Movie Nation

The reason to mention the sometime actor and director of such violent, lurid and iconic indie films as “King of New York” and “Bad Lieutenant” in the headline of this review is to zero in on the most promising possibility of “The App.”

Abel Ferrara plays the American director of an Italian production of “The Life of Jesus.” The filming of that movie-within-a-movie doesn’t go well. But the mere presence of Ferrara on the set influences the neon and LED-glow look of this deathly dull “app that messes up your life” thriller.

We see a Rome and Milan of tacky/modernist hotel suites, of ancient statues freshly capped with neon halos, of LED crosses and faces lit with the soft glow, or strobing pulses, of a smart phone.

Whatever else co-writer/director Elisa Fuksas (“Nina”) is aiming for here, visually she’s paying homage to Ferrara. Hell, if she didn’t have other credits, I’d suggest her name is a Ferrara construct. Say the surname out loud to hear where I’m coming from.

“The App” is about “Italy’s most famous heir,” a rich pretty boy (Vincenzo Crea) named Niccolo whom we meet in bed in Los Angeles. He’s having post-coital pillow talk with Eva (Jessica Cressy), his grad-student girlfriend.

Niccolo hasn’t mentioned the fortune he’s an heir to. He wants to make it as an actor on his own, sort of like Kate and Rooney Mara. And he’s just scored his big break — playing Jesus for Abel Ferrara (never identified by name) back in the Old Country.

But Eva has a request. Sign up for this popular dating app “for people already in relationships, but curious” as to who else is out there. It’s for her Phd thesis, she says. He’ll be “Lorenzo,” she’ll be “Sara.” Who knows, maybe they’ll find out they’re “perfect” for each other, she coos (in Italian with English subtitles, or dubbed into English).

This is the last thing he he needs, but sure. He’s about to play Jesus, “and a lot of actors have gone a little mad” in that undertaking. His family business is about to undertake a huge merger and his “place within the company” has to be sorted (he’s estranged from his parents). Nothing like a little role-playing on a sex hook-up app, at the insistence of his girlfriend, to get in the right frame of mind.

Niccolo finds himself interrupted, and intrigued by “Us,” the app. Some video message him, teasing and tempting. Another gets her hooks in him with just her voice.

And there’s the head of housekeeping at the swanky Rome hotel where he stays. Ofelia (Greta Scarano) is a tad too attentive, too fretful and sneaky, a trifle more Catholic than seems safe — considering the role he’s about to play and the amorality she thinks he lives by.

Thanks to the film he’s making, and the app, Niccolo finds himself “tested,” in ways almost totally unlike Jesus (a serpent co-stars in one scene), lying to Eva when she comes to visit and pining for this “Maria” woman of uncertain identity who keeps setting up phantom meetings, enticing him with her sexy voice, talking him out of deleting the app.

The poor guy is sure to crack up.

As colorful and pricey as the production values look, the cast in front of those settings is never less than drab. Little bits of sexual titillation don’t alter the fact that our lead is a curly/pretty hunk…of dead weight. The supporting cast fares no better.

The plot teases promising twists that don’t quite develop. A Fellini-esque moment or two — Niccolo being tied to a cross for a green screen tests — doesn’t animate “The App” enough to warrant your time.

Still, give it up for the settings, the tackiest bedrooms this side of Vegas, or those depicted in “Uncut Gems.” Maybe Ms. Fuksas should have signed Ferrara on as a script doctor. He’s made plenty of unwatchable films, but at least he gives the viewer something awful to latch onto. Fuksas doesn’t even do that.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, self-injury, profanity

Cast: Vincenzo Crea, Jessica Cressy, Greta Scarano and Abel Ferrara

Credits: Directed by Elisa Fuksas, script by Elisa Fuksas, Lucio Pellegrini. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:19

This isn’t the Georgia of the Falcons, “Real Housewives” or Tyler Perry.

It’s the one Stalin came from.

So you can see the “Billy Elliott” challenges of a life in tights in this Feb. release.

A sonata isn’t just a drab Hyundai sedan or a sleep-aid meant to treat insomnia.

It’s a work for a solo instrumentalist, typically, in classical music, composed for violin or piano, although there are flute, organ and clarinet works famous within the repertoire of those instruments as well.

The aptness of “Sonata” as a name for a sleep aid depends on your appreciation of classical music.

“The Sonata” is a stylish, Gothic and high-toned horror tale set in the world of classical music. It is remarkable for being one of the final films of “Blade Runner” icon Rutger Hauer. Not managing much that’s frightening, it’s also a tad sleep-inducing.

Hauer plays Richard Marlowe, a composer introduced in a bravura first person point-of-view opening. We see a man walking the halls of his gloomy French chateau holding a candle in front of him to light the way. He stops, fetches a gas can, walks to a terrace, douses himself and…well, there’s a candle.

Freya Tingley of TV’s “Once Upon a Time” is Rose, a temperamental young concert violinist who takes the news of her father’s death frostily. She hadn’t seen him since she was a toddler.

Her French agent, Charles (Simon Abkarian of “Rendition”), is taken aback by her “I don’t have time for this right now” response. He didn’t realize who her father was — a composer “not famous, more notorious,” and something of a recluse in his last years.

Both of them have their interest piqued when Rose inherits his home in France, and the copyrights to his music. The old man even left Rose an envelope. That’s what leads her to “The Sonata,” Marlowe’s last score.

It’s a creepy piece of music, dissonant at first, with a tricky tempo. And in it are these odd symbols, not traditional musical notation.

No matter. Charles sees dollar signs, the daughter performing and recording a celebrated composer’s last work. Rose isn’t so sure. And as Charles gains guidance from an aloof musicologist (James Faulkner) that points to the occult, Rose starts thumbing through a book collection that includes assorted works of Satanic lore (and oddly, Ambrose Bierce’s satirical “The Devil’s Dictionary,” no doubt purchased because of its catchy title).

Weird dreams reach her, old cassettes of some of the old man’s more horrific hobbies turn up. Premiering this sonata?

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

Hauer has little chance to make much of an impression, mostly appearing in a vintage TV interview Marlowe gave.

“Music…it’s not entertainment. It floats around inside me…I just follow the voice I hear!”

God?

“Something like that.”

The score, by Alexis Maingaud, is horror strings on steroids and quite lovely. Director Andrew Desdmond and his production designer and cinematographer conjure up a properly spooky look and setting — overcast skies, dimly-lit chambers, a foggy forest.

But the script delivers very little punch or pace to let that creepy vibe pay off. The marvelous, chilling score might as well be a funeral dirge, as slow as this conjuring is at getting to its payoff and point.

It’s a pity Hauer couldn’t have bowed out on a high note with, say, his patrician menace in “The Sisters Brothers.” At least “The Sonata” won’t be his curtain call. He had other film performances in the can when he died in July. As uneven or unworthy as many of the movies he’s performed in have been in recent years, let’s hope at least one of them is better than this.

MPAA Rating: unrated, horror imagery, profanity

Credits Freya Tingley, Simon Abkarian, Rutger Hauer, James Faulkner

Credits: Directed by Andrew Desmond, script by Andrew Desmond, Arthur Morin. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:28

The dashing figure of singer, actor and icon Pedro Infante still looms large enough in Mexican pop culture as to inspire fresh appreciations of his talent.

Sometimes, the reference can be oblique, in animated form (“Coco”). Sometimes, it’s more direct, but not anybody’s idea of a screen biography. That’s where the musical comedy “Como Caído del Cielo” resides, a lighthearted but underwhelming fantasy built around a legend, trading on his celebrity, his talent and his reputation as a womanizer.

Yes, it was a different era. Infante died in a plane crash in 1957. And yes, he “owned” it, as the kids say today. The guy starred in a movie titled “Dice que soy Mujeriego” (“They call me a ‘Womanizer’) for heaven’s sake.

That’s almost where we meet Infanté (Omar Chaparro). He is dead, but in limbo instead of heaven, singing his ranchera ballads to “my audience,” which still exists, if only in his mind.

The decision-makers in Heaven would love to be rid of him. He was famous and his songs were romantic classics, but he himself something of a rotter. “You did too much good to rot in Hell,” the angels decide (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

The angels (Roger Montes, Itza Sodi) decide to bring him back to Earth, let him improve his “record” enough to get him into heaven. It’s a “Heaven Can Wait” remake, of sorts, with Pedro taking on the guise of another womanizing Pedro, a Pedro Infante impersonator who has been in a coma for 90 days, bankrupting the motorcycle police woman (Ana Claudia Talancón) who is his wife in the process.

The angels will supervise his tidying up of New Pedro’s life, which won’t be easy. They’ll watch over him (they’re nude, easily the funniest joke in the movie), make sure he doesn’t go and tell anyone or otherwise give away that he’s the real Pedro Infante, reincarnated.

The fish-out-of-water possibilities here are promising, the sexist old school mariachi trying to fit in without realizing what cell phones are, and that feminism has put women in uniform and changed Mexico and the world in ways that render rakes like him obsolete.

That’s not the movie José Pepe Bojórquez (“Hidden Moon”) chose to make. The culture clash/battle of the sexes/generational differences stuff is mentioned, but never ever grappled with. Somebody might note how out of date quinceanera “coming out/coming of age” parties are, but New Pedro’s niece Milagros (Elaine Haro) wants a lavish one, and that’s that. Pedro insists on taking control of Raquel’s police motorcycle, old fashioned Latin macho at its worst. She acquiesces.

Pedro, given the bare minimum of charm and charisma by Chaparro (seen in “Compadres” and as a bit player in the Eugenio Derbez comedies “How to be a Latin Lover” and “Overboard” in the U.S.), is trapped in a seriously old-fashioned and scattered comedy that makes much of Infanté’s reputation, but shows little evidence of the man who tells his guardian angels “Women are what kept me strong. They were my VITAMINS!”

His transition should be one of shocking abruptness, a “Eureka” moment when he sees the light thanks to meeting his granddaughter (Yare Santana) for the first time, a young woman (great-granddaughter age, just saying) with a seriously-jaded view of a “great” man she never met.

Instead, Chaparro plays this guy as catnip to the ladies, eager to brush them off, repent, reform and patch up New Pedro’s life. That’s going to be tough because New Pedro was cheating with the cousin (Stephanie Cayo) of wife Raquel, Raquel mortgaged their house to the hilt to pay for his medical bills and she cannot forget or forgive his faithless womanizing.

Pedro is chased by thugs in the employ of the mayor, sings in assorted Infanté impersonator competitions, on the street and in the restaurant where granddaughter Jenny works, and winds up in the ring — fighting (literally) to raise money to bail out Raquel’s mortgage woes. Restaurant kitchen pals, Pedro’s mariachi bandmates, Raquel’s family and policewoman colleagues all figure in the story.

None make much of an impression.

Unfunny asides about cell phones, automatic dishwashers and the hyper-sexualized twerk-crazed dancing on music shows on TV pop up.

Yeah, it’s all over the place. A promising, legendary subject wrecked by a cluttered script that tries many dated things, most of which don’t play as particularly amusing.

The silky, disembodied voice of Infante does the singing for Chaparro, understandable, but a little off-putting.

It’s more frustrating than funny, a movie titled “Como Caído del Cielo (As Fallen from the Clouds)” that plays as fallen but never quite getting up from that fall.

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Cast: Omar Chaparro, Ana Claudia Talancón, Stephanie Cayo, Yare Santana, Elaine Haro, Roger Montes, Itza Sodi

Credits: Directed by José Pepe Bojórquez, script by Alfredo Felix-Diaz and José Pepe Bojórquez. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

The hair-raising moments of the creature feature “Sweetheart” come the first time our shipwrecked heroine (Kiersey Clemons) is chased and swiped-at by the clawed monster from the deep that wants to eat her.

It only comes out at night. We, and she, are only getting glimpses of this Creature from the Pacific Lagoon, Beast from 5 Fathoms.

Letting us see more would be a mistake, we think, remembering Jenn’s harrowing nights spent in a hammock she’s hung as high up the coconut palms as she can manage, or crawled into a hollow log that might resist the talons of the beast.

So naturally, that’s what co-writer/director J.D. Dillard does. His modestly gripping “Cast Away with a Creature” (Sorry, I’ll stop.) fritters away its fright and suspense as it shows us too much. It muddies its spare survivalist plot and clutters its cast with characters who might have a better bead on Jenn’s post-shipwreck sanity than she does.

If you want to know why this ostensibly taut, lean thriller didn’t get a theatrical release, even with rising star Clemons (“Hearts Beat Loud,” “Angie Tribeca”) in the lead, this is why.

Director Dillard & Co. had a promising minimalist horror pitch, but blew it in execution.

Jenn washes up on the shore of a deserted isle (in Fiji), and finds a shipmate just down the beach from her. He lives just long enough for her to shout her name into his ear, try to stop his bleeding coral reef injuring, and struggle with the Coconut Conundrum.

That temptation is the first place she goes to get him “water.” She missed the “Cast Away” narration about it being a diuretic — NOT what you need when you’re likely to die of thirst.

Jenn is a survivor. And in this script, she’s going to have help. Finding a previous shipwrecked survivor’s stash of matches, Polaroids, a water-logged diary and Coca Colas will get her started. Finding her luggage from the sailboat that sank with her, her boyfriend (Emory Cohen) and three others on board means she’ll have a change of clothes.

I love that she doesn’t talk to herself (“Cast Away” style) or to volleyball. We just observe her figuring out food, frantically working out the flare gun that doesn’t flag down a passing plane.

It’s the noises of the night that freak her out. Whatever “It” is, it devours fish — leaving half-eaten sharks on the beach. And it isn’t picky about human flesh, either — digging up the bodies that wash up on shore with Jenn.

Her shock at her predicament leaps straight into pragmatism — How do I survive it? How do I get off this island? — and assumptions. She assumes that since the damned thing only comes at night, and that means she’s safe hunting for its lair during daylight hours.

I love the set up and the setting, and Clemons makes a plucky, attractive heroine to take the ride with. But Dillard goes wrong when he washes away the monstrous mystery, and when he introduces other characters and their back-stories to the plot — late in the second act.

That makes the finale, however satisfying, inevitable in the extreme, and the terrors that set it up not the least bit terrifying.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for creature violence, some bloody images and brief strong language

Cast: Kiersey Clemons, Emory Cohen, Hanna Mangan Lawrence

Credits: Directed by J.D. Dillard, script by J.D. Dillard, Alex Hyner and Alex Theurer. A Universal/Blumhouse release, on Netflix.

Running time: 1:22

This period piece is about a feminist protest of the 1970 Miss World pageant in London.

Keira Knightley is a young mother properly outraged by this pageant and its patriarchal practices, Gugu Mbatha-Raw is a contestant. Jessie Buckley and Suki Waterhouse and Keely Hawes also star in“Misbehavior,” a March (UK) release, a real world event and protest with lots of points of view.

Rhys Ifans is the piggish organizer/promoter, Eric Morley.

Philippa Lowthorpe (“Three Girls”) directed it.

Greg Kinnear peels back the skin to show Bob Hope at his sexist, womanizing ugliest. That’s reason enough to check this British “true story” production out.

Imagine “The Breakfast Club” set in “Twin Peaks.”

There’s a mysterious disappearance, adults misbehaving or just plain mentally ill and their kids acting out, toying with adult perversions, obsessed with menstruation and singing, in plaintive choral settings, the music of The Go Go’s, New Order and Cyndi Lauper.

In “Knives and Skin,” writer-director Jennifer Reeder (“Signature Move”) lays out a lifetime of obsessions in a moody, atmospheric period piece that isn’t a period piece. It’s uneven, frustrating here and there, icky there and here. And it’s a picture that, like a hormonal teen, puzzles through the uncertain emotions, observed hypocrisy and sexual/fashion experimentation as one makes up one’s mind about such things.

It begins with a hook-up, or near hook-up. Pretty marching band member Carolyn (Raven Whitley) gone for a ride with jock Andy (Ty Olwin) with certain expectations and demands. She doesn’t want her new glasses broken.

“I actually DON’T want to see what’s about to happen,” she buzzkills. I nasty love-scratch on his forehead. But no kissing on the mouth, and then…”I changed my mind!”

Andy ditches her, sans glasses, in the middle of nowhere. Carolyn never makes it home.

Her classmates — including friends who had a rock band with her as their drummer — are ill-equipped to deal with the shock. Her school chorus-leader mom (Marika Engelhardt) goes straight into denial.

“Can I have Renee (his wife) send over a casserole?” the sheriff (James Vincent Meredith) wants to know.

“I don’t think it’s time for a casserole, yet,” she intones. Time passes, and Mrs. Harper grows more deluded, speaking to the student body as if Carolyn is merely late, and assuming that she shares her mother’s musical priorities.

“She’s missed three marching band practices in a row,” she tells the kids. “She’s gonna get kicked out!”

Joanna (Grace Smith) used to be a friend. Now, she and her circle ponder Carolyn’s fate, judge her even though they’re not blind to the raving dysfunction in their own families. and in Joanna’s case toying with adults obsessed with teen sexuality. Carolyn?”

“I ignored her, like everybody else.”

Tampon gags, underwear sales to pervs, a grandma (Marilyn Dodds Frank) who gets her jollies from porn and nude-modeling for art student, an unemployed father who dresses in clown makeup to cheat on the madwoman (Audrey Francis) he is married to, fashion and makeup statements straight out of Madonna/Adam Ant-era MTV (Maybe it IS a period piece)  — there’s a lot to process here.

Perhaps the writer-director should have tried, you know, processing it.

That’s why “Knives and Skin” feels like a TV pilot, a “Twin Peaks” with music instead of lumber, no diner and no “damned good coffee.”

A stand-out moment, Carolyn’s mother smells her daughter’s scent in the car she was last seen alive in, smelling her even on the boy (Olwin) she was last seen with. Will she solve the disappearance with just her nose?

Reeder is better at landing a pithy line and maintaining a creepy tone than she is at pacing and the beginning-middle-end story story structure of a missing teenager tale.

She casts unknowns to little knowns, rarely identifying look-alike characters, leaving the viewer in the dark about who relates to whom, in some instances.

She had the makings for a cult film, a “midnight movie” as its distributor (IFC Midnight) no doubt hopes. But it’s entirely too scattered, sacrificing coherence, loaded down with characters who are more clutter than carriers of plot and substance.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Grace Smith, Marika Engelhardt, Kate Arrington,  James Vincent Meredith, Kayla Carter,  Tom Hopper, Ty Olwin, Emma  Ladji and Ra, Robert T. Cunningham and Raven Whitley

Credits: Written and directed by Jennifer Reeder. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:48

“Signs and Meaning in the Cinema” was the grad school textbook I got the most out of.

Iconic images freighted with symbolic meaning, layers of interpretation added to film beyond what dialogue, exposition and performance could carry — Wollen made it simple and obvious. Once he pointed out these extra layers, you couldn’t unsee them.

A genuine film scholar, one of the important ones.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/peter-wollen-dead-author-signs-meaning-cinema-was-81-1264534

“Ashes in the Snow” is a game attempt at adding Stalin’s gulags to the horrors of Hitler’s Holocaust to our collective memory of the crimes of World War II.

The Russians beat the Germans in the institution of slave labor concentration camps where political prisoners, dissidents, those who “fell out of favor” and mistrusted nationalities were sentenced — often to be worked to death. And the first of them were carved out of the Siberian wilderness — by those imprisoned there — in 1930.

“Ashes” is the fictional story of a Lithuanian family headed by an activist academic (Sam Hazeldine) shipped to Siberia after the Russo-Soviet Empire occupied the Baltic countries, and half of Poland, in 1939-40. Father’s efforts to “help” people was noticed and they were arrested, hustled onto a train and separated in 1941.

Father was an art professor, and daughter Lina (Bel Powley) a talented teen portrait painter and sketch artist awaiting word on if she’d gotten into art school. The day she received her letter from the admissions office is the day they were taken. She vows to not open it and see if she was accepted until her dad is there to open it with her.

The sufferings of Lina, her mother (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and younger brother (Tom Sweet) are many, and straight out of the World War II catalog of the oppressed — packed into freight cars, starved and manhandled for the weeks it takes to cross the vastness of Mother Russia, prisoners dying, a woman losing her infant along the way.

It’s a sobering reminder of what happens when good people are helpless in the face of a state that thinks “putting them in camps” is something it should be doing in everyone’s name. The NKVD (pre-KGB) uniformed police were already indoctrinated and accustomed to the dehumanizing brutality they exercised over the helpless. Complain about your treatment and summary executions were the rule.

Except for young Ukrainian Kretzky (Martin Wallström). He has to be bullied into brutishness by his silky smooth sadist of a commander (Peter Franzén).

Lina’s art her lifeline to her humanity in this script. She scribbles maps, still-lifes and portraits on anything she can find to draw on, with any pencil or pen offered. The handsome young prisoner Andrius (Jonah Hauer-King) is a favorite subject. And once at the camp, he supplies her with paper and pencils.

The film’s catalog of atrocities is all too familiar. Its melodramatic touches — Andrius magically transforming into a master pilferer, other prisoners begging Lina to document their horrors — “People, they must know what is happening here.”

Lina has taken Papa’s “perception” lessons to heart — “I draw what I see.” So no, Commander. You might not want her to draw your portrait. She sees your ugliness.

The art drops into the background as lives narrow into the desperation of simply surviving the work — harvesting beets or herring — the bitter cold, disease sweeping the camps, starvation setting in. Kretzky must face tests of his humanity, like everyone else.

Starving people denounce each other to save their own skins.

Powley, a delight in “”Diary of a Teenage Girl” and “A Royal Night Out,” can be applauded for trying something darker, but the checkbox script and pedestrian direction Marius A. Markevicius, who produced Peter Weir’s escape from Siberia thriller “The Way Back,” let her down.

It’s hard for anybody to make much of an impression, although Kongsli (“Force Majeure,” “Wonder Woman”) has moments of pathos and defiance that stick with you.

I appreciate the film’s ambition and message, and the meticulous period detail, but there’s no getting around it all goes for naught in this, a dull tour of a grimly compelling historic subject.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Bel Powley, Jonah Hauer-King, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Martin Wallström, Sam Hazeldine and Peter Franzén.

Credits: Directed by Marius A. Markevicius, script by Ben York Jones, based on the novel by Ruta Sepetys. A Vertical Entertainment release

Running time: 1:38

A photographer, obviously new to covering Israeli courts, asks the woman about to give a statement at the end of the trial for her name and title. The scrum of photographers are too busy to react, though you can hear a couple of shocked chuckles amidst the shutters clicking and mad shuffle for position.

“Lea TSEMEL,” the defense counsel barks. “Losing Lawyer!”

For close to half a century, she has been Israel’s legal gadfly, a thorn in the military “occupation” and legal system, an “Advocate,” the “Jew who defends terrorists.” She’s been labeled “traitor,” been spat upon and threatened at gunpoint. Her husband, an activist who works outside the court system, has been arrested.

Lea Tsemel’s other clients? Interrogated without counsel, tortured, run through courts where – even if their guilt is little in doubt, “due process” appears to be untranslatable into Hebrew.

An armed forces veteran from just after the 1967 “Six Day War” who turned to the law when she saw civil rights being trampled, violence against Palestinians brushed off or covered up, “confiscations” of property legalized and sweeping punishments routinely administered for whole families, neighborhoods and classes of citizens.

She became the public conscience of Israel as the state struggled to absorb conquered territories via a series of measures that collectively came to resemble a Middle Eastern Apartheid if not outright “ethnic cleansing.”

Decades of TV interviews are interspersed in this profile documentary by Philippe Bellaiche and Rachel Leah Jones, with the main story thread following her defense of a Palestinian minor caught taking part in one of the country’s frequent knife-attacks — this one on a public bus.

Chapters in that story shape the legal protocols of such a case — “plea,” “charge sheet changes,” “testimony,” “sentencing etc.

Her lonely quest through a maze of legalese and the shifting sands of Israeli jurisprudence is illustrated by sketch-animation inserting court documents behind her as outline as she’s followed into court.

The 70ish, matronly Tsemel bickers with Tareq, her co-counsel, meets with the parents of the 13 year old boy she’s defending as snippets of interviews from the ’70s, ’80s and today — and the cases that were closely linked to that period in time — underline her decades of dogged determination to case by case, turn the tide in the courts and through public opinion, even as she loses — pretty much constantly.

Here she is in the ’70s, declaring that “Israelis have no right to tell Palestinians how to resist.” Hunger strikers in the ’80s, bombings and shootings and slashings all divorced from the actions these “terrorists” are reacting to — land seizures, random air strikes, raids and sweeps and wall-building.

Her own children recall the difficulty of being associated with a high profile figure treated as “traitor” to her race by many Israelis. Not the easiest way to grow up.

But Talila Warschawski gets what her mother has been up to, starting a dialogue, pushing the idea of “equal justice for all” into the Israeli mainstream as something that doesn’t exist — yet — but should. Talia knows what to shout “whenever I find myself in trouble,” caught in a riot, trapped in a violence situation.

“I’m LEA TSEMEL’S DAUGHTER!”

At least the Palestinians would pay her heed. Palestinian feminist Hanan Ashrawi praises Tsemel’s stoicism in the face of terrible odds, her righteous sense of right and wrong.

And other activist lawyers note her impact, chipping away at a court system with inherent biases, forced to treat the occupied people fighting Israel as “combatants,” just to give them International Law standing, forced to consider juvenile defendants under different rules — eventually — a fierce “Advocate” and “losing lawyer” building a wall of case law, one painful loss at a time.

It’s hardly the most “balanced” documentary you’re going to see on the woman, who was the subject of a “60 Minutes” profile in the ’80s. None of her critics are put on camera.

But “Advocate” is a reminder to audiences everywhere of the importance of the rule of law, its equal application and appointing judges who understand that importance.

MPAA Rating: unrated, news footage of violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Lea Tsemel, Hanan Ashrawi, Michael Warschawski, Talia Warschawski, Nissan Warschawski,

Credits: Directed by Philippe Bellaiche, Rachel Leah Jones, script by Rachel Leah Jones. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:49