Movie Nation

If you want to know what the kids have been watching this weekend, they’ve been reading subtitles, brushing up on their Spanish and…biology.

“Through My Window (A través de mi ventana)” is a Spanish teens-on-the-make drama/not-rom-com built on a “Pretty in Pink” framework. It’s based on a — Book? Story? — by Wattpad fiction writer Ariana Godoy that plays around with that “in love with a rich guy while poor and maybe perfect-for-her ‘Duckie’ pines away” formula that pre-dates John Hughes by hundreds of years.

Godoy and the film’s variations on that formula? Our lovers aren’t star-crossed. They’re thrown together by a bit of wifi theft. And they’re not chaste, pining away for each other, teasing towards expressions of true love no matter what his family says. Oh no. They’re connecting carnally pretty much from the start.

Three word review? “Vapid but titillating.”

Raquel, played by screen newcomer Clare Galle, is a high schooler growing up without a dad. Like him, she sees herself as a writer. Like him, she’s unpublished and likely to remain that way, seeing as how she takes a writer’s workshop and refuses to ever share her work for evaluation by her teacher or peers.

“Through My Window” is her narrated story of her life and the torrid romance that takes it over.

Her house is “surrounded” by the mansion with courtyards owned by the too-aptly-named Hidalgo family. There are three hunky sons in that clan — Artemis, Ares and Apollo (LOL) — and the middle one is the one Raquel kind of/sort of stalks — online, and peeping in on his exercise sessions, his post-shower strutting around nude and the parade of young women who share his bed.

God of War Ares steals her wifi password — for some reason, the rich can’t get wifi that works — and dares Raquel to do something about it. He (Julio Peña) is arrogant, aloof. He knows she’s INTO him, and he feigns disinterest in the beautiful virgin next door. She can’t “report” him to anybody.

“I guess it’s not common for stalkers to report the people they’re stalking,” he purrs (in Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed). “Sleep tight, Witch.“

Yeah, he gives her a nickname. And yes, that makes him irresistible. Along with his six-pack, soccer skills, darkly handsome looks and his dismissal.

It takes no time at all for them to plunge into heavy petting and panty-shedding. None at all.

Eduard Sola’s script, based on Godoy’s story, lacks anything in the way of subtlety and a tendency to rush towards the um, climax– several climaxes.

Raquel is crushed on by her “best friend and future husband” Yoshi, who wears pink in his blond hair and is about as masculine as Jon Cryer was in “Pretty in Pink.” Yoshi (Guillermo Lasheras) is a bit of an exhibitionist, a bit dull as most doormat-characters are, and that’s all we know about him.

For that matter, every single character is so superficial and all-surface that perhaps Ms. Godoy’s fiction is published in tweets. Just guessing, mind you.

There’s Barcelona scenery and sex, posh parties and sex, and obvious foreshadowing and melodrama at every turn. Subtle? Not in the least.

As teens are the ones watching this, let’s make this a teachable moment, shall we? What’s our anti-hero allergic to, kids? It’s IMPOSSIBLE to miss, as are the few other germane plot points, underlined and highlighted so that we don’t miss them.

Still, third-string director Marçal Forés is not new to salacious sexual content (“Everlasting Love”) and shoots a few good sex scenes with our very attractive leads, and clumsily squeezes those in between shots of scenic Barcelona’s mountaintop theme park, Tibidabo.

And that’s what the kids are here for, right? The sex, not the theme park.

Rating: TV-MA, fairly explicit sex, profanity and drinking — all involving high school teens

Cast: Clara Galle, Julio Peña, Guillermo Lasheras, Pilar Castro and
Natalia Azahara.

Credits: Directed by Marçal Forés, scripted by Eduard Sola, based on a novel by
Ariana Godoy. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

How does a $150 million disaster movie (figures from Exhibitor Relations) look so cheap?

You can see that in the TV ads, which is why RoRo Emmerich’s “Moonfall” did a piddling $700k Thursday night, with a $3.4 Friday that wouldn’t save it.

Bombs away! Under $10 for the weekend? Even lower? Under $7?

The big hit this weekend isn’t drawing its demo. “Jackass Forever” is a 20plus year old franchise whose lead just got that AARP recruiting card in the mail.

It did “$1.6 Thursday, just under $10 Friday (which includes Thursday’s take), and is headed towards a $21 million or so opening weekend.

“Scream” and “Spider-Man” have propped up theaters for the past two months. There’s nothing on the immediate horizon that will take their place and sell tickets.

So cinemas are booking indie fare and realizing their screens with”Get Back” and “West Side Story” trying to sell enough concessions to hang on.

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Inspired by a true story, “Soumaya” is a French drama that walks the tightrope between understanding a “crackdown” after a mass terrorist attack by Islamist fanatics, and resisting it on principle.

It is built around a performance that mixes despair, resignation and sublimated anger. Soraya Hachoumi plays the title character, a woman abruptly fired for “gross negligence” within days of having her apartment raided by a French SWAT team.

She figures, while she’s been summoned to the office of a higher up, that this would be a good time to complain about anti-Islamic harassment from a co-worker. She could not be more wrong. “You’ve changed” (in French with English subtitles) is the nicest thing Aurelie (Sarah Perriez) can manage.

“I doubt this will be ending here,” Soumaya snaps back.

It’s not until she hears her name on TV that we get what’s been going on — glimpses of the police raid, the dismissal thanks to a tip from the prefect of police, how Soumaya “changed.”

Something was going on in her life that got her more actively involved with a local mosque. Now she’s labeled as “connected to the jihadist community” and that her job, working in a Roissy airport management firm, gave her “access to sensitive information.”

The Nov. 15 terror attacks weren’t that long ago. And this “crackdown” has authorities deciding to err on the side of public safety concerns, and they’ve been granted state-of-emergency powers that allow them to act on suspicion, not on cold hard evidence.

Because all they have on Soumaya is that she started dressing more conservatively, got spotted changing out of her hijab in the parking lot, and is listed by name on her mosque’s website as being righteous and “on the path of Allah.”

We’ve seen Jerome (Julien Lheureux) given a lift to the airport by Kais (Khalid Berkouz). Jerome has stared at the crackdown and decided the “love it or leave it” crowd is right. He’s leaving for North Africa — Tunisia or Algeria (it’s not made clear). Kais is a lawyer who has energetically helped defend employers and others caught up in the firings of Muslims deemed “a threat to the Republic.”

When Kais abruptly switches sides after taking one case with his attack-dog boss (Karine Dogliani) too many, he finds himself representing Soumaya as she starts the process of taking her employer to court. Not that she’s crazy about this.

The film settles into Soumaya’s conflicted feelings about how hard to fight her employer and her country, pulled in different directions by her family and her lawyer and fretting about how this is impacting her seven year-old daughter.

The legal tug of war shows just how swamped the system was as this crackdown assaulted civil liberties in the name of public safety.

And then there’s white and liberal Jerome’s trek to North Africa, an idealist confronted with his own unconscious biases about the people.

Directed by Ubaydah Abu-Usayd and Waheed Khan, “Soumaya” makes its points thanks to the compelling performance at its heart. But the script (by Ubaydah Abu-Usayd and Maryam Um-Usayd), direction and editing stumble in their efforts to hide or delay revealing necessary associations.

Jerome is connected to this case, but his connection to Kais and Soumaya is blurred or so slow in coming that it adds to the film’s confusion. Every time the film drifts south to a place never identified where Jerome faces a harsh enlightenment, it loses the thread.

Directors Abu-Usayd and Khan stage some compelling courtroom scenes, and capture police over-reaction in a couple of ways.

The drama is compelling enough, and the messaging is vague by-design and with good reason. But the meandering interwoven stories don’t gel in ways heighten the drama or add weight to the message.

Soumaya the character is on the fence about what happens to her, and the film reflects that. It’s perfectly watchable, but the mixed message is too muddled to have maximum impact.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Soraya Hachoumi, Khalid Berkouz, Karine Dogliani, Islem Sehili, Sonya Mellah, Sarah Perriez and Julien Lheureux

Credits: Directed by Ubaydah Abu-Usayd and Waheed Khan, scripted by Ubaydah Abu-Usayd and Maryam Um-Usayd. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:43

This looks to be a fine vehicle for Samuel L., a Walter Mosely story of an old man, a lot of lost memories and his need to get them back to tidy up his life before departing it.

A bit of fantasy thus works its way into this drama, which also stars Cynthia Kaye McWilliams, Omar Benson Miller and Walton Goggins.

This begins streaming March 11.

Julie is in med school, cramming so that she can master the finer points of surgery, or at least keep up the grades she needs to stay in school.

Only she’d rather try her hand at psychotherapy, joining the ranks of “Norway’s future spiritual advisors.” Sure, her classmates will be “mostly girls with eating disorders.” But who better to listen to and treat the unhappy?

Then again, maybe photography is her bag. Let’s get a camera and take some classes.

She starts an affair with a professor. But there’s this younger (still older than her) underground comic creator that catches her eye. For now.

Just don’t start nagging her about children or questioning whether taking a job in a bookstore is how one becomes a writer. Because that’s next.

And if that’s next, who comes after the comic book artist?

Yes, Julie is young, thin, beautiful and fickle, flighty and awfully careless with other people’s feelings and with commitment. But is she really “The Worst Person in the World?”

Joachim Trier finishes off his “Oslo Trilogy” (“Reprise,” “Oslo, August 31st”) with a meandering, deadpan dissection of one aimless-by-generation young woman as she tries to figure out what the hell it is she wants. Or who.

“Verdens verste menneske,” as it is titled in Norwegian (it’s subtitled) is kind of a Gen Z “Singles” or “St. Elmo’s Fire,” with just one “single,” a “finding yourself” without taking a journey film, it offers a taste of living without a firm life plan that’s not exactly a comedy “in twelve chapters, a prologue and an epilogue.”

Cannes award winner Renate Reinsve has the title role, a beguiling and infuriating, not particularly self-aware advertisement for the concept “Just what the hell do women her age want these days?”

If that sounds harsh — consider. Over the course of four years, Julie changes career paths repeatedly, as people with options and the luxury of time a socialist (ish) education system can. She moves in with three different guys, always taking up with the next while she’s still allegedly-committed to the current, lying when asked “Have you met someone else?”

That poor associate professor had no chance when the star writer/illustrator of “Bobcat” comics, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) catches her eye at a party. He’s a few years older and when they weekend with his extended family, they get a dose of the good and the bad of parenting. Smitten she may be, because he’s ready to try child-rearing, maybe just to fit in with his siblings. Julie? She’s not “in the same place,” and willing to get in a row over it.

“It’s like you’re waiting for something, I don’t know what,” he fumes.

She stalks out of a party with his friends and crashes another down the street, alluring and lured when she takes in Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) who is taking in the party — and her — from the end of a sofa.

Their flirtation without “cheating” is the best of the film’s “let’s flip rom-com conventions.” It’s a “meet cute” with each of the people coupled and committed to others. “Cheating,” they agree, is bad. So what to do with this instant chemistry? They test where “the line” in — sharing smoke from a joint, sniffing each other’s armpits, watching each other use the toilet.

Who says romance is dead?

Julie’s best bet for coping with indecision is stopping time — freezing everybody she knows or runs into in place as she trial-runs the idea of bailing on one guy and taking up with another.

Later, when as part of a new couple, there’s a magic mushroom ride engagingly envisioned by Trier, with Julie hallucinating her lithe youthful body in old age and working out her “daddy” issues, at least as long as the mushroom’s haze lasts.

Through it all, Julie half-struggles with her “worst” impulses — with dishonesty, with her chronic indecision. Through it all, a narrator drolly notes Julie’s problems with the truth. A suggestion that “We might get back together” during a breakup merits, “Then and there, Julie meant it.” And through it all, episodes of life play out in chapters titled “Julie’s Narcissistic Circus” and “Bad Timing.”

Reinsve makes a more beguiling than compelling lead, letting on Julie’s “flakey” qualities, giving us hints that she’s self-aware enough to be bothered by them.

The men our anti-heroine encounters share a general powerlessness in the relationships. One who tries to end their coupling finds her overruling him with her wiles and sex appeal.

“Worst Person,” directed by a man, scripted by two men, suggests a certain judgment of this generation of young women as we follow Julie’s story. It’s not an endorsement of her aimlessness, not a condemnation of it and not really an explanation. Make your own inferences about the career confusion, co-dependencies and gender uncertainty that seem to be its most talked-about hallmarks. of Gen Z.

Yes, Julie moves back home for a bit. Yes, her mother’s supportive, tolerant of her whims, but confused. No, Julie doesn’t change pronouns.

One thing you can say for Trier’s Oslo trilogy. He makes the city look real and lived-in, as opposed to most films which make it look like some austere statement on Scandinavian minimalism and better living through chilly socialist design.

I can’t say I have a firm handle on what it’s all about, or that Trier does either. But he’s made a wistful, ironic film about being young, having options and “waiting for something” that will perhaps make up one’s mind for one.

Rating: R for sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and some language

Cast: Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum

Credits: Directed by Joachim Trier, scripted by Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:08

The last couple of times I’ve stopped off in Charleston, S.C. on my frequent road trips up and down the Eastern seaboard, I’ve seen this guy.

He’s an older fellow with a stars-and-bars bedecked pickup, making sure he and his T-shirt and Confederate apologia are where one and all can see him, right there on the park/shoreline of the battery where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.

If you’re white and grew up in the South and don’t share his politics, Braxton Spivey is the sort of redneck crank you make it a point to avoid. I can only imagine an African American’s reaction to him, as he’s obviously here to intimidate, send a message, and make Savannah a much more inviting stop that Charleston (for me) among scenic Southern coastal cities.

We only know his name because Jefferey Robinson, the Memphis native/Ivy League-educated deputy legal defense director of the American Civil Liberties Union, engaged him in a chat for his new documentary, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America.”

Their encounter isn’t a “Look at the smart Black man ‘own’ the racist dunce” moment. It’s a soft-voiced but forceful evisceration, witness-on-the-stand style, of “Flags Across the South” president Spivey’s laughable Civil War view that “It was not about slavery.”

Robinson patiently asks questions, offers reasonable factual refutations with an “Isn’t THAT right?” and “Wouldn’t you agree with that?” He’s not getting very far in the whole “common ground” thing. But he’s working on it, talking about the economics and tariffs that Spivey insists were instigations for the war. Robinson wends his way towards showing how the entire economy of the South, and much more than you realize of the North, was tied up in slavery, the balance sheets of vast quantities of free labor needed to harvest cotton, tobacco and rice, the whole ecosystem of ship building and runaway slave recovery.

“Facts were not that important to this gentleman,” Robinson says upon departing. He doesn’t know if people this far down the lie of “heritage, not hate” “can be reached.” But “If nobody tries, he definitely won’t change.”

“Who We Are” never uses the conservative scare phrase “critical race theory.” But that’s what this illuminating, damning and sometimes touching film is — “Critical Race Theory” delivered as a sort of TED Talk.

Robinson uses illustrations, graphics and rhetoric to tell the story of Race in America. He travels to landmarks in the racial history of the country — Charleston, Memphis, Selma and Tulsa.

His lecture is about America’s various “tipping point” moments, when racial progress and harmony might seem possible, and the violent convulsions that always seem to move the country backward. The Civil Rights Era collapses when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is murdered. Donald Trump comes to power in reaction to America electing its first African-American president.

Robinson tells his own story, and white classmates from his days in Memphis in the late ’60s remind him of racist incidents that happened to him or around him that he doesn’t even remember.

He delves into “unconscious bias” and tears a huge hole in the arguments against “reparations” to remedy hundreds of years of economic disparity and racist blowback against Black achievement.

Yes, he visits the empty fields where “The Black Wall Street” once stood, massacred out of existence in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. He meets with survivors of those killed by police violence, the descendants of lynching victims, and walks the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge, which activists want renamed.

And he gets into the origins of Black mistrust of police and police abuse of Black people, which dates back to how most of America’s police departments were founded, as outgrowths of “slave patrols” of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Robinson’s purpose here is to cut through the lies, propaganda and rhetoric and look at what all those folks so anxious to ban and even burn books are trying to cover up.

He touches on the voter suppression that is today’s version of the oppression that was written into the Constitution, where “slavery” is only mentioned by its name once.

And he provides fodder for anybody who finds themselves in the middle of “Confederate monument” debates, noting what this or that celebrated figure in Tennessee or elsewhere actually did before the war, and then during it, participating in the slaughter of their fellow Americans to preserve a “peculiar institution” that remains America’s shame to this day.

Robinson’s fact-backed reason is never contrasted with the spittle-spewing rage and hate we’ve seen on so many news reports in recent years. But those fact-averse tirages are never far from the viewer’s mind in “Who We Are.”

It’s an eye-opening documentary. But reviewing it, one feels the need to add a footnote. With racist minoritarian take-overs of school boards, county commissions and the like heralding a “New Jim Crow” South, and even Midwest and parts of the Northeast, you’d better see it while you still can.

Rating:  PG-13 for thematic content, disturbing images, violence and strong language – all involving racism

Cast: Jeffery Robinson, Josephine Bolling McCall, Carolyn Payne, Tami Sawyer, Braxton Spivey and Gwynn Carr.

Credits: Directed by Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler, scripted by Jeffery Robinson. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:57

It look Lifetime, an acclaimed female screenwriter turned director and another woman writing the script to finally tell the stories of country music icons Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline from their point of view.

And it took Netflix to grab “Patsy & Loretta” and deliver it to a bigger audience, streaming now.

As grand as the Oscar-winning “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was, as underrated as its Patsy Cline companion picture “Sweet Dreams” remains, you had to figure that we weren’t seeing the hard knocks reality of their married lives, one of the things that bonded the established star with the rawboned newcomer in the Nashville of the early ’60s.

“Thelma & Louise” writer, TV’s “Nashville” creator and “Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood” writer/director Callie Khouri and screenwriter Angelina Burnett (TV’s “Boss,” “Halt and Catch Fire”) correct that. And with the two Broadway stars they cast, women who do their own singing, they give us a brisk (OK, rushed), sentimental “behind the glamour” gloss of a bio-pic.

Earlier films about these two country gals — Patsy, from Winchester, Va. and Loretta from Butcher Holler, Kentucky — who met and became best friends in the man’s world of 1960s Nashville, played up their connection and touch on the troubled, even violent marriages that they endured while singing about housewives’ heartbreak. “Patsy & Loretta” takes the gloves off.

Patsy is played by Broadway’s dazzling Megan Hilty (“Wicked,” TV’s “Smash”), a big-voiced belter who caresses “Crazy,” delivers a polished “Walking After Midnight” and makes sure we see Patsy as flawed enough to make her share of bad choices.

She didn’t want to cover “Walking,” as it wasn’t country enough. But her shot on Arthur Godfrey’s network talent show saw her talked-out of her cowgirl costumes, into a stylish dress and into stardom, one of the first “crossover” queens of Nashville’s emerging “Countrypolitan” sound.

We meet her between marriages, laying her cards on the table of a Winchester honky tonk to the smooth talking/dirty-joke-telling Charlie Dick (Kyl Schmid, quite good).

“Two thangs I want in this world,” she warns him — “babies and hit records!”

The “dream house,” “Caddy in the driveway” (HIS dream) and “fox fur coat” would come later.

Jessie Mueller of “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” is lanky, naive and bullied Loretta, hearing Patsy and Kitty Wells on the radio in rural Washington state, hoping for something more than a life of babies and more babies and struggle. We see her humming and picking out her own songs, pushed and shoved by her beer-swilling husband toward stardom.

Burnett’s script zeroes in on that piece of Nashville lore, how the newly-crowned queen has a car crash, Loretta sings a song in tribute on Ernest Tubb’s radio show which Patsy hears, leading to a hospital room meeting and lifelong friendship.

The baggage this picture carries isn’t just the resonance and history we recall from the two singers’ stories and earlier bio-pics. We know that this “lifelong friendship” has a bittersweet brevity about it.

But while they’re getting to know one another, Patsy coaches Loretta on how to dress, on record deals, how to handle sleazy promoters and being her own woman.

“So, you just do whatever Doo (Doolittle Lynn) tells you?”

We see Doolittle (Joe Tippett, properly hulking) veto makeup, fly into jealous rages at any man who looks at his wife even as he’s making eyes at every honky tonk girl within reach. He throws his weight around, and sometimes his wife.

“If Doo don’t listen,” Patsy advises, “you find somethin’ heavy and make’em.“

The film’s depiction of the blue collar violence against women that the “Honeymooners” era culture normalized on TV can be chilling, even if we don’t see the beatings.

Both singers tend to pretty up the vocal stylings of the legendary singers they’re impersonating. For my money, Mueller comes closer to the unpolished earnestness of Lynn than Hilty’s brassy-but-too-polished Cline. But both are good enough to take one-woman shows of these icons on the road.

The film has a Lifetime malnourishment about it — limited in settings, lacking in razzle dazzle, not even getting the take-off weather right for that ill-fated plane right. The demands of knowing what you have to leave out when you’re telling a story in between commercial breaks stands out seeing “Patsy & Loretta” on Netflix. It’s “brisk” to the point of “hurried.”

It’s still a most worthwhile endeavor and a worthy film.

Rating: TV-14, violence, profanity, frank discussions of sexuality

Cast: Megan Hilty, Jessie Mueller, Janine Turner, Joe Tippett, Kyl Schmid and Billy Slaughter

Credits: Directed by Callie Khouri, scripted by Angelina Burnett. A Lifetime Original on Netflix

Running time: 1:27

“The Wolf and the Lion” may be cloying, kid-friendly claptrap, a “nature” film about the unlikely upbringing of a couple of cubs on an idyllic island in Canada. But kids under the age of six won’t mind most of the stuff their parents — some parents, anyway — will roll their eyes at.

But ohmygodohmygodohmyGOD! The lion cub and the wolf pup in this are get-them-their-own-Youtube Channel adorable.

There’s little that’s serious about this cutesy “road comedy.” Let’s label it that, because all the raised-as-brothers business and back-story about how the lion and the wolf came to life with ringleted redhead Alma (Molly Kunz) on an island in the North Woods is just a prologue for the two siblings, all grown up, going on the lam.

A hunters shoots the mother of the lion cub in Africa, just to fetch the cub and fly him off to be in the circus. The snow wolf pup has an easier time of it. His “she wolf” mom brings him to stay at Alma’s place because she was kind enough to free her from a net meant to trap her.

It takes a miracle to pair these critters up, and that’s just what this dizzy script provides. The cub’s plane crashes and he winds up in an eagle’s nest. When the eagle shoves him out, Alma (Molly Kunz) just happens to be taking a nature walk right beneath the tree and catches the kitten.

She’s come to her late grandpa’s island after his death to reflect, just a pit stop on her way to a future as a concert pianist with the L.A. Philharmonic, she hopes. But the off-the-book animals thrown into her care change that. She won’t let Wildlife Protection have them, even though they’re looking for the missing lion.

She won’t let the obnoxious, dorky city-boy wolf-researcher (Charlie Carrick) dart and tag or remove snow wolves from her island. And she won’t admit to godfather Joe (the Great Graham Greene) that she’s doing this, or that she’s in over her head. She’s got “control” she figures.

“Holy dancing and whistling Jesus!” Joe replies, speaking for the audience. “You ain’t in control of squat!”

Events conspire to prove him right.

French director Gilles de Maistre started his career in conventional dramas but migrated to nature-friendly kiddie fare at some point. He is on his most entertaining ground just following his feline/canine stars around, letting them tear up the book-and-art covered cabin in the woods, helping each other out of jams as they run from circus and Federal hunters who would trap them.

The human stuff is entirely too predictable. And the whole thing is so Disney sweet and cutesey it’ll make your teeth hurt.

The comedy comes from the self-described “very important scientist” and his feud with the “nutcase” who kept a lion and a snow wolf in her house. It’s seriously lame. The drama comes from the hunt, the abuse circus animals face (drugs, declawing, etc).

There isn’t much here, but what’s the cardinal rule of filmed entertainment for kids? “First, do no harm.”

Unless your child is inclined to run up and hug wild things in the woods, or at the zoo, mark “The Wolf and the Lion” down as “harmless” and let the kids have at it.

Rating: PG for thematic elements, language and some peril

Cast: Molly Kunz, Charlie Carrick, Rhys Slack, Evan Buliung and Graham Greene

Credits: Directed by Gilles de Maistre, scripted by Prune de Maistre. A Blue Fox release of a Studio Canal film

Running time: 1:39

Ready for a little Sundance Film Fest-approved “surreal?”

“Strawberry Mansion” is a 2035 tale of mice and men…and women. Weird, wacky, DIY cultish stuff.

This one opens in limited release Feb. 18.

A disaster movie in every sense of the word, “Moonfall” instantly becomes the biggest swing-and-a-miss of Roland Emmerich’s popcorn packed career. And yes, I saw “Anonymous,” his “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays” debacle, and the better-intentioned bust “Stonewall.”

“Moonfall” is too big to be a bad B-movie, too malnourished to pass for an A-picture and not bad enough to even amount to campy fun.

What’s wrong with it? Start with the cast’s commitment to the nutty “moon is actually an alien mega-structure” whose warranty has just expired plot. Halle Berry has an Oscar and just looks dazed, first scene to last. Patrick Wilson wholly bought into “The Conjuring” universe but can’t even summon up a wink to the camera here. Even Donald Sutherland’s cameo in his latest “Here’s the cover-up” conspiracy buff is as half-hearted as we’ve ever seen him.

“Game of Thrones” alumnus John Bradley, as the REAL conspiracy buff, the one with the mad orbital math skills, is not ready for his close-up. And Charlie Plummer seems confused about why his presence was required.

The bit players surrounding them are, to a one, underwhelming — zero charisma in the lot.

Only the durable Michael Peña comes off unscathed, largely thanks to the small scope of his role.

The effects don’t look like models or purely digital recreations of a clockwork moon, earthquakes and tidal waves, but digitized models. No Roland “2012/Independence Day/Day After Tomorrow/Midway” Emmerich effects extravaganza has ever looked this fake.

The dialogue is mostly dull variations of “Come on people, think outside the box!” and “We all have our problems now. And the moon falling to Earth isn’t one of them.”

And that story. Oh my stars and garters.

It starts with alternate history, a space shuttle accident that was related to what’s about to go wrong on a bigger scale later on. There’s a cover-up, with Mr. Conspiracy (Sutherland in a wheelchair) setting the record straight about “One giant leap for yadda yadda yadda.”

A disgraced and divorced astronaut (Wilson) is out of the loop. He former shuttlemate (Berry) is still with NASA but…confused.

The only guy with a clue and without “clearance” or secrecy obligations is British crank (Bradley) who supports himself as a custodian and has the wherewithal to impersonate scientists so that he can collect raw data on the moon’s orbit. He’s half-crazy, speaking to an audience of the more completely crazed.

“I love Elon!”

Word gets out just as the moonshine is about to hit the fan.

There are characters and plot devices borrowed from other Emmerich films, the legitimate blockbusters. Charlie Plummer is the estranged son of the disgraced astronaut, trying to get himself and others to safety, for starters.

But with nobody all that committed to playing up the doom, and only the British “megastructurist” having the potential to be any fun, the picture never had a chance.

Bradley is no Jeff Goldblum in “ID4,” no Woody Harrelson in “2112.” To spread the blame around, Wilson is no Kurt Russell, Will Smith or Dennis Quaid, either.

There’s barely a hint of fun and nary a drop of pathos in any of this. And with the effects rarely “special” and never all that impressive, “Moonfall” never rises, never sets and barely distracts one from whatever might be on your cell phone (very rude in a cinema) or endlessly checking your watch.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, disaster action, strong language, and some drug use

Cast: Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Carolina Bartczak, Charlie Plummer, Michael Peña and Donald Sutherland

Credits: Directed by Roland Emmerich, scripted by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:00