Movie Nation

Say what you like about “Lord of the Flies” and its many, many screen (and literary) imitations over the decades. That story, about the savagery barely civilized out of our young, even and especially the “well born” among them, still plays.

“School’s Out Forever,” based on a Scott K. Andrews novel, may seem a cheesy “Toy Soldiers” variation set in an English boarding school. Throw in a little accidental topicality — civilization breaks down during a pandemic — and some blunt statements on violence, guns and mob mentality, and it’s a lot closer to “Lord of the Flies” than any teens-fight-back action dramedy.

When the contagion breaks out, Lee (Oscar Kennedy) has just been kicked out of Saint Marks School for Boys for playing one cruel prank too many. His mate and co-prankster “Mac” (Liam Lau Fernandez) may have escaped consequences, but Lee’s sent home just in time for the great die-off.

Mercifully, the dead stay dead here. No “28 Days Later” or “Walking Dead,” thank you very much. But a call from his Mum, estranged from his father, tells Lee that he can’t count on holing up at home. No, “Go back to St. Marks,” his mother says. She’ll fetch him there.

The vacant streets and empty stores outside might show a world that’s collapsed. But even though the headmaster (Anthony Head) has died, there is a semblance of order. Mr. Bates (Alex Macqueen) keeps the surviving kids and their matron/nurse (Jasmine Blackborow) organized and looking ahead.

Lee’s return means he can re-team with Mac. Who better to facilitate post-apocalyptic survival than two born anarchists, these amoral pranksters?

But the outside village, Worham, is getting organized under the rule of the gun. And the boys’ “Get medicine, be the heroes” quest in the school van goes awry. Now the armed outside world, led by Georgina (Samantha Bond) is gathering at the gates. Big decisions must be made concerning self-defense, self-preservation and the moral or immoral decisions that undergird them.

Who should be in charge? What steps can be taken? What can they do to wriggle out of the ugly dilemmas they face?

Visual effects specialist turned writer-director Oliver Milburn (“The Harsh Light of Day” was his directing debut) does well by the action beats and manages to keep some ugly choices that mark this coming-of-age tale intact.

Mac, to the manner born, has the decisiveness that we sometimes confuse for “born to lead.” He and Lee are equally young, rash in their decisions, barely considering consequences of their actions. But Mac, merely by taking action and assuming the part, takes on the leadership of the contagion-immune kids. Right. Firearms training it is!

Lee has been slow to recognize what his headmaster lectured him about as he expelled him from the school. “We don’t indulge children. We build men!” Now, though, he’s starting to get it.

Blackborow’s matron is the conscience of the story, but more than one adult demonstrates that compassion is something you acquire with age. Can the student body survive under that ethos?

It’s not every seemingly-empty-headed action film that questions whether ugly times beg for ends-justify-the-means thinking, deployed by everyone from Winston Churchill to Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Milburn doesn’t develop the supporting schoolkid characters enough to show that “Lord of the Flies” radicalization/indoctrination in the stark terms the picture needs. The coda seems unnecessary and there are moments when every action screenplay takes leave of common sense.That “You have 24 hours” to make a decision crutch may be the stupidest thing any movie like this trots out.

But screen newcomer Fernandez, British TV veteran Kennedy, Bond (Moneypenny in “Goldeneye”), Blackborow (“Shadow and Bone”) and Macqueen (“All is True”) give this punchy, lightweight parable the emotional heft to come off.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, alcohol and drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Oscar Kennedy, Liam Lau Fernandez, Jasmine Blackborow, Alex Macqueen, Samantha Bond and Anthony Head.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Oliver Milburn, based on a Scott K. Andrews novel. A Central City Media release.

Running time: 1:45

The stately, intimate and pictorially perfect “Center Stage” was Hong Kong filmmaker Stanley Kwan’s “Citizen Kane” styled experiment in screen biography.

He set out to tell the tragic story of a legend of early Chinese cinema, a starlet whose beauty was said to rival Garbo’s, but who took her own life because of a personal scandal when she was 24. Kwan, who went on to make “Hold You Tight” and “Red Rose White Rose,” uses monochromatic archival interviews (some “aged”) with those who knew Ruan Ling-yu, staged black and white interviews with assorted film folk of the Hong Kong of 1991, commenting on Ruan’s “lost” films and her career, and long flashbacks to the late silent era and early sound cinema of 1929 into the ’30s as we see Ruan’s acting style, her commitment to her roles, her personal life and her tragedy.

Maggie Cheung, of “2046,” “Hero” and “In the Mood for Love,” plays herself, longing to make her mark but not end up like Ruan, and she plays the screen legend in the long, lush flashbacks.

She’s paired with Tony Leung (Stanley Kwan’s “Showtime,” “Lost in Beijing”) in the back-and-forth of commenting on the star of the past, and portraying Ruan’s paramour and escort to the poshest nightspots of Jazz Age China.

We visit film sets to see Ruan work, get a dose of the politics on and off the set back then (She worked just as Japan was trying out the aggression that led up to World War II — occupying Manchuria.) and sit in on planning sessions for a possible film biography of this “lost” legend of pre-war Chinese cinema.

For all the potential that scenario presents, cinema-as-it-was-then, “inventing” a new reality in screen acting. Kwan’s approach is so quiet, intimate and slow that the whole affair — outside of the chatty and realistic table read and banter of the present day moments — feels like a lacquered-over still-life.

Seeing immaculate recreations of silent and early-sound film sets, soundstages with skylights instead of artificial light, is all well and good. But just because what was on screen was silent that doesn’t mean the footage was the product of dead quiet on the set.

Directors would have on-set musicians to set a mood, whisper or call out directions to alter the performance as it was happening. There’s no “life” to these moments in Kwan’s vision.

Cheung is far more interesting in the flashbacks — crawling in the snow by herself after hours to rehearse what her character will “feel” in the next day’s scene, dancing and night clubbing — than as “herself” in the present day footage.

The contrast between the lively banter of the present day filmmakers and the generally funereal past — gorgeous, artfully lit and shot it may be — points to why Kwan never broke through in the international cinema, turns up on no lists of “Great Hong Kong Directors” and is little known outside of cinephile circles.

Cheung won Berlin Film Fest honors when “Center Stage” came out back in 1991, but the film didn’t make her the star Gong Li became after “Ju Dou” (1990) and later films with Zhang Yimou.

So I’ll say what other critics who have endorsed this picture in various releases over the years will not. It’s a lovely stiff, more artful in the attempt than in execution.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Han Chin, Lily Li, Carina Lau, Cecilia Yip, Lawrence Ng and Stanley Kwan

Credits: Directed by Stanley Kwan, script by Yau Dai an Ping. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:54

The Hollywood shorthand we remember as “high concept,” a “pitch” you could squeeze into a single sentence, reached its zenith in the 1980s. As SOME of us never gave it up, let’s trot it out to describe Apple’s new ’80s exercise/politics/body-issues series “Physical.”

It’s Jennifer Lawrence’s “Joy” meets “Nurse Jackie,” a tale of a woman with big personal problems and secrets and a really “big idea” that comes to her, gradually but forming up early in the series’ first season.

Rose Byrne’s a droll, had-enough housewife feminist at the center of it, and she makes it an easy series to fall into. And series creator Annie Weisman’s plot — she produced TV’s “About a Boy” — takes a lot of turns before taking you where you figure it’s going.

Byrne (“Bridesmaids,””Neighbors”) plays Sheila Rubin, a San Diego suburbanite who married the activist/idealist who lit her romantic fire at UC-Berkeley at the end of the ’60s. But in 1986, she’s a self-loathing housewife with the big poufy poodle-curls and wafer thin build that whispers “eating disorder.” And politics professor Danny (Rory Scovel of “Robbie” and “I Feel Pretty”) hasn’t grown up. He still has an eye for cute coeds, a taste for weed and activist/schmactivist, he’s got very “traditional/conventional” man’s ability to under-estimate his wife.

Rose’s self-judgment hits her hard with every mirror she stares into — “wrinkles and zits” and spandex leotards, a “disco sex kitten look at YOUR age?”

Her endless cricitisms rain on her psyche in voice-over criticism that includes the words “pig” and “monster” and “idiot,” and they’re not limited to her. She judges her lump of a husband, the other mothers dropping off kids at their “co-op” private preschool, pretty much everybody she meets. But she almost always finds a way to top their critiques with those aimed at herself.

Because when she’s at her most fragile, and most obsessed with her looks, she snaps. That’s when she raids their savings account. That’s when she loads up at the drive-through window of her favorite burger joint. And that’s when she checks into a cheap (ish) motel to strip, binge and then purge. Oh yes, she’s that messed up.

But as Danny’s career goes off the rails and he delusionally decides to run for office on a rein-in-development platform, Sheila finds herself a new outlet for her body image mania. She ducks into Body by Bunny, an aerobics class run by a grumpier-than-perky Lebanese-American pixie (Della Saba).

The series is about Sheila’s juggling act, the secrets she keeps from those around her, especially her husband, their increasingly perilous finances and Danny’s swelling ego, fed partly by his even-more-sexist Berkeley classmate and now campaign manager (Geoffrey Arend). Anti-social Sheila has to help get signatures on petitions, raise money from their “betters” and scheme to get a career out of this new craze, aerobics.

The characters are a fairly unpleasant lot, giving this the tinge of “cringeworthy TV.” Byrne makes Sheila irritatingly vain — “You’re still skinnier and prettier” than a dinner guest, she thinks. But she’s haunted by her perceived physical failings.

Getting pushed around by an increasingly dead-weight husband make us root for her. Getting mixed up with “Bunny” of “Body by Bunny” and Bunny’s surfer/videographer boyfriend, contemptuous yet pitying her plump, rich and depressed neighbor (Dierdre Friel), fretting over this “Mormon moralist” developer (Paul Sparks) who is devouring their suburban town and plowing under the environment as he does, but who also seems tempted by Sheila’s Olivia Newton-John physique.

The show’s got the ’80s soundtrack, and a whiff of ’80s fashions and sort of leftover ’70s morality. Scovel’s Danny wears early ’70s sideburns (guys tend to stick with the last look they had when they were single). And the “limited series” drip drip drip storytelling style hints that the drama may peak right at the end of the ten episode run, as the early episodes are more soapy than seriously dramatic.

But Byrne makes it worth a watch, and once you’re in, it isn’t just nostalgia that keeps you coming back for more.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, drug use, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Rose Byrne, Rory Scovel, Dierdre Friel, Della Saba, Paul Sparks and Geoffrey Arend

Credits: Created by Annie Weisman, An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 10 episodes @ :25-:35 minutes each

A decent gimmick and half an idea for a movie surrounding it bedevil “Songs for a Sloth,” a coping-with-loss comedy that — pardon me — just hangs there.

There are entirely too many “slowly” jokes to squander on a single review, even a comedy with promise that’s left twisting in the wind.

A father has died, and go-getter son Maxwell (Richard Hollman) isn’t taking it well. Manically digging around Dad’s backyard, looking for the bones for a long-dead dog because “It was Dad’s last wish” is just the start of it.

Slacker son Barney (Brian McCarthy) isn’t all that worked-up over it. He’s not that worked-up for anything. Drifting daughter Jenna (Ava Eisenson) was out of touch and didn’t even make it to the funeral, or the reading of the will. She wasn’t there to hear that their father died broke after pouring his money into a fund to create a habitat for the North American sloth.

Don’t bother looking that up. There hasn’t been a North American variety in this planetary epoch.

In fact, even though he drained his accounts and took out a “reverse mortgage,” which means they’re losing his house, too (Tom Selleck’s nose just keeps growing and growing.), the family needs $10,000 just to get this habitat up and running.

Maxwell, losing ground at work, where he scripts industrial videos for Big Pharma, is nonplussed. Barney shrugs. Jenna, when she shows up, isn’t much more motivated.

But Maxwell has seen a sloth, THE sloth, the one their dad obsessed over. And it (a puppet) talks in Jack McBrayer’s voice.

“Wassup? Wanna hear an idea for a short story?”

Maxwell breaks out his old guitar and knocks off a “Don’t Let Me Die” song. He enlists Barney to help him get a video of it up online. Even Jenna will have to pitch in if they’re to raise the necessary cash to make their father’s dream come true.

There’s a dopey idea in the “A.L.F.” ballpark in play here, which the movie makes little use of.

We get “the metaphor,” that the son who had to sell out to make something of himself is up against two indulged and slothful siblings who won’t let him hear the end of it, and seem allergic to hard work and doing it quicky.

One of the videos they concoct is cute, but too much of what we see here is Barney’s pitch for “Sad Max: Boring Road.” The movie has almost no laughs and little energy is expended in attempting to get it to come off.

Hollman sings and plays guitar, but he isn’t given any funny way of reacting to the talking sloth and isn’t all that interesting bickering with his do-nothing siblings.

MPA Rating: unrated, squeaky clean

Cast:  Richard Hollman, Brian McCarthy, Ava Eisenson and the voice of Jack McBrayer.

Credits: Directed by Bradley Hasse, script by Bradley Hasse, Richard Hollman. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:25

The burning question, carried over from each “Rogue Warfare” thriller to the next, is “Are they getting better?”

Is “Rogue Warfare: Death of a Nation,” the best yet?

The reasons the sequels exist are still here — cheap, desert southwest locations, surplus Humvees, cheap chopper rental and a cast with nothing else on their calendars.

But these cumbersome, dull and incompetently-scripted thrillers have the same people-in-uniform acting un-military in every way action beats. The cast and the characters, a fantasy “off the books” dream team of QAnon fantasy “international cooperation” commandos, haven’t improved.

We also think people have been killed-off, and they haven’t. We assume the “Supreme Leader” (Essam Ferris), has been foiled. Nope.

The hulking Frenchman (Bertrand-Xavier Corbi) still mutters “Theez guy eez PEESING me off!”

Supreme Leader still schemes, plots and plans in his desert hideways, draped in black for his every online video appearance.

“I assure you, our time is coming!”

The Russian sharp shooter (Katie Keene) gets her blonde mop done up in more elaborate braids.

And Chris Mulkey is still the commanding officer, “Brisco,” and still the luckiest actor in the cast. All his scenes are in a tent, “the war room.” As in, he’s not out there in gear and the sweltering, skin-cancerous sun.

Maybe he just has the best agent.

These movies are all junk, the third is no exception.

MPA Rating: R for violence and language 

Cast: Will Yun Lee, Jermaine Love, Katie Keene, Essam Ferris, Rory Markham, Fernando Chien, Bertrand-Xavier Corbi and Chris Mulkey.

Credits: Directed by Mike Gunther, script by Michael J. Day. A Saban Films release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:39

The phrase, “You look like the ghost of a Victorian prostitute” could only mean one thing.

“Downton Abbey” is BACK!

Actually, it’s the second season of “Flack,” star Anna Paquin‘s PR version of “Nurse Jackie,” a show with a drug addicted queen of poor decisions facing an unplanned pregnancy, thanks to her corrosive co-worker and closest confidante’s (Lydia Wilson) boyfriend, a fired assistant (Rebecca Benson) manipulated into a return a boss (Sophie Okonedo) taking up with an ex (Sam Neill).

And that’s just the opening salvo of personal “issues” facing this crack London “spin” firm’s crew for Season Two. Clients?

Well, the reality TV darlings have a baby, only it’s not the golfer/husband’s. Twitter has had a field day trashing this latest clumsy “The baby’s Black at birth” TV stunt.

There’s a grey-haired journalist arrested in a raid on a brothel, a tech tycoon (Daniel Kae Kim) who needs help Twitter-apologizing, and who takes a fancy to dishy mean girl Eve (Wilson), this singing star with a temper, that politician needing an image makeover.

You got the idea from season one. More of the same in season two — drama with troubled Robyn’s (Paquin) divorcing sister (Genevieve Angelson), just two Americans trying (kind of) to “pass” for natives in Swinging/Spinning London, making up lies to cover for this celeb disaster here, bribing eyewitnesses there, always with the withering, overly-polished put-downs.

“Good ol’dead-eyed, tight-lipped, draown everyone and yourrself in self-destructive self-pity Robyn.”

The cynicism is more or less intact, although the personal lives take on a more sudsy, soap operatic twist this time around.

I picked up on more self-aware, self-disclosing confessions, or what passes for confessions, with every new client or old treating their hired “flacks” (slang, which I defined when reviewing series season one) as if they’re priests or shrinks, baring their souls because no PR person would ever reveal or use their dirty secrets against them, would they?

This struck me as melodramatic and off.

A pause for a tirade against an abortion nut here, an unscrupulous billionaire instantly recognizing what a “douche” he is there — imagine Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg or Elizabeth Holmes having the self-confidence to do that — the show both has its moments and tends to grate as preachy and on-the-nose at times.

I like the ways it shows how PR has weaponized #MeToo and “bullying.” A “solution” to a troubled celeb marriage is aptly glib and heartless.

“Polyamory is actually super on-trend right now!”

And the dialogue is, first episode to last, crackling and mean. There’s “video” of a celeb assault in a bar.

“It’s bad.”

“Britney with an UMBRELLA bad?”

“Solange in an ELEVATOR bad!”

If you get the references (the links are for memory-jogging purposes only), you’re in on the joke. Occasional emotional moment aside, that’s what we’re here for — heartless, amoral and efficient people efficiently “handling” the all-too-human/often over-the-top foibles of those who pay them for that handling.

How will innocent, Scottish Melody survive this?

“Flack” isn’t necessarily great TV. More of a guilty pleasure. But it is, undeniably, great fun.

MPA Rating: TV-14, sex, drugs, profanity

Cast: Anna Paquin, Lydia Wilson, Rebecca Benson, Sam Neill, Daniel Dae Kim, and Sophie Okonedo

Credits: Created by Oliver Lansley. An Amazon release.

Running time: 12 episodes @43-53 minutes each.

It’s nigh on impossible to single out highlights from the joyously upbeat concert film, “Summer of Love (…Or When the Revolution Could NOT be Televised).”

Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. sit, in tears, as they see their performance with The Fifth Dimension for the first time in over fifty years.

Here are Gladys Knight and the Pips at their peak, just about to blow up and just dazzling.

Stevie Wonder makes the leap from “Little Stevie” into adulthood, resetting his career, live on stage in the summer of 1969.

Mavis Staples of The Staples Singers joins her idol, the legendary Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, sharing the mike as they sing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite hymn, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” in tribute.

Abbey Lincoln, B.B. King‘s blues, The Chambers Brothers, Max Roach‘s jazz, Hugh Masekela‘s Afro-accented jazz, Ray Barreto‘s Latin/Afro jazz, comic Moms Mabley, Sly and the Family Stone and the regal Nina Simone all appeared on that stage in Mount Morris Park, an era-defining series of shows in Black music, polished, beautifully filmed and preserved for posterity.

As more than one interview subject makes clear in Roots star and “Tonight Show” bandleader Questlove’s film, Woodstock got all of the musical attention that summer, when America landed on the moon and the ’60s wound down. But the show its documenters, then-and-now, called “Black Woodstock” (a working title of this film) was epic in its own way, with its singularly-impressive line-up playing for a sea of mostly-Black New York faces, 50,000 at a time.

Questlove is a tad disingenuous about what he’s presenting here. The film plays down the fact that this was an entire summer of festivals, not a “Black Woodstock,” putting all these acts on stage over a weekend or whatever. And the title of his film is even more misleading. These shows WERE “televised” on New York PBS later in the summer of ’69, concerts filmed and edited together under director Hal Tulchin.

But he’s right about it being mostly forgotten, that “nobody would believe it happened” save for the long-stored film footage resurrected here.

“Summer of Soul” uses its well-chosen interviews with festival attendees who included journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault and festival participants from singers and band members to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, to give us context and a sense of the significance of the concerts.

“Negro” was evolving from “African American” to “Black,” Black fashion from sharkskin suits to leather and dashikis, “Little Stevie” to “Stevie” and Black America from protesting for Civil Rights to bracing for “dealing with white America at its worst” as Richard Nixon took power.

The audience, after a decade of turmoil, was already “radicalized,” if not-quite demoralized from the high profile political murders and riots of the era. The concerts, backed by the city of New York under its mayor, one of the last of a now-extinct political animal, a “liberal Republican,” went off without a hitch, despite having both Black Panthers and the NYPD providing security.

The shows take us back to a day when music was a more unifying force in American life, with many of the shows — featuring The Edwin Hawkins Singers (“Oh Happy Day”) and other Gospel acts — taking on a religious fervor, soul and funk acts sharing the stage with jazz, blues and Gospel ones.

And festival organizer, the “lounge singer” and “a hustler in the best sense,” Tony Lawrence, who also emceed the shows, gets his due. “He talked a big game, and he delivered.”

Questlove, billed as Ahmir-Khalib Thompson here, has made one of the most entertaining concert films in years, a piece of Baby Boomer nostalgia that is thrilling and moving, jaw-dropping (those Pips get me, every time) and toe-tapping, and a history lesson, all rolled into one.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for some disturbing images, smoking and brief drug material. 

Cast: Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., Stevie Wonder, Jesse Jackson, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Luis Miranda, Chris Rock, Tony Lawrence, Hal Tulchin and Gladys Knight

Credits: Directed by Ahmir-Khalib “Questlove” Thompson. A Searchlight/Hulu release

Running time: 1:57

“The Birthday Cake” is a lurid, blood-and-marinara-soaked mob movie, another tale of “this neighborhood’s changing” thanks to shifting demographics and an aging mafioso losing his grip. It’s also a coming-of-age story about a kid who wasn’t tough the first time the chips were down. Is he any tougher ten years later?

What it lacks in novelty it somewhat atones for in vivid, slice-of-a-sordid-life scenes, a tour of this corner of Brooklyn taken by our hero (Shiloh Fernandez of “Evil Dead” “and “Edge of Winter”), a young man on foot delivering his “mother’s famous cake” to a birthday party for his father.

On the walk in question, Gio walks into a convenience store, a bakery and a strip club. He’s button-holed by Federal agents and almost forgets the cake in a taxi. And at every step of the way, as he’s accosted, threatened and glad-handed, EVERYbody complains about his Uncle Angelo, the “old boss” who is losing ground on all fronts.

We saw it coming ten years before, as young Gio (David Mazouz) was egged into confronting the intruding “Russians” who humiliated him at school. And despite the best efforts of his Uncle Leo (Emory Cohen), the kid didn’t have it in him.

That came days after his father was murdered. And even though teen Gio only allowed himself to show any emotion to his priest (Ewan McGregor), he manned-up for the family, especially his mother (Lorraine Bracco).

Every year since, there’s been a birthday party for the dead dad, always at Uncle Angelo’s tacky mob mansion. But this year, with Feds and Russians closing in, and with Leo missing, mixed-up in “some business with the Puerto Ricans,” that walk is going to be fraught and interminable.

Fernandez, who is quite good in the lead and who co-wrote the script and co-produced this star vehicle, surrounded himself with stars, which gives the picture an unwieldy quality. Aggressive, noisy Italians over-populate every scene and both color this world he’s living in, and clutter it up.

The always-superb William Fichtner plays the uncle who’s a tough-guy cop. Penn Badgley is club-owner Peeno, John Magaro is one of the louder cousins, with Paul Sorvino a patriarch on a ventilator and Val Kilmer, well-cast as the aged, slipping boss Angelo, playing a man who (like Kilmer himself) has to speak through an electronic voice box.

And on that meandering walk, Gio falls into testy-cute arguments between the bakery-owning couple (Ashley Benson and Jeremy Allen White). They get impromptu marriage counseling from the taxi driver (Luis Guzmán) they all ride with.

A strip-club stop is de rigueur in such films — partly in the name of mob/cop movie authenticity, but mainly because producers like to be surrounded by naked strippers on set.

All those names and faces and locations overwhelm first-time feature director Jimmy Giannopoulos. He sloppily switches the film’s point of view, from Gio’s to others’, just often enough to break the flow. Most characters are poorly-served, as there are so many squeezed in.

In the end, clever third-act twist aside, the excess characters and story threads wreck the over-familiar mob movie recipe of this “Birthday Cake.” It doesn’t so much resolve as leave a bad taste in your mouth.

MPA Rating: R for pervasive language, violence, some sexual references, nudity and drug use

Cast: Shiloh Fernandez, Lorraine Bracco, William Fichtner, Aldis Hodge, Penn Badgley, Luis Guzmán, Ashley Benson, Emory Cohen, Ashley Benson, John Magaro, Paul Sorvino, Val Kilmer and Ewan McGregor

Credits: Directed by Jimmy Giannopoulos, script by Shiloh Fernandez, Diomedes Raul Bermudez and Jimmy Giannopoulos. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:33

Disney/Pixar’s animated “Luca” is “The Little Mermaid” without the heart, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” without the laughs.

It’s a dull if gorgeous-looking time-killer aimed at a very young and undemanding audience, perhaps not too young to ask “Mom, can we go to ITALY?” afterwards.

Because that’s where this is set and that setting is the film’s chief virtue. The sea nymphs who long to taste life on the land are pining for the Italia of cinematic lore, of Fellini and “Cinema Paradiso” and Hollywood stereotypes of Italians — pasta and bambinos, Ray Bans and transistor radios, and Vespas for everyone!

“Santa mozzarella!”

It’s all cute enough. But mamma mia, is this the most empty-headed Pixar script ever? Rhetorical question.

Luca, voiced by Jacob Tremblay of “Wonder” and “Room,” is an undersea tween who stares up and wonders what’s beyond his world. And then he makes the mistake of asking his scaled, finned family (Maya Rudolph, Jim Gaffigan).

“Where do boats come from?”

Granny (Sandy Martin) would totally blather on about going “to the surface” and having “done the change.” His parents shut that down in a flash. Which of course, piques his curiosity.

That’s how he goes above the surface, how he experiences “the change.” And that’s where he meets Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer). Alberto also has “done the change.” But he’s an old hand on life-on-land.

“Everything GOOD is above the surface,” he crows. “Air. Gravity. The SUN!”

Best of all is what they see puttering about the seaport village Alberto shows Luca, that shiny icon of Italian style, minimalism and “freedom” — the Vespa motor scooter, “the greatest thing humans ever made.”

If every “Cars” and “Planes” and “Toy Story” movie Disney and Pixar ever made was designed to sell toys, “Luca” represents the next Disney Great Leap Forward. It has the best product placement of any animated film since “Steamboat Willy.”

“Mom? Can we get a VESPA?”

The boys listen to fishermen and adopt human slang. “Ey, what’s wrong with you, Stupido?”

They try to master walking. “Try to lead with your head,” is Alberto’s advice.

And they try to DIY their own Vespa,”ma certo.”

The “big” theme here is overcoming the fears that keep you from experiencing the world, that “Bruno in your head,” Alberto explains of the little voice that keeps one from taking chances. “Don’t listen to stupid Bruno!”

That applies to the humans, too. They have a notion there are creatures beneath the Mediterranean. They have fears and prejudices about them. And they have harpoons.

Luckily, the nymphs-turned-boys are befriended by Giulia (Emma Berman). Her one-armed fisherman dad (Marco Barricelli) probably wouldn’t approve if he knew.

But hey, they like his pasta.

There’s a bully who has the coolest Vespa, and a big contest the boys could compete in and win. It involves running and swimming and eating pasta.

All they have to do to fit in is “don’t get wet.” Because that’s how they “change” back.

The cute-enough bits are Alberto’s delusional “explanations” of things and life on dry land, the night sky is filled with “anchovies and the Big Fish (the moon),” pining over a world where wild Vespas roam free — in their dreams.

But those bits are few and far between. The sight-gags are tiny-tyke simple, the jokes rare. And lacking musical numbers — What, no romantic ballad longing for a Vespa? — there just isn’t much to “Luca,” something Disney wisely decided was better as a streaming offering than anything they’d put in theaters.

MPA Rating: PG for rude humor, language, some thematic elements and brief violence 

Cast: The voices of Jacob Tremplay, Jack Dylan Grazer, Maya Rudolph, Emma Berman, Marco Barricelli, Sacha Baron Cohen and Jim Gaffigan

Credits: Directed by Enrico Casarosa, script by Jesse Andrews and Mike Jones. A Disney/Pixar release on Disney+.

Running time: 1:35

Has there ever been a World War II classic that starts as clumsily as “A Walk on the Sun?”

Corny ballad with printed sing-along lyrics, a poorly-faked landing craft voyage that never gives you any sense that the GIs on board are actually at sea, arch dialogue, including one private (played by John Ireland) who recites aloud his next planned letter home to his sister.

“Dear Frances, I am writing you this letter relaxing on the deck of a luxury liner. On shore the natives have evidently just spotted us and are getting up a reception – fireworks, music and that sort of stuff. Ha…”

There’s a solid 20+ minutes of this cheese. Even when the platoon’s lieutenant is hit offshore (and off-camera) and the drawling medic (Sterling Holloway) jokes his way forward to treat a dying man, everything about this opening act screams “The director was born during the Victorian Era,” as indeed Lewis Milestone was. Stodgy. Old fashioned hokum.

But once you get past the hokum, this is surprisingly sober and grimly realistic for its day. Eventually the style settles down, the “Wait wait wait” because “this is the Army, after all” tedium begins to resonate and the characters and the fine actors who play them start to make their marks.

Norman Lloyd is the put-upon complainer who figures he’ll “make sergeant” eventually, by the time they fight “The Battle of Tibet, in 1956.”

We tend to forget, in the middle of this global war, nobody really knew how long it would take to turn back fanatical fascists and anybody else who threatened liberty.

Richard Conte is the wise-ass machine gunner with a funny line for any eventuality. Italian deserters surrender to the platoon.

“Ask’em if they know where I can get a pizza.”

Lloyd Bridges is the farmer turned sergeant who might be the most competent NCO, and certainly the bravest.

Ireland is the poet, Windy, always composing those letters aloud, waxing lyrical about “GI dirt” and piping up when his commanders don’t have a clue.

“You’re a pretty shrewd guy, Windy.”

“That’s what I tell myself, all the time.”

And Dana Andrews is the stoical sergeant following the chain of command, even though the second in command (Herbert Rudley), nervous but in charge after the lieutenant’s death, has no one’s confidence.

“How’s baby?” Andrews’ Sgt. Tyne asks of the GI cradling his Thompson sub machine-gun, its butt covered in notches for “kills.”

“I’ll wake her up when I need her.”

The platoon is packed with troops when they land. They have a simple mission, seize a farmhouse stronghold, blow up a bridge below it.

As they duck strafing German fighters and take on tanks (off camera) and a machine-gun equipped halftrack (on camera), men die, and not generally in melodramatic ways. Nobody stops to mourn or get sentimental. Milestone — he directed the definitive 1930s film version of the anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front”– and screenwriter Robert Rossen (“All the President’s Men” and “The Hustler”) give this movie, filmed while the war was winding down, a dose of unemotional reality in between the wisecracks.

“It’s a funny thing, how many people you meet in an army that cross your path for a few seconds and you never see ’em again.”

 The combat is messy, inefficient, just like the real thing. Half the platoon hurls grenades at that hafltrack. It takes forever to disable and then take out.

The assault on the farmhouse, even by combat veterans, has a “follow orders” fatalism. There’s no Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne derring do. The machine gunner is to keep the Germans pinned down.

“I’m gonna aim for the knees, and then work north,” Pvt. Rivera (Conte) chortles.

They send a squad out to flank the house. “Volunteers? “

“Pass out the purple hearts, mother!”

“Any extra pay?”

“Naah.”

“Then I’ll go anyway, just to make them feel ashamed.”

The rest of the platoon will charge. A lot of them will go down.

The hokum here is mostly in the opening and closing moments, where singer Kenneth Spencer croons “the ballads.” The combat sequences, from quick sketches that show how limited your average GI’s field of vision is — What’s that explosion over there? Where’s that smoke coming from? Who’s coming up behind us? Are we all alone? — to the big set piece in the finale, are handled with professional polish.

After a while, even Windy’s narrated letters home stop sounding so damned hokey.

“Dear Frances, we just blew a bridge and took a farmhouse. It was so easy… so terribly easy.”

It’s not “The Ballad of GI Joe” or as good as the combat films of the ’50s. But if you run across “A Walk in the Sun,” as I have over the years, don’t let the first 20+ minutes chase you away. Ireland, Bridges, Conte, Andrews and Milestone make it well worth your while.

MPA Rating: “Approved”

Cast: Dana Andrews, Lloyd Bridges, Richard Conte, John Ireland, Huntz Hall, Sterling Holloway, Herbert Rudley and Norman Lloyd

Credits: Directed by Lewis Milestone, script by Robert Rossen, based on the novel by Harry Brown.

Running time: 1:57