around in the kitchen, distracted by his dreams of music producer/DJ stardom.

And his wife (Lucia Ocone) is cold comfort in all this, perhaps because she’s in the dark about how bad things really are.

A scooter accident lets Salvo see a vision of his ever-disapproving dad (Tony Sperandeo). He’s he one who gives him the “bird/nest/valley” aphorism. He’s the one who always called Salvo “useless.” And that vision tells Salvo that he’s died.

The fact that there’s in inheritance sends Salvo winging southward, to Southern Italy where his Sicilian dad ran a farm overrun with snails. He must make up with his sullen, estranged brother Lillo (Giovanni Calcagno), convince him to sell the place, and hope he can recover his repossessed pizzeria.

Here’s what Salvo never told his wife and kids. That his dad was still living, that he has a brother. His long-long crush Carmela (Manuela Ventura) is back in this sleepy little village. Oh, and by the way, Salvatore had his own pop stardom dreams. He wrote and recorded a corny Neapolitan single in honor of “Carme” in his long-haired youth.

The only way ALL of this can come out is for the whole family to eventually follow him south to find out the truth and take this comedy to its logical conclusion.

I think the first movie to teach me about Italian regionalist prejudice was Lina Wertmüller’s charming “Ciao, Professore!” Hearing and reading subtitles about northern Italian attitudes towards those “rednecks” in the south, from Naples on over to Sicily, was an eye opener.

Here, Salvo lets us know that these “bumpkins” and “rednecks” (in Italian with English subtitles) were a big reason he left. But when he returns, he’s mobbed by old friends who help him close down the bar with wine-soaked sing-alongs.

Sure, it’s the sort of small town where the longtime mayor finally died, only to have his son take over the job. Old grudges, like old flames, never die.

And the snail situation at the family farm is so severe that I wondered if they weren’t raising them for restaurants. Considering the seething resentment Lillo harbors over this solitary life of labor, frustration and misery convinces one otherwise.

“Fresh Air” isn’t a challenging comedy. But it does manage to upend expectations, here and there. And Baglio, who cowrote the script with director Alessio Lauria and others, mugs and fumes and lies and gestures wildly enough to keep it amusing, or at least help it merrily make its way toward the finish line.

Knowing when to end a film, drop the mike, is an art, and these folks have given us all we need to know about whatever “happily ever after” is coming. They don’t show it because there’s no need. We jus tknow.

Maybe it’s the sunny, sleepy, overgrown and gone to seed scenery talking, but while this “Breath” isn’t all that, it’s not that bad.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Aldo Baglio, Lucia Ocone, Giovanni Calcagno, Manuela Ventura, Ludavica Martino and Davide Calgaro

Credits: Directed by Alessio Lauria, scripted by Aldo Baglio, Valerio Bareletti, Morgan Bertacca and Alessio Lauria. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

The boy looks like any one of the hundreds of hustling teens on Panama City’s streets. His scam is using traffic cones to sell parking spots with implied “Be a shame if something happened to your nice car” “protection” in the bargain.

But Alicia, a 40ish Mexican architect, isn’t in the mood for a shake down. She ignores, argues with and then pays the kid under his asking price.

As she sits, smoking, on her balcony, she watches the boy who goes by “Chief.” And Chief watches her. When she leaves for work, selling pricey high-rise condos in tropical Panama’s ocean view building boom, he’s washed her Audi, unbidden. More arguing, more angry bickering and more under-paying.

It’s not until he shows up at her door, bloodied by a gunshot wound, that she’s truly forced to deal with Chief. And even after she’s scooped him up and spirited him to a hospital, she keeps her distance, ignoring pleas from nurses and guards for her name and the patient’s identity.

They don’t know she lives on “Plaza Catedral.” But he does. And when he escapes from the hospital, the homeless urchin named makes a beeline for her address. Like it or not, solitary, self-pitying Alicia has a new responsibility in her life.

Panamanian writer-director Abner Benaim’s debut drama — he’s made documentaries and a lone comedy before now — was Panama’s submission for Best International Feature film at the Oscars a couple of years back.

It’s a simple, downbeat tale built on familiar themes, with generally predictable story beats and plot points.

Yes, Alicia — played with a guarded, calloused fragility by Ilse Salas — has a secret pain. All those people asking how she’s doing, the friends dragging her out for drinks? She’s newly divorced. And as we quickly figure out, she used to have a son.

Of course one relates to the other.

Chief has a real name, “Alexis.” But he has no home. Calling a doctor she knows about how long it should take for him to recover only earns Alicia a lecture.

“The younger they are, the more dangerous they are,” he tells her (in Spanish with English subtitles).

But warning or not, even with nightmares about what he might do to her or her property, Alicia finds herself taking care of this uneducated, gang-affiliated street kid, played by real-life street teen Fernando Xavier De Casta.

There’s not a lot of street grit to this story, which is mostly told from Alicia’s entitled point-of-view. The burden Benaim faced making this was in finding something new to do with this situation, a new angle to attack this chronic Third World/Central and South American condition.

He doesn’t. Whatever Chief is mixed up in is bound to infiltrate Alicia’s life. Whatever his presence does for the sleepwalk of grief that is her daily existence is not guaranteed to be a change for the better.

Benaim has made a sharply-observed account of a Panamanian social ill as it impacts two people — one who lives it, the other who “sees” it for the first time. The problem is he doesn’t observe enough that’s new and doesn’t do anything novel with this familiar set-up.

A glimpse of crowded, cosmopolitan Panama and the people left behind in its tax haven/vacation-get-away building boom is all we get. A glimpse is no longer enough.

Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Ilse Salas, Fernando Xavier De Casta and Manolo Cardona

Credits: Scripted and directed by Abner Benaim. A Samuel Goldwyn release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:33