Movie Nation

“Just Short of Perfect” is an Around the World with Netflix romantic comedy from Brazil, a sentimental but clumsy search for laughs in pairing up a tall bombshell and an exceptionally short but rich suitor,.t.

Or as they say in Hollywood, “How things work out here.”

I’ll limit myself to one bad but unavoidable pun by saying as “low” farces go, this one falls short. OK, that’s two but I got them both into a single sentence.

Juliania Paes, whom you might remember from the Brazilian drama “Farewell” or one of the remakes of “Dona Flor and her Two Husbands,” plays Ivana, a vivacious 40something attorney in the middle of divorcing her bullying law firm partner Danilo (Marcelo Laham).

Danilo fights her over their dog, their offices, everything. We can guess, from his priorities (money), that he’s about to have second thoughts about breaking up the “partnership.”

But Ivana loses her phone, and this charming stranger calls her house to offer it back. He makes jokes about his last name, “Leão” — Portuguese for “lion, — and agrees to meet her and return the cell.

He’ll recognize her, he assures her. Which he does. But when Ricardo Leão (Leandro Hassum) introduces himself, she cannot help but notice he’s half her size.

The sight gag, repeatedly endlessly in this strained “cute” romance, is achieved through forced perspective, simply filming Hassum, last seen in the Brazilian holiday farce “Just Another Christmas,” separately when need be. He’s always seen with tables, chairs, car seats, Ivana and everything else practically towering over him. The effect isn’t seamless — we can see he’s lit differently in the trick shots — but it’s more than convincing enough.

Ricardo’s size does not reflect his confidence. He jokes, pulling out his ID “to show you I’m a grown man (in Portuguese with English subtitles).” He boldly takes her out sky-diving, lets her know his profession (cardiac surgeon), and talks her into a second date, and a third.

We’re supposed to buy his “charm” as winning her over. Maybe we can. Maybe not.

But when the Pope has heart problems on his way to a visit to Brazil, it is “world famous” Dr. Leão they call. As if Ivana isn’t impressed enough, her diminutive suitor grabs the mike post-surgery and gives the world the word — in Latin, just like they do when they’re naming a new pope in Vatican City.

“Habemus papam!”

Him taking her to an exclusive dance club where he takes the stage to sing and play the upright bass on Bamboleo seals the deal. Well, after a club creep hits on her and he’s challenged to a “Macarena” dance-off, which Ricardo naturally wins.

But just as Ivana is falling for Ricardo, the big obstacles make themselves heard and seen. Her ex unloads a tirade of “runt” jokes. Ricardo shows up, as her date, for her brother’s same-sex wedding and he’s confused for being the “dwarf” in their wedding song and dance entertainment.

And when that ridiculous mixup is settled, her mother (Elizângela) can’t stop blurting out short jokes and tactless “dwarf” references, one after the other.

“Is he old enough to drink? Is he old enough to drive?“

Hassum is a big star in Brazil, but anybody viewing this from the rest of the world might wonder if height is the biggest reason “She’s out of his league.” He’s not the prettiest matinee idol, and his comic gifts aren’t showcased very well here.

The movie’s “We are what we are” messaging has some heft to it. Dr. “Very Short” isn’t shy about dropping “Fatty” on an omnipresent pizza delivery guy.

But recycled “little man sex” gags, too-obvious fart-jokes and unfunny “translation” blunders — explaining what’s going on at the wedding for the least convincing “Alabama in-laws” this side of Reese Witherspoon’s little comedy of a few years back — limit the appeal and entertainment value in this “break stereotypes” tale.

Rating: TV-14, sexual situations

Cast: Juliana Paes, Leandro Hassum, Elizângela and Marcelo Laham.

Credits: Directed by Ale McHaddo, scripted by Michelle Ferreira. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

Career bit-players Stephanie Lynn and Alexandra Case wrote themselves into leading ladies with “Soulmate(s),” a rom-com in which they play the two best-looking single thirtysomethings in all of Vermont, “besties” with a pact that one won’t marry without the other marrying the same day.

It’s every bit as cutesy as that sounds. “Vermont” alone could be the giveaway, promising a movie of maple sap-sucking and roadside syrup stands, cow-milking, bell choirs, string bands, covered bridges and tiny houses. Yup, so “sweet” it makes your teeth ache.

Guitar-picking farm daughter Jessie (Lynn) and blogger, notary and aspiring op-ed writer Sam (Case) have been friends since five, share a tiny house and pretty much everything else in their lives.

But Big Maple is moving in and squeezing out small farmers, and that’s the perfect reason for Jessie to fall for a Peterson Maple exec, hunky Landon (Mark Famiglietti). But that “pact” gets in the way of her future happiness. Or so Sam hopes.

Sam aims to be “Vermont’s Erin Brockovich,” sounding the alarm about this corporate takeover and the “shortcuts” that could undermine “real” maple syrup. Think “Chinese honey.”

But Jessamine’s swooning over the hunk who lives on a 40 foot ketch on Lake Champlain interrupts their idyll. Sam desperately realizes that the only thing that can slow-Jess’s roll to the altar is invoking their “pact,” and the only thing Jess can do is resolve that she’s “gonna find you a man.” Queue the “speed-dating” montage. If only the “speed-dating montage” was the sum total of it.

“Soulmate(s)” is a Hallmark Channel holiday romance without the snow, aka “insipid. The jokes are treacly, the situations warmed-over from scores of better movies and the whole thing plays kind of 1943.

“This is Vermont. It’s always a bit ‘1943.’”

There’s a protest, a brief mention of “GMO” battles and the region’s ever-widening “warm spells.” At least those causes don’t face the sell-out the script seems to be angling for.

The perfectly-turned-out (Such hair!) leads give themselves a fine showcase, if they’re angling for recurring roles on a sitcom. Case’s drunken, interrupt-a-string-band with her rap about “used to have a buddy, now she’s a duddy” is one of the least cringe-worthy moments in it.

The supporting players are experienced and professional, but not people who add spark to a movie that sorely needs it.

It’s a little late to be pointing this out, but just because your romantic comedy’s set in Vermont is no reason to make it sappy.

Rating: unrated, inoffensive in the extreme

Cast: Stephanie Lynn, Alexandra Case, Mark Famiglietti, Di Quon, Zachary Spicer and Alice Barrett.

Credits: Directed by Timothy Armstrong, scripted by Stephanie Lynn and Alexandra Case. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:32

The phrase “Maze Brothers,” as in “A Maze Brothers Film,” appears four times in the opening credits to the thriller “La Flamme Rouge.” Brent Scott Maze and Derek Maze wrote it, directed it, produced and split editing and cinematography credits on the film, which stars Balthazar Getty as a retired cycling champ who drunkenly and half-accidentally kills his fiance and the new cycling team captain our killer discovered was having an affair with her.

Here’s what the Maze Brothers so desperately want to get credit for.

Every instance of foreshadowing is fixed with an extreme close-up — a whiskey glass, a bolt-action rifle over a mantel, a CCTV camera, a pill bottle and an Uzi caught in XCU and a freeze-frame, to boot.

The detective (George Griffith) who sets out in pursuit of our cyclist-on-the-lam likes playing with his cigarette lighter, featured in so many close-ups that you’d swear there was product placement involved.

He should have an easier job of it than he does, because the fleeing Rick Van Pelt (Getty) lays low at a stoner pal’s luxurious pad. And Rick forgets to turn off the lights of his vintage Stingray when he ducks inside.

No way that geriatric Chevy”ll start when Rick needs it.

One of the unsavory people mixed up in this mess is a threatening, trash-talking art dealer played by Clint Howard. He likes playing with ball bearings. You know, like Captain Queeg in “The Caine Mutiny.”

“I’m LOSING my patience!” Ron Howard’s cooler-brother exclaims.

French “steroid” mafiosi have our former cyclist’s doctor (Todd Lowe) in their sights. But a local mobster (Josh Martin) is way ahead of them. He sends his favorite hitman, motorcyclist Nacho (played by Nacho Picasso…LOL). Nacho either goes shirtless or wears tattered tank tops underneath his biker gear. Because he wants us to notice his tats.

The title? It’s got nothing to do with the lurid color palette they take a shot at creating for the picture, the blood on the crime scene and what not. Well, maybe in the lamest symbolic sense it does. It’s a Tour de France term, the red flag that signals there’s one kilometer to go before crossing the finish line.

Did I mention the movie has godawful dialogue, is badly-acted, dully-plotted and slower than Sacha Baron Cohen on a tricycle?

Yeah, it sucks — pretty every way a film can suck. But at least the Maze Brothers made sure they got credit for it.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Balthazar Getty, Nicole LaLiberte, Todd Lowe, George Griffith, Sebastian Quinn, Nacho Picasso and Clint Howard.

Credits: Scripted, produced, directed by Brent Scott Maze and Derek Maze. Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:34

The smart little girl is about eight when she starts seriously questioning her mother.

“Is it true they killed Mr. Pancho?” No, mother Rita (Mayra Batalla) tells little Ana (Ana Cristina Ordóñez González). He had to leave. His whole family, including your classmate Juana, left.

But why did they leave their cattle, their clothes, everything in their house and Juana’s bicycle?

“People leave everything behind as if they’ll come back for it some day,” Rita says, in Spanish with English subtitles. And enough with the questions.

“Prayers for the Stolen” is about the modern day slavery of mountain villages in modern Mexico. Living where poppies grow is a life sentence for the women and men there, intimidated into continuing the menial work of cutting the poppy buds and later harvesting their nectar for heroin.

The masked soldiers may come and spray with their helicopters, and make their presence felt for a few days here and there. But they always “spray everywhere except” where they’re supposed to. And when they leave, the goons in the SUVs and pickups, with their automatic weapons, roll in to renew their enslavement, extort their teachers, and take their girls when they’re of age.

“Prayers,” based on a novel by Jennifer Clement, is a richly-textured, slow-moving saga set over several years of young Ana’s life (Marya Membreño plays her as an adolescent).

It captures a tense mother-daughter relationship, fraught because of the film’s opening image. We see Rita and little Ana hand-digging a hole for her. She will hide in this any time the cartel goons show up. School is fine, her estranged father might be a lifeline if she needs to escape. But the here and now is that a mother of very limited means must worry every day for her child’s safety and the circumscribed future she faces.

But I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t tell you what a lot of critics now on Rotten Tomatoes won’t. “Slow-moving” is this movie’s Achilles heel. Screenwriter/director Tatiana Huezo drifts from patience-testing to maddening in the film’s funereal pace, from childhood into adolescence.

There are incidents here and there, but she’s made a film almost wholly out of texture. We see texture well past the moment where we get the point — Ana, Paula (Camila Gaal) and their pal with the cleft palette Maria (Blanca Itzel Pérez) are thick as thieves, almost from birth. They’re equally under threat, equally let down by a corrupt government that has ceded this section of the Sierras to bride-paying cartels.

But Paula and Ana’s mothers lie when they take their little girls in to have their hair cropped short. “Lice” has nothing to do with it, and the fact that Maria doesn’t face that is a growing-up moment for them all. Ana and Paula will have targets on their back by puberty.

From childhood, Maria’s enterprising brother Margarito has had his eye on Ana, roughhousing and teasing the way boys do. He works in the quarry with the men, and eventually in the poppy fields. As he grows up (Julián Guzmán Girón plays him as an adolescent), Ana may see his virtues, but also his shortcomings. His “trap” is different, but just as deadly.

A movie that progresses at this rate gives you a lot of time to pick over what it’s really getting at. The defenseless locals hide when trouble comes, lie to save themselves and flee if they get the chance. They make no moral judgments about the only decent paying jobs for unskilled laborers, although they have to see they’re in a cage they’re locking behind themselves.

First-time feature director Huezo — and three cheers for Netflix for giving so many the chance to get a feature film made — keeps the melodrama to a minimum and the confrontations mostly off camera. We hear shouts and shots. We and the locals see bodies.

The new teacher, who takes over when the previous one flees the threats and extortion, is something of an activist. Mister Fernando (Memo Villegas) sees promise in Ana, and convinces the locals to rig an impromptu warning bell, although he’s careful not to call it that. How long will he last.

This is what Third World autocracies look like, people in virtual chains, schools threatened by armed rednecks rolling in by the pick-up load. America’s days of looking down at this as “those people’s problem” may be over for good, thanks to the past five years.

I’m recommending this patient, immersive drama from South of the Border, but with a proviso. Don’t be shy about adjusting the playback speed in your Netflix settings. Huezo may not have a grasp of how waiting over an hour to get around to what your movie about is abusing the audience. Maybe by her second film, she’ll figure that out.

Rating: R for some language, implied violence, sexuality

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tatiana Huezo, based on a novel by Jennifer Clement. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50

This could be cute. No. Seriously.

A cheerfully amoral Hollywood “ghost hunter” huckster baits an AirBnB flat with “evil” artifacts and monitors the attacks on the guests in via hidden cameras in “Lair,” a stumbling but sometimes chilling thriller set in London.

But it’s not what you think.

Well, sleazeball “Dr.” Caramore (Corey Johnson) says he’s doing it to help the legal defense of a friend and colleague (Oded Fehr) in prison for clubbing his wife and child to death with such an artifact. It’s just that as the creep show begins and the first blood is spilled, there’s no way anything he does seems legal, moral or the least bit sensible.

And any chance the movie has of coming off is tossed away in an incompetently mis-ordered finale that guts whatever suspense was building for an “aftermath” where “what finally happened” is unimaginatively and dully explained via an interrogation and flashback within it.

Johnson (“United 93,””Captain Phillips” and “The Mauritanian”) makes a colorful fraud caught up in a double homicide in which he is almost implicated. He didn’t do the killing, as the testy lawyer (Alexandra Gilbreath) for his imprisoned friend (Fehr) notes. But he set it up and put the “possessed” and “evil” artifact in his house.

“It’s a CHUNK of TREE,” he protests, ridiculing her “Christian” take on what happened. Her religion has “more than one and a half billion followers the world over,” she spits back.

“So does Dwayne F—–g Johnson!”

He enlists a production assistant to wire up a convenient flat, puts up an ad and a same sex couple (Alana Wallace, Aislinn De’Ath) come into town for the weekend. Maria (De’Ath, and is that a perfect horror name or what?) has just split from her husband, bringing rebellious teen Joey (Anya Newall) and tiny tyke Lily (Laura Mount) with her.

But there’s nothing like a rebellious teen and, you know, demonic assaults that most of them cannot see to put a strain on a new couple.

Johnson’s acerbic take on a classic Hollywood vulgarian is the most fun element in play here. A quick temper and a quick way with a cutting quip makes us wait for the next nasty exchange.

“Listen lady, I don’t have the time or the crayons to explain this to you.”

The attacks have a barely-glimpsed quickness that makes the early ones more effective than those in the finale, in which we see beastly transformations and graphic butchery.

“Lair” isn’t quite working as the “strain on the family” horrors play out, and bodies are covered up. It falls utterly apart in the equally-slow-footed third act, finishing the botch-job begun in the first.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sexual situations, pot use, profanity

Cast: Corey Johnson, Alana Wallace, Aislinn De’Ath, Anya Newall, Sean Buchanan, Lara Mount and Oded Fehr.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adam Ethan Crow. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:39

So many Oscar winners, so very dark and comical.

Coming to Netflix.

The problem with film titles is that they’re not protected by copyright. It’s not unheard of to have films with the same title roll out in the same year, confusing viewers and muddying the chances of either film finding its audience.

There’s a new British film that premiered in the Toronto Film Festival this year to some fanfare, which considering John Michael McDonagh (“The Guard,””Calvary”) adapted it for the screen, and Oscar winner Ralph Fiennes, along with Jessica Chastain, Matt Smith and Caleb Landry Jones star in it, is to be expected.

That isn’t the film titled “The Forgiven” that’s just popped up on Netflix. This is the well-intentioned character drama about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and features Oscar winner Forest Whitaker doing an empathetic and impassioned interpretation of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, squaring off with Eric Bana as a “psychopathic” SSA (state security police) cop, a convicted mass murderer, in infamous Pollsmoor Prison.

Roland Joffé of “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission” directed this somewhat staid, uneven and generally downbeat drama. Its centers of action are Tutu’s navigating the treacherous personal and political currents outside that prison, where his fact-finding and public testimony interrogations are under fire from veterans of the just-ended Apartheid regime in South Africa, and inside the prison, where one of the most notorious inmates, Piet Blomfeld (Bana) has baited him with a feigned interest in “forgiveness.”

Blomfeld’s spitting fury, f-bombs and racist slurs reveal that he has more interest in enflaming the racial hatred that anchored his belief system than in any “biased” reconciliation. It’s all Tutu can do to get him to stop calling him “boy,” even if turning that to a more pious “father” seems out of reach.

But the Archbishop has weeping parents like Mrs. Morobe (Thandi Makhubele, terrific) begging for closure, “just a bone” from her missing “disappeared” child, and fellow commissioners (Terry Norton) seeking details of something called “Operation Hacksaw.” If the Nobel laureate Tutu can appeal to this man’s “humanity,” maybe Blomfeld can be redeemed, at least in part.

There are plenty of still-serving, still-intimidating state police like Hansi Coetzee (Morné Visser) who don’t want that can of worms opened. And with Blomfeld in a prison population where murderous gangs are just waiting for a target to take out, the clock may be ticking on this “offer.”

Whitaker’s impersonation is quite good, considering the size difference between the diminutive Tutu (5’4″) and himself. Facial prosthetics and a wig help. But a great actor goes beyond that and mimicking a voice to get at the man’s innate decency and compassion.

How can I pray for her when I don’t know what happened?” he pleads to Blomfeld, seeking answers about the woman’s missing child even after his reasoning — “We either learn to live together in this country, or we die together in this country” — fails.

Bana plays Blomfeld as a curled fist, deaf to reason or compassion, hatred driving his every action.

The scenes concerning the often fractious meetings and hearings of the commission, covered in the earlier drama “In My Country,” are rather drab when compared to their one-on-one confrontations. And the prison scheming and violence is standard issue prison thriller stuff, nothing new to see there, either.

Far more interesting is the less-developed side of this story, the actual rounding up of clues, digging for mass graves and facing police intimidation pretty much every step of the way on the country’s march towards the truth. And the film’s prologue, setting up our story in the distant past, showing one character’s disappearance and another’s formative childhood moment, is solid and gripping.

Joffé and his film’s intent are beyond reproach, but his patient, stolid storytelling style, emphasizing character over action here, kind of sucks the life out of the movie, something the occasional Whitaker vs. Bana fireworks cannot compensate for.

This “Forgiven” isn’t the even more obscure African film from 2016, and it’s not the Moroccan tale that McDonagh, Fiennes and Chastain have in store for us. And sad to say this one isn’t epic or memorable enough to merit other filmmakers fleeing from that title in the near future.

In other words, more confusion and “Forgivens” are coming until that happens.

Rating: R for disturbing/violent content, and language throughout including some sexual references

Cast: Forest Whitaker, Eric Bana, Terry Norton, Morné Visser, Thandi Makhubele

Credits: Directed by Roland Joffé, scripted by Michael Ashton and Roland Joffé. A Saban Films/Lionsgate production on Netflix.

Running time: 2:00

Ben Colman and Ali Vingiano go through an epic breakup, yet can’t exactly separate with the entire planet in a pandemic lockdown.

This gets a theatrical release Dec. 3.

The idea of Northern California as a marijuana growing paradise imbedded itself in the culture long before “Humboldt” visited it and made it a joke over a dozen years ago.

A sea of towering trees hiding patches of the weed that turned old hippies into independent “entrepreneurs,” it’s a green Garden of Eden that gave birth to a thriving, cash-only economy.

But along came all these states that started legalizing the stuff. That took away not just the outlaw cachet of it all, but made competing damned near impossible in a Brave New World of Pot Taxes, Pot Regulation and a supply chain that had to vouch that its supply is “legally grown.”

Damned government killjoys. And by the way, generations of enthusiasts have been saying that’s exactly what would happen the moment “legalized pot” became the standard. The cartels would have to move on. Smuggling, dumping bales of “square grouper” off the coast of Florida, for instance, just doesn’t pay in an era when Tommy Chong and Willie Nelson and others have their own brand-name-bud, on sale in much of the country.

“Freeland” is a simple, intimate drama about one grower facing the end of her way of life in this Edenic part of the world. Well-acted, simply-plotted and surprisingly poignant, it could be about any way of life, any chosen profession, that becomes endangered in a heartbeat thanks to “change” some see coming and others hope to wait out.

Krisha Fairchild stars as Devi, pushing 60 and a veteran of “32 years in the business.” Still striking, with long hair that long ago turned silver, you can tell her story at a glance. She moved to Humboldt County and environs at the tale end of the “off the grid, back to the land” hippy movement. Yeah, she was in a commune, and yes it was called “Freeland.”

But like others who stuck it out, she realized the way to make a living out here where the neighbors are scarce and the law is scarcer was to plant, breed, harvest and market marijuana.

She and a few other old timers stick around, but she’s got a young workforce (Frank Mosley, Lily Gladstone and Cameron James Matthews). She pays them in cash at the end of each week, and every so often, she meets a guy (Robert Parsons) in an RV with Nebraska license plates and makes an exchange — cash for cannabis.

Like everybody else in this business, she enjoys her handiwork, and everybody’s in agreement that this “new strain” she’s come up with is one of her best. But she’s no sooner decided on a vulgar name for it than the walls close in around her and the Big Arm of the State is slapping enjoinders on her gate and fines on her business.

Others have gone legal, spent the money on permits. Devi, who doesn’t use banks, must have figured she could get to the finish line — retirement — before the roof caved in.

She’s been warned that “once they legalize there” (Nebraska) the jig would be up. But the state and the county aren’t giving her the luxury of waiting for that to happen. Her expiration date has been moved up.

“Freeland” follows her as she reminisces in between frantic efforts to get permitted, unload her current crop and hang on just long enough to get back on an even keel.

Filmmakers Kate McLean and Mario Furloni come from documentary backgrounds, so it’s not surprising that they rest their debut features film on closely-observed details and on Fairchild’s Earth Mother presence.

Devi works her crop and turns over stalks in her drying house. She trims the buds and packs the product. And then she gives it a quick blast of air freshener, before trundling if off to her small town post office.

Fairchild (she starred in “Krisha” and “American Folk”) is the personification of the strong, independent working class woman of the land, and of the Flower Child in Winter. Her Devi has her life just so, with a system she’s made work for her. And when it blows up on her, she doesn’t let her workers, neighbors or anybody else see her cry. But we do.

Furloni and McLean keep their story lean and mostly melodrama free. Past tales of violence among the weedoisie, back-stabbing and ratting each other out for a competitive edge don’t figure here. This threat is less violent, more bureaucratic.

Our heroine’s seen the signs, had ample warning. She just didn’t act.

The suspense comes from the risks we see her taking, the ways a bad situation could turn much worse if this gambler’s last throw of the dice goes awry.

Fairchild lets us see regret in this performance, and a bittersweet nostalgia for the world she first moved to, the reasons she came and the people she loved back then.

It’s not epic, not heightened drama or even all that tragic. But “Freeland” is a film many can identify with, even if you’ve never picked up a pipe or bong. It’s a universal story, a timeless tale about anybody who’s napped a little too long and woken up to realize the working world has changed and might have no place for you in it.

Rating: unrated, marijuana use, drinking, profanity

Cast: Krisha Fairchild, Frank Mosley, Lily Gladstone, John Craven, Cameron James Matthews and Robert Parsons.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mario Furloni and Kate McLean. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:20