Movie Nation

“France” is an eye-popping star turn by Léa Seydoux in search of a more coherent and pointed satire than the movie surrounding her.

Seydoux, one-time “Bond Girl,” much-honored co-star of “Midnight in Paris,” “”Blue Is the Warmest Color,” “The French Dispatch” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” is well-cast as a glib telegenic beauty who holds the country she shares her name with transfixed, thanks to her provocative questioning of public figures, her canny pursuit of “attention” and her stunning blonde looks.

But writer-director Bruno Dumont’s meandering, not-entirely-aimless drama can’t zero in on a target and mostly fails to get to its point. It’s as if the director of a couple of recent French “Joan of Arc” epics sought a modern equivalent, a media martyr, a woman trapped in an existential crisis over fame. But his movie can’t settle on a tone as he goes places that Hollywood’s “Sullivan’s Travels,” “A Face in the Crowd,” “Broadcast News” and “Up Close and Personal” went before.

Seydoux is better than the movie. But her character’s uncertain values, ethics and frame of mind — as scripted — do her no favors.

France de Meurs is the fashion plate star of i-news, a French TV channel that everyone seems to watch. She is recognized everywhere, a catwalk-ready advert for herself and her programs, but an open-season invitation to a tsunami of personal-space invasions. Start to finish, “France” shows the French are no more immune to this mania for taking a selfie with, or simply cell-snapping away at the famous.

We meet her at a news conference where her dazzling wardrobe and front-row placement assure one and all that she is the first the president will call on. But when he makes his entrance, she’s chatting up a colleague, not standing up out of the same respect most other reporters do.

And when he makes an opening statement, she is exchanging looks, giggles and obscene gestures with her flippant-to-the-point-of-unprofessional producer Lou (Blanche Gardin). Her question is a classic “gotcha” provocation.

Regarding the “insurrectionist state” of the country, she asks (in French with English subtitles), and what he’s not doing about it, “are you heedless or powerless?”

Lou coached her on what to ask, and how to ask it. When the president responds, star anchor her back-row producer keep exchanging looks and gestures and giggling.

She defends herself later by suggesting that the public values her point of view, that “through my gaze” they get “A View of the World,” the name of her chat show, that they can identify with.

“But what about your need for the spotlight?” her interviewer wants to know. She has no answer for that.

We see her in action and realize she’s not the cartoonish caricature such figures often turn into in the movies. She is sharp, repeatedly correcting the spin a conservative anti-EU politician recites on her show.

We get a notion of how TV-news camera savvy she is when she starts filing reports from an unnamed West African country, a former French colony that’s fighting a civil war and choking the Mediterranean with refugees. She “directs” her camera operator, coaches and “stages” loyalist fighter poses, calls for “reverse angles” where she “acts” out the question she just asked.

And then she improvises, in a few takes, her stand-up closing statement for the package. She’s good at what she does.

At her spacious, art gallery chic home, she has a rebelling nine year old son and an older, sullen, semi-has-been novelist husband, Fred (Benjamin Biolay). She’s the one bringing home the bacon.

But a dinner party scene where “Fred” is mocked for a “retouched” photo on a book cover, where he’s subjected to impudent questions from the guests, or asked of France right in front of him, plays somewhat like the almost-comical press conference that opened the film. It’s not quite funny, not tart enough to sting. What is this movie trying to say, and where is it going?

France’s existential crisis comes when she distractedly knocks over a working immigrant on his motorbike in traffic. She starts weeping more often as she goes out of her way to atone for her sins, and tamp down a scandal that comes from it.

Lou may be better versed in such mishaps, reminding France at one point that “these things last 24 hours now.” As France has more chances to test that theory out — infidelity, blunders on air, etc. — she can’t stop taking it all to heart, as if she’s clinging to that “crime and punishment” media narrative of an earlier era.

The blunders/exposure that took down the anti-hero of “A Face in the Crowd” and got Dan Rather and Brian Williams yanked off the air might earn no more than a Jeffrey Toobin slap on the wrist, a Tucker Carlson “vacation” today.

Dumont puts France/Seydoux in plenty of situations that merit her “I can’t bear it any more” dismay. She tries to volunteer at a soup kitchen, and takes abuse not just from other volunteers, but from the homeless. Her constant mingling with the rich ruling class doesn’t immunize her from their disdain.

When France meets a guy at an exclusive German Swiss alpine spa, his seeming confusion at her “You don’t recognize me?” should put her on her guard. She knows how famous she is, and suffers for it.

Seydoux gives us gorgeous and perfectly-put-together “suffering” in ways that make the film never-less than watchable.

But Dumont’s film doesn’t provide a neat come-uppance/repentance for France’s “crimes” or a denouement that gives us any more idea of what we’ve just seen than the tale as it unfolded. This is just some stuff that somebody who craved fame had happen to her.

It takes a lot of nerve to title your French media satire “France.” What we see over the two hours of this film is Dumont losing that nerve, time and again.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Léa Seydoux, Blanche Gardin, Benjamin Biolay

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bruno Dumont. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 2:12

This glossy 15th century period piece is about the intrigues surrounding the Kalmar Union, and the woman trying to hold it together.

“Margrete” opens Dec. 17.

This lowdown and dirty thriller opens Dec. 7.

There are several moments when “Mixtape,” a sentimental learn-about-my-parents-through-their-music dramedy, teeters on the edge of tumbling into maudlin.

Every movie with “so cute you want to pinch its cheeks” in its DNA runs that risk.

But then a song comes on, becomes a topic of dissection and discussion, because that’s what the movie’s about, finding a mixtape made by our heroine’s parents. And if you’re of a certain age, or any one of many certain ages, you’re transported back to your memories of that song, or of the songs that meant the same thing to you that it must have meant to those in-love-but-long-dead teens who made it.

It can be Roxy Music’s “More That This,” or The Kinks’ “Better Things,” a snippet of Third Eye Blind.

Because “nostalgia” isn’t just for Baby Boomers. It can transcend age and race and nation of origin.

Gemma Brooke Allen, who played “Young Kate” in the Mary Elizabeth Winstead actioner “Kate,” stars as Bev, a little girl growing up with her hard-working grandma (Julie Bowen) because her mom and dad died over a decade ago.

She’s a largely friendless tween who is barely worth the trouble to pick on at James K. Polk Middle School. That’s how anonymous she is.

She’d love to learn more about her parents, but that’s a touchy subject with grandma. Because her mother had her at 16, and her dad wasn’t much older. Because grandma had her mother in her teens. And the reason she’s taking on extra shifts delivering mail and that they’re eating cheap is because she’s saving up the cash to get Bev into college to break that cycle.

The last thing that kid needs to stumble across in the attic is a mixtape of her parents’ music. It’s the end of 1999, and SOME folks are hoarding food and freaking out over what Y2K might bring. Bev looking for clues in the songs one parent gave to the other when they were falling in love might not be a distraction Bev needs right now.

But when she plays the tape on her mom’s battered Walkman, it hangs, as cassettes used to do. She’s barely dipped into Girls at Our Best performing “Getting Nowhere Fast” when she gets nowhere at all.

Luckily, there’s a hip record store of yore downtown, run by the surly ex-punk Anti (indie comedy mainstay Nick Thune of “Mr. Roosevelt” and “Dave Made a Maze”). He’ll  take “Punky Brewster’s”
lunch money. Reluctantly, because Britney boppers are the last thing he needs in his aficionado-oriented shop. And her parents’ playlist?

“Not bad…The Stooges. Otis Spunkmeyer…The Quick.”

Some songs are rare, some might be impossible to source. And she can only afford to buy one at a time. But he shames her to do it right.

A mixtape “is a message from the maker to the listener.” If she wants to figure anything out about said “maker” and “listener,” she’s got to hear the songs — all of them, in order. And Anti’s little retail piece of punkdom is just a starting point.

That’s a very clever conceit to hang your movie on, and I dare say it would play if the kid in question were of any other race and her lost parents into any other genre of music.

Bev hears “Linda Linda” by The Blue Hearts and can’t make out the Japanese lyrics. Maybe the classmate she doesn’t know across the street (Audrey Hseih) can help, if her Tiger Mom will let her out the door.

Too bad Audrey’s Taiwanese. But she’s hip to the tech, and “there’s this new thing…Napster…all the songs are free!” She joins the quest.

At some point, the scowling tween punk Nicky (Olga Petsa) will need to be approached (scary) and consulted. A visit to a punk club is in order.

And along the way, the new friends conspire to convince classmates that the new school mascot should be “The Mullet” — no, not the fish — the wheelchair-bound school bully (Diego Mercado) must be confronted and grandma will relent and let out details like the fact that Kim, Bev’s late mother, “wanted to be a ‘Solid Gold Dancer’ when she grew up.”

Some promising paths are introduced and abandoned. The jokes are of the low-hanging-fruit “What are you looking for?” “Your DeLorean! You can’t just pop back to the ’80s and pick up a tape there!” variety.

But screenwriter Stacey Menear peppers the script with bit players who score points, from Taiwanese friend Ellen’s feral and funny five-year-old brother who can be “dared” into doing most anything to Nicky’s punk-musician sibling, whom she can beat up if he starts something (she’s egged on by their dad) to the one local musician on the tape, still around and still playing, the guy who is the reason the tweens sneak into a punk club. He’s played by Jackson Rathbone to great effect.

The pre-pubescent ages of our heroines — they even banter about the mysteries of “the tampon” — gives the film a refreshing innocence.

Movies like this always represent some sort of validation of the filmmakers’ musical taste, which makes them almost too specific. Will parents who grew up with hip hop enjoy sharing it with their tweens?

But the warmth wins you over, and the players seal the deal with little blasts of sweet mixed with sassy.

If you’ve ever made a “Mixtape,” or ever wondered what they were and why your parents or grandparents obsessed about them, this little low-key gem is a winner.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Gemma Brooke Allen, Audrey Hseih, Nick Thune, Olga Petsa, Diego Mercado, Jackson Rathbone and Julie Bowen

Credits: Directed by Valerie Weiss, scripted by Stacey Menear. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

Here’s a warm, cuddly comedy about family and Christmas, fellowship and food and presents and oh — a planetary apocalypse.

There are no spoiler alerts in play with “Silent Night,” a darker-than-dark romp pitched as “apocalyptic” and which starts out sassy and fun, but turns grim and thought-provoking, pretty much at its midway point.

I had to take a walk to process this one, have a glass of wine to mull it over. Because while there’s no denying its quality, I’m not sure whether I’ll recommend it 360 words from now.

Writer-director Camille Griffin makes her feature film debut with this morbid farce, one of whose stars is that “Jo Jo Rabbit” sensation, Roman Griffin Davis, aka her son with cinematographer-husband Ben Davis.

This “Silent Night” is set in Britain, in a big old country house where friends and family are gathering for a Christmas celebration with food and drink, centering on “truth and love,” hostess Nell (Keira Knightley) insists. Or “love and forgiveness.” She can’t decide.

“Who do we forgive?”

“OurSELVES.”

Art (young Davis) is the only one of her three boys helping with the prep, and he cuts his finger, bleeding all over the carrots. Husband Simon (Matthew Goode) is extremely over-dressed as he chases the chickens out of their coop out back.

The guests include lovers Bella (Lucy Punch) and Alex (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), the posh married couple Sandra (Annabelle Wallis) and Tony (Rupert Jones) and his (not hers) teenish daughter (Davida McKenzie, younger sister of Thomasin) and college pal and physician James (Sope Dirisu), rolling in with his American girlfriend, Sophie (Lily-Rose Depp), who is young enough to earn endless “How old IS she?” cracks from her fellow dinner guests.

“She CAN’T be 15!”

There’s a lot of indulging going on, fretting over who might have not been invited, over this or that dish that was hard to procure. Nell and Simon are hellbent on pleasing everyone.

But while the adults go overboard on the whole English “reserve” and “don’t talk about things” in the dinner conversation, the foul-mouthed kids are more frank. They watch the news. They bicker about the queen and the party in power.

They know what’s coming, just not whether it’s “The Russians” or “the (catastrophically-stressed) planet” that’s the cause. Simon interrupts, struggling to salvage the evening. Nell is more interested in CYA.

“We just want you to understand — as your parents, we are NOT to blame!”

A movie about whether or not Nell’s unruly boys are allowed to drop the c-word — “It’s CHRISTmas! What would the baby Jesus say?” — turns into something more terminal, if just as profanely debated.

Is this really the End? “You believe the Government?”

“God NOoooooo! They killed Diana!”

Is writer-director Griffin making a statement on environmental catastrophe, on Do Nothing Tories and the clueless Brexiting masses who empowered them? Or is she taking a shot at indulgent, you’re all special, every-thought-you-have-is-a-pearl-of-wisdom parenting?

Maybe a bit of both. I had a hard time plumbing her intent here as she has a hard time declaring it and moving it to the fore.

What’s much easier is relying on the actors to guide us. The leads, Knightley and Goode, carry their share of the comedy but really earn their keep in the tragic undertones that bubble up between the thinning supply of laughs in the last act of “Silent Night.” Each comes damned close to heartbreaking.

Dirisu (“Sand Castle”) delivers “dispassionate medical professional” with aplomb, Wallis nails “vain and catty,” Howell-Baptiste plays put-upon and taken-for-granted well, Depp has no trouble voicing American contrarianism and the criminally under-employed Punch dons a deep, faux butch voice to deliver her share of the punchlines.

All that said, this “Silent Night” doesn’t land its satiric punches cleanly. And in abandoning the “comedy” part of “dark comedy,” it isn’t exactly a place to get happy during a global pandemic.

But I’m curious to see what the writer-director who assembled this stellar cast, including her young-and-angsty son, and talked them into telling this story, will come up with next.

Rating: unrated, death, profanity, smoking and drinking

Cast: Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Roman Griffin Davis, Sope Dirisu, Lily-Rose Depp, Annabelle Wallis, Rufus Jones and Lucy Punch

Credits: Scripted and directed by Camille Griffin. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:32

“Swan Song,” a reunion project for “Moonlight” alumni Mahersala Ali and Naomie Harris, is quiet, introspective science fiction about a dying man’s struggle with the notion of cloning himself and letting that clone take over his life shortly before his death.

“Introspective” is becoming something like the two-time Oscar winning Ali’s brand, as he often plays brooding, thoughtful and soft-spoken characters capable of the occasional burst of fury (“Green Book”).

But writer-director Benjamin Cleary’s debut feature does neither Ali nor himself any favors. The movie’s so low-key and low-heat that it’s slow. And with that lack of pace we’re forced to confront, often, how over-familiar this story, this version of “the future” and this film are.

Start with the idea of second-guessing a second chance at life via cloning.” It wasn’t the freshest notion when “Seconds” crossed that threshold in the 1960s. There’ve been whole TV series about cloning and other films in which characters wrestle with the ethics of extending life — often their own — this way.

The very first scene of the movie is borrowed from another movie as well. It’s a “meet cute,” with graphic artist/designer Cameron (Ali) ordering a chocolate bar (from a robot) on a commuter train of the near future.

A bubbly, distracted stranger (Harris) sits down, chattering away on her phone. She distractedly opens the candy bar and starts eating.

Cameron is a little surprised, and intrigued enough to be bold and do the over-familiar thing. He breaks off a piece of the bar as well. This goes on, with a few exchanges of coy, flirtatious looks. We can’t tell if she’s put-out or pleased, as he seems to be.

He generously gives her the rest of the bar as she leaves. She smiles. And when his stop arrives, he stands up and discovers…the candy bar he bought earlier. The whole shared-food thing was a mistake, and he laughs and laughs.

So do we. Even if we remember the classic short film that invented that bit. Don’t tell me Cleary, who won an Oscar for a short he made a few years back, hasn’t seen 1989’s “The Lunch Date,” one of the cinema’s greatest short films, now preserved in the National Film Registry.

“Swan Song” picks up its story some time later, as Cameron keeps a big secret from the “lunch date” Poppy who is now his wife and the mother of their little boy. He is having seizures. He has cancer. He’s dying.

And there’s a second big secret. There’s a new firm offering him an option. He’s off for a weekend to seal the deal, one of the first-ever customers of Arra House, run by Dr. Scott (Glenn Close) and her trusted assistant (Adam Beach). They, and their vast AI tech lab offer “molecular regeneration,” a replacement Cameron, “right down to the molecule.” His clone is his actual twin, and meeting it unnerves him. He flees.

But there’s still time. Dr. Scott is persistent. And Cameron is still keeping all this secret from Poppy. Once she sees him sick, or heaven forbid, he dies in front of her and their child, the “option” Arra
House affords him will be gone.

“Swan Song” is about his internal debate over the ethics, morality and surrender that doing this will entail. Cameron will be surrendering his life, before death, so that his family can go on as if nothing happened. Can he do it? Would you?

Cleary gives us routine “this is what the future will look like” peeks. The future tech includes cameras in our contact lenses, holographic displays everywhere — in 3D monster boxing match games Cameron plays with his child.

Sleek, self-driving taxis, austere, curved, minimalist architecture, a world that isn’t overpopulated, over-polluted, over-heated and fascistic –you’d have thought this naive, idealized future would be something the cinema had grown out of. We can’t even ban machine guns for teenagers in this country. How in hell are we going to solve even bigger problems?

There are pop-up partitions Dr. Scott can switch on from her phone to give Cameron privacy as he “tests” this clone in phone interaction with his wife. Which he does. He meets another “client” of Harrah House, a funny downtown realtor (the ever-adorable Awkwafina), also dying, but perhaps more accepting of this transition.

As he checks the “memories” transplanted to his clone, Cameron remembers the life he is losing, the troubled stretches in the marriage, the “future” he won’t be around to see.

Ali’s showiest scenes are when he debates his “molecular regenerated” self, the flashes of temper he drops on the doctor and the clone’s troubling adjustment to “his” home.

But even those heated moments lack much of a punch. There’s not much meat to the performances, which is understandable as “Swan Song” is redigesting subject matter that’s been covered before, and often. It’s as if the cast and director figure we’ve seen straight-forward treatments of this subject. Now is the time for an understated, impressionistic riff on cloning ethics and human choices — too understated.

The light moments are so rare and the emotional outbursts likewise that the autumnal (overcast) lighting, somber music and quiet conversations of “Swan Song” are in danger of putting the viewer to sleep.

Not a ringing endorsement, but it’s hard to think of this as anything but the first misstep in Ali’s formidable post-Oscar career.

Rating: language (profanity)

Cast: Mahersala Ali, Naomie Harris, Glenn Close, Adam Beach and Awkwafina

Credits: Scripted and directed by Benjamin Cleary. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:52

“She broke down on the road. She’s got a little girl. She’s missing.” And it’s not just a lone woman on a car trip terrors that face her. Something supernatural is involved.

This Eduardo Rodriguez film comes out Dec. 14.

Today’s version of the “Hero’s Journey” is a Chinese folktale rendered into an impressive-looking mess of a mashup — part medieval fantasy, with Minatours and shape shifters, “Mad Max” post-apocalyptic car chases, firearms and flesh.

“Green Snake” is like the cover of a Robert W. Howard “Conan” book rendered in CGI anime animation — violent and lurid, with lots of action and a little skin.

The story? Well, let’s just say it’s more impressive to look at than to try and follow and absorb.

“Green Snake” is a sequel to a GKids animated folk tale of a few years back, thus the new film’s full title in Chinese — “Bai She 2: Qing She jie qi,” aka “White Snake 2: The Tribulation of the Green Snake.”

One of our heroines, Blanca, was trapped in a magical purgatory by an evil sorcerer. Her sister Verta is obsessed with freeing her. That’s how she winds up a thousand years removed from her Song Dynasty world of magical powers — she could fly, armed with a light sabre with tendrils for blades.

Verta wakes up in a ruined China of the future, a blasted wasteland called Asuraville, populated with humans, demons, spirits, as well as Ox Heads, Horse Heads, “Raska” and octopi.

Verta’s journey to free Blanca means she must find a way out of this place, partly by using her wits, fighting and parkour skills to survive as she’s lost her powers, largely from asking every human (ish) person she meets to lay out another long chapter of exposition.

Is this punishment? Who ends up here?”

“People who cannot accept reality,” she is told. It has to do with obsessions, “unfulfilled desires” that take over your life. “If you’re here, it’s clearly because you can’t let go.“

Verta can’t let go of Blanca. Her odyssey leads her to all sorts of ways out of Asuraville, into all sorts of fights with a shifting series of alliances.

It’s easier to follow than it it so explain as a movie plot. “Green Snake” isn’t awful, just kind of nonsensical, a time-sucking quest tale that has little that’s original mixed in with all the derivations.

The fun bits are a montage of Verta being shown how to cope with cars, flashlights, motorcycles, laptops and soda cans.

We don’t have to wonder if she’ll transition to a warrior’s halter-top sports bra. That’s a given.

I kind of like the Eastern mysticism floating through the odd bits of dialogue. Even the villain, Fahai, has his moments.

“I am not worthy,” he admits. “Dharma is eternal…The pursuit of illusion bars the way to Nirvana.”

You don’t say? Changed my life. Actually, “Green Snake” just sucked a couple of hours out it.

If you stay through the credits, which do NOT list the English language (Netflix) voice cast, there’s a hint of more “Snakes” to come.

Rating: TV-14, fear, violence

Credits: Directed by Amp Wong, scripted by Damoa. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:13

Half a century into his career, and the king of Spanish cinema is still working on his Mommy Issues.

‘Parallel Mothers” gives us Pedro Almodóvar in his 70s, past the rambunctious, liberating and boundary pushing cinema of his “Women on the Verge” youth, a gay filmmaker who grew up in the fascist Spain of Franco coming to grips with his own legacy and his country’s.

He does it by marrying a story of single-motherhood and the loss of a child with a family history of single moms, the first of whom was given that status when a fascist hit squad made her husband disappear. It’s a brilliant conceit that invites us to read in Almodóvar’s own history and what he himself sees as his legacy — movies, many of them brilliant, but no children to carry on the family name.

Almodóvar considers this through his protagonist, Janis (his longtime muse Penélope Cruz), and cleverly compares the loss she feels in the present day with the lingering pain generations of her family carry over the lack of closure with their murdered ancestor in a country that’s tried to reconcile its murderous Catholo-fascist past and move on.

Janis is a fashion and magazine photographer in Madrid who meets a forensic anthropologist (Israel Elejalde) on an assignment, and proceeds to tell him her family’s tragic history, the ancestor taken from his home, shot and buried in a mass grave outside of the small town where she grew up.

She knows where the bodies were buried. Everyone there does. But no one — official or informal — has dug up the dead, identified them and given them a proper burial, leaving this an open wound that has spanned generations for everyone related to someone buried in that grim, unmarked memorial to the Spanish Civil War.

Arturo can help. It doesn’t hurt that Janis is a knockout. That’s how these two, thrown together by tragedy and work, wind up in bed with an “accident” putting Janis in a shared maternity room with teenaged Ana (Milena Smit) some months down the road.

Ana is also facing childbirth as a result of an “accident.” But Janis doesn’t “regret” hers. Ana does.

They bond, with Janis pitching in on the mothering that Ana’s self-absorbed actress-mother (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) isn’t doing, and give birth to babies with just a hint of “complications” that put them in the observation ward.

It isn’t until Arturo, now out of the picture, asks to see the baby that Janis starts to wonder about the tyke that her best friend (Rossy de Palma) has already described as a bit “ethnic,” code for darker Latin American “Indian” genetic traits.

“I don’t recognize her,” Arturo tactlessly declares. He doesn’t think it’s his. Janis is furious. A flashback shows how she made an earlier break from Arturo on telling him the news of her pregnancy. She wants nothing from him.

“I will be a single mother, like my mother before me, and her mother before her!” (in Spanish with English subtitles).

But as angry as she is, she has eyes and Internet access. One genetic test kit later, she has her answer. It’s just that she doesn’t tell anyone. She simply cozies up to Ana, and changes her phone number to avoid telling Arturo he was right.

Almodóvar’s films, even the comedies, have soap operatic melodrama woven into their stories. “Baby switch” is classic soap stuff, and much of what follows only “works” in that sort of par-for-the-course soap universe.

But keeping his camera tight on Cruz, he tells the story of her agony with her eyes and the occasional tear. If she’s manipulating Ana and keeping Arturo at arm’s length, she has her reasons.

And every reminder of the lone “connection” she has with her baby daddy — that hoped-for uncovering of, identifying and re-burying her ancestor — reminds us of the legacy of pain and loss that is her shared lot with millions of present-day Spaniards.

Almodóvar does an adequate job of marrying these two disparate stories, even if he has to skate past gaps in the logic and clumsily-handled flashbacks.

But he hitched his wagon to Cruz wisely, all those years ago. She makes us feel every gut-punch loss Janis faces and bears up under. That keeps us going through the absurd and ever-so-Almodóvar sexual twists and turns in the tale, and keeps us engaged until the picture’s intensely moving payoff.

This isn’t one of the filmmaker’s great films, but it is a serious return to form and a movie that makes us feel the pain of women — in childbirth. in disappointment and in loss — as intensely as he does.

And that, for those who’ve been paying attention, is his legacy.

Rating: R, for some sexuality

Cast: Penélope Cruz, Milena Smit, Rossy de Palma, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and Israel Elejalde

Credits: Scripted and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:03

Star Ethan Hawke introduces, out of character, Abel Ferrara’s latest film with a little reminder of “what we’ve been living through” the last couple of years, and a professed “I can’t wait to see” what Ferrara’s come up with this time.

That tells us several things about the movie, “Zeroes and Ones,” that follows. Its star either didn’t get to see the finished film, or he did and he’s not going too far out on a limb endorsing it, either from doubts about it or confusion as to its point.

And Ferrara himself felt the need to “cheat” with this sort of prologue, telling a viewer how to best appreciate his minimal-but-not-quite-minimalist exercise in movie making under limited lockdown in Italia. He’s asking us to grade-it-on-the-curve.

That’s sort of like sticking a cute Sigourney Weaver cameo in the closing credits of your slick but empty “Ghostbusters” money grab, hoping to at least spin your way into a better movie.

Ferrara needs this “how to watch it” help because the paranoid tale he sets out to tell is neither wholly coherent nor particularly compelling.

Hawke — as he’s explained in that prologue — plays two roles, that of a US soldier in Rome and that of the soldier’s brother, a terrorist or “revolutionary” imprisoned somewhere undergoing “enhanced interrogation (water boarding, drugging) to try and prevent an attack from his “group.”

There’s a lot of wordless hiking, in COVID mask, fatigues and combat gear, through the empty streets, along empty rooftops and down darkened passageways. Soldiers get their temperature checked, embark and debark from trucks, sweep across empty parks — searching.

As a woman (Valeria Correale) soldier Hawke (distinguished by having his hair tied back) knows asks, “Have you figured out what you’re doing in my country?”
The soldier gives the filmmaker’s answer to her. “Working on it.”

We glimpse, either live-streamed and recorded, Islamic terror threats that “call on you (the West, the US, etc.) to be people of principle.” Or else.

An interrogator (Valerio Mastandrea) asks a two word question of the unkempt, raving, hair-down prisoner Hawke.

“What? Where?”

“Your enemy won’t be gone when you kill me,” the terrorist growls between water-boardings.

Drugging him turns his aversion to answering questions into free form Woody Guthrie quoting, rants about that ultimate act of protest, the one that was the beginning of the end in Vietnam, and the beginning of the Arab Spring.

“How come no one is setting themselves on fire?” He’d do it, he screams. With a pandemic, the rise of fascist nationalism and America descending into Trumpism, it’s time, he figures.

The soldier and others have an idea of the target — Rome itself, Vatican City specifically, “the capital” of Christendom, “Death to the infidels,” another shot in a “3000 year war,” our soldier opines. “Thousand year war,” a Muslim prisoner later corrects him.

Ferrara wants brownie points for faking all this under extreme filmmaking conditions, as does ever other filmmaker who told a “pandemic story” during the pandemic.

But the obscurant strain of it all shows. Most of what’s here would be filler in a better film, or bullet point scenes in a story more wholly-shaped and worked out.

Ferrara fans will recognize hints of his recurring themes, and the increased concerns of his dotage (he moved to Italy/got out of America for a variety of reasons).

And you’ll spot his wife, Cristina Chiriac, laughing in a couple of scenes, and their little girl Anna with the mysterious woman in another.

I think that’s a Ferrara cameo as a masked, cowled monk.

But none of that, or the not-special-at-all effects and self-consciously “arty” touches. really matter. If it weren’t for that “think of what I did, and under what conditions” prologue, none of us would give this a second thought. Including the picture’s star.

Rating:  R for language, some violence, bloody images, sexual material and drug content

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Valerio Mastandrea, Valeria Correale, Cristina Chiriac, Anna Ferrara

Credits: Scripted and directed by Abel Ferrara. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:26