Movie Nation

A broken-hearted guy not quite getting over a breakup lets us see his pain, his world and what’s funny about it in this April 30 release from Samuel Goldwyn.

“Moffie” is a South African “Full Metal Jacket,” a drama about the dehumanizing nature of combat training, the need to turn “soft” conscripts into unquestioning killing machines and an arm of foreign policy and the psychic cost that can have.

But this early ’80s period piece is about South Africa under Apartheid. The troops are training to fight “communism” on the border of Angola, a former Portuguese colony whose civil war included communists, and which South Africa was hellbent on “containing.”

And the sensitive young man hurled into this environment of violence, virulent racism, bullying and intimidation is never going to “fit in. Because “moffie” is a South African slur for “gay.”

Kai Luke Brummer is Nicholas van der Swart, whose last night “free” is a party in his honor, one in which he confides to his mother (Barbara-Marié Immelman) that he’s “plotting my escape (in English and Afrikaans with subtitles).”

Every white 16 year-old male in the country was being summoned, and the prep school “English” kid who looks like a blond Eddie Redmayne has no way out. Can he keep his head down and pass muster?

He makes a friend of a fellow recruit (Matthew Vey) on the train to training camp, recoils from the racist hooting and brutality that spills off the train at Black Africans they see along the way, endures bullying from his comrades and actual abuse from his sadistic, foul-mouthed drill instructor (Hilton Pelser) and tries to avoid being labeled a “moffie,” and a fate worse than merely washing out — “Ward 22.”

That’s where they send those who crack-up or are outed as gay.

South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus (“Beauty”) takes the classic structure of the boot camp drama in all its brutality, climaxing with that “first test in combat,” and blends in Vietnam-like “unpopular war,””racism” and the dangers of being a closeted homosexual in that era into the mix.

He plays up the homoerotic nature of military service — a single-sex environment of young men, exercised to a high level of fitness, shirtless at work and showering in groups — and parks a recruit whom we learn has some idea already of who he is into that.

That’s the secret Nicholas must keep in a place where revealing that could lead to beatings or worse. The stress and trauma of all this breaks one comrade in a very “Full Metal Jacket” way.

Hermanus, who co-wrote the script, gives short shrift to the nature of Late Apartheid racism here, with just a single, bitterly-poignant scene carrying that part of this “nothing heroic about it” story.

And the film’s training flirtation that begins in a fox hole? That’s just so on the nose.

But “Moffie” makes for a fascinating variation on a well-worn theme. And Brummer, bringing a stoicism to this “no place for a sensitive young man” experience, let’s us appreciate who Nicholas is and just what sort of mettle a man had to have just to endure that and survive.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, nudity and profanity

Cast: Kai Luke Brummer, Matthew Vey, Ryan de Villiers and Barbara-Marié Immelman

Credits: Directed by Oliver Hermanus, script by Oliver Hermanus, Jack Sidey An IFC release.

Running time: 1:44

Young love is tested by illness and honesty issues in “Caught by a Wave,” a scenic Italian romance set against a sailing backdrop.

The leads are pretty and the locales romantic, but the scenario is generic and the pacing funereal in this dry-eyed weeper of rehab and regattas.

Sailing camp on the isle of Favignana is where Sara (Elvira Camarrone) meets Lorenzo (Roberto Christian). She’s a bit more confident than the other kids, more at home in a Laser racing dinghy than the newbies. He’s been to the camp many times, and is now an expert dinghy racer (29ers) and assistant instructor.

He comes on strong and cute, she plays it coy. “Let him suffer, no matter what” her BFF Barbara (Sofia Migliara) instructs (in Italian with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

But Sara has a secret, one that enters the picture the moment she cramps up one day on the water. Back home, she has another episode and we learn the truth from the doctor who puts her into rehab. Her “inevitably degenerative muscular dystrophy” has advanced. This doesn’t bode well for her future, much less any future with Lorenzo.

How long will she keep this from him?

Second-unit director Massimiliano Camaiti makes the sailing scenes pretty and pretty exciting in his feature directing debut. And the script, which he co-wrote, has its touching moments. Lorenzo lost his mother as a child and taking on a relationship with doom hanging over it gives him a struggle, if less of one than Sara, who sees the future of her disease in her fellow rehab patients.

There isn’t much edge here, but teens hospitalized after a rave and a helpful aunt teaching Lorenzo how to light a cigarette aren’t elements you’d see in your typical North American teen romance.

The cute bits aren’t quite enough to merit ducking into this Netflix original. But the lovely setting and the romance might decide that for some. And who, when facing a grim future, wouldn’t want to hear something this reassuring from your first love?

“I’m with you, and it’s the best thing that could ever happen.”

MPA Rating: TV-14, teen sexuality, teen smoking, drug abuse and alcohol consumption

Cast: Elvira Camarrone, Roberto Christian, Donatella Finocchiaro, Sofia Migliara, Vincenzo Amato, Corrado Invernizzi

Credits: Directed by Massimiliano Camaiti , script by Claudia Bottino, Massimiliano Camaiti. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

Filmgoers tend to assume they’re watching “the director’s cut” of pretty much every movie we see. But despite having the job title that suggests final arbiter of “my film,” that’s often not the case. Producers and studio execs are shorten and reshape movies to suit their own commercial instincts all the time.

I didn’t see “Mapplethorpe” when it dribbled out a couple of years back. It came and went without a thought, so why not give director Ondi Timoner another crack at it? I mean, if Zack Snyder gets $75 million do-overs, what’s the harm?

Timoner, a documentary filmmaker (“Dig!,” “We Live in Public” and the climate sell-out “Cool It” were hers), added 12 minutes to the film for its re-release. What we see on the screen now is more of former “Doctor Who” Matt Smith‘s spot-on American accent and solid impersonation of the controversial photographer/artist/provocateur. But the film is a choppy series of sketches and snapshots that don’t really take us inside the man’s head.

The framing device, a tweenage Mapplethorpe (Logan Smith) taking his Kodak into a cemetery and then the family’s Catholic church, shooting arresting (perhaps homoerotic) closeups of the iconography in the stained glass, statuary and Christ on the Cross, hints at a “theme” to the man’s life’s work.

He was looking at religion in a way sure to provoke his humorless engineer father (Mark Moses).

But there was a lot more to Mapplethorpe’s eye, a photography of striking contrasts between darkness and light, still-lifes that stand-out, and yes, a fascination with nude males and sexual organs, homosexual sex and the BDSM world of New York in the post-Stonewall ’70s.

His screen biopic feels malnourished, almost from the start. There was no money for an impressive supporting cast, so his first love/first muse, punk poetess Patti Smith is played by the little known look-alike (sort of) Marianne Rendón of TV’s “Imposters.” The best-known supporting player is veteran character actor John Benjamin Hickey, who plays Sam Wagstaff, the gay collector who became Mapplethorpe’s lover and biggest backer, launching him to fame.

In tracking Mapplethorpe’s rise concurrent with Smith’s rising status as a punk icon, none of Smith’s music was licensed, no effort was made to show her performances, some of which Mapplethorpe attended.

And the late life controversy, which put him in the spotlight in his last year before dying of AIDS, feels skimmed over.

What Timoner spends her screen time on is the sexual part of Mapplethorpe’s journey, that gift, from a new artsy neighbor (Tina Benko), of his first Polaroid camera, the pursuit of men to model for him as he made jewelry to help support himself (Smith carried the financial load), his first seduction by such a model (Thomas Philip O’Neill) on through his days haunting New York’s gay bathhouses, photographing the leather boys cavorting within.

A friend nicknames him “The shy pornographer,” and there’s plenty of rejection from the “gatekeepers” of the New York art world before Wagstaff meets him and becomes his champion.

Notoriety turns to fame and that leads to celebrity portraiture — most famously, Schwarzenegger, Roy Cohn, Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol. And along the way, his brittle relationship with his family is trotted out just often enough to remind us of the original rejection, by his Dad.

Here’s how the script handles the passing parade of the ’70s and eqarly-80s. Mapplethorpe to Patti — “Did you write a song I can dance to, yet?” She never did.

Patti to Mapplethorpe — “Did you hear about Jimi?”

“Janis and Jimi, so f—–g sad.”

“Let’s go down to the Stonewall.”

There’s just enough of the art to remind us that he had talent beyond the mere ability to stir up controversy. And Smith gives us just enough of the artist’s arc — “rebel” in the military corps at the Pratt Institute (he dropped out), to enthusiastic and poor up-and-comer to jaded and arrogant, rich and famous — to keep us interested.

But there’s no flow to the film. The episodes feel like abrupt stand-alone scenes, each meant to carry the story forward, but not really connecting to each other organically.

I’m glad Timoner got another crack at this “Basquiat-ish” life. But this “director’s cut” doesn’t appear to have done the film or its subject any favors.

MPA Rating: unrated, sexually explicit content, drug abuse, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: Matt Smith, Marianne Rendón, John Benjamin Hickey, Tina Benko, Thomas Philip O’Neill and Brandon Sklenar

Credits: Directed by Ondi Timoner, script by Ondi Timoner, Mikko Alanne and Bruce Goodrich. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:55

With popcorn movies like “Godzilla vs. Kong,” the main thing is getting the tone right. Outside of kaiju cultists, nobody takes this nonsense seriously. So the movie should reflect that.

Comic relief characters like the conspiracy nut Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry), griping about a technocrat as “the woman with the villain hairdo” and the cowardly nerd Josh (Julian Dennison of “Hunt for the Wilderpeople”) are a must.

Ironic vintage pop songs on the soundtrack, underlining the joke? Elvis is a given. “The Air that I Breath” by The Hollies and Johnnie and Joe’s “Over the Mountain, Across the Sea” will do.

“Over the mountain, across the sea
There’s a girl, she’s waiting for me.”

Because on Skull Island, a deaf native girl (Kaylee Hottle) is literally waiting on the big ape to awaken in the opening scene.

As for bad guys, only the best actor never to play a Bond villain (Demián Bichir) fills the bill.

This version of the Battle of the Titans goes deep down a kaiju rabbit hole — center of the “Hollow Earth” deep — as we travel to the place where titanic critters like Kong, Godzilla and their ilk live and carry on until they take the tunnel to the top and make mayhem for us.

There’s this megacorp run by a megalomaniac (Bichir), Apex Corporation, whose giant research facility is mostly underground in the capital of Florabama — Pensacola. That’s where conspiracy nut Bernie has gone undercover to tell the People the Truth.

When Godzilla attacks the place, Bernie looks like a sage, and not just another nut with a podcast. That’s what sends Godzilla Girl Madison (Millie Bobby Brown) and her pal Josh to him. That’s how they infiltrate the facility, without the knowledge of Madison’s “Monarch Corp” scientist and absentee dad (Kyle Chandler). And that’s how they end up in an elevator together.

“How deep does this go?” Josh wonders.

“Hell,” Bernie cracks. “It goes to Hell.”

Rebecca Hall is the scientist trying to keep Kong trapped and placated on Skull Island, but a little late in figuring out the deaf girl can chat with the giant ape via sign language.

Alexander Skarsgård is a barely credible academic, “a sci-fi quack trading in fringe physics,” is enlisted by Big Apex chief to round up Kong to guide them to the center of the Hollow Earth to find something to fend off the Lizard King. He’ll have to win trust of Kong’s keeper and his little gal pal.

The Apex oligarch’s daughter (Eiza González) will tag along and Mean Girl ensure that everybody does what they’re paid to do.

But everybody knows they’re just under-card matches before the Main Event, a slug fest that’ll leave some Pacific Rim megalopolis in ruins with a body count nobody in the movie will be tactless enough to point out.

The fights are epic, and I have to admit, the ever-improving CGI makes Kong the most empathetic he’s been since he was sniffing his fingers around Fay Wray.

I lost interest at the whole magic tech trip to the Hollow Earth — HEAV the “antigravity” powered shuttles are called, for Hollow Earth Aerial Vehicle. Snicker. And really, with NBA players saying out loud that the Earth is flat, do we need to suggest it’s hollow, too?

But there’s a theme park ride joke (and proof of concept) sequence, some splendid brawling in the deep, from ship to ship and all over Hong Kong.

At least one Japanese character is an absolute necessity in this bit of Hollywood cultural appropriation. Remember, Godzilla and Kong tangled before in the cinema of Ancient Japan. And nobody else pronounces Godzilla’s name right — “Gorjirra!”

Kudos to the class of actors who signed on for this, some of them making their second outing in kaiju country. Everybody, especially Henry, Hall and Skarsgård, looks properly over-awed and gobsmacked at their first glance at the impossible, or just very very improbable.

Sure, you’ll feel a little dumber than you were going into all this by the time the credits roll. But that’s always been the point underscoring the more obvious one.

Like the kaiju rock anthem says, “History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of Man.”

MPA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of creature violence/destruction and brief language

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Alexander Skarsgård, Bryan Tyree Henry, Millie Bobby Brown, Kaylee Hottle, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Lance Reddick, Kyle Chandler and Demián Bichir.

Credits: Directed by Adam Wingard, script by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein. A Warner Bros./HBO Max release.

Running time: 1:53

Kind of a bummer that they’re reunited in an American armored car guard pic. Scott Eastwood is in it But beggars can’t be choosers, right?

Leave it to Mother Russia to come up with the most complex nesting doll of a series, a darkly comic tale of suspense and interlocking stories originally produced for Russian TV.

“An Ordinary Woman” reeks of cultural rot and personal corruption, a culture of casual criminality, cheating and lies, all wrapped up in a single “ordinary” Russian family.

And it can be damned funny, in a “Weekend at Bernie’s” way. Prostitution, adultery, drugs, blackmail and murder make for darker than dark comedy.

Marina (Anna Mikhalkova) is a high-mileage 39 year-old who earns that label, “an ordinary woman.” But by that time we hear that we’ve already seen the pregnant Marina get the results from her ultrasound. Her surgeon husband (Evgeniy Grishkovets) is so consumed with work calls that he’s barely there. But the OB-GYN won’t tell her until he hangs up.

“Hydrocelaphalus.” Their unborn son has a birth defect and probably won’t live long, if at all.

This is where the tone for this entire series is set. The news all but rolls off her, and doesn’t floor her husband either. Everybody we meet in this series is unflappable, resigned to the worst. Forget the plot for a moment and bathe in what lives of quiet desperation look like when resignation has set in. In a world of incompetence, cut-rate service, slackers (Nobody is EVER on time.), drunks and juggling jobs, what’s another piece of bad news?

But “ordinary?” Not Marina. She shrugs off the latest expenses of her florist shop, Plan Bs her latest childcare issue with her youngest by corralling her college age daughter Katya (Elizaveta Kononova) and makes a public restroom inspection of her latest recruit for her real business.

Zhenya (Aleksandra Bortich) is beautiful, fresh from the provinces and in need of work. Marina will be her pimp.

“What, you expected a Black guy in a leopard print top,” (in Russian with English subtitles)?

Marina’s husband knows nothing of this, nor does Marina realize Artyom has a chick on the side, a highly strung nurse (Mariya Andreeva) at his hospital, and she’s got…demands.

Daughter Katya is pretty much skipping college and living with her boyfriend at the motorbike garage where he works. When she borrows a bike to cover her tracks with her mother, it gets stolen and now the beau is in hock with a guy who expects a payout.

And then one of Marina’s hookers is murdered in the high end hotel where she helped former hooker Galina (Yuliya Melikhova) land a desk clerk job.

Complicated? You have no idea.

Let’s throw in the attention-starved drama queen of the family. No, not the harridan mother-in-law (Tatyana Dogileva), but Tanya, the eight-year old who thinks nothing of derailing a day or a night with her drama, faked injuries in gymnastics class or growing fury at the idea that a baby is about to steal her spotlight in the family.

How is “an ordinary woman” supposed to deal with, well, a body in a hotel, a murder she can’t let the cops hear about, a family that doesn’t know about her side hustle or a MURDERER (She’s too busy to think of that, for now.)?

There were CCTV tapes in the hotel? Who knows how to erase them?

Katya needs fast cash to get the boyfriend out of a jam. Maybe dealing drugs to the nerd who crushes on her?

And just wait until the alcoholic detective (Darya Saveleva) whose mother has dementia shows up!

It takes some getting used to the way everybody in “An Ordinary Woman” under-reacts to every fresh crisis that threatens to bring the house of cards she or he has built crashing down.

It’s not just Marina’s repeated demand that this or that underling “Use your HEAD” or “BRAIN,” as she expects little pieces of impossible to be dispensed with by other “ordinary” people. Everyone knows how lying works, that putting off a reckoning is the best they can hope for.

We’re looking at an entire nation of people who learned to scramble, lie on the fly, take short cuts and create work-arounds to get by long before the Bolsheviks took over. Problem pregnancy, lost motorbike, body to dispose of, there’s little asking for help and a whole lot of unspoken “I’ve GOT this,” all of it carried out in secret. Nobody shows anybody else their cards.

The award-winning “An Ordinary Woman” makes for TV that bowls you over with almost too much complexity, but draws you in with one instance after another of “How in the hell is she getting out of this?”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, alcohol and drug abuse

Cast: Anna Mikhalkova, Elizaveta Kononova, Evgeniy Grishkovets, Aleksandra Bortich, Darya Saveleva, Yuliya Melikhova, Tatyana Dogileva

Credits: Written by Maria Melenevskaya, Denis Utochkin and Aleksandr Sobicheviskiy. Streaming on Topic and Topic.com

Running time: 17 episodes @42-52 minutes each

This Searchlight thriller has a whiff of some of the smart horror coming out of A24 these days.

Rebecca Hall stars in “The Night House,” a mirror image mind-game tale from the director of “The Ritual.” It’s coming our way July 16.

“Your parents. They visited.” “That’s impossible. My parents are dead…”

“Then who are they?” “Nobody?”

“They visited. Who are they?” “Nobody. Nobody came over.”

“You know them. Who ARE they?” “Demons.”

“The Believer” is a creepy pseudo-intellectual horror story, a pretentious and arch mashup of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Misery.”

It starts with head games, veers into blood games and staggers into injection games. And while I can’t say I think it’s great or even all that coherent, it stands out as cryptic horror whose grasp exceeds its reach.

Lucas (Aidan Bristow of TV’s “L.A. Macabre”) is on crutches, unemployed and seeing a shrink (Billy Zane). Their sessions including the “talking cure,” and unconventional timed-maze puzzle tests and slideshow association.

But Lucas is an unconventional patient. He’s a physicist, and he’s not sure about his wife, what she’s done and what she might do…to him.

Violet (Sophie Kargman) speaks in a trancelike monotone, with the eyes of an automaton. She thinks Lucas is “close-minded.” But she’s been different since “the thing that happened last month.”

And her explanations, that “My eyes are open, are YOURS?” and handing over a tattered book on demonology and infamous demonic “cases” aren’t getting anywhere with a man of science.

“I firmly regard what you did last month as your own conscious and selfish choice…Not a demon or demon’s manipulation of you.”

Can this marriage be saved?

Writer-director Shan Serafin (“The Forest”) builds his story on such brittle, formalized exchanges, dim lighting, extreme close-ups and a not-that-mysterious mystery that unfolds with flashes of violence, splashes of blood and deepening paranoia.

“Believer” has comic moments, with those “parents” (Susan Wilder, Lindsey Ginter) barging in, nosing around and talking nonstop as they do.

“We are SOoooo rude!”

The unemployed physicist tries to engage his wife on a variety of subjects, tries to find a new job after breaking his foot (How DID that happen?) and tries to get an explanation from Violet about “last month,” or else he’s just going to have to leave.

“I can’t have you itinerant. You agreed to stay by my side.”

Kargman, pop-eyed and poker-faced, makes a nice, soulless foil to Bristow’s confused, nightmare-haunted and increasingly fearful Lucas. She’s ex-cheerleader scary.

And Zane? He’s here to layer on the mumbo jumbo. Lucas wants to try hypnosis to see if this mania and mystery is all in his head.

“What makes you think we’re not in the middle of hypnosis right now?”

How often does that line pop up at your typical 420 night out?

As I said, “Believer” didn’t quite come together for me, never settled into a space where I thought it was going to resolve itself in a more coherent fashion than the story that precedes that finale.

But it’s just strange and unsettling enough to be worth a look, if this kind of horror is your thing.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sexuality

Cast: Sophie Kargman, Aidan Bristow and Billy Zane

Credits: Scripted and directed by Shan Serafin, A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:31

Submitted for your persusal…an April 23 adaptation of H.P.’s “writings.”