Movie Nation

In my mind, and perhaps in yours, I saw Cage going all John Wick in this “Truffle Hunters” tale. You don’t mess with a man’s truffle hunting pig. No-sir.

As someone who makes it a point to watch everything the Oscar winner puts on film, every B and C- movie he churns out in his workaholism as therapy lifestyle (He told me once he needs the work to get out of his head, and I believe him.), that’s the sort of film it sounded like when it was first announced.

Gonzo. Violent. Vengeful.

And since, as the trailer suggests, it isn’t, maybe they’ll do that with the sequel?

Best thing about Jason Mamoa taking on Aquaman? He gets into a much better class of B-movies.

Fun actor, great presence, wonderful big screen bad ass.

“Holy Beasts (“La Fiera y la Fiesta)” is a movie about making a movie, an “art film” about old friends gathering to make a murdered filmmaker’s long-planned dream project in his native Santo Domingo.

Geraldine Chaplin plays the aged actress and sometime director who will turn “Water Follies” into a movie. Vera was close to Jean-Louis, and narrates much of this dark, cursed vampire tale as a conversation with his ghost.

“I found your script and I’m going to shoot it,” she begins. But when she gets to the Dominican Republic, her hypeman/producer Victor (Jaime Pina) has leapt ahead, scrambling to bums-rush this thing into production before the money vanishes and/or Vera stumbles, gets cold feet or flips out at the sets, costumes and dancer casting that he’s run off and handled for her.

“I didn’t approve ANY of this!” The sets (seen as models) “look like cheap kitsch!”

“Kitsch is IN!”

She can bark “How can you DO this to me?” all she wants. Victor’s back on the phone, promising the Dominican film community that “This is going to be the BIG one!”

Vera summons her co-star, Henri (Udo Kier), who balks at making the trip. “Hurricanes? Erupting volcanoes? NOT for me!”

But he comes. As their equally aged cinematographer Martín (Luis Ospina) shows up, rehearsals begin and the location scouting ends. And that’s when things go seriously sideways.

This movie about an elderly dancer (played by Vera) whose cabaret is filled with eternally-young hoofers, thanks to the predations of a choreographer/vampire (Kier) starts to lose dancers, and not to “creative differences.” Oh no. They have fatal neck injuries.

One of the dancers is to be played Vera’s long lost grandson (Jackie Ludueña Koslovitch), a lithe, long-haired and exceptionally feminine young man, and through him we start to pick up on what made the real Jean-Louis Jorge stand out. His films –some of which are sampled here — featured erotically-charged, gender-bending sequences. A maid (Yeraldine Asencio) who could be of any number of genders, a short-haired producer’s assistant (Pau Bertolini) who has her/his pick of pronouns, this is apparently in keeping with Jorge’s themes and style.

But will they be able to finish a film that is so accident prone that Vera wonders if long-dead Jean-Louis himself is to blame?

Co-writers/directors Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán take us back to the artier days of indie/international cinema with “Holy Beasts.” The dialogue feels improvised, the “relationships” seem real and there’s a little in the casting.

Producer Victor wonders if Vera has the “memory” and stamina to star in and shoot this film. But as he ticks off the names of their contemporaries, filmmaker friends who might be able to “help,” he’s the one who didn’t realize this or that “name” was dead.

It’s a dreamy making-a-movie narrative of stunning locations, elaborate costume parties and drugs, of geezers remembering their “Quaalude” days, and thankful that “Tough weeds never die.”

Like the film within the film, there’s a wistful contrast between the aged stars — in front of and behind the camera — and the fit and beautiful and often androgynous dancers in the supporting cast.

I was reminded of any number of cinema classics from the 1960s, starting with Truffaut’s “Day for Night” but staggering into the more obscure indulgences of Pasolini, Goddard, Fellini and Resnais. Like some of their works, “Holy Beasts” doesn’t quite come off in terms of coherence or dramatic tension, but impresses in almost every scene.

That’s the real homage here, to a ’70s-80s Dominican throwback to ’60s cinema who made art without seemingly trying too hard, sweating every detail or fretting too much about how coherent the script will seem to the casual viewer.

It’s offhand and off-the-cuff, extreme effort made to feel tossed-off, effortless. And if it’s all somewhat confusing, that was pretty much the point, back then and right now.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, nudity

Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Udo Kier, Jackie Ludueña Koslovitch, Pau Bertoloni, Luis Ospina and Jaime Pina

Credits: Scripted and directed by Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:29

No movie I’ve seen this year has hit me harder than “Cousins.” This heartfelt, emotionally wrenching story set among New Zealand’s indigenous Maori is poetry on screen, a compact saga of one extended family’s history and the lost cousin that those who knew her never give up looking for.

Movingly-adapted from a novel by one of New Zealand’s most celebrated writers, Patricia Grace, it follows Mata, a child orphaned by the state, abandoned by her callous British father. But even as she’s shoved into a home for “Desolate Children,” indoctrinated with the Bible, denied her own culture and language and kept from her family, they’re looking for her.

The secret to the film’s power is the number of times the tale lets us hope that she’s “rescued” and “brought home,” only to have that snatched away by a racist system and the racists who benefit from it.

In the fictive present, Mata (Tanea Heke) is old and homeless in Wellington, lost in her thoughts, adrift on a stream-of-conscious that takes her through her earliest memories, her first reconnections with her family and the cruel hand life dealt her. She grew up exploited, neglected and unschooled about family, social interactions, love and sex. She grew up without her family’s loving embrace.

Prim Mrs. Parkinson (Sylvia Rands) becomes her legal guardian when her mother dies, the one who drops little Mata (Te Ao Marama Baker) at the Mercy Home and who later takes her back in as a virtual indentured servant.

Her family doesn’t find her for years, but Aunt Gloria (Cian Elyse White) and others track her down and get her “home” for the holidays, with cousin Missy (Keyahne Patrick Williams) in charge of introducing her around and getting the older relatives to speak English around her.

And slightly older cousin Makareta (Shannon Williams), the self-described “spoiled one,” recognizes the injustice going on and vows, “We’re going to get you back, Mata. I promise.”

Decades later, Makareta (co-screenwriter Briar Grace Smith) has become a lawyer, trying to help the family hang onto ancestral lands, still looking at old family photos and wondering, “Where are you, Cousin?”

Co-directors Ainsely Gardiner (he produced “Eagle vs. Shark”) and Briar Grace Smith (she wrote “The Strength of Water”) seamlessly blend the various streams of the past with the film’s present. Mata’s school years, where she absorbed a contempt for her “ugly” people who “worship false gods and drink beer,” her late teens when when entered the workforce (to the benefit of her “guardian”) on to the first young man to turn her head.

Makareta, groomed to be a “great leader” by her ambitious mother, endures her own trials. And Missy (Hariata Moriarty, and later Rachel House) grows up to be exactly what we saw in her as a child, the glue that holds the family together, come hell or high water. The stream of actresses, young, youngest and old, who tell this tale are well-cast and sympathetically directed.

It’s a melancholy script decorated with poignant grace notes — that rebel schoolmate who sticks up for Mata when she’s bullied, the glimmer of connection when a Maori groundskeeper recognizes her “people,” the sisterhood of hatmakers who embrace her and slowly socialize her in her first job, an “arranged” wedding, a sad funeral.

What Smith and Gardiner have adapted is a rare and precious thing, a movie whose narrative momentum is carried by the simplest of longings — hope.

“Cousins” moves us to tears by the mythic promise of their grandmother, one we trust that no matter how dark, how often hope is dashed, will be fulfilled.

“The land, her ancestors, will bring her home.”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, adult situations, profanity

Tanea Heke, Te Raukura Gray, Te Ao Marama Baker, Ana Scotney, Rachel House, Briar Grace Smith, Miriama Smith, Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne, Keyahne Patrick Williams, Shannon Williams, Hariata Moriarty, and Sylvia Rands

Credits: Directed by Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace Smith, scripted by Briar Grace Smith, based on a novel by Patricia Grace. Coming to Netflix July 22.

Running time: 1:38

Terror totes an axe in “Fear Street Part 2: 1978,” the middle film in Leigh Janiak’s homage to horror films and the eras they came from.

Twenty five minutes into “Part 2,” the summer camp slaughterhouse instalment in the trilogy, a rerecorded version of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” turns up. Because the Captain and Kansas, Bowie and Neil and Tennille may set up the era, but nothing sets the mood like more cowbell.

That’s kind of the way of this film, entirely too “on the nose” for its own damned good.

The finale to “Part 1” introduced us to a Camp Nightwing survivor of the the long-ago-executed “witch” Sarah Fier, rumored to possess spree killers over the decades in forever-sullied Shadyside. “Part 2” is about C. Berman, aka Cindy Berman (Emily Rudd), at that ill-fated camp where the kids of Shadyside and neighboring, affluent and less crime-ridden Sunnyvale gathered in the summer.

Until, that is, 1978.

Cindy is a goody-two-shoes at the camp. Her sister Ziggy (Sadie Sink) is a hellion, lashing out at their disintegrating home life and shrinking future, on the verge of being “hung” as a witch by the mean Sunnyvalers when saner heads prevail.

But the camp nurse (Jordana Spiro) has been poking around in the past. There’s a map, and a “treasure” at the end of it that might “end this curse” and save Shadyside. As we’ve already seen all hell break loose in 1994, we know better.

“You can’t stop her. Run as far as you can as fast as you can,” the adult C. Berman (Gillian Jacobs) warned 1994’s Deena et al.

It all ties together as one big convoluted and inter-connected and inbred narrative, the future sheriff (Ted Sutherland) and future C. Berman and others struggle to get through one hellish night, the back-story is filled in more, and we hear more of the local murderous nursery rhyme.

“Before the witch’s final break, she found a way to cheat death…”

There’s a perfunctory quality to the situations and performances, the dialogue and the “terror,” cribbed from scores of “kids killed at camp” thrillers. It’s pitiless, but one gets the feeling the actors have seen the films these borrowings came from are just imitating their forebears.

“Part 2,” truth be told, feels kind of gassed after the giddiness of “1994.” The threats, terrors and manipulations are hammered home with a cudgel.

I mean, being chased with a guy with an axe is still seriously harrowing, and Janiak handles the attacks with skill, amped up by the screams and shrieking violins on the soundtrack. But familiarity breeds you-know-what.

Telling us what the future looks like isn’t the “spoiler” you might expect. But as we descend down the rabbit hole with the writer-director, we can guess the real suspense will come from in the third film, set in “The Witch” era — 1666.

How WILL she manage a movie that isn’t stuffed with Foghat, The Runaways, “Carry On My Wayward Son” and more cowbell?

MPA Rating: R, bloody horror violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Sadie Sink, Ryan Sink, Emily Rudd, McCabe Slye, Ted Sutherland, Chiara Aurelia, Michael Provost

Credits: Scripted and directed by Leigh Janiak, A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51

Even if Bundy is a serial killer subject who’s been beaten into submission, this August release looks intriguing.

Robert Patrick’s the warden, Luke Kirby is a charismatic but less sexy/cute version of Bundy than we’re used to, and Wood plays an FBI agent hoping to get a few last answers out of a genuine monster before he faces his final justice.

Coming in November.

“How I Became a Superhero (Comment je suis devenu super-héros)” is a French twist on a common Hollywood theme — superhumans, living among us, minor celebrities with all the human foibles.

It’s not as serious minded as “Watchmen” or “Heroes,” not particularly lightweight and cute, either. But like the Russian “Major Grom: Plague Doctor,” it’s a curiosity, an example of how other cultures tackle a genre American cinema has beaten to death.

Actor turned first-time feature director Douglas Attal’s film is more tactile and lived-in than most Marvel or DC movies. It’s basically a police procedural with a superhuman mystery as the subject of its investigation. Occasional burst of effects aside, it doesn’t go full-on superheroic until late in the third act.

Somebody is kidnapping Parisians with powers. And Detective Moreau (Pio Marmaï), long on the job, almost as long on a losing streak, is given the case. He may be saddled with a no-nonsense partner (Vimala Pons) now, but back in the day, he was department “liaison” for the Pack Royal, a team of heroic super-heroes who helped him solve crimes of “supercriminality.”

That’s the sort of “super” folks we see the most of, here. “Mr. Cold? Could I get a selfie with you?” celebrities, convicts, goons and headcases. Moreau will lean on his old friend, time/shifting Monte Carlo (veteran French character actor Benoît Poelvoorde), who had to retire due to Parkinson’s, and Callista, the clairvoyant superhuman (Leïla Bekhti) who runs a sort of after school/keep’em out of trouble program for superhuman teens.

Yes, that sounds a lot like “X-Men,” troubled superhumans causing trouble. But there’s no Professor Xavier here to show them their better selves.

What’s more, the streets are flooded with drugs which give people brief blasts of the bad sort of superhuman “powers.” A string of increasingly-deadly arsons is what our cop duo is investigating — at first. But their main suspects, and other people with powers are disappearing, too.

The cops bicker in the usual ways, and do the “good cop/bad cop” thing as if they think it’ll work, although crooks have seen that in the movies for 100 years.

I found the entire enterprise just a tad above “boring,” lacking much in the way of action or urgency or connection with the characters. But eventually it settles in and we get moments of mild excitement and genuine pathos.

And the film being French, it manages the sexiest superhero scene since “Spider-Man.”

MPA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast: Pio Marmaï, Vimala Pons, Leïla Bekhti, Swann Arlaud and Benoît Poelvoorde

Credits: Directed by Douglas Attal, script by Cédric Anger, Melisa Godet, Charlotte Sanson, Douglas Attal and Gérald Bronner, based on the graphic novel by Gérald Bronner. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

What’s a stoner comedy without weed? If it’s “Mandibles,” the latest deadpan farce from the French director of “Rubber,” it’s still daft, stoned or stone-cold sober.

“Mandibles” is a shambolic, sometimes funny and always-silly amble through the South of France with a couple of dopes who’ve stumbled upon a gigantic house fly.

They didn’t plan it, although they make lots of “plans” about the big bug the more sentimental of the two, Jean-Gab (David Marsais) promptly names “Dominique.” Something to do with “drones,” maybe, a trained fly that can make them rich by maybe doing what they do, only better.

They’re low rent hustlers. Manu (Grégoire Ludig) is the muscle, a homeless mug and part-time thug given “a mission” by his sketchy pal Raimondo (Raphaël Quenard). Get a car, drive to the chateau of Michel-Michel, pick up a suitcase, put it in the trunk.

As Raimondo finds Manu homeless, sleeping on the beach, that presents several challenges. Got to get a car, first. He breaks Raimondo’s confidence by bringing his hapless filling station attendant pal Jean-Gab along.

But that old Mercedes Manu hot-wired? There’s a noise in the trunk. And it’s neither mechanical nor human.

Writer-director Quentin Dupieux finds a few chuckles in this quirky couple, dimwits who hook horns (with their fists) every time something pays off for them, shouting, “TORO.”

Their simple “mission” is going wrong before they take a look in the trunk (a hot-wired car has no keys, remember). Every DIY challenge they face they solve in the most half-assed manner imaginable.

They stop to “train” the fly, but they need somewhere to lay low. They decide on the camper trailer (“caravan” in Euro-speak) of an old guy Manu head-butts as he robs him. But caravans aren’t fireproof, or nincompoop-proof.

Right in the middle of another sight gag — towing the Mercedes with a unicorn bicycle — they’re stopped and befriended by a gaggle of bourgeois ladies, one of whom is sure Manu is somebody she knew from high school.

And that’s how we meet Agnes, a friend of the family who SHOUTS (in French, with English subtitles) her every rude thought and deranged accusation at them due to a brain injury. “WHERE DID YOU LEARN YOUR MANNERS?” Whatever else “Mandibles” manages, Agnes (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is one hilarious creation.

The picture doesn’t go much of anywhere, but aimless in Rayol-Canadel-sur-Mer, La Croix Valmer and elsewhere along the Côte d’Azur​ counts for something, a pretty setting for a seriously deadpan (and slightly icky) comedy about two guys on the lam with a fly.

MPA Rating: unrated, some violence, profanity

Cast: Grégoire Ludig, David Marsais, Adèle Exarchopoulos, India Hair, Roméo Elvis, Raphaël Quenard

Credits: Scripted and directed by Quentin Dupieux. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:17

Strike while the iron is hot, jefe.

Netflix has this project, which looks cute enough.