Movie Nation

Of all the projects Netflix has given great directors the money to film — many of them Oscar-nominated, some of them even bringing master filmmakers like Jane Campion back to the mainstream — tossing money to Richard Linklater got them the most adorable results.

Linklater, an indie icon since “Slacker,” a writer-director lionized for “Boyhood,” took Netflix money and made a rotoscoped animated film, this one a classic of American late ’60s nostalgia.

“Apollo 10 1/2” is ostensibly a space race comedy about a kid plucked from a Houston elementary school after NASA’s first moon lander is accidentally underbuilt and only has room for a child. But it turns out to be Linklater’s thoroughly-detailed survey of a childhood spent growing up at the tail end of the “space race,” when the future seemed without boundaries, America embraced the new and all that mattered was “beating the damned Russians” to the moon.

So while a couple of “Men in Black” (Zachary Levi and Glen Powell) drop by Ed White Elementary (named for an astronaut) and recruit young Stan (Milo Coy) for their “super secret” mission, telling him “Stan, you’re our only hope,” the adult Stan’s memories of that are almost crowded out by everything else that was grabbing his attention in that summer of ’69.

Jack Black reunites with his “School of Rock” director to voice-over narrate that sentimental journey, describing everything from what was on TV back then and what “Astroworld,” the amusement park next to the world’s first domed stadium, the Houston Astrodome, was like, to the now-banned corporal punishment that faced school kids, neighborhood misbehavior and even Little League players who dared to make an error.

If you grew up in that era — Linklater and I are contemporaries — you will be bowled-over by the depth of details, the toy rocket mania and every other dangerous thing under-supervised kids and their didn’t-know-any-better parents did or allowed rather than let kids stay indoors and watch TV or play video games.

If you’re too young to remember any of this, you might be gobsmacked at all the strife, struggle, shock of the new and dizzying hope for the future that went on while “Sugar Sugar” was playing on the radio.

Unrestrained freeway rides in the bed of a pickup truck, “roman candle” fights and inattentive child care all seemed to come home to roost on the evening news, where Vietnam casualty counts began as grim and found their way into “routine” — normalized for a distracted, mass-consuming public.

“We were expendable,” adult Stan (Black) drolly notes. Indeed they/we were. After previous summers’ riots and assassinations, “the last ‘duck-and-cover'” generation would expect no less.

“Twilight Zone” to Jell-O molds, “2001: A Space Odyssey” to single-breadwinner families able to enjoy the good life on a single salary, it’s all a bit shocking if all-too-warmly remembered.

Rotoscoping, which involves filming actors and then coloring their performances to turn the footage into animation, tends to render its subject matter timeless, as Linklater did with “Waking Life” and Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman did with their animated/painted last days of Van Gogh classic, “Loving Vincent.”

With almost the entire film consisting of voice-over narrated memories, montages of events and vignettes as backdrop, “Apollo 10 1/2” might have been utterly forgettable without the rotoscoped adding of computer-painted rose-colored glasses.

But in this form, it becomes something timeless, not autobiography (Linklater’s parents divorced when he was 7), but a sweet and somewhat innocent memory play animated in brighter-than-real-life color, a summary of how things were in an America that accomplished great things even as its institutions strained at revolutionary/evolutionary change that continues to this day.

Rating: Injury Images|Some Suggestive Material|Smoking)

Cast: Narrated by Jack Black, with Zachary Levi, Lee Eddy, Milo Coy, Bill Wise, Josh Wiggins

Credits: Scripted and directed by Richard Linklater. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

This story of the Great Brit who boxed her way to glory — at the 2012 London games, no less — opens April 5.

A critic-friend I’ve sat on several film festival panels with over the years once explained to a questioner from the audience the difference between critics and filmgoers.

Most movie fans only go to films that interest them, genres, franchises, etc. that they have an investment in. If video game, comic book, horror or manga adaptations are your thing, you’re predisposed to like what you decide to go see.

Critics, on the other hand, “see everything,” he said.

It’s in that spirit that I approach a film like “Jujutsu Kaisen 0.,” a Japanese anime blockbuster that opened to very good business in North America last weekend. One wants to see what all the fuss is about, and see if all the Rotten Tomatoes reviews were merely fanboy endorsements, as even the ones that seem of mixed feelings or negative appear to be labeled “fresh.”

Fans, some of them critics, were presold on it. But is it for anybody else?

While I like some anime, I’ve seen enough of it to form an opinion of what has merit and what is pandering piffle, with “story” and “artistic ambition” being the big difference between winners and losers. And as a lover of Japanese cinema, I thought I’d sit in with the faithful to catch a subtitled (not dubbed) version of “Jujutsu.”

TV anime veteran Sunghoo Park’s “Jujutsu Kaisen O.” has a whiff of “Into the Spiderverse” about it. It’s literally like a manga come to animated life. Park uses manga-style intertitles and interstitials to introduce characters, treats us to manga-mimicking extreme action, extreme violence and exaggerated facial expressions in extreme close-up.

The animation, while still anime-jerky (under-animated) is CGI-assisted and more striking and luridly colored, “darker” than the water colorish hand-painted pastels of the classics of Hiyao Miyazaki and others. It’s a bit eye-popping.

But the story isn’t all that. It’s about a shy, bullied teen — Yuta Okkotsu — who is haunted by and protected by a curse, the vengeful spirit of a little girl he professed lifelong devotion to as a child. She was run over by a car and lives on as Rita, the curse that avenges him on others who treat him badly. In an opening scene, we see the pool of blood and the gruesome closet stuffed with mangled bodies, the aftermath of Yuta’s last “incident” at his last high school.

In the spirit of “No Child Left Behind,” Yuta isn’t executed, but summoned to a special school for special people like him. His enthusiastic teacher, Satoru Gojo, dons a blindfold each day before addressing the class. And with standoffish, gifted, curse-mastering/curse-battling classmates Maki Zenin, Toge Inumaki, and Panda, Yuta will be trained to control, fight and dispense with curses of all types, of course leading up to facing his biggest demon, the enormous, powerful and still-jealous-after-death Rita.

What an outsider sees is a sort of “Wizarding World” setting, Jujutsu High, with rules (“Only curses can affect other curses.”), students with magical powers and creatures/curses that range in appearance from “Ghost Busters” cuddly apparitions to “Alien” inspired monsters.

The students instruct each other as their sensei, aka “the dumb blindfolded guy,” “looks” on and provides guidance.

Yuta’s “normal” teen concerns, that “I want to be needed by someone,” are hindered by the burden of his childhood, a curse bound by a ring that Rita once gave him, because as his teacher intones, “There is no curse more twisted than love.” But the big question might be, “Who cursed whom?”

As an immersive experience, this adapted prequel to a best-selling manga series isn’t so much hard to follow as ornately detailed to cover what thin storytelling it actually is. One of the great things about Japanese cinema and TV is the sense that more than perhaps any other culture in the world, when we dip into it the instant feeling of “alien” comes through. I find the ingrained mythos, the legends, the cultural differences that turn up in everything from romances and gangster tales to horror movies, ghost stories, workplace and family dramas endlessly fascinating.

Hell, even “Iron Chef,” which helped introduce the “foodie” fad to North America, was a culturally illuminating hoot.

But as a medium for storytelling, anime is seriously miss-or-hit with me. There’s a world of difference between “The Wind is Rising” or “Howl’s Moving Castle,” “Ponyo” or “My Neighbor Totoro” and the average “Dragon Ball” franchise installment, and as pretty and vivid and violent as it sometimes is, “Jujutsu Kaisen O.” falls on the wrong end of that spectrum. It has all the virtues and failings of many a comic book adaptation — impressive visuals, generic supernatural action, thinly-developed characters and a “story” that barely fulfills the obligations of that label.

The jokes — many of them mouthed by the manic and not-at-all-mellow Panda — and the sight gags lean towards simply goofy or low-hanging fruit. The plot is convoluted, not the least bit inviting or deep and frankly puerile, with PG-13 violence and “darkness” draped over it.

Perhaps there’s more on the written/drawn manga page, and it’s understandable that fans would cherish the chance to see how a favorite manga is animated into motion. You made it a hit, and plenty of critic-fans have endorsed it. Cosplay away.

But does it ever really come to life? Not for me.

Rating: PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, language, thematic material and some suggestive references

Cast: The voices of Megumi Ogata, Mikako Komatsu, Kōki Uchiyama, Tomokazu Seki, Yûichi Nakamura, Subaru Kimura and Kana Hanazawa

Credits: Directed by Sunghoo Park, scripted by Hiroshi Seko and based on the Gege Akutami manga. A TOHO Animation film, a Crunchyroll release.

Running time: 1:45

“X” doesn’t reinvent one of the most popular, time-tested horror genres so much as breathe a little life into it.

That “promiscuous young folks go slumming in rural America and get themselves slaughtered” plot feels seriously worn-out. But writer-director Ti West (“The Sacrament”) gives it a reset as he takes us back to a blood-spattered birthplace of the Culture Wars, with fundamentalism stripped down to its bare, hateful resentments of the carnal hedonism that new generations have embraced, and sexual liberality is exposed for the empty opportunism it can embody.

Even if few of the many murders served-up in this spatter-stained slaughter have real novelty to them, even if the set-up and “Psycho” meets “Friday the 13th” set-up is entirely too familiar, West has made a rare horror tale that makes you listen, ponder and consider what’s happening to its hapless victims, and why.

West takes the “Well, they had it coming” horror trope of “extra-marital sex gets you killed” and turns it on its “Psycho” ear.

Veteran character actor Martin Henderson (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Miracles from Heaven”) is Wayne, a hustler who has figured out a new way to “get rich” off the “girls” he manages in a seedy Houston strip club. He’s rented an old boarding house on a ranch that’s gone to seed out in the sticks and convinced his much-younger stripper/girlfriend Maxine (Mia Goth), her more experienced colleague Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Bobby-Lynne’s Black boyfriend (Kid Cudi) to come make a porno, “like ‘Debby Does Dallas.'”

It’s 1979 and Wayne can see the future, when people are going to want to “watch porn in the comfort of their own homes.” With an artistic-minded filmmaker (Owen Campbell) and the filmmaker’s girlfriend (Jenna Ortega) coming along to record sound, they’ll make “The Farmers’ Daughters” into “cinematic art” that’ll “make us all rich.”

Naturally they all ride up in a ’70s van. Of course they stop for “supplies” with the unfiltered Wayne and underdressed “talent” drawing unwanted attention from the store owner.

And naturally, the old geezer (Stephen Ure) who rents them the place out behind his farmhouse takes a dislike to Wayne. But money is money…

The crew of six commences to filming, and the more explicit the better. But there’s another person in that farmhouse, along with simmering resentments and deathly dark secrets. Maybe that gator in the swimmin’ pond and everybody’s tendency to run around barefoot and bare-assed around buggy barns and tumbledown outbuildings aren’t the only threats facing our enterprising movie makers.

West frames this story in a flashback. We’ve seen a sheriff (James Gaylyn) doffing and donning his sunglasses as he walks through the aftermath of whatever went wrong out there.

The director intercuts a non-stop TV sermon by a drawling, fire-and-brimstone preacher, warning of a “forgiving God” who has his “limits” into the proceedings, and gives his heroine the motivation that has driven generations of youth, much to the dismay of their increasingly enraged, conservative and “left out” elders.

“I need to be FAMOUS, Wayne,” is Maxine’s mantra. Most everybody here has that on their minds. The elderly, embittered and infirm can only mutter “I was young, once.” Maxine is the stand-out character and Goth (“Suspiria”) both the heart of the movie and its spectral warning of what’s to come, in more ways than one.

The movie-within-the-movie has a cheesy, 16mm celluloid quality. And the homages are sometimes implied but just as often spoken aloud — “Pyscho” among them.

West never quite lets the murdersp lapse into “perfunctory.” But his foreshadowing is obvious enough to feel intentional, and most of the gruesome killings are ideas cribbed from other movies, also intentional.

If you’re making a horror homage to other horror and setting your story in the late ’70s, with the soundtrack to match, there’s one touchstone tune destined to underscore your tour de force moment. This song was in the original “Halloween,” opens the first TV version of “The Stand” and returned to its hallowed place in horror with “Scream.” “Don’t Fear the Reaper” dresses up a fairly generic if gushing and graphically-detailed first murder, with chilling, Rock Hall-of-Fame-worthy style.

What West is really interested in is the sinister, self-absorbed generational resentment that provides the conflict in these movies. Before the phrase “Red State vs. Blue State” was ever coined, what West envisions is horror that predicts it and sees it coming. “X” takes us back to open our eyes to what all of these movies have been saying, showing us the culmination of America’s city vs. country, sophisticated vs. falling behind divide.

This sort of “Chainsaw Massacre without Chainsaws” has always pointed to that aching sense of a world that’s left the armed, unsophisticated and embittered behind. And the libidinous, tolerant and post-’60s “free love” drug-experimenting youth so often portrayed as “got what they had coming to them” in such movies never saw it coming, and never “had it coming,” no matter how often the genre reinforced that glib, hateful message.

The monsters are real, and with or without masks or machetes, they’d rather see others dead than be reminded that others are having a better time.

Rating: R for strong bloody violence and gore, strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use, and language

Cast: Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Kid Cudi, Martin Henderson, Owen Campbell, Stephen Ure, James Gaylyn and Brittany Snow.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ti West. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:45

The action romp “The Lost City” is an inferior version of almost every single adventure comedy it steals from. But that’s the joke here, and it plays. Because there’s a lot of stealing going on in this multi-hand script, all-star cast spectacle.

The obvious inspirations are the “Romancing the Stone” movies, with a romance novelist — Sandra Bullock here, Kathleen Turner way back when — kidnapped into a daft adventure of the sort she usually writes about. But there’s a hint of “Nim’s Island,” too. Our novelist has become something of a recluse, and the guy who sets out to rescue her is her fictional action hero, Dash. Only “Dash” in this case is the “Fabio-wigged” model for the covers of her books. Alan poses as Dash on her covers, and hapless, handsome language-mangling hunk Alan is played by the generally shirtless Channing Tatum.

There’s a rich supervillain, as there always is, and if Daniel Radcliffe‘s name isn’t the first you think of when that character is labeled, it will after this. Radcliffe co-starred in “Jungle,” a movie about searching the jungle for “lost villages,” which doesn’t feel like a coincidence.

Because Brad Pitt, in a scene-stealing first act cameo, once produced and gave some thought to starring in “The Lost City of Z,” a true story about the search for an ancient city lost in the jungles of Amazonia.

Even the casting takes on a jokey air in “Lost City,” with moments meant to mimic “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and every other movie with a modern setting and a “lost treasure” in the tropics as its “MacGuffin.” Hell, there’re even jokes about Fabio and MacGuffins in this tossed salad of a screenplay.

Bullock is Loretta Sage, who “used to be the best selling” author of her romance genre, something her agent (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) is gambling a lot of cash on as she talks the now-widowed and reclusive author out of seclusion and onto a book tour.

Booking Loretta with the vapid and insanely popular cover model (Tatum) of her books for joint appearances is the first sign that this is going to be a nightmare. There is no metaphor this himbo can’t mix, no semantic stumble he can’t manage. She’d much rather be done with the books and him so that he can set off on “The shirts-on phase of your career.”

Then she’s kidnapped after a book signing. It turns out, those quest romance novels were written by a trained historian and ancient languages linguist whose late husband was an archeologist who did some poking around looking for the Lost City of D. And that’s what billionaire punk Abigail Fairfax (Radcliffe) wants to find. Yes, there are jokes about wealthy Brits giving their sons effeminate names.

Loretta’s barely yelped, “What IS this, ‘Taken?'” when Alan — who hears the phrase “You DO realize you’re NOT Dash?’ more than once — springs into action. There was this special ops/soldier of fortune dude he met at some meditation retreat/whole-body-cleanse/ashram whatever.

You can tell on the phone that Jack Trainor is Mr. No-Nonsense, Mr. Competent, Mr. “Proof of Life” Rescuer. You can tell on the phone that Jack Trainor is played by Mr. Brad Pitt. And he’s hilarious.

That’s the first big joke that works, and his few scenes get “The Lost City” on its feet, onto the island where Loretta’s been taken to decipher ancient writings and locate this buried “Crown of Fire,” and into comic mayhem as prissy, pretty and dim-witted Alan becomes her last, best hope of getting out of this alive.

Bullock had a gift for Lucille Ball pratfalls in her early comic career, and she does a fair job of reviving that shtick here, traipsing and tripping through jungles in a “SeaQuest” pink sequined jumpsuit, chased by goons on motorcycles and a supervillain in his own luxury tank.

There’s a clumsiness and tendency to miscalculate by every character in this — from the villain who doesn’t realize what his vertical take-off jet will do when its engines focus on a nice cheese sampler smorgasbord he’s laid out for his “guest,” to the “rescuer” who seems to mainly want credit for trying to “save” his meal ticket, to the writer herself, who is forever judging “a book by its cover.”

Only Pitt’s Trainor, running up trees, dispatching one kidnapper after another, tracking and plucking a plainly smitten Loretta in a flash, knows what he’s doing here. And what do we do with “competence” in America, kids?

“Lost City” works up a head of steam, but only here and there. Bullock is amusing and effective as the lead, although you have to believe she’d have thrown herself into this with real abandon 20 years ago. Tatum, Radcliffe and Pitt have their moments.

And “Office” alumna Oscar Nuñez makes a delightful appearance as a low-rent local cargo pilot who takes a fancy to Randolph’s irritated and on-task agent.

But there are characters who don’t land all the laughs they should and more than one situation whose clunky payoff slows the picture’s joke-to-joke rhythm and pacing.

Nobody could confuse the co-directing Nee Brothers (“Band of Robbers”) for comedy auteurs, although to be fair, this script feels more cut-and-paste than inspired.

The fact that “Lost City” still plays, still delivers plenty of cute and sometimes bawdy laughs amidst all the homages and “borrowings” from better films is a tribute to its stars and its one great conceit — that it’s taking on a jokey, derivative genre, and everybody we see in it is in on that joke.

Rating: PG-13 for violence and some bloody images, suggestive material, partial nudity and language.

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Oscar Nuñez and Brad Pitt.

Credits: Directed by Aaron Nee and Adam Nee, scripted by Oren Uzeil, Dana Fox and Adam Nee. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:52

An Oscar-nominated actress completes her “Naomi vs. Nature” trilogy with “Infinite Storm,” a psychological battle against the primal elements starring Naomi Watts.

As in “The Impossible,” her character — a 50something New Hampshire search-and-rescue hiker named Pam Bales — faces an extreme event, this time a blizzard. Pam is tested. And as in Watts’ “The Sea of Trees,” when she stumbles into an out-of-his-depth hiker, that test grows more harrowing as she tries to get him off that frigid mountain in a howling gale.

Here, it’s not the life that she wants to get back to that drives Pam through hallucinatory flashbacks. It’s memories of the pictures of two little girls that this loner keeps in her remote riverside cabin.

There’s a dreamy, existential sadness that hangs over this Polish co-production, filmed in Slovenia and directed by Malgorzata Szumowsk (“Never Gonna Snow Again”). It begins with Pam, the fatalism she puts into her packing-for-the-hike routine, the radio weather warnings echoed by her innkeeper pal (Denis O’Hare). When she tells him “You know what day it is,” he knows better than to insist she not take this hike in that coming weather.

Something happened to those two little girls.

As she hears cries in the blizzard, we wonder if her ears are playing tricks on her. But when she sees tracks, she knows someone got caught in the blizzard.

“You have GOT to be kidding,” she gripes. “SNEAKERS?”

When she stumbles into the stranger (Billy Howle), he is all but frozen — stubborn, silent and maybe even stoned.

“Jesus, you’re dressed for the BEACH.”

He seems to have little interest in surviving, but she’s not leaving this dope behind. So begins their long trek down, with all the usual obstacles added to the life-threatening stumbles Pam had to overcome just to reach the summit.

“Inspired by a true story” or not, movies like this have their own formula and tropes, some of which I’ve listed above. I’m a big fan of the genre, and if this isn’t up there with “Wild,” “Into the Wild” and the like, it still works and Watts makes us invest in her character’s quest to survive. But what’s most interesting about “Infinite Storm” is the gutting grief that’s layered on top of that. We wonder who is more messed up. Will he kill himself? Will he get her killed?

Following up her woodlands sprint to a school shooting drama “The Desperate Hour” with this film gives one the impression that Watts is making a point about women over 50, actresses included. She’s perfectly credible in these roles, accomplishing physical feats that any fit woman could manage and performing in these movies with a sort of dogged “I’m still here, dammit” determination.

Watts’ stoic, sturdy performance and the film’s affecting and formula-busting third act make this “Infinite Storm” well worth weathering.

Rating: R, profanity, injuries

Cast: Naomi Watts, Denis O’Hare and Billy Howle

Credits: Directed by Malgorzata Szumowska, scripted by Joshua Rollins. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time:

A properly spooky coming-of-age in a house where something just isn’t right story, “You Are Not My Mother” delivers supernatural chills with an Irish accent.

The frights are muted, but the air of dread that hangs over Irish writer-director Kate Dolan’s debut feature makes it an immersive experience, one anybody with “mother issues” will quickly identify with.

Hazel Doupe of “Float Like a Butterfly” stars as Charlotte, “Char” to her family. And if that was her as a wee babe plopped in the middle of a fire in the film’s opening scene, Char just might be somebody’s very twisted idea of a pun.

This North Dublin teen is painfully shy and bullied at school. But that’s nothing like what she leaves behind back home. Her granny (Ingrid Craigie), whom we’ve seen reading a book of spells and lighting that fire in the opening scene, has the look of somebody Hansel & Gretel warned us about. And her mother, the manic, mercurial Angela (Carolyn Bracken) isn’t any prize, either. Getting her to drive you to school might mean grabbing the wheel to keep her from catatonically running into a horse.

A kindly art teacher (Jade Jordon) can say “My door is always open,” but that just confirms what Char dreads. They gossip about her at school. The mean girls have been coached by their parents. There’s something weird about those Delaneys.

Mom disappearing after dropping her at school, finally coming home after everybody’s been out looking for her, is par for the course. We see what granny does when Char’s not there, and whatever this home situation turns out to be, cruelty and violence are sure to be a part of it.

Char can only keep her head down and hope the sociopathic bullies at school don’t do what this family seems to understand is the ultimate punishment — setting her on fire.

Doupe makes Char a depressingly downtrodden kid, eyes always averted, just waiting to be picked on or put upon. She is appalled at her living situation, always shouting “What’s WRONG with you?” at her mother, and suspicious of everybody save her trying-to-help uncle (Paul Reid).

But can he help? And what exactly is granny up to, and how does that impact Char?

The frights are slow-burns here, threats that make us wince, violence that’s lightly applied. And for all the build-up, I found the payoff — the finale — something more smoldering than explosive and fiery.

It still makes for an interesting “really seeing your mother for the first time” thriller, one that takes coming-of-age tropes and supernatural horror cliches and makes them work in this gloomy setting among these superstitious people.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug use, profanity

Cast: Hazel Doupe, Carolyn Bracken, Ingrid Craigie, Jade Jordan, Jordanne Jones and Paul Reid.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kate Dolan. A Magnet/Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:33

Eric Dane, Teri Polo, Peter Facinelli and Leslie Uggams star in this May 6 mystery thriller.

I’ve been getting a “Romancing the Stone” meets “Nim’s Island” vibe from the trailers for this action comedy, and I’m not alone.

Bullock in the Kathleen Turner role, the writer, with Channing Tatum as her hunky hero type and maybe Daniel Radcliffe as Danny DeVito?

Maybe not. But we’ll know shortly.

Today’s Around the World with Netflix offering is a sentimental Turkish weeper about an adorable child, his dying mom and the man she pursues so that she can leave her son “In Good Hands.”

If the film, titled “Sen Yasamaya Bak” in Turkish, sounds like a maudlin and cliche-ridden “dying mom” movie, it pretty much is. But there are almost enough variations from formula to make it worth a look. Just don’t forget your hanky.

Melisa, played by Asli Enver of “My Brother,” is that single mom, an Istanbul waitress whose whole life revolves around five-year-old Can (Mert Ege Ak). They spend all their time together, so much so that he can’t bear to start school and she can’t bear to force him to go.

But when we meet her, she’s just been told she has five months to live. She shrugs, fires up another cigarette, and saunters toward her future.

Her waitress pal Fatos (Ezgi Senler) mentions she’d be happy to take on the responsibility of raising a child. But both agree that maybe a man might be a better choice. Melisa backs into that idea by setting her cap for a rude rich guy (Kaan Urgancioglu of TV’s “Jack Ryan”) they run into at a coffee shop.

Rude guy calls her annoying kid “The Devil,” buys the last pastry that the kid has said he wanted, and is next seen on the cover of a magazine as Turkey’s bike magazine tycoon, the “Bike Whisperer (groan).” Melisa sets her cap for Firat, because anything’s better than breaking the news to her little boy.

“Nothing will happen to you,” the clingy kid is already saying (in dubbed English. or Turkish with subtitles). “What did I do wrong?” Yes, he’s worried that he’ll lose her and that it will be his fault.

The “romance” starts out tetchy and dismissive, but she finds ways to disarm and surprise Firat. The kid is a bit of a nightmare, with no plans to share his mother. But buy a cute Japanese spitz that he can walk and play with and he can be won over.

But we all know how this is going to end, if not exactly why and when.

Director Ketche finds inventive ways to get inside Melisa’s head, nightmare sequences involving her favorite form of art (she paints over the backs of assembled jigsaw puzzles). The script by Hakan Bonomo has sentimental touches and a few soap-opera-worthy twists that sit right on the edge of “Oh, come now.”

Enver lets us see something of Melisa’s soaking up what little life she has left, and Urgancioglu makes a sturdy idealized hunk to hang this female wish fulfillment fantasy on.

“In Good Hands” is better production-designed than some Turkish Netflix fare. This is an Istanbul that feels lived-in, if a tad tidier than documentaries about the city show. Money and bars and sex and leggy ladies with tattoos and hunky Firat’s Camaro combine to make this feel like a Lifetime Original Movie in Turkish.

Yes, it’s dull and mostly-predictable. But it’s more of a near miss than you might expect.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, drinking, smoking, some profanity

Cast: Asli Enver, Kaan Urgancioglu, Mert Ege Ak and Ezgi Senler.

Credits: Directed by Ketche, scripted by Hakan Bonomo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44