Movie Nation

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.

So the franchise that made Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell household names is revived, a state-of-the-art horror thriller about mothers and daughters and “maggots.”

Lee Cronin, who dug “The Hole in the Ground,” scripted and directed this reboot, with a nod to Mr. Raimi.

I don’t know. No Raimi behind the camera. No Bruce in front of it. No Morristown, Tennessee “cabin in the woods” setting? Doesn’t seem all that “Evil” without the basics.

April 20.

I only knew this guy from “Top Gear,” this appearance especially. YouTube star as well

Quite the drifter, Ken Block taught the world the meaning of Hoonigan.

A co founder of DC shoes, which I’m wearing right now.

Died the way he lived, no doubt. Balls out. Ken Block was 55. RIP.

“M3GAN” is a fierce and fun thriller about a doll that develops a murderous mind of its own. Sure, that’s as tired a trope as there is in the horror realm. But this laugh-out-loud dark comedy flirts with being THE murderous doll movie.

With a brilliant melding of child-in-a-suit and CGI, hints of satire and grim, knowing laughs about tech addiction and the death of human connection, this pretty good film could have been great.

A little girl (Violet McGraw) loses her parents in a car accident and is sent to live with her toy company robotics whiz Aunt Jemma, played by Allison Williams.

Thirtysomething Jemma isn’t exactly “mother” material. She has toys, but they’re “collectibles.” She doesn’t have a job, she has an all-consuming career. When it comes to responding with compassion and empathy to a child who’s just lost her parents, Jemma can’t even seem to manage the human touch, much less a hug.

And it’s not like she’s weeping herself at the loss of her sister and brother-in-law. Talk about “robotic.”

Jemma’s real passion is a robot doll she and her team (Jan Van Epps and Brian Jordan Alvarez) have been secretly prepping for their robotics play-pal toy company. She’s even hidden “M.3.G.A.N.,” the “Model Three Generative Android,” from their deadline-obsessed/cost-conscious boss (Ronny Chieng, damned funny) who dismisses the prototype as a “cyborg puppet show” — at first.

But Jemma is hellbent on swinging for the fences, and realizes that the doll can be programmed to do a lot of things she’s too far down the Sheldon Cooper spectrum to manage — childcare, child instruction, and simply listening and paying attention.

A demonstration lets M3GAN show off her ability to learn from nine-year-old Cady, pick up on her unhappiness and both comfort her in her grief and distract her from her lonely, loveless misery.

But as the two are “paired,” Jemma’s level of control slips. And as we’ve heard “keep Cady from harm” is M3GAN’s prime directive, we can see what’s coming, even if clueless Jemma cannot.

In the later acts, the doll takes on standard double-jointed monster motion straight out of “The Ring” and scores of skittered, body-contorting menace imitations — really over-the-top stuff. But the best effects might be the simplest — a plastic-faced doll with human-eye shaped cameras silently following Cady and potential threats around her, judging and perhaps plotting.

The doll’s design might seem to be guided by the young actress cast to “play” her, Amie Donald. But to me she looks like Chloe Grace Moretz did when she first started turning up in films. And that’s just...creepy. Moretz could seem a little scary in her tweens. And she might have a good name-image-likeness licensing case, if she were to pursue one.

The movie’s jokes are fangirl and fanboy-friendly jabs at pop culture, tech-obsession and people’s shock at “meeting” this “toy” for the first time.

The frights are mostly jolts that come from the viewer realizing this or that deadly thing the doll can do and how it’s “learning” to do even more.

What a difference a few days makes.

If they’d released “Last Resort,” a clumsily-copied “Die Hard” knockoff, by Dec. 31, it might have made a few critics’ “Worst of the Year” list.

It’s badly-written and amateurishly-acted, so amateurishly that one feels sorry for much of the cast. Carpetbagging French filmmaker Jean-Marc Minéo, who works out of Thailand and whose resume has a whiff of Steven Segal about it, convinced his backers that they should film this clunker in English.

On top of all the recycled “Die Hard” plot points, viewers are forced to listen to performers phonetically sound-out their dialogue in not-quite-funny fractured English. Yes, they manage it better than you or I would be at speaking Thai, but come on.

“Wot de Hell you doin dere?” is about as good as it gets.

It’s an action vehicle for London-born actor/stunt-man Jon Foo, aka Jonathon Patrick Foo, co-star of the “Rush Hour” TV series of a few years back. He plays an “ex special forces” super-soldier whose wife (Julaluck Ismalone) is about to leave him. She’s at the bank, trying to close joint accounts with her daughter (Angelina Ismalone) when it is robbed.

The attackers are “Middle Eastern” which is “unfortunate,” a laughably apologetic bit of screenwriting. What, worried this won’t play in Dubai? The terrorists are led by some generic big American (Clayton Norcross). And there’s something that they want from the vault.

Only they can’t get in right away. It’ll take time. It’s a pity writer-director Minéo didn’t set this over Christmas. Then “Die Hard” screenwriters Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza could have sued him over it.

Our ex-special forces hero finally “gets up off the couch,” as his daughter puts it, turns off the public domain Popeye cartoons he’s watching, skips past police lines and starts interfering with the ninja-garbed villains’ evil plans in the banking high rise.

“My Dad is gonna come get me and you’re going to be in trouble!”

We’ve had months of hype for this AI robot doll turns murderous thriller.

Universal seems high on it. Let’s see what the deal is.

Legend has it that Clint Eastwood’s first move when accepting a script — as an actor or a director — is to go through it and slash extraneous dialogue, leaving just enough to have the story make sense.

It’s a simple vengeance quest, and aside from the Spirit Halloween store mustache he wears in the opening scene, Cage isn’t terrible in it. But. That. Script.

It’s as if screenwriter Carl. W. Lucas (“The Wave”) watched one Western, it was “True Grit,” and he decided everybody had to talk as much as Mattie Ross, but didn’t realize he’s no (novelist) Charles Portis.

This starts with the opening scene and carries on all the way to the epilogue, one character after another getting diarrhea of the mouth, monologuing, repeating himself or herself, as if the screenwriter was trying out lines that he was sure would mostly wind up on the cutting room floor — with the weakest words edited out. As they should have been.

“Your daddy about the meanest son of a bitch I ever met, pardon my language,” he declares. We get it. She gets it. But on he drones.

Lucas, who scripted a forgotten Justin Long action pic, “The Wave,” isn’t a screenwriter. He’s a Western cliche aggregator. And director Brett Donowho, who has been one of those trying to wring the last ounce of acting out of Bruce Willis (“Acts of Violence”), lets him get away with it.

That kid’s going to want revenge for that.

That simple quest, packaged in a 95 minute movie, takes forever to play out thanks to one eye-rolling Pause for a Monologue after another.

But next time, maybe he should take a little more responsibility for what’s being filmed. Maybe take on at least some semblance of Clint. Bring a Sharpie to that first read-through, and commence to editing right on the spot. Remind the lesser lights around you that the movie rule is, “Don’t tell us, SHOW us.”

Rating: R for violence

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Noah Le Gros, Kerry Knuppe, Nick Searcy, Abraham Benrubi and Clint Howard.

Credits: Directed by Brett Donowho, scripted by Carl W. Lucas. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:35

Every neighborhood has one, that perpetually prickly “You kids get off my lawn!” martinet. He lives, in his mind, in an ordered universe. And all the “idiots” around him, at work, at home and in life, are screwing that up.

“Codgers” is our most affectionate name for them.

Tom Hanks cannot help but play the soft side of just such a codger in “A Man Called Otto,” a maudlin, drawn-out to the point of “endless” remake of an Oscar-nominated international hit from Sweden a few years back.

Director Marc Forster eschews action (“World War Z”) for his “Kite Runner/Finding Neverland” sentimental side in a movie that is affecting, here and there, and resonates because sad, embittered loneliness is a universal curse of old age. As I pointed out in my review of the Swedish film, “A Man Called Ove, “the bitter have their reasons.”

But the previous film and the novel it is based on work in ways this sunnier, sappier Hollywood one simply can’t. The metaphor of a Swedish film about a lonely, suicidal widower who finds renewed purpose in the inept-at-home-ownership immigrants who move in across the street may translate. It’s the film’s suicide attempts that don’t land as dark comedy laughs this time.

The Swedes have a lot more experience with that sort of thing.

Otto is an exacting 60something who expects everybody to follow the rules, especially in the townhouse subdivision he’s lived much of his life. “Idiots” who can’t properly sort their recycling, won’t clean up after their dogs, who fling unwanted ad circulars on every lawn and treat this gated, parking-by-permit-only oasis the way people do these days — as if “rules” are for “other” people — get an earful from Otto.

We see him storm out of his retirement “send off” at the steel mill (Pittsburgh and Eastern Ohio were filming locations) in a huff and demand to “see the manager” at his local big box hardware store when they won’t sell him five feet of rope as “we sell it by the yard.”

The rope and the metal shackle he bought are needed at home. Otto testily shuts off his phone service and his electricity, bickers with the gas company, fetches his drill and mounts a hook on the ceiling of his living room. That’s where five feet of rope will become a noose.

He puts on his best suit, and…

As efficient and competent as he is about everything else, we’d expect this to go off without much of a hitch. But then these “idiots” who can’t back a U-Haul trailer into a parking space across the street distract him. And this kind of adult incompetence he cannot tolerate.

Marisol (Mariana Treviño) is pregnant, animated and Hispanic, chattering directions at hapless Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). Before he knows it, Otto is intervening in their sloppy parking job. And thanks to everything else these new renters don’t know how to do, or have the tools to do, Otto is drawn into their lives.

Marisol’s “Are you always this unfriendly?” falls on deaf ears. But her proffered Tupperware tubs of assorted Central and South American delicacies (she grew up all over) might wear him down. His longtime neighbors might still get the curt growls, and the developers intent on buying out this subdivision his rage.

Bubbly, talks-with-her-mouth-and-hands Marisol is harder to resist. Even when it comes to the stray cat that shows up. Not that Otto has been completely distracted from his main objective — ending this misery of a life.

They seem like such a nice couple. He’s strolling around the grounds of their gated subdivision in his robe on a chilly winter’s morning. She’s sleeping in.

When she wakes, she wants him to repeat a “lost at sea/remember why we made the journey together” toast he once made to her. He’s got her first cocktail of the day in hand, a mimosa from the looks of it.

They are from different parts of the world. He’s Middle Eastern. She’s Eastern European, perhaps Russian, and English is their common language. But Nijm and Irina plainly communicate in more physical ways, with or without alcohol erasing any inhibitions.

But within a few minutes, we figure out that they don’t actually belong here. This McMansion in suburban Chicago (Palatine, Ill.)? This open bar? That mink stole? “Borrowed.”

They are “Grasshoppers,” just another word for squatters of the “locust” family. They have the run of almost this entire neighborhood of second homes whose wealthy owners winter in warmer climes.

Writer-director Brad Bischoff’s debut feature is a day-in-the-life riff on squatting, class and class resentment, aspirations, love and “family.” It makes a compelling, compact showcase for stars Iva Gocheva and Saleh Bakri. They play lovers who happen to be alcoholic outlaws.

Over the course of the day, they drink their way around their corner of the world, breaking into houses, crashing a realtor’s “open house” and invited in by the few neighbors still around, who accept their improvised lies and casual chutzpah as evidence that they “belong.”

This couple, whose refer to each other as “husband” and “wife,” are co-dependent co-conspirators. He is something of a revolutionary, rudely muttering resentful insults at the “haves” that have what he never will, and more than their share of it, to boot. He might be right, but he’s quite the jerk about it, even to a realtor, a restaurant’s sommelier, a friendly customer or neighbor who bends over backwards to “be nice” and never quite patronizing.

She is talking about “family” and “the future,” in the way women in societies all over the world do. She might be pregnant. But sure, a chocolate martini would be great! Because there couldn’t be a “future” in living like this, and with this guy.

Oh, and that open house? What better way to stick it to the man than having sex in these absentee landowners’ bathroom?

Bischoff has grafted a “Days of Wine and Roses” romantic bender onto what is normally a more fraught “Homeless in America” story, with the geopolitics of migration and the unseemly accumulation of wealth by the tax-privileged rich as subtexts.

Bischoff has created a bracing first feature in which society’s designated losers mask their bitterness in contempt and their desperation in alcohol.

Bakri and Gocheva let us see the flawed logic and painful realizations that this couple are not “really THESE people,” the sorts who own multiple McMansions and decorate in the “a bit gaudy” style. And whatever dreams they harbor, they never will be.

The cleverness in the performances is that they never wholly repel us, but never exactly invite our sympathy and let us root for them either. Older viewers will cringe a little at what they’re doing. Younger ones, facing economically-limited futures, might wonder if they’d have Irina and Nimj’s nerve.

Rating: unrated, sex, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Saleh Bakri, Iva Gocheva

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brad Bischoff. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:20