Movie Nation

Decades of “Twilight Zone” episodes and movies from “Primer”” and “Timecrimes” to “Safety Not Guaranteed” have demonstrated that you don’t need a huge budget to tell a time travel story.

The best films of the genre are intellectual exercises, and for all the laughs and “cool” parts of the blockbuster “Back to the Future” franchise, the mental math required to keep timelines straight is at least half the fun.

Time travel tales make us face choices, dilemmas and unforseen “Butterfly Effect” repercussions that are theoretically probable if anyone masters the machinery of giving a life or a historical period a temporal “do over.”

“Aporia” brings a fretful melancholia to the genre by taking away the “travel” from time travel, and letting characters impact the past and future by pushing a button that kills someone. So it’s a little like like a laugh-free “Safety Not Guaranteed,” a less moral version of the Frank Langella/Cameron Diaz thriller “The Box.”

The word “aporia” means an unresolvable dilemma, some situation that’s crated an impasse.

That’s what the characters here face as they ponder the possibilities, the ethics and the pitfalls of using “a machine that can (metaphorically) fire a bullet into the past” at the target of their choice. Well, kind of ponder.

We don’t learn about “the machine” until after we’ve met Sophie (Judy Greer), a struggling nurse and single-mom whose daughter (Faithe C. Herman) is getting kicked out of school for “not showing up.”

The fact that the school is calling and that Sophie is “there” even though they’re suspending for her skipping school is just the first unresolved puzzle facing us here.

Riley has been acting-out ever since her father died. In flasbhacks, we see how close she and Mal (Edi Gathegi) were and how much in love Sophie and Mal-short-for-Malcolm were.

But something happened, something that keeps dragging harassed Sophie back into court seeking justice. for Mal’s death.

Mal is gone, their daughter wants nothing to do with her mother and Mom is at her wit’s end.

Mal was a scientist living on disability after an on-the-job accident some years before his death. His best friend, the immigrant physicist-turned Lyft driver Jabir (Payman Maadi) is Sophie’s “rock,” the one she turns to in her many crises.

He’s the one who mentions this “machine” he and Mal had been working on. It hadn’t worked-out as a time travel device. But with a computer interface aimed at someone at a particular place at a very particular (very recent history only) time, it can engineer the death of the guy who killed Mal and bring the much-missed husband and fatehr back to life.

Smart filmmakers find ways to dodge “explaining” the means of delivering time travel. Sometimes, a DeLorean is all it takes. Writer-director Jared Moshe explains less than most — there’s this “abstract particle” — which is all well and good.

But there’s kind of cavalier, justify-this-as-it-goes improvisational feel to some of the many ethical and moral debates that the picture tries to introduce.

Jabir’s “What harm is there in trying?” flippancy comes before “There is no ‘undo’ button,” and before any consideration comes up about the morality of their actions.

They’re killing a guy, after all. We overhear enough about how he caused Mal’s death to wonder if this is defensible in the least.

But this being a movie, we know that A) Mal is going to find out what they did and B) there will be other calls to use that gadget — which uses car batteries and jumper cables in its design — to kill a mass shooter or school attacker, and tidy up lives that were dirsupted by that first “kill” intervention.

The stunning life make-over that bringing Mal back creates has Jabir and Sophie ecstatic, and unknowning Riley reborn, to say nothing about what it does for Mal. But unforseen consequences ripple away from that first killing.

Greer, in her best role in years, really sells that moment where Sophie morphs from angry, desperate skeptic with dashed hopes to wife who gets a cell phone call from the beloved-but-dead and much-needed partner and husband she lost eight months before.

It’s not Kathleen Turner answering a phone from her long-dead granny in “Peggy Sue Got Married,” but it’ll do. Greer give the nost nuanced performance here, and I didn’t feel much from any other actor’s effects.

I wasn’t nuts about the abrupt shifts in ethics and stumbling debates over taking this or that action in the middle acts. We never actually “see” the killings, which makes for an interesting series of ways to test if the outcome they sought turned out. Well, the first time we see that it’s “interesting.”

And the conclusion has a rough logic to its consequences, but seems arrived at abruptly. Big emotions we expect never quite arrive after that first “machining.”

Taking all this deathly serious has its own downside. There’s pathos and guilt we see but never raelly feel it.

If you’ve seen the several titles I mentioned at the outset — obvious sources of inspiraction here — this film’s big surprise or two will still land. But nothing outside of those third act twists feels fresh or as cleverly thought-out as the many antecedents to “Aporia,” several of which play better and challenge the viewer more than this version of a time-tested, time-honored genre.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi and Payman Maadi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jared Moshe. A Well Go USA release.

Running time:

This looks fascinating, a “hack” that hit the weakest link in a banking/Federal Reserve chain.

“Billion Dollar Heist” comes out Aug. 15.

Writer-director Roderick MacKay’s “The Furnace” is a solid if somewhat slow Australian variation on the “gold fever leads to gold madness” “Treasure of Sierra Madre” theme.

MacKay’s debut feature is about a blood-stained quest to get stolen gold out of the Outback in 1897, the latter years of that Down Under experiment in using camels as desert transport and impressing Afghans, Sikhs and others from the sandy quarters of The Empire to drive them.

As a subtext, the film shows the connection many of this camel drivers made with the country’s other outcast class — Aborigines. So MacKay makes some pointed observations about Aussie racism, as well.

Hanif (Ahmed Malek of “The Swimmers”) and Jundah (Kaushik Das of “The Dog Days of Christmas) are “cameleers,” drover-partners trying to make a business out of the work that began as “indentured servitude.” Hanif, a Muslim, wants to save enough to go home to Afghanistan. Jundah, who is Sikh, is more resigned to this place and its people — Aboriginies like their friend Woorak (Baykali Ganambarr of “The Nightengale”).

The most important thing they all have in common? They’re all “Boy” to any white man they meet, with the South Asians — Sunni, Shia and Sikh — merely lumped together as “Ghans” to the whites.

The faintest hint of talking back at a well, a simple “No problem,” gets Jundah murdered. Woorak and his spear provide swift retribution to the killer.

Hanif gives some thought to laying low with Woorak’s tribe before going off on his own. But stumbling across the scene of a shoot-out changes his mind. The lone survivor (David Wenham of “300) needs medical help.

Oh, and don’t forget my “goods.” This is the aftermath of a gold heist. He has crown-stamped ingots, and all belong to him since everybody else is dead.

The Aborogines who figure this out eventually chase them away, fretting over “the dust storm you kick up behind you.”

Because soon a special crown army “gold squad” (Jay Ryan, Samson Coulter and Erik Thompson) are on their trail. But if our desert duo can make it to a town with an off-the-books smelter, they’ll be rich, with Hanif able to return home.

The film follows a generally predictable path with many of the usual obstacles — mutual mistrust, third party, fourth party and fifth party interfence, the risk of dying of thirst.

That “path” includes personal story arcs the characters traverse, something MacKay handles a bit more clumsily. Some of the action beats digress from the leads and feel arbitrary in their inclusion.

But it’s a sturdy yarn that hits many of the right notes, with Malek and Wenham setting off a few sparks and the quarrelsome army squad setting off others, as they have as many problems among themselves as with assorted “others,” most of them labeled with racial slurs.

And the bloodletting, when it comes, it as pitiless as it would have been anywhere that called itself a “frontier” whose inhabitants reconciled themselves to “life is cheap” as a creed.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Ahmed Malek, David Wenham, Baykali Ganambarr, Jay Ryan,
Trevor Jamieson and Erik Thompson

Credits: Scripted and directed by Roderick MacKay. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

I was traveling Monday when word came down that the great action director William Friedkin died.

I only interviewed him once, about one of his lesser titles, “Blue Chips,” which brought him to Orlando where he and Shaquille O’Neal held forth about the state of college hoops and the film.

But a couple of revealing documentaries I’ve reviewed in recent years paint a great picture of this Oscar winner, art lover and all-around colorful figure, director of “The French Connection,” “The Exorcist,” “To Live and Die in LA” and “Killer Joe.”

My favorite among the two docs is “Leap of Faith,” his deconstruction of how he made “The Exorcist.” But this one, “Friedkin Uncut,” is worth tracking down on this or that streamer if you want a feel for the man.

“Leap of Faith” is on Youtube subscription, Vudu and Amazon. “Friedkin Uncut” is on free streamers Tubi and Pluto and elsewhere.

“Sorceror,” his Roy Scheider remake of “Wages of Fear,” is a favorite among his fans, and I’ve watched “The French Connection” so many times I’ve memorized the damned license plates from that movie’s epic, on the fly, “guerilla filmmaking” (to hear Friedkin tell it) chase scene.

He was adept at turning stage plays into movies, too — “The Boys in the Band,” “Bug” and “Killer” Joe.”

His style was that he had a LOT of styles. Actors turned in great performances in his films, largely due to his refusal to rehearse and love of “accidents” and tricks he’d play on his actors — live (blank, we trust) gunshots to get a jolt or moment of shock, etc.

Raconteur, epicurean. iconoclast, Old School Director as Emperor. RIP, Billy Friedkin.

This looks like a great production values period piece that ably mimics old school Universal horror fun.

“Jules” is a bland comedy about aging and an alien, of little consequence save for its impressive and whimsically-engaged cast.

Oscar winner Ben Kingsley, Emmy winner Jane Curtin and always-amusing Emmy nominee Harriet Sansom Harris take their shot at this twee tale of elderly small-town eccentrics who have a close encounter, and that trio gets everything they can out of it. The trouble is, there isn’t enough to “get.”

Milton, Joyce (Curtin) and Sandy (Harris) are classic “types,” features of many a small town’s active, functioning democracy. They’re” regulars” at tiny Boonton, Pa.’s council meetings, always there to speak up in the public comments after business of government has been transacted.

The council has to sit there and silently endure these aged broken records and their suggestions and complaints, meeting after meeting after meeting.

Sandy has “helpful” projects she’s undertaking that she wants government to be aware of. Joyce is a bit of a “pickleball” obsessed crank. And Milton’s got an endlessly-repeated suggestion for a new crosswalk, and repeatedly passes on his concerns that the town motto, “a great place to call home,” is confusing. “A great place to refer to as ‘home'” would be more to the point.

They’re all in their ’70s, and these meetings are a part of their regular, lonely routine. He’s widowed, estranged from a son who never calls, looked-after by his veterinary nurse daughter ( Zoë Winters of “Succession”) who takes care of his bills and frets over his mental health.

And then there’s a loud noise that wakes him up, and 911 doesn’t want to hear about it.

“A spaceship has crashed in my backyard, and it has crushed my azeleas!”

Damned if he doesn’t bring it up at a council meeting and drop the news on the checkout clerk at his local market. If you have enough “senior moments,” people stop listening to you. So the only people to take him seriously, in concerned (Sandy) and “You make us all look bad” (Joyce) ways, are his contempories.

That 70something brain trust has to figure out what to do with the alien and his or her busted spaceship, its appetitite for apples and its silent obsession with cats.

Screenwriter Gavin Steckler got a few very short-run TV series up and streaming, and here mashes up bits of “Cocoon,” “E.T.,” “Starman” and “A.L.F.” to make a not-at-all-veiled comment on the indignities of growing old. First among them is not being listened to or taken seriously, second might be the loss of control that comes when your child (Winters) insists you see the doctor, who has the effrrontery to give you one of those humiliating congitive tests that Trump was given while in office.

As director Marc Turtletaub has had much better lucky as producer (“The Farewell,” “Little Miss Sunshine”) than director (“Gods Behaving Badly”), that leaves this cast kind of on its own to add laughs and pathos to very thin material.

Despite having Curtin sing “Free Bird,” a career-first for a “Saturday Night Live/Kate & Allie/Third Rock” legend, the only laugh-out-loud bits were the shock-value profanities that pop up when everybody but the unflappable Milton reacts to this unprecedented visitation.

Everything about “Jules” — from complications to the ongoing TV coverage of a National Security Agency search for a “missing weather balloon” — feels pre-digested and been-there/seen-that winded.

But all that aside, the players make “Jules” a perfectly pleasant piece of counter-programming for any fan of its cast or anyone in search of late summer cinematic comfort food.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, a couple of comic expletives

Cast: Ben Kingsley, Jane Curtin, Harriet Sansom Harris and Zoë Winters.

Credits: Directed by Marc Turtletaub, scripted by Gavin Steckler. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:27

A French best seller about “making the invisible visible” among that country’s under-employed and over-worked “gig economy” cleaning crews becomes a sentimental, occasionally-moving melodrama built around Juliette Binoche, playing a well-known writer/researcher undercover among those crews, trapped “Between Two Worlds.”

At its best, Emmanuel Carrèr’s film based on the Florence Aubenas non-fiction book “Le Quai de Ouistreham” gives us an up-close look at people trapped at the bottom of the employment ladder, sprinting through the staterooms and gangways of a French ferry that hauls tourists back and forth on overnight trips to Britain, scrambling to clean and replace the bedding in every stateroom before the next departure.

“Four minutes” per room, her fellow cleaners tell posh, 50something Marianne (Binoche) on her first night, in Frenchg with English subtitles. That’s all the instruction she gets.

“You either cut it or you don’t.”

We’ve barely had time to ponder why any filmmaker — French or otherwise — would think the luminous Binoche could pass for “invisible” or even “working poor,” when her voice-over narration, Marianne taking notes in various cleaning jobs in and around Caen and the way she befriends and questions co-workers give away the game.

She’s researching her new book, an expose of the employment crisis created by the gig economy and how it’s impacting those stuck on that bottom rung. But early on, when an employment counselor discovers her secret, we’re asked to ponder, as she must, the morality, ethics and authenticity of dipping her toes in a world the real people have to struggle through for days and years on end.

We think it even if no one says it out loud. She’s a wealthy, coddled dilettante lying to young Marilou (Léa Carne), struggling Cedric (Didier Pupin), who hits on her in the most chivalrous ways and on testy, single mother-of-three Chrystèle, given a wary, guarded resignation by Hélène Lambert.

We hear Marianne invent her new past, brag about how she goes “off grid” to do this sort of background research, but we can only imagine the world of letters, publishing and privilege she’s come from.

But she does her damnedest to fit in, learning the various cleaning regimens — public restrooms to rental vacation trailers to the ferries that rotate through the port of Ouistreham.

Strangers become new friends who entrust her with the loan of an ancient Citroen, which enables her to find more “hours” in more jobs, and to make more acquaintances.

Some folks have a dream, but many, like Chrystèle, barely have time for that. A lottery ticket and a laugh about meeting “some rich guy” is all she has energy to hope for.

I love the way Lambert side-eyes this stranger when Marianne detours them to a beach, an over-worked working-class single-mom forced to bask in the beauty of the coast and to indulge this stranger who figures a little dip in the sea would be just the sort of lark she could use right now.

We know everything that’s going to happen here, including how these “two worlds” are destined to collide.That robs the film of some of the pathos of Netflix’s “Maid” and similar productions that really get into working class reatlities. Yes, there’s always a bowling alley scene, even in French entries in this genre.

So there’s a distance between us and cinemantic immersion and investment here just as Marianne feels a distance thanks to her dilettantism, how different she is from “these people.”

Its predictability doesn’t break “Between Two Worlds,” but it does soften the blows it intends to deliver.

Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Hélène Lambert, Léa Carne, Emily Madeleine and Didier Pupin

Credits: Directed by Emmanuel Carrèr, scripted by and Hélène Devynck and Emmanuel Carrère, based on a book by Florence Aubenas. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 1:46

Daisy Ridley and Oscar winner Marion Cotillard also provide voices for this multi-animation style whimsy, coming to theaters Aug.25.

Considering the middling kids’ fare this past summer, that’s a nice counter- programming move.

When it comes to comedy, “tone” counts for a lot. So hats off– OK, Keffiyehs off — to director Malik Nejer, screenwriter Abdulaziz Al Muzaini and their cast for going for “goofy” with “Head to Head,” that rarest of rare birds, a Saudi Arabian caper comedy.

They throw in mistaken identity, a corpse that must be disguised so an old patriarch is painted-up and dressed as a woman, a madcap mad bomber, Saudi swearing and Saudi Arabian catfishing and assorted hustles and schemes circling around a long missing “egg.”

As a character nicknamed the King of Diamonds is being released from a Russian prison in the opening, you can guess what kind of “egg” that might be.

I wish I could say it works, that it’s light of foot with a comically subversive streak that speaks to everyday life in a sometimes murderous and always repressive, sexist and dictatorial monarchy. But despite having the makings of a fun farce, “Head to Head” never quite clicks.

But that’s me writing having watched it through the eyes of a Westerner. Maybe the baby-steps in this ongoing search, “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” plays as more riotous in Riyadh.

Over the top threats and violence are filmed in comic bug-eyed close-ups, jokey split screens and almost jaunty montages attempt to force laughs into sequences that aren’t that funny.

But there are laughs amongst the tried-and-true darkly comic situations and often cartoonish characters.

This King of Diamonds crime figure (Shaher Al Qurashi) is released from a Russian prison and flies into Riyadh the same day as the patriarch (Saleh Alkhalaqi) of Sheik’s Chauffeur limo service, a company whose scheming, low-life son is putting on the market for an IPO.

The inbound father-figures are mixed-up by the blundering limo service, which has abruptly been put in the hands of a new CEO, the dopey, corrupt (parts stealing) mechanic Fayadh (Abdulaziz Alshehri).

The ex-con’s mob family in lawless Bathaikha wants their leader. The limo firm’s IPO can’t go forward without their now-hostage owner.

There’s nothing for it but for Fayadh and distracted, ready-to-flee-the-country-with-his girlfriend (Ida Alkusay) limo driver Darwish (Adel Radwan) to take their elderly mob boss to the “exchange.” Only he dies before it can happen.

Mortal threats and a hail of bullets don’t solve anything. They’ll have to scheme with an ever-widening selection of screwball local miscreants, including the catsfishing mugger (Ziyad Alamri) and his ginormous, short-tempered bomb-maker/accomplice (Hesham Alhosawi).

Things sort of bog down as this simple tale turns cluttered and over-complicated in the middle acts. And some funny characters and situations aren’t milked for all they’re worth.

I got a kick out of the parts-swapping/Cadillac-customization hustle Fayadh’s accomplice is running, with his help — new parts swapped out for old, “extra” parts stolen and sold.

“This Cadillac doesn’t go in reverse,” in Arabic with subtitles — or dubbed.” You sold REVERSE?”

“Why do you want to go in reverse? The FUTURE is out there, in FRONT of you?”

What they do with this corpse is not Ghusl in the worst way. Pity they don’t get more giggles for their trouble.

A couple of low-comedy slap fights are worth a chuckle. Female impersonation (post mortem) is a plot point, and the lone woman character has agency and pluck. The lawlessness in this or that corner of the Kingdom is ridiculed, as is “global warming.” No, the Saudis don’t want you to believe in it, either.

The giggles don’t add up to much, but you’ve got to walk before you sprint. I’d love to see more attempts like this as Netflix, Malik Nejer and Abdulaziz Al-Muzani try to show us that Saudis like to laugh, too, and that they can make a comedy that transcends religion and desert borders.

In the meantime, let’s just say “Nice try.”

Rating: TV-MA, violence, death, profanity

Cast: Abdulaziz Alshehri, Adel Radwan, Ida Alkusay, Mohammad Alqass, Ziyad Alamri and Hesham Alhosawi.

Credits: Malik Nejer, scripted by Abdulaziz Al-Muzaini. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

Elizabeth Falkner was a jet-setting, TV-friendly chef and “food personality” at work on a documentary project of some sort when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020.

She recognized the calamity unfolding around her, and also admits to being triggered by memories of closing her restauranst and getting out of that work-yourself-to-death business during the financial collapse of 2008.

She and filmmaker Peter Ferriero (“Her Name is Chef”) switched gears and decided to document, in real time, what the pandemic and the various shutdowns were doing to one of America’s largest industries, one in which she’d already seen an “unsustainable” and toxic mix of workloads, tiny profit margins, burnout risks, ever-more-demanding “foodie” customers and a health care system not set up to take care of those who feed us.

“Sorry, We’re Closed,” is a hopeful, brisk and sprawling “cook’s tour” with “self-care” and support for COVID closed eateries and their stressed chefs and staff as its subtext. They’d not only be visiting scores of closed eateries as their chefs “pivoted” to take-out and home delivery. Falkner would be checking in with stressed chefs — many of whom were filling their time with TikTok and Instagram performative cooking, lessons, etc., and many more of whom were drinking and “crying in a fetal position” about their finances, their inability to pay their stressed hired help and their mental and physical health during a global pandemic.

Falkner and her fellow restaurateurs bristle at the mishandling of the pandemic, then-president Donald Trump “actively sabotaging” the pandemic response and the restaurant industury when he tried to give the flu’s origin racist labeling. Chinese and Asian-American chefs and their friend Falkner express outrage and fear at the division and hate-crimes this was sewing.

The Black Lives Matter protests became another challenge, mid-pandemic, trying to protect one’s restaurant from marches that sometimes led to vandalism.

And all of these tests — disruption of the food supply, laying off of labor, forced closures and general unrest, are just “a dress rehearsal for climate change,” warns the sage and chef Alice Waters, godmother of modern American foodie culture.

The broad swath of people Falkner and Ferriero track down give the film a diffuse focus. It might have been better-served by limiting the number of people interviewed and using fewer chefs, servers, “mixologists” and others to illustrate the myriad problems facing an industry that didn’t get an airline-sized bailout, despite dwarfing most other American workforces in size and reach.

The lack of European-style universal healthcare is listed as one of the biggest burdens facing the “tips” side of the workplace. Millions didn’t return to those jobs after the pandemic, and not just those working for fast food giants or unscrupulous business owners who hoarded all their PPP loan for themselves rather than keep workers on the payroll, which was the entire point.

Burnout and substance abuse, already widespread in this all-consuming/endless days-and-nights job (read Anthony Bordain’s “Kitchen Confidential”), got worse.

But Falker, allowing herself to get very emotional about all this at times, gives us an idea that she didn’t just want to document a crisis and its impact on a corner of the culture. Inspired by an essay by Prune owner and chef and New York Times columnist Gabrielle Hamilton, Falkner wanted to provide a voice to those struggling, a place for those personally impacted to vent and sound the alarm and a filmed visit to boost morale.

Judging from the finished film, she met most of those goals.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Elizabeth Falkner, Alice Waters, Esdras Ochoa, Perry Cheung, Gabrielle Hamilton, Ann Kim, Gerald Sombright, many others

Credits: Directed by Peter Ferriero, written and narrated by Elizabeth Falkner. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:18