Movie Nation

“When I’m a Moth” is a fictional, myth-making and myth-puncturing look at a brief interlude in Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s early life, a summer she spent “sliming salmon” at a fish cannery in Valdez, Alaska.

It’s a talky, mulling-things-over sort of story, practically a filmed play with boats, scenery and romance, but also fish entrails, the Vietnam War and America’s political divide as its backdrop.

Filmmakers Magdalena Zayak and Zachary Colter have conjured up something pretentious, odd and strange, a movie that almost defies comparison to other films. But I was reminded of “Agatha,” the Redgrave/Hoffman tale of what happened when mystery writer Agatha Christie disappeared for several days at the height of her fame, and of “Southside with You,” the Obamas’ courtship romance.

It’s at its most intriguing when it’s musing, a fresh-faced Wellesley College grad (Addison Timlin of “Feast of the Seven Fishes” and TV’s “Start-Up”) meeting two strangers — out of work Japanese fishermen (TJ Kayama, Toshiji Takeshima) — striking up a socially awkward conversation that for her involves moments of self-reflection, self-doubt and confession.

Hillary is “in a strange mood,” and offers to buy rough-looking strangers Mitsuru (Takeshima) and Ryohei (Kayama) a drink. It feels dangerous, with the sketchy-looking men eyeballing the coed a little too lasciviously, but also worried about racist “vigilantes” among the locals, and her wondering if they’re serious.

And as they question her and question her some more, and she questions them back, it feels on-the-spectrum awkward.

“Why you trust men you do not know? How old are you?”

“Older than my body.”

She has a plan for her life, relating how she is on a “predetermined path,” “like a moth” they interpret. At 21, she lays it all out — Yale Law, politics, activism, the idea being “to liberate people, create communal trust.”

They warily discuss her in sexual terms, in Japanese, right in front of her.

“You shouldn’t tease me like you normally tease women.”

“We’re not stupid.” “Who said you’re stupid?”

Yes, she uses “language like a small sword.” And yes, she knows she needs “to work on softening my personality…You can’t let people know you’re ambitious.“

The film is a moody, atmospheric and not terribly revealing failure, I have to say. But it is a fascinating one.

Here is Hillary, suggesting she’ll spin how she lost her job at the cannery. She’s “slow” on the line, she admits. But she might tell her Chicago Republican daddy or anyone else that asks that she pointed out the unsanitary conditions and sometimes unfit fish to management.

“Canned from the cannery” her drinking companions joke.

She considers her own shifting politics (Goldwater Republican to war-protesting Democrat) and decides “Real power is the capacity to educate ignorant people, maybe. So Nixon has no power at all.” But “Kissinger is a war criminal. I’ll crush him if I get the chance.”

She’s telling all this to two foreigners with shaky English and working class grasps of the world — limited, even if the younger one, Ryohei, has been to university and read “The Brothers Karamazov” and is handsome enough to get away with insult-flirting.

“Maybe you don’t know. Maybe you just like talking.”

The script, which includes sex and a just-off-the-hook introduction to sushi, toys with prescience, putting words in the 2016 presidential candidate’s mouth that make her prophetic.

“You can’t get rid of ignorance. It always seems to triumph, somehow…I feel doomed.”

“When I’m a Moth,” filmed in the green-greys of what passes for an Alaskan spring (Vancouver, actually) with rusted-out fishing hulks, towering peaks coming right down to the water, the various salmon “runs” detailed and tracked and gutted, has a marvelous simplicity about it, and a “walk in the midnight sun” eye for details.

I lived for a year just across the Gulf of Alaska from Valdez, in Kodiak, another coastal fishing town. This myopic film resonates in its depiction of the insular world of such places, the sophisticated culture shock experienced by, and delivered to the locals by the legions of college kids who come for the summer work.

A blonde coed shows up, everybody in town notices. She’s “under-stimulated,” but there to “get my hands dirty” and meet and chat up and listen to working people (Japanese, mostly, back then, Filipino by the time I arrived)? That’d get attention, too.

It’s a film that’s of mixed emotions about the future First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State. And that goes for the film as well.

Yet Timlin is terrific, showing us a wonk and political animal in the making — focused, unintimidated and kind of fearless, a young woman traveling solo to the roughest corner of the country for smelly, disgusting work with the hardened souls who perform it.

It’s not going to interest the Fox News crowd. But for anybody the least bit curious about how a Hillary Rodham might be formed, shaped and reshaped — as we all are — in her early 20s, it makes for a challenging film and an intriguing fantasia.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations

Cast: Addison Timlin, TJ Kayama, Toshiji Takeshima

Credits: Scripted and directed by Magdalena Zayak and Zachary Colter. A Winter Film release.

Running time: 1:31

“The Secret Diary of an Exchange Student” works itself into a lather for its finale, briefly becoming a door-slamming farce with a college applicant who faces deportation, his dismayed college admissions interviewer, a cadre of anti-deportation protestors, sheriff’s deputies, a crazed NSA agent and her “exchange student” hostage, a shrieking baby and the perky but hapless Brazilian exchange student/au pair who set all this in motion.

This “Around the World with Netflix” outing is a Brazilian rom-com that’s lean on laughs but cute around the edges, a movie whose best zingers come at the expense of the norte americanos, or a young leftist’s attitudes about them (us).

Former child actress Larissa Manoela plays Barbara, a 23 year old from Rio who wears a flight attendant’s uniform to work at the airport, but who spends her days hustling “Dream Trip” magazine subscriptions. She’s full of travel tips from the magazine, but has never traveled herself.

One failed “contest” to sell the most subscriptions later, and she chucks that gig for her new idea about how to go abroad. She’ll become an au pair, learn English while living in America, and drag her raving leftist taxi dispatcher pal Taila (Thati Lopes) with her.

Taila is the life of the movie, ranting at “rideshare colonialists” who want to “destroy our industry” (she manages a taxi stand at the airport), steal the Amazon and “take our Niobium,” some mineral she’s heard is Brazil’s ticket to the future.

This handsome flight attendant Barbara met, Brad (David Sherod), may be the inspiration for this scheme, but that doesn’t mean Taila’s going to let him forget “This economic crisis was created by the Americans.”

They fly into Brad’s upstate New York town in the middle of winter, befriend a handsome Brazilian student (Bruno Montaleone) who works in the ski resort, and have misadventures with Barbara’s taskmaster single-mom lawyer-boss (Kathy-ann Hart) and the gun-loving, hunting-crazed, meat-addicted family that takes Taila in because they miss their own daughter, a captive NSA agent.

You can see where most of the comic possibilities are, but what you should know going in is how long it takes the movie to set up and how little is done with this stuffed-critter-couple Taila must cope with, where the language barrier is practically a blessing.

The two Brazilians enter “The world’s best educational system,” an American high school, where English is taught by a woman who thinks singing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” is the key to learning. Smart aleck Chinese teens mock them to their faces (in Mandarin).

And all their plans go awry, with romantic blunders, ICE issues and twists that tie this story up in the most eye-rolling way possible.

It’s a colorful, cheerful and messy movie, meandering out of the starting gate, struggling to avoid anything remotely edgy or interesting.

“Culture clash” comedies like this live and die on their “clashes,” and the conflict that might have worked is leftist Taila’s encounter with gun nutty, conservative, arteriosclerosis-meets-diabetes rural America. But the “americanos” scripted and cast aren’t “out there” enough to be funny, even if Taila’s reaction to them and their stuffed chipmunk, etc., is.

Director and co-writer Bruno Garotti ensures that our heroines’ first encounters with snow and downhill skiing dodge anything amusing or slapstickish, that their romances are PG-dull and that the odd scene that clicks — singing in a Brazilian-themed club in NYC, airport mishaps — isn’t enough to make this “Secret Diary” worth reading.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Larissa Manoela, Thati Lopes, Bruno Montaleone, Kathy-ann Hart

Credits: Directed by Bruno Garotti, script by Bruno Garotti and Sylvio Gonçalves. A Warner Brothers film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:36

The stark desert north of Sudan is realistically and beautifully captured in Amjad Abu Alala’s “You Will Die at Twenty,” a potent parable for life in this war torn and timelessly backward corner of the world.

A Sudanese entry in the Best International Feature category at the Oscars, this 2019 film, shot under stresses one can only imagine, earns a virtual release from Film Movement this month.

A mother (Islam Mubarak) takes her newborn boy to be blessed by a visiting Imam as he greets the faithful at a nearby mosque. As dervishes whirl in celebration, the leader counts up as this blessing is granted. When the dervish drops dead at the number “twenty,” a chill falls over the occasion and gasps spread through the crowd.

“Everything is fated,” the Imam intones (in Arabic with English subtitles) and mother Sakina protests and cries. The Imam can’t lift “the curse.” “God’s command is inevitable.” Her son, named Muzamil, will die at twenty.

Devout Sakina accepts this fate. But the boy’s father (Talal Afifi) is crushed. He will leave for the city and send home money. He will not let himself be there for the coming tragedy, which he doesn’t realize begins years before that fated day.

A little boy growing up in an isolated, superstitious village, whose own mother buys into his prophesied death, is going to have it rough.

His madrassa classmates are murderously cruel, covering him in ashes, wrapping him in a burial cloth and locking him in a trunk. His mother, marking dates on a wall of their house, never lets him forget how he can expect “such a short lifespan,” pushing him deep into memorizing the Quran as comfort and perhaps a stay of execution.

Only little Naima befriends him and loves him. And as the years pass and Muzamil (Mustafa Shehata) reaches his 19th year, Naima (Bonna Khalid), from a wealthier family, adds a new pressure to his fearful, overly careful life.

“Either you are scared of me or you love me,” she declares. And boy, you’d better make up your mind up fast.

This is just the moment that the kid, a delivery boy for the local store, meets an outspoken apostate. Sulaiman (Mahmoud Maysara Elsaraj) gets his Aragy (vodka) dropped off each day, a former world traveler who prefers to keep an anti-Islamic buzz on now that he’s passing his final years in the village of his birth.

Sulaiman is profane, dismissive of this superstitious nonsense, suggesting the boy “follow the Nile” to a bigger, better life where everybody doesn’t expect him to die any day now.

Sulaiman lives in a house of cluttered wonders — film cameras, projectors and erotic posters of Middle Eastern film stars of the pre-Islamic Fundamentalism past. That photo of Marilyn Monroe?

“She is from another world.”

Sulaiman can’t help but broaden the boy’s mind, showing him scenes of the secular classic “Cairo Station” and footage he shot of pre-Islamic coup Khartoum. Sulaiman is the film’s slice of “Cinema Paradiso.” He used to be a news cameraman.

Director Alala, who co-adapted the script from a short story by Hammour Zaida, carefully maintains the sundrenched cloud Muzamil lives under, a cloud his mother cultivates.

The performances are documentary real, with just enough melodrama about them to keep things interesting.

We don’t know what will come as that fateful “20th” is counted down, etched on the wall, with Muzamil feeling a growing pressure to escape, lash out in protest or tempt fate by taking risks at the crushing weight of ugly expectations his neighbors, his mother and his religion have set upon his shoulders.

An ugly, patriarchal and sexist moment in the film’s problematic finale promises little relief from that. There’s little chance of the “Cinema Paradiso” bittersweet entering the picture.

But Alala has still made a remarkable film of religious overtones and undertones (even a New Testament touch), of martyrdom and resignation that we can only hope Muzalil and indeed Sudan eventually reject for a fuller life.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Mustafa Shehata, Islam Mubarak, Mahmoud Maysara Elsaraj, Bonna Khalid and Talal Afifi

Credits: Directed by Amjad Abu Alala, script by Amjad Abu Alala and Yousef Ibrahim, based on a short story by Hammour Zaida. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:46

Smart sci fi, good cast. This looks good.

A grieving, sullen and silent tween is sent off to visit her Thai grandmother for the summer of “My Best Worst Adventure,” a moving and engaging kids’ movie with just enough hard edge to come off.

It has that “Black Stallion” and “The Fox and the Child” novelty of telling its story mostly with pictures, a film of few words. And many of those words are Thai, with not all of them translated with subtitles.

Jenny (Lily Patra), who just lost her mother, has stopped speaking. She’s lashing out, so deep into her anger that she can’t get out of this trip she doesn’t want to take by meeting her father’s (Eoin O’Brien) one condition.

“You don’t want to go, just talk to me. TELL me you don’t want to go.”

Next thing she knows, she’s in Culture Shock rural Thailand, staying with granny “the dictator” (Phanida Suwansaad), typing her complaints onto social media on a tablet that she can’t even recharge.

“Day One: I’ve been abducted by aliens…Day Two of the hostage crisis…They babble at me all the time, like I even know what they’re saying.”

She’s even thrown into a school where she doesn’t speak the language, but where she picks up on the kid the others bully and even the teacher browbeats. Boonrod (Pan Rugtawtr) is also silent. She’s seen the scruffy, grimy kid picking pockets in the temple, scrambling to find enough to eat and doting on Samlee, his water buffalo.

As the opening images of “My Best Worst Adventure” were of boys riding water buffalo in no saddle, no helmet, no-holds-barred races, we pretty much know what the third act holds for us.

The movie’s charms are in the setting and Jenny’s unwillingness to adjust to it. She is bullied, too, over her “manga” art (monsters) and her silence. There’s always a rich kid (Chinnapat Kitichaivaranggoon) ready to lead his flunkies into picking on somebody he figures is weak.

This is B-movie producer and sometime writer-director Joel Soisson’s second attempt to tell this tale and get audiences to watch it, after 2015’s “Buffalo Rider” (story by Chinnapat Kitichaivaranggoon). Perhaps the earlier version had a little more local color and a little less of the water buffalo race.

But what almost certainly separates the two films is Patra and Rugtawatr’s quiet, engaging presence at the center of it, and an action climax that is tough, beautifully moving and yet still kid-friendly.

Rating: unrated, fistfights, animal injuries, alcohol abuse

Cast: Lily Patra, Pan Rugtawatr, Chinnapat Kitichaivaranggoon, Phanida Suwansaad and Eoin O’Brien

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joel Soisson. A KMDG release.

Running time: 1:26

The fundamental problem with any action pic starring Jason Momoa is who can you credibly cast that one could reasonably expect to bring down the Man Mountain?

Making his character a mixed martial artist in “Sweet Girl” just compounds that problem.

It’s a nonsensical thriller whose RIDICULOUS third act twists finish the job that its “reduced expectations” opening moments set us up for.

Getting Momoa to wade through a couple of pages of voice-over narration is a serious misuse of his talents. He’s not a natural at it.

“As the years pass, we realize we are nothing more than the experiences that make us.”

OK, there’s the REAL problem. This dog is on the screenwriters — Philip Eisner, Scott Hurwitz and Will Staples.

It’s a topical tale about Big Pharma skullduggery and lives discarded in its eagerness to put profits over humans. In this case, the lengths such entities go to include hiring kill teams along with the usual buying and selling politicians.

Momoa plays Ray, a Pittsburgh husband and Dad who is losing his wife (Adria Arjona) to cancer. A life-saving experimental drug that was about to come out as a generic was halted.

Ray ends up on the phone on a CNN chat show involving the smug, callous Martin Shkreli clone (Justin Bartha) who made that decision.

“If my wife dies, it’s YOUR death sentence,” Ray threatens. “I will hunt you down and kill you with my bare hands.”

Yes, his wife dies, and no, the FBI doesn’t come knocking at his door. But a reporter calls, draws Ray into a meeting and that’s where he runs afoul of the first hitman (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) who logically shouldn’t be able to take even one Momoa haymaker. There will be others.

Ray and daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced of “Dora and the Lost City of Gold”) are on the lam in his rusty ’72 Cutlass, the most conspicuous get-away car in Western Pennsylvania.

The plot, which has run through three timeframes by this point (Ray and others training Rachel in MMA), unravels from there. Dad gets in fights, Rachel gets in the way, and then passes judgment on what it is they’re doing.

“So all the values you taught me growing up are out the window?”

Merced throws herself into this, despite the fight physics that precludes her character’s ability to clobber guys twice her size.

Before “Aquaman” made him the star that “Conan” did not, Momoa acquitted himself well in plenty of B-pictures like this — “Road to Paloma,” “Wolves,” “Braven” — and brute force roles in “Game of Thrones,” “Frontier” and the like on TV.

The occasional decently-staged fight or grace note here stands out, because there aren’t many. A story this badly constructed with dialogue this stilted and characters this thin is simply beneath Momoa, at this stage.

Filling your down time between “Aquaman” appearances, and “Dune,” with a movie scripted by the hack who did “Event Horizon” isn’t a smart play.

Rating: R, for strong violence, some profanity

Cast: Jason Momoa, Isabela Merced, Raza Jaffrey, Amy Brenneman, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Adria Arjona, Lex Scott Davis and Justin Bartha

Credits: Directed by Brian Andrew Mendoza, scripted by Philip Eisner and Gregg Hurwitz. A Netflix release.

Running time:

Maggie Q returns to “Nikita” territory with “The Protege,” playing a sexy and exotic assassin not unlike her best known TV role.

It’s her latest lead, part of a run that included “Fantasy Island,” “Death of Me” and “The Argument,” and she almost lets us see herself asking “Is this a step backwards?” in her tentative, blasé performance.

Anna was a Vietnamese orphan raised by the hired killer (Samuel L. Jackson) who found her after walking in late on a scene of mass slaughter. Bad men had killed her family. Little Anna (Eva Nugyen Thorsen) is the last person standing. And she’s holding one of their guns.

Decades later, she and her mentor are a cool, efficient machine, people who “find people who can’t be found,” and often as not, stab, shoot, strangle or kill them with a bomb.

But Moody (Jackson) is getting on up there, even if he claims “70 is the new 30.” And he’s got that tubercular cough that tells us, and anybody who’s ever been to the opera, he’s not long for this world.

And the merest hint of searching for a long-lost child of an infamous oligarch, the subject of an earlier contract, puts Moody in the bullseye and Anna on the lam and on the hunt. Killers are on her tail and must be dispatched. Cities and old “friends” must be visited and outfits must be changed, and often.

Anna’s search for yet another person who “can’t be found” takes her back to her native Vietnam, despite her serious misgivings.

“Our past is never what we left it.”

Michael Keaton plays Rembrandt, a mysterious “security” expert who knows way more about Anna and Moody than she should be comfortable with. He’s menacing — he may be involved with those who are after her — and he’s very flirtatious. She flirts back.

“How long you been doing this?”

“Long enough not to miss.“

Keaton brings a little sparkle to his scenes, but he and Maggie Q have little to no chemistry. The fact that he’s 27 years her senior may have something to do with it. The fight choreography has to hide a lot of stunt doubling accordingly.

Q is runway ready and model thin, and here she lets us see hesitation in every little flash of action. That’s not what we want from an action heroine.

Director Martin Campbell has Bond credits and a resume that stretches back to the ’70s. But his violent, humorless and predictable vengeance reinvention of Jackie Chan (“The Foreigner”) let us know he’s lost his edge and whatever he brings to the fights and shootouts here, he can’t make it all coalesce into a coherent film.

The script is straight-up formula, which suggests few surprises, but also that the component parts should have clicked better than they did. Jackson’s played this sort of guy to death, and can’t find any more fun in such characters. Not without Ryan Reynolds and Selma Hayek around. Keaton (and his stunt double) delivers the goods.

Robert Patrick shows up as the leader of a ‘Nam vets biker gang, in Vietnam, and is so colorful you kind of wish the movie had been more about him.

But our star, framed in many an alluring closeup, gives us nothing here. She’s almost expressionless, and however “true to life” that might be for a cold-blooded killer, that choice makes for a dull, uninvolving performance.

Q was pretty good in “Death of Me,” and “Fantasy Island” wasn’t really her fault. So it’s not that she can’t carry a movie. But she does a damn poor job of hiding her disinterest in this one.

Rating: R for strong and bloody violence, language, some sexual references and brief nudity

Cast: Maggie Q, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Patrick, Ray Feuron, Patrick Malahide and Michael Keaton.

Credits: Directed by Martin Campbell, script by Richard Wenk. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:49

This one streams on Shudder Sept.9, at the start of the Halloween horror season.

Comically flat, emotionally thin but not-entirely-charmless, “Out of My League” is a distinctly Italian take on young love shadowed by terminal illness.

Like more than one Italian film that I’ve taken in as we journey “around the world with Netflix,” it seems quaint, dated and retrograde by North American standards. Would Hollywood serve up a self-described “ugly duckling,” the butterfly who “stayed a caterpillar” heroine we see here, what with all the image-embracing and “shaming” eschewing going on?

But this is Turin, not Tampa. Marta (Ludovica Francesconi) is a perky, petite pixie, a 19 year-old orphaned as a toddler, resigned to her Plain Giada looks. And that’s not all she’s resigned to.

“The worst is yet to come,” she narrates (in dubbed English, or Italian with English subtitles).

She was orphaned at 3, and the two things her parents left her are the family home, which she’s finally taken possession of, and mucoviscidosis. That’s another name for cystic fibrosis. Her lungs fill with mucus under a whole raft of conditions, and her future looks circumscribed and short.

She may have two gay BFFs, one more than the rom-com minimum. And Federica (Gaja Masciale) and Jacopo (Jozef Gjura) may go everywhere with her, even joining her for medical appointments. But they’re not amused by her gallows humor.

“How long have I got?”

Her doctor’s assurances of “What matters is your attitude” seems like a cop out. Because Marta is bubbling over with attitude. Her job at the local food coop includes giving sexy, sensual readings of “Today’s specials” memos over the PA system, so sultry that men and boys are always shoving come-on notes under her door. She pins them to her office “wailing wall,” laughing at her one chance to be the one dismissing potential suitors.

Her BFFs encourage her to scan through Tinder, even as she admits “my sex appeal is best expressed on a keypad.

But there is the one guy, young, rich and handsome, that she has eye for. As there’s no sense waiting around, she proceeds to stalk, pursue and generally get in the sightlines of hunky, arrogant Arturo (Giuseppe Maggio).

There’s a hint of “Sixteen Candles” to this pursuit. The last thing Marta expects is for Arturo to notice her back and call her bluff.

First-time feature director Alice Filippi and screenwriters Roberto Proia and Michela Straniero shove in the usual assortment of “big gestures,” first date makeover montage, the “karoake” moment (he sings “Fly Me to the Moon” in fractured English) and obstacles to love and devotion. Those of course are topped with the with the easily-anticipated “She’s not telling him she’s sick” twist.

Everything we see feels contrived. Nothing we see or hear plays as “funny” and even “cute” seems beyond this flat romance’s reach.

When you can’t make anything funny out of the two gay 19 year-old roommates (they live with Marta in her house) haplessly trying to make a baby for reasons we can never fathom, you ruin the highs before the story’s arc shows you the lows — coughing jags, oxygen tubes up the nose, hospitals and the like.

I never bought into any of this. Maggio is a foot taller and hits the gym, and Francesconi’s best efforts can’t make the scripted Marta witty, funny or charming enough to merit a second glance.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, nudity, profanity

Cast: Ludovica Francesconi, Giuseppe Maggio, Gaja Masciale and Jozef Gjura.

Credits: Directed by Alice Filippi, scripted by Roberto Proia and Michela Straniero. An Eagle Films Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

Cary Elwes as a New York Times book critic? Will he survive his encounter with the grizzled, grumpy and soused old coot Caine plays in this Sept. 17 comedy?