Movie Nation

“PAW Patrol: The Movie” is not for anybody old enough to read a movie review — even “Young Sheldon” in his nappies.

With animation a little more “Jimmy Neutron” polished than TV, an infantile story and no jokes that play to anybody over say, six, it’s also not a movie worth wasting a disposable facemask on at the multiplex.

But how does the Hungry Hungry Hippocratic Oath of children’s entertainment begin?

“First, do no harm.”

It’s a seriously inoffensive confection about facing one’s “issues” and fears and helping people. And if Paramount wants to move a little toy merchandise in the process, why not?

In Adventure Bay, ATV and motorcycle teen-rescuer Ryder (voiced by Will Brisbin) “and his team of pups” can always be counted on showing up to save the day.

A sea turtle’s trapped on a road, or a Canadian trucker (Tyler Perry) dangles his rig over a bridge because he swerved to avoid that turtle (“Canadian”), the PAW Patrol howls into action.

And lead dog in all their rescues is Chase (Iain Armitage), as in “Chase in ON the case!”

But when they’re summoned to Adventure City, Chase has flashbacks to his abandoned pup childhood. He loses his edge and freezes up in dangerous situations.

And with the new Mayor Humdinger (Ron Pardo) in charge, it’s no longer a dog-friendly city. Dogs are being rounded up. At least they’re not taken to the “Isle of Dogs.”

“He’s into cats.” Yes, Humdinger had to run unopposed to get elected.

How will these Can-Do Canines — Marshall, Zuma, Rubble, Chase, Skye and Rocky — and new friend Liberty the dachshund (Marsai Martin) set this world to right? With gadgets and transforming cars, trucks, bikes and boats and an “Oww owww AROOoooooo.”

This “Patrol” is sort of “Thunderbirds” (puppets) and “Superfriends” for a new and quite young generation, with just enough positive messaging to merit mentioning that.

“What kind of leader gives up on someone the second things get hard?”

And the jokes are of the “This is OFF the LEASH” and “What’s got HIS leash in a knot?” variety.

Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel plays a wigged TV reporter named Marty Muckraker. Kim Roberts and Dax Shepard voice supporting players. And Adam Levine, Alessia Cara, Kiki Riggs, Spilt Milk, Fifth Harmony, Isabela Merced and Eiza Gonzalez turn up on the soundtrack.

If the kids are into the TV show and you already have Paramount Plus, or want to give the streamer a trial run, have at it. But it’s nothing special, and it’s not worth going to a theater to see.

Rating: G.

Cast: The voices of Iain Armitage, Will Brisbin, Lily Bartlam, Marsai Martin, Ron Pardo, Keegan Hedley, Shayle Simmons, Jimmy Kimmel and Tyler Perry

Credits: Directed by Cal Brunker, scripted by Billy Frolick, Bob Barlen and Cal Brunker. A Paramount/Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:26

Our endless fascination with “Lady Killer” Ted Bundy means we’ve seen a lot of handsome look-alikes play him on the screen, from Mark Harmon and Cary Elwes to Zac Efron, each taking a shot at a mass-murderer with cover boy looks, the “sexy” serial killer with the charismatic smile.

With “No Man of God,” actor Luke Kirby gives us the definitive Bundy — arrogant, articulate, devious and delusional. Kirby (Lenny Bruce in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) simmers and snaps, purrs and seduces, and yet never for a minute lets us forget who and what he is. This is Bundy without the “glamour,” a “monster” hellbent on insisting that “‘Normal‘ people kill people,” and that’s all he is.

“No Man of God” is a “True Story” treatment of Bundy’s last days. It’s set against the birth of FBI and police “profiling,” with a pioneer of that trade, William “Bill” Hagmaier (Elijah Wood) interviewing Bundy over the final years before the serial killer was executed in Starke, Florida’s Raiford Prison.

Actress-turned-director Amber Sealey and screenwriter Kit Lesser (aka C. Robert Cargill, who wrote “Sinister” and had a hand in “Doctor Strange”) give us a standard, playlike two-hander, a “cat and mouse” movie of interviews/interrogations, with each participant trying to get into the other’s head.

Snippets of news coverage of the crimes and the baying-for-blood execution mob that showed up in 1989 (many in camo, even then) are woven into a story about research and “remorse.”

Wood’s Hagmaeir is first seen on his knees, praying. When he meets Bundy, whom his FBI BSU (Behavioral Science Unit) boss (Robert Patrick) and the skeptical prison warden (W. Earl Brown) are sure won’t talk, he has one sale to make.

“I’m not here looking for evidence. I’m looking for understanding.”

For “profiling” to work, its practitioners need to know the sort of person they’re looking for –habits, lifestyle and psychological (family) background.

Casting Wood pays dividends straight away, as he plays up Hagmaier’s non-threatening curiosity, his deference and well-mannered solicitousness, and his piety. He’s just the sort of guy Bundy would figure his silky seduction and flashes of fury would intimidate.

Kirby’s Bundy veers from aloof contempt about “liars in cheap suits on government salaries” to calling Hagmaeir his “friend” over the course of four years of interviews.

The conversations with the convicted murderer, ostensibly aimed at getting Bundy’s insights on the “Green River Killer,” still at large at the time, range from “Silence of the Lambs” analytical to “Capote” confessional.

“Do you have any idea what a spree like this would take out of you?” Bundy wonders, laying out his “profile” of the elusive Washington state murderer of sex workers and runaways. He’s forever trying to connect his married, father of a little boy interrogator to himself, a “normal” person capable of doing the most heinous things.

“I’m tired of people saying I’m crazy,” Bundy fumes.

Hagmaier is tasked with listening, recording and debating Bundy, hiding his hand, only occasionally showing off his own profiling skills, more as a way of establishing a professional rapport, convincing him that they’re intellectual equals.

Our leads have a toe-to-toe intensity that clicks in many scenes. Wood and Kirby are well-matched, with Kirby giving us the superiority complex that generations of post-Bundy Hollywood serial killers have affected, and Wood showing just how troubling this assignment becomes, an FBI agent feigning professionalism as he quakes at the heartbreaking details of Bundy’s crimes.

A secondary villain, the smug religious opportunist Dr. James Dobson (Christian Clemenson), is introduced late. He finagled a last hours interview with Bundy where we see him gullibly fed a load of codswallop by Bundy about the influence of “soft-core porn” on his psyche as Hagmaeir’s eyes widen with furious incredulity.

Aleksa Palladino gives sharp edges to Bundy’s defense attorney (her name changed here), and Patrick serves up his best “authority figure.”

Sealey (“No Light and No Land Anywhere”) keeps her camera tight, sometimes shooting from low angles to underscore the seeming power imbalance in the conversations.

She picks up not just actual crime victims, seen in still shot montages mixed with home movies and news footage, but every young woman whom either man comes in contact with, in or out of prison, viewed as Bundy would eyeball them — as potential prey, someone who might fall under the “Lady Killer’s” spell, if only for a moment.

With so many Bundy films and TV series out there, “No Man of God” stands out by Kirby capturing not just the vanity and egoism, but the stark “banality of evil” that strips the “glamour” off a creep who lured women into assorted stolen Volkswagens, assaulted and killed them, rarely in that order.

Rating: unrated, discussions of graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Elijah Wood, Luke Kirby, Aleksa Palladino and Robert Patrick

Credits: Directed by Amber Sealey, scripted by Kit Lesser. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:41

It’s never wholly fair to dismiss a movie just because it’s unpleasant to sit through. But that’s a good place to start with “We Need to Do Something.”

This horror star vehicle for Sierra McCormick (“Pretty Little Stalker,” “American Horror Story” and “The Vast of Night”) is a gooey, meandering supernatural thriller that’s on its surest ground at its simplest — before all the Young Goths In Love business of spells, curses and digging up graves because that’s what your “I used to be a cutter/I used to be dead” girlfriend (Lisette Alexis) wants.

But it’s easier to sell a “sexy teen lesbians bring on the Apocalypse” pitch, I guess.

We meet Mel (McCormick), her testy and tippling Dad (Pat Healy), had-enough Mom (Vinessa Shaw) and antic, nerdy little brother (John James Cronin) in the family bathroom, riding out a tornado.

The little nerd keeps suggesting its “an F5.” Mom reassures him it’s not, repeats the story of the day he was born to comfort him and dodges phone calls and texts from….someone.

Mel?

“I think…something BAD might be happening.” As in this is no ordinary storm.

A few shrieks at thunderclaps later, a tree crashes on their roof and and blocks their way out. Fine. Wait it out. Call for help when the worst has passed.

Dad has just enough left in his travel mug to keep the edge off. Mom frets but figures it’ll all be fine. Mel’s nerves are fraying because she can’t get Amy to text back.

And little Bobby is seeing a snake. And then he’s hearing a dog. And then something supernatural happens, and Dad’s tipsy tirade that “it’s not the END of the GOD—–d world” seems a tad premature.

The compact melodrama within that bathroom, even with the supernatural menace that seems piled on top of the natural ones, is where the suspense lies. Survival might depend on the water staying on, eating whatever’s at hand, shouting for help, improvising and working the problem as the family comes unraveled.

Dad’s “survival,” in between tantrums, might depend on whether or not that mouthwash is “alcohol free.”

But we need flashbacks to what Mel believes caused all this, the first blush of high school love between the over-accessorized Amy and “Blade Runner” eye-makeup Mel, and what they do to punish those who would interfere with their romance.

“We Need to Do Something” doesn’t invent a set of horror rules and play by them, doesn’t get much accomplished between big (ok, middling) frights and leans on titillation more than it should.

Whatever pathos the picture might have generated is frittered away as is the suspense as flashbacks release whatever tension that trapped-in-a-bathroom scenario offers.

A line like Amy’s portentous “You can’t fix the inevitable” might apply to the debut script of Max Boot III, who doesn’t appear to be related to the famous Max Boot, conflict pundit and author.

But they threw a pretty good cast and some decent, gruesome and disturbing effects at it, even if all they managed to accomplish was “unpleasant.”

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic, gory violence

Cast: Sierra McCormick, Pat Healy, Vinessa Shaw, John James Cronin and Lisette Alexis

Credits: Directed by Sean King O’Grady, script by Max Booth III. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:36

A tale of boy-meets-girl, girl-wrecks-boys-life told with sublime melancholy by Japanese auteur Kôji Fukada, “The Real Thing” plays like the darkest “romantic comedy” you ever saw.

A “love story” with melodramatic complications and coincidences, and confrontations that border on bizarre, it makes for a fascinating dive into dysfunction, co-dependency and the credo that “some women are just no damned good for a man, and vice versa.”

“The Real Thing” began life as a manga, a Japanese graphic novel, which was then adapted into a ten part series for Japanese TV by Fukada, director of “Harmonium” and “A Girl Missing.” It was edited into an epic-length film of nearly four hours running time for Cannes. It’s not that important, in the age of bingewatching, that it’s been returned to its ten episode format for this Film Movement release, but I’ll still call it a “movie” for reviewing purposes — a movie in ten bite-sized installments.

Tsuji (Win Morisaki of “Ready Player One”) is a handsome, 30ish “salaryman” for a Ondo Toy & Fireworks in Tokyo. A mid-level manager, he likes to keep his life compartmentalized. Clients who want to “have a drink” merit a muttered “pain in the ass.” And women at the office who throw themselves at him may get some of what they want, but not “love.”

One night, like the loyal salaryman he is, he insists a convenience store customer (Kaho Tsuchimura of “Mother”) have a plastic soap bubble pistol that isn’t in torn packaging. She accepts, fumbles with a map and asks directions, seeming confused or at least distracted.

Little does he know he’s just sealed his fate. That chance encounter leads to one we can’t put down to chance. He walks home, she drives past him and stops on the railroad tracks. Erratic and panicked, she needs saving and so he does.

But when the police show up, she lies. “He” was driving. She doesn’t even know his name, and the lie comes unraveled. Rather than flee this trainwreck-in-progress, Tsuji gives her cab fare home. He gives her a business card so she can pay him back.

Tsuji’s every early encounter with Ukiyo costs him money. He makes her write out IOUs, but discovers she’s given him the wrong address. He’s got the rental car company she used hassling him for fees and damages.

And that instantly messes up his compartmentalized life. The lovesick colleague, Hosokawa (Kei Ishibashi), whom he lives with, is put out. The 24 year-old pixie, Minako (Kei Ishibashi) who is all over him, gets rebuffed and never realizes it.

Tsuji finds himself emptying his bank account to deal with a manipulative yakuza (Yukiya Kitamura) who threatens to turn Ukiyo into a club “hostess” or worse. She lies, obfuscates, whimpers and bows and apologizes.

You could make a drinking game out of the number of times Ukiyo says, “I have something to tell you.” Every new “secret” reveals a further complication and another wad of cash.

Like the yazuka (gangster, loan-shark) Wakita, our curiosity is piqued. “You have an ulterior motive with her?” Is the sex that good? Yes, she’s that good, Ukiyo insists. “No, we’ve never DONE it,” Tsuji corrects.

“No one is better than her at mesmerizing a man,” Wakita sighs (in Japanese with English subtitles). And so it would seem.

“The Real Thing” piles on the personal complications and the details in a story that ebbs and flows, with him looking for her and then her seeking him, over a period of years.

Clues dribble out about his sense of “order” and not leaving a “mess” and her seemingly bottomless background of debt, bad relationships, alcohol abuse and apologies.

Each is, in his or her own way, a boy or girl who “just can’t say no.” There’s a satiric thread here, about Japanese culture and “responsibility” and “loyalty” and “order” and good manners. The endless apologizing and appeals for cash can make you shout at the screen, or come up with your own drinking games.

The running time is daunting, and truthfully, not wholly justified (limited series “drip drip drip” storytelling). But if you’re intrigued by this most ambitious venture by one of Japan’s most challenging filmmakers, track “The Real Thing” down and consume it, preferable in bite-sized portions.

Cast: Win Morisaki, Kaho Tsuchimura, Kei Ishibashi, Shôhei Uno, Akari Fukunaga and Yukiya Kitamura

Credits: Directed by Kôji Fukada, script by Shintaro Mitani, based on the manga by Mochiru Hoshisato. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 3:52, in ten episodes

“When I’m a Moth” is a fictional, myth-making and myth-puncturing look at a brief interlude in Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s early life, a summer she spent “sliming salmon” at a fish cannery in Valdez, Alaska.

It’s a talky, mulling-things-over sort of story, practically a filmed play with boats, scenery and romance, but also fish entrails, the Vietnam War and America’s political divide as its backdrop.

Filmmakers Magdalena Zayak and Zachary Colter have conjured up something pretentious, odd and strange, a movie that almost defies comparison to other films. But I was reminded of “Agatha,” the Redgrave/Hoffman tale of what happened when mystery writer Agatha Christie disappeared for several days at the height of her fame, and of “Southside with You,” the Obamas’ courtship romance.

It’s at its most intriguing when it’s musing, a fresh-faced Wellesley College grad (Addison Timlin of “Feast of the Seven Fishes” and TV’s “Start-Up”) meeting two strangers — out of work Japanese fishermen (TJ Kayama, Toshiji Takeshima) — striking up a socially awkward conversation that for her involves moments of self-reflection, self-doubt and confession.

Hillary is “in a strange mood,” and offers to buy rough-looking strangers Mitsuru (Takeshima) and Ryohei (Kayama) a drink. It feels dangerous, with the sketchy-looking men eyeballing the coed a little too lasciviously, but also worried about racist “vigilantes” among the locals, and her wondering if they’re serious.

And as they question her and question her some more, and she questions them back, it feels on-the-spectrum awkward.

“Why you trust men you do not know? How old are you?”

“Older than my body.”

She has a plan for her life, relating how she is on a “predetermined path,” “like a moth” they interpret. At 21, she lays it all out — Yale Law, politics, activism, the idea being “to liberate people, create communal trust.”

They warily discuss her in sexual terms, in Japanese, right in front of her.

“You shouldn’t tease me like you normally tease women.”

“We’re not stupid.” “Who said you’re stupid?”

Yes, she uses “language like a small sword.” And yes, she knows she needs “to work on softening my personality…You can’t let people know you’re ambitious.“

The film is a moody, atmospheric and not terribly revealing failure, I have to say. But it is a fascinating one.

Here is Hillary, suggesting she’ll spin how she lost her job at the cannery. She’s “slow” on the line, she admits. But she might tell her Chicago Republican daddy or anyone else that asks that she pointed out the unsanitary conditions and sometimes unfit fish to management.

“Canned from the cannery” her drinking companions joke.

She considers her own shifting politics (Goldwater Republican to war-protesting Democrat) and decides “Real power is the capacity to educate ignorant people, maybe. So Nixon has no power at all.” But “Kissinger is a war criminal. I’ll crush him if I get the chance.”

She’s telling all this to two foreigners with shaky English and working class grasps of the world — limited, even if the younger one, Ryohei, has been to university and read “The Brothers Karamazov” and is handsome enough to get away with insult-flirting.

“Maybe you don’t know. Maybe you just like talking.”

The script, which includes sex and a just-off-the-hook introduction to sushi, toys with prescience, putting words in the 2016 presidential candidate’s mouth that make her prophetic.

“You can’t get rid of ignorance. It always seems to triumph, somehow…I feel doomed.”

“When I’m a Moth,” filmed in the green-greys of what passes for an Alaskan spring (Vancouver, actually) with rusted-out fishing hulks, towering peaks coming right down to the water, the various salmon “runs” detailed and tracked and gutted, has a marvelous simplicity about it, and a “walk in the midnight sun” eye for details.

I lived for a year just across the Gulf of Alaska from Valdez, in Kodiak, another coastal fishing town. This myopic film resonates in its depiction of the insular world of such places, the sophisticated culture shock experienced by, and delivered to the locals by the legions of college kids who come for the summer work.

A blonde coed shows up, everybody in town notices. She’s “under-stimulated,” but there to “get my hands dirty” and meet and chat up and listen to working people (Japanese, mostly, back then, Filipino by the time I arrived)? That’d get attention, too.

It’s a film that’s of mixed emotions about the future First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State. And that goes for the film as well.

Yet Timlin is terrific, showing us a wonk and political animal in the making — focused, unintimidated and kind of fearless, a young woman traveling solo to the roughest corner of the country for smelly, disgusting work with the hardened souls who perform it.

It’s not going to interest the Fox News crowd. But for anybody the least bit curious about how a Hillary Rodham might be formed, shaped and reshaped — as we all are — in her early 20s, it makes for a challenging film and an intriguing fantasia.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations

Cast: Addison Timlin, TJ Kayama, Toshiji Takeshima

Credits: Scripted and directed by Magdalena Zayak and Zachary Colter. A Winter Film release.

Running time: 1:31

“The Secret Diary of an Exchange Student” works itself into a lather for its finale, briefly becoming a door-slamming farce with a college applicant who faces deportation, his dismayed college admissions interviewer, a cadre of anti-deportation protestors, sheriff’s deputies, a crazed NSA agent and her “exchange student” hostage, a shrieking baby and the perky but hapless Brazilian exchange student/au pair who set all this in motion.

This “Around the World with Netflix” outing is a Brazilian rom-com that’s lean on laughs but cute around the edges, a movie whose best zingers come at the expense of the norte americanos, or a young leftist’s attitudes about them (us).

Former child actress Larissa Manoela plays Barbara, a 23 year old from Rio who wears a flight attendant’s uniform to work at the airport, but who spends her days hustling “Dream Trip” magazine subscriptions. She’s full of travel tips from the magazine, but has never traveled herself.

One failed “contest” to sell the most subscriptions later, and she chucks that gig for her new idea about how to go abroad. She’ll become an au pair, learn English while living in America, and drag her raving leftist taxi dispatcher pal Taila (Thati Lopes) with her.

Taila is the life of the movie, ranting at “rideshare colonialists” who want to “destroy our industry” (she manages a taxi stand at the airport), steal the Amazon and “take our Niobium,” some mineral she’s heard is Brazil’s ticket to the future.

This handsome flight attendant Barbara met, Brad (David Sherod), may be the inspiration for this scheme, but that doesn’t mean Taila’s going to let him forget “This economic crisis was created by the Americans.”

They fly into Brad’s upstate New York town in the middle of winter, befriend a handsome Brazilian student (Bruno Montaleone) who works in the ski resort, and have misadventures with Barbara’s taskmaster single-mom lawyer-boss (Kathy-ann Hart) and the gun-loving, hunting-crazed, meat-addicted family that takes Taila in because they miss their own daughter, a captive NSA agent.

You can see where most of the comic possibilities are, but what you should know going in is how long it takes the movie to set up and how little is done with this stuffed-critter-couple Taila must cope with, where the language barrier is practically a blessing.

The two Brazilians enter “The world’s best educational system,” an American high school, where English is taught by a woman who thinks singing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” is the key to learning. Smart aleck Chinese teens mock them to their faces (in Mandarin).

And all their plans go awry, with romantic blunders, ICE issues and twists that tie this story up in the most eye-rolling way possible.

It’s a colorful, cheerful and messy movie, meandering out of the starting gate, struggling to avoid anything remotely edgy or interesting.

“Culture clash” comedies like this live and die on their “clashes,” and the conflict that might have worked is leftist Taila’s encounter with gun nutty, conservative, arteriosclerosis-meets-diabetes rural America. But the “americanos” scripted and cast aren’t “out there” enough to be funny, even if Taila’s reaction to them and their stuffed chipmunk, etc., is.

Director and co-writer Bruno Garotti ensures that our heroines’ first encounters with snow and downhill skiing dodge anything amusing or slapstickish, that their romances are PG-dull and that the odd scene that clicks — singing in a Brazilian-themed club in NYC, airport mishaps — isn’t enough to make this “Secret Diary” worth reading.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Larissa Manoela, Thati Lopes, Bruno Montaleone, Kathy-ann Hart

Credits: Directed by Bruno Garotti, script by Bruno Garotti and Sylvio Gonçalves. A Warner Brothers film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:36

The stark desert north of Sudan is realistically and beautifully captured in Amjad Abu Alala’s “You Will Die at Twenty,” a potent parable for life in this war torn and timelessly backward corner of the world.

A Sudanese entry in the Best International Feature category at the Oscars, this 2019 film, shot under stresses one can only imagine, earns a virtual release from Film Movement this month.

A mother (Islam Mubarak) takes her newborn boy to be blessed by a visiting Imam as he greets the faithful at a nearby mosque. As dervishes whirl in celebration, the leader counts up as this blessing is granted. When the dervish drops dead at the number “twenty,” a chill falls over the occasion and gasps spread through the crowd.

“Everything is fated,” the Imam intones (in Arabic with English subtitles) and mother Sakina protests and cries. The Imam can’t lift “the curse.” “God’s command is inevitable.” Her son, named Muzamil, will die at twenty.

Devout Sakina accepts this fate. But the boy’s father (Talal Afifi) is crushed. He will leave for the city and send home money. He will not let himself be there for the coming tragedy, which he doesn’t realize begins years before that fated day.

A little boy growing up in an isolated, superstitious village, whose own mother buys into his prophesied death, is going to have it rough.

His madrassa classmates are murderously cruel, covering him in ashes, wrapping him in a burial cloth and locking him in a trunk. His mother, marking dates on a wall of their house, never lets him forget how he can expect “such a short lifespan,” pushing him deep into memorizing the Quran as comfort and perhaps a stay of execution.

Only little Naima befriends him and loves him. And as the years pass and Muzamil (Mustafa Shehata) reaches his 19th year, Naima (Bonna Khalid), from a wealthier family, adds a new pressure to his fearful, overly careful life.

“Either you are scared of me or you love me,” she declares. And boy, you’d better make up your mind up fast.

This is just the moment that the kid, a delivery boy for the local store, meets an outspoken apostate. Sulaiman (Mahmoud Maysara Elsaraj) gets his Aragy (vodka) dropped off each day, a former world traveler who prefers to keep an anti-Islamic buzz on now that he’s passing his final years in the village of his birth.

Sulaiman is profane, dismissive of this superstitious nonsense, suggesting the boy “follow the Nile” to a bigger, better life where everybody doesn’t expect him to die any day now.

Sulaiman lives in a house of cluttered wonders — film cameras, projectors and erotic posters of Middle Eastern film stars of the pre-Islamic Fundamentalism past. That photo of Marilyn Monroe?

“She is from another world.”

Sulaiman can’t help but broaden the boy’s mind, showing him scenes of the secular classic “Cairo Station” and footage he shot of pre-Islamic coup Khartoum. Sulaiman is the film’s slice of “Cinema Paradiso.” He used to be a news cameraman.

Director Alala, who co-adapted the script from a short story by Hammour Zaida, carefully maintains the sundrenched cloud Muzamil lives under, a cloud his mother cultivates.

The performances are documentary real, with just enough melodrama about them to keep things interesting.

We don’t know what will come as that fateful “20th” is counted down, etched on the wall, with Muzamil feeling a growing pressure to escape, lash out in protest or tempt fate by taking risks at the crushing weight of ugly expectations his neighbors, his mother and his religion have set upon his shoulders.

An ugly, patriarchal and sexist moment in the film’s problematic finale promises little relief from that. There’s little chance of the “Cinema Paradiso” bittersweet entering the picture.

But Alala has still made a remarkable film of religious overtones and undertones (even a New Testament touch), of martyrdom and resignation that we can only hope Muzalil and indeed Sudan eventually reject for a fuller life.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Mustafa Shehata, Islam Mubarak, Mahmoud Maysara Elsaraj, Bonna Khalid and Talal Afifi

Credits: Directed by Amjad Abu Alala, script by Amjad Abu Alala and Yousef Ibrahim, based on a short story by Hammour Zaida. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:46

A grieving, sullen and silent tween is sent off to visit her Thai grandmother for the summer of “My Best Worst Adventure,” a moving and engaging kids’ movie with just enough hard edge to come off.

It has that “Black Stallion” and “The Fox and the Child” novelty of telling its story mostly with pictures, a film of few words. And many of those words are Thai, with not all of them translated with subtitles.

Jenny (Lily Patra), who just lost her mother, has stopped speaking. She’s lashing out, so deep into her anger that she can’t get out of this trip she doesn’t want to take by meeting her father’s (Eoin O’Brien) one condition.

“You don’t want to go, just talk to me. TELL me you don’t want to go.”

Next thing she knows, she’s in Culture Shock rural Thailand, staying with granny “the dictator” (Phanida Suwansaad), typing her complaints onto social media on a tablet that she can’t even recharge.

“Day One: I’ve been abducted by aliens…Day Two of the hostage crisis…They babble at me all the time, like I even know what they’re saying.”

She’s even thrown into a school where she doesn’t speak the language, but where she picks up on the kid the others bully and even the teacher browbeats. Boonrod (Pan Rugtawtr) is also silent. She’s seen the scruffy, grimy kid picking pockets in the temple, scrambling to find enough to eat and doting on Samlee, his water buffalo.

As the opening images of “My Best Worst Adventure” were of boys riding water buffalo in no saddle, no helmet, no-holds-barred races, we pretty much know what the third act holds for us.

The movie’s charms are in the setting and Jenny’s unwillingness to adjust to it. She is bullied, too, over her “manga” art (monsters) and her silence. There’s always a rich kid (Chinnapat Kitichaivaranggoon) ready to lead his flunkies into picking on somebody he figures is weak.

This is B-movie producer and sometime writer-director Joel Soisson’s second attempt to tell this tale and get audiences to watch it, after 2015’s “Buffalo Rider” (story by Chinnapat Kitichaivaranggoon). Perhaps the earlier version had a little more local color and a little less of the water buffalo race.

But what almost certainly separates the two films is Patra and Rugtawatr’s quiet, engaging presence at the center of it, and an action climax that is tough, beautifully moving and yet still kid-friendly.

Rating: unrated, fistfights, animal injuries, alcohol abuse

Cast: Lily Patra, Pan Rugtawatr, Chinnapat Kitichaivaranggoon, Phanida Suwansaad and Eoin O’Brien

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joel Soisson. A KMDG release.

Running time: 1:26

The fundamental problem with any action pic starring Jason Momoa is who can you credibly cast that one could reasonably expect to bring down the Man Mountain?

Making his character a mixed martial artist in “Sweet Girl” just compounds that problem.

It’s a nonsensical thriller whose RIDICULOUS third act twists finish the job that its “reduced expectations” opening moments set us up for.

Getting Momoa to wade through a couple of pages of voice-over narration is a serious misuse of his talents. He’s not a natural at it.

“As the years pass, we realize we are nothing more than the experiences that make us.”

OK, there’s the REAL problem. This dog is on the screenwriters — Philip Eisner, Scott Hurwitz and Will Staples.

It’s a topical tale about Big Pharma skullduggery and lives discarded in its eagerness to put profits over humans. In this case, the lengths such entities go to include hiring kill teams along with the usual buying and selling politicians.

Momoa plays Ray, a Pittsburgh husband and Dad who is losing his wife (Adria Arjona) to cancer. A life-saving experimental drug that was about to come out as a generic was halted.

Ray ends up on the phone on a CNN chat show involving the smug, callous Martin Shkreli clone (Justin Bartha) who made that decision.

“If my wife dies, it’s YOUR death sentence,” Ray threatens. “I will hunt you down and kill you with my bare hands.”

Yes, his wife dies, and no, the FBI doesn’t come knocking at his door. But a reporter calls, draws Ray into a meeting and that’s where he runs afoul of the first hitman (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) who logically shouldn’t be able to take even one Momoa haymaker. There will be others.

Ray and daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced of “Dora and the Lost City of Gold”) are on the lam in his rusty ’72 Cutlass, the most conspicuous get-away car in Western Pennsylvania.

The plot, which has run through three timeframes by this point (Ray and others training Rachel in MMA), unravels from there. Dad gets in fights, Rachel gets in the way, and then passes judgment on what it is they’re doing.

“So all the values you taught me growing up are out the window?”

Merced throws herself into this, despite the fight physics that precludes her character’s ability to clobber guys twice her size.

Before “Aquaman” made him the star that “Conan” did not, Momoa acquitted himself well in plenty of B-pictures like this — “Road to Paloma,” “Wolves,” “Braven” — and brute force roles in “Game of Thrones,” “Frontier” and the like on TV.

The occasional decently-staged fight or grace note here stands out, because there aren’t many. A story this badly constructed with dialogue this stilted and characters this thin is simply beneath Momoa, at this stage.

Filling your down time between “Aquaman” appearances, and “Dune,” with a movie scripted by the hack who did “Event Horizon” isn’t a smart play.

Rating: R, for strong violence, some profanity

Cast: Jason Momoa, Isabela Merced, Raza Jaffrey, Amy Brenneman, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Adria Arjona, Lex Scott Davis and Justin Bartha

Credits: Directed by Brian Andrew Mendoza, scripted by Philip Eisner and Gregg Hurwitz. A Netflix release.

Running time:

Maggie Q returns to “Nikita” territory with “The Protege,” playing a sexy and exotic assassin not unlike her best known TV role.

It’s her latest lead, part of a run that included “Fantasy Island,” “Death of Me” and “The Argument,” and she almost lets us see herself asking “Is this a step backwards?” in her tentative, blasé performance.

Anna was a Vietnamese orphan raised by the hired killer (Samuel L. Jackson) who found her after walking in late on a scene of mass slaughter. Bad men had killed her family. Little Anna (Eva Nugyen Thorsen) is the last person standing. And she’s holding one of their guns.

Decades later, she and her mentor are a cool, efficient machine, people who “find people who can’t be found,” and often as not, stab, shoot, strangle or kill them with a bomb.

But Moody (Jackson) is getting on up there, even if he claims “70 is the new 30.” And he’s got that tubercular cough that tells us, and anybody who’s ever been to the opera, he’s not long for this world.

And the merest hint of searching for a long-lost child of an infamous oligarch, the subject of an earlier contract, puts Moody in the bullseye and Anna on the lam and on the hunt. Killers are on her tail and must be dispatched. Cities and old “friends” must be visited and outfits must be changed, and often.

Anna’s search for yet another person who “can’t be found” takes her back to her native Vietnam, despite her serious misgivings.

“Our past is never what we left it.”

Michael Keaton plays Rembrandt, a mysterious “security” expert who knows way more about Anna and Moody than she should be comfortable with. He’s menacing — he may be involved with those who are after her — and he’s very flirtatious. She flirts back.

“How long you been doing this?”

“Long enough not to miss.“

Keaton brings a little sparkle to his scenes, but he and Maggie Q have little to no chemistry. The fact that he’s 27 years her senior may have something to do with it. The fight choreography has to hide a lot of stunt doubling accordingly.

Q is runway ready and model thin, and here she lets us see hesitation in every little flash of action. That’s not what we want from an action heroine.

Director Martin Campbell has Bond credits and a resume that stretches back to the ’70s. But his violent, humorless and predictable vengeance reinvention of Jackie Chan (“The Foreigner”) let us know he’s lost his edge and whatever he brings to the fights and shootouts here, he can’t make it all coalesce into a coherent film.

The script is straight-up formula, which suggests few surprises, but also that the component parts should have clicked better than they did. Jackson’s played this sort of guy to death, and can’t find any more fun in such characters. Not without Ryan Reynolds and Selma Hayek around. Keaton (and his stunt double) delivers the goods.

Robert Patrick shows up as the leader of a ‘Nam vets biker gang, in Vietnam, and is so colorful you kind of wish the movie had been more about him.

But our star, framed in many an alluring closeup, gives us nothing here. She’s almost expressionless, and however “true to life” that might be for a cold-blooded killer, that choice makes for a dull, uninvolving performance.

Q was pretty good in “Death of Me,” and “Fantasy Island” wasn’t really her fault. So it’s not that she can’t carry a movie. But she does a damn poor job of hiding her disinterest in this one.

Rating: R for strong and bloody violence, language, some sexual references and brief nudity

Cast: Maggie Q, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Patrick, Ray Feuron, Patrick Malahide and Michael Keaton.

Credits: Directed by Martin Campbell, script by Richard Wenk. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:49