Movie Nation

“You Resemble Me” is a tale of two sisters, raised under abuse, cast out of their home and torn apart by The State.

A sometimes moving, always gripping story of a life on the streets, it’s also French account of how members of France’s immigrant communities — descendants of those who moved there from France’s many overseas colonies — become radicalized.

The directing debut of co-writer and star Dina Amer is a vivid portrait of the French underclass and one of the best movies to ever make us walk a mile in the shoes of someone we might not be able to identify with — someone radicalized — but who seems more relatable and understandable, the more time we spend with her.

Hasna and Mariam (Lorenza Grimaudo, Ilonna Grimaudo) could not be tighter. They’re about 9 and 6 when we meet them, adorable urchins who make their own fun together and run around, free range kids on the tourist-packed streets of Paris.

Their favorite game is their “You resemble me!” (in French with English subtitles), no “You resemble ME!” “You have the same MOUTH as me,” “You have the same BEAUTY marks as ME.”

They don’t have to dress alike for them to say it or for us to see it. But on Mariam’s birthday, they do dress alike. Somehow, streetwise Hasna has found them matching dresses.

Getting home, brother Yousef has other presents. But their celebration is cut short when they awaken their mother (Sana Sri) with the noise. Mom, who has four kids ranging in age from tween to toddler, hasn’t just forgotten Mariam’s birthday. She starts gathering up presents Yousef has given her.

“We could sell this in Morocco.”

She wants to know where Hasna got the money for the dresses, and wants whatever cash she has on her. And then she wants the dresses, which she is sure she could also sell in her native Morocco.

Mom is abusive, and plainly mentally ill. One near-brawl later, captured by a frenetic hand-held camera, Hasna and her inseparable sister are on the streets, stealing from the homeless, shoplifting food and sundries from street market vendors, keeping it together no matter how perilous their circumstances.

But the words “Have I ever let you down?” have barely crossed on Hasna’s lips when an irate vendor grabs them and they find themselves in child protective services.

And this time, they won’t be going home. They won’t be “placed” together. For “your own good,” they’re being separated.

“You took half of my life away!” the older sibling screams.

Placing Hasna with a wealthy French family doesn’t mollify her. When they insist on serving her pork at Christmas dinner, she’s back on the lam with her cowboy hat and a lifetime of brutally hard lessons ahead of her.

Years later, cowgirl-obsessed Hasna (director and co-writer Amer) is still on the streets, in the clubs, procuring drugs and using sex to pay for them, only living a “normal” life when she’s babysitting for an old friend, who lets her crash at her place.

She reaches out to her sister, but Mariam won’t answer the phone. Hasna tries to hold down a job, but her street life makes her recognizable and her short temper won’t let her keep it. Her story seems one insurmountable impasse after another.

Amer frames this personal saga with events closer to the present day, as adult Hasna narrates her gripes about being brought up French when the French won’t accept her and her kind as they are.

“Do the French think I’ve come to slit the throats of their wives and daughters?”

It’s a rhetorical question.

Amer’s brisk script keeps many of the ugliest events in Hansa’s life off camera. But we see enough to fear for her safety and fret over her more violent impulses. By the time she’s an adult, she is certainly tough enough to take care of herself even if she’s too unschooled for even the Army.

The child actresses have no trouble making themselves appear vulnerable, at risk and yet essentially happy, so long as they’re together. The adult Amer gives a searing portrait of just how lost someone who went through all this might be, how belligerent she is about insisting that others hear her story and what she’s survived.

Amer handles the action beats with skill — hand-held camera fights and chases — and does a great job of hiding the story’s revelations, stringing us along, pointing us this way when she knows things will go that way.

French police aren’t portrayed as racists here, even if they are sticklers about enforcing the country’s no hijab policy. And when Hasna and we first open the online “recruitment video” of an Islamic extremist relative, we see how it plays and how it might appeal to someone as disaffected as Hasna, even if we see the holes in its arguments.

“Our religion and their culture are not compatible.”

Perhaps so, we think. But as we’ve watched this troubling, engrossing and empathetically-rendered story unfold and noted its many way points, one can’t help but feel we and the filmmaker are as at a loss about what could be done to alter such life paths, and their outcomes, as France herself.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sexual situations, smoking, profanity

Cast: Dina Amer, Lorenza Grimaudo, Ilonna Grimaudo, Sana Sri, Agnès de Tyssandier and Alexandre Gonin

Credits: Directed by Dina Amer, scripted by Dina Amer and Omar Mullick. A Dedza release.

Running time: 1:31

Swinton is both mother and daughter in this ghost story from director Joanna Hogg, a real tour de force that could park her in the best actress field — or best supporting actress — depending on the breaks.

Dec. 2, from A24.

Taste is the most subjective thing in film criticism. It’s a deeply personal thing, built on background and core beliefs that direct how a given person responds to a given moviegoing experience.

I think about “Educating Rita” several times a year, pretty much every year since this 1983 jewel came out. I think of it whenever someone mentions another grand Michael Caine performance, as friends prep children for the Big Adventure of university, and urge them to watch it with their kids before they depart. I couldn’t help but think of it watching “Tár,” which is all about Mahler, at least as a subtext.

That line, “Wouldn’t you just die without Mahler?” from “Rita” is amusing, ironic and aspirational. A pretentious but fragile young aesthete bubbles it to our title character more than once.

Working at a classical music NPR station at the time “Rita” came out, my friends on the staff and I just snorted at the reference, sort of a variation of the way Woody Allen used Mahler as shorthand for “See how smart I am?” himself and how cultured any of his characters who dropped the name were meant to be viewed.

And I recall how this movie changed my life. Whatever the critics at the time thought — and Roger Ebert rather missed the boat on this one — it was plain to me at the time that the upper-middle to upper class backgrounds of that generation of reviewers kept them from “getting” a movie that can be summed up with a few words from Willy Russell’s play that spoke to college professor Dr. Frank Bryant (Caine) as well, the reasons this hairdresser and “Open University” student he was tutoring wanted to go to college.

Rita (Julie Walters, in a career-defining performance) was down’ta pub with her family. Everyone was swilling beer, young and old, singing along to some inane Brit-pop on the jukebox. And Rita noticed her Mum weeping.

“Why are you crying, Mother,” she asked?

“There must be better songs to sing than this,” her despairing mother answered.

That’s the play. That’s the movie. That’s why you show this film to your kids, in high school or as they’re college-bound, especially if they’re not to the manner born. College is an expensive gamble, adventure and ordeal. And why do you go? To learn how other people see the world, to meet people from cultures outside your social or work circle, to expand your mind, to learn that there are “better songs to sing.”

Caine plays “Frank,” as Rita calls him, first scene to last, with a mix of burnt-out dipsomania and long-dormant idealism. He is the teacher, the mentor who relishes the “unspoiled” working girl of 26 who presents herself to him to be taught.

Dr. Frank Bryant has a roomy, book-stuffed office, with bottles hidden behind some volumes. “The Lost Weekend” hides one, because he’s witty that way. But his classes have noticed the sleepy eyes and boozy, distracted slur of his lectures.

“You don’t really expect me to teach this sober?”

Frank is a published poet who teaches literature, 50ish and past caring. And then this blowsy spitfire shows up, an empty vessel who wants him to “change” her “from the inside,” expose her to the wider world, “better songs” and real literature.

“Devouring pulp fiction is not being ‘well-read,,'” he tells her, words I’ve parroted to too many comic book addicts to count. “You have to be selective. Discipline your mind!”

Rita, whose real name is Susan but who changed it to be more colorful — like her bleached blonde with pink highlights hair — will journey from uncultured naif to collegiate sophisticate. She will do this over the objections of her working class bloke husband (Malcolm Douglas) who doesn’t approve of anything that takes her away from him, their home, the pub and his zeal to become a father, of anything that “changes” her.

She bubbles over with enthusiasm after seeing her first play (“Macbeth”), develops a sharp outsider’s take on Chekhov and Ibse and, learns how to write scholarly essays as she prepares for final examinations. Walters makes every moment feel like a discovery, one we’d want to make ourselves.

Rita is a walking, talking accidental pun, especially concerning E.M. Forster’s most famous novel and one of the many British euphemisms for one’s buttocks.

“‘Howard’s End?’ Sounds disgusting!”

Frank will find himself traveling from tuned-out, burn-out case to someone who at least has one thing a week to look forward to, an eager pupil whose journey he watches with a mixture of awe, joy and horror. Pupils are destined to outgrow their teachers. And Frank, being pretty far gone, needs “a shock to the system” (another Caine gem from this period in his career) if he’s ever going to crawl out of the bottle, out of a failed love affair and out of (it is implied) the cycle of taking up with female students who flatter him and keep him stuck in one place, tipsy, preserved in amber, bitter about what might have been.

Watching the film anew, prompted by Cate Blanchett’s “Wouldn’t you just die without Mahler?” “Tar” performance, I was struck by its relevance to our moment. People hellbent on preserving the cocoons they live in are on the warpath against the Ritas who left their social, familial and geographic bubbles, who dared to broaden their experience of the world, who are willing to expose themselves to alternate points of view and who develop depth, sophistication and empathy for others simply by breaking out of their provincialism.

The only thing that “dates” “Educating Rita” is the period-correct but insipid synthesizer score, which not only dates movies of that era, but grates in virtually every film that made that fateful musical choice back then.

Director Lewis Gilbert was best-known for making Michael Caine’s breakout, “Alfie,” and three James Bond films. He also directed the adaptation of Willy Russell’s other famous play from that era, the similarly-themed (a woman “changed” by a mind-expanding experience — travel) “Shirley Valentine.”

“Educating Rita” was nominated for three Oscars. It won none. Caine would have to wait for his, and became a Grand Old Man of the Cinema, celebrated in blockbusters, indie films and Oscar bait pictures for the rest of his days.

Walters became a character actress and mainstay of Brit film, a delight in the “Mama Mia!” movies, and a beloved member of the Harry Potter Universe.

Me? I saw “Educating Rita” from the perch of a public radio job at a university. Within three months of seeing it, I had enrolled in grad school, studying English/criticism, finding a mentor and starting the part time job of reviewing films for a North Dakota newspaper.

Maybe Roger Ebert didn’t like it. Sometimes he’d do that just to have something to argue with Siskel about on TV. I thought “Rita” was a wonderful character piece that spoke to people who could relate to working class upbringing aspiring for something greater. For years, I’d write columns on how this should be shown to teenagers — cussing included — who might pick up on its messaging and aspire to bigger, finer things.

Now, I still see it as a true classic, one of the finest films of the ’80s, a high point for Caine, Walters and Gilbert and a movie I think about all the time because it literally changed my life.

Rating: PG, some profanity

Cast: Julie Walters, Michael Caine, Maureen Lipman, Malcolm Douglas, Michael Williams

Credits: Directed by Lewis Gilbert, scripted by Willy Russell, based on his play. A Rank/Acorn release, on Youtube, Amazon and many free streamers.

Running time: 1:50

You’ve got to be on their wavelength to “get” the latest strange, dry and deadpan sci-fi venture of “Synchronic” and “The Endless” creators Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead.

“Something in the Dirt” is about two oddly-mismatched, reasonably compatible Angelinos who stumble into some bizarre phenomena that they set out to study, film and stream-of-consciousness “explain” in a DIY documentary about what’s going on.

For me, it was a droll reminder that I’m not so much on their wavelength as wavelength-adjacent. Their movies have a questioning and curious high-mindedness and intention that isn’t exactly something that one warms up to, or anything that provokes empathetic, fearful, awed or amused reactions.

You don’t leave one of their films saying “I laughed, I cried.” Well, I don’t, anyway.

“Dirt” begins when an itinerant LA bartender Levi (Benson) moves into a dumpy apartment on a flightpath to LAX, a place at the base of a (Laurel) canyon-side that seems consumed with ugly brushfires in the background of most every exterior shot we see of it.

John (Moorhead) is a long-time tenant, a former math teacher and church photographer who followed his husband to LA, and now makes ends meet by gathering and charging city scooters.

The first “joke” here might be the huge, unexplained blood stain on the religious gay man’s shirt when snorkeling buff Levi meets him.

Levi bums a smoke, provides a sort of cut-quartz ash tray for their shared enjoyment. And something — or some entity — makes the damned thing levitate in Levi’s overheated apartment.

Their jaws drop — a bit. The more articulate John notes that “We just saw something profound, and we have to show it to the world,” something “that’s like book deals and like movies and like TV shows and religious views and…”

Levi? They’ve just seen what happens when you “take too many edibles (while) watching ‘Unsolved Mysteries.'”

I mean, they’re both amazed and nonplussed. And yes, the “edibles” analogy is funny.

They and we take note of the formulae, equations, refraction diagrams and the like that cover the walls in Levi’s apartment, which had been vacant for a decade. There’s something “off” about his closet door.

And again, that ashtray-looking rock levitated and as the light passed through it, patterns emerged on the walls that has John musing over “ghosts” and “gateways” and light, and Levi wondering if they’re having some “Dan Brown” (“Da Vinci Code”) response to what’s going on.

“If you’re a ghost, DO something…different. Do something DIFFERENT.”

John talks Levi into making a documentary about this phenomenon, which multiplies into phenomena as he muses about the “cosmic puzzle” and the “music of the spheres” that seem connected with what they’re seeing (“Ode to Joy,” pop culture shorthand for “deep”).

Snippets of home movies of childhood (a NASA visit) and hints of the secrets each man is keeping from the other are blended into esoteric discussions of the light spectrum, time travel, “Jerusalem Syndrome,” TED talks, cats as a possible source in a spike in schizophrenia (“You can look it up!”), “The X-Files” and the characters “Dana Fox or Mulder Scully,” and “Something in the Dirt” half-morphs into a mocumentary.

A chemist, a geologist and assorted film editors weigh in about whatever is going on in this corner of Laurel Canyon for the “film.”

“How much you think Netflix pays for something like this?”

Benson and Moorhead posit two incompatible but somehow sync-able ways of looking at the world in showing us two out-of-their-depths stumbling into something extraordinary and then struggling to find ways to “show it to the world” and cash in on it, and maybe understand it as they do.

Levi, like us, may wonder if it’s “possible this is extremely dangerous and we just overlooked that part?” But there’s a heedlessness borne of John’s Internet and TED talk hubris, the idea that if you’ve trawled the web enough, you’re qualified to look for answers and reach conclusions, even if you’re plainly not, like say almost everybody making movies about UFOs, ghosts and “unexplained phenomena.”

“What’s crazier, believing every single coincidence you see, or just ignoring them?”

The presence of peripheral characters doesn’t alter this film’s two-hander nature, and fortunately for the leads, one is a perfectly convincing “surfer, dude” and the other could pass for a lapsed gay Mormon missionary who swears and smokes.

The jokes are desert Southwest dry — Levi complaining about how hard it is to get a bartender job in LA, John quoting a fear-of-flying friend that “You can only fall so fast” and begging Levi to watch him for signs of a “psychotic break.”

What Benson and Moorhead have conjured up here is their oddest, most esoteric dramedy yet, a tale quirky and weird, more serious than silly and certainly worth a look just to pick through the torrent of references herein. You’ve just got to be on their wavelength to get anything more than passing pleasure out of it.

Rating: R for language and a brief violent image.

Cast: Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson

Credits: Directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, scripted by Justin Benson. An XYZ release.

Running time: 1:55

Here’s what the best movies about talk radio — “Talk Radio” being the gold standard — get right.

It’s what Marshall McLuhan called a “hot medium,” requiring the engagement of the listener/consumer at a level TV and film don’t. Voices matter. The words matter.

It’s a world with urgency built into it, an endless succession of moment by moment deadlines where every second is “money” and even the most laid-back practitioners (the somnambulists at NPR, and their podcast imitators) have an energy that can seem manic when you look behind the scenes.

“Dead air” — casual, undramatic silences — is a death sentence. No one “listening at home” will “stay tuned.”

The Eddie Marson talk radio thriller “Feedback” a couple of years back got most of these elements right. “On the Line,” the new Mel Gibson thriller about a “shock jock” held hostage, on the mike, by a threatening caller, gets most of them wrong.

It’s bad radio, and that makes for a very bad movie.

It feels off in ways obvious and also more slyly annoying. By the time we hear the fourth foreign accent with LA’s KLAT-FM staff — building guard to program director, Brits and Asians and Continentals, one and all — we’ve guessed that they filmed this thriller abroad. My guess was South Africa or Eastern Europe. No, writer-director Romuald Boulanger cast and shot this close to home, in Paris.

We never hear a commercial from this alleged commercial radio station, never get a sense that the real-time (ish) story is ticking over and tensing up. The host, Elvis Cooney (Gibson), is Imus-old and slow, spewing his low-energy patter into the cosmos with nothing that would keep a listener engaged in a Top Five market.

It’s no wonder his ratings are “flat as a crepe,” the program director (Frenchwoman Nadia Farès) complains, in the parlance of Paris. He’s making bad radio.

The movie? It never overcomes that unreality, never gets up a head of steam. And no amount of scripted surprises — all packed into the finale — can atone for that.

Elvis kisses his wife and five year-old daughter good night, checks into the high rise where the station is located, and we note how he doesn’t know the Anglo-Indian security guard and has no interest in learning how to pronounce his name.

“On the Line” is a midnight/all-night anything goes chat show, something Elvis has wearied of. We see how angry the guy who has the earlier time slot (Kevin Dillon) is over Elvis coveting “my show.”

A new, wet-behind-the-ears British engineer (mislabeled the “producer”) here, Dylan (William Moseley) sees what Elvis looks like “triggered,” as a part of his hazing ritual on the job. The much-younger call-screener, guest-booker and real producer Mary (Alia Seror-O’Neill) is in on the prank, and takes the “washed-up diaper wearing has-been” host’s sexist jokes with good humor.

What kind of audience might a no-holds-barred (lots of F-bombs and other profanity on the air) host attract?

“Nocturnal emitters,” Elvis labels them. But his callousness can bend towards kindness when he senses a caller is troubled. That would be “Gary,” who is “gonna do something really screwed up tonight.” Gary has a beef with somebody. “I’m gonna take out his whole family.”

And Elvis takes pains to talk him out of it. By the way, where’re you calling from, Gary?

“I’m at YOUR HOUSE!”

A kidnapping “game” with murderous blackmail, humiliation and execution is set in motion. It’s shockingly convoluted and stunningly dull.

Characters meander all over the high rise, threats are made and a couple of people are turned into corpses.

“Let’s call the police to save time!”

Naah, “I’ve dealt with kooks like this for 30 years,” and cracks about “We’ve gotta keep the cops kosher, right?” remind us that the star of the show’s in charge, and that the star of the movie was anti-Semitic before Kanye tried to make anti-Semitism cool.

The screenplay is laced with the phrase “I’m begging you,” with advice like “We have to hurry” which neither the characters nor the filmmakers listen to.

There’s little menace in the (mostly) unseen kidnapper’s voice, and Gibson never lets on that the stakes are as high as the story claims.

It’s a movie that demands we tune out long before it tries to “explain” away its shortcomings.

Gibson’s always given fair value, even in C-movies in his post-cancellation dotage. This one dogs along until the cheap cheat of an ending lands. And tries to land again.

But at least he and Dillon got a trip to Paris out of it.

Rating: R (Language Throughout|Some Violent Content)

Cast: Mel Gibson, Alia Seror-O’Neill, William Mosely, Nadia Farès and Kevin Dillon.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Romuald Boulanger. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:44

I cringe so much every time I have to pummel a really bad performance that I avoid doing so at almost all costs. There are so many things that can go wrong in the making of a bad film — script, direction, cast chemistry, tone — that it is pointlessly mean to single out the poor people playing the poorly written parts.

But what thin promise “I’m Totally Fine” makes to us in its opening scenes — a grieving woman (Jillian Bell) drives to a rural SoCal rental house for a party she forgot to cancel — vanishes in a flash the moment the dead best friend/business partner (Natalie Morales of “Happily,” “Stuber” and TV’s “Dead to Me”) manifests herself before her.

The inane script has the dead friend brought back to life by an alien, an advanced and curious but naive and tone-deaf “Starman” in female form. Morales makes the disastrous — no other word for it — decision to play the character in a stunningly unfunny, unaffecting and college acting class incompetent impersonation of Mork, Starman or Lieutenant Data.

“‘Boogie Woogie Woogie,'” she says in a flat, metallic attempt at appearing otherworldly. “That was Jennifer’s favorite wedding song.”

Vanessa (Bell, of “Office Christmas Party, “22 Jump Street” etc.) tries writing this off to a hangover, grief, a “ghost” or what have you. A holographic “Human Orientation” presentation half convinces her that this Jennifer-look-alike in the “Darling, You’re Different” T-shirt is interplanetary.

Jennifer chugging olive oil for its lubrication/anti-freeze qualities should seal the deal. The alien is here to “do tests” and “study” us. For 48 hours. Poor Vanessa — a dead friend and business partner and now this.

“This body seems designed for dancing.” On Vanessa bursting into tears — “We do not have crying. This is valuable data. Thank you.”

It’s fingersnails-dragged-across-a-blackboard until they’re bloody unfunny, cringe-worthy in the worst sense.

Bell delivers a deflated performance that gives away the fact that as a former “SNL” writer, sitcom creator (“Badsitter”) and cast member of a few rowdy comedies that actually play — “The Night Before,” “Bridesmaids,” “Office Christmas Party”) — she knows this isn’t getting there.

The sentimental stuff is limp and unaffecting. Bit players in support struggle to wring a laugh out of the Molly-offering DJ Vanessa forgot to cancel, the hovering husband checking in by Facetime constantly out of concern or the helpful good ol’boy who isn’t the serial killer Vanessa tells her friend from Roswell she might be.

No, one cannot and should not blame Morales all of this, much of it laid at the feet of screenwriter Alisha Ketry, whose script plays like an inept piece of pandemic typewriting, a “movie we can get made for little money” and under isolation restrictions. But if Morales is anxious for “I’m Totally Fine” to die a silent, unnoticed death, one can see and hear why in most every word to come out of her mouth here.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jillian Bell and Natalie Morales.

Credits: Directed by Brandon Dermer, scripted by Alisha Ketry. A Decal release.

Running time: 1:23

The critically-acclaimed drama “Call Jane,” about the “bad old days” before abortion was legal in the US, isn’t just a movie, it’s a cause.

Now the producers of it are showing it at women’s health care clinics that provide abortions, a way of spreading the word, pushing voter turnout and reversing the incredibly unpopular and comically “defended” Supreme Court decision that threatens woman and America with a civil-rights-stripping return to something like the Dark Ages.

That’s right. Instead of addressing the assorted problems and crises facing the world today, women are having to organize in ways that the film, set in 1960s Chicago, recreates — prepping for a war over “privacy” and “settled law” that’s been in place for nearly 50 years.

Here’s a short doc on the movement that the film, starring Elizabeth Banks, Sigourney Weaver, Wunmi Mosaku and Kate Mara, recreates.

Scott Cooper helms this latest Tale of Poe to make it on the screen, based on a novel by Louis Bayard in which EAP is a character.

Gillian Anderson is in it. And Harry Melling co-stars as Edgar Allan Poe.

Gloriously gloomy looking, as was the no budget indie “Poe in a murder investigation” film “Raven’s Hollow,” which came out last summer.

Jan. 6 this comes to Netflix.

Interesting that Disney+ goes to the Tim Allen well again. Irrelevant to the generation that has kids, too reactionary for about two thirds of the country to avoid being “canceled.”

You seen some of the stuff he’s been “joking” about? Ugh..

Nov. 16.

A steep fall off from it’s $67 million opening didn’t kill “Black Adam.” Dwayne Johnson’s comic book crap on a cracker added $25 million on its second weekend, pushing it over $108 million overall.

The new Lionsgate release, smuggled into theaters without critics’ previews and shelved so long one of its stars died two years ago, “Prey for the Devil” did $7 million because a PG-13 horror movie is always money in the bank.

It’ll never catch “Smile,” which will hit the $100 million mark next weekend.

“Halloween Ends” has another $3.7 and clears the $60 million mark, far short of “Smile,” but good enough.

“Lyle Lyle Crocodile” is chomping away, over $32 million by the end of the weekend.

“Till” added thousands of theaters and climbed into the top ten, $2.8 million. Good film. Go see it.

“The Woman King” has one last weekend in the top ten, over a million.

“Tar” added hundreds of theaters and didn’t crack the top ten, right around $1 million.