Movie Nation

Perhaps the writer-director of a film about a teacher having an affair with an unstable student (“Blame”) wasn’t the right choice for turning out a light-with-thoughtful-moments Zoey Deutch comedy about Internet fame-whoring and its consequences.

“Not Okay” wants to be kind of a goof on the subject. Deutch seems to want to make it one.

But former child actress turned writer-director Quinn Shephard doesn’t appear to be on the same page with this heavy-handed mope. Perhaps she changed her mind about her script at some point, but for some reason “Not Okay,” sunny and silly with consequences to come and guilt growing out of that, simply curdles in the third act, and doesn’t so much end as announce a verdict.

The often-effervescent Deutch, most recently seen in the gangland period piece “The Outfit,” but best known for lighter fare like “Set it Up,” “Buffaloed” and “The Disaster Artist,” plays Danni Sanders, a New Yorker with a photo editing job at the online mag “Depravity.”

Danni narrates about how she badly she wants “to be noticed, to be seen.” But her attempts at writing for the mag are narcissistic “Zillenial” takes on “missing 9/11,” being stuck in “J-train Bushwick” and the like. No, Danni, “tone deaf” can’t “be a brand,” even if it is “what Lena Dunham does.”

Shunned by everyone at the office, invisible to the popular stoner/vaper influencer Colin (Dylan O’Brien) she inexplicably crushes on, and too self-absorbed to remember her office-mate Kelvin’s (Karan Soni) name, Danni craves a place at the table with the cool kids, to be invited to “gay bowling,” to be “important.”

Colin’s kind offer of a few hits off his new 7-ended blunt, or if you prefer, “joint,” gets Danni buzzed enough that her online envy of influencers and colleagues going off to exotic places turns into “I could fake that.” A few poses in a beret, a lot of help from Photoshop or its equivalent, an invented (with website) “writer’s retreat” in Paris and an abrupt vacation demand from work, and she’s off.

Danni is living the same “best life” as the most seasoned online humbraggers, taking in the sights, looking cute in her travel togs, all from the comfort of…Bushwick.

Damned if she doesn’t wake up the next AM to a flood of concerned posts and messages — from friends, new “followers” and her parents. Paris has experienced a string of citywide terror attacks. And checking in as “safe” isn’t going to cover her fake Paris trip tracks.

“Not Okay” is at its sunniest with Danni inventing the trip, and then scrambling to cover it — taking luggage and her beret to the airport so her Mom (Embeth Davidtz) can be relieved to have her home, and her Dad (Brennan Brown) can break down in tears as he embraces her.

That’s the photo, taken by a newspaper journalist, that starts Danni down the path to fame. From there, seeing as how little anyone questions her authenticity or the veracity of her experience, she starts writing about “what I saw” and becomes a media sensation, “blowing up Instagram, speaking of bombings.”

But if she wants to write convincing accounts of trauma and PTSD, she’ll need to do her research. That’s how she finds herself in a survivor’s self-help group. It’s not the 40something guy who was at the Manchester Ariana Grande concert-bombing she latches onto. It’s the young school shooting survivor Rowan (Mia Isaac, terrific), a kid who became an activist and got Internet famous for it, who takes her in.

It’s probably no coincidence that “Not Okay,” which takes its title from an expression Danni steals from Rowan, loses its way when the hoaxer starts appropriating experience and behavior from the shooting survivor. That’s not okay.

We watch as Rowan kind of flinches and then smiles and agrees to every little suggestion Danni makes that allows her to cadge a little bit more of her fame, experience and audience. It’s cruel and callous, and Deutch can’t make what the script does with this plot twist funny.

Danni’s guilt is personified in her seeing the “person of interest” in Paris bombings, an unknown man in a face-hiding hoodie, in her nightmares, in public spaces and any time she does something that wrongs poor Rowan.

As the picture takes its turn towards Danni getting everything she wanted and slowly start to second guess her goals and eventually her unethical methods, “Not Okay” gropes around for a resolution that will challenge, inform and maybe entertain. And it fails.

Shephard has picked a topic for her film that stays case-specific when she wants and needs it to expand into a larger statement. Yes, there’s appropriation, yes the web “turns victims into villains” at the drop of a hat, and yes, every Jussie Smollett who claims victimhood for some wrong that never happened erodes confidence in what the hive mind can accept as fact.

Is that a raging societal problem, or is Shephard getting on us for our rush to lionize, or condemn?

Danni as a creation is little more than a cliche of a stereotype, as is the one woman in the office to instinctively mistrust her. That’s always the gay in the screenplay, isn’t it?

When our anti-heroine skips past the truly righteous folks who have responded to her “I’m not okay” column with their own struggles to ask “Did you see Kendall Jenner’s post? I had no IDEA she’d experienced so much discrimination,” it’s not much of a laugh. But that’s your movie, right there, and the lesson to be taught.

The generation grasping for fame on the Internet learns compassion and finally figures out the difference between authentic people and real suffering, and everybody who just strikes that pose for “woke points,” likes and followers. That’s make an OK comedy, or even a dramedy, and almost certainly a better film than this.

Rating:  R for language throughout, drug use and some sexual content

Cast: Zoey Deutch, Mia Isaac, Dylan O’Brien, Embeth Davidtz, Nadia Alexander and Karan Soni.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Quinn Shephard. A Searchlight release on Hulu.

Running time: 1:40

Lost memories, abductions and an odyssey to find an abducted mother, all in this dreamy Aug. 12 release from Juno Films.

French music video veteran and sometime feature filmmaker (“Our Day Will Come”) Romain Gavris brings Netflix a French (subtitled) caper comedy with a mean streak, “Le monde est à toi” aka “The World is Yours.”

It’s a “one last job/score” tale that takes its title from the DePalma/Pacino “Scarface” and its style from “Snatch” era Guy Ritchie. Yeah, it’s funny. And violent. And very French.

Karim Leklou of “A Prophet” and “The Stronghold” stars as Farès, the “plugger” version of a mid-level management drug trafficker. He’s at that “getting out” stage of his “career,” and has his “straight” life all planned out — an exclusive ice-pop distribution deal for Morocco, a townhouse in the suburbs with a pool — his version of “Haute bourgeoisie for me.”

But his pickpocket/safecracker mother, played with amoral, abusive and martyred glee by Isabelle Adjani (“Diabolique,” “Camille Claudel,” Ishtar”), won’t let him have the money. He took the risks, earned it and saved it. She’s “handled” the cash, and her refusal to turn it over first makes him wonder if she’s put her dream life ahead of his, or worst, that she’s gambled it all away.

So that drug run to Spain that he turned down, the one the deranged and infantile new gang boss Poutane (Sofian Khammes) pitched? He’s forced to take it, now. Thanks to Mum.

He’s must bring two of Poutane’s very young and psychotic henchmen, both named Mohamed (Mahamadou Sangaré, Mounir Amamra). He’ll need the aged, punchy and chatty ex-con Henri (Vincent Cassel of “Mesrine,” “Eastern Promises” and “Black Swan”) to watch his back. And he could use one of his mother’s pickpocket proteges, the younger woman his mother calls “your girlfriend” (Oulaya Amamra).

One thing we figure out from Farès’ unwillingness to confront his mother and her refusal to apologize is that he’s not as tough as most of the folks he mixes with. He’s right to want to get out.

But to pay for the cars he’ll need for this job he and Henri need to pull off a pre-smuggling run robbery. “Fake guns” is all they need, he insists. When it goes horribly, hilariously wrong, the die is cast and the tone is set.

Farès is trapped in this deal with idiots, flakes and untrustworthy reprobates. Everybody he deals with is likely to push him around. And nothing about this junket to Costa Brava will go according to plan.

“The World is Yours” isn’t an out-and-out farce, but the Guy Ritchie plot, cast of characters and even editing strategy finds laughs left, right and every which way in between.

Running gags like everybody thinking almost-hapless Farès’ Mr. Freeze (ice pop) deal is a “scam,” NOBODY being trustworthy and the Two Mohamed’s passion for Illuminati conspiracies (explained on Youtube) and their virulent Anglophia are introduced and return, funnier each time they play out.

“Speak FRENCH you f—–g BRITS!”

A double-crossing “Scotsman” can be distracted by a pretty young thing (Amamra’s pickpocket, Lamya) if she karaokes the Scot (Sam Spruell) and his soccer goon accomplice’s favorite jam.

Toto’s always good for a laugh.

Gavras may have music video chops, but there are only a few moments when the editing — handling a “How drug dealers get tangled up in ‘conspiracy to commit terrorism’ stings” in a montage — and pacing are totally up to comedy snuff.

But Leklou, sort of a French version of hangdog British character actor Daniel Mays, has us rooting for him, alternately worried or furious on Farès’ behalf. Amamra makes a most mercenary femme fatale and Adjani and Cassel thoroughly class-up the joint, each playing characters who are maddening in the most amusing ways.

With Netflix’s poor batting average in over-financing and filming Hollywood thrillers, perhaps the solution to their declining viewership is to spend more of that money abroad on films like “The World is Yours.” The French have this genre wired.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug content, profanity

Cast: Karim Leklou, Isabelle Adjani, Vincent Cassel, Oulaya Amamra, Sam Spruell, Sofian Khammes, Mahamadou Sangaré, Mounir Amamra and Gaby Rose.

Credits: Directed by Romain Gavras, scripted by Romain Gavras, Karim Boukercha and Noé Debré. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

The title “The Last Movie Stars” conveys a certain Hollywood mystique and history. And there’s little doubt that however they broke the mold, whatever their longevity as a couple, their acting reputations and charitable contributions, Oscar winners Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman were the embodiment of old school Hollywood image burnishing.

Together forever, with only rare tabloid hints that they weren’t the perfect couple, Actor’s Studio to “And the winner is,” theirs was a storybook/cover-story/”60 Minutes” puff piece for the ages.

Newman was the ever faithful husband, father, craftsman actor, philanthropist and man’s man, a success in every field he tackled, including race car driving. Woodward was the funny, folksy beauty, lauded as one of the great actresses of her generation, a mother who raised their children, embraced his children from an earlier marriage, and took with great humor all the “He’s with HER?” sniping that came with being married to one of the screen’s great male beauties.

She’d bring her knitting on camera for TV interviews. He’d jovially join her, worshipping her openly in joint or solo appearances, joking around with generations of talk show hosts while cultivating the guise of a smart, thoughtful, compassionate Everyman.

Golden Age MGM studio publicists couldn’t have done a better job of creating and maintaining such enviable personas.

But contrary to that genteel South Carolina image, Woodward was a fiercely competitive and breathtakingly ambitious woman, starting as a teen campaigning for this or that high school “queen” honor, driving on into her stage breakthrough, film stardom and the Oscar — for “The Three Faces of Eve” — that came all-too quickly.

“I had infinite belief it would happen,” she declared in interviews. “Acting is like sex. You should do it, not talk about it” is about as deep into her technique as she cared to get. As a mother?

“Actors rarely make good parents,” she admitted, wistfully wondering at what having children cost her career.

Woodward may have made her own dress to wear the night she won the Oscar. But that wild child floozy she played opposite Brando in “The Fugitive Kind” let her sum herself up and that thirst for fame in ways magazine cover stories never did, in words written by her fellow Southerner, Tennessee Williams.

“I’m an exhibitionist. I want people to know I’m alive.”

Newman, just “an a–hole from Shaker Heights,” as his fellow Actor’s Studio member Ben Gazarra once said, challenging a “phony” performance, was the son of a sporting goods business owner and a mother with toxic tendencies that Woodward and Newman’s first wife got to witness up close.

“I was running away from something,” Newman freely admitted about his move into acting. “I wasn’t running towards something.”

Ethan Hawke‘s entertaining revealing and definitive six part series for CNN Films and HBO Max, premiering July 22, peels away the First Couple of Hollywood’s facade even as it celebrates the accomplished talents and complicated people behind those images.

Recruited by one of their daughters to film “The Last Movie Stars,” Hawke took it on as a pandemic project, with its prospect of Zoom interviews mixed with half a century of TV talk show appearances and news profiles, as well as generous samplings of their screen work. But he was also given access to the notes of a planned memoir that Newman abandoned. Later in life, Newman commissioned screenwriter and family intimate Stewart Stern (“Rebel Without a Cause,” “Sybil,” “Rachel, Rachel”) to interview him, Woodward, legions of work colleagues, family and friends.

And although Newman destroyed most of the audio tapes of this 100 interview undertaking, the meticulous Stern had the tapes transcribed before that happened. He spoke with Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, Kazan and Ritt and Rosenberg and George Roy Hill, Estelle Parsons and generations of directors, writers and co-stars. Newman’s first wife, the one he started cheating on with his Broadway co-star (fellow understudy) Woodward after the birth of their third child, sat for a seriously frank and pained conversation. Stern got their fellow actors and their directors to talk about their strengths, weaknesses and the personal crises they went through on and off the set over the course of their careers.

Recognizing this material as gold, Hawke then rounded up legions of his own contemporaries, actors and fellow fans most of them. He got them to voice-over narrate/act out, as “a play with voices,” these deep-dive transcribed interviews, Woodward and Newman included, and letters they exchanged. We see Hawke arrange these voice-overs, and see and hear him and his friends explain and discuss, like delighted fanboys and fangirls, what he was uncovering, what was going on in their private and professional lives, what the two of them learned in the Actor’s Studio, how the arcs of their careers diverged and what they must have cost them.

Vincent D’Onofrio, brought in to voice Karl Malden and John Huston, gives the most moving and succinct demonstration of “The Method” I’ve ever seen, showing Hawke the difference between “a line reading without a ‘choice,’ and a line reading without a ‘choice,'” breaking down, mid-Zoom call, on command. It’s magical.

Elia Kazan’s Actor’s Studio “Actor’s Oath?” Ok, that’s touching, but kind of hilarious.

George Clooney performs Newman’s no-holds-barred interview answers for Stern, Laura Linney handles Woodward’s candid chats. Sam Rockwell does”Cool Hand Luke” director Stuart Rosenberg, Bobby Cannavale does Kazan, Alexander Nivola is Redford, recalling the practical jokes the “Butch” and “Sundance” co-stars and lifelong chums shared and “never talked about” to each other or the general public.

What the always-talking-about-racing boor Newman did with the old Porsche body Redford had dropped off — anonymously — as a birthday present, is criminal. What Redford did to it after it was returned “as molten metal,” is inspired. And on and on that went.

Films and film performances are deftly deconstructed and admired. Writer and director Paul Schrader calls “Hud” “a landmark…the most important performance in the history of (American) cinema,” thanks to its “unapologetic bad guy” title character and Newman’s unsentimental portrayal of him.

While “The Last Movie Stars” is able to showcase screen tests for famous roles neither star got in their 20s — Newman was always “everybody’s third choice, after Brando and Dean,” huffs close-friend Vidal (Hilariously impersonated by Brooks Ashmanskas — well done!) — the series reminds us that there are several Newman films we never see re-broadcast on TV or available for streaming, and that there are Woodward performances that are literally lost.

Hawke has to order online an old VHS copy of Woodward and director Franklin J. Schaffner’s film, “The Stripper,” brutally recut and retitled from William Inge’s play “A Loss of Roses” by an infamous studio chief.

The series is more or less chronological, skipping back to fill in details about childhood trauma and the “real” story behind that storybook Broadway backstage romance that ended Newman’s first marriage. But Hawke shares his own process, discussing with pal Billy Crudup and his actress-daughter Maya Hawke how he should approach this or that.

“I want the ‘Cool Hand Luke’ section to be GREAT.”

What he settled on, at the suggestion of friends, family and philosophers, was to treat Woodward, Newman and their marriage as three separate characters. Hawke let’s us in on his filmmaking process as he debates a CNN producer on whether to include the post-mortem auction that saw someone pay $15 million for Newman’s favorite watch. As an interviewer, he pushes and probes their children to get at whether Paul was “a functioning alcoholic,” but intimations that he cheated on Joanne are limited to tabloid headlines and a daughter’s memory of seeing a memoir by someone who claimed to have slept with him tucked in his desk drawer.

What’s far more interesting here is the way “Paris Blues” co-star Poitier avoids labeling Newman an actor with “soul,” the way Woodward and everybody else always assumed him to be “second banana” to Brando, Dean, even McQueen and especially in his own house, an inferior talent when compared to Woodward.

Director Martin Ritt, a frequent collaborator with them both, may amusingly sniff that his “Hud” star “never wants to work with me again” because most of their films were “failures” — aesthetically and financially, at least in Newman’s eyes. “I get it, I get it. He always had enormous hits with that George Roy Hill (“The Sting,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Slapshot”). “

But “Talent is a genetic accident,” Ritt insisted. What Newman, a self-described “emotional Republican” (not a self-compliment) did with “his average (emotional) equipment” was extraordinary.

“The private nature of Paul, the unwillingness to commit, which would then make the commitment extraordinary,” was his secret.

That, Woodward would often jokingly snipe, and having roles, success and screen glory that just “fell in his lap” thanks to Brando aging out of youth roles, James Dean dying young and Newman getting his breaks in role after role meant for Dean, launching his career.

The film tilts and not-that-subtly more towards Newman, as his spotlight career was fuller and more iconic and her films more of-their-time, many of them aging badly.

Nothing Hawke uncovers here changes his first impressions, related to his fellow actors in his Zoom pitches as two film stars we associate with “love (“PASSIONATE,” several of their children call it.), family, ethical citizens” who happened to be great actors.

But telling Woodward and Newman’s stories this thoroughly, using a parade of people living, including “Color of Money” director Scorsese, with his encyclopedic memory of every film he’s seen, and long gone, actors, writers, directors — all people who take care with words and how they come off and take this “movie” and film acting business seriously — make Hawke’s documentary a new benchmark for in-depth looks at films and those who make them.

For film lovers, “The Last Movie Stars” is unapologetically essential viewing, a gold standard fitting that rare on-screen power couple whose image together transcended even the often-spectacular work they did, with or without each other, on the big screen.

By the time its touching finale plays out, the great actors who evolved into the greatest philanthropists Hollywood ever produced will have you agreeing with that bold, challenging title. They were “the last movie stars.”

Rating: unrated, profanity, adult themes

Cast: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Ethan Hawke, Laura Linney, George Clooney, Vincent D’Onofrio, Sam Rockwell, Zoe Kazan, Sidney Poitier, Martin Scorsese, Mark Ruffalo, Oscar Isaac, Bobby Cannavale, Billy Crudup, Alexander Nivola, Nell Newman, Stephanie Newman, Susan Kendall Newman, Claire Newman, Melissa Newman and Brooks Ashmanskas.

Credits: Directed by Ethan Hawke, scripted/transcribed by Stewart Stern. A CNN Films/HBO Max release.

Running time: 6 episodes @50-80 minutes each

You’ll recognize a face or two in this Aug 12 release from Well Go USA.

Into horror? Getting your horror fix the horror streamer Shudder?

Here’s a teaser for an Aug. 16 release there.

“Bundles” is a cute, sassy and scruffy indie dramedy about women — especially Black women — and “good hair,” what they’ll go through to get it and how some folks figure out an illegal way to feed that need.

And then this light little microbudget movie goes all serious, with extreme consequences, and this promising picture goes straight to hell. Off a cliff, look-out-below and let’s watch some folks get murdered as we do in a sort of “Whose idea WAS this?” fiasco that is almost stupefying to behold.

Co-directors Ryan Jordan and Jeffrey Leslie and screenwriter Maurice Hill had the good sense to borrow Spike Lee’s “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop” backdrop, set it in a high school, salon and barbershop of Washington, D.C. with young women mugging other women to snip off their long locks and re-sell them as weaves, extensions and wefts (“bundles”) for fun and profit. But they lost the thread when they took that goofy notion and introduced street gang violence, turning the third act into a bloodbath.

It starts as a high school prank, a bit of revenge for dark-skinned-and-touchy-about-it Morgan (Yavonna Harris), whose mouthy, lunchroom “dozens” duel with her former Latina pal Maria (Marissa Arguijo) escalates beyond “burnt-ass face” to “Andale, ho!” and leaves Morgan in tears, ruining her perfectly-made-up class photo face.

Her hairdresser older sister Jackie (Tanisha Cardwell), Jackie’s friend Tiff (Alexis Jacquelyn Smith) and ready-to-rumble goddess-pal Vick-short-for-Victoria (Naysa Young) react to this “Code Red Morgan” with a plan to “get” Maria.

They tase her, hack off a hunk of her hair, and realizing what they have, package it for resale. Does $1700 for long blonde extensions (Jackie dyes it) sound like a fair offer?

“Per gram, hair is worth more than marijuana!”

The quartet has found a way to quick cash “without stripping or selling ass,” so they go into business, tasing and shearing Arabic, Asian, African-American and Latina (and Latino) hair all over The District.

“If I was racially insecure, I would want this s— for myself!”

The TV coverage of women hysterical at the violation of it all is just over-the-top enough to be funny.

There’s snappy banter, with the occasional awkward(unpolished novice-actress line-reading, is funny in these scenes — strong, mouthy women putting down catcallers, gossiping in the beauty parlor, menfolk joking about the gang that’s “scalping” women all over DC, the cops irked by the lack of leads in this crime wave of “pranks.”

And then a line is crossed, an Asian street gang gets involved, and any teachable-moment/guilt-and-redemption good vibes vanish.

It is astonishing how off-key “Bundles” goes, and how badly the violence is introduced into this light dramedy, and how grimly and poorly-acted that violence plays out.

Did the filmmakers not workshop this? Did they not invite trusted friends to watch the dailies and warn them off this wrong turn?

More’s the pity. They were onto something until they weren’t.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Yavonna Harris, Naysa Young, Marissa Arguijo, Alexis Jacquelyn Smith, Kevin Tan and Tanisha Cardwell

Credits: Directed by Ryan Jordan and Jeffrey Leslie, scripted by Maurice Hill. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:36

Leave it to Jordan Peele to turn a fun twist on a summer saucer story/creature feature into a Major Motion Picture Event.

“Nope” is Peele’s “Signs,” turning his camera away from the scalding racial satire of “Get Out” and the obscurant, self-serious messaging of “Us” and pointing it at everyone in our “get mine” fame-whoring culture, especially the exploit-everything ethos of Hollywood where he makes his living.

Damn it’s fun, a popcorn movie with smarts, sentiment and unconventional performances, plot turns and “logic” that wrong-foots the viewer time and again.

Haywood’s Hollywood Horses is a ranch in a remote, mountainous, treeless and oft-filmed valley in Southern California (Santa Clarita and environs). A stunt-horse rental operation for the film industry, it’s run by a Black family that claims descent from that “first movie star,” the Black jockey filmed in Eadweard Muybridge’s 1881 movies-inventing snippet of a horse and its jockey in motion.

Patriarch Otis (Keith David) is a master trainer long past retirement age. But his introverted son, Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya) doesn’t seem ready to step into his shoes. And manic chatterbox daughter Emerald (Keke Palmer) is never around.

One day, metal rains from the sky and Dad winds up with a nickel punched into his skull. It kills him. Otis Jr. or “OJ” doesn’t really mourn. He hasn’t the time. How can he keep this ranch going?

A commercial shoot that goes terribly wrong underscores this. Otis needs the outgoing, showbiz striver Emerald to interact with and charm the crew, and she’s irresponsibly late, infuriatingly self-promoting and distracted, so there’s an accident.

Nothing for it but to start selling off horses until they can get back in the industry’s good graces. The owner of the latest incarnation of a nearby small-time theme park (Steven Yuen of “Minari”) is a buyer. Emerald tags along for the sale and we hear Ricky “Jupe” Park’s claim to fame as he shows them, and us his tiny personal career museum.

He used to be a child star, but on one show co-starring a chimpanzee, the ape went nuts and blood was spilled. Actors died, Jupe was traumatized and Hollywood changed its rules for working with chimps. At least OJ gets this. That’s one thing the slow-to-get-it trainer OJ understands — animal behavior.

But selling one more horse won’t save Haywood’s Hollywood Horses. For that, the extraordinary thing that killed their dad — noise and lights and movement and whatever-else-it-is-in-the-sky that made it rain metal objects — has to repeat itself. They’ve got to get “the money shot,” “undeniable” proof of of flying saucers on video.

That’s how they meet tech nerd/conspiracy buff Angel (Brandon Perea giving us a dopey/hyper Dave Franco riff) at the nearby consumer electronics/CCTV warehouse store.

“Maybe you’re in a UFO ‘hot spot!'” Angel enthuses. “‘Ancient Aliens,’ History Channel, WATCH that sh–!“”

That’s why Emerald wants that grizzled director of photography (Michael Wincott) from that failed commercial shoot’s help as well.

OJ — yes, people wince at the sound of his name — keeps his head down as he maintains his routine and can’t quite think ahead as he ponders the nature of the “bad miracle” that has befallen them. Emerald’s eyes are on the prize — intellectual and photographic property, “Oprah” TV fame, the works. And Angel? He’s hellbent on horning in on whatever they have planned.

Peele’s films and TV (the “Twilight Zone” reboot, “Lovecraft Country”) all have a flicker of folklore about them. In “Nope,” it’s Hollywood and show business myths and UFO or “UAP” lore that he taps into, serving up “facts” and events that resemble real history, or at least the “Ancient Aliens” version. Some of these are presented in flashbacks or related in mesmerizing, sober and seriously-detailed anecdotes. That TV show debacle? “SNL’s” take on it was “killer!”

Horror movies exist in their own world, and Peele plays around with “rules” in this one that are basically brain droppings of sci-fi author Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” “Teasers” are aliens who just want to mess with us by showing up in remote places and appearing to yahoos “nobody will believe” when they claim to have seen aliens. And in Adams’ universe, there’s something called The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, an animal “so mind-bogglingly stupid that it thinks that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you.” Animal behavior, a big subtext of the plot, just might be universal.

Keke Palmer flat out brings it here, turning her brand of “What’s she on?” manic intensity to someone who reacts with awestruck terror at seeing the extraordinary, but only when it turns menacing. Palmer dazzles as Emerald shifts from frenetic eagerness to exploit “our moment” to fear to fury as the story unfolds. Perea matches her comic energy as Angel.

Kaluuya has the trickier job, playing the introvert. OJ seems on-the-spectrum slow on the uptake, even when things fall from the sky and knock his aged father out of the saddle. Kaluuya makes OJ as irritating as Emerald– forever under-reacting to threats, danger and loss. OJ’s inertia is as “off” and Emerald’s breathless, unthinking let’s GET something out of this over-eagerness.

Peele picks up a Tarantino trick in casting two iconic character actors, David and Wincott, giving them them lovely big screen curtain calls/career bumps with these two chewy roles.

Not all of it makes perfect sense, not every character’s behavior is logical or psychologically defensible. And the title has a glib one-liner Will Smith sales pitch quality that feels forced when we hear it on screen.

But “Nope” is a thoroughly entertaining ride, as strange as it is beautiful, growing even stranger and more beautiful in the later acts. And Peele, “Tenet” director of photography Hoyte Van Hoytema and composer Michael Abels ensure that every scene, every frame has the look, sound and feel of an Event, a movie you won’t want to miss on the big screen because everyone will be talking about it for the rest of the summer.

Rating: R for language throughout and some violence/bloody images.

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott and Keith David

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jordan Peele. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:15

The Cher-like Endless “Farewell Tour” that is the Halloween franchise brings back Jamie Lee one more time, Oct. 14.

“Too Old for Fairytales” is an aimless, amiable coming-of-age ramble about a video game addict who has to grow up — at least a little — when his mother gets sick.

It’s a harmless and not utterly charmless Polish kids’ dramedy (subtitled, or dubbed into English) of The Big Game genre — a video game team hoping to win The Big “Robot Masters” e-sports tournament. But there’s stuff about learning to think of others, getting over being “spoiled,” getting that first crush, coping with bullies and figuring out life is better lived when you add some balance to it, blended in.

Maciej Karas is Waldek, our hero and narrator. He’s a tween deep into first-person-shooter online games and doted-on by his single mom (Karolina Gruszka). With her cooking for him, dressing him and walking him to school — not even letting him cross the street by himself — he’s got all the time in the world to practice his sport and dream of gaming glory, the spotlight, “hordes of fans…and GROUPIES.”

That part of the dream is shared with his BFF Staszek (Patryk Siemek), who has “gone all hormonal” and girl crazy. They just lost a local tourney, but no worries. The BIG one is a month away.

But Mom is giving him and us a lot of worried looks. She’s summoned her no-nonsense/all-nonsense hippie aunt (Dorota Kolak) to stay with Waldek, because Mom is headed to the hospital “for tests.”

The coddled kid may not have a clue what that means. All he can see is this major disruption in his life right before his Big Tourney. Goofy Aunt Mariola makes him step away from his games and take bike rides. And that’s not all.

“I have to DRESS myself? I have to FEED myself? I have to walk ALONE to school? I have to cross the STREET by myself?”

Wait’ll he tells mom that he’s dozing off at the computer from exhaustion, that a team member quit on him and that he’s breaking a sweat for the first time in his life thanks to this flakey aunt who has this skydiving-simulator rig she uses to hang from the ceiling and go to her happy place.

Waldek and Straszek will have to recruit (“cast”) a new member for their “Three Kings” team. It might be an older player, maybe a younger one, possibly a girl (“No WAY!”) or even a gamer whose online image is a voice-disguised giant ant avatar.

And Waldek has to learn life lessons, to think about others and care for their needs, to “cut (someone’s) fear in half” by shouldering part of their burden, to learn the difference between good lies and bad ones and how to be a man from his grandpa (Andrzej Grabowski), who appears in the third act.

Kolak’s dizzy auntie character is pleasant enough, but not remotely hilarious or “larger than life” gregarious the way such figures typically turn up in movies.

The jokey handling of meeting and competing for Waldek’s first crush (Amelia Fijalkowska) is cute, if not exactly original. All the ways the movie makes the kid grow up, with a healthy dose of “No more hugs, shake hands LIKE A MAN” lecturing, play as kind of traditional if not downright old fashioned.

And the story arc’s limited parameters mean we know most of what’s coming, with our guesses predicated on how locked-in the need for “happy endings” is for this “fairy tale.”

All of which inspire the label “harmless, not utterly charmless.”

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Maciej Karas, Dorota Kolak, Karolina Gruszka,
Patryk Siemek, Amelia Fijalkowska and Andrzej Grabowski

Credits: Directed by Kristofer Rus, Scripted by
Agnieszka Dabrowska, based on her novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46