Movie Nation

Neil Simon co-wrote it, Burt Bachrach and Hal David composed the jaunty music, Vittoria De Sica directed it and Peter Sellers starred in it.

But when “After the Fox” came out in 1966, this sly farce about The State of the Cinema didn’t get a lot of love.

Simon and Sellers might have been at their peak — the first of a couple of creative and popular “peaks” for the famous playwright. And the cleverly-conceived and structured script had a few topical laughs and a lot of Italian and film business lampooning that played. But nobody wanted to see it.

Thankfully, this not-quite-romp has improved with age. We can appreciate a wholly-engaged Peter Sellers at his most animated, his wife Britt Ekland at her most coquettish and the great character ham Victor Mature coming out of retirement to send-up his entire tanned, grinning and “handsome” career.

And every single silliness-of-the-cinema and the chimeric delusions of the starstruck fans lands. Here’s a comedy that plays like a snapshot of Italy and Italian cinema in the ’60s, and an amusing sendup of stereotypes and the self-seriousness of art films of the era.

It’s not the best comedy of the era, the best Sellers comedy (Blake Edwards’ “The Party” gets my vote) of the time or Neil Simon at his wittiest. But it’s fun, especially if you’re old enough to remember Sellers or just now discovering the greatest screen comedian of his age.

Sellers dons an earnest, almost breathless Italian accent — not that different from his French one in the Inspector Clouseau movies — as Aldo Vanucci, aka “The Fox,” an honorable and famous thief seven months in prison for his last caper.

Having his prison wired — catering to his comforts — he’s content to finish his sentence. But his Mama (Lydia Brazzi) is unforgiving about his abandonment. And his younger sister (Ekland) is going wrong. She’s “on the streets,” his old cronies (Tino Buazzelli, Mac Ronay and Paolo Stoppa) tell Aldo. That moves The Fox to act.

“If only I could steal enough to beome an honest man!”

His services are needed to help crooks who stole gold bullion from Cairo get their haul ashore somewhere in Italy.

Dodging the carbineri (cops) and finding Gina “on the streets,” trying to become a movie star, inspires our Fox to come up with a plan. Making a movie would be a great cover for a caper, explaining away a crowd of crooks, winning the enthusiasm of the locals who won’t interfere because they all want to be “in the movie,” and even getting the cooperation from the cops.

All The Fox and his minions need is a cover-story/plot about the Cairo Gold, filmmaking gear (stolen from the set of a Biblican epic being directed by Vittorio De Sica) and a “name” for the cast.

Hollywood has-been Tony Powell (Victor Mature of “My Darling Clementine,” etc) is in town, not-quite defying age and Hollywood ageism, and not getting a lot of work in the process.

They have their cover story. They find a location — tiny Selvio, on the Neopolitan coast — and they have a date to shoot there. But delays at sea mean that great Italian auteur Federico Fabrizio (Sellers) will have to fake it until the bullion makes it…ashore.

Script? Plot?

“Een HERE (pointing to his head) ees my screept,” he bellows. “Een HERE (pointing to his heart) ees my plot!”

Mads is an 18th century dreamer/doer intent on building “The king’s first settlement on the heath” of Denmark’s Jutland on “The king’s land” on behalf of the king.

Who “doesn’t know you exist.”

Ummm…

A February release from Magnolia.

Ryan Reynolds stars, with the voices of Steve Carell, Emily Blunt, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Sam Rockwell, Awkwafina and many others voicing those imaginary childhood friends who need a new kid to work with.

“IF” is coming our way in May.

It was a blockbuster when it opened on the Subcontinent. But as in North America, being a big box office hit isn’t necessarily a qualifier for Oscar glory.

India’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature competition is a sentimental, feel-good and quite old-fashioned disaster movie.

“2018: Everyone is a Hero” is about the cyclonic monsoon floods that covered Kerala state in August of that year, an epic disaster compared by locals to the biggest flood of the previous century. It adheres to the time-established formula of disaster movies — following assorted characters, inside and outside of officialdom, as they face the calamity unfolding around them.

Some will step up. Some will underestimate the risk. Some will live and some will die.

The new wrinkles in the plot are the role climate change is playing in rising sea levels, making such coastal events far worse, something more than one character mentions. And there’s a novel way a Keral Emergency Operations Center calls for volunteers — via WhatsApp. A legion of young people on mopeds show up for duty in one of Jude Anthany Joseph’s films best scenes.

“2018” takes as its motto an opening aphorism — “Every calamity is just ‘news’ until it hits us.”

We meet Anoop (Tovino Thomas), a young man who’s come home after deciding the army’s “not for me,” all that getting up early in the morning nonsense and all. He tries to fit in back home, takes a fancy to the cute new school teacher (Tanvi Ram), and hopes to shed his self-confessed reputation as a “coward.”

Shaji (Kunchacko Boban) is a mid-level adminstrator with the state’s emergency preparedness center, fretting over his wife and child as he tries to nudge his dismissive superior into taking preventative measures.

“Is it better to save people after trapping them, or to save them before they are trapped,” he wants to know (in Malayam with English subtitles)?

Government higher-ups fret over panic, but TV, crowd-sourced websites and others are already raising the alarm about doomed dams, the higher sea levels and the downpour that’s just beginning.

The handsome chap his dad named “Nixon” (he has a brother named “Winston”) has dreams of being a famous model. But handsome or not, Nixon (Asif Ali) from a working class fishing family, which suggests to his intended bride’s father that they’ll all end up in a relief camp every time the water rises. At least the hunk has the good sense to go by the nickname “Popeye.” That creates expectations about what he’ll do when the chips are down.

And Aju Varghese plays a tour guide stuck leading a dopey Polish vlogger and his girlfriend around Kerala, showing off canceled boat races and the like in the middle of a torrential downpour.

A pre-disaster near tragedy at sea amongst the fishermen prefigures what is to come. And when the worst arrives, the effects take us into a massive flood, with rising water threatening all, daring underwater swims to save this person or that one and fishermen rising to the occasion amidst a chorus of weeping panic.

Hey, it was the ’80s. Axel was the Name of the Decade, amIright?

Paul Rudd and Joseph Gordon Levitt, along with Judge Reinhold and a few survivors from the Glory Days of “Beverly Hills Cop” are back on the job in this summer action comedy from Netflix.

Gotta be better than Amazon’s idea, sticking Eddie Murphy in an X-mas movie. Right? Right?

The comforts, traumas and shortcomings of “Memory” make for a poignant if somewhat melodramatic romance and star vehicle for two of the best in the acting business — Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard.

It’s a story of two damaged people, lost in different ways — one grasping for memories worth keeping, the other trying to grapple with what she can’t forget, and move on.

We meet Sylvia in a filmically familiar space — the dimly-lit church basement of big city Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

She is 13 years sober. It’s worth celebrating. So she’s brought her teen (ish) daughter Anna with her, because that’s the nature of their relationship. But while Anna knows about the drinking, she doesn’t know when and how it started.

Sylvia works in an adult special needs home, which takes a special kind of caring. But she isn’t just wary about men. She’s alarmed, alert and determined to keep her distance from them.

The fridge breaks in her apartment, and the repairman buzzes the intercom.

“I asked for a repair WOMAN,” she snaps.

Then there’s this fellow she glimpses at a high school reunion. She notices he’s behind her as she heads to the train. She keeps her distance in her car on the El. And when he trails her all the way to her apartment, she’s almost alarmed. She recognizes him.

But when he stays out there in the rain and sleeps in it until the morning, Sylvia picks up on something. Being in the social service system, she knows who to call.

Saul, it turns out, has dementia. His brother (Josh Charles) and niece (Elsie Fisher) live with him as caregivers. After she stops by to see Saul, they wonder, might Sylvia be available to pitch in?

But they didn’t hear her conversation with him. They don’t have a clue of their “connection.”

The latest film from the writer-director of the Tim Roth star vehicles “Sundown” and “Chronic” struggles to not tumble into Lifetime Original Movie territory. One plot twist snaps your head back. Another makes you scratch that same head because you, like everybody else, thought we’d moved past “all people with major mental health issues really need is love” pablum.

The latter half of the second act has some eye-rolling leaps of logic that almost took me out of Michel Franco’s movie.

But Merrit Wever of “Nurse Jackie” brings a touch of Earth Mama flintiness to the role of Sylvia’s happily-married with kids younger sister, Olivia. Charles gives his brother-of-the-demented-Saul role some edge. Jessica Harper, playing the mother of Olivia and Sylvia who may know the origin story of all this hurt, or at least help clarify it, maintains an aloofness that tells us she long ago made up her mind about Sylvia’s “problems.”

And the leads are pretty much flawless. Chastain lets us see damage that cuts so deep it may make Sylvia an unreliable witness to her own trauma as she over-compensates as a protector and nurturer. Sarsgaard gives us a man whose short-term memory is almost completely shot, but who has taken that as an excuse to “live in the moment.”

It’s never that “cute,” to its credit.

But whatever lapses “Memory” suffers from, these two ensure that it is never less than engrossing, and that their characters connect in ways that can’t help but be touching, even if “far fetched” comes to mind as they do.

Rating: R for some sexual content, language and graphic nudity.

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Brooke Timber, Merritt Wever, Jessica Harper and Josh Charles.

Credits:Scripted and directed by Michel Franco. A Ketchup Entertainment/Mubi release.

Running time: 1:40

Martin Freeman plays the Tennessee high school teacher and mentor who is challenged by a talented student who decides to tease, test and maybe even ruin him.

A bracing, trippy thriller that lets technique overwhelm a simple story, “NAGA” is like no Saudi film we’ve ever seen before.

Writer-director Meshal Al Jaser’s tale of young female (limited) rebellion and a quest to escape a posh party in the desert, a police raid on that party, a faithless boyfriend and assorted Saudi rednecks, sexists and a controlling, menacing and unforgiving father is souped-up to the point of near incoherence.

Endless swish-pans, blackouts with dialogue or sound effects only, shots held so short we can’t make out what they’re capturing and a non-linear narrative give the viewer pause.

And it makes one want to pause the picture and re-watch a bit just to see what is passing us by in this stylish but over-stylized blur. Was Al Jaser hoping to rush things by Saudi censorship and official disapproval by making the picture something of a trial to follow and make sense of?

A prologue shows us a moment of horrific violence in 1975. A man armed with an AK-47 marches into a hospital and shoots a new mother and the doctor treating her.

Decades later. Sarah (Adwa Bader) is a young adult daughter still living at home, still sneaking smokes behind her parents’ backs, still coping with her bratty kid brother. He swipes her purse and she dashes out after him, only to duck back inside the door to the family courtyard to cover her head and face.

This is Saudi Arabia, after all.

A day of shopping with girlfriend Hadeel (Mariam Aishagrawi) turns testy, and ends with Sarah slipping off and getting into the ancient Chevy Impala of a lout making boorish noises and gestures to her across the street.

Saad (Yazeed Almajyul) is her secret boyfriend. Sarah just needed the “date” with Hadeel as cover for spending the day and part of the evening with him. Her stern, traditional talk-radio addict Dad (Khalid Bin Shaddad) is to pick her up at 9:59. Sharp.

When Saad talks her into a party at someone’s “camp in the desert” (in Arabic with subtitles, or dubbed), she hopes it’s worth “getting slaughtered by my Dad” over.

“NAGA” — no idea what the title means, and I can’t find anyone else who has reported it — descends into an afternoon-and-night-long odyssey of the surreal variety, an acid trip into a sexist, patriarchal hell filled with men behaving badly and a young woman trying to navigate around them or through them just to get back in time and avoid what might be even worse — her father’s fundamentalist fury.

It begins with pistol-packing rednecks in a pick-up truck (of course) menacing them on a forlorn desert highway through the dunes, getting lost via Google Maps and Saad’s general incompetence, running over a camel calf and facing the ire of a camel herder and an enraged, pregnant mama camel.

Even taking a break to relax canyonside and shout a couple of echoes into the ether has an air of menace as somebody starts shouting back at them.

Was that a gunshot?

A divided country with a “Florida Alliance” and “Western” forces of Texas and California at war with the central government?

Sounds far-fetched but cautionary and not exactly the kind of “escape” people will be looking for next April, in an election year.

But A24 is putting it out this coming spring.

Filmgoers will have two sides of Mulroney available this Christmas. He’s in that Australian-set romance “Anyone But You,” starring Sydney Sweeney, Glen Powell and Alexandra Shipp. That was supposed to come out in January, but Sony is smuggling it into theaters Christmas.

And McDermott’s an escaped murderer on the hunt in this Dec. 22 thriller with Darren Mann, Celia Rose Gooding and Mena Suvari.