Movie Nation

There’s something about a real-world global pandemic that takes some of the “fun” out of such dystopian tales on the big screen.

But “Only” is too good to dismiss, just escapist enough to make us forget “Hell, I could tune in to CNN if I wanted to see this.”

It’s a story told out of order, flashbacks scattered through a tale that begins with the grim fatalism of a voice-over narration that asks, “Do you forgive me?”

A comet, Covino, skipped by the Earth. What looked like snow but was more like nuclear fallout rained down. And people got sick. Women? They started dying.

Freida Pinto plays the aptly-named Eva, a survivor. Leslie Odom, Jr.  is Will, her husband and protector.

We’re introduced to them just as soldiers, roll up wearing gas masks, pounding on their door. They’re looking for a woman searching based on a tip.

Names on the lease are parsed, the apartment — UV lights and plastic sheeting “sealing” it off from the contagion — is tossed. But the officer in charge (we never see him) lets his humanity slip through the mask.

“I’m not taking a sick one,” he says to Will, telling him and us that “he knows” where she’s hidden. “I know what they do with the sick ones.”

They are on their own, welcome to spend their remaining hours/days together, duct-taping her chest, covering her head and putting on makeup to simulate a five o’clock shadow so that they can have “one last cooked meal” together as they head out on the run.

Vandalized billboards suggest the length of time this pandemic has been around, urging citizens to “Get Tested” for “The Embryo Project.”

There are rewards for “healthy women.” Draconian measures to procure them are official policy. Will has listened to Eva’s doctor dad, who had very specific intructions, “rules” that might let them survive. Will is protecting them both from the virus as long as possible. He is set on defending her by any means necessary.

Writer-director Takashi Doscher (“Still” was his.) bathes this hellish future-present in the greys and blues of doom, eternal winter.

He’s mashed up “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Children of Men” and the recent Casey Affleck dystopia “Light of My Life” in creating this bleak landscape where the end of the human race is within sight.

“Science,” glimpsed on TV and online, is both the hope for salvation and a palpable threat. Religious extremists are violently resisting the scientific solution dictated from on high.

Eva and Will? They’re trying not to fight, trying to not think about The Worst, struggling to stay on the same page as a couple — him trying to protect her, her wondering if there’s any point to that now, any point at all.

Will drifts from the reassuring “This’ll be over in a few weeks” to “I’m waiting for you to wake up and realize that ‘this’ is ‘life’ now.”

Yes, it’s derivative, with story beats from every sci-fi dystopia of recent vintage — “The Road,” “28 Days Later,” and especially “Light of My Life.”

It’s not the “Only” movie to follow this arc, to deliver one expected scene after another. But it is a sci-fi parable with performances that click and situations — tried and true as they are — that pop. We can only hope that “It’s only a movie” will be the way we look back on it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Freida Pinto, Lesley Odom Jr.

Credits: Written and directed by Takashi Doscher.  A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:37

Aaron Fisher wrote, directed and stars in a pretty convincing portrait of manic depression in “Inside the Rain,” a “finding yourself/finding love” romance staggered by cliches and delusional missteps.

The director Fisher gives the actor Fisher places to shine. The screenwriter Fisher doesn’t provide enough of those places, or share enough of them with the supporting cast.

We meet Ben Glass, 25, as he starts college. He’s on a lot of meds. He’s had a lot of problems. He sees a shrink (Rosie Perez, testy and adorable) regularly. And he’s in the habit of augmenting his meds with vodka-energy drink cocktails to take the edge off.

First day in film class is how we learn he is “literally bi-polar.” “ADHD, OCD, borderline personality disorder…You name it, I have it.”

His self-description to his classmate, Daisy (Katie Claire McGrath) is what gets him into trouble. His illness makes him “recklessly extravagant.” That’s all it takes for her to ignore his “on the spectrum” weirdness, his resting-mental-case-face and his tank-top oriented wardrobe and sleep with him.

Her “You need to go now” post-coitus sends himself into a tailspin — a suicide attempt. He guilts her in the process, she over-reacts (not really) and the school is ready to kick him out.

“I’m going to make a movie to show what REALLY happened!”

If you’re saying “How lame is that?” you’re not alone. But the student filmmaker making a movie about his struggles element is mostly-consigned to the frustrations of fund-raising, the odd cameo of “a Hollywood producer” low-life (Eric Roberts) who is friends with his Dad (Paul Schulze), and casting.

Ben wants this “model” who serves as a literal sushi bar — they serve fish on her naked (fig leaves) body — at the local strip club to star in his film. Emma (Ellen Toland of “The Chaperone”) just wants “somebody to take me seriously.”

Ben and Emma hang out, try to crowdfund his movie and cope with his mood swings.  He’s hellbent on fighting this college disciplinary thing, refusing to take his meds if Dad doesn’t hire him a lawyer, hellbent on making this movie, determined to use his paintball team as his crew.

Fisher’s scenes with Perez are the ones with the pop to them — feisty, light-hearted exchanges with her promising to “cure you within six weeks” (No psychiatrist would EVER say that.), him nursing delusional depression or manic “highs” where “I’m THE MAN” applies to paintball, movie-making or dating a model/stripper WAY out of his league.

Ben’s confession that “I SHOULD feel sorry for myself,” his “This happens a lot, honestly” to the young woman he texted his suicide note to, even his turning on his phone to play Emma a song as he walks her to her car, all feel like real moments trapped in a movie that can’t quite get out of its own way.

Toland, Perez, Roberts and Schulze are the most polished performers here. Fisher, being unknown, has an amateurish authenticity that works in the character’s favor if not the story’s.

The trite — Roberts’ cameo is pointless, the paintball thing is straight out of “The Big Bang Theory” — overwhelms what could be interesting in this scattered romantic dramedy that takes a Bob Dylan lyric from “Just Like a Woman” as its title.

And all that title does is highlight how much more on-the-money the soundtrack is than the movie it underscores.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity, substance abuse

Cast: Aaron Fisher, Ellen Toland, Catherine Curtin, Paul Schulze, Rita Raider, Eric Roberts and Rosie Perez.

Credits: Written and directed by Aaron Fisher. An Act 13 release.

Running time: 1:30

“The Social Ones” is a knowing smirk of a farce about social media “influencers” and the dizzy, faux importance they have in our cell-and-selfie-obsessed culture.

Funny people vamp up funny characters in a deadpan comedy that lightly lampoons the phenomenon without quite landing the sucker punches or the laughs it needs to come off.

Writer-director Laura Kosann and her sister Danielle Kosann star as Mia and Ava, star reporter and photographer for National Influencer Magazine. They round up broadly-drawn social media “stars” of the moment for this mockumentary send-up of the very idea “influencers.”

There’s Dan (Colton Ryan), “The King of Snapchat,” a would-be video daredevil who has no actual skills at the various stunts he attempts.

Josie Z (Amanda Giobbi) is a “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” Instagram fashionista, a diva forever abusing her hapless intern (Davram Stiefler).

“My nose job is FRESH. I KNOW how I want it to look!”

Dixie Bell (Desi Domo) is “The Goddess of Viral Food,” a Gordon Ramsay-mouthed chef running a team of minions who does “hybrid desserts” from “the six basic food groups” which include “pizza…stuff stuffed with CHEESE….and anything you can dye with a rainbow.”

She’s having a fling with KapPhatJawacki (Setareki Wainiqolo), the demented “Meme God.”

And Nicole Kang in Jane Zap, a vlogger dressed in kittenish Hello Kitty-wear, dressing up “models” (pets she borrows) for video photo shoots.

The sister-journalists deadpan about how “‘Engagement’ doesn’t mean ‘marriage’ any more,” and how their anxiety kicks in every time they have to profile one of these “legends,” because it’s not like “just casually approaching Gandhi at a DINNER PARTY.”

Peter Scolari’s an academic doltishly teaching doltish college kids the most basic elements of social media — “What is a ‘like?’ Anyone? A troll?”

Stephanie March is the shrink to Social Media Nation, counseling “hot” Internet couples, influencers struggling to cope with the pressure of their “fame” in an office with “#” and “@” paintings on the wall.

Debra Jo Rupp is the overheated, Anne Rice-ish novelist of sex and tech fetishism, “#touchingwithouttouching.”

And Richard Kind? Well, you’ll see.

It’s hard to send up a phenomenon that already seems like a parody of “real life.” And pausing for big servings of “message” stops it cold.

You know what “The Social Ones” is? It’s a film festival comedy, one that plays better to a forgiving, message-savvy audience. Despite the comically committed bigger-name cameos, the send-up of a “troll farm,” and the best of the over-the-top influencers (Giobbi is a stitch), it rarely achieves much beyond a smirk of recognition.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Desi Domo, Colton Ryan, Amanda Giobbi, Setareki Wainiqolo, Nicole Kang, Danielle Kosann , Laura Kosann, Peter Scolari, Debra Jo Rupp and Richard Kind

Credits: Written and directed by Laura Kosann. A Comedy Dynamics release.

Running time: 1:27

Ever seen this on the stage? For hundreds of years, this was the great favorite of community theater/dinner theater/LITTLE theaters all across the English speaking world.

And elsewhere. Dame Judi, Isla F., Dan Stevens as the blocked playwright staging a seance…and as the “spirit?”

Watch and see.

“Blithe Spirit” opens May Day.

The resemblance borders on uncanny. With the right haircut, the proper dose of blonde, Kristen Stewart IS Jean Seberg.

But the Iowa-born Seberg, made famous by “Saint Joan,” made immortal in “Breathless (“À bout de souffle”), had a spark that the always-underplaying Stewart never manages, even as she’s capturing the star-crossed starlet in the most traumatic period of her life.

And “Seberg,” a semi-historical account of Seberg’s radical 1960s political dilettantism and her pursuit and persecution by J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I., never quite jells into the tragic jeremiad and Oscar bait it was intended to be.

After Truffaut’s groundbreaking “Breathless,” Seberg pursued a career, half in Hollywood, half in France — married French novelist, filmmaker and diplomat Romain Gary (Yvan Atal) and had a son with him.

“Seberg” captures the star at 30, fretting over whether to take a lucrative, high-profile role in a Hollywood picture.

“It’s a Western…a Western musical. It’s irrelevant,” she complains to her agent (Stephen Root). “I want to make a difference.”

As the musical was “Paint Your Wagon,” a debacle like few others, she was right in the first regard. Flying Pan Am to Hollywood she impulsively dives into achieving the second. A Muslim militant, Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie) creates a “class” incident on her flight, and in an opportunistic instant, she throws in with his group for a photo op on the tarmac.

That gets the attention of the F.B.I., which is dedicated to undermining “elements in society who don’t like the way we do things here in America.”

Seberg is no dummy. She figures she was being baited on that flight, probably for money and public support. And she doesn’t know Jamal is an ex-con, an unstable womanizer who has done time in a mental hospital. That we learn from the F.B.I. agents assigned by their station chief (Colm Meany) to wiretap the movie star and track the movements of Jamal.

Jack O’Connell of “Unbroken” plays the agent with a conscience. Vince Vaughn plays the racist rageaholic inclined to top his boss’s “shine revolutionary” description of Jamal with a few choice uses of the N-word.

Mackie turns up the charisma, making Jamal a compelling speaker and master of rhetoric. When Seberg speaks of her “frivolous” work, he reassures her “The Revolution needs movie stars.”

They have an affair, and when the F.B.I. snoops stop making their “dark meat on the bone” cracks, they have what they need — a famous face giving “money and a platform” to radicals. Let the surveillance begin.

She feeds fuel to the fire. It’s 1968, Young Paris is on the streets, youth protests against racism, injustice and the Vietnam War are everywhere. And Seberg, living in France and returning to her native America, is good for a quote on that.

“This country is at war with itself.”

The surveillance scenes feel quaint — guys in white shirts and ties, sitting in a van or in HQ, listening to conversations and sexual encounters. Then you think of what they’re doing, a government agency spying on non-criminals, leaking embarrassing truths and in many cases, noxious lies to ruin “enemies of the state.”

Seberg gets wind of this and grows more paranoid by the hour after realizing that SOMEbody is deep into her business, destroying her marriage and her career.

Jamal, married to a leader in the Movement (Zazie Beetz), is feeling the heat, too.

Agent Jack starts to question the ethics of what he’s doing once his wife (Margaret Qualley) gets wind of it.

Stewart gets across Seberg’s spiking paranoia, but never lets us feel it. She’s a chill actress, and that keeps a barrier up that hurts the movie.

Watch her scenes with Mackie and Beetz. She practically wilts in their presence (especially the fearsome Beetz).

The script veers away from history with its whole “agent with a conscience” balderdash. The crazed partner Vaughn plays is straight out of bad melodrama.

And director Benedict Andrews underscores just how deeply he doesn’t “get it” by finishing the film with a long closeup of Stewart/Seberg, failing to wring emotions out of her, her failing to wring them out of us. Maybe that’s his way of throwing her under the bus, but a guy best known for stage works translated for the screen and “Una” didn’t do his star and her “star vehicle” any favors at any point.

MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual content/nudity and some drug use

Cast: Kristin Stewart, Jack O’Connell, Anthony Mackie, Margaret Qualley, Zazie Beetz, Yvan Atal, Stephen Root, Colm Meany and Vince Vaughn

Credits:Directed by Benedict Andrews, script by Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse An Amazon original release.

Running time: 1:42

It’s a sports dramedy in the traditional “McFarland USA” (and 1900 variations) mold.

But with violence, life or death consequences and traditional native ways of life and mistrust of “Southerners.” When you live above the Arctic circle, even Canadians are Southerners.

Cute. But again, the stakes are a lot higher than even “Crooked Arrows,” which covered the same sport from a Native American point of view. Seeing as how North American tribes invented it, that’s only fair.

“The Grizzlies” growl March 20.

You think the daughter of Miss Diana Ross knows how to play the diva?

Yeah. “Black-ish” is where Tracee Ellis Ross has to do the real acting.

Dakota Johnson plays the long-suffering assistant to the diva.

Ice Cube, Eddie Izzard, Zoe Chao and Diplo also feature in the cast of this May 8 release, “The High Note.”

In this country, we hear about these kids from teachers. The stories of how one disturbed, disruptive child requires constant attention, eats up all the teacher’s time, are legion.

Manic, impulsive, sometimes, untamable rageaholics are stressing educators and social workers the world over. In Germany, they even have a name for them — “System Crasher.”

Here’s an unblinking portrait of such a child, a willful, possibly psychotic nine-year-old girl not old enough to be parked in a mental hospital, not responsive to any kindness, any “last chance” at foster care, disrupting schools, group homes, hospitals and lives with every violent tantrum.

Benni (Helena Zengel) is a blonde, blue-eyed fury — sweet and bubbly one moment, flipped-out and lashing out the next. Some trauma in her childhood contributed to this, but her over-scheduled doctor (Melanie Straub) lets the “s” word out, just once, in suggesting “off label use” of some different drug that might calm her down. It’s worked on “schizophrenia.”

The debut feature film of Nora Fingscheidt lets Benni (short for Bernadette) into our hearts, worthy of our pity. But our real sympathies bend toward the over-matched group home counselors, teachers, social workers and one “school escort” as they try everything to corral this uncontrollable child. There’s a lenience that seems delusional, the more times we see evidence of it play out. But they’re just following protocol. Their efforts always ends with her escaping, acting-out and hurting somebody, and in the hospital under restraint.

Benni is desperate to go home to her mum (Lisa Hagmeister), who shows us just enough of her poor choices to allow a single finger of blame pointed her way. Benni escapes, convinces a stranger to drive her to Helmstedt, where her mother and two siblings live with her latest boyfriend.

Benni bullies her younger brother and sister, but in a benign way. Mom and boyfriend come home, and in seconds a violent outburst has her attacking her mother and punched and locked in a closet until the police arrive.

Every time she’s on the loose, something goes wrong — an ugly confrontation with a dog, schoolyard taunting that turns violent, tantrums that have an entire group home on lockdown while she hurls things about in the playground.

Reasoning with her is pointless. Warning her about every new placement falls on deaf ears — “It’s got to work this time, OK?” (in German with subtitles).

American audiences may bristle at the laxity of her supervision. She is plainly a danger to herself and others. But “the system” dictates what steps they can take. And with other foster kids, group home children and schoolchildren to cope with, Benni is a test “the system” cannot pass. It’s gutsy of the film to show us how there are literally no easy answers in a case like this.

But when her doctor suggests an “intensive therapy abroad,” sending her and a counselor off to Africa, feel free to roll your eyes? Is she just shipping this problem south? Why on Earth would anybody think that would work?

Her school escort, Micha (Albrecht Schuch) figures a “vacation” in the less stimulating woods, a forest cabin on a farm, would help. Letting a male counselor take a little girl into the woods sounds too creepy to ever happen in the States, but the system in Germany is desperate enough to let him try.

Zengel is a balled-up fist of energy in the title role, getting across the sweetness that can convince those who take pity on Benni that “she’s making progress,” but unleashing hell in a flash to remind them she isn’t.

An excellent supporting cast suggests empathy that crosses into pity, which “the system” doesn’t allow.

And that next explosive mood swing is all it takes to remind each and every caring adult put in her path that pity and caring and hugs won’t be enough. Drugs and institutionalization, those last resorts, start to look like a blessed relief long before “System Crasher” checks out.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Helena Zengel, Albrecht Schuch, Gabriela Maria Schmeide, Lisa Hagmeister

Credits: Written and directed by Nora Fingscheidt. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:58