Movie Nation

Even if you don’t speak French, the balls-out French cars-and-criminals thriller “Lost Bullet” will teach you the only three words you need to review it.

“Oh putain oui!” Or as we say in the States, “Aw HELL yeah!”

This gonzo Netflix Original by Guillaume Pierret (his “Matriche” was nothing like this) has visceral, heart-pounding car chases that compare — favorably — with the very best the “Fast and Furious” franchise has ever offered.

It has twists, turns and brawls. The set piece? The most stunning escape from a police station ever staged, endlessly inventive, breathless, two-fisted and action-packed.

Damn.

Stuntman turned actor Alban Lenoir (“15 Minutes of War”), who helped cook up the story that became the script, stars as a French gearhead of a criminal bent. His character, Lino, gets one of most dazzling “introductions” on screen in recent memory.

We see him tuning-up and souping-up a car for a “job.” We see him and his hapless, in-debt-and-needs-cash pal Quentin (Rod Paradot) climb in it and register Quentin’s dismay at Lino’s choice of ride.

“A (Renault) Clio?” For those who don’t know, it’s like a Smart Car without the performance or sex appeal.

Needless to say, the smash-and-grab Lino has in mind doesn’t work out, and doesn’t work out in the most hilarious way.

That’s how Lino ends up in prison. That’s where Charas (Ramzy Bedia, gruff and terrific) grabs him for his anti-drug unit. The bad guys are running drugs in hot rods, which the French effeminately label “go fasts.” Charas needs a mechanic who can turn the cops’ Fords (mostly) into criminal-catching road racers.

“I need a magician,” he tells his boss. “Let me have him!”

But something happens, Lino is framed for it and he’s got almost no chance to get free and no time to clear his name.

Brilliant touches abound in this French (with English subtitles) film, titled “Balle Perdue” where the fondue flows.

Lino is tougher than we think, which is predictable. But he’s something of an engineering whiz — not just good with engines, but with applied-force/mass and resistance calculations. Dude can bust a move and bust a lock and turn a car into a battering ram that can punch WAY above its weight.

Stéfi Celma is the one cop who might (MIGHT) believe Lino’s story.

And you know that somebody’s 1990 Renault 21 turbo (pictured) will have a co-starring role.

Yeah, it’s a genre piece — street chases and fights along the docks and on a farm.

Yeah, the dialogue’s kept to a minimum, nothing much to write home about.

But is it breathless, blow-the-doors-off fun? “Oh putain oui!”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, extreme violence, bloody

Cast: Alban Lenoir, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Ramzy Bedia, Stéfi Celma

Credits: Written and directed by Guillaume Pierret. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

Whatever feelings “A Regular Woman,” a first-person account of a victim of an “honor killing” among Turkish Kurds in Germany, smug superiority barely enters the mind.

German director Sherry Hormann, working from a script based on an infamous 2005 case, summons up outrage, heartache, worry and judgement in 90 tight and damning minutes. But as our heroine and narrator, the late Hatun “Aynur” Sürücü (Almila Bagriacik) takes us from arranged marriage (in the eighth grade) to separation, nagging to harassment to actual abuse by her own family after she flees the brute, Hormann never encourages us to take the “Well, that’s THEM” attitude.

This barbaric practice isn’t exclusively Muslim, for starters. And an observant Westerner can’t help but feel creepy similarities to what we see in extremist patriarchies the world over — Jewish, Protestant, Catholic and Mormon among them. “Controlling women” is what all such ancient customs have in common, with threats and intimidation more widespread than actual murder.

Hormann tells this story “Sunset Boulevard” fashion, with Aynur narrating as we see her body, covered in a sheet, on a German street. The narration is something of a crutch — over-used. But that’s how Hormann has her lay it all out there for us, and how she keeps her movie impressively short and tight.

From her arranged marriage (carried out in Turkey) at 15 onward, Aynur shows us a family hellbent on maintaining cultural (not necessarily religious) traditions and gender roles, no matter how long they’ve lived in the West.

“Men don’t like loud women,” is her mother’s (Meral Perin) wedding day advice. And that razor blade she slips her? Well, that’s another way of avoiding “shaming” the man.

We don’t see the abuse that sends her, pregnant and fleeing, back to her family’s crowded (nine children) flat. But Aynur is quick to acknowledge “being a disgrace,” and very German in the way she methodically lists why family members would be the cruelest, the one break-dancing older sibling in law school who’d have her back, and the one who would eventually kill her — egged on by his brothers.

She also lists the six “justifications” for honor killing within her culture, and they are as chilling as you’d imagine.

The three brothers (Rauand Taleb, Mehmet Atesci, Aram Arami) who give her the most trouble are archetypal villains — brutish, scowling fundamentalists who don’t need a radical Imam’s encouragement to be monstrous to her for “shaming” their father and their family by giving up on the marriage, moving out as a single mom, pursuing an education and a career.

But that Imam gives his thumb’s up anyway, for what that’s worth, although he notes, “Stoning is not permitted in Germany.”

We can puzzle over why Aynur doesn’t flee, what binds her to a family which, after she moves out, only maintains contact with furtive visits and calls cursing her out at all hours of the day and night. Aynur acknowledges that.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she narrates (in German with English subtitles). “Is she still so stupid?”

We know the answer to that, and no amount of explaining can allay that fear. We know how this ends.

The pathos here is built-in, a young mother with an adorable child, trying to better herself and her life in a part of the world where women have more of a shot at a better life. The drama is waiting to see where the alliances will fall, who will resist and in what ways “the system” will fail her.

There are sympathetic bureaucrats and rigid by-the-book types who never let practical considerations like credible threats to a woman’s life get in the way of their “rules.”

“Regular” Germans are eyewitnesses to some of this, parties to it on the bus — where they see Aynur assaulted and threatened — and in the courts.

The performances are quite good, although I could have used more terror and fury from Bagriacik’s Aynur. She gets there. Eventually. The three actors playing the brothers are variations on a hulking, hateful theme — poster boys for abuse.

Few come off unscathed in this brisk portrait of a modern world reluctant to confront monstrous practices that some of those who move into it “for better lives” bring with them.

The voice-over, as I say, can feel over-used here. But Hormann uses still photograph montages to underscore and illustrate the “progress” Aynur is making in freeing herself from her “toxic” family — studying to be an electrician, losing the head scarf and freeing her hair, dancing in a night club for the first time in her life.

Hormann, whose “Desert Flower” was about female genital mutilation, hasn’t made another version of bluntly malicious (if factual and damning) “The Stoning of Saroya M.” But “A Regular Woman (Nur Eiene Frau)” doesn’t leave much doubt that Islam and Muslim cultures, in particular, have some serious civilizing to do if they want to wholly join the 21st century.

And western democracies that don’t listen to women or take this murderous practice — on the rise, by the way — seriously aren’t being tolerant or “respectful” of cultural differences. They have blood on their hands.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, some nudity, profanity

Cast:Almila Bagriacik, Meral Perin, Rauand Taleb, Mehmet Atesci, Aram Arami and Lina Wendel

Credits: Directed by Sherry Hormann, script by Florian Öller, based on the book by Matthias Deiß and Jo Goll.  A Corinth release.

Running time:

An exceptionally well-cast account of the Cuban spies vs. South Florida anti-Castro activists war of the 1990s, “Wasp Network,” comes apart in a big way almost precisely at the midway point.

The mysteries of a story about Cuban men defecting to the the U.S. and becoming pilots with the Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban emigre air force with the proclaimed mission of guiding the Coast Guard to rafts of “boat people” fleeing Castro’s Cuba for Florida, disappear and our big questions are answered, an hour in to a two hour movie.

Yes, Rene Gonzalez (Edgar Ramirez), a doting dad and loving husband who abruptly and cold-bloodedly abandons them (Penelope Cruz is his wife Olga) to take his skydiving jump plane across the Florida Strait to Los Estados Unidos, is a Cuban spy.

And yes, the more mercenary Juan Pablo Roque (Wagner Mouro), who snorkeled his way from a Cuban beach into Guantanamo Bay, where the United States maintains a base on the island, defects and then marries the gorgeous divorcee played by Ana de Armas (“Knives Out!”), is also an agent for Castro.

Their activities — saving refugees, but also flirting with involvement in drug smuggling, which both reject — are laid-out as the boss of their “Wasp Network” of spies (Gael Garcia Bernal) takes charge.

It’s as if French director Olivier Assayas realized chatty, relationship-centric French films (“Non-Fiction,” “The Clouds of Sils Maria,” “Personal Shopper”) are his thing and either lost his nerve or his patience with this involving if not exactly “thrilling” docu-drama/spy thriller.

And here I was, all set to praise Netflix for gathering this cast, telling a fascinating and important story and making amends to Ramirez for the atrocity that was his last Netflix outing, “The Last Days of American Crime.”

It’s not as if a story about the Castro provocations and underworld activities of South Florida’s most fanatical anti-Castro Cuban Americans isn’t worth telling. But Assayas is less interested in their murky politics and financing and more fascinated by the “heroic” Cuban efforts to battle American sanctions and the blind-eye the U.S. turned on the “terrorists” it allowed to do what they want from the safety of airfields in S. Florida.

In a movie about fanatics, he chose the less interesting ones — dogmatic, Fidel-worshiping communists — to build his movie on.

Ramirez makes a marvelously myopic man with a mission. Not even his wife knows what he’s done this for. No, she isn’t telling their daughter the truth about what happened to Daddy.

“I don’t want her to learn her father is a traitor,” she hisses on the phone (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

His contacts with the Cuban American National Foundation have him flying, without warning, to Honduras for a touch-and-go drug shipment, which he will not repeat.

“I didn’t defect to run drugs,” he declares to his contact with this “liberate Cuba” organization that runs Brothers to the Rescue, and is financed with drug money. “I’m working for the liberation of Cuba!”

Roque is confronted about the secrets he is keeping from his suspicious bride, and his spending habits.

“I didn’t flee Cuba to come to Miami to be a loser!”

That dichotomy, man of principles vs mercenary professional spy, isn’t enough to hang “Wasp Network” (what they Cubans named their spy ring) on.

Bernal, when he shows up, is limited to being Mr. Exposition, explaining things to his spies, other characters and the audience.

Cruz’s character is set up to be more of a central figure than she winds up playing, and de Armas is reduced to beautiful, testy set dressing.

The entire second half of the picture feels perfunctory, with FBI intrigues, Cuban secret police and Cuban Air Force self-righteousness and Castro and Clinton public statements about what’s been going on.

It’s not as if I’m not open to a movie relating how the ineffective American embargo crippled the island and forever soured relations, how that made Cubans there as fanatical as many first generation Cuban emigres over here.

The excesses of that South Florida mob have been well-documented, if not discussed here.

The violence that results from the activities shown in “Wasp Network” is frittered away, with little suspense, tension or trauma. If this Cuban “infiltration,” which the film essentially celebrates, was so successful, and if the FBI was as tuned-in to what was coming, how did either side let the third act bloodshed happen?

Ramirez and Bernal crackle in their few scenes together, spies who effortlessly switch to Cuba’s preferred “second language” (Russian) to avoid giving away their secrets, as if two Cubans speaking RUSSIAN wouldn’t set off alarm bells in South Florida.

There’s too much to “Wasp Network,” much of it good, to dismiss it out of hand. But it only takes an hour of this two hour-plus movie for us to figure out Assayas wasn’t the right writer-director to pull it off.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug content, sex

Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Penelope Cruz, Ana de Armas, Gael Garcia Bernal, Tony Plana and Wagner Moura

Credits: Directed by Olivier Assayas script by Olivier Assayas, based on the Fernando Morais book.

Running time: 2:03

If Charles Dickens was alive today, would he try his hand at being a socially conscious fiction writer in film?

That’s the intriguing question posed by “Run with the Hunted,” a gritty near miss of a B-movie about abused children who wind up in the clutches of their very own Fagin in what is unmistakably a modern spin on “Oliver Twist.”

A solid cast decorated with screen veterans and unblinking violence characterize this near-miss from writer-director John Swab (“Let Me Make You a Martyr”).

Oscar (Mitchell Paulsen) and Loux (Madilyn Kellam) are neighbors and inseparable friends, devoted in ways far beyond their years (about 14).

But Loux’s family life has its horrible secret, one Oscar can’t go to his parents (William Forsythe plays his dad) about. He makes the fateful decision to save her by any means necessary. That involves a fireplace poker he uses on her abusive, drunken redneck father.

The crime puts Oscar on the run in the middle of the night, a dash to a city a hundred miles away. Once there, he meets a different girl, the street teen Peaches (Kylie Rogers). She brings him “home” to the warehouse where she and “my family of broken toys” live.

They’re a gang of petty thieves raised in picking pockets by their version of Dickens’ “Fagin,” named Sway (Mark Boone Junior). This stealing school is run as part of a larger enterprise by the big boss, Birdie (Ron Perlman), who keeps the promising kids around for bigger crimes once they’ve outgrown street hustling. In Dickensian terms, he’s a bit of Fagin, a bit of the murderous Bill Sikes.

Oscar lives his life under Sway’s supervision and Birdie’s protection — from the law and his parents, all of them looking for this “criminal” run-away.

“You’ve made decisions only a man should make,” the kid is told.

“You know why I’m the way I am?” Birdie asks him. “I wanted more. And I wasn’t gonna ask for it. I just took it. You’ve gotta just grab whatcha want. Ain’t nobody gonna give it to you.”

Fifteen years later, the seeds planted in childhood bear fruit as Peaches (Dree Hemingway of “The Unicorn” and “In a Relationship”) has taken on more adult hustles, and her man Oscar (Michael Pitt of “Boardwalk Empire,” “Rob the Mob” and “Criminal”) is taking armed robbery assignments.

That’s when another young woman (Sam Quartin) shows up, takes a job with a local private eye (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.) and starts asking questions about this long-missing kid.

Oscar is Birdie’s most trusted soldier, Peaches is Birdie’s favorite. Both get the best advice the now-politically-connected Birdie has to offer.

“You know, men — they get to be a certain age they get delusions of grandeur. They wanna run everything themselves.”

Perlman is the seasoned cynic and veteran heavy who anchors the picture, and makes it worth watching. Pitt is also a safe bet to give you fair value in disturbed, edgy, “capable of violence” roles.

Hemingway — of those Hemigways — has her best role ever playing a young woman who picked up cutthroat cunning, and little else, in her years picking pockets.

But “Run with the Hunted” kind of rattles around like a racoon confined in a tiger cage.  The milieu and characters are here, with “Lost Boys” references that don’t really hide the “Oliver Twist” structure. The “twists” in this “Oliver” are entirely predictable, including the finale.

A shocking “accident” here, an armed robbery there — a woman picking up a trail a decade after it went cold through a seedy private eye who doesn’t want anything to do with stirring things up with Birdie’s empire and the cops who collude with him.

What grabbed my attention in lieu of surprises were questions about the economics of it all. How do you make a gang of child pickpockets pay off in a First World country? The overhead must be murder, to say nothing of social workers and police NOT on the take who could not help but notice the tween-to-teen crime wave.

“Overthinking” in the audience undoes many a slackly-paced and formulaic thriller. It’s where the mind wanders when the action on the screen slacks off.

But Perlman, Pitt, Hemingway and Whitlock deliver and make this near-miss interesting enough to hope Swab’s next outing will have as much promise, and deliver on more of it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, adult situations all involving children

Cast: Ron Perlman, Dree Hemingway, Michael Pitt, Sam Quartin, Isaiah Whitlock, Jr., Mark Boone Jr. and William Forsythe.

Credits: Written and directed by John Swab. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:33

“Mr. Jones” is a story of three journalists.

One persistently and somewhat naively stumbled into a genocidal scandal of world-shaking proportions.

One tried to cover it up from the pages of one of the world’s great newspapers, and became one of the most infamous apologists in the history of journalism.

And a third turned into a novelist who laid bare the crimes of a system that was as base as human nature, and just as murderous when the characters conveying that aren’t humans at all, but animals on a farm.

Director Agnieska Holland returns to the era of her first great triumph (“Europa Europa”), events leading up to World War II, for this account of Holomodor— the Stalin/Soviet-made famine that killed millions in Ukraine in 1932-33. It’s also a straightforward biography of the reporter most widely credited with exposing it to the outside world, government Foreign Affairs Advisor turned journalist Gareth Jones.

James Norton of “Little Women” stars as Jones, capturing the naive idealism and moral absolutism of a man who had just scored an interview with Adolf Hitler, a literary coup for himself but something of a nuisance to his boss, former prime minister David Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham), who with his Liberal Party aristocratic peers, refused to see Germany as a renewed threat.

It’s early 1933, just after the Reichstag Fire. Jones — newly laid-off — figures Britain will need another alliance with Russia (now the Soviet Union) if German moves to re-arm and attack its neighbors are to be resisted. But there’s something about “The Soviet Miracle” and “Stalin’s spending spree” that the Cambridge-educated Jones doesn’t get.

“How is Stalin paying for it all?”

He books passage to the East.

“I hear Moscow is beautiful this time of year.” “March?!”

And once there, he is confronted with two facts. Reporters are “confined” to Moscow, shadowed by minders, men one journalist (Vanessa Kirby) labels “Big Brother.” The other fact? Everyone there seems to accept Soviet propaganda and press releases at face value, because that’s what Pulitzer Prize-winner and Soviet enthusiast Walter Duranty of The New York Times does.

Duranty is played by Peter Sarsgaard at his most unctuous and oily. He is wired in, a veritable Soviet lobbying presence in the American press as he acts as go-between for their government and that of the United States.

But the suspicious death of a friend has Jones on his guard. He longs to get out, see “Stalin’s Gold,” the grain raised in the “black earth” of Ukraine where Jones’s mother was born. Might one of Duranty’s junior reporters, Ada (Kirby) help?

Not much, it turns out. But Jones, carrying that “Where’s the money coming from?” question in his mind, connives his way into making such a trip. And what he finds there is one of the great tragedies of the last century.

Holland and screenwriter Andrea Chalupa frame the story within the letter writing and then, novel typing of left-leaning journalist Eric Blair, who turned out Depression Era enthusiasm for the “new way” Soviet Russia is doing things. At first.

The clever touches in this script capture Jones’s inexperience in journalism. He rubs Ada Brooks the wrong way by asking her questions no competitive reporter wants to answer.

“What are you working on? What are your SOURCES?”

Jones was young, and his idealism clashes with the “agenda” he sees Duranty and his lackeys pushing. He takes the “follow the facts where they lead” credo to the hilt.

Holland contrasts the opulence with which assorted commissars travel, work (plush offices) and gorge themselves with the world Jones escapes his Ukraine minder to see — snowy whites, colorless greys, bread lines that turn to bread brawls as starving people fight for the scraps that aren’t “sent to Moscow,” a married couple, frozen in their beds after starving.

And don’t ask the feral children he sees everywhere what they’re using for meat.

Those children sing nursery rhymes to the famine, recite (in Russian with English subtitles) anti-Stalin limericks (“Stalin sits on his throne, playing the violin. He looks down with a frown on our bread-giving country…”

This film was 22 minutes longer when it played film festivals, and it can feel truncated when the third act rolls around. Jones didn’t actually “break” the story, but he was the first to sign his name to “I saw famine” stories. So there’s more to this than we see here.

But Norton makes a sturdy, inexperienced but curious hero, a man every bit as idealistic about “the truth” as Sarsgaard’s Duranty is all about “a movement bigger than any one person,” his “agenda.”

“Bitter Harvest” was a pretty good 2016 movie about the details, life within one village during The Holomodor. Holland, Chalupa and “Mr. Jones” show us the view from the outside, the struggle to get the story out.

And in its loveliest touch, they show us the long memory of literature, when the right journalist and critic takes on the nom de plume “Orwell,” and tells the tale of what happens in a world where “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, disturbing images of starvation

Cast: James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard, Joseph Mawle, Kenneth Cranham

Credits: Directed by Agnieszka Holland, script by Andrea Chalupa. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:58

A top drawer writer/director, solid A-, B+ list talent and a haunted house seemingly designed by Maurice Escher class up the mildly-scary thriller, “You Should Have Left.”

It has an A-picture gloss and sophistication often missing from the genre. The dialogue crackles, the situations the stuff of many a domestic melodrama. And the ending makes logical sense, even if the pathos and sucker-punch frights, the terror of real violence, are missing.

Kevin Bacon plays the older, wealthier Angelino who has nabbed himself a much younger movie star wife (Amanda Seyfried). But in this family, “nightmares” are the shared trait. Even six year-old Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex) has them. The picture opens with her alarmed at a noise she hears in the night, getting up to close a door, and muttering, in the manner of all Hollywood six-year-olds.

“God dammit!”

The whisper in her ear corrects this behavior, or should.

“Don’t curse, unless you wanna BE cursed!”

Susanna (Seyfried) is in the middle of a shoot, fussing over her husband’s poolside habits like the ultimate “child bride” (or trophy wife).

“Old man…SUN block!”

Theo smiles this off, and suffers the petty humiliations of being denied a visit to the set by some functionary who figures “You’re her father?” Mercifully, Theo can only hear the sex scene that is the order of the day.

But there’s a break between films coming up. Let’s rent a place, and as the British house-hunting show puts it,“Escape to the Country.” They grab a posh “pile” in rural Wales, sight unseen, via an Internet ad.

It’s mysterious and modern, austere and chilly. The rooms are a veritable Escher maze of brick and dim lighting. Perfect!

The dynamics of the family will be put to the test by this place, whose history is muttered by the fussbudget local shopkeeper (Colin Blumenau) Theo meets in what he jokingly calls “The Village of the Damned.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak Welsh,” the American gripes.

“That was ENGLISH.”

Right.

The older man is suspicious of his younger wife, who giggles too much in her many phone conversations with her director. And he’s stuck answering the BIG questions emanating from the six-year old.

“Daddy, because you’re old, you WILL die before Mommy, right?”

Ouch.

“Why do we have to die at all?”

“Life is not survivable.”

The kid is the first one to hear things in the house. They never believe the kid, do they?

The shopkeeper asks the one question that should set off alarm bells –“Anything happen, yet?”

Theo doesn’t exactly shrug any of this off. He’s just consumed with worry that he’ll be recognized. He has a past.

You cast accomplished actors in films like this to get more emotion out of what is too often a formulaic genre. The dividend here is an absolutely real connection between father and daughter. Watch Bacon’s interactions with young Miss Essex. They’re so natural we buy in instantly.

Seyfried gets to send up her screen sex kitten image, playing an actress who complains about her director wanting her to get naked “again,” for scenes that come off “kind of porny.”

Adapter-director David Koepp scripted “Jurassic Park,” a “Spider-Man,” a “Mission: Impossible” and a string of (mostly) hits, the witty “Ghost Town” among them. The dialogue here positively sparkles, characters have realistic motivations and close-to-the-bone reactions to strains in their relationships.

But underplaying the terror of facing the supernatural is always a mistake.

The effects are stark and simple. Mirrors misbehave. A creeper wanders the shadows. How far would YOU go to wake yourself up from every parent’s worst nightmare?

It’s all rather less than the sum of its parts, but the first two thirds of “You Should Leave” impress and engross. It’s a pity we don’t get to see it with an audience. Because if there’s one thing that amplifies tiny frights, it’s other people overreacting as if they’re scared out of their wits.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence, disturbing images, sexual content and language

Cast: Kevin Bacon, Amanda Seyfried, Avery Tiiu Essex, Colin Blumenau

Credits: Written and directed by David Koepp, based on the Daniel Kehlmann novel. A Universal/BlumHouse release.

Running time: 1:33

A teenage girl’s coming of age story shines a light on Korean sexism, educational Darwinism and the afterthought that girls seem to be there in “House of Hummingbird,” a sweet and forlorn “year in the life” drama.

The debut feature of Bora Kim is a period piece. She uses an eventful year in Korea — 1994 — and parks the downtrodden, failing student with limited expectations Eun-hee (Ji-hu Park) in it for a drama about the events that could make or break her.

Eun-hee lives in a violently dysfunctional house where her doted-on older brother Daehoon is being tutored and nagged towards college, an academic achievement that might be beyond his reach. He takes out his frustrations on his littlest sister. He learned the violence not just from his father (In-gi Jeong), we come to believe, but from the culture.

Older sister Suhee is still in school as well, but she’ll do anything to not be around the house, only showing up for meals and helping with the family’s baked goods business.

Eun-hee is as badgered as the other two, forced to take an after school “cram class” (tutoring) even though her girls’ school classmates have already singled her out as “housemaid” material.

She’s naively seeing her first boyfriend, who doesn’t seem to want to show her off in public. And even that is just another distraction weighing her down.

Insulted, humiliated or just ignored in class, passing notes instead of taking notes in the tutoring sessions with her pal Jisuk, doodling comic book characters when she should be paying attention, it’s all coming to head.

The headmaster’s pep talk to the kids should put the fear of God into the lot of them.

“Today is the first day (on the road) to your death!”

That’s a lot to carry on your shoulders. Eun-hee is only 14.

Over the course of this year, there will be karaoke sessions with her one or two friends, heartbreak and betrayal, misbehavior and tragedies. And there’ll be a health scare, something it takes a while to get her distracted, depressed mother (Seung-Yun Lee)

The year’s sole saving grace? Her new cram course tutor in Chinese, Miss Yong-ji (Sae-byeok Kim) takes her seriously, doesn’t berate her or raise her voice.

One day, Yong-ji sings a mournful injured-in-the-workplace song, another day she explains Chinese poetry.

“How many people do you know?” She gets an unreasonably high answer. “And now how many of them do you understand? How many of THEM understand what’s going on inside you?”

“House of Hummingbird,” in virtual cinemas (for instance, on your local art cinema’s website) on June 26, lets the momentous events of ’94 (a North Korean dictator dies) pass behind the teens trying to figure out what it is that they’ll be doing for the rest of their lives, when they’ll flower and when life will start to seem worth living.

The girls experiment with smoking, shoplifting, French kissing and thoughts of suicide as they consider the future laid out for them, a marriage where “you’re each other’s furniture,” or some sort of career — but only if you get into Seoul University somehow.

Bora Kim lets the story unfold in its own time, allowing for interludes — Mom’s drunken brother shows up to apologize for sucking up all the family money and energy from her as he was shoved into a life and career he wasn’t smart to handle — and plenty of teen distractions.

It takes a solid hour before we get a hint that maybe Eun-hee isn’t a complete dolt and slacker. “House of Hummingbird” is more interested in the limitations Korea’s patriarchy puts on her than her actual potential, more alarmed by the intense pressure even kids who fall on the “not-the-brightest” end of the spectrum are put under.

The film meanders a bit, and dawdles a bit more. But its compelling and unblinking portrait of a girl’s life, her expectations, prospects, obstacles and second class status announce Ms. Kim, its director, as a talent to watch as a chronicler of female life another of Asia’s “Miracle Economies.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Ji-hu Park, Sae-byeok Kim, Seung-Yun Lee and In-gi Jeong

Credits: Written and directed by Bora Kim. A Well Go/Kino release.

Running time: 2:18

From Variety — AMC Theatres Reverses Course, Will Require Guests to Wear Masks https://t.co/HHdhXmlp04 https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1274027621521797120?s=20

Netflix dips its toes into that most Japanese of film forms, anime, with “A Whisker Away,” a charming, whimsical fantasy that you’d never guess came from the country that gave us “Hello Kitty.”

It’s a body-switch tale about a manic teenage girl who obsesses over a boy, and is lured into getting close to him by taking the guise of a cat.

Miyo (voiced by Mirai Shida in Japanese, with English subtitles) is impulsive and given to acting out. Her mother left her father, and dad’s new live-in girlfriend is a bit young and green to be stepping into mothering.

Miyo crushes on classmate Hinode (Natsuki Hanae). Hard. As in hip-check in hockey or hoops hard. “Sunrise attack!” she shrieks, tumbling into him each morning at school. She can’t tell how embarrassed he is by this.

Maybe the nickname everybody else in school has given her should be her clue. “MUGE, Miss Ultra Gaga Enigmatic.”

Her 14-15 year old problems get the best of her, and she confesses “I hate this stupid world. I wish it would end soon.”

But this Buddha-sized cat she runs into sells cat masks. All she has to do is lend him her “human face mask” and she can see the world through cat’s eyes — literally.

As “Taro” she can get close to Hinode and see his life. She can also leap off roofs into trees, something she takes to doing as Miyo, putting the mask on mid-flight.

Of course, there’s a catch to becoming a cute cat. Several catches, beginning with “I need to wipe my butt” issues and carrying on through to the REAL cost of this “exchange.”

Studio Clorido (a “Pokeman” anime, and “Penguin Highway”) did the animation here, and while it isn’t as rich as the best Studio Ghibli outings, the detail and effects are better than your average TV anime.

Mari Okada’s script is a winner, offering up the usual slices-of-Japanese-life (“festivals,” meals, cats and school life). I wasn’t nuts about the finale, but the Fat Cat with the Masks is a grand creation, and the fanciful alternate world of cats, complete with a “Human Car Bar,” is wonderfully imaginative.

Cats have little more trouble slipping into human guises than humans becoming cats.

The movie may be mostly about teen love, but there are all these subtexts — adored pets and adoring pets who crave sharing their shorter lives with their one human, pet mortality.

The West may have long regarded the East as “inscrutable.” In Japan, they save that word for felines, who come off here as reserved, loyal, observant and aloof. On the money, to anybody who’s ever shared a life with a cat.

Money well spent, Netflix. Let’s see what else you’ve got.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG, fear, violence, smoking.

Cast: The voices of Mirai Shida, Natsuki Hanae, Susumu Chiba.

Credits: Directed by Jun’ichi Satô, Tomotaka Shibayama, script by Mari Okada. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

The Kansas City chain ignored movie going demographics and common sense in deciding to make its theaters COVID and MAGA friendly.

“AMC Theater CEO Adam Aron says their cinemas won’t require masks upon reopening because they didn’t “want to be drawn into a political controversy.”

https://t.co/zNjy9wzGMK https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1273763757592735746?s=20

Needless to say, Twitter is lighting this wingnut up. But as Regal and Cinemark have also said they won’t be requiring masks, it’s not wholly unexpected.

Cinemas, like most businesses, don’t want to scare off any potential customer. Younger people tend to be moviegoers, and more careless about COVID in general. The more rural you get, the fewer masks you see in stores and public places

But big city theaters are going to be dead empty on reopening because of this. AMC is broke as it is. This will hasten their demise, I dare say.