Movie Nation

“RedLife” is a grimly immersive, relentlessly downbeat Thai melodrama that stumbles among the down-and-out crowd of Bangkok’s underbelly.

Sex workers and thieves dream small — starting a life as a couple, getting a “real job,” a single mom simply hoping her child finishes school, a daughter hoping for something “normal,” friendship and affection. That’s all they can allow themselves in lives this close to the margin.

It’s more interesting as a character portrait than a story with a coherent plot, more focused on putting us there than giving us insights into getting there and getting out. But it’s worth a look if you’re interested in that sex-work capital’s struggling masses yearning to breathe free, and make the rent.

Ter (Thiti Mahayotaruk) is the new guy in the gang, the one Kiang (Ukrit Willi Brod Don Gabriel) runs, attacking solitary victims, pitlessly beating them and stealing their wallets and backpacks.

They’re all around 20, but this new lookout is about as green as they get. He fails to intervene in a mugging that goes wrong, and ends up being the only one caught when the cops finally come. Only the intervention of his girlfriend, the sex worker Mind (Karnpicha Pongpanit) gets him out.

What she has to do to free him is just another reminder of how useless he is. He is frustrated, furious, cowardly and lost. He can’t even get himself out of this impoverished jam, much less dream up a better life for them both.

Som (Supitcha Sungkajinda) is a teen trying to keep a low profile at her girls school. She is months behind on her tuition and too broke to do anything extra-curricular. Her mother Aoi (Krongthong Rachatawan) won’t face these problems head on, as she’s deep in denial about her own financial affairs. Aoi still treats her teen as a child, another form of avoiding reality.

Aoi is a cranky 50ish sex-worker, staring at the end of the only means of making a bad living she ever had. As Som can’t talk with her about anything, the girl confides instead in a sympathetic 50ish drag queen.

Writer-director Ekalak Klunson and his co-writers don’t do much to tie these stories together even as we suspect they’re on a collision course. This tediously slow narrative merely reveals how unprepared for the “real world” that they live in Som and Ter turn out to be.

As horror movies that weave “Scream” and “Dead Zone” plot points and gimmicks with high school homophobia and staring it down go, “Departing Seniors” parks itself squarely in “I’ve seen worse.”

Grace notes about sexuality, blunt treatments of bullying and a plot that at least has a certain character-driven logic to it give this derivative, self-conscious thriller a chance. The filmmakers take a number of ingredients, none of them novel or new, and make something less than awful out of them.

Javier, played by Ignacio Diaz-Silverio (TV’s “Primo”), is a smarty-pants/smart aleck senior at Springhurst High, a photographer for the school paper vying for valedictorian of the Class of 2019, with only his flip and funny ride-or-die bestie Bianca (Ireon Roach of “Candyman”) to share this peak moment with.

Because Javier is bullied. Because Javier is gay.

At least he has his antipathy for the other candidate for valedictorian, popular, rich and pretty Ginny (Maisie Merlock) to cling to. The fact that she’s dating Top Jock and Javier’s chief formentor Trevor (Cameron Scott Roberts) makes them Javier’s Couple to Hate.

But mere days before the end of the school year, students start dying of “suicide.” That’s what they and the authorities think is happening. But wrists can be slashed by others, deaths in the pool, in the locker room or on the hard pavement beneath the school’s roof can be “arranged.”

The viewer knows that some nut-with-a-knife and a “Scream” hoodie with a “V for Vendetta” mask has offed them.

It’s only when bullies brutally shove Javier down the stairs that he starts to pull it all together. A nurse’s touch, an inanimate object-gift that he reaches for, lots of things give him “visions” of who all these people really are, and what will happen to some of them if he doesn’t act, if he can’t figure out who might be the monster behind the mask.

One doesn’t get a sense that enough was spent on hiring a tasty mob-connected villain for this Feb. 23 release. But the setting and the set-up have time-proven potential. The tone of “The Bad Shepherd” seems just right.

Money’s power to instantly corrupt is as timeless a theme as you could want for your thriller.

There are a lot of reasons seasoned critics and cinephiles still hold onto the 1970s as Hollywood’s true “Golden Age.” They’re the touchstone decade built on a string of benchmark classics which we rightly measure all the films that followed and most of those that came before against, when filmmakers’ personal visions ruled even as the modern blockbuster was born.

“Chinatown” is a keystone movie of that era, one of the pictures that let the world see the transformation that was taking place, as it was happening. It is auteurist, with the screenwriter as the true auteur here, as was the case with “Network.” It was and is epic, but intimate.

It’s also a star vehicle with Jack Nicholson‘s coming out as a major star. Taken in context, it was yet another period piece anchored in a previous Golden Age — the 1930s. But it was and remains something startling and new, a film noir that transcended the genre and slapped a modern, post Manson Family, mid-Watergate exclamation point on it.

The violence Roman Polanski put on screen still makes you grimace. The performances have an effortless reality about them, even at their most operatic.

And Robert Towne’s genre script, which made most of those that preceded it and everything that came after seem lazy and undercooked by comparison, still unsettles, challenges, surprises and thrills.

A story that taps into the corruption the Nixon era, the large scale scheming that remade Los Angeles in the ’30s and the perversions of the rich and unrestrained, seemingly tailor-made for the not-yet-exposed pedophile Polanski, it’s no wonder that “Chinatown” became shorthand in the movie and the culture for pervasive and systemic rot and injustice.

Nicholson is J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a dapper private eye who presides over an office with two seasoned “associates” (Joe Mantell and Crispin Glover’s dad, Bruce Glover) and a secretary (Nandu Hinds) he’s genteel enough to send out of the room when he wants to repeat an off-color joke.

A society dame (Diane Ladd) shows up and asks him to check on her husband, whom she thinks is having an affair. Jake advises her to “let sleeping dogs lie,” but it’s to no avail. When she tells him her husband’s name, “Mulwray,” Jake recognizes it.

And after he and his associates have “tailed” their quarry from water board public meetings to mid-drought water reservoirs to the sea, snapping shots of Mulwray rowing a possible paramour around Echo Lake, he smells a little publicity that might boost his business.

The “scandal” that explodes in the papers happens with or without Jake’s machinations. But the ruthlessly rich femme fatale (Faye Dunaway) who shows up at his office with her lawyer upends all of that. She’s the “real” Mrs. Mulwray. She’s ready to sue.

Jake’s efforts to head that off send him in search of Mulwray, as the city’s water czar goes missing. And right after he’s found drowned, Jake’s real problems begin. Mrs. Mulwray, her obscenely-rich father (John Huston) and a whole lot of people who either know better than to keep asking questions about that “accident” or water “theft” or land buyouts seem hellbent on keeping Jake from getting to the bottom of things, and by any means necessary.

“Popular Theory” is a limp effort to reclaim the comic possibilities of “child genius” from TV (“Young Sheldon”) that makes one wish they’d just left this genre to the boob tube.

It’s about a high school upperclasswoman who is all of 13, and who decides that “popularity” as it is conceived in adoloscence might be chemical, and something she can manipulate in a lab experiment.

Sophia Reid-Gantzert stars as Erwin, whose scientist mother named her for the famous Erwin Schrödinger, “the father of quantum mechanics” and theorizer of the thought experiment “Schrödinger’s Cat.”

Her mother’s dead, and poor Dad (Marc Evan Jackson) hasn’t a clue about impending puberty or this science thing she’s so good at.

Then again, as she voice-over narrates about how high school follows “Darwin’s Law, survival of the fittest,'” an intellectually-secure adult should be there to correct her (Darwin never said or “believed” that).

Director and co-writer Ali Scher and co-writer Joe Swanson (“The Doorman”) remind us that film folks don’t, by and large, know Jack about science.

Erwin’s mother figure is supposed to be her daffy hairdresser Aunt Tammy, who is anti-science because she thinks it’s “interfering with (Erwin’s) social development” and because she’s played by Cheryl Hines, wife of anti-vax crank RFK.

Tammy wears a different hairdo in every appearance, and her follicular “creations” are the film’s only sight-gags that work.

Erwin is left to plug along on her own, smartest kid in school, last picked for pretty much anything physical or fun. Older sister Ari (Chloe East) is 17, into boys and all the things girls do to make themselves attractive to them, and not at all into being Erwin’s sis.

And then a new student arrives to threaten the one thing Erwin has going for her, her unrivaled smarts. Nerdy nebbish Winston (Lincoln Lambert) is just as precocious with a keen interest in chemistry. They’re to be rivals for the science fair’s big summer science scholarship.

When Erwin decides her science fair experiment should be in the various properties of popularity, particularly scent, she reluctantly agrees to take on Winston as her lab partner. They’ll concoct a “Nutty Professor” like hormone that will make whoever chews their experimental chewing gum popular.

Sequel to a viral “Winnie’s in the public domain, let’s do a horror riff on it” straight-to-video production.

No word on the release date for this bloody-minded bear yet.

The late historian David McCullough told me something once in an interview that I’ve applied to most every historical drama I’ve reviewed ever since.

“The people living through” historical events, McCullough noted, “don’t know how any of this will turn out.”

The Founding Fathers gambled their lives that America would somehow gain independence from Britain. A lot of Germans made the decision to thow in their lot in with the Nazis before and well into World War II.

And in the Occupied Countries of Europe and Asia, nobody knew who would prevail. Some saw short term certainty and immediate gain by collaborating. Others, the real outliers, followed their conscience and clung to hope that compassion, humanity and justice would turn back the tide of fascism that had swept over much of the world at the time.

“Wil,” a Belgian thriller retitled “Will” by Netflix as a play on words, is about that awful dilemma as faced by a couple of green Belgian policemen in 1942, when the outcome of the war was very much in doubt.

Wilfried (Stef Aerts) and Lode (Matteo Simoni) are Antwerp 20somethings with two and a half weeks of training and a lecture on how they’re here to be “the buffer between our people and the Germans” by their weathered commanding officer, Jean (Jan Bijvoet).

But Jean finishes his instructions (in Flemish, or dubbed into English) to the recruits with a sing-along, an old children’s song about a bear who butters its own bread. The chorus provides their Antwerp P.D. credo.

“I stood by and watched it all.”

Uniformed but unarmed, leaned-on by the Germans, but not trusted by them, and serving in the most vital port in Europe, these peace officers are destined to see a lot, maybe even take part in things they know to be wrong. The Germans have the power, the guns and the ruthlessness. What can mere cops do? “Follow orders?”

Wil and Lode stumble into the ultimate dilemma of their age on their first night on the job. A belligerent, pill-popping non-commissioned Nazi officer has orders to arrest some Jews for “non work,” code for “Arrest them and seize their property because they’re Jewish,” and the police are required to provide assistance.

As he terrorizes the family inside, the wife begs to slip out the door, which Lode and Wil are to guard. Wil lets her pass and hand-off her little girl to a neighbor. But when the neighbor’s husband cruelly shoves the child back out the door, the wife rushes past her captor and grabs the kid and flees. The German gives chase, and when he catches them, Wil’s conscience kicks in and there’s one less Nazi on Earth.

The Jewish family escapes, and Wil and Lode, being cops, know how to get away with this killing. What they don’t know is what reprisals will come, how far they will reach and just how much their guilt will eat at them as “innocent” people are rounded-up, tortured and often summarily shot.

The two rookies find themselves connected to the White Brigade, the nascent Belgian resistance. Lode’s sister, Yvette (Annelore Crollet) becomes a prod for Wil’s conscience, and a romantic temptation.

But she isn’t the only one. A friend of Wil’s politically-connected father, Verschaffel (Dirk Roofthooft), offers the easy temptations of greed, status and go-along-to-get-along sins. He could get them through this ordeal fat, drunk and alive, but only if Wil “picks a side,” embraces Verschaffel’s anti-Semitism, his venal opportunism and his affection for “my friend Gregor.”

Gregor turns out to be the German secret police chief (Dimitrij Schaad) who is hellbent on finding out who murdered this German soldier, and in testing Wil and breaking up the resistance.

Collaboration offers Wil access to a seized Jewish home as a painting studio and an easier life for himself and his family. Resistance offers a possibly clearer conscience, but deathly risk — “the Wall” is how the Belgian cops put it, the structure the Germans stand you up against as they shoot you.

The fights are furious enough, but the script for the Vietnamese martial arts thriller “The Foggy Mountain” (Dinh Mu Suong) is as weary a collection of cliches, trite tropes and recycled Eastern “wisdom” as one could imagine.

And having seen many a martial arts movie, one can imagine much.

A fighter — played by star and fight choreographer Peter Pham — is forced to face “one last fight.” His blind wife (Truc May) objects. But gambling gangster Ba Rau (Kim Long Thach) insists. When things don’t go the gangster’s way, fighter Phi must have his revenge. Not the he isn’t warned.

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” doesn’t move him, even in Vietnamese (with English subtitles), because “The punch has no eye.”

Phi must travel into the jungle, to The Foggy Mountain hideout. He will bring school-teacher and trained fighter Bang Tam (Le Thao), just to be sure.

Because you just know that human trafficking is involved, and legions of villains must be faced (Truong Dinh Hoang and Simon Kook play the most formidable ones), victims will be chased and heroes and villains will die and aphorisms must be intoned.

“Killing is addiction. No addiction is good.”

Neither is this movie, alas. The acting is stiff, almost every scene without a chase or a fight is dull and static.

“Mountain” is a thriller that’s all punched-up and no place to go but down the mountain, downhill to cliche town.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Peter Pham, Kim Long Thach, Le Thao, Truc May, Truong Dinh Hoang and Simon Kook

Credits: Directed by Phan Anh and Ken Dinh, scripted by Phan Ahn, Phan Ngoc and Ken Dinh. A Hi-Yah!/Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:27

Rudy Pankow has the title role in this oil patch comedy, which also stars Bruce Dern.

Looks good, and that combo has comic promise. Love that THC.

March 8.

An all-star cast doing another variation of Matthew Vaughn’s intro to spycraft “Kingsman” formula failed to pay dividends as middling Thursday night and not overwhelming Friday put “Argylle” on track to fall short of $17 million on its opening weekend.

Deadline.com notes that That’s enough to chase “Mean Girls” and “The Beekeeper” out of the top spot, with Jason Statham’s best action pic in decades coming in second at over $5 million ($50 total by Monday), the long in the tooth holiday hit “Wonka” coming in third with “Mean Girls” ($66 million to date) further down the ladder, falling to fifth (after “Migration,” which cleared the $100 million mark this week) and well under $5 million in ticket sales after almost a month in theaters.

Apple TV better hope “Argylle” pulls in subscribers for the streamer, as it won’t break even theatrically. It did nobody on board any favors, especially Vaughn and star Bryce Dallas Howard.

“Aquaman’s” last weekend in the top ten sent it over $120 million in North American ticket sales alone.

“Anyone But You” continues adding to its take, an R dates Rom-com that keeps on producing. It’s over $76, and while it won’t hit $100, Sydney Sweeney and that lucky co star from “Top Gun” will be bankable thanks to this sleeper.