Movie Nation

This Berlin Film Fest darling looks intriguing — immigrant joins Foreign Legion, but what he gets mixed up in down in Africa makes his question his service and who is doing what to whom.

Feb. 2.

There’s a lot to sort out and take in from this trailer to what’s obviously a B/C movie thriller, coming from Quiver.

Some recognizable faces — Laurie Fortier of “The Walking Dead,” “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday” and decades of TV and mostly-bad movies in between, for starters.

Alas, no Fran Drescher. Hey, SAG presidents need work, too!

Those “Mean Girls” are back, still lording over North Shore High, still cruel and cutting as only high school girls can be, still trying to make “fetch” a thing.

Tina Fey‘s greatest girl-on-girl teen take-down returns in triumph, a sometimes dazzling and most cinematic remake based on her Broadway musical which was based on her 2004 Lindsay Lohan/Rachel McAdams star vehicle.

It’s as fun as ever, and edgier than you remember. Because of course the “edge” has moved in 20 years. And hey, you go “Broadway” and you have to up the sexual ante. It’s sexier, bustier, gayer and earned almost too much “PG-13” latitude in the language and the veritable Russ Meyer Cleavage Collection in its casting and the way that cast is dressed, framed and photographed.

Fey’s musician husband Jeff Richmond composed the score, and he and Nell Bejamin reworked their thirteen Broadway show tunes to fit a new cast of energetic, high-range would-be pop divas and Broadway babies.

And first-time feature co-directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. showcase their new stars with style, serving up sparkling, long singing tracking shots and 360 degree pans, punchy, music video/Bollywood-influenced production numbers and a party scene that, like the rest of the movie, really pushes that PG-13 edge.

But Fey’s message for her younger sisters remains intact. Girl-on-girl bullying is totally a thing and out of control in an oversexed, status, fashion and social-media-obsessed age.

The cleverest conceit here might be telling the tale with lots of TikTok tidbits. Characters drive the gossip, perform for their cell phone camera and cruelly comment and pile on each other via little video interludes.

That’s how the tale is narrated, too. The impressive Auli’i Cravalho and hilarious Jaquel Spivey are Janis and Damien, the artsy outsider and the big, hilarious “almost too gay to function” teen (Fey is always looking for that next Titus Burgess) misfits who sing and dish us into this “Cautionary Tale,” and out of it.

They’re the ones who befriend new kid Cady (Aussie Angourie Rice from “Spider-Man: Homecoming”), who sang a Kenyan savanna lament so convincingly her scientist mom (Jenna Fischer from “The Office”) decided to move them from Africa back to the states.

That’s how home-schooled Cady, with her scientist-taught smarts, simple fashions and wholesome values, arrives at North Shore and utterly fails to fit in.

Janis and Damien console and counsel her. But the minute this new novelty on campus falls under the gaze of “The Plastics,” the titular “Mean Girls” trio — ditzy Karen (Avantika), insecure Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and their “Apex Predator” queen, Regina (Reneé Rapp) — Cady is lured into their “pink” lair, their value system and their power plays.

As Cady is groomed and made-over, crushing on classmate Aaron (Christopher Briney), her personality changes, her values warp and her grades tumble. Mean Girls being what they are, as one of the showstoppers assures us, “Someone Gets Hurt” along the way.

Fey reprises her role as the teacher trying to talk some sense into these tarted-up teens.

“Home schooled?’ That’s a…fun way to take jobs away from my union!”

Her “Saturday Night Live” castmate Tim Meadows is back as the amusingly befuddled principal. Busy Philips is perfectly-cast as Regina’s poor-priorities-begin-at-home barely-tolerated Mom, who only wants to be the girls’ “bestie,” celebrating Cady as “‘new meat in our ‘lady taco.'”

Ahem.

And Jon Hamm is the gruff, unfiltered “health” and sex education teacher who crosses a couple of lines every time he pops up on screen. You’re covering the gamut from “whoremones” to condoms to “choking” in this class?

The songs were seriously reworked from the stage show, tailor-made to fit the singers and sometimes sex-up the proceedings. If Megan Thee Stallion features on one of the tunes, and has a funny string of TikTok cameos in the picture, you know it’s going to at least flirt with an R-rated vibe.

So whatever positive body images the casting serves us — short and tall, skinny and slim and zaftig — whatever sentimental sweetness comes through casting of Meadows and anybody else from the original film, this version of “Mean Girls” all but sexualizes itself right out of its natural demographic — tweens aspiring to be teens and “see how that’s done” in a movie.

You don’t want your tween-to-teen girls to be “mean.” You don’t want them to hide their brilliance to play “dumb” for a boy, or their dimmer, shallower female peers. And you probably don’t want them idolizing growing-up-too-fast teen sexpots, either — plunging necklines, immodest social media poses and posts and the like.

Yes, that’s the “edge” these days. But maybe this new “Mean Girls,” as fun and cool as it can be, isn’t for middle schoolers or parents who pay attention to how their kids grow up.

Rating: PG-13 for sexual material, strong language, and teen drinking.

Cast: Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Auli’i Cravalho, Avantika, Jaquel Spivey, Bebe Wood, Tina Fey, Jenna Fischer, Jon Hamm and Tim Meadows.

Credits: scripted by Tina Fey, based on her stage musical which was based on her 2004 movie “Mean Girls.” A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:52

Idyllic 1950s lives and child-rearing, an accident and “blame” and “guilt” tear apart two friends and neighbors and mothers.

Two Oscar winners go toe-to-toe — literally.

Looks chilling.

America’s penchant for conspiracy theories can be traced back to the nation’s founding. And as recent events confirm, our thirst for embracing ideas that unseen forces and assorted nefarious boogeymen are pulling the political strings and killing those who might change the status quo like the Kennedys or those who know too much like Jeffrey Epstein remain unquenched.

Hollywood, like America, took a few years to process the too-deadly-to-seem random political assassinations of the 1960s.

Sinister, unseen “secret programs” and megalomaniacal tycoons or bureaucrats turned up in thriller after thriller in one of the cinema’s greatest decades, the ’70s. From “The Conversation” to “Winter Kills,” with “The Anderson Tapes,” “Marathon Man,” “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Odessa File” just a few of the more famous examples, the movies set out to make us paranoid in “The Me Decade.”

When the best conspiracy picture of them all, “All the President’s Men,” arrived and put an exclamation point on this subgenre, we were excused for that unsettling feeling that unseen forces were manipulating our future. Because in that true story, they were.

“The Parallax View” (1974) isn’t the only political picture Hollywood icon Warren Beatty ever tackled. But it’s the most despairing.

A “somebody is recruiting assassins and patsies” tale, it arrived just as Watergate was consuming the country and the Nixon Administration, the scandal’s nefarious perpetrators. The film didn’t make much of a splash, then. But it’s fascinating to dive into it now, after all that’s changed and hasn’t changed in 50 years.

A Seattle political appearance at the famed Space Needle ends with a sitting senator murdered in front of a crowd of admirers and press in an enclosed, high-rise location from which there’s no escape. The alleged shooter, a waiter, doesn’t escape. Chased, this “lone gunman” falls to his death.

Years later, after a “commission” has investigated and settled on yet another “lone nut/gunman” conclusion, a TV reporter present (Paula Prentiss, excellent) shows up, frantic, at the house of her ex-boyfriend, newspaper reporter Joseph Frady (Beatty).

Both of them were there “that day.” But Frady dismisses her paranoia over the number of people who “witnessed” that shooting who have died in the three years since.

“Whoever killed them will try to kill me!”

When she turns up dead, as she expected but he wrote off to her troubled psyche, Frady starts poking around where she wanted him to look, seeking that campaign manager (William Daniels) she was sure had his suspicions.

An attempt on Frady’s own life gets his attention, and brochures and paperwork from this “Parallax” corporation gives him a lead. If only his too-understanding editor (Hume Cronyn) would pay him to keep digging.

“You go expecting these things to happen,” the skeptical Bill notes of Frady’s agenda-driven style, “and they do.”

It’s only after surviving another murder attempt that Frady has the freedom to change his identity and see if he can get closer to this mysterious firm and those who do its dirty business.

Director Alan J. Pakula makes this thriller his warm-up to the details-must-be-accurate adaptation of “All the President’s Men.” “Parallax” is a picture of puzzle pieces, which only Frady seems to have in his head. He’s not sure about those pieces, and not sharing everything he knows.

He doesn’t tell his editor a corrupt sheriff tried to murder him. He never fills anybody in on all he suspects. Frady is ambitious, and sure he’ll be able to break this story all alone.

“I’m dead, Bill,” he says after an attempt on his life allegedly succeeded. “I just want to stay that way for awhile.”

“Parallax” becomes a picture of episodes, one that demands attention and which Pakula guarantees by setting, for instance, a “meet” with an ex-FBI agent (Kenneth Mars) on the kiddie train at an amusement park. A couple of the killings are on camera, and if they’re not shocking now, they must have been then.

The signature image of this picture, the one that sticks with you, is of Frady/Beatty getting a sample of “Clockwork Orange” style “brainwashing” via image-and-word associations projected in a cavernous room as he sits in a comfy chair.

Beatty plays this guy as amoral and guilt free. Reviews that suggest “guilt” is his reason for starting to dig into this story are imposing something on the performance that Beatty doesn’t play.

But there are intriguing cultural artifacts — curiosities of the time — that stand out today. Frady tracks a mysterious piece of luggage onto a plane. A bomb? He boards, without clearing security because you could PAY the stewardess for the flight on BOARD the plane.

Airport security and security around the various senators and senate candidates is laughably lax by today’s standards. That works against the film because even back then this had to seem “off.” The last big killing is almost surreal in the under-reaction of one and all.

That’s how Parallax wants it.

Like all good clockwork thrillers, this one sets up problems and then works the problems. Pakula and Beatty, working from a script by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (Beatty pal and “Chinatown” genius Robert Towne had an uncredited hand in it), reduce the Loren Singer source novel to a string of dilemmas and narrow escapes.

Frady has to hold his own in a fight with a homophobic deputy, get away in a car chase, learn how to be a convincing sociopath from an academic psychologist (Anthony Zerbe, terrific as always) who plays the video game “Pong” with a chimp he’s trained and figure out how to get off an airplane that he’s pretty sure has a bomb on it.

Unlike modern thrillers, this journalist isn’t just after the story. He has a conscience and sees the need to save innocent lives. He uses simple methods to throw a monkey wrench into this “Parallax” outfit’s planned murders.

Having just watched yet another thriller about an ex “special” agent performing almost superhuman feats of cunning, strength and spycraft (“The Beekeeper”), it’s nice to remember the ’70s, when a desk jockey (Robert Redford) might have to learn survival skills on the fly when professional evil-doers with government badges and guns target him in “Three Days of the Condor,” or a lone reporter has to live by his wits when confronted with evidence of organized political killings as he runs afoul of those Parallax alumni who pull the triggers.

In leaving out remedial pauses for explanation, that big scene where the Hero lays it all out for us, “The Parallax View” frustrates as much now as it must have in 1974. Even a close reading leaves one with questions and “What ifs,” then and now.

But nobody in 1974 had a distracting, 5G digital form of crack at their disposal when watching it.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss, Hume Cronyn, Jim Davis, Kenneth Mars,

Credits: Directed by Alan Pakula, scripted by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple, Jr., based on the novel by Loren Singer. A Paramount release on Amazon, Netflix etc.

Running time: 1:41

“Reflect” is a “find yourself” odyssey about five 30ish Angelinas who travel to Sedona, Arizona, for a spiritual/self-actualizing “obstacle course” weekend in a place the Tarot-card-reades/Astrology-believer/crystal-consultants of Flakey America consider a spiritual vortex.

Writer-director-star Dana Kippel might be exploring the psychic scars of the mother-daughter bond (she herself is adopted) via the characters and their trippy encounters and hallucinations on this vision quest.

She might be serving up a parable of emotional winners and losers and how losers can discover what is holding them back by exploring mother-daughter trauma, and connecting with something greater than themselves in a literal “Game of Life.”

Or “Reflect” might be a parody of everything described above and the sort of indulgent, ditzy narcissists who believe in this multi-layered nonsense.

A hint about that last possibility is that for all the over-the-top characters and bitchy “girl” on girl bickering amongst the five female friends — Kippel, and Grace Patterson, Ariana Brown, Jadelyn Breier and Marissa Patterson — very little that happens here could be objectively described as “funny.

Even the flashes of rank amateruism in some of the acting among the loopy “guides” who run this retreat (Joe Filippone, Campbell Crates), the wiccans/Satanists (Dash Katz, Maya Knell, etc) they encounter, the father-son “Game of Life” “show” hosts (Robert Enriquez and Ryan Jack Connell) who appear to be manipulating events and experiences in these self-discover “courses,” are never more than broad, mirth-free cartoons, not amusing or realistic three or even two dimensional characters.

The “insights” are trite, the characters thinly-sketched irritants and the indulgent, self-absorbed “journey” story makes too little sense to be easy to “trip” through. Not that there’s any motivation at all for the viewer to make that effort.

But perhaps the filmmaker got more out of the experience than the viewer was ever meant to. At least she and her cast and crew got to spend time in some of the loveliest desert scenery in North America.

Rating: unrated, profanity, suggestions of hallucinogenics

Cast: Dana Kippel, Grace Patterson, Ariana Brown, Jadelyn Breier, Marissa Patterson, Joe Filippone, Robert Enriquez, Dash Katz, Campbell Crates and Ryan Jack Connell.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dana Kippel. A Cranked Up release.

Running time: 1:24

Tina Fey gets to turn the Broadway musical based on her generation-defining teen comedy onto the screen in a January release.

This looks repetitive — same basic plot, no Lindsay Lohan/Rachel McAdams, et al. — but fun.

Jon Hamm, Jenna Fischeer, Busy Philips and and Tim Meadows join Tina F among the adults in this Friday release.

The teens — mean or otherwise — include Reneé Rapp, Avantika, Bebe Wood and Angourie Rice.

We don’t shave for J. Stay movies, right mate?

Unless it’s our scalp.

We confine the chatter to a low Cockney growl.

We take our tea with honey with because that’s the way Jason Statham LIKES IT and “it’s flammable,” or so we hear.

And we wear the white-soled sneakers, because they make the blood stand out better.

Director David Oryan and screenwriters Isaac Fahed and Doris Saba reached for sentimental, low-hanging fruit in their Lebanese childbirth dramedy “C-Section.” And every now and then, they got their hands on a sweet fig or a tart tangerine.

But this clash of classes and family cultures chomps at the bit to be a romp, a loud and fractious farce that we feel is about to take over, here and there, but never does.

Apparently the phrase “Maratan ‘ukhraa! ‘Asraeu!” isn’t common currency among Lebanese filmakers. That Hollywood direction common on comedy sets, “Again! Faster!” never crosses anyone’s mind? Not even in French (“Encore! Plus rapide!”)?

This is a gentle, downright sweet at times story of class and cultural divides showing up in a tony private hospital, divides bridged by the shared ordeal of childbirth and the commitment to give one’s children a better life than the one you have.

Awww.

Any edge the story begins with is rubbed off, and the unchallenging plot works out in such predictable ways that film’s dragging pace becomes a terminal failing.

The Dorians, Raya (Pamela El Kik) and Carl (Chadi Haddad) show up at Capital Boutique Hospital by appointment. They leave the car with the valet, tip the doorman and make their way to reservations, where their birth “suite” is ready, they’re told (in French and Arabic).

All is quiet, calm and customer friendly, despite developer Carl’s constant contractor issues, quietly argued-out by by phone.

Sonia (Rola Beksmati) and Sabeh (Ramy Atallah) blow in in a sea of wails, shouts and threats in Arabic. She is in labor, and he’s in a panic.

No, they don’t have a “reservation.” No, their doctor is back in the village. No, they don’t have insurance. Or a deposit. No, you CANNOT transport her to the “hospital on the hill.”

Sabeh creates chaos, shouts at the staff and puts the Dorians on the spot about “letting (Sonia) go first.”

And hell, he’s not even her husband. When burly, brutish carpenter Massad (Ammar Shalak) shows up, the REAL shouting and bullying begins.

What kind of hospital IS this? “A private one,” the older administrator, Mr. Vahe (Gabriel Yammine) tells them all in his calmest indoor voice.

They want to haggle, he wants to avoid a shaming scandal in the media. But with every concession, “hours” to come up with a deposit, “changing hospitals” right after the birth, etc., Massad raises his voice, ups the threat level and entitles his way into special treatment.

When his whole family shows up to celebrate the blessed event as his many impositions and demands wash over on the Dorians, things are sure to escalate. Which they do.

Shalak, Beksmati, Atallah and Yammine are the players here who “get” comedy, in a Western sense, and play their parts big and loud and as fast as they can get away with. While the sentimental scenes play to the rest of the cast’s strengths, they stop the movie cold.

A cute touch — having Vahe, the administrator who can’t remember Massad’s name and whom Massad refers to simply as “The Armenian” is a Siri novice and a big fan of the Franco-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour. Arabic, American or French, who doesn’t love Aznavour?

The narrative’s sympathies lie with Massad, but the film tests that by making him a boorish bully who can’t be reasoned with or forced to face the consequences of his many liberties and threats. He comes off as a working poor, uncouth and entitled jerk, but maybe that’s just me being brainwashed by America’s own two-tiered health care system.

“C-Section” is rarely surprising, but at least its affable in all the too-predictable ways. If only director Oryan had picked up on what was actually working and pressed for that energy level and pace throughout.

But to do that, you’ve got to precede every “ACTION!” with an “Encore! PLUS RAPIDE!”

Rating: TV-14, violence, smoking

Cast: Ammar Shalak, Pamela El Kik, Rola Beksmati, Chadi Haddad, Ramy Atallah and Gabriel Yammine

Credits: Directed by David Oryan, scripted by Isaac Fahed and Doris Saba. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

The latest film from the Oscar-winning writer of “Dead Poet’s Society” is a sordid, torpid tale of violence and revenge set against the pulse-pounding (cough cough) sport of keno-pool, that oddball boardgame variation of billiards.

“Double Down South” is a languid, drawling bore that’s about as interesting as the games that are its centerpiece. In the 1998 “present” of this picture, keno is explained and explained, and games unfold and we see results, and hear more explanations.

Damned if we don’t know less about this arcane game at the end than we do the first time our lithe, tight-tank-topped heroine (Lili Simmons) shows up at an antebellum mansion gone to seed and turned into a diner and pool hall and asks to be taught the sport.

“Holy s–t! That’s a double AND a Montgomery!”

The hell you say?

Diana (Simmons) rolls up to Nick’s place in a rusty pickup, her own pool cue in hand. She’s come to “the keno capital of the world,” BFE Georgia, to pick up keno from the pot-bellied, Confederate-flag fetishizing locals.

Diana is a born distraction, with her highlights, tattoos and belly button ring.

“You come to shoot pool?” One-eyed “Little Nick” (Igby Rigney) wants to know

“Didn’t come to adopt a puppy,” she purrs. Yeah, she’s a tough-one.

But is she tough enough to hang with the veteran players, and with Nick-the-owner, given a venomous, lecherous edge by horror movie/biker series (“Sons of Anarchy”) icon Kim Coates? He’s on her like racism on a redneck, because he sees dollars in the dish that played her first-ever keno in his joint.

“I just kind of lost my ass out there,” she protests.

“Still quite the ass.”

She will be “schooled” in this pool-hustle variation by Little Nick, Nick and Old Nick (veteran character actor Tom Bower), the owner who passed this set-designed-gone-to-seed mansion/pool parlor on to middle-aged Nick.

That Nick is scary. That Nick carries a bottom half of a pool cue he uses to beat customers, foes and proteges who get out of line. That Nick lost his fingers recently because of some deal with went South (“further” South). And that Nick sees this “distraction” as an “attraction” for his business.

Players in this “man’s game,” a billiards variation that is “all finesse,” will flock to Nick’s when they hear about Diana and decide to match up against this Southern fried sexpot in the flesh. Or so Nick thinks.

Writer-director Tom Schulman, who counts “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” “Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag” and the epic Eddie Murphy bomb “Holy Man” among his scripts, hasn’t had many credits in this millenium. He scripted the badly-reviewed “Anatomy of Hope” TV movie for J.J. Abrams, and wrote the flop that drove Gene Hackman into retirement — “Welcome to Mooseport.”

This isn’t anybody’s idea of a comeback. He’s lost whatever he knew about “pace” and seems mostly content to collect cliches to adorn this leaden, formulaic pool hustle movie with, and share the ever-changing “rules” on how one bets on keno.

Racist, sexist Nick has secrets Diana must learn. Little Nick is the one who passes them on. But Little Nick has his own story to tell — how he ended up with one eye.

Simmons, a veteran of series TV (“True Detective,” “Westworld,” “Ray Donovan” and she was Catwoman in “Gotham”) doesn’t embarass herself here, despite playing a character both nakedly obvious and badly underwritten.

Coates always gives fair value, with that trademark dyed mop of curls and goatee signaling the menace he’s often called on to portray.

“DROP the psychoanalysis of the psycho,” he says, as everybody tries to fill Diana in on one S&M foe she faces.

Justin Marcel McManus plays Nick’s kryptonite, Beaumont DuBinion, a Black man who is better at this arcane game than Nick. But is he better than Diana, now that Nick’s lost a lot of fingers?

One big problem here is the simple fact that the game Schulman built this around isn’t interesting or exciting on the screen. Keno, as we hear, isn’t a “power” game with billaird cues and balls. So there’s no dramatic “CLACK” to the break, no way to whiz-bang photogragh and edit the dull-but-difficult shots, the putt-putt/bingo style put-the-ball-in-the-big-right-hole nature of it all.

The games are staged, blocked, scripted and “called” in ways guaranteed to rob the narrative of its “Why should we care?” requirement. Curling has more thrills.

That’s not the only reason “Double Down South” crawls along, 70 minutes of story sloppily packaged in a 124 minute movie. But it’s a big one.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Lili Simmons, Kim Coates, Igby Rigney, Justin Marcel McManus, Rebecca Lines and Tom Bower.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tom Schulman. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 2:04