Movie Nation

“Saving Paradise” is another old fashioned, sentimental take on work, workplaces and their value in an America that has ceded control of such things to Wall Street, and watched as Main Street paid the price.

Yes, thirty years after “Other People’s Money” — the play and then the film — and industries are still “shipping jobs overseas” leaving behind gutted factories, gutted towns and diminished lives in their wake.

It’s a cloying, cutesy and feel-good fable about the way these stories always grope around for a happy ending that an unsentimental America never seems to provide.

William Moseley (“The Courier,” TV’s “The Royals”) stars as Michael Peterson, the somewhat ruthless 30something Wall Streeter summoned home when his father dies.

The old man (Lawrence Pressman) was a beloved figure in tiny Paradise, Pennsylvania. He’s kept the last factory in town — Peterson’s Pencils — in business, employing a diverse workforce of older “lifers” and minorities including the differently-abled, giving rusting, foreclosing Paradise a pulse.

Now, he’s gone, the loan is due and that workforce is worried about their future and belligerently skeptical that this heir turned corporate raider has their best interests at heart.

Like nobody there’s ever seen “Gung Ho!”

The Van Billet script is strictly a cut-and-paste collection of cliches and “types.”

Christmas is coming, and their loan due-date will fall right on top of it, potentially putting people out of work for the holidays. The factory is antiquated. There’s little margin for profit selling the world pencils.

The late Mary Pat Gleason finished her career of loud, put-out Everywomen by playing mouthy plant manager Mary.

George Steeves is “on-the-spectrum” mail boy Walter, who can rattle off cascades of “facts” about pencils, and the factory’s productivity. Paul Dooley (“Breaking Away,” “Hairspray”) is his dotty, retired grandfather and Shashawnee Hall (“El Camino Christmas”) is the grumpy plant maintenance guy.

There’s a tarty office flirt (Valeria Maldonado), and of course, “Miss Right,” the “gal he left behind.” That would be the cute CFO Charlie (Johanna Braddy) who knew Michael when he was “Mikey” and hung out with him and his long-dead older brother, seen in flashbacks.

The debates between Michael and Charlie take on unnatural escalations as the script rushes them and us into crisis mode.

“It’s all about the BOTTOM LINE, isn’t it?”

“What other ‘line’ IS there?”

At some point, these two (cute together, and decent performers) are going to “click.” At some other point, somebody is certain to shout, “Go ahead, run away! IT’s your SPECIALTY!”

Seriously, screenplays like this aren’t so much composed as composted — recycled.

Director Jay Silverman (“Off the Menu,” “Girl on the Edge”) could have bent this edge-of-insipid story in a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie direction, fully capitalizing on all the sentiment. Instead he lets our leads, and a few others, pepper the tale with real world profanity.

As “Saving Paradise” is never more than a corny, old-fashioned working world wish fulfillment fantasy, that’s unfortunate. Maybe they’ll re-cut it when Hallmark asks.

Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, some profanity

Cast: William Moseley, Johanna Braddy, Mimi Kennedy, Mary Pat Gleason,
Shashawnee Hall, Lawrence Pressman, Bill Cobbs and Paul Dooley

Credits: Directed by Jay Silverman, scripted by Van Billet. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:41

Sure, you had me at “Yakuza Princess.” But was there ever a more ponderous gangland saga set in the Japanese mafia than this?

It has a novel setting – the Liberdade neighborhood of Sao Paolo, Brazil, home to the largest ethnic Japanese enclave outside of Japan itself. And any yakuza story is going to pack gangland slaughter, gunplay and samurai swords wielded by over-tattooed, bellowing thugs.

But that’s about it. The Japanese-American singer Mazumi makes a sturdy if not particularly compelling lead. Jonathan Rhys Meyers was cast to give it a “name” in a role not really all that important to the plot.

And that plot! Whatever made the graphic novel this was based on worth a look steadily fades from view as our heroine, transplanted to Sao Paolo and raised there, visits first this person, then that one, and on and on, each of them sadly shaking her or his head because “I am not the one who can give you answers” but “This OTHER person you must find,” perhaps they can.

Akemi was the lone survivor of the slaughter of her grandfather’s entire clan back in Osaka. She was too little to remember what happened, whisked away to Liberdade where a collection of teachers and relatives raised her to work in a gift shop and train with a sensei in his dojo.

“Let DISCIPLINE shape your spirit and mind,” her teacher (Toshiji Takeshima) intones. “Let NOTHING come between you and your sword.”

On the day she turns 21, this American or Englishman (Meyers) , the doctors can’t decide which, wakes up in a Sao Paolo, his face and body covered in bandages hiding the stitched-up slashmarks, his memory gone.

The only thing that might trigger its return is the sword the cops say he was traveling with. Nope. Doesn’t tell him a thing. But he affects an escape and, not speaking a word of Portuguese, grabs that sword and stalks about Liberdade, a cut-up foreigner in a hoodie, toting a Katana sword on his back. Looking for…answers? Inconspicuous.

Back in Japan, Akemi’s secret has gotten out, and a grizzled yakuza (Tsuyoshi Ihara of “Letters from Iwo Jima” and “Thirteen Assassins”) hops on a plane to track her down.

The film’s first big action sequence has the yakuza, the American and a gang of local goons with a beef against Akemi all colliding, bloodily and terminally, in her apartment.

The fights are shot with more style and fury than anything else — lens flare (Digitally added?) and blood on the lens at every turn. The players are reasonable convincing in these brawls, even if we’re confused by the action and conflicting loyalties of most involved.

There are displays of torture, murder and finger-lopping yakuza loyalty tests, and the things these swords can slice off are sliced off, and often.

But our heroine takes forever to figure out what should be obvious early on, that grandpa wasn’t a “harmless old man,” even after the American asserts that “There ARE no harmless old men.” And even the twists that give Meyers’ character a reason to be here don’t pass that “Raiders of the Lost Ark” conundrum test. The story would essentially be the same without him here — the odd rescue and extra hand in a fight notwithstanding.

Mazumi’s handling of the fight choreography aside, it’s hard to see this as any great advert for her talents and future in film. She’s pretty, athletic but dull.

Not that “Yakuza Princess” fails on her account. It’s no great credit to anybody here, chiefly director and co-adaptor Vicente Amorin (Viggo Mortensen’s “Good” was his career peak), who has no feel for the material, no deep appreciation of the genre.

Rating: R for strong bloody violence, some language and graphic nudity

Cast: Masumi, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Eijiro Ozaki and Jonathan Rhys Meyers

Credits: Directed by Vicente Amorin, scripted by Vicente Amorin, Kimi Lee, Tubaldini Shelling and Fernando Tose, based on a graphic novel by Danilo Beyruth. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:51

Beware the writer/director/star filmmaker who imagines his character as irresistible catnip to the ladies. Call it the “Edward Burns Delusion,” because it’s a good rule of thumb, and a cautionary one worth taking into account if you’re writing yourself into your movie.

Justin Etheredge trips over that, and a few other things, in his sweet but uneven and not particularly graceful “Good,” his second feature, after 2016’s “Get Out the Way.”

As Payton Poitier (“No relation.”), he is an aimless no-real-prospects Atlantan who misses his grandma, has an ex desperate to talk to him, a higher-class fiancée” and eventually a third woman tempted to throw herself at him.

In Etheredge’s dreams, anyway.

“Good” is about the old man he meets at his late grandmother’s favorite diner.

“We all end up alone,” Gregory (the great Keith David) pontificates. “At least somebody loved you.”

Gregory a regular, as well. He’s also well put-together, plainly somebody who has some money. And he’s not buying the “grandma” spiel Payton dishes out.

“I’m an old man. Old men EAT at diners. YOU’RE the lonely bastard” in this conversation.

A lift home leads to the first abrupt plot shift. Gregory’s daughter (Nefetari Spencer) makes Payton an over-the-top offer to become her dad’s caregiver, almost on the spot. As he’s just lost his previous temp job, and he’s hoping to marry the upscale Shannon (Kali Racquel), sure, he’ll take it.

But those voice mails from his ex, Jeneta (Christen Sharice)? They’re about exactly what you’d figure they’re about. She’s pregnant.

“Good” is about a guy who claims he learned “how to be a man” from his grandmother avoiding his adult responsibilities and getting chewed out about it by a character played by Keith David, who specializes in Old Testament cussing outs.

“Another young BLACK man making babies he won’t raise,” Old Gregory fumes.

At least he cools off whenever they watch “In the Heat of the Night.”

“You DO look like your daddy,” the old man cracks. He’s forgetful, might even have forgotten “the kid” assured him he wasn’t one of “those” Poitiers.” Or maybe he’s just having some old man fun at the hapless younger man’s expense.

Etheredge the director and co-writer brings in plenty of complications — Payton’s shaky status and need to placate his spoiled, wealthier bride-to-be, his inability to shake off Jeneta’s insistence on having a baby she insists is his.

He’s not ready “to throw my whole life away because you decided to have a baby.”

And then there’s Gregory, his half-estranged daughter Barbara, who runs his development empire and has little use for the father who wasn’t the “Father” Gregory nags Payton to be.

However familiar its situations and obstacles, “Good” passes the time easily, with Etheredge having a little chemistry with his booming, blustering co-star. But their scenes, like virtually every story element in “Good,” feel unfinished, ready for another re-write. The humor doesn’t quite pop, the pathos is more a notion in the film’s prospectus than anything the co-writers (Nathan Allen is the other) were able to deliver.

The transitions are abrupt, starting from that first one I mentioned. “Health” issues are introduced by the entrance of a doctor who seems to run his practice out of an Atlanta hotel room (Not a house call, not a doctor’s office, must be the Marriott).

That makes “Good” more likeable than polished, more “almost” or “nice try” than “Good.”

Rating: unrated, lots of profanity, homophobic slurs

Cast: Justin Etheredge, Keith David, Nefetari Spencer, Kali Racquel and Christen Sharice

Credits: Directed by Justin Etheredge, script by Justin Etheredge and Nathan Allen. Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:20

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