Movie Nation

If we’ve learned anything from historical books and films such as “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” it’s that there is rarely an avenging angel, a righteous man or woman who comes and saves people in the middle of an indigenous genocide and gives the viewer a real life “Hollywood ending.”

In Canada and Australia, Africa, Central and South America and the American West it happened. It was condoned, sanctioned and endorsed, or at the very least tolerated by governments, communities and the clergy. Nobody rode in and saved them.

“The Settlers” is a genocidal story set in a place so forbidding it was nicknamed “Desolation Island,” its main city “Port Hunger” and that harbor “Useless Bay” — Tierra del Fuego. This film isn’t about ancient history. Events depicted here went on into the early 20th century. And “official” history didn’t want to acknowledge it, any more than the wealthy and powerful Catholic Church which, at best, turned a blind eye.

Writer/director Felipe Gálvez Habere treats this as a grim myth, an ugly “Odyssey” about men on a quest for a “safe” path to transport “white gold” — sheep — to the Atlantic on the huge island shared by Argentina and Chile. “Safe,” means territory free of sheep-eating Ona Indians. Making it “safe” means killing them.

This dark film about the ugliest tendencies of human nature under rapacious “colonial” capitalism is Chile’s bid to earn an Oscar nomination for the upcoming 96th Academy Awards. It deserves that recognition.

“Wool stained with blood loses all its value,” a politically-savvy sage notes at one point in this story. Reason enough for the still-young nation and its power-connected Church to be reluctant to stop this while it was happening, or condemn it when it started coming to light.

Inspired by true events and crimes commited by real villains named here, it’s about the desire of a rich landowner, José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) to find a path to get his vast herds of sheep to a port and then to market.

His “Lieutenant,” foreman and enforcer is Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley), a former British soldier who wears his Army red coat years after his service “in the war.” He’s a pitiless brute with “clean this island” orders.

An accident slices off a European laborer’s arm, and MacLennan shoots him, as he’s of no value. If this is how this racist treats “a white man,” we don’t have to guess how he treats the sheep-eating natives. They didn’t name him “Red Pig” for nothing.

He chooses the best shot among his fence crew to accompany him. That’s Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), whom Bill (Benjamin Westfall), the Texas “tracker” Don Jose also assigns to this mission, sizes up as “not white, not Indian,” although “halfbreed” never crosses his lips.

“You never know ‘who‘ they’re gonna shoot.”

They set off — the tippling, bullying Scotsman bickering with the “You’re doin’ everythin’ WRONG, Lieutenant!” Texan, who learned his trade hunting Apache, and the conflicted half-Native given a gun and expected join in the violence when ordered to.

For his debut feature — the film is in English and Spanish with subtitles — Gálvez structures his quest around three encounters — the first with an Argentine army surveying crew. Their surveyor scientist (Mariano Llinás) notes the “delicate features” and intelligence of the indigenous people and ponders the primitive governments, the winner-take-all capitalism of the rich and connected like Don Jose, of this and many other continents in 1901.

“These people, Mister MacLennan, should be taken to the university, to OXFORD, to make them engineers and lawyers!”

But even the “enlightened” surveyor and man of science insists his Native servant join him in his tent, and it is assumed, his bed.

Then there’s an odd party led by an English officer (Sam Spruell), a man one and all get a bad vibe about, but who will not hear of them refusing his hospitality. Something the Argentines said earlier lingers on the viewer’s mind.

“Nothing good happens when military (men) get bored.”

And later still, our hunting party spies a Native tribal group — women and children included. A third encounter will be the ugliest.

Stanley, Arancibia and Spruell are the stand-outs in the cast, with Arancibia letting us see the anguish and fret, at every point, as to how Segundo will respond to this latest threat, affront or crime against humanity.

Structurally, “The Settlers” is a bit cumbersome as it abandons that three-stop quest and we revisit the region and some of those involved in these events a few years later. In this informative history lesson part of the film, the “government” wants to meet survivors and perhaps hear their stories, or at least confirm their loyalty to a country about to celebrate its 100th birthday.

That plays as a theatrical and clumsy epilogue.

But it’s an engrossing story, even at its most gruesome or theatrical. For my money, it’s more satisfying, cinematic and exotic than the thematically and historically similar “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, rape, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Mark Stanley, Camilo Arancibia, Benjamin Westfall,
Mariano Llinás, Mishell Guaña, Alfredo Castro, Marcelo Alonso and Sam Spruell

Credits: Directed by Felipe Gálvez Habere, scripted by Antonia Girardi, Felipe Gálvez Haberle and Mariano Llinás. A Mubi release.

Running time: 1:40

Fans instantly get the pun in the title — a riff on “Destroy All Monsters,” for the rest of you.

It’s got Alex Winter, ace documentarian and Eternal “Bill” from “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” and Kumail Nanjiani and Jon Daly and Thomas Lennon and that talk-show host/voice-over presence Phil Hendrie in the cast.

Jonah Ray — who was on the latter incarnation of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and was in “Weird Al” and is now going by Jonah Ray Rodrigues stars.

This looks hilarious, as they certainly had enough gonzo stuff to cut a fun trailer out of it.

Shudder bought “Neighbors,” and it streams Jan. 12. I may have to ull rank and get a screener to review this sooner than that, because…just because, right?

A big holiday musical based on a character by Roald Dahl is proving almost irresistable for filmgoers, as a decent Thursday and big Friday point to “Wonka,” the prequel to “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” raking in $39 million+ on its opening weekend.

Friday’s take was around $13, per Deadline.com. No doubt chocolate sales spiked afterwards as well, as this confection does a grand job of selling that sweet, much better than the earlier Willys, which treated it as a poison pill. Sure, we see Keegan-Michael Key balloon up from eating too many sweets (Diabetes to follow?), but it’s all as sweet as can be, and that goes for star Timothee’ Chalamet, who is at his most charming here.

“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” is picking up the crumbs, to the tune of $5.8 million.

“Napoleon”($2.2 ) “Beyonce Renaissance” ($1.9)and “Wish” $3.2) are among the titles fading out of the top five. “Wish” has faded to sixth. “Beyonce’s” officially the director and star of a concert film that has hit the $30 million mark, and won’t go much further. It’s only a bomb if you compare it to “Taylor Swift Eras,” which earned six times as much.

Those damned “Trolls” are still around ($4 million), trailing the fading “Godzilla Minus One” ($4.8) and another Japanese offering, Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” ($5.1).

Fathom Events is showing a holiday special film spun off the faith-based “Chosen” TV series, and “Christmas with the Chosen” is doing $3 million after limited [review screenings gave it a $1.7 million start.

“Poor Things,” earning $1.1 million in limited but pretty wide release, sneaks into the top ten. It’ll drop out next week, so don’t get your hopes up.

Here’s the final Sunday noon estimate from @BoxofficePro

“Freud’s Last Session” is a period piece about an imagined meeting between the Father of Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and an “Oxford don,” the emerging “Christian apologist” who would go on to write “The Chronicles of Narnia,” C.S. Lewis.

Based on a play by Matthew St. Germain, it’ s a thoughtful, literary-minded war of wills and words. The The “godless” rational Viennese Jew challenges the traumatized World War I veteran who’d come home to Oxford, reaffirmed his Christianity as he studied and taught English literature, and compared notes on the mythology and lore of many cultures with some like-minded friends and colleagues, most famously J.R.R. Tolkien.

Anthony Hopkins adds another grand laurel to his much-honored career, giving a grumpy, imperious twinkle to Freud, at the end of his life, lauded the world over and not above insulting the 40 year-old Lewis (Matthew Goode, spot-on as always) to his face.

They gently and sometimes testily spar, a sick old man fretting over the pain from his primitively-treated oral cancer and puzzled about how “someone of your supreme intellect” could “embrace an insidious lie” and not let go of “this fairy tale of faith” told by the Christian Bible.

Lewis counters by suggesting Freud has replaced faith with “sex,” in his theories and writings about understanding the human condition, but leans on every Christian apologist’s favorite comeback when backed into a corner.

“Have you ever considered how terrifying it would be if you’re wrong?”

In Matt Brown’s film — he gave us “The Man Who Knew Infinity” — the well-matched leads go at it in this often uneven battle of wits in what is certainly the most quotable film of the year.

Lewis, already well-known, having published “The Pilgrim’s Regress” and taken a pretty good shot at Freud in it a few years before, makes a reluctant and tardy trek to The Great Freud’s rented house two days after Germany invaded Poland. He’s been summoned.

That’s the jumping off point for their to and fro during a day in which the radio is switched on and off to hear war updates — Britain has given Germany an ultimatum, which the Germans are ignoring. We’ve heard their leader calling for the “anihillation of the Jewish race in Europe” in a radio speech under the opening credits. We will hear actual BBC updates, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s response before the day is done.

Brown expands the play, opening it up into the garden, a quick hike to a nearby church as air raid shelter, adding to Freud’s thoughts on Christianity as “art appreciation.” He admires the statuary and stained glass of it all. And we’re treated to vivid Vienna flashbacks for Freud and WWI trench trauma for Lewis.

That gives the film more context and visual variety, adding to the richness of the text and the wonderful actors performing it.

But this “opening up” also makes for some mischief, as it adds Anna Freud (Liv Lisa Fries) and the early years of her lifelong relationship with Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour) and references Anna’s father’s disapproval. Jeremy Northam (Uncredited?) plays a psychoanalyst suitor to Anna that Sigmund most contend with.

The film also gives credence to the possibility that pioneering childhood psychologist Anna was not just her father’s heir apparent in psychology, his caretaker and pupil, but perhaps something worse, an accusation I can find no credible source to back up.

Is the purpose of this to diminish the already somewhat historically-diminished Freud? Seeing as how the simple existence of this speculative play-turned-film serves to place the “Chronicles of Narnia” children’s fantasy novelist and famous WWII era BBC radio Christian apologist on the same level as Sigmund Freud, that seems a reasonable guess.

But for the viewer, even that just embellishes what is a lovely, poignant thought exercise in the most eloquently argued film of the year.

Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, some bloody/violent images, sexual material and smoking.

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode, Liv Lisa Fries, Jodi Balfour and Jeremy Northam

Credits: Directed by Matt Brown, scripted by Mark St. Germain and Matt Brown, based on St. Germain’s play. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:48

Grier is great in “The Color Purple.” And here he is again, in something more off-center and sly.

Limited release March 22.

Thirty-six times over the past 65 years Egypt has submitted films to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in the vain hope of winning an Oscar. And 36 times, Egypt has come up short, not even earning a nomination for what once was called “Best Foreign Language Film” and is now labeled “Best International Feature.”

“Voy! Voy! Voy!” should change that. It may not, Academy demographics and Middle Eastern geopolitics being what they are. I have seen deeper, more serious films in contention for this year’s field.

But damned if I’ve seen a funnier submission than this slow-set-up caper comedy, a movie you figure you’ve figured out until you haven’t, a staid and cynical story until it turns dark and laugh-out-loud funny.

It’s about a ringer getting onto a local blind soccer club’s team so that he can travel to a European tournament, his shady means of escaping a life of little hope and limited expectations. Writer-director Omar Hilal, making his feature filmmaking debut, takes his sweet time setting that up, dragging characters into the story, one by one.

But once that unsavory scheme is set in motion, the complications and silly, utterly unexpected surprises make this a feel-good delight.

A laugh out loud comedy from the Middle East? Go figure. And did I mention this is “inspired by a true story?”

Hassan (Mohamed Farrag) is desperate to get out of Egypt. He’s taken to seducing elderly foreign women to achieve that goal. One almost paid off, he tells his smoking buddies, the cynical Amr (Amgar al Haggar) and idealistic Saeed (Taha Desouky), until she dropped dead after sex.

Hassan is a security guard with zero prospects, a pretty woman (Passant Shawky) willing to ignore her mother’s warnings about “that bum” she’s fallen for and to wait for him. He doesn’t think of her or his aged mother (Hana Youssef) as he dreams of escape and even visits a smuggler to check the going rate for a perilous boat journey to Italy.

He’d have to fake “a Syrian accent” once he gets ashore. But never mind. It’s too expensive.

Adel (Bayoumi Fouad) is a portly 50something P.E. teacher at a middle school, losing all hope he’ll ever land a decent coaching job in Egyptian soccer. When he hears about an opening on a club team that has a shot at going to a world championship tourney, he’s leery. But his wheelchair-bound son begs him to take that shot.

The team is made up of visually-impaired players. The games are played on fenced-in outdoor concrete courts, or in gymasions. And when blind players run towards the rattle of the ball, players the world over shout out the Spanish word for “Here I come” so as to avoid colliding with each other at speed.

“Voy! Voy! Voy!”

It’s in the rules.

Hearing about that team gives Hassan a plan. Fooling and charming the new coach isn’t an issue. Nor is playing in matches that will let them qualify for a visually-impaired World Cup tourney in Poland. Hassan isn’t exactly scrupulous.

But as things take first one turn, then another and then another after that, we’re going to find out how low he’ll go and just what lines his friends will cross to help him realize his dream of a new life.

“Women on the Edge” is a cheerfully dumb Argentine riff on agism, sexism and the horrors of cosmetic surgery that seems inspired by a pretty famous film by Pedro Almodóvar.

Take away the heart, gay content, much of the edge and most of the laughs and you’ve got an Argentine “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”

The premise is that a group of women with “impulse control” and “anger management” problems meet at a support group. They all have issues with men. It’s just that they’re the ones forced to seek help.

One knocked a couple of teeth out of the male boss who dared “grab my ass.” Angela (Carla Peterson) is a famous TV actress who found out her co-star and younger lover (Esteban Lamothe) is expecting a baby during a humiliating live TV chat-show appearance.

And Vera (Julieta Díaz) is an overwhelmed mother of two trying to market her own organic cosmetics line with no help from her disinterested, forgetful breadwinner husband (Alfonso Tort). Ramiro didn’t bother to tell Vera that his new boss is his old flame Paola (Claudia Fernández) who has had lots of work done and shoves her nose in it.

As a rule of this support group, they’re each to take on a “partner” who acts as their sponsor, shadowing and calming irritated nerves, Vera and Angela are paired up.

Angela may have injured her ex on a TV set. All she requires is a new love, and maybe “having a little work done.” But Vera put her husband’s new boss in the hospital, so she’s in legal trouble.

The movie is about the source of Angela’s paid endorsement cosmetic surgery and Vera’s belief this hustler (Salvador del Solar) isn’t just putting the moves on the TV star. He’s about to disfigure her with his quack treatment and “toxin,” and he may be the reason Paola’s in the hospital.

“You’re not old yet, but you’re about to be” was Dr. Leven’s cautionary come-on to Angela (in Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed). And there’s the theme of the movie.

Everywhere they turn, women are being dismissed, ditched, overlooked and underappreciated by men who only have eyes for youth. And these ladies are pissed. They’re out for revenge.

The sight gags in this comedy — including “deformed” makeup — aren’t anything to brag about. The dialogue relies on random shots of profanity to grab a laugh.

The players do what they can, which isn’t much. The plot is as messy as three screenwriters could make it, with the only things that pass for consistency being the rampant sexism/ageism and an overall vulgar tone.

This subject matter and this set-up could have paid off. But nothing of the sort happens, just a cast soldiering through inferior material based on a solid premise, and a director most intent on getting a Gurinder Chadha (“Bend it Like Beckham”) dance number into the closing credits.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Carla Peterson, Julieta Díaz, Salvador del Solar, Eugenia Guerty, Cecilia Font, Bredna Keizerman, Alfonso Tort and Esteban Lamothe.

Credits: Directed by Azul Lombardía, scripted by Jazmín Rodríguez Duca, Sebastián Meschengieser and Alberto Rojas Apel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

Let’s go ahead and call the code on “E.R.” alumnus George Clooney‘s days of serving up nostalgic Americana as a director. “The Boys in the Boat” is that badly-botched.

After “Monuments Men” and “Leatherheads” and a stumbling “Catch-22” series, maybe it’s time to get your head out of the past, pal. You’ve lost your feel for it. Or maybe you’re just too distracted to make these sentimental sagas work.

“Boat” is an uplifting story about the University of Washington’s rowing team’s path to the 1936 Olympics — broke, hungry and (in one case) homeless guys get on the boat, in the middle of the Great Depression, and splash a little cold water on Nazi faces in Berlin.

That’s what it’s supposed to be, what came through in the Daniel James Brown non-fiction book about this tale of pluck and pathos. You figure your director has the good sense to absorb that from the book, and the time to watch “Seabiscuit” and maybe “Chariots of Fire” and triangulate a tone, a story arc and an uplifting Big Finish the way those classics did.

Nah.

Blandly-cast, dully-scripted and flatly-directed, the only moments of life in this story are tucked in that eight-man rowing shell. A diminutive coxwain (Luke Slattery) urges the rowers on. Callum Turner, Jack Mulhern, Sam Strike and the others — who learned to row at a convincing, championship level for the movie — work themselves ragged in the face of high odds, stiff competition and the trials of ordinary life during that perilous age.

But if you can’t get anything emotional of a homeless young man (Turner) eating from a can in a burned-out hulk of a Model A Ford, where he lives, his life and future saved by rowing, maybe the time for trafficking in nostalgia is over.

The rawboned, strapping young Brit Turner (“Fantastic Beasts,” “Emma.”) physically looks the part of Joe Rantz, a struggling young man on his own too early, trying to find enough work to stay alive and plug his way through engineering school at the U. of W. But the character is so underwritten, his scenes so heartlessly scripted and directed, that we don’t identify with the guy, his struggle or his reluctant courtship of the cute coed (Hadley Robinson) who sets her eye for him.

“Take me on a boat ride!”

Not that the love story is supposed to be with her. It’s really on the boat, where Rantz, fellow broke non-athlete Roger Morris (Strike) and the silent, stern and focused Don Hume (Mulhern) bond and battle first the university’s varsity crew (they’re JV), then the best of the collegiate west, all the way to a national championship which will determine who will join Jesse Owens in Berlin.

Aussie Joel Edgerton barely registers as the gruff coach who insists “Rowing is more poetry than sport.” Brit Peter Guinness isn’t given moments to rhapsodize about the love and life he pours into making these slick wooden racing shells, and thus lacks the obligatory twinkle.

Clooney and the screenwriter do a poor job of setting up the “rich kid” rivals that they’re rowing against. Hell, the coaches mention “what money gets you” and “Harvard and Yale” back East, and then never put them in the water against U-Dub.

We get a nice taste of rowing tactics, training and terminology. But the story lacks the Depression Underdog context of “Seabiscuit,” the heart and soul of “Chariots of Fire” and other sports movies of this genre.

Clooney, who sold his tequila brand for a billion bucks a couple of years back, isn’t doing this for money, doesn’t act that much these days and wouldn’t appear to have a lot of distractions keeping him from focusing on more than just how to film the races. He knows what the story’s heart is. And yet he fails utterly in getting that across and saving this “Boat” from sinking.

Which it does. Like a stone.

Rating: PG-13 for profanity and smoking

Cast: Callum Turner, Joel Edgerton, Peter Guinness, Hadley Robinson, Luke Slattery, Jack Mulhern and Sam Strike.

Credits: Directed by George Clooney, scripted by Mark L. Smith, based on the book by Daniel James Brown. An MGM/Amazon release.

Running time: 2:04

So will it be “Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse” vs. “The Boy and the Heron” for the best animated feature Oscar this year?

Anybody who really thinks “Elemental,” “Super Mario Brothers,” “Trolls Band Together,” “Wish” or “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” deserve Oscar glory must be nine years old.

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem?” There’s a possibility.

Maybe Illumination has a shot.

“Migration” has a good look, a few good ducks-on-vacation gags, some funny voices. Could it be a contender?

“The Boy and the Heron” is going to be the sentimental favorite. But nothing I’ve seen from a major studio or that got a decent release is screaming “Instant Classic” to me.

“Merry Little Batman?” Not really seeing that.

Let’s see what the birds tell us.

Cute and quippy, “Merry Little Batman” is an adorably silly holiday goof on DC/Warner Brothers’ most valuable comic book franchise.

It’s light and fun enough that it has to be giving the Warner suits staring down “Aquaman” and “Suicide Squad” red ink the notion that maybe Warner Animation should get a crack at all these “intellectual properties.”

The hook — Bruce Wayne (voiced by Luke Wilson) is now an overprotective single dad of lad named Damien (Yonas Kibreab), whose Christmas wish is to Be Just Like Dad, a superhero.

Dad’s more worried if the eight-year-old’s got a fresh “boo boo” from all his ninja, bat-roping antics. Selina the cat has got to be traumatized.

Eight years-old is too young to absorb the “focus, responsibility and sacrifice” it takes to be Batman, Dad figures. To say nothing of the “high pain threshhold.”

But showing the kid his many busted rib scars is to no avail. The father — who frantically and violently cleaned-up Gotham’s crime before his child’s birth — is lured off for some Justice League work in Nova Scotia. House-breakers (Natalie Palamides and Michael Fielding) get around to Wayne Manor, and even though they lose most of their loot in the fracas the kid starts, they get away with Damien’s trainer-utility belt.

“Crime must be back in Gotham! It’s a Christmas Miracle!”

There’s nothing for it but to ditch aged butler Alfred (James Cromwell), lose the Batman pajamas and grab a “real” batsuit, borrow Dad’s wheels and pursue the thieves, who turn out to be minions of…Joker, of course (David Hornsby, a cackling hoot).

For all his giggles, Joker hates when anybody else is happy. He’s out to ruin Christmas.

“That does it. I’m moving to Metropolis.”

Production designer Guillaume Fesquet concieves a sort of Cartoon Network (Remember “Dexter’s Laboritory?”) world with comically-drawn characters that look and act a lot more Tim Burton or Adam West than Christopher Nolan.

And director Mike Roth and screenwriter Morgan Evans take their best shot at laughing and brawling their way through that world.

Batman has left recorded video instructions for the day Damien might have to put on the Batsuit — instructions laced with fond memories of the kid’s birth.

“Your mother was a total smokeshow!”

The villains — because of course many of them have to team up — curse the child with “hellion” and “turdmuffin” insults.

The movie kind of drags through the middle acts. The violence is on a par with the animated TV show, which is what kids expect and have always expected, “Peppa Pig,” “Spongebob” and “Dora” be damned.

But the tone is always campy, and that carries the day here, all the way through to “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Dark Knight.”

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Luke Wilson, James Cromwell, Yonas Kibreab and David Hornsby.

Credits: Directed by Mike Roth, scripted by Morgan Evans. A DC/Warner Bros. Animation/MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:36