Movie Nation

A multi generational journey across goes wrong in this April release.

In adapting the novel “Moxie” into a film, Amy Poehler takes a stab at a generation-defining teen comedy like “Mean Girls,” the one her BFF Tina Fey wrote.

It’s an of-its moment movie, hip and flip and “Woke” with a capital “W.” “Moxie” is less comic and more ambitious than “Mean Girls,” which leads it into darker places and a little length-padding mission creep.

But its still an uplifting celebration of Gen Z female empowerment, a nice little pat on the back for Poehler’s own Generation X and big step up from her directing debut, “Wine Country.”

Hadley Robinson plays Vivian, who starts her junior year at Oregon’s Rockport High School with purpose — get admitted into Cal — and a best friend, her fellow “INTJ” (introvert), Claudia (Lauren Tsai).

They show up at school, eagerly awaiting and half-dreading the publication of “The List.” That’s a rating system cooked up by unknown jocks and bros that labels classmates “Designated Drunk,” “Best Ass,” “Most Bangable” and the like.

But by the time this list is texted, en masse, to the entire student body, Vivian’s had her eyes opened. The bluff bullying of entitled star jock Mitchell Wilson (Patrick Schwarzenegger, perfectly loathsome) has crossed into “dangerous” harassment which new girl Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Pena, terrific) isn’t having.

Reporting this to their Baby Boomer principal (Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden) gets a boys-will-be-boys response, and “that word (harassment) — it means I have to do…a whole lot of stuff.” Principal Shelly is all about students with “moxie,” who let stuff like this roll off their backs.

Like that works with bullies — ever.

Lucy is black and already woke. Vivian wakes up herself, takes the Riot Grrrl recollections of her still-tattooed divorced mom (Poehler) to heart, and starts a secret “Zine.” She draws, clips out photos Old School, literally cutting-and-pasting the artwork together — as if any kid today wouldn’t do that all on a smart phone — gets it photocopied and spreads it around the school.

“Moxie” catches on, and together with some outspoken soccer girls, a “dress code” victim and a trans girl looking for acknowledgement, a movement is made and a “revolution” at this toxic school begins.

The English teacher (Ike Barinholtz) quickly learns that he can’t sit this one out.

“If you’re doing nothing,” he’s lectured, “then you’re part of the problem.”

And the only person to figure out that Vivian is behind all this is “not a shrimp anymore” boy-ally, Seth (Nico Hiraga of “Booksmart”). She’s giving skateboarder Seth the eye, and he’s giving it back.

“Secret identities are objectively rad.”

“Moxie” charts a revolution from its birth to the points where “it goes too far,” “blowback” and beyond and delivers positive messaging pretty much all along the way.

It’s a high school comedy that hits all the waypoints of such movies — “Big Party,” “First Boyfriend,” pep rallies and conflict with parents. But there are more uplifting moments than funny ones, and that’s by design. And the film’s turn toward the dark side may be defensible, but stops it cold.

“By design” also gets entirely too close to “on-the-nose” for its own good. The students of color are the first to see the problem and embrace the solution. The schism that opens between Vivian and pal Claudia has “Tiger Mom” stereotyping, and the mother-daughter conflict that Vivian and mother Lisa fall into feels contrived.

The entire affair seems pre-digested and somewhat “sanitized for your protection.”

Robinson (“Little Women”) pleasantly embodies that “nice girl next door” spectrum that Vivian falls on, a perfectly acceptable tour guide for One Teen’s Journey to Feminism. But few of the performances really pop, and that goes back to the screenplay created from Jennifer Mathieu’s novel. You wish it was wittier.

It’s still an intensely likable and watchable dramedy, even if it never quite reaches that “generation defining comedy” thing.

MPA Rating:  PG-13 for thematic elements, strong language and sexual material, and some teen drinking 

Cast: Hadley Robinson, Lauren Tsai, Alycia Pascual-Pena, Amy Poehler, Nico Hiraga, Ike Barinholtz, and Clark Gregg.

Credits: Directed by Amy Poehler, script by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer, based on the novel by Jennifer Mathieu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51

“Yalda: A Night of Forgiveness” is a riveting and thoroughly engrossing satire of Iranian culture and the work-arounds built into a theocracy, ways of ignoring calls for reform and the shedding of “tradition.”

Tehran filmmaker Massoud Bakhshi’s Sundance-honored second feature is an international production whose puzzles begin with the alien culture he immerses us in and ends with “Wait, Iran let him get away with that?”

“Yalda” is about patriarchy, “temporary marriage,” an “apology culture” that’s become embedded in Sharia law and the legal system and the entrenched “eye for an eye” and “blood money” side of that justice system.

And it’s about a (fictional) TV show, “Joy of Forgiveness,” where the condemned can get legally-binding “forgiveness” via a live on-air apology to the injured party or their family.

The film is set in real time as that show’s producer (Babak Karimi), crew and host (Arman Darvish) frantically prep for and then broadcast their Yalda (a Winter’s Solstice holiday) episode.

There are many moving parts that have to fall into place, a lot of people to placate and masters to serve on this show, which has a musical guest, an in-show lottery, a text-in reality TV poll element and its dramatic main event, a live, Jerry Springer-style (but well-mannered) confrontation.

Producer Ayat (Karimi) has an in-control-room censor from the State, a woman who objects to how downbeat and depressing this holiday episode is. Ayat has to get a condemned woman (Sadaf Asgari), the night’s star, to the studio from prison. He’s scrambling to ensure that the woman whom that condemned “star” wronged (Behnaz Jafari), someone who may not want to accept an apology or even participate, shows up. Tonight’s special guest, an Iranian film star, has to be accommodated for her appearance where she’ll read a poem appropriate to the holiday and “forgiveness.”

But Maryam (Asgari) is young, desperate and hellbent on telling her “truth” to the live audience and the woman who will be sitting opposite her. She denies the crime, that she “murdered” Mona’s father, even though she was convicted and sentenced to the gallows. Her manic mother arranged this TV pardon, but Maryam demands “Let me speak for MYSELF!”

Ayat tries to talk her down (in Persian with English subtitles). But dammit, woman, this is TELEVISION.

“You can ruin your life if you want, but I won’t let you ruin my show.”

When Mona (Jafari) shows up, Ayat won’t let Maryam meet her and re-plead her case. He’s keeping this confrontation on set and fresh for his audience.

It’s just that with live TV, with a near-hysterical condemned woman facing a stone-faced, unforgiving daughter, things are sure to go wrong. And this story, unfolding in 89 tightrope-walking minutes, reveals a complicated familial connection, hidden agendas and the cruelty of the patriarchal power imbalance between Mona’s wealthy father and the much-younger woman he (and Maryam’s mother) talked into a “temporary marriage.”

When Westerners get worked-up over the traditions and sexist loopholes of the Muslim world and Sharia law, things like that — a short term “arrangement” for a man who doesn’t want to commit to a woman, to create offspring with her or be charged with soliciting prostitution — are what they point to.

Bakhshi, whose feature debut was”A Respectable Family,” bends reality just enough to make this satire sting. He takes an outsider-looking-in peek at how Iranian justice looks to the outside world and serves up a movie that plays as “Network” meets “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Ayat’s slick, modern Western-style show, with its woman director and gender-mixed crew, goes off the rails during the confrontation and “show more commercials” isn’t enough of a stall. “Let’s have another song.”

“We don’t have PERMITS for that,” his censor barks. Wait. What?

The on-camera pressure on both women — Maryam feels showing clips of her trial and the crime being reenacted are “humiliating,” Mona’s stubbornness faces commercial-break arm-twisting — mounts as the plot twists on this secret or that veiled threat.

“Yalda” exposes a messy system where the weakest elements of a theocratic patriarchy are vulnerable to a sexist unbalancing of the scales of justice and subject to public shaming. But damn, it makes for fascinating television and a movie that will pull you in, first scene to its harrowing finale.

MPA Rating: unrated, smoking, profanity

Cast: Sadaf Asgari, Behnaz Jafari, Babak Karimi, Arman Darvish

Credits: Scripted and directed by Massoud Bakhshi. A Film Movement release

Running time: 1:29

“Sometime Other Than Now” is a soft-spoken indie romance about the endless reservoir of forgiveness that is woman. Or at least the movie myth version.

Kate Walsh of “Grey’s Anatomy” plays one. Trieste Kelly Dunn is another. And young Alexa Swinton plays a forgiveness apprentice in this thin tale of a grizzled, soulful biker who comes to a tiny New England coastal town with a heavy heart and an itch to leave.

Donal Logue of “Gotham” is Sam, a guy we meet just as the surf is about to wash up over him and the motorcycle which he drove off the road some time before. We are intrigued.

Long-haired, beared and 50something, he is “the mystery man,” the “enigmatic drifter” who has to get the bike fixed, who ducks into the Sunset Motel & Cafe and catches the eye of proprietor Kate (Walsh).

He might be interested, might be frightened of the prospect. Something about this town (Greenport, NY is a location, despite the Massachusetts plates) has him jumpy.

She isn’t really interested, “No no no,” she says. Until her blind date — a lawyer — sits while Sam gets up to silently intervene as a guy loudly bullies his now-ex girlfriend waitress at a local restaurant.

Kate and Sam’s moments together, on the beach, cafe or wherever, have an artificial awkwardness about them. A lot of “It’s none of my business” and “Would you like to?” left hanging in their empty conversations.

As he’s a got the silent thing going, and is unkempt and tattooed and she used to be a Boston lawyer, you have to wonder what, other than the requirements of the screenplay, will pair them up?

But as they do, as she declares a post-coital “the whole mystery man thing, the whole enigmatic drifter thing, that’s over now,” we start learn why he’s here and in such discomfort.

Every screen story is contrived, so sure, his motorcycle is always “waiting for parts” and “maybe tomorrow, for sure,” keeping Sam around. There’s always an aw shucks local (P.J. Marshall) who might be sweet on Kate, but being a mechanic figures she’s even more out of his league.

He accepts that even after he gets a clue about who she’s taking up with instead of him.

Walsh slips into this part with ease, a woman with her own past and of some accomplishment, half-swooning over the first guy who can fix a leak, a hinge or lightbulb at her tiny motel.

Logue can be charming, but this script leaves Sam with nothing but “damaged” and “withdrawn” and guilt-ridden.

As much as I like the cast and the laid back setting, writer-director Dylan McCormick (“Four Lane Highway”) finds little to do with either. And nothing that he cooks up is the least bit surprising, even the illogical leaps that suggest that larger theme — that women will forgive an awful lot.

Which in Sam’s case, they do. No matter what he does or has done.

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, some nudity

Cast: Kate Walsh, Donal Logue, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Amy Hargreaves

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dylan McCormick. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:30

Sean “Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy” Combs lays out the mission statement for this new documentary about The Notorious B.I.G. right before the opening credits.

“This story doesn’t have to have a tragic ending.”

What follows in “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell,” is an adoring, seriously upbeat portrait of New York rap icon Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, a film built around his literal family — his widow, mother and Jamaican grandmother — and the “Junior Mafia” crew of rappers, hype men and friends from his entourage.

The guy was murdered at 24 in Los Angeles in a crime that remains unsolved 24 years later. But that tale is for another movie, earlier docs (starting with “Biggie & Tupac”) and documentaries to come.

If it accomplishes nothing else, and it does, Emmett Malloy’s new film tears Biggie away from Tupac Shakur, his friend and later hip hop rival and fellow unsolved murder victim. In separating them and their shared fates, that infamous “feud” is given the play it probably deserves — all “drama” on gangsta-wannabe Tupac’s side.

Biggie? He was selling drugs on street corners, as he was quick to remind folks, right around the time Tupac was finishing the ballet classes his momma put him in.

Malloy, who directed “Tribes of Palos Verdes” and various music videos and music docs for The White Stripes, Jack Johnson, etc., builds the film around the hours of home movies, studio recordings and onstage material recorded by Wallace’s lifelong friend and videographer D Roc. And he interviews D Roc, Wallace’s mother, grandmother and widow, P. Diddy and a lot of people who were a part of Biggie’s orbit growing up in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, many of whom stuck with him as he became famous.

Diddy is here for the hype, his greatest discovery, “the greatest rapper of all time, and I was saying that when he was alive.”

D Roc and many of the others are here to separate the man from the image. Christopher, which is what his Jamaican-born school-teacher mother Voletta called him all his life, “was a conscious person. He knew what was going on” and kept friends and family close, D Roc says. But “Notorious B.I.G.? He didn’t give a f–k.”

That isn’t a knock, just a way of separating the verbally dexterous born “entrepreneur” from the image he conjured up. As a teen, Christopher sold crack on the street corners of his neighborhood, Bed Stuy and environs. And he oversold that image later. His rap career took off so young that his street-selling days were more days than years.

Because as grainy home videos make obvious, his Jamaican background and connection to musicians like his Uncle Dave Wallace back in Jamaica (which Christopher visited several times) and jazz sax player Donald Harrison (a neighbor) gave him a musical edge when it came to making his mark rhyming.

A Catholic schoolboy exposed to Jamaican slang and rhythms, “an R & B writer and singer who became a rapper,” as Diddy puts it, a shy kid who expressed himself in rhyming rap battles before becoming “The King of New York,” he was soaring in popularity right up to the moment he was gunned down in traffic, right at his peak.

The film’s focus on the positive leaves little room for getting at anything truly negative. And when you die at 24, there’s truthfully not a lot of that to “report.” The “feud” and the list of his potential murderers, many of whom carried alleged beefs with Biggie, is where that material lies and it’s mostly missing.

The most fascinating content here is hearing his mother’s ambitions — a desire to come to America and “get rich”– and Wallace’s myriad musical influences, not just his pals and peers but those father figure mentors who entered his life.

Being just a gloss on his life, we don’t pick up on the appetites and genetics that made him 6’2″ and 375 pounds. No “father” is so much as mentioned.

But his friends and family remind us how much he was loved by those closest to him, and competing New York TV helicopter crews filming his funeral cortege back in March of 1997, streets filled with cheering-not-weeping fans, show us emphatically that they were not alone.

MPA Rating: R, drug content, profanity

Cast: Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, Voletta Wallace, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, D Roc, Faith Evans, Matty C., Donald Harrison, Lil Cease

Credits: Directed by Emmett Malloy, script by Sam Sweet. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

“Enforcement” is a gritty and deliberate Danish thriller about a bad day that bad policework instigated, and two cops who get trapped in mayhem at least partially of their own making.

It’s another “Two Cops in a Cruiser” picture, only the “cruiser” is a VW wagon and the police are patrolling the immigrant neighborhoods of Copenhagen.

You can’t call it a Danish “Training Day” because both Jens Høyer and Mike Andersen have been around long enough to know the drill. It’s just that Andersen (Jacob Lohmann) is a short-tempered, belligerent nightmare and Høyer (Simon Sears) is still idealistic enough to see that the chokehold killing that leads to their Day and Night of Hell was the product of a racist police force all too happy to use brute force, because they can.

Their captain has called in everybody after an Arabic suspect was choked into a coma in police custody. He’s quick to remind them (in Danish with English subtitles) that “We’re the people’s only safeguard against total chaos.” But no, let’s stay out of the housing projects today.

That captain has saddled Høyer with a new partner, one who gives the “good cops” on the force pause. Andersen is circle-the-wagons apologist about the “mistake” that put a suspect on life support. He’s a hulking brute in his 40s, big on stop-and-frisk humiliations, topped off with insults every time he stops.

“What is it with you boys and perfume?”

Høyer? He was an eyewitness to the chokehold.

Their day begins with driving and Andersen griping non-stop about “Gypsies” and racist slurs for Arabs. But the “normal” day ends long before dark when they disobey orders and find themselves in a minority-dominated neighborhood where one stop-and-frisk too many, and at the worst possible time, leaves them on foot, without their car, and with dispatch telling them “Romeo 14-05 I have no squad cars available” for “extraction.”

The harassed and humiliated “suspect” Amos (Tarek Zayat) is still in custody, witness to the mayhem breaking out around them, and the growing rift between his captors.

The script covers a lot of familiar cops-trapped-“behind-enemy-lines” ground — holed up in a store, chased by motorcycle thugs and the like. And the set up leads us to expect the two patrolmen to experience differing story arcs, with the formula film’s main mystery who will experience the bigger epiphany.

Lohmann and Sears intentionally create the opposite of “chemistry” — mutual contempt, and nicely balance against each other as they do. The younger guy is muscular and tough and not scared of the jaded Andersen, who is every bully with a badge you’ve ever seen on the screen.

The twists range from natural (if predictable) progressions to major and minor leaps into improbability.

On the whole, though, “Enforcement,” released as “Shorta” (Arabic slang for “cops”) in Europe, is a solid is slow-moving police actioner that reminds us that no matter the continent, police work is the same dangerous game. And that the world over, that “game” has entirely too many of the wrong sorts of people signing up.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast:  Jacob Lohmann, Simon Sears, Tarek Zayat, Özlem Saglanmak and Issa Khattab

Credits: Scripted and directed by  Frederik Louis Hviid, Anders Ølholm. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:48

“Penguin Bloom” is a light, uplifting tale about an Australian paralyzed in an accident, who starts to recover and redirect her life thanks to a magpie her family takes in.

It’s a “feel good” family-oriented picture that sinks or swims based on your tolerance for the genre and how taken you are by a bird that Rossini once built an opera around, “La Gazza Ladra,” “The Thieving Magpie.”

Because as good as Naomi Watts always is, this time playing a once-active surfer and mother of three facing a soul-crushing future in a wheelchair, the bird — played by ten painstakingly trained and conditioned magpies — is a wonder, lifting this simple parable into the realm of “How’d they get it to DO that?” animal pictures.

A tween boy, Noah Bloom (Griffin Murray-Johnston) wistfully narrates the tale, the oldest of three brothers living on the Australian coast, frolicking with his siblings and his photographer dad (“Walking Dead” veteran Andrew Lincoln) and nurse mum (Watts), until that fateful day on that vacation to Thailand when his mother had a fall.

Enough time has passed, our narrator tells us, that he’s able to draw a conclusion about what really happened that day.

“It’s like Mum was stolen from us.”

Sam (Watts) is withdrawn, struggling to accept the things, from basic tying the kids laces to running on the beach and surfing, that she’s lost. Husband Cam is always saying the wrong things.

“How are you?”

“How AM I?” she hisses, ordering him to never ask that again in front of “the boys.””I don’t want to have to lie to them.”

Her upbeat chatterbox mother (Jacki Weaver) is all “Gotta keep your SPIRITS up,” tidying up and giving unwanted advice and callous labels on every visit.

“You’re NOT a ‘spastic!’ No one thinks so!”

Sam is teetering towards giving up, blocking out the past and wallowing in her awful predicament until one plaintive request from her oldest, made on his way out the door to school.

“Can you look after Penguin for me?”

This is the baby magpie he found, fallen from “her” nest. Noah looks up what to feed it, Dad helps and hit brothers join in, all of them obsessed with the little screeching baby bird in that basket Noah turned into a nest.

Sam? She’s warned him not to keep it, ignored the squawks and cries, takes no interest in the black and white seemingly flightless bird named after another species of black and white flightless bird.

But playing “Louie Louie” on the stereo to drown Penguin’s racket out leads to a revelation. The bird has personality and feelings and a LOT of curiosity.

Glendyn Irvin’s film, working from a Shaun Grant/Harry Cripps script, grafts the “new critter in the house” comedy to a serious, giving-up-until-I-get-up story of injury and loss.

Most of the story beats we take in here are perfectly conventional — the enraged lashing out, the morose withdrawal, children retreating in guilt or horror. Watts is as sharp as you’d expect acting that out.

Weaver makes a nice irritant on the family dynamic and Rachel House shows up as a thoroughly Oz kayaking instructor. A cute touch? Noah learns to play the guitar, picking out a most apt Beatles tune to his darling Penguin.

The bird — it took ten “credited” magpies to “play” this part — is a marvel. She wanders the halls, jumps on furniture, shelves and laps, knocking this over, curiously toying with that and pooping on just about everything.

Aussie TV director Ivin keeps his camera at Penguin eye view as he chases her down halls, under beds and the like. The film emphasizes how smart and enterprising magpies are, and gives her canine-levels of affection and commitment. Penguin knows when something’s not right with Mum.

You have to know going all this going in, because you either respond to a “Mouse Hunt” level tiny creature has personality story, or you don’t. I did.

MPA Rating: TV-14

Cast:Naomi Watts, Griffin Murray-Johnston, Andrew Lincoln, Rachel House and Jacki Weaver

Credits: Directed by Glendyn Ivin, script by Shaun Grant and Harry Cripps, based on the memoir by Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive. A Roadshow release on Netflix.

An awful lot of twitterers are awfully cavalier about their use of this phrase.

Can’t be bothered to read what they have a complaint about if there’s a chance to pile on, based on some Summer’s Eve’s eagerness to misunderstand plain English.

But hey, infants gotta infant, trolls gotta troll…