Movie Nation

Lorraine Bracco, Keegan Michael Key and Luke Evans also star in this Robert Zemeckia (Remember him?) film.

Sept 8.

Pierce Brosnan heads the supporting cast in this comic book adaptation, part of the DC Shazam thread of comic book storylines.

Oct. 21.

Digital aerial combat has come a long ways since “Red Tails” and “Flyboys,” judging by the trailer of this October release. “Midway” raised the CGI bar.

Those are F4U Corsairs, WWII vintage fighter-bombers, flying missions in the Korean War of WWII vintage U.S. aircraft carriers.

This true story is about a famed Navy combat duo, pilot-and-wingman, who happened to be of different races in what was a first for the U.S. military.

Powell’s one of the hunky young pilots of “Top Gun,” now in theaters, Majors was a star of “Lovecraft Country” and “The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Christian Jackson, Serinda Swan, Joseph Cross and Joe Jonas are also in the cast.

I had to look up this Dutch translation after taking in the tense, suspenseful World War II drama “Riphagen,” retitled “Riphagen: The Untouchable” for its Netflix release.

“Nagelbijter” is the only Dutch word for it — “nail biter.” It’s a gripping, ugly movie built around one of the great villainous Nazi turns. As Bernardus Andries “Dries” Riphagen,Jeroen van Koningsbrugge is more than a hulking, evil presence. He is cunning incarnate, a brute with brains, the ability to read and manipulate people and as utterly ruthless as any death camp commandant or gas chamber guard.

Riphagen was a mob-connected Dutchmen who betrayed Jews and got them shipped to Poland to be gassed. But not at first. No, “I believe I can help you,” he’d purr. You just need to sign over your house, hand over your cash and jewels. Give me the keys to your roadster, your motorboat. Some of it will help pay off the Nazis,” he’d assure them. The rest he’ll “hold. Just…until all of this is over.”

And after he’d won their trust and bled them dry, gotten them to convince friends also in hiding to trust him, only then would their names turn up on SD (collaborationist Dutch State Security) lists so that they could be rounded up and turned over to the Germans.

Director Pieter Kuijpers and screenwriters Thomas van der Ree and Paul Jan Nelissen set out to air some Dutch dirty laundry about World War II and remind us that whatever simplistic treatment it gets in most history books, no Occupied Country came off wholly clean. And the man whose story they use to illustrate this is the very embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “the banality of evil.”

We see Riphagen work his reassuring magic with desperate people fearing for their lives, the ultimate salesman. He poses for photographs with every “client” as a way of reassuring them of his intentions.

Never mind that he and a partner, acting on tips they paid the cops for, carried out these searches and “discoveries” themselves. Once he’s sat down and started talking business, the used car, vacation timeshare or swampland in Florida is as good as sold.

That punching bag he keeps in his office? That’s not just for show. Bald and brawny, he isn’t shy about punching-out or head-butting anybody else who tries to extort or threaten his pigeons.

Konigsbrugge made a brief, memorable impression in “Spider-Man: Far from Home,” just a single scene as a Dutch soccer hooligan. Yeah, he’s credibly frightening.

But he has to suggest nerve and native cunning in this performance, as well. Here’s a man who is commissioned by the Nazis to round up Jews, and who is cheating the Germans out of the loot they expect to collect. Riphagen is condemning civilians to a horrible death, and the Resistance suspects as much and is keeping a file on him.

He has to placate the German Army commander in Amsterdam (Richard Gonlag), who has the power of life and death over him, and keep the police insider/secret Resistance fighter Jan (Kay Greidanus), an idealistic young man who suspects the worst of him, at bay.

The operating principle that separates good thrillers from great ones is that the villain must have a point of view. It’s easy enough to suspect that Riphagen sees shades of grey in his monstrous activities. That’s the side he shows the cute waitress (Lisa Zweerman) he courts and marries. She’s also seen him pummel her abusive, drunken father into behaving better on what amounts to their first date. She can see him as noble.

But as the film reminds us, wartime occupation creates an entire country of double lives. Jan, already living a double life and a married cop, is tempted by a new member of his Resistance cell (Anna Raadsveld). But she is Jewish, compromised and in the clutches of Riphagen. Some day, he’s going to find a way to profit from her “associations.”

One thing that separates this film from similar movies (Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book” and “Soldier of Orange” are two of the best) is that it takes the story past the German surrender and into the murky waters of post-Occupation collaborator-hunting.

Riphagen is cunning enough to disappear. Jan is dogged enough to keep searching. But in the shifting priorities of the returned “government in exile” and the new Soviet threat halfway across Germany, “communists” are as bad as Nazi sympathizers. Mistrust and betrayal are added to a populace where few could claim to be patriots, with the bonafides to prove it.

And all the shifty, smooth-talking, well-connected operators like Dries Riphagen would need to do is rewrite a little history, make things a lot more gray than black and white and convince yet another set of authority figures that they was indeed on their “side.”

Justice could seem a soft-focus pipe dream when compared to the simple clarity of wartime, where suspicion, just enough evidence and a pistol could bring matters to a swift, messy end.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, smoking

Cast: Jeroen van Koningsbrugge, Kay Greidanus, Anna Raadsveld, Lisa Zweerman, Huub Smit, Michel Sluysmans, Sigrid ten Napel and Richard Gonlag.

Credits: Directed by Pieter Kuijpers, scripted by Thomas van der Ree and Paul Jan Nelissen.A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:11

Glib, aged mercenaries face off with an Army patrol trapped with them in an Afghan tunnel in “The Prey: Legend of Karnoctus,” a C-movie that wants to embrace the campy cheese, but never gets closer than arm’s length.

Starring cigar-chomping tough guy Nick Chinlund, who’s been around since “Lethal Weapon 3” and “Con Air,” and the elder statesman of big screen badasses, Danny Trejo (“Machete”), it’s a lightweight mashup of combat film, heist picture and creature feature set in The Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan.

The “combat film” part follows a patrol of GIs as they stumble into a firefight that was provoked by the heist that the geezers — including Adrian Paul, Kevin Grevioux, whose voice is so deep it’s seismic, and Fito De LaParra, who is Trejo’s 70something contemporary — just pulled off with disguises, a tank, machine guns and a machete.

Survivors of the combat patrol stumble into a tunnel where the “special forces” guys — that’s how they identify themselves — have stashed these cases of loot that they just grabbed.

As we’ve seen in the movie’s opening tunnel-dwelling Taliban fighters and chemists snatched by the blue, four-eyed beast they know as “Karnoctus,” things are about to turn even less survivable.

What WAS that?

“Maybe a bear or something?”

Matt Musgrove, Masika Kalysha, Benny Mora, Mingyu Chu and Jacob Charlot are among those playing the soldiers, mostly generic and indistinguishable from each other save for their ethnicity. We give them a glance and figure we shouldn’t get too attached, because somebody’s got to be Karnoctus fodder, right?

We barely have time to note the cute rapport that the 60something Chinlund has with the spry and pushing-80 Trejo when “Vega, ” Trejo’s character, jumps into an army truck and makes his early first-act exit.

Maybe we think, “Hey, they’re going to fetch a “chopper” to haul their loot out? Why don’t they, uh, put the crates in the truck and take it to the chopper?” Maybe not. “Thinking” isn’t what we’re here for.

Don’t overthink the GI who is walking and talking moments after his field-tracheotomy, either.

The beast itself is a dude in a furry suit on all fours who looks like he recovered after Bill Shatner shot him off that jetliner wing.

The frights and fights are standard issue — nothing scary, nothing that fun either.

The first scene Taliban prey joke around and find out. “Are you HIGH?” The GIs try to play things by the book, the “special forces” fakers stage their shootouts to Canned Heat’s “Going Up the Country.”

The mission debrief on “The Prey” is that it’s not remotely exciting or scary enough to be worth a look, and not nearly goofy enough to be “so bad it’s fun.”

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Nick Chinlund, Masika Kalysha, Kevin Grevioux, Matt Musgrove, Benny Mora, Aaron Paul and Danny Trejo

Credits: Directed by The Hensman Brothers, scripted by Matthew Hensman and Gustavo Sainz de la Peña. A Lennexe release.

A dystopian, political, topical and fantastical musical from Africa, “Neptune Frost” is as unusual a film as you’ll see this year.

This Rwandan musical is cryptic and meandering, and easier to decipher than it is to follow. But like an opera in a language you don’t know well, even if they weren’t contorting and embellishing words and phrases in song, “Neptune” cuts through its own noise to speak to uncomfortable universal truths about Life Today.

That device you’re reading this review on? It’s got coltan in it. And chances are, you don’t know and don’t want to know what it is or how it got there. But maybe if that message is wrapped in songs in a colorful African fantasy it’ll go down easier.

In a coltan mine, ununiformed soldiers stand guard over slaves who bust up the rocks and extract the precious mineral. A rifle butt ends one miner’s suffering and prompts a singing protest, with a drum band appearing as magical accompaniment.

“Tekno” is no more.

Neptune, a pan-sexual symbolic figure played by Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja, rejects the “opiate of the masses” words of the preacher that presided over his/her/their friend’s funeral, bashes the pastor in the head and goes on the lam.

A cross-country odyssey that takes us over lakes and through villages ensues, with songs — “terrabytes in C-major,” and poetic speeches about the “free labor” (modern slavery) wrought by “unending war” in the region, wars that lead to “free labor” via “the currency of our depletion.”

Gender is fluid throughout the film as characters travel from “death to other passages,” dropping into dreams where the prophecies of The Wheel Man — a phantom with a bicycle wheels headdress — are delivered.

And how are those amplified? On the world wide web, by a hacker named “Martyr Loser King” who gets the word out that “WE power the system” and “The miner is the POWER source” to a world that just wants cheap cell phones, you guys.

As you might expect from an obscurant film like “Neptune Frost” (You do NOT want to know who ‘Frost’ is.), someone at some point is obligated to narrate, in Swahili, “Maybe you’re asking yourself, ‘WTF is this?'”

Striking, beautiful and beautifully-costumed characters with symbolic names (“Psychology,” “Innocence,” “Memory”) talk in poetic riddles.

“The mountains have not awakened.” “Their fire is our breath.” “The sunlight does not burn the ground.”

“One who swallows cocoanut husks trusts his anus.”

The pacing and deliberately opaque storytelling “won’t be to every taste,” — critic speak for a “challenging” film. But co-directors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyma give us a sci-fi dreamscape, a colorful slice of Africa, lovely multi-lingual music, and a “There’s no such thing as a free iPhone” message in their musical.

That’s quite the hack they’ve pulled off.

Rating: unrated, some violence

Cast: Cheryl Isheja, Elvis Ngabo, Kaya Free, Eliane Umuhire, Dorcy Rugamba, Bertrand Ninteretse, Trésor Niyongabo and Eric Ngangare

Credits: Directed by “Swan” (Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman), scripted by Saul Williams. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:44

The old joke that “Assault rifles are for gangsters, and rednecks too lazy to learn to shoot” comes to mind when sitting through the mayhem of “White Elephant,” a cop-hunted-by-hitmen thriller starring a lot of old-in-the-tooth action stars.

This unfortunately-timed bodycount features Bruce Willis, who has to have half his lines dubbed or looped, Eugenio Derbez’s handsome and wooden-as-a-Sequoia son, Tifton, Georgia substituting for the Southwest border country and almost zero non-corrupt police presence evident as larger and larger teams of tac-geared hired killers come after “clean cop” Olga Kurylenko –– and miss.

Seems about right.

Michael Rooker stars as a veteran hired killer with a pretty boy protege (Vadhir Derbez), a mob lawyer (John Malkovich) go-between, an impatient mob boss (Willis) and a dead wife whom he broods over, all the way through the movie.

A gang war involving that boss, the Mexican mafia and “The Russians” is breaking out, and the hitmen find themselves having to “clean up” two cops (Michael Rose and Kurylenko) who saw the sniper school-trained (and tattooed) Carlos (Derbez) after a murder.

She proves to be pretty hard to take out.

Malkovich is here to give Rooker a little lecture on ancient Greek justice. Willis is here to give orders — sometimes in his own voice — “Put a bullet in that b—-‘s head or I’ll put one in yours.“

To be fair, he apologizes when Rooker’s character softly demands it. Yeah, “White Elephant” is stupid that way.

And Derbez, playing kind of killer who dresses too flashy to not be noticed and wears his sunglasses into dark houses on night assassinations, is spot-on in one regard — reminding us in almost every scene that he hasn’t the “earned” presence, the skills or the screen charisma to hold his own with the likes of these folks.

Judging from the inane script, the unhurried direction by stuntman-turned-director Jesse V. Johnson, and by the destruction wrought when machine guns tear up cars, houses and people (nothing graphic enough to be “honest), it’s obvious that the budget here went to actors and ordinance.

Rating: Unrated, graphic violence.

Cast: Michael Rooker, Olga Kurylenko, John Malkovich, Vadhir Derbez and Bruce Willis.

Credits: Directed by Jesse V. Johnson, scripted by Jesse V. Johnson, Erik Martinez and Katherine Lee McEwan. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:32

An iconic tune’s tortured journey to fame, a songwriter’s ticket to immortality.

As dying-man’s-last-road trip dramas go, “Hole in the Wall (Gat in Die Muur)” has more “hole” than “wall.”

Dull, uninvolving and downright off-putting in the story it tells and the way that it tells it, “Wall” doesn’t make sense until you consider that its star co-directed it. It’s a dubious star vehicle and something of a head-scratcher, even after we realize that.

Rian, played by veteran character actor Andre Odendaal (who shares his name with a famous South African cricketer and historian,), is something of a physical wreck. He’s getting oxygen and still smoking, well past his prime and yet somehow catnip to the ladies.

An impulsive, demanding sixtysomething, his ex-wife’s description of him seems to fit — “a selfish, very charming, clever pedigreed as—-e.”

We catch up with Rian as he’s acting on two impulses. He’s paid a beautiful and seemingly-charmed young woman, Ava (Tinarie van Wyk Loots) to drive him on a month-long road trip. And he’s “urgently” summoned his estranged son from college, Ben (Nicholas Campbell), to “interrupt my life” for this trip of unspecified purpose, indeterminate length or destination.

There’s nothing for it but for Ben to comply, and they’re off — Ava driving, Ben sullen and sulking, Rian complaining about their silence.

We’ve guessed it before anybody admits it. Rian is dying, “stage four,” all of that. What he’s brought them along on this trip for is to “find out why you’re here,” on Earth, living this life.

That’s what he tells Ben, anyway. Ava is “an angel,” and seriously sexy. Is she here for Rian, or for the kid to fall in love with? An old friend asks Rian if she’s Ben’s “girlfriend.”

“Not yet.”

Our “Around the World with Netflix” trek takes us along the scenic, rugged coast of South Africa, with the icy Southern Ocean washing up on it and Black South Africans apparently priced out of even spending time there. A plainly shoehorned-in and under-explained connection between Rian and a Black family turns up in the third act, allowing the white folk a chance to experience a traditional Black South African wedding, and Rian to both order them around, and seem generous because apparently he’s left them property.

Like the only other Black face in the movie, they’re former servants of his.

Father and son have some issues to work out, which are perfunctorily handled. The kid doesn’t weep at Dad’s bad news, and only tires of his father’s spontaneity and irresponsibility long after the viewer has. Rian has another “secret,” which is introduced and abandoned with a plop.

Rian stumbles into a much younger woman in a public restroom, and the movie suggests this is a sexy and flirtatious moment. Nah. It’s creepy as hell.

We see little evidence of the character’s “charm” — just see others responding as if they’ve been charmed by something that would irk the average Jack or Jill. Grabbing an armful of junk foot and trotting back out to the SUV, only (over) paying when the store proprietress protests, etc.

The film’s general ineptitude is exemplified by sending our travelers to a seaside Elvis-tribute “Graceland” inn, only to do pretty much nothing sweet, cute, funny or Elvisy with it.

Maybe it’s just me, but I never bought into the Dad’s “larger than life” status, his “charming” label or apparent sex appeal. The dying man’s story arc is ill-defined and the “growing” by one and all wouldn’t seem justified if there was any evidence of it to begin with.

But hey, the scenery’s nice.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, constant smoking, profanity

Cast: Andre Odendaal, Tinarie van Wyk Loots, Nicholas Campbell, Bheki Mkhwane and Anna Davel

Credits: Directed by Andre Odendaal and Johan Vorster, scripted by Susan Coetzer. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44