Movie Nation

Robin Wright’s directing debut has a quiet, Earthy elegance about it that mirrors our image of the her as an actress and a public figure. “Land” takes the director and leading lady out of her natural milieu and puts her in nature in a spare, simple parable about the healing power of solitude.

We don’t hear her name, not straight away. But we do see her suffering, riven by grief, visiting a therapist. The hoary bromides, “reach out to people” and get them to help you cope won’t work here.

“Why would I want anyone else to feel this?”

Her sister (Kim Dickens) sees it, too and struggles to get a promise — Please…”don’t hurt yourself…for me.“

But Emma, as she eventually reveals, has come to a decision. We see the closing at the realtor’s (Brad Leland), the rented SUV and U-Haul, and follow them as she heads to the Unibomber-remote cabin she’s bought in the mountains of Wyoming.

“You shouldn’t have any problems with trespassers,” the grizzled real estate agent jokes. She didn’t have to tell him what she’s told others. “It’s really difficult to be around other people.”

She seems out of her depth and naive to the agent, utterly underestimating the off-the-grid lifestyle she’s about to immerse herself in. But she’s got her few possessions, a not-quite weatherproof long-empty cabin, a “Game Processing Handbook” and a little other literature to guide her.

Fishing? Setting snares for trapping? Planting a garden? No problem. She’s got canned goods to survive on until that works out.

But we’ve seen her ditch her cell phone and send the rent truck back to town. She is beyond assistance when things go wrong.

The first “accident” isn’t fatal. The second mishap involves a bear visit. She dreams of a husband and child that are no longer with her, ghosts she packed for her move. Before long, those are hunger-driven hallucinations.

Good thing the handsome trapper (Demián Bichir) stumbles over her. Good thing he knows an above-the-call-of-duty nurse (Sarah Dawn Pledge).

The screenplay by Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam is a cut-and-paste collection of archetypes marching stoically through a trail of “suffering in solitude” tropes. These were around long before Grizzly Adams taught Mountain Man ways to “Jeremiah Johnson,” before the Old Mariner instructed Josh Lucas sailboat living for his “Year in Mooring.”

Movies like this undersell the drudgery of surviving on your own. PBS did a series, “Frontier House,” that laid out the grueling math of simple firewood stockpiling. It’s exhausting and never-ending, as is getting water, killing game.

Such tales are on surer ground underscoring a single harsh truth. “The grieving process” might be the cruelest euphemism in the psychotherapist’s playbook.

Wright’s beautiful film features elegantly-composed shots, many of them “magic hour” sunsets with our heroine sipping her coffee or taking a tub bath outdoors in the golden light.

The acting is superb and spare, as you might expect. Wright could run an acting school and the cinema would be the richer for it. Here, it’s not just her but her co-stars who master understatement. Sarah Dawn Pledge is the least experienced of the lot and gets across big emotions and realizations in a single, simple look or gesture. Dazzling.

The formidable Bechir fills those Sage of the Mountains boots with ease.

“Only a person who has never been hungry would think starving is a good way to die.”

“Why are you helping me?” “You are in my path.”

But if you’re looking for surprises, look elsewhere. As a fan of this “Wild,””Into the Wild,” “All is Lost,” survival genre, I can say there is nothing here you can’t see coming, not from that breathtaking mountainside vantage point.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, brief strong language, and partial nudity |

Cast: Robin Wright, Demián Bichir, Sarah Dawn Pledge, Kim Dickens and Brad Leland

Credits: Directed by Robin Wright, script by Jesse Chatham, Erin Dignam. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:29

Back in a simpler or — let’s face it — more “simplistic” time, we didn’t seem to have this “bullying” problem that has taken hold of the national consciousness this past decade.

We thought we understood “Bullying is bad” as a culture. Movies from the dawn of Hollywood reinforced an idea that became a national credo, and even worked its way into our foreign policy.

How was Hitler described to us? A bully. We all got it. You don’t let a bully get away with it

From FDR and Jimmy Stewart’s “Destry” to Andy Griffith and columnist Mike Royko, the lesson was always the same. You stand up to bullies. They come for you, you “aim for the nose” Royko remembered his old man lecturing him.

But something has shifted in the culture, and that’s one of the threads tugged at in “Bullied,” the latest documentary on this subject.

Some of what we and who we see in “Bullied” is so familiar that you may confuse Professor Thomas Keith’s film with “Bully” or other films on the subject.

But where this collection of interviews, of schoolyard and school bus cell phone videos, CCTV footage, reality TV and Donald Trump rallies breaks from the pack is looking at root causes of bullying and trying yet another version of “What we can do about it” solutions.

Keith, who teaches Philosophy and Gender Studies at Cal State Polytechnic, gives us more anecdotes from grieving parents whose bullied children died — often at their own hands — and traumatized kids talking about facing bullying even now.

He also rounded up scores of academics as well as parents turned activists and media analysts to talk about “Why kids bully” in addition to repeating the awful statistics on teen suicides spiking in an age of cyber-bullying and five years of relentless coverage of a “Bully in Chief.”

Yes, it’s another thing that got a lot worse during the Trump years.

We hear about “Bully Culture,” how it is born because “bullying is a route to popularity…Kids would not bully if there was not a social benefit.”

Who gets bullied? Kids who don’t conform — “any minority,” Black or Hispanic or “foreign” or “LGBTQ” or the disabled or “on the spectrum” children with “social deficit” issues.

Why is such such a problem in youth? Because the “impulse control” area of the brain — the pre-frontal cortex — is the last part to develop.

Not that plenty of people never outgrow that impulse control. It’s almost triggering to see the athletes, coaches, rappers and others captured on tape name-calling, threatening, gay bashing and picking fights.

We see examples of “Bully Media,” from faux tough-guy Trump’s taunts from various podiums to reality TV’s other textbook illusion of conflict, the idea from assorted “Real Housewives” shows that “women (going) at each other is a natural state,” reinforced by faked, dramatized conflicts on every show in the Andy Cohen empire.

The controversial and canceled Netflix adaptation of the book “13 Reasons Why,” about bullying and why a character kills herself, is linked directly in a “Here’s how to kill yourself as a way out” connection to the suicides of bullied teens.

As this review suggests, “Bullied” covers new ground even as it feels, at times, as if it’s all over the place. Remember, an academic made it, not a professional filmmaker.

It’s still a useful addition to the national conversation, even if we’ve lost that cultural cohesion that recognized this hateful practice as wrong, to be resisted at every age, even when it’s a rich, incompetent businessman who never got in a real fight in his entitled life who lied and cheated his way into the Oval Office.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast:  Ron Avi Astor, Jennifer Davis, Kimya Dennis, Kirk Smalley, Eric James Borges, Thomas Keith, many others.

Credits: Directed by Thomas Keith. A Majestas Group release.

Running time: 1:07

A lot of thrillers begin with or feature a prison-bus break-out as a signature scene — “48 Hrs.” and “The Fugitive,” for instance. But here’s one that’s all about the break-out, or break-in depending on your point of view.

“Below Zero (Bajocero)” is a simple, brutal and harrowing Spanish thriller about an assault on a prison transport bus outbound from Cuenca in the harsh Spanish winter. Director and co-writer Lluís Quílez (“Out of the Dark”) throws misdirection plays at us that bely its simplicity and reliance on basically one location to make an action feature with quirky characters that set up quirkier twists.

That location is the interior of a maximum security prison bus, basically an “armored bunker” on wheels as the driver Martín (Javier Gutiérrez) declares, at one point. He’s a veteran cop on his first “transfer” in a long time.

He’s a family man teamed-up with the brutish Montesinos (Isak Férriz) to haul six dangerous inmates from one prison to another. “Discretion” and “surprise” dictate that they do this in the middle of the night.

But as we see the inmates rounded up to leave, we see one procure a key, and hide it even where a strip search won’t give it away. Ahem.

Montesinos is brusque, no nonsense, inclined to throw his weight around. Martín is the “rules aren’t there to be ‘relaxed'” and “You can’t beat up every dirtbag who gets in your face” stickler.

We’ll see who’s the smarter cop and who’s tougher when the bus is waylaid on a foggy surface road on this longest night of their lives.

The inmates are a colorful crew of varying ages and “types.” The dangerous Romanian human trafficker Mihei (Florin Opritescu) is the one they’re most worried about. Motor-mouthed Gollum (Andrés Gertrúdix) is a nuisance, young Nano (Patrick Criado) has as many tattoos as any of them, aged Pardo (Miquel Gelabert) is in for some major financial crime, tough-as-nails Rei (Édgar Vittorino) simmers in silence, unless you bring up his sister.

And then there’s the cunning and charismatic older con (Luis Callejo), who insists on going by (in Spanish with English subtitles) “my stage name, Ramis.” Like the rest, Ramis promises to be a handful. That’s why each has his own steel-walled cell for the ride.

And then the ride is intercepted. Do we know who pulled this off, “took care” of the escort police cruiser and blew out a tire? Do “they” know who has come to release them, or just one of them, with the possibility the attackers will kill everyone else on board?

After a few seriously illogical moments setting up this backroad hijacking, leaving wounded Martín on his own with six dangerous men, “Below Zero” settles in to a siege filled with surprises.

Callejo, who was Joseph in the Biblical thriller “Risen,” makes a colorful creep who can’t be trusted, even if he’s showing you his hand.

Gutiérrez, a Netflix staple thanks to “Assassin’s Creed,” “The Motive,” “Marshlands” and “The Occupant,” makes a believably over-matched cop who finds the nerve to bluff when his life is on the line.

But as “types,” these characters are all just “Who dies or lies next?” pawns to be played with in the Fernando Navarro and Quílez screenplay, one that considers every way to get into and out of a locked “armored bunker” with whoever’s trying to get at them outside, and a dozen ways to die inside.

It’s no “48 Hrs.” or “Fugitive,” but “Below Zero” is a good one, with or without subtitles.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity,

Cast: Javier Gutiérrez, Isak Férriz, Florin Opritescu, Karra Elejalde, Andrés Gertrúdix, Patrick Criado, Miquel Gelabert, Édgar Vittorino and Luis Callejo

Credits: Directed by Lluís Quílez, script by Fernando Navarro, Lluís Quílez. A Moreno Films release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:46

Writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford’s debut feature is as sober a treatment of the “date rape” drug experience as the cinema has ever shown us. “Test Pattern” captures the “how,” immerses us in the “now” and shows us the lives brought to a standstill by the experience and the soul-crushing systemic failures of the aftermath.

What Renisha (Brittany S. Hall) sees in Evan (Will Brill) that first night at an Austin bar is anybody’s guess. She’s beautiful, put-together, with an electric smile and a ready laugh. And she’s just there for a girls’ night out, dancing and drinks.

But one look, one dance and awkward, underdressed, unshaven and slightly balding Evan has to have her number. Even though he has no clue how to go about it, even though his clumsy approach isn’t particularly charming, she consents.

There’s “consent” a few dates later, too.

An interracial couple is born. We see that first date, hear her ambitions and learn he’s a tattooist. But just as we’re underlining our “out of his league and class” biases, raising an eyebrow on the mismatch — which has a whiff of white privilege about it — Evan delivers one of those compliments that stick. He won’t hear of her belittling her hope to “help” people and society in a future job.

“I feel like you always know what you’re talking about.”

A doting love affair, with breakfasts of “Your favorite,” affirming “I love yous” in every good-bye, cohabitation, new “ink” and new braids for her and the supportive confidence that has her in a new development director job at a non-profit, they’re destined to be together.

And then “that night” happens.

Ford takes great pains to show us ways you don’t need a “date” for “date rape” to happen. The way it plays out here is quietly heart-breaking, good judgement overruled by a pushy friend and the pushy guys whom the pushy friend doesn’t see as a threat.

Drugs are involved. Ford and her leading lady make us experience the dazed, reduced-capacity inability to respond and escape, the confusion and the guilt.

How will Evan respond to this test? How will “the system?”

Using flashbacks to show telling moments in Renisha and Evan’s relationship, Ford hints at the blur of emotions sweeping over her heroine. And Hall makes us feel much of what Renisha does, a wide spectrum ranging from embarrassed resignation to humiliation to frustration.

Ford has made a downbeat, realistic treatment of this subject that doesn’t have a built-in call-to-arms as part of its make-up. That’s implied. Nobody, no couples, should have to go through this.

MPA Rating: Unrated, adult subject matter, alcohol and drug use

Cast: Brittany S. Hall, Will Brill, Gail Bean

Credits: Written and directed by Shatara Michelle Ford. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:23

They don’t hand out Oscars to every casting director, the person who puts pictures and names in front of filmmakers to give them ideas of how to turn their scripted characters into flesh and blood actors.

Lynn Stalmaster, “The Master Caster,” the most famous person ever to do this job, got one. The guy who cast “Superman,” “Tootsie,” “In the Heat of the Night” and scores of iconic films, has died. He was 93.

Look at that list of credits. Got to meet him once, as a cub reporter, and he pointed out the obvious — that no, he didn’t put Brando in “Superman” or Michelle in “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday.” Stars are typically brainstormed by writers, directors and producers.

Casting directors can join in on that brainstorming and have a ready supply of ideas and glossy photos (back then) to show to filmmakers as suggestions that they’ve gleaned from reading the script.

And everybody who isn’t Dustin Hoffman or Pollack on “Tootsie” — maybe even Jessica Lange — came out of Stalmaster’s suggestions, arranged auditions and the like.

Look at that list of credits and smile.

Here’s a good measure by how original a film is. How hard is it to come up with analogues, other titles this picture reminds you of?

The deftly paranoid indie “Lapsis” had me flashing back to “Brazil” and “Safety Not Guaranteed,” not that either of those films has that much in common with its story or style of storytelling.

It’s about people hired by this megalithic cable corporation to tow tiny trailers unspooling wiring as they follow their phones’ GPS directions to these cube-shaped monoliths, tucked away in state parks. They plug in and “make a connection.” This allows encrypted, secure communication to speed up stock trading. Apparently.

But what it’s really about it is the traps of modern life. It’s a lucrative, exhausting menial job in which “cablers” are monitored constantly and in competition with cable-towing robots. Everything about it is sketchy, from the hustlers who pitch it at “cabler” fairs, those who trade “medallions” that certify you for the work to the supervisors who send you to a suburban ranch-style house’s garage for your gear and even the manner of payment — cash can be elusive, “points” are not.

There’s a new illness spreading, “Omnia,” another “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” going around that prompts those who don’t have it to say, “Isn’t that the thing that’s all made up?”

That’s what Ray’s little brother Jamie has. That’s what has Ray (Dean Imperial) looking for something more lucrative than his airline luggage-delivery service gig, because Jamie (Babe Howard) needs to go to a very pricy clinic for treatment.

Health care is not a human right in this alternate reality, either.

A few words about Mr. Imperial. You’ve never seen him in anything. He was a writer for TV’s “Imposters.” He’s balding, with a middle-aged spread, mustachioed and always three days since his last desperately-needed shave.

And he sounds just like James Gandolfini. I mean DEAD ringer. If anybody out there in Internetland wants to create a “Further Adventures of Tony Soprano” podcast, here’s your guy.

Ray has, a stranger tells him on first meeting, “a ’70s mobster vibe going on.” Naturally he lives in Queens.

But as tough and streetsmart as he can seem, Ray’s got a lot of questions for the wide-eyed pitchwomen and pitchmen staffing the booths at the cabler’s trade fair/symposium and training session.

“Is it, for sure, safe?”

They assure him it is, without noting how out of shape he is and how in-shape he may need to be. They say nothing of cablers who’re “unjustly detained or penalized.”

And nobody, not them, the tech who shows a room full of cablers a staticky old “training” video, and not Felix (James McDaniel) who sells Rsy a previously-used “medallion,” the one with the “trail name” “Lapsis Beeftec,” can wholly explain this technology, why it’s needed in a wireless age and why all this cabling is done in the woods by women and men who march hither and yon all day and sometimes into the night on “routes” to the next “Quantum” cabling interface cube.

“I don’t know what they hell’s going on!”

On the trail, his friendly but wary fellow cablers start to fill him in. It’s not until he runs into the serenely cynical and “cabler”-wise Anna (Madeline Wise) that he and we start to get some answers, but even then it’s not remotely completely clear.

As nothing I’ve described to you costs more than a short trip to a Lowes, an REI (camping gear and backpacks) and a still-operating Radio Shack, you can tell this is sci-fi of the mind, not the budget. Noah Hutton’s film isn’t about the tech or even the story, it’s about “this strange unaccountable feeling,” as Douglas Adams once wrote, “that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.”

Is Jamie’s illness “real” or a product of the medical/pharmaceutical complex? The upselling that goes on at his “clinic” (Arliss Howard plays the doctor/used-car salesman running it) makes Ray wonder.

Is everyone having a “Quantum computer” really necessary? It’s a “planned obsolescence” trap with government in on this required “upgrade,” basically insisting that you have it — like HDTV or Turbotax. If you don’t buy in, you’re all but stuck in an alternate reality.

There’s a “sold my soul to the company store” vibe about “Lapsis,” this sense that people are lured in, pulled into debt slavery, laboring at seemingly well-paid menial labor just to pay debts that have been conjured up by a rigged system — a bit like the rising, entrapping debt of banks, insurers and cell phone companies.

But this being a movie, maybe SOMEbody knows what’s really going on and SOME people are conspiring to do something about it.

One last analogy here might by the no-budget sci-fi “Primer,” not an iconic title in the genre, but minimalist science fiction that sticks with you for years and gives you a lot to chew on.

That’s Hutton’s gift of “Lapsis,” a puzzling picture that challenges, leaves out “all the answers” and serves up Tony Soprano-lite as our intrepid, in-over-his-head tour guide through a hell of our own creation.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Dean Imperial, Madeline Wise, Babe Howard, James McDaniel, Ivory Aquino, Dora Madison and Arliss Howard

Credits: Scripted and directed by Noah Hutton. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:44

It’d be hard to overstate just how likeable Netflix’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” movies are. Cute cast, realistic (if affluent) situations, upbeat messaging and first love-affirming, precisely what a teen rom com should be.

And if Netflix wants to wring the life out of the “franchise,” even that doesn’t ding that likability. The third film in the “trilogy,” “To All the Boys: Always and Forever” is just as likable, manages a couple of lump in the throat moments and a candy-colored view of high school, senior class trip (to NYC), spring break with family (to Seoul), prom, a wedding and graduation.

But as pretty as this is and as cheerful as everybody in it can be, this is seriously dull stuff. I mean, watching prom backdrop paint dry dull. The stakes are low, the conflict is realistically banal and all the edges are rubbed off one and all, as if they had any to start with.

I’m all for a teen romance that isn’t all sex, beer pong and rock’n roll or hip hop. Young kids especially could stand slow-your-roll, grow-up-gradually messaging. But 16-and-up? These play like movies your parents want you to see. And we all know what that means.

Lara Jean (Lana Condor) and Peter (Noah Centineo) have known each other forever, and “found” each two movies ago. Now it’s senior year, and it’s go-big-or-go-home time.

He’s got a lacrosse scholarship to Stanford. Will the aspiring English Lit major be able to join him there? LA sweats that, big time.

No, she won’t. That’s fine. Plan B, she goes to a great school close by and maybe transfers. Peter rolls with her “Berkeley” news and other changes to the “dream” — in which LJ fantasizes about their entire futures together, at least through that house with the picket fence.

“We’re gonna get through this” is played with the gravitas of a cancer diagnosis.

But as is the way of such screen romances, the “drift apart” is just beginning. Will they make it? Will they make it through prom? Will they “make it” prom night?

Breathless fans rightly want answers.

The dialogue is blandly adorable, with but a single swear word in 110 minutes of screen time.

The lovers “burn low and slow…we’re like brisket.” Sadly, the same could be said of the movie.

With every sparkly trip to the bowling alley, every romantic trip to the “Lock Tower” (lovers leave locks) in Seoul, every “promposal” leading up to prom, “Always and Forever” just seems to take always and forever to get on with it.

Peter’s estranged dad (Henry Thompson), LJ’s remarrying dad (John Corbett), a high school feud that turns nice, the contents here have the taste and “safe” quality of baby food.

Love the characters, love the colorful, artificial, overdressed (“Cute shoes” is a running gag line.)”Grease!” color palette and “High School Musical” production design.

But there’s more to life than “To limo, or not to limo?” And pandemic escape or not, there should be a lot more to a movie high school romance than this.

“Always and Forever” is still likable, still cute, but utterly out of ideas.

MPA Rating: PG

Cast:  Lana Condor, Noah Centineo, Janel Parrish, Anna Cathcart, Madeleine Arthur, Henry Thomas and John Corbett

Credits: Directed by Michael Fimognari, script by  Katie Lovejoy based on the Jenny Han novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

“Yeah, I’ll do your little movie,” the pitch meeting ended, probably a short one, probably handled by phone. But the Oscar winning actor had one rider he insisted on in his contract.

“I’ll do it so long as I don’t have to talk.”

Say this for the quixotic career of Nicolas Cage, Academy Award winner, “Moonstruck” star, “National Treasure” national treasure — the man knows his brand. And while his contemporaries may grimace through one straight-to-video dog after another, silently seething at the status they’ve lost, ol’Nic just keeps burnishing that South by Southwest/Comic Con/C-movie nerd approved image.

Because collecting little checks, one right after the other, is just as good as a big payday every couple of years. Especially if, as he once told me in an interview, he needs the constant distraction of constant work. It keeps him sane.

And every so often, a “Joe” or “Color Out of Space” or “Mandy” comes along and has everybody saying, “I’ve ALWAYS thought Nic Cage was cool!”

“Willy’s Wonderland” isn’t one of those movies. But maybe “The Underbearable Weight of Massive Talent” will be. Or the Joe Exotic miniseries he will star in. Because with James Brown gone, THIS is “the hardest working man in show business.”

“Willy’s Wonderland” is a haunted theme park tale. A Camero-driving stranger (Cage) is bushwhacked on the road, a “helpful” tow truck driver (Chris Warner) picks him up — for a price.

And the owner of this theme park, Tex (Ric Reitz) is there to make him a deal. He’ll cover the car repairs if he’ll “stay the night cleaning” this abandoned but to-be-reopened funhouse attraction, Willy’s Wonderland.

It closed a few years back because “mommy ‘safety’ organizations shut us down.” But Tex has a dream.

The silent stranger takes off his sunglasses, dons a t-shirt like a “real employee,” and gets to work as the doors are padlocked behind him.

The Stranger brought his own case of Punch Cola with him. And every so often, his watch alarm goes off, he’ll gulp a punch and maybe take a break by playing pinball.

But those damned animatronic critters that fill this place? Their eyes follow him around. They come to malign life every time a cleaner comes.

“I’m gonna tear your EYES out and FEAST on your soul” doesn’t shake our man-with-a-cleaning mission.

Got to put down the mop, break out a knife or maybe break that mop handle in half as he furiously impales, guts, decapitates or strangles the creatures — who are eerily familiar, in non-copyright infringing ways.

There’s a murderous fairy with a hint of Tinkerbelle, a Banana Splits-ish gorilla, a Wally Gator here and H.R. PufnStuff there.

This place is like the Carowinds in Hell! If that’s not redundant

But these local teens keep trying to burn this place down because they know what happens inside.

“You’re not SAFE in there,” Liv (Emily Tosta) shouts. “We gotta get you OUT!”

The Stranger won’t listen, Liv won’t torch the place with him in it, so she goes to fetch him, and five of her friends follow, turning this into a “Dead Teenagers Movie,” with all that implies.

The fights are competently-handled and arrive at the proper intervals for fanboys to howl in gory appreciation.

Veteran character actress Beth Grant plays the sheriff, who does all she can to keep Liv out of trouble. The older players register in the expected ways. The younger ones? Nobody stands out.

Director Kevin Lewis powers through this thing (the odd mispronounced “blown” line makes it into the film) as if he knows the script is crap and that his leading lady’s not the best at registering shock, fear or fury and there’s no point in looking for a better take.

But Cage, dyed hair, beard and boots, brings home the B-movie bacon, as usual. It’s just seriously undercooked this time out.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Emily Tosta, Beth Grant, Ric Reitz, Chris Warner

Credits: Directed by Kevin Lewis, script by G.O. Parsons. A Screen Media release

Running time: 1:28

“Red Dot” is a savage if not wholly satisfying “flip-the-script” stalked in the wilderness thriller whose cleverness comes from its subtext.

We’ve seen scads of these “slickers in the wild” stories since “Deliverance” and “Southern Comfort.” Sometimes, they begin with a provocation. Often they don’t, with kid-sacrifice cults or rural rednecks robbing innocent passing travelers and the like as the “motivation.” Not here.

We’ve heard the vacationing young Stockholm couple (Nanna Blondell, Anastasios Soulis) make cracks about how folks are in “The North.” We get a hint of the pickup trucks, beards and firearms culture. And as Nadja (Blondell) is Black, racism rears its head.

But when they’re on the run, fleeing hunters they figure they crossed when they dinged their pick-up-up at the filling station, the judgmental college grads have a dilemma.

When everybody you encounter is bearded, rough around the edges and armed, who can you trust? How can you tell friend from murderous foe?

Neither hotheaded Nadja nor half-passive David (Soulis) says it, but damned if the viewer doesn’t think it.

“Well, they all look alike.”

That’s an ingenious inversion in the formula of Alain Darborg (he also directed) and Per Dickson’s script. Rushing to judgement, leaning on stereotypes and fearing what those stereotypes have taught you isn’t going to do anybody any favors.

That big twist dresses up a formulaic thriller that telegraphs its punches once it moves on from David’s proposal and the bickering marriage that’s set up in the opening act.

Maybe a trip to “Bear Valley,” a little cross-country skiing and camping with Boris the dog will set things to right. Maybe Nadja will get around to telling David that she’s pregnant.

That last paragraph sets up a strictly pro-forma thriller where that first “Dueling Banjos” moment doesn’t actually need banjos for us to know what’s coming.

Winter, remote Sweden, “Bear” valley, locals with what they figure is a murderous beef or two with the couple. Tick off everything in your mind that could happen to put them on the run through the snow, and that will happen to them as they run, and you won’t be disappointed.

The performances are solid, with Blondell (“Sisters in Arms,” and she’s in the upcoming “Black Widow”) giving a furious edge to being a Black med student in lily white Sweden.

The best scene is the one with the first “Red Dot” in it, but other action beats are handled well enough to pass muster.

And the twists only pay off if you let yourself fall into the same trap our hunted Stockholmies do. You will.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, disturbing images, profanity

Cast: Nanna Blondell, Anastasios Soulis

Credits: Directed by Alain Darborg, script by Alain Darborg, Per Dickson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25

Folksy Midwestern culotte culture comes to sunny, silly Florida in “Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” a not-quite-romp cooked up by “Bridesmaids” breakout Kristen Wiig and the actress-screenwriter who scripted that breakout hit, Annie Mumolo.

It’s like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch given a lot of money so that they could hire every showbiz pal they have as they tried to fill 107 minutes of screen time.

Say this for Wiig and Mumolo, who co-wrote this. Whatever points they score against Nebraska in the opening scenes, there’s eerily-amusing accuracy to their (dated) take on the Sunshine State. The salmon and teal, canary yellows, lilac to lavender Disneycolor palette, the fruity cocktails and tourists, the Jimmy Buffett and uh, Bertie Higgins on the soundtrack? Nailed it.

Sure, they had to go to Mexico (Cancún) to mimic the Florida of tourist lore, but whatever works.

Divorced and widowed Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) are Nebraska furniture saleswomen joined at the hip and the lip. They do everything together, including discouraging customers who might want to buy the sofa they enjoy sitting on together at the store, chattering away.

Their voices are high and Midwestern nasal, and each’s inane banter tumbles over the other’s — a dialogue/duologue that ponders the Big Questions of life.

“It’s odd to think that all the raccoons in the world are sleeping right now.”

Say what?

“Listen, I don’t really know more than I’ve already said. And some of what I said I’m even sure I actually know.”

When the store shuts down and they’re tossed out of their authoritarian “Talking Club” (Phyllis Smith of “The Office” is in it, “SNL’s” Vanessa Bayer plays the martinet who rules it with an iron first), the “girls” have to admit “We’ve lost our shimmer!”

Barb would like to see her friend “get out there.”

Star? “Men find me disgusting, and I’m OK with it.”

But a pal (Wendy McClendon-Covey of “The Goldbergs”) goes on and on about this resort she just visited on the coast of Florida. Barb & Star decide on a vacation.

They’ll go, soak up the sun, sip “boat drinks,” ride the banana boat and maybe meet someone. Greeted by a Disney Deco dazzling and amusing production number on arrival, they’re gobsmacked and you can’t help but get your hopes up that “Barb & Star” have found their shimmer, and the movie has found its voice.

There’s even a singer-pianist (Mark Jonathan Davis) who is just killing it in the lounge with a tune of his own invention (actually, Wiig co-wrote it).

“I love boobies. I love gazongas. I love knockers and chimichangas!“

But this is where the Supervillain plot settles in and the movie, waterlogged already, all but sinks.

The supervillain (Wiig in a second role, in Kibuki pancake makeup and alien-blue contacts) has a bone to pick with this town, a diabolical plot to destroy it and a lovesick minion (Jamie Dornan) she’s sent to seal its fate.

Dornan, the once-and-always Christian Grey of “Fifty Shades of” You-Know-Who, is the surprise delight in the casting here. His secret agent character, Edgar Pagét, gets swept up in Barb & Star’s company, gets drunk and into a compromising position with them. Next thing you know, he’s singing and dancing about this new love he’s found.

Christian Grey, singing and dancing. A lot of ladies would pay to see that, right? But that’s the lone highlight of the last two thirds of this lighthearted but heavy-handed farce.

It’s the sort of film that defines “culottes” as an opening credit, and tries to wring laughs out of “hot dog soup” (the gals’ Midwestern specialty), the goofy stuff the ladies pack, the way they apply sunscreen and Damon Wayans Jr.

Wayans, the least funny member of that extended family, is on the cusp of amusing here, as a hapless second agent sent to assist the first.

Another of The Lady’s henchmen is little Yoyo (Reyn Doi), a kid whose cover is as a paper boy who loves singing along to Streisand.

There might be enough here to make this comedy zip by. Wiig can be hilarious, and there are two of her here. And Mumolo didn’t just script “Bridesmaids,” she’s had supporting parts in many a comedy from “The Boss” to “Bad Moms.”

But entrusting this to a first-time feature director with episodic TV and showbiz documentaries dominating his resume proves unfortunate. The funny bits drift past their payoff, the pace flags (88 minute movie stretched out to 107) and the light, tongue-in-cheek tone, the riffing banter between the leads isn’t enough to save it.

Worst of all, they only gave Dornan one quite-funny number, and neither Wiig nor Mumolo have a movie moment that’s up to that.

MPA Rating:PG-13 for crude sexual content, drug use and some strong language 

Cast: Kristen Wiig, Annie Mumolo, Jamie Dornan, Damon Wayons Jr. and Wendy McClendon-Covey,

Credits: Directed by Josh Greenbaum, script by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:47