Movie Nation

A Mid December comic thriller.

Could be cute. And violent.

There’s no shouting and very little pleading in “Safe Place,” Croatian writer, director and star Juraj Lerotić’s debut feature.

That can be misleading, as the film is about a brother and his mother’s frantic efforts to keep a sibling and son, who has just tried to kill himself, from finishing the job. It’s a fraught 24 hours for all involved, with a depressed and perhaps schizophrenic patient who won’t stay in his hospital room and is compelled to make more sad-eyed confessions about hospital staff who “are going to kill me,” and the like, and family struggling to understand it and fighting indifference at every turn.

Lerotić casts a spell and serves up life lessons in a sort of parable about those who are ready to go and want to go, and the loved ones determined to stop them.

A long, static opening shot sees Bruno (Leroti) dash through a street scene of placid quiet, desperate to break the door open in a weathered high rise, more desperate to break down the door to brother Damir’s apartment after he does.

Damir (Goran Markovic) is bleeding from the wrist, and calm enough to be in a stupor. Bruno plunges into manic efforts to get an ambulance and impatient annoyance with the police who show up at the hospital, demanding that Bruno come back to the apartment — immediately — and explain why he busted doors and ask “Who cleaned up the blood?” as if they have any doubts that the glowering man on the gurney did this to himself. And then there’s the shockingly rude, unprofessional and disinterested psychotherapist who resents any questions about treatment or the medications he’s prescribing.

“You don’t trust us,” he smirks, in Croatian with English subtitles. And to Bruno and Damir’s mother (Snjezana Sinovcic Siskov) “You’re a strange woman.”

A couple of things we pick up almost in passing. Bruno is a screenwriter. And telling your brother, in a hospital bed with his wrist bandaged, that “You can only state lines I write for you to say,” is not something you’d expect to hear, not in the real world or the reality Lerotić presents here.

His film is partly autobiographical, and we can take it as an experiment in narrative or as an exercise in self-help, a way of letting himself and his mother off the hook for what they didn’t pick up on in Damir’s state of mind and a way of getting back at unconcerned, unhurried officials, healers and administrators who cannot see or make themselves care about what this event has done to everyone close to the person who attempted it.

Either way, “Safe Place” makes for a beautifully subtle portrayal of guilt, fear and grief, the stress a loved one’s actions bring to those who love them and the acknowledgement that whatever they could have done, odds are it probably wouldn’t have changed the course of history.

Rating: unrated, suicide as subject matter, smoking

Cast: Juraj Lerotić, Goran Markovic and Snjezana Sinovcic Siskov

Credits: Scripted and directed by Juraj Lerotić. A Pipser release.

Running time: 1:43

 The actor Rainn Wilson recently changed his name to Rainnfall Heat Wave Extreme Winter Wilson as a way of protesting America’s indifference to the growing climate crisis facing the planet.

Young activist Greta Thunberg has devoted her life to challenging world leaders to do something, inspiring millions to emulate her and earning the ire of climate change deniers and those who financially back them the world over.

So if Disney decides the hour is getting late and there’s no sense in sugar-coating an animated parable about our pigheadedness in the face of imminent peril, and serves up a generally humorless and heavy-handed cartoon about an environmental crisis like “Strange World,” they’re not going to get criticized by me for their intent.

The film’s stumbling unoriginality, cliched characters and joyless jokes that land like flops from a constipated greenhouse gassy cow, however earn every ounce of ire I can summon.

I didn’t realize the screenwriter and co-director wrote “Raya and the last Dragon,” which was also a bust in my book, and in a lot of the same ways. Like this, it was overloaded in representation, underwhelming in story and dialogue.

I couldn’t make out Dennis Quaid‘s cleverly-disguised voice in the trailer. There was a lot that hit me out of the blue about this one, because there’s been zero buzz for it. Disney knows what they have here. Talking it up won’t help. So they haven’t.

Quaid plays a legendary explorer from a fantasy civilization trapped in a valley, surrounded by high mountains that he and his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) attempt to conquer in the opening sequence.

But Jaeger Clade is hellbent on carrying on when things turn disastrous. And son Searcher decides to head back to backward Avalonia with the electrically-charged berries from the Pando plant (Hey, Disney owns Pandora now, too!) he’s just discovered, which can help Avalonia even more than finding out what’s “beyond the mountains.”

Dad Jaeger goes missing. Searcher comes home, marries (Gabrielle Union), has a son (Jaboukie Young-White) builds a thriving Pando plantation, which in the intervening years has revolutionized their world. Floating cars, airships, electric light, all thanks to energy berries from a plant they’ve become positively addicted to.

But the plants are dying, and the leader (Lucy Liu) is intent on going out beyond the edges of their world, beneath it even, to find out why. Events conspire to put everybody in Searcher’s life on that airship with him and her — stow-aways included — all of them wrapped-up in solving the mystery of why the plants they need to fuel their civilization are going away.

On the way, they find Searcher’s long lost dad, who hasn’t changed. Can son and father evolve, with the help of one’s wife and the other’s grandkid, and learn to accept each other and figure out the solution to the Big Problem they discover?

I mean, the kid’s got this world-building video game he’s great at, and that could help.

I’d quote some funny lines from “Strange World,” but honestly, I didn’t hear any. A cute and helpful underworld creature they nickname Splat is meant to provide sight gags. As is the family mutt. But nah. Nothing doing.

The animation isn’t bad, in a “shades of ‘Avatar'” sort of way. And the “message” comes through, loud and clear. Will little kids figure out the allegory? Not without Mom and Dad explaining it to them, I fear.

But as I stopped taking notes — not proud to admit that at some point I wrote in HUGE type a four-letter expletive that rhymes with “QUIT” all the way across my notebook page — I picked up on where the laughs really are in this animated environmental comedy.

It’s a movie that’s about our addiction to something that’s killing us, which the Koch Brothers and their minions have brainwashed a third of the country into pretending isn’t happening.

The folks triggered by anti-consumerist “Wall-E” are going to have coronaries over this.

It’s built around a family with A) an interracial couple that’s not shy about showing affection, two loving farmers raising a B) gay teenager whom they adore and wholly support and treat as normal because that’s what loving, intelligent people do.

Heck, they even have a three-legged dog.

And when they’re given information about something they’re doing that’s endangering civilization, they adapt and repent.

I dare say the belligerent runt who picked a fight with Disney in Florida this past year, and his mouth-breathing minions are going to lose their rhymes-with-quit over that. So there’s that.

The movie? Not one of Disney’s best. One of its weakest in many years, I’d say.

Rating: PG for action/peril and some thematic elements

Cast: The voices of Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Gabrielle Union, Lucy Liu and Jaboukie Young-White

Credits: Directed by Don Hal and Qui Nguyen, scripted by Qui Ngutyen. A Walt Disney Animation release.

Running time: 1:42

One of the bloodiest and most important struggles of World War II in the Pacific is given a loopy, ahistorical B-movie treatment with loopy, B-movie actors in “Battle for Saipan.“

It’s loosely based on the real-life “banzai charge” at the climax of the battle, when thousands of surviving Japanese troops charged vainly at Marine and Army positions, overrunning them at first but wiped-out, almost to the last man, eventually.

Writer-director Brandon Slagle (“Frost,””Crossbreed”) uses that fact for a fictional “last stand” story set in a military hospital, with doctors and nurses having to pick up weapons to fend off bayonets, machine guns and samurai swords.

Setting it in a hospital also allows Slagle to make his WWII movie coed, so that he could cast his muse — Devanny Pinn — something he does in every film of his I cared to look up. Isn’t that sweet?

The movie, filmed in Thailand, has Louis Mandylor as a major whose patrol is ambushed at the beginning of that July 7 Japanese counter-attack. Major Porter is from Staten Island, a fact that’s an endless bone of comical contention when he drags the one other survivor from his unit to the hospital, where Dr. Vic (Casper Van Dien) presides.

Vic is from Brooklyn. Staten Island might as well a Canadian province.

Porter is taken to “the general,” played by Jeff Fahey in full Col. Kurtz/”Apocalypse Now” mode. He’s sweaty, goateed, long-haired and drunk. And he’s supposedly in charge. Guess it’s up to the major to organize a defense.

“Do you hide beyond your scalpel and syringe of morphine all day?”

Everybody in the place, doctors, nurses to patients — including the guy we see lose his arm (graphically) in a surgery scene — has to fight for their lives as freshly-laundered Japanese infantry and officers infiltrate the place, generally in groups of two or three, making them easier to handle.

There’s no urgency to the situation. A Cold War era tank meant to be Japanese blows a hole in the building, and all the ward of patients and nurses can do is shrug and ask “What the hell was that?”

The fights are reasonably well-staged, with the odd ludicrous touch.

But this is weak directing of bad writing with a lot of actors — one of them apparently the director’s lady friend — getting a working vacation in Thailand for their trouble.

There are epic tales about this bloody battle waiting to be told. One, “Windtalkers,” was turned into a movie. Making this one up seems all the more pointless seeing as how poorly it turned out.

Rating: R for strong violence, bloody images and some language

Cast: Casper Van Dien, Louis Mandylor, Devanny Pinn, Jennifer Wenger, Natalia Nikolaeva, Randall J. Bacon and Jeff Fahey.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandon Slagle. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:33

So, a fantasy parable about a world of earth, wind, fire and water, things do different as to be “Elemental,” living together, mixing and mingling and eventually getting along?

Hard to get much of a bead on it based on this trailer.

The actor’s first duty in a movie that is plainly nobody’s idea of a “good choice” is to not let us know it’s her or his “only choice” or offer at the moment. Don’t embarrass yourself by looking bored or annoyed at being here.

And “Burn Notice” veteran Jeffrey Donovan, as the only real “name” in the cast of “R.I.P.D. 2,” manages that, more or less.

It’s a sequel nobody wanted, another outing with heavenly law enforcement officers commissioned to deal with the undead as their lot in the afterlife.

The mind-bogglingly dumb original 2013 film threw Oscar winner Jeff Bridges, Canadian national treasure Ryan Reynolds, Mary Louise Parker and Kevin Bacon at this concept, pairing up an Old West lawman (Bridges) with a modern dead cop (Reynolds) in modern day Boston.

It was a low point on the resumes of all involved.

But the accountants at Universal saw “intellectual property” where others only noticed the red ink, and decided to revisit the comic book they own the rights to for a straight-up Western from Hell sequel. Or prequel.

Sheriff Roy (Donovan) is murdered in the line of duty, just as his daughter’s about to marry. But after heavenly processing, he’s sent back as a member of the Rest in Peace Police Dept.

His partner? She’s a Medieval Frenchwoman named Jean (Penelope Mitchell) who is handy with a sword and knows her Bible. Wonder what her last name is?

Some hapless gold miner (Richard Brake) has dug a tad too deep in Utah, where Hell is uncomfortably close to the surface (we guessed as much). He’s rounding up legions of “deados” as minions and talking “New World Order.”

A cute touch. Our team cannot appear as themselves to mortal man or woman. Their avatars are a pair of nicely turned out African-American women (Rachel Adedeji and Evlyne Oyedokun). That makes for some amusingly awkward encounters, and a testy take down of a “No Colored Allowed” sign in one establishment.

The one-liners are of the “You got looser lip’s than a jawless mule” and that knot is “tighter’n a bull’s ass in fly season.”

Pardner.

Perhaps the best gag in the piece is dressing Sheriff Roy (The same character that Bridges plays in the other film? Making this a prequel?) in a brown leather jacket from the Studio 54 collection, complete with cape.

Worst gag? The idea that heaven has an armory, filled with gold plated pistols and multi-barrel “deado” shootin’ irons. That’s a firearm fetishist’s wet dream.

Jake Choi finds a grin here and there as a deado prisoner the duo take with them on their quest. Brake growls in that Old West heavy manner but is no one’s idea of a top drawer bad guy.

This is no credit to anybody involved, dull and dumb, badly directed from a really bad script the director took a co-writing credit on.

Leave this corpse buried.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Jeffrey Donovan, Rachel Adedeji, Penelope Mitchell, Jake Choi, Evlyne Oyedokun and Richard Brake.

Credits: Directed by Paul Leydon, scripted by Andrew Klein and Paul Leyden. based on the comic book. A Universal film release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:42

We’ve seen decades of boot camp movies over the decades, most taking their cue from 1957’s “The D.I.,” with Jack Webb playing the titular Marine Corps drill instructor. More recently, the bar was set by R. Lee Ermey in “Full Metal Jacket,” another D.I. charged with changing recruits into soldiers, no matter what their background, disposition or fitness for the job.

But we’ve never seen a version of this coming-of-age/making-of-a-soldier tale as seen through the eyes of a not-wholly-closeted gay man. Writer-director Elegance Bratton makes his semi-autobiographical drama “The Inspection” both a classic underdog-in-boot-camp story, and a blunt and unblinking look at a gay man’s experience in the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era, which ended in 2011.

Bratton and his alter ego, Newark recruit Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) lean into ugly tropes that opponents of gay enlistment trot out every time their bigotry gets the better of them. A just-effeminate-enough gay man putting himself in an all-male environment, living with and showering with his comrades in arms?

Let’s just say Bratton dares to put the “phobia” back in homophobia by some of what his protagonist experiences, does and dreams of doing in this world of testosterone and muscles.

Ellis is homeless when we meet him. He may have his gay “fam” as a support system, but they aren’t feeding, housing and caring for him or giving him options for taking care of himself.

At 25, he has to beg his estranged, disapproving prison guard mom (Gabrielle Union, wearing her mileage and her ferocity) for the paperwork that’ll let him join the military.

It’s 2005, near the post-9/11 peak of military activity, and lipstick-wearing Ellis wants to be a Marine.

Mom’s an embittered mess and cruelly-skeptical of how his “life style” will fit in the Corps.

“Come back” as “the son I gave BIRTH to,” she snaps, and that’s that.

Sure enough, the bullying starts on the bus ride to basic training. But Ellis shows his first hint of mettle when he sits next to a targeted recruit.

His on-base greeting (Parris Island is never named) is the cliched litany of yelling, spittle and intimidation from the two assistant drill instructors. Chief Gunnery Sgt. Laws (Bokeem Woodbine) is sparing in his shouting, but not in his threats.

“I will break you,” he promises one and all. “I HATE recruits. But I LOVE Marines.” He’s duty-bound and old school enough to do whatever it takes, above or below board, to weed out the weak from his Beloved Corps.

Woodbine gives Laws a temper that he controls, a cunning that he rarely gives away and a gaydar that is a little slow on the uptake. He praises the faintly fey “French” and his commitment, before finding his ready-made excuse for cutting him.

“The Inspection” thus sets up as the standard war-of-wills story, but with a generic boot camp “system” vs a culture willing to bend and modernize that system twist on that.

It’s fascinating, if perhaps a tad triggering for some old soldiers who can’t see how “this sort of thing” could happen, when of course it’s been happening all along.

Pope, of Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood” mini series, pays dividends as an actor who is both believably gay and convincingly fit, flinty and tough enough to stand up to grueling training and savage bullying.

Raúl Castillo plays a D.I. who makes an intriguing argument for finding the Marine inside the man, picking up on French’s determination, focus, loyalty to his comrades and intelligence. If Laws is willing to do what it takes to make the “sissy” wash out, French and Sgt. Rosales are willing to call him out about crossed-lines and “psychopath” behavior.

Speaking of bullying out of control, McCaul Lombardi is just as realistic as the anointed squad leader in the class, willing to mete out peer-punishment at the D.I.’s instigation to force French out.

But “The Inspection” is best appreciated as a showcase for Woodbine and Union, each taking her or his best big screen dramatic role in years and bringing it home in scene after scene. She almost quivers with contempt for her own child. Woodbine gives Laws the cocksureness of his own prejudices, certain that this less butch recruit won’t pass his every test.

They make Bratton’s film a metaphor for American ignorance faced-down with first-hand experience. He sets up the character to fail, even taunts us with the obvious traps society long-expected recruits like Ellis French or Elegance Bratton to fall into. He then transforms them into further tests for a homeless, desperate gay man who wants to change his future and serve his country as he does.

Bratton makes it not just believable but acceptable for Ellis to be seen as among “The Few, the Proud.” Because gay men, as this Marine Corps vet realizes, know a little something about “pride,” too.

Rating:  R for language throughout, sexual content, some nudity and violence.
Eman Esfand

Cast: Jeremy Pope, Bokeem Woodbine, Raúl Castillo, McCaul Lombardi.
Eman Esfandi and Gabrielle Union.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Elegance Bratton. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:35

One of the best films ever made about the Armenian Genocide tells the story of one of the first survivors to make it to America. It’s titled “Aurora’s Sunrise,” and it uses different media, bending film genres to relate one of the great tragedies of the 20th century through one woman’s plight.

Arshaluys Mardiginian, renamed “Aurora” when she came to America in 1918, met an American newspaperman who helped publicize her ordeal and the mass murder being carried out by the Ottoman Turks under the cover of World War I. Reporter Henry Gates ghost-wrote a serialized memoir from her accounts, got the interest of Hollywood, and put Mardiginian in a William Selig-produced film epic, “Auction of Souls, (Ravished Armenia)” that traveled America, raising money for Armenian orphans and a hoped-for independent Armenian state.

Here’s what Armenian director Inna Sahakyan and her crew of filmmakers and animators drew from to tell Mardiginian’s tale. Sahakyan includes snippets of the 20 surviving minutes of the 80 minute 1919 biographical thriller sometimes called “Ravished Armenia.” As little of that film survives, a crew went out and recreated silent black and white scenes from it with an actress (Anzehelika Hakobyan) portraying Aurora, who played herself in the movie of her odyssey back in 1919.

There’s also documentary footage of the late Arshaluys Mardiginian, from a long oral history interview she sat for in 1984.

And there’s gorgeous animation — what appears to be rotoscoped actors under-animated in front of lush, water-colorish backgrounds of 1910s Armenia, present day Syria, and America. It is narrated by actress Arpi Petrossian, who speaks in Aurora’s voice in monologues from her memoir about her ordeal.

Take the animated documentary “Waltz with Bashir,” throw in some of the multi-media technique of “Nuts!” and add a few more degrees of difficulty and you have an idea of what Sahakyan and her team have attempted and pulled off.

“Aurora’s Sunrise” is an often gorgeous and always extraordinary film relating one woman’s extraordinary ordeal.

In 1915, from the very start of the Ottoman Empire’s WWI alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary, 13 year-old Arshaluys notes her family being warned by a Kurdish shepherd that the Turks were rounding up Armenians all over the empire.

Her family — she had seven siblings — lived in a small town (Chmshkadzag), provided for by a father who kept silkworms and made, dyed and sold silk. The kids put on plays and had happy lives, right up to the moment the round-up of conscripts began.

Armenian men, including her father and brother, were forced into the army, en masse. In her telling, that set the stage for the mass evictions, “death march” and mass murders carried out shortly afterward by the Ottoman army. The men were dead or gone. Women and children were easily evicted by the Ottoman Army, which was challenged all over the Middle East by Arabs and the British, crushed by the Russians to the north, an army in which discipline and the chain of command had broken down.

At night, Arshaluys recalled (in Armenian with English subtitles), the soldiers marched these women and children to their deaths and “got drunk and laid hands of the girls” — scenes recreated here with black and white silent footage more graphic than what might have been filmed in 1919.

Arshaluys and her siblings were hounded, robbed and raped by bandits and repeatedly assaulted by Turkish troops, who tossed children overboard as they barge-shipped refugees down the corpse-littered Euphrates River.

Turks kidnapped and sold Arshaluys, and she was exploited even by Kurds who took her in after she escaped a harem. But eventually, she found sanctuary and passage (via revolutionary St. Petersburg) to America to “tell our story.”

She had a brother who had immigrated here earlier. But once in America, in addition to telling her story, she found herself exploited in different ways by that unscrupulous reporter.

It all makes for a moving and utterly fascinating narrative that folds in a war, grim accounts of what one refugee endures to survive it, and American media and early motion picture history into a narrative of a horrific genocide, which the Turks refuse to acknowledge committing to this very day.

It’s a bit difficult to tell what’s archival footage from the recreations here. The mix of media makes “Aurora’s Sunrise” more challenging than your typical Best International Feature Oscar entry. But let’s hope the Academy embraces that challenge and recognizes this brilliant achievement with a nomination.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Arshaluys Mardiganian, Anzhelika Hakobyan, with the voices of Arpi Petrossian, Ervin Amiryan, Sara Anjargolian and others.

Credits: Directed by Inna Sahakyan, scripted by Peter Liakhov, Kerstin Meyer-Beetz and Inna Sahakyan. A Cineuropa release.

Running time: 1:36

Seems like every time he reminds us of how good he is, Nic Cage goes right back to doing B-or-C pictures.

The wardrobe and (in one shot) fake mustache give this one away. Could be good. Maybe not. We’ll see.

(My review of the film, posted three months after this trailer, is here.)

Apologies to anyone at the roll-your-eyes “Here he goes again” stage of reading my familiar gripe, lament and rant about where too many thrillers come up short — pacing.

But here I go again.

“The Pay Day” is a a caper comedy of little action, low acting energy and almost non-existent wit. And every single one of those cringe-worthy shortcoming is connected to the snail’s pace which this indie outing commits to.

It’s disastrously slow — slow to start, slow to get down to business, with slow scenes, slow transitions to new scenes, slow line readings and indifferent editing that does nothing to correct the director’s timidity on the set.

Sam Bradford, mate, if you’ve never heard the phrase “Once again, but FASTER,” you should have. Pace is everything in a caper comedy. EVERYthing. And every single moment of this failure is like watching a fresco dry.

Kyla Frye and Sam Benjamin co-star and co-wrote this story of high stakes/zero-drama data theft. They plays characters who’re both after the same accounts from some firm that’s allegedly keeping the secret illegal stashes of Members of Parliament. She shoots him to prevent him from stealing the flash drive she’s just downloaded.

Could love be far behind?

It’s just that stupid, and never for one agonizing-as-it-plays-out minute lets you forget it.

We’ve seen Jennifer sacked from her office data management job because the boss can’t be asked for a raise. An anonymous phone call proposes a meeting with a cryptic “Anne Boleyn’s ruby slippers” recognition phrase.

Mr. Gates, played by the actor’s actor and Welles biographer Simon Callow, has a new gig for her. Her take?

“One percent of $500 million.” Yes, she can do the math. Can you?

She has to don a wig and fake her way past the lax and annoyingly chatty staff of the London office building where this takes place. And then she’s interrupted by a talky, chummy, over-familiar employee who won’t stop flirting and won’t take a hint that she needs “PRIV-acy,” as the Brits say it, to finish her “clean the server” work.

She’s doing this in a purloined office-maid’s vest, which he notes but doesn’t question. That’s because he wants that data, too. That’s how he gets shot.

Scene after lead-footed scene, with cops coming into the building after the shot is fired, an evacuation, etc., lacks any sense of urgency at all. Then there’s the woman who has never fired a gun barely registering shock at what she’s done, and a guy who acts as if a bleeding (barely) shoulder wound is no big deal continuing their struggles over a flash drive, flirting and passing out for “sex dreams” of the other.

It’s stunningly dumb. The acting is weak, another failing that the hapless editor fails to hide. And every sequence, every scene and every line is so flat and plays out so slowly that the stupid just stands out more.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Kyla Frye, Sam Benjamin and Simon Callow.

Credits: Directed by Sam Bradford, scripted by Sam Benjamin and Kyla Frye. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:33