Movie Nation

In her latest, Malin Åkerman plays a 40something divorcee who has “baby fever,” which is why she finds herself coming on to select single men the night of her peak ovulation, turning a friend’s birthday gathering into “The Donor Party.”

The debut feature of writer-director Thom Harp is a raunchy, skirt-hiking farce that never quite achieves the happy ending all involved were hoping for, although it finds a few laughs and some oh-no-they-didn’ts.

Jacqueline is doing fine until she runs into her ex (Ryan Gaul) and the woman he left her for, who is now pregnant. He didn’t want children with her. Let the record reflect that she’s a jilted divorcee who “wasted all my good eggs” on “that a—-le” Todd.

Her besties Amandine (Bria Henderson of TV’s “The Good Doctor”) and Molly (Erinn Hayes of “Children’s Hospital”) try to console her, and then come up with “a plan” for how to solve her problem.

The script has Jacqueline dismiss “adoption” and sperm bank implantation as “too expensive.” And yet she expects to be able to afford to raise a child.

She’s over 40 and can’t waste any more time dating. There’s nothing for it but to aggressively pursue a one night stand. The search for “A single man who is disease-free in the suburbs” begins.

But to ensure success, they decide Jacqueline had better make it “three one-night-stands.” And as Molly’s about to throw a birthday party for her husband (Rob Corddry), Jacqueline might be able to triple down, all in one night. With her ovulation app as her guide and lesbian Amandine and long-married Molly doing the match-making, and Jacqueline looking like the Swedish Canadian blonde goddess Malin Åkerman, this should be a snap.

The party is populated by pregnant women (including Aarti Mann of “The Big Bang Theory”) and other moms who warn Jacqueline about the consequences of childbirth — career loss, body strained and stretched, a loss of your childless friends and a change in your “interests.” Those will become what your child is interested in, not you.

But it’s also got daddy candidates, from the arrogant and sexist portrait painter (Jerry O’Connell) to TV’s “Shirtless Chef” (Jeff Torres), a preening poser who fancies himself the new Jeff Goldblum, to the short, sweet nebbish (Dan Ahdoot) and hunky blond flirt Armin (Ryan Hansen).

The night will include wine spiked with “Molly” for the unknowing potential “sperm donors,” clumsy come-ons from Jacqueline, who is out of practice, and a lot of intercourse — in all of its (not really R rated) messy glory.

Henderson may be playing a modern rom-com “type,” the sassy Black gay BFF. But she lands a lot of the laughs, aiding and abetting the “sperm-napping” or whatever everybody wants to call it. Armandine is the “coach,” urging her player to “‘Ho’ now,” so she can “Mom later.”

Corddry’s good for a giggle or three, Hayes does an amusing stoned act and O’Connell heads right over the top as a jerk who trots out every “shaming” in the book for our expectant-to-be-inseminated heroine.

Åkerman throws herself into this with something resembling the skin-and-sweat-and-sexual abandon she brought to her breakout film, “The Heartbreak Kid.” But Jacqueline is older, sadder, so long off the seducing a man market that she’s taking man-catching advice from a sarcastic lesbian. Åkerman plays that desperation, too.

Not every actor brings something fun to the table, because the misfiring script has so many characters to service that most have no chance to make an impression.

There are moments when we hear monologues on aging, the disparity in dating (men always with younger women), the gamble that your chosen mate will be a good father, or even want to be one.

But this isn’t anywhere nearly as thought-provoking, amusing or sentimental as the raunchier “Knocked-Up.” And the one-night/many partners thing, vulgar as it is, isn’t as amusing as it might have played with script doctoring and a deeper, more comically-experienced cast.

Rating: unrated, drug abuse, sex and sex and profanity about sex

Cast: Malin Åkerman, Jerry O’Connell, Bria Henderson, Erinn Hayes, Ryan Hansen, Dan Ahdoot, Aarti Mann and Rob Corddry

Credits: Scripted and directed by Thom Harp. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:33

“The Pilgrim” is a serene, scenic and soul-searching indie drama that goes adrift as it charts an over-familiar course.

It’s about a workaholic manager at a London construction firm summoned home to the Great Plains after his mother dies. He will come to terms with his relationship with her, his sister and the beautiful topography of South Dakota and Wyoming he left behind.

Jeff Worden is “Will” in London, a guy juggling workers, clients and architects in a job that rides him day and night. Even his live-in London girlfriend (Lou Llobel) takes a back seat to his ever-ringing cell, even on holiday.

“I can’t NOT take calls!”

One call he wishes he’d dodged was from sister Jeannie, telling “Billy,” as she’s always known him, that their mother died. Girlfriend Claire sees his ordained priorities clearly even if he does not.

There’s nothing for it but to fly “home,” to the small ranch his mother owned and to the bitchy divorced rancher sister (Rebekah Stein) who isn’t inclined to cut the guy who got away (from Nebraska, I think) any slack.

“When’s the service?” he wants to know. “We already had it.”

They clash, she shoves the old coffee can with “what’s left of her” in it into his hands, and he Jeeps off to Wyoming, where his estranged mother grew up, to the family homestead where Aunt Kay (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) presides because their mother wanted her ashes scattered where the buffalo roam.

Director/co-writer Joshua Benson makes his debut feature a “Nomadland” postcard of the prairie, the northern plains and Wyoming hill country. But he’s not very good at finding novel or particularly compelling things for our “Look Homeward, Angel” wanderer to do.

Will stops off at a small town (South Dakota, I think) rodeo as Aaron Copland’s classical music warhorse “Rodeo” plays on the soundtrack, soul-searches in a rustic, clapboard roadside church, gets hit on by the hottest cowgirl in a honky tonk and picks up a working class hitchhiker on her way to an open pit mine just to be “helpful.”

The settings embed us in a sense of place, be it London or South Dakota sh–kicker country. The dialogue is sparse and spare, but the trauma that separated mother from son is as trite, tried and true as that enthusiastic blonde honky tonk angel (Emerald Clark) or the solemn, sober and thoroughly adult hitchhiker (Rachel Colwell).

The finale offers no real surprise and bears the hallmarks of “outsider” thinking.

Grace notes aside, it’s funny how often green, big city filmmakers (Benson’s a Brandeis alum who attended a London film school) romanticize the tug of rural values/virtues cliche, ignoring the reality that runs up against this weary narrative trap. People leave for a lot of good reasons.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Jeff Worden, Lou Llobel, Rebekah Stein, Rachel Colwell and Julie Oliver-Touchstone.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joshua Benson. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:34

Guy Ritchie may have — at long last — lost his fastball when it comes to action ensemble pieces with his muse, Jason Statham.

But their fifth collaboration, a “Mission: Somewhat Improbable” caper (action) comedy, has Aubrey Plaza, Hugh Grant, Josh Hartnett and Cary Elwes to pick up the comic slack whilst Statham throws his punches. And rapper Bugzy Malone makes that “competent sidekick” thing look easy in this good-natured “gangs all here” romp that never quite romps, but bounces along well enough to summon up memories of Statham/Ritchie triumphs of the past.

“Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre,” is the ungainly title of this much-delayed COVID era Miramax project that went through STX’s hands before Lionsgate took over and presents it to the public. Right from the start, it parks us squarely in the middle of Guy Ritchieland as Mr. “Unique Set of Skills” Statham sees his latest “rehabilitation retreat” interrupted by his posh oenophile control agent (Cary Elwes).

“Mind if I come in?” “Yes I fu—-‘ DO!”

“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?” “No I’m fu—-‘ NOT.”

Something they’re calling “The Handle” has been violently snatched in South Africa. The world’s most dangerous folks are all abuzz about whatever it is — bomb, formula, program, pee pee tapes.

There’s nothing for it but for Orson Fortune to have a go getting it back. He’s lost some of his team to “the competition.” But with driver/sniper/tough guy J.J. (Malone) and new “coms” and IT specialist Sarah Fidel (Plaza) in tow, and boss/fixer Nathan Jasmine (Elwes) pressed into service in the field, maybe they’ll have a spot of luck, eh wot?

An international arms dealer not-quite-able to hide his Cockney past (Grant) is involved. And as he’s obsessed with this Hollywood action star (Hartnett), there’s nothing for it but to persuade the American to come “play yourself,” Nic Cage style, to lure the villain into letting them all break into his yacht, his villainesque villa and his computer so’s they can get a “handle” on the handle.

The whole thing is a Bond-lite lark, lots of “Mission: Impossible” locales — Morocco, London, Madrid, Antalya, Turkey — and swank settings for parties, heists and Statham to bust out a little of the bald-headed, five o’clock shadow fight choreography that made him rich.

Eddie Marsan plays the head of whatever “Special Branch” signs their checks, Peter Ferdinando is the half step ahead or behind rival secret agent hunting the same “handle,” and Grant is more charming and smitten (It’s Aubrey, we get it.) than ruthless — for much of the film — which tends to lower the stakes.

As “the competition” in this pursuit is possibly in-house, another rival agency within British Intelligence, there’s a real void where a Big Bad Villain ought to be. Ritchie didn’t give us a lethal-enough Grant sidekick that is pretty much required in such films to give them a sense of balance.

But Statham and Grant know their way around a punchline or double entendre and Hartnett can be amusing, playing an action hero forced to be heroic.

“Are you a patriot?” “I don’t vote Republican, if that’s what you mean.”

And Plaza is as reliable a dirty laugh as the movies have these days.

“Please don’t pee on me. I don’t do that anymore.”

The “Operation’s” not vintage Ritchie, not classic Statham. But this “Ruse” pays off in ways that will let fans reminisce about the good old days, when their movies were rougher and you needed bloody subtitles to figure out what those limey hoodlums were saying.

Rating: R, violence, profanity, Aubrey Plaza

Cast: Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza, Bugzy Malone, Josh Hartnett, Cary Elwes and Hugh Grant.

Credits: Directed by Guy Ritchie, scripted by Guy Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies. A Miramax film, a Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:54

Sam Worthington plays an Aussie sniper roped into some violently sketchy business in “Transfusion,” a thriller about a father, a son, a comrade-in-arms and a late wife who keeps lecturing her husband, post mortem, about how he’s “failing” their boy. Rugby star turned actor Matt Nable wrote, directed and co-stars in this meandering, stumbling thriller that reaches for pathos in between fights and shootouts, and never seems to get out of its own way. We meet Corporal Ryan Logan (Worthington) and his sergeant Johnny (Nable) as they’re on a small-scale “retrieval” mission in Iraq. Logan’s a sniper who ends up taking a bullet meant for his mate when they finally get close to their quarry. Back home, Ryan’s got a little boy (Gilbert Bradman) he’s trying to teach manly hunting skills, a beautiful wife (Phoebe Tonkin) and another baby on the way. A car accident while he’s on duty wrecks his perfect life. “Eight years later,” he can’t hold a job, his teen son (Edward Carmody) is in and out of trouble, and his old comrade Johnny needs his help on the one type of “job” both of them might still be good at doing. “One night, in and out, zero rounds.”

What follows a fairly bloody robbery — torture included — is more violent, more disorganized and littered with not-that-easy-to-follow “complications.”

The child’s journey might have been the most interesting one to follow here, taking him from “Will I be brave like you one day?” to the troubled teen he is today.Flashbacks show us the aftermath of that long-ago car crash, the decisions that were made the fates that were sealed.

Worthington’s not a bad actor, handling the fight choreography and the sensitive scenes with his usual skill.

Nable’s got a decent, brawny and weathered screen presence, and he wrote himself an OK supporting part for this, his feature writing and directing debut. It’s just that he can’t stop himself from cluttering up the works with complications, back stories and unsatisfying “resolutions” to this or that, all pointing to the sloppy sentiment you just know will settle in for the finale.

Rating: R for violence, teen drinking and drug use, profanity

Cast: Sam Worthington, Phoebe Tonkin, Gilbert Bradman, Edward Carmody and Matt Nable

Credits: Scripted and directed by Matt Nable. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:46

God, I miss “Drunk History.”

But Hulu talked Mel Brooks into bringing “History of the World” back, which has a similar sketch-comedy spin on history format — without, alas, the hilarious application of alcohol. So I guess this’ll have to do.

“History of the World: Part II” comes over 40 years after the Mel Brooks movie that inspired it. Mel’s here as a co-creator, co-writer, narrator and a buff, digitally de-aged host at one point. And the new eight part series wears his signature shtick — a little song, a little Borsht Belt, a bit of bad taste, and a lot of profanity and amusing vulgarity.

So what do we get for our Hulu, here?

Seth Rogen as a Noah who figures the ark only really needs every breed of lap dog — ever — Taika Waititi as Sigmund Freud, an awkward meeting between Marco Polo (Jake Johson) teaching Kublai Khan (Ronny Chieng) “Marco Polo.”

“It really works better in a pool.”

Wanda Sykes is one of a sea of regulars, many of whom turned up on “Drunk History.” She plays Harriet Tubman as part of a series of sketches about The Civil War, and adorably depicts ground-breaking Black Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in sketches imagined as an homage to the sitcom “227,” complete with Jenifer Lewis and Herself — Marla Gibbs.

There are six sketches per episode, with Mel introducing beauty vlogger the Princess Anastasia (Dove Cameron) or a credit-hogging William Shakespeare (Josh Gad), who channels infamous credit-hog Mel at a “pitch meeting” from his writing “staff.

Nick Kroll, J.B. Smoove and Richard Kind are Apostles in a series of sketches about Black Jesus (Jay Ellis). Smoove, as St. Luke, was born to perform the line “It’s the RO RO,” ancient Hebrew for “po po” back in the day. James Urbaniak makes a pretty funny Roman Centurian.

Running through much of the series, I’d say there’s a laugh or chuckle per episode, and every so often a genuine spit-take. Johnny Knoxville, bearded and appearing in “The Russian Revolution” sketches…

“I’m Rasputin, and this is called…getting stabbed in the back and thrown into the River Neva!”

Toss in the right theme music, and what else could it be? “Jack-Rasp.”

A lot of the ideas play as stale, the effort and strain shows on plenty of others (Kumail Nanjiani pitching “The Kama Sutra” as a sex and soup book). Sometimes, the title is pretty much the whole joke.

“Curb Your Judaism.”

“Drunk History” really did steal this comic conceit’s thunder — familiar faces playing historical figures for laughs, many of them pitching in as co-producers and writers of the sketches. The trouble is, they improved on the worn-out Mel model, something made all too obvious here.

But a series that serves up Nick Kroll and Pamela Adlon and Jack Black (as Stalin) singing “Fiddler on the Revolution” tunes? Sure.

Even all the stuff that doesn’t land is probably even funnier if the viewer’s had a few. We can make it “Drunk History” all by ourselves.

Rating: profanity, sexual gags

Cast: Nick Kroll, Wanda Sykes, Seth Rogen, Dove Cameron, Jack Black, Kumail Nanjiani, Ronny Chieng, Zasie Beetz, Josh Gad, Ike Barinholtz, Taika Waititi, Sam Richardson, J.B. Smoove, Rob Corddry, Sarah Silverman, Tyler James Williams, Johnny Knoxville and Marla Gibbs

Credits: Created by Mel Brooks and David Stassen (“The Mindy Project”), based on the Mel Brooks movie. A Hulu release, March 6.

Running time: eight episodes @28 minutes each

Nobody should watch the latest from Indian filmmaker Lijo Jose Pellissery without at least glancing over a review.

The director of “Churuli” and “Angamaly Diaries” has a reputation for not playing by the rules, for not overexplaining or even explaining at all what he’s up to in his immersive,  Malayalam-language “nonlinear” dramas and dramedies.

“Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam” takes its sweet time getting going, in letting us know that an enterprising fussbudget from Kerala has chartered a tour bus and lodgings for his fellow Christian pilgrims to visit a revered Catholic basilica to the south, in Velanukanni in the state of Tamil Nadu.

The film is even cagey about giving our tour leader’s name — James. We meet him (Mammootty) as he’s pounding on doors, trying to get everyone up and back on the tiny, packed bus for the long drive home. After all that effort, all his fussing on how “late” the tardy travelers are making everyone else, his wife (Ramya Pandian) and son are the last ones to board. Before him.

Settling the bill at the Matha Lodge, he asks the Tamil clerk the meaning of a homily on a poster at the desk, the gist of which is “When you doze off, you die. When you awaken, you are reborn.” Remember that. It’s what this movie is all about.

A lot of the banter on their slow drive home is about the “southern” Tamil folks they’ve been among, with James particularly irritated at the unsophistication, the language barrier and the cuisine. He fumes at the roadside patio diner they visit where the chai tea is sugary to the point of a diabetic coma and the food too spicy, even by the curried-up cuisine standards of the Subcontinent.

Then James dozes off for a stretch, like the rest of this mostly-older tour of neighbors and relatives. He wakes before the others, tells the driver to pull over, and disappears into a field of tall grain. Toilet break?

We follow him into a Tamil village, overhear the sounds of TVs playing movies or the news, see him stop to feed and pet a familiar cow, bend over and pet a dog he knows by name, change his lungi (skirt) from the laundry line, duck into a house where only a blind old woman is awake, listening to TV.

He chats, barges in on a younger woman (Ramya Suvi) and freaks Pookuzhali with his fussing about her letting them run out of tea and groceries, grabs their motorbike and sets off on errands? Rounds? Hunting up breakfast?

Wait. She’s his wife? His “other” wife?

James, who can’t speak and has a faint distaste for all things Tamil is now fluent, likes the food and the over-sugared tea. He’s backslapping and joshing around with the boys, even as the village wakes up and locals start chasing the guy who (in Tamil, with subtitles) “stole our bike!”

Nobody in this village recognizes him save for the blind mother. Nobody stranded on the bus knows what to do once they figure out where he’s gone. Grabbing him and dragging him back isn’t an option. He’s huge. Leaving him is a no go because of all the relatives he has on board for this trip which he planned and possibly even financed.

James, an ordinary, burly, middle-aged Malayam, has woken up as Sundaram, a long-missing husband and father now back at “home” in the Tamil Twilight Zone.

Pellissery is a patient filmmaker, letting long takes immerse us in the sights and sounds of the place before giving us his Big Twist. He’s made passengers-thrown-together-for-a-bus-ride tales before (“Churuli”). Here he uses that as a vehicle for giving us a hint of “The Return of Martin Guerre” (and its Hollywood remake, “Sommersby”) or any number of “body switch” comedies (“Big,” for instance), all packed onto a traveling “show” reminiscent of Fellini — Fellini without the “carnival” or the laughs.

Our co-writer and director gives us time to ponder what the hell is going on here and time to slowly work it out, never quite giving us enough information to piece it all together and start enjoying what we’re seeing.

The much-honored, larger-than-life Mollywood (Malayam-language Indian films) veteran Mammootty is so well-known at home that Anthony Bourdain visited him when he came to learn about the people, the life and cuisine of Kerala on his “No Reservations” series. Mammooty’s done plenty of comedies, and maintains a somewhat light-hearted air in many scenes here, even if the film never quite trips over into laugh-out-loud farce.

Grumpy James gives in to amusing and over-familiar insults with locals, all of whom he seems to know, none of whom remember him. A bit of drinking, a drunken sing-along, lip-synching a long scene of a famous Tamil-language film make him the life of the village bar, even as the family he has imposed on starts to flip out — as one might expect when a “fraudster” comes home and sleeps in the same house as a possibly-widowed (her husband disappeared) woman and her furious college-age daughter.

The Kerala prejudices about Tamils are played for laughs about the food, the crime, etc. A child wanders away from the bus.

“There are CHILD grabbers here,” she’s warned (in Malayam in these scenes). “If they CATCH you they will blind you and make you beg in the streets!”

That should keep the wandering tween close to home.

That Tamil hotel homily is but the first clue about what is happening here. There’s also a closing title that suggests a sort of play within a play that explains the title — “Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam,” which this Bollywood/Mollywood critic translates as “A Mid-Day Slumber,” and yes, even critics sometimes read other critics to get a handle on details no non-native speaker could understand.

Challenging and slice-of-life engrossing it may be, it’s all a tad too dry for my Western tastes. Pellissery gives us all these wonderful comic possibilities, but chooses something more serious and mysterious — that “Twilight Zone” analogy — when this would have worked better and perhaps traveled better as a farce.

Rating: TV-14, drinking, threats of violence

Cast: Mammootty, Ramya Suvi, Ramya Pandian, Ashokan

Credits: Directed by Lijo Jose Pellissery, scripted by S. Hareesh, Lijo Jose Pellissery. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

If you’ve ever bought a pass to an entire film festival just to see the restored Fritz Lang masterpiece “Metropolis” or Abel Gance’s “Napoleon,” ever driven across state lines just to catch the post-restoration re-release of “Lawrence of Arabia,” or signed up to a streaming service to ensure you wouldn’t miss the stunningly-preserved 1964 documentary epic “Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba),” you are the target audience for “Film, the Living Record of Our Memory.”

This broad and sometimes overwhelmingly thorough celebration of the unsung preservationists archiving and restoring the film heritage of countries, continents and the human race should be on any film buff’s radar.

Inés Toharia Terán has made a documentary that dares to mimic the “overwhelmed” experience every archivist, from the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman Museum and the Library of Congress, to the British Film Institute, Cinematique Francais, across Europe and Asia, Africa and South America faces every day.

There’s just so much to take in, so much to hunt down, so many films that’ve already been lost, so much to preserve and present to film lovers, historians, anthropologists and everybody else. Where do you start?

Terán takes us into labs and revisits film history through restored archival footage. A legion of preservations, historians, advocates and famous filmmakers such as Wim Wenders, Fernando Trueba and Costa-Gavras take us through the myriad of problems facing these under-funded and over-worked history detectives. They’re battling to preserve our film heritage, rewriting history as we learn all that earlier generations of historians missed due to what’s been lost. And we see what’s worth saving to that end, not just pop hits but moving images preserving whole populations, eras, cultural trends, famous personages and the forgotten masses.

Nitrate films made before 1950 are mostly lost, some “80-90% of silent films” gone forever, early works by Hitchcock and Melies, Alice Guy are gone, with only slim odds of some new treasure trove turning up and filling in film history.

Early and even established studios recycled silver-coated early film stock for its metal value, Universal, most notoriously. The huge fireproof vaults where studios stored prints and negatives were prone to fires, thanks to the explosion chemistry of early film stock.

With every lost film, there’s more lost history. And what’s been found and restored, generously sampled in “The Living Record of Our Memory,” opens our eyes — home movies of harvests during The Great Depression, the aftermath of vandalism of Jewish businesses in 1930s Vienna, late era Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, to say nothing of the pre-fame appearances of later-famous actors and directors.

“Living Record” celebrates the triumphs of detective work, painstaking restoration and presenting lost history to the masses, often via Youtube, which as more than one archivist notes, “isn’t an archive,” but is great for getting these often entertaining “artifacts” back in front of eyeballs.

Think “the talkies” began with “The Jazz Singer?” Oh no. The cinema’s first great pioneer, Thomas Edison, may not have been able to get his 1913 soundtrack and film image to sync up in all the nickelodeons that showed “Nursery Favorites,” despite experimenting with talking movies since 1894. But preservationists, with the footage and the soundtrack in hand, fixed that and put it on Youtube.

At several points during this eye-opening film, the parameters expand and expectations are upended. The first archivists were collectors who began storing motion picture prints on the scads of different formats, from the countries where the cinema was born — the U.S., France, and Britain — before the end of the 19th century. They set the tone for archivists/completists to follow, private collectors to university and national archives.

More recent preservationists have broadened what must be included in the world’s cinematic heritage, from pre-movie camera magic lantern show materials and dawn of cinema footage to classics, 120 years of Olympic Games footage to home movies, “lost” works by famous film artist, the Hollywood-sized industrial film/educational film industries’ product to even Youtube and TikTok ephemera of today.

Albert Einstein never learned to drive. But as a lark, a studio put him and his wife in one for a little special effects featurette that captures the great thinker at his most whimsical.

The “never knew that existed” visuals are accompanied by a bit of myth-busting. No, “digital archiving” is not the answer to this ongoing problem of deteriorating film stock and lost titles. Digital storage media — none of them — last a fraction as long as celluloid negatives and prints kept in cool, dry, cared-for archives.

The “cloud” isn’t the answer, and gigantic power-sucking servers aren’t either. The pie-in-the-sky possibilities suggested here suggest that the process of “migrating” preserved digital copies of historically significant material will be ongoing as the tech evolves in ever faster cycles.

One of the best arguments for doing this points to the ways previous revivals of interest in various corners of film history have sparked explosions of creativity amongst new generations of filmmakers.

The French New Wave, the L.A. Rebellion, the VHS video revival, the collectible disc mania, streaming, the rise of documentaries shot on cell phones, each has been inspired by renewed interest in the medium’s history, widening who gets to make movies and thus broadened the cinema’s reach.

There’s simply too much in this documentary to summarize without leaving out scores of other access points to film fans, cultural historians, filmmakers and students of the cinema. The one gripe with “Record of Living Memory” is that it’s too broad and tries too hard to cover too many bases.

But if you were an archivist or a film loving film editor, what would you leave out?

“Film, the Living Record of Memory” played a lot of film festivals, and now it’s showing up in cinemas as it moves to streaming. If you love movies and think you know the medium’s history, prepare to be overwhelmed.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Wim Wenders, Costa-Gavras, Ridley Scott, Celine Ruivo, Bryony Dixon, Grover Crisp, Benjamin Chowkwan Ado, Lotte Eisner, Ann Adachi-Tasch, Vittorio Storaro, Te-Ling Chen, Margaret Bodde, Kevin Brownlow and many others

Credits: Scripted and directed by Inés Toharia Terán A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:58

You’d think even Stephen King would be tired of “Children of the Corn” remakes by now. But as he’s having another “moment,” in which everything he ever wrote is potential fodder for a new franchise reboot, here we are with the tenth telling of a version of that tale and another check for the screen rights to his short story in the bank.

Kurt Wimmer, a screenwriter specializing in remakes (“The Thomas Crown Affair,” “Point Break” and “Total Recall”) and a writer-director credited with mostly disasters like “Ultraviolet,” eschews suspense for sadism in this prequel, which tells us how a Nebraska town’s cornfields got custody of its “children” and how the real enemy is Big Ag feeding high fructose corn syrup to a planet of addicts.

If you recognize a few familiar Aussie faces in the cast, most famously Bruce Spence from the original “Mad Max” movies (he plays a preacher), that’s because they turned filmed Down Under and turned Oz into Rylston, Nebraska for this corn dog.

An orphaned boy who spends too much time “in the corn” stalks in and butchers the adults in his (apparently) abusive orphanage in the film’s opening scene. A “hostage situation” develops, and an incompetent attempt to “gas” the place by the local sheriff (Andrew S. Gilbert) kills all the children there, save for one.

Eden (Kate Moyer) survives, and turns the rest of the tweens in town into minions, extras in her production of “Lord of the Flies,” “Lost Boys” and girls punishing kids by having them walk the plank.

The grownups are all worked up over a blight that’s killed much of the corn, thanks to GrowSynth’s GMO corn and breed-specific fertilizer. They want to plow all the fields asunder and take government subsidies in doing that.

One of the older teens in town, Boleyn (Yeah, right.), played by Elena Kampouris of Netflix’s “Jupiter’s Legacy,” dreams up a mock trial in front of a reporter to hold the local rubes — including her Dad (Callan Mulvey) — accountable via “public humiliation” for the brain-drained village’s biggest blunders.

But Eden and her “posse” have other ideas.

Wimmer’s cleverest touch might be having the locals watching a “Twilight Zone” episode about a supernaturally tyrannical child send adults “to the cornfield” (“It’s a Good Life”), acknowledging the font of many of Mr. King’s most marketable horror ideas. But even that’s head-slappingly on-the-nose.

Having a child wonder if they are “making a childish mistake” isn’t the cleverest turn of phrase Wimmer’s ever typed. “It’s never a mistake to try and change the world” isn’t much better.

The challenge here was to build a story around a rightfully, even righteously vengeful child out to punish adults for the world they’re leaving her and her peers, a pitiless Greta Thunberg with a taste for blood.

The writer-director isn’t up to it, giving away the game early, over-explaining almost as early and showing us the Groot of All Evil in too much detail. It’s no use expecting a child actress to save the picture with her performance.

Kampouris, the heroine here, is a pale, willowy presence at the center of the picture, but handcuffed by a thinly-sketched-in character with college on her mind and the skinny girl brass to send her big, tough daddy “for help” while she tries to thwart the psychotic tween and her crew on her own.

Sure.

This “Corn” sat on the shelf during COVID lockdown, but we can’t say it went stale during the delay. This was cynical in conception and rotten in execution long before the masks came out.

Rating: R for violence and bloody images.

Cast: Elena Kampouris, Kate Moyer, Callan Mulvey and Bruce Spence.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kurt Wimmer, based on the short story by Stephen King. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:33

“Call Me Chihiro” is a soapy, static Japanese melodrama that drifts through the months after a sex worker has given up “the life.” It’s true to its source material as it captures the brooding, interior world quality of some of the more subtle manga, the Japanese comic books for adults. But as cinema, it plays as dull, seemingly random sketches that add up to a motion picture that’s more of a still life portrait.

Our title character (Kasumi Arimura) is a beaming bento shop clerk whom we quickly notice is popular with her customers. Very popular. They’re all male, local factory workers who flirt and make crude come-ons, and she smiles and gives as good as she gets.

They knew her in her previous profession, as a “massage parlor” sex worker.

Near as we can tell, this other profession didn’t scar her. As we never get an idea of what exactly drove her into that work via the film’s flashbacks, we accept her as she presents herself — solitary, friendly and kind. A teenage schoolgirl (Hana Toyoshima) takes secret snaps of her cuddling a feral cat, chatting up a bratty little boy (Tetta Shimada), sticking up for, feeding and all but taking in an old homeless man (composer turned actor (Keiichi Suzuki) she sees bullied on the docks of Hiroshima.

Eating with him, we see her fondness for the food of the cranky cook, Nagai (Toshie Negishi) at the bento shop and her taste for the extremely tart pickled plums that are Nagai’s specialty. Chihiro grimaces, and then smiles every time she takes a bite.

And there’s our big fat manga metaphor, film fans. Chihiro has a taste for the bitter, even as she maintains that sweet face.

She allows herself to bond with the teen Suniko and sassy little boy, Makoto, even as figures from her old life — from customers to her transgender sex-worker friend Basil (Van) and her ex-boss, the tropical fish dealer/pimp, played by Lily Franky — wander back into her current one.

She visits the now-blind owner of the bento shop (Jun Fubuki) who hired her in the hospital, chatting her up under another name, hiding their previous connection.

Through it all, we sense a damaged young woman making an effort to connect with people, but lonely and uncertain of her place or anyone’s ability to connect thanks to the scars of her life, most of them left unexplained.

Co-writer/director Rikiya Imaizumi’s (“Sad Tea,” “What is Love?”) adaptation might have had a dreamy quality as he leads us through this woman’s drfting life and implied struggle for happiness and connection. But the blocking and acting is laughably stiff. There’s almost no such thing as a walking and talking shot here, with virtually every encounter a series of stock-still one-shots — Chiriro arguing with Basil, Suniko lashing out at her chilly, remote “certified cook” mother, Matako’s single mom chewing out Chihiro for befriending him.

A movie this long and this still practically begs to be taken more seriously than what transpires on the screen actually merits. What I took from it was a renewed appreciation for Japanese cooking, that “Iron Chef” obsession with food as mere subtext, and a sense that I’d just seen the most PG (It’s rated TV-14, due to a single sex scene) rated film about a sex worker in the history of cinema.

Fans of the manga may get more out of it than the casual viewer just dipping her or his toes in this “Around the World with Netflix” entry. The rest of us are left to scroll through bento online menus to see how much of what we’ve sampled on the screen we can order as take out.

Rating: TV-14, sex, adult subject matter

Cast: Kasumi Arimura, Hana Toyoshima, Tetta Shimada, Van, Ryûya Wakaba. Jun Fubuki and Keiichi Suzuki

Credits: Directed by Rikiya Imaizumi, scripted by Kaori Sawai and Rikiya Imaizumi, based on the manga by Hiroyuki Yasuda. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:12

It was a hit when it was first released and nominated for four Oscars, winning two. But Franco Zeffirelli’s lavish, period-perfect and bracingly young “Romeo and Juliet” wasn’t universally loved.

Critics decried its “bowdlerized” Shakespeare, the dewy inexperience of its teenaged leads.

The first filmed “Romeo and Juliet” to dare to cast truly age-appropriate leads, filmed in sunny Tuscany (not Verona, in Veneto) with a colorful Medieval setting, was a bracing, breathless take on a play long served up by overaged stage actors. As such, it is a movie whose luster grows with the passage of time.

Franco Zeffirelli became the official heir to Laurence Olivier’s lifelong passion for popularizing Shakespeare on the big screen (a passion he shared with Orson Welles). Olivier passed the baton by giving the film its narration, and dubbed a couple of voices in the soundtrack for Zeffirelli, who had just filmed a boozy, bawdy, brawny and sexy “Taming of the Shrew” with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.

In the years that followed, others reconnected the play with the heightened emotions and headstrong, limited-life-experience stakes of youth in the first blush of love. Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” moved the violence and heat to a modern setting with some success. But the Italian creator of operatic spectacles on stage and screen – the Mel Gibson “Hamlet,” a decent “Jane Eyre,” the weeper remake “The Champ” and “Endless Love” were his — reset the tone and the bar for Shakespeare adaptations to follow with this lush, romantic and violent melodrama.

Watching it now, with its bloody Montague and Capulet brawls on cobblestone streets inside an old, stone-walled city, its stunning Oscar winning costumes and glorious Oscar-winning cinematography, you can see that bar rising, with only the big screen Shakespeares of Kenneth Branagh (“Henry V” and “Much Ado About Nothing” particularly) challenging this one in terms of sheer beauty and lived-in realism.

It’s studied and polished and yet feels impulsive, with the characters swept along by a story driven by hormones and ancient grudges beyond the control of the mere mortals, especially our love-at-first-sight lovers.

How young were Hussey and Whiting? Fifteen and sixteen. The two stars, whose ensuing careers didn’t measure up to this heady head-start, filed suit about being sexually exploited (the film has a lone scene of barely-glimpsed nudity) in January, 55 years after its release.

The title characters excuse the inexperience of the leads, who give this film its enthusiasm and breathlessness. But acting careers were made, then and now, by the showy violence of Tybalt. Young Orson Welles made his name on the stage in the part of the sword-fighting, feud-fueling hothead of the Capulet clan. Michael York, tanned and dark and dangerous here, explodes off the screen in a performance of such fencing fury that he found himself all but typecast for a while.

We should all be so lucky as to be “cast” as a swordsman in Richard Lester’s glorious “Three Musketeers” movies.

Tybalt’s the play’s purest punk, the swordsman who would rather fight than exchange witticisms with his Montague counterpart, the scalding, tipsy Mercutio (the wonderful John McEnery).

“Consort? What, dost thou make us minstrels? If thou makes us minstrels, look to hear nothing but discords. Here’s my fiddlestick!”

Milo O’Shea brings a hint of Irish wit and soul, and some priestly CYA fear, to Friar Laurence.

And Pat Heywood‘s effusive, doting turn as Juliet’s nurse amuses, charms and touches the heart.

Yes, the extensive dialogue of the stagebound play has been trimmed. Thank heavens. We’ve all seen what the unexpurgated — almost every word from every preserved “version” of a Shakespeare script — looks and sounds like, thanks to Branagh’s overly-faithful “Hamlet.”

The action is chaotic and the settings lend so much “as it happened” authenticity to everything that no Romeo since should dare climb anything but a real Italian tree to reach that balcony.

“But soft; what light through yonder window breaks? It is my lady! O, it is my love. O that she knew she were.”

There have been a few screen “Romeo and Juliets” since Zeffirelli’s, but the one or two that took a chance at being period pieces haven’t come close to this one. Most filmmakers have recognized that its a comparison they don’t want to risk, that its safer to attempt this timeless tale in verse in modern settings. But even Baz Luhrmann had trouble giving Leo and Claire the heedless, hormonal and heartbreaking hunger of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1960s film, the gold standard this “tale of woe,” and as Olivier hoped, a time-tested film testament of the timelessness of the Immortal Bard.

Rating: PG, violence, a moment of nudity involving teens

Cast: Leonard Whiting, Olivia Hussey, Michael York, John McEnery, Pat Heywood and Milo O’Shea, narrated by Laurence Olivier.

Credits: Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, scripted by Franco Brusati, Masolino D’Amico and Franco Zeffirelli, adapted from the play by William Shakespeare. A Paramount release on Amazon, Tubi and PosiTV.

Running time: 2:18