Movie Nation

There is no better time capsule for the outlandish, post-Bond action cinema of the ’60s than the camp comic book romp “Danger: Diabolik.”

This Franco-Italian heist thriller was “Matt Helm” meets “Batman,” all lavish modernist sets and near-nudity, fake blood, fake voices (it’s almost all looped, even when we’re hearing the actual actors) and um, good clean fun.

Want to know where “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” came from? It’s a little Bond, a smidgen of TV’s “The Avengers,” and a LOT of “Diabolik.”

John Phillip Law (“Barbarella,” “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming”), Hollywood’s hot new “himbo,” has the largely silent title role, a master criminal and supervillain with the unlimited resources it takes to rob huge currency shipments, priceless jewels and for the grand finale, the largest gold ingot ever, melted into the shape of a coffin.

He has an underground villain’s lair on the coast, naturally — so that he can dock his cool super-secret submarine. The villa comes complete with shag carpeting, modular/circular sofas, his and hers mod showers and gadgets galore. The man burns through E-Type Jaguars as if they were Turkish cigarettes.

Eva (Austrian bombshell Marisa Mell) is at his side in every caper, always there in disguise with a backup Jaguar, always in his bed at the end of the day.

They are hunted relentlessly by Inspector Ginko (Frenchman Michel Piccoli of “Belle du Jour”), and griped about by a government minister (British comic Terry-Thomas) who does all those things Terry-Thomas does. Well, he doesn’t say “Drat and blast!” this time, a stumble on the part of the (many) screenwriters.

“Diabolik… I assure you that this individual, whose very name reveals his antagonism to the established values of our society, will soon be brought… to justice!”

Bond villain Adolfo Celi (sans eye-patch) plays Valmont, a villain out to do away with Diabolik as well.

Diabolik has no “code,” has no “honor” and isn’t shy about killing cops or a planeload of fellow villains who get in his way.

The script has no zingy one-liners, the effects range from “Wait, that submersible is real and way cooler than any Bond sub” (of the ’60s) to cheapness itself.

It’s not as sexy as “Barbarella,” not as funny as Woody Allen’s dubbed goof “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” Dubbed into in whatever language (Italian, English) you find this pan Euro production in, it’s never-quite hilarious.

“Diabolik” is a cult film — a miscalculated bomb, amusingly awful — that’s almost in a category of “cult” all its own. It played midnight shows, often in rep with John Phillip Law’s other “cult” classic, “Barbarella,” earned the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” treatment, and is almost forgotten now.

Considering where cult cinema has gone — gruesomely violent, profane, “Showgirls” explicit or “Big Lebowski” (not that bad) — it’s positively quaint.

Best served as an appetizer to an “Austin Powers” marathon, if “Casino Royale” (the “original” one, with Peter Sellers) isn’t available.

MPAA Rating: unrated, lots of violence, some nudity

Cast: John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi, Terry-Thomas

Credits: Directed by Mario Bava, script by Dino Maiuri, Brian Degas , Tudor Gates and Mario Bava and    based on the comic book.

Running time: 1:45

The most interesting thing in “Twelve” is not what this Little League “big game” movie is all about.

The boy who longs to make it to The Little League World Series has been cut from the team in the Connecticut town his family’s just moved to. His dad (Erik Heger) has chewed on the coach who (unfairly, of course) didn’t pick his boy for the all star team from their league that will play other all-star teams for the chance to advance through various tourneys towards Williamsport, Pa. and the LLWS.

Fear not, Dad says. There’s another league you can try out for nearby. THEY’LL be sure to recognize your talent.

And just for a moment, the kid, who shares his father’s obsession for baseball glory, says the right thing, a sentence that puts whatever Dad is doing to the family, his own career and his two baseball-stars-in-the-making sons into perspective.

“I don’t want to have to move again.”

We get a glimpse of Dad’s shortcuts, financial and professional and personal “issues.”

“I’m a loser, for crying out loud! I don’t want the boys to have a failure for a father!

But those visit-a-shrink issues get lost in the shuffle in this bland, generic and shallow boy’s baseball dream movie.

The messaging — that if you don’t get picked “it wasn’t fair,” that rejection isn’t a part of life, that surrendering the family’s stability to living vicariously through your kids is OK, as are bragging and cockiness, so long as it’s just the OTHER kid who’s throwing beanballs — is problematic.

Which isn’t papered over by the fact that this is about an obsessive year-long pursuit of “getting even” with the coach that cut you, and coach’s oft-berated punk son.

Kyle (Wyatt Ralff) can play any position, and short and scrawny or not, he can hit to any field and hit for power. Just don’t ask him to pitch. He won’t. There’s a secret reason why, which we can guess. Because we’ve seen more than one baseball movie in our lives.

Dad thinks his own ballplaying years were hampered by not wanting it enough, but just giving up.

“Dad, can you make sure I don’t give up?”

The family’s move from Massachusetts to Connecticut means a new school and new team for older brother Xavier (Liam Obergfoll), who hints that conflict with their “played some college ball” dad could be on the horizon.

“I think it’s about time I started paying a little more attention to girls, and a little less to baseball!”

Dad’s not having it. And the writer-director chickens out on “conflict” and lets Xavier switch his nickname to “X” and get the prettiest girl in school AND star for the baseball team AND — when he has no more time to help coach his kid brother — has a girlfriend (Lexi Collins) who blackmails him into helping the kid.

Not that Kyle needs much. Dad is a constant presence in the batting cage, at the diamond, managing the diet of his 12-year-old on a year-long quest.

“Get some protein in you…Doesn’t matter what it takes like. We’ve just gotta get it in your system. Rocky drank raw eggs!”

Dad rents an apartment in a nearby town (even though he’s a bust as a 42 year-old entry-level salesman). But gosh darn it, there’s no conflict with his wife (Jennifer Mudge), the lads’ mother. Because conflict, the stuff of drama, is confined to the diamond in this direct-to-video project.

“He’s never going to be 12 again! We have to give him a chance to live his dream!”

Hardcore Little League parents are rolling their eyes at my nitpicking over “messaging” in the movie. America isn’t really about “sportsmanship” any more. And making a professional athlete takes obsessive parents. We know that.

But while the game scenes have Little League speed to them (save for the absurd, physiology and physics-defying pitching speeds), there isn’t much pop to the way they’re filmed and edited.

Shortchanging EVERY other player on the teams save for Evil Coach (Jeremy Holm) and Evil Coach’s bean-balling, trash-talking son (Vincent Pavonetti) narrows the focus and drains the film of potential color and humor around the edges.

Somebody — the writer-director, the stage parents of a child actor kid — named their player “Truffaut” on his jersey, after the French director of the classic of traumatized childhood, “The 400 Blows.”

What’s up with that?

It’s not mocking to say writer-director Steve Grimaldi is “no Truffaut.” Because who is?

But he plainly had neither the interest nor the talent to recognize what would make this movie stand out, give the movie an edge or make this movie watchable enough to be commercial. As desperate as we all are to see a little baseball, the little baseball with a movie wrapped around it that is “Twelve” isn’t going to fill the bill.

MPAA Rating: G

Cast: Wyatt Ralff, Erik Heger, Jennifer Mudge, Liam Obergfoll, Lexi Collins and Jeremy Holm.

Credits: Written and directed by Steve Grimaldi. An Indie Rights release.

Running time: 1:32

Releasing “Planet of the Humans” on Earth Day is either an epic piece of “bad timing,” or a solitary act of defiance in the face of everything and everyone this environmental documentary opposes.

Let’s lean towards the latter. Because on a day we’ve celebrated for 50 years as “The Beginning of the End of Pollution” (the first PR campaign tag) and a signature moment when environmentalism went mainstream, maybe what we need is a good, hard shake out of our complacency.

As the Earth takes a deep breath in the COVID19 enforced collapse of fossil fuel use, here’s a movie that goes after the villains still among us — Big Oil, Big Energy, the Koch Brothers, but also the Sierra Club, environmental icon Bill McKibben, Treehugger.org, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg and Al Gore.

But but but…say WHAT now?

Michigan filmmaker Jeff Gibbs (backed by Michael Moore) posits that environmentalism has become something of a religion to much of the culture. And “our religion” has been co-opted by capitalism. We’re being led by false-prophets looking to increase tangible profits.

We’ve been sold a three card monte game that’s convincing us that magic bullets are just lying around, ready for government policies and government subsidies, to save us from ourselves. Solar? Wind? Short-term band-aids that aren’t pushing down fossil fuel use in the least.

Worst of all, this “green” energy that all the college kids, protesting for their universities to invest in after they DIVEST from oil, gas and coal — “bio-mass.”

“That’s burning forests for energy,” Gibbs narrates in between clips of college presidents hosting press events for going green (MSU, UNC, and the granddaddy college in this con, Middlebury, Vermont) and Al Gore and others trying to explain or dodge explaining how deforesting the planet will save us from climate change.

Hint. It won’t. When cynical tycoons like Branson (Virgin planes, trains etc.) and Bloomberg push it, it’s because they’ve got ground-floor investment cash tied up in timberland, government leaders willing to log forests for “wood chips” and communities lined up for “BioMass” plants, an energy fad that entails burning energy to harvest and cut down trees, and set them on fire, along with old tires, trash and other toxic wastes.

It’s our “industrial capitalist” system which is the real enemy, as Koch Brothers investment tentacles reach into every stage of “green” energy, just as surely as they back Keystone Pipelines and fracking subsidies as well.

When they own Georgia Pacific, why should we be shocked that they’re pushing for new biomass power plants? And if capitalism’s cash can get to the likes of Gore and McKibben, where will the moral authority of environmentalism move to?

Where is the Green Gandhi? Is she named Thunberg?

Gibbs, who has been on this green beat for years, is something of a monotonous on-camera interviewer — just persistent enough to come off as “dogged.”

But as he mows down the sacred cows of the Green Left — “Planet of the Humans” pummels Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and High Priest McKibben, and just eviscerates the Sierra Club — he makes a fatal filmmaking mistake his mudraker mentor should have steered him clear of.

Where’s the hope? There’s no third act “But here’s what we can do, here’s where people are doing it right.”

After seeing how wind farms are the new “mountaintop removal” energy industry (displacing coal), seeing lively, life-filled deserts reduced to lifeless sand and abandoned solar panels, getting the skinny on how the “German Renewables Miracle,” electric cars, batteries and everything else is more hype than help, we need something to cling to.

This far-ranging (choppy) doc, now on Youtube, lays out the errors in our ways and the capitalists — who range from cynics to charlatans — who are not to be trusted. But its whole “solution/action step” — in rhetorical argument terms — is “We’ve got to get down to the truth, the basic facts” before we can even begin to address this mess.

Population control, consumption control, treading more lightly? Yeah, we know that. We just don’t want to hear it. Yet. Will “Planet of the Humans” open our ears?

MPAA Rating: Disturbing images

Cast: Jeff Gibbs, Ozzie Zehner, Sheldon Solomon, Nina Jablonsky, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Al Gore, Bill McKibben

Credits: Directed by Jeff Gibbs. A Rumble Media release.

Running time: 1:40

The “Big Game” sports movie gets some welcome Caribbean in “Sprinter,” a drama about the pitfall-filled rise of a Jamaican short-distance runner.

It’s pure formula and almost pure hokum, but as everything sounds more fun in that musical Jamaican patois, it’s not an unpleasant (if overlong) sitting.

Dale Elliott plays Akeem Sharp, a runner competing in the shadow of his “legendary” older brother, a great sprinter years earlier at St. Lazarus High. He’s a big kid, but easily overlooked. He can’t win at his brother’s distance, 400 meters, to save his life.

It’s been a pleasant working class life, even though his mother (Lorraine Toussaint) left for the U.S. in the film’s opening scene. “It’s just two years,” she consoled her sons and husband (Dennis Titus). She’d be sending money home so that they can finish their house, educate their kids.

Ten years later, every call and Skype is just “Well, maybe next year.”

Older brother Germaine (Kadeem Wilson) is still around, a “legend” and maybe the wrong kind of role model. He’s the “General,” now — a flirt and skirt-chaser with an infant and a very lucrative phone “Congratulations, you’re a winner” lottery scam that he runs out of his fenced-in mansion, a new Jaguar, and a lot of bad advice.

The kid? He needs to listen to his coach (David Alan Grier), who looks at his fast-start, faster-fade 400 meter failure, and at his stopwatch, and makes a suggestion.

“You never win de four, but two? Maybe another story.”

Events conspire to force Akeem to try 200 meters. And overnight, he’s a star, “first time in de papers” the down to Earth female sprinter Kerry (Shantol Jackson) teases. “Don’ let it gooo to y’ head!”

Which of course it does — TV appearances, clubs and parties with brother Germaine. Germaine even sets him up with a previously unattainable girlfriend (Shak-Quera South).

What can go wrong? Well, all the seeds of his downfall have been planted — the absent mother, the underworld brother, the mercenary hottie.

And Akeem is sophomoric in his sophistication, even on his best days.

But how many movies do you see set in Jamaica, that tell a Jamaican story? “Sprinter” takes something the country is known for and builds a tolerably formulaic picture that looks beyond the picturesque and for the “real.”

Akeem’s nickname becomes “The Rasta Rocket,” and of course he lets that go to his head. But as he’s chasing girls and looking at U.S. track scholarship offers, we see his world — nice enough houses, with even the poorest covered with barred windows and locked gates. Guns show up more than once. Corruption and criminality are right out in the open.

People leave “The Island Paradise” for a reason.

The reggaeton-infused soundtrack doesn’t mince words and the script doesn’t shy away from teen sex, teen missteps and what happens when your hopes are pinned to the narrowest of dreams — athletics.

The cast is game enough, with Grier surprisingly effective (if not at all funny) as the coach-losing-his-patience stereotype. A standout moment comes the one time Germaine breaks out of “Jamaican” and offers a generic, white American accent delivering the empty promises he once heard, that he’s warning Akeem about hearing now.

It’s just that “Sprinter” loses what little nerve it has at about halfway through, a reminder that Hollywood versions of “The Big Game” movie have had to break the formula to gain notice.

It’s likable enough, but after breaking out of the blocks, the picture gets gassed by the midway mark. The best it can do after that is not “win” or “place,” but just “show.”

MPAA Rating:  TV-MA, sex, drugs, profanity, guns

Cast: Dale Elliott, Lorraine Toussaint, David Alan Grier, Shantol Jackson,  Shak-Quera South and Kadeem Wilson.

Credits: Directed by Storm Saulter, script by Storm Saulter and Robert A. Maylor. A FilmRise release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:51

It’s easy to make too much out of “the last role Felicity Huffman took before going to prison” with “Tammy’s Always Dying.” A dressed-down, alcoholic, depressed and promiscuous mother — constantly threatening suicide — and the impact that has on her self-loathing barmaid daughter?

“On the nose,” “martyred” and all that, right?

But the timing doesn’t work. This was in the can before the “college admissions scandal” broke in March of 2019.

Take away the “martyred Felicity Huffman” read, and “Tammy’s” a pretty humdrum affair — not awful, not that deep or showy either. It’s not Oscar bait, but there’s good work here, some sharp and intimate observations about co-dependency, pithy dialogue and a solid sense of (Canadian) place.

And if you want to interpret it as “atonement” for a minor scandal in the “rigged system” of American life, have at it.

Anastasia Phillips (quite good) is Catherine, the barmaid who leaves work needing to sleep off each shift in their little corner of Ontario. But she can’t. She’s got to go talk her drunken mother off the bridge — literally.

“You’re depressed because you’re drunk all the time,” she complains.

“No,” Tammy corrects her. “I drink because I’m depressed all the time.”

The kid lives down the street, which is handy when her mother might “stick your head in the oven at the end of every month.” Mom corrects that, too — electric, not gas.

Catherine works with one of Tammy’s exes, the still-fatherly Doug (Clark Johnson), and endures a humiliating and degrading sexual affair with married lowlife Reggie (Aaron Ashmore) consummated in store rooms or the back seat of her beater car.

Her one confidante in all this is Doug, who lets her revisit her childhood with a weekly lunch at a nice restaurant in Toronto, a chance to remember her delusional tween ballet years and escape the horrors of a suicidal, clingy mother.

Tammy’s an embarrassing, unfiltered blurter. Whatever obnoxious insult or crude come-on (to another barfly) that comes to mind comes out of her mouth.

Catherine? She’s way past “over it.”

And then Mom gets cancer. Tammy is numb to the diagnosis, and the prognosis of “months.” Catherine can’t take one more wrinkle in Mom’s all-consuming neediness.

“If she wants to die, LET HER!”  And “Killing herself would be the least selfish thing she’s ever done!”

But Doug pushes Tammy to clean up, make amends, to “go out a better woman.”

Will she? Or will Tammy still to her credo?

“I’m not a good person. I’m a good time.”

The screenplay by Joanne Sarazen kind of unravels in the third act. The struggle to find something to do with obvious bits of foreshadowing doesn’t help an overall sense of “incomplete” that hangs over the picture after its inevitable resolution.

But what is indie cinema if it doesn’t immerse you in tough lives and a working class sense of place? More scenes in the bar, as over-familiar as they are, might have helped. What movies and TV used to call “our regulars” are alcoholics, day drinkers. It’s a sad place where everybody has a sad story and a weakness.

At least director Amy Jo Johnson gives us a rare peek at that Canadian obsession for jelly donuts. You betcha.

As showy as it is meant to be, as deflating as the subject matter is, “Tammy’s Always Dying” is still worth your while. And if we want to regard this as an act of atonement, so be it. Huffman reminds us she’s a fine actress who isn’t afraid to “go there,” haggard, torn fishnets and never a hint of glamour as she hangs from a bridge or dives into a bottle or jelly donut.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Felicity Huffman, Anastasia Phillips, Clark Johnson, Aaron Ashmore and Lauren Holley.

Credits:  Directed by Amy Jo Johnson, script by Joanne Sarazen. A Quiver release.

Running Time: 1:29

Ask a hundred film buffs what their favorite cult film is, and you’ll get 500 answers.

Because nobody wants to limit that pick to the obvious — “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Harold & Maude,” “Eraserhead” — to admit how many times they’ve watched “The Evil Dead,” or to interrupt their latest trip to Lebowski Fest to give the question more serious thought.

So it’s no wonder that Quiver and director Danny Wolf couldn’t limit themselves to a single documentary, rounding up stars, directors, academics and critics to swoon over and deconstruct their favorites.

“Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All Time” is a three-part mini-series, covering everything from “Freaks” to “The Warriors,” “Spinal Tap” to “Valley Girl.”

There are lots of opinions about the definition of a “cult” film, taking into account its “edge,” forbidden fruit “danger,” rejection by the mass movie audience (many were bonafide “flops” that found their audience over decades) and that ineffable “something” that makes you want to call your best friend and yell, “Friend, you have GOT to see this.”

I think John Cleese comes the closest to getting that definition right.

A cult film, Our Lord J.C. (of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”) says, is one “that you think is much better than it is.”

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)” is celebrated as the greatest cult film of them all, a movie that opened to little notice, but which “never ever left the cinema,” as Patricia Quinn, one of several members of the cast speaking here, declares. Fans and critics and cult director John Waters (“Pink Flamingos”) talk of its impact on the culture, putting a “transvestite transexual” on screens where isolated, closeted fans could see someone that might be closer to their own sexuality than anything mainstream Hollywood was putting out.

Tod Browning’s still alarming “differently-abled” thriller “Freaks” (1932) is titled “the scariest movie ever made” by the likes of comic writer Bruce Vilanch and others.

Pam Grier talks of her glory days in Blaxploitation cinema like “Foxy Brown” and “Coffy.”

Gary Busey goes hyperbolic over “Point Break,” which has gained stature via a growing online fandom.

“Harold & Maude,” “The Decline of Western Civilization” punk documentaries, the films of the cleavage-cultist Russ Meyers and the down and dirty noir classics of Sam Fuller (“The Naked Kiss”), John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13” — a lot of ground is covered just in “Volume One: Midnight Madness.”

Everybody here is an enthusiast, and director Danny Wolf got Jeff Bridges and John Turturro to talk about “The Big Lebowski,” Rob Reiner and several others to speak about “Spinal Tap” and David Patrick Kelly to reminisce of the glory that was and remains “The Warriors.”

Those big names missing (Tim Curry, Keanu, Kathryn Bigelow, Tarantino, David Lynch, seen only in a ’70s interview) are barely missed.

Not all of it works. The conceit of having a “panel” consisting of directors Joe Dante (“Gremlins”) and John Waters, actress Ileana Douglas (?) and comic and actor Kevin Pollack (!?) could have left the hosting to Waters — the real authority, the Cult King.

There’s a whole subgenre of “revolting cult films” that aren’t so labeled but show up here. “Eraserhead” and any of the early warped Waters movies could turn your stomach.

Later installments will dwell on everything from masterpieces like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Blade Runner” to the obscure “Liquid Sky,” bonafide hits (no “cult” to them) like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” to the zombie genre — “Living Dead” movies no longer having any cult appeal.

What, no “Stunt Man?” Well, they got to “Show Girls.” That’ll have to do.

But that’s the fun of it all, the arguments it starts. Because what really defines this sub-category of cinema is movies that have taken on a life of their own, taken over by fans.

And if the fans prefer “The Warriors” (popular, enduring, classic) to “Streets of Fire” (a lot more “cultish” for my money), they’re the arbiters.

“Time Warp,” in three installments, shows up via VOD and digital streaming, April 21 (ep. 1), May 19 (ep. 2) and June 23 (ep. 3).

Tune in. All the cool kids will be there.

Here’s where you can Stream “Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All Time”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, grotesque imagery, profanity

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Pam Grier, John Waters, Penelope Spheeris, Amy Heckerling, Gary Busey, Jeff Goldblum, John Turtorro, Joe Dante, Ileana Douglas, Sid Haig and David Patrick Kelly.

Credits: Directed by Danny Wolf. A Quiver release.

Running time: Three episodes at 1:30 each.

Molly Sims is the right Missy.

Lauren Lupkus is “The Wrong Missy.”

David Spade is back?

Thanks, Netflix.

May 13.

Too many movies to name begin with a famous quotation as an opening title, a prologue that parks the objectives of the story within the parameters of a pithy observation about life, love or the world we live in. We forget them before the frame has wholly faded into the first scene.

But here’s one you need to remember, first scene to last. The French dramedy “Bad Seeds (Mauvaises herbes)” is introduced with a famous phrase from Victor “Les Miersables” Hugo — “There are no bad seeds or bad men; there are only bad farmers.”

“Bad Seeds” is loaded with laughs, but a Middle Eastern massacre plays out under its opening credits. A little boy is the sole survivor.

The first of many jarring shifts in tone jumps us from this tiny waif’s plight, weeping and lost and alone, to present day Paris and the parking lot of a mall. An old woman has her purse snatched. An elderly passerby gives chase.

But the moment thief and pursuer are out of sight, the legendary Catherine Deneuve, as Monique, proceeds to empty the chivalrous stranger’s cart into her car trunk.

The abandoned purse always has a note in it, in French — “That will teach you to help others, a—–e!”

The young mugger (the French comic and writer-director-star Kheiron) and “old lady” are in cahoots. They share the haul and share an apartment.

She’s all “I’m not old, I’m EXPERIENCED (in French, with English subtitles).” He’s forever pulling scams — getting phone numbers of beautiful women who think he’s at the airport (he’s in a suit) to pick up Beyoncé and/or Jay-Z. Oddly, he never has the nerve to call.

But one mall carpark hustle too many puts them in the sights of her old friend, Victor (screen veteran André Dussollier of “Amelie” and “A Very Long Engagement”). He recognizes her, and chases down him. Damned if the tables aren’t turned.

Monique shrugs it off, but Waël has a rap sheet. And Victor’s turning the tables has a kicker. I’d hate to turn you in. Help me run this class for troubled kids — just for a day.

Monique can be his “volunteer” secretary, as he interviews to fill a permanent teaching position. Waël will handle the kids.

Mon dieu! Is he qualified?

“No,” she chuckles. “But he’s full of surprises.”

So the “retired” woman who describes her job as “to keep (Waël) out of jail,” will work the office — scaring off potential qualified competitors there for a job interview. Waël, who is none the wiser, has to engage and entertain “problem children” kicked out of the schools in Creteil well enough to keep them coming back.

Kheiron, whose real name is Manouchehr Tabib, leans on his stand-up background to try and get the half-dozen miscreants, who give him the silent treatment “in protest” of their punishment, to speak to him and to get something out of this “class.”

He riffs. You, Karim! Are you gay?

“NO!”

“Change your SHIRT, then!”

To Ludo, the one African in the class, “Remember to brush your teeth. Back in the day, slaves with the best teeth had the most value. And you never know…”

He insults them, regales them with tall tales, and takes them out into the nearby streets to make connections, beg, hustle and “communicate.”

Two kids are in rival gangs, one’s hiding a painful secret, the youngest is a Gypsy (Roma) who never stayed in one place long enough to learn to speak French, much less to write it.

Victor — who coincidentally shares the first name of Monsieur Victor Hugo — has just one bit of advice for dealing with this cross-section of modern France. “Remember, a problem child is a child with a problem.”

The little life lessons/hustles are cute, Deneuve’s Monique has plenty of hustles up her own sleeve, and so much of the movie’s “present day” is light that it plays like a teacher-changes-students/students-change-teacher comedy that isn’t quite all there.

And then WHAM, a flashback takes us back to Beirut (never overtly identified) and the horrors this little boy endured many years ago. He finds sunglasses, and learns to be a “blind” beggar/pickpocket. He witnesses crimes and death, suffers loss and want and fear.

Waël, too, picks up on the “child with a problem” cases in his class, when he isn’t hitting on the voluptuous older sister of one student and wondering what this shifty-looking “social worker” is doing lurking around another.

Kheiron has a deft hand with comedy, and like many a comic who writes her or himself into a film, a passion for pathos. Deneuve could play her light, sweet and not-above-deceit character in her sleep, and doesn’t. She’s delightful, and the fact that the script doesn’t over-explain her or her connection to Waël adds to the “old lady” cool she wears with her usual style.

And Dussollier gets two of the biggest, simplest laughs you can imagine, and does so with a very French elan.

But the turns toward the touching in the third act makes “Bad Seeds” more than a comedy that almost works. They are lump in the throat moments that pay homage to Victor Hugo, to “bad seeds” given the right farmer, to the art of the con artist’s “long con,”and to that one teacher/mentor/surrogate parent who makes a difference in just one life, and lives to see its ripple effects.

Watch it in French, enjoy the laughs, stay to the end, keep your Kleenex box handy and expect to be moved.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Kheiron, Catherine Deneuve, André Dussollier, Ouassima Zrouki, Youssouf Wague Louison Blivet, Hakou Benosmane, Adil Dehbi, Joseph Jovanovic, Leila Boumedjane

Credits: Written and directed by Kheiron. A Studio Canal/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

Early ’90s, a self-sustaining human habitat experiment in a biosphere.

It was so fascinating that it even inspired a Pauly Shore movie.

Remember Pauly Shore?

May 8, this Neon documentary remembers this event in the words of the people who lived through it.

Eva and Brandon are that couple that you’re rooting for in high school or hoping that they make it through college together.

And so is the movie about their romance. “Angelfish” covers very familiar cinematic ground. He’s from the wrong side of the New York tracks, she’s from an equally wrong side. She has responsibilities, duties to her family. He does, too, with an even worse home situation to manage.

But these two crazy kids and their comfort food romance — “West Side Story” without the dancing or singing gangs — have something. They may not say much or do much. But they pass the test Brandon’s boss at the supermarket deli (Bobby Plasencia) sets up in the first scene.

“It ain’t all sunshine and roses. You’ve gotta find someone who’s not gonna put you in a bad place.”

Brandon, played by Jim Stanton of Showtime’s “Your Honor” series, keeps to himself, keeps it polite and when he has to, keeps it real. He’s from Kings Bridge, a section of the north Bronx that’s long been tough and is transitioning from working class white to Latin in the early ’90s.

He meets Marble Hill native Eva (rapper Princess Nokia) at the meat counter, and bluntly helps her fend off a creeper running his “Aye, mami” game at her against her will.

She’s pretty and shy, college-bound. That’s all he gets from her. But as she walks away his slack-jawed smile gives away his game. Smitten.

Eva’s friends, especially the brash gay teen Ricky (Sebastian Chacon), have little pearls of wisdom for her, too. Close the deal with your beau Rafael, who’s down in “PR.” Go to college. Get on with it.

“It don’t make sense waiting to do something that’s going to make you happy,” Ricky advises, reading from the movie gay BFF guidebook.

But is Rafael and college to study accounting what she wants to do? It’s certainly her working mom’s wish.

The second moment Eva runs into Brandon is where her questioning of that path begins. He’s big on telling her to follow her dream and try acting. She doesn’t say anything, but maybe a deli man at a market isn’t all he could be, either.

Life at home? Complicated. She’s got siblings, including an older brother with special needs, and mom works all the time. He has a younger brother, Conor (Stanley Simons), a lazy teen itching to hang out with the wrong crowd.

And their single mom (Erin Davie) is a barfly, still pretty enough to wind up bringing this guy or that guy home. She doesn’t feed her kids and brushes everything off on Brandon. Oh, and she’s always mouthing off about “those people” coming in “our neighborhood.”

Well, as the Bard said, “The course of true love never did run smooth. True love always encounters difficulties.”

Mentioning Shakespeare in reviewing writer-director Peter Lee’s debut feature isn’t fair, but he’s riding on the shoulders of giants, dwarves, and everybody else who ever scripted a “young love” romance here.

He shortchanges Eva’s posse of friends, and conveniently leaves Brandon a loner — trapped keeping his kid brother out of trouble, holding his tongue longer than humanly possible over his mother’s pronounced neglect and disinterest.

The movie is both uncluttered and malnourished by that narrowing of focus.

Lee’s leads aren’t dazzling, but both have good chemistry and screen presence. Stanton has more scenes, but all he has to do is live up to the line Eva’s girlfriend slips her when they do their restroom “conference” about her new beau.

“You should see the way he looks at you!”

Princess Nokia, who may return to using her “Not a cell phone” name (Destiny Nicole Frasqueri) someday, doesn’t have a lot of arrows in her acting quiver yet. But she feels real up on the screen. Her character is lived-in, conflicted, not ready for the adult decisions she’s having to make at 18.

“Angelfish” is seriously undemanding, but benefits from novel settings (few New York movies are set in Marble Hill/Kings Bridge) and a period piece story that strips away the artifice and distraction that love in the age of cell phones promises. Back in ’93, you had to use a pay phone when you wanted privacy, had to write somebody’s number down and had to wait in the apartment if you were expecting a call.

That’s true love.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity, suggestions of sexual situations

Cast: Princess Nokia, Jim Stanton, Stanley Simons, Erin Davie, Sebastian Chacon and Rosie Berrido

Credits:  Written and directed by Peter Lee. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:36