Movie Nation

For a while, at least, I was thinking somebody dropped the ball with this domestic horror “comedy” “Who Invited Them.”

“This is good enough to have played in theaters,” I said to myself, noting how a good cast does well playing two couples who act out manipulations, show widening strains in a marriage and play into a night that just won’t end because one couple won’t go home after the cocktail party’s over.

I mean, sure, the foreshadowing’s so obvious that you’d have to be deaf to not pick up on where writer-director Duncan Birmingham’s debut feature is headed — eventually. But there’s still some mystery about what distractions pop up along the way, how the evening might just “get interesting” after a lot of booze, a little “booger sugar” and pressure to stay up late, do more coke and maybe…swing?

But this short-but-not-particularly-brisk thriller delivers smirks, not laughs and intrigues, not frights. There are structural problems and badly worked-in red herrings that make the final act quite the little letdown.

Still, let’s accentuate the positive first. Ryan Hansen of TV’s “Veronica Mars” and Melissa Tang “The Kominsky Method”) click as a Adam and Margo, a couple with a little boy, a new-to-them house “in The Hills” overlooking LA, and a few issues they’re not really dealing with.

He’s trying to entertain a generally reluctant klatch of colleagues at a not-quite-house-warming, and she’s avoiding all of them by hanging out with her cook-friend in the kitchen.

But as Adam toasts and welcomes one and all “our friends,” he can’t help but notice these two good-looking strangers. Who are they? Friends of Margo? Nope.

As the house empties out, they compare notes on “that super slick couple” who look like they’re “dressed for a sexy funeral” and wonder who they might be.

Why not ask them yourselves? They haven’t left. They were in a bathroom...together.

All the awkwardness that entails is struggled through as we meet Tom (Timothy Granaderos of “13 Reasons Why”) and Sasha (Perry Mattfeld of “Shameless” and “In the Dark”). They’re very cool. They’re very pretty. They’re “the neighbors.”

Of course we don’t buy that, even if Margo and Adam do. Kind of.

They manage to finagle a last drink and talk Adam into putting some vinyl on the turntable. And then, either as a foursome — all in the same room — or breaking up into “Let me help you with that” guy-guy/woman-woman pairings, the strangers start tugging at fissures in this marriage, poking at the sore spots. The party hosts fall right into that trap.

That’s the most interesting part of “Who Invited Them,” the relationship dynamics and the ways Margo and Adam are manipulated into going for each other’s throats.

But the Big Clue has been delivered and the story slides, and then stumbles a bit as it makes that turn towards the denouement, where all our suspicions bear fruit and yet nothing all that scary happens.

The violence is unpleasant, with a little added dash of sad and disturbing. It feels both inevitable and shoehorned-in. We believe in the menaced couple, but the ease with which they’re baited keeps us from rooting for them.

And the finale seems like an incomplete cheat.

Still, it’s good enough to at least make one wish all involved the best, “better luck next time” and all that. It’s just that the first hour had one hoping for a lot more than a consolation prize.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity and innuendo

Cast: Ryan Hansen, Melissa Tang, Perry Mattfeld and Timothy Granaderos.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Duncan Birmingham. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:21

A French diplomat faces State Security skullduggery in 2017 Siberia.

Looks flinty and nerve wracking.

A Jan 20 release from Magnet/Mangolia

Every movie set during the Holocaust has some merit, especially those based on historical accounts of survivors. Anyone who lived through that needs to be celebrated, and those who didn’t must be remembered.

But not all concentration camp dramas are created equal.

“The Champion,” originally titled “The Champion of Auschwitz,” is about Polish boxer and “Inmate #77” at the death camp, Tadeusz “Teddy” Pietrzykowski, a Warsaw bantamweight imprisoned for fleeing the occupied country to re-join the Polish Army in exile. He survived the camps by fighting for the entertainment of the German Nazis. He was lionized in Poland and has been the subject of books and films there.

But one suspects the reason the Poles have venerated his story is at least in part because he wasn’t Jewish. And this facile, cliched and grievously limited-in-scope film biography doesn’t do him, his real story, the real tragedy or this genre of film any justice.

Pietrzykowski’s story is worth retelling because the real life details of it are fascinating and often inspiring, and because it’s worth remembering that the mass incarceration and slaughter widely known as The Holocaust wasn’t just about Jewish genocide.

Writer-director Maciej Barczewski’s debut feature looks right but never feels anything but contrived. He traffics in tropes, and trips himself up on details, glibly skipping through this story with seemingly the thinnest understanding of the real history and the facts of the event he’s working with.

A working “death camp” with “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (“Work Makes You Free”) over its front gate doesn’t have its officers and functionaries bellowing “There is no exit other than through the chimney of the crematorium” to its new inmates.

Yes, they were sadists, evil on an almost inhuman level. But blurting that out, how would they keep order? Arrivals would freak out and probably even riot at times. Even the illusion of “showers” would be shattered and every single operation of the camp would be compromised and rendered much more difficult to manage.

We see the myth of the “urbane, cultured Nazi” officer trotted out for the umpteenth time, and watch SS officers and their families — overdressed swells — sitting in the snowy cold of a Polish winter watching an inmate — who should be shivering — give an OUTdoor winter piano recital.

Scene after scene here rings false, or at least hard to defend with facts.

Our boxer (Piotr Glowacki) tries to keep his head down, and being “the dodge king of Warsaw,” an expert at avoiding blows, has to help. But his background and skill are discovered in the most trite way, and he befriends the beefy, bullying but also imprisoned German capo (Piotr Witkowski) who used to be a boxer as well, and who becomes t”he champion’s” champion.

“We’ll fatten him up and he’ll fight the best boxers!”

Why do the Nazis listen to this Walter? Why is this German imprisoned at Auschwitz, as we’re never told? Why have a dwarf as ringmaster/bout announcer? Why stray so far from the simple, more colorful facts of Pietrzykowski’s story in grasping for an “entertaining” and “uplifting” concentration camp film?

The cruelty, summary executions, starvation and presence of death all around those imprisoned there are established facts about such places and recreated here. A Nazi officer who makes inmates who have “stolen” apples put them on their heads before he shoots them, but who spares those who, unprompted, quote Schiller’s “William Tell” to him? Give me a break.

One accepts death camp movies on their level when possible. Even “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” had merits and pathos and made you feel something.

For all its vivid recreation of the era and the grim physical realities of the camps, its mostly solid and credible performances, “The Champion” fails at almost everything else important to any movie that tackles this subject.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Piotr Glowacki, Jan Szydlowski, Marianna Pawlisz, Grzegorz Malecki, Marcin Czarnik and Piotr Witkowski

Credits: Scripted and directed by Maciej Barczewski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

This Jan 27 B-movie release has a battle-tested villain, Arnold Vosloo, with Jacob Keohane as the lead, and Jackson Rathbone, Michael Ironside, Bruce Davison and Jorge Garcia in the supporting cast.

And it features James Urbaniak as…HIMMLER?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

P.T. Barnum was 60 when he first took his “emporium,” oddities exhibition and giant circus on the road in 1870. William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his “Wild West Show,” with its cast of several hundred people, hundreds of horses and a small herd of buffalo, debuted and hit the road in 1883.

And while Barnum was practically the inventor of “ballyhoo” and hype, and was the first to proclaim he was putting on “The Greatest Show on Earth,” anyone alive in the late 19th and early 20th century who saw both spectacles might beg to differ. “The Greatest Showman” is a matter of some debate.

There were few spectacles outside of the Roman Colosseum to rival the “Wild West Show,” a grand, chaotic pageant of “the taming of the frontier,” with famous cowboys, famous Indians, sharp shooters, lawmen and trick riders by the score.

And if there’s one thing filmmaker Robert Altman was known for in those heady days of his “M*A*S*H” to “Popeye” peak, it was pageants — sweeping, overpopulated tableaux of Americana that said something about the American psyche.

America’s politically-dubious modern wars to America’s “HealtH” fads, country music conservativism to the American way of “Wedding,” if it had a big theme and a lot of actors willing to play all the moving parts, Altman was in. It wasn’t the only sort of film he’d make over the course of his career, but it why we remember him, and how he bowed-out, with one last all-star spectacle, “A Prairie Home Companion,” in 2006.

“Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” was an ambitious attempt to recreate the man, the myth-making and one of the defining spectacles of what people back then, and in the film, called “The Show Business.”

It’s got Paul Newman in the title role, with Joel Grey playing Bill’s partner, producer and “MC” of course. The big themes are the myth that was already settling in about the country’s noble struggle to “tame” the frontier, about the Natives slaughtered and displaced by that, the wildlife and ecosystems nearly wiped out, historic American racism and how all of that could be encapsulated in a single Big Show.

The film, which I must’ve seen in part or as a whole a dozen times on TV as it was a cable staple in the ’80s, never quite comes off. Nobody describes it as their favorite Newman film or the best of Altman. But channel surfing by a Buffalo Bill documentary sent me down the rabbit hole of wondering which towns I’ve lived in hosted “Wild West Show” visits while it was touring, and curious enough to make me want to see this 1976 epic again.

Homeless teens leave the mean streets of Medellin for the promise of a far-off plot of land in “The Kings of the World,” director and co-writer Laura Mora Ortega’s dark, picaresque odyssey through Colombia’s half-abandoned interior.

It’s a dreamlike journey into the hopes of reckless, under-educated kids who have nothing but each other, that piece of land and their “freedom.” And their concept of that seems borrowed from Kris Kristofferson, “just another word for ‘nothing left to lose.'” That’s what sends this broke, oft-injured and sometimes-quarrelsome quintet on their quixotic quest.

Ortega, who directed the gritty crime drama “Killing Jesus,” introduces these lads in their element in a opening act of nervous energy filmed with a jarring hand-held camera.

Bryan Andre, “Ra” (Carlos Andrés Castañeda) is 19, living on the streets, pilfering and begging and hustling, the magnet for several friends who ride busted, chainless and DIY modified “coasting” bikes, three-to-a-seat, as they look out for each other and keep each other company.

There’s safety in numbers, they must think. Because the lives of homeless kids like them are the cheapest of the cheap. Any bravado they think they’re showing by their mock machete fights won’t do them much good when they’re out of their element.

But that’s where these “Kings of the World” (“Los reyes del mundo”) are headed when Ra gets a letter from the national Land Restitution Agency. His late grandmother’s claim that she was involuntarily and illegally “displaced” from her home in rural Nechi has been heard and granted.

Ra’s dream of “a place” for them to live and make something of themselves and “be free” is coming true. Sere (Davison Florez), Nano (Brahian Acevedo) and Winny (Cristian Campaña) are up for this trek in an instant.

They don’t really know where Nechi is or how long it’ll take to get there. They’re not exactly rolling in cash. But hey, they have their bikes.

Before they can go, a first sign of trouble. Their in-again/out-again “friend” and supposed relative Culebra (Cristian David Duque) storms up full or threats and accusations. No, they’re not trying to “ditch” him. Sure, he can come.

There’s not much point in pleading the case that “SOMEone should offer Michael Jai White better roles” any more. He’s all but given up on that himself, and is back to writing his own vehicles.

White, always and forever “Black Dynamite,” proves just as bad at whipping up a decent story for his muscle-bound martial artist persona as anybody else with “As Good as Dead.”

It’s a stumbling, illogical and silly genre thriller that calls attention to its tropes and its shortcomings, and not in a fun “Black Dynamite” (White also scripted that) way.

A former agent “hiding out in Olde Mexico” thriller of the “We’re in Mexico, so every character we meet speaks English” variety, it features a script that has our hero tell his “story” — in detail to a new acquaintance — only to have them start arguing about which Van Damme, Schwarzenegger, Stallone or whoever picture that “story” sounds like.

“Raid 2?” Hell no. “Rambro?” OK, maybe that floats.

That “story” opens with our man on the down-low in Mexico, working on a road surveying crew and not speaking any Spanish. Apparently. Not that he stands out or anything.

Every morning, he strips that shirt off to go through his martial arts workout with his DIY kicking/training post (with car tires), noting only in passing that this skinny Mexican teen (Luca Oriel) is on the hill behind his travel trailer home, mimicking those moves.

Oscar is bullied. Oscar has a brother in prison. Oscar needs to know how to fight. Mr. Davis takes him under his beefy wings.

“When you get hit first?” he recites, “It’s my fault,” Oscar responds.

Bloody nose from a punch? “Never wipe it in battle! It’s a sign of weakness!“

One easy martial arts training montage later, and Oscar is whining about “competition,” which Davis dismisses.

But when brother Hector (Guillermo Iván) gets out of prison, Oscar takes on a big bruiser at a bareknuckle prize fighting competition, Cobra Kai’s a guy three times his size, and gets on youtube.

That’s how the bad men in LA — the golfing goon (Louis Mandylor) and corrupt and imprisoned ex-cop (Tom Berenger) find out where “Davis” is. Because “nobody else fights light that. And they want to get even with the big man South of the Border.

“Renfield?” He’s got issues. He’s in a support group.

Can they work these toxic workplace issues out? April 14, we’ll see.

Rampling plays the retired war correspondent who has to take the troubled offspring of a sibling in this period piece, coming out Feb. 24.

Looks lovely.

French action auteur Romain Gavras turns a racial flashpoint and riot in a suburban Paris high rise housing complex into a Medieval siege in “Athena,” an epic in unrest painted with a camera.

It’s a film of beautiful images and stunning tracking shots — long takes weaving and hurtling through the chaos of the violence that breaks out when video of police murdering a young man of Algerian heritage there emerges.

Roman candles and stun grenades, smoke and Molotov cocktails streak across the screen as armor-plated shield-bearing riot police evoke memories of “300” as they use a Testudo formation try to break through the blocks of the (fictional) Athena estate.

Gavras, who did the jolting drug-dealing/car-chase thriller “The World is Yours,” knocks us back in our seats from the start. He climaxes a stunning opening with this film’s lone motorized moment — rioters parading on motorbikes and the police van they’ve captured — and wades into the semi-organized mayhem of enraged, untrained but motivated youth scrambling to face the armed force of the police state.

It’s a tale of four brothers from that estate and the powder-keg that France sits on with a permanent, disenfranchised Arabic minority comprised of citizens from its former colonies.

Abdel (Dali Benssalah) is a decorated soldier brought before the cameras by his family, his community and his country. His brother Idir was murdered, apparently by cops, and Abdel’s in uniform as he’s trotted out to demand justice via legal means (a lawyer is with him), and plead for calm and patience as “the system” works this out.

But his ponytailed younger brother Karim (Sami Slimane) is seething in that crowd in front of the police precinct. He tosses the first Molotov cocktail, signaling his track-suited “soldiers” for the assault in which they rout the cops, overrun bystanders and sack the station, gathering weapons — guns and grenades and ammo and gun-safes where more guns are kept.

This assault is the moment “Athena” first bowls us over, and we track in one long take from dismayed Abdel to enraged Karim and charge through this station with the brawling rioters, piling into that stolen van and careening, with their spoils, back to Athena.

Whatever the designers had in mind for this lower-caste/low-cost housing block, they built a highly-defensible fortress, with apartment towers, raised and walled walkways and courtyards, a concrete Bauhaus-inspired living space that would look right at home with catapults and pots of boiling oil on its battlements.

Karim storms through plans for the defense, delegating “harki” (troops) and weapons. Meanwhile, older brother Moktar (Ouassini Embarek) has his own problems. He’s a drug dealer trying to get his latest score out of the place with his small posse of armed goons. Good luck with that.

Abdel’s efforts to calm troubled waters — from outside — get nowhere because Karim won’t take his calls. Even his hopes, and those of the religious leaders of this Islamic community, to evacuate non-combatants living there to safety seem futile.

And then a young cop (Anthony Bajon) gets separated from the phalanx and captured. Even in his distraught state and confused loyalties, Abdel might be the only man in a position to save him.