Movie Nation

“Luzzu” is a simple but gripping drama about a Maltese fisherman facing the end of his generations-long profession in a world of globe-trotting trawlers, international trade and climate change.

Its star is a real-life Maltese fisherman, a man so intimately acquainted with his way of life and the desolation of losing it that what we’re watching never feels like a performance, but a hard life lived in front of the camera.

Maltese-American Alex Camilleri’s debut feature summons up memories of other movies set in archaic professions — coal mining and textiles, family farming and cowboying — and the classics of Italian neo-realist cinema such as “Bicycle Thieves.” Like those films, and “Luzzu” producer Ramin Bahrani’s “Chop Shop,” it crosses the line between fiction and life, dramatizing the intimate details of hard work and struggle using people who have endured that as its performers.

Whatever its antecedents, there’s the resonance of reality in “Luzzu,” one of the best pictures of 2021.

Jesmark Sicluna plays a version of himself, a thirtyish young man who puts to sea for a couple of days at a time in his 12 foot long luzzu, the colorful Maltese version of an ancient fishing boat once common all over the Mediterranean. It’s a double-ended, high freeboard (steep sides to fend off waves) vessel his great grandfather owned, then his grandfather and his father.

It’s kept generations of his fishing family safe and employed. And on the day and night we meet him, it’s taking on water.

Jesmark’s lack of panic is part and parcel of the sense that he gets across that he’s grown up on the water. He handles nets and his slim catch with a lifetime of barehanded practice. He pushes at the soft spot in the wooden hull knowing he dare not push it harder, but that it’ll get him home.

He pulls out the homemade ice (frozen plastic water bottles he breaks up), stores his catch and makes his way to shore.

There’s a baby to be picked up — little Aiden — and a waitress wife, Denise (Michela Farrugia) to meet up with.

They have a pediatrician’s appointment, and her news isn’t good. Their infant is slow growing and slow-developing. He needs extra care and to see expensive specialists if he’s to have a shot at growing up normal.

Rifts in the marriage are exposed as Denise suggests they get in touch with her wealthy but estranged mother.

“I’ll take care of us, OK?” he assures her (in Maltese with English subtitles). But she’s no more reassured than we are, and for the first time we notice, she’s a little out of his league. We see him notice that, too.

He’s not catching many fish, either by himself or on his brother David’s (David Scicluna) bigger boat. David helps him haul Jes’s boat, Ta’ Palma, onto shore and diagnose its repair. But that’s going to cost money. Maybe he could take on work on a local trawler?

“Trawlers destroy the sea bed,” he barks at Denise. Jes has principles and will not ruin the fishery his family has depended on forever.

“Luzzu” becomes the story of how family friction, deepening debt and a world that’s closing in around him makes this stubborn, outspoken man cut corners and watch his principles gurgle to the bottom like his dreams of a self-employed job-for-life.

Camilleri’s movie flirts with melodrama as the odds pile up against our hero, with everyone from the “new” auctioneer at the local wholesale fish market to restaurant owners to fisheries managers and even his wife’s own family becoming an obstacle in his path for going on as he always has.

We see that “Bicycle Thieves” corruption set in as he watches a foreign fisherman/hustler (Uday McLean, terrific) get ahead and get in Jes’s way, time and again. Catching the fish is brutally hard work. Getting someone to pay you money for it when the system seems rigged is damned near impossible.

Sicluna displays a brittle tetchiness that only grows as Jes sees opportunities lost and his still-principled brother David standing in his way. David looks at Jes with worry, much of it directed at the boat his kid brother can’t afford to fix and cannot repair by himself.

“Without a boat, you lose your way.”

Camilleri gets a vivid, lived-in drama out of showing up Jesmark losing his way, making compromise after compromise as so many of us do when faced with the desperate need to provide for our family.

With scenes set on the water, on the docks in the dark of night when shady deals are made, and in the open where rich traditions and a way of life erode right before our eyes, Camilleri’s made a startling debut and a film that takes us into a alien world that is instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever had to work for a living.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jesmark Sicluna, Michela Farrugia, David Scicluna, Uday McLean

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Camilleri. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:34

Man, what was in that brownie I finished off lunch with?

“The Magical Journey” plays as some kind of half-arsed, trippy flashback to the Bad Old Days of Eastern Bloc children’s cinema.

It’s a kids fantasy with a trio of well-known Western actors taking a paid vacation to Ukraine to make it. They’ve suffered for their art, now it’s our turn. Let’s hope Jean Reno, Virginie Ledoyen and Saul Rubinek‘s checks cleared.

“Magical” is set at a Ukrainian film studio where a little girl learns of the perilous path her mother took — at age 12 — to ensure that she inherited the soundstage complex instead of having it fall into the hands of her evil aunt (Severija Janusauskaite).

The costumes looks like community theater cast-offs, the sets like unfinished cable TV kids’ show backdrops and the acting and effects are strictly student film quality.

The script? That ’70s flashback analogy suits. It’s inane and banal and dubbed, sometimes overwhelming the viewer with trite dialogue — “Save the princess from the Evil Queen!” — and often doing that Eastern Bloc political incorrectness thing about the differently-abled to tone deaf perfection.

“We already have one deaf-mute. Who needs another?” Yeah, shout that line at the limping, one-leg-shorter-than-the-other villain.

As a child, Polina (Polina Pechenenko) escapes from her cruel Aunt Varvara and creepy one-leg-shorter-than-the-other limping cousin (Eloy Alfaro Verstraeten) in search of her past, thanks to a fragment of a photo she found of her father (Wim Willaert).

Dad’s just gotten out of prison and he’s searching — violently — for his daughter.

Polina crashes the family movie studio, and is given a quest from a vision (Jean Reno) from “the other side of the screen.” Her “incomplete movie” must be completed by finding the rest of the tattered parts of the photo. She will journey from a war movie set to a tiny tots in school horror tale, to a Viking movie, etc., getting help from assorted characters in movies she encounters along the way.

Rubinek plays the studio chief, and others from the “real” world take on new guises in this “movie in my mind” Polina is playing a part in.

A six year-old child might be able to figure that out. But let’s have mom explain what we just saw unfold on the screen in voice-over, because that’s what incompetent movie makers always do — assume the viewer is as slow on the uptake as they are.

“The actors of the movie I was imagining were the same exact people I had met that very morning.” Get it? If not, Mom adds, “They were just playing different roles in my film.”

About 15 minutes were whacked off “Journey” to make it releasable in the US, and to compensate for all the content and plot that was lost, the mother-voice-over-narrating-to-daughter gets insanely out of hand.

The one good sequence involves Polina getting help from a tweenage girl boxer (complete with cornrows) in a clever-staged, choreographed and effects-assisted boxing match with a guy three times her height and six times her weight — “Goliath.”

The rest? Rubbish.

Rating: unrated, a little violent, with insensitive treatment of handicapped characters, etc.

Cast: Polina Pechenenko, Severija Janusauskaite, Virginie Ledoyen, Wim Willaert, Saul Rubinek and Jean Reno

Credits: Directed by Olias Barco, scripted by Olias Barco, Saul Rubinek and Anouchka Walewyk. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:20

The latest reboot of “Dune” opened to enthusiastic reviews, some less enthusiastic than others. And its first weekend it hit a healthy but underwhelming $40.1 million at the box office.

Yes, it’s long. And yes, it is sci fi and yes, there are characters in capes and cool costumes in exotic off-world settings.

But this didn’t come close to Marvel or Bond or even “Halloween Kills” numbers.

The Timothee Chalamet fanbase isn’t a sci fi crowd. The sci fi crowd, when it did show up, went with IMAX theaters. That upscale ticket represented nearly 20% of the weekend’s take.

“Halloween Kills” got murdered on its second weekend, a precipitous “Tyler Perry Plunge” of over 70% this weekend, to $14 million. It’ll clear $100. Eventually. But nobody was happy with that mess.

The final Daniel Craig outing as James Bond “No Time to Die” cleared the $500 million mark worldwide this week, but barely fell short of $12 million on its third weekend out in North America.

“Venom: Let There Be Carnage” is heading towards $200 million domestic, with another $9 million in tickets sold this weekend.

“Addams Family 2” will clear the $50 million mark by next weekend, another $4.2 this weekend.

Figures courtesy of @ExhibitorRelations.

Many a long, poetic scene decorates the John Patrick Shanley (“Moonstruck”) Irish romance “Wild Mountain Thyme,” just two characters talking, the way the Irish do, about “waiting” which the Irish also do.

That might explain why this light charmer starring the widely-worshipped Emily Blunt (Twitter has many a Church of St. Emily Herself congregation) never found even a hint of traction when it opened mid-pandemic.

But the novelty of her slinging an Irish accent (more or less) and the utter delight of Christopher Walken showing off his “version” of “the gift of the gab” as narrator and one of her co-stars, make this slender, ever-so-Irish romance worth tracking down.

It’s a farm fable about neighbors Rosemary (Blunt) and Anthony (Jamie Dornan, “Fifty Shades Free At Last”) who grew up next door to each other and seem destined to be together.

But he’s troubled and distracted, and she’s been in a decades-long funk over his inattention in a romantic way.

Once, when they were children, Anthony pushed Rosemary because she was bullying a cute lass who had little Anthony’s eye. At some point, his family had to sell a piece of land that was their sole access to the county road. And since that’s the very spot where Anthony pushed Rosemary, she’s sitting on it after inheriting it, making the Reillys go to the trouble of opening and closing a couple of gates just to get home after a trip to town or a visit to the pub.

Tony (Walken), Anthony’s Dad, is over that and then some. He’d too old to farm and would like to make the property more valuable by getting back that land. Because he’s determined that their farm (in Crossmolina, County Mayo, while the setting of the Shanley play this is based on was “Outside Mullingar”) not fall out of the hands of their family, which has owned it for 131 years.

And Tony is disappointed and damned tired of waiting for Anthony to get on the stick, marry and produce an heir, preferably with the woman he’s grown up with on the next farm over.

People age and grouse and die, machinations involving an American relative (Jon Hamm) play into the proceedings, and a lot of lovely sentimentally-Irish dialogue gets brushed over by Blunt, Dornan and Walken, who opens proceedings by relating that “If an Iiiiiirishman dies telling a story, you can be shore e’ll be back!”

Your affection — or tolerance — for that sort of cinematic Irish affectation should be your guide in deciding whether to see “Wild Mountain Thyme.”

There’s little Rosemary grousing, “Eeeyyye ‘ave no poorpose. I’m joost a gurrrrl, and the world is fulla gurrrls.”

Adult Rosemary is much more sanguine. “Hope is a force, and women are the salvation of the world.”

Adult Anthony muses that “Some of us don’t have joy. But we do what we must. Is a man who does what he must but gets no pleasure any less of a man?”

His Dad is sure his boy’s “no farmer…You take after John Kelly (one of his late wife’s relatives). And that man was as mad as the full moon.“

As for all this “waiting” Anthony does, and Tony must do, and Rosemary foolishly persists in, Tony’s got one sentence for Anthony that lands hardest.

You’re famous all over Ireland for what goes by you.”

I love that sort of thing, to be honest. It’s a real guilty pleasure, hearing Rosemary’s mother (Dearbhla Molloy) grump “Take me home before me PACEmaker runs down to zero,” and describe her daughter’s stallion describe as “That hairse is Saaatan on fourrrrr feet!”

Blunt sings the title folk tune — beautifully — in a pub talent contest, and Hamm’s faintly-boorish American gets to be the adult in the room, wondering why the Irish “accept these crazy things” and noting the emotional cost of the sort of romantic idealism that Hollywood and John Patrick Shanley Himself traffic in.

“The kind of dreams kids have make adults miserable.”

“Wild Mountain Thyme” is a mixed bag of a romance. The Irish may not take to it and its cloying speeches delivered in “Quiet Man” accents. But it’s not for natives or native speakers, is it? It’s for the diaspora and those of us who look to our fantasy ideal of the Irish to provide a dream — wistful, melancholy, hopeful and “waiting.”

Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements and suggestive comments

Cast: Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, Christopher Walken, Dearbhla Molloy and Jon Hamm

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Patrick Shanley, based on his play. A Bleecker St. release, now on assorted streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:42

A lot more license might have been granted the randy, horny teenagers farce “Our Ladies” had it started life as a novel by a woma, and reached the big screen with, you know, a woman or two on the script or behind the camera.

Because all due respect to Michael Caton-Jones, who has everything from “Scandal” and “Doc Hollywood” to “Memphis Belle” and “Rob Roy” in his credit, it can play like some sort of adolescent male’s wish-fulfillment fantasy.

I mean, libidinous Catholic teenage girls — in uniform — comparing notes, bragging about sexual prowess and their conquests in terms so coarse, crude and explicit they’d make many a men’s lock room collectively blush? “Girls” (16-17) with a “bottom’s up, knickers down” ethos when they’re away from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School in Fort William? That plays into a whole lot of borderline-to-well-across-the-borderline pervy male fantasies, the world over.

But good humor and a heaping helping of heart pull it off.

A coming-of-age dramedy set in 1996 Scotland, it has the feel of a movie filmed in that era in indie international cinema. You’ve got rude, rebellious and sexually active — or desperate to be sexually-active — small town Catholic schoolgirls gone wild in a world of karaoke, growing up too fast and ’80s and ’90s Brit pop and pubs.

Every guy in it is either hapless or an utter heel — daft, think-they’re-rakes peers and older creepy disco era holdovers trying to prey on a schoolgirls’ choir come to Edinburgh to compete and raise hell. And to the filmmakers’ credit, the poor Scotsmen and Scots boys are no match for this estrogenized mob.

Orla (Tallulah Greive) is the mascot of this crew, dodging her pills and covering her head with a scarf to hide her short hair. She’s “our miracle,” choir mistress Sister Condron (Kate Dickie) enthuses. Yeah, Orla survived something horrible, and narrates our tale. And of course they call Sister Condron “Sister Condom.”

Lifelong pals Manda (Sally Messham) and Finnoula (Abigail Lawrie) are kind of ringleaders. But Kylah (Marli Siu) is the cool one with the best voice, which she trots out for a rock band she fronts and “shags” for kicks. Chell (Rona Morison) is the most sexually uninhibited.

And there’s the rich girl Kay (Eve Austin) they all love to hate. They can make all the sneak-off-and-stir-it-up plans they want for their choir competition in Edinburgh. No way they’ll include the choir mistress’s pet, the college bound “head girl” dropped off in a luxury sedan at “The Virgin Megastore” (their nickname for school) every morning.

But over the course of their trek to the Big City, we’ll learn each girl’s hidden pain or secret shame, figure out their aspirations or lack of them — college, or trapped in Fort William — as they navigate a minefield of under-age drinking and unprotected sex.

“Our Ladies” dances through a string of melodramatic cliches and almost riotously funny situations — always interrupted by a dollop of humanity and heart.

The girls tart up and drink until they vomit, break the rules and break each other’s hearts as they figure out Truths about themselves in a city famous for its drinking and Scottish sin.

Caton-Jones keeps it on its feet, which helps the cliches skip by as quickly as the truly cringe-worthy moments, most of which end with a guys-are-such-losers punchline.

And Grieve, Siu, Lawrie, Austin, Messham and Morison each get a passable “big scene” and telling moment, some more serious than others, that make “Our Ladies” worth hearing out, no matter how filthy their modes of expression.

Rating: R for sexual content, language throughout, brief graphic nudity, and teen drinking and drug use

Cast: Tallulah Greive, Sally Messham, Marli Siu, Abigail Lawrie, Rona Morison and Kate Dickie.

Credits: Directed by Michael Caton-Jones, scripted by Michael Caton-Jones, Alan Sharp, based on a novel by Alan Warner. A Sony Pictures International release on several streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:46

It was a French thriller about 16 years ago, about a heist that goes wrong and ambulance that gets hijacked.

Eiza Gonzalez, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, A Martine Garret Dillahunt and Devan Long flesh out the cast of this action packed Feb. 18 release.

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Interesting to see what they’re going for here.

Sort of an anime rendered into live-action ’60s camp approach.

November 19, John Cho & Co. (Daniella Pineda), drop this bounty hunter series adaptation onto Netflix.

This comes to Netflix next week.

Curious to see it, because his image/message control has meant that we don’t hear him making statements or being interviewed. We just see memes and his latest message t-shirt, and gauge reaction to him accordingly.

“In his own words” could be revelatory, even if it is a recollection/reconstruction of his high school years.

Jacob Fortune-Lloyd of TV’s “Queen’s Gambit” landed the lead. Here’s a look at him in character, and at the real Beatles manager Brian Epstein — dapper, gay, classy and canny — whom he’ll be playing.

Rosie Day (“Outlander”) just joined a cast that includes Emily Watson, Eddie Marsan and Lukas Gage.

Jonas Åkerlund (“Lords of Chaos,” Netflix’s “Polar”) is directing this 2022 release, set to film in Liverpool, London and the US.

A February 18 release with a lot of geography, exotic cultures, and Spider Man and Marky Mark.

Looks…nuts. Bugs Bunny Physics, “National Treasure/Tomb-Raiders” plotting…