Movie Nation

As you can tell from her photograph, actress Nell Barlow exudes Big Mary Elizabeth Winstead energy in “Sweetheart,” a light British rom-com about coming of age when you’re gay, confused and in your teens.

It’s a pity her character April, or “AJ” as she’s now billing herself, can’t see that. That’d be a great confidence booster for someone at her age, when self-loathing is our default setting.

AJ is the caustic, hyper-critical narrator of her summer vacation/summer romance story, a reluctant hostage to her mother’s “caravan resort” (RV trailer rentals) family holiday somewhere near Bridport, Dorset, another piece of Britain’s White Cliffs coast.

That not-quite-incessant narration is a rare misstep in writer-director Marley Morrison’s sympathetic comedy about being at that “experimenting” age in life, something parents have even more trouble with than their confused, fumbling-about-in-the-dark kids. AJ is at her most quotable when speaking aloud, often arguing with her Mum (Jo Hartley).

“Why can’t I just do what I want?”

“Because it CHANGES every five minutes, April!”

To her credit, her mother is supportive of her middle daughter, even if she’s seeing a long list of passions, phobias and dreams that all look like “phases” to her. April abruptly decides to become “AJ.” April’s chopped off her own hair, which better suits her shapeless, fashion-free wardrobe. April wants to quit school, not go back for her senior year (she’s 17).

“AJ” plans to go to Indonesia to volunteer to “knit jumpers for elephants,” who are “freezing to death” due to climate change.

The dear. It’s no wonder so many parents are dismayed when we hit our middle to late teens. We’re all head cases.

But this trip to the caravan resort will be her chance to “switch off” her phone and her head for a few days. The family has long come here, although this year, Dad’s “not invited,” and maybe never will be again.

What Mum really needs is April’s baby-sitting help with her eight-year old sister, Dayna. What Mum really wants is bonding time with her oldest, 29 year-old Lucy (Sophia Di Martino), who is very pregnant, with laid-back boyfriend Steve (Samuel Anderson) in tow.

What AJ needs, she quickly figures out, is a girlfriend. But even if lifeguard Isla (Ella-Rae Smith) is a sexy combination of Scary Spice and Sporty Spice, even if she’s quick with a friendly smile, “Girls like her like boys.” Or so AJ believes.

This looks like a real Rod Serling/Stephen King freakout. And in a good way.

Feb. 10

There are dramatic moments, stretches of action and snatches of pithy dialogue that suggest there’s a half-decent thriller inside the ungainly, frustrating mess of “Among the Beasts.” But it goes wrong, right from the start, in an unnecessary, uninteresting story set-up that eats up a whopping 40 minutes of screen time.

It’s a movie about child trafficking, about an ex-Marine and a mob daughter tracking down the traffickers, off the books and beyond the reach of the cops.

But we don’t even meet the mob daughter — played by Libe Barer — until we hit the film’s halfway mark, which tells you all you need to know about the need for editing in the SCREENWRITING stage, and how NOT to give your thriller even the most remote sense of urgency.

We’re shown a little girl and a man (Tory Kittles) at the veterinarian’s office. Their relationship isn’t clear, but there’s an asthmatic pug involved, so there’s that.

It turns out the 40something guy, who goes by “Paul,” but whom a lot of people call “LT,” helps run a mixed martial arts gym. It turns out he’s pretty tough, very handy with his fists. And he’s coldblooded in his threats.

“You’re making a mistake,” he growls to one fool who tests him. “You. All by yourself.”

Another mug hears “Go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done,” and does exactly that.

When the little girl he was with at the veterinary clinic is snatched, the viewer must figure out the relationship Paul had with her, her family and the like. The clues to that are stupidly slow in coming.

“LT” stands for “Lieutenant.” Lt. Paul is connected to little Kayla’s family because he served with her late father. Her mother’s a mess, so Kayla’s teenaged sister is the one who slaps him and gives him his orders when someone abducts Kayla.

“I’m just asking you to do what you always do. Bring. Her. Home.”

LT asks around, calls in cop favors and tosses the bar facing the sidewalk where the 12 year-old was abducted. No dice. A year later, he’s crawled into a bottle and up his own nose out of guilt.

That’s when the mob daughter Lola shows up with a story of a missing cousin, and a grudging “No cops, for obvious reasons” partnership forms.

It feels like the sort of film where you keep an eye peeled for light switches on the walls in every interior scene. Didn’t see one, though. Well done!

Feb.21.

Sure, you can give your movie a rapacious Viking prologue to a modern day werewolf story.

But it’s not until the new-to-town cop meets the grizzled, loony one-armed werewolf hunter whose name is Lars and not Quint, and the young academic wolf expert/veterinarian is consulted, and the locals attempt their own hunt — which goes badly — and the Norske blonde mayor tries to calm fears that this “Jaws” with fur has a shot at coming off.

“Viking Wolf” is a Norwegian werewolf movie that traffics in the tropes of the genre, from that first bloody attack to the “infection” that no rational person believes in, but which strikes a pretty teen who’s been bitten.

But it’s the amusingly obvious “Jaws” references that tickled me. The rest of the movie’s a muddle, with this back story under-explained and that empathetic thread not satisfyingly unraveled. But the moment Mr. “I’ve been hunting this my entire life” shows up, the picture becomes promising.

Thale (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne) is the new teen in town, pretty enough to find herself invited to hang with the gang down at “The Bay,” a fjord-side beach where teenagers party. She’s arrived, mid-schoolyear, with gossip about her past. “Drugs” and stuff from Oslo, her classmates think. “I killed a man,” Thale says.

Wait, what? Perhaps her father, as we’ve seen she’s got a stepdad? I don’t think that’s ever explained, certainly not before some beast bursts out of the woods, bites Thale and then yanks the mayor’s screaming daughter into the inky black night.

Finding her body only gives the sheriff’s department more trouble. If it was a wolf, there are “local concerns” to be dealt with, the sheriff tells his newest deputy, the Swede Liv (Liv Mjönes), who happens to be Thale’s mom.

We’re allowed to wonder if the locals know all about what’s going on, some of them anyway. But that’s not developed any more than Thale’s “I killed a man.”

As she recovers, bullied by classmates who think she could have “saved” the dead girl, Thale notices her hearing getting sharp and her hallucinations turning “Norwegian Werewolf in Nybo.”

Mom is visited by the one-armed Lars, whom she dismisses, but not before he’s given her a silver bullet. They call in wolf expert William (Arthur Hakalahti), who has to abandon his “Wolves don’t kill people” education to help battle the beast.

There’s a bond that’s introduced between Thale and her deaf little sister, but that’s not built up into anything that generates pathos when it’s called for. The family dynamic is frayed, as mom has remarried and Thale is acting out, either through resentment or guilt.

The “Jaws” plot might have been the most entertaining direction this could have taken. You’d lose the teen “Twilight” hook, but enjoy a hunt with a cop, a wizened hunter and a callow, scientific method “expert,” battling the beast and bantering old werewolf tales rather than recounting the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis. “Viking Wolf” commits to some of that, but not nearly enough.

Write this one off as an interesting attempt to find a salty-fresh angle to the werewolf genre, but a “‘Jaws’ with Claws” that ends up being mostly toothless.

TV-MA, violence

Cast: Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Liv Mjönes, Arthur Hakalahti and Ståle Bjørnhaug

Credits: Directed by Stig Svensen, scripted by Espen Aukan and Stig Svendsen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

“Poppy” is a cute Kiwi comedy about a teen with Down Syndrome who refuses to let it slow her roll or limit her life.

Poppy wants to learn to drive. Poppy wants to be able to drift when she drives. Poppy wants an official mechanic’s apprenticeship so her big brother will have to pay her a full salary at the small town New Zealand family garage they inherited. And Poppy wants a boyfriend. Poppy has um, plans for that boyfriend.

In the movie, big brother Dave seems like a bigger barrier than Down Syndrome to Poppy realizing her goals. Let’s all “BOO” Dave (Ari Boyland) when he tries to quash Poppy’s teen driving dreams, when he goes after the boy whom she has her eye on, when he tells her “No!”

As her limitations seem on the lower end of the range of Down disability, the film has a hint of idealized wish fulfillment fantasy about it. It can be cloying. As adorable as Poppy can be, given an impish, determined charm by Libby Hunsdale, our heroine is not the viewer’s surrogate here.

That would be Dave. We share his skepticism. Dave’s prejudices — literally his “pre-judging” what his maturing if still childish, mentally-challenged 19 year-old sister is capable of — are our prejudices.

It’s all down to Poppy to change his and our minds.

That’s not as easy as the film seems to think it is.

Everybody here — this was filmed in Kāpiti District, on New Zealand’s North Island — knows Poppy and indulges her. Everybody has a hard time saying “No” to her.

When she meets Sophia (Kali Kopae) at the NZ version of the DMV, she’s got a new friend and confederate in getting her driver’s permit. But without brother Dave’s instruction and willingness to let her drive his car, that could be stymied.

She and former high school classmate Luke (Seb Hunter) get reacquainted when Luke has a mishap with his car and she’s in the tow-truck with Dave when they go to fetch it.

Luke’s just been dumped by his mean-girl girlfriend. Luke can’t afford to pay to get his car fixed. Poppy sees her opportunity. Or opportunities.

Luke can give her driving lessons on the side in return for her work on the things she knows how to fix on the car. She’ll just “borrow” customer’s cars from the Simpsons & Son Garage, the family business, for the driving lessons.

And Luke is on the rebound. Maybe he’ll be susceptible to her persuasion in other matters as well. To that end, Dave catches her visiting the gynecologist — another “ally” — to see about a birth control shot.

Dave is…concerned.

The most lovable heavyweight of the modern era gets a bio pic starring Khris Davis, with Oscar winner Forest Whitaker as his trainer, manager, corner man and Sullivan Jones as Muhammad Ali.

April 28, this one hits theaters. Yes, the title is longer and more unwieldy than just “Big George Foreman.”

I saw just enough of the “Pam & Tommy” Hulu series to think, “Yeah, about what I expected” and “Nooo, not for me.”

Salacious and lowbrow, yes. Emmy winning it might have been. But if you commit to avoiding “Baywatch” and every thing the Playboy empress, chat show favorite, sex-tape star and Kardashian of Her Day was attached to — save for her feature film debut, “Barb Wire” — you don’t want to break that streak.

To Pamela Anderson herself? That series was another cruel swipe at her persona and the woman behind it, another unsolicited slap at what’s left of her reputation.

So like a lot of folks, I was curious enough about the “real” Canadian cover girl/blonde bombshell/sex-in-a-swimsuit to check out Ryan White’s Netflix documentary “starring” her.

That’s proper billing, because “Pamela: A Love Story,” has a performative aspect. It begins with her “finding” a stash of video tapes and declaring “I didn’t know I had all those.”

Sure. OK.

I generally don’t go for documentaries that open with a whopper like that, but if the director of “Ask Dr. Ruth” is OK with it, let’s see how far he and his star take this.

It is very much “A Love Story,” letting Anderson do almost all of the talking.

She describes her life, her parents’ tumultuous Canadian working class marriage and a rough upbringing that included a child-molesting babysitter and rape at age 12.

“Discovered” as a teen in a LaBatts T-shirt at a Canadian football game — commercials, posters, “Playboy,” Playmate, “Baywatch,” international beauty icon, late night TV chat show punchline, married oodles of times, often on a whim, she’s done a lot of living and skims the surface of that here.

“It’s good to get it out, once or twice, in your own words,” admits a woman who is often “portrayed” by others in words not her own.

Interviewed for the film, with questions that generally lead to mini-monologues, reading from her years of yellow legal pad journals, mowing her mother’s Vancouver Island lawn in fashionable boots and sundress, watching hours of home videos (but not THAT video) and recounting, at length, the events depicted in “Pam & Tommy,” Anderson comes off as “real” as this format allows.

Unguarded? No. Deep? Not really, but somewhat self-aware. Unfiltered, warts and all? Only the ones she wants us to see, kids.

When we glimpse her latest ex-husband, a Canadian contractor she dumped in January of last year, after being married a year, we get an idea of the voices this documentary lacks to be authoritative.

Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee she describes as the love of her life, and considering the fractious passion she remembers in her parents’ relationship, that’s understandable and revealing. She seems to think so, too. That’s what “love” looked like, to her. Lee went to prison for abusing her.

She dated a few jerks (Kid Rock), had lingering affairs with womanizers (surfer Kelly Slater) and the like. Even her marriages were interpreted as A), her ditzy impulsiveness and B), half a dozen men’s desire to “acquire” this status symbol, objectifying her all the way to the altar.

But when you marry guys you barely know, I mean, come on.

Snippets of archival interviews with Kid Rock and Tommy Lee don’t remotely cover “the other side” of these relationships or hint at the damage she must have left in her wake, at least on some occasions.

But that would, to be glib, cut into her victimhood screen time. There’s plenty of coverage of the degradation and humiliation she suffered when someone stole a safe from her house with Tommy Lee, and the world’s first “viral sex tape” came to light. Add to that ugliness a few extremely creepy interview clips from a chat with Matt Lauer, a disingenuous Jay Leno “Who ME?” chat show confrontation that is no confrontation (over his mockery of her) at all, while glossing over her connection to Julian Assange, laughing off her contacts with Vladimir Putin over saving the seals calls into question Pamela’s “truth,” and the film’s.

So that opening fib has given us our expectations. Don’t take all of this as unfiltered facts, and don’t accept her self-analysis as the last word on her career, talents, love life and psychology.

The only “expert” interviewed here is Gregory Butler, the LA dance coach who got her into passable shape to join “Chicago” on Broadway, playing Roxie. And he is nothing but a gentleman and as diplomatic as can be about her singing and dancing skills, trotted out for the first time in her mid-50s.

Stately. Sentimental. Bit of a departure for Guy Ritchie.

Dar Salim co-stars as the interpreter a soldier decides he must save, thanks to “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant.” Yes, that’s its full title.

April.

“Rye Lane” has all the ingredients of a classic romantic comedy. All of them.

It starts with a “meet cute,” introduces a morose, just-dumped guy to a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, compresses time into (mostly) a magical single day walking-and-talking “date” through a colorful corner of the world, hits all the comically wrong notes in karaoke moment and finishes with a Grand Romantic Gesture.

First-time feature director Raine Allen Miller and writers Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia immerse us in Brixton, South London. And they and their stars Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson upend a few rom-com conventions and improve on a few others in the most delightfully charming screen romance in ages.

The “meet cute” is in a public toilet, with the camera tracking over the tops of the various stalls to zero in on weepy Dom in his pink Converse and Beats, and brassy stranger Yas trying to comfort him from from the next “unisex” stall.

She’s a Manic Pixie Black London Girl, and apparently determined to press this “random” for details of his “mess.”

“EVERYBODY has a mess,” she reassures him.

And over the course of a day, walking the crowded, colorful streets, watching OAPs (old age pensioners) learning tai chi in a park, eating street food and extending the day with an “Oh, I’m going this way too” every so often, we flash back to his messy breakup, and even get around to hers.

It’s like The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” as a rom-com. It’s all cute and charming and “real,” and bloody adorable.

Allen handles every flashback to this “sign” (red flag) that things weren’t going well in the previous relationship, or that red letter date when it was officially “over” differently. There are quick, literal recreations and longer, comically-idealized “I WISH it had happened this way” takes.

One even has Yas acting out her theatrical break-up on stage in front of a theater packed with Doms.

But he’s an accountant, shorthand for “boring” even if you’re Black, even in the UK. And she’s an aspiring costume designer, hoping for a big break, shorthand for bubbly, upbeat and force of nature. Can this go anywhere?

We’ve seen scores of other versions of her impose-herself-on-his “first time seeing my ex with my ex-best friend, who cheated on me” meet-up. Oparah turns it into a hilarious napalming of the beautiful but faithless ex (Karene Parker) and the dopey, handsome lout (Benjamin Sarpong-Broni) she preferred to Dom.

The set-up is a cliche, the characters reduced to “types,” and playing the hell out of it makes it a spit-take riot.

I loved the way the film peels away layers of hurt for each character, inverts their roles as Dom — in time-honored Manic Pixie Dream Girl rom-com style — becomes the bubbly, outgoing one for a bit and Yas becomes the passive, quiet one, reliving old pain.

But Oparah was born to be this brash, her every bit of banter worth watching with subtitles so that every bite of Cockney-Creole slang can be savored.

“He was tryin’ to DILUTE my squash, and I was like ‘NOT TODAY, Satan!'”

There are hijinks to be had, a Jamaican backyard cookout to be crashed, confrontations to come and wisdom to be shared, most of it from the lady who is sure “EVERYbody has a mess!”

“There are two types of people in the world, the ones who wave (back at people waving at them from) boats, and people who hate joy!”

And then, a “Wait, WHAT?” cameo pops up, a random moment in a movie built on them that rivals media philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s appearance in “Annie Hall.”

Let’s just say there’s a burrito shop worth stopping by on their walk. It’s called “Love Guac’tually.” And the grizzled burrito maker would make Jane Austen spit out her Fanta.

This Sundance darling would have been a perfect Valentine’s Day date-movie release. But that would’ve been rushing things. Searchlight/Disney have their hands on one of the best rom-coms in years, and it may take a while to build buzz for it.

So here’s that buzz. The film opens March 31. Remember it, make a note. And wait for that cameo. It’s a hoot, and one among many in this slice of romantic life along “Rye Lane.”

Rating: R, sexual situations, profanity, toilet humor

Cast: David Jonsson, Vivian Oparah, Karene Parker, Poppy Allen-Quarmby, Benjamin Sarpong-Broni and Simon Manyonda

Credits: Directed by Raine Allen Miller, scripted by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:22