Movie Nation

It’s always damned impressive to see Jonathan Rhys Meyers bring the same intensity he’s long been famous for in yet another “larger than life” role in the big screen.

Meyers gives a soulful turn as a benevolent despot from the glory years of the British Empire, and makes “Edge of the World” never less than fascinating drama, even if the “epic adventure” has lost its luster in a less imperialist/more enlightened age.

So say what you will about how out-of-date another “white man’s burden” tale is, how this sort of British history has moved beyond politically incorrect to something even less defensible in the grand march of social progress. The star makes the “hero” conflicted and riveting and maybe ahead of his time.

Meyers plays a Brit straight out of the pages of Conrad’s “Lord Jim” or Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King” in this screen biography of James Brooke, a man who became the Rajah of Sarawak on the gigantic island of Borneo in the mid-19th century. His life inspired both Conrad and Kipling, and as “The White Raj” — the working title of this film and other biographies of Brooke — his feats gave birth to every tale about a “civilized man” who comes in and takes over a “savage” land.

But as his Brooke, and those closest to him in this most foreign corner of the world, ask in the film, “Who will “civilize” whom?”

Brooke narrates his “Heart of Darkness” story, wondering “How long until they figure out that I’m a fraud?” — an Englishman born in India who “failed at school, at marriage, in the Army” now setting foot on Borneo on “a voyage of discovery, not conquest.”

Not that the two princes in charge of Sarawak, Mahkota (Bront Palarae) and the younger Badruddin (Samo Rafael) buy that. Not when Brooke and his cousin and Army friend, Crookshank (Dominic Monaghan) come ashore and make that claim.

Using “statecraft,” they finagle a journey up river, accompanied by those princes where they witness, firsthand, the “savagery” of the local “pirates” and the punishment meted out with impunity by both sides. This is a Muslim state, and beheadings are the preferred form of summary execution.

With the aid of his translator Subu and of the accomplished Chinese woman Madam Lin (Josie Ho), who appears to be an old flame, Brooke tries to avoid putting himself and the cannon on his personal schooner, the Royalist, at the disposal of the ruthless Mahkota, who is angling to better his chances to become the next Sultan of Brunei.

Prince Badruddin? He’s smitten with the man he calls “the white tiger.”

“So what do white men call it when princes lie to each other?”

“Diplomacy!”

As events conspire to envelope Brooke in the “war” that’s taking place in the jungle, events including his falling for the Princess Fatima (Atiqah Hasiholom), we see how he became Rajah and just what that led to.

Director Michael Hausman, best known for the Val Kilmer drama “Blind Horizon,” the experimental “A Study in Gravity,” and making music videos for JT and J. Lo, gives his movie a dense jungle, high-heat and humidity torpor, which tends to blunt the Rob Allyn screenplay’s narrative momentum.

A lot of complicated diplomacy, with Crookshank and a Royal Navy officer (Ralph Ineson) angling to add to The British Empire, which we’re reminded “the sun never sets on,” is muddied up for an action climax and a melodramatic finale.

And then there’s that whole ethnocentricism/implicit racism (embodied in Ineson’s fictional character) that cannot help but taint such a tale. British “discoveries” that led to “colonies” usually involved “conquest.” But not in this case.

Meyers is quite good at playing a man who seems loathe to take actions that he sees as imperialist, but loathe to avoid the entanglements that make those actions inevitable. His Brooke is a self-doubting, guilt-ridden sort who vows to snuff out slavery and head-hunting among the natives when he’s “given” his title and power. And his benevolence extends to those he keeps counsel with, two very smart and ahead-of-their-time outspoken women among them.

This makes for perfectly engrossing film that accurately mimics the way history treats James Brooke to this day — as heroic in a kind of “You take the good, you take the bad” arm’s length sort of way.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex

Cast: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Dominic Monaghan, Atiqah Hasiholom, Samo Rafael, Bront Palarae, Ralph Ineson and Jessie Ho

Credits Directed by Michael Haussman, script by Rob Allyn. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:44

In this busy, rushed, multi-tasking world we live in, who has time for a movie that will not get to the point, a point, ANY point?

So it is with “Open Your Eyes,” the latest film to use that well-worn title — latest, last and least among them.

It’s a movie about a screenwriter, and as many learned long before writer-director Greg A. Sager ever spit-polished a lens, there’s nothing more suspenseful and exciting than watching someone tap tap tap away at a keyboard, writing another of his “low budget B-horror movies without any discernible stars,” as Jason (Ry Barrett) eventually tells his neighbor Lisa (Joanna Saul).

We’re grateful they’re having a conversation, because the movie’s first half is mostly just Jason writing, hearing noises, seeing this oozing, crack walking down his wall and trying to lure a cat out of the ventilation ducts. The first eight minutes have no talking at all, and the odd “Jason, you a–h–e” over some screen writing blunder isn’t much improvement.

The dialogue, once there are two characters to share it?

“Hey.” “Hey.” You are home.” “I am.” “I was knocking…” “Hence, I answered.”

It doesn’t make a sharp turn to screwball, scintillating or Shakespeare. Sinister synthesizer music underscores just about everything.

Something is eating at Jason, and we’ve seen him shrink wrap a rug he’s rolled something — Someone? — up in the first scenes. What’s he not giving away? What’s his secret?

Lisa seems to both attract and trigger him. Who or what is she? A normal filmmaker would start to reveal some answers, but Sager’s a “Why give ANYthing away?” sort. For over an hour.

That big revelation is a slow-fizzle, too. And without any “action” or compelling performances or any interesting thing at all — near kitchen accidents don’t count — what remains is a coma-inducing-dull “low budget B-horror movie without any discernible stars.”

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Ry Barrett, Joanna Saul

Credits: Scripted and directed by Greg A, Sager. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:40

You’ve got to meet this dopey desert slasher picture on its own terms.

You have to be ready to laugh at the archetypes/stereotypes, the one-liners, the D-movie bravado.

“Why don’t you step out of there and fight me LIKE A WOMAN?”

And of course you’ve got to get the oral sex while driving pun in the title. Because “Road Head” isn’t just about decapitations in the desert southwest.

They all come looking for the wonders of “Isola Lake,” even though the sign pointing to it dates from the ’50s and the “road” is that in name only.

That’s where the first couple we see decide to tempt driving fate with a little under-the-seat-belt distraction. That’s when we hear the sound of heads being sliced-off, mercifully off-camera.

Enter gay Santa Monican couple Bryan (Clayton Farris) and Alex (Damian Joseph Quinn) and their just-got-over-a-breakup friend Stephanie (Elizabeth Grullon). They, too, have been misled by the “lake” in the place’s name. And they, too, must face The Executioner (Adam Nemet), clad in chain mail and feathers and wielding a broadsword.

At least these three have bitchy put-downs at their ready command for “that Medieval Faire reject” and his “toy sword from a nerd convention.” No, they will not go gentle into that beheaded night.

Grullon’s Stephanie is the stand-out here, snide and given to under-reactions when the worst happens, but rallying to fierceness when the chips are down.

More amusing than militant Alex figures he can compliment his way out of a jam. “I love your outfit!”

There’s a chase, a pause for an anti-patriarchy, control-my-own body rant and more bloody almost-funny violence than you can shake a blood squib at.

And if it all didn’t end a lot more unpleasantly than it begins — sometimes “tripping up expectations” beheads your movie, kids — this might be a fun genre dive, a “Rubber” or “House of 1000 Corpses” with less carnage and more comedy.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual situations, pot use and profanity

Cast: Elizabeth Grullon, Damian Joseph Quinn, Clayton Farris, Clay Acker, Adam Nemet

Credits: Directed by David Del Rio, script by Justin Xavier. A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:24

Bulky, tattooed goons beat up “foreigners” and show up at protests, snapping cell-phone photos, sneering, intimidating, just hoping to start a riot.

And the protesters have reason to wonder if the sometimes-passive cops aren’t on the thugs’ side.

Chanting “We are PEACEful, what are YOU?” doesn’t seem to help.

So some of them take to donning black hoodies and masks, “escalating” things in a fraught, divided country at a perilous moment.

“And Tomorrow the Entire World” is a footsoldiers’ eye view of a Big Picture movement, a thriller set against the clash of anti-fascists against fascists in a country more sensitive than most about just what rule-by-thuggery right wing authoritarianism leads to. This German story, when it works, is fraught with the tension young people there recognize as the stakes in this struggle.

In a part of the world that has safeguards against the “slow motion coup” of racist voter suppression of violent, dogmatic and cultish minority political movements, the right resorts to more direct violence to get its authoritarian way.

And as an opening title (voiced-over, as well) reminds viewers, their constitution underscores the right and duty to “resist those in society who seek to abolish the constitutional order.”

That is the group P81’s guiding principle. And that’s why Luisa, played by Mala Emde, has talked her law school pal Batte (Luisa-Céline Gaffron) into introducing her to them. They’re a small commune, united in their politics, their youth and their passion, showing up to confront fascist rallies and lend their support to other groups protesting the Reich-minded right, which never really went away after a World War was fought to exterminate it.

Luisa’s motives are unclear, but her sense of acceptable risk is in an instant. At a rally where skinheads start attacking protesters, she saves Batte from an assault by taking her assailant’s dropped phone.

He gives chase and assaults her, and only the intervention of Alfa (Noah Saavedra) saves her. She is attracted to the dashing king of “escalation,” and smart enough to insist that they dig into this phone and figure out what the other side is planning.

We can’t say that’s when Luisa’s radicalization begins, because plainly she’s already there. The early clues about her background transcend the “bored rich girl” (from the country) stereotype, and make her mystery all the more fascinating.

What is it about her baronial dad, their weekend hunting club events and her family’s politics and/or history that brought her here?

And will she be the cliche we suspect her to be, falling for the hunky anarchist who upsets the apple cart of “peaceful” P81 with vandalism, ambush assaults and the like?

Emde, who has played Anne Frank on German TV, makes a compelling tour guide into this world of planned protests and counter-protests, of disguises and escape routes to get past road blocks so that P81’s outliers can stymie the racists’ plans which Luisa’s stolen cell phone has given them access to.

You may find yourself, here and there, yelling at the damned TV, “Stupid stupid STUPID move” at some misjudgment in the making. But co-writer and director Julia von Heinz trips up expectations and delivers surprises, even if the film’s energy and forward momentum flag in the second act.

One thing the filmmaker has no control over is how Netflix cast the English-speakers to dub the German dialogue into English. The Nazis sound like folk-music singing hippies, or high school guidance counselors.

Thank heavens the film reverts to the original German for their actual anti-Semitic, foreigner “exterminating” sing-alongs. Even the Germans know theirs is a language that sounds angry, villainous and oppressive. So do the Proud Boys and assorted American Nazi groups, which adopt German phrases in addition to Nazi German iconography to inspire the faithful.

Other parts of the world might not have codified and institutionalized the right-left conflict to the degree that Europe in general and Germany in particular have (“right wing” and “left wing” are 19th century French inventions). But “And Tomorrow the Entire World” achieves a kind of universality in its messaging, its warnings about “escalation” and the historical consequences of shying away from that escalation.

People who have been brainwashed into “anti-fa is the REAL threat” won’t like it. But then again, they’ve never bothered to look up the what the “fa” part stands for.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, sex

Cast: Mala Emde, Noah Saavedra, Tonio Schneider, Luisa-Céline Gaffron and Andreas Lust

Credits: Directed by Julia von Heinz, script by John Quester and Julia von Heinz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51

Cape Canaveral National Cemetery at dawn.

This version of the true story of Sir James Brooke, who explored Borneo and then set up his own kingdom there, stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Dominic Monaghan and opens June 21. https://youtu.be/ycgW26bzjq0

“Censor” is a horror satire about one of those intrepid, iron-stomached bureaucrats of the British Board of Film Classification, a woman who brings a zeal “to protect people” to her job in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

It’s the mid-80s, and the Fleet Street press and the public are in an uproar over the invasion of “video nasties,” extreme horror that was making its way around the censors, into stores and into the hands of children and the criminally suggestible.

Enid Baines sees herself as the last line of defense against a sea of sadistic blood and gore, movies that the public is sure are leading to imitation by the nation’s most heinous criminals.

Niamh Algar, of “Calm With Horses” and “Wrath of Man,” plays the censor her colleagues label “Little Miss Perfect.” She takes notes, watches and rewatches scenes, pushes back against the permissive posh (Nicholas Burns) they usually pair her with, a snob who dismisses this disemboweling or that rape as “nothing” or worse yet, “art.”

Enid is a loner, pretty enough to constantly be hit on by men, including the creepy producer Doug Smart (Michael Smiley, wonderfully oily) who’s always trying to “get a 15” (approval for watching by ages 15-and-up) rating for the sordid B-movies he puts out. Enid is immune to everyone’s charms.

Because Enid is focused on the work, driven by a trauma of childhood to treat her job with a missionary’s zeal. We learn about that at pretty much the same time that it all goes wrong. There’s a gruesome crime and the press ties it to a movie that Enid “let in” (with edits).

Somehow, they know not-quite-anonymous censor approved this particular “nasty,” so the harassing phone calls and scrums with the pushy press at her door begin.

That stress is the perfect thing to plunge her into an obsession over a horror actress (Sophia La Porta) who looks too familiar, whose movies seems to echo the great tragedy of Enid’s guilt-ridden childhood.

The Irish Algar is at her most buttoned-down here, hiding the “pretty” with “prim” and not wholly succeeding. She’s got standards — insisting, like Hitchcock, that “somethings should be left to the imagination.”

Eye gougings and rapes, axe murders and “tug of war over his intestines” are but some of the lines Enid draws in the sand.

But Algar, as she’s proven in film and on TV (“Raised by Wolves,” “Pure” and “The Virtues”), is adept at both overtly demonstrating a character’s edge and baggage, or leaving the merest suggestion of it in her performance.

“Censor” is a slight and obvious slasher film whose satiric points are both slapped-down and endorsed. Maybe violent cinema is twisting our heroine just as she worries it is twisting the public.

But the stern star and fascinating if limited peek into the world of ratings, even in a period piece set in a more conservative time, makes “Censor” a horror title well worth a look, “video nasties” included.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic horror violence

Cast: Niamh Algar, Michael Smiley, Clare Perkins, Sophia La Porta and Adrian Schiller

Credits: Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond, script by Prano Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:24

An Antoine Fuqua take on an action tale with sci Fi underpinnings. June 10 on Paramount +.

It takes a while, a good overlong while, for the Thai thriller “Ghost Lab” to get going. But man, once it’s on its feet, saddle up for a fun ride. Hair raising moments, touches of pathos, gonzo violence, decent effects and the occasional laugh.

Director and co-writer Paween Purijitpanya flirts with “Flatliners” and “Ghost” in this Around the World with Netflix tale of two surgical residents at a Thai hospital who resolve to prove “that ghosts are real.”

Wee and Gla have been close friends since med school. Wee ((Thanapob Leeratanakajorn) is the sad, nerdy and serious one, doting over his dying, hospitalized mother. Gla (Paris Intarakomalyas) is the handsome practical joker, always pranking Wee with fake “ghost” frights.”

But Gla has a secret. He’s been “researching” ghosts ever since childhood, when he was sure he saw his dad shortly after his father’s death. He’s traveled to Asia’s great haunts, even that cursed “Suicide Forest” in Japan. He’s interviewed scores of people with ghost sighting stories.

Although he hasn’t seen one since the night he saw his father, Gla is sure they can “prove ghosts are real.” Wee, facing his mother’s impending death, signs on and the two of them — young men of science — start working the problem.

First question, “How can ghosts be real?” Physics isn’t much help. Are ghosts “photons” or “energy?”

But as they question how ghosts manifest themselves, why they would and to whom, they figure they can “group” ghosts and perhaps make some progress.

Wouldn’t you know it, right after swapping jokes with nurses about a corpse that came in, burnt to a crisp, Wee and Gla see the victim (digital, creaky stop-motion) manifest itself in the dark of the break room.

There’s CCTV video from all around the hospital showing filing cabinets opening, chairs sliding across the floor and wheelchairs navigating empty hallways. There’s lots of death in hospitals. The ghost-hunting duo figure they’re onto something, especially when they stumble into a “dance of the wheelchairs” in one gloomy corner of the basement.

How to get ghosts to manifest themselves in ways that allow others to see, audiences to be convinced and science to accept a research paper? Their “solutions” to that quandary take up the latter half of the film.

The hair-raising moments come in underlit scenes of empty with objects moving under their own power. The pathos comes from death and loss as these callous “cutters” face the limits of their callousness, and make ridiculous leaps to “prove” their point.

And the laughs burst out of the blasts of profanity at each gobsmacked “Eureka” moment of discovery.

The dialogue is largely corny, and the “Ghost” moments, meant to tug at the heartstrings, are few. As I said, we spend the lumbering first act and part of the second hearing “I think I was born to prove to the world that ghosts exist,” and the like.

But after that patience-testing/bar-lowering first half, I was quite impressed by the second. Sure, it’s a mixed-bag, sentimental and soft even as the story contrives to put the friends at odds, with deadly consequences. But “Ghost Lab” has flashes of style and wit that suggest we’ll be hearing more from this filmmaker, and that it could be fun.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity, suicide

Cast: Thanapob Leeratanakajorn, Paris Intarakomalyas and Nuttanicha Dungwattanawa

Credits: Directed by Paween Purijitpanya script by Paween Purijitpanya, Vasudhorn Piyaromna, Tossaphon Riantong. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

Ok, who hasn’t dreamed dark thoughts about some social media troll who’s made disgusting, cruel or hateful comments about something you’ve said, shared or posted?

No one, right? There’s something very satisfying about the thought that some thinks-he-or-she-is-anonymous online troll realizing, with shock, that they aren’t protected from their ugly, sometimes violent opinions by “anonymity” just before they catch a bellyful of shotgun pellets.

Just me? Never mind. If you make your living opinion writing, it’s a hazard of the trade, just as much as the always trolling trolls.

“The Columnist” is a sick and twisted journalist’s revenge fantasy from Holland, a tale of an embattled opinion writer (Katja Herbers) who ignores the advice that many share and few are willing to stick to.

“Don’t read the comments,” (in Dutch, with English subtitles). “NEVER read the comments.

She lies awake at night over the hate mail. And after say, 470-too-many “Nazi” and “whore” and “pedophile” and worse shots, she identifies such a troll and knocks him off the roof, a troll who will troll no more.

Is this DARK? Oh my stars and garters, yes.

Herbers, of “Westworld,” plays Femke Boot, a single mom who drives a Prius, but like many of her environmentally-aware countrymen, prefers a bike. She takes stands in her newspaper, “Volksrant,” and takes the hits.

Only they don’t roll off her back. Femke goes on TV to plead, “Look, can’t we just have different opinions and be nice about it?” As if that was ever the case.

Her debater that night is a horror writer whose pen name is Steven Dood (“Steven Death”), an eye-linered, Satanic-goateed success at what Femke herself can’t get a grip on. She has a book deal and first-time-novelist “writer’s block.”

Her ways of shedding that and getting a start on her book? Sleep with Steven Dood, starting a relationship with him. And she starts taking out the SOBs who fill up the comments on anything she writes with the Dutch word that — in English — rhymes with “runt.”

An extra wrinkle? Her teen daughter (Claire Poro) is a journalist at her school newspaper fighting a profane (and funny) war over “free speech” with the school headmaster (Harry van Rijthoven). As Femke, who makes her living exercising her right to free speech, either ambushes or directly confronts and then kills her online tormenters for exercising their version of the same thing, she’s trying to support her kid and ignore her own hypocrisy.

“They’re only words,” the kid shrugs. “Words can still hurt,” murderess mom rationalizes.

The script here limits the pre-murder accusations and debates that Femke gets into with her attackers, choosing instead to leap right into the revenge killings. That robs the film of any gravitas and of much of its political subtext. She’s a woman writing on things that seem to enrage men, some of whom have Trump photos on their Facebook pages. But we don’t really see translated versions of the writing that sets them off.

Nor are those hateful comments, sampled generously on the screen, translated from Dutch. That’s a big blunder, even if we kind of get the gist.

I was reminded of the dark Canadian comedy “The Last Supper,” one of Ron Perlman’s finest films. In that, “liberals” decide to trap and execute the Rush Limbaugh of their nightmares, a corrosive conservative talk show host played by Perlman. That film managed to make the hypocrisy of non-violent people taking violent action over someone swaying public opinion against them by exercising his free speech both more amusing and dispiriting, in terms of abandoning one’s core principles.

“The Columnist” isn’t that subtle and doesn’t manage that finesse.

Still, Herbers makes a fine Fury, rarely second-guessing her “solution” to this outrage and injustice that’s keeping her up at night. And if you’ve ever been tempted to get even with some online tormentor with more than wit and the English language as a blunt instrument, here’s a movie that’ll help convince you otherwise.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Katja Herbers, Bram van der Kelen, Claire Poro and Harry van Rijthoven

Credits: Directed by Ivo van Art, script by Daan Windhorst. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:24