Movie Nation

The hallmarks of a D-movie are many, but often include the following.

They’re usually horror films. And there’re always a couple of horror “names” in the cast, people whose credits include low-to-no-budget slasher, spatter and “dead teenager” movie credibility.

In “Ash and Bone,” those include Jimmy Doom (“Blood Immortal”), Mel Novak (“Game of Death”) and Jamie Bernadette (TV’s “Midnight, Texas”).

Do they help win financing, get distribution (not in this case) or entice downloads? That’s the bet, anyway.

The dialogue’s littered with cliches and grammatical abominations. Lines like “You’re not from around here, are you?” are a given.

The plot is so old it qualifies for Social Security, the characters simple archetypes. Gun nuts? Cannibals? Corrupt sheriff? Insolent Goth Girl?

And occasionally you’ll see a shot, a scene composition so inept that a character sitting on a sofa looks like a head on a bearskin body, or a cop wears his sunglasses on top of his head so that we see the production lighting inside that bar.

These films have picked up a new nickname. Anytime the free-with-ads streamer “Tubi” is trending, you can bet some self-financed delusion where you can hear “Action!” in the incompetent editing, bad effects and idiotic makeup has just popped up there.

“Ash and Bone” isn’t on Tubi. Yet.

A father (director Harley Wallen) takes his new wife (Kaiti Wallen, ahem) and troubled daughter from an earlier marriage (Angelina Danielle Cama) from Detroit, where Goth girl Cassie was getting into trouble, to rural Hadley Lake, Michigan.

Things’ll be fine. Or things will be better. After she takes her earbuds out and listens to parent and other people instead of death metal. After Dad finally lays down the law. Until that day happens, she grabs the keys to Dad’s van and cruises for a bar, flashes a fake ID and asks the locals (Bernadette and Mason Heidger) where she might find “a haunted house.”

There aren’t any. But maybe the creepy McKinley place’ll do. It’s not haunted. When they break in, it’s obvious it’s not even empty. But that wall covered with missing persons fliers at the bar is thought to be connected to it.

“What is that SMELL?”

Maybe the video camera in that basement torture chamber they’ve stumbled into will state the obvious.

As “everybody knows” the owners and most suspect something awful going on, we don’t need to be told that “something’s up with this town and this family.” That “smell” might be corruption. Or it might just be what the title of this tale foretells — “Ash and Bone,” and maybe a little burnt flesh.

Even by the more forgiving standards of no-budget horror, this isn’t any good. There’s no pace. Scenes lie flat, not so much progressing as standing and waiting around to see if they ever end.

Getting your movie scripted, financed, cast, produced and finished is a series of small to major miracles any indie filmmaker can testify to. But some of them simply aren’t worth that herculean effort. Perhaps the most valuable talent any filmmaker can have is the ability to recognize that before that first casting call.

It’s a pity they don’t teach that in film school, or add that to any web page on “how to make a movie.” It’s not just about “Can we get this movie made?” It’s “Should we?”

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, teen drinking, profanity

Cast: Angelina Danielle Cama, Jamie Bernadette, Harley Wallen, Kaiti Wallen, Mason Heidger, Mel Novak, with Erika Hoveland and Jimmy Doom.

Credits: Directed by Harley Wallen, scripted by Bret Miller. A Cama Productions release.

Running time: 1:37

The topicality, the writing, the Edward Hopper Stuck at Waffle House production design, the mayhem in pantomime.

And the acting. Jenna Ortega’s most touching moment.

The academic turned Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist Richard Russo’s college-set comedy “Straight Man” becomes the latest Bob Oedenkirk AMC+ series, casting him as a writer/English dept. chair in mid-midlife crisis — “Lucky Hank.”

It’s a droll comedy about witty, petty, self-absorbed academics, snowflake students and the low-stakes turf wars of academia, a dryer-than-dry comic cocktail in the ballpark of Netflix’s “The Chair.” Watching it one can both raise one’s hopes, and understand why Netflix cancelled that Sandra Oh series after just a season. I got the distinct impression that AMC saw that, too, and budgeted “Lucky Hank” accordingly.

Oedenkirk plays William Henry Deveraux, Jr., the chairman of Railton College’s fractious, back-biting eight member English department. He is married, apparently happily, to the college’s queen of smoothing troubled waters (Mireille Enos of TV’s “The Killing” and “Hanna”), crisis counselor for the college. He published one novel, decades ago. He’s the estranged son of a just-retired famous literary critic.

And now he’s teaching a fiction-writing workshop, a never-quite-has-been listening to delusional students try their hand at what they’re sure will make them famous.

Our story begins the day Hank is challenged, mid-daydream, by a rich kid (Jackson Kelly) who figures he’s the next Don DeLillo. One sneer too many, a personal attack on “your only novel” and where Hank ended up, sets him off.

His meanest comeback? “You’re HERE! The reason you’re here really shows that you didn’t try very hard in high school.”

Queue the campus-wide outrage, the demands for his firing start high (Oscar Nuñez from “The Office” is the harassed Dean of Faculty) that spill over into a “de-chairing” effort in his department. And the kid expects an apology.

Hank copes with this amidst his years-long writer’s block, fresh problems involving his over-achiever dad, the constant mooching of his married daughter (Olivia Scott-Welch), and threatened budget cuts that he may be facing even if he’s deposed as department chair.

In the second episode, a longtime friend (Brian Huskey) who was first-published at the same time as Hank, triggers more angst when he comes for a richly-compensated public Q & A that his old pal Hank is expected to moderate. The department revolt — Suzanne Cryer, Cedric Yarbrough, Shannon DeVido, Arthur Keng, Nancy Robertson, Haig Sutherland and Alvina August — climaxes just as many faculty “types” turn on each other and bigger issues settle onto the horizon.

AMC only provided the first two episodes for review, so the famous cover-illustration hook for this pre-Pulitzer outing by the author of “Empire Falls” — which involves the department budget, tenure and a threat against the on-campus geese — is down the road.

Can one tell if this is going to be worth the viewer’s time from the first two installments? There’s a bit of “Office” style promise in the predictable gender politics, chosen discipline hierarchy and sexual history nature of the department infighting, somewhat less in the students who aren’t likely to forget Hank labeled them “mediocrities” at “this middling college” in a “forgotten town.” Or that he dismissed that smug rich kid who compared his blundering style to Chaucer and dashed his expectations of winning a Pulitzer for literature.

“I’ll bet a KIDNEY that you don’t!”

“Have a Nice Day!” is a sentimental coming of age dramedy that doesn’t quite come off. Lots of promising if somewhat conventional possibilities are introduced, with only the least interesting of them pursued.

It’s lighthearted, but ungainly, incomplete and disappointing more often than not.

Álvaro Guerrero plays an aged ex-DJ forcibly retired a long way from where the action is. But back in the day, he was a star of Mexico City’s Universo Musical, famed for his introduction of “La hora de rock and roll,” on the radio.

Now Enrique Guerrero, aka “Enrique Guerrerock,” is just “‘Rique” to his equally-aged pals down at the town barbershop (Eduardo de la Peña, Fernando Larrañaga and Sidney Robote). They sit and sip Cuba Libres and tell ‘Rique stories when he’s not around.

But an announcement on the radio about an upcoming anniversary celebration kind of freaks ‘Rique out. Surely his old flame, the co-hostess, “La Bomba,” who dumped him when the station broke up their team years before, will be there. He’s still got his ancient Boss Mustang, although now it’s a wreck. He needs cash to fix up the car, clean himself up and make the trip to Mexico City to show her what she lost.

That’s how he winds up bagging groceries at the supermercado. And that throws him into conflict with the kid ordered to train him, Picho (Eduardo Minett).

‘Rique is revered by the manager, so he can do what he wants, smoke in the no-smoking zones. When he helps himself to more than his share of the tips, Picho is pissed. The kid’s got enough problems, pining away for his favorite cashier and high school classmate, Amanda (Andrea Chaparro). Cavalier ‘Rique is a bit of a cock-blocker, in that regard.

But that’s how the hustling, shortcutting, charming and shoplifting ‘Rique smooths things over with the kid. He’ll help him learn how to break out of the friend zone with Amanda, if Picho will help him in his latest side hustle — pilfering the recyclable cardboard from the store that pays their salaries.

The kid is treated to an Elvis pompadour — because that was “cool” to rock-a-billy loving ‘Rique. He learns to be mysterious, elusive and remote. And he is trained in how to steal and somehow get screwed out of part of his share as they make off with all that cardboard.

A throwback martial arts fantasy like “Code of the Assassins” can’t help but summon up what one remembers of Joseph Campbell’s seminal book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” or Vladimir Propp’s “The Morphology of the Folk Tale.”

There really are only about half a dozen plots in all of fiction. And the “hero” really does have “a thousand faces,” masked or unmasked, in superhero tights, the cloak of a Jedi or an ancient warrior from Asia, the Middle East or anywhere else.

“Code of the Assassins,” released as “Song of the Assassins” in China, harks back to Asia’s version of the sort of talky, fan-friendly quests that one can see in any comic book movie from Marvel or DC. It’s got the same archetypes — fighters with specialized, supernatural skills, treacherous villains, damsels and dragon ladies — magical talismans and a wondrous object coveted by all, in this case, an ornate, sliding and folding copper map to “all of the forgotten treasures” in this version of mythic China.

It stuffs the screen with characters, exposition and conflicting motivations. And it damned near talks itself to death in the process. But all that really matters are that the fights are cool and that various warriors, assassins, princes, generals and judges “stick the superhero landing.”

Daniel Lee, director of “Three Kingdoms” and “White Vengeance,” tells a tale of a time when “assassins were used to solve problems.” Can’t release a movie that would scare the People’s Republicans who run China by giving the proles ideas, can we?

Qi Junyuan, aka “Blue Asura” (Shaofeng Feng of “1921” and “White Vengeance”) is a one-armed member of the Ghost Valley assassins guild, murderous mercenaries hired to solve geo-political and economic problems by the assorted kingdoms of ancient China. He wears a gilded mask and black cloak when on the job for South Pagoda or East Mulberry or whatever royal line bids for his services.

And that missing arm has been replaced by ancient Chinese bionic tech. He’s got a steampunk arm — the Arm of Asura — that spring loads daggers or swords into that hand and fires darts or grappling hooks that help him fly from pagoda to pagoda.

He has an overlord, Golden Mask, and a mentor, Grim Ghost.

“Let go of the hatred and prevail in righteousness, Grim Ghost/Obi Wan counsels.

And he’s got a grudge. That map he’s been summoned to steal from a general (Jun Hu) who has been sent take it from its latest owner was made by our hero’s father. Making it got his entire clan slaughtered, save for Qi Junyuan.

There’s a winning business idea tucked into the 93 minutes of the grief, guilt and its consequences drama “Rebroken.”

The film features Tobin Bell, the Once and Always “Jigsaw,” as a sort of inscrutable therapist members of a grief self-help group sneak off to see for life-changing advice, or perhaps a supernatural “do over” of the event that killed someone else and broke them. And hearing Bell’s mesmerizing growl of a whisper, dispensing the wisdom of the ages — in fortune cookie-length bites — made me wonder why he’s never turned that into an opportunity.

A Daily Affirmation by Tobin Bell seems like a website begging for our money.

“Sometimes what we think is lost is not lost at all,” life coach (Guru?) Vaughan intones. “It just needs to be rediscovered.”

He’s put a memorization mantra on LP for his latest grieving visitor (Scott Hamm Duenas, also credited with co-writing the script).

“You mind is open, you heart is clear, now open both to what is dear.”

The movie may take forever to begin, not deliver much at all when it does and end a lot less cryptically than those who wrote it think. But the owlish, soft-spoken Bell has little life lessons aplenty, just as he did in the “Saw” movies. Only this time, there’s no booby trap to lop off your fingers or grind down your scalp.

“Folks don’t always like what they discover about themselves,” Vaughan says, a warning label for ayahuasca if eve I heard one.

Duenas’s Will is the sullen guy sitting through grief group meetings, by court order, challenged to “share” his story by the group leader (Alison Haislip), badgered by cop and meeting member Bryan (co-writer Kipp Tribble) as he heads out the door after each session, dead set on walking to the liquor store and then back to his house, where a missing child’s magnetic letters still decorate the fridge with “I love you Daddy.”

Lydia (Nija Okoro) is the group member who would love to amend Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s “Five Stages of Grief/Dying.”

“There ought to be a sixth step...Reversal.”

She’s the one who tips Will about someone who could REALLY help. That’s how he tracks down Vaughan in a puptent on the outskirts of town. And once we get past the outrage that “NOBODY puts Tobin BELL in a PUPTENT,” we listen as he counsels Will. Whatever he’s selling, he’s giving it away. And whatever that is, you’ve got to accept it on faith.

“Listen with a clear and open mind,” he says. And here, have some LPs. Vaughan has recorded affirmations to listen to until you doze off.

This is lovely to look at. The um “story?” Hard to uh, SAY.

April 5 we find out.

Long review short, if you liked Idris Elba as the plays-by-his-own-rules DCI John Luther on the British TV series, you’ll enjoy another two hours with him in the made for Netflix film, “Luther: The Fallen Sun.” Whatever else the series promises or delivers, Elba’s effortless cool and charisma is always engaging, no matter what’s going on around him or what’s thrown at him in a story.

But for the uninitiated, here’s what Netflix pounds sterling get you when you take a project there.

This is “Luther” that spares no expense, with settings, effects and over-the-top villainy that sends him to prison and eventually to Norway to fight his foe.

Netflix spent Andy Serkis money to land him — and his breathtaking haircut — as the bad guy, and Cynthia Erivo as a cop Luther must evade and/or join forces with to save the day and his skin in the process.

Suffice it to say, series creator Neil Cross got something like a blank check to realize anything he could dream up for this latest “Luther.” But that blank check trips up almost everybody of real note who accepts it. The movies that come out of Netflix’s largesse have Netflix editing, and indulgent, “Do whatever you want” supervision.

There’s no pushback on the screenplay’s excesses, and that’s true if you’re Adam McKay (“Don’t Look Up”), Adam Sandler or Martin Scorsese (“The Irishman”). That’s really driven home here, as nobody involved with this is at a Scorsese/McKay level.

Luther shows up at a crime scene where a young man has gone missing. The lad’s mother (Hattie Morahan) extracts a “PROMISE me you’ll find my son” from him. But before he can, other factors come into play.

We’ve heard the lad (James Bradford) blackmailed into showing up at the place where he was nabbed. And the guy doing the blackmailing (Serkis) notes the questions being asked by the cop, makes a call declaring “I can’t allow that to happen,” and lays out a wish list of dirt.

Evidence of “any line he’s crossed…corruption,” deep secrets, legal shortcuts taken, crimes, that’s what’s needed on “analog” John Luther.

“I want (“dum dum DUuuuuuuum” music)…his shame!”

Luther finds himself exposed, accused, tried and convicted by montage. The new cop on the missing kid case (Cynthia Erivo) is a step or two behind our kidnapper. She only realizes this when relatives of many such victims are lured to a mansion where the bodies of their loves ones are hanging.

Luther only figures out the dastardly sophistication of it all when he’s secretly reached and taunted in prison. He’s got to call on old mates and contacts to stage an escape, and his old colleague retired off the force (series regular Dermot Crowley) to get him what he needs to know to trap this monster.

“€Twenty on if I get him before you get me,” is the bet. “Make it €50!”

A widowed single-mom, broken-hearted over her aging father’s decline, finds something to look forward to in stealing another woman’s husband in “One Fine Morning (“Un beau matin”), the latest navel-gazing drama from the director of “Bergman Island” and “Goodbye First Love.”

That sentence passes more judgement than writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve ever offers in this intimate romance built on close observations and not reaching conclusions about characters and their actions. It’s about stasis, death and personal rebirth, not consequences or collateral damage. It suffers from those omissions.

Léa Seydoux is Sandra, a freelance translator turning German or English speakers at conferences, D-Day reunions and other public engagements into French or English that her listeners can understand. It’s a job that requires concentration, but whose hours allow her to dote on eight-year-old daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins) and check in frequently on her philosophy professor father (Pascal Greggory), who is losing his sight and his faculties, we eventually learn, to Benson’s syndrome, a form of dementia.

Seeing someone whose “whole life was committed to thinking” (in French with English subtitles) break down this way, hearing her father insist that “You mustn’t let people take pity on you,” brings her to tears.

But things look up when she crosses paths with an old friend of her and her late husband’s. Clément (Melvil Poupaud) is a globe-trotting scientist — a “cosmo-chemist” with a wife and son about Linn’s age. Their first conversation, in a park where they reconnect, introduces the idea that his marriage isn’t the best and that she figures “my love life is behind me.”

Neither we nor they have to be French to see that as foreplay for the affair that quickly follows.

Hansen-Løve’s film enfolds three points of view — Sandra’s work life, where every so often she lets her mind wander off-task and into the situations facing her off-duty, her tentative-then-torrid romance with the dashing scientist who happens to be great with kids, and the step-by-step decline that she, her sister (Sarah Le Picard), her father’s companion (Fejria Deliba), assorted health care workers and counselors and her mother (Nicole Garcia) witness and take steps to manage.

Her mother and father are long-divorced, but Mom still has a say and just enough distance to organize moving into a nursing home (a multi-stage process) and disposing of her husband’s apartment, mementos and vast collection of books.

Every step, every encounter with one of her father’s former students, makes Sandra weep. At least she has this new love, a man her daughter is quite taken with.

As matter of fact and real-world/real-people as “One Fine Morning” can be, there’s an airless unreality to it all. We never meet “the wife,” barely glimpse the little boy and only a few predictable “I can’t do this to them” backsliding moments address these complications of having an affair at 40.

There’s a whole ready-for-export corner of French cinema where TVs are never glimpsed, where only Schubert or Renaissance music is overheard and where the only jobs are writer, academic or translator who is also working on a project to turn the letters of Annemarie Schwarzenbach into something French academics and French speakers can read.

Think of the last 25 French films you saw, and I dare say 20 of them will meet these criteria. Even the hospital and nursing home scenes here have a film-set quiet about them, as if this is not a detail this tale of life’s details cares to bother with.

The real human emotions, seeing one’s own mortality through a failing parent, noticing how your child is impacted by this new lover and possible father figure who may not work out, get somewhat swallowed in a sort of Woody-Allen-at-his-most-pretentious-and-Bergmaneseque sterility.

Seydoux is subtle and introspective here, and a tad dull despite the obligatory nude scenes. Her sparkling work in “The French Dispatch” and showier turns in “France” and even the Bond films underscores how muted this character and this story are.

Hansen-Løve often makes personal films exploring the geography of the psyche and intellectualizing such corners of it as the creative process, love and loss. “Bergman Island” touched on the “creative couple” dynamic and can be taken as a fictional dissection of her relationship with her longtime mentor and lover, the much older and more established French filmmaker Olivier Assayas.

There’s nothing remotely that juicy or interesting going on here. And the universality of the “stage of life” experiences is somewhat lost when you remove all the edges, complications and distractions from your portrait, which then takes on the tone of “still life” more often than any movie should.

Rating: R for some sexuality, nudity and language

Cast: Léa Seydoux, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia, Camille Leban Martins and Pascal Greggory

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:52

Dopey, transgressive, off-the-wall?

Check out Matthew Broderick’s haircut.

J-Law leans into...something for this June 23 farce about “helicopter parents” trying to transaction a woman into spending time with their “undatable” 19 year old dork of a son.

A few chuckles in the trailer, often a good sign.