Movie Nation

Fierce, furious and feminine, “The Woman King” is an action picture that isn’t so much “released” as “unleashed.

It’s a period piece built around history’s real Amazons — the all-female palace guard of the Kingdom of Dahomey. Oscar winner Viola Davis stars in it, heading a cast of equally formidable women who march us through a fictional but historically-sound story of resistance, fighting the good fight and stirring up “good trouble” in an Africa “corrupted” by the racist European slave trade.

Talk about a movie of its moment.

Women headline this. Women produced it, including Davis and her acclaimed-actress friend Maria Bello (who also gets a “story” credit). Gina Prince-Bythewood takes what she learned making “Old Guard” and applies it to a much better script — by Dana Stevens. And women on screen charge through it, battling abusers, enslavers, Africans and Europeans to set things to right in a small kingdom threatened at all sides by larger powers.

As depicted here, the Agojie were the Green Berets of their era — a committed combat elite. They were an African, asexual (apparently) Sacred Band of Thebes, women trained from youth to fight and work as a unit because Dahomey was losing so many of its men to larger kingdoms’ addiction to the slave trade.

Davis plays Nanisca, general of this corps. With her fearsome lieutenants (wonder women Lashana Lynch and Sheila Atim), she is tasked with carrying out the policies of the new king, Ghezo (John Boyega). And what Ghezo wants is to get out from under the domineering thumb of the Oyo Empire.

Dahomey pays the Oyo tribute, and still Oyo goons and their allies raid villages and take captives to sell to the Portuguese. The film opens on Nanisca and her ululating Dahomey Team Six staging a merciless counter-raid to free hostages and butcher the bad guys who stole them.

The film’s story is largely seen through the eyes of a petite teen (South African newcomer Thuso Mbedu) who will not accept her father’s arranged marriage to a much older man who thinks slapping her in front of her dad will seal the match.

Nawi is physically smaller than the rest of her recruiting class. She is mouthy, talking back to the battle-scarred general, who lectures them “We need SMART warriors. The dumb ones die quickly.”

With a little instruction and a lot of training and discipline, maybe she’ll make the cut.

“Always obey Izuke,” a lieutenant (Lynch, of “No Time to Die” and “Captain Marvel) snaps. Nawi pauses, confused. “I am Izuke!”

Oh.

A towering, ruthless new general (Jimmy Odukoya) is their Oyo foe. He leads from horseback, and is most intent on grabbing hostages for the Portuguese (Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Jordan Bolger) who show up at the slave port controlled by the Oyo.

Nanisca must mold her fighting force, shake off off her injuries and advancing years, battle her own trauma, outsmart her foes and out-maneuver the king’s wives and persuade her monarch that maybe Dahomey should opt out of this slave trade economy altogether.

The script has some old fashioned touches. One of the Portuguese (Bolger) is the son of a kidnapped Dahomeyan mother, and could be somebody’s love interest. The “change our economy” to get out of slave trading messaging seems revisionist and “modern.”

Prince-Bythewood and the screenwriter haven’t yet mastered the perfect drop-the-mike moment, giving the ending an anti-climactic touch or two…or three.

But the production design, the training sequences, the visceral, breathless and just-plain-cool combat, the singing, dancing, parading and mourning by an impressive cast drive the picture and pull us along with it.

Davis lets us see a seriously badass broad’s vulnerable side, mastering the fight choreography and reminding us at every moment that she’s one of the best actresses of her generation. She’s the thespian rising tide that lifts every other performance around her.

Lynch, Odukoya, Atim and Mbedu are her stand-out support. And Boyega seems perfectly cast as a young, impressionable king who’d like to impose his will on all his subjects, but with the good sense to listen to the tougher-than-him woman with the better ideas.

“The Woman King” reminds us that the real history we don’t know makes for a great story, and a grand action yarn. You want to learn where all the good parts and “realistic” elements of that comic book movie “Black Panther” and its sequel came from? Gaze upon “The Woman King,” and be thrilled.

Rating: PG-13 (Sequences of Strong Violence|Partial Nudity|Brief Language|Some Disturbing Material|Thematic Content)

Cast: Viola Davis, Lashana Lynch, Thuso Mbedu, Sheila Atim, Jordan Bolger, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Jayme Lawson, Adrienne Warren, Jimmy Odukoya and John Boyega

Credits: Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, scripted byDana Stevens. A Sony Tristar release.

Running time: 2:06

Yes, it’s different. And kind of the same. Disney’s version of Hans Christian Anderson’s character is a sweet singing woman of color.

The original animated film thrilled kids, brought adults to tears and Disney back to animated relevance.

The bar is extra high on this one.

Direct to Disney+? Still dying to see it.

Now here’s a sequel we can all get behind. An “Enchanted” follow up that’s all about life after marrying your McDreamy Prince and moving to the ‘burbs.

Love and Amy! And Maya Rudolph’s on board this time.

“The Bengali” is a lovely home movie about finding one’s roots, a simple tale that connects a New Orleans family to its West Bengal patriarch, who came over from India in the late 19th century.

School teacher Fatima Shaik grew up hearing the stories about her grandfather, Mohamed Musa Shaik, and seeing the hookah he’d brought over from India when he landed in New Orleans in 1893. She’d heard the lore about him being an “Oxford” man, from Calcutta, about him having land back in the old country.

The hookah, family homes and family members were lost in Hurricane Katrina. That adds impetus to her quest.

With Indian American filmmaker Kavery Kaul as her translator and the person documenting this journey, she’d go back to Calcutta — or a village close to it — and see how much of this “lore” was fact, and how much was just grandpa over-selling his past.

Through Fatima, a devout Louisiana Catholic, we learn of a number of immigrants from India who made their way to the port of New Orleans and how interested her family and her adult daughters are in this part of their lineage. As Gandhi discovered, growing up in South Africa, people of Indian and later Afro-Indian descent were “Black” to the dominant, segregationist white culture. Being fair-skinned, Fatima’s family felt an “otherness” that appears to have equated with rootlessness.

So she takes off on a big adventure, a stranger in a strange land, but a place that lingers in her DNA and that might jibe with family memories.

Weaving the Cajun accordions of New Orleans with the tablas and sitars of India into the score, Kaul follows, aids and assists Fatima, who works extra hard not to come off as the stereotypical “ugly American.” That’s not easy, as she is an ever-smiling, inquisitive foreigner who asks a lot of question. She stands out in the crowds of her grandfather’s country, and sets off alarm bells in locals every time she mentions “my grandfather’s land.”

Kaul, being more Indian than her film’s subject, becomes the person the locals confide in as she and Fatima track, via an old letter to an Indian lawyer, the village where Mohamed grew up and the land he might have left behind when he emigrated.

Kaul is the one a mistrusting local man says “I can’t tell if she’s black or white” to, who overhears Muslim villagers gripe “She’ll sing Catholic songs,” whom a village elder lectures “She’s from another religion so she can’t be one of us.”

Fatima smiles, tries to teach local girls the “second line” Mardi Gras dance from New Orleans, and never quite figures out how that the way to defuse the local paranoia might be saying “I’m not here to make a claim on his land.” Because as far as we know, that could be her intent.

“Why are you asking SO MANY QUESTIONS?” more than one local wants to know.

In “greedy, wasteful” America, as she knows the locals see “us,” most of “us” know better than to verbally renounce our property rights, after all.

Her encounters with the Catch-22 rabbit hole of Indian bureaucracy — ancient and English-inculcated record keeping, without any hint of English “efficiency” — are as amusing as they are frustrating.

“Madam, I KEEP the records. I can’t SEARCH the records!”

As you can guess by the fact “The Bengali” was finished and merited a release, there is a warm (ish) payoff to their efforts.

That, and the unknown history it dips into, makes the film rewarding enough to merit a look, even if it never quite transcends its limited “home movies made by a professional filmmaker” reach.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Fatima Shaik, Kavery Kaul

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kavery Kaul. A Dada Films release.

Running time: 1:12

It always circles back to “Clerks” for Kevin Smith.

Jersey’s DIY indie filmmaker may have taken his shots at leaving Jay and Silent Bob and Dante and Randal et al. But those guys and that New Jersey convenience store they inhabit are his safe space. They’re what made him a nerd culture icon and kept him in the public eye when the non “Clerks” content let him down, as it often did.

But some of us got the warm fuzzies for the “final” Jackass movie, which showed us those once-young pranksters hitting 50, getting old and taking it in the ‘nads one more time in a stupidly funny picture that welcomed a COVID-weary nation back to the multiplex.

And that’s kind of the goal of “Clerks III,” a nostalgic wallow in Smith’s Quick Stop-driven career and the motley crew of Jersey crudes who populate the Smithverse.

Smith returns to the scene of the comic crime, still home to the characters that tickled us so back in 1994, for an unfunny, sentimental visit that pretty much kills this “franchise” off — literally.

The widowed Dante (Brian O’Halloran) now co-owns the local Quick Stop with big-talking, swaggering loser Randal (Jeff Anderson). The video store next door long ago shuttered, its “VHS and Nintendo Rentals” sign papered over with “THC.” But inside, videotapes line the shelves as if the place has been declared a state historic site.

The guys are still playing rooftop boot-hockey, still allowing drug dealers Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) to peddle their wares out front.

Everybody’s deep-dive into “Star Wars” minutia is ongoing. And they’re still attempting the same alliterative put-downs — “Elon Muskrat,” “Motley Crewneck.”

It’s in the middle of one of those colorless putdown rants aimed at their employee, Elias (Trevor Fehrman), who’s now into “Christian crypto,” that Randal faces “The Widowmaker.” He has a heart attack, which he survives. His life-changing epiphany?

“I’m gonna make a MOVIE about my life!”

He’ll call it “Inconvenienced,” and as it shakes out, Randal and Dante will play themselves and others will show up and say and perform all the goofy nonsense they’ve witnessed and heard from customers as “clerks” for three decades.

Silent Bob will be their DP, who speaks just long enough to give a diatribe on the merits of shooting in black and white.

This could be fun, in a weary “meta” sort of way.

But unlike the lowdown, grungy and quippy “Clerks,” “Clerks III” — shot in color — has the look of a self-distributed Youtube sitcom pilot. With about as many laughs.

Everybody looks pretty well-preserved, all things considered — thinning hair dyed, plenty of makeup. Smith, 52, looks tanned and as fit as he’s ever been.

The Quick Stop blouses are new and freshly-pressed, making the store and the characters within in it look bland and unlived in. Where’s the mileage?

In the years since “Clerks,” writer-director Smith had a heart attack, and other cast members had addiction issues and health scares. There’s a lot of disappointment built into this movie, in front of and behind the camera. And that just isn’t amusing.

Smith folds mortality, grief and regret into the story to give it depth, but the strain of being glib about those elements shows. Scene after scene plays out without so much as a chuckle.

Some of what weighs on the picture is how the rest of the world has shifted around this 1994 bubble of cute and cutting edge “Jersey style.”

In the ensuing decades, weed has largely been legalized and the culture has coarsened in step with those crude, cursing “Clerks.”

Yes, the first words in this sequel begin with an “f” and end with “you.” We all talk like that now.

The “donkey” act bits and sexual vulgarisms don’t just feel played-out. They feel old.

Still, a lot of friends agreed to do cameos. Amy Sedaris is a goofy-but-not-funny surgeon, Justin Long is a less-funny tight-lipped nurse, with Kate Micucci, Bobby Moynihan, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Mr. Sarah Michelle — Freddie Prinze, Jr. — Fred Armisen, Danny Trejo and Ben Affleck checking in. None of them elicit more than a grin.

But an hour into the film, things threaten — briefly — to improve. Jay and Silent Bob are set to recreate their boom-box dance moment. But Jay’s a literalist when it comes to “dancing like no one’s watching.” Everybody has to leave the set as Silent Bob plays Jefferson Starship’s “Find Your Way Back” and the duo channel their pre-AARP card-in-the-mail selves, if only for a moment.

The movie starts to feel sweet. Bringing back Dante’s old loves — the irritable, still-living exes (Marilyn Ghigliotti and Jennifer Schwalbach Smith) — and the one who died (Rosario Dawson, acting in a better movie than the one surrounding her) — plays.

But that warm moment is fleeting and “Clerks III” continues its slog to the finish, an edgy comedy that’s lost its edge, a franchise whose expiration date passed long ago.

Rating: R, lots and lots of profanity, drug use

Cast: Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Trevor Fehrman, Marilyn Ghigliotti, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith and Rosario Dawson

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kevin Smith. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:40

Dear Britannia. You have time. Reconsider?

This one is previewing early because they’re sure they’ve got something good here.

One can hardly wait.

When we meet Justin Long’s actor character AJ in the new thriller “Barbarian,” he’s a Hollywood lad on the make, a guy with a TV pilot about to be picked up sporting down the coast with the top down in a vintage Alfa Romeo Spider not too many years removed from the model Dustin Hoffman drove in “The Graduate.”

Apt.

A giddy AJ is singing along to the car’s sound system. And what’s that patter song he’s singing along to?

Why, a tune that was new at the same time the car was, a song inspired by “Jungle Book” author Rudyard Kipling.

An Oct. 14 release from Samuel Goldwyn, this one could’ve used some serious title brainstorming. “Hitman’s Holiday” gets the job done.

Scott Adkins and Ray Stevenson, making a movie in Malta with lots of “Warriors” style colorful hitman characters trying to kill someone our “hero” is trying to protect.

“The Movie,” a “comical” hostage “thriller” about a deranged no-talent who home-invades a has-been movie star’s house to force her to be in his film, is not autobiographical. That needs to be said.

It is not funny, exciting, scripturally witty, cinematically interesting or acted in any way that threatens at any moment to change all the things it’s not.

It’s the kind of disaster that hits my in-box, with begging/badgering messages from a publicist hired by the distributor or (more likely) by the delusional self-distributing filmmaker who hasn’t taken the parade of “pass” and “no” replies from studios/distributors seriously.

Jarrod Pistilli, sort of a more-annoying-even-less-amusing version of Jamie Kennedy, is the pushy “delivery” guy who brings a package to faded star Janet, played by Bonnie Root, who lets us feel her pain. We even sense its on-set presence between takes.

Walter the delivery guy wants her to read his script, wants her to film his script, and has delivered a huge box with all his filmmaking gear for the eventuality that he lashes her to his delivery dolly and production begins.

The most generous way to look at this amateurish riff and an amateur trying to shoot a “POV” picture with a helmet cam as he co-stars in it is as a lark that did not work and never should have seen the light of day. Nothing wrong with trying and failing. But “never seen the light of day” is the phrase that pays here.

I take no pleasure eviscerating no-budget delusions. The Wisconsinites who thought they could make a movie about race in the trenches of World War I…in Wisconsin, stick in my mind. The only people who read the reviews of such invisible disasters are those who made the movie, or their check-writing/enabling/participation trophy-praising parents. And they’re enraged, not knowing the many times others on the team heard the word “No,” and “No” for good reason.

The fact that bottom-rung distributor Gravitas picked “Movie” up suggests the filmmakers thought they had something, that they tried to get higher rungs on the distribution ladder to distribute it. Gravitas finds a nugget in their corner of the cinema ghetto every now and then. All they risk here is pocket change, and another ding on their reputation.

But a note to writer-director Michael Mandell. Your family, who probably helped finance it, the other funders — Kickstarter, etc. — won’t tell you the truth. If every other distributor is saying “Nope,” take it to heart. Otherwise, some mean old movie critic is going to type a hole right in your “The Next Kubrick” dreams.

Distributors used to be gate keepers for indie cinema, raising standards by turning away junk. Publicists fulfilled at least some of that function, too. In this day and age, it’s down to critics alone. Apparently.

Naming your movie “The Movie?” Unfathomably stupid.

And that publicist whose pitched this? Lady, you’re on my list.

Rating: unrated, PG-13ish

Cast: Bonnie Root and Jarrod Pistilli

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Mandell. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:25

Even those of us long in on the joke of Neil Labute’s He Man Woman Haters Club dramedies, ironic depictions of toxic masculinity wrapped in male affirmation, have to find “House of Darkness” a trial.

His latest horror riff on emasculated men and emasculating women — remember, he was entrusted with “The Wicker Man” remake, and turned it into a misogynistic mess — is a a thoughtfully half-baked attempt to graft his big themes onto what is obviously a vampire’s revenge, pretty much from the moment we read its title.

“House” is like a filmed play with misandric and misogynistic subtexts, and might be the talkiest 88 minute movie in history. No kidding, Justin Long. If you weren’t paid by the word here, you need a better agent. Or accountant.

Cinematically-static if well-acted, and dramatically-flat throughout, it’s an end-of-the-date story of gamesmanship, competing agendas and differing interpretations of what’s going on in a coupling towards copulation sense.

It’s a #MetToo movie with fangs, dull fangs. Labute, who gained fame with his brutal satire “In the Company of Men,” set out to sell a “Men are from Mars, Women are from Transylvania” version of the battle of the sexes. It doesn’t work.

Long plays a BMW’d social climber who takes the lovely Mina (Kate Bosworth) home to her remote “castle” after meeting in a bar.

He is right on the cusp of chivalrous, offering to walk her to her door, seeing as how “dark” and “scary” this corner of nowhere is to a city guy. Then he’s got to be getting back, he insists. No expectations, no “come in for a drink” pretexts presumed. He is persuaded to change his mind.

“Lead the way,” he enthuses. “I have been, ever since we met,” she says.

No, he doesn’t know her name at this point, or she his. But we can hear what a Chatty Cathy he is, talking himself into rhetorical corners where he admits he “fibs” a lot, among other things.

“How did we get on this subject?”

“To make you uncomfortable.“

Abnd we can see that she has the cocksure confidence of a beautiful blonde, “forward,” and not coy about it. She has him inside, sitting by the fire, sipping wine and talking away before he knows it.

The dialogue of their little mating pas de deux, with him questioning her about the house, property and the family and her testing him, is the best thing in the film, even if Labute is anything but subtle about what he’s doing with it.

“‘Sexy,’ he calls her, with an “Is that OK to say any more without setting the women’s rights movement back too far?” proviso.

The “filmed play” touches come from the obvious melodramatics — characters disappearing off camera, others abruptly appearing for “shock” value, our “hero” dozing off and having on-the-nose nightmares when he does This clunker is so tediously theatrical — told in what feels like (never-ending) real-time — you can practically hear the coughs, yawns and squirming in the seats of a theater audience as you’re watching it.

And the payoff, when it comes, is both expected and so gory and over-the-top that if “Barbarian” doesn’t end up being a new horror pigeonhole for Long’s career, “House of Darkness” could see to that.

I’ve followed Labute since the beginning of his career. Plucking his themes out of whatever stories he choses to tell, in whatever genre, is a favorite game among critics. But with this and with his almost-as-disappointing “Out of the Blue,” you have to wonder if his hot button issue/cutting edge days are gone, or if his favorite “hot button” — men standing up for masculinity — isn’t as out of date as the TV series he’s just finished filming, “American Gigolo.”

Rating: R, graphic violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Justin Long, Kate Bosworth, Gia Crovatin and Lucy Walters

Credits: Scripted and directed by Neil Labute. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:28