Movie Nation

They still take walks together and still goof around a bit when they do.

Their bickering is more cute bantering, about “When’re you going to take the (Xmas) decorations down?” “When’re YOU gonna take them down?”

“Kid” is his term of endearment for her. “EED-jet” (idiot) is hers for him.

Theirs is the very picture of contented domesticity, of “Ordinary Love.”

But that love could be all on the surface. When any couple faces one of those “ultimate tests,” the fault lines show. Lucky for us this domestic melodrama has Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville to act all that out for it.

It’s a film that begins with lives that have a suburban Northern Ireland intimacy to them — meals, wine, always together. We start to wonder, “Is she retired? Is he?” We see a young woman’s photo in several rooms. Off at school?

Even the “alarm bell” moment has a light, lived-in feel.

“Feel my left breast.”

“Just the one?”

Yes, Joan has felt a lump. Yes, they — emphasis on THEY — need to have it checked out. What follows is standard-issue couple-coping-with-cancer “Lifetime Original Movie” fodder.

Except that it’s a little more than that. The “reveals” may be less revealing than they expected them to be, the heated arguments feel a trifle contrived.

But two wonderful players put this over with warmth, worry and honesty.

American viewers of this Northern Ireland/UK production may be struck, as I was, at the way directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn put the “social” in socialized medicine.

This depiction of National Health Service treatment is both honest — there’s a  shared “prep for mammogram” room that gives the feeling this system is built for efficiency, not privacy — and touching.

Women ask each other about their procedures, joke and comfort one another. Men that Tom (Neeson) runs into at the hospital sing its praises to put him at ease.

There’s a kindness and community here that implies a support system that extends beyond family, when you leave the bottom-line-terror that the insurance industry brings to the equation.

Manville (“Maleficent,” “Mr/ Turner”) has an earthiness that throws the performance’s no-holds-barred scenes into sharp relief.

And Neeson, freed from the straight-jacket that too many action films have slapped on him, gives Tom a stoic, crusty vulnerability that comes out in every line, post-diagnosis.

“How d’you say to someone, ‘Don’t die?'”

Not a lot of new ground is covered here, and not every viewer will embrace the “socialized medicine” subtext that pops up. But “Ordinary Love” quietly celebrates a committed marriage with physical and emotional pain, fear, pity and self-pity testing it.

Maybe that’s because they never have to worry about insurance coverage.

MPAA Rating: R for brief sexuality/nudity.

Cast: Liam Neeson, Lesley Manville, David Wilmot, Amit Shah.

Credits: Directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, script by Owen McCaffrey. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 1:32

It’s brutishly heavy-handed, with a performance or two so hammy they came straight from the smokehouse.

But those quibbles aside,  “Beneath Us” is a torture porn satire that never fails to hold one’s interest, even if it doesn’t quite come off. It takes you from point A to point U — underground, literally “beneath us,” with efficiency and visceral verve.

This topical tale is about illegal immigration, bigotry and the exploitation that always wins out when capitalist bigots struggle with their consciences on the subject.

In large cities in some corners of America — especially Southern California — you can find day laborers standing on the corner next to your home improvement/lumber store. They work on the cheap, off the books. Because they’re not legally here or allowed to work here.

Day after day, guys like this get into strangers’ vehicles and ride off for a job site they hope will be lucrative, safe and easy. The simple but clever conceit here is “What if it is none of the above?”

After a bit of “Give away your movie whydoncha?” as a prologue, we meet Memo (Josue Aguirre), a sullen young man riding into America in the trunk of a car. He’s here to reunited with older brother Alejandro (Rigo Sanchez).

The reunion isn’t tearful or even that pleasant. Antonio has been in SoCal for years. He has a wife and son he is saving to try to get across the border. And Memo seems to resent all that this American Dream has cost them.

He’s not that crazy about the whole day-laborer thing. Hector (Roberto ‘Sanz’ Sanchez) is the macho guy in their “crew” who jokes about gringos telling each other never to get into a stranger’s van or car, “but we do it” no questions asked.

Their “We can do it cheaper” hustle pays off — maybe too easily. And the curvaceous customer (Lynn Collins) is awfully brazen about letting four men she doesn’t know into her SUV. Is it her crucifix that protects her?

“What kind of man sends his woman to pick up strangers?” Hector wonders.

We instantly wonder who’s in the REAL “stranger danger” here?

The “four man job” involves Hector, Alejandro, Memo and Tonio (Thomas Chavira) renovating a guest house. They dry wall, put in flooring, paint and dig and pour cement for a new patio.

Sound like a lot to get done in a day? Even a very LONG day? It is. They can’t finish. But she hasn’t come out to dismiss them, pay them or offer them a lift back to town.

Worklights kick on.

“I’ll bet they’re hoping we leave,” Hector complains, (in English and Spanish with Engish subtitles). They won’t be bluffed.

If nobody picked up on the clue that a drill bit they’re using has bits of blood and hair on it, surely Liz (Collins, of TV’s “Manhunt”TV) turning the hose on them to wake them in the middle of the night is the give-away.

They’re not going anywhere. With no pay, no “papers,” no transport and no way out of a gated, electric-fenced rural farmhouse, she has all the power. Her husband (James Tupper of TV’s “Big Little Lies”) may be in and out, off playing golf in ugly white-fop stereotype shorts and black socks. Liz has a shotgun.

And things turn from unfair to unpleasant to unsurvivable in a flash.

This debut feature from Max Pachman ups the violence ante without doing enough to ratchet up suspense at the same time.

There’s a passivity to the entrapped men — save for Hector, who is big and burly, a blowhard and sexist skirt-chaser. And then there’s Collins’ Liz, a campy cartoon of a villainness.

She tosses her hair, shows some leg or cleavage and archly plays up the lip-smacking cruelty of the character, always protesting that “I wouldn’t want you to think I’m being unfair!”

It’s not satire. It’s camp.

The movie itself never follows her down that Cruella-de-House-Flipper hole, and that muffles its impact. Either go over-the-top or don’t. No fence sitting.

“Beneath Us” scores its satiric points without the “15 million illegals” speeches, and there’s tension even in characters who seem quite helpless (She DOES have them over a barrel.) and unable to resist the ugly fate that seems to await them.

But “Beneath Us” leaves the viewer with more a “Nice try, guys” than any sense of release or righteous fury at what we’re watching.

MPAA Rating:R for violence, language and some nudity

Cast: Lynn Collins, Rigo Sanchez, Josue Aguirre, James Tupper, Roberto ‘Sanz’ Sanchez  and Edy Ganem

Credits: Directed by Max Pachman, script by Mark Mavrothalasitis and Max Pachman. A New Mainstream Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:30

Yes, this is what I do between screenings in a theater — post trailers I’ve just seen before the last show.

Kristen Scott Thomas brings her posh prickliness and Sharon Horgan her goofy “Catastrophe” irreverence to this late March release about a choir formed by the wives of British service members deployed to Afghanistan.

Well, that’s when Lionsgate is releasing “Run.” Mother’s Day. A Munchausen by Proxy tale of terror?

This Easter release looks awfully “Call of the Wild” — digital effects, flowers and birds, turning the classic novel “The Secret Garden” into something more “Alice in Wonderland” ish.

Colin Firth and Julie Walters are the big names in this ambitious, “Let’s try a new genre” STX release.

The cancellation of the coolest cultural event in Texas due to fears of spreading the Corona Virus among musicians, filmmakers and fans prompted this tweet from the director of “Sean of the Dead.”

edgarwright (@edgarwright) Tweeted:
I love SXSW, it’s been so good to me over the years. With its cancellation, spare a thought for the many indie film-makers, bands, artists and fans who were excited to go & to the people and businesses of Austin who were relying on that trade. Show your support however you can. https://twitter.com/edgarwright/status/1236187140733755392?s=20

They called it “The Battle of the Atlantic” back in “The Big One, WWII.”

German U-Boats, later forming into “wolfpacks” attacked Allied convoys from North America to Great Britain.

Destroyers and corvettes, “tin cans” or “Greyhounds,” dashed about and hunted the U-Boats while escorting the merchant ships, troop ships and tankers across.

This has a lot of “Midway” about it. Because it’s a digital recreation of naval vessels of the day and combat. VERY digital.

This sort of war movie was commonplace from the ’40s on into the ’60s –“In Which We Serve,” “The Enemy Below.” Now, they can do it with computers, some nautical sets and a good cast.

Tom Hanks stars in “Greyhound,” which is based on a C.S. Forester novel.It opens June 12, pushed back by the virus maybe?

Shorter and different, giving away more of the conceit behind the story.

“Antebellum” opens April 24.

Boy, you settle in for an easy-going feel-good sports drama, and “The Grizzlies” is what you get instead.

It’s got lump-in-the-throat, feel-good moments, sure. But the stakes could not be higher in this Canadian production. It begins with a suicide, and that won’t be the last we see or hear about. The alcoholism, violence, poverty and lack of hope that anything will ever get better make this village above the Arctic Circle infamous for its suicide rate.

And “Grizzlies” doesn’t even show ‎Nunavut Territory at its bleakest — in the winter, when there’s little daylight and temps are at their lowest.

Ben Schnetzer (“The Book Thief”) stars as Russ Shepherd, a history teacher fresh out of McGill U. “Northern Exposured” to the far north for a teaching job that will forgive his student loan.

Russ is the classic “fish out of water,” an upbeat Canadian full of questions “aboot” this place he’s only read about in history and geography classes and seen in documentaries.

“You lived up here a long time?” he quizzes one native.

“Six thousand years!”

Will Sasso is the math teacher who picks him up and shows Russ around Kuluktuk — and gives him his first dose of what life there is like. Food prices are insanely high. Nobody locks their doors and you don’t have to knock to come in. Everybody has guns.

Oh, and Mike drinks, like everybody else. He even drinks and drives. Other folks? The alcohol fuels domestic violence, and it doesn’t help that staggering suicide rate. This has filtered down from the adults to the kids at the high school, who drink and joke and smoke and flirt every evening after school, which many don’t bother to attend.

Russ gets an earful of “‘Mister’ is a white man’s word” and cracks about being a “Southerner” that first day in class. Questions from the kids are downright impertinent.

“Hey Russ, how bad you mess up” to wind up in Kuluktuk?

He even gets punched in the mouth. It’s pretty obvious this booze, violence, depression and hopelessness is hard-wired into the place.

“What’s being done” about this “epidemic?”

“Nothing. Or nothing that works.”

He can’t reach the kids with the “get an education so you can get the hell out of here” pitch. “School” meant traumatic relocations (government boarding schools) for their parents, and the kids have absorbed a lifetime of mistrust and disdain for “the white man’s school.” The boys would rather hunt, anyway.

Abandoning hope is just their modern wrinkle on “the old ways.”

Russ figures the sport that got him through college would be just the thing. If only he can talk the no-nonsense principal (Tantoo Cardinal) into getting past his “arrogant and pushy” first impression and let him start a lacrosse team.

That takes a LOT of doing.

There’s a bit of “Northern Exposure” in this Moira Walley-Beckett, Graham Yost script. The “fish out of water” needs an inscrutable female tour guide. That would be Miranda (Emerald MacDonald), “the smartest, most responsible kid in school.” She explains customs, folkways and values to Russ.

But the film’s light, comic touch ends every time Russ is exposed to this kid’s dissolute home life, that one’s abusive father. They’re feeding their hungry families, caring for neglected younger siblings. Some are bullied at home.

And the “popular” boys, the would-be jocks? They’re listening to their parents when it comes to listening to “the white man.”

As the principal warns, “Broken promises are dangerous up here.”

“Grizzlies” can be heavy-handed in its messaging, trite in the assorted over-familiar obstacles hurled in the hero’s way as he seeks to teach these kids the sport their southern (native) forebears invented, that getting clean enough to play is vital because, “You cannot win with that crap in your system.”

But more than once, and at the most unexpected moments, something in Miranda de Pencier’s film will hit you right in the heart. A training regimen that includes racing “the best athlete here,” the guilt Russ takes on for not hearing a one teenager’s cry for help and advice, shocking deaths.

This isn’t the most flattering portrayal of Inuit life, from the cycles of drug and alcohol and physical abuse, to the almost Russian schadenfreude of the place — rejecting “white man’s” education and any efforts to better yourself. That’s a welcome break from the formulaic character arcs and plot in “The Grizzlies.”

And the mostly non-professional cast of kids — Booboo Stewart, MacDonald, Anna Lambe, Paul Nutarariaq and Ricky Marty-Pahtaykan among them — and Schnetzer’s affable way of getting across naive tactlessness give “The Grizzlies” a lift.

This is a “feel good” movie that lets you feel good only after it shows you how bad everything can get.

MPAA Rating: R for language, and some drug/alcohol use involving teens

Cast: Ben Schnetzer, Booboo Stewart, Emerald MacDonald, Anna Lambe, Paul Nutarariaq , Ricky Marty-Pahtaykan , Tantoo Cardinal, and Will Sasso

Credits: Directed by Miranda de Pencier, script by Moira Walley-Beckett, Graham Yost. An Elevation release.

Running time: 1:46

“The Way Back” is a dull if somewhat likable nothing of a sports melodrama.

It offers a “My character got sober, just like me” story arc for Ben Affleck to talk about on the chat shows. And good for him. It’s a shame he didn’t show us more of this drunken, grieving, angry ex-jock to latch onto and give the movie an emotional payoff. That’s what I mean by “somewhat likeable nothing.”

Affleck, screenwriter Brad Ingelsby screenwriter and his “Accountant” director seem more concerned with the movie they were NOT going to make than the 108 minute mope they delivered.

It wasn’t going to be a buildup to “The Big Game” formula sports movie. So even though his character is a one-time star lured back to coach his Catholic high school alma mater, the players are no more than colorful “types” — the arrogant loafer, the dancing clown, the bruising football player throwing elbows, the meek point guard who has to learn to speak up and let his light shine.

None of them stand out because this isn’t about them.

Coach? He cusses for comic effect. Catholic school or not, nobody puts a muzzle on Jack Cunningham’s potty mouth.

Affleck & Co. struggle to avoid the standard “redemption” story arc, take great pains to hide The Secret Pain coach is dealing with. And while he can play good and soused with the best of them, Affleck’s drunk is never less than functional, a poker-faced clear-liquor-sneak who occasionally, out of nowhere, blows his cool.

Their best efforts go for naught as “The Way Back,” despite focusing wholly on Jack, his estranged wife Janina Gavankar) and concerned but eye-rolling sister (Michaela Watkins, of course), is “just” a sports movie, and as such is a a lot more “Coach Carter” than “Hoosiers.” More’s the pity.

Jack works in construction in the San Francisco Bay area by day, and closes up Harold’s Bar by night. Not that he doesn’t drink on the job. And drink driving to the job.

Then the priest who runs Bishop Hayes High makes him an offer, and a plea. They need a coach NOW. Do it part time in the evenings and weekends. Save the old alma mater, son.

The best scene in “The Way Back” might be Jack’s drink-a-case-of-beer-to-think-it-over evening, a montage of drinking and rehearsing the speech he’ll use to turn down the priest’s offer of a new reason to get up in the morning.

Jack doesn’t want to lose his nights of “D’ya ever hear the one?” bar jokes with the down-and-out regulars (“Wonder Years” dad Dan Lauria among them). Jack fits right in with the “given up” crowd. Every drinker has a story. We don’t need to hear it to know that. Glynn Turman plays “Doc,” the old friend who takes Jack home after he’s had far too many.

The basketball in this movie is nothing to write home about, and the coaching bits are the most generic cliches you can imagine. Cocky, distracted, undisciplined losers who “couldn’t hit the ocean if you were shootin’ from the beach” whipped into shape by — say it with me, basketball movie fans, a full-time “full court press” and conditioning. “Coach Carter” isn’t the only one who can demand wind sprints up and down the bleachers.

Affleck, stalking the sideline, disheveled in his best barrel-chested-drunk impression, hollers bon mots like “MOVE. Let’s go let’s GO! Watch the CLOCK! Set screens!”

I yell exactly the same thing at my TV all the way through March Madness.

Action screenwriter Ingelsby (“Run All Night,” “Out of the Furnace”) seems out of his depth here. Nobody paid any attention to the basketball or baller chatter.

“Sometimes the smart play is not the RIGHT play.”

Good to know.

Still, one of the kids is amusing and the cussing — the team has a disapproving chaplain (Jeremy Radin) and a by-the-book algebra teacher (Al Madrigal) assistant coach — can be funny in context.

But Jack’s eruptions of temper seem abrupt and inorganic. The picture has a nice “everybody is dealing with something,” downtrodden tone. But Affleck deadpans Jack to such a degree that as defensible as that might be, in a “he’s keeping it all bottled up” sense, it is just dull to watch.

I’m an Affleck fan. But man, if you don’t let us see the suffering, what’s the point?

The husband-wife arguments have no heart or pop, the lectures from the concerned sister are flat.

All of which adds up to my original thesis — “somewhat likable nothing.”

Getting sober? Good for him. But maybe he’s still too close to the subject matter to do it justice.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout including some sexual references

Cast: Ben Affleck, Michaela Watkins, Janina Gavankar, Al Madrigal, Glynn Turman and Brandon Wilson

Credits: Directed by Gavin O’Connor, script by Brad Ingelsby and Gavin O’Connor. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:48