Movie Nation

A brilliant conceit sets up a cutesy, just-clever-enough New York comedy in “God’s Time,” a tale of twelve steps and an addict with a grudge and a gun.

It’s a movie that brazenly riffs on why actor’s love movies about twelve step groups. It’s the “sharing,” the storytelling, when people talk about what they’re going through and what they’re thinking.

“I’m so-and-so, and I’m an addict/alcoholic,” they always begin.

“People ‘share’ to grow, to vent and to hear the sound of their own voice,” a “family” leader says. And boy is that obvious in the many times the Dominican spitfire Regina (Liza Carabel) launches into her tirades about taking in her ex and having him “evict me from my own apartment” and “”stealing” her effing dog in the process.

Everybody hears this “share” over and over, ad nauseum, from Regina — the “g” is a Spanish “h” — always finishing meetings that begin with “God grant me the serenity” with her fondest wish, that “Russell, that ex, get what’s coming to him “in God’s Time.”

Clean-cut actor-wannabe Luca (Dion Costelloe) and his clingy, manic pal Dev (Ben Groh) endure this broken record because hot mess that she is, Regina is more “hot” than mess, or so they hope. Dev is positively obsessed.

And that one time that Regina, who has mentioned poison and a pistol as her preferred means of giving her ex Russell his just deserts, leaves out “in God’s Time,” hyper Dev flies completely off the handle. He is SURE someone’s about to be hurt and that she’s about to make a mistake that will haunt the rest of her life.

If only they could track her down, talk her down, intervene, etc.

The movie becomes a not-remotely-frantic search for Regina, with Luca even more desperate to get Dev and himself to a callback for an acting job. It’s a day-long odyssey that hits on things you never do in 12-step programs (lie about someone’s relapse, risking sending them into a shame spiral), Regina’s many manipulations and many men and the lads’ friendship sorely tested as Dev is sure he’s reading this danger right, and will say anything that will help him save his crush from a killing and the cops.

Through it all, our on-camera narrator, Dev, lectures us on what we’ve seen and heard in a hundred other 12-step movies, leaning hard on the two things you simple MUST have in AA — “A higher power” to submit to, and “a sponsor.”

Fair enough and promising enough — a ticking-clock 12 step comedy taking us through hijinks and misadventures and the like.

Where “cutesy” kicks in on writer-director Daniel Antebi’s debut feature is in the form and the substance of Dev’s constant, fourth-wall-busting narration.

Dev takes us on his ecstatic bike rides through Manhattan set “to my own theme music,” lets us feel his fury at Luca’s fake-name for him every time they lie to get information about where Regina has gone — “Manuel.” Groh turns to the camera and grouses, grins or just winks as this sprint never quite gets up to speed.

But it’s often amusing, and that narration can serve comic purposes. At one moment, when he and Luca have disrupted a meeting that isn’t their usual AA group, their “family,” a brawl breaks out and Dev helps the filmmaker out by turning to the camera and blurting out “Don’t you WANT to see this?” just as the film cuts away. He’s sticking up for the viewer, but sparing the production a fight choreographer and the sight of an inexperienced cast who might not take to fight choreography.

As comedies go, it’s a scruffy little film with more promise than payoff. Most of the characters are merely sketched in, save for one.

Newcomer Caribel, all curls and beguiling smiles and tirades and manipulation, makes Regina a fascinating femme fatale. She is irresistible, knows it and yet cannot get past her own demons to make her feminine wiles pay off for her.

It’s not every rom-com that dares to let you hate the leading lady, dares you to find an excuse to like her and dares to make her an object of pity and concern by the time she’s smashed her way through this 12 step China shop.

“God’s Time” is a series of men lamenting Regina-with-an-“h.” Caribel reminds them, and us, that this really all about her and they and we might as well accept it.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Ben Groh, Dion Costelloe and Liza Caribel

Credits: Scripted and directed by Daniel Antebi. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:23

”Bunker” is a pokey, low-heat/low-energy WWI horror movie rendered in airlessly theatrical strokes by director Adrian Langley.

Some of that staginess wanders into the starchy performances of the leads. And as we start to notice this is the quietest combat film ever and that no characters are acting as panicked or at least as purposeful as soldiers buried underground, trapped with something sinister, might behave, one wonders if this lack of urgency might be traced to the poor director as well.

Patrick Moltane plays Lt. Turner, the stiff-upper-Brit whose stern orders convey a general “No need to hurry” about them as he forms each lovingly-enunciated officer-class cliche.

The urge to mutter “Steady on, man” is hard to overcome, even if you know he can’t hear you.

A squad of Tommies are comfortably ensconced in their own bunker when one of their number notices that Jerry had abandoned his bunker, straight across No Man’s Land. There’s nothing for it but to pop over and have look, wot?

The new Yank medic (Eddie Ramos) and Yank HQ functionary (Sean Cullen) will come along, crawling through the darkness and silencing a manic Hun who seems seriously freaked-out about something he’s experienced as they do.

Sure enough, the bunker they tumble into the trench to reconnoiter turns out to be “sealed from the outside.” Why the devil would they do that?

Before someone can get the words “Something doesn’t feel right” out load, the tiny patrol ducks inside and sees evidence that something decidedly unmilitary has transpired. The German (Luke Baines) nailed to a cross is a big clue.

That’s when explosive and gas-laden bombs entomb them inside, unable to summon help over the field telephone they dragged with them.

The nailed-up German might have some answers, as he’s in pretty good shape for a bloke with spikes through his hands. Let’s make him help dig us out!

The madness and deaths that follow are pro forma and nothing that moves the macabre needle in this horror tale. The squad is blandly cast and played, the pecking order and command dynamic nonsensical and dull.

And the quiet night in the gloomy bowels of the bunker almost make one forget why any of them are there, and that there’s a war on.

The film’s too sober to be a proper fright fest, and too tame and tedious to be a worthy WWI tale.

Rating: R for violence, gore and some profanity

Cast: Patrick Moltane, Eddie Ramos, Quinn Moran, Sean Cullen, Julian Feder, Mike Mihm, Adriano Gatto and Luke Baines.

Credits: Directed by Adrian Langley, scripted by Michael Huntsman. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:37

With “Possessed,” Malay-language cinema takes tenative, lurching steps into the world of the “Living Dead,” “Walking Dead” and “Evil Dead.”

The zombies in this attack-on-a-remote-single-sex-college-campus tale start out zombie-walking and turn into “World War Z” sprinters by the third act. They dread the coming of the light, like um, vampires. For anyone to survive, one of their number reasons, “we just have to make it til dawn!”

But even if the Malaysian undead don’t have the rules of “Zombieland” down pat, the effects are decent and the makeup is outstanding even if the plot is canned/store-brand generic and the frights not all that frightening.

The acting? It’s a zombie movie.

When one of a group of five college guys, with two female relatives/friends in tow, suggest they all “pray before we get back to” campus, we have our first hint that this was filmed in an Islamic country, and our first spoiler. No way the devout Muslim kid gets it, right?

An injured teacher (Alif Satar) is summoned back to campus during semester break and told “Allah is testing you” (in Malay with English subtitles). That’s why he’s been called back right after the car crash that killed his wife and kids. That, and there’s no such thing as a teacher’s union at this school.

A school matron (Alicia Amin) drops off food for the kids, and mentions “the Silat boys” at a local village got themselves “possessed” as casually as she might pass on a football score.

When one of the vacationing students opens a mysterious bottle, something gets out and infects him and “the Silat boys” won’t be the only ones craving human flesh.

I’ve watched several Malay films over the years in my travels “Around the World with Netflix,” and one other thing I picked up on from “Rasuk (Possesssed),” an otherwise tame affair, was how this James Lee (“Kill First”) thriller it treats the principal female characters. They have the agency and identities that make them stand out from much Malay cinema.

Elisya Sandha is Alia, introduced as another stereotypically demure maiden who came along for the pink VW Microbus ride to take her kid brother (Ikmal Amry) back to school. But when the chips are down and brother Adli has only one bar on his cell phone on the zombie-infested campus, who does he call to come rescue them?

Luckily for the lads, Alia’s VW driver/mechanic pal Kak Yam (Bella Rahim) is a tad tougher than the college boys. Her fondness for engines and butch haircut and pink bus would make her a simple stereotype in your average Western film. Is she gay? Because that’s downright tolerant for the Islamic world and Malay cinema.

But when zombies are feeding and converting those they bite and you figure light is the one thing you can fight them off with, you need a gal who knows her way around a diesel generator, no matter what pronouns are used.

Rating: TV-14, gory violence, profanity

Cast: Alif Satar, Ikmal Amri, Elisya Sandha, Abbas Mahmood, Alicia Amin, Bella Rahim, Ayie Elham, Syazwan Razak and Atiq Azman

Credits: Directed by James Lee, scripted by Adib Zaini. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Mystery hangs over the images of Natives that Helmut Dosantos captures in his debut feature doc, “Gods of Mexico.” These are ancient people doing ancient jobs in the most traditional way imaginable, and Dosantos set out to document entirely with images.

He only tells us which tribal and geographical corner of Mexico this sequence is set in — “Quetzalcoatl: The West,” “Huitzilopochtl: The South.”

He graces us with two simple category labels: “White” for “Mixtec: The South” to denote the salt pans we see men laboriously working, drying salt in and bagging, and then loading onto donkeys, and “Black” for “The North: Sierra de Catorce” where timeworn men crawl into a (Silver? Perhaps?) mine, chiseling and blowing up ore, playing crap games by headlamp light on their breaks.

Nothing is explained, image is all. We see color and black and white silhouettes, iconic full “Flaherty” face shots and poses struck and held — by miners, laborers, men on horseback, men leading donkeys, a naked couple considering sex and staring at the camera.

Traditional masks of some sort decorate as many images as majestic Saguaro Cacti. We consider a meteorite crater, a village, a cockfight, a mysterious well-deep hole that is dug as part of the “White” chapter, where a fire is set and tended for hours as…some part of the salt-making process?

The sound is natural, the music “diegetic” — organic and captured as it is performed by old men on this bowed percussion instrument of that stringed jaw-harp.

We know which region and which Native people we’re seeing. Everything else you figure out on your own, or pause while streaming to look up on your phone.

The nude scene — a static pose — summons up memories of the beginning of documentary filmmaking, the Urtext films of Robert Flaherty, motion picture images of an anthropological/ethnographic nature.

I prefer my documentaries to be more informative than “Gods of Mexico.” But that prehistoric cinema connection renders this mesmerizing film as magical as it is historical, reminding us that a no-longer Third World country still has traditional people doing things much as they have for millennia, that ancient Dodge 3/4 ton truck that salt workers load with their sacks notwithstanding.

Rating: unrated, nudity, cockfighting

Credits: Scripted and directed by Helmut Dosantos. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:37

From a press release I got today, datelined NYC, “now in pre-production.”

“Uwe Boll, the prolific director and producer, is coming back after a 5 year hiatus, entering with his feature film ‘FIRST SHIFT.’ The crime drama follows an NYC police officer and his rookie partner Angela as they experience a 12-hour shift on the streets of New York City. Tapped to star in lead roles are Gino Anthony Pesi (Shades of Blue, Ambitions) as Deo Russo and Kristen Renton (Sons of Anarchy, Days of Our Lives) as Officer Angela Dutton. Additional cast includes Onye Eme-Akwari (Outer Banks), Willie C. Carpenter (Men in Black), Garry Pastore (THE IRISHMAN), and Cate Bottiglione (Law & Order: Organized Crime). FIRST SHIFT is currently in pre-production, with filming beginning this Spring in New York. 

FIRST SHIFT is a gripping tale that captures the essence of life as a cop in one of America’s busiest cities. From the mundane to the dangerous, viewers will experience an intense day in the life of law enforcement officers”

Knowing Uwe Boll, having reviewed many an atrocity with his name on it, having taken his name in vain MANY times since her mercifully disappeared from the scene, and noting the “pre-production” stage of this project, I responded the only way a sentient cinephile should.

“Does that mean it’s not too late to stop this?”

The meaner response would be “Are you taking stock of your life and career, and wondering how you wound up plugging the disasters of the Ed Wood of Our Age?”

This sweet little romance, from director Kyra Sedgewick, was picked up by Samuel Goldwyn and comes out March 31.

Is Screen Gems frantically trying to grab the remake rights to the Korean stolen cell-phone thriller “Unlocked?”

If they aren’t, the Hollywood distributor of “Searching” and its somewhat lesser follow-up “Missing” is missing the boat.

“Unlocked” is a crackling, nervy and above all sinister parable that will make any viewer think twice and thrice about letting one’s cell phone out of your sight. And it’ll make ALL of us blush when we recognize the degree to which we’ve folded so much of our lives, our livelihoods, our identity and our fortunes into these pocket-sized modern marvels.

Writer-director Kim Tae-joon — the post-zombie-apocalypse “Peninsula” was his” — pokes at our paranoia, and justifies it in this tight tale that shows just how easy it might be for someone to destroy your life if he has a mind to, and gets hold of your cell phone.

First act montages show us how much plucky Na Mi (Chun Woo-hee) runs her life via her cell.

She’s buying drinks and photographing food, not just by publishing her location via (sometimes drunken) photos on social media. She’s using map applications, doing her banking, making lunch dates, buying baseball tickets, listening to music, running a “hidden” social media identity to help with her marketing job and using her fingerprint to access the damned phone.

And all around her, distractedly zombie-walking down the streets or packed into buses, everybody else is doing the same.

All it takes is one tipsy trip home, one phone left behind on a bus, and one bad actor to blow up her world.

He uses a phrase-reading app to give him a woman’s voice when Ni Ma and a pal call to retrieve her phone. He lies that the phone has been dropped, and has been left with an ace phone repairman, Mr. “Digital Sheriff,” which is this bespectacled nerd’s (Yim Si-wan) alleged business.

Once she’s in his sketchy “shop,” he gets her password from her, copies all the data from her phone and installs spyware that will allow him to hear her calls, see her searches, read her texts and follow her anywhere she goes.

And he starts keeping a long list of her friends, family, “likes” and passions and meticulously writes down ways to use that against her and disrupt her life. She’s cute, so he’ll throw “stalking” into the mix.

But this veteran cop (Kim Hee-won) is on a case where bodies are turning up, usually near plum trees. Det. Ji-man recognizes that M.O. There’s a serial killer on the loose, and we can only assume that he has a thing for cell phones as well as plums.

Kim, adapting a book by Japanese novelist Akira Shiga, serves up three points of view — Ni Ma’s unraveling friendships and ignored warnings from her father (Park Ho-san), the not-frantic-enough police hunt, and the villainous Jun Yeong’s meticulous scheming, contriving ways to meet Ni Ma and meet her “needs” (tickets, buying a CD she advertises online) and even giving himself a makeover when she criticizes his haircut and glasses to a friend while her ever-listening/ever-watching phone is nearby.

“Unlocked” takes a few maddening turns that might prompt a shout or two at the screen and the police, who let one cop dictate that no nationwide “BOLO” be issued for this plum-sucking killer they’ve identified as their one and only suspect.

The film is a bit overly patient in setting up the menace and the obstacles to the mystery being solved and that menace being thwarted before our unsuspecting 20something is snatched and buried “in the mountains” near another plum tree.

But when the third act kicks in, the ticking clock starts and every one of the final minutes on this cell-plan story can be savored for the well-engineered and well-acted thriller it is.

If Netflix isn’t planning a North American/English language remake (it’s in undubbed Korean), Screen Gems certainly should.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Chun Woo-hee, Yim Si-wan, Kim Hee-won, Park Ho-san

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kim Tae-joon, based on a novel by Akira Shiga. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

Guy Ritchie’s (“Snatch”) and Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting”) made it all look so easy that Matthew Vaughn (“Layer Cake”) thought he’d have a go.

But that slice of British working class/underclass/criminal class life ensemble dramedy thing is easy to imitate, harder to get right.

“Three Day Millionaire,” scripted by Paul Stephenson and directed by Jack Spring (“Destination: Dewsbury”), is a Ritchie-lite movie that gets many of the basics right even as a misses a couple of the most obvious.

It’s a tale of “trawlermen” from the historic fishing port of Grimsby, a Lincolnshire landmark whose glory days ended as the Cod Wars were settled in the 1970s. A group of sons-of-sons-of-sons-of-sons of trawlermen stare at “The End Times” and find themselves lured into a heist, just as the working port is about to make the inevitable transition to “prime seaside real estate.”

Curly Dean (James Burrows) heads our colorful cast of characters, goateed and tattooed, narrating from his trawler bunk, straight at the camera, telling us the place’s history and introducing his motley mates.

There’s pudgy, short-attention-span Budgie (Sam Glen), the former shipmate Codge (Michael Kinsey), whose drug abuse made him a liability no skipper would take on, and reliably discrete cabbie Weezy (Robbie Gee).

Jonas Armstrong is Charlie Graham, the fuming ex-fisherman who went to work for The Big Boss (Colm Meaney, of course) who contracts the fleet of boats and owns the fishpacking plants, where Queenie (Grace Long) and Demi, aka “Pitbull” (Melissa Batchelor) make an honest wage.

Graham is the one who realizes what Barr the Big Boss is about to do, sell out to Devine Residential Group, which will turn the “greatest fishing docks in the world” into flats, condos and Starbucks. Gilly (Lauren Foster), Curly Dean’s girl-in-port, also knows, but isn’t letting on. Graham is the one who pitches the caper.

“Fishermen we are,” Codge grouses. “‘Oceans F—–g FOUR’ we definitely are NOT!”

Nevertheless, a scheme involving Budgie’s mum (Catherine Adams), who is Barr’s paramour, and a safe full of cash destined for the crypto market is casually cooked up as the trawlermen finish up their latest booze and big-spending binge as “Three Day Millionaires,” the trawler crew ethos that most of what you earn had better be spent before taking on that next voyage, because it’s “bad luck” not to.

This is a good-natured action comedy that could seriously do with a bit of subtitling. It’s not like anyone outside of Limeyland is going to pick up on the thick, salty slang without it.

Stephenson’s script is fine at capturing the flavor of the place, where every fisherman, from the youngest to codgers like Curly Dean’s alcoholic Dad “Teapot” believes “It’ll come back,” that the decades-long downturn in fishing work is “just a lull.”

But a city’s slow death is a lot harder to instill desperation into than a story with more imminent peril. The stakes seem low, the caper under-planned and a lot less inventive than you’d like. Realistic? Sure. Kind of.

“This is nothing compared to the risks we take at sea!”

Maybe it was too expensive to show us that risk, as the boat scenes seem filmed in a painted up, docked and long-unused trawler rather than something we see in the “wine dark sea.”

The overlong opening act takes pains to give a Ritchie-esque freeze-frame introduction to every character, and suggests the women who love these seafaring men will have agency and a role in the caper. But they’re barely in this.

For Anglophiles like me, a “Three Day Millionaire” is always going to be worth a look, especially on a streaming platform that subtitles. But as even Guy Ritchie isn’t really making “Guy Ritchie movies” any more — God help us, “Aladdin 2” is on the way, and “Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre” is finally getting a U.S. release in March — maybe mimicking the master, even somewhat clumsily, isn’t the smartest play these days.

Rating: unrated, moderate violence, drug abuse, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: James Burrows, Michael Kinsey, Sam Glen, Robbie Gee, Lauren Foster, Jonas Armstrong, Melissa Batchelor, Grace Long, Catherine Adams and Colm Meaney

Credits: Directed by Jack Spring, scripted by Paul Stephenson. An Entertainment Squad release.

Running time: 1:35

Finally, a video game movie we can all get behind.

March 31, this bizarre tale of how “the perfect game” escaped from the Soviet Union and made Gameboy the toy of the decade, comes to Apple TV+.

March 24, the gangs all back — Keanu, Lance, Laurence and Ian, with a Skarsgård, a “Warriors” reference and a Donnie Yen.

What the trailer doesn’t tell you? This beast is two hours and 49 minutes long.