Movie Nation

“Upgraded” is an almost-frothy rom-com built on a “Devil Wears Prada” framework.

A plucky intern at an auction house deals with a tyrannical boss and a new love on a trip to London where she tries to make it in a pretentious world of prestige art sales.

It’s a star vehicle for Miss “Plucky,” played by Camila Mendes (“Riverdale”). So of course Oscar winner Marisa Tomei and Oscar nominee Lena Olin steal it from her.

Fun turns by Anythony Head as a tipsy British painter and Andrew Schultz as a grumpy/mouthy New York brother-in-law and some properly bitchy “mean girl” colleagues (Fola Evans-Akingbola and Rachel Matthews) and snappy banter are among its recommendations.

“Thank you for doing the bare minumum that this job requires.” “A degree in art history is actually very useful!”

“What happened to your manners, ‘Downton Abbey?'” “More of a ‘Bridgerton’ man, myself.”

Ana (Mendes) is a Tampa native struggling to get through an internship with a top art auction house in New York when luck and initiative earn her a big break — a London trip and chance to be “third assistant” to the “sociopathic perfectionist” Claire (Tomei), who slings a Euro-bourgeois accent even though, rumor has it, she’s “from Minnetonka, Minnesota.”

Events conspire to earn lowly Ana an “upgrade” to first class, and that’s how she bumps into (literally) posh Will (Archie Renaux of “The Other Zoey” and “Best Beer Run Ever”).

That’s how she meets his “rapidly aging” model/actress mom (Olin), falls in with artist Julius (Head) and generally entangles herself in a big “hush hush” auction of modernist masterworks.

The character’s struggles are mild, with little if any of that “Prada” edge. Mendes is a pleasant and pretty leading lady who looks ten years younger than she is, with just enough chemistry with Renaux to achieve “bare minimum the job requires” status.

And while actress turned director Carlson Young keeps the trains and planes running (slowly) on time, she doesn’t give us a single scene that pops, or production design that ever comes across as upscale, only little flashes of wit and fun from the veterans in the cast, who are better than the material.

She’s managed a slick and shiny wish-fulfillment fantasy that is strictly downmarket — Hallmark movie chic.

Rating: R, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Camila Mendes, Archie Renaux, Lena Olin, Anthony Head, Rachel Matthews, Fola Evans-Akingbola, Aimee Carrero, Andrew Schultz, Thomas Kretschmann and Marisa Tomei

Credits: Directed by Carlson Young, scripted by Christine Lenig, Justin Matthews and Luke Spencer Roberts. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:45

There’s no reinventing the wheel when it comes to movies about addiction. We’re all familiar with the “steps” in screenplays that mimic “stages of grief” more than AA’s famous “twelve steps.”

Loved ones are tested and abused, impulses are indulged, weaknesses are exposed, pitied and loathed. Relapses, self-destructive lashing out, a stop for a “meeting,” resistance and either surrender “to a higher power” or to getting help or simply giving in to that addiction that is going to kill you, these are the tropes of movies about the subject, and “Bleeding Love” can’t avoid them.

But this story of a long-estranged father taking the 20 year-old he barely knows any more from San Diego to Sante Fe is wrapped in a poignance that isn’t hard to embrace. Whatever familiar situations we see a father (Ewan McGregor) experience with his trainwreck daughter (Clara McGregor) resonate in ways that overwhelm any urge to give this lightweight drama a “trite” dismissal.

We can attribute that to the redemptive and sometimes painfully helpless feeling of such stories. But actors and “baggage” play their part here, as well. Yes, Clara McGregor is a pretty “nepo baby.” I’d say what we recall about what dad Ewan put their family through trumps that, in this case, and gives this familiar story a forgiving tone that lifts it above that over-familiarity.

We meet them in dad’s battered ’80s Chevy Sierra pickup, the one with a “Highlands” landscaping logo on the side. He’s in his 40s, still with a hint of a Scots accent, and he’s driving his damaged 20 year-old daughter to rehab.

All his “You know I’ve been there” sympathy and “I was acting like a child, but I HAD a child” excuses fall on deaf ears. The daughter is dismissive, sneaky, quick to steal a drink from a fellow diner’s glass, shoplift bottles from a convenience store and make any rash decision that will get her that next buzz.

Even “You have no idea how lucky you are to be alive” doesn’t move her. Because she is. She OD’d the day before. He got the call from his ex. And since many of her earliest childhood memories are of her ever-entertaining father, blitzed and driving, tripping at a ball game or just “fun” in ways that suggest chemical assistance, he figures it’s time he took on this “make amends” step in his own life.

Screenwriter Ruby Caster turned this “reunion on the way to rehab” tale into a road picture, and director Emma Westenberg (“Stranger’s Arms”) keeps the collection of odd, funny, revealing and just plain random encounters short, biting and occasionaly sweet as we lumber down that long and well-worn highway.

A breakdown? Sure? Wildly eccentric tow-truck driver (Kim Zimmer)? OK. An impromptu birthday-party/truck-repair session, coming on to the drugs and booze-proving host of the party (Jake Weary), taking a forbidden after hours dip at a dumpy motel pool and indulging a death-by-chocolate-and-whipped-cream pancake breakfast the way the daughter liked them as a child are among the waypoints.

Will a lifetime of big and bigger mistakes set up the Biggest Mistake of All? Maybe. But not until after the father-daughter sing-along to the film’s title tune, “Bleeding Love” by Leona Lewis.

“I keep bleeding, keep keep bleeding love…”

Nothing here comes as much of a surprise, even the most “random” encounter of them all. Dad is a much more accomplished, subtle and expressive actor than his daughter, and the experience gap shows, here and there.

But the right emotional buttons are punched, enough of them at just the right moment for “Bleeding Love” to not bleed out. It plays like 12 step cinematic comfort food, and if you’re drawn to it and find yourself enjoying it, no “making amends” is necessary.

Rating: unrated, drug addiction, smoking, profanity

Cast: Ewan McGregor and Clara McGregor, Kim Zimmer and Jake Weary

Credits: Directed by Emma Westenberg, scripted by Ruby Caster. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:41

She’s an easy character for anybody who never got too deep into superhero comics to ignore. But when you’re monetizing your assetts at a film production company, no corner of the Spiderverse can be left unexplored.

So Sony’s piece of the Marvel pie, “Madame Web,” was a done deal as soon as that first mediocre (at best) “Venom” movie came out.

They held “Madame Web” from release until Valentine’s Day, in the generally slow month of February, and have suppressed reviews until the last minute.

But the trailers aren’t bad and Dakota Johnson is a pretty big name to shove into that part. Let’s see if it worked out. I hope, for the sake of the nation’s cinemas, it does.

(Seen it. Hated it. My review is linked here.)

Scripted by committee, performed in a nearly-indecipherable Jamaican patois and overseen by his legacy-protecting son Ziggy Marley, you knew the Bob Marley biopic “One Love” was going to have its problems and fall short of the mark in some important ways.

Hell, it points us towards a climactic concert and then ends — abruptly — just as that show is cranking up.

And if Paramount had thought “Bob Marley: One Love” was a triumph, they’d have released it during awards season and pushed to make it an Oscar contender.

But every movie is no more or less than what you, the viewer, take into it. And if this isn’t the musical bio pic we would have hoped this truly larger than life figure deserved, it is perfectly serviceable. The performances ensure that there’s a charismatic, recognizably-human icon at its center, flawed and passionate and downright messianic at times.

And Kingsley Ben-Adir‘s performance in the title role towers above the film surrounding him, as does Lashana Lynch‘s driven, layered turn as Bob’s soulmate, backup singer and conscience — Rita Marley.

Yes, that’s producer Ziggy Marley’s sanitizing influence on the film showing. When Dad had more illegitimate children than those born in or adopted into marriage, you could see why a musician-son would want to “supervise” the way Dad is depicted.

The misshapen script that “King Richard” director Reinaldo Marcus Green wrestles with — he is one of four credited screenwriters — bounces around the Jamaica torn by political strife in the mid-’70s, back to Bob’s childhood and memories of his mother and the white colonialist father he never knew, and into the superstardom that had him vowing to use his popularity to bring unity to Jamaica.

Oh, and the creation of his seminal LP “Exodus” is touched on, as is his fervent desire, despite management’s efforts to cash in with richer audienes, to perform in Africa.

Ben-Adir sometimes sings and picks out tunes, the origins of “Exodus,” “Three Little Birds” (“Don’t Worry about a Thing”), etc., and sometimes lip-syncs to Marley’s distinctive Rastafarian reggae wail.

He utterly masters the physicality of the man, a lithe, athletic Rastafarian ganga smoker who sought God in daily life throught music and grooved to a rhythm all his own.

The funniest line in the film speaks to that most musical English patois, Jamaican, which is both understandable and indecipherable and in need of subtitles much of the time.

“I’m sorry, say again?”

Ben-Adir and Lynch have no trouble getting across the meaning of their scenes — arguments, debates, accusations and professions of love. But a lot of the words are lost much of the time.

“Sometimes, da messenger become de message,” Rita tells him, and considering how popular he was, far and wide, by the moment of his untimely death at 36, we get it.

All along, Bob is committed to “mekk a rekkod dot wan steenk up de place.” Not that he ever did.

Marley’s “team” is a faction of hard-driving bottom-liner Brits (James Norton) and Americans (Michael Gandolfini) and a trusted Jamaican road manager who might be bribable (Anthony Welsh).

Major names from his story — early bandmates, etc. — are given short shrift. Some of the rockers who flocked to him — Jagger and Joe Strummer among them — are glimpsed.

It’s a film of compromises, with many of those working against giving us a complete portrait of the man beyond the legend. But it’s also immersive, letting us see the ferment that created him, the Rastafarianism that shaped his worldview and the flawed people who supported him and were supported by him.

And through all this messiness, something like the man emerges, the music endures — we see songs born — and a true fan is sure to find the pearls to cling to amidst everything that gets lost in debates and outright historical revisionism.

Lynch (“The Woman King”) is a marvel and Ben-Adir (“One Night in Miami”) gives a committed, career-defining performance at the heart of this sometimes stumbling musical maelstrom.

For some of us, that’s going to be enough. Because while a great Bob Marley documentary is already out there, this may be the one time a big studio picture about his life and music is attempted. Even if it falls short of hopes, it’s still worth taking in, if only for the memories — fond and emotional — his name and his music still engender.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, marijuana use and smoking throughout and some profanity.

Cast: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Lashana Lynch, James Norton, Anthony Welsh, Michael Gandolfini, Quan-Dajai Henriques and Nia Ashi.

Credits: Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, scripted by Terrence Winter, Frank E. Flowers, Zach Baylin and Reinaldo Marcus Green. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:44

Impressive effects and a general light-hearted tone give “Dr. Cheon and the Lost Talisman,” a Korean sword, sorcery and ghost-busting action comedy, a fighting chance.

It doesn’t quite come off as it cannot avoid the trap of so many comic (web comic in this case) adaptations, over-emphasizing the brawls over the laughs. But genre fans might find enough in it to draw them in.

The plot gets lost in a lot of mumbo jumbo about “Seolgyeong,” talismans installed by shamans to keep demons locked away in the netherlife. So the makings of a pretty good “scammer” ghost buster who discovers there are real ghosts to bust, and that he knows how to do it, are kind of discarded in a jaunty-but-not-quite-jaunty-enough comic thriller.

The title character is given a nice swagger by Korean star Gang Dong-won (“Peninsula”). Dr. Cheon is a trained psychotherapist given to analyzing Korean culture via observations from the American-published Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM.

Korea, Dr. Cheon rationalizes to Apprentice Kang (Lee Dong’hwi), suffers from two culture-related mental maladies — “anger syndrome” and “ancestral possession.”

Well, he is quoting from DSM-4, we note, when DWM-5 may not buy into the same societal illnesses.

Dr. Cheon is a scammer who tells his apprentice and anybody else who questions his gadget trickery and flim-flammery that he’s saving these “subjects” from blowing bigger bucks on fighting their delusions about the undead.

He’s just busting the “ghosts” inside their head.

Dr. Cheon wears this cute little bell on a bracelet that “never rings,” one that is designed to sense the presence of the supernatural. “The Lost Talisman” is the quest and fight for his life that the Doc takes on, for others, on the day that damned bell finally rings.

There’s some demonic shaman (Huh Joon-ho of “Escape from Mogadishu”) who is manipulating hapless victims into fighting to break a talisman and wreak havoc upon the real world, so Dr. Cheon must use this busted sword that must be reforged to save possessed victims, young and old, from this menace from beyond.

Or something like that.

Esom plays a haunted, monied woman who sees dead people who throws cash at the ghostbusters to save a child. Her little sister?

The threads of the plot are a tad untidy and more difficult to follow than is necessary. Gang Dong-won as “The Broken Sword-Wielder” doesn’t give us much in the nature of surprise, shock and horror at the good doctor’s discovery that these beasts he’s banishing really exist, and that he has ties to them going back to his childhood, and earlier generations of his family.

There’s no learning curve in his battling the monstrous entities he now realizes are real. I guess remembering all the folk traditions and everything he’s faked over the years is enough.

I’m leery of any picture that puts too much emphasis on the final battle. Here, psychotronic effects and grenade launchers are used in a fight the infightable struggle in a gloriously gloomy cave. And that eats up the entire third act.

Perhaps this seemed more coherent in Korea. Unlike kimchi, Kias, K-pop and other Korean cinema, “Dr. Cheon” just doesn’t travel well.

Rating: unrated, lots of violence

Cast: Gang Dong-won, Huh Joon-ho, Esom, Lee Dong-hwi and Kim Song-hoo.

Credits: Directed by Kim Seong-sik, scripted by Kang Hye-jung, based on a web comic by Huretsha and Kim Hong-Tae. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:38

Cynthia Erivo is the witch Elphaba, Arianna Grande is Glinda the “Good Witch,” with Michelle Yeoh, and Jeff Goldblum.

No Dorothys are necessary in this version of Mr. Baum’s Oz, remember.

Jon M. Chu of “In the Heights” and “Crazy Rich Asians” and a dance pic or two and “Now You See Me 2,” directs what looks to be a “Wonka” sized holiday spectacle, and just the first half (“Part One”) of the story.

Thanksgiving.

“Ashes” is a slick and sleek Turkish thriller about a woman who falls in love with an unpublished book, a romance based in reality but enveloped in romance novel fantasy.

The latest from filmmaker Erdem Tepegöz (“In the Shadows”) begins with promise, throws in a little sexual heat, and reaches a violent and faintly cryptic climax. But it’s a melodrama that grinds its gears through the middle acts as the dull competes with the far-fetched, muting the story’s impact as it tumbles into boredom.

Gökçe (Funda Eryigit) is a happily-married upper middle-class mother of one, a wife whose publisher husband Kenan (Mehmet Günsür) utterly depends on her evaluations of manuscripts worth publishing as novels.

All is right in Gökçe’s world, save for the occasional botched delivery at her tony Nisantisi (Istanbul) neighborhood boutique. And then she picks up this battered proof with the word “Ashes” (Kül) on the cover.

Narrated in a woman’s voice, it is about a carpenter who “changes the live of people whose path he crosses,” perhaps for the better. Then again, maybe not. The mysterious “M” she writes about, and his mysterious “tower” that opens up the way the narrator sees the city, draws Gökçe in.

Next thing Gökçe knows, she’s tracking down a bakery mentioned in the book. And when that turns out to be a real location in the more hardscrabble Balat district, she starts looking for this “M.”

Lo and behold, she finds a furniture maker who matches the description. “Ali,” he goes by. But his first name is Metin (Alperen Duymaz). He is bearded, sexy and grumpy and apparently in demand. She commissions him to make a mirror for her shop, and that throws them together.

She mentions nothing of the book she is evaluating, and by the time she’s figured out this “tower” and “view,” we realize what Gökçe apparently does not.This guy is catnip, and she’s under his spell and soon will be under and over his sheets, etc.

Tepegöz, working from an Erdi Isik script, visualizes scenes from the faintly purplish prose of the book “Ashes” using a turn-to-ashes/materialize-from-ashes effect to let us see his Gökçe is watching this supposedly fictional book become real via locations and a flesh-and-blood “M.”

But who wrote the book, and what conclusions does the author reach about the irresistible “M?” 

The performances have enough heat to make the chemistry convincing, even if we never get a hint of guilt or fear of discovery from our straying heroine. The revealing wardrobe and cliched violent argument that turns to vigorous sex isn’t enough to make us forget the full life and loving marriage she has thrown over for a case of “fictophilia,” falling in love with a character from a book.

The arguments seem more pre-ordained than impulsive and in-the-moment. Eryigit doesn’t give us much in the way of “conflicted” in this urbane, high-class boutique-owner who tumbles into slumming with a carpenter.

And the movie’s mystery and hint of magical realism are tossed aside in a flurry of prosaic over-explaining that tends to let the ashes, so carefully swirled into the air in the opening act, settle in the most predictably pedestrian places by the finale.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Funda Eryigit, Alperen Duymaz and Mehmet Günsür

Credits: Directed by Erdem Tepegöz, scripted by
Erdi Isik. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

Your short flight from LAX to Cabo San Lucas goes down. Way down.

You’re trapped in an air pocket in the fuselage some distance below the surface. There are sharks outside, a limited air supply inside, and help may or may not get there “in time.”

What do you do?

That’s the winning premise of the thriller “No Way Up,” a picture that presents us with a survivable air crash scenario and a grim dilemma and invites the cast of “survivors” and the viewer to work the problem.

This disaster movie, from some of the people who made the “47 Meters Down” pictures (not the writers or directors), has a little suspense but very little sense of urgency, which considering the prospects of the half dozen or so folks trapped, is a problem. Lacking much in the way of pace or panic, if just sort of flounders.

Sophie McIntosh is Ava, the fetching daughter of a California governor running for re-election. She’s met two college friends (Jeremias Armoore, Will Attenborough) for a little vacation-reunion in Cabo San Lucas.

What can go wrong? Well, as she’s the daughter of a famous person, lots of things. Which is why Dad’s go-to retired bodyguard (Colm Meaney) comes along as a “babysitter.”

We have just enough time to get acquainted with the gay flight attendant (Manuel Pacifo), the elderly couple (Phyllis Logan and James Carroll Jordan) taking their 10 year-old British granddaughter (Grace Nettles) to their condo in Cabo when the plane goes down.

Ava’s “I just like having you around” foreshadowing pays off as Brandon (Meaney) quickle sizes up the situation, their options and possible rescue.

“Look for anybody getting drousy,” he tells Ava as he heads off to rummage for anything useful in the totally-submerged plane. That’s the give-away that they’re running out of air. He doesn’t suggest tapping on the hull, the time-honored way of letting survivors of a sinking know there’s life below. And no, his assessment of how “stable” the plane teetering on an undersea shelf is cannot be right.

But nobody figures on the instant arrival of sharks looking for snacks.

Most everything in this lumbering thriller, scripted by producer-turned-producer/screenwriter Andy Mayson and directed by Claudio Fäh, the Swiss director of a couple of lesser “Sniper” sequels and “Northmen: A Viking Saga,” is predictable down to the timing of what happens and when.

But the underwater photography is striking, the sinking plane set convincing and a few of the jolts work.

The performances may be uneven — with old pros Meaney and “Downton Abbey” vet Logan giving fair value and McIntosh managing the proper privileged-but-proves-to-be-plucky heroine.

As for everybody else, this can’t have been the most comfortable set to spend hours and hours on, and a little of that claustrophia makes it into the performances. Still, “lack of urgency” trumps that, and that is created through editing for pace. If “No Way Up” goes down for the third time, that’s not on the actors.

Rating: R, violence, profanity, a harrowing plane crash and gruesome shark attacks

Cast: Sophie McIntosh, Jeremias Amoore, Manuel Pacific, Will Attenborough, Grace Nettle, Phyllis Logan and Colm Meaney.

Credits: Directed by Claudio Fäh, scripted by Andy Mayson. An RLJE film, an IFC release.

Running time: 1:30

A truly transcendent figure is music, an iconic spokesman for the oppressed whoever and where they might be, and a guy who was a lot more than his mellow, uplifting persona.

I had higher hopes for this, a holiday rollout and perhaps awards consideration. Paramount put a damper on such expectations by pushing it into a cinema dead zone. But with theaters starved for new releases and audiences dying to see something fresh, maybe it’ll be a hit.

“Bob Marley: One Love” opens Valentine’s Day, Wednesday.

July 26.

Angus MacFadyen classes up this tale of “Marvel Jesus.” Looks fun, and yeah they’re out of ideas.