Movie Nation

One of the best films ever made about the Armenian Genocide tells the story of one of the first survivors to make it to America. It’s titled “Aurora’s Sunrise,” and it uses different media, bending film genres to relate one of the great tragedies of the 20th century through one woman’s plight.

Arshaluys Mardiginian, renamed “Aurora” when she came to America in 1918, met an American newspaperman who helped publicize her ordeal and the mass murder being carried out by the Ottoman Turks under the cover of World War I. Reporter Henry Gates ghost-wrote a serialized memoir from her accounts, got the interest of Hollywood, and put Mardiginian in a William Selig-produced film epic, “Auction of Souls, (Ravished Armenia)” that traveled America, raising money for Armenian orphans and a hoped-for independent Armenian state.

Here’s what Armenian director Inna Sahakyan and her crew of filmmakers and animators drew from to tell Mardiginian’s tale. Sahakyan includes snippets of the 20 surviving minutes of the 80 minute 1919 biographical thriller sometimes called “Ravished Armenia.” As little of that film survives, a crew went out and recreated silent black and white scenes from it with an actress (Anzehelika Hakobyan) portraying Aurora, who played herself in the movie of her odyssey back in 1919.

There’s also documentary footage of the late Arshaluys Mardiginian, from a long oral history interview she sat for in 1984.

And there’s gorgeous animation — what appears to be rotoscoped actors under-animated in front of lush, water-colorish backgrounds of 1910s Armenia, present day Syria, and America. It is narrated by actress Arpi Petrossian, who speaks in Aurora’s voice in monologues from her memoir about her ordeal.

Take the animated documentary “Waltz with Bashir,” throw in some of the multi-media technique of “Nuts!” and add a few more degrees of difficulty and you have an idea of what Sahakyan and her team have attempted and pulled off.

“Aurora’s Sunrise” is an often gorgeous and always extraordinary film relating one woman’s extraordinary ordeal.

In 1915, from the very start of the Ottoman Empire’s WWI alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary, 13 year-old Arshaluys notes her family being warned by a Kurdish shepherd that the Turks were rounding up Armenians all over the empire.

Her family — she had seven siblings — lived in a small town (Chmshkadzag), provided for by a father who kept silkworms and made, dyed and sold silk. The kids put on plays and had happy lives, right up to the moment the round-up of conscripts began.

Armenian men, including her father and brother, were forced into the army, en masse. In her telling, that set the stage for the mass evictions, “death march” and mass murders carried out shortly afterward by the Ottoman army. The men were dead or gone. Women and children were easily evicted by the Ottoman Army, which was challenged all over the Middle East by Arabs and the British, crushed by the Russians to the north, an army in which discipline and the chain of command had broken down.

At night, Arshaluys recalled (in Armenian with English subtitles), the soldiers marched these women and children to their deaths and “got drunk and laid hands of the girls” — scenes recreated here with black and white silent footage more graphic than what might have been filmed in 1919.

Arshaluys and her siblings were hounded, robbed and raped by bandits and repeatedly assaulted by Turkish troops, who tossed children overboard as they barge-shipped refugees down the corpse-littered Euphrates River.

Turks kidnapped and sold Arshaluys, and she was exploited even by Kurds who took her in after she escaped a harem. But eventually, she found sanctuary and passage (via revolutionary St. Petersburg) to America to “tell our story.”

She had a brother who had immigrated here earlier. But once in America, in addition to telling her story, she found herself exploited in different ways by that unscrupulous reporter.

It all makes for a moving and utterly fascinating narrative that folds in a war, grim accounts of what one refugee endures to survive it, and American media and early motion picture history into a narrative of a horrific genocide, which the Turks refuse to acknowledge committing to this very day.

It’s a bit difficult to tell what’s archival footage from the recreations here. The mix of media makes “Aurora’s Sunrise” more challenging than your typical Best International Feature Oscar entry. But let’s hope the Academy embraces that challenge and recognizes this brilliant achievement with a nomination.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Arshaluys Mardiganian, Anzhelika Hakobyan, with the voices of Arpi Petrossian, Ervin Amiryan, Sara Anjargolian and others.

Credits: Directed by Inna Sahakyan, scripted by Peter Liakhov, Kerstin Meyer-Beetz and Inna Sahakyan. A Cineuropa release.

Running time: 1:36

Apologies to anyone at the roll-your-eyes “Here he goes again” stage of reading my familiar gripe, lament and rant about where too many thrillers come up short — pacing.

But here I go again.

“The Pay Day” is a a caper comedy of little action, low acting energy and almost non-existent wit. And every single one of those cringe-worthy shortcoming is connected to the snail’s pace which this indie outing commits to.

It’s disastrously slow — slow to start, slow to get down to business, with slow scenes, slow transitions to new scenes, slow line readings and indifferent editing that does nothing to correct the director’s timidity on the set.

Sam Bradford, mate, if you’ve never heard the phrase “Once again, but FASTER,” you should have. Pace is everything in a caper comedy. EVERYthing. And every single moment of this failure is like watching a fresco dry.

Kyla Frye and Sam Benjamin co-star and co-wrote this story of high stakes/zero-drama data theft. They plays characters who’re both after the same accounts from some firm that’s allegedly keeping the secret illegal stashes of Members of Parliament. She shoots him to prevent him from stealing the flash drive she’s just downloaded.

Could love be far behind?

It’s just that stupid, and never for one agonizing-as-it-plays-out minute lets you forget it.

We’ve seen Jennifer sacked from her office data management job because the boss can’t be asked for a raise. An anonymous phone call proposes a meeting with a cryptic “Anne Boleyn’s ruby slippers” recognition phrase.

Mr. Gates, played by the actor’s actor and Welles biographer Simon Callow, has a new gig for her. Her take?

“One percent of $500 million.” Yes, she can do the math. Can you?

She has to don a wig and fake her way past the lax and annoyingly chatty staff of the London office building where this takes place. And then she’s interrupted by a talky, chummy, over-familiar employee who won’t stop flirting and won’t take a hint that she needs “PRIV-acy,” as the Brits say it, to finish her “clean the server” work.

She’s doing this in a purloined office-maid’s vest, which he notes but doesn’t question. That’s because he wants that data, too. That’s how he gets shot.

Scene after lead-footed scene, with cops coming into the building after the shot is fired, an evacuation, etc., lacks any sense of urgency at all. Then there’s the woman who has never fired a gun barely registering shock at what she’s done, and a guy who acts as if a bleeding (barely) shoulder wound is no big deal continuing their struggles over a flash drive, flirting and passing out for “sex dreams” of the other.

It’s stunningly dumb. The acting is weak, another failing that the hapless editor fails to hide. And every sequence, every scene and every line is so flat and plays out so slowly that the stupid just stands out more.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Kyla Frye, Sam Benjamin and Simon Callow.

Credits: Directed by Sam Bradford, scripted by Sam Benjamin and Kyla Frye. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:33

Here are three things that aren’t explained in the movie that might help you get more out of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “oneiric,” Fellini-esqe, quasi-autobiographical magnum opus “Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.”

“Oneiric,” a label applied by the filmmaker and/or the studio to the film, means “dream poem.”

“Bardo” is a Buddhist term for a “transitional” state between death and life, “purgatory” without the Catholic guilt. So our hero is either dreaming, or near death.

And the giant salamanders that show show up in a handful of scenes of this film about a Mexican journalist who gained fame after he relocated to the United States and turned to “docufiction” documentaries, are axolotls, named by the Aztecs — unique to Mexico City and thus a symbol of the city and the Mexican Republic.

In the film, they can be interpreted as the fragile pull of the hero’s heritage when deep down, he knows moving north expanded his possibilities and gave his children the chance to excel in ways that hierarchical, hidebound and constrained Mexico would not.

It’s a movie — pardon, film, as in “A film is a movie we don’t quite understand.” — of dreams and narrative shifts in time and the order of events, a tapestry of modern and ancient Mexico. Its money-scene is a debate between Silvario Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho, an Iñárritu look-alike) and infamous conquistador Hernán Cortés (Ivan Massagué) at the top of a mountain of Native corpses in a Mexico City littered with the “disappeared” dead of the country’s recent history.

Not to worry, the “dead,” whom our protagonist, returned to the city from the U.S. to be feted before flying “home” to LA to receive a prestigious journalism honor, are but “extras” on a film shoot — his own.

Silvario as a character has seen them drop dead symbolically everywhere he turns his eyes to show the carnage of the drug wars, murderous corruption and the sea of humanity that has been fleeing north to the Rio Grande for 100 years, many of them dying along the way.

But before I go any further into this challenging satiric parable in an “8 1/2/All That Jazz” vein, what do we say about movies that don’t give us everything we need to interpret them between the opening and closing credits? That force us to look up obscure esoterica? We call such films cheats, the product of a pretentious, indulgent filmmaker who might actually be making this for a Mexican audience, not that you’d get a lot of traction with obscure Buddhist titling and 40 peso words for “dream narrative” in Ciudad Mexico either.

At some point, watching “Bardo,” I had to close up my notebook, give up on writing down the sometimes profound “handful of truths” in the hero’s conversations with his wife (Griselda Siciliani), kids (Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Sancho), long-dead father (Luis Couturier), mother (Luz Jiménez) and Cortez.

At some point, there’s nothing for it but to lean forward, rest your head on your heads and try to figure out what this Oscar-winning (“Birdman,” “The Revenant”) pendejo is trying to say in two and a half hours of out time thanks to a big blank indulgent check from Netflix.

Silvario is determined to get an interview with a race-baiting/Mexican-hating US president. The news is filled with Amazon.com’s plans to buy “the Mexican state of Baja, California.”

Our documentarian is defensive about his homeland to anyone who bad-mouths the “Third World” basket-case state overrun with migrants fleeing north from Central and South America, narco-lords, corrupt cops and the corrupt politicians who enable them. But Silvario sees the classism that is so shocking to his kids, the affluence he has lived in and raised them in contrasted with the poverty that sends hundreds of thousands north when the crops fails and the struggle overwhelms them. He feels the resentment for leaving.

He drifts into encounters with ghosts, and truthfully, we aren’t sure in any given scene just what the reality of the moment is, if he’s really making love to his wife or sitting — mute — while an old comrade, now an embittered click-bait ambush chat show host (Francisco Rubio) who attacks him, smiling, on a live TV.

“Exposure at any price,” Silvario complains when the friend Luis complains about his silent evasions.
That’s what attention culture demands. Here he is, like every over-achiever who ever had to mix with the entitled, “seeking approval from people who despite me.”

Reality in “Bardo” is subjective, and capricious. Which is why we mutter Mexican profanities at the great Iñárritu. The pendejo isn’t playing fair.

There are magical moments, and brilliant sequences tossed into this ensalada of a movie — long tracking shots through a big rental hall concert/dance party, through his spacious Mexico City house, over the desert as we see Silvario’s acclaimed and controversial migrant profile film recreated.

He lectures the American ambassador (Jay O. Sanders) about a mythic moment in the disastrous (for Mexico) Mexican-American war, and it is recreated right in front of them, with Mexican actors in cheap blond wigs portraying the American troops.

Funny.

Silvario sees stigmata on his feet, more than once and watches them nailed to the floor at one point, and muses on the state of things and his state of mind in voice over-narration, which more than one character complains about. “Move your LIPS” when you talk (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

Some of the profundities I jotted down before giving up and simply trying to decode what I was seeing — “A documentarian should not believe, or not believe. He only must know where to point the camera.” Old age isn’t summoned or expected, but when it arrives “It becomes a full time job.”

There’s a lot of that in the third act, which goes on forever and drags and drags, despite having the odd pithy observation about life and living it, guilt over “home” and the like.

I didn’t hate “Bardo,” something I can’t say about Iñárritu’s pal Alfonso Cuaron’s even more indulgent and hilariously over-rated “Roma.” But he’s made a film that challenges and infuriates and in equal measure.

And if the worst thing that comes from it is a few critic-fans calling him a “pendejo” for it, he’ll have gotten off lightly.

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

Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Sancho, Francisco Rubio and Jay O. Sanders.

Credits: Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, scripted by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Nicolás Giacobone. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:39

There’s something about Alaska that welcomes the quirky and celebrates the extreme.

It’s where The Iditarod was born, after all. But I used to live on remote Kodiak Island, where the locals would invent drunken DIY river raft races, bizarre footraces and no-holds-barred golfing challenges — there is no golf course — up the mountain overlooking the town of Kodiak. Every corner of Alaska is overrun with such oddities. Screwballs congregate there.

And sometimes, they invent a new race to lure more of them north.

“The Race to Alaska” is a goofy, lighthearted documentary about the R2AK, The Race to Alaska — scores and scores of boats without engines — racing sloops, catamarans and trimarans to dinghies, beach cats and the occasional paddle board — dash and endure the 750 miles from Port Townsend, Washington to Ketchikan, Alaska via “The Inside Strait,” a quest that can take from 3-13 days.

“Sounds like a good way to die!” one participant laughs. And he’s not wrong.

When you’re pedaling, paddling, or sailing through some of the most stunning seaside scenery on Earth, the Johnstone Straight, Seymour Narrows and “Cape Caution, which was NOT named by somebody who hadn’t been there,” are trying to kill you.

Giant waves, sudden changes in weather, vast tidal rapids, huge whirlpools, rocks, loose logs and shipping traffic — the occasional giant cruise ship looms up behind you — break gear, swamp boats and test experienced sailors and novices alike, every year since 2015.

“How do I avoid icy death?” becomes everyone’s motto.

But it’s also treated as something of a joke, even by the participants. They begin with a “LeMans start” (racers racing on foot onto their boats) accompanied by the Red Army Chorus’s booming rendition of the old Soviet National Anthem. Yes, in formerly Russian Alaska and environs, that’s still funny.

Filmmaker Zach Carver uses interviews and on-board video diaries from solo sailors and crews ranging from privileged bros to “blue collar” sailors, feminists, sourdoughs, eccentrics and adventure athletes to paint a fun picture of a character-building boat race peopled by genuine characters.

They are “someone who has the ability to push themselves beyond” their abilities, and beyond the expectations of others,” organizer Jack Beattie waxes lyrically.

“We have about 70 miles to smoke all the weed,” one crew decides as they hit the home stretch.

The boats can be customized to suit the conditions, or disposable yard sale purchases, with names like Sail Like a Girl, Freeburd, Fashionably Late, Grace B, Ptarmigan, Soggy Beavers and Jungle Kitty.

Crews rough it with DIY toilets, catching sleep where they can –on board in the rain and spraw, or in tents or homemade shelters along the undeveloped shore, where the Alaskan brown bears roam.

All are tested, some have to quit and some find themselves beaten down by the grind and exhilarated by the awe-inspiring views, joyous porpoise encounters and the thrill of the chase.

“We intentionally made a really frustrating race” with that in mind, Beattie admits with a cackle.

It’s a playful movie, very much in the spirit of the engine-free race it documents, with the various boat crews producing the memorable moments — knockdowns (when wind or wave slaps a boat onto its side, or worse — brilliant bits of ingenuity, sight-seeing ashore, meeting locals and Native Americans, and um, bonding as a crew.

“We’re brothers, working on being enemies. It’s a small boat.”

Sure, bragging rights enter the picture, but just getting to the finish line is achievement enough for most. Of course, somebody turned her race into a TED Talk. That’s how the attention economy works.

But what’s striking about these folks is the ingenuity mixed with idealistic naivete that so many bring to this bucket list adventure. As an experienced sailor who lives aboard a sailboat in Florida, I was amazed at some of the gadgets people invented to move even big boats when the wind or the tide are against them. Take away the easy “engine” answer to everything and people get creative.

“Gas is what we use now in place of intelligence,” one old salt opines. And he’s not wrong, at least in this case.

Beattie gets the last word on all this, a chamber of commerce/town promoter type who knew “the best bad idea” he and race coordinator Daniel Evans had ever heard, and ran with it. He should put this on a T-shirt as the motto of this good time/hard time once a year regatta.

“Be safe, be bold, do something incredible. And get over yourself.”

Rating: unrated, profanity, drug references

Cast: Jack Beattie, Daniel Evans, many others

Credits: Directed by Zach Carver, scripted by Zach Carver and Greg King. A Freestyle Release.

Running time: 1:37

Of all the things you’d never expect to find on the resume of Mauna Loa-sized Jason Momoa under “special skills,” “plays nice with kids” has to be pretty far from predictable.

He’s the best thing, almost the only entertaining thing, in the dazzling eye-candy kiddie fantasy “Slumberland,” which suggests Netflix suits pondering the question, “What would a children’s movie from the director of ‘Constantine’ look like?” It’s just the sort of thing those gambling-with-house-money goofballs would sign off on.

I don’t see the comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland” credited on this, unlike the dazzling but little seen animated film from the late ’80s “Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland.” The new film isn’t wholly unrelated to that source material, or even that earlier film. But it’s even more “out there,” if that’s possible.

The fantasies of Terry Gilliam (“Time Bandits,””Brazil”), the Harry Potter universe, “Inception” and “The Never Ending Story” are sampled in this grab bag script that’s here mainly to provide Momoa a stage to show off over-the-top kid-friendly comic chops we never knew he possessed.

It’s got a character named Nemo whose nightly adventures through the vast dreamscape of Slumberland are a quest for her, and this “outlaw” and “pirate” and gonzo goof her dad used to know. She is looking for her father, a lighthouse keeper who home-schooled Nemo up until the day he was lost at sea.

Wacky, beefy Flip (Momoa) has his own quest, showing up at the lighthouse after Nemo’s dad (Kyle Chandler) undertakes one stormy rescue mission too many. Nemo (Marlow Barkley) is heartbroken and just wants to find her father and ditch her bachelor Big City uncle (Chris O’Dowd, stripped of his Irish accent and given little funny to say or do) where she’s been sent to live.

Flip is a horned, fanged, top-hatted dynamo straight out of Wonderland — Slumberland in this case — a nutball and a bull in a china shop when it comes to that lighthouse. He trashes it looking for a map. The kid can’t recall it, but she wouldn’t want to let this guy have it, anyway. He’s looking for these pearls in the vast somnambulant world of Slumberland. He needs the map to track them down and steal them. Because he’s a thief.

“You said ‘thief’ like it’s a BAD thing!”

If Nemo wants to ditch her doorknob-selling uncle, she’ll have to locate that hidden map and tag along with Flip as they navigate through Slumberland, jumping from dream to dream to dream, wildly conceived fantasies, some of them.

They interrupt a Spanish dancer’s reverie, whirling through a dance floor covered with figures who turn out to be butterflies congregating and taking human shape. They bop into a huge dump truck hurtling through city streets with a pre-school dreamer at the wheel.

At one point, they wreck and plunge into the deep, only to fight their near-drowning way out of the truck, stepping out of this dream by climbing through a portal that terminates in a tank on the back of a toilet.

Momoa hoots and hollers. He mugs for the camera. He teaches, threatens and teases. He gets the kid to dance with him.

David Guoin and Michael Handelman are the credited screenwriters. Team “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb” and “Dinner for Schmucks” script a few funny bits about Canada’s most popular dream and Canadians in general (“Timmies!”) and wrote Flip’s lines about boiling life down to basics.

“Wine, women and WAFFLES! The three dubs!”

The plot is all over the place — literally — a dream cop hunting the sleep thief Flip all through Slumberland, Nemo’s waking hour schemes to slip out of school, find a quiet spot to read her uncle’s “History of Doorknobs” coffee table book and fall to sleep.

There are all these rules to this world, most of which have nothing to do with the quest and the characters on it.

But I laughed at a lot of what Momoa does and says, and cackled at the kid having trouble getting this stunningly dull (you’d think) doorknob book to put her to sleep.

“Why’d you have to be so INTERESTING?”

Pretty as the digital effects are, traipsing or racing through a glass and chrome “Inception” city, plunging beneath the waves, dodging the swirling tentacled clouds that represent nightmares because the kid is “a nightmare MAGNET,” they don’t add up to much of a plot. The film meanders into detours and kills the better part of two hours on a quest that seems close to wrapping up after one.

For all the visuals trotted out here, there isn’t enough to see or enough going on to fill the dead spaces littering this bloated film re-edit waiting to happen.

And man, I have GOT to stop looking up the STUPID money Netflix is shelling out for these high-end spectacles. It’s not like Elon Musk is threatening to take them over or anything. But DAMN. $150 million for this? Sure, “It’s all on the screen.” And?

At least Momoa is fun. Find him a comedy, somebody. He’s got Joe Manganiello’s build, and enough of his comic chops to handle a a movie that doesn’t require him to play a biker, a barbarian or a deep sea beefcake.

Rating: PG, scary images, some profanity

Cast: Jason Momoa, Marlow Barkley, Chris O’Dowd, Weruche Opia, and Kyle Chandler

Credits: A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

“Nanny” is that rare sophisticated and cosmopolitan horror movie, a tale with chills and cross-cultural issues far beyond your usual nut-with-a-knife or demons menacing the kids in a cabin in the woods.

Nikyatu Jusu’s debut feature, an award winner at Sundance, is about a young single mother struggling to earn enough money in New York to send for her little boy back in Senegal. The separation is messing with her head, and adding African superstitions and fears onto the guilt she feels for going a year without seeing her boy in the flesh isn’t helping.

It’s a dreamy, spooky film that is sparing with its overt frights as it as much concerned with our heroine’s real world problems as it is her supernatural worries.

Aisha, played with fear and fire by Anna Diop (“Us,” TV’s “Titans”) is a regal beauty from Dakar just starting a new job. She’ll be taking care of an upper-middle class white family’s five year-old girl. Both parents (Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector) work, and keep a roomy, modern high-rise apartment with a spare bedroom for “overnights.”

Mother Amy is a hugger — warm, if a bit self-absorbed and careerist. Husband Adam is a photo-journalist who’s often away. They could really use the help. Aisha really needs the money. And they pay cash, which tells us volumes about the power dynamic in play here.

Aisha is an instant hit with their little girl (Rose Decker), a finicky eater who takes to West African cuisine that her new babysitter, caregiver and French tutor brings to work.

When Adam meets Aisha, he is friendly and impressed enough to say “I can tell you’re not going to be with us for very long.”

But Aisha is increasingly distracted at work. Her facetime chats with her boy are infrequent and frustrating. She starts to see him in her dreams and daytime hallucinations in the park, wakes up from nightmares or feels the tug of African demon mermaids, Mami Wata, trying to drown her in the pool where she takes Rose for swimtime.

She judges herself in the mirror, and worse, the independent image of her reflected back seems judgy, too.

Aisha struggles to keep it together. Maybe dating the handsome single-dad doorman (Sinqua Walls) will give her some relief. Or not. His mother (Lesley Uggams, enjoying a nice career renaissance) knows Africa and has “the sight.” She intuits much about Aisha and her state of mind, not all of which she shares.

A couple of quick observations of the Sierra Leoni filmmaker Jusu’s world-building for this film. Aisha is surrounded by overtly friendly New Yorkers. Amy lends Aisha a fancy dress so that Aisha can join a family cocktail party. Adam is complimentary and makes an effort to relate to Aisha as a woman of the world, with a ready grasp of the world she came from.

And doorman Malik to the very picture of charm and (New York) chivalry.

But Aisha is keenly aware of the power dynamics in play. Her employers are forgetful about paying her, and their marriage seems shaky. How demanding can she be? Malik has a steady job, but he’s as complicated and messy as the rest of us.

This world of affluence and off-the-tax-rolls cheap nannies gives her access to the finer things, and cash to send home to get a plane ticket for her boy. But as distracted as Aisha is and as flighty as they are, it could all go away.

No, the effects and frights aren’t the most original. But Jusu so grounds her film in this reality and so focusses our attentions on Aisha’s plight that the drama draws us in and forces us to be content with dread when the genre is knows for its jolts.

It’s no “Babadook” or “Mama,” but for a horror movie for people who won’t realize they’re watching a horror movie, it’s not bad.

Rating:  R for some language and brief sexuality/nudity.

Cast: Anna Diop, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Spector, Sinqua Walls and Lesley Uggams.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nikyatu Jusu. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:37

In the indie vampire thrilleramedy “Blood Relatives,” the anti hero travels the blue highways of America in a Fire Blue ’69 Barracuda, mutters in Yiddish and is tracked down by a teen who might be his daughter.

“I need to keep a LOW PROFILE!!”

“In your exotic cartoon muscle car that you drive around country all night?”

“It’s DOMESTIC!”

I feel…seen, and on soooo many levels.

Writer, director and star Noah Segan (he was a traffic cop in “Knives Out”) has made a generally witty and novel vampire movie, a genre I had pretty much given up on. His original twist — vampire as kvetching and kvelling car-nut Jewish dad.

The stranger in the black leather jacket only drives at night. He has a car cover he encases the ‘Cuda in if he’s trapped outside in the treeless, housing- free middle of nowhere when the sun comes up. That happens a lot, we gather. Because like any vintage Chrysler/Plymouth/Dodge product, that muscle car goes through the Mopar (parts).

But somewhere in the middle of BFE, Texas, this teenager (Victoria Moroles of TV’s “Teen Wolf”) we’ve seen stalking him in her hoodie and backpack catches up to “Francis.” Remember, he’s a very old guy in a 1950s punk guise — “You look like you dressed as Fonzie for Halloween…every day.”

What’s a Son of the Borscht Belt supposed to say to that?

“Nice Jewish boy,” that Fonzie.

Sixteen year-old “Jane” recites his rare-ish car’s specs, and he wonders “How do you KNOW that?”

“The Internet.”

“How did you FIND me?”

“The Internet.”

Ageless vampire doesn’t know from Internets, so he’ll have to take her word for it.

Her mother died. She told her daughter who her daddy was, what he drives. And between her own peculiar response to sunlight and blood and observations of the father figure she’s been stalking, Jane figured out the rest.

So, father and daughter do the vampire lifestyle, wandering and hunting and teaching her the ropes on America’s Blue Highways, with her always getting asked “You OK?” by strangers who wonder what this girl is doing with this 30something greaser in a Barracuda? Or will they move to a small town under assumed names, enroll her in school and join a single parent support group?

Which do you think is potentially funnier?

The energy flags in this lighthearted dark romp, but that happens in comedies that live and die on their snappy, shticky banter. “Blood Relatives” is still shticky enough — and sticky enough — to deliver laughs with bite.

Rating: unrated, violence, a bit of blood, adult humor

Cast: Victoria Moroles, Noah Segan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Noah Segan. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:27

Amy Adams couldn’t very well turn down a sequel to “Enchanted,” the 2007 Disney delight that made the “Junebug” breakout a bonafide Hollywood star.

But seeing her soldier through “Disenchanted” makes one wish she had. She puts on her happy face and tries to make new songs and a darker direction in the story seem light on its feet. And still the sinking feeling sets in that a better title would have been “Disheartening.”

“Enchanted” was a fairy-tale mash-up musical romance that leaned into Disney Princessiana. It was a lyrical comedy most heavily indebted to “Sleeping Beauty” and a pretty young fairy tale heroine, raised with the animals of the forest, just in search of her “true love’s kiss.”

“Disenchanted,” scripted by Brigitte Hales, takes “Cinderella” as its main source. It has a mean girl who’s grown up to be an Evil Queen (Maya Rudolph). But it’s more about Adams’ Giselle, with a new baby but more importantly a rebellious teen stepdaughter (Gabriella Baldacchino) since she’s married Robert (Patrick Dempsey). When Giselle magically transforms her, her childrens’ and her husband’s new home in suburban Monroeville into a fairytale-ish “Monrolasia,” like the Andalasia Giselle grew up in, guess what Giselle turns into?

“An evil STEPmother!”

Nope. Not having it. She’s a great actress and the fact that it doesn’t work is all on the writer and on director Adam Shankman, who almost never hit the right tone, here.

New challenges, going toe to toe with the local realtor/PTA queen transformed into the Evil Queen, trying to live down being mean to her own stepdaughter, with lawyer-husband Robert forced to learn how to battle dragons and sing his own songs (not badly), new production numbers set to new songs, and none of it plays as light, amusing escapism.

This thing is a joyless chore to get through. Here’s a sample lyric from an early number, after Giselle and Robert deign to move from princess-out-of-water New York to the bucolic country.

“We’ve left behind those city lights, for riding bikes and flying kites. We will be suburbaNITES!”

“Even more ‘Enchanted?'” Well, no.

When your highlight comes in the first act, as married Andalasian royalty King Edward (James Marsden) and his New York queen, Nancy (Idina Menzel) return, you can probably see in the editing process where your movie’s gone wrong.

Their royal fairytale-land friends have moved into a Queen Anne “fixer-upper.”

“Your dwelling…you’ve become POOR now?” the king wants to know. And still a lawyer, not a “country squire?”

“A brave front is required to face a life as barren as this!”

Marsden is pretty much the only reminder of how campy and giddy this material once was and that the new film should have striven to be.

Love him. Love Rudolph. Adore Amy Adams most of all. But “Disenchanted” plays like a contractual obligation, a paycheck, a nearly laughless show of loyalty to the folks who made you what you are.

Rating: PG, mild peril and profanity

Cast: Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, Maya Rudolph, Gabriella Baldacchino, Idina Menzel and James Marsden

Credits: Directed by Adam Shankman, scripted by Brigitte Hales. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:58

The mind takes conditioning to get on the right wavelength to wrestle with post-modernist social satire. We’re decades removed from screen satire’s golden age, an era roughly bracketed by two Peter Sellers films, “Dr. Strangelove” and “Being There.”

And getting a handle on writer Don Dellilo, whose breakout novel, “White Noise” brought his Hemingway meets Vonnegut, Allende, Rushie and Updike style, themes and subject matter to the wider public and great acclaim, exercises other muscles that the cinephile is rarely called on to use.

“White Noise” is now a big budget “prestige picture” from Netflix, a sprawling shock to the system that feels true to the book, and yet glib and on the whole, unsatisfying. There’s a reason this 1985 work hasn’t been filmed before now. And throwing $140 million and Noah Baumbach (“The Meyerowitz Stories, “Mistress America” and “While We’re Young”) at it explains why.

Adam Driver plays our protagonist, Dr. Jack Gladney, a middle-aged academic at The College on the Hill in bucolic Blacksmith mid America. He is “North America’s foremost expert” on Adolf Hitler.

“I teach advanced Naziism,” he cracks.

Jack is married, for the umpteenth time, to the poodle-curled Babette (Greta Gerwig, Mrs. Baumbach), and their combined families include two daughters and two sons.

Jack is an amusing collection of contradictions. He’s a rock star lecturer on campus, but a Hitler expert having to take secret German lessons from a local immigrant, because God forbid academia figure out he doesn’t know Hitler’s native tongue. He is devoted to his latest wife, but concerned and suspicious when her teen daughter from a previous marriage (Raffey Cassidy) discovers a prescription — one among many — that “Babo” is taking. Babo is becoming more and more forgetful as a result, and nobody Jack speaks to has ever heard of this drug.

Jack is obsessed with mortality, his own, and the fear that he won’t “go first,” which he expresses to his wife, who shares that fear because neither wants to be left “alone.”

But that fear of death is strangely dormant when the family and their world faces an existential and tactile threat. A railway chemical accident sends Jack’s brilliant son Heidrich (Sam Nivola) into early 80s (pre-Internet) research and threat-identifying (and fear-mongering) overdrive.

“The Airborne Toxic Event” is coming, and only Jack seems unwilling to grasp the emergency at hand.

No, we weren’t paranoid about the Zombie Apocalypse in the ’80s. But we did have a flippant, shallow, draft-dodging actor in the White House prone to “limited nuclear war” wisecracks. And we didn’t yet live in a media environment that allowed for easy dismissal or gaslighting away disasters in the making, either.

We trusted “authority,” be it governmental or media.

The family, society and culture will be tested by this disaster and the “White Noise” of modern life, and unravel a bit before the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” ethos of the day bubbles up.

I love the quick-stroke skewering of academia that Baumbach scatters through the opening scenes. Don Cheadle, playing Dr. Murray Siskind, an expert on the morphology and and meaning of car crashes in American cinema — and Elvis — lands many of the movie’s biggest laughs, and the occasional searing insight.

“We are fragile people surrounded by hostile facts.”

One bravura sequence comes when Murray summons Jack to his Elvis class as moral support in his battle to protect his turf within whatever quirky umbrella heading their “department” lives under. They engage in a funny, complimentary rap-battle lecture, pointing out the similarities of two of the 20th century’s most famous and infamous “mama’s boys,” Der Fuhrer and The King.

Every scene’s soundtrack is layered with inquisitive kid-questions, chatty commentary, lively debate and ennui not borne in silence.

It’s when the “Airborne Toxic Event” hits that this noisy mayhem is muted, and then whipped to a crescendo as Baumbach creates a “World War Z” level cacophony of chaos — mass, manic evacuation, citizens herded into a Boy Scout camp, officialdom treating this murderous emergency like “an exercise” while all those concentrated into this one place tune in to their radios and bulky portable TVs, desperate for information, furious — as one evacuee, played by Bill Camp notes — at the way the country and the world are ignoring and forgetting them already.

Scenes like that animate the film, and yet underscore the most lethal two-word takedown of DeLillo’s choice of themes, and his style — he also novelized reactions to Lee Harvey Oswald (“Libra”) and the Cold War (“Underworld”). “Hysterical realism.”

The performances here aren’t particularly affecting, as Baumbach treats even the serious issues and pointed social commentary as cartoonish. I mean, he cast the one-hit-wonder singer-turned-actor Andre Benjamin as a fellow academic and does a Bollywood/Gurinder Chadha dance-off bringing the entire cast into the gaudy sanctity of the Blacksmith A & P for the closing credits.

Cute.

He fixates on the ugly clothes, uglier cars and forgivingly-unfit body-types of the ’80s, with Driver taking on a pot belly for his part and everybody’s hair a proto-MTV nightmare. Beyond the surface gloss, this film begs for focus, insight and meaning.

I’m afraid this is another case of Netflix’s Big Blank Check indulging a filmmaker, who cashed it and lost himself in the “White Noise” superficialities while never quite wrestling a perhaps-unfilmable novel into shape.

Rating: R, violence and (profanity)

Cast: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, May Nivola, Jodie Turner-Smith, Andre Benjamin and Bill Camp.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Noah Baumbach, based on a Don DeLillo novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:16

“Four Samosas” is a scruffy, hit or miss indie caper comedy about four young Indian Americans who set out to rob the store of a local grocer who’s gotten rich by illicit means.

It’s built on a generational angst, with a hint of cultural displacement, like a lot of Indian comedies set in North America. Writer-director Ravi Kapoor’s screenplay even references the slang acronym that became the title of one of the earliest movies in this vein — “ABCD” — which stands for “American Born Confused Deshi (person of Indian descent growing up here). “

Our hero, Vinny (Vek Potula), who runs a sari shop, is addressed thusly by his nemesis, Sanjay (Karan Soni of the “Deadpool” movies), who was born in India and has some sort of goat dung business there.

“Oh look, if it isn’t American Born Confused...Loser.”

Vinny has an American street argot sales patter, which does little for sari sales, but helps him in his real passion, writing and performing rap rhymes. It doesn’t help him enough to make him good at it.

He was dumped by the fair hairdresser/eyebrow threader Rina (Summer Bishil), which everyone he mentions this to reminds him was “three YEARS ago.”

Hey, “pain’s got its own clock.”

His buddy Zak (Nirvan Patnaik) runs a chaat shop, watches bad Bollywood movies and dreams of Bollywood stardom. Handsome Zak is lusted after by the “under over-achiever” Anjali (Sharmita Bhattacharya) who produces her own news brochure, The Great Little India Times, which she distributes all over Artesia, the chunk of Greater LA that’s west of Anaheim, south of LA proper.

The news that Rina is engaged to Sanjay sends Vinny into a tailspin, and he resolves to swipe the off-the-books diamonds Rina’s grocery store-owner dad (Tony Mirrcandani, a Republic of India Rip Torn) has stashed in a safe.

In classic caper comedy style, Vinny assembles his team, they don disguises and take their shot at precious jewel riches.

Indie comedies lean heavily on the Spike Lee’s Early Films model — random slices of neighborhood life and neighborhood characters decorate the seriously mundane plot.

A local “gang” of tracksuit wearing “revolutionaries” wants to declare their piece of the city The Free State of Aisetra, the 51st state and all Indian. A), “That’s Artesia spelled backwards,” Vinny points out. “And if I wanted to live in South Asia (the Indian subcontinent), I’d LIVE in South Asia!”

Many locals are all whipped up about an upcoming festival with a talent show in it. Vinny is brother-figure rapper to younger aspiring rapper cousin Nikki (Maya Kapoor), and seeks advice from a priest I take to be his father (writer-director Ravi Kapoor).

A more recent immigrant whom they recruit to help them crack the safe holding the diamonds is an Indian tech school alumna (Sonal Shah) bitter about not finding a US job and facing deporation.

The heist is visualized in fantasized classic heist movie tropes, but that sort of caper only happens in movies where four broke friends don’t have to worry about not having the money to do the job the way Tom Cruise would as Ethan Hunt.

The sources of comedy here include that colorful milieu, the oddballs who populate it and the way people with no special skills might attempt a burglary. There’s not quite enough of each on its own, but together all that adds up to a few laughs and plenty of chuckles. The picture kind of goes to pieces in the third act, but not before we’ve had a fantasized Bollywood production number — produced on the cheap — and lots of gags about haplessness, loserdom and goat feces.

These Four Samosas — the Indian potato appetizer is slang for a lot of things, including “ass” — get by on the their own ineptitude, and the fish-out-of-water clumsiness of transplanted people who don’t “fit in” any more than they need to, because it’d be a tragedy if they did.

Rating: PG-13, some profanity and “a rude gesture”

Cast: Venk Potula, Sharmita Bhattacharya, Sonal Shah, Nirvan Patnaik, Karan Soni, Tony Mirrcandani, Summer Bishil and Ravi Kapoor

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ravi Kapoor. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:20