Movie Nation

A lot of movies keep their secrets well enough that they make you wonder, “What the hell is this thing about?” It’s not often that a film frustrates even veteran mass consumers of movies like me with that feeling over an hour into the viewing.

“Ultrasound” is a maddening mystery of multiple but mysteriously interconnected timelines and sets of characters, a movie the revels in its confusion. When it finally starts to reveal its point, you don’t feel rewarded for figuring it all out — because you haven’t. You just feel relieved in an “OK, sure, now I get it” and “Oh, I’m not losing it after all” sense.

It begins with a car accident that wasn’t an “accident.” We’ve seen spiked boobytrap that blew his tires in the rain, and maybe we’re not surprised when the couple who take in the driver, Glen (Vincent Kartheiser of “Mad Men”) seem…off.

Art (Bob Stephenson) is too friendly, too chatty and much older. Meeting his wife (Chelsea Lopez) is jarring, as she seems fragile and trapped. He’s too quick to share his “manic depression.” But she’s over-shared that first. That’s before she lets on that she “married my high school teacher.”

“Pretty f—-d up, huh?”

Glen is put on his guard and on his heels, wrong-footed long before the suggestion that he spend the night with the wife. His outraged protests segue to Glen and Cyndi, deep in discussion, on her marital bed.

There are these jarring jump-cuts, a flash of just a few frames of film jolting Glen to another reality, another take on the situation. There’s a ringing in his ears.

And…SCENE.

Katie (Rainey Qualley of “Ocean’s Eight”) is doing laps in a public pool, fending off the rude attentions of a creeper. She’s pregnant. Or is she? There’s an assignation with the mysterious Alex (Chris Gartin) she’s late for.

Is Cyndi pregnant, too? How does Glen end up in a wheelchair, and what do the folks in lab coats (Breeda Wool, Tunde Adebimpe) have to do with all this?

Cryptic scenes follow other cryptic scenes, conversations seem to reveal much, or nothing of importance. Connections between characters are so flimsy that you wonder if there’s been a mistake in the editing or the processing of first-time feature director Rob Schoeder’s film of Conor Stechschulte’s obscurant screenplay.

We know the title. We hear the ringing tones, and get those David Lynch/John Carpenter subliminal flashes that hint at time, memory or reality being distorted, which sets us up for most anything.

And then the fog clears and a much more recognizable and conventional thriller unfolds.

The marvel here is how long “Ultrasound” keeps us off-balance and lost, how much the filmmakers are willing to test the viewer’s patience and the risks involved in making this sort of movie mystery in the age of streaming. It’s one thing to be trapped in a theater, ticket purchased and thus forced to accept an unfairly challenging movie on its own terms. It’s quite another when the viewer has the option of shouting “EFF this” at whatever home screen they’re experiencing this on and moving on.

“Ultrasound” challenges us to go with our instincts and first impressions no matter what we learn about characters later on, only to upend those impressions on occasion. It puzzles and annoys and maybe even infuriates.

When even the “Ahhh, so that’s what’s going on” isn’t the easy, unearned and spoon-fed reward it seems to be, you know you’ve been tested by a movie that isn’t giving you enough information for that to be a fair game.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Vincent Kartheiser, Chelsea Lopez, Breeda Wool, Rainey Qualley, Tunde Adebimpe and Bob Stephenson

Credits: Directed by Rob Schroeder, scripted by Conor Stechschulte. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:43

Sandra Bullock, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Zazie Beetz, Joey King and Logan Lerman are the costars in what could be a fusillade of summer fun, coming July 15.

April 1. Looks ferocious, it does. I was guessing Australia, not because of the accents, but because of the ferocity and the weapons and general savagery.

But no. British to the hilt.

Well it’s not a dog lover’s movie, that’s for sure. Tales that involve but don’t star sled dogs rarely are.

“Against the Ice,” the latest Greenland project from Danish “Game of Thrones” star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, recreates a little-known piece of Danish survival lore from the golden age of Arctic exploration. It’s about the men who went in search of the remnants of a previous expedition to the northwest coast of Greenland. They had no hope of finding survivors. But they wanted to collect the evidence those earlier explorers gathered to debunk possible American claims (through the dubious “first to the North Pole” claimant, Robert Peary) that Greenland being actually two islands and not one huge Danish one.

Coster-Waldau is married to a Greenlander and did an arresting travel series (“Through Greenland”) on the former Danish colony, today a part of Denmark. Here he takes on the role of Ejnar Mikkelsen, captain of that second effort, in a “true story” account that barely transcends the cliches of the genre.

From the moment we meet Captain Mikkelsen, returning from an unsuccessful search that has cost his subordinate (Gísli Örn Garðarsson) his toes, gruesomely lost to frostbite, to the film’s depiction of endurance through privation, exhaustion, hardship and madness, “Against the Ice” covers too-familiar ice-covered ground in all the most conventional ways.

The crew of the wooden ship sailed into these iced-over-in-winter waters, the Alabama, have grown weary and leery of the obsessed, mission-oriented Mikkelsen. When he announces his plan to return to seek this stone cairn that a surviving letter from the dead explorers says they put up to mark where they left a written account of their findings, “volunteers” don’t exactly line up.

Given the distances involved and the navigation gear at hand, “that’s like walking from Moscow to Rome, looking for stones,” they gripe.

“Sometimes it’s best to not think too much,” is the captain’s ethos. The mission comes first.

Only young ship’s mechanic and engineer Iver Iversen (Joe Cole of “Peaky Blinders” and “Gangs of London”) volunteers for this “adventure.” And straight off, it’s obvious that this “greenhorn” is in over his head.

An ex-navy man, he’s never been to the Artic before, never had to build up his stamina to endure the unendurable. And he’s taken to naming his dogs. The other Danes, like the Inuit of Greenland, regard their sled dogs as tools to be used, worn out and be eaten, if necessary — by the surviving dogs, and by the explorers.

All that will change as Iver and the captain will face the ultimate test — hundreds upon hundreds of miles over hundreds upon hundreds of days, with blizzards and polar bears, falls through the ice and everything else you expect in tales of polar explorers.

The captain has a woman (Heida Reed) he hallucinates and eager Iver has a growing list of missteps that make him question his fitness for the task and the captain’s fading competence.

Pairing a polar newcomer with a grizzled veteran of the Arctic, which really happened, is damned convenient for the screenwriters, one of whom was Coster-Waldau. The “kid” thus has this alien terrain and the history of expeditions there and the importance of this one explained to him by the veteran.

All he has to do is ask the obvious questions he and we think of, “Why do you do it?” to bring up accounts of earlier treks and tests, related not just to the character but to us as viewers.

Coster-Waldau makes this real-life character more stoic than anything else. Even his “losing it” rages seem constrained by a dogmatic sense of duty. Cole doesn’t bring much that’s colorful or fresh to Iversen’s pluck and hero-worship.

Veteran Danish director Peter Flinth (“Beatles” and “Nobel’s Last Will” were his) delivers a film that feels approved by its co-writer and star in terms of thoroughness, but that lumbers as it passes from one waypoint to the next in the standard “alone in the Arctic” narrative.

No, you were never going to make a dog-lover-friendly film out of this. But a brisk pace is a must when you’re covering material many others have covered before.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Joe Cole, Heida Reed, Þorsteinn Bachmann and Charles Dance.

Credits: Directed by Peter Flinth, scripted by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Joe Derrick, based on the memoir by Ejnar Mikkelsen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

What do you follow the introspective look at “identity” that was “Inside/Out” and the reflections on what makes up the “Soul” with, if you’re an intellectually ambitious animation house that’s run out of ways to say “You’ve got a friend in me?”

Why, you take on puberty via a 13 year-old daughter of Chinese-Canadian immigrants living in Toronto during the Golden Age of Boy Bands.

“Turning Red” seems like a stretch, considering the usual audience for Pixar movies skews younger. But they’ve been determined to challenge that notion for years, and maybe they’ve joined Disney in that “audience for life” movies that appeal to “children of all ages” branding thing.

But that um, title…

This one opens March 11.

A good rule of thumb about whether or not to watch a movie from the mid-1930s on into the 1950s is to ask, “Is Basil Rathbone in it?” The vulpine baritone with the steely gaze and plummy line-readings dressed up a lot more than Sherlock Holmes mysteries or Errol Flynn swashbucklers. As villains or ghosts (“A Christmas Carol”), he couldn’t help but class up the joint.

It’s a pity RKO didn’t pay his electric presence its proper due in “Heartbeat,” a Sam Wood-directed Ginger Rogers romance filmed just after the war and set in pre-war Paris. A not-quite-frothy romance that tried to pass off 36 year-old Ginger as “just escaped from reform school,” it paired her up with debonair French expat Jean-Pierre Aumont, whom Hollywood had to regard as a “Well, if you can’t get Paul Henried” choice for much of his time there. They looked that much alike.

But the movie this might have been is in “Heartbeat’s” crackling first scenes. Rogers’ gamine Arlette shows up at a Parisian school run by Professor Aristide, and he’s played with an officious and greedy twinkle by Rathbone.

Professor Aristide is “a respectable gentleman,” smoking jacket-respectable, polished and efficient. He’s headmaster at a boarding school for pickpockets.

“Nimble fingers are the great essential!”

He uses a vast collection of manikins to train the street thieves of Paris, many of whom just arrived from abroad or the provinces, all of them eager to learn. One hilarious bit — one training dummy is wired up like the kids’ game “Operation,” which could practically have been inspired by this movie. Make a blunder picking this dummy’s pocket — lifting his watch or plucking his stick-pin — he lights up.

As you might guess of a “respectable” man who sends his pupils out to pilfer polite society, Aristide’s a stickler for speech.

“How many times do I have to remind you that I will NOT tolerate slang in my classroom?”

Trainee Arlette is valued because she can sell the “It wasn’t ME” protest, upon being caught, better than anybody, and she can pass for honest. But damned if her career and the movie don’t go wrong shortly after she’s sent on her first outing.

Adolphe Menjou plays an ambassador whose pearl stick-pin is just irresistible to Arlette. She plucks it, but he drolly and wordlessly tracks her off the street car, into the cinema, merely snapping his fingers to demand its return.

This ambassador doesn’t turn her in to the authorities. He drags her home, dresses her up, passes her off as a colleague’s “niece” and puts her to work to steal one item off one particular guest at an embassy reception. That guest turns out to be the dashing young bachelor Pierre de Roche (Aumont). And between dancing with him to rob him and dancing with him again to return the purloined timepiece, he is smitten, even if she is just looking for enough money to “buy a husband” for a marriage-in-name-only that will keep her out of reform school.

The complications, the “courtship” snags, the obstacles presented by friends in this posh world de Roche travels in, Arlette’s engagement and a pleasant pause for Ginger to sing a limp little ditty, “Can You Guess?” don’t add up to much of anything, or anything nearly as interesting as a life of petty crime.

The characters in that half of the movie are ably played by familiar faces like Melville Cooper, Mona Harris, Eduardo Cianelli and Henry Stephenson. But there’s no pop to any of these performances or scenes. It’s a nicely-designed but drab “star vehicle” romance with elegant clothes, upper class predicaments and a very cute terrier.

The heartbeat of “Heartbeat” is the school for artful dodgers and its headmaster. He’s got to keep his charges out of trouble and turn them not just into convincing thieves, but credible liars.

“When I lie, everybody knows it,” new recruit Yves (Mikhail Rasumny) laments. “I should go into politics, where it doesn’t matter!”

Wood, whose workmanlike and rarely flashy career included “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” “Pride of the Yankees,” the grand farce “Casanova Brown” and Rogers’ classic, “Kitty Foyle,” had to see there was a better movie built around the ongoing pickpocket operation and its “Oliver Twist” hold on Arlette.

But RKO, determined to extract maximum value out of Rogers and an accomplished supporting cast — at least some of whom were anxious to get back to Europe now that the war was over, produced a far more star-centered vehicle with a lot less going for it, maintaining Rogers’ profile but not challenging her or the audience with something edgier, grittier and funnier.

Based on a French 1940 romantic drama “Battement de couer,” “Heartbeat” isn’t a bad film, but more of a light and watchable programmer than the prestige picture RKO wanted or the larcenous farce it could have been.

Big names like Menjou have little to do. And every scene that doesn’t have Rathbone booming instructions, scolding his student pickpockets or collecting their “collections” at day’s end is an opportunity lost.

Rating: “approved”

Cast: Ginger Rogers, Basil Rathbone, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Adolphe Menjou, Mona Harris, Melville Cooper and Mikhail Rasumny

Directed by Sam Wood, scripted by Morrie Ryskind, Hans Wilhelm, Max Kolpé and Michel Duran, adapted from the French film “Battement de couer.” An RKO release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers

Running time: 1:42

Joanna is an English teacher at a Polish high school, battling student indifference and bursts of foul-mouthed exuberance on a daily basis.

She’s married to Witek, the school’s headmaster, but he’s “falling apart” and sort of checked out of his half of the marriage. That’s probably why she carries on an affair with the school’s safety officer, Maicek.

Her mother has Alzheimer’s and lives with them. Her jerk youngest son Jan is so disconnected from reality and school work that he’s not likely to graduate.

And then there’s her oldest, Adam. He’s married, with his bitchy wife and crying “brat” living with them, three more mouths for Jo to have to listen to, shop for and feed.

The stress of all this is wrecking her health and affecting her nerves. She needs to smoke a blunt, here and there, just to relax.

That’s just one more thing, it turns out, for the person who writes and sends blackmail notes to her to threaten her with.

But really, who is she to complain? She has “My Wonderful Life” and that’s enough.

The latest from the director of “A Coach’s Daughter” is a dry and somewhat frustrating dramedy with a contrived mystery to add suspense.

There’s a “Women on the Verge/Woman Under the Influence” or Jill Clayburgh feminist Hollywood films of the ’70s (“IT’s My Turn”) structure to this life that we see Jo (Ageta Buzek, quite good) trapped in. When she lays out her litany of woes/burdens, she’s inclined to shrug “They all need me,” (in dubbed English, or Polish with subtitles) and I need them.”

But the husband (Jacek Braciak) who strolls home into near chaos — with a stopped-up sink, screeching toddler, inconsiderate son practicing dance videos instead of doing his homework and a wife frazzled by it all — a husband who then chirps “I’m going for a run,” the same husband who left her a note for shopping he can’t be bothered to pitch in with, we do wonder how exactly Jo needs them.

We see a beautiful young colleague insult her, to her face, at a faculty meeting, with Witek saying nothing. We pick up on the effrontery of a daughter-in-law Karina (Wiktoria Wolanska) who expects all this extra care, and the gift of Jo’s mother’s vacant apartment.

Jo is developing a rash and worrying about her health so much that she’s asking “Is it MS?” (another “Dr. Google” self-diagnosis) and getting cat scans, even as her thoughtless family is labeling her a hypochondriac.

And we can’t help but notice that the only time Jo giggles and smiles is when she’s with the lumpy but frisky Maicek (Adam Woronowicz) as they carry on their affair in that very apartment that still belongs to her mother that her bitchy daughter-in-law covets.

The giggles go away when the notes, calling her names and listing her transgressions, start to arrive, when the school is painted up by vandals, when the threats later include still photos, then video.

Not that we didn’t see that coming. The moment Jo and Maicek start videoing each other en flagrante delicto we know that “evidence” is coming out in some form, that Jo will be imperiled by it.

Grzegorzek commits to making this a frustrating drama rather than a darkly amusing comedy, which seems a mistake. All this stress piled on top of one person never reaches the level of tragedy, but a cute scene where her English students take over her class after she’s called into her husband’s office captures how funny this might have been.

There will a big confrontation — only it’s not that confrontational. There is surely a huge unloading of grievances, only it’s mostly a string of pulled-punches.

The “mystery” is a non-starter and gets short shrift in the script.

And if there’s emotional promise to this story about a women bearing more than most of us could handle, it isn’t kept. Jo is martyred to her callous family. She’s a philanderer and subject to absurd pothead shaming. But we can’t feel but so sorry for her if she won’t lash out in her own defense, if she doesn’t shut her smug, wandering-eye husband down with just the right remark, if she tolerates her daughter-in-law’s impudence longer than anyone should.

Buzek, a star of the gripping Oscar short-listed Polish drama “The Pit,” is a striking but rail-thin presence with a whiff of “unhealthy” or “Is she sick?” about her. That and Jo’s constant doctor trips have us waiting for one last shoe to drop.

But even that is left dangling by a filmmaker who has an interesting character and who has put her in quite the spot, yet seems at a loss as to what to do about it.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Ageta Buzek, Jacek Braciak, Adam Woronowicz, Małgorzata Zajączkowska, Paweł Kruszelnicki, Jakub Zając

Credits: Scripted and directed by Łukasz Grzegorzek. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

The children reveal their secrets, mainly to each other, in the Norwegian summer.

The director of “Blind” and “Louder than Bombs” is behind “The Innocents.”

This IFC thriller comes out May 13.

Leo’s always good, and Thorne seems to hold her own opposite her in this. Avenging mom of a musician gets that revenge March 18.

Honestly, “The Office” ruined the “mockumentary” as a genre. There’s nothing like a long-running TV series, where everybody involved in front of and behind the camera forgets the original conceit of “We’re being candidly filmed while all this nonsense is going on,” to make one lose the thread.

Thus we get movies labeled “mockumentary” where there’s no pretext of “an unseen or little-seen crew is filming this,” utterly abandoning the sense of loony “reality” captured as it happens.

That’s “Adventures in Success,” a cult comedy that’s perfectly cultish but barely comical. More dispiriting than illuminating or amusing, it’s about this “self help” “start-up” in the heart of hippyland (Windham, NY, in the Catskills and not that far from Woodstock).

Peggy Appleyard (Lexie Mountain) is our cult leader, an “energy transformationalist” working “the fringe of self-help,” a woman with the charismatic intensity of a leader, and the fifth-rate thinking and inane, nonsensical patter of a crackpot.

Her jibberish incantations, ceremonies and double-speak masquerading as “teachings” is all about “Jilling Off,” the commune she’s set up in a big house on the edge of town where her first seven followers are led through hourglass-timed rituals aimed at “creating the greatest female orgasm in history” and denying the men in the cult that same pleasure.

“Five, six, seven eight,” they all chant, “female pleasure is truly great!”

Erica (Yaz Perea) has answered some vague ad and taken the bus north from Florida. She will become their “eighth,” and is immersed in the group meals, group lectures, group “training” and groupthink.

Peggy is a self-anointed expert in everything from sex and diet to self-defense and quasi-religious self-help cults as business “start-ups.”

Peggy teaches her followers to see everything — and I do mean everything, from cultural phenomena to sliced limes — in genital terms.

We get the joke pretty quickly, and there are a few grins at the obviously-fake-but-just-real-enough trappings of a cult and the “types” drawn into one. But the test of any one-joke film is how you incorporate that joke into a story, and where you take your one good gag.

There’s friction with the sleepy town which regards these standoffish interlopers as “the sex people” and keep them at a distance. There’s conflict within the group as the guys, hapless and devout as they may be, recognize they’re getting the short end of the sexual stick from this set-up.

And as Peggy drives them towards their big break — a “booth” at a Niagara Falls Health & Wellness Expo, her chance to get venture capital “angel investors” interested in her — even the firmest believers have to pick up on just how full of crap this nose-ringed, Doc Martened messiah actually is.

The best scenes have a free association feel. There’s an improvised dodge ball confrontation with townies. At one point, the women in the cult gather to gripe about society’s vagina “shaming” — the idealized representative of female genitalia in porn, etc.

“My vagina is a TEAMSTER…”MY vagina went through the Vietnam WAR….”MY vagina is Erin Brockovich, and she’s gonna make sure the water’s clean!”

But those moments are few and far between. I’d say there’s about 40 minutes of playful cult fun-poking here, and a movie that goes on an hour beyond that expiration point.

The rest of “Success” isn’t so much filler as repetition. There’s even a “filmmaker” in their midst, trying to DIY his own documentary within the mockumentary as hippy bookkeeping, doublespeak exposed for what it is and men denied sexual release come to a — pardon me — “head.”

Right. Sure. Fine. And?

Rating: unrated, frank sexual situations

Cast: Lexie Mountain, Yaz Perea, Khan Bayal, Asia Lee Boostani, Nell Sherman, Nina Tarr, Drew Freed, Alec Jones Trujillo.

Credits: Directed by Jay Buim, scripted by Jay Buim and Susan Juvet. A Utopia release.

Running time: 1:38