Movie Nation

“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.”

July 28, this John Magarro/Chasten Harmon star vehicle hits.

Looks pretty good, played a lot of festivals.

“The Modelizer” is a sex-comedy masquerading as a wish-fulfillment fantasy romance, sort of a “Crazy Rich Womanizing Asians,” and pretty much as insufferable as that sounds.

Veteran supporting player Byron Mann — “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” “Little Fires Everywhere,” “The Big Short” — scripted himself a star vehicle. He plays a smirking, narrates-to-the-camera heir to a Hong Kong real-estate empire who uses his wealth and access to “the most coveted commodity in Hong Kong” — living space — to bed every model who makes her way to the modeling capital of Asia.

We meet Shawn doggie-styling/multi-tasking one model while talking about his model girlfriend Jana
(Dominika Kachlik) and comparing notes with his best bud Bucky (Nichkhun) who is doing the same — in the same penthouse living room.

Frat-bro tacky? Why yes it is!

Perhaps Shawn’s biggest challenge is keeping Jana by reassuring her he’s his “Queen Bee” while continuing to piggishly pick-up models, who look for work and sugar daddies in the city with the highest per capita population of millionaires in the world.

But there’s also a big merger his mother (Julia Nickson) is badgering him about. Seems his womanizing is “bad optics” for their prospective Mainland business partner. He needs to give up the posse and the steady, find a nice Chinese woman and settle down.

And that could be derailed by an extravagant “gift” he sugar daddied to the wrong side-piece. Alina (Hana Hrzic) has a deed, demands and if need be, the services of her Polish thug brother.

That makes this the perfect time for Shawn’s easily-distracted-eye to turn towards sweet, innocent Brazilian Camilla (Rayssa Bratillieri), fresh off the plane, relying on Google translate and facing one indecent proposition after another just for showing up.

At least the little old rich man named Wellington (Kenneth Tsang) will take her to mass. Shawn? He’s closing stores she can try on a new wardrobe he offers to buy, or pitching a “We’ve just met” weekend get-away.

“I’ve NEVER not ‘closed’ a model with the Maldives!” he incredulously smirks to the camera.

The hook here is the transactional “game” that playboys and married rich men play with fashion models, with each party looking to get what they want out of the transaction. That nasty, cynical edge is abandoned in stages as Shawn, in little fits and starts, sort of sees the error in his ways.

Or is he persistent because he’s not used to “I’m not that kind of girl” saying “no?”

There’s barely enough to hold our interest in what is essentially a seriously outdated and sexist women-as-commodities rom-com.

The plot is clumsily built on “deadlines” that no one takes seriously enough to give this tale stakes or urgency.

The movie shoehorns in its own “Bro Rules,” but “wish-fulfillment fantasy” rules these days ordain that whatever people “learn,” they sacrifice nothing to acquire their hearts’ desires. A little bit of “growing,” but not much.

He still wants the youngest, prettiest model he sees. She still wants to parlay her beauty into wealth and comfort.

Still, Hawaiian-born director Keoni Waxman treats us to a veritable Hong Kong travelogue of sights and street scenes, a shiny utterly empty-headed romance with none of the grit of Hong Kong action and little of the charm of a normal romance, because almost everybody here is too obnoxious to relate to.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Byron Mann, Rayssa Bratillieri, Dominika Kachlik,
Hana Hrzic, Kenneth Tsang and Julia Nickson

Credits: Directed by Keoni Waxman and starring Byron Mann. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:35

A kid grows up in a sibling’s shadow in this adaptation of a novel by  David Chariandy.

Screens and streams VOD Aug. 4, and this Clement Virgo film looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

“Gold Brick” is a twisty French heist picture that leans on the “cute.”

It’s a “Get even with the rich” scheme that involves pilfering perfume from France’s Chartres-centered “Cosmetics Valley” distribution chain. It’s more of a “How to” heist picture than a caper comedy.

But this short, not-quite-brisk film’s real shortcoming is that writer-director Jérémie Rozan makes it all about the MO and the VO — “how they’re doing it,” and having his hero explain how, ad nauseum, start-to-finish, in voice-over narration.

We don’t get to figure things out from visuals, situations and dialogue. Noooo. It must be spoon-fed, explained endlessly, with the odd quip or aphorism to make the thief Daniel Sauveur (Raphaël Quenard) sound like a wit.

“Don’t forget, the worst rich person is the one who used to be poor,” he narrates (in French with subtitles, or dubbed). “Like they say in Japan, ‘Rain falls harder on a leaking roof.'”

That oer-explaining is a pity because one thing the script tries to get right is that thieves aren’t generally the smartest guys in the room.

Daniel grew up working class in Chartres, world famous for its cathedral. But even the family home’s view of that stone pile of magnificence is ruined by a billboard for Breuills & Fils (and son) trucking. In Chartres, “The Breuills always win.”

Daniel and his pal-named-for-the-truck-company Scania (Igor Gotesman) fight to not end up working for the Breuils, to no avail. They “own this town.” But once on the payroll, Daniel is the one who figures out all this trendy perfume they’re shipping comes in boxes. The company inventories the boxes, not the number of bottles in them.

A scam is born. But being lummoxes, they sell online, or to street stall vendors. They throw money around. Daniel is stupid enough to wear a Rolex to work, which his crooked foreman (Stéphan Wojtowicz) takes from him. They’re barely clever enough to stay one step up on that shakedown artist and the out-of-his-depth heir who runs this place (Antoine Guoy), much less the cops.

Daniel even blurts out details of his “start-up” to the out-of-his-league blonde (Agathe Rousselle) he hits on at the tony night club. Turns out, she’s new at Breuill’s, in HR. His scheme almost unravels before it really gets going.

The film tracks that pilfering as it progresses from stealing little and thinking small to stealing big and playing all the angles. And every step of the way, Daniel has to thief-splain every damned thing he does, including alternate versions of the way this all will play out.

It’s more engrossing than engaging, as one consequence of over-reliance on voice-over is that it distances the viewer from the protagonist. Even in films where it works — “Goodfellas” comes to mind — we are more observers than participants in what’s going on thanks to the remove having a character talk directly to the viewer adds to the narrative.

The path through the plot here is fascinating, but low-stakes all the way. We never fear for our “heroes,” or connect with them.

And voice-over becomes not just the writer-director’s crutch, but the actor’s. We get less out of Quenard’s performance than we should because his endless explanations leave little that needs to be gotten across by the acting. And when he’s a little less interesting to watch, so if everybody around him.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex

Cast: Raphaël Quenard, Igor Gotesman, Agathe Rousselle, Stéphan Wojtowicz, Youssef Hajdi and Antoine Guoy

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jérémie Rozan. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

I was about five minutes into re-watching “The Cincinnati Kid” when it struck me that I needed to read or re-read director Norman Jewison’s autobiography, or hunt down the recent biography of the Canadian director.

He’s not exactly an obscure filmmaker, with seven Oscar nominations and films like “Moonstruck” and “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming” in his extensive filmography.

But his fifth feature film, his first “serious” movie, has threads that turn up so often in his later work that one wonders, “What made him such a righteous dude?”

The Toronto native who made the groundbreaking “In the Heat of the Night,” “A Soldier’s Story” and the very impressive bio-pic “The Hurricane” was astutely in touch with America’s shifting attitudes on race. And he made sure his films were ahead of the curve in that regard.

Jewison, a child of the Great Depression, took over a 1930s gambling drama Sam Peckinpah was hellbent on making dark and noirish (he filmed a few scenes in black and white, and was fired) and gently folded “representation” and “inclusion” into it so subtly that one barely notices it today.

Steve McQueen, the emerging icon of Hollywood cool, is the title character, a transplanted-to-New Orleans poker player living by his instincts and wits and occasionally surviving with his fists. And who’s the first person we see him show an interest in impressing?

It’s a Black shoeshine boy who always wants him to stop and “try me.” They pitch coins, and Eric, “The Cincinnati Kid” wins. Always. He smiles, tells the lad “You’re not ready for me, yet,” and keeps his coin.

The film, reset from the St. Louis of the Richard Jessup novel to the more racially-tolerant New Orleans, points us towards The Big Game, a showdown between The Kid and the best player of the day, Lancey Howard (Edward G. Robinson). But this being The Big Easy, Jewison made sure to include jazz singer and actor Cab Calloway at the table. “Yeller” the character is named, mixed in with players named “Pig” and “Ladyfingers.” The mere fact he’s in there, playing cards as equals, gives us a taste of New Orleans and an idea of all the “erased” history movies set in such milieus that Hollywood had served up prior to this.

“The Cincinnati Kid” is an inferior run through the similar milieu and themes of “The Hustler,” an unamusing Depression Era card-game precursor to “The Sting.” The plot sets up a love triangle, a potential cheat, misplaced loyalties and what feels like a low-stakes contest. Win or lose, how will The Kid’s life change?

But its muted colors, quiet tone and some impressive performances lift this classic also-ran into something worth watching.

The Kid wants to prove something — to himself, his peers and to his girl Christian (Tuesday Weld), whom he wants to impress.

“Listen, Christian, after the game, I’ll be The Man. I’ll be the best there is. People will sit down at the table with you, just so they can say they played with The Man. And that’s what I’m gonna be, Christian.”

But McQueen’s too cool to let on that his character is “desperate” for this new status. There’s none of the alcoholic resentment of “Fast Eddie” “The Hustler” in him. McQueen gave performances worthy of Oscars. Most of the time, though, he seemed more determined to define his steely cool image and stick to it.

Karl Malden’s The Kid’s old friend, Shooter, a gambler reduced to “playing the percentages” and trying to keep a seriously mercenary floozy of a wife (Ann-Margret, terrific) interested.

Rip Torn plays the scion of local gentry, a would-be card sharp who isn’t in the same league with The Kid or the legendary Lancey Howard.

Jack Weston seems a tad on-the-nose, cast as the skilled but faintly delusional “Pig,” a guy sure to let you see him sweat. Joan Blondell impresses as the blowsy old broad Lady Fingers, with Calloway and veteran character players Jeff Corey and Theodore Marcuse, and Milton Seltzer playing a note-taking/math-computing “Doc” at the card table. Dub Taylor shows up as a dealer at a lower-rent game early in the film.

The McQueen/Edward G. Robinson dynamic is one place “The Cincinnati Kid” had the potential to best “The Hustler.” The dapper Lancey is more present in the picture, more insidious in the ways he brushes off the challenge of “The Kid,” and gets into his opponent’s head over his love-life troubles — Christian, awaiting a commitment, the married Mebla (Ann-Margret) throwing herself at the possible New King of Cards.

But Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats is a “presence” in “The Hustler,” a mostly off-camera myth, Fast Eddie’s Great White Whale. Robinson is too familiar as an actor and a character in the film to be Larger than Life. The movie needed less Edward G., more Edward G. mystique.

Even the Jessup novel was compared to “The Hustler” and found wanting.

Jewison still makes a perfectly entertaining movie out of a card game, a love triangle and a lot of competing agendas in play with every “fold,” “call” or “raise.” A game about “making the wrong move at the right time” becomes the right movie for Jewison, one that transformed a comedy guy into somebody who’d make dramas a lot better than this, often with a social subtext that couldn’t help but strike a nerve.

Rating: PG-13ish

Cast: Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Tuesday Weld, Cab Calloway, Rip Torn and Karl Malden.

Credits: Directed by Norman Jewison, scripted by Ring Lardner Jr. and Terry Southern, based on a novel by Richard Jessup. An MGM release on Amazon, Youtube and Movies!

Running time: 1:42

“Beauty and the Beast” may have been put in book form by a Frenchwoman in the 18th century. But as Disney and lyricist Howard Ashman reminded us, it’s a “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme.” Researchers have found its plot elements and themes in stories from many cultures, some of which push its origins back some 4,000 years.

One of those “origin” lineages is Scandinavian. So California filmmaker Max Gold is on firm “Morphology of the Folk Tale” footing in setting “Belle,” his no-dancing-teapots version of the story, in a stark “Seventh Seal” (Icelandic) landscape.

It’s a violent variation of the story somewhat more in keeping with the grim darkness of the original tale, ignoring the “Disney” versions and the softening up the famous 90s’ TV adaptation gave it. But as recognizable as its themes and story beats are, as striking as the settings might be, “Belle” is a clumsy film, uncertain of its tone, unsatisfying in its performances and handling of those themes.

Andrea Snædal‘s Belle is a farm girl living with a widowed father (Gudmundur Thorvaldsson) who’d like nothing better than to marry her off to one of the local lumps. But she’s not having it.

Where they live, a legend has become more than local lore. Men poking around the cave where a rose of immortality is kept find themselves slaughtered and eaten by The Beast. The location of that magical rose seems well-known. But its origins, a “curse” rendered unto a man by a jilted witch-lover, are not.

That’s why that witch (Hana Vagnerová) is our narrator. She can set the story straight.

When Belle’s father grows deathly ill, she goes hunting for the rose. The cave where it is kept is guarded by a mute and blind young torch-bearer. Belle won’t be dissuaded. She meets the man who sometimes transforms into a beast (Ingi Hrafn Hilmarsson) and begs the rose off him. He seems nice enough, “kind” and all that.

With a little help from the conjure-woman, Papa is cured. But the “spell” that fixes him “has an ‘unless.'” It won’t last “unless” Belle goes to stay with the beast, and over Dad’s objections, she does.

His “curse” stares them both in the face, and in this version “I have to fall in love” is “the rule” that will break it. That’s a switch from the traditional point of the story, that the Beast has to be sweet enough for someone to fall for him.

The fetching, spirited Belle seems like a cute catch. But not so fast, there, fairytale fans!

The film, in English with bits of Icelandic dialogue and a folk song, reaches for a lighter touch as Belle tries to “test” ideas about the “rules,” the things that turn the rugged hermit into The Beast. Throwing rocks at his head doesn’t provoke him. Tying him up and pouring hot candle wax may have its kinky fans, but it does nothing to change man into Beast.

The film never quite finds its sweet spot. The violence mixed with flippant modern vernacular is never quite darkly funny, and the film leaves one puzzled about Belle’s agenda, or the Witch’s. The Beast’s, at least, we understand.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say Gold doesn’t “get” the meaning of the tale, whose best film version might still be the 1946 Jean Cocteau French classic. But at least the animated “Disney version” was moving.

This one just meanders about a striking landscape and struggles to strike a chord, or at other times, to simply make sense.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Andrea Snædal, Ingi Hrafn Hilmarsson, Gudmundur Thorvaldsson and Hana Vagnerová

Credits: Scripted and directed by Max Gold. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:30

The first tune that grabs your attention in this horror film, directed by and starring Patrick Wilson, is a re-recorded Kevin Cronin cover of REO Speedwagon’s “Roll with the Changes.”

The second is a peculiar little flourish playing on the turntable of our nightmares, this ditty by ditty dynamo Tiny Tim.

And then there’s the one you have to stay through the closing credits to get to, the one that reminds us that Patrick Wilson’s a singing actor, when the need or the urge arises.

He’s “featured” on this, which plays under the credits.