Movie Nation

It should go without saying that you don’t settle into the two-hours+ of a drama set within the world of haute cuisine with an empty stomach. That’s doubly true for the Thai tale “Hunger,” whose title is the last warning you’ll get.

This making-of-a-chef saga is a clever mashup of assorted chef-stories, with dashes of everything from “The Menu” to “Chef,” with a tiny pinch of “No Reservations/Mostly Martha.” Yes, most of those are pretty conventional, but there’s just enough of that “Menu” edge to make this savory, food-focused coming-into-her-own drama crackle in the peanut oil.

Aoy, played by by Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying of “Bad Genius,” slaves away over the wok in her aged father’s open air Pad See Ew diner, serving up delectable comfort noodles for the slurping and gulping masses. Her friends envy her because at least she had a real job to take over when she finished school, but her head’s down and likely to stay that way forever in this limiting venue.

But that changes when a handsome, well-turned-out young assistant sous chef (Gunn Svasti) orders her food, takes one bite and leaves her a business card that must cost more than anything on her menu. He’s seen how she “works the fire,” and invites her to try out at Hunger.

She has a sister in school and a brother who drops by for meals and a high-mileage father who might be easing off to let her take over the family shop. But Aoy accepts the challenge. Why, she is asked?

“I want to be special!” (in Thai with English subtitles).

Passing muster with Chef Paul in the symphony of stainless steel that serves his hottest-eatery-in-the-East won’t be easy. And beating the posh lad with culinary school-training and higher-end restaurant experience is just the beginning of her challenges.

Chef Paul, played with poker-faced malice veteran actor and director (“Headshot,” “The Secret Weapon”) Nopachai Chaiyanam, is a bully, an exacting showboat who uses the priceist ingredients — Wagyu beef, Kurobuta pork, lobsters fresh off the boat. A catered event is coming up, and his way of hazing Aoy is to take that stupidly-expensive beef and make her show him she can slice it without “sawing,” and “work the fire” so that’s it’s lightly seared, with the flavorful blood involved barely cooked.

Her apprenticeship in this top flight kitchen will include flattery and know-your-place demotions, trips with Tone the sous chef recruiter to fetch Grade A ingredients. and after-hours lessons from Tone. And if don’t know how erotic massaging meat before cooking can be, well back to your salad, dear.

Aoy works through the night and collects the flaming oil burns on her arms that it takes to achieve the higher expectations demanded of her.

But as she sees what ravenous pigs even the well-mannered elite turn into when devouring chef’s creations, she and the movie get to their point.

What and who is all this “foodie” frenzy about? Are any of these status symbol culinary “experiences” worth it? Is it as noble as the world’s famous chefs all claim? The simple “honor” of serving people your great creations that Bourdain and Ramsay and others have preached all has a pricey, performative and morally corrupting mania about it.

What might this environment do to a simple but beautiful noodle cook from the working class?

The writer of “Girl from Nowhere,” Kongdej Jaturanrasamee, scripted and produced this, and masters both the milieu and the genre with this formulaic foodie delight. Director Sitisiri Mongkolsiri (the Thai Oscar submission “Inhuman Kiss”) gives it a polish that suggests this could be his audition for Hollywood work, or at the very least a Thai film meant more for the international market than the domestic one.

In Hollywood terms, it’s just a “big game” story, setting us up for a chefs showdown/throwdown.

The story arc in such tales may be the epitome of “conventional” — chef learns that “expensive” doesn’t equate with “the very best.” But don’t be surprised if this ravishing production sends you online in search of a Door Dash serving of something, and no mere Pad Thai will do.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drugs, nudity, smoking, rude gestures

Cast: Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying, Nopachai Chaiyanam and Gunn Svasti.

Credits: Directed by Sitisiri Mongkolsiri, scripted by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:10

“STOP the presses!” they’d yell in all the old newspapering movies of the ’40s whenever something extraordinary would happen.

But a bad movie blowing up the box office? Nothing to see here. Happens all the time.

“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” was always going to be a hit, with early expectations suggesting it’d hit $85 million on its opening weekend.

Oh no. The plotless video game that inspired a pretty much plotless, candy-colored turd of a movie left that prognostication in the dust before Friday even dawned.

It’s on track to have a $146 million weekend, Deadline.com says. And since it opened on a Wednesday and opened huge, it may reach as high as $200 million over its first five days — $195 being Deadline’s projection.

Pent up demand for animated family friendly fare, Illumination’s generally top-notch track record for kiddie entertainment (until now), all played into creating a blockbuster and a big payday for Nintendo and one of the most popular video games of all time.

I wasn’t the only one to call this thing a dog. But families want to get out, and nostalgic gamers must be showing up in some numbers, too.

It is on track to best “Frozen 2” as the biggest global animated feature opening of all time. Here’s how @BoxOfficePro called it.

The far more grown-up and more entertaining “Air” is doing OK. But $18.7 million over five days is nothing compared to “Mario’s” Friday take, with the “Bros.” pulling in nearly $60 million on that one day alone. Affleck, Damon & Co. sold a lot of tickets to a movie about the invention and marketing of a basketball shoe, a movie with no love story and no action beats. That’s impressive.

“Dungeons & Dragons” cleared $14 million on its second weekend, just behind “John Wick: Chapter 4” and just ahead of the other also rans.

A few tasty co stars fill the orbit of Sir Ben’s Salvador Dali, an unfocused “celebrity” during the era he befriended Mia Farrow and ran with the jet set, and had no time to paint.

Sort of “My Week with Marilyn” with a young assistant trying to keep our genius on task — any task.

Rupert Graves and Suki Waterhouse are among the co stars.

June 9.

Eden REALLY wants to go to college, and not just any college, but tony Pembroke.

As widowed Dad runs a septic tank service, she’s going to need help.

That’s why the “scholarship girl” hits up her rich private school classmate for a good word. His dad’s a Congressman and on the college’s board. That’s why she refuses to accept snobby Schroder’s brush-offs. That’s why she talks her bestie into joining her for a party the rich kid is throwing. That’s why they’ve donned contrasting “angel” costumes in black and white. It’s a “themed” “heaven and hell” party.

And that party’s where BFF Zara gets drunk and Eden, working that rich boy hard for that help getting into Pembroke, sees what’s on a cell phone — footage of a classmate who disapppeared the week before, possibibly incriminating evidence involving the rich and the powerful.

This self-described “smart” girl is going to be put to the test, trying to escape the clutches of the criminally implicated, people who know what she thinks she knows and are damned sure not letting her get out of there to tell the tale.

“You’re Killing Me” is a tight formulaic thriller with snatches of suspense, struggling through panic problem-solving, a somewhat high body count and a final iconic and seriously badass image of the late Anne Heche, paired with Dermot Mulroney as the parents of the rich, creepy teen named after a “Peanuts” character.

McKaley Miller of “Ma” and TV’s “Hart of Dixie” is Eden, the girl who knows what she wants and won’t let her insulted feelings keep her from imploring Schroder (Brice Anthony Heller, perfectly vile) to intervene on her behalf. Keyara Milliner is Zara, the besty who rides into this party with her — “It’ll be FUN!” — takes one for the team and gets Mickeyed by Schroder’s ride-or-die, Gooch (Will Deusner).

Eden is so self-centered she sets Zara up to be date-raped. But as she finally shoos away Gooch, he’s the doofus who drops his phone. As the film’s opening images were of a teen girl being video-recorded, and the cops showing up at school looking for information on missing Melissa, Eden’s quick to do the math.

She locks herself, the losing-its-charge cell phone (It’s a phone-free party–Congressman’s rules.) and Zara into a bedroom, and makes her panicked first mistake. She lets Schroder know she knows what’s on the phone, even as she won’t let him in.

The “party” devolves” into a desperate struggle to procure a charger and use that phone to call for help and alert the police about what’s on it, or for the bad boys and Schroder’s track-jock girlfriend (Morgana Van Peebles) to bust in, get that phone, and at least cover their tracks, if not worse.

The antagonists are well-enough matched, and the supporting players — especially Mulroney and Heche — give this straightforward escape-or-die picture higher stakes and sinister undertones.

Co-directors Beth Hanna and Jerren Lauder keep it moving fast enough that when characters in the Walker Hare, Brad Martocello script lose common sense in moments of panic, it’s more understandable than eye-rollable.

Yes, while we can guess where this is going on more than one occasion, we can’t always. And even when we do, there’s something damned satisfying on a visceral level to the punch, counter-punch scheming and clawing of it all.

Rating: unrated, pretty violent

Cast: McKaley Miller, Brice Anthony Heller, Keyara Milliner, Morgana Van Peebles, Will Deusner, Dermot Mulroney and Anne Heche.

Credits: Directed by Beth Hanna and Jerren Lauder, scripted by Walker Hare, Brad Martocello A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:34

No “big” names in the cast, but it could be interest.

Paramount has this one for digital and theatrical release, beginning May 5.

“Chupa” is a harmless Spanglish trifle for kids, an “E.T.” riff about Mexico’s flying (!?) vampire bobcat of myth, El Chucacabra.

It’s built on a simple formula — kid discovers a supernatural (or extraterrestrial) playmate, must save it from those who would exploit it — and executed accordingly.

There’s a little pop to its casting and limited charm in its Mexican cultural touchstones. Look at this list of screenwriters and see if you can guess how “limited” that is — Sean Kennedy Moore, Joe Barnathan, Marcus Rinehart and Brendan Bellomo. Not a Spanish surname in the writing of this Chris Columbus (“Home Alone”) production.

Evan Whitten (his grandmother’s Mexican) plays Alex, a Kansas City kid who lost his Mexican-American dad and has come to resent his culture, thanks to bullies at school. So his Mom (Adriana Paz) sends him South, to San Javier, to visit his abuelo, “Granddad” to him because Alex knows no Spanish.

He’ll hang with his cousins — the non-English speaking Memo (Nickolas Verdugo) and bilingual tween Luna (Ashley Ciara) — pick up the language, the culture, the cuisine (“Crickets? Those are BUGS!”) and live on grandpa’s ranch for a week or two.

Here’s the first place “Chupa” goes right. The great Demián Bichir hurls himself into this grandpa role, a retired, brain-injured luchadore who will teach the kid about his heritage, and maybe show him a few wrestling moves in the bargain.

The second boon to “Chupa” is its villain. Christian Slater is Indiana Jones’ evil twin, a scientist paid by wealthy moguls to prove a Chupacabra exists, and catch it so that it’s blood’s “healing qualities” can be exploited for material gain.

He’s close to success before Alex shows up, just missing catching one in the film’s prologue. But when CGI baby Chupa gets separated from his mommy, Alex finds and befriends him and stands in Quinn the Scientific Poacher’s way.

“Stop being so dramatic, kid. Go home. Get a DOG.”

Slater brings just enough amoral panic — Quinn’s got a deadline — to make his villain register.

But Bichir, whimsical as forgetful grandpa — all bellows and bravado remembering his former life, as masked hero of the luchador ring, El Santo — just brings it. He is a hoot to behold, and gives the film a cultural authenticity it lacks in most every scene he isn’t in.

There isn’t much to this that will appeal to anybody over the age of eight. But the film’s real sin is in how it shortchanges the legend and the Mexicanness of all this.

Director Jonás Cuarón, who co-wrote “Gravity” with his acclaimed director dad Alfonso and who directed “Desierto,” had better credits and better chops than most anybody listed as a writer, and real credibility in the culture. Paying him to give the script a more serious going-over could have paid real dividends, in this case.

Instead, all he’s here to do is make the kids hit their marks so that the CGI critter will fit in the frame. Pity.

Rating: PG

Credits: Evan Whitten, Ashley Ciara, Nickolas Verdugo, Christian Slater and Demián Bichir.

Credits: Directed by Jonás Cuarón, scripted by Sean Kennedy Moore, Joe Barnathan, Marcus Rinehart and Brendan Bellomo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

Our intrepid old man hero makes it into the Age of the Rolling Stones with no “Sympathy for the Devil,” or The Devil’s Hireling, Nazi Mads Mikkelsen.

I have been skeptical about this since its inception. Do we really need another…

And this gimmick, a time-controlling “dial?” GMAB.

But this trailer pushes so many of the right buttons that hope arises. Great villain, more Nazis getting their asses kicked so badly they become Republicans. Phoebe Waller-Bridge as a kickass sidekick. She “makes” this trailer.

A new director — James Mangold — takes on an iconic character.

Toby Jones, and John Rhys-Davies, one more time.

And Grandpa Harry Ford, still getting a dirty, mythological/archeological job done.

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” June 30.

“I don’t know much about art,” the old joke goes. “But I know what I like.”

That settles in for a pleasant, gloriously inconsequential run around the cinematic block with the latest from Kelly Reichardt. In “Showing Up,” the “First Cow” director/co-writer returns to her obscurant past (“Wendy and Lucy”) for an odd and esoteric take on art, the artist’s eye and the genteel poverty of the lifestyle set in the ever-so-low-stakes world of a Portlandia bubble of artists, art families and the art school that nurtures it.

Not a whole helluva lot happens in 108 minutes. Reichardt kind of dares you to “get” it, and dares you not to like it. But anybody familiar with this world and its archetypes might find pleasure in what Reichardt chose to focus on and lightly poke in the ribs here.

Michelle Williams rejoins her “Wendy and Lucy” director to play Lizzy, a sculptress working in clay and exasperated by the distractions of her landlady and fellow artist (Hong Chau of “The Whale”). Lizzy hasn’t had hot water in weeks. Lizzy has “a lot of work.” She has “an opening” coming up.

And so does the equally self-involved Jo, who brushes off every entreaty about the damned hot water heater with a little humbragging and a bit of flattery. Her “show” opens first. She works in wall-hangings of a dream catcher/mobile variety. But Jo can tell that every new “piece” Lizzy is prepping for the kiln is “a-MAZING.”

André Benjamin, once known for singing “Hey Ya” with OutKast, most recently seen in TV’s “Dispatches from Elsewhere,” has the kiln where all the potters (James LeGros) and their students and sculptors like Lizzy have their newly-glazed art baked to completion.

Maryann Plunkett plays Jean, who runs OSAC, the Oregon School of Art and Culture, and Lizzy’s boss. And when Lizzy wonders if her artist brother Sean will show up for her opening, we find out Jean is also Lizzy’s mom.

One of the characteristics of monocultures like this is the self-sustaining bubble that they become. Artists begat artists. Lizzy’s divorced dad (Judd Hirsch) was a potter, retired and playing house host to random strangers (Amanda Plummer included) like the unrepetent hippy he and everyone here pretty much is.

It’s a world where people obsess over gallery fliers — their writing, design and who gets “credit” for them — and “invitations,” where the gossip is of who is flattering whose work. Lizzy and Jo work in different media, but they are unmistakably rivals, even if Jo won’t acknowledge it and thinks nothing of blowing off Lizzy’s needs and sapping her concentration in this imaginary deadline-pressure cooker.

“But…I have so much WORK.”

“Showing Up” passes on an appreciation of The Artist’s Eye, that considered gaze that artists give to each other’s work, sizing up effort, talent, message and intent in a few seconds. Whatever they may think of what you’re doing, being supportive and encouraging to your face is what matters.

Reichardt immerses us in a world of “movement” classes, nude life drawing classes, fabric workshops with eager students (overwhelmingly white) working at looms and “openings” that begin with the art, progress to “installation” and climax with a circle jerk of other artists eating little cubes of cheese and drinking white wine as they compliment and probably backsnipe when you’re out of earshot.

Dramatically, Reichardt regresses from the more consequential, clever and incident-packed period piece “First Cow” with an overly droll movie that internalizes much and plainly not much that’s important to anyone other than the artist doing the internalizing.

The pigeon is a comic device for instigating conflict, but it barely does. More promising is Lizzy’s elusive brother Sean (John Magara), a morose recluse whose burst of creativity entails digging artistic holes in his backyard.

“Art is the Earth talking!”

But all of the comic possibilities here — feuding divorced parents, plainly disturbed but labeled “brilliant” brother, the Lizzy/Jo rivalry (which includes a man) and the damned pigeon, are introduced and robbed of their potential by a defiant filmmaker hellbent on defying and suppressing expectations.

“Showing Up” is amiable, pointilistically-observed minutia in which the minutia’s the point. It’s not for everyone, even among those who know art, and know “what I like.”

Rating: R (Brief Graphic Nudity)

Cast: Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Maryann Plunkett, Andre Benjamin, John Magaro, James LeGros, Amanda Plummer and Judd Hirsch

Credits: Directed by Kelly Reichardt, scripted by Kelly Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:48

French filmmaker François Ozon’s “Everything Went Fine” is a fact-based drama that details the moral quandary and legal and logistical obstacles family members face in France when a failing relative asks them the ultimate favor.

“I want you to help me end it.”

But a writer-director known for films that touch on sex, sexuality and sexual tension — “Swimming Pool,” “Young & Beautiful” and the recent “Summer of ’85” are among his credits — was sure to emphasize the unconventional in the story actress-turned-writer Emmanuèle Bernheim told in her memoir, “Tout s’est bien passé.”

That adds to the complications and mixed-emotions of those closest to Andre Bernheim, who decides, after a debilitating stroke, that 84 years on this Earth is enough. Ozon’s cast expertly navigates this downbeat terrain, and find the sometimes humorous irony of helping an unpleasant man and “bad father” get out of their hair.

Parisian sisters Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) and Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) are properly torn-up when father Andre (André Dussollier) has his stroke. Their sculptress mother (the regal Charlotte Rampling) has her own late life health issues — Parkinson’s and depression. Now this.

There’s also this fellow the sisters refer to as “Sh–head” to contend with, someone they see skulking outside of the hospital, not “daring” to visit while one of the two of them are visiting.

As the tubes go in and come out, the diapers and the IV — “That’ll be his food, now.” — the sisters weep and wrestle with this shell of a man they used to know.

But on a Metro ride home, Emmanuèle or “Manue,” as Dad called her, helps a tourist figure out a folding map. That prompts a flashback to her early teens, sitting in the back seat of her father’s ’80s Peugout, trying and failing to give him directions from a similar road map.

“Idiot girl,” he barks (in French with English subtitles), taking the map while driving, only pulling over when she gets carsick. He berated her for eating and we get the impression he didn’t stop there.

So why is Manue the one he choses to say “I want you to help me end it” to?

Pascale figures it’s a “gift,” considering how much she “wished him dead” when she was younger. Manue’s guess is even more blunt.

“Such an ass—e, right to the end.”

The film, seen entirely from Manue’s point of view, is about her efforts to brush past this mortal request, and once that doesn’t work, how she, her sister, their disinterested mother and others deal with it.

And let’s not forget “S—head,” lest he have a stake in all this.

As grim as end-of-life realities and decisions always are, there’s something faintly comical going on here, and not just in the nickname for this nuisance who will make his role in all this known as he lashes out and invades this somber space.

The sisters practically make an art out of taking bad news or being goaded by their father to get on with his wishes by storming out of the room in tears. First one runs away. Then the other. Then the first again. And so on.

And then there’s the worst complication of all, harder to deal with than the logistics of getting a bedridden man out of France, where “death with dignity” laws are more primitive, and into Switzerland.

Once the plans are in motion, this “ass—-” of a father turns whimsical, pleasant, engaged and charming. He remembers put-upon Manue’s birthday, dotes on a grandson, and seems like he might have some will to live after all. Maybe.

“Don’t think I’ve changed my mind,” he mutters.

There’s enough in this true story that seems borrowed from the dark comedy “Death at a Funeral” that I felt Ozon was giving us permission to laugh at some of this. Dad turns into a chatterbox about something he’s planning that’s against the law? That’s either a nasty going-away present for his legally liable daughters, or just comically dense.

The milieu, a privileged French-cinema-specific world in which TVs are never heard, but where everyone listens to Brahms piano sonatas, goes to gallery openings, a wealthy Jewish family touched by but not gutted by The Holocaust (pointedly mentioned) kind of underscores the amused/bemused tone.

If I’m reading that wrong, feel free to correct me, Monsieur Ozon. I have Google Translate.

But deathly-serious or darkly comic, Ozon’s players deftly maneuvre through the emotions, Internet searches and legal consulations of Dad’s journey into Shakespeare’s ultimate “undiscovered country.” The radiant Marceau lets us see the struggle, the fading hopes that Andre will change his mind and her conflicted emotions buried underneath all the planning that falls on her.

Unlike dramas like “The Father” or “Amour,” Ozon gets to “The End” without tears, giving this universal experience another point of view.

What’s happening here could be a bullying father’s sickest trick, or a very complicated way to give everyone in his life closure, And either way, the time for crying is early on in this last act, not at the very end of it.

Rating: unrated, some profanity,adult subject matter

Cast: Sophie Marceau, André Dussollier, Géraldine Pailhas and Charlotte Rampling

Credits: Directed by François Ozon, scripted by François Ozon and Philippe Piazzo, based on a memoir by Emmanuèle Bernheim. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 1:52

I’ve told friends, who ask questions about people I’ve interviewed, that the only time I’ve ever gotten up from an interview, and stopped at the hotel suite or restaurant entryway and turned around, considering the question, “Wanna grab a beer?” to a subject was Michael J. Fox.

The impulse never came up before or after. Blame it on watching him grow up on TV or his disarming Canadian charm, but it felt like two friends having a chat about some piece of work he’d just done, how it related to some piece of work I was about to do (profile him).

A lot of people took a hit when we heard of his illness. Not him.

May 12, this comes to Apple TV+.