Movie Nation

I’m not a huge horror buff, fan or aficionado. But when I sit down to watch one I do like for it to be smart.

“Clock” is a childbirth/”biological clock” thriller that has modern medicine playing God, The Holocaust and Human Evolution itself as its subtexts.

Smart? Writer-director Alexis Jacknow’s debut feature borders on brilliant.

Dianna Agron plays Ella, our protagonist, a 37 year-old doctor’s wife whose interior design business is just blowing up, so she’s just a tad touchy if not downright testy when her pregnant-or-already-a-mother girlfriends gang up on her at a friend’s baby shower.

Wanna feel the baby kick? Erm, no.

“It’s a BABY, Ella, not an ALIEN.”

Their “Don’t worry, your biological clock will kick in” assurances fall on deaf ears. She’s not sure she has one. Especially with her aged, widowed father (Saul Rubinek at his nudnik best) badgering her about the family that almost didn’t make it through the Holocaust, a genetic line that “ends with you” if she doesn’t ante up.

Her new OB-GYN is quick to turn her “I don’t think I’m ready yet” upside down with the news that womb-wise, she’s now officially “geriatric.” But there’s this “clinical study.”

Ella gives it some thought, notes the friction it’s causing in her otherwise happy/sexually-fulfilling marriage (Jay Ali plays her husband) and rashly cancels her biggest-ever contract, tells her husband she’s got business out of town and submits to the pills and “cognitive therapy” of Dr. Simmons, played by Melora Hardin of TV’s “The Office” and “Transparent.”

Let’s get that “clock fixed,” the good doctor says. Side effects? Of course. This is a horror movie, after all.

Ella gives Agron a character with edge and just a whiff of vulnerability, and she is fierce and frightening in the part. Ella pushes back against pushy parent and pushy friends, snaps at the good doctor and Agron lets us see hallucinations she pretty much shrugs off because this broad is tough. It’s a terrific performance.

A funny moment — Ella sees a tree-climbing child whose distracted mother hasn’t noticed and then distracts her with more kvetching about “You WANT a baby!” Mom’s one-track-mind lobbying means no one intervenes and the kid takes a terrible fall.

Stephen Lukach’s unsettling score, the gloomy-doomy production design of Kristin Gibler and Jacknow’s lean script and focused direction build the mood, so that when this “Let’s get you pregnant” picture turns dark, we’re braced for it.

The veteran character actor Rubinek brings an alarmingly cruel edge to this needy aspiring grandad, leaning into “type” and crossing several lines as he guilts his daughter with “Your mother and I loved each other THAT much” (a dig at the husband, sitting right next to Ella) and launching into a lecture that includes “the camps (Bergen-Belsen)” and decrying the “empty chairs at the table” because Ella hasn’t been fruitful and multiplied.

“Evolution” and “procreation” seems to be on everybody’s lips. It’s no wonder our Ella is ready to go off the deep end.

Nightmarishly gory visions of childbirth rattle her. Drugs and an isolation tank and Rorsach tests that animate suggest that she’s got good reason for doubts.

Frights? There are a couple. But this is mostly a thriller about Ella, a surrogate for generations of women, battling against peer pressure, family pressure and the politics of stealing a woman’s bodily autonomy, fighting to live her best life, one that she chooses, one that won’t include a baby.

Rating: unrated, violence, gore, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Dianna Agron, Melora Hardin, Jay Ali and Saul Rubinek.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alexis Jacknow. A 20th Century Studios/Hulu release.

Running time: 1:31

Harry Belafonte, who brought music from “The Islands” to the masses and helped integrate American pop music, film and television, an activist who never lost that passion for justice and equality, has died at the age of 96.

He outlived his friend and fellow Caribbean islander who made it in Hollywood Sidney Poiter. But each man’s passing has brought back the flood of memories that connected them through each’s long and storied careers.

Belafonte got his start in The American Negro Theatre, which is where he met and befriended Poitier. They became two of the most important figures in American popular culture, each man breaking segregation barriers in his primary field, often swapping places by being this or that “first” in film.

You read the biography of one, and the other figures most prominently in it. Harry would turn down roles (“Porgy and Bess”), Sidney would take the job instead. Sidney wins his first Oscar for “Lilies of the Field,” Harry rides him for not doing his own singing.

They’d pal around, make movies together, and fall out — Belafonte always the more outspoken and fiery, Poitier always the more courtly and genteel.

I got to interview them separately, and each joked about the absent other in ways that had this cute edge to it. I recall Poitier getting a guarded look on his face when I started to talk about what Harry had said jokingly about him when Belafonte was honored at the National Black Theatre Festival, which I used to cover for the newspaper in the city where it was founded.

And I remember Belafonte leaning forward with a teeth-baring smile when I threw something that Poitier had said jokingly about him in an earlier interview.

Both men lost their wariness and roared at each other’s loving barbs when the punchlines arrived, plainly delighted that they’d come up together and yet taken different paths towards the same personal and universal goals.

Loved Harry in “Uptown Saturday Night” and “Buck and the Preacher” with Sidney, and he classed up “BlackKklansman” in ways Spike Lee was certain he would. “Odds Against Tomorrow,” “The Angel Levine,” Altman’s “The Player” and “Kansas City,” “Bobby,” he was damned good on the screen.

Poitier had the grander film career. But only Harry could teach the world to love Caribbean music and the island lifestyle. Lifelong fan Jimmy Buffett used to cover this one, in tribute and to give thanks.

96 years. Well done.

Inutterably gorgeous and inexpressively sad, “The Eight Mountains” is an Italian journey of male self-discovery, a “Razor’s Edge” without a war, “Eat Pray Love” with a little less indulgence.

Based on a novel by Paolo Cognetti, it wrestles with a man’s fate and the ennui that comes with recognizing your destiny. These existential themes are seen through the eyes of a man who remembers his lifelong friendship from the days when Pietro was a city boy, curious about the world, bristling at life’s boundaries and the role he is ordained to take, and his new “montanero” friend, Bruno, whose life path seemed set from birth.

Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) grew up in Turin. He was 12 when he spent that first summer in the Grenan Mountains, in a once-thriving cheese-making village that in the ’80s had shrunk to just 14 inhabitants and only one child, Bruno (Cristiano Sassella), who also happened to be his age.

They became fast friends, wandering the Alpine meadows, swimming in an Alpine lake with Pietro, given the dialect nickname “Berio” (both mean “rock”), helping with Bruno’s chores with the dairy cattle and goats.

Bruno is smart, with a natural engineering inclination. But he is trapped there, or so Pietro’s parents think. He’s also more athletic, something Pietro resents as his engineer father (Filippo Timi) likes to take vigorous hikes up mountains and glaciers when he visits and Bruno is better at it.

Dad seems to prefer the more robust Bruno, which causes Pietro to toss a tantrum when his parents try to arrange for the country boy to come live with them and get a proper schooling in the city. His mother speaks of giving Bruno “choices” in life, which Pietro resists. He wants his summer-in-the-mountains friend.

But Bruno’s absent, construction-worker dad vetoes this, and instead takes Bruno with him to work on a distant project. Pietro’s parents sealed Bruno’s fate by interfering, and Pietro lost his playmate.

“His adult life started at 13,” the adult Pietro (Luca Marinelli) laments in voice-over.

They’re separated, with Bruno the brick-layer working away and indulged only-child Pietro (Andrea Palma plays him as an adolescent) drifting through school, unfocused about what to do with his life, leading to a serious teenaged estrangement from his highly-strung careerist Dad.

“I never want to become like you,” Pietro lashes out, in Italian with English subtitles.

Only after Pietro’s father dies does he renew his relationship with Bruno as his friend is determined to rebuild a long-ruined cabin in the alpeggio — the high pasture — that Pietro’s dad bought and made Bruno promise to fix up.

As they reunite to accomplish this, Pietro realizes Bruno was in closer touch with his father than he was, and may have even understood him better. As more years pass and Pietro wanders the Himalayas in between returns to the alpeggio adn the life Bruno makes there, he and we see, compare and measure two divergent life paths and the barriers to happiness and fulfillment in each.

There’s a little of Winston Groom’s “Forrest Gump” theme underlying “The Eight Mountains.” The title, an Eastern metaphor, suggests two paths to fulfillment — one wandering, climbing assorted peaks, the other, staying close to where you grew up and mastering that environment, that one mountain.

Husband and wife filmmakers Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, teaming up for the first time (he directed “Beautiful Boy,” she used to be an actress), tap into the story’s existential angst, that finding-one’s-way/finding-one’s-place that every generation faces in accordance with the world they grows up in.

The performances are subdued and sublime, highlighting each character’s efforts to reject or embrace his fate, or both. Masculine silence, the things men don’t say out loud to each other, underlies every conversation.

The filmmakers perfectly set the tone for the film by scoring it to the music of Swedish singer-songwriter (in English) Daniel Norgren, whose DIY instruments and simply-produced laments unerringly put us in the characters’ frame of mind.

I don’t think “The Eight Mountains” is exclusionary or gender-specific enough to be inscrutable to women, any more than “Eat Pray Love” was for men. But you may have to be a grown man to wholly appreciate what this exquisite, heartbreaking movie is getting at, the melanchly nostalgia that hangs over it.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Luca Marinelli, Alessandro Borghi, Lupo Barbiero, Cristiano Sassella, Elisabetta Mazzullo, Andrea Palma and Filippo Timi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, based on the novel by Paolo Cognetti. A Janus Films release.

Running time: 2:27

Damn, this looks a LOT like “More Than a Game, the 2008 doc LeBron James participated in and produced. Buzz Bissinger of “Friday Night Lights” is involved this time, but…

June 2. Maybe it’ll be more revealing.

Ben Milliken the actor more or less holds his own as a seemingly unkillable bouncer, drug mule and factotum for another Mexican Reina del Sur in “Snag,” an indie thriller in the “El Mariachi” mold.

As a director and co-writer and probably overseer of the editing of this picture, he can’t get out of his own way.

It’s the story of a bloke the locals can’t stop calling “gringo,” even though he’s not a Norteamericano. Those who do grasp that he’s merely an Australian just label him “blanco,” which is somehow almost worse.

He came to Mexico on “business” some while back, fell in with the beautiful Valentina (Sofía Castro), who saved his arse in a Cantina brawl. But that just gets him further in Dutch with her mob queen mom (Jeanette Aguilar Harris).

Bullets fly and blood flows and it comes to pass that the mother is hiding the daughter from the not-actually-a-gringo. And by Jesús, this tyranny/blanco-blocking will not stand! 

Simple, lean little quest story, with pistolas and ametralladoras and brawls that get ugly and then turn out to be personal and good-natured.

“Good to see you too, man.”

Cute. But here’s where Milliken gets too cute and outsmarts himself. He’s broken the thin narrative into two timelines, “Then” and “Now.” “Then” tells us how he got here, first meetings with this character or that one. “Now” is his quest to get to the woman he loves.

As the movie progresses, it jumps back and forth in time so often it happens in mid-shootout, mid-meeting, watering down suspense, removing any sense of mystery and slowing things down no matter how fast the edits.

It’s a stupid, showy blunder. And it does this marginal script and uneven-in-skill-and-charisma cast no favors.

You’ve got torture scenes, shifting alliances and an old friend (Jaime Camil) maybe hired to deal with our hero telling us that “Honor is something you show up for.” You’ve got great locations, like a cantina in the literal middle of nowhere (New Mexico locations) that becomes the setting of the first furious brawl.

A running gag is the Man from Oz’s “I don’t understand Spanish.” But with a beautiful woman as his incentive, he’ll work on it.

“Im halfway through Rosetta Stone.”

“Who’s SHE?”

The title is a piece of fishing parlance, meaning that your baited hook didn’t go in the fish’s mouth, but “snagged” it in the back, a fin or something. “Cheating” is how some sportsfishermen (not in Alaska when I lived there) see it.

It doesn’t neatly line up with the theme and the story here. But with all the hired killers — “The Twins,” “The Reaper” — and other characters, not all of whom have an actual dramatic purpose, and all the cutting back and forth between “Then” and “Now,” it’s not like the title is the problem most desperately in need of correction, as far as “Snag” goes.

Not terrible, could have easily been better had our director, co-writer and star not tripped over all his many jobs along the way.

Rating: unrated, violence and lots of it

Cast: Ben Milliken, Sofía Castro, Jeanette Aguilar Harris, Jonny Beauchamp, Jaime Camil and
C.J. Perry Barnyashev

Credits: Directed by Ben Milliken, scripted by Brent Tarnol and Ben Milliken. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:27

As comic thrillers go, “Andy Somebody” isn’t much.

It’s about a put-upon accountant who steals from a loathesome, abusive and thoroughly crooked California plastic surgeon and said surgeon’s efforts to recover his ill-gotten gains.

There are no thrills in this pursuit or the assorted “showdowns” that fold into it. There’s nothing funny about it, either. Proof? Two cops are staking out the shady surgeon (Jonathan Buckley) and notice Andy (Jeremy Evans, who co-wrote this) have a little private tantrum to himself on a fire escape.

“He seems mad…like IKEA’s having an online sale but the shop floor’s not matching what the online ad says.”

A hired-goon (Jacob Bruce) catches up with Andy, his writer-pal Joy (Leslie Wong) and a couple of other folks in a seedy motel. The goon needs to search the room for the missing loot, so he sends his hostages elsewhere.

“All right, into the bathroom. EVERYbody. Fred, Daphne, Shaggy…Velma.”

Hilarious, right?

The production values are student film “indie,” a couple of decent compositions, a lot of other “ugly” shots, with continuity errors (Andy’s beard comes and goes, and not just in scenes after he’s supposed to have shaved it off) and the like. The acting rarely rises to the level of “middling.”

The plot is cut-and-pasted from a thousand better thrillers, only dumber, with scenes that serve zero purpose and jokes nobody would find funny.

And there’s nobody in it you’ve ever heard of or seen before.

But it’s still somebody’s bargain basement baby, so the polite thing to do is wish them all well, “better luck next time” and all that. I’m not getting those 90 minutes back, so no sense belaboring it.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Jeremy Evans, Leslie Wong, Jonathan Buckley, Jacob Bruce

Credits: Directed by Jesse David Ing, scripted by Jesse David Ing and Jeremy Evans. A Launch Release on Vudu, et al.

Running time: 1:23

“A Tourist’s Guide to Love” is a lovely Vietnamese travelogue in search of a romantic comedy that would transform the trip into a movie.

It’s a Rachel Leigh Cook star vehicle so inane that even she seems more interested in showing us the sights than focusing on the “just broke up with her boyfriend” and “flirts with the Vietnamese tour guide” story.

Calling it “cute” is as strained as the efforts at humor. “Insipid” just sounds mean, but is closer to the mark.

It’s about that old Paul Bowles/”Sheltering Sky” difference between “a tourist and a traveler.”

“A tourist wants to escape life,” tour guide Sinh (Scott Ly) enthuses. “A traveler wants to experience it.”

The woman he’s explaining that to (Cook) is Amanda Riley, a “secret shopper” from her LA travel agency taking a guided Vietnamese tour with a tiny local company that her boss (Missi Pyle) might want to buy.

She and her boss overshare a bit, which is why Amanda thought her beau of five years (Ben Feldman) was about to propose, when really he just wanted to tell her he was moving to Ohio.

Now she’s in the Exotic East, scouting “the hottest tourist destination” on the planet, trying to decide if Saigon Silver Star Tours — which ignores Ho Chi Minh City’s real name — is worth buying to give their company an entrée to the market.

Sinh and his cousin/driver Anh (Tranh Truc) take have a dozen tourists from Ho Chi Minh City to Da Nang and elsewhere “off the beaten path” “to show visitors the best possible Vietnam.”

They do. It’s gorgeous, from the Tet Lunar New Year celebrations, lantern-lined streets and water candles to Champa Empire ruins.

But the movie makes little attempt to flesh out the other tourists, blandly presents even the “visit to my grandmother’s village” sequences, and is so blandly cast that Missi Pyle on the phone is the most entertaining person in it. And even she’s watered down for this outing.

Sinh, who grew up in the U.S., flirts by saying her full name repeatedly — “Is Amanda Riley being impulsive?” “Is Amanda Riley learning to relax?”

Is Amanda Riley as bored as I was watching this?

Travel rom-coms are an ancient genre (“If it’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium,” “My Life in Ruins”), and it’s laudable that they’re trying for something a little different here. But are they?

Top tip, if you find yourself so compelled, don’t forget Netflix has a playback speed adjustment on the lower right of the screen. At least the blase pauses between locations will pass by faster this way.

Rating: PG

Cast: Rachel Leigh Cook, Scott Ly, Thanh Truc, Ben Feldman, Nsut Le Thien and Missi Pyle.

Credits: Directed by Steven K. Tsuchida, scripted by Eirene Donohue. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

“Broadway” is a solidly suspenseful Greek film noir set among Athen pickpockets, men and a woman laying low by night, putting on “shows” to distract their marks during the day and slowly figuring out the trap this life is, one set for these “artful dodgers” by the Fagin in charge.

It’s not as clear about what transpires as it might be, and writer-director Christos Massalas has his heroine voice-over narrate the picture to death. But it’s not bad.

Nelly is a dancer and the daughter of a dancer. But her mother, she tells us, was a ballerina who married money and her husband was not Nelly’s dad. That explains, in her mind, where we see her dancing.

Nelly, played by Elsa Lekakou, needs a pole for her act.

Her family hired men to hunt her down and bring her home. But Nelly doesn’t worry. She has a habit of being “rescued” by strange men, she assures us in voice-over.

Markos “was an artist, or so he said,” and she let him think she believed him. But any mug tough enough to clobber a detective who tracked her down to the club isn’t a painter or sculptor. Markos is another kind of artist. She finds out the particulars when he takes her to his hide-in-plain-sight hideout.

There’s an abandoned live theater with a rooftop cinema complex called “Broadway,” filled with cockroaches and underworld rats like Markos (Stathis Apostolou), Rudolf (Rafael Papad) and Mohommed, aka “Mojito” (Salim Talbi). The guy they call “Locksmith”(Hristos Politis) lets them stay there.

Locksmith takes his cut whenever they go out picking pockets. “Thieves are like magicans,” Markos says (in Greek with English subtitles). “They work with ‘distractions.'”

And now that they have a trained exotic dancer with access to the old theater’s abandoned costumes, they have their “distraction.”

Things are just getting good when another tenant of Broadway, a badly-beaten man (Foivos Papadopoulos) hiding out from the Big Gangsters in town, gets well enough to become a liability. He has to maintain the illusion that he’s dead, and yet somehow be useful.

Nelly’s access to costumes and makeup gives her inspiration. The “corpse” they realize is called “Jonas” becomes “Barbara.” Nelly choreographs Barbara into the act and the crowds they can pickpocket grow larger.

But as the opening scene to “Broadway” showed us Nelly visiting Markos in prison, we know it can’t last. And the dancer dressing as a woman is too pretty for Nelly to not to take up with him when the dangerous Markos is away.

Writer-director Christos Massalas dreams up a fascinating milieu and fills it with just-colorful-enough characters. Rudolf and Mojito are a couple, Jonas’s sexuality seems a bit fluid and Nelly is a straight-up opportunist who is just waiting on that next dance and that next “rescue.”

The film’s lone light touch is a scene in which the cops are onto them, but Barbara’s instant acceptance by the Athens drag community — and its speed-dial network of allies — effects their escape, hilariously.

The deadly love triangle that’s set up is engrossing, but all these mysterious underworld figures who seem to be pulling a lot of the strings are merely mentioned and never seen. There’s a “How’d THAT happen?” explanation or two lacking in the film’s affecting finale.

But Massalas immerses us in this pole-dancing “Oliver Twist” tale and the cast goes all-in to show us a Greece beyond the migrant headlines and the tourist sites, one where you’d better watch your wallet, because not everyone can count on a stampede of drag queens to bail you out of a jam.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Elsa Lekakou, Stathis Apostolou, Foivos Papadopoulos, Rafael Papad and Salim Talbi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christos Massalas. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:37

Ken Loach is Britain’s great social justice filmmaker, a chronicler of labor struggles and Irish uprisings and working class folks just trying to survive every fresh assault on their way of life.

Films like “Kes” and “Land and Freedom” and “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” and “Jimmy’s Hall and “I, Daniel Blake” could be period pieces and might be history lessons or sociology lectures, but they were consistently compelling leftist cinema and great favorites at Canned

Now he’s showing what he says will be his final film at Cannes. “The Old Oak” is about a dying rural village’s age old pub facing closure and becoming a flashpoint for blowback against the arrival of Syrian refugees.

He’s 87, and he says considering the time it takes to get a film together and fear of “declining facilities” means it’s time to hang it up. He’s tried to retire a few times before, but social injustices always enraged him enough to come back. Not this time.

Amelia had a pretty good time on her 18th birthday. Popular and beautiful, with a whiff of lazy mean girl about her, she drank and danced and shunned those nerdy “drama kids” like everybody else.

But something happens on 40th birthday that causes her to revisit her 18th, over and over again.

Yes, “One More Time” is a Swedish “Groundhog Day,” watchable in English or in the Muppet Show chef’s mother tongue. But that moment when it admits as much as over-and-over-again Amelia (Hedda Stiernstedt) tries to get answers is just one way this charming variation-on-a-theme wins you over.

Amelia has gone through her version of Kubler-Ross’s “stages,” adding “confusion” to the list that includes “denial” and “anger” and combining “depression” and “acceptance” as she works through that 18th birthday, beginning to end, repeatedly.

Finally, she’s turned to her former friend, that “drama kid” (Miriam Ingrid) who grew up to be a famous singer-songwriter (Tove Edfelt). Fiona showed up at Amelia’s 18th birthday party — they share a birthday — uninvited. She showed up despite the fact that she’d already tried to play a song she wrote at the school talent show, and Amelia walked out, just like everybody else in their class.

And even though this kid’s been hurt by the end of their friendship, she hears Amelia’s “crazy” story out, and serves up the answer — “Groundhog Day.”

Amelia’s “never seen it.” But as Fiona’s Mom runs this 2002 town’s video store, Amelia arm-twists Fiona into fetching that DVD, passing up “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Back to the Future” to get to it. That’s how Amelia figures out what we’ve spotted the moment she wakes up, 18, a second time.

Amelia’s got to learn to be “nicer” if she ever wants to break this “time loop.”

With “Groundhog Day” being one of my all time favorites, and probably one of yours, the only hope “One More Time” has of pulling us in is seeing what the filmmakers do with that too-similar-plot.

There’s a bit of “Before I Fall” fatalism in this version, as screenwriters Sofie and Tove Forsman hint at dire consequences, moonshine poisoning, shattered friendships and relationships that demand to be broken with every attempt Amelia makes to change her fate.

Even as she struggles through possible solutions to her trap and complains “Nothing I do matters” and turns reckless when nothing she tries works, we sense consequences to every action Amelia takes.

“You’ll regret this the rest of your life,” she warns her bestie (Elinor Silfversparre), who craves a hookup with a guy she crushes on. A drunken “tell all of you your future” speech at a later incarnation of that party climaxes with a heartfelt hug of someone the script doesn’t need to tell us will die in those intervening 20 years.

The third act has heart-tugging moments and a few twists that I didn’t see coming as I guessed “What possible directions can they take from here?” all the way through it.

“Groundhog Day” variations are always about life’s second chances, “fixing” something that’s gone wrong and digging the trapped character, in Punxsutawney or “Palm Springs,” out of the bitter rut their life has tumbled into. That’s a universal longing, which is why this plot keeps coming back, again and again, going back to “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

What if I hadn’t done this or that and life had turned out differently?

This isn’t the best “version” of this “do over” story ever. But it pushes a lot of the right buttons and is just different enough to be worth revisiting “Groundhog Day” “One More Time,” here in the company of cute young Swedes.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual references, binge-drinking teens

Cast: Hedda Stiernstedt, Elinor Silfversparre, Miriam Ingrid, Tove Edfelt, Maxwell Cunningham, David Tainton

Credits: Directed by Jonatan Zetzler, scripted by Sofie Forsman and Tove Forsman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26