Movie Nation

Leon talks a good game.

He’s come to the summer house of a friend, in the forest set back from the sea, to “work.” He has “a manuscript” and a “deadline.”

The friend — Felix — wants to dash off for a swim, fix a leaking roof on his mother’s cottage, socialize. He too has a “deadline,” a photography portfolio to finish for an art school application.

But Leon is the one who says “work” all the time. “I need to work alone.” “I have to go. Work.”

Noises — from the woods, planes and helicopters overhead, the other woman staying in this house in the words having sex — distract and alarm him. He’s always dozing off and rarely really zeroing in on the task at hand. What’s up with that?

At least his intense focus on the “work” that he’s not really doing, the deadline he’s probably going to miss, keeps his head down. All around him, people are recreating, chatting, enjoying their time off as if they also have limited time.

A cataclysm is coming. Those planes and helicopters? They’re hauling water. Just down the way, the forest is “Afire” and getting closer all the time.

The latest from writer-director Christian Petzold– “Undine” and “Phoenix” were his — isn’t a disaster movie. It’s another character study in Germanic stereotypes and a romance that never quite becomes romantic.

He has Felix (Landston Uibel) drag his friend Leon (Thomas Schubert) away for a long weekend at his mother’s hutte by the sea. And once there, Felix and we wonder why in the hell he would bother.

Leon is pedantic, sullen, dull and humorless, an all “work” wet blanket. Even the fetching young “seasonal worker” (Paula Beer) also staying at Felix’s mother’s place can’t drag him out of his funk.

Leon won’t go swimming. He’s constantly trying to get Felix on task — either finishing his portfolio, getting the Mercedes that broke down on the way fixed, or fetching groceries. He’s tactless to Nadja about her noisy love-making, and about her job. She can’t even bribe him into being human with an offer of a free ice cream cone from her resort town cart.

“I’m not a big fan of ice cream.”

As romance and hurt feelings and short tempers and increasingly alarming signs of the fire-to-come swirl around him, Leon will have to break out of his existential funk if he wants to survive and if he wants his “work” to be readable.

Schubert, an award-winning young Austrian actor, makes Leon on-the-spectrum unlikable pretty much start to finish. Leon’s self-seriousness crosses into insufferability. So there’s no sense confessing his love to the pretty woman he can’t have a conversation with without insulting her.

Uibel’s Felix is more carefree, open to experience and distraction. Uibel doesn’t have much to play in a light character with a casual disregard for deadlines and risk. Even though he never becomes a sweetness and light “type,” we never stop wondering why he brought this stick in the mud with him.

Beer, who played “Undine,” leans into guarded but beguiling here, a free spirit who keeps her secrets even as she’s reaching out to this hapless, tuned-out narcissist who seems to live his life by the rules and a discipline he professes but rarely practices.

“Afire” is a dry, downbeat character study for the first two acts and a film that turns to melodrama — the fire upon them — for the third.

It’s likeable and engrossing, with Petzold not shy about spending the time to let a wild card character, lifeguard Devid (Enno Trebs), tell an anecdotal joke that only a German would find funny, or to bring in Leon’s publisher/editor late in the story to sort of “explain” why Leon’s the way he is.

The film, titled “Roter Himmel” (Red Sky) in Germany, makes an intriguing journey from irritating to melancholy and sad thanks largely to an engaging cast and a filmmaker brave enough to bore and annoy us before belatedly getting to his point, which we’ve known it all along.

Rating: unrated, animal peril, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs and Matthias Brandt.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christian Petzold. A Janus release.

Running time: 1:44

I really enjoyed this moody Chinese film noir about an inmate remembering why he’s in prison.

“Spare, dark and gritty,” an award winner at Cannes, this Film Movement release deserves a bigger audience.

Now the good folks of Maitland, Florida can enjoy a movie with subtitles added to their library’s collection.

MovieNation, spreading fine foreign language cinema all over the Southeast, no matter how much their George Wallace wannabe governors may hate the idea of minds being broadened by movies.

The first time I heard that Britishism disguised by the clever British acronym “Cee YoU Next Tuesday” was right around the first of October, 1980.

And because it came out of the plummy, posh Oscar-winning mouth of the late Glenda Jackson, it went right by me.

I can pinpoint this date because she said it in the movie “Hopscotch,” a jaunty little spy comedy starring her and set up as a star vehicle for Walter Matthau. Last night I spat out my Guinness in comic surprise at having missed the joke, the first time around.

Jackson wasn’t the first person I heard use the Yiddishism “feygeleh,” probably the origin of the gay slur, something her character drops into a description her character is passing onto Kendig, played by the Yiddish-mad Matthau. Mel Brooks slipped it into “Blazing Saddles” and maybe elsewhere, if memory serves. It too, is kind of an out-of-nowhere gag that trots by without notice.

The first time I interviewed Matthau was about the movie “I.Q.,” in which he played The tallest Einstein Ever. As he and the great scientist were contemporaneous enough to have possibly met, I asked him when he’d have said to Albert E. if he had the chance.

Matthau said “I’d have probably have told him a joke in Yiddish. Einstein LOVED Yiddish!”

Then Matthau, who got his start in New York’s Yiddish theater, launched into an off-color comic anecdote/joke about three men, in Yiddish. It took a minute of two to get to the punchline, in Yiddish. Which he then breathlessly translated. HILARIOUSLY.

Matthau was mad for Yiddish, relished a joke well-told, adored Mozart and loved the high life he both worked his way into with his acting, and that he married into by tying the knot with the famous playwright William Saroyan’s ex-wife, the celebrated socialite Carol Marcus.

“Hopscotch” was thus tailor-made for the then-60 year-old Matthau, a comic actor having a grand second wind in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He’d play a globe-trotting spy who doesn’t take being put out to pasture well.

Using his spycraft, and with a little help from a retired Brit lady spook and lover (Jackson), Kendig” would “Hopscotch” around Europe and America, teasing his amoral CIA boss (Ned Beatty) and his Old World Charm Soviet nemesis (Herbert Lom) with a tell-all “tell-the-truth” memoir about spy-shenanigans with dictators like Somoza and Papa Doc and the “mysterious death of Dag Hammarskjold.”

In a post-Watergate age of growing government mistrust and government agency misbehavior, the rival spy agencies would do anything to silence this rogue agent who was telling all their secrets. Kendig? He’d travel from Salzburg to Switzerland, London to Marseilles and even Savannah, skipping along, using old contacts and everything he knew about his hunters to evade them and vex them no end, sending them one scandalized chapter at a time.

“Hopscotch” thus becomes a comic thriller and travelogue, with Matthau in assorted Homberg hats, safari jackets and trenchcoats, merrily plotting this trick, that escape and the occasional humiliation, singing along, humming and on occasion conducting the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart every step of the way.

British cinematographer/producer/director Ronald Neame, who got his start shooting the films of David Lean in the ’40s, wasn’t known for comedy. “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Prime of Miss Jean Brody” were his most famous films. But Mozart turns this bon bon of a movie into a bouncy little gambol of a Grand Tour.

How much did Matthau love Mozart? On his one visit to “Saturday Night Live,” he threw his weight around (a lot, according to the cast) and made cast-member Garrett Morris the night’s musical guest, singing a Mozart aria.

The film is a case study in effortlessness. It’s never hilarious, but the laughs stick with you and there are chuckles scattered throughout this picture. Matthau is playing at playing a spy, and he makes damned sure you know he isn’t trying too hard.

In one scene, recognized as a blown take that got in the movie, he’s typing away at his book in the vacation home of his hateful, violent (and foul-mouthed) boss, “C U Next Tuesday Meyerson (Beatty)” outside of Savannah when Kendig returns his typewriter carriage a bit clumsily and knocks over his just-opened bottle of Michelob.

Not in the script. Matthau, unrattled, stays in character, picks up the beer the way every one of us would in such a mishap and drinks it to stop it from foaming all over everything.

The whole movie is like that, with Jackson lending her equally effortless “touch of class” to the proceedings right from her “meet cute” introduction.

“Oh where have you BEEEEEN you old GOAT?”

I hadn’t watched “Hopscotch” all the way through in decades, but the scenes that stick still stick, and the charm just twinkles off scene after scene. Matthau and Jackson, who had clicked in “House Calls” a couple of years earlier, have a laid-back chemistry that’s hard to top. Beatty makes a perfectly vile autocratic villain. Lom, the “Pink Panther” series veteran, stands out among the supporting cast, and look for Matthau’s son and stepdaughter in cute bit parts.

Munich, Salzburg and Savannah and environs make it feel Bond-lite, a well-traveled caper comedy as spy thriller with laughs instead of bloodshed and stakes so low you never for a moment fear for the safety of our “Barber of Seville” singing hero.

It’s as watchable as ever, so See it Next Tuesday or at your convenience.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Ned Beatty, Herbert Lom and Sam Waterston.

Credits: Directed by Ronald Neame, scripted by Brian Garfield and Bryan Forbes, based on the novel by Brian Garfield. An AVCO Embassy release on Movies!, Amazon, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:46

“My veins no longer pump the blood of life,” Gus purrs to Irene, when he finally gets her to agree to go out with him. “We NEED you to nurture me back to life, Irene. An ETERNITY awaits us!”

Irene? She’s hearing those alarm bells go off, the ones that might have been dinging the first few times this gorgeous, foreign-accented Adonis hit on her as he was jogging. But then Irene (Jamie Bernadette) didn’t know women named Iris and Ireland and Ivy and Irerce and Ira have been getting killed all over metro Atlanta, apparently by a serial killer who can’t spell worth a damn.

There’s something about this Augustus “Gus” fellow (Luca Della Valle) who’s haunted her dreams, something from Catholic mythology, something about a saint pierced by a bunch of arrows, as if that excused this weirdo going around town gutting women with an ancient spearhead.

“Sebastian,” this ridiculous, almost-not-quite-amateurish picture’s title, is our clue.

The slickest thing in this no-budget indie is writer-director Mann Robinson’s animated production logo. But hats off to anybody who gets his or her script written, talks just enough “name recognition” talent to sign on to get it financed, filmed and released…to Tubi.

That Mr. Mann must be damned persuasive. I lost count of how many grown-ass-actresses he talked into taking their tops off for this fiasco.

The acting isn’t awful, although if I see one more student-film-level flop with veteran character player Clifton Powell‘s name in the credits, I’m taking that as a warning.

The story — cops (Torrei Hart and Darius McCrary) slow-walking and stumble-footing their way through disappearances that turn into murder cases, poor Irene abused by her cheating bro beau (Michael Emery), then courted by the tall, dark stranger “Gus” — has zero forward momentum. It’s a still-life.

And the dialogue?

“This s–t is SERIOUS,” the captain (Powell) says.

“That serious, Captain?”

“SERIOUS.”

Me? I’m getting too old for this s–t.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence, nudity, profanity.

Cast: Jamie Bernadette, Luca Della Valle, Torrei Hart, Darius McCrary and Clifton Powell.

Credits: Directed by Mann Robinson, scripted by Ken King and Mann Robinson. A Mann Robinson Production on Tubi.

Running time: 1:30

Sorry, if you’re OK with this faster and faster cycle of recycling, and Chalameting — in this case — of this worn out Roald Dahl story — you’re part of the problem.

Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa? Sure. Seeing as how “Paddington” director Paul King is on board, that suits.

What was the last thing we say Chalamet in, kids? Wasn’t about eating chocolate now, was it?

Warner Brothers might want to put in more effort on original material.

Just in time for the holidays. No Wilder, no Depp, little in the way of music.

The right viewer in the proper frame of mind, in the mood for a gloomy, symbolic and supernatural dip into the psyche, might get more out of the Aussie thriller “Run Rabbit Run” than I did.

A slower-than-slow slide into a mother’s concern for a psychosis seemingly taking over her child, or perhaps herself, Daina Reid’s film almost made good on its threat to put me to sleep.

Sarah Snook, of “The Glass Castle,” “Pieces of a Woman” and “An American Pickle,” stars as Sarah, a fertility specialist and single mother in suburban Adelaide, South Australia.

She’s just lost her father, we gather in a compact little bit of opening exposition. She’s newly divorced. And we learn all this via her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre), who asks a lot of questions about her upcoming seventh birthday party, which give the viewer a lot of answers about their lives.

They’re in a new place, with boxes filling the garage. And Mia is saying “I miss” this or that person — including Sarah’s estranged mother, Joan.

“I miss people I’ve never met all the time,” the kid assures her.

Then a white rabbit turns up at their door one day, and quite aside from the symbolism of a fertility doc taking care of a bunny, there’s the fact that her nickname for her child is “Bunny.”

Sarah tries to get the bunny to “f— off” once Mia’s gone to bed. The rabbit fights back, and Mia sees this from her window. That’s when Mia starts acting out, demanding to see “Joan,” looking for pictures of her mother’s childhood. There’s another girl in some of those old family photos. Mia declares “That’s me,” and when they visit Joan (Greta Scacchi) in the nursing home that’s stuck dealing with her dementia, Mia insists that she’s Alice, Sarah’s long lost sister.

Sarah skips from puzzled to infuriated to frantic over this turn of events, as Mia becomes more and more difficult to handle and starts sketching your standard issue “child seeing monsters” drawings at home and at school.

Can this child and mother be saved?

After that elegantly compact scene-setting opening, Reid — best known for TV’s “Shining Girls” — has a devil of a time getting this picture started and getting over a serious case of streaming-TV beating-around-the-bushism.

Yes, we can guess where this is heading, and quickly. Confusing us with whom exactly Mia is apparently reincarnating (Could be Joan, for a few scenes, “Alice” it is…eventually) doesn’t improve the narrative or throw us off the scent.

Snook does a nice job of unraveling, and LaTorre makes a perfectly infuriating, undisciplined child.

But “Run Rabbit Run” never moves at anything faster than a saunter, and takes forever to stop meandering about and get on the obvious horror parable it is trying to put over.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Sarah Snook, Lily LaTorre, Greta Scacchi and Damon Herriman.

Credits: Directed by Daina Reid, scripted by Hannah Kent. An XYZ films release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:40

Dame Maggie, Oscar Queen Kathy Bates and always-a-contender Laura Linney make their way from Ireland to a famous French shrine.

Wonder if the cinema’ll serve a decent pint for the occasion?

Harp or Guinness I’m thinking.

(Updated: My review of the film from that Guinness free screening is here )

“The Channel” is a super-violent cops-and-robbers shoot-em-up set in the Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans.

It’s built around “Heat” scaled shootouts between Tac’d to the max ex-military bank robbers, and New Orleans PD, SWAT and an FBI bank robbery unit.

The picture benefits from its simplicity — robbers, bloodied and hunted and on the run — and its Big Easy setting. A big chunk of the budget went to armanent and bullet-riddled mayhem, with getaway cars and cop cruisers, cops and robbers riddled with bullets in several set-piece shootouts eating up much of the film’s running time.

It’s not the most logical thriller, with suggestions of real world law enforcement behavior — a furious need for revenge — jumbled up with a plot that contrives to judge one cop killer more harshly than others, and old fashioned scenes of faceless men in blue displaying heedless bravery in the face of overwhelming firepower, something the news — and New Orleans PD’s MO — -doesn’t validate.

But it’s not terrible, with a couple of decent performances and veteran B-movie director William Kaufman (“Sinners and Saints,” “The Hit List,” “Jarhead” and “The Marine” sequels) giving us competently-staged action and dialogue — he co-wrote the script — that leans into hard-boiled.

“Catch’em? This is NEW ORLEANS. We’re gonna BURY’em.”

A father (Clayne Crawford of TV’s “Lethal Weapon”) hands his baby girl off to a sitter and takes off for a day of work. That means gearing up and masking up with five ex-military goons, plus a driver, to knock-off a local bank.

The guy in charge, Mick (veteran heavy Max Martini)? He gives his personality away in a long, racist joke from his time in Iraq on the drive over, and his psychosis in the way he beats and tortures the bank manager AFTER the guy has surrendered the vault key.

It turns out, Mick and Jamie, our father-figure, are brothers. They will be referred to as “The Mean One” and “The Smart One” when others speak of the two ex-Marines on this long day turned into night.

The robbery goes just well enough for them to be shocked when they’re ambushed in the parking lot. A LONG shoot-out ensues, half a dozen cops die, as do half of the villains. The survivors are on the run, one of them bleeding-out, with even their underworld connections forsaking them in their hour of need.

“Too much blood on” their stolen loot. “BLUE blood.”

But there is no situation that Mick isn’t willing to beat or murder their way into mastering. Gangsters and cops get it in equal measure, with loyal Jamie ever-more-appalled, yet still pulling the trigger to cover whatever throwdown his brother’s gotten them into this time.

His baby has a mother, and Ava (Juliene Joyner) is begging him to flee and cussing out Mick — to his face — when his brother doesn’t run.

Nicoye Banks plays the FBI agent leading the hunt for men he IDs as “vets with trigger time in the sandbox.” Jaren Mitchell plays the one local underworld figure the robbers figure they can deal with. But can they?

The performances are mostly on-the-mark, with Martini, Joyner, Banks and Mitchell standing out, and other players impressing in a scene or two as a snitch, a fence, an ex-military medic, etc.

The shootouts are staged with more efficiency than flair, and considering the gunstore-emptying expenditure of ammo, even “efficiency” is a stretch. Every now and then you see law enforcement holding semi-automatic weapons in ways we don’t usually see on a set with a military or police consultant present.

“The Channel” limits its “New Orleans moments” to a hasty bit of street life that passes by, mid-escape, and a scene on a street car. Shorter shootouts and more of that local color wouldn’t have been a bad thing.

Making more of the “revenge” nature of the pursuit and less of the “die like a warrior” messaging of the bad guys would have given the picture some needed edge. And that might have saved “The Channel” from a head-slappingly stupid finale that simply beggars belief.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Clayne Crawford, Max Martini, Juliene Joyner, Nicoye Banks, Todd Jenkins and Jaren Mitchell.

Credits: Directed by William Kaufman, scripted by William Kaufman and Paul Reichelt. A Brainstorm Media release.

Running time: 1:40

“Two Tickets to Greece” kicks off like too many other Grecian idylls, with a woman in need of getting her spark, zest for life, belief in love or “groove” back setting off for sunny Greece.

But this variation on a “Shirley Valentine/Mamma Mia!/My Life in Ruins/Sisterhood” theme is French and thus a bit brittle, a little eccentric and less predictable than you might think.

It’s the sort of mismatched “buddy” travelogue that passes slowly over slight misadventures and hurt feelings that accompany a tentative, perhaps ill-advised reunion of two former childhood friends. And then Kristin Scott Thomas shows up, and what was passable entertainment is unmistakably funnier, more complicated and more interesting.

Writer-director Marc Fitoussi (“Paris Follies”) first introduces us to two Meudon middle school girls — bookish, withdrawn Blandine and wild child Magalie who has come by to help her friend babysit, raid the family’s liquor cabinet and listen to the soundtrack to that late ’80s cult film, “The Big Blue.”

It’s 1989, and that mesmerizing early Luc Besson drama about free-diving has the girls obsessed. With much of it set off the island of Amorgos, Greece, that gives the tweens a bucket list item.

“We WILL go,” Blandine promises (in French with English subtitles), probably the most assertive that she’s ever been.

Thirty years later, we catch up with on-the-spectrum-bitter Blandine (Olivia Côte) as she’s muttering and fleeing a spirit-lifting improvisation class that her college-age son (Alexandre Desrousseaux) gave her as a present.

He’s about to leave for school. Her ex-husband, his father, is about to remarry, to a younger woman. Benji is worried about her, how depressed and lost she seems to be.

Stumbling across the “Big Blue” soundtrack CD, “property of Magalie Graulières,” he hears about her childhood friend, “as sassy as they came.” He sets them up on a blind reunion date.

Negative, embittered Blandine isn’t as bowled-over by the still vivacious, impulsive and irresponsible Magaliie (Laure Calamy, Côte’s co-star in “My Donkey, My Lover & I”) as the viewer is. She hears about Magalie’s casual living arrangements with a bisexual roommate and debt-dodging ways and figures “deadbeat.”

But for once she doesn’t accentuate the negative about the experience to her son. So when pressing issues keep him from joining her on that long-delayed dream trip to Greece, he gives Magalie his ticket and expects the two to get along like old times. As the trip instantly strains Blandine’s tolerance for exhuberant, “over-the-top” Magalie, how will they fare when things start to go wrong?

There’s little to this film, innocuously-titled “Les Cyclades” after the chain of islands they traverse, that suggests a knockabout farce is about to break out. Encounters with goats, surfers, archeologists and surly Greek ferry crew members don’t merit much more than a smile.

Calamy has the fun part, and her energy carries the picture and the wet-blanket character that Magalie would never have remained friends with, even if they hadn’t split up as kids. The personality clash has a muted politeness that gets in the way of big laughs.

But then they meet Magalie’s artist friend, a British woman raised French and now living with her lover on Mykonso — so of course she changed her name to Bijou. Kristin Scott Thomas lights things up in these scenes, bubbling over with an uninhibited, post-menopausal “artist type” free-spiritedness that lifts the picture’s third act.

This “Trip to Greece” isn’t an epic journey, and that includes the familiar emotional ground the characters have to cover. But the leads click, the scenery is fab and there are just enough chuckles, sweet laughs and grimaces to make it worth 100 minutes of our time in the sundrenched birthplace of Western Civilization.

Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity, underage drinking, pot smoking

Cast: Laure Calamy, Olivia Côte, Kristin Scott Thomas, Alexandre Desrousseaux and Panos Koronis.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marc Fitoussi. A Greenwich release.

Running time: 1:50

The first trailer for this sweeping saga of the rose and fall of Bonaparte features Vanessa Kirby and Ian McNeice (thought it was Rupert Everett as the Duke of Wellington, or is he George III?)…and a performance that I guess will grow on me and everybody else. Because Joaquin Phoenix is affecting but very much against the grain in how Napoleon is traditionally portrayed.

Thanksgiving, we all learn “La Marseillaise,” and the limits of ego and power and “genius.”