Movie Nation

The effect is more jarring than subtle, and it instantly sets “Black Widow” apart from your average Marvel comic book action movie.

We aren’t watching digital superheroes brawl in a blur of digital effects, digital backgrounds and the like.

There’s still a lot of special effects trickery, digitized aircraft and environments, augmented stunts and “Bugs Bunny Physics” in the leaps, tumbles and what-not our heroes and villains carry out and somehow survive.

But when Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh and Rachel Weisz and David Harbour go at it with legions of “widows” and other minions of the villainous Dreyko (Ray Winstone), including a monstrous “secret weapon” whom James Bond fans will recognize, they’re going at it. As in, there’s not just a fight choreographer (James Young) here. There’s a vast team of choreographers, stunt folks and trainers and using them gives the movie a visual coherence that most Marvel movies and every Transformers film lack.

The stars and their stunt doubles make “Black Widow” the most tactile of any Marvel movie. Punches land, actresses tumble, stunt-doubles execute twisty spins and kicks. “Super” heroics abound, but as Natasha Romanov’s “sister” Yelena cracks, unlike “god from space” (Thor), they’re going to need “Ibuprofen” when all is said and done.

We’ve been watching trailers to this movie for YEARS, it seems, as the pandemic held up the release. Fortunately, the only stuff those trailers give away is the “family” dynamic that Black Widow Natasha grew up in, cute “reunion” quarreling, and a few moments where our heroine strikes her “ridiculous (hair-flipping super-heroine) pose” and is thus “a total poseur,” or so says her little sister.

“Black Widow” begins in 1995 as the “family” — two young daughters played by Ever Anderson (Milla Jovovich’s kid) and Violet McGraw — are yanked from their Ohio home by their sleeper-agent parents (Harbour and Weiss).

Their boss (Winstone, in a big Stalin mustache and wig) has summoned them home as their covers are “blown” and Feds and S.H.I.E.L.D are hot on their trail.

But that “escape” is just the beginning of the girls’ “nightmare.” Their “parents” weren’t real parents. And in scenes ripped straight from the border camps imagery of America’s ongoing immigration debate, the girls — who aren’t real sisters — are heartlessly hurled into a “system” with no family.

They’re trained to become Black Widows, heartless post-Soviet Russian assassins.

In 2016, Natasha is laying low during “the Avengers getting divorced” timeline, but Yelena’s still on the job for Vladimir, murdering who she’s told, fetching vials of a red gas that Dreykov needs.

“Dad?” He’s in prison, the onetime “Red Guardian” bragging about his super-soldier exploits as he lays waste to every would-be arm wrestling opponent. “Mom?” She’s doing the Devil’s work somewhere else.

Time for “reunion” and “revenge!”

This has been a year where the go-to action film analogy has been “The Roger Moore James Bond” films, the lighter, jokier pictures in that long-running franchise. I know. I get Google alerts every time some wag sees “Roger Moore as Bond” in “Hit Man’s Wife’s Bodyguard” or “F9” or what have you.

Aussie director Cate Shortland (she did “Lore” and “The Berlin Syndrome”) and screenwriter Eric Pearson lean into that, showing the 1995 family catching “Moonraker” on TV, using a little “Moonraker” music at one point.

The tone is light, although the finished product isn’t remotely as funny as the laugh-out-loud jokey Joss Whedon “Avengers” movies.

But the casting is spot on. Finding two shortish actresses of great skill to pass for Natasha’s mother-and-sister, it’d be hard to top the Oscar winning Weisz (“The Constant Gardener”) and Oscar-nominated Pugh.

The British Pugh and American Johansson click in ways you’d never expect. And that’ll be handy, as they’re going up against “a man who commands the very will of others.”

That whole “free will” subtext, a new concept to our Russian anti-heroes, gets kind of lost in the mix. The “today’s politics” that come up in montages (reminding SOME people that Putin is still The Enemy) is fuzzy. The picture reaches its climax, stuffs in a coda to get us back into the Avengers timeline, and then adds a TV tie-in after the credits.

Marvel selling Marvel never ends.

But the stars make it a fun ride, even when the action goes “Roger Moore as Bond” goofy, even when Harbour is hitting a Russian-accented punchline entirely too hard, and even when Yelena relents and strikes her own “super hero pose.”

MPA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence/action, some language and thematic material

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, Rachel Weisz, David Harbour, O-T Fagbenle, William Hurt and Ray Winstone.

Credits: Directed by Cate Shortland script by Eric Pearson, based on the Marvel Comics. A Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 2:13

A pretty bad horror comedy briefly takes a turn for the better when its biggest “name” makes his “star entrance.”

“Let Us In” is advertised as a “Candyman/Slenderman” take on the “black-eyed kids” urban legend — pale, otherworldly children and teens who make dead-eyed/deadpan appearances before someone only to have them disappear or die.

Maybe it spun out of earlier horror movies like “Children of the Damned,” but now it’s totally a mythic “thing,” and a worldwide phenomenon.

But the movie is a tween-friendly goof on that legend. Kids are disappearing, a quartet of creepers dressed in black hoodies are to blame and our tween leads (Makenzie Moss and O’Neill Monahan) are playing with a radio transceiver, trying to contact aliens.

It’s the sort of film where “I think I just sharted” and “Emily, I’m quaking” and “I’ll even let you dress me up like a girl” and these “black-eyed kids” “smell really bad, like a mixture of really old cheese and butt” dominate the dialogue.

Even the black-eyed kids, whose go-to line for every victim is the perfectly-understated “Will you let us in?” break character and blurt out a deadpan “ouchie” if a victim dares to fight back.

So “Creepy, much?” No. Not at all.

But then our intrepid kid-investigators get a tip. They visit Mean Mr. Munch, the scariest old man in town. The well-turned-out recluse might have some expertise in the matter. And when they encounter him, he chills the giggly “You don’t have to be a little beyotch about it” right out of them.

“We appreciate you ‘letting us in.'”

The camera closes in tight on Tobin Bell, the original/accept-no-substitute “Jigsaw.”

“That supposed to be a joke?”

Filmmaker Craig Moss couldn’t afford Bell for long, and the movie he slaps up around this well-written and acted “explanation” scene is barely more than mediocre — attempted cuteness, everybody underreacting to a town-wide tragedy, figuring out how to “fight back” (lame and obvious), slinging slang and cracking wise.

The comedy isn’t funny enough to justify taking that tack and the would-be-scares are wholly undercut by the tone they settled on. Older viewers might be reminded of Chevy Chase’s Land Shark “Saturday Night Live” bits in the later “Let us in” demands of the black-eyed kids.

I kept expecting to hear “CANDYgram…”

But Bell classes up the joint enough to shame director and co-writer Craig Moss (the “Bad Ass” movies) into wishing he’d at least kept his black-eyed children as serious as Bell. “Deadpan” doesn’t work when your scary, monstrous villains let us in on their smirk.

MPA Rating: unrated, a little profanity

Cast: Makenzie Moss, Sadie Stanley, Siena Agudong, O’Neill Monahan, Conor Husting and Tobin Bell.

Credits: Directed by Craig Moss, script by Joe Callero and Craig Moss. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:23

The technical approach to this one has me intrigued. Might this appeal to the tiny the target audience? I think it might. September 17 we find out. https://youtu.be/4zH5iYM4wJo

“The House of Flowers: The Movie,” might have been a sequel that’s a fun introduction to the ground-breaking Netflix series about a big, affluent and very dysfunctional Mexico City family that owns a flower shop and a gay cabaret both named “The House of Flowers (La casa de las flores).”

Or it could have been a fond send-off, with series creator (and “Movie” writer-director) Manolo Caro tying up loose ends, unleashing the members of the de La Mora clan on their foes, rivals, ex-lovers and hapless bystanders one last sentimental time.

It doesn’t quite manage either, although the latter was more Caro’s aim.

The film is an exceptionally messy and character-cluttered rush with few laughs among its various players’ reprising their Greatest (Character Trait) Hits. The squishy closing credits coda feels like an apology, a promise or a threat, depending on how you take the preceding movie.

“Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.”

That’s a John Lennon quote made famous by “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” and it fits the finale if you’re of a mind that Caro will make MORE sequels. But it doesn’t do justice to the Almodóvar-does-a-telenovela gender-bending spoof that Caro cooked up for three seasons on Netflix.

The hook here is that beloved nanny/housekeeper Delia (Norma Angélica) is dying, and only Paulina de la Mora (Cecilia Suárez) knows. But she will keep Delia’s secret and somehow find a way to fulfill Delia’s dying wish, that a “treasure” she left buried in the walls of the de la Mora mansion, which they’ve now sold, be recovered.

For that Paulina will need the help of pretty and “experienced” sister Elena (Aislinn Derbez) and hapless and gay brother Julián (Dario Yazbek Bernal) and a parade of other family members, none of whom are supposed to know Delia’s health.

And they’ll need the help of “the girls,” the quartet of muscular transgender employees/friends who know how to get a dirty job done — in this case, knocking a hole in a wall.

Then there’s the matter of proving who killed their beloved Patricio (Christian Chávez). They’ll trick the suspect into confession. They’ll manage that as they’re also breaking in and fetching that “treasure.”

This caper will be a part of this one long evening where they crack the “Mission: Impossible” level security in their former house, elude guards who know the infamous family on sight, infiltrate and half-wreck a Jewish wedding, interrupting a cheating groom mid-coitus and later interfere with a younger member of the clan’s “first time.”

Soap operatic confrontations mix with low farce predicaments, the family dynamic is renewed — the can-do sister, the screw-up brother, the something-in-between other sister. There’s a pause for a song or two, one warbled from the grave.

As bizarre and frenetic as it all is, the comedy isn’t played broadly. Well, not THAT broadly.

“Everyone get in the closet,” (in Spanish with English subtitles). “What? AGAIN?”

It’s not funny enough to lure new viewers to the still-streaming series (2018-2020), although it gives you hints about what made it funny and why it was a hit.

“Why do rich people in Mexico have the worst taste?” Paulina wonders, peeking in a window of the house THEY used to over-decorate, now over-decorated by another. “Your fly is undone” is the extreme extreme in the comedy.

One gets the impression Caro loves the series and the characters, but that he’s done with them. So he’ll take Netflix’s money, pay the cast and let most everybody take one more bow.

He just didn’t wrangle a script that does any of them or his creation justice.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, sex, profanity

Cast Cecilia Suárez, Aislinn Derbez, Dario Yazbek Bernal, Norma Angélica, David Ostrosky, Isabel Burr and Christian Chávez

Credits: Scripted and directed by Manolo Caro. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

This one has the makings of the year’s biggest crowd pleaser, with Oscar winner Marlee Matlin as the mom, Emilia Jones as the New England fishing family daughter who loves to sing and — of all people — Eugenio Derbez — as the singing coach/teacher who recognizes our heroine’s gift.

“Coda” comes to Apple TV+ August 13.

One quick way to depress yourself about the state of ethics in medicine is to Google the phase “organ donation scandal.” Germany to China, Bulgaria to India, this life-and-death access to transplantable organs has proven as easy to corrupt as dramatists long warned us.

One of those plumbing the depths of this medical, moral and financial dilemma was the veteran TV writer and playwright Mark St. Germain. Putting his play “The God Dilemma” on the screen attracted a good, if not top box office cast who deliver brilliant flashes of outrage and moments of pathos in writer-director Austin Stark’s revealing, moving and quietly gripping film.

Kelsey Grammer has his best role since “Frasier” as a conflicted, brooding heart surgeon who sits on such a committee at New York’s St. Augustine Hospital. Sitting with Dr. Boxer, passing judgment on who might be the best candidate for such transplants are testy Dr. Wilkes (Patricia R. Floyd), a sarcastic psychologist (Peter Kim) and the chief of medicine (Janeane Garofalo).

And on the day we’re introduced to this sage and sometimes impassioned debate on who has “the best chance for success,” “a good support system,” “lifestyle” (exercise, diet, drug-free), and who is otherwise “worthy” of a new heart is the new addition to the committee, a young cardiac surgeon who just got out of Dr. Boxer’s bed — Dr. Jordan Taylor (Julia Stiles). Oh, and this priest (Colman Domingo) shows up “representing the board.

The situation set up here is soap operatic, and the ticking clock they face (“Organ Expiration: 50 minutes” graphics) adds to that TV medical drama feel of it all. On top of all that, the hospital has had transplant failures, has lost its A-rated standing and is gambling, yet again, by implanting a heart into an older woman whose worthiness is more empathy than science based.

And then there’s the day’s big “new” decision, reshuffling the list of candidates based on their medical progress or decline.

The playboy son of a wealthy hospital benefactor (Dan Hedaya) might “move up in status” — if he’s drug free, if the girlfriend (Elizabeth Masucci) admitted with him verifies that the party boy is clean. A doorman and a rich old widow are also under reconsideration.

Dr. Boxer doesn’t think Dr. Taylor is “cut out for this,” and she does seem a tad idealistic about what they’re doing, “playing God.”

“I’ll be the first to step aside when God walks in here and votes,” Boxer growls.

The deliberations are never easy, the notion that “We could add years” to this doorman or that cranky old widow’s life, drug tests to evaluate, and then “other” considerations that come in — a $25 million “grant” that is dangled.

Also soap operatic, as is the pairing with Grammer with the much-younger Stiles.

But the story ably shifts back and forth between two timelines, the 2014 committee meeting that is Taylor’s first day voting on those decisions, and “seven years later,” when Dr. Boxer is on the verge of an animal-based xenotransplantation solution to the “worldwide organ shortage.”

Events in one timeline prefigure the other, and the ethical choices bandied about “then” have repercussions “now.” Have characters altered their views or seen their ethics soften?

Melodramatic? Sure. But most of the story threads are quite engrossing and sometimes touching. The tale is framed in the accident that makes a young man’s heart available, young lovers looking at the stars and planning for a future that one of them will never live to see.

Writer-director Stark keeps the histrionics to a minimum, and still almost everyone has her or his “moment” and makes the most of it. Stiles, the standout in the cast is impressive as always, but Garofalo and Grammer are the most surprising, giving us beautiful, nuanced moments of pained moral compromise or quiet desperation.

“The God Committee” is the sort of solid drama you get when actors you think you know are gifted with a script they can sink their teeth into, and make the most of their moment to shine.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, graphic surgical scenes, smoking

Cast: Kelsey Grammer, Julia Stiles, Janeane Garofalo, Colman Domingo, Patricia R. Floyd, Peter Kim and Dan Hedaya

Credits: Scripted and directed by Austin Stark, based on the play by Mark St. Germain. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:39

This looks good, and “Downeast,” a festival favorite, opens July 13.

“Skinwalker” is a too-talkative walking-corpse of a Western horror tale from the auteur who churned out “Eminence Hill” and “The Covenant.”

A couple of horseless cowboys (Nathaniel Burns and director Robert Conway) stumble across a Native American grave. The one with the “Duck Dynasty” beard (Burns) takes a death totem from the grave. And all sorts of living dead revenge is unleashed.

Desperados and lawmen and Mormons pay the price for this desecration.

The sets suffice, in a bare bones of the day way, and nothing interesting is done with the Arizona locations of this sleepwalk of a movie.

The acting’s pretty stiff, the violence is ugly enough, and right on the edge of random. The totem and its first “victim” take separate paths and lead whoever each encounters into the grave, thanks to the shapeshifting (not really) “Skinwalker.”

But that talking, all the anachronisms mixed with pale-imitation-of-“True Grit” dialogue and portentous speechifying.

“She can feign a grace and composure of the prim and proper. But she’s the SERPENT.” And this was but a drop of her venom!”

Dang, Marshal. Where’d you learn to talk so purty?

There’s gunslinger moralizing at Mormon “plural marriage.”

“You got a problem with the way you live our lives, outlaw?”

Eva Hamilton (“Ruin Me”) plays the saucy consort of an outlaw. No sense trying to reason with “the Serpent.”

“Blow it out your backside, Marshal!”

Of course, all that fine talk is no substitute for pacing. This corpse is dead on its feet.

Cast: Eva Hamilton, Cameron Kotecki, Amelia Haberman, Nathaniel Burns

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Conway. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:34

“The Holy Game” sets out to give the Catholic Church a little image burnishing by showing how its stages a civil, sportsmanlike soccer matches among the various seminaries and schools of Rome, in and around Vatican City.

It’s called The Clericus Cup, a mini “World Cup” for pre-ordination seminarians and some of their teachers and mentors, playing on behalf of Pontifical Urban College, North American College’s Martyrs, Mater Ecclessiae, Redemptoris Mater, schools filled with players from five continents and 66 nations.

One young priest compares it to the Quidditch World Cup of the “Harry Potter” novels. Considering the names of the colleges and teams, it’s no wonder than analogy caught on.

But as we meet a sampling of the player/seminarians, see practices and watch soccer matches (not awful) play out, as we get a glimpse of the lives these men lead in their pursuit of a life of “self sacrifice” that is “not a job, a vocation,” taking vows of poverty and chastity as they talk about “putting all their trust in God,” the Elephant in the room is poking his nose over our shoulders, and theirs.

For most of the people he’s met after announcing his choice of vocations, Grayson Heenan says, “The only press they’ve heard about the Catholic Church is negative.” That’s ongoing and no, he doesn’t know what to say to that.

Some of the men speak of the lives they might have led and we get a hint of regrets. Their teachers, directors of colleges, talk about pursuing “happiness…that goes beyond fame and glory and money,” a student speaks of the “sacrifice for the greater good.”

Still others ponder why there are pedophiles in the priesthood, and TV news coverage shows TV anchors and Catholics around the world reacting to the shocking crimes the church has covered up.

And then, sure enough, one of the priests we’ve seen on camera, waxing lyrical about the calling and the work, is exposed as one of “those” priests. Not an usher-boy molester, but just a “celibate” who fathered children post-ordination.

Of course this hijacks the movie, a light treatment of the final years of a priest’s education, showing us how they’re trained to give the last rites in hospitals, for instance, and setting an example of how futbol should be played (they give out “blue cards” as penalties, in which the offending player goes to the sideline and “spiritually reflects” on what he’s done).

Which begs the question, “When the whole point of your movie is undercut, what should a filmmaker do?” Was there a way to re-cut it, re-direct the focus and make this somehow worthwhile, at least in a “slice of life about the priesthood today” sense?

No. Directors Brent Hodge and Chris Kelly were at a loss about what to do, and cannot “finesse” that grenade that went off in their footage. The picture is only 67 minutes long, making you wonder what had to be left out as they scrambled to “pivot” and take in the film’s new reality. The version I watched had “rights” clearance issues, people whom they talked to who might not agree to appear in the final cut.

They probably should have accepted that they’d wasted resources, time and effort on a movie that was never going to work, even at the truncated 67 minutes this one comes in at.

“The Holy Game” just leaves us wondering if maybe the sexually problematic Catholic Church should take off the cleats, stop moralizing about others and playing politics and take a red card. Sit down and shut up until they’ve fixed their catastrophic, faith-killing, life-shattering problems.

And Gravitas Ventures? When did you guys lose the judgement that should tell you when a lightweight “Vatican clerical students play soccer” doc is rendered unfit to release?

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Grayson Heenan, Mike Zimmerman, Eric Atta Gyasi, Father Oscar Turrion, Felice Alborghetti

Credits: Directed by Brent Hodge and Chris Kelly. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:07