Movie Nation

A mobster on the lam turns life coach for an introverted Italian comic book nerd in “The Turning Point (La svolta),” an Italian mob dramedy with a hard, bloody edge.

Riccardo Antonaroli’s film, based on a Roberto Cimpanelli/Gabriele Scarfone script, skips from a heist that goes wrong to a “Three Days of the Condor” situation to — of course — jokes about “Stockholm Syndrome” as our nerd learns a few things about carrying oneself as a “made man” before slamming into a brutal and bullet-riddled finale.

It packs all that, and romance and mob power struggles, into 90 minutes. Not bad.

A 40ish courier/collector makes one of his stops at the Flamingo Bar, only to have his collections backpack snatched by a brash, motorcycle-helmeted interloper who makes his getaway on a scooter.

Ah, but the courier is on a motorcycle and no head start will be enough, even without the wipeout our-nearly-panicked pack-snatcher has in Rome’s old Garbatella neighborhood. He flees on foot, dropping some of the loot as he does.

What can the big brute (Andrea Lattanzi) do but barge in on diminutive Ludovico (Brando Pacitto), a shy aspiring comic book artist who studies economics because that’s what his disappointed and well-off farmer father expects?

The bargain — made at gunpoint — is that Filippo the armed robber will give the cowering shrimp Ludovico a few thousand Euros once he’s able to slip out.

The reality is that the courier mobilized “the boys” to invade the neighborhood, stake out the various old high rises and begin an apartment-by-apartment search to locate the money that Big Boss Caino lost. The seriousness of the situation is underscored when that hapless courier gets a lecture on “fate” before his is primly dispatched by the amoral Bruzzetti (Marcello Fonte). Made Man Spartaco (Max Malatesta) and his partner are sent to round up this brazen thief. Spartaco doesn’t approve of Bruzetti’s methods or the boss’s heartless way of blaming and executing the courier, or of the boss’s ulterior motives.

Laying low makes antsy Filippo chatty, scrambling for something to do. He’s Italian, so naturally he’ll cook. No, first he’ll goad/train his meek hostage to break into a neighbor’s apartment to steal ingredients. He fixes broken and untidy things about the nerd’s apartment.

And that cute coed (Ludovica Martino) whom our hostage can barely make eye contact with, a young woman who can’t free herself of a rich and abusive boyfriend? One busted boyfriend nose later, and it’s problema risolto.

This promising first feature by Antonaroli juggles the lighter side of being a mob hostage — the makeover, the advice to the lovelorn — with the brute force/bullet-to-the-head/knife-in-the-neck methods of Caino (Tullio Sorrentino) and his gang.

Caino’s growled lectures (in Italian with subtitles, or dubbed) on “Do you know what’s the most important thing to a man? His reputation. It doesn’t matter what you are, it’s what people THINK you are” are contrasted with Filippo’s tough love tough talk to cowering Ludovico, who uses”I have a serious illness” to explain his miserable life.

Oh? The teenager’s stocking cap you wear covers your chemo? No?

“‘Depression?’ You hate yourself. You don’t need a degree to see that.”

That sentiment is sure to set off folks who preach that “depression is a serious illness,” but in this script, it has Ludovico facing up to his issues and addressing them thanks to “my guardian angel.” Yeah, it’s glib and formulaic, but it plays.

The acting is quite good, particularly on the mob side, with Fonte oozing menace, Malatesta seething resentment and Sorrentino’s relaxed, murderous air suggesting a hard man untroubled by who and what he has to do or have done to get his “reputation” back.

The leads click just well enough in a serio-comic “bromance” sort of way.

And Antonaroli ensures that the story clips along, never letting us lose the thread or the fact that the stakes are literally life and death, something underscored by the hammer blows of the finale.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Andrea Lattanzi, Brando Pacitto, Ludovica Martino, Max Malatesta and Marcello Fonte

Credits: Directed by Riccardo Antonaroli, scripted by Roberto Cimpanelli and Gabriele Scarfone. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

As beaten, shot, torched, blown-up and hacked to death as the zombie picture is, Uruguayan
Gustavo Hernández finds a way to give us something that at least feels fresh in the genre.

“Virus-32” or “Virus :32” is as pitiless as it is stylish.

The arresting filming style is established in a killer long-take opening, when we see a kid being dropped off with her irresponsible mother as the camera swoops from close-up to soaring over rooftops and into the apartment of manic, ditzy Iris (Paula Silva), who will bring Tata along with her to work at “the club.”

There are probably cuts hidden within this five minute-plus shot, but it’s a bravura opening, tidily establishing characters (Tata is eight, with a skateboard and the arm in the cast that comes with it) and the loving dynamic between exes that makes us wonder what tore this marriage apart.

The “pitiless” part kicks in when the virus turns the populace into crazed and flesh-craving muertos vivientes who invade “the club” and Iris and Tata must cope with one of the defining dilemmas of horror — how to survive the zombie apocalypse.

We’ve checked out Iris’s pink-streaked hair, her piercings and her use of the word “club” (in Spanish with English subtitles). We’re pretty sure she’s the irresponsible type. But “club” means an athletic club that’s closed after hours. She’s a night watchman. Still, her new employers got the same “can’t trust her with anything” vibe that the viewer did. They didn’t give her a gun.

Iris and others will face awful choices and fates worse than death as writer-director Hernández spares few and shows little pity to the rest as we and Iris — naturally, mother and child get separated — must grasp what is happening and gather enough wits to cope, find her kid and keep her safe.

One thing the more observant survivors pick up on is this movie’s zombie pause mode. After they’ve attacked and killed somebody they stand there for :32 seconds before going about more of their bloody business.

Handy to know, still a stupid gimmick, but it is what it is. Not much is made of the first “infection” symptom, either — stigmata.

The grabber scenes involve avoiding joining the undead’s dinner menu by leaping into a pool (underwater zombie attacks) and Iris finding herself “rescued” only to owe the preternaturally calm Luis (Daniel Hendler), who did her a favor and expects one in return.

That involves helping his wife give birth. She’s infected. No, “The Walking Dead” birth scene has nothing on what we see here.

The trick to making a non-comic winner in this genre is early on stablishing how far you’re’ willing to go and just who and what you’re willing to sacrifice to make the viewer think “This nut’s gonna make us watch a gore-stained wretch devour a child and her puppy.”

Hernández gives us the idea that he will do the unexpected, and that it won’t be pretty.

But that’s not exactly true, as this is a beautifully shot film — gloom, smoke, smoke bombs and shadows dominate the visual palette. We see the first undead trying to get in through distorted shadowy hands and faces pressed against opaque windows.

The :32 second thing provides one dandy suspenseful sequence. And the stakes start out high and only go higher as there is that childbirth thing and we’re witnesses to a meaningful death or two, and not just wanton, anonymous video-game style slaughter.

It’s not all that original and not actually on a par with the benchmark films of this corner of horror, “Night of the Living Dead,” “28 Days Later,” “World War Z” and “Zombieland.” But Hernández shows a flair for thrillers and an eye for showy visual storytelling that, with his third film (after “La casa muda” and “You Shall Not Sleep”) establishes him as a horror director to watch.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence and lots of it

Cast: Paula Silva, Daniel Hendler

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gustavo Hernández. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:30

For the first two and a half acts of “Night Drive,” director Vysakh, his screenwriter Abhilash Pillai and cast treat us to a modestly-affecting thriller about a Christmas Eve drive gone wrong.

There’s little action and lots of melodrama as rideshare driver Georgy takes his childhood sweetheart Riya, a crusading TV news reporter, on a birthday trek through coastal Kerala, where Malayam is spoken and the beaches are at their most romantic after dark. They do a little shopping, sit on the beach and wait for an impromptu Christmas parade to pass.

Even after the inciting incident for the story — a police roadblock that prompts the argument that leads to Riya running into a guy toting gold bars for the corrupt politician Riya is trying to nail with her reporting — it’s a perfectly straightforward “frame-up” story, with the cop Riya corrected and chewed out ready to pin “attempted murder” (in Malayam with English subtitles) on them. Cunning Georgy and canny Riya have to figure a way to wriggle out of a trap.

But as we turn towards the tale’s conclusion, it climaxes with a wild martial arts brawl that we don’t see coming and a lot of coincidental, complex soap operatic plot twists that have to be over-explained to be believed.

It’s kind of fun, if laughable. It’s just that it hardly seems to fit the meandering, pokey picture that preceded it.

Riya (Anna Ben) gets the bad news that this crooked government minister (Siddique) she’s been trying to hold accountable is about to get off “Scot free.” However, the minister himself gets warned he’s going to be arrested, unless he sorts this little “gold” scandal out, before noon the next day.

And merry Christmas to you, minister!

Smart, chivalrous and handsome Georgy takes a lady and her cute kid home and is done with his rideshare duties for the night. If he can sneak Riya past her tipsy, disapproving retired soldier Dad, they’ll go for a drive.

Georgy has vague plans to work in Dubai. Riya isn’t hearing it.

“Do you have any plans to marry me?”

And that’s when the checkpoint, the courier, the gold and the “accident” that includes “slash” wounds happens and derails their night.

The sobriety stop with the cops led by chief inspector Benny Moopen (Indrajith Sukumaran) is sexist, sassy and just testy enough to never turn funny. Georgy’s apologies are nullified by Riya’s “Here’s what the law says” backtalk.

“Oh look, the lady has spoken again!”

When they wind up in the hospital, delivering a guy Riya’s just run over, we know they’re in for it.

Only the stakes never feel that high. She is on TV and famous. The cop gets a little rough with Georgy, but nothing that menacing.

And then there’s the amount of gold all this is over — 18 kilos. That’s about $850,000 worth, and with the 40 pounds of 18K gold stuffed in a tote bag, it seems even less consequential. Surely a scandal threatening a top politician and implying attempted murder would involve more loot.

The screenplay packs in a lot of flips and twists into the last half of the third act, and brings in Georgy’s faithful pals (Prasanth, Sreevidya Nair) for semi-comic moral support. And while the fight itself — played out in slo-mo, with one person folding her arms and smiling because she knows someone with “particular skills” that will be ably demonstrated — is a stitch, it really does seem to belong to a funnier, more action-packed picture.

Even with the conspiracy and implied frame-up plot unfolding, the first hundred minutes of this “Drive” is too timid to deserve its over-the-top climax and over-explained payoff.

Rating: TV-14, violence, drinking

Cast: Anna Ben, Roshan Mathew, Indrajith Sukumaran, Prasanth, Sreevidya Nair and Siddique

Credits: Directed by Vysakh, scripted by Abhilash Pillai. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

It’s French, of course. And Polish. With a little English.

Bertrand Mandico’s “After Blue” drops on June 3.

“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.

I’ve had a couple of other chances to catch a preview of this one, but things came up, and I almost can’t bear to see it. The risk of letdown is high.

But let’s hope for the best and hang onto that one great take away that “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” has already given us all.

Have you seen how relaxed, loose and happy Nicolas Cage seems, out promoting this daft action comedy that was tailor-made for him, a tribute to NIC CAGE served on a plate of self-mockery?

Those of us who have interviewed him worried about Cage for years. He seemed tormented during the ’90s. And the string of C-movies he’s filled VOD queues with in recent decades wasn’t that encouraging. He needed the work as much as he needed the money, we figured, and that can’t be good.

With “Pig” and “Unbearable,” we’ve got an aging action star comfortable in his own skin, still making indie films, with all those awful shot-in-Thailand C movies sort of falling by the wayside.

I’ll never forget how lost he sounded when I interviewed him for “The Weather Man,” an actor who bluntly admitted that he needed to work constantly because of not wanting to go home and how miserable he was “in my own head.”

A happy and healthy Nic Cage, celebrated for being the over-the-top entity that he is, is a joyful thing to behold.

Fingers crossed!