Movie Nation

There are more than a few laughs in the coming-of-age dramedy “The Invisible Thread,” about a teen coming to terms with himself and his life with “my two dads.” This Italian “Around the World with Netflix” outing (in Italian, or dubbed into British English) has lovely messaging about parenthood, first love, infidelity, drugs…oh, and Italy’s laughably slow march to legal and social acceptance of gay rights.

And even if “Il filo invisbile” as they call it in Rome stumbles a lot, lapses into melodrama and really doesn’t know when to get off stage, it finishes with a simple “family” image so warm it could move you to tears.

So, a mixed bag? Very much so. But it’s one of the most interesting Italian offerings Netflix has financed, a comedy of misunderstandings and gender expectations, “traditional” vs “unconventional” family clashes and that “edge” that even teen-oriented tales from Italy always deliver.

Leone (Francesco Gheghi) is 15 and together with his best-mate Jacopo (Emanuele Maria Di Stefano) is putting the finishing touches on their class video project, “My Colorful Family.” He’s narrated the broad strokes of all his two dads (Francesco Scianna, Filippo Timi) went through and gave up to have him, from California college pal surrogate (Jodhi May) to legal battles in Italy over everything from his parents’ right to marry to whose names would be on the kid’s birth certificate.

One dad is an anthropologist who ended up running a restaurant, the other a trained architect who settled for owning a kitchen-renovation design business. But they’ve raised a kid in comfort and love, which is all anybody could ask for.

They’ve never taken DNA tests to see who exactly “fathered” the lad. There was never any need, even though “knowing” that would make their documentary more exciting, Jacopo argues.

The parents are uneasy about this project as it is, with restaurateur Simone (Timi) feigning annoyance but architect Paolo (Scianna) fretting that they’ve “raised an opportunist,” willing to “exploit” their unusual private lives for personal gain.

Naturally, events conspire to make that test a necessity. What’s impressive here is the amount of clutter director Marco Simon Puccioni and his co-writers conjure up to point us to that foreshadowed climax.

Leone has to fall in love with the new French girl Anna (Guilia Maenza). Her family has to get all confused over Leone’s parentage, with her brawling bully of a brother Dario (Matteo Oscar Giuggioli) leaping to the his own conclusions.

Jacopo’s science experiments with drugs could interfere — the subtitling/dubbing tries to scrub “cocaine” and ecstasy down to “weed” in a couple of instances. And the school’s obsession with rock-climbing as a sport sets us up for tests beyond the emotional ones that Leone is overwhelmed with.

Puccioni (“Shelter Me”) serves up a few almost-madcap fights and ever-so-Italian shouting matches about sex, sexuality, parentage and cheating and makes a few jokes at California’s expense, a whole lot more at Italy’s expense, with various characters stirring the pot and creating the misunderstandings.

Gheghi is something of a blank slate as our lead, but Maenza picks up the slack as a classic “I’m pretty so I get away with being rude, creating conflict and what have you.” Di Stefano and Giugglioli make sharp impressions in roles that border on being simple “types.”

The two dads are best showcased in shouting matches that point towards a breakup, which plays out as alternately sad and amusing.

And always in the background are those not-quite-getting-it Italians — Anna and Dario, their mom, lawyers, “the system,” hospital doctors and admissions clerks. Perhaps that “culture changing/culture clash” stuff plays funnier in Italy. Let’s hope so.

“The Invisible Thread” could do with a little streamlining, although some of the complications produce daft moments and exasperated laughs.

Clutter aside, it’s a likeable, well-intentioned mess of a comedy, one that’ll leave you with the warm fuzzies even if it loses the “thread” once, twice or thrice along the way.

Rating: TV-MA, drug abuse, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Francesco Gheghi, Francesco Scianna, Filippo Timi, Giulia Maenza, Emanuele Maria Di Stefano, Matteo Oscar Giuggioli and Jodhi May.

Credits: Directed by Marco Simon Puccioni, scripted by Luca De Bei, Gianluca Bernardini and Marco Simon Puccioni. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

This minimalist, mostly wordless depiction of a milk cow’s life, with human analogies as we see the world from two females’ point of view, has endless buzz, an April 8 release date and almost no awards season attention.

“Cow” is from the director of “American Honey.”

The old Nirvana song and even older joke “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re NOT out to get you” comes to life in “All My Friends Hate Me,” a dark cringe of a comedy direct from the UK.

College friends gather for a friend’s birthday, and the birthday boy Pete starts to get the feeling that A) they’ve never grown up, B) they’ve all turned against him and C) some “stranger” they’ve added to their ranks, a bloke they met “down’tha’pub,” is behind it.

They’re a posh crowd, but Pete (Tom Stourton, who co-wrote this) has moved on to a life of working with refugees for a non-profit, traveling the world doing good. He lets that fact drop a tad too often as his friends gather at the family estate of George (Joshua McGuire), with George’s girlfriend-since-college Fig (Georgina Campbell), the snooty, snorting snob Archie (Graham Dickson), and Pete’s fragile one-time artist girlfriend Claire (Antonia Clarke).

Pete is nervous about them meeting Sofia (Charly Clive), whom he lets slip he’s going to propose to. He’s been rattled by the drive up to Cleve Manor thanks to a random run-in with a homeless man, the man’s whimpering dog, and a “colorful” old local who gets cute and cagey about giving directions. Arriving alone — Sofia is coming later — with no sign of the others, for hours, also throws him off.

And he is really put-out about this tipsy, tactless lout Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), who stumbles back with the others, who’ve been pubbing, who is anxious to meet the guy the others described as “apparently one of the funniest guys on the planet,” and who proceeds to test, tease, and provoke Pete at every turn.

Harry’s needling seems to encourage the others, one by one, to up the ante in their own poking and joking with Pete abouthis righteous job, which “makes up for past crimes,” about him not actually being “invited” to his own birthday party, his rising paranoia (pranks with weapons) and his reluctance to play along with every fresh insult, afront and pointed jab.

Has Harry got into his head, or into the head of the others? Is this some serious mass gaslighting, or is Pete off his meds? Which he is sure Harry has stolen from him?

Stourton (“The Spy Who Dumped Me”) makes a depressingly relatable Mr. Put-Upon, with a hapless humorlessness that makes that “one of the funniest guys on the planet” the biggest insult of all.

Tricks of memory, petty put-downs and accusations pile up on this out-of-place guest-of-honor, and Stourton’s Pete wears them like sackcloth and ashes.

Demri-Burns, also in “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” and “Alan Partridge,” utterly inhabits that “fun drunk” who can hold his liquor and never lets it get in the way of his bullying. He smirks, winks, undercuts and suggests a guy everybody underestimates and no one should.

Dickson makes his mark as the indulged, privileged poshest of the posh, “dressing for dinner” and mocking the idea of some “random pez (peasant)” interfering with a good time.

And Campbell is the embodiment of the great beauty who paired up with a richest lad, doubly-entitling her to be Pete’s judge.

“Just so you know, you’re not doing well.”

“The Office” was where “cringeworthy comedy” had its finest hour, and “All My Friends Hate Me” reminds us that show was a Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant oh-so-British invention. The fear of public humiliation, of not fitting in, the constant apologizing, the aggrieved victimhood aren’t just national punchlines, they’re badges of “Keep calm and carry on” stoicism.

Which of course makes all of Pete’s slights, real and perceived, more wincingly painful, if not always painfully funny.

Rating: R for language throughout, drug use and brief graphic nudity.

Cast: Tom Stourton, Georgina Campbell, Antonia Clarke, Graham Dickson, Joshua McGuire, Dustin Demri-Burns, Charly Clive and Christopher Fairbank.

Credits: Directed by Andrew Gaynord, scripted by Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:35

There’s a “China Syndrome” coincidence greeting the arrival of “Fear” in North American cinemas this weekend.

All those news reports about an outpouring of support for refugees fleeing Ukraine for points West have come with one seriously ugly sidebar. African students attending college in Ukraine have been badly misused and abused at the border.

“Fear” isn’t about that Russian invasion or about Ukraine. But this biting parable about an African fleeing violence in Mali, trapped in a Bulgarian town near the Turkish border, still resonates. The part of the world that perfected anti-Semitism and hardwired hatred of Gypsies into its various cultures isn’t exactly famous for its liberality and tolerance when it comes to people with darker skin, as “Fear” reminds us.

Svetla, played by the Bulgarian Frances McDormand, Svetlana Yancheva, has just lost her job at a school that closed. The village where she lives isn’t dying. It’s all but dead. A half-finished Iron Curtain era resort stands stark guard over this section of the coast. And even the winter-stripped trees, shorn and so ashen as to make one question if life will ever return there, underscore the death and emptiness there.

Svetla will stay on, job or no job, to tend to her husband’s grave and carry on one-sided conversations with him. Luckily, she’s handy with a shotgun and there are hares to be had. So at least she won’t starve.

The local border guard garrison, commanded by the bearishly uncuddly Bochev (Stoyan Bochev) may drag a fear-mongering TV reporter out for a “NoSir” hunt — “We yell, ‘Are you armed?’ at the immigrants,” a subordinate jokes. “NOsir!” And all the spit-flinging xenophobic talk on TV and among her neighbors should harden Svetla’s attitudes towards “foreigners,” too.

But damned if she doesn’t roust one up while out hunting hares.

The language barrier between them is complete. He speaks English, tells her he’s from Mali, begs her not to shoot. She sputters in Bulgarian and rages and marches him, at gunpoint, to that garrison. It’s empty. Everybody’s out hunting up immigrants trying to cross in groups.

She asks the mayor where to take him and gets the runaround. Even reaching the guards earns a gruff, racist dismissal from folks who still make simian insults when they see a Black face. They have no room for him.

There’s nothing for it but to take him home, try to communicate just enough to keep him in line, and sleep with her shotgun as she keeps the stranger locked in her cellar.

“I have human rights!” he protests in vain. “Don’t cry, you African man,” she pleads, also in vain.

Actor turned writer-director Ivaylo Hristov paints this village in compact, subtle strokes of intolerance. They’re bigots to a one, irate at the cornucopia of refugees from Afghanistan and Syria and elsewhere, all trying to get to “Germany” by way of their dying, flat-broke community.

“No dirty Gypsies in my hotel,” growls Ivan (Ivan Savov), a council member and local shaker and mover who crudely flirted with Svetla right up to the moment she took in an African stranger, who turns out to be named Bamba (Michael Flemming).

Bamba smiles, speaks English to all he meets and tries to placate fears. He’d also like to move to Germany. Anything’s got to be better than this racist rathole, right?

But he is rebuffed at every turn. Only Svetla warms to his plight, and that seems to be as much the result of local harassment as any milk of human kindness coursing through her heart. Threats, vandalism and worse face them, and in the manner of a hundred movies about people making a journey to interracial understanding, Svetla gets her back up.

The film’s grim black and white cinematography rules out much in the way of cute. But Bamba’s pluck and Svetla’s softening have an upbeat quality. The village is so bereft of cosmopolitanism that they need a schoolboy to translate their instructions to their detained migrants into fractured English, always good for a laugh.

“Fear” can’t help but cover familiar immigrant narrative ground. But Hristov and his characters maintain a deadpan drollery that makes this grimmer take on the migrant’s plight and Eastern Europe’s often hateful backwardness play as lighter than it really is.

Rating: unrated, violence, racial slurs, profanity

Cast: Svetlana Yancheva, Michael Flemming, Stoyan Bochev, Ivan Savov, Miroslava Gogovska and Krassimir Dokov

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ivaylo Hristov. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:40

This promises to be an eye popper.

April 1, Focus Features remind us that Noomi doesn’t mess around.

Avenging women punish sexist, abusive incels, frat-bros and “Men’s Movement” misogynists in “Asking for It,” a clunky piece of motion picture empowerment written and directed by a dude.

Bit-player/production assistant Eamon O’Rourke looked at the gender/culture wars landscape and decided what women REALLY want is revenge for all the Cosbys, Woodys, Rogans, Trumps, sex traffickers and Proud Boys running loose. So, tasing, humiliating, emasculating and frat-bombing it is.

Fair enough.

Yes, he makes a hash of it. But there are moments, here and there, where you can see what a pretty good cast saw in the possibilities of the material. Kiersey Clemons, Vanessa Hudgens, Radha Mitchell and Alexandra Shipp don’t sign up for junk, as a general rule.

And and enfeebled “Warriors” villain David Patrick Kelly? Yeah, this is just the sort of ill-assembled garbage he turns up in these days.

Clemons, of “Dope” and “Hearts Beat Loud,” is a small town waitress who finds herself hit on by a “regular” (Shipp, of “Love, Simon,” “tick tick BOOM” and the X-Men franchise) and by that high school classmate who went off to law school.

Guess which one drugs and rapes her, leaving her triggered? Guess who’s in an underground group of feminist avengers out to right the sexist wrongs in their world?

Joey (Clemons) finds herself a part of ride-alongs, a sort of “clean up the streets” program run by elders played by Mitchell, Hudgens and Casey Camp-Horinek.

As this “payback” is set against a climate of Men First Movement “dominance,” inspired by online influencer Mark Vanderhill (Ezra Miller, of “The Stand” remake, and “Flash” in the DCU), we know there’s a showdown coming.

He’s Mr. “You see it, you want it, you take it,” which could mean most anything one can acquire at gunpoint. Pretty easy to hate, unlike you’re a MAGA trucker.

The women confer with and lean on allies like this African American justice group leader (Demetrius Shipp Jr.), that sympathetic sheriff (Luke Hemsworth) and local activists (Gabourey Sidibe) who can get them closer to the camo-clad goon and his online minions about to hold a rally in a nearby small city whose dirty sheriff (Kelly) runs the show for the evil patriarchy.

There’s very little attempt to ground “Asking for It” in reality, or in delivering righteous, visceral comeuppance.

Miller throws himself into his character’s tirades, but in action, he’s about as tough as his look-alike, Justin Long.

Hudgens takes another stab at lip-ringed, tattooed street-punk, and isn’t bad. Shipp in dreads has more of the build for it, and the way she flicks a knife gives her street cred.

It’s a little amusing hearing the drawl Mitchell serves up as her Earth-Mama-to-the-Movement matriarch.

But Clemons, as a lead, is too passive to invest in, at least as the script is constructed around her.

The villains are every bit as cartoonish as their real-life counterparts in today’s America. Sould anybody follow Miller into battle or embrace his strident, skinny goateed “leadership?” Joe Rogan seems a better poster-roid for that crowd.

Rating: R for disturbing and violent content, sexual material, nudity, and language throughout

Cast: Kiersey Clemons, Alexandra Shipp, Vanessa Hudgens, Ezra Miller, David Patrick Kelly, Luke Hemsworth, Gabourey Sidibe and Radha Mitchell.

Credits: A Saban release.

Running time: 1:37

Here’s your “buy in” moment for “Turning Red,” Pixar’s latest animated attempt to break the mold about what cartoons for kids can be about.

Thirteen year-old over-achiever Meilin has been acting weird. She seems distracted at school. She’s peer-pressured beyond her group boy-band worship and into noticing the cute older boy at the corner convenience store. And her mom, Ming, has noticed these changes in “my little scholar.” Mom has just one question.

“Did the red peony bloom?”

Yes, she’s speaking metaphorically. But a Chinese-Canadian mom has just asked her teen daughter if she’s started menstruating — in a Pixar animated film.

It’s not such a stretch, considering the heavy lifting that “Inside/Out” and “Soul” did or attempted. But those “At least it’s not another ‘Toy Story’ sequel or variation” films were more psychological and touchy-feely. “Turning Red” — and boy, that title could spin a lot of ways considering its subject and the Chinese milieu — is inherently more biological, if allegorical.

And if you’re thinking “He is wading into a MINEfield” here, think about what the movie is saying or trying to say. Mei Mei, voiced by Rosalie Chiang, suddenly wakes up one morning as a giant, clumsy red panda, given to throwing her weight around amidst the occasional “triggered” emotional rage.

Her mother (Sandra Oh) and a gathering of elders in her family not only want to perform a ceremony to remove this inherited quirk in her DNA and personality. The message is she’s got to learn to control her inner panda, her emotions, her “mood swings.”

Considering how the acronym “PMS” has been erased from North American culture, that’s a gutsy play. Pixar, pandering to the more traditional Chinese marketplace (with indifferent results), revives something treated as dated — tropes about “that time of the month” and PMS — in the West.

The movie’s a lighthearted and sometimes entertaining odd duck on several levels. It dips into Chinese expat culture and cuisine in Toronto, and is inexplicably set in 2002. I guess that was “Peak Boy Band,” and Mei and her eighth grade BFFs Miriam, Priya and Abby (Ava Morse, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Hyein Park) are DEEP into 4Town, a five member (?) pop group of the NSYNC/O-Town school.

Meilin is confused by this change in her life, upset and hiding from her friends. But they’re not judgemental. They think she’s cute and fluffy in her panda guise. And all she has to do to change back is calm her emotions.

Being just-out-of-their-tweens, the kids find a way to exploit Mei’s panda persona amongst their accepting or at least curious classmates.

Yes, there’s more than a hint of “Teen Wolf” in this script by Julia Cho and director Domee Shi, who directed the adorable and Oscar-winning Chinese mom and her baby dumpling short, “Bao” a few years back. And you have to applaud the studio for green-lighting a movie that at least attempts to start “that conversation” between parents and kids.

But ambitions aside, I found the movie’s mashup of messaging, cultural recycling (Mei’s family runs a temple/shrine) of themes about “ancestors” and the origins of the red panda in human form a bit of a muddle — never exactly incoherent, not exactly consequential.

Adult characters are thinly-developed, with more promise than payoff. Even the kids, animated in a sort of digital Aardman style (wide mouths, narrow teeth), are two dimensional, at best.

At least the slapstick — what little there is of it — plays.

“Turning Red” isn’t so much a bad movie as a tentative one. It came to life with grand intentions, some cute characters, a ready-made toy tie-in and a hint of controversy. It plays as focus-grouped and watered-down — not the daring, boundary-pushing children’s edutainment it might have been.

Rating: PG for thematic material, suggestive content and language

Cast: The voices of Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Orion Lee,
Hyein Park and James Wong.

Credits: Directed by Domee Shi, scripted by Julia Cho and Domee Shi. A Pixar release.

Running time: 1:39

Recognize any voices in this rotoscope animated film from the director of “Waking Life?”

Maybe Jack Black? Zachary Levi?

Yeah, it comes to Netflix April 1.

Go figure.

Well, this looks sadistic, primal and dare one say it, “fun?”

Catalina Sandina Moreno, Iwan Rheon, Tom Cullen, Inès Spiridonov and Will Kemp star in this Charles Dorfman, the producer of “Honest Thief” and “The Lost Daughter,” now trying his hand at directing.

Here’s a little “Around the World with Netflix” bauble that takes a dip into the lives of Crazy Rich Moroccans in the Netherlands.

Its novelty is that setting, and the way it willfully upends cultural mores and expectations. Yes, it’s a broad and rowdy (ish) rom-com, somewhat predictable and limited in its ambitions. But the simple acts of embracing and poking fun at a “traditional,” patriarchal Islamic culture as it Goes Dutch delivers a few laughs amid the “princesses don’t need a prince to be ‘complete'” lecture.

“Meskina,” as translated here, means “scorned woman,” a Dutch-Moroccan version of “old maid.” That’s how judgmental family and peers regard our heroine/narrator Leyla (Maryam Hassouni). She may be 30 and beautiful, but she’s living with her widowed mom (Rachida Iaallala) and neither supporting herself nor “out there” dating.

Older, married and unfiltered sister Amira (Soundos El Ahmadi) can joke that “Dating is haram,” prohibited under Islamic law. But that’s a joke between sassy sisters. They’re a lot more Dutch than Moroccan. The film’s opening scene, a wedding where our narrator/heroine describes her plight — family expectations, age, agoraphobia — has characters asking each other if they’ve become Hindu. Whatever the ceremony is, the “event” is pure Bollywood excess in attire and “Crazy Rich Asians” in its conspicuous consumption.

Leyla’s “secret” romance with the wildly successful “golden boy” of their circle, the rich record producer Abdelkarim (Olaf Ait Tami) finally becomes public at that wedding, and leads to her own marriage. But that paparazzi-bedeviled match is abruptly tossed away in a scandal “four years later,” putting Leyla back “out there.” She’s discarded as abruptly as that whole “agoraphobia” diagnosis, which is never mentioned again after the first scene.

Yeah, “Meskina” is perfunctory and sloppy like that.

All of this prologue sets us up for Leyla taking a job with her snobby and influential event-planner niece (Jouman Fattal), a montage of the many dates that, haram or not, she struggles through, and the competing efforts of her no-bedside-manner doctor/sister and her nagging mother to set her up.

The sister’s online dating efforts lead to rich, soulful and non-Muslim Fabian (Vincent Banic).

“He’s not Moroccan!” “What ARE you? 1954?”

And mom’s matchmaking pairs her with traditional and equally smitten Amin (Nasrdin Dchar).

Who will she choose? How can she choose?

Meanwhile, she’s still trying to turn this “Dutch Muslim girl who doesn’t need a prince to feel complete” fairytale idea into a children’s book, making her “the Dutch Judy Blume.”

There are scattered laughs in this messy, ungainly comedy’s teasing, flirting, ululating women, trying-too-hard men and the apparently bi Muslim assistant (Bilal Wahib) who tries to give our heroine that gay BFF at work that women in all such tinsel-tainted rom-coms require.

What’s more interesting are the pronounced efforts to upend expectations about Europe’s allegedly insular and unassimilated first and second generation Muslim population. Lip service may be paid to being traditional and dating “Mocre” (Moroccan), but every “date,” every pop-song sing along, the whole glitzy hip hop scene and the sisters’ outspokenness and frank and frequent deployment of the F-bomb blow up that preconception.

There isn’t much to “Meskina” that we haven’t seen presented to better effect in dozens of other “culture clash” romantic comedies. The “clash” here is so watered-down as to deny the picture its one chance at real friction, something a sermon delivered at the climax doesn’t correct.

The performances are pretty flat, although El Ahmadi, playing sister Amira broad and loud, makes a most amusing impression. None of the men register at all, outside of the generic “goofballs I met online” dating montage.

We never buy the gorgeous Hassouni as anything remotely “Meskina,” as if that’s part of the “fairy tale” that is her life. The laughs are too scattered for this to pay off.

And whatever shock value there might be to an Islamic audience — short skirts, suggestive music and dancing, etc. — to Western eyes this is as edgy as Moroccan mint tea. The script puts much effort into being mildly offensive — the F-bombs — which never hides how blandly inoffensive it will play to anybody who doesn’t fret over what is or isn’t haram.

Rating: TV-MA, lots of profanity

Cast: Maryam Hassouni, Soundos El Ahmadi, Rachida Iaallala, Olaf Ait Tami, Vincent Banic, Nasrdin Dchar, Bilal Wahib and Jouman Fattal

Credits: Directed by Daria Bukvic, scripted by Fadua El Akchaoui, Daria Bukvic and Ernst Gonlag. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38