Movie Nation

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

An IRA hit man is hunted by a relative (Kerry Condon) of someone he killed.

This period piece from “The Troubles” has Ciaran Hinds and Colm Meaney and all of my attention, as it looks a step above the films Liam Neeson is offered these days.

Looks great, doesn’t it?

Can a collegiate puppeteer find love as an au pair in Paris?

That’s the not-quite-burning question at the heart of “Goodbye, Petrushka,” an amiable but aimless romantic comedy that struggles to tie puppetry, filmmaking and figure skating together in a story of a coed’s first shots at love.

It’s an occasionally cute, strained attempt at twee that never quite comes together or comes off.

Lizzie Kehoe is Claire, a New York college filmmaker trying to make something out of her lifelong love of puppets. She’s got a self-impressed teacher who isn’t impressed with her. Any guy who refers to himself as “Professor Steve” (Dhane Ross) and eschews teaching his class about the great films and great filmmakers because he’d rather talk about “Professor Steve” is suspect.

Claire’s got a richer, prettier, dizzier friend (Casey Landman) who wants them to skip off to Paris for a semester or so. That’s not something Claire considers until she stumbles into the handsome Frenchman, Thibaut (Thomas Vieljeux). But his days in New York are ending, he says. Adieu!

Claire is instantly smitten and totally-obsessed. She had no idea he was a failed figure skater, having just gotten the “past your prime” and “I strongly advise you to end your career yourself” lecture from a skating federation chief. But some anxious Google searching and she’s all about Thibaut, or plans to be.

Claire, who speaks French and is flattered when he compliments her French, impulsively decides to go to Paris, become an au pair rather than split expenses with spendthrift friend Julia (Landman), get involved with the famous French puppetry school and make a film about them, with Thibaut, while she’s there.

Writer-director Nicola Rose has some fun with the French language and French snootiness (every “Your accent is terrible” French bureaucrat is played by Joëlle Haddad Champeyroux in a different wig), the traps and warnings Claire misses when the au pair recruiter “warns” (tricks) her about the nature of the job. And Rose takes a shot at faking a trip to Paris on an indie film budget.

But the film plays like “Hey, this guy can skate so let’s use it” in the strained ways it tries piece all this into a narrative, to add a figure skater to the film Claire wants to adapt from the story of “Petrushka.”

Claire’s crush on Thibaut seems headed nowhere, so she takes up with the first young Parisian (Bartek Szymanski) to flatter her accent, a detour that has a chuckle or two but nothing more.

The performances overall are more competent than compelling, affecting or particularly funny.

And for all this talk about puppets, some of whom we see, but never “in action,” the film has no idea of what to do with them. Claire’s fantasy sequences in which she can imagine the story she wants to tell or the romance with Thibaut she wishes she had are illustrated with drawn (CGI assisted) animation.

Why have a puppeteer and a story about puppets if you’re not going to use them as anything but an occasional sight gag? That’s a serious aesthetic and logical stumble in a movie that is already a little light on charm and very thin entertainment.

Rating: unrated, some scenes of a sexual nature

Cast: Lizzie Kehoe, Thomas Vieljeux, Casey Landman, Bartek Szymanski, Joëlle Haddad Champeyroux, Marine Assaiante and Dhane Ross

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicola Rose. An IndieRights release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:40

The plot of “Love Again” is so over-familiar I stopped streaming it not once but thrice to make certain I’d never seen it before.

It’s so forumulaic that I hope writer-director James C. Strouse is blushing if he’s walking a Screen Actor’s Guild picket line. This movie could have been conceived, cast and scripted by AI, almost as easily as, say, a movie review generator AI could have panned it.

But for what it is, a sort of wistful, sad Hallmark romance with pretty leads who have little chemistry, it’s not terrible. Random laughs are scattered throughout.

“Love Again” stars Priyanka Chopra Jonas (“Baywatch,” “The Matrix Resurrecions”) as a grieving woman who can’t get over her dead, about-to-propose boyfriend, and features Priyanka’s real-lie husband Nick Jonas as a gym-rat personal trainer dating app set-up who is Mr. Wrong with a capital “W.”

And the idea of casting the ever-emotive singer Céline Dion as a slightly surlier version of herself, making our leading man (Sam Heughan of “To Olivia”) “grow up” — “I’m 35!” — “So there’s still TIME!” — is fun.

Those gimmicks were the chief appeal of this limp late spring release, which nobody saw, but which is now finding an audience on Netflix thank to palpitating Jonas Brothers (and Priyanka) fans, and the unfortunate news about Céline Dion’s health.

Tell me if this plot doesn’t sound too familiar. Children’s book illustrator Mira has a mushy lunch with lover John (Arinzé Kene) only to witness him killed in an accident that happens right in front of her. Two years later, Mira’s not over this loss. But she starts texting John, and during a thunderstorm, those texts turn up on the phone of a slightly bitter, freshly-jilted New York Chronicle music journalist, Rob (Sam Heughan).

He doesn’t respond. But after figuring out these “I spend every day thinking of you” texts aren’t a prank, “catfishing” or anything of the sort, he becomes intrigued and maybe a bit obsessed. He attends the opera (“Orpheus & Eurydice”) hoping to find her, and is moved by the story on stage.

As he’s been assigned to write a profile about the culture’s “Celinaissance” — a Dion comeback — he finds himself scolded, insulted, cajoled and invited back among the land of the living and loving by the great romantic balladeer with the Big French Canadian voice.

When Rob finally “meets” Mira, the only questions are, “How long before he tells her? and “How bad will it look when she finds out?”

Yes, that “secret” that “we didn’t meet by accident” plot has been around since before “Meet John Doe” used it during The Great Depression. No, these leads don’t set off any real sparks, because there’s nothing flinty, nothing with a steel edge about this.

A major problem? Rob isn’t nearly cynical enough, and rubbing any unlikable edge off the character is Against the Law, as far as screen portrayals of jaded journalists go. Love, this jilted bore reminds us, “It’s just a bunch of pheromones that wear off. Then you get your heart ripped out, covered in bleach, stomped on” and “set on fire in front of your friends and family.”

Awww. Poor baby.

That’s the short summary review of the movie, too. “Poor baby.”

They had a formualic plat, a few good lines, a few cute scenes, and two fun cameos — Mr. Jonas, and a tasty Celia Imrie turn in which she pleasantly calls in an intern at her children’s book publishing house, recounts the young woman’s struggle to get to this job, and tells Mira she’ll FIRE the intern if Mira doesn’t sort out some good (not weepy) ideas for illustrations of a new book — pronto.

What they didn’t have was a movie as compelling as the various parts they pieced together.

Rating: PG-13 (Some profanity, sexual content)

Cast: Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Sam Heughan, Céline Dion, Sofia Barclay, Arinzé Kene, Russel Tovey, Steve Oram, Lydia West, Celia Imrie and Nick Jonas.

Credits: Scripted and directed by James C. Strouse. A Sony/Screen Gems release now on Netflix.

Running time: 1:44

Not sure how this is being released, seeing as how it’s only 31 minutes long. But the trailer is now in theaters, so we’ll see.

This features connections to the original film, and amped-up frights.

David Gordon Green seems trapped in horror these days. Pity.

Oct. 6, “The Believer” hits theaters.