Movie Nation

Long before this little “Thank you for your support” package was even dreamed up, I was swooning over this American Classic about houselessness not “homelessness.” They live on wheels on the road, the American migrants, the new “Okies,” in perpetual “Nomadland.”

Granted, I live on a sailboat, not in an RV. But I see these people, this “tribe” everywhere.

Maybe I’ll pass on the dashboard sunscreen to some Queen of the Road I run across. The license plate? VW bound.

Thanks Searchlight Pictures, and good luck with the Oscar nominations.

See “Nomadland,” the best American pic of 2020.

Uneven performances and a dawdling, clunky script mute the impact of “Fatima,” the latest attempt to tell the story of “Our Lady of Fatima” in a way that doesn’t insult the faithful or earn ridicule from everybody else.

This modern era Catholic “miracle” long ago crossed into myth, a story kept alive by various means and in many media over the century since it happened.

Marco Pontecorvo’s film uses a standard historical picture device — the “interview” with a principal that takes us back to the late WWI visions seen by three Portuguese children, shepherds who claimed to have been visited by the Virgin Mary, “Our Lady of the Rosary,” who delivered a message of hope for them to pass on to a troubled world.

Sônia Braga is Sister Lucia, last surviving direct link to the visions, now an old woman who speaks to a researcher (Harvey Keitel) writing a book about “mass delusions” and “seers,” and a man who has already written that “all seers are ‘de facto’ unstable.”

Sister Lucia, reminiscing about what happened to her at age 10, isn’t trying to convince this professor. “I can only give my testimony,” she confesses. “It doesn’t look like the world has heeded the message of heavenly peace” that “our lady” passed on.

Her flashbacks take us to the horrors of World War I Portugal, a new republic struggling to make its place in the Europe by contributing to the Allied war effort in France. Little Lucia (Stephanie Gil) has a brother in the trenches in France and a devout mother (Lúcia Moniz) who figures prayers and fervent belief will bring her boy Manuel home safe and sound.

The script suggests that Lucia’s heavy burden of faith is put on her shoulders by her mother, whose prayers involved bargaining with God, promising this and that if Manuel came home. Slip up, lose faith or fail to walk a pious path, Mom preaches, and Lucia could seal Manuel’s fate.

Maybe that’s why she started seeing a woman in white, first in a cave where she drew on the walls while tending their sheep, then on a hillside with two young shepherd friends (Alejandra Howard, Jorge Lamelas). Lucia is shown horrors, including Manuel’s possible fate, “a war worse than this one,” a papal assassination attempt, during these visions, which she was ordered to keep “secret.”

But a visitation from the Virgin Mary is not something you hide from the superstitious Catholics of 1917 Portugal. The priest (Joaquim de Almeida) thinks “someone is playing a prank on you” or “the Devil is trying to trick you.” The mayor (Goran Visnjic) is aggravated at this “stupid superstition” among his constituents.

But through disbelief and threats, and the overwhelming attention by thousands of the faithful who flock to the city of Fátima to behold a miracle, be healed or ask for the save return of loved ones.

The script veers from corny credulity to some very nicely-conceived arguments raised by the skeptical professor to the old but still a firm-believer nun. The many logical fallacies common to such miracles are introduced, chief among them the notion that “Jesus had chosen” the children for this message, putting a terrible burden on the very young, who endure intense questioning, skeptical neighbors and official scorn.

Showing them Hell, and saying that two of the three would “soon be joining me” (in heaven) isn’t something a beneficent deity would do to little kids.

If you’re looking for a film that makes its case that Lucia, as the oldest, the ringleader and the sole survivor around when a shrine was built at the site of the visions, “Fatima” isn’t it. The vague nature of the prophecies doesn’t close the deal.

The film itself is a mixed bag, some decent performances — Keitel, young Gil and Moniz stand out — struggling with a script that wants to have it both ways and yet neither debunks the stories nor makes the case for the canonizations of the kids.

The crowd scenes, with a sea of extras convincingly desperate to believe, are the heart of the picture and the only moments that really come close to “moving.” “Fatima” finds its emotional core here, a miracle placed in its context, but limited in ways that don’t bear up to any application of logic.

The skeptics and cynics are drawn as cartoons, people who can be won over by whatever happened there back in 1917.

It’d take a Hail Mary better than anything we see here to lift “Fatima” into the realm of faith-based films that change hearts and minds.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for some strong violence and disturbing images

Cast: Stephanie Gil, Joana Ribeiro, Joaquim de Almeida, Goran Visnjic, Stephanie Gil, Joana Ribeiro, Lúcia Moniz, Harvey Keitel and Sônia Braga.

Credits: Directed by Marco Pontecorvo, script by Valerio D’Annunzio, Barbara Nicolosi and Marco Pontecorvo. A Picturehouse film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:52

“Dementer” is a horror tale of demonic possession and a cult survivor’s struggles to prevent it.

But that simple narrative is taken somewhere unique by filmmaker Chad Crawford Kinkle. This low budget Satanic story is set in the world of special needs caregiving. Blending a few actors with a largely nonprofessional cast, keeping everything cryptic and telling his story with sound effects and montage — a perfectly coherent blur of edits — Kinkle has conjured up a minimalist tale almost guaranteed to give you the creeps.

Katie (Katie Groshong) is 40ish and job hunting. What she owns is still stuffed into her car when she lands a job with Skills Development Services, a company that provides in-house and in-group-home care to special needs adults in a rural Tennessee county. Katie is personable, outgoing with the clients.

But she’s hearing voices. We hear them too, hissed and whispered, sometimes speaking backwards, sometimes as plain as day.

“For a life is given, a devil is born!”

She has flashbacks, sees blood and tries not to let whatever she’s been through slip out in front of her supervisor (Brandy Edmiston) or favorite client, Stephanie (Stephanie Kinkle, the director’s sister).

But we’ve seen the scars on her back, rituals she witnessed by bonfire light. We catch her in weeping, quivering fear when she knows nobody else can see.

And when Stephanie gets sick, Katie figures it’s all connected to what she knows, what she went through and what she represents.

“I’m NOT going to let them get you, too!”

Writer-director Kinkle immerses us in a documentary-real milieu and cast — nurses, patients — and layers in the horror via flashbacks and recurring images. A blood-covered floor, a nude, bloodied woman fleeing into the darkness, bonfire rituals and incantations, instructions and warnings from that voice.

The butcher she visits to collect a cow’s heart (a talisman) doesn’t blink an eye as he takes us into the freezer in a slaughterhouse of horrors.

The film is cheap-looking as a matter of style — whiteboard scrawled opening credits, grainy night vision footage, handheld camera chases and close-ups of a Satanic symbol, painted in blood or forged in steel.

And it’s mysterious. There’s no more to the “story” than that summary above — a woman with a whole collection of dreamcatchers hanging from her rear-view mirror, the echoey incantations in her head, a dark past and a fraught present.

I wanted a little more out of the script, some further explanation, at least a few of the loose ends wrapped up. But what’s here is a near triumph of mood and tone over “story,” and certainly creepy enough to recommend.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Katie Groshong, Brandy Edmiston, Stephanie Kinkle and Larry Fessenden

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chad Crawford Kinkle. A Dark Star release (March 2).

Running time: 1:20

A long doc charting the rise and glory days of a pop queen, directed by a legitimate star doc maker (“The September Issue”).

I think the embargo on reviewing this is Thursday, so watch for that then.

Love, and a terminal diagnosis. Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård co-star as “artist partners” put to the relationship test when she is diagnosed with cancer.

“Hope” is a shortlisted Oscar contender, so a nomination would ensure it’d get some distribution in the US. Looks intriguing.

The director of “The Great Buddha +,” an award-winning Taiwanese crime dramedy, takes a stab at dark farce for his second feature film. He thought it’d be funny to title it “Classmates Minus,” as he’s made a dark and deadpan director-narrated comedy of four high school classmates who hit various walls and change directions in their lives when they hit their 40s.

Scattered laughs and quaint peeks into the culture adorn its two hours+ running time. Even allowing for cultural differences in the idea of pacing in a screen comedy, “Classmates Minus” is slow going. But here’s a taste of what you get if you go down this South Taiwan rabbit hole.

Writer-director Hsin-yao Huang introduces us to a sad, solitary stutterer nicknamed “Blockage” (Kuan-Ting Liu) who makes paper houses, cars, etc, to adorn a funeral pyre and let the deceased realize unfulfilled dreams of their lives in a dream house marking their death. Fan-Man (Jen-Shuo Cheng) is a frustrated office drone, a claims adjuster with an big insurer. The lump they all nicknamed “Tin Can” (Na-Dou Lin) is a lonely local field worker who helps find housing for the disadvantaged.

And Tom (Ming-Shuai Shih), unlike the others, is married — a filmmaker cooling his heels and learning his craft by making TV commercials. His wife (Zhi-Ying Zhu) indulges his dream career, and his nighttime talking-in-his-sleep “direction.”

“Action! FOCUS! Cut!”

“A never-fulfilled movie dream can quickly become a nightmare.”

The opening minutes of “Classmates Minus” aim to set a tone, a tracking shot following a filmmaker on a motor scooter, narrated by another filmmaker. It’s an homage to Italian Nanni Moretti’s “Caro Diario.”

As we follow these four friends’ drift through their daily lives, some scenes stand out and a few situations connect. But touching or droll, satiric or snide, the whole never really came together for me.

Tin Can almost ODs on diet pills, and stumbles into his high school crush, a beautiful woman who never knew he existed then, needs a house now and is getting by as a hooker.

Blockage lives with and takes care of his granny, and when she takes a turn for the worse, he sees a vision of the Golden Boy and Jade Girl, accompanied by Old Li — spirits who are harbingers of death. He doesn’t let that keep him from hiring a matchmaker and hoping he can get out a work or three that impresses the right woman.

Fan-Man heads towards a marriage and struggles with a dead-end job, where “doing the right thing” and “doing right” are distinctions the company makes and punishes him for not grasping.

And filmmaker Tom is abruptly recruited to run for a corrupt congressman’s seat, mentored by that congressman as he mounts a campaign and struggles to get some control of it himself and hand onto his marriage as well.

The film’s most farcical moment includes a vision of a Taiwanese action hero, who soothes nerves over a communication barrier with “You can just speak Chinese. There will be subtitles below.”

Moments like that, some snide remarks about Taiwan’s “chosen by heaven” founder-leader, General Chiang Kai-Shek and cynical politicking that interrupts’ one friend’s wedding and another’s funeral, point to a sunnier, sillier film than Huang manages here.

The characters are interesting enough, the setting and details as well. It’s just that everything one would lump together as “entertainment” is spread out, separated by dead screen time and dull sidebars.

Again, some of this is just different modes of movie-making for different audiences. That said, this was so slow it started to get on my nerves.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Ming-Shuai Shih, Jen-Shuo Cheng, Kuan-Ting Liu, Na-Dou Lin, Zhi-Ying Zhu, Lotus Wang

Credits: Scripted, directed and narrated by Hsin-yao Huang. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:02

Damn, blast and infernal curses. What have these well-meaning ninnies done to “Blithe Spirit?”

A game, sometimes arch cast and lush period design are wasted on a film that bears a faint resemblance to the play by Noel Coward.

Oh all right, more than a “faint resemblance.” The structure is roughly the same, and the characters are carried forth from the 1940s play, first put on film by David Lean. But those august names didn’t discourage British TV director Edward Hall (“Downton Abbey”) and three screenwriters from making a hash of things.

If you’re going to make it a period piece — And who doesn’t do that to “Blithe” these days?” — why bother wiping out Coward’s dialogue, resetting character motivations and only truly preserving the meanness?

“Downton” alum Dan Stevens is our blocked mystery novelist, Charles Condomine, in this version struggling with an empty typewriter page over adapting his first novel for the silver screen.

It’s 1937, and his producer/father-in-law (Simon Kunz) thinks “Hitchcock would be the perfect director” for it.

But Charles can’t get a handle on it, even though he’s adapting his own novel. Wife Ruth (Isla Fisher) tries to be understanding, but his tirades and drinking go on.

“Can I get you anything?”

“DIVINE intervention!”

Truth be told, he hasn’t written a word in years. It’s as if his first wife was his muse, and perky, bubbly Ruth is no substitute. He’s still being obsessed with Elvira, the first Mrs. Condomine. That’s even affecting his love life.

“Big Ben’s stopped chiming,” he gripes to his doctor-friend (Julian Rhind-Tutt). “It’s like playing billiards with a rope!”

Great joke…which George Burns told at 90.

At least the doctor can “fix” that. “Barbituates!”

“Is it habit-forming?” “Not in the least! I’ve been using them for years.”

Charles fumbles about for a hook, a way to give his unwritten script an added kick. A night at the theater watching swami, spiritualist and hustler Madame Arcati (Judi Dench) fake-levitate and try to convince the punters that she can “break through to the other side” and talk to the dead might help.

That’s a bust, so Charles invites her for a private seance, “just for research” he assures himself and everybody else. Imagine his shock when shortly after that humbug his late wife shows up, confused and annoyed at the changes to her house, and wearing the jodhpurs, boots and riding gloves she had on the last time they were together.

“Elvira, you’re dead” rattles her. But as she’s played by scary spitfire Leslie Mann, we know that won’t be the end of it. She teases and taunts him, calls him “an astral bigamist,” and as he’s the only one who sees her, arguing back just has everybody thinking he’s barking mad, as posh limeys are wont to say.

The supernatural stuff is old hat, the “writing a screenplay” business is leaned on entirely too heavily (padding an already added-on ending) and the cruel touches just dampen spirits as the lighter moments are few and so flatly-written they don’t give this material the sparkle it once did.

I haven’t seen the play in ages, and all I remember from the experience is thinking “This is stodgy,” so it’s understandable that one would want to brighten it up with a little cinematic history. But Coward’s jokes were wittier than most of what we hear here.

Stevens mugs, Fisher vamps and Mann and Dench do their damnedest. But you can’t improve on Coward, and there’s no re-animating this corpse.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for suggestive references and some drug material. 

Cast: Dan Stevens, Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann and Judi Dench

Credits: Directed by Edward Hall, script by Nick Moorcroft, Meg Leonard  and Piers Ashworth, based on the play by Noel Coward. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:39

A local heroine, high school hoops star back in the down, is now a police detective in this seven episode series. Jean Smart plays her mom.

A murder mystery, something new from Kate? Count me present. April 18.

March 1, watch that broad with the scissors, the one they call “The Stylist.”

Sure, we couldn’t get our hair done at all for months and months. And now that we can visit a salon (in most places) THIS cautionary thriller comes along.