Movie Nation

Oy, Ryan Andrew Hooper and Matt Redd. We’re on to you, lads.

The director and writer of “Tollbooth” have conjured up a modern day Welsh Western in the style of “The Guard,” with the whole enterprise basically an homage to the writer-directors Martin McDonagh and his brother John Michael McDonagh.

It lacks the Catholic subtexts, the operatic violence and the showy McDonagh style. The setting and characters are Welsh and not Irish. But there’s enough spark in the dialogue, novelty in the twists and foreboding in the way the characters eyeball their fate to make the connection clear and the tribute to the masters an affectionate and entertaining one.

If it’s not on a par with the works of the McDonagh Brotherss, it’s still a droll, dark homage that works.

Veteran character actor Michael Smiley (“Rogue One” to “The Nun,” “Free Fire” and “The Lobster”) is the title character. That’s what everybody calls the 60ish loner who takes tolls on a remote, narrow and dangerous Welsh backroad.

He sits and reads (“Stoner”), eats his lunch and deals with so few drivers that the job seems like a make-work project.

Don’t ask him which ferry you should take or what time they run.

“I’m not a timetable.”

And for the love of Pete, don’t you dare rob him. This guy has a past. This guy has friends.

“I’ll expect recompense, if not retribution,” he mutters into the phone. He has minions (Iwan Rheon and Paul Kaye) at his beck and call.

But the anarchic “triplets” (Gwyneth Keyworth) who threatened him and held him up at gunpoint, local characters bopping about in a 1961 Morris Minor convertible with a novelty horn that plays “Dixie,” pay that no heed. Everybody knows who they are and they have no notion of “consequences.”

And they’re not the only ones who have brought the threat of violence to this man “in the middle of nowhere, but really in the middle of everything.”

“Tollbooth” is framed in “a long story” told to the local constable (Annes Elwy of the Welsh thriller “The Feast”) in search of answers from the bloke even she only knows as “Tollbooth,” a fellow with a lot of explaining to do.

The plot is a “You understand who you’re dealing with” tale of actions, recriminations and an ancient grudge of the “I done a terrible thing a long time ago” school. It’s told out of order, with some scenes repeated as we see a convertible driving toff (Gary Beadle) show up, watch a farmer extorted and start to understand the “operation” being run through this remote tollbooth.

We pick up on the dynamics of a whole village — or at least its pub — “protecting” Tollbooth’s real identity, and start to learn about secrets and meet the Elvis impersonator/gang-leader Dixie (Evelyn Mok), a tough broad with a psychopathic henchman (Darren Evans) whose mumble is so pronounced only she understands him.

And yes, every single character and wrinkle laid out above could have come from this McDonagh (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) or that one (“Calvary”).

I’m not pointing that out to jab the filmmakers. After all, if you’re going to imitate others, imitate the best, right? And the bottom line is, “Tollbooth” works, even if it plays as more of a surface skim of guilt, grudges, revenge and remorse.

Smiley plays Tollbooth with an understated patience and calm, even when others seem to have the drop on him. Elwy gives us a bead on young but not exactly “green” member of Heddlu, not as pissed as she should be about being out of the loop about Tollbooth, but with other issues on her mind.

Rheon (“Game of Thrones”) does what he can with a character that’s like a Welsh survey of every punk Colin Farrell played back in the day.

And watch for a tasty turn by ex-Bond and Indiana Jones villain Julian Glover in the finale.

It’s not a dazzling debut feature. But Hooper and Redd ensure that it’s a tidy, tough and entertaining one, and that any reminders of the films its borrowing from just add to the fun.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Michael Smiley, Annes Elwy, Iwan Rheon, Evelyn Mok, Gary Beadle, Gwyneth Keyworth and Julian Glover.

Credits: Directed by Ryan Andrew Hooper, scripted by Matt Redd. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:23

It’s a crying shame Netflix doesn’t have the 2014 Korean thriller “A Hard Day” loaded up and ready for a compare-and-contrast take on “Restless,” the new French film based on it.

From the looks of “Restless,” that’s entirely by design. This comically-absurd but never quite comical tale of a corrupt cop covering his tracks in an investigation that should point straight at him could only suffer in that comparison.

The dirty cop (Franck Gastambide) has hit somebody with his car, stuffed the body in the trunk and used his jacket to cover the corpse. Where’s his ID when he runs into a National Guard roadblock? In the jacket. How’s he talk his way out of this “Step out of the car. We’re going to need to look in the trunk” (dubbed, or in French with English subtitles) trap?

I’d say “Don’t ask,” but this early first act stumble sets the tone. Lt. Blin starts a brawl and gets maced. And they still don’t look in the trunk of the BMW with the busted headlight and windshield, still don’t see the ID of the cop who just assaulted them.

The whole damned movie is like this.

Det. Blin is getting warnings from his precinct (in the provinces) that Internal Affairs is raiding the station. His mother’s dead in the hospital. His little girl is in the care of his sister. And now he’s just run over some dude in the middle of nowhere.

Why not stuff the body into his mother’s coffin? All that’ll take is disabling hospital CCTV cameras, fishing his mother’s corpse out of the morgue via ventilation shafts with the help of a crawling, occasionally-stopping to “shoot,” mechanical soldier toy, opening a coffin, resealing it with the accident victim in it and forgetting to search the dead dude for his phone.

If you thought the toy making a racket in an air duct was noisy, wait’ll you hear the dead guy’s ring tone from inside a coffin.

“Restless,” titled “Sans répit”in French, is one ridonculous situation like that after another. There was a “witness” to the accident who keeps calling. A much older cop (Simon Abkarian) storms into the police station and beats the hell out of muscular young-buck Blin, in front of witnesses. And there are zero consequences.

Gastambide is right on the cusp of adequate in playing a corrupt cop on the verge of panicking. Abkarian is menacing enough to suggest he can still hold his own in a fight. But the performances are generally on a par with the screenplay — perfunctory.

No stand-off, trap or showdown is so simple that it can’t be rendered idiotically over-complicated and insanely illogical by the screenwriters.

Director and co-writer Régis Blondeau turned in a version of “A Hard Day” that’s 15 minutes shorter than the Korean original, by Seong-hun Kim. Blondeau must have left all the parts that helped it make sense.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Franck Gastambide, Simon Abkarian, Michaël Abiteboul and Tracy Gotoas

Credits: Directed by Régis Blondeau, scripted by Régis Blondeau and Julien Colombani. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

The director of “Crank” did this?

Reduced to working with the “canceled” Mel (not really), with Mel reduced to second billing, after Cole Hauser?

Some of Mel’s “fallen star in the movie wilderness” genre pictures haven’t been bad. This. Looks. Dreadful.

Perhaps you’ve missed the phenomenon that is British comedienne Catherine Tate, and the most outrageous character from Brit TV’s “The Catherine Tate Show.”

Well, she’s got her own movie, and after the Brits have a go at it, you might want to stream it.

Sure, it looks like “Mama’s Family” with a British edge and a modern “Lissen up, Millennials” pop about it.

But hey, could be fun.

He missed a train home after visiting his family in Glasgow on the anniversary of his mother’s death.

But as grumps and ducks into the tiny club called King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut instead, we get the tiniest glimpse of the night’s musical bill. Scrawled at the bottom of the chalkboard is an afterthought, perhaps even chalked on by the “cheeky” unknown band themselves — “Oasis.” That fateful night, our narrator assures us, “changed history.”

“Creation Stories” is a drugs, not-really-sex and Jesus and Mary Chain/Oasis history seen through the eyes of and heard through the c-word-cluttered Glaswegian accent of Ewen Bremner as record impresario and “stupid ginger gargoyle” Alan McGee.

Every movie about any British musical phenomenon of the post-Beatles era is, in its way, an inferior copy of “24 Hour Party People.” “Creation Stories” even covers some of that same ground, with our hero (Leo Flanagan plays him as a teen) remembering the night he and his Bowie/Thin Lizzy-obsessed mates saw The Sex Pistols on British TV and decided that was who they wanted to be,

But this muddy, murky dramedy — starring a “Trainspotting” alumnus, giving us the barest glimpses of this or that Red Letter Date Brit Musical Moment and burdened with occasionally indecipherable accents — is a winner.

“Creation Stories” takes its title from McGee’s memoir, which was named for the groundbreaking record label he founded and ran in the ’80s and ’90s It’s a scrambling “seat of the pants” movie that, like McGee, demands that you meet it on his own terms.

The framing device is a long LA interview the drugs-and-ego-tripping McGee gives to an LA reporter (Suki Waterhouse) in the ’90s, a common vehicle for telling tales of a famous person’s life, real or fictional.

McGee grew up in a house with a brutish dad (Richard Jobson) determined to beat the “wearing your sister’s make-up” out of a son he’s decided will become “a qualified electrician,” like him.

Alan McGee had bigger dreams. We follow him to London and see his first steps into the music scene playing with bands like The Drains and The Laughing Apple.

“I didn’t have any talent, which limited my options some.”

But he did have an ear, and with a team he describes as “accidental alchemists,” they started a club, then record labels, and signing bands like Television Personalities, My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream and finally Oasis made their names, allowing this always-broke loan-shark-financed label to leave its mark.

A running gag — every band McGee hypes, from his earliest days to Oasis, is “going to be BIGGER than U-2!”

This Nick Moran film skips through a lot of those “creation stories,” save for the Oasis one. Magazine covers and even that tonight’s-musical-line-up chalkboard with Oasis on it are on the screen for what seems like split seconds. Only the Oasis rise is give much musical screen time.

What “Creation” does instead is follow McGee down the familiar rabbit hole of drugs (Jason Isaac plays the one dealer-too-many who broke McGee — almost) and into political influence, his role in helping the Labour Party and Tony Blair relabel itself and Britain “Cool Britannia” in the ’90s, and McGee’s enraged cynicism about that.

Unlike most films of this genre, the man is more important than his “movement,” and that’s the focus here. And hey, if your biggest impact was giving the world Oasis, you see the point.

Not all of it works. But giddy moments and goofy touches — former Bond villain Steven Berkoff shows up as “my inspiration,” the ghost of infamous 1930s novelist, occultist, thinker and druggy Alastair Crowley — put “Creation Stories” over.

And Bremner, even when we can’t understand every word coming out of that haggis and whisky-sotted gob, wholly inhabits this self-destructive yet idealistic tyro who so shaped his era that he himself almost became “bigger than U-2.”

Rating: unrated, drugs, profanity galore, a hint of sex

Cast: Ewen Bremner, Suki Waterhouse, Leo Flanagan, Jason Isaac, Seána Kerslake with Steven Berkhoff as Alastair Crowley.

Credits: Directed by Nick Moran, scripted by Dean Cavanagh and Irvine Welsh, based on Alan McGee’s memoir of the same title. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:45

The fractious family dealing with the death of a matriarch or patriarch comedy — or drama — dates from the Greeks. So finding some new way of coming at it has proven a challenge over the decades.

But COVID provided one that director and co-writer Stephanie Laing and a vast crew of “names” overcame with “Family Squares.” It’s a cute and quirky COVID comedy built on Zoom calls, big secrets, sibling estrangement and amusingly “judgy” banter.

Anyone predisposed to like the off-center line-readings of Judy Greer, the curmudgeonly cracks of June Squibb, Earth Mama weariness of Margot Martindale, the blunt “honesty” of Anne Dowd and the late career realization Henry Winkler is still pretty damn funny — just to name the elder stateswomen and men of the cast — should get a kick from this.

Squibb plays the no-nonsense Mama Mabel who begat a daughter (Martindale) who had five children, leading to a couple of great-grandchildren as well. Mabel also gave birth to a feckless, self-absorbed and oh-so-Californian touchy-feely son (Winkler).

Greer, Billy Magnussen, Casey Wilson, Timothy Simons and Scott MacArthur play the grandchildren, each dealing with some sort of crisis, each overly dependent on “Granny” in ways that will become obvious. Elsie Fisher and MacLaren Laing play the great grandchildren, one dealing with an earlier loss that has her lashing out at her stumbling, needy dad (Simons), the other stuck on a road trip with his shattered, even-needier mom (Greer) who is RVing her way through Arizona to escape a divorce and pandemic.

The estimable Sam Richardson plays the funeral director.

“Shall we get down to the business of bereavement?” “Can I just STOP you right there?”

And Zoe Chao is the hospice nurse who presides over everybody who dials in to see Mabel Worth draw her last breaths.

Zoom? “It’s like watching the f—–g ‘Jetsons'” may be the pithiest summary of that experience ever.

Uncle Bobby (Winkler), who gets on everybody’s nerves, is quick to speak up and quicker to jump the gun on Mabel’s status.

“It’s her death rattle, it’s her soul trying to say ‘Goodbye.'”

Mabel does eventually pass, but she left behind videos giving hard-nosed advice about stumbling members of the family (most of them) and revealing wrongdoing of others, and reminding one and all “You’ve all been acting like jackasses” for the past year. The dings are quick to come and cut to the core. Noting a posh Zoom backdrop in a sibling’s kitchen — “How much did GRANDMA spend on that remodel?”

“I just want you to focus on your family and focus on you. You’ve never had a problem doing that in the past.”

The self-published author (Scott MacArthur), perhaps a war hero, at least in his mind — “I should write the obit. Have you had a chance to read my book?”

The funeral director doubles as an estate lawyer. Wait, what? “I AM in the Penny Saver now,” he chirps, angling for more business.

There’s also Mabel’s younger wife (Anne Dowd) back in New York, struggling to deal with how she’s been left out of much of this planning.

Sibling rivalry breaks down into “Look, we GET it, you’re BOTH the saddest.”

And every so often, the unseen narrator (Rob Reiner, sounding like he was recorded on a cellphone during a Zoom call) quotes George Burns and tries to move things along.

In terms of production values, “Family Squares” falls somewhere between the slick, purpose-made studio-backed romances “(Locked Down”) and the sea of more DIY affairs made by filmmakers hoping to be the first to initiate the “Lockdown” genre and use the limitations of a lockdown to his or her advantage.

The cast, as you’d expect, is superb, with every single player, many of them longtime audience favorites, delivering. The women are singularly impressive, so much so that even Chao brings such a zing to the hospice nurse that you forget she’s barely in it.

No, this isn’t deep. But there are some surprises and just enough laughs. If you’ve ever dealt with family over the death of a relative, the sting of recognition alone is worth an extra giggle or two.

Rating: R for language (profanity).

Cast: June Squibb, Judy Greer, Henry Winkler, Margot Martindale, Zoe Chao, Sam Richardson, Billy Magnussen, Casey Wilson, Timothy Simons, Scott MacArthur, Elsie Fisher, MacLaren Laing and Anne Dowd, narrated by Rob Reiner.

Credits: Directed by Stephanie Laing, scripted by Stephanie Laing and Brad Morris. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:30

Neal McDonagh, Christina Ochoa, Tommy Flanagan and Jason Scott Lee star in this little people against the mob thriller, opening April 1.

Darby isn’t big on thinking things through. Rash decisions, lashing out, acting on impulse, that’s how you end up in your seventh stint of rehab, too jaded to mask your cynicism about the process.

A phone call telling her that Mom’s in the hospital with an aneurysm and that she “may not make it” prompts another impulse. Steal a couple of tools that’ll help you steal a car, and take off for Salt Lake.

But the weather’s closing the highways. And holing up in an Interstate rest area during a blizzard, she hears the cries from a van in the parking lot. A kid’s been kidnapped. Somebody among the four folks waiting out the weather inside is a child trafficker.

With no cell service and little history of rational decisions under pressure, what will Darby do?

“No Exit” is a claustrophobic, minimalistic and sometimes paranoid thriller, just five people trapped together, with at least two of them knowing a secret and one trying to figure out a way to save a little girl.

It’s probably not paranoid enough. But as the story gives away this or that secret too early, it compensates with new wrinkles, feeds the viewer, the heroine and the kidnapper clues about what’s to come and what will be used to make that happen.

Havana Rose Liu, just seen in “The Sky is Everywhere” and Netflix’s “The Chair,” impresses as our lead, a young woman who gave up and keeps giving up, until that phone call gives her purpose, and that child in the van delivers moral clarity. Darby’s problem solving might seem a stretch, but Liu makes her wariness and ability to lie/improvise on the fly feel lived in.

Dale Dickey, Danny Ramirez, David Rysdahl and Dennis Haysbert are her fellow shut-ins, and suspects. The script and the casting throws doubt into the mix and encourages us to overthink things. Wait, did they cast him/her to throw us off the scent?

The dark and snowy outdoors are more convincingly snowy than frigid, and a rest area undergoing renovations gives the tale for too many options for mischief, plotting off to one side, and weapons.

Director Damien Power (“Killing Ground”) and the screenwriters, working from a Taylor Adams novel, trip us up just enough to keep this interesting and serve up plenty of violence — some of it torturous — to show us the high stakes.

Dickey and Haysbert are the stand-outs in the cast, playing a married couple with their own way of bickering.

“I don’t LIKE that guy.” “You don’t KNOW that guy.” “I’ve known PLENTY of ‘THAT guy.'”

As child kidnapping/trafficking thrillers go — and yes, there have been scores of these — “No Exit” barely stands out from the pack and overreaches at times. But it puts us in somebody’s snow-caked shoes and dares us to reason or fight our way out of this with her, which is all you can ask.

Rating: R for strong violence, language and some drug content

Cast: Havana Rose Liu, Dale Dickey, Danny Ramirez, David Rysdahl and Dennis Haysbert

Credits: Directed by Damien Power, scripted by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, based on the Taylor Adams novel. A 20th Century release on Hulu.

Running time: 1:35

A loud round of applause for Netflix for giving that master of dark French whimsy Jean-Pierre Jeunet, creator of “Delicatessen,” “Amelie” and “The City of Lost Children” money to make one of his twisted tales in his inimitable eye-candy style.

But it’s a crying shame “BigBug,” the Netflix film that resulted, is as plastic as Saran Wrap, as warm as Saran Wrap and as amusing as a puppy wrapped in Saran Wrap.

His big idea for the streaming service as another “trapped in one building” story (“Delicatessen”) in which future humans, absurdly reliant on AI, are locked in their houses as the AI “Singularity” is achieved and “Terminator: Judgement Day” begins.

Jeunet & Co. (co-writer Guillaume Laurant) try to wring pathos, thrills and laughs out of ridiculous people trying to outsmart machines, with the added bonus that their household “mecas” (mechanical), robots, are sympathetic to their humans and want to BE human, and so help out as best they can.

The “Jetsons” eye candy ‘bots, fashions, household gadgets and whatnot are impressive enough that the filmmaker pauses to take in brainy bot “Einstein” or Monique (Claude Perron), the maid robot who customizes herself to please her human owners in ways that include sexual ones.

That’s what’s going on with the household ‘bots. They’re coddling and ingratiating themselves with the humans trapped inside when “The Big Jam” (a massive self-driving car traffic jam) turns out to be the harbinger of the robot apocalypse. Can these “family” robots prove their humanity and help save the actual humans?

The cyborg enforcer/security robots from high tech Yonyx all look like Francois Levantal dressed up as a RoboCop member of the Borg. These cyborgs are hosting popular reality TV shows and running for president. And they’re scary as all get out, equipped with lasers and new rules and laws that they themselves created to facilitate their take-over.

But why should they fret over humans fighting back? None of them can get out of their “Smart” houses.

The jokes are lame, either in English or French with English subtitles. Jeunet is better known for twisted sight gags, and there’s just one of those that really paid off for me — a hypnotized ditz (Claire Chust) is ordered to do something, convinced she has boundless strength, by a cyborg. She proceeds to drag all the other divorced parents, their hooking-up teen kids and a neighbor all the way across the living room to do the evil Yonyx Corp’s bidding.

Those French and their pantomime.

The people playing machines (Perron, Levantal and Alban Lenoir) stand out in the cast, but not for doing anything new with the “I’m stiff and jerking around because I’m a robot, get it?” bit. They stand out mainly because the humans playing humans are mostly dull, even the ditz.

Jeunet can’t even find much that’s funny about a cloned eternally obnoxious Jack Russell terrier, “the neighbor’s dog,” after introducing him.

After “Micmacs” (2009) I pretty much gave up on Jeunet, who had quite a run from the post-apocalyptic farce “Delicatessen” through “Lost Children,” “Alien Resurrection” (an inventive if not brilliant sequel), “Amelie” and “A Very Long Engagement.” So had film producers and financiers, judging from his slim filmography since then.

But I still applaud Netflix for giving him one last shot. Even though he blew it, “BigBug” still looks like nothing else that’s hit the screen in years. It’s just that he used to tell more touching and more whimsically interesting stories with those quirky settings.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity

Cast: Elsa Zylberstein, Isabelle Nanty, Claude Perron, Stéphane De Groodt, Youssef Hajdi, François Levantal, Claire Chust, Marysole Fertard, Alban Lenoir, Hélie Thonnat and Dominique Pinon.

Credits: Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, scripted by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51