Movie Nation

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

The people that brought us “The Wave” and “The Quake” annex another piece of disaster movie real-estate with “The Burning Sea,” a compact, tense and smart oil rig yarn that’s light on melodrama, heavy on facts and heartening in its environmental messaging.

It’s “Deep Water Horizon” without clear-cut villains or swaggering, one-liner-popping heroes. Yes, some of the genre tropes the Scandinavians choose to leave out are missed. But there are things this trilogy of “when things go wrong in a big way” thrillers do that Hollywood might be well-served in copying.

For starters, the Big One, when it comes, won’t likely arrive from space as asteroids or aliens. It could be Earth-bound and natural, with a heavy dose of the Arrogance of Man involved.

“Burning Sea” follows the team that operates a fancy new underwater drone on behalf of the Norwegian oil industry. Sofia (Kristine Kujath Thorp) is young and seriously smitten, but not with the tech support specialist Arthur (Rolf Kristian Larsen) who keeps Eelie, the articulated, motor-driven eel that she drives that is able to wend its way through undersea oil-rig architecture to spot problems and make or identify fixes. Sofia is in love with single-dad Stian (Henrik Bjelland), a worker on one of the scores of rigs that fuel Norway’s economy by drilling for and pumping oil out from under the North Sea.

One day, Sofia and Arthur are called on an “emergency mission” that the big boss (Bjørn Floberg) won’t disclose to them the particulars of until they’ve signed their Non-Disclosure-Agreements (NDAs).

Uh oh.

Sure enough, a rig collapsed and sank. Everybody in a suit is worried about “security” and no one seems that excited when Eelie tracks down and finds a survivor. They have just enough time to take in that video when Sofia sees something far more disturbing. Telling her boss, the aptly-named William Lie (Floberg) gets her nowhere…she thinks.

“Why don’t we leave that to the specialists,” he purrs (in Norwegian with English subtitles).

But before you can say “COVER UP,” we’re treated to a meeting with “specialists” and the government official (Christoffer Staib) in charge of this corner of the economy. Nothing is released to the press, but nothing is covered-up or sugar coated inside that meeting. They’re looking at a calamity, perhaps “something we did ourselves (man-made)” that could skill scores of people and spill “350 times” what the Deepwater Horizon disaster dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.

One can’t help but find refreshing the idea that nobody ducks the awful choices this dilemma presents to every decision maker. Steps are taken, but as is the way of such movies, things don’t go according to plan. I’ll let you guess who needs rescuing and who does that rescuing.

The “Quake” director and “Wave” screenwriter (one of them) strip the movie of a lot of conflicts that a Hollywood story would have jammed-in and any movie that wants to realistically appear “American” in this day and age would have to include.

There are no greedy corporate villains. Culpability is cultural, spread over the entire country that has gotten rich in this environmentally-catastrophic business.

There is no corporate or corporate media pushback, no politicians praising oil and rooting for the sea to catch fire, no Tucker Carlson begging for an apocalypse that he can blame on somebody his overlords want to make the scapegoat.

The Norwegians here are presented in a sort of idealized consensus-building aimed at “the greater good,” the sort of image polishing one usually associates with movies made by and about China.

“The Burning Sea” lacks the pulse-pounding ticking clock to doom of an impending earthquake or a tsunamic bearing down on our heroes, vital in “The Wave” and “The Quake.” Such an element is introduced, but the editing fritters away that edge-of-your-seat excitement, no matter how much the musical score insists it’s coming.

But those shortcomings are papered-over with a few scenes of genuine suspense and performances that go all-in on portraying these folks as slack-jawed at the scale of what they’re dealing with, but professionals ever intent on “working the problem.” Bosses soberly pass on awful news to those impacted by it, and people caught up in the maelstrom may look wild-eyed with fear, and seem manic, but they never panic.

And any time you can top your tale of crisis, calamity and heroism with sacrifice, pathos and a hopeful message, you call that a “win,” in Hollywood or Aelsund.

Rating: PG-13 for peril, some disturbing images, language and brief partial nudity

Cast: Kristine Kujath Thorp, Henrik Bjelland, Rolf Kristian Larsen and Bjørn Floberg

Credits: Directed by John Andreas Andersen, scripted by Harald Rosenløw-Eeg and Lars Gudmestad. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:44

We know the minute we see the old man strike up a conversation with the young woman that she’s a ghost. Serene, silent and spectral, it doesn’t matter that he chats as if they’re old acquaintances. Something about him (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) and her (Noutnapha Soydara) suggests that they’ve met this way, on this long dirt road in rural Laos, many times.

The latest feature from Mattie Do, the LA daughter of Laotian refugees who moved back to Laos to become the country’s “only female filmmaker,” is a quiet and ominous story set in the future, but scripted and acted like an ancient folk tale. “The Long Walk” isn’t exactly a thriller, more of a mystery. And it’s science fiction with the barest traces of that genre in its slow-moving narrative.

But whatever you call this unicorn filmed by a unicorn, it’s engrossing and arresting.

We wonder about the old man from the start. He gathers scrap to sell in his village market, gets paid via an electronic implant in his arm, and seems to always be walking, with or without that lonely young woman who knows him but never speaks.

We’ve seen skulls half-buried in the dirt, and women suffering grievous injuries. There’s someone missing from that market. And as he always seems to be around these activities, we size him up as a serial killer or a shaman, because when the cops interrogate him and poke around his house, it’s as if they suspect him and also want him to contact the missing and presumedly dead woman.

A boy (Por Silatsa) lives along that same road, the son of an ill-tempered , hard-drinking father and sickly mother. The kid sees the young woman, too. And when the old man and the boy meet, what the child is told about her and himself is troubling, mind-blowing and illuminating for this tale of the unsettled dead and the superstitious, confused living.

They’re not the only ones. The Christopher Larsen (“Creepshow”) and Douangmany Soliphanh script is cryptic, giving up in secrets in tiny, belated servings. Director Do (Larsen wrote “Dearest Sister” for her, and they co-wrote “Creepshow”) patiently doles out clues and fixates on tone and the novelty of the setting.

It may be the future, but Laotian burial practices and rituals are treated as eternal. Characters like the old man leave oranges at roadside shrines, which the ghost eats and shares with the boy. There’s modernity, and a shamanistic “commune with the dead” tradition in addition to the mystery of who these women were or are and who is making them vanish, leaving their families grasping for closure.

Deaths we witness aren’t happening in real time, but in the past, the future or some Mobius loop containing both.

The patient storytelling won’t be to every taste, and truth be told, not a whole lot happens over the course of these 111 minutes. This isn’t jolting horror, and nothing about it could be pitched as “scary.”

But Do isn’t just an “only Laotian” novelty act. She’s not making commercial films (this 2019 festival film is just now earning distribution), and while there’s always a place at film festivals for movies from an exotic, little-filmed locale set in an exotic culture, one has to hope she’ll figure out “action” and how incidents, not tone alone, make for entertaining drama that plays beyond the film festival circuit.

Still, there’s style and a vivid sense of place in this most unusual movie, a film of future tech and sonic booming jets and unelectrified farms where the work is still done by hand, the way it has been for hundreds of years.

That makes this “Walk” long, but rewarding in the end.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast:Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy, Noutnapha Soydara, Por Silatsa, Vilouna Phetmany

Credits: Directed by Mattie Do, scripted by Christopher Larsen and Douangmany Soliphanh. A Yellow Veil release.

Running time: 1:51

It isn’t his “Twilight” stardom or his piece of the Harry Potter universe that has me intrigued to see Robert Pattinson’s take on “Batman.”

The director isn’t a lure either. We’ve had Burton and Nolan. Other filmmakers’ imprint on the franchise has been fleeting.

But the startling variety of roles R. Patts has taken on, with varying degrees of success, suggest a curiosity that could make an interesting rich, reclusive and haunted Dark Knight.

“The Batman” opens March 4.

What do you make of this? VERY Japanese, really…out there.

Who do you think the title is referring to as “The Cherry Bushido?” Surely not…

Anyway, this is odd looking sword-and-sorcery and nationalism and North Korean missile provocations mashup. March 11 we shall see what we shall see.

The early scenes of Martha Coolidge’s Holocaust romance “I’ll Find You” cover over-familiar ground with a Polish classical music subtext. A flashback takes us back to the days our future lovers met, as rival tween prodigies in pre-war Lodz, Poland. The foreshadowing is obvious and we aren’t the only ones who know the awful things to come.

The only thing that distinguishes the film’s opening act is the fact that a real violinist/actress, Ursula Parker, plays one of the fiddling kids. As Rachel Rubin, she is impressive, playing the real pieces by Chopin and others. Rachel is a bit of a smarty pants who lords it over the lesser mortals at their school. And young fellow fiddler Robert Pulaski (Sebastian Croft) is intimidated by her.

Besides, “she’s Jewish and I’m Catholic. There could never be a ‘crush.'” Famous last words.

The director of “Valley Girl,” “Rambling Rose” and “Lost in Yonkers” cuts back and forth between the kids as they meet and the young adults (Adelaide Clemens of “The Great Gatsby,” and Leo Suter) re-connect just as Poland is having to pay heed to what Germany is doing in Czechoslovakia, with Rachel engaged to another and Robert on the cusp of fame, not as a violinist, but as a tenor.

And through all this, I shrugged the picture off as it just lies there, flat, uninvolving and waiting for somebody to shock it to life. That’s what happens when the great Stellan Skarsgård shows up for the second time. As a great German tenor named Benno Moser (Skarsgård’s “Mamma Mia!” voice means his singing is dubbed), he’d met Robert as a boy soprano, telling him to look him up after his voice changed. Robert (newcomer Suter, quite good) takes him up on that as he flees Poland after Rachel and her family are rounded up.

Showing up at the tenor’s estate, Robert fears he’s gambled on a German who might not be a “Good German,” and willing to help him save Rachel. The aging diva does nothing to put his mind at ease, bulling past any talk of a young woman shipped to Auschwitz. He just wants to know about the kid’s voice. C’mon, he says as he sits at the piano. A duet!

“Hitler has only got one ball,” the tenor bellows, starting in on an infamous ditty beloved by the Brits, sung to the “River Kwai” “Col. Bogey’s March. “Göring has two but very small…”

The lad has his answer, and the obligation to join in.

“Himmler is rather sim’lar, But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all!”

Skarsgård lifts the movie and makes the later acts a serious improvement over the earliest ones.

The stakes have already been raised, with death all around them. The young singer has to control his emotions when they’re called on to perform Wagner to the Fuhrer and his minions. And the opera legend gradually gets involved in trying to save the star violinist of the Auschwitz inmate orchestra.

The war goes on and on Robert’s promise that “I’ll find you” and that they’ll meet at Carnegie Hall seems more and more remote.

The leads don’t have dazzling chemistry, but that’s partly due to the script giving them few opportunities for that.

It’s a fictional story and while it more or less tracks the course of the war, start to finish there’s this jerky, lurching quality to the narrative, with little flow and zero urgency considering the woman was at a death camp, after all.

Coolidge, who has done mostly TV in recent decades, has a film with built-in pathos and stakes and beautiful music, and she only manages a scene or two that deliver anything like real emotion.

Thus “I’ll Find You” comes off like a lot of the lip-sync’d singing and mimed playing of the actors portraying musicians — fake and lacking the heart and passion necessary to pull this off.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Adelaide Clemens, Leo Suter, Ursula Parker, Sebastian Croft, Stephen Dorff, Connie Nielsen and Stellan Skarsgård.

Credits: Directed by Martha Coolidge, scripted by David S. Ward and Bozenna Intrator. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:56

So who are the Scandinavian commandoes fighting up there near the Artic Circle in this mid-apocalyptic thriller?

Maybe Russians?

March 18, on Netflix.

This March 11 thriller from RLJE and Shudder is about going home because “Your mama’s grave has been vandalized,” and realizing that hell’s bells, there’s a way on but not way OFF this island.

I can’t be the first to notice Jocelin Donahue looks like Famke Jansen, the Next Generation.

Looks like a number of driving situations I’ve stumbled into Way Down South, I tell you what.