Movie Nation

UFOs and aliens and A Bomb tests in the 1950s desert make up the weekends of Anderson’s latest, opening June 16.

All star cast, not a lot of laughs in this first trailer, but you get the idea. “Twee” as ever.

Perhaps you’re not of a mind that a short-lived record label run by an all-in music biz gambler of the ’70s is a subject worthy of a two hour and seventeen minute musical bio-pic.

But that just means you’re not the son of Neil Bogart, the Brooklyn born knaker, trombenik and whatever other Yiddish word or phrase denotes “showboating show biz hustler.” Because that’s who the music exec Neil Scott Bogatz was.

As “Spinning Gold,” the film by son Timothy Bogart points out, his dad went by many names and tore through many careers before finally founding his own record label — Casablanca (Get it?) — and gambling everything that he could make a bunch of New York Jewish rockers dressed in leather and painted-up like Kabuki theatre actors into record-selling rock stars, a singular-voiced American soul chanteuse a disco diva and get everyone to vote George Clinton and Parliament onto the charts.

Chutzpah? This Bogatz/Bogart fellow had enough for everybody.

His son’s film about him is part musical. Neil’s first stab at stardom was as a pop singer, after all. And his first breakout single as a record exec was stumbling into the ’60s choir that turned “Oh Happy Day” into one of the great one-off novelty hits of all time.

The movie and the story it tells are kind of all over the place.”Oh Happy Day” jumps off as an actual production number with our singing Bogart (Jeremy Jordan) pitching in with the Edwin Hawkins Singers and having a heavenly epiphany as he does.

There’s also begging money off the mob (Vincent Pastore, of course), blundering with his first big Casablanca gamble (a comedy LP by…Johnny Carson?), the debacle of the label’s “launch” of KISS, the wife named Beth (Michelle Monaghan) who believes in him and sticks with him until he starts stepping out with the manager of KISS (Lindsy Foncesca), all of it filtered through Bogart doing his own narration as scripted by his adoring son.

“Gold” can be a fascinating snapshot of early ’60s Brill Building pop, late ’60s hustle to sign R&B stars The Isley Brothers (depicted as “scary” here), the many missteps it took before KISS blew up and the effort it took to convince the churchly LaDonna Adrian Gaines to become Donna Summer.

Neil sits at the piano with Gladys Knight (Ledisi) and helps her turn “Midnight Train to Houston” into one bound for “Georgia” and career-making stardom. Sure.

The KISS chronology served up here and Bogart’s alleged reaction to the Peter Criss ballad “Beth” wouldn’t hold up in court.

What we’re seeing can be frothy fun or stilted and seriously self-serving — at least as far as Bogart’s legacy is concerned.

“Every single bit of it was true,” Bogart charms, “even the parts of it that weren’t.”

Jordan is properly charismatic as the lead, with the two great loves of Bogart’s life well cast with polished performers. Jay Pharaoh and Dan Fogler play the partners, the studio-or-record-promotion-savvy teammates whom Bogart brought with him from previous jobs to form “the biggest independent record label” of them all.

“How long have you been planning this?” “Since I was eight.”

With the exception of The Isleys (Jason Derulo and Doron Bell) and Wiz Khalifa’s impish-stoner turn as funkmaster Clinton, the music and musicians’ side of things come up short. Virtually no one looks like or sings on a par with the pop legends they’re playing. While that isn’t an issue with the painted-up lads of KISS, it’s a bit tooth-grinding hearing bland versions of the distinct stylings of Donna Summer and others.

If Bogart had little to nothing to do with the career of singer Bill Withers, why even bring somebody who neither looks like him nor sounds like him? Yes, fact-checking this performer-packed picture proves to be a pain.

Suffice it to say there’s a hint of “Rocket Man” to Bogart-the-younger’s approach here, a whiff of every other recent musical bio-pic in style and story and presentation. But in this cluttered jumble of a film, he manages to do everything just a little bit worse than “Respect,” “Get on Up,” “I Wanna Dance iwth Somebody” and everybody else, the odd goosebumps “moment of creation” scene mixed in with the whisky, cigarettes and cocaine notwithstanding.

Rating: R for pervasive language, drug use, some sexual material and nudity.

Cast: Jeremy Jordan, Michelle Monaghan, Ledisi, Lindsy Fonseca, Jay Pharaoh, Wiz Khalifa, Casey Likes, Pink Sweat$, Dan Fogler, Tayla Parx and Jason Isaacs.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Timothy Scott Bogart. A Hero Partners release.

Running time: 2:17

In life, it happens gradually. But in the movies, one day a character wakes up and realizes she or he isn’t in sync with or even aware of “what the kids are into these days.”

That’s the subtext of actor turned writer-director Todd Flaherty‘s feature directing debut, “Chrissy Judy.” It’s an old fashioned romance in a queer setting, and is about reaching that moment when cruising, casual sex and narcissism aren’t enough — and are ending, anyway, because at least in terms of your “crowd,” you’re getting “old.”

Flaherty stars as the “Judy” of the title — aka “Judy Blew’em” — half of a drag act with closer-than-close friend Chrissy (Wyatt Fenner), Manhattan besties who join long-coupled friends for a Fire Island weekend in the film’s opening scenes.

They’re well into their 30s, which means “40” is the new “old.” They’re out of step, with their “Golden Girls” references and “Murder She Wrote” mania, their fondest wish to get away to “P-town.“

Their stage act reflects their age. They’re the hangers-on of the last generation to obsess over Judy and Barbra and torch songs and Broadway/American Songbook classics like “Ain’t We Got Fun” and “What’ll I Do?”

We’ve just gotten into the “bitch,” “bitch-please” “Carrie and Big,” “Steve and Miranda” rhythms of their banter and their relationship when Chrissy delivers his news. This new guy he’s been seeing? He’s moving in with him. In Philadelphia.

It’s a take-stock moment for both of them, but especially Judy. The endless waiter gigs, the “I’m going to be FAMOUS” delusions, sharing an apartment which he still can’t afford despite the two women roommates he’s renting from, random bar pick-ups — that’s not very adult.

Adults — not all of them — typically outgrow all that. Not our Judy, who underscores the redundancy in the phrase gay narcissist.

It may be time to knock off the blond dye jobs, the Grindr photos, the live-for-today lack of planning…anything. It’s time to notice how “the act” was going over even before Judy turns solo.

That’s your grandad’s drag, dear.

Flaherty shot “Chrissy Judy” in black and white to underscore how old fashioned all this feels. This is a throwback, a melodramatic rom-com that could be from an earlier era in queer cinema. It’s a little raunchier, but not really any more sexually explicit than the tentative gay romances and melodramas of the early ’90s.

That gives it a predictable air and makes one wish for more bitchy laughs.

But Flaherty writes plenty of crisp, crackling advance-the-plot/character arc scenes. When Judy is invited down to weekend with Chrissy and new-love Shawn (Kiyon Spencer) he finds himself amongst the nesting gays of Philadelphia, the settled and second-house set, “people we used to make fun of.”

When Judy tries to turn a romantic connection (Joey Tarranto) into something more than heated, unsatisfactory sex, he finds himself giving the side-eye to the shallow lifestyle he once embraced, and maybe a little self-acceptance about his lack of common ground with Next Generation vapids who remind him of himself a dozen years before.

“Chrissy Judy,” obviously structured to be a Flaherty star vehicle, is a tad abrupt in “breaking up the act”(that seems to come too early) and loses its momentum as the later acts turn reflective and predictable.

But it won me over with its nostalgia, a pre-“Bros” take on gay life and love and that inarticulate need most everyone feels “to be alone with someone” that Judy, even after giving up that cheeseball drag name, could never describe as “companionship.”

Rating: unrated, sexually explicit, pot use, profanity

Cast: Todd Flaherty, Wyatt Fenner, Joey Taranto and Kiyon Spencer

Credits: Scripted and directed by Todd Flaherty. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:34

“Furies” is a lurid, ultraviolent Vietnamese thriller about a quartet of women assembled to take down a Saigon crime lord by hitting him where it hurts — killing off his henchmen in ones, twos, or big bunches.

Yes, characters refer to what is still officially known as Ho Chi Minh City as Saigon. And no, it probably never occurred to them that an alternate title might occur to anyone watching these female avengers in the U.S.

“Charlie’s Angels,” anyone? I kid.

But there’s no messing around in actress (“The Old Guard,” “Furie,” “Da Five Bloods”), co-writer and director Veronica Ngo‘s blistering underworld bloodbath.

It’s the sort of film that opens with a child’s rape, and serves up enough such scenes that one is inclined to mutter, “How many damned rapes are in this thing?”

Little Bi, who stabs her attacker to death, survives that moment on her sex-worker/mother’s houseboat, but Mom does not. Bi (Dong Anh Quynh) grows up homeless and never far from her next victimization, until she is rescued by Jacqueline, “Aunt Lin” (Ngo), a tough-minded matriarch with an idea for “ending” the rampant sex trafficking and sexual assaults that come with it.

“We have no one to protect us,” Lin intones (in subtitled Vietnamese or dubbed into English). “We’ve all lived and lost. We were like wild daisies, trying to grow out of the darkness.

Bi will join Jacqueline’s petite tyros Hong (Rima Thanh Vy) and Than (Toc Tien), “Wolf Sisters” their foes call them. She will train with them. And they will, together, go after the drug smuggler, human trafficker and crime boss Hai (Thuan Ngyen), a venal predator with many minions and one kryptonite — women.

This formula thriller, not really a sequel to Ngo’s breakout action pic in the West, “Furie,” is packed with punch-above-their-throw-weight brawls and knife-fights, climaxing in a big shootout.

Asian actioners in general and Southeast Asian films of this genre in particular often feature that moment when a huge gang assembles to attack the hero or heroines, and either visit their stash of machetes or grab one each as they steal from the cutlery stall at a street market.

It’s a blunt statement of what’s obviously on the way — machete mayhem.

The plot? Well, it’s predictable, right down to its twists and turns. People on both sides will die. A lot of blood will be spilled. The only cops we meet are in the coda. Twas ever thus in underworld sagas filled with “Furies.”

But one trope that “Furies” tops is a stylized, effects-packed motorbike chase through the narrow alleys and streets of the old city late at night, a furious fight-and-flight without firearms that will pin your ears back. Seriously cool.

And even if “cool” is prioritized over logic or novelty in this bloody battle to the death, it’s still enough to recommend Ngo’s bracing, kinetic and beautifully shot and edited tale of life and death, rape and revenge in Old/New Saigon.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sexual violence, drug abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Veronica Ngo, Rima Thanh Vy, Toc Tien, Dong Anh Quynh and Thuan Nguyen

Credits: Directed by Veronica Ngo, scripted by Nha Uyen Ly Nguyen, Nguyen Ngoc Thach, Nguyen Truong Nhan, Aaron Toronto and Veronica Ngo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

He’s already covered this ground with a pretty good documentary, “More than a Game.” As an aside, the one time I interviewed LBJ was for that film. Interesting story, complicated guy.

“The Chosen One” and the guys who became his B-ball brothers pre-NBA, that’s the story this new film tells.

Now, let’s be frank. LeBron’s teen years weren’t “typical,” and there’s little romantic about being “brothers” in an AAU all-star team — named “Shooting Stars” — instead of a “My old school” sentimental trip through his high school years. It’s prep school for entitled jocks.

The King was ordained and on his way to a throne, and skipped high school hoops and college on his way to taking that crown.

Could be good.

June 2 on Peacock.

The most common image in “In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis,” is the one represented in two photographs above.

We see the Argentinian pope, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in scores of over-the-shoulder shots, filmed from behind as he rides, waves from and stoops to kiss babies from the Popemobile, rolling into the Central African Republican, mobbed by throngs in Mexico and Malta, greeted with a lot more indifference on the streets of Havana.

“What sort of documentary would that add up to,” the wags among you might ask — lots and lots of shots of crowds waving at the pontiff, mixed with samples of his seriously undynamic multi-lingual public speaking? “A pretty boring one” is the answer.

Vatican-approved writer-director Gianfranco Rosi plumbs the archives of this activist pope’s decade of travel, the 53 countries he’s visited — Japan to Brazil, and many points in between. The sequences Rosi chose to include aren’t exactly animated. But then, neither is this Pope.

The popular, humble and soft-spoken Francis — who took his name from St. Francis of Assisi — makes his mark in this film with his choice of subjects. He speaks often of the tragedies accompanying assaults on human migration, the world’s poor and how they bear the burden of unlivable living conditions, putting them at risk in conflict zones and places vulnerable to a changing climate, doomed to drown as they try to cross the Mediterranean, other seas, deserts and war zones.

We see his speech to the College of Cardinals about the Catholic Church’s shameful abusive priests scandals, hear him apologize for this more than once, hear his “Never again” reflection on the Holocaust in Jerusalem and other genocides (Speaking truth-to-power re: Turkey and the Armenians), express sorrow for the fate of Native Americans/First Nations peoples in Canada and fret over the nature of violence, nationalism and militarism and greed.

The result can’t help but be a film that’s never much more than a sketch, a gloss on the guy in the layers of Papal white whose heart and message seem pro humanity in all the most righteous ways, but whose “leading by example” isn’t always the most cinematic.

Rosi can’t make the man a fire and brimstone preacher or even a Pope John Paul II scold, because it just isn’t in him. But he can capture an emotional moment when Francis enters a poor household in a Brazilian favela where he’s about to speak, a meeting where he tries to mend fences with the assorted Orthodox Church patriarchs, and sits mostly-silent with Muslim imam in Iraq, his mere presence in many of these places speaking volumes.

Francis is at his most enthusiastic in Madagascar, lauding the work Father Pedro Opeka, an Argentinian like the Pope himself, and one dedicated to improving the lives of that island nation’s poorest of the poor, those literally living at the largest garbage dump there.

Those moments, and the spooky scene of Francis crossing the empty St. Peter’s Square, going up the steps of the Basilica at twilight to give a speech mid-COVID lockdown, are all that give much life to this pretty but staid and colorless documentary.

One can’t help but think this Pope deserves more than a simple, stale travelogue.

Rating: unrated, scenes of conflict, poverty

Cast: Pope Francis.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gianfranco Rosi. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:26

“The Fist of the Condor” transports the basic elements of your typical Bruce-Lee-in-Hong-Kong era martials arts “epic” to the beaches, biker bars and Andean mountains of Chile, and gives us all the archetypes of the genre speaking Spanish.

This old-fashioned “quest” reteams “Redeemer” director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza and his martial arts muse, Marko Zaror for more wirework, more slo-motion, more training sequences and more “challenge” fights with a series of warrior foes, all of them in pursuit of the Condor fighting “manual,” a book pieced-together from the martial arts of the ancient Incan Empire.

Not that it did the Incans a bit of good.

It’s a film so wrapped up in “homage” that the story never amounts to much more than cut and paste, ahistorical, neo-mystical nonsense. About the only “Dragon” trait they didn’t replicate is the hilariously inept dubbing of the principals into English. This baby is Spanish, all the way.

But while it begins with “Oh BOY” promise and finishes with a half-hearted flourish, the back-story stuffed middle acts (Our bald hero in a bad wig, and our villain in a black feathered condor suit) are tedium itself. And the effort to set this up as a continuing saga leaves it amusingly, obviously and frustratingly incomplete.

Zaror, one of the fiercest figures in “John Wick Chapter 4,” has the vulpine look of a muscle-bound Mark Strong when he’s shaved his head to look like a martial arts monk. We meet “The Warrior” (El Guerrero) on the beach, challenged by a random young buck seeking what our hero does not have, the “Fist of the Condor” manual that helped him master his form of martial arts.

The kid is looking for the wrong guy. Who is the right guy?

“My twin.“

What’s his “Achilles heel?”

“Photophobia.” You can foil the fiercest fighter this side of Donnie Yen with…a mirror and a little blinding sunlight.

Oh. It’s like that, is it? Why yes it is.

Wernher Schurmann (“Too Late to Die Young”) was fight choreographer here, and he stages several positively balletic brawls — pirouettes and jetes, punches thrown and dodged, somersaults by the score.

Our hero is constantly facing foes he has to tell “for the last time, I am NOT the ONE,” in growled Spanish with English subtitles.

He can’t park his motorcycle without getting challenged. But the places he parks are some of the most striking locations for a martial arts genre piece since those Golden Age Honk Kong classics of yore.

One villain wears too much eye shadow, because there’s one in every crowd, and every martial arts film. The training bits include the Wisdom of the East being handed down by Master Wook (Man Soo Yoon)…in Spanish, and the challenges of “The Condor Woman” (Gina Aguad), who takes a back seat to no one when it comes to inscrutable words to live by.

“See not with your eyes, but with your whole body!”

Director Espinoza does a fine job with the action beats and the epic settings. But every time this brief but not brisk genre thriller breaks into a new “Chapter,” aka “Chapter III: The Evil Guest,” he crosses from homage into parody and from master genre filmmaker into somebody whose “Achilles heel” is his screenwriting.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Marko Zaror, Gina Aguad, Eyal Meyer and Man Soo Yoon

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ernesto Díaz Espinoza. A Hi-Yah!/Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:22

June 16, “opposites” like fire and ice, attract? Ok.

Quasi-funky score. Almost no dialogue.

Interesting look, but no more than “interesting.”

Are you sold?

“Colorblind” is a heavy-handed melodrama about race that never overcomes the air of “student film” that its many ways of underscoring its lone metaphor provide.

It’s about a Black artist who suffers from colorblindness, a trait she has passed on to her son. Her life lessons to him include “You don’t want to show anyone your weakness.”

So we’ve got a painter who can’t distinguish most colors — something underscored with visuals seen from her almost-monochromatic point of view — who tries to hide that from those who might buy her canvases, and a child who learns to keep their shared secret.

They face overt racism in the unnamed big city they’ve just moved into, harassment from profiling cops and overt hostility from their new landlord, a retired firefighter who rented to them, sight unseen, and takes an instant dislike to them both.

He’s the sort of retired firefighter who plays romantic classical etudes on his piano and keeps a dead cotton plant as decor, so he can pluck off cotton balls to give our working mom to underscore a racist point.

Watermelon isn’t on-the-nose-enough for him, I guess.

And let’s name our heroine Magdalene because everything else here points to judging someone by appearance through one’s own warped view of the world.

Every lesson Mom (Chantel Riley) has to teach her boy Monet (Trae Maridadi) about race and how to manage their sight limitations and keeping their distance from the bigot upstairs hews to the film’s narrow, broken-record messaging.

Every moment the kid spends with the “Giant” racist makes you wince at its obviousness.

“So, paint can mix, but not people?”

“Well, they can, but they shouldn’t.”

Every misunderstanding is foreshadowed as if a student screenwriter has just learned the term in Screenwriting 201. Every “coincidence” is worth a grimace.

The characters are archetypes, the performances similarly one-dimensional or, in a couple of cases, seriously inexperienced.

“Colorblindness” is the sort of well-intentioned picture on a heavy subject that could make the rounds of little-known film festivals and collect awards, which it has. But if it isn’t a simplistic, ham-fisted student film, it sure as hell plays like one.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Chantel Riley, Trae Maridadi, Garry Chalk and Mike Dopud

Credits: Directed by Mostafa Keshvari, scripted by Mostafa Keshvari and Selina Williams. An Eldon Road release.

Running time: 1:28

“Johnny” is about one inspiring priest’s efforts to create a Catholic hospice to give Poles facing death a compassionate end of life experience, battling a foul-mouthed archbishop over the idea even as he himself battled the cancer that would kill him.

It’s based on the true story of Father Jan Kaczkowski and his relationship with the troubled ex-con forced to do community service under his charge, Patryk Galewski.

But the debut feature that music video director Daniel Jaroszek serves up is a classic “dry-eyed weeper.” We know what it intends to do, but damned if the only time it really does it is with that Pavlovian emotional footage of the “real” priest and real ex-con that such movies always pack into the closing credits.

Slow-footed, more downbeat than sad and endlessly-narrated in voice-over, first by the drug-dealing mug, then by the priest (in Polish with subtitles, or dubbed into English), it left me as cold as a Warsaw winter.

Dawid Ogrodnik of “Ida” and “Silent Night” is the good father, an earnest “outsider” who takes over a local congregation near Puck, sees the real need in his parish and sets out to fund and build a hospice for the many elderly and the dying.

It’s an earnest performance of a recognizable screen “type,” the “cool” problem-solving priest who ruffles feathers while doing good.

Piotr Trojan plays Patryk, breaking and entering, getting his ass beaten, tossed in prison and after all he’s done, the beneficiary of a “suspended sentence.” It’s obvious, from the start of his narration, how much he admires this priest who (eventually) changed his life.

“He limped where no one walked before,” he says of the priest with the cane, the thicker-than-thick glasses and matter-of-fact determination to do something for his people.

The film flatly skims over the efforts to launch the hospice, drably gets around to Father Jan’s own illness and skips through much of the hard work of evolving that Patryk must undertake to become a decent human being.

Patryk is reluctant to do the work, flippant about the geezers he cares for — indirectly, at first, as a handyman — until he meets someone much younger, entirely too young to be making videos for her little boy’s well-into-the-future 18th birthday.

At least Trojan gets to play a few emotional moments. Ogrodnik’s Father Jan is even-tempered and effortlessly famous and popular for what he’s doing, eventually.

I appreciated the daring of showing an archbishop resorting to longshoreman speech — F-bombs galore — to express his displeasure at this hospice. I missed why this old coot was against the idea. Maybe there’s an explanation, but the flatness of the film buried it in the mundane and people who refuse to be moved or excited by it.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Dawid Ogrodnik, Piotr Trojan, Marta Stalmierska

Credits: Directed by Daniel Jaroszek, scripted by Maciej Kraszewski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:00