Movie Nation

She already got two movies and a TV series out of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” And Nia Vardalos even put a Greek travel comedy into theaters, “My Life in Ruins.”

But it’s pretty obvious that the only thing Hollywood wants out of her is more versions of her big family comedy sleeper hit of 20 years ago. And that’s a shame, and not just because she is utterly out of ideas of what to do with those characters except send them on a trip. That’s lame enough to be a 30 year running gag on “The Simpsons.”

“My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3” is a comedy that’s almost over before it begins, a Greek travelogue and tourism ad filled with the less-funny-by-the-movie/TV episode Portakalous family one more time.

Actors have died, so patriarchs are written out. An excuse with screenwriterly stretch-marks must be trotted out to send the family to Greece. With Gus (Michael Constantine) dead, the family is making the visit to the village he emigrated from for a reunion, a trip he never got to make.

Because “immigrants work hard,” give it all to the kids,” that’s their ethos, daughter Toula (Vardalos) preaches.

She wants to fulfill Dad’s wish that his journal be handed over to his childhood friends, who’d learn how his life turned out and the glories of a big Greek American family in Chicago and a restaurant called Dancing Zorba’s.

Brother Nick (Louis Mandylor) has other plans to do with Dad’s wishes, if he can ever stop grossly “grooming” himself in front of everybody and manage it.

Daughter Paris (Elena Kampourish) has taken off from NYU to come along, but she has a secret. Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin, still stealing scenes) has hired the guy everybody wants Paris to end up with, Aristotle (Elias Kacavas) to be her luggage porter for the trip.

A last goodbye to Mom (Lainie Kazan), who is slipping into dementia, and seven of them are off to the Olde Country, to meet the hip, tries-too-hard mayor of the dying village, the non-binary Victory (Melina Kotselou).

A big family secret will turn up. They and we will see olive groves and vineyards, flocks and herds and donkeys, the sights of Greece (“Can we stop at the Parthenon?” “No.”). Cranky locals will turn out to be kindhearted when it comes to the refugees who are flooding into Greece from the Middle East and Ukraine.

“Say ‘Hello!’ We are not xenophobic!”

“GREEK word!”

Things will look bleak, but another Big Fat Greek Wedding might in the cards for somebody.

Vardalos is out of new things to say — “A Greek man retires a week after he’s dead!” “Have sex on Easter, like everybody else!” And the new characters don’t have enough screen time to blossom and make some larger statement on Greece today. There’s barely room for the usual Vardalos pleas for tolerance via a big fat Greek embrace of everybody, gender, nationality be damned.

The players vary in their commitments, from barely worth the effort to trying too hard.

The third act delivers a couple of warm moments that lift it. But this picture’s a corpse still being shock-paddled and CPR-pounded on the operating table. Call the code, Nia. And yes, you look younger than everybody else in the orignal cast, now.

Rating: PG-13 for suggestive material and some nudity

Cast: Nia Vardalos. John Corbett, Louis Mandylor, Andrea Martin, Elena Kampouris, Melina Kotselou, Elias Kacavas, Joey Fatone and Lainie Kazan.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nia Vardalos. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:31

What a random, almost plotless debacle “The Nun II” turns out to be.

Three screenwriters — one assumes (this is AI-generated bad) — took characters created by James Wan and Gary Dauberman, and sort of half-assed their way into giving two survivors from “The Nun” another battle with the wimpled menace, and Bonnie Aarons an excuse to doll up like a murderous Marilyn Manson in a habit.

I’m sitting there, dilligently taking notes, and writing in large, scribbled-in-the-dark letters, “When are they going to tell us what the hell this is about?”

They’ve got to bring The Nun back, resuscitate the demon and all that. They turn her loose on assorted locations, the primary one being in 1956 France. But why? What’s her beef this time?

The attempt to “explain” and “motivate” the murderess may be the lamest bit of plot-engineering outside of the Rob Schneider Universe. It’s shoehorned in, dropped into the plot by research we don’t see (Were any Catholics involved in making this movie?) and supposedly carried out by young Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga, not great but not her fault).

Irene must hurry to France to a Catholic girl’s school where a teacher (Anna Popplewel) and her student-daughter (Katelyn Rose Downey) are among those menaced by some shadowy presence, dreamed about and glimpsed in shadows, and in the movie’s “money” moment, manifested in a collage created by a hellish wind that blows over the titles on a newstand’s magazine rack.

That school is where “The Nun” survivor handyman Maurice (Jonas Bloquet) landed. Coincidence? Ya-think?

The deaths are gruesome, the jolts cheap and the best effect is keeping the Mansonesque made-up Aarons in the shadows, menace incarnate.

I think the most hilariously stupid thing that happens here is having the He Man Girl Hater’s Club known as the Vatican send some plump, pampered archbishop stereotype to summon Nun-survivor Irene, a slip of a thing, to find out what this “demon” is up to this time. And, you know, deal with it. She is the “only one” who “has experience” with this demon.

“The Church needs another miracle.”

Even taking her 20something bestie from the convent (Storm Reid) with her tells us there are going to be two overmatched young women tossed about like little ragdolls, hoisted into the air and choked and who will only survive if the Satanic Sister (Aarons) or some minion or cloned manifestation of that Nun get bored torturing them to death.

Me? I was only bored for maybe 100 of the 108 or so minutes of this mess. There’s only so much admiring the production design will do for you.

Rating: R, violent content (terror?)

Cast: Taissa Farmiga, Jonas Bloquet, Storm Reid, Anna Popplewel, Katelyn Rose Downey and Bonnie Aarons.

Credits: Directed by Michael Chaves, scripted by Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing and Akela Cooper, based characters in the first “Nun” movie. A Warner Bros./New Line release.

Running time: 1:48

Part of “The Carnage in the Convent” universe.

Let’s have a good fright in Regal 4DX this Thursday afternoon, eh?

There’s one line from the chorus of the nautical anthem “Rule Britannia!” that always makes me cringe.

“Britons never will be slaves.”

Anybody who remembers reading of the 150 years of “press gangs,” rounding up civilian men in seaports or non-Navy vessels at sea, kidnapping them and forcing them into this dangerous service against their will, would think the Royal Navy choruses that belt that tune out are engaged in historical gaslighting.

The first movie most film fans learned of this brutish practice might have been, for generations, 1962’s “Damn the Defiant!” It’s got press gangs and lives upended by the practice, and sailors organizing against the life-threatening brutality of service in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.

It’s a slightly-less jingoistic, less harmonious version of the world more thrillingly recreated for Peter Weir’s magnificent version of the Patrick O’Brian “Master and Commander” novels, the TV version of the adventures of “Hornblower” and nothing at all like the jolly tars of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies.

And since it’s been a regular feature, rerun on TV since the mid-60s, it’s a version of that history that’s stuck.

The sturdy British director Lewis Gilbert, of a few James Bond films and “Educating Rita” fame, serves up a version of shipboard politics and combat under sail (Think “slow motion.”) in a film that flips the script on 1962’s “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

Here, it’s the first officer who is the hardcase who helps drive the already-organizing sailors to mutiny, and a respected but softer captain who might have a chance to head off the worst.

The film’s a mix of coastal Spanish sea scenes and port settings, and soundstage interiors, with rear-projection action added where needed. It’s 1962 state of the art, no doubt, and a bit stodgy in pacing, shot selection and editing. Movies today put you closer to the action and play up the visceral experience of a battle, or simply heeled-over and “cracking on” in a tall ship under full sail.

But there’s something to be said for the calms captured here, ships ghosting along on Mediterranean zephyrs and light onshore breezes. The film’s climax, a desperate battle against French frigates and a fireship in the fog, is almost stately if still as suspenseful as it needs to be (and not a whit more).

Alec Guinness plays Captain Crawford, a by-the-book skipper, unbending in “following orders” but leaning towards keeping “a happy ship” when it comes to the Royal Navy’s penchant for corporal punishment.

His new first officer, Lt. Scott-Padget (Dirk Bogarde) takes a sterner view, a barking martinet who threatens and flogs at will.

A liberal captain and a sadistic first officer is a recipe for conlict. Their struggle is over whose word will be law in striking a balance between a”disciplined” and “efficient” ship and keeping the crew placated with a “happy ship.”

Crawford’s already mentioned “food that event the rats won’t eat” and lower decks resembling “life on a prison hulk” to his commanding officer. He knows his crew is suffering.

We see those lower decks through the meetings and machinations of the crew, with the hulking Vizzard (Anthony Quayle) signing his mates up for a secretly-planned general fleet strike over working conditions, pay and the like.

“Why is everyone afraid of the word ‘mutiny?’ Spread the Gospel.” The idea is, if every ship joins in, “they can’t hang” the entire Royal Navy.

Over the course of a voyage from Spithead to Corsica, the liberal captain and his sadistic first officer will clash, the French will move on Italy and earn an alliance with Spain and the frigate H.M.S. Defiant will be tested.

Gilbert, who’d do three Bond films, was a bridge between a more old-fashioned style of movie and filmmaking, one that didn’t hide the technical artifice, and the improved effects of the late ’60s and ’70s. “Defiant” is a lot more of the former than the latter.

The action sequences can seem as if they’re in slow motion as large spars (masts and booms) slowly tumble to the deck and the cannon recoil resembles Errol Flynn-era naval artillery rather than the real thing.

But Guinness and Bogarde set off serious sparks in a feud that peaks with the first officer taking out his rage at his by-the-book chief by having the captain’s midshipman son (David Robinson) caned for one minor infraction after another.

With the younger officer being politically “connected” and capable of “breaking” any captain he’s under, Crawford has to take care with every move he makes.

“From now on, I shall take steps that astound you!” seems like an empty threat.

Whatever affection I had for this seafaring tale in my old-movies-on-TV youth, “Damn the Defiant!” is more of a decent-to-good film than a great one. The director of “Shirley Valentine” and “Alfie” was more at home with interpersonal dramas than large scale action. Gilbert’s Bond outings could be fun (“The Spy Who Loved Me”) but rarely managed the sledgehammered pacing or bloody-minded sizzle of the best pictures in that series.

Burning a real wooden ship to the waterline is still damned impressive over 50 years later. But it’s Bogarde, Guinness and Quayle who animate the film, force us to take sides and make “Damn the Defiant!” worthy of being called a “classic.”

Rating: “approved” (TV-PG, violence)

Cast: Alec Guinness, Dirk Bogarde, Anthony Quayle, Maurice Denham, Murray Melvin and Tom Bell.

Credits: Directed by Lewis Gilbert, scripted by Nigel Neale and Edmund H. North, based on a novel by Frank Tilsley . A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:40

Johnny Flynn plays the younger version of a very old man remembered for his “Save one life, save the world” mission.

Helena Bonham Carter, Lena Olin, Romula Garai and Jonathan Pryce also star.

Considering that Hopkins isn’t being offered much that’s worthy of his talents in these, his final working years, this looks lovely and quite moving.

A Jan. 1 release.

In the spirit of “It’s never too soon to start teaching the kids discernment and the difference between cut-rate and low-bit-rate CGI animation and the good stuff,” let’s dive into the latest “Swan Princess” incarnation.

“The Swan Princess: A Fairytale Begins” is no “beginning” at all, but a continuation of a well-received 1994 traditionally-animated film from Disney alumnus Richard Rich, who directed “The Black Cauldron” and “The Fox and the Hound” and found himself on the outside looking in when The Mouse redicovered how to make animated classics with “The Little Mermaid.”

This Sony Wonder production for Netflix has a few frames from the earliest version of the story, but is mostly of that under-animated plastic-looking CGI variety one sees in cheaper car commercials and flatter, duller-looking TV and streaming shows. Remember the old direct-to-video Barbie under-animations of the early 2000s? It looks like those.

The film is about assorted transfers of power in the kingdom where all this is set, with the odd forgettably pleasant song, here and there, lecturing the peasants and the viewers on “What it takes to be a queen” and the virtues of “A story with another side.”

A new queen, 40ish Uberta (Catherine Lavin) is plucked from the masses of peasants related to royalty and crowned. Her working class husband Maximillian (Jesse LaPierre) sets out to reform policies among the Council of Crowns kings and queens so that the poor have work and food and don’t become thieves.

Queen Uberta? She’s all wrapped up in her “cause,” dueling a rival for best dog lover. Uberta takes in strays and tries to turn mutts into dog show winners, because she’s down to Earth like the common folk.

Generations join the family, rivalries rise and fall, talking critters show up and all of it is framed within a story “30 years” after all this begins, when the famous singer Madame LaCroix sings her final concert.

Frame by frame, it’s uglier to look at than most any recent feature-length animated bauble to cross most kids’ field of view — cheap and TV-friendly were the guiding principles here.

The voice cast is made up of unknown but competent professional voice actors — and screenwriter Brian Nissen.

The best one can say about this would be “It’s harmless enough.” But there’s a dated, patriarchal take on the queen, who has the power but who has little “causes” while the husband-king is the one fighting injustice, homelessness and the class war being waged by the rich against the not rich.

The songs vanish into thin memory, the animation drab and the story a patchwork pile of nothing. This “Swan Princess” is animated babysitting for tiny tots, nothing more. And even they will someday look back on what they watched as a pre-schooler and roll their eyes.

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Catherine Lavin, Jesse LaPierre, Yuri Lowenthal, Nina Herzog, many others

Credits: Directed by Richard Rich, scripted by Brian Nissen. A Sony Wonder release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:29

Hilary Swank’s screen career is a stark reminder that all an Oscar or two really gets you is the attention of filmmakers with a challenging role to offer, and perhaps just enough money to get that film made. Because a star who is “not box office” is the label that matters to most everybody else in the movie business.

“The Good Mother” is a case in a point, a timely but somewhat perfunctory mystery/character study from director and co-writer Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, who once made “As You Are.” There are good things about it, but nothing great and nothing all that worthy of our attention. But the cast battles any low expectations it might create and gives the viewer something to hang onto.

The first time Marissa (Swank) and Paige (Olivia Cooke of “Thoroughbreds,” “Pixie,” “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) see each other on screen here, Marissa gives the younger woman a slap so hard she knocks her down.

They’re at a funeral. Paige is plainly pregnant. And yet Marissa needs someone to blame for the drug-related death of her son.

“You know, I didn’t make him a junky,” the mother-to-be tells the distraught, grieving mother of Mike. “The Good Mother,” a “problem drinker” who has let life beat her into alcoholism, is a far better candidate for that, if the movie is inviting us to fix blame.

Marissa is an Albany newspaper editor, once a gifted writer “who won’t write,” her boss complains. Her other son, Toby (Jack Reynor) is a cop. It’s pretty obvious that no one in her life can count on her, and that went for the dead son as well. She’s always knocking them back at her lonely neighborhood bar, finishing off another bottle at home, passing out, sleeping through appointments, and when she goes back to work, maybe even sneaking a nip or two in her coffee.

But whatever or whoever killed Mike had something to do with this hot new drug, “Mother’s Milk,” “heroin coated fentanyl.” Paige finds his stash and flees the goons who bust into her place to get it.

Marissa is resigned to taking her in. Paige, having a roof over her head and no visible means of support, decides she’s going to do what officer Toby can’t. She’s going to find Mike’s killer.

Everything in that last paragraph is what I mean by “perfunctory.” Plucky, pregnant Paige doesn’t let pregnancy or danger or no experience in investigating dissuade her from this impulsive pursuit. The tippling reporter-on-leave she’s living with should be the curious one, the furious one wanting justice. But she has to be shamed back into that.

Joris-Peyrafitte allows room for detours into a grief group meeting (but not AA) and a pregnancy sidebar that sees Toby and his wife Gina (played by the Dominican actress Dilone of “The Novice) trying to have a baby, letting Gina and recovering-junky Paige bond.

But all those distractions and “The Good Mother’s” brief running time can’t keep us from too-quickly solving the mystery, after failing to make us invest in that solution.

Swank plays this part so internally that there’s not much to latch onto. And Cooke never has the screen time to give Paige the layers of damage a pregnant addict should have. Where’s the Mother to Mother mistrust?

The third act’s unraveling of the plot is pretty interesting and well-handled via close-ups that at least show us who and how, if never why.

“The Good Mother” doesn’t just feel perfunctory in the ways it skips straight into under-motivated behavior and actions. It feels incomplete. “Whodunit” is less of a mystery than “why” they done it, or why everybody else behaves the way they do in what could have been a more compelling, engrossing film.

Rating: R for language throughout, some violent content and drug material.

Cast: Hillary Swank, Olivia Cooke, Hopper Penn, Dilone and Jack Reynor

Credits: Directed by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, scripted by Madison Harrison and Miles Joris-Peyrafitte. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:30

A teen’s plans for college and a brighter future are derailed when she finds out she’s an undocumented immigrant in “Marisol,” a compelling if melodramatic version of the struggle to get to America narrative.

Films from “El Norte” to “A Better Life,” “Sin Nombre” to “La Misma Luna” have covered the perilous path many from Central America and Mexico take to get to the United States, and their reasons for coming. The timely “Marisol” shows us a potential DACA “dreamer” who finds out, at the worst possible moment, that she might need such a program, as she never realized she wasn’t born a U.S. citizen.

The title character in Claire Audrey Aguayo’s script is a Rio Valley, Texas teen, a “good girl” who cleans stables for a neighbor and cares for his horses, who studies hard and just got a scholarship and has an interview with a University of California-Davis recruiter.

Marisol, played by Esmeralda Camargo in an engaging, empathetic debut performance, lives with her single-mom aunt (Liana Mendoza) and her aimless 20ish son Jaime (Max Pelayo). But things start to go wrong the minute she confers with the Incel classmate this Texas high school has left in charge of the computerized college interview schedule.

“Justin,” given an awkward-with-an-edge portrayal by Theo Taplitz of “Wyrm” and Little Men,” flirts clumsily, jokes menacingly and just so happens to be going to the same party at the local hideout the kids call “The Lot” tonight.

Mirasol is brusque when he makes a cruel joke, polite but nothing more when he approaches her again in school and decidedly uninterested when he then comes up to her at the party and then gets into it with her hostile cousin.

We know Mirasol shouldn’t be at this party, but her bestie Helen (Mia King) can be pretty persuasive. We and she know she should leave when the evening takes a bit of a turn, something Helen won’t hear of. She has her college admissions interview tomorrow, after all.

What Marisol doesn’t know and what Justin and we do know is how telling her lack of a social security number is on her interview sign-up form. And we know that whatever happens that evening is going to flip his “f–king wetback” button and there’s almost sure to be an “incident.”

When a cop (Ricky Catter) comes to talk with her aunt, Marisol’s tearful Tia Carmen — a nurse working with a lawyer to get her own visa — tells her niece she shouldn’t come home “tonight.” Things spiral from there as a panicked teen takes help from her community to flee and perhaps go find her estranged mother “al norte,” to the north, in Kansas.

Director Kevin Abrams (“I Got a Monster”) balances Marisol’s potentially-perilous odyssey with friend Helen’s frantic efforts to find her (the aunt and cousin have their own problems), the police officer’s collection of differing accounts of “the incident” and Justin’s online spiral into (skinny) Proud Boy vigilantism.

There’s suspense in almost every stage of the underground railroad for undocumented aliens that Marisol takes, from Texas to Topeka to Des Moines on towards Minneapolis, especially when the person accepting this help is a teenage girl.

The Making of an Incel stuff is infuriating. And the local police/ICE turf wars are depressingly realistic.

The one big thing working against how all this plays is how over-familiar the ground is, how even with the occasional twist or bit of misdirection from the script, we’ve kind of seen this and we pretty much know where it’s headed.

But Camargo puts a sympathetic face on a statistic, an innocent child targeted, and the collateral damage that spills over from that shatters lives, limits futures and has blowback that the online anti-immigration zealots can’t begin to fathom.

Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Esmeralda Camargo, Liana Mendoza, Ricky Catter, Max Pelayo, Mia King and Theo Taplitz.

Credits: Directed by Kevin Abrams. scripted by Claire Audrey Aguayo. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:31

Damn, Elvis is riding with Bane!

Jodie Comer, Michael Shannon and Boyd Holbrook also star in this saga about the ride of a midwestern biker gang, from the ’60s onward.

Writer/director Jeff Nichols did the Matthew McConaughey indie “Mud,” the Michael Shannon indie gem “Take Shelter” and paired up Shannon up with Joel Edgerton for the dazzling “Midnight Special.”

He hasn’t made a bad film. And it doesn’t look like he’s about to start making bad ones any time soon.

Dec. 1.

The opening act of “Wolf Pack” is disorienting, bracing and action-packed enough to give one hope we’re heading into a solid action thriller/mystery.

Then somebody tosses sand into the gears and this B-movie grinds to a halt in the middle acts. Soap operatic “backstory” is added. The plot gets deeper into “pipelines” and China’s interest in them than anyone would care to know.

But it’s at moments like this that many a failing thriller serves up a line that sums up how badly things have gone wrong.

“Evacuate the building!” a Central Asian energy minister barks, in English (the film is in Mandarin, with subtitles, and has some English dialogue).

“Sir, let’s MOVE,” an aide/bodyguard snaps back.

“NO,” says the guy who JUST SAID “Evacuate” replies, perhaps confused. “We must stay here!”

That’s kind of how things go in the movie writer Michael Chiang (“Army Daze,””Our Sister Mambo”) makes his writing and directing debut.

Ke Tong (Aarif Rahman, a physics student turned Hong Kong pop star turned actor) is a doctor in an impoverished desert crisis zone when we meet him, cynical enough to suggest of a dying patient, “Better put him out of his misery.”

That kind of goes against the grain of the idealistic image this charitable, handsome young man of medicine has projected in magazine profiles. But he’s off before we have a chance to wonder if he’d pass muster with Doctors Without Borders.

On the bus to the air strip he’s recruited by an eager young blonde (Luxia Jiang) who wants his help rescuing kids trapped in a volcano in Java. Next thing Ke Tong knows, he’s spirited off the bus, strapped to the woman who just tossed his luggage, passport, etc into a river and air-grabbed by a passing helicopter. He figures out he’s being kidnapped a minute or three before he’s drugged.

Ke Tong hits the ground as a reluctant member of this team of contractors who operate under a corporate name borrowed from Chinese military history — Bei Wei. When they’re quickly captured, Ke Tong, nicknamed “Handsome” by the others, is forced to operate on some Central Asian warloard’s wounded brother.

That ends in a firefight. Who ARE they guys and this woman? Who is paying them and what is their agenda? Because this “mission” isn’t over.

But the deeper we get into it, the more we learn the backstories of those mercenaries — played by Jin Zhang, Luxia Jiang, Mark Luu, Liu Ye, Yi Zhang and Kuo-Chung Tang — and “Handsome,” the less interesting “Wolf Pack” becomes.

“Wolf Pack” works best when we’re as wrong-footed as our hero, when he’s trying to escape this mysterious gang’s clutches, desperate for “Who do you WORK for?” answers.

“I’m not a mercenary. I’m a DOCTOR!”

The whole medical thing is dropped very early on as we learn more about this doc, who has survival and evading pursuers and fighting skills his captors don’t know about.

Well, the head guy Diao (Jin Zhang) does.

The effects are generally adequate even if we can tell digital fire or RPG explosions have been added. The multi-lingual dialogue is a bit of a chore to act in — for some — and listen to (English pronunciations take a beating) for everyone else.

And the best martial arts action and gunplay are in the first act. After that, this convoluted “Wolf Pack” tale turns into something of a mutt.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Aarif Rahman, Jin Zhang, Luxia Jiang, Mark Luu, Liu Ye, Yi Zhang and Kuo-Chung Tang

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Chiang. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:44