Movie Nation

The sets, effects and production design of “The Devil Conspiracy” is damned impressive — huge and gloomy, foggy, Apocalyptic and Hellish.

One would expect no less from a movie that mashes up “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Exorcist” and “The Boys from Brazil.”

“Conspiracy” lets us know it is heavy on exposition, “DNA,” Bond villain labs and Satanic lairs, shoot-outs, stabbings and beheadings and Christian mythology. Satan is something of a smart ass. St. Michael, in his angelic and his human guises, is something of a badass.

Granted, it takes a while before that fateful decision is made to “play this for laughs,” too late to alter the picture’s destiny. But by the “f— around and find out” third act, a lot what comes out of Satan and St. Michael’s mouths is pretty damned and pretty damned funny.

What carnage! What chaos! And all so that Satan can deliver to The Lord God Almighty “the greatest f-you daddy of all time”

Director Nathan Frankowski of “To Write Love on Your Arms” and “Montford: The Chickasaw Rancher” doesn’t have a genre or a “style” per se. So this generously-budgeted/no-“name” stars horror epic is just all over the place; never quite serious, never remotely silly enough.

Laura (Alice Ewing-Orr), an American art history student in Turin, doesn’t believe in “evil,” but she’s fascinated by images of St. Michael fighting the devil. That’s how she comes to be in the cathedral museum where The Shroud of Turin is back on public display. She’s been sketching Satan’s face on a sculpture so long she’s locked inside at closing.

That’s when the wraith (Eveline Hall) strides in and beheads the guards, allowing mugs in a G-Wagon to roll in and help her snatch the shroud.

A prologue has shown us Satan’s fall and sentence to hell, put there by St. Michael (Peter Mensah). These modern day minions have it in mind to get him out by helping Lucifer be reborn. They’ll use the DNA from the shroud to clone a Son of God for Satan.

Idiots. Only rubes and fanatics don’t realize the Shroud of Turin is fake.

But Dr. Laurents (Brian Caspe) is a man of science, someone who has been raiding crypts in this cathedral, using DNA to bring back the composer Vivaldi, painter and sculptor Michelangelo, all the best Italians. He sells the rights to raise these “Boys from Bologna” (close enough) to the super rich, who would love having a genius bear their surname.

The priest (Joe Doyle) who got Laura into this special exhibition and is killed by the wraith makes his dying wish that “St. Michael use” his body to come back to Earth and stop Team Lucifer. When he does, it’s game on.

This is no Travolta “Michael.” This is Mel Gibson’s idea of an archangel.

This movie might have been more fun had it not lurched along, with all these kidnapped prospective surrogates (including Laura) fighting to avoid insemination rape, Michael visiting a local expert who provides him with everything he needs to visit Satan in hell (flares, a torch, and a pump shotgun) and Laura’s traumatic impregnation and takeover by the strong and mighty, if not righteous, special effects fetus in her womb.

Doyle brings a little swagger to Michael, shaking his head at the sorts of econoboxes “priests” have to drive, setting off explosions like a droll, clerically-collared Bond. And Ewing-Orr, of “The Courier,” “The Theory of Everything” and “Atonement,” commits to Laura’s rage and terror like a real pro.

But Frankowski can’t quite decide how seriously to take this Veering between existential faith-based terror and trying to get Laura’s attention, only to be told in a Satanic voice coming out of the pregnant woman’s mouth, “Laura isn’t here right now,” makes for a generally unsatisfying bit of nonsense that never frightens and never quite makes it as a comedy.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Alice Ewing-Orr, Joe Doyle, Eveline Hall, Peter Mensah, Brian Caspe and Joe Anderson.

Credits: Directed by Nathan Frankowski, scripted by Ed Alan. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:50

Netflix has this teen rom-com thing down.

Joey King or Ava Michele or Anjelika Washington or Camila Mendes, the leading ladies may change. But the aspirational wealth-and-bling settings don’t.

The vocal fry sass, the best Hollywood dentistry money can buy and makeup that banishes freckles from memory, designer school uniforms accessorized to impress, the total absence of “rich” parents who are just mentioned as providers of affluence — cars, mansions for parties, “Ivies” for college — it’s a formula, bitches, and they’ve mastered it.

It all kind of comes home with “Do Revenge,” the most excessive Netflix teen romantic comedy of them all. The kids are coiffed and ready for the runway. The school is affluence itself. The cars are classic, the stakes are high(ish) and the thrills include drugs.

So let’s push the language envelope, too. The c-word makes its bow, and not just dropped by this or that random British accent in a South Florida private school setting.

“Do Revenge” is awash in excess, a “Mean Girls” married to a “Strangers on a Train” plot designed to bend towards “Heathers” until the little dears who filmed it lose their nerve.

It’s hip, quippy and quotable, a self-referential riff on “’90s teen rom-coms,” right down to the Le
Tigre, Harvey Danger, Third Eye Blind, Meredith Brooks, Fatboy Slim soundtrack.

“I’m sorry, ‘Schoolhouse Rock.’ Are you dragging my SENTENCE structure?”

That no one involved recognized when enough is enough, not only losing their nerve to go straight to the edge, but not knowing when to wrap it all up, is its own college transcript tragedy. The film is flip and fun right up to the moment it tries to outsmart itself.

Camila Mendes trots out her “Riverdale” fangs out one more time as Drea, super-cute, super-popular and totally together queen of Rosehill School. She dates the popular, politically-connected rich boy Max (Austin Abrams), hangs with “The Royal Court” of entitled beauties and has Yale in the bag.

Not bad for a scholarship girl whose never-seen mom is a nurse.

But one leaked sex video later and it all comes crashing down. Slapping that ass Max for letting or making it happen makes “him” the victim, at least to the school’s lady head master (teen queen Hall of Famer Sarah Michelle Gellar). Drea is on probation and is shunned for her entire pre-senior-year summer.

Then “the new girl” shows up. Eleanor (Maya Hawke, Uma and Ethan’s kid) is gender fluid, into her dad’s classic car collection and forced to come to a new school where her own gay tormentor resides.

One or two complaining conversations later, it’s resolved. They will “do each other’s revenge,” like in that Hitchcock movie nobody references, the one about the strangers and the train.

Reputations will be savaged, hypocrisy exposed, an aspiring chef’s menu will be mushroomed.

And Max? He can found the “Cis Hetero Men Champion Identifying Female Students League” if he wants. He’s still got a bullseye on his “carefully curated image.”

Jokes like that fake organization don’t quite land, but a lot of the zingers do. Eleanor feels “like Billie Jean King in a sea of Maria Sharapovas.”

Ever since the Golden Age of John Hughes, “Sixteen Candles” through “Pretty in Pink,” teen movies have been instantly, adorably dated because no matter how current a filmmaker like director and co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson makes the dialogue, it’s her “’90s kid” tastes that adorn her movie.

Sure, play a little Billie Eilish, maybe her most f-bombed song, just to establish your campus cred, but that soundtrack is not what 2020s kids are jamming to. Reference “’90s teen rom-coms” as you “tour” the campus.Here are our “Instagram Bitches,” over there is the environmental “Greta Thunberg Brigade,” “Horny Theatre Kids, etc.”

But as each new friend undertakes to “destroy” the other’s nemesis, “Do Revenge” grinds its gears. There’s a solid 90 minutes of fun movie here, 100 tops. And this thing just goes on and on, that “Neflix editing” that doesn’t take into account how quickly-paced screen teen rom-coms need to be.

Mendes projects confidence and charisma, but it might be that “Veronica” on “Riverdale” will be a hard acting habit to break. She never gives us that beautiful-but-vulnerable Vanessa Hudgens side, not convincingly anyway. Hawke has become the Nepo Baby poster child and “Do Revenge” feels like the movie that inspired that whole Hollywood trend story and its offshoots, thanks to her lack of presence and middling performance.

The ’80s comedies that inspired the ’90s ones and gave birth to the current crop found a little heart and delivered at least one adult to “talk some sense” into kids teetering onto the wrong path — “revenge,” for instance.

And the kids weren’t all vapid consumerists aspiring to Kardashianhood. Back then, such girls were always Ms. Perfect Rachel McAdams, and the rich future frat-bros were often played by James Spader, typecast as a blond bastard for a reason. There’s barely a hint of Drea’s disadvantaged status here. She’s “thrift shopping,” the mean girls all say. We never see it, or evidence of it. Her hair style costs more than that late model Mitsubishi Evo she’s driving.

But “Do Revenge” is worth doing for a bit, anyway. Feel free to drift over to the lower right of your Netflix screen and change the speed to 1.25 times “normal” after about the midpoint. This thing drags.

Rating: R, mild violence, drugs, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Camila Mendes, Maya Hawke, Austin Abrams, Rish Shah, Talia Ryder and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Credits: Directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, scripted by Celeste Ballard, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:02

If chemistry were all, then the sparks Amy Adams and Matthew Goode set off might be enough in ‘Leap Year,’ a romantic comedy in which those sparks never quite ignite.

Wrapped too tight American meets louche, world-weary Irishman? Add Guinness and a few laughs and at LEAST a PG-13 rating and we’ll talk.

She plays Anna, an over-organized real-estate “stager,” that person who comes in before an open house, puts out flowers and bakes cookies, all to trick prospective buyers into thinking they’re “home.” She and long-term beau Jeremy (Adam Scott), the cardiologist, have a shot at getting into Boston’s exclusive “Davenport” luxury apartment building. What they don’t have is a date — for a wedding, or even plans for a date. Four years in and workaholic boyfriend can’t pull the trigger on this “convenient” romance.

But when he is off to a conference in Dublin, her dad (John Lithgow) reminds her of the Irish tradition that grandma used to snare grandpa. On leap day in a leap year, the ladies in Ireland get to do the proposing.

Anna leaps on a plane to go and close the deal. “I’m on a schedule,” she snaps when weather re-directs her to Wales. But her dangerous crossing of the Irish Sea isn’t the worst of it. Once she shows up in Dingle, the only person who can get her to Dublin in time is the cynical, financially-strapped pub owner, Declan (Goode), who isn’t keen to go to “a city of chancers and cheats.” But he does.

Will mishap-prone Anna get them killed? Will she ever get past his nickname for her (“EEED-jut”) and see his charm?

Anand Tucker (“Shopgirl”) is not the first, or fourth name that comes to mind when you’re looking for a romantic comedy director. He gives us a generous selection of heart-melting Adams close-ups. But his touch is heavy-handed, the pacing is sluggish and he doesn’t know how to use the locations for warmth or how to cast the standard issue Irish bit players for “local color.” Romantic comedies should sparkle. Tucker doesn’t do “sparkle.”

Irish character actors abound, but are given entirely too little to do. There’s barely a hint of “diddley aye” music.

The “Made of Honor” screenwriters don’t deliver enough jokes or feisty exchanges between the ill-matched traveling companions. The PG rating robs the picture of that well-placed curse that lets us laugh at the obstacles to love the couple encounter on their quest.

It’s a romantic comedy. We know where this is going. Tucker & Co. don’t seem to realize that it’s not the destination, it’s the witty, winsome journey that counts.

Rating: PG for sensuality and language

Cast: Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, ADam Scott, John Lithgow,

Credits: Directed by Anand Tucker, scripted by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont. A Universal release, now on Netflix, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:40

First of all, “Virtually Heroes” wasn’t really lost. It was sort of abandoned back in 2013. Finished, but not even released that I’m aware of.

It’s a “Roger Corman” film in that he produced it, and his name got Mark Hamill for an on-the-nose cameo that lasts about six minutes and shows up at the beginning of the third act. Corman produced ten times as many movies (515) as he directed (56). So, something special? Something rare? Not really.

Corman was famous for giving generations of filmmakers their start, from Coppola and Demme and Scorsese and Sayles to Cameron and Dante and Ron Howard. G.J. Echternkamp, who directed this, made less than a handful of execrable flops. Suffice it to say he’s no Joe Dante.

There are glimpses of actors Jan Michael Vincent and Robert Patrick, archival footage from some earlier Corman productions from when Patrick was just about ready to shave for the first time and Vincent was still alive.

But setting out to make a “cult” film rarely pays off. We can always tell when folks are trying too hard, and that’s what’s happening in this attempt to spoof the video game experience.

It’s a Vietnam War action picture about two self-aware video game characters (Robert Baker and Ben Chase) who try and try and try again to complete their “mission,” rescuing hostages from the North Vietnamese Army. Or is it the Viet Cong?

“These guys are wearing tan. That means they’re a LOT tougher than the guys in black!”

At least, that’s the way it plays out in the game, which freezes up (“LOADING” graphics), features acres of dusty Southern Cal locations doubling for humid Southeast Asia and has our “heroes” shooting up legions of brown folks and shouting “USA! USA!” right up to the moment when they’re “killed” again, and have to restart the game and try once more.

That’s the funniest conceit here, that this is a “this time we win” Vietnam fantasy. And the two supermen can’t quite manage it.

Katie Savoy plays the shapely, anti-war photographer grizzled Books (Baker) can never wholly “save,” never quite steal a “kiss” from.

Humans mostly behave like “humans” in this gamescape. Save for Lt. Ho (Sam Medina), a bullet-dodging martial arts master who dispatches his victims with a Bond villain golden luger.

“That dude was like a Vietnamese Spider Man!”

There are NPCs (“non-player characters”) and jokes about NPCs, and by the commanding officer NPC (Gregory North).

“The terrain makes the Ozarks look like Busch God-D—-d GARDENS!”

And Mark Hamill shows up as “The Monk,” offering fortune cookie wisdom about how never finishing the game helps the character (or player) “perfect himself.” I’d quote more of him, but he has most of the good lines, and there’s no point in robbing you of the pleasure of Master Mark’s moments of wisdom.

The tone is jokey enough, a few of the gags land. When our two man rescue squad runs to the edge of their “map,” they’re about to leave the gamescape. Their faces mash up against unseen glass.

Cheap, funny and effective, kind of the hallmarks of a Robert Corman production. If only they’d had more of those.

Still, I suppose if you’ve quaffed a few, edibled a few others and what not, this could be a nonstop giggle.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Robert Baker, Ben Chase, Katie Savoy, Kevin Trang, Theo Breaux, Ben Messmer, Sam Medina and Mark Hamill

Credits: Directed by G.J. Echternkamp, scripted by Matt Yamashita. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:23

You don’t have to look hard to see the criticisms of “The Way Things Work in China” tucked into the somber, slow-burn thriller “Back to the Wharf.” It’s in the sealed fate of the protagonists, the way “some pigs are more equal than others” in this “Animal Farm” and in the closing credits, which tidy the story up in a People’s Republic-Approved coda.

It’s about influence, future prospects and a chain reaction tragedy that dominates the life of our meek and smart but downtrodden protagonist.

Zhang Yu plays Song Hao, a top one percent of his class high-schooler who survives bullying thanks to his friendship with the cocky punk son of the deputy mayor in the small city of Xiyuan. Li Pang’s long been “a pal,” or at least a guy who gets his jollies bullying bullies.

Until that day that the principal informs Song Hao that his great grades and promised college placement were going to another. Li Pang (Hong-Chi Lee) will have the wide-open future, influence and affluence that a college education would promise.

In a “one child” China, where family advancement is traced in generations, Li Pang has been designated a winner. Song Hao’s father (Wang Yanhui) gets this, and starts to complain. Song Hao tries to confront Li Pang and get him to admit this betrayal to his face.

But the kid storms into the wrong house, is attacked by the drunken owner, and stabs him in a fight. Song Hao’s dad finds the man, and does the calculus as he pretends to listen to the bleeding man’s pleas to call an ambulance. Dad’s promotion is on the line. His future and his family line’s Master Plan is endangered. He finishes the bleeding Wan off and lets his son think it was all his fault.

The kid flees town and takes a menial job with a stone cutting and carving factory far away. Only when Song Hao’s mother dies does he return. He was never fingered for the crime, and now he learns that the daughter of the dead man grew up an orphan who now hangs on to a derelict house coveted by developers. His own father took his promotion and dumped his mother to take a second shot at having a family and producing a “successful” heir.

And Li Pang? Once a punk, always a punk. He’s a well-connected college-educated high roller who works for the development corporation that wants that orphan teen’s (Enxi Deng) house, by hook or by crook.

What can passive, downtrodden Song Hao do about any of this?

The fatalism that hangs over Li Xiaofeng’s film is personified by Yu’s unsmiling, dispassionate and expressionless performance. That cute, pushy classmate who was not one of their school’s intellectual “elite” was destined to become a toll-taker. And by God, she will have this eligible, mopey bachelor who has returned for his mother’s funeral.

“It was meant to be,” she crows (in Chinese with English subtitles). “I’m single TOO!”

Song Hao tries to ignore her and gets downright rude. It doesn’t work. Meanwhile, he’s trying to do right by the teen whose father he accidentally killed.

I like the script’s sad cause and effect throughline, all of it started when some well-placed mediocrity is promoted, upsetting what Americans would call “the meritocracy.” Song Hao may protest that it’s “Not fair,” but everyone from the principal who puts his finger on the scales to the fathers of both boys involved is expected to shrug off injustices and accept their fates.

The film’s commentary on this is underscored by the setting for the finale, a vast collection of rusting, no longer useful fishing boats which China is too busy to renovate or recycle. The unfeeling behemoth, a State which teaches its populace to value calm and “order” above all, is simply too big and too busy to bother with individual rights or industries that change, chewing up the people who made their livelihoods in them.

“You can’t fight them,” is Song Hao’s father’s advice. His second family has a Western (blonde) tutor, teaching them English so they can emigrate. That’s his solution.

“Back to the Wharf” has the look and tone of a film noir, with a mousy anti-hero at its center, and not a decisive man of action.

The picture is a very slow starter, and even when the script begins to jolt, shock and make us fear our protagonist is merely fodder for the machine, even as it teases us with the idea that a man can only take so much, we know better than to get our hopes up too much.

It’s China, Jake.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex

Cast: Zhang Yu, Song Jia, Wang Yanhui, Hong-Chi Lee and Enxi Deng

Credits: Directed by Li Xiaofeng, scripted by Xin Yu and Li Xiaofeng. A Red Waters release.

Running time: 1:55

“Dog Gone” is a maudlin, sappy (inspired by a) “true story” about a boy and his missing dog. It’s a Netflix tearjerker of the “Marley & Me/A Dog’s Purpose” school, packed with cliches and served up with a heaping helping of melodramatics as a side dish.

It’s a family movie, nobody’s idea of Great Cinema, but will almost certainly play as less manipulative to younger viewers.

What it has going for it is a simple universal truth. Almost everybody loves dogs. “Dog Gone’s” big, obvious subtext is dogs as a unifying connective tissue in the culture. Losing one is as close to a shared heartbreak as anything the young and old share as a common experience.

“Of COURSE I’ll help you look for your dog” is as basic a test of humanity as you’re likely to come up with.

Director Stephen Herek (“Mr. Holland’s Opus” was his high water mark) goes for the hankies in this adaptation of Pauls Toutonghi’s non-fiction book, imagined here as a tale of an overachiever but disconnected father (Rob Lowe) and his newly-graduated-but-aimless-son (Johnny Berchtold) who bond over the search for the irresponsible son’s wayward Lab.

We meet just-ditched-for-a-Frisbee-bro Fielding at “Virginia University.” His way out of his girlfriend-loss funk?

“Let’s go to the pound!”

For “What is man without the beasts,” Fielding declares, quoting Chief Seattle to his BFF Nate (Nick Peine). He’ll adopt a dog, name him “Gonker,” and let him live “free” and off-leash all through college.

But after sleeping through his graduation, he gets mildly reproached by his super-organized, motivated “fixer” and problem-solver Dad for his lack of direction and the fact that he’s adopted a dog and never told his father or mother (Kimberly Williams-Paisley).

“Having a dog’s a responsibility!”

Aimless Fielding is no closer to figuring out life after he has to move back home to Northern Virginia, when he and Nate let Gonker off-leash on a day hike on the Appalachian Trail. One fox encounter later, Gonker’s gone.

“Dog Gone” is about the search for that missing dog, with father and son hitting the trail and mom organizing a methodical, county-by-county, town-by-town, newspaper by social media message board hunt for the missing pet.

Because it turns out Mom lost a dog when she was young, and flashbacks remind dog people of another universal truth. That trauma can last a lifetime, and Mom’s sure not willing to let it happen again.

Herek isn’t a subtle director, and you can scan his credits to see “competence” is sort of the top end of expectations of anything he puts his name on.

“Dog Gone” rubs any edge off every character in it, doesn’t develop the father-son disagreement gap at all, and fails utterly to find any humor in a big, galumphing dog creating mischief and mayhem because, like his slacker owner, he lacks discipline.

The script piles health scares into a “ticking clock” plot — the dog is off his meds, the kid isn’t well either — to little avail. And it doesn’t give Berchtold or Williams-Paisley the big emotional moments their characters are set up to experience, the despair of loss or a Hollywood ending.

But here’s what I was thinking about in all the many encounters, on the trail, in stores and shelters and veterinary offices depicted in the movie. There’s that one waitress in a remote, mountain-town eatery who sums up the shared humanity that piles onto this movie, something that anyone who’s ever looked for a lost dog will recognize from when they printed up fliers or posted a notice on Facebook.

“Your dog’s lost? Oh my GOODNESS, he’s so cute!”

Of COURSE she’ll post your flier. Of COURSE we’ll “pass the word” among rescue groups, shelters, neighbors, biker gangs.

About a third of the women I am “friends” with on social media are semi-professional dog rescue allies. Many of them relentlessly post found and lost dog notices all the live-long day.

“Dog Gone” taps into that world — the shelters, animal rescue subculture, the helpers, the way members of the media embrace missing dog stories, fellow dog owners with “how to track” and “how to help him track you” tips.

“Must love dogs” should be our national motto.

Then there’s the Appalachian Trail subculture, hikers of “A Walk in the Woods” vintage and Gen Z hippies of the “Wild” persuasion whom the movie quickly sketches in.

“We’ll keep an eye out,” because of course they will.

Shouting “Who’s looking for Gonker?” into the woods where the name “Gonker!” echoes toward you?

“I am!”

To put it simpler, EVERYONE is.

So no, “Dog Gone” isn’t a very good movie. But if you and your kids love dogs, you’d be cheating yourself by missing it.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Rob Lowe, Johnny Berchtold, Nick Peine and Kimberly Williams-Paisley.

Credits: Directed by Stephen Herek, scripted by Nick Santora, based on the book by Pauls Toutonghi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

“Saint Omer” is a dry, patience-testing parable about cultures clashing, cultural disconnection, motherhood and the eating fear of infanticide many mothers harbor — “The Medea Complex.”

That, by the way, would have been a much more informative, dramatic and poetic title than the drab name of the city where a dramatically-flat French murder trial takes place, that of a Senegalese immigrant accused of leaving her baby to drown in the surf.

But “more informative, dramatic and poetic” would have been too easy for French-born (of Senegalese parents) filmmaker Alice Diop, known for documentaries (“We,””La mort de Danton”) about refugees and African immigrants in France, and an acclaimed French TV series about the various forms of violence against women in French life.

Diop gives us clues of what her debut feature film is about grudgingly, masks her messaging with endless and dully-shot and performed scenes of the trial, and surrenders any illusion of “entertainment” pretty much entirely in this movie which touches on racism, superstition, the French system of justice and Every Mother’s Nightmare.

Plainly, others got more out of it than I did, as this is France’s contender for the Best International Feature in this year’s Academy Awards. But when you introduce an accomplished, striking and barely-sketched-in college professor and promptly drop her into a trial she’s observing 15 minutes into your movie, and don’t let us escape that courtroom’s real-time tedium for 25 solid minutes, you’re not just testing your audience. You’re abusing it.

The script doesn’t reveal exactly what it is about this nationally notorious trial that makes college professor and novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame) want to witness her fellow countrywoman’s questioning. Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) had a baby with her much older, white lover (Xavier Maly). Isolated from her partner, her family and her own culture in a strange land where she hoped to study law, fixated on a “curse” put on her when she left Senegal, she left the baby girl on the beach at Berck-sur-Mer at low tide. Fishermen found it.

Rama, who is teaching Marguerite Duras using images of French women who slept with Nazis having their heads shaved as punishment and “shaming” after World War II when we meet her, is also in an interracial relationship. She is, it turns out, pregnant. And despite being a beautiful accomplished novelist in a multicultural democracy, she starts to feel some of the same pressures Laurence claims as Rama listens, with growing concern, to Laurence’s lengthy questioning from a judge and the lawyers in court.

Oh, she’s here because she thinks this trial could serve as fodder for her next book, “Medea Castaway.” Diop drops this key piece of information FAR later than she should have, in a phone chat with Rama’s publisher, who isn’t keen on that title.

That would be a handy fact to have at hand when this first-time feature director is burying us under emotion-free testimony about Laurence’s early life, her relationships, emotions and insistence that “sorcery” had a hand in this murder.

“I don’t think I’m the responsible person in this case,” she flatly declares under questioning in a courtroom which provides subtle drama and no histrionics, and eats up the vast majority of “Saint Omer’s” two-hours-plus running time.

The meat of the movie is the way white, Gallic French society, via its courts, treats The Other. Judges and lawyers lightly debate just how seriously “cultural” differences have to be taken into account for this murderous act, with one lawyer glibly comparing it to “African female genital mutilation” and a judge suggesting “FGM,” at least, has perceived “benefits.” “Infanticide does not.”

Perhaps I’m misreading what spins out, in French with English subtitles, in those courtroom scenes. What I hear and understand is a steady drip-drip-drip drowning of Laurence’s various “reasons,” “excuses” and lies about her academic career, her background and supposed superstition, which comes off as her attempt at a “get out of jail free” card for this unspeakable crime.

Because none of the (mostly) female (all) white people questioning her have a clue about any of that. And French tolerance and sensitivities notwithstanding, they like the viewer judge this “curse” business as nonsense or a lie.

Rama, taking the “motherhood” and “stranger in a strange land” revelations too hard, weeps at some of what she’s absorbing, fretting over her own situation, privileged though it may be. And every Senegalese and white person she speaks to or overhears can’t stop herself or himself from noting how “articulate” Laurence is, how smooth and educated her command of French comes off in court.

Racist? Oh yes.

But perhaps one has to be a mother and have struggled with the psychology of pregnancy to better appreciate the “Medea” business in this script, which is underplayed to the point where one must ask other critics the blunt question, “Are we reviewing the movie, or the director’s statement about what she was trying to accomplish?”

While there are things to be explored and pondered in drab “Saint Omer,” Diop’s organization of her message and lack of prioritization of simple courtesy-to-the-viewer information we need in order to follow the story and answer that fundamental question, “What the hell is this thing about?” leaves a lot to be desired.

Rating: Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and brief strong language

Cast: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Salimata Kamate, Xavier Maly and Thomas de Pourquery

Credits: Directed by Alice Diop, scripted by Alice Diop and Amrita David. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:02

I had to return to Daniel Day Lewis‘ Oscar acceptance speech from the spring of 1990 — God Bless Youtube — to make sure I was remembering it right, that he saluted the Academy for “providing me with the makings of one helluva weekend in Dublin” followed by a tribute to the young actor who played the even-younger Christy Brown in the early scenes of “My Left Foot.”

That Day Lewis, the oft-nominated, three-time Oscar winner who is basically the Brando, DeNiro and Streep of his generation of actors, could transform himself into the memoirist, poet, painter and novelist Christy Brown — born with cerebral palsy — seems like a given today. He’s simply the very best at what he did before he retired and gave the rest of the Screen Actor’s Guild a chance.

But watching the film anew, I was stunned at how good young Hugh O’Conor, a mere boy of 13 charged with managing the same transformation as Day Lewis, was and is in the film. He’d played a troubled epileptic child whom a young priest (Liam Neeson) takes an encouraging interest in for 1985’s “Lamb.” So he had to be the most qualified actor in Dublin for those early scenes. Still, he’s astonishing in a physically demanding role, managing the spasms, the “I have no mouth and I must scream” despair of an unspeaking, unable-to-write child whom everybody in 1930s and early ’40s Dublin assumed was “an idiot,” thanks to his birth defect.

Day Lewis is amazing in the film. Hugh O’Conor breaks your heart.

What drew me back to this Oscar-winner was this awards’ season, and the presence of yet another performance that might get dismissed, as some wags are wont to do, as a “stunt.”

Think of Ray Milland’s convincing drunk in “The Lost Weekend,” Joanne Woodward’s multiple personality disorder turn in “The Three Faces of Eve,” Jon Voight’s paraplegic performance in “Coming Home” or Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant “Rain Man” and you see evidence of actors in the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences recognizing excellence, degree of difficulty and showmanship in a performance.

Day Lewis edged out fellow nominee Tom Cruise’s best shot at an Oscar for his paralyzed Vietnam vet turned anti-war protester in “Born on the Fourth of July” back in 1990.

So Brendan Fraser, putting on pounds, donning a fat suit and and assuming the role of “The Whale” is part of a long Hollywood tradition, with an Oscar nomination instantly part of the conversation.

But what Day Lewis and the other examples cited above managed to do, something Fraser pulled off as well, I think, is transcending the “disabled struggle” story trope to create a fully-formed, emotionally-flawed and complicated character.

With Christy Brown having passed just a few years before this film, based on his memoir, and some of the people involved in his life still around, “My Left Foot” still paints a complex and sometimes unflattering portrait of a man whose every day was an epic struggle, and who did not suffer this misery in silence.

We see a Brown who self-medicates and is an abusive drunk, a needy and demanding man who did not suffer anyone — fools, the well-to-do, fellow artists or the women who came into his life — easily or gladly.

Whatever “weekend” Day Lewis experienced in the pubs of Dublin, it’s hard to imagine having much fun with a brilliant, cutting and never-quite-self-pitying Brown, should you find him your drinking mate for the evening.

The movie tracks Brown from childhood, recreating that “Eureka” moment when his large, distracted and working poor family realized that his one controllable foot and its dexterous toes could write (seen above), and into adolescence and his celebrated adulthood as a man or art and letters.

Brenda Fricker collected an Oscar playing Brown’s sainted mother. Ray McAnally is his loving but dismissive-at-first hard-drinking Da’ and Fiona Shaw deftly plays a composite character, a doctor who recognizes Christy’s “poet’s soul” and the artist trapped in that barely-functioning body, and becomes Brown’s first serious romantic interest.

If anything, “My Left Foot” went a little light on the miseries of Brown’s 49 years on Earth, which is to be expected.

But Daniel Day Lewis, Hugh O’Conor and director Jim Sheridan made damned sure that whatever Hollywood thought, whatever “rewarding a stunt performance ” rationale might enter in filmdom’s collective mind about this bit of work, their combined efforts would be never less than a wholly realized human being.

This Christy would have good days and bad days, show off his love, devotion and charm, and his prickly side when he was in his cups.

It’s a performance and a film that I have to say still holds up. That makes “My Left Foot” well worth tracking down this Oscar season, and any Oscar season where you hear a whiff of “stunt” blowback against a demanding, wholly-committed performance like this one and every single other one I’ve mentioned in this appreciation, including Brendan Fraser’s.

Rating: R, violence, nudity, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Daniel Day Lewis, Brenda Fricker, Ray McAnally, Fiona Shaw, Adrian Dunbar, Cyril Cusack and Hugh O’Conor.

Credits: Directed by Jim Sheridan, scripted by Shane Connaughton and Jim Sheridan, based on the memoir by Christy Brown. A Miramax release on Amazon, Tubi, PosiTV, etc.

Running time: 1:43

The grey-haired woman whose daughter disappeared is as startled to run into the third prosecutor/investigator assigned to her daughter’s case while out hunting for her child herself.

What’s he doing here?

“Fixing other people’s mistakes,” he buck-passes. And her?

“Doing other peoples JOBS.”

The best Netflix movie with “Noise” in the title is Natalia Beristáin’s film about Mexico’s “desaparecida,” another Latin American country — like Argentina and Chile under military junta rule — that is seeing tens of thousands of its young people disappear.

Beristáin, a feminist filmmaker known for “The Eternal Feminine” and directing several episodes of TV’s “Mosquito Coast” adaptation, takes us inside the end game cost of a country not just losing its drug war, but one that has all but capitulated to the cartels on the other side.

A solitary mother (Julieta Egurrola), an artist who works in textiles, begs, rages and hires outside help when the indifferent, corrupt and cowardly police refuse to help her locate her missing 20something daughter.

Her estranged husband (Arturo Beristáin) and agent is just as upset, but putting on a brave face that is little comfort. At least her first visit to a support group gives her some relief, the realization that she is not alone, an outlet to tell her story.

Some 90,000 Mexicans — young people, women mostly, and journalists, perhaps even a cop or two who isn’t on the take — have vanished in the country’s war on the people who feed America’s appetite for illegal drugs.

“Noise,” like the Argentine classics “The Official Story” and “The Disappeared,” will follow Julia as she retains a lawyer/researcher (Teresa Ruiz) to carry out her own search. They visit morgues, wary, lazy and cover-up prone local police. And they join scores of other mothers who have learned to carry out their own “killing fields” searches for evidence of mass graves and something that might identify their missing loved ones.

“We had to teach ourselves how to do such missions,” a veteran of this particular hunt confesses.How long has she been searching? “Nine years.”

The “Mexican Femicide” graffiti covers the cities, and Julia even meets the youngest and the angriest, girls and young women taking to the streets in ever-growing, ever-rowdier protests.

None of which matter to the “Men With Guns,” criminals and the uniformed state-payroll goons who are more interested in silencing “trouble-makers” than stopping a nationwide crime wave and giving these families some peace.

As a movie, “Noise” is a slow starter. The picture comes to a complete halt for the necessary but overlong opening act “support group” scene, and has pacing problems into the nerve-wracking, infuriating and disheartening third act.

But it quietly takes hold of the viewer with patience, a gripping story that has plenty to say to audiences all over the world, especially those with under-policed police, accepted corruption at the highest levels, where a “War on Women” is a political policy, even if it’s never been declared.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Julieta Egurrola, Teresa Ruiz, Adrian Vazquez and Arturo Beristáin

Credits: Directed by Natalia Beristáin,  scripted by Natalia Beristáin and Diego Enrique Osorno. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

What the Screen Actors Guild Award nominations are to the Acting Oscars, a good indicator of what the Oscar nomination field will look like, the Producers Guild Awards are to Best Picture, Best Documentary and Best Animated Film.

Looks like “Glass Onion” and other titles ignored by SAG, get added on here.

“She Said” is apparently not Oscar worthy, nor is “Women Talking” or “The Woman King,” or “Till” but the super popular junk “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” are.

Producers are big on movies that draw a crowd. The exceptions, this year, are “Tar” and “The Fabelmans,” which by the way, wouldn’t make any sentient person’s Top Five Steven Spielberg movies.

Mutter.

“Tar” and “Whale” made the cut, and the slightly more popular “Banshees of Inisherin” is included, but several fine films missed that cut.

“Babylon” was depending on an awards season and Oscar bounce it almost certainly will not get.

Happy to see “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” made the Best Animated Feature contenders list, and the box office underwhelmer “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” crashed that party.

Below the page break, find the full list of feature film, documentary and TV and streaming nominees.