Movie Nation

Top tip here. One should never dip into a “Wyrmwood” zombie film around meal time — yours, or theirs.

“Wyrmwood: Apocalypse,” the sequel to 2014’s “Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead,” is a “Zombieland” meets “Soylent Green” blood-on-the-lens splatterfest. It’s probably meant to be funnier than I took it, but at least the slaughterhouse smorgasbord laid out here has a light touch.

Jay Gallagher and Bianca Bradey return from the first “Wyrmwood.” Brooke is infected, but “manageable” thanks to some serum we see Corporal Reese (Gallagher) administer in the first scene.

Brooke drops out of sight, but you can tell from the crazy in her eyes that she’ll be back, and that she’s destined to be their queen.

“Apocalypse” is about the world that’s been normalized around this (aerosol pathogen) outbreak. Soldiers in this corner of Australia have all gone “Road Warrior.” Reese hunts zombies and this new variation, “hybrids,” and delivers them to his superiors in “The Bunker,” where a hazmat-suited, blood-spattered “surgeon general” (Nicholas Boshier) is doing “experiments” in the search for a “cure.”

That serum suggests he’s made some progress. Those anti-viral pills Reese downs tell us that there might be real science going on, in spite of the torture chamber/abattoir vibe “The Bunker” gives off.

Reese lives in a DIY solo fort made of hurricane fencing and sheets of corrugated tin. He drives a Ute that Mad Max himself would be proud to park in the old family garage. He doesn’t question orders, slaughtering zombie or subduing anybody plainly not a staggering member of the walking dead.

Guy on a motorbike? Fetch him to the surgeon’s. These Aboriginal sisters, Maxi and Grace (Shantae Barnes-Cowa and Tasia Zalar)? One of them might be a hybrid. More “experiments?”

The idea of life’s ugly normalizations post-zombie apocalypse may have endured a thorough exploration in the various “Walking Dead” iterations and their many international zombie series counterparts. It’s still amusing to see the form our dystopia takes after the zombies chow down.

Reese has enslaved assorted zombies, short term, to power his pedal-driven gadgets and serve as training dummies. When he’s done with them, he dispatches each with a shot to the head.

“Wyrmwood: Apocalypse” is totally divorced from whatever’s left of city civilization (it’s all forest and field rural), and settles quickly into a “rescue” quest tale full of slaughter, sacrifice and post-Apocalyptic slang.

“Well well, turns out our surgeon general here is a BITE-hider!”

Gallagher makes a perfectly believable gruff badass, the sisters are properly plucky and the beautiful Bradey is so convincingly “gone” that Brooke would scare even the drunkest barfly out of making a pass.

The formulaic third act tends to drag on and on, but there’s still enough here for genre fans to bite their teeth into (sorry) and chew on (ahem).

Rating: unrated, seriously gory

Cast: Jay Gallagher, Shantae Barnes-Cowan, Bianca Bradey, Nicholas Boshier and Tasia Zalar

Credits: Directed by Kiah Roache-Turner, scripted by Kiah Roache-Turner and Tristan Roache-Turner. An XYZ release.

Running time: 1:28

Cristi’s out of town visitor Hadi is a German-Turkish flight attendant so handsome that he can’t wait to get him to his apartment. The elevator will do.

But when his sister drops by, she chides her brother for not taking Hadi out, showing him the Romanian sights. She echoes Hadi’s own hopes that they’d “take a drive” to “the mountains.” Nothing doing.

Cristi hasn’t even taken time off work. On the job, in this Eastern Orthodox, conservative and homophobic country, no one can know about his private life. Cristi (Conrad Mericoffer) is a cop and any public displays of his sexuality could be a career killer, at the very least.

“Poppy Field” is a Romanian drama about the state of gay life in that still-backward country, decades after the end of its totalitarian dictatorship. Eugen Jebeleanu’s brief, intimate film sees Cristi challenged at home — by Hadi (Radouan Leflahi), who frets over his closeted status, and by sister Catalina (Cendana Trifan), who berates him for not treating his lover with more respect, even if she’s sure this is just serial-dater Cristi’s “gay phase.” On the job, Cristi keeps as much to himself as his fellow Jandarmeria (police) allow. He talks of women he’s dated in the past tense, and stays silent when he’s jokingly asked if he “beats them,” perhaps a logical Romanian reason for relationships that never seem to last.

But things come to a head when he and his team are sent to break up a disturbance at the state cinema. A group of noisy, icon-wielding Orthodox protesters have disrupted a screening of a lesbian romance. In the film’s long middle act, Cristi must stand passively by as furious fanatics hurl slurs at the audience, get in the paying patrons’ and cops’ faces in a situation that isn’t helped by police presence.

Because when the cops start asking for IDs, it’s the folks who bought tickets to the movie that they seem to want to interrogate. And a guy in that audience may be discrete, but when nobody else is watching, he turns insistent.

“You’re really gonna pretend you don’t know me (in Romanian, with English subtitles)?”

Jebeleanu keeps his ambitions modest in his debut feature film. This is one man’s often-ignoble reaction to having to deny himself to half the people he knows — his colleagues. Cristi lashes out and “overcompensates,” and that only makes matters worse.

The script (by Ioana Moraru) is more concerned with introducing Cristi’s dilemma and putting him through this harrowing test than in resolving his situation — publicly or psychologically.

Mericoffer keeps this interior journey on simmer for most of the film, only exploding in his “protests too much” reaction to being confronted with some version of his true self. It’s a compact, tightly-wound performance, which suits the film beautifully.

By Western standards, “Poppy Field” may feel as dated as one protestor’s hurled insult — “Sexo-MARXIST!” But in showing Romania’s version of what the West went through decades ago in terms of simple tolerance, there’s an implied “Let’s not go back there” message to increasingly reactionary Europe and America’s reddest states that feels fraught, if not downright wearying. Maybe “It gets better,” but not without making hard, brave choices.

Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity, slurs

Cast: Conrad Mericoffer, Alexandru Potocean, Radouan Leflahi, George Pistereanu and Cendana Trifan.

Credits: Directed by Eugen Jebeleanu, scripted by Ioana Moraru. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:21

“Ambulance” is 80 minutes of pure mayhem wallowing through 140-150 minutes of pure Michael Bay hokum.

The action sequences are assaultive, brutally-efficient exercises in gunplay, stunts and frenetic acting passing by in a blur as breathless as the editing team can make it, all of it set to a thundering pulse-pounding score by Lorne Balfe.

The the whole movie is glib, with a police SIS captain in tattered USC gear driving his drooling mastiff around in a vintage Fiat 500 spouting flippant dialogue, with only the rarest line standing out. The plot goes completely off the rails.

And the casting is archetypal, one long Bay cliche.

Jake Gyllenhaal turns on the “crazy Jake,” with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Manta in “Aquaman”) in the “good half-brother corrupted” sidekick role, Eiza González as this year’s Megan Fox, playing a kidnapped paramedic and Garret Dillahunt as a Josh Duhamel substitute — the cop/authority figure given to bragging that “We’re SIS…we set traps” for bad guys. “That’s how we do it.”

It opens with an emotional gut-punch and ends with an attempted reprise of that. But most of what comes in between is a life-is-cheap/nobody-ever-needs-to-reload gunfight and crash-crash-crash (in more or less real time) car chase.

Given all that, knowing that things are going to get real stupid at some point, with characters quoting Michael Bay movies (“The Rock,” “Bad Boys”), and acknowledging that the 2:16 advertised running time is an understatement, do you give yourself over to Bay’s latest non-“Transformers”/”Bad Boys” ride?

Maybe. But you’ll hate yourself in the morning.

Abdul-Mateen II plays Will, a Marine vet with a sickly wife, big medical bills and an unhelpful military insurance complex letting him down. But his “brother,” the guy whose father “took me in,” might help. Even if his wife keeps Danny’s (Gyllenhaal) phone number blocked and warns Will away.

Sure, Danny’ll help. But not with a job helping him guard a rich client’s car collection and working as a sort of flunky/personal assistant. No, Danny’s got “a score” lined up. It’s about to go down right now. You in?

Combat vet Will finds himself in a supposedly souped-up delivery van with Danny and a bunch of strangers pulling off a $32 million bank robbery in downtown LA.

The heist goes off as an homage to Michael Mann’s “Heat,” with that one unplanned interruption that springs a massive police response. Nobody shouts “It’s a TRAP!” because there isn’t time.

Hundreds of rounds are expended, robbers drop one by one, and then it’s just improvising Danny, assuring his brother that he’ll “get you home,” hijacking an ambulance that’s shown up to save a freshly-shot cop.

EMT Cam (González) is another hostage, trying to save the bleeding-out policemen as Will drives the wheels off that ambulance through the crowded streets, freeways and down the oft-filmed LA River, chased by a “Blues Brothers” supply of crashable police cars and some seriously audacious police helicopter piloting.

The jaw-dropping moments come early — Cam’s first paramedic call of the day involves a child impaled in a car crash — and almost often enough to keep us invested. There’s a hilarious cell phone/Facetime “consultation” on a grisly bit of mid-chase back-of-ambulance surgery and the choppers swoop in so low they almost sandblast the paint right off the ambulance.

But once the picture goes seriously over-the-top and Jake pays for “help” in their escape, there’s no coming back. It’s the worst of the “Fast and Furious” movies (same Dodge product placement, same Latin car culture) in Michael Bay form.

Dillahunt is the “my day off” SIS (Special Investigations Section) captain who mismanages the chase at every turn, Olivia Stambouliah is his mouthy tech/coordination assistant and Keir O’Donnell is the gay FBI agent who leaves couples-counseling to get in on the action.

“He is looking for a way out,” the Fed says, stating the SCREAMINGLY obvious.

“How do you know that?” Captain can’t-see-the-obvious replies.

Dillahunt can’t make lines like his character’s “chess match and a cage fight” analogy funny, because they aren’t. And he generally isn’t, either.

“Ambulance” is based on a Danish thriller from 2005 which I recall seeing, but don’t recall being Danish so maybe not. It can’t have stumbled along the line between self-parody and just-plain-nuts that this does.

But Gyllenhaal knows a thing about blowing up a performance to match the mayhem around him. And if Yahya Abdul-Mateen II isn’t turned into some level of “star” by his toe-to-toe-with-Jake turn, at least he’ll force a lot more of us to remember how to spell his name.

As for the movie, just add the word “stupid” to “guilty pleasure” and you’ll have it covered.

Rating:  R for intense violence, bloody images and language throughout

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González, Olivia Stambouliah and Garret Dillahunt.

Credits: Directed by Michael Bay, based on the German film “Ambulancen.” A Universal release.

Running time: 2:16

“Cobalt Blue” is an Indian “Call Me By Your Name,” a gay lad’s sexual coming-of-age tale that shares torrid sexual encounters and a few other details from the André Aciman novel that screenwriter James Ivory turned into Oscar bait film five years back.

Yes, there’s fruit. No, it’s a not a peach this time, but a tangerine, squished until it explodes in a moment of passion.

Writer-director Sachin Kundalkar, adapting his own novel, serves up one of the steamiest Indian melodramas ever with this softcore love triangle about an aspiring poet and novelist, his tomboyish field hockey star sister and the renter who takes over an upstairs room in an upper middle class family’s house in 1991 Fort Kochi, Kerala, and takes an interest in each sibling in turn.

Tanay (Neelay Mehendale) is a college kid with dreams of literary glory. “I want to write like Chekov, Pushkin and Tolstoy” he enthuses. He speaks to the spirit of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in the family fish pond, and scribbles in notebooks about how “I want to write about Russian boys in Goa!”

Yes, he’s narcissistic and effeminate and he sets off the gaydar of his lusty literature professor (Neil Bhoopalam). But those academically-unethical thoughts take a back seat when the elders of the family die, freeing an apartment upstairs that Tanay craves. No. Dad wants to rent it out. But at least “a boy” rents it.

The unnamed hunk (Prateik Babbar) is effortlessly cool, a photographer and artist who favors a certain color that becomes Tanay’s obsession. Well, one of his obsessions.

“I need to quench my thirst with the lips of another,” Tanay swoons, and soon the unnamed stranger is teasing him along, taking him for midnight canoe rides and then just plain taking him.

Meanwhile, the family’s in a tizzy over a sibling who wants to marry but who can’t because of his cute Peppermint Patty of the Field Hockey world sister, who “must marry first.”

Environmental activist Anjura (Anjali Sivaraman) seems uninterested in boys, even the ones her family is hellbent on setting her up with. But that guy upstairs is catnip to all comers.

Kundalkar’s slow, lumbering tale of forbidden love is as obvious as a sloppy kiss between teenagers. The teacher passes on Rimbaud collections to his student, Tanay lends hapless Anjura moisturizer, the stranger’s “handsome but rude” brush off of Anjura is something she is sure to find irresistible.

And poor Tanay is aching through all this by composing what sounds like haiku.

“I walk with a pebble…in my sock. It hurts!”

“Cobalt Blue’s” sexual daring won’t startle Western viewers, who’ve seen decades of films this overt and far more explicit. And as a filmmaker, Kundalkar’s sense of pace seems borrowed from Russian novelists — the most long-winded ones. Watching this movie is like watching cobalt paint dry for long stretches.

But there’s almost certainly a difference in how this plays in the exotic East, where audiences conditioned by chaste Bollywood musicals and Indian melodramas don’t find the films nearly the patience-testing slogs they can seem to Western viewers.

The performances are interesting and never less than sexy, if a tad soap operatic. Babbar practically lathers himself right off the screen.

The very idea of an Indian homage to “Call Me By Your Name” would have seemed too hot to handle just a few years ago. So give Kundalkar credit for taking a shot at themes and situations that push the long-prudish boundaries of Indian cinema into virgin territory. Maybe next time, he’ll find a literary editor who’ll redline all the trite predictability, and a film editor who’ll speed things up a bit.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, partial nudity

Cast: Neelay Mehendale, Prateik Babbar, Anjali Sivaraman, Geetanjali Kulkarni and Neil Bhoopalam

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sachin Kundalkar, based on his novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

“Mothering Sunday” is a somber, sad tale of the gutting emptiness of loss, the unspoken-of absences of everyone who died in The Great War as remembered by an adult writer who saw this all first hand during her years “in service,” as a maid for Britain’s aristocratic rich.

Based on a novel by Graham Swift, Eva Husson’s film is equal parts writerly and painterly, with lovely visual compositions and exquisite light, decor and costuming complementing the observations and musings of its protagonist, the symbolically-named Jane Fairchild.

In that role, Odessa Young (“Assassination Nation”) is forced to on a clinic in the art of acting while nude. It’s a performance with the unselfconsciousness of one’s beautiful youth. And if the film’s too quiet and melodramatic to surprise, she at least tries to give it soulful heart that almost lets it transcend its notoriety.

Fittingly, Husson (“Girls of the Sun”) lets us see the elderly Jane, now celebrated for a novel that came from these experiences. And she’s played by the Oscar-winning legend Glenda Jackson, whose early career included a 1960s film of similar ambition and sexually nude notoriety — “Women in Love.”

Jane the maid and the cook at Beechcroft House (Patsy Ferran) are to have this “Mothering Sunday,” a church holiday conflated with the later American Mother’s Day, off. The mere name of the fourth Sunday in Lent celebration of one’s “mother church” (where one was baptized) is triggering for parents of all classes all across Britain.

It’s 1924, and every family has felt loss, none more than the Nivens. The absences at their dinner table has turned Mr. Niven (Colin Firth) into a purveyor of empty platitudes about a picnic where “We Nivens shall assemble” for an engagement announcement. “Nice to have a little joy” in their lives, he opines.

His sour, embittered wife (Olivia Colman) is having none of it. She seldom speaks and her gestures are confined to pained looks when she isn’t summoning up the cutting remarks she reserves for public chastisements of her husband’s inane, stiff-upper-lip optimism.

Jane wonders if at this gathering they’ll “tell each other the truth” and speak of those missing. But this day, Jane is off, free to “do as you please,” as Mr. Niven notes, wistfully. “Imagine that, ‘Do as you please.'”

And that means a visit to her paramour, the upper class lover (Josh O’Connor) who is the surviving scion of a nearby family, almost all alone in a great house whose elders have passed, along with siblings Paul lost in the war.

Paul is studying law and facing a marriage of almost feudal origins in its arrangements. He will wed the young woman (Emma D’Arcy) intended for his older brother. He is as resigned to this as the reckless, flapper-in-the-making Emma Hobday, who embodies the “Jazz Age” hedonism born of the mass death that shocked and created a “Lost Generation” of the dead and those hellbent on cheating death.

During their midday assignation, Jane and Paul talk of books and his predicament, leaving out the war deaths that shape it. And they have sex and dwell on the symbolism of “seed” that he can’t allow to be “planted,” and on the messy clean-up that most movies tastefully leave out of the experience.

“Mothering Sunday” skips back and forth through four timelines — a 1924 “present,” the recent (1918) past that brought Jane to Beechcroft House, a point some years in the future when she’s a bookstore clerk and aspiring writer living with a encouraging Black philosopher (Sope Dirisu), and in her dotage, when Jane is considering all her life and the many losses that intruded upon it and made her the writer she became.

The Oscar winners Colman — given one tasty “lashing out” moment, and a tender one — Firth and Jackson are the standouts in the cast, accomplishing much in just a few scenes each. D’Arcy has a few grace notes to play outside the anger Emma aims at the world and the lot in life she’s been given.

O’Connor is most interesting if you consider what his character represents — a bride-to-be’s second choice, what passes for “a catch” in a country that’s given up a generation of its young men to a pointless war.

Young is entirely too passive in the lead. Yes, Jane must keep to her “place,” hide her emotions as the Pink Floyd song suggests, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.” But there’s little to hang onto in this character and her performance of it.

The unaffected, unselfconscious curiosity Young has to play as a nude Jane ponders the bodily fluids of intercourse and wanders the halls, portrait gallery and library of Paul’s empty house after he finally departs for his own engagement picnic is both impressive and devoid of emotion.

If a male director had pushed for such naked longueurs, there’d be “exploitation” scolding hanging over it, I dare say. Whatever it speaks of in character terms, it seems more showy and attention-grabbing here.

Still, one can’t help but envy actors and actresses (equal opportunity nudity here) who can perform such moments with some aplomb.

Whatever “Mothering Sunday” lacks in emotional payoffs, it’s the shattered tone that Husson gets across that makes it work. Few films have done as well at capturing the disorienting, utterly-deflating feeling of a grief everyone involved realizes they will never, ever get over, so there’s no sense even trying to talk about it.

As if anything could make it worse.

Rating: R, explicit sex, nudity, some profanity, smoking

Cast: Odessa Young, Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Josh O’Connor, Patsy Ferran, Emma D’Arcy and Glenda Jackson.

Credits: Directed by Eva Husson, script by Alice Birch, based on the novel by Graham Swift. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:44

“Night Moves” is one of those ’70s to early ’80s Hollywood noirs you channel surf by, get a taste of and say “I need to come back and catch this bad boy from the beginning.”

It’s got Gene Hackman, stepping into stardom after “The Poseidon Adventure,” Arthur Penn behind the camera and that sun-faded cinematography of Bruce Surtees (“Dirty Harry,” “Play Misty for Me”) that is the epitome of the way the era looked on film.

Penn (“Bonnie and Clyde”) took a dip in the Big ’70s Noir Revival” (“The Long Goodbye,””Farewell My Lovely”) in a sexy, sordid story that captures LA and the celluloid film business of the day at its most louche and the laid back Florida Keys (Sanibel Island, actually) before Jimmy Buffett, McMansions, mass tourism and hurricanes ruined them.

Scotsman Alan Sharp’s workmanlike script — he later wrote “Rob Roy” for Liam Neeson, Jessica Lange and Tim Roth — turns Hackman into a long-retired football player who uses his size, his wiles and a little unexplained polish to charge on the high end and support himself and the working wife (Susan Clark) in middle class comfort.

An ex actress (Janet Ward) who divorced well commissions Harry Moseby to track down her wild child/wayward daughter. Delly is 16, “liberated,” sexually active and the role all but set the tone for Melanie Griffith’s career for years and years afterward. This was her first speaking part in the movies.

“When we’re all as ‘free’ as Delly, there’ll be rioting in the streets.”

James Woods plays a lowlife mechanic who works on film sets, fixing car and airplane engines, one of Delly’s paramours. Harry’s search will take him onto the set of director Joey Ziegler’s (Edward Binns) latest and into the Florida Keys, where the kid has fled to hang with her stepdad (John Crawford) and his fishing/diving charter assistant and maybe paramour (Jennifer Warren, never better).

There are “accidents,” deaths, and movie stunts set against infidelity and bad parenting, and loads of frank talk about all of it.

This character was “down on my knees to half the men in this town,” and given to crude come-ons.

“You could’ve joined me. It’s a big bath.” “Maybe some other time, when I’m feeling really dirty.”

Another character always looks freshly beaten (Woods). “What happened to your face?” “I won second prize in a fight.”

The plot’s geography feels off, in a coast-to-coast jaunts sense. I think they shot some of the LA scenes — not the movie-within-the-movie “location shoot” — in Sanibel, too.

There’s mourning after deaths, alliances are broken and then too-abruptly re-aligned. The “MacGuffin” driving all this is as arbitrary as the twists.

And the deaths-that-might-be-murders are a little tricky to reason out, for the viewer if not for Harry Moseby.

So many movies of the ’70s seems to reset their genres, and invent new ones. The modern blockbuster was born and “The Godfather” movies rethought our ever-evolving take on “The Greatest Film Ever Made.”

But when I think of the era, it’s of solid, bleached and washed-out thrillers (The notorious Eastmancolor film stock?) with chewy dialogue like this one, co-stars like Warren and Hackman swapping tough, sunbaked lines with a world weary fatalism that matched the age.

“Where were you when Kennedy got shot?” “Which Kennedy?” “Any Kennedy.”

Hackman’s vulnerable tough guy — Hey, his wife’s cheating on him with Harris Yulin, for Pete’s sake. — seems a random collection of hobbies (chess, with the film’s title a pun on “Knight Moves”), urges, urges fended off, hunches and day-late getting to the bottom of things.

But there’s craft in every moment, and not just the fights, come-ons and nervy, pitiless finale. He sneaks into his house to catch his wife with her lover. Cranks up opera on the stereo, and when Yulin’s limping cheat stumbles down, Harry bellows “How about those ADVENT speakers?”

Damn. I had Advents, too. What a great decade for speakers, and movies.

Rating: R, for violence, sex, nudity, profanity, smoking

Cast: Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Melanie Griffith, Susan Clark, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars, Janet Ward, John Crawford and James Woods

Credits: Directed by Arthur Penn, scripted by Alan Sharp. A Warner Brothers release on assorted streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:40

“These are grownup issues,” the big, bad Big Energy dude tells the 12 year-old Dutch girl. He mutters something about her “arrogance” and childish, limited world of the world.

But this lying Dutchman doesn’t know Nova (Kika van de Vijver) is from the future. He doesn’t know she’s come here to stop the future this Dutch Koch Brother’s shortsighted greed will cause. He has no idea that she’s armed, and that while robots of the future are every bit as adorable as kids’ movies have made them out to be, this kid is packing and might be tempted to pop an electrical cap in his ass.

“Captain Nova” may be slow and lack much in the way of urgency as a pilot (Anniek Pheifer) comes back from the future to keep us from terminating ourselves. But there’s something absolutely adorable about a Greta Thunberg showing us as an avenging angel out to break the political gridlock the uber-rich have paid for to ensure our doom.

Greta’s irked a good portion of the time. Righteous as she is, you get the feeling keeping her away from weapons is a solid choice, for environmental malefactors if not for the planet.

The reason she comes to mind while watching “Nova” is that this Captain comes in from the “Blade Runner” burnt-out future, gets in her shuttle with a shoulder-riding robot named — aptly, ADD — heads to the past to head off this environmental apocalypse. But when she’s pulled from the chrono-shuttle she’s all of 12 years old.

Conveniently, in this dullish but kid-friendly tale directed and co-written by Dutch TV writer and director Maurice Trouwborst, has de-aged Captain Nova “rescued” by ATV riding latchkey teen Nas (Marouane Meftah), who finds himself ordered around by a pretty young blonde, thus giving him a life lesson he will never outgrow.

They go on the lam, with only ADD (ahem) to help them, aside from assorted adults who can’t believe kids would steal a BMW X-1 and flee the Dutch department of defense investigator (Hannah van Lunteren) and her nerdy science aide (Joep Vermolen) who are trying to figure out how a kid’s fingerprints ended up in this UFO that crashed in the forest.

That kid is the 12 year-old Nova in her proper timeline. And one thing that can never happen, as we know from the “temporal paradox,” is Nova meeting Nova.

Here’s the cute kiddy stuff here. The robot has bits of “Short Circuit” and “Flight of the Navigator” and every childish “electronic sidekick” ever. He hovers or hangs over her shoulder, lecturing Nova on eating the green produce offered by present day Earth folk with “Eat eat eat, VITAMINS,” in Dutch, or in English with subtitles.

And that gun that the suddenly 12-again Nova totes? It’s not generally lethal. She shoots somebody and they go into time out.

“He’s been put on pause for a few hours. Gives him some time to think about his career, his life...”

There’s more promise in “Captain Nova” than payoff. A short running time and uncluttered throughline only leads to stupid shortcuts — a military prisoner that hasn’t been frisked for weapons — tepid getaways from the pursuers and more places for the chirpy robot to not be funny.

The hellscape future is quite convincing, and the plot has merit. It’s the sluggish execution that demotes “Captain Nova” back to corporal.

Rating: TV-14, violence, mild profanity

Cast: Anniek Pheifer, Kika van de Vijver, Marouane Meftah, Hannah van Lunteren, Joep Vermolen
Robbert Bleij and J.V. Martin.

Credits: Directed by Maurice Trouwborst, scripted by Lotte Tabbers and
Maurice Trouwborst. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

He’s the teaser advert video revealing the theme, the vibe and the ’70s music (of course) that makes it “Guardians” branded.

C’mon. You’ve gotta visit Disney World before Governor Il Douche shuts it down.

Fresh out of college, I used to conduct and produce interviews for public radio stations. And one thing one quickly picks up on from such a job is an instinctual skepticism when chatting up say, the head of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network of “researchers” and enthusiasts (located in Lincolnton, N.C., at the time) or a North Dakota Native American college professor and his son who talk about being abducted by aliens.

One has to be on guard against the logical fallacies people use to make cases for something that lacks concrete proof, and yet has thrived in Conspiracy-minded America for the better part of a century. Because the last thing you want to come off as is a gullible rube.

Such worries never seem to cross the brow of “investigators” and co-hosts of these “On the Trail of UFOs” documentaries, Shannon Legro and Seth Breedlove. They take in every bit of hearsay, some of it backed up by under-credentialed “experts” with the authoritative “many people say” or “there’ve been reports” when describing “hollowed out mountain” UFO or “top secret government bases” where the “black helicopters” hide.

In “Night Visitors,” they speak with “experts” whose idea of “well-documented” isn’t backed up by any source they cite. The filmmakers blend in animated recreations of UFO “visits” and “events” with grainy footage of lights in the night sky purportedly captured by eyewitnesses, without distinguishing between the two or even making note of which is which.

Perhaps they had copyright issues dealing with such material, and if they’d spent the cash they blew on a slick, sci-fi “truth is out there” score, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

And that’s shame, because the thing is, someone or something is mutilating livestock and apparently has made it a habit of hitting this small King family cattle ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado repeatedly over the years. There’s been a lot of reporting on such incidents, with explanations, as Legro and folks she interviews here claim, ranging from occult rituals to “government experiments” to aliens.

Even taking into account the range of much more logical and plausible reasons — animal attacks to neighbors’ revenge, gruesome farm country pranks to insurance fraud — we still don’t know what’s happening. And the waters have been so muddied by the unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable that the Wikipedia page on the topic is a self-admitted “fringe theories” mess.

“Night Visitors” lapses into humorless/charmless self-parody as the “experts” are limited to fellow true believers in the “high strangeness” of this corner of Colorado, a place that Breedlove and Legro compare to their West Virginia “investigations” of “cryptids” like the Mothman, in earlier films.

I hesitate to toss the label “charlatans” at these two Youtube-ready amateurs. But in never seeking genuine, credentialed academic experts who might offer real pushback to their “far out” or “farther out” solutions to mysteries, by never expressing any skepticism at that what they’re being told is just self-aggrandizing causal fallacies delivered by “fake” authorities, they are, at best, “gullible rubes” selling cow patty theories of cattle mutilations to other gullible rubes.

And where’s that all end up? In a DC pizza parlor, where the suckers seek the nexus of a Big Conspiracy fomented by obvious con artists and hustlers who have preyed on the naive and dull witted since time immemorial.

It’s all harmless “X-Files” fun until people get hurt, a treasonous con artist hustles the suckers into electing him and reality reveals just how poor at parsing fact-from-BS you have to be to consider snake oil salesmen “authorities” on anything. “Critical thinking” never figures into it. Any of it.

There’s a reason learning how to identify fallacious arguments is called “healthy skepticism.” It’s healthy, and it’ll make you demand proof from obvious frauds who have no interest or ability providing that.

Rating: unrated, some graphic cattle mutilation imagery

Cast: Shannon Legro, Seth Breedlove, others

Credits: Scripted and directed by Seth Breedlove. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:21

An American Japanophile’s deep dive into the Tokyo underworld becomes an entertaining and intriguing mob mystery in “Tokyo Vice,” a new series on HBO Max starring Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe and Rinko Kikuchi.

It’s immersive and engrossing, if more conventional than you might expect. “Heat,” “Last of the Mohicans” and “Collateral” filmmaker Michael Mann directed the pilot, which has just enough design, style and panache to remind us that he brought “Miami Vice” to TV much earlier in his career. He sets the tone for the show — more procedural than flash — start to finish.

Set in 1999, we get a taste of Japanese mob rituals and a peek inside the workings of one of the world’s largest newspapers, here named Meicho Shimbun (if the subtitling is correct) but based on Mainichi Shimbun. The series touches on Japanese acceptance of authority, always publishing the “official” police version of every crime.

“There are no murders in Japan” may sound Orwellian, but that’s the way stabbings, shootings and such are reported. Not until the cops call it a “murder” is it so identified. So that slashed up fellow with the knife sticking out of his last and terminal wound will have to wait.

Japanese sexism, racism, xenophobia and mania for boy bands (It’s peak Backstreet Boys era Tokyo.) is touched on.

Just getting a job at the newspaper, which has “never hired a gaijin” (foreigner) requires taking an exhaustive test with maybe a hundred other aspirants.

Everybody smokes, and the new kid is informed that’s something he’ll be taking up soon enough, if he ever learns to hack it as a hack at a 12 million reader newspaper.

And everywhere, there are the teeming masses — from the huge, orderly, deferential and ever-so-polite “scrum” at every police press conference, to the streets and lurid, plush designer nightclubs where the hostesses ply their trade.

The story is told from five points of view. Jake Adelstein (Elgort) — the series is based on his memoir — is the “gaijin” who came to teach English and understand the culture, but whose background pushes him into work where learning about Japanese policing, its underworld and night life culture is crucial to the job. This world is “explained” to him and the viewer — but not OVER-explained — as he experiences it.

Samantha (Rachel Keller) is the “hostess” “bottle girl” playing her own angles, scrambling to make some cash, keeping her own secrets. Tokyo Police detective/family man Katagiri (Watanabe) is a veteran cop straining at the “just keeping the peace/just close-the-case” police work that rarely digs deep enough to get at real criminals or the true “Why?” of crimes. Emi (Rinko Kichuchi of “Pacific Rim” and “Babel” is Jake’s editor, the one who keeps his racist and seemingly anti-Semitic section editor from firing this “half Jew/half-ape” on general principles, if not just cause.

The American, a University of Missouri product (home to a prestigious journalism school), isn’t quick to pick up on the “rules” for news coverage and the strict formula such stories stick to is this gigantic newspaper.

And Sato (Shô Kasamatsu) is a young yakuza, tested, teased and tormented by his mob, a guy whose life intersects with Jake’s and Samantha’s in ways both menacing and potentially helpful.

Everyone has personal tests and slippery ethics about what is the truth. Everyone has secrets they’d like to keep, that they’re afraid of or running away from.

Elgort has made the most of his years being cast as “callow youth,” and this mop-topped fish-out-of-water is a good fit — arrogant, happy to surprise the various Japanese he meets by knowing their language (not that any of them take this revelation well), but sloppy and easily misled by a would-be mentor or yakuza or cop who needs a favor.

Watanabe, a mainstay of Japanese, Asian and Hollywood cinema since the ’80s classic “Tampopo,” classes up the series and lends it gravitas and toughness. And he’s just the headliner among a supporting cast of faces long familiar in Japanese cinema.

The high-stakes intrigues here are fascinating, if somewhat back-burnered. Such series are built on cliff-hangers, which keep us coming back for the next installment. The cliffhangers here aren’t dazzlers.

But the milieu will be lure enough to anyone curious about this Westernized but still exotic culture, its cuisine, tattooed gangsters, accommodating cops and seemingly meek, don’t-rock-the-boat press.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sex, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe, Rachel Keller, Shô Kasamatsu, Ella Rumph and Rinko Kikuchi.

Credits: Created by J.T. Rogers, based on Jake Edelstein’s memoir. An HBO Max release.

Running time: 10 episodes @ :58 minutes each.