Movie Nation

The tug of the old life struggles with the promise of the new in “Nakom,” a neorealist Ghanian drama made by a couple of American filmmakers.

The debut feature of co-directors Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman may tell a classic “How’ll you keep’em down on the farm after they’ve seen the lights of the big city?” tale. But the details they include and the surprising places they take it make it a novel and richly-rewarding film experience.

Iddrisu, played by Jacob Ayanaba, is a smart 20something college student thriving in teeming Kumasi. He’s acing his classes, even has a city girlfriend. And then his sister calls. Their father has died.

“Come back to Nakom.”

Iddrisi is the eldest, the favored son who got to go away to college. Returning to his village he gets a quick lesson in what it took to put him in that position, and what is expected of him now.

Dad went into debt with his brother, Uncle Napoleon (Thomas Kulidu), a reasonable man with many cows. But he expects to be reimbursed for the bull he sold to finance his nephew’s education.

There’s an extended family led by Senior Mother (Justina Kulidu) who welcome him back and insist “The house is yours, now.”

But the house is just a big hut. There’s no running water, no in-house electricity. His next-oldest brother Kamal (Abdul Aziz) is an embittered layabout. His smart little sister Damata (Grace Ayariga) would love to go to college, but grimly faces a future of being “married off to one of these village boys.” Littlest brother Hassan is already skipping school, doomed to be trapped here if no adult takes on the job of riding his lazy behind.

There’s a much younger “junior mother” (Shetu Musah), as African-Islamic polygamy is practiced here. And that creates all sorts of tensions in the mourning ritual.

They’ve also taken in teen Fatima (Esther Issaca), the granddaughter of Uncle Napoleon. She’s treated as a servant.

And there was a drought the previous year. Will later, shorter rainy seasons thanks to climate change let them grow enough onions and millet to get by, pay their debts and keep Iddrisa in school?

Oh, and then there’s the Christian first love (Felicia Atampuri) he left behind when he left for college.

That stricken look permanently painted across Iddrisu’s face isn’t just from mourning. He’s overwhelmed, despairing of ever getting back to his “life.”

His “I’ll leave it to the women” to get this place on its feet is a delusion.

“Is it only you, or are all men this blind?”

His uncle’s nagging “Don’t disappoint me,” his mother is badgering him “Who will watch over this house?” The sage Chief (James Azure) has practical advice, but a tendency to speak in homilies.

“They say when a man dances, the drums are beating for him.”

What is a college lad with dreams of med school to do?

The script teases out little victories in Issidru’s “dream deferred” life. He’s in a college of science, so he knows that the soil is played out. He listened to his father’s advice on planting, waiting for the rains to begin in earnest before putting seed in the ground.

And he’s got a cell phone and a bicycle. He can track the best prices for the family’s onion crop, and is willing to take on “women’s work,” pedaling hither and yon (even over the border into Togo) to get the most money for their efforts.

But this myopic, circumscribed life, with its petty squabbles, personal melodramas, limited horizons and shorter life span, isn’t “calling him home.” Is there a way out of his trap that won’t bring shame and ruin on them all?

The dialogue — in English and Kusaal with English subtitles — carries layers of meaning beyond the story’s simple plot points and messaging, which is as plain as the pained look on Ayanaba’s expressive face.

“It is always for men to decide things,” Damata sighs, a family dominated and maintained by women but dependent on the labors, decisions and caprices of its men.

Filmmakers Norris and Pittman refuse to sentimentalize this story. Recognizing the sacrifices his family made for him to go to college doesn’t guarantee Iddrisu will take the accepted, “noble” path laid out for him here. But will he?

That quandary lets “Nakom” engage the viewer on a lot of levels, an exotic tale set in a seldom-filmed milieu but with pressures, obligations and decisions that are a universal rite of passage.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jacob Ayanaba, Grace Ayariga, Justina Kulidu, Shetu Musah, Abdul Aziz,
Felicia Atampuri, Thomas Kulidu and James Azure

Credits: Directed by Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman, script by T.W. Pittman and (dialogue) Isaac Adakudugu. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:30

In the late 1950s, the golden age of the TV Western, Sam Peckinpah was a TV writer and sometime director whose scriptsstood out thanks to their hard, unconventional and unsentimental edge.

In 1960-61, the future director of “Ride the High Country,” “The Wild Bunch” and “The Getaway” parlayed that limited notoriety, and his association with rising star Brian Keith (Peckinpah wrote five episodes of Keith’s “Westerner” series) into his first shot at making a feature film.

“The Deadly Companions” is a Western quest tale, a dark and unsentimental spin on the John Ford/John Wayne fable “3 Godfathers” about desperadoes who care for an infant they stumble across on the run, a film which came out over a dozen before. Watching it, you can see the cantankerous Peckinpah poking The Old Master right in the eye more than once.

In an early church scene, set in a saloon that doubles as tiny Gila City’s house of worship, the congregation is rushed through “Rock of Ages,” the sort of hymn Ford milked and built many a stately, pious Western around.

“Companions’ co-star is the formidable Maureen O’Hara, a Ford favorite.

And the “3 Godfathers” here are mistrusting, violent and pitiless men who throw in together for a robbery. “I hear they got a new bank and an old marshal in Gila City” is all it takes for the ex-soldier still wearing his cavalry blue with yellow piping pants (Keith), the cutthroat Turk (Chill Wills, in a rare villainous turn) whom he recruits dangling from a noose, and Turk’s womanizing psycho-gunslinger partner Billy (Steve Cochran) to team up.

When the bank robbery is delayed due to “Yellowlegs” (Keith) considering having a bullet removed from his shoulder, others hit it first and the “trouble with his shootin’ arm” Yellowlegs accidentally kills the son of the doyenne of the local “dance” hall (O’Hara, playing a genuine “fallen” woman).

Ostracized by the locals, Kit (O’Hara) hisses that she’ll bury her boy next to his father in far off Saringo, “Apache country” on the Mexican border. Yellowlegs orders the “godfathers” to join him to escort her and the body, over her furious objections.

The movie has a TV-budget myopia but a hard-nosed tone and hardboiled dialogue that would become Peckinpah trademarks.

The simple, weathered saloon setting for the first scene, with Wills bound and noosed in his thick buffalo coat, balancing on a small beer keg to delay his strangulation, is a grabber. Yellowlegs recognizes the card-cheat who’s about to die and sets out to free him before the guilty man’s dissolute partner staggers in, tipsy and with two women, to shoot the rope and disrupt the ongojng card game, which isn’t paying much heed to rough justice they had a hand ordering carried out.

The mistrust in the impromptu trio is palpable, with Turk and Billy bristling at being given orders and Turk nagging Billy to shoot “Yellowlegs,” or Turk will do it himself — shoot him in the back.

“That ain’t no way to kill a man, not even a Yankee!”

Wills has one moment where his character’s itchy, hot overcoat gets the best of him and he scratches his back, bear-style, rubbing up against a Saguaro cactus.

The plot is head-slappingly illogical, from all the passed-up opportunities to shoot Yellowlegs to the various ways their journey is delayed. Losing a horse or two is one thing, but stopping to “bury the wagon?” The reasoning for ditching it is sound, but…

One thing I’ve never seen in all my decades of watching Westerns is the wild, drunken rumpus an Apache war party engages in after they’ve attacked and seized a stagecoach, many donning the clothes of the dead passengers.

That’s another shot at Ford, who launched Wayne’s career with the Ur Western “Stagecoach” in 1939. How are the Apaches drunk? Must have had a whiskey salesman on board.

Peckinpah’s biography “If They Move, Kill’em” supports the fact that he filmed this quick and cheap. The day-for-night shots don’t match a couple of lovely scenes actually filmed in twilight. The early gunplay is mostly sound effects. And did he lure O’Hara to the role by promising her she could sing the opening credits song?

It’s odd to watch a Cochran movie after reading how thriller writer James Ellroy portrayed him in his 1950s Hollywood drugs, sex, tabloid gossip and murder tale “Widespread Panic.” Cochran is one of the real-life characters in that riff on “Confidential” magazine’s days of infamy. Colorful Cochran is celebrated by the penis-size-obsessed Ellroy (His most juvenile book? I’d say so.), a B-movie figure of leftist politics and stag-film infamy, according to the novelist/”L.A. Confidential” historian.

As with most debut features in the celluloid century before you could make a movie on your cell phone, the miracle of getting “The Deadly Companions” made is worth considering. It’s far from Peckinpah’s best. But he got it made and made it all work.

And back in 1961, seeing O’Hara in this light and the Old West this rough must have been quite the novelty. I wonder what John Ford thought of it?

MPA Rating: “approve,” violence, adult themes

Cast: Brian Keith, Maureen O’Hara, Tom Cochran and Chill Wills.

Credits: Directed by Sam Peckpinpah, script by A.S. Fleischman. An American Pathe release on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:33

This August 6 release is a thriller set in “Black Hawk Down” 1991 Somalia.

Looks gripping.

“John and the Hole,” the painterly, understated and under-plotted directing debut of visual artist turned filmmaker Pascual Sisto, leaves the diagnosis of its title character up to the viewer. And right from the start, he’s a puzzle.

John (Charlie Shotwell) is smart, but expressionless. He’s full of questions, but won’t directly answer any question posed to him. An off-camera teacher badgers him about a math problem, which he answers but only says “I don’t know” — repeatedly — when she asks him how he figured it out.

The few queries he bothers to answer at home, or from anyone else, get the same response. When he blurts “Okay,” just to extract himself from a conversation and make whatever adult is quizzing him give up, he sounds exactly like Pete Davidson doing his annoying “Saturday Night Live” dimwit Chad.

Is John, a well-cared for, well-off upper middle class 13 year-old “on the spectrum?” He plays the piano, takes tennis lessons and yet seems disconnected from reality. He is blank-faced and deadpan, utterly unemotional. Dad (Michael C. Hall, aka “Dexter”) gives him an expensive drone. No response. No “Thanks, Dad,” either.

He’s given to vacantly serving up a barrage of questions that that would leave anyone dismayed in a “Where do I begin?” sense.

The gardener tells him he’s “weeding.” “What’s that?”

That big hole he found in the woods behind the house? It’s a “bunker.” Why would people build a bunker? “In case something bad happens.” “Like what?” Mom (Jennifer Ehle) mentions “a bad storm,” sheltering this sheltered child from the nuclear paranoia that ebbs and flows and prompts bunker-building, like the one somebody abandoned before finishing it.

The sense we get from his parents is that they indulge this “What’s it like, being an adult?” child, and don’t sweat the warning signs. His sister (Taissa Farmiga) is the only one to point out when he’s being annoying. Which is often.

But he’s on his own a lot, which means he wanders the house and has access to the family pharmacy. When he foists lemonade on the gardener, it puts the man to sleep. And that’s just a trial run. John then methodically drugs his parents and sister and wheel-barrows them out to the bunker in their sleep.

And when they wake up, he ignores their cries, pleas and threats, lowers food to them occasionally, and leaves them trapped.

John is a psychopath.

Sisto, working from a script by Nicolás Giacobone, has made an overcast, glum and seriously disturbing “Ice Storm” without the ice, a parable seemingly without a point.

We’ve got Shotwell (“Eli,” “The Glass Castle,” Captain Fantastic”) at his most perfectly-coiffed and perfectly deadpan, playing a character “curious” about adulthood and its superficial trappings (driving, having money, eating what you want) and about what one sees in a near-death experience.

Maybe he can get an answer to that last one by holding his only friend (Ben O’Brien) underwater in the pool.

Adults start asking where his parents are? He lies on the fly, embellishing and covering up.

The parents aren’t the most attentive and have either never corrected him or given up on that because of how he is. But there’s nothing we see that would explain the kid’s cruel entombment of them or his apathy about letting them out. Ehle’s mother figure seems more aware of how he is than the others, but the child doesn’t relate or respond to any of them.

And let’s not think too much about how a scrawny 13 year-old got them in that “hole” without killing or injuring them in the drop, mattresses or not.

The cryptic story has an equally cryptic framing device, a newly-single mom (Georgia Lyman) telling the “story” of “John and the Hole” to her little girl (Samantha LeBretton) as…a cautionary fable? No, that doesn’t work.

There’s nothing wrong with weaving a story the viewer can’t unravel as its playing out. But “John and the Hole” doesn’t have enough of a story to maintain any narrative drive and doesn’t point towards answers or give the viewer any hope of resolution or release.

Director Sisto paints a pretty picture of a hole, and never digs himself out of it.

MPA Rating: R for language

Cast: Charlie Shotwell, Jennifer Ehle, Michael C. Hall, Ben O’Brien and Taissa Farmiga

Credits: Directed by Pascual Sisto, script by Nicolás Giacobone. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:38

In the days before streaming — before home video even — film-lovers flocked to New York to get their art, indie and international cinema fix. We made our pilgrimage to the Beekman, the Paris, the Waverly, Sutton, Lincoln Plaza, Cinema I and II and even Carnegie Hall Cinemas to see the latest from Italy, Vietnam, Australia, China or Japan, to catch this indie breakout from Sundance or that buzzed documentary that premiered in Telluride.

Most of the theaters are gone now. Changing times, shifting screen-watching habits and soaring real estate values did them in. But in their day, they were the incubators of films that changed the movies audiences in America got to see and changed the cinema itself, the sorts of movies Hollywood makes or buys for distribution in North America.

“Searching for Mr. Rugoff” is about the progenitor of that system that raised the country’s cinematic IQ, created generations of more sophisticated filmgoers and inspired young filmmakers who came of age knowing there was more to movies than what Hollywood served up.

Rugoff, the son of the founder of a regional New York theater chain that dated back to nickelodeon (silent) cinema, turned five theaters he (mostly) inherited — the Sutton, Beekman, Paris, Cinema I and II (America’s first “multiplex”) and the Plaza — into “launching pads” for the films of Truffaut, Lina Wertmüller, Ingmar Bergman, Costa-Gavras, Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, and for the most celebrated documentaries of the ’60s and ’70s.

Monty Python didn’t really become a “thing” in the U.S. until Rugoff, using those theaters as the anchor for his Cinema 5 film distribution company, hyped “Monty Python & the Holy Grail” into a New York smash that then played in cinemas all over the United States.

Onetime Cinema 5 employee, now a film distributor and academic, Ira Deutchman adds documentary filmmaker to his resume with this engaging, nostalgic and eye-opening film, his “search” for a lost figure in indie “art cinema” history, a man who peaked and plunged pre-Internet, whose name all but disappeared from movie history.

Rugoff may be mostly-forgotten, a man his former employees describe as something of an ogre, a “terrible person,” disheveled, gauche and “truly a difficult man” who’d sleep through screenings (he was on medications), say “I loved it” afterwards and buy the rights to many a classic non-studio film of the ’60s and ’70s. But he was a singular figure in the American cinema and in shaping American cinematic tastes.

The thesis Deutchman presents is that Rugoff looked beyond Hollywood for films to book in his theaters, tracking down indie fare before we called it “independent,” and booking it for say the smaller house in his innovative Cinema I & II multiplex. Dramas like “Nothing But a Man” and documentaries such as “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “Endless Summer” and the works of French, Italian, Swedish and German directors would be shown, vigorously promoted, ingeniously-advertised and given pre-Internet buzz by “sold out” runs in these tony, high-profile, mostly upper-East Side Manhattan movie houses.

Rugoff would then book those films into cinemas across the country, using their “New York hit” cachet to make Bergman and “Pumping Iron,” “Z” and “Tall Blonde Man with One Red Shoe” hits.

Costa-Gavras (“Z,” “State of Siege”) and Lina Wertmüller (“Swept Away”) appear here and remember Rugoff and marvel at how he did business and made their films box office hits and then Oscar-nominees and sometimes Oscar winners.

Rugoff started to bend American and even Hollywood tastes, and by the 1970s, Hollywood’s stodgy “Sound of Music” blockbusters changed. The System started financing edgier, artier more “independent” fare and “Easy Rider” and “Mean Streets” to “Dog Day Afternoon,” “A Woman Under the Influence” began turning up on Hollywood’s release slates.

Specialty distributors such as New Line/Fine Line (founder Bob Shaye is here), October Films, Miramax and Sony Pictures Classics popped up and took away Rugoff’s bread-and-butter bookings, forcing him out of the business. But not before he had changed it forever.

Interviewing fellow Cinema 5 alumni, academics, competitors, filmmakers and members of Rugoff’s family, Deutchman dissects the myths surrounding the man, downloads decades of anecdotes about his “Holy Grail” was promoted by dressing up employees in Medieval chain mail and marching them up and down the streets of New York or how “Pumping Iron” showings were preceded by body building demonstrations. And in separating the fact from the fiction, the “good taste” (in movies) from the boorish bullying, Deutchman resurrects Rugoff’s place in film history.

The portrait that emerges is of a guy who could tell you why you’d want to see “Putney Swope,” and how he’d sell it to the masses, but not somebody you’d want to work for or ever suffer through a disgusting meal with.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Ira Deutchman, Costa-Gavras, Lina Wertmüller, Bruce Brown, Sarah Kernochan, Evangeline Peterson, Paula Silver, Bob Shaye, Richard Peña

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ira Deutchman. A Deutchman Co. release.

Running time: 1:33

A New York kid mourns his lost dad and comes of age under Grandpa’s tutelage, and in reaction to Grandpa’s frontier ways. And there’s a cute dingo.

Funnyman Jake Johnson is the son “tested” by his now-dead mother in the bittersweet “better to grow up late than never” comedy “Ride the Eagle.”

It’s a not-quite-aimless film peopled with “types” and built on movie tropes — the sorts of situations and stories one finds often in film and TV, rarely in real life. A good cast and amusing situations make it a pleasant, sometimes amusing if not particularly memorable experience.

Johnson, who co-wrote it, is Leif, our first “type.” He’s a woodlands California slacker, adrift at 40, living in a cabin behind a friend’s (Luis Fernandez-Gil) house, with no apparent purpose other than playing the bongos in a band with that friend and sharing his life with a black Labrador named Nora.

When an intermediary (Cleo King) brings him the news that his mother died, he barely reacts, because they were long-estranged. He’s not certain this doesn’t call for a “celebration.

She abandoned him and joined a cult in the mountains further north, so of course she’s played by Susan Sarandon.

“Played” because Mom left him A) a cabin up there in pot paradise and B) a VHS videotape about the tasks he must perform before he inherits it. It’s his “conditional inheritance.” There’s nothing for it but for him to load the van, discover that her “cabin” is a rustic McMansion built of redwood, that she’s stashed pot everywhere, and to listen to her airy fairy lectures on that VHS tapes because she felt “I did not teach you enough stuff,” so better late than never.

His tasks are given fanciful labels like “Express yourself” and “Love is important” and “Eat what you kill…become a predator, not the prey,” and include delivering notes to people who don’t know she’s dead, him tracking down and apologizing to his ex, and trout fishing with his bare hands.

And the bumps on the road include a hostile local (J.K. Simmons) given to elaborate, profane phone threats and that “one who got away” (D’Arcy Carden) who might be still interested, all these years later.

It’s easy to see every actor in their appointed character. There’s very little heavy lifting here, no big emotional peaks and only the occasional threat of violence to interrupt the mellow vibe this “Ride” coasts on.

Johnson, of “New Girl” and “Safety Not Guaranteed,” has aged out of the hyper hilarity he served up earlier in his career, but eases into this situation and this character like mid-career, pre-comeback Matthew McConaughey.

“Just go with it” seems to be the vibe they went for, and that’s my halfhearted endorsement of “Ride the Eagle.” If you like these actors and this woodland setting, just go with it.

MPA Rating: unrated, pot smoking and profanity

Cast: Jake Johnson, Susan Sarandon, D’Arcy Carden, Cleo King, Luis Fernandez-Gil and J.K. Simmons

Credits: Directed by Trent O’Donnell, script by Jake Johnson and Trent O’Donnell. A Decal release.

Running time: 1:28

Good cast, gritty milieu for this Sept. 3 release.

A November “awards season” release, this has some currency and a lot of heft to it. Smith looks good.

We few. We lucky, lucky few.

We who nothing of the magical qualities of the doula, we for whom the acronym “RIE” is akin to speaking in tongues. We have no idea how lucky we are.

Here’s a comedy about childbirth in present day LA, in the America of self-actualizing, over-sharing, conflict resolution and conflict-avoiding, of becoming “Fully Realized Humans” before they try to birth and raise such a creature.

It’s a sometimes hilarious post-mumblecore meditation, rumination and romp about getting prepared (for childbirth) and realizing how unprepared you are, about judging the lumps who raised you and realizing that maybe they didn’t have the data at their disposal you do, Dr. Spock or not.

Mostly, it’s about the panic that sends our settled and prepping couple — Jess Weixler and Joshua Leonard — into “bucket list” fits of all the living they need to do before life, as they know it, is over.

It all starts when Jackie and Elliot have a baby shower which turns into a comical series of friends’ one upping each other on childbirth as “the worst thing ever” and “crib death” riffs.

Their doula, aka “Mommy’s new (paid) best-friend,” midwife, birth coach (Erica Chidi Cohen) makes the mistake of asking them to close their eyes and visualize “what YOU need,” at this point. They doze off, just for a second.

Then they take Maya’s “prescription,” “one orgasm a day” and head home and realize time’s running out on all the things they never did. Jackie is VERY pregnant, but they both dive straight into the deep waters of the River Denial, given this “bucket list” chance.

“Jump out of an airplane!” “Dine and DASH!” “Go SWIMMING with SHARKS!” “Get tattoos!” “Visit ANTARCTICA!” “Buy a classic car and drive it up the coast!” “Get chased by COPS!”

But the path to “Fully Realized Humans” has to pass through that very first “item” that they settle on actually doing. The words “pegging” and “strap on” are enough to make a grown man like Elliot quake.

Director and co-star Leonard, a long way from his days lost in the woods in search of “The Blair Witch,” gets laughs out of Elliot’s wide-eyed alarm at their visit to a sex toys shop and everything that visit opens up. Turns out they both have “daddy issues.”

Weixler (“The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” and TV’s “The Good Wife”) was a solid eight months pregnant when they filmed this, so deliver her a special Oscar for that. She gives us a Jackie who is fine until that moment where she figures out she’s not…as prepared as she thought.

Banter, group scenes and debates have an improvised, “nobody really knows where this is going” feel. Funny people riffing, actresses who’ve given birth unloading the LOWdown on childbirth to the pregnant actress, parents (Michael Chieffo, Beth Grant and Tom Bower) jolted and backpedaling as they confronted by their shortcomings in a pre-birth intervention staged by their son or daughter.

The film is scripted (by the co-stars), but that “mumblecore” sense of chatty people chatting something to death until funny words come out bubbles through every scene that isn’t a montage of the two spraying graffiti, daring the cops to chase them, or getting lost in the dark on a nature hike.

It’s a scruffy comedy and what’s on screen can be pretty rough at times. But get past the jaw-dropping nature of the “pegging” and ponder how much of what went on there was improvised and the laughs become impossible to suppress.

MPA Rating: unrated, some violence, drug abuse, sexually explicit and lots of profanity

Cast: Jess Weixler, Joshua Leonard, Erica Chidi Cohen, Michael Chieffo, Tom Bower and Beth Grant

Credits: Directed by Joshua Leonard, script by Jess Weixler and Joshua Leonard. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:16