Movie Nation

This, my friends, is the way to walk off into the action hero sunset.

Jean-Claude Van Damme, kicking ass and doing splits, donning disguises and having a few laughs at his own expense. Pontificating like a pugilist/prophet, a sage for the ages.

“He who wants to approach a lion should look like a gazelle.” “If a beard endowed wisdom, then all goats would be prophets.”

And “The Mist…it can be seen, but it’s impossible to CATCH it!”

That’s his character’s code name in “The Last Mercenary,” the funniest French action romp in ages, a laugh-out-loud farce filled with “Wow, the old guy can still DO that?” fights and stunts.

Brawls in bathroom stalls, a chase in a driving school Suzuki econobox, a dash through Paris on a rented Cityscooter in tidy whiteys — OK, a supporting player handles that — “Last Mercenary” is the sort of lark that a lot films in this genre try to be. But everybody involved in director David Charhon’s overlong skip-along the silly side is up to the task, doing it “old school” (in French with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

JCVD is the title character — ancient, mysterious and not photographed since middle school, a “James Bond” who has been off the books for decades until he pops back into Paris on urgent business.

There’s this entitled Middle Eastern prince (Nassim Lyes) who’s leading police on chases, singing along to the disco on his antique gullwing Mercedes 300, doing drugs and barking his best Tony Montana impersonation, because “Scarface” is more of a documentary to him than a fictional (remake) character. And he can’t be prosecuted because he has “full immunity.”

Richard Brumere, aka “The Mist” (JCVD) is the one who guaranteed that immunity. But it was for his son, a hapless, directionless 25 year old named Archibald Al Mamoud (Samir Decazza), a kid his father left in the care of a brother agent. The prince has been given his identity and “immunity for life” by some corrupt member of the government.

Now, that immunity has been pulled, the kid is just “a mess from the ’90s” to be “cleaned up.” Only the intervention of his unknown Dad can save him.

There’s this EMP gadget called “Big Mac” that is about to fall into the wrong hands, and The Mist has to save his son, clear his name, foil the Big Mac sale and expose the corrupt. And he’s got to do it wearing every kilometer of Van Damme’s high-mileage body and beautiful Belgian face.

The Mist gets unwelcome “help” from “Archie’s” friend Dalila (Assa Sylla, an Afro-French spitfire) and her hulking stoner brother Momo (Djimo).

And there’s this out-of-his-depth bureaucrat (Alban Ivanov) who might not be so dumb that he’s willing to be the designated patsy when all this goes sideways. He’s the one who loved tidy whiteys, and he’s hilarious.

The set pieces are action-packed stunners played for MAXIMUM giggles. That Suzuki driver’s ed car is chased by assorted cop cars and vengeful agents in a Dodge Challenger, a sprint at high speed and in slo-mo, with The Mist “driving” from the instructor’s side because his kid never learned to drive and freezes at the steering wheel. It’s set to Blondie’s “One Way or Another.”

The fights are cleverly photographed, and as much fun as Van Damme has with disguises — janitor, swim instructor, waiter, driving instructor and hooker — he has even more showing off those freaking splits he can still do, only now for jaw-dropping comic effect.

Van Damme is in on the joke, and never for a second lets us see that he’s in on it. That’s what’s the most fun about “The Last Mercenary.”

If only Arnold and Sly, Bruce and Wesley and Jackie and Mel and Jason were taking notes. This is how you want your past-your-prime action years to pass, with a punch and a laugh.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence and lots of it, profanity — ditto.

Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Samir Decazza, Assa Sylla, Djimo,
Alban Ivanov, Patrick Timsit, Eric Judor and Nassim Lyes.

Credits: Directed by David Charhon, script by David Charhon and Ismaël Sy Savané. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

The tug of the old life struggles with the promise of the new in “Nakom,” a neorealist Ghanian drama made by a couple of American filmmakers.

The debut feature of co-directors Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman may tell a classic “How’ll you keep’em down on the farm after they’ve seen the lights of the big city?” tale. But the details they include and the surprising places they take it make it a novel and richly-rewarding film experience.

Iddrisu, played by Jacob Ayanaba, is a smart 20something college student thriving in teeming Kumasi. He’s acing his classes, even has a city girlfriend. And then his sister calls. Their father has died.

“Come back to Nakom.”

Iddrisi is the eldest, the favored son who got to go away to college. Returning to his village he gets a quick lesson in what it took to put him in that position, and what is expected of him now.

Dad went into debt with his brother, Uncle Napoleon (Thomas Kulidu), a reasonable man with many cows. But he expects to be reimbursed for the bull he sold to finance his nephew’s education.

There’s an extended family led by Senior Mother (Justina Kulidu) who welcome him back and insist “The house is yours, now.”

But the house is just a big hut. There’s no running water, no in-house electricity. His next-oldest brother Kamal (Abdul Aziz) is an embittered layabout. His smart little sister Damata (Grace Ayariga) would love to go to college, but grimly faces a future of being “married off to one of these village boys.” Littlest brother Hassan is already skipping school, doomed to be trapped here if no adult takes on the job of riding his lazy behind.

There’s a much younger “junior mother” (Shetu Musah), as African-Islamic polygamy is practiced here. And that creates all sorts of tensions in the mourning ritual.

They’ve also taken in teen Fatima (Esther Issaca), the granddaughter of Uncle Napoleon. She’s treated as a servant.

And there was a drought the previous year. Will later, shorter rainy seasons thanks to climate change let them grow enough onions and millet to get by, pay their debts and keep Iddrisa in school?

Oh, and then there’s the Christian first love (Felicia Atampuri) he left behind when he left for college.

That stricken look permanently painted across Iddrisu’s face isn’t just from mourning. He’s overwhelmed, despairing of ever getting back to his “life.”

His “I’ll leave it to the women” to get this place on its feet is a delusion.

“Is it only you, or are all men this blind?”

His uncle’s nagging “Don’t disappoint me,” his mother is badgering him “Who will watch over this house?” The sage Chief (James Azure) has practical advice, but a tendency to speak in homilies.

“They say when a man dances, the drums are beating for him.”

What is a college lad with dreams of med school to do?

The script teases out little victories in Issidru’s “dream deferred” life. He’s in a college of science, so he knows that the soil is played out. He listened to his father’s advice on planting, waiting for the rains to begin in earnest before putting seed in the ground.

And he’s got a cell phone and a bicycle. He can track the best prices for the family’s onion crop, and is willing to take on “women’s work,” pedaling hither and yon (even over the border into Togo) to get the most money for their efforts.

But this myopic, circumscribed life, with its petty squabbles, personal melodramas, limited horizons and shorter life span, isn’t “calling him home.” Is there a way out of his trap that won’t bring shame and ruin on them all?

The dialogue — in English and Kusaal with English subtitles — carries layers of meaning beyond the story’s simple plot points and messaging, which is as plain as the pained look on Ayanaba’s expressive face.

“It is always for men to decide things,” Damata sighs, a family dominated and maintained by women but dependent on the labors, decisions and caprices of its men.

Filmmakers Norris and Pittman refuse to sentimentalize this story. Recognizing the sacrifices his family made for him to go to college doesn’t guarantee Iddrisu will take the accepted, “noble” path laid out for him here. But will he?

That quandary lets “Nakom” engage the viewer on a lot of levels, an exotic tale set in a seldom-filmed milieu but with pressures, obligations and decisions that are a universal rite of passage.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jacob Ayanaba, Grace Ayariga, Justina Kulidu, Shetu Musah, Abdul Aziz,
Felicia Atampuri, Thomas Kulidu and James Azure

Credits: Directed by Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman, script by T.W. Pittman and (dialogue) Isaac Adakudugu. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:30

In the late 1950s, the golden age of the TV Western, Sam Peckinpah was a TV writer and sometime director whose scriptsstood out thanks to their hard, unconventional and unsentimental edge.

In 1960-61, the future director of “Ride the High Country,” “The Wild Bunch” and “The Getaway” parlayed that limited notoriety, and his association with rising star Brian Keith (Peckinpah wrote five episodes of Keith’s “Westerner” series) into his first shot at making a feature film.

“The Deadly Companions” is a Western quest tale, a dark and unsentimental spin on the John Ford/John Wayne fable “3 Godfathers” about desperadoes who care for an infant they stumble across on the run, a film which came out over a dozen before. Watching it, you can see the cantankerous Peckinpah poking The Old Master right in the eye more than once.

In an early church scene, set in a saloon that doubles as tiny Gila City’s house of worship, the congregation is rushed through “Rock of Ages,” the sort of hymn Ford milked and built many a stately, pious Western around.

“Companions’ co-star is the formidable Maureen O’Hara, a Ford favorite.

And the “3 Godfathers” here are mistrusting, violent and pitiless men who throw in together for a robbery. “I hear they got a new bank and an old marshal in Gila City” is all it takes for the ex-soldier still wearing his cavalry blue with yellow piping pants (Keith), the cutthroat Turk (Chill Wills, in a rare villainous turn) whom he recruits dangling from a noose, and Turk’s womanizing psycho-gunslinger partner Billy (Steve Cochran) to team up.

When the bank robbery is delayed due to “Yellowlegs” (Keith) considering having a bullet removed from his shoulder, others hit it first and the “trouble with his shootin’ arm” Yellowlegs accidentally kills the son of the doyenne of the local “dance” hall (O’Hara, playing a genuine “fallen” woman).

Ostracized by the locals, Kit (O’Hara) hisses that she’ll bury her boy next to his father in far off Saringo, “Apache country” on the Mexican border. Yellowlegs orders the “godfathers” to join him to escort her and the body, over her furious objections.

The movie has a TV-budget myopia but a hard-nosed tone and hardboiled dialogue that would become Peckinpah trademarks.

The simple, weathered saloon setting for the first scene, with Wills bound and noosed in his thick buffalo coat, balancing on a small beer keg to delay his strangulation, is a grabber. Yellowlegs recognizes the card-cheat who’s about to die and sets out to free him before the guilty man’s dissolute partner staggers in, tipsy and with two women, to shoot the rope and disrupt the ongojng card game, which isn’t paying much heed to rough justice they had a hand ordering carried out.

The mistrust in the impromptu trio is palpable, with Turk and Billy bristling at being given orders and Turk nagging Billy to shoot “Yellowlegs,” or Turk will do it himself — shoot him in the back.

“That ain’t no way to kill a man, not even a Yankee!”

Wills has one moment where his character’s itchy, hot overcoat gets the best of him and he scratches his back, bear-style, rubbing up against a Saguaro cactus.

The plot is head-slappingly illogical, from all the passed-up opportunities to shoot Yellowlegs to the various ways their journey is delayed. Losing a horse or two is one thing, but stopping to “bury the wagon?” The reasoning for ditching it is sound, but…

One thing I’ve never seen in all my decades of watching Westerns is the wild, drunken rumpus an Apache war party engages in after they’ve attacked and seized a stagecoach, many donning the clothes of the dead passengers.

That’s another shot at Ford, who launched Wayne’s career with the Ur Western “Stagecoach” in 1939. How are the Apaches drunk? Must have had a whiskey salesman on board.

Peckinpah’s biography “If They Move, Kill’em” supports the fact that he filmed this quick and cheap. The day-for-night shots don’t match a couple of lovely scenes actually filmed in twilight. The early gunplay is mostly sound effects. And did he lure O’Hara to the role by promising her she could sing the opening credits song?

It’s odd to watch a Cochran movie after reading how thriller writer James Ellroy portrayed him in his 1950s Hollywood drugs, sex, tabloid gossip and murder tale “Widespread Panic.” Cochran is one of the real-life characters in that riff on “Confidential” magazine’s days of infamy. Colorful Cochran is celebrated by the penis-size-obsessed Ellroy (His most juvenile book? I’d say so.), a B-movie figure of leftist politics and stag-film infamy, according to the novelist/”L.A. Confidential” historian.

As with most debut features in the celluloid century before you could make a movie on your cell phone, the miracle of getting “The Deadly Companions” made is worth considering. It’s far from Peckinpah’s best. But he got it made and made it all work.

And back in 1961, seeing O’Hara in this light and the Old West this rough must have been quite the novelty. I wonder what John Ford thought of it?

MPA Rating: “approve,” violence, adult themes

Cast: Brian Keith, Maureen O’Hara, Tom Cochran and Chill Wills.

Credits: Directed by Sam Peckpinpah, script by A.S. Fleischman. An American Pathe release on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:33

“John and the Hole,” the painterly, understated and under-plotted directing debut of visual artist turned filmmaker Pascual Sisto, leaves the diagnosis of its title character up to the viewer. And right from the start, he’s a puzzle.

John (Charlie Shotwell) is smart, but expressionless. He’s full of questions, but won’t directly answer any question posed to him. An off-camera teacher badgers him about a math problem, which he answers but only says “I don’t know” — repeatedly — when she asks him how he figured it out.

The few queries he bothers to answer at home, or from anyone else, get the same response. When he blurts “Okay,” just to extract himself from a conversation and make whatever adult is quizzing him give up, he sounds exactly like Pete Davidson doing his annoying “Saturday Night Live” dimwit Chad.

Is John, a well-cared for, well-off upper middle class 13 year-old “on the spectrum?” He plays the piano, takes tennis lessons and yet seems disconnected from reality. He is blank-faced and deadpan, utterly unemotional. Dad (Michael C. Hall, aka “Dexter”) gives him an expensive drone. No response. No “Thanks, Dad,” either.

He’s given to vacantly serving up a barrage of questions that that would leave anyone dismayed in a “Where do I begin?” sense.

The gardener tells him he’s “weeding.” “What’s that?”

That big hole he found in the woods behind the house? It’s a “bunker.” Why would people build a bunker? “In case something bad happens.” “Like what?” Mom (Jennifer Ehle) mentions “a bad storm,” sheltering this sheltered child from the nuclear paranoia that ebbs and flows and prompts bunker-building, like the one somebody abandoned before finishing it.

The sense we get from his parents is that they indulge this “What’s it like, being an adult?” child, and don’t sweat the warning signs. His sister (Taissa Farmiga) is the only one to point out when he’s being annoying. Which is often.

But he’s on his own a lot, which means he wanders the house and has access to the family pharmacy. When he foists lemonade on the gardener, it puts the man to sleep. And that’s just a trial run. John then methodically drugs his parents and sister and wheel-barrows them out to the bunker in their sleep.

And when they wake up, he ignores their cries, pleas and threats, lowers food to them occasionally, and leaves them trapped.

John is a psychopath.

Sisto, working from a script by Nicolás Giacobone, has made an overcast, glum and seriously disturbing “Ice Storm” without the ice, a parable seemingly without a point.

We’ve got Shotwell (“Eli,” “The Glass Castle,” Captain Fantastic”) at his most perfectly-coiffed and perfectly deadpan, playing a character “curious” about adulthood and its superficial trappings (driving, having money, eating what you want) and about what one sees in a near-death experience.

Maybe he can get an answer to that last one by holding his only friend (Ben O’Brien) underwater in the pool.

Adults start asking where his parents are? He lies on the fly, embellishing and covering up.

The parents aren’t the most attentive and have either never corrected him or given up on that because of how he is. But there’s nothing we see that would explain the kid’s cruel entombment of them or his apathy about letting them out. Ehle’s mother figure seems more aware of how he is than the others, but the child doesn’t relate or respond to any of them.

And let’s not think too much about how a scrawny 13 year-old got them in that “hole” without killing or injuring them in the drop, mattresses or not.

The cryptic story has an equally cryptic framing device, a newly-single mom (Georgia Lyman) telling the “story” of “John and the Hole” to her little girl (Samantha LeBretton) as…a cautionary fable? No, that doesn’t work.

There’s nothing wrong with weaving a story the viewer can’t unravel as its playing out. But “John and the Hole” doesn’t have enough of a story to maintain any narrative drive and doesn’t point towards answers or give the viewer any hope of resolution or release.

Director Sisto paints a pretty picture of a hole, and never digs himself out of it.

MPA Rating: R for language

Cast: Charlie Shotwell, Jennifer Ehle, Michael C. Hall, Ben O’Brien and Taissa Farmiga

Credits: Directed by Pascual Sisto, script by Nicolás Giacobone. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:38

In the days before streaming — before home video even — film-lovers flocked to New York to get their art, indie and international cinema fix. We made our pilgrimage to the Beekman, the Paris, the Waverly, Sutton, Lincoln Plaza, Cinema I and II and even Carnegie Hall Cinemas to see the latest from Italy, Vietnam, Australia, China or Japan, to catch this indie breakout from Sundance or that buzzed documentary that premiered in Telluride.

Most of the theaters are gone now. Changing times, shifting screen-watching habits and soaring real estate values did them in. But in their day, they were the incubators of films that changed the movies audiences in America got to see and changed the cinema itself, the sorts of movies Hollywood makes or buys for distribution in North America.

“Searching for Mr. Rugoff” is about the progenitor of that system that raised the country’s cinematic IQ, created generations of more sophisticated filmgoers and inspired young filmmakers who came of age knowing there was more to movies than what Hollywood served up.

Rugoff, the son of the founder of a regional New York theater chain that dated back to nickelodeon (silent) cinema, turned five theaters he (mostly) inherited — the Sutton, Beekman, Paris, Cinema I and II (America’s first “multiplex”) and the Plaza — into “launching pads” for the films of Truffaut, Lina Wertmüller, Ingmar Bergman, Costa-Gavras, Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, and for the most celebrated documentaries of the ’60s and ’70s.

Monty Python didn’t really become a “thing” in the U.S. until Rugoff, using those theaters as the anchor for his Cinema 5 film distribution company, hyped “Monty Python & the Holy Grail” into a New York smash that then played in cinemas all over the United States.

Onetime Cinema 5 employee, now a film distributor and academic, Ira Deutchman adds documentary filmmaker to his resume with this engaging, nostalgic and eye-opening film, his “search” for a lost figure in indie “art cinema” history, a man who peaked and plunged pre-Internet, whose name all but disappeared from movie history.

Rugoff may be mostly-forgotten, a man his former employees describe as something of an ogre, a “terrible person,” disheveled, gauche and “truly a difficult man” who’d sleep through screenings (he was on medications), say “I loved it” afterwards and buy the rights to many a classic non-studio film of the ’60s and ’70s. But he was a singular figure in the American cinema and in shaping American cinematic tastes.

The thesis Deutchman presents is that Rugoff looked beyond Hollywood for films to book in his theaters, tracking down indie fare before we called it “independent,” and booking it for say the smaller house in his innovative Cinema I & II multiplex. Dramas like “Nothing But a Man” and documentaries such as “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “Endless Summer” and the works of French, Italian, Swedish and German directors would be shown, vigorously promoted, ingeniously-advertised and given pre-Internet buzz by “sold out” runs in these tony, high-profile, mostly upper-East Side Manhattan movie houses.

Rugoff would then book those films into cinemas across the country, using their “New York hit” cachet to make Bergman and “Pumping Iron,” “Z” and “Tall Blonde Man with One Red Shoe” hits.

Costa-Gavras (“Z,” “State of Siege”) and Lina Wertmüller (“Swept Away”) appear here and remember Rugoff and marvel at how he did business and made their films box office hits and then Oscar-nominees and sometimes Oscar winners.

Rugoff started to bend American and even Hollywood tastes, and by the 1970s, Hollywood’s stodgy “Sound of Music” blockbusters changed. The System started financing edgier, artier more “independent” fare and “Easy Rider” and “Mean Streets” to “Dog Day Afternoon,” “A Woman Under the Influence” began turning up on Hollywood’s release slates.

Specialty distributors such as New Line/Fine Line (founder Bob Shaye is here), October Films, Miramax and Sony Pictures Classics popped up and took away Rugoff’s bread-and-butter bookings, forcing him out of the business. But not before he had changed it forever.

Interviewing fellow Cinema 5 alumni, academics, competitors, filmmakers and members of Rugoff’s family, Deutchman dissects the myths surrounding the man, downloads decades of anecdotes about his “Holy Grail” was promoted by dressing up employees in Medieval chain mail and marching them up and down the streets of New York or how “Pumping Iron” showings were preceded by body building demonstrations. And in separating the fact from the fiction, the “good taste” (in movies) from the boorish bullying, Deutchman resurrects Rugoff’s place in film history.

The portrait that emerges is of a guy who could tell you why you’d want to see “Putney Swope,” and how he’d sell it to the masses, but not somebody you’d want to work for or ever suffer through a disgusting meal with.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Ira Deutchman, Costa-Gavras, Lina Wertmüller, Bruce Brown, Sarah Kernochan, Evangeline Peterson, Paula Silver, Bob Shaye, Richard Peña

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ira Deutchman. A Deutchman Co. release.

Running time: 1:33

Funnyman Jake Johnson is the son “tested” by his now-dead mother in the bittersweet “better to grow up late than never” comedy “Ride the Eagle.”

It’s a not-quite-aimless film peopled with “types” and built on movie tropes — the sorts of situations and stories one finds often in film and TV, rarely in real life. A good cast and amusing situations make it a pleasant, sometimes amusing if not particularly memorable experience.

Johnson, who co-wrote it, is Leif, our first “type.” He’s a woodlands California slacker, adrift at 40, living in a cabin behind a friend’s (Luis Fernandez-Gil) house, with no apparent purpose other than playing the bongos in a band with that friend and sharing his life with a black Labrador named Nora.

When an intermediary (Cleo King) brings him the news that his mother died, he barely reacts, because they were long-estranged. He’s not certain this doesn’t call for a “celebration.

She abandoned him and joined a cult in the mountains further north, so of course she’s played by Susan Sarandon.

“Played” because Mom left him A) a cabin up there in pot paradise and B) a VHS videotape about the tasks he must perform before he inherits it. It’s his “conditional inheritance.” There’s nothing for it but for him to load the van, discover that her “cabin” is a rustic McMansion built of redwood, that she’s stashed pot everywhere, and to listen to her airy fairy lectures on that VHS tapes because she felt “I did not teach you enough stuff,” so better late than never.

His tasks are given fanciful labels like “Express yourself” and “Love is important” and “Eat what you kill…become a predator, not the prey,” and include delivering notes to people who don’t know she’s dead, him tracking down and apologizing to his ex, and trout fishing with his bare hands.

And the bumps on the road include a hostile local (J.K. Simmons) given to elaborate, profane phone threats and that “one who got away” (D’Arcy Carden) who might be still interested, all these years later.

It’s easy to see every actor in their appointed character. There’s very little heavy lifting here, no big emotional peaks and only the occasional threat of violence to interrupt the mellow vibe this “Ride” coasts on.

Johnson, of “New Girl” and “Safety Not Guaranteed,” has aged out of the hyper hilarity he served up earlier in his career, but eases into this situation and this character like mid-career, pre-comeback Matthew McConaughey.

“Just go with it” seems to be the vibe they went for, and that’s my halfhearted endorsement of “Ride the Eagle.” If you like these actors and this woodland setting, just go with it.

MPA Rating: unrated, pot smoking and profanity

Cast: Jake Johnson, Susan Sarandon, D’Arcy Carden, Cleo King, Luis Fernandez-Gil and J.K. Simmons

Credits: Directed by Trent O’Donnell, script by Jake Johnson and Trent O’Donnell. A Decal release.

Running time: 1:28

We few. We lucky, lucky few.

We who nothing of the magical qualities of the doula, we for whom the acronym “RIE” is akin to speaking in tongues. We have no idea how lucky we are.

Here’s a comedy about childbirth in present day LA, in the America of self-actualizing, over-sharing, conflict resolution and conflict-avoiding, of becoming “Fully Realized Humans” before they try to birth and raise such a creature.

It’s a sometimes hilarious post-mumblecore meditation, rumination and romp about getting prepared (for childbirth) and realizing how unprepared you are, about judging the lumps who raised you and realizing that maybe they didn’t have the data at their disposal you do, Dr. Spock or not.

Mostly, it’s about the panic that sends our settled and prepping couple — Jess Weixler and Joshua Leonard — into “bucket list” fits of all the living they need to do before life, as they know it, is over.

It all starts when Jackie and Elliot have a baby shower which turns into a comical series of friends’ one upping each other on childbirth as “the worst thing ever” and “crib death” riffs.

Their doula, aka “Mommy’s new (paid) best-friend,” midwife, birth coach (Erica Chidi Cohen) makes the mistake of asking them to close their eyes and visualize “what YOU need,” at this point. They doze off, just for a second.

Then they take Maya’s “prescription,” “one orgasm a day” and head home and realize time’s running out on all the things they never did. Jackie is VERY pregnant, but they both dive straight into the deep waters of the River Denial, given this “bucket list” chance.

“Jump out of an airplane!” “Dine and DASH!” “Go SWIMMING with SHARKS!” “Get tattoos!” “Visit ANTARCTICA!” “Buy a classic car and drive it up the coast!” “Get chased by COPS!”

But the path to “Fully Realized Humans” has to pass through that very first “item” that they settle on actually doing. The words “pegging” and “strap on” are enough to make a grown man like Elliot quake.

Director and co-star Leonard, a long way from his days lost in the woods in search of “The Blair Witch,” gets laughs out of Elliot’s wide-eyed alarm at their visit to a sex toys shop and everything that visit opens up. Turns out they both have “daddy issues.”

Weixler (“The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” and TV’s “The Good Wife”) was a solid eight months pregnant when they filmed this, so deliver her a special Oscar for that. She gives us a Jackie who is fine until that moment where she figures out she’s not…as prepared as she thought.

Banter, group scenes and debates have an improvised, “nobody really knows where this is going” feel. Funny people riffing, actresses who’ve given birth unloading the LOWdown on childbirth to the pregnant actress, parents (Michael Chieffo, Beth Grant and Tom Bower) jolted and backpedaling as they confronted by their shortcomings in a pre-birth intervention staged by their son or daughter.

The film is scripted (by the co-stars), but that “mumblecore” sense of chatty people chatting something to death until funny words come out bubbles through every scene that isn’t a montage of the two spraying graffiti, daring the cops to chase them, or getting lost in the dark on a nature hike.

It’s a scruffy comedy and what’s on screen can be pretty rough at times. But get past the jaw-dropping nature of the “pegging” and ponder how much of what went on there was improvised and the laughs become impossible to suppress.

MPA Rating: unrated, some violence, drug abuse, sexually explicit and lots of profanity

Cast: Jess Weixler, Joshua Leonard, Erica Chidi Cohen, Michael Chieffo, Tom Bower and Beth Grant

Credits: Directed by Joshua Leonard, script by Jess Weixler and Joshua Leonard. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:16

“Bankrolled?” Think of it as a classic example of “meeting a comedy on its own terms.”

It takes a while to settle in. And truthfully, you’ve got to be simpatico with its vibe, something that ties “Bankrolled” to the stoner comedies of the past.

I started this Mexican satire from Netflix three times before it roped me in. It’s almost manic and as random as random can be. But then you see, “Ah, so this is ‘The Producers’ with a hint of classic Cheech & Chong (“Nice Dreams”) and a lot of satirical invention?”

Something like that. Just go with it.

The glimmering, shiny Silicon Valley send-up is set in a high-glossed Mexico City of youth, easy money, loopy “entrepreneurs” and born-victim venture capitalists. It’s about two aimless sometimes-stoned non-hustling hustlers (Aldo Escalante, Ricardo Polanco), hitting 30 and seeing their peers “start-up” and “network” their way to fame and glory.

All Polo (Escalante) wants is to fit in with them, with pretentious poseurs and their wacky apps and “ping pong” parties where they brainstorm “the next next thing.” He already has the bossy influencer/”muse” (María Chacón) such self-hype kings require. If only he had, you know, an original thought, “Big Idea” or any notion of what “follow through” looks like. And the money to bring that idea to fruition.

Even more directionless Blas (Polanco) is a slacker’s slacker. He’s got programming talent wrapped in misplaced idealism. His pretention is cynicism mixed with coffee snobbery. His ambition is no higher than landing a barista gig at the upscale beanery too snooty to ever hire him, maybe settling in Catalonia and reading architect Antonio Gaudi’s autobiography in his leisure.

But they finagle their way into a classmate’s (Guiseppe Gamba) “ping ponging” (a new phrase for “brainstorming”) networking party and stumble into their drug dealer pal Aderales (Fabrizio Santini). He’s no longer selling weed, etc. He’s rebranded. “Nootropics” is all about stimulants, things that may or may not be legal and may or may not help one zero in on a great idea and pound away at it — drugged-up and sleeplessly — until they have something, “just like Elon.”

Damned if they don’t wake up with an online pitch they don’t remember making for an idea that sounds stupid and seems stupid but just might be nutty enough to catch on in crowdfunding/Venture Capital circles.

SignNow will allow players/downloaders to indulge in our mania for “clicktivisim,” “the stupidest form of social justice.”

You click “like” on some cause, save the manatees or support homeless women, feel righteous, collect “points” in competition with the other self-righteous-and-too-lazy-to-lift-more-than-a-finger, and “change the world.” How addictive is that?

Polo and Blas can’t shrug off this drunken “ping ponged” idea that they pitched and posted. Because a VC outfit named Bankrolled, where “crowdfunding is the NEW economy,” get behind it and next thing you know, they have a $2,000,000, their own start-up, status with the other “entrepreneurs” and…expectations.

They’ll live large, spend like drunken sailors, and fail. On purpose. Just like “The Producers.” Only things don’t work out that way. Just like “The Producers.”

Veteran Mexican TV and film writer (“How to Survive Being Single”) turned first-time feature director Marcos Bucay takes too long to get us through this long set-up. But starting with the way the guys “remember” what they did to get to that video “pitch” — their hungover selves llook across the room at their drunken, stoned “last night” selves to see how they got to here — “Bankrolled” is on a roll.

Welcome to a world where everybody is online and maintaining the illusion of their lives online. Everyone is live-streaming, everyone wants attention, everyone wants the validation of likes and the ultimate ego trip of a YayTalk. You know who and what that’s sending up, right, the “Here I am, ain’t I great?” TED Talk phenomenon.

YouthBank, where their line of credit is set up, is part ashram, part VR gaming room where you set up accounts with a “singing” password.Yeah, you sing or hum a bar of music and that unlocks your account.

Every office is a romper room, every “meeting” a pep rally, every colleague half-clueless about whatever it is they’re doing, and what drinks, colon cleanses and drugs will help them meet the deadline for whatever it is they’re making.

It’s just nuts. They’re all making…nothing.

The parallel story has two Bankrolled “professionals” working the SignNow account — officious workaholic Nat (Natalia Téllez) and cocky free-spirit Mayte (Seo Ju Park), who thinks every day is “Slutty Monday.” They’re in charge of supervising this start-up, keeping tabs on where the money goes, and as an afterthought, figuring out if this “idea” is worth anything to anyone and if the guys who came up with it are just con artists.

Because their bubbly boss, Gus (Sebastián Zurita) is too ditzy and enthusiastic to sweat details like that.

The dialogue and situations hurl a thousand riffs on the start-ups that closed the door on new “big ideas” in hospitality, dating and sex (Lyft, AirBnd, Tinder, Grindr), on every “cleanse” and new drink/supplement/lifestyle fad “fresh from LA” and on everything that can go wrong at the top of a start-up just like this.

It’s all a mad clutter, but I got into Polo’s egomania and work-avoidance “networking” and Blas’s delusions that he’s being cheated out of credit when the two of them are changing their coding team’s priorities every hour on the hour.

For a comedy that gets in its own way more often than not, that doesn’t give nearly enough screen time to the two somewhat funnier women (Park is seriously hilarious and seriously shortchanged) or even enough to let the leads fully form their characters, this still manages some serious third act laughs.

It’s amusing enough to be worth reading the subtitles if you’re not fluent in Spanish. And it might be even funnier once Hollywood realizes its promise and tidies things up for an even more manic and messy remake.

Cast: Aldo Escalante, Ricardo Polanco, Natalia Téllez, Fabrizio Santini, Seo Ju Park
María Chacón, Sebastián Zurita and Guiseppe Gamba.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marcos Bucay. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

Any movie with “dolphin” in the title is pretty much pre-certified “kid-friendly,” and “Dolphin Island” certainly honors that.

It’s a lightly-charming Bahamas travelogue with a teen, her dolphin friend and her fisherman grandpa who just might lose custody of her to her “other” grandparents — rich American cityfolk.

The plot could have been cooked up over a conch fritters and beer lunch, the drama is that predictable. And the acting’s uneven. But the adorable trained dolphin, the “island time” pacing and often flattering depiction of Bahamian life make it family viewing of the “Can we take a vacation THERE?” variety.

Annabelle (Tyler Jade Nixon) is a 15 year-old who loves on her grandpa’s aged fishing boat and whose day starts checking the stone crab traps and poking around for conch, and playing around with Mitzi, her dolphin DFF.

School comes after that, after her colorfully-named granddad, Jonah Coleridge, has used any excuse to bluster about keeping their “bourgeois” creditors at bay or break into song. He’s played by British stage actor Peter Woodward, who is the film’s great delight. His plummy locutions lend a literary, salted air to the picture and he generally classes up the joint.

Mitzi? She chatters and squeaks and leaps and picks up trash with her snout whenever she leaves the family aquatic center where they all live. It’s supposedly a non-profit “research” lagoon, but looks more like your typical dolphin training, “swim with the dolphins” private enterprise operation, wholly downplayed in the movie.

Their “beach bums on a permanent holiday” idyll is interrupted by the social worker (Dionne Lea) who coins that phrase to describe Jonah, who reminds her a little too much of her ex-husband to be “a good parent.”

A lawyer (Bob Bledsoe) everyone confuses for a “pirate” on first meeting — “Hey, I OWN a SUIT!” — is another interrupting. Barrister Carbunkle (ahem) has been retained by the “other” grandparents to get custody of the kid. He’s well-versed in the way things work in “de islands.”

“Money goes a long way here. And if you will just let me take a pile of it” and spread it around (bribes), this will all happen in a (slow walked) flash.

All this happens just as Annabelle is discovering peer parties and a cute boy (Aaron Burrows) who picks up cash by picking pockets, offering them back to the “You just dropped this” tourists, and is invariably offered a “reward” for being so thoughtful.

The movie’s limited locations and incidents and amateurish bit players betray its modest budget. Its cut-and-paste script, lack of focus on where the audience’s interests lie (in the kids, the water and the dolphin) betray limited ambition, and maybe sticking with the actors they know will deliver.

It could be a Bahamian Tourism Board production if it weren’t for the casual corruption, lax legal, child and animal welfare standards on display.

But it’s diverse by design, sunny and as I say the dolphin is as adorable as dolphins unfailingly are. If you’re looking for something beyond Disney+ or the hormones and conspicuous consumption of virtually every series and streaming movie made for this audience, it’s worth a watch.

MPA Rating: TV-Y7

Cast: Peter Woodward, Tyler Jade Nixon, Dionne Lee, Aaron Burrows and Bob Bledsoe

Credits: Directed by Mike Disa, script by Shaked Berenson, Mike Disa and Rolfe Kanefsky. An Entertainment Squad release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:31

We have just enough time to settle in for the fun ride that “Jungle Cruise” might have been before the rug is almost wholly pulled out from under us.

Dwayne Johnson turns up the charm and charisma as everybody’s favorite theme park ride skipper, Capt. Frank Wolff. He’s a con artist, but “It’s only a scam if you fall for it.” He’s a smart aleck tour guide — “We know that of all the jungle cruises you could have taken….ours was the cheapest.” He’s entirely too fond of puns. “I used to work in an orange juice factory…But I got canned.”

And those go over with the tourists as well as they ever have.

“Mommy, please make him stop.“

Johnson has unexpectedly effortless chemistry with Emily Blunt, who plays Lily Houghton, a somewhat swashbuckling, ever-so-English scientist/researcher who wants to hire him to search for this enchanted Amazonian tree with healing powers.

“If you’re a believer in legends, you should believe in curses, too,” he warns her. “Is there a single thing about you I can trust?” she wants to know.

Paul Giamatti is introduced as an upriver monopolist and threat to Capt. Frank’s tour boat trade, Jesse Plemons makes a perfectly fleshy-faced Teutonic villain, a German prince also looking for a Tree of Life, one possessing “The Tears of the Moon” — blooms which can heal most anything.

Something like that could come in handy in pre-penicillin 1916, in the middle of World War I.

When the formidable Édgar Ramírez (“Point Break,” “Hands of Stone, “Yes Day”) as a supernatural Spanish conquistador, shows up, we go along with it, all part of the “African Queen/Pirates of the Caribbean” mashup that’s being served up. He’s got the Javier Bardem/Bill Nighy role.

But at some point, director Jaume Collet-Serra (“The Orphan,” “House of Wax”) remembers he’s not Spielberg, who made “Raiders of the Lost Ark” after “Sugarland Express and after “1941.” He’s not Gore Verbinski, fresh off the glorious farce “Mouse Hunt” when he launched “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

This “African Queen/Pirates/Raiders” romp, with all its light “Romancing the Stone” potential, goes dark and violent and CGI production-designed to death. Collet-Serra plays up the script’s “Aguirre, The Wrath of God” elements and utterly loses the thread. In punning terms, the “jungle” gets the better of him.

“Jungle Cruise” is a gorgeous-looking lark, with teeming jungles, towering waterfalls, a half-sized German U-Boat and a “cruise” boat — La Quila — that looks like the zombie African Queen.

Lily Houghton brings along her fey fop of a brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall) who “comes out,” something of a first for a Disney family action film. We get our first gay double-entendre from him, and a less printable second.

“Gosh, there’s certainly a lot of you, isn’t there?”

And we’re treated to a spirited sail up river (and yet “down” rapids) towards the corner of Amazonia that legend says was home to this magical tree, with shifty Capt. Frank repeating “You’re gonna BEG me to turn back” and labeling the first woman of science he’s ever met as “Pants,” thanks to her attire.

As her hired captain, he’s just “Skippy” to her.

Giamatti may mostly be lost in the story early on, but there’s enough nonsense to atone for that.

Still, the digital snakes, toucans and piranhas — “Better eat them before they eat you!” — are joined by Capt. Frank’s half-convincing digital jaguar, something of a let-down.

The jokes wane and the tone darkens and the charm just drains straight out of “Jungle Cruise.”

Collet-Serra spoils a bravura opening, with Blunt giving us a taste of Johnny Depp/Orlando Bloom derring do as Lily tricks the sexist, dismissive Royal Society out of its map of that jungle she wants to cruise to find that tree she insists really exists.

He wastes Johnson summoning up decades and decades of Disney Jungle Cruise theme-park ride nostalgia — the puns, the wisecracks, the dire warnings — “Everything you see wants to kill you, and can.”

It’s a film that wants to be a little of this, a lot of that and funny in the bargain. You want to like it so much that you can sense Disney getting a new franchise out of it, even if it doesn’t quite come off. But if they do sequels, they’d bloody well better hire somebody who knows comedy to film them.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of adventure violence

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Paul Giamatti, Jesse Plemons, Jack Whitehall,
Veronica Falcón and Édgar Ramírez.

Credits: Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, script by Glenn Ficara and John Requa. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:07