Movie Nation

For his latest feat, Mr. Canadian Trade-Balancer Ryan Reynolds travels through time to trade barbs with his 12-year-old self, further extends the warranty for action comedy hack Shawn “Night at the Museum” Levy and makes Mark Ruffalo funny.

Pulling those off for “The Adam Project,” a noisy/cutesy and kid-friendly mashup of a dozen more original movies, is no mean feat. But for a picture that’s no big deal and no credit to the genre, it passes the time pleasantly enough, largely thanks to its intensely likeable, quick-quipping star.

You could say the same for the last Levy-Reynolds team-up, “Free Guy,” it’s worth noting. Levy knows when to throw a few effects at you, and when to let his star and those paired up with that star take over and make with the funny business.

Reynolds has the title role, and when we meet Adam, he’s getting shot at and shot up as he steals a time jet. It’s 2050 and our hero has business in the past. That business is back in 2022, and it’s where he runs into his younger self.

Walker Scobell has the tricky job of being wired and witty Ryan Reynolds-as-Adam at 12, and he’s passably quick on the uptake. The short-for-his-age Adam’s suspended from school for fighting (getting beat up) again, something his older self understands.

“You have a very punchable face.”

The kid isn’t as quick as his/their dog to figure out who this stranger who’s busted into his house is. But he is fast on the flippant threats, about facing years of therapy telling a shrink “where the bad man touched me.”

Something happened in the past that’s messed up the future. There’s an oligarch (Catherine Keener) who has all this power. Older and younger Adam have to fight off the villains, circumvent Mom (Jennifer Garner) and find their way back to Dad (Ruffalo). Otherwise, the future?

“You’ve seen ‘Terminator?’ That’s 2050 on a GOOD day.”

“Adam” is built on a “Guardians of the Galaxy” template, from the parent-child sentiment to the derivative action beats and gadgets — “Is that a light saber?” “No, it’s a (Older Adam turns it on)…” “It’s a light saber.” There’s joke after joke about other movies in the genre, slavish devotion to classic rock tunes on the soundtrack and of course Zoe Saldana, here cast as adult Adam’s action-heroine wife.

Saldana is almost criminally under-used here, but she has a moment or two, mostly emotional grace notes that turn up throughout the picture amidst the levity and mayhem.

The way their pet Labrador recognizes Adult Adam, and the looks he has trying to figure out how this scent-recognition thing is shared is one such moment. Adult Adam reassuring grieving Mom that her little boy loves her is another. Kids that age?

“It’s like living with a urinal cake that yells at you.”

Lots of funny lines land, as does a sight gag or two. Where can I get that hilarious “Face/Off” joke T-shirt that professor-dad (Ruffalo) calls attention to in his college lecture?

Everything here is something we’ve seen before — chases, “light saber” fights, the big Bond-sized set-piece finale. It gets fairly tedious fairly early on.

But if you love Reynolds, you’re here to hear him crack wise, smirk and get complimented on how “ripped” he is. Because he won’t be Canuck Eye Candy forever. And who knows how funny he’ll be in his fast-approaching Betty White/victory lap dotage?

Rating: PG-13 for violence/action, language and suggestive references.

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Walker Scobell, Zoe Saldana, Catherine Keener, Alex Mallari Jr. and Mark Ruffalo.

Credits: Directed by Shawn Levy, scripted by Jonathan Tropper, T.S. Nowlin and Jennifer Flackett. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

Have a smirk over the irony of naming an exploitive sex, webcams and coeds killer tale “Exploited.” It’s not like it’s going to score any other points for cleverness.

A feebly-plotted, meekly-acted raw dog softcore porn pic masquerading as a thriller, the only promise it keeps is that it’s as unpleasant as the webcam sex interrupted by assault opening scene, start to finish.

College freshman Brian (Jordan Ver Hoeve) may have an older sibling at Starling University, aka Second Choice U. But the blonde kid brother (Half brother?) has some things to work through in between the classes, parties and wrestler-bully roommate Jeremy (Andrew Matthew Welch).

Like the fact that Jeremy might be into initiating Brian, sexually. Jeremy’s girlfriend (Makenzie Vega)? She doesn’t need to know.

But every little secret just might be exposed when Brian, and then his part-time drug dealing brother (Will Peltz), dig deep into this mysterious flash drive which shows the wide range of kink a former classmate (Colin Bates) serviced via web cam — gay and straight, S&M, clowns, furries.

Are we seeing the guy murdered on camera in the last of those “acts?” That makes this a “snuff” drive.

No, let’s not go to the police. Let’s try and figure out who that was and who the clients were amongst our classmates and that one particularly arrogant B-movie beauty physics professor (Leah Pipes).

There’s email, webcam and cell-phone text hacking and manipulation, more and more people get sucked in or on as we stagger towards some sort of anti-climactic climax.

The mystery doesn’t entirely play fair, not that it’s interesting enough to entice one into sticking with this. The acting is pretty bad, and there’s a general unpleasantness to the proceedings that makes the film a video equivalent chastity belt.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex, drug use, nudity, profanity

Cast: Jordan Ver Hoeve, Hannah Rose May, Will Peltz, Makenzie Vega, Andrew Matthew Welch, Leah Pipes and Colin Bates.

Credits: Directed by Jon Abrahams, scripted by Carl Moellenberg and Anthony Del Negro. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:21

Dermot Mulroney and Jason Isaacs are among the co-stars of this B-movie Mel special. And yes, that’s Barkhad Abdi from “Captain Philips,” along with Katie Cassidy, Annie Ilonzeh and Adan Canto, whose work I am unfamiliar with.

Director Grant Johnson did a Chace Crawford, Michele Weaver and Kevin Zegers vehicle called “Nighthawks” a few years back.

“Agent Game” opens April 8.

HBO Max has this Lana Condor/Cole Sprouse star-crossed love affair, also starring Zach Braff, set for streaming release March 31.

Not a giggle in the trailer, but it could be sweet and special effective.

“Autumn Girl” is the “Mrs. Maisel stumbles into ‘All About Eve'” Polish musical biography you didn’t know you needed until it showed up in your Netflix queue.

A few songs, a few laughs, a little sex, a lot of sexism — it’s one of those frothy “It shouldn’t work but it does” pictures, largely thanks to the charm, sass and sex appeal of its star, Maria Debska.

Debska plays Kalina Jedrusik, the real-life “Autumn Girl” of Polish pop and Polish TV in the early ’60s. Writer-director Katarzyna Klimkiewicz parks Debska, as Jedrusik, in a shiny, candy-colored fantasy version of Iron Curtain Poland and lets her sing, dance and strut like the queen bee this 1960s diva was.

Somebody labeled Jedrusik “the Polish Marilyn Monroe,” and when we meet her, she’s kind of let that go to her head. Sure, she’s living in socialist apartment flats and shopping at department stores where cloth is the hot seller (not finished fashions), just like everybody else.

But she’s a star! She’s on TV! Kalina’s not putting her Skoda in “drive “until she’s got her lipstick just right, traffic light be damned. And she’s sure as shooting not waiting in line like everybody else if she has any say in the matter.

Kalina has a writer-husband (Leszek Lichota) and a young, handsome lover (Bartlomiej Kotschedoff) living with her under the same roof. She wears her dresses tight and low-cut, smokes like a chimney and her cute bob haircut is the style to steal. All the ladies say so, well, except for the ones who want everybody to wait their turn.

But there’s this new Party Member/boss at the TV station. Ryszard (Bartlomiej Kotschedoff) used to do Polish summer stock with Kalina, back in the day. And she doesn’t remember him. When he comes on strong, asking/ordering her to dinner with “the new boss,” she rebuffs him and not nearly as gently as she might have.

Next thing she knows, her “lateness” is an issue, “the people” are outraged at her sexiness, and she’s out of a gig. Kalina and we are about to remember that “cancel culture” was invented the moment the phrase “black ball” was coined. She is persona non grata every place she might sing and perform. She turns to vodka and bitterness, shaken, not stirred.

The great novelty of this film, in Polish with subtitles or dubbed into English, is how Kalina sees her life coming apart in production numbers — a restaurant where everybody dances around her, their smile-free faces mimicking the tight-lipped fury she herself sings (in Polish) through.

She laments her plight, cautions her unhearing, would-be womanizer boss and equally faithless husband (An open marriage?) to “Let go of the lust,” and longs for the day when can sing and own her “sexiness” on TV again.

The film, titled “Bo we mnie jest seks” in Polish, follows a predictable story arc. Sadly, some of benchmark “Big” moments we know are coming are production-designed and production-numbered right out of their potential impact. Supporting players’ storylines are underdeveloped, and the cabaret-ready tunes aren’t going to keep any Broadway composer up at night, even the ones who speak Polish.

It’s never quite as playful as that opening title, “This may or may not have really happened.”

But Debska is a delight in this part, blowsy and brassy, cute and careerist, a comrade in her element, thriving under socialism because the Party let her be a star. She lets us see the light go out in her life when the spotlight is yanked away, and lets us hope she’ll have a comeback number, with just the right slinky dress and choreography to match.

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, smoking, drinking and profanity

Cast: Maria Debska, Leszek Lichota, Bartlomiej Kotschedoff, Krzysztof Zalewski and Katarzyna Obidzinska

Credits: Scripted and directed by Katarzyna Klimkiewicz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

Beware the Clowns of March!

Premiering on the Ides of March.

“What did you get us INTO?”

Let that be a lesson to you, kids.

“Exploited” exploits its way into our hearts tomorrow, March 11.

A famous Broadway actress (Leo) has her final curtain call interrupted by the news her son (Jake Weary) has died. This mystery thriller, also starring Bella Thorne, comes our way March 18.

In film buff slang, “Felliniesque” conveys a a lot of cinematic shorthand in just a single word. It can mean a self-conscious artist self-conscious about her or his self-consciousness. The word is almost synonymous with existential angst and cultural ennui.

And since the term most quickly summons up memories of “La Dolce Vita” or its bookend, “8 1/2,” there’s a lightness about it — self-criticism as cultural criticism, most often with an amused, arm’s length take on decadence and society’s shortcomings.

That “lightness” means it’s not the perfect fit in describing Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s angsty social satire “Ahed’s Knee.” The title may echo Eric Rohmer’s pre #MetToo older-man/teen-girls cringe comedy “Claire’s Knee.” But Lapid (“The Kindergarten Teacher”) is grappling with something more elemental about an artist’s role in society and his own place in an increasingly reactionary and groupthink-authoritarian Israel.

A Palestinian teen named Ahed Tamimi, whose family has suffered deaths and imprisonment at the hands of Israeli occupiers, lashed out at a soldier and had the temerity to slap him. The video became an international stink as Israel threw the kid in prison.

“Ahed’s Knee” begins with a disorienting, stream-of-camera-in-extreme-close-up musical audition session for a movie about her. Israeli (not Palestinian) actresses — Ortal Solomon, Neta Roth and Mili Eshet — sing “Welcome to the Jungle,” show off expensive dental work and the tear in their leggings at the knee, don wigs and hurl themselves into the part for a jaded filmmaker, “Y” (Avshalom Pollak) and his casting director.

We hear an actor, playing the part of a government official, grouse that Ahed — who faced house arrest — “should have gotten a bullet in the knee” because THAT would have kept her in the house, “arrested.”

And maybe we see what Y sees in that moment. The very idea of some privileged, acting-schooled Israeli Jew playing this icon of Palestinian resistance to oppression is patently offensive. Then again, maybe that’s not crossed Y’s mind...yet.

As he sits in a small plane en route to the town of Sapir for an afternoon screening of one of his earlier films at a local library, we pick up on Y’s discontent. The son of artists, his collaborator/screenwriter mother has cancer. When he talks, he mutters (in Hebrew) about the “dumbing down of this country” thanks to “censorship,” message-control, leading to a populace that “revels in its stupidity.”

He downloads all this simmering concern on the young, perky culture ministry functionary (Nur Fibak) who welcomes him, briefs him on the town, the desert region (Avra) it is in and how the evening’s screening and Q&A will go. She smiles prettily and makes lots of eye contact. The leather-jacketed Y, stubbly and 40something and single, takes on a familiarity with her that whispers “chemistry” or hints at least that he’s interested.

But there’s this form from “the ministry,” the list of subjects he’s allowed to speak about (and get paid for). She chirps on about “the sea,” life, love, “Jewish immigration,” and Y grouses about “no mention of the occupation, conflict” and the like.

There’s a crisis of conscience in play, and we sense a tirade to come. “Ahed’s Knee” is about that day in Sapir, from arrival to screening to debating that “approved” list of topics and the State of the State of Israel, where an artist might well feel the walls of free expression closing in on him thanks to decades of corrupt, thought-controlling reactionary rule.

Lapid’s storytelling style here includes odd interludes — a driver (Yoram Honig) takes the filmmaker to his room, pausing to show him the rotting result of a failed deal with the Russians over the bell pepper harvest, pausing again for a little sing-along and dance-along to Bill Withers’ ironically-used “Lovely Day.”

Y relates an anecdote from his national military service days that musically sends up the homoerotic nature of military service (more dancing) and underscores his point about how “off message” unapproved thought and talk are suppressed, beginning with that heady dose of military indoctrination.

“Felliniesque” kicks in with the seriously roundabout way Lapid gets to the story at hand and the various, occasionally daft interludes. I can’t say it all fits together neatly or that it all contributes to the narrative in a particularly helpful, streamlined way. But it’s easy enough to make sense of.

Pollak, a veteran of film sets in front of and behind the camera, wears his RayBans and five-day stubble like a movie-making egoist, imposing himself — conversationally — on women he doesn’t know, like the small plane pilot who transports him, interrupting a power ballad singer rehearsing with her bassist in a Sapir garage, and the captive, somewhat star-struck Yahalom (Fibak) escorting him around, hearing him out and professing sympathy for his anti “censorship” ethos, perhaps because she has some carnal interest in him.

Lapid’s film ambles along, never straying far from its path but dawdling and stopping for distracting little bits of business — one of the actresses auditioning for him calls to obnoxiously lobby for the part, that pause at the bell pepper farm, a couple of somewhat aimless thinking/ phone-chatting walk-abouts in the Avra desert.

“Ahed’s Knee” isn’t as sexy, satiric and light as its Felliniesque opening promises. But Lapid manages to make a lot of points about the creative person’s life in modern Israel, the sensitivities triggered and the moral quandary a thinking Israeli finds her or himself in. The writer-director does a decent job of cloaking a sermon about artistic freedom in a tale of an artist at an intellectual crossroads and a man fixated on the fate of “Ahed’s Knee.”

Rating: unrated, profanity, violence

Cast: Avshalom Pollak, Nur Fibak, Yoram Honig, Ortal Solomon, Neta Roth and Mili Eshet

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nadav Lapid. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:49

“The Left Handed Gun” has a distinct pride of place in Paul Newman lore.

He’d already risen to stardom, not nearly as quickly as Brando, but quick enough to earn the envy of his life-long rival, Steve McQueen.”Somebody Up There Likes Me” pretty much ended Newman’s days of bit parts on TV and supporting roles on film.

And here he was, the lead in a star-vehicle Western, the “pretty boy” of the moment, his increasingly famous bright blue eyes dulled down in black and white. But more than anything else, this film and Newman’s movies of this era cemented his reputation as a serious actor.

He’d played Billy the Kid on TV three years before he stepped in front of the camera for Arthur Penn, whom he’d once acted for on the anthology series “Playwrights ’56.” Now Penn was making his major motion picture directing debut, and Newman would perfect his take on The Kid.

It wasn’t until later researchers looked hard at the most famous photograph of William Bonney and realized it was an inverted negative that the fact that Billy was actually right-handed became established. So there’s no faulting Gore Vidal, who wrote the teleplay that Newman had starred in, and helped expand and flesh it out, with screenwriter Leslie Stevens, for the big screen.

What was novel about the TV treatment and this later film is how unsentimental it is about Bonney, romanticized for 75 years, largely thanks to his name and youth. Watching “Gun” again, I was reminded of the ad campaign for Sam Peckinpah’s even gloomier take on the character, played by Kris Kristofferson in 1973’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”

“Billy the Kid was a Punk.”

Newman’s “kid” carries a grudge all the way to his grave in this film. Taken in by the rancher Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston), a kindly Scotsman who took pity, put trust in Billy and turned him into a reader, Billy makes it his short life’s work to avenge Tunstall’s murder by law enforcement put up to it by his rivals.

There’s nothing sentimental about this Old West. Billy goads men that were a part of the conspiracy into gunfights, and kills others who stand in his way with barely a hint of righteousness in his revenge.

The striking thing about the movie is catching Newman just before “star clout” kicked in. He may have gotten his former TV director on board, but he played up “the kid” nature of his character just by denying himself the vanity of a horse that wouldn’t make him look so short. Watch the first time he mounts up in the movie. It’s like a tween climbing a tree, scrambling to do it quickly just to minimize any chance of “You man enough for that there hoss?” derision from the other cowhands. Check out the much shorter horse he rides as “Butch Cassidy,” in comparison.

His performance is wound-tight yet subtle, boyishly antic and just mature enough to let us see the character’s realization that he’s done wrong or made a fatal mistake.

But what really stood out on this re-viewing was the superb support Newman got from future Western icon John Dehner, turned into a wholly-logical and perfectly understandable Pat Garrett, the old running mate turned lawman who hunts The Kid down. Vidal’s take on the character is sharp, and all the best Garretts are descendants of this one. Dehner plays Pat as patient-and-understanding, but accepting of the fact that The Kid has earned his fate and he’s the one to make him meet it.

Dehner played many a heavy in Westerns and authority figures in other films and on TV, and later earned his own measure of immortality with a hilarious send-up of his booming, owlish Western persona as a comic villain in James Garner’s “Support Your Local Gunfighter.”

Denver Pyle’s most famous big screen role was in Arthur Penn’s greatest film, “Bonnie and Clyde,” released nearly ten years later. As in that film, he’s a lawman here.

And James Best almost left his bit player/character actor career behind after his flinty, empathetic turn as Billy’s fellow cowhand, friend and conscience, Tom Folliard. Best was never able to establish himself as a “name” star or leading man. He’s most remembered for his role as the hapless sheriff on TV’s “Dukes of Hazzard” twenty years later. He retired to my corner of Florida, spending most of his last years as a Space Coast celebrity.

There’s nothing flashy save for the performances in Penn’s debut feature. If anything, the first act seems rushed, with character development and detail skipped over. Television directors had to work quickly and TV screenplays had to be brisk and truncated. It takes a while for a style and patience to settle in.

It may not stand out the way “The Left Handed Gun” did when it hit the screen in ’58, a bracing counterpoint to the tsunami of formulaic “Manifest Destiny/Code of the West” Westerns that came before it on the big screen, and the generic Western fare already flooding TV, which it would continue to do into the late ’60s. The action sequences are blunt instruments and the grace notes tend to overwhelm them.

But the performances still crackle with understated modernity, giving us a West of not just sagebrush, saddles and stereotypes, but of real people, ruthless and impulsive, cunning and careless, actors playing folks who never let on that they know how this many-times-told story is going to end.

Rating: approved, violence

Cast: Paul Newman, John Dehner, James Best, Lita Milan, Denver Pyle, Hurd Hatfield, Colin Keith-Johnston, Martin Garralaga, Wally Brown and Paul Smith

Credits: Directed by Arthur Penn, scripted by Leslie Stevens, based on a Gore Vidal TV script. A Warner Brothers release available on Amazon and most any streaming platform.

Running time: 1:42