Movie Nation

“On Fire” is a solid if generally unsurprising drama spun out of every week’s headlines, a tale of a family scrambling to escape the wildfire that’s exploded all around their rural home in the dry, mountainous American West.

Starring and co-directed by Peter Facinelli (“Twilight”), it’s got impressive fire effects, a few jolts and moments of pathos mixed in with lapses in logic and urgency and the odd bit of over-the-top “silliness.”

May co-star Asher Angel, as the teen track-star son of contractor Dad and very pregnant Mom (Fiona Dourif of TV’s “Chucky”), has a long and fruitful career, and lots of talk show appearances where he can laugh off his signature silly moment in this generally sober-minded treatment of an increasingly common and fraught experience — escaping the flames from another blaze in an historically fire-prone, drying, climate-changed world.

“F— you, FIRE!” young Clay yells into the flames.

An opening montage of news audio captures fire coverage from Canada and the US to Australia, Greece, Turkey and Russia, which isn’t necessarily the global take that Dave and son Clay, and later Dave and wife Sarah exchange when they note the ominous towering cloud of smoke a couple of ridgelines beyond the one they live on.

“Little brush fire” comments lead inevitably to “It’s getting bigger,” and last minute fire prep — extra hoses, sprinklers, fire blankets and an Internet check of “how to fireproof your house in a forest fire” list.

Dave scrambles, Sarah tries to rouse Dave’s aged, on-oxygen-and-still-smoking father George (Lance Henriksen) to action and considers packing up to flee.

Meanwhile, things at the local 911 call center are heating up as new-to-the-job Kayla (Ashlei Foushee) tries to reassure locals that it’s all under control.

There’s an urgency to the prep — setting sprinklers on the roof, raking away acres of dry pine needles (good luck) that is never quite mirrored in the 911 call center scenes.

And once the inevitable happens, the fire blows up and cinders in, the family is separated and accidents, tragedies and think-on-your-feet changes in plans kick in. The narrative takes a few too many pauses for the story to propel us into the blaze and through it in the shoes of people who have never faced anything like this.

“On Fire” looks pretty good for a picture of obviously modest budget. They didn’t have the cash to mimic the winds and “firestorm” such forest-devouring furnaces create. I mean, Clay’s track team uniform looks off-the-rack-at-Dollar-General, after all.

But characters take the time to bicker over climate change, lament the struggle of having a single-wide home with “no insurance” in ways that many experience life in low-opportunity, rural and sylvan slices of “Paradise.”

“On Fire” isn’t all that, but all things considered — the cast is good, and the fire is impressive — it’s not half bad, either.

Rating: PG-13 for action/peril, disturbing images, smoking and some strong language.

Cast: Peter Facinelli, Fiona Dourif, Ashlei Foushee, Asher Angel and Lance Henriksen.

Credits: Directed by Peter Facinelli and Nick Lyon, scripted by Nick Lyon and Ron Peer. A Cineverse release.

Running time: 1:20

The cinematic label for any film under 40 minutes is “a short.” But in the case of “Strange Way of Life,” Pedro Almodóvar’s half hour long gay Western romance with gunplay, the better descriptor might be “small.” Truncated, even.

A tale of two former “hired guns” reuniting 25 years after a brief two month love affair, Almodóvar (“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down” and “Parallel Mothers”) dances down a fine line between soap operatic melodrama, Western tropes, bittersweet romance and camp.

He puts his two stars, Pedro Pascale and Ethan Hawke, on horseback, but keeps the camera tight for the most part. That makes the movie, with its sublimated emotions and romance — or at least a sexual relationship — rekindled by liquor, intimate.

But the Old West never seemed quite so small as it does here.

Hawke plays a sheriff resigned to chasing down a murder suspect with a locally-familiar limp. Pascal is Silva, his old riding mate who shows up at just this moment to get reaquainted.

The suspect is Silva’s son. Might a seduction spare his offspring?

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“How do you want me to look at you?”

Old wounds are reopened, old plans long abandoned revisited, and hard truths faced. Justice and loyalty demands that the son’s got to be brought in, dead or alive.

There’s even a flashback, showing our two drunken, whoremongering pistoleros (Jason Fernández and José Condessa) shooting wineskins, cackling madly and ignoring the sex workers they’re partying with to drinking from tehir bullet holes with their hands down each other’s chaps.

While the same sex romance may be somewhat novel, and the minimalist plot and narrow focus on a scale with many classic Westerns, it’s hard to imagine the Spanish Oscar winner getting a full length feature out of this. It’s a one-joke short. /Thus, “Strange Way of Life” is paired for release with the filmmaker’s more symbolic and cryptic 2020 short “The Human Voice,” starring Tilda Swinton, which is also half an hour long.

Sure, this hour of filmmaking is by Almodóvar, and is always going to be a little clever, a bit daring and maybe even subversive at times. But premium prices at your favorite art cinema for an hour of movies makes this package (I vaguely remember “Human Voice” but didn’t review it) an iffy recommendation at best.

Rating: R, violence, sexual situations, nudity, profanity

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Pedro Pascale, George Steane, Jason Fernández and José Condessa

Credits:Scripted and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: :31

Here we go again, Ellen Burstyn may be 90, but she’s still getting a demon exorcising job done.

My review is here.

Netflix has had very good luck with World War movies, mostly made abroad. This three part series, set in WWII France, is about a blind radio operator speaking out about the darkness of fascism, and a German soldier witnessing this monstrous political movement from the inside.

Aria Mia Loberti and Louis Hofmann star.

Hugh Laurie and Mark Ruffalo are also in the cast.

Nov. 2.

They didn’t use words like “groomer” way back when. But if this isn’t the most famous case of it — ever — I don’t know what is.

Cailee Spaeny has the title role. Aussie Jacob Elordi is The King….who liked them young. Very young.

Nov. 3.

“Love is in the Air” is an an inane and scenic romance from Australia, a “Hallmark Movie” is all but name.

This Netflix release is an old-fashioned “fish out of water” comedy that’s rarely comic, a city boy/gal from the bush rom-com that blows the “meet cute” and so glams up our tough lady pilot of the bush that she’s ready for a runaway, all right. Just not one that caters to small propeller planes.

Long review short, it’s a film built on a foolproof formula, in which the fools foul up the basics.

Delta Goodrem is Dana, who never shows up for a day at work at tiny, one-Cessna Fullteron Airways without perfect makeup, eyelashes, highlights and a daily blowout.

She’s a pilot always missing tourist charter appointments for “remote air support” pick ups and drop-offs, mail delivery and “emergencies, such as taking a snakebit dog from a remote sheep station to a vet.

That irks the boss, but as Jeff (Roy Billing) is her widowed Dad, there’ll be no complaining.

The sassy mechanic Nikki (Steph Tisdell) worries about their one-serviceable aircraft’s 50 year-old engine, and wishes Dana would get back together with the local hunk.

“You’ve gotta put your foot on the ground sometime, otherwise, life will fly right by you” is merely the first of the eye-rolling aviation puns that litter the script.

But Fullerton (not a real town, Whitsunday, Queensland was the main location) isn’t independently-owned. A hustling analyst with London’s ITCM Financial sees the operation is on their books, and well worth liquidating. Will (Joshua Sasse) tells the boss (Hugh Parker) this, and the boss — also his dad — sends him south, “to the ass-end of the world,” to check out the operation and make their move to close it down.

Considering that the plane ticket, etc., would just be more lost cash, you’d think they’d do that remotely. But no. Dad wants the lad to prove himself. Which Will proceeds to screw up, almost from the start.

A half-hearted attempt at mistaken identity at the airport, a hasty enlistment in “assisting” pilot Dana in some of her work, and Will is enchanted by the place, the seat-of-your-pants nature of the job and the flying, and smitten with the sassy Dana.

What that situation needs is sparks, a little friction. If you remember the tomboyish bush pilot Maggie of “Northern Exposure” you know how this is supposed to play. Beautiful or not, she’s too butch for the sissy city boy. But the sparks fly anyway.

That doesn’t happen here. Everything is watered-down, with any promising rough edges rubbed off. There’s little chemistry between the attractive leads. The “real reason” Will’s here is sure to get out. Even the third act “crisis” (a storm) is predictable and is plotted out in the least logical or interesting way imaginable.

A bit of attempted beach football (soccer) in a suit, a little cricket on the tarmac, a little slang — “Get a wiggle on!” “Oh my giddy aunt!” — a few puns, and a bit of coastal Queensland scenery is about all there is to the stale “Love is in the Air.”

Rating: TV-14, mild peril, profanity

Cast: Delta Goodrem, Joshua Sasse, Roy Billing, Hugh Parker and Steph Tisdell.

Credits: Direted by Adrian Powers, scripted by Katherine McPhee, Caera Bradshaw and Andrian Powers. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

Joan Baez wrapped up her 60 year career as a folk music icon and very public global civil rights activist with a 2019 show in Madrid, an exclamation point at the end of decades of thrilling, often landmark performances, protests and outspoken activism.

Her unmistakable soprano voice ringing clear and true, even as it aged, covering classic folk tunes and songs of her own creation, was always a clarion call for justice.

Now 82, she’s already been lauded and given her due as a legend, an “American Master,” as PBS labeled her.

“Joan Baez: I Am a Noise” is a more intimate look inward at a life in the public eye, famous from her teens, a Time Magazine cover at 21, respected and controversial from the beginnings of her public life to the end of it.

Three directors use lengthy conversations with Joan, her now-passed sister Pauline and mother “Joan Sr.,” archival interviews, readings from childhood essays and life journals, taped letters from the road and even cassette recordings of therapy sessions to paint a deeper portrait of a complex woman with so many layers to her no single film could do her justice.

A Mexican-American (her father was a preacher-turned physicist and UNESCO researcher) who experienced discrimination in childhood until she picked up first a ukulele and then a guitar, Baez was “running around barefoot, long-haired, looking like the Virgin Mary and probably thinking I was a little bit like her” in her youth,

But as her family became Quakers and she witnessed poverty in America and around the world, thanks to her father moving them to assorted Third World countries working for UNESCO, she noted in a teen essay, “I am not a saint. I am a noise.”

Interviewers like Christiane Amanpour might hail “one of the purest notes in music history,” but Baez sees herself, in reflection, as “just the right voice at the right time.”

“I Am a Noise” uses some childhood reenactments to recreate that childhood, and snippets of animation to provide visuals for the vast archives of audio recordings of her tape-recorder-mad father, her own taped letters and reflections.

We see performances from the last stretches of the tour she didn’t want to call “a farewell,” with her small band — son Gabriel Harris was her percussionist — and the film uses snippets of those shows and samples her scores classic live performances over the decades.

She revisits her brief, youthful and celebrated affair with Bob Dylan and her role in legitimizing his career and songwriting. We see their soulful and sometimes playful joint stage appearances, and note how her rural New York home is still decorated with images of Bob.

It’s a somewhat sprawling and almost ungainly film, years in the making, very revealing and yet notably incomplete. The great love affairs — male and female — leave off Apple founder Steve Jobs, and the weight of late life allegations of abuse by their father, which Baez and her folk-singing younger sister Mimi Fariña made, necessarily burdens the movie’s third act.

The focus is narrowly on Joan and her family, with only rare outside voices of authority glimpsed in archival interviews placing Baez on the pedestal music and cultural history built for her.

But her reflections on a life lived in the public eye are insightful and her memories of the many landmark civil rights events she participated in and help popularize an invaluable record of her era.

When folk singer and actor Theodore Bikel (“The African Queen,” “The Defiant Ones”) introduced Baez onto the stage at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival, his few simple words set up all the acclaim that her later life would live up to.

It was a rare thing, Bikel noted, to have a “great singer and musician” wrapped up in someone who is also “a great human being.”

Rating: unrated, drug content, abuse discussions, some profanity

Cast: Joan Baez, Pauline Baez, Gabriel Harris, Joan Baez Sr., with archival interviews/etc. with Bob Dylan, Mimi Fariña, Richard Fariña and David Harris

Credits: Directed by Mira Navazsky, Maeve O’Boyle and Karen O’Connor. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:53

This paranoid sci-fi thriller, based on a hit novel by Rumaan Alam, comes to theaters in Nov. and then Netflix Dec. 7.

“Mr. Robot” veteran Sam Esmail makes his feature film debut directing this, with BBC “Industry” star Myha’la Herrold (she’s losing the “Herrold” in billing, now) getting big exposure in this prestige pic from Netflix.

There are a lot of telltale signs that “Grieve,” a pretentious, cryptic and childishly obscurant title loosely labeled as “horror” and inexplicably picked up for distribution by Terror Films, might be a student film.

I try not to review student films, even those whose filmmakers are cheeky enough to get an off-off brand distributor to pick their movie up. They’re mostly bad, and I don’t grade on the curve. Which is a way of saying I can be pretty mean. Ask anybody.

Writer-director Robbie Smith hasn’t made anything else, near as one can tell.

His screenwriting betrays a certain in-his-own-headspace insensibility that opens with nearly three minutes of a character curled up on a floor, listening to what appears to be (the audio mix is poor) an old phone message while the screen is covered in large block letters “GRI” over “EVE.”

A prologue that is a pointless structural blunder (the “credits” come after it) sets up our grieving Sam (Paris Peterson) before he is sent home from the office and into his family’s cabin out in the snowy, overcast woods. Somewhere.

Sam is grieving for Sarah (Danielle Keaton), whom we finally glimpse in a flashback over 20 minutes into the nearly-dialogue-free opening act. And he reconnects with a childhood friend (Jacob Nichols) from cabin country, unhappily married, working class and ready to “party” with pills and what not.

Sam starts to hear voices. Sometimes, it’s his voice, narrating…something. Every now and then, he hears cryptic pronouncements whispered in French.

“Nothing festers in the cracks and expands…Nothing lives and grows.”

Yes, it’s as inane in English as it is in French.

By the time Sam sees a gnarled hand reach out of the ground, we wonder if he’s losing it, if he’s having pill flashbacks or he’s actually encountering something supernatural, apparently unrelated to his grief. By the time he has his first “accident” (self harm), we still haven’t figured out what exactly is going on here.

Helpfully, Smith provides an explanation for the plot on the film’s IMDb page. There’s little that he wrote there that actually jibes with the pseudo-artsy, choppy, indifferently-plotted movie we’ve seen on the screen. And “explaining” away your intentially obscure movie with a director’s statement is very “student film,” BTW.

The cast is neither accomplished nor interesting — mostly-unknown, with Keaton’s long career of bit parts apparently deemed unworthy of documenting on Wikipedia.

Obscure, clumsily-pretentious, under-scripted and flatly acted, there’s nothing to recommend here.

But if it’s a student film, there’s always the hope that things will click further along, maybe in grad school. Or not.

As it is, I can’t for the life of me figure out what any distributor saw in this, and even the publicist sending out pitches for this waste of time mis-titled “Grieve” “Grief” in bold block letters of her own.

Good grief.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse

Cast: Paris Peterson, Danielle Keaton and Jacob Nichols

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robbie Smith. A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:05

“Reptile” ends with a few delicious twists and such a satisfying punch that it’s a shame we have to talk about “Netflix editing” again, that lack of cutting that makes even a pretty smart and dense thriller play like a New Orleans funeral.

The film, co-scripted by star Benicio del Toro, starts slowly, slows down for a few more complications, meanders a bit and finds its way to a fine finish that’s a bit late arriving.

It’s a tale of murder, infidelity, drugs, real estate and a cop with a past on the case. A willowy young real estate agent (Matilda Lutz) is murdered. Her handsome but older real estate tycoon beau (Justin Timberlake) is Suspect One.

But Det. Tom Nichols (del Toro), a Philly cop new to the suburban Scarborough P.D., and his partner (Ato Essandoh of TV’s “The Diplomat”), his captain (Eric Bogosian) and his department have a lot of other possibilities thrown in front of them as this case progresses.

There’s the dead woman’s “artist” not-quite-ex-husband (Karl Glussman). The mother of our real estate tycoon (Frances Fisher) gives off strong dragon lady vibes. This nut the real estate hustlers screwed over (Michael Cameron Pitt) figures in their deliberations as well.

So do a lot of other variables in this slow-to-unravel tale, one that throws in an “It was just a dream” red herring — one among many — and shifts points of view several times, even as though is the dogged, perhaps-tainted Nichols that is our protagonist here.

They went for a bit of stunt-casting that really pays off — re-pairing del Toro with his “Excess Baggage” (1997) co-star Alicia Silverstone, who plays the earthy, sexy and brassy cop wife who gives as good as she gets from her detective husband.

There’s also a kitchen renovation that isn’t going well, a real estate business that has some off-the-books tax tricks that add an extra whiff of corruption, some back and forth over clues, DNA and a misidentified vehicle of interest, all set against a cop culture that sees a lot of off-hours socializing amongst the Blue, with the cynical, callous detectives placing cash bets on suspects and the sage Nichols noting to his new partner that “overtime” in police work is for “milking,” if you need the extra money.

That casts a shadow over Nichols’ self-rightous lecture to a subordinate “uniform” at a crime scene.

“When you walk through that front door, there’s a jury of twelve watching you.”

There’s something about Nichols that has his captain insisting he’s “clean” to the chief, that has one cop-obsessed suspect declaring “This is your chance to redeem yourself,” that makes us wonder about that opening act hand wound that Nichols walks onto the crime scene with.

Justin Timberlake was born looking “guilty.” But maybe that’s just meant to throw us off.

Just guessing here, but the poker-faced, iguana-eyed Oscar-winner del Toro, of “Traffic,” “Sicario” and “The Usual Suspects” is as good an inspiration/explanation for the title “Reptile” as any. Still, the script is littered with self-serving, scaly characters up and down the line.

Music video director Grant Singer, who makes his feature directing debut and co-wrote the script, gets a lot of misdirection plot threads in a story almost overstuffed with characters, some of whom we’re meant to underestimate, some we fear and others we fear for.

Love del Toro in this part, love seeing the sparks he sets off (as a jealous husband) with Silverstone, and it’s great seeing the under-utilized Pitt, Fisher and Bogosian in chewy roles for a change.

But Singer has of now no feel for pacing, and Netflix has made it some sort of streamer policy that they don’t push newcomers or screen legends like Scorsese, Spike, Cuaron and Campion to deliver brisk, tight cuts with pace and urgency. This lizard drags for the first 90 minutes and only really gets up to speed in the third act.

It’s perfectly watchable, but let it play on during the bathroom breaks and search for snacks. It’s so slow you probably won’t miss anything vital, not until the third act.

Rating: R, violence, drug content, profanity

Cast: Benicio del Toro, Alicia Silverstone, Justin Timberlake, Eric Bogosian, Frances Fisher, Tom Nowicki, Ato Essandoh, Karl Glussman, Dominick Lombardozzi, Matilda Lutz and Michael Carmen Pitt.

Credits: Directed by Grant Singer, scripted Grant Singer, Benjamin Brewer and Benicio del Toro. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:16