Movie Nation

The new German thriller “Sixty Minutes” lives or dies on the back of its brutal, sometimes bloody brawls, which push mixed martial arts mayhem in the movies to a new level.

The beatdowns, punchups and kickdowns are savagely-staged and breathlessly-photographed and edited. And while we’re allowed to weigh if any human being could survive this pummeling, much less get back up and run until he has to fight again, it isn’t realism that director and co-writer Oliver Kienle was going for.

The melodramatic set-up is loaded with eye-rollers. And the pace lags as our hero, with “Sixty Minutes” to parkour and punch his way across Berlin, sometimes loses that sense of urgency that’s attached to his mission.

But the fights? They’re something else.

It’s basically a “Run Lola Run” riff with MMA and parkour decor, rarely pulse-pounding but with every fight a visceral immersion in the moment for the viewer.

Actor/martial artist Emilio Sakraya is “Octa,” which could be short for “octagon” as that’s how he makes his living. Octavio is a bleached-blond MMA fighter facing a big test against the hulking Benko (Aristo Luis). He’s antsy, lashing-out during his warmups with his trainer, Cosima (Maire Mouroum), a Greek Fury in fighting tights who’s worried he’s going to punch himself out before the bell.

Benko is making everybody wait. And wait. Considering how much money is riding on the fight, manager Paul (Dennis Mojen) may be the most nervous of all. Everyone in this corner really needs the cash.

But the delays have Octa fuming. It’s his little girl’s birthday, and he’s promised A) that he’ll be there, B) that he’s bringing a cake and C) that he has a “present” which the child doesn’t realize is to be this animal shelter kitten named “Onion” (“Zwiebel” in German, as the film is in German or dubbed into English, etc.).

“I don’t want to take too many shots” in the fight is his big worry. He doesn’t want the seven-year-old to see Daddy all bruised and bloody.

When the fight’s finally on, they hey get to the venue. But nobody’s tough enough to take Octa’s phone from him. His perpetual absence has his little girl in tears. His ex and her lawyer-boyfriend tell him they’re suing for sole custody if he can’t get there by six, “Sixty Minutes” from now.

When Octa bolts, who’s going to stop the brute? It turns out, a whole LOT of people are interested in that bout he’s bailing on, a whole LOT of people with martial arts skills, Lincoln Navigators and Hummers and pistols have a whole LOT of “skin” in this “game.”

Octa must steal taxis from paying customers, hurdle car-hoods and clambor over walls, dash through subway stations and underground clubs, get grabbed by first one group and then another, and remember to…pick up that cake and get to the animal shelter to fetch little Zwiebel der kitten.

“Gott im himmel!”

The story’s a bit much. But what we’re here for are the fights — the choke-out that four guys have to administer to get Octa in that Lincoln, the mayhem that ensues when he wakes up, with throwdown after throwdown with mobster Chino (Paul Wollin), the beefy Winkel (Florian Schmidtke) and their minions keeping Octa from his date with little Leonie (Morik Maya Heydo).

The story keeps adding layers of unnecessary “complications” and motivations for these over-zealous mobsters, money borrowed from more mobsters on up and down the line. Octa isn’t hearing that, but the birthday party stakes seem awfully low to account for all this violence.

And such violence! My favorite bit might be how little zip-tying him to a chair slows Octa down, although that early fight in the Navigator seems hardest to top. The idea that “We don’t want him HURT” because they need this fight to come off is abandoned pretty quickly. But Octa (sort of) takes care not to use his lethal hands and feet in a lethal enough way for the useless cops he approaches for help to have an excuse to lock him up.

He checks his watch and sees the minutes ticking down. Can he catch a break?

At the end of that hour, we’ve seen a bit of Berlin on film, gasped at some of the action beats, tasted a lot of blood and wondered if the Germans call “German chocolate cake” just “cake” (“kuchen”)? Is that enough? To some fans, maybe.

Rating: TV-MA, incredibly violent, some profanity

Cast: Emilio Sakraya, Marie Mouroum, Paul Wollin, Aristo Luis, Florian Schmidtke and Dennis Mojen.

Credits: Directed by Oliver Kienle, scripted by Oliver Kienle and Philip Koch. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

A dead weekend for new releases, mostly gassed out existing titles and really cold weather in a lot of the country made this corner of January a non starter at the cinema.

“Mean Girls” is adding another $11 million and change to its running tally, and Deadline.com projects that the musical remake won’t pass the original Tina Fey film’s box office take from 20 years ago and thus will fall well short of $100 million, all in.

Jason Statham’s best-reviewed franchise starter in nearly 20 years and his first decent hit in ages, “The Beekeeper” is pounding away to another $8.4 million.

“Wonka” is a certified holidays-and-beyond blockbuster, rolling up another $6.4.

And the winter’s honest to Pete sleeper has to be the R-Rated. Sydney Sweeney rom-com “Anyone But You,” racking up (ahem) another $5.4 million almost a month into its run.

Bleecker Street had the weekend almost all to itself for its half-decent sci Fi space war parable “I S.S.” Lacking a big name in the cast — Oscar winner Ariana DeBose isn’t yet “box office” — it was never going to blow up. But $3 million and change is a disaster, no matter how “the witness protection program of film distribution” and Deadline.com spin it. Just a tiny bit more effort and this solid and impressive if not terribly surprising thriller could have maxed-out in the $10 million range.

Neon’s “Origins” isn’t an awards contender but in limited release Ava Duvernay’s smart sermon on race and “caste” is making noise on a per screen basis. It’s not entertaining or moving enough to play in the provinces, but those tolerant of her slack, meandering directing style will get what she intended out of it.

@boxofficepro gets the final word.

Ms. Ridley co-stars with Dave Merheje in this Rachel Lambert dramedy (?), whose biggest selling point is that Oscilloscope Labs has it. And we never go far wrong with their releases.

Jan. 26.

“Trunk: Locked-in” is a tense and paranoid “work the problem” thriller about a woman struggling to get out of the Audi trunk she’s been drugged and stuffed into, desperately reaching out via cell phone for help from family, the authorities — anybody.

German writer/director Marc Schießer’s debut feature never goes far wrong as it drowns us in claustrophia, doling out tiny clues about our victim, what happened to her and possible reasons for it. And it’s never off-base trapped in that trunk with Malina, given a smart, urgent, mind-racing edge by Sina Martens in the film’s best moments.

The thriller’s energy flags as this rational victim stops reasoning, pleading and suffering through her plight long enough to make us despair that she’ll ever “get it” and get back on task. And the claustrophobic Malina’s-point-of-view-only bond is broken by the filmmaker in the third act of this real time “ticking clock” thriller. But it’s still a genuine German-language (with some English) nail-biter.

She wakes up in the half-closed trunk of a late model Audi, parked in an alley in the rain. Malina finds out she can’t move her legs to escape. But she grasps at the garbage bag — one of several — lit-up by her ringing phone, which is stuffed in it. Her unseen tormentor closes the trunk on her as she plays dead and he finishes disposing of those bags.

She’s been “taken.” What will she do? How can she escape?

Schießer’s camera is stuffed into that trunk with her as she starts to seek clues and give us others. She methodically takes account of her physical state — legs, “up to the spinal cord” — like a doctor or ER nurse.

She’ll find a gaping wound, eventually.

Malina turns on the cell flashlight and pokes around for release mechanisms and tries to push open the trunk. She takes inventory. There isn’t much here but her phone and her boyfriend’s small GoPro style camcorder. That’s how she sees the kidnapping and gets a glimpse of her captor.

Yes, that’s cheating.

Malina’s sister calls and a frantic Malina cannot convince the self-absorbed chatterbox that this isn’t more of her “drama.” Sis snarkily sends a “How to get out of a locked trunk” tutorial.

Her father flips out and is sure it’s someone who has a grudge against him or their family. He won’t call the police.

Only emergency operator Elisa (the voice of Luise Helm) takes Malina seriously and seems up to helping her. Eventually.

“Are you under the influence of drugs right now?”

They filmed this one in S.C., and it looks sweet and just soft and squishy enough to not merit a theatrical release.

Hulu has this Searchlight release, starting Feb. 9.

Here’s a link to my review of it.

Once and always “Iron Man” and possible Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Robert Downey Jr. is holding a sweepstakes/fundraiser, offering five of his electric-modified classic cars to lucky winners.

You don’t have to buy or donate anything to win, but donations are accepted and there’s also merch related to this cool, environmentally friendly fundraiser. And if you donate, you can increase your entries and thus slightly improve your odds for winning.

For his “Dream Cars” TV series, he adapted his Mom’s old Merc to be electric, converted a classic “big block” 1965 Corvette into something less likely to change the climate — and did the same for a VW Microbus, a vintage Chevy pickup, a classic Buick Riviera and an ’85 Chevy El Camino.

And now he’s unloading inventory and you could get your hands on one of those electric babies for nothing. All for the benefit of the reduce-your-carbon “Footprint Coalition.”

What have you got to lose? Aside from all the time it takes to figure out how to enter without donating (buried info, digtally tricky, etc.). Want that Oscar, RDJ? Maybe make “Entering” a tad easier before there’s a scandal.

What makes a “classic” film is what it leaves in the memory — sympathetic, lost or loathesome characters played by gifted actors, stunning visuals, seamless editing, a relatable or vicariously thrilling plot, pithy, quotable dialogue, or perhaps a couple of iconic scenes that burn into your psyche.

And then there’s “The Third Man,” one movie which one can confidently say has all of these elements, each of them a benchmark for measuring other films of its era and of all time against. In genre terms, it’s a mystery-thriller, one that transcends genre. In cinephile speak, it is a perfect thriller.

Director Carol Reed made other films, an Oscar winner among them. But this epoch-defining mystery-thriller was his masterpiece. Writer Graham Greene‘s stylish, naunced prose and shades-of-grey characters made his novels irresistible to filmmakers, even if his genre specialization and sheer popularity meant he’d never be more than “short listed” for the Nobel Prize for literature.

Joseph Cotten was one of the finest actors to never win an Oscar, or even a nomination. Orson Welles was brilliant in his own films, but given the greatest “star entrance” in the history of cinema, he transcends performance. His character becomes a symbol and one permanently attached to the “larger than life: Welles legend. Trevor Howard’s stiff-upper-lip British Army officer became his permanent onscreen persona after this 1949 film. But look at the shadings he gives this Major Calloway.

I’ve seen this film many times on TV, in college cinema societies and film festivals, and developed a great appreciation for its classic moments and brilliant turns of phrase — “The Cuckoo Clock” speech included — in editing snippets of the soundtrack into a long public radio celebration of it during my NPR station days.

But the truism about classic films and filmlovers is that every time we return to a great film, we stumble into details we hadn’t noticed, shadings we had not picked up on, rich textures in cinematography, editing, dialogue, characters and performance.

What stands out anew here are not just the great, underscored moments — the big scenes, the seductive pull of Austrian Anton Karas’s alternately jaunty and mournful zither music, the vast empty streets of post-conquest Vienna in the dark of night, the startling close-ups, the perfectly-turned phrases, outstanding performances and breathless, mostly music-free chase through the shadowy sewers of the ancient city.

And damned if I remembered Holly Martins’ tipsy trip to a burlesque club and the naked-save-for-pasties Viennese dancer he ignores between drinks.

But let’s notice that Reed and Greene had the simple epiphany of leaving lots of dialogue in untranslated German, reinforcing how out of his depth our “innocent” American pulp Western novelist Holly is in this alien, bombed and Nazi-corrupted city.

“Third Man” is correctly-labeled a “film noir,” but it’s a transitional tale in that regard. It recognizes the innocence with which the New World entered the Old World’s War, and lets us see that curdle in the figure of the naive, broke, dogmatic and yet doggedly determined dime novelist who thinks he can find out what really became of his old pal, a notorious racketeer run over by a car just before Holly’s arrival.

The plot — Holly Martins (Cotten) shows up, the struggling author of “The Oklahoma Kid” and “The Lone Rider of Sante Fe,” summoned to Vienna by the promise of a post-war job with his old friend Harry Lime (Welles). He arrives too late, he learns. He picks up bits of the story — in broken English — from Harry’s porter-neighbor (Paul Hörbiger).

There was an accident. Harry is “already in hell,” the old man suggests, “or in heaven.”

Holly hastens to the funeral, sees a mysterious woman (Alida Valli) there, perhaps the one genuine mourner. And he meets British Major Calloway, whom he insulting calls “Callahan” more times than the “I’m English, not Irish” Brit would like.

Harry’s death? “Best thing that ever happened to him,” the Major sniffs. Nothing for it but to find poor Holly a spot on the next flight back out.

But Holly hears conflicting versions of how Harry died. He died “instantly,” one witness says. He spoke of Holly and left instructions to meet and take care of him, says another. There were two men with him when he died. Or maybe there was a “Third Man.”

As Martins, irate at the tactless and he believes improperly judgmental Calloway, digs deeper, he meets the guarded, fearful actress Anna (Valli) and gets on Calloway’s last nerve. The major’s hulking sergeant (Bernard Lee) may be a fan of Martins’ books. But that doesn’t mean he won’t bop the foolish Yank if the need arises.

“I don’t want another murder in this case,” Calloway cautions Holly, after he’s mentioned people who have disappeared or died thanks to Harry Lime. “And you were born to be murdered.”

Real life father and daughter in a road trip dramedy about recovery and addiction and parenting when “You got that from me.”

Daniel Kaluuya, the British star of “Get Out,” “Nope” and “Judas & the Black Messiah,” steps behind the camera for “The Kitchen,” a story of underclass unrest in the face of official indifference, and one young man’s conflicted efforts to give a boy a better life than he himself experienced growing up.

Kaluuya co-wrote and co-directed the film, which may have nothing to do with its distracted focus and murky messaging. Or that may explain the movie’s failings entirely. Whatever the cause, it makes for a somewhat immersive mixed-bag of a movie, which puts a damper on any temptation to use “promising first film” in describing it.

In the London of the near future, there is but one traditional “Housing Estate” (project) standing, the either half-finished or half-ruined complex and eco-system called “The Kitchen.”

It’s where the displaced of all races — working poor or permanently-unemployed — can live as squatters. But “they” want the land. And all the daily “radio” preaching from DJ “Lord Kitchener” (Ian Wright) might not be enough to prevent the Lord and his People’s violent mass eviction.

“They can’t stop ‘we’,” he tells his audience every morning. But Isaac, aka “Izi” (Kano, aka Kane Robinson) has him tuned out.

Izi has a steady job at the Funeral Home of the Future — Life After Life. That’s where the dead are turned into planters for trees, a far more productive and environtmentally sound use of corpses than embalming or cremating them. And gainfully-employed Izi has put in for and been accepted for a single-occupancy flat by high-tech housers Buena Vida. Izi has his eye on escaping this “sh–hole.”

But one funeral service breaks his upsell-the-bereaved pitch and fake-empathy for the dearly departed. A woman name Toni is buried. Izi seems a little shaken. And her 12-or-13 year-old son (Jedaiah Bannerman) notices.

The kid, Benji, asks the obvious question, the one any kid who never knew his father might. Izi brushes that off, rebuffs the kid’s enthusiasm for his motorbike and makes his way back to “The Kitchen.” But the boy weighs on his mind and his conscience.

And having nowhere else to go, the kid makes his way to the infamous squatter’s zone on his own, falls in with Staples’ (Hope Ikpoku Jnr) gang, which feeds kids pancakes, identifies talent and recruits them for what we guess is either a crime spree or a war, or perhaps both.

“The Kitchen” thus sets up as a tug of war over the boy’s future and a long, cold night of the soul for loner Izi, who can see his way out, and the contract for a “single occupancy” apartment standing in the way of taking in an orphaned boy.

But rather than wring pathos out of this and score political points with these characters’ plight, Kaluuya & Co content themselves with immersing us in this “Attack the Block/District B-13″ world, with its multi-racial teeming masses, future Afro-Caribbean hip hop and patois and melting pot of the impoverished milieu.

It’s not really enough. Kaluuya and his co-director, Kidwe Tavares, are first-time feature filmmakers, with only co-screenwriter Joe Murtagh (“American Animals”) having credits that suggest he knows the secret of creating a compelling and complete narrative. This isn’t anybody involved’s best credit.

Characters are introduced — Benji’s cute tween gal pal Ruby (Teija Kabs) — and somewhat forgotten. Themes are thrown out there, discarded and picked up again.

The best idea in this might be the town crier DJ, Lord Kitchener, whose name is an historical pun. But that’s borrowed from Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.”

Even with that welcome “borrowing,” “Kitchen” adds to a meal only half-cooked.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Kano, Jedaiah Bannerman, Hope Ikpoku Jnr, Teija Kabs, Demmy Ladipo and Ian Wright

Credits: Directed by Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares, scripted by Daniel Kaluuya and Joe Murtagh. A Film 4/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47