Movie Nation

“Night Moves” is one of those ’70s to early ’80s Hollywood noirs you channel surf by, get a taste of and say “I need to come back and catch this bad boy from the beginning.”

It’s got Gene Hackman, stepping into stardom after “The Poseidon Adventure,” Arthur Penn behind the camera and that sun-faded cinematography of Bruce Surtees (“Dirty Harry,” “Play Misty for Me”) that is the epitome of the way the era looked on film.

Penn (“Bonnie and Clyde”) took a dip in the Big ’70s Noir Revival” (“The Long Goodbye,””Farewell My Lovely”) in a sexy, sordid story that captures LA and the celluloid film business of the day at its most louche and the laid back Florida Keys (Sanibel Island, actually) before Jimmy Buffett, McMansions, mass tourism and hurricanes ruined them.

Scotsman Alan Sharp’s workmanlike script — he later wrote “Rob Roy” for Liam Neeson, Jessica Lange and Tim Roth — turns Hackman into a long-retired football player who uses his size, his wiles and a little unexplained polish to charge on the high end and support himself and the working wife (Susan Clark) in middle class comfort.

An ex actress (Janet Ward) who divorced well commissions Harry Moseby to track down her wild child/wayward daughter. Delly is 16, “liberated,” sexually active and the role all but set the tone for Melanie Griffith’s career for years and years afterward. This was her first speaking part in the movies.

“When we’re all as ‘free’ as Delly, there’ll be rioting in the streets.”

James Woods plays a lowlife mechanic who works on film sets, fixing car and airplane engines, one of Delly’s paramours. Harry’s search will take him onto the set of director Joey Ziegler’s (Edward Binns) latest and into the Florida Keys, where the kid has fled to hang with her stepdad (John Crawford) and his fishing/diving charter assistant and maybe paramour (Jennifer Warren, never better).

There are “accidents,” deaths, and movie stunts set against infidelity and bad parenting, and loads of frank talk about all of it.

This character was “down on my knees to half the men in this town,” and given to crude come-ons.

“You could’ve joined me. It’s a big bath.” “Maybe some other time, when I’m feeling really dirty.”

Another character always looks freshly beaten (Woods). “What happened to your face?” “I won second prize in a fight.”

The plot’s geography feels off, in a coast-to-coast jaunts sense. I think they shot some of the LA scenes — not the movie-within-the-movie “location shoot” — in Sanibel, too.

There’s mourning after deaths, alliances are broken and then too-abruptly re-aligned. The “MacGuffin” driving all this is as arbitrary as the twists.

And the deaths-that-might-be-murders are a little tricky to reason out, for the viewer if not for Harry Moseby.

So many movies of the ’70s seems to reset their genres, and invent new ones. The modern blockbuster was born and “The Godfather” movies rethought our ever-evolving take on “The Greatest Film Ever Made.”

But when I think of the era, it’s of solid, bleached and washed-out thrillers (The notorious Eastmancolor film stock?) with chewy dialogue like this one, co-stars like Warren and Hackman swapping tough, sunbaked lines with a world weary fatalism that matched the age.

“Where were you when Kennedy got shot?” “Which Kennedy?” “Any Kennedy.”

Hackman’s vulnerable tough guy — Hey, his wife’s cheating on him with Harris Yulin, for Pete’s sake. — seems a random collection of hobbies (chess, with the film’s title a pun on “Knight Moves”), urges, urges fended off, hunches and day-late getting to the bottom of things.

But there’s craft in every moment, and not just the fights, come-ons and nervy, pitiless finale. He sneaks into his house to catch his wife with her lover. Cranks up opera on the stereo, and when Yulin’s limping cheat stumbles down, Harry bellows “How about those ADVENT speakers?”

Damn. I had Advents, too. What a great decade for speakers, and movies.

Rating: R, for violence, sex, nudity, profanity, smoking

Cast: Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Melanie Griffith, Susan Clark, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars, Janet Ward, John Crawford and James Woods

Credits: Directed by Arthur Penn, scripted by Alan Sharp. A Warner Brothers release on assorted streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:40

“These are grownup issues,” the big, bad Big Energy dude tells the 12 year-old Dutch girl. He mutters something about her “arrogance” and childish, limited world of the world.

But this lying Dutchman doesn’t know Nova (Kika van de Vijver) is from the future. He doesn’t know she’s come here to stop the future this Dutch Koch Brother’s shortsighted greed will cause. He has no idea that she’s armed, and that while robots of the future are every bit as adorable as kids’ movies have made them out to be, this kid is packing and might be tempted to pop an electrical cap in his ass.

“Captain Nova” may be slow and lack much in the way of urgency as a pilot (Anniek Pheifer) comes back from the future to keep us from terminating ourselves. But there’s something absolutely adorable about a Greta Thunberg showing us as an avenging angel out to break the political gridlock the uber-rich have paid for to ensure our doom.

Greta’s irked a good portion of the time. Righteous as she is, you get the feeling keeping her away from weapons is a solid choice, for environmental malefactors if not for the planet.

The reason she comes to mind while watching “Nova” is that this Captain comes in from the “Blade Runner” burnt-out future, gets in her shuttle with a shoulder-riding robot named — aptly, ADD — heads to the past to head off this environmental apocalypse. But when she’s pulled from the chrono-shuttle she’s all of 12 years old.

Conveniently, in this dullish but kid-friendly tale directed and co-written by Dutch TV writer and director Maurice Trouwborst, has de-aged Captain Nova “rescued” by ATV riding latchkey teen Nas (Marouane Meftah), who finds himself ordered around by a pretty young blonde, thus giving him a life lesson he will never outgrow.

They go on the lam, with only ADD (ahem) to help them, aside from assorted adults who can’t believe kids would steal a BMW X-1 and flee the Dutch department of defense investigator (Hannah van Lunteren) and her nerdy science aide (Joep Vermolen) who are trying to figure out how a kid’s fingerprints ended up in this UFO that crashed in the forest.

That kid is the 12 year-old Nova in her proper timeline. And one thing that can never happen, as we know from the “temporal paradox,” is Nova meeting Nova.

Here’s the cute kiddy stuff here. The robot has bits of “Short Circuit” and “Flight of the Navigator” and every childish “electronic sidekick” ever. He hovers or hangs over her shoulder, lecturing Nova on eating the green produce offered by present day Earth folk with “Eat eat eat, VITAMINS,” in Dutch, or in English with subtitles.

And that gun that the suddenly 12-again Nova totes? It’s not generally lethal. She shoots somebody and they go into time out.

“He’s been put on pause for a few hours. Gives him some time to think about his career, his life...”

There’s more promise in “Captain Nova” than payoff. A short running time and uncluttered throughline only leads to stupid shortcuts — a military prisoner that hasn’t been frisked for weapons — tepid getaways from the pursuers and more places for the chirpy robot to not be funny.

The hellscape future is quite convincing, and the plot has merit. It’s the sluggish execution that demotes “Captain Nova” back to corporal.

Rating: TV-14, violence, mild profanity

Cast: Anniek Pheifer, Kika van de Vijver, Marouane Meftah, Hannah van Lunteren, Joep Vermolen
Robbert Bleij and J.V. Martin.

Credits: Directed by Maurice Trouwborst, scripted by Lotte Tabbers and
Maurice Trouwborst. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

He’s the teaser advert video revealing the theme, the vibe and the ’70s music (of course) that makes it “Guardians” branded.

C’mon. You’ve gotta visit Disney World before Governor Il Douche shuts it down.

Fresh out of college, I used to conduct and produce interviews for public radio stations. And one thing one quickly picks up on from such a job is an instinctual skepticism when chatting up say, the head of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network of “researchers” and enthusiasts (located in Lincolnton, N.C., at the time) or a North Dakota Native American college professor and his son who talk about being abducted by aliens.

One has to be on guard against the logical fallacies people use to make cases for something that lacks concrete proof, and yet has thrived in Conspiracy-minded America for the better part of a century. Because the last thing you want to come off as is a gullible rube.

Such worries never seem to cross the brow of “investigators” and co-hosts of these “On the Trail of UFOs” documentaries, Shannon Legro and Seth Breedlove. They take in every bit of hearsay, some of it backed up by under-credentialed “experts” with the authoritative “many people say” or “there’ve been reports” when describing “hollowed out mountain” UFO or “top secret government bases” where the “black helicopters” hide.

In “Night Visitors,” they speak with “experts” whose idea of “well-documented” isn’t backed up by any source they cite. The filmmakers blend in animated recreations of UFO “visits” and “events” with grainy footage of lights in the night sky purportedly captured by eyewitnesses, without distinguishing between the two or even making note of which is which.

Perhaps they had copyright issues dealing with such material, and if they’d spent the cash they blew on a slick, sci-fi “truth is out there” score, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

And that’s shame, because the thing is, someone or something is mutilating livestock and apparently has made it a habit of hitting this small King family cattle ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado repeatedly over the years. There’s been a lot of reporting on such incidents, with explanations, as Legro and folks she interviews here claim, ranging from occult rituals to “government experiments” to aliens.

Even taking into account the range of much more logical and plausible reasons — animal attacks to neighbors’ revenge, gruesome farm country pranks to insurance fraud — we still don’t know what’s happening. And the waters have been so muddied by the unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable that the Wikipedia page on the topic is a self-admitted “fringe theories” mess.

“Night Visitors” lapses into humorless/charmless self-parody as the “experts” are limited to fellow true believers in the “high strangeness” of this corner of Colorado, a place that Breedlove and Legro compare to their West Virginia “investigations” of “cryptids” like the Mothman, in earlier films.

I hesitate to toss the label “charlatans” at these two Youtube-ready amateurs. But in never seeking genuine, credentialed academic experts who might offer real pushback to their “far out” or “farther out” solutions to mysteries, by never expressing any skepticism at that what they’re being told is just self-aggrandizing causal fallacies delivered by “fake” authorities, they are, at best, “gullible rubes” selling cow patty theories of cattle mutilations to other gullible rubes.

And where’s that all end up? In a DC pizza parlor, where the suckers seek the nexus of a Big Conspiracy fomented by obvious con artists and hustlers who have preyed on the naive and dull witted since time immemorial.

It’s all harmless “X-Files” fun until people get hurt, a treasonous con artist hustles the suckers into electing him and reality reveals just how poor at parsing fact-from-BS you have to be to consider snake oil salesmen “authorities” on anything. “Critical thinking” never figures into it. Any of it.

There’s a reason learning how to identify fallacious arguments is called “healthy skepticism.” It’s healthy, and it’ll make you demand proof from obvious frauds who have no interest or ability providing that.

Rating: unrated, some graphic cattle mutilation imagery

Cast: Shannon Legro, Seth Breedlove, others

Credits: Scripted and directed by Seth Breedlove. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:21

An American Japanophile’s deep dive into the Tokyo underworld becomes an entertaining and intriguing mob mystery in “Tokyo Vice,” a new series on HBO Max starring Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe and Rinko Kikuchi.

It’s immersive and engrossing, if more conventional than you might expect. “Heat,” “Last of the Mohicans” and “Collateral” filmmaker Michael Mann directed the pilot, which has just enough design, style and panache to remind us that he brought “Miami Vice” to TV much earlier in his career. He sets the tone for the show — more procedural than flash — start to finish.

Set in 1999, we get a taste of Japanese mob rituals and a peek inside the workings of one of the world’s largest newspapers, here named Meicho Shimbun (if the subtitling is correct) but based on Mainichi Shimbun. The series touches on Japanese acceptance of authority, always publishing the “official” police version of every crime.

“There are no murders in Japan” may sound Orwellian, but that’s the way stabbings, shootings and such are reported. Not until the cops call it a “murder” is it so identified. So that slashed up fellow with the knife sticking out of his last and terminal wound will have to wait.

Japanese sexism, racism, xenophobia and mania for boy bands (It’s peak Backstreet Boys era Tokyo.) is touched on.

Just getting a job at the newspaper, which has “never hired a gaijin” (foreigner) requires taking an exhaustive test with maybe a hundred other aspirants.

Everybody smokes, and the new kid is informed that’s something he’ll be taking up soon enough, if he ever learns to hack it as a hack at a 12 million reader newspaper.

And everywhere, there are the teeming masses — from the huge, orderly, deferential and ever-so-polite “scrum” at every police press conference, to the streets and lurid, plush designer nightclubs where the hostesses ply their trade.

The story is told from five points of view. Jake Adelstein (Elgort) — the series is based on his memoir — is the “gaijin” who came to teach English and understand the culture, but whose background pushes him into work where learning about Japanese policing, its underworld and night life culture is crucial to the job. This world is “explained” to him and the viewer — but not OVER-explained — as he experiences it.

Samantha (Rachel Keller) is the “hostess” “bottle girl” playing her own angles, scrambling to make some cash, keeping her own secrets. Tokyo Police detective/family man Katagiri (Watanabe) is a veteran cop straining at the “just keeping the peace/just close-the-case” police work that rarely digs deep enough to get at real criminals or the true “Why?” of crimes. Emi (Rinko Kichuchi of “Pacific Rim” and “Babel” is Jake’s editor, the one who keeps his racist and seemingly anti-Semitic section editor from firing this “half Jew/half-ape” on general principles, if not just cause.

The American, a University of Missouri product (home to a prestigious journalism school), isn’t quick to pick up on the “rules” for news coverage and the strict formula such stories stick to is this gigantic newspaper.

And Sato (Shô Kasamatsu) is a young yakuza, tested, teased and tormented by his mob, a guy whose life intersects with Jake’s and Samantha’s in ways both menacing and potentially helpful.

Everyone has personal tests and slippery ethics about what is the truth. Everyone has secrets they’d like to keep, that they’re afraid of or running away from.

Elgort has made the most of his years being cast as “callow youth,” and this mop-topped fish-out-of-water is a good fit — arrogant, happy to surprise the various Japanese he meets by knowing their language (not that any of them take this revelation well), but sloppy and easily misled by a would-be mentor or yakuza or cop who needs a favor.

Watanabe, a mainstay of Japanese, Asian and Hollywood cinema since the ’80s classic “Tampopo,” classes up the series and lends it gravitas and toughness. And he’s just the headliner among a supporting cast of faces long familiar in Japanese cinema.

The high-stakes intrigues here are fascinating, if somewhat back-burnered. Such series are built on cliff-hangers, which keep us coming back for the next installment. The cliffhangers here aren’t dazzlers.

But the milieu will be lure enough to anyone curious about this Westernized but still exotic culture, its cuisine, tattooed gangsters, accommodating cops and seemingly meek, don’t-rock-the-boat press.

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

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe, Rachel Keller, Shô Kasamatsu, Ella Rumph and Rinko Kikuchi.

Credits: Created by J.T. Rogers, based on Jake Edelstein’s memoir. An HBO Max release.

Running time: 10 episodes @ :58 minutes each.

Dominic Sherwood stars in this action revival. And honestly, there’s not a familiar name or face in it, than I can see. South African set, straight to Warner Brothers video.

A $17 million Friday (and late Thursday) got Marvel/Sony’s “Morbius” off on the right foot. It didn’t quite hit the $41 million predicted, based on that healthy start. But for a “Marvel adjacent” non MCU movie, that’s not bad.

Sony can call that a “win” and move on. Reviews were brutal, but who cares as long as that much-delayed dog is off the shelf and in the books.

A solid second weekend for “The Lost City,” still the best “date movie” in theaters at the moment. Paramount picked up another $14.8 million, clearing the $54 million mark, on its way to about $75-80 million domestic, when all is said and done.

“The Batman” pulled in a robust $10.8 million or so five weekends deep into its release. By Tuesday it will clear the $350 million mark at the North American box office.

Another $3.6 million in ticket sales for the franchise starter “Uncharted.” It’ll clear $140 million before next weekend.

“Spider-Man: No Way Home” rolled up another $1.4 million, which lifted it clear of the $800 million mark it passed last week. $802 now.

“Dog” has proven to be a family-friendly dramedy with legs, and a tail. It picked up another $1.3 million, cleared the $60 million mark and may top out in the $70 range before the movies of summer chase it away.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is doing great business on just 38 screens in the largest cities — over $1 million, with a $26K per screen average. You’re going to want to see that.

A24’s other release at the moment, “X,” didn’t do nearly the money that a horror story set in “Chainsaw” country with a ’70s porn subtext should have. It also earned $1.2 million, and stands at just $10 million. Where’d the horror audience go?

“Sing 2” enjoys the last of its long, exclusive run as the only animated picture to take kids to with another $830K, with over $161 million US and closing in on $400 million global.

The blizzard survival drama “Infinite Storm” melted down to a mere $278K or so. It’s earned $1.3 million. Better than nothing, but not much, a decent movie that never found its audience.

“The Outfit” deserved better, too. A Mark Rylance gangland period piece with a tailoring subtext? A good movie that earned just $140K this weekend, and won’t reach the $4 million mark in theaters ($3.2 or so now).

And the Hawaiian feel-good documentary/biography “Waterman” did $20,000. Find a way to see that one. It’s lovely.

Figures from Exhibitor Relations (@ERCBoxoffice and Box Office Pro (@Boxofficepro).

The review embargo for this HBO Max series about an American reporter covering the Japanese mob for a Japanese newspaper is Monday afternoon.

But before one writes the review of Ansel Elgort’s series set in the Japanese underworld, one must immerse oneself in it. Half a dozen episodes, each an hour long.

I don’t review a lot of series, as they’re time consuming, and reviews of series have an extremely limited shelf life, as in nobody reads them a month after they’ve been published.

But I love mob movies, love Japanese films, love Japanese mob movies.

So Sunday is “Tokyo Vice” day. Michael Mann directed the series premiere, and here we go.

A Cold War drama set in a Czechoslovakian seminary just after the Russo-Warsaw Pact invasion of the country is today’s DVD dropoff.

“Servants” is, of course, a good one, a winner from our friends at Film Movement

MovieNation, spreading fine cinema, like Roger Appleseed, to public libraries far and wide.

Happy viewing, South Boston, Va. I dare some patrons here in the rural South needed to be reminded why the Russians are our ancient ideological enemies. Lot of Faux News cultists here in the Bosom of the Lord and the Heart of Tobaccoland. I know. I grew up here.

Try to forget Neil Maskell’s turn as a young Winston Churchill on TV’s “Peaky Blinders.” Put Winston out of your mind.

As “Bull,” every time the hulking Maskell enters a room people look alarmed. Shocked even. And nobody’s ever glad to see him.

‘Allo, Cheryl,” he says to his ex in the film’s opening scene. She’s crying, slack-jawed, at the sight of her current husband, duct-taped from head to foot in his easy chair. She barely has time to process this and dodge Bull’s query about someone else’s whereabouts, when he pitilessly and purposefully pokes that taped-face husband in the gut with a knife.

Because there is just one name Bull is dropping other names to track down, and that’s of the son “they” took from him.

“AIDAN!” he bellows at every single victim. They remain a victim only long enough for a flashback to tell us something awful happened years before, a travel trailer fire, a hasty burial in an open field.

These aren’t “victims” Bull is having his way with. They’re co-conspirators. His mission is nailing down what happened to his little boy, and butchering every single SOB who did him wrong, which only partly explains what they’re all so shocked and awed at seeing him.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Williams (the choral dramedy “Unfinished Song” was his) has produced an instant gem of the “vengeance picture” genre, with Maskell a sort of insensate brute bulling through the china shop that once was his life in the underworld.

The story is as jarringly violent as it is overly familiar. He starts on this spree. He’s working his way up to the “boss” (venerable character actor David Hayman). And as he passes through the way-stations of his past, embodied in former colleagues, relatives and acquaintances who are about to become bodies, flashbacks tell us what happened to Bull and show us the lad (Henri Charles) he lost, a loss he’s about to collect on, with interest.

Bull is a magnificently malevolent creation, on the page and in the flesh. He’s got no qualms about getting the drop on this villain or that one, even the one taking his kids to school. Kids are curious, and Bull is just as sweet at describing himself as you’d expect, given the slaughter we’ve already witnessed.

“Ooo’re you,” the children want to know?

“Aye’m the big bad WOLF!”

Williams gives us just enough of this suburban underworld, just a single corrupt cop, the merest hint of the “stuff” this Cockney mob and its branches are into. British underworld pictures are a bracing break from North American ones, largely because the violence is more personal. Fewer guns. We get a hint of why Bull doesn’t use them from the one time he has to acquire a pistol. It’s not at easy as in the U.S.

The best vengeance pictures never experience mission creep. Everybody confronted by this guy is shaking in his or her boots for reasons too obvious at the moment, and more obvious in an unnecessarily twisty finale.

“If you don’t tell me what happened to Aidan, I’m gonna make you EAT that little knife yer’oldin’, mate!”

I wasn’t nuts about the coda here. But even that can’t be faulted as it makes sense, dramatically.

Hayman makes a perfectly logical, absolutely sociopathic crime lord, a man as quick with a sawed-off as Bull is with a fist or blade.

Everybody else? They’re just china, here for Bull to smash through on his way to his ultimate destination — vengeance or death, or both.

Rating: R for strong violence, language throughout and some drug material

Cast: Neil Maskell, Lois Brabin-Blatt, Elizabeth Counsell, Jason Milligan and David Hayman

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Andrew Williams. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:28