Movie Nation

Cameroonian filmmaker Olivier Assoua makes his feature directing debut with “The Eagle’s Nest,” a lurid, lurching and muddled melodrama that still manages some good ideas and terrific moments.

The screenplay, which he co-wrote, has an “everything but the kitchen sink” flavor as see see drug abuse and drug money, sexual abuse, betrayal and murder, all set against a story about a young woman’s desperation to get out of “this s–thole” that has her trapped, with nothing but her good looks and her wiles help her escape her hometown, Nkongsamba.

Our first glimpse of Paris, played by Claude Scholastique Nkou Mbida, is of her crawling through the mud on a rainy night. Whatever this bleached blonde’s “Goth” girl dreams, something has gone wrong.

“The Eagle’s Nest” — not sure what the title has to do with the story — clumsily backtracks and backfills as we learn what happened and what Paris plans to do about it.

She is “saved” from her injuries by the young nurse’s aide Obama (Richard Essame), a timid soul who pines for her. He has set up a clinic there, something Paris and her brassy BFF Samantha (Felicity Asseh) ridicule.

Paris doesn’t let whatever happened distract her from her escape plan. “Life sucks in Africa” she tells one and all (in French with English subtitles), including her mother (Sybile Aline Njoke) and little sister.

Everybody is curious about her plans, but she doesn’t give what we’d call straight answers. Mom and others want to know where she’s come up with the money, and she’s even more evasive about that.

We can guess.

But something happens, her money and passport are taken. As she won’t call the cops, it’s up to her and Samantha to track the perps through the modest clubs (where Samantha is a singer) and seedy nightlife of their corner of Cameroon.

Several elements conspire to make “The Eagle’s Nest” hard to follow. Assoua doesn’t clearly delineate what is the story’s “present” is, and what happened earlier. The flashbacks and present-day search for the cash and passport are mashed together in a very confusing way.

Performances would ordinarily help make that distinction, but Mbida never gives us any sense of urgency or panic over what’s happened to her prospects or her family. Worst of all, she doesn’t show much in the way of emotion until late in the third act. By then, we’ve spent an hour wondering if this or that scene came before her mother and little sister’s murder, or after it.

She never sheds a tear over this loss, which is almost certainly all her fault.

“What did you get yourself into this time?” is a question everybody asks and she won’t answer.

Her character drops the suggestion that she was molested by her father as a child, and lost her virginity “too cheaply” to the first guy who offered to give her a ride in his car — when she was 13. But even these facts of life are presented poker-faced.

Samantha’s worst moment came on an earlier attempt to escape Africa. We see her tortured and perhaps sexually assaulted in Tripoli, Libya, jumping off point for many migrants fleeing to Europe.

I say “perhaps sexually assaulted” because much of the violence here is kept off camera. A lucrative sex worker threesome that Sam sets up for her and Paris to score cash from a high roller (Keumbang Diedonné) is kept PG, more implied than explicit. Even Sam’s singing is skipped over as we see her club act, but don’t hear it.

The bare bones of a tight melodrama about narcissism and “look out for myself” greed, murder and money and betrayal are here. But it never comes together until the striking and violent finale.

Which suggests that there’s enough here for viewers to hope Assoua gets better and gets it right next time.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Claude Scholastique Nkou Mbida, Felicity Asseh, Richard Essame, Keumbang Diedonné,
Axel Abessolo

Credits: Directed by Olivier Assoua, scripted by Magno Assoua Adeline and Olivier Assoua. An Indie Rights release.

Running time: 1:31

A carny tale from the Oscar winning director of “The Shape of Water,” starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara and Willem Dafoe….and others.

Looks lush, lurid and menacing, and jst in time for the holidays, too!

“Even Mice Belong in Heaven” is the most adorable and unusual animated offering for kids this year.

A Czech production based on a children’s book by Iva Procházková, it’s an afterlife tale. And unlike “All Dogs Go to Heaven,” it’s almost wholly-invested in presenting a deeply-detailed look at heaven for animals, a charming hereafter of amusement park and moral tests in the “Forest of Forests.”

And what’s your prize for examining your life among the hippo, crocs, flamingos and other fauna? “A movie ticket.” That personalized trip to the cinema is a genuine lump in your throat moment, a feat few animated films from Hollywood can manage these days.

There’s something mesmerizing about the handcrafted look of stop-motion animation that transfixes children and that adults — some of us, anyway — never grow out of. “Mice” is more reminiscent of the European “Peter and the Wolf” stop-motion (models, hand-posed frame by frame) short than the recent classics of the genre, by Aardman (“Wallace & Gromit”) or Laika (“Coraline”). The artists’ handiwork shows in every frame.

Wizzy the mouse (voiced in the film’s English language version by Simona Berman) is forever proving to her brothers, her friend Mole and others in her world that she’s brave, even though she’s “always afraid, like every other mouse.”

She’d like to be heroic like her mouse-stached father, whose exploits are taught in mouse school. To prove it, she slips into the abandoned playground and snatches a tuft from fur from a sleeping fox.

But the fox awakens, and despite being cheered on by the animals she’s trying to impress, she finds herself in the foggy white purgatory of heaven. A long-horned goat checks her in, assures her that yes, she’s dead and no, that she, the goat isn’t “God.”

When Wizzy discovers that she’s been sent to the same place as the fox she assumes killed her, she is seriously put-out. But events conspire to tie Miss “I don’t need any help!” and the stammering White Belly (Graham Halstead) together for their journey, a “Pilgrim’s Progress” through obstacles, rules and rites of passage before they get their tickets to the cinema.

They learn of each other’s shortcomings and “issues,” and as they deal with helpful crocs, rageaholic badgers and pestering peers of their own genus, they prove their worth and face their species’ prejudices.

“Heaven is what you make of it,” a croc tells them, before reminding each to wash up, especially their ears.

“You cannot go back,” a sage lobster intones. “You must go where your nose points, not your tail.”

The theology is childlike and mostly upbeat. The biggest sin either of these two must shake is their childish phobia about baths. Yes, that’s an issue in Czechoslovakia, too. Heaven is largely one big bathtime, with hot springs hot tubs and the like. Mice, it turns out, are especially touchy about having to wash their ears.

The translated dialogue only occasionally flirts with funny or profound. The fox is warned by a legend of the vulpine race about “making friends with FOOD” (a mouse).

But the whimsical, hand-made realization of heaven and the life-affirming “meaning” of it is kid-friendly in the extreme, and that makes “Even Mice Belong in Heaven” a charmer worth tracking down (in theaters and streaming) this holiday season.

Rating:unrated

Cast: The voices of Simona Berman, Graham Halstead, Ryan Andes, Marc Thompson, Major Attaway, Mary O’Brady 

Credits: Directed by Jan Bubenicek and Denisa Grimmová, scripted by Alice Nellis, Richard Malatinsky and Jeffrey Hilton, based on the book by Iva Procházková. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:20

Joaquin Phoenix and “endearing” don’t often make it into the same sentence. But watch his soft-spoken, laid-back turn in “C’mon, C’mon,” a movie about a midlife discovery of just how hard parenting is. “Endearing” is the only word that fits. Working with an adorable moppet will do that for you.

The latest dramedy from the director of “Beginners” and “20th Century Women” is a black and white essay on childhood trauma, memory and family — one teetering on the brink, but with an ill-prepared uncle willing to pitch in to keep others from tumbling into the abyss. Quiet and obsessed with sound, indulgent and wise, brittle but softened by love, it’s another sensitive and humane feature from Mike Mills, a filmmaker who makes “family” and “listening” a focus of all of his films.

That’s what Johnny does for a living — listening, He’s a public radio reporter, traveling the country, interviewing the children of immigrants for a documentary he and others are producing. He treats the kids with respect, never talking down when he asks “When you think about the future” questions about their lives and their prospects. Best of all, he listens to what they have to say.

Another person he’s hearing these days is his sister, Viv (played by Gaby Hoffman). They live on opposite coasts, and haven’t been close of late. But the anniversary of their mother’s death has them chatting. He catches up on how little Jesse (Woody Norman) is doing. And that’s when he gets a hint about a situation Viv has to deal with regarding her concert musician husband.

Viv has to go to Paul (Scoot McNairy), who has taken a job in Oakland. She lives in greater LA. And without words being said, we can tell Johnny knows why she can’t take Jesse with her, why she needs to go and why her trip might take time.

Next thing we know, laid-back, single and childless 40something Johnny is volunteering to take care of her son.

Mom describes Jesse as “a whole little person, now.” He’s nine and indulged way beyond what most families would consider “normal.” Jesse has been warned that Johnny is “a bit awkward.” Johnny? He has no idea what’s coming.

“Why aren’t you married,” the tactless tyke asks? “Why did she (his mother) stop talking to you?”

Jesse sports an unruly mop and a lot of needs. He needs to be read to at bedtime, is fond of sleeping in the grownups’ bed, loves hiding from caregivers when they’re out in public, has to be kept away from sugar and simply must be addressed as an “orphan kid” from next door who play-acts this whole morbid thing about Viv (later Johnny) having children that died, which is why he wants to come stay with them.

Johnny’s mild-mannered meltdown, when it finally comes, is overdue.

“Why does everything have to be like this weird eccentric thing that you do? Why can’t you be NORMAL?”

If he’d thought rather than snapping, Johnny could have come up with a reasonable answer by himself, one that might have made him hold his tongue. All those soundless flashback arguments we’ve seen between the siblings weren’t just about their dying mother. Some of them were about whatever else was going on in Viv’s house. Paul has “manic” problems of his own. We’re seen the apple. Guess what the tree is like.

I love the way Mills gives Johnny “bonding” ideas that come from his work. Soon, Jesse is as obsessed with “getting sound” (recording audio environments like the beach, skate parks and the like) as his uncle.

Having Johnny read aloud from the (credited) parenting books, comic books and essays Viv keeps around the house (“Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty,” by Jaqueline Rose, “The Bipolar Bear Family” comic, by Angela Holloway) is a clever way of getting Big Themes into the story without having the characters dive into exposition.

Johnny’s endless parade of interviews with kids looks like a Hollywood child actor casting call. If they aren’t actors, they certainly were cast for being the prettiest girls and boys in their age range available. Nary a zit, crooked tooth or fashion-impaired outfit in the lot. But even that will play as “real” to regular listeners to NPR, which tends to skew urban, overly-articulate and coastal in the people it reports on and listeners it caters to.

Young Master Norman, a British child actor, is very good at taking Jesse right to the cusp of “insufferable.” He makes acting-out look obvious. He’s convincingly precocious, which is the way the movies treat almost all children. We don’t need the “I don’t really have friends. I mostly talk with adults” confession. That’s a trap even an indie icon like Mike Mills can’t help but fall into.

But Phoenix and Hoffman really sell “C’mon, C’mon,” settling into “siblings” with such ease that even their phone conversations have a lived-in familiarity — Johnny admitting he shouted at the brat, Viv relieved that it’s not just her.

That relationship — the childless and clueless but willing to learn, and the “finally somebody realizes what mom’s go through” sibling — makes this warm but melancholy movie something to be cherished, another “family relationships” movie from a filmmaker so good at them that it’s about time he shared his reading list with the audience, giving away his secrets.

Rating: R for language (profanity)

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffman, Woody Norman and Scoot McNairy

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mike Mills. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:48

I have a faint recollection of seeing the Korean thriller “Hide and Seek” several years back. The plot twist is familiar when it turns up again in actor-turned-director Joel David Moore’s remake.

But even with all that information, even re-watching the picture’s last third to see if I’d missed something, it’s hard to make sense of the remake’s finale. The pieces don’t fit as neatly as they did in Jung Huh’s original, and that spoils the effect.

It’s about a hotelier (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who just inherited dad’s tony Grand Parkmore Hotel in Manhattan. Noah lives in the penthouse with his wife (Jacinda Barrett) and two kids.

The over-organized refrigerator, fastidious grooming and a tendency to scrub his hands with a psychotic vigor make us wonder about Noah, and diagnose him as “OCD” on the spot.

The last thing a guy like that needs, with this new responsibility just added to his portfolio, is hearing from his “fixer” lawyer (Joe Pantoliano) that his estranged and apparently-disturbed brother has returned to the city, perhaps to make trouble over the will.

Noah follows directions to the condemned flophouse where brother “Jacob” was last seen. Mr. OCD Fastidious finds himself haggling with an informal slumlord (Mustafa Shakir), his phone snatched by an urchin whose mother (Sue Jean Kim) is convinced the missing Jacob was some sort of pervert, and then mugged by a homeless guy.

Before this mystery is unraveled, neat-freak Noah will be crawling through ruined crawl spaces, seeing this mysterious, helmeted menace everywhere and certain that its Jacob demanding his share.

“He wants what’s mine, what’s HIS!”

Rhys Meyers goes properly wild-eyed for this performance, playing a buttoned-down man who snaps and turns manic. The wife and kids, his employees? They don’t seem to notice the guy is off his rocker.

And as Noah’s nightmares about the sinister motorcycle-helmet turn real, other threats from that condemned building manifest themselves in more beatings and a deeper puzzle.

We saw the helmet kill a young renting “squatter” (Alejandra Rivera) in the first scene. We know the threat is real. But in a building littered with crazy, who can it be?

Writer-director Joel David Moore, an actor in the “Avatar” franchise, has no problem getting our attention with the mystery. But he squanders that attention with a story that doesn’t play fair or logically add up. A couple of interesting performances are similarly squandered.

This “Hide and Seek” isn’t hatefully bad. It’s short, well-acted and easy enough to follow until it isn’t. It’s the “until it isn’t” that earns it the label, “disappointing.”

Rating:  R for some violence, disturbing images, nudity, and for language.

Cast: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Jacinda Barrett, Mustafa Shakir, Alejandra Rivera, Sue Jean Kim and Joe Pantoliano

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joel David Moore, based on the South Korean film of the same title by Jung Huh. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:24

This February 25 thriller has the “Bridge of Spies” and “Dunkirk” star playing a tailor with a very important mob commission on this one particular night.

Zoey Deutsch and Dylan O’Brien and Johnny Flynn are in the supporting cast.

“The Summit of the Gods” stands alone when it comes to animated films about mountain climbing. So it has that going for it.

It’s a tale that hangs on two mysteries — that of a recovered camera that might have belonged to George Mallory, the Englishman who might have “summited” Mount Everest in 1924, before disappearing in the snow for 75 years. His body was found in 1999, something not mentioned in the film, which is based on a Japanese comic book (manga).

The movie’s speculation is about a camera that Mallory might have had on his person, and the notion that an obsessive purist climber might have found it, withholding it from the world.

The other “mystery” is the one that’s been glibly answered for the 150 years people have battled sheer rock faces and ice walls to reach the world’s highest peaks. Why do they climb this or that mountain? Mallory is the bloke who gave that oft-quoted answer.

“Because it’s there.”

French animation filmmaker Patrick Imbert and his animation team tell this straightforward story in the most time-honored straightforward way. That makes for an engrossing film, but one that doesn’t really “get at” that “why,” despite paying lip service to the psyche of climbers.

A photojournalist comes home from a failed Everest expedition disgruntled with the work and the people who engage in this sport that has become his specialty. But a Nepalese barfly pitched him a much better story and an artifact, one that Fukamachi failed to act on. The guy wanted to sell him Mallory’s “vest pocket camera.”

The cynical Fukamachi brushed off the hustle, but later saw the hustler surrendering the camera to a big guy who seemed to have a better claim on it. And that guy’s missing fingers convince Fukamachi that he was the reclusive climbing legend Habu, a working-class mountaineer who gained fame in the ’60s and dropped out of sight years before.

Finding Habu and that camera become the reporter’s obsessions. But even after finding Habu, “answers” won’t come easily for a plainly-haunted man who will only say, “Once you get a taste for it, nothing else matters” when it comes to explaining himself.

In classic “Citizen Kane” fashion, we have a reporter talking to people who knew Habu, hearing their accounts of a self-absorbed obsessive, a classic loner who reminds anyone climbing with him, “If I’m in a tough spot, you leave me.”

His interview subjects him fill in on the man’s life story, and what they leave out Fukamachi fleshes out in voice-over narration.

“The Summit of the Gods” isn’t necessarily a story that needed to be told via animation. There are no talking animals, monsters or big-haired ponies. The medium is used to depict a death or two, some hallucinations and some decently rendered mountains. The animation isn’t anime, but is in that ballpark — slightly jumpy, under-animated.

It’s the screenplay, the mysteries in the plot, that sell this. It’s worth adding that it’s not over-sold, and like most films adapted from comic books, it’s more a surface skim than a deeply illuminating exploration of the human condition.

While “Summit” doesn’t expand the animation frontier or lift animation as an artform, it’s a perfectly watchable way of telling a reasonably compelling story.

Rating: PG, Thematic Content|Peril|Some Language|Smoking|Unsettling Images

Cast: The voices of Darren Barnet, Rich Ting, Keiko Agena

Credits: Directed by Patrick Imbert, scripted by Patrick Imbert and Magali Pouzol, based on the manga by Jirô Taniguchi and Baku Yumemakura. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36 

A March 17 you-know-what-day tale of Irish goblins getting after the new folks in town, who happen to be Londoners played by Hannah John-Kamen and Douglas Booth.

A 50 year-old man loses his job and finds his home, family and very life are subject to “Repossession” in this new thriller from Singapore.

That plot summary has a lot more potential to it than the choppy, hard to follow and not at all frightening film that co-writer/directors Ming Siu Goh and Scott C. Hillyard turned in.

It’s “choppy” because while flashbacks purport to fill in a story that takes forever to get down to business, big gaps in what we’re meant to know remain. We can’t keep track of what is real and what isn’t because the filmmakers didn’t. And it’s literally choppy at times, as jump-cuts work their way into the would-be terror, totally taking the viewer out of the moment, if indeed it had any notion of drawing us in for a good scare.

If you’ve ever lost a job, you can identify with what happens to Jim Tan (Gerald Chew of “Wonder Boy”). The entire chilly process is offensive and humiliating. When the layoff hits and he refuses to sign a letter of resignation or the letter of termination, he takes things one step further by lashing out at the boss who gives him her best “It’s out of my hands.”

He’s so crushed he can’t tell his wife Linda (Amy Cheng of “Crazy Rich Asians”), who fills her days with charity work, work that often includes her writing a big check. They have a live-in maid and a daughter (Rachel Wan) in college. Their condo has a pool, and he drives an Audi.

And he’s not inclined to listen to the advice of his old army buddy (Sivakumar Palakrishnan) who all but orders him to tell his wife, sell the car and job hunt like mad.

“Repossession” goes seriously wrong by devoting its first hour to Jim’s job interviews, his dabbling in day trading and his secret work driving a ride-share.

It isn’t just agism, periodic downsizing and an ebb and flow economy that are working against him. Something more sinister has it in for him. We think. Or he thinks.

Is it paranoia that has him seeing spectral things, flashing back to a telling moment from his and his sister’s childhood or another army days “episode?” Or did that teen (Matthew Loo) he knocked down with his car who later tells him a dullish story about a monster who devoured a village have some message he was cryptically trying to pass on?

“You look down,” the sage kid says (in English). “Bad things happen when you’re down.

Whatever the viewer pieces together in her or his head, the movie doesn’t pass along straightforward answers. There’s nothing resembling a cause-and-effect, here. We can guess that there is, but there’s too little information to settle the matter.

As the film jumps around with those two flashback timelines, events in the present day seem to mimic events of the past, with the suggestion that whatever made bad things happen then is back to make similar things today.

Only that’s not clear, either. Is it all just in his head, as the narrative ignores this “possessed” moment or that exorcism, jumping ahead as if they never happened?

So confused. So confusing. So NOT scary or edifying. So why bother?

Rating: unrated, horror violence, profanity

Cast: Gerald Chew, Amy Cheng, Sivakumar Palakrishnan, Rachel Wan and Matthew Loo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ming Siu Goh and Scott C. Hillyard. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:34

He’s stoic, a humorless loner. Unless he’s replaying his favorite TV commercials starring the infantile comic “Jackal.” Those move him to hysterics.

He’s tougher than tough, with the scars to show for it. But he freaks out like a little boy if his food’s too hot.

He’s unblinking, unflinching, and prone to doing everything around the house from computing to working out in the nude.

And as we’ve seen in the opening scene, a geisha restaurant slaughter, he’s a methodical hitman who does the calculus of a kill before he pulls the trigger. We see graphics (a “Terminator” or Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” movies trick) of the targeted spot he wants to hit, the angle the bullet will travel and the many many variations of each shot he has to wade through in the blink of an eye.

He’s so good he’s mythic. Call him “The Fable,” because this masked-murderer (Jun’ichi Okada) might be just that, someone who doesn’t exist.

The long, somewhat sluggish comic thriller director Kan Eguchi gets out of this manga adaptation has scattered laughs and lots and lots of killing, much of that played as comedy, too. We are not that amused.

But the big set-pieces here are wowzers, good enough to merit a sequel (“The Fable: A Hitman Who Doesn’t Kill”), so let’s dive in.

Our nameless mass murderer (“hundred of kills”) has just finished cleaning up “some trouble,” so his boss (Kôichi Satô) sends him and his Tokyo driver-sidekick (Fumino Kimura) off to Osaka to lay low.

They are to “blend in” as “ordinary” citizens, Boss instructs them (in Japanese with English subtitles). But as he is being put up by a mob ally, our hero will go as “a professional,” just not himself, the legend others call “The Fable.”

“Don’t you DARE get into trouble,” the boss who trained him warns. “No killing.” If he does, “I’ll kill you.”

That’s going to be tricky, as there are a lot of mob “problems” swirling around Director Ebihara (Ken Yasuda). A mob-connected sociopath (Yûya Yagira) is about to get out of jail and stir things up. And then there’s this contract killer (Sôta Fukushi) out to find this “Fable,” and test himself against him in the midst of what could be a mob coup in the making.

All the Fable, hiding under the name Akira with his hard-brawling, hard-drinking “sister,” wants is get a job and pretend to lead an ordinary life, with just enough mobsters knowing he’s there to prevent that.

Okada maintains a poker face for most of the movie, until those goofball commercials by the Jackal show up. He dissolves into hysterics, something no one around him quite understands.

The comedy is played broadly while the action beats have a methodical dullness about them. He wades through foes in ways that are more impressive as you repeat-watch them in slow motion. At speed, the killing is perfunctory, driven by a need to impress through sheer numbers.

I wasn’t. Not much, anyway.

Flashbacks explaining how The Boss and The Fable met are unnecessary.

The complications are a damsel (Mizuki Yamamoto) in distress, a mobster wanting to pimp her out, kidnappings and the threat of rape, all with poor Akira forced to handle the situation without actually killing anybody.

As a gimmick, that’s kind of interesting. But the explanations — reduced lethality bullets and what not — are feeble.

Still, all involved seem to think that’s enough to hang not one movie, but a sequel titled “A Hitman Who Doesn’t Kill” on. Maybe they get a better handle on their plot device in the second film. “Fable,” despite its excessive run time and stretches of tedium, was at least popular enough to warrant having another go with this character.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence

Cast: Jun’ichi Okada, Fumino Kimura, Mizuki Yamamoto, Sôta Fukushi, Ken Yasuda, Yûya Yagira, Osamu Mukai and Kôichi Satô.

Credits: Directed by Kan Eguchi, scripted by Watanabe Yusuke, based on a manga by Katsuhisa Minami. A Nippon TV film on Netflix

Running time: 2:03