Movie Nation

Michael B. Jordan makes his directing debut in “Creed III,” his third acting outing in the never-ending “Rocky” saga, the first without founding father Sylvester Stallone on screen.

And the movie he gives us is quiet, almost stately, a real actor’s picture and something of a redemption for Jonathan Majors, so good in “Devotion,” so disengaged as the heavy in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”

Majors finds the vulnerable, resentful core of his character, an ex-con who did time thanks to young Adonis Creed’s Biggest Mistake. Damien “Dame” Anderson gets out of jail and eases his way into the orbit of the now-retired champ before hitting him with the “Try spending half your life in a cell…watching somebody else live your life” guilt trip turned threat.

Jordan takes a solid swing at showing us something fresh in the fight sequences, boxers whose focus and intensity literally leaves them as the only two men in the rink and the darkened stadium where they’re fighting, a sell-out crowd blocked utterly out of their minds and erased from the visuals.

He also takes pains to show us something we’ve seen after real life prize-fights — even if rarely — two pugilists recognizing that they’re the only two people in the world who know what they just went through, and the bond that creates.

But that story. Ugh. “Recycled” does the word a disservice. This is a humorless, dry retread of the lesser, later “Rocky” movies, a molehill of a tale for our boxing titans to climb.

It’s a movie about being at the top, rich, fat and happy. But whatever laughs or eyerolls Rocky Balboa was able to generate about sudden affluence, whatever guts he could summon up to battle a Clubber Lang (Mister T, a loose parallel to Majors’ Damien Anderson) — pride or principal or revenge now that he no longer has the desperation of a nobody getting a title shot — it’s just not here.

The script, like Adonis Creed in the story, has good intentions but no fire and no heart.

Adonis a Ralph Lauren billboard model and a guy who drives to work in his Rolls Royce, running his own stable of fighters from his marquee gym when we meet him. Dame comes back into his life, a figure from flashbacks of their big brother/kid brother relationship past. Creed takes him on and makes him a sparring partner for his current champ.

But a humble, grateful Dame starts acting out, his punches too pointed, his swings too dirty for mere sparring. “My clock is ticking” he says. “Too old” or not, the former Golden Glove winner wants his shot 18 years after he went to prison.

Adonis tells his Mama (Phylicia Rashad), singer-turned-producer wife (Tessa Thompson) and his trainer Little Duke (Wood Harris) that “I can make it right.” But he’s not seeing what they see.

“He’s telling you who he is,” Duke counsels. “BELIEVE him!”

You know how these pictures work. Events align and people conspire to put these two men who used to be “like brothers” into the ring together for a grudge match, where broken noses, broken ribs, broken hands and concussions are the possible payoff.

Jordan sets up the over-the-top spectacle of a championship and delivers an impressive fight or two.

But rarely have the stakes felt so low in one of these movies, seldom have the plot contrivances felt so contrived, with our first-time director rubbing the edge off the picture in an effort to step away from the “two Black men beating each other’s brains out” symbolism here.

He softens the movie without stripping the violence, and it goes adrift, characters groping about in a story that doesn’t have a real purpose or reason to exist. .

And if the Creeds insist on Rolls Roycing their deaf pre-tween daughter (Mila Davis-Kent) to ringside to watch this brutal beating her dad takes, you have to wonder if the better fight might be the one with Child Protective Services.

Rating: PG-13 (Violence|Some Strong Language|Intense Sports Action).

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson, Jonathan Majors, Wood Harris and Florian Munteanu.

Credits: Directed by Michael B. Jordan, scripted by Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin. An MGM/UA release.

Running time: 1:56

Vietnam War literature is where we first heard the combat infantry expression “thousand yard stare.” It’s entered the war lit/war film lexicon as shorthand for the soldier whose eyes reflect the exhausted wariness of anybody too long “in country.”

But it wasn’t until I saw Jesse Gavin wear it as a Afghan combat vet who will never get over what he lost in “Northern Shade” that I got a sense of what it must look like.

Gavin, a career bit-player turned leading man, gives a breakout performance as an infantryman who saw a close friend die overseas, and comes home to his old man’s boat — a weathered sport fishing trawler which he lives on — a strained relationship with his mother, a long-estranged younger brother, and a bottle.

If you saw, smoked with and chatted up the ghost of your fallen comrade Noel (Alejandro Bravo) on a regular basis, you’d drink, too.

When a private eye (Titania Galliher) visits The Gasshole — perfect name for a boat with no sails, BTW — and asks questions about a now-burned-out vehicle Justin gave his little brother Charlie, Noel chides Justin about his responsibilities.

“Go up there and find him.”

“Up there” is Connecticut’s rural border country with New York. Charlie’s joined some guys holed up in the woods. Yeah, it’s what you think. Yes, another guy “in the woods” is someone the private detective is looking for. And no, the cops — even the ones not sympathetic to camo-wearing secessionist militia goons — are not interested.

Writer-director Christopher Rucinski doesn’t stretch the genres he’s mashing up for this classic “find my missing partner/relative/lover/old-comrade” quest. His background is visual effects, but he’s made his writing and directing debut a film that doesn’t call for any, just really good actors.

What he gets absolutely right, in every role, is casting. Bravo makes a “careless” and somewhat naive Noel in the field, a weary best friend/nagging conscience as a ghost. Galliher is believable as an ex-military/ex-cop with a conscience. And Rose Marie Guess gives Noel’s war widow and single mom a pandemic-strained loneliness that’s easy to buy into.

The militia members we meet are belligerent, secretive and intellectually weak enough to fall under the spell of Billy (Romano Orzari), a strutting, conspiracy-minded blowhard and Wit and Wisdom of Joe Rogan philosopher.

“When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers. Somebody’s got stand up for the grass.”

And Gavin gives a John Hawke in “Winter’s Bone” eye-opener of a performance — haunted, twitchy, weary and guilt-ridden, a man who must lose that “thousand yard stare” before he can be of any use to anybody.

The plot points aren’t the most surprising or even rationally defensible. But Gavin & Co. make this an intimate thriller with personal agendas, limited people making rash, limiting decisions with life or death consequences, with no one there to talk them out of any of it.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Jesse Gavin, Titania Galliher, Rose Marie Guess, Alejandro Bravo, Joseph Poliquin and Romano Orzari

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Rucinski. A Bayview release.

Running time: 1:36

My stars and garters, I lost COUNT of the number of times I muttered “They did NOT just go THERE” while watching “Cocaine Bear.”

I haven’t seen this many cocaine jokes since “Saturday Night Live” in the ’80s. And the gore. The GORE. Entrance and exit wounds, a disemboweling, maulings and clawings — early Eli Roth bloody.

It’s “Snakes on a Plane” with a bear. No Samuel L. Jackson, alas. And lots and lots of cocaine.

A hyper, just-addicted short-attention-span mama bear, bear cubs caked in “booger sugar,” children taking big, fat heaping spoonfuls? Heavens!

Comic actress turned comic director (“Pitch Perfect 2,” “Charlie’s Angels”) Elizabeth Banks and the screenwriter serve up a wildly fictionalized splatter comedy based on a real-life Tennessee tale from the mid-80s. And say what you want about the piddling dialogue and middling script, if the horror and coke joke audience was bigger, this bear would mop the bloodstained floor with that Ant-Man. Whatever its actual merits, this beast fills the cheap seats

A jaunty, jokey, life-is-cheap tone is set up in the opening, a montage of TV news coverage of the day (Tom Brokaw‘s finest hour) and the sight of a lummox drug trafficker (Matthew Rhys) dancing and snorting and tossing duffel after duffel stuffed with coke-cakes out of an auto-pilot prop plane, then clumsily killing himself when he bails out over The Smokeys in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Ray Liotta, in what won’t turn out to have been his final film (pity), plays a Missouri drug dealer who wants to get his ditched cargo back. O’Shea Jackson, Jr. and “Solo” exiled Alden Ehrenreich are the subordinates he sends into the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area to retrieve it.

Isiah Whitlock Jr. is a Tennessee cop out to catch the elusive Syd (Liotta) and his minions.

But others, from local snatch-and-grab hoodlums, to kids playing hooky from school (Brooklynn Prince of “The Florida Project,” and Christian Convery) stumble across the duffels, the wrapped coke cakes or the bear that got to at least some of the cocaine first.

“It’s demented…or something!” Or something it is!

Hapless hikers, embittered park ranger (Margo Martindale), wildlife and biodiversity expert (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) or single mom (Keri Russell) hunting for her kid all find themselves chased by, contending with and/or ripped-up by this Ursa Americanus with a newfound taste for Erythoxylon coca.

“Cocaine Bear” summons up memories of the “cocaine” comedies of the ’80s — not films about the drug or drug dealing per se, but instantly-forgettable high concept comedies made under the influence kind of aimed at those under the influence.

The digital bear is…animated. For the most part.

The biggest running gag here is the title, especially the first word in it. Coke is a joke. F-bombs tart up other lines meant to be funnier. And then there’s the comic gore — stabbings, fingers shot off, teeth and claws tearing at flesh and intestines.

Attention is paid to the syrupy synth-pop music of the era, and the goofy, period-specific (often synthetic) clothing. That’s worth a grin or two.

But the Jimmy Warden screenplay needed script doctoring, a heaping helping of joke-juicing. Sight gags and gore may sell tickets. The wacky news story, covered-to-death by TV in its day, may ensure that the picture jumps right out of the gate in the opening act. There’s just not enough funny business here to keep this from flatlining pretty much from the halfway point onward.

Banks is one of the great screen comediennes of her era. As a director? Did you see “Pitch Perfect 2” or the last and least “Charlies Angels” ever? She gets the easiest laughs, manages a fright or two as we fear for children and other innocent victims of the bear. And that’s it.

The movie loses its buzz too early and drifts into a hangover of a third act thanks to blown opportunities, trite situations, weak set-ups and tame punch-lines.

It isn’t quite “Snakes on a Plane,” a high concept comedy in which ALL of the fun is in the title and the billing. But it’s too close.

Rating: R for bloody violence and gore, drug content and language throughout

Cast: Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Brooklynn Prince, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Alden Ehrenreich, Christian Convery, Margo Martindale and Ray Liotta

Credits: Directed by Elizabeth Banks, scripted by Jimmy Warden. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:35

A daughter comes home to be at her aged, ailing father’s side to hear his lasdtbrewuesr. That she help him end his life

Look for this one in mid April.

It’s worth applying the Hippocratic Oath when considering the quality, veracity and messaging of any “faith based film.”

“First, do no harm,” Hippocrates preached.

The angry, divisive tone of “God’s Not Dead,” “Left Behind” and too many films that ride on the backs of Kevin Sorbo and/or Kirk Cameron are just for the fanatics, folks who politicize faith and bend Christianity into what is widely considered “Christian Nationalism” and recognized as dangerous to a pluralistic, secular democracy.

Films like “Miracles from Heaven,” “Noble,” “Same Kind of Different as Me” and “Soul Surfer” succeed by personalizing faith, playing up the real world problems and real world relief people take from faith, downplaying supernaturalism and avoiding angry, absolutist Falwellian politics.

There is no “harm” in “corny.” Sentimental and idealized? Why not? And if the story is real-world based, a little “edge” is a welcome ingredient.

“Jesus Revolution” keeps that oath and passes muster in a lot of regards. It’s a generally uplifting account of the hippies and spiritual searchers who turned away from LSD and drug experimenting and turned towards faith, without giving up their tie-dye or VW Microbuses.

It was a brief moment in time — and a Time Magazine cover (in 1971) — as this film, based on Pastor Greg Laurie’s memoir, makes clear in the closing minutes. But Laurie, a big deal in California Protestantism and (documentary) film producing, feels it’s worth remembering and celebrating, and not just for self-promotional reasons.

In the movie’s 1967-68 opening, we meet Pastor Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammer), presiding over a dying California congregation at Calvary Chapel, tuned out of debates with his college age daughter (Ally Ioannides) at home.

The TV news is filled with Vietnam War coverage, Vietnam War protests and middle-aged reporters talking about kids who live by “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

Pastor Chuck preaches that “this generation is lost, aimless…a generation without restraint.”

But daughter Janette figures what Dad needs is to meet a real hippie. Lonnie Frisbee, played by Jonathan Roumie of the popular series “The Chosen” (He plays Jesus) is just a Jesus look-alike she picks up hitchhiking. But Pastor Chuck hears him out and takes his suggestion that “kids are searching for the real thing,” “sheep without a shepherd.”

That transforms Pastor Chuck and Calvary Chapel. Overnight, Lonnie’s friends and future followers flock to this Woodstock-by-the-Sea, barefoot and unwashed, looking for meaning and wanting to be baptized in nearby Pirate’s Cove.

Meanwhile, military school teen Greg (Joel Courtney of Netflix’s “The Kissing Booth”) is so drawn to hippie chick Cathe (Anna Grace Barlow of TV’s “The Big Leap”) that he finds himself at “happenings,” where Janis sings and LSD guru Timothy Leary speaks, praising the young people for their “relentless search for the truth.”

By the way, MAJOR “edge” and style points for including Leary and taking him seriously here.

Greg follows Cathe and her crowd into a Microbus, into mind-expanding drugs, into flashbacks to his troubled life and childhood with his single mom (Kimberly Williams-Paisley). It takes an overdose and a car crash to wake SOME of them up.

When Greg meets Lonnie, he is ripe for recruitment and definitely in need of something new. But he sees what others were saying then and still say about this movement and its moment, a generation swapping one “addiction” for another.

“What if it’s just another high, another drug?”

Co-directors Jon Erwin (“I Can Only Imagine”) and Brent McCorkle (“Unconditional”) add a reporter with the Biblical name Josiah (DeVon Franklin) to give their story a framing device, the questioning and writing of that Time Magazine cover story, and add a little diversity to the cast.

They capture the birth of the first big faith-based “Jesus Music” group, Love Song, serve up contemporary pop by America, Fleetwood Mac, The Doobie Brothers and Edwin Starr and try to weave the threads of the story into an era-appropriate hippy poncho.

But their movie experiences its 40 minutes in the wilderness as it loses track of Pastor Chuck’s story arc and epiphany, and leans on future Pastor Greg’s journey, which isn’t remotely as interesting. But he wrote the book and produced the movie, so…

The money moment here might be when the 60something preacher listens to the complaints of the church’s elders about bare feet and dirty carpets, and they show up Sunday to see him washing his new flock’s feet as they walk in.

Out of context, that’s a little weird and could be played for comedy. Grammer, bless him, plays it straight and it is simple and moving and Biblical.

Lulls aside, “Jesus Revolution” works in that classic upbeat California vibe way. It’s not any sort of breakthrough as a movie or a “movement” moment. But it makes a nice contrast to the religious rhetoric of today, the pricey Super-Bowl-on-Fox ads funded by shadowy figures who preach tolerance while funding hate groups.

Laurie and the filmmakers have the good sense to step away from that. They know that the Hippocratic Oath isn’t just for doctors, and their movie is richer for that.

Rating: PG-13 for strong drug content involving teens and some thematic elements

Cast: Jonathan Roumie, Joel Courtney, Anna Grace Bellow, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, DeVon Franklin, Julia Campbell and Kelsey Grammer.

Credits: Directed by Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle, scripted by Jon Erwin and Jon Gunn, based on the memoir by Greg Laurie. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:59

OK, a movie made in Morristown, Tennessee, birthplace of “Evil Dead” and the careers of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, one with a nasty pun for a title.

“Welcome Villain” is the distributing company?

March 3, “Hunt Her Kill Her” becomes available for perusal by the low-budget horror cognoscenti.

Steve Martin’s “Number One is Walking: My Life in Movies and Other Diversions,” is the sort of book that airports should buy in bulk and sell at a discount, so that passengers can give them a quick read and leave them behind for somebody else to pick up before their flight.

It’s a lightly-amusing collection of anecdotes, illustrated “graphic novel” style by Harry Bliss. There are also scores of single-page cartoons for which Martin provided the captions, and Bliss illustrated. It is a 20 minute read, tops.

While perusing it, you might think, “Whoa, a couple of these (there are maybe 60 or 70) might be clever enough to actually make it into The New Yorker!”

And then you read the back cover and realize, “Hey, Harry Bliss does this for a LIVING at The New Yorker.”

Well, I haven’t picked it up in a while, so maybe they’ve had a bit of a falling-off, at least in terms of wit. Or maybe he was just thrilled to get into a book with Steve Martin and didn’t have the temerity or the heart to say “Let’s take another run at this” or that.

It’s a slight book, even by the standards of the short-funny-takes genre that Woody Allen, Martin and others have served up for decades.

Illustrating showbiz lore from his early years with the banjo, the making of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” “Roxanne” and other films, relating “How I got into movies” and how he got out — “I lost interest in the movies at exactly the same time the movies lost interest in me” — should have been the template that this enterprise stuck with. That’s what works.

I’d love to see a whole book of illustrated versions of his “SNL” appearances, how “King Tut” came to be, that “Love at First Laugh” connection with Martin Short, his shorter half for decades of stage appearances, TV sketches and the Third Act triumph that is “Only Murders in the Building.”

I know he’s covered some of that stuff in other memoirs, but an anecdote about the first time he went to the Lapin Agile in Paris, inspiring his play, “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” a few others about early stand-up and the like would be more readable and entertaining than much of what made the cut here.

The guy did a whole Jacqueline Onassis bit when he was the Stadium Stand-up King, preserved on vinyl. Not connecting that to a party at her apartment years later when he did “Waiting for Godot” on Broadway seems an opportunity missed. Or maybe he’s forgotten that, or chose to forget it.

Pages of cartoons illustrating his purchase of an off-the-books, street “caption” because Martin couldn’t come up with anything funnier doesn’t play, nor does the “I blow dried the cat” “hot” caption he “bought.”

I was reminded of the late comic polymath and King of All Media Steve Allen, whom Martin has emulated and bested in some regards — stand-up, stand-up LPs, films, books, plays, music, TV. Any time a Seinfeld or Kevin Hart, Silverman or Samantha Bee takes on a book, a play or a talk or game show, they’re following in the footsteps of the first famous “Tonight Show” host, who tallied films, tunes, multiple series and enough books to keep Ron DeSantis’s censors busy for weeks among his “keep busy” and “use the brand” efforts.

Allen wrote a lot about comedy, and while no one would confuse him with Henri Bergson, he was a superb analyst of the medium, the form and those who practiced it. He astutely took Martin’s off-kilter lowbrow high-wit seriously very early on.

Having had the pleasure of interviewing both Allen and Martin a few times over the years, that’s a label that both men have relished, being taken “seriously.”

But if you’re going to dig at Milton Berle, in his day the most unpopular comic among his peers, widely regarded as a jerk, why would you hold back and sugar coat the one time you worked in a movie with Chevy Chase (“The Three Amigos,” which Martin conceived)? Nobody in show business WANTS to work with Chevy Chase. Sometimes, they’ve been forced to, but the stories about him go back to the ’70s, took flight in the ’80s and led to his exile by the ’90s, until TV folk forgot what an insufferable ass he is and brought him back. Briefly.

A lightweight tome like this might not be the place to address that (Surely he’s got “Chevy stories.”). But recalling that Robin Williams was either “on” or “off” during their “Godot,” a guy who couldn’t help but disrupt rehearsals with manic riffs, suggests that maybe it is.

Martin’s “real people” buying tickets to his movies — many of which were bad — isn’t quite the cop out it seems. He acknowledges how hard it is to make one that works, how many you have to make to get a few really good ones under your belt. “All of Me” with Lily Tomlin and “Roxanne” with Darryl Hannah, greenlit by the one studio exec in Hollywood who remembered who Cyrano de Bergerac was, and the pablum that was “Parenthood” have their moments and memories revived here.

With so many books, memoirs included, on his resume, Martin can be forgiven for not wanting to repeat himself, for running out of things to recall and joke about that he hasn’t passed on in another book. What he can be chewed out for is peddling and packaging this “curated,” rarely-charming piffle from a specialty publisher at premium prices.

If you’re going to write a comic book, why charge for a hard cover? It’s not like you need another Edward Hopper, even if he provides the punchline to one of the better cartoons served up here.

“Number One is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions.” By Steve Martin, drawings by Harry Bliss. Caledon Books. $30. Maybe…70 pages of content, mostly drawings with a blank page on the back.

Neve wants to believe it when she says it. She especially wants the person she’s talking with to buy in.

“I’m a proud Black woman,” she says, not even convincing herself. “PROUD.”

But we’ve already seen her immersion in white British suburbia — Castle Combe, is it? We’ve heard Neve practice her posh pronunciations in the vanity mirror before heading out. We’ve caught her donation-shaming a neighbor into supporting her latest cause and overheard another neighbor, a friend, “compliment” her by saying she’s “practically one of us.“

She’s married well, with two teens in the local private school, where she’s taken on classes and assistant head-mistress duties, without ever locating her “references,” her boss jokes.

She frets over wigs, the pricey gloves that she wears to drive the Range Rover, considering every word and the appropriate received pronunciation way of saying it. Even her walk seems studied.

When you’re Black practically “passing” for white in your little corner of Brexitania, every day’s a little more “Stepford” than the last.

And God forbid she see a Black face in town. That’s most triggering of all. Neve is certain, on a gut level, that “The Strays” will be her undoing.

Actor-turned-writer/director Nathaniel Martello-White and his star, Ashley Madekwe of Brit-TV’s “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” cook up a fine, paranoid thriller about race, the many shades of racism and “appearances.”

That’s what Neve struggles to maintain even as she becomes unhinged by seeing a Black man (Jordan Myrie) in town, and then as the new custodian at her school. It’s a good thing she hasn’t caught a glimpse of him with a young Black woman (Bukky Bakray). Because that, we’re sure, will really set her off.

Neve, her white husband (Justin Salinger) and kids (Samuel Paul Small, Maria Almieda) refer to themselves as “a Black family.” But it’s easy to see signs they’re playing that down. Son Sebastian may play basketball (like a British actor). But he’s keen to minimize the racist bullying he encounters at school.

When daughter Mary comes home with her blondish hair in braids, Neve visibly quakes. Fair-skinned, and all this effort to “fit in” and look white, and the kid does this.

As Neve sees Black people among them, as nobody else seems to notice them (at first), as taped black stick figures turn up on the mirror on her Range Rover, we’re allowed just enough time to wonder just how much of this is in her head, and if she’s over-reacting to a perceived “threat.”

She’s hellbent on not taking in “strays.”

Martello-White peppers his script with the death-by-a-million-cuts racial indignities a Black minority faces even after assimilating into a white society — dinner party “friends” who tactlessly quote some new dog-whistling pundit who “dares” to revive “white flight” as a cultural phenomenon.

Interviewing for a job, the would-be custodian knows to read the room and talk up Liverpool FC to the head master doing the hiring, who breaks the ice with a tone-deaf “The only color that matters — TEAM colors!”

Liberal do-gooderism is chided as a benefit for “the less fortunate” comes unraveled when those “less fortunate” show up.

The third act resolutions to the mystery, and sudden turn towards violence, are more strained and limiting than one might like. But Madekwe plays up Neve’s calculating ways, and the added math she does to identify a perceived menace to her world.

And the smart, subdued finale is the only one that we’d believe and accept — logical, and damning and thought-provoking, not unlike the thriller than precedes it.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Ashley Madekwe, Justin Salinger, Jordan Myrie, Samuel Paul Small, Maria Almieda and Bukky Bakray.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nathaniel Martello-White. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

The director of “Grabbers” serves up this tale of family property and a blood covenant of some sort that comes with it. Part of the deed. Or tradition. A curse? Maybe a bit of all three.

March 10, “Unwelcome,” starring “Black Mirror’s” Hannah John-Kamen, Douglas Booth and that EveryIrishman, Colm Meaney, comes to theaters and to your future understanding of “closing costs.”