Movie Nation

The tropes of the big screen boxing drama were basically chiseled in stone in the Hollywood of the 1930s and ’40s, set up and recycled — with some variations — by “The Champ” and “Golden Boy” and “Body and Soul,” and repeated ever since.

“American Fighter” is built on those traditions, a “tough kid” with “big obstacles” to overcome if he wants to win the “big rematch” and solve his “big problem.”

Except this kid is named “Ali.” He’s a Persian immigrant in 1981 America, college wrestler tough, but with bigotry and hustlers surrounding him everywhere he goes and a sickly mother back in Tehran who needs American medical attention to survive.

His dad? He was executed on the tarmac before the parents could fly out.

George Kosturos (“A California Christmas,” “The Ride”) steps into the spotlight here, playing a fighter who could only exist in B-movies. He learns “underground” no-holds-barred fighting on the fly, punches way above his weight or the laws of physics, lands scores of knuckle-breaking haymakers and endures just as many as he scrambles to raise the cash to smuggle his mom out of Revolutionary Iran.

He’s scored a back-door college wrestling scholarship on the West Coast, but privileged or not, he doesn’t have the cash or the means of making it to save his mother.

Until his wrestling buddy (Bryan Craig) notes how Ali handles one racist “camel jockey” (and worse) insult too many from their teammates.

“That punch you threw in practice, you think you could do that again?”

Ryan is thus Ali’s entre to the underground fight scene of Northern California, booked and gambled-on 15 minute bouts staged in basements, hay lofts and the like for a few hundred bucks a throw.

Tommy Flanagan (“Sons of Anarchy,” “Braveheart”) is the ever-so-Irish promoter/profiteer who smells money in people betting against the hated “Muslim.” Sean Patrick Flannery (“Dexter,” “Assault on VA-33”) is the sage and boozy trainer the kid won’t give the time of day to, until he figures out he’s in over his head.

And Allison Paige plays the cute coed who digs Ali’s curly locks and exotic accent.

There’s a whiff of “Hallmark movie” to this brute brawl of a drama. Outside of the ring, it’s chaste and downright cheesy — a roller rink date, Mom’s worries in Iran, the fatherly way Flanery’s Duke sobers up just enough to teach “the kid” a thing of two.

“It’s the land of opportunity, kid. And yours is just inside that ring.”

One break from formula is that this “teachable moment” comes awfully late, too late to work, really. How did Ali get so good so fast, and carry on all this time without instruction?

The period piece nature of the pic means we get an ’80s synth-pop score and a lot of cornball post-“Rocky” cornerman wisdom about fighting “three-legged donkeys” and “blame makes you weak, son.”

Despite the racism, the budding romance, the pathos of Ali’s “cause” and the under-developed “wrestling” side of things — no, absorbing the ethics of no-ethics brawling isn’t allowed in the NCAA — “American Fighter” never overcomes the perfunctory story and B-movie “types” performing it.

The players give fair value, but not that extra something that would have lent this pathos or made us care. And if you’ve seen one savage beat-down, you’ve seen them all.

MPA Rating: R for violence

Cast: George Kosturos, Tommy Flanagan, Sean Patrick Flanery, Allison Paige and Bryan Craig

Credits: Directed by Shawn Paul Piccinino, script by Carl Morris, Shaun Paul Piccinino. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:38

Suki Waterhouse, a deep-voice/zero-range “model/actress” plays the “new girl” at a “Seance” obsessed boarding school in this week’s classmate killer horror thriller.

While her look, voice and name are distinctive, I don’t recall her standing out in “The Broken Hearts Gallery” or “Assassination Nation” the way she does here. She’s utterly dreadful, but perhaps she hated the material and figured even “phoning it in” wasn’t worth the effort.

Expressionless Camille shows up an Eveldine Academy just after a seance that led to a teen’s suicide. But WAS it? A suicide?

Camille crosses swords with the mean girl clique, led by Alice (Inanna Sarkis) but including Roz (Djouliet Amara), Yvonne (Stephanie Sy), Bethany (Madisen Beaty) and Lenora (Jade Michael), young women of privilege prone to pranks.

“You really don’t want to get on our bad side.”

Luckily, the new girl with the English accent has one friend, Helina (Ella-Rae Smith), even if Helina’s agenda leans towards friend-with-benefits.

But they’re all in the same boat at this “haunted” school, with the recent suicide, which created an opening for Camille, perhaps caused by a ghost and not by the mean girls tricking, scaring and humiliating her into leaping out a window.

“Some people think that it was an accident,” Helina says. She and Camille are interested in finding out. But those scratching, creaking noises in the walls, lights constantly flickering out and apparitions mean that Alice’s seance-strategy is the one everybody pursues.

Is there a dead disgruntled alumna or something/someone else out to “get” the girls — picking them off one-by-one as they conveniently separate and find themselves alone and dead?

There’s a generous sampling of horror “mystery” cliches in this script, plenty of this or that death/disappearance “doesn’t make any sense.”

Writer-director Simon Barrett makes sure that everyone looks fabulous, as most are playing pretty, vain princesses, and those who aren’t immediately fall under suspicion.

The requisite titillation of the dead (female) teenager movie genre isn’t remotely titillating — a shower scene here, a leotarded dance rehearsal there.

And through it all stands Waterhouse, stone-faced and stiff, underreacting to this death or that bit of peril, selling the fight sequence with all she (and a stunt double) have.

At least she’s been cast in a new version of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” so perhaps that’s what was on her mind while Waterhouse was shooting this. But being second banana to the notoriously awful Dakota Johnson (google her and “bad actress”) tells us all we need to know about that. Perhaps Waterhouse realizes that, as well.

MPA Rating: R for bloody horror violence, language and some drug use 

Cast: Suki Waterhouse,  Madisen Beaty, Inanna Sarkis, Stephanie Sy, Ella-Rae Smith, Jamde Michael, Seamus Patterson

Credits: Scripted and directed by Simon Barrett. An RLJE/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:33

“You were always quiet,” the old flame says of the big city cop who’s come home for a funeral.” “You always saw everything.”

That’s Eric Bana’s character in “The Dry,” a solid and engrossing police procedural from Down Under. He plays Aaron Falk, a detective who grew up in remote, drought-stricken Kiewarra, but left long ago, and under a cloud.

Now he’s been summoned home for the funeral of a former friend, a guy who killed his family in a murder-suicide. And that has the entire town furious. Aaron knew Luke. And Aaron and Luke lied about another death twenty years before. Now Luke’s gone and killed his wife and son and then himself. If only Aaron had told the truth back then, they think.

But Luke’s family (Julia Blake, Bruce Spence) want Aaron to clear his name, once again.

“Obviously, Luke didn’t do it,” his mother declares. Nobody else in town buys that. They’re pretty damned sure Luke, or Aaron or both of them had something to do with a girl’s drowning when they were teens. The harassment, led by the girl’s hard-drinking redneck brother (Matt Nable) turns from testy to ugly in a flash.

In scenes set in the present day, Aaron watches and listens. Unarmed, supposedly off-the-clock as a Federal police detective who just broke a big finance scandal case, Aaron avoids confrontations. He takes care to include the out-of-his-depth local police sergeant (Keir O’Donnell) as he follows leads and patiently asks questions.

There are no obvious answers, but suspects start to pop up and the town’s secrets start to emerge, one clue at a time.

Aaron meets up with former classmate, now a single-mom Gretchen (Genevieve O’Reilly) and there are sparks, even if he’s asking everyone questions, including her.

“Can’t we just sit and drink our body weight?”

In scenes set in the past, the teen Aaron (Joe Klocek) is just as subdued, the quiet partner to brash, abrasive and charismatic pal Luke (Sam Corlett), the handsome one that turned all the girls’ heads. And he’s just as observant, scenes the adult Aaron replays in his mind as he rethinks that “mystery” from long ago.

Ellie (BeBe Bettencourt), a haunted beauty who guards her secrets even if her unhappiness shows, had both boys’ attention.

What happened back then, and is it “connected,” somehow, to what’s happening now?

Aussie director Robert Connolly (“The Bank”) takes his time with this material, slowly building up characters, layer by layer. The stresses of the drought are stated overtly at first, and slip into the background. A visit to “the ol’swimmin’ hole” shows it to be dry, as is everybody’s favorite fishing lake.

“Shooting rabbits,” the European imports that overran Australia in the 19th century whose presence is even less welcome in times of drought, has become a local routine. “Can’t have’em on my property.”

Aaron doesn’t have the stomach for that. But we have to wonder how much abuse Aaron will take from a very hostile town where he’s no longer welcome. And while clues start to pop up, which he and we notice at the same time, the false leads outnumber the real ones for much of the picture.

The film’s downbeat tone suits its sedate pace. There’s room for characters to breathe and develop, and O’Reilly, Nable, Bettencourt and others play people with flaws and quirks and secrets insofar as anyone can have such things in a town this size.

Bana makes Aaron the most intriguing and “real” feeling character of all — troubled by guilt and questions he may not want the answer to, stumbling in the wrong direction, here and there, but never breaking stride, never panicking, never blowing up or melting down in that way “Hollywood” cops so often do.

The film’s resolution leaves something to be desired, but Bana pulls us in even and gets us past even the moments when “The Dry” threatens to leave us high and dry.

MPA Rating: R for violence, and language throughout 

Cast: Eric Bana, Genevieve O’Reilly, Keir O’Donnell, BeBe Bettencourt, Matt Nable, Miranda Tapsell, Julia Blake and Bruce Spence.

Credits: Directed by Robert Connolly, script by Harry Cripps, Robert Connolly and Samantha Strauss, based on a novel by Jane Harper. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:57

His name is Pineapple Tangaroa, and his resume mentions Austin, Texas, sometime actor (“Puncture,” Song to Song”), “entrepreneur” and — implied — “local character.”

His face is one big tattoo, punctured by piercings that turn him into a walking visual effect.

And in “Drunk Bus,” his character, naturally-named Pineapple, taps into that cuddly sort of intimidating that Terry Crews and Dave Bautista have mastered, bulky and badass, with just a hint of stoner Seth Rogen.

Pineapple is brought on board the Kent, Ohio “campus loop” bus driven by recent grad Michael (Charlie Tahan), who gets picked-on so often that it’s crossed over into violence.

Pining away over the longtime girlfriend who “moved on” nine months earlier, downcast and hapless with women, ready to take the might-as-well-make-a-career-of-it offer pitched by his boss (the heard, but never seen Will Forte) who tempts his “protege” with awards and a full-time contract via radio. Michael is literally trapped in a “loop” of his own, indecisive creation. Pineapple sizes him up in an instant and resolves, in the manner of such coming-of-age tales, to do things about all that.

Tahan, of TV’s “Ozark” and “Gotham,” makes Michael that loser who can’t even manage to be the hero of his own story. That’s how this works, and that’s how Tangaroa, playing the quintessential Force of Nature mentor, walks away with “Drunk Bus,” a rude, laugh-out-loud on-and-off-campus romp that premiered, of course, at South by Southwest in Austin.

Not that stealing the movie proves all that easy. Screenwriter Chris Molinaro and first-time co-directors John Carlucci and Brandon LaGanke populate this “Pineapple Excess” with a “Night Tara” (Sydney Farley as a sexy coed who has night terrors), a pot-dealing “Devo Ted” (comic writer and actor Dave Hill), a profane and insane old passenger in a motorized wheelchair nicknamed “F–k Y– Bob” (Martin Pfefferkorn) and other frat bros and sorority girls with AA in their futures.

Michael’s got a boorish dolt of a “registered sex offender” roommate (Zach Cherry) and two true blue friends, gay Justin (Tonatiuh) and unregistered pickpocket Kat (Kara Hayward), none of whom are having any luck at all at shaking Michael out of his funk over lost-love Amy (Sarah Mezzanotte). Then a bullying passenger clobbers Michael, Pineapple is “hired,” and Michael and the movie are changed…forEVER.

Pineapple’s stocky, inked, pierced and wearing leather and chains. Any argument with with is over before it begins. “The Bro Whisperer” sizes the kid up and says “What you need is a do-over.”

That’s how Michael meets the pot dealing, pizza bagel loving Ted, obsessed with “the seminal art punk band that formed one town over.” Devo and “devolution” are what Ted is all about.

That’s how Michael learns at the feet of his new life coach. “A wise Samoan once said, “Change doesn’t begin when you get knocked on your ass. It begins when you decide to get on your feet again.”

That “wise Samoan?” “Dwayne the Mother-F—–g Rock JOHNSON.”

Pineapple’s a loose cannon rolling the decks of Michael’s late night bus circuit, picking up drunks who vomit or poop on board, rolling by a frathouse that throws equally disgusting things on his windshield. Pineapple’s the one who understands the kid’s fundamental hangups, that he can’t make a decision and that he “never shampooed the Wookie.”

Ahem.

Tahan makes a fine straight man for all these funny people surrounding him, with Tangaroa, Hill, Cherry and Hayward giving him hilarious takes to react to.

The laughs in “Drunk Bus” may come in familiar places, but there’s a genuine effort to flip the script just enough to avoid the standard traps in such farces. “Revenge” has no upside, “growth” comes from making “an actual decision in your life,” and “settling” — in love or career — is not something you do when you’re this far under 25.

Michael needs to grow up, or at least start the process. Michael needs to listen to this hulking, over-decorated conscience that’s bellowing in his ear. His friends know this.

“I already like him better than I ever liked you.”

And Michael needs to learn the limits of any mentor’s wisdom. At some point, you stop listening, because otherwise, you never escape the loop, you never get off the “Drunk Bus” and stagger off to your real destiny.

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

Cast: Charlie Tahan, Kara Hayward, Zach Cherry, Tonatiuh, Dave Hill, Sarah Mezzanotte, Martin Pfefferkorn and Pineapple Tangaroa.

Credits: Directed by John Carlucci, Brandon LaGanke, script by Chris Molinaro. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:40

If you’re Muslim and you die in Newark, chances are your body will pass through the caring hands of Hanif, a casket-maker and ritual body washer who lives and works there.

Hanif is an accomplished craftsman and a member of the majority Black city’s large Muslim community. He is affable and outgoing, and in moments where it counts, empathetic.

But he is quick to admit that when he was younger, he was in trouble — in and out of jail. He was a neglectful father, something he’s trying to make up for in his 50s. That’s why he takes an interest in two kids at a crossroads, both of them in his neighborhood.

Zeshawn Ali’s sympathetic if somewhat diffuse documentary “Two Gods” is a slice of Hanif’s life — watching him work, washing corpses with care, tidying up the rough, cheap pine coffins he builds, seeing him socialize in his little corner of Newark, a salty but friendly role model to kids looking for role models where they can kind them.

We also see Hanif’s efforts to be there” for his adult son Tyler, who missed having him as a dad when he was doing much of his growing up. We see Hanif good-naturedly trying to a father figure to Furquan, who is 12 and living with a troubled mother and her latest violent boyfriend. And we watch him struggle to reach Naz, a 17 year-old who complains about being a police “target” after an arrest, a distracted boy who makes these complaints after being picked up in a stolen car or “run in” for something else in front of a sea of pricy sneakers in his room.

“Just when they see you doing good,” the kid who is getting his cash from somewhere gripes, “they smack you.”

The biracial Furquan’s problems are with his environment, something Hanif can help with by simply asking for his “help.” He teaches the boy how to use the tools at hand to build coffins in his boss’s shop.

Tyler is amenable to a little bonding over father-son sparring, with boxing gloves.

Naz? He’s “hanging with the wrong people,” by his own admission, making mock rap videos glorifying violence, greed and guns. A dressing down from Hanif might help, or might not.

Ali’s black and white film follows one kid, “rescued” from his toxic home and taken to rural N.C., and loses track of another — as indeed do the authorities, briefly — after Naz cuts off his ankle monitor.

There isn’t much in the way of message, just a guy trying to make a difference, taking a Zen level of attention and care with his work, a regular at his mosque and setting out to be a steady, supportive presence in these young people’s lives.

“Two Gods” is a pleasant enough immersion in this world, with its close-ups of bees on flowers, birds rummaging through garbage and fly-on-the-wall scenes of Furquan in the shop with Hanif, mixing it up with him over his Super Soaker

But the movie loses its purpose and coherence whenever it drifts away from Hanif. The construction feels most haphazard when we’re following Furquan, half-following Naz and not getting much out of Tyler save for Facetime chats with his dad, getting teased for picking his nose as he does.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Credits: Directed by Zeshawn Ali.

Running time: 1:22

There are days when horror movie film school must sound like NBA practice.

“The key…is ISOLATION.”

Just as star players perform best when they get a one-on-one matchup with a foe, horror movies are built on villains invariably splitting up and dealing with our heroines or heroes in isolation. That gives the good guys a chance to stab, club or trick their way out of whatever hostage torture and murder scenario they’ve been written into.

“The Retreat” is about gay couples lured into the wilderness where they can be captured and and killed for their “lifestyle choices.” A rustic “gay BnB” for weekend getaways and celebrations? That may be the only joke in the movie.

Renee and Val are coming out for another couple’s pre-wedding celebration in the woods of early fall. They’re just at the stage where Val (Sarah Allen) is wondering “where this is going,” and Renee (Tommie-Amber Pirie) isn’t wanting to talk about it.

They won’t settle that at “The Retreat.” They won’t have time. The menace settles in before they leave the inevitable country convenience store stop every horror movie cast stops in before they head for “The Cabin in the Woods.”

The “Take Out Your Ex — One Bullet Oughta Do It” bumper sticker should be a warning. Ominous servings of “Did you hear that?” and “Is somebody watching us?” should seal the deal.

RUN. But no. The moment they get there, they’re hurled into the nightmare we’ve seen another gay couple endure in the film’s prologue.

All those camo masks and hunting accessories we saw in the store aren’t just for deer, you know.

The foreshadowing in Alyson Richards’ screenplay is textbook obvious. Renee grew up among rural hunters who “culled the (deer) herd” and dragged her along for it.

“Why do you think I live in the city?”

A flat tire, another trope of “cabin in the woods” horror, means in this case that we see a shot of the tire iron (actually a crow bar, which makes no sense) used in the repair.

Val? She’s “a scientist.” Got to figure that’ll play into the plot.

The perils they face are cliches and the characters hunting them are stereotypes who like poking through their phone photos post-capture.

“I’m gonna take a peek at your disgusting lifestyle, pervert!”

It’s a shot-in-the-back, victim-clutches-chest slasher pic, with much “quick and dirty” story telling and filmmaking in evidence.

But once our heroines get their “isolation,” the embattled stars give us reason to root for them.

“The Retreat” may be horror by the numbers, but there are solid reasons these character types and story tropes are recycled, again and again. As they teach you in horror film school, they endure because they work, even if they don’t have a prayer of surprising anybody as they do.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Tommie-Amber Pirie, Sarah Allen, Aaron Ashmore and Celina Sinden

Credits: Directed by Pat Mills, script by Alyson Richards. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:22

They are ordinary people, the elderly EveryGerman you’d meet in the park feeding the birds, gathered for a kaffeeklatsch or simply reminiscing in groups in retirement homes.

Their names never made it on the court dockets at Nuremberg, never gained international infamy. They weren’t literal “war criminals.”

With a little prodding, they might break out a photo album or scrapbook filled with memorabilia from a time most have mixed feelings about. Here’s a photo from my Hitler Youth days. Here I am in uniform. Here’s the badge from my SS unit, my Nationalist Socialist Party membership card.

German filmmaker Luke Holland realized, back in 2008, that these people, Germany’s “infamous generation” to America’s “greatest generation,” were dying out. And while screens of every size have been filled with stories of the victims of the Holocaust, families torn apart and murdered off, and of the most heinous criminals of that atrocity, those movies aren’t the whole story.

The ordinary Germans who enlisted, joined the “elite” SS, who fought the war that their votes and their enthusiasm started, and who for decades avoided opening up about what they did during history’s darkest hours, are dying off. Holland set out to find them, hear their stories, prod them and discover how they reconciled this part of their lives, to give a “Final Account.”

That “mixed feelings” about the war and the war crimes associated with fascist “Nazi” Germany is embodied in the phrases we’ve heard so often they’ve become international punchlines.

“Never a member of the Nazi Party…I fought in the Wehrmacht (army, not the SS) on the Russian front.”

We hear the most common of those in Holland’s quietly chilling film. “I knew nothing,” in German, with English subtitles.” “We saw nothing.”

But we also hear of “our shame,” see expressions of guilt and regret scattered among the denialism, rationalizations and worse that the many SS, Werhmacht and Luftwaffe (air force) servicemen serve up, that the female accountants and simple private citizens use as excuses for looking the other way.

Some recall long-dead parents and siblings falling for Hitler. But many of those interviewed here didn’t join the various “party” youth groups out of ideology.

“We didn’t support the party. We loved the uniforms, the singing.” And when they enlisted in the military?

“I believed in it and wanted to die a hero’s death, nonsense like that.”

Former members of the Hitler Youth recall how they were ordered to “guard” (block entry) to Jewish businesses, others remember Kristallnacht’s crimes against Jewish people, property and synagogues.

“We were astounded” when the fire brigades stood by and let buildings burn on those nights in November of 1938.

“The Jews weren’t very popular,” one Waffen SS lieutenant, with the unfiltered bluntness of old age, shrugs. “This had...consequences.”

Their names are given — just ordinary Heinrich and Franz, Klaus, Herbert and Margarethe and many others. Some are questioned by Holland, the oldest man interviewed here is nudged into talking by his daughter. Many repeat the same denials they’ve lived with for 75 years, others mutter “How could they/we NOT know” what was going on, either next door, down the street or in the camp just outside of town.

We see archival photos, “evidence” of the horrors, which almost everyone admits “were whispered about” right from the start. But the reason for the whispering was fear.

And we’re shown memorials, not just to the most infamous camps — Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen. There’s Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen, and Ebensee, Austria and Bernburg, Germany, home to a euthanasia center — lest we forget the German Reich also murdered those it deemed a “drain” on society — those with mental or physical disabilities.

And we hear about those who “benefited” from the mass incarcerations and murders, small local businesses that were willing cogs in a planned fascist-capitalist slave labor industrial complex.

If “Final Account” has a shortcoming, it’s that few moments stick out as most chilling of all. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” is very much on display. This stone mason or that infantryman doesn’t have that stick out as the essential testimonial or image here.

There’s no Polish railwayman reprising the throat-slashing gesture he made — out of cruelty, fatalism or warning — to Jewish arrivals at the death camp he delivered them to, the most haunting image of Claude Lanzman’s “Shoah.”

Here, flashes of unapologetic racism and glimpses of humanity intermingle in people whose very “ordinariness” is their most striking quality. That, coupled with the timing of Holland’s film, with global fascism showing its fangs again in countries which always sneered “It could never happen here,” reminds us that most Germans never thought that either. And like us, they could not have been more wrong.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material and some disturbing images

Credits: Directed by Luke Holland. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1″34

Angelina Jolie plays a Montana smoke-jumper turned fire-watcher caught up in protecting a child from profession assassins in “Those Who Wish Me Dead,” a strained and clumsy thriller that stands out as the first misstep from director and co-writer Taylor Sheridan, of “Hell or High
Water” and “Wind River.”

Jolie’s the boss of a macho, swaggering team that parachutes into difficult to reach fires, and she’s just been re-assigned after an accident in the field. No more swapping jokes and stunts and a flask with the boys. Fragile Hannah is assigned to a fire tower to think about what she’s done — obsess about it.

Her ex (Jon Bernthal, the muscle of the movie) is sheriff, and inclined to keep an eye on her, seeing as she’s almost been demoted out of her career. But he’s got a survivalist training school operator wife (Medina Senghore, the heart of the movie) at home, so he’s got his hands full.

And that’s before the Big City Accountant (Jake Weber) grabs his kid (Finn Little) and makes a run for…Montana. If the movies have taught us nothing else, it’s that accountants “know things.” If those things were to ever get out, there’d be trouble. He kind of explains that to the kid.

“Trouble” is the elite, sadistic hit squad sent to head them off. Aiden Gillen is the leader, the sort of goon who’ll start a forest fire to cover his murderous tracks. Nicholas Hoult is his not-much-nicer sidekick.

You’ve already guessed that the kid winds up alone, that the assassins bull-in-a-china-shop the locals to find him, and that Hannah is his best hope for surviving to tell his dad’s secrets.

For a movie that keeps its smoke jumping angle in the background, Sheridan works in some good fire effects and a little solid woodlore. Dad imparts the most basic get-out-of-the-wilderness strategy to his kid. Hike downhill, find a creek.

“Creeks lead to rivers, rivers lead to towns.”

Jolie is years-removed from her action lead days, so she does what the aging men in the genre do — swaggers, wisecracks and smirks to compensate. The effort shows, and she’s required to justify in dialogue how somebody as plainly model thin, “skinny,” as her is able to do this sort of superhuman work. Not buying it.

Senghore, of TV’s “Happy!,” and Bernthal (he was in Sheridan’s “Wind River”) are so good together, and separately, that you almost wish they were the leads and starring in a better movie.

Gillen, of “Game of Thrones” and the “Maze Runner” movies, is a perfectly credible killer, as his Hoult.

But Jolie isn’t playing the most interesting character, and she tends to “Maleficent” this — relying on the cheekbones to do the heavy lifting for her.

The movie’s gone wrong before Hannah’s sentenced to her tower, “a 20 by 20 box on stilts with no toilet,” a radio and great views. Weber’s Dad character sputters on and on in some cryptic monologues about what he knows and about whom, and those give the film’s early scenes a serious case of whiplash, as those monologues are intercut with scenes where the regal Jolie is meant to be mixing it up with her “crew,” and seems about as at home doing that as you’d expect.

Even the third act fights and shootouts can’t pull “Those Who Wish Me Dead” back from the you-know-what.

MPA Rating:  R for strong violence, and language throughout 

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Aidan Gillen, Jon Bernthal, Nicholas Hoult, Medina Senghore, Jake Weber, Finn Little and Tyler Perry.

Credits: Directed by Taylor Sheridan, script by Michael Koryta, Charles Leavitt and Taylor Sheridan, based on a novel by Kortya. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:40

“Finding You,” a romantic comedy about two-mismatched Americans in Ireland, is intended as a dessert dish — light and sweet. But think of this trifling comedy as a not-quite-traditional trifle built on top of stale angel food cake. No matter how you dress it up and toss characters, complications and “secrets” at it, the stale angel food cake is all you taste.

Rose Reid, who starred in writer-director Brian Baugh’s “Welcome Home to Christmas,” and  Jedidiah Goodacre, whose “Salem Witch Trials” name was better suited to TV’s “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” are bland co-stars who set off little in the way of sparks.

So, let’s dress things up. Finley Sinclair (Rose) is an aspiring violinist who failed to audition her way into the Manhattan Conservatory. No worries, she’ll spend a semester abroad in Ireland, just like her brother did before her. #problemsoftheprivileged.

Finley has a SECRET. And that secret has its own secret, drawings leading her…somewhere.

Beckett Rush (Goodacre) is the rising young star of a series of “Dawn of the Dragon” sword-and-sorcery romances, all filmed in Ireland. They “meet cute” (not even close) in First Class on the flight over. Beckett’s a tabloid favorite.

And Beckett has a SECRET.

One of Finley’s tasks as a student in Ireland is to befriend and comfort a bitter old woman (Oscar winner Vanessa Redgrave). Her Cathleen Sweeney has a SECRET.

Then, there’s the tipsy fiddler down’tha pub — Patrick Bergin, adding twinkling and diddly aye music to his repertoire.

Might fiddler Seamus have…a SECRET?

Sorry to taunt the writer-director over this, but bashing him about the ears over the ridiculous coincidences, inability to find an original laugh and making the lovely Irish scenery and tourist sites look as drab and bland as his leading characters would just be mean.

The silly movie within a movie is seriously half-arsed, with tabloid mating intrigues between Beckett and his co-star (Katherine McNamara) “massaged” by Beckett’s agent (Tom Everett Scott). There’s a “big dance” coming, where every couple in tiny Carlingford claims is where they met their true love.

That plays with lovelorn teen Emma (Saoirse-Monica Jackson, trying WAY too hard), Finley’s “sister” for the summer as she’s the daughter of the B & B owners who put her up. But Finley, whose answer to every early Beckett (chaste) come-on is “I know your type,” has another agenda.

Still, Ireland may take hold of her, put the “diddly aye” life in her fiddle playing and the spring in her romantic step.

This picture is so contrived that the family (Fiona Bell and Ciaran McMahon) who accept exchange student Finley are not only the same folks who took in her brother years before, but they have to announce that they’ve just inherited this B & B (or the money to buy it).

That makes for more potential mischief and more coincidences in the never-ending parade of them Baugh shovels out.

“Potential” is basically what this movie squanders.

The supporting players are more interesting than the leads, who never make us care about them or root for them. And it’s fascinating to watch a brilliant talent like Redgrave and a game hoofer like Bergin try to lift this dead weight all by themselves.

They can’t.

MPA Rating: PG for language and thematic elements

Cast: Rose Reid,  Jedidiah Goodacre, Tom Everett Scott, Patrick Bergin, Saoirse-Monica Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave and Patrick Bergin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brian Baugh. A Roadsides Attraction release.

Running time: 1:55 (too bloody long)

The best film indie icon John Sayles ever made (sorry “Lone Star,” “Secaucus Seven,” “Lianna” fans) was a brilliant period piece about a miner’s strike answered with corporate and state violence — 1987’s “Matewan.”

It is a classic on every level — labor relations history vividly brought to life, period perfect detail, a gorgeous, lived-in color palette. And that cast.

Before he became an Oscar winner, here was Chris Cooper, introduced to the world as he played a miner.

Mary McDonnell went on to star in “Dances with Wolves.”

Sayles favorite David Straithairn would leap from his iconic turn as flinty, miner-sympathizing police chief Sid Hatfield (of THOSE Hatfields) to mainstream Hollywood, films like “L.A. Confidential,” “Good Night and Good Luck,” an Oscar nomination. He’s the male lead in the similarly indie “Nomadland,” a wonderful actor who is great in everything he plays.

And James Earl Jones has one of his best roles playing an old miner who doesn’t suffer bigots, newfangled gadgets or Baldwin-Felts mine-company goons gladly.

The real Matewan is so damned mountainous and remote “they have to pipe the sunshine in” as the old Appalachian joke goes. So they filmed the movie in the more accessible Thurmond, W.Va. But some friends and I are checking out the REAL Matewan today, remembering the UMW history and the battle. Here are some pictures of it as it looks today

Tip…if you go, take the walking tour offered by Jim Baldwin, descended from the founder of the private police force “detectives” of Baldwin Felts.

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