Movie Nation

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.

It was all supposed to be “utopian.”

High-rise apartment towers, surrounded by trees — and other apartment towers — would provide affordable housing, convenience, population density that makes mass transit and other service deliveries “efficient” and could create instant “community.”

It hasn’t exactly worked out that way in much of the world, but maybe South Korea would be different.

That’s the promise of “Concrete Utopia,“something set up and underlined in TV news coverage and documentary footage in the opening sequence of Uhm Tae-hwa’s Oscar submitted thriller.

That’s before the “event,” the “dystopian premise of the film is established.

It came with the roar of a giant beast, giving one the first thought that this would be another South Korean tale of disaster brought on by zombies or toxic-waste created river monsters. But this rumble is from a seismic wave, a building-toppling ripple caused by a catastrophic earthquake.

And this disaster apparently isn’t something localized. For “Concrete Utopia” and its “Lord of the Flies,” “Animal Farm” and “The Omega Man” parable to work, the survivors here — the residents of the last tower standing, Seoul’s Hwang Gung Apartments — government has to disappear. “International aid” is off the table.

With no power, communication, food or water supply, these “216 survivors” in “136 apartments” are on their own.

Confusion and trauma are quickly replaced with how “lucky” and “chosen” they were that they survived, and that they have shelter. It’s winter. But that means other survivors are coming to their doors, begging to get in. They aren’t wholly overrun, but things get crowded and testy pretty quickly.

Nurse Myung-hwa (Park Bo-yong) is instantly welcoming of the desperate mother and little boy who knock at their door. Civil servant/planner husbnd Min-sung (Park Seo-joon) is more wary. He can do the math. With no signs of outside help, not so much as a crackling voice of hope on their walkie talkies, simply surviving medium-to-long term is going to be unsustainable.

Tenants gather to debate what to do, how to organize this impromptu society. Fortysomething mom Geum-ae (Kim Sun-young) called the meeting and asks the right questions through a cacaphony of “They say women are stronger in a crisis,” “outsiders must go” and “We can’t just let them freeze” (in Korean, with English subtitles).

Planner Min-sung notes that somebody has to be in charge, a leader who can organize their survival until help comes or directing people how to restore some of their former life of safety, good health and comfort to them. The group abruptly skips past Geum-ae and Min-Sung as “candidates” and settle on the guy who frantically and bravely put out an apartment fire that could have doomed them all.

Yeong-tak (Lee Byung-hun) seems to have military experience, and the “thousand yard stare”of a man in shock at everything he’s been through on top of what everybody else has been through. And he’s a bit taken aback by this new “delegate” status conferred on him.

But when it’s decided to “throw out” all the “outsiders,” he and Geum-ae formulate an impromptu plan to carry it out, no matter how much Myung-hwa protests. Min-sung and pretty much everybody else just go along.

That’s just beginning of this “human empathy is the first thing to go” disaster parable, as personalities clash, socialism morphs into “You work, you eat” capitalism and impersonal ruthlessness points the picture down a very familiar path.

Hayao Miyazaki, the great Japanese animator whose name is synonymous with the anime art form, told the world he was retiring with the 2013 film “The Wind Rises.” That’s a fascinating, mostly historical World War II story about the idealistic designer of Japan’s iconic World War II fighter plane, labeled the “Zero” by the U.S. military.

While distinctly Japanese in subject matter, that somewhat jingoistic “farewell” seemed out of character for a filmmaker who won an Oscar for “Spirited Away,” someone best known for fables with magical characters (“My Neighbor Totoro,” “Ponyo,” “Howl’s Moving Castle”) playfully or symbolically juxtaposed against life in “modern” Japan.

So he’s made another “farewell” film much more in keeping with his style and his sort of storytelling.

“The Boy and the Heron” is about a child of World War II sent to live in the country with his father and his father’s new wife after the lad’s mother is killed in a hospital fire. He runs afoul of a pesky gray heron, who transforms into creature trying to lure him into “the other world” that’s apparently much easier to access in the countryside than in the bombed cities.

“Your presence is requested,” the toothy heron (voiced by Masaki Suda, in Japanese with English subtitles) croaks more than once.

When young Mahito (voiced by Soma Santoki) sees his pregnant stepmother (Yoshino Kimura) wander into the forest, he fetches his homemade bamboo bow and arrow and pursues her into the underworld.

The lad, bullied in his new school to the point where he injures himself rather than go back, has nightmares about his mother dying in that fire that resulted from Allied bombing. The film is set shortly after the fall of the island of Saipan, which when the bombing began and is mentioned by his father (Takuya Kimura), an industrialist who has set up an airplane cowling factory in the remote countryside. The boy’s heron-guided plunge into an afterlife of magic, gigantic talking and fighting parakeets and the like in pursuit of his stepmother is a search to save his stepmother and perhaps his birth mother, or at least obtain closure with the latter.