Movie Nation

A child’s quest to find a mythic figure who can save his mother, Oyelowo directed and stars in this May 7 release.

“Tu me manques” was Bolivia’s best hope for a Best International Feature Oscar nomination this year.

It’s a drama about the creation of the play it was based on, a fictionalized account of the playwright’s loss of a lover to suicide after coming out to his family, and that structure — the playwright telling the story of the play’s inspiration to a reporter — works against it just enough to let us see why it didn’t make the cut in a field that includes the Romanian self-indictment “Collective” and the Danish dazzler “Another Round.”

But while writer-director Rodrigo Bellot’s film adaptation of his play may cover tragic, if over-familiar gay “coming out” ground, its finale packs a culture-shifting punch to the gut that makes it all pay off.

Sebastian (Fernando Barbosa) gets the news in New York, an accidental, enraged minute of Facetime with Jorge (Oscar Martínez), the father of his ex-lover. He didn’t mean to respond to Sebastian’s many “Tu me manques (I miss you)” emails, but since I’ve got you on the line…

“STAY AWAY,” he rages (in English and Spanish with English subtitles). “You’ve caused enough pain in our family…We don’t have people ‘like that’ in our family!”

He throws in an “I know ‘your kind'” and a death threat for good measure. And then he drops the bomb. Gabriel is dead. He killed himself rather than get on a plane back to New York.

The recriminations go back and forth, and Sebastian figures that’s that, and starts doing what aspiring playwrights do. He wrestles with his grief by trying to create a play about Gabriel’s closeted life in the Catholic homophobic machismo of Latin America.

Only Jorge shows up at his door, wanting to “know” his son’s life in New York. Their arguments and debates turn into a journey through the city that Gabriel (Luis Gamarra) knew, the restaurant where he worked, their life together, their mutual friends (including one played by Almodovar favorite Rossy de Palma), even a visit to a “meat market” gay nightclub.

Sebastian relates this tale to a reporter, and throws in flashbacks within flashbacks to show their adorable retail men’s wear department “meet cute,” and Sebastian’s later struggles to get his play — with 30 actors playing “Gabriel” — on stage in conservative Bolivia.

Bellot’s depiction of New York gay life can feel like a cliche as we meet the most flamboyant of his and Gabriel’s friends, Alonso (Dominic Colón) and the bitchiest, TJ (Tommy Herlinger). But Herlinger nails the “degrees of gayness” gay spectrum lecture to Gabriel, delivered at the newcomer’s first gay New York party, seven “steps” that range from “I’m gay but…” to “flamboyant martyr.”

The play gets a “Chorus Line” audition treatment, assorted young Bolivian men telling their painful personal stories to Sebastian’s video camera, material that might turn up on stage as Gabriel’s story is turned into a universal one. Real life gay bashing interrupts rehearsals.

There’s also a clever scene where Sebastian takes Jorge to a New York priest who explains the various Biblical condemnations of homosexuality and pretty much “outs” St. Paul as self-loathing and closeted.

The clumsy structure interrupts the flow of the film and makes “Tu me manques” more of a mixed bag than it might have otherwise been. But the good moments stand out and the finale sticks with you, an arresting piece of theater whose power isn’t diminished when the camera simply shows you what actors are doing on a darkened stage.

MPA Rating: unrated, nudity, sex, profanity

Cast: Fernando Barbosa, Oscar Martínez, Rossy de Palma, Dominic Colón and Tommy Herlinger

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rodrigo Bellot, based on his play. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:50

More than one political figure hoped to gain recognition for their newly formed state in the Paris talks following the end of World War I. Ho Chi Minh might be the most famous today, thanks to what didn’t happen there.

But Queen Marie’s efforts at making Romania a state are also historical fact. This May 7 release looks period piece sumptuous and promises intrigue and a tortured prophecy for the future.

Barry Pepper makes the best of a rare leading man turn in “Trigger Point,” a predictable if efficient assassin “gone to ground” thriller filmed in end-of-winter Ontario.

He’s been credible as a man of violence since before “Saving Private Ryan,” and that makes him easy to accept as “Lewis,” a killer for “the Agency” until he was taken prisoner and talked some years before.

Now he’s hiding out on a remote, camouflaged farm with the usual CCTV cameras and movie prop “gun room” arsenal and standard issue cinematic flashbacks hinting at what he went through which pop up any time he’s “triggered.”

He uses a drone to check intruders — animal or human — on his property, a loner who always takes the one seat at the town diner where he can best see any potential threat and who makes himself useful at the local bookstore.

But the opening sequence of TV vet (“Hawaii 5-0,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” “MacGuyver”) Brad Turner’s film is filled with spitting sounds. Somebody is killing their way to him, and using a silencer as she does.

Colm Feore plays a former boss who finds Lewis first, a man fretting about old conspiracies, the crimes of Lewis, whom he calls “Nicholas,” and a daughter who’s been grabbed by the bad guys.

“Most of your friends want you dead more than your enemies” is an interesting way to say “Hello.”

Our man in Ontario finds himself shooting and sleuthing his way towards the missing Monica (Eve Harlow) and making a lot of spitting noises himself.

“Trigger Point” is shockingly conventional, with many a plot point, story beat and even shoot-out recycled from decades of other such films.

I used “efficient” earlier, as this picture piles up a body count without making the viewer deaf (silencers abound) or taking a lot of time doing it. But “perfunctory” seems more descriptive.

We know what’s coming. So does the cast. There’s not much point in any foot-dragging, then. Let’s get on with it.

The acting isn’t so much “bad” as pro forma, with players hired to do what they can do without breaking a sweat. Pepper and Feore do that with ease, and if the movie they’re doing more than go through the motions to perform in isn’t anything we haven’t seen too often before to let this be of any interest, that’s hardly their fault.

One “surprise?” The bad guy drives a Bentley. All these years of “Jaaaags” and they’re moving up in class?

MPA Rating: unrated, gun violence and lots of it

Cast: Barry Pepper, Colm Feore, Eve Harlow and Laura Vandervoort

Credits: Directed by Brad Turner, script by Michael Vickerman. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:22

This one gets a limited theatrical release in the us on April 30.

“Monday” is a “lost weekend” romance, something so obvious a one of the main characters uses the phrase at his most blitzed.

It’s a love affair that walks on eggshells for the better part of two hours, two people with hints of co-dependency who have no business being together, sticking it out for that weekend — and many to follow — just trying to make it to “Monday.” And even though it overstays its welcome and its characters achieve a degree of “grating” that you wouldn’t think Denise Gough and Sebastian Stan could manage, it makes for a compelling portrait of denial, because that’s one big thing these two have in common.

Chloe and Mickey are a couple of ex-pats living in Greece. He’s a sometime musician and popular DJ living like he knows this line of work and lifestyle has an expiration date. When we meet her, she’s leaving drunken messages for an ex who dumped her.

It’s boozy love at first sight. Or lust. That’s how they end up naked on the beach and arrested. It’s “Friday” a title tells us. They’re kind of thrown together for the weekend by the fact that she misplaced her purse. There’s a “big gesture” and a brittle connection — with the odd testy moment — is made.

It’s just that Chloe, an immigration lawyer helping immigrants who want to come to the States, is finally done with the place and is flying home Monday.

Mickey’s “You’re always gonna regret not doing something rather than doing something” doesn’t move her. His last ditch effort to interrupt her passage through the terminal does.

“Monday” tracks their love affair — impulsive sex, co-habitation, an impromptu street rave to celebrate her furniture, which won’t fit into his apartment, through their first “his friends and YOUR friends” party, humiliations and slights — and deep into the messy intimacy that comes from people with baggage and “issues” coupling up.

Stan, of the “Captain America” movies and TV shows, hits on a sort of blitzed, uninhibited Jason Bateman vibe and makes it work for him here. He lets us see that Mickey’s old enough to know better, and that he can’t help himself.

Gough (“The Kid Who Would Be King,” “The Good Traitor”) has the tougher performance as the viewer’s surrogate. Chloe sees the signs and hears the warnings about “Mickey Go Lucky” and what a “baby” this “irresponsible,” self-destructive guy she’s hitched her future to, and Gough lets us watch the doubts creep across her face and body language even as Chloe’s scrambling to tamp those doubts down.

It all gets to be too much, what with the full frontal at the drop of a hat, and “four, no SIX shots of tequila” and “Get us drugs” and complications from each character’s history. No scene seems superfluous even if many go on too long. “A bit of a wallow” may cross your mind, as it did mine.

But director and co-writer Argyris Papadimitropoulus (“Suntan”) doesn’t let his baby drown in the bathwater, even if he never figures out he could have turned off the tap twenty minutes before the closing credits and delivered the same message in a tighter film.

MPA Rating: R (Sexual Content|Drug Use|Pervasive Language|Nudity/Graphic Nudity)

Cast: Sebastian Stan, Denise Gough, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Dominique Tipper, Eilli Tringou and Andreas Konstantinou.

Credits: Directed by Argyris Papadimitropoulos, script by Rob Hayes, Argyris Papadimitropoulos. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:57

The only thing keeping every member of the cast of “Game of Thrones” from having her or his own movie to star in is a lack of chutzpah in the outliers’ agents.

Eugene Simon, once Lancel Lannister on TV, is on his third film post-“GOT,” misleadingly titled “Sensation.” It follows “The Lodgers” and the dark ensemble comedy “Kill Ben Lyk.”

It’s a drabber-than-drab DNA-driven “special” people fantasy, and it’s not stretch to say the material leaves him drab in it. “Sensation” is so lifeless and pointless as to make one ponder “What is the half-life on a ‘Game of Thrones’ career bounce?”

Simon’s Andrew Cooper, an intense London postman curious about his ancestry. But getting the “results” of his test proves to be a test in itself.

The bullying older man who insists he be addressed as “DOCTOR Marinus” (Alastair B. Cumming) is all obfuscations, threats and contempt.

“All data is the property of the company,” he sneers. And his “program” has “flagged certain characteristics” in the lad’s genetic makeup that mean “You are coming with us.”

Cooper, without “any idea” of how he’s doing it, snaps bones and bests the “muscle” Marinus has brought along in case the kid gives him any backtalk.

We puzzle over why Cooper still gets in the car with these creeps, despite having abilities he didn’t realize he had.

We wonder what’s up with his eyes, which wobble wildly when he takes in information, and about his manic violin playing, something he “just (copies) videos I watch” to master.

And we fret over this English manor house where people like him have been gathered “for study” by the expressionless supervisor Nadia (Emily Wyatt). It’s the sort of place where people with “special” senses and “abilities” are told “No one’s holding you here” when we can plainly see several someones are.

The “tests” the talented undergo there involve scenarios transmitted into their heads that have them thinking they’re shooting someone or witnessing somebody tossed off a double-decker bus, all while they’re confined to the grounds of this “institution.”

Like Cooper, we wonder what they want with him and how much of what he’s experiencing is real and what is merely induced-hallucination.

Director and co-writer Martin Grof (“Excursion”) has no effects budget here, so simple digital edits take Cooper in and out of scenarios, with music “selling” the transformation (not even close) we’ve just witnessed.

The “training” these subjects undergo at this facility are rendered in exercises too bland to mention. The action beats — aside from the “Is this real?” questions — are dull.

Among the cast, only the sinister Cumming (“What a Cirus”) stands out, and his character all but vanishes after the first act.

With the release of “Sensation,” Eugene Simon can take comfort on last month’s news that HBO has signed George RR Martin for six possible spinoff series. That doesn’t do the Slovak director Martin Grof any good, but at least his star could have a future in Westeros.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Eugene Simon, Emily Wyatt, Jennifer Martin and Alastair G. Cumming

Credits: Directed by Martin Grof, script by Magdalena Drahovska, Martin Grof. A GROFilm release.

Running time: 1:35

Yes, it’s a sequel. You remember that sassy, silly violent action comedy Samuel L joined @vancityreynolds for back in the early days of RR’s gin peddling days?

This summer’s installment adds Salma and her brand of murderous sass. “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” is slated for June 16.

It doesn’t take much effort to sympathize with Turquoise Jones.

She’s not just a single mom struggling to keep a hormonal teen in line. She’s not just a working woman who needs two jobs to cover their bills, not just a woman in the workplace forced to contend with the “interest” of an employer, and not just somebody who has to hassle her almost-ex to fork over a little child support.

Turquoise is hung-up on what might have been, the ways her life didn’t go according to plan, the mistakes she made and the people who helped her make them, through unprotected sex or AWOL parenting. Because as the newspaper clipping on the wall of the bar/barbeque where she works reminds her every day, she was once “Miss Juneteenth.”

Writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples cooks up a lot of relatable complications for Turquoise, played with weary but stoic focus by Nicole Beharie, to contend with. There’s nothing here most of us haven’t dealt with or run into in real life, much less seen on the screen.

Because “Miss Juneteenth” is about a disappointed woman determined that her daughter, Kai (Alexis Chikaeze, superb) not have it as hard. To that end, she’s riding her 14-year-old “about to turn 15” and making sure that somebody is in the child’s company, even when she’s waiting tables at Wayman’s BBQ, or cleaning down at Baker’s Funeral Home.

Sometimes, it’s her handsome but distracted husband (Kendrick Sampson), who every so often reminds her and tells us why he’s not living under their roof any more. Other days it might be her seriously religious mother (Lori Hayes), who isn’t shy about turning Turquoise down because “She’s not MY daughter.”

Mom remembers when Turquoise was Fort Worth’s Miss Juneteenth, a teen with a scholarship to the Historically Black College or University (HBCU) of her choice. That was 15 years ago. And who’s about to turn 15?

Turquoise makes it her mission to put Kai in that same tiara, with that same scholarship and a chance to make better choices and get out of the grind of low-paying jobs, overdue bills and occasional power shut-offs.

Turquoise has avoided the snobs who run the contest for years, but now she’s got to doll up, primp and remember the poise, posture, etiquette and perfect grammar the contest insists on, just to register a VERY reluctant Kai, who’d rather try out for the school dance squad.

“We will ensure she is transformed,” the ladies of Juneteenth purr. And “No daughter of mine” is dressing up “like a pole dancer” to shake her money maker on that dance squad. It’s a very touchy subject for Turquoise.

There’s a long tradition in African American cinema of making movies that entertain, dramatize real life experiences and teach. Here, the instruction is on the 1865 history of the holiday, celebrated when Texas slaves learned they’d been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier.

Kai has to take lessons in what fork, glass and spoon to use in formal settings and visit a run-down, unassuming Juneteenth Museum to learn just why she’s going through all this.

Turquoise has to scramble to find the money for a gown and entry fees so that her daughter can live the dream she never did. She’s also got to decide what to do about this marriage and how to respond to the funeral home boss (Akron Watson) who wants to bring her into the middle class with him.

“You were meant for more. You’re too good of a woman to be living the way you do,” paycheck to inadequate paycheck.

The settings feel lived-in — worn down bars, dirty streets and cowboy boots. The script has just enough surprises to keep us engrossed, lots of signs that Turquoise’s pluck and determination are bordering on mania, and plenty of heart, sad affirmations of what Black working poor poverty does to people in the South.

“Ain’t no ‘American Dream’ for Black folks,” BBQ owner Wayman (Marcus M. Maudlin, well-cast) laments. He never misses a day of work and doesn’t over-maintain his popular business because he’s watching every dollar, determined to avoid “the white man’s bank” and hang onto it rather than risk any unnecessary expense.

Writer-director Peoples lets us see Turquoise learn from everybody in her life, even those snubbing her. And he ensures that Kai learns a little, too. Will it be enough to change their fates?

As tried and true as its plot points and sympathies are, “Miss Juneteenth” manages to be a bracing depiction of generational working class poverty, and a beautiful lesson in how easily plans fail when your options are this limited and the pathway to success this narrow.

MPA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter, alcohol, smoking

Cast: Nicole Beharie, Kendrick Sampson, Alexis Chikaeze, Lori Hayes and Marcus M. Mauldin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:37

This one comes our way April 30.