Movie Nation

If Charles Dickens was alive today, would he try his hand at being a socially conscious fiction writer in film?

That’s the intriguing question posed by “Run with the Hunted,” a gritty near miss of a B-movie about abused children who wind up in the clutches of their very own Fagin in what is unmistakably a modern spin on “Oliver Twist.”

A solid cast decorated with screen veterans and unblinking violence characterize this near-miss from writer-director John Swab (“Let Me Make You a Martyr”).

Oscar (Mitchell Paulsen) and Loux (Madilyn Kellam) are neighbors and inseparable friends, devoted in ways far beyond their years (about 14).

But Loux’s family life has its horrible secret, one Oscar can’t go to his parents (William Forsythe plays his dad) about. He makes the fateful decision to save her by any means necessary. That involves a fireplace poker he uses on her abusive, drunken redneck father.

The crime puts Oscar on the run in the middle of the night, a dash to a city a hundred miles away. Once there, he meets a different girl, the street teen Peaches (Kylie Rogers). She brings him “home” to the warehouse where she and “my family of broken toys” live.

They’re a gang of petty thieves raised in picking pockets by their version of Dickens’ “Fagin,” named Sway (Mark Boone Junior). This stealing school is run as part of a larger enterprise by the big boss, Birdie (Ron Perlman), who keeps the promising kids around for bigger crimes once they’ve outgrown street hustling. In Dickensian terms, he’s a bit of Fagin, a bit of the murderous Bill Sikes.

Oscar lives his life under Sway’s supervision and Birdie’s protection — from the law and his parents, all of them looking for this “criminal” run-away.

“You’ve made decisions only a man should make,” the kid is told.

“You know why I’m the way I am?” Birdie asks him. “I wanted more. And I wasn’t gonna ask for it. I just took it. You’ve gotta just grab whatcha want. Ain’t nobody gonna give it to you.”

Fifteen years later, the seeds planted in childhood bear fruit as Peaches (Dree Hemingway of “The Unicorn” and “In a Relationship”) has taken on more adult hustles, and her man Oscar (Michael Pitt of “Boardwalk Empire,” “Rob the Mob” and “Criminal”) is taking armed robbery assignments.

That’s when another young woman (Sam Quartin) shows up, takes a job with a local private eye (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.) and starts asking questions about this long-missing kid.

Oscar is Birdie’s most trusted soldier, Peaches is Birdie’s favorite. Both get the best advice the now-politically-connected Birdie has to offer.

“You know, men — they get to be a certain age they get delusions of grandeur. They wanna run everything themselves.”

Perlman is the seasoned cynic and veteran heavy who anchors the picture, and makes it worth watching. Pitt is also a safe bet to give you fair value in disturbed, edgy, “capable of violence” roles.

Hemingway — of those Hemigways — has her best role ever playing a young woman who picked up cutthroat cunning, and little else, in her years picking pockets.

But “Run with the Hunted” kind of rattles around like a racoon confined in a tiger cage.  The milieu and characters are here, with “Lost Boys” references that don’t really hide the “Oliver Twist” structure. The “twists” in this “Oliver” are entirely predictable, including the finale.

A shocking “accident” here, an armed robbery there — a woman picking up a trail a decade after it went cold through a seedy private eye who doesn’t want anything to do with stirring things up with Birdie’s empire and the cops who collude with him.

What grabbed my attention in lieu of surprises were questions about the economics of it all. How do you make a gang of child pickpockets pay off in a First World country? The overhead must be murder, to say nothing of social workers and police NOT on the take who could not help but notice the tween-to-teen crime wave.

“Overthinking” in the audience undoes many a slackly-paced and formulaic thriller. It’s where the mind wanders when the action on the screen slacks off.

But Perlman, Pitt, Hemingway and Whitlock deliver and make this near-miss interesting enough to hope Swab’s next outing will have as much promise, and deliver on more of it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, adult situations all involving children

Cast: Ron Perlman, Dree Hemingway, Michael Pitt, Sam Quartin, Isaiah Whitlock, Jr., Mark Boone Jr. and William Forsythe.

Credits: Written and directed by John Swab. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:33

Art and oddness, dash of cute and a Viking funeral in the land of the midnight sun. Quiver will release this one soon.

“Mr. Jones” is a story of three journalists.

One persistently and somewhat naively stumbled into a genocidal scandal of world-shaking proportions.

One tried to cover it up from the pages of one of the world’s great newspapers, and became one of the most infamous apologists in the history of journalism.

And a third turned into a novelist who laid bare the crimes of a system that was as base as human nature, and just as murderous when the characters conveying that aren’t humans at all, but animals on a farm.

Director Agnieska Holland returns to the era of her first great triumph (“Europa Europa”), events leading up to World War II, for this account of Holomodor— the Stalin/Soviet-made famine that killed millions in Ukraine in 1932-33. It’s also a straightforward biography of the reporter most widely credited with exposing it to the outside world, government Foreign Affairs Advisor turned journalist Gareth Jones.

James Norton of “Little Women” stars as Jones, capturing the naive idealism and moral absolutism of a man who had just scored an interview with Adolf Hitler, a literary coup for himself but something of a nuisance to his boss, former prime minister David Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham), who with his Liberal Party aristocratic peers, refused to see Germany as a renewed threat.

It’s early 1933, just after the Reichstag Fire. Jones — newly laid-off — figures Britain will need another alliance with Russia (now the Soviet Union) if German moves to re-arm and attack its neighbors are to be resisted. But there’s something about “The Soviet Miracle” and “Stalin’s spending spree” that the Cambridge-educated Jones doesn’t get.

“How is Stalin paying for it all?”

He books passage to the East.

“I hear Moscow is beautiful this time of year.” “March?!”

And once there, he is confronted with two facts. Reporters are “confined” to Moscow, shadowed by minders, men one journalist (Vanessa Kirby) labels “Big Brother.” The other fact? Everyone there seems to accept Soviet propaganda and press releases at face value, because that’s what Pulitzer Prize-winner and Soviet enthusiast Walter Duranty of The New York Times does.

Duranty is played by Peter Sarsgaard at his most unctuous and oily. He is wired in, a veritable Soviet lobbying presence in the American press as he acts as go-between for their government and that of the United States.

But the suspicious death of a friend has Jones on his guard. He longs to get out, see “Stalin’s Gold,” the grain raised in the “black earth” of Ukraine where Jones’s mother was born. Might one of Duranty’s junior reporters, Ada (Kirby) help?

Not much, it turns out. But Jones, carrying that “Where’s the money coming from?” question in his mind, connives his way into making such a trip. And what he finds there is one of the great tragedies of the last century.

Holland and screenwriter Andrea Chalupa frame the story within the letter writing and then, novel typing of left-leaning journalist Eric Blair, who turned out Depression Era enthusiasm for the “new way” Soviet Russia is doing things. At first.

The clever touches in this script capture Jones’s inexperience in journalism. He rubs Ada Brooks the wrong way by asking her questions no competitive reporter wants to answer.

“What are you working on? What are your SOURCES?”

Jones was young, and his idealism clashes with the “agenda” he sees Duranty and his lackeys pushing. He takes the “follow the facts where they lead” credo to the hilt.

Holland contrasts the opulence with which assorted commissars travel, work (plush offices) and gorge themselves with the world Jones escapes his Ukraine minder to see — snowy whites, colorless greys, bread lines that turn to bread brawls as starving people fight for the scraps that aren’t “sent to Moscow,” a married couple, frozen in their beds after starving.

And don’t ask the feral children he sees everywhere what they’re using for meat.

Those children sing nursery rhymes to the famine, recite (in Russian with English subtitles) anti-Stalin limericks (“Stalin sits on his throne, playing the violin. He looks down with a frown on our bread-giving country…”

This film was 22 minutes longer when it played film festivals, and it can feel truncated when the third act rolls around. Jones didn’t actually “break” the story, but he was the first to sign his name to “I saw famine” stories. So there’s more to this than we see here.

But Norton makes a sturdy, inexperienced but curious hero, a man every bit as idealistic about “the truth” as Sarsgaard’s Duranty is all about “a movement bigger than any one person,” his “agenda.”

“Bitter Harvest” was a pretty good 2016 movie about the details, life within one village during The Holomodor. Holland, Chalupa and “Mr. Jones” show us the view from the outside, the struggle to get the story out.

And in its loveliest touch, they show us the long memory of literature, when the right journalist and critic takes on the nom de plume “Orwell,” and tells the tale of what happens in a world where “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, disturbing images of starvation

Cast: James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard, Joseph Mawle, Kenneth Cranham

Credits: Directed by Agnieszka Holland, script by Andrea Chalupa. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:58

Allison Brie and Dan Stevens star in another vacation “rental” house from hell story. More conventional, not supernatural.

Love the music and the visual chills in this Dave Franco directed thriller.

On television?

No. On HBO.

A top drawer writer/director, solid A-, B+ list talent and a haunted house seemingly designed by Maurice Escher class up the mildly-scary thriller, “You Should Have Left.”

It has an A-picture gloss and sophistication often missing from the genre. The dialogue crackles, the situations the stuff of many a domestic melodrama. And the ending makes logical sense, even if the pathos and sucker-punch frights, the terror of real violence, are missing.

Kevin Bacon plays the older, wealthier Angelino who has nabbed himself a much younger movie star wife (Amanda Seyfried). But in this family, “nightmares” are the shared trait. Even six year-old Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex) has them. The picture opens with her alarmed at a noise she hears in the night, getting up to close a door, and muttering, in the manner of all Hollywood six-year-olds.

“God dammit!”

The whisper in her ear corrects this behavior, or should.

“Don’t curse, unless you wanna BE cursed!”

Susanna (Seyfried) is in the middle of a shoot, fussing over her husband’s poolside habits like the ultimate “child bride” (or trophy wife).

“Old man…SUN block!”

Theo smiles this off, and suffers the petty humiliations of being denied a visit to the set by some functionary who figures “You’re her father?” Mercifully, Theo can only hear the sex scene that is the order of the day.

But there’s a break between films coming up. Let’s rent a place, and as the British house-hunting show puts it,“Escape to the Country.” They grab a posh “pile” in rural Wales, sight unseen, via an Internet ad.

It’s mysterious and modern, austere and chilly. The rooms are a veritable Escher maze of brick and dim lighting. Perfect!

The dynamics of the family will be put to the test by this place, whose history is muttered by the fussbudget local shopkeeper (Colin Blumenau) Theo meets in what he jokingly calls “The Village of the Damned.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak Welsh,” the American gripes.

“That was ENGLISH.”

Right.

The older man is suspicious of his younger wife, who giggles too much in her many phone conversations with her director. And he’s stuck answering the BIG questions emanating from the six-year old.

“Daddy, because you’re old, you WILL die before Mommy, right?”

Ouch.

“Why do we have to die at all?”

“Life is not survivable.”

The kid is the first one to hear things in the house. They never believe the kid, do they?

The shopkeeper asks the one question that should set off alarm bells –“Anything happen, yet?”

Theo doesn’t exactly shrug any of this off. He’s just consumed with worry that he’ll be recognized. He has a past.

You cast accomplished actors in films like this to get more emotion out of what is too often a formulaic genre. The dividend here is an absolutely real connection between father and daughter. Watch Bacon’s interactions with young Miss Essex. They’re so natural we buy in instantly.

Seyfried gets to send up her screen sex kitten image, playing an actress who complains about her director wanting her to get naked “again,” for scenes that come off “kind of porny.”

Adapter-director David Koepp scripted “Jurassic Park,” a “Spider-Man,” a “Mission: Impossible” and a string of (mostly) hits, the witty “Ghost Town” among them. The dialogue here positively sparkles, characters have realistic motivations and close-to-the-bone reactions to strains in their relationships.

But underplaying the terror of facing the supernatural is always a mistake.

The effects are stark and simple. Mirrors misbehave. A creeper wanders the shadows. How far would YOU go to wake yourself up from every parent’s worst nightmare?

It’s all rather less than the sum of its parts, but the first two thirds of “You Should Leave” impress and engross. It’s a pity we don’t get to see it with an audience. Because if there’s one thing that amplifies tiny frights, it’s other people overreacting as if they’re scared out of their wits.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence, disturbing images, sexual content and language

Cast: Kevin Bacon, Amanda Seyfried, Avery Tiiu Essex, Colin Blumenau

Credits: Written and directed by David Koepp, based on the Daniel Kehlmann novel. A Universal/BlumHouse release.

Running time: 1:33

A teenage girl’s coming of age story shines a light on Korean sexism, educational Darwinism and the afterthought that girls seem to be there in “House of Hummingbird,” a sweet and forlorn “year in the life” drama.

The debut feature of Bora Kim is a period piece. She uses an eventful year in Korea — 1994 — and parks the downtrodden, failing student with limited expectations Eun-hee (Ji-hu Park) in it for a drama about the events that could make or break her.

Eun-hee lives in a violently dysfunctional house where her doted-on older brother Daehoon is being tutored and nagged towards college, an academic achievement that might be beyond his reach. He takes out his frustrations on his littlest sister. He learned the violence not just from his father (In-gi Jeong), we come to believe, but from the culture.

Older sister Suhee is still in school as well, but she’ll do anything to not be around the house, only showing up for meals and helping with the family’s baked goods business.

Eun-hee is as badgered as the other two, forced to take an after school “cram class” (tutoring) even though her girls’ school classmates have already singled her out as “housemaid” material.

She’s naively seeing her first boyfriend, who doesn’t seem to want to show her off in public. And even that is just another distraction weighing her down.

Insulted, humiliated or just ignored in class, passing notes instead of taking notes in the tutoring sessions with her pal Jisuk, doodling comic book characters when she should be paying attention, it’s all coming to head.

The headmaster’s pep talk to the kids should put the fear of God into the lot of them.

“Today is the first day (on the road) to your death!”

That’s a lot to carry on your shoulders. Eun-hee is only 14.

Over the course of this year, there will be karaoke sessions with her one or two friends, heartbreak and betrayal, misbehavior and tragedies. And there’ll be a health scare, something it takes a while to get her distracted, depressed mother (Seung-Yun Lee)

The year’s sole saving grace? Her new cram course tutor in Chinese, Miss Yong-ji (Sae-byeok Kim) takes her seriously, doesn’t berate her or raise her voice.

One day, Yong-ji sings a mournful injured-in-the-workplace song, another day she explains Chinese poetry.

“How many people do you know?” She gets an unreasonably high answer. “And now how many of them do you understand? How many of THEM understand what’s going on inside you?”

“House of Hummingbird,” in virtual cinemas (for instance, on your local art cinema’s website) on June 26, lets the momentous events of ’94 (a North Korean dictator dies) pass behind the teens trying to figure out what it is that they’ll be doing for the rest of their lives, when they’ll flower and when life will start to seem worth living.

The girls experiment with smoking, shoplifting, French kissing and thoughts of suicide as they consider the future laid out for them, a marriage where “you’re each other’s furniture,” or some sort of career — but only if you get into Seoul University somehow.

Bora Kim lets the story unfold in its own time, allowing for interludes — Mom’s drunken brother shows up to apologize for sucking up all the family money and energy from her as he was shoved into a life and career he wasn’t smart to handle — and plenty of teen distractions.

It takes a solid hour before we get a hint that maybe Eun-hee isn’t a complete dolt and slacker. “House of Hummingbird” is more interested in the limitations Korea’s patriarchy puts on her than her actual potential, more alarmed by the intense pressure even kids who fall on the “not-the-brightest” end of the spectrum are put under.

The film meanders a bit, and dawdles a bit more. But its compelling and unblinking portrait of a girl’s life, her expectations, prospects, obstacles and second class status announce Ms. Kim, its director, as a talent to watch as a chronicler of female life another of Asia’s “Miracle Economies.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Ji-hu Park, Sae-byeok Kim, Seung-Yun Lee and In-gi Jeong

Credits: Written and directed by Bora Kim. A Well Go/Kino release.

Running time: 2:18

From Variety — AMC Theatres Reverses Course, Will Require Guests to Wear Masks https://t.co/HHdhXmlp04 https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1274027621521797120?s=20

Netflix dips its toes into that most Japanese of film forms, anime, with “A Whisker Away,” a charming, whimsical fantasy that you’d never guess came from the country that gave us “Hello Kitty.”

It’s a body-switch tale about a manic teenage girl who obsesses over a boy, and is lured into getting close to him by taking the guise of a cat.

Miyo (voiced by Mirai Shida in Japanese, with English subtitles) is impulsive and given to acting out. Her mother left her father, and dad’s new live-in girlfriend is a bit young and green to be stepping into mothering.

Miyo crushes on classmate Hinode (Natsuki Hanae). Hard. As in hip-check in hockey or hoops hard. “Sunrise attack!” she shrieks, tumbling into him each morning at school. She can’t tell how embarrassed he is by this.

Maybe the nickname everybody else in school has given her should be her clue. “MUGE, Miss Ultra Gaga Enigmatic.”

Her 14-15 year old problems get the best of her, and she confesses “I hate this stupid world. I wish it would end soon.”

But this Buddha-sized cat she runs into sells cat masks. All she has to do is lend him her “human face mask” and she can see the world through cat’s eyes — literally.

As “Taro” she can get close to Hinode and see his life. She can also leap off roofs into trees, something she takes to doing as Miyo, putting the mask on mid-flight.

Of course, there’s a catch to becoming a cute cat. Several catches, beginning with “I need to wipe my butt” issues and carrying on through to the REAL cost of this “exchange.”

Studio Clorido (a “Pokeman” anime, and “Penguin Highway”) did the animation here, and while it isn’t as rich as the best Studio Ghibli outings, the detail and effects are better than your average TV anime.

Mari Okada’s script is a winner, offering up the usual slices-of-Japanese-life (“festivals,” meals, cats and school life). I wasn’t nuts about the finale, but the Fat Cat with the Masks is a grand creation, and the fanciful alternate world of cats, complete with a “Human Car Bar,” is wonderfully imaginative.

Cats have little more trouble slipping into human guises than humans becoming cats.

The movie may be mostly about teen love, but there are all these subtexts — adored pets and adoring pets who crave sharing their shorter lives with their one human, pet mortality.

The West may have long regarded the East as “inscrutable.” In Japan, they save that word for felines, who come off here as reserved, loyal, observant and aloof. On the money, to anybody who’s ever shared a life with a cat.

Money well spent, Netflix. Let’s see what else you’ve got.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG, fear, violence, smoking.

Cast: The voices of Mirai Shida, Natsuki Hanae, Susumu Chiba.

Credits: Directed by Jun’ichi Satô, Tomotaka Shibayama, script by Mari Okada. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44