Movie Nation

The first names that come to mind when you hear the literary term “magical realism” are South American, the second Bengali, and so on down the line.

But Iranian actress/author Shahrnoush Parsipour took her shot at this blend of harsh reality coped with through fantasy with “Women Without Men,” a look back at the crucial crisis of her country’s recent history — the 1953 British-backed and CIA-plotted coup that overthrew a nascent and fractious Persian democracy and set the stage for a decades of troubles to come.

Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari turned that into a gorgeous, meditative and poetic film in 2009, a tale of four women who live through the crisis, coping and denying, protesting and helplessly caught up in the communist rallies and conservative religious zealotry that became the most potent counter and eventual overthrow of that regime decades later.

Arita Shahrzad is Farrokhlagha, unhappily-married to an army officer, her life shaken up by the return of an old lover (Bijan Daneshmand) who fled during earlier British rule. His return has her dreaming of starting over, buying an orchard and experiencing love in her late 40s.

Munis (Shabnam Toloui) is glued to her radio, increasingly upset by the early British blockade that was designed to bring down the government. She may wear black and be pushing 30 and unmarried, but she would be wholly radicalized if she weren’t under the thumb of her tyrannical fundamentalist brother Amir Khan (Essa Zahir) who is determined that she marry. We meet her as she’s giving serious thought to giving in to despair and contemplating suicide.

Her friend Faezeh (Pegah Ferydoni) is Amir Khan’s kind of woman. She longs to marry him, but listening to Munis’ alarm at the political situation and her personal enslavement is enough to give the devout Faezeh pause.

And most hopeless of all is Zarin (Orsolya Tóth). She is trapped, the most in-demand prostitute at a Tehran brothel. Haunted and emaciated, she despairs of ever escaping, of ever being truly “clean.”

“Women Without Men” follows each down her own path, into the coffee shops where politics and philosophy is bickered over in the middle of a coup.

“Albert Camus was WRONG!”

Radios crackle with alarming news updates, marches lead to rallies and rallies lead to crackdowns. And in voice-over narration, we hear characters’ inner musings and see their fantastical dreams. Musin finally gets to attend a rally.

“I was there not to watch, but to see!”

Image after image in this immaculately-composed picture stands out — misty groves at dusk and gardens of flowers, long walks down stark, empty roads, a death that isn’t really a death — or is it followed by a haunting?

The most chilling moment has to be Zarin’s shamed trip to the communal baths, women and their children unaware of her profession, helpful and supportive. But she would prefer to scrub her skin raw by herself, tormented by her lot in life.

Scenes like that remind us that there’s no way this depiction of pre-lapsarian Iran could have been filmed there. The explosive politics, the unflattering depiction of zealots and the sex and nudity, recreating a more liberal era before the Shah and the Army, before the mullahs ran things, had to be recreated in Casablanca.

For all the navel gazing, dreams and poetic interludes, “Women Without Men” is a film that’s aging well, a work of art that sends the same messages a dozen years after its creation — that whatever strife the men in charge of this troubled land stir up, it is the women who suffer and silently obsess over what the men leave out or take away.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Orsolya Tóth, Shabnam Toloui, Pegah Ferydoni, Arita Shahrzad

Credits: Scripted and directed by Shirin Neshat, Shoja Azari, based on the novel by Shahrnoush Parsipour. An Indiepix/Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:39

A sparkling supporting cast can’t save “The Seventh Day,” a tepid exorcism thriller that begins with promise and dies pretty much the moment the “lead” steps into the spotlight.

It’s got Keith David as a stalwart priest trying to save a possessed child in 1995 Baltimore while Pope John Paul speaks to the multitudes of the city just down the street.

There’s Guy Pearce as “the best exorcist” in the Church at a time when “the Church simply walked away” from the Hollywood-sensationalized Catholic practice. And Stephen Lang is the archbishop pep-talking our “young recruit, the best in his class” and lending gravitas to this latest thriller built on an ancient rite.

But that support and some half-decent effects don’t make this formulaic flop scary, tense or the least bit credible. If the lead doesn’t buy in and seem horrified at witnessing the supernatural and the terrifying for the first time, why should we?

So the presence — or lack thereof — of Vadhir Derbez as the young exorcist in training Father Daniel is instructive in one way only. Movie business nepotism isn’t just a Hollywood thing. It happens in Mexico (He’s Eugenio Derbez’s kid) too.

Not to lay this dog wholly at his feet, but Derbez seems to physcially shrink in his scenes with grizzled badass Pearce. As they share most of their scenes, well that’s a problem.

Another boy (Brady Jenness ) is possessed, the Church thinks. He’s gone nuts with an axe on his family and he’s in custody, awaiting a psyche evaluation. But before Father Daniel can join the team to save him, he’s got to pass muster with the chain-smoking, foul-mouthed Father Peter (Pearce). And Peter’s not impressed that Daniel did “two grueling weeks of exorcist nursery school.”

He tests the recruit by dragging him to a homeless camp and challenging him to “find evil” there.

“An exorcist doesn’t hide from evil. He runs TOWARD it, feels (evil) in his bones and can sense when it’s close.”

They meet the boy, question him and set out to contact-trace little Charlie’s disease, figure out where he caught the Devil’s Flu.

But mainly, this is just Derbez underreacting to everything, struggling to hold his own with better actors and generally killing any reason we should care about what we are supposed to invest in about this story.

The “trainee” business is promising enough, but “The Seventh Day” seems to give away the fact that it had its biggest names on set for very short periods. Derbez’s Daniel goes into many situations on his own, with limited screen time for Pearce.

There’s one fairly chilling kid interrogation scene — a floating boy, a pencil levitated into a weapon, cops lured into the interrogation room only to be attacked by a “presence.

Writer-director Justin Lange made a bit of a splash with “The Dark” a couple of years back. This come-down has plotting problems and lifeless scenes and the hoariest gimmick in the history of demonic possession cinema.

And Lange is the guy who hired a big Mexican star’s kid as his lead.

The failures pile up quickly after that promising first act and “The Seventh Day” doesn’t hold the interest past day two.

MPA Rating: R (Disturbing Images|Violent Content|Some Language)

Cast: Guy Pearce, Vadhir Derbez, Robin Bartlett, Brady Jenness, Stephen Lang and Keith David

Credits: Scripted and directed by Justin P. Lange. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:27

A little history we in the West don’t know.

This post WWI period piece opens May 7.

Weird Al narrates (and speaks in Tiny’s place) in this April 23 release.

Best concert I ever saw? Tina Turner, the “Farewell Tour,” the first one — 2000.

It was the exclamation point on a sixteen year-long victory lap for the hardest working woman in show business. And yes, she left it all on the stage that night, 62 years-old and overwhelming a big backing band, wearing out backup singers and dancers half her age.

Best concert ever? Not. Even. Close.

We remember that she was a tornado in performance, a force of nature, a huge voice, an artist who struggled against racism in her genre of music and suffered like few others in the limelight — abused, escaping a marriage of literal “torture.”

We remember “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” — the “comeback” song, the hit motion picture, the myth.

But what “Tina,” the new HBO documentary profile reminds us, is how deep she is. Poised. Frank, modest, unschooled, very smart and well-spoken long before she took on an English accent. But deep — as good a spokeswoman and role model for the benefits of Buddhism as anyone who ever lived deep.

“It wasn’t a good life,” she recalled, back in 1981. “The good did not balance out the bad.”

But that was 1981. And nobody in show business ever had a third act like Anna Mae Bullock, aka Tina Turner.

“Tina” is built around a 2019 interview at her Swiss chateau and draws generously from tapes that led to that famous “People” magazine profile in 1981 that let the world know the abusive marriage she’d just escaped. There are tapes Kurt Loder made while writing “I, Tina,” her autobiography with her.

We hear from one of her sons, her backup singers, members of The Ike & Tina Turner Revue, her road manager, Oprah, the author of the recent “Tina” musical, and Angela Bassett –who played her on the screen. Archival interviews with the late Ike Turner and others help tell the story of a sharecropper’s daughter, abandoned by her mother, snatched from obscurity and the long march to fame, a “life without love” which only arrived very late.

Then the we see the grainy rehearsal footage, the stunning work ethic, the missteps that led her through “The Hollywood Squares” and a Vegas cabaret act to the unparalleled comeback spearheaded by a song others had recorded before, a song “I didn’t like…at all,” but which seemed to tell her life story.

And that’s the way she performed “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” from 1984 until the end of her last “farewell tour” in 2009 — as if she’d lived it.

“Tina” is a summarization and a celebration, a film that takes the singer and viewer from “Nutbush City Limits” to the break-out hit that never happened, “River Deep, Mountain High,” from Vegas to “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome,” hit records, full stadiums and James Bond movie themes.

Even those old enough to remember the epic, show-stopping cover of Credence’s “Proud Mary,” the signature song of her best years with Ike Turner, may have forgotten her Vegas residency — broke after the break-up, struggling in tiny venues with music that didn’t suit the big voice and electrifying performer she was.

“Tina” charts the serendipity of her comeback, the Olivia Newton John manager who helped her reinvent herself (and even Roger Davies was at a loss, at first, about what to do with her), “too old to rock’n roll” and running the legs off generations of forgotten successors, leaving it all out there every night — once, playing to 186,000 in Rio and sending everybody home happy.

“What I gleaned from her life,” Bassett says, “was love…Love of audiences, of music, love of her talent, of freedom…There’s a part of her that we’ve all laid claim to. I hope she knows how beloved, adored she is, throughout the world.”

“Tina” leaves little doubt of that.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, discussions of abuse, suicide

Cast: Tina Turner, Oprah Winfrey, Kurt Loder, Ike Turner, Katori Hall, Rhonda Graam, ERwin Bach, Craig Turner, Roger Davies, Le’Jeune Fletcher, and Angela Bassett

Credits: Scripted and directed by  Daniel Lindsay, T.J. Martin. An HBO release.

Running time: 1:58

“French Exit” is like a Whit Stillman adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s “The Lotus Eater,” with producer Wes Anderson dropping by the set, late in the shoot, insisting that he “Make it more TWEE.”

It’s a tale of the idle rich facing the end of that wealth, of callousness, droll wit and a breakdown in the face of loss, with no one facing that loss mature enough to process it.

“Exit” succeeds on another fine “third act” turn by Michelle Pfeiffer playing a wounded woman of wealth intent on maintaining all the imperious cruelty of class that her unfaded beauty and diminished cash reserves allow.

Yes, you try to match the tone of the review to the ambitions of the film. If this reads as pretentious, that’s what’s called for in director Azazel Jacobs (“The Lovers”) film of Patrick DeWitt’s novel.

Profligacy and co-dependency are how widowed Frances Price (Pfeiffer) gets by. We meet her as she removes her son from boarding school. Years later, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) still lives with her, still can’t face up to her — even to pass along the news that he’s engaged to prickly and prim Susan (Imogen Poots).

Oh, “to be youngish and in love-ish,” mother coos.

But her accountant has her more self-absorbed than usual. “It’s all gone.” She must “sell it all,” convert the NYC mansion, the art and jewels into cash. When her lone friend (Frances Coyne) offers use of her Paris apartment, Frances takes her payoff in Euros, stuffs it in her luggage, smuggles their black cat “Little Frank” in her purse and she and Malcolm sail for the continent.

So much for Susan, New York — where Frances has been a magnet for “odd” gossip ever since her husband’s notorious death — and life.

She muses about dying when the cash runs out. Very Somerset Maugham. It’s a good thing she doesn’t do that around Malcolm, who has been raised to be as pretty and useless as her.

Frances dines at the captain’s table on the crossing while Malcolm flirts with the no-sugarcoating-it fortune teller (Danielle Macdonald of “Patti Cakes”).

“A third of the people on this ship are in the presence of death,” she says. And she knows.

In Paris, Frances maintains her hauteur as she stacks her cash in a closet and spends like a drunken sailor, over-tipping like the madwoman she is.

A Madame Reynard (“Seinfeld vet Valerie Mahaffey) reaches out for friendship.

“I’ve no need of friends in my life, at the moment.”

But events conspire to soften Frances just a bit, and every dead husband (Tracy Letts), recent acquaintance (including Isaach De Bankolé as a French detective) and chicken comes home to roost, eventually, all in their spacious apartment in the City of Light.

“French Exit” is as dry as dry can be, an arch comedy cast in the glorious gloom of Paris in the fall. As with his brittle and theatrical dramedy “The Lovers” (co-starring Letts and Debra Winger as a bitter, long-married couple), Jacobs traffics in characters who hide their emotions behind cutting remarks.

“I’m going to miss you, Frances,” her financial advisor allows, not realizing she’s just insulted him in French.

“Won’t you all?”

The carefully-crafted put-downs, drolleries and profundities smother any chance of any one expressing anything resembling raw emotion. It’s a “simply isn’t done” sort of story and world we’re allowed to see into here.

“We allow ourselves contentment, and the heart brings us ease in good time” is all anyone here hopes for. Which is sad and wickedly observant. We wonder if Frances will have the courage to make that “exit” and if Malcolm has the wits to alter his fate and find happiness.

It won’t be to every taste, with the odd asides contrasting homelessness with genteel poverty, and its third act descent into seances seems silly, if not wholly off-key.

Pfeiffer is as grand as ever, and in every sense of the word. Hedges gives Malcolm a martini sophistication still childishly under Mother’s thumb air.

Whatever its virtues and failings, “French Exit” never loses that whiff of elegant, overdue decay and the sense that everyone around it smells it. They and we know what happens with Lotus Eaters in the end, even if they’ve kept their looks, their arrogance and their psychological scars. When the money’s gone, that’s all that remains.

MPA Rating: R for language and sexual references

Cast: Michelle Pfeiffer, Lucas Hedges, Imogen Poots, Danielle Macdonald, Isaach De Bankolé, Susan Coyne, Valerie Mahaffey and Tracy Letts

Credits: Directed by Azazel Jacobs, script by Patrick DeWitt, based on his novel. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:52

Victor is having an argument with a wife who isn’t at home. What’s with this? Where’s that?

It takes him a couple of minutes to see the half-empty shelves and closets. It takes him a minute more to see the note.

“When I’m back from work, I want you out of here.“

He calls his agent, who is of little help. Get a hotel room. He rings up his adult son, and catches him in the middle of the same predicament. Amisha — whom Victor hasn’t met, whom son Zach has been living with for months, whose name Victor can’t get right to save his life, is tossing the lad out the very same day.

Zach (Tim Linde) is gutted. Victor, (Leopold Witte), a best-selling mystery writer, is resigned, bemused and “Well, I’ve got a new publisher and book signing in Scotland.” Zach is crushed, coddled and lacking in confidence in ways only a guy whose girlfriend calls him a “wimp” can be. Better come with me, kiddo.

“Waterboys” is an adorable, tetchy Danish comedy about belated parenting, the arrested development and pathological “bullsh—–g” that is a writer’s MO and trying to find your feet again amongst a cheap, cranky people who aren’t into whining — the Scots.

Dutch writer-director Robert Jan Westdijk (“The Dinner Club”) piles cute characters and culture clashing on top of heartbreak, guilt and loss for a warm comedy that hits you in unexpected ways.

There’s the shock Zach experiences at seeing that his mother has moved everything his father owns into the garage, and the pain of having him help with the move out, only to have highly-strung Amisha go all fangirl and flirty on his Dad, right in front of him.

“Would you sign my book?”

Victor is incorrigible and self-absorbed enough to let that roll off his back. Grab that cello and a bag and shove’em into the Saab and let’s roll.

Because Zach is A) lost, B) like Victor, not getting through to his mother and C) still afraid of flying. The fact that he wears his bow arm in a cast is his mother’s solution for carpel tunnel he’s picked up playing his instrument. The fact that he doesn’t drive is because he’s just a little bit timid and withdrawn from the world.

A running gag — Dad’s constantly giving him bad advice on how to approach his Amisha problem. Zach desperately wants her back, and Victor knows how that looks and that pleading will never work. A little “tough love,” maybe cussing her out by text message on Zach’s phone?

Another running gag, Dad’s undying love for “The Waterboys,” a Scottish band that he and his about-to-be-ex-wife saw in concert. By coincidence, they’re doing a “homecoming show” in Edinburgh when they arrive in the city to meet Victor’s new Scottish publisher and do a few media events and public readings.

Pity it’s sold out. Pity that asking the PR lady (Helen Belbin) to look into that gets little more than a laugh. Rhona’s the sister of the publisher, brusque and not the least bit star struck. She insults Victor, his books and his inability to follow instructions, right in front of the kid.

All Dad’s charm, his spoiled impulsiveness, the way he flirts on the kid’s behalf with the cute hotel maid (Julie McLellan), that doesn’t work on Rhona. No drive home after a dinner meeting, either. Here’s change for two bus tickets. SEE ya.

Westdijk finds laughs in throwing Victor’s hedonism into the insular macho gloom of Scotland. Salmon fishing, since your detective hero (17 novels worth) is an accomplished angler? SURE, Victor knows all about it. Cough cough.

Witte, who has been a mainstay of Dutch TV since the ’80s, throws himself into Victor’s exaggerated sense of self with the confidence of blithe ignorance. He wants to “research smuggling,” so he hides cocaine in the kid’s cello case on the car ferry over to Britain. He corrects everybody’s grammar, makes up stories to try and score Waterboys tickets and does everything he can to pretend this break-up hasn’t hit him.

Did his wife have a “reason” for kicking him out?

“No more than usual,” he says (in Dutch with English subtitles). “It was my STUFF she threw out, not me!”

But she’s left him a letter in an envelope, “In case you want to know ‘why.'” He won’t open it.

Linde’s job is to make Zach less pathetic and whipped than he seems, which he does by bouncing off his irritating father — sometimes literally.

Through them, and a sparkling supporting cast, Westdijk gives us a little bickering, a little bonding, a little personal growth, a bit of Scotland and a lot of “Waterboys.” And if that’s not enough to add up to a comic winner, I don’t know what is.

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual and, drug content, profanity

Cast: Leopold Witte, Tim Linde, Helen Belbin and Julie McLellan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Jan Westdijk. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:33

This looks good. Epic. Another chance to revel in the glory that Jack Thompson, too.

A May 14 release.

This is a big departure for Elba, a father-son drama about healing and child rearing in a better late than never sense. Lee Daniels had a hand in it, and could use a winner. https://youtu.be/utFcqVy0FtI

It’s an animated short that will be unleashed on the world April 6.

Taika W. voices the rabbit, Gervais is the director we hear.

Olivia Munn, Zac Efron and Tricia Helfer are also in Spencer Susser’s short film. Take a look at this teaser.

UPDATED: The complete film has since been posted. You can find it here. It’s still a short film, but it’s longer and harder to watch than the teaser, which is still posted below.