Movie Nation

The Oscar-nominated “The Fabelmans” showed that there’s still an audience for Judd Hirsch leaning into the Old Jewish Man shtick, which makes the indie comedy “iMordecai” marketable.

So here we are and here he is, a very old man in a “Virginia is for Lovers” hat, paired up with his “Taxi” co-star Carol Kane, shaming his son (Sean Astin) for showing up in a Porsche, “a Nazi sh– car,” jackhammering his condo’s bathroom floor because, “Vot, you vant I should use a toothpick?”

Mordecai Samel goes around telling everyone he’s 80, when we’ve already heard him narrate the animated first act of his life story, born in rural Poland in 1933 ( 90 years ago).

Vot, ve can’t do math?

He survived the Russians occupying his village, escaped the Holocaust, married Fela (Kane) and retired to Florida, a former plumber and painter with his “nudnik” new-father son (Astin) nearby, a “schlemiel” who doesn’t know a pipe wrench from channel locks.

But when the kid insists Dad get a new iPhone, all the kvetching in the world can’t save Mordecai from his fate, to become intimate with Siri and “that brainwashing device by Stalin,” as Fela puts it, in his pocket.

It’s not every iPhone-using senior who gets one-on-one lessons on how to used the phone “with no buttons.” But saleslady Nina (Azia Dinea Hale) takes an interest. And as we gather from her volunteering at the local Jewish Community Center, she’s got a keen interest in Holocaust survivors.

Director and co-writer Marvin Samel begins this story with Mordecai relating (animated) family lore that he was born under a Polish apple tree, and bonked on the head at birth. I’d say Samel leaves no low-hanging-fruit unpicked in this undemanding, comfort food comedy, but the truth is, he does.

The picture tends to peter out as we drift away from Mordecai, relating his life story to Nina in animated flashbacks (Remember, he’s a painter, and not just a housepainter.). His son is a Florida cigar maker, hoping to make that big score and sell his company. But his aged Dad has always been his “jinx.”

We get a glimpse of son Marvin’s (there’s a bit of autobiography here) home life — wife (Stephanie J. Block), newborn twins with Dad plainly pushing 50. But there’s not much that’s funny in that story thread, and the comic legend Kane is kind of wasted in a role that shifts into dementia.

“Her mind isn’t working like it used to.”

“So whose is?”

Hirsch’s storied TV career had him mostly playing the straight man, a reactor to assorted madcap friends and colleagues cast opposite him on shows like “Taxi” and “Dear John.” Here, he carries all the comic weight, advising a young cell phone seller on how to earn laughs from the stand-up stage, attempting plumbing fixes, “jinxing” things for his kid and making his dotty wife jealous at all the women trying to “steal you away.”

It’s a fun performance in a poor-to-middling dramedy. If you haven’t seen “The Fabelmans,” you really haven’t seen him pulling out all the stops, which is something to behold.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jodd Hirsch, Carol Kane, Azia Dinea Hale, Nick Puga, Stephanie J. Block and Sean Astin.

Credits: Directed by Marvin Samel, scripted by Rudy Gaines, Marvin Samel and Dahlia Heyman. A Femor release.

Running time: 1:42

Hey, if we have “gender reveal parties,” why not a sperm donor party?

March 3, this raunchy empowerment comedy, co-starring Rob Corddry, Bria Henderson, Erinn Hayes and Jerry O’Connell is unleashed upon us all, and as Tracy Morgan likes to say, “SOMEbody’s gonna get pregnant.”

Philippa Soo is getting over that “long lost husband” (Luke Bracey) with Mr. Right (Simu Liu of “Shang Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings”)…and then the husband comes back from the supposedly dead, but at least lost at sea.

Sounds like a 1963 Doris Day/James Garner/Polly Bergen comedy, “Move Over, Darling.”

April 7, we learn the phrase “husband-in-law.”

“A Sunday Affair” is a soapy love-triangle melodrama bathed in Nigerian affluence. The plotting is obvious, the acting stiff and stagebound and the payoff an eye-roller.

Aside from that…

An opening montage lets us see that Uche and Toyim have been friends since childhood, looking for love and success in greater Lagos, getting cynical about at least one of those goals by their early 20s, still single when they attend the stylish, tony wedding for Uche’s sister in their late 30s.

Uche ( Nse Ikpe-Etim) runs an art gallery, thanks to a little help from a “sugar daddy.”

“I like my men married,” she cracks. “Much less hassle.”

That’s how she hooks up with “Sunday,” aka Akim (Oris Erhuero) at that wedding. Her BFF Toyim (Dakore Egbuson-Akande) catches up with them post-coitus, and lets her bestie and her bestie’s hook-up know that she knows he’s married.

A chance cross-country train ride pairs up “the marrying kind” Toyim with Akim for a long chat, where she buys his pitch that he’s getting divorced from his “American wife.”

Now Toyim is interested. Now she’s forgetting the guy hooked up with her bestie. Now she’s having second thoughts about the reason for that train ride, her trek to a fertility clinic. She’s not waiting on the right man to come along and father her baby.

“Your body, your choice,” Akim says, recycling the hottest pickup line of the past 25 years.

Soon our player is hooking up with both, getting guilted by his brother, and struggling with the decision of whether to divorce and which woman to choose as we wonder which bestie will spill the tea about “this new man in my life” first.

The Nigerian setting is the main novelty in this flatlining melodrama. Posh homes and fancy restaurants, sex in Porsches, this is a Lagos version of Tyler Perry’s Atlanta, aspirational and African, not African-American, with midnight walks on the beach as an added bonus.

Toss in a little cultural sexism and woman-on-woman judgement and you still don’t have enough conflict to spark this script to life. The cast is just good enough to make you notice their wooden readings of wooden dialogue (in English).

But like most Nigerian films one finds when traveling “Around the World with Netflix,” the Nollywood polish at least gives it a gloss that makes “A Sunday Affair” neatly fit in with the other international films on the streaming service, even if the screenwriting and acting isn’t quite up to par.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Dakore Egbuson-Akande, Nse Ikpe-Etim and Oris Erhuero

Credits: Directed by Walter Taylour, scripted by Darrel Bristow-Bovey. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

So, Jonathan Majors plays another villain, this time in another variation on a theme by Stallone.

It opens March 3, so obviously they think they have another winner. Let’s hope so!

A morose, motherless teen finds out a few things about himself and his gene pool when his alcoholic, dying granny comes to stay with him in “Juniper,” a curtain call drama built around a fine turn by screen legend Charlotte Rampling.

Actor turned writer-director Matthew J. Saville’s debut feature makes for a dry, unemotional blend of dark comedy and co-dependency, scenic but desultory, even when Rampling is at her best.

New Zealand native George Ferrier stars in this Kiwi coming-of-age story about a boarding school kid who comes home to help his widowed father (Marton Csokas) deal with Dad’s English, globe-trotting mother, who is to move in with them.

Granny Ruth isn’t the warmest creature, a brittle conflict photographer who took to gin (giving the film its title) long ago, and expects to maintain her bottle-a-day habit while her broken leg heals. As she is in her 70s, that’s a bit hopeful on her part, and on medical science’s.

Grandson Sam doesn’t know her and doesn’t want to get to know her. He’s never recovered from the loss of his Mom. And Dad can’t wait to find an excuse to flee the country to “settle” Ruth’s affairs back in the U.K. Ruth never even told him who his father was, so he has his reasons.

With Sam motorbiking out into the woods to prep a noose for himself, is there anything Ruth can or will do that can mend this broken child and breaking family?

Rampling, recently seen in “Dune,” “Benedetta” and “Red Sparrow,” a screen fixture since her modeling youth (“Hard Day’s Night,” “Zardoz”), nominated for an Oscar for “45 Years,” should have been nominated for “The Verdict,” sports a salty, imperious presence here, a tough broad who has seen it all, lived it up and isn’t inclined to take any guff, even in her current and perhaps terminal infirm state.

“Do the girls like you?” is her first question of her grandson.

“Which wars?” did she cover is his to her. “Most of them,” she shrugs.

They never quite connect, engaging in their own war of wills instead. She’s also dryly scrapping with her nurse (Edith Poor), who is both a caregiver and drink mixer, and more oddly, a devout Christian who is also a vice-enabler. She fetches an Anglican priest for Ruth.

“I thought you might like to talk.”

“Why did you think that?”

The film’s one real scene of sharp banter and real conflict comes here, Ruth cynically baiting the priest with a bribe, him losing his temper — “You do deals with the Devil, not with God!”

Saville’s story — supposedly borrowed from his own childhood — has few incidents that one would go so far as to describe as “action.” Everything is interior and emotional and approached at arm’s length. We get a load of Sam’s unhappiness and his short temper, even as we wonder what it is that makes him loathe Ruth on sight.

The relationship is a standoff until they meet on Ruth’s irresponsible and not exactly moral terms, and even that doesn’t give the movie the lift we keep waiting for, the meaning it searches for or the heart it generally lacks.

Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, suicide, profanity

And Charlotte Rampling, George Ferrier, Edith Poor and Marton Csokas.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Matthew J. Saville. A Greenwich release.

Running time: 1:34

“How I Became a Gangster” trots out every plot device, every trope and every cliche of every gangster picture of the past twenty years and gives them all a coke-flavored Polish accent.

It’s an over-familiar tale buried under an incessant, self-serving and redundant voice-over narration. Our gangster-in-the-making speaks of his “normal” childhood, his lifelong passion for brawling, his “code” and his country for two hours and twenty minutes of movie that never for a minute shakes the “We’ve SEEN all this before” baggage it carries all along the way.

Our “inspired by a true story” begins as a working-class kid gets labeled “a pint-sized hitman” at 10, thanks to his school principal. He steals his dad’s taxi for joyrides and has a “Bronx Tale” epiphany about the mugs with money in The People’s Republic of Poland. From 1977 onwards, through “Solidarity” into the 2000s, our canny, cunning mafioso (Marcin Kowalczyk) punches, shoots, schemes and outsmarts his fellow thugs and the police en route to his lowlife version of “The Good Life.”

The film shows us this tried-and-true (ish) story with visuals, actors performing actions. And our antihero redundantly explains in voice-over what we’re plainly seeing and comments on the arc of his “hero’s journey.”

“The state WAS the mafia,” under the commies, he notes, in Polish or dubbed into English. “The mafia is stronger when the state is weak,” he says of the new democratic Poland.

“Yesterday’s wolves are today’s sheep” he says of his rivals.

He brawls as a release, to keep in practice and to build his “legend.”

He compliments those he beats up — “You were incredible. After this we will always be brothers!”

Not that either part of that is true. It’s just what he says.

We meet the college girl (Natalia Szroeder) he IDs, targets and brutishly takes from others.

And we see how he acquires a protege, the kid called “Walden” (Tomasz Wlosok) after Thoreau’s pond of serenity and self-awareness. He is the most careless compadre this cunning and and careful mob boss takes on, which tells us the kid’s fate long before the film’s finale.

The Tomasz Wlosok screenplay lets our unnamed protagonist pass judgement on those he interacts with, reserving the harshest labels for “rats” like the mob boss who snitches on the rest of Poland’s underworld.

The “code” pitched here is “we stay away from women and children” even as we see women brutalized and reduced to sex work property, and hear of a kid murdered as an eyewitness. “We only steal from the rich” is always meant ironically, as he and his crew steal artwork or hit post office payroll shipments and mostly shoot at each other…for now.

The heists aren’t planned onscreen and are blandly-executed and filmed — sometimes in slow motion — when they come.

Assassinations with silencers, savage beatings and little snippets of lowlife high life decorate the proceedings but add little to the experience we’ve immersed ourselves in.

Kowalczyk — he was in the prehistoric lad-and-his-wolf thriller “Alpha” — is a charismatic villain quite at home with fight choreography.

But his contract must have paid him by the word. That narration would fill a Gniezno phonebook, and it adds nothing to “How I Became a Gangster” except over-explained tedium.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug abuse, explicit sex, profanity

Cast: Marcin Kowalczyk, Tomasz Wlosok, Natalia Szroeder

Credits: Directed by Maciej Kawulski, scripted by Tomasz Wlosok. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:19

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

After tamping down expectations a tad, this turns out to be a franchise-best opening for the “Ant Man” corner of the marvel universe.

Deadline.com’s projections, that “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” would finish second, edging out “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” in a weekend of almost nothing but sequels, were off. See the correct order below.

On twitter? Follow @BoxOfficePro, source of the numbers and graphic below.

”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