Movie Nation

“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is a sumptuous period piece about passion, feminine independence and painting set in a world of bustles and bodices and ladies wearing Empire waist.

Like the process of portrait painting it depicts, it’s a patient, drawn-out affair, a tale with an ending we see long before the last brush stroke is applied to canvas.

Noémie Merlant is Marianne, a painter we meet as she poses for the young ladies studying under her what to notice, what to sketch next, details they need to pick up on to paint.

Such powers of observation have served Marianne, who learned from her father, well. In a long flashback, we see when those skills of observation served her best — taking on the portrait of a reluctant bride intended for her Italian husband-to-be.

There’s a mystery to this place and this young woman. Marianne arrives by ship’s longboat, having had to rescue her crate of canvases when they fell overboard. Her subject has just come home from a convent. Her subject’s sister just died. And her subject refused to pose for the previous painter who attempted a portrait, which he abandoned — headless — before he disappeared.

“She wore out one painter before you,” the young woman’s mother (Valeria Golino of “Rain Man”) warns (in French and occasionally Italian, with English subtitles). So the daughter cannot know why Marianne is here other than to be a companion. She will have to walk, talk and visit with Heloise (Adèle Haenel) and enlist the help of the only servant (Luàna Bajrami) if she’s to pull this stealth portraiture off.

Heloise is introduced from behind, her head covered on first meeting. Over the course of weeks, Marianne must study her and recite her studies in interior monologues about “the ear, its cartilage” and the like, surreptitiously sketching when her back is turned or sketching from memory back in her room.

When she complains “I haven’t seen her smile,” to Sophie the maid, Sophie’s response changes everything.

“Have you tried to be funny?”

Heloise misses the “equality” of the convent she was yanked out of, is sad that she’s lost her sister but furious that her death means “leaving me her fate” — marrying some Milanese noble she’s never met.

Their interactions grow more sympathetic and unguarded, even as Marianne continues to hide her true purpose. The remoteness of the house, the intimacy of the conversations, the prolonged “study” of each other’s mannerisms, tics and “tells” set the stage for love.

French writer-director Céline Sciamma doesn’t rush any of this, but that doesn’t keep us from leaping ahead in the story. Heloise declaring she likes to “bathe” in the sea, but doesn’t know if she can swim adds a touch of danger, but just that — only a touch.

She’s trying to create a sensual experience, but her shot selection doesn’t emphasize and aid that until the film’s third act. We watch Marianne paint, but the camera doesn’t mimic her eye for Heloise’s eyebrows, neck and eyes.

The painting stays in the foreground, even as the masquerade breaks down. Marianne has trouble getting her countenance just so, and Heloise knows it.

“I didn’t know you were an art critic!”

“And I didn’t know you were a painter!”

“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” spreads its “independence” and “equality” messaging over several characters and gives these themes many forms. As you’ve probably heard, the 18th century’s methods for abortion come into play.

But even those scenes lack much in the way of emotion. Drama is here. You just have to concentrate to pick up on it.

The performances are subtle, rarely giving in to simmering. That and the film’s literal reliance on art, as it is made, slows the picture to a crawl.

It’s still a lovely character study in a lovely setting, even if the romance rarely achieves the urgency or heat to truly animate this “portrait.”

MPAA Rating: R for some nudity and sexuality

Cast: Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami and Valeria Golino

Credits: Scripted and directed by Céline Sciamma. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:01

Another version of “The Most Dangerous Game” with “liberal elites” hunting “red state conservatives” for sport.

It was delayed after assorted gun nut mass shootings last year. “Conservative” elites?

It’ll dominate Fox “news” coverage in March. Betcha money.

Film critics and other “elites will be spending the weeks after March 13 explaining “satire” to the uninitiated. And repeating the fact that this is a fictional movie, not a documentary.

“Fantasy Island” is showing in a Florida beach town cinema filled with retirees.

It doesn’t matter that they don’t know from “Blumhouse,” and have no idea what they’re in for. This is the way it meant to be seen, not so much because they’re old enough to remember the soapy, has-been star-studded TV show of the ’70s, but because horror studio Blumhouse has re-imagined it as a grim tale of grappling with regrets.

“Regret is a disease,” our host, Mr. Roarke (Michael Peña) tells his guests.

And whatever young horror fans have among the things in life they wish they could do over, it takes some years to compile genuine remorse over misdeeds, paths not taken and the like.

I didn’t hate this slaughter-at-the-soap opera reboot. Not until it goes seriously off the rails in the third act, anyway. But don’t get your “torture porn” hopes up with the word “slaughter.” It is PG-13, after all. And this isn’t “Hostel.”

The guests are a lonely woman (Maggie Q) dwelling on the man she turned down and the life that got away, the cop who was a soldier’s son and longs to play-act like he’s in the military (Austin Stowell), two brothers by different mothers (Jimmy O. Yang and Ryan Hansen) who want to sample the hedonism and excess of great wealth with an epic pool-party filled with models and the embittered 20something (Lucy Hale) who wants revenge on her high school tormentor (Portia Doubleday) ten years after the fact.

The rules are that they must “see the fantasy through.” They can’t bail, even as they find themselves learning things they don’t want to know about who they are.

“I’m sorry, is this a vacation or a therapy session?”

“It can be BOTH…This is Fantasy Island. It’s as real as you make it.”

What they experience are a collection of fairly humdrum life do-overs or facile dreams of excess. Mr. Roarke is always there, hands in his white linen pockets (Peña has none of Ricardo Montalban’s smarmy, menacing elegance), offering pithy aphorisms as teachable moments.

“I am afraid that the problem with ‘having it all’ is that other people want to take it!”

I am afraid the biggest problem with “Fantasy Island” is the screenplay’s fixation on EXPLAINING how all this is possible. The arriving guests may speculate on drugged drinks and LARP (live action role-players) and “holograms, just like Tupac!” The “answer” is far dumber and eats up the entire third act.

The characters are blandly interesting, the engineering of how their fantasies might overlap is clever right up to the moment it isn’t, but the dialogue is flippant and often funny.

“Oooo, a ‘panic room.’ I feel like Jodie Foster in that Jodie Foster movie!”

The moments of peril seem like “Saw” outtakes, and the big “EXPLANATION” could bring Harlan Ellison back from the grave for another lawsuit.

Will there be a sequel? Don’t bet against it. Me? I’m just waiting on Blumhouse’s “The Love Boat.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, terror, drug content, suggestive material and brief strong language

Cast: Michael Peña, Lucy Hale, Maggie Q, Austin Stowell, Portia Doubleday, Jimmy O. Yang, Ryan Hansen and Michael Rooker

Credits: Directed by Jeff Wadlow, script by Jillian Jacobs, Christopher Roach and Jeff Wadlow  A Blumhouse/Columbia Pictures release.

Running time: 1:50

Silly Germans. Don’t they know only Judd Apatow can get away with a comedy with a two hour run time?

And even he only pulls it off every third or fourth movie.

“Isi & Ossi” is an old fashioned screwball romance about two crazy kids from different classes who “date” to rub her rich parents the wrong way.

That’s straight out of 1930s Hollywood. And in case you’ve forgotten what was going on in Germany in the 1930s, the older characters in this farce remind you.

“Democracy is crap, and I was around for Hitler!” is slightly funnier in the original German, although you can watch/listen to this dubbed, if you so choose. It’s disorienting to hear African-American English speaking voices dubbing the Aryan rappers in a Mannheim rap battle, but to each her/his own.

Isi (Lisa Vicari) is a pretty young rich thing — real name, Isabel — who “has the brains of a gummy bear.” She’s just finished high school and is resisting her “trust fund” parents’ efforts to shove her into college. Her only talent is cooking, which she picked up from the staff at home.

Finding out Mom Felicity Huffman’d her high school degree and her admission to college settles it. She’s in open revolt. She takes a job at Tommy’s Burgers, where “It’s been proven our food makes people blind and impotent.”

That’s where she meets Osi — real name, Oscar (Dennis Mojen) — a brutish working class East German who sees a way out of his family’s money-losing gas station with his fists. He’s a boxer who needs sponsor cash to get his “big break” fight.

Isi comes on to him to rattle her folks and open their wallets for New York culinary school tuition. She’s not very good at this throwing herself at a guy thing, and he’s no good at courtship. Too crude, coarse, profane and hot-headed.

His Arabic pal (Walid Al-Atiyat) counsels the “Rocky” approach — “Can you give a compliment? Rocky smothered Adrian in compliments! ADRIAN!”

But when Isi and Ossi come clean with their schemes, the die is cast. They’ll scam her parents by being the Couple from Hell, scaring them into paying him off and sending her to New York.

How you stretch that thin, worn-out comedy concept to two hours is you let almost every scene go on past its comic payoff, you shove in a little tender confessional moment or two with the parents, and you remember the best thing about The Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night.” You add a hilarious grandpa.

Ernest Stötzner plays Oscar’s Gramps, fresh out of prison, hellbent on becoming a rapper.

“Didn’t you SEE ‘8 Mile?'”

Give the old man a shot at a rap battle, find your movie’s biggest laughs. Get Grandpa drunk and ranting about “Hipsters” and “A-rabs” and “that fairy, Hitler,” and at least you’ve got what passes for comedy here.

The bull in the China shop Ossi “courtship” stuff has a chuckle here and there — Tschüchin, the Arab friend, turns an art gallery show inside out in the crudest “Everybody’s a critic” way.

But mostly, “Isi & Ossi” is a reminder that the Germans aren’t famous for their sense of humor, even if they have finally gotten around to making their own Hitler jokes.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Lisa Vicari, Dennis Mojen, Ernest Stötzner and Walid Al-Atiyat.

Credits: Written and directed by Oliver Kienle. A Neflix release.

Running time: 1:53

The fanatic is unyielding in his beliefs, unbending in his attention to religious edicts and prayer-time.

He has heard the word “apostate” and the word “bitch.” And he’s taking matters into his own hands.

He is methodical as he wraps paper towels in tape, a DIY sheath for the paring knife he stuffs into his sock. He’ll knock on her door and…problem solved!

But this dead-eyed, dogmatic would-be killer is young. “Young Ahmed” looks to be about 15.

The latest thriller from Belgium’s Dardennes Brothers (“Two Days, One Night,” “The Promise”) is quietly chilling and subtly disheartening. It’s about a radicalized child, a state and a “system” that does everything “right” to compassionately change his heart. And time and again, we see those interventions just aren’t working.

The Dardennes discovered Idir Ben Addi who becomes EveryTeen in this, his debut film. Ahmed is dyslexic, so he requires after-school tutoring from Madame Ines (Myriem Akheddiou). His single mom (Clair Bodson) dotes on him. His older sister loves him.

But he’s spending all his time with the fiery young Imam (Othmane Moumen) and is almost wholly indoctrinated to the Islamic fundamentalism — no kissing or saying goodbye to women or girls, harsh judgement for “infidels” and “apostates.”

That he’s able to manage this in spite of every woman in his life reaching out, begging, arguing and even (in the case of sister Yasmine) pummeling him is a wonder.

Calling his mother “askarji” (a drunk) isn’t the last straw. She doesn’t even speak the language, but she knows an insult when she hears is. And that darned nuisance Madame Ines is starting an Arabic class so that Belgian Muslim kids can learn their parents’ language without getting that indoctrinating instruction “through the Koran” has Ahmed, his somewhat less fanatical brother and “plants” in the community meeting about the class pushing back against this blasphemous act. Ahmed puts the exclamation point on the debate.

“Your new boyfriend is a Jew!”

That’s when the kid crosses over, procures that paring knife and sets out to silence Madame Ines, if not every every woman who doesn’t adhere to his and his Iman’s doctrinaire idea of Islam, Arabic and women’s role in it.

“Young Ahmed” is mostly about what happens after that attempt — the detention center where he’s sent, the counselors and psychologist who try to accommodate his beliefs while teaching him empathy — getting him to tutor another boy in French, putting him to work on the farm dealing with animals, with a farm family and with their cute farm daughter Louise (Victoria Bluck).

Filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne set us up for predictable twists, and don’t always avoid delivering the expected payoff. Mostly, they do, maintaining suspense, keeping us guessing about whether or not any of this compassion is rubbing off on the kid.

Addi plays Ahmed as poker-faced, avoiding eye contact, on-task and losing himself in the structure and narrow path his passion for Islam gives him. He is every “rebellious” teen you’ve ever dealt with — with the stubborn certitude of one too young to know all that he doesn’t know.

Like its anti-hero, “Young Ahmed” is narrow in focus, intimate in detail and troubling in its monomania. Start to finish, it forces one despairing question on us, one it cannot answer.

Can “Young Ahmed” be saved?

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Idir Ben Addi, Clair Bodson, Myriem Akheddiou, Victoria Bluck, and Othmane Moumen

Credits: Written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:24

“Love Jacked” is built on maybe the silliest premise to ever prop up a romantic comedy. A young art school graduate, rebelling against her hardware store-owner Dad’s bossiness, takes a trip to Africa, falls for Mr. Wrong and tells the family they’re to be married.

But she catches the guy cheating before she gets on the plane for home. And rather than admit her cupidity to her overbearing Dad, she relies on a stranger who offers to pose as that fiance, African accent and all.

Ridiculous.

But here’s what works. The scene where Maya (Amber Stevens, who also played a Maya in “22 Jump Street”) introduces her (fake) intended to the family has her as shocked at his appearance and voice as they are.

“What’s with the ROBES?” she hisses.

“Haven’t you seen ‘Coming to America?'”

There are a couple of cute bits like this in this leaden comedy, a film that could use a lot of campy “Imitation African” stuff like that for our con-man groom (Shamier Anderson), more “tests” by Maya’s Afro-centric uncle (Mike Epps, always good for a laugh) and more bluster from Maya’s skeptical dad, the master-blusterer Keith David.

The set up is, as I said, ridiculous, the “Southern California” settings of this Canadian/South African production are plainly South African, the situations rote and the performers at a loss to overcome all this.

Malcolm (Anderson) has just busted up with his fellow pool hustler/conman, Tyrell (Lyriq Bent). It’s a violent parting of the ways, as Malcolm has a heart that keeps him from stealing from the poor, and Tyrell has a gun and a grudge.

Enter Maya, with her fiance predicament. Maybe they can help each other out? How hard can it be?

“Where do you think the ‘African’ in African AMERICAN came from?”

They plot and scheme, the hapless family goes along, Uncle Rudy (Epps) is misplaces for FAR too long, and Tyrell’s got to make a return appearance to muck things up, as if they weren’t mucked up before.

We can buy a romance warming up between these two, but not based on what this fiasco delivers.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, for some suggestive material.

Cast: Amanda Stevens, Shamier Anderson, Keith David, Marla Gibbs, Lyriq Bent, Demetrius Grosse and Mike Epps

Credits: Directed by Alfons Adetuyi, script by Linda Eskeland, Robert Adetuyi, Alfons Adetuyi. An Inner City Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

You can’t get more Australian than a romantic comedy with a walkabout, an Aboriginal wedding, a heaping helping of Oz slang and some serious sight seeing in the wonders of the little-filmed Northern Territory.

Or as they call it Down Under, Australia’s “Top End.” Thus, our story’s title, “Top End Wedding.”

Lauren and Ned live in Adelaide, a couple of attorneys — one newly-promoted, the other a prosecutor who has no heart for the job.

Ned (Gwilym Lee, who played guitarist Brian May in “Bohemian Rhapsody”) proposes on the day he quits, and the day Lauren (Miranda Tapsell of “The Sapphires”) wins over her boss, aka “Cruella de Vil.”

That boss (Kerry Fox) gives Lauren just ten days to do the deed and honeymoon. Lauren has this notion of going “home” to marry, so that’s going to be tricky. Trickier? Ned hasn’t had a chance to tell her he’s quit, and when they get to Darwin, her Dad (Huw Higginson) is morose.

Her Mum has buggered off, and he’s at home, wearing pajamas all day and weeping in the pantry, listening to“If You Leave Me Now” over and over again.

Mum is a Chicago fan. But where did she go?

We’ve seen, in a prologue, the inciting incident of long ago when young Daphne fled her own wedding on the Tiwi Islands. She’s been estranged from her family ever since. Lauren grew up without learning her native language. She can’t make the same mistake. They MUST find Mum.

Daphne’s trail isn’t hard to follow — a trashed resort hotel room (the hotel is shaped like a crocodile) here, a hook-up with a French pilot giving helicopter tours of Kakadu National Park there.

But that hunt isn’t the only strain on the couple. Who’ll plan their wedding with them traipsing hither and yon in Dad’s “ute” (SUV), dipping into stunning canyons and connecting Lauren with her Aboriginal heritage?

In the movie’s most absurd touch, it’s that over-organized/workaholic boss, who isn’t so “Cruella” after all, who is summoned.

It’s as frothy as you expect a movie like this to be, with misty-eyed moments of re-connection with “my people” mixed with a bawdy “hens party” with bridesmaids and bride drinking from penis-shaped straws and eating “budgie” (penis) shaped cake.

Weepy Dad and tactless future son-in-law? They’ve got “Die Hard” and “footie” on the telly.

The running gag with the sappy Cetera-era Chicago song, the “French” pilot who isn’t (French), the campy Tiwi Island taxi driver who, like everybody else there, is “your family” set the tone.

“I’ll see’ya ’round, like a ringworm!”

There’s touching native choral music, and a cute variation of The National Anthem (“Down Under” by Men at Work”) and oh-so-much-Aussie/Aboriginal slang.

“OY! You MOB! Shut yer’holes and get your rings in the car!”

There aren’t many surprises, but the amusing bit players, throw-away lines and general “feels” that “Top End Wedding” leaves you with put it over. There are laughs, sure, but who doesn’t cry at weddings?

MPAA Rating: TV-14, bachelorette party gags

Cast: Miranda Tapsell, Gwilym Lee, Kerry Fox, Huw Higginson, Elaine Crombie , Shari Sebbens, Dalara Williams, Jason Desantis and Ursula Yovich

Credits: Directed by Wayne Blair, script by Miranda Tapsell, Joshua Tyler. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:42

I have a theory about that…

Heath Heine, Rick Haak and Jon Cotton star in this Mar. 10 release