Movie Nation

Israeli actress turned director Hadas Ben Aroya continues her exploration of the love and sex lives of young Israeli Jews with “All Eyes Off Me,” her follow-up to “People That Are Not Me.”

Her debut feature explored the curiosity, longing and sexual thrill-seeking of a young woman unwilling to commit, unable to satisfy her urges in any way that doesn’t render every relationship “casual,” to the point where she adds strangers she’s just met to the ex and the new guy she keeps around as part time partners.

The new film follows three people whose interlocking love lives would make things terribly complicated if everyone know all about everyone else.

Ben Aroya tells us their stories in three episodes. In the first, bisexual and bedazzled Danny (Hadar Katz) makes her way into a party, somewhat dazed. She smiles, asks for “Max” and takes a break from her poking around from room to room to have a random, long makeout session with a woman who seems drunk enough to have decided this is how she will spend the evening.

But Danny eschews drink and lets a group of intimates know why. She’s just tested pregnant. So we can guess why she’s looking for Max.

Seeing him with another woman doesn’t throw her completely. That’s the vibe we get from this crowd — young, not committing to anyone, “exclusivity” or even a single gender. But when she finally gets Max (Leib Levin) alone, Danny can’t bring up the topic at hand. She finds herself deflecting by giving dating advice, which he seems to take.

Episode two is Max, all smitten with Avishag (Elisheva Weil), confessing his almost instant “love” for her and his attraction to men, as well, “but not ‘manly men,'” he hastens to add (in Hebrew with English subtitles). “Feminine ones.”

The vivacious Avishag rolls with this, and might even take it as a major selling point of this insatiable new lover. Avishag has been around enough to know what she likes, and she has very particular cravings in bed. She’d liked to be choked, choked like he’s serious. And she wouldn’t mind the occasional pre-orgasmic slap.

And the third episode gets at the consequences of those predilections, Avishag’s avoidance of her latest dalliance and eagerness for a next distraction, literally the first guy who comes along.

Ben Aroya tells these stories in long, slow and conversation-heavy takes, each episode a lingering, slowly-unfolding sequence with monologues and sexual encounters ranging from light and casual to heavy and revealing.

Danny’s revelation to friends at the party earns her a long discourse of how abortion is “granted” in Israel, the drawn-out physical and psychological pain of “the pills,” vs. the single-visit surgical options from women who know.

Max’s suggestion that he’s ready to dash into a weekend away with new love Avishag earns a lecture on rushing things from Danny.

Avishag’s pointed requests for sexual activities are noted and turn into “appointment” sex talk with Max, who has to “schedule” this in.

The film’s middle act is nude and sexually explicit enough that it takes over the film and narrow its interpretations. The third act seems a disheartening reaction to “taking things too far,” with no learning from the previous experience.

The “So, that’s it?” structure undercuts, somewhat, the promise of its title, that we’re seeing young people who need to be beyond judgement and scrutiny during their “I’m working this out” years of experimenting. That lowers the stakes and strips the pathos from the performances, flattening out the movie watching experience.

And the second act’s length and explicit nature suggest the filmmaker got lost in the particulars of filming intercourse and titillation and decided to make a primer on rough sex, Israeli style.

“Eyes Off Me” is more carnal than emotional or particularly psychological. But I guess Ben Aroya has her brand and she’s just going to stick with it.

Rating: unrated, sexually explicit

Cast: Hadar Katz, Leib Levin, Yoav Hayt and Elisheva Weil

Credits: Scripted and directed by Hadas Ben Aroya. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:28

Long before Nicol Williamson broke character and fight choreography the sacred vows of the theater and went after a co-star, mid-performance, in “I Hate Hamlet,” he had a reputation. Scary. Dangerous. Volatile. Did not give a f—.

I remember interviewing that co-star, Evan Handler, when Handler’s memoir “It’s Only Temporary” came out some years later. Handler quit the Broadway production on the spot, even though some corners of the press (the Brits) played down the incident with a prop sword as a “swat on the bottom.” Pressing him on the matter, Handler set me straight and gave one an appreciation of what terror it was, being on stage with a deranged and armed co-star in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Williamson, one of the most acclaimed British stage actors of his generation, was difficult on sets, theatrical and cinematic. He could be a bit of a loose cannon after hours. But he rarely got across that scary, psychotic, anger-mismanagement quality on screen.

Stumbling into the 1969 tour de force “The Reckoning,” there it all is. He’s downright alarming in this blunt instrument of a thriller. Williamson lets us see a man of violence who represses that violence as best he can, until that moment when his past demands that he “do something” when one of his own is wronged.

Williamson plays Michael “Mick” Marler, a raging, on-edge mid-level manager at an adding machine manufacturer that was too late getting into the computer game. He toxic testosterones his secretary and bullies subordinates, but saves his most intense “management” for his reserved, timid boss (Paul Rogers), whose path to the top Michael defends as if his own manhood is threatened.

“I couldn’t give a pennyworth of COLD TEA what you ‘feel,’ Mr. Berham!”

At home, he’s a drunken brute of a “paddywhacker,” a trait barely tolerated by his “English bitch” of a wife (Ann Bell). But the upper class minx lets lust be her guide when considering her mate’s rougher qualities.

Then Michael gets the phone call that makes him “Mick” again. His father up in Liverpool is on his deathbed. And no amount of reckless Jaguar driving will get him there on time. But he notices bruises under the old man’s ribs. No matter what the go-along-to-get-along Irish doctor (Godfrey Quigley) says, Mick can guess what’s happened.

Meeting with one of Da’s mates (J.G. Devlin) confirms it. And as old Cocky tells of that night at The Bricklayer’s Arms, of Mick’s dad singing mournful Irish ballads only to get beaten up by “Teddy Boys,” it’s plain that there’ll be no calling “the English PO-lice,” “the bogeys.” Something will have to be done, and it’ll be businessman/suburban estate gentleman Mick who’ll have to do it.

The neglected and abused elderly become avenging zombies in the German thriller “Old People,” a film with a clever hook, grisly details and a motivated, some would say justifiably so, “villain” class.

Writer-director Andy Fetscher’s depiction of the horrors of old age has its sad, universal truths, even if it uses them to trot us through the same old genre tropes, even if it stumbles from its initial premise.

In the opening tease, a fictional “present” a young, distracted elder-care nurse hangs up her phone, checks in on an aged client and is promptly murdered by him.

The implication is that this has been going on for some time, that seniors started turning into the “Living Dead” the previous summer in a rural nursing home visited in a long flashback that is the movie’s primary focus. Yet somehow, this front line worker in the present day’s social safety net is unaware of the threat that every home visit now carries with it.

That summer before, Ella (Melika Foroutan), her teen daughter (Bianca Nawrath) and younger son (Otto Emil Koch) return from Berlin to the rural hamlet where she grew up. They’re back because her sister (Maxine Kazis) is getting married.

Ella figures she and the kids will drive her dad to the wedding and reception, celebrate the ceremony and head back to the city. But sister Sanna notes “you haven’t called” or been back in quite a while. She doesn’t know Dad’s in a nursing home? Wait, the head nurse there (Anna Unterberger) turns out to be the woman Ella’s husband (Stephen Luca) left her for. How’d that hap…never mind.

Ella’s guilty neglect is all over her face as she visits the chillingly quiet Saalheim Home and sees the nearly catatonic residents there, the more active among them “restrained” in their beds. This Nurse Kim gives a “What can you do?” (in German with subtitles, or dubbed) and strikes us as a real piece of work. And she might be one of the “good” nurses there.

Because as the family dresses for the wedding, and Ella and Sanna’s silent father (Paul Faßnacht) is taken out for the evening, the impersonal cruelty of such warehouses for the very old becomes clear. They’re kept to a schedule, lightly taunted that they weren’t “invited” to the wedding festivities in this aged, dying village they’ve spent their entire lives in, but which they can hear across the way — until the windows are unceremoniously closed.

They snap. There’ll be no “happily ever after” for the newly-married couple or for Ella and her obviously-conflicted ex, who never wanted to leave this town. The mob may be old and largely quiet. But they’re motivated.

One way to get past that seasonal “holiday movie phobia” thing more than a few of us suffer from is to throw in some Italian-Americans, as writer-director Robert Tinnell does with “Feast of the Seven Fishes.”

Make it a period piece, nostalgic for the days when a lot of your relatives were World War II vets, and one was at D-Day.

Make’em cook, you know, the “seven fishes” of this Italian Catholic Christmas Eve dinner tradition — baccaloa, smelt, whiting, shrimp, oysters, eel and calamari.

Let’em grab each other by the neck, for hugs and brother-on-brother wrestling fights.

Give’em plenty of sassy banter, throw-away lines that are the garlic of any dishy Italian-American comedy.

“What am I, Kojak?”

“You’re an idiot. Not your fault. You take after Uncle Carmine’s side of the gene pool!”

“Very funny. Tell me when to laugh!”

A little wistful romance, a touch of leaving the cozy family nest, all set against a holiday feast — prepping for it, cooking it, bickering, chasing the womenfolk out of the kitchen — that’s a winning combo for a holiday rom-com.

It’s a holiday movie that gets better with every showing. No low-hanging comic fruit is left unplucked in this sentimental easy-going and at times adorable entry in the seasonal comedy onslaught.

“On Christmas Eve in this town, EVERYbody is Italian. Or thinks they are!”

Tony Oliverio (Skyler Gisondo of “Booksmart”) is college age, but stuck at home in Greentown, West Virginia (actually Rivesville and Fairmont, West Virginia). He’s a painter who works in the family meat market his parents run. No chance of accepting admission to a “pretty good art school” in Pittsburgh.

It’s 1983 and his big Italian family is one generation removed from working in the coal mines. They’ll never go for anything as seemingly frivolous as “art school.”

He’s just broken up with his girlfriend since elementary school, and Katie (Addison Timlin), isn’t taking it well.

Cousin Angelo (Andrew Schultz) reminds him that “the chicks that went away to college, the ones we NEVER get to see? They’re back…and horny for the holidays!” That’s how Tony meets Beth (winsome Madison Iseman of the “Goosebumps” movies), a pretty blonde coed who went straight from prep school to the Ivy League.

It being 1983, Beth is resisting her parents’ push toward making more concrete plans with rich preppie Prentice (Allen Williamson), who’d rather be skiing this holiday.

Beth and Prentice, or Beth and Tony? If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, right? Que sera sera and all that.

There’s a mouth-watering comic montage of fish cooking as Tony explains the day’s cuisine to Beth.

But a comedy like this lives or dies on its supporting characters and the supporting cast you get to play them, and “Feast of the Seven Fishes” has a terrific one. Sure, they’re playing “types” — the lazy great uncle, the lazy little brother, the grousing patriarch (Paul Ben-Victor of TV’s “Goliath,” shining in a rare comic turn), the gambling, hustling “businessman” brother, given a “Paisano!” twinkle by Joe Pantoliano.

The grumpy great-grandmother (Lynn Cohen) doesn’t approve of the pretty blonde non-Catholic. Beth, one and all agree — when they switch to Italian when talking about her in front of her — is a “Mangia-cake,” a cake-eater. Rich. And the Oliverios? “Not OUR kind of people” Beth’s mother reminds her.

Naturally, she’s dragged into the holiday feast, old men in their t-shirts peeling shrimp, stuffing calamari and frying baccaloa.

Naturally, everybody they know drops by, including Juke (Josh Helman), a bookish, bespectacled philosopher/psychoanalyst who just happens to be a mechanic.

“Feast of the Seven Fishes” has a little bit of every family holiday comedy about it, a touch of “Big Night” thanks to the food, and in this one character — Juke — a hint of “Diner.”

Most of the players have their moment or two, but none rings more true than Katie’s, a young woman devastated by her break-up, acting-out to try and win him back — adrift.

“I didn’t just lose Tony. I lost the whole family!”

I can’t stress enough how undemanding, easy-going, predictable and familiar this comedy is. Nor can I stress enough how well its tried-and-true ingredients blend, how much it feels grounded in a place and the people there.

Call “Feast of the Seven Fishes” what it is, Christmas comedy comfort food. And bring your appetite.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with a little fisticuffs, a little pot, a little profanity

Cast: Skyler Gisondo, Madison Iseman, Josh Helman, Paul Ben-Victor, Lynn Cohen, Addison Timlin, Jessica Darrow and Joe Pantoliano

Credits: Written and directed by Robert Tinnell. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:37

I don’t recognize the players here, but making the main effect a simple trick of eye color and the magical time travel gimmick a chrome colored pill is a novel B or C-movie approach.

Jan. 17, feast your eyes on “The Tomorrow Job.”

Sub-freezing temps and high winds covering much of North America are doing a number on the second weekend of “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

With a holiday weekend, decent word of mouth that’s kept the take high all week (It has the best Wednesday of 2022), one might have expected the super-expensive 20th Century/Disney release to come closer to matching its $134 million opening weekend. Nothing doing. It’s down about 60%, with a $55 million weekend, $82 million through Monday take, per Deadline.com.

“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” is seriously underperforming, as smart parents know better than to freeze their kids in this weather. A $3.8 million Friday (It opened Wed.) points to an $11 million or so weekend. Ouch.

“I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” the Whitney Houston bio-pic, is angling for a $6 million weekend, maybe as much as $10 million by midnight Monday.

“Babylon” opened wide this weekend, and this long-as-“Avatar” Hollywood history lesson will be lucky to make it to $3.5 million by Sunday night, $5 million by Monday night.

“Violent Night” is racking up another $3 million this weekend.

And “The Whale,” an Oscar contender opening wide-ish, cracks the top 10 with a $1 million or just under three day weekend opening.

“Luckiest Girl Alive” might be the best “Lifetime Original Movie” ever, certainly the best one of those Netflix has made.

Yes, that label is both descriptive — a film that has a female protagonist overcoming obstacles or some horrific event — and pejorative.

Lifetime Original Movies, even versions of them made for Netflix, are soapy and empowering and chatty. Rare is the genre outing that isn’t about a woman overcoming some monstrous thing a man or men in general have done to her.

Mila Kunis has her best dramatic role in years thanks to Jessica Knoll’s adaptation of her best-selling novel. And British TV director Mike Barker (“Broadchurch,” TV’s “Fargo”) manages an uneven film in which the trauma is palpable, the surprises deftly hidden and his star has the room to give a star turn.

Kunis plays New York glossy mag “trend” journalist Ani Fanelli, an editor-pleasing author of journalism “skanky” enough to “keep the lights on.”

Salacious listicles like “60 Handsfree Ways to Get Him Off” sell “The Women’s Bible,” and editor Lolo (Jennifer Beals, quite good) knows it. That’s why she’s trying to wrangle jobs for them both at the New York Times.

Ani is about to marry into money, and insists that the handsome Luke (Finn Wittrock) “knows all my secrets, and still loves me.” But Ani has a huge trauma in her past, something her interior monologues won’t let her forget. Registering for knives at a posh Manhattan cutlery emporium triggers her.

“Snap OUT of it, Psycho!” her inner voice tells her.

Whatever happened, happened at a prestigious private school in Pennsylvania. Whatever happened made national news. Whatever happened, Ani, who went by “Tiffani” back then, survived. And whatever happened, another survivor has built a publishing and activist career out of it, one in which he labeled Ani “complicit” in the crime.

Nearly two decades later, she may be six weeks from her dream marry-up wedding, which thrills her gauche “Real Housewives of PennyTucky” mother (Connie Britton, terrific) more than her. But all that ugliness is coming back into her life thanks to a persistent documentary filmmaker (Dalmar Abuzeid) who wants the “survivor who has never spoken out” to talk for his film. And even though he’s also talking to her chief tormenter, he’s full of assurances about not victimizing her again, “keeping her safe” in the film, which makes him either diabolically disingenuous, or laughably naive.

“Luckiest Girl Alive” is about all the juggling women must do — career, marriage, money — with trauma a whole new set of balls Ani must keep in the air as her interior monologues debate whether or not to do the documentary, whether or not to follow her husband-to-be to his new job in London and whether any of this will help her decide to confront the past.

“What’s the point of punching above your weight if you’re not fighting?”

You think you’ve gotten around to most every Western worth its spurs, the ones directed by the Four Masters of the genre; John Ford, Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway and Henry King.

You figure saddling up for the Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart collaborations, and even the more twisted takes on the genre by Nicholas Ray and surely you have Westerns covered.

And then somebody talks up “Warlock,” a title I’ve skipped by dozens of times, despite the cast of favorites and the colorful support.

It’s a “town tamer” tale with a heaping helping of “My Darling Clementine” about it. Warlock’s a town being bullied by murderous cattle thieves. Their deputy is chased off, humiliated. Let’s bring in the gunman Henry Fonda and, instead of a gambler/gunslinger played by Victor Mature, trade up for the great Anthony Quinn.

Instead of a Clementine, we’ll sub in the righteous, church-going mine heiress, played by Dolores Michaels, who sees something noble in the hard man who makes his living killing goons and the brutes who employ them.

This Edward Dmytryk film is a morally ambiguous Western, as one might expect from the director of “The Caine Mutiny” and “The Young Lions.” The town named Warlock might have summoned and hired a town tamer to be their marshal working “outside the law.” But they pay lip service to being conflicted over killing that comes at a terrible social cost and fails to solve the problems that simplistic thinking, to this very day, thinks it’s supposed to.

The aged, hobbled “judge” (Wallace Ford) rants about the dangers of such men, of “any man who sets himself above others,” above the law, above lives of those he’s allegedly protecting.

And Fonda’s veteran town-tamer Clay Blaisedell is experienced enough to know the life cycle of the job, when folks figure he’s gotten “too powerful,” which always happens when the big trouble is over, and ask him to leave.

Richard Widmark is a conflicted member of the “San Pablos” boys, a cattle operation out on dusty range and this film’s version of the Clanton family or its scores of genre imitators. They’re led by Abe McQuown (Tom Drake), a hard case fond of using numbers, lots of men with guns, to intimidate the town and run the old deputy out.

He’s also big on projecting. Nobody talks about “back shooters,” the lowest of the low in gunfighting, more than McQuown. Nobody’s quicker to resort to such deadly cheating. That makes him a law unto himself. What kind of man is he?

“Worse than he oughta be,” Johnny Gannon (Widmark) admits. “Gettin’ worse all the time.”

Johnny’s come to a fork in the road with this outfit. And even though his hotheaded kid brother (the famous comic and TV “Batman’s” Riddler Frank Gorshin) is remaining, Johnny opts to ask for the newly-open deputy job.

That sets him up in opposition to the new mercenary marshal, and gets the attention of the newcomer-to-town, the sometime prostitute Lily (Dorothy Malone, quite good). She’s a witness to the robbery and murder that sets this story in motion, and it turns out she’s been tracking Blaisedell and her ex-lover Morgan across the West, hunting for revenge and the man who might give it to her.

The promo photos and plot description make “Seoul Vibe” out to be a Korean “Fast and Furious” film. At the very least, we have a right to expect lots of action and wild car stunts performed by characters played by a good-looking young cast.

But call it a letdown, a not-quite-there-yet thriller or a 65 minute movie asleep in a 140 minute time-suck, any one of which give away that I think “It’s a bust.” The plot is dull, the pacing uneven and the get-aways, while decent, are mostly saved for the third act. So, wake me when you get to that, right?

A hot young driver, Dong-Wook (Yoo Ah-in) and his partner-in-car parts Joon-gi (Seong-wu Ong) are freshly home from arms-running in Saudi Arabia.”The best driver in the world” has dreams of Daytona and his hype-man pal dreams of going with him.

But no sooner have they landed at Gimpo Airport when they’re spotted by Men in Suits. They barely have time to reunite with their crew (Lee Kyoo-hyung, Park Ju-hyun, Go Kyung-Pyo) before Prosecutor Ahn (Oh Jung-se) shows up ready to arrest the lot of them.

“Priors,” you see.

It’s 1988, and Seoul is bracing for the Olympics. The country’s politics are the usual pre-or-post-attempted-coup mess, and Ahn wants them to get the goods on the corrupt goons keeping a disgraced leader well-financed. Madame Kang (Moon So-ri) and the amusingly “Dukes of Hazard” ranked General Lee (Kim Seong-gyoon) are into something that’s yielding lots of Yankee greenbacks. There’s this “ledger” that the prosecutor wants.

Go undercover, become drivers for their smuggling operation, get that ledger, and he’ll clear everybody’s record and hook up those with American racing dreams with visas.

That’ll entail passing a hairy (not really) cross-town driving test dreamed up by the villains, and keeping their motives secret from people who won’t hesitate to kill them if get wind of their plot.

Hyundais and other local rolling stock must be modified, all cars from that boxy era that produced the Nissan Skyline in Japan and K-Cars and Cavaliers and the ugliest Ford Mustangs in history in the U.S.

The drivers, Dong-wook’s biker-babe little sister (Park Ju-hyun) and others with dreams of being “spies” take on a mission wondering if Prosecutor Ahn will be there for them when the chips are down.

The profanity-peppered dialogue isn’t much, either in Korean with subtitles or dubbed into English.

“You think this is a movie? Cars don’t blow up that easily!”

Novel ways of getting cars on two wheels, physics-defying sequences in chases and dopey bits of out-smarting the armed and dangerous bad guys — who of course take a hostage — will figure into the action, which as I say, is weighted heavily towards the third act.

Which is entirely too late to justify the sleep inducing vibe this picture manages up to that point.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, torture, profanity

Cast: Yoo Ah-in, Lee Kyoo-hyung, Park Ju-hyun, Go Kyung-Pyo, Seong-wu Ong, Oh Jung-se, Kim Seong-gyoon and Moon So-ri

Credits: Directed by Hyeon-seong Moon, scripted by Sua Shin. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:20

The son of a clairvoyant joins an Icelandic gang in this Jan 9 release.