Movie Nation

Movies that take us beyond showing gun violence as entertainment are rare. It’s not just the immediate, factual consequences of what happens when a human being is shot, the damage done and the trauma of the moment that we rarely see. The void that comes after the horror is mostly undiscovered country.

“Peace in the Valley” is an indie drama that goes there, a quietly compelling account of what comes next and the varying responses of a newly-widowed mother to the tragedy that happened almost right in front of her.

It was just supposed to be a short stop at the supermarket, a trip to pick up items needed for ten-year-old Jess’s (William Samri) science project. We see Dad (Michael Abbott Jr.) indulge the kid, egg him on to race against the clock so they can get in and out, and Mom (Brit Shaw) try to temper that irresponsible joke.

And then we hear the first shots. As John herds his family into the back and sprints to the sound of the gunfire, Ashley weeps and we hear the unmistakable rat-a-tat firing of a semi-automatic weapon.

“Peace in the Valley” isn’t about a shooter, that shooter’s motives, the machine-gun makers, marketers and apologists, or any other victims. It’s about this family’s response to the aftermath, the empty feeling that the funeral engenders, the late arrival of John’s more devil-may-care brother (also Abbott) and what he’ll do to comfort his nephew and sister-in-law.

“Peace” mainly rests on the shoulders of Shaw, a veteran of TV guest-shots and small parts in little-seen features, and she doesn’t disappoint. Ashley is sullen enough around “Uncle Billy” to suggest that they have history, that she knows this tactless, camo-clad jerk a little too well. Her comforting mother (Dendrie Taylor) is little comfort, and her suggestion that “It’s ok to need help” gets dismissed.

The last thing Ashley wants is the “pointless pity party” of a support group, she says.

But overwhelmed and acting-out, ducking into the local honkytonk to drink and get hit on, and not rebuff it, tells her she might be wrong. Even the bar singer hitting on her recognizes her.

“I guess I’m pretty famous right now.”

Self help in a group setting is a must, but only fellow griever Sandra (Nicky Buggs) seems relatable to Ashley.

With clingy, hyperactive Jess fighting in school and begging her to let him join gun culture with fun Uncle Billy, who tactlessly invites him to “go see if we can nab us a buck,” weeks after his father was gunned down, Ashley needs all the help she can get.

Writer-director Tyler Riggs, of “God’s Waiting Room,” finds a few twists and turns to throw at us in this somewhat novel variation on a timeworn “grief” melodrama. The occasional seriously sad exchange stands out as much as the sexual come-ons, which are jarring and generic thanks to their grating male writer-director’s point-of-view “tells.”

Punches are pulled and things left unsaid in Ashley’s disapproval of her tactless brother-in-law’s hunting invitation. But in this corner of the world, being anti anything to do with firearms is not something the pickup truck set says aloud.

“Peace in the Valley” is a good film, showing a lot of promise behind the camera and in front of it. Hopefully somebody will pick it up and distribute it, and soon. Because if there’s any country that needs to consider how crushing and disruptive gun violence is, it’s this one.

Rating: unrated, sex, profanity, smoking

Cast: Brit Shaw, Michael Abbott Jr., Nicky Buggs, William Samri and Dendrie Taylor

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tyler Riggs. Reviewed at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Running time: 1:28

The documentary as autobiography has been around for a while, with filmmakers like Ross McElwee (“Sherman’s March”) turning “personal essay” films into exercises in family history and a soul searching exploration of one’s place in it.

Filmmaker and sometime actress Rebecca Huntt makes a Millennial-defining statement on the genre with “Beba,” an alternately searing and scalding piece of family history that doesn’t spare the beautiful narcissist doing the examining, either.

“I am the lens, the subject, the authority,” she declares in voice-over behind images of her on the beach, walking the New York streets and the like. “Violence lives in my DNA. I use it to hurt those closest to me.”

A film eight years in the making, shot on sumptuous, saturated (16mm) celluloid, “Beba” explores “the curses of my family slowly killing us,” seeing herself as the product of her striving and succeeding immigrant parents and her trainwreck siblings, and her place within that circle of pain.

Her father fled Trujillo’s dictatorial oligarchy and its “ethnic cleansing” of the Dominican Republic to New York, where after the shock of seeing 1960s Bedford Stuyvesant , vowed to get out of there and move his family to Central Park West. Which, after marrying a rebellious middle class Venezuelan college graduate, he did.

Huntt, whom her mother nicknamed “Beba,” and her two older siblings, lived with their parents in a crowded rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment at that tony address, “the poorest kids in Central Park West.”

She talks with her doting, proud Dad and her reluctant mother. And while we don’t know how they made a living and managed to lift this family into the middle class, we start to get a hint of Beba’s grievances, how she doesn’t really “get” her father, and heaps blame on her stern, fair-skinned mother, who snippily cuts off the interview in the middle of Rebecca’s accusation of “microaggressions.”

“I am going to war,” she warned us in the opening voice over, “and there will be casualties.”

Existential angst is laid bare in this self-portrait masquerading as family photo album. We don’t really hear from her estranged brother Juancarlos, just that he made Beba cry on a family drive to Disney World “and that’s the last time my brother remembers our father talking to him.” Her free spirited, pot smoking, rebel sister Raquel whirls through a chain-smoking walk/chat that reveals little but her restlessness, “agoraphobia” Beba says.

Director of photography and camera operator Sophia Stieglitz got years of shots of model-slim and pretty Rebecca/Beba as she debates “privilege” with her mostly-white college crowd, remembers a Latin lover who killed himself and weeps while singing a sad Dominican song at a karaoke bar and narrates her story in voice over.

Still, the Disney World trip and Central Park West clues hint at a pretty normal, middle class upbringing. Rebecca got into prestigious Bard College, indulged by her favorite professor (interviewed here), who recalls her seemingly taking that education for granted, she was shaped by an upscale and free thinking school where Mia and Ronan Farrow, Tom Ford, Todd Haynes, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest and the rich lads who formed Steely Dan matriculated and where the great philosopher Hannah Arendt once taught.

She studied abroad, and chose Ghana in West Africa for that. Rebecca Huntt all but demands that we ask, “What is this spoiled, entitled brat’s problem?”

She talks about Blackness in identity politics terms, but we aren’t shown specific examples of barriers and burdens associated with race and class. She moves back home some time after college, and admits her callous treatment of her and describes the ongoing war with her brother that includes his cruel sabotage — in her eyes — of a coveted job interview in film production.

And she finds the most pretentious turn of phrase for wanting to learn to cook for herself, “making time for the ritual of cooking.”

Yes, there are eye-rolling moments at her expense aplenty. But as we remember this is her film and that her portrayal is under her control, we appreciate the bluntness, the “snitching” she’s doing on her family, whom she confesses may “never speak” to her again, and herself.

Her family’s history, and her own racial status, help explain Beba’s angst. And if she’s asking DNA-deep questions, looking for answers and somewhat adrift and perhaps not wholly self-aware as she does it, maybe that’s a hallmark of her generation.

“Beba” is not a feat she’ll be able to repeat, not with herself and her family as subject matter. She’s unlikely to ever have the many years it took to make this deep dive. Thanks to this beautiful, nakedly honest film, she could be a filmmaker and a screen presence to watch. Or this could be that one movie she has in her.

Either way, Huntt laid it all out there and put it all on the screen and let the family-rending chips fall where they may, and she should be celebrated for having the guts to strip herself and those around her this naked with her snitching.

We are all heroes of our own stories, victims of our own tragedies. And as Huntt reminds us, at times we can be the villains, as well.

Rating: R, for language (profanity)

Cast: Rebecca Huntt

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rebecca Huntt. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:20

“My Donkey, My Lover & I” is one of the unexpected filmgoing delights of this summer. It’s a French road comedy in which the “road” is a famous French hiking trail pioneered by a legendary Scottish writer, the vehicle a donkey and the journey one of romantic self discovery through beautiful scenery, cozy hostels and homey dining rooms..

So, “Eat, Bray Love” it is, then.

Titled “Antoinette dans les Cévennes” when it came out in France, it’s about a French fifth grade teacher out to meet a lover in the The Stevenson Trail, a multi-day trek through the Cévennes region along a route Robert Louis Stevenson took with a donkey named Modestine, from Puy-en-Velay to Ales.

Antoinette Lapouge (Laure Calamy) wasn’t planning on taking this trip, at least not alone. When we meet the vivacious 30something she is changing into a fancy costume in her classroom, and topping that inappropriate overexposure by leading her kids in an end of year performance of a too sexy love ballad.

Parental eyebrows are raised, especially when Antoinette, in a fit of passion, takes over the singing at the end. And then we see who this exhibition was for. Vladimir (Benjamin Lavernhe) is the father of one of her students. The second they can grab a moment alone, they’re going at it.

But their little “vacation” together is off. He’s married and he’s taking a donkey hike with the wife and daughter. Antoinette may not be a hiker, or an experienced donkey handler, or even somebody who knows how to tie a proper slipknot. That doesn’t keep her from impulsively booking such a trip on that same trail herself.

We’ll see who ruins whose vacation, won’t we?

A Hollywood version of this story would have played-up the mayhem Antoinette causes or might cause by finding and crashing her lover’s family vacation. It would have leaned hard on the quirky eccentrics she meets on the trail and milked stubborn donkey jokes for all that they’re worth.

Writer-director Caroline Vignal, inspired by Stevenson’s “Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes,” goes for something gentler, if just as light. It’s a quirky spiritual journey in the tradition of “The Way,” whimsical and soulful, but with swearing and braying.

Right from her first meal with a table full of strangers in a hostel, Antoinette is interrogated, mocked for doing things the Stevenson way with a donkey, which is an added hassle, and gently-and-not-so-gently judged for her life choices, her affair with a married man — the father of a student, no less.

“You’re right,” she giggles, in French with English subtitles. “Shame on me.”

Her over-sharing that first night sets up a running gag. Antoinette makes this trek in notoriety. Her plans to “stumble into” the lover and his family are widely known, and sometimes scorned. Almost every hostel keeper and many others on the trail know her story.

And if you don’t know how to curse in French, her interactions with Patrick the Irish donkey are a great primer and another running gag.

The donkey is just enough of a character in this film to register, a critter who only walks when she talks to him. Her talking, on these 20 or so kilometer a day hikes, is filled with chatter about Vladimir, what she loves and what she hopes, her anger and her despair and longing for this unavailable mate.

Naturally, when the donkey finally meets Vlad, his wife (Olivia Côte) and child, he’s had time to form an opinion of them.

“My Donkey” is a travelogue with weepy moments and grace notes — Antoinette breaking down at the sight of a loving, hostel-running couple and their kids, and then comforted by the story of why Stevenson took his own solitary trek told to her by sympathetic husband Idriss (Denis Mpunga).

The picture gets by on such moments, but even the meandering that goes on between them is cute and has its own charm.

If you’re looking for low-exertion a summer escape movie with a bucket list travel destination as its setting and a donkey and the hapless, lovelorn sap who rides him as its stars, “My Donkey, My Lover & I” certainly fills the bill.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Laure Calamy, Benjamin Lavernhe, Olivia Côte and Denis Mpunga

Credits: Scripted and directed by Caroline Vignal. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:36

Kevin Hart‘s always good for a few manic, exasperated laughs. Laid back Woody Harrelson adds value to pretty much anything he’s in.

Both are experts at “buddy pictures.” “The Man from Toronto” should be a pretty safe bet.

And it is. Safe. There’s a little energy and the tiniest hint of edge to this hit-man meets the guy confused for a hit-man action comedy. But as likable as the two stars are, as experienced as each is at sharing the screen this way, they barely make this “Man” worth your trouble.

Hart’s a fumbling promotions manager at a friend’s gym. Or was. We see him get the sack. His “big ideas” weren’t big enough, or smart. He’s always been like this, creating DIY Youtube exercise videos for the “Teddy Burn” and “Teddy Boxing” (no punches land).

“All the ‘WOW without the ‘ow!'”

“Teddy” has a reputation, which even his wife Lori (Jasmine Matthews) has heard of. His name has “become a verb.” Everybody knows what it means to “Teddy something up.”

They’re getting away for the weekend, to scenic Onancock, Virginia. But after dropping Lori off at a spa, Teddy rolls up to the wrong address for their AirBnB. They two guys there are waiting for someone else. As one guy is tied up and the other has failed to get some needed information out of him, we can guess what “The Man from Toronto” will do.

Especially since we’ve seen this shaved-head, black-hat, shades, overcoat and gloves “specialist” at work.

“When you beg for your life,” The Man tells the first victim he tortures on behalf of a mobster, “I’m not gonna hear your screams.”

But since no one’s ever SEEN this “Man from Toronto,” that’s who they think Teddy is. A nice bit of business — Teddy sees the guy tied up, spins on his heels with a “Oh hell n…..” He’s stopped, and instantly he starts to wing it.

Some mysterious someone from Venezuela has hired this expert “in 23 martial arts,” “a ghost.”

“They say he filleted an entire poker parlor in Minnesota!”

Teddy’s mix-up becomes a government problem when they bust in. He’s been photographed, and now all these mobsters and bad faith/bad state actors think he’s the real “man.” In a “North by Northwest” twist, Teddy is forced to continue the charade. He’s been through some things. He’s about to go through some more.

“The Man from Toronto” only finds its first laughs some minutes in, when Hart and Harrelson’s characters meet for the first time. The “real” man tests the fake one by using his trademark. He quotes s 19th century poets as a code. Lay some Keats on me, little man.

“You wanna hear her old stuff or her new stuff?”

“Well, HE…died at 25.”

“You got some SACK to come with no gender etiquette! ‘He’ may not IDENTIFY as ‘he!'”

It wouldn’t be much of a movie if the “real” man executed the fake one straight off. The script turns itself inside out to keep them paired up, hunted by the Feds and those who hire guys like “The Man from Toronto.” They send “The Man from Miami” (Pierson Fode) after him.

A couple of half-decent escapes and stunt-double-assisted brawls pay off. The whole “Man from” gimmick has promise, because every city has its “man,” apparently. Some one-liners land, such as the way Teddy takes what he’s heard from the Feds and other thugs to relate how he became a hit-man.

“Are you stealing my origin story, now?”

The pretend “relationship” has Teddy and Lori double-dating with his “friend” and hers (Kaley Cuoco).

Cuoco’s presence in this points to a general gripe about Netflix “star” comedies. They spend all their money on the stars (Jason Statham originally had the title role, and Sony set this up for theatrical release). And there’s nothing left for the supporting players.

Sitcom-sharp Cuoco registers and manages a funny moment, but no other supporting players in this thing is famous or funny or was given anything amusing to do.

The leads click well enough. But every moment Hart and Harrelson aren’t on the screen, the film dies. The real torture in this torture comedy becomes the too-long wait for it to end.

Rating: PG-13 (Some Strong Language|Violence Throughout|Suggestive Material)

Cast: Kevin Hart, Woody Harrelson, Jasmine Matthews, Pierson Fode and Kaley Cuoco

Credits: Directed by Patrick Hughes, scripted by Robbie Fox and Chris Bremner. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50

Here you go. Yes, you have to wait until Sept. 30 to grow your own grin.

The South African actress Alice Krige first gained notice in America in a sprawling “Tale of Two Cities” TV adaptation that broadcast in 1980. But her fate was ordained by her big screen debut.

In “Ghost Story,” she was the young woman once coveted young men, who now haunts the old men — Fred Astraire, Melvyn Douglas and John Houseman — who caused her death half a century before.

Although she has enjoyed a grand run in film and on TV in a great variety of roles, playing up her scary side has proven her secret to longevity.

“She Will” gives her a fine showcase, a horror movie without the frights, but with creepy, gloomy style to burn as any picture “presented by Dario Argento” would have to be. Charlotte Colbert’s debut feature is a reclamation of the lost art of montage. Extreme close-ups and images shrouded in fog of horrors of the distant past and recent surgery, witch burnings and filmmaking trauma blend together in chilling and gorgeous sequences that are a credit to the entire production, but particularly to editors Matyas Fekete and Yorgos Mavropsaridis.

You watch this film and never, for a second, do you forget you’re seeing art in motion.

Krige plays an aging screen diva, fresh off a double mastectomy, haunted by what happened on her big break film over 50 years before. As she travels in a private train coach north through Britain, it all comes to a head as news of a “sequel” to that long-ago film, “Navajo Frontier,” breaks.

Veronica Ghent has a hint of Norma “Sunset Boulevard” Desmond to her — aged, infirm and damaged. She travels with a personal healthcare worker, Desi (Kota Eberhardt), whom she barely tolerates.

“That haircut, ‘Anarchist with a Day Job?'”

Her trip is to a “solitary retreat” in the forests of Scotland, but which turns out to be anything but solitary.

Her “I don’t do groups” protests are to no avail. It’s off-season, and everybody else is there for the activities organized by this crystal pyramid-gazing seer and charlatan, given a playful, boozy touch by Rupert Everett. Some of his cultish followers, young and old, are big Veronica fans.

Holing up in a remote cabin on the site won’t save Veronica from their lectures and painting lessons.

But there’s something about the place, the soil and the vibe of it. They used to burn witches there, and perhaps that gave the earth curative properties. It’s certainly giving Veronica, and even Desi dreams.

Veronica’s nightmares have her confronting an old co-star, a screen icon constantly working into his dotage, headed for a knighthood and much more in the public eye than her.

Malcolm McDowell and Krige only have a single scene where they’re in the same frame together. But these two screen legends, horror mainstays in their later years, make it a juicy one.

Colbert uses her stars to great advantage and her film to weave a spell around them. Krige’s turn as Veronica has a valedictory air, a celebration of her skills at turning a two word phrase into as succinct a description of old age as any ever uttered.

“Any pain,” her caregiver wants to know?

“Every pain.”

As for the film itself, it takes predictable turns, lacking only the predictable shocks that usually accompany those to make it something more than merely chilling.

Colbert emphasizes “local color” as the ashes flaked off a wood fire are “witches feathers” in this part of Scotland and the only pub in town is the only place to get wifi and be plied with drinks and other exotic substances by the retreat’s hunky handyman (Jack Greenlees).

“She Will” is so well-acted and so visually sophisticated and striking that I didn’t mind the missing “terror” in all this. Like Krige’s horror debut, it’s more about the story than the “ghosts” — witches, in this case.

And if anybody deserves a smart supernatural thriller that pays homage to her horror bonafides, it’s the witch from “Gretel & Hansel,” the matriarch of the most recent “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” the Queen of Jean-Luc Picard’s Enterprise enemies, the Borg.

Rating: unrated, violence, substance abuse

Cast: Alice Krige, Kota Eberhardt, Rupert Everett, Layla Burns and Malcolm McDowell/

Credits: Directed by Charlotte Colbert, scripted by Kitty Percy and Charlotte Colbert. An IFC Midnight/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:36

This Rebecca Huntt film opens in select theaters Friday. Looks like greater counter programming to the popcorn pics of summer.

A tsunami of good vibes rolls over “Trevor: The Musical,” an upbeat, kids-friendly tale told in song about a bullied but hopeful middle school boy who is sorely tested by and abused for his just-emerging sense of his sexuality.

A pre “It gets better” era period piece anchored in the music of gay icon Diana Ross, it’s based on the Oscar-winning 1994 short film “Trevor” and the outreach-and-counseling non-profit that the film inspired, The Trevor Project.

The composing/writing team of Dan Collins and Julianne Wick Davis (“Southern Comfort”) walk a delicate line. They’re trying to tell a story about an eighth grader so humiliated and shunned after being labeled “a pansy” that he attempts suicide, and tell it in a way that won’t be harsh, adult and kid-unfriendly, so that kids Trevor’s age can see it and see that there’s hope, that people do get through this and that suicide isn’t the answer.

Tricky.

Their musical doesn’t quite commit to its subject matter, and rarely dazzles as it dances its way around it. “Trevor: The Musical” has pluck and real kids with just-hit-pubertyish voices and kid-simplified choreography awash in positive messaging in a show that feels seriously dated, if worthwhile in the attempt.

The film, basically a filmed production of the play just after closing night this past April, preserves the stage show and celebrates its one glorious conceit. Trevor (Holden Hagelberger), a small town kid all about “making daydreams out of dust,” gets counsel and comfort from 1981 era Diana Ross, played with a slinky, all-embracing vivaciousness by Yasmeen Sulieman.

So the score’s syrupy, instantly-forgettable solos, duets and anthemic chorus tunes “My Imagination” and how Trevor “Can’t Wait” for the “day of my destiny,” are utterly outclassed by Sulieman’s lovely renditions of snippets of “Do You Know?,” “It’s My Turn,” “Upside Down,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Remember Me,” “Endless Love” and “I’m Coming Out.”

The story has Trevor, unable to get in the school talent show by acting/singing out all the parts of “Fame,” stumbling into the idea of choreographing the annual drag turn in “tutus” by the school jocks. Out go the tutus, in come the lads in a white tie and tails, hat and cane chorus line straight out of a ’30s musical.

That effort, working closely with star jock Pinky (Sammy Dell), trying to convince the jocks that “Men dance — Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Tommy Tune!” turns out to be Trevor’s undoing. Because every school has its homophobes, and some of them are also Mean Girls.

Two actors (Sally Wilfert and Jarrod Zimmerman) play all the adult roles — the homophobic PE coach, the less-than-understanding talent-show coordinating teacher, the Reagan Assassination Attempt-obsessed parents, and the Catholic priest Trevor is forced to consult. Not one of these characters makes an impression.

The best things about the show are Sulieman’s singing, and how Diana-mad tween Trevor interprets the songs and uses them as holy texts giving guidance to his confused sexual feelings, which he’d rather ignore because of an “artistic” bent that craves the spotlight.

“Diana says ‘Get back up and try….” “Diana says. ‘I can’t lay down and die!'”

Disney’s even-more-tentative film of “Better Nate than Never” avoided even using the word “gay” in describing its narcissistic hero, so filming “Trevor” and releasing this during Pride Month has merit. Their corporate timidity, which hasn’t protected them from Florida’s “Don’t say gay” free-speech quashing governor’s rage, means they’re never going to be guilty of “recruiting” by simply telling this story, or having a same-sex couple in “Lightyear.”

But as mere inclusion in their films and the musicals they choose to present is earning the otherwise gay-friendly company abuse from bigots and bigotry-exploiting politicians, the time for timidity is past. Well-intentioned and “inoffensive” by design content as namby-pamby and entertainment-thin as “Trevor: The Musical” isn’t accomplishing much of anything.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Holden Hagelberger, Sammy Dell, Isabel A. Medina, Aryan Simhadri, Alyssa Emily Marvin, with Yasmeen Sulieman as Diana Ross

Credits: Directed by Robin Abrams, based on the stage production by Dan Collins and Julianne Wick Davis, choreographed by Josh Prince, directed on stage Marc Bruni, A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:54

This drama about an accident and its cover-up, the moral implications of that and the like, didn’t star two Oscar winners when it was filmed. But now Jessica Chastain joins co-star Ralph Fiennes in that regard.

This opens July 1.

An exiled CIA agent can only trust…her.

July 1.