Movie Nation

A little history we in the West don’t know.

This post WWI period piece opens May 7.

Weird Al narrates (and speaks in Tiny’s place) in this April 23 release.

Best concert I ever saw? Tina Turner, the “Farewell Tour,” the first one — 2000.

It was the exclamation point on a sixteen year-long victory lap for the hardest working woman in show business. And yes, she left it all on the stage that night, 62 years-old and overwhelming a big backing band, wearing out backup singers and dancers half her age.

Best concert ever? Not. Even. Close.

We remember that she was a tornado in performance, a force of nature, a huge voice, an artist who struggled against racism in her genre of music and suffered like few others in the limelight — abused, escaping a marriage of literal “torture.”

We remember “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” — the “comeback” song, the hit motion picture, the myth.

But what “Tina,” the new HBO documentary profile reminds us, is how deep she is. Poised. Frank, modest, unschooled, very smart and well-spoken long before she took on an English accent. But deep — as good a spokeswoman and role model for the benefits of Buddhism as anyone who ever lived deep.

“It wasn’t a good life,” she recalled, back in 1981. “The good did not balance out the bad.”

But that was 1981. And nobody in show business ever had a third act like Anna Mae Bullock, aka Tina Turner.

“Tina” is built around a 2019 interview at her Swiss chateau and draws generously from tapes that led to that famous “People” magazine profile in 1981 that let the world know the abusive marriage she’d just escaped. There are tapes Kurt Loder made while writing “I, Tina,” her autobiography with her.

We hear from one of her sons, her backup singers, members of The Ike & Tina Turner Revue, her road manager, Oprah, the author of the recent “Tina” musical, and Angela Bassett –who played her on the screen. Archival interviews with the late Ike Turner and others help tell the story of a sharecropper’s daughter, abandoned by her mother, snatched from obscurity and the long march to fame, a “life without love” which only arrived very late.

Then the we see the grainy rehearsal footage, the stunning work ethic, the missteps that led her through “The Hollywood Squares” and a Vegas cabaret act to the unparalleled comeback spearheaded by a song others had recorded before, a song “I didn’t like…at all,” but which seemed to tell her life story.

And that’s the way she performed “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” from 1984 until the end of her last “farewell tour” in 2009 — as if she’d lived it.

“Tina” is a summarization and a celebration, a film that takes the singer and viewer from “Nutbush City Limits” to the break-out hit that never happened, “River Deep, Mountain High,” from Vegas to “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome,” hit records, full stadiums and James Bond movie themes.

Even those old enough to remember the epic, show-stopping cover of Credence’s “Proud Mary,” the signature song of her best years with Ike Turner, may have forgotten her Vegas residency — broke after the break-up, struggling in tiny venues with music that didn’t suit the big voice and electrifying performer she was.

“Tina” charts the serendipity of her comeback, the Olivia Newton John manager who helped her reinvent herself (and even Roger Davies was at a loss, at first, about what to do with her), “too old to rock’n roll” and running the legs off generations of forgotten successors, leaving it all out there every night — once, playing to 186,000 in Rio and sending everybody home happy.

“What I gleaned from her life,” Bassett says, “was love…Love of audiences, of music, love of her talent, of freedom…There’s a part of her that we’ve all laid claim to. I hope she knows how beloved, adored she is, throughout the world.”

“Tina” leaves little doubt of that.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, discussions of abuse, suicide

Cast: Tina Turner, Oprah Winfrey, Kurt Loder, Ike Turner, Katori Hall, Rhonda Graam, ERwin Bach, Craig Turner, Roger Davies, Le’Jeune Fletcher, and Angela Bassett

Credits: Scripted and directed by  Daniel Lindsay, T.J. Martin. An HBO release.

Running time: 1:58

“French Exit” is like a Whit Stillman adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s “The Lotus Eater,” with producer Wes Anderson dropping by the set, late in the shoot, insisting that he “Make it more TWEE.”

It’s a tale of the idle rich facing the end of that wealth, of callousness, droll wit and a breakdown in the face of loss, with no one facing that loss mature enough to process it.

“Exit” succeeds on another fine “third act” turn by Michelle Pfeiffer playing a wounded woman of wealth intent on maintaining all the imperious cruelty of class that her unfaded beauty and diminished cash reserves allow.

Yes, you try to match the tone of the review to the ambitions of the film. If this reads as pretentious, that’s what’s called for in director Azazel Jacobs (“The Lovers”) film of Patrick DeWitt’s novel.

Profligacy and co-dependency are how widowed Frances Price (Pfeiffer) gets by. We meet her as she removes her son from boarding school. Years later, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) still lives with her, still can’t face up to her — even to pass along the news that he’s engaged to prickly and prim Susan (Imogen Poots).

Oh, “to be youngish and in love-ish,” mother coos.

But her accountant has her more self-absorbed than usual. “It’s all gone.” She must “sell it all,” convert the NYC mansion, the art and jewels into cash. When her lone friend (Frances Coyne) offers use of her Paris apartment, Frances takes her payoff in Euros, stuffs it in her luggage, smuggles their black cat “Little Frank” in her purse and she and Malcolm sail for the continent.

So much for Susan, New York — where Frances has been a magnet for “odd” gossip ever since her husband’s notorious death — and life.

She muses about dying when the cash runs out. Very Somerset Maugham. It’s a good thing she doesn’t do that around Malcolm, who has been raised to be as pretty and useless as her.

Frances dines at the captain’s table on the crossing while Malcolm flirts with the no-sugarcoating-it fortune teller (Danielle Macdonald of “Patti Cakes”).

“A third of the people on this ship are in the presence of death,” she says. And she knows.

In Paris, Frances maintains her hauteur as she stacks her cash in a closet and spends like a drunken sailor, over-tipping like the madwoman she is.

A Madame Reynard (“Seinfeld vet Valerie Mahaffey) reaches out for friendship.

“I’ve no need of friends in my life, at the moment.”

But events conspire to soften Frances just a bit, and every dead husband (Tracy Letts), recent acquaintance (including Isaach De Bankolé as a French detective) and chicken comes home to roost, eventually, all in their spacious apartment in the City of Light.

“French Exit” is as dry as dry can be, an arch comedy cast in the glorious gloom of Paris in the fall. As with his brittle and theatrical dramedy “The Lovers” (co-starring Letts and Debra Winger as a bitter, long-married couple), Jacobs traffics in characters who hide their emotions behind cutting remarks.

“I’m going to miss you, Frances,” her financial advisor allows, not realizing she’s just insulted him in French.

“Won’t you all?”

The carefully-crafted put-downs, drolleries and profundities smother any chance of any one expressing anything resembling raw emotion. It’s a “simply isn’t done” sort of story and world we’re allowed to see into here.

“We allow ourselves contentment, and the heart brings us ease in good time” is all anyone here hopes for. Which is sad and wickedly observant. We wonder if Frances will have the courage to make that “exit” and if Malcolm has the wits to alter his fate and find happiness.

It won’t be to every taste, with the odd asides contrasting homelessness with genteel poverty, and its third act descent into seances seems silly, if not wholly off-key.

Pfeiffer is as grand as ever, and in every sense of the word. Hedges gives Malcolm a martini sophistication still childishly under Mother’s thumb air.

Whatever its virtues and failings, “French Exit” never loses that whiff of elegant, overdue decay and the sense that everyone around it smells it. They and we know what happens with Lotus Eaters in the end, even if they’ve kept their looks, their arrogance and their psychological scars. When the money’s gone, that’s all that remains.

MPA Rating: R for language and sexual references

Cast: Michelle Pfeiffer, Lucas Hedges, Imogen Poots, Danielle Macdonald, Isaach De Bankolé, Susan Coyne, Valerie Mahaffey and Tracy Letts

Credits: Directed by Azazel Jacobs, script by Patrick DeWitt, based on his novel. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:52

Victor is having an argument with a wife who isn’t at home. What’s with this? Where’s that?

It takes him a couple of minutes to see the half-empty shelves and closets. It takes him a minute more to see the note.

“When I’m back from work, I want you out of here.“

He calls his agent, who is of little help. Get a hotel room. He rings up his adult son, and catches him in the middle of the same predicament. Amisha — whom Victor hasn’t met, whom son Zach has been living with for months, whose name Victor can’t get right to save his life, is tossing the lad out the very same day.

Zach (Tim Linde) is gutted. Victor, (Leopold Witte), a best-selling mystery writer, is resigned, bemused and “Well, I’ve got a new publisher and book signing in Scotland.” Zach is crushed, coddled and lacking in confidence in ways only a guy whose girlfriend calls him a “wimp” can be. Better come with me, kiddo.

“Waterboys” is an adorable, tetchy Danish comedy about belated parenting, the arrested development and pathological “bullsh—–g” that is a writer’s MO and trying to find your feet again amongst a cheap, cranky people who aren’t into whining — the Scots.

Dutch writer-director Robert Jan Westdijk (“The Dinner Club”) piles cute characters and culture clashing on top of heartbreak, guilt and loss for a warm comedy that hits you in unexpected ways.

There’s the shock Zach experiences at seeing that his mother has moved everything his father owns into the garage, and the pain of having him help with the move out, only to have highly-strung Amisha go all fangirl and flirty on his Dad, right in front of him.

“Would you sign my book?”

Victor is incorrigible and self-absorbed enough to let that roll off his back. Grab that cello and a bag and shove’em into the Saab and let’s roll.

Because Zach is A) lost, B) like Victor, not getting through to his mother and C) still afraid of flying. The fact that he wears his bow arm in a cast is his mother’s solution for carpel tunnel he’s picked up playing his instrument. The fact that he doesn’t drive is because he’s just a little bit timid and withdrawn from the world.

A running gag — Dad’s constantly giving him bad advice on how to approach his Amisha problem. Zach desperately wants her back, and Victor knows how that looks and that pleading will never work. A little “tough love,” maybe cussing her out by text message on Zach’s phone?

Another running gag, Dad’s undying love for “The Waterboys,” a Scottish band that he and his about-to-be-ex-wife saw in concert. By coincidence, they’re doing a “homecoming show” in Edinburgh when they arrive in the city to meet Victor’s new Scottish publisher and do a few media events and public readings.

Pity it’s sold out. Pity that asking the PR lady (Helen Belbin) to look into that gets little more than a laugh. Rhona’s the sister of the publisher, brusque and not the least bit star struck. She insults Victor, his books and his inability to follow instructions, right in front of the kid.

All Dad’s charm, his spoiled impulsiveness, the way he flirts on the kid’s behalf with the cute hotel maid (Julie McLellan), that doesn’t work on Rhona. No drive home after a dinner meeting, either. Here’s change for two bus tickets. SEE ya.

Westdijk finds laughs in throwing Victor’s hedonism into the insular macho gloom of Scotland. Salmon fishing, since your detective hero (17 novels worth) is an accomplished angler? SURE, Victor knows all about it. Cough cough.

Witte, who has been a mainstay of Dutch TV since the ’80s, throws himself into Victor’s exaggerated sense of self with the confidence of blithe ignorance. He wants to “research smuggling,” so he hides cocaine in the kid’s cello case on the car ferry over to Britain. He corrects everybody’s grammar, makes up stories to try and score Waterboys tickets and does everything he can to pretend this break-up hasn’t hit him.

Did his wife have a “reason” for kicking him out?

“No more than usual,” he says (in Dutch with English subtitles). “It was my STUFF she threw out, not me!”

But she’s left him a letter in an envelope, “In case you want to know ‘why.'” He won’t open it.

Linde’s job is to make Zach less pathetic and whipped than he seems, which he does by bouncing off his irritating father — sometimes literally.

Through them, and a sparkling supporting cast, Westdijk gives us a little bickering, a little bonding, a little personal growth, a bit of Scotland and a lot of “Waterboys.” And if that’s not enough to add up to a comic winner, I don’t know what is.

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual and, drug content, profanity

Cast: Leopold Witte, Tim Linde, Helen Belbin and Julie McLellan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Jan Westdijk. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:33

This looks good. Epic. Another chance to revel in the glory that Jack Thompson, too.

A May 14 release.

This is a big departure for Elba, a father-son drama about healing and child rearing in a better late than never sense. Lee Daniels had a hand in it, and could use a winner. https://youtu.be/utFcqVy0FtI

It’s an animated short that will be unleashed on the world April 6.

Taika W. voices the rabbit, Gervais is the director we hear.

Olivia Munn, Zac Efron and Tricia Helfer are also in Spencer Susser’s short film. Take a look at this teaser.

UPDATED: The complete film has since been posted. You can find it here. It’s still a short film, but it’s longer and harder to watch than the teaser, which is still posted below.

This thriller stars Anson Mount as a shooter who creates “collateral damage,” Abbie Cornish as a waitress he’s sweet on and David Morse as a nosy cop.

“The Virtuoso” is an April 30 release, and reminds us that roles like “The Father” don’t come along often, even for the very best actors alive.

Christopher Lloyd is 82 years young, still getting laughs with the wild hair and his way with a punchline.

Jean Smart? The “Designing Woman” is 69, and still getting the guy.

William Shatner has them both beat. He gets online just long enough to thank fans for birthday wishes, and damned near breaks Twitter. He turned 90 just the other day. And yes, he’s still a headliner.

“Senior Moment” is a thin, faintly amusing spin in the late life romance lane, a Palm Springs rom-com about a guy finally finding a woman he loves more than what looks to be a ’59 Porsche 356. It’s one of those movies that’s more “Well, thank heavens somebody made a movie for that demographic” than entertaining, but we don’t pick on stars chasing Betty White past 90.

Shatner’s Victor Martin, a retired Air Force major who likes his freedom and loves his trophy Porsche. He and pal Sal (Lloyd) tool around town, ogling women who’d be too young to date their grandsons, if they had grandsons.

“Like two hard-boiled eggs doing the salsa,” Victor purrs at one young lady entirely too young to be caught dead using a crosswalk in Palm Springs.

Victor’s a character around town, a “host” at their favorite piano bar and a guy the cops keep giving warnings, because 80something or not, he’s still a speed freak.

But one stoplight joke-off with a “cholo” in a lowrider later, all that goes away. The car’s impounded and license-free Victor’s stuck in Ubers, taxis, on foot or traveling by bus.

“Only losers ride the bus.”

Naturally, that’s Victor stumbles into Cuckoo Cafe owner Caroline. As he drops his groceries, fends off heat stroke by sticking his head in the supermarket ice cream cooler and tries to find his mojo without the car he always thought of as a you-know-what magnet, Victor has an epiphany.

He’s sweet on Caroline.

Sure, “I like fast cars and you like tortoises (desert tortoises, which she’s trying to save).” He’s into junk food and she’s Ms. Organic.

“I thought ALL wine was organic!”

But maybe, is this artist-rival for her attention (Esai Morales) can be fended off, they can find a middle ground. Maybe there’s time for a little romance and a bed where she can share a joint with him and he can force down a little blue pill.

There are a few jokes in the script, but even though director Giorgio Serafini is no old hand at comedy (he’s a veteran of B-movies like “The Good War” and “Game of Death”), he has to realize he left a lot of laughs one the table.

There’s a bit of goofy fun in the shyster lawyer, driving test instructor and “life coach” Don McManus prepping Victor to re-take his driving test with a video game, two-on-two basketball and playing three-card monte at poolside, where Victor has to fight the “distraction” of young women in swimsuits.

Profanity and sexual joking around aside, “Senior Moment” suffers from that “It’s harmless enough” label easily slapped on too many “comedies for seniors.”

The lecherous old guy stuff may play to Shatner’s demo, but feels kind of winded and out of date here.

There’s some cute bonding with the “cholo,” Pablo (Carlos Miranda) who tricked Victor into the drag race that cost him his license. And a sentimental story about a cuckoo clock in Caroline’s cafe isn’t quite the groaner it almost becomes.

But giving Lloyd too little to do, and not having funnier players in Victor’s posse are both lost opportunities. Smart can still hit a punchline and isn’t given anything amusing to play or say here.

And when Victor is introduced at Captain Hook’s piano bar, we face the biggest comic letdown of all. Nobody begs him to sing.

If there’s anything an old trooper like Shatner knows, it’s how hilarious the culture thinks his singing is. Come on, Bill, give the people what they want!

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity, marijuana, alcohol

Cast: William Shatner, Jean Smart, Christopher Lloyd, Carlos Miranda and Esai Morales.

Credits: Directed by Giorgio Serafini, scripted by Kurt Brungardt, Christopher Momenee. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:32