Movie Nation

Of all the mob hits and Mafia massacres you’ve read about or seen dramatized in the movies, nothing compares to a Capo eyeballing a kids’ soccer team, then arranging for them to meet with “an accident” during their trip to Venezuela.

They were Canadian. And the reason that happened? The Montreal Sicilian mob needed a means to smuggle cocaine into the country. Who’s going to dig around searching the bodies of dead children?

That’s the cold-blooded crime at the heart of “Mafia, Inc.,” a gritty Canadian mob saga about two families, tied to each other through haberdashery and blood.

Director Daniel Grou (TV’s “Vikings”) and screenwriter Sylvain Guy (“Louis Cyr”) crafted a workmanlike saga out of the non-fiction book of the same title by André Cédilot and André Noël. There’s nothing flashy about retelling this mostly-“true” story. A long flashback shoved into the second act makes the tale unfold more clumsily than gracefully. But the violence, waiting for more violence and intrigues make this a compelling, highly-watchable account of corruption, murderous mob ambition and family ties in French Canadian Quebec.

Veteran Italian character actor Sergio Castellitto plays Franceso Paterno, boss of a Montreal crime family looking for an opening to ensure his legacy and wealth for another generation. A planned bridge connecting Sicily and mainland Italy in the early ’90s seems to be his answer. With mob-connected politicians and a mob-friendly government, an “investment opportunity” promises to allow Mafia money laundering on an epic scale on the multi-billion Euro project.

He needs to keep a low profile, keep the peace between rival gangs in Montreal. He’ll divvy up territory among bikers, Irish, Lebanese and and others, reduce the violence and streamline the flow of drugs.

But promoting made-man Vince (Marc-André Grondin of “Goon”) above his own son Giacomo “Jack” Paterno (Donny Falsetti) creates hard feelings. We know blood’ll be spilled over that, sooner or later.

Vince Gamache may have his own history with the family. But there are other ties. Vince’s dad (Gilbert Sicotte) is longtime tailor to the Sicilian-Canadians. And Francesco’s youngest son (Mike Ricci) is in love with the tailor’s daughter, Vince’s sister Sofia (Mylène Mackay) and plans to marry her.

The long-codified tropes of Mafia movies pepper the script. But these conventions, rituals and the like aren’t fetishized here in the manner of too many ollywood films. We aren’t buried under such details.

The most colorful supporting player is Tommy (Antonio Iammatteo), the pushy, greedy informant whose mob nickname is “Yap Yap.”

The violence is sometimes abrupt, sometimes set-up and slow marched across the screen, but always horrific.

And yes, the (nameless) cops are watching. But with mob-tied figures in government in Italy and Canada, how many steps will the Mounties be behind our villains? Two? Three?

Castellitto gives Francesco a silky veneer that makes his explosions of temper all the more alarming. He’s played Enzo Ferrari on the screen, has been in films all over the world (“Chronicles of Narnia,” “Mostly Martha” seen here). But this is a character he can really tear into.

Grondin’s take on Vince has a bracing heedlessness to it. Documentaries on the mob always remind us that these guys aren’t rocket scientists. Native cunning fights a mental tug of war with recklessness, risky impulsiveness. Grondin lets us see this guy struggle to be crafty, a man only at his sharpest when raw instinct has to take over.

The best thing about the script and direction is that we rarely get too far ahead of it. We think we see what’s coming, but you never know.

Much of the appeal here, the film’s only real novelty, is its setting. These are Canadian monsters, seemingly out-of-place, running roughshod over their countrymen the way the Yakuza alarm and shock well-mannered Japan.

Watch “Mafia, Inc.” and you’ll never buy into the maple-syrup/hockey-mad “nice neighbors to the North” stereotype again.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity

Cast:  Sergio Castellitto, Marc-André Grondin, Mylène Mackay, Gilbert Sicotte, Antonio Iammatteo

Credits: Directed by Daniel Grou, script by Sylvain Guy, based on the book by André Cédilot and André Noël. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 2:23

“The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity” is an effects-and-exposition-stuffed character-cluttered Chinese martial arts fantasy — heavy on the fantasy, light on the martial arts.

Dammit.

But rather than let the collage of images above suffice, I suppose I should give you more of a taste of what it’s like lest you invest two hours and twelve minutes of your time unwisely.

There are these priests in ancient Never Never China charged with defending against the Evil Serpent, “the first of all evil things,” whenever it rears its viperous head.

The assorted priests are summoned to the Imperial City to defend it against serpent skullduggery and other demons.

Two of the priests meet cute — and hostile. But you just know a bromance is aborning whenever Qing Ming (Mark Chao) throws down with Boya (Allen Deng),

“You talk the way you fight. Without thinking!”

They’ve all taken on “the austere duty of saving lives,” so they cast protection spells and cope with magical portal incursions into the city and infighting and suspicion in their ranks when people are murdered.

They conjure and fly and fight and meet on digital soundstage dreamscapes, camera circling them as they get profound or romantic or sarcastic.

“Are you saying I’m stupid?” “Sure am!” “Aren’t you the clever one?” “I will NOT be mocked!”

There are these guardians they’re teamed up with to supposedly “capture demon energy.” Is this based on a video game? Anyway, the guardians are whimsically-named Mad Painter, Crimsons Bird, White Tiger, Black Tortoise and Blue Dragon.

“Just my luck. Of all the guardians, I get the Blue Dragon.”

Yup, just your luck.

The effects are fine, although some of the digital landscapes are more convincing than others. The acting is generic and black, more a matter of makeup and costume and slo-mo digital fight choreography than “performance.”

It’s not thrilling, not romantic and lacking either, not much fun at all.

The priest and demonic deaths are impressive, even though the script is such a hash one is inclined to be culturally insensitive and call it “nonsense.”

MPA Rating: TV-14, violence, a little blood

Cast: Mark Chao, Allen Deng, Ziwen Wang, Jessie Li

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jingming Guo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:12

The personal essay documentary is kind of old-hat now. Everyone who powers up a camera is at least tempted to pull a Michael Moore and make their movie largely about themselves and some sort of personal investigation or journey.

Mark Blumberg’s “The Act of Reading” harks back to the pre-Michael M. origins of the genre, to Ross McElwee’s quirky, droll and revealing personal journey films “Sherman’s March” and “Bright Leaf.” That’s the tone Blumberg goes for here — dry, personally insightful. He doesn’t deliver, but that seems to be his goal.

“Reading” is set up as an act of contrition. Blumberg flunked 11th grade English twenty years ago because he dodged reading “Moby Dick” and failed to file an essay on it. The film endeavors to “finish that book report I should have done for you,” to take us on a journey into the book, maybe show some appreciation of that teacher.

We meet people connected by blood to “Moby Dick’s” author, visit museums with ties to Herman Melville, hear from academics on the importance of reading, learn about dyslexia, see scenes from amateurish plays based on Melville’s life and adapting “Moby Dick,” and we hang with a great teacher in Austin, Texas.

Vicki Hebert wasn’t Blumberg’s teacher. Seeing the way she charms and challenges her high school class — dissecting this 19th century novel, breaking it into component parts, parsing characters and many a revealing sentence from the book, donning a facial tattoo in the style of Queequeg the harpoonist from the story — we can infer that maybe Blumberg would’ve read the damned thing had she been his teacher.

That could have been his organizing outline. And maybe his debut feature documentary wouldn’t be so scattered, indulgent and flat-footed.

The classroom material is rich, with Hebert facing the “mutiny in class” that she’s seen every other time she’s taught the novel, a “Why are you making us do this?” day. Kids break into study groups or fumble about in the darkness of the prose on their own. Or give up and go jump on their trampoline.

Blumberg frequently cuts into the annual New Bedford Whaling Museum “marathon reading” of “Moby Dick,” scores of fans watching, listening and pitching in to read the novel aloud, start to finish on a snowy winter’s weekend.

That’s where he meets Peter Gansevoort Whittemore, great great grandson of the author, a guy who takes his heritage seriously even as he jokes he’d never own up to that in high school “because everybody in school HATED ‘Moby Dick.'”

Blumberg’s wife also meets a Melville descendant, a yoga teacher and aspiring playwright named Elizabeth Doss, who scripted a play of the author’s life, imagining him as a woman as she struggled with marriage and getting the book into a publishable form.

Doss and Blumberg’s wife act out some of this play.

That isn’t really where this film went off the rails for me, but it hints at the mission creep to come. We meet the extended Blumberg family at dinner, drift off to a series of brother-to-brother chats where Blumberg finds out why his nurse/paddle-boarder sibling “never reads.” “Dyslexia” is his (self) diagnosis.

So we wander off into an exploration of that.

We’re treated to some on-the-spectrum/way-off-topic bickering in the filmmaker’s marriage, and ponder our clean-cut protagonist/director in fresh ways.

And we wonder what happened to the promising idea of “finishing the essay” on the book he long-ago promised his teacher, Janet Werner, a mea culpa picture that celebrates teachers, reading, a book that’s “required” and tough but dense, decipherable and the very definition of “literary fiction.”

Because that movie, with a sheepish protagonist humbled by his past and humbled further by learning about this book, why reading matters, why kids fear it and critics and academics now exalt it, would be worth watching.

The fact that he re-gathers his family, who tell him that very fact to his face over dinner for the finale, isn’t funny or cute and doesn’t let him off the hook, either.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Vicki Hebert, Riccardo Pitts-Wiley, Janet Werner, Peter Gansevoort Whittemore, Elizabeth Doss, John Cleary, Maryanne Wolfe, Mark Blumberg and family

Credits: Directed by Mark Blumberg. A Barrow House release.

Robin Wright’s directing debut has a quiet, Earthy elegance about it that mirrors our image of the her as an actress and a public figure. “Land” takes the director and leading lady out of her natural milieu and puts her in nature in a spare, simple parable about the healing power of solitude.

We don’t hear her name, not straight away. But we do see her suffering, riven by grief, visiting a therapist. The hoary bromides, “reach out to people” and get them to help you cope won’t work here.

“Why would I want anyone else to feel this?”

Her sister (Kim Dickens) sees it, too and struggles to get a promise — Please…”don’t hurt yourself…for me.“

But Emma, as she eventually reveals, has come to a decision. We see the closing at the realtor’s (Brad Leland), the rented SUV and U-Haul, and follow them as she heads to the Unibomber-remote cabin she’s bought in the mountains of Wyoming.

“You shouldn’t have any problems with trespassers,” the grizzled real estate agent jokes. She didn’t have to tell him what she’s told others. “It’s really difficult to be around other people.”

She seems out of her depth and naive to the agent, utterly underestimating the off-the-grid lifestyle she’s about to immerse herself in. But she’s got her few possessions, a not-quite weatherproof long-empty cabin, a “Game Processing Handbook” and a little other literature to guide her.

Fishing? Setting snares for trapping? Planting a garden? No problem. She’s got canned goods to survive on until that works out.

But we’ve seen her ditch her cell phone and send the rent truck back to town. She is beyond assistance when things go wrong.

The first “accident” isn’t fatal. The second mishap involves a bear visit. She dreams of a husband and child that are no longer with her, ghosts she packed for her move. Before long, those are hunger-driven hallucinations.

Good thing the handsome trapper (Demián Bichir) stumbles over her. Good thing he knows an above-the-call-of-duty nurse (Sarah Dawn Pledge).

The screenplay by Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam is a cut-and-paste collection of archetypes marching stoically through a trail of “suffering in solitude” tropes. These were around long before Grizzly Adams taught Mountain Man ways to “Jeremiah Johnson,” before the Old Mariner instructed Josh Lucas sailboat living for his “Year in Mooring.”

Movies like this undersell the drudgery of surviving on your own. PBS did a series, “Frontier House,” that laid out the grueling math of simple firewood stockpiling. It’s exhausting and never-ending, as is getting water, killing game.

Such tales are on surer ground underscoring a single harsh truth. “The grieving process” might be the cruelest euphemism in the psychotherapist’s playbook.

Wright’s beautiful film features elegantly-composed shots, many of them “magic hour” sunsets with our heroine sipping her coffee or taking a tub bath outdoors in the golden light.

The acting is superb and spare, as you might expect. Wright could run an acting school and the cinema would be the richer for it. Here, it’s not just her but her co-stars who master understatement. Sarah Dawn Pledge is the least experienced of the lot and gets across big emotions and realizations in a single, simple look or gesture. Dazzling.

The formidable Bechir fills those Sage of the Mountains boots with ease.

“Only a person who has never been hungry would think starving is a good way to die.”

“Why are you helping me?” “You are in my path.”

But if you’re looking for surprises, look elsewhere. As a fan of this “Wild,””Into the Wild,” “All is Lost,” survival genre, I can say there is nothing here you can’t see coming, not from that breathtaking mountainside vantage point.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, brief strong language, and partial nudity |

Cast: Robin Wright, Demián Bichir, Sarah Dawn Pledge, Kim Dickens and Brad Leland

Credits: Directed by Robin Wright, script by Jesse Chatham, Erin Dignam. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:29

Dystopian enough for you?

Iain Glenn is the one face and voice I recognize in this Berlin FF premiere. Striking to look at. https://youtu.be/hw0m4B6UkHA

Back in a simpler or — let’s face it — more “simplistic” time, we didn’t seem to have this “bullying” problem that has taken hold of the national consciousness this past decade.

We thought we understood “Bullying is bad” as a culture. Movies from the dawn of Hollywood reinforced an idea that became a national credo, and even worked its way into our foreign policy.

How was Hitler described to us? A bully. We all got it. You don’t let a bully get away with it

From FDR and Jimmy Stewart’s “Destry” to Andy Griffith and columnist Mike Royko, the lesson was always the same. You stand up to bullies. They come for you, you “aim for the nose” Royko remembered his old man lecturing him.

But something has shifted in the culture, and that’s one of the threads tugged at in “Bullied,” the latest documentary on this subject.

Some of what we and who we see in “Bullied” is so familiar that you may confuse Professor Thomas Keith’s film with “Bully” or other films on the subject.

But where this collection of interviews, of schoolyard and school bus cell phone videos, CCTV footage, reality TV and Donald Trump rallies breaks from the pack is looking at root causes of bullying and trying yet another version of “What we can do about it” solutions.

Keith, who teaches Philosophy and Gender Studies at Cal State Polytechnic, gives us more anecdotes from grieving parents whose bullied children died — often at their own hands — and traumatized kids talking about facing bullying even now.

He also rounded up scores of academics as well as parents turned activists and media analysts to talk about “Why kids bully” in addition to repeating the awful statistics on teen suicides spiking in an age of cyber-bullying and five years of relentless coverage of a “Bully in Chief.”

Yes, it’s another thing that got a lot worse during the Trump years.

We hear about “Bully Culture,” how it is born because “bullying is a route to popularity…Kids would not bully if there was not a social benefit.”

Who gets bullied? Kids who don’t conform — “any minority,” Black or Hispanic or “foreign” or “LGBTQ” or the disabled or “on the spectrum” children with “social deficit” issues.

Why is such such a problem in youth? Because the “impulse control” area of the brain — the pre-frontal cortex — is the last part to develop.

Not that plenty of people never outgrow that impulse control. It’s almost triggering to see the athletes, coaches, rappers and others captured on tape name-calling, threatening, gay bashing and picking fights.

We see examples of “Bully Media,” from faux tough-guy Trump’s taunts from various podiums to reality TV’s other textbook illusion of conflict, the idea from assorted “Real Housewives” shows that “women (going) at each other is a natural state,” reinforced by faked, dramatized conflicts on every show in the Andy Cohen empire.

The controversial and canceled Netflix adaptation of the book “13 Reasons Why,” about bullying and why a character kills herself, is linked directly in a “Here’s how to kill yourself as a way out” connection to the suicides of bullied teens.

As this review suggests, “Bullied” covers new ground even as it feels, at times, as if it’s all over the place. Remember, an academic made it, not a professional filmmaker.

It’s still a useful addition to the national conversation, even if we’ve lost that cultural cohesion that recognized this hateful practice as wrong, to be resisted at every age, even when it’s a rich, incompetent businessman who never got in a real fight in his entitled life who lied and cheated his way into the Oval Office.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast:  Ron Avi Astor, Jennifer Davis, Kimya Dennis, Kirk Smalley, Eric James Borges, Thomas Keith, many others.

Credits: Directed by Thomas Keith. A Majestas Group release.

Running time: 1:07

A lot of thrillers begin with or feature a prison-bus break-out as a signature scene — “48 Hrs.” and “The Fugitive,” for instance. But here’s one that’s all about the break-out, or break-in depending on your point of view.

“Below Zero (Bajocero)” is a simple, brutal and harrowing Spanish thriller about an assault on a prison transport bus outbound from Cuenca in the harsh Spanish winter. Director and co-writer Lluís Quílez (“Out of the Dark”) throws misdirection plays at us that bely its simplicity and reliance on basically one location to make an action feature with quirky characters that set up quirkier twists.

That location is the interior of a maximum security prison bus, basically an “armored bunker” on wheels as the driver Martín (Javier Gutiérrez) declares, at one point. He’s a veteran cop on his first “transfer” in a long time.

He’s a family man teamed-up with the brutish Montesinos (Isak Férriz) to haul six dangerous inmates from one prison to another. “Discretion” and “surprise” dictate that they do this in the middle of the night.

But as we see the inmates rounded up to leave, we see one procure a key, and hide it even where a strip search won’t give it away. Ahem.

Montesinos is brusque, no nonsense, inclined to throw his weight around. Martín is the “rules aren’t there to be ‘relaxed'” and “You can’t beat up every dirtbag who gets in your face” stickler.

We’ll see who’s the smarter cop and who’s tougher when the bus is waylaid on a foggy surface road on this longest night of their lives.

The inmates are a colorful crew of varying ages and “types.” The dangerous Romanian human trafficker Mihei (Florin Opritescu) is the one they’re most worried about. Motor-mouthed Gollum (Andrés Gertrúdix) is a nuisance, young Nano (Patrick Criado) has as many tattoos as any of them, aged Pardo (Miquel Gelabert) is in for some major financial crime, tough-as-nails Rei (Édgar Vittorino) simmers in silence, unless you bring up his sister.

And then there’s the cunning and charismatic older con (Luis Callejo), who insists on going by (in Spanish with English subtitles) “my stage name, Ramis.” Like the rest, Ramis promises to be a handful. That’s why each has his own steel-walled cell for the ride.

And then the ride is intercepted. Do we know who pulled this off, “took care” of the escort police cruiser and blew out a tire? Do “they” know who has come to release them, or just one of them, with the possibility the attackers will kill everyone else on board?

After a few seriously illogical moments setting up this backroad hijacking, leaving wounded Martín on his own with six dangerous men, “Below Zero” settles in to a siege filled with surprises.

Callejo, who was Joseph in the Biblical thriller “Risen,” makes a colorful creep who can’t be trusted, even if he’s showing you his hand.

Gutiérrez, a Netflix staple thanks to “Assassin’s Creed,” “The Motive,” “Marshlands” and “The Occupant,” makes a believably over-matched cop who finds the nerve to bluff when his life is on the line.

But as “types,” these characters are all just “Who dies or lies next?” pawns to be played with in the Fernando Navarro and Quílez screenplay, one that considers every way to get into and out of a locked “armored bunker” with whoever’s trying to get at them outside, and a dozen ways to die inside.

It’s no “48 Hrs.” or “Fugitive,” but “Below Zero” is a good one, with or without subtitles.

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

Cast: Javier Gutiérrez, Isak Férriz, Florin Opritescu, Karra Elejalde, Andrés Gertrúdix, Patrick Criado, Miquel Gelabert, Édgar Vittorino and Luis Callejo

Credits: Directed by Lluís Quílez, script by Fernando Navarro, Lluís Quílez. A Moreno Films release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:46

Writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford’s debut feature is as sober a treatment of the “date rape” drug experience as the cinema has ever shown us. “Test Pattern” captures the “how,” immerses us in the “now” and shows us the lives brought to a standstill by the experience and the soul-crushing systemic failures of the aftermath.

What Renisha (Brittany S. Hall) sees in Evan (Will Brill) that first night at an Austin bar is anybody’s guess. She’s beautiful, put-together, with an electric smile and a ready laugh. And she’s just there for a girls’ night out, dancing and drinks.

But one look, one dance and awkward, underdressed, unshaven and slightly balding Evan has to have her number. Even though he has no clue how to go about it, even though his clumsy approach isn’t particularly charming, she consents.

There’s “consent” a few dates later, too.

An interracial couple is born. We see that first date, hear her ambitions and learn he’s a tattooist. But just as we’re underlining our “out of his league and class” biases, raising an eyebrow on the mismatch — which has a whiff of white privilege about it — Evan delivers one of those compliments that stick. He won’t hear of her belittling her hope to “help” people and society in a future job.

“I feel like you always know what you’re talking about.”

A doting love affair, with breakfasts of “Your favorite,” affirming “I love yous” in every good-bye, cohabitation, new “ink” and new braids for her and the supportive confidence that has her in a new development director job at a non-profit, they’re destined to be together.

And then “that night” happens.

Ford takes great pains to show us ways you don’t need a “date” for “date rape” to happen. The way it plays out here is quietly heart-breaking, good judgement overruled by a pushy friend and the pushy guys whom the pushy friend doesn’t see as a threat.

Drugs are involved. Ford and her leading lady make us experience the dazed, reduced-capacity inability to respond and escape, the confusion and the guilt.

How will Evan respond to this test? How will “the system?”

Using flashbacks to show telling moments in Renisha and Evan’s relationship, Ford hints at the blur of emotions sweeping over her heroine. And Hall makes us feel much of what Renisha does, a wide spectrum ranging from embarrassed resignation to humiliation to frustration.

Ford has made a downbeat, realistic treatment of this subject that doesn’t have a built-in call-to-arms as part of its make-up. That’s implied. Nobody, no couples, should have to go through this.

MPA Rating: Unrated, adult subject matter, alcohol and drug use

Cast: Brittany S. Hall, Will Brill, Gail Bean

Credits: Written and directed by Shatara Michelle Ford. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:23

They don’t hand out Oscars to every casting director, the person who puts pictures and names in front of filmmakers to give them ideas of how to turn their scripted characters into flesh and blood actors.

Lynn Stalmaster, “The Master Caster,” the most famous person ever to do this job, got one. The guy who cast “Superman,” “Tootsie,” “In the Heat of the Night” and scores of iconic films, has died. He was 93.

Look at that list of credits. Got to meet him once, as a cub reporter, and he pointed out the obvious — that no, he didn’t put Brando in “Superman” or Michelle in “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday.” Stars are typically brainstormed by writers, directors and producers.

Casting directors can join in on that brainstorming and have a ready supply of ideas and glossy photos (back then) to show to filmmakers as suggestions that they’ve gleaned from reading the script.

And everybody who isn’t Dustin Hoffman or Pollack on “Tootsie” — maybe even Jessica Lange — came out of Stalmaster’s suggestions, arranged auditions and the like.

Look at that list of credits and smile.