Movie Nation

You don’t need to wait for the next season of “The Handmaid’s Tale” or the future it foretells to get a taste of what the global right wing patriarchy has in mind for women. Plunge into the “honor killing” Islamic present of “AV: The Hunt,” a Turkish thriller that could be set anywhere this primitive practice still takes place.

It’s a bracing, damning indictment of a world where women have no bodily autonomy wrapped in a visceral, on-the-lam chase thriller in which every man our heroine meets is not just an existential threat, but a real one.

From rude, intrusive questions implying “Know your place, woman,” to overt threats, a Brotherhood of Man are in league to oppress, catch, abuse, punish and kill Ayse as she tries to escape the small city she’s fled for the supposed anonymity and cosmopolitanism of Istanbul.

Ayse, given a “Kill Bill” fierceness by Billur Melis Koç, has screwed up. She’s been cheating on her brutish husband with a feckless fireman. Husband Sedat (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) busts in on them. Making matters worse, he’s a cop who goes completely off the deep end at this betrayal. He kills the fireman, and Ayse, injuring herself in the escape, barely gets out of their seedy love nest with her life, if not her clothes.

We don’t get the feeling that Sedat’s psychotic behavior is accepted and even normalized until we see Ayse get a little help from a friend, and hear the same counsel repeated in every desperate phone call to female relatives that she makes.

“We told you this would happen,” in Turkish with English subtitles. “You dug a hole for yourself…You knew this would happen…You have to bear it like everyone else.“

Grabbing cash and car keys from her parents’ house reveals how far this judgment extends. Her own family’s men try to stop her, by any means necessary.

She makes her getaway, the first of many, but her quest seems impossible. A traffic stop or a bus stop, male strangers or relatives, an entire culture is hellbent on taking Ayse out, or aiding Sedat in doing that.

Director and co-writer Emre Kay (“Tales from Kars”) serves up one suspenseful scene after another — Ayse stopped for not having her license on her, an older cop lecturing her, taking her into custody, evading her questions about his over-the-top civil rights violations, Ayse eying his gun, where he put her car keys, where his keys are.

All of which culminates in a literal hunt in a forest, a young woman whose own father and family seem determined to see her dead rather than let her get away with “shaming” them.

The escapes, chases and fights — with fists, headbutts, rocks, knives and guns — are expertly set-up, played-out and concluded. Koç doesn’t just look a bit like Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill.” She could play her sister if she learns how to use a samurai sword.

We’re never allowed to settle back and assume we have this film’s ending figured out. Ayse is in peril, first scene to last, in a film that doesn’t waste a single one of its 86 minutes.

“AV: The Hunt” isn’t overt in its politics, but it’s easy to read them into the movie. The “secular state” isn’t as secular as it once was, and maybe never was to the degree Turkey has long boasted to the world. “Conservative” leaders pandering to “fundamentalists” have seen to that.

If you think “Handmaid’s Tale” is just a futuristic dystopia political pundits are warning you about via the actions of the American and international far right, here’s a slap-in-the-face reminder that it’s not the future. For many women, it’s a hellish present.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Billur Melis Koç, Ahmet Rifat Sungar, Adam Bay, Yagiz Can

Credits: Directed by Emre Akay, scripted by Emre Akay and Deniz Cuylan

Running time: 1:26

Plaza always gives off the “maybe don’t mess with me” vibe. Usually with a wink.

A solid, straightforward narrative — heavy on the history, light in melodrama — is the best recommendation for “A Call to Spy,” a true story of World War II and an American woman who joined British agents to do perform espionage in Occupied France.

The life story of Virginia Hall was exciting enough that not much embellishment was needed for this film, which actress Sarah Megan Thomas scripted as a star vehicle for herself. Although it betrays its modest budget in the limited and malnourished action sequences, the low-wattage “star power” and the somewhat polished if faintly flat TV movie production design and pacing, it does justice to its subject, even if it leaves her more colorless than we’d hope.

In 1941, shortly before the debacle/”miracle” of Dunkirk, the Brits set up the Special Operations Executive to train and recruit agents in case France fell. When it did, recruiter/supervisor Vera Atkins (Stana Katic) had women already well into training for the work of infiltrating Franceh, gathering intelligence, setting up networks, paying partisans and arranging or directly carrying out sabotage of the German war machine.

Atkins’ boss, Col. Maurice Buckmaster (Linus Roache) embraced her idea that however dangerous the work, women were “more inconspicuous” than men in the field in France. Virginia Hall, a frustrated member of the U.S. foreign service, limited in promotions because of a wooden leg, was among those Atkins lined up. Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte), a Russian-born Indian Muslim already in the service as a radio operator, was another.

We get a glimpse of their training, from “ungentlemanly warfare” (self-defense) to surviving torture, and then they’re off — smuggled into France to help lead the struggle to free Europe from Naziism.

“Yours will be a lonely courage,” they hear as they depart (separately). As Virginia sets up networks and leans on her instincts about who to trust, Noor skips from location to location, her radio set in tow, barely a full step ahead of the Germans and their radio-tracking French collaborators.

Director Lydia Dean Pilcher did “Radium Girls” just before this film, another modest but moving piece of overlooked women’s history. The drama is embedded in the situations here, as Pilcher doesn’t manage more than a scene or two of genuine suspense, despite the terror of this work.

Thomas, who also wrote and and co-starred in “Equity,” scripts herself some juicy scenes — Hall living by her instincts, having to throw her weight around amongst sexist Frenchmen and even more sexist Brits — but rarely makes as much out of them as we’d like. The historical Hall was to the manner born and didn’t suffer slights easily — more smart and tough than plucky. Here we get an adequate performance where something with more heat and flash was called for.

Apte (“The Wedding Guest”) comes closer to the mark in a narrower role, a younger, more timid radio operator barely prepared for what she must deal with and its consequences.

The dialogue is WWII boilerplate — “It doesn’t feel right.” “So we’re acting on feelings, now?”

And although the film hews closely to the historical record, the pace is so sedate one wonders if a brisker production could have carried the story on to the war’s end, as Hall’s exploits were ongoing.

As other films on Hall and the extraordinary women of SOE are still in the planning stages, “A Call to Spy” remains the defining take on their heroics and contributions to the war effort. Let’s hope Netflix picking it up greases the wheels toward a bigger budget, more exciting and more thorough accounting. There’s a mini series in this.

Rating: PG-13 for some strong violence, disturbing images, language, and smoking

Cast: Sarah Megan Thomas, Radhika Apte, Stana Katic, Rossif Sutherland and Linus Roache.

Credits: Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher, scripted by Sarah Megan Thomas. An IFC release on Netflix.

Running time: 2:03

It wasn’t hard to track down a still shot from “Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between” that captures how bland it is. And I needed that shot to make a point that this endless pop music montage masquerading as a “last summer before college” romance underscores.

It’s the banality of beauty incarnate.

The leads of this screen adaptation of a Jennifer E. Smith book could not be prettier, with singing/songwriting actor Jordan Fisher paired up with Talia Ryder, who gives off a sort of young Jennifer Connolly vibe.

But chemistry? Investment in their acting, interest in them as characters or a couple on the screen? Not so much.

He’s the popular hunk with a band, a thing for karaoke and loads of charisma. She’s the “new” girl who just moved back to the town she was born in, someone who has looked at her parents’ broken marriage and her follow-this-or-that-man from town-to-town mother (Jennifer Robertson) and decided she is not going through any of that.

So Aidan can turn down the charm on their first meeting — a house part — and its aftermath. Clare can see where this is going.

“I’m not looking for a boyfriend.”

No ties in high school. She has Ivy League law in her future, and no distraction or traumatic summer-before-Dartmouth break-up is going to interrupt that.

But he negotiates her into an “OK, for now,” without much friction. That’s a hallmark of this Netflix romance. Even the arguments feel watered down and banal.

They will carry on a half-hearted, musical montage romance through the school year and prove to everyone that they can be adult enough to end things gracefully and move on after that.

“The king and queen of ending things” they are, to their BFFs (Ayo Edebiri for her, Nico Haraga for him) and everybody else. Until, of course, the deadline approaches.

There’s nothing to this Michael Lewen (scripted by Amy Reed) film until well into the Big Night the smitten Aidan has planned for their final date, which he will fill with recreations of their memorable dates and lots of Big Gestures. Perhaps he’ll drop the L-bomb again to see if he can get a rise out of Clare, because she’s avoiding it.

What’s almost worth watching here — and really, this movie has little to offer teens or anybody older than tweens — are the ways Clare intentionally sabotages this romantic fairytale “change her mind” effort on Aidan’s part.

Don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not cute or funny or romantic, just inviting friends in as a buffer, forcing Aidan to change plans again and again to dull the impact and foil what he expects to accomplish on their last night together .

It’s cunning in its thoughtlessness, irritating to him and gives “Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between” a few “real” moments that show promise, even if the leads can’t deliver the sparks that might set a fire.

Rating: TV-14, young love, teen hijinks.

Cast: Talia Ryder, Jordan Fisher, Ayo Edebiri, Djouliet Amara, Jennifer Robertson and Nico Haraga.

Credits: Directed by Michael Lewen, scripted by Amy Reed, based on the book by Jennifer E. Smith. A Lionsgate film for Netflix

Running time: 1:24

Amazon is releasing, what, a “teaser” a week for this new prequel series (I think I have that right) to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy fiction epic?

Another one is due July 14, so they say.

Not a bad strategy.

What do we see for this fall streaming event? Something a bit more digital, a LOT more diverse in terms of casting when compared to Peter Jackson’s films.

It’s not just the topography and geography that look like New Zealand, this time around.

I was kind of shrugging off the whole enterprise, but now one finds oneself intrigued. One does.

“The Sea Beast” bolts off the screen with a photo-realistic CGI animated shipwreck and a bracing blast of high stakes mayhem as told by a plucky girl, reading a dime novel on sea serpents and those who hunt them — “Tales of Captain Crow” — to her fellow orphans.

Director Chris Williams of “Moana,” “Bolt” and “Big Hero 6,” and his co-writer fold in bits of “Treasure Island,” “Moby Dick” and “Pinocchio” into their tale of that age when the ships were wooden, the crews made of iron and the deep was filled with ship-devouring beasts destined to be hunted to extinction by crews using cannon, pistols and harpoons that they try not to call “harpoons” because we all know what they’re doing in a metaphorical sense — even the kids.

The beasts are a substitute for whales.

It’s not the movie’s abrupt inevitable turn towards “There’s got to be another way” in the age-old struggle between sailors and beasts, nor the gloriously and historically-defensible diverse crew chasing the last of these “beasts” in the “hunting” ship, The Inevitable that kind of lost me. It’s the whole “How to Train Your Dragon” without the laughs that it devolves into that make this Netflix outing something of a yawner.

The action is spectacular, the menace palpable and the “see things from the ‘hunted’ beasts point-of-view” angle touching, in a metaphorical way. But swap out the humorless sailors for funny, Scots-accented Vikings, and even a ten year old will recognize “We’ve SEEN this.”

Jared Harris brings gruff gusto the role of surly Captain Crow, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Sarah, his hyper-competent, tough, no-nonsense first mate.

But danged if the patriarchal skipper hasn’t ordained the foundling sailor and deadliest hunter Jacob (Karl Urban), whom he regards as “like a son” as his replacement on the bridge. First, though, Captain Crow has unfinished business with The Red Bluster, deadliest of the red-tails, one of many species of sea beasts that The Inevitable and its rivals hunt, at the behest of The Royals (“Downton’s” Jim Carter, and Doon Mackichan).

Meanwhile, orphan Maisie (Zaris Angel-Hator) finishes up her latest reading from “Tales of Captain Crow” to her fellow orphans, and makes her latest escape from the ever-so-nice orphanage. Her plan? To find the captain and throw in with his swarthy crew.

She only finds Jacob, on shore leave. And he’s all “A ship is no place for a kid,” which just means she’ll have to stow away to get on board.

Maisie’s efforts to intervene in the ship-vs-beast battle only get her and Jacob swallowed. And that’s how she befriends “Red” and everybody has to change her or his entire worldview.

“Maybe you can be a hero and still be wrong,” is the messaging here.

It’s more adult than you might think, but rarely jarringly-so. Generic, harmless enough and watchable, with a few touching moments — seeing the old harpoons sticking out of the “Dragon”/gecko designed beast — and plenty of violence.

But charm and humor are in shorter supply than you’d hope. There’s barely a funny moment in it, even though there are English-accented attempts at jokes about how often sailors say “Yarrrr,” and a cute baby beast is introduced, right on cue, in the later acts.

It’s better than some Netflix animated fare, but not original or fun enough to be up to the streamer’s gold standards in CGI entertainment for kids — “Klaus” or “The Mitchells vs. the Machines.”

Rating: PG, violence and lots of it

Cast: The voices of Karl Urban, Zaris-Angel Hator, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Jim Carter, Doon Mackichan, Dan Stevens and Jared Harris.

Credits: Directed by Chris Williams, scripted by Nell Benjamin and Chris Williams. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

For some reason, when I heard of sitcom mainstay Larry Storch’s passing at the grand old age of 99, this scene is what came to mind.

Blake Edwards had a bit of a big screen comeback after “10,” and the first fruit that Dudley Moore/Bo Derek/Julie Andrews sex comedy bore fruit was the skewering Hollywood farce, “S.O.B.”

Edwards’ Big Statement on the town where he made his living had lots of funny TV actors, and William Holden, Andrews (Mrs. Edwards’) and the scene stealing Robert Preston in a tale of shallow dad’s, venomous gossip journalists, alcoholic old timers, Dr. Feel goods and a director having a breakdown at the expense of his wife star (Andrews).

Storch stands out in the politically incorrect guru presiding over a funeral.

Nutty scene. Never get away with it today.

RIP, Mister Whoopie.

“Thor: Love and Thunder” had a great but not world beating Thursday night and Friday, $29 million in “previews” piling up to a $70 million Friday, and that points to a $140-150 million opening weekend, according to Deadline.com.

Exhibitor Relations was figuring over $150, based on the “Doctor Strange” calculus. It had a $36 million Thursday and opened with $187 million back in May.

Decent if not breathlessly swooning reviews from critics and fans were tamping down expectations for this lark with dark undertones directed by Taika Waititi, much as they did for “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”

“Taika” is trending, where fandom is waging war over “the romance” and the laughs, and assorted other issues related to the film, its gay pirate-friendly (Or not friendly enough?) director.

Whatever else is happening, Disney saturating TV with Marvel content and rolling two films out closely together in a Marvelverse that’s treading water after the end of the Avengers panderfests seem like the biggest issues.

Be a shame if the two best directors to sign on for recent Marvel movies, Raimi for “Strange,” Waititi with “Thor,” got blamed for finally exhausting the Marvel Mother Lode.

“Minions: The Rise of Gru” enters the weekend in the $170 million range with an expected strong holdover, maybe another $60-70 when all is said and done. It made $13.5 million on Wednesday alone. Over $10 on Thursday.

“Maverick” had another big Friday and is headed towards a $14.6 million weekend.

“Elvis” entered the weekend over $80 million, closing in on that first $100.

“Black Phone” will be close to $70 million by midnight Sunday.

Nice to see Freeman getting another detective thriller in before hanging it up.

Frank Grillo also stars with The Great Binoche in this July 29 release.

Gawd, not this again.

“Torture porn?” Wanton self-injury and exploding head slaughter set to the tune of “Ten Little Indians?”

It’s entirely possible the creators of this nigh-on-unwatchable “Death Count” know that no less than Agatha Christie perfected this plot, thanks to a novel with a seriously racist title. That count-down the-dead thing may be the weariest trope in horror.

At least we know that they know they’re copying “Saw” and “Hostel,” because characters mention that in this cheesy, derivative C-movie splatter fest.

Eight people wake up in separate cells in another mass murderer’s dungeon. They have exploding collars on their necks, TV cameras and monitors in their cells.

The Warden (Costas Mandylor, in cowl, beard and one-eyed mask) has a “game” for them to play — online and streamed, their success/survival in it predicated on online “likes.”

The imprisoned include teachers (Sarah French), administrators and others from this one particular school. Their “game” involves inflicting “a non-suicidal self-injury” with the snips, pliers, sledgehammer, whip, etc. in a box on their cell.

The coach protests about “sportsmanship” and “rules” and complains that “You think some sicko is gonna get off watching this?”

Coach (Wesley Cannon) must be from Tibet.

Outside, Michael Madsen plays the sick-joking, unexplained eyebrow-stitched detective trying to track down this murderous event, which is blowing up the police station’s phones, lighting up the internet and tying up a WHOLE lot of “missing persons” cases that just were filed.

Madsen has the Reaganesque dye job and the world weariness to repeat that line, “I’m gettin’ too old for this s—” like he means it.

It’s a stupid movie that’ll probably make you dumber, just by watching it. The voyeurism of the victims’ predicament extends to anybody who checks in on films like this just to watch the “cool” ways people are killed, although some fanboy out on how the makeup is applied to create gruesome injuries — and wait for the naked cleavage.

My favorite cheesy touch? The filmmakers try to show the world news media transfixed by these murders streamed in real time. So they get “actors” to stand in front of fake foreign network graphics and read, in bad Little Theatre Foreign-Accented English, their headlines.

Damn. That’s…funny.

There’s an anti-public schools subtext that slips in here, and precious little actual problem-solving by those about to die to figure out a way to survive all this. So there’s nothing at all for us to invest in.

Mandylor isn’t bad, pretty much every thing and everybody else is.

But at least it’s short.

Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Costas Mandylor, Sarah French, Devanny Pinn, Wesley Cannon Robert LaSardo and Michael Madsen.

Credits: Directed by Michael Su, scripted by Michael Merino and Rolfe Kanefsky. A Mahal Empire release.

Running time: 1:22