Movie Nation

So how do we compartmentalize and allegorize “Gunpowder Milkshake,” the hit-woman action “comedy” starring Karen Gillan?

“Joanna Wick?” “Gloria” at half speed? “La Femme Samantha?” “Sin City” sans most sins?

Set in a lurid, neon-soaked underworld of gangs, gangsters and “The Firm,” just another mob with a “keep order” ethos, meet-ups are at “The Diner,” a ’50s themed joint that’s been there for ages and the waitress Rose always asks “Can I lighten your load for you?” as a polite way of disarming the armed.

Our hitwoman goes to The Library where mild-mannered “librarians” (Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino and Angela Bassett) check out Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf classics with pistols hidden in the pages.

“This girl needs to do some READING.” So “Joanna Wick” it is.

Sam, played by Freya Allen as a teen, never quite got over mommy abandonment issues. Splitting milkshakes at The Diner was their routine. Then Mommy (Lena Headey) had to fend off attackers out for revenge for her latest job, and kisses her off with an “I have to disappear for a while.”

Fifteen years later, Sam (Gillan) has taken over Mom’s duties with Nathan, “HR director with The Firm” (Paul Giamatti, of course). But there’s this one job that goes sideways. Some “accountant stole from us.”

“How much did he take?”

“Enough to earn to a visit from you.”

It turns out the guy did the stealing under duress. The villains have his little girl (Chloe Coleman). Shooting him only makes things worse. Motherless/Daddyless Sam has to make this good.

Nothing else goes according to “plan.” Nothing ever does in these movies.

It’d be easy to get behind the movie’s latest twist on empowered equal opportunity mass murder if there was much more to this than the slow-footed slaughter.

The cutesy “mothering” touches are insipid in this setting.

There aren’t many jokes, and most of those don’t land. Gillan’s shown a wry, deadpan side in the “Jumanji” movies. It doesn’t play here. The lack of big ticket charismatic villains, the Netflix thriller brand (alas) is also a minus. The fights have a half-speed, edit-the-fight-choreography-to-cover feel.

I really enjoyed a goofy/bloody slo-mo-due-to-drugs brawl at a spotless white dentist’s office where the doctor (Michael Smiley) is an after-hours mob surgeon. But an underwhelming car chase/shoot-out follows that.

The dialogue is amusing enough, here and there. “”A girl made the three of you look like ‘The Walking Dead.'”

The “give every name actress a big fight moment” pays off, even if it’s kind of spoiled by draping Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” over one brawl, and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” over another. That, like every excessive Bowling Alley Beatdown or Death Comes to the Diner screams “trying too damned hard.”

All that said, if Israeli B-movie maker Navot Papushado (“Rabies,” “Big Bad Wolves”) had kept this thing on its feet and sprinting — fewer pauses for motherly pathos, Spaghetti Western face-offs, etc. — “Milkshake” would have gone down easier, no matter how much gunpowder was used.

MPA Rating: R for strong bloody violence and profanity throughout.

Cast: Karen Gillan, Lena Headey, Paul Giamatti, Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh, Freya Allen and Carla Gugino.

Credits: Directed by Navot Papushado, script by Ehud Lavski and
Navot Papushado A Canal+ film, a Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

When it premiered in 1989, “D-Man in the Waters” was hailed as “dance of the moment,” a symbolic, energetic and balletic piece that “radiates life in the face of tragedy.”

The co-founder of the Jones-Zane Company that created it had died of AIDS. When he passed away, the paramedics that came to pick up his body refused to touch the corpse. One of the stars of that company, the “D-Man” of the title, was about to succumb to AIDS, yet made an brief appearance onstage in that premiere performance.

Can a work so much of its time, “dance of the moment,” live on, stay relevant and inspire young dancers and new audiences decades later?

That’s not questioned in the documentary, “Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones & D-Man in the Waters.” The piece endures and the film, shot before another pandemic tore through America, is largely set within the context of a new production of the piece mounted by Loyola Marymount University, directed by a veteran of that Jones-Zane ensemble.

But this sometimes emotional film shows us the struggle of Bill T. Jones and new production choreographer (and co-director of this film) Rosalynde LeBlanc to convey the symbolism and stakes to dancers too young to remember AIDS and all it did to dance, America and American culture.

LeBlanc and co-director Tom Hurwitz get Jones and veterans of his company to remember the crucible the show was created in, finished off as they all witnessed the wasting death of Jones’ “wife, husband” and business partner, half of a couple he describes as “a continent of two.”

“Cathartic” rehearsals altered the choreography of the show and gave it the emotional punch that made it a distinct live dance experience.

LeBlanc, leading Loyala Marymount students in rehearsals, stops to question the ensemble about what they’ve been told about AIDS in school, by parents, friends and relatives. Then she asks them about what crises they feel the show might relate to today — rampant gun violence, etc. — all in an effort to raise the emotional stakes in their performances.

Jones sits in on some of the rehearsals, instructing, encouraging, coaxing — “Don’t think ‘decorative.’ You’re an ATHLETE!”

It’s an intimate film that breaks down sequences of the dance as they’re slowly walked through and then assembled. If the movie lacks something, it’s the outside voices — academics, contemporaries in dance, critics — placing this work within dance history, verifying its importance and significance.

Still, “Can You You Bring It” is a fascinating history lesson, especially to generations that didn’t grow up under the AIDS specter, when sexuality and dating had dire consequences and when the big city worlds of dance, theater and the arts were decimated, almost overnight.

One dancer recalls that “half my phone book” of colleagues and collaborators “had died” before treatments arrived to stem the tide.

Up until then, and all through rehearsals and that premiere production of “D-Man in the Waters,” dancers were struggling to stay afloat, to carry on as almost everyone they knew went under.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Bill T. Jones, Rosalynde LeBlanc, Janet Lilly, Arthur Aviles, Heidi Lasky, Laurence Goldhuber

Credits: Directed by Tom Hurwitz, Rosalynde LeBlanc. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:34

Dr. Seuss would have loved Peter Wohlleben. The writer who dreamed up the line “I speak for the trees” would appreciate a real, live Lorax among us. “The most famous forester in Germany” has become a worldwide spokesman for what’s really going on in the woods, drawing on research from others and his own decades of experience to declare that trees are “not gigantic robots,” but “sentient beings” that communicate, feel and cooperate as they “pursue their objectives.”

“The Hidden Life of Trees” is a documentary built around Wohlleben’s teaching, lecturing and travels, based on his book of the same title (“Das geheime Leben der Bäume” in German). It’s a lovely blend of science, travelogue and arboreal evangelism.

He explains the science that’s revealed how trees communicate and cooperate with each other, not so much “competing” for sunlight, water and nutrients, as “sharing,” sending sugars to each other to keep ancient roots alive even after a trunk has fallen.

He makes his own “Ents” from “Lord of the Rings” joke, but that’s after he’s shown us the way fungi — mushrooms, the stars of “Fantastic Fungi” — weave a “wood wide web” under the forest floor, passing on information about stresses, threats and the like from tree to tree.

And he preaches to foresters, timber concerns, politicians and anybody who will listen about the proper care of forests — benign neglect — and the damage done by clear-cutting and mechanized harvesting, of planting one (usually non-native) species on tree farms and acting as if that monoculture is “helping” anyone other than big lumber and pulp paper concerns.

“If we want to use forests in the battle against climate change,” Wohlleben insists, “we have to allow them to grow old.”

Jörg Adolph’s film follows the forester through forests of Germany — “reserves” where “old growth” has reproduced the “virgin” beech forests of ancient central Europe, recent sites of forest fires (where leaving the trees, even the dead ones, standing, is the best practice). He visits the world’s oldest tree, a 10,000 year-old spruce in Sweden. He pitches in on anti-coal mine/clear-cutting protests in Germany and Vancouver.

And nature footage by Jan Haft — extreme closeups and majestic panoramas, time-lapse sequences and slow-motion scenes — fills in the rest, showing us the grandeur and the quiet of great expanses of trees left to do what trees do, the collection of forest creatures who depend on the nuts, cones and seeds of trees to survive.

And that underscores Wohlleben’s main points (either presented on camera, in German, or narrated from his book in English). Deciduous trees, he says, “before they bloom, agree among themselves” about when to do it. They can hold off on dropping seeds for a year or two as a means of preventing the wild boar, squirrel and deer populations from growing too fast and threatening the forest. Smart trees.

He also makes the case for avoiding transplanting trees from nurseries, doomed to “die before their time” because of whacking the roots back to make them easier transport, and against mechanical harvesting altogether. Forest floors are ruined for water retention and life regeneration by the gigantic, automated harvesters that render the work so fast and efficient these days.

A chat with the Canadian scientist/philosopher David Suzuki lays out the shortsightedness of logging and loggers. Wohlleben, like the trees, is thinking in terms of centuries, ecosystems and sustainability. Big Timber is cashing in on the worldwide lumber shortage to clear cut much of North America, all over again. Take any backroad in the rural South and you’ll see this, descendants with little connection to the land selling off timber rights to rape, ruin and run clear-cutters and chip mills.

“The Hidden Life of Trees” won’t change that practice on its own. But if you’re tempted into the woods by this film, maybe you’ll be a little more open to the idea of “individual rights” gathered in number to battle “corporate rights” in search of a more sane and sustainable way of looking at the forest, and the trees within it.

MPA Rating: PG

Cast: Peter Wohlleben, David Suzuki, Markus Lanz, Achim Bogdahn

Credits: Directed by Jörg Adolph and Jan Haft (nature footage). A Constantin Films release.

Running time: 1:24 (North American version)

The “coming of age/first summer romance” hallmarks are all over “Last Summer,” a Turkish take on a Hollywood staple.

Period piece, like “Dirty Dancing” and “The Way Way Back” and many others? Check. Beach resort with lots of skin and a skimpy swimwear? Oh yes. Dance clubs soundtracked with the music of the day? Check. First booze, first cigarette, lots of talk of “virginity” and losing it?

Check, mate.

“Innocent” teen crushing on an older might-be-lover? Sure. Hey, it’s set in 1996, a “pre-Erdogan” secular “sexy” summer, so why not?

But Ozan Açiktan’s film is so chaste it plays as a melodramatic tease. The situations may be familiar, but the payoffs are tepid, the resolution to the romantic threads, too safe and muted.

Deniz (Fatih Berk Sahin) and his family have come to Bodrum for their long, annual vacation. He’s 16 or so, a late bloomer the other kids used to tease as “Pac-Man” for his “baby fat.” Now he’s a tall, lean, athletic swimmer. He’s got peers he can catch up with every summer here.

But his ready-for-college sister Ebru (Aslihan Malbora) isn’t as bothered when he hangs with her and her friends. Until her BFF Alsi (Halit Özgür Sari) starts making a LOT of “Lookit you, all grown up” remarks. He is flattered by the attention, and smitten.

Thus begins his summer-long ache, diving off “dangerous” cliffs to impress her and his sister’s crowd, brought into nightclubs with them, getting mixed up in Ebru’s drama over her secret new boyfriend Kaan (Eray Ertüren) and wondering just what Asli’s up to as she invites him everywhere, makes a point of staying behind with him, rubs suntan oil all over his and touches his face–a lot — when they dance.

There’s an innocence to it all, but a slightly-older woman with a belly button piercing is complimenting him, even if there’s a patronizing edge to her “You’re a tiger” (in Turkish with subtitles, or dubbed into English) flirtations.

And then a wealthy pal of Kaan’s (Halit Özgür Sari) befriends him, and starts hanging with the two of them. Burak is 20something, charismatic and masculine in ways Deniz can’t match. Who will be the third wheel, the “go between,” the “chaperone,” as this summer rolls by?

The cast is pretty and polished. “Last Summer” is beautifully shot, showing off Bodrum and the Aegean Coast to great effect. Shimmering, over-the-top nightclubs, rocky shores on “the wine dark seas,” fig orchards and beautiful people recreating and kicking back, this has to be a summer to remember, right?

Only it isn’t. The flirtation has a sexual edge thanks to Deniz ogling Asli (we never see her notice) at every opportunity. But there’s no heat, just hints of his teenage longing. Virtually nothing is going on here, and the filmmakers seem to figure that out too late.

The third act has a whiff of “not growing up to be my Dad” philosophizing, the angst of college entrance exams and the “future” that may be wide open, or may be abruptly shut down for those who don’t figure things out before it’s too late.

Even the reckless behavior of youth seems recycled from every other film in this summer romance genre.

Pretty it may be. But all those elements conspire to make “Last Summer” not one we’ll remember, but one quickly forgotten.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, underage smoking, alcohol, profanity

Cast: Fatih Berk Sahin, Ece Çesmioglu, Halit Özgür Sari, Aslihan Malbora and Eray Ertüren

Credits: Directed by Ozan Açiktan, script by Sami Berat Marçali and Ozan Açiktan A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

True confessions time. Be honest. We ALL first heard tell of this Nicolas Cage project “Pig” and thought, “Nic goes John Wick over a truffle pig.” Scan the Internet for postings of the first trailer to Michael Sarnoski’s film. Just about every comment had a chortle over the vengeance thriller B-movie possibilities that presented.

But dark as it can be, “Pig,” owes more to “Northern Exposure” than it does any generic thriller, Keanu Reeves A-picture of Nicolas Cage B-movie. It’s a fictional variation on the longer-in-production/first-in-theaters “Truffle Hunters” documentary. This is the story of a hermit who hunts for truffles in remote Oregon with his truffle-snuffling hog his only companion.

Cage is understated, intense and haunted in this seriocomic search for a stolen companion, a man on a quixotic quest through the dark underbelly of foodie Portlandia. Ever few years, the guy reminds us of why he won an Oscar and “Pig” is this decade’s “Joe.”

He lives a Spartan, unwashed existence in an off-the-grid shack deep in the Northwest forest. His only friend is his sow, whom he dotes on when they’re not off hunting pricey, edible fungi. He cooks up some of what they dig up and shares it with the tail-wagging pig, who may not have a name but is as expressive and devoted as any beloved dog.

A battered cassette that he slaps into his ancient boom box suggests his name is “Robin,” and whatever past life he lived, these days he’s down in the dirt, sniffing and even tasting it to get an idea of where the truffles hide.

His buyer (Alex Wolff) is a callow, sarcastic creep in a Camaro, rolling up once a week, bitching about “no cell phone” but offering to set the hermit up with “one of those (propane-fired) camp showers.” The kid may know something of how Robin ended up here, but he doesn’t understand it. And he doesn’t push it, because he has a good thing going.

Right up to the night when locals thugs bust in, club Robin and steal his pig. He is forced to revive his long-mothballed pickup, forced to visit civilization for the first time in years, forced to bring Amir (Wolff) in on his quest.

No cops. No trips to a gun shop. No bloody oaths and threats. “I just want my pig back.”

Thus does the man who eschewed civilized Portland and all its wonders drag Mr. “This isn’t really MY Problem” into his quest, meeting back-to-nature stoners and visiting underworld bumfights involving not just homeless folk, but kitchen staff in the city’s fey, foodie-favored fine-dining eateries.

The script, co-written by Sarnoski and Vanessa Block, gives Cage a few “Nic Cage” moments of rage. I mean, the man was mugged and his pig was pignapped, after all. But “Pig” hangs on Cage’s soulful intensity in the part, a man who used to be somebody who, as one contemptuous old acquaintance hisses “doesn’t exist” now. “You have no value.”

But Robin knows “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about” in this life. And he’s leading by example, showing others that in the long scheme on time, in a place “overdue” for a “city flattened” earthquake or volcanic apocalypse, he’s figured out what has value. We don’t have to agree. We just have to acknowledge where his Zen quest has taken him.

The biggest laugh comes from the reaction of an equally high-mileage fellow truffler at the news of the theft of the pig. “Mac” swears LOUDLY, drops what she’s doing, mid-truffle auction, and stomps off to get some answers and threaten the wrath of God. Damned if she isn’t played by Gretchen Corbett, James Garner’s lawyer/lady friend on “The Rockford Files.”

“Pig” is meant to leave a faintly bittersweet aftertaste. Quests can be fruitless, personal “history” can retain its mysteries and wry, deadpan commentary on foodie culture, “molecular gastronomy” and whatever else sucks the joy out of “The Joy of Cooking” doesn’t make this a comedy any more than a tale of bearded vengeance on the march.

It’s just touching in its approach to the subject, filling in the blanks on the sorts of fellows who truffle hunt, something “The Truffle Hunters” left out. But the human to truffle-hunting companion connection the documentary showed is writ large in “Pig.”

If, like most casual film fans, you’ve skipped the decades of Nicolas Cage’s B and C movies that he fills his every waking moment filming, maybe you won’t be as shocked at the layered tenderness of this performance, with just the occasional reminder, thanks to the actor’s on-screen baggage, of how this saga could turn violent and vengeful.

Final true confession? I’d totally like to see that movie as well. Maybe the sequel?

MPA Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff and Adam Arkin.

Credits: Directed by Michael Sarnoski, script by Vanessa Block and Michael Sarnoski. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:32

“Holy Beasts (“La Fiera y la Fiesta)” is a movie about making a movie, an “art film” about old friends gathering to make a murdered filmmaker’s long-planned dream project in his native Santo Domingo.

Geraldine Chaplin plays the aged actress and sometime director who will turn “Water Follies” into a movie. Vera was close to Jean-Louis, and narrates much of this dark, cursed vampire tale as a conversation with his ghost.

“I found your script and I’m going to shoot it,” she begins. But when she gets to the Dominican Republic, her hypeman/producer Victor (Jaime Pina) has leapt ahead, scrambling to bums-rush this thing into production before the money vanishes and/or Vera stumbles, gets cold feet or flips out at the sets, costumes and dancer casting that he’s run off and handled for her.

“I didn’t approve ANY of this!” The sets (seen as models) “look like cheap kitsch!”

“Kitsch is IN!”

She can bark “How can you DO this to me?” all she wants. Victor’s back on the phone, promising the Dominican film community that “This is going to be the BIG one!”

Vera summons her co-star, Henri (Udo Kier), who balks at making the trip. “Hurricanes? Erupting volcanoes? NOT for me!”

But he comes. As their equally aged cinematographer Martín (Luis Ospina) shows up, rehearsals begin and the location scouting ends. And that’s when things go seriously sideways.

This movie about an elderly dancer (played by Vera) whose cabaret is filled with eternally-young hoofers, thanks to the predations of a choreographer/vampire (Kier) starts to lose dancers, and not to “creative differences.” Oh no. They have fatal neck injuries.

One of the dancers is to be played Vera’s long lost grandson (Jackie Ludueña Koslovitch), a lithe, long-haired and exceptionally feminine young man, and through him we start to pick up on what made the real Jean-Louis Jorge stand out. His films –some of which are sampled here — featured erotically-charged, gender-bending sequences. A maid (Yeraldine Asencio) who could be of any number of genders, a short-haired producer’s assistant (Pau Bertolini) who has her/his pick of pronouns, this is apparently in keeping with Jorge’s themes and style.

But will they be able to finish a film that is so accident prone that Vera wonders if long-dead Jean-Louis himself is to blame?

Co-writers/directors Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán take us back to the artier days of indie/international cinema with “Holy Beasts.” The dialogue feels improvised, the “relationships” seem real and there’s a little in the casting.

Producer Victor wonders if Vera has the “memory” and stamina to star in and shoot this film. But as he ticks off the names of their contemporaries, filmmaker friends who might be able to “help,” he’s the one who didn’t realize this or that “name” was dead.

It’s a dreamy making-a-movie narrative of stunning locations, elaborate costume parties and drugs, of geezers remembering their “Quaalude” days, and thankful that “Tough weeds never die.”

Like the film within the film, there’s a wistful contrast between the aged stars — in front of and behind the camera — and the fit and beautiful and often androgynous dancers in the supporting cast.

I was reminded of any number of cinema classics from the 1960s, starting with Truffaut’s “Day for Night” but staggering into the more obscure indulgences of Pasolini, Goddard, Fellini and Resnais. Like some of their works, “Holy Beasts” doesn’t quite come off in terms of coherence or dramatic tension, but impresses in almost every scene.

That’s the real homage here, to a ’70s-80s Dominican throwback to ’60s cinema who made art without seemingly trying too hard, sweating every detail or fretting too much about how coherent the script will seem to the casual viewer.

It’s offhand and off-the-cuff, extreme effort made to feel tossed-off, effortless. And if it’s all somewhat confusing, that was pretty much the point, back then and right now.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, nudity

Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Udo Kier, Jackie Ludueña Koslovitch, Pau Bertoloni, Luis Ospina and Jaime Pina

Credits: Scripted and directed by Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:29

No movie I’ve seen this year has hit me harder than “Cousins.” This heartfelt, emotionally wrenching story set among New Zealand’s indigenous Maori is poetry on screen, a compact saga of one extended family’s history and the lost cousin that those who knew her never give up looking for.

Movingly-adapted from a novel by one of New Zealand’s most celebrated writers, Patricia Grace, it follows Mata, a child orphaned by the state, abandoned by her callous British father. But even as she’s shoved into a home for “Desolate Children,” indoctrinated with the Bible, denied her own culture and language and kept from her family, they’re looking for her.

The secret to the film’s power is the number of times the tale lets us hope that she’s “rescued” and “brought home,” only to have that snatched away by a racist system and the racists who benefit from it.

In the fictive present, Mata (Tanea Heke) is old and homeless in Wellington, lost in her thoughts, adrift on a stream-of-conscious that takes her through her earliest memories, her first reconnections with her family and the cruel hand life dealt her. She grew up exploited, neglected and unschooled about family, social interactions, love and sex. She grew up without her family’s loving embrace.

Prim Mrs. Parkinson (Sylvia Rands) becomes her legal guardian when her mother dies, the one who drops little Mata (Te Ao Marama Baker) at the Mercy Home and who later takes her back in as a virtual indentured servant.

Her family doesn’t find her for years, but Aunt Gloria (Cian Elyse White) and others track her down and get her “home” for the holidays, with cousin Missy (Keyahne Patrick Williams) in charge of introducing her around and getting the older relatives to speak English around her.

And slightly older cousin Makareta (Shannon Williams), the self-described “spoiled one,” recognizes the injustice going on and vows, “We’re going to get you back, Mata. I promise.”

Decades later, Makareta (co-screenwriter Briar Grace Smith) has become a lawyer, trying to help the family hang onto ancestral lands, still looking at old family photos and wondering, “Where are you, Cousin?”

Co-directors Ainsely Gardiner (he produced “Eagle vs. Shark”) and Briar Grace Smith (she wrote “The Strength of Water”) seamlessly blend the various streams of the past with the film’s present. Mata’s school years, where she absorbed a contempt for her “ugly” people who “worship false gods and drink beer,” her late teens when when entered the workforce (to the benefit of her “guardian”) on to the first young man to turn her head.

Makareta, groomed to be a “great leader” by her ambitious mother, endures her own trials. And Missy (Hariata Moriarty, and later Rachel House) grows up to be exactly what we saw in her as a child, the glue that holds the family together, come hell or high water. The stream of actresses, young, youngest and old, who tell this tale are well-cast and sympathetically directed.

It’s a melancholy script decorated with poignant grace notes — that rebel schoolmate who sticks up for Mata when she’s bullied, the glimmer of connection when a Maori groundskeeper recognizes her “people,” the sisterhood of hatmakers who embrace her and slowly socialize her in her first job, an “arranged” wedding, a sad funeral.

What Smith and Gardiner have adapted is a rare and precious thing, a movie whose narrative momentum is carried by the simplest of longings — hope.

“Cousins” moves us to tears by the mythic promise of their grandmother, one we trust that no matter how dark, how often hope is dashed, will be fulfilled.

“The land, her ancestors, will bring her home.”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, adult situations, profanity

Tanea Heke, Te Raukura Gray, Te Ao Marama Baker, Ana Scotney, Rachel House, Briar Grace Smith, Miriama Smith, Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne, Keyahne Patrick Williams, Shannon Williams, Hariata Moriarty, and Sylvia Rands

Credits: Directed by Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace Smith, scripted by Briar Grace Smith, based on a novel by Patricia Grace. Coming to Netflix July 22.

Running time: 1:38

Terror totes an axe in “Fear Street Part 2: 1978,” the middle film in Leigh Janiak’s homage to horror films and the eras they came from.

Twenty five minutes into “Part 2,” the summer camp slaughterhouse instalment in the trilogy, a rerecorded version of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” turns up. Because the Captain and Kansas, Bowie and Neil and Tennille may set up the era, but nothing sets the mood like more cowbell.

That’s kind of the way of this film, entirely too “on the nose” for its own damned good.

The finale to “Part 1” introduced us to a Camp Nightwing survivor of the the long-ago-executed “witch” Sarah Fier, rumored to possess spree killers over the decades in forever-sullied Shadyside. “Part 2” is about C. Berman, aka Cindy Berman (Emily Rudd), at that ill-fated camp where the kids of Shadyside and neighboring, affluent and less crime-ridden Sunnyvale gathered in the summer.

Until, that is, 1978.

Cindy is a goody-two-shoes at the camp. Her sister Ziggy (Sadie Sink) is a hellion, lashing out at their disintegrating home life and shrinking future, on the verge of being “hung” as a witch by the mean Sunnyvalers when saner heads prevail.

But the camp nurse (Jordana Spiro) has been poking around in the past. There’s a map, and a “treasure” at the end of it that might “end this curse” and save Shadyside. As we’ve already seen all hell break loose in 1994, we know better.

“You can’t stop her. Run as far as you can as fast as you can,” the adult C. Berman (Gillian Jacobs) warned 1994’s Deena et al.

It all ties together as one big convoluted and inter-connected and inbred narrative, the future sheriff (Ted Sutherland) and future C. Berman and others struggle to get through one hellish night, the back-story is filled in more, and we hear more of the local murderous nursery rhyme.

“Before the witch’s final break, she found a way to cheat death…”

There’s a perfunctory quality to the situations and performances, the dialogue and the “terror,” cribbed from scores of “kids killed at camp” thrillers. It’s pitiless, but one gets the feeling the actors have seen the films these borrowings came from are just imitating their forebears.

“Part 2,” truth be told, feels kind of gassed after the giddiness of “1994.” The threats, terrors and manipulations are hammered home with a cudgel.

I mean, being chased with a guy with an axe is still seriously harrowing, and Janiak handles the attacks with skill, amped up by the screams and shrieking violins on the soundtrack. But familiarity breeds you-know-what.

Telling us what the future looks like isn’t the “spoiler” you might expect. But as we descend down the rabbit hole with the writer-director, we can guess the real suspense will come from in the third film, set in “The Witch” era — 1666.

How WILL she manage a movie that isn’t stuffed with Foghat, The Runaways, “Carry On My Wayward Son” and more cowbell?

MPA Rating: R, bloody horror violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Sadie Sink, Ryan Sink, Emily Rudd, McCabe Slye, Ted Sutherland, Chiara Aurelia, Michael Provost

Credits: Scripted and directed by Leigh Janiak, A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51

“How I Became a Superhero (Comment je suis devenu super-héros)” is a French twist on a common Hollywood theme — superhumans, living among us, minor celebrities with all the human foibles.

It’s not as serious minded as “Watchmen” or “Heroes,” not particularly lightweight and cute, either. But like the Russian “Major Grom: Plague Doctor,” it’s a curiosity, an example of how other cultures tackle a genre American cinema has beaten to death.

Actor turned first-time feature director Douglas Attal’s film is more tactile and lived-in than most Marvel or DC movies. It’s basically a police procedural with a superhuman mystery as the subject of its investigation. Occasional burst of effects aside, it doesn’t go full-on superheroic until late in the third act.

Somebody is kidnapping Parisians with powers. And Detective Moreau (Pio Marmaï), long on the job, almost as long on a losing streak, is given the case. He may be saddled with a no-nonsense partner (Vimala Pons) now, but back in the day, he was department “liaison” for the Pack Royal, a team of heroic super-heroes who helped him solve crimes of “supercriminality.”

That’s the sort of “super” folks we see the most of, here. “Mr. Cold? Could I get a selfie with you?” celebrities, convicts, goons and headcases. Moreau will lean on his old friend, time/shifting Monte Carlo (veteran French character actor Benoît Poelvoorde), who had to retire due to Parkinson’s, and Callista, the clairvoyant superhuman (Leïla Bekhti) who runs a sort of after school/keep’em out of trouble program for superhuman teens.

Yes, that sounds a lot like “X-Men,” troubled superhumans causing trouble. But there’s no Professor Xavier here to show them their better selves.

What’s more, the streets are flooded with drugs which give people brief blasts of the bad sort of superhuman “powers.” A string of increasingly-deadly arsons is what our cop duo is investigating — at first. But their main suspects, and other people with powers are disappearing, too.

The cops bicker in the usual ways, and do the “good cop/bad cop” thing as if they think it’ll work, although crooks have seen that in the movies for 100 years.

I found the entire enterprise just a tad above “boring,” lacking much in the way of action or urgency or connection with the characters. But eventually it settles in and we get moments of mild excitement and genuine pathos.

And the film being French, it manages the sexiest superhero scene since “Spider-Man.”

MPA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast: Pio Marmaï, Vimala Pons, Leïla Bekhti, Swann Arlaud and Benoît Poelvoorde

Credits: Directed by Douglas Attal, script by Cédric Anger, Melisa Godet, Charlotte Sanson, Douglas Attal and Gérald Bronner, based on the graphic novel by Gérald Bronner. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

What’s a stoner comedy without weed? If it’s “Mandibles,” the latest deadpan farce from the French director of “Rubber,” it’s still daft, stoned or stone-cold sober.

“Mandibles” is a shambolic, sometimes funny and always-silly amble through the South of France with a couple of dopes who’ve stumbled upon a gigantic house fly.

They didn’t plan it, although they make lots of “plans” about the big bug the more sentimental of the two, Jean-Gab (David Marsais) promptly names “Dominique.” Something to do with “drones,” maybe, a trained fly that can make them rich by maybe doing what they do, only better.

They’re low rent hustlers. Manu (Grégoire Ludig) is the muscle, a homeless mug and part-time thug given “a mission” by his sketchy pal Raimondo (Raphaël Quenard). Get a car, drive to the chateau of Michel-Michel, pick up a suitcase, put it in the trunk.

As Raimondo finds Manu homeless, sleeping on the beach, that presents several challenges. Got to get a car, first. He breaks Raimondo’s confidence by bringing his hapless filling station attendant pal Jean-Gab along.

But that old Mercedes Manu hot-wired? There’s a noise in the trunk. And it’s neither mechanical nor human.

Writer-director Quentin Dupieux finds a few chuckles in this quirky couple, dimwits who hook horns (with their fists) every time something pays off for them, shouting, “TORO.”

Their simple “mission” is going wrong before they take a look in the trunk (a hot-wired car has no keys, remember). Every DIY challenge they face they solve in the most half-assed manner imaginable.

They stop to “train” the fly, but they need somewhere to lay low. They decide on the camper trailer (“caravan” in Euro-speak) of an old guy Manu head-butts as he robs him. But caravans aren’t fireproof, or nincompoop-proof.

Right in the middle of another sight gag — towing the Mercedes with a unicorn bicycle — they’re stopped and befriended by a gaggle of bourgeois ladies, one of whom is sure Manu is somebody she knew from high school.

And that’s how we meet Agnes, a friend of the family who SHOUTS (in French, with English subtitles) her every rude thought and deranged accusation at them due to a brain injury. “WHERE DID YOU LEARN YOUR MANNERS?” Whatever else “Mandibles” manages, Agnes (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is one hilarious creation.

The picture doesn’t go much of anywhere, but aimless in Rayol-Canadel-sur-Mer, La Croix Valmer and elsewhere along the Côte d’Azur​ counts for something, a pretty setting for a seriously deadpan (and slightly icky) comedy about two guys on the lam with a fly.

MPA Rating: unrated, some violence, profanity

Cast: Grégoire Ludig, David Marsais, Adèle Exarchopoulos, India Hair, Roméo Elvis, Raphaël Quenard

Credits: Scripted and directed by Quentin Dupieux. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:17