Movie Nation

Alvin Ailey towers over American dance like few figures in history — a pioneer, revolutionary, icon and inspiration whose works live beyond his death in 1989, as does his groundbreaking Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Pieces like “Resurrection,” “Love Songs,” “Masakela Language” and “Cry” on back to “Blues Suite” are revived to this day, far removed from the “contemporary dance” that they were a half-century or more ago, when they premiered.

He is the epitome of the expression, a prince among “American Masters.” Which is where “Ailey,” this wonderful new Jamila Wignot film, now a Neon theatrical release, is bound. But let’s not dwell on the obvious question that’s the first thing that comes to mind after watching it.

“What TOOK you so long?”

Using interviews with dance partners and generations of alumni of his Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, generous samples of performance footage and Ailey rehearsing his corps — an eagle-eyed taskmaster — and archival TV and audio interviews with the man himself, Wignot rebuilds a lonely, driven life that created great art and answers a question Ailey himself must has asked more than once. Was it worth it? Yes it was.

Wignot anchors the film in 2018 rehearsals for a 60th anniversary commission by Ailey acolyte Rennie Harris. “Lazarus,” it was called, and as Harris describes Ailey’s art and style, we see him walk and talk the company through a piece that is Ailey’s legacy, writ large.

Dancers stretch out, standing on their tiptoes, heads titled unnaturally to one side, a lynching in a gesture. This is Harris showing us the essence of Ailey — African American “blood memory,” dance as “story telling,” the choreographer using his corps to “carve the space,” as Ailey himself put it.

His name became a brand during his lifetime, illustrating what his friend, early influence and duet partner Carmen de Lavallade means when she says “sometimes your name becomes bigger than yourself.”

Wignot, using stock footage in sync with Ailey’s own recollections, tells the story of how a son of a cotton picker/maid/single mom from Texas became a world famous choreographer whose company was celebrated from Melbourne to Moscow as it made State Dept. sponsored tours, showing off American dance and a multi-racial company to the world.

Yes, this happened at a time when American Dance Theater couldn’t stay in decent hotels in a largely-segregated America. And yes, that was one of the stresses that Ailey internalized and worked out through his choreography, his every show shouting “I AM” to the world, as one dancer remembers.

Ailey remembers having “nobody to model myself after,” but having a life-changing experience when he saw the Afro-Caribbean dances of Katherine Dunham’s company after his mother moved them to Los Angeles during World War II.

As his fame grew, creating dances from personal experience and memory as well as “blood memory,” he made a vow to those who would follow.

“I want it to be easier than it was for me.”

Generations of dancers back that assertion up.

Like many dancing lives that carried on into the age of AIDS, his story has a tragic arc to it. But Wignot — she did the “Triangle Fire” “American Experience” doc, and Henry Louis Gates films for PBS — takes us from tentative teen to triumph to tragedy with heart and gravitas. This was a life and career of great consequence, a Kennedy Center honoree and an American Master long before this marvelous portrait makes its way — eventually — to PBS.

MPA Rating: PG-13, for brief strong language (profanity)

Cast: Alvin Ailey, Rennie Harris, Carmen de Lavallade, Don Martin, George Faison, Masazumi Chaya, Sylvia Waters, Hope Clarke, Bill T. Jones and Judith Jamison

Credits: Directed by Jamila Wignot. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:35

“Fear Street” shuffles off this mortal coil and shuffles out the door with “Fear Street Part 3: 1666,” a movie that takes R.L. Stine’s witch’s curse story back to the witch hunts of yore — or of “Union” — and stumbles back into 1994 to wrap it all up.

It builds up to a bloody and touching climax, showing us — and our 1994 heroine Deena (Kiana Madeira) — how Sarah Frier lost her hand and cursed the land and folks who live on it forever and ever back in 1666.

And then it returns for a long third act in ’94, which for all the curiosity-sating “resolve everything/explain all” monologues and BIG FINISH, can’t help but come off as anti-climactic.

The acting still ranges from uneven to indifferent. The “revelation” is well-hidden, in that we’re not really thinking about it before the obvious becomes um, obvious.

And the whole enterprise has this anachronistic feel, which even a 17th setting doesn’t discourage — folks tossing “frigid bitch” and “whore” around like they were brought up on Showtime.

In 1666 Union, the name of the “settlement” that split into Sunnyvale and Shadyside, Sarah — played by Deena (Kiana Madeira) — also has a brother (also played by Benjamin Flores Jr. ) and is also a Sapphic sister. Back then, she crushed on the preacher’s daughter, Hannah (still Olivia Scott Welch).

But it being 1666, intolerance didn’t take 1994 form. No, back then “the love that dare not say its name” could get you crucified, or burned at the stake or hung or what have you.

So all this talk about “a full moon rises before nightfall” which means it’s “a good night to enjoy the fruit of the land” that the local young people exchange as a greeting in ritualistic “Let’s go to the woods for a Bacchanale” code is fraught with risk, at least as far as those two are concerned.

“They’ll hang us, Sarah!” “I was not ALIVE before now, anyway!”

Next thing you know, a sow has eaten her new piglets, the fruit is rotting on the trees and the preacher (Michael Chandler) has gone murderously mad.

Only Solomon Goode (Ashley Zukerman) speaks out for reason and seems to defend the young women we know will be accused of being the “cause” for all this.

A mad scramble to find a way to escape their fates ensues, but we all know SOMEbody’s going to lose a hand, otherwise the two prequel-sequels have no point, right?

The first two acts build, with rising action and suspense, pulse-pounding editing and shrieking strings on the score.

And then we fizzle back to 1994, and despite having the lone decent joke of the trilogy, all attempts to top the caves, torches, lynch mob and mass murders of 1666 come off as…R.L. Stine “everything but the kitchen sink” kiddie horror.

Well, kiddie horror with cussing and a lesbian romance for the ages. That’s what it’s meant to be, anyway.

Our loving couple don’t have much chemistry, the “brother” is better suited to Nickelodeon afternoon programming in terms of acting craft and few folks here manage to convince us of the high stakes involved.

This is a workmanlike if uninspiring directorial outing for Leigh Janiak, but what she and her co-screenwriters were working with isn’t exactly Stephen King depth. Not that King is anybody’s idea of Hemingway.

The players committed to perform in all three films in the trilogy, but the connection we’re meant to feel for their characters is never established — a product of thin performances and the choppy narrative — and the attempts at pathos never pay off.

What we have in these three films is the streaming equivalent of a summer horror beach book, an R.L. Stine page-turner more interesting for “how this all turns out” than any shocks, frights or tugs at the heartstrings.

MPA Rating: Rated R for strong violence and gore, language, some sexuality and brief drug use

Cast: Kiana Madeira, Benjamin Flores Jr., Olivia Scott Welch, Ashley Zukerman, Darrel Britt-Gibson and Gillian Jacobs.

Credits: Directed by Leigh Janiak, script by Phil Graziadei, Kate Trefry and Leigh Janiak, based on the story by R.L. Stine. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

“Whirlybird” is “An American Family” in Breaking News, an adrenalin-fueled rush of live, broadcast journalism as it was practiced in a huge, violent city set against the backdrop of family success, glory and dysfunction.

It’s a riveting account the rise of “coming to you LIVE via Chopper 2, 4, 6 or 13” journalism as practiced by the people who invented it. And it’s a sobering take on what that “Nightcrawler” lifestyle costs the people who live it and the culture that’s become addicted to it.

You might not remember the names “Bob Tur” with “my wife Marika on camera” if you live outside of Los Angeles. But if you saw truck driver Reginald Denny dragged from his rig and nearly beaten to death in the riots that followed the verdict in the police beating of Rodney King, you saw their work. If you saw the slow-motion chase that preceded O.J. Simpson’s arrest, “Chopper Bob” was there first.

From Madonna’s wedding to Sean Penn to decades of plane crashes, floods and the Northridge Earthquake, this husband and wife team, founders of the indie L.A. News Service and later employees of the top-rated TV stations in Los Angeles, documented the city at its most tragic, violent and infamous.

And even if you never learned their omnipresent names and faces because you lived far from there, you know their work and their offspring. They’re the parents of NBC News reporter Katy Tur.

Matt Yoka’s film covers the family’s rise, from “video nerd” Bob meeting and courting college grad and theater usher Marika, to their self-taught dive into freelance TV news coverage, on into Bob’s mania for “getting their first” because “You can miss the greatest story in the world — by a minute,” and their transition into pioneering TV “live breaking news” helicopter reporting into Bob’s later transition — into Zoey Tur, after a divorce, the collapse of their business and a sex change.

That’s a lot to take in, and Yoka, using interviews with the family, generous samplings of home movies and their reportorial “greatest hits,” delivers an immersive, exhausting and tragedy-tinged film that mimics the adrenalin junkie nature of the work, the never-ending “deadline” and fear of “missing the big story” and the short fuse that amplifies the abuse Tur heaped upon others as they worked in that pressure cooker.

Marika Gerrard dissects the disconnect that experiencing life through a news camera viewfinder creates, and Zoey admits that it wasn’t until covering the story that made them, a passenger jet crash, that she was taken aback by the idea that this wasn’t just a “story” and that they had some of the first video. Those were “people” and “families” whose lives ended, and ended up on the evening news.

“Whirlybird” charts a rising mania in Tur set against the troubling abuse that accompanied what became a literally all-consuming job, with the fame and riches that came with it.

Here’s little Katy Tur, barely old enough to walk, practicing her TV “stand-up.” And there she is in the chopper with Dad as he spies a small plane crash.

The family and their star second pilot, Lawrence Welk III, note Bob’s soaring ego and messianic turns — executing rescues in flooding and earthquake stories they were covering, collecting Emmys and FAA violations and suspensions all along the way.

The film is a helluva rush and a helluva ride, tracking both the creation of and rising popularity of a style of journalism, a family’s collapse and a man’s acceptance of both his rage and role in all of that, and of the gender dysphoria that led him to transition into a woman. Bob Tur accepted this just as America was turning a corner on tolerance of transgender people.

And if Yoka wasn’t actually there, documenting this disintegrating “American Family” as it came apart, he still did a terrific job reconstructing these lives, this work and that collapse.

MPA Rating: unrated, violent news footage, profanity

Cast: Zoey Tur, Marika Gerrard, Lawrence Welk III, Jamie Tur and Katy Tur.

Credits: Directed by Matt Yoka. A Greenwich Entertainment release (Aug. 6).

Running time: 1:43

An arty thriller about a boy who holds a family hostage in a hole in the ground?

Disturbing.

This IFC release starts rolling out August 6.

The signature achievement of “This Little Love of Mine” is a classic cinematic fool’s errand.

It’s an opulent South Seas island romance shot in Australia, with an Aussie cast headed by Saskia Hampele and Liam McIntyre.

And the decision was made to scrub the Oz right off it, them and everything the least bit colorful about it.

But kudos to Hampele (“A Few Less Men”) and McIntyre (“Spartacus,” “The Flash”) for mastering the bland Midwestern speech of Middle America, no matter how that scrubs any “exotic” touch this pabulum might have managed.

Hampele plays Laura, a high-powered San Francisco lawyer, angling for partner, engaged and on her way…back to Sapphire Cove, the island where she grew up.

The business mogul (Martin Portus, the lone Aussie accent) who shared the island with the natives, and less-well-heeled Anglo locals wants to sign his company over to his grandson. It’s got to happen before his 85th birthday, a deadline for him ceding control.

Laura grew up with grandson “Chip” (McIntyre), but hasn’t seen him in decades. She’s still just the gal to make him sign on the dotted line.

Only he’s living the good life, captain of a charter boat/ferry, beach bumming and what not. The last thing he wants is all that responsibility.

“Not a workaholic like you, but I could put on a suit and get things done. I look great in a suit…Probably.”

So the “workaholic” and the fellow “living on island time,” as Jimmy Buffett would put it, click and clash and haggle and make bets to see whose will wins out. She doesn’t play fair, for starters. And he’s a hard bargainer.

He’ll read “one page for every fun thing you try” here on the island of her youth. Sure. In between emails, Zoom meetings, arm-twisting from her boss (Monette Lee) and distracted calls from her equally ambitious fiance (Craig Horner).

Let the horseback riding/snorkeling etc. begin.

Honestly, this is so dull it barely passes Hallmark Channel muster. Surely somebody considered setting this thing at Christmas time, a Hallmark niche Netflix is going after with a vengeance.

What we have here is a movie made to please Our American Masters, but which has any chance for drama, local color or fun friction — the stuff that sets off “sparks” in a screen romance — bleached right out of it.

The average viewer might be dreaming up improvements to the generic plot and bland characters and sleep-inducing dialogue just from stealing gags and gimmicks from other movies in this genre.

Make the beach bum a real “bum” — loves his rum drinks, avoids responsibility altogether, slinging a lot of the Oz-Island slang. Make him a little sexist or louche, threatened by her.

Turn Laura into a tougher go-getter who labored to lose her accent and “island time” work ethic, only to fall back into “old habits” and her old accent.

Anything would lift this out of its blase “Look at you, all fancy and grown up” banter and hiking, sight-seeing (filmed in North Queensland) and the like.

“Little Love” has very little love, zero stakes and gives the viewer no skin in the game. There’s nothing and no one here to care about.

MPA Rating: TV-G

Cast: Saskia Hampele, Liam McIntyre, Lynn Gilmartin, Lawrence Ola

Credits: Directed by Christine Luby, script by Georgia Harrison. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

Isabelle Huppert, lost in character, sits at a traffic light and giddily sings along with the radio, earning giggles from the biker who pulls up next to her.

Patience is her name, and she’s having a good day. Or maybe it’s what comprises that “good day” that lightened her mood, just by its scent.

There’s all this hashish packed up in the hatchback, stuffed to the roof. The retired police drug-sniffing dog she rescued helped her find it. And Patience, high or just high on the possibilities, is beside herself.

She’s got a mother in a very pricey Paris nursing home, high association fees at her apartment, her late husband’s debts to settle — lots of “expenses.” But she’s got this hashish and she’s got an angle.

The daughter of an Algerian father and Holocaust survivor mother, she’s fluent in Arabic. She translates for the police drug interdiction squad. Any phone conversation, in Arabic, with the folks who brought in the hash or are planning to distribute it — now through her — she will hear. She knows who to sell the hash to. And the suspect the cops come to know as “La Matron,” aka “Mama Weed,” will only be passing on to the police what she wants them to hear.

Oh, and the chief of that squad (Hippolyte Girardot)? He’s her boss….with benefits.

“Mama Weed” is a cackle-out-loud drug smuggling thriller, a suspenseful, cynical and often very amusing comedy about somebody with “an existential” problem with what she does for a living, who finds it also creates opportunities for her, opportunities fraught with risk but which she leaps into because of who she is and where her loyalties lie.

We get a hint that Patience, back in the day, drove a family boat on “runs” into Switzerland. Dad was sketchy, and he raised a daughter indifferent to let’s just say “the law.” Her probably-sketchy husband died decades ago with a lot of tax debts.

She’s behind on her payments at the private care nursing home when a conversation she’s wiretapped into gives her a start. This smuggler the cops are digitally tracking, hoping for a big score, is on the phone with the kindly nurse, Kadidja (Farida Ouchani) who cares for Patience’s mother.

There’s nothing for it but to mistranslate and mislead the police, get in a taxi and run over to warn her. In an instant, she’s committed to saving the woman’s son because of “all you’ve done for my mother.”

And with that, we’re off to the races as our anti-heroine puzzles over how to fool her bosses, trick and foil the scary drug gang, invent a new identity — looking up how to disguise herself in a hijab online — and make a lot of money in a very short period of time.

Can she pull it off?

Director and co-writer Jean-Paul Salomé (“The Chameleon,” “Girls with Guns”) has engineered a clever, comical script built on coincidences and quirky, unconventional relationships.

Patience “knows” the “small fry” drug smugglers she helped identify “Scotch” (Rachid Guellaz) and “Cocoa Puff” (Mourad Boudaoud). She’s got their damned phone numbers, for Pete’s sake. A burner phone, a text message in Arabic, and she’s in business.

A clever touch — one big time dealer has figured out that the most private chat space of all, the one the cops never get wise to, is communicating in the middle of online first-person shooter video games. Log in, get into a shootout, shout out your conversation to your foe.

Cute twists also include the amusing places Patience selects for the hand-offs, and the small world of petty (and not so petty) corruption she wades into, crossing paths with assorted relatives of her working class Chinese immigrant landlady (Nadja Nguyen).

The music and the pace of the editing raise the stakes and up the tempo in the later acts. This flippant, fun movie skips by at a brisk-never-rushed quick canter.

But its the laugh-out-loud chutzpah of it all and Huppert’s cocksure, casual and lie-on-the-fly amorality in the title role that gives “Mama Weed” her buzz. Huppert has never been sunnier or funnier.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, drug content, profanity

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Hippolyte Girardot, Rachid Guellaz, Farida Ouchani and Nadja Nguyen

Credits: Directed by Jean-Paul Salomé, script by Jean-Paul Salomé, Hannelore Cayre. A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:45

Let’s assume everybody who’ll stream this — or read a review of it — isn’t a card-carrying musical theater hater.

None of that tired “People break into song, that doesn’t happen in ‘real life'” argument that Jerry Seinfeld wore out decades ago, and which Keegan-Michael Key’s character Josh parrots in episode one of “Schmigadoon!” Because Cecily Strong’s Melissa has the perfect comeback.

“You seem OK with magic hammers that come when you call them.”

This “Lorne Michaels Presents…” limited series plays like an absurdly ambitious “Saturday Night Live” recurring sketch, or a much less ambitious musical spoof created expressly for the small screen. The songs are lightly-amusing parodies of tunes from “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” “The Sound of Music” and other classics, including — you guessed it — “Brigadoon.” And the intentionally old-fashioned choreography and camera shots are composed on a TV screen scale — compact.

The “Brigadoon” plot is an unhappy unmarried couple (Key and Strong) who stumble across a foggy bridge on a backpacking trip and find themselves in idyllic Schmigadoon, where the 167 “color blind casting” natives sing and dance and “always strive for peace and happiness.”

But is it really “the most beautiful, wonderful, magical place of all?”

“It’s like if ‘The Walking Dead’ was also ‘Glee!'”

Because it turns out, they cannot just walk out the way they walked in. And “We’re smart. We found our way out of IKEA” is no help.

It seems these two doctors, who met “cute” at the hospital where they work, cannot get out of Schmigadoon until they’ve found “true love.” That’s according to the leprechaun (Martin Short) who explains the bridge they cannot cross back over.

For cynical, always letting-her-down Josh, “It’s important to me that we hate things together.” But the more romantic Melissa kind of goes with it. “Holy s—, am I about to get a song, my OWN song?” And this hunky carny named Danny (Aaron Tveit) is giving her the “Tunnel of Love” come-on.

If they’re not truly in love, where will they find “true love” so that they can escape “Schmigadoon?”

Nothing here is going to give Lin-Manuel Miranda the cold shakes. A little tap dancing, parody songs by series co-creator (with Ken Daurio) Cinco Paul that sound more workshopped than Broadway-bound.

The stakes are lower than low. Because “Nobody gets killed in a musical. Except ‘Oklahoma!’ And ‘Carousel.’ And ‘South Pacific.’ And, oh HELLO. ‘West Side Story!'”

The leads have decent chemistry, with Strong having more to play with. Melissa debates morality and ethics with the natives and the hunky Hispanic doctor (Jaime Cahill) she goes to work for. And she explains to Josh (and the viewer) “how musicals work,” ticks off the ones they’re living through (“Music Man,””King and I,” etc.). Key’s tempted by the “school marm” (“What’s a ‘marm’ again?”) played by “Hamilton” veteran Ariana DeBose, and by a waitress flirt (Disney Channel alumna Dove Cameron).

Musical theater royalty Kristin Chenoweth plays the town’s puritanical head of Mothers Against the Future and preacher’s (Fred Armisen) wife, and equally royal Alan Cumming is the confused, Mayor Aloyius Menlove. He gets a number or three, and Ann Harada playing his wife lilts through an “oh, honey” number, as the last to get a clue.

“He’s a queer one, that man’o mine.”

Subtle. But damned if that isn’t that a cue for another Cumming number (delivered in a florid pre-“Showboat” style).

Her entire “SNL” career has prepped Strong for that moment when OB-GYN Melissa picks up a guitar and explains the facts of life to an incredibly naive pregnant couple with a “Sing with me” send-up of that song that began by naming a female deer.

“Vagina…is where the penis goes. Ovaries…make eggs for you and me! Testes…are where the sperm repose, CERVIX is where they can swim free!”

Each episode begins with a sweetly-deflating flashback that shows how much trouble our unhappy couple is in.

It’s all kind of cute, kind of snarky and just sweet enough to come off. Well, come off just enough to keep you watching to see if they finally get Keegan-Michael Key to sing and dance.

“I’m. Not. Singing.”

MPA Rating: A little profanity, a lot of innuendo

Cast: Cecily Strong, Keenan-Michael Key, Alan Cumming, Kristin Chenoweth, Dove Cameron, Ann Harada, Jaime Cahill, Aaron Tveit, Fred Armisen, Ariana DeBose, Martin Short and Jane Krakowski.

Credits: Created by Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: Six episodes @:30 each.

“Sublet” is an American in Tel Aviv story, a laid-back travelogue about a travel writer who visits the city for a “five days in” article, and gets more than he bargained — or embracing the local custom — haggled for.

John Benjamin Hickey (“The Good Wife,” “Mapplethorpe”) gives a not-quite-fussbudget air to Michael, a veteran traveler who takes a sublet rather than checking into a hotel, because that’s the quickest way to immerse yourself in a place. He instantly regrets the decision.

Tomer (Israeli newcomer Niv Nissim) gets the days he’s renting the place wrong. He’s a student, a filmmaker and a slovenly housekeeper. But he begs Michael to keep the bargain, and here we are — a gay, middle-aged and married travel writer tucked into a “hip, hot” neighborhood, with a young, gay horror movie maker as his tour guide.

Tomer reflects the way director and co-writer Eytan Fox wants Tel Aviv to come off — ever so laid back. He shows off the beach, the cafes, treelined streets filled with student-age kids and the occasional tourist. Tomer takes Michael to a nightclub and on a train ride “home” to visit his mother (Miki Kim) in a kibbutz.

We never see any IDF (Israeli Defense Force) soldiers. It’s easy to be “laid back” when that part of Israeli life is erased from the story. The only stresses are of a minor melodramatic nature — a dancer friend (Lihi Kornowksi) has love life troubles, Tomer has commitment issues and darn it all, his bike is stolen. Again.

His reaction to the stolen bike, which turns up exactly where he expects — a local Palestinian-run second-hand bike shop — sets the tone. He won’t rat them out to the police “because the cops around here are racist,” and would put the man out of business. He’s young and tolerant and given to making patronizing, ageist cracks at Michael’s expense, almost from the start.

“It’s very unoriginal to be a gay man who loves musicals!”

Tomer makes “artistic horror” movies, which he shares with Michael, dreams, like many of his young countrymen, of moving to Berlin, which surprises Michael, it being “a place that symbolizes Jewish tragedy.” Tomer and dancer Daria have a good laugh at that. They’re not listening to the Middle Aged American who says “I hate to be the guy who says, ‘When I was your age…'”

The handsome student is the very embodiment of how he describes the average Israeli’s attitude towards Western tourists. “They just want you to like them…We’re in the Middle East, but want to be a part of the West.”

“Sublet” has an easy-going charm right up to the moments when a little “edge” is finally jammed in. A brutally off-key introduction to “Israel’s version of Grindr” is as abrupt as the as the third act turns in the story are utterly predictable and eye rolling.

If this was a heterosexual romance playing this game it’d be hooted right off the screen.

Yet the light and lightly-unsettling charms of “Sublet” win you over, even if you suspect that Fox has merely added a sexual edge to atone for the political and ethnic strife he’s taken care to avoid.

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: John Benjamin Hickey, Niv Nissim, Lihi Kornowski and Miki Kim

Credits: Directed by Eytan Fox, script by Eytan Fox and Itay Segal. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:27

This Oct. 1 release looks like a sort of history lesson in Christian popular music. Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith et al, lots of veterans of the scene speak out here.

Interesting timing, considering the way polling and demographic trends are pointing for Christianity, institutionally and politically and in general these days.