Movie Nation

A solid, straightforward narrative — heavy on the history, light in melodrama — is the best recommendation for “A Call to Spy,” a true story of World War II and an American woman who joined British agents to do perform espionage in Occupied France.

The life story of Virginia Hall was exciting enough that not much embellishment was needed for this film, which actress Sarah Megan Thomas scripted as a star vehicle for herself. Although it betrays its modest budget in the limited and malnourished action sequences, the low-wattage “star power” and the somewhat polished if faintly flat TV movie production design and pacing, it does justice to its subject, even if it leaves her more colorless than we’d hope.

In 1941, shortly before the debacle/”miracle” of Dunkirk, the Brits set up the Special Operations Executive to train and recruit agents in case France fell. When it did, recruiter/supervisor Vera Atkins (Stana Katic) had women already well into training for the work of infiltrating Franceh, gathering intelligence, setting up networks, paying partisans and arranging or directly carrying out sabotage of the German war machine.

Atkins’ boss, Col. Maurice Buckmaster (Linus Roache) embraced her idea that however dangerous the work, women were “more inconspicuous” than men in the field in France. Virginia Hall, a frustrated member of the U.S. foreign service, limited in promotions because of a wooden leg, was among those Atkins lined up. Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte), a Russian-born Indian Muslim already in the service as a radio operator, was another.

We get a glimpse of their training, from “ungentlemanly warfare” (self-defense) to surviving torture, and then they’re off — smuggled into France to help lead the struggle to free Europe from Naziism.

“Yours will be a lonely courage,” they hear as they depart (separately). As Virginia sets up networks and leans on her instincts about who to trust, Noor skips from location to location, her radio set in tow, barely a full step ahead of the Germans and their radio-tracking French collaborators.

Director Lydia Dean Pilcher did “Radium Girls” just before this film, another modest but moving piece of overlooked women’s history. The drama is embedded in the situations here, as Pilcher doesn’t manage more than a scene or two of genuine suspense, despite the terror of this work.

Thomas, who also wrote and and co-starred in “Equity,” scripts herself some juicy scenes — Hall living by her instincts, having to throw her weight around amongst sexist Frenchmen and even more sexist Brits — but rarely makes as much out of them as we’d like. The historical Hall was to the manner born and didn’t suffer slights easily — more smart and tough than plucky. Here we get an adequate performance where something with more heat and flash was called for.

Apte (“The Wedding Guest”) comes closer to the mark in a narrower role, a younger, more timid radio operator barely prepared for what she must deal with and its consequences.

The dialogue is WWII boilerplate — “It doesn’t feel right.” “So we’re acting on feelings, now?”

And although the film hews closely to the historical record, the pace is so sedate one wonders if a brisker production could have carried the story on to the war’s end, as Hall’s exploits were ongoing.

As other films on Hall and the extraordinary women of SOE are still in the planning stages, “A Call to Spy” remains the defining take on their heroics and contributions to the war effort. Let’s hope Netflix picking it up greases the wheels toward a bigger budget, more exciting and more thorough accounting. There’s a mini series in this.

Rating: PG-13 for some strong violence, disturbing images, language, and smoking

Cast: Sarah Megan Thomas, Radhika Apte, Stana Katic, Rossif Sutherland and Linus Roache.

Credits: Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher, scripted by Sarah Megan Thomas. An IFC release on Netflix.

Running time: 2:03

It wasn’t hard to track down a still shot from “Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between” that captures how bland it is. And I needed that shot to make a point that this endless pop music montage masquerading as a “last summer before college” romance underscores.

It’s the banality of beauty incarnate.

The leads of this screen adaptation of a Jennifer E. Smith book could not be prettier, with singing/songwriting actor Jordan Fisher paired up with Talia Ryder, who gives off a sort of young Jennifer Connolly vibe.

But chemistry? Investment in their acting, interest in them as characters or a couple on the screen? Not so much.

He’s the popular hunk with a band, a thing for karaoke and loads of charisma. She’s the “new” girl who just moved back to the town she was born in, someone who has looked at her parents’ broken marriage and her follow-this-or-that-man from town-to-town mother (Jennifer Robertson) and decided she is not going through any of that.

So Aidan can turn down the charm on their first meeting — a house part — and its aftermath. Clare can see where this is going.

“I’m not looking for a boyfriend.”

No ties in high school. She has Ivy League law in her future, and no distraction or traumatic summer-before-Dartmouth break-up is going to interrupt that.

But he negotiates her into an “OK, for now,” without much friction. That’s a hallmark of this Netflix romance. Even the arguments feel watered down and banal.

They will carry on a half-hearted, musical montage romance through the school year and prove to everyone that they can be adult enough to end things gracefully and move on after that.

“The king and queen of ending things” they are, to their BFFs (Ayo Edebiri for her, Nico Haraga for him) and everybody else. Until, of course, the deadline approaches.

There’s nothing to this Michael Lewen (scripted by Amy Reed) film until well into the Big Night the smitten Aidan has planned for their final date, which he will fill with recreations of their memorable dates and lots of Big Gestures. Perhaps he’ll drop the L-bomb again to see if he can get a rise out of Clare, because she’s avoiding it.

What’s almost worth watching here — and really, this movie has little to offer teens or anybody older than tweens — are the ways Clare intentionally sabotages this romantic fairytale “change her mind” effort on Aidan’s part.

Don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not cute or funny or romantic, just inviting friends in as a buffer, forcing Aidan to change plans again and again to dull the impact and foil what he expects to accomplish on their last night together .

It’s cunning in its thoughtlessness, irritating to him and gives “Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between” a few “real” moments that show promise, even if the leads can’t deliver the sparks that might set a fire.

Rating: TV-14, young love, teen hijinks.

Cast: Talia Ryder, Jordan Fisher, Ayo Edebiri, Djouliet Amara, Jennifer Robertson and Nico Haraga.

Credits: Directed by Michael Lewen, scripted by Amy Reed, based on the book by Jennifer E. Smith. A Lionsgate film for Netflix

Running time: 1:24

Amazon is releasing, what, a “teaser” a week for this new prequel series (I think I have that right) to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy fiction epic?

Another one is due July 14, so they say.

Not a bad strategy.

What do we see for this fall streaming event? Something a bit more digital, a LOT more diverse in terms of casting when compared to Peter Jackson’s films.

It’s not just the topography and geography that look like New Zealand, this time around.

I was kind of shrugging off the whole enterprise, but now one finds oneself intrigued. One does.

“The Sea Beast” bolts off the screen with a photo-realistic CGI animated shipwreck and a bracing blast of high stakes mayhem as told by a plucky girl, reading a dime novel on sea serpents and those who hunt them — “Tales of Captain Crow” — to her fellow orphans.

Director Chris Williams of “Moana,” “Bolt” and “Big Hero 6,” and his co-writer fold in bits of “Treasure Island,” “Moby Dick” and “Pinocchio” into their tale of that age when the ships were wooden, the crews made of iron and the deep was filled with ship-devouring beasts destined to be hunted to extinction by crews using cannon, pistols and harpoons that they try not to call “harpoons” because we all know what they’re doing in a metaphorical sense — even the kids.

The beasts are a substitute for whales.

It’s not the movie’s abrupt inevitable turn towards “There’s got to be another way” in the age-old struggle between sailors and beasts, nor the gloriously and historically-defensible diverse crew chasing the last of these “beasts” in the “hunting” ship, The Inevitable that kind of lost me. It’s the whole “How to Train Your Dragon” without the laughs that it devolves into that make this Netflix outing something of a yawner.

The action is spectacular, the menace palpable and the “see things from the ‘hunted’ beasts point-of-view” angle touching, in a metaphorical way. But swap out the humorless sailors for funny, Scots-accented Vikings, and even a ten year old will recognize “We’ve SEEN this.”

Jared Harris brings gruff gusto the role of surly Captain Crow, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Sarah, his hyper-competent, tough, no-nonsense first mate.

But danged if the patriarchal skipper hasn’t ordained the foundling sailor and deadliest hunter Jacob (Karl Urban), whom he regards as “like a son” as his replacement on the bridge. First, though, Captain Crow has unfinished business with The Red Bluster, deadliest of the red-tails, one of many species of sea beasts that The Inevitable and its rivals hunt, at the behest of The Royals (“Downton’s” Jim Carter, and Doon Mackichan).

Meanwhile, orphan Maisie (Zaris Angel-Hator) finishes up her latest reading from “Tales of Captain Crow” to her fellow orphans, and makes her latest escape from the ever-so-nice orphanage. Her plan? To find the captain and throw in with his swarthy crew.

She only finds Jacob, on shore leave. And he’s all “A ship is no place for a kid,” which just means she’ll have to stow away to get on board.

Maisie’s efforts to intervene in the ship-vs-beast battle only get her and Jacob swallowed. And that’s how she befriends “Red” and everybody has to change her or his entire worldview.

“Maybe you can be a hero and still be wrong,” is the messaging here.

It’s more adult than you might think, but rarely jarringly-so. Generic, harmless enough and watchable, with a few touching moments — seeing the old harpoons sticking out of the “Dragon”/gecko designed beast — and plenty of violence.

But charm and humor are in shorter supply than you’d hope. There’s barely a funny moment in it, even though there are English-accented attempts at jokes about how often sailors say “Yarrrr,” and a cute baby beast is introduced, right on cue, in the later acts.

It’s better than some Netflix animated fare, but not original or fun enough to be up to the streamer’s gold standards in CGI entertainment for kids — “Klaus” or “The Mitchells vs. the Machines.”

Rating: PG, violence and lots of it

Cast: The voices of Karl Urban, Zaris-Angel Hator, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Jim Carter, Doon Mackichan, Dan Stevens and Jared Harris.

Credits: Directed by Chris Williams, scripted by Nell Benjamin and Chris Williams. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

For some reason, when I heard of sitcom mainstay Larry Storch’s passing at the grand old age of 99, this scene is what came to mind.

Blake Edwards had a bit of a big screen comeback after “10,” and the first fruit that Dudley Moore/Bo Derek/Julie Andrews sex comedy bore fruit was the skewering Hollywood farce, “S.O.B.”

Edwards’ Big Statement on the town where he made his living had lots of funny TV actors, and William Holden, Andrews (Mrs. Edwards’) and the scene stealing Robert Preston in a tale of shallow dad’s, venomous gossip journalists, alcoholic old timers, Dr. Feel goods and a director having a breakdown at the expense of his wife star (Andrews).

Storch stands out in the politically incorrect guru presiding over a funeral.

Nutty scene. Never get away with it today.

RIP, Mister Whoopie.

Nice to see Freeman getting another detective thriller in before hanging it up.

Frank Grillo also stars with The Great Binoche in this July 29 release.

Gawd, not this again.

“Torture porn?” Wanton self-injury and exploding head slaughter set to the tune of “Ten Little Indians?”

It’s entirely possible the creators of this nigh-on-unwatchable “Death Count” know that no less than Agatha Christie perfected this plot, thanks to a novel with a seriously racist title. That count-down the-dead thing may be the weariest trope in horror.

At least we know that they know they’re copying “Saw” and “Hostel,” because characters mention that in this cheesy, derivative C-movie splatter fest.

Eight people wake up in separate cells in another mass murderer’s dungeon. They have exploding collars on their necks, TV cameras and monitors in their cells.

The Warden (Costas Mandylor, in cowl, beard and one-eyed mask) has a “game” for them to play — online and streamed, their success/survival in it predicated on online “likes.”

The imprisoned include teachers (Sarah French), administrators and others from this one particular school. Their “game” involves inflicting “a non-suicidal self-injury” with the snips, pliers, sledgehammer, whip, etc. in a box on their cell.

The coach protests about “sportsmanship” and “rules” and complains that “You think some sicko is gonna get off watching this?”

Coach (Wesley Cannon) must be from Tibet.

Outside, Michael Madsen plays the sick-joking, unexplained eyebrow-stitched detective trying to track down this murderous event, which is blowing up the police station’s phones, lighting up the internet and tying up a WHOLE lot of “missing persons” cases that just were filed.

Madsen has the Reaganesque dye job and the world weariness to repeat that line, “I’m gettin’ too old for this s—” like he means it.

It’s a stupid movie that’ll probably make you dumber, just by watching it. The voyeurism of the victims’ predicament extends to anybody who checks in on films like this just to watch the “cool” ways people are killed, although some fanboy out on how the makeup is applied to create gruesome injuries — and wait for the naked cleavage.

My favorite cheesy touch? The filmmakers try to show the world news media transfixed by these murders streamed in real time. So they get “actors” to stand in front of fake foreign network graphics and read, in bad Little Theatre Foreign-Accented English, their headlines.

Damn. That’s…funny.

There’s an anti-public schools subtext that slips in here, and precious little actual problem-solving by those about to die to figure out a way to survive all this. So there’s nothing at all for us to invest in.

Mandylor isn’t bad, pretty much every thing and everybody else is.

But at least it’s short.

Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Costas Mandylor, Sarah French, Devanny Pinn, Wesley Cannon Robert LaSardo and Michael Madsen.

Credits: Directed by Michael Su, scripted by Michael Merino and Rolfe Kanefsky. A Mahal Empire release.

Running time: 1:22

Every now and then a debut feature film comes out that reminds you that not everybody dying to direct a movie is a slave to genre. Some filmmakers love actors and how they can touch, move and even inspire an audience.

“A Love Song” is an autumnal romance starring two of the best character actors in the business. If nothing else had gone right in Max Walker-Silverman’s first feature, the fact that he put screen veterans Dale Dickey and Wes Studi in the spotlight stands him in good stead. They make the showcase he paired them up in a lovely elegy on loneliness, loss and the rose-colored memories of youth.

Dickey was 15 years and scores of credits into her career when “Winter’s Bone” transformed her raw, weathered looks into a one of the most instantly-recognizable faces in film (“Hell or High Water”) or TV (Netflix’s “Unbelievable”). She stars as a solitary soul camping out by a Colorado lake in her ancient Shasta trailer.

Faye drinks her beer at room temp, makes her coffee from lake water, traps giant crayfish to eat and keeps to herself on this campsite in the heart of Nomadland. There’s vintage country blues on the radio, all sorts of flora, fauna and star-gazing she masters thanks to a couple of Audubon guides, and the occasional visit from the friendly young horse-riding postman (John Way). He’s important, because Faye wrote a letter. Any day now, she’s expecting a reply, or a visit from a high school flame from these parts.

Other nomads camp nearby, but well out of eyesight, not spoiling her mountain peak view or daily nature rambles. But Faye has her routine and her eye on the calendar. She’s giving this guy until mid-September to show.

The Oscar-winning Studi, a Native American screen icon since “Dances With Wolves,” “Last of the Mohicans” and “Geronimo,” is that guy. He shows up with a dog, a guitar and a lot of memories, most of them bittersweet.

Walker-Silverman keeps the dialogue spare and lets these two tell their stories with their faces and a sort of genteel shyness. It takes few words, a few looks and a few reminiscences to get them from “You know me?– “I don’t know.” to “Look at you. Look at us.”

The film is adorned with other lovers — a gay couple (Michelle Wilson and Benja K. Thomas) to pop the question — and a pleasantly cutesy quintet of siblings looking to rebury their patriarch, with the little girl (Marty Grace Dennis ) in their cowboy-hatted ranks their designated spokesperson. Faye’s parked on an unmarked grave, which requires a little good-mannered finessing.

Faye’s story is the one we’re following, the one wondering, “Reckon you can still love something that ain’t there no more?” It’s a fine, compact and soulful turn, on a par with Frances McDormand’s “Nomadland” performance. Studi adds more awkward grace to the proceedings, and a guitar lesson that leads to a sweet duet, Michael Hurley’s “Be Kind to Me,” a popular tune from their (@1971) high school years.

I’m taking the liberty of reviewing this slight and scenic cinematic chamber piece a few weeks before it opens, because it’s worth asking about and asking for at your local cineplex.

“A Love Song” is a lovely, valedictory film for two of the best actors of their generation, so it’s worth the effort you make to track it down. Any time a movie maker crafts something this gentle and fine for two wonderful players who rarely get the spotlight is to be celebrated.

Rating: PG

Cast: Dale Dickey, Wes Studi.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Max Walker-Silverman. A July 29 Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:21

This award winner looks charming and bittersweet.

Aug. 12 from Strand Releasing.

A father tries to check himself and his family out of a civilization he sees as hopelessly corrupt and doomed in “Costa Brava, Lebanon,” a parable of parenting and pollution set in Lebanon “in a near future.”

Co-writer/director Mounia Aki takes on “Mosquito Coast” themes for a debut feature whose ironic title — the “real” Costa Brava is the northern Spanish Riviera — reminds us that “paradise” can be anywhere, and that you don’t save paradise by checking out of the real world as an escape.

Aki, who once directed a short film on Beirut’s garbage crisis, uses that as the backdrop of this story of two people who met at a street protest, but years later have put their placards down and fled to the mountains, “the last green space” in the country. Walid (Saleh Bakri) and the former pop star Souraya (Nadine Labaki), their teen daughter Tala (Nadia Charbel) and irrepressible pre-tween Reem (Geana Restom) raise their own vegetables and chickens, off the grid with his mother (Liliane Chacar Khoury) on a mountain oasis that’s been in his family for years.

“Beirut will never change,” he says (in Arabic with English subtitles) of their former hometown, hot and polluted and overrun with trash as it drifts from crisis to crisis.

But Beirut’s problem is about to be dumped into their backyard. The harbinger of it is this statue they see as it is set up on land Walid didn’t even realize his moved-to-Norway sister had sold. The statue? “It’s of the president,” a functionary, Tarek (François Nour). Yes, they’re that far out of the loop. Still, it’s not exactly a good likeness.

The country has bamboozled foreign investors for yet another “save Lebanon from itself” project, a “green” eco-friendly waste dump carved out of undeveloped land and literally in their front yard.

It doesn’t matter that Walid and pretty much any countryman polled on the street knows how this will play out. “Green” is just “a PR stunt.” an environmental disaster is being visited upon them all, with dust, plastic bags of plastic garbage, heavy machinery and all-night-lights. An election is coming, and the debacle won’t become obvious until after election day. But taking pictures for his “lawsuit” is all Walid is willing to do about it. And yelling at his sell-out sister (Yumna Marwan) by phone.

They won’t “take a bribe” to leave, won’t sell out. We’ll see who blinks first.

Aki uses this struggle as the ultimate test for a family — a wife who misses their old cosmopolitan life and her notoriety, a husband lost in dogma, unable to reengage with the world, a mouthy little girl who idolizes him, ordering workers to “LEAVE” and throwing fruit at them when they don’t, and an isolated teenaged daughter who takes a shiny to hunky Tarek, who isn’t above returning the attention.

Salty, jaded, seen-it-all and supposedly dying — or emigrating to Colombia — grandma seems like the only one who isn’t taking sides.

Walid is “filling (Reem’s) head with horror stories” about the state of the planet and the nightmare of Beirut as a place to live. Mom is flattered by the attention of garbage workers who remember her pop career. And granny isn’t above cadging smokes off older workers, letting them use their bathroom during construction and shrugging off the statement that makes to the corrupt and their corrupted work force.

That’s no way to win a stand-off, sister.

As in “Mosquito Coast,” Bakri gives us a sense of Walid tilting at windmills, with the kids rebelling against it. But Labaki’s force-of-nature Souroya gives us the impression that she could shout down her “eccentric” husband at any moment and move this mountain, or them off of it.

A mix of overt shouting matches and subtler moments illustrate this war of wills, ideologies and parenting styles. And the odd hallucinatory reverie reminds the characters, and the viewer, that try as we might, there’s no wishing a big problem away when it comes bulldozing and dynamiting at your door.

If you want something to change, you’ve got to get back in the fight, back on the barricades, back in heroic light every parent wants their children to see them in.

Rating: unrated, mild violence, sexuality, smoking, profanity

Cast: Nadine Labaki, Saleh Bakri, Nadia Charbel, Geana Restom, François Nour and Liliane Chacar Khoury

Credits: Directed by Mounia Akl, scripted by Mounia Akl and Clara Roquet. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:44