Movie Nation

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.

One hair-raising moment in the Korean thriller “The Ghost Station,” a tale of people having subway”accidents” that look like nothing of the sort, involves cell phone tech.

Someone points their cell camera down a tunnel. The focus framing outline pops up on the cell screen as the device zeroes in on what it senses the owner is trying to photograph. The phone sees what the eyes can’t as this frame jumps back and forth, quickly closing in on our wireless customer, who is, by this point, understandably freaked-out.

This brief and seriously derivative ghost story has a Korean director, cast and settings, and a Japanese screenwriter and references to a “grudge” and a “well.” J-horror fans will get those references.

Most of the creepy stuff is tucked into an explained-to-death-but-we’ve-already-figured-it-out third act. But it more or less holds one’s interest, and it manages a chill or two.

Kim Bor-ra play Na-young, a cub reporter with Daily Modu. She’s just screwed-up when we meet her, getting reamed-out for not knowing her selection for a “Summer ‘It’ Girl” photo feature is transgender, and apparently inadvertantly “outing” her.

A lawsuit is pending. But when your job is to generate clickbait, you can barely pause to consider that.

“We’re not a legitimate news outlet,” her editor (Kim Na-Yoon) lectures her. “We’re a cheap tabloid. Don’t forget who we are.”

That’s why she chooses to make something out of a tragic accident-or-suicide at a nearby subway station. She sees weird things going on — a woman jerking about as if yanked, clues about a “second victim” at the accident scene. The embalmer who showed up to clean up the mess confirms it. He saw a child underneath a stairwell next to the tracks. She showed him a number on a cardboard placard, and vanished.

Digging into the mystery, warned away from “ghost stories” by the detective who decided this was an open and shut case and harangued by her abusive, pageviews-crazed publisher (Kim Soo-jin), Na young will clickbait her way to some answers, endangering herself and others as she does followup story after followup story.

One interview subject turns out to have died an hour before their chat. And what’s up with those fingernail scratches those entrapped in this mystery seem to have?

The brevity of “The Ghost Station” means that there isn’t a lot of time for gravitas. But not a lot happens until that third act. The solution to the mystery shocks and appalls, but it is about as original as “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Still, it’s short, so it’s not an utter waste of time. Or not a waste of much time.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Kim Bor-ra, Kim Jeahyun, Shin So-yul,
Kim Na-Yoon and Kim Soo-jin

Credits: Directed by Hiroshi Takahashi, scripted by Jeong Yong-ki. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:20

This looks indie and non traditional, as far as Westerns go.

We are… intrigued. Jan. 12.

Hand it to Warner Bros. for their approach to their favorite piece of Roald Dahl intellectual property.

They didn’t just remake “Charlie” or “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” They took a stab at giving us a back story about how “magician, inventor and chocolatier” Willy got his start.

They spared almost no expense in acquiring a big name cast, new music (by Neil Hannon and Jody Talbot), choreographing big new production numbers with more sprawling production design, giving us something like the most spectacular “Wonka” ever.

They cannily hired the wit behind “Paddington” to direct and co-write it and make the chocolate trains run on time.

With Hugh Grant, Keegan Michael Key, Rowan Atkinson, Oscar winners Olivia Colman and Sally Hawkins on board, the only worry might have been Timothée Chalamet in the title role. And he gives the chocolatier a light, upbeat touch. There’s none of writer-Roald’s sinister, punishing edge in Young Willy.

And Chalamet can sing, showing off a lilting, pleasant movie musical (not Broadway ready) voice, holding his own in some pretty impressive dance numbers, and selling his chocolate with an off-center twist.

“Hover chocolates?” They not only let you fly, they’re “salted with the bittersweet tears of a Russian clown.”

“Wonka” is a musical comedy that bowls you over with bigness — big stars, big sets, big numbers and big whimsy in service of a story that takes Willy from a ship’s cook gig on a fanciful fantasy film freighter to an unnamed 1930s EuroCity where he does battle with the singing, dancing, back-stabbing “chocolate cartel” (Paterson Joseph, Mathew Banyton and Matt Lucas).

“The greedy beat the needy” is their motto, and the movie’s cautionary message.

Willy’s got his tiny chocolate factory in a traveling trunk, unusually delicious and large beans that he stole from Oompa Loompa land — which a lone Loompa (Grant) is hellbent on stealing back, in bean or Wonka Chocolate form.

All he has to do is escape an enslaving laundry run by villains played by Colman and Tom Davis, where young Noodle (Calah Lane) and Abacus Crunch (“Downton’s” own Jim Carter) are among those working off their debt. He’s got to dodge the chocolate-craving/ever-fattening-up chief of police (Key) and his minions and outfox the cartel.

All if he wants to manifest the “destiny” his late mother (Hawkins) urged him into.

Every trailer gets more and more of the scale of this epic across. This one offers up more of the Chalamet/Zendaya love story (Watch your back, Tom Holland). And “More COWbell.”

Just saw Chalamet’s “Wonka,” and seriously — if he can duel to the death, ride giant worms, get the girl AND carry a tune — the skinny dude’s going to be at the front of the A-list from here on out.

March 1.