Movie Nation

The movies tend to oversimplify the countless crimes committed against Europe by Nazi Germany. That label “Nazi” has become screen shorthand for “We don’t need to know how or why, that alone explains it.”

In “Calm at Sea,” German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff (“The Tin Drum,” the first film version of “The Handmaid’s Tale”) digs into one pivotal incident to show us the bureaucratic chain of command, the weighing of consequences, the attempts to shift, duck or share blame of an infamous turning point incident in newly-occupied France.

The story of how communist zealots, intent on replicating Russia’s October Revolution in “independent thinking” France, shoot the German officer in charge of the Nantes district, triggering a rash over-reaction from Hitler himself, makes for a grim history lesson and fascinating psychological/sociological study. It’s a logistics-and-paperwork-heavy period piece, not a thriller like the similar and superior “Anthropoid” (about an equally famous Czech assassination). But it makes the viewer look at state sanctioned massacres and how they happen in a new way.

The focal point is young Guy Môquet (Léo-Paul Salmain), a teenager being held in a coastal detention facility run by the French, largely on behalf of their German masters. He runs footraces for the prize of a bar of soap, attends classes and flirts with the fair Odette (Victoire Du Bois) through the fence at the neighboring women’s camp.

He recites poetry to her, compares her to Lenin’s wife (he’s a leftist, son of a communist) and she laughs at “What a child” he is (in French, with English subtitles).

Young Guy and everybody else at this camp figures they’ll serve their time — for political activities, or pickpocketing — and go home. It’s 1941, France has been under German and Vichy control for a year, and the “real” German army is busy invading the Soviet Union.

But the eager hit squad that takes out Lt. Holtz in Nantes is about to change that. They underestimate the reliability of their pistols (another officer escapes), and these Party Members in good standing wholly underestimate the German response. Hitler hears of it, and we start to see his dismaying orders ripple through the “1000 officers” in charge of France, the German chain of command.

Général Otto von Stülpnagel (André Jung) fumes that “I am a soldier, NOT a butcher!” (in German, with English subtitles). His underlings kvetch about appearances, how this will “play” all over France, legalities and the French psyche. As if von Stülpnagel doesn’t know they can’t rule France without “collaborators.” The “individualistic” French are sure to flip out. “We are NOT in POLAND,” he rages, to no avail.

A French police prefect (Sébastien Accart) is ordered to come up with a list of 150 names — communists, Gaullists, and “see if there are any Jews.” He, and then his bosses in Vichy, insist that the Germans use the rule of law, or that at least they be forced to do the selecting, deciding who lives and dies. “No women,” he is told. Kids? Why not?

This will eventually reach the camp, where the defiantly French communists in the barracks insist they have a “right to music” (a smuggled in radio), and carry on with a modicum of defiance even when warning notices spring up around town, Germans show up to order their French guards into action, “selecting,” and the wheels of mass murder are set in motion.

Schlöndorff attempts to create a ticking clock, showing the “hour” or two everyone involved has to set things in motion, or else. He shows us the debates within the trio of assassins about whether or not to turn themselves in, the barracks debate over what might be done and if their deaths with have that October Revolution galvanizing effect of making them martyrs. And we see the German conscripts, green and young occupation troops, struggling to flirt with or at least fraternize with the locals, exchanging “You ever shoot a man?” worries and suffering awful attacks of conscience when that “duty” is hurriedly thrust upon them.

Their field officers served in Poland and scream at their charges to man up and be German soldiers. The viewer is allowed to infer that mass shootings are part of the job.

And the urbane writer and general staff officer Ernst Jünger (Ulrich Matthes) takes it all in, writes it all down and hides his distaste for the buck-passing, inhumane order-following he sees, and tries to defend his own part in this with a French opera singer (Arielle Dombasle) he’s trying to seduce.

“I prefer the role of witness,” he shrugs. His writings and reports are a major source for the screenplay, as are the journals of the various French men, and the letters the condemned were allowed to write wives, sweethearts and family.

“Calm at Sea” is an orderly, unrushed and almost “calm” film of progression through the steps of this war crime in the making. There are meetings, meetings and more meetings, with the Germans conferring with the French gendarmes and trying not to make it look like they’re giving them orders when they’re telling them to select, separate out and inform the prisoners who will be shot if the “real” suspects aren’t fingered by the populace, or fail to turn themselves in.

The field officers know the drill, but struggle to keep their conscripts in line and bucked up for the “orders” at hand. Some of the infantry can’t keep them from weeping or throwing up.

The victims are a whole range of defiances, from numbed with shock to spitting at their French collaborator guards to “Vive la France, vive la liberte, vive la Revolution!”

But for a film about an infamous war crime, the entire affair is too bloodless, literally and figuratively. The acting is good, but almost every performance is dry and dry-eyed. The murders are awful, but the emotional impact is muted thanks to the film’s drift away from the martyred Guy Môquet, still celebrated in France but really just a kid who misread the times and placed himself in harm’s way.

For all that, “Calm at Sea” is still a fascinating deep dive into the psychology, bureaucracy and endless miscalculations — especially by the murderous Germans — that led to a massacre that became a policy that stiffened a lot more of the French to find ways to resist the barbaric soldiers as butchers watching over them.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Léo-Paul Salmain, Marc Barbé, Ulrich Matthes, Sébastien Accart, André Jung, Victoire Du Bois, Arielle Dombasle

Credits: Scripted and directed by Volker Schlöndorff. A Corinth release.

Running time: 1:36

Not every Reynolds outing has to be funny, snarky, violent and in the “Deadpool” vein.

This one co-stars Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana, a time travel tale about a visit from your space traveling future self.

Aside from the effects, there’s nothing much given away here that would appeal to anybody over 11, but March 11 may prove that wrong.

When you set your romance against the most aesthetically pleasing watersport of them all — kite surfing — you’d better make sure the melodramatic story is fun, tortured, twisty and/or steamy enough to keep folks from wondering, “When’re they going to show more kite surfing?”

The Polish film “Into the Wind (Pod Wiatr)” manages nothing of the sort. A summer romance set in the resort town of Hel on the Baltic Sea, it’s a semi-conscious bore whenever we aren’t watching kite surfing — which is most of the time.

Ania has come here with her Dad (Marcin Perchuc), his new wife and their toddler. Dad’s a doctor, and Ania’s heading to med school. She’ll take over for him at his clinic someday, he figures. They’re meeting old family friends, and their lawyer-to-be son Kuba (Sebastian Kuba) is part of everybody’s “plans” for Ania (Sonia Mietielica) as well.

But expressionless Ania has watched the VW Vanagon loaded with loud, wild-haired kite surfers that passed them on the road. And she’s had about enough of Daddy’s “plans.”

The set-up suggests a cute “Nobody kite-surfs Baby in a corner” romance, something light and sexy and athletic and very photogenic, with kite-surfing taking the place of dancing.

No, what the filmmakers have in mind here is far duller — parents fooling around, Ania’s haunted past, utterly predictable “obstacles” to surfer-hunk Michal’s (Jakub Sasak) love connection with the pretty, unsmiling rich girl who comes to him for lessons.

Mietielica is almost expressionless in this movie, which could be her attempt to play deflated, grief-stricken and morose. There’s never a light moment in her performance. One can read more into it as there’s a sex scene almost as joyless as everything else in “Into the Wind.” Perhaps she was so bothered by the jarring, slo-motion seduction – nudity-included, hers — that she couldn’t summon up much of a smile about anything else.

That scene plays as both somewhat tender and exploitative, seeing how PG or PG-13 everything is leading up to it and following it.

But at least the kite surfing is as athletic and striking as you’d hope. Who knew there was surfing of any sort on the Baltic?

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, sex, drug use

Cast: Sonia Mietielica, Jakub Sasak, Marcin Perchuc, Sebastian Dela, Waleria Gorobets, with Bitimania and Wojciech Gassowski

Credits: Kristoffer Rus, scripted by Julian Kijowski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

Caleb Landry Jones stars in this drama, based on an infamous Australian mass shooting at Port Arthur, Tasmania in the ’90s.

IFC has it, and it’s due out March 30. Looks harrowing.

The film adaptation of Jandy Nelson’s YA novel “The Sky is Everywhere” skips along the thin line between “wears you down” and “wears you out.”

A tale of teen love and grief with a heaping helping of magical realism, it’s a mostly-engaging if often cutesy portrait of processing the loss of a beloved sibling, and needing to “fall into the arms” of someone just to escape it.

Grace Kaufman of TV’s “Man with a Plan” stars as Lennie, our heroine, leading lady and (almost incessant) narrator, a teen growing up with her Earth Mama granny (Cherry Jones) and pothead uncle (Jason Segel), struggling with realizing that “the most terrible thing can happen at any time.”

That was the sudden loss of her vibrant, outgoing and artsy sister Bailey (Havana Rose Liu) to the same health condition that took their mother.

Lennie must soldier on alone, taking a lot of time off from school to walk the woods of California’s “Enchanted Forest” (Eureka, California was the filming location), looking for “signs” beneath the Candelabra Redwoods and calling her dead sister’s voice mail to leave messages about what she’s feeling.

Lennie is virginal and obsessed with “Wuthering Heights” and its tale of love denied and deferred, and she’s “lost the one person on Earth who understood me.”

Returning to school isn’t a big help, even with Honor Band class, bubbly BFF Sarah (Ji-young Yoo) and cute bandmate Joe (Jacques Colimon) suddenly showing a little interest in her. That Juilliard dream she shared with her sister is gone, and Lennie’s prone to self-destructively lashing out. Mean girl and first-chair clarinet competitor Rachel (Julia Schlaepfer) is ready and willing to exploit that.

Perhaps the only person to share her grief at Lennie’s level is Bailey’s beau, landscaper Toby (Pico Alexander). But maybe he’s not the right person to turn to for comfort.

Lennie’s life, at this moment, is a riot of sensations, processing and hormones. And hanging out with two aging hippies with their magical roses, symbolic houseplant named Lennie (it’s dying) and offers of “a session in the Truth Mobile,” talking about one’s feelings in her mother’s old minivan, may not be the path to mental health this kid sorely needs.

Impulsively bad choices, curling up in her sister’s closet and abandoning her “dream” and much of what makes Lennie herself might be her journey, or could turn out to be her destination.

Director Josephine Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline”) helps author and screenwriter Nelson realize her vision for this adaptation. That includes lots of sister flashbacks, an exultant memorial service that didn’t quite satisfy Lennie’s needs and plenty of special effects and other visual whimsies.

Rose bushes turn into humans who embrace Lennie when she listens to Bach with fellow musician Joe. A piece he plays on the trumpet literally bowls over their classmates as they’re walking down a hall. And when Lennie recalls Bailey’s way of “moving through the world like music,” it becomes a delightful street dance scene.

Lennie’s roiled emotions and hormones are played-up in a somewhat realistic way how someone too young to know how to act might react to grief. But it plays as shallow, and when she narrates “Grief is a house that disappears each time someone knocks at the door,” one hears the author’s own voice grasping for faux profundities.

That said, the hard-won courtship between “grief girl” and music boy is sweet, and the on-the-nose casting of the adults, Jones and Segel, pays off exactly as one would hope.

And our child-actress-turned-young adult girl-next-door lead makes this flawed heroine sympathetic enough that she wears you down even as the movie around her sometimes just wears you out.

Rating: PG-13 for language, sexual references and drug use

Cast: Grace Kaufman, Jacques Colimon, Havana Rose Liu, Pico Alexander, Cherry Jones and Jason Segel.

Credits: Directed by Josephine Decker, scripted by Jandy Nelson, based on her novel. An A24/Apple release.

Running time: 1:44

Lots of familiar faces fill this trailer to a potential blockbuster. If COVID will allow it.

Hulu has this March 3 release, and surrounded the Oscar nominated Seyfried with some pretty big names to tell the story of the hustler who headed the fake blood testing firm Theranos.

May.

A creature feature from Shudder, this bikinis and blood bonanza is available for ogling in mid March.

No matter how much “Marry Me” seems to be tailor-made for actress, pop star and “unlucky at love” celebrity Jennifer Lopez, it’s no more her story than “Notting Hill” was simply about Julia Roberts.

Both are comic wish fulfillment fantasies in which famous women decide they can only find love with ordinary Joes. So in these cases, the “wish fulfillment” is EveryGuy’s.

And all this stuff about a globally famous “brand” and “influencer” and paparazzi target, famous for being famous and infamous for failed romances (which sometimes end in suggestions of cheating)? That’s got to be from the comic book this is based on and not Lopez’s own punchline-littered love life, right?

Any “Notting Hill: The Musical” comparison here is an easy fit, as both of these films feature superstars playing superstars, only as moon-eyed romantics and with all their sharp edges buffed off. You’ve got to be mercenary, self-absorbed and tough as nails to thrive under the media microscope of such fame, and if there’s a big gripe I’d throw out there about this sweet, generally-charming and family-friendly romance, it’s this idealized and psychologically-uncomplicated portrait of our star.

But Lopez, who sings and dances and social media influences her fanbase as Kat Lopez, hasd never looked more stunning on the screen. And she plays the heck out of Kat’s vulnerability, a star on the backside of 40 dueting with Bastian (Maluma) a song titled “Marry Me” which could be an award winner, with a New York mid-concert wedding to “the love of my life” during her concert stand there.

That blows up, as these things do in the cell-phone stalking era, with video that catches him cheating. Her mid-performance “wedding” is off, her near-tears confessional about her search for love barely hinting at the humiliation she’s just suffered.

But there’s this guy, a math teacher (Owen Wilson) bullied into taking his little fangirl (Chloe Coleman) by gay Kat fangirl Parker (Sarah Silverman), is standing out in the sea of fans, holding a “Marry Me” placard he’s been handed.

Damned if Kat, standing in Liberace’s idea of a wedding dress on stage, doesn’t take this lifeline from that “random albino” and offer a glazed “Yes” to his offer.

Charlie “the guy” is summoned. An officiant asks do you “take this guy to be your lawfully” you-know-what, and Kat says “Yes” again. And this deer-in-headlights single dad takes in the hurt in her as-vulnerable-as-she-gets superstar’s eyes, and replies “Sure.”

This is the viewer’s check in or check out point in “Marry Me.” Maybe ten, twenty years ago, we’d have all thought “Oh come on.” Then we catch the gossip on who Pete Davidson’s dating, who Colin Jost married and whoever Julia Roberts ended up with, and we think, “Oh this could totally happen.”

In our image-obsessed, social-media massaging era, it might go down just like this, with NDAs and quid pro quo and an omnipresent cameraman as they marry, and then sort of get to know one another during press conferences, “Today Show” appearances, or as they get into makeup backstage.

Kat can show her cunning when she frets over how “I’ll look crazy” for going through with this. Her manager (John Bradley of “Game of Thrones” and “Moonfall”) is there to correct her.

“ER. You’ll look ‘crazy-ER.'”

Like any social media animal, she knows the idea is to change the subject, from “punch line” to “impulsive, without a plan,” at her first joint press appearance with her new “husband.” “But look where my plans have got me.”

Charlie seems to get that like much of what’s on social media, “It’s not real. It’s all a facade.” But damned if he doesn’t charm the press, as well as this rich, famous stranger in distress sitting to his right.

Here’s why this works. Wilson’s disarming, querulous sincerity and sweetness just washes over the movie, the viewing audience and ever-glamorous Ms. Jennifer Lopez. If one thinks “She cast him for some of the same reasons Kat takes on Charlie,” one won’t be alone. He makes her vulnerability believable and softens her appeal, from dancer/bombshell/sex object to that famous phrase from “Notting Hill” — “Just a girl.”

Sure, it’s all so sugary it can make your teeth ache. But listen to the math teacher’s advice to his math-whiz daughter, “If you sit in the question, the answer will find you.” It may not be profound, but it’s adorable.

Director Kato Coiro of Peacock/Hulu’s “Girls5Eva” and Neflix’s “Dead to Me,” has this story proceed at a screen romance pace, because it’s not a punchy and punchline-heavy rom-com.

Silverman is here to give the movie the little edge it manages, taking over Charlie’s post-nup “negotiation” with Kat’s manager. As in “Moonfall,” Bradley seems cast because he looks enough like Ricky Gervais that one expects him to be funny. He tries his best.

Stephen Wallum from “Nurse Jackie” plays the Kat-fan school choir director, because you know there are going to be school visits, choral serenades to Kat, dance lessons for the Pi-Thons, the math team Charlie coaches, and a real date.

“Are you inviting me to the school dance?”

Lopez has had plenty of ups and downs in her film and public career, and this catches her in a post-“Hustlers” high. Wilson’s been reduced to mostly just the films made by his earliest champion, Wes Anderson’s.

But “Marry Me” gives them both an engaging if undemanding romantic outing, newfangled enough to be social media-current, old fashioned enough to warrant bringing the whole family. Just remember to brush your teeth afterwards.

Rating: PG-13 for some language and suggestive material

Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Maluma, Sarah Silverman, John Bradley, Stephen Wallum and Chloe Coleman.

Credits: Directed by Kat Coiro, scripted by Harper Dill and John Rogers, based on the graphic novel by Bobby Crosby. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:52