Movie Nation

A parable about parenting and a grim fairytale about grief and the Natural Order of Things, “Lamb” might be the oddest film you settle in for this year.

Special effects technician turned director Valdimar Jóhannsson conjures up an Icelandic story both bizarre and familiar, a piece of folklore both ancient and creepily current. It’s a gloomy, provocative tone poem of life, death, fog and sheep.

This Swedish/Norwegian/Polish production is about a farm couple (Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason) as unchanging as the overcast skies on their corner of the coast. So entrenched are their routines — tending sheep and the gear it takes to run the farm — that they don’t talk a lot.

Their first words are downbeat lunchtime banter about a news story about the possibilities of time travel.

“I like it fine in the here and now,” Ingvar says, shutting down that chat.

“This year is better than last year” Maria says, trying again later.

“Which makes it better than the year before,” he says, shutting that down as well.

But as they busy themselves helping their ewes give birth in the barn, one lamb’s difficult arrival gives them pause. They exchange a look. And the next thing we know, Maria is hand feeding it and tucking it into a metal tub converted to a bed in their bedroom.

Ingvar? He seems to ponder this for a bit, and then fetch a baby’s crib out of storage. “Ada” is going to be sleeping in their room, long term. Ada will be joining them for meals.

Something was missing from their lives, possibly taken from them. And now they have a replacement.

But the unease we feel about all this is compounded by memories of the film’s opening scene. Something taking growling breaths stalking through the fog, scaring off a herd of ponies and getting the wide-eyed, panicked attention of the sheep in the barn.

The trusty sheep dog growls and whines, expressing his own unease, and not just as this odd living arrangement his people have settled into.

And that ewe bleating at their window? You can guess whose birth mother she is.

It takes an untimely visit from Ingmar’s musician-brother (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) to broach the subject of this New Normal his brother and sister-in-law have adopted, that includes reading bedtime stories and taking baths with Ada.

They’re “playing house with that animal,” and need reminding. “It’s not a child!”

You have to get past the bizarre premise and shed any notion that what you’re seeing is a conventional horror movie and accept “Lamb” on its own terms, the way Maria and Ingvar expect brother Pétur to accept their “blessing.”

Jóhannsson maintains a chilling mood even as the viewer runs through every fable in our collective memory and figures out where this is going.

Only we don’t. Not entirely. The script’s surprises are mostly subtle, its “twists” just to the left or right of our expectations about how this “unnatural” tale plays out.

The acting, too, is subtle — reserved. Whatever this trio work out between them, it probably won’t involve shouting or shooting. Then again…

That understatement and the lack of big frights make “Lamb” a chiller you appreciate more than embrace, ponder more than wholly understand.

Whatever transpires or is left unexplained, Jóhannsson never loses track of the mood he sets out to establish, that of a frosty folk tale that suggests that not everything we do to cope with grief is healthy, acceptable and should be dressed up as a little girl.

Rating: R for strong bloody images, sexuality/nudity.

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Hilmir Snær Guðnason and Björn Hlynur Haraldsson.

Credits: Directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson, scripted by Sjón and Valdimar Jóhannsson. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:46

“Sweet Thing,” the latest film from veteran indie filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell is an ambling, self-consciously arty and yet utterly conventional coming-of-age drama starring his children, Lana and Nico.

If you only remember his breakthrough film, 1992’s wry “In the Soup,” it can feel like a departure. But considering the quixotic filmography that followed — “13 Moons,” “Louis & Frank,” “Pete Smalls is Dead” — and the fact that his largely unseen previous film (“Little Feet”) also starred his kids, “Sweet Thing” fits that artist-groping-for-a-story-and-a-means-of-filming-it cliche.

Because this dreamy drift through a troubled childhood traffics in cliches.

Billie (Lana Rockwell) was named for Billie Holiday, and she sings and plays the ukulele. She’s a young teen who is the primary caregiver of her little brother Nico (Nico Rockwell).

That’s because Dad (Will Patton) staggers from pocket-change job to pocket change job. Literally. He’s a drunk, and gets money for booze if not food for his kids by wearing a panda suit for a Chinese restaurant.

“I got you a treat,” he slurs in a more sober moment. “Don’t ask me where I got it. That’s between me and the surveillance camera!”

Mom ditched them, so Billie and Nico are scrambling to sell stuff — aluminum cans, an old toilet — for cash, or drum up business for a local used tire shop by sticking nails under parked cars.

This impoverished corner of suburban, coastal Massachusetts where they live (New Bedford was the filming location) has rocky beaches and slums, and the junkyards are full of boats.

Billie has visions of an older woman and the security she symbolizes. Grandma? Maybe. Because we meet Mom (Karyn Parsons), and she’s moved on. Vague “we’ll get together” promises are all she offers. Dad’s confrontations with her new man, Beaux (M.L. Josepher) aren’t helpful.

There’s a hint of something even darker than the alcoholism that haunts their father. Is he abusive? And when they finally end up staying with Mom when Dad gets locked up to sober up, those worries are renewed. Beaux is a bully, among other failings.

Luckily, they have a new friend, Malik (Jabari Watkins) to goof around with, and when the chips are down, count on if they have to run away. He’s sweet on Billie and her curly blonde locks.

Rockwell immerses us in the sort of warm “poverty porn” that such films too-often traffic in. “The Florida Project” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild” managed that “a romanticized child’s view of down and out” far better.

Here, the threats to childhood come from every direction, yet the kids can’t quite be stirred from their waking dream. They swim, wander, struggle and bond.

Rockwell stages some grimly realistic moments of adult humiliation — their father’s and their mother’s.

Mostly, he’s just filming kids being kids — walking railroad tracks, climbing onto abandoned boats, sitting in a dimly-lit hovel singing or picking out a tune.

He shot in black and white and uses old fashioned iris-in/iris-out transitions at times, reinforcing this “dream of childhood” idea.

To be honest, that’s not enough.

“Sweet Thing” starts from natural empathy at the sight of seeing kids struggling, but refuses to grapple with that.

The few way stations on this overly-familiar wander through “picaresque” don’t make you feel much of anything, just a vague sense that “Oh, that’s pretty” and “that scene was nice” from “there’s no food in the house” to intimations of molestation, all the way to Rockwell’s cop out of an ending.

The kids are generally unaffected and “real,” the setting is novel and the black and white heightens to sense of “grit” even if this is far from “gritty.” “Sweet Thing” just never amounts to much that’s sweet, or magical or tragic or sad.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual abuse

Cast: Lana Rockwell, Nico Rockwell, Jabari Watkins, Karyn Parsons, M.L. Josepher and Will Patton.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alexandre Rockwell. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:31

“Lust Life Love” sets out to be a “Polyamorous Sex in the City” with a lot more sex, a bit less glamour and no fun at all.

Writer, co-director and star Stephanie Sellars takes a shot at lifting her acting career and writing career out of short films with a movie inspired by her short-lived “Lust Life” column in a now defunct free weekly in New York back in 2006-7. But when you’re focused on sex and romance as a topic and narrating, in voice-over, your column (a blog, here), you can’t help but invite comparisons to Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Catrall’s finest hours.

Veronica (Sellars) ponders the polyamorous imponderables on her popular blog. She wants to know “Is true love a reason to be monogamous?” She wonders if “three people can come together in mutual desire and not fall apart.”

Anybody who has ever seen a screen romance or rom-com on TV or film knows the answer. But as the old joke goes, every generation has to announce its reinventing sex, romance, family, child-rearing or what have you. And whether its “Harry Met Sally” or “Friends” or “thirtysomething” or “Sex and the City,” the “Eureka!” moment comes when they realize they haven’t reinvented anything.

So “Lust Life Love” puts the polyamory fad — if indeed one can call it that — out there and in the spotlight. Veronica, who identifies as bisexual, juggles her pierced and tattooed girlfriend (Jeanna Han) with this hunky young Latino artist (Rolando Chusan) she poses for, and beds on occasion.

And then there are the others she picks up — solicits, etc. — and uses as fodder for her column. The opening scene of “Lust Life Love” is her sharing lust with a couple she’s just met.
They’re the first people she uses the phrase, “no pressure, no expectations” with.

But we quickly figure out, through her repeated usage (and the fact that others in her “world” use it), that it’s their version of “just kidding.” Of course there’s pressure. And it’s all about “expectations.”

Veronica’s life, as a character, revolves around sex — sex parties (orgies), casual pick-ups, flirtations that don’t stop when she learns this new fellow Daniel (Jake Choi) is married.

Veronica may play semantics games with “swingers” and “key parties,” something her parents (Susanna Fraser and Bill Irwin) joke about from “back in OUR day.” But we, like they, see through her kidding-herself BS.

As she and a third person (Makeda Declet) form the “not a couple, a triad” that finishes off Daniel’s marriage, we can see the red flags, the lie in her “It is enlightening to see my partner through the desires of another.” Somebody’s about to get jealous.

“Lust Life Love” makes Veronica her new beau Daniel’s tour guide into this world of alleged “heartbreak insurance,” “the advantage” seen in a sexual/romantic arrangement that allegedly doesn’t leave one shattered if one person in the “triad” breaks things off.

The “parties” may be masked or unmasked, they’re still orgies. The club “Chemistry” where they sometimes meet their hookups and longer-term relationships isn’t labeled “a sex club.” But a generation older than these hipsters sees them for what they are.

Are they not teaching kids about the ’70s in school? At all?

Her mother remembers. She wonders why her daughter doesn’t write children’s books. But a fan who recognizes her on the street asks an even more insulting question.

“Have you ever considered porn?” “No,” she snaps. “Have you?”

Still, when the notorious blog gets the attention of video website producers, Veronica’s dismissal of “sex workers” seems premature. She’s staging “parties,” hook-ups and coupling (tripling) for the camera.

But when you’re wading into all this like you’re the first person to ever dabble in something your generation merely added a new name to, “self-knowledge” is just one of many “knowledges” you lack.

Sellars puts it all out there in this film, and comes off as competent both as an actress and screenwriter. It’s the gap between “competent” and “compelling” that trips her up.

The many sex scenes in “Lust Life Love” scream “INSECURITY,” as in there’s no confidence in either the scripted interior lives of the characters or the cast’s performance of them. When you limit your story to just “Lust” and “Love,” the life you depict can’t help but seem shallow and contrived.

Rating: unrated, sexually explicit, profanity

Cast: Stephanie Sellars, Jake Choi, Makeda Declet, Jeanna Han, Rolando Chusan, Susanna Fraser and Bill Irwin.

Credits: Directed by Benjamin Feuer and Stephanie Sellars, scripted by Stephanie Sellars. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:36

If you have any fondness at all for the movie, the myth that was “Ghostbusters,” here’s the definitive “How we made that” documentary about the comic blockbuster of 1984.

Me? I got the warm fuzzies for actor and co-writer Harold Ramis, who died after “Cleanin’ Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters” was finished but who is the sympathetic, frank and charming heart of the movie — then, and way back in ’84.

Filmmakers Anthony and Claire Bueno use clips from the Ivan Reitman comedy, still shots, animation, storyboards and fresh interviews with cast members — stars, co-stars, supporting and bit players — as well as producers, visual and sound effects wizards and master puppeteers to give us a Compleat History of this seminal piece of ’80s cinema.

The nostalgia isn’t just for Ramis and the movie itself, which was quite sweet for an undemanding high-concept all-star farce. The effects team reminds us that all these ghouls and oozing ectoplasm, beasts and “terror dogs” were created before “digital effects” were around.

Sculpted models, tactile tactical ghostbusting gear, cards flying out of a library’s card catalog, rubber claws grabbing and groping Sigourney Weaver once she gave the effects crew permission — “Go ahead, make my day!” — “Ghostbusters” and this documentary remembering it are practically a museum exhibit on the art of optical and practical effects.

That final rooftop scene set was Cecil B. DeMille scale. But nothing was tougher than getting the Stay Puft Marshmallow guy — a character performer in a big foam rubber suit — right.

Weaver recreates her “New York theater” style comic audition. William Atherton recalls, with some chagrin, the way schoolkids would holler “Dickless!” at him, an insult improvised by Murray on set. Ernie Hudson recalls with “I’m over it, NOW” annoyance at how his character was originally written, then stripped down rather than let him have as many funny moments as the other original ghostbusters.

Tracking down the bit players who played the college kids Bill Murray’s Dr. Venkman is “testing” and shocking in an early scene is a coup, and makes up for the absence of Murray and Rick Moranis, the only two principals who didn’t sit down for interviews. Here’s Alice Drummond, that first spooked librarian, and many other single scene stars show up.

We hear how John Candy “agented himself” out of the role eventually taken by Moranis, see audition tapes of Darryl Hannah and Denise Crosby (“Star Trek: The Next Generation”) and are told how “Slimer,” the most distinctive blobby ghost, is a tribute to another planned co-star, John Belushi who died before Dan Aykroyd’s original futuristic sci-fi comedy pitch was bought by Columbia. Akyroyd, Ramis and director Reitman then rewrote it into the comedy that owned much of 1984 at the box office.

The title comes from a tune by the Bus Boys (seen in Walter Hill’s cop-buddy picture “48 Hrs.” from the era) used in the film. Not as famous as Ray Parker Jr.‘s title song, but another piece of the picture’s tableaux.

And to think it all started in Dan Aykroyd’s head, grabbing a piece of family lore — his great grandfather Samuel Aykroyd was a Kingston, Ontario dentist and “psychic researcher,” something that his descendent fixated on, dug into, embraced the research and memorized the jargon of that world long before ever getting the idea that maybe that could be a movie.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Harold Ramis, Dan Akroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Ray Parker, Jr., Ivan Reitman, Ernie Hudson, Richard Edlund, Sheldon Kahn, Annie Potts and William Atherton

Credits: Directed by Anthony Bueno, scripted by Anthony Bueno and Claire BuenoA Screen Media release.

Running time: 2:08

I can’t count the number of movie or TV characters I’ve run into in American or international films or TV who explain their flippant fluency in American English with the line, “I learned it watching Hollywood movies.” It’s an accepted truism, considered proof of Hollywood’s broad cultural reach.

And it’s not just American English that can be absorbed via this idea that if you’re exposed to a language by hearing it and reading subtitles.

That’s one of the reasons I review so much international cinema here, why I coined the phrase “Around the World With Netflix.” Films and TV series can teach you about a culture, prep you for travel there, and they can serve as a primer in the language they’re spoken in as well.

Put your pandemic binge-watching to good use. Turn the subtitles on and watch every film from every place you’re dying to visit in its original language.

I’m not likely to pick up much Mandarin, or Swedish or Russian just from watching films in those languages. But as part of a more concerted effort to pick up a little Portuguese, Greek, German or French, immersing yourself in films and TV programs in those languages is a great way to speed up the process of learning how to listen and interpret as you do.

I watch all my futbol on Spanish language TV, and if you see a LOT of Spanish language films reviewed here, that’s one reason for it. Language learning for many of us has a big visual component, and apps and downloadable audio tutorials don’t give you that. Mastering Spanglish is a must in North America. Going deeper into it is not just common sense. It makes travel easier, to say nothing of improving your appreciation for Spanish language cinema and TV.

And if you’re starting from square one with a language, it makes sense to begin with shorter shows aimed at younger viewers, shows like the futbol-oriented “Hollie e Benji” (Italian), the wildly popular “Les Aventures de Tintin” (French) or “El Chavo” (Spanish) have a decent sized vocabulary and plenty of repetition, just the ticket for assembling those first building blocks in a new language.

There is a LOT of this content, if you know where to look. For instance, Spanish cartoons for beginners are everywhere.

It can be a challenge, even if you’ve studied a language in school and been exposed to it off through friends, travel and film over the years, to make out what native-speaking characters, speaking at the normal or sometimes manic speed of “real” conversations, are saying. Eugenio Derbez enunciates like a professor of languages, Catherine Deneuve has the plummy locutions of an upper class grande dame and Marion Cotillard practically translates every word she speaks with her expressive face.

But the best children’s programs compensate for that, especially those from the various public broadcasting services around the world. The French and Spanish are fanatics for fluency, recognizing it as the ultimate building block to a happy, fulfilling lives and cohesive societies.

So whenever you’re taking an “Around the World With Netflix” or Topic or Amazon streaming trip, turn those subtitles on. The dubbed versions of films and series miss the nuances and idiomatic colors of a language. And if you’re not picking up words, sentences and distinct turns of phrase yet, dig around for online language instruction with a video element. There’s a lot to be said for the teaching possibilities of your average foreign language cartoon.

And so it goes…Nov. 19?

Fascinating figure, captivating writer, a great subject for a biographical documentary.

“Keep it simple, stupid” is something many a screenwriter should keep taped on her or his keyboard when conjuring up a movie. That’s particularly beneficial if you’re trafficking in screen thrillers.

Judging from his movies, I’m guessing writer-director Hadi Hajaig (“Blue Iguana”) has “KISS” somewhere embellishing his laptop. His “Vengeance is Mine” is the very embodiment of that ethos.

It opens with a little crook-on-crook mayhem, an armed London drug heist that turns bloody because it was always meant to. And it ends with a “Witness” stand-off in the farm country outside of the city.

In between, Hajaig reminds us that film is, above all, a visual medium. Dialogue is spare, and there isn’t any for long stretches. Minutes and minutes pass before the film’s first words are uttered.

Whatever the body count of that opening shootout, there was one victim who wasn’t even there. Harry (Con O’Neill of “Chernobyl”) lives in the old church where he works as janitor and handyman. He is a tortured soul, awakening each day and confronting the urge to kill himself.

He might do it with a chair whose leg he taped a knife to. He might manage it with just a jump from the choir loft.

The church cook (Sarah-Jane Potts) could be someone he can talk to. But she’s in a support group there, dealing with her own issues.

And then he gets a tip and his life has a purpose. Flashbacks tell us Harry lost his wife and daughter in a hit-and-run accident. He got a look at the gang in the getaway car. Now, the private eye he hired long ago (Ricky Grover) has a lead.

That at last gets Harry to talking. He stalks the people he recognizes (movies always exaggerate the human power of facial recognition). He hocks his late wife’s ring. We know what he’ll buy with that money.

Hajaig heeds my common complaint with these “Death Wish/Taken” clones. Harry has no “particular skills” for this business. He’s an inept stalker, an out-of-his-depth fighter, a shaky-handed shooter when the moment of truth comes.

It doesn’t help that his wife pops up in distracting flashbacks in the middle of every confrontation.

Hajaig keeps the story moving forward and limits the dialogue, beginning to end. Only one sentence matters.

“They were my life.”

Extreme close-ups dominate the shot selection, music is limited to the flashbacks and the violence is visceral and in-your-face. Nothing goes according to Harry’s half-considered “plan” and sadism is the only motivating force of our villains, with Anton Saunders (of “Blue Iguana,” and TV’s “Luther” and “The Last Kingdom”) chewing up his scenes as the most psychotic of all.

The thin story imposes a low ceiling on the film, although it breaks formula just enough to limit its predictability.

Hajaig gets a bit carried away with movie “shotgun physics,” the notion that a blast from a double-barrel can lift and hurl bulky men over distances that rival the Wright Brothers’ first flight.

And despite its church setting, “Vengeance is Mine” doesn’t make any attempt at redemption or learning “vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord” is how that phrase ends.

It’s still a solid B-movie revenge thriller, well-acted and tightly put-together, kept simple by design.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Con O’Neill, Sarah-Jane Potts, Anton Saunders, Ricky Grover

Credits: Scripted and directed by Hadi Hajaig. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:24

Projections were as low as $40 million and as high as $80.

Too low. Tom Hardy is a Money making marvel, Michelle Williams and Woody Harrelson deserve bonuses. Andy Serkis hath directed a blockbuster.

Yeah, “Let There be Carnage” is a noisy gory bore. A bit worse than the other genre bores that preceded it this year.

But it made more moolah than “Widow,” “Shang Chi,” any of them on opening weekend.

“Addams Family 2” pulled in $18, not awful. Not good at all.

“Shang Chi” fell off at long last but is over $206 domestically, total. $5.6 million this weekend.

Everybody watched the “Sopranos” prequel on HBO Max. But $5 million for the pilot to a new “Many Saints of Newark” series? Found money.

Figures from Exhibitor Relations.

One image I’ve never been able to shake from my memory, decades after reviewing a history of hip hop documentary, is the picture of young Tupac Shakur in ballet tights. The hardest of the hard rappers, “assassinated” according to some in the middle of his posturing, high-profile record label feud, was a coddled mama’s boy who took ballet lessons.

“Forever Rich” is a tense Dutch thriller about another hip hop tough guy whose pose runs up against harsh reality.

A streetwise (ish) kid, a mama’s boy, Rich has focused on one thing since childhood — hip hop fame. “Forever Rich” opens with a home video his doting mom (Hadewych Minis) took of him as a tween.

Adult (ish) Rich (Jonas Smulders, superb) is about to see the culmination of that dream — a sold-out show in his hometown, a Sony record deal pending, a baby boy and a baby mama in tow and a gaudy Rolex and gaudier Mercedes G-wagon among his prized possessions.

But Rich, whose “Forever Rich” tour is launching, is about to go through some things. In a long day and night, he is mugged by “1112 Street Soldiers,” allegedly teenaged fans (from his rough and poor 1112 postal code). He is videoed and ridiculed by them on social media.

The online humiliation — not taking into account there were four of them and they were armed and just Rich and his unarmed tour manager Tony (Daniël Kolf) — is swift and disastrous.

“Poser” (in Dutch, with English subtitles) is the most polite criticism.

They have his watch. They beat him up at knife point. They have his phone, and we know what idiot under-25s put on their phones, don’t we? It all starts crashing down around his ears.

And even before that is obvious, Rich instinctively reaches for revenge. He will get that damned watch back. He will punish the punks. He will video their defeat and rally social media to his cause and turn the tide. When the bored cops offer “no special treatment,” he will take matters into his own hands.

Yeah, that’ll work out. And tell me Hollywood isn’t salivating to remake this. That is one can’t-miss premise.

Over the course of that evening, Rich loses control of the narrative — his agent (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing can’t control his smothering, alcoholic mother) — gets “friends” (employees) injured and endangered in his single-minded pursuit, and blunders again and again in learning Robert Palmer’s long-sung-about life lesson, “Wise men know that revenge does not taste sweet.”

I got a laugh out of Rich thinking he’s outsmarted the muggers, tracking his phone to a hotel, jumping a guy with the stand-out shoes he noticed during his beat down. Then the guy’s girlfriend shows up and drops Rich like a sack of…tulip bulbs.

Director and co-writer Shady El-Hamus (“About That Life”) isn’t shy about showing Rich’s infantile streak and his delusions of toughness. Auto-tuned, tattooed and grilled up, what do you want to bet there’s a tutu or two in his past, too?

But Rich instinctively grasps image and perception and the stakes involved. His idiotic lashing out, lunging this way and that, has a logic to it. If he can get that watch back, maybe humiliate a mugger, he can regain control of his narrative.

Laws broken, cops crossed and possible consequences for his actions? None of that matters. He’s that focused, has that much to lose. And he knows it even if the viewer is slack-jawed at the clumsy, out-of-his-depth extremes he will lunge into.

Sinem Kavus plays his latest girlfriend, mother of his child, and gives Anna an edge that suggests she’s only willing to take so much in clinging to her sugar daddy.

Kolf’s Tony is a voice of reason who instantly caves to every furious whim Rich pursues in getting even, and getting even online, with these masked punks who have set off a bomb in the middle of his finest hour.

Mustafa Duygulu plays “Appie,” Rich’s beefy head of security, a guy who might have embellished his own legend in getting the job but who has to put up or shut up when his paycheck is mugged in a parking garage, of all places.

But this is Smulders’ show, a performance that lets us see the myopia, mania and native cunning in play (or missing) in his single-minded pursuit of getting what’s his back.

There are hiccups in the narrative, and maybe a little more could be done emotionally with all Rich sees himself losing. But it’s still a riveting tale, one that will either be tidied up and streamlined or utterly botched in translation the moment Hollywood scripts a remake.

With a story as good as this one, you know they’ll take a shot.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Jonas Smulders, Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing, Hadewych Minis, Daniël Kolf, Mustafa Duygulu and Sinem Kavus

Credits: Directed by Shady El-Hamus, scripted by Shady El-Hamus and Jeroen Scholten van Aschat. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

Here’s one thing about bullying that “Runt” gets exactly right. There’s a conspiracy of silence among the kids who suffer from it, the ill-raised thugs who carry it out and today’s “let’s get this beatdown on video” insensate cretins whom we used to call “bystanders.”

Here’s another. It’s a teenager’s ultimate “Catch-22,” damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma. Speak up and the ostracization spreads among your classmates, the bullying gets worse as adults earn the sobriquet “clueless” and “ineffectual.” Fight back and you’re blamed. And the bullying gets worse. Duck and cower and you carry the shame forever. And the bullying gets worse.

“Runt” is a slightly exaggerated march through that war zone, an artistic kid picked on by a gang of jocks and threatened by the unfashionable suburban LA high school’s teachers who figure making him speak up about it is for his own good.

It’s entirely too “on the nose” to be very surprising, and the third act is a bit of a head-scratcher. But it feels lived-in, stumbled through and endured, rather like high school itself.

Disney Channel alumnus Cameron Boyce (“Gamer’s Guide to Pretty Much Everything”) stars as Cal, a smart kid living with a nurse single mom (we never see her face) and his beloved Australian cattle dog, aptly named Runt.

Cal is a talented artist and a focused kid who avoids the drugs that seem to be all around him at his school. He bags groceries in the afternoons and pines away for the cute, popular Gabby (Brianna Hildebrand) in the mornings.

As is the way of such movies, he can’t see the perfect match who keeps trying to catch his eye while right under his nose. I must add that casting cover girlish/runway-ready Nicole Elizabeth Berger (“The Place of No Words”) as Cecily undercuts the traditional “She’s dressed down, but wait till he REALLY sees her” MO of such movies.

The football team has decided that Cal is their ticket to a perfect season and are relentlessly threatening as they strong arm him into letting them cheat. When they’re caught, the clueless teacher leans on Cal and the kid’s tenuous grasp on a normal school experience is torn away.

Vic (Aramis Knight), the star QB who figures a major college will come calling if they have a perfect season, leads the gang that assaults and humiliates Cal at every turn, the more public the better, the more bruising he has to make up a lie to cover for.

A confrontation in the principal’s office reveals the insidious nature of Cal’s quandary. The jerk coach (Jason Patric) sides with his players and helps them carry off their cover up.

So much for making time with Gabby, who is Vic’s girlfriend, by the way. So much for getting to know the pretty Cecily, nicknamed “Home Schooled” by his classmates, especially his oafish friend Borgie (Cyrus Arnold).

So much for Gabby’s “come to my party” to “show them how none of this even bothers you.”

That party is where things seriously escalate in the classic bully-as-imagined-victim sense. For Cal and Cecily, school life becomes a living, physical and social-media assault nightmare.

You don’t have to know actor Boyce’s life story to find poignance in this story, the awful choices facing this kid and the future that’s being jeopardized by a gang of jocks who exist in high school’s version of “above the law.”

He’s superb at making us furious on his behalf, yelling at the screen for him to fight back. His performance and the screenplay are great at capturing how limited his options are and how ill-equipped your average high school kid is at dealing with this all-consuming, wholly personal disaster.

Cal takes stupid steps and makes poor choices because he won’t, he can’t, consult an adult on the matter.

Cecily has her own take on the situation, and Berger gets across somebody whose confidence or lack of it hides a rough home life that is her secret shame.

“Runt” has enough going for it that you may not be as bothered by its predictability, and worse, it’s melodramatic stumbles toward the finish line. But even with those shortcomings, the cast and the lived-in feel of this high school world conjured up by director and co-writer William Coakley make this “Runt” the pick-of-the-litter when it comes to movies about high school bullying.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Cameron Boyce, Nicole Elizabeth Berger, Brianna Hildebrand, Aramis Knight, Cyrus Arnold and Jason Patric.

Credits: Directed by William Coakley, scripted by Christian van Gregg, Armand Constantine and William Coakley. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:35