Movie Nation

A hint of Massachusetts in this Long Island period piece? “Tenduh Bah” is the proper title of the Amazon release, opening Friday.

Time-proven people-in-peril horror formulas cross borders and cultures. That’s true in “Roh,” a somewhat effective tale of terror set in the forests of Malaysia.

That’s where a mother (Farah Ahmad), her tween daughter (Mhia Farhana) and younger son (Harith Haziq) find themselves menaced by “omens,” sinister forces in play in their corner of the middle of nowhere.

We’ve seen a feral child (Putri Qaseh) digging up a fresh grave in the dark of night, a Burning Bush her only light.

Mother Mak has no hope of her husband returning, and has only her children to rely on out there. But when they see a slain deer hanging from a tree, they have an idea something’s up. There’s an evil “old people talk about” around here, a creature that targets deer and small children.

Sounds like she’s making that up to keep them safe. But she warns them to beware of anything they see in the forest.

And we’ve already seen this solitary hunter (Namron) stalking about, searching for something. Now would be the perfect time for this mute, filthy wild child to pay them a visit. They feed her and try to figure out her story.

It’s only after she’s killed and eaten a chicken, raw, that she blurts out an answer.

“When the moon is full, all of you will die,” she says (in Malay with English subtitles).

Perhaps the woman (June Lolong) from the village across the river can help. Because once you’ve seen an unwashed urchin devour a bloody chicken and heard her deliver an ominous warning before slitting her own throat, you’re pretty sure this isn’t something you can handle alone.

Writer-director Emir Ezwan, working from a story he and one of his stars (and a producer) conjured up, renders this tale in slow, deliberate strokes.

It’s more chilling than frightening, and just cryptic enough about what’s really happened and what is really happening to keep the viewer engaged.

And even if his film isn’t a non-stop downward spiral into terror, the shocks are genuine and the violence grisly, personal and demonic.

Rating: Unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Farah Ahmad, Mhia Farhana, Harith Haziq, June Lojong, Putri Qaseh and Namron.

Credits:Scripted and directed by Emir Ezwan. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:23

It’s a 63 year-old stage musical widely regarded as a classic, and 60 year-old movie beloved by generations, also considered a classic and on TV almost constantly.

So who thought giving Steven Spielberg a lot of money and a coveted December/holidays release spot was a sure thing? Aside from Spielberg?

His no-big-stars-in-it “West Side Story” opened to some ecstatic reviews, but mostly respectful ones, and managed just over $10.5 million on its opening weekend. It only earned $4 million and change overseas.

There’s a lot of kvetching over exactly why this didn’t blow up, or why the Sondheim/Bernstein classic didn’t at least out perform the lesser efforts of Lin-Manuel Miranda and others, the recent run of musicals that either featured the “Hamilton” creator in the cast (“Mary Poppins”), behind the camera (“Tick…tick…BOOM!”) or in charge of the whole shebang (“In the Heights”).

Yes, it’s Latin-flavored in a big way, and that audience didn’t show for “In the Heights.” There’s a big difference between the Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, Dominican and Panamanian audiences, Hollywood is occasionally reminded.

Unless you’re referring to “Fast and Furious” movies, those cultures don’t collide at the cinema watching musicals.

“No stars” seems to be the biggest hangup. I was chatting with a fellow critic over the box office bomb this was shaping up to be (an $800k Thursday night opening told the story), and wondering if this would have played even as a Disney/ABC “blockbuster TV event.”

Spielberg went for reality, when musicals should never take that approach too far (“La La Land” got away with it, somewhat). He chose a “Hamilton” star to play the breakout character Anita, and got Ansel Elgort and a total unknown to play Tony and Maria.

The result is a movie that played well…in New York.

Why would 20th Century (pre-Disney) studios give Spielberg the money to make this? Well, there’s a reason 20th Century Fox was a perpetual also-ran, outside of the occasional Big Deal (“Star Wars,””Last of the Mohicans,” etc). Their big gambles were traditionally long shots that landed as wrong shots.

Why would Spielberg think this was a good idea? “Ego,” my critic pal noted. Seems about right. 

All Spielberg accomplished here was making another good-not-great film on a resume wholly filled with big ticket studio projects. He’s spent his entire career trying to be “the new Orson Welles,” a boy wonder who exploded in the scene (lying about his age to appear younger than Welles), and made plenty of blockbusters and a handful of classics working in the studio system, which Welles rarely could.

All I thought when watching the impressive “West Side Story” was how Robert Wise’s 60 year-old film was just as impressive, without drones, lightweight digital cameras and modern tech. Wise (“Sound of Music,””Star Trek: The Motion Picture”) didn’t have Spielberg’s gifts or canon. But Spielberg is a lot closer to “The New Robert Wise” than he is “The Next Orson Welles.” This “West Side Story” had plenty of emotion in select moments, but felt flat with a lot of scenes that didn’t pay off as well as they did way back when.

I still think “West Side Story” will have legs throughout the holidays. But with no Hugh Jackman/Zach Efron and Zendaya, no “radio friendly” new tunes, it’s not going to “Greatest Showman” its way into the black.

STX’s “National Champions” was savvy programming for the end of the “regular” college football season, a decent enough take on the “student athletes deserve to be paid” debate set against the National Championship game in New Orleans. But the movie only really “played” in the football-mad South, where the idea of paying athletes runs up against institutional and cultural racism. So it didn’t do all that well there, either. It didn’t even sell $1 million in tickets, with just over $300k on well over 1000 screens.

The limited Amazon release “Being the Riccardos” did better on 400 screens, over $400K. That isn’t a dazzling per-screen average either. Folks will watch that Oscar bait on Amazon Prime instead.

Yes, there’s still a pandemic going on, but “Spider-Man” is about to remove that excuse from any of the second-guessing surrounding “West Side Story” and the under-performers of fall. COVID or not, that could clear $100 million on its opening weekend alone.

“Encanto” rounded up another $9.4 million (over $70 so far), “Ghostbusters Afterlife” continues to sell even as it falls off to $7 for the weekend (It’s already over $111 million overall), “House of Gucci” did another $4 million and change — it’s over $40, respectable, and it could get some awards season help.

“Eternals,” the worst-reviewed Marvel movie of them all, finishes its run just over $160.

Although Shaun and his fellow Mossy Bottom Farm sheep will never replace Wallace & Gromit as my favorite Aardman characters, they get themselves into a fine mess in “Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas.”

Yes, basically every Shaun story, in feature film, short film, TV series or holiday special, is about he sheep making mischief and creating mayhem when they get off the farm. But this time there’s snow!

The story involves the eyeless (and Muppet-like) farmer whipping up a not-quite-lethal batch of holiday home brew that he bottles for the town Christmas Fair as Shaun and his non-speaking (save for bleats) flock DIY decorate their barn and Christmas tree with freshly-laid (and painted) eggs, assorted household appliances and the bonnet badge on the farmer’s truck.

Dressing as Santa and taking his trusty dog — who tried to “save” the botched batch of punch that the farmer overloaded with salt — the farmer sets off for the fair. But the lamb of the flock mistook the eyeless Santa for the real one and stowed away on the truck.

Shaun, the lamb’s ewe and four other sheep wangle their own ride to town in pursuit. Things get really complicated when a little girl is given the gift box that the lamb is hiding in. The kid’s a hyperactive moppet, the indulged daughter of the TV chef the Farmer whose recipe for grog he copied, half of a lifestyle show’s husband/wife star couple.

The sheep must track the lamb to the country house of the couple, foil the kid and outrun her parents. The dog tracks the sheep, as his life’s work is tidying up the sheep’s messes and keeping them on Mossy Bottom Farm.

If it ever got out that they were getting out, the Farmer would replace him, I dare say.

“The Flight Before Christmas” starts slowly and gets up a fine head of steam by the top bottles of the home brew pop, creating a cork ricochet incident that tickles.

A mistletoe vendor sells a lot of sprigs, and stuck under another kisses…the cold hard cash she’s collected so far tonight. The Farmer gets mistaken for the “real” Santa and is mobbed at a “Tell Santa what you want for Christmas” event.

Skiing/sledding gags, a Roomba run amok bit — there’s just enough going on to keep the littlest kids interested. And a tiny dollop of heart helps.

They’ll never be Wallace & Gromit, but Shaun and his sheep will do until they run out of reasons to slip off the farm.

Rating: TV-Y

Credits: Directed by Steve Cox, story by Giles Pilbrow and Mark Burton. An Aardman film on Netflix.

Running time: :30

A little of the absurdist madness of 1960s cinema lives on in “Last Words,” a sort of “Waiting for Goddard” End Times tale about the last people on post-apocalyptic Earth making a movie about themselves.

Based on a novel by Santiago Amigorena, who co-wrote the script with director Jonathan Nossiter (“Signs and Wonders” and the terrific documentary “Mondovino” were his), it’s equal parts bleak and daft.

Because when I say “making a movie” I mean that in the most literal sense. An ancient survivor (Nick Nolte) of the movie-making business, preserving reels of celluloid and the primitive means of projecting it 50 years after the apocalypse, teaches a wandering soul (Kalipha Touray) how to build a motion picture camera. We even see them manufacture the “film” itself, putting “magic” chemicals onto celluloid, perforating the edges by hand, the works.

The Earth is a blasted, dry wasteland covered in post-tsunami (must have been a comet strike) rubble. There’s nothing green left, “rain” water is undrinkable and the only food are the last surviving tin cans.

But as the ways this happened and decades of life before it were caught on what is just “digital dust” since the power grid went away, the old man who goes by “Shakespeare” and who has memories of “the ’60s” and The Sex Pistols — in 2085 — is hellbent on convincing this much younger man to undertake this film project.

Don’t do the math of how old Nolte’s character would have to be. That’s maddening all by itself. And don’t let yourself consider how pointless the notion of documenting and “interviewing” any survivors they come across as they trek to Athens. That’s as pointless as wondering how they’re recording “sound” for these interviews.

It’s as looney as it sounds — as nonsensical as our young Afro-European narrator, who has no name and was born so far after the apocalypse that he has “no learning,” knows “nothing” of how things were were before — and yet keeps narrating specific dates.

“June 20, 2086” or “June 2, 2085” etc. Um, how is he supposed to know that? Even after he’s met the Old Man of the Movies hidden in an ancient cellar in Bologna, Italy, holed up watching Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock Jr.” or “The Cameraman” or the prehistoric films of the brothers Lumiere he’s preserved, there’s no notion anyone would remember when exactly this is.

The Earth is so depopulated — nothing grows — that the sum total of human knowledge has all but disappeared. Books are around, for the oldest survivors and maybe those like our narrator who “taught myself to read.”

When our narrator tells us “I am the last person on Earth,” we can take him at his word as what he’s relating about “Shakespeare” and their journey to Greece is a flashback from a year or so earlier. Nolte’s character has flashbacks within that flashback that drop a little death and social collapse right-after-it-happened to fill us in.

The reason they’re going to Athens was “a call” that was made, decades before, that told scattered pockets of survivors Greece had greenery and food and even potable water. Was that ever true, or just a myth? The only way to find out…

Greece, it turns out, does have a sort of “’60s commune” with a greenery, plants being nursed back to life, dozens of people ranging in age from their 20s to much older, with the sage Zyberski (Stellan Skarsgård, apparently still in his snowplow pants from “In Order of Disappearance”) and grinning, amorous and aged Balkt (Charlotte Rampling) as their role models.

The commune can feed them, with everyone camped out among the ancient ruins. The newcomers can introduce these survivors to the wonders of the cinema, Eric Idle singing the “Galaxy Song” from “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.”

Those are the most magical scenes of “Last Words,” seeing people rediscover movies the way the first filmgoers did in the late 1890s — touching the screen in wonder at the “people” they see there, laughing at the slapstick, missing the irony of the old Disney cartoon entertaining prison camp inmates scene in “Sullivan’s Travels.”

Filmed in Moroccan wastelands — dressed with rusted hulks of ships and boats washed inland 50 years before — and several sections of ruined cities in Italy, this dystopian wallow in cinematic nostalgia isn’t anybody’s idea of sophisticated science fiction.

So don’t take it as sci-fi. “Waiting for Godot” is our template. But even in an absurdist/existential sense, it’s a muddle.

Still, something brought Skarsgård and Rampling back onto a Nossiter set — both have worked with him before — something beyond the promise of a paid Italian vacation one would hope.

Dystopias have a certain romance to them, the idea of solitude and the bittersweet fatalism of a doom that will be complete if and when these characters die. Tying that to the conceit that celluloid film is “the last chance to leave a living trace of man,” that old movies (and snippets of TV shows) preserved that way are living time capsules, works.

It’s sad to report that the best you can say of the movie surrounding those conceits is that it’s an indulgent downer, not utterly incoherent but a grim journey from hopelessness to pointlessness.

Cast: Nick Nolte, Kalipha Touray, Charlotte Rampling, Alba Rohrwacher and Stellan Skarsgård.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jonathan Nossiter, scripted by Santiago Amigorena and Jonathan Nossiter, based on Amigorena’s novel. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 2:01

Cristovam sits, blank-faced but concentrating, as he’s lectured in the boss’s office.

He works in a dairy. They’re having to cut back. The country is in “crisis” and when we figure out that country is Brazil, we get it.

But the white boss is relating meaningless platitudes mixed with bad news in German. In this part of “The South,” you’re more likely to hear Bavarian beer hall music than sambas. The folks who run the Kainz dairy came from Germany, cling to their lederhosen and lord it over the natives.

“We came from Europe to bring innovation.” They “invested in many people here.” But Cristovam (Antonio Pitanga) needs to take a pay cut.

When we later see him stripping out of his anti-contamination suit, we can tell this 20 year veteran of the company, who moved to their headquarters plant in the South from a dairy in the north that they closed, is the only Black man in the workforce.

As the boss’s German words are translated, Cristovam expresses concern.

“As an old Black man, who would he get a better option?” the boss grouses to his secretary.

Still, when Cristovam walks home to his ancient shack in the woods, we can see his overhead is low. It’s just him and his little three-legged dog. Perhaps he’ll get by in his “Memory House.”

Co-writer and director João Paulo Miranda Maria serves up a limited-dialogue parable of racism, cultures clashing and the violence that ripples from that in this film. Using limited dialogue, just a handful of characters and behavior that ranges from intolerant to monstrous cruelty, he parks Traditional Brazil squarely in the path of outsiders-with-a-different-agenda Brazil. It’s not so much about “Why things are the way they are” as a more cautionary take on how bad they could get.

Cristovam dines in a local restaurant with Alpine decor and finds himself at a chilling “independence from those lazy, corrupt people from the north” rally, one hosted by a plump German-speaking dumpling who’d have been right at home in front of a crowd in the Fatherland in 1938. Cristovam is urged to sign the speaker’s petition.

Cristovam’s not kept out of the local beer hall, where the oompah music plays and the almost entirely-white clientele plays billiards and flirts with the Brazilian hustler Jenifer (Ana Flavia Cavalcanti). Old fashioned Cristovam questions her choices, to no avail. When he meets her mother (Aline Marta Maia) he’s on surer ground. He thinks.

But his simple life is constantly under threat. Some locals harass him, and cruel teens shoot his dog with their pellet gun. They return, relentlessly. They break into his shack, and older versions of this Hermann Goering division abroad curse and threaten him.

Something’s sure to snap. Eventually, Cristovam will go further than bringing his traditional antelope horn instrument to disrupt the beer barrel polkas. With masks and jungle tribe spears in his simple home, you just know somebody’s going to get hurt.

Director Maria and his co-writer Felipe Sholl conjure up a mystical, primitive world that Cristovam embraces through his animist Carnaval costumes and that horn.

The story isn’t so simplistic as to suggest him summoning ancient avenging gods to protect him. But with all the jaguar references and imagery, that’s certainly in his hero’s mind.

I could have done without the cause-effect “abused-becomes-an-abuser” “traditionalist” scene, and some story threads are left dangling, something a movie with so few incidents and so little dialogue can ill afford.

But “Memory House” has an understated power running through it that’s undeniable and unsettling. With so little that’s independent-minded coming out of Brazilian cinema these days, Maria has found a niche well worth exploring and schisms few others dare to talk about.

Rating: Unrated, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Antonio Pitanga, Ana Flavia Cavalcanti, Aline Marta Maia, Sam Louwyck, Soren Hellerup

Credits: Directed by João Paulo Miranda Maria, scripted by João Paulo Miranda Maria and Felipe Sholl. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:34

Hey now, that’s not cricket.

But it’s pretty much par for the course. You make a moon-eyed youth romance, it’s popular enough to inspire a sequel. Even in Italy that means you end with a (spoiler alert) “to be continued.”

“Out of My League” was a somewhat charming but thin Netflix release of the summer before last, an Italian “Fault in Our Stars” or “Me Before You” about a plucky young wallflower (Ludovica Francesconi) who longs to find love, some super-hunky guy.

She had a plan, a way with witty wooing words, and a timetable. But all along, she has this other thing driving her. Marta has mucoviscidosis. another name for cystic fibrosis.

By the end of that film, she had new hope and and a new beau, the stalked-until-he-relented Arturo.

“Still Out of My League,” the sequel, has Marta narrating that “nothing much has changed,” except for the fact that she dumped Arturo because they had very little in common save for the physical thing.

“I dumped HIM,” she insists to one and all, in Italian or dubbed into (British-accented) Englush. “Why does no one believe me?”

The sequel also loses Marta’s “five questions game,” her PA system at the supermarket come-ons and frankly, a lot of its charm.

Her new artist/dreamboat beau, Gabriele (Giancarlo Commare) is really into her, and jealous. It’s not going to help things when he takes a 10 month job in Paris, with her waiting for a lung transpant.

The “glass half full” girl has a brusque new doctor who doesn’t sugar-coat her doom, and her refusal to let the disease limit her life.

She still has “my two guardian angels,” her gay BFF roommates, Federica (Gaja Masciale) and Jacopo (Jozef Gjura). And her old pal Giacomo (Riccardo Niceforo), aka “Gollum,” is still hanging around their corner of Turin.

Which is handy, because the sequel has a whole lot more of her friends’ love lives and somewhat less of hers. It’s just that none of their stories are developed all that deeply, so that’s a problem.

Fiery redhead Federica’s poker hustling gets her a job as an on-staff hacker at a tech firm run by the handsome Mauro (Giorgio Lupano). Not that she’d notice, being gay and all. Not that he cares, being a sexual harasser, or so she’s told.

Jacopo is hellbent on finding somebody but suffering from FOMO — until he spies a hunk whom he can’t say for certain is gay.

Gnome-like Giacomo? He tumbles into bed at a party with an equally drunken super-hot influencer (Jenny De Nucci) who digs his company between the sheets, but won’t go “public” with him.

All the while, Marta is dealing with a long-distance affair, a jealous lover and a disease that’s running down her life clock with every passing day.

A couple of nice moments pop up — a little pathos and a moon-eyed romantic speech.

But as the focus drifts off Marta and those it shifts to aren’t developed enough to be all that interesting.

Sure, it’s “to be continued.” But the second movie in what I guess is now a trilogy doesn’t have enough entertainment content to warrant “to be continued.” If they had drama, romance and funny scenes and lines to work with, everybody involved would have been better off serving them up here.

Will “Still Out of My League,” an inferior sequel, scare away potential viewers of the third film, titled “Always Out of My League,” if my Italian is correct? It just might.

Rating: TV-Ma, sexual situations, near nudity, profanity

Cast: Ludovica Francesconi, Giancarlo Commare, Gaja Masciale, Jenny De Nucci, Riccardo Niceforo, Giorgio Lupano, Jozef Gjura

Credits: Directed by Claudio Norza, scripted by Roberto Proia and Michela Straniero. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

We meet him hitchhiking down a cobble-stoned street, then asking a young woman if he can borrow her bike. He just needs to go home and feed his dog.

“It’s just down here a little bit, on the left,” he says (in Slovenian with English subtitles). A woman relents and takes her husband’s bike to ride along and bring her bike back when the old man gets home.

But he can’t quite manage a bike any more, so he walks it. He keeps saying “Just down there.” He stops to take a little wade in the river.

That’s when the van shows up, uniformed staff tumble out and “Bruno” founds himself fetched. It’s back to his small town nursing home for Bruno (Sandi Pavlin).

“Sanremo,” Slovenia’s entry in the Best International Feature competition for the Academy Awards, is an understated essay on old age, the shrinking world and declining memory that comes with it.

Bruno forgets things, that he doesn’t live in his old house anymore, that his dog Rexy is long gone, that wife Stefanija passed away years ago. He walks off, from time to time, lost in a reverie or mistaken errand he remembers he needs to finish.

He says “I just arrived here today” when he strikes up a dinner conversation with the attractive woman (Silva Cusin) whom we’ve noticed loves standing under the sprinklers on the grounds of the timeworn but well-kept assisted living facility. Whatever they once were, each is somewhat lost in the mists of their minds.

But listen to Bruno light up when he talks about Sanremo, a festival he used to attend down on the Italian Riviera. It’s just that Dusa — we never hear her tell him her name — isn’t interested in the past. “What can you do? Each day is a new day.” So sure, talk about Sanremo.

“How do we get here? How do we get there?”

Not a lot happens in “Sanremo.” Themes and “plot” are as limited as this elderly couple’s horizons and expectations. But it’s a lovely character study in a minor key.

There’s a lot of forgetting and just the tiniest hint of remembering in this odd courtship. He asks to join her at dinner, gives his name and she doesn’t offer hers. He assume familiarities and she stops him short.

They’re together for art class, cutting up photos for collages, and exercise with the other residents, tossing a basketball around.

Bruno only tosses it to Dusa. Dusa only passes it back to Bruno.

And every now and then he wanders down the street, into the woods. Dusa’s wanderings are weather related. She’ll stand in the sprinklers or step out into the snow in her nightgown, heedless of whatever reasons one used to have for not doing that. Unprompted, she sings, softly and beautifully, tunes that he remembers.

One thing North American viewers will be struck by is the endless patience of the staff. Another might be the absence of TV and the preponderance of activities — piano recitals, a field trip to help pick grapes, for instance.

“Sanremo” is so thin on plot and incident as to flirt with tedium. But writer-director Miroslav Mandic (“I Act, I Am”) sets a tone that draws you in and makes you ponder the twilight years and what, aside from inertia, gives one the will to go on and the desire to get up in the morning.

We all have our bottom line.

And it asks the two most important questions that hang over every senior in assisted living and elder care, even if nobody really wants to know the answers.

“How do we get here? How do we get there?”

Rating: unrated

Cast: Sandi Pavlin, Silva Cusin, Mojca Funkl

Credits: Written and directed by Miroslav Mandic. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:29

Adam McKay made his mark behind the camera for Will Ferrell’s greatest comic hits — “Anchorman,” “Step Brothers” etc. But with “The Big Short,” an all-star romp that explained and sent up the shortsighted Wall Street types who wrecked the economy in 2007-8, we had to start taking him more seriously. He has insights into the culture, politics and American Way that are worth hearing out, and he isn’t shy about rendering his civics (“Vice”) or economics lessons in farces.

“Don’t Look Up” shows us he’s been reading his glowing reviews a little too eagerly.

It’s an another all-star comedy, with Oscar winners Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Mark Rylance in its ranks. It’s a satire about a Big Subject — the ways nothing gets done in the face of great planetary crises thanks to money, know-nothing politics and a shallow, ignorant and easily-distracted culture that can’t focus on anything big because trivia, optics and “clicks” control our attention spans.

McKay’s just as “right” about his target as ever. But the tone of this “Deep Impact/Wag the Dog” mashup is off. It veers towards strident, and as the clutter gathers around it, it drifts into dull. The jokes dry up and only a few members of his cast are veterans of “let’s make this funnier on the set” filmmaking.

Yes, Jonah Hill’s the funniest player in it, but Blanchett and Streep — thoroughbreds in any genre — give him a run for his money.

A beautifully-conceived first act mimics the openings of “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact.” Kate (Lawrence), a solitary Phd candidate in astronomy, sees something during her telescope session, charts it through a few frames, and lets out a little squeal of delight. The observatory fills with classmates and their nurturing professor, Dr. Mindy (DiCaprio) and they celebrate Comet Dibiaski, named after Kate of course.

Then Dr. Mindy leads the class through the flight path math, and he stops short. He sends everybody home as he and Kate have their first freak out. It’s heading towards Earth, and it’s big.

McKay’s homework shines in the scenes that follow. Mindy and Kate have to reach out from their Michigan State U. lab (a top-ranked astronomy school), get confirmation from a Subaru telescope (yes, the car-maker sponsors telescopes worldwide) and get the head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (“A real place” a screen title reminds us) on the phone.

Dr. Teddy Ogelthorpe (Rob Morgan, having a Netflix December) is no-nonsense, “extinction level event” alert and let’s “schedule the school field trip (get our scientists to the White House)” and break the “planet killer” news to the president.

Kate needs a moment. “I gotta go get high.”

That should set the tone for the rest of the movie, with the science folk, not-used-to-dealing-with-politicians or uneducated laymen or TV chat show ditzes, hurled into a White House where everybody’s on a different power trip, especially the president’s shallow chief-of-staff. He (Hill) also happens to be her son.

“Thanks for dressing up” is the lightest of his insults to the disheveled scientists.

Streep plays a president obsessed with optics, a “troubled” Supreme Court appointment and sinking poll numbers, fretting about “If this breaks before the mid-terms, we’ll lose Congress.”

That’s McKay’s first misstep. Common “Wag the Dog” sense tells us that this is precisely the “change-the-subject/rally-the-nation” distraction President Orlean needs. How’d she miss that? Oh. Right. TFG.

“They’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them the credit for,” Kate decides, at one point.

It takes a while for our Palin-meets-Hillary president to come around, with Dr. Mindy staring in slack-jawed disbelief at her “sit tight and assess” brush off, and anger-mis-manager Kate flipping the “Are you f—–g KIDDING me?” out. They have to go to the press and meltdown on a chat show that is the meanest takedown of Michael Strahan and Mika Brzezinski (Tyler Perry and Blanchett) you could imagine. He’s bubbly and dizzy, she’s even shallower and hot-to-trot. “On our next show…”

“Don’t Look Up” points us towards the technological “options” we hear about with every asteroid “near miss,” but filters them through American politics and the fizzy dreams and schemes of a cellphone billionaire (Mark Rylance, with bleached teeth, channeling Joe Biden’s impersonation of Musk-Bezos-erberg).

In other words, don’t get your hopes up.

The bulk of the movie is a blend of spot-on take-downs — President Orlean’s stage-managed, spectacle-packed grave TV announcement that plays like a send-up of an infamous “Mission: Accomplished” moment — and meandering distractions.

We see the ways the “message” is mishandled by “The Media,” leaving the door open to crackpots, every one of whom has a YouTube/Instagram megaphone to scream lies and sew doubt.

Some supporting players score big. Ariana Grande plays a self-absorbed pop starlet whose break-up and make-up with another pop star is a global distraction. But let her be the first to jump on the “Look up and see for yourself” vs the “Don’t Look Up” science-denying nutoisie and she’ll write you a hit to publicize it.

Chris Evans plays a movie star whose latest film is timed to capitalize on the day of the collision, Himesh Patel is Kate’s online “journalist” beau who instantly sells her out and goes for an “I Slept with a Lunatic” book deal. Look for Patti Lupone in the frequent montages of TV/social media coverage as a gum-snapping rube selling shovels online “because we gotta dig in.”

And Ron Perlman shows up as an unfiltered, mercenary “American hero” badass selected to fly a re-commissioned space shuttle into the comet to blow it up. He’s at his bellowing, blustery best here.

There’s no point in adding Timothee Chalamet as a dopey Sk8er Boi who comforts Kate after she’s become a meme and the most hated woman in America, thanks to her on-camera meltdowns and the comet that bears her name.

McKay nails the life-cycle of “scandal” and “emergency” in American public life, skewers a lot of easy targets and loses the thread more often than he should. But dark comedies like this are hard to pull off because if you lose your nerve, it’s just a joke, and if you don’t, your movie sinks into despair.

DuckDuckGo the phrase “movie satires” and you’ll see a few examples that worked, and scores and scores that never had a chance.

Opening with “Network,” stumbling into “War Machine” but ending “On the Beach” just doesn’t play, making this a morose misstep for a filmmaker who was on quite a roll.

Rating: R, Language Throughout (profanity), Graphic Nudity, Drug Content, some Sexual Content

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Meryl Streep, Tyler Perry, Timothee Chalamet, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Ariana Grande, Cate Blanchett and Ron Perlman

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adam McKay. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:18

We can all pretty much agree that if the time comes to mount a “serious” new werewolf movie — or reboot the twinkly “Twilight” franchise — that George MacKay’s your guy.

The “1917” star got into spectacular shape, took his lessons with a movement coach seriously and if there’s ever been a human special effect more convincing as Canis lupus than MacKay, I’ve not seen her. Or him.

So you’ve got this documentary-real realization of “a boy who thinks he’s a wolf” at the heart of “Wolf,” the debut fictional feature of Nathalie Biancheri. And there’s a vague and poorly-realized satiric point of it all — sending such a young man to join other young men, and women, who think they’re horses, parrots, a lion, a German shepherd (That’s AlSAtion to you.) and a duck in an aversion/conversion therapy clinic.

There’s the point of it, the satiric target with the bullseye wr large. And while the picture misses that target, by and large, there’s still a whiff of “If this had been a hit, they’d be adding letters to the ever-lengthening acronym” of gender spectrum/body “dysphoria. Because God forbid somebody should feel left out, feel “unseen.”

I found it helpful to lie back and think of J.K. Rowling as young Jacob (MacKay) is put under the care of Dr. Mann (Paddy Considine) and his “good cop” colleague (Eileen Walsh) at some remote British compound where such special cases gather for therapy that includes dancing “like normal people” and cages, restraints and torture.

Rowling, who’s stuck her foot in it repeatedly over her complaints about the shifting nature of female gender identity and “trans-phobia” would appreciate the ironic Next Frontier on what legitimate critics and intolerant cranks alike figure is “the next logical step” in how a person “identifies.” TheHarry Potter novelist might approve of this film, whose “hero” meets a “wildcat” (Lily-Rose Depp) who makes him consider giving it all up for love, and whose villain (Considine) is a classic “compassionate in public, sadistic in private” doctor offering “treatment” to people so afflicted.

There’s a joke about “Am I allowed to say ‘afflicted’ about this now? Because I was when I started writing this review.

MacKay’s Jakob gets into a classic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” war of wills with the unbending Dr. Mann. Depp’s Wildcat turns into the classic “delusions she’ll give up for love” as we get a sense that one of them really believes what he’s doing, and others locked in there are maybe a little less committed.

For Jakob, “It’s not about surviving, it’s about surviving as me.”

MacKay’s immersion in the character is a fascinating thing to behold, even if the Players around him are “types” and “tropes,” and the revelations about them pro forma.

Biancheri keeps her film unnerving and anxious via the judicious use of extreme close-ups, hand-help sequences and off-in-the-head editing.

Considine’s “I’ll deal with it,” hands-on can-do doctor is the most interesting character in the piece, someone so sure of himself he knows that his round patients will fit in whatever square holes he shoves them into.

The many scenes involving therapy, cruel punishment, acceptance and sexual titillation and are mostly showcases for MacKay’s genre-busting turn as a guy who’s taken a great improv “character” entirely too far.

“Wolf” is thought-provoking, to be sure. And it makes you wonder if the filmmaker is about of bounds for holding satiric attitudes that were fine when she started shooting and might seem dated and inflexible a few years later.

I found the whole thing more tiresome than intriguing, and wouldn’t recommend it unless you threatened me with being locked in a cage with MacKay in character. Now THAT would be scary.

Rating: R for some abusive behavior, sexuality, nudity and language (profanity)

Cast: George MacKay, Lily-Rose Depp, Paddy Considine, Mary Lou McCarthy and Eileen Walsh

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nathalie Biancheri. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:39