Movie Nation

A fourteen year-old German girl experiences her first crush and her sexual awakening in “Cocoon.” But to shy, observant Nora’s surprise, that crush and first love is an older teen girl.

Writer-director Leonie Krippendorff — who created the lesbian romance “Loving Her” for German TV — serves up a lived-in world and relatable, many-layered teenaged characters who delight just as easily as they disappoint. And she gives Nora a Big Fat Metaphor as a hobby. She raises caterpillars to release as butterflies, thus our metamorphosis metaphoric title — “Cocoon,” “Kokon” in German.

Nora, played with a kind of guarded guilelessness by Lena Urzendowsky, is the shrinking violet in older sister Jule’s (Lena Klenke) circle. Jule and Aylin (Elina Vildanova) are loud, exuberant BFFs, but they have little problem including mousy Nora in their travels and conversations about boys, music and weight, of all things.

Jule seems obsessed with being thin, and at one point we see the three of them attempting a “model’s trick,” eating orange juice-soaked cotton balls to lose weight.

Both older girls can be mean, or touchingly supportive. When we meet Jules and Nora’s barfly mom (Anja Schneider), we understand that. In the end, the sisters have to lean on each other, and Nora seems to be the one who recognized this first.

But frolicking in the pool with beautiful Aylin gives Nora tingles that she’s never felt before. She doesn’t have the words to describe what she’s going through, what she feels, or even how to bring it up. Jules and Aylin are super-tight. Why, she asks her sister, do they “need” or even want boys?

One touchingly tender moment has Nora talking to a sympathetic, non-judgmental teacher who gives her exactly what a good teacher should — the “you’re going to ‘feel’ a lot of things at your age, and it’s OK,” speech.

The fact that everybody speaks German isn’t the only way we realize the setting is Europe and not Florida.

Nora’s awkward naivete gets her hand-broken at a party with loud, loutish boys whom Jule and Nora are sweet on. Jule gets her to the hospital for that, but is no help in PE class that day Nora has her first menstruation while walking the balance beam.

An absentee, advice-free mom, a teacher who doesn’t see it, a sister who picks today to find her kid sister “embarrassing” all combine for a young girl’s worst nightmare.

But in the toilet, there’s salvation. It’s bob-haired blonde Romy (Jella Haase) to the rescue. It’s no wonder Nora falls instantly in love with her.

Krippendorff invites us into a latch-key kid world of parties, late night over-the-fence dips in the community pool, teen drinking and casual pot use centered around two sisters who pretty much have to fend for themselves.

The kids run through a wide range of emotions and issues — crushes, requited and unrequited, sexual experimentation, love, humiliation and heartbreak.

Nora narrates this climate-changed (insanely hot) summer story from some point in the future, letting us see and hear what she felt and endured and obviously survived.

What’s striking about this milieu is the limited drama or lack of strife in all this. Human sexuality class invites a vigorous teen debate about teen parenting vs. abortion between outspoken Muslim girls and traditional Turkish boys, who seem sheepish at parroting their parents’ bullet points.

Even the German kids have taken to blurting “I swear on the Koran” to comically emphasize a point, and Aylin is using a translator app to teach herself Turkish. She has a new boyfriend.

And nobody — even the immature and sometimes obnoxious boys — is judging anybody’s sexuality or sexual spectrum “experimenting.”

The performers are, to a one, unaffected. And once I got past Urzendowsky’s eerie resemblance to the surviving photos of Anne Frank, I was amazed at her understated immersion in this questioning kid too shy to ask for answers, unless there’s a Youtube tutorial on tampons.

Krippendorff squeezes a lot of layers of the urban teen experience into “Cocoon’s” slim 93 or so minutes, and gives a lot of shades to her characters, who are never simple “types” the way most Hollywood films about high schoolers are.

What “Cocoon” encourages Nora with isn’t the American message of “It gets better,” it’s something much more universal. Everybody goes through a version of this. And when everybody’s cool about it, it’s no big deal.

Rating: unrated, teen drug and alcohol abuse, sexual subject matter

Cast: Lena Urzendowsky, Lena Klenke, Elina Vildanova,
Anja Schneider and Jella Haase

Credits: Scripted and directed by Leonie Krippendorff. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:33

“Don” is one of those Bollywood musicals that reminds us that too much Indian cinema puts the “in” in “inane.”

A self-congratulatory story of a writer-director — Cibi Chakravarthi — bullied into attending engineering school instead of “art school” (film school) as he wanted, it stars Sivakarthikeyan as his singing, dancing, romancing and pranking alter ego.

S.J. Suryah plays the Best Engineering University “discipline” counselor, Boominathan, a martinet who keeps the sea of kids cowed and intimidated, until Chakravarthi and his pals scheme of a way to get rid of him — applying for a bigger, better job for him, online, behind his back.

“Chaka” gets nicknamed “Don” of the school for this stunt. And while he’s not having much luck impressing the beautiful and full of herself Angaiyarkanni (Priyanka Arulmoha) for this, and can only fool his stern, slap-him-silly dad (Samuthirakani) for so long with an elaborate prank that involves hiring somebody to play him for a meeting with school officials, and getting another chap to play his dad for the real meeting, he expects to get by.

Of course, he’s not done with Boominathan, not done dreaming of film school and he’s remembering all this as he drives his “I’m a big success” Range Rover to the college through a pouring rain, dodging elephants because the entire film’s a flashback.

I’ve seen a lot more Indian cinema in recent years, thanks to the rise of Netflix and its eagerness to share Bollywood (and non-Bollywood) films and take us “Around the World with Netflix.” The movies are often patience-testing, but most are perfectly watchable thanks to the camp value of the dancing, that turns up even in some action films. But the 2:45 of “Don” takes the biscuit.

Strip away the production numbers, which are always fun — although often more fun than the tunes performed here — and a cute courtship musical montage that has our prospective lovers dancing/flirting around the Taj Mahal — and there is nothing worth giving a minute’s attention to here.

Those kid-boxed-about-the-ears scenes showing us how his father abused, put down and generally held-back Chakravarthi set us up for a better movie.

But once the film hits college, its “School Daze” plot struggles to get on its feet even if the production numbers passed muster. Our “hero” isn’t interesting, in even a smug pranking jerk sort of way. There’s little chemistry with his leading lady, and scene after scene has this insufferable and unfunny disciplinarian scheming, being foiled and never one drawing a laugh for any of it.

And on and on and on and on this drivel goes. Looking at his credits, I can see that I have not seen Sivakarthikeyan’s other films, although his music has turned up in titles I recognize. He seems a better singer/dancer than actor, a reminder that not every handsome swain can seduce the camera and make a character relatable, likable or even tolerable.

Some of this, of course, is a cultural difference in cinematic priorities. Indian cinema, as a rule, is long and repetitive, as if they expect the audience to half pay attention, maybe leave the theater or walk away from the TV for long stretches. So nothing much of interest happens a very substantial portion of the time.

My Florida film-fanatic patience was utterly out the door by the one hour mark and nothing that followed improved my mood.

This is awful. I didn’t hate every minute of it, but those tolerable stretches were few and far between.

Rating: TV-14, violence,

Cast: Sivakarthikeyan, S.J. Suryah,
Priyanka Arulmohan and Samuthirakani

Written and directed by Cibi Chakravarthi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:45

Americans are conditioned to wait for that moment when an onscreen brawl crosses over into “to the death” territory. Some gangster or cop will pull out a firearm.

You’ll have a long wait for that in “Paid in Blood,” a Korean gang war thriller that spills all its blood the old-fashioned way — with fists, sticks and knives.

The latest film from Yoon Youngbin reminds us just how much damage a sharp blade can do, how long it can take to “bleed out” from the wounds, and how much guts it takes the fight with this corner of gangland’s weapon of choice.

Titles “Tomb of the River” is Korea, it’s a movie of elderly gangsters and their hobbies — pen and ink drawings, growing and drying one’s own chili peppers — and the hotblooded young men who might not let anybody’s retirement pass peacefully, if they even let a mob boss reach retirement age.

The power dynamic at play is brutal Lee Min-suk (Jang Hyuk), a gangster born in Seoul, is now a “debt collector” for one of the two main gangs in coastal Gangneung. No, he’s not content with that long-time arrangement, which includes the occasional hired killing. He breaks his deal with the Gyeongdo Gang with a blade.

Kim Gil-suk (YOO O-Seong) is a loyal lieutenant with the rival Taekji gang, the sort of insider who has an in with the cops. He’s always warning his boss when this meeting or that bar is about to be raided.

Even though the patriarch of this underworld counsels “not fighting” because “when you fight, you both get hurt,” Lee Min-suk is about to slice up the peace and anybody planning to keep it.

His MO? He finds saps who owe him big debts to take the fall. The ineffectual and corrupt cops can’t get to him.

The plot can be hard to follow, as MANY character names and loyalties have to be sorted out, and the pacing between action sequences seems even more ponderous because of that.

But the fights are intimate or epic in scale, and buckets of blood are always spilled. Same with the film’s assorted assassinations.

And the acting is sharp, with many a blade handled with skill, many a cigarette lit with flair, many a death gruesome and in-your-face personal.

The tough-guy trash talk — in Korean, with English subtitles — is flinty and properly bad-ass

“If you use pens, you get ink. But if you use knives, you get blood.”

“Not anymore. Nowadays, pens get you blood. Knives just get you jail.“

“You’re soft when it matters most.” And “Don’t waste your breath like this. You won’t have enough when you actually need it.”

Yoon Youngbin is no John Woo (Who is?). But he’s whipped up a solid and just-exciting-enough gangster movie with grimly conflicted characters and violence that can only be this visceral and personal when the debt collecting is done with a knife, not the coward’s cannon of choice, an AR-15.

Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Jang Hyuk, YOO O-Seong, Park Seong-geun, Oh Dae-hwan, Lee Hyun-kyun  and Shin Seung-hwan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Yoon Youngbin. A Well Go USA release, also streaming on Hi-YAH!,

Running time: 1:59

This will help struggling multiplexes in the cinema’s late summer graveyard weeks, so it’s not all bad.

But the cynicism of Sony releasing a longer cut of this just-left-theaters release so soon underscores what some movies — the comic book ones — actually are. They’re just content to be tinkered with to add a little to the bottom line.

Ever since the “Close Encounters,” “Star Wars” and “Blade Runner” “director’s cut” tinkering, the cinema has drifted further and further away from the literary concept of a “copy text,” the artist and her or his editor/publisher/releasing studio’s definitive version of this piece of art, the one that goes to the printers or shows up in theaters or video.

What makes a work of art great isn’t a focus group’s input or endless waffling over what “little darlings,” as Hemingway called his bitterest but necessary edits, one had to kill.

Your movie, based on your best instincts, didn’t play or underperformed? No worries, Zach Snyder. Have another go. The fans will eat that up. Again.

Yeah, you’re devalued as an “artist,” your reputation takes another hit, even if the picture is “improved ”

But this? This is just Sony not wanting to waste effort and risk cash on original “content.” Let’s just give fans Blu-ray features inserted into the movie for another $11-16 ticket.

It’s hard to take comic book movies as anything other than “content” when Sony agrees with me, and not the ComicCon crowd.

Thomas Haden Church most often finds his laughs via characters with a laid back, deadpan view of the world, characters that drive the highly strung folks around him nuts. And there’s comedy gold in the laid back guy finally losing his cool and blowing his fuse, a slow burn turning into a meltdown.

Dianna Agron is similarly low key, thanks to her intimate, close-up-oriented underplaying, a subtlety often seen in folks who mastered their craft on TV.

So it’s easy to believe them as an estranged father and daughter in the dramedy “Acidman,” which just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. There’s an “apple/tree” vibe to their underplaying, waiting for the laughs or emotional fireworks to come rather than committing to generate them themselves.

That’s probably why they’re miscast together here. He needs someone more antic to set off sparks with. So does she. Pairing them up makes for an intimate, reflective and generally dull two-hander that only rarely comes to life.

Maggie has fly and drive across the country to “check up on” her father. With good cause. He’s living in a battered, cluttered double-wide in the middle of the woods somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. She drives up and the first thing she notices is that someone has spray-painted “Acidman,” in orange on the side of the house. And not because they’re fans of Japanese indie rock, we guess.

He wasn’t warned she was coming, although his “might’ve tidied up a bit” seems like sarcasm. Her suggestion that she might do the same seems just as sarcastic.

He tinkers with stuff, makes industrial-machinery metal machine synthesizer music, and walks his German short-haired pointer, ‘Migo.

Whatever he used to be, he’s now a not-quite-recluse, settling in “a good place to be left along.” At least the waitress at the village diner (Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris) knows him. Other locals, especially the younger ones, see him as a town character, thus the graffiti on his house.

And when she invites herself along for a dad-and-his-dog late night wander, she starts to figure him out.

“It’s a good night to go searching,” is all he’ll say. But when they reach a high bluff and he points out “red orbs” of light in the distance,” his obsession, his “brain smash” becomes clear. Those lights?

“Think interplanetary…You can say it.”

He’s certain he’s seeing and communicating with UFOs, who he figures are just doing some sort of “interplanetary drive-by.”

So now we know his secret and can mull over what she might do in response to it. But what about hers? She’s got to be her for some other reason, because, you know, it’s a movie. That’s the way such scripts play out.

Agron and Church have some moments, played in a father-daughter shorthand that works.

“I think fathers are supposed to give a daughter advice” is quietly but abruptly cut off at the knees. Her announced reasons for the visit are dismissed just as curtly.

But as likable as these two are as players, their interactions pretty much flatline. The possibilities between the characters are too limited and the surprises mostly unsurprising. There’s just too little going on and very little to invest in as a viewer.

Director and co-writer Alex Lehmann, part of that Duplass Brothers talking-talking mumblecore movie industrial complex, has made a couple of features (“Paddleton,” “Blue Jay”) for Netflix that few have seen. Here’s another.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Thomas Haden Church, Dianna Agron and Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris.

Credits: Directed by Alex Lehmann, scripted by Chris Dowling and Alex Lehmann. A Signal A release seen for The Tribeca Film Festival

Running time: 1:26

Well, he’s no Jason Momoa.

DJ should try a few more bad guys on for size, not that we expect “Black Adam” (Oct.) to be all “dark side.”

This sequel to “The Witch: Subversion,” about a lab, a massacre, a real mess, opens Friday.

Well Go Entertainment had it, and you know we never go far wrong with them.

Riding high on the download and play charts, thanks to “Stranger Things.”

Some of us remember her first American appearance, which was…astonishing. Beguiling. Enthralling.

Songs with drama performed dramatically by a beautiful mop topped Brit.

She was absurdly young when she broke out, and she was on “Saturday Night Live” when it was a lot more avante garde or at least quirky in its musical guests. A

And yes, if you were good you got to sing with a great house band.

Check out the hairy Canadian playing piano for her.

In California wine country, they have to take climate change seriously, and competition just as seriously.

Want to set yourself apart from from the pack? Brand yourself as having a greener footprint and even more “organic” approach to wine-making.

Want to make an agriculture industry more sustainable? Start doing things the more environmentally friendly way.

“Living Wine” might make you thirsty when it comes out July 15.

There’s something to be said for quitting while you’re ahead.

I’m not talking about the filmmakers/paranormalists who returned to the “haunted” house in Florence, Mississippi after making “The House in Between” about their investigations into a striking, modernish A-frame where lights come on by themselves, bumps and “disembodied voices” fill the night and pretty much anything they leave on the stairs rolls or falls off.

The need for “The House in Between Part 2” had to be a matter of pride. Because as I said in my review, they do not make their case or seal the deal with the first film.

“Part 2” is a slicker, higher-budget effort, with what looks like better quality cameras and a spooky, composed chamber music score.

As to “proving” ghosts exist and that something or someone is haunting this stylish Mississippi Amityville home via their “Paranormal Activity” cameras, night-vision and motion detectors, I’d say they came closest to winning skeptical viewers in the first act. Early scenes showing what appear to be call-and-response efforts to get the ghost(s) to roll one of a collection of balls off the staircase do indeed produce balls that seem to roll off their perch on command.

Sure, the doll they set up, facing/teetering backwards on the lip of a stair, seems about to tumble before the investigator takes his hand off it.

But early on, the film is convincing enough that most viewers are going to narrow the possibilities of all this to two outcomes. Either “something odd” is going on in that house at 322 Whatever Street in Florence, or these eager-to-find-proof beavers are faking it.

Short of visiting that house, I’m not sure even co-director/hype-man Steve Gonsalves‘ self-declared “most thorough and in-depth paranormal investigation that has ever been documented” should convince anybody. He makes a few statements like that, and everybody here pretty much talks in the weasel language of “I’m not saying that I think” when that’s exactly what they’re saying.

Still, giving the film crew the benefit of the doubt, that what they’re hearing (not clear and not convincing) or seeing (something more curious) is legit, that first act does make one wonder.

Alas, they don’t quit there.

To their credit, the makers of the 2020 film go out and find more folks who might deliver a natural (as opposed to supernatural) explanation for the noises, movement and lights that owner Alice Jackson and others claim to have seen/experienced in her house.

A guy sweeps the property with ground-penetrating radar. An actual geophysicist named Carolyn Streiff electronically pokes around, looking for elemental explanations for phenomena. And there’s digging. They throw some money at this sequel, in front of and behind the camera, above and below the ground.

But that, for me, is where “In Between 2” drifts off course. Metal detecting is one thing. Getting into the history of town from a local historian is interesting, digging into Alice’s life story and a recent tragedy and surveying what might be beneath the ground may seem “logical,” but only to ghost story buffs and horror film fanatics.

This is how this haunting or that grisly series of encounters with the supernatural is “explained” — in movies like “Paranormal Activity,” “The Blair Witch Project,” etc. The “experts” summoned in the later acts are more true believers and “ghost hunters,” with a California hypnotherapist thrown in for good measure.

None of this builds on the case made in the opening act. It just pads the film out to a longer length and waters down its impact.

Gonsalves even moves the goalposts in the third act. All of a sudden, this “looking for proof” story becomes “get Alice back into her house” to live, via their investigations, since she’s too jumpy to spend the night here.

Well, at least they spared us a “spiritual cleansing” or exorcism.

When paranormal gadget guru Elizabeth Saint whines that “I would love to get to a place where the field is taken more seriously” by legitimate science, we’re simply reminded of how under-credentialed and unconvincing this social circle (some of them met at “conventions”) of self-anointed experts is.

If what they’re seeing and experiencing is as real as it seems to them, you’d think they could show their evidence and talk somebody with heavy duty credentials to fly in and verify some of what they claim.

Short of that, “House in Between Part 2” is just like part one, a circle-jerk of the credulous fluffing the credulous, none of them credible enough on her or his own to make the case.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Alice Jackson, Steven Gonsalves, Brad Cooney, Elizabeth Saint, Carolyn Streiff, John Bullard, Dustin Pari, Laurie McDonald and Morgan Gates

Directed by Steve Gonsalves and Kendall Whelpton, A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:42