Movie Nation

Well damn, I did not see this coming.

The best film in ages about coming to grips with “fluid” gender issues so dominating film, TV and other media these days is smart, reassuringly sweet and Polish.

I dare say you know someone in your life who is dealing with this culture-roiling issue — an uncertain kid, a confused parent wondering if “just a phase/cry for attention” is wishful thinking, an intolerant relative or politician figuring he/she can wish or legislate it away — who’d get something out of “Fanfic,” the story of an angry, pill-popping motherless teen who stops being angry the minute she tries on a boyfriend’s clothes.

Model/actress Alin Szewczyk stars as Toska, the unhappiest kid at her high school. Eating-disorder-thin, she’s got razor marks on her wrists and a tendency to steal her contruction foreman father’s pain pills.

Toska’s only escape is writing “fanfic,” a Polish fan fiction that isn’t exactly like the fan-written further adventures of popular intellectual property characters from “Star Trek” and comic books and the like that blew up in the West. She imagines herself as a rock star or whoever, writes a story about that and posts it online, where others give her affirmation for this introverted creative outlet.

But one day, throwing up in the toilet during a “welcome back to school” assembly, Toska has a “meet cute.” The new boy, Leon (Jan Cieciara) is throwing up in the next stall.

He makes the effort at friendship, maybe even flirting. But we’ve established that tough-girl Toska is above all that. She is asexual and friendless, the class “weirdo” (in Polish with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

Leon persists, and something about him gets her fancy. She starts writing fanfic of herself as a rock star and Leon as a cross-dressing guitarist in her band.

And one party invitation later, she gets soaked on the walk over, he lends her some clothes, and Toska’s makeover becomes her transformation. The stress is gone with the hair and Leon helps her trim.

Her widowed dad (Dobromir Dymecki) may wish she’d “act like a normal girl,” and “stop playing ‘dressup’ already.” But Toska has changed her look, consulted Youtube videos on taping down her breasts and changed her pronoun and name to the more masculine “Tosiek.”

That complicated enough? No? Did I mention Leon’s gay, and crushed-on by a gay classmate? And yet he and Tosiek are still drawn to each other.

Tosiek is too young to know how to process or at least articulate what’s happening.

“I just know when something feels right and when it doesn’t.”

And no matter what school bullies, online trolls or a particularly intolerant teacher — “Did you watch too many American movies?” is her best put-down. — say, that settles it with Tosiek and with Leon.

Adapted from a novel by Natalia Osińska, “Fanfic” loses track of the fan fiction subtext (Tosiek’s imagined black and white movies of rock stardom with Leon in drag) after that dominates the early acts.

But what director and co-writer Marta Karwowska gets out of this is a lived-in school life, kids who flirt and fight and flee and bully like real teens, a realistic depiction of confusion-based anger and “dysphoria” and a hopeful note that if Poland, ground zero and eager participant in the Holocaust, may just catch on, with or without “too many American movies.”

Tosiek speaks for cultures and generations in a single, simple line explaining a botched co-written class assignment about a topic that is eating up a lot of headspace in cultures around the world.

“Gender is BORING.” And if today’s teens and 20somethings do their part in erasing it as “an issue,” that might be a public service no one saw coming.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, teen drinking, sexuality

Cast: Alin Szewczyk, Jan Cieciara, Maja Szopa, Krzysztof Oleksyn, Ignacy Liss, Agnieszka Rajda and Dobromir Dymecki

Credits: Directed by Marta Karwowska, scripted by Marta Karwowska and Grzegorz Jaroszuk, based on a novel by Natalia Osińska. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

The mere presence of Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a Manhattan movie creates expectations even though we’re decades-removed from her “Seinfeld” stardom.

But this time she’s working for that indie icon Nicole Holofcener, a writer and director known for intimate and sometimes lighthearted portraits of characters in a particular world and a distinct, instantly-recognizable stage and status in life.

Remember those poor souls coping with “Friends with Money,” featuring “Friend” Jennifer Aniston, or the New Yorkers wrestling with neighbors and living space and the appearance of charity in “Please Give,” or the odd couple at an odd time to be dating again (Louis-Dreyfus paired with James Gandolfini) of “Enough Said?”

This time Louis-Dreyfus is playing someone much older and no wiser, still craving status, still insecure enough to let a little white lie, tactlessly revealed, move her to admit “You Hurt My Feelings.”

Beth teaches fiction writing for one of the colleges in town, an intimate workshop of five slightly off-center “over-sharers.” She’s published a well-received memoir that reached a tiny audience, an audience she is deflated to learn doesn’t include her students. Maybe if the fatherly “abuse wasn’t just verbal” it’d have sold better, she tells herself, her agent, her mother (Jeannie Berlin) and others. And she has been wrestling with draft after draft of her first novel.

Her agent is cool on it. Her adoring husband of several decades, Don (Tobias Menzies, Prince Philip in “The Crowne”) gushes with encouragement. But she might want to consider what Don does for a living — he’s a psychotherapist — when she hears that from him. Because when she overhears Don candidly complaining that he doesn’t “like” the book, or being subjected to reading draft after draft of it, Beth is shattered.

In an instant, she tells her sister (Michaela Watkins, terrific), she goes from affection and a tendency to share food and ice cream cones with her soul mate to “I am NOT going to be able to look him in the face again!”

Even among the fragile family circle/bubble Beth has ensconced herself in, that seems extreme.

But consider her sister, an interior decorator who has to keep a smile on her face as she shows one wall-mounted light fixture after another to a shallow, demanding client and hold her tongue when her semi-successful husband (Arian Moayed) struggles to get acting roles and not lose them because he’s not very interesting in the spotlight.

Consider Don’s practice. If Beth could spy on him with patients, she’d hear the inane, ineffectual advice he passes on, see how forgetful he’s getting with age and hear clients muttering “Idiot” when they leave or sign off a Zoom session.

One feuding couple (Amber Tamblyn and David Cross, hilarious) set aside a little time from tearing into each other in every session to chew on Don’s competence or seeming unwillingness to help.

And then there’s Beth and Don’s pot-store manager son (Owen Teague), a 23 year-old playwright wannabe who lashes out at his privileged, only child upbringing and those who supervised it and their little white lies of encouragement.

“You always expect the BEST from me!”

What can a mother say to that but “You’re WELCOME!”

“You Hurt My Feelings” and its characters are caught up in a low stakes game built on petty complaints, and that impacts our appreciation of it. It’s lightly funny, but only occasionally. It’s sharply-observed, but like “Seinfeld,” its populace is caught up in New York minutia.

The broad nature of sitcom structure and laughs allowed that earlier TV show to explain Manhattanites (with a dose of Queens) to America, and mock them to great success. Holofcener is shooting fish in a much smaller barrel here.

“You’re Hurting My Feelings” feels confined by geography, claustrophobic in its concentration on a few city blocks and a tiny number of annoying people within them. It’s a twee comedy, well-played and mostly close-to-the-vest, but lacking much in the way of novelty and the sharper observations Holofcener is famous for.

Her surehandedness with comedy — it’s not wholly her thing — can also be questioned in the tightassed academia farce “Lucky Hank,” which she directed and which never quite delivers in a way you’d hope.

But Louis-Dreyfus is an always-engaging screen presence, most entertaining when she’s most exasperated. And Holofcener has parked her in a cute if slight sociological study that takes navel-gazing New Yorkers into their AARP years, still comfortably discomfitted by the littlest things, still making mountains out of lives littered with molehills.

Rating: R, (profanity)

Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Arian Moayed, Owen Teague, Amber Tamblyn, Jeannie Berlin and David Cross

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicole Holofcener. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:33

An elderly man walks into the frame and sits on a park bench, a ritual repeated tens of millions of times every much day pretty everywhere in the world.

This little old man with a Spanish accent isn’t talking about retirement, winding down his days or anything like that. He’s got purpose, a lifetime of work behind him and years — as many as he has left — to carry on.

After all, Enrique Medina says. “You don’t want to let down Voyager.”

Two matching NASA spacecraft were launched in 1977, in the middle of America’s “national malaise.” A culture famed for inventing disposability and “planned obsolescence” produced engineering that would dazzle science fiction fans and impress even Medieval cathedral builders or Victorian engineers with its durability and ultility.

And now, 45 years-and-counting on, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still out there, traveling well beyond our solar system, adding to the breadth of human knowledge with instruments and tech designed before Ford Pintos were pulled off the road.

“It’s Quieter in the Twilight” is an elegaic documentary about the aging, shrinking Jet Propulsion Laboratory team that keeps track of, in touch with and maintains and monitors what these two intrepid spaceships discover.

As we meet the dozen scientists and engineers still on the job (this was filmed from 2019-2021/22), they get emotional over the job, the spacecraft and how they and their two starships are nearing the end of the the line.

“Age casts a shadow over everything we do,” one engineer notes.

Billy Miossi’s film speaks to most everyone on that shrinking team, some of whom have been around since launch, all of whom sing the praises of the “forgotten hero” of America’s space program, how it was envisioned, the optimism and excitement that greeted this first effort to hit a grand slam — visiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, all in one trip. And they talk about the ongoing mission as both craft left the Solar System, passed through the heliosphere (the edge of the sun’s “solar wind”) and the project settled into “out of sight, out of mind” status, as far as NASA has been concerned.

The team wrestles with repairs to the one Deep Space Network communication dish that can reach one of the craft, in Australia, fretting over everything they can do to keep their baby alive enough to re-awaken when the dish comes back online. And they struggle with everything that could and did go wrong during COVID.

That part of “Twilight” is more technical and a tad duller than the rest.

But early on, Miossi fills the screen with images of the prep and the launch, montages of long ago headlines, reports by long dead TV news reporters and anchors waxing rhapsodic, many of them landing the Big Interview on this subject, science superstar in the making Carl Sagan.

The bulk of the film is about the work today, an aging workforce of the usual NASA “pocket protector and glasses” white guy nerds, but also immigrants from South America and Korea, a Black engineer who grew up during segregation and had to carve a new path just to get into science.

In that regard, “It’s Quieter in the Twilight” is both an elegy and a film infused with a dewy-eyed optimism. We’re looking back and remembering an era where science and achievement and diversity were lauded and lionized, when national pride was based on swinging for the fences, and we’re looking back from an age when every value epitomized by Voyager and the America back then is under assault.

Maybe, this film suggests, it is “Twilight.” But if we remember what we did then, a new dawn will be just as bright.

Rating: unrated, G-worthy

Cast: Suzanne Dodd, Chris Jones, Jefferson Hall, Sun Matsumoto, Enrique Medina, Todd Barder, Lu Yang, Fernando Peralta, Andrea Angrum and Ed Stone

Credits: Directed by Billy Miossi. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:24

Granted, it is a post World War I story, the tail end of “the closing of the West” era.

But this October Awards Season release has Oscar winners and an epic look and an “erased” history subject.

DiCaprio and De Niro and Scorsese and Brendan and Lithgow. Oh my.

One of the great gifts the cinema has bestowed on us has been the lovely third act comeback afforded writer-director Paul Schrader.

A figure from the “Taxi Driver,” “Hardcore” and “Raging Bull” era of iconoclastic American cinema, he was all but left for dead in the age of “content” and comic book cinematic juvenalia.

But here he is, Scorsese’s greatest screenwriter and a damned fine writer-director (“Cat People,” “Light Sleeper,” Light Sleeper”) in his own right, serving up stories with patience, depth, metaphor and moral and cultural topicality, our most Christian filmmaker plumbing the depths of our modern mortal souls.

Religion isn’t in the foreground of the latest from the writer/director of “First Reformed.” But it’s a subtext lying just beneath the surface of “Master Gardener,” a story of redemption and cultivating one’s way towards the renewal that every growing season promises.

The Aussie Joel Edgerton (the film “Animal Kingdom,””The Great Gatsby,” “Loving”) gives one of his finest performances as our narrator and protoganist, a true believer in the nobility of the garden and the power of working with plants to restore the soul.

“Gardening is a belief in the future,” Narvel Roth narrates, floridly filling pages of his journal with reveries of flora and pedantic asides on the history of this hobby, which he treats with the reverence of one newly-converted to the faith that saved him.

The way he talks, we might think he’s a college lecturer on the subject. But the way Narvel carries himself, the cut of his hair and the slicked-down way he wears it, suggests something harder. Narvel is a man with a past, and we know it long before he compares a particular floral scented “buzz” as “like that you get just before pulling the trigger.”

Sigourney Weaver plays his old money boss, the owner and steward of Gracewood Gardens on her family’s estate, where “four generations of curated botany, horticulture and display” is nothing to sneeze at.

Norma is patrician without being patronizing, devoted to an annual charity auction that lets her gardens raise money for Meals on Wheels, and informal enough to relish Narvel’s sarcasm about watching “grown men in pastel pants outbid each other for a flower,” even calling Narvel “Sweet Pea” with more affection than we’d think possible, considering the diffence in their classes.

But Norma needs a favor. Her troubled grandniece, daughter of an addicted daughter of her late sister, needs help straightening out her life. Maya is 20ish, “of mixed blood,” and Narvel is to take her on as a an apprentice.

Narvel asks questions of Norma, and when Maya (Quintessa Swindell of “Black Adam”) arrives, he asks more. He sizes her up, senses her past and her present. He embeds her with the garden staff, teaches and mentors her. And when her messiness cannot be hidden, he asks her a question everyone could stand to hear on occasion.

“Are you satisfied with your life?”

If you’ve read or heard anything about “Master Gardener,” you’ve figured out the pun in its title. Narvel’s big secret isn’t a secret to Norma, his U.S. Marshal Service handler (Esai Morales) or the viewer, the first time we see him peel his shirt off in the comfort of his garden cottage.

Narvel’s swastika tattoos connect with his camo-clad militant white supremacist past which we glimpse in flashbacks. This was who he used to be, a cruel “master race” cultist consumed by hate and the violence that spins out of that.

“I found a life in flowers. How unlikely is that?”

But this isn’t just his road to redemption story. “Master Gardener” is about planting seeds, culling dead or dying branches and making room for new growth. Whatever he’s held onto from that past life, he’s cultivating something in Maya that could save her.

Edgerton gives one of his most compact and introverted performances as this man “saved” by “manure” and what can grow in it. Weaver is similarly quiet, almost subdued, the very embodiment of a widowed woman of property. And Swindell slides easily into the rhythms of the world Schrader conjures up, where even the arguments have a gentility about them.

The grandniece is “impertinent,” a deadly sin in a world this ancient and ordered.

Schrader makes more melodramatic choices in the film’s later acts, some of them unfortunate. Every time you see a 50ish leading man linked romantically with a 20something beauty, the viewer is free to consider that the aged writer-director’s wish fulfillment fantasy.

But he still manages to trip up expectations, leaning into “man of violence returns to violence” genre conventions, even casting his hero and heroine into the wilderness, but letting them and his movie find their footing and their core values as they do.

There can be no renewal, after all, without a periodic and brutally unsentimental cutting, killing or trimming.

Rating: R for language, brief sexual content and nudity

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, Quintessa Swindell, Esai Morales

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Schrader. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:51

I did theater in high school, worked on shows in college.

But plainly I was missing out, not going to “Theater Camp.”

This summer release from Searchlight is so clever and tolerant it could get banned in Florida. See it while you can, boys and girls.

This looks rough and tumble, and a tad edgy.

A Middle Eastern poet and med student who gets a rep as a “Dr. Feelgood,” thanks to his hipper-than-thou, gets-around girlfriend?

As Paris Hilton would say in her day, “Sounds hot.”

June 27.

I could not WAIT to get to the Norwegian “Royalteen” sequel, “Royalteen: Princess Margrethe,” (he lied). I mean, what could top that soapy “going to high school with royalty and falling for a prince” fairytale with “real teen” sex and profanity and every other “issue” under the sun complicating the affair?

“Princess Margrethe” leaves young lovers Lena (Ines Høysæter Asserson) and the curly prince Kalle (Mathias Storhøi) behind to tell the story of the Mean Girl half of the royal Norwegian high school twins. What made her mean? What keeps the meanness going? Let’s find out!

This sequel, also based on the YA novel by Randi Fuglehaug and Anne Gunn Halvorsen, is marginally more interesting because of all the things that hang over someone labeled “Miss Perfect” and “The Most Beautiful Woman in Norway” by the European press.

Margrethe, as interpreted by Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, has family responsibilities and a paranoia borne of a press and culture that’s just waiting for her and others in her family to take a wrong step.

That’s one reason why she was so freaked out by her brother’s crush on the “experienced” and complicated commoner Lena. But that’s not why Margrethe fainted at the prom in the last scene of “Royalteen.”

The opening of “Princess Margrethe” shows her being wheeled into the hospital and a doctor telling her and her parents about all the drugs in her system.

“Keeping this quiet” is only going to cover up so much. Flashbacks to that night remind Margrethe how she got so messed up, and the overly-attentive boy who got her that way.

Margrethe spends this sequel fretting over video that creep recorded that might get out, over the flirty Prince of Denmark not named Hamlet (Sammy Germain Wadi), whether to carry on with aspiring DJ Arni (Filip Bargee Ramberg), her brother’s pal and a guy who knows her better than anyone and pondering the state of the monarchy, her image and what is going on with her parents’ marriage.

Margrethe feels pressured by the one friend she has in the world (Amalie Sporsheim) to do what teenagers do and lose her virginity. But to whom? Prince Alexander of Denmark? Arni? Gustav the possible blackmailer?

Getting drunk widens her playing field to a stranger who protectively takes her home.

“You know, you HAVE to sleep with me,” she hiccups. “It’s in the con…consti…constiTUtion.”

Through it all, her depressed and often bedridden mother’s (Kirsti Stubø) words of warning hang over her (in Norwegian with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

“It’s not like we’re normal people.”

But in most ways, they are.

The misunderstandings are just as lame as in “Royalteen,” the “mysteries” are just as contrived and guessable.

But there are a few cute, if seriously cliched moments. As blah as it all seems to the jaded adults in the room, “Margrethe” might fill the bill for teens who want to see that “royalty has the same issues everybody else does” and live vicariously in this milieu, a “teen princess” movie with a profane, sexual and pharmaceutical edge.

Rating: TV-MA, substance abuse, sexual situations, a little nudity, profanity

Cast: Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Filip Bargee Ramberg, Sammy Germain Wadi, Frode Winther, Amalie Sporsheim, Kirsti Stubø, Mathias Storhøi and Ines Høysæter Asserson.

Credits: Directed by  Ingvild Søderlind, scripted by Marta Huglen Revheim, Ester Schartum-Hansen and Per-Olav Sørensen, based on the book by Randi Fuglehaug and Anne Gunn Halvorsen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

Holofcener made Catherine Keener a star, and gave Jennifer Aniston one of her best roles.

This looks wonderful.

“Knights of the Zodiac” is an adequately-budgeted action fantasy about young warriors recruited to protect or attack the reincarnation of the Greek goddess Athena, warriors identified by their connection to an inner power/”Force” called Cosmos.

No, it has nothing to do with the science TV series based on the book by Carl Sagan. Yes, it has a lot of similarities to every other YA sci-fi/fantasy thingamabob that’s ever come down the pike.

Based on a manga/Japanese comic book series, it isn’t cast and played as “young” as say “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.” But it’s still pretty childish in its setting, derivative plotting, actions beats, heroines and heroes.

Japanese American singer-actor Mackenyu — please don’t make fun of the name, or the fact that this chap figures he gets to go by one name when his level of fame suggests maybe that’s an overreach — stars as Seiya, whose older sister was snatched when he was a child.

He got a hint of her “Cosmos” power when he grabbed at her magic medallion necklace one time. As a haunted adult, he’s still looking for her, and of course cage-fighting in an underground octagon to make ends meet.

Just as he’s getting his butt whipped by the brute Cassios (Nick Stahl), he summons up that dormant power. That alerts rich-guy recruiter Alman Kido (Sean Bean) to his existence and whereabouts, and summons the minions of Alman Kido’s sinister ex-wife Vander Guraad (Famke Janssen).

In a flash, our hero has to choose a side, which of course means he’ll be taken in by the guy protecting the new goddess Athena, born Sienna (Madison Iseman), a spoiled “rich girl” to Seiya. He’ll have to train, learn to use his powers, ponder the mystery of his missing sister, resist the temptations of Vander Guraad and eventually “save” Athena when the chips are down.

Or not.

The fight scenes have cool slo-mo effects, and the best of them come from the pre-“Knights of the Zodiac” armor that Seiya acquires as he masters his powers. The octagon action has some decent wirework — spinning, floating kicks and what not.

The acting is never really bad, just indifferent. Even old pros Bean and Janssen can’t summon up much enthusiasm for this silliness. Mackenyu shows off a few martial arts moves early on. But once you’ve got magic powers and armor, the brawls turn “Transformers” dull and CGI.

The running “gag” is “You don’t know when to quit, do you?” And the rest of the dialogue is either too bland to bother quoting or standard issue “You should have DIED when you had the chance!”

The limited sci-fi “tech” we see is mainly this Opsrey-styled jet-powered transport.

Fans of the comics will certainly get more out of it than newbies like me. All we see is all the other middling YA sagas it resembles, borrows from and fails to match or improve upon.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Mackenyu, Famke Janssen, Madison Iseman, Nick Stahl, Diego Tinoco, Caitlin Hudson and Sean Bean

Credits: Directed by Tomasz Baginski, scripted by Josh Campbell, Matt Stueken and Kiel Murray based on the manga/comic series by Masami Kurumada. A Sony release.

Running time: 1:5