Movie Nation

Perhaps I was too hasty to write off Renaults. Mais oui?

It’s also pretty obvious France has found its answer to Jason Statham. His name’s Alban Lenoir. Did you see “Lost Bullet?” Yeah. That putain de mère, right there.

I knew ten minutes into its sequel that I was going to break my years-in-newspapering rule to never park profanity in a review. But Gawd DAMN. Have you seen this “Lost Bullet 2” on the Netflix?

It picks up the action right after — and then a year and a half after — our rogue cop Lino (Lenoir) recovers from the near-death-experience that was the case that got his brother killed in the original film — drug smuggling across the Spanish border. Lino’s taken advantage of France’s civilized leave-from-work rules to heal his wounds, move into his car and go a little crazy.

But he’s hellbent on protecting his brother’s widow, Stella (Anne Serra) from the mob that murdered his sibling.

Four bad guys break into her house. There’s no time to call the working police. Lino barges in and proceeds to pummel and torture one of them — bones snapping, the works — in front of two others who say nothing but who HAVE to be thinking, “Damn I did not sign UP for this!” With every savage injury, Lino stares down the other two, daring them to stop him, giving them every chance to do what any sane thug would do.

RUN.

But they never do.

Writer-director Guillaume Pierret doesn’t change things up much from the first film, going just a little — ok a LOT — over the top in Lino’s obsession with revenge, and his “modifications” to his battering-ram-armed Renault 21 Eurobox.

What our writer-director serves up is near non-stop action, adhering to a couple of hard and true action film truths.

Number one, fistfights and no-holds-barred brawls are better than shootouts, every time. Shoot outs are for creaky old action stars who have lost their fastball.

Truth number two, why crash ten Renaults when France is full of them? Why not 100?

“Lost Bullet 2: Back for More” relentlessly serves up a brutal fight, then a pulse-pounding chase, then another fight, another chase and on and on.

It is pure action mayhem and it is a breathless, jaw-dropping hoot.

Lino is still trying to get to the mastermind who killed his brother. His former partner and immediate superior Julia (Stéfi Celma) isn’t hearing it. Her boss (Pascale Arbillot) won’t have it.

There must be dirty cops involved. And the mob has its own killers on the case. Lino thinks this goon Marco (Sébastien Lalanne) can either lead him to the Big Cheese, or simply accept his just deserts — getting beaten to death.

Shot in the arid South of France near the Spanish frontier, Pierret finds narrow roads for chases, scary spots for road blocks and whole sixpacks of Renaults — cop cars, SUVs, etc. — to blow up.

Stripping the plot down to such basics isn’t for everyone. But these are fights with real violence and obvious bodily consequences, car crashes that are as outlandish and physics-defying as anything you’ll see in your average comic book movie.

There’s nothing obviously digital going on here, kids. The French have long been aces when it comes to car chases.

If you like your fights righteously brutal and head-buttingly realistic and your car chases Vin Diesel free, this is the thriller for you.

You don’t have to see the first film to follow the second, because honestly, plot points went right out of my head right after watching “Balle perdue,” as they titled it in France. But if you haven’t, check out “Perdue” one, take a while to catch your breath, and dive straight into “2.” There’s nothing like’em on Netflix.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, and lots of it

Cast: Alban Lenoir, Stéfi Celma, Sébastien Lalanne, Diego Martín, Anne Serra, Pascale Arbillot

Credits: Scripted and directed by Guillaume Pierret. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

Life in the city wasn’t working for them, so the Hayes family pulled up stakes and moved to “the mountain.”

Here, there’s no “job” for mom or dad, no bus ride to school for their two daughters.

“We make the rules, now,” is Dad’s explanation and their creed.

Sister Mary is young enough to roll with it all. But tweenage Riley is taking this all in, accepting that they’re “pioneers” until she starts to understand what she doesn’t understand, acting out until she figures it out.

“Manifest West” is an engrossing, surprisingly serious portrait of a family in crisis. Whatever the Hayes clan hoped to get from abandoning the city, going “off the grid,” depending on themselves and their fellow grid-shedding neighbors, Riley, played by Lexy Kolker in a breakout performance, could be the one who figures it all out.

This wasn’t a conscious, measured choice. It was a Hail Mary pass, a move made out of desperation. Whatever self-sufficient dreams Dad — played by Milo Gibson in perhaps his best performance yet — had, he’s brought them there because he didn’t know what else to do.

Mom (Annet Mahendru of “The Walking Dead”) isn’t well. And whatever everybody else brought into the woods with them, that isn’t changing her condition or the strength of the single thread holding this family together.

Co-writers/directors Joe Dietsch and Louie Gibson gave us the “Most Dangerous Game” variation “Happy Hunting,” and graduate from the primal and visceral to something subtler and more sophisticated with this thriller with a hint of “Leave No Trace” about it.

The Hayes find themselves in a community of supposed like-thinkers. But Riley sees what we see — free range kids lashing out at this lifestyle, attitudes towards guns and authority that range from adult to infantile — and a world that tests the worthy and prepared, and the medicated, cityfied, unschooled and stressed equally.

Movies with a mental illness subtext always have a glib grasp of their malady, but our writer-director team keep that in the background, minimizing this common shortcoming.

Milo Gibson, brother of co-director Louie — both of them sons of Oscar-winner Mel Gibson — shows us the fears of a man out of his element, struggling to keep it together but increasingly frazzled and paranoid about his role as family provider and protector.

Mahendru manages a subtle enough version of wife Alice’s mental struggles. Michael Cudlitz plays a neighbor who reminds us that not everyone who uses firearms is a nut, and allows us to underestimate him with a performance of sober depth.

But young Kolker, of TV’s “Shooter” and “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D” is our guide into the psyche of a tween trying to turn into a teen amongst the other kids in this world. Riley makes her own mistakes, flunks her own tests, comes to her own conclusions and might very well have her own mental issues thanks to the consequences of her family’s move, her father’s actions and her own response to them. And Kolker lets us see it all, and read just what is sinking in, what her next wrong move might be with us worried for her all along the way.

Rating: unrated, violence, teen drinking, profanity

Cast: Milo Gibson, Lexy Kolker, Annet Mahendru and Michael Cudlitz

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joe Dietsch and Louie Gibson A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:31

People keep messing with John Wick. He keeps killing them off.

If they haven’t learned by March 24, they never will.

You can hand it to director James Gray, who gave us “The Immigrant,” “Ad Astra” and “The Yards,” for presenting a portrait of a childhood which he himself seemed to make “troubled.”

His autobiographical “Armageddon Time” will prove to be an interesting contrast to Steven Spielberg’s more star-crossed “Fabelmans” childhood. Mainly because the hero is a self-absorbed, distracted jerk who has to go through some things to have a prayer of being a better person.

But it’s an oddly unaffecting odyssey, and that’s only partly due to its obnoxious sixth grade aspiring artist/protagonist Paul Graff, played by Michael Banks Repeta.

There’s messaging about the discrimination and escape-from-death his family faced in Europe — convoluted, disorganized recollections delivered with warmth or vehemence by Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins as the kid’s doting grandpa. But the overall feel of the film is disconnection and distance.

Set in 1980, Gray goes out of his way to show these New York Jews mocking Reagan and shaking their heads over the direction the country takes in electing him. Members of the Trump family are involved in the private school young Paul is shipped off to when his disinterest, attempts at public classroom comedy and carrying on with his “held back” Black classmate James (Jaylin Webb, quite good) cause him to fail.

“Armageddon” plays like a semi-organized collection of anecdotes, not really pointing towards an epiphany. It’s a little “Basketball Diaries,” a smidge of “The Graduate” and a heaping helping of Barry Levinson’s far more sentimentalized childhood reverie “Avalon,” which was also built around lots of extended family dinners. Here, those are full of bickering, joking and acting out.

Paul is picked on by his older brother (Ryan Sell), indulged by the mother (Anne Hathaway, quite good) who has him in public school for principled and selfish reasons. She’s works, is president of the PTA, and wants to run for school board. Paul’s dad (Jeremy Strong), an appliance repairman, runs hot to cold. He’s got finite limits to just how much nonsense he’s going to put up with from his kids.

Paul refers to his family as “rich” to his classmates. They’re not. He’s a finicky eater, and leaps from the table in the middle of a family dinner he’s rejected to call in an order of Chinese dumplings over his mother’s money complaints and his father’s rising ire that ends up exploding in front of the whole family.

The film can feel like an attempt at atonement by its writer/director. If he was like this as a kid, that’s an interesting shame to carry around with you.

All Paul wants to do is draw. Caricaturing his new teacher, Mr. Turkeltaub, as a turkey, may get a laugh. But that’s what puts him in the “problem” category with his older classmate James.

Next thing we know, they’re ducking out of a class trip to the Guggenheim — where Paul is quite taken with the Kandinskys — to cruise the subway.

Paul picks up on something about James. He’s singled-out in class for abuse by a teacher who has lost interest in helping him, perhaps out of racism. Paul identifies with this, and his grandfather’s lessons about the pogroms grandma fled and the discrimination he didn’t escape when they left Europe. The kid kind of, sort of, takes his first steps towards being a “mensch.”

There’s not a lot that’s novel in these recollections. Even his beats-him-with-a-belt father repeats a credo that generations of parents have tried to live up to. Dad doesn’t want his distracted, “in the clouds” kid to be “just like” him.

“I want you to be a whole lot better than me.”

We don’t need someone meant to be Trump patriarch Fred lecturing the newcomer at Forest Manor Prep that “Your respect for the uniform reflects your respect for the school,” or hear another Trump (Jessica Chastain) point out that these private scion of the (mostly) elite are destined to earn, innovate and rule everybody else.

Young Repeta manages a sort of insecure cocksureness at times. He’s not great in the part, more of a placeholder, someone to bask in everybody else’s light whenever he’s paired up with any other character.

Kids smoking a J in the boys’ room, parents quarreling over a “bad” kid, playing hooky, that one teacher who encourages you, life and death and a future destined to be ruined, Paul faces some hard truths about himself as he shows sympathy but can’t fight his indulged, destructive impulses.

Not all of “Armageddon Time” — it takes its title from Reagan selling a TV interviewer that Evangelical Right talking point about immoral “end times” — is recycled sentiment. But it feels certainly feels that way. And the fact that it comes out just ahead of filmmaker Spielberg’s 1960s similar but but more starry-eyed childhood remembered, “The Fabelmans” just underscores that.

Rating: R, Some Drug Use Involving Minors|profanity

Cast: Michael Banks Repeta, Anne Hathaway, Jaylin Webb, Jeremy Strong, Tovah Feldshuh and Anthony Hopkins.

Credits: Scripted and directed by James Gray. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:54

“One Piece Film: Red” practically redefines the phrase “eye candy” when it comes to Japanese anime. A colorful cornucopia that pushes the shadings palette, it’s a musical fantasy action adventure so stuffed with characters that you pretty much have to be Japanese to keep all, or at least some of them straight.

That’s what happens when you adapt a manga and get 15 films out of it — visual dazzle and character clutter that leaves the narrative comically incoherent Nipponese nonsense.

I dare say fans will find pleasure in the ongoing brawl between pirates and the straw hats and in Uta the singer’s power pop, so Shakira-stylized that she mesmerizes all who hear her. I’m tempted to source the soundtrack, but I traded my MX5, and the whole point would be to listen with the top down and soak in the stares of everybody who stops next to me at a traffic light.

In this One World fantasy, there is but one government and its most important branch just might be the Navy. They’re the ones charged with contending with pirates. It may be a high tech civilization offering pop show spectacles that would put Lizzo, Taylor and Gaga to shame. But seafaring is still done under sail. Call it “sail punk” fantasy, because steam punk is ruled out.

Uta’s (Kaori Nazuka) putting on this epic show when assorted piratical factions set out to singer-nap her, mid-concert. The straw hats, including childhood chum Luffy (Mayumi Tanaka) set out to foil them. Flashbacks show their childhoods, with Uta’s craving for stardom separating them, eventually.

There are other intrigues and wrinkles in the plot, but they take a back seat to a stadium full of characters. A talking bear, what looks like Hello Kitty’s uncle and a hulking talking and tusked blue beast wearing an Elvis suit (“fat Elvis” era) stand out from the pack.

But there are others — Nami, Shanks, etc. — who are part of the story’s continuum and take on their tiny pieces of the puzzle to move this two hour chiaroscuro cartoon to its climax.

It’s all rather psychedelic in look and feel, not so much a film a newcomer to the series plumbs for meaning. Let it wash over you as spectacle that can be a tiny window to another culture.

For instance, there’s this telling line, served up after we’ve spent much of the movie watching Uta sing via a sort of boots-eye-view, looking up her skirt. She’s not alone in getting the anime lads’ attention. Nami (Akemi Okamura).

“I can almost see Nami-san’s PANTIES!”

No, that isn’t in every anime film. But don’t get me started on Miyazaki.

Film series produced by Hollywood take some pains to make each movie stand alone by giving the viewer enough information and ongoing narrative recap to let it make sense. Japanese anime isn’t bound by those rules. Whatever the simplest throughline of the thread is, “One Piece” makes just enough sense to grab hold of, but not enough to recommend to anyone not already immersed in this world.

About 15 minutes of its dazzling visuals and vapid narrative is enough. But if you doubt this distinctly Japanese art form isn’t making its mark, check out the box office of this film, and take note of the trailer for the next “Puss’in Boots” movie from Hollywood. It’s loaded with anime approaches to fights, action and over-the-top wackiness.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, suggestive material, profanity

Voice Cast (Japanese version): Kaori Nazuka, Mayumi Tanaka,
Akemi Okamura, Shûichi Ikeda, many others

Credits: Directed by Gorô Taniguchi, scripted by Tsutomu Kuroiwa, based on a manga by Eiichiro Oga. A Crunchyroll release.

Running time: 1:55

Well, tonight’s scheduled screening of “Bones & All” got canceled because the publicist who handles that title is in Miami, even though Orlando and Tampa theaters won’t be closed by a tropical storm that blows a bit and rains a bit. Guess it was just easier to cancel them statewide.

So I’ll catch up with this Focus Features under promoted James Gray “personal” movie instead.

No quiet quitting for me.

Not every “mystery thriller” needs to have much of a mystery about it to work. But none can get by without that “Eureka,” aka “Oh (snap)” moment. And in “The Good Nurse,” that’s a doozy.

This true story, with some minor alterations, provides an acting showcase for two of the best, Oscar winners Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne. They both play nurses, but only one of them is “good.” And the “aha” here is when one figures out how the other one is killing patients in their hospitals, and has done so in hospitals all over Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, who gave us “The Hunt” and “Another Round,” serves up a slow, deliberate story of empathetic caregivers and CYA-fixated hospital administrators, of a nurse who has become an angel of death and of dogged cops who struggle to make a case when they’re being stonewalled by the institutions where these deaths happened and continue to happen.

Chastian is Amy Loughren, a single mother of two with the overnight shift at her hospital and a secret she needs to keep for a few more months. Amy has a dangerous heart condition, and she won’t be covered by her employers’ insurance until she’s been on this job for a full year.

She is, in many ways, nursing’s ideal — talking to the coma cases, comforting family, bending the rules to make a bad situation a little easier.

Charlie Cullen also calls patients by their first name, also seems to go the extra mile when it comes to compassion. He learns Amy’s secret and he keeps it and pitches in to help her finish her trek to the “insured” finish line.

“I’m gonna help you get through this.”

But we’ve seen a “code” he was involved in at a previous hospital. And when a patient he and Amy share on their shift dies as well, we — if not she or anyone else — can do the math.

Veteran character actor Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha (“Sylvie’s Love,””Crown Heights”) enter the picture as two cops summoned, by state health dept. mandate, to investigate what the euphemism loving “risk manager” (Kim Dickens) labels “an unexplainable incident.”

Somebody died. The hospital did a mortality report, and now, almost two months later, they’ve had to inform the police.

“The Good Nurse” has two villains — a killer and a parade of (mostly unseen) corporate suits who cover up the deaths. The film is about catching one and trying to work around or confront the other.

Administrators circle the wagons, cops lose their tempers and the title character struggles to reconcile what she’s going through, her judgement of the friend and colleague with what she’s learning.

Redmayne gives us a “quiet type” version of “the banality of evil,” not giving much away, even in the eyes. Lindholm spends little screen time showing his point of view.

Chastain has more to play and makes her character’s conflicts empathetic and understandable. This guy is saving her life and her job. He can’t be…or can he?

The police procedural element of “Good Nurse” is the most potentially riveting, and damned frustrating. But justice has proven to be a slippery thing in America in recent years, with lawyers flinging up road blocks and villains running out the clock so that even good cops can’t nab the guilty.

Lindholm’s patience with this material kind of outlasts ours. There needs to be more flesh on the bone to justify the two hour running time. The dead spots show.

And with an accompanying documentary also coming out, we can judge for ourselves if there were opportunities missed in giving the feature film treatment to this notorious case.

Rating: R (profanity)

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Eddie Redmayne, Kim Dickens, Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich.

Credits: Directed by Tobias Lindholm, scripted by Krysty Wilson-Cairns, based on the book by Charles Graeber. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

The band Lord Huron has produced, I guess, this trippy feature film inspired by their album “Vide Noir.” And for the record, the music’s pretty cool, kind of twangy “Twin Peaks” ethereal, unmoored in time, fitting for a pseudo-psychedelic film noir set in 1960s LA.

The movie? It’s best summed up by the phrase “interesting failure.” It has a great look, some striking scenes, a pretentious, pedestrian story that crawls by performed by something short of the most compelling cast every assembled.

Too mean? Hey, I’m a big David Alan Grier fan, too!

Victor Mascitelli plays Buck, a mop-topped young man who wakes up woozy and filthy, lying in the dirt amidst the detritus of whatever was in his 1967 Chevy Impala — a map, a pocket knife, a Voice-o-Gram 45 rpm disc that he recorded with his best gal back home in Detroit.

As Buck has awakened in the dark in the dust on the edge of the desert outside of LA, we can guess the story without the need for any hard-boiled film noir voice over narration.

There’s a dame. Her name is Lee (Ashleigh Cummings). She’s a singer. And in over-edited quick-cut flashbacks, we hear her wondering if Buck is ever going to get her out of Detroit.

News flash — he didn’t. News flash — she left. That’s how he wound up in LA. And we’re guessing, that’s how he got himself beaten up and left for dead, “Black Brained” into a near stupor by the mob guy who got Lee’s attention and got Lee studio time to cut an album.

The narrative takes us through the events that led to this dumping in the dust, sections of story given chapter titles — “The Emerald Star,” “Whispering Pines” etc., mostly taken from Lord Huron song or album titles — because that’s something Tarantino did and every green screenwriter figures it’s the only way to organize a script.

Buck bumps into a psychic, assorted thugs, a mobster who notes his name “sounds like the stuff legends are made of,” a ’60s street gang banger, musicians and even a dead singer that he hallucinates as fronting a band he’s listening to in a not-quite-swank nightclub.

He picks up clues. And he keeps hearing about this hot new drug, “Vide Noir,” the best way to escape, “obliterate the self,” all that jazz.

Buck’s the sort of anti-hero who takes a licking and keeps hunting down Lee. Buck’s a guy who’d never roll into LA without his old hunting rifle in the back seat, or that buck knife in his pants in case he gets clobbered and locked in the trunk of his own Impala.

The best scene has him crashing a recording session set up for Lee, pretending to be a replacement player and not even trying toftake his way through reading sheet music or playing his learn-by-ear acoustic guitar. The Great D.A. Grier is the session producer.

But even that scene plays as flat, under-developed and kind of amateurish. Mascitelli’s IMdb page is all “additional crew” and “camera and electrical equipment” credits, which is obvious from his performance.

Without a compelling, believable lead, someone who can come off as naive and out of his depth, but who just might have inner resources he calls on to “save my Lee,” give us emotions showing he longs for her, fears for her and faces down his own fears to find her, “Vide Noir” devolves into some pretty set pieces that might grab the eye and set up as classic genre moments, but wither and die thanks to the performances.

The production design is cool, the cutting and staging are sharp. But the movie that comes out of all that doesn’t play.

So maybe I’ll give the record a listen.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Victor Mascitelli, Ashleigh Cummings, Kanya Iwana, Todd Stashwick and David Alan Grier

Credits: Directed by Ariel Vida, scripted by Ben Schneider. A Yellow Veil production, a 1091 release.

Running time: 1:36

She’s a veteran of the Afghanistan occupation, recovering from problems physical and mental, finishing up physical therapy for one, taking “‘don’t shoot yourself in the head’ kind of medicine” for the other.

He’s a sad-eyed mechanic with a prosthetic leg.

They’re just two broken people dealing with hurt, loss and grief in the town she couldn’t wait to get out of, the one that’s home to his every memory, good or bad — New Orleans.

“Causeway” is an intimate, downbeat character drama that pairs up Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry of “Widows” and TV’s “Atlanta” for a story of reflection and regret and the slim chance of making a connection that might lead each out of the hole they’re trapped in.

Not a lot happens, and some of what does is predictable in that “This is the point where the conflict kicks in” formulaic indie drama sort of way. But it’s very well-acted and its somber tone gives it heart and gravitas that the leads cash in on, time and again.

Lawrence is Lynsey, whom we meet in a wheelchair, somewhat shellshocked and in the care of a kindly widowed retiree (Jayne Houdyshell) who took up home nursing, and taking in patients, after caring for her late husband for years.

“What a miserable life” is all unfiltered Lynsey can blurt out when hearing that.

She’s got physical therapy to master, and memory issues and other PTSD symptoms. It takes time just to get her to a point where she can go “home.” And when she gets to the house she grew up in, her got-the-date-wrong mother (Linda Edmond) isn’t at home, telling us this is how Lynsey was raised — indifferently. Lynsey is “back,” but only for a “visit.” She can’t wait to get out…again.

It’s only when she borrows the family’s ancient pick-up that she meets someone she’s willing to have a conversation with. That would be James, the mechanic who looks over the aged, under-maintained Chevy Scottsdale she’s limped in with under a cloud of smoke.

James has a limp, too. He’s compassionate and easygoing and “interested” in ways that may go beyond the fact that she’s beautiful. She’s finally got someone she can talk to without opening the chat with her condition. And he gets to have a conversation with an attractive, smart and pretty woman.

The chief virtue of this Lila Neugebauer film — she directed the fine Netflix series “Maid” — is how lived-in these characters feel. Nobody takes on a N’awlins accent, but Lawrence has little trouble finding her way back to working class in this role. Her line-readings have a dry, flat quality that make us wonder what’s happened to Lynsey, what drained her and made Lynsey how she is.

Henry’s easy-going way with a line, a gesture or a suggestion from somebody else keeps him near the top of Hollywood stars most anybody’d love to have a beer with. James responds to someone he can have a sensitive conversation with like a man relieved of a burden. He, like she, has “secrets” and pain that we can see even if we don’t know the specifics.

It’s a little surprising that it took three screenwriters to conjure up what connects these two — a city and the shared music and history that comes with it. Somebody figured out she’d need to grab the first job that presents itself — cleaning pools, and found things to do with that. Somebody else probably figured out James’ real agenda.

“Causeway” is slight but immersive, warm with the occasional chill and engaging in ways two very good actors can manage with just the barest bones of a story and a scattering of secrets to give away, one pained revelation at a time.

Rating: R (profanity), smoking

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Brian Tyree Henry, Linda Edmund and Stephen McKinley Henderson.

Credits: Directed by Lila Neugebauer, scripted by Otessa Moshfegh, Luke Goebel and Elizabeth Sanders. An A24 Film on Apple+.

Running time: 1:34