Movie Nation

The triumph of Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman” is the sense of occasion the director and her co-writer/producer Jordan Peele bring to this reboot.

This is horror with grandeur, a movie that pays homage to history and feels so of-the-moment as to seem fresh out of the lab.

“Candyman,” the glossiest horror movie in ages, isn’t just horror. It’s horror that reaches for the Latin in that MGM (which produced the original film and gets co-credit here) logo we see in the opening credits — “Ars gratia artis,” “art for art’s sake.”

We’re treated to Tony Todd’s iconic boogeyman, the gentrification of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini Green projects by not just yuppies, but art-world Black buppies, the long history of lynching African Americans, then and now, “extra judicial killings” by a callous, trigger-happy police force and one great big unintentional metaphor for America deluged by Delta.

If there’s a lesson about tempting fate in any story that invokes “Say my name (five times),” it’s right out in the open and said out loud to the militantly anti-vax and anti-mask moronocracy.

“F–k around, see what happens.”

DaCosta (“Little Woods”) conjures up a story about stories, having characters, from our artist Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II of “The Get Down”), “researching” the legend for inspiration, to the Cabrini refugee (Colman Domingo of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) who runs a laundromat, grab us with just their voices. We hear how grad student Helen Lyles (Virginia Madsen, heard on tapes from the original 1992 film) played a part in summoning up the Halloween season horror long ago.

These chilling scenes, just an actor telling a tale, are brilliantly illustrated with creepy-as-all-get-out shadow puppetry. The cut-out stick-puppets match this art-world thriller’s self-conscious sense of “artistry,” pretentious poseurs dabbling where they shouldn’t, gentrifiers blind to their role in cultural destruction.

“The Great Black Hope of the Chicago Art Scene” lives with polished curator Brianna (Teyonah Parris of “The Photograph,””If Beale Street Could Talk” and TV’s “WandaVision”), and desperately needs “the new, the now.” Thanks to a spooky story told by her brother Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), Anthony finds himself stumbling into the Candyman tale while digging around the ruins of Cabrini Green.

He titles his “didactic cliche” (everybody’s a critic, especially the critic — Rebecca Spence) show “Say my Name.” Uh. Oh.

We see the first wrapped candy hit the floor, we cringe. We hear the first bee, we wince. We get our first glimpse of the man with the candy in one hand and a hook for the other, we rejoice.

DaCosta serves up a few of “Candyman’s Greatest Hits” amid the violence she unleashes here. It’s a spatter film that goes to some pains not to show the slashing. We hear it, see flashes of bloody mayhem from inside a locked girls’ bathroom stall in the inevitable “high schoolers summon Candyman” moment.

It may not deliver the edge-of-your-seat gulping terror or pander to the “gore uber alles” corner of horror’s fanbase. But catching just enough of a mass slaughter through a dropped teen’s compact mirror is smart, sophisticated storyboarding and framing.

The acting is more solidly-grounded than dazzling, but Domingo stands out, a character actor taking his place among the greats.

The script is on a whole new horror level, weaving in the themes, subtexts, history and social commentary together so artfully that you might not notice until you see how Anthony’s body, rotting under the weight of the curse he’s unleashed, evolves into the most horrific lynching victim you’ve ever seen.

And kudos to whoever cooked up Troy’s bitchy gay put-down of “Basquiat ass…Sun Ra” pretentious artiste Anthony.

DaCosta, along with cinematographer John Guleserian, gloss-and-grit production designer Cara Brower and art directors Jami Primer and Ines Rose, ensure that fans are served, and fed something that feels — first frame to last — classy, upscale, an homage that delivers that “sense of occasion.”

Rating: R, for bloody horror violence, and language (profanity) including some sexual references

Cast: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyona Parris, Colman Domingo, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Rebecca Spence and Tony Todd

Credits: Directed by Nia DaCosta, scripted by Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld and Nia DaCosta, based on the 1992 MGM film. A Universal/MGM release.

Running time: 1:31

“Flag Day,” director and star Sean Penn’s painterly but somewhat perfunctory tale of toxic parenting, was intended as a star vehicle for his daughter Dylan Penn. And he makes sure it fills the bill, in that regard, a movie of striking landscapes and beautiful silhouettes, but whose “money shot,” first scene to last, is close-up after lingering closeup.

All Dylan has to do, playing the teen and then adult journalist Jennifer Vogel, child of a con artist and counterfeiter, is hold her own in scenes with one of the finest screen actors ever. And the model-turned-actress daughter of Robin Wright more or less does, giving us a flash of temper here, weeping despair there and a lot of stoic disappointment in between.

Josh Brolin, Dale Dickey and Eddie Marsan lend effortless support, with Penn’s son Hopper Penn playing the other child of lie-spinning, Chopin-listening Minnesota “entrepreneur” John Vogel, a guy who is in and out of his kids’ lives over the 17 years the story covers.

But Penn the elder has made a movie more concerned with grainy images captured in twilight than pace, more wrapped up in picture-postcard cinematography than a plot that surprises or dialogue that rings true.

“Flag Day” is framed within the real-life journalist-daughter’s meeting with a law enforcement official (Oscar winner Regina King), who fills her in on her father’s latest brush with the law.

The story-proper is told in flashback, with Jennifer (played by Jadyn Rylee as a tween) remembering her “reckless” and dishonest father as the family bounced around, ran up debts and ran out on those debts, sometimes before and occasionally after a beating when he hustled the wrong guy, often torching the house or business he couldn’t make the payments on as he fled.

He’d put Jennifer, his oldest, behind the wheel in his lap on long overnight drives, “because you’ve got to learn to drive if you want to see the world,” and he needed a little shuteye.

Seriously.

John runs out on wife Patty (Katheryn Winnick), tells his brother (Brolin, understated and stoic) “I’d do ANYthing for those kids.”

“Prove it,” his younger brother growls.

Patty crawls into a bottle, and then into a marriage to a creep who takes his best shot at molesting Jennifer during her punked-out teens. And despite all of Patty’s warnings about who and what her father is, that’s her escape.

The child grows into young adulthood, hearing her father spin this or that attempt at “going straight,” debating him on their matching drug-abuse habits, struggling to reconcile her love for him with her desperation for a normal, supportive role-model parent.

Dickey does a short, earthy turn as John’s mom, calling her son “a bad penny…
born on Flag Day” who would “burn down the world if he thought it’d put him in a white mansion.” And Marsan has a cameo playing a polluter the adult Jennifer confronts in an interview.

What Penn was shooting for here is a far softer-edged “At Close Range,” a career-making coming-of-age picture about that moment when a child realizes they’ve been worshipping a false idol.

But “softer” in this case means the arc of the story is pre-determined and dramatically flat. The stakes seem lower, right up to the moment in the third act when they’re not.

Jennifer’s “finding herself” years are covered in a montage of hitchhiking hippy excesses. And there’s not much detail or color to her father’s myriad schemes (a “jeans stretching” device) to keep things interesting.

Their shared scenes have some meat to them, but the content around them is so thin that we’re relieved when John pulls a bank robbery and disappointed when it’s handled so flatly.

Penn the younger just turned 30, and is thus less convincing as a teen than as an adult. And the “model” in her (she’s done a little acting, here and there) might explain some of the grammatically clunky lines she spouts (Blown takes?) as Jennifer tries to get into journalism school, and then becomes a journalist, one lacking an alacrity with the language when asking questions, arguing with an editor or facing off with a polluter.

The problem with “Flag Day” isn’t that she doesn’t measure up to the material. It’s that a pretty promising story (the “Ford v. Ferrari” Butterworth brothers scripted it) rarely measures up to the damned fine cast her father rounded up for it. He’s made a film that may look as painterly as Penn’s best directing job, “Into the Wild,” but never measures up to it.

Rating: Some Drug Use, Violent Content, language (profanity)

Cast: Sean Penn, Dylan Penn, Regina King, Dale Dickey, Hopper Penn, Eddie Marsan, and Josh Brolin

Credits: Directed by Sean Penn, script by Jez Butterworth and John Henry Butterworth. An MGM release.

Running time: 1:49

There are “film festival” movies, pictures so odd that there’s no audience for them outside of “The Festival Circuit,” and there are student films, which are unpolished and indulgent for a reasons, and there are even student “film festival” films — indulgent onanism somehow interesting enough to gain entry to a film fest, here and there.

“Like a Dirty French Novel” is almost a whole new thing, a nonsensical mishmash in the episodic, possibly interconnected “stories” mold. “Pulp Fiction,” “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” “Sin City” were examples of this that worked, some more than others.

“Like a Dirty French Novel” doesn’t.

A seriously random, badly-acted (as a rule), with lines recited rather than “performed,” “stories” that lead nowhere with characters that aren’t relatable — to the viewer or reality in general, here’s a “film” that has it all. Or nothing to recommend it, to be more precise.

Sex and sex work and phone sex and porn kind of weave through it, not so much a “theme” as well, “something to put in our movie.”

Florid, deranged monologues, random action — a kidnapping, mistaken identity, car theft, “It’s quicksand, it’s QUICKsand!” — feigned “erotic” dancing, a mysterious phone-sex caller, Halloween-masked “observers, all set against a “vertiginous pandemic.”

All these “stories,” not one of them worth following, not a one amusing, titillating or remotely entertaining. “Tied together?” Not really.

The upshot? Unwatchable twaddle. Clever title, though.

Rating: unrated violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Laura Urgelles, Amanda Viola, Jennifer Daly, Brittany Sampson, Robby Valls, Aaron Bustos, Dan Rojay, Arko Miro

Credits: Directed by Mike Cuenca, script by Mike Cuenca, Ashlee Elfman, Dan Rojay. A Bldv. du Cinema release.

Running time: 1:18

The teaser trailer to the next Tom Holland web-slinger installment is…a bit of Doctor Strange, a lot of Peter Parker summing up “the story so far.”

Twitter is all aflutter over how Benedict C sounds like James Franco in this trailer. Ahem.

And then there’s our old friend from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Younger old friend…

A notorious counterfeiter and his daughter bond or break apart in this “true story” directed by Penn.

“PAW Patrol: The Movie” is not for anybody old enough to read a movie review — even “Young Sheldon” in his nappies.

With animation a little more “Jimmy Neutron” polished than TV, an infantile story and no jokes that play to anybody over say, six, it’s also not a movie worth wasting a disposable facemask on at the multiplex.

But how does the Hungry Hungry Hippocratic Oath of children’s entertainment begin?

“First, do no harm.”

It’s a seriously inoffensive confection about facing one’s “issues” and fears and helping people. And if Paramount wants to move a little toy merchandise in the process, why not?

In Adventure Bay, ATV and motorcycle teen-rescuer Ryder (voiced by Will Brisbin) “and his team of pups” can always be counted on showing up to save the day.

A sea turtle’s trapped on a road, or a Canadian trucker (Tyler Perry) dangles his rig over a bridge because he swerved to avoid that turtle (“Canadian”), the PAW Patrol howls into action.

And lead dog in all their rescues is Chase (Iain Armitage), as in “Chase in ON the case!”

But when they’re summoned to Adventure City, Chase has flashbacks to his abandoned pup childhood. He loses his edge and freezes up in dangerous situations.

And with the new Mayor Humdinger (Ron Pardo) in charge, it’s no longer a dog-friendly city. Dogs are being rounded up. At least they’re not taken to the “Isle of Dogs.”

“He’s into cats.” Yes, Humdinger had to run unopposed to get elected.

How will these Can-Do Canines — Marshall, Zuma, Rubble, Chase, Skye and Rocky — and new friend Liberty the dachshund (Marsai Martin) set this world to right? With gadgets and transforming cars, trucks, bikes and boats and an “Oww owww AROOoooooo.”

This “Patrol” is sort of “Thunderbirds” (puppets) and “Superfriends” for a new and quite young generation, with just enough positive messaging to merit mentioning that.

“What kind of leader gives up on someone the second things get hard?”

And the jokes are of the “This is OFF the LEASH” and “What’s got HIS leash in a knot?” variety.

Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel plays a wigged TV reporter named Marty Muckraker. Kim Roberts and Dax Shepard voice supporting players. And Adam Levine, Alessia Cara, Kiki Riggs, Spilt Milk, Fifth Harmony, Isabela Merced and Eiza Gonzalez turn up on the soundtrack.

If the kids are into the TV show and you already have Paramount Plus, or want to give the streamer a trial run, have at it. But it’s nothing special, and it’s not worth going to a theater to see.

Rating: G.

Cast: The voices of Iain Armitage, Will Brisbin, Lily Bartlam, Marsai Martin, Ron Pardo, Keegan Hedley, Shayle Simmons, Jimmy Kimmel and Tyler Perry

Credits: Directed by Cal Brunker, scripted by Billy Frolick, Bob Barlen and Cal Brunker. A Paramount/Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:26

Our endless fascination with “Lady Killer” Ted Bundy means we’ve seen a lot of handsome look-alikes play him on the screen, from Mark Harmon and Cary Elwes to Zac Efron, each taking a shot at a mass-murderer with cover boy looks, the “sexy” serial killer with the charismatic smile.

With “No Man of God,” actor Luke Kirby gives us the definitive Bundy — arrogant, articulate, devious and delusional. Kirby (Lenny Bruce in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) simmers and snaps, purrs and seduces, and yet never for a minute lets us forget who and what he is. This is Bundy without the “glamour,” a “monster” hellbent on insisting that “‘Normal‘ people kill people,” and that’s all he is.

“No Man of God” is a “True Story” treatment of Bundy’s last days. It’s set against the birth of FBI and police “profiling,” with a pioneer of that trade, William “Bill” Hagmaier (Elijah Wood) interviewing Bundy over the final years before the serial killer was executed in Starke, Florida’s Raiford Prison.

Actress-turned-director Amber Sealey and screenwriter Kit Lesser (aka C. Robert Cargill, who wrote “Sinister” and had a hand in “Doctor Strange”) give us a standard, playlike two-hander, a “cat and mouse” movie of interviews/interrogations, with each participant trying to get into the other’s head.

Snippets of news coverage of the crimes and the baying-for-blood execution mob that showed up in 1989 (many in camo, even then) are woven into a story about research and “remorse.”

Wood’s Hagmaeir is first seen on his knees, praying. When he meets Bundy, whom his FBI BSU (Behavioral Science Unit) boss (Robert Patrick) and the skeptical prison warden (W. Earl Brown) are sure won’t talk, he has one sale to make.

“I’m not here looking for evidence. I’m looking for understanding.”

For “profiling” to work, its practitioners need to know the sort of person they’re looking for –habits, lifestyle and psychological (family) background.

Casting Wood pays dividends straight away, as he plays up Hagmaier’s non-threatening curiosity, his deference and well-mannered solicitousness, and his piety. He’s just the sort of guy Bundy would figure his silky seduction and flashes of fury would intimidate.

Kirby’s Bundy veers from aloof contempt about “liars in cheap suits on government salaries” to calling Hagmaeir his “friend” over the course of four years of interviews.

The conversations with the convicted murderer, ostensibly aimed at getting Bundy’s insights on the “Green River Killer,” still at large at the time, range from “Silence of the Lambs” analytical to “Capote” confessional.

“Do you have any idea what a spree like this would take out of you?” Bundy wonders, laying out his “profile” of the elusive Washington state murderer of sex workers and runaways. He’s forever trying to connect his married, father of a little boy interrogator to himself, a “normal” person capable of doing the most heinous things.

“I’m tired of people saying I’m crazy,” Bundy fumes.

Hagmaier is tasked with listening, recording and debating Bundy, hiding his hand, only occasionally showing off his own profiling skills, more as a way of establishing a professional rapport, convincing him that they’re intellectual equals.

Our leads have a toe-to-toe intensity that clicks in many scenes. Wood and Kirby are well-matched, with Kirby giving us the superiority complex that generations of post-Bundy Hollywood serial killers have affected, and Wood showing just how troubling this assignment becomes, an FBI agent feigning professionalism as he quakes at the heartbreaking details of Bundy’s crimes.

A secondary villain, the smug religious opportunist Dr. James Dobson (Christian Clemenson), is introduced late. He finagled a last hours interview with Bundy where we see him gullibly fed a load of codswallop by Bundy about the influence of “soft-core porn” on his psyche as Hagmaeir’s eyes widen with furious incredulity.

Aleksa Palladino gives sharp edges to Bundy’s defense attorney (her name changed here), and Patrick serves up his best “authority figure.”

Sealey (“No Light and No Land Anywhere”) keeps her camera tight, sometimes shooting from low angles to underscore the seeming power imbalance in the conversations.

She picks up not just actual crime victims, seen in still shot montages mixed with home movies and news footage, but every young woman whom either man comes in contact with, in or out of prison, viewed as Bundy would eyeball them — as potential prey, someone who might fall under the “Lady Killer’s” spell, if only for a moment.

With so many Bundy films and TV series out there, “No Man of God” stands out by Kirby capturing not just the vanity and egoism, but the stark “banality of evil” that strips the “glamour” off a creep who lured women into assorted stolen Volkswagens, assaulted and killed them, rarely in that order.

Rating: unrated, discussions of graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Elijah Wood, Luke Kirby, Aleksa Palladino and Robert Patrick

Credits: Directed by Amber Sealey, scripted by Kit Lesser. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:41

It’s never wholly fair to dismiss a movie just because it’s unpleasant to sit through. But that’s a good place to start with “We Need to Do Something.”

This horror star vehicle for Sierra McCormick (“Pretty Little Stalker,” “American Horror Story” and “The Vast of Night”) is a gooey, meandering supernatural thriller that’s on its surest ground at its simplest — before all the Young Goths In Love business of spells, curses and digging up graves because that’s what your “I used to be a cutter/I used to be dead” girlfriend (Lisette Alexis) wants.

But it’s easier to sell a “sexy teen lesbians bring on the Apocalypse” pitch, I guess.

We meet Mel (McCormick), her testy and tippling Dad (Pat Healy), had-enough Mom (Vinessa Shaw) and antic, nerdy little brother (John James Cronin) in the family bathroom, riding out a tornado.

The little nerd keeps suggesting its “an F5.” Mom reassures him it’s not, repeats the story of the day he was born to comfort him and dodges phone calls and texts from….someone.

Mel?

“I think…something BAD might be happening.” As in this is no ordinary storm.

A few shrieks at thunderclaps later, a tree crashes on their roof and and blocks their way out. Fine. Wait it out. Call for help when the worst has passed.

Dad has just enough left in his travel mug to keep the edge off. Mom frets but figures it’ll all be fine. Mel’s nerves are fraying because she can’t get Amy to text back.

And little Bobby is seeing a snake. And then he’s hearing a dog. And then something supernatural happens, and Dad’s tipsy tirade that “it’s not the END of the GOD—–d world” seems a tad premature.

The compact melodrama within that bathroom, even with the supernatural menace that seems piled on top of the natural ones, is where the suspense lies. Survival might depend on the water staying on, eating whatever’s at hand, shouting for help, improvising and working the problem as the family comes unraveled.

Dad’s “survival,” in between tantrums, might depend on whether or not that mouthwash is “alcohol free.”

But we need flashbacks to what Mel believes caused all this, the first blush of high school love between the over-accessorized Amy and “Blade Runner” eye-makeup Mel, and what they do to punish those who would interfere with their romance.

“We Need to Do Something” doesn’t invent a set of horror rules and play by them, doesn’t get much accomplished between big (ok, middling) frights and leans on titillation more than it should.

Whatever pathos the picture might have generated is frittered away as is the suspense as flashbacks release whatever tension that trapped-in-a-bathroom scenario offers.

A line like Amy’s portentous “You can’t fix the inevitable” might apply to the debut script of Max Boot III, who doesn’t appear to be related to the famous Max Boot, conflict pundit and author.

But they threw a pretty good cast and some decent, gruesome and disturbing effects at it, even if all they managed to accomplish was “unpleasant.”

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic, gory violence

Cast: Sierra McCormick, Pat Healy, Vinessa Shaw, John James Cronin and Lisette Alexis

Credits: Directed by Sean King O’Grady, script by Max Booth III. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:36

The dog days of August, traditionally the cinema’s dumping ground for dogs, is the first stretch of the movie calendar to return to “normal.”

“The Night House” got good reviews and didn’t do diddly with the horror fangirls and fanboys. Just under “The Protege.” I’m gonna say it, “too smart for the target audience.” No slaughter, no T & A. Serious female lead — Rebecca Hall — and they couldn’t be bribed into theaters.

“The Protege” was a Maggie Q star vehicle. Not great. Just under $3. Maggie Q has been a grand supporting player in action pix. Cannot carry one, especially one she didn’t wholly commit to. Middling performance.

And “Reminisce” a traditional Warner Brothers throw-a-lot-of money at a big name and give a contract director a petard to hoist herself on bomb, did a piddling $2 million. Lisa Joy of the hyped to heck “Westworld” was behind this. Got handed her head.

The TV cartoon amped up for the big screen, “Paw Patrol,” did over $13. Does that mean I need to review it?

No, not a good weekend for women in the movie biz. Two female star vehicles and a big budget writer director debut debacle.

But August, amIright?

That leaves the field clear for Ryan Reynolds and “Free Guy” which wanted over $18 in it’s second weekend.

“Suicide Squad” lost a thousand screens and fell off the map. Didn’t cost James Gunn any Twitter followers, but his cachet got a serious swat on the bottom.

A tale of boy-meets-girl, girl-wrecks-boys-life told with sublime melancholy by Japanese auteur Kôji Fukada, “The Real Thing” plays like the darkest “romantic comedy” you ever saw.

A “love story” with melodramatic complications and coincidences, and confrontations that border on bizarre, it makes for a fascinating dive into dysfunction, co-dependency and the credo that “some women are just no damned good for a man, and vice versa.”

“The Real Thing” began life as a manga, a Japanese graphic novel, which was then adapted into a ten part series for Japanese TV by Fukada, director of “Harmonium” and “A Girl Missing.” It was edited into an epic-length film of nearly four hours running time for Cannes. It’s not that important, in the age of bingewatching, that it’s been returned to its ten episode format for this Film Movement release, but I’ll still call it a “movie” for reviewing purposes — a movie in ten bite-sized installments.

Tsuji (Win Morisaki of “Ready Player One”) is a handsome, 30ish “salaryman” for a Ondo Toy & Fireworks in Tokyo. A mid-level manager, he likes to keep his life compartmentalized. Clients who want to “have a drink” merit a muttered “pain in the ass.” And women at the office who throw themselves at him may get some of what they want, but not “love.”

One night, like the loyal salaryman he is, he insists a convenience store customer (Kaho Tsuchimura of “Mother”) have a plastic soap bubble pistol that isn’t in torn packaging. She accepts, fumbles with a map and asks directions, seeming confused or at least distracted.

Little does he know he’s just sealed his fate. That chance encounter leads to one we can’t put down to chance. He walks home, she drives past him and stops on the railroad tracks. Erratic and panicked, she needs saving and so he does.

But when the police show up, she lies. “He” was driving. She doesn’t even know his name, and the lie comes unraveled. Rather than flee this trainwreck-in-progress, Tsuji gives her cab fare home. He gives her a business card so she can pay him back.

Tsuji’s every early encounter with Ukiyo costs him money. He makes her write out IOUs, but discovers she’s given him the wrong address. He’s got the rental car company she used hassling him for fees and damages.

And that instantly messes up his compartmentalized life. The lovesick colleague, Hosokawa (Kei Ishibashi), whom he lives with, is put out. The 24 year-old pixie, Minako (Kei Ishibashi) who is all over him, gets rebuffed and never realizes it.

Tsuji finds himself emptying his bank account to deal with a manipulative yakuza (Yukiya Kitamura) who threatens to turn Ukiyo into a club “hostess” or worse. She lies, obfuscates, whimpers and bows and apologizes.

You could make a drinking game out of the number of times Ukiyo says, “I have something to tell you.” Every new “secret” reveals a further complication and another wad of cash.

Like the yazuka (gangster, loan-shark) Wakita, our curiosity is piqued. “You have an ulterior motive with her?” Is the sex that good? Yes, she’s that good, Ukiyo insists. “No, we’ve never DONE it,” Tsuji corrects.

“No one is better than her at mesmerizing a man,” Wakita sighs (in Japanese with English subtitles). And so it would seem.

“The Real Thing” piles on the personal complications and the details in a story that ebbs and flows, with him looking for her and then her seeking him, over a period of years.

Clues dribble out about his sense of “order” and not leaving a “mess” and her seemingly bottomless background of debt, bad relationships, alcohol abuse and apologies.

Each is, in his or her own way, a boy or girl who “just can’t say no.” There’s a satiric thread here, about Japanese culture and “responsibility” and “loyalty” and “order” and good manners. The endless apologizing and appeals for cash can make you shout at the screen, or come up with your own drinking games.

The running time is daunting, and truthfully, not wholly justified (limited series “drip drip drip” storytelling). But if you’re intrigued by this most ambitious venture by one of Japan’s most challenging filmmakers, track “The Real Thing” down and consume it, preferable in bite-sized portions.

Cast: Win Morisaki, Kaho Tsuchimura, Kei Ishibashi, Shôhei Uno, Akari Fukunaga and Yukiya Kitamura

Credits: Directed by Kôji Fukada, script by Shintaro Mitani, based on the manga by Mochiru Hoshisato. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 3:52, in ten episodes