Movie Nation

Manchurian atrocities in 1940, intrigues, a moral dilemma in a fascist state.

Kino Lorber has this film fest darling coming out on Sept.17.

“Really Love” invites you to tumble into its sophisticated milieu, the Washington, D.C. of African American art and artists, aspirational affluence and a romance that crosses classes.

The tony galleries, early career ambitions, beautiful people doing beautiful things set to a silky smooth jazz score all do their best to atone for a script seriously thin on originality or conflict and flat performances that generate a little heat, but no “real” feeling of romance.

Isaiah (Kori Siriboe of “Girls Trip”) is an artistic “young blood,” struggling to get his start and make something of his MICA (Maryland Institute College of Arts) degree and all the promise he left school with.

Stevie (newcomer Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing) is an upper middle class Georgetown law school student, aiming her affluence and education at America’s housing inequities.

They meet at a gallery show. He’s forward, fingering her necklace. She makes a lot of eye contact and allows it.

When it turns out she’s friends with the wife of his best friend, they stumble into each other again. A no-stress, laid-back courtship ensues.

But ambition is sure to get in the way of that. And her parents (Suzzanne Douglas and Blair Underwood) aren’t about to let their plans for their daughter be dampened by waiting for a promising artist to get rich and famous in his own right.

Michael Ealey plays a wonderfully salty mentor to Isaiah, making even simplistic dialogue sing.

“Your ass need to get inspired!”

Our leads kind of glide through this, from well-appointed townhouses gallery openings and Alvin Ailey dance company shows to “Southeast” front stoops, where Isaiah gets the “That ain’t no real job” and “Let me FIND out you like being broke” bromides from his dad.

There’s an elegance about the look and feel of “Really Love” that the screenplay — by first-time feature director Angel Kristi Williams and “Grey’s Anatomy” staff writer Felicia Pride — is always letting down in a variety of the most obvious ways, from the story’s conventional arc to the often-clunky dialogue.

“So how do you know when a painting’s finished?”

“How do you know when you’re making love to someone?”

That’s a come-on that needs a rewrite, and that goes for the movie as well.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, smoking and some profanity

Cast: Kori Siriboe, Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing, Uzo Abuda, Suzzanne Douglas, Michael Ealey and Blair Underwood.

Credits: Directed by Angel Kristi Williams, scripted by Felicia Pride and Angel Kristi Williams. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

“The Madness Inside Me” is a lukewarm-at-best psychological thriller about a widowed crime victim who engages in sexually charged games with the man who killed her husband.

The added twist? Madison (Merrin Dungey) is a forensic psychologist. She knows the criminal mind, and learns a little more about it every time she visits an inmate she is counseling and evaluating for possible parole.

Writer-director Matthew Berkowitz opens with the aftermath of a murder, takes us back to set it up and then forward to see how Madison reacts when she sees the man (Devon Graye) who killed her husband and assaulted her.

But recognizing him in the police lineup doesn’t lead to her to identifying him for arrest. No. She has something more interesting in mind.

It begins with stalking and that leads to coffee with the killer.

“I can’t sleep because of you,” she confesses. Mr. Pitiless and Crazy-eyed is curious about her work, her success rate in reforming or “curing” a convicted criminal.

“How do you change someone?

“You can’t.”

But Madison has changed, and her story shows just how much this killer has gotten into her head and what that does to her psychologically and sexually.

Dungey, of TV’s “Big Little Lies,” “Star Trek: Picard,” “American Horror Story” and many other series (and the movie “Greenland”) has to make do with a script that shortchanges Madison’s grief and rather muddles our sense of what she’s going to do to fill up the void in her life, the rage she must feel for the killer.

There are erotic undercurrents to her reasons for getting to know this guy. But they don’t make a whole lot of psychological sense.

The whole sexual kick out of breaking and entering thing may be explained by the psychologist, but the way it’s handled drains much of the drama and secret, kinky thrills out of Madison’s experience and our experience of her experience.

Berkowitz’s story has plenty of promising threads and false leads. Madison is anxious to help a convicted killer (Scotty Tovar) out of prison, bears grudges against her in-laws, etc. Night club pickups, meltdowns at work, sexual acting-out all are introduced. But they don’t weave together in any compelling way.

Our writer-director boils this down to a two-person tale, but the characters and performances of them aren’t substantial or intriguing enough to pull us in.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Merrin Dungey, Devon Graye, Jennifer Gelfer, Thomas Q. Jones and Anthony DeSando.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Matthew Berkowitz. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:29

A thriller with disappearances at it’s heart and a “Three Billboards”like heroine.

Robyn Lively stars in this festival award winner on its way to a theater)streamer near you.

A rancher, his brother and the brother’s wife are the heart of this drama.

Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Keith Carradine and Thomasin McKenzie also star in this Jane Champion film for Netflix film, slated for a December awards season release

You might remember the end of this story. A murderous Saudi sheik buys a mysterious “lost” painting by Leonardo da Vinci for a king’s ransom and tries to get it wholly legitimized by loaning it to the Louvre Museum to display alongside a painting it somewhat resembles, the “Mona Lisa.”

There’s an uproar, and…

“The Lost Leonardo” engagingly takes us on the circuitous path this painting of Jesus, “Salvator Mundi” (savior of the world) took to get to that moment. It’s about a modest, period-correct damaged work on wood purchased in New Orleans that made its way, through restorations and a consensus of opinions by experts, scholars, dealers and curators to the center of conversation in the art world, setting staggering sales records all along the way.

Those appearing on camera testifying about “Salvator” range from the quizzical and amused to the defiant and defensive, with a little sheepishness creeping in here and there when the word “greed” enters the conversation.

A painting that cost “sleeper hunter” Alexander Parish and his investor/partner Robert Simon $1,175 went through sales and one of the most-hyped auctions ever before a Saudi sucker paid $450,000,000 for it a few years later.

All of it based on a series of assumptions, miscommunications, not-quite-endorsements and a major exhibition that lent it the aura of authenticity and led the auction house Christie’s to use the video below to hype it when it came up for auction, just people standing in rapt awe in front of a very famous painting, people including another “Leonardo.”

Director Andreas Koefoed interviews the journalists who dug into how all this happened and introduces the art skeptics who warned that someday, we’d all be looking back on this and wondering “how these idiots could have ever seen this as a Leonardo.”

But the “idiots” make a pretty compelling case, which lends “The Lost Leonardo” the air of an ongoing mystery that isn’t as settled as the skeptical — some of them loudly so — would lead us to believe.

Paintings by Leonardo — only 15 are known to survive — have “a strange presence,” one expert explains — “very assertive, very ambiguous.”

“Salvator Mundi” has that, and Christie’s used that awe-inspiring presence for what its discoverer snaps “is NOT even a good painting” to make that video above. It is just eerily enough like the “Mona Lisa” to give the non-expert pause.

Because who among us could tell the difference between a Leonardo, a “workshop of Leonardo,” a “follower of Leonardo” or “circle of Leonardo” or “copy of Leonardo” painting?

It’s on wood, which was Leonardo’s MO, plainly came from the 15th century, had damage and 500 years of attempted repairs, paint-overs and touch ups. “Salvator” invited the comparison and left room for doubt.

The film leaves much out of the picture’s provenance, its history of ownership, and not just the ancient gaps about who produced it and when. Was it really owned by Charles I or Charles II of England? How did it get from them to New Orleans?

But as reputations take credibility hits, sketchy Russians and slippery Swiss duck and weave and that one restorer finds her unfortunate place in immortality, “The Lost Leonardo” opens up a world to us that few movies — from “The Thomas Crown Affair” to “Tenet” — have ever let us see.

Obscene wealth, the gauche, unsophisticated rich, “experts” with agendas, “free port” storage and insane amounts of money float by under the unblinking gaze of an Italo-European Jesus, “Salvator Mundi” but still “not even a good painting.”

Rating: PG-13, for nude art images (seriously)

Cast: Alexander Parish, Robert Simon, Dianne Modestini, Evan Beard, Martin Kemp, Yves Bouvier, Jacques Franck, Georgina Adam and Jerry Saltz.

Credits: Directed by Andreas Koefoed, scripted by Andreas Koefoed, Christian Kirk Muff, Mark Monroe and Duska Zagorac. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:40

The tennis is good, the filming and editing of the tennis even better in the French sports melodrama “Final Set.”

It’s a “Big Game/Big Match” movie with all the trappings of the genre — lots of foreshadowing, an aged veteran hoping for one last glimpse of glory, a cocky youngster, a still-demanding tennis mother, a spouse who realized it was time for her to move on and can’t make her husband see the same.

And it works. Quentin Reynard’s French Open tale has drama and splendidly compact performances that make its predictable journey a perfectly pleasant way to experience the clay of Paris’s Stade Roland Garros.

As a player, the oddly-named Thomas Edison (Alex Lutz of “The Visitors: Bastille Day” and “Paris-Willouby”) peaked about twenty years earlier. He had his shot at the big brass ring, only to see it slip through his fingers.

Twenty years and three knee surgeries later, he’s facing the twilight of his career, facing a slow recovery from the last surgery and a lot of canceled offers for seeding in tournaments.

He’s got a wife, a former player herself (Ana Girandot). They have a little boy who is just showing interest in playing games with balls, but mother Eve coos to him (in French with English subtitles) “Oh, Gaspard won’t be a tennis player. He’ll be a doctor!”

And Thomas, at 37, still has his tennis mother. Kristin Scott Thomas brings a lifetime of formidable women to Judith, still “correcting,” still “coaching,” still his sternest critic, the one who hasn’t seen him play live in years.

Writer-director Quentin Reynaud, who plays Thomas’s playing partner and coach, shows us the indignities of a career on the wane. Eve fields the calls with canceled offers, debates her husband’s deep slide in the rankings, and plans to start a course in sports management.

But if she’s done, she’s pretty damned sure he is, too. He’s just not seeing it. He’ll try for the French Open, joining 127 other “qualifiers” competing in a grueling pre-tourney round of matches just to win the privilege of being crushed by one of the top seeds in the early rounds.

Another indignity? The town cars that take players to and from the tourney are for the seeds, not you, old sport.

Thomas might use this as motivation, the fact that nobody believes in him.
But to meet his goal, Thomas focuses on the cocky younger version of him, a 17 year old played by French tennis star Jurgen Briand. The onetime “future hope of French tennis” only hopes to get the chance to play the current version.

What can I say about this pre-ordained plot and film of archetypes, aside from “It works?”

The Oscar nominee Kristin Scott Thomas is just as intimidating in French as she is her native English. “We all get old, Thomas” could have been vamped up. But KST keeps the “disappointed in you” hidden, unspoken. “Try the over-35 championship.” Nobody does “brittle” better.

Lutz makes a believable athlete and Thomas an intriguing character, a man whose recovery included memorizing all the pushing-40 tennis stars who got one last hurrah just before they bowed out.

The supernaturally beautiful Girandot manages to be both sympathetic and cruelly, perhaps selfishly pragmatic, pointing out Thomas’s delusion, even as he’s punching through qualifying, picking up a tiny product endorsement and wondering just how far he can go, this time and “next year.”

“Final Set” isn’t leaps and bounds better than Paul Bettany’s Brit-tennis has-been tale, “Wimbledon,” or any of the other tennis dramas. But in keeping it simple and personal, Reynaud finds the sweet-spot in a movie whose ebb and flow we know by heart, whose finale is the one we’re almost sure to expect.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Alex Lutz, Ana Girandot, Jurgen Briand, Quentin Reynaud and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Quentin Reynaud. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:52

It’s a tribute to the professionalism of your typical movie set that all C-movies don’t face that mid-production attack of the giggles that impacts what we see on the screen.

The film has little budget. The cast has been on TV shows and films that did. And if just one or two people hit the “This is rubbish, I’m just going to have a laugh with it” phase, the giggles spread.

“Final Frequency” is a movie that lets us see that happen. At some point, even the behind-the-camera talent threw up their hands. Because this serious and seriously bad thriller about a lost notebook of scientist Nicola Tesla and his his research into frequency weapons could trigger an LA earthquake in the middle of a G-20 summits goes all goofy for some of the second and all of its third act.

Loopy LARPA (live action role player) laughs, as our “team” is assembled from gamers, cosplayers, LARPAs and a cop (Lou Ferrigno Jr.) reduced to campus security guard, all try to pitch in and rescue the kidnapped scientist played by Charles Shaughnessy, who never recovered from co-starring in “The Nanny.”

Kirby Bliss Blanton of “The Young and the Restless” is the pretty graduate assistant searching for her academic boss and concealing his Tesla notebook from villains led by the still “Seinfeld” “breathtaking” Richard Burgi.

It’s all predicated on the idea that Tesla was “100 years ahead of his time,” and this notebook, whose theories and research could be used to cancel out earthquakes, or cause them, “can’t fall into the wrong hands.”

Our grad assistant refuses the help of the smart-aleck security guard (Ferrigno Jr.) and her deafened by combat brother (Luke Guldan) until the chips are really down, and even then only a couple of campus IT nerds (Abhay Walia and an almost-amusing Nikki Soohoo) will do.

“SAVE the universe!”

The effects are mostly limited to contact lenses that let us know a character has been sonically hypnotized by these sonic mind-control guns, which Burgi’s villain urges his minions to use with extreme prejudice.

“Shoot! Shoot to KILL!” Pause. “Why aren’t these things WORKing?”

The science is gibberish, the dialogue likewise, the characters cardboard with stiff performances to match.

Aside from that, tho…

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Kirby Bliss Blanton, Charles Shaughnessy, Lou Ferrigno Jr., Richard Burgi, Luke Guldan, Kim Estes, Abhay Walia and Nikki Soohoo.

Credits: Directed by Tim Lowry, scripted by Penny Gibben. A Winter Star release.

Running time: 1:31

Ruth Platt’s “Martyr’s Lane” is horror at a low simmer, a triumph of tone over content, performances over frights.

This beautifully Gothic ghost story rests on the shoulders of two angelic moppets, a film that makes its myopic simplicity a virtue in every perfectly-composed frame.

Kiera Thompson plays Leah, a parson’s daughter living in the eerie rectory provided by her father’s parish. She keeps to herself and plays alone. But there are voices in this house, and Leah hears them. And there’s something haunting her mother (Denise Gough of “71,” “A Dark Place” and “The Kid Who Would Be King”) that may or may not be related to the whispers Leah hears in the shadows.

Leah’s cruel college-bound sister Bex (Hannah Rae) makes sure to add the spooky story of how they live down the street from an old monastery that was the scene of a Catholic massacre in the Church of England’s violent birth years to her teasing and tormenting routine. Bex sees the worst in the kid, even in Leah’s asthma attacks.

“You’re an attention-seeking little brat,” she hisses.

Father Thomas (Thomas Cree) is devoted to his parish, and popular. But wife Sarah sees the nuisance the older women parishioners are, bridling at the bossy fussbudget (Anastasia Hille) who’s always going on about the books and “receipts.”

All of them are too busy for Leah, whose curiosity has her wondering what she’s hearing and coveting what Mum has hidden away in her locket.

That’s about the time that the late night visits begin. The little girl (Sienna Sayer) is dressed in a battered white outfit, with wings clipped on. She can’t recall her name, but calls herself Leah’s “guardian angel.” And in their giggling games and chats, she challenges Leah to find this or that item lost or buried on the church grounds.

We adults know that those are “clues,” clues with a hint of menace about them.

Thompson and Sayer’s scenes are a moppet-sized marvel, natural, polished, perfectly-enunciated — empathetic acting at its most natural. They’re a big reason this picture, which has a guessable “mystery” and a lot more lowering gloom and dread than frights, comes off.

Leah’s travels make us fear for her. And the fact the family has a pet dog and a white rabbit Leah’s named “Mary” because it somehow got pregnant locked up in a rabbit hutch make us wonder what other grimness awaits.

Actress turned writer-director Platt (“The Black Forest”) draws us in and serves up just enough foreboding to keep us engrossed. There’s not a lot here, but the well-crafted minimalism and occasional moving moment pay off.

“Martyr’s Lane” is a reminder that you don’t need entrails and screams, demons and cadavers to cast a ghostly spell. Sometimes, a weathered abandoned doll in a fall-cluttered English garden, a lock of hair or faint scratching at a window is all it takes.

Rating: unrated, mild horror violence

Cast: Kiera Thompson, Denise Gough, Sienna Sayer, Thomas Cree and Hannah Rae.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ruth Platt. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:36

This opened in the UK during the pandemic (Streamed?) and finally gets a US release Sept. 17.