Movie Nation

This dramedy with magical realism and environmental subtexts opens June 15 and looks like a winner.

Not a lot of movies about guys visited by talking sloths in their dreams and taking on a family quest to save sloth habitat out there.

I won’t say I was in a tiny minority of reviewers who praised the charms of “Miss Potter” when it came out in late 2006-early 2007. But I was a bit of an outlier in being swept away by its beauty, delicacy and melancholy romance.

Spruced up as a holiday season Weinstein Co. Oscar contender, the company’s money troubles and a general “over it” attitude about bullying Oscar campaigner and future #MeToo supervillain Harvey Weinstein and even its Oscar-winning star, Renee Zellweger, doomed it with critics and audiences alike.

Period pieces like this reek of “privilege,” which was mentioned in a few reviews years before that condemnation took over the culture.

But looking at it anew, I still connected with its many virtues, the innate sweetness of the characters and the approach — a genteel English “spinster” born into wealth whose perfectly-realized drawings come to animated life, in her mind, as her “friends” which she turns into books that all but invented “children’s literature.

Here’s what I wrote about it upon release. “With “Miss Potter,” Renee Zellweger has won back that precious thing that stardom rips away and the tabloids won’t let you reclaim: her charm.”

There was a lot going on in her post-“Cold Mountain”/”Bridget Jones” life back then, all of it overwhelming a perfectly weightless meringue of a movie. And in the years since, plastic surgery and an Oscar winning “comeback” (“Judy”) haven’t restored any of the appeal she could claim at the turn of the millennium.

But “Miss Potter” feels like a movie most of us swung at and “missed.”

These days, it plays as quaint and gloriously dated, an echo of a time when flawlessly-realized recreations of Edenic England were something worth striving for and films investors could be talked into. Zellweger and co-star Ewan McGregor can’t erase the years or the tabloid interest in their respective lives, but this movie can.

“Miss Potter” catches up with 32 year-old Beatrix in the early years of the last century, confident enough to take her “little book for children” — drawings and all — around to publishers who still weren’t used to dealing with women and could feign little interest in kid lit.

But a small publishing house run by brothers Harold and Fruing Warne (Anton Lesser and “Pride & Prejudice” alumnus David Bamber) fight the urge to dismiss her and take on this “Peter Rabbit” tale. It’ll give their nuisance, idle brother Norman (McGregor) something to do that won’t cost the family its fortune.

That amuses and pleases her father (the great Scot Bill Paterson) if not her snooty, socially-climbing mother (Barbara Flynn).

And when Beatrix meets the boyish but enthusiastic Norman, sparks fly as they find common ground in creating a book that combines art, fancy, whimsy and thrift, one that most every family can afford.

As smitten as the two plainly are as they cook up the publishing phenomenon of the age, Beatrix’s true swept-off-her-feet moment comes when she meets Norman’s equally spinsterish sister, given a pent-up exuberance by Emily Watson.

“I must warn you, Miss Potter, I am more than prepared to like you!”

There are sparks there, too. But any hint of that sort of sexual tension remains that, a “hint.” This is about Beatrix breaking through in a man’s world, becoming a wealthy woman in her own right, showing just what someone born into wealth and comfort can accomplish with every advantage and the free time to polish a craft and create art.

The tension in this quite old-fashioned bio-pic is provided by her unpleasable mother, who never got over her inability to marry her off.

 “My mother and I have come to an understanding. We’ve agreed not understand each other.”

At least her indulgent father gets it.

“Our daughter is famous, Helen. You’re the only person who doesn’t know it.”

Her parents are only united when it comes to opposition to her marrying “a tradesman,” who happens to be charming, sweet on her and the main reason she’s rich enough to start shopping for farms in the Lake District.

No expense was spared in taking the production to that part of Cumbria where the Potters summered and which provided Beatrix with much of her inspiration for her stories of ever-so-English tiny creatures of the forests and fields.

The scenery here — they filmed in Scotland and the Isle of Man, as well as London and Cumbria — makes “Miss Potter” the best travel advertisement for the north of England ever put on film.

And the performances are almost unfailingly sweet, romantic with a heavy dose of Edwardian decorum and repression.

I may have been a bit over-the-top in my effusive praise for this in 2006. But if you’re still “over” Zellweger and McGregor, perhaps getting over being “over” them is in order. “Miss Potter” remains the perfect place to start.

MPA Rating: PG for brief mild language

Cast: Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson, Barbara Flynn and Bill Paterson

Credits: Directed by Chris Noonan, script by Richard Maltby Jr. A Weinstein Co release (now streaming via Lionsgate on assorted services

Running time: 1:28

Joel Coen’s directing the adaptation A24 will put in theaters and AppleTV will stream, a little Shakespeare coming our way performed by two of the very best American acting has to offer.

“I will not be afraid of death and bane, til Birnham Forest come to Dunsinan.”

Omar is a Syrian refugee who maintains a poker face even as he gives us a glimpse of the full emotional range of the “displaced person experience.” He is sad, deflated, guilt-ridden and powerless. Surely “hopeful” figured in there at some point.

But when you’re stuck on a remote Scottish island that might as well be named “Purgatory,” “Limbo” is about as upbeat as his situation gets.

Writer-director Ben Sharrock’s debut feature has all the ingredients to turn into a twee take on “fish out of water” shoved where, as the vulgar insult goes, “the sun don’t shine.” But this wistful, deadpan tale never quite goes there, which seems apt, given the subject matter.

They are from Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, and they’ve temporarily raised this dying, isolated village’s population “by 25 percent,” the locals insist. But for all the quirky assimilation classes presided over by Helga (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Boris (Kenneth Collard), amusingly-mimed examples of how to avoid breaking decorum while dancing, when the phrase “I used to” comes in handy, we see in no uncertain terms that these single men are in utter despair.

Omar (Amir El-Masry) and his flatmates, Farhad from Afghanistan (Vikash Bhai) and Sudanese brothers Waseef (Ola Orebiyi) and Abedi (Kwabena Ansah), have been tossed into a snowy, overcast place where English is its subtitle-challenging worst. Wasef figures its for a reason.

They’re trying “to break us, to get us to volunteer to go home.”

Omar has had his arm in a cast since he’s been here, trudging from classes to the store to the single pay phone on a windswept hillside to call his parents, who made it only as far as Istanbul.

We learn from his calls to his mother that his estranged brother is still in Syria, fighting for, we presume, the non-Assad side. From his father, who wonders why the kid isn’t making cash we learn Omar’s “no work permit” status, and figure out the instrument Omar takes with him everywhere, even if he can’t play it with a bum arm.

“People don’t care about the oud here,” the son sighs to his father.

Farhad has been here the longest, and cynical Wasef explains that “Afghans” were once the flavor of the month, in the world’s spotlight. Then it was the Sudanese. It’s been Syrians for a while, but it’s entirely possible Omar missed the window of when we all were paying attention to Syria.

Sure, there’s a “Refugees Welcome” sign on the community center. Nobody is what you’d call hostile. But Omar is hassled by boorish rural teens doing donuts on the sand flats at low tide and want to know if he’s in Al Qaida. Then there’s the tactless dad who blurts out “Bet ye never thought ye’d end up HERE, didya laddie?” in front of his daughter in the thickest burr on the island.

Sharrock packs the front and the back of the frame in most scenes, stressing the stark scenery and odd locals. Whatever Omar is stoically not reacting to in the foreground, there’s sure to be a kid on a distant trampoline as the snow gently settles around outsiders who aren’t exactly used to this sort of damp cold.

The filmmaker gives us an understated and illuminating microcosm of the displaced person experience — a town with a lone industry, a fish-packing plant, which can hire permitted “economic refugees” but not those fleeing death back home and kept in “limbo” here, and lets us feel the comic resentment some of Omar’s flatmates feel about this.

Omar? He keeps those feelings to himself, makes promises to his family he can’t keep and makes us wonder what he’s carrying with him that weighs so heavily on his heart. His lack of emotions make us wonder if he even wants or is anyone worthy of that coveted “asylum” in the West.

El-Masry, who features in TV’s “Jack Ryan” action spy series playing guess-what, makes a somewhat colorless reactor to all that’s going on around him. He learns the slur “Paki” from the more tactless than hateful local, and learns even quicker that it’s not what you say to the second generation Sikh who runs the ill-equipped market. If there are laughs in any situation, it’s the other character who provides them.

Happy endings and tragedies, a crisis of conscience and a chicken all play into this story of lonely strangers thrown together at a latitude that will do nothing to ease their isolation. Several situations tickle, some sadden and a lone moment of magical realism lays it all out there, what people fleeing conflict are allowed to/forced to feel guilty about as they seek a better life than “home,” for all its pull, provided.

MPA Rating: R for language (profanity)

Cast: Amir El-Masry, Vikash Bhai, Ola Orebiyi, Kwabena Ansah, Kenneth Collard and Sidse Babett Knudsen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ben Sharrock. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:44

As “Saw” movies go, “Spiral,” the latest film “from the Book of Saw,” isn’t one of the worst in the never-ending franchise. It’s not one of the best, either.

This thriller sits on the gory edge of the blade, teetering between “not all that” and “not that bad.”

It’s got Chris Rock in the lead as a jaded detective stalked by whatever “copycat” killer is playing the late Jigsaw’s old tricks on new victims — murderous, compromised or simply corrupt cops.

And having C. Rock guarantees some cynical sneers about marriage, “Forrest Gump” and being forced to take on a new partner (Max Minghella).

“Do I LOOK like a f—–g Jamaican nanny?”

The film serves up Samuel L. Jackson as Rock’s retired police-chief Dad. Let the bullets and “muthaf—as” fly.

There’s a funny homage to the original film.

Darren Lynn Bousman, director of three previous “Saw” sequels, returns to the franchise for the first time in over a dozen years as director, and that’s very outside-the-box for Hollywood these days — loyalty, hiring a director with experience. He’s made better and worse “Saw” movies than this.

And on the negative side, there are more and grislier torture-murders engineered by whoever this new sadistic mechanical genius might be — stuff involving trains for a cop who “railroaded” innocent people, dismemberment, electrocutions, “the usual” only more so.

“Live or die,” we hear a far less growly voice than Tobin Bell purr on the video or audiotapes. “Make your choice.”

The butchery’s creative as there never seems to be a shortage of ways to impale, suffocate or whatever someone to death. If it’s done “well” it can be excruciating to sit through. “Spiral” never achieves “excruciating.” Then again, maybe I was looking away.

The “motivations” for the crimes are more overt and the deadly dilemmas — consent to losing the power to speak, walk or what have you in exchange for surviving the ordeal — still ring true.

I like Rock in the part, even if he has one or two moments where he squints so hard you grimace in sympathy for his acting teacher. He and Jackson give this re-launching of the franchise the most star power since “Saw,” which paired up Cary Elwes and Danny Glover.

But if “Saw” is becoming a thing again, “Spiral” summons up more questions than it resolves.

Which college is turning out these DaVinci-clever engineers? MIT? Cal Tech? Va. Tech? Does Elon Musk have their resumes?

Does Tobin Bell still get paid if you use just a photo of him in fond remembrance of the mass murderer/moral arbiter he played in the earlier films?

And is 11 years enough time since “Saw: The Final Chapter?” Will anybody show up for this reboot? I’d hate for Bousman to be forced back onto his starving collegiate diet — Ramen noodle soup.

The film may have a “take it or leave it” quality, but nostalgia for horror franchises is totally a thing, and at least partly justified in this spin of the blade.

MPA Rating: R (Pervasive Language|Grisly Bloody Violence|Brief Drug Use|Some Sexual References|Torture)

Cast: Chris Rock, Max Minghella, Marisol Nichols and Samuel L. Jackson

Credits: Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, script by Josh Stolberg, Peter Goldfinger. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:33

What fresh nonsense is this? Well, “fresh” is maybe a tad generous.

“Undercover Punch and Gun” is a jokey Hong Kong action pic with first-person shooter video game gunfights, martials arts mayhem, terrific stunts and some pretty damned funny one-liners.

Two villains duck bullets in a shootout.

“Fireboy! Car doors won’t stop bullets!”

“It works in MOVIES!”

Both drop dead, settling that argument.

The villain (Chinese-American actor Andy On of “Black Hat”) is “a logistics guy” who specializes in filling his freighters with drugs and humans to be trafficked. And he’s picky about his minions.

“If anyone can kick my ass, they can take the boat!”

They try. Lord knows they try.

He stares down the “hero,” undercover cop Wu (Philip Ng of “Birth of a Dragon” and “Once Upon a Time in Shanghai”) and shames him with the ultimate insult.

“I ADDED you on Facebook,” he hisses in Chinese with English subtitles, fiddling with his phone. “Aaand…I just unfriended you!”

It’s like that, a blood-spattered/body-count action comedy about Wu and his manic goofball partner Tiger (Vanness Wu, a hoot). Tiger’s the sort of joker who gets tattoo tributes of every “boss” — cop or street gang leader — who dies while he works with him.

He’s already got one for Wu.

The semi-nonsensical story puts these two in an act opening drug deal that ends with everybody but them being slaughtered and another undercover team grabbing the cash. The fallout from that is that our two heroes are recruited to the freighter-smuggling gang run by Ha, a smart brawler who runs human trafficking like a Fortune 500 business, with CCTV in every shipping container cage.

But he’s in need of an expert meth cook and the one they try to steal from Madame Tong gets away, despite Tiger leaping onto the roof of her car as she remembers “my street racing days.”

Tiger must dress up and swish up as a TV cooking show chef version of a meth cook — complete with music (he makes Ha’s minions sing for him).

“Undercover Punch and Gun,” which may also be known as “Undercover vs. Undercover” or be a re-edit of that (the cast lists don’t sync up) or even a sequel, is goofy, over-the-top old school martial arts with a Jackie Chan twist. There are laugh-out-loud outtakes under the closing credits.

The movie? Not all that, but Ng, Wu and On handle the fights and stunts with amused skill and Wu’s way with the lighter material makes it a lark, a middling martial arts action comedy that’s worth a few laughs, if you’re in the mood for that.

Cast: Philip Ng, Vanness Wu, Andy On, Joyce Wenjuan Feng, Carrie Ng, Lam Suet, Susan Yam-Yam Shaw

Credits: Scripted and directed by Philip Lui Koon-Nam, Frankie Tam, A Well Go USA release.

Running time:

“Dark Forest” is a German police procedural that is less about tracking down a serial killer than about the ripple effects of random, senseless violence and the pain of not-knowing what’s happened to a loved one who simply vanishes.

There’s mystery in this account of a 30 year-long German case that only dogged persistence by the brother of a missing woman — a chief of the Federal Police, no less — and others came anywhere near resolving.

The German title, “Das Geheimnis des Totenwaldes,” translates as “The Secret Forest of the Dead,” and that’s how the story begins. In 1989 Saxony, a couple having a pleasant walk in the woods in the Istforst is seized and killed. Weeks later it happens again, in almost exactly the same spot.

These is the same forest SS chief Heinrich Himmler was supposedly buried after he committed suicide in 1945, and there are odd bits of art scattered within it — totems. The fellow who carves them becomes one of the suspects as a local PD takes on the case and rookie Anne Bach (Karoline Schuch) asks questions the gruff and dismissive older guys (Karsten Mielke, August Wittgenstein) haven’t thought of.

When they tramp into the woods to see the second crime scenes, one even mutters “Please don’t let this be a serial killer” (in German with English subtitles), as if that’ll help.

They’ve barely had time to wrap their heads around this baffling case when another one is thrown their way. The new chief of the Federal Police in Hamburg, Thomas Bethge (Matthias Brandt) has just comforted his sister, Barbara (Silke Bodenbender) over a husband who is ditching her for a young employee at his printing plant when Barbara disappears.

Barbara, a hard drinker in the best of times, vanished after a party held by neighbors in the same town — Weesenburg. The big city chief finds himself all but begging the locals to get on the stick and keep him informed, as he’s promised their mother he’ll find his sister.

The cases ebb and flow, with first one and then the other stepping into the foreground. Assorted suspects are introduced. But the one who stands out in Barbara’s husband Robert (Nicholas Ofczarek). He appears to have motives and the means to dispose of a body. As the police do what police do — make an educated guess and block out other possibilities, with the media looking Robert’s way as well, even their teenage daughter starts to suspect the worst.

Several things will stand out to a North American viewer, punches that no doubt landed when this showed in Germany last year. The local police are clumsy, a tad inept and belligerent about it. The senior detective, Lohse (Mielke) is condescending and defensive every time Bethge makes a suggestion or asks a question.

The prosecutor, played by Moritz Grove, is openly contemptuous. If it wasn’t for junior detective Gerke’s (Wittgenstein) crush on the cute new cop fresh out of the academy, Bach wouldn’t make any headway in either case.

Hairstyles, clothing and cars change, years pass — and then decades. The “forest” case recedes into the background because nobody in Weesenberg has the wherewithal to pursue it, or even tidy up their earlier sloppiness. Only Bethge’s nagging and frequent visits keep his former pupil, Bach, on his missing sister’s case.

The implication, of course, is that they’re connected.

What “Dark Woods” does best is show the grinding agony of uncertainty. As with a lot of cases like this, “sightings” of the missing woman play into the investigation. A cloud hangs over Robert’s new marriage, which shockingly survives the scrutiny, if not without scars.

The suspects are suspects for a reason. But how would an innocent person respond to the public pressure with the stakes being this high?

Brandt, a sturdy presence in German film (“Killing Stella”) and TV (“Berlin Babylon”) makes a stoic, by-the-book anchor, which Schuch (“Hanna’s Journey”) ably takes us from a rookie who has to shrug off the sexist and less competent superiors who blow off her hunches and ridicule her deductive reasoning, to a middle-aged cop who doesn’t have to take that crap anymore, and who simply will not give up her favorite theory.

The tale is told in such a way as even as we’re seeing impressive DIY escapes by Suspect One, we’re doubting his guilt over this crime even as evidence of others starts to pile up. The first episode teases subtexts and twists that don’t pan out, and frankly the mystery won’t be a mystery if a sharp cop zeroes in on the right leads, motives and acess.

“Dark Woods” is just intriguing enough to hook you, and touching enough to make you feel for Barbara’s family, who are haunted by the horrors she must have faced and the simple act of not-knowing. This disappearance is corrosive and trying and can’t be doing anybody any good.

And we’re even allowed to feel for the accused, who may get something like due process, but not when the temptation to add “media” pressure becomes a crutch the cops can’t resist.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, sexuality, adult subject matter

Cast: Matthias Brandt, Karoline Schuch, Nicholas Ofczarek, Silke Bodenbender, Karsten Mielke and August Wittgenstein.

Credits: Directed by Sven Bohse, scripted/created by Stefan Kolditz. Now streaming on Topic.

Running time: 6 episodes :42-:50 minutes each

A Welsh cattle and pig farm evolved over the decades to become the world’s first “residential recording studio” in the late 1960s.

Musicians could go there, isolate, create and live under the same roof — almost dormitory style — as they cut classics from “Paranoia” (Black Sabbath) and “Bohemian Rhapsody” to “Wonderwall” (Oasis) and “Yellow” (Coldplay), all because the two brothers who inherited the farm had to give up their “the next Elvis” dreams, but who were smarter than their parents in realizing “There’s no money in farming.”

“Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm” is a cute surface gloss in the “if these recording studio walls could talk” genre. Not as deep as dive into the music and “sound” as “Muscle Shoals,” but on a par with “Sound City” and as filled with music-making and musicians-behaving-badly anecdotes as any “Behind the Music” feature.

Filmmaker Hannah Berryman introduces us to the quirky, music-loving Ward brothers, Kingsley and Charlie, shows them doing a little farming and listens to the tale of how they turned the horse breeding acreage their parents bought as Amberly Court Farm in Rockfield, Monmouthshire into a still-working farm, but one where this Coach House or that Pig Barn was transformed into a place where hit records were recorded.

We spend precious little time touring the facilities, with just glimpses of the studios themselves. There’s no home movies or “video” of Queen recording its breakout, operatic hit or Ozzy and Black Sabbath doing the takes it took to nail down “Paranoid” or even Ace thumping out “How Long (Has This Been Going On).”

There’s a lot more of that footage later on, long after Foghat, Iggy, Bowie and Adam Ant put in their time there.

Instead, we’re treated to older musicians marveling as they recall the creative environment, the remoteness of it all, and the smell of the working farm where they were free to create, but also do what they pleased in their off hours.

A TV feature story from the ’70s shows us the “derelict farm” where the magic took place. Still photos show Black Sabbath messing around with river rafts, guns and bows and arrows and Liam Gallagher remembers an epic meltdown/smash-up Oasis staged making “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” back in ’95. Yeah, they pretty much broke up at Rockfield.

A member of The Charlatans killed himself in a drunk driving accident on the way back from a band gathering at a local pub. Even Black Sabbath turned some sort of corner, working and living together out there in the ’70s.

“We started out being a rock band that dabbled in drugs,” Osbourne (more slurry than usual) remembers. “We ended up being a drug band dabbling in rock.”

There’s probably too much material here that amounts to podcast anecdotes — Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, who named Simple Minds after a Bowie lyric, being on the farm at the same time as Iggy Popp in the late ’70s. And whenever Iggy was in the UK, you could bet Bowie would be dropping in soon after

He did, and Simple Minds ended up backing the two of them on “Playing It Safe.”

Again, there’s no video of the magic happening, and the animation dropped in here and there to “recreate” such moments doesn’t really fill that void.

Charlie Ward’s daughter confesses the place and vibe were more of a “guys” thing. Joan Armatrading and a couple of other women recorded there, but rare was the woman, either singer-songwriter or bandmember, who found the need for the rustic, no-distractions world of Rockfield.

T’Pau recorded there, off an on. Getting them to speak on camera would have made the film feel more diverse, even if that’s not exactly the studio’s rock brand. The closing credits, listing the vast array of talents who worked there, is almost wholly hip hop, R & B and reggae-free.

Robert Plant’s reminiscences are some of the most frank, remembering “I was already a cliche” by the time Led Zeppelin broke up. He went to Rockfield in the ’80s to reinvent himself.

There were fallow years as sampling and digital recording turned every hotel room or home office into a “studio.” But bands and singers still show up, hoping a little of the magic rubs off on them and that what they step in on the way through the door will wash off with leather soap and water.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, discussions of drug abuse

Cast: Ozzy Osborne, Robert Plant, Lisa Ward, Kingsley Ward, Charles Ward, Jim Kerr, Liam Gallagher, Bonehead, Eliza Carthy, Chris Martin

Credits: Directed by Hannah Berryman. An Abramorama release.

Running time:

When is a surprise twist no surprise at all? When the movie starts to make no sense without that inevitability, that’s when.

“Antidote” opens with an unexplained hanging and leaps straight into a woman (Ashlynne Yennie) rising from her bed complaining of intense stomach pain. Her husband (Yorgos Karamihos) and daughter rush her to the hospital, “appendicitis” is diagnosed, her family insists “we’ll wait” through the surgery and then…Sharyn wakes up.

She’s in a featureless room with dim lighting and no windows. There’s an IV drip. And her hands? They’re cuffed to the bed.

An evasive doctor (Louis Mandylor) answers no questions and recommends pills “to help you with your anxiety.”

“Where am I? Where is my family? Why was I restrained?”

Adding F-bombs to her growing outrage and panic, she makes the lawsuit threat. To which Dr. Hellenbach (HAH!) says those words that no movie hostage ever wants to hear.

“No one will come looking for you, Sharyn.”

There are other patients, glimpses of the horrors they’re being subjected to. She and we hear screams and in the limited view she gets of the place, Sharyn sees blood.

But whatever else happens to all concerned, nobody leaves.

Got it?

The acting doesn’t generate much in the way of fear, and even less pathos.

Our tale tumbles into discovering the other patients, hearing tidbits from their backstories, flashbacks to Sharyn’s past, her life before her husband, her connection to the hanging victim in the opening scene.

Being predictable about your story’s destination isn’t a cardinal sin, but there’s no “Antidote” for the dull waypoints this one marches us past along the way. It never quite achieves “terrible,” but it’s never more than terribly dull.

MPA Rating:

Cast: Ashlynne Yennie, Louis Mandylor, Ajugie Duke, Yorgos Karamihos, Ravi Daidu and Scott Alin.

Credits: Directed by Peter Daskaloff, scripted by Peter Daskaloff, Matthew Toronto. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:28

July 30, this one hits theaters.