Movie Nation

“Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf” is as mercurial and scattered as its teen heroine, a 17 year-old struggling to process identity, multiple family crises, hormones and the unwanted attentions of “a friend of the family.”

It’s a movie with a lot more promise and ambition than its lurching, stumbling execution can do justice to. The second feature film by Susan Youssef (“Habibi Rasak Kharban”) is a melodrama that teeters between frustrating and infuriating.

Marjoun (Veracity Butcher) is a teenaged daughter of Islamic Lebanese parents, just another high school kid in ripped jeans and black tees coping with high school in the only hometown she’s ever known — Little Rock, Arkansas.

She has a mother (Clara Khoury) who is on medication, given to impulsive rages and naivete that seems as much a part of her culture and upbringing as her mental illness. Marjoun’s little sister (Maram Aljahmi) has taken up the hijab — at age 10 — for reasons never made clear. To please her mother, maybe? That puts a target on her at middle school. She’s being bullied.

And then there’s Dad (Tarek Bishara). He’s in jail on a host of politically popular charges, all stemming from donating cash he earned from the family convenience store to the wrong Middle Eastern groups.

With her testy, can’t-read-English mother checked-out, her sheltered sister who can’t even feed herself and her dad in the clutches of “the system” with only a public defender to help, Marjoun needs to step up. But how?

Marjoun, a smart kid, enters a cash prize essay contest and asks one and all for money to help get her father proper counsel. She even hits up the boy (Alexander Biglane) she’s just started dating.

Her cracked mother makes a bad situation worse by inviting an actor-friend (Dominic Rains) to come “help with the store.” All he wants to help with is Marjoun.

“Sami is a man of God,” Mom prattles, as if she has a clue. Khoury never lets this mother character warrant sympathy. She serves up a mentally ill woman wholly incapable of making adult decisions, slapping and lashing out at her children, “medicated” or not. And she likes the idea of Sami coming on to her teenaged daughter.

Youssef slow-walks her young heroine through this minefield, struggling to show us how someone utterly inexperienced when confronted with all this would try to process it. Marjoun needs to save her father, wants to rally support in their Islamic community, desperately needs cash and has to cope with the cartoonish but criminally serious lechery of a 20something actor who comes on strong.

“Marjoun” slowly whips the viewer back and forth, letting us see rather than have explained to us Marjourn’s decision to “cover up” herself, watching the conflict she’s feeling between her culture and her environment play out over her desire for a motorcycle.

There’s good stuff here — Butcher’s title role turn, for instance. But Youssef loses track of it as she shifts points of view willy nilly and throws everything and anything at this family, little of it landing with any emotional impact.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Veracity Butcher, Clara Khoury, Maram Aljahmi, Alexander Biglane, Tarek Bishara and Dominic Rains.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Susan Youssef. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:20

Major points for style in this trailer for the Boy Harsher “Twin Peaks” meets Lady Jason thriller “The Runner.”

Shudder will release this Jan.16.

A good Spanish drama about a stubborn tender of sheep holding out against developers should join the collection of The Jean Rhenn Public Library, Seminole County’s finest.

Here’s my review of “El Pastor.”

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It takes a good, long time for Jonathan Cenzual Burley’s “El Pastor (The Shepherd)” to become the thriller that comes to mind the moment you hear its description. But he makes sure that in this gritty tale of a lone-holdout who won’t sell his land to developers, throwing his shortsighted neighbors into a tizzy, it’s time well spent.

The Spanish drama constantly echoes the many Hollywood versions of this “lone-holdout” formula film, but the patience, detail and slow-simmer-to-slow-boil plot set it apart from its genre antecedents. It’s good.

Miguel Martín impresses as Anselmo, a lonely shepherd living outside a village whose only significant employer is a hog abattoir, a slaughterhouse for the pigs destined to be the jamon the Spanish crave from birth.

Anselmo lives a simple, Spartan life — a gas stone, a dog, Pillo, who helps with the sheep, and electricity so that he doesn’t have to read by candlelight.

That and his stops at the local bar are the only indulgences he allows himself. At 55, anyone else would see this as a rut, a dead end. But when developers come and give him the full-court press sales pitch — they want his land as part of their scheme for a planned community of houses, shops and a civic center — he politely brushes them off. Not interested.

They’re offering his a “more than fair” (in Spanish with English subtitles) price. Probably not enough to support him into his dotage, but “fair.” He’s just not going to change.

“He must be a little slow,” they figure. Not to worry. Local peer pressure should change his mind.

With big money, big debts and miscalculated “logic,” meat-packer Julian (Alfonso Mendiguchía) and his hotheaded employee Paco (Juan Luis Sara) figure this is a done deal. It isn’t.

Friends and others warn Anselmo that he’s “in for a hard time.” They have no idea. Things can only get messier from there.

Little-used leading man Martín, of “Celda 211,” maintains a “stubborn” without seeming that way posture, giving us a simple man who prefers a knowable status quo to the “promises” of the deal, which his land is the linchpin for.

Burley shows us the ulterior motives of the developers and those in their thrall, but doesn’t develop the light flirtation Anselmo has with the local librarian (Maribel Iglesias). This is all about desperate people whose desperation seems self-generated, a guy who fits in well enough most times, but has a growing list of enemies when he dares cling to what he has.

The striking central Spanish plains settings and self-contained world Burley captures here is what sets this formulaic film apart. That, and its patience. We know things are going to come to a head. He makes us wait to see how, and then provides a surprise or two in how that happens.

Not the first time we’ve seen this sort of story, but not a bad variation of it.

Rating: Unrated, violence

Cast: Miguel Martín, Juan Luis Sara, Alfonso Mendiguchía and Maribel Iglesias

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jonathan Cenzual Burley. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:38

Three generations of owners of the same British house cope with “change” and mysterious twists in their circumstances and fate.

The look of this vermin and bugs-animated series (Helena Bonham Carter and Matthew Goode are among those doing the voices) sets it apart, and it gives a big boost to veteran stop motion animators who get a high profile Netflix project that lifts their profiles and could allow many of them to graduate from animated shorts to features.

Jan 14, only on Netflix.

Who’s up for a “Lost City of Z,” “Romancing the Stone” mashup?

With Daniel Radcliffe in the uh Danny DeVito role?

This could be cute. Pitt had “Lost City of Z” rights for a while. Getting a comedy out of it? Smart play.

Let’s cut to the chase with “The King’s Man,” shall we?

The movie doesn’t come to life, pop off the screen and make any impression at all until Rasputin shows up.

All this other “origin story” of the Kingsman SECRET secret service, its founding during the bloodbath that was World War I, is mostly just stuff and nonsense, and bloody dispiriting nonsense at that.

But when Lord Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) and his teen son Conrad (Harris Dickinson of TV’s Getty series, “Trust”) are shipped off to Russia to deal with this “mad monk” who has the Tsar’s ear, “King’s Man” comes to dark, deathly and damned funny life.

Rhys Ifans is charged with bringing the fun to this stolid, self-serious comic book adaptation. And the scruffy beanstalk who stole “Notting Hill” is just the man for the job of The Monk The Russians Could Not Kill.

Every plummy turn of phrase, delivered in silly Slavic-accented English, tickles.

“You dare to QVESTION ze vessel of ze LORD?”

With a little help from stunt doubles and special effects this Rasputin does a manic Russian sabre dance set to…Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance.”

And as villains go, Rasputin was the Michael Myers of his day. He took a licking and kept on ticking.

Ifans’ turn, making the mystic someone with a hint of actual supernatural healing powers, a sweet tooth and a taste for sex of every and all varieties, is a hoot. He’s so good that he almost stops this two hour and 11 minute death march cold. And “stopping” is the last thing this monstrosity needed.

It’s not really the cast’s fault. Well, not much their fault. Director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn has an impossible time of making the run-up to The Great War anything but tragic. The crowned heads of Europe hurtle towards the inevitable, with Rasputin, Lenin, Gavrilo Princip and his co-conspirators, the out-of-date Lord Kitchener (Charles Dance) either hastening the disaster, or unable to forestall it.

A cute touch — having Tom Hollander play the cousins King George, Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicolas — a pointed reminder of the political system that helped cause the war, and was mostly destroyed because of it.

Fiennes plays Britain’s most famous landed and titled pacifist, a man who lost his wife as they tried to provide aid to the victims in a South African concentration camp during the Boer War. Lord Oxford’s vow to keep their son safe is why he won’t allow young Conrad to enlist in 1914. He sees the war that this quickly became, a mass slaughter meatgrinder trapped in the trenches of Flanders and France.

“It’s not fighting. It’s dying.”

But when Kitchener summons him to form this back-door spy service to manipulate events and alter the course of history, the Oxfords are on board. Scheming, spying, bespoke tailoring and derring do ensue.

Truth be told, the movie never crawls out from under the pall of those opening acts. It’s hard to lighten the tone after your movie starts in a concentration camp and stumbles into the trenches.

Fiennes is a terrific actor who never gets to play the droll touch the movie desperately needed. Dickinson is rather lost in the scale of it all, not having the screen charisma to carry his share of the load.

Gemma Arterton and Djimon Hounsou, as other enlistees (and servants) in “the service” just add to the whole asinine noblesse oblige of it all.

If the world learned nothing from that war and bloody century that followed, and apparently it learned little, it should have been that the rich and entitled classes made these messes and profited from them, with or without a little self-serving self-sacrifice on their part. And no comic book faked history — including well-staged archduke assassination attempts — can shake the gloom off that.

“King’s Man” doesn’t send up the tragic comedy of the start of The Great War, doesn’t rewrite history in any particularly interesting, illuminating or entertaining way. It just gets stuck in the mud, like the millions whose lives were squandered in it.

Only Rhys Ifans’ performance — silly, sinister and over-the-top — suggests that anyone involved “got the joke,” as it were.

Rating: R for sequences of strong/bloody violence, language, and some sexual material

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Harris Dickinson, Gemma Arterton, Djimon Hounsou, Charles Dance, Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans.

Credits: Directed by Matthew Vaughn, scripted by Matthew Vaughn and Karl Gajdusek, based on the Mark Millar comic book. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 2:11

There are worse ways to spend a holiday matinee than sitting with the kids watching and singing along with a “Sing” movie.

“Sing 2” is just as long, just as childishly-plotted and almost manic in its haste to hurtle from tune to tune. But it’s harmless and harmonious, which is the bottom line all parents look for when entertaining the 8-and-unders.

“Say a Little Prayer” all you want, but what other movie can you imagine that would have the nerve to serve up Reese Witherspoon as a pig covering Ariana Grande, she wolf Halsey singing Alicia Keys’ “Girl on Fire” and a porcupine-voiced Scarlett Johansson putting heart and soul into “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For?”

A little Rodgers & Hammerstein (“Something Wonderful”), a dab of Steve Miller (“Abra Cadabra”), a slice of Steve Winwood (“Higher Love”), a blast of Prince (“Let’s Go Crazy”), a sample of The Struts (“Could Have Been Me”) and a cold cool splash of Coldplay (“Sky Full of Stars”) whiz by in a musical blur sometimes performed by the original artists, but most often covered by the singers/actors playing animated “all creatures great and small,” critters who just want to “put on a show.”

That’s our plot. Koala Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) is still out to prove that “You’re Never Too Small to Hit the Big Time” (song idea for MM for “Sing 3” — Webb Wilder, look’em up). But he and his little band of dreamers — porcine Rosita (Witherspoon) and Gunther (Nick Kroll, the comic highlight), timid elephant Meena (Tori Kelly), singing gorilla Johnny (Taron Egerton) and guitar goddess Ash (Johansson) — still haven’t proven themselves in “the entertainment capital.”

A talent scout from there blows them off. So there’s nothing for it but to catch a bus to Redshore City and make their pitch to the impresario himself, the short-tempered white wolf named Mr. Crystal (Bobby Cannavale).

He isn’t bowled over, but Gunther’s mad notion of a sci-fi musical revue, “Out of this World,” changes Crystal’s mind. One condition? They’d better deliver the leonine legend Clay Calloway (Bono), a once major figure in music whose tunes they want to use, in person, singing a role. One later condition? Crystal’s daughter (Halsey) wants to be in the show, too.

The big parent appeal of this impressively-animated spectacle is the song line-up, tunes many who grew up in the ’90s-2000s and now have children of their own will know by heart. No, not everyone will recognize the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (“Heads Will Roll,” covered by ScarJo), but the Weeknd’s “Cant’ Feel My Face” is represented, Bomba Estero is here, and Billie Eilish and Elton John.

The movie surrounding the tunes isn’t all that, despite Illumination’s dazzling, colorful animation. But the ensemble crooning “Where the Streets Have No Name” and Shawn Mendes’ “There’s Nothing Holding Me Back” makes the time and the movie fly by so fast that you won’t mind.

Rating: PG for some rude material and mild peril/violence

Cast: The voices of Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Scarlet Johansson, Letitia Wright, Nick Kroll, Halsey, Bobby Cannavale, Taron Egerton, Tori Kelly, Pharrell Williams and Bono.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Garth Jennings. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:50

Major points for style and just plain kinkiness go to Canadian Bruce LaBruce for his latest cinematic toying with taboos, “Saint-Narcisse.”

When you see and review 1,000 movies a year, any filmmaker who makes you sit up and go, “Well, that’s weird” and “never seen THAT” gets to take bow.

The director of “Gerontophilia,” the “gay ‘Harold and Maude,'” the groundbreaking queer horror film “Otto: Up with Dead People” and the controversial “L.A. Zombies” crosses lines again with a film that takes “self-love” to a dark and twisted extreme, and has a little fun with it along the way.

Dominic (Félix-Antoine Duval) is “a beautiful guy” who doesn’t need to be reminded of it by strangers. He can see that in the mirror, which he stares into a lot more than is wholly healthy. Dominic is 22, lives with and takes care of his Quebecoise grandmother, fending off her “When are you getting married?” questions, fantasizing about having instant, impulsive sex with any random fellow beauty he runs into at the laundromat.

The thing is, the real pleasure in that imaginary raw-dogging is in spying the shocked passers-by looking in the window, and seeing his own gorgeous reflection in “the act” in that window.

Dominic walks the streets with a Polaroid instant-camera, snapping shots of himself from different angles in different locations, handing those snaps to strangers. It’s 1972, and he’s just invented “the selfie” and “Instagram.”

But grandma was holding out on him, something that only becomes clear after her death. She and his late father raised him, telling him his mother died. But locked in a strongbox in granny’s closet is evidence to the contrary. His mother is alive. She sent letters. There’s nothing for it but to motorbike to distant Saint-Narcisse, meet the woman in the woods the locals call “a witch,” and meet the much younger woman “who never seems to age” living with her.

Once there, camping out in a cemetery next to a grave with his name on it, he figures out that other people were told HE was dead.

And then there’s this secretive and seemingly perverse “order” of Catholic monks secluded in a monastery on the edge of town, a group he spies on as they smoke, skinny dip and horseplay the way you’d never imagine monks carrying on.

The bilingual Félix-Antoine Duval — the film is in English or subtitled French — makes a curious, confused and yet cocky leading man out of Dominic. He has the confidence of the beautiful-and-I-know-it, brashly stripping and taking an outdoor shower in front of the furious young woodswoman (Alexandra Petrachuk) he finds his mother living with.

Mom (Tania Kontoyanni) has but to look at him to “recognize my own son.” The power struggle that ensues in that house is but a sideshow for the self-absorbed, self-loving bisexual Dominic. He spies one of those monks, and eventually we figure out what or who has his attention.

LaBruce feeds us three points of view, slipping away from Dominic to show us mother Beatrice and lover or daughter figure Irene’s quarrels, and the kinky intrigues of the Saint-Narcisse monastery, where paranoid Father Andrew (Andreas Apergis) may have reasons for his paranoia.

LaBruce juxtaposes the beautiful/accusatory Jesus hanging on the cross in that monastery with the goings-on there, and in the movie in general.

He pokes heteronormative judgement and homosexual narcissism in equal measure.

With “Saint-Narcisse,” he gives us a young man’s search for his identity, an early ’70s “know yourself” fanatic who feels incomplete for reasons he can’t put a finger on. He will find answers, and what he does with that “discovery” will be merely the latest and greatest taboo Bruce LaBruce gets around to in his unsettling and faintly amusing riff on sexual identity and the outer limits of searching for it.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Félix-Antoine Duval, Tania Kontoyanni, Alexandra Petrachuk and Andreas Apergis

Credits: Directed by Bruce LaBruce, scripted by Bruce LaBruce and Martin Gerard. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:41

“Son of Monarchs” is a contemplative character study of a molecular biologist who studies the Monarch butterflies that winter in and around his hometown of Angangueo, Michoacán. He studies them at a university in New York, and when he’s summoned home for the funeral of the abuela who raised him, he relives some of the trauma that made him leave and copes with unfinished business with the older brother who stayed.

The latest from the director of “The Fly Room” continues his insect-centric character studies with a movie that doesn’t openly lay out where it’s going or what it’s about, but gets everything it can out of its backdrop, the annual, instinctual migration of Monarchs from all over North American back to their ancestral home to the Rosario Sanctuary and points near it in Mexico.

When you name your little boy “Mendel,” after the famous mathematician/geneticist, you’re pretty much setting his course for life. In flashbacks, the adult Mendel (Tenoch Huerta) remembers roaming the butterfly-covered forests with older brother Simón, bombarding his sibling with questions about the butterflies who fly there, secure the next generation and die.

A lot of Mendel’s questions are about life and the afterlife. There’s a reason their grandmother is raising them. Something happened to their parents.

In present-day New York, Mendel experiments with Monarch wing colors and patterns, looking for the genes that determine this or that, looking for the perfect color to use in his tattoo tribute to the winged creatures who make his hometown a tourist attraction. He’s a star pupil of his mentor (William Mapother), but a lonely loner, wholly consumed by his work.

Back in Mexico for the funeral, he participates in rites for his grandmother, rituals from the Day of the Dead. He catches up with childhood chum (Gabino Rodríguez) who joined him in the costumed festival celebrating the butterflies when they were little.

We pick up on the bad blood between him and his brother (Noé Hernández), the auditory flashbacks that capture the sounds of a flood, desperation, the modern day schism caused by the mine where his brother works and it and the “gangs” who run it ruining the habitat for the most famous of all butterflies.

Back in New York, we witness a tiny break in his work obsession when Mendel takes up with a social worker (Alexia Rasmussen) whose hobby is mastering the flying trapeze. New York, where any and all “passions” are indulged.

“Sons of Monarchs” is the sort of understated indie drama that leaves you with a wish list as you watch the closing credits.

I wish this tale told in Spanish (mostly) had more directly tied the butterflies’ fate to Mendel’s, wish there’d been more overt connection to these butterflies, “spirits of the dead” in Mexico, to Mendel and wish he’d taken a more out-front role in securing their habitat and survival.

But that’s another movie. What’s here is more subtle and intimate, getting at the trauma obliquely, making the migrating butterfly connection only in the vaguest sense.

Huerta, seen most recently in “The Forever Purge” and “Narcos: Mexico,” gives a poker-faced performance with just a hint of soul sneaking through.

And his writer-director, filling in butterfly tourism (festivals, etc) around the edges, makes the “Son of Monarchs” metaphorical point clear enough — eventually. He’s too interested in the biology of it all — chrysalis dissections, color at the genetic level — to make his point more overt.

It’s not a great film of deep insights into the human condition. But Gambis has found an arresting backdrop for a quiet, human story of loss, regret, guilt and work distraction, a movie well worth checking out just for the butterflies.

Rating: R for language (profanity)

Cast: Tenoch Huerta, Noé Hernández, Alexia Rasmussen and William Mapother.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alexis Gambis. An HBO Max release.

Running time: 1:37