Movie Nation

“I Am All Girls” is a melodramatic South African thriller about the international sex slave trade, with hints at its vast reach and its long sordid history and a suggestion that the only “solution” to it is avenging, in-the-know cops.

Which is to say, it starts off with pathos, heart and purpose, and kind of devolves into derring do and shootouts. Kind of frustrating that way, really.

It’s “inspired by” a true story, although its historical background isn’t easily ascertained on the Internet. In 1994, a child trafficker confessed, fingered higher ups in the Apartheid government, and did all this on tape, only to wound up dead in his cell the next day.

This was all covered up by the corrupt, racist regime of the day.

“All the Girls” is about that story, and its present-day blowback. As it flashes back and forth in time, freeze-frames show us photos of missing girls, black and white, from South Africa.

Somebody in the present day has access to that long suppressed video confession. Somebody is watching it, tracking police investigations and showing up ahead of the cops, or getting the “justice” that the “system” isn’t — shooting offenders, past and present, and carving initials in their chest.

Erica Wessels plays Det. Jodie Snyman, the archetypical “cop who cares too much.” She’s getting ahead of herself, making mistakes, failing to get convictions.

Because she weeps when she raids a brothel or busts open shipping containers filled with kidnapped girls bound for the Middle East.

She’s constantly lectured about by her captain (Mothusi Magano), who takes her off her Hawks (Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, DPCI) team and pushes her onto a simple murder case just to get her to “take a break.”

Only her colleague, the quietly intense Ntombi (Hlubi Mboya) understands. These two have history and/or chemistry. Too bad special police like this aren’t supposed to know where each other live.

Jodie’s new case connects to her old case, the bodies pile up and little girls, then and now, go through the hell of abduction, transport and sex slave lives — murdered when they’re “used up” — in scenes that cut back and forth between 1994 and today.

Because the person doing the executing has a connection to that past, and no, that isn’t made a a secret here.

Donovan Marsh’s film bounces from Johannesburg to the port city of Durban, chasing shipping containers and those who fill them with children and ship them abroad.

Yes, shipping manifests play into the case, and yes, we see just enough of this from the victims’ point of view to be moved. Just not as much as you’d expect.

Wessels is pretty good at playing a drink-to-forget cop-movie archetype, Mboya’s role is under-developed, and the villains mostly faceless and certainly no one the film focuses on, any more than the faceless, mostly-nameless “girls.”

The most chilling scenes are the grainy video from 1994, a kidnapper (J.P. du Plessis) spilling the beans, naming names, suggesting that the worldwide traffic in children for rich and powerful pedophiles is indeed everything recent news reports says it is.

Giving up on maintaining the story’s mystery might seems like a cop out, and “I Am All Girls” gains nothing, dramatically, from this early revelation.

The structure is ad hoc and the plot choppy, with the action beats — such as they are — holding the movie together and maintaining our interest. But just barely.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex trafficking subject matter, profanity

Cast:  Erica Wessels, Hlubi Mboya, Mothusi Magano, J.P. du Plessis and Brendon Daniels.

Credits: Directed by Donovan Marsh, script by Wayne Fitzjohn, Emile Leuvennink, Marcell Greeff A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

A Quebecoise drama due out June 18. It’s from Oscilloscope, so you know it’s going to be good.

When is imitation NOT the sincerest form of flattery? When you’re imitating Alfred Hitchcock, ALL of Alfred Hitchcock’s ouevre in a manic misshapen mess of a thriller meant to be an homage.

“The Master of Suspense” never managed “manic,” recognized it as the enemy of “suspense.” And director Joe Wright (“Atonement,” “Darkest Hour”) surely should have known that, even if playwright, actor and in this case, screenwriter Tracy Letts didn’t.

“The Woman in the Window” is about an agoraphobic movie nut who thinks she’s witnessed a murder in the brownstone across from hers on West 121st Street.

Amy Adams plays Anna, a child psychologist whose “anxiety” pushed her into this isolation. It may have busted up her marriage (Anthony Mackie plays the husband) and landed her in therapy (Letts plays her shrink) and on medication.

The therapy and the meds are really working, as Anna’s going through wine like she’s hydrating with it and neither she nor anyone else around her can believe what she sees or says she’s seen.

And like L.B. Jeffries, Jimmy Stewart’s character in “Rear Window,” she’s become obsessed with the folks within her limited field on view on West 121st street. Those new neighbors? They get ALL of her attention. Maybe that’s a good thing, she tells her therapist.

“People who snoop on their neighbors don’t kill themselves,” she reassures him.

Julianne Moore is Jane Russell, friendly, coming over to give her a scented candle, sip wine and complain about her “tight, controlling” husband. Fred Hechinger is their son, the outgoing Ethan, who is allergic to her Persian cat, Punch.

And the testy guy who crosses the street looking for those two, Alastair? That’s Gary Oldman. He’s just the sort of husband you’d picture as “tight, controlling.” And when Anna sees something happen to Jane through that window, Alastair must have been the fellow holding the knife.

Oldman as a possible psychopathic killer? Kind of on the nose. When Anna makes her accusations, his rants are vintage, pre-Oscar Oldman.

“A drunken, shut-in pill-popping CAT lady!”

Wyatt Russell plays the singer-songwriter Anna rents her basement apartment to, and imposes on and generally worries to death. Brian Tyree Henry is the detective who shows up to patiently investigate her latest accusation and burst of “mania.”

It’s based on a novel by A.J. Finn, and freely acknowledges its “Rear Window” connections (unlike “Disturbia”) by having that as one of the movies Anna watches, along with anything Bogart or Bacall or Clifton Webb made in the black and white ’40s.

Adams gives some interesting wrinkles to a woman who studies the mind and has seen patients, and can’t get a handle on whether or not what she’s seeing or experiencing is real or a product of her guilt-ridden mental breakdown. She knows what’s happening to her, with or without “gaslighting.”

Oldman is sinister enough to make you think he’s giving away the game from the get-go. But there are all these other obvious “tells” in the clumsily “tricky” screenplay.

We can’t be sure of anything, because Wright shoots and cuts this thriller to death. Tilted camera, extreme close-ups and whip-pans, snippets of classic films in Anna’s mind, with Letts’ staccato take on film noir patter, the strident Bernard Hermann Hitchcock strings and Adams amping up the mania, who can believe any of it?

It’s so overdone it’s as if they’re all panicking over the balderdash they figured out — after filming started — they were collectively serving up.

Shortcomings aside, stylistic overkill (Hellloooo Brian DePalma) included, the only real downside to all this is the too-obvious “mystery” is the dishonor it does the filmmaker Wright, Letts & Co. are “paying tribute” to.

Don’t let a bad Hitchock homage scare you away from The Master of Suspense.

MPA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Wyatt Russell, Fred Hechinger, Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Anthony Mackie.

Credits: Directed by Joe Wright, script by Tracy Letts, based on a novel by A.J. Finn. A 20th Century release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:42

Not everyone remembers that “Undine” or Ondine is a name from mythology, a water nymph of “The Little Mermaid” variety — one with a great gravitas attached to her love life.

With or without that knowledge, the opening “break-up” scene in Christian Petzold’s German fantasy based on that myth is dark and intense.

Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) has just summoned Undine (Paula Beer) to “our cafe,” and given her the “I’ve met someone else” speech before we meet them. She isn’t taking it well.

“You said you loved me…forever!” And, cutting to the chase, “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you!”

And you thought YOUR break-ups had drama.

Undine is a Berlin government docent, leading tour groups through talks about the history of the city via gigantic floor models covering much of the re-united Berlin’s landscape, talks that take in architecture and geopolitics as well as its birth (in the 13th century) and many rebirths.

Undine herself is up for a rebirth. The faithless Johannes was supposed to wait in “our cafe” to continue their talk, and perhaps get more threats from the impulsive and ever-so-intense Undine. But when she returns, he’s gone. And this other fellow, Christoph (Franz Rogowski) , is ready to use “I just heard your talk” as a way of asking her out.

A couple of clumsy moves later, there’s an accident, he’s picking shards of a shattered fish tank out of her, telling her he’s an industrial diver and as she stares at the bubbling statue of such a diver from the tank, dying fish flopping on the floor all around them, it’s love at first sight.

That’s how this “Undine” goes. It’s fun to compare it to memories (or track it down on assorted streamers — Roku, for instance) of the fanciful 2009 Irish romance “Ondine,” which starred Colin Farrell. The modern German spin on this takes us into the murky depths of the rivers and reservoirs where Christoph works, checking infrastructure, welding and encountering Big Gunther, a giant catfish notorious in a water supply reservoir.

Christoph’s a natural match for a woman with (we guess) aquatic roots. Will she see that?

Petzold emphasizes the dreamy nature of the story, which can be nightmarish if you fear drowning in the dark.

Beer’s Undine is striking, given to falling for someone HARD, and clingy once she has. She is just an ordinary, single civil servant with the weight of myth hanging on her. Rogowski, who was in Petzold’s WWII drama “Transit,” has a needy, wounded Joaquin Phoenix look and vibe that he plays up here, to good effect.

But seeing a German version of this myth/fairytale reminds one to never get your hopes too high. As the Brothers Grimm and everyone who came afterwards have constantly reminded us, “fairytale romances” have a dark subtext that “happy endings” are the real myth, here.

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual situations

Cast: Paula Beer, Franz Rogowski, Maryam Zaree and Jacob Matschenz

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christian Petzold. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:30

One big idea separates “1971: The Year that Music Changed Everything” from other music anthology documentaries bathed in Baby Boomer nostalgia. It’s the overreaching claim in the title, that “music changed everything” in that seminal year, just after the ’60s, just before the ’70s took hold.

It wasn’t just fashion and music that were transformed, but social attitudes on everything from sexuality and pornography to race, drug use, faith to faith in politics were upended in a youth-driven revolution whose big bang still echoes today.

A generation being sent to slaughter in a ruinous war, “at odds with the silent majority,” broke through and drove the Nixon administration and FBI so nuts that Watergate happened and the Vietnam War ended. And musically?

“We were creating the 21st century in 1971,” David Bowie remembered.

In eight installments, episodes titled “Respect,” “Starman,” “Exile” “What’s Happening?” “End of the Acid Dream, “Changes,” “Our Time is Now” and “The Revolution Will Not be Televised” break down the peak year for activism in American pop, rock and soul.

Asif Kapadia, who gave us the warm but blunt Amy Winehouse documentary “Amy” co-produced and co-directed the series, building it on archival footage and scores of interviews — some fresh, some archival, stretching from back then to the present, all heard in voice-over.

Here’s Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders remembering when the National Guard came to her school and shot protestors days after students burned the campus ROTC building. Hynde attended Kent State. We hear from Marvin Gaye, Mick and Carole King, Tina and Sly and see many of them in TV appearances from 1971.

Dick Cavett has a lot of moments with a lot of artists — not all of them comfortable (Sly Stone was blitzed). But who remembers how hip Merv Griffin’s “musical guests” were?

A great stylistic choice? Lyrics appear on screen as Bill Withers sings “Harlem,” Tina and Carole and Aretha sing songs of female empowerment or protesting racial injustice. The breadth of material, with artists from Lennon and Yoko to The Staple Singers, The Stones, Black Sabbath and The Who performing and/or composing music of social relevance, takes the viewer from impressed to overwhelmed.

“Respect Yourself” The Staples sing. Make sure “We Won’t Get Fooled Again,” declare The Who.

Jim Morrison died, “glam” blew up, Elton John broke out in America, Bowie signed a record deal, visited Warhol, met Lou Reed and Iggy Popp and “the actor” took on a new role, a reinvented persona who became “Ziggy Stardust.”

Big rock concerts had given a generation a mythic moment at Woodstock and the tar of infamy at Altamonte. But when George Harrison and his friend Ravi Shankar whipped up The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, musical activism took on the mantle of charity.

The “make the world a little better” benefit concert was born on Aug. 1, 1971, in Madison Square Garden.

The Rolling Stones went deep down the heroin rabbit hole in the South of France, and came out with their LP “Exile on Main Street.” And by the time they cleaned up enough to perform live again, they launched the epic 1972 tour that shaped their stadium-filling persona from that day forward.

Pete Townsend and Kraftwerk dabbled with synthesizers, Marshall McLuhan and Pete prophesied the day when “all the music and film” in the world will be on a machine in your home, for easy access to entertainment and manipulation by The State or Big Capitalism.

African American artists punched through on whitewashed TV and reinvented music’s business model to give themselves a chance. Marc Bolan led young girls astray, and The Osmonds stepped into a “wholesome” vacuum.

The range of material covered and the voices heard — from McLuhan to Bob Marley, Aretha (a supporter of Angela Davis) to Alice Cooper, Gil Scott-Heron to Hunter S. Thompson — is right on the edge of mind-blowing.

Granted, Kapadia & Co. use “context” to work in momentous events that surrounded 1971. The Kent State massacre happened in 1970, and the Beatles broke up that same year. The infamous Rolling Stones Altamonte concert, “the death knell for the ’60s” and “the end of the ‘acid dream,'” played out in 1969, and the epic African American musicians in Ghana concert, “Soul to Soul,” was in 1970.

And if you’ve gone your whole life without catching the soothing sounds of Yoko Ono’s activist, apple-cart upsetting music or hoped you’d never have to consider Geraldo Rivera again, guess again.

Lennon and Ono were front and center, performing and protesting everything from Vietnam to an infamous British obscenity case (“Oz” magazine) with Yoko yelling at bowler-hatted hidebound Britannia to “Open Your Box.” And Rivera? He was all over New York music and culture and protests and the like, the young face of New York TV news at the time.

It’s a lot to take in, and almost sure to earn “OK, Boomer” eye-rolls from those who came along decades later. But “1971” starts with an outlandish claim and proceeds to do a pretty good job of backing it up. Will the Britney/Kanye/Kendrick/Beyonce/J Balvin-J.Lo/J-T generation be able to make its nostalgia seem as epochal and historic?

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, drug content, profanity, smoking

Cast: Tina Turner, John Lennon, Marvin Gaye, Carole King, Sly Stone, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Curtis Mayfield, Pop and Mavis Staples, Pete Townsend

Credits: Produced by Asif Kapadia, directed by Asif Kapadia, Danielle Peck and James Rogan. A Mercury Studios/Apple TV+ release

Running time: eight episodes @:43-:50 each

The warm, inviting glow of that pricey tank in our homes or our favorite sea food restaurants can be a living, bubbling conversation piece. We treat the tanks and those in them more as decor than pets, which is probably a good thing. Most “pet” salt water fish don’t live long.

And to get that one tang, angelfish or clownfish, many many others had to die as they’re plucked from reefs, stunned with cyanide or rooted out with dynamite. Not pleasant to think about, but “The Dark Hobby” gets right in your face about this vast “trade” in fish collecting and reef-looting.

Paula Fouce’s film parks itself at ground zero in the “war on fish collecting,” Hawaii. It’s the place in the United States where such exotics have been treated as “inventory” by a handful of big aquarium supply companies, depleting the island’s reefs and seriously damaging the coral and dinging the snorkeling/diving tourism industry as it does.

You fly all the way out, rent a tank and day trip to a reef, and it’s as deserted as the brown lumps off the Florida Keys, which also used to teem with life.

We hear from biologists and Kapuna elders, from educators and Humane Society and PETA activists, and from people who were once “in the business” of exporting or selling tropical fish to America and the world’s aquariums. And we witness Hawaii’s battle over regulating or even banning the practice, a stumbling, years-long struggle to not let the Pearls of the Pacific turn into the ruined, lifeless reefs of the Philippines or the Greater Caribbean.

The fish who clean, groom and police the reefs are vital to their survival, the experts here argue. They’re not just “instinctive” creatures, but animals with self-awareness and “biographies.”

Just watch “My Octopus Teacher” as your homework.

The simple truth, one former industry insider admits, is that “there’s not enough value put on their lives” to stop this in much of the world.

Fouce (“Song of the Dunes: Search for the Original Gypsies” and “No Asylum: The Untold Chapter of Anne Frank’s Story”) builds her film around the efforts of Hawaiian Robert Wintner, aka “Snorkel Bob,” a diver, reef-lover and outspoken activist in this long struggle to stop the looting of Hawaii’s natural resources by bottom-feeing wildlife dealers.

“All you need is $50 and a pulse” to get a license to harvest reef fish, Wintner complains here, there and everywhere. The reefs are being damaged, the experience of diving on them ruined and the island’s patrimony sacrificed for “an amusement industry.”

Those fish belong on the reef, Hawaiian elder Willy Kaupiko complains. “Don’t take our fish and put them in an aquarium in New York or Tennessee!”

The film doesn’t seek “balance” on this story, just snippets of a Youtube influencer talking about her tanks and fish that outgrow it. The collectors have been known to attack divers photographing their looting. And no wonder, considering the fact that like baby seal clubbers and Japanese dolphin slaughterers, they know they’re doing something wrong.

A quick DuckDuckGo search reveals the vast subculture of collectors and aquarium aficionados who aren’t giving this side of their hobby a lot of thought. As “in your face” as the arguments presented here are, a more confrontational filmmaker would have filmed Snorkel Bob approaching and debating such enthusiasts, the way PETA people get after puppy mill customers.

But there aren’t really two sides to this, even as we hear discussions of “buying out” people who have made this trade their livelihood, even as we see legislation move slowly, face gubernatorial vetoes and court tests as the reefs grow more barren and brown.

Heck, even the global explosion in destructive lionfish populations is attributable to collecting and tanking tropical fish.

“The Dark Hobby” has rhetorical “solution step” answers to the vexing problems it presents here, the wildlife sanctuaries that are cropping up in the seas off Hawaii, and the one totally surrounding the island of Cuba, a reef in the process of healing that could position the country to be the dive tourism capital of the world unless the rest of the world takes similar action.

There are “reef cams” for those who want that “live fish” experience in their home. “Buy an HDTV” Snorkel Bob half-jokes. Tune in to say, Deerfield Beach, Florida’s reef cam.

Activists are missing the boat if they aren’t attacking this problem on the consumer end. Granted, shaming tropical bird owners hasn’t saved their souls, but fish tank fanatics? They should be easier to reach.

Just show them the dusty, unused, long-stored tank you find at any given yard sale on any street in America and ask them if they really have to have one?

Aquariums can be lovely, if you can stand the noise, smell and grim business of cleaning them or dealing with the deaths of the “pets” you confine in them.

A few testimonials about the ordeal of trying to unload the damned thing when you’re tired of the cleaning, maintenance and constant refreshing of the living critters you keep in it would do more to kill off this “Dark Hobby” than anything else.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Robert Wintner aka “Snorkel Bob,” Jessica Wooley, Yvonne Ware, Jonathan Balcombe, Gail Grabowsky, Rene Umberger

Credits: Directed by Paula Fouce, scripted by Paula Fouce, William Haugse. A Rhino Films release.

Running time: 1:13

Wanna feel old?

HBO Max is guessing you do. Still, looks kind of cute. May 27.

This mystery thriller comes our way July 2.

The word “uneven” is built-into any anthology film, and “The 100 Candles Game” is no exception. But here, the least interesting “story” of the eight sampled, is the framing tale, four people gathered in a candle-lit room telling tales of terror, then sent off to see if they see something spooky in a mirror in the next room.

Dumb. Not scary at all. Nothing the four leads (Magui Bravi, Clara Kovacic, James Wright, Agustin Olcese) do changes that.

That’s not true of any of the tales the four “tell” here, of child witches, a boy hunted by the “fog demons,” “black-eyed child” demons, a pregnant woman’s exorcism, a “buried alive” story with a cell phone twist and “Mom sees monsters when she’s off her meds” tale brought to alarming life by Amy Smart (the “Crank” movies, “Seventh Moon,” TV’s “Justified” and “Shameless”) and the like.

But none of them are stop-this-ride-I-wanna-get-off scary. They’re all too short, with the linking story playing like the dull filler it is.

The look, with seven directors signing on, is quite consistent. The effects are generally impressive.

And aside from the always-good Smart, I was most impressed by the Argentine Eugenia Kolodziej, who plays the hell out of that “waking up in a coffin” nightmare.

The brevity of the stories allows them to exit with an abrupt kick, a mild twist here and there. But most of them feel half-baked — punchy, going somewhere, until they don’t.

MPA Rating: Amy Smart

Cast: Magui Bravi, Clara Kovacic, James Wright, Agustin Olcese, Eugenia Kolodziej and Amy Smart

Credits: Directed by Victor Català, Brian Deane, Oliver Lee Garland, Guillermo Lockhart, Tony Morales, Nicolás Onetti, Nicholas Patterson, Daniel Rübesam and Christopher West, scripted by Mauro Croche and Guillermo Lockhart. A Devilworks release.

Running time: 1:38

The tropes of the big screen boxing drama were basically chiseled in stone in the Hollywood of the 1930s and ’40s, set up and recycled — with some variations — by “The Champ” and “Golden Boy” and “Body and Soul,” and repeated ever since.

“American Fighter” is built on those traditions, a “tough kid” with “big obstacles” to overcome if he wants to win the “big rematch” and solve his “big problem.”

Except this kid is named “Ali.” He’s a Persian immigrant in 1981 America, college wrestler tough, but with bigotry and hustlers surrounding him everywhere he goes and a sickly mother back in Tehran who needs American medical attention to survive.

His dad? He was executed on the tarmac before the parents could fly out.

George Kosturos (“A California Christmas,” “The Ride”) steps into the spotlight here, playing a fighter who could only exist in B-movies. He learns “underground” no-holds-barred fighting on the fly, punches way above his weight or the laws of physics, lands scores of knuckle-breaking haymakers and endures just as many as he scrambles to raise the cash to smuggle his mom out of Revolutionary Iran.

He’s scored a back-door college wrestling scholarship on the West Coast, but privileged or not, he doesn’t have the cash or the means of making it to save his mother.

Until his wrestling buddy (Bryan Craig) notes how Ali handles one racist “camel jockey” (and worse) insult too many from their teammates.

“That punch you threw in practice, you think you could do that again?”

Ryan is thus Ali’s entre to the underground fight scene of Northern California, booked and gambled-on 15 minute bouts staged in basements, hay lofts and the like for a few hundred bucks a throw.

Tommy Flanagan (“Sons of Anarchy,” “Braveheart”) is the ever-so-Irish promoter/profiteer who smells money in people betting against the hated “Muslim.” Sean Patrick Flannery (“Dexter,” “Assault on VA-33”) is the sage and boozy trainer the kid won’t give the time of day to, until he figures out he’s in over his head.

And Allison Paige plays the cute coed who digs Ali’s curly locks and exotic accent.

There’s a whiff of “Hallmark movie” to this brute brawl of a drama. Outside of the ring, it’s chaste and downright cheesy — a roller rink date, Mom’s worries in Iran, the fatherly way Flanery’s Duke sobers up just enough to teach “the kid” a thing of two.

“It’s the land of opportunity, kid. And yours is just inside that ring.”

One break from formula is that this “teachable moment” comes awfully late, too late to work, really. How did Ali get so good so fast, and carry on all this time without instruction?

The period piece nature of the pic means we get an ’80s synth-pop score and a lot of cornball post-“Rocky” cornerman wisdom about fighting “three-legged donkeys” and “blame makes you weak, son.”

Despite the racism, the budding romance, the pathos of Ali’s “cause” and the under-developed “wrestling” side of things — no, absorbing the ethics of no-ethics brawling isn’t allowed in the NCAA — “American Fighter” never overcomes the perfunctory story and B-movie “types” performing it.

The players give fair value, but not that extra something that would have lent this pathos or made us care. And if you’ve seen one savage beat-down, you’ve seen them all.

MPA Rating: R for violence

Cast: George Kosturos, Tommy Flanagan, Sean Patrick Flanery, Allison Paige and Bryan Craig

Credits: Directed by Shawn Paul Piccinino, script by Carl Morris, Shaun Paul Piccinino. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:38