Movie Nation

I know it’s “only a sequel,” and “only” a children’s animated film at that.

But “Minions: The Rise of Gru” is a movie of manic, demented genius. It’s a slapsticky/witty, action-and-sight-gag-packed romp of a popcorn movie, a film that delivers more animated laughs than every other kids’ cartoon this year, put together.

Suck on that, Beavis.

Heck, the string of ’70s pop, rock and soul music cues, puns and “Minions Sing the ’70s” giggles utterly outclass both “Sing” movies while rarely delivering a lyric human ears can decipher. Unless, of course, you speak Minion. Feel free to sing along with Paul Simon’s “Cecilia” or the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” if you do.

Nothing against Steve Carell, but who knew Gru, as an adult or in his learning-the-super-villain ropes years in this prequel, works even better as a supporting player? That’s the breakthrough these Minions movies have managed.

Gru, closing in on 11, longs to join the Vicious Six, the best gang of supervillains on the West Coast. It’s 1976, and Blaxploitation baddie Belle Bottom (Taraji P. Henson), wimpled menace Nun-chucks (Lucy Lawless), Strong Hold (Danny Trejo), lobster-legged Jean Clawed (J.C. Van Damme) and Svengeance (Dolph Lundgren) work with the wily old Wild Knuckles (Oscar winner Alan Arkin) to steal The Zodiac Stone, a pendant with magical powers.

After their Indiana Jones-style heist, the other five betray Wild Knuckles and leave him for dead. They’ll hold auditions for somebody new to make them “Six” again. Somebody younger. Maybe a lot younger.

They don’t know Gru’s evil plots mostly consist of self-designed stink bombs he tosses into “Jaws” screenings to clear the theater for him and his Minion pals. They might not be impressed with his spray-can cheese gun, used on anybody who stands in their way at the ice cream shop.

“Don’t cheese me, bro!”

Gru is dismissed as a “punk kid” at his job interview, but decides to take Belle Bottom’s sneering “Come back when you’ve done something to IMPRESS me” to heart and swipes the stone.

A Minion loses that stone as they’re making their wild and crazy getaway. The next thing Gru knows, he’s been snatched pretty much right out of his mother’s (Julie Andrews) Tupperware party, with the still-living Wild Knuckles wanting the Zodiac Stone, Belle Bottom and the other Vicious Five also on his trail and the Minions haplessly trying to track kidnapped “Mini-Boss” and hunt down the misplaced stone.

Their efforts will take in a chase-and-then-road trip with a hip biker (RZA), a stolen jetliner to get to San Francisco and martial arts training by acupuncturist and Kung Fu Master Chow (Michelle Yeoh), who is NOT to be taken lightly, in spite of her short, plump appearance.

Her scenes, beating up “bullies” and training the little yellow “tater tots,” steal the picture.

As I mentioned, Gru is kind of sidelined in this outing, which turns out to be a blessing. Most of those big name voice actors aren’t recognizable and have too few lines to register, even if they were.

“Rise of Gru” is kind of frantic and over-the-top violent. But that’s something to embrace. This may be the most wound-up, slo-mo, cartoonish slapstick animated film since the golden Looney Tunes age of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. Bodies and faces distorted by collisions and kicks, eyes bugging out in terror, all vintage Looney touches. The animators even steal gimmicks and action poses/freeze-frames from anime action pictures to make the action even more jaw-dropping and hilarious.

The setting is the campiest decade of them all, and that explains all the “Kung Fu Fighting,” Blaxploitation references and the like. But it also leads to joke after joke made out of the music.

The villains’ lair is beneath a record store cleverly labeled “Criminal Records,” and the password is a Linda Ronstadt hit of the era, “You’re No Good.” But Sunshine Band disco, funk, soul, Carpenters pop, “Fly Like an Eagle” and Rhymin’ Simon all fold into the soundtrack and find a comic foothold here.

The Beastie Boys may not fit, but they’re made to.

It all swirls together in a riot of color, action, deadpan gags and musical and martial arts mayhem, a kids’ movie that rushes by you so fast you won’t want to take a concession stand break. And if you do, you might want to avoid the sugar. The tots, tykes and tweens will be wound up enough without that added pre-diabetic buzz.

Rating: for some action/violence and rude humor

Cast: The voices of Steve Carell, Taraji P. Henson, Michelle Yeoh, Russell Brand, Pierre Coffin, Lucy Lawless, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Danny Trejo, Dolph Lundgren, RZA, Julie Andrews and Alan Arkin.

Credits: Directed by Kyle Balda, Brad Ableson and Jonathan del Val, scripted by Matthew Fogel. A Universal release, an Illumination film.

Running time: 1:27

I’ve always had a soft spot for Beavis and Butt-Head.

Or maybe that was just the Dulcolax doing its job.

But here they are, 29 years after their MTV debut, moronically sniggering and slap fighting their way through their second feature film.

“Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe” rips off the plot to “Space Camp,” and slaps a dab of “multiverse” on it to let us and all those Marvel suits know that particular sci-fi plot twist is officially “played.”

Yes, our two “heroes” have gotten up from the couch, stopped calling David Lee Roth “fat boy” and Ozzy “an old fart” to set out on an epic journey through space and time, “a quest to score.”

It’s about as funny as your average episode — OK episode and a half — of their long-running, on and off series. Except it’s padded with 45 minutes of “We’ve lost our fastball.”

“Ball… hehehehehe.”

They’re back and Butt-Head wants us to know where they’ve been since 1998 (the series came back in 2011, briefly). And therein lies the tale. It begins with a ruined Highland High science fair which earns them a misguided stint at Space Camp as “two at-risk youths.” Their days at Johnson Space Flight Center — “Hehehehehehehe…’Johnson’ — let them show that they’re really good — obsessed — with uh, “docking procedures.”

“Huhuhuhuhu…”

So the next Endeavor shuttle mission brings them along. Mayhem ensues, people die and these two — sure this is all just foreplay from the mission commander (voiced by Andrea Savage) who “wants to score” — wind up drifting into a black hole.

No, neither Beavis not Butt-Head (both guys are still voiced by creator Mike Judge) can’t let “hole” can let that pass without sniggering notice. Or misunderstood panic.

“I don’t want to die in a Butthole! I have dreams about it all the time!”

They find themselves in 2022, with cell phones, the sexy-sounding Siri app, Kia Souls and college gender studies classes, where they do a broad wingnut-friendly “teachable moment” riff on “white privilege.”

Fair enough. Just not as funny as them, with Beavis shifting into his Cornholio guise, winding up in prison.

Beavis: “That youth pastor always said we’d end up in here some day!”

Butt-Head: “The system works, Beavis.”

The “two idiots” are chased by Men in Black and the former shuttle commander, now a sinister Texas governor with a dirty secret — she “killed” them — she is determined to keep.

And there are smart “alternate universe” versions of the characters that pop up with an urgent plea, which falls on dim and deaf ears. Because stupid Beavis and Butt-Head are as stupid as ever.

Despite making an effort to offend, here and there, the characters have lost some of their edge and Judge can’t help but suggest “old fart” in still attempting to manage those grating, giggling pubescent voices.

Will this movie be enough to create a new generation of fans? No. That’s why it ended up on Paramount+, where we old farts can get nostalgic and remember funnier moments from them, their earlier movie and their heydays in MTV’s golden age, with or without the Dulcolax.

Rating: TV-14, profanity, toilet humor, innuendo

Cast: The voices of Mike Judge, Andrea Savage, Tig Notaro, Gary Cole and Chi McBride

Credits: Directed by John Rice and Albert Calleros, scripted by Mike Judge and Lewis Morton, based on characters created by Mike Judge. A Paramount + release.

Running time: 1:26

This Swiss co-production features teens making bad decisions, using each other and abusing social media and (when they’re in the picture) their parents.

I rather liked “Lovecut,” which narrowly avoids the label “exploitation” in its portrayal of the shortsighted, irresponsible “free range” adolescence. I hope Maitland Library patrons do as well.

MovieNation, spreading fine cinema far and wide, one DVD at a time.

Elvis comes to mind whilst watching the shoot-em-up “Code Name Banshee.”

“A little less conversation, a little more action, please,” he’d sing. “All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me. A little more bite, a little less bark…”

After a couple of opening shoot-outs, this straight-up C-movie — directed by Jon Keeyes, scripted by Matthew Rogers — flops into lots and lots of cliche-riddled conversation, some time line stumbles (“Five years earlier,” or is it?) and finishes with a whole lot of gunfire, most of it by The Character Who Never Reloads.

That would be the title character, played by “Sin City” and “Pearl Harbor” alumna Jaime King. In a short haircut punching way above her model-slim bodyweight, she has the Ruby Rose role in this implausible and mostly-dull actioner about CIA assassins, high-priced “contracts,” accused “traitors” going off the grid and our heroine hunting for them, because one is or was her dad and the other was her mentor.

Banshee beats up and threatens her apparent CIA “control” (Kim DeLonghi) in an opening scene — in the woman’s OFFICE, mind you. Her father was either killed or went dark after passing on “assets” to the Russians, or so she’s told. His partner and her mentor (Antonio Banderas) disappeared as well.

Funny thing about this screenplay, it never actually clears the whole “treason” thing up. That just sits there, uninvestigated and unresolved. Perhaps Merrick Garland is “on it.”

Banshee works with the modern action pic’s laziest deus ex machina, the all-knowing, all-systems-controlling hacker (Aleksander Vayshelboym). He tracks down the untrackable and guides her into villains’ lairs, where they’re aced out of a contract by some under-explained goon (Tommy Flanagan) and his huge payroll of armed thugs.

The only thing that can solve and settle all this is finding her former mentor.

Naturally, Caleb (Banderas) has slipped into some old, suburban town where he runs a bar. Naturally, he is widowed, with a teen daughter (Catherine Davis) who doesn’t know his past, but should suspect something, as Dad has trained her in martial arts and with his arsenal of firearms.

“Construction?” Sure.

Naturally, Caleb doesn’t want to be found, doesn’t want to get involved and has no interest in clearing his name because, again, that whole “treason” plot thread has been pretty much abandoned.

“There eees mooooooooooore to life than contract killing,” he purrs. But that wisdom comes too late. If she can find him, so can the Irish Eliminator that Flanagan plays.

The story beats are strictly formula, with a few ingredients missing. Somehow, there’s always time to gawk at and fetishize some “professional’s” vast arsenal of weapons, and joke about them.

“Trust issues.”

Truth be told, no action picture with Banderas and the always-working Flanagan (“Westworld,” “There Are No Saints,” “Sand Castle”) in it is a total write-off. Banderas makes every line a world-weary Spanish-accented thrill. And Flanagan breaks out his most his menacing brogue for every syllable.

“How many ye’got,” he growls to a minion? “Enough,” the minion underestimates.

It’s never enough, especially when the Big Finish features 110 pound women throwing 190-220 pound goons around, especially when one of those women Never Ever Reloads.

Stupid movie.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Jaime King, Antonio Banderas, Catherine Davis, Aleksander Vayshelboym, Kim DeLonghi and Tommy Flanagan

Credits: Directed by Jon Keeyes, scripted by Matthew Rogers. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:32

When it comes to cult films, ours is not to reason why they gain that status. Ours is but to shrug and marvel that this rare phenomenon has occurred, again, and perhaps laugh or cringe along with the cultists, which may give us all the clues we need.

“Straight to VHS” is about Uruguay’s first direct-to-video thriller. “Act of Violence in a Young Journalist” suddenly appeared on video store shelves there in 1988, and copies of it entered legend — at parties, family and friends’ New Year’s tradition, clung to by film school students much the way Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” inspired a generation of American indie filmmakers.

“Hey, I can do that,” would-be Coppolas and Kubricks said, sometimes going to far as to brag, “Hey, I can do BETTER than that.”

With “Act of Violence,” a bizarre, often inept thriller involving a radio reporter and her work, conversations and relationships, they had to be right. It has hints of “The Room” in its inane storytelling, incompetent editing and weird characters. All anyone knows about the filmmaker, Manuel Lamas, is that he’s obviously “self taught.”

“Straight to VHS” director Emilio Silva Torres sees the movie as “a punk rock call to grab a camera and film your world.”

Torres, whose own filmmaking bonafides are skimpy in the extreme, set out to find Lamas and the people who made this film. Talking with fellow filmmakers, critics and fans from all over South America, using too-few snippets of “Act of Violence” to truly give us the flavor of it, “Straight to VHS” becomes a mystery and a manhunt, as well as a search for Lamas’ other titles.

We hear from people who sold or rented him video gear, learn about the primitive high-end camcorder and video-deck-to-deck editing conditions Lamas worked under. Torres learns, through newspaper and magazine archives, of other films.

But getting people to tell him about Lamas and give away where he is proves nearly impossible. Long hunts for the stars prove almost fruitless as the survivors prove to be reluctant to be interviewed on camera. It is people on the technical side who have more to add. And with a few news clips here, some “personal VHS tapes” of Lamas there, and a couple of interviews, a portrait emerges.

Lamas was an arrogant know-it-all who knew little and wouldn’t listen to advice or accept simple gear upgrades that would have polished his productions. As to why his stars won’t talk about the experience, clues emerge from his personal tapes, which an old colleague held onto. We see him experimenting with shots and framing and scenes, and then rehearsing a sex scene.

“Selfish,” one colleague recalls, in Spanish with English subtitles. “A misogynist,” a former actor allegedly says.

“He was a sadist,” Torres, who worked in the camera and electrical department of a single documentary, diagnoses. “I get why everyone wants to forget him.”

Torres’ film has moments when it’s a fun man-hunt movie, and the footage he uncovers can be chilling, in a rambling confessional (actual footage of Lamas) or control freak “directing” a rehearsal sense.

But as each and every on-camera interview rambles on — too long — and the film itself winds and wends its way towards its quarry, a nagging feeling overwhelms the non-Lamas-cultist that Torres has never answered question one.

“Why is this guy worth hunting down, again?” There’s so little of “Act of Violence” included here, with its fuzzy video transfers and static-blur effects used to show its age, for us to form an opinion on it.

It’s not as obviously-demented and wrong-headed as “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” not kitschy/revolting like “Pink Flamingoes,” not as amusingly, instantly incompetent as “The Room.”

Torres has plenty of fellow aficionados on camera telling us that they “get it,” but not really why. And he samples so little of the actual film that we’re kind of left in the dark.

He’s made a documentary that investigates a cult filmmaker who had a big influence without unraveling that influence, a period piece that visits many a former (now empty) video store, that catches up with that VHS generation and a few hardcore fans who fling to VHS, who prowl social media pages hunting for those long lost actors. But in not showing enough telling samples of Lamas’ films, he never really lets us in on the joke.

Rating: unrated, nudity, sexual situations

Cast: Manuel Lamas, narrated by Emilio Silva Torres.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emilio Silva Torres. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:17

The acting is underwhelming, the sound is tinny and off-mike and the script isn’t the least bit subtle about shoving exploitive nudity and lesbian sex into the lurid Lovecraft thriller, “H.P. Lovecraft’s Witch House.”

So, amateurish? Hell yes.

But the ambition is here, and director and co-scripter Bobby Easley’s efforts to weave gloomy collages and montages of superimposed horror imagery — extreme close-ups of underlit rituals and nightmares and Satan showing off his horns as nude cultists cavort by the bonfire — almost atone for some of the worst sins of this non-quite-laughable trip to Lovecraft Country.

Lovecraft aficionados will know the story (“The Dreams of the Witch-House”), the ancient witch-villain Keziah Mason, the bizarre occult riff on academia, Miskatonic University, and the themes of the “Cthulhu Mythos” — the symbolic ancient geometry of inter-dimensional travel, “the witch’s curve” and Stonehenge and Nazi “magic castles” and what not.

It’s the execution of it all that really lets the picture down.

Portia Chellelynn plays Alice, a student-older-than-average who flees a friend’s apartment, her refuge after escaping an abusive relationship that ended in a beating that caused a miscarriage. Her new hide out, Hannah House, is a remote old mansion recommended by her Miskatonic professor and mentor (John Johnson).

In a huge, rambling brick house with many rooms, the frightening owner (Andrea Collins) tucks Alice in the unfinished attic.

“I need to be here. I can feel it!”

There’s just that owner, her creeper alcoholic old Jesus freak brother (Joe Padgett) and her too-welcoming walking-tattoo niece Tommi (Julie Anne Prescott) sharing the place.

What’s spooky about that?

Well, the rats, for starters. The loose floorboard hiding a long-rolled-up black magic altar cloth, creepy paintings of this former servant named Keziah and weird stuff happening in the woods out back are kind of red flags, too.

Alice doesn’t have dreams, she has nightmares. And the fact that infants and children are being abducted all around town should give her another clue.

Gratuitous nudity and supernatural perils encountered while the star’s in her underwear aside, this is a seriously silly movie. Its a high school dropout’s idea of what college is like, right down to the professor and his unmistakable Harley mechanic beard and grasp of Lovecraftian academics.

There’s a whiff of the whole “people who take Lovecraft WAY too seriously” about it, especially in the QAnon U. scenes.

Still, Easley manages some striking if murky and so dimly-lit you can’t follow the action ritual sequences. I could see that footage recycled in nightmare sequences of better films, with better acting and better sound, etc.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Portia Chellelynn, Julie Anne Prescott, John Johnson, Erin Trimble and Andrea Collins

Credits: Directed by Bobby Easley, scripted by Bobby Easley and Ken Wallace, based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dreams of the Witch-House.” A Horror Wasteland release.

Running time: 1:20

You glance at the poster or the DVD cover for “ScarfFace” and you figure “Ah, a new edition to the DePalma/Pacino Cuban gangster epic” is out.

“Say ‘allo to my leetle friend” and all that.

And then you see the extra “f” in the title and figure out it’s a documentary about “competitive eating,” and chuckle. “Clever…cute.”

But the deeper you get into this film about this distinctly American “sport,” built around the annual, over-hyped and oft-televised World Championship hot-dog eating contest staged every July 4 at Nathan’s on Coney Island, the more the film resembles the making-of-a-mobster tale from the ’80s.

PETA protests and deaths among the competitors, allegations of xenophobia and corruption and racketeering and “fixed” results sour what little wry amusement there is for what its most cynical competitor aptly describes as “”wasting food in onstage display of gluttony” that is both gross and quintessentially American.

Joseph Ruze and Sean Slater’s documentary starts out like many a puff-piece TV feature on the comical metaphor for Wasteful America, Gorging America and Why America is So Fat. A little Coney Island stunt, first staged in 1916, grows into something the content-starved “All ‘Sports’ network, ESPN, turns into a big footnote in the annual “news” that spins around the July 4 holiday.

“Joey Chestnut beats Takeru Kobayashi in Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest! USA! USA!”

George Shea is a PR guy who got involved with promoting the event, took on MC duties and is laugh-out-loud GREAT at it. He had to be the one to give nicknames to some of the eaters — Joey “Jaws” Chestnut, Matthew “The Megatoad” Stonie, Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas.

“The Four Horsemen of the Esophagus are here today,” he intones, working up the crowd, competing for “The Most Important Trophy in the HISTORY OF THE WORLD!”

That there’s some hype, and the straw-boater topped Shea’s breathless patter, reciting-from-memory the titles in eating pierogis, chicken wings, brats and tacos each contestant can claim, is an amusing marvel.

And then “the hot-dog eating contest” film evolves into an expose of “Major League Eating” and hints of greed and megalomania, showing Shea as a would-be Vince McMahon/France family NASCAR cover-ups and NFL colluding hype-master who has taken it over.

It’s enough to make you lose your appetite…for hot dogs and for good-natured carny barker ballyhoo.

The portraits of the competitors are superficial in the extreme. Even the obnoxious self-promoter Juan “More Bite” (Get it?) who is always “available” to talk to doesn’t give us much idea of what motivates these folks — who might pick up an extra $75,000 a year at the very top level — or what their lives are like.

But taking the film far and wide, to Vegas and eating contests staged in restaurants and fairs, gives us an idea of the small-time nature of it, and just how low the stakes actually are that these people and the controlling (no media access except, by contract, through Shea) tyrant who runs it are fighting over.

What feels, at the outset, like a good-natured “King of Kong” (competitive arcade game players) riff on an arcane corner of Americana starts to smell like every dirty thing you’ve ever heard or suspected of the WWE, NASCAR and the NFL.

When we learn, early on, that the skinny Japanese fellow, Takeru Kobayashi, who helped make this event national news in the early 2000s, was banned from competing for refusing to sign on with the greedy control-freak publicist and hype man who took over “competitive eating,” the entire enterprise starts to smell.

And just when you marvel that of all the time we spend watching people shove hot dogs with buns down their throats “nobody chokes to death,” the deaths start to turn up.

They’re not choking, but this practice is as lethal as you’d expect, shortening and ending lives.

As an expose, “ScarfFace” makes a great surface gloss on this “sport,” just deep enough to suggest how unsavory it all is, perhaps not deep enough to lead to legal action against the filmmakers. The “scandals” surrounding it are usually limited to the deaths.

And every “King of Kong” or WWE needs its villain. Shea may even relish (ahem) that label.

The staged footage of Mexican “fans” of the sport watching it on TV and the cynical, droll commentary of semi “above it all” eater and self-described lab trial test subject Phil “The Abyss” Fuden may put this vulgar display of Ugly Americanism in perspective. Or it could be the filmmakers taking their own shot at hyping their product into something it never quite is — an authoritative take-down of a July 4 “tradition.”

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Joey Chestnut, George Shea, Miki Sudo, Molly Schuyler, Takeru Kobayashi, Juan “More Bite” Rodriguez, Phil “The Abyss” Fuden, Matt Stonie

Credits: Directed by Joseph Ruze and Sean Slater, scripted by Sean Slater. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:17

Mandy Patinkin also stars in this “Let me tell you my story” sequel that takes “Wonder” and lessons about doing the right thing and kindness back to The Holocaust.

October 14th.

“Sniper” movies are a combat genre all their own thanks to the fatal attraction of the loners — usually two-person teams — who do the work, hit-men or women in uniform, a one-or-two-shooter “surgical strike.”

Many a first-person shooter video game has sniper characters. Check the Internet Movie Database out — scores of titles built around snipers, many of them spin-offs of a seminal Tom Berenger B-movie from the early ’90s — “Sniper.”

The Ukrainian thriller “Sniper: The White Raven,” hews to that Berenger/Billy Zane film’s formula, with its own Ukrainian twists. It’s built on vengeance, a lone shooter mowing down Russians and their in-country lackeys during the 2014 Russian invasion, and a present-day 2022 epilogue.

It’s based on the experiences of a real-life Ukrainian soldier, and unlike most any sniper movie you can think of, this time, we see how such super-shooters are selected and trained.

“Nobody likes snipers,” the hard-as-nails “Cap” (Andriy Mostrenko) growls to his recruits, in Ukrainian with English subtitles. “They are insidious and elegant.” They can kill with stealth and any number of weapons, none of them all that high-tech. Because “It’s not the rifle that makes a sniper. It’s intelligence and endurance.”

Aldoshyn Pavlo stars as Mykola, a hippie pacifist when we meet him, married to an artist (Maryna Koshkina) who is expecting their first child, living lightly on the land in a dugout house they built, using electricity from a windmill they installed. They’re cute and odd enough to make local TV in their corner of Donetsk.

Mykola bikes to work and teaches his disinterested students physics. But he gets their interest when he turns a punk’s spitballs into a lesson on the mathematics of velocity.

Clever.

When tensions boil over after Ukraine removes its corrupt Russian puppet president, the stealth invasion begins. Mykola and wife Nastya are in the middle of nowhere, is a somewhat camouflaged house. They must be “spies,” the newly-unmasked Russians declare. One seriously rough-handling of the civilians later and she’s dead and he’s left for dead.

Ukrainian militia help with the burial, but they don’t trust the guy the locals nicknamed “Digger,” because of his dugout house, either. Mykola must convince them he’s no longer a pacifist, that he craves revenge. He will go by the code-name, “Raven,” he says, getting WAY ahead of himself.

The militia bootcamp training montage shows how little regard the officers and fellow recruits have for the long-haired teacher. But his math skills get him noticed when he raises his hand for the sniper recruiters.

Yeah kids, you’ve got to be able to do a lot of calculating when you’re choosing your shot.

“The White Raven” follows our grieving widower, toting his wife’s carved raven totem, into combat to carve fear on the black hearts of the enemy, one dead goon at a time.

Labeling sniper films “genre” pictures works because almost to a one — “Sniper” to “American Sniper,” Saving Private Ryan” to “Enemy at the Gates” — they all boil down to The Ultimate Test. There’s always “a shooter with talent,” as Barry Pepper’s character declares in “Private Ryan.” A sniper-vs-sniper duel is inevitable.

That said, Marian Bushan’s film does a splendid job with the preliminaries, doesn’t leave out the morality of having to shoot a familiar face, and doesn’t omit the consequences of mistakes.

The action climax is solid, tense and exciting. And if you’re wondering why Russian generals are as rare as white ravens, stick around for the coda.

Rating: Rated R for violence, bloody images, language and some sexuality/nudity.

Cast: Pavlo Aldoshyn, Maryna Koshkina and Andriy Mostrenko

Credits: Directed by Marian Bushan, scripted by Marian Bushan and Mykola Voronin. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:51

The most perilous minefield in the movies might be daring to explore teen sexuality on screen.

Raunchy farces use the cover of comedy, because everybody knows taking this subject seriously risks crossing the line into straight-up exploitation. And whatever notoriety you want for your film, few are going to embrace the scandal of turning up on a “hot teen sex” web search.

And yet every generation has a version of Larry Clark’s salacious “Kids,” with that film’s screenwriter, Harmony Korine, unleashing “Spring Breakers” a generation later.

Those are the stakes for filmmakers’ Iliana Estañol and Johanna Lietha’s “Lovecut,” a never-sordid but somewhat sterile survey of sexuality in the social media age set amongst the young, beautiful and under-parented in Vienna. They take care to avoid the whole “hot teen sex” trap by limiting nudity and keeping their focus on the young couples, their challenges and the life-altering dead-ends they can drift into trying to figure out love and sex on their own.

Everybody in the movie has secrets. Each of them is homeless, recklessly rebellious or otherwise damaged going in. And all of them end up in relationships limited or doomed by the digital nature of dating for this generation.

Anna and Jakob (Sara Toth and Kerem Abdelhamed) are in the white-hot heat stage of their affair, always in search of the next place they can “do it,” and capture what they do on video. Instagram keeps taking down Anna’s exhibitionist displays of their ardor. But if they want to move in together, the older (maybe 19) Jakob has an idea — uploading their videos to paying porn sites.

“But what if our friends see them?” Anna frets, as if their friends aren’t seeing them in bed, on rooftops or wherever the next sexual selfie is set.

Besties Luka and Momo (Luca von Schrader and Melissa Irowa) are bar and club-hopping teens on the loose, each providing the other with cover and a sense of security as Luka drags Momo — who likes playing with the assumed name and guise of “Olga, from Russia” — along on a Tinder date with Ben (Max Kuess).

Luka is all about messing around. “I don’t want a relationship,” she insists (in German with English subtitles). “Me either.” And “No FEELINGS,” she insists.

Momo isn’t content being the third wheel for Luka’s “no feelings” hook-ups. But her relationship with Alex (Valentin Gruber) is strictly online, video calls for mutual, semi-clothed masturbation. She’s anxious to meet in person, but Alex isn’t.

The “secrets” here range from the obvious to the genuinely surprising, and all point to what we “know” about someone based on their social media profile and the superficial nature of the love connections.

Everybody’s young and sexy in their streak-dyed hair, top knots, torn fishnets, short skirts or belly-baring shirts. Getting beyond that is where everything turns messy — “too old for her,” probation, greed, “using” people, exhibitionism and the like doom every affair captured here, a generation digitally trapped in a learning curve that earlier ones never had to contend with, although each era has its own challenges.

For all their film’s surface intimacy, Estañol and Lietha have the hardest time connecting the viewer with these kids. We may see their flaws and emphasize with their challenges, but there’s a clinical distance to the portrayals, a Teutonic iciness that robs them of emotions.

Nobody cries at what they’re going through, no one loses her or his temper at the way whoever they’ve hooked-up with uses them.

The drama is limited to a few mild parental outbursts, a lot of measured, under-challenged acting-out, plenty of episodes where things come to a head and yet don’t. Not really.

This milieu, kids flopping from apartment to house-breaking to checked-out hotel room that the maids haven’t cleaned yet, has an earthy promise that rarely delivers. Younger viewers may find a character to identify with, but the movie presents us only with superficialities — the hot guy on probation, the “virgin” who wants not just experience, but a real boyfriend.

And the message of “Lovecut,” that there is no “learning” through all this, unless it’s learning to manipulate each other and get away with murder with your parents, is just dispiriting.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, alcohol abuse, all involving teens

Cast: Sara Toth, Max Kuess, Kerem Abdelhamed, Luca von Schrader, Melissa Irowa and Valentin Gruber.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Iliana Estañol and Johanna Lietha. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:34