Movie Nation

Ashley Benson and Shiloh Fernandez star in this potentially murderous tale, which has a hint of class warfare about it.

“Private Property” opens and streams VOD Friday.

One self-evident truth of teen summer romance movies is that they’re all wish fulfillment fantasies. Party-packed, carefree, candy-colored money-is-no-obstacle to anything we want to do because everybody is Cover Girl thin and gorgeous — even the girls — they’re like a beach book with a brooding hero who lures the shrinking violet into blooming, or vice versa.

One of the reasons Netflix has OWNED this genre is that they’ve leaned into this trite-but-true rule, and made it their own. And giving the adaptor/screenwriter of the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” movies.Sofia Alvarez, a shot at directing is another smart move.

So it doesn’t matter that “Along for the Ride,” her adaptation of a Sarah Dessen novel about a child of divorced literary/academic parents who loses some of her academic focus and “intensity” as she comes out of her shell during a summer in a beach town, seems overfamiliar and focus-grouped. It’s not for “us,” and by “us” I mean anybody not of a “Kissing Booth/To All the Boys” demographic, any viewer who doesn’t get misty-eyed over the heyday of teen queen Joey King.

If you’re over 30, every damned thing about “Along for the Ride” will feel ridiculously predictable, from the hunk’s unruly mop of curls to the heroine’s mousey attire that doesn’t wholly hide how much modeling she’s probably done (nailed it). Not having read the book, I’d bet cash money that the most worn out tropes that turn up on screen here were cut-and-pasted into as well, because YA lit or YA movies, the plot elements are endlessly recyclable.

Even Colby, the name of the beach town where the pretentiously-named Auden (Emma Pasarow) — her parents are into lit, remember — goes to spend the summer with Dad (Dermot Mulroney) sounds invented by a high school girl.

Auden recognizes that “maybe I come off as too intense,” so maybe a summer at the beach with writer-Dad, his bubbly, younger new wife Heidi (Kate Bosworth), their baby Thisbe and working at Heidi’s chic boutique with hipper teen skinny-minis (Laura Kariuki, Sami Finnerty and Genevieve Hannelius) will be just the thing to let her “be a different version” of herself as prep school alumna who’s “never done anything you can’t read about on my (high school) transcript.”

She gets hit on by the town’s “handsome tool,” tries to fit in with popular colleagues (Auden does the store’s books) who “dance every day at 6,” aka “quitting time, and meets the brooding BMX hunk Eli (Belmont Cameli) who almost bumps into her with his bike.

Easy to see how that could happen, all those curls covering his eyes, you know.

Eli has a dark secret, of course. But he’s distracted by shy Auden’s lack of life experience and challenges her to a “quest” — a life list they will tick off as the summer progresses ; “food fight,” “trespassing,” “prom,” etc.

Meanwhile, Auden grows up to see the good and the bad in her outspoken, fiercely feminist Mom (Andie MacDowell, pretty good), the bad and the good in her self-absorbed Dad and her too-smart-to-be-a-victim-forever stepmom.

Even if you’re over 30 and are two steps ahead of this predigested “content” along the way, “Along for the Ride” makes a perfectly watchable/reasonably universal slice of unintentional beach nostalgia.

Even the pitfalls of such projects are preordained, as the music “the cool kids” are listening to is just here to validate the filmmaker in charge’s own musical youth. Are kids listening to indie rock by No Age, Santigold, Jade or Girls? Twenty years ago they were. You just dated yourself, Alvarez. Welcome to “old.”

I loved the “dream beach town” conjured up for all this, a lighthouse to break-into, cool cafe hidden inside a laundromat, miniature golf (A course with a grotto!) and the like. As “Along” was filmed in the Carolina Beach/Wilmington, N.C. area, the northern reaches of the “Redneck Riviera,” Colby was probably a safe bet rename if you don’t want anybody to have a drawl.

And in selecting locations and dolling everybody up, Alvarez gives this working class beach that familiar Netflix sheen of affluence, something even the great John Hughes figured out audiences would resent, after a while.

I’m a lot less forgiving for the way relationships and conversations play out in movies like this. There are bad characters, but they’re basically all adults. Potential “mean girls” are either forgotten or have their edges rubbed off in the most insipid ways.

There’s almost no friction in Auden’s “fitting in” with her cooler colleagues. The dialogue is littered with unrealistic “over sharing” confessionals, every single one received with the cliche, “I needed to hear it.”

The literariness of the parents is fingernails-on-a-chalkboard cringy. Only a YA author would think ANYone would name a kid “Thisbe.”

The leads are pleasantly bland, sort of this generation’s version of Jamie Gertz/Jennifer Love Hewitt and Leto/McCarthy.

Alvarez knows her audience and has a better idea of what they want to see than I do, so more power to her and best of luck in the future. But maybe a little more effort to skip over or at least conceal the cliches, types and tropes would make that future work more “timeless” than generic and disposable as “this year’s beach romance movie for teens.”

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Emma Pasarow, Belmont Cameli, Laura Kariuki, Kate Bosworth, Dermot Mulroney and Andie MacDowell

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sofia Alvarez, based on the novel by Sarah Dessen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

One of the greatest and unlikeliest stories of a European expat finding Hollywood glory had to be the American career of the great Viennese auteur and innovator Fritz Lang, who fled the Nazis and left masterpieces such as “M” and “Metropolis” behind to carve out a stardust sprinkled career as a Hollywood journeyman.

Lang made Westerns (“The Return of Frank James,” “Rancho Notorious”) and dabbled in combat, espionage, swashbucklers (“Moonfleet”) and other genres before finding his voice and hitting his stride in the crime thriller genre that the French labeled “film noir,” an idiom he not only made his own, but helped invent.

“The Blue Gardenia” is representative of this late career resurgence, even if this 1953 film — coming after his triumph with Marlene Dietrich, “Rancho Notorious,” and just before the genre-defining “The Big Heat,” “While the City Sleeps” and “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” — doesn’t represent his very best work.’

It’s a brisk, grim tale of a long distance operator (Anne Baxter) who gets a Dear Jane from her man in Korea, accepts the come-ons of a lady-killer artist (Raymond Burr) and fears she murdered the cad after he gets her blackout drunk and comes on entirely too strong.

There are glimpses of Lang’s paranoid gloom and shadows, of a criminal’s struggle to learn to be cunning in the tension contained in a tiny phone booth where our operator tries to confess to a local hotshot newspaper columnist (Richard Conte).

We can even sense some kinky-for-its-day social commentary of the “This is a man’s world” variety as one ladykiller (Conte’s Casey Mayo) wishes another “little black book” collector (Burr’s Harry Prebble) “good hunting” among the skirts each chases into the foggy Santa Monica night.

As wiseacre roommate and fellow phone operator Crystal (Ann Sothern at her sassiest) cracks, “Honey, if a girl killed every man who got fresh with her, how much of the male population you think there’d be left?”

We see operator try to keep her secret from her roommates (Jeff Donnell is another), cover her tracks and evade the columnist and his cop pal (future Superman George Reeves), and “The Blue Gardenia” — taking its name from the club where the alcoholic seduction begins — folds in some suspense and a hint of paranoia, building towards a climax that feels seriously anti-climatic.

Still there’s a nasty cynicism that all the best noirs can boast of, the way one and all joke about the murdered man, the callousness of the columnist, the good-natured liberties taken by men with women and the cop and the columnist’s willingness to trip each other up and cross (later established) ethical lines to get their “Blue Gardenia,” as the newspaper comes to label the femme fatale.

What stands out to me is how Lang keeps things unfussy, uncluttered and quick, flashing a little style but not enough to irk Warner Brothers, which just wanted to get maximum entertainment value out of an Anne Baxter star vehicle.

There’s even a pause for a song, a little Nat King Cole title tune spotlight that doesn’t propel the narrative forward but which puts a rising singing star center stage for a nice nightclub moment, mid-movie. It introduces a song that ties into the plot, not one of Cole’s best but delivered with his usual silky/sexy charm, another way Lang lets himself play Hollywood’s (cross-promotional) game.

Baxter was never the most dynamic leading lady, which allows Sothern to steal scenes, oily, villainous Burr to steal others and Conte to toy with the idea of swiping his with her as well.

Reeves had one of his best big screen roles as this jaded but wily homicide detective who isn’t above lightly threatening his “pal,” the columnist. The “boy’s club” here has four members, with Burr’s Prebble the one who has a convertible, a swank apartment and a heel’s tendency to get out of line. It’s like the other guys — Mayo, Detective Captain Haynes (Reeves) and the columnist’s nerdy-trusty photographer-sidekick (veteran character player Richard Erdman, most famous for “Stalag 17”) — like-dislike the victim, but kind of figure he had it coming.

Burr, like Reeves, would find immortality on the small screen — “Perry Mason,” “Ironside,” etc. But this is that rare big screen turn that gives him a character with (shallow) depth. He isn’t the stolid, edited-in American reporter of “Godzilla” or the fair-haired, insensate Hitchcockian monster of “Rear Window.” Prebble has charm, culture, an easy way with the ladies that works up to the point where plying them with alcohol takes over.

If you’re a film buff and you stumble across “Directed by Fritz Lang” while channel surfing, you’re obligated to check the movie out. “Blue Gardenia” is nobody’s idea of a masterpiece, but it does show a great filmmaker right in the middle of his last great Hollywood run, and ably demonstrates the unaffected “company man” he could be that guaranteed his success over here even if he lacked the innovative spark and complete control he once attained “over there.”

Rating: unrated

Cast: Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Anne Sothern, Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell, Richard Erdman and George Reeves.

Credits: Directed by Fritz Lang, scripted by Charles Hoffman. A Warner Brothers release on Tubi, Amazon and other streamers.

Running time: 1:30

A thriller about an aimless, dangerous drifter and the stripper who might be his savior?

Actor turned writer-director Sean Patrick Flanery wrote and directed this tale that turns towards horror, and which stars Billy Budinich and Caylee Cowan in the title roles, with Lin Shaye, Kevin Dillon, Flaherty himself and Jonathan Schaech in support.

“Frank and Penelope” opens June 3.

We are…intrigued.

“Official Competition” is an arid farce about movies as “cinema,” the pretension of festivals and festival-honored films made by “critics’ darlings.”

It’s built on scenes that either hit the bullseye, or miss the mark because of slow pacing and a general dryness that might leave comedy fans a bit parched. But anyone who follows “the festival circuit” and “awards season” films will appreciate the way it skewers its targets with jokes and jabs aimed mainly at fans of serious cinema.

Argentine filmmakers Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat (“4X4,” “My Masterpiece”) take a shot at ripping film festivals, art films, cinematic divas and the like with a small but elite cast and one impressively icy setting — a cavernous, ultra-modernist, echoey and empty mansion. That’s where an eccentric filmmaker preps for production and rehearses her two famous co-stars for a film adaptation of a popular novel financed by a boring, little-known rich man who wants to make “a great film” that will become his legacy.

José Luis Gómez is Humberto, the “millionaire” (he’d better be a billionaire) whose 80th birthday reminded him of his relative anonymity. He’d like to leave something behind with his name on it — perhaps an architecturally-stunning bridge? Well, a film would be cheaper.

He will hire only “the best,” starting with the criticall-adored director of “Haze,” “The Inverted Rain” and “The Void.” The film’s first laugh is our first sight of Lola Cuevas. We have never seen Oscar-winner Penélope Cruz perched beneath a mountain of red curls this vast.

Humberto’s spent “a fortune” to get the rights to the novel that Lola will “very very loosely adapt, as in “mostly ignore” as she cuts, pastes and scrapbooks her script to life.

Actors? She insists only two men could play the brothers/”rivals” in this film — the actor’s actor and legendary acting teacher Iván Torres (veteran Argentine actor Oscar Martínez of “Tu Me Manques” and “Live Twice, Love Once”) and rich, celebrated international star Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas).

Their eccentric director will put them through “exercises,” stare down their bubbling “Quien es mas macho?” rivalry and use it to heighten the drama of her picture. She will bully and manipulate. Because she’s dealing with one pretentious poseur who deigns to “correct” her script, right from the start, and a movie star, who isn’t used to the formidable challenge of an egomaniac co-star, a “visionary” director and everybody else’s “method.”

It’s funny when Lola makes snobby Iván repeat his first line in the script — “Buenos dias” — a dozen or more times, trying to get a version she “believes.” It’s funny how he tries to contain his annoyance at this, and how Félix tries to hide his amusement.

Then of course, it’s his turn. Try to play a man who is drunk, trying to pretend he’s not drunk and yet drunk as a “three” on a “scale of one-to-ten.” That’s some seriously precise direction, querida.

The three of them — with an occasional assistant in the room — play mind games over who shows up first and who keeps whom waiting each day, who is the “best” actor, whose technique is more suited to this project, Mr. Deep “Back Story” or Mr. “Just Study the Words” and “play” the part.

The handsome screen star looks for leverage by coming on to the sexy director and other tricks. The actor/educator — think James Lipton without the glasses — never lets anyone on set or off forget that he’s too good for all this.

Sight gags such as the guys’ first glance at the script — a literal scrapbook of photos, pieces of photos, drawings — a 50 microphone “audition” by Humberto’s granddaughter/actress in which we hear every sloppy slurp of the makeout scene she (Pilar Castro) is subjected to, or the reason Lola has each man bring his “awards” to a rehearsal, and deploys packing tape to restrain her hired actors — pay off.

But despite the occasional outlandish moment, most of what’s on view here is mundane — bitching over fabric swatches with an art director — or at least somewhat predictable, right down to the Cannes press conference (droll, ironic, lightly amusing) that wraps everything up.

As a fan of Cohn and Duprat’s tighter, darker previous collaborations I was keenly aware of the passage of screen time and slack pacing here. “Official Competition” feels like an 80 minute spoof bundled in the gauze of a 115 minute film.

Comedy is a close-up medium, but aside from a few moments with Lola’s voluminous hair and freckles, with Félix’s alarm at the contract-violation of touching or endangering “my livelihood, my face (in Spanish with English subtitles),” Cohn and Duprat frame scene after scene in “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday” long or medium shots. And suffice it to say, neither of them is Jacques Tati.

That adds to the chilly, remote feeling, that there isn’t enough action, aren’t enough outlandish characters or situations to make this as funny as a “For Your Consideration” or any other film about “film festival films.” In making a movie sending up movies like this, they’ve erred on the side of too-on-the-nose.

There’s all this literal and figurative dead space surrounding a tiny cast that has been and can be funnier than “Official Competition” lets them be.

Rating: R for language and some nudity

Cast: Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, Oscar Martínez, Pilar Castro and José Luis Gómez

Credits: Directed by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, scripted by Mariano Cohn, Gastón Duprat and Andrés Duprat. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:55

Mixed reviews and Sam Raimi’s offbeat turn toward horror in the third act haven’t dampened the box office impact of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”

The film pulled in $36 million from Thursday, adding up to a $90 million Friday. Will it top out at $180, or reach all the $200 million mark by Sunday night?

The fact that it’s on over 4500 screens, including upsold IMAX and other “premium” seats, didn’t hurt. It will swallow the cinema this weekend.

That is the seventh best Friday of all time, per Exhibitor Relations. It’s already earned over $139 million overseas, as well.

“Sonic the Hedgehog 2” is willing the family friendly sweepstakes, rolling in another $6.6 million this weekend, pushing it over $170 million all in by midnight Sunday.

“The Lost City,” the action comedy that’s been the top “date movie” of the spring, added enough cash Friday to point to a $2 4 million weekend, $94 million total in North America.

Ang Lee would go on to Oscar winning glory, helming “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Broke back Mountain.”

But his debut feature was a touching and sometimes amusing fish-out-of-water story about an old widower trying to fit in with his American son’s family and neighborhood in suburban New York.

Tai Chi and King Fu classes might help.

“Pushing Hands” heralded a new talent telling stories about an underfilled community, America’s Asian and Chinese diaspora. Lee would follow this with “The Wedding Banquet” and “Eat Drink Man Woman,” creating what came to be called his “Father Knows Best” trilogy.

His sensibilities proved his worthiness to take on Jane Austen’s”Sense & Sensibility” down the road.

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Bad news/good news time.

Bad news, Justin Lin finally decided the high price of (Vin) Diesel was reason enough to bail out of the “Fast and Furious” franchise. He quit “Fast X.”

Good news, Louis Leterrier, director of the tighter, meaner and occasionally more realistic car chase “Transporter” movies, has been signed to take over.

Bad news, “The Takedown,” Leterrier’s latest cars and cutesy cop buddy picture, made for Netflix, pretty much sucks.

Good and bad news? “Fast 9: The Fast Saga,” and most of the recent of the Lin-helmed car cartoons kind of sucked, too. So the early take on “Fast X” is kind of a (car) wash. Lin or Leterrier, how good could it be?

“Takedown” reteams Omar Sy , French star of “The Intouchables,” who’s turned up in the “Jurassic World” and “X-Men” franchises, with Laurent Lafitte, whose French films (“Tell No One”) have rarely made it to North America.

They played cute and mismatched cops in “On the Other Side of the Tracks” ten years ago. Now, they’re still mismatched but re-teamed for a big case involving murder, drugs and guns and racist French fascists, because they have those, too.

Ousmane Diakité (Sy) rose to become a star of French policing, a two-fisted tough-guy criminal division chief whom the force wants to use in recruiting films as the “face” of French law enforcement. Their first TV ad is a cartoon using him, which irks him no end as they’re plainly using him to pretend they’re more diverse than they are.

François Monge (Lafitte) is a dashing, to-the-manner-born elitist and womanizer whose family connections could only get him to the level of “captain.” Nobody wants to work with him, and he’s so unscrupulously on-the-make that he beds his assigned department psychotherapist in his opening scene.

Ousmane’s introductory scene has him trying to single-handedly bring down a criminally violent “monster” street fighter in an underground (literally) prize fight.

Finding half a corpse dangling from a high speed train entitles Monge to a share of the case, when it turns out he was A) shot first and B) on some new hyped-up drug that makes its addicts relentless and almost impossible to bring down.

So Monge and his superior, Diakité, set out for the provinces from when this decapitated corpse came, to mingle with the “traditional” local “patriots” who are fans of this white nationalist mayor (Dmitri Storoge) who just might be France’s fascist future.

Monge insists that the lovelorn single-dad Diakité hit on the female local cop (Izïa Higelin) they’re assigned to work with, with awkward consequences.

The banter (in French, or dubbed into English) is of the “That was SMALL of you,” “That was small of YOU” put-downs exchanged over public restroom urinals, “barbeque” jokes about the state of a (full frontal nude) half-corpse and the like.

The comedy comes from the rich and tactless Monge’s inability to question people without creating a scene (“Hey, I can be SENSITIVE.”) and the two-fisted Diakité having to try and punch his way out of messy situations.

The leads are engaging, but not nearly as much as they and the film they’re in assume they are.

There’s one big and showy cross country car chase and a bunch of brawls, generally involving the mouthy, prove-how-tough-I-am Diakité. The best effect in this is reconstructing — in 3-D slo-mo — how a motorcyclist came to be shot and sheared in half by a high speed train.

Those minor highlights will have to do because as timely as the plot and the predestined villain seem to be, as an action comedy the plot is preordained and the characters the simplest of archetypes. Everybody does pretty much what you expect them to do when you expect them to do it.

So yes, Leterrier may turn out to be the perfect “Fast X” filmmaker after all.

Rating: TV-MA, gruesome violence, played for laughs, profanity

Cast: Omar Sy, Laurent Lafitte, Dmitri Storoge and Izïa Higelin

Credits: Directed by Louis Leterrier, scripted by Stéphane Kazandjian. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:00

Antonia Campbell-Hughes has the title role, with Joel Fry, Aline Armstrong and Johnny Flynn, who might be the threat, in this paranoid thriller. “Cordelia” comes our way May 20, via Screen Media.

This engrossing drama about bullying and its impact not just on the boy directly subject to it, but to his sister, stay at home dad, family and a school bureaucracy helpless to handle it has a lot to offer…and subtitles. It’s in French. Let’s hope tiny Halifax, Va. is up for it.

“Playground” is a challenging, rewarding and sometimes heartbreaking film, well worth checking out.

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