Movie Nation

Boy, it takes more than a few minutes to get one’s mind around the idea that Adam Sandler’s produced and co-stars in a comedy which you simply must use the word “endearing” to describe. “Charming” works its way in, “kind of adorable” also fits “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.”

Sure, he employs half his family in this Happy Madison production, a coming-of-age comedy adapted from Fiona Rosenbloom’s Judy Blume-ish novel. He’s no longer employing old comic cronies and sportscaster Dan Patrick. But it’s not like he’s turned over a new leaf.

First-time director Sammi Cohen and her production team give us further proof that Netflix owns the glossy teen movie market with this sparkling snapshot of a traditional rite of passage in an age of aspirational, attention-economy affluence.

Sunny Sandler stars as Stacy Friedman, our teen practicing her “portion” of the Torah, struggling to come up with a Bat Mitzah project and over-planning her “New York” themed coming-out party while indulgent parents Bree (Idina Menzel) and Danny (Adam Sandler) smile and shake their heads.

No, she can’t book a yacht or an Olivia Rodrigo drive-by on a jetski. But at least she has her bestie Lydia (Samantha Lorraine) to help plan and choreograph it, with Stacy producing Lydia’s introduction (life summary) video for Lydia’s “Candyland” bat mitzvah, which precedes hers.

Lydia’s parents (Jackie Sandler and Luis Guzman) are splitting up and “Mom wants to spend all of Dad’s money before the next court date.” But she’s got her bestie to lean on and play their watch-a-sad-video to “see who can cry first” game. And they’ve got Hebrew School.

That’s where “You Are So Not Invited” really sets itself apart. You might as well call this tony academy Borscht Belt Prep, thanks to the all the shticky staff and the “cool rabbi” presiding over all these “cutie-pops.”

“Saturday Night Live’s” Sarah Sherman flat-out steals the movie as Rabbi Rebecca, urging her charges to “do something menschy for your community, for society at large,” with their mitzvah projects, to “practice (chanting) your haftarah” and prep themselves for adulthood, when you “have to take responsibility for your actions” and own your own mistakes.

Rabbi Rebecca sings her lessons as she deflects the big questions from her tween and teen students.

“If God exists, why is there climate change?” “”Why can’t straight people get on gay TikTok?”

“God is so random,” she sings, and the kids sing along. “God is so random!“

Stacy prays “Dear God, it’s Stacy” prayers and tries to get her parents on board her idea for an adult, talked-about and “legendary” party. No bouncy houses or ball pits.

“Oh my GOD, that’s so for kids! I’ve been having my period for over SEVEN months now!”

Dad is all memories of “MY bar mitzvah” in “your grandparents’ basement” — no renting a hall, no hiring that hyped-up “idiot” DJ Schmuley (Ido Mosseri, funny).

“THAT’s why we fought the Nazis? So YOU could have a (virgin) mojito bar?”

But there’s a cute boy, Andy Goldfarb (Dylan Hoffman) in the picture. And the richest, shallowesst mean girls might be mean enough to include one bestie and one bestie only in their mean girl games.

There’s trouble on the horizon among these Chosen Children.

The school is so cool and the houses so high end that when Cohen & Co. treat us to a “Breaking Away” riff, kids gathering at “The Ledge” of the local quarry for their most dangerous entertainment, it’s jarring. Too working class.

The snapshot of this world is richly-detailed, with a year-long parade of bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, all DJ’d by Schumley, each a more expensive “theme” than the one before, with Stacy stuck at the grandma’s table for one and soaking up a little wisdom, and her bored older sister (Sadie Sandler, of course) and her bestie (Zaara Kuttemperoor) watching “It!” and “Shawshank” on their iPhone rather than joining in the “fun” with the “kids.”

It’s funny and flippant and a tad vulgar when it isn’t being cute. The life lesson and messaging is upbeat and sentimental. Maybe Mr. Middle School Right isn’t even Jewish, he’s just enrolled there. And the little asides have a bit of adult bite to them.

“Don’t worry,” the mean girls — my favorite is named Kym Chang Cohen — purr. “Some of us are straight, too.” Sounds like a suggestion that had Rolling Stone trying to cancel Alice Cooper.

The cast is about as diverse as is possible considering the world depicted here. But you don’t have to be Jewish to “get” most of what’s going on and be on board with the lesson that “adulthood” isn’t just about sexuality, getting and spending money and “looking hot,” and all that. It’s about not hiding behind your youth, making more responsible decisions and owning the irresponsible ones.

And if we’re lucky, there are teachers who will guide us on that path, and parents there to make corrections, even if they aren’t trying to nepo-baby you into the family business.

Rating: PG-13, some profanity, scatalogical humor

Cast: Sunny Sandler, Samantha Lorraine, Idina Menzel, Sarah Sherman, Jackie Sandler, Dylan Hoffman, Luis Guzman and Adam Sandler

Credits: Directed by Sammi Cohen, scripted by Alison Peck, based on a novel by Fiona Rosenbloom. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

The stakes are higher, the cast has lost any pandemic-paunch/puffiness and everybody tries harder in “Vacation Friends 2,” which is something, I guess.

And having John Cena reveal to the world, via a scripted character’s little admission, what we’ve all been thinking is a plus.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everybody likes me.”

But even with a Caribbean get-away and the addition of a baby, drug-dealers and Steve Buscemi at his sketchiest, this sequel is a watered-down umbrella drink of a comedy. The set-ups – casino to first-time-surfing to escaping a cartel — are tired and the jokes are limp and random recyclings of the 2021 original film.

Still, here goes. Two years after meeting and becoming “Vacation Friends” with the unhinged, uninhibited vulgarians Ron and Kyla (Cena and Meredith Hagner), we and they remember that Marcus and Emily (Lil Rel Howery and Yvonne Orji) found some redeeming qualities in those two reprobates.

That’s why they’ve invited the couple and their new baby to a Caribbean resort, with Marcus slated to make a pitch to build a Chicago hotel to the same Korean hotel/resort ownership group that runs it.

They’ve hired and brought along their favorite amusingly-unctuous hotel manager (Carlos Santos) from the coastal Mexican resort where they met to babysit.

A little patronizing, but OK.

Emily and Marcus are in baby-making mode themselves, and figure a little romance and hanging with two gonzos who have a better idea of how to “just have fun” is a good plan.

As you’ve guessed, the “meeting” and pitch is moved up, and the exec running that presentation (the amusing Ronnie Chieng) is not a Marcus Parker fan.

Kyla and Ron waste no time in embarrassing Marcus, and to add to that, her dad (Buscemi) shows up, fresh out of prison for “money laundering,” or so he says. He’s talking “crypto” and sneaking off to meet shady locals and a trigger-happy drug dealer (Jamie Hector).

What could go wrong? That doesn’t involve being tricked into snorkeling in Cuba, getting shot at on multiple occasions and trying to figure out how to escape a sinking shipping container?

The awkward interactions with Koreans — getting into old-fashioned Asian drinking games “to bond” — are probably the most promising thing here, and those scenes are few.

Cena’s cockeyed optimism in character is a little less funny than it was the first time, and Howery is at a loss in how to wring gigggles out of this script.

But there are moments. Buscemi does that weasely, snarky, sketchy thing he does, Santos channels Ricardo Montalban in his big moments and Hector carries himself the way movie drug dealers do, with a pistol-in-the-belt swagger.

Lil Rel has his (played out) go-to moves, and Cena, as his character points out, is “liked” by pretty much “everybody.

If it weren’t for the overwhelming feeling of “winded and exhausted” that the picture wears in every scene, they might have gotten something funnier out of this.

Rating: R, Drug use, some sexual references, pervasive profanity

Cast: Lil Rel Howery, John Cena, Yvonne Orji, Meredith Hagner, Carlos Santos, Ronnie Chieng, Jamie Hector and Steve Buscemi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Clay Tarver, based on characters created by John Francis Daley, Jonathan M. Goldstein, Tim Mullen, Tom Mullen and Clay Tarver. A 20th Century release on Hulu.

Running time: 1:46

You think you know what you’re going to get from a Liam Neeson thriller titled “Retribution.”

But his latest, the third remake of a “There’s a bomb in your car and you can’t get out” Spanish thriller (“El Desconocido”), has a few deviations from formula.

And the Big Irishman, often framed in beads-of-sweat-tight closeups, gives a fine, strung-out and fraught performance as a long-hustling hedge fund manager whose financial shortcuts may have screwed-over the wrong somebody somewhere along the way.

Matt Turner is a closer with his partnership, the guy the head of the firm (Matthew Modine) calls in to buck up clients who get cold feet on this sale or that investment in a volatile market.

He’s a barely-attentive parent, due to miss yet another soccer match of Emily the tween (Lilly Aspell), dealing with a teen son Zach (Jack Champion) in open rebellion.

But his ever-disappointed wife (Embeth Davidtz) holds him to that one promise, to take the kids to their respective Berlin schools on yet another busy weekday. The daughter happily complies, but the son he has to chase down and beg to get in his pricey Mercedes SUV.

Matt didn’t make much of all the system-alerts that came on when he buckled his seatbelt and punched on the ignition. This failed, that requires service, another system turns up error messages.

But director Nimród Antal (“The Whiskey Bandit,” “Control”) lets us zero in on the bucket snapping, the circuits activating and that thing beneath Matt’s seat. When the disguised voice comes on a cell phone tucked into the center console, we’re hardly surprised.

Don’t get out. Your seat has a weight-sensitive trigger. Don’t call the cops. Oh, your kids are here? Too bad. Do what this fellow says or “You’ll be pulling your guts from the trees from here to Vienna!”

“Who IS this?” gets no answer. “WHY?”

“There IS no why.”

Matt and his kids are trapped in this car, sent hither and yon in something like “real time, from straße to straße, witnessing other cars blowing up and Matt’s friends and business associates meeting grisly ends after having just enough time to freak out and panic.

Matt almost does, despite his pleas to “Stay calm” and “everything will be fine” to his kids and others.

Neeson is damned good in this part, a business man with none of those “Taken” “particular skills,” just a guy who works out on the heavy bag and keeps his temper in check — more or less.

The adults in the cast respond to this extraordinary danger in ways you’d expect, with Modine, Davidtz and especially Arian Moayed, as a manager trying to stop his freaking-out-wife from fleeing their car, standing out for serving up a realistic reaction to this terror.

The kids don’t quite shrug it off, but they’re far more blase than you’d expect. Noma Dumezweni, as an Interpol cop, has her moments, but delivers little flinty flair in the part.

The narrative spins its wheels in the middle acts as the picture loses much of its opening momentum, only to recover much of that for a talkative, over-explained and somewhat predictable finale.

But Antal and Neeson gives us an opening act that leaves the metallic taste of dread in one’s mouth, a dilemma in which neither Matt nor we see a solution, a “problem” we can’t work out any more than trapped and doomed Matt can.

And Neeson gives us a bit more to chew on here than his standard hunt-for-his-daughter/avenge-his-son fare, an actor who lets us see the panic, see the wheels frantically turning and who never shies away from letting us see him sweat.

Rating: R, violence, some profanity

Cast: Liam Neeson, Embeth Davidtz, Noma Dumezweni, Jack Champion, Lilly Aspell and Matthew Modine.

Credits: Directed by Nimród Antal, scripted by Christopher Salmanpour, based on a Spanish thriller screenplay by Alberto Marini. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

Hey, I’m talking about the MOVIE. Not the crook getting more of his just deserts.

Yeah, I could’ve gotten a Lionsgate screener link for this title.

But a friend loves Liam Neeson, and really The Big Irishman should ooooonly be experienced on the Big Screen.

7pm, GTC Stadium 12 in Danville, VA.

My review? Right here.

Harper’s an LA professional woman in her late 20s, an ad campaign director as put-together, perfectly turned-out and organized as her pristine, perfectly-conceived magazine ad shoots.

And then, just as she gets the news that a prestigious account has landed on her desk, she gets a call from Child Protective Services in Las Vegas. A mother of two there has lost control of her life, with a teen raising a younger half-brother in a house with no food, no electricity and mom passed out on the couch.

We can’t make out Harper’s connection to all this, only her efforts to call her father, somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. Next thing we know, this organized, responsible woman is picking up that teenager from school. The kid’s coming back to Los Angeles with Harper, and that’s that.

The story of “No Right Way” could play out in a lot of scenarios, many of them variations on a “Baby Boom” theme. But writer, director and star Chelsea Bo had a hand in scripting an earlier “parenthood” riff, “Fully Realized Humans.” Expect anything but the expected.

Harper isn’t the sister of the manic, blame-everybody-else stoner mother (Eliza Coupe). Tiffany was merely another ex-wife of her father’s. Dad’s years of warning to “avoid that mess” might explain the years since she’s seen Georgie, her half-sister.

But despite that, in spite of her father’s sat-phone warnings to do nothing, avoid “that mess” again and despite her own tidy, careerist life, Harper is stepping up. No foster care for her sister, no ma’am.

Georgie half-complies. But she’s a sk8rgrl and not inclined to shower on a regular basis. She borrows Harper’s phone for giggly catch-up calls to all her Vegas friends, picks up and inspects every tchotchke in Harper’s house and lets on to a “free range” life of 13 year-old breaking-and-entering.

Whatever was going on at home, Georgie takes her mother’s side, parrots every excuse and accusation against Mom’s latest ex, Teddy, and vents her ongoing fury at being separated from her little (half) brother.

Harper serves Georgie healthy (vegan) food, says all the right things to bond and sets mild “boundaries” as she dips her toes in “parenting.” And being a rules-following, organized problem solver, she sets out to do something about “this situation.”

Our writer, director and star keeps everything mild-mannered, everything orderly and almost touchy-feely in this “big sister” enterprise, until the third act, when we see just how far out of her depth Ms. “Organized” with a “Plan” is and just what she’s up against back in Vegas, or way off in the disconnected Pacific.

Bo’s Harper is a solid, stable presence in this, leaving room for “American Horror Story” veteran Acres, “Happy Endings” alumna Coupe and no-nonsense “Veep” veteran Sufe Bradshaw, as the mother of Georgie’s best friends, to shine.

The acting is as spot-on as the pacing, a story that lures us in and charms up before delivering that cold slap of reality.

“No Right Way” is downright triggering in the ways it recreates every encounter a reasonable, responsible person has when dealing with the unreasonable. Not that Harper knows what she’s doing, but if you’ve ever had arguments with a rageaholic or a hysteric, you’ll sympathize with the idea that the irrational and ill-tempered are ganging up on the sanest person here.

And even the sanest among us can get in over our heads, misread the room or a family dynamic.

What Bo’s made here is a movie about parenting for people who aren’t parents, those of us who can see problems and propose solutions, but reach the limits of our experience and our suggestions for handling something like this a lot quicker than we’d think.

With statistics all over the world pointing to lower birthrates and longer delays in starting families, “No Right Way” feels timely and humbling as it sets our “That’s what I’d do” expectations up, and slaps them around all through the third act.

You can follow the rules and do what you’re sure is “right,” but when there’s “No Right Way,” the results are going to be unexpected, unsettling and damned unpleasant at times. And that’s just the way it is.

Rating: unrated, some violence, profanity

Cast: Chelsea Bo, Ava Acres, Eliza Coupe, Ty Cortes, Guy Noland and Sufe Bradshaw

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chelsea Bo. A Paxeros production.

Running time: 1:43

“Fremont” is a droll comedy about the immigrant experience that only has to hint at the trauma such uprootings often involve, and about how residents of the host country generally don’t have a clue about what this newcomer is dealing with, or how to help.

The Iranian-born director and co-writer Babak Jalali has imagined this as a fish-out-of-water tale where our heroine is so isolated she can’t express so much as a smile to fit in, can’t talk about herself or her issues even to the fellow countrymen and women relocated to a modest residence motel in Fremont, California.

What’s funny isn’t what she can’t talk about. It’s her deadpan reactions to almost everyone around her.

Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is young, pretty and reserved. She’s college educated, and she speaks English. She’s got a job at a nearby (San Francisco) fortune cookie factory. But she can’t sleep. And there’s virtually no one she can tell this to, no hint of reasons why until we learn a couple of simple facts.

She’s from Afghanistan. She worked as a translator for the U.S. military there. Some of her fellow Afghans now living with her in that hotel shun her and regard her as a traitor. Her family “back home” may have problems with the Taliban over her work and her departure.

Her blue-collar co-workers aren’t deep thinkers, so there’s no confiding in “work friends.”And when she finally gets to see a shrink (Greg Turkington), he won’t simply give her pills. He wants to talk. But what he wants to talk about is his favorite novel “about immigrants.” It’s Jack London’s tale of a wolf-dog, “White Fang.”

That’s the kind of subtle humor Jalali goes for here, dry and a tad dopey. For it to work, Zada has to almost never crack a smile, never change her expression at all as Donya does a variation of what she must have done back in Afghanistan.

She indulges her Chinese karaoke-obsessed co-worker (Hilda Schmelling). She takes the “promotion” to “message writer” at this old, “hand-made” fortune cookie factory, indulging her boss. She indulges the only psychotherapist in the world to think “White Fang” has something to say of Afghan immigrants.

But as she indulges one and all, she starts to come out of her shell almost in spite of herself and the efforts of those she’s humoring just to get some sleep. Little acts of rebellion pop out at the hotel, in the fortunes she writes for the cookies her factory sells.

Jalali — “Land,” “Radio Dreams” and “Frontier Blues” were his — stages scenes with a Jim Jarmusch paience and simplicity — an exchange of static one-shots as the deadpan shrink and deadpan Donya debate whether she should even be there (she’s taken a friend’s appointment), a patient and lightly-amusing lecture from a kind and somewhat philosophical Chinese-American factory owner about what she should be writing.

“Fortune messages are a responsibility.”

“They shouldn’t be too lucky. They shouldn’t be too unlucky. They shouldn’t be too short. They shouldn’t be too long. They shouldn’t be too original. They shouldn’t be too obvious.”

“Virtue,” he tells her, “stands in the middle.”

If there’s sounder advice for how to get along in America or the world, I’ve not heard it. And if we worry for Donya, something about her short emotional journey reassures us that whatever she’s been through, however dire what she’s not talking about might have been, she’s going to be fine.

And if her future seems unwritten and full of possibility, that might be because “The fortune you seek is in the next cookie.”

Rating: unrated, PG worthy

Cast: Anaita Wali Zada, Hilda Schmelling, Greg Turkington and Jeremy Allen White

Credits: Directed by Babak Jalali, scripted by Carolina Cavalli and Babak Jalali A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:31

I was wondering where everybody’s favorite villain, Ben Mendelsohn, had got off to.

He and Daisy Ridley and Garrett Hedlund star in this adaptation of Karen Dionne’s novel about a woman who has to confront her past when the monster who kidnapped, held hostage and raped her mother escapes from prison.

The book got lots of acclaim from organizations that honor thrillers and those who write them.

Neil Burger (“The Illusionist,” “The Upside”) directed. Promising all the way around.

Oct. 6.

Most of us missed the 2015 B-movie “Brotherly Love,” a lame “Romeo & Juliet” enlivened by the presence of that force of nature, Keke Palmer.

But now it’s on Netflix, and for anyone of the Keke Completist persuasion — don’t brag about seeing “Nope” if you haven’t seen “Pimp” — it’s an interesting turn, her last hurrah as a high schooler in a “street” drama that lets her sing.

“Brotherly Love” is a Philly-with-a-capital-P tale of gang violence, hoops, romance and families ties, produced by Will Smith, who gets a shout-out in the many expositional speeches about famous Black Folks from Philly that pepper the screenplay’s dialogue.

Keke is our ever-narrating Jackie, the teen girl in a family featuring a blue chip hoops recruit, Sergio, “Serge” (Eric D. Hill, Jr.) and a drug dealing gangster older brother, “June,” short for “Junior” (Cory Hardircht), a guy who likes to spread the cash around and “take care” of everybody, their alcoholic widowed mom (Macy Gray) included.

As a gang hit/mass-shooting is the film’s opening scene and an ill-fated love affair is at its heart, we know this has a whiff of Shakespeare in its tragic intent. It doesn’t embarrass the Bard or anybody involved. But it’s pretty ham-fisted and clumsy as an overreach.

Their neighborhood has “The Hill” and “The Bottom,” and never-the-twain shall meet, with rich African Americans residing on high and those still struggling, fighting and grubbing away on the streets below.

Jackie’s family lose their musician Dad, and that’s put June in charge of providing. Mom (Gray) has crawled into a bottle.

Sergio is an underclassman headed for “a D-one” basketball school and he hopes, the NBA. Jackie’s a cheerleader with Philadelphia Music Academy dreams. June is just trying to keep the coming “war” at bay long enough to help them achieve their goals.

And then rich kid Chris (Quincy Brown) shows up, with his AMG Mercedes, dad in the Philly music business and eye for Jackie. She’s leery. We’re leerier.

As is June, who wonders what this pretty boy from The Hill and gangs associated with it wants with his sister.

“I’m gonna keep it 100 percent with you” talks don’t dissuade our “Romeo.” Nor does the rising violence around them, some of it perpetrated by trigger-happy lieutenants of June.

Characters like narrator Jackie and local barber Uncle Ron (Faizon Love) launch into speeches about Kobe and Will Smith and other famous African-Americans from Philly without prompting.

“I done seen this ‘hood take down the best!”

The first act is littered with uses of the Philly slang “jawn,” related to music, ambitions, life skills and the like.

But just as you’re settling into the feeling that this story of hoops, gang violence, teen love and “green,” isn’t bad, it trips over itself and wish fulfillment fantasy morphs into formula.

As much as “Brotherly Love” immerses itself in The Sound of Philadelphia, the clumsy contrivances of the plot render those moot, sometimes laughably so.

Palmer gives her character edge and a romantic Achilles heel, and it’s not enough to paper over the character and the plot’s many blind spots. She’s always been fun to watch, but a scene in the recording studio when her new suitor hooks her up with an impromptu recording session is an eye-roller that stops the picture dead. And it’s not alone.

Yes, we know she can sing and that she is an unfiltered, exhuberant queen of social media. But the main message of “Brotherly Love” is how lucky she was to be tossed the lifeline of “Nope” and have a role that plays to her chatty, charismatic and daffy strengths.

This B-movie might have been her future, and that one isn’t as bright as the one she’s facing now, with or without a record deal.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Keke Palmer, Cory Hardricht, Romeo Miller, Eric D. Hill., Jr., Quincy Brown, Faizon Love and Macy Gray.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jamal Hill. A Freestyle release on Netflix

Running time: 1:27

“Invisible Beauty” is a documentary that makes one reconsider, yet again, the role fashion plays in society by how it has always narrowed “standards of beauty,” how it presents “what power looks like” and by remembering a woman who was one of the first through the door to “inclusion.”

And when Bethann Hardison got through it, she made damned sure she held that door open to generations that followed.

Hardison co-directed the film and framed it as a way of jump-starting her unstarted memoirs, and as a sort of “looking back to go forward” in a life spent modeling and making the scene, fashion consulting, model agency operating and activism.

“When I look at my life, you’re so busy doing it than you never think there’s a story to tell about it.”

A good way to start, her astrologer assures her, is “Your talking about (and with) other people is your story.”

So here are fashion designers such as Stephen Burrows and fashion photographer Bruce Webber talking about her “presence,” a woman who “seemed taller than she was” thanks to the way she carried herself on the runway — not just a Black woman but a dark-skinned “kind of adrogynous” Black woman and one of the first to turn up in major shows in the ’60s.

Here are Iman and Naomi Campbell, Veronica Webb and other Black models she mentored recalling her influence. The serene Somali icon Iman gets choked up describing Hardison as “the Statue of Liberty” for her, the first American in the fashion scene to welcome her and not resent a foreigner joining the growing ranks of Black models in America.

We’re treated to archival interviews and chats with friends, from Whoopi and Tracee Ellis Ross to Zendaya. And the film recalls the famous “Battle of Versailles” charity fashion show at the French palace, in which the American designers showing assembled a dream team of young African American models who swooped in and swirled and put on a show, bowling over stodgy, ancient and ever-so-white Eurofashion as they did.

That show “gave her purpose,” and as a woman who ran her own modeling agency, Hardison turned out a generation of Black fashion icons.

Co-directing the movie and thus controlling what is related and who is spoken to, if not how it is all framed (we hear several phone chats with co-director Frédéric Tcheng), a lot is left out about her early life, first jobs and childhood that saw her raised by her grandmother, her activist Imam father and occasionally by her own mother.

We’re allowed to reflect on how that impacted her “live my life” upbringing of her son, the actor Kadeem Hardison, who got direction from her — she pointed him at acting and got him into classes — but which was mostly carried out by her grandmother, the same woman who mostly raised her. The circle of neglect explains Kadeem’s on-and-off relationship with her to this day, which he touches on in a cheerful “I’m a grown-ass man” and getting over that is partly on him interview.

Through it all, Hardison mère comes off as upbeat and complicated, playful and regal, accomplished and human, joyously open, narcissistic, immodest and “lift everyone else up” generous.

“If you’re gonna go to the circus,” she says, “get on the rides!”

And if the whole world is obsessing over what Zendaya and her generation of great beauties of color are wearing today, she and Hardison both know who has had the most outsized influence on why that is.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Bethann Hardison, Zendaya, Iman, Naomi Campbell, Bruce Webber, Veronica Webb and Kadeem Hardison

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bethann Hardison and Frédéric Tcheng. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:56

Breathless suspense and a powerful performance of internalized trauma and barely-hidden rage by Babetida Sadjo make “Our Father, the Devil” a thriller that stands out from the pack.

It’s the story of a conflict zone refugee suddenly confronted by a man she thinks is a former warlord, a woman triggered into taking action against the monster who slaughtered her family and enslaved her in her African past.

Cameroonian actress turned writer-director Elle Foumbi’s debut feature has echoes of “Death and the Maiden,” the Sigourney Weaver/Ben Kingsley film based on Chilean Ariel Dorfman’s play. But this time the story is Afro-French, the victim now a West African chef in a nursing home and the man she’s sure destroyed her past and scarred her life a new Catholic priest ministering to the residents.

Beautiful Marie mostly keeps to herself at work, running a three person kitchen for her elderly clientele, always sitting outside alone when she stops for a coffee, glass of wine and a smoke at a local cafe. The waiter (Franck Saurel) may try to flirt, or at least engage her in chit chat.

That’s her cue to leave a tip and walk alway. Always. Any man who approaches her earns a look of disdain, or a wary reach for the knife she keeps in her purse.

Marie may live in Luchon, a resort town along the French border with Spain, serving food that would be the envy of any nursing home anywhere in the world. Because they may be old, but they are French, after all. They take their meals seriously. Her favorite resident may be a retired cooking school teacher (Maëlle Genet) whom she dotes on and who has transformed her from a cook and into a chef.

She can carry on knowing and supportive conversations about men with her roommate, Nadia (Jennifer Tchiakpe), a nurse at the home. But whatever happened back in her never-named West African homeland (Sadjo is from Guinea-Bissau, but most every country in the region has seen brutal civil wars) has left her with a trauma that gives her panic attacks.

When she sees this new priest, she freezes up. When he leads the residents in prayer, she faints. When she comes to, she avoids eye contact as he asks for seconds, compliments her cooking and even comes to her kitchen, after hours, for leftovers.

We’ve seen her Internet search the man she who wiped out her village and gutted her life. “Reported killed” doesn’t jibe with her undimmed memories of 20 years before, the eyes, speech and mannerisms she remembers. Does her recognize her?

In a flash, she snaps. And when he wakes up, he’s hog-tied on a remote, mountainside chateau, facing a woman who calls him “Sogo” despite his protests that she’s got the wrong man.

“The police will come looking for me,” he pleads, in French with English subtitles.

“You’re a Black immigrant. No one will come. No one will look very hard.”

She seems positive, but he’s very convincing. She tests him with her native tongue, Mandinka. She makes promises that are lethal threats.

“Get comfortable. You’re not leaving here alive.”

She relates her trauma, her disbelief that he cannot remember her. And she trots out the “commandments” she remembers from her rape, torture and indoctrination.

“Commandment three, ‘You sleep, you die.'”

The set-up may be “Burning Bed” melodramatic, but Foumbi never lets the film tumble into predictability. We see things almost wholly from Marie’s point of view, but get a sense of the human being inside her captor. The plot has its obvious contrivances, but they never take us out of the story and never dictate any predictable “Hollywood” turn.

And the striking Sadjo, of “The Paradise Suite” and “And Breathe Normally” keeps us riveted, reading Marie’s eyes for what she’s feeling and thinking, empathizing with her but rattled enough by her actions to wonder if she’s snapped, that her haunted past caused her to make the mistake that will finish her.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Babetida Sadjo, Souleymane Sy Savane, Jennifer Tchiakpe,
Martine Amisse, Maëlle Genet and Franck Saurel

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ellie Foumbi. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:49