Movie Nation

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

Yvonne Orji and Meredith Hagner are back, too. And even scene-stealing hotel manager Maurillio (Carlos Santos) returns. Ronnie Chieng and Buscemi (as the ex-con father-in-law to Ron and Kyla) join the cast of this raunchy sequel.

Yeah, they’ll try too hard. But there were laughs in the original film, so…

This hits Hulu Friday.

“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

Music Box has this, which is opening in limited release Friday.

And yes, it looks adorable.

“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

Whatever its title in Tagalog/Filipino, translating the chaste, wistful “different timelines” romance into “Love You Long Time” for international consumption was…unfortunate.

Do a quick online search for it. I’ll wait. This turned up. A LOT. Right?

Even skipping by the idea that the title is a tease, promising something more unsavory than this was ever going to deliver, it’s a frustratingly insipid romance that skips over some “hows,” meanders through inane barely-flirtatious and disconnected chats and concludes with nothing less than utterly unresolved frustration.

Ikay (Eisel Serrano) is a “blocked” young screenwriter catching hell for not getting the revisions right on her “magnum opus,” apparently a tale scripted from her own life. She goes into the country to get a change of scene and catch up with her favorite aunt (Ana Abad Santos).

But on the way, she had a fender bender and this walkie talkie somehow wound up in her car. She turns it on, and this nice young man named Uly (Carlo Aquino) reaches out to her. They chat about their lives, their lonelines and their drab romantic histories.

But every time they try and get together in person, at a local cathedral or restuarant, they fail to connect or even cross paths. Uly is puzzled. Ikay is furious at these “games” he’s playing with her.

Eventually, he posts a Twitter photo to prove he’s in the same park as her. But his “jokes” or “pranks” about how he’s in 2018 and her angry replies about “It’s 2022!” eventually let these two slowpokes figure out what we guessed a few scenes ago.

They’re on different timelines.

They accept this as if it’s a common nuisance of Filipino life, and are as late on the uptake that one of them might be in an alternate universe, or dead, as they were on the possibility that they are in in the same space, but in separate times.

They carry on their chats. Ikay transcribes some of this into her screenplay, and her aunt serves up some self-help speak, quoting (in English) from her favorite American books on the subject. Yes, the U.S. has cornered the market on this “literature.”

“This is your story. Believe in it…Live your ‘present.’ You don’t forget your past, Ikay. You learn from it.”

It’s a very slow and low-heat film. Some of this reaction can possibly be attributed to the story and the split-screen way it’s told, and some to cultural differences. But the leads set off few sparks, with Aquino being as boy-band bland as any romantic hearthrob I’ve seen on screen lately.

And the resolution simply lost me. Even allowing for “It’s not going to be a ‘Hollywood Ending,'” (screenwriter makes hit movie out of this “experience”) it accomplishes nothing and leaves one wishing one had 104 minutes back.

Rating: TV-MA, a bloody car accident

Cast: Eisel Serrano, Carlo Aquino and Ana Abad Santos

Credits: Directed by Jaime Habac Jr., scripted by Gena Tenaja. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

A little “Dune,” a bit of “Star Wars,” ok a LOT of “Dune.”

Cleopatra Coleman, Sophia Boutella, Djimon H., Jena Malone, Charlie Hunam, Cary Elwes, narrated by Sir Anthony.

An original — derivative, sure — saga in two parts, the first dropping Dec. 22.