Movie Nation

A little slice-of-the-long-war in Ukraine satire from Film Movement, “Donbass” has a title everyone recognizes as a region the Russians covet and have been destabilizing and invading since 2014, calling it a “civil war” as they send “separatists” in to kill and take ground.

From my review — “This is “civil war” as performance, a big, broad lie pushed by Putin, pushed-back-against by the legitimate Ukrainian government, where it’s not so much ground taken and public support implied as how everything “appears.”

If you’re a library card holder in the greater Casselberry region, ask for it by title. It should be on the shelves shortly.

MovieNation, spreading fine cinema one title, one Southeastern public library at a time.

“Wolves of War” is a straight-up WWII B-movie, leaning towards C.

A semi-sensible “secret mission” thriller, it sends a bunch of British paratroopers — accompanied by a young scientist (Jackson Bews) — in search of a researcher who’s been living in Germany for decades, working on nuclear physics, aka The Bomb.

The film’s a grab bag of WWII movie cliches — a “drop” mission gone wrong, a bit of noble sacrifice here, a little executing Nazi militiamen there. Plenty of shooting, which is what we came here for, right? That, and a little “moral of the story” profundity.

“There’s this old saying that there are two wolves fighting inside all of us. One good, one bad. And the wolf that wins is the one we feed the most.”

Ed Westwick is Jack Wallace, a father who reads a bedtime story to his little girl one night in 1939, and now — five years later — is still fighting, second or third in command of this mission “a thousand miles from” the front lines (nobody knows geography any more), somewhere in Bavaria.

Matt Willis is Captain Norwood, ruthlessly focused and on-task. There’s also an Irish sharpshooter (Sam Gittins).

The father and the captain have their battle of conscience. A skinny Nazi commander (Max Themak) hunts them without mercy.

The screwy bit is that the scientist collaborating with the Nazis is an American (Rupert Graves). At no point does anybody question his actions or patriotism. They choose to treat this 20 year collaboration as a “rescue” mission, and the scientist and his daughter (Anastasia Martin) go along like good little von Brauns.

I kept waiting for the local militia, with their twisted swastikas, to turn out to be zombies or something. Alas, no “Overlord” laughs here.

The action’s decent enough, if plainly shot on a tiny budget. The script? Whew.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Ed Westwick, Sam Gittins, Matt Willis, Jackson Bews, Éva Magyar, Max Themak, Jack Parr, Anastasia Martin and Rupert Graves

Credits: Directed by Giles Alderson, scripted by Ben Mole. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:27

Here’s a little Brit bauble that got by me, and you and most everybody else when it popped out briefly back in 2012.

“The Hot Potato” was “inspired by a” true story about a stolen lump of uranium and all the trouble a couple of mugs — and the thugs they consult — have unloading it in the late 1960s.

It’s got Ray Winstone and a stand-out turn by his daughter Lois, along with Colm Meaney as a fight-fixing mobster, Jack Huston (“Ben-Hur,”American Hustle”), David Harewood (“Blood Diamond”) the wonderful John Lynch (“The Secret Garden,” “Best,” “In the Name of the Father”) and veteran bit player Derren Nesbitt, who played many a Nazi in his day.

And while this caper comedy isn’t a laugh riot, it’s damned funny at times and generally wry and daft in tone, a Cockney-accented “Hot Rock,” for those who remember that ’72 burglary-goes-bad comedy with Redford, Segal, Liebman and Mostel.

Redoubtable Ray plays Kenny, who runs a low-rent metal casting/metalwork shop that’s slowing going to seed when a young mate (Huston) shows up with a fancy and locked chrome shipping case he’s nicked at a salvage job after a fire or gas explosion or something.

They get it open, and see all these lead pellets surrounding something even heavier than the lead — “sort of a baked potato with ears.” They try chiseling it and sawing it. Not gold. Harder. Finally they find somebody who can tell them what the metal is, at least.

It’s uranium.

A couple of running gags in the movie are the fact that Kenny and Danny have to be reminded how “dangerous” this stuff is. They never give voice to what this stuff is used for. Have you ever tried to sell something you don’t dare take out of a lead casing, something used to make nuclear bombs?

It takes over half the movie for somebody to figure out, “get a Geiger counter.” Maybe that’ll help with the sale.

Kenny calls the shadiest guy he knows, Harry (Meaney). And Harry warns him and warns him again and then sets him up with underworld kingpins, “The Twins,” both played by Lynch. They aren’t really The Krays, but that’s who they’re meant to be.

The twins, seriously dangerous men with serious connections, set up a meeting. And being hardballers, they start our story down a comically torturous path, as the price they try to wrangle keeps going up and this portly, shifty German, Fritz (Nesbitt) they’re working with keeps playing the angles.

Kenny, Danny and bookkeeper Carole (Lois Winstone), Danny’s girlfriend, find themselves galivanting from Brussels to Ostend to Luxembourg to Rome.

“The Vatican? Where the Pope lives?”

“That’s good. Someone with a bit of money, at least!”

The running gags are light and plentiful here. Nobody, not the alleged CIA buyer (Harewood), not the various Germans, the Italian or Israeli, ever shows up with a bag of cash and a willingness to close the deal.

The mobsters beat up Kenny and Danny, who burn through cash buying plane tickets or fixing Danny’s 1961 Jaguar — which keeps getting shot up as double-crosses and chases become part of the adventure of it all.

Writer-director Tim Lewiston, who usually works in sound design (he also directed last year’s “There’s Always Hope”) gives the most complete character arc, and many of the funniest lines, to Winstone’s daughter, and she delivers. Carole goes from lovesick office manager to pistol-packing mama like ones she’s seen “in the pictures.”

“She thinks she’s Emma-Bloody-PEEL!”

And Nesbitt, finding a giggle every time there’s food in sight as he’s playing a glutton who literally shoves everything into his face, camps it up just enough to delight.

“Eye zink ve are beink FOLLOWED,” he mutters, at the wheel of the Jag in the Belgian countryside. Not to worry, “I used to fly Messerschmidt 109s! Zis car iss a BALLERINA in mein heart!”

Winstone the elder is deadpan, a thick-accented Cockney showing us how out of his depth Kenny is by every thing he doesn’t know about uranium and geopolitics. That mysterious would-be buyer they just met?

“MOSSAD!”

“I fought ‘is name was ‘arry!”

The “Hot Rock” comparison should tell you this is a tad old fashioned, with “Man from U.N.C.L.E” and “James-bleedin’-BOND” jokes, dated chases and a lot of stumbling to and fro without anybody getting any closer to paying up and collecting the goods.

I’m guessing the choppiness of the narrative slowed this to a crawl in theaters, never letting the picture get up a full head of steam. But streaming lessens such flaws, and good players stand out no matter how the story is unfolding around them.

If you’re a Winstone and Meaney fan, it’s got just enough of what they do best to get by, even if Winstone’s daughter and a guy who supported himself for decades by clicking his heels and demanding “Vere are your papers?” upstage them.

Rating: TV-14, violence, some profanity

Cast: Ray Winstone, Jack Huston, David Harewood, Lois Winstone, Derren Nesbitt, John Lynch and Colm Meaney.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tim Lewiston. A FilmRise release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:38

Coming soon?

We all know and have been saddened as we learned about Bruce Willis and the aphasia that has battered his ability to speak, remember lines or act. What hasn’t been explained is why his family keeps trotting him out there to make awful appearances in D-movie after D-movie, films that are beneath him and cannot possibly pay enough to be worth the cost in effort and to his good name.

Are their finances that dire? Is it therapeutic to put him in a familiar, supportive environment like a movie set making garbage like “Corrective Measures,” one film after another in a race against his diminishing capacities?

Anybody following his career knows he’s been in the doghouse, doing under-financed dogs save for the occasional supporting turn in an “Expendables” sequel, for over a dozen years. We can ponder how long ago the diagnosis was made and how much money he or those counseling him expected to put away making scores of instantly awful crap like “Measures.”

Because make no mistake, this movie is terrible right out of the gate, and execrable by the time Willis makes his belated bow — 23 minutes in.

It’s a stupidly-conceived, ineptly-scripted post-apocalyptic tale of super-powered super-criminals locked away in a Supermax prison presided over by hipster “overseer” Michael Rooker, running his fiefdom and appearing on TV to brag about how “Nuttin’s gettin’ outta here, NUTTIN1” while sporting a 1950s hep cat straw hat.

Willis plays Julius Loeb, “The Lobe,” and his superpower — powers are “nullified” inside the prison walls — is too laughable to give away.

There’s a gigantic religious fanatic psychopath named Payback (Dan Payne), a seemingly timid “empath” we’re supposed to root for (Brennan Mejia) and “The Conductor,” an “explainer” character who gives us loads of exposition as to the hows, whys and history of San Tiburon Prison and how the most dangerous of the dangerous are kept there. He’s played by Tom Cavanagh, whom I remember from “Scrubs.”

A supervillain prison movie with monsters, epic brawls and blood. Yay.

Here’s what it might be remembered for, the last time Bruce Willis tells a joke onscreen.

“You know how to make Holy Water? You boil the hell out of it!”

This is just sad. Hire the guy a new investment counselor, or let his family go out and get real jobs and support themselves and give Bruce a break. Even if this is therapeutic, it’s no way to be remembered.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Bruce Willis, Brennan Mejia, Hayley Sales, Dan Payne, Tom Cavanagh, Kat Ruston and Michael Rooker.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sean Patrick O’Reilly. A Tubi release.

Running time: 1:46

Writer-director Neil LaBute makes a mockery of film noir in his new thriller “Out of the Blue.” It’s a lampoon of the classic femme fatale stories that define the genre — from “Double Indemnity” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” to this film’s closest antecedent, “Body Heat.”

The filmmaker who has dabbled in and sent-up misogyny (“In the Company of Men”) and racism (“Lakeview Terrace”) goes glib and tacky with a story of Rhode Island wrongdoing set in motion by an unhappily married, abused rich woman played by Diane Kruger.

The sex scenes have a wacky unreality about them — in a reading room at a library, on a rock in a park. There are dozens of pointless time inter-titles — “Three Days Later,” “The Next Wednesday” — waving a red flag over all of this.

“I’m not being serious, folks!”

And he cast Jack Nicholson’s kid as the “Postman” sap, the ex-con lured by a sexy older woman into a situation we see coming a mile off, which LaBute doesn’t even try to make realistic because the genre is, on its face, kind of laughable. To him, I guess.

Ray Nicholson is the fitness freak Connor, a librarian in Twin Oaks, Rhode Island. Kruger is the blonde he sees walking out of the sea after a morning swim. He is goofily enamored. She is guarded and coy.

“Fortune favors the bold,” she scolds him after a near flirtation.

When she drops by the library later, in sunglasses hiding a black eye, he is hooked.

But Connor isn’t just some naive, mild-mannered librarian. We figure that out when we meet his abrasive, bullying probation officer (Hank Azaria, terrific). The guy plainly isn’t interested in helping his parolee settle into a new life and forget the past. He wears a windbreaker with PROBATION in large, alarming letters emblazoned on the back. In public.

Do such jackets even exist?

The probie creates scenes and humiliates Connor because he can. And Connor, smitten by the lonely, battered and rich stepmother and her plight, pursued by the pretty and more age-appropriate librarian Kim (Gia Crovatin), replaces the secret his probie won’t let him keep with a bigger one. He begins a (somewhat) torrid affair.

LaBute is messing with us, first scene to last, with his obvious foreshadowing, the way Connor steers Kruger’s Marilyn to “The Postman Always Rings Twice” on the library’s shelves, his mention of the town’s name, “Twin Oaks, the name of the cafe” in the novel and movies made from it.

As to Marilyn’s “problem?”

“Maybe I can be the solution.”

The general idea here is a sound one, taking the conventions of a celebrated genre and sending them up. But LaBute’s incessant grasping for laughs out of “The Next Tuesday” and “Sometime After That” titles is instantly cloying.

Kruger plays Marilyn straight down the middle — a little Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity,” an attempt at Lange sensuality in the Nicholson/Jessica Lange version of “Postman,” a smidgen of Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat.” She’s adequate in the part, which is inadequate for the movie as Nicholson-the-Younger is out of his depth here, not really giving us much to hang onto.

Connor needs to be gullible but dangerous, his naivete and passion something we connect with, his secrets sinister. Nicholson gives us a couple of notes, not the full sonata. Without reading his bio beforehand, I didn’t make the resemblance connection and kept wondering “Who IS this guy and why’d LaBute entrust him with his movie?”

But the film’s bigger flaws are all on the director who cast him, a filmmaker who keeps trying to have his noir and mock it, too.

Rating:  R for sexual content, language and some violence.

Cast: Diane Kruger, Ray Nicholson, Gia Crovatin, Chase Sui Wonders and Hank Azaria.

Scripted and directed by Neil LaBute. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:44

Oct. 18, this documentary, narrated by PBS favorite Peter Coyote, streams and promises…a lot more UFO hearsay?

Lotta sizzle and “testimony” endorsements in this trailer.

It’s entirely possible that the universe was trying to tell Robert something, and he missed the traumatic and obvious sign it gave him in the opening of “Funny Pages.”

Robert, played by Daniel Zolghadri, is a cocky, indulged high school cartoonist with dreams of Mad Magazine glory. We meet the hero of our story at a mentoring session in which his cartoonist/cartoon historian high school teacher (Stephen Adly Guirgis) has praised Robert to the high heavens and told him he’s “already at a professional level” with his drafting, artwork and comic strip/comic book wit.

“College?” It could very well “ruin” him.

But as that session comes to an awkward close, Robert causes his mentor’s gruesome death. Maybe this adult world of adult cartoon humor, the people who create it and the people who consume it, isn’t the right path to go down.

“Funny Pages” follows Robert as he follows that “forget college” advice and his dream, gets in trouble with the law, finds work and gets a dose of supporting himself on a pittance. He will live through his art, feeding on the the Fellini grotesques of his corner of New Jersey. Wild hair, exaggerated noses or ears, pot bellies and bizarre personality quirks and perversions in real life are fodder for his art.

He could be the next R. Crumb, and he’s sure of it. Almost everybody he meets encourages his “Michael Jordan/Kobe Bryant” level genius.

Bit player turned first time feature writer-director Owen Kline takes us into a “Ghost World” of the comic book store of pop culture lore, filled with oddballs, obsessives, the obese and the acned, the whitest white kids — and adults — you know.

Kline leans into the stereotypes and leads us into the darker recesses of lonerdom as Princeton-pampered Robert dismisses his parents (Maria Dizzia and Josh Pais), drops out of high school and moves into a hellish dump of an apartment in Trenton.

Robert rudely dismisses the crude efforts of his fellow comic-obsessive and would-be artist pal Miles (Miles Emmanuel) and starts selling off his comic collection to supplement his two part time jobs — at The Garage Comics store and as a transcriptionist for the lawyer (Marcia DeBonis) who kept him out of jail.

And he shows off his work and the pornographic “Tijuana bibles” to the creepy confirmed bachelors (Michael Townsend Wright, Cleveland Thomas) he rents a bed from, judging that this is exactly the sort of stuff they’d be into. Eventually he meets someone new to idolize, a former comic book industry insider (Matthew Maher).

Eighteen is not too young to learn the lesson, “Never meet your heroes.”

Kline goes for cringe-worthy characters and cringy laughs of the R. Crumb variety, and Maher, a veteran supporting player often typecast in scary or instant-impression “fringe” character roles (“Gone Baby Gone,” “Wonder Wheel,” “Marriage Story”) is the source of most of those intensely discomfiting chuckles.

This “Wallace” fellow, a former artist who used to work in “color separating” in the inking of comic books, is eccentric beyond eccentric, bitter and wrapped too tight. He becomes Maher’s tour de force. Wallace’s insecurities are many, his “triggers,” the things that set him off, many more.

Kline presents us with a coming-of-age story, or an artist finding his voice tale, and never quite delivers either. As an actor, he once worked with Noah Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale”), and “Funny Pages” has a bit of Baumach’s funny-not-funny ear mixed in with Terry Zwigoff’s “Ghost World” “harmless” screwballs-who-might be dangerous vibe.

He’s found a fascinating subculture to take us into, settled on a hero to take on a quest through it. And then he kind of lost the thread, if not his nerve. Whatever the universe was telling Kline, the message or warning got a little muddled in translation.

Rating: R for crude sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief violent images.

Cast: Daniel Zolghadri, Matthew Maher, Maria Dizzia, Miles Emanuel, Josh Pais, Marcia DeBonis, Michael Townsend Wright, Cleveland Thomas, Jr., Stephen Adly Guirgis and Ron Rifkin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Owen Kline. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:26

This might be something to add to the tsunami of bad to not-that-good news rolling over the dominant streaming service.

This morning I was notified by email that Netflix had authorized someone else to change the email address and phone number allowing them to change MY account to their log-in.

I had paused Netflix a month ago, and all of a sudden, I have multiple charges from them on my credit card, obviously due to some MAJOR hole in Netflix’s account security.

Anybody else running into this? This sort of data breach usually is spread far and wide, and while it’s not absolutely certain that this was on Netflix’s end, that seems to be where the fishing is going on. A

And it’s been going on for years.