Movie Nation

Samuel Goldwyn Films has this Ukrainian…Western.

Pistols, Katana swords and bloodshed.

I napisheet you not. Opens Friday.

An American summoned to Italy to be “The Boss” of “The Family.”

Toni Collette has the title role, Monica Bellucci is her rival/advisor, etc.

Atsa gotta be cute, capisce?

Get past the sometimes cool and properly sinister effects and “The 9th Precinct” is a very stupid movie — or at least a seriously silly one — trying to pass itself off as a serious thriller.

A tale of ghosts and the cops who keep them from breaking the law and disturbing the living, it is “R.I.P.D.” masquerading as “Ghost,” reaching for sentiment when “Ghostbusters” was always going to be closer to the mark.

It’s about a young traffic cop (Roy Chiu) whose ability to “see what other people can’t” lands him a job at the 9th in the subterranean offices of the Houli Police Agency. It was either that, or be fired. His instincts spotted a murderer, his partner got killed and he insisted in a report that a female ghost intervened on his behalf and saved him.

Must be nuts, right?

Det. Chang (Chia-Chia Peng) takes him on at the 9th and shows him the ropes of ghost-busting, as it were.

Special incense seems to enable interactions with the dead. A special yin/yang umbrella protects them. A “sacred water pistol” will defend him. You have speak to ghosts, but they won’t talk back, not that you can hear, anyway. And ghosts can cause trouble.

“One gets confused when one has just died,” Chang explains, in Mandarin with English subtitles. One gets a little confused streaming this movie, one hastens to add.

As they investigate hauntings, young officer Chen Chia-hao resents this work when they should be using ghosts, like his late traffic police partner, to track down killers. As ghosts lead him to bodies in a mass grave, Chia-hao’s sense of urgency seems justified.

Who or what is behind these deaths? Is there a serial killer, or are these ritual murders of some sort?

Flashbacks tell us of our hero’s “gift.” There’s a mystical colleague who allows herself to be “possessed” by The Master, a nosy reporter and an imperious hospital administrator to contend with, fights with the living and the dead and a game of Russian roulette.

And as sober as it all seems, it’s not scary enough to be a thriller and not silly enough to be played for laughs.

Co, a Chinese “R.I.P.D.” without any laughs. At all.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking

Cast: Roy Chiu, Chia-Chia Peng, Eugenie Liu, Chen-Ling Wen, Blaire Chang, Eugenie Liu and
Heaven Hai.

Credits: Directed by Ding Lin Wang, scripted by Kiu -li Chang and Ding Lin Wang. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Any doubt that the Chinese invented noodles is utterly erased in Donnie Yen‘s martial arts actioner, “Sakra.” He takes this sword-and-sorcery saga straight into Spaghetti Eastern — or Ramen Noodles Western, if you prefer — territory from the first bit of horseplay and earliest twangs of Italian Westerns of the ’60s guitar in the score.

It’s an often-over-the-top action romp, full of epic brawls and flawless, fluid wirework stunts (Yen’s an old hand at playing flying martial artists), where magic plays a hand and many die, but noble deaths and big death scenes almost always point to sorcerers tampering with “Is she/he really gone?”

And it’s quite a bit of fun, when it’s on the move and fists are flying. In between? A bit of a drag, with a pointless (Franchise building?) epiloguethat tends to muddy up what came before.

At the beginning of the Song Dynasty, a babe is found, literally “wrapped in swadling clothes,” left at the door of a childless couple. Young Qiao Fung grows up gifted, strong and righteous. He joins the Beggar’s Gang at an early age.

We meet him as an adult (Yen, of “Rogue One,” “John Wick 4,” etc.) lecturing a Shaolin monk who is transporting “a gift,” perhaps a sacrifice, in a covered cage. The brash stranger is told to mind his own business by the cruel monk.

“In the land of the Great Song, anyone who disregards morality is my business!” Xiao declares. And it’s on like Song…Dynasty. Minions and the monk, who can fling fire out of his fingers, must be foiled. Martial arts blows must be labeled as they’re delivered.

“Dragon Claw Hand!” “Dog Beating Staff!” “Eighteen Subduing Dragon Palms!” Later comes my favorite of all.

“The Proud Dragon Repents!”

Xiao Fung turns out to be the leader of the Beggar’s Gang. The prisoner turns out to be a pretty young lady Azhu (Chen Yuqi) whom Xiao Fung instantly devotes his life to defending.

That’s fateful, because when he returns to the gang to seek medical help for her, the vast bureaucracy of The Beggar’s Gang has deemed him a “traitor” and a “foreigner,” accused of the murder of the late husband or Mrs. Ma (Grace Wong Kwan Hing), who has a letter from her husband that lays the blame for his future death at Xiao Fung. So…he MUST be guilty!

Chinese justice, nothing like it.

The rest of the movie involves brawls and intrigues, magical martial arts, a little horseplay and — through most of the middle acts — a helluva lot of talking about what’s happened, what’s going to happen and the need for the Heroes at Heroes Gathering Manor (catchy) to deal with the rogue warrior of the Central Plains.

This is a film of scale and scope, with a sea of extras confronting our hero on foot and an army of allies catching wine bottles he samples and tosses back — at full gallop — for all to share.

Fight choreographers Hua Tan and Kang Yu cook up some dazzling martial arts ballets as no roadhouse, manor house or city street on the Central Plains is safe from their precisely-planned mayhem.

Yen may still be doing a lot of his own stunts, with the once-and-future stunt-man/Ip Man having credits that pre-date Jet Li’s “Hero” ands his own turns as “Iron Monkey.” If that’s really him dashing effortlessly, poetically across the rooftops of one town Xiao Fung tears up I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s one of the most graceful pieces of wirework I’ve ever seen in a martial arts movie.

Yes, the story’s a goof, a nonsensical mash-up that gives his character an excuse to bowl over legions of hired swordsmen and soldiers, monks and wizarding world warriors. But Yen is terrific, a Smiler with the Knife anti-hero who has the charisma Jet Li lacked and a cool bravado that never suited everyman martial arts comic Jackie Chan.

If he sticks around John Wick-world for a while, or returns to a time “Long ago in a galaxy far away” for an encore, or just keeps doing what he does in the noodle countries of the Exotic East, we’ll all be the richer for it.

Rating: R, bloody violence

Cast: Donnie Ye, Chen Yuqi, Eddie Chueng, Grace Wong Kwan Hing, Yuan Xiangren

Credits: Directed by Donnie Yen, scripted Ha Ben and Chen Li, based on the novel by Louis Cha. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:10

In the small town where I grew up, in the BFE borderlands of Virginia and N.C., I lived within walking distance of a downtown cinema that opened and closed a few times in my childhood, giving up the ghost completely at about the time I headed off to college.

By the early ’70s, I was walking to it on my own for the first time as my parents had aged out of going out to the movies, the way so many do. I’d see “Valdez is Coming” or “The Getaway,” “The Three Musketeers” or “American Graffiti,” sometimes on weekends with friends but most often by myself because they weren’t as into cinema as me, and I had a paper route and pocket money.

“The Sting,” which opened on my birthday, Christmas of ’73 in much of the country, didn’t arrive until shortly thereafter — well before the Oscars, as I remember it. It was a life-changing experience, a movie that made the long walk home a giddy skip-to-my-lou that I can picture to this day. Roger Ebert would later talk about “out of body experience” movies. This did that for me.

Over the years, meeting fellow critics — mostly contemporaries — at film festivals and press events, whenever we’d swap notes on the movie that changed the course of our ambitions “The Sting” came up a lot. It wasn’t just me.

It’s a movie that made one invest in watching the Oscars, to make sure the Academy “got it right.” Seven Academy Awards? That’s pretty close to what was deserved.

Watching it anew makes one appreciate the clockwork screenplay that David S. Ward devised, far and a away his best script, although he’d go on to adapt “Cannery Row,” have a hand in “Sleepless in Seattle” and the comedy blockbusters titled “Major League.”

But its the arcana, the production designed near-perfection of its period detail, the total immersion that George Roy Hill’s jaunty direction, the production artist Jaroslav Gebr’s Norman Rockwellian title cards denoting chapters — “The Set-Up,” “The Hook,” “The Sting” — and the glorious Oscar-winning Marvin Hamlisch adaptation of Scott Joplin’s ragtime that bowls one over, even today.

Hill, reuniting his “Butch” and “Sundance,” Paul Newman and Robert Redford, surrounded them with faces — a Who’s Who of character actors of the day. I’d started noticing the stand out work of guys like Slim Pickens in his chewy cameo in “The Getaway,” and a other colorful bit players before this film. But here Ray Walston and Harold Gould as dapper confidence men recruited for “The Big Con,” and Eileen Brennan and Charles Durning and Jack Kehoe and that mug’s mug, Charles Dierkop, left me amazed.

Robert Earl Jones, James Earl Jones’ dad, gave his most endearing performance in a movie that made everyone in it — even players with just a scene or two, like Jones — immortal, because few pictures, especially Oscar winners, have aged as well as “The Sting.”

The Depression Era milieu, contrasting down-and-outers with the crooks and high rollers who thrive in any economy, reinforces the cinematic memories of the era laid out by “Paper Moon,” which came out in May of ’73, and prefigures the “Gatsbymania” that would arrive when Redford’s take on “The Great Gatsby” premiered in March of ’74.

“The Sting” came out in the middle of the Watergate meltdown, an upbeat piece of pure escape that left crooked politicians and Vietnam and cynicism at the window where you bought your ticket. And watching it now, I can see Ward’s  plotting as an extension of what people had seen in recent years during the long run of TV’s “Mission: Impossible!”

Hard to remember that was a television show before Tom Cruise came along, isn’t it?

The “Sting” story — a simple bait and switch cons a runner, transporting Joliet numbers and off track betting cash back to the Big Boss, out of thousands.

Luther (Jones) and Erie (Kehoe) figure they’re set for life as they split up the take later. But Hooker, “the Kid,” has already blown his on a big bet on a fixed roulette wheel.

Their grift gets Luther killed, chases off Erie and sends Hooker to Chicago to look up an old pal of Luther’s, the master of the Big Con — Henry Gondorff (Newman).

The goal is revenge on the Five Points native (“Gangs of New York”) Irish mob boss Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw, a year away from “Jaws”). Gondorff and everybody else loved Luther. Everybody’s in, with the Kid getting a makeover and a quick lesson in Big Con caper comedies.

These set-up scenes make the middle acts a pure delight, with this or that speciality pursued and hired. There’s a veritable guild of Chicago con artists, with a “sheet” of “who’s in town.” That’s how the so-dapper-he-must-be-gay Twist (Gould) selects their huge crew.

The Kid? He’s got Lonnegan’s goons after him, and a brutal, corrupt Joliet cop (Durning) determined to grab him to shake him down and avenge himself on a hustler who tried to pay him off with counterfiet cash.

Shaw played a lot of burly heroes in his too-short career. But Lonnegan is a masterful study in menace. When Doyle tells you how it’s going to be, his finishing phrase lets you know that’s just what he expects to happen, or else.

“Ya follow?”

We see this brutish bear of a man poked, repeatedly, by Newman’s Gondorff, play-acting a rich bookie named Shaw, as a drunk who keeps besting the big man at cards and mangling his last name every time he taunts and insults him.

The bait is taken, “The Hook” is set, and we’re off on a leisurely romp through the least depressing Great Depression tale of them all.

Walston, Gould, Durning and Dana Elcar — in the first of his No Nonsense authority figure roles — sparkle. Brennan, fresh off “The Last Picture Show,” brings her trademark working class gravitas to a madam who runs a brothel upstairs from a carousel.

Redford literally sprints through a lot of scenes, and Newman takes his sentimental, cynical and amusingly boozy (when he needs to fake it) mentor-protege thing with his pal to the bank.

“The Sting” became a cultural phenomenon, sparking a ragtime revival, renewed appreciation for illustrator Norman Rockwell (even though Gebr did the title cards, not Rockwell) and making Hamlisch a star composer in its wake. I interviewed him some years later when he was touring Florida’s “blue hair circuit,” the performance halls in seniors-heavy cities along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. We had a lot to chat about (he won multiple Oscars), but chatting by speaker phone from wherever I was reaching him, when I mentioned “The Sting,” that was the one he started picking out on the piano, an acknowledgment that this was the work that made him.

The movie became a benchmark for me, for good and ill, especially when it came to Oscar nominees. Rare is the Oscar winner that’s a feel-good film, a caper comedy or a wildly popular hit. “Schindler’s List” and “Twelve Years a Slave,” movies of import, are the goal and that at least is defensible.

But “How will it/does it hold up?” has figured permanently into how I rate movies in reviewing them.

Nobody’s talking up “The English Patient” today, and “Crash” wasn’t the only Oscar winner that the Academy, and those who love movies, wish they could take back. Is anybody tracking down “The Artist” (the true fate of “Babylon”) these days, or “The Shape of Water,” “Moonlight,” “Parasite,” “Nomadland,” “CODA” to rewatch for pleasure and edification?

Is “Everything Everywhere all at Once” destined to have an afterlife, to “hold up?”

Maybe. But not the way “The Sting” has. I’ll take that bet all day long.

Rating: PG, violence, a little burlesque nudity courtesy of Sally Kirkland.

Cast: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw, Eileen Brennan, Ray Walston, Charles Durning, Dana Elcar, Charles Dierkop, Jack Kehoe, Dimitra Arliss, Harold Gould and Robert Earl Jones.

Credits: Directed by George Roy Hill, scripted by David S. Ward. A Universal release on Amazon, Netflix, etc.

Running time: 2:09

“Devil’s Hollow” is a downbeat, torpid thriller of the Appalachian Gothic persuasion. A few solid performances and a strong sense of place never quite lift this formulaic melodrama out of the funk it wallows in.

Shuler Hensley stars as Bobby Hawkins, fresh out of 13 years in La Grange prison, still confined to house arrest by an ankle monitor. He’s returned to the farm where he grew up, not to “work it,” but to sit and mope, master his cell phone and occasionally summon the lone sex worker here in BFE, Kentucky.

Bobby has history here — with his old running mate, Birdy (Will Hawkes), who has found Jesus and become a First Baptist regular, with his barmaid ex, Kelly (Kelly Shipe), with the daughter he barely knows (Skyler Hensley) and with the ringleader of the criminal crew he used to run with, Harry Casper (David Dwyer, pretty damned menacing).

Harry’s the guy who figures that Bobby, after doing jail time the others dodged, still owes him money from that “First National job.” Bobby insists the member of their quartet who disapppeared got it all, but Harry doens’t want to hear it.

And by the way, Bobby’s daughter somehow wound up in crime-boss Harry’s care. So things are complicated, and about to get moreso.

“Devil’s Hollow,” which Bobby apparently forgot how to pronounce while in stir (Real Appalachian folk I know still say “Holler.”) is the sort of place where an ex-con can have a nip with his probation officer (Patrick Mitchell) and expect no help from the sheriff (Emma Thorne) when Harry’s henchmen come to collect.

There’s enough here that you can see the makings of a better indie film than writer-director Chris Easterly got out of this raw material. Tropes and recycled plots and sequences that we know are coming abound.

But as tropes go, if there’s a better way to start a dark backwoods tale of money, family and murder than the sight of a 40something loner, gone-to-seed, digging a hole by lantern light as he narrates-drawls “I don’t know where to begin, really,” I haven’t run across it.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual content

Cast: Shuler Hensley, David Dwyer, Skyler Hensley, Will Hawkes, Kelly Shipe, Patrick Mitchell and Emma Thorne

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chris Easterly. Self Distributed

Running time: 1:17

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