Movie Nation

Broadly speaking, China’s World War II began before anybody else’s, and ended with the conclusion of the long off-and-on Chinese Civil War that preceded it and postdated it.

Any trip down the rabbit hole of the various Sino-Japanese wars, considered a sideshow of the global conflagration by Westerners, is going to be messy and feature various alliances, “war lords” as war leaders, collaborators and the Japanese trying to swallow a divided nation many times their size through conquest, treachery and outright barbarism.

As China’s military record in the field was nothing to wave a big red flag over, combat movies from a Chinese perspective are more propagandistic fantasies than anything truly historic — even the ones that don’t feature Bruce Willis. Safer ground for filmmakers seems to be tales of espionage, intrigue and resistance.

“Cliff Walkers” and “The Message” went that route, and that’s where writer-director Er Cheng takes his moody, murky thriller “Hidden Blade.”

It tells the story of the war years through the eyes of spies who work for the the nationalist Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek, the collaborationist “We just want peace” government of “President” Wang Jingwei and the communists, whom everyone else — occupiers and resisters — figures are the “real” threat.

There’s an “it’s never too late to change sides” ethos among most, and that even goes for the cynical Shanghai-based Japanese intelligence officer (Hiroyuki Mori) who’d rather be in the first conquered corner of China, Manchuria, “the fortress” against Soviet invasion, or so the Japanese believed at the time.

It’s interesting that Cheng, who did the gangland WWII tale “The Wasted Times,” takes pains to show the Japanese point of view, the “How do you win a war without a goal?” realization of some who figure their island empire has bitten off more than it can chew in its “land war in Asia” blunder.

But “Hidden Blade” has many characters and points of view, from sketched-in “honey trap” female spies ( Xun Zhou, Jingyi Zhang, Shuying Jiang) to government functionaries, Japanese troops in the field committing atrocities and a bomber co-pilot who keeps his dog, “Roosevelt,” in the cockpit with him on missions.

Cheng’s narrative flips back and forth in time, from early war interrogations to late conflict walks along a river delta littered with the corpses of Japanese invaders. So it’s a little hard to follow thanks to his needlessly untidy storytelling.

It still immerses us in uncertain, nerve-wracking times as we follow well-dressed and well-fed city spies, officers and officials down the corrupt, back-stabbing road towards communism’s triumph. And it features just enough action, including a couple of the most savage brawls in recent screen history, to deserve its “war movie” label.

Hong Kong acting legend Tony Leung (“In the Mood for Love,” “Red Cliff,” “Chungking Express”) is Mr. He, a smiling, silky-smooth debriefer/interrogator who surfs the shifting currents of China’s struggle but sees the safest ground in the employ of the collaborationist Wang regime.

But even the ruthless Mr. He has his blind spot. Yes, it involves a woman assassin (Xun Zhou) working for the communists.

Sino-Korean boy-bandmate and TV actor Yibo Wang gives a breakout performance as the brooding Mr. Ye, an agent so pretty that our first and second impressions are that he’s romantically involved with his partner and constant dinner companion Mr. Tang (Chengpeng Dong). But Ye also has a woman he is trying to save from this slaughter.

The women are this spy war’s philosophers, intoning truisms that hold for any civil war or violent political divide.

“It’s easy to forgive an enemy, impossible to forgive a friend.”

Real history skips back and forth underneath this ebbing and flowing narrative, with the Japanese in China certain that they’re about to join Germany in invading the U.S.S.R. (Their dictatorship was most terrified of a war with Russia, throwing Toyota-tanks against real armor. But Stalin was also obsessed with a Japanese stab in the back.). There are scenes that capture the round-up of foreigners in Shanghai depicted in “Empire of the Sun,” mentions of The Rape of Nanking, an anti-spy raid that goes wrong and an everyday atrocity in the countryside, summary executions and a mass “punishment” of locals accused of fouling a well.

They are buried alive as a concrete foundation is poured for a new grain elevator.

As you can gather, there’s a lot to get in and a lot to take in, and Cheng’s storytelling doesn’t make absorbing it any easier. You’d think he watched “Inglorious Bastards” a few too many times, the way he stages every interrogation as a long string of soliloquies, characters giving monologues to each other that pass for conversation.

But Leung is terrific, and Wang holds his own and dazzles in a couple of epic fights. The women characters are secondary, but there’s room to play around with their degrees of fanaticism. The Japanese officer Watanabe (Mori) is almost sympathetic thanks his delusions and disillusionment. Watch how he sees a raid go wrong and gets out of his car and pulls out his samurai sword and to salvage it. Listen to how he takes the news that a Japanese prince has been assassinated on duty in China.

“I guess I’ll have to disembowel myself to apologize.”

I found the whole “Hidden Blade” rather less satisfying than its individual component parts. The many characters, myriad plot points and points of view and added complications with the narrative timeline clutter things up.

But scene after immaculately-realized, quietly-menacing scene pays off. The violence is shocking even when it’s not sudden and the messaging is less heavy-handed than typical Chinese fare set during WWII. Whatever went wrong for China on the battlefield, the secretive men and women hiding their politics and taking the measure of all their many enemies were a real success story, even if they’d never recognize the oligarchical, class-conscious “People’s Republic” of today.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Tony Leung, Yibo Wang, Xun Zhou, Jingyi Zhang, Shuying Jiang and Hiroyuki Mori.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Er Cheng. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:10

A melancholy Chinese romance of love-unconfessed and much else left unsaid, writer-director Luyi Zhang’s “Yanagawa” takes its title from its Japanese setting. But that title, like the film’s “love triangle that might be a quadrangle,” is somewhat ironic.

The canal-laced seaside city described as “The Venice of Japan” didn’t dazzle the director of “The Quiet Dream.” He sees what we see — a quiet, working class water town that just happens to have sturdy, workboat-style gondolas poled by gondoliers through a water world more like Thailand than the Italian coast.

And memories of teenaged crushes don’t stand up to the film’s scrutiny as we hang out with two brothers who follow that girl who left them and Beijing behind twenty years before to this Rising Sun Venice.

We meet Li Dong (Luyi Zhang) just as he’s breaking Chinese custom and decorum, bumming a smoke off a lady outside of the Beijing U. hospital, over-sharing by admitting he’s just learned he has “Cancer, stage four” which chases her away in a flash.

That’s almost the last big “share” that Li Dong undertakes as the introvert in this quiet drama. He doesn’t tell his arrogant, boorish brother, Li Chun (Bai Qing Xin), even over drinks.

Married-and-over-it Li Chun is a bit of a bully, and a conversation hog. He wonders what’s up with his brother, who deflects by deciding that the house he inherited from their task-master dad should go to the Li Chun and his family.

They’re a family that is only comfortable leaving things unsaid and leaving out details of this “inheritance” and reasons for it. Any complaints they have about each other, the culture and the world are answered with their father’s pet expression — “Whatever happened to morality?”

Speaking of that, Li Dong says, we should go away for a few days, head over to Yanagawa to see the sights and see if they can locate the lovely Liu Chuan, whom the never-married Li Dong has been hunting down and pining for.

She’s a singer there. And whatever crush he and his brother shared over her 20 years before, he’s wondering if she might have been the only girl he ever loved.

To this end, Li Dong has learned Japanese. Li Chun sets the tone for their trip by marveling at this, and ridiculing it. His constant put-downs betray his insecurity. And matters only get worse when they go into the bar where Chuan sings breathy, wistful torch songs to the somewhat appreciative Japanese audience.

Perhaps the audience is there for the same reason as the brothers. Liu Chuan (Ni Ni) is a long-haired beauty in her late ’30s, never married and trilingual since she spent time in London and settled in Japan. She finishes a tune, walks up to their table and sits down as if they never parted.

A dynamic is re-established. Nerdy Dong is mostly silent, save for the odd shy remark about how things were (at least in his imagination) when they were younger. Chun dominates the conversation, openly comes-on and flirts, married-or-not, a cocky, self-assured vulgarian whom Liu Chuan either indulges in the most coarse way, or brushes off.

Chun flirts with xenophobia, mocking all things Japanese and any Japanese customs his brother or the woman he still calls “Chuan’er” abide by. The world knows a stereotypical Japanese tourist and the classic “ugly American” image abroad. Chun is a modern traveling stereotype himself, a brash Chinese blow-hard.

Dong just tries to stay in the conversation and not give away his morbid secret.

And if that’s not romantically complicated enough, the Japanese landlord who rents the siblings a room (Sôsuke Ikematsu) also has a crush on Chuan, but even he has trouble expressing that as they converse in his second language, her third — English.

Lu Zahng, few of whose films (“Chingqing” and “Scenery”) have played in North America, doesn’t deliver much in the way of big emotions or major revelations here.

“I really like you” (in subtitled Mandarin “Pekingese” or Japanese, or English) is about as open as these crazy repressed Asians get.

There’s a bit going on beneath the surface, and perhaps more going on with Liu Chuan than either of the three men pursuing her pick up on.

Is she sleeping around? Is she even interested in any of them?

That’s not altogether clear, nor is the fact that Chuan realizes she’s met the teen daughter of her youngest suitor, Nakayama (Ikematsu).

So much is left hanging, unsaid or unresolved, even in the finale.

But “Yangawa” still makes for a fascinating Asian variation of cultures and ideas of love and romance in collision, even if it’s no “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

Rating: unrated, adult situations

Cast: Ni Ni, Luyi Zhang, Bai Qing Xin and Sôsuke Ikematsu

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lu Zhang. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:52

“Marlowe” is a vamp, a bunch of 60somethings playacting hardboiled 40somethings. I’m OK with that, for obvious reasons.

The light isn’t right. This is the first filmed-version of Raymond Chandler’s famed LA gumshoe shot in Barcelona and Dublin, which explains that.

Characters don’t talk like real people, but the way we wish real people talked — flinty, florid fulminations over “assignations” with “femme fatales,” missing persons, gangsters, cops and others all up and down the spectrum of corruption.

“I’m more harmless than I look.”

“I’m sorry that it was ultimately uninteresting to talk to you.”

“When you’re getting to be an old man, it’s OK to get out alive.”

And for once, Philip Marlowe is forced to consider the first person to have that famous surname, the playwright who scribbled “Dr. Faustus.”

“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,” an Angelino recites upon meeting “the big man.”

“That was his one good line,” Liam Neeson’s Marlowe growls in recognition.

I’d call this thriller — directed by Neil Jordan, who won an Oscar for writing “The Crying Game,” and scripted by William Monahan, who won his for “The Departed”– a fun, bad movie. But it’s not bad, just arch and over the top and all attitude and genre tropes and cliches.

And if you can’t find pleasure in seeing how tickled Oscar winner Jessica Lange is to be swapping pithy, punchy lines with an actor worthy of her stature, of watching grizzled Colm Meaney pass on old cop’s advice to a high-mileage private dick, if you can’t bask in the juicy tete a tetes Neeson shares with Danny Huston, Ian Hart and Alan Cumming, perhaps there’s a movie about a superhero the size of an ant that may be more your speed.

Diane Kruger plays the femme fatale who wants to know “How private, exactly, are your investigations, Mr. Marlowe?”

Claire Cavendish’s lover (François Arnaud) is supposedly dead, but she’s not convinced.

She’d rather her husband and her retired screen siren mother (Lange) not know about this digging around. Cop pals Hart and Meaney aren’t keen on this “investigation.” The “exclusive club” manager (Huston) who supposedly witnessed the death is more interested in obfuscation and World War I stories about how corpses don’t phase guys like himself and Marlowe.

“You’re my age. Perhaps you were there. Perhaps you know how it was and therefor is.“

Cumming is the mob boss whose gift of the gab and quoting of the writer’s Bible, Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style,” rubs off on his bodyguard/driver (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje).

“I’m a generic name, an eponymous ‘trademark!'”

“Marlowe” is set in 1939-40, with “I’ll Be Seeing You” seemingly on every Victrola and radio. It takes place for on “the periphery” of the movie business, and dips into the drug trade in a world of Irish “Colleens” of the screen, and “mick” cops, Mexicans on the outside starting to look in, sex workers and secrets, which every mystery thrives on.

The mystery isn’t all that engrossing, and the picture devolves into some CYA third act over-explaining to compensate for that. It can be a bit much, and more often than not. So OK, maybe it is a bad picture that’s still fun.

But it’d be hard to imagine this cast, with Neeson reuniting with his “Michael Collins” director and his “Kingdom of Heaven” screenwriter, not giving something resembling fair value.

The ambition alone is a real step up for Neeson, still making two-fisted action pictures, but this time in a literary-minded period piece package.

With “pearls before swine” quips and banter about Christopher Marlowe’s alleged authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, if this “Marlowe” isn’t Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep/Farewell My Lovely” hero, he’ll do until some younger fellow fit to fill his gumshoes comes along.

Rating: R for language, violent content, some sexual material and brief drug use

Cast: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, Danny Huston, Alan Cumming, Daniela Melchior, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ian Hart and Colm Meaney.

Credits: Directed by Neil Jordan, scripted by William Monahan, adapted from the novel by John Banville, based on Raymond Chandler’s character, Philip Marlowe. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:49

Your daily dose of weird?

Recreating the meeting of two infamous “bad boys,” just before filming “Going South” together.

A bit of a goof starring Jamie Costa doing the Jack Drawl, and Sandy Danto as Belushi in full “Samurai Co-Star” mode. Blitzed.

There’s a difference “cute” and “cutesy.” But until the Mexican road comedy “All the Places (A todas partes),” I’d never tried to split hairs between “cute-ish” and cutesy.

It’s about two semi-estranged siblings who mend fences by taking a cross-country motorcycle trip to see “all the places” they’d wanted to go as children, when they first negotiated such an odyssey.

The travelogue value of their journey is given short shrift. And even the scenes that play a little funny have a sitcom Ross-and-Monica in “Friends” energy about them. They’re a bit winded, a lot of “seen that before.”

Mauricio Ochmann plays Fernando, the jet-setting workaholic who has lived in Singapore for years and who gripes that “(expletive) Mexico” (in Spanish or dubbed into English) is why he missed their father’s funeral — inefficient airport, unhurried cabbie.

But that’s just a fresh grudge to add to other grievances for Gabriela, whom Fernando insists on calling “Gabo” (Ana Serradilla). He left her and the family behind, and missed their stress-inducing father’s transformative last years, his death and his funeral.

To Gabo, “Fer” is an exemplar of Dad’s old saying — “If the coffee lacks color, it’s clear.” Fernando has shown everybody his priorities.

An evening of steady pressure for her to cut him a little slack climaxes in a game of ping pong lubricated with tequila shots. That’s how they laugh again, and how they stumble into their teen map and travel book, in which they vowed to cross the country to Acapulco on their motorcycles, binging on every hotel’s “entire menu,” to see “A todas partes” from the seats of their Carabela motorcycles.

They’re tipsy when they dust off the long-unused bikes, and helmet-free as they motor to the city square in San Miguel de Allende. But when they sober up, Fernando is frantic to get back home, back to the client who has been blowing up his phone.

Nope. Gabo won’t hear of it, and they’re off down winding desert mountain roads, stopping at a Fiesta de Vino y Queso (wine and cheese), hitting Tlaxcala and Mexico City, flirting with strangers, trotting out their childhood tapdancing routine, picking up hippies who help them trip with mushrooms and getting into a cantina fight over a ping pong match along the way.

Yes, I know it’s a dated reference, but come on. “Friends.” Ross and Monica. You see it, right?

Just a couple of scenes manage any comic payoff, and only one finds the pathos that this sentimental journey promises.

We get precious little in terms of local sights, people or cuisines, although there are a couple of binge eating scenes.

The whole “work pressure” subtext is forgotten as Fernando slips back into Mexican priorities — family, vacation, wine and tequila — almost leaning into stereotypes.

How “dangerous” such a trek would be is only addressed comically, as the hippies want to see some ID and take selfies with them before they’ll chance a hitchhike ride from these squares. Even the notorious local police are reduced to doofuses overly proud of their hometown, quick to harass the condescending strangers.

There’s a nice friction between the foul-mouthed, combative leads that suggests the movie this might have been.

But back the entire affair with syrupy, colorless Muzak and no one will mistake this fluff for “Motorcycle Diaries” or those charming “Long Way” motorcycle-travel documentaries of Ewen McGregor and Charley Boorman.

The makings of a charming formula road picture are here. But director Pitipol Ybarra and screenwriter Adriana Pelusi abandoned too many ingredients for “All the Things” to come off.

TV-MA, sexual situations, drinking and motorcycling, mild violence, profanity

Cast: Ana Serradilla and Mauricio Ochmann

Credits: Directed by Pitipol Ybarra, scripted by Adriana Pelusi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

In Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK,” Donald Sutherland played a character only identified as “X,” the “explainer” who downloads most of the suspect government and government officials’ actions in the days surrounding the Kennedy Assassination in 1963.

It’s a strange and in retrospect amusing way of throwing everything behind Stone’s thesis in the film at the wall at once in a single mesmerizing third action monologue.

Imagine a whole movie of such monologues, with more than one version of such a connect-the-dots character.

“88” is a political thriller by the one-named Nigerian/British/American filmmaker Eromose (“Legacy”), a two hour sermon on white supremacy and dark money and how America got to where it is today. It’s never less than interesting, even as its dramatic urgency wanes due to the monotony of its message and the over-the-top “thrills” this thriller never bothers to provide.

Brandon Victor Jackson plays Femi, a numbers guy who works in accounting in the fundraising office of candidate Harold Roundtree, a pre-Iowa (oopsie) “front-runner” for the 2024 presidential nomination, mainly thanks to huge infusions of cash from assorted non-profit political action committees.

Femi spots an odd thing about these donations, their bizarre numeric amounts that add up to some incarnation of the number “88.”

As he passes this info on to his senior campaign staff bosses (Amy Sloan, Michael Harney), he continues to dig and brings in a Jewish pal (Thomas Sadoski) whose “investigative” skills he can tap into. And Ira sees something straight away. Those numbers, “88?” That’s white supremacist code for the eighth letter of the alphabet, repeated.

“HH…’Heil Hitler.'”

“88” takes these two, and Femi’s pregnant activist/wife Maria (Naturi Naughton) and that campaign through a round of digging and soul-searching over the latest “chosen one” candidate, a great communicator with all the right education and background and a sketchy tie to one big non-profit PAC, the one he ran right up to the day he announced, “One USA.”

We meet the candidate who inspires Femi and convinces the veteran political operatives on the staff that he’s a winner via a long interview Roundtree has with a tough-minded, challenging journalist.

Our writer-director lets us know how to write “names” into your low-budget film’s cast, by putting the movie’s two most famous actors onto basically a single TV interview set (no background, just darkness behind them) for a series of scenes intercut into the action, scenes that might have taken just a couple of days to shoot.

Orlando Jones (“Drumline”) is surprisingly affecting and Obama-esque as Roundtree, and William Fichtner (TV’s “Mom,” “The Perfect Storm”) gets to ask the uncomfortable questions as a bulldog TV interrogator who brings up “race,” a topic our candidate dodges, Big Money in politics and white supremacy, including Abraham Lincoln’s thoughts on the matter.

Femi’s quest takes on “Marathon Man” intrigues (without violence), “follow the money” “All the President’s Men” plotting and “JFK” warning phone calls and “visits” from those who either want to expose the truth, or want to ensure Femi doesn’t reveal it.

“There’s a storm coming, Mister Jackson! Stay out of the way!”

Eromose gives us primers on lynching and global racist politics and even an animated “Schoolhouse Rock” style explainer on how “rich people buy elections” thanks to the infamous Citizen’s United case.

“88” is informatively watchable, thanks to all these in-story tutorials. What it lacks is high drama and a sense of the stakes, which never feel as murderous as you might expect. All this backstory about Femi’s AA membership and wife Maria’s boycott-armed activism against her own bank’s lending policies and the “plantation owners” of the National Football League and debating Black Lives Matter vs. Stop Asian Hate clutters up the film and ignores the very basic lessons of “All the President’s Men.”

“Follow the money,” and “What did the (candidate for) President know, and when did he know it?”

It’s possible to be a bit awed by the “JFK” ambition of “88,” even if the execution waters down Eromose’s message to the point where we wonder if he’s simply lost his nerve.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Brandon Victor Jackson, Naturi Naughton, Amy Sloan, Michael Harney, Thomas Sadoski, William Fichtner and Orlando Jones

Credits: Scripted and directed by Eromose. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 2:01

Superhero movies have gone all in on “universe building” of late, that “Avatar” model that pushes the notion “If we show them strange, ‘new’ and wondrous places, they will come.”

So the latest “Ant-Man” is basically “‘Avatar’ with Ants…and some jokes.”

Trapped in the multi-verse mania that has been a hallmark of post-“Avengers” comic book adaptations, it finds an excuse to drag our loveable goof of a hero (Paul Rudd), his sidekick The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) and entourage — Wasp mama (Michelle Pfeiffer), shrinking/expanding scientist (Michael Douglas) and Ant Man Scott Lang’s neglected, acting-out teen daughter (Kathryn Newton) — into “The Quantum Realm.”

That’s a universe that exists on a subatomic level. But you just know they won’t be content to fight over submicroscopic stakes there. Somebody in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is going to toss that word “multiverse” out there as its become like product placement in most Marvel and DC superhero movies.

“The Quantum Realm” is full of odd creatures like horses with snail heads and sentient manta rays who provide friendly “Finding Nemo” transport wafting through a gloomy, cave-like landscape that looks like “Avatar” with a different color palette.

Yes, there’s a war on, with a vast array of folks ranging from talking blobs to “Cantina Band” alumni to warrior princesses taking sides and resisting “The Conqueror” (Jonathan Majors of “Lovecraft Country” and “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”).

The “jokes” in this “Avatar with Ants and Jokes” are provided by Rudd’s lighthearted persona more than witty dialogue writing. He can make Scott’s first panicked reassurance to daughter Cassie when they figure out where they are amusing just with sputtering Dad-isms.

“We’re OK. It’s going to be OK. OK? Ok!”

There’s topical messaging about “There’s always room to grow” as a person (Ant-Man puns!), getting involved in defending others — “Just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening.” — and the idea that even the most evil among us redeemable.

“It’s never too late to stop beiing a d–k!”

Toss in the most boring Marvel villain in ages and colorfully-animated or costumed (Katy M. O’Brian) but generic sci-fi action archetypes fighting over this wholly derivative world you’ve gone to the trouble of building.

But there’s no getting around the general pointlessness, the low stakes they’re playing for and the aimlessness of it all.

Checking the time, via watch or cell phone? Plan on doing that. A lot.

“Ant-Man” franchise director Peyton Reed cut his teeth on a cheerleading comedy (“Bring it On”), a forgettable Jim Carrey high concept comedy (“Yes Man”) and failed rom-coms (“Down with Love,” “The Break-Up”). His real gift to this genre is tone — light and jovial, not as clever or funny as “Thor,” but cute.

He makes the CGI effects trains run on time, gets a cameo or two in (Bill Murray, a returning Corey Stoll) and makes one of them amusing and milks a few sight gags for all that they’re worth.

His direction of the Jeff Loveness script borrows from “Star Wars” and “Avatar” and even “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and rarely in subtle ways.

The action beats are often straight up “The cavalry’s here” Western tropes, with this or that character getting her or his fight “moment,” and others just left on the periphery.

Pfeiffer is moved front and center for this film, and her stunt double gets quite the workout out of it.

But Majors seems at a loss, as good actors often are (Oscar Isaac comes to mind) when it comes to finding one’s omnipotent supervillain footing. At least Josh Brolin had the excuse of being wholly animated, and given a few darkly-amusing lines.

Fans will find more in this than I did. But if you’re a filmgoer not craving “fan service” from this and every Marvel movie, it’s just a time-killer, fitfully amusing tedium.

“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is much ado about a lot of microscopic nothing.

Rating: PG-13 for violence/action, and language

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Kathryn Newton, Katy M. O’Brian, William Jackson Harper, Corey Stoll, Bill Murray, Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Credits: Directed by Peyton Reed, scripted by Jeff Loveness. A Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 2:05

At some point, as a romantic comedy is failing right before your eyes, you settle for “at least it’s not offensive.”

“At Midnight” is the mildest R-rated rom-com on record, a tame and tepid affair pairing up a couple of career supporting players as the leads, with mild-mannered laughs, lukewarm love scenes and conventional wish-fulfillment-fantasy plot points.

Think “Notting Hill,” with Spanish accents instead of British ones. There’s even an “I’m standing here” line, and a visit to a birthday dinner with the lucky duck “civilian” who falls for a movie star.

Avrile Lavigne had an “obvious” line about that. And yes, she’s mentioned in the movie.

Monica Barbaro of “Top Gun: Maverick,” plays movie star Sophie, about to shoot the third film in the “Super Society” super hero trilogy with her co-star and faithless, boorish lover of five years Adam (Anders Holm of “Game Over, Man”) when she catches him cheating.

Not to worry. They share an agent (Whitney Cummings), who tells Adam “Cheating? It’s actually very hip. Very FRENCH…ForGIVE yourself!” Sophie she warns to keep quiet and think about defining herself by her famous, feckless beaus.” Remember Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston?

“Don’t be another Jen.”

That film shoot down in Cancún and Isla Mujeres will be awkward, maybe even painful. Then comes the “meet cute.”

Alejandro (Diego Boneta) is a bilingual assistant manager at the resort hotel where the cast is staying, demoted to looking after “la artiste,” the fetching leading lady, which means dropping off towels while she’s prepping for a shower.

He’s “seen me naked,” she complains.

“I wasn’t looking!”

“Well, NOW I’m offended!”

Yeah, the script is a tad retro. And duller that supermarket salsa. But let the limp “forbidden romance” begin. He’s endangering his career by violating “rule #1” for the hotel staff, “no dating guests.” She has to keep this breakup with the cheater quiet until after the film is shot, maybe until after the premiere.

But those crazy kids…

Catherine Cohen plays Sophie’s scene-stealing BFF turned personal assistant.

“Actors! They’re all unstable narcissists with no perfection of reality!”

Casey Thomas Brown is Sophie’s bitchy gay manager, constantly in conflict with her bullying, self-serving agent.

“If I wanted to get ‘topped’ I’d go on Grindr!”

Cummings and those two are the only “sparks” of comedy that “At Midnight” provides. But hats off for contriving a most realistic conflict/break-up scene for people of wildly different statuses, the one moment in this “Notting Hill” knockoff that plays as poignant and believable as the original film.

But “believable” kind of goes out the door when your tale is about a movie starlet falling in love, not dating for status, career, riches etc. That only happens in the movies.

Rating: R for some language

Cast: Monica Barbaro, Anders Holm, Diego Boneta, Catherine Cohen, Casey Thomas Brown, Fernando Carsa and Whitney Cummings.

Credits: Directed by Jonah Feingold, scripted by Maria Hinojos and Jonah Feingold. A Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:39

Shy, reclusive and homesick when she wasn’t at home with her father and siblings in Haworth, Yorkshire, not much was known about “Wuthering Heights” author Emily Bronte in her brief thirty years of life. And not much more is known today, some of that spin from her equally famous competitive writer/sister Charlotte Bronte, of “Jane Eyre” fame.

Perhaps there were roiling passions beneath the surface of one sister that the other played-down due to decorum, reputation, prudishness or just plain jealousy. They do come off as rivals, thanks mostly to what we’ve learned about Charlotte’s fiddling with her sibling’s image.

But that leaves the door open to speculation, to inventing details of a life no one knows, a “Becoming Jane” (about Jane Austen’s “true love”) or “Immortal Beloved” (Beethoven) treatment of a discrete life whose discretion was guarded, even after death.

With “Emily,” the debut feature of actress turned director Frances O’Connor (“The Conjuring 2,” “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” TV’s Mr. Selfridge”), we’re shown a mercurial talent and “You know how I don’t like to meet new people” near-recluse who is also a woman of Austenesque wit and Byronic passions.

She carries on a torrid affair with the curate (assistant pastor) at her father’s church.

It’s probably not true. Scholars and fans have guessed that it was sister Anne Bronte whom Curate William Weightman adored. But that doesn’t spoil the film, which veers from defiant to self-destructive, playful to tragic, and gives a proper star vehicle to Emma Mackey of TV’s “Sex Education” and the recent big screen “Death on the Nile,” as the writer who billed herself Ellis Bell during her lifetime.

We meet a young woman lectured to “Try not to be a BURDEN, Emily” by her family, a girl growing up without her mother, determined to impress her stern father (Adrian Dunbar, terrific) and fit in with her sisters and brother.

But older sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling, biting and subtle) comes home from boarding school and chides her, straight away. She doesn’t approve of Emily’s oddness, her passion for making up stories, a girl nicknamed “the strange one” by the locals.

“You’re an EMBARASSMENT to us,” Charlotte eventually fumes.

The film suggests that maybe this is because Emily was the one who dismissed Charlotte’s chances with the handsome new curate, a man fond of homey, lighthearted sermons that pass along Christian values with a bit of humor.

O’Connor strolls through the “known” parts of the biography such as Emily cowering in a closet at her sister’s boarding school, weeping until she’s sent home. The writer-director details the close attachment to Bronte’s only brother, the mercurial “Freedom of Thought” dreamer, Branwell (Fionn Whitehead).

But a couple of scenes will take your breath away with their audacity and invention.

We learn how their mother’s death is something “which we never speak of,” before Mr. Bronte brings out a theatre mask that was anonymously given, as a wedding present, to him and his late wife. When Dad goes to bed, the sisters, Branwell and their new pal — the hip young preacher — break it out for a guess-who-I-am-behind-the-mask version of charades.

They force the shy Emily to take a turn, and she becomes first a silent killjoy wearing the mask, then a chilling and ghostly recollection of their mother, which leads to an incredibly emotional opening for the siblings’ closure with their lost parent.

At another point, Branwell is being sent away, and he insists on making their farewells as Emily hangs the laundered sheets. They bicker, confess and even embrace never seeing each other, with a billowing sheet between them. And then he’s gone.

That’s brilliant in its simplicity.

I’m not the first person to pick up on how much the Anglo-French Mackey resembles the Australian star and “It” actress Margot Robbie. They’ve been cast together in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” comedy, two classic “doll-like” look-alike beauties. That’s germane because one can almost see Robbie cast in this version of Bronte, presented here as a woman who eschewed the “blind faith” of her father and the young preacher, Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) who comes to their parish, teaches Emily French, and not just the language.

Ahem.

O’Connor sets up this affair in classic Austen “Loathing at first sight” fashion, and by the time things are hot and heavy, jokes around with the demure letters Emily writes and voice-over-narrates to her teacher-sister Charlotte comically contrasted with Emily’s literal rolls in the hay.

“Emily” won’t pass muster in the halls of academe or among the Brontefiles. Dates are rearranged, liberties taken, some of a libertine (opium, sex) nature.

But our writer-director has conjured up a full, flesh and blood life. And our star transforms Emily from a repressed Yorkshire artist who channeled her passions onto the pages of one of the Great Romantic Novels into a human being of sexual passion, love and heartbreak, and a thing for Men on the Moors.

Rating: R for some sexuality/nudity and drug use.

Cast: Emma Mackey, Alexandra Dowling, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Fionn Whitehead,
Gemma Jones and Adrian Dunbar

Credits: Scripted and directed by Frances O’Connor. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 2:10

“Ah don’t have to remind you that her daddy thinks he is the ‘Jesus J. Edgar Christ’ of the Appalachian Mountains,” the mountaineer crime patriarch drawls in warning to his only son, who has taken up with a local prosecutor’s “rabbit-ass daughter.”

“Mah daddy, his his daddy before’im, and now you — we do not choose this way of life,” he tells his boy, Jacob (Hopper Penn). It chose us.”

There is only one Thornton, and he goes by “Billy Bob.” In “Devil’s Peak,” the film adaptation of David Joy’s “Where all Light Tends to Go,” Billy Boy Thornton sinks his teeth into Southernspeak for a modern Southern gothic tale of “outlawing” as the family business, which these days and in these foothills and hollows means “meth.”

Thornton is the colorful linchpin of this somber, slow but simmering crime melodrama, a film that also features Jackie Earle Haley as the comfy-with-looking-the-other-way sheriff, and Robin Wright as the ex-wife Charlie McNeely (Thornton) gave up on when she got hooked on the drug his clan now sells all over Jackson County, N.C.

Penn plays the 20ish lad still figuring out his family’s criminal legacy and how he fits in it, and how he can hang onto the girlfriend (Katelyn Nacon) his daddy disapproves of as he faces the ugly, illegal responsibilities that come with being a McNeely.

Director Ben Young and screenwriter Robert Knott lose themselves in Joy’s colorful Appalachian colloquialisms and Thornton’s peerless way with such lines.

“If this thang needs to’go off for some reason,” Charlie says as he hands his kid a revolver, “it touches mud and water. Got that?”

Got it.

Thornton’s menace, augmented by a Satanic dyed goatee and bald pate, mixes easily with the folksy way he has of relating Charlie’s family anecdotes, each and every one designed to instruct via a life lesson learned, almost all of those lessons chilling. Charlie, we can guess, can be utterly heartless when the need arises.

Haley’s county sheriff is something of an archetype — casually corrupt, but seemingly level-headed, with hints of compassion.

Wright makes a decent impression in a limited number of scenes, as does Emma Booth, brassy as the bald old crook’s half-his-age-hussy.

“Devil’s Peak” is a simple story whose filmmakers lose track of threads and characters, perhaps owing to editing. Jacob’s devotion to his girlfriend is thinly-developed, her politically-ambitious stepdad (Brian d’Arcy James) practically an afterthought. I am predisposed to go for Appalachian stories, so some of that I let slide.

A bigger issue is how this mixed-bag thriller is Exhibit A in the whole debate over Hollywood “nepo babies,” all those celebrity offspring who follow their parents into “the family business,” and how that often doesn’t pay dividends on the screen.

Hopper Penn is the son of Sean Penn and Robin Wright, and even playing callow lad of 20ish, he’s never more than adequate in the part and not always that. But without him, Mom doesn’t sign on, the film doesn’t have three big name stars to ensure its value and get financed and “Where All Light Tends to Go” isn’t adapted for the screen.

The Catch-22 of casting meant that they compromised on their lead just to get the film made. It happens all the time.

They had the makings of a solid, gritty and distinctly Southern B-picture. But their young lead, without whom I dare say this never would have been made, has an arresting look and yet little screen presence or acting craft (no acting school for him) to compensate for that.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Robin Wright, Hopper Penn, Jackie Earle Haley, Katelyn Nacon, Brian d’Arcy James and Emma Booth

Credits: Directed by Ben Young, scripted by Robert Knott, based on a novel “Where all Light Tends to Go,” by David Joy. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:35