Movie Nation

“Children of Sin” is the third micro-budget, self-distributed feature horror film from writer, director, actor and producer Christopher Wesley Moore.

He had trouble getting anyone to review his first two films, “Triggered” and “A Stranger Among the Living.” “Sin,” a lumbering, bloody, subtle-as-a-butcher knife splatter film, seems to explain why. Not quite amateurish, but clumsy and cumbersome and on-the-cusp-of-camp, there are good ideas lost in its tedious execution.

But if he’s looking for encouragement, let me just say I’ve seen worse.

An unhappy family strains under the dictatorial, fundamentalist rule of a domineering stepfather (Jeff Buchwald). Stepson Jackson (Lewis Hines) is accepting it, even if that means he had to stay in the closet a while longer. Half step-sister Emma (Meredith Mohler) is in open rebellion, and online looking up “How much is an abortion?”

Mom (Keni Bounds) is at her wit’s end, a woman with no marketable skills and a household that isn’t working out. There’s nothing for it but to put the kids in a Children of Abraham House. It’s a residential “rehab” for wayward teens, and it promises results in just three days.

Mary Esther (horror veteran Jo-Ann Robinson) runs the local “house” with an iron fist. Of course, “their headquarters are in Florida, where all the crazy s–t is,” one resident tells the kids when they’re checked in.

There are uniforms to wear, chores to carry out and “three strikes” allowed for breaking any of the rules there.

Jackson, guided by assistant counselor Hank (writer-director-producer Moore) and lorded over by Mary Esther, buys in. Emma, facing an unwanted pregnancy and an equally unwanted change in wardrobe, resists. And she hears things. Like this “three days” spiel is “what they tell everybody. It’s never three days.

“You never see anybody leave, either,” a long-timer tells her. “They just don’t show up for breakfast one day.”

There’s this locked room where disobedient kids are kept. With all this turnover, is there even anybody here who remembers someone actually coming out of solitary? As we get a peek at what Mary Esther does to teenagers in there, we have our answer. Torturous restraints, gags, and worse face the “laughing all the way to hell” crowd.

Most of the kids are just as cynical about this intervention as Emma, joking that the house’s proper name is “the home for unwed mothers and perverts.”

The treatments, for promiscuity and “the homosexual virus,” are laughable. Or almost laughable.

That’s because the rarely-scary picture dips towards camp but never goes whole hog. A couple of laughs through gritted teeth is about all Moore (no relation) manages.

The good idea here is exposing these sorts of scammy “treatment” centers and slapping them around a bit in a genre picture. Like pretty much every form of “rehab” in America, con artists, insurance skimmers and others have found a way to prey on the gullible and the vulnerable.

Yeah, you could make a half-decent slasher picture out of that setting. “Children of Sin” isn’t it.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Meredith Mohler, Jo-Ann Robinson, Lewis Hines, Jeff Buchwald, Keni Bounds and Christopher Wesley Moore.

Credits: Written and directed by Christopher Wesley Moore. A CWM Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:35

Last quarter, Netflix’s long streak of expanding subscriber numbers ended with a bang. They lost paying customers in the hundreds of thousands — with millions more projected to bail out. .

And that has them looking for culprits. First came the staggering news that tens of millions are stealing their content — their way of looking at it — by sharing password info with friends, family and neighbors. They’ve let it slide up to now, but there is…concern. Now.

And then came this more telling trial balloon. They’re dabbling with the idea of having cheaper levels of service that come with commercials.

Tubi, Roku, Pluto and others are eating their lunch. They’re doing it by being free on your Smart TV, and running commercials. HBO Max and Hulu and Disney+ are looking for ad money, too.

All of those services are also starting to produce original content, just like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix.

Game on?

This could just be posturing for “the markets,” which have to notice the endless growth model has come to an end. But maybe you, like me, have seen a fall-off in Netflix original content production, a lot more sharing of “Netflix Italy/South America/Spain/France/India/South Korea” films and series to cover that.

I’ve noticed because most months, I run out of things I’d be interested in reviewing about mid month. After their recent price hike, that makes me wonder if I’ll resume my practice of dropping it for a couple of months, staying on a couple of months.

My mother has Roku, Tubi, Pluto and other free streamers that I load onto her TV whenever I visit. The advertising breaks are computer generated and irritating, but for the one-time cost of a TV and monthly high speed internet, she has almost as many viewing options as I do.

And I’ve just started reviewing original titles produced by those “free” streamers.

So yeah, game is definitely on. The only game in town stopped being the only game in town during the pandemic, and their inflationary price hike has customers voting with their feet.

It’ll be interesting to see what they finally decide to do when they respond to these red flags.

Reports of Nicolas Cage’s “comeback” have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, that’s mainly because, as Cage himself — playing a daffier version of himself — says a few times in “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” “I was never gone.“

Sure, he’s been working constantly, turning in C-movies like “Mandy,” “Jiu Jitsu,” “Prisoners of the Ghostland,” “Army of One,” three or four of them a year going back decades. It’s just that almost all have been undemanding, disposable junk unfitting for an Oscar winner like himself.

He and Cuba Gooding Jr. should have regular lunch dates to bitch about this.

But this new fanboyish lark could and should be a rare hit outside of Cage’s sensitive and funny voice work on the animated “Croods” movies. It just isn’t all that. It begins with great, goofy promise and ends with a bang. It’s the middle acts and “plot complications” that drag it down.

Don’t go expecting some deep existential crisis facing a faded action star who, like his “Face/Off” co-star, sports hair and hair dye that aren’t fooling anybody any more.

There’s little “Being John Malkovich” whimsy and none of that film’s cracked inventiveness. Even scenes with the older Nic arguing with the young, longhaired, leather-jacked Nic (a great use of “de-aging”) of “Valley Girl,” “Peggy Sue Got Married” or “Rumble Fish” is more promising than hilarious.

Still, it plays. In pandering “fanboy inspired movie” terms, it’s closer to “Fanboys” than “Snakes on a Plane.” Sweet. Almost cute.

Cage plays the Nic Cage of pre-“Pig,” a celebrated actor beloved and warmly-mocked for his gonzo intensity, something he lays out for an indie director whom he flatters by mentioning “Lear” in reference to his script, and then blows the meeting by laying out a Nic Cage intense reading of a scene from the movie, unprompted.

There are laugh-out-loud moments like this right from the start, and cute bits of casting. Neil Patrick Harris is the prototypical “agent” of Hollywood lore, the one more prone to remind The Man of his debts than his talent. That comes up after Cage handles his latest disappointment with an announcement he wants that agent to put “in the trades.”

“I’m retired.” He aspires to simplicity, to “live the life of a house cat.”

No dice. There’s your hotel bill… But this Spanish fan will pay him $1 million to show up for his Mallorca birthday party. And that’s how Nic meets “the Spanish Dr. No,” an underworld figure of staggering wealth, a serious boner for his favorite action star and the name Javi Gutierrez.

Pairing Cage with Pedro Pascal as his rich, shady and probably ruthless new “friend,” is the most inspired element of “Unbearable Weight.” Shedding his “Mandalorian” helmet once more, proving that his “almost the only funny guy in Judd Apatow’s ‘The Bubble'” turn was no fluke, Pascal and Cage click like Javi and Cage, a rich mobster who just wants his hero to “read my script.”

The movie has them debating the merits of this or that screenplay necessity or cheesy Hollywood convention, looking for something more than a “Donnie Brasco” touch as they concoct their own script and bond like the macho hombres they both aspire to be.

Assuming his new pal is the action stud of the “National Treasure,” “Con Air” and “The Rock” movies is a mistake.

“That was the stunt team,” Cage takes pains to correct.

The secondary plot has a couple of CIA agents (reunited “Oath” co-stars Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz), luring Cage into helping them locate the teen daughter of a Spanish politician that Javi’s gang supposedly is holding hostage.

That’s a necessary plot complication that doesn’t add much in the way of laughs.

What works here is the buddy bonding stuff and the endless Cage goofs on his reputation — impulsive, a spendthrift, intense to the point of self-parody at work, with a personal life that’s a lot more complicated than having a single ex (Irish spitfire Sharon Horgan of TV’s “Catastrophe” and “This Way Up”) and a single bored-with-Dad’s-narcissism teen daughter (Lily Mo Sheen).

Shoot-outs, chases, leaping off cliffs and saving the day? All givens. Whatever else “Unbearable Weight” is, it’s a “Nic FRIGGGGGGGGIN’ CAGE” movie.

And it’s funny enough so long as Cage and Pascal are bromancing their way towards that big pay off/stand-off, the one you’ve seen in all the trailers because, let’s face it, it sells “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.”

“I’ll never forget you, man!”

The movie? Cage’ll make better ones than this, and probably funnier ones. And so will Pascal.

Rating: R for language throughout, some sexual references, drug use and violence.

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Sharon Horgan, Lily Mo Sheen, Neil Patrick Harris, Ike Barinholtz and Tiffany Haddish.

Credits: Directed by Tom Gormican, scripted by Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:47

This “true story” crime saga doesn’t have a well known cast, but that may not matter when you’re using an archetypal plot. May 6, from Samuel Goldwyn.

…tastes like wine from a can. Stick to bottles, “Bev.” And maybe hard seltzer or some such.

The first time you see “the effect,” you’ll puzzle over the “Benjamin Button” idiocy of it all and ponder “What in the French-Canadian F is this?”

Because SOMEbody thought the idea of digitally de-aging and shrinking the star of “Aline” to have one actress play an undisguised portrait of Celine Dion from age 12 to the present day — she’s 54 — was a good idea. And we all know who that idiot was.

If French director, co-writer and star Valérie Lemercier was living in America, she’d have not just pricier, inferior health care. She’d have long ago gotten that “Welcome to AARP” card in the mail. LONG ago.

This may be the most delusional star turn since the silent film era, a woman pushing 60 pretending to be 12 lip-syncing to Celine’s earliest hits, sung in “Aline” by Victoria Sio.

The result is instant camp. I mean INSTANT. Do the gays know about “Aline?” This fromage has “cult” film written all over it.

This sentimental portrait of a working poor Quebecoise, an “ugly duckling” among a family of 14 children growing up to be the premier belter of her day, Queen of Vegas and all that manages to be sympathetic and profoundly unflattering at the same time.

Born “the baby” in a huge and musical Catholic family in rural Quebec, we see Aline’s first public appearance — singing at a brother’s wedding — rendered with edits that never let us see the the whole child, at age five. That grotesque digital effect and vocal looping kick in as we’re showing Aline all but taking over the family act, leading her mother (Danielle Fichaud, deliciously earthy) and singing, hustling older brother Jean Bobin (Antoine Vézina) to realize they have a star on their hands.

She may be an indifferent student at school, but by age 12 they write her a song and get it to a grasping, hard-luck talent manager, Guy-Claude (Sylvain Marcel), who travels from “Is that really you singing?” to “I’m gonna make you a star” (in French, with English subtitles, with later scenes in English) in a heartbeat.

Young Aline becomes the Princess of Quebec, the darling of Canada and a sensation in France before her doting, savvy manager advises — over her family’s objections — a long break, so that her singular voice can mature and she can be made over for reintroduction to America and the world.

Braces, English lessons, jazzercise classes to give this gawky provincial “grace” on stage, and then this Extreme Makeover: Music Edition returns to the limelight and conquers the world.

With or without Dion’s blessing and cooperation, the script takes great pains to show that it was the girlish Aline who pursued “more than twice her age” manager, the man coaching and doting on her and carefully protecting/directing her every move on her way to the top.

Aline’s mother confronts her — “This is utter NONSENSE, Aline!” — and threatens Guy, but to no avail.

“Aline” then charts the star and her manager keeping their secret, Aline breaking down on TV rather than admit who she sings all these tender love ballads to, their marriage and long struggle to have children and keep her “No vegetables, BEEF” diet spouse healthy and alive through eventual pregnancies and her years-long Vegas residency.

Lemercier isn’t a bad actress (fans of French cinema will remember her from “May Fools,” Selena Gomez fanatics will recognize her from “Monte Carlo”). She does a decent job of recreating the adult Celine’s stage act, and the film is picture perfect at mimicking the Oscar night sensation Dion made when she sang the Oscar winning “My Heart Will Go On” from “Titanic.”

The women share swanlike physiques and just enough dance skills for the film to pull off the skinny star in a Big Stage Show numbers.

And the touching moments can be genuinely moving, in a corny, old fashioned musical bio-pic way.

But when you’ve started out camp, it’s hard to go back. One finds oneself wondering what other outlandish tricks Lemercier has up her sleeve. Will she send up this May-Late October romance? Will the “makeover” sequence include a nose job? The real Dion denies ever having one and the fake Celine looks nothing like the real one, thanks to a prominent Gallic prow.

It’s almost disappointing that the movie plays things more or less straight after that jarring first act. The sanitized love affair with her father-figure manager and everything else is so conventional that the argument could be made that this would have been nothing more than Hallmark Channel picture had that loopy stunt not started off the proceedings.

Then again, that opening “epic fail” and descent into camp allows us to laugh off the entire enterprise, which can’t have been from Lemercier and her enablers had in mind.

Rating: PG-13 (Some Suggestive Material|Brief Language)

Cast: Valérie Lemercier, Sylvain Marcel, Danielle Fichaud, Roc Lafortune and Antoine Vézina

Credits: Directed by Valérie Lemercier, scripted by Brigitte Buc, Valérie Lemercier A Roadside Attractions/Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 2:08

The director of “The Torture Club” and “Love Disease” is back for another dainty dip into the deep end of Japanese kink with “Sexual Drive,” a droll triptych of food, sex and perverse manipulation.

In “Remembrance of Things Past,” Marcel Proust’s narrator lapses into memories at the mere scent on a madeleine cookie. Kôta Yoshida’s characters, in three stories, connect food to sexual arousal via a provocateur who encourages them to do just that.

It’s something of a dark comedy, a “Tampopo” with little of the savory sensuality and few of the laughs.

The stories are named after foods — Nattō, Mapo Tufu and Ramen with Extra Back Fat. In each, our seemingly omniscient instigator, Kurita (Tateto Serizawa) forces those he confronts to consider the sensuality of the food they’re eating, considering eating or that they watch a loved one eat.

Kinky.

In Nattō, a suspicious husband (Ryô Ikeda) is slowly driven to tears and fury when he meets Kurita, the man who admits to having an affair with his wife. We hear Kurita’s gruesome detail-oriented description of their meeting — she’s a nurse who treated him — and see his obscene fixation of the sticky, smelly soy concoction that she eats for breakfast. And we join the husband in his growing despair and shock, if not in his revulsion that turns towards arousal.

Mapo Tofu puts Kurita in the path of a driver (Honami Satô) with anxiety issues on her way to buy some spicey tofu that’s on sale at a nearby market. Kurita doesn’t approve, as he used to live in the corner of China where this super-hot dish was invented.

“It’s red, like lave, and makes your tongue hurt!” This “family safe” bargain version is a compromise Akane shouldn’t make. As he seems to know much of her life history, perhaps that’s right. As she hit him with her car, and neither we nor she can see how that happened, we can ponder what’s really going on here, and what corner of kinkiness Kurita will claim this time.

And in “Ramen with Extra Back Fat” the “other woman” is stood up for her date with a married man (Shogen) and stops by a greasy spoon noodle shop where “talking isn’t allowed,” and there’s only the sound of men slurping the fatty, garlic-dosed noodles and the scent of sweaty men devouring that fragrant comfort food.

Her lover is led there, by phone, by Kurita, who narrates how the evening went for her in the most salacious terms. She wanted “a bowl of ramen that would satisfy her desires,” as Mr. Married Man was too busy for her this night.

The performances throw a few outsized (culturally appropriate) reactions to these situations at us, even as we’re invited to wonder how we’d respond to such baiting. Serizawa’s Kurita makes a fascinating anchor figure through it all — not much to look at (he’s a self-described “stroke” victim in the first story), but into the pleasures of the flesh, and not in any conventional way either. He’s provoking those he encounters to think of themselves, their diets and the food choices of their lovers in erotic terms.

This three-part picture is more interesting than titillating, a film best appreciated as a semi-sordid slice of interior lives in a culture that worships good manners and may or may not have invented pornography, but certainly perfected it in either case.

Rating: unrated, frank sex talk

Cast: Manami Hashimoto, Ryô Ikeda, Mukau Nakamura, Honami Satô, Tateto Serizawa, Shogen, Rina Takeda

Credits: Scripted and directed and Kôta Yoshida. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:11

We don’t see the moment she first caught his eye. But she did. And we see how he instinctually conspires to literally “bump into” her.

He is young. She is younger. And in a flash he’s turned his “rude” bump into a come-on that ends with Faruk insisting that Mona take his phone number. He’s so smooth and confident that he does this before he can even get her name.

She lies about being a dropout. Perhaps because he obviously is. But as we’ve seen his 18ish womanizing ways, we wonder if she’s old enough to even realize she’s taken the phone number of not just a player, but a potential predator.

Because winsome, girlish Mona (Sumeja Dardagan) is just in ninth grade, and the daughter of wealthy, probably corrupt bureaucrats intent on shipping her off to Canada. And Faruk (Pavle Cemerikic) isn’t just a hustler. He’s mixed-up with some seriously shady folks in Sarajevo. Is this “grooming,” or love at first sight?

“The White Fortress,” titled “Tabija” in Bosnia Herzegovina, is a wistful, aching romance with a hint of menace about it. Well-acted and deliberately-paced, it presents us with not just two young lovers straining against all that they don’t have in common to be together, but a relationship we never question even as we know we should.

Because Faruk doesn’t just live with his grandmother, watch World War II documentaries and old Yugoslav war films, help his uncle with his scrap metal business — the long civil war, decades ago, created a lot of scrap — and chase skirts. He and his pal Almir (Pavle Cemerikic) run errands for a local gangster, the mostly-unseen but widely-feared Cedo. And chief among those errands is taking prostitutes to their appointments.

Our one hope for Faruk, and young Mona, is a simple act of arm-twisted chivalry that puts him in hot water with Cedo and underscores the danger we sense in Mona associating with the kid. When he shows up to take Minela (Farah Hadzic) to a suburban customer, he’s on his scooter. She insists he take her in a taxi.

That sets off a chain of events that could doom him, Mona and their affair, if what the thug figures he’s now “owed” is pricey enough.

Writer-director Igor Drljaca’s Oscar-submitted drama captures a country of haves and resigned, hustling have-nots. Mona’s life of school, studying English, and a luxurious house with parents who despise one another is contrasted with Faruk’s half-ruined apartment complex where he lives with his grandmother, his endless hustles and side hustles.

He leaves his scooter to take Minela by taxi, a tire is stolen from the bike, and maybe more. Extra cash for that, and the colorful shirts he likes means another hustle, another chance to get in Dutch with Cedo, another peril for Mona because Cedo needs “a girl.” And we’ve seen Minela’s fate.

As their back stories are filled in, we get a hint that maybe Faruk wasn’t always of this underclass, that maybe he had more potentially in common with Mona than we thought. But knowing her age and knowing his associations, we fear for her and what he might be capable of.

Drljaca gives this simple story just enough melodrama to get by, and frankly it could have used more. But it is an engrossing portrait of romance in a beautiful place not-that-many-decades removed from a genocidal civil war. There are ruins and history and a populace still impacted and corrupted by that history, people on edge about the possible return of the “bad old days.” Faruk and Mona’s fraught affair is engaging and sometimes moving, and a fascinating peek into how others live and how scars are carried by generations that came after a cataclysm.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations, off camera violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Pavle Cemerikic, Sumeja Dardagan, Jasmin Geljo, Kerim Cutuna, Ermin Bravo and Farah Hadzic

Credits: Scripted and directed by Igor Drljaca. A Game Theory release.

Running time: 1:29

Sigfried Sassoon, WWI “shellshock” survivor, closeted gay man, great poet. “Benediction” was scripted and directed by Terence Davies (“The House of Mirth,” “A Quiet Passion,””The Deep Blue Sea”).

Coming soon.

You’ve got to get yourself into a Bollywood headspace when settling in for “Dasvi,” an Abhishek Bachchan star vehicle about an ignorant Indian politician who goes to prison and sees the light — and gets his GED.

Be prepared for how handsome the lead is and how beautiful his co-stars are.

Brace yourself for subtitles. Whatever India’s relationship with English, much of the movie, like most of everyday discourse, is in Hindi.

Expect a couple of song and dance numbers, and a LOT of musical montages as our under-educated hero, a disgraced chief minister of his state, learns about the Hindi and English languages, math and chemistry and Indian history on his journey to enlightenment.

And count your blessings when considering that the typical Bollywood (style) musical never tells a simple story in the 75 minutes necessary when two to three hours, sometimes more, will do.

“Dasvi” is only two hours and five minutes long. Lightweight.

But even as it drags, as is inevitable in something so light that’s stretched out beyond reason, it manages clever touches, funny characters and witty exchanges as it imparts its lesson about the importance of education to a thoughtful, considered and compassionate life.

And Bachchan (“The Big Bull,””Husband Material”) is dashing, first scene to last in this journey from arrogant, caste-favored mustache-twirling villain-for-life to humbled man who learns from “gurus” — his fellow prison inmates — what an educated, cultured and qualified person needs to know to govern a gigantic, complex country like India.

Kickbacks, political favors, adoring crowds organized by his staff and travel in Mercedes SUV convoys are the life of Ganga Ram Chaudhary, the latest in a family of politicians to serve as chief minister in Harit Pradesh.

He’s never learned anything but how to grift the system and exercise his privilege, because that’s what “the chair,” his job, requires. “The Chair rules” is all he’s needed to know.

But a teacher recruitment/kickback scandal brings him down so abruptly you’d swear this movie would be over in an hour. Sure, he’s able to appoint his meek, known-nothing wife (Nimrat Kaur) to his job before he’s hauled off. No, he won’t bow to enter the tiny door to the prison where he’s to serve his sentence.

“I never bow! I would rather lose my head than bow” to enter prison.

But once inside, his special treatment includes delivered meals and a private room with an office, computer and phone. He just might be able to run his political empire from there.

Only meek little Bimla develops a taste for power herself. Once she stops sleeping through legislative sessions, that is.

And the new prison superintendent (Yami Gautam) is all over Chaudhary, and the sycophantic warden (Manu Rishi Chadha) whom the disgraced politico appointed to that job. His privileges end, and it takes a good while — and a song and dance or two — for him to figure out a way out that doesn’t involve feigning illness or bribes.

“Dasvi” — the title translates to “tenth,” which might be Chaudhary’s place in the family succession, or any number of others things as it is not explained — is most impressive in the long sequence of study sessions where our anti-hero learns about his country’s history, literally dreaming he’s intervening in this incident or that one involving Gandhi or other major figures on India’s 20th century history.

His gurus — the dwarf inmate named Ghanti (“Bell,” played by Arun Kushwah) and the prison librarian, nicknamed (say it aloud) Rai Bareli (Danish Husain) among them — are engaging characters who could have used a few more scenes.

Instead, the film sets up the wife’s political treachery (sabotaging his education for political gain) and the superintendent’s obvious chemistry with this “problem” inmate, who may be doing this GED thing as just a stunt to get out of prison labor.

Given the sort of upbeat, frothy and chaste samosa Tushar Jalota’s debut feature is, that “chemistry” plays as a non-starter.

Bachchan is good enough in the lead — charismatic, blustery, aloof and when need be, funny — that many of those shortcomings don’t matter.

It’s not classic “Bollywood” and never more than simply on a par with much of the comic film fare coming out of India these days — pleasant, but kind of bland, jaunty but meandering, lacking the pace and the edge to set itself apart from the rest.

But it’s just like Netflix to finance something India would formerly have had to travel to a cinema to see, a light but socially conscious comedy with songs and dances to break up the civics lesson.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Nimrat Kaur, Yami Gautam, Manu Rishi Chadha,
Danish Husain and Arun Kushwah

Credits: Directed by Tushar Jalota, scripted by Suresh Nair and Ritesh Shah. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:05