Movie Nation

It’d be hard to overstate just how likeable Netflix’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” movies are. Cute cast, realistic (if affluent) situations, upbeat messaging and first love-affirming, precisely what a teen rom com should be.

And if Netflix wants to wring the life out of the “franchise,” even that doesn’t ding that likability. The third film in the “trilogy,” “To All the Boys: Always and Forever” is just as likable, manages a couple of lump in the throat moments and a candy-colored view of high school, senior class trip (to NYC), spring break with family (to Seoul), prom, a wedding and graduation.

But as pretty as this is and as cheerful as everybody in it can be, this is seriously dull stuff. I mean, watching prom backdrop paint dry dull. The stakes are low, the conflict is realistically banal and all the edges are rubbed off one and all, as if they had any to start with.

I’m all for a teen romance that isn’t all sex, beer pong and rock’n roll or hip hop. Young kids especially could stand slow-your-roll, grow-up-gradually messaging. But 16-and-up? These play like movies your parents want you to see. And we all know what that means.

Lara Jean (Lana Condor) and Peter (Noah Centineo) have known each other forever, and “found” each two movies ago. Now it’s senior year, and it’s go-big-or-go-home time.

He’s got a lacrosse scholarship to Stanford. Will the aspiring English Lit major be able to join him there? LA sweats that, big time.

No, she won’t. That’s fine. Plan B, she goes to a great school close by and maybe transfers. Peter rolls with her “Berkeley” news and other changes to the “dream” — in which LJ fantasizes about their entire futures together, at least through that house with the picket fence.

“We’re gonna get through this” is played with the gravitas of a cancer diagnosis.

But as is the way of such screen romances, the “drift apart” is just beginning. Will they make it? Will they make it through prom? Will they “make it” prom night?

Breathless fans rightly want answers.

The dialogue is blandly adorable, with but a single swear word in 110 minutes of screen time.

The lovers “burn low and slow…we’re like brisket.” Sadly, the same could be said of the movie.

With every sparkly trip to the bowling alley, every romantic trip to the “Lock Tower” (lovers leave locks) in Seoul, every “promposal” leading up to prom, “Always and Forever” just seems to take always and forever to get on with it.

Peter’s estranged dad (Henry Thompson), LJ’s remarrying dad (John Corbett), a high school feud that turns nice, the contents here have the taste and “safe” quality of baby food.

Love the characters, love the colorful, artificial, overdressed (“Cute shoes” is a running gag line.)”Grease!” color palette and “High School Musical” production design.

But there’s more to life than “To limo, or not to limo?” And pandemic escape or not, there should be a lot more to a movie high school romance than this.

“Always and Forever” is still likable, still cute, but utterly out of ideas.

MPA Rating: PG

Cast:  Lana Condor, Noah Centineo, Janel Parrish, Anna Cathcart, Madeleine Arthur, Henry Thomas and John Corbett

Credits: Directed by Michael Fimognari, script by  Katie Lovejoy based on the Jenny Han novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

“Yeah, I’ll do your little movie,” the pitch meeting ended, probably a short one, probably handled by phone. But the Oscar winning actor had one rider he insisted on in his contract.

“I’ll do it so long as I don’t have to talk.”

Say this for the quixotic career of Nicolas Cage, Academy Award winner, “Moonstruck” star, “National Treasure” national treasure — the man knows his brand. And while his contemporaries may grimace through one straight-to-video dog after another, silently seething at the status they’ve lost, ol’Nic just keeps burnishing that South by Southwest/Comic Con/C-movie nerd approved image.

Because collecting little checks, one right after the other, is just as good as a big payday every couple of years. Especially if, as he once told me in an interview, he needs the constant distraction of constant work. It keeps him sane.

And every so often, a “Joe” or “Color Out of Space” or “Mandy” comes along and has everybody saying, “I’ve ALWAYS thought Nic Cage was cool!”

“Willy’s Wonderland” isn’t one of those movies. But maybe “The Underbearable Weight of Massive Talent” will be. Or the Joe Exotic miniseries he will star in. Because with James Brown gone, THIS is “the hardest working man in show business.”

“Willy’s Wonderland” is a haunted theme park tale. A Camero-driving stranger (Cage) is bushwhacked on the road, a “helpful” tow truck driver (Chris Warner) picks him up — for a price.

And the owner of this theme park, Tex (Ric Reitz) is there to make him a deal. He’ll cover the car repairs if he’ll “stay the night cleaning” this abandoned but to-be-reopened funhouse attraction, Willy’s Wonderland.

It closed a few years back because “mommy ‘safety’ organizations shut us down.” But Tex has a dream.

The silent stranger takes off his sunglasses, dons a t-shirt like a “real employee,” and gets to work as the doors are padlocked behind him.

The Stranger brought his own case of Punch Cola with him. And every so often, his watch alarm goes off, he’ll gulp a punch and maybe take a break by playing pinball.

But those damned animatronic critters that fill this place? Their eyes follow him around. They come to malign life every time a cleaner comes.

“I’m gonna tear your EYES out and FEAST on your soul” doesn’t shake our man-with-a-cleaning mission.

Got to put down the mop, break out a knife or maybe break that mop handle in half as he furiously impales, guts, decapitates or strangles the creatures — who are eerily familiar, in non-copyright infringing ways.

There’s a murderous fairy with a hint of Tinkerbelle, a Banana Splits-ish gorilla, a Wally Gator here and H.R. PufnStuff there.

This place is like the Carowinds in Hell! If that’s not redundant

But these local teens keep trying to burn this place down because they know what happens inside.

“You’re not SAFE in there,” Liv (Emily Tosta) shouts. “We gotta get you OUT!”

The Stranger won’t listen, Liv won’t torch the place with him in it, so she goes to fetch him, and five of her friends follow, turning this into a “Dead Teenagers Movie,” with all that implies.

The fights are competently-handled and arrive at the proper intervals for fanboys to howl in gory appreciation.

Veteran character actress Beth Grant plays the sheriff, who does all she can to keep Liv out of trouble. The older players register in the expected ways. The younger ones? Nobody stands out.

Director Kevin Lewis powers through this thing (the odd mispronounced “blown” line makes it into the film) as if he knows the script is crap and that his leading lady’s not the best at registering shock, fear or fury and there’s no point in looking for a better take.

But Cage, dyed hair, beard and boots, brings home the B-movie bacon, as usual. It’s just seriously undercooked this time out.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Emily Tosta, Beth Grant, Ric Reitz, Chris Warner

Credits: Directed by Kevin Lewis, script by G.O. Parsons. A Screen Media release

Running time: 1:28

“Red Dot” is a savage if not wholly satisfying “flip-the-script” stalked in the wilderness thriller whose cleverness comes from its subtext.

We’ve seen scads of these “slickers in the wild” stories since “Deliverance” and “Southern Comfort.” Sometimes, they begin with a provocation. Often they don’t, with kid-sacrifice cults or rural rednecks robbing innocent passing travelers and the like as the “motivation.” Not here.

We’ve heard the vacationing young Stockholm couple (Nanna Blondell, Anastasios Soulis) make cracks about how folks are in “The North.” We get a hint of the pickup trucks, beards and firearms culture. And as Nadja (Blondell) is Black, racism rears its head.

But when they’re on the run, fleeing hunters they figure they crossed when they dinged their pick-up-up at the filling station, the judgmental college grads have a dilemma.

When everybody you encounter is bearded, rough around the edges and armed, who can you trust? How can you tell friend from murderous foe?

Neither hotheaded Nadja nor half-passive David (Soulis) says it, but damned if the viewer doesn’t think it.

“Well, they all look alike.”

That’s an ingenious inversion in the formula of Alain Darborg (he also directed) and Per Dickson’s script. Rushing to judgement, leaning on stereotypes and fearing what those stereotypes have taught you isn’t going to do anybody any favors.

That big twist dresses up a formulaic thriller that telegraphs its punches once it moves on from David’s proposal and the bickering marriage that’s set up in the opening act.

Maybe a trip to “Bear Valley,” a little cross-country skiing and camping with Boris the dog will set things to right. Maybe Nadja will get around to telling David that she’s pregnant.

That last paragraph sets up a strictly pro-forma thriller where that first “Dueling Banjos” moment doesn’t actually need banjos for us to know what’s coming.

Winter, remote Sweden, “Bear” valley, locals with what they figure is a murderous beef or two with the couple. Tick off everything in your mind that could happen to put them on the run through the snow, and that will happen to them as they run, and you won’t be disappointed.

The performances are solid, with Blondell (“Sisters in Arms,” and she’s in the upcoming “Black Widow”) giving a furious edge to being a Black med student in lily white Sweden.

The best scene is the one with the first “Red Dot” in it, but other action beats are handled well enough to pass muster.

And the twists only pay off if you let yourself fall into the same trap our hunted Stockholmies do. You will.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, disturbing images, profanity

Cast: Nanna Blondell, Anastasios Soulis

Credits: Directed by Alain Darborg, script by Alain Darborg, Per Dickson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25

March 25 from Shudder.

Folksy Midwestern culotte culture comes to sunny, silly Florida in “Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” a not-quite-romp cooked up by “Bridesmaids” breakout Kristen Wiig and the actress-screenwriter who scripted that breakout hit, Annie Mumolo.

It’s like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch given a lot of money so that they could hire every showbiz pal they have as they tried to fill 107 minutes of screen time.

Say this for Wiig and Mumolo, who co-wrote this. Whatever points they score against Nebraska in the opening scenes, there’s eerily-amusing accuracy to their (dated) take on the Sunshine State. The salmon and teal, canary yellows, lilac to lavender Disneycolor palette, the fruity cocktails and tourists, the Jimmy Buffett and uh, Bertie Higgins on the soundtrack? Nailed it.

Sure, they had to go to Mexico (Cancún) to mimic the Florida of tourist lore, but whatever works.

Divorced and widowed Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) are Nebraska furniture saleswomen joined at the hip and the lip. They do everything together, including discouraging customers who might want to buy the sofa they enjoy sitting on together at the store, chattering away.

Their voices are high and Midwestern nasal, and each’s inane banter tumbles over the other’s — a dialogue/duologue that ponders the Big Questions of life.

“It’s odd to think that all the raccoons in the world are sleeping right now.”

Say what?

“Listen, I don’t really know more than I’ve already said. And some of what I said I’m even sure I actually know.”

When the store shuts down and they’re tossed out of their authoritarian “Talking Club” (Phyllis Smith of “The Office” is in it, “SNL’s” Vanessa Bayer plays the martinet who rules it with an iron first), the “girls” have to admit “We’ve lost our shimmer!”

Barb would like to see her friend “get out there.”

Star? “Men find me disgusting, and I’m OK with it.”

But a pal (Wendy McClendon-Covey of “The Goldbergs”) goes on and on about this resort she just visited on the coast of Florida. Barb & Star decide on a vacation.

They’ll go, soak up the sun, sip “boat drinks,” ride the banana boat and maybe meet someone. Greeted by a Disney Deco dazzling and amusing production number on arrival, they’re gobsmacked and you can’t help but get your hopes up that “Barb & Star” have found their shimmer, and the movie has found its voice.

There’s even a singer-pianist (Mark Jonathan Davis) who is just killing it in the lounge with a tune of his own invention (actually, Wiig co-wrote it).

“I love boobies. I love gazongas. I love knockers and chimichangas!“

But this is where the Supervillain plot settles in and the movie, waterlogged already, all but sinks.

The supervillain (Wiig in a second role, in Kibuki pancake makeup and alien-blue contacts) has a bone to pick with this town, a diabolical plot to destroy it and a lovesick minion (Jamie Dornan) she’s sent to seal its fate.

Dornan, the once-and-always Christian Grey of “Fifty Shades of” You-Know-Who, is the surprise delight in the casting here. His secret agent character, Edgar Pagét, gets swept up in Barb & Star’s company, gets drunk and into a compromising position with them. Next thing you know, he’s singing and dancing about this new love he’s found.

Christian Grey, singing and dancing. A lot of ladies would pay to see that, right? But that’s the lone highlight of the last two thirds of this lighthearted but heavy-handed farce.

It’s the sort of film that defines “culottes” as an opening credit, and tries to wring laughs out of “hot dog soup” (the gals’ Midwestern specialty), the goofy stuff the ladies pack, the way they apply sunscreen and Damon Wayans Jr.

Wayans, the least funny member of that extended family, is on the cusp of amusing here, as a hapless second agent sent to assist the first.

Another of The Lady’s henchmen is little Yoyo (Reyn Doi), a kid whose cover is as a paper boy who loves singing along to Streisand.

There might be enough here to make this comedy zip by. Wiig can be hilarious, and there are two of her here. And Mumolo didn’t just script “Bridesmaids,” she’s had supporting parts in many a comedy from “The Boss” to “Bad Moms.”

But entrusting this to a first-time feature director with episodic TV and showbiz documentaries dominating his resume proves unfortunate. The funny bits drift past their payoff, the pace flags (88 minute movie stretched out to 107) and the light, tongue-in-cheek tone, the riffing banter between the leads isn’t enough to save it.

Worst of all, they only gave Dornan one quite-funny number, and neither Wiig nor Mumolo have a movie moment that’s up to that.

MPA Rating:PG-13 for crude sexual content, drug use and some strong language 

Cast: Kristen Wiig, Annie Mumolo, Jamie Dornan, Damon Wayons Jr. and Wendy McClendon-Covey,

Credits: Directed by Josh Greenbaum, script by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:47

Better late than never, right?

Yeah, I missed getting a preview screening when Hulu picked up this Neon comedy last summer. But with Valentine’s Day coming up and everybody hunting anew for something romantic to watch, I figured I’d catch up with this Andy Samberg comedy.

Hulu is running a free month trial promotion, so if it isn’t on your streaming menu, here’s a suggestion. Sign up, even if only for February. You’ve got “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” coming up in a week or so. Stream “Framing Britney Spears” if you missed it on FX, “Mrs. America,” “The Great” too. Then see what the fuss was over “Ted Lasso” and hit “Palm Springs” to see if this is all worth sealing the Hulu deal.

We all know Andy Samberg’s game, albeit the tamer TV-friendly version. But it isn’t the novelty of unfiltered drugs, profanity and Samberg masturbation gags that’s surprising in this R-rated riff on “Groundhog Day.”

And J.K. Simmons playing a comical stalker with a grudge? Not much of a stretch to imagine that.

It’s “Cristin Milioti unleashed” that sells “Palm Springs.” We’ve never seen the “mother” on TV’s “How I Met Your Mother” this quick, coarse, crude and hilarious. Give a good actress a script that plays to her strengths, and watch out!

Who knew Milioti — she was also in “The Mindy Project” — had a soft spot for gonzo, self-absorbed, bad decisions-loving irresponsible sister-of-the-bride types? She’s found her sweet spot.

The set up — a weekend “destination wedding” in Palm Springs. Nyles (Samberg) is there as “Misty’s boyfriend,” but when we see bridesmaid Misty (Meredith Hagner) submit to his carnal impulse the morning of the wedding, we know they’re done.

“It’s not you, it’s me” or “It’s not me, it’s you.” You decide.

“Hey Misty, will you kill me?”

Nyles is drinking. A lot. The wedding reception has everyone dressed to the nines, and Nyles tipsy in shorts and Hawaiian shirt, swilling one beer (“Akupara” for Google Easter Egg hunters) after another, like he doesn’t give a rip, then grabbing the mike and moving everybody to tears toasting the newlyweds.

He locks eyes with the sister of the bride, Sarah (Milioti), tries to dazzle her by floating across the crowded dance floor, expertly mimicking every dancer he stands next to.

He flirts. They chat. They wander the desert just off the edge of the oasis resort, and that’s when Nyles gets shot with arrows, hunted by the hulking, pitiless “Roy” (Simmons). He crawls to a glowing cave and shouts for Sarah to “Stay back,” and she doesn’t.

Damned if she doesn’t wake up, just like him, the next AM — in the same place she was the day before, only as we see that same day play out, this time it’s from her exasperated point of view. She’s hysterical, furious and cursing, “What did you DO?”

Is he “The Antichrist?” Nah, he’s only fooling about that. But this “purgatory,” or “glitch in the simulation” or ripple in the “indeterminate universe” is something he’s been stuck in. A while. And now she is, too.

Our heroine and hero have the remaining 75 minutes of the movie to make their peace with this pleasant-if-empty existence, find a way to make a suicide stick (“You never die.”) or reason their way out of this time loop, which may be a punishment for who they are, a Hell of their own making, or something a lot more arbitrary.

I love the idea of a shared, hellish “Groundhog Day” joined mid-trap.

Collaborators Max Barbakow and screenwriter Andy Siara previously did a short film together, and make their feature film debut with a sci-fi comedy that, like the smartest ones, don’t lose themselves in “why” this is happening. They concentrate on how their characters cope.

The picture isn’t an unending laugh riot, and some parts of its “exit strategy” are clunky.

But a few quick-hit supporting turns register.  June Squib is a grandma hip enough to know what the kids are saying when they mean “Thank-you” these days — “Shukran.” Dale Dickey is a high-mileage honky tonk habitué. And Peter Gallagher plays the father-of-the-bride, condemned to repeatedly ask “Who IS he?” again and again, until that ONE scene where we KNOW he knows Nyles.

It. Is. A. Doozy.

The tone may be nihilistic, but the banter is flip, offhand and funny. Nyles’ toast to the happy couple includes the crack “who do NOT look like siblings,” because they (Camila Mendes and Tyler Hoechlin) do. Kind of.

And as with “Groundhog Day,” little dollops of profundity stop us short.

Life? “Nothing worse than going through this s— alone.”

The nature of time and probability? “What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present!”

Our leads make a cute couple, and again, Milioti holds her own with Samberg in even the wackiest bits. Of which there are a few.

And maybe Milioti gives the veteran funnyman something back. Thanks to her, a little heart-tugging seriousness makes this budding romance feel plausible in a daft, sometimes raunchy comedy in which almost everything else is implausible.

MPA Rating: R for sexual content, language throughout, drug use and some violence 

Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, J.K. Simmons, June Squibb, Meredith Hagner, Dale Dickey and Peter Gallagher.

Credits: Directed by Max Barbakow, script by Andy Siara. A Neon film on Hulu.

Running time: 1:30

To be fair, the #epicfails of romance dramedy “Hopeless Romantic” doesn’t feel written and directed by committee. Half a dozen directors and eight credited screenwriters don’t mean it plays “choppy” and uneven, like many an “anthology” film before it. There’s a consistent pace, vibe and tone pretty much throughout.

If it doesn’t work, it’s because the episodes intended to be funny only occasionally are, and the “edgy” scenes cross over into off-putting.

Lynda Boyd of Netflix’s “Virgin River” stars in this make-work project for every Canadian actress under the sun. She plays Anna, recently-widowed and attending a friend’s wedding.

She’s a cardiologist, able to define “broken heart syndrome” as a cardiac illness that sometimes accompanies the stress of a romantic loss. Yes, that’s a MUCH better title for the film as “Hopeless Romantic” has been used many times before.

Anna is fretting over the wedding reception speech she’s slated to give, and as she frets, she encounters, stumbles into and meets women who — with a little prompting –relate tales of heartbreak, “ghosting,” death, actionably inappropriate student/”teacher” canoodling and barely-avoided not-quite-a-date date rape.

There are seven such meetings/flashbacks, including Anna’s own.

The funniest is the comically-unhappy encounter a “cougar” (Amy Groening of “Goon”) has with the mother and sister of a punk boy toy she’s been hooking up with. Mom went to school with her and bullied her. And she’s still at it, as “Simmy” searches the 24 year-old’s apartment for pills she lost there. Her paramour’s jerk teen sister videos the entire humiliating affair, which doesn’t really end with an out-the-window escape.

Groening is the stand-out performer here.

Joy (Kirstin Howell) flashes back to her first boy-encounter, a semi-funny/tweens-misunderstand sex talk tale of the boy who threw rocks at her to get her attention when she was 11. She never solved the mysteries of attraction and romance, but not because of an avoided “birds and bees” talk with her rattled dad.

The only other lighthearted end-of-love memory has a tipsy ER doc (Susan Kent) relating stumbling into an “adult beginners” swim class that features another woman who assures her it’s a “great place to meet guys.” Ms. On the Prowl promptly sets her eyes on a ringless man of appropriate age, who happens to be the doctor’s just-divorced ex.

A couple of chuckles ensue.

Other stories, of a young woman struggling with the humiliations of dating in an age of “ghosting,” a young waitress recalling her first same-sex crush, that near date-rape thing, etc. are sadder, more flatly-played and intriguing only in how problematic some of them are.

The best connection to “anthology” as a genre is the film’s don’t-quite-work sequences weighing down the ones that do, or come close to a decent payoff.

“Mixed bag” comes with the “anthology film” territory.

MPA Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, sexual situations, profanity, innuendo

Cast: Lynda Boyd, Kirstin Howell, Francine Deschepper, Amy Groening, Katie Dorian, Susan Kent, Emily Power

Credits: Directed by Martine Blue, Deanne Foley, Latonia Hartery, Stephanie Joline, Ruth Lawrence and Megan Wennberg. Script by Martine Blue, Emily Bridger, Jay Dahl, Deanne Foley, Stephanie Joline, Ruth Lawrence, Iain Macleod and Megan Wennberg. A Game Theory release.

Running time: 1:26

An ancient treasure, an old old Spanish bank vault…say no more!

We meet them all at a tearful Italian dockside farewell.

A family is disembarking for France, looking for better opportunities than their tiny coastal village can provide them. Mamma is crying, but little Lucia is inconsolable. Mother and father area leaving, and taking her kid brother with them.

Tweenage Lucia (Marta Castiglia) insists, “I’m all grown UP now! I can work, too!”

But no, she’s not old enough to work and she’d be another mouth to feed. She must stay here, in her quaint, aging-and-dying village, a place younger people leave because there’s no work.

Mom may promise to be home by Christmas, that she’ll call and write, but Lucia knows she’ll be on her own, “Alone With Her Dreams.”

The debut feature of Paolo Licata is an adaptation of the novel “Picciridda – Con i piedi nella sabbia” by Catena Fiorello, a coming-of-age tale with some bite, a picturesque period piece that finds the ugliness whitewashed over in any small town and not just an Italian fishing village.

Lucia will learn this through her stern, scowling grandmother, called “Donna Maria” (Lucia Sardo) by her neighbors. It’s a label of “respect,” she tells her granddaughter. But the kid understands Granny’s other nickname without explanation — “The General.”

Grandma is bossy, short-tempered and quick with a slap or to whip out a spoon for a quick serving of corporal punishment.

Lucia has to content herself playing with her favorite chicken all through the sunbaked summer. In fall, school starts and the attentions of a new friend (Nicoletta Cifariello), who adores her and lets the viewer know that someday she’ll graduate from kissing pictures of her favorite actresses and divas on the covers of magazines to kissing real live girls.

But that’s of no concern to Lucia, who is just old enough to start picking up on a family feud. Here in this village, where everyone knows everyone else, and their history, there are still secrets. And a big one is why The General isn’t on speaking terms with her sister Pina (Ileana Rigano) or Pina’s vivacious daughter Rosamaria (Katia Greco).

Stumbling on Rosamaria having a go with a local married man in a coastal cave isn’t the “secret,” shameful and dangerous though that might be. What is it?

Director and co-adaptor Licata vividly recreates a time and a place. The lack of cars in this village suggests it might be a coastal island, and the kids are all free range in a seemingly idyllic, if dying, piece of Old Italia.

It is the closeness of death of many of the inhabitants that first tips us that The General might not be the villain she seems. “No one dresses the dead like Donna Maria,” her granddaughter is told (in Italian with English subtitles). She comes whenever called to prepare the dead for their funerals.

Her threats to Lucia about associating with Pina’s family suggest she’ll “cut your hand” if she catches them hanging out. So naturally, that’s what the kid does. Pina dotes on her and Rosamaria takes her in as a co-conspirator in the torrid affair she’s having with the icecream vendor.

But as stern as The General is about chores, coming home after school, reading her parents’ letters aloud (the old woman is illiterate) and staying away from Pina, she knows “there is no life here.” She knows that when her family comes for her, Lucia should leave and never come back.

The performances here have a consistent brittle tenderness, adults and children playing a sort of getting-on-with-a-limited-life resignation that doesn’t allow much pleasure into it.

The film’s third act surprises pack a punch, and make a touchy change in tone in a movie that is never quite “Cinema Paradiso” sunny. It tells a story that reaches a climax, finds another and drifts on a bit after that second one.

It’s still a mesmerizing visit to Italy as it was, natural beauty and quaint “character” hiding the same harsh truths and ugly realities that any place else has.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Marta Castiglia, Lucia Sardo, Katia Greco, Ileana Rigano, Nicoletta Cifariello

Credits: Directed by Paolo Licata, script by Paolo Licata, Ugo Chiti and Catena Fiorello, based on the novel by Catena Fiorello. A Corinth Films release on Film Movement Plus.

Running time: 1:39

When all this “Free Britney” hysteria started, and every time it’s kicked up since, I’ve shaken my head at the conundrum her unique situation seems to present.

Is Britney Spears still with us because of the draconian conservatorship her family imposed on her in the middle of her head-shaving, lashing-out hospitalizations of 2007-8? Maybe you’re like me and you’ve thought the same thing.

“Framing Britney Spears,” a “New York Times Presents” doc on FX/Hulu, should make us all question what we’ve heard, what we think we “know” in what could be an altogether different read on her plight — monitored and “controlled” by her father, Jamie Spears, her “$60 million (and counting) estate” under his “supervision.”

Yes, she seemed to pull herself together, but was she ever “falling apart?”

Yes, she’s turned around her image and her career with a dazzling and lucrative “comeback,” as a performer and as a person in the public eye. Would she have managed that without restraints placed on her actions, purchases and social life?

Samatha Stark’s “Framing,” which had no direct access to any member of the Spears family — Britney, her father Jamie, mother and semi-“silent” partner Lynne, or siblings — is in many ways yet more speculation of about the same order as the attention that the film suggests misused, abused and drove her to distraction a dozen years ago.

Record label folks, a personal assistant, lawyers, a backup dancer and assorted New York Times reporters on the Britney beat (none have interviewed her) can surmise, question and throw thoughts against the wall.

But like the bloggers, protesters and ardent fans, they and we DON’T KNOW.

Like reality TV, Stark’s film serves up villains, this time with a touch of New York condescension. Spears’ father comes off as a greedy, drawling ne’er do well, aimless and country and with his eyes on the prize early on. Her mother, glimpsed rarely even in archival interviews, seems passive and negligent.

The one sibling, “film producer” Bryan Spears, who spoke on a podcast about his sister’s situation, intimates that there’s some sort of ugly patriarchy ruling over her life even as he suggests they saved her life a dozen years ago and that she’s a lot more “free” than the “Free Britney” protesters seem to think.

The film doesn’t lay a glove on ex-husband Kevin Federline, a pretty serious omission. And it doesn’t bring up Britney’s whirlwind of other engagements, messy and impulsive relationships that led right up to the conservatorship.

Justin Timberlake, who rode a high-profile relationship with Spears to solo stardom post-“Mickey Mouse Club” and N’Sync, takes a big hit, too. But a single piggish radio interview isn’t necessarily a fair characterization, any more than a paparazzi-induced meltdown right before the conservatorship was of Britney.

The through-line of the film is the sexism and cruel nature of the attention Spears was subjected to, almost from the start — a “Mickey Mouse” club alumnus whose sexy breakout hit with its game-changing music video upsetting “parents” and conservatives and male interviewers and that Damned Diane Sawyer, too.

Another repeated message is that she’s not a dunce who needed puppetmasters to make her famous and maintain her fame. Leaving small town Louisiana for New York auditions, TV fame and then recording superstardom, she “grew up fast” as we say. She is lucid and sober, if somewhat taken aback or brought to tears in some of the interviews (Sawyer and Matt Lauer are rightly being re-crucified for their treatment of her, but many others were even worse.).

The “sexy vamp in underwear” image she was saddled with played into the later rush to judgement that she was a careless mother, driving with a baby in her lap photos making that case against her, the film suggests.

Being hounded by a seriously predatory celebrity press (only one paparazzo speaks here, and a magazine photo editor) and photo corps almost certainly contributed to incidents like that. “Instigated” and “provoked” the incidents might be more like it. “Framing” lets them off easy. If Paris Hilton (a celeb pal) is here, where is Perez Hilton, a major online tormenter of Spears at her lowest moments?

Her onetime-chaperone turned “business assistant” on tour, Felicia Culotta, opines that Spears is “capable of so much” more than she’s allowed to control now, and was seriously in charge of her image and career earlier on. But mainly Culotta is here “to remind people of why they fell in love with her in the first place.”

That’s the part of the film I could relate to. As Jive Records exec Kim Kaiman dissects her star’s “approachable” image and the way even a seemingly exploitive music video showed her in command of herself, her space, her flawless choreography and her choices, I remembered an early Sept. 1998 pitch from a Jive Records publicist.

I was angling for an N’Sync interview, and he said “Oh, we’ve got this girl opening for them (on their about-to-begin tour), let me Fed Ex this video to you. She is going to be SOMEthing.”

Dude was, if anything, understating the case. And as reluctant as I have always been to talk to REALLY young “talents” (she was 16), I caught up with her a couple of days after the video arrived.

As “Framing” rightly points out (culture critic Wesley Morris makes the case), that Oct. 1998 video release was a paradigm-shifting event in American pop culture.

All the girl powered pop of the past 20 years owes a least a little something to Britney and “Baby One More Time.”

Back then and in a couple of chats I had with her over the next few years, she came off as sweet, a little unsophisticated and girlish. A kid. Her one-admitted guilty pleasure was binge-watching “Friends” at home or on the road.

She understood and took ownership of songs written for her and had a pretty big hand in that whole schoolgirl uniform “Hit Me Baby” video vibe, and in every image-makeover that followed. “Sexy” wasn’t imposed on her.

“Normal” and “very young” was her offstage persona. But yes, you could tell she’d never been to college.

Later interviews, sampled in “Framing,” show a quickly-maturing and sophisticated, if vulnerable and living-under-glass, self-aware star who was starting to see the walls of her life closing in around her.

As Kaiman and others say in “Framing Britney,” younger girls went mad for her not necessarily for the sexy school girl image, but for the teen who was front and center and in charge, the relatable cool kid who could recruit her own dance corps to fall in line behind her, copying her moves and her fashion-forward treatment of the required-dress in that fictional school.

“Framing” may show a press conference where the stupidly rude land mine “Are you a virgin?” question was asked, which became an early misstep in terms of her image and reputation. But it doesn’t show how the media turned that into a “brand” that everyone rolled their eyes at, and it doesn’t ID the pig who asked it. She was a kid and it was an awful question.

Lacking interviews with the principals, we don’t get anything about possible drug use — allegations that she was drugged by one would-be Svengali, Sam Lutfi, yes. If she ever flunked a drug test, that’s germane.

She’s probably not sending “secret messages” in her Instagram posts. But she’s definitely showing a growing defiance about her situation and getting her message out, even if the California court system is unfairly keeping her from hiring her own lawyer in the fight over her life and her interests.

I don’t know if “Framing” solves anything, or if we actually get closer to her than any of the decades of superficial print and video profiles and interviews did. I appeared on a VH-1 “Behind the Music” on N’Sync and when asked about her personal life, her JT history, I had to shrug them off. Those parts of a celebrity life are unknowable, something I think that Stark’s film reinforces.

The best endorsement for “Framing Britney Spears” might be the fact that it opens the floor for questioning, forcing the public to reconsider her and the courts to look at her situation through the eyes of other known abuses of involuntary hospitalizations and conservatorships the way her fans and the general public have. It’s not just Lifetime Original Movie villains who manipulate that system.

If there’s a lot of money involved and a chance for ill-use and exploitation, that’s reason enough to suspect it. Maybe it’s time Britney got the benefit of the doubt, instead of giving that to literally every other lawyer, parent or gold-digging ex-husband in her orbit.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, substance abuse, some profanity

Cast: Britney Spears, Felicia Culotta, Nancy Carson, Paris Hilton, Kim Kaiman, Daniel RAmos, Wesley Morris, Vivian Lee Thoreen, Diane Sawyer, Matt Lauer

Credits: Directed by Samantha Stark. On FX and Hulu

Running time: 1:14