Movie Nation

A few essential facts you have to know before deciding whether to watch “Medieval,” a fictionalized early 15th century account of the exploits of Czech hero Jan Žižk.

The knight, rebel and celebrated general who “never lost a battle” was famously-nicknamed “One-eyed Žižka.” Ben Foster plays him in the film, and when we meet the hero, he’s pre-eye patch. So, you know what’s coming.

The film features Michael Caine as a sage advisor to the Kings of Bohemia,  including King Wenceslas IV, who was heir to the post of Holy Roman Emperor. We get a few scenes of a perplexed looking Lord Boresh in a coach that’s under attack early on, and a couple of scenes late in the third act with Britain’s Cockney treasure. He earns his pay, but not in the middle acts.

And as anybody who’s ever seen a sword-fighting movie — pirates, Romans, Medieval knights, Tartars, Robin Hood — a villain has to bark “He’s MINE,” in the middle of a melee, at some point.

Stuntman and actor turned director Petr Jákl (he also did another Czech history tale, “Kajínek“) serves up a sturdy, intimate and two-fisted epic in the muted greys of the Golden Age of Leather, Wood, Stone and Steel.

“Medieval” slides down the slippery slope towards cheesy, and the third act has annoying gaps in the story and lapses in logic. But how many Medieval Bohemian chivalry and combat stories make it to the screen?

Foster plays a fierce fighter, sometime brigand and sword-for-hire in the future Czech Republic in the middle of the Papal Schism. There’s a pope in Rome and a French-approved “Antipope” in Avignon. Wenceslas IV (Karel Roden) is in line to become Holy Roman Emperor, a “defender of the (Christian) faith position that began with Charlemagne and ended in the early 19th century.

But feckless Wenceslas has a rival brother, Sigismund (Matthew Goode, as slippery as one would expect), King of Hungary, and a lot of debts — mostly held by Henry of Rosenberg (Til Schweiger).

Lord Boresh (Caine), who retains Jan Žižk and his Bohemians as paid extra security, will need their help getting Wenceslas to Rome without incident, as Boresh sees this as the only way to mend the papal schism and rally Christianity against the Turks, or the Poles or heretical Eastern Orthodox Byzantines.

Those who would stop this include Rosenberg and his ally, Sigismund. The best way to foil Rosenberg and perhaps raise ransom cash for good-and-broke-King-Wenceslas might be kidnapping the fair Katherine (Sophie Lowe of “Blow the Man Down” and TV’s “Romper Stomper”). She’s the niece of the French king and engaged to the cruel Sigismund.

“Medieval” becomes a bloody game of “Who’s Got the Princess?” as rivals kidnap, battle over, “free” and recapture the Lady Katherine many times.

We see how “One-eyed Žižka” earned his nickname, and sample medieval treatment for open sores (not for the maggot-squeamish). We glimpse the tactician and combat innovator that Žižka is known to have been — turning wagons into rolling forts, a precursor to Žižka later arming them with cannon and inventing the tank.

Jákl’s script leans heavily on combat movie cliches translated into the age of lance, bow, shield and sword. There’s a sharpshooter — a guy who’s aces with a crossbow — a big cuddly hulk, a treacherous colleague and a super-sized knight-villain (Roland Møller).

Foster is quite good in a role that needs him for action more than line-readings or great displays of emotion. Goode and Schweiger offer decent support, and Caine does well enough with a somewhat thankless part.

Lowe doesn’t give the film the emotional punch her part called for, and frankly that’s not Jákl’s fault. He gives her chances, and she never manages to be much more than a placeholder in a role that is mostly fictional invention, although there was a real Katherine mixed up in these lives.

The third act shows signs of heavy-handed editing as we wonder how this character got tied to a tree and that one impaled by an arrow.

Still, it’s all perfectly workmanlike, save for the fights, which are splendid. If Medieval Times are your jam (as they are mine), “Medieval” is worth a look and almost entertaining enough to get by.

But what it’s “getting by” isn’t just corny tropes of films of the period, but way too much historical clutter and intrigues — almost Byzantine in their twisty complexity — to let this action picture every break free of the muck it’s stuck in too much of the time.

Rating: R for strong and grisly violent content throughout, and some nudity.

Cast: Ben Foster, Sophie Lowe, Matthew Goode, Til Schweiger, Roland Møller and Michael Caine.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Petr Jákl. An Avenue release.

Running time: 2:05

Awards season Oscar bait with a top drawer supporting cast for the Jewish kid who learns about racism via family history and what a classmate and friend is subjected to.

November.

Netflix has this Oct. 7.

Based on a best seller, intriguing, promising?

Ok.

“Saloum” is a distinctly West African thriller about drug trade-connected mercenaries who escape from a military coup only to face their biggest test in a nature preserve in Saloum, Senegal.

It’s crackling good long before it turns supernatural. And their new foe, an ancient demonic presence depicted as a series of swarming, devil-horned Bigfoot bee beasts, ensures that turn towards a different genre has menace that just pops off the screen.

Writer-director Jean Luc Hebulot (“Dealer”) opens this film with an African proverb.

“Revenge is like a river whose bottom is reached only when we drown.”

Our anti-heroic “heroes” are three members of Bangui’s Hyenas, opportunistic “guns for hire” who can be good guys or bad guys, depending on who pays them the most money for their services.

They’re slipping out of Guinea Bissau, escorting a dealer they nickname “The Mexican” (Renaud Farah) because the military is slaughtering drug dealers and their hirelings left and right during the coup.

Young Chaka (Yann Gael) is handy with a gun and steely-eyed in a pinch. Rafa (Roger Sallah) is bigger, meaner and older and prefers knives and cleavers when dealing with a foe. And the shaman Minuit (Mentor Ba) is their secret weapon, a George Clinton-dreadlocked shaman who keeps knock-out powder handy which he blows in the faces of enemies to get the trio — with Mexican “Felix” in tow — out of one jam after another.

But the small plane they grab and fly out is shot at by the soldiers who show up too late to stop them. Leaking fuel, they can’t make it to Dakar. They come down in the middle of nowhere, Senegal, and need the half-Senegalese Chaka to lead them through a nature sanctuary to acquire fuel and something to patch the gas tank with.

One wrinkle. The tank doesn’t have a bullet hole in it. Somebody punctured it with a knife. That someone — perhaps one of the three hyenas themselves — “sabotaged” their escape with a million dollar passenger and a bunch of gold ingots.

Nothing like gold ingots to raise the suspicion/paranoia level.

The three Africans keep The Mexican drugged as they trek over desert and up the river to Saloum, a wildlife sanctuary that’s home to a work-for-room-and-board (and drinks) hostel.

“Three days here and they will forget all about us,” Chaka insists (in French or Wolof, with English subtitles). He used to know the smiling, accommodating director of the place, Omar (Bruno Henry). All these ruffians have to do is show off their polished side, be civil, and the musician couple, the hired help and the deaf-mute guest Awa (Evelyne Ily Juhen) will be none the wiser.

A couple of very cool twists. That “labor in exchange for accommodations” deal has everybody distributing food to local villagers, scaring off poachers, cleaning the compound’s bar and planting mangrove shoots at low tide to stave off the rising sea.

“Do we LOOK like UNICEF?”

And damned if all of the three don’t know sign language, which leads not to some friendly understanding with the deaf-mute woman, but to a nasty and very funny stand-off as she reads these soldiers of fortune like a book. Whatever they’re up to, she wants in.

The performances have African authenticity and Hollywood swagger. Most of these guys, and the woman who finds herself trapped in their company, are convincing badasses, which will come in handy when that “revenge” parable comes home to roost, and the ancient spirits of the place come for them.

The action beats are polished and exciting, the locations unique and the violence — when it comes — is visceral and tense.

“Saloum” would’ve been a perfectly-engrossing, taut and tough-minded tale without the “Dusk Til Dawn/Attack the Block” touches. But that addition raises the stakes and puts this conventional African thriller on horror fandom’s radar, and on Shudder, where everybody can stream it.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Yann Gael, Evelyne Ily Juhen, Roger Sallah, Mentor Ba and Bruno Henry.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Evelyne Ily Juhen. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:24

“Hold Me Tight” is a beautifully mysterious French tale of grief, guilt, regret and madness. Adapting a play by Claudine Galea, actor-turned-director Mathieu Amalric (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) finds exquisite melancholy in a story of a family that’s been shattered by something.

What that “something” is only becomes clear after we’ve been wholly-engaged and drawn into this sad saga, a film that doles out its clues in tiny doses, leaving some things a mystery which the viewer can only speculate on, further enriching the experience.

A woman (Vicky Krieps of “The Last Vermeer,” “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” and “Phantom Thread”) fumes over Polaroids of her family and then purposefully storms out the door, driving away in an ancient AMC Pacer.

A husband and father (Arieh Worthalter of “The Take” and “Girl”) nags his kids (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet and Sacha Ardilly) to get ready for school. The complaints and excuses include “I want Mom to make me hot chocolate!”

We follow Mom down the road to a friend’s service station, and beyond. And we see life go on for the family she’s apparently left behind for whatever journey she is impulsively taking — piano practice, meals, work and homework.

Whatever is going on with that family — “You made Mom run away!” and “You BROKE Mom!” are accusations thrown around (in French with English subtitles) — Clarisse is sending signals that point to everything from “flaked out” and “drunk” to “manic” and “certifiable.”

She is a translator, and flips out at a father correcting his son’s behavior in the middle of a port town tour. At a local bar, she is a talkative, clingy tippler whose erratic behavior — drunkenly hugging strange men, wandering up a snowy mountain, burying her face in ice at the fresh seafood market — merits stares and “Are you OK, Ma’am?” questions.

And back home, her son is crawling into a bubble bath in his favorite spaceman costume, his tweenage sister pulling him away from their father since she alone can comfort him.

Something has broken. Someone has left. Lives have been disrupted, if not rent apart.

Amalric keeps his story’s secrets as long as possible, dropping hints and revelations here and there. We glimpse flashbacks to how Clarisse and Marc met, and follow the children’s lives into their teens.

And all along the way, Amalric immerses us in the madness of regret and the futile search for explanations and “closure.”

“Hold Me Tight” (“Serre moi fort”) hangs on our engagement in the mystery, and our empathy for Clarisse. Krieps cagily gives her an air of self-absorption that we wonder might be self-preservation. Whatever is going on with this woman, we fear for her even if empathy is slower coming.

Something happened. Something was irretrievably broken and lost. And it’s entirely possible that “guilt” figures into Clarisse’s manic grief. Krieps makes her journey into this open wound not just intriguing, but heartbreaking.

Rating: unrated, nudity

Cast: Vicky Krieps, Arieh Worthalter, Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet and Sacha Ardilly

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mathieu Amalric, based on a play by Claudine Galea. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:37

A family with a daughter deep into Wednesday Addams cosplaying shows up in a small midwestern city, and people start dying. Suicides, deaths that don’t look like suicides, heart attacks, always with the little girl giving somebody the evil eye, always after meeting the insurance salesman husband in the family.

And there’s this serpent relic, a tiny stick with a metal snake wrapped around it, that turns up on the scenes of some of the deaths.

Somebody or some thing — THAT thing — is “The Harbinger” of bad things to come, “evil things.”

Here’s a promising horror tale of a Deal with the Devil, a Native curse, an “evil” child and a Native woman (Irene Bedard) to explain it all — “I practice the arts!” — to the hapless and maybe implicated parents (Will Klipstine, Amanda McDonald) of a child (Madeleine McGraw) who gives everybody she meets the willies.

There’s also his cadaverous, wild-eyed stranger in a trench coat who seems to be pulling the strings. When your only billing is “Creepy Man”(Bruce Bohne), any conclusions we leap to about you are going to be on the money.

But “The Harbinger” is a dawdling, chatty, over-explained thriller that fritters away the promise of a story that packs a lot of proven horror tropes into a single package, an 85 minute film in a 114 minute box.

A few decent effects — gruesome murders, characters dangling from an unseen noose or the invisible hands of the Devil — are undone by the masked demon we see, a plot that trips over itself more often than not and the dithering pacing.

The daughter’s central role feels like a red herring, even though one and all figure she’s the creepiest one of all. We see her diagnosed with schizophrenia in an opening scene, see the family skipping from town to town thanks to Dad’s “work.” But the evil child trope is abandoned, or simply misplaced.

When the Native spirit woman Floating Hawk (Bedard of TV’s “The Stand”) intones, “Only death can set her free,” we’re a bit skeptical. As is her father, understandably, and in more ways than one.

As a police detective (Vince Duvall) dives into linking the deaths, and gets ahead of himself trying to railroad this “insurance” man into jail, as the locals shun the newcomers who seem to visit death upon everyone they meet, we wish they were seeing what we and the Snyder family was seeing.

“Kill yourself” scrawled, backwards in blood on a wall, for starters.

All the explaining and the third act’s chase/quest elements aren’t enough to save the day.

Take the title as a warning. This isn’t a “Harbinger” of disaster. It’s just all portents of evil, and precious little that’s entertaining comes with it.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Will Klipstine, Madeleine McGraw, Amanda McDonald, Bruce Bohne, Vince Duvall and Irene Bedard.

Credits: Directed by Will Klipstein, scripted by Amy Mills and Will Klipstein. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:54

No, this one doesn’t star Kurt Russell and has nothing to do with hockey.

This “Miracle” is a Romanian thriller involving cops and a nun. Pretty good, too.

Is Mims, Fla. ready to read Romanian subtitles? Let’s hope so.

MovieNation, spreading fine cinema across the land, one library, one DVD at a time.

Nothing like watching a “smart house runs amok” thriller on the morning of your latest data breach (Thanks, Netflix) to put you in the mood.

“Margaux” is the story of a “Siri” with serious issues, and it goes like this.

A coding nerd, a stoner, a model, an influencer and a sexually ravenous college couple book a weekend in a gated, remote smart house, the highest of high tech mansions that caters to, flatters and anticipates your every need once you’ve “downloaded my app,” which is how you gain admittance.

As we’ve seen a wealthy couple tortured and butchered in the opening scene — stay away from “automatic” massage chairs — this is not going to end well.

Himbo pretty boy Drew (Jedidiah Goodacre), his last-minute plus-one, the vapid influencer not-really-girlfriend Lexi (Vanessa Morgan), “hot couple” Kayla and Devin (Phoebe Miu and Jordan Buhat) and stoner Clay (Richard Harmon) don’t suspect a thing.

Clay’s as “high as a flock of toucans…FRUIT Loops,” so at least he has an excuse.

The coding queen of this “nerd herd,” Hannah (Madison Pettis) is more leery. She’s not even on social media.

“The more you look at the coding,” she warns, “the more you realize how scary it is.”

And this house, adapting to its new weekend renters, slings a “‘K, queen?” and “balls” and other slang into her speech as she takes on the guise of “the built-in roommate who does ALL the dishes” for these Oregon coeds.

As they tour the facilities, a cover version of “Pure Imagination” from “Willy Wonka” plays along. This place can cook, ferment, digitally 3D print anything they can imagine.

It’s been doing this for a while, now. And “this” includes lulling everybody into a false sense of security, separating this or that person from the group and killing or coming close to killing them as “she” does.”

Hannah’s the one who says “I think we should leave,” but who listens to The Smart One? There’s swimming, “Truth or Dare” and lots of drinking and what not to get into.

They never see it coming.

I like the way one of the three credited screenwriters dipped his toe in “Terminator” styled Machine Conspiracy Theory and “Alien” androids — bleeding milky white. The effects are good.

B-movie mainstay Steven C. Miller (2012’s “Silent Night,” a few recent Bruce Willis action pix) builds suspense here and there and stages a reasonably inventive murder-by-technology moment or two.

But “Margaux” is so formulaic as to forbid anything resembling a surprise. The tech depicted here is closer to “conjuring” than anything that could be mimicked, manufactured or automated today.

And several of the life-threatening situations resolve in ways that can only be described as laughable, all but letting us read the studio’s “notes” to this or that screenwriter.

“We need her around for the third act, so invent a way to do that.” One note that wasn’t passed down the line is getting a character to mention other characters have gone missing.

“Whatever happened to” is seriously late in coming.

Methodical and formulaic or not, “Margaux” manages a few notes of caution in between the screams the splatters. For instance, I won’t be giving Netflix my credit card again any time soon.

Rating:R (Violence and Gore|Drug Use|Some Sexual Material|Language)

Cast: Madison Pettis, Vanessa Morgan, Jedidiah Goodacre, Richard Harmon, Phoebe Miu and Jordan Buhat.

Credits: Directed by Steven C. Miller, scripted by Chris Beyrooty, Chris Sivertson and Nick Waters. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:44

Pearce’s novelist went into seclusion after his book was blamed for triggering “the Knoxville shooter.”

Alice Eve co stars in this gritty looking variation on a “Conspiracy Theory” theme.

Sept. 23, in theaters and streaming.

Putting “Spider Man: No Way Home” proved to be a minor boon to cinemas. Very minor. It may win Labor Day Weekend, but not by much.

“Top Gun: Maverick” cleared the $700 million mark. So we’ve got that going for us.”