Movie Nation

A big turn by John Boyega, with support from Nicole Beharie, Connie Britton and Michael K. Williams.

An African American Georgia-set “Dog Day Afternoon” is the pitch, and this looks very good.

Aug. 26, from Bleecker Street.

There are movies born of obvious inspiration and perspiration on the part of all involved, and then there is “content,” manufactured to maximize potential profits from a piece of intellectual property.

That’s what the comic book adaptation “DC League of Super-Pets” is. Warners owns the rights to everything in the DC Comic Book Universe, and if Marvel can make a mint over an animated “Spider-Man,” “Why not us?”

They rounded up a big-name voice cast for this dive into the younger-kids-skewing “Super-Pets” comics. They cooked up an origin story of how Superman’s dog, Krypto, came to Earth and how denizens of a rescue pet shop acquire similar super-powers and help Krypto help the Justice League out when Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Cyborg, Aquaman, Flash and Green Lantern get in a jam.

It’s formulaic, rarely funny and seriously cynical for a movie aimed at small kids. But a couple of moments have a lovely and quite-unexpected pathos to them, about the relationships people — even superheroes — develop with companion animals. That doesn’t atone for some of that milk-our-IP-for-every-cent-it-can-earn cynicism. Still, it’s something.

Dwayne Johnson voices Krypto, given his own cape and partnering duties with Superman (John Krasinski) as part of their normal “Wake up, it’s WALK o’clock!” dog-owner relationship. Krypto’s a classic side-kick, there to carry half the load when an explosion knocks out a link of elevated train tracks, which always happens in superhero movies.

Kevin Hart voices Ace, a bull-terrier mix and longtime inmate at a pet rescue store, waiting — like PB the pig (Vanessa Bayer), Chip (Diego Luna) the squirrel and Merton the sometimes potty-mouthed turtle (Natasha Lyonne) — “to feel the warm embrace of a middle-aged person who lives alone.”

They share their space with the hairless lab-experiment guinea pig Lulu (Kate McKinnon) who harbors delusions of supervillain grandeur.

When Lex Luthor (Marc Maron) comes up with yet another Kryptonite scheme to foil Superman, aka “Mister Outside Underpants,” Krypto has bigger problems than fretting over Lois Lane coming between him and his best buddy. And the rescue critters find themselves endowed with super powers.

The gags here come from TV coverage, which features jokey graphics underneath this or that extraordinary calamity suggesting a “wealthy person actually goes to jail” and the like. There’s a funny-at-first, progressively more lame as it is repeated “smooth jazz” riff, a few “dookie” jokes and the extremely nearsighted turtle voiced by Lyonne comes close, time and again, to actually swearing.

“I can’t see (bleep)!”

Krypto gets starchy, stentorian prerecorded advice from his Kryptonian dad (Keith David, quite funny), the only pets picked for adoption at the shelter are kittens (who are evil), and Lulu keeps shrieking her views on world domination, which humans only here as the irate squeaks of a petulant pet.

The heart-tugging bits spin out of how Krypto followed baby Kal-El from Krypton and how Ace came to be in a rescue shelter.

The big-name voices rarely pay dividends, as only Lyonne and McKinnon have much in the way of fun with the characters. Johnson always makes an effort, but Hart — saddled with even fewer laugh-lines — pretty much phones it in. And even he put more into this than Marc Maron, the dullest Lex Luthor ever.

Keanu Reeves brings his best brooding, deadpan take on Batman, muttering about how he doesn’t want a pet because “I work alone…except for Robin…and Alfred…and whoever that guy was that Morgan Freeman played.”

The CG-assisted animation’s good, if nothing special. The messaging?

“You don’t have to have superpowers to be a hero.” Words to live by, kids.

“Super-Pets” doesn’t add up to much, not for adults sitting through this with the kids, anyway. But eight-and-unders? They’re down for dookie jokes and the almost-saying-“a-bad-word” Merton the turtle. A little more of that might have above this one above “mediocre ‘content,’ with a smidgen of heart.”

Rating: PG, innuendo

Cast: The voices of Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Kate McKinnon, Diego Luna, Vanessa Bayer, Natasha Lyonne, Marc Maron, John Krasinski, Jemaine Clement, Daveed Diggs, Keith David and Keanu Reeves.

Credits: Directed by Jared Stern and Sam Levine, scripted by Jared Stern and John Whittington. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:46

A widow finds herself missing her abusive trainwreck of a late husband after she remarries in “Dona Flor and her Two Husbands,” a Brazilian classic that’s been remade under many titles, and even became a Brazilian TV series.

Racy, quite sexy for its time and for decades the most popular movie ever made in Brazil, the 1976 breakout feature of director and co-writer Bruno Barreto has been restored in all its lurid, colorful, slice-of-1940s Brazilian glory for a re-release.

It’s a gorgeous period piece, vividly recreating a lively Salvador, Bahia, Brazil during World War II. That’s where we meet the drunken, handsome partying playboy Vandinho. It’s Carnival time, and he’s in drag with a mob of his mates, tipsily crooning along with a guitarist by the dawn’s early light until he keels over and drops dead.

His wife Dona Flor (Sônia Braga) runs to his side and wails, and as the women of her neighborhood comfort her, the funeral preparations begin and the men start to tell stories, a comically contrasting portrait of the blond rake (José Wilker) emerges.

He was “a gambler and a whoremonger,” the ladies cluck, in Portuguese, with English subtitles. His wedding ring? “He never wore it,” maybe because of the womanizing, more likely because “he lost it” in a bet. “And he BEAT her.”

The men lament the loss of their louche life-of-the-party. He always had an eye for “the stars, the dice and whores,” they chuckle. Roulette wheels all over town should stop spinning in tribute.

A boorish brute and a charmer he was. And a rascal. And since this was Brazil in 1943, that one time he slapped Florípides when she wouldn’t surrender her savings during a gambling binge, his fellows — at least — are willing to let that slide.

But a long flashback takes us through their lives as a couple. Florípides runs a cooking school, and we see her recall preparing (in sumptuous detail) his seafood favorite dishes. It’s just that there’s no indication of where HIS money comes from. What keeps him in white linen suits, always a high roller with the dice, always betting on “red” at the roulette wheel, always bluffing at the after-hours poker game at the funeral parlor?

There’s someone at the door? Twenty reales says its about a dead MAN, not a woman!

Valdomiro or “Vandiho” is quite the charmer, running tabs, flirting with every good looking woman in town — hookers, casino singers, his wife’s culinary students. He leans on his local priest for stake money for his latest sure thing bet, and the padre is almost sold.

And Vandiho is an uninhibited lover. We almost don’t need to see him in action with his wife to figure that out.

Sensuality just oozes out of this film — Vandinho, sitting on a streetside windowsill, lounging about in his underwear, buxom women all up and down the street spilling out of their windows, and bodices to see him and appreciate the show.

But all that carnality leaves Florípides’ life when she dons the black dress. Remarrying the respectable, socially upstanding pharmacist (Mauro Mendonça) improves her life in every regard — save in the bedroom.

She ignores the warnings from the bruxa, conjure woman (witch) who suggests there were and are steps to make sure her late husband’s soul is “at rest.” That’s how her mostly-silent longings for that “excitement” in her life result in his ghostly return — mostly nude, entertaining her reluctant — “I am MARRIED now!” — sexual fantasies, sitting on their wardrobe, cackling at Dr Teodoro Madureira’s clinical, perfunctory love-making. Only she can see him as he joins them in their marital bed each night.

“Dona Flor” was a Golden Globe contender in its day, and quite notorious. Its closing image is as iconic as the final shot of films like “The 400 Blows” — a happy trio, emerging from church on Sunday, promenading down the rua and across the square, with naked Vandinho arm in arm, grabbing Flora’s bottom.

Barreto, already a veteran filmmaker with two features under his belt and yet just 21 when this film came out, went on to successfully adapt another Jorge Amado novel, “Gabriela,” with Braga, hit another high water mark with “Four Days in September” and make a mostly-forgotten string of also-ran dramas and comedies such as the Gwyneth Paltrow flight attendant sex romp “View from the Top.” He was married to Steven Spielberg’s ex, Amy Irving, in the ’90s.

Braga became a fixture in Brazilian and then international cinema with “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and was most recently in “Wonder,” “The Jesus Rolls,” “Fatima” and TV’s “Luke Cage.”

And “Dona Flor” went on to be remade, again and again, with Hollywood’s laughably PG “Kiss Me Goodbye (1982) starring Sally Field and Jeff Bridges as the newlyweds, with James Caan the rake and gambling man she never got over, the worst of the lot.

Perhaps the main reason this classic been so ripe for remakes is that the original, colorful as it is, has some pretty slack storytelling, a 90 minute yarn squeezed into a 110 minute sex farce. The long flashback detailing Vadinho’s excesses is marvelous. The pharmacist’s staid and upper class speeches (to his fellow pharmacists), musicales and starchy parties just go on and on.

But it’s still funny, still gorgeous to look at. And if Wilker smirks, leans and leers off the screen, Braga positively shimmers as a woman who can’t always get what she wants — not in one package, anyway.

Rating: R, sex, nudity, domestic violence

Cast: Sônia Braga, José Wilker and Mauro Mendonça

Credits: Directed by Bruno Barreto, scripted by Bruno Barreto and Eduardo Coutinho, based on a novel by Jorge Amado. A Film Movement restoration and re-release.

Running time: 1:50

“Amandla” is a South African siblings saga built on the classic “one brother becomes a cop, one a thief” formula.

An unconventional setting gives the film a certain novelty — South Africa just before Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and years after he was elected president and Apartheid was over. But writer-director Nerina De Jager’s film frustrates as it struggles and stumbles to add a racial subtext to hang an essentially Zulu story upon, and some of the performances don’t measure up to others.

The story opens with two little boys hunting birds, their jobs on an estate run by what we take to be pretty liberal if still quite patriarchal Boers. Little Impi (Thabiso Masoti) has just turned 11, and is the tougher sibling, the one who has to wring a wounded game bird’s neck. Nkosana (Bahle Mashinini) may be taller, but he’s younger and not as tough.

They work, help their parents and joke around about the music they overhear from the owners.

“You wanna know why they’re white? They all died listening to this music. They’re GHOSTS!”

But Mom has a warning about this “very important day for the whites,” Dingaan’s Day, a white nationalist South African holiday celebrating a victory over the Zulus. The boys should be on their guard, as the most virulent and violent racists might use it as an excuse to act-out.

On that day of all days, Impi helps his friend, Elizabeth (Jeanique Fourie) from the white landowner’s family learn to use a bow and arrow. She kisses him within the sight of local ruffians, and that sets off a chain of events that dooms the boys’ parents.

“Amandla,” which takes its title from the “Power to the People” slogan of anti-Apartheid activists, first goes a little wrong as the boys see their father’s dead body and flee, stopping just long enough to see their mother murdered. These boys don’t cry. They don’t react at all to what they’ve witnessed.

Years later, Impi (Lemogang Tsipa) has become a near legend as a “ghost,” a burglar who never gets caught. He’s kept himself and Nkosana alive and on the streets. But now the younger brother (Thabo Rametsi) is ready to become a policeman in Nelson Mandela’s South Africa, “to restore justice,” he says.

Impi may talk of returning to their native Kwazulu, but he’s got a girlfriend and a baby on the way in Soweto, so that’s where he moves. On the evening of his first day there, he’s kidnapped by a gang and blackmailed into working for Shaka (Israel Matsete-Zulu), trapped and forced to go along on their versions of breaking-and-entering, where murder and rape are commonplace.

At times, it seems as if De Jager (“The Greenwich Village Massacre”) has seen melodramatic thrillers that use this formula, but is too impatient to stick to what works. We get one brief entrance-day speech at the police academy where the force demands that all new recruits enforce the law “without prejudice” — for a change. We never really see evidence of Imbi as any sort of master thief whose skills are in demand.

That makes the film’s turn towards tragic melodrama ring hollow. Its efforts to tie the past to the present play as an afterthought.

“Amandla” has no emotional core. This potentially riveting drama about siblings and violence and a country going through one of the most astonishing political/racial transformations in history has barely a moment that moves or inspires. Too many of the performances lack much in the way of heart, either.

The idea was here, but the execution was pretty much botched. Perhaps Netflix should pay closer attention to the resumes in the many countries where it does business, as this sort of “bad filmmaker makes a not-all-it-could-be film” surprise happens over and over again, all over the Netflix world.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Lemogang Tsipa, Thabo Rametsi, Thabiso Masoti,
Bahle Mashinini, Jeanique Fourie and Israel Matseke-Zulu

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nerina De Jager. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

Labute was the king of toxic masculinity takes back in the day. Here, he’s got a “Double Indemnity/Body Heat” thing going on with Kruger calling the shots, Hank Azaria as the husband and Ray Nicholson as the hapless pawn lured to commit murder.

I’m just spitballing that plot, but that usually the way these things play out. Labute should make it twisty and interesting.

Quiver has this Aug. 26 release.

Properly paranoid and just trippy enough to be triggering, Addison Heimann’s “Hypochondriac” takes us into one tortured life and the troubled past that led to it.

A prologue sets up the trauma to follow. Young Will, whom his manic, prattling Puerto Rican mother (Marlene Forte) calls “Lindo” (pretty boy) creates what he figures will be a happy Halloween memory in a wolf costume. But the sounds of shattered glass signals another of his mother’s episodes.

If “Pack a bag, we’re LEAVING” isn’t answered quickly enough, she’ll fly off the handle. “You’re in COLLUSION with him!” And that leads, on one memorable night, to her hands wrapped around his neck, coming so close to strangling Will to death that he has to wear a turtleneck to Little League practice.

Eighteen years later, Will (Zach Villa) outwardly seems over and done with that traumatic childhood. He’s a happy potter, dancing his clays to the kiln for baking, in a relationship and high on life. And occasionally mushrooms.

But a colleague’s panic attack shows Will’s other skill, one hard won in his difficult childhood. He knows how to talk people out of their weeping, fetal crouch.

And Mother’s Day is coming, which means his other half Luke (Devon Graye) wants them to visit his mother. Whatever Luke doesn’t know about Will’s past, his “my mother’s been dead most of my life” hints he might not be up for that. But sure, it’s a brunch date it is.

Will hasn’t told Luke much, which makes the paranoid text messages from “Mom” and hallucinations he starts to have other things he can’t broach with his new love. Mom is as manic as ever.

“You must become a private INVESTIGATOR,” she insists, at one point.

But dizzy spells, headaches, arm injuries and the like while working around a white hot kiln? It’s time to see a doctor.

Writer-director Heimann’s debut feature does well at keeping Will’s uncertainty about what ails him in doubt. Could this be all in his head? “Just stress,” his frat-bro doctor insists. But, all these symptoms…what about ALS, schizophrenia?

“Duuuude,” frat-bro doc advises, “don’t GOOGLE.”

But as visions of wolves and his nutty mother persist and self-harm becomes a real concern, if Will isn’t googling, at least he’s getting second and third opinions. So are we.

“Hypochondriac” makes a broad spectrum of the medical profession a running gag. Every doctor, specialist and shrink has the same sassy Pomeranian poster on the wall, the wone with “Be bright like glitter and bubbly like champagne!”

That contrasts with the many manifestations of Will’s mother’s illness — nonsensical packages, insane voice mails, threats, pleas. His disinterested, nonchalant father (Chris Doubek) even cracks a faint smile when he suggests the son is turning out just like the kid’s mother.

It doesn’t come together nearly as neatly as you’d like. But “Hypochondriac” manages a few chills and some eyes-averting gore thanks to Will’s memories of what happened and how close he is to repeating the awful past he grew up in.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex, profanity

Cast: Zach Villa, Devon Graye, Marlene Forte, Yumarie Morales and Chris Doubek.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Addison Heimann. An XYZ release.

Running time: 1:37

Mia Goth played Pearl in “X,” and she figured her back story had another movie in her.

Ti West agreed. A24 has this, you say? Of course.

My favorite memory of Paul Sorvino was of him, sitting in the audience, blubbering like the proudest parent who ever walked the Earth, when his daughter Mira Sorvino won an Oscar for playing a foul-mouthed hooker in a Woody Allen comedy.

Maybe that moment isn’t aging as well as it might have, all things considered. But Mira and I both started bawling when I brought it up in an interview a couple of years later. You know how it goes. SHE starts crying at the question and the memory, and I start crying. Pavlovian.

But for all the funnymen and Made Men this Italian American icon played over the decades, the clip below has to be my standout on screen moment for him.

It’s a dazzling impersonation of a politically-wired, money-grubbing hypocrite, a distinctly American “type” still with us, still separating rubes from their money, still steering our politics straight into a toxic pit. Sorvino? He brought it, gloves off, smirk hiding the sinister glower, the Full Falwell.

Whatever its qualifies, you have to figure this late season addition to the superhero lineup is a question mark that comes after fans lined up for “Spider Man,” and showed a lot of signs of fan fatigue with “Doctor Strange” and “Thor.”

Yeah, the excuses they used were finding faults in these two name director Marvel outings. Trying to show that they’ve become discriminating after years of making most every comic book movie an adored blockbuster. And even those two films made bank.

But with streaming services and TV and cinemas flooded with this shlock, maybe we’re seeing signs that overexposure has set in.

This October, Dwayne Johnson will be the exceptionally fit guinea pig in testing that theory.

Rebecca Hall’s reinvention as the queen of “smart horror” continues, more or less apace, with “Resurrection,” a paranoid and metaphorical thriller so cryptic that it borders on obscurant.

So this Andrew Semans film has that, a chilly tone built from slick production design and an increasingly under threat/unhinged Hall in common with “The Night House,” her most recent dip in the genre pool.

Hall plays Margaret, a highly-competent mid-level exec at a bio tech/pharmaceutical firm who could be the poster woman for “Lean In.” A single mom, unsentimentally involved with a married subordinate (Michael Esper), she may not give off “life advice” vibes to us, but she’s who intern Gwyn (Angela Wong Carbone) goes to for career and romantic guidance. Margaret sizes up Gwyn’s description of a plainly-manipulative lover in an instant.

“You should find someone who makes you feel good.

The 40 year-old Margaret schedules assignations with her lover and family time in her tony two story designer flat for bonding and “hovering” over her ready-for-college daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman).

But things start to unravel with a tooth, wholly extracted, that Abbie finds tucked in her things.

It isn’t just Abbie’s bike accident, which Margaret is slow to respond to because she was having a nooner with her married man, that makes Mom “even more suffocating than usual.” She’s spied a stranger from her past (Tim Roth) lurking around the edges of their world — in a store, a park, on a street. Abbie doesn’t recognize the threat. No one but Margaret does.

“Who’s going to protect you?”

What follows is a swirl of paranoid reactions, over-reactions and confrontations as Margaret tries to prepare for dealing with this David Moore she knew in her teens, and frantically attempts to alert others to what she believes he’s capable of.

Semans’ script suggests guilt, blame and next-level psychological mind-games in the connection between his heroine and her perceived nemesis. As in other films that go down this path, there’s uncertainty about what’s actually happening to Margaret and what’s just in her head.

Roth serves up an understated sort of “Gaslight” level of sinister here as Moore protests she’s mistaken him for someone else, then backhandedly reveals that lie when he starts his decades-old manipulations, demanding “a kindness” from this woman he once toyed with like a puppeteer.

That’s how she sees him, anyway.

Hall gives us Six Degrees of Separation from her Sanity in Margaret’s unraveling, a performance that conveys impotent rage, grief, guilt and paranoia without bluntly explaining what transpired way back when, and what’s going on now. Unless, of course, the deranged version of events that she “confesses” to her intern can be taken at face value.

I could have used a more blatant laying out of the cards in what might be a Roe vs. Wade thriller, or something more overtly traumatic and horrific. Semans leans on “cryptic” too hard, even as his killer cast ensures this “Resurrection” will have its riveting, harrowing moments no matter how much symbolic and obscure the filmmaker tries to be.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Grace Kaufman, Michael Esper, Angela Wong Carbone and Tim Roth.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Andrew Semans. An IFC/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:43