Movie Nation

“Sometime Other Than Now” is a soft-spoken indie romance about the endless reservoir of forgiveness that is woman. Or at least the movie myth version.

Kate Walsh of “Grey’s Anatomy” plays one. Trieste Kelly Dunn is another. And young Alexa Swinton plays a forgiveness apprentice in this thin tale of a grizzled, soulful biker who comes to a tiny New England coastal town with a heavy heart and an itch to leave.

Donal Logue of “Gotham” is Sam, a guy we meet just as the surf is about to wash up over him and the motorcycle which he drove off the road some time before. We are intrigued.

Long-haired, beared and 50something, he is “the mystery man,” the “enigmatic drifter” who has to get the bike fixed, who ducks into the Sunset Motel & Cafe and catches the eye of proprietor Kate (Walsh).

He might be interested, might be frightened of the prospect. Something about this town (Greenport, NY is a location, despite the Massachusetts plates) has him jumpy.

She isn’t really interested, “No no no,” she says. Until her blind date — a lawyer — sits while Sam gets up to silently intervene as a guy loudly bullies his now-ex girlfriend waitress at a local restaurant.

Kate and Sam’s moments together, on the beach, cafe or wherever, have an artificial awkwardness about them. A lot of “It’s none of my business” and “Would you like to?” left hanging in their empty conversations.

As he’s a got the silent thing going, and is unkempt and tattooed and she used to be a Boston lawyer, you have to wonder what, other than the requirements of the screenplay, will pair them up?

But as they do, as she declares a post-coital “the whole mystery man thing, the whole enigmatic drifter thing, that’s over now,” we start learn why he’s here and in such discomfort.

Every screen story is contrived, so sure, his motorcycle is always “waiting for parts” and “maybe tomorrow, for sure,” keeping Sam around. There’s always an aw shucks local (P.J. Marshall) who might be sweet on Kate, but being a mechanic figures she’s even more out of his league.

He accepts that even after he gets a clue about who she’s taking up with instead of him.

Walsh slips into this part with ease, a woman with her own past and of some accomplishment, half-swooning over the first guy who can fix a leak, a hinge or lightbulb at her tiny motel.

Logue can be charming, but this script leaves Sam with nothing but “damaged” and “withdrawn” and guilt-ridden.

As much as I like the cast and the laid back setting, writer-director Dylan McCormick (“Four Lane Highway”) finds little to do with either. And nothing that he cooks up is the least bit surprising, even the illogical leaps that suggest that larger theme — that women will forgive an awful lot.

Which in Sam’s case, they do. No matter what he does or has done.

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, some nudity

Cast: Kate Walsh, Donal Logue, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Amy Hargreaves

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dylan McCormick. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:30

Sean “Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy” Combs lays out the mission statement for this new documentary about The Notorious B.I.G. right before the opening credits.

“This story doesn’t have to have a tragic ending.”

What follows in “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell,” is an adoring, seriously upbeat portrait of New York rap icon Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, a film built around his literal family — his widow, mother and Jamaican grandmother — and the “Junior Mafia” crew of rappers, hype men and friends from his entourage.

The guy was murdered at 24 in Los Angeles in a crime that remains unsolved 24 years later. But that tale is for another movie, earlier docs (starting with “Biggie & Tupac”) and documentaries to come.

If it accomplishes nothing else, and it does, Emmett Malloy’s new film tears Biggie away from Tupac Shakur, his friend and later hip hop rival and fellow unsolved murder victim. In separating them and their shared fates, that infamous “feud” is given the play it probably deserves — all “drama” on gangsta-wannabe Tupac’s side.

Biggie? He was selling drugs on street corners, as he was quick to remind folks, right around the time Tupac was finishing the ballet classes his momma put him in.

Malloy, who directed “Tribes of Palos Verdes” and various music videos and music docs for The White Stripes, Jack Johnson, etc., builds the film around the hours of home movies, studio recordings and onstage material recorded by Wallace’s lifelong friend and videographer D Roc. And he interviews D Roc, Wallace’s mother, grandmother and widow, P. Diddy and a lot of people who were a part of Biggie’s orbit growing up in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, many of whom stuck with him as he became famous.

Diddy is here for the hype, his greatest discovery, “the greatest rapper of all time, and I was saying that when he was alive.”

D Roc and many of the others are here to separate the man from the image. Christopher, which is what his Jamaican-born school-teacher mother Voletta called him all his life, “was a conscious person. He knew what was going on” and kept friends and family close, D Roc says. But “Notorious B.I.G.? He didn’t give a f–k.”

That isn’t a knock, just a way of separating the verbally dexterous born “entrepreneur” from the image he conjured up. As a teen, Christopher sold crack on the street corners of his neighborhood, Bed Stuy and environs. And he oversold that image later. His rap career took off so young that his street-selling days were more days than years.

Because as grainy home videos make obvious, his Jamaican background and connection to musicians like his Uncle Dave Wallace back in Jamaica (which Christopher visited several times) and jazz sax player Donald Harrison (a neighbor) gave him a musical edge when it came to making his mark rhyming.

A Catholic schoolboy exposed to Jamaican slang and rhythms, “an R & B writer and singer who became a rapper,” as Diddy puts it, a shy kid who expressed himself in rhyming rap battles before becoming “The King of New York,” he was soaring in popularity right up to the moment he was gunned down in traffic, right at his peak.

The film’s focus on the positive leaves little room for getting at anything truly negative. And when you die at 24, there’s truthfully not a lot of that to “report.” The “feud” and the list of his potential murderers, many of whom carried alleged beefs with Biggie, is where that material lies and it’s mostly missing.

The most fascinating content here is hearing his mother’s ambitions — a desire to come to America and “get rich”– and Wallace’s myriad musical influences, not just his pals and peers but those father figure mentors who entered his life.

Being just a gloss on his life, we don’t pick up on the appetites and genetics that made him 6’2″ and 375 pounds. No “father” is so much as mentioned.

But his friends and family remind us how much he was loved by those closest to him, and competing New York TV helicopter crews filming his funeral cortege back in March of 1997, streets filled with cheering-not-weeping fans, show us emphatically that they were not alone.

MPA Rating: R, drug content, profanity

Cast: Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, Voletta Wallace, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, D Roc, Faith Evans, Matty C., Donald Harrison, Lil Cease

Credits: Directed by Emmett Malloy, script by Sam Sweet. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

“Enforcement” is a gritty and deliberate Danish thriller about a bad day that bad policework instigated, and two cops who get trapped in mayhem at least partially of their own making.

It’s another “Two Cops in a Cruiser” picture, only the “cruiser” is a VW wagon and the police are patrolling the immigrant neighborhoods of Copenhagen.

You can’t call it a Danish “Training Day” because both Jens Høyer and Mike Andersen have been around long enough to know the drill. It’s just that Andersen (Jacob Lohmann) is a short-tempered, belligerent nightmare and Høyer (Simon Sears) is still idealistic enough to see that the chokehold killing that leads to their Day and Night of Hell was the product of a racist police force all too happy to use brute force, because they can.

Their captain has called in everybody after an Arabic suspect was choked into a coma in police custody. He’s quick to remind them (in Danish with English subtitles) that “We’re the people’s only safeguard against total chaos.” But no, let’s stay out of the housing projects today.

That captain has saddled Høyer with a new partner, one who gives the “good cops” on the force pause. Andersen is circle-the-wagons apologist about the “mistake” that put a suspect on life support. He’s a hulking brute in his 40s, big on stop-and-frisk humiliations, topped off with insults every time he stops.

“What is it with you boys and perfume?”

Høyer? He was an eyewitness to the chokehold.

Their day begins with driving and Andersen griping non-stop about “Gypsies” and racist slurs for Arabs. But the “normal” day ends long before dark when they disobey orders and find themselves in a minority-dominated neighborhood where one stop-and-frisk too many, and at the worst possible time, leaves them on foot, without their car, and with dispatch telling them “Romeo 14-05 I have no squad cars available” for “extraction.”

The harassed and humiliated “suspect” Amos (Tarek Zayat) is still in custody, witness to the mayhem breaking out around them, and the growing rift between his captors.

The script covers a lot of familiar cops-trapped-“behind-enemy-lines” ground — holed up in a store, chased by motorcycle thugs and the like. And the set up leads us to expect the two patrolmen to experience differing story arcs, with the formula film’s main mystery who will experience the bigger epiphany.

Lohmann and Sears intentionally create the opposite of “chemistry” — mutual contempt, and nicely balance against each other as they do. The younger guy is muscular and tough and not scared of the jaded Andersen, who is every bully with a badge you’ve ever seen on the screen.

The twists range from natural (if predictable) progressions to major and minor leaps into improbability.

On the whole, though, “Enforcement,” released as “Shorta” (Arabic slang for “cops”) in Europe, is a solid is slow-moving police actioner that reminds us that no matter the continent, police work is the same dangerous game. And that the world over, that “game” has entirely too many of the wrong sorts of people signing up.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast:  Jacob Lohmann, Simon Sears, Tarek Zayat, Özlem Saglanmak and Issa Khattab

Credits: Scripted and directed by  Frederik Louis Hviid, Anders Ølholm. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:48

“Penguin Bloom” is a light, uplifting tale about an Australian paralyzed in an accident, who starts to recover and redirect her life thanks to a magpie her family takes in.

It’s a “feel good” family-oriented picture that sinks or swims based on your tolerance for the genre and how taken you are by a bird that Rossini once built an opera around, “La Gazza Ladra,” “The Thieving Magpie.”

Because as good as Naomi Watts always is, this time playing a once-active surfer and mother of three facing a soul-crushing future in a wheelchair, the bird — played by ten painstakingly trained and conditioned magpies — is a wonder, lifting this simple parable into the realm of “How’d they get it to DO that?” animal pictures.

A tween boy, Noah Bloom (Griffin Murray-Johnston) wistfully narrates the tale, the oldest of three brothers living on the Australian coast, frolicking with his siblings and his photographer dad (“Walking Dead” veteran Andrew Lincoln) and nurse mum (Watts), until that fateful day on that vacation to Thailand when his mother had a fall.

Enough time has passed, our narrator tells us, that he’s able to draw a conclusion about what really happened that day.

“It’s like Mum was stolen from us.”

Sam (Watts) is withdrawn, struggling to accept the things, from basic tying the kids laces to running on the beach and surfing, that she’s lost. Husband Cam is always saying the wrong things.

“How are you?”

“How AM I?” she hisses, ordering him to never ask that again in front of “the boys.””I don’t want to have to lie to them.”

Her upbeat chatterbox mother (Jacki Weaver) is all “Gotta keep your SPIRITS up,” tidying up and giving unwanted advice and callous labels on every visit.

“You’re NOT a ‘spastic!’ No one thinks so!”

Sam is teetering towards giving up, blocking out the past and wallowing in her awful predicament until one plaintive request from her oldest, made on his way out the door to school.

“Can you look after Penguin for me?”

This is the baby magpie he found, fallen from “her” nest. Noah looks up what to feed it, Dad helps and hit brothers join in, all of them obsessed with the little screeching baby bird in that basket Noah turned into a nest.

Sam? She’s warned him not to keep it, ignored the squawks and cries, takes no interest in the black and white seemingly flightless bird named after another species of black and white flightless bird.

But playing “Louie Louie” on the stereo to drown Penguin’s racket out leads to a revelation. The bird has personality and feelings and a LOT of curiosity.

Glendyn Irvin’s film, working from a Shaun Grant/Harry Cripps script, grafts the “new critter in the house” comedy to a serious, giving-up-until-I-get-up story of injury and loss.

Most of the story beats we take in here are perfectly conventional — the enraged lashing out, the morose withdrawal, children retreating in guilt or horror. Watts is as sharp as you’d expect acting that out.

Weaver makes a nice irritant on the family dynamic and Rachel House shows up as a thoroughly Oz kayaking instructor. A cute touch? Noah learns to play the guitar, picking out a most apt Beatles tune to his darling Penguin.

The bird — it took ten “credited” magpies to “play” this part — is a marvel. She wanders the halls, jumps on furniture, shelves and laps, knocking this over, curiously toying with that and pooping on just about everything.

Aussie TV director Ivin keeps his camera at Penguin eye view as he chases her down halls, under beds and the like. The film emphasizes how smart and enterprising magpies are, and gives her canine-levels of affection and commitment. Penguin knows when something’s not right with Mum.

You have to know going all this going in, because you either respond to a “Mouse Hunt” level tiny creature has personality story, or you don’t. I did.

MPA Rating: TV-14

Cast:Naomi Watts, Griffin Murray-Johnston, Andrew Lincoln, Rachel House and Jacki Weaver

Credits: Directed by Glendyn Ivin, script by Shaun Grant and Harry Cripps, based on the memoir by Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive. A Roadshow release on Netflix.

An awful lot of twitterers are awfully cavalier about their use of this phrase.

Can’t be bothered to read what they have a complaint about if there’s a chance to pile on, based on some Summer’s Eve’s eagerness to misunderstand plain English.

But hey, infants gotta infant, trolls gotta troll…

Veteran producer (“An Ideal Husband,””Wayne’s World”) and sometime director Barnaby Thompson had to know what he was looking at when his son Preston pitched him his screenplay for “Pixie.”

A murderously dry Irish action dramedy with priests, drugs, scenery and slang and gun battles?

Throw in Brendan Gleeson and you’ve got a movie by Ireland’s Martin (“In Bruges,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) or John Michael McDonagh (“The Guard,””Calvary”).

But there’s no Gleeson and none of the suspense or moral ambiguity and little of the wit and gory gusto of the McDonaghs in this film. Still, it’s got a good enough cast, a couple of twists and enough brute force to it that it’s worth taking in on its own terms.

Those terms being “We’re imitating the McDonagh Brothers, so what?”

Olivia Cooke slings an Irish accent in the title role, that of an aspiring artiste and young woman who knows what she wants, and being tied down to her corner of western Ireland isn’t it.

She is legendary among the lads roughly her age in her corner of the world.

“She won’t just break your heart. She’ll take a Kalashnikov to you!”

But, well, she’s a reddish-haired Irish-accented version of Olivia Cooke. What’s a boy to do?

That’s what lures mates Frank (Ben Hardy) and Harland (Daryl McCormack) into her world and its promise of sexual “adventure” and photography.

But Pixie’s got one ex-boyfriend (Rory Fleck Byrne) we’ve already seen murder people. And then there’s her Dad — “STEPdad” (Colm Meaney) — and step-brother Mickey (Turlough Convery), who’re plainly into the gang thing.

Do Pixie’s two new fanboys have any clue what they’re getting into? Once that is, they’ve taken note of the drug deal interrupted by slaughter — in a church, no less — that was the opening scene and left four “priests” dead and put Father McGrath on the tele, warning the TV news audience that “The Lord will have his vengeance!“

As Father McGrath gives us the gimlet-eyed Alec Baldwin squint when he says this — because he’s played by Alec Baldwin — we know he bloody-well means business.

Cooke, of “Sound of Metal” and “Thoroughbreds,” steps out of her comfort zone here, and there’s something a little lacking in her hard, ruthless and determined Child of the Mob character. Pixie is deliberate and calm, even when threatened, toughened up in ways we can only guess. Cooke gives us the cunning without really selling the brutishness.

Yes, Pixie might feel untouchable, being a mob boss’s son. But the dynamics of that family and simple presence of immediate danger don’t register. She’s quick to arrange violent risks for others. Is she capable of it herself?

Still, the situations she gets them all into, the screwy incongruity of it all — Visiting Catholic “priests” from Afghanistan? — give “Pixie” a kick.

As does the dialogue, corrosive banter and threats, every guy she meets kind of going gooey in the mouth trying to talk to Pixie. Her armed-and-dangerous ex-Colin (Rory Fleck Byrne)?

“We ‘re on a BREAK. Just a bit of a wobble!”

A drug dealer greets Pixie and pals as “Harry, Ron and Hermione.”

Pixie defends her stepfather’s sensibilities. “Just because you kill people doesn’t mean you can’t be into Wagner?

It all comes off as watered-down McDonagh Brothers, to get back to our original thesis. But as we’re given a taste of Irish mob torture, as we watch another poor sod digging his own grave at gunpoint in the grey gloom of another remote Irish backroad, as we spy the Irish vanity license plate that spells out “Feckin Eejet,” I’m inclined to shrug off the absurdly convenient and contrived finale and endorse this.

It’s not the McDonaghs, not either one of them or them both together. But it’s a fair enough imitation until they go back to Sligo and stir something fresh up themselves.

MPA Rating: R for violence, language, drug content and some sexual references

Cast: Olivia Cooke, Ben Hardy, Daryl McCormack, Olivia Byrne, Turlough Convery, Colm Meaney and Alec Baldwin

Credits: Directed by Barnaby Thompson, script by Preston Thompson. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:33

African American gangsters play power games with Italian American mob.

Lance Gross stars in this March 12 release.

Nothing more instantly-dates an animated film for children than over-earnest efforts to contemporize the dialogue, to render it slangy and to-the-minute current.

That’s all over the script to Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon,” where a lot of effort was put into making the dragon, in particular, sound flip and hip.

She’s voiced by the comic actress Awkwafina, so the pale blue dragon lets us know “I’m gonna be real with you, I’m not the BEST dragon,” that “I got water skills that kill!” and “I gotcha girl. WHO’S your dragon?”

“Super sketchy,” if you asked me. “BOOM goes the dynamite,” which even the kids have moved on from, thank heavens. The strain shows, and slang is no substitute for actual humor — sight gags or funny lines.

That said, “Raya” is a pleasant enough kids’ adventure — “Raiders of the Lost Ark” meets “Mulan” who is now a “Tomb Raider.”

The story is a made-up mash-up of Pan-Asian/Southeast Asian myths hanging on learning to “trust” people again, and features a plague that has decimated the land and a heroine whose lifelong pal is a pet pangolin, the pill-bug armadillo which the Chinese government blames for the global pandemic COVID-19.

Timely? Sure. Accidentally a tad on-the-nose, and eyebrow-raising in theme? Oh yes.

We meet Raya, voiced by Kelly Marie Tran (the recent “Star Wars” trilogy), apprenticed to her Guardian of the Dragon Gem father (Daniel Dae Kim). It’s kept in a temple in the land of Heart, one of the five nations of the land that was broken when the last dragon died defending against the Droon (a vividly visual rendition of a plague).

But the gem, a reminder of the dragons’ sacrifice, is coveted by the other states — Fang, Talon, Tail and Spine — which broke up and took the names of the parts of a dragon.

Raya is tricked by the Fang girl Namaari, leading to the stone shattering. Namaari grows up to be a nemesis voiced by Gemma Chan. Five states each keep a shard from the stone, Droon returns to devastate the land and Raya makes it her life’s mission to figure out if there’s a surviving dragon, and if she can piece the stone back together and end the plague.

Raya, riding her pangolin-ish pillbug steed, searches the rivers for the dragon, and finally finds Sisu. But with all the mistrust and treachery, can she and her shape-shifting dragon (Awkwafina) put their world to right?

Their quest puts Raya into many magical martial arts fights, has her stumble into a “con baby,” a cute street hustler and thief in league with thieving monkeys, just one of the legions of orphans in a land wiped out by Droon. There’s a hustling teen “Shrimporium” proprietor (Izaac Wang) and a wizened, one-eyed warrior (Benedict Wong) who have their roles to play.

As thin as the story and themes and comic relief moments are, “Raya” has redeeming dollops of heart — the way even the quarreling five states are awed and religiously respectful at their first encounter with a creature of legend, or the graveyard where so many of the creatures were turned to stone.

And the action sequences, derivative of many a martial arts combat film that they are, dazzle.

“Hand-to-hand, or sword?” “BLADES all the way!”

The film borrows animation tricks from the “Kung Fu Panda” movies — animated rod puppets and shadow puppets illustrate the flashbacks to the “legend” that the movie purports to revive.

“Kung Fu Panda” spawned a recent run of animated films set in Asia, but none — aside from the Jack Black voiced martial arts comedies — have really clicked with me. “Over the Moon” and “Abominable” and “Raya and the Last Dragon” are big on message, one that seems Chinese government-sanctioned (or at least tailored not to offend that government), light on entertainment. This may be pitched as Southeast Asian, but the lands (deserts, snow) aren’t. Vague on purpose?

Younger kids won’t necessarily recognize what they’re missing, but the distinct lack of “Disney magic” shows in “Raya and the Last Dragon.” There’s more of that in the bouncy, touching and lightly charming Disney short “Us Again” attached to “Raya.”

MPA Rating: PG, action violence

Cast: The voices of Kelly Marie Tran, Awkwafina, Benedict Wong, Gemma Chan, Daniel Kae Kim, Izaac Wang, Sandra Oh and (maybe) Betty White.

Credits: Directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada, script by Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:45

May is a self-help author who’s having trouble getting a deal in place for that next book. She can be excused for thinking her agent is patronizing her when he sugar-coats the lack of enthusiasm she’s getting from publishers.

No, she hasn’t been “Lucky” to have female-empowerment books like “Go it Alone” published. She puts in the work, she insists.

She has a brittle but functional marriage, which should be a comfort. But even her husband can seem a tad patronizing. And then she sees a masked man in their backyard in the middle of the night. That crashing sound means he’s broken in.

Ted is slow to awaken, and a lot more blase about picking up his 3-wood and heading out to confront the intruder.

“May, get up. We have to fight for our lives now,” he yawns.

His dispatches the masked man, but there is no body — “Same as the last time.” He’d like to get back to bed, but heck, got to call the police “again.”

May’s shock and fear is replaced with an expression that means the same in the U.S. and Canada, where “Lucky” was filmed.

“What the HELL?”

Screenwriter-star Brea Grant (“12 Hour Shift”) conjures up an intriguing and engrossing horror parable with dashes of feminism and shots at “going it alone,” a story of a writer tormented by the same stalker, night after night.

With a variety of weapons, in varying venues and intervening in murderous scenarios involving this killer menacing her publicist/assistant (Yasmine Al-Bustami) and sister-in-law (Kauser Mohammed), May must fight this demon, who gives a new manifestation to the term “personal demon.”

What’s going on here? May’s husband (Dhruv Uday Singh) takes umbrage at her understandably fraught response to what seems to her to be a new threat in her life, and moves out. That leaves her alone, with golf club or baseball bat, knife, hatchet or hammer, to beat off each fresh assault.

As in other stories where a perceived, persistent, nightly menace makes you and others question if this is all in May’s head ,”Lucky” makes you chew on what’s at the root of this. This cops are quick to tire of her crying “Wolf!” A social worker is brought in.

And yet, like Huple’s cat sleeping on Hungry Joe’s face every night in Joseph Keller’s “Catch-22,” we know that May has to take this seriously. It’s a matter of life and death, symbolically or otherwise.

This “explanations” for all this are less interesting than the mystery, a masked “stranger” (maybe) testing May’s ability to “go it alone,” a woman not taken seriously by men at every turn, and women (the social worker, the sister-in-law) connected to the men in her case, a woman heroically and capably defending herself, night after night, never getting credit for slaying the beast because the body disappears.

What do you think’s going on?  You don’t have to be “Lucky” to decode that. But Grant and director Natasha Kermani (“Imitation Girl,””Shattered”) package their “message” into a pretty clever if not all that ambitious thriller, with Grant our stoic heroine, fighting the good fight, night after night, plainly able to “go it alone” but maybe wondering if it’s worth it.

MPA rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Brea Grant, Hunter C. Smith, Dhruv Uday Singh, Kausar Mohammed, Yasmine Al-Bustami

Credits: Directed by Natasha Kermani, script by Brea Grant. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:21