Movie Nation

Jazz — on record, in live performance and played in studio sessions — dominates, suffuses and sets the tone of “Learn to Swim,” a dark and dreamy romance set against the Toronto jazz scene.

First-time feature director and co-writer Thyrone Tommy lets the silky smooth sounds of the music — by Chester Hansen, Tika Simone and Leland Whitty — contrast with the fragile mental state of Dezi and the fractious, boozy love life that is rarely more than a distraction for a man seemingly married to his sax.

Thomas Antony Olajide is Dezi, a brilliant player and arranger who doesn’t suffer fools or collaborators gladly. Fellow players with more drive than he has put up with a lot — indifference, rudeness and downright hostility — just to get him to show up, sit in and stay committed to their quintet’s success.

For them, it”s all about “getting signed” to a record deal.

Dezi is all about the sets and the solos, working with new vocalist Selma (Emma Ferrreira), whose spoken/sung vocal improvisations might be their big break.

But invite a guitarist to sit in without telling him, try a song in a key he didn’t designate, and on-the-spectrum temperamental Dezi shows up — or more likely, storms out.

He’s got an abscessed tooth to nurse, a drinking problem and a new neighbor (Andrea Davis) disturbing his peace — he plays records while running his instrument-cleaning side hustle. The last thing Mr. Wrapped-Too-Tight needs is a romantic entanglement. Selma? She’s sexy and fiery enough to make the sparks and Spanish profanity fly when these two hook up. It certainly makes for interesting rehearsals.

“I don’t know why you’re not getting this key. You sound like a dying mouse.”

Having history with bassist June (Andrea Pavlovic) and club barmaid Jesse (Khadijah Salawu) just makes everything messier, even as it speaks to what women who are drawn to talent will put up with from a man.

Director Tommy and co-writer Marni Van Dyk tell the story of this downbeat romance with less dialogue than music, sketching in a romance and its many distractions in scenes that can make you wonder how much of what he’s feeling and experiencing is just in the guy’s head.

It’s a slight and simple story, but the way it’s folded into the music lends it weight and scale.

Davis, playing an older woman who vexes the new tenant in her apartment building, mothers him and flirts with him, is a stand out among the supporting players.

And Canadian stage actor Olajide, who broke out with this Toronto Film Festival darling, which got him cast as one of the stars of the upcoming “Interview with the Vampire” series, makes a fascinating, obsessive jerk, an artist lost in his music but no better at managing his career than managing his romance or his alcohol intake.

His is a brooding performance that makes us come to him, the way the great ones — the ones whose acting is like great improvisational jazz — often do.

Rating: unrated, sex, alcohol abuse

Cast: Thomas Antony Olajide, Emma Ferreira, Andrea Davis, Andrea Pavlovic and Khadijah Salawu

Credits: Directed by Thyrone Tommy, scripted by Thyrone Tommy and Marni Van Dyk. A CBC Films/Array/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

A thriller of modest budget and modest thrills, “Raven’s Hollow” gets by on funereal gloom and sheer ambition.

An American Gothic horror story filmed in Latvia, it’s a period piece about Edgar Allan Poe’s West Point years. Grounded in fantasy and bathed in realistic detail, the latest from writer-director Christopher Hatton takes him from C-movie actioners (“Battle of the Damned”) into a solid if emotionally flat B-movie/genre film.

Poe, played by “Chronicles of Narnia” alumnus William Moseley, and four other cadets from the United States Military Academy in West Point are out in farm country in the late 1820s when they come upon a disemboweled man hung up like a scarecrow.

All of them underreact to this shocking sight. But Poe’s morbid curiosity and his compassion veto the “Let’s just ride on” consensus. “We’re honor bound” to cut him down and find his kin, the already-published poet declares.

The dying man’s whispered word “raven” sends them to a most European looking settlement — half-empty– called Raven’s Hollow. That’s where Poe’s search for clues — remember, he wrote the first detective story in English — leads to suspects natural and supernatural.

Who killed this man? And what killed our comrade, as the first of the cadets is picked off?

“The Devil?” “The RAVEN!”

The locals, in an odd mix of accents, assure the soldiers “You don’t need to worry about it” and urge them to just mosey along, until one of them is killed. The soldiers aren’t buying this “raven” nonsense.

“Did the bird peck him to death?”

It’s just that they’re not policemen or anything, not knowing “how to begin” to investigate something as strange and deadly as this.

“We have ALREADY begun,” Poe declares. “If you’d pause to consider, we HAVE the answers!”

Moseley makes an inquisitive, unflappable Poe, not immune to the lure of laudanum (opium) or the poetry and prose possibilities all around him. Here’s mention of a “Lenore,” there’s an Usher (Oberon K.A. Adjepong).

And then there’s the “spirit” snatching and gutting folks left and right forevermore, The Raven.

Moseley lacks the spark, mania and lunacy that John Cusack brought to his late-life Poe in “The Raven.” The supporting cast is a mixed bag of colorful character players like Kate Dickie and David Hayman, and mostly colorless place-holders in other roles.

The effects aren’t bad, although one transformation moment plays as a lot funnier than was intended.

But even though it never lets us forget the lack of star power and modest budget, even if it never makes the leap to “compelling,” “Raven’s Hollow” is never less than an interesting effort and a good-looking argument that given the money, Hatton could show us something, with the right script.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: William Moseley, Kate Dickey, Melanie Zanetti, Callum Woodhouse, David Hayman, Oberon K.A. Adjepong, Callum McGowan and Mathis Landwehr.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Hatton. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:38

A “portal” is discovered, a different perhaps “best life” is discovered? But first, let’s kill the guy who’s living it.

Sept. 6.

A little “Shazam,” a bit of “Spy Kids,” a hint of “Agent Cody Banks,” there’s barely an original thought in “Secret Headquarters.” Not that the kiddie audience this Paramount+ production is intended for will care, or even recognize that.

It’s a violent, noisy, slangy and pricey superhero movie that’s for fankids, not fanboys or fangirls or the lactose intolerant. Talk about cheesy.

Owen Wilson plays a guy who stumbles into a “UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena)” crash site, and after asking an Air Force pilot who collided with it, “What, UFO wasn’t working for you guys?” is “chosen” to receive alien “guardian” technology.

He’s fitted for the suit and the gadgets and zips around the globe, saving hostages, stopping meltdowns and preventing wars.

But this bothers a lot of people. First, there’s the pilot (Jesse Williams) whom no one believes saw a UFO and who wasn’t chosen. Then, there’s the defense-contractor (Michael Peña) who wants the tech. And last and least comes Charlie (Walker Scobell), the son Jack Kincaid neglects for the next eight years as he’s out saving the planet.

“I thought he worked at a Genius bar!”

“Secret Headquarters” is what middle school Charlie and the pals (Momona Tamada, Kezii Curtis, Keith L. Williams and Abby James Witherspoon) stumble into when now-divorced Dad, who’s told the kid nothing, leaves Charlie home alone.

The bad guys come hunting for the tech, the kids have to fight them off, bickering and joking along the way. Guns are fired, minions die. A school dance is trashed.

The crack team behind the camera here have a “Paranormal Activity” sequel and a Netflix superpower movie nobody remembers (“Project Power”) on their resumes, and no feel at all for tween-to-teen entertainment.

“We’re not KIDS. We’re YOUNG ADULTS.”

The jokes are mostly telegraphed and fall flat, especially the ones about kids-a-“that age.”

“I know I look really mature, but I’m just now getting comfortable in my own skin!”

At least “I’m too PRETTY to die!” plays.

Superhero movie or not, that tweenage audience is tricky to target, so there’s no shame in missing it. But miss it they did.

Leaving the funniest player in the cast out of most of the picture? That’s just dumb.

Rating: Rated PG for violence, action, language and some rude humor.

Cast: Owen Wilson, Jesse Williams, Walker Scobell, Momona Tamada, Kezii Curtis, Keith L. Williams, Abby James Witherspoon and Michael Peña.

Credits: Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, scripted by Josh Koenigsberg, Ariel Schulman, Henry Jost and Christopher L. Yost. A Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:44

Emma Markey, last seen in “Death on the Nile” and on Netflix’s “Sex Education,” has the title role in this grey skies and gloom look at the author of “Wuthering Heights.”

October 14, from Warner Bros.

Dreamy looking, isn’t it?

Aug. 26 from Kino Lorber.

I don’t recognize any actors in this low budget look at the early military age life of Edgar Allan Poe.

Love the tone and the vibe it gives off. It’s on Shudder. I am headed there shortly.

Coming Sept. 2, to theaters and streaming.

“A ‘film,'” the old joke goes, “is a ‘movie’ we don’t quite understand.” And if you’re not a little confused when you’re watching a film by French avante garde/Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) director Jean-Luc Godard, you’re probably not getting it.

That’s the thesis of the Indian comedy “Adieu Godard,” a quirky and quaint tale of village provincialism, porn and “pure cinema” in the style of the French master, Jean-Luc Godard. Amartya Bhattacharyya’s homage is about what happens when a porn-addicted old man (Choudhury Bikash) has his eyes opened when he rents Godard’s New Wave masterpiece “Breathless” by mistake.

As his daughter (Sudhasri Madhusmita) tells the tale to a pretentious young big city filmmaker (Abhishek Giri) years later, her father Ananda “didn’t even understand the subtitles.” But something about Godard’s technique rattles Ananda and so touches him that before we know it, he’s planning a Godard film festival so that his fellow rural porn and Bollywood addicts can have their tastes and minds changed, too.

Ananda was seemingly content to bicker over his accounts at the store that rents him dirty DVDs and invite three equally pervy pals over (Choudhury Jayaprakash Das, Swastik Choudhury and Shankar Basu Mallik) to leer at and literally drool over the “American” or “Japanese” actors going at it in these sexcapades.

It’s a “men’s only” activity, even though daughter Shilpa (Madhusmita), then a student, could hear, as could his sad and sighing wife (Shwetapadma Satpathy). Ananda is puzzled about why his wife could be depressed.

“All wives are depressed,” the doctor reassures him.

But everything changes when the store, fearing a crackdown, drops the porn and passes on “Breathless.” And despite the noisy commentary by his porn pals — “Twenty minutes in, and NO action…Clothes ON…Is it a film? No song, no dance, no fight, no romance, and it’s a film?” — Ananda is changed.

He wants to learn English from his daughter, so that he can read the subtitles. And he wants to see every Godard film he can get his hands on. Once he acquires five DVDs, that can only mean one thing. “This village needs a (Godard) film festival!”

“Adieu Godard” is in Origay with subtitles, with some scenes in English. It finds its laughs in pithy village exchanges — “My wife is sick.” “EVERY man says so!” — in sight gags and in the incongruous notion of a generally experimental, narrative-defying French filmmaker finding a fan in BFE, India.

Ananda’s friends aren’t sure the locals are “ready” for Godard. They have enough trouble figuring out what to shout over the PA system they strap to a bike to ride around advertising the festival.

“Listen listen listen,” they shout. “Foreign films…all heroes, all heroines, all villains are FOREIGNERS…revealing costumes, FAIR skin!”

Ananda insists “there are no heroes, heroines or villains” in Godard films, “only characters.” He’s getting nowhere with that argument.

Writer-director Bhattacharyya toys with Godard touches by having daughter Shilpa abruptly start narrating this story to her filmmaker beau just before the half-hour mark. The “past” scenes are in black and white, the modern ones in color. The “dirty” sexuality of the porn is contrasted with the porn addicts and “Adieu Godard” being positively prim and very India 1999 (cutting away to avoid showing a kiss). That kiss becomes a village scandal.

Later, there’s a frank (by Indian standards) “virgin/condoms” sex conversation between the modern day couple as they discuss the story of the village that hosted a Godard film festival and try to turn everyone in that story into “characters” suitable for a movie.

It’s very self-conscious and gets very meta and kind of arty. But if “Adieu Godard” rarely achieves laugh-out-loud chuckles, scene after scene finds grins, giggles and bits of comical outrage.

And if Bhattacharyya’s film lacks a linear narrative and a more conventionally joking tone, well that’s just so Godard of him.

Rating: unrated, sexuality, profanity, off-camera violence

Cast: Choudhury Bikash, Sudhasri Madhusmita, Dipanwit Dashmohapatra, Abhishek Giri, Swastik Choudhury and Shankar Basu Mallik

Credits: Scripted and directed by Amartya Bhattacharyya. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:22

Stephen James, Travis Fimmel and Paul Walter Hauser also star in this convict in search of justice for his sister tale.

August 19.