Movie Nation

The moral of the French dirty cops thriller “Rogue City” is a familiar one to American crime film fans. The police are a gang, just with different “colors.”

Convoluted, bloody and downbeat, it’s about a Marseilles anti-gang unit that takes extralegal shortcuts until that day they finally cross one line too many and one Corsican mob that isn’t having it.

Actor turned writer-director Olivier Marchal has made police pictures his forte (“Borderline,” “A Gang Story,” “36th Precinct” “Gangsters”), and here he tosses in everything but the évier de cuisine, with so many characters, intrigues and competing agendas that make you grateful Netflix is a streaming service. You can rewind any time you like, because this is kind of hard to follow.

It’s loosely (sloppily) framed within an opening murder-suicide scene, mostly played-out over a black screen. As that’s not enough violence to open the picture, we drop into a massacre at an Arab waterfront club.

Lannick Gautry (a “District 13” thriller sequel) stars as Capt. Vronski, head of a squad assigned to deal with Marseilles’ drug smuggling gangs. Giving him that name allows him to debate Tolstoy with an urbane mobster (Gérard Lanvin) they’re transporting to prison.

That’s the most French thing in this movie. Well, that and characters’ penchant for quoting Biblical Proverbs, and French, Arabic or Corsican proverbs, too.

“Shaving a donkey is a waste of soap and time,” one fellow mutters (in French, with English subtitles). “He who lays a hand on my people should protest HIS people.”

Vronski, Willy (Stanislas Merhar), Max (Kaaris) and Zach (David Belle) have the French version of Internal Affairs on their case, a boss (Patrick Catalifo) who gives them lots of leeway, and a high-minded chief (Jean Reno) to please.

And they have an inter-deparmental rival, Costa (Moussa Maaskri), who turns out to be a dirty cop. Never mind the fact that the turncoat in their ranks is played by an Algerian. Every cop here is compromised, ethnicity be damned.

With the Corsicans and the Arabs fighting over the waterfront and Spanish cocaine business, friends you can count on a lot of shooting.

Gautry’s Vronski is that classic “cool” cop — beautiful, pregnant wife (Erika Sainte) who is introduced because at some point mobsters will threaten her, sailing catamaran as their home. The other guys, barely sketched in, have troubled marriages and loyalties only to each other.

Marchal runs them back and forth across the waterfront, back alleys and hidden coves around Marseilles, slaughtering each other to cover up last crime.

The stand-out character for me is Santu, a Corsican mobster played by Alain Figlarz. And the stand out scene is him being arrested in church, at a funeral.

As for the rest, writer-director Marchal loses track of characters, story threads, mob cash and drugs, impatient as he is to get to the next shoot out.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug content, nudity, profanity

Cast: Yannick Gautry, Moussa Maaskri, Stanislas Merhar, Kaaris, David Belle, Patrick Catalifo, Erika Sainte, Jeanne Bournaud Alain Figlarz and Jean Reno.

Credits: Written and directed by Olivier Marchal. A Gaumont film, a Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

What is it with characters in horror movies and carrots? Always cutting up carrots, always with the same result.

And sheep. If it’s a tale set on a remote farm — heaven knows how often this happens — it’s always a sheep farm. The lambs! The bleating of the lambs! Make it stop!

“The Dark and the Wicked” is a terror tale trope ride from the writer-director director of “The Strangers,” gloomy and creepy and gory, if not exactly surprising or all that suspenseful.

When you’ve got carrots and lambs and crucifixes, you’ve set the table. We know what we’re getting for dinner.

Marin Ireland and Michael Abbott Jr. are siblings who’ve come home to see their bedbound dying father, and maybe help out their overwhelmed mother (Julie Oliver-Touchs). But Mom isn’t exactly welcoming.

“You don’t need to be here” and “I told you not to come” aren’t taken the right way.

“It’s gonna be OK, Momma.”

“WHAT’s going to be OK?”

Something is going on in the house, which is eerily quiet the way houses are in most horror movies. Nobody thinks to turn on “Jeopardy?”

Listening to the moan of the wind and the creaking of the wooden floors and walls would drive anybody nuts. Mom is a case in point. Remember the “carrots.”

The siblings are troubled long before tragedy strikes. A non-religious family, they puzzled by the crucifixes and Catholic votive candles. A clergyman (Xander Berkeley) seems to know Mother well. Or maybe not.

And the howling in the Texas night isn’t their handyman (Tom Nowicki). Something sinister is behind it, behind the visions the siblings see in the mirror, the shadows, on the ceilings.

Writeer-director Bryan Bertino takes a grim situation — a family waiting for a loved one to die — and slowly puts the would-be mourners to the test. What they’re seeing, who they’re hearing, can’t be real.

Ireland (“The Irishman,” “Hell or High Water” and TV’s “Umbrella Academy”) reacts to the supernatural in a way we might expect — profanity and screams, tears and terror. She lets us see Louise flinch at every shock, and unravel a bit with every new one she faces.

Abbott (“Hearts Beat Loud,” “In the Radiant City”) makes a different choice. His Michael recoils, but tamps down the terror. Internalizing it might be what a farm-raised man might do, especially a non-believer.

The leaden pace tends to make “The Dark and the Wicked” a slow-burn of a thriller, easing us into the next grisly shock. I can’t say that works to the film’s benefit, even if it’s been to build suspense, even if we’re meant to be developing empathy for the sister and brother powering through what was always going to be an awful situation, but that has turned demonic.

But the players sell it. And the jolts — an apparition here, a ghost in a shadows there — get the job done.

Leaving the source of this supernatural assault vague is a smart choice, a mysterious horror that can visit anyone, anywhere, especially if you live on a remote Texas farm with sheep and carrots.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott, Jr. , Xander Berkeley, Julie Oliver-Touchs and Tom Nowicki

Credits: Written and directed by Bryan Bertino. An RLJE/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:36

I didn’t get to the first season of “The Mandalorian” when it broke last year at this time, but I did tuck into it in the spring, when COVID and the collapse of film release schedules left me a bit at a loss for what to watch.

So I could do little more than raise an eyebrow over the 2019 toy season mania for Baby Yoda and the breathless buzz from the faithful about the serialized, A-list effects-driven treatment of the “Star Wars” universe, after the last Death Star was blown up.

I didn’t bother to review that first season, because zeroing in on the show’s second pass seemed more promising. Once the buzz dies down, we’ll see what we really have. I’d save my powder for that.

Glancing back over my reviews of the J.J. Abrams big screen installments, which were to a one inferior to the stand-alone “Rogue One,” and a little better than the poorly-cast prequel “Solo,” I had to approach “Mandolorian” with an eye for its intended audience, which it almost certainly serves well.

The idea is to generate interest in a still wildly popular but steadily-fading and over-exposed franchise to a new generation of addicts. So that “intended audience” for Jon Favreau’s spinoff about Boba Fett’s bounty hunter kin, Mandalorians, skews younger.

And if I was an eleven year-old girl or boy, I’d be waiting with bated breath for this Neverending Story to continue. But I’m not eleven. So brace yourself.

The second season premiere episode, “The Marshal,” takes one right back to the era George Lucas conceived his space opera in — the early ’70s. “Marshal” is largely set on the desert planet of Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s dusty stomping grounds. And it is a straight-up early-70s TV Western with space ships.

There was always that element to the original trilogy — the naive hot shot kid on a quest, the grizzled gunslinger, the saloons, evil “bosses” and a faceless enemy — helmeted, not covered in warpaint — who exist simply to be slaughtered. Here, Favreau goes all-in for an installment that will set the tone if not limit the settings of this planet-hopping quest to find kinfolk who can protect this toddler with The Force from the lawless legions that would love to grab him.

Casting Timothy Olyphant, fresh (ish) off his “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” turn as a TV Western star of the late ’60s makes that connection obvious. That’s a valid, if not exactly novel approach to take. “Episode IV” owed as much to “The Searchers” as “The Hidden Fortress,” after all.

And truth be told, the first time I heard the Mandalorian who decides to protect the Baby Yoda speak, I thought Pedro Pascal WAS Timothy Olyphant.

“The Marshal” sends our traveling baby sitter from bar to MMA brawl in search of his kind, those who can join him protecting the tyke in the floating stroller egg. That’s how he’s directed to Tatooine, not to the friendly confines of Mos Eisley, but for the pretty much “wiped out” settlement of Mos Pelgo.

It’s where The Marshal (Olyphant) keeps order, and does it with Mandalorian armor, if not bloodline. Meeting him as he swaggers, bowlegged, into a saloon is laughably on-the-nose, a good kind of laugh.

Familiar creatures (Banthas, Tusken, Jawas) and transport (hover-bikes, Sand Crawler) are here, along with Amy Sedaris’ chatty, “Thank The Force” cliche-spouting comic relief, Peli Motto, complaining about her droids.

“You just can’t get good help anymore!”

The serious “Star Wars” speak doesn’t kick in until The Mandalorian and The Marshal swap Bantha-sized bon mots.

“I guess, every once in a while, both suns shine on a womprat’s tale!”

I like the kid-friendly death-threats doled out by The Mandalorian, safe behind his Batman-utility belt pack of hardware.

“Tell me where the Mandalorians are and I’ll walk out of here without killing you.“

But The Marshal gives as good as he gets, to Sand People, for instance.

“Sit back down before I put a hole inya!“

He gets on just fine with this menacing “new gun in town.” Heck, they team up in that Disney-fied “let’s all work together for a common goal” “Toy Story” way.

You want novelty? You’ll have to wait for later episodes. “The Marshal” is strictly comfort food, unchallenging and unexciting. Olyphant’s line-readings of the somewhat childish trope-trapped dialogue are as flat as the fellow whose face we’re not meant to see. The added length only highlights how repetitive and derivative the whole enterprise is.

Real menace? Giancarlo Esposito is coming. So maybe. Better fights? Former MMA star Gina Carano is due up. So, probably. Real conflict? Don’t hold your breath.

The tone they’re aiming for has been set, and the demographics bar lowered to tweens-and-younger. And no, a story that has lots and lots of locations, many races and character names, bartenders ranging from cyclops to Snivvians, is not necessarily deep.

As Billy or Wyatt or Johnny Ringo could tell you, a saloon’s a saloon, with or without a cantina band.

It’s not my place to dissect this show for those who obsess over it, parsing its minutia, dying for that next moment Baby shows he/she won’t be backed into a corner.

Still, do yourself a favor. Visit your favorite streaming, cable or broadcast “Westerns” channel. Jon Favreau certainly did. Look at what Hollywood was turning out on horseback by the early ’70s; exhausted, cornball rehashes of tales and archetypes that were old hat and worn out long before John Wayne won his Oscar.

Like Western watchers back then, waiting for “The Mandalorian” to get better is like waiting for nostalgia to finally get old.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, violence and lots of it.

Cast: Pedro Pascal, Amy Sedaris, Timothy Olyphant, Giancarlo Esposito, Gina Carano and Carl Weathers.

Credits: Created by Jon Favreau. A Disney+ release.

Running t

“Kindred” sets up as a mash up of “Get Out!” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” with its pregnant Black woman trapped on the Scottish estate of the father of her child.

It’s not nearly as paranoid or supernatural as all that. The movie we’re left with is more a battle of wills, with a whiff of madness or whatever it is that has our heroine dreaming of crows. Slim thriller pickings, in other words.

Charlotte, played with a gathering intensity by Tamara Lawrence, is the stable worker who fell for the handsome veterinarian. They’d love to move to Australia, make a fresh start. But Ben (Edward Holcroft) has this mother that they both avoid, and his mother’s stepson Thomas (Jack Lowden) isn’t anybody they’d care to visit, either. “We’re not even related,” Ben hisses.

Still, in the spirit of “get it over with,” they come over for lunch and to break the news. It does not go well.

“Your brother is LEAVING me,” Mum (Fiona Shaw in fully fury) rages. So much for lunch.

But their plans to flee hit a few bumps in the road. Charlotte is the last to realize that she’s pregnant (continuity has her looking preggers from the start). She’s not sure she wants to bring the fetus to term. “I’m on the pill for a REASON,” after all.

And then Ben is killed in a work accident.

Tragedy or not, Charlotte and the mother tear into each other — literally — at the hospital. The next thing Charlotte knows, she wakes up in the estate, her phone is mysteriously “broken,” and she cannot leave.

Co-writer and director Joe Marcantonio, making his feature directing debut, drapes “Kindred” in the gloom of late fall and has the score (by Jack Halama and Natalie Holt) shrouded in quivering strings — classic thriller touches.

But tone and good performers alone will only take you so far, and the thin story here rather lets the project down. Hints of Charlotte’s family having a “history” of mental problems are left dangling, undercutting any notion that she’s imagining that everyone — the family doctor (Anton Lesser), hovering Thomas and cruel, controlling Margaret (Shaw) — is out to get her, or at least keep her locked up her.

Charlotte’s escape attempts are diverting but hardly riveting. Maybe she’s cunning enough to get out, or maybe they’re drugging her, clouding her judgment and slowing her down enough to make such efforts futile.

We long for that moment when she can force her way into a hospital or turn to a friend (Chloe Pirrie) with that all important “Look, I know this is going to sound crazy” plea for help.

It’s not just that “Kindred” doesn’t go full “Rosemary’s Baby” with why these strangers want her to have her baby at home where they can get at it, or that we get little clear notion of why they won’t let her “Get Out.” It’s that the movie has very little, suspense and thrills-wise, to offer instead.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Tamara Lawrence, Jack Lowden, Edward Holcroft, Chloe Pirrie and Fiona Shaw.

Credits: Directed by Joe Marcantonio, script by Joe Marcantonio and Jason McColgan. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:42

One can’t watch the Romanian documentary “Collective (Colectiv)” without feeling as if the film is a snapshot of America’s future.

A kleptocracy run amok, corruption spreading up and down the bureaucratic ladder, a tragedy that exposes a rotten system overwhelmed and caught with its pants down.

And a leader stands before the press and vows (in Romanian, with English subtitles) that “the first thing to do to regain trust is to stop lying.”

For Romania, that came after a fire in a Bucharest night club without a fire suppression system and with too few (unmarked) exits killed 27. The Colectiv club blaze injured 180 others, and at one point we see the moment it started and the chaos that followed during a speed metal concert there. It is horrific cell-phone footage.

But the real horror came days later. Another 37 people died, some with survivable burn wounds, but treated in hospitals run on bribes and cost-cutting, so filled with infection that they could boast “the most deplorable sanitary conditions in Europe.”

Patients were so poorly cared for that they got maggots in their wounds.

It took a newspaper with “sports” as its primary readership, Sports Gazette, and several intrepid reporters to blow up this scandal, which ranged from bribed managers running the hospitals to a firm — Hexi Pharma — and its offshore financed chief, which watered down disinfectants, and even IODINE, in what lead reporter Catalin Tolontan described as “an experiment,” with every hospital patient in the country a guinea pig to see just how bad things could get before the deaths became public and outrage exploded.

Plainly the briber-in-chief could have implicated hundreds of not jus no jt hack hospital managers, but an entrenched, corrupt government that looked the other way. His “suicide” has a Jeffrey Epstein convenience about it.

Nanau’s film follows three main threads — Tolontan and colleague Mirela Neag digging and pushing the widening scandal story forward, forcing resignations along the way, young burn victim Tedy Ursuleanu‘s recovery (acquiring an artificial hand, modeling as the face of the tragedy) and in the offices and press conferences of Vlad Voisculescu, the “patients’ advocate” lobbyist brought in with a wave of “technocrats” to clean up a government proven to be just as corrupt as the dictatorship it replaced decades ago.

Vlad is the new Minister of Health, the one who promises to “stop lying.” We watch his uphill fight against pass-the-buck underlings, a combative press and a public easily swayed by Big Promises for the political party responsible for the state of affairs, pretending none of it is their fauly.

We see defiant bureaucrats insisting “all needs are being met” by a plainly inadequate system, doctors as whistleblowers and the dogged pursuit of chemical tests on the watered-down products the hospitals were further watering down so the local fat cats in charge could spend the savings on mansions, Porsches and vacations.

The allegations flying around back in 2016-17 have a whiff of Trumpism about them — incompetence, self-dealing, murderous callousness. The reporters flirt with using the word “murder” to describe the criminal intent of those paid off to let things get this bad.

And there’s deja vu in watching Tolontan deal with Romanian TV, which eagerly follows his team’s reporting each night, but which cannot resist from shooting at the messenger when he appears on their talk shows, losing the thread and forgetting the real victims here.

Nanau doesn’t. His film may drift deep into journalistic arcana for long stretches, but he never forgets to come back to Tedy, or the families of survivors (Minister Vlad meets with them), or the shocking tragedy that inspired all this.

Even if his fellow countrymen are just as easily distracted by politicians who shrug off every Sandy Hook, Parkland, Vegas or Orlando/Pulse. The people they voted for created this mess. Not holding them accountable makes them just as culpable.

MPAA Rating: unrated, traumatic fire footage and burn wound imagery

Cast: Catalin Tolontan, Tedy Ursuleanu, Mirela Neag and Vlad Voiculescu

Credits: Directed by Alexander Nanau, script by Alexander Nanau, Antoaneta Opris. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:49

Comic-of-the-political-moment Sarah Cooper riffs through her Trump-lip-syncing repertoire and her Twitter friends list with her Netflix sketch show, “Everything’s Fine.”

Playing herself as an embattled morning show hostess — the show is called “Everything’s Fine” — she shows the camera a lot of looks and an acting savvy that should lead to more work, which feels like the point of this quick turn-around special.

Because her “moment” has a shelf life, and being smart and talented and over 40, she’s got to look past oh, next week.

“Everything’s Fine” has sketches, fake commercials, office intrigue and “black-ish” folks at Mar-a-Lago.

Maya Rudolph gives us the weather, climate-changed and hellish. Funny.

Aubrey Plaza plays a QAnon version of QVC (home shopping) for the paranoid and conspiracy-minded. Plaza never fails to amuse.

Jon Hamm does his killer “My Pillow” impersonation, Ben Stiller’s a tech CEO who turns out to be a robot, Jane Lynch is a twisted cooking show “Karen,” leading to a Whoopi Goldberg narrated Ken Burns-style doc on the “history of ‘Karens.'”

Megan Thee Stallion and Jordana Bachman bits, and so on.

Cooper gets backstage career advice from her producers on how to be a more “non-threatening Black woman,” Marisa Tomei plays one of too-many bosses and Fred Armisen, her on-set producer “Scooter,” socially distances, tests assorted PPE, and can’t find a laugh.

“Can’t find a laugh” goes for the whole special, sadly. Cooper is game, and is a fun on-camera presence. But this material is weak and prematurely dated.

The marquee bit is the “Access Hollywood” tape lip-sync, with Oscar winner Dame Helen Mirren cackling and enabling away as Billy Bush. Ick. Bush wasn’t banned long enough. And “meh” as a sketch.

The public service in this special is reminding us of all the climate, political, civil rights, violence and corruption we’ve been subjected to this year, and how TV programmers have eaten that up.

“Tomorrow, something bad happens to your favorite celebrity!”

Here’s to hoping our and Sarah Cooper’s “tomorrow” is better than today, and that Cooper lands a third act to a career that has flourished, online, this year, after being off the radar for too long before we found her.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, adult content, profanity

Cast: Sarah Cooper, Maya Rudolph, Helen Mirren, Jane Lynch, Jon Hamm, Aubrey Plaza, Connie Chung, Winona Ryder, Marisa Tomei, Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Stiller and Fred Armisen.

Credits: Directed by Natasha Lyonne. A Netflix release.

Running time: :49

A deep bow of respect is due to Ms. Joey King, who used her newly emerging star clout (“Fargo,” “Kissing Booth,” “Slender Man,” “Summer ’03”) to get “Radium Girls” on the screen.

It’s a well-acted, smartly-reported and heartfelt if somewhat malnourished period piece about the heroic women of U.S. Radium Corp’s New Jersey watch-dial factory. In the mid-1920s, they realized they were being poisoned, painting luminous radioactive numbers on watchfaces, and took the callous corporation to court, exposing a cover-up that changed American labor and workplace safety.

Reminding people of the Radium Girls‘ sacrifice and struggle at a time when worker rights and worker safety are under open assault is a gutsy move and does a great credit to King and co-star Abby Quinn (“Little Women,” TV’s new “Mad About You”).

Filmmakers Lydia Dean Pilcher, Ginnhy Mohler and (co-writer) Brittany Shaw tell a compelling, old-fashioned story in a somewhat stolid (corny, even) style. But the leads, playing sisters employed at the factory, make us care and break our hearts in this classic tale of Big Business lowballing the value of human life and sacrificing worker safety in the process.

Bess (King) is a 17 year-old who dreams of silent screen fame, like her idol, Rudolph Valentino. Older sister Josephine (Quinn) is the smart one, and the industrious one. She turns out many more dials per day, because like the other workers at American Radium, she licks her brush to keep its point fine enough to paint the glow-in-the-dark numbers onto the watch faces.

The women employed in this work weren’t just exposed to radiation on the job. Win the “most watches painted in a month” prize and American Radium would give you a bottle of Radithor, a radium-based patent medicine.

Bess frets over the “aftertaste” and doesn’t indulge in glow-in-the-dark makeup parties with her colleagues.

“Stop being a worrywart,” everybody says.

And then one sister gets sick, and she’s not the first. Getting straight answers out of “the company doctor” (Neil Huff) is impossible. It isn’t until the communist photographer (Collin Kelly Sordelet) Bess has taken a shine to suggests that they visit this crusading outfit called The Consumer’s League that they get their first dose of The Truth.

Doctors working for companies like this diagnose “syphilis” to shame the victim and the family into not talking about what’s made them sick. They’ve been hearing from other girls and women. What they need is proof, a corpse that shows that the cause of death might be something nobody knew about at the time, radiation poisoning.

“Radium Girls” uses a carnival barker pitching “radium water,” the “miracle elixir of the age,” and lots of advertising for “radium” products, as well as silent, black and white documentary film footage to lend authenticity to their fictionalized version of this banner moment in U.S. labor history.

A conceit of the film is introducing a sympathetic African American documentary filmmaker (Susan Heyward) character, having her talk about “The Tulsa Massacre,” and the government’s involvement in it, and showing the value of alliances in effecting change.

Not enough is done with that, and the fictional trial, while moving and hopeful, tends to draw matters out.

But Quinn and King carry the emotional weight of the film, and they’re good enough to make “Radium Girls” worth remembering and checking out. They put a moving human face on a story that’s been told in PBS documentaries and books, which gave us the facts, but not the heart of the heroines or the dead souls of the fat cat villains.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Joey King, Abby Quinn, Cara Seymour, Scott Shepherd, Susan Heyward, Neil Huff and Collin Kelly-Sordelet

Credits: Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher, Ginny Mohler, Script by Ginny Mohler and Brittany Shaw. A Juno release.

Running time: 1:42

Sure, it’s still a bargain.
And considering that Netflix looks to take a big piece of the Oscar nominations pie this year, you pretty much can’t get around subscribing.

Still, with their subscriber base, it’s hard to see how they’ve spent it all, or even a large portion of it, on content, no matter how much “Kill the Irishman,” “Roma” and “Da Five Bloods” cost.

From Variety

https://t.co/CbSL8wPmJt https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1321896812928815105?s=20

Let’s remake “The Craft” and rub all its hard, cruel edges off.

It’ll be “woke” and tolerant, righteous in its inclusion and opposition to those against those values. It just won’t be scary or have the “now they’ve gone too far” arc from good, clean witchcraft fun to violent and vengeful, betrayal and death.

Actress turned writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones (“Life in Pieces”) revives the franchise with a somewhat toothless thriller titled “The Craft: Legacy,” a reboot/sequel with empowerment messaging and sisterhood bonding, and too little of the stuff that made “The Craft” a cult favorite of generations.

In simpler terms, she’s giggly-girlied it up and sucked all the life out of it.

But this “Legacy” has a promising start. Three high school girls (Zoey Luna, Lovie Simone, Gideon Adlon) have discovered their “power,” and have taken a dive into the occult, via candlelit ceremonies and incantations delivered in a circle.

But this “magic circle” is like a compass rose. It lacks a “west.” They find her when Lily (Cailee Spaeny of “On the Basis of Sex” and “Bad Times at the El Royale”) becomes the New Girl in School.

Pixie-haired Lily may wear a witchy necklace and see a snake walking up to the house of her mom’s (Michelle Monaghan) new love. But she’s got no clue as to what’s she’s capable of.

She starts to find out when Frankie, Lou and Lisa offer their support after a teenage girl’s mid-class menstrual moment becomes the bullies’ excuse to shame her.

This is Lister-Jones’ best scene, a moment of hurt and embarrassment turned into a rite of “sisterhood.” When they realize that Lily’s “special,” they invite her in, and she accepts in a flash — the new friends, the rituals, the super-naturalism.

She must have seen “Charmed” reruns or something.

The early bonding scenes, with the girls going on about the “stages” of witchcraft mastery that they have to go through, with Frankie (Adlon) enthusing about shape-shifting into “K-Stew” from “Twilight,” play as giddy, jokey fun.

“You shouldn’t run from your power,” Lily is advised, somberly. “NONE of us should.”

But let’s “take our coven for a TEST drive!”

The girls “reform” (neuter) via a curse, the school bully (Nicholas Galitzine) and avail themselves of their powers in class and in the cafeteria. But nothing really gets out of hand. Any “infighting” seems pre-ordained by a screenwriting formula, not organic or a natural product of the changing power dynamics of the coven.

One interesting conflict is set up. Lily’s new “dad” is some sort of Men’s Movement thinker/author. Casting David Duchovny as a sort of rival “cult” leader, with his three teen sons amounting to the lab rats in his experiment in “Hallowed Masculinity” is clever, but doesn’t pay off on the screen as well as its reads on the page.

Lister-Jones loses herself in high school romance, teen clique dynamics and riffing on high school “types” and rites of passage. The biggest laugh in the picture might mean the Sex Ed film the kids sit through, to hoots and catcalls from the obnoxious and immature boys.

“‘Yes’ and only ‘yes’ means ‘yes!'”

Lister-Jones hasn’t utterly ruined “The Craft,” and thanks mostly to the cast and the chemistry they build via weary “makeover” and “circle in the woods” scenes, it has its charms.

But stripping it of its cruelty, sense of grievance and teen-impulsive passion for violent revenge rubs off too much of what made the first film work from this “sequel.” And no cameo from the first film can atone for that.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, crude and sexual content, language and brief drug material

Cast: Cailee Spaeny, Zoey Luna, Lovie Simone, Gideon Adlon, Nicholas Galitzine, Michelle Monaghan and David Duchovny

Credits: Written and directed by Zoe Lister-Jones, based on Peter Filardi’s script “The Craft.” A Sony release.

Running time: 1:34

We meet Darryl Gant in his car, driving through the dark, ruined streets of Camden, New Jersey.

Philly guys on the radio compare the place to “Robocop’s Detroit” and “I Am Legend,” a ghost town since its Campbell’s Soup, RCA records glory days.

And Darryl? “I’m doing what I always do.” “What,” a friend wants to know, “chasing her around?”

Hasan Oswald’s sad, infuriating and compelling “Higher Love” is about Darryl’s search for his girlfriend of seven years. Nani is a crack addict, for starters. “There’s not any drug Nani won’t do,” Darryl admits. But he loves her. She’s pregnant. And she’s with her “get high buddies.” Can she be saved?

Oswald follows the search from two points of view — Darryl’s and Nani’s. Darryl questions junkies on the pitch-black streets, amid the tumbledown factories of a city whose heyday passed long before Sinatra did. Nani, dolled up and sporting a stoned, Kardashian vocal fry, whines about the names Darryl calls her when she’s on a bender, selling herself for drug money.

“You told me ‘Never give up’ on you,” he says when he finally tracks her down. And he hasn’t. Yet. But even he can see that “I don’t think there will be a happy ending.”

Oswald keeps his camera docu-drama close, capturing Darryl’s concern and Nani’s perpetual daze. He has a decent job and she can’t understand why he won’t finance her addiction. She listens to talk of “vitamins” for the baby she’s carrying and rehab for herself.

But “It sucks to love somebody who don’t love themselves.”

Oswald’s film captures America’s opioid epidemic in its more urban form. White and black addicts and dealers talk about methadone and rehab and let us hear and see how that’s all it may ever be — talk. Darryl eyes the big picture of Camden when he disparages efforts at reviving the city that don’t start with addressing this healthcare crisis first.

“The people have to choose” to turn themselves around before Camden can come back.

The story arc here could confirm or contradict Darryl’s forlorn prediction of no “happy ending.” But as the baby is born the struggle continues anew, Darryl stoically notes that “He didn’t choose his mother, I did,” and that has to guide his thinking from here on out.

As for Camden, the low-level dealer Iman sizes the place up on a snowy afternoon at a local cemetery.

“I know who killed him,” he says, pointing to one tombstone, and then another. It’s a profoundly sad moment in a downbeat documentary that doesn’t have answers, just broken people unable to “choose” what’s best for them and the city whose ruin is both their trap and their responsibility.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, drug abuse, sex work discussions, drinking, smoking, profanity

Cast: Darryl Gant, Nani, Iman, Nikki and Raymond

Credits: Written and directed by Hasan Oswald. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:17