Movie Nation

This “true story” looks unusual and arresting and authentic in casting and details. I’m totally there.

Nov. 18.

Yes, the headline is a rhetorical question. Because if there’s one thing the 50+ years since “Bullitt” has proven, it’s that most every big screen cop thriller has been in many if not most ways a remake of this Steve McQueen/Peter Yates classic.

We’ve had half a century of the “renegade” “outsider,” “goes his own way” cops, hunting for justice in a broken and/or corrupt system. There have been hundreds of films in which the cop hero drove a “car with character,” and any car buff or film fan knows what you mean when you say “Bullitt Mustang.” The “GT” is understood, the image iconic.

But let’s take that headline literally, shall we? Watching the film again for the umpteenth time last night, I gave it a hard, unsentimental pass for the first time in years.

The story — Lt. Frank Bullitt (McQueen) is tasked by his boss (the redoubtable Simon Oakland) to protect a mob witness (Felice Orlandi) expected to testify at hearings being held by an ambitious, self-important peacocking Congressman (Robert Vaughn).

The Chicago “Outfit” (Vic Tayback plays a mobster) “gets to” the witness, almost killing him. Bullitt and a sympathetic doctor (Georg Stanford Brown) conspire to hide him — dead or alive — to lure the bad guys (John Aprea and Bill Hickman, later a cop in “The French Connection”) into trying again.

Bullitt is followed, and this being his town, he turns the tables on the Dodge Charger-driving heavies and a chase ensues. More wrinkles in the plot unravel, but Bullitt — with dogged determination, the love of a beautiful woman (Jacqueline Bissett) and a wardrobe that became the quintessence of cool because Steve McQueen wore it — won’t be denied.

Truth be told, it’s a thriller that peaks with the epic car chase, and fizzles out afterwards. There’s a nice buildup, some terrific tone-and-setting scenes that show us San Francisco as the “cool” was about to give way to the hippies, turtle-necked hipsters in jazz clubs transitioning towards tie-dyed Deadheads in ballrooms or parks. And then that chase, the crashes at its climax, and the movie winds down, the tempo changing from cool jazz to smooth jazz.

As much as many a police procedural owes to this Yates film — he also did “Breaking Away” — and this formulaic Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner screenplay (based on Robert L. Fish’s novel “Mute Witness”), there’s a LOT of room for improvement. It’s a 90 minute thriller in a 114 minute package.

Some of the performances pop — McQueen, Vaughn and Oakland stand out. Many seem performed in the shadows. Robert Duvall gives away none of the “finest actor of his generation” glory that was to come, here playing a cab driver who leads Bullitt around town, checking out stops their “witness” made before turning himself in.

As a car nut and McQueen buff, I treat this film as a period piece any time I watch it these days. It’s a lovely, gritty San Francisco time capsule from the Golden Age of Muscle Cars. It’s not just the Mustang and the Dodge Charger with the 34 falling off hubcaps (apparently) that draw the eye, or the green VW Beetle they keep passing, the white GTO and white Austin Healey (my pick of the lot) they weave around or pass by repeatedly.

That’s always an economy that filmmakers whose movies become classics live to regret — using the same rented (or crew members) vehicles several times in shots over the course of the film. You don’t notice unless the film hits and people end up watching it over and over again over the years. Check out the driving scenes of Walter Hill’s “48 Hours.” You see the vintage Porsche that figures into the plot in random early traffic “filler” scenes. Stuff like that happens a lot.

Even “Bullit’s” iconic hill-hurtling race through the Streets of San Francisco, gold standard that it is, has been bested by any number of (mostly) European car chases in the ensuing decades — “French Connection” to “The Transporter” movies, “Ronin” to a good moment here and there in this Bond or Tom Cruise film or that “Fast/Furious” effort. “Bullitt” won the Oscar for editing, but largely because it was such a quantum leap ahead of filmed car chases that came before it.

“The French Connection” was the first film whose chase bettered it, and that was five years later and William Friedkin is a madman. So they had that going for them.

But yes, you could remake “Bullitt,” make it tighter although perhaps not more tense, jazz up the chase a bit or a lot. You’d have to set it somewhere more exotic and unusual, I dare say. New Orleans, post Katrina? Half-abandoned Detroit? Somewhere abroad that hasn’t been filmed to death?

But you’d still run up against that roadblock presented by the film’s star. McQueen was a master of acting with his eyes, doing less with more in a way that Eastwood and Cruise emulated but never could quite match, that Denzel has dabbled in more recently with some success. Lean and blond, he cut an angular figure in the film frame. And yes, he did many of his own stunts, something only Cruise can boast of today.

It’s hard to think of a modern star under 40 who embodies “cool” the way McQueen did then.

One of the many definitions of a “film classic” is a movie that cannot or should not ever be remade. Nobody ever has remade “Bullitt.” There was never a “limited series,” never a reboot.

Fifty years later and the closest anyone has ever come to that is simply stealing plot points here, an action beat there, and wishing that their leading man was a tenth as cool as Steve McQueen.

Rating: PG (violence)

Cast: Steven McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bissett, Simon Oakland, Vic Tayback, Norman Fell, Felice Orlandi, Georg Stanford Brown and Robert Duvall.

Credits: Directed by Peter Yates, scripted by Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner, based on a novel by Robert L. Fish.

What a dreadful bore “The Sleep Experiment” turns out to be.

A period piece thriller about a sleep deprivation study in Britain’s Porton Down government science park, it’s old fashioned and corny, bloody and — like life itself in more primitive times — “nasty, brutish and short.”

Writer-director John Farrelly takes a bit of lore about the secretive location and cooks up a tale of inmates recruited to go 30 days without sleep for a study tailor-made for disaster. Years later, a couple of cops (Barry John Kinsella and Anthony Murphy) talk the scientist in charge (Tom Kerrisk) to come in for “an interview” that will be, of course, an interrogation.

Tricky coppers. But the good doctor is a pyschologist and his “motives” were good. “Unethical” or not, pointless (my first thought) or not, these five “human guinea pigs” are locked up in a cell with books, food, a single toilet and a solitary sink.

These “volunteers,” who stood to have their sentences suspended, are an odd mix of “types” — the bullying Sean (Brian Moore), the “fish out of water” Eric (Steven Jess), the snide, canny and secretive Luke (Will Murphy), harder-to-pin down Patrick (Sam McGovern) and most dutiful diary keeper, the hulking elder of their ranks, Edward (Robert James Capel).

The idea is that we watch them meet, size each other up and crack up over time as they’re given orders via PA system — “Exercise begins now!” — manipulated in other ways, gassed with something that keeps them awake and monitored through a two-way mirror.

Farrelly fails to build suspense and tension in this ready-made pressure cooker situation. He turns the interrogation of the scientist in charge into something that the occasional threat and bit of shouting does nothing to animate the film. A couple of the characters are almost interesting, made somewhat less so by the perfunctory back stories given them.

The “explain it all” finale plays like something out of a 1940s B-movie.

And on and on it drones, with bloody meltdowns, inane crackups and flashes of savagery that never engage the viewer or come close to having a point.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence profanity

Cast: Brian Moore, Robert James Capel, Steven Jess, Sam McGovern, Will Murphy, Tom Kerrisk, Anthony Murphy and Barry John Kinsella

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Farrelly. A Red Water Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:21

This indie sci fi comic thriller is now streaming. Looks worth reviewing.

Yes, if it’s a holiday musical we expect Mr Funny or Die and his Canadian labradoodle to do their own singing, dammit.

Wait for it. Wait. Waiiiit.

Nov 11, in theaters, shortly thereafter on Apple TV+, not on that “Net” thingy everybody is bailing out of.

Nov. 18, the movie about the guy who figured Enzo’s high maintenance automotive penile implants could be bettered opens.

Mira Sorvino also stars. Love Grillo’s Chico Marx Italian!

Atsa mi SPORTS car! Mama Mia!

Wow, I did not see THAT coming. Or that. Or this other thing.

Shinzô Katayama’s “Missing” is a serial killer thriller that trips you up, bounces you around and repels and entertains you all along the way.

The assistant director of “Mother” doesn’t exactly play fair — shifting his narrative’s point of view, folding the story back in on its opening image, then cheating its way past it. But damn, it’s quite a ride.

A motherless middle school girl (Aoi Itô) has to come down to a shop where her father (Jirô Satô) has tried to skip out on a bill. He seems drunk, distracted, and we get the impression that this isn’t his first run-in with the Osaka PD. We also get the impression that whatever happened to his wife/her mother might be behind it.

Kaede gets Dad off with an “As you can see, my dad’s not all there” (in Japanese with English subtitles). But we’ve seen the film’s opening image. And thanks to the news, we know what some people do with hammers like the one her father is seen staggering around with, confused and upset, in that moment.

Kaede should be obsessing over that boy at school who is determined to be her middle school beau. But no, her father — reduced to day work jobs — is a mess. And then he disappears.

“Don’t look for me. I’m fine” was his last text message.

The cops want to know if Dad drinks, if he’s in debt? The wrecking yard where he supposedly showed up for day work has another man with his name on the clock, a young, boy-band skinny nail-biter. Is that a clue?

Why yes it is. But not one Kaede shares with the police. We heard Dad mention that he’d seen a guy who appeared on a sort of “Japan’s Most Wanted” TV show on the train, a skinny, brooding nail-biter.

With Mr. I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend in tow, and later with a concerned teacher, Kaede travels far and wide in suburban Osaka in search of her father, or the serial killer who might know what happened to him.

Katayama makes Kaede’s share of the story entertaining by showing us a brave, furious child out to find a father who doesn’t want to be found. If something happened to him, so be it. She’ll find this “No Name” killer, whom the cops have named (Hiroya Shimizu).

When she stumbles into him in an abandoned building, what does he do? Kill her, because, you know, that’s what serial killers do? No. He flees.

We get it. She’s a teenage girl. Terrifying.

I like the way the story sort of hands off responsibility for Kaede from one character to another. And then, just as we’re settling in for a quest, Katayama changes points of view. We start following Dad and see what he’s been up to and how all this ties together.

The violence in this second half of the narrative is more explicit, the reasons for it deeply rooted in Japanese culture and altogether grimmer. And every time we think we have a handle on who’s doing what to whom, and how that works in this murderous puzzle, another wrinkle is added.

It can be a little confusing as we shift back to “three months ago” and then “13 months ago,” tying everything together, climaxing with a masterfully-conceived game of real-time ping pong that has a whiff of cat and mouse about it.

Katayama — he also wrote and directed “Siblings of the Cape” — announces himself as a Japanese thriller director to watch with this. “Missing” leaves nothing out, no mysterious stone unturned, no surprise twist un-attempted and little to chance.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Jirô Satô, Aoi Itô and Hiroya Shimizu

Credits: Directed by Shinzô Katayama, scripted by Shinzô Katayama, Kazuhisa Kotera and Ryô Takada. A DarkStar release.

Running time: 2:03

Love this idea for a sequel. Love Amy Adams, Idina Menzel, James Marsden and Patrick Dempsey…and they added Maya Rudolph.

Loved “Enchanted.” Let’s how “Happily Ever After” goes off the rails.

Nov. 18.

“You Resemble Me” is a tale of two sisters, raised under abuse, cast out of their home and torn apart by The State.

A sometimes moving, always gripping story of a life on the streets, it’s also French account of how members of France’s immigrant communities — descendants of those who moved there from France’s many overseas colonies — become radicalized.

The directing debut of co-writer and star Dina Amer is a vivid portrait of the French underclass and one of the best movies to ever make us walk a mile in the shoes of someone we might not be able to identify with — someone radicalized — but who seems more relatable and understandable, the more time we spend with her.

Hasna and Mariam (Lorenza Grimaudo, Ilonna Grimaudo) could not be tighter. They’re about 9 and 6 when we meet them, adorable urchins who make their own fun together and run around, free range kids on the tourist-packed streets of Paris.

Their favorite game is their “You resemble me!” (in French with English subtitles), no “You resemble ME!” “You have the same MOUTH as me,” “You have the same BEAUTY marks as ME.”

They don’t have to dress alike for them to say it or for us to see it. But on Mariam’s birthday, they do dress alike. Somehow, streetwise Hasna has found them matching dresses.

Getting home, brother Yousef has other presents. But their celebration is cut short when they awaken their mother (Sana Sri) with the noise. Mom, who has four kids ranging in age from tween to toddler, hasn’t just forgotten Mariam’s birthday. She starts gathering up presents Yousef has given her.

“We could sell this in Morocco.”

She wants to know where Hasna got the money for the dresses, and wants whatever cash she has on her. And then she wants the dresses, which she is sure she could also sell in her native Morocco.

Mom is abusive, and plainly mentally ill. One near-brawl later, captured by a frenetic hand-held camera, Hasna and her inseparable sister are on the streets, stealing from the homeless, shoplifting food and sundries from street market vendors, keeping it together no matter how perilous their circumstances.

But the words “Have I ever let you down?” have barely crossed on Hasna’s lips when an irate vendor grabs them and they find themselves in child protective services.

And this time, they won’t be going home. They won’t be “placed” together. For “your own good,” they’re being separated.

“You took half of my life away!” the older sibling screams.

Placing Hasna with a wealthy French family doesn’t mollify her. When they insist on serving her pork at Christmas dinner, she’s back on the lam with her cowboy hat and a lifetime of brutally hard lessons ahead of her.

Years later, cowgirl-obsessed Hasna (director and co-writer Amer) is still on the streets, in the clubs, procuring drugs and using sex to pay for them, only living a “normal” life when she’s babysitting for an old friend, who lets her crash at her place.

She reaches out to her sister, but Mariam won’t answer the phone. Hasna tries to hold down a job, but her street life makes her recognizable and her short temper won’t let her keep it. Her story seems one insurmountable impasse after another.

Amer frames this personal saga with events closer to the present day, as adult Hasna narrates her gripes about being brought up French when the French won’t accept her and her kind as they are.

“Do the French think I’ve come to slit the throats of their wives and daughters?”

It’s a rhetorical question.

Amer’s brisk script keeps many of the ugliest events in Hansa’s life off camera. But we see enough to fear for her safety and fret over her more violent impulses. By the time she’s an adult, she is certainly tough enough to take care of herself even if she’s too unschooled for even the Army.

The child actresses have no trouble making themselves appear vulnerable, at risk and yet essentially happy, so long as they’re together. The adult Amer gives a searing portrait of just how lost someone who went through all this might be, how belligerent she is about insisting that others hear her story and what she’s survived.

Amer handles the action beats with skill — hand-held camera fights and chases — and does a great job of hiding the story’s revelations, stringing us along, pointing us this way when she knows things will go that way.

French police aren’t portrayed as racists here, even if they are sticklers about enforcing the country’s no hijab policy. And when Hasna and we first open the online “recruitment video” of an Islamic extremist relative, we see how it plays and how it might appeal to someone as disaffected as Hasna, even if we see the holes in its arguments.

“Our religion and their culture are not compatible.”

Perhaps so, we think. But as we’ve watched this troubling, engrossing and empathetically-rendered story unfold and noted its many way points, one can’t help but feel we and the filmmaker are as at a loss about what could be done to alter such life paths, and their outcomes, as France herself.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sexual situations, smoking, profanity

Cast: Dina Amer, Lorenza Grimaudo, Ilonna Grimaudo, Sana Sri, Agnès de Tyssandier and Alexandre Gonin

Credits: Directed by Dina Amer, scripted by Dina Amer and Omar Mullick. A Dedza release.

Running time: 1:31

Swinton is both mother and daughter in this ghost story from director Joanna Hogg, a real tour de force that could park her in the best actress field — or best supporting actress — depending on the breaks.

Dec. 2, from A24.