Movie Nation

“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

This debut indie comedy got a little attention at Cannes, and picked up by A24.

Looks cute. Comes our way Aug. 24, which is that notorious late August dumping ground for movies with low expectations.

He made a few mostly-forgotten films, but clay animation pioneer Will Vinton brought stop-motion animation back into vogue with his famous “California Raisins” TV commercials in the ’80s.

Anyway, his role in bringing back the art form that was used long before he came along — Remember “Gumby and Pokey” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV? Clay animation predates tjosenshows in films, is worth taking a look at.

His Claymation work was featured in Michael Jackson videos, “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” that Eddie Murphy TV series “The PJs” and elsewhere, his career probably helped by the fact that he copyrighted the term “claymation,” although I’m not sure who first coined that. I remember his lawyers sending me a threatening letter for using it in a review around 1990. I don’t know who coined the term “douchebag” either, but its equivalent certainly comes to mind at the thought of this guy seizing a term in common currency and claiming it as his own.

The art form predates Vinton by decades and decades. It broke out on TV in the ’50s (“Gumby,”;Davey and Goliath”) and even earlier in film.

“Claydream” comes out Aug. 5.

There’s an adjustment period facing the average viewer for those first few minutes of Billy Porter’s high school trans-romance “Anything’s Possible.” It’s not unlike what one experiences diving into a film from a foreign culture, in a genre you can’t quite peg, starring actors you’ve never seen before and in a language you don’t understand.

You can be a bit unmoored by it all.

It’s not the subject matter of “Anything’s Possible” that made me disconnect. The entire enterprise seems artificial, even leaving out the omni-present “gender issues.”

When a dad character in the movie jokes about his primping teen son’s piled-high pompadour — “‘Grease’ auditions today at school?” — that’s kind of what’s on the screen, a lot of Actor’s Equity veterans playing high school kids, just the way Olivia and Travolta did it back in the ’80s.

Porter, a Broadway and TV (“Pose”) star, cast his film with stage actors and a social media influencer as his star. So it’s a dewy-youth coming-of-age story that feels like “Grease,” or those filmed youth-oriented stage musicals Disney+ televises, only with feature film production values. The older-than-they-should-be actors require some extra “suspension of disbelief.”

None more than our heroine. As Kelsa, a clothes horse adored and accepted by her divorced doctor Mom (“Hamilton’s” Renée Elise Goldsberry), the trans woman, influencer and TV actress (“Sideways Smile”) Eva Reign speaks in a thoughtfully-considered, deep and adenoidal affectation that belies whatever age Eva is using today.

When she moved from St. Louis to New York, her birth name and gender were tossed away, and so apparently was her birth certificate.

Her performance is polished, subdued and very much controlled, a world-wise actress with a lot of perspective playing an innocent, just-figuring-everything-out-for-the-first-time youth. It’s an affectation piled on top of other affectations, each one further removing the character from a connection with the viewer.

Think of the transgender turns in “Orange is the New Black” or “Tangerine.” Those performances felt organic and natural. This feels like pose-as-performance.

As Kelsa vlogs about transitioning — at 17 — in high school, about her favorite exotic animals, and muses about her “existential despair,” the viewer can wonder “What high school kid talks like that, with that voice in command of a vocabulary that wholly articulates one’s gender dysphoria and ‘despair? At 17?'”

It’s almost a relief when her BFF Em (Courtnee Carter) blurts out “I broke my finger on accident” later in the movie. That’s one characteristic of authentic high school speech — grammatical boners.

The rest of the movie — like life itself, like high school, like your hormonal teen years — is kind of messy, something you muddle through.

She’s on hormone suppression therapy, she reveals, but is far enough along and above all MATURE enough to ponder moving on from knowing “what I need to survive” to figuring out “what I need to THRIVE.” Kelsa is wrestling with all this on her semi-secret (Mom doesn’t know about it) vlog, to “help others” by sharing her experience of transitioning and just getting through high school.

Kelsa has a zoology degree and becoming a nature film camera operator among her life goals. Boys?

“Why have a boyfriend when I have two best friends?”

That would be the tall fashion plate Em and the boyfriended hipster Chris (Kelly Lamor Wilson).

Em’s got her eye on cute Khal (Abubakr Ali). But Khal is noticing the attention-grabbing blend of fashion and femininity that is Kelsa. Not that he can tell his gay-intolerant pal Otis (Grant Reynolds) that.

Kelsa gets to turn her attention from herself with a “Not EVERYthing is about gender” as she wonders, “How do you know when you officially have a crush?”

And Khal finds himself and others challenging and questioning his attraction. Is he is just in this for “the ‘woke’ points?” Kids in high school aren’t just known for “experimenting.” They’re infamous for the stand-out-from-the-crowd posturing.

“There are a lot of men who’re attracted to trans women,” Chris growls at him, “but when it gets down to it, they’re not down...to get to it.”

Each member of River Point High’s most talked-about couple loses a friend over their coupling. With outside pressures and out of town college on the horizon, can this relationship be saved?

The best scenes in “Anything’s Possible” aren’t the tender moments, the blush of first love and the chemistry of a first kiss. Because, to be brutally honest, we don’t buy it and those scenes — far too many of them for the film’s own good — simply do not play, not with a couple of 26-31 year olds trying to project an innocence that would only be convincing on the stage, and not in cinematic close-up.

But cute bits work, such as the way Khal courts Kelsa by imitating her favorite nature documentary host, David Attenborough, as he comically comments on high school courtship rituals and the like.

The folks playing the grownups make the best impressions here, parents that range from understanding to defiantly protective, with Goldsberry having an epic shout-off with a fellow parent in a meeting in the principal’s office.

Porter, a first time filmmaker (look for his cameo), tries to get into almost EVERYthing to do with trans issues into this film — bathrooms, and “our space” and J.K. Rowling-styled “socialized male energy” debates about testosterone and what defines a woman. When Kelsa bumps shoulders or gives somebody a shove, she transforms into the equivalent of a pugnacious point guard “creating space,” and that strength, muscle and aggression disparity is very much part of the whole public discussion of that corner of the ever-lengthening LGBTQIA acronym.

All that makes for an unfocused, jumbled movie that isn’t quite settled on what it wants to be, a romance at war with itself, struggling to find its heart while never-really-landing punches in its political debates. It’s topical, but it settles nothing, informative and sensitive in its representations, cute but never cute enough.

Rating: PG-13 for strong language, thematic material, sexual material and brief teen drinking.

Cast: Eva Reign, Abubakr Ali, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Kelly Lamor Wilson, Courtnee Carter, Naveen Paddock and Grant Reynolds.

Credits: Directed by Billy Porter, scripted by Ximena García Lecuona (as Alvaro Garcia Lecuona). An Orion/MGM release via Amazon.

Running time: 1:36

Call me old fashioned, but the last thing I want in a sex comedy is “timid” and “coy.”

“How to Please a Woman” is an airless, laughless romantic “romp” from down under about a woman who takes over a failed moving company and turns “Pleased to Move You” into a moving, house-cleaning, stripping and sexual service operation.

Because, in Oz — Australia — the ladies are frustrated. And nobody wants to live in a dirty house.

Sally Phillips (“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”) stars Gina, a 50something business viability assessor who gets laid off on her birthday, of all days. Rather than take the slam-dunk age discrimination lawsuit laid at her feet by her clueless, boorish younger boss (Oliver Wenn), she has an epiphany. She’ll take over this all-guy moving company her firm has just shut down.

Blame her mates at her morning swim club for that. They pitched in and bought her a “whatever you want” stripper (Alexander England) for her birthday, and she turned her embarrassment into “Could you clean my house?”

As that stripper/sex worker happened to be one of those newly-laid-off movers, the idea’s right there in front of her.

What do women really want? A guy who’ll clean her house. Topless. And maybe take things to the next level.

“Obviously the cleaning must be effective,” she says, pitching the new business model to the lads of “Pleased to Move You.” “With a minimum of one orgasm” guaranteed. No boys, “yours” doesn’t count.

Word gets around.

“I hear he leaves no SURFACE untouched.”

That’s the movie’s opening pitch. The twist here is that the guys — one hunk, the rest several peers short of a six-pack — aren’t all that in the sack. So, Gina’s sex-worker-hiring mates from the swim club are needed for on-the-job training.

Gina’s own frustrations are a part of the package, as well. And as predictable as that is, as amusing as her first encounter with a vibrator might be and with an age-appropriate manager (Erik Thomson) right there in the office with her to “solve” her problem, writer-director Renée Webster can’t find a funny line or amusing situation to save her life.

Here’s how “off” this is. Gina’s friends hire her a sex worker for her birthday. They mention the passage of time since she’s had something romantic happen to her. And we’ve seen Gina with a husband (Cameron Daddo), a lawyer who gave her cash for her birthday because he’s that considerate.

But since her friends don’t speak of this Adrian fellow, since Gina seems mostly alone at home, there’s hint after hint that character isn’t really there. One can’t tell if he’s dead and she’s just seeing his tuned-out/checked-out-of-the-marriage ghost, or if he’s just a stiff, and not the good kind.

The are semi-comical sex scenes here, but the nudity is all in the locker room of their swim club. There’s a signals-crossing joke sitcom moment or two and a “Real cop, or stripper cop?” gag. There is the hope of a little comic frisson from her gaggle of gal-pals.

But none of it generates anything more than a smirk. The players mug a bit, but nobody works up a sweat, in front of or behind the camera.

“How to Please a Woman” may play to its target audience, giving voice to female relationship frustrations and the like. But as pleasantly drab as it generally is, I dare say it won’t please any gender, any where.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Sally Phillips, Alexander England, Caroline Brazier, Erik Thomson, Tasma Walton, Hayley McElhinney and Roz Hammond

Credits: Scripted and directed by Renée Webster. A Brainstorm Media release.

Running time: 1:47

My heart goes out to any aspiring filmmaker who takes a shot at making a Western with no money. All horror takes is a bit of makeup, some fake blood and — in the case of a cheap zombie movie — ragged clothes and tubs of ashen gray makeup.

But a Western? You have guns, and cheaping out on having an armorer on the set is what killed Brandon Lee. You have horses, and need to hire actors who look like they know which end is which, as well as wranglers. And you need some undeveloped, less-spoiled corners of the American West, and a director of photography who can give your picture a look that feels documentary real, sepia-toned nostalgic or dust and sweat and blood and sagebrush Sergio Leone.

“Black Wood” has a novel setting, the under-filmed wilds of South Dakota’s Black Hills, and every now and then an image pops on screen that looks just right — fog in the rocky, forested hills, a rider galloping down a prairie ridgeline. But writer-director Chris Canfield’s debut micro-budget/no-budget feature — a horror/horse opera hybrid — doesn’t do either genre justice.

The performances are uneven, with a few players having experience on obscure, equally malnourished and overreaching indie film sets, and others outright amateurs. There are continuity errors, with shots not quite matching up — scenes with fog when shot from one angle, bright sun from another.

The “beast,” a Native spirit called Wendigo, is just another dude in a fur suit and antler head. And the gold — remember, there was a gold rush in the Black Hills during “Deadwood” days — is plainly spray painted rocks.

Tanajsia Slaughter plays a tormented Lakota woman named Dowanhowee who comes to Coyote Junction looking for a horse. She ends up killing a guy to get one. Guided by “The Great Spirit,” she has a date in the “Black Woods.”

Bates Wilder, who was in the even more misguidedly ambitious “The Great War,” an attempt at making a World War I movie is the pine forests of Wisconsin if memory serves, plays Dutch Wilder, a limping hardcase who leads a gang of five that fetches things that can’t be fetched and does other dirty deeds, for a price. It was one of his men who lost his life and then his horse, and he had all their cash in his saddle bags.

It doesn’t matter that the sinister schemer Pickerton (Kara Rainer) has sent her right hand man (Glenn Morshower) to lead the gang to a mining claim they’re to help steal, a “You know to kill people, I know how to find shiny things” deal. First things first.

Amusingly, neither the Native tracker (Casey Birdinground) nor Dutch’s field glasses can figure out they’re hunting a woman, even after they get close enough to wound her. She’s led them into the Black Woods, but even she is afraid of the creature that they might run into there — Wendigo.

“Twice as tall as a man,” tracker Two Feathers growls, “with the claws of a wolf, the teeth of a cougar and the strength of a bear.”

As we’ve already seen the film’s no-expense-spared depiction of disemboweling injuries, we can believe it.

I like Canfield’s efforts at giving us a West we can buy into. The town is very DIY and sloppily thrown together. None of this Hollywood’s Finest Craftsman construction. The streets may be grass — never seen that in a place where horseshoes and wagon wheels turn thruways into dust and mud — but the place feels lived-in, with high mileage hookers, two-fisted cowpokes and virulent racist drunks.

“You goin’ soft on feather heads?”

But even in those stretches where the acting is passable and the locations pretty enough, the movie all this effort was inspired by is dawdling drivel, a pokey tale with dialogue that’s basically one long series of profane, blood oath threats and translated Lakota and a story that we’ve seen 1670 versions of already, virtually none of them any more memorable than this.

Rating: R for violence, gore and language.

Cast: Bates Wilder, Tanajsia Slaughter, Glenn Morshower, George Thomas Mansel, Casey Birdinground, Stelio Savante, Andrew Stecker and Kara Rainer

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chris Canfield. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:35

Adrift, unable to hold a job, maladjusted and arrested in her development. Maybe what Audrey needs is for somebody to adopt her.

This film festival darling isn’t the comedy which that set up suggests. It hunts at something more existential and self-help friendly.

Intriguing.

The Netherland in Ranch Country design suggested by the trailers make this feel like yet another Jordan Peele genre-transcending horror “event, which “Get Out” most certainly was and “Us” never quite managed to be.

The streaming series “Lovecraft Country” has it’s admirers. But aside from getting Spike Lee back to being his best by producing his “BlackKklansman,” Peele could use a blockbuster. We’ve been watching trailers for this thing forever, and as they’re previewing it on an Imax screen, expectations are high.

Great moment for Keke Palmer, and let’s hope it’s a great movie.

Throwing in a mewling infant is a bit much.

Granted, I was far enough into the sentimental Spanish coming-of-age melodrama that I thought, “You can’t do a knockoff of ‘Stand By Me’ without a body,” when lo and behold one appears. Then a second.

But in “Live is Life,” the bodies are of “Trainspotting” drug addicts. And stumbling across them, this “Stand Buy Me” gives half a thought to becoming “Five Teens as a Baby.”

Considering our 1985 15 year-olds are always wrestling with everything from a held-back-a-year report card to cancer, bullying and a desperate desire to kiss a girl, trespassing, vandalism, petty theft and grand theft boat — with a grand theft tractor to come — the baby is obviously one melodramatic flourish too many.

But the baby, its care, feeding and protection is given little thought in this get-it-all-in screenplay. Considering all the other issues, plot elements and dangling threads this Dani de la Torre (director) and Albert Spinosa (script) film has to deal with, that’s a wise de-emphasis. Just not as wise as leaving the infant out.

A bracing open introduces us to “Rodri,” short for Rodrigo (Adrián Baena), a kid fleeing a pack of goons — the school handball team, if you can believe that — in Alcorcón, a suburb of Madrid. He escapes into the old taxi his dad drives for the family’s summer vacation in the mountains of Galicia.

There, among the terraced vineyards where his grandparents live is where Rodri re-connects with his summer running mates.

There’s “The twins,” Alvaro and Maza (Juan Del Pozo, Raúl del Pozo). One is constantly going on about how good he is at karate, the other tells frank jokes about dying in between sharing details of the chemo that took his hair. Bespectacled richer kid Garriga (Javier Casellas) is the one with all the best soccer trading cards, all the fireworks he can carry and his pudgy heart set on kissing this girl from class. Soso (David Rodríguez) has a job, which helps his family, something that’s necessary since his father fell off a roof at work and has been in a coma.

Wow. And you thought telenovelas were a Mexican thing, and aimed at middle-aged women.

As Midsummer Night is here, they decide to undertake a quest, to camp out on a mountain top, locates flowers of this rare “Breath of the Earth” plant and make a healing potion out of it.

A lie to this or that parent, stuff a boomerang and a canteen in a backpack, and they’re off on this summer’s “great adventure.

Rodri’s parents, who don’t even believe he’s being bullied, are easy enough to fool. But bullying follows this kid like a bad debt. A pack of local motorbike hooligans called “The Sioux” have already run him off the road. They will be one of the many obstacles the guys have to overcome on their distracted, meandering quest.

But first they’ve got to stop at “The Templars,” a Medieval tomb where they tell lies, sip cola and chant “All together always” like the little nerds they just might be.

Our screenwriter wrote the Spanish version of “The Red Band Society,” about the sick kids in a hospital cancer ward, and an earlier boy-bonding melodrama, so he’s an old hand at getting the details right — starting with that magical tune that has all of Europe singing along in the summer of ’85.

No, I don’t remember the Austrian group Opus or their big hit “Live is Life,” but screenwriter Espinosa does, and the film has an almost-production number moment with everybody in a traffic jam singing along to it, some of them even getting out of their cars.

But the first sign that this coming-of-age dramedy is overreaching is the entire village full of problems that these five kids are wrestling with, and the second is their elaborate and not wholly believable plan to distract, sabotage and bike past The Sioux and Mr. Mullet (Jon López) their gang leader.

The journey takes days, and we see little evidence the lads brought much to sustain them on their odyssey. They prank locals, break into this or that place and generally follow the longest distance between two points to reach their goal.

Getting shot at by what I assume are pellet guns, an afternoon of drinking, bravely taking the shortcut through the sketchy side of one town they pass through — there are a lot of legs to this journey and a lot of scenes that don’t really move the plot forward.

The geography of this trek is a joke, as are the boat, etc., that they pick up along the way to help them complete it.

As the five boys get distracted, so do we, and all these promising story elements are introduced and left undeveloped. The kids hide, what, a cola stash into the crypt of a dead Templar? That’s a “sacred place” that maybe could have played a bigger part in their “crew” or “fellowship,” ennobling their quest. Develop that, and leave some of the other clutter out.

The sentimental moments include hugs and tears and some frank talk about death and living like today’s your last day — at 15.

“Living only teaches you to let go of what you have (in subtitled Spanish, or dubbed into English). “What matters is choosing kindness.”

“Live if Life” is original only in the number of movies it cribs from. But it isn’t “Stand By Me,” it’s not really “Five Teens and a Baby,” and it sure as shooting isn’t “Goonies.”

Schmaltz aside, I enjoyed this enough to recommend it up until it took that second act turn towards a baby, a teen party and all the stuff that had to be stuffed into the third act because of everything introduced in the first two.

Espinosa tosses all these balls in the air, and de la Torre (“La Sombra de la Rey,” aka “Gun City”) doesn’t really do justice to any of them.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, teen drinking, images of drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Adrián Baena, Juan Del Pozo, Raúl del Pozo, Javier Casellas, David Rodríguez and Jon López

Credits: Directed by Dani de la Torre, scripted by Albert Espinosa. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

Katie Holmes‘ “Alone Together” is the latest, almost certainly not the last of the “pandemic makes strange bedfellows” dramas and romances inspired by and filmed during lockdown.

Tenderly-conceived, tastefully-directed, handsomely-mounted and prestigiously-cast, its a drama that runs up against the wall of over-familiarity and the ceiling of expectations. Even without being the umpteenth version of this sort of film to come out, it’s pretty bland going.

Holmes plays a New York journalist, unpanicked by the looming lockdown because her long-time boyfriend has booked them an AirBnB in the country to ride out this “two week” global shutdown.

But while the Manhattan streets may be poetically empty and her cell charged so that she can take care of a few last details, there are roadblocks. The subways aren’t running. She gets a message that her beau is staying to take care of his parents, instead of escaping to the country. One long Lyft-ride later, there’s no key at the AirBnB.

And then the door opens and there’s a stranger already booked in the roomiest two story/one-bedroom/single-bath in the history of American suburban housing. June’s litany of complaints and snap judgements about Charlie (Jim Sturgess) prompt that pithiest of New York privilege put-downs.

“Upper West Side?”

A simple act of kindness later, she’s got a place to crash. He’ll “take the couch.”

What are the chances that a New York food critic and a motorcycle restorer can find Love in a Time of COVID?

Holmes, who has grown up on films sets, turns out to be an almost effortlessly graceful screen storyteller. As with her directing debut (“All We Had”), the polish is here even if the source material lacks much bite.

She layers her story with historical details we all remember, from the little moments of humanity among even hardened, crusty New Yorkers (not the panhandlers, alas) and the daily news briefings from bluff Governor Andrew Cuomo which play as the audio backdrop to their isolation, to the nightly symphony of pots and pans played by the locked-in of many cities around the world, showing appreciation for medical workers and demonstrating “I’m still here” to their neighbors and themselves.

The “end” of lockdown is boiled down to a single image — a discarded mask on a New York city street.

Our writer-director stages a reprise of her finest big screen performance in talking her “Pieces of April” co-star Derek Luke into sharing the screen with her again, this time as the lover “who doesn’t want to be with me in the middle of a f—-g pandemic.”

She landed Sturgess and Oscar winner Melissa Leo to play his character’s mother.

But what’s missing here the friction that would make this compelling, or at least something beyond passably interesting. It’s a mistake Shakespeare made Job One for all romances and rom-coms when he wrote, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” The conflict here is muted, brushed-aside and papered-over.

Sure, it’s cute that the only place these two folks trapped together can find to serve them (take out, eaten in his ancient Mustang II in the parking lot) is McDonald’s. We all figured that out quickly enough. Making too little out of the fact that a vegetarian food critic is reduced to that is a laugh or two missed.

There have been big budget/big star versions of this sort of story that didn’t work any better than Holmes’ directing debut. But that’s little consolation. At this point, if it’s not as edgy, funny or romantic as “Seven Days,” there’s not much point to any “Alone Together” tale.

Rating: R, for language (profanity) and adult situations

Cast: Katie Holmes, Jim Sturgess, Derek Luke and Melissa Leo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Katie Holmes. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:41