Movie Nation

Cypress trees in their grey winter garb, moss and rust-covered RVs, McMansions and omnipresent double-wides show off Greater Tampa to accurate effect in “Painkiller,” a thriller about the opioid epidemic, those who profit from from and a murderous “avenger” out to stop them.

It’s a straight-up C-movie starring Michael Paré (“Streets of Fire,” “City of Lies”) and horror movie mainstay Bill Oberst Jr. as a pill-pushing doc and the internet radio host and ex-cop hellbent to “out” him and others behind the “white collar genocide” crippling the “pill-plagued USA.”

And then there’s the hooded, masked “six shooter” killer who ranges far and wide, from Lutz to Temple Terrace, Baskin to Carrolwood, lecturing and shooting street dealing grandmas, doctors and lobbyists and Big Pharma execs and the like.

“D’ya ever stop to think about the lives you’ve ruined?”

The intrigues aren’t intriguing, the complications aren’t complex and the performances perfunctory.

And then there are all the incendiary, legally-actionable “headlines” slapped on the fake newspapers and on the screen after many a murder. That’s the sort of detail that comes from screenwriters whose only experience of newspapers is seeing them on the screen in B-movies.

As the body count piles up and we’re told, point blank, that the police approve of his work, we accept that filmmaker Mark Savage has no interest or idea how to create mystery or suspense. Perhaps he has a future in video games, where “story” isn’t as important as the “score.”

Kudos to any actor who gives her or his all to enterprises like this, but “Painkiller” is nothing to be proud of or highlight in your credits.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic gun violence, sex, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Michael Paré, Bill Oberst Jr., Alexander Pennecke, Kristina Beringer

Credits: Directed by Mark Savage, script by Tom Parnel, David Richards and Mark Savage. A Delirium release.

Running time: 1:25

An arresting setting, funereal tone and solid performances don’t wholly atone for a script that’s thin on frights or suspense in the Aussie thriller “Sweet River.”

It’s about lost children and adults who die supernatural deaths when they try to move on from the trauma of those “lost.”

The setting is the cane country of Queensland, Australia — Tweed Valley. The forlorn town of Billins was where a serial killer once roamed. Children disappeared, and the rippling effects of their loss hang over the place to this day.

That’s where Hanna (English born Aussie actress Lisa Kay) has come to get out of her head, listen to her meditation tapes and maybe dry out. She’s rented a manager’s cottage on the edge of the cane fields, one cane field in particular.

What she doesn’t know as she listens to “the currents can sweep you away in life” and other taped platitudes about grief and despair, is that the bloke (Jeremy Waters) who rented it to her has gotten drunk at the local watering hole and come to an untimely end on his way home.

The police are saying he drowned, when we’ve seen the wreck, heard the noises and seen the man yanked away into the trackless cane fields. The police didn’t hear him threaten to “finally harvest that field” in the seedy Billins Hotel bar. The police aren’t interested in doing the math.

Drowning. “That’s what’s going on my report and that’s where we’re leaving it.”

The property owner (Martin Sacks) makes good on her rental, but he and his paranoid wife (Geneviève Lemon) are suspicious of Hanna’s motives for coming here. The ugly history of the place has to be a draw. And as she asks about why everyone around here keeps red lights on their porches, even covering their flashlights, and other questions about the disappearances and then later deaths that followed the supposed conclusion of “the case,” it comes out.

She lost a child. She can’t rest until she’s found his body and buried him. All these hallucinations she’s having, seeing children in the cane, and all those later mysterious deaths have something to do with that vast field outside her window.

It’s all terribly promising, a woman convincingly gutted by grief, looking for answers so fervently she starts seeing things, discovering the end result of such torment in Elenor (Lemon), the wife of the understanding but leery John (Sacks).

People see a child in the road in dark, fear they’ve hit it or swerve to avoid it, and bad things happen. They’ve been seeing this happen for years.

Director Justin McMillan doesn’t over-explain who all the players are in this puzzle, but we can pick up on the disparate threads — flashbacks showing the killer’s connection to the community, assorted children, some more logical a part of the plot than others.

A little confusion isn’t a bad thing, but there’s more than enough to weaken the impact of the attempted frights here. This unsuspenseful blend of “Lovely Bones” mystery and “Children of the Corn (Cane)” sucks you into its gloom, but fails to deliver shock, awe or closure.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lisa Kay, Eddie Baroo, Martin Sacks, Geneviève Lemon, Chris Haywood 

Credits: Directed by Justin McMillan, script by Eddie Baroo, Marc Furmie. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:41

“Together Together” is an offbeat comedy that sets out to redefine “intimacy” for a “woke” and lonely age.

A pre-pandemic romantic/”unromantic” comedy, it has the currency of a Woody Allen takedown and a clever way of warily circling any notion of a May-October romance. But what stands out in writer-director Nikole Beckwith’s first attempt at comedy (“Stockholm, Pennsylvania, a thriller, was her debut) is a pre-pandemic sense of isolation. It revels in the quiet despair of disconnection and the sheer relief at being forced to reckon with someone and get along with them well enough to finally get to know them.

In Matt, a 40something man who has decided that he wants a family even if relationships seem to evade him, Ed Helms has a role right in his sad but hopeful, eager but clumsy wheelhouse. Since he broke out in “The Office,” that’s been his brand — a hangdog who always tries too hard, a misguided, tone-deaf “enthusiast.”

And relative newcomer Patti Harrison — she was in “A Simple Favor” — sparkles as Anna, the aimless young barista who passes Matt’s awkward questionnaire, signs on the dotted line and takes the money.

“If ‘family’ is important to someone, you should be able to make one,” she reasons. And less tactfully, “I know it’s not the best thing in the world, being alone.“

But the first glimpse at the Anna beyond the contract in that early meeting is what sells Matt. Anna reveals her ultimate, intimate qualification. She had a baby in high school.

“I do know what it’s like to carry a baby, and then give it up.”

There’s no judgment in saying that single line is freighted with sadness. We don’t need to know she’s now estranged from her family, because she is. We don’t need to see her checkbook to pick up on her needing cash. And we don’t need to ponder her sense of self-worth, because she’s 26 and has already done the math of what she has that’s most valuable about her at this stage in her life — her uterus.

“Together Together” is about his buying her “gifts” that are actually for a baby she won’t keep, or to ensure that she drinks the right teas, eats the right diet and maybe has comfortable shoes as she starts carrying around extra weight in a job that keeps her on her feet.

He’s micromanaging, another Ed Helms “enthusiast” character. It takes Anna a while to start pushing back, to belatedly establish boundaries.

We learn bits and pieces of Anna’s story, but even the hardest question she can ask Matt seems beyond answering.

“Why are you alone?”

Beckwith decorates this tale with a deadpan “couples” therapist Matt insists they see (Tig Notaro, on the mark), a droll nurse/tech at the OB-GYN office (Sufe Bradshaw, whose eyerolls are all implied) and Anna’s over-sharing, chatterbox gay barista coworker (Julio Torres).

The only parents involved are Matt’s, with Nora Dunn as his rude, judgmental mother and Fred Melamed as the Dad who divorced her, and whose tactlessness at least comes from a kinder place, like Matt’s.

The ebb and flow of the Anna/Matt connection and the emotional distance it’ll take for her to go through with their planned clean break makes a fascinating, if chilly, do-si-do for these two to square dance.

And the “romance” structure of “Together Together” gives the film a sweet sense of longing, even if a guy having to force a woman to watch “Friends” with him underscores “She’s too young for you, sport.”

But that “Friends” choice gives away this slight but thoughtful comedy’s intentions as surely as their almost-funny first meeting 88 minutes earlier. It might not wholly succeed, but Beckwith’s “Together Together” is wrestling the word “relationship” away from wherever it is now and back to a simpler time, when “I’ll be there for you” meant something, and not just to Phoebe, Joey, Chandler & Co.

MPA Rating: R for some sexual references and language

Cast: Ed Helms, Patti Harrison, Tig Notaro, Nora Dunn, Julio Torres, Rosalind Chao and Fred Melamed.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nikole Beckwith. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time:

Simi Liu is the lead but Awkwafina, Michelle geog and Tony Leung are a lot more familiar to Western audiences.

The images are impressive, as you’d expect in any new nature doc about the giants of the sea.

But the behaviors observed and revelations about whale “language,” “culture,” knowledge passed-down, generation to generation, expressions of curiosity, “love” and “grief” are what’s eye-opening in “Secrets of the Whales,” coming to Disney+ on Earth Day, April 22.

Beautifully photographed by whale photographer/experts like Brian Skerry, poetically put-together, written and directed by Brian Armstrong and Andy Mitchell, with Sigourney Weaver sympathetically narrating it, “Secrets” is a singularly impressive nature doc series, on a par with the best of the BBC and Disney Nature.

Orcas, belugas, humpbacks and others are highlighted over four episodes, each shown in the corners of the world where they hold forth, each distinct in its culture, songs, genetic memory and tradition and skills passed on. It took four years and trips from Alaska to Antarctica, Patagonia to the Falklands, Norway to New Zealand to film it.

“Bubble net feeding” is passed down, generation to generation, by some pods of humpbacks. Some have figured out ways to amplify their globe-girdling songs by bellowing into coral reefs, “like an amphitheater.” Only in Patagonia have orcas learned to pluck sea lions off the beach. Only in New Zealand has this one pod mastered catching sting rays, holding them upside down “which puts them to sleep,” the mother of the pod sharing her catch with her extended family.

The kid-friendly prose can tilt towards the cute, with humpbacks vying to be “the singing sensation of a hidden world.” A trip by belugas to Cunningham Inlet in Canada “is like a family trip to the spa,” where “the gravelly bottom (of the river) is like a loofah for an itch they’ve been waiting all year to scratch.”

But with just enough experts weighing in on the new “secrets” that are coming out — matriarchal orca pods, non-family herring and krill-hunting humpback parties that gather in the same places to team up, year after migratory year, belugas “may even give themselves names” — with a generally upbeat tone (photographer-divers free an orca wrapped in cables that drag fishing nets), “Secrets of the Whales” makes a great escape from the generally glum environment news piling up like “overdue” invoices all over the world.

MPA Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Narrated by Sigourney Weaver, featuring Brian Skerry and others.

Credits: Written and directed by Brian Armstrong and Andy Mitchell. A National Geographic/Disney+ release (premiering April 22)

Running time: Four episodes @ :50 minutes each

Staid, stiff and stately history, “Queen Marie,” titled “Queen Marie of Romania” in Europe, plays like a lesser installment of “Masterpiece Theatre,” a reminder that not everything in costume and ripped from the pages of royal history is a “masterpiece.”

It’s about the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who married a Hohenzollern (tied to the Kaiser of Germany, but also descended from Victoria) and found herself the unlikely heroine of her adoptive country by charming, challenging and intimidating the leaders of the Four (victorious) Powers at the peace talks where empires were divvied up in Paris at the end of World War I.

Those negotiations, where the leaders of France, Britain, Italy and the United States made most of the decisions, were infamous for a lot of reasons. The reparations imposed on a bellicose Germany, setting up the grievances that led to World War II, was most infamous. But it’s also where The Balfour Declaration about Palestine’s status and other arbitrary “lines on a map” were made that set the stage for the a century of conflict in the Middle East, and where the imperious imperialists dismissed an Indochinese delegate pleading for independence, a fellow who became famous himself — Ho Chi Minh.

Queen Marie, played by Romanian Roxana Lupu, was once a great beauty pursued by a cousin who later become King George V of France. Here, she’s pretty but matronly, a mother with a spoiled, short-tempered adult son (Anghel Damian) determined to marry his bedmate — not a royal — and carry on adding to his car collection, and another son in university in Britain, and a few younger daughters to tend to.

But Romania is in crisis. It was on the wrong front of the Great War, an Entente ally whose fate was tied to Russia, and when Russia folded, Romania was occupied and forced to sign a treaty with Germany. That has the other allies inclined to ignore territorial claims — Transylvania, among them — that the government feels should be under its flag.

The barking, bellowing prime minister (Adrian Titieni) is good at getting ignored. American president Woodrow Wilson (Patrick Drury) never misses a chance to walk out on the strident man’s increasingly irate pleas (in English and Romanian with English subtitles).

“The American president can’t even find Romania on the map!” Well, as he was a university president, maybe that tag is meant for a later president.

With the Western world starting to share the right to vote with women, maybe “It’s high time women expressed their opinions.”

Romania’s queen lobbies the politicians and her husband, King Ferdinand (David Plier), no more Romanian by birth than her, to let her have a go at it. After all, she is a queen, “granddaughter of Victoria,” which still impresses the Brits. She can ask “Cousin George” (King George V of the UK, played by Nicholas Boulton) for help.

With “the will and the heart of the nation” at her back, she packs up the princesses, arrives in Paris and being the lone royal about, proceeds to dazzle the press and slowly wrangle her way to meetings with Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Wilson. She tries pleas to their humanity, charm (on Wilson’s royally-awed wife). And when that fails, she lights into one or two in her best “WHO is Queen?” voice.

“I would be careful where you draw your lines, Mr. Prime Minister. The consequences might be felt 100 years from now!”

After all, if they let Romania down, perhaps it’ll go the way of Russia and turn Bolshevik!

The movie’s grim tone stems from the tragedy of Europe right after a devastating war. Romanians are starving. So any chance this palace and grand hotel-set costume drama had at being a light, plucky proto-feminist romp is tossed aside for Real Romanian and Royal European History.

They go for “musty” and “overly-impressed-with-inbreds” in other words. The film’s great virtue is in reminding us of just how tiny this “world” was, with everybody related through Queen Victoria, and merely invoking Victoria’s name is enough to make the Brits and to a lesser degree everybody else quake in their presence.

And Marie’s family problems, disappointing sons whose loyalty is to title, wealth and privilege and not their parents’ adoptive country, a need to “marry off” the daughters on this Paris trip, remind us that family is family and always messy.

The performances are dry and a bit starchy, with Lupu occasionally achieving the outskirts of “inspiring” as the Queen. The dialogue is middle school Romanian history text stiff.

Handsomely staged, costumed and filmed, “Queen Marie” is more valuable as history, even with its blue blood biases, than as entertainment. But while Romanians may get more from it than outsiders, one has to hope they don’t see this as any representation of “The Good Ol’Days,” when even a foreigner from the “right family” was more entitled to represent your country than anybody produced by a meritocracy.

MPA Rating: unrated, nudity in one explicit sex scene.

Cast: Roxana Lupu, Daniel Plier, Richard Elfyn, Patrick Drury, Caroline Loncq, Ronald Chenery, Adrian Titieni, Anghel Damian and Nicholas Boulton

Credits: Directed by Alexis Sweet Cahill and Brigitte Drodtloff, script by Alexis Sweet Cahill, Brigitte Drodtloff, Gabi Antal, Ioana Manea and Maria-Denise Teodoru. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:50

A little Lumberton, N.C. after dark, a little Zoom Q & A with Isabella Rossellini afterwards.

Let’s see if I can get “off script” for my introduction.

A 35th anniversary showing at the 30th anniversary FFF. Great way to polish off the middle weekend of the Florida Film Festival.

Morgan Freeman sits in a wheelchair and orders B-movie action queen Ruby Rose around in “Vanquish,” a slow-walking, slow-drawling thriller filled with actors who have no business being in a movie with Freeman, who’s barely in it himself.

It’s bad in so many bizarre ways you wish it was bad enough to be fun, but it isn’t.

Freeman plays “America’s police commissioner,” a crooked cop confined to a wheel chair who kidnaps the sickly daughter of his “friend.” Victoria used to be some sort of secret agent “courier,” and with dominoes tumbling around a Federal investigation of this unnamed state’s “dirty cops” going all the way up to the governor (Julie Lott), Damon (Freeman) needs her services in the worst way.

He offers to pay for her kid’s treatment, and for insurance, takes her hostage. Victoria has to make five runs around town collecting mountains of cash that will make this world of Federal trouble go away.

She’ll get on her electric bike with “Blade Runner” synthesizers zinging behind her and zip around this seaside city from “a German bar,” to an African-American money laundering scheme backstage at a…curling ring? I think? That’s for starters.

The gay mobster’s lair is just delish, because a lot of people drawl in this Gothic noir nonsense. Victoria has quite the reputation, and everybody she meets wants her dead.

“I heard you killed more people than Quentin Tarantino!”

She tries, Lord knows she tries.

It’s a thriller with a lot of older bit players muttering updates into the phones at each other as Damon watches Vicky’s pick-ups, which seem to always end in glib gunplay, via a camera on her bike helmet and on her jacket lapel.

He’s always barking “Up ahead, Vicky!” and “Don’t PASS OUT, Vicky!” “It’s a TRAP.”

A half-assed car chase here, MO-lasses slow chats between dirty cops there, and on and on this clunker goes, at half-speed crawl from start to finish.

George Gallo, who wrote “Midnight Run” and “Bad Boys” back in his salad days, has lost whatever sense of forward motion even his worst scripts had. Hallucinatory fish-eye lenses, blurred sequences, extreme close-ups and flashes of an editor’s “Maybe I can save this” ambition show themselves.

Not a chance. A Southern drawl can convey peril, but only when it’s wielded by a master. Every scene that doesn’t end in gunplay is static as a still-life, only one of them with lines as funny as this.

“He’s dead?” “Pretty sure.” “What happened?” “You’ll…have to ask him.”

The bizarre stuff has to do with locale. The drawls give-away “local hires” in a lot of supporting roles, so it’s good a few Biloxi, Mississippi natives cashed a check or two, and not just Freeman, who lives there and owns a blues club in Clarksdale.

But a German language nightclub…in Biloxi? A French mobster? In Biloxi?

Rose, perhaps picking up on all the accents, lapses into her native Aussie, but just once or twice.

Weak villains, dull supporting players, and now it can be said — Rose only works in thrillers where she’s a menacing, mysterious figure of palpable menace, a supporting player who gets the fight choreography, stunt support and editing to carry it off.

But “John Wick” this isn’t.

MPA Rating: R for bloody violence, language, some sexual material and drug use

Cast: Morgan Freeman, Ruby Rose, Chris Mullinax, Patrick Muldoon and Julie Lott.

Credits: Directed by George Gallo, script by and George Gallo. A Lionsgate release

Running time: 1:36

No one went to Neon’s doc “Gunda,” to “Minari” or “The Father” either.

“Chaos Walking” tripped like every other movie in wide release.

All the box office cash went to “Godzilla vs Kong,” another $7.7 million. The monster mash has made $80 million in the US. It will have cleared $400 million worldwide by next weekend.

“Voyager” finished it’s last quick swirl down the toilet, as only “Nobody,” ($2.5),”Unholy” ($2) and “Raya and the Last Dragon” ($1.9 million) picked up any Kong scraps.

Those figures come from studio reports filed tob@ExhibitorRelations and @BoxOfficePro.