Movie Nation

For years, the gold standard for savage physical beat-downs depicted on screen was Chan-wook Park’s “Oldboy,” whose most visceral scene is a long-held-hostage “hero’s” furious claw-hammer takedown of an entire gang standing between him and his enraged revenge upon his tormentor.

A couple of brawls in “RRR” surpass it in scale via epic fisticuffs, a lone policeman wading through the teeming masses of Colonial India. The furious fights in “Onk-Bok” and the slaughterhouse of “The Raid” made their mark. But “Oldboy” has proven hard to top.

A stunningly-realistic, pulse-pounding punchout at the climax of Kin Long Chan’s Hong Kong noir “Hand Rolled Cigarette (Sau gyun yin)” joins the list of tussles that come close to topping “Oldboy.”

Our hero, a military vet named Chiu, is trapped in a stand-off between gang leaders. Chambers have been emptied and blood has been spilled. And just as the dueling mobsters reach some sort of rapprochement, Chiu — out of desperation, self-preservation and an untapped reservoir of rage — lashes out.

He’s spent the entire film being pushed around, drowning in loan shark debt, unwillingly mixed-up in another lowlife’s getaway from a big drug theft, one more smuggling deal gone sour, all adding to his woes and the threats to his person.

“G.I. Chiu”(Ka Tun Lam) is also carrying guilt over what he has and hasn’t done to show loyalty to his old comrades.

So he’s got issues. He’s had enough. And these gangsters? They’ve been seriously effing around. It’s time they found out.

A prologue establishes Chiu’s late 1990s military background, a Hong Kong soldier with the British before the colony’s handover, denied a passport to emigrate, sentenced to a life of crime by his limited skill set.

His present-day hustle? Smuggling “lucky” and endangered Golden Coin turtles from Taiwan. Boss Tai (Ben Yuen) has to stake him on this deal. But Boss Tai doesn’t know that middle-man Chiu and smuggler Pickle (To-yin-gor) are partners, scheming to drive the price up on the boss and add to Chiu’s commission.

Chiu needs this deal to service an old debt. No one who tells him he needs to “find a girl,” settle down, can imagine how he lives — in a big apartment cluttered with the detritus of earlier deals gone awry. Our hero never heard Broadway impresario Billy Rose’s famous warning, “Never invest in anything that eats or needs painting.”

But native Chinese aren’t the only ones deep into crime in Hong Kong. The racist locals call South Asians “brownies,” and a couple of Indians — Kapil (Bitto Singh Hartihan) and his cousin Mani (Bipin Karma) — are in the drug dealing business with Boss Tai.

“Go back to your country” insults are on the tip of every tongue the minute a disagreement happens. Something goes wrong in their interactions, and next thing Mani knows he’s on the lam, leaving his nine year old brother to fend for himself as he waits for word from Kapil, who’s also gone underground.

A breathless foot chase is how Mani ended up in Chiu’s apartment. Chiu tries to work out a way to settle his debts via the hiding Mani without getting Mani or the both of them killed.

Kin Long Chan’s story shifts points of view — from Chiu to Mani to the mob that mistrusts one as it searches for the other. He loses track of the ex-military story thread, which probably was destined for a larger role in this story at some point in the script.

Still, there’s a glorious claustrophobia to the cluttered settings and the streets, rooftops and alleys Mani is chased through. And our first-time director knows that a proper “film noir” only gets labeled such if there’s fog, and he serves up a doozie of a payoff scene in the lowering gloom of night.

Lam’s stoic turn in the leading role helps underscore the John Woo influences here. There’s less gunplay, and no churches or white dove Christian iconography. But the grit and the violence and the “code” of Woo’s world seem intact.

The one funny line in this Cantonese (with English subtitles) thriller comes when Boss Tai thinks some outsider is crossing him right to his face, just not in his native language.

“You think I don’t know MANDARIN? I grew up on SHAW BROTHERS movies!”

The one lighthearted scene comes from Chiu having to fill in for his houseguest when the guy’s kid brother (Anees) is threatened with expulsion from school. No, Chiu’s not really “a relative” of this “brownie.” He proves it by grabbing the kid by the ear until he apologizes to his teacher.

“Realism” in a movie fight means every blow counts, nobody has supernatural powers of recovery from the kicking that broke a rib or two, the concussion that must have resulted when your head is bashed into furniture or the floor. The combatants stagger, bleed and have to will themselves to carry on, survive and finish what they started.

That’s what happens here, with “Hand Rolled Cigarette” earning a fine climax to a pretty tight and thoroughly-atmospheric debut from an actor-turned-director who looks like he knows what he’s doing.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug content

Cast: Ka Tun Lam, Bipin Karma, Ben Yuen, Michael Ning

Credits: Directed by Kin Long Chan, scripted by Kin Long Chan and Ryan Wai-Chun Ling. An Edko release on Netflix.

Running time:

The stakes that characters are struggling for in a story matter, even in kid’s literature. And you can’t wholly appreciate what the children and adults are battling over in J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world until you read or see a knockoff where the consequences of failure are much lower.

In “School for Magical Animals,” a couple of kids, arbitrarily gifted with a talking and cunning “detective” fox and a worldly old talking tortoise, are trying to figure out who is stealing stuff — including the tower clock at the entrance — from their school.

Based on a novel by the German kid-lit author Margit Auer, one installment of an award-winning series and turned into a (half-hearted) musical, the film version is never more than an account of far less “fantastic beasts” with no effort at all exerted to “find them.”

Milan Peschel plays Mortimer Morrison, an oddball seeker of “magical animals,” traveling Europe in a quirky vintage circus bus, quizzing a bear (no dice) and other critters with his magpie sidekick. Once he stumbles into some properly magical wildlife, there’s nothing for it but to visit a postcard-worthy Alpine town to hand them out, with the aid of a bewitching teacher (Nadja Uhl) who takes a job at the local school.

Ida (Emilia Maier) is the cute new “ginger” in class, destined to be bullied having just moved there with her hairdresser single mom (Marleen Lohse). The school is having a rash of thefts, with the martinet headmaster (Justus von Dohnányi) and hapless handyman (Heiko Pinkowski) at a loss as to who’s doing it.

Ida is given/teamed-up with Rabbat the Fox. Equally bullied Benni (Leonard Conrads) gets the tortoise, who sails up on a raft of her own design.

Unhappy cool kid Jo (Loris Sichrovsky) is enlisted in their cause. But no other kids are gifted by magical animals, prompting protests.

A little song and dance later — pop and hip hop with German touches (the film is dubbed into English) — and we’ve learned not to fall for the obvious, not to judge a book by its cover, all that good stuff.

And the wily “detective” fox has figured out “I can’t do this on my own.”

Dominik Giesriegl cooked-up the pleasantly forgettable music.

The kids are cute, and the student body’s about as diverse as you’d expect from a German children’s movie filmed in Austria — not very. Only the leads are developed as characters to any degree, with generic blonde mean girls doing most of the bullying.

But the lower-than-low stakes render this adaptation barely serviceable as a harmless kiddie time-killer. There’s just too little going on, and dance numbers with middling choreography and chattering digital critters don’t change that.

Rating: PG, for mild language, peril and thematic elements

Cast: Emilia Maier, Leonard Conrads, Nadja Uhl, Heiko Pinkowski, Loris Sichrovsky, Marleen Lohse and Justus von Dohnányi

Credits: Directed by Gregor Schnitzler, scripted by Viola Schmidt, John Chambers, Arne Nolting and Alexander Dydyna, based on a novel by Margit Auer. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:34

Mermaids are Mean Girls, evil, the krakens are the real cool undersea kids. Got it?

June.

“Chantilly Lace” was an all-star, largely-improvised 1993 “friends through the years” dramedy memorable mainly for its cast. This Sundance indie — that was its filming location and the place it premiered — featured Talia Shire from the “Godfather” and “Rocky” movies, “Supergirl/City Slickers” star Helen Slater, Lindsay Crouse (“House of Games,” “Places in the Heart”), JoBeth Williams (“Poltergeist,” “The Big Chill”) and, as sisters, Jill Eikenberry (“L.A. Law”) and Ally Sheedy (“The Breakfast Club”).

Director Linda Yellen’s feature earned comparisons to “The Big Chill” and its antecedent, “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” as well as George Cukor’s “The Women.” No men figured directly in this story of Boomer BFFs hitting their 40s and facing everything that comes with that — failing relationships, career challenges and death, a younger, out-of-the-closet sister begging her older sibling to be the one to tell their parents that she’s gay.

“Chantilly Bridge” picks up their story 30 years later, with less improvisation, with a few new additions to the cast, but a film built on the same sorts of personal relationships and personal challenges, more tempered with age and more bland in the rendering.

Williams’ character Natalie, a film critic and daughter of an actress who was laid off and then dies in the original film, narrates this new tale as the surviving friends and her character’s younger sister (Patricia Richardson of TV’s “Home Improvement”) come to the Finger Lakes region of New York in mid winter to clean out her late mother’s home.

Sisters Val (Eikenberry) and Lizzie (Sheedy) still feud, this time over Lizzie being a no-show for this gathering (Facetime).

Hannah (Slater) comes, with her 30ish daughter (Naaji Sky Adzimah), named for Natalie, in tow.

The spiritual Maggie (Shire) is transitioning into hospice work. Rheza (Crouse) works with caged wildlife — wolves and an elk — at a seasonal zoo just down the road.

They gather, reminisce, share stories about first kisses and first sexual experiences and workplace issues, “#MeToo” among them, drink a bit and make “a toast” or two.

This one is “super stuck” at this stage in her life, that one has realized that “friendships,” like marriages, “take effort.”

Val? She’s come to a conclusion about the absent Lizzie.

“My sister’s such a bitch!”

A little mourning, grief over a forced “retirement,” and discussions of age and the life cycle of any job in which younger people come in and shift the attention away from their elders, relationships and having children — there’s a universality to the themes and subject matter, and a dull overfamiliarity to everyone’s “take” on each subject.

But as I say, “Chantilly Lace” is best-remembered for that cast. Yellen, then and now, has better producing credits (the Holocaust TV movie “Playing for Time”) than writing (“The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana,” “The Last Film Festival”) and directing (“The Simian Line”) ones. This film, more scripted than improvised, is all generalized banalities, the shared trials of being “at that age.”

At least we’re spared the “organ recital” here, no “my hip” or “my kidney” or “my back” laments for this crew. Even though that might have been funny.

Our nostalgic attachment to actresses who had their share of iconic roles decades ago is worth something. And “Chantilly Bridge” does a service in reminding us that Slater, Richardson, Shire, Cruise, Eikenberry, Sheedy and Williams are still around, still good at what they do and still employable.

But the middling material they have to work with does them no favors in this scenic, sentimental trip down memory lane, a film that lacks even the few fireworks — seen in flashbacks here — that the tepid “Chantilly Lace” provided.

Rating: unrated, adult themes, sex toy

Cast: Helen Slater, Patricia Richardson, Talia Shire, Lindsay Crouse, Jill Eikenberry, Naaji Sky Adzimah, Ally Sheedy and JoBeth Williams.

Credits: Directed by Linda Yellen, scripted by Michael Leeds and Linda Yellen. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:26

Taryn Manning, Frank Grillo and Virginia Madsen also star in this dark –“I think I shot the cook” — action comedy.

Looks violently amusing. Caan goes all in. Tidy whiteys, the works.

April 4.

Here’s another variation on the shlub whose only shot at a beautiful woman is if he’s “The Last Man on Earth,” this one a movie and not a Fox TV series.

This wan Colombian comedy — “El Último Hombre Sobre La Tierra” in Spanish — is as hard up for laughs as our dumpy, gauche and crude anti-hero, the “little pest” all the ladies in the office nicknamed “Piquiña,” is for love.

Roberto, played by the comic Jhon Álex Toro, is loud. He’s unkempt and unwashed. He’s boorish. He crushes on the gorgeous exec Liliana (Laura Acuña), and gets drunk enough at the office Christmas party to A) interfere with her plans to get close to hunky Camilo (Rodrigo Candamill) and B) confess his hiccupping devotion to her in the most poetic words he can summon up.

“Not if you were the LAST MAN ON EARTH,” she says, which sounds even more final and deflating in Spanish (with subtitles) than it does in English.

But when she wakes up to a depopulated world — Rapture? Plot contrivance? — that vow will be put to a test.

Naturally, the place they run into each other is the liquor store. She’s looking for signs of life. He’s looking to stock up for a bender.

Unbathed Roberto tries to push past the “Piquiña” nickname to realize his heart’s desire, as they’re thrown together searching empty streets, stores and an empty amusement park where the rides are still spinning away into oblivion.

The fit and beautiful Liliana can’t talk him into bathing or eating the healthy way she does. But with a generous serving of alcohol provided by him, they wind up in bed. Bliss with a smirking “repopulate the Earth” gag barely has time to set in before her bubbly assistant Martha (Jeka Garces) shows up.

And their unhappy “love triangle” barely has time to register, with Martha discovering Roberto’s gifts in the sack, when yet another “last man” shows up.

Guess who?

The script is by veteran Colombian scribe Darío Armando García Granados, aka “Dago Garcia” aka DAGO. While he deserves kudos for flipping an ethnic slur on its ear, the author of “Penalty Kick” and other Colombian film and TV laughers doesn’t find anything new or funny to do with this material.

Toro vamps it up and his over-the-top gaucherie is the only thing here with even a prayer of generating a giggle. Candamil is almost amusing as the hunky stiff. But nobody here is given enough help by the script for this thing to play as funny or touching and surprising.

The production has a nice sparkle to it, as this version of End Times loses the people, but not the electricity or the things that make make civilization civil.

But the script was never more than an under-developed, unfinished idea before Netflix came along and threw money in Colombia’s direction, begging the locals to come up with something, anything, even rejects shoved into a drawer and never polished.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity, alcohol abuse, off-camera sex

Cast: Laura Acuña, Jhon Álex Toro, Rodrigo Candamill and Jeka Garces

Credits: Directed by Juan Camilo Pinzón, scripted by Darío Armando García Granados, aka “DAGO.” A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

A tale of the “little white lies” that people tell to stay married.

Ahem.

This madcap Medieval farce has Pope jokes and a hero far removed from Notre Dame, a “hunchback” named “Quasi” without the “Modo.” Or perhaps he’s just Quasi to his friends.

With that Mel Brooks style of Vulgar History making a comeback, might the time be right for Broken Lizard — those “Super Troops” goofs who went to college together at Colgate — to take a new bow?

This Searchlight release goes straight to Hulu April 20.

That’s “4-20,” kids. Nudge nudge, wink wink SAY no MORE!

History barely remembers they were at Woodstock, as they were left out of the film due to contract issues. Their Grammy glory came the year before that awards show was recorded on videotape.

They played Vegas, the epitome of “selling out,” in their day. But there might have been a moment or two when Blood, Sweat & Tears was considered “cool.” They were founded by legendary musician, songwriter and session man Al Kooper, after all.

They were, at their peak (they’re still around) a nine-piece pop band with horns. Their sound was “ubiquitous” during a brief flash of time, between 1969-71. They’re remembered as part of a post-Janis Joplin/Joe Cocker Big Band rock era that included Chicago and The Electric Flag.

The Fifth Dimension and Three Dog Night were perhaps their closest analogs. BS&T was a singer-fronted “show band” whose original hits like “Spinning Wheel” were far outnumbered by jazzed-up covers of songs by the likes of Laura Nyro (“And When I Die”), Brenda Holloway and Berry Gordy (“You Make Me So Very Happy”) and The Beatles (“Got to Get You Into My Life”).

“What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears” is a documentary about a tipping point moment for the ensemble, when they took on a three nation State Dept.-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe at the height of the Vietnam War. They were the first pop band to play the role of “musical ambassadors” behind the Iron Curtain, something Louis Armstrong and jazz and classical music figures pioneered in the ’50s and ’60s.

“Selling out” to work for a government during a wildly unpopular war, they were condemned by the counter-culture, the underground press and eventually the mainstream press and their fanbase just as musical tastes moved on to glam, heavy metal, punk and disco.

But in their telling, they were “blackmailed” into committing career “suicide” by the Nixon Administration, which sought propaganda value — at home and abroad — from this “youth” group playing in Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland.

Writer-director John Scheinfeld, a veteran of historical music docs, is most famous for his “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” expose of government persecution of the most radical Beatle. He and his researchers have some receipts backing up that assertion in this film, memos from Henry Kissinger to Nixon, archived Romanian police state surveillance files and the like.

The story goes that singer David Clayton-Thomas, as distinct to their sound as their horns, had a police record in his native Canada and a fresh charge of threatening an ex-girlfriend with a gun (“Dropped,” he says). He faced deportation from the lucrative American market, or at the very least having his work visa yanked.

What makes that assertion credible is the Guess Who song “American Woman,” a tune whipped-up by that Canadian band when they were threatened with draft notices or deportation for overstaying their visas in the US during the Vietnam War.

But “blackmailed” into doing a three country State Dept. tour seems a stretch. What’s described here is a shady bit of “quid pro quo,” an ex-con manager “made a deal,” they got to continue touring and recording with their Canadian lead singer, IF they did this “favor” for the State Dept.

They’d come back, play Vegas and get labeled “uncool” and “sell-outs” and even picketed by Abbie Hoffman and others. That was the price of this “do us a favor we’ll do you a favor” “deal.”

BS&T brought a film crew along to capture their shows for a planned concert film, subject to State Dept. approval and dependent on whatever strictures the various governments in the countries where they were playing could think up. It never saw the light of day.

The film Scheinfeld got out of all of this political dealing, “James Bond” skullduggery and “Rocky and Bullwinkle/Peter Sellers” Cold War comedy is an account of a forgotten tour with moments of triumph, a near riot in Bucharest thanks to government goons and police dogs brought in to ensure that no one had too good of a time, and a night when BS&T bombed and were all but booed offstage in Zagreb.

So it’s a little bit “U.S. vs John Lennon,” and a hint of “Festival Express,” a doc about an infamous and ill-fated all-star Canadian rail tour on the heels of Woodstock.

Many band members remember the chilling moments mixed with thrills, being called-out for encore after encore, standing up to Romanian “decrees,” and seeing the consequences — kids arrested and beaten thanks to their concert.

A scholar from the Nixon presidential library provides Cold War context, actual concertgoers from Romania and Poland revel in the memories of this ground-breaking tour, and the band marvel at their reception — good and bad — in a part of the world where this sort of “rhythm” simply was not allowed.

Record label impresario Clive Davis provides musical judgement about what this interruption in their meteoric rise might have meant to their legacy and longevity.

And Rolling Stone writer David Felton shows up to read his snarky 1970 take on their return, a story headlined “BS&T Turns Backs on Commies,” and apologize for that and the blood-in-the-water rejection of a band which merely told people what they witnessed in the secretive Eastern Bloc — poverty and pitiless repression, not a popular stance with the West’s counter-culture of the day.

Critic David Wild might be closest to the mark in answering the “What the Hell Happened” question in describing their sound as making them a band “of their moment,” with less shelf life than the contemporaries who hewed to a guitar-quartet formula that evolved and endures as “classic rock.”

The film’s political focus seems a tad narrow, but the evidence that this tour — however it came to be — did them no favors and didn’t do Nixon any more service than his association with “Up With People” is convincing.

And hearing all the efforts filmmaker Donn Cambern and his traveling film crew went to in order to prevent Romanian destruction of their startling and historically-valuable footage makes one wish it could be recovered. What the State Dept. did to it stripped out that value and so muted the result that it’s just as well their edit never saw the light of day.

But if those 65 hours of concert, backstage and in-audience footage is around — just judging from the audio tape recordings of upset and irate band members backstage, outraged at Romanian police treatment of their audience — a fascinating and colorful piece of history has been lost and a generation far-removed from that era has been cheated of an eye-opening musical depiction of the Cold War at its ugly peak.

Rating: unrated

Cast: David Clayton-Thomas, Steve Katz, Fred Lipsius, Bobby Colomby, Tina Cunningham, Donn Cambern, David Wild, Jim Fielder, Tom Naftali, David Felton and Clive Davis

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Scheinfeld. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:52

A “Zodiac” true story serial killer thriller earns a “She Said” styled treatment in “Boston Strangler,” a newspaper procedural about the dogged reporting that turned up clues and held an inept police department’s feet to the fire in an infamous case in the 1960s.

Well-cast, properly gloomy, with a serious bone to pick about Beantown’s “good ol’boys at the bar” sexism and chummy mediocrity, it’s a step-up for writer-director Matt Ruskin, whose “Crown Heights” had similar “attack the system” ambitions but fell short of the mark.

In the early ’60s, somebody is talking their way into homes, townhouses and apartments and strangling women with their panty hose. He’s leaving the hose tied “in a bow” as “a gift” for the cops.

“Did it look decorative?” asks Boston Record-American reporter Loretta McLaughlin, given a poker-faced flintiness by Keira Knightley. She’s a features reporter condemned to “women’s” society profiles and reviewing new toasters, but wants a job on the police beat.

Chris Cooper plays the crusty editor who won’t consider it, even when she shows up at his desk with clippings from her paper and a nearby town’s suggesting there’s a “phantom” strangler out there preying on women.

“Let me profile the victims,” she offers, “on my own time.”

She’s the one who hears about the panty hose bows, who makes the connection and confirms, to the outrage of reporters, editors and the police commissioner (Bill Camp), that there’s a serial killer preying on older women.

When the story blows up, brassy, seasoned pro Jean Cole (Carrie Coon of “Widows,” “The Post” and TV’s “Sin”) is partnered with her to report and write the stories that would define that now-closed newspaper in history as the one that owned the biggest local story of the day, the one that labeled the murderer “The Boston Strangler.”

Cole and McLaughlin run into sexism in the office and from the cops, resentful that two “skirts” are making them look bad.

Alessandro Nivola plays one detective who will swap info with McLaughlin as the story evolves from a manhunt to an expose about a police department and a city “that can’t protect its women.”

This “Strangler” isn’t “Zodiac.” It’s chilling and unsettling, but never terrifying in the relentless manner of David Fincher’s gripping masterpiece. And it’s considerably less cut-and-dried than the lurid 1968 thriller “The Boston Strangler” starring Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis’s dad as the killer. As newspaper sagas go, “Strangler” feels closer to the quixotic “We may never get the full story” tale told by “Kill the Messenger.”

Ruskin takes care to let us hear a first murder through apartment walls, another taking place in another room after the killer has talked his way in the door as a plumber/painter or whatever. We only see one of the gruesome crimes committed, in the flesh, one third of the way in.

The dimly-lit bars capture the city’s drinking scene. Ask if a cop’s on duty, and if he isn’t, ask “Where’s he drink?” The police commissioner comes into the editor’s office and is promptly handed a libation to lubricate his tirade at these “skirts” casting doubt on his uniforms and detectives.

The story is simplified in ways that rob another newspaper of the “scoop” that first alerted the city to the serial killer risk of a “mad strangler” loose in their streets. The Boston Sunday Herald broke that story. But as with “She Said,” the shoe leather reporting, threatening phone calls and genuine peril at the idea that one of these women will be alone with someone who might be a dangerous criminal feels authentic.

We’re given suspects, and if you’ve lost track of the state of the case in the decades that have passed since it was “solved,” with DNA evidence altering its conclusions, you will be as surprised as I was by the third act, which isn’t so much an epilogue as a “wait just a minute, here.”

The main achievements of this “Strangler” are to show improvement in Ruskin’s screen storytelling skills and to open the door to further dives — in documentary or re-enacted series form — into a case that transfixed the nation, became a movie and introduced the name of F. Lee Bailey into legal infamy, decades before the O.J. case tossed the last shovelfuls of dirt on his reputation.

Rating: R for some violent content and language.

Cast: Keira Knightley, Carrie Coon, Alessandro Nivola, David Dastmalchian, Bill Camp and Chris Cooper

Credits: Scripted and directed by Matt Ruskin. A 20th Century release on Hulu.

Running time: 1:52