Movie Nation

Whatever else you can say about the charming and intimate documentary that follows a “Stray” dog through the streets of Istanbul, it’s a rare piece of positive PR for a Middle Eastern country that never makes the news for something good.

Elizabeth Lo‘s narration-free film points out that Turkey and the city tried to “eradicate” its stray dog population all through the 20th century. International outcry is credited with halting the roundups and mass killings. But the evidence presented by “Stray” shows Turks, and Turkmens and Chechens and anybody else among the masses of locals and immigrants passing through being rarely anything but kind to the 100,000 or so dogs who wander the city, its streets, alleys, squares and parks.

Zeytin is the dog we follow here, a tall, beautiful and self-sufficient mutt who makes her rounds, checking trash bins behind restaurants, sipping from fountains, meeting other dogs and occasionally engaging in the one game in the global pooch-on-pooch pentathlon — “CHASE me!”

By day construction workers and shopkeepers call her by name, scratch her ears and give her a pat or a bone. Sure, every now and then a hose is aimed in her direction. And sitting next to strangers in a park can get a spirited cussing-out by foul-mouthed Chinese tourists. But she is tolerated, has the luxury of standing up and stretching before she leaves a parking space a delivery truck driver needs.

The shots are so tight we can wonder if Lo’s camera isn’t a deterrent from the kicks and yelling much of the world greets strays with.

By night, she curls up with street urchins from Turkmenistan, “glue-sniffers” who love dogs and argue with the construction workers at the site where they sleep. The workers are always chasing them off, yelling for them not to be around during work hours. The dogs? The dogs can stay.

Zeytin’s wanderings, catching up with doppelganger mutt Nazar, checking in on beautiful puppy Kartal and her street dog family, confirm a lot of what Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s book of some years back, “The Hidden Life of Dogs” pointed out. Dogs love to be around other dogs.

Zeytin only is growled at by dogs who figure “These humans are here to care for me, not you. Keep moving, sister.” Pack mentality and violence shows up in one scene, but the only serious fight is over a huge sheep bone she’s just procured. A strange stray with a bone of his own attacks her to get it until a garbage man intervenes.

“A–h–e! Why won’t you share?”

There’s little conflict here, a little fear that something awful may happen to Zeytin or her fellow street animals. Istanbul’s change in laws made it a crime to “hold,” injure or euthanize a stray. They’re protected by mandate, cuddlier versions of the street cattle of Mumbai or the chickens of Key West.

But “Stray” pulls us into their world, filmed from a dog’s eye level (Human faces are rare, human conversations merely overheard.). These dogs haven’t gone feral, and the humans who interact with them meet them on their terms.

Perhaps the Turks have read the ancient Greeks whose thoughts on dogs Lo inserts as intertitles throughout “Stray” to underscore her larger point.

“Human beings live artificially and hypocritically and would do well to study the dog,” Diogenes said thousands of years ago. If he saw a kindred spirit in canines, strays or pampered purebreds, who are we to disagree?

“Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.”

MPA rating: Unrated, profanity, smoking, canine se

Credits: Directed by Elizabeth Lo. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:12

Henry Golding gives his most laid-back, natural screen performance in “Monsoon,” a melancholy Vietnamese travelogue and romance.

The “Crazy Rich Asians” and “The Gentleman” star plays Kit, a Vietnamese expat raised in Britain who has returned to the homeland he barely remembers to scatter some ashes.

While there, Kit reconnects with a childhood family friend Lee (David Tran) who tries to jar his memories of a country and city — Saigon — which has been almost wholly remade in the decades since it became Ho Chi Minh City.

Much of Hong Khaou’s film is just Kit walking the streets, reflecting, riding on the back of motorscooters, taking the train north to the city of his parents’ birth, Hanoi. He’s looking for a place to leave the ashes in the wooden urn he’s brought with him, “somewhere momentous,” and he doesn’t look as if he’s having much luck, or that he’s in a hurry. He takes it all in and tries to remember a past his parents pretty much erased.

This is not a “memory play,” not a reflective story with flashbacks. Simple, spare conversations give away tiny pieces of his story to Lee, and eventually to Lewis (Parker Sawyers). They’re two Westerners who set off each other’s gaydar, and begin an affair.

I can’t remember a Vietnamese travel program that’s shown as much of the city life there as “Monsoon.” The opening image, the mesmerizing flow of traffic at a busy roundabout as viewed from on high, sets the tone. We see what Kit sees. Sometimes it’s a striking bridge, a timeworn neighborhood, a gallery, restaurant or hotel bedroom.

Golding gets across a sense of a man both at home here and adrift, letting the last of the grief that the loss of Kit’s “formidable” mother wash away from him. An online anime artist, he’s a lot more social than the stereotype of that job implies. Lewis isn’t the only friend he makes, or lover that he takes.

If there’s a knock on “Monsoon” it’s that not a lot happens. The drama is light, the unpleasant memories summoned up are watered-down by Kit and Lee, whose family failed to escape the way Kit’s was able to.

But Golding, losing the debonair dash he wore uneasily in “Crazy Rich Asians” and the menace he half pulled-off in “The Gentlemen,” pleasantly drifts through this like someone not willing to look the part of a tourist, confident in his charm and never out of his depth so long as he has it.

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, smoking

Cast: Henry Golding, David Tran, Parker Sawyers, Molly Harris

Credits: Scripted and directed by Hong Khaou. A Strand/BBC film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:25

This March 26 comedy stars William Shatner as a leadfooted senior citizen who loses his license and may find love…if he can keep Jean Smart from taking up with “the artist” (Esai Morales).

Shatner’s sidekick? Christopher Lloyd.

One of America’s greatest writers, Tim O’Brien was well over a decade past his last published book when filmmaker Aaron Matthews started following him around, filming a documentary.

O’Brien was into his ’70s, and stopped writing basically when his sons were born in the early 2000s. But as the Vietnam War vet and lifelong smoker started pondering his mortality and “did the math,” he knew there was at least one more book he needed to write, one to the sons he probably won’t see into adulthood.

“The War and Peace of Tim O’Brien” captures a lion of American letters in winter. The American Book Award-winning author of “The Things They Carried,” “If I Die in a Combat Zone” and my pick as the best Vietnam War novel never to be made into a movie, “Going After Cacciato,” the de facto poet laureate of that war, gives speeches and lectures, gets interviewed — a lot — and watches his kids play basketball.

And in the middle of the night, he tries to write. The book became “Dad’s Maybe Book,” and “War and Peace” shows us the heavy lifting it takes to write what his wife Meredith calls “his last book. He’s going to say everything that he wants to say in it.”

But he relates to an audience at one of his readings, “With every syllable I try to talk myself out of writing the next syllable.” When you’ve become “a war novelist,” when you’re mining your own experiences “in country” (1969-70), writing is painful.

Matthews, sometimes chatting from behind the camera, once even pitching in as the exasperated writer loses his new credit card in a gas pump, keeps this informal. He is filmmaker as “company” to O’Brien, a sounding board the novelist can pontificate to, saltily grouse with and — perhaps performatively — grind out the work for. That gives “War and Peace” a casual intimacy that many “fly on the wall” documentaries lack.

We can practically see the camera crew adding pressure to a writer with demons he still wrestles with, a war he never really got over and a deadline that is his own mortality.

Writer’s block sends O’Brien onto the kitchen floor, hand-cleaning the grout with paper towels, a wee hours of the morning pursuit.

O’Brien frets over that “war writer” label, “the entire content of my obituary.” His speeches see him as an anti war “Evangelist,” urging listeners to consider “the rectitude” of war.

And he sleeps in a “trench” he makes on a sofa or a bed, piled up pillows and blankets as if he’s hunkering down in a combat zone. He guiltily ponders the times young men have come up to him after hearing him read, telling them he’s convinced them to enlist.

Some of the best scenes in “War and Peace” have him sitting down with other vets, contradicting their politics, but finding common ground simply because he’s shared their experience and even the most stridently conservative among them respect that.

And he writes, hoping that some day his boys will “find my ghost in these pages…My kids, when I’m dead, will hear their father’s voice.” Damn, he’s quotable.

Those kids? They aren’t curious or gutsy enough to ask him about that war, a war none of their classmates’ parents can relate to. They acknowledge Dad’s bad days and rough nights, the trauma that they can see lingering in his moods.

He describes a firefight in a reading, “the bee-sting sensation in my left hand, the zipping sounds of eternity passing by,” he recalls a day and an event few people can fathom — “The Man I Killed.”

And as he types away, constantly interrupted, taking too little care of his health, exasperated by a dying Lexus or his sons’ addiction to “screens,” we marvel at the compulsion of the artist to make art, to leave a legacy not just to all of us, but to those living under his roof.

This struggle through O’Brien’s “War and Peace” make the viewer appreciate that it’s not just his time in combat that deserves our gratitude. As he pours a little more of himself onto every hard-won page, all I could think to say is “Thank you for your service.”

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking

Cast: Tim O’Brien, Meredith O’Brien, Ben Fountain, Tad O’Brien, Timmy O’Brien and Dan Rather

Credits: Directed by Aaron Matthews. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:23

This production makes an almost instant hash of “The Girl on the Train,” a novel turned into a Hollywood thriller starring Emily Blunt a few years back.

Heavy-handed, with hammy acting, silly and soap operatic, struggling to keep the plot plausible and sensible, it’s a good-looking film, which is pretty much all one can say for it.

Parineeti Chopra of “Namaste England” stars as Mira, the pregnant London barrister (attorney) who loses her baby in a car accident caused by mobsters out for revenge. She comes out of that trauma with partial amnesia and a husband (Avinash Tiwary) who cheats on her and leaves her.

A year later and she’s still disturbed, as you might expect. But Mira is stalking her ex, lashing out when she does. She’s drinking constantly, even taking a flask with her on her travels.

And she’s riding the commuter train back to and by her old life, narrating her tale of woe and her grievances as she does. She spies a pretty, younger woman (Aditi Rao Hydari) who seems to have it all, judging from the peek inside her house, passing glimpses of her and her husband happy in the yard.

“Will my life ever be as perfect as hers is? She’s everything I lost!”

Mira interrupts her ongoing meltdown for a little envy. But as we’ve seen that young woman stalked in the forests in the film’s opening scene, we wonder if that envy is called for. When Nusrat (Hydari) goes missing, there are plenty of suspects, plenty of motives floating around her “perfect” life. Might amnesiac Mira have enough motive to be one of those suspects?

Director Ribhu Dasgupta (“Three”) clumsily incorporates the police investigation into this supposedly deepening mystery. Kirti Kulhari plays the Scotland Yard detective in charge, a Sikh woman who is one of those who has taken up the turban, and who comes off like a 1950s bull-in-a-china-shop cop.

She visits crime scenes and slaps suspects. She swaggers.

“Officer,” the missing woman’s psychotherapist (Hiten Patel) begs, “find her…please.”

“I will,” she assures him.

The mystery at the heart of Paula Hawkins’ novel is still solid, but all the false-leads seem obvious, and Chopra tends to seriously overdo it playing a drunk and hysteric.

The British setting, with almost all Hindi-speaking characters is kind of novel. The film opens with an Indian wedding, basically staged as a production number. And it’s not like the Hollywood version of “The Girl” is any sort of classic, though I liked it more than most.

This four-screenwriter take on it misses in almost every regard.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Parineeti Chopra, Aditi Rao Hydari, Kirti Kulhari, Avinash Tiwary

Credits: Directed by Ribhu Dasgupta, script Gaurav Shukla, Ribhu Dasgupta, Abhijeet Khuman and Viddesh Malandkar by based on a novel by Paula Hawkins. A Reliance release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:58

It’s a Tom & Jerry cartoon, so we’re not splitting the atom here.

Besides, I’m pretty sure Jerry split that sucker over Tom’s noggin back in the ’50s, when they were at MGM.

The “Tom & Jerry” movie is, first and foremost, cute. Animated animals — cats, a mouse, a rat, a dog, a goldfish, singing pigeons, peacocks and elephants — in live-action with real people New York city cute.

Co-starring them with Chloë Grace Moretz? Cute. And Michael Peña? Cute too. Colin Jost, playing an over-the-top groom in an extravagant Indian wedding? Kind of cute.

Ken Jeong as a chef? Dr. Ken’s act has worn kind of thin, but you can’t win ’em all.

This farce, scripted by Kevin Costello and directed by Tim Story (“Shaft,” the “Ride Along” movies) has a little flavor of the city, a hint of funk and the classic Tom & Jerry conflict.

Tom scratches out a living busking on his portable keyboard as a blind, piano-playing cat who dreams of opening for John Legend. Opportunist Jerry horns in on his act.

Let the violent mayhem begin, with baseball bats and meat tenderizers, scissors and hammers, pratfalls and splats, TZOLTS of electric shock and plenty of “Ooogah OOOgah” sound effects.

The setting is a swank hotel about to host the wedding of a couple of social media darlings (Jost and Pallavi Sharda). Naturally, that’s the place Jerry figures is his new home. Naturally, the vengeful Tom pursues him there.

Kayla is the hustler who fakes her way into a job at the Royal Gate. Peña is her boss, Jeong the harassed head chef.

With a big wedding getting bigger every second because of the groom’s egocentric elephantiasis, what could go wrong?

The gags include mute Tom’s way of communicating with Kayla — more and more elaborate games of “charades,” even though, when the spirit moves him, he can warble a fair auto-tuned Ray Charles imitation from the keyboard.

The script takes swings at “The Warriors” and “Dueling Banjoes,” Steve Bartman and PETA and “millennials.” Jerry still likes olives in his martinis. Tom is more of an oenophile.

Kayla on a mouse hunt? “I’ll CATCH him…or her. I’m not gender biased!”

The groom’s bulldog Spike? “I’m sorry,” Jost cracks. “He’s a little animated.”

The target demo here is the same as it ever was — 8-and-under. There’s plenty of slapstick and critter gags for them, crashing furniture, trashed hotel rooms and wedding party mishaps.

The rest of us? “Cute” it is and cute these two forever will be.

MPA Rating: PG for cartoon violence, rude humor and brief language 

Cast: Chloe Grace Moretz, Michael Peña, Colin Jost, Pallavi Sharda, Jordan Bolger, Patsy Ferran and Ken Jeong

Credits: Directed by Tim Story, script by  Kevin Costello, based on characters created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. A Warner Bros. release (HBO Max).

Running time: 1:41

Let’s see how this works out. Warner Brothers sent a screener in the wee hours of the morning, and I know from past experience that their screener system is one of limitless limitations (Smart TVs…and Android phones? WTF?).

But it looks cute so let’s give it a shot.

Wise is the pop star who knows how to preserve a little mystery about themselves, even in the age of “over-sharing” and the microscope that is social media.

Her most obsessed fans can find out bits of this and that. Some, I dare say, even figured out where she lives with her family in a middle-class home in Greater Los Angeles (Highland Park).

But there’s so much we don’t know, and still won’t know after watching the intimate and somewhat revealing documentary profile, “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry,” on Apple TV+.

We meet a seemingly-unguarded, generally-unfiltered and determinedly unselfconscious young woman, tracked through her quick rise to fame late in her 16th year, through her 17th and well into her 18th.

Director R.J. Cutler, who did the Vogue doc “The September Issue,” the superb supernatural teen death drama “If I Stay” and the TV doc series “American High,” was well-suited to the subject. But as we see the teen use her mom as a stand-in and home props to block out her concept for a music video, as we see her sketch out songs (basically storyboards), the visual and emotional effect she is going for with them, as we hear her bluntly tell her mother how she’s going to warn this or that music video director about what she WON’T be doing, we can wonder how much control Cutler had over the project.

I mean, nobody is identified in it. We can figure out who her dad is, her mom and Finneas the brother/collaborator/co-star. None are ID’d by name. So this person giving feedback is from…her management company? Interscope Records? That one going over her physical regimen — her free-form and athletic dancing gives her shinsplints and “throws out” her neck at one point — is a physical therapist, personal chiropractor, trainer, chakra choreographer?

Chelsea?

She’s 19, stupidly famous and ridiculously open-hearted around her fans. Mosh pits and hugs for people standing in line don’t see very Queen Bey or Tay Tay. So if she wants to keep her location, her family’s names and the somewhat-overwhelmed and handsome African American boyfriend she had at the time of filming out of the public eye, that’s understandable.

She calls him “Q” and he has a $700 haircut and bright red dye job, and that’s enough.

But 140 minutes of “fly on the wall” filmmaking, mostly of Eilish performing, songwriting (or avoiding it, as her brother complains), doing photo shoots and radio interviews and peaking at Coachella is a bit much. Celebrating her staggering sales and Grammy success with a family-gifted Dodge Challenger (We watch her pass her driving test, and give her car its first wash) and recycling her Creation Myth — social media star, bedroom recording her debut LP “and she’s so young” –leaves the film a “blur.”

Glimpses and only glimpses of home movies show the full-throated childhood of Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell and the “musical family” she grew up in.

“Our family was just one big f—–g song!”

Clips show her in the dance training she underwent until injuries curtailed that. She mentions her body dysmorphia without connecting that to dance, but declares her aversion to “tiny, tight outfits.” As unselfconscious as she seems, she is super-self conscious about that, thus the oversized shirts and baggy shorts that are her uniform.

She confesses to her years of self-injury, cutting herself as punishment for whatever failings she saw in herself at 14. She mentions having Tourette’s, but she comes off like any other unfiltered teen you run into these days.

Eilish likes drawing genitals and dropping the F-bomb, and the only hint of ego slips in with a “How do people NOT miss me? I would miss me!”

Her art comes from “never feeling happy,” but she’s pretty giddy a lot of the time. Who wouldn’t be? But “I feel the dark things,” obvious from her music, is what sells. Her brother is the one with his eyes on the business here, Mr. “We need to write a hit” in this R-rated version of The Carpenters. Getting her to sit down and collaborate on a tune is a chore, though. And she’s already complaining that this or that new material is “just like everything else we’ve ever done.”

She gets it. If the distinct and once red-hot Miley and Adele and Katy and Lady Gaga can turn a tad passe, Eilish won’t be able to avoid it.

Childhood Justin Bieber fan reluctant to do a duet with her now-married longtime skirt-chasing idol, radio interview guest who reminds us of how young she is by all the pop culture references she doesn’t get, and Queen of Coachella who gets a backstage visit from the four-model-years previous queen, Katy Perry.

“This is gonna be WILD for 10 years,” Perry warns her. “So if you wanna talk…”

No, the 17 year-old girl with “Pirate” in her name and a mania for “Pirates of the Caribbean” doesn’t recognize the handsome man Katy introduces as her fiance, Orlando Bloom. But once she makes the connection, she reaches out for a second meeting like every fangirl in her audience.

The tour stops and performances pad “A Little Blurry” to its bloated 2:20 running time, not that fans will mind. As someone who wondered if she had real singing chops when she whispery processed voice first blew up, I was impressed with a couple of performances. But like her, you can hear the songs are “just like everything else we’ve ever done,” and that makes the film drag and drag in its last hour.

She’s just 19. Eighty minutes would have been more than adequate to cover her life thus far, especially if you aren’t interviewing her or even identifying everybody in that life with her.

MPA Rating: R, profanity and lots of it.

Cast: Billie Eilish, Finneas, Maggie Baird, Patrick O’Connell, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom

Credits: Directed by R.J. Cutler. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:21

Yes, this looks as generically “contest” oriented as way too many martial arts thrillers and a lot of video game adaptations as well.

But this R Rated run through the XBox or Playstation but not Wii of gamefan’s wet dreams set a trailer viewership record in just a week.

Kinda sick, if you asked me