Movie Nation

They aren’t the leads, but Brett Cullen and Lesley Ann Warren pretty much carry “It Snows all the Time,” an old-fashion, solid but stolid look at the blow dementia deals a blow to an Omaha family.

Back when Warren, who first gained fame as Cinderella in a 1960s TV production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” and Cullen (of TV’s “Falcon Crest” and more recently, “The Black List”) were starting out, “Snows” would’ve been labeled a “Disease of the Week” movie — the sort of well-cast, informative and if you were lucky moving production the TV networks used to roll out 40 times a year.

Today, we’re too enlightened to use that label. But “Snows” still makes a terrific “explainer,” showing us the signs — which most of his family doesn’t pick up on, or slip into denial over — that patriarch Paul has developed dementia at 58.

The story is seen through the eyes of his Big City son Jesse (Eric Hover, who based the story on his own family), who comes home to Omaha after a long absence to notice Dad is “different.”

He’s wanders off mid conversation and seems distracted pretty much every waking moment. What’s worse, he worked up over the wrong football teams on the tube.

“He likes them now,” is all Jesse’s slacker younger brother (Sterling Knight), who dropped out of college and lives at home, says.

“I keep waiting for him to snap out of it,” their mother (Warren) says. Not that she’s under any illusions. Brother Artie is to self-involved to notice. Their older brother Tony (director and co-writer Jay Gannione) may have noticed, but as he and his wife are expecting a baby and he’s a bit fond of the phrase “It’s in God’s hands,” he’s shrugged it off.

But Jesse sees the yard that’s gone to seed, the confused way his father reacts to long-familiar intersections while driving and the general absent-mindedness that seems to have taken over.

Not that Jesse, who gets an earful of “You’re NEVER here” from his siblings, leaps to the right conclusion. Not at first. At least he’s in town to help his mother talk Dad into a follow-up visit with a specialist, try to help Dad fix his 1940s Ford pickup and arm-twist the clueless Artie to help him tidy up the yard.

Paul? He’s having an impossible time just focusing his eyes in the right direction or remembering what he’s supposed to be doing. But an old blessing his long-dead father used to say before meals? That he has no trouble recalling.

Cullen anchors “It Snows all the Time” in a rock-solid reality. He’s deep into character, with eyes, gestures and a kind of antic impatience that can be symptomatic of dementia. If you keep moving, maybe it’ll all come back to you, or maybe nobody else will notice what you can’t quite put your finger on.

Warren walks an interesting line between dread and denial. Whatever their sons haven’t figured out, she’s not been willing to come right out and say, and certainly not say to Jesse on the phone.

Nothing here is totally new in the way the screen treats dementia. And the sidebars — Jesse confronted by the girl he left behind (Taryn Manning), his lovelife in LA (“a model”), brother Artie’s ever-irritating laziness and refusal to see the crisis right in front of him that he should be pitching in with — are as played-out as the new baby meets the old-before-his-time grandpa, wandering in the fog.

But Cullen and Warren give this drama a gravitas and poignance that transcends the trite formula “It Snows all the Time” never strays from.

Rating: unrated, some profanity, adult themes

Cast: Eric Hover, Brett Cullen, Lesley Ann Warren, Jay Giannone, Sterling Knight, John Beasley, Tatyana Ali and Taryn Manning.

Credits: Directed by Jay Giannone, scripted by Jay Giannone and Eric Watson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:30

It’s not hard to scare the willies out of folks with a shark. There may be nothing in the prehistoric part of our brain that tells us to run from zombies, vampires or werewolves. But sharks? We’re wired to be wary of them, and Spielberg just reminded us of that.

Which is why the reactions to most of the Aussies in “The Reef: Stalked” to the great white that is either eating them or bearing down on them for another dinner course are so Actor’s Studio “off.”

As James Lipton might have said, “Sharks are scary. SHOW us that you know this!”

Nope. The ladies on a casual snorkeling/spear-fishing outing to a reef off the coast casually paddle back pretty much as casually as they paddled out.

The most experienced of this quartet, Nic and Jodie (Teressa Liane, Ann Truong) blithely decide to kayak over to a reef island “to get started” on cooking the fish they’ve speared. That leaves “You’re not prepared for this” Annie (Saskia Archer) to relate the fact that she just saw a fin to diving buddy Lisa (Kate Lister).

The “most sharks are timid” lecture falls on deaf ears. Do sharks even have ears? Because that’s when the attacks start.

Writer-director Andrew Traucki’s sequel to his 2010 film “The Reef” has some excellent shark attack footage and manages a couple of passably suspenseful “Jaws” like moments of waiting for the worst to happen.

The best acting moment is a Aboriginal mother frantically summoning first one child, then another, ashore, swimming just off that reef island. She gives us helpless panic, wrenching agony at watching at attack in the offing and then the water turning red.

But nobody else in this picture gives us anything remotely as fearful or real. There’s no panic or even much of a determined, “We’ve got to paddle like hell” to get to shore urgency.

It’s as if that casual dropping of Aussie surfer slang for sharks, “The Man in the Gray Suit,” lulled the four snorkelers to sleep.

La-di-dah, maybe we should do something. Oh bother, our friend just got chomped. Well, let’s see if I/we can save her, or maybe, you know, outthink the insensate beast that’s “hunting us.”

Traucki makes one character a veteran diver traumatized by the fact her sister was murdered by an abusive boyfriend, who drowned her in a tub. But…she “ran off to work a dive boat in Greece” after that murder, and then did a little Eat, Pray Love traveling.

“Water” scares her? Well, I guess it comes and goes. A lot.

Nic is quick to judge couch-potato Annie with “This isn’t you, you can’t do this,” but it’s not like she’s proven good at handling this sort of imminent danger and threat herself.

The best movies like this do a much better job of selling the building terror, the fear of a gruesome injury or death by being eaten alive– drowning in the process. As much responsibility as the writer and director share (they’re one and the same here) in making that primal fear connect with the viewer, it’s the actors who determine whether or not the viewer buys in, empathizes and puts herself or himself in their swim fins, scared half to death.

You don’t have to be Mandy Moore in “47 Meters Down” or Blake Lively in “The Shallows” to be good at mimicking that normal human terror and panic. “Open Water” had a no name cast and yet was shockingly effective at getting across the realization that “We’re dinner if we don’t do everything we can think of, and in a life-or-death hurry.”

Some good shark attack sequences and a simple “Fin!” and “It’s COMING for US” plot doesn’t work because virtually no one at no moment in “The Reef: Stalked” acts as if there’s a bloody shark about to make them the main course.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Teressa Liane, Ann Truong, Saskia Archer, Kate Lister

Credits: Scripted and directed by Andrew Traucki. An RLJE Entertaintment/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:31

The post Chadwick Bozeman era begins.

Netflix has something that promises to generate a “Stranger Things” level buzz.

Aug. 5.

The latest Kevin Hart/Dwayne Johnson buddy picture is animated and has a better shot at giving “Minions” a little competition at the take-the-kids-to-a-cartoon summer sweepstakes.

It opens this coming week.

Oscar winner Helen Mirren and Djimon Hounsou try to class up the most childish and lighthearted superhero franchise’s second installment.

Yeah, cutting the trailer to an Eminem tune gives him “edge.” Not a bad niche to go for, kid friendliest comic book adaptations. Create a new generation of fans?

“Shazam! 2” comes out Christmas.

Wincott sounds like a lifetime of hard living and bad omens singing it in the movie. Here’s that hepcat Sheb Wooley showing us how it sounded originally.

March, 2023.

“Nobody can kill everyone. Not even you.”

Wanna bet? I think he’s still pissed about the dog. Just a theory.

Fishburne and Reddick and Donnie Yen and Bill Skarsgård and Clancy Brown and Rina Sawayama and Hiroyuki Sanada Get-a-Wash-and-Cut-Keanu star.

Westerner weighing in on this Around the World with Netflix thriller from Indonesia. Guys, maybe titling your picture, or letting Netflix retitle it “Ben & Jody” isn’t the most butch move you could have made.

It’s like titling a macho, male-centric North American thriller “Jamie & Todd.” Or, you know, “Roger.”

But if your heroes are an office-bound activist and a barista with just enough toughness to get by, I guess that works.

The third film in a martial arts/knife-fight series called “Filosofi Kopi,” it’s as topical as deforestation, as focused on a “Big Martial Arts” finish as any Thai “Ong Bok” movie.

Sure, it drags a bit in the middle acts, and even shifts point of view for a while, away from the barista Beni and his occasionally-weeping pal, Jody. But the Battle Royale finale is fun.

Beni (Chicco Jerikho) is a coffee grower in the jungle, formerly a famed barista in the big city (Jakarta). He’s come “home” to “The District” to help the locals fight Big Lumber takeover of their lands, to stop the widespread deforestation taking place everywhere unbridled capitalism has its way.

The barricades he and his fellow activists man are assaulted by club-wielding corporate goons. And before the night is out, Beni will be assaulted again, and taken hostage mid-call.

Jody (Rio Dewanto) leaves the comfort of the city for “the jungle,” where “We’re all alone here,” (in Indonesian with English subtitles). He has no sooner taken the advice to “Watch your back” when his nosing around leads to him being “taken” as well.

Next thing he knows, the “city boy” and the country barista have their reunion in a cage with over a dozen older men. Ben & Jody and a bunch of small village elders are now part of the slave workforce that Jakarta Pacific (I made that up) uses for its path-clearing, before coming in to clear cut.

They plot their escape. It involves Beni’s A-rated coffee, and “Their guard is down any time they watch a badminton game.” But getting out, being grievously wounded in the process, only leads them to a village where the archer-women (Hana Malasan, Aghiny Haque) are in charge, and hellbent on freeing their elders.

Veteran heavy and Javanese fight choreographer Yayan Ruhian is our jungle villain, a man who would kill — literally — for a good cuppa Joe. But will our pacifist, ethical protestors and the women determined to fight back “ethically” go that far?

Director and co-writer Angga Dwimas Sasongko, who directed the mini-series that started this franchise, seems impatient to get through the preliminaries and get to the Big Brawl. There are dead patches and much of what puts these two dangerous-if-they-escape-and-tell-the-world characters in slavery seems perfunctory and arbitrary.

Not only can they never be allowed to leave alive, they aren’t stripped of all of their possessions when they arrive. Each finds himself with a neat wristwatch, perhaps a bargaining chip for later?

I sense wirework in some of the action that makes up the Big Finish, an attempted rescue at the lumber camp. Characters isolate and pair-up with a foe, with daggers and fists and machetes the preferred weapons. Pistols and AK-47s are what you use when you’re sure you’ve lost.

The finish isn’t bad. But too much of what “Ben & Jody” go through to get there is seriously decaffeinated, I must say.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, gun violence, profanity

Cast: Chicco Jerikho, Rio Dewanto, Hana Malasan, Aghniny Haque and Yayan Ruhian.

Credits: Directed by Angga Dwimas Sasongko, scripted by Angga Dwimas Sasongko and M. Nurman Wardi, based on characters created by Dewi Lestari. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

I was chatting with a young blood/employee at the Florida marina where I live, and he started kvetching about his indifference to wearing Coppertone, Banana Boat or my choice in sunblock, Neutragena.

“Young blood,” says I. “Don’t forget the sunscreen.”

Young Blood asked Siri to play it, for I am an old salt, wise in the ways of the sea. And rays.

Yes, a generation or more has come up never hearing this Chicago columnist’s “graduation speech” turned into a 1999 pop hit by the director of “Moulin Rouge” and future director of “Elvis.”

It was fate that made me hear it and need it the first summer I went through on La Florida.

Mary Schmich wrote it. But Baz gave it a cultural moment via this slow jam.

This is the greatest public service our man Baz will ever perform. The damned thing ought to be played on every radio station, especially in the summer months (year round in Florida).

Never heard it? Here it is. Remember it? Share it with a young blood you know.

See “Elvis ” And don’t forget the sunscreen.