Movie Nation

A tip of the cowboy hat to Netflix, for picking up this Chickasaw Nation-financed drama and offering it during Native American Heritage Month.

“Montford: The Chickasaw Rancher,” is about a 19th century member of the Chickasaw Nation who became a land and cattle baron in the Oklahoma Indian Territories, and who maintained his empire even after the U.S. government turned around and sold that “Indian” land during the “Sooner” land rushes of the late 19th century.

I dare say most of us outside of Oklahoma have never heard of Johnson, whose father was a Scottish actor and mother half-Chickasaw and a member of the tribe. But his story, a little “Red River” with a touch of “Giant,” makes for an epic saga or a compact, sturdy 90 minute action biography, in this case.

Director Nathan Frankowski (“To Write Love on Her Arms”) and first-time-produced screenwriter Lucy Tennessee Cole give us a brief prologue — young Montford and his sister’s childhood abandonment by their father (Dermot Mulroney) — and jump straight to his 1861 wedding day.

The Civil War is underway, and the tribes of Oklahoma, learning little from the Iroquois Confederacy’s experiences choosing the wrong side to join in the American Revolution, have allied themselves with the CSA. When rapacious “blue belly” Union troops interrupt the wedding, an elder gives them and us the reason for the alliance — the same one that motivated the Iroquois, “broken treaties” and the existential threat the USA represented to Native cultures.

The nasty, cattle-procuring Sgt. Richter (James Landry Hébert) and his racist “wild Injuns” threats tell Montford (Martin Senmeiser of “Wind River” and “Westworld”) this is going to be a long war. Washington’s ongoing “control” to ensure “progress” assimilation or reservations policies are “why we always win,” Sgt. Bad Teeth sneers, “and Injuns always lose.”

Montford, his wife Mary Elizabeth (Grace Montie) and trusted hired hand Jack (Denim Richards) struggle through the lean war years, with their livestock always under threat from the Army or rustlers who wear hoods and dress as Natives.

But the Johnsons start a family, and after the war, rounding up “maverick” cattle from the hills marks the beginning of a big herd.

Frankowski’s film features standoffs and shootouts with scalp-hunting bandits (Tommy Flanagan plays their leader), a front-row seat for the “official” depredations of mass buffalo slaughter, a policy meant to force the tribes onto reservations, and a cattle drive.

And Johnson’s place within his community is never left offscreen. He pitches in to help the starving from other tribes, and when Cheyenne leaders (Tanaka Means plays Rising Wolf) are arrested and shipped off to St. Augustine, Florida, Montford and his now-returned prodigal father go therw to speak up for them.

It was a life lived large in hard times, and Senmeiser makes a charismatic and striking lead for this hero’s journey.

After a teetering start — that wedding scene has speechifying and archetype-embracing that can put your teeth on edge — the script settles down to move us through the mostly-true touchstone moments of Johnson’s life.

“Chickasaw” flirts with corny, here and there. Not all supporting actors are created equal. And it’s a pity Mulroney didn’t play the Scots dad as Scottish, but maybe next time.

But it’s better than most of the B-Westerns that come down the pike most years, the leads impress and the action beats are first-rate-on-a-budget.

Some streaming service, maybe even this one, should take on the whole Montford Johnson family saga. It’s a stirring piece of history, full of drama, conflict, racism and rising above it that hasn’t been given the attention it deserves.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Martin Senmeiser, Denim Richards, Grace Montie, James Landry Hébert, Tommy Flanagan, Tanaka Means and Dermot Mulroney.

Credits: Directed by Nathan Frankowski, scripted by Lucy Tennessee Cole, based on a biography of the same title by Neil Johnson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

It’s the story of the James-Younger Gang told in stately, sweeping vistas, star charisma, cold-blooded stares and bursts of epic Peckinpah violence.

“The Long Riders” came out in 1980, in the middle of director Walter Hill’s run of genre classics — after “Hard Times,” and “The Warriors,” before “Southern Comfort” and his blockbuster buddy thriller, “48 Hrs.” He’d go on to make “Extreme Prejudice,” “Johnny Handsome,” “Geronimo” and “Wild Bill,” a former Peckinpah pupil (he did second unit work on “The Getaway”) turned reasonable facsimile of the macho master.

A passion project of the Keach brothers, James and Stacy, the film was famous when it came out for its gimmick — casting Keach, Carradine, Guest and Quaid siblings as blood-relative outlaws who rode with Jesse (James Keach) and Frank (Stacy Keach) James. And it was almost as famous for its action set-piece, the most spectacular depiction of the ill-fated Northfield, Minnesota hold-up turned epic shootout.

What stands out about it over 40 years later is not just the outlaw cool it is wrapped in — men of various degrees of sartorial vanity who don their game faces when they put on the long, duck dusters that became something of a fashion thing when the film came out. There’s a rawboned authenticity in the geography and topography, a Western legend written far from any place where sagebrush could grow, but too-often depicted on ground that just looked wrong — barren, dry and dusty.

Interviewing Christopher Guest, who with brother Nicholas played the Ford brothers, who shot Jesse James, the director and star of “Best in Show” marveled at the level of detail on the remote woodland Georgia sets. “A bunch of us would saddle up and ride up this logging road, away from all the trailers and cameras, and in an instant, you were back there,” he recalled. Locations in California and Texas were also used, all of them contributing to the jarringly authentic feel of it all.

The production’s “goofs” listed on the movie’s IMDb page, tend towards nitpicking even when they aren’t dead wrong. But an Americana tune written long after the James Gang rode into legend and the odd shotgun shell mistake can’t tarnish the picture’s touchstone authenticity.

James Keach makes Jesse a humorless, hard and yet dapper outlaw who stole to prop up his mother’s farm, and because that’s what he and his unreconstructed Confederate running mates learned how to do in the Civil War. Stacy Keach’s Frank is more rational, but not the best at tempering Jesse’s authoritarian streak.

The movie goes to some pains to show as much of the gang’s down time — rural courtship rituals, saloon drinking and whoring — as it does of their long rides, stagecoach, bank and train robberies.

Randy Quaid and Dennis Quaid play the Millers, outlaw cousins — one competent and loyal, the younger an impulsive hothead.

But it is the Youngers who make the movie for me. Keith Carradine is rational, romantic middle brother Jim, future “Revenge of the Nerds” star Robert Carradine is young braggart Bob, and David Carradine brings a malevolent scene-stealing whimsy to oldest brother Cole, a twinkly-eyed professional who never really says so out loud, but never lets us forget that he’s the one who “lets” Jesse lead the gang.

Carradine’s scenes with Pamela Reed (“The Right Stuff”) who plays legendary Old West prostitute Belle Shirley, later to become Belle Starr, are dazzling, hard-nosed brothel/bar-room flirtations of lust, avarice and calculation.

Belle’s resigned but made-her-peace-with-it air in every exchange with her sometime paying lover set “The Long Riders” apart from every other screen treatment of The James/Younger Gang legend. When is Cole going to give thought to “making a respectable woman out of me?”

“You’re a whore,” Carradine’s Younger deadpans, tactlessly yet affectionately. “You’ll never be respectable, Belle. That’s what I like about you!”

That doesn’t keep him from turning possessive, allowing Reed’s fiery Belle — who finally marries a tough hombre named Starr — to assert her independence.

“I do what I want with who I want. And don’t make no mistake about it!”

And when Cole and her husband (Hill regular James Remar) exchange words, Belle isn’t shy about egging them on.

“Now boys, there is no need to fight over lil’ ol’ me. But if you’ve got to, make it man-to-man. Hand-to-hand.” They go at it, held together by their teeth clenching opposite ends of her stocking, Bowie knife to Bowie knife.

The entertainment value of siblings bickering with real siblings and the flirtatious fire of the Reed-Carradine scenes give “The Long Riders” a life that the staid, stiff and just-as-“authentic” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (2007), never manages. It’s a movie that left the Youngers out of the story altogether, and still somehow came in an hour longer.

Astute viewers of “The Long Riders” will see the seeds of Hill’s “Wild Bill,” and of the TV series “Deadwood,” whose pilot he consulted on, set the tone for and deftly directed. He did the acclaimed mini-series “Broken Trail” and has one last Western, “Dead for a Dollar,” in the can and in post-production.

Ry Cooder’s Roots Music score is period perfect, even if “I’m an Old Rebel” is actually a tune that dates from 1915, and not the 1870s.

And film buffs will recognize the crusty old Confederate on a stagecoach as Harry Carrey Jr. of John Ford’s repertory company and future horror icon Lin Shaye in small roles.

There have been good Westerns made since “The Long Riders” — Eastwood’s “Unforgiven,” “The Sisters Brothers,” “Hostiles,” the current release “Old Henry” and a couple of watchably gritty genre exemplars from Hill himself. But for those of us who remember this classic, it’s still the yardstick against which every “True Grit” remake must measure up to. This combination of cast, story and spare film storytelling style makes it very hard to top, an essential example of all a Western can and should be.

Rating: R for strong violence, sexuality, and language (profanity)

Cast: David Carradine, James Keach, Stacy Keach, Pamela Reed, Randy Quaid, Keith Carradine, Robert Carradine, Dennis Quaid, Christopher Guest, Nicholas Guest, James Whitmore, Jr., James Remar and Fran Ryan

Credits: Directed by Walter Hill, scripted by Bill Bryden, Steven Smith and Stacy Keach. An MGM/UA release, streaming everywhere

Running time: 1:40

That headline’s dead-on accurate and ridiculously misleading. It makes this indie, arty, obscurant drama from Mexico sound like something it’s not, which is interesting.

Editor and first-time feature writer-director David Torres sets out to tell a simple, sad story about the deadly business of Mexican journalism, how tragedy visits two generations of a family and how the threat of impending injury or death could easily induce one long panic attack for those still practicing it.

And the self-conscious bore puts all his efforts into hiding “story” and “character” and “urban legend as harbinger” beneath the most laborious 68 minutes imaginable.

Toirres never identifies where, exactly, all this is going on. If you don’t recognize the sites, the topography, you’re left perhaps as disoriented as the main character, Eric (Raúl Briones), whose last days are remembered by a few who knew him, and recreated here. When “Oaxaca” is finally mentioned, you figure, “Ah, Mexico.” But where in Mexico?

Character names are either given up grudgingly, several scenes in, or never mentioned at all. Half the cast in the credits below is never identified. Who are they? What is their relationship to Eric?

Juliet (Sofia Alvarez), the fellow journalist he had an “open relationship” with, is seen roller-blading around a mostly-empty city, reflecting on Eric and (perhaps) remembering their inane conversations about their sexual history and this “buffalo man” they both have seen, here and there.

Yeah, it’s a guy with a buffalo’s head.

The bearded, homeless drunk (Antonio Monroi) followed around at length might be Eric’s physicist dad, in mourning over his journalist wife, whom “they disappeared.”

And Jonas (José Luis Pérez) is a self-described “thug” who was tasked with torturing Eric out of writing. He is interviewed on camera, and seen in a flashback, having just beaten Eric.

“I myself will turn you cold,” he threatens, in Spanish with English subtitles.

Eric reported on a mining company’s mistreatment of indigenous people, among other things. Jonas is the guy we see in an opening scene pump bullets into Eric.

There are other women, unnamed. One of them is an artist.

Too much of the dialogue is inane, too much detail (Eric actually “reporting”) is left out. We just see the toll authoritarian, anti-press kleptocracies take on journalists trying to seek the truth.

“A beast, if you look at it, devours you,” Eric intones. That must be why he’s seen the Buffalo Man. It has to be why has gotten the panic attack shakes.

There’s a story here, but Torres can’t be bothered to come right out and tell it. That doesn’t necessarily result in “art,” just an extremely aggravating and frustratingly opaque movie.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Raúl Briones, Sofia Alvarez, Verónica Bravo, Antonio Monroi, José Luis Pérez

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Torres. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:09

“Zero to Hero” is a heartwarming story of a paralympian, the obstacles he has to overcome and the mother behind him every tentative step, all the way to the finish line.

This Around the World with Netflix offering is about So Wa Wai, one of the most famous of all paralympians, and features some distinctly Chinese touches — “Mom” is a Tiger Mom, and how — and a bluntness about its hero’s plight that breaks up the sentimentality built into the story.

So was a sprinter who competed in five different Paralympiads, collecting 12 medals from Atlanta to London. Director Chin Man Wan and screenwriter David Lo frame the story within the one-time “Wonder Boy” making a comeback at the 2008 Beijing Paralympics. From the startling line of the 200 meter sprint, he thinks back over everything he had to overcome just to get there.’

We see his mother, played by veteran Hong Kong actress Sandra Ng (“Moster Hunt,” “Beauty on Duty”) sprint to the hospital with her baby where she gets the bad news. “Hemolytic jaundice” has given him brain damage. So much muscle control is lost that “He may never be able to walk or eat on his own.” Even speech will be difficult.

Mom is given a life and death choice right there, and she elects for the risky procedure that will save little Wa Wai’s life. He loses much of his hearing, and she hocks a watch to buy him a hearing aid.

She carries him on her back for years, drags him to work with her at a laundry, keeping him in a dog cage while she’s working. The film’s heart-breaking signature scene isn’t on the track or the medals ceremony podium. It comes when the little boy is able to crawl out of that cage and clever enough to think it’s a cute prank to pull on Mom. She drops him on the dangerous industrial conveyor belt, shouts “You have to walk RIGHT NOW or just DIE here (in Cantonese with English subtitles)!”

It’s an over-the-top “tough love” moment, and just nuts when you think about it. The fact that no miracle occurs, despite the omnipresent “Ah-ah-ah-ah-aaaaahhhh” heavenly chorus on the soundtrack, doesn’t spoil the moment or her punch line.

“No one will ever treat you like an ordinary person,” she counsels. “So just be extraordinary!”

As Wa Wai picks up speech, learns to write and staggers to his feet, we can see he’s taken that challenge to heart. And when Mom sees him fleeing bullies with ease in their high rise apartment project, she takes the gawky teen to sign up for paralympic training, even though he’s under age.

Coach Fong (Louis Cheung), a former Paralympian himself, takes him on, bans his hovering, doting mother from practice and turns the raw talent into a sprinting champion.

The most interesting points on this standard waypoints (athletic) “hero’s journey” are not the pitfalls Wa Wai — played by Tin Lok Choi as a little boy, Ho Yeung Fung as a teen and Chung-Hang Leung as a world-beating adult — faces coming up. The scenes with bite are the soul-slapping moments that happen after stardom.

A younger brother (Locker Lam) bridles at his lifelong status as the baby his parents had “to look after Wa Wai.” Mom and the entire family struggle to pay for Wa Wai’s training and upkeep, and makes endorsement deals that exhaust and exasperate her oldest son.

“Mama is always watching you” even carries over to his love life, his crush on the coach’s daughter (Suet-Ying Chung).

“Zero to Hero” is conventional enough to pass for comfort food, but just edgy enough to render its “Jim Thorpe: All American/Chariots of Fire” formula fresh.

It’s meant to be inspiring and a little sentimental, and thanks to sturdy service behind the camera and tearful turns in front of it, it is.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Sandra Ng, Chung-Hang Leung, Louis Cheung, Suet-Ying Chung, Locker Lam and Tony Tsz-Tung Wu

Credits: Directed by Chin Man Wan, scripted by David Lo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

The debut feature from writer-director Bennet De Brabandere was titled “Cherrypicker” for a while and renamed “Ankle Biters” for release. But while he cleverly-retitled this story of a hockey goon who runs afoul of his girlfriend’s four 7-and-under daughters, he never nails down the tone.

As horror, it’s slow-of-foot and blows enough basic set-ups that rob it of suspense that it at best, “almost” comes off. As a dark comedy, which certainly seems the intent, it stumbles along, never quite making light of the plight of a tough guy who never knows what hit him.

As it opens with a funeral, we have some idea of what’s coming. Seeing the dead man’s mother pour some of her son’s ashes into a hockey glove and hearing a TV reporter refer as “a bevloved party animal and jack-ass pro-hockey f–k-boy, who” establishes the tone they were going for, if never quite found.

Sean Chase, played by actor-stunt-man Zion Forrest Lee, is seen in a brutal, eye-gouging fight on the ice. But that was before the “five months earlier” flashback the film takes us on, a post-broken-neck rehab that ended his career and started his romance with the vivacious Laura (Marianthi Evans of “Max Payne” and TV’s “Defiance”).

In the boudoir, he and she like it rough. And we see them videoing their choking, taping-up sex play.

But she has four little girls. And everybody he knows — his dad, his agent — blurts out “That’s a lotta kids.”

He won’t be deterred. On a “family” summer trip to his lake cottage, he plans to give her his grandma’s ring. And he hopes to bond with the quartet of cuties that come with Laura as a package deal.

Fat chance.

Four sisters — Rosalee Reid, Violet Reid, Lily Reid, Dahlia Reid — play the four little angels. We see the dynamics of the foursome, and catch a whiff of ringleader Rosalee’s dark side and how she runs the show.

Little Dahlia might be open to the idea of Sean being in their lives. But not Rosalee, and Lily and Violet are quick to join her.

They notice bruises on Mommy and ask her questions she dodges. And when they rummage through his luggage, they not only find his adhesive bondage-tape, they find the ring.

“If Sean puts this on her finger, it will make Sean our daddy forever!”

Rosalee and the rest aren’t keen on letting that happen.

The plot doesn’t escalate from harmless pranks to life-threatening stunts. The standard comic — dark or otherwise — way of playing this out would have Sean slowly realize what they’re doing, unable to convince Mom that they’re not little darlings after all. Instead, we’re thrown right into serious bad intent to serious injury and worse.

That “jailbait” teen (Matia Jackett) next door whom Sean’s known since forever? Will she get in the way?

Lee came up with the story for this and isn’t bad for a first-time leading man. He doesn’t make Sean into a dumb jock caricature, although that might have played as funnier.

Brabandere, to his credit, doesn’t make the girls “Home Alone” booby-trap masterminds. But Mommy’s bruises are downplayed and don’t seem to be their prime motive for going psychopath. These Daughters of the Damned are seen as afraid of spiders, but unafraid of pulling a knife on somebody or of torture.

That’s more unpleasant than entertaining. And that kind of goes for the film, too.

There’s a clever plot here with plenty of can’t-miss possibilities. Brabandere misses too many of those, and kind of hangs his “Ankle Biters” out to dry.

Rating: unrated, graphic bloody violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Zion Forrest Lee, Marianthi Evans, Rosalee Reid, Violet Reid, Lily Reid, Dahlia Reid, Matia Jackett and Colin Mochrie.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bennet De Brabandere. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:31

Writer, wit and craftsman, science fiction icon and cultural iconoclast, Kurt Vonnegut‘s long and storied career saw him climb from penny-pinching obscurity to celebrity, wealth and fame, a novelist whose every book remains in print and whose pithiest remarks have become Internet memes for the ages.

“Everything is nothing…with a twist.” “There is enough love in this world for everybody, if people will just look.” “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, as there’s less cleaning up to do afterward.” “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”

“Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time” is a celebration of his life and career, explaining his work through his biography and the tragic tests of his years on Earth. It’s pretty close to definitive, and if it isn’t it at least points to the treasure trove of material there is about him that future documentaries might draw from, and lifts the writer’s profile in the public consciousness above cult status fourteen years after his death.

Filmmaker Robert B. Weide, fresh off producing a TV documentary about the Marx Brothers, decided to approach his favorite novelist with the idea of making a film biography of Vonnegut back in the ’80s, when Weide was young and Vonnegut had finally come down off his “Slaughterhouse: Five” tidal wave of adoration. They started collaborating in 1988. And now, with the intervention of co-director Don Argott (“Framing John DeLorean”), everything that was collected and filmed over those intervening decades has been turned into an entertaining What Makes a Great Writer documentary.

Interviewing Vonnegut many times over the years, and then Vonnegut’s daughters and son and the four boys of his late sister that he took in and helped raise, as well as Vonnegut scholars and editors and fans like Morley Safer (who died in 2016), showing us draft after corrected and changed draft of his books, scenes from the films made from “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Mother Night” and a play he wrote, and filling in around the edges with Vonnegut’s many witty, laughter-filled public appearances and even warm taped messages saved from Weide’s answering machine, “Unstuck in Time” thoroughly dissects the life and the work.

The film probes at Vonnegut’s half-reluctantly discussed experiences in World War II, a POW captured in the Battle of the Bulge, imprisoned in the slaughterhouse district of the historic, scenic and arts-filled “city without sin,” Dresden, Germany, which was firebombed into oblivion in February of 1945, with Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners protected by the bowels of the abattoir where they were locked up.

Thanks to the extensive presence of The Man Himself, “Unstuck” is almost a performance piece — Vonnegut showing us the family boat dock where he “discovered” the imaginary planet of Tralfamadore, featured in “Slaughterhouse,” visiting old family homes and discoursing on his general feeling of being “Unstuck in time,” a major theme of that break-through novel. But the novels, collectively?

“My books are jokes — mosaics of jokes.”

We also see and hear how he came to believe in the value of “extended families,” not just blood relations but people you connect with wherever you are. As we catch him sympathetically chatting up and hearing out his less famous contemporaries at his high school reunion, and pick up anecdotes about his generosity with fans and strangers who’d stop him on the street, you have to wonder if he wasn’t the most approachable famous author who ever lived.

A biographer compares him to Mark Twain, calling him a writer you “read to understand the 20th century the way Mark Twain is read to under the the 19th.”

And along the way, filmmaker Weide himself appears, giving “some sort of explanation” for what took him so long to finish the movie, emphasizing the closeness of the “extended family” relationship and filling us in on how his own life and career progressed in the intervening years.

The “performance piece” warps from a one-man show to an ungainly two-hander.

Weide’s “explanation” seems obvious. He got busy, sure. Weide even scripted and produced a pretty good Vonnegut big screen adaptation, “Mother Night.” But mainly he had to have been overwhelmed. A TV and public-appearance friendly writer with an extensive literary canon, the sheer volume of Vonnegutiana to sift through would have daunted anyone.

But that doesn’t excuse Weide’s putting himself in the film to such a large extent that he distracts from his subject. Journalistically, it’s called “injecting yourself into a story.” It can be as simple as giving a couple of personal reflections, maybe even based on in-person meetings, in a profile or obituary. Anything much beyond that and you’ve got to take care to avoid making the story/film, etc. about you.

Weide isn’t a journalist. But his constant presence in “Unstuck” begins with his “some explanation is necessary” about the years going by, the interviews and Vonnegut TV appearances, graduation addresses, speeches and public readings that Vonnegut would pass on to him, making Weide “sort of his archivist.” But as the film goes on, Weide’s interjections drift from “necessary” and kind of understandable to needy, annoying and finally insufferable.

When you watch video of Weide accept his Emmy for directing Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” you might be tempted to remember that TV is a producer’s medium, that directors are near-anonymous hired technicians there. Attaching yourself to a great writer corrects that relative obscurity. And the mind might wander to what David would say and do in a “Curb” episode about a hanger-on, even a friend, who promised to do something decades before and hasn’t gotten around to finishing it and crosses over into clinging to him to absorb some of that fame.

That attention-hogging doesn’t ruin “Unstuck in Time,” but it does mute its impact. As good as the film is, we sense that it could have been better, with more time spent tracking down fellow writers-admirers (John Irving pops up…once), others placing Vonnegut on the pantheon of science fiction. But that would have cut into Weide’s screen time.

Still, “Unstuck” points the way towards that next piece of cinematic Vonnegut scholarship, documentaries about Vonnegut to come. Those filmmakers will start out knowing how much is out there about him, hopefully archived in (mostly) one place — preferably a university. And it won’t take them 40 years to finish it.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Kurt Vonnegut, Robert E. Weide, Edie Vonnegut, Nanny Vonnegut, and John Irving

Credits: Directed by Robert B. Weide and Don Argott. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:06

Today’s “Around the World with Netflix” outing is a gritty, suspenseful Brazilian drama about human trafficking and what the trafficked do at the end of that ugly road.

Alexandre Moratto’s “7 Prisoners” takes us for a ride — the same one the title characters take — from the impoverished, dead-end lives that await them in the countryside to the promise of “The Big City,” Sao Paolo. They aren’t kidnapped. Mateus (Christian Malheiros) and the others in his group gladly get on board the minivan whose driver promised them work that will make them “rich and prosperous,” with cash enough for them to send back home to help their families.

The smiling driver gives a little advance to each family as he makes his pick ups. And at the end of the line, after they’ve ogled their first sight of the Sao Paolo, boasted to each other about where they’ll live and what they’ll seek in terms of education and career, that driver gets his payoff.

One is illiterate, a “hick” to the others. Another’s a hothead, and Mateus and another wonder about “contracts” and why they need to surrender their ID to their new boss, Luca (Rodrigo Santoro of “300” and TV’s “Westworld”).

The early days — stripping copper wiring for resale, breaking down abandoned cars and separating metals for recycling — are grueling. Their living conditions are Spartan, their meals meager. And their pay? They haven’t seen a centavo.

Hotheaded Isaque (Lucas Oranmian) fumes, but Mateus, the smartest of the lot, is the mouthiest. He complains. And that’s when all of them, from illiterate Ezequiel (Vitor Julian) to panicky Samuel (Buno Roca), get the hard “facts.”

Luca whips out a notebook, filled with billed figures for everything “we did for you (in Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles). I did you all a favor. Now you OWE me.”

Mateus threatens to “tell the police.” But the police, they discover, are in on it. Plotting their escape, they take their shot. But when that first attempt fails, what will they do?”

Moratto, a Brazilian-American filmmaker from the same North Carolina film school as David Gordon Green and Ramin Bahrani, has us experience this grueling ordeal through the eyes of Mateus.

Malheiros, who was in Moratto’s earlier drama “Socrates,” makes our hero a poker-faced realist with the eye for the long game. After planning their first attempt and hearing the threats to their family from Luca and the corrupt cops who recapture the one guy to get away, he tries to make himself more useful, to ingratiate himself in with the boss.

Luca sees he’s the smartest of the lot and Santoro lets us see the wheels turning as he tempts his smartest pupil with better jobs, and more rewards.

Can Mateus keep the peace with the others long enough to figure out another escape? How deep down the rabbit hole of corruption will he allow himself to go?

“7 Prisoners” gets us caught up in its moral quandary and the hard mathematics of survival, and is just long enough, with enough forks in the road Mateus faces, to put us in his shoes.

As far as texture goes and ambition goes, this isn’t “City of God” and Moratto isn’t Fernando Meirelles. Not yet, anyway. But this unblinking, consequential and taut film about one of the most unpleasant facts of Emerging Economies life announces him as a filmmaker to watch and a dramatic with a great eye and ear for conflict, physical and moral.

Rating: R for language, some violence and a sexual reference

Cast: Christian Malheiros, Rodrigo Santoro, Lucas Oranmian, Vitor Julian and Bruno Rocha.

Credits: Directed by Alexandre Moratto, scripted by Thayná Mantesso and Alexandre Moratto. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33.

Say what you want, but I LIKE this version of Ellie Kemper.

The ever-sweetly-smiling plucky ditz of “The Office” and “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” goes kind of, well, bad-ass for “Home Sweet Home Alone.” And that’s fun because in this version of “Home Alone,” adults are definitely rooting for the house-breakers, and not the smart-aleck punk who’s barricaded and booby-trapped himself inside to defend it.

The topicality of this reboot is that a suburban family is about to lose its house. Father Jeff (Rob Delaney) has lost his job, and teacher-mom (Kemper) are hiding the “selling our house” news from the kids every way they can.

They even get a realtor (Kenan Thompson, funny as usual) to join their conspiracy and help them stage a secret Open House. That’s how British potty-break-craving Carol (Aisling Bea) and her Brit Brat of a kid (Archie Yates of “JoJo Rabbit”) end up dropping in. Just for a little trip to the loo, my darlings.

Smart-mouthed Archie takes entirely too much interest in the “ugly boy” porcelain dolls that husband Jeff inherited from his mother. When the most valuable one turns up missing, naturally they want to find the kid and get it back.

“Harry stinking Potter comes into our house” and swipes our financial lifeline? It’s on.

But a few blocks away, little Max has hidden himself from the mayhem in his stuffed-with-visitors McMansion, and that’s how he’s Left Behind. Sorry, left “Home Alone.”

Mum, Dad and the extended family are all in Tokyo, and Max has the place — with its “HouseBot” smart house gadget — all to himself.

Jeff is leery of breaking and entering to retrieve what’s theirs, but Pam isn’t having “Harry Stinkin’ Potter come into OUR house” and steal their future. Oh, it’s on.

A few misunderstandings later and Max is onto their efforts, and proceeds to plan accordingly — Hot Wheels hot-feet tricks, “Satan’s Heinie” hot sauce traps and a Nerf cannon repurposed to fire billiard balls. It’s going to get nasty in the middle of Chicagoland’s (Winnetka) latest “Snowmageddon.”

The original “Home Alone” is one of those films, like “Shawshank,” beloved beyond any actual merits seen on the screen. But that said, there’s no improving on it, only remaking it into a washed-out photocopy.

Little kids will appreciate the heaping helping of slapstick — again, no better than the Mac Culkin version. Parents will sympathize with the wisecrack, “Why’re they always remaking the classics?” uttered by a supporting character early on.

More could have been done with the “frantic” Mum, whose very English avalanche of “Sorry, sorry, sorry” apologies can’t get her onto a plane quick enough to get back to her child. The Irish comedienne Bea could have done a LOT more with this part, had the screenwriters let her.

Delaney, of TV’s “Catastrophe,” does his best Will Ferrell. It’s not bad, just not funny enough.

Kemper, I have to say, just brings it. Sure, there were stunt doubles on board, but the pratfalls, the fury of a woman wronged, the lie-on-the-fly cunning — this is a You-Don’t-Mess-With-Momma we can get behind.

Young Yates is obnoxiously written and he does what he can with what’s there.

But the original film had a lot more edge than this. There’s a hint of Max worrying Mum will go to jail for Child Endangerment, which keeps the cops (the one we meet is named McCallister) out of the picture and he battles the intruders. We feared for the kid, then. We root against the little creep, now.

A trip to church provided much of the heart of the first film. That trip doesn’t accomplish that here.

And the third act wraps up this not-quite warm and fuzzy enterprise in a smothering blanket of warm and fuzzy.

There it is. Nice snow, some very good pratfalls, Ellie K and Kenan T kill it and everybody else reads their script and wishes John Hughes was still around to fix it.

Rating: PG, for slapstick violence

Cast: Ellie Kemper, Rob Delaney, Archie Yates, Aisling Bea, Timothy Simons and Kenan Thompson.

Credits: Directed by Dan Mazer, scripted by Mikey Day and Streiter Seidel, based on the John Hughes films. A 20th Century film on Disney+.

Running time: 1:36

Wherever film satire has traveled in the past half century, there’s something seriously retrograde in Rada Jude’s film festival darling “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn.”

I wracked my memory banks while watching it, trying to summon up a film to compare its random, randy combination of cultural commentary and low comedy to. All I could come up with is the infamous “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” a satiric 1971 docu-comedy from Yugoslavia, and “Kentucky Fried Movie,” a hilariously vulgar 1977 sketch comedy with social commentary in its sophomoric content.

But what else could be analogous to a movie that uses a teacher’s home sex video, uploaded to the internet, and her “trial” by school parent-teacher committee for it as a scorched earth slapdown of national hypocrisy?

What other recent film has abandoned its story for a middle act titled “A Short Dictionary of Anecdotes, Signs and Wonders?” That’s a long, random-seeming interlude of short snippets of historical footage (WWII genocide and the day Romania switched from Nazi-backing to Stalin-loving), a taste of (dictator) Ceaucescu, animation, a present-day choir of nuns singing a fascist anthem to an approving, elderly Romanian Orthodox priest alongside a quick history of how the church has “always backed dictators,” as has the army. There’s a brief history of pornography, shots of Romanian redneckery’s lifted pickups, that infamous leaked footage of the U.S. airstrike-on-journalists footage in Iraq, video of oral sex and other “wonders” described in deadpan text aimed at making larger points about about modern times and modern life.

So yes, it’s a trifle hard to categorize. It has a light-enough tone that you feel it’s aiming for laughs, but those are few and far between. At least the message is clear, no matter how much meandering goes on as it’s being delivered.

“Bang” begins with a bang — the “sex tape” in question, a married couple going up, down and over-the-top in a sort of role-playing “porn star” romp in the boudoir, which they’re videoing. The WWII torch song “Lili Marlene” plays on the stereo, a relative keeps interrupting with childcare concerns and things start explicit and only grow more so.

We then jump to Emi (Katia Pascariu), an accomplished history teacher at an exclusive school, and see her grueling day of dealing with that video getting out. It even reached PornHub, at one point.

Writer-director Jude (“The Happiest Girl in the World,” “Scarred Hearts”) tracks her as she eggs on her husband’s efforts to get the video pulled (how it got online has a couple of explanations) by phone. She visits an open air market to buy flowers to flatter a possible ally in her “hearing” that night. She copes with traffic, sexual harassers, checkout line meltdowns and belligerent motorists, all on foot.

And as she walks, she and we overhear (in Romanian with English subtitles) snippets of mostly-masked conversations full of innuendo, rumor and ignorance — “It’s scientifically proven incense prevents cancer!”

Everybody is quick to curse as they complain about each other, about the government and an “organ donation” scandal. An older woman grumps that “No one ever got COVID from a Eucharist spoon.” Another walks straight up to the camera and drops the C-word directly to the viewing audience.

The mirror Jude holds up to his Borat-ish homeland and the portrait he presents for foreigners is never, for one second, flattering. We see decaying Soviet bloc housing, haphazard construction and anarchic traffic, overgrown, untended trees and shrubbery. And then there are the angry, short-tempered, broke, backward, blundering, gauche, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic people who probably have a lot more to worry about than whether their kids are accessing the same porn of their teacher than they are.

The factoid-packed middle act “explains” Romania via history, culture, physical examples (elevator doors in a nice building decorated with a “Doggie Style” couple), polls and the like.

The film’s third act returns to Emi’s plight with a long, nasty debate about her status at the school as parents judge and humiliate her and she tries to use her knowledge of history and privacy rights to fend them off.

There’s a universality to the messaging in the film that has become Romania’s submission for Best International Feature in this year’s Oscar competition (fat chance). People’s prejudices have come out into daylight in much of the world in the past few years, and a global pandemic didn’t push them back into the shadows.

Jude’s long line of snippets about Romanian attitudes about rape, examples of public homophobia, statements from historical figures about “robotic warfare” and Jesus, oral sex and the like enliven but don’t necessarily entertain or illuminate the simpler through-line story. I found that middle-act interlude heavy-handed and the jokey “three possible outcomes” for the film that Jude toys with clumsy, although it does deliver the film’s funniest (an anti-Semite’s “A-HA! moment).

Once we’ve heard from the virulently anti-Semitic soldier-parent (Nicodim Ungureanu), the shrill, rich Romanian “Karen” (Olimpia Malai) and the misogynistic, ultra-conservative anti-mask airline pilot (Andi Vasluianu) shout that masks are “the muzzle of slaves,” we get the point.

Rating: Unrated, explicit sex, racism, homophobia and profanity

Cast: Katia Pascariu, Claudia Ieremia, Olimpia Malai, Nicodim Ungureanu and Andi Vasluianu

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rada Jude. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:46

In a film era when too many filmmakers figure computer animation is the only way to make “Clifford” come to life, when “101 Digital Dalmatians” seems cheaper, when the only way to get Harrison Ford cto work with a dog is creating a computer-animated one, it’s always refreshing when a production chooses to go with real, fur-teeth-and-tails canines in a movie about dogs.

So kudos to the folks who hired cattle dogs, terriers, bulldogs, chihuahuas and their trainers to bring “Pups Alone” to life. Viewers can tell the difference, and generally, we prefer real dogs.

The movie surrounding them is nothing more than holiday TV-babysitting fare, something you park small children in front of while cooking, decorating or gift-wrapping. The dogs ae adorable. The movie? Not so much.

It’s an undemanding live-action “Secret Life of Pets/Home Alone” hybrid — bad jokes, middling human actors interacting with the critters and lots of canine slapstick involving defending a house with contraptions.

There are no adult-sophistication laughs in it. The simplistic story is cluttered up and almost overwhelmed by a first act is overwhelmed voice-over narration, animated with pop-up storybook images, just to get the kiddies up to speed on a plot that even a child should be able to follow.

But it’s harmless enough, and less of a commitment than gifting a child with a dog.

A widowed dog-gadget inventor (Tyler Hollinger) and the little girl (Isadora Lindsey) he’s too distracted to raise move to a “company town” where that company is a giant pet products conglomerate run by Eric Roberts.

Dad’s many gadgets, meant to simplify life in their house, are forever barking out “System Fail.” But maybe his dog “speech” translator collar will pay off.

Bitter work rival and neighbor Victor Von Manure (Dolph Lundgren) is out to sabotage that. And their dogs also take sides in the fight.

Smart and helpful Charlie the cattle dog (Jerry O’Connell) is desperate to mend fences between Dad and Grandpa Peter so that gramps can “bring Christmas back.” He has to intervene with the mailman to make that happen. And he’s got to defend their house from bulldog Vinnie (Danny Trejo), the “Dogfather,” and his gang of “Dogfellas” (Rob Schneider among them).

Victor has also hired two “Home Alone” cast-offs, low-rent mugs (Nicholas Turturro, Stelio Savante) who pose as homeless beggars at times, and as assistance-the-the-visually-impaired Christmas decorators (they ransack a little old blind lady’s house instead of setting up her tree). With all the Pet Tech employees at a corporate ski trip retreat at Big Bear Lake, the house and Robert’s many inventions will be easy pickings, right?

Charlie will need the help of the cute neighbor’s cute cattle dog (voiced by Jennifer Love Hewitt) and junkyard terrier Oliver (Malcolm McDowell) to “save Christmas.”

Little kids may be amused by the malfunctioning DIY gadgets that the dogs use to defend inventor Robert’s house full of inventions from the bad guys. They’ll probably laugh at the dog voices. And they might wonder that if Charlie can pick up packing paper and such and drop it in the trash can, why their dog can’t be similarly helpful.

The corporate retreat scenes, with their bonding-over-grownup-Twister and the like cut into montages, are unfunny tedium to all ages.

There’s nothing to this that would distract your average adult scrambling to get ready for the holidays. But the cute canines defending a house while they’re “Home Alone” might keep the tiniest tykes interested…for a little while, anyway.

Rating: unrated, mild profanity, dog poop gags

Cast: Dolph Lundren, Isadora Lindsey, Tyler Hollinger, Nicholas Turturro, Stelio Savante, Keith David and Eric Roberts, and the voices of Jerry O’Connell, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Danny Trejo, Rob Schneider and Malcolm McDowell

Credits: Directed by Alex Merkin, scripted by Brandon Burrows, Casey DeVargas and Jason Gruich. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:47