Movie Nation

A hundred minutes of monologues, tirades and sometimes testy exchanges filmed in black and white, “Malcolm & Marie” adds up to a tepid two hander, a “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” without the writing to come off.

The dialogue and direction virtually never shakes its theatricality, the feeling that we’re hearing and watching a play. Writer-director Sam Levinson has John David Washington and Zendaya bark out lists — of credentials, backstory, film theory, past lovers, failings and grievances. They fight over the lists. And it’s exhausting.

Washington plays a filmmaker who has finally made a movie critics and the public might embrace. But Malcom’s celebration with his girlfriend of five years, an energetic James Brown sing-along and good Scotch, ridiculing white critics who finally are making the “Spike Lee and John Singleton and Barry Jenkins” comparisons (racially confining) and white liberals guilted into seeing “political” African American cinema, is smothered by Marie’s chilly response as she makes him mac and cheese.

He forgot to thank her in his speech at the premiere.

“You’ve never gotten a good review in your life,” she drops. “Mediocre” pops up when he stops ranting about about “What’s wrong?” And no, he will not admit that his screenplay was stolen from her real life addictions and recovery.

He’s self-absorbed — as creative folks inevitably are. And he multi-tasks, wolfing down her mac and cheese and opening his counter-arguments to her “It’s not until you’re about to lose someone that you start to pay attention.”

“Malcolm & Marie” comes from writer-director Sam Levinson, of “Assassination Nation,” and TV’s “Euphoria,” which stars Zendaya, and wears its intentions in every speech, every pretentious black and white frame.

Washington is already making it in Hollywood, thanks to “BlackKlansman” and being Denzel’s kid. But here’s another big screen chance for singer/actress Disney alumnus Zendaya to step out of “high school” (even the HBO drama series “Euphoria” is a sort of senior year experience) and into adult roles.

That it does. She’s getting most of the buzz from this. Is she great in it? She’s fine, but Oscar nomination fine? Washington goes so far over the top that she’s subtle by comparison. There’s no affectation to the performance. Well, this looks like her first drag off a cigarette. There’s not a lot of fire and spark, just blase dismissals of her man, her man’s “neediness” and tiny glimpses of her damaged past.

Malcolm’s profane, breathless tirade as he reads his first review allows her to patiently absorb, in ways that she must have absorbed “the misunderstood artist” rants for years. But Zendaya’s big emotional moments tend toward bloodless. Raising her thin, girlish voice doesn’t add presence or years. There is an awful imbalance in screen heft here thanks to how Washington pitches his performance — loud, overwhelming bellows and barks. This isn’t a great part, and she isn’t not be the best choice to make it one.

The ebb and flow of their real-time bickering and making-up feels script-dictated and inorganic.

Levinson’s script fills the soundtrack by emptying his memory banks of every film school conversation about “the male gaze,” dolly shots vs Steadicam, “The King’s Speech” and the generation of Jewish creatives who made “Gone with the Wind” and lionized “that Nazi-loving Lindbergh.” He turns his hero into the very forest-for-the-trees “educated” analyzer that he professes to despise. Maybe he can’t help himself, being born into the business (his dad directed “Rain Man”).

All this cinema-talk analysis is tedious, making the movie Malcolm made sound tedious, too.

And all this theatricality in the writing, blocking and acting always leads to a film that keeps the viewer at arm’s length. No amount of Washington shouting or Zendaya overwhelmed in his tsunami of speechifying changes that.

MPA Rating: R for pervasive language and sexual content 

Cast: Zendaya, John David Washington

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sam Levinson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

“Know Fear” is a grisly haunted house story distinguished mainly in the extensive use of the sound effect of a knife plunging into flesh.

“CHUCK CHUCK CHUCK squish squish squish.”

It’s a short thriller that tosses us right into “the ritual,” blood spilled on the pages of an ancient book of Latin incantations. “The ritual” isn’t explained, and in that first scene, we have to wonder if it does anybody any good.

But then that family is “gone,” The “For Sale” sign goes up and “SOLD” is scrawled on it, and hey — the book comes with the house.

Strange noises in the walls spook Wendy (Amy Carlson), the new owner who finds it. Husband Donald (David Alan Basche) can’t hear the creaking, cracking noises or whispers. At first.

But Wendy is quickly taken over by…something. A horror moment of grim suspense? Watching her half-decide (as if she has any control) to stick her hand in a pan of frying meat.

When whatever has hold of the house gets visiting niece (Mallory Bechtel), an amateur ghost hunter, nephew Charlie (Jack DiFalco) and Wendy’s graduate assistant (Meeya Davis) indoors and traps them, “Know Fear” gets down to business.

Who will survive? Who can read Latin? And why can’t everyone “see” or “hear” what the demon is doing?

“You can’t possibly believe any of this,” is Donald’s response. But he catches on.

The bizarre selective “Why can’t you see what I see?” vs. “Why can’t you hear what I hear?” gimmick doesn’t pay off. There’s more describing than actually showing what they face and the sounds it makes.

The script leaves a lot out, the acting is competent — everybody pants in fear when appropriate — if not compelling. The direction limits the gimmicks to a single yanked-out-of-the-frame shot and the script is most concerned about not wasting a moment between the next application of that knife-plunging-into-flesh effect.

“CHUCK CHUCK CHUCK…”

To “Know Fear” is to hear that over and over again, I guess.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody, gurgling graphic violence

Cast: Amy Carlson, David Alan Basche, Mallory Bechtel, Meeya Davis and Jack DiFalco

Credits: Directed by Jamison M. LoCascio, script by Adam Ambrosio, Jamison M. LoCascio. A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:17

Painter, collagist, poet, public scold, filmmaker and performance artist David Wojnarowicz cut a wide swath in the in the narrowest of narrow lanes of the New York art world of the 1980s.

He was a phenomenon of AIDS era East Village art, and a victim of it. As he’s not as well remembered as his contemporaries, Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat, filmmaker Chris McKim “(Out of Iraq,” TV’s “Sex Change Hospital”) figured a documentary might jar our memories.

McKim’s clever conceit in making a film about an artist known for graffiti, stenciling images over posters and product labels and painting on driftwood and garbage cans, is to conjure his film out of the “found objects” Wojnarowicz left behind.

This terrific and informative documentary made of home movies, friends’ super 8mm film of Wojnarowicz and the hustler-turned-self-taught-artist’s audio cassette diaries and even his home answering machine tapes. And there are interviews with those still living who remember him, most famously New York essayist and social scene observer Fran Lebowitz, sketch in the picture.

There’s also an interview Wojnarowicz did with NPR’s “Fresh Air” hostess Terry Gross, whose questions often begin with lengthy discourses on the subject’s background and career. We barely hear the artist there, but Gross tells much of his story — abusive childhood, teen prostitute, artist — in what passes for a question.

“I tried hard to be normal,” he says, “tried very hard to be accepted. And on some level, it’s just a complete waste of time.”

He also tried his hand at writing monologues, hopped freights to Jamestown, N.D., lost himself in Genet and Rimbaud, sang with a band (3 Teens Kill 4) and moved to Paris and moved back to New York in time to film off his TV a Reagan for president TV ad with its “Make America great again” message.

As he found his voice via guerilla, “outlaw” installations in the abandoned piers of NYC, AIDS and Reaganism came to define him and his work.

“We rise to confront the State,” he wrote. And as he did, and faced the “gay plague” as AIDS was labeled in its early New York days, “we confronted a diseased society as well.”

Friends and lovers pass along their recollections and give testimonials about an artist facing up to his moment, made famous when the NEA pulled funding for a show his “political” and “sexual” work was appearing in. Works such as “Science Lesson,” “Prison Rape” and one that gives this film its subtitle, “F–k You, F—-ng Fa—ts,” made his reputation.

One piece is described thusly — “It looked like tetanus!”

He showed at the Whitney and did a personal installation in the home of the rich, art-dealing/collecting parents of future Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. It was a basement mural/found-objects piece, infested with roaches. On purpose.

“David didn’t really like rich people,” one friend wryly notes.

Endorsed by William S. Burroughs, Wojnarowicz was so famous that upon his death, at the end of the ’80s, his was “the first political funeral of the AIDS era.”

McKim’s film can be seen as a fascinating overview, a peek into a guy who packed a lot of life into 37 years, and a compelling, entertaining prospectus for a feature film biography of this now largely-forgotten artist. If that’s the case, count me in. After you’ve immersed yourself in this genuine New York “character,” unpolished, smart, biting and uncompromising, you might very well feel the same.

MPA Rating: unrated, nudity, sexual content, profanity

Cast: The voices of David Wojnarowicz, Fran Leibowitz,  Barry Blinderman, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar

Credits: Directed by Chris McKim. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:48

Jason Bateman and Bobby Cannavale join the…fun? This doesn’t look funny at all, but well — we’ll just have to see. April 9 on Netflix.

Joe Manganiello, Ellar Coltrane, Helena Howard, Elena Kampouris and Thomas Lennon star in this ’80s tale of alt-rock/indie rock fans who turn “fanatic” when Manchester’s own The Smiths decide to hang it up.

Joe Man-Jello as a DJ? Totally see that. March 26 from RLJE, in theaters.

“Sentinelle” is a French vengeance tale that dispenses with developing peripheral characters and concentrates solely on its long she-wolf heroine.

But even she is short-changed in this tight but illogical skips-a step-or-three thriller.

The Ukrainian model-turned actress Olga Kurylenko, of “Quantum of Solace,” “Johnny English Strikes Again,” “Seven Psychopaths,” “The November Man” and lots of other thrillers, has never shed her runway-thin build.

That doesn’t mean she can’t be lethal. Dress her in camo, gear her up with belts and body armor and she’s still the skinniest commando in the French Army, which is what she plays in “Sentinelle.”

Klara is a translator/interrogator trooper helping extract info from prisoners in the Middle East when we meet her. But she’s slow to pick up the suicide bomber they’ve just taken into custody, slower to react when she realizes the peril.

So she’s re-assigned to domestic duties, gearing up as part of the four-trooper patrols that have become part of French life — armed military snooping around, trying to head off the next terror attack on French soil.

They’ve even re-assigned her to the Côte d’Azur, Nice, where he mom and sister Tania (Marilyn Lima) live.

But Klara is haunted, easily triggered, in counseling and on medications. And when the meds run out, she knows where to score them on the street just as she knows which woman in the club that her gaydar tells her would be up for a little after hours action.

That’s how she gets separated from Tania, and that’s when her sister is assaulted and left for dead on the beach. Klara isn’t a cop, but she knows how to get information, and how to handle herself in a fight.

So this already-unstable drug addict puts on her uniform and arms herself and heads out to figure out who did this to her sister so she can kill him or them.

Kurylenko handles the fight choreography with style, even if we don’t want to ponder the physics of someone this willowy taking a beating and dealing one out to people much heavier.

This French film has no “I’m coming for you” threats, the hallmark of your typical Hollywood treatment of revenge. Klara just targets her man, adjusts the target for new info, impulsively tries to take care of it in a flash, and when she’s interrupted by her comrades in arms, schemes a better idea to get a dirty job done.

Ignoring “physics” is optional here. Ignoring “logic” a little less so. There’s no intervention from the superiors, who let her and us know they see her unraveling. There is no wariness of letting her patrol, after she’s shown a tendency to freeze in the clutch, even after they and we get the sense that she’s out for something “personal” and bloody.

At 80 minutes, “Sentinelle” is seriously biff-bam “Thank-you, ma’am.” It has to be. Any pauses to let us think it through might prompt laughter, and nobody wants that, especially not the skinny broad with the assault rifle.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug abuse, nudity

Cast: Olga Kurylenko, Marilyn Lima, Michel Nabokoff 

Credits: Directed by Julien Leclercq, script by Julien Leclercq,  Matthieu Serveau. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:20

Damn.

No over-budgeted, under-scripted thirty-years-too-late Eddie Murphy sequel should EVER deliver as many smiles as “Coming 2 America.”

Not enough funny lines? Maybe a miscalculation, setting most of this “fish out of water” story in Africa instead of Queens?

But here’s Wesley Snipes, cleverly recast as the villainous General Izzi dance-stepping into the royal court of Zumunda at the head of an armed entourage drill team. His eyes are laughing. And so were mine.

This high-tone farce has song and dance, dirty and lowdown and Eddie and Arsenio Hall — at their best in bit parts covered in old age makeup — revisiting a character comedy that wasn’t much of anything except a BLOCKbuster, a movie humorist Art Buchwald took Eddie and Paramount to court over.

But nostalgia is designed to give you the warm fuzzies, and “Coming 2” has those, and how.

Back to that Queens barbershop with Murphy and Hall playing geezers, back to church with Arsenio killing it as a sexist, greedy old preacher, back to McDowell’s with John Amos insisting his joint is “NOTHING like McDonald’s.”

Throw in Morgan Freeman narrating a funeral — in person — cameos by En Vogue, Salt-N-Pepa and Dikembe Mutumbo, Colin Jost sending up his “privileged-racially-clueless” persona, Trevor Noah in a mustache as a TV anchor for the Zamunda News Network and James Earls Jones intoning “This…is ZNN!”

It doesn’t add up to much. But this little “80s night” on the big screen delivers.

Prince Akeem is still married to his Queens girl Lisa (Shari Headley), but closing in on Charles of England as the oldest prince in the pack. But King Jaffa Joffer (James Earl Jones) knows the end is nigh. And despite having three smart and brave daughters (Kiki Layne plays the oldest), to his “shame and disappointment,” Akeem and Lisa haven’t produced a son to pass the kingdom on to.

Sexist as that is, it also could mean trouble from General Izzi and his minions from the covetous neighboring land of Nextdooria.

But wait! The court shaman (Guess who?) had a vision, and royal aide Semmi (Hall) confirms it. Akeem had a hook-up in Queens before he met Lisa. And that produced a “bastard” son.

Everybody in this enjoys saying “bastard.” Especially Akeem. He and Semmi flit off to New York to find the 30 year-old fatherless, unemployable ticket-scalper “bastard” Lavelle (Jermaine Fowler), round him and his Mom (Leslie Jones) and maybe even his no-good uncle (Tracy Morgan) up and bring them back to Africa.

Only a royal wedding to Gen. Izzi’s bombshell daughter (Teyano Taylor) can save the day.

Craig Brewer of “Hustle & Flow” and TV’s “Empire” wasn’t the obvious choice to direct this comedy. But with lavish sets and funny people, many of them obviously thrilled to be in a project this high-profile again all these decades later, doing the heavy lifting, “Coming 2” never grinds to a halt.

The African setting — digital elephants and lions — is Georgia generic. And the young leading man barely holds his own with this august cast, even if the older returning characters are a little joke-deprived, .

But “Coming 2 America” still provides enough smiles to make up for the lack of belly-laughs. And if you miss hearing Murphy’s famous “heh-heh-heh” laugh, stay through the credits.

MPA Rating: PG-13, violence, sexual jokes, “herb” jokes, profanity

Cast: Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Jermaine Fowler, Leslie Jones, Shari Headley, Kiki Layne, Nomzamo Mbatha, Wesley Snipes, Teyano Taylor, Tracy Morgan and James Earl Jones.

Credits: Directed by Craig Brewer, script by Kenya Barris and David Sheffield. A Paramount/Amazon Studios release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:49

“Xico’s Journey” is a cheerful, colorfully-animated and culturally-aware Mexican cartoon about legend and myth and two kids and a dog who want to save their picturesque village from fracking.

Although it scores points for tapping into Mexican heritage and myth and takes on a reckless, people-and-planet-killing energy industry practice, an indifferent script does it no favors.

It’s one of those cartoons where a lot of characters cackle, long and hard, of collapse into guffaws or in the villain’s case, tosses back his head in maniacal, evil laughter. And viewers, young and old, wonder what the heck it is that they’re laughing at as there aren’t any funny lines or even particularly funny situations.

The village of San Jaime de las Jaibas earned its name because in prehistoric times, there were crabs there. Now it is a quaint, cute and sleepy town sitting at the foot of the mountain people like Nana Petra call “mother.”

Copi, who was raised by her grandmother after her parents died, and her pal
Gus frolic in its streets and stir up a little trouble as they do, chased all the time by her dog Xico (“HEE-co”).

But greedy Mr. Frevler, who likes his laughs maniacal, and his board of directors see that mountain as “a literal gold mine!” All the minerals they can extract from it, if only they can con the mayor, take over the town and do what they like to the land, aquifer and people.

Very norteamericano.

The mayor preaches “progress” and “jobs,” but a company official makes a quick note of the fine print, the “worst that can happen” when you pump “methanol, benzene, ethylbenzene and toluene” into the ground.

Careful. Some states, like N.C., have made it illegal to report on the poisons frackers pump into aquifers.

Nana Petra is outraged, starts muttering about a legend, the need to “reunite the three stones” and hinting that Copi’s mom might be where those three stones have to be reunited — “in the heart of the mountain.”

Darned if Copi, Gus and little Xico don’t take off to see what’s what before Nana Petra can convince creaky Don Viejo and another elder to undertake the quest.

The kids encounter creatures of Mexican myth and folklore, and wouldn’t you know it? Her dog starts talking. No matter what language you watch this in, turn the subtitles on. Otherwise, how’ll you know how to spell the breed Xico is when he says it out loud?

“Xoloitzcuintle.” Say it with me!

A rhyming rabbit, a prankster possum, a scorpion, a condor and Mexican Pronghorn play their parts as the “journey” progresses and the mystery unravels.

The animation, by Mexican Anima animation house, is a couple steps below the top Hollywood operations, but gives us quality backgrounds, distinct characters and plenty of Aztec iconography. Not bad.

The messaging — “Do you think rich people will consider us before they go and destroy everything?” — is spot on.

A little script doctoring and “Xico’s Journey” could have been a keeper, a movie with laughing characters who have something to laugh at.

MPA Rating: TV-Y7

Credits: Directed by Eric D. Cabello Díaz, script by Enrique Renteria. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

In April the weather should be warm enough to make this Antarctic (and Arctic) true story endurable.

Norway’s greatest modern hero gets a bio pic that Samuel Goldwyn’s releasing in the US.

Scan your memory banks and run through the legions of YA sci-fi adaptations that have made it to the screen. Try and conjure up a sliding scale, say “Hunger Games” to “The Giver” or “Ender’s Game” or “City of Ember” or the later “Divergents” or “Maze Runners” and on and on.

I was stunned, during the middle of Hollywood’s “Find me the next ‘Hunger Games'” hunt, at how many were more or less unwatchable, and how all of them were forgettable.

“Chaos Walking,” based on a Patrick Ness novel, directed by Doug Liman (“Edge of Tomorrow”), finished and labeled “unreleaseable,” reshot by Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe”) is now perfectly watchable, if doomed to be forgettable.

Whatever it began life as it arrives as a parable on toxic masculinity, set as it is in a culture where men can’t keep themselves from “saying the silent part out loud.” That’s topical, damning, and in the film (and source novel’s) conceits, kind of funny.

Casting Spider Man-boy Tom Holland makes this work. As a babbling 20ish “settler” on “New World,” a planet generations removed from Earth (a 64 year journey away), Holland plays a variation of his chatty, insecure but good-hearted Peter Parker, a guy who helps the sole survivor of a “second wave” colonial scout ship escape The Patriarchy.

As she’s played by Daisy Ridley of the recent “Star Wars” trilogy, there’s a just hint here and there that maybe she could that on her own.

Holland is “Todd Hewitt,” a name he repeats in his head ad nauseum as a way to “control the noise.” That’s what they call the errant thoughts that every man there spews into the ether. A clever touch? The “thoughts” look like a vaping chain-smoker, with flashbacks and visualizations of what might be projected onto them. The planet causes this.

“Control your noise” well enough and you can keep “secrets,” which no man on this planet can manage all that well. Control it and you can project threats — giant snakes — or traps (imagined fences springing up around a quarry) into the minds of your foes.

Todd is the youngest lad in Prentiss Town, named for the smooth-talking, mind-controlling Mayor (Mads Mikkelsen). The Mayor keeps their history, tells and retells the story of how the native inhabitants of the planet “murdered all the women.”

But when a scout ship crash lands near Todd and the farm of his two dads (Demián Bichir, Kurt Sutter) who raised him, and this young woman (Ridley) is the sole survivor, the mayor can’t hide his intentions.

Todd and the young woman must flee.

The Québec locations give this world of entropy a 19th century Pacific Northwest as it was first being settled feel. It’s a world of farming and fur hunting and “be a man,” as Todd has to remind himself constantly. It looks lived-in, a society that has devolved as its technology broke or the batteries gave out, back on horseback because the ark they arrived on brought them (and dogs like Todd’s Toto-ish Manchee) along with the people and Big Plans.

The core plot elements are cut-and-paste YA dystopia — a quest with villains in hot pursuit, chased on horseback, shot at, rivers to cross and a goal line that seems to move further away despite the best efforts of our intrepid young heroes.

But they get maximum mileage out of the core gimmick, the fact that men can’t hide their thoughts from anyone, and women can. Holland’s Todd thinks/speaks “yellow hair, pretty,” and blurts out “Please ignore that” to “the girl” who has never been on terra firma, born on the space ark that brought her here.

“The civilizing influence of women” may be a trite, tired trope, but Todd embodies this and is as prone to violence as every other man there.

And the villains are first rate. Mikkelsen has a simmering menace, and David Olyelowo, who once played Martin Luther King Jr. (“Selma”) takes sexist religion to its violent, patriarchal extreme — madness — as “The Preacher,” a man expecting “retribution” for the lives they’ve lived, the lies they tell and the crimes that must have been part of that.

No, you won’t remember this a year from now — just the vapor-thoughts effect, the jokey tone that floats around that and the heroes and villains. But how much of “The Hunger Games” sticks in the memory after four films? Heroes, villains, the train and a bow and arrow? Maybe?

MPA Rating:PG-13 for violence and language

Cast: Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley, David Oyelowo, Demián Bichir, Nick Jonas, Cynthia Erivo and Mads Mikkelsen

Credits: Directed by Doug Liman, script by Patrick Ness and Christopher Ford, based on a novel by Patrick Ness. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:49