Movie Nation

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.

A problematic play became a troubled film shoot and then a box office bomb when Tennessee Williams, Sidney Lumet, Brando and United Artists took a shot at “Orpheus Descending,” the play that became “The Fugitive Kind” back in 1960.

It’s slow, a low-simmer Southern Gothic slice of suffocating small town prejudices, sublimated desires and the trap of the “way its always been” hierarchy.

It features Marlon Brando with all his sex appeal and little of his heat or dramatic fire, Joanne Woodward at her spunkiest, a somewhat miscast Anna Magnani, with the actress who played her role on stage (Maureen Stapleton) on the set with her most days.

A happy shoot? An infamously unhappy one, according to legend. You can see it in Brando’s lack of interest, actresses insecurely over-emoting to compensate, in the leaden pacing that sets in after crackling introductory scenes.

Even the famed Williams monologues, soulful reveries of the past and dreams and genteel possibility have the life squeezed out of them by the weight of the film surrounding them.

“You might think that there’s. . .there’s many. . .many kinds of people in this world. But there’s only two kinds: The buyers and the ones that get bought. No, there’s another kind…

“It’s a kind that don’t belong no place at all. There’s a kind of bird that don’t have any legs so it can’t alight on nothing. So it has to spend its whole life on its wings in the air. I seen one, once. It died and fell to earth. And its body was light blue colored. And it was just as tiny as your little finger. And it was so light in the palm of your hand that it didn’t weigh more than a feather. And its wings spread out that wide. And you could see right through them. That’s why the hawks don’t catch them. . .because they don’t see ’em. They don’t see ’em way up in that high blue sky near the sun.”

Poetic as that is, it stops the picture cold when it’s already lurched to a crawl.

But Lumet, with his third feature film after a sterling career in Golden Age television, immerses us in a seedy, sordid and unsafe South that only Williams could dream up and only Milton, New York could recreate without the threat of cross-burnings of disapproval interrupting filming.

Brando’s a New Orleans musician, “an entertainer” with more implied in that than merely playing an autographed guitar that bluesman Leadbelly gave him. His jacket gives Val Xavier his nickname — “Snakeskin.”

We meet him in an edgy but interminable court scene, talking his way out of a long jail sentence, but also out of town. On a rainy night, he makes his exit only to break down in BFE Mississippi. A hunk like Val depends on the kindness of strangers — one in particular, the sheriff’s wife (Stapleton). She takes him in out of the rain, feeds him and hearing his mumbled wish for a fresh start, takes a stab at placing him in a job.

The owner of the town’s only store (Victor Jory) has just gotten out of a Memphis hospital. He’s unlikely to ever get back to running the place, and maybe his (unexplained Italian) wife (Magnani) could use some help.

Val first has to fend off the attention of the local hellion. Woodward’s wild, loud, liquor-swilling juke-joint-banned Carol Cutrere is as unwashed as her Jaguar XK, which she tears around two counties in, top down, pedal to the metal. The places she’s not allowed in compete with the places where she’s not allowed to drive on her rap sheet. But she’s from money, so there’s no controlling her.

And there’s no saving her, Val seems to gather. But maybe he can get her out of this or that fix just by taking the wheel, even if all she ever wants to do is go “juking.”

“That’s when you get in a car, which is preferably open in any kind of weather. And then you drink a little bit and you drive a little bit, and then you stop and you dance a little bit with a jukebox. And then you drink a little bit more and you drive a little bit more, you stop and you dance a little bit more to another juke box! And then you stop dancing and you just drink and you drive. And then, you stop driving.”

The tug of war over Val’s attentions and his very soul is him wanting to impress the mother figure, the sheriff’s wife, to rescue the unhappy-to-the-point-of-stricken Lady Torrance (Magnani), whose traumatic past includes family horrors and a frustrated affair with Carol’s ne’er do well brother (John Baragrey), and escaping his own sordid past, thrown in his face by the presence of party gal Carol.

It’ll all end in tragedy, I do declare.

Racism is introduced by the sheriff, and there has never been a better big screen bigot than character heavy R.G. Armstrong. Threats and seductions and rain and even the tiniest hopes of bringing a little refinement to this corner of muddy, redneck hell are just there to be thwarted in Tennessee Williamsland.

The stagebound film reminded me of the one time I can recall seeing it on the stage. Leave out the rain, fire and Jaguar they could have taken this version on the road, where audiences might have reveled in the star power, but not in the story, which grinds to a halt once the lights come on in that general store turned “department” store.

Brando completists still make pilgrimages to “Fugitive,” and Williams fans looking for the “first play that didn’t work” in his canon might be drawn in. This counts as a rare stumble after a decade of triumphs and Oscar-lauded screen adaptations.

Magnani’s presence is interesting to ponder in a back story Williams doesn’t provide the character. As she’s playing Lady Torrance, she must have been a war bride, the cruelty her husband visited upon her family a product of that war.

Lumet’s direction crackles in the opening act, and then the man who directed “12 Angry Men” on basically a single set finds himself at a loss in how to animate this busier set, motivate his players and keep the peace. The lighting and production design are immersive, but “The Fugitive Kind” can feel like a still life, sordid dead-end lives preserved in a muddy, beer-stained glass menagerie.

The thing that gave me the biggest kick out of belatedly getting around to this tainted “classic” is seeing, on the screen, what Paul Newman saw when he looked at Joanne Woodward. Not just the talent, but the spark and fire — sexy and funny and up for anything.

But he can’t have approved of what she and her character did to that Jaguar. That’s beyond the pale.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, adult themes, profanity

Cast: Marlon Brando, Joanne Woodward, Anna Magnani, Victor Jory, Maureen Stapleton, R.G. Armstrong, John Baragrey and Emory Richardson

Credits: Directed by Sidney Lumet, script by Tennessee Williams and Meade Roberts, based on a play by Tennessee Williams. A United Artists release on assorted streaming platforms.

Running time: 2:01

Reforming the fast, loose, pocket stuffing elders of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has proven to be nigh on impossible over the decades.

The terrible ratings of the 2021 pandemic Gloves should have made this a no brainer. They have all the leverage, why didn’t they do better than they did with Trump, Matt Lauer and other network scandals over the years?

But renewed pressure on slow to act NBC has turned the tide. The Peacock is not broadcasting a ceremony in 2022.

This came on the same day that Tom Cruise sent his Globe trophies back to the racist, sexist and corrupt old boys’ club.

Will the HFPA, which has gotten fat on broadcast bucks and exaggerated clout based on the awards, stand down clean house and put on something with a more professional presence behind the screen?

Stay tuned.

Tom Hardy’s back in what has proven to be an unlikely franchise seeing as how the original wasn’t much fun, not in the same darkly comical league with “Deadpool,” wasn’t deep enough to be as dark as it turned out.

Hardy was good and the effects first rate. Why should Disney keep all the money?

He’s back. Harry Nilsson cover in the trailer.

Sept 26. We are…curious.

This doc, about the Tulsa Race Riot/Massacre, comes out this June — 100 years after scores of people were killed, hundreds were injured and thousands detained — on National Geographic and Hulu, right around Juneteenth.

A compelling subject, and this clip makes you hope they did it justice.

“The Killing of Two Lovers” is a break-up story as stark as its Utah-in-winter setting, as brutal as its title.

The debut feature of writer-director Robert Machoian throws us into the seemingly quiet aftermath of a split, the calm after what appears to have been a just-as-calm “we need to work through some things” parting.

But there isn’t any “working through” whatever is going on here. That “calm” is an illusion, “no fault divorce” a myth. A family has been torn in two, and here’s a movie about the psychic violence that all-too-often dissolves into physical violence.

We meet David, given a simmering-before-the-boil energy by Clayne Crawford of TV’s version of “Lethal Weapon,” as he’s standing over a couple in bed, a revolver in his hand and wondering what to do with it.

We come to learn it’s his bed. Or it used to be. That’s his wife sleeping in it with another man. Those noises in the rest of the house are their four kids, getting restless just before dawn.

David gets as far as cocking the trigger before slipping out a window and sprinting down the street.

In a small town (This was filmed in Kanosh, Utah.), there’s no such thing as a “quiet” break-up. Everybody knows. David’s sprint ends at his pickup. And he only has to drive it another block or two to wind up at his dad’s house, where he’s staying. That’s how big this town is.

As David tries to get a handle on walking the kids to school and entertaining them on weekends, we meet soft-spoken wife Nikki (Sepideh Moafi of “The ‘L’ Word” and “The Deuce”). She sounds reasonable. But we also figure out how recent all this is, how quickly she worked the “see other people” into the equation, where she met the guy in her bed now and just how she and David ended up together, how young they were.

Nikki has late-awakening dreams, only some of which she’s articulated.

“So what did you have planned before Jess ruined it?”

That’s how she puts the question on “date night,” describing their oldest — their daughter — as a mistake, a trap they fell into.

She wants to know if David’s looking at places to rent. No wonder he’s confused. This isn’t “date night” banter. It’s tidying up and moving on.

But David? His dream is to get everything he had back. That is literally “all I think about.”

Machoian paints this portrait in pain in sound. We hear metal-on-metal, clinking and thunking noises as David drives around, grasping at what he should do. Confront? Kill? That’s his mind grinding its gears.

It’s a film of perfectly-observed moments — their three boys abandoning their still-rolling bikes as they dash for the school bus, Dad trying entirely-too-hard to make a snowy Saturday in the park, trying out model rockets, engaging, losing more ground with the oldest child, their daughter Jess (Avery Pizzuto, terrific).

And it’s a story of blunt counseling, some of it coming from that rebelling teen.

“You know, Dad, you need to FIGHT for us.”

That’s what we’re worried about. Amid these fully-rounded characters and vividly-recognizable lives, the threat of violence, of David’s frazzled state and the fact that he has a gun hangs over everything. What form will this “fight” take? Will he and “Mom’s new boyfriend (Chris Coy)” have a conversation, or have it out?

The situations are documentary-real, the acting barely feels like “acting” at all as we invest in the story, feel its pain and fear its outcome.

Machoian never lets this lapse into melodrama, never allows the reality of it all to lapse. The fact that he can take such an intimate, over-familiar situation and discover surprises and twists in it may be his most impressive feat of all.

MPA Rating: R for language (the MPA doesn’t care about “violence,” apparently)

Cast: Clayne Crawford, Sepideh Moafi, Avery Pizzuto and Chris Coy

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Machoian. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:24