Movie Nation

Spare, dark and gritty to a degree rare in Chinese cinema, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” is a thoroughly engrossing film noir about guilt and a resolve to somehow make things right.

Eddie Peng of “The Great Wall” and “Love after Love” stars as Xue-Ming Wang, a silent, stoic inmate when we meet him. He narrates his “how I got here” (in Mandarin with English subtitles) story in classic noir style — doing it, he says, to remember because prison is “a process of forgetting.”

Outside, he was a working class Wang, a poker-faced HVAC repairman with a factory worker girlfriend (Peiyao Jiang) and a two pack a day habit. One night years before, after working late, he drove home through the undeveloped outskirts of Yuxien, let himself get distracted and ran over a man.

That’s his crime, we come to discover. He wanted to leave, but came back and dragged the body into the weeds. The ways this eats at him aren’t obvious. But when he sees the victim’s widow (Sylvia Chang) giving out fliers, he shuts down the girlfriend and takes on his quest. He will stalk, inveigle himself into Mrs. Liang’s life, fixing her AC, lightly questioning her about her missing husband, her search for answers and closure. He’ll try to tell her what happened. He’ll try to turn himself in at a crowded, noisy police station.

Mostly, he’ll just be “around,” when he isn’t taking details from her and setting out to find out more about the dead man’s life.

Remembering all this from prison, he knows and we’ll find out the First Rule of a Film Noir mystery thriller. Nothing is as it first seems.

Director and co-writer Shipei Wen’s debut feature reveals this Columbia U. film school grad has a patient way of giving away his story’s secrets. Scenes are repeated, bringing new information, new details for us to consider into the story.

Our opinion of our anti-hero changes and we see him cower from responsibility, interfere with and even heroically attempt to intervene in Mrs. Liang’s plight. Wang isn’t shy about diving into a brawl. He even hurls himself into a random gang fight on a walk home. No, he doesn’t have “particular skills” in this regard. But guilt is eating at him and making him reckless.

The presence of a dogged Yuexin police detective (Yanhei Wang) tips us that this won’t just be a story about how Wang was captured. There’s more going on that the storyteller is withholding, layers that he’ll peel off for us as the mystery deepens even if the crime isn’t much that would last past one evening TV news cycle.

“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” takes its title from the 1950s tune, covered (in English) by a Chinese recording artist, a blind bar band singer and others during the course of the film. It’s one of the most evocative ballads in the Elvis repertoire and reinforces the tone and the solitary nature of Wang’s quest, and his life in prison.

Is the fictional city’s name symbolic, too? This is what turns up when you Google it.

Peng, more experienced than he looks here, makes a rugged, easily-underestimated anti-hero, a young man heedless of his own safety often as not and more cunning than you’d think. Chang gives us a widow conflicted about her loss, guilt-stricken in her own way and naive enough to not make all the connections and sense danger in this guarded young stranger who has entered her life.

Wen’s film shows us an underworld where the big impersonal State may get its man, but where crimes, by and large, go unpunished. Gangs, loan sharks, armed thugs and back alley gun dealers co-exist and cops, dogged or not, are taking their lives into their own hands when they push too hard.

This quietly riveting Cannes Golden Camera Award (Best First Feature) nominee introduces a filmmaker with a great eye and almost serene patience, and an early mastery of this genre should he choose to make it his specialty.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Eddie Peng, Sylvia Chang, Peiyao Jiang and Yanhei Wang.

Credits: Directed by Shipei Wen, scripted by Binghao Zhao, Yinou Wang and Shipei Wen. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:35

No, our most inscrutable, cerebral documentary, feature films director and occasional movie bad guy Herzog didn’t direct this. The chap who made “The Search for General Tso,” a Chinese cuisine and restaurant doc did.

But a movie about preserving proof of our lives on this planet and our shared humanity? Of course Werner H. is here.

Looks promising, if not as trippy and dreamy as a Herzog directed doc.

“Punch” is a gritty yet warm Kiwi coming-of-age drama about boxing, machismo and teenaged sexual identity and discovery. Its subject matter predicts the genre cliches it can’t avoid. But some novel twists, artfully unfussy direction, sensitive performances and a strong sense of place — small town New Zealand — make it a winner.

Jim (Jordan Oosterhof) is the fighter, 17 years-old, a working class kid dutifully trained and managed by his Dad (Tim Roth), who has his eyes on the prize — Jim’s “first professional fight.”

So keep to your training. No staying up all night editing music videos out of frolics with his friends, no messing about, pre-bout with his cute girlfriend (Abigail Laurent), who calls him a “tease” for not putting out.

Jim’s a solitary sort, given to naked jogs through the volcanic sand dunes near home. That’s where he runs into another loner. Whetu (Conan Hayes) lives in a shack near the water with his dog. They’re high school classmates, but don’t hang out together. Whetu is half-Maori, and a hustler. He turns tricks for money in public restrooms to get by. His classmates gossip about it. A local cop calls him “Tiffany,” as if he’s called him that before.

So this first encounter with Jim, off campus and in the buff, is a tad awkward.

But we get a sense that Jim is a bit more empathetic and kind than his “butch” classmates. And when he wades into the surf, playing with a drone, and gets stung by jellyfish, he’s lucky there’s someone who hears his screams and comes to his aid. No, neither of them is a fan of “Friends,” since you’re wondering.

To Jim, Whetu is the natural man, living on his own, relishing the fact that “I keep the world at a distance.” Whetu marvels at Jim’s artistic side and his Dad’s insistence that his boy box.

“This whole f—-n’ town REEKS of testosterone.”

A friendship forms, which is one of the ways Jim takes his eye off his “prize,” and the rest of his life. Dad’s too old to be working as a laborer at a cement mill. He’s sick, too. But damned if he isn’t going to get his kid ready for his professional debut.

“Dad, I’ve got a life.” “Not any more, you ain’t. You’re a boxer.“

The melodramatic touches include the father’s hidden illness, Whetu’s love of singing and songwriting and his bitchy defiance in the face of gay-shaming at school, gay-bashing off campus.

No potential same sex romance could begin without boys-being-boys roughhousing.

And no fight picture would be complete without a “dirty (rival) manager” trying to steer the kid away from his old man and into a career he’s not really sure he wants.

Writer-diector Welby Ings’ debut feature may traffic in those tropes. But he keeps his focus on the central characters, leaving few of their story threads unstitched as he allows the rest of the cast to quietly melt into the naturalistic background.

Roth’s signing on the dotted line got the picture made, and he gives his latest rock-solid turn in support as an aging, sickly alcoholic racing against the clock to try and make something of his kid, not really up to the task.

That gives our promising leads the spotlight and their first ever starring roles, and Oosterhof and Hayes don’t disappoint. These are nuanced performances, characters with a soft center but an edge they make certain to trot out when challenged or threatened.

Ings and his stars ensure that “Punch” turns out to be a lot more than a working New Zealand vacation for Roth, and a boxing picture with enough more interesting stuff going on that time in the ring is almost a dramatic afterthought.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, alcohol abuse, marijuana and profanity

Cast: Jordan Oosterhof, Conan Hayes, Abigail Laurent, Karl Willetts and Tim Roth

Credits: Scripted and directed by Welby Ings. A Darkstar release.

Running time: 1:39

A Gospel-tinged music comedy about an R & B singer who comes South to stay with family only to find a new route to glory via throwing a lot of razzle and dazzle and rhythm and blues at “church music.”

Didn’t Cuba Gooding Jr. do something like this?

“Praise This” stars Chloe Bailey, Tristan Mack Wilds, Quavo, Rafael Castillo, Lauren Lott, Cocoa Brown and Anjelika Washington and comes to Peacock TV April 7.

Germany, Turkey and Croatia aren’t exactly hotspots for romantic comedies. But today’s “Around the World with Netflix” offering samples all three languages and cultures for a stunningly scenic and sometimes adorable bit of formulaic fun.

“Faraway” is about a neglected wife and taken-for-granted mother, wife and daughter who flees from Germany to Croatia after her elderly mother dies. Because sometimes, all it takes is a change of scene to figure out — in an instant, or maybe a few days of instants — just how miserable you are.

We learn an awful lot about the Turco-German Zeynep (Naomi Krauss) in one harried morning breakfast scene.

Her dad (Vedak Erincin) treats her like a washerwoman and valet as she scrambles to get everyone up and fed and ready for the day. Her laid-back husband (Adnan Maral), a chef running their restaurant, is leisurely enjoying his breakfast and thinks nothing of eating the lone piece of toast she buttered for herself to gulp down in a dash. Her college-age daughter (Bahar Balci) is a sullen, phone-distracted brat too lazy to get a move on, and determined to dress down and tart up for the day’s big event.

We’ve barely had time to process what jerks they are, to a one, when we realize what day today is. Zeynep is burying her mother.

An elderly lawyer upstairs drops off some papers he was keeping for her mother, and they’re off to the funeral. Well, almost all of them. Husband Ilyas forgot. And he had Zeynep’s eulogy with him. She rushes into the restaurant only to find him flirting with his new cook.

That’s what sends her home to grab those “papers,” to her phone, looking up directions to Croatia, to “The Island Between the Sky and Sea” where her mother grew up. Mom secretly kept the fact that she bought a house there years ago from her self-absorbed husband. “Zeyne” swipes the restaurant’s catering van and flees.

Arriving, by ferry, in the middle of the night, she navigates to a charming, primitive (no electricity) cliffside stone cottage that began life hundreds of years ago as a stable. When she wakes up in the morning, having slept in her Spanx, she finds a naked Croat (Goran Bogdan) in the bed with her.

Therein lies a tale.

Unhappy women running away to “Eat, Pray Love” or live in Provence, Greece or “Under the Tuscan Sun” stories are practically a genre unto themselves, and “Faraway” hews to the tried and true formula of such films.

There’s a language barrier, so she and Josip — the previous owner who stayed for 15 years “until someone showed up” to claim the property — communicate in English. Cultures clash. She wants to “R & B” the place, prompting him to correct her to “Airbnb” and flip the eff out.

But we know where this “meet cute” — “I barely recognize you with your clothes on!” — is going, even as Zeyne comes to grips with the life she is hellbent on not going back to, even as the hunky young real estate agent Conrad (Artjom Gilz) puts the drunken moves on her.

Josip takes to calling that greedy swine “Macron,” which fits. But he’s moved out of the house and into a tent in the yard with his goat, and sets out to sabotage Zeyne’s property-owning plans.

There’s nothing all that deep going on here, just a woman “finding herself” in cultures not known for stories about women finding themselves. The semi-comical sheep stampede arrives, right on cue, as does the flock of geese following Zeyne and her battered bicycle down the quaint country lane.

A little bisexual inclusion, an amusing brawl amongst all the men fighting for her attention, and you’ve got an international comedy that rises to “cute” just often enough to justify something you’d watch just for the novelty and beauty of the setting.

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, profanity

Cast: Naomi Krauss, Goran Bogdan, Adnan Maral, Bahar Balci and Artjom Gilz.

Credits: Directed by Vanessa Jopp, scripted by Jane Ainscough and Alex Kendall. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

Somewhere in LA, editors are at work on the Academy Awards’ version of this.

Frankly, Oscar should just ask for permission to use the SAG version. It’s more thorough and maybe the best of these I’ve seen since the one Quincy Jones and Savion Glover cooked up decades ago.

Not going to lie, this looks adorable.

An Avenger doing Big Idea, locally focused small scale charity. Veeeeeery cool. Righteous dude.

No converting snowplows though, mate.

Disney+ in April.

A couple of sketchy “refurbished” cell phones gives a couple of British tweens the ability to take calls from the future in “Future TX,” a dreadfully chatty, incessantly-explaining 90 minutes of nonsense from the U.K.

They make D-movies for kids in Dorset? Who knew?

It’s a film of limited but effective-enough visual effects, “canned” sound effects, over-hyped action that’s nothing to write home about and a lot of monologues from a phone voice from the near future detailing how, since “physical time travel” has been proven “not feasible,” the best way to communicate a future threat to the past is...wait for it...VOICE mail.

So if you check your in-box and hear, say, a processed, mechanical male who sounds like Number One from “The Prisoner,” warning about a “bot net” threat in the making, that Brexit was a Russian-backed scam and to stop voting Tory to save the future, it just might be that.

Arran Kemp and Adele Congreve play two besties about to be busted-up because Dylan’s American dad (Doug Cockle, and we see why you moved to Britain, mate) is moving the family to Dubai. He lets the kid go and gives the kid the cash for a couple of cell phones as a way of making it up to him.

One is for Dylan, the other for Molly. But the sketchy phones come from a sketchy “no refunds” guy who doesn’t bother to explain the lava-lamp node on the back of each phone, or warn them about the calls they’re about to get.

Those calls order them to “save the world/save the future” by going to this or that set of “coordinates,” conning some tinfoil-hat-type (Griff Rhys Jones) out of his computer and smothering this bot net thingy in its crib.

The locations are generic, even by British suburbia standards. The villain (Rhys Jones again) wouldn’t scare anyone. The action beats are limp. The kiddie “work the problem” steps to accomplishing their mission forgettable and the addition of a dull smart aleck sidekick in a wheelchair (James Grogan) adds nothing but a bit of inclusion in a movie whose real problems are that inane, insipid screenplay by paired writers and directors Tim Clague and Danny Stack.

So, no “Well done” for you two.

Rating: unrated, squeaky clean

Cast: Adele Congreve, Arran Kemp, James Grogan, Catriona Knox, Doug Cockle, Nicole Farady and Griff Rhys Jones

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tim Clague and Danny Stack. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:28

Action comedy time, with Chris Evans playing the part of Chris Pine to Ana de Armas in the Gal Gadot role.

A little romance, a few texts — a LOT of texts — unanswered, and a Big Romantic Gesture that doesn’t go as planned. Because she’s in the habit of shooting people, generally not those she hooks up with.

Apple TV+. April. Embrace the Cute!

My review of the film is at this link. The trailer is below.

The latest model of the movies’ most efficient eviscerating machine, “Scream VI,” kills off five characters within the first 40 minutes.

Characters lean into the conventions of the genre once more, breaking down the obvious tropes, tricks and trivia concerning “What’s your favorite scary movie?” that are so universally recognized by now that even relative newcomers to the genre know exactly what cliches these carnage-as-comfort-food films promise and deliver, time and again, to the delight of the faithful.

When a character returns to the action late in the third act and asks, “Did I miss ‘the monologue?'” everybody knows the answer to that, because a villain has just finished one more “Where I explain and over-explain my villainy” speech.

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Gary Busick serve up six new set pieces, cinematic abattoirs you’ve seen sampled in the trailers — the Slaughter on the Subway and Bloodbath in the
Bodega among them.

We’re reminded that “nobody does ‘just’ a sequel anymore,” because this genre is all about the “franchise.” Thus the rules are different for “legacy characters,” changes in story direction and the like.

And when it comes to movies, we know “It’s all about ‘true crime’ limited series” in this, the golden age of streaming. Yes, the “Scream” movies are the most meta of the genre, constantly commenting on their requirements, conventions and how eye-rolling they are.

But at some point, the send-up of the send-up gets to be a bit much. Leaning into the trite just trips you up. And what you’re left with and a few nice acting moments thanks to the lovely leads filmed in loving close-up and a wearying slog through two hours of tedious fan service — one conventional gutting after another, one hundred and seven new “tzing, zing” blade sound effects is fifty too many and even the “Ghostface” mask, inspired by Munch’s painting “The Scream,” loses its thrill.

You’re no longer adorably embracing and amusingly upending conventions of the genre you say you’re honoring. You’re burying the viewer under a soap opera-sized backstory, and boring us with the arcane and absurd “reasons” mass murder has returned and someone new is masking up and butchering those connected to the saga’s narrative, but also fresh “randoms” sometimes played by big names.

The tale this time takes place in New York, where the “Core Four” from the last “Scream” have migrated to college. Tara (“Wednesday” Addams breakout Jenna Ortega) is determined to put Woodboro and the generations of killing behind her. Wary older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) is here to advise and protect. The smitten Chad (Mason Gooding) is another survivor, another potential protector or suspect, as is this movie’s explainer, Chad’s hip, genre-explaining gay sister Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown).

They’re all enrolled in Blackmore U., which has a pretty and pretty famous slasher film expert professor (Australian Samara Weaving) and a shrink (the Canadian character actor and sometime villain Henry Czerny) Sam is seeing, but whom Tara is avoiding.

It’s Halloween, and little sister wants to party. Third wheel roomie Quinn (Liana Liberato of “If I Stay” and “Banana Split”) is having more sex than everybody else put together, probably without her the knowledge of her cop dad (Dermot Mulroney).

A couple of fresh faces circle the “Core Four,” and notoriety hangs over Tara and especially Sam thanks to their bloody escape, with some college age netizens seeing Sam as the real “murderer” and harassing her for it.

When the killings start, Mindy is cautiously defiant, Chad loyal and stoic, Tara is terrified. Sam? The way she focuses on survival strategies lets a touch of panic sneak into her “What TOOK you so long?” bravado.

And that damned Gail Weathers (Courtney Cox) pops back up to comfort, “investigate” and help cash in as a “legacy” character and TV news stereotype.

There’s a sadness that has always popped up, in good moments and bad, in these movies. And you can feel it here as this or that undeserving victim faces a sudden and horrific end. Commenting on the fanboys of the genre via a film student who sees victims as “just meat” to him explains why the films reach for something resembling empathy-for-the-dead or dying on occasion.

But it doesn’t excuse why, from that first disemboweling of Drew Barrymore way back, the killings are given more thought than reasons for them are, or why — for all their “history” — these films fail so miserably at making their characters or the viewer feel the real or even watered-down movie versions of “real” consequences of violence.

“Being at a house party after you almost got brutally murdered at a house party” isn’t funny, even when ironically pointed out.

I’ve always appreciated the humor in these films, but by the time things go wholly over the top for the finale this time, the joking has run its course.

Hilariously, the distributing studio for this one has a long list of vague “spoiler” embargoes attached to this sixth film of an endlessly repetitive franchise. As if there is such a thing at this stage.

We’re treated to lots and lots of title-checks, not just of the great horror movies, but of the “Stab” movies made about the Woodboro “Ghostface” killer, which is so meta I won’t even attempt the math. The jokes about the best “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” film, about “Psycho II” being under-rated have aged out of their delight and thrill.

And there stands “Scream,” bloody blade in hand one more time, all stabbed out. We no longer have to ask, “Why the long face, pal?”

Rating: R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, and brief drug use

Cast: Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Hayden Panattiere, Tony Revolori, Liana Liberato, Henry Czerny, Dermot Mulroney and Courtney Cox

Credits: Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, scripted by James Vanderbilt and Gary Busick, based on characters created by Kevin Williamson. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:03