Movie Nation

April 28, one of the hit books of the ’70s becomes a major and probably very cute motion picture.

They got the music right.

The fight as it played out underground it the setting of this Feb. 24 thriller. Genre film, but the trailer suggests it could be good.

You don’t have to look hard to see the criticisms of “The Way Things Work in China” tucked into the somber, slow-burn thriller “Back to the Wharf.” It’s in the sealed fate of the protagonists, the way “some pigs are more equal than others” in this “Animal Farm” and in the closing credits, which tidy the story up in a People’s Republic-Approved coda.

It’s about influence, future prospects and a chain reaction tragedy that dominates the life of our meek and smart but downtrodden protagonist.

Zhang Yu plays Song Hao, a top one percent of his class high-schooler who survives bullying thanks to his friendship with the cocky punk son of the deputy mayor in the small city of Xiyuan. Li Pang’s long been “a pal,” or at least a guy who gets his jollies bullying bullies.

Until that day that the principal informs Song Hao that his great grades and promised college placement were going to another. Li Pang (Hong-Chi Lee) will have the wide-open future, influence and affluence that a college education would promise.

In a “one child” China, where family advancement is traced in generations, Li Pang has been designated a winner. Song Hao’s father (Wang Yanhui) gets this, and starts to complain. Song Hao tries to confront Li Pang and get him to admit this betrayal to his face.

But the kid storms into the wrong house, is attacked by the drunken owner, and stabs him in a fight. Song Hao’s dad finds the man, and does the calculus as he pretends to listen to the bleeding man’s pleas to call an ambulance. Dad’s promotion is on the line. His future and his family line’s Master Plan is endangered. He finishes the bleeding Wan off and lets his son think it was all his fault.

The kid flees town and takes a menial job with a stone cutting and carving factory far away. Only when Song Hao’s mother dies does he return. He was never fingered for the crime, and now he learns that the daughter of the dead man grew up an orphan who now hangs on to a derelict house coveted by developers. His own father took his promotion and dumped his mother to take a second shot at having a family and producing a “successful” heir.

And Li Pang? Once a punk, always a punk. He’s a well-connected college-educated high roller who works for the development corporation that wants that orphan teen’s (Enxi Deng) house, by hook or by crook.

What can passive, downtrodden Song Hao do about any of this?

The fatalism that hangs over Li Xiaofeng’s film is personified by Yu’s unsmiling, dispassionate and expressionless performance. That cute, pushy classmate who was not one of their school’s intellectual “elite” was destined to become a toll-taker. And by God, she will have this eligible, mopey bachelor who has returned for his mother’s funeral.

“It was meant to be,” she crows (in Chinese with English subtitles). “I’m single TOO!”

Song Hao tries to ignore her and gets downright rude. It doesn’t work. Meanwhile, he’s trying to do right by the teen whose father he accidentally killed.

I like the script’s sad cause and effect throughline, all of it started when some well-placed mediocrity is promoted, upsetting what Americans would call “the meritocracy.” Song Hao may protest that it’s “Not fair,” but everyone from the principal who puts his finger on the scales to the fathers of both boys involved is expected to shrug off injustices and accept their fates.

The film’s commentary on this is underscored by the setting for the finale, a vast collection of rusting, no longer useful fishing boats which China is too busy to renovate or recycle. The unfeeling behemoth, a State which teaches its populace to value calm and “order” above all, is simply too big and too busy to bother with individual rights or industries that change, chewing up the people who made their livelihoods in them.

“You can’t fight them,” is Song Hao’s father’s advice. His second family has a Western (blonde) tutor, teaching them English so they can emigrate. That’s his solution.

“Back to the Wharf” has the look and tone of a film noir, with a mousy anti-hero at its center, and not a decisive man of action.

The picture is a very slow starter, and even when the script begins to jolt, shock and make us fear our protagonist is merely fodder for the machine, even as it teases us with the idea that a man can only take so much, we know better than to get our hopes up too much.

It’s China, Jake.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex

Cast: Zhang Yu, Song Jia, Wang Yanhui, Hong-Chi Lee and Enxi Deng

Credits: Directed by Li Xiaofeng, scripted by Xin Yu and Li Xiaofeng. A Red Waters release.

Running time: 1:55

“Dog Gone” is a maudlin, sappy (inspired by a) “true story” about a boy and his missing dog. It’s a Netflix tearjerker of the “Marley & Me/A Dog’s Purpose” school, packed with cliches and served up with a heaping helping of melodramatics as a side dish.

It’s a family movie, nobody’s idea of Great Cinema, but will almost certainly play as less manipulative to younger viewers.

What it has going for it is a simple universal truth. Almost everybody loves dogs. “Dog Gone’s” big, obvious subtext is dogs as a unifying connective tissue in the culture. Losing one is as close to a shared heartbreak as anything the young and old share as a common experience.

“Of COURSE I’ll help you look for your dog” is as basic a test of humanity as you’re likely to come up with.

Director Stephen Herek (“Mr. Holland’s Opus” was his high water mark) goes for the hankies in this adaptation of Pauls Toutonghi’s non-fiction book, imagined here as a tale of an overachiever but disconnected father (Rob Lowe) and his newly-graduated-but-aimless-son (Johnny Berchtold) who bond over the search for the irresponsible son’s wayward Lab.

We meet just-ditched-for-a-Frisbee-bro Fielding at “Virginia University.” His way out of his girlfriend-loss funk?

“Let’s go to the pound!”

For “What is man without the beasts,” Fielding declares, quoting Chief Seattle to his BFF Nate (Nick Peine). He’ll adopt a dog, name him “Gonker,” and let him live “free” and off-leash all through college.

But after sleeping through his graduation, he gets mildly reproached by his super-organized, motivated “fixer” and problem-solver Dad for his lack of direction and the fact that he’s adopted a dog and never told his father or mother (Kimberly Williams-Paisley).

“Having a dog’s a responsibility!”

Aimless Fielding is no closer to figuring out life after he has to move back home to Northern Virginia, when he and Nate let Gonker off-leash on a day hike on the Appalachian Trail. One fox encounter later, Gonker’s gone.

“Dog Gone” is about the search for that missing dog, with father and son hitting the trail and mom organizing a methodical, county-by-county, town-by-town, newspaper by social media message board hunt for the missing pet.

Because it turns out Mom lost a dog when she was young, and flashbacks remind dog people of another universal truth. That trauma can last a lifetime, and Mom’s sure not willing to let it happen again.

Herek isn’t a subtle director, and you can scan his credits to see “competence” is sort of the top end of expectations of anything he puts his name on.

“Dog Gone” rubs any edge off every character in it, doesn’t develop the father-son disagreement gap at all, and fails utterly to find any humor in a big, galumphing dog creating mischief and mayhem because, like his slacker owner, he lacks discipline.

The script piles health scares into a “ticking clock” plot — the dog is off his meds, the kid isn’t well either — to little avail. And it doesn’t give Berchtold or Williams-Paisley the big emotional moments their characters are set up to experience, the despair of loss or a Hollywood ending.

But here’s what I was thinking about in all the many encounters, on the trail, in stores and shelters and veterinary offices depicted in the movie. There’s that one waitress in a remote, mountain-town eatery who sums up the shared humanity that piles onto this movie, something that anyone who’s ever looked for a lost dog will recognize from when they printed up fliers or posted a notice on Facebook.

“Your dog’s lost? Oh my GOODNESS, he’s so cute!”

Of COURSE she’ll post your flier. Of COURSE we’ll “pass the word” among rescue groups, shelters, neighbors, biker gangs.

About a third of the women I am “friends” with on social media are semi-professional dog rescue allies. Many of them relentlessly post found and lost dog notices all the live-long day.

“Dog Gone” taps into that world — the shelters, animal rescue subculture, the helpers, the way members of the media embrace missing dog stories, fellow dog owners with “how to track” and “how to help him track you” tips.

“Must love dogs” should be our national motto.

Then there’s the Appalachian Trail subculture, hikers of “A Walk in the Woods” vintage and Gen Z hippies of the “Wild” persuasion whom the movie quickly sketches in.

“We’ll keep an eye out,” because of course they will.

Shouting “Who’s looking for Gonker?” into the woods where the name “Gonker!” echoes toward you?

“I am!”

To put it simpler, EVERYONE is.

So no, “Dog Gone” isn’t a very good movie. But if you and your kids love dogs, you’d be cheating yourself by missing it.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Rob Lowe, Johnny Berchtold, Nick Peine and Kimberly Williams-Paisley.

Credits: Directed by Stephen Herek, scripted by Nick Santora, based on the book by Pauls Toutonghi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

A Feb 10 theatrical release, Apple TV the next week heist and dysfunctional family thriller which also stars Brianna Middleton and Justice Smith.

It’s from A24, which suggests “thought provoking” and a certain quality, but limited box office appeal which is why Apple gets it in a hurry.

“Saint Omer” is a dry, patience-testing parable about cultures clashing, cultural disconnection, motherhood and the eating fear of infanticide many mothers harbor — “The Medea Complex.”

That, by the way, would have been a much more informative, dramatic and poetic title than the drab name of the city where a dramatically-flat French murder trial takes place, that of a Senegalese immigrant accused of leaving her baby to drown in the surf.

But “more informative, dramatic and poetic” would have been too easy for French-born (of Senegalese parents) filmmaker Alice Diop, known for documentaries (“We,””La mort de Danton”) about refugees and African immigrants in France, and an acclaimed French TV series about the various forms of violence against women in French life.

Diop gives us clues of what her debut feature film is about grudgingly, masks her messaging with endless and dully-shot and performed scenes of the trial, and surrenders any illusion of “entertainment” pretty much entirely in this movie which touches on racism, superstition, the French system of justice and Every Mother’s Nightmare.

Plainly, others got more out of it than I did, as this is France’s contender for the Best International Feature in this year’s Academy Awards. But when you introduce an accomplished, striking and barely-sketched-in college professor and promptly drop her into a trial she’s observing 15 minutes into your movie, and don’t let us escape that courtroom’s real-time tedium for 25 solid minutes, you’re not just testing your audience. You’re abusing it.

The script doesn’t reveal exactly what it is about this nationally notorious trial that makes college professor and novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame) want to witness her fellow countrywoman’s questioning. Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) had a baby with her much older, white lover (Xavier Maly). Isolated from her partner, her family and her own culture in a strange land where she hoped to study law, fixated on a “curse” put on her when she left Senegal, she left the baby girl on the beach at Berck-sur-Mer at low tide. Fishermen found it.

Rama, who is teaching Marguerite Duras using images of French women who slept with Nazis having their heads shaved as punishment and “shaming” after World War II when we meet her, is also in an interracial relationship. She is, it turns out, pregnant. And despite being a beautiful accomplished novelist in a multicultural democracy, she starts to feel some of the same pressures Laurence claims as Rama listens, with growing concern, to Laurence’s lengthy questioning from a judge and the lawyers in court.

Oh, she’s here because she thinks this trial could serve as fodder for her next book, “Medea Castaway.” Diop drops this key piece of information FAR later than she should have, in a phone chat with Rama’s publisher, who isn’t keen on that title.

That would be a handy fact to have at hand when this first-time feature director is burying us under emotion-free testimony about Laurence’s early life, her relationships, emotions and insistence that “sorcery” had a hand in this murder.

“I don’t think I’m the responsible person in this case,” she flatly declares under questioning in a courtroom which provides subtle drama and no histrionics, and eats up the vast majority of “Saint Omer’s” two-hours-plus running time.

The meat of the movie is the way white, Gallic French society, via its courts, treats The Other. Judges and lawyers lightly debate just how seriously “cultural” differences have to be taken into account for this murderous act, with one lawyer glibly comparing it to “African female genital mutilation” and a judge suggesting “FGM,” at least, has perceived “benefits.” “Infanticide does not.”

Perhaps I’m misreading what spins out, in French with English subtitles, in those courtroom scenes. What I hear and understand is a steady drip-drip-drip drowning of Laurence’s various “reasons,” “excuses” and lies about her academic career, her background and supposed superstition, which comes off as her attempt at a “get out of jail free” card for this unspeakable crime.

Because none of the (mostly) female (all) white people questioning her have a clue about any of that. And French tolerance and sensitivities notwithstanding, they like the viewer judge this “curse” business as nonsense or a lie.

Rama, taking the “motherhood” and “stranger in a strange land” revelations too hard, weeps at some of what she’s absorbing, fretting over her own situation, privileged though it may be. And every Senegalese and white person she speaks to or overhears can’t stop herself or himself from noting how “articulate” Laurence is, how smooth and educated her command of French comes off in court.

Racist? Oh yes.

But perhaps one has to be a mother and have struggled with the psychology of pregnancy to better appreciate the “Medea” business in this script, which is underplayed to the point where one must ask other critics the blunt question, “Are we reviewing the movie, or the director’s statement about what she was trying to accomplish?”

While there are things to be explored and pondered in drab “Saint Omer,” Diop’s organization of her message and lack of prioritization of simple courtesy-to-the-viewer information we need in order to follow the story and answer that fundamental question, “What the hell is this thing about?” leaves a lot to be desired.

Rating: Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and brief strong language

Cast: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Salimata Kamate, Xavier Maly and Thomas de Pourquery

Credits: Directed by Alice Diop, scripted by Alice Diop and Amrita David. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:02

I had to return to Daniel Day Lewis‘ Oscar acceptance speech from the spring of 1990 — God Bless Youtube — to make sure I was remembering it right, that he saluted the Academy for “providing me with the makings of one helluva weekend in Dublin” followed by a tribute to the young actor who played the even-younger Christy Brown in the early scenes of “My Left Foot.”

That Day Lewis, the oft-nominated, three-time Oscar winner who is basically the Brando, DeNiro and Streep of his generation of actors, could transform himself into the memoirist, poet, painter and novelist Christy Brown — born with cerebral palsy — seems like a given today. He’s simply the very best at what he did before he retired and gave the rest of the Screen Actor’s Guild a chance.

But watching the film anew, I was stunned at how good young Hugh O’Conor, a mere boy of 13 charged with managing the same transformation as Day Lewis, was and is in the film. He’d played a troubled epileptic child whom a young priest (Liam Neeson) takes an encouraging interest in for 1985’s “Lamb.” So he had to be the most qualified actor in Dublin for those early scenes. Still, he’s astonishing in a physically demanding role, managing the spasms, the “I have no mouth and I must scream” despair of an unspeaking, unable-to-write child whom everybody in 1930s and early ’40s Dublin assumed was “an idiot,” thanks to his birth defect.

Day Lewis is amazing in the film. Hugh O’Conor breaks your heart.

What drew me back to this Oscar-winner was this awards’ season, and the presence of yet another performance that might get dismissed, as some wags are wont to do, as a “stunt.”

Think of Ray Milland’s convincing drunk in “The Lost Weekend,” Joanne Woodward’s multiple personality disorder turn in “The Three Faces of Eve,” Jon Voight’s paraplegic performance in “Coming Home” or Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant “Rain Man” and you see evidence of actors in the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences recognizing excellence, degree of difficulty and showmanship in a performance.

Day Lewis edged out fellow nominee Tom Cruise’s best shot at an Oscar for his paralyzed Vietnam vet turned anti-war protester in “Born on the Fourth of July” back in 1990.

So Brendan Fraser, putting on pounds, donning a fat suit and and assuming the role of “The Whale” is part of a long Hollywood tradition, with an Oscar nomination instantly part of the conversation.

But what Day Lewis and the other examples cited above managed to do, something Fraser pulled off as well, I think, is transcending the “disabled struggle” story trope to create a fully-formed, emotionally-flawed and complicated character.

With Christy Brown having passed just a few years before this film, based on his memoir, and some of the people involved in his life still around, “My Left Foot” still paints a complex and sometimes unflattering portrait of a man whose every day was an epic struggle, and who did not suffer this misery in silence.

We see a Brown who self-medicates and is an abusive drunk, a needy and demanding man who did not suffer anyone — fools, the well-to-do, fellow artists or the women who came into his life — easily or gladly.

Whatever “weekend” Day Lewis experienced in the pubs of Dublin, it’s hard to imagine having much fun with a brilliant, cutting and never-quite-self-pitying Brown, should you find him your drinking mate for the evening.

The movie tracks Brown from childhood, recreating that “Eureka” moment when his large, distracted and working poor family realized that his one controllable foot and its dexterous toes could write (seen above), and into adolescence and his celebrated adulthood as a man or art and letters.

Brenda Fricker collected an Oscar playing Brown’s sainted mother. Ray McAnally is his loving but dismissive-at-first hard-drinking Da’ and Fiona Shaw deftly plays a composite character, a doctor who recognizes Christy’s “poet’s soul” and the artist trapped in that barely-functioning body, and becomes Brown’s first serious romantic interest.

If anything, “My Left Foot” went a little light on the miseries of Brown’s 49 years on Earth, which is to be expected.

But Daniel Day Lewis, Hugh O’Conor and director Jim Sheridan made damned sure that whatever Hollywood thought, whatever “rewarding a stunt performance ” rationale might enter in filmdom’s collective mind about this bit of work, their combined efforts would be never less than a wholly realized human being.

This Christy would have good days and bad days, show off his love, devotion and charm, and his prickly side when he was in his cups.

It’s a performance and a film that I have to say still holds up. That makes “My Left Foot” well worth tracking down this Oscar season, and any Oscar season where you hear a whiff of “stunt” blowback against a demanding, wholly-committed performance like this one and every single other one I’ve mentioned in this appreciation, including Brendan Fraser’s.

Rating: R, violence, nudity, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Daniel Day Lewis, Brenda Fricker, Ray McAnally, Fiona Shaw, Adrian Dunbar, Cyril Cusack and Hugh O’Conor.

Credits: Directed by Jim Sheridan, scripted by Shane Connaughton and Jim Sheridan, based on the memoir by Christy Brown. A Miramax release on Amazon, Tubi, PosiTV, etc.

Running time: 1:43

The grey-haired woman whose daughter disappeared is as startled to run into the third prosecutor/investigator assigned to her daughter’s case while out hunting for her child herself.

What’s he doing here?

“Fixing other people’s mistakes,” he buck-passes. And her?

“Doing other peoples JOBS.”

The best Netflix movie with “Noise” in the title is Natalia Beristáin’s film about Mexico’s “desaparecida,” another Latin American country — like Argentina and Chile under military junta rule — that is seeing tens of thousands of its young people disappear.

Beristáin, a feminist filmmaker known for “The Eternal Feminine” and directing several episodes of TV’s “Mosquito Coast” adaptation, takes us inside the end game cost of a country not just losing its drug war, but one that has all but capitulated to the cartels on the other side.

A solitary mother (Julieta Egurrola), an artist who works in textiles, begs, rages and hires outside help when the indifferent, corrupt and cowardly police refuse to help her locate her missing 20something daughter.

Her estranged husband (Arturo Beristáin) and agent is just as upset, but putting on a brave face that is little comfort. At least her first visit to a support group gives her some relief, the realization that she is not alone, an outlet to tell her story.

Some 90,000 Mexicans — young people, women mostly, and journalists, perhaps even a cop or two who isn’t on the take — have vanished in the country’s war on the people who feed America’s appetite for illegal drugs.

“Noise,” like the Argentine classics “The Official Story” and “The Disappeared,” will follow Julia as she retains a lawyer/researcher (Teresa Ruiz) to carry out her own search. They visit morgues, wary, lazy and cover-up prone local police. And they join scores of other mothers who have learned to carry out their own “killing fields” searches for evidence of mass graves and something that might identify their missing loved ones.

“We had to teach ourselves how to do such missions,” a veteran of this particular hunt confesses.How long has she been searching? “Nine years.”

The “Mexican Femicide” graffiti covers the cities, and Julia even meets the youngest and the angriest, girls and young women taking to the streets in ever-growing, ever-rowdier protests.

None of which matter to the “Men With Guns,” criminals and the uniformed state-payroll goons who are more interested in silencing “trouble-makers” than stopping a nationwide crime wave and giving these families some peace.

As a movie, “Noise” is a slow starter. The picture comes to a complete halt for the necessary but overlong opening act “support group” scene, and has pacing problems into the nerve-wracking, infuriating and disheartening third act.

But it quietly takes hold of the viewer with patience, a gripping story that has plenty to say to audiences all over the world, especially those with under-policed police, accepted corruption at the highest levels, where a “War on Women” is a political policy, even if it’s never been declared.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Julieta Egurrola, Teresa Ruiz, Adrian Vazquez and Arturo Beristáin

Credits: Directed by Natalia Beristáin,  scripted by Natalia Beristáin and Diego Enrique Osorno. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

What the Screen Actors Guild Award nominations are to the Acting Oscars, a good indicator of what the Oscar nomination field will look like, the Producers Guild Awards are to Best Picture, Best Documentary and Best Animated Film.

Looks like “Glass Onion” and other titles ignored by SAG, get added on here.

“She Said” is apparently not Oscar worthy, nor is “Women Talking” or “The Woman King,” or “Till” but the super popular junk “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” are.

Producers are big on movies that draw a crowd. The exceptions, this year, are “Tar” and “The Fabelmans,” which by the way, wouldn’t make any sentient person’s Top Five Steven Spielberg movies.

Mutter.

“Tar” and “Whale” made the cut, and the slightly more popular “Banshees of Inisherin” is included, but several fine films missed that cut.

“Babylon” was depending on an awards season and Oscar bounce it almost certainly will not get.

Happy to see “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” made the Best Animated Feature contenders list, and the box office underwhelmer “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” crashed that party.

Below the page break, find the full list of feature film, documentary and TV and streaming nominees.

Dave Franco directed, and he and Brie co-wrote this oddball rom-dramedy.

Coming soon, Feb. 10. Looks cute.