Movie Nation

“Who’s a Good Boy?” is a Mexican variation on the “last guy to lose his virginity” teen sex comedy, one that takes its title from the label for guys who end up in “The Friend Zone,” aka being someone’s pet “dog.”

Director and co-writer Ihtzi Hurtado did the female classmates who switch bodies at the reunion romp “Crazy for Change” for Amazon. Which makes her an...interesting choice for this partially pigish boys-eye-view of high school, girls and sex.

Chema, the nickname of high school senior Jose Maria (Sebastian Dante), is a tall, awkward and lovelorn kid staring down his senior year with his best buds Hugo and Ruben (Diego Meléndez, Harold Azuara), plotting out his timeline — class Christmas party, class trip, applying to engineering schools.

But the closest thing he has for a love life is an online video of “beach girl,” which he masturbates to every chance he gets.

He’s too shy and inexperienced to ask anybody out, something we see him demonstrate in class to more than one classmate.

Eli? She (Luisa Guzmán Quintero) is into music, like him. They’ve been friends since childhood. They should totally apply together for that teen DJ job they see advertised in school. So. Sure.

But, you know, she’s his “cousin,” as everybody knows. And then he gets distracted when a school administrator assigned him to welcome and escort around, show the ropes to, a goddess from Acapulco, Claudia (Sirena Ortiz).

All Claudia has to do is show up in something revealing and let him take her around, then drive her to and from school, and buy her a coffee from a trendy chain because “I’ve seen influencers” drinking that, and he’s putty in her hands.

When she starts calling him “baby,” that seals it.

But we’ve seen how teachers and the same administrator who gave him this “show her the school” duties regard Chema. He’s a “softy,” a pushover, the guy others impose on and walk all over.

He won’t hear it, even when his pals finally get around to tell him he’s a “dog with an ‘o'” (in Spanish, subtitled or dubbed into English). Chema is fast becoming Claudia’s “pet.”

His semi-clueless friends aren’t the only giving him advice. There’s his “uncle” Jaime (Adrián Vásquez), a salty friend his Chema’s late father who “made him a promise” to look out for Chema, his little sister and their mother (Grettell Valdez). He’s always coming south from El Paso to “help out” and dispense something “I really really hate to” give — “advice.”

“If the broad comes in for a hug, say good-bye, son.”

The movie is about Chema ignoring all the advice and all the warning signs, trying everything he can to win the fair Claudia, and hilariously humiliating himself all along the way.

Well, maybe not “hilariously.”

Intriguing world building here, as you might expect. Starving artists are a fascinating self absorbed community, here peopled by believably cute eccentrics.

Judd Hirsch is the big name in the supporting cast. “Showing Up” shows up in late spring.

“Waking Up Dead” is an emotionally flatlining romantic dramedy that can’t decide if it would rather be a glib gloss of shallow actors and their shallow lives, or a glib gloss of the struggles that might be hidden beneath all that.

The attempts at humor come closer to the mark, but even they are undercut by drab acting, tepid jokes and pedestrian blocking, direction and editing. The fact that the lighter scenes are mostly music-free forces us to consider the impoverished nature of the production.

Gabriel Sousa plays Danny Maldonado, a hunky gay actor who’s cut a wide swath through Hollywood — sexually. He’s always cheated on his longtime beau Eddy (Caio Ara), hooking up at that gym, scrolling Grindr when he isn’t dodging creditor’s calls.

His professional frustrations might be embodied by that one time someone thinks she recognizes him on the street. She keeps ticking off credits, and he knows exactly who she’s talking about — a different Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American actor than him. He’s going crazy that there’s basically “one other Dominican actor in town,” and he’s the one who keeps getting the call-backs.

But at least casting people know how to buck a guy up. They remember roles.

“Everyone still talks about your arc as a narcoleptic rapist on ‘S.V.U.'”

“Epileptic rapist.”

Phyllis, his agent, sees him as “35” trying to pass for “in my 20s” and is ready to hang up and just give up.

And then, the house of cards, the illusion that is his “life,” comes crashing down around him. Eddy kicks him out, he resorts to house-sitting for friends who didn’t leave the place stocked, so he’s stuck arranging Grindr hook-ups who will “Send me an Uber” to get o deliver him, or who must show up with “Toilet paper and a snack.”

His life coach friend (Patricia McKenzie) struggles to help. This British ex-pat real estate agent (Judy Geeson of “To Sir With Love”) who used to act tries to buck him up, and fellow actress Ilana (Cody Renee Cameron) focuses on the positive.

It’s just that the work isn’t coming and the calls keep pouring in collection agents and from the sister “who raised me” (Angelic Zambrana) that their ex-junky mother is dying.

What’s a lad to do? Aside from swiping left or right, vaping a little weed and sharing some more blow?

A call telling him that the queen of soapy/sexy episode TV, Shonda Rhimes, wants him for a pilot comes just in time. Danny was ineptly trying to hang himself.

All he has to do is master the finer points of playing a pre-operation transgender surgeon with multiple lovers and he can turn it around, clean “up my life,” give back, “make some changes” and all that.

“Just don’t go into recovery,” his coke-sharing agent (ex porn star Traci Lords) quips. “It makes people boring.“

The flippant dialogue and running gags are what could carry the day here. Danny runs out of soap and shampoo at the place he’s house-sitting, and everybody wants to know why his cologne smells like “Cascade,””Palmolive” or “Ajax?”

“It’s DAWN!”

But the picture’s sharp turn towards shame, despair and “karma” punctures that balloon. Whatever truths are tapped into about broken people desperate to perform are lost in tearless cliches about difficult childhoods excusing destructive narcissism as adults.

The editor turned writer-director Terracino doesn’t have the budget to show much flair behind the camera. And the dialogue and plotting have a clumsiness that makes one wonder if the camera set-ups and blocking are indeed give-aways that we’re watching a student film.

“Waking Up Dead” is a bit better than that. And if the entire enterprise had been a dark comedy, it would certainly have played more smoothly and consistently, even if “hilariously” was always out of reach.

Rating: unrated, drug abuse, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Gabriel Sousa, Traci Lords, Angelic Zambrana, Judy Geeson, Caio Ara, Cody Renee Cameron, Patricia McKenzie

Credits: Scripted and directed by Terracino. A Breaking Glass release.

Running time: 1:17

Noirish thrillers aren’t wholly unknown in mainland China, but so few have been exported over the years that they’re still unicorns.

This is Xiaofeng Li‘s follow up to “Ash,” which covered similar genre territory. Jan 17, it’s available in the US.

A moment, if you please, for one last bow and sword-sweeping flourish from Antonio Banderas in the guise of perhaps his greatest screen creation, that swashbuckling catnip-to-the-kitties and the kiddies, Puss-in Boots.

The star of “Puss-in-Boots: The Last Wish” is so glorious in the part that I’d put the Most Special Spaniard right up there with Robin Williams as giving one of the finest vocal characterizations ever to grace an animated film.

“PRAaaaaaay for mercy from… Puss in Boots!”

With every verbal curlicue, every sexy growl, every rrrrrollled R, the man makes this Dreamworks version of the fairy tale figure a work of art and a tutorial in committing to the character with the best instrument in your acting tool kit — your voice. Banderas brings it in every scene, with every line, as if this is the audition that will make him. As if he wasn’t already a legend.

For his third outing as the the cavalier cat burglar, Banderas and a star-studded ensemble including Salma Hayek (Kitty Softpaws), Florence Pugh (Goldilocks), Oscar-winner Olivia Colman (Mama Bear), Ray Winstone (Papa Bear) and John Mulaney (plum on his thumb Jack Horner) fight with or help the cat cope with his fear of mortality, fear of commitment and ego as Puss stares death right in the face…and runs like a scaredy cat.

The film throws our hero into another epic “I LAUGH at death!” throw-down with a giant whose peace he disturbed with his latest self-celebratory fiesta. But his big finish doesn’t lead to another serving of his favorite dish, “gaassssssssssss-pacho.” Puss gets good and conked.

And the town veterinarian has some bad news for him. He’s used up all but one of his “nine lives.” He’s told to retire. But but… “A legend NEVER dies!” Or so he’s always believed.

When a sinister wolf (Wagner Moura, terrific) shows up in a hooded cloak, armed with scythes, Puss finds himself literally fighting for his life for perhaps the first time in his life.

He runs off to live out his days sans hat, sword and boots with a cat lady (Da’Vine Joy Ranolph, a hoot) and her ever-growing brood. The nameless outcast mutt (Harvey Guillén) who disguises himself as a cat just to have a home, only knows him by his Puss’s new name, Pickles. “Puss” must disappear forever, as he grows his beard, eats and eats, learns to use a litterbox and probably wishes the producers had bought the rights to “Memory” for him to sing.

When it comes to Byzantine scheming and plots, those ancient Eastern Roman Imperialists had nothing on the Japanese yakuza.

The back-stabbing, front-stabbing, neck-snapping, hit-man/hit-woman intrigues of the new thriller “Hell Dogs” bears that out. It’s a movie of huge, murderous gangs and undercover cops killing their way to the top of them, of betrayals and corrupt Christian cults tied to “far right American politics,” of drugs and prostitution and ivory smuggling and homoeroticism.

And if it doesn’t simply wear you out, it’s not for lack of trying. The opening act’s mountain of exposition, skipped-through backstory and tsunami of names of mobsters and molls and allegiances and complications are a LOT of clutter to plunge through, especially on a movie Netflix hasn’t gotten around to creating an English language soundtrack for.

Lots and lots of subtitles, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

It’s damned near impossible to figure out who is relating to whoever and wherever this unwieldy beast is set.

But focus on the performance of Jun’ichi Okada, who has aged out of his J-pop years into a properly grizzled screen samurai, cop or brawler who punches above his (modest) height. He is a riveting presence who holds this movie together when it is talking and back-storying us to death, just the guy you want to answer the question “Why?” near the end.

“You want the long or the short version?”

We meet him as an unassuming, muscular slob strolling into a rural chicken farm, identifying a former yakuza (Japanese mafia) killer named “Mad Dog.” He’s there to expose, confront and with a shrug, suggest “You must atone” for that tattooed body-count of kills inked onto his arm.

But the guy making this suggestion has a body-count tattoo, too. Mad Dog never knew what hit him.

It turns out this avenger’s name is Goro Idezutsi (Okada), and he used to be a cop nicknamed “G.I.” He’s long off the force, just a man wandering the land like a samurai, settling scores. An undercover unit’s chief (Yoshi Sakô) grabs him, shames him with “No cop has fallen lower than you,” and offers him a deal — a well-paid undercover job to infiltrate one of the country’s most mob-infested regions.

They’ve got computer personality read-outs on which young made mob man he’d be best suited to partner up with, Muro (Kentarô Sakaguchi). He’s to work his way into the elite squad of the Kozu family, the Hell Dogs. He will have to kill his way to the top by wiping out “The Expelled” (outcasts forming their own gang) and bringing down those top gangsters who have gotten cozy with the police.

As “Tak,” his undercover alias, he will mix and flatter and impress Pops, Bear, Nas-Teeth, Slick and others, working his way towards towards the runway-model slim pretty boy in charge, Toako, played by pop star/actor Miyavi.

And if Pops’ woman, Emiri (Mayu Matsuoka), takes a shine to him, he’ll just have to finesse his way around that, too.

It takes a good, long while for this narrative to weed through the early slaughter — a prologue that sets-up what is being avenged — and get to a point where it’s lean enough to grasp. But the charismatic Okada drags us along as we see double and triple crosses, mass murder and fights involving all sorts of ordnance — a 1935 Manville revolver shotgun, for instance, just the thing you want when you’ve become this or that boss’s bodyguard and they’ve wandered into an abandoned factory trap, with platoons of rival gangsters storming in, wearing face shields and rain slickers to keep from getting all splattered with blood as they shotgun everyone in sight.

“Hell Dogs” is a deep dive into yakuza genre thrillers, featuring locations Westerners never see (ruined bottling plants, etc), exotic, pimped wing-doored SUVs that Japan doesn’t export and police ethics (killing your way through a mob) not common in Western cinema and Western policing.

Writer-director Masato Harada (“Baragaki: Unbroken Samurai”) and his fight choreographers manage to up the ante, brawl after brawl, shootout after shoot-out. These escalate, sometimes in scale — sheer numbers — sometimes in simple shock-value and intensity. One involving a hit-woman made my jaw drop.

It’s not a film for the faint-hearted, with torture and yakuza finger-lopping and fights to the death so intimate we feel the high stakes and desperation.

But it’s also goofy. The gangsters speculate on Toake’s sexuality. I mean, who wouldn’t? But there’s no judgement here, because when you’re naked around other guys so much you’ve memorized their full body tattoos, who knows who swings which way? You’d be surprised. You will be surprised.

Mobsters, as in accurate depictions of their “class” in other countries, are seen as gauche, callous and stupidly careless. One higher-up makes his karaoke choices straight out of the Andrea Bocelli songbook. Another drags his wife onstage to duet the workers of the worlds anthem, “L’Internationale.” Damned commie. Probably Chinese. These yakuza have their fingers in lots of countries and all sorts of illicit trade.

“Hell Dogs,” whose full title is “Hell Dogs: In the House of Bamboo,” is a lot to take in and a movie that takes too long to give us our bearings.

But our tour guide through it all is the dogged, scowling, undeterred Tak, aka “G.I.,” a hard man with a secret inside of a ploy buried behind a bigger secret. Okada’s violent world-weariness in the part makes this guy the only one who, in mid-slaughter, can give anybody on screen or off, the answer to “why” all this is going on.

“You want the long or the short version?” Let’s take the long one and see how often it makes our jaws drop.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Cast:Junichi Okada, Kentaro Sakaguchi, Mayu Matsuoka, Miyavi and Yoshi Sakô

Credits: Scripted and directed by Masato Harada, based on a novel by Akio Fukamachi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:18

The early 20th century Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig has had a pretty good run when it comes to adaptations of his work into film.

His novella, “Letter from an Unknown Woman” became one of the great screen romances and one of the loveliest films ever shot in black and white thanks to Max Ophüls’ 1948 treatment. Scores of his books and stories have become films, his play “Volpone” has been filmed several times, and Wes Anderson gave him a deserved “inspired by” credit for his glorious “Grand Budapest Hotel.”

When you write compact, moving and atmospheric novels filled with pithy dialogue, filmmakers will beat a path your door.

His symbolic and moving psychological drama “Chess: A Novel” was filmed as “Chess Story,” titled “The Royal Game” when it was released in Europe. It’s a showcase of the film-friendly glory that was Zweig, a lush period piece about Vienna as the Nazis takeover, a cryptic story of money, character, guilt and chess. And as our hero, the Viennese Dr. Bartok lets us hear, it is damned quotable.

“As long as Vienna keeps dancing, the world can’t end,” he purrs in (subtitled) German to his wife, Anne, on the ballroom dance floor. “Vienna survived the Turks. It’ll survive the Germans.”

Dr. Bartok, played by Oliver Massuci of “Look Who’s Back,” a Hitler-mocking comedy, and a member of the “Fantastic Beasts” universe, is a rich, entitled man headed for a great fall. But even after all he goes through, he retains his wit.

“You must be either very proud or very wealthy,” a stranger wonders.

“I used to be both.”

The framing device is an ocean voyage, passengers boarding a liner from Rotterdam, bound for America. A shellshocked Bartok meets his loving wife (Birgit Minichmayr) as they’re about to clear customs. She prattles on but he has a hard time summoning anything to say.

“How was it ‘back then?'” he asks, and she reassures him of the glories of pre-war Vienna. Their fellow passengers appear to be swells, the “dress for dinner” type. But in their spartan cabin, Josef, traveling under the name “Max,” is taken back to 1938, the day of The Anschluss.

Josef’s newspaper headlines a call for everyone to vote “No” on the referendum to be held that week on merger with Germany. He and Anne dress for a gala, but the drive to the grand ballroom is fraught as their Mercedes limo is surrounded by torch carrying, marching Nazis, screaming their contempt at the rich, a rabble who needs “someone to blame for their hunger,” Josef notes.

But surely they’re not the majority. Surely Austria won’t vote…

Bartok’s friends and associates that night all call him by his nickname, “The Notary,” as he and his circle of peers — many Jewish, it is implied — joke about the Nazi regime and its leaders.

But one friend (Lukas Miko) warns him of the dire things to come, and within hours. “The Notary” is in the act of burning his papers when he is taken.

We learn what that nickname means when the urbane, well-dressed goon (Albrecht Schuch) takes him into custody at Vienna’s finest hotel, with Bartok still in his formal wear.

The good doctor is an asset manager, the son another of such advisor/investor. The fortunes of Vienna’s most fortunate are in secret accounts abroad in his care, and only Bartok can tell the Germans how to get to them.

Meanwhile, on the ship, Bartok as “Max” is making a scene, drinking too much and interfering in a series of speed-chess matches with the “world champion,” a bearded, disheveled and illiterate mute from Hungary, his manager insists. Somehow Bartok, who once dismissed the game his interrogator asked him about as “a pastime of bored Prussian generals,” found the time to master it.

“Chess Story” is how that came to be, and how it will figure into this voyage.

“Chess Story” was directed by Philipp Stölzl, the Bavarian filmmaker known for such period pieces as “North Face” and “Young Goethe.” He was entrusted with turning Noah Gordon’s popular novel of Medieval Europe and a medically curious young Westerner who poses as a Jew to study at the feet of a famed Persian physician, and made a gorgeous Ben Kingsley/Stellan Skarsgaard showcase, “The Physician” out of it. This story is in safe if not exactly the most-celebrated hands.

Here, he and screenwriter Eldar Grigorian maintain a disorienting sense of mystery as to what’s really going on. Bartok is kept in that Hotel forever. The later sea voyage seems oddly out of time, literally so, as Bartok seeks clocks spinning backwards.

And the chess that he loses himself in is as much a mark of madness — in melodramas like this — as it is genius.

Masucci cagily plays Bartok as a broken man with flashes of sentient outrage in the shipboard scenes, and as a man of principles and stubborn loyalty in the flashbacks, not quite haughty, but someone used to dismissing lesser lights that trouble him, with or without those damned armbands.

The novelist Zweig isn’t necessarily parked on some pedestal of great 20th century literature, but he produced cleverly-plotted entertainments populated by flawed romantic heroes and heroines.

That’s what “Chess Story” is, mournful and just cryptic enough to leave you guessing what you just saw, but touched, engaged and intrigued by it, comfortable in realizing that over-explaining is not necessary and would spoil some of the fun.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex

Cast: Oliver Masucci, Birgit Minichmayr, Albrecht Schuch, Lukas Miko and Rolf Lassgård

Credits: Directed by Philipp Stölzl, scripted by Eldar Grigorian, based on a novel by Stefan Zweig. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:52

All those small to practically cut-out-of-the-film sized roles Nolan gave to Cillian Murphy pay off for the “Peaky Blinders” star in his chance to headline a blockbuster torn from the pages of history.

This is the trailer attached to “Avatar: The Way of Water” showings.

Very impressive, and in my mind at least, exactly the sort of film Nolan should fill the rest of his career with.

Summer release.

I love the voice acting in these kid comedies. Banderas really REALLY brings it. I mean, Oscar worthy voice acting.

Salma and Ray Winstone SINGS and Florence Pugh and Oscar winner Olivia Colman and John Mulaney and Da’Vine Joy Randolph flesh out the voice cast.

Good times. Opens Friday

Vietnamese American filmmaker Victor Vu has made dramas that Vietnam has submitted as Best International Feature Oscar contenders — “Dreamy Eyes” and “Yellow Flowers on the Green Grass.”

But his latest is a straight-up B-movie, a sci-fi action pic about what happens after a Vietnamese surgeon-researcher masters the tricky business of head transplants. Its Vietnamese title is “Lôi Báo,” but for North American import, they cut straight to the point — “Head Rush.”

And you thought Switzerland was famous for its cheese.

It’s a somewhat slack thriller notable for the novelty of its locations and some top drawer fight choreography. Veteran stuntman Vincent Wang made his mark in “Bourne” films before choreographing the action in films such as “The Great Wall” and “Now You See Me 2.”

The story? Well, it’s got comic books, comic book movie action, rich villains who want to live longer, a femme fatale and super-secret head transplants managed on what look like stripped-down tanning beds.

Tam, played by the Costanza-named Cuong Seven (“Tracer,” “The Immortal”), is an aspiring graphic novelist working on a super hero fantasy as his wife Linh (Tran Thi Nha Phuong) keeps him and their son Bu afloat running a coffee shop. His helpful Uncle Ma (Hoang Son) is always around to offer advice and literary criticism.

But we can’t help but notice Tam’s operatic cough. And what’s an operatic cough mean in the first act? In operas, it’s usually tuberculosis. In infamously cigarette-crazed Vietnam, it means “lung cancer,” even if “I’m not even 30 years old,” though we never see Tam or anybody else lighting up

Our hero’s prognosis is dire, and he races through Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief in death-and-dying, lashing out at Linh, madly trying to finish up his years-in-the-making book. But Uncle Ma offers a second opinion. Visiting his little farm and its greenhouses, Tam is shown secret beds that “are for growing humans, not just strawberries.” Uncle Ma has been doing transplant research.

Tam would rather run into the woods and hang himself, but as Uncle Ma finds him in the forest just as he’s failed, a gang shoot-out and chase stumbles by. And what does that provide? A handy fresh corpse, a brawling brute we learn is called Nghia (Vu Tuan Viet).

Next thing we know, Tam is wearing a lot of turtlenecks — to cover the gruesome scar, y’see — and has the strength to lift cars off of crash victims, parkour up the sides of buildings to rescue fire victims and punch out purse snatchers.

His kid figures dad is a new superhero

But there are memories of people as well as physical training in his new body’s cells, Uncle Ma theorizes. And those folks from that body’s past see the dude in the news and start to wonder if their old quarry Nghia has survived his shooting and had plastic surgery.

The action beats here are fun, with wirework backflips, “bullet-time” slow motion and epic gunplay, fisticuffs and knife fights thrown into the mix.

Vu includes sequences that play out wild and wacky action from Tam’s comic-book-in-progress, and there’s even a mythic action fantasy sequence that’s animated as a story Linh relates to their little boy at bedtime.

But there’s no getting around how dopey this all is, right down to the B-movie cliches that make up much of the dialogue.

“Come down and PLAY,” a henchman taunts our hero, as every hoary thriller trope save for tying his wife to the railroad tracks is trotted out.

The picture practically stops in its tracks as the middle acts limit our action to a lot of talk and a few acts of minor derring do.

With a movie like “Head Rush,” you come for the action, but usually you hope for the cheese that comes with it to be a little better than this.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Cuong Seven, Tran Thi Nha Phuong, Hoang Son, Ngoc Anh Vu, Vu Tuan Viet and Quach Ngoc Ngoan

Credits: Directed by Victor Vu, scripted by Doan Nhat Nam, Kay Nguyen and Victor Vu. A Glass House release.

Running time: 1:47