Movie Nation

Salons and barber shops, with their bitchy gossip, rotating cast of customer-characters and general jokey atmosphere are one of the most popular settings for comedies, no matter what culture you’re in.

The Brazilian “A Cut Above” centers around a Rio de Janeiro “favela” (working class neighborhood) shop, like so many in the movies “about to be closed,” and the efforts of a just-graduated teen son to save it.

It’s a shambolic film that bops about, parades through too many characters and far outstays its welcome, sticking around for a solid half hour past its dramatic climax. But it’s worth a look just to see favela life that isn’t depicted as an impoverished, violent tragedy but as a scrappy village of friends, competitors and underdogs all looking to get by.

Lucas Penteado is our talk-to-the-camera narrator, Richardsson, a cinematic trick that underscores how much this Rio lad looks like an “Everybody Hates Chris” era Tyler James Williams.

He sings the praises of the place, says “We all take care of each other” and then proceeds to show us how that might or might not be true.

His Mom (Solange Couto) has long run Saigon de Beleze, a beauty parlor that has seen better days. His dad (Serjão Loroza) died years ago, but appears to Richardsson — in a bright orange suit, a playful spirit who might intervene and guide him. Only he never really does.

His sister (Juliana Alves) is a college coed and a campus activist who, like his mother, expects Richardsson to matriculate.

And the gorgeous classmate he crushes on (Rebecca) kind of expects that, too, even though she’s involved with Cheese Curd, an about-to-break-big rapper.

Mom’s salon has lost its cachet to bombshell Greice Kelly’s (Hah!) place across the street. Greice (Jennifer Dias) is her own gorgeous best ad for her salon. Greice and Mom’s landlord are scheming to evict Mom and her two kids from Saigon because the rent is overdue.

And Richardsson has to decide, pretty much right now, his course for life. Law? Business? Cutting hair? Mom is sure a visit to a Santaria conjure woman will help him pick a career, but all she advises is that he buy a chicken and look to “Feathers” for guidance.

Three writers and co-directors Rodrigo França and Letícia Prisco pack the screen to its very edges with this colorful preacher, that old flame of Mom’s, customers, relatives, favela “militia” gangsters and the like. They don’t do much with any of them.

Try as they might, they can’t keep us from seeing — via Richardsson’s steady insistence — that he might be the “answer” to Mom’s money problems. Want to bet the word “viral” will enter into that? So they keep throwing characters at the screen to distract us.

It’s all good-natured enough (in Portuguese, or dubbed into English) if rarely — if ever — laugh-out-loud funny.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity, inuendo

Cast: Lucas Penteado, Solange Couto, Juliana Alves, Rebecca, Serjão Loroza and Jennifer Dias

Credits: Directed by Rodrigo França and Letícia Prisco, scripted by Marcelo Andrade, Anderson França and Silvio Guindane. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

If a tidal wave of Christmas romances and parade of second-chance-at-love pictures were no giveaway, “Purple Hearts” should be the Netflix warning shot that makes its point.

“We’re COMING for you, Hallmark Channel!”

A marriage-of-convenience dramedy about a Marine who could use some extra “marriage allowance” cash and a diabetic singer who needs insurance offers up the promise of conflict between a conservative soldier psyching himself up for a combat tour and an immigrant’s daughter, pacifist and would-be pop starlet quickly sours in a screenplay that loses its nerve and leads who have no chemistry whatsoever.

Arguments about “entitled” feminists and the “casual misogyny” of a “bro” culture military begin over-the-top, and are abruptly abandoned. With one Marine blurting, We’re good enough to fight for your ass, but not to touch it,” maybe that’s for the best.

Screenwriters Kyle Jarrow and Liz. W. Garcia and director Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum skipped “Subtlety” day in film school. But not Schmaltz 101.

As they tell the story of waitress-and-aspiring singer-songwriter Cassie (singing actress Sofia Carson) and new Marine Luke (Nicholas Galitzine), everyone involved is charged with translating “Green Card” into a story of military insurance and benefits and “faking” a marriage until romance blossoms.

In leaving out the charm and the romance, and abandoning the picture’s “edge” to make it play for Hallmark Channel America, they pretty much blow it, even if scenes here and there work and deliver something like an emotional payoff.

Cassie and The Loyal — her band of waitresses and waiters — get the attention of Marines on leave in Oceanside, California. Cassie gets the attention of Luke, thanks to the fact that she’s not having this boys-will-be-boys grab-assing, and that she “used to babysit” Frankie (Chosen Jacobs), another Marine in Luke’s platoon.

The leads “meet cute” in a way that starts testy and practically leads to blows before they go to their separate corners.

But when Cassie ducks out to check her sugar levels in the parking lot, and take an insulin shot (“Type One”), we see her vulnerability. Not being able to pay for refills on her waitress/cover-band earnings, we get it. She’s facing a life-or-death medical problem that can’t wait.

An awkward “proposal” to old friend Frankie earns her a scolding from his son-of-an-M.P. pal Luke, “prison” threats and “scam” accusations. But then we see his vulnerability. Luke owes a low-rent mobster (Anthony Ippolito) money. Lots of it. He has a “past.” Cassie’s pitch just might work with him.

When they reach a bargain, we’re served awkward group scenes with his platoon, an awkward wedding and a seriously clumsy good-bye (after an abrupt night of passion), and he’s off. All she has to do is stay in touch, video call sweet nothings that the rest of his platoon sees, and get back to writing songs, only now they’re apparently inspired by Luke.

The character arc here is strictly Cassie’s, as the liberal “illegal alien’s” daughter comes to appreciate — slowly and clumsily — the sacrifice men in uniform make on this or that combat tour in the Middle East. “Purple Hearts,” from its very title, panders to corners of the country that hold military service in hallowed regard. Nicholas Sparks and others have gotten rich surfing America’s urban/rural/Blue State-Red State “sophistication gap.” Why not Netflix?

But most viewers, including me, will see through the movie’s ham-fisted manipulations and poorly-executed tugs at the heart strings.

Yes, a military funeral is all but guaranteed to draw tears. But every other emotion, every plot twist towards “love” and away from “convenience,” is handled so poorly you cringe.

Carson’s breathy singing voice is pleasant enough and very much of its time, even if the ballads she plows through here fit well only because so much of what surrounds them is also pure schmaltz.

Galitzine and pretty much the entire remainder of the cast achieve “adequate” in their best moments.

I wouldn’t have minded seeing a film wrestle with these real rifts in the culture, intra-generational gaps that have widened since the end of the draft. That sort of conflict could have set off real sparks and provided a basis for the chemistry our leads sorely lack.

“Purple Hearts” plays like a Cassie-gets-her-big-break wish-fulfillment fantasy with the whole fake marriage business, debts and medical issues and everything else mere afterthoughts.

Rating: TV-14, violence, sexuality, profanity

Cast: Sofia Carson, Nicholas Galitzine, Chosen Jacobs, Linden Ashby and Anthony Ippolito

Credits: Directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, scripted by Kyle Jarrow and Liz. W. Garcia. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:02

Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” is dressed up as a modern day graffiti artist in the income-inequality London of today in “Twist,” a contemporary take on the tale which — our narrator/hero promises — “won’t ‘ave no singin'” or dancing.

And looking at the cast, the Banksy/Amy Winehouse era Carnaby Street-Revisited costuming, it’s easy to shout “Oy, you lot are ONTO something!”

Lena Headey (“300”) as a murderously mop-topped menace Sikes, Rita Ora as a sexy, swaggering artful Dodger, Jude and Sadie’s fit, handsome and youthful son Raff Law as Oliver “Twist” and Oscar winner Sir Michael Caine as a twinkling, scheming old rascal Fagin, with all the best lines?”

“We’re all ‘orphans,’ here.”

Dickens wasn’t really writing the first “caper comedy,” but you can see it in the characters, situations and structure of the novel and every adaptation, especially this one, with its recognizable rich “mark” (David Walliams) and ever-present legal interloper Bumble (Leigh Francis).

Make your hero a graffiti bandit infamous for “reaching places other people can’t” for his art/vandalism, throw in a little parkour, turn the tug of war over “Nancy,” tagged “Red” (Sophia Simnett) here, between Sikes and Oliver into something romantic and sexy, and the hard work is done.

This plays, and thanks to the lovely leads, dazzling costumes and high-class nature of the caper — art theft — it is easy on the eyes and practically skips by.

No, it’s not deep and lacks pathos or any emotional investment in the characters. And really, there’s nothing remotely surprising in the phone-hacking/security-cracking/painting switching plot. But what do you expect out of a 90 minute lark?

The wall-tagging spray-painter Twist falls in with Dodger, Batesy (Franz Drameh) and the gang after intervening in a near-arrest. He takes in their pilfered/pickpocketed vintage-clothing-boutique “club house” digs and it isn’t long before he abandons his rooftop tent camping and joins the mob.

Having a fellow parkour practitioner, the fabulously fit and beautiful Red, to “train” with is an enticement. But the sage Fagin closes the deal.

“An idealist, eh? ‘All property is theft?’ Ideals are useless, like an appendix. Cut’em out!”

Twist joins the “merry band” for a revenge heist, looting the illegal hoard or big time art dealer (Walliams, famous for “Little Britain?).

The lingering threat of the murderous Sikes hangs over the entire gang, with cops hounding Oliver and trying to “turn” him, Sikes standing in the way of his pursuit of Red and the like. The obstacles and “twists” arrive — preordained, right on cue and utterly unsurprising.

But it’s cute enough, with Caine lending it some charm, Law holding his own and Headey toting the “heavy” load. Call it a “bad movie” that plays, because that’s all this shoots for.

Rating: R for some violence and language (profanity)

Cast: Michael Caine, Lena Headey, Rita Ora, Raff Law, Sophia Simnett, Franz Drameh, Leigh Francis and David Walliams.

Credits: Directed by Martin Owen, scripted by John Warthall, Salley Collett and Matthew Parkhill. A Saban Films/Roku release.

Running time: 1:32

A simple coming-of-age tale built on the novelty that this story is about a teenage Black fly girl in Brooklyn, 1994’s “Alma’s Rainbow” earns a 4K restoration and re-release

Writer-director Ayoka Chenzira launched her career with this debut feature. Almost 30 years later, “Rainbow” plays as quaint, cute, theatrical and colorful. Its best ingredients — a raucous, estrogen and Caribbean-charged African American beauty parlor, a sibling struggle for control of the dreams of the teen title character, and florid and poetic life lessons from the women who know her – are good enough that they make you wish there was a lot more of that and less of the everything else.

Alma (Kim Weston-Moran) runs Alma Gold’s Flamingo Parlour out of her brownstone, a single mom providing room and board for daughter Rainbow (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) and a gathering place for the local ladies — a few of them, like her fellow hairdresser Babs (Jennifer Copeland) from the Caribbean.

“Betta ta’be da batsman dan a bowler any day’a the week!”

Rainbow’s a Catholic schoolgirl with dreams of fly girl fame. She and a couple of boys named Sea Breeze and Pepper have a crew, “8 Traxx.” That’s why she’s always hiding her bike shorts underneath her school uniform. Some days, she doesn’t bother with school at all.

Not that the ladies of the salon and her Mom aren’t impressing on her the need to stay in school and make something of herself that way.

“Keep your pants up and your dress down!”

Then Alma’s diva sister Ruby (Mizan Kirby) shows up, and all bets are off.

Whatever Mom’s tentative thoughts of getting back into the dating pool might be — the handyman Blue (Lee Dobson) sets the ladies hearts and other parts aflutter — Ruby is “out there,” all woman, with exotic underwear and song and dance ambitions and a lot of other opinions about what make a woman’s life to share with her niece.

“Don’t take let nobody see you rehearse. Don’t take second best from NOBODY. And ALWAYS claim your space!”

The stagey, demonstrative cast and the “memory play” reveries are what make “Rainbow””theatrical,” in a “Life is one big memory, ain’t it, Sugar?” way. I was reminded of several plays from the African American theater watching it and more importantly, hearing it.

The “coming of age” scenes are mere tropes, but every scene that has Rainbow getting unsolicited advice — about life, “boys,” getting her first period — from the ladies of the salon has a richness that makes up for that.

Rating: unrated, nudity, sexuality, profanity

Cast: Victoria Gabrielle Platt, Kim Weston-Moran, Mizan Kirby and Lee Dobson

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ayoka Chenzira. A Kino Lorber re-release.

Running time: 1:25

Rating: unrated, nudity, sexuality, profanity

Cast: Victoria Gabrielle Platt, Kim Weston-Moran, Mizan Kirby and Lee Dobson

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ayoka Chenzira. A Kino Lorber re-release.

Running time: 1:25

“Slight” can be a great virtue in an intimate indie film, especially when it’s paired with “twee.”

That’s the potential we’re looking for when we sit down to “Shalom Taiwan,” an Argentinian comedy/travelogue about a Buenos Aires rabbi who goes where the money is — now — in seeking donors among the well-heeled who work in the economy known as “The Asian Tiger,” th island of Taiwan.

Alas, director and co-writer Walter Tejblum’s wistful dramedy never amounts to much of anything at all. With low stakes, limited laughs and enervated scenes that should crackle with warmth and wit, but don’t, it’s too slight for its own good.

Fabián Rosenthal is Aaron, the rabbi of a temple and community center that’s just starting to make a mark. He is warmth personified, and something of a dynamo — full of plans for a soup kitchen, food pantry and daycare center at his already-renovated temple, and just as full of advice for his rabbinical protege’ Jonny (Santiago Korovsky).

Interested in the cute clerk at the temple? Hit her with this pickup line — “You may not be perfect, but your flaws are quite charming.” No, it doesn’t go over in Spanish any better than it reads in English.

And about the temple’s mortgage, which allows these big dreams — “A rabbi without debt is a rabbi without projects!”

But it’s not his congregation that covers their finances. It’s wealthy New York Jewish backers. With their $150,000 temple-improvement loan coming due, Aaron jets off to NYC for a little do-re-mi. Little does he realize that the Argentine economy isn’t the only basket case in international money matters. “Not a good time for us,” his donors tell him. Small checks are all he can hope for.

“There are 200 companies in Taiwan” that are competing and beating him, one penthouse pauper complains.

With Aaron’s “Business is business” lender (Carlos Portaluppi) already ready to foreclose, there’s nothing for it but to leave the wife and three babies and fly halfway around the world to secure a future for his other baby.

The culture shock we expect Aaron to be caught up in is barely glimpsed. He’s got a local rabbi who gives him contacts, and he’s off — stuck pitching one rich businessman as he spends a day at an amusement park with his son, walking the terraced rows of a tea plantation with another, getting a check here, a brushoff there and a $1 bill at one point.

Rosenthal is engaging enough as the lead. But Tejblum can barely wring a laugh or more than a drop of charm out of any of it. And with so little overt comedy — cruising karaoke bars with a smitten young woman whose rich mother wants her talked out of her current slacker crush, impatiently poking the ever-so-patient and monk-like tea leaf picker — one finds oneself grasping at bigger meaning, a life lesson that the alleged Orthodox sage can learn from others or teach himself.

One can grasp and hope all one wants. There just isn’t much to grab hold of here and not much to this other than some pretty pictures, a few featherweight stereotypes — Argentine, American, Taiwanese and Jewish — and a whole lot of potential pretty much squandered.

Rating: some profanity

Cast: Fabián Rosenthal, Sebastián Hsu, Carlos Portaluppi and Mercedes Funes

Credits: Directed by Walter Tejblum, scripted by Sergio Dubcovsky and Walter Tejblum An Outsider Pictures release.

Running time: 1:25

A little shouting at the screen when watching a movie can be a good thing — liberating, underscoring hw involved you’ve gotten in the story.

And then there’s the shouting one must simply must do at “Pipa,” retitled “Recurrence” for North American Netflix. It’s a thriller, the third in a series (“Intuition,””Perdida”), about Argentine cop Manuela “Pipa” Pelari, and it’s the worst of the lot.

Filmed in the arid, rocky mountains of Argentina that look the most like Mexico, its striking scenery is its best recommendation. And star Luisana Lopilato — who married Michael Buble’ — is back and always delivers fair value.

But this movie is as cluttered as a telenovela, and just as stupid.

It’s about a dead “Indian” girl, dirty cops, a missing cell phone and the machinations of a corrupt machine in a corner of the world where displacing the locals and using the police to stomp all over them — and their rights. Yes, “Recurrence” is a little hard to follow and a lot harder to reason out.

Pipa has been kicked out of policing and lives in the mountains with her idiotically rebellious 12-13 year-old son Tobias (Benjamín Del Cerro). Her aunt (Paulina García) lives nearby and provides moral support, wondering why she won’t risk entering the local dating scene.

As Pipa has a knack for “choosing the wrong guy” (in Spanish, subtitled or dubbed into English), be they cops or civilians, that’s not on her agenda.

But then this pretty “junky” teen dies in a way that leaves her body charred to a crisp, and Pipa’s aunt insists that she look into it.

North or south of the border, “The word of the police is not enough,” she insists to her niece. “To them, she’s not important.”

As Pipa sniffs around, she gets the attention of the bad cops, and maybe one good one. Rufino (Mauricio Paniagua) is Indigenous and sympathetic to the locals who fret over what the richest, most powerful family in town is doing with their land, and who protest every arrest and police beating no matter how little good it seems to do.

As we and she recreate the party that was the last place the victim (a servant) was seen alive, see TV ads for a crusading reformer campaigning for mayor, eavesdrop on the rich current mayor who is about to marry his son into that even wealthier family, drop in on Pato (polo-like “horseball” matches) of the area’s One Percent, we can guess what Pipa suspects.

The corruption runs deep and wide, and just might be murderous. Pipa starts to get threats.

A kid who’s hanging with the country boys who like playing with guns is what constitutes “trouble at home.” And every now and then, he just lashes out at her and she takes it, because that’s what parents do in the movies.

All this plot clutter doesn’t make the story more complex. The broad canvas/narrow focus nature of the tale means that many threads are introduced and left dangling. The only reason for the Native protests is to contrast Rufino from his brutish fellow cops and supposedly suggest the “political” stakes of what’s being covered up.

And at every juncture, someone does something so obviously boneheaded as to make you shout at the screen. Cops shoot at Pipa and a suspect she’s questioning, narrowly missing her, and ask in all seriousness, “Are you all right?” Police chases never have cops radioing in their actual location.

We see characters drop guns, phones, etc., only to have them reappear in their possession.

“Recurrence” is a scenic but very stupid murder mystery/thriller. So learn from my mistake. There’s no sense both of us losing our voices shouting at this dud.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: Luisana Lopilato, Inés Estévez, Paulina García, Ariel Staltari, Mauricio Paniagua, Santiago Artemis

Credits: Directed by Alejandro Montiel, scripted by
Florencia Etcheves, Alejandro Montiel and Mili Roque Pitt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

There’s no sense sugar-coating this or beating around the bush. The Korean in-flight thriller “Emergency Declaration” laughably steals a lot of over-the-top plot points from “Airplane!” and the trouble-mid-flight thriller that “Airplane!” set out to spoof, 1957’s “Zero Hour!”

There are times when one wonders if this overwrought, overlong, can’t-find-an-ending epic is supposed to be funny, and times we’re sure it isn’t. The knowledge that, “Well, it was seven minutes longer when it opened in Korea” is cold consolation.

And then there’s the filmmaking lore of Rod Serling’s 1966 script for “The Doomsday Flight,” one of the first movies to ever feature a passenger bringing a bomb onto an airliner. It instantly-spawned imitation bomb threats and perhaps even real bombers in the years after it came out and became Serling’s biggest screenwriting regret. He actually had to come out and apologize for it.

“Emergency Declaration,” about a bio-terror attack on a packed jumbo jet, is so plausible and detailed as to make one fear the wrong sorts of folks will see it and follow its “How To” steps, and give everybody one more reason to not get on a jet.

Those provisos aside, this Jae-rim Han picture has its tense moments, its high stakes drama and even a little pathos. The whole isn’t all that, but bits and pieces work.

The creep (Si-wan Yim) might as well be walking around Incheon Airport waving a red flag.

“Which plane will have a lot of people on it?” he smirks (in Korean with English subtitles) at the ticket clerk. Her taken-aback look earns an “I’m just curious. Is that a problem?“

He approaches a child, asks rude questions of one and all, for instance if this girl’s father (Lee Byung-hun of “I Saw the Devil”) “is divorced,” for instance.

Dad’s alarm bells go off. And they sound louder when he sees that this nut is on their flight to Honolulu with them.

Meanwhile, a police detective (Song Kang-ho of “The Host” and “Parasite”) is the only one in his precinct to take seriously the tip that some “nut” has posted an online video threatening to take down an airliner.

One problem? Anybody here speak good English? That’s the language the creep made the threat in, and while the school kids that live in the same complex speak it well, and thus passed on their tip, the cops are caught flat-footed. Until, that is, they break into the guy’s apartment and discover grim “evidence.”

The best scenes of “Emergency Declaration” are the ticking clock police hunt, and the single dad’s ability to piece together a threat and efforts to raise the alarm once on board the plane. Because in this social media age, SOMEbody on board sees the creep’s threatening video, and while nobody may know the nature of the threat — yet — they can pretty much tell the airport creeper and now fellow-passenger was the young jerk making the video.

That’s a novelty that becomes a running thread through the movie. Ordinary people put the pieces together, and the airline, the government and the police have their hands forced because the media has picked up on what has been crowdsourced into the open.

The attack and efforts to get this plane on the ground, the “secret” that this or that character shares with another, only hold suspense for the second or two it takes for the viewer to recognize the over-used tropes being trotted out here. Eyes will roll.

And that finale takes a marginal thriller that is worth at least a look right down the rabbit hole of “You have GOT to be kidding me.”

It’s one thing to get a chuckle out of a cop whose limited knowledge of the world means he doesn’t know Honolulu is in Hawaii (Song Kang-ho’s specialty is “slow” characters). It’s another to have a jet that’s made an “emergency declaration” hours before somehow conjure up fuel it surely wouldn’t have as the movie makes its socially-relevant points about a world reluctant to risk bringing a pandemic to their piece of terra firma by letting them land.

Thus, a “mixed bag” thriller drifts into Korean soap opera territory, and never returns from it.

And as a sidebar, hey — Well Go USA (the film’s North American distributor) — it’s 2022. Quit cheaping out with white subtitles on movies set inside a white jetliner, or white offices or against pale while skies. YELLOW subtitles are readable, not the washed-out effort you wasted your money on here. Everybody else pretty much figured that out in the ’90s.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Byung-hun, Jeon Do-yeon, Kim So-jin and Si-wan Yim

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jae-rim Han. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:21

It’s ever-so-hard to type when one is clutching one’s pearls over the shock, the pervy NERVE of it all!

A 38 year-old American novelist living in London has an affair with a 15-16 year-old mini-skirted Mod, and marries her rather than face statutory rape charges?

One has to wonder just whose idea “Lola,” was, a cringeworthy faux satire titled “London Affair” or “Twinky” in various other places it was released?

Director Richard Donner, just a couple of years away from “Superman” stardom, said Charles Bronson pitched him the script. Co-star Susan George was but 19 (and playing 16) when it was filmed, and even though it set the tone for too much of her career, can’t be blamed. It’s when you read the credits of screenwriter Norman Thaddeus Vane (“Taxi Dancer” and “Club Life”) and hear he was a “frequent contributor” to Penthouse Magazine, that it becomes pretty obvious where this originated.

A dabbler in light porn thought he’d have a go at a lightweight “Lolita.” And it being the tail end of the Swinging Sixties, drive-in friendly American International Pictures thought “Why not?” What’s shocking about it, all these decades later, is that Honor Blackman, Trevor Howard, Robert Morley, Lionel Jeffries and Jack Hawkins signed on for a wink-wink scene or two.

It really was a different universe back then. But watching Bronson — who was 48 when it was filmed — one can see “This isn’t the best idea for paying for a trip to London” in his tentative, “What am I DOING?” performance.

The jig is up over morning breakfast one day at Lola’s family’s posh townhouse, when her little brother rats her out to her parents (Honor Blackman, Michael Craig). It’s not just the sexed-up “banned in England” pulp fiction of Scott Wardman that’s she hiding. It’s her diary, where she talks about all the boys she wrote “F” next to, and the affair with the man more than twice her age that she confesses.

Mum prattles from “Where are the DIRTY bits, darling?” about the smutty novel Lola’s reading, to outrage. Dad fumes about the publishing house, bringing Wardman up on charges. But it gets WORSE.

“He’s AMERICAN!” Contact the Home Office to have this man deported!

Lola, all bangs and beret, la-di-dah bicycles her way to her lover’s flat, and in the midst of a childish come-on, lets drop the details of how their “secret” got out — drip by infantile drip.

Whatever status having an older lover earned her with her libidinous classmates, however much her lecherous creeper grandfather (Trevor Howard) approves, there’s going to be hell to play.

But these scenes, while saying as much, don’t really convey concern, alarm or shame. Cringeworthy or not, attempted “Swinging Sixties” satire, different era and all that or not, this is a very badly-written and acted movie.

A police visit and Wardman’s all-too-quick summoning of the phrase “statutory rape” have them half-scrambling for a way out. “We could get married,” she chirps. “Illegal, here,” he grumps. “Not in SCOTLAND,” she counters, probably the best “joke” of the movie. And off they go.

The comedy is all of the oversexed sitcom variety, “Love, American Style” era bubble baths and bantering about “I love that kid,” literally.

They move to New York where Wardman gets bad advice from his not-prudish-but-incredulous lawyer (Orson Bean) and not-wholly-shocked reactions from his parents (Kay Medford, Paul Ford).

Lola, played as a cross between “Lolita” and “Candy” — naive, childish but sexually mature — is blind to the leering real estate agent and tone-deaf to everyone else’s reaction to this sexualized child in their presence.

Bronson, almost to his credit, never gets past “tentative” and the sense that someone is standing off camera with a gun pointed at him, forcing him to try this “hip” and “sexy” riff on a conservative generation’s view of an oversexed generation behind them.

“I make naughty, uncool moves with a 16 year-old girl and suddenly my life’s upside down!”

Under any title, in any of its many different running time edits, “Lola” is a terrible movie — not Woody Allen “Manhattan” perverse and damning. Just bad. But it’s one of five movies Bronson had released that year, so at least we know that nobody put a lot of thought into it at any stage of production.

Bronson, a fine actor, would curdle into the gnarled old inner city avenger of the “Death Wish” movies. George has gone on to enjoy a long career, although “Straw Dogs” would be the rare high point, and “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry,” “Die, Screaming Marianne,” “Mandingo” and the like were her lot for years after “Twinky.”

And Donner would finally break free from the TV directing that was his bread and butter for years before and after “Lola” to become a maker of blockbusters (“Superman,” “The Omen”), “Goonies” and “Lethal Weapon” movies.

As with much of the satire and attempted satire of the ’60s and early ’70s, what we see when we look back on movies like “Lola” is how very much a man’s world it was — in cinema and in the culture these films rolled out in. “Statutory Rape” and the joke “15 will get you 20” may have been punchlines, but they don’t let any man in the creation or decision-making chain here off the hook. The law was on the books because the culture had realized, decades before, that this was wrong.

And while finding the “cutting edge” was as hard then as it is now, trying to step lightly when leaping over it was never a good idea. You either go “Candy” or go “Lolita,” or go home.

Rating: Would you believe GP, or PG?

Cast: Charles Bronson, Susan George, Orson Bean, Honor Blackman, Trevor Howard, Paul Ford, Jack Hawkins, Robert Morley, Michael Craig, Lionel Jeffries, Barney Martin and Kay Medford.

Credits: Directed by Richard Donner, scripted by Norman Thaddeus Vane. An American International release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers.

Running time: 1:17/1:38

One gimmick is about all your average 79 minute horror movie can manage, but at least that one trick is kind of promising in “Glorious.”

Fresh-off-a-breakup Wes (Ryan Kwanten) polishes off a long drive, a purge and an alcoholic binge with an encounter with a disembodied voice in a stall at a highway rest area. The voice claims to be a deity, and it sounds a lot like J.K. Simmons.

We’ve all seen “Whiplash.” We know that’s a voice you take seriously. Well, take is seriously after a “What’s a god like you doing in a place like this?” joke. Or two.

“The universe has a FAVOR to ask!” The God Simmons (not his real name) booms.

“What is it? Does the universe need help moving?”

Joking aside, Wes finds himself trapped in a toilet in BFE with something supernatural, as well as his own issues — grief, regret, guilt and loneliness among them. He’s not getting out of there without paying a price.

What sounds like a pretty good– if glib — student play (we see four characters, and hear a fifth) plays as a modestly interesting, sometimes artfully gory drama in this Rebekah McKendry film, a story whose allure lessens the longer that one “gimmick” takes to run its course.

If we’re thinking theological, and “Glorious” certainly aims for that, we’ve got Wes trying to get out, maybe hoping to exercise some free will or simply running from whatever demons he brought into that toilet with him.

Some of us can see what’s coming, which isn’t a deal-breaker as far as making “Glorious” watchable. What’s required here is that the characters keep us engaged until the payoff or twist or grim or happy resolution. What would be nice is if we feel something/anything for any given character.

I have to say this chatty, pseudo-existential screenplay didn’t get me there, with no performance —- Sylvia Grace Crim plays the girlfriend, seen in flashbacks — pulling me in and only one character coming close to being someone I could identify with. And he used to play Peter Parker’s boss.

Yeah, critics have “god complexes.” So sue me. But “Glorious?” I could take it or leave it.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Ryan Kwanten, Sylvia Grace Crim, Tordy Clark, André Lamar and the voice of J.K. Simmons.

Credits: Directed by Rebekah McKendry, scripted by Joshua Hull, David Ian McKendry and Todd Rigney. A Shudder (ug. 18) release.

Running time: 1:19

Racy for its day, and still seriously ribald today, this 1976 classic from Brazil has been restored and re issued by Film Movement. Here’s my review of this comical “troubled marriage” farce.

Person County, N.C. and its library system win this donation from MovieNation, spreading fine cinema over the mostly rural Southeast, one film and one red county library at a time.