Movie Nation

A couple of things keep me from reviewing more TV series, short or long form.

They’re a big investment in time if you want to do a show justice. Watching three, four or five episodes is kind of a must, and for someone who takes notes, jots down snippets of dialogue to illustrate punchy writing, or its opposite (dull hackwork), that’s a whole day.

And the reviews, once you’ve written them, have no shelf life. Viewers/consumers tend to flock to a show when it’s new, with a few obsessing about “Ozark,” “Bosch” or “The Walking Dead” or that Taika Waititi gay pirates thing, doing blogs, podcasts and the like as the series continues, while the rest of the culture has moved on.

With every streaming service coming up with marquee shows — “Handmaid’s Tale,” “Only Murders in the Building,” “Ted Lasso” — subscribing to them all just to keep up isn’t cost effective. Getting every single streamer/cable operation to provide critics with previews of their next big thing is exhausting, because most aren’t as efficient as most film studios, Netflix, Paramount and Apple TV+, at telling you what they have coming up and setting you up with site access to review it.

Follow Disney’s lead, kids. They have this figured out.

So I’m not reviewing “Poker Face,” despite its very promising pilot. And great cast. And the fact that Rian Johnson has taken his Netflix movie proof-of-concept handling of mysteries to its logical conclusion, long-form series.

A Natasha Lyonne star vehicle — long may she reign — it’s got elements of TV classics like “Columbo,” “The Fugitive” and “The Immortal” in it, as regular TV critics have pointed out. But its setting, starting in the sordid world of Nevada gambling and wandering off from there, has “The Cooler” and “Hard Eight” wired in.

Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a high-mileage, high-functioning alcoholic who when we meet her is just another short-skirt cocktail waitress at Frost Casino in somewhere-other-than-Vegas Nevada. She’s “doing all right,” living in a tiny, battered travel trailer, keeping her ’70s Plymouth Barracuda running, with enough money for beer and whatever it is we don’t see her eating.

Charlie wound up in Gambling Country thanks to her “gift.” She’s got an uncanny knack for sensing when somebody is lying. Lying is called “bluffing” in poker, so you get the connection. Not that she can gamble there.

The pilot is about a friend from that casino hotel who sees something illegal and tries to report it and to reach Charlie, but is murdered in the opening scenes. As in “Colombo” and other tales of this type, the show is about how each week’s crime and criminal are unraveled by persistent, annoying Charlie, her gift and her slightly askew, somewhat half-assed sense of moral justice.

Johnson immerses us in each week’s corner of the world Charlie inhabits, makes his case for why crimes in this milieu are the sort that cops — in gambling towns, they’re pretty much all on the take — don’t sweat. These are “little people” whom “nobody’ll miss.” And he does his damnedest to scripturally and cinematically make Charlie’s case using just her tricky way of questioning (“The Closer,” with a near-supernatural bent), her booze-addled “Monk” powers of observation, her survival instincts and her common sense. Her vague goal, made up on the fly, is to crack the case and acquire some sort of rough justice by the open-ended (she’s on the lam) closing credits.

Lyonne, a former teen star who made a comeback with “Orange is the New Black,” is at her scruffy, sassy, blowsy best here. She makes most every time she says “BullSHIT” at a lie she’s willing to call someone on to their face, fresh.

Johnson signed up a SAG directory of co-stars to populate Charlie’s traveling panorama of victims and suspects — Oscar winner Adrien Brody and the steely Benjamin Bratt in the pilot, with Ron PERLMAN, Judith Light, the estimable Tim Blake Nelson, Megan Suri, Chloe Sevigny, Ellen Barkin, Nick Nolte, Simon Helberg (“Big Bang Theory”), Tim Meadows of “SNL,” Lil Rel Howery and the unseen, menacing voice of a Mr. Big casino owner matching wits and learning the parameters of Charlie’s “gift” the hard way throughout the run.

I like Johnson’s problem-solving, the situations he gets his characters into and ways he comes up with for Charlie to escape her latest fix. But I do wonder how long he can keep this up. “Glass Onion” proved that he’s got a limited number of tricks up his sleeve for Benoit Blanc to employ, and even in the pilot to “Poker Face” we see Charlie, and him, flailing a bit, missing the Best Way to Get Out of a Crowded Hotel When You’re Being Chased gambit.

Sending your heroine on the lam in a beater of a 50 year-old conspicuous muscle “car with character,” is cool but not the subtlest/cleverest touch.

But I plan to get back to “Poker Face” when Peacock parks it on their free site down the road. If you’re curious, Peacock will let you set up an account, credit card free, to see that pilot and some of their older content, so even if you don’t subscribe — $29 and change for a whole year right now seems like a bargain — you can at least see what all the fuss is about.

In the case of “Poker Face,” that fuss seems justified.

Emma Mackey plays the “Wuthering Heights” author in this early 19th century period piece from director Frances O’Connor.

Bleecker Street is distributing “Emily” in the US, late Feb. at an art cinema near you.

It’s not cricket to talk about a film’s third act and finale in a review, because that could lead to “spoilers” and one mustn’t reveal those. One just mustn’t.

But as I’m breaking format here and using the poster to “Condor’s Nest” as there is no art out there on the Interwebs that truly does justice to the feast of character actors this C-movie serves up, here’s a taste.

The climax begins as “The Boys from Brazil,” finding high and low ranking Nazis holed up in postwar Nazi-friendly Bolivia, a “Condor’s Nest” ruled over by no less than former SS chief Heinrich Himmler, whom history reminds us died in Allied custody. Or DID he?

In a couple of campy scenes acted-out in full Nazi regalia, nerdy-quirky character actor James Urbaniak (“Henry Fool,” “Fay Grim” and “The Girl from Monday” came long before “The Fabelmans”) as Himmler and Bruce Davison (“Ben,” “The X-Men”) as his Nazi subordinate bicker and banter in “Cabaret” German about ancient Atlanteans in South America and their “big Aryan” skulls.

And then for its last trick, the movie leaps from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to “The Wild Bunch.”

It’s nuts, not quite funny enough, but as daft as writer-director Phil Blattenberger could make it. With this movie and his disastrous stab at Vietnam (“Point Man”), Blattenberger’s ambitions become clear. “Daft” in this case is an accident. He wants to be the Uwe Boll of combat cinema.

The film starts out as a post World War II vengeance tale. A long opening sequence reveals how our hero witnessed the rest of his downed B-17 crew murdered, as prisoners, by a sneering, luger-lugging SS officer played by veteran heavy Arnold Visloo. Corporal-not-Captain Spaulding (Jacob Keohane) will go to the ends of the Earth — South America — to track that bastard down in the decade after the war.

Spalding reminds us all how simple politics can be.

“You sit at a table with Nazis, that makes you a Nazi!”

That logic is how he winds up in Argentina, kidnapping, torturing and murdering Nazis left and right, hunting down his quarry. That’s how he crosses paths with the Nazi A-bomb expert Vogel (Al Pagano) who promises to lead him to this Col. Bach. That’s also where he crosses swords and pistols with Israeli agent Leyna (Corinne Britti) who wants to kidnap Vogel back to Israel to stand trial.

There’s no point in complaining how bad Bach is, and invoking Himmler doesn’t move her. But this American pretending to be Swiss (don’t ask) is more determined than she is, which is how they all end up in the foothills of the Andes.

God, I have MISSED this version of Jonah Hill — the riffing, slanging, offending, hip-hop-quoting, “best joke in the room wins” Jonah.

“You People” is a comic throwback, an all-star Jonah and Lauren and Nia, Julia and Eddie, Mike Epps and David Duchovny singing John Legend off-key at the piano farce that begins with a sprint, gets gassed far too often and yet still produces a lot of laughs, all of them packed into its funniest stretches.

It starts with a clever conceit, a flip, hip and seriously funny podcast where Mo (“SNL” writer/performer Sam Jay) and E-Z (Hill) riff on pop culture and the intersection of the races, often hilariously, always crossing boundaries.

A disease that’s gotten too “popular?”

“ALS made more money than LEBRON that year!”

Southern white racists?

“I didn’t like that they took Confederate flags outta NASCAR. I was like. ‘Nah, let’em have that.’ You take too much too fast, they out lookin’ for MEAT.”

But “The Mo (Jay) and E-Z Show” is just a tone-setter for the romantic comedy to come. E-Z is actually Ezra Cohen, a stock broker who dreams of the day when that podcast can be his only “thing.” He’s a 35 year-old with game and wit who doesn’t seem to click with the Jewish ladies from temple his mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, in rare form) sets him up with.

Then comes the “meet cute.” He gets into what he thinks is a Mini Uber. Amira (Lauren London of TV’s “Games People Play”) freaks out. A misunderstanding leads to a date.

Things are all romantic-comedy-montage-sweet right up to that moment, six months later, when he’s ready to get serious and neither has met the other’s family.

His mom tries ever-so-hard to be current in fashion and slang, but is a classic “tone-deaf” and tolerant liberal who’d consider herself “woke” if it weren’t for the grammar issues. Dad (Duchovny) is one of those “You ever meet?” guys who will ask any Black person if they know Xzibit. Or Magic Johnson.

Amira’s folks are Nation of Islam Muslims. Dad (Eddie Murphy) once got to spend quality with the anti-Semitic “Brother Minister Louis Farrakhan,” and Mom (Nia Long) isn’t having ANY comparison between The Holocaust and slavery.

As feelings are hurt, arguments begun and abandoned, “get to know” afternoons are sabotaged and comic cameos (Anthony Anderson, Richard Benjamin, Elliott Gould, Dean Cole, Rhea Perlman and Omar Epps) roll by, a few of them scoring laughs, you think “This is about to get GOOD.”

Let us now praise screen legends, ladies of a certain age still donning the greasepaint, still saving their best for their closeups.

“80 for Brady” packs an entire generation of screen queens into the same movie for a comedy about little old ladies who are crazy for footballer Tom Brady.

But hell’s bells, Hollywood couldn’t find a better excuse, or at least a funnier script to showcase Oscar winners Jane Fonda and Sally Field, Oscar nominee and multiple Emmy winner Lily Tomlin and the Greatest Living EGOT Rita Moreno?

You don’t have to be a Tom Brady hater to pan this. But you are obligated to separate this wan script and feebly-fictionalized laugher from its stars, who have legendary comic chops that this movie treats like oversized false teeth.

This Million Dollar Quartet play longtime New England pals who accidentally bonded over an NFL game the day then-young Brady took over as quarterback for the Patriots. It’s now 2017, and they’ve been meeting on Gamedays ever since.

They’re just there to “enjoy men the way the Romans did, sweaty and piled on top of one another in tight PANTS,” Lou (Tomlin) crows. And so they do.

Widowed Maura (Moreno), retired college professor Betty (Field) and onetime TV-model turned “erotic fan fiction” novelist Trish (Fonda) gather, gab, don jersey and repeat their rituals (knocking over the chips) to “help” their team and their Tom win, week after week.

It must be working. The Patriots are going to another Super Bowl. Maybe, Lou suggests, its time they actually went to see their pushing-40 hero, “almost 80 in people years.” He won’t be under center that much longer for these “ladies over 80 who love Tom Brady.”

Most have their doubts, and some have obligations — Bob Balaban plays Betty’s hapless, nerdy professor husband, Sara Gilbert is Lou’s worried daughter and Glynn Turman is a nursing home gent with an eye for Maura. But there’s this Patriot fan radio contest (Rob Corddry and Kyle Mooney play the “chowdahead” hosts) offering four tickets, and Lou and the crew resolve to win it.

Next thing we know, they’re on the lam to Houston, with encounters with “Gronk,” the subject of Trish’s “fantasy” fiction, and other footballers, Mayor of Flavortown Guy Fieri and flirty ex-jock Harry Hamlin to speed them along, and daffy obstacles to get in the way of this wish fulfillment fantasy coming true.

Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski is an amusing sight gag here, as is Fieri, whom the stoned Maura hallucinates as every face at a Super Bowl Party poker game. All part of “the fan experience” of “The Big Game.”

Brady, a credited producer, is featured in the third act, a Super Bowl which, if you don’t remember, I won’t spoil it for you. If there was a subtext here, it might come from that and it doesn’t really apply.

The further we get away from a war, the more vital it is that there be SOMEbody on a set who can keep the cast and crew from making fools of themselves when you’re making a combat film.

“Military consultant,” “technical advisor,” call them whatever you want. It doesn’t have to be R. Lee Ermey, but you put ex-military on your payroll so that your movie looks and sounds authentic, and not like Spike Lee’s combat movies. Or like Aaron Eckhart in “Ambush.”

It’s a movie set early (ish) in the Vietnam War, 1966. Eckhart plays a commander who sends his Special Forces subordinates to a new base in “Quang TRY province.” Ordering men into harm’s way, and he doesn’t know how to pronounce “Quaug Tri Province?” Like “TREE?”

Maybe it’s early enough in the war that he wouldn’t have heard it. Sure. But considering most everything that follows…

“Ambush” is a B-movie (maybe C) about a lost “secret dossier” that a rageaholic Green Beret (Gregory Sims) and others are sent to recover. Sims goes full R. Lee Ermey “Full Metal Jacket” in the middle of an undersized, remote outpost behind enemy lines, screaming at a subordinate so loud Uncle Ho could hear him in Hanoi.

“What the actual F— does that CHILD need with a gun?”

So, nobody trained the lads in the “This is my rifle, this is my ‘gun'” (penis) rhyme of boot camp?

The answer to that comes when the film’s ostensible star, Jonathan Rhys Myers shows up. He’s a “hunter,” with a tracking dog and a pistol grip pump shotgun. At least the chopper he lands in seems regulation and period correct.

Considering the opening scene is plainly a Jeep-drive through a military aircraft graveyard (a B-58, mixed in with 1980s vintage mothballed jets) meant to be Vietnam era airfield, that’s more than the movie leads us to expect.

“LEFTtenant Col. Mills, sir,” Rhys Myers drawls as he salutes CAPTAIN Mora. Hey, we’re in the jungle. No standing on ceremony. Or British pronunciations of “Lieutenant” from a Southerner.

He’s wearing shiny “Bird Col.” insignia. In the bush, for starters. Shiny target. And he should be wearing the oak cluster of a Lt. Col., right? Entirely too high up the chain of command and too old to be a jungle-savvy LRP (“lurp”). Whatever.

It’s all pretty much downhill from there. The shootouts are noisy and manic but non-military, starting with the “ambush” that opens the action. There’s no rhyme or reason to who we follow and what point of view is dominant.

The party of soldiers sent into the jungle to retrieve the “secret” stuff keeps breaking up into smaller and smaller units — one or two groups sniffing around above ground, another party that splits up when they discover that the Vietnamese dig tunnels and can pop up here, there, seemingly everywhere.

“We’re fah-tin a new enemy,” JRM drawls. “They don’t come from the sky. They don’t come across the sea. They don’t come from the land. They come from the EARTH!”

There’s a lot of tunnel tracking and tunnel fighting, with firearms, knives and a flamethrower. The booby traps show SOMEbody Googled “Vietnam War” to find “punji pits,” and a cute scorpion dump.

He was son of one of the great character actors, a member of John Ford’s repertory company.

He was brother of a TV icon, and brother to an original “Nerd.”

And the siblings worked on a favorite Western of mine, “The Long Riders.”

Here’s his big moment.

And here’s the “Nashville” movie moment that led to it.

There’s value in taking on a first-rate villain. Ask Michael Keaton about that.

And what villainy could be more personal and relatable than an obnoxious “tenant” with “rights” who simply refuses to leave, and cannot be easily evicted? Remember Keaton in “Pacific Heights?”

The great François Cluzet of the downbeat French buddy comedy “The Intouchables,” the recent charmer “The Kitchen Brigade” and “Tell No One” makes a seething, loathsome impression in the deed-or-no-deed thriller “The Man in the Basement.”

He plays an older, down on his luck ex-teacher who gets a break from the owner (Jérémie Renier) of an unused basement space in the apartment he inherited that the teacher wants to buy.

“We trust each other,” Simon chirps (in French with English subtitles). He’s happy to have this property off his books. “You’re doing me a favor,” the new owner, “cleaning out my late mother’s place” and thus needing storage, agrees.

But it turns out, the guy’s mother died years before. It turns out, the “teacher” was fired for cause, for teaching disinformation to his history students. It turns out, the guy’s a Holocaust Denier.

Simon is Jewish. And he doesn’t find out any of that until a neighbor tells him “The man who bought the cellar slept in it last night.”

Thus begins an ever-escalating war of wills and struggle over “legal rights,” threats, “Pacific Heights” harassment with a hint of “Cape Fear” as the “teacher” gets in the head of not just Simon’s neighbors, but of Simon’s impressionable teenaged daughter (Victoria Eber).

This looks hilarious. Feb. 24 on Netflix.

Credit Belgian director and co-writer Lukas Dhont for knowing the one “special effect” his drama “Close” has going for it. Every chance he gets, he makes the audience lose itself in the mystery of his star’s limpid, boyish eyes.

As 12 year-old Leo, Eden Dambrine lets us see curiosity about the world, take in the carpet of color that is ground zero in Belgium’s world famous “floriculture” (flowers) industry, and deep affection and connection for his “BFF,” Remi (Gustav De Waele)..

They spend their days, their meals and many of their nights together playing, working the flower fields and bicycling, often ending those days with sleepovers. They are inseparable and mutually supportive.

But when school starts, the notice of their classmates affects Leo a lot more than Remi.

“Are you a couple?” (in French and/or Dutch, with English subtitles) is as tactful as any of their classmates get. The girls are curious. The boys are quick to grab hold of a slur.

As Leo turns touchy about this, his eyes let us see the fear, the fury and then the guilt as he decides to distance himself from his best friend, who is confused and then deeply hurt over a bond that’s breaking and a love — however platonic — that’s been taken away.

Dhont, who also did the ballerina-with-gender-dysphoria drama “Girl,” keeps everything asexual and innocent in this tale of what might be that moment of sexual awakening. Both boys are sensitive, but Remi, a promising young oboist, is the more sensitive one.

As Leo doesn’t articulate what he’s doing — perhaps neither has the words yet to express their feelings — Remi is shattered and bereft. An attempt to sever the bond of sharing a bed during their sleepovers devolves into a wrestling, shoving match because Remi’s mom (Émilie Dequenne) isn’t there to do what parents do, in Flanders, Fife or Philadelphia.

“Boys, use your WORDS!”

But Remi can’t find the right way to protest and complain through the hurt. And slight, soulful Leo, who bristles at slurs flung their way, starts to hang with the jocks and takes on youth hockey. He can’t find a way to insist on “boundaries” with a friend whom he starts to question thanks to the cruelty of a few classmates.

And as tightlipped as kids are, parents and school counselors can only know so much before a situation gets out of hand and tragedy strikes.