Movie Nation

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

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

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

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

The acting? It’s a zombie movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: TV-14, gory violence, profanity

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

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

Running time: 1:34

A $17.5 million Thursday tipped us that the latest “Ant-Man and The Wasp” movie was going to have a better than fine, considerably less than overwhelming opening weekend at the box office.

Fold that in to what added up to a $44 million Friday, and it looks like Marvel’s latest is on track for a $100 million opening weekend. Projections were as high as $115-120, so Disney lowballing its expected take was the smart bet. They know what they had on their hands.

That’s better than “Ant-Man and The Wasp,” better than the feeble “Eternals” and middling “Black Widow,” if nowhere near a Top Ten or Fifteen Marvel opening.

Inflated ticket prices and February release date played their role in this as well.

Reviews have been weak to almost hostile. “Quantumania” has a derivative plot and settings, tepid jokes, middling villain, etc.

It should still hit $115 with President’s Day tossed in, so call it a win and expect the bottom to fall out the second weekend. It’ll keep the theaters busy until March.

“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” finally cat-bounced past “Avatar: The Shape of Water” for second place. A $6.5 million three-day and $8.5 million four day weekend pushes it to $170 million or so as parents and kids give this winner an Oscar nominated bounce. Could it reach $200 million by Oscar night?

Eddie Murphy made some noise after his Golden Globes speech about how “Donkey” from the “Shrek” movies should get a sequel. That seems like smart money. He said “Donkey’s a whole lot funnier than ‘Puss-in-Boots.” Dead wrong about that, Axel. Banderas made the kitty’s every purr a hoot. His acting, the exaggerated Castilian formality and bravado, made every “Puss” even funnier than the film around him. Donkey, like Murphy himself, needs scripted jokes. And by the end of Shrek, those were long exhausted.

“Avatar” will add another $6 and change and maybe clear $8 by midnight Monday — over $650 million, US, edging towards $700.

“Magic Mike’s Last Dance” didn’t plunge after its weak opening weekend, a 43% drop off might be the most respectable thing about that dog, which will be lucky to reach $25 million before losing its screens.

And expect “80 for Brady,” tailing off after a generally middling run ($33 million by Monday, thanks to a $4 million three-day/$4.4 four day) to prompt Tom Brady to “shockingly” announce one more unretirement. Maybe he’s figured out that’s his great gift, even as his skills fade, and that broadcasters, like actors even “playing” themselves in a movie, have to have a personality. He barely registers on the screen, big screen or small.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: unrated, nudity, cockfighting

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

Running time: 1:37

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

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

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

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

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

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