Movie Nation

Some big themes and social issues are wrapped up in the stylish Indian period piece “Bulbbul,” a thriller that leans far too heavily on “Hound of the Baskervilles” for its own good.

I mean, when you’ve got the law-school bound brother-in-law theorizing and developing suspects about a series of gruesome murders in 1901 Bengal, suggesting he’s “playing Sherlock” would be more of a give-away, had we not figured out where this was going early on.

In a corner of the country wrapped in scarlet foggy nights, a former child bride presides over the manor. Because the Lord, who was a good twenty years older than Bulbbul when he fetched her decades before, has relocated. Or maybe “fled.”

Bulbbul, played with a self-assured smile by Tripti Dimri (“Poster Boys”), is happy to reunite with the brother-in-law, Satya (Avinash Tiwary) who was her childhood playmate when she was “married,” all of seven or eight years old.

Back then, her auntie told her to just keep those toe-rings on. It’s how men “control” their brides, she was told. Now, she’s on her own in a luxurious estate even as the village and surrounding land is bewitched by “the Demon Woman.”

Satya is a privileged, educated young man who sees one murder victim, pronounces that “our British law asks for proof” and says no demon, specter or beast did this.

“What woman is capable of such a brutal murder?” he wonders, in Hindi with English subtitles.

Bulbbul? She just grins.

There’s a doctor (Parambrata Chattopadhyay) who might know more than he lets on, and a sister-in-law (Paoli Dam) who shaved her head and went into mourning after the death of her husband (Rahul Bose), the Lord’s simple-minded twin brother.

Tish tosh, Bulbbul clucks. Around here, a person gets a fever and “the demon” did it. Is she clucking too much?

Lyricist turned director Anvita Dutt shuffles up the narrative order, beginning with the “wedding” decades before, shifting back and forth to give us clues to something we’ve already figured out, “motivations” for the murders, how a “monster” was made.

The performances are properly pitched, the production design is striking, the frankness of the depiction of violence against women (by Indian cinema standards) brutal, but refreshing for its honesty.

Still, messing around with “twins” muddies up the proceedings, and the source material is too obvious to be worth revisiting for the umpteenth time.

The best any critical Western viewer might offer in praise is “Nice try.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, including rape

Cast: Tripti Dimri, Avinash Tiwary, Rahul Bose, Parambrata Chattopadhyay and Paoli Dam

Credits: Directed by Anvita Dutt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

The new trailer? Yes. It is. Funny, too. Adorably nostalgic.

Movie’s been pushed back once or twice, Sept. 1 now. We’ll see.

A young Nigerian travels to Brazil in search of his missing older brother in “Shine Your Eyes,” a lyrical São Paulo mystery-travelogue that takes us through math, music and into madness.

The search-for-a-missing person story is one of the most reliable in literature and film, and this feature from Matias Mariani (“I Touched All Your Stuff”) is a worthy addition to the canon and another reason to go “Around the World with Netflix.”

Amadi, played by veteran Nigerian actor O.C. Okeje (“Potato Potahto”) has been charged by his mother with finding his brother Ikenna, who moved to Brazil to make use of his beautiful mind.

Amadi, a musician, Internet searches for the college where math-genius Ikenna teaches. It takes him a while to figure out it doesn’t exist. He questions his uncle (Barry Igujie) for clues. Well, Ikenna may have done this, he may have done that. He “lost a lot of money gambling” could be key.

That’s what sends Amadi to the horse track. That’s why he bets on the horse named Schopenhauer.

“Here is not a good place for German philosophers,” an older gambler (Paolo Andre) chuckles. He has a professorial look about him. Maybe he’s met Ikenna? “Serendipity” becomes Amadi’s guiding principle in his search.

From the professor, he retrieves textbooks in which Ikenna scrawled his ideas into the margins. The Internet cafe has a repair shop. Could that be Ikenna’s old laptop?

Amadi’s quest takes him and us into the African diaspora of a huge South American city, stopping to jam or sing reggae karaoke and converse in Igbo (his native tongue), meeting people who encountered his brother — who was quite memorable — tracing photographs packed into that old laptop, lost in montages of thought, science, music and gambling that Ikenna mused about.

The mystery deepens and Amadi’s guilt over his lack of success — symbolized by the message his mother recorded to Ikenna on his phone — worsens. And then he meets a woman who works for his uncle who knew Ikenna.

Emilia (Indira Nascimento) doesn’t speak English or Igbo, Amadi doesn’t speak Portuguese. But they connect via cell phone translation apps and a simple “I enjoy his company” chemistry.

Half a dozen people collaborated with Mariani on the script, no doubt helping with all the philosophical, musical and scientific concepts and dialogue (in English, Portuguese and Igbo) touched on here.

Ukeje wonderfully conveys Amadi’s frustration at not being able to find what happened to his brother, his constant awareness that he’s not “the smart one.” Yet his cell phone, Internet savvy and instincts point him in one right direction after another. Through it all, Ukeje never lets us forget this is a man haunted by a sibling who is in his head with him.

Mariani gives us a tour of São Paolo beyond the tourist sites, into the working world of Africans and Afro-Brazilians in this “white man’s city.”

There are two ways movies like this can turn out, and both outcomes have dazzled in their own way, in classics such as “The Third Man” and taut recent entertainments such as “Searching.”  I thought the payoff here was something less than the story that came before it.

Nevertheless, “Shine Your Eyes” will grab you and take you to a place you’ve never been and into a mystery which only a sibling can solve. It’s the best new film on Netflix this month.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult themes that almost get it into PG-13 territory.

Cast: O.C. Ukeje, Indira Nascimento, Paolo Andre, Barry Igujie

Credits: Directed by Matias Mariani, script by Chika Akandu, Francine Barbosa, Júlia Murat, Maíra Bühler, Chioma Thompson, Roberto Winter and Matias Mariani. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

“Babysplitters” is the very definition of a “split decision” comedy.

On the one hand, it has funny lines, situations and the odd funny touch in the performances.

On the other, those are spread out over two hours. Only Judd Apatow can get away with that.

The central conceit — couples half-interested in having a child deciding to have one they share, “Babysplitting,” is promising. But there are subsidiary plot threads that have little upside and eat up screen time between laughs.

Danny Pudi, a member of the vast cast of TV’s “Community,” back in the day, makes an amusing leading man. The rest of the cast is more miss than hit.

Pudi and Emily Chang (TV’s “The Bold Type”) are a married couple in their 30s “thinking about” having a baby. As in “SOMEday,” according to him, “soon” by her reckoning. Writer-director Sam Friedlander’s best scene is our introduction to Sarah and Jeff — actu sexus — him fumbling with a condom she wants nothing to do with, him not reading the signals that she REALLY wants this to produce something, right now.

“Sometimes I wonder if you want to have a baby WITH me, or just have a baby, period!”

“Don’t make me choose, Because right now, the BABY has the edge!”

By the way, Chang? Funny.

Jeff’s hangups about a baby start with his unhappy work life, as the grownup at an organic food farm-to-table start-up, FRM2TBL. He’s the “boomer” (“Ok, NOT a boomer!”) always running afoul of what the CEO calls “tee-dubs,” Trigger Warnings among the youth.

“I’m OFFENDED,” one Gen-Z ditz snaps. “I did Ancestry.com, and I’m like, one PERcent Indian!”

It’s “Native American,” dear.

“Whitesplaining. Whatever.”

“Have you SEEN me?” Pudi is of Indian-Polish extraction, and is late learning “I can’t CORRECT someone if I have a penis?”

Sarah and Jeff go back and forth over pluses and minuses of having a child — “It crushes your social circle,” for starters. But have a baby, get a whole NEW social circle, “just like freshman year in college.”

They have the odd nightmarish encounter with free range kids, the product of “CCPP, collaborative constructive permissive parenting.”

But their friends Taylor and Don (Maiara Walsh and Eddie Alfano), a ballet dancer and a gym owner, are stuck in the same dilemma. He wants a child, she’s focused on dancing for a few years more.

Somehow, they talk themselves into this weird “new” idea. Somehow, they find an oddball OGB-GYN (Brian Thomas Smith of “The Big Bang Theory,” amusing) who is judgement-free.

Let the REAL complications begin. And let the movie, which has been witty banter, clever montages (Jeff gets caught in the “Normandy” of water-balloon assaults at a bratty kids’ party), starts to bog down, lumber and limp along.

Jeff has a shrink (Mark Feuerstein) whose therapy involves sending Jeff on a lot of hypnotic reveries that turn into nightmare scenarios.

Sarah’s job, as a meter maid, involves regular run-ins with an actress with kids who is always getting parking tickets.

The “getting pregnant” part of the story has many wrinkles, options and negotiations. Guess which the most awkward would be, and that’s the way they go — complete with four people participating, bargaining and the like.

“Is it OK to talk dirty?”

“COACH her, babe.”

The last 75 minutes of “Babysplitters” doesn’t live up to the promise of the first 45. What is light, snappy and fun becomes labored, cluttered and almost too serious for its own good.

This needed tightening at the screenplay stage, and failing that — merciless editing pre-release. Cut the shrink scenes altogether, for starters.

There’s a cute “reinventing having a baby” comedy here. It just gets lost in all the bathwater.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, sexual content

Cast: Danny Pudi, Emily Chang, Maiara Walsh, Eddie Alfano and Brian Thomas Smith.

Credits: Written and directed by Sam Friedlander. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:59

Jemima West stars as a British combat surgeon returning from duty to fresh nightmares, nightmares that have nothing to do with PTSD.

This opens Aug. 21, and props to any actress, no matter how fetching, for hanging on to “Jemima” as a first name. A rare name to start with, rarer still thanks to the syrup.

If you see one documentary about Russian hockey and the NHL’s historical connection to it — and there have been a few — make it “Red Penguins.” Director Gabe Polsky’s second crack at this subject (2014’s “Red Army” was good, too.) is a parable woven into a history lesson — how American capitalism met the “Leviathan” of Russian corruption, paranoia and thuggery, and had to flee.

And the timing of the film’s release — Aug. 4 — cannot help but make this whimsical tale’s dark undercurrents prophetic. It plays like a warning for the America Vladimir Putin and his biggest fan seem to want to make over in Russia’s image — corrupt, authoritarian, with an “elite” outside the rule of law.

The film is a brisk and often amusing history of how the Pittsburgh Penguins National Hockey League team bought a half-interest in the Red Army hockey squad, the powerhouse Soviet national team that found itself no longer viable with the collapse of the Soviet empire.

The story begins with a gonzo giddiness as film producer and Penguins co-owner Howard Baldwin (“Ray,” and the hockey films “Sudden Death” and “Mystery Alaska”) decides to gamble on buying into the team (Michael J. Fox was also an investor), and sends hustler/promoter/marketer Steve Warshaw to Moscow to see what can be done to make it work.

Warshaw became the “crazy American freak,” he says, and the Russian partners interviewed here agree. He figured out how to rebrand the squad as “Red Penguins,” how to spruce up their decrepit “Ice Palace” for the games, and how to get fans to come back now that the CCCP was gone from their jerseys.

“Clean bathrooms and free toilet paper” were a plus. There’s a strip club tucked into the building where the arena is? “Stripper cheerleaders on skates,” sliding behind the Zamobini between periods, peeling off their clothes as they do.

They’d sell sponsorships for the first time, billboards in the arena, patches on the jerseys. Free Gillette razors night! Pittsburgh’s Iron City Beer is a sponsor? Free BEER night!

“We’d have drunk 14, 15 year-olds in the stands,” Warshaw laughs.

But the culture clash was there from the get-go. The Russians were prone to late nights and tardy, tipsy arrivals at work. And they were paranoid. A team that couldn’t fill its arena “if Jesus Christ resurrected” was part of the show was suddenly the hottest ticket in town again, internationally marketed, with Disney nipping at its heels for a piece. And surly Russian partners like the always-laughing/always-menacing Valery Gushen (interviewed extensively here) were SURE “they’re STEALING from us.”

It’s called “projecting,” a word that’s come into common currency the last four years. They were sure the Penguins were stealing from them because stealing is what they know and do.

But this early ’90s window, this “crazy world” that “we took advantage of” as Warshaw puts it, was to be brief. The shakedowns and extortion started early. The Russian mob (infamous “businessman” Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov appears on camera) muscled in.

And then the government collapsed into civil turmoil — riots, tanks on the streets, and this viperous runt named Putin was angling higher authority.

Polsky takes us on quite the sleigh ride, from the sunny silliness of gambling on Russian hockey, and then marketing it, to the grim reality that sets in — threats, intimidation and even murders.

Warshaw laughs about the stunts and gimmicks he unleashed to get butts in the seats of their arena and chuckles over a disastrous US tour, sending notes to the Disney chairman opening with “Dear Comrade Eisner.” Gushev laughs and laughs at the idea that a mob-connected “firm” put a spy/minder in Warshaw’s office with him in the later period of the partnership.

Polsky can be heard off-camera, offering sometimes incredulous, sometimes persistent questions in English and in Russian. An ex-KGB official is interrupted by Russian police in the middle of a Red Square interview. Outtakes are left in as Warshaw tries to keep his spin on this all glib and knowing. Baldwin is taken aback at Michael Eisner (not interviewed here) denying any Disney overtures on buying in or buying out the former Red Army team. Uh, it’s here, in WRITING, Comrade Eisner.

Every Russian, from team officials to media personalities, turns grimfaced as the “Constitutional Crisis” between Boris Yeltsin and hardliners in the parliament is revisited. It’s easy to see now as the beginning of the end of Russia’s dalliance with democracy.

But the real sage here is the mustache-waxed former team “mascot,” who’d yank off his penguin head so show the crowd his face — simply not done in North America. He is the one who philosophizes about American democratic capitalism facing “the Leviathan” of the Russian way, where “the mafia IS the system.”

With kidnappings and on-the-street shakedowns rampant, and an authoritarian kleptocracy of a “government” run by the biggest looters of all, Disney had the sense to back away from involvement. The Pittsburgh Penguins organization, and Warshaw, did too.

The sports to real life analogy in “Red Penguins” is hanging there, like a banner in the rafters of the arena of “The Greatest Hockey Team Ever.” Twenty years later, the rest of America decided to try its own Russian experiment in reverse. Will we wake up in time?

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence/bloody images, sexual material/nudity, some strong language and a drug reference

Cast: Steve Warshaw, Howard Baldwin, Valery Gushen, Victor Gusev, Alimzha Tokhlaknunov

Credits: Written and directed by Gabe Polsky. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:2;

Translated from the printed page onto a black and white movie screen, removed from the heady “Eastern European novelist chic” of the Nabokov ’60s, and the kinky literary “freedom” of the age, Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird” can be appreciated for what it is.

It’s an act of revenge, a child survivor of the Holocaust’s lashing condemnation of the Europe, especially Eastern Europe, that unleashed it — superstitious, prejudiced, sadistic and cruel, amoral moralists almost to a one.

A picaresque and gruesomely sensationalist child’s odyssey set along the Polish-Soviet frontier, it’s a wonder anybody ever gave Kosinski the license to pass it off as “autobiography.” No, he survived the war hiding in plain sight in relative safety and comfort. And yes, he was a fabulist who might not have gotten away with the literary license he was granted when he was plagiarizing “Being There” and the works that made him.

Adapting “Painted Bird,” Czech actor-turned-director Václav Marhoul (“Smart Phillip”) serves up a film of excesses; violence ranging from animal cruelty to torture and murder, sexual perversion that gives bestiality a try, characters whose most “noble” moments are not murdering the child, and teaching him to kill. And, at a nearly relentless two hours and 49 minutes, “Painted Bird” is an excessive test of patience and tolerance for the range of human depravity touched on.

What, no cannibalism?

Petr Kotlár is Joska, an olive-skinned “other” who lives with his aunt and is assaulted by the locals any time he ventures out. Here is your first escape point in “The Painted Bird.” We meet him as a gang of boys chases him through the woods, beats him and tortures his pet mink to death.

Either you commit to seeing “The Painted Bird” through, or you move on. Because it doesn’t get any easier.

His aunt dies, and he accidentally burns her house down in the bargain. There will be no succor in the village, where the hateful, toothless rubes mutter (in Polish) “He’s bewitched the cows,” “He’s the seed of the Devil!” But an old seer (Alla Sokolova) pronounces a different verdict, which is both a condemnation and his salvation.

“He is a vampire,” she says. “I’ll buy him,” she says with her next breath.

This is the way of “The Painted Bird.” Joska, hounded and tormented, taken in by mentors all across this Hellscape.

Our first give-away to the era is spying a German observation plane. The front, when the movie begins, is far to the east, in Russia. But “the war” will return, with a vengeance, for the third act.

Joska will be taken on by a monstrous cat-fancying gristmill operator (Udo Kier), a catcher and seller of songbirds (giving the film its title) and an oversexed farm wench.

He will be “a gift for the Fritzes” (handed over to the Germans) but saved by the old Storm Trooper (Stellan Skarsgård) assigned to murder him, rescued by a sickly priest (Harvey Keitel, dubbed), passed on to another monster (Julian Sands), assailed by Cossacks and saved by the Red Army.
Barry Pepper plays a Soviet version of the sniper he portrayed in “Saving Private Ryan,” a lazy, unimaginative bit of casting that works.
Through it all, the child endures — fleeing a mob here, an awful living situation there — finally going mute at all he’s seen and survived.

Marhoul set out to make an “unblinking” adaptation of the novel, and he succeeded. I won’t say the flat, limited-contrast black and white cinematography is a plus, because it isn’t.

Avoiding the obvious trap of having our hero narrate his saga just makes it harder to grapple with what is happening, and why. We work for that. It’s a movie of little dialogue.

But at some point, one has to get off the fence about “The Painted Bird,” and either embrace or “appreciate” it — at arm’s length. I opt for the latter.

Agnieska Holland’s dark and grim but somewhat lighter boys-journey-through-the-Holocaust film, “Europa Europa” (1990), based on an actual memoir, gets across the same points without the just-swallowed-acid aftertaste.

Hatred fatigue sets in — hatred for the awful people who eagerly participate in one “wilding” after another, mobbing and assaulting the little boy for being either a “Gypsy” or a Jew, and maybe a little hatred for Kosinski for his obvious loathing and heartless judgement for the heartless.

The humanity that emerges from this story isn’t humane. Perhaps the only way this over-the-top WWII “Inferno” really works is as an “explanation for how I turned out,” as autobiography. And as we now know, that’s not true.

But as a depiction of the dark sides of human nature, stupid and instinctively cruel? Look around you. The author was on the money, passing on a warning from “then” that is just as apt “now.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, animal cruelty, bestiality — an NC-17 if ever there was one.

Cast: Petr Kotlár, Alla Sokolova, Udo Kier, Jitka Cvancarová, Stellan Skarsgård, Harvey Keitel, Julian Sands, Radim Fiala and Barry Pepper

Credits: Written and directed by Václav Marhoul, based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:49

Aug 21-28 this Jimmy Henderson “Let’s hunt convicts in the jungles of SE Asia” thriller streams.

“Lake of Death (De dødes tjern)” is a mildly creepy Norwegian thriller about a “haunted” lake and a young woman (Iben Akerlie) haunted by guilt over her long-missing twin brother.

It’s built on horror conventions that go back to Edgar Allan Poe, and worn out by every “Friday the 13th” variation since. But this time, it’s five good looking young Norwegians who head to the cabin in the woods to face the strange goings-on, bumps in the night, getting yanked under the water by “something” while swimming, visions of the missing brother and “Wait, who made us all breakfast?”

One of them, Bernhard (Jakob Schøyen Andersen) is a horror/ghost story podcaster, gathering audio on the legends of this lake, joking around with “Cabin Fever,” “Evil Dead” and a certain unfinished “Project” about an American witch movie references, and playing scary tricks on his fellow cabin campers.

And when they unwind, the kids rock out to “Cities on Flame With Rock and Roll,” because “Don’t Fear the Reaper” is entirely too on-the-nose for anybody to get away with these days.

There’s a dog, because of course there is.

“Anybody seen Totto?”

The foreshadowing is trifle obvious. Even the finale is guessable. But of course there are twists, a mild chill here and there, and not just from the lower depths of the lake in question.

“They say it’s BOTTOMless!”

Oslo-based writer-director Nini Bull Rabsahm has reimagined a haunted lake novel by André Bjerke, previously filmed in 1958.  She has a little fun with the conventions she’s working with. Just not enough.

Akerlie makes a properly spooked heroine, seeing black water coming out of the tap, bleeding out of walls and spat out of her friends — even if they can’t see it. Akerlie gives us equal measures of guilt and resignation. Whatever is going on, it’s everybody ELSE who is doing most of the freaking out about the “Lake of Death.”

She keeps seeing images of her brother (Patrick Walshe McBride, not a Scandinavian so we’ll make him deaf-mute to save on language lessons).

The setting and cast make this pleasant enough to sit through, if a bit of a yawner. Ms. Robsahm must have realized that if we “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” there’s really not much point.

Cast:  Iben Akerlie  Patrick Walshe McBride, Jakob Schøyen Andersen, Elias Munk, Jonathan Harboe, Ulric von der Esch and Sophie Lie.

Credits: Written and directed by Nini Bull Robsahm, inspired by the 1958 film “Lake of the Dead” and the 1942 novel by  André Bjerke.   A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:34