Movie Nation

There’s a hardnosed, cynical and downbeat political thriller straining to get out in “Black Beach,” a Spanish film about First World corruption and Third World strife.

It’s a bit of a slog, frustrating and convoluted. The filmmakers can’t gracefully extract themselves from a story that wants to get to its point and end a lot sooner than it does.

But it has virtues worth recognizing and a taut, tense and bloody chase scene through an African slum that will put you on the edge of your seat.

Here’s the take-away from it — it’s a direct evocation of “white privilege” and its echoes in “white man’s burden” Africa.

As Carlos Furster, Raúl Arévalo portrays of man of confidence born of privilege, bravery built on untouchability. He’s the son of a U.N. High Commissioner (Paulina García), an NGO-trained negotiator, now a globe-trotting fixer for Big Oil.

When he’s ordered back to Africa to mediate a hostage situation in a country where he used to work, a nation under a UN embargo but with a big oil deal in the works, he gives no hint that he’s out of his depth.

Carlos knows the principals — the “president” (Emilio Buale), the alleged “leader” of a revolutionary faction (Jimmy Castro) — and the lay of the land. His past gives him contacts that will, he is sure, get him to the hostage and make this all go away without reigniting a civil war.

In this violent place, where people are dying or just disappearing right and left, where leadership lives in utter opulence while most live in slums, Carlos struts around as if he’s bullet proof. Because he is.

Provide him with a Ferrari, give him access to generals, and he all but runs roughshod over the locals in pursuit of his goal. He goes nose-to-nose, threatening the warden at the infamous seaside prison that gives the movie its title — “Black Beach.”

Offer him cocaine, as the president does in a friendly chat, and he’ll take it. Whatever he once was, Carlos finished selling out years ago.

Now he has absolute immunity and utter impunity as he swaggers hither and yon, looking for his old friend Calixto, tracking him through the man’s wife Ada, not considering what his search might reap.

Carlos may be married with a baby on the way. But back in the day, Ada (Aída Wellgaye) was his in-country girlfriend. Now she’s the key to reaching Calixto, finding the hostage and settling all this without violence and the bad optics that will be in the media.

Or so Carlos figures. But right in the middle of his bull-in-the-china-shop search, he picks up on what we cannot miss. People are dying all around him. People he tracks down meet untimely ends.

Nobody in authority will touch the white guy, but every African he arm-twists is instantly imperiled. Carlos is European interference in Africa in a single character. He is good intentions with sinister underpinnings, and eventually even he sees it.

Arévalo (“Marshland,” Almodovar’s “Pain and Glory”) lets us see Carlos transform from a guy working the angles and angling for that New York promotion to somebody who finally turns around to see the destruction in his wake.

Candela Peña plays the guide and former NGO pal Ade, who could be the conscience that he’s forgotten he had. Claude Musungayi is the silky smooth-talking Afro-French boss who dangles that promotion and pays a lot of lip service to his Man in Africa’s safety and future.

Director and co-writer Esteban Crespo (“Amar”) complicates the script to the point of distraction and frustrates the viewer with all the promising possibilities we recognize from other such thrillers (“The Constant Gardener,” “Under Fire,” “The Year of Living Dangerously”) that he refuses to mimic.

The old love story, the “past” that comes back to haunt the hero, the compromises he sees himself making, all are left underdeveloped in this misshapen thriller that rarely gets up the urgency it needs to come off.

But the big chase through the slums, staged on the film’s Canary Islands set, is a bracing suggestion of the thriller that might have been.

The high stakes were always there. The way the film beats around the bush in showing them makes us see that it’s not just Carlos, but the filmmakers making a movie out of his story who are very slow to pick up on that.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast:  Raúl Arévalo, Paulina García, Lidia Nené, Candela Peña, Claude Musungayi, Melina Matthews, Emilio Buale and Aída Wellgaye

Credits: Directed by Esteban Crespo, script by Esteban Crespo, David Moreno. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

“Space Sweepers” is what K-Pop looks like in sci-fi movie form.

A not-quite-amusing mashup of “Valerian” and “The Fifth Element,” “Blade Runner” and “Elysium,” it’s the sugariest eye candy Netflix has ever produced.

It’s gorgeous, and if you’re all about immersing yourself in a futuristic, apocalyptic, grimy-lived in world, then sit back and soak in the two hours and seventeen minutes of Korean-made candy corn. Go in expecting something that isn’t empty-headed in ways that make its escapism tedious and you’ll be disappointed.

Set in 2092 in orbit around an arid, orange dust-storm covered Earth post “Blade Runner 2049,” it concerns the halfway harrowing misadventures of a crew of space junk collectors, slowly going bankrupt in the “sweeper” eat sweeper world of selling abandoned, floating hardware for its precious metal content.

Song Joong-Ki is Tae-Ho, a junk collector obsessed with finding his long-missing daughter. Kim Tae-ri is the too cool for Space School Captain Jang, who wears her Raybans in low Earth orbit. And “Tiger” Park (Seon-kyu Jin) is the grimy, mohawked tattooed engineer who keeps their souped-up space scow, the Victory, flying.

A “droid” weapon that looks like a seven year old girl has escaped. “Dorothy” (Ye-Rin Park) may look like cuteness incarnate — “bowl cut” or not. She’s really a bomb, seized by the radical Black Fox group, coveted by the 152 year old megamogul Sullivan (Richard Armitage), who doesn’t look a day over 44.

Unless, of course, the Elon-level genius and polymath gets angry. Sullivan runs UTS, which owns most everything in space, including the space elevators that get people there. He hates what humanity has done to Earth and makes no bones about ruthlessly deciding who gets to escape it.

Sullivan is about to colonize Mars, has this miracle “Tree of Life” plant that will help with the terraforming and is missing this Dorothy that may not be exactly what the story fed to the media says.

Naturally, the Victory is where Dorothy ends up. It takes even the robot in the crew, Bubs, a few minutes to figure out who this stowaway is, even though her face and “bowl cut” have been plastered everywhere. But once they make the connection, these “starving” junkers angle for a way to make her pay off for them.

Cute or not, cash is cash. Who will pay the most?

“Cute” is the primary aim here, thus the K-Pop analogy. We’re treated to bantering bickering via radio or orbital poker games (in Korean, Danish, Danish, Russian, German, Chinese and English, with English subtitles unless you watch it dubbed), an annoying, wise-cracking and humming robot, mob meet-ups in orbital discos, low Earth orbit ballets of spaceships chasing junk in between space stations, one of which is a dead ringer for Jodie Foster’s stomping grounds, Elysium.

Shoot outs, wisecracks, narrow escapes and brutal, bloodied captures, a big BOOM that might be coming and Raybans that might never come off.

It’s oh-so-pretty to look at. But talk about empty calories.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, some violence, drinking, lots of profanity

Cast: Song Joong-Ki, Kim Tae-ri, Seon-kyu Jin, Richard Armitage

Credits: Directed by  Sung-hee Jo, script by ; Sung-hee Jo,  Seung-min Yoon, Seo-ae Yoo-kang. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:17

Short running time feature dramas have an obligation to get down to business, to not squander screen time on clutter. There’s no room for extraneous characters, scenes jammed in that don’t advance the plot, needlessly obscuring relationships when the occasional Big Reveal is mystery enough.

“Alice Fades Away” is a Southern Gothic thriller with abuse and murder, a young wife and mother on the run, building toward a bloody showdown “evil” too vile to be allowed to exist in this world. And it does its damnedest to not let us in on the game.

The debut feature of Ryan Bliss, it’s a little Faulkner/Flannery O’Connor and a lot “Road to Perdition,” a tale set in 1953, with everybody driving a pre-war vintage car, “Southern” Gothic with a finale set on a quasi-communal New England farm and the most amusingly pointless intertitles — needlessly detailing the days of the week (“SUNDAY”) — this side of a student film project.

For a 76 minute thriller, it wastes a helluva lot of time.

Alice (Ashley Shelton) is gushing over her little boy, assuring him that “wishes do come true” because “I wished for you, and you came.”

A drawling old patriarch (William Sadler), seen separately, damns her by reputation as he is interviewing an unseen young man with a lot of questions about her.

“What did he SEE in her?” The old man has no answer.

It turns out he’s talking about his son. As it happens, Alice is on the run. And eventually it develops that the guy asking the questions (Timothy Sekk) has been charged with tracking her down, which is a lot easier than it should be, considering the remote farm of lost or wandering souls where Alice ends up.

In structuring his moody film with flashbacks within flashbacks, by showing so many new (restored) 1940 cars, Bliss adds confusion to his obscurant touches. There are movies that make you come to them. “Alice Fades Away” takes no pains to guide us along that path.

Alice’s son (narrates). Then Alice takes a turn. Then we hear a little more from that patriarch “interview.” A flashback follows, and more confusion enters the picture as we’re never sure how far back this scene will take us, or it it’s in the fictive “present.”

We barely settle into the pastoral idyll of the farm belonging to pseudo-prophet Bishop (Jay Potter), when the combat veteran intones that “that smell” of death has returned to his nostrils, thanks to Alice returning to the farm where she used to live.

The women (Blanche Baker, Emily Eckes) and others on the farm wonder if Alice has brought doom down on them. As flashbacks make clear, the powerful patriarch tasking her pursuer has blood in his eye and revenge in his heart.

Sadler has an affecting unaffected menace. Sekk takes on a little of Jude Law’s psychotic hit man mien from “Perdition.” And Beardmore gets across everything Alice is on the run from in his couple of scenes. Nobody else — and there are many “elses” — makes much of an impression.

I get why the story order was shuffled and why the narrative is rendered murky. The plot is generic, scanty, seriously cut-and-dried.

That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have worked, delivered the gloom followed by the gut punch that so much Southern Gothic traffics in.

Bliss has taken what feels like a simple short film and padded the hell out of it with every narrative and editing trick in the book to make it at least appear to be feature length. We’re not fooled.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Ashley Shelton, Blanche Baker, Emily Eckes, Tommy Beardmore, Jay Potter, Timothy Sekk and William Sadler

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ryan Bliss. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:16

In order to categorize the new film from actor turned actor-director Louis-Do de Lencquesaing a “comedy,” the viewer has to lead to a few assumptions. Because de Lencquesaing (“Cache” he starred in, “In a Rush” he wrote, directed and co-starred in) doesn’t explain jack during the course of it.

In “The Holy Family (La sainte famille)” the director/co-writer plays a French academic. We’re never given his credentials or any explicit notion of what he does. Let’s assume he’s a bioethicist with a theological bent, as we meet him giving a lecture on “the mystery” of life’s beginning.

“Mystery is the most precious thing,” he declares, stirring up a little ire among scientists. He’d like that mystery preserved.

That gets the attention of the government, which we assume is conservative and isn’t keen on all of the mystery of “the fabrication of life” being unraveled, either. For political reasons.

We can assume Jean, his character, is of a like mind — being rich and Catholic and all. We see him dash off to the funeral of his family’s longtime housekeeper/caregiver/nanny in Barcelona.

But when the government names him “Minister of Family” matters, charged with setting policy on reproductive, sexual identity and other very personal “family” issues, we wonder if Jean is the right fellow for the job. So does he. Eventually.

Because his family? It’s messy, even by the famously lax standards of the French.

Wife Marie (Léa Drucker) is 40something, some sort of engineer/architect jetting back and forth to a harbor renovation gig in Tangier. She’s pregnant, she tells him.

“If we keep it, are we staying together?” she wonders (in French, with English subtitles).

“Were we splitting up?”

They’re having problems, as her many trips to Morocco, the little flashes of rebellion of teen daughter by Marie’s first marriage Léonore (Billie Blain) and the signs that Jean has a wandering eye tell us.

There was this sexy cousin (Laura Smet) he ran into at the caretaker’s funeral. Do they have history? There’s his eagerness to take any call insisting “we meet in person” from strange women like Christine (Inna Modja), who turns out to be an aide to the prime minister, putting out feelers about whether he’d like a job.

Not that he lets that stop him from flirting.

His mother (the great Marthe Keller) and grandmother drive him to distraction — endless calls to “come over” because “it’s urgent.” He’s needed to hang a painting or run an errand.

And there’s brother Hervé (Thierry Godard), who is gay and troubled and hasn’t actually come out to anybody in the family although some have “figured it out.”

These complications and several others, along with the occasional pause for sex or abrupt bit of flashing, suggest “sex farce” or at least farce. But nothing particularly funny emerges from any of this.

The entire affair is as dry as as a Tangier summer. It’s a comedy only in the ironies presented, droll only in how understated/un-stated/unexplained so much of what happens plays out.

Not that we can’t follow it.

But any picture where new characters and complications are being introduced right up to the bloody closing credits, where most every phone conversation begins “I don’t want to get into it on the phone,” where we don’t really know what this 50ish lump is and why he’s catnip to (some of) the ladies is more annoying than amusing or even particularly engaging.

MPAA Rating: unrated, mild violence, sex, nudity

Cast:  Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Laura Smet, Marthe Keller, Léa Drucker, Inna Modja and Thierry Godard

Credits: Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, script by Jérôme Beaujour and Louis-Do de Lencquesaing. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:24

A lovely looking March 5 release from the Mouse.

There aren’t many tropes I despise more than the “babbling finale,” thrillers with villains who summarize their many crimes and maybe their motives as well in that final, drawn-out and usually murderous confrontation.

“Paradise Cove” isn’t wholly ruined by such a coda. It’s gone a bit wrong here and there just getting to that dramatic climax. But a botched ending tips it into “not really recommended” territory.

Mena Suvari and Todd Grinnell (TV’s “One Day at a Time”) roll into Malibu with everything they own in a contractor’s pick-up truck. Tracey and Jack are house flippers from Detroit, and there’s this beachside house his mom left him.

She’s just died. And just finding a place to park the urn with her ashes is a problem. Mom hoarded, let every single thing in the house break and fail and apparently had a fire at some point as well. It’s a standing, fixable ruin.

He says “We’re fixing it up ourselves,” but that’s only in the sense of too many house-flipping TV shows. He’s only good for demolition, she’s the “designer.” They hire locals for a “non-permitted” renovation. Because this flip, with its “six million dollar view,” could make them.

They’re also trying to get pregnant, with fertility shots and pricey treatment on their plate. As things start to go wrong, Jack underscores the obvious.

“We just can’t afford to have anything else go wrong.”

And there’s this one “thing” that not only goes wrong, she makes other things go wrong. She’s a former owner, homeless and squatting under the house. Bree (Kristin Bauer van Straten of “True Blood”) is pretty obviously bent on their destruction.

Like John Schlesinger’s nightmare tenant (Michael Keaton) thriller “Pacific Heights,” “Paradise Cove” is a property-owner’s-worst-nightmare tale hanging on California’s bend-over-backwards tenant, squatter and homeless laws.

Bree has “been here forever,” and “will be here long after you’re gone” law enforcement informs them. The cops won’t do anything before construction starts. And once the “non-permitted” work begins, contractor Griff (Eddie Goines) advises against further police involvement.

Joan (Krista Allen), the double-entendre dropping wine shop owner who gives them a “Welcome to the neighborhood” bottle when she finds out which house they’ve moved into, just wants to know “Have you met Bree?” Griff is more direct.

“There’s crazy, MALIBU crazy. And then there’s Bree!”

Bauer van Stratten plays the ex-model turned-homeless nut to the hilt. Fiftyish, with the muscle memory to play up her lingering sex appeal, Bree creates instant problems in the marriage and has mood changes that alarm us and Tracey from the start. Jack? He’ll take some convincing.

This script pretty much diagrams who we’re expected to fear for, and Bree never disappoints even as she crosses “that line” too early for there to be any mystery about her potential. She isn’t cunning, but she knows the house, the beach and surroundings intimately, and has some notion of what she can get away with.

Suvari does well by the testy wife running out of patience over pregnancy, the “gamble” this renovation is and her husband’s inability to solve this seemingly insoluble problem sleeping in the crawl space below, drinking and smoking and a stranger overhearing their most intimate moments and their plans.

Logic goes out the window at one or two early points, and especially in the slow stomp toward a climax.

We hear a few stats about greater LA’s homeless problem, and we hear a lot more about Bree and what put her here as the film unfolds, especially in that babbling finale.

But like homelessness itself, “Paradise Cove” has problems we, and the folks who made this, can’t talk our way out of.

Cast: Mena Suvari, Todd Grinnell,  Kristin Bauer van Straten, Eddie Goines

Credits: Directed by  Martin Guigui, script by Sherry Klein. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:39

The filmmakers did “On the Record,” so they’re used to tackling controversy.

Perhaps they will find fresh evidence or more conclusive evidence to support Mia Farrow and her family’s claims against Woody Allen. Perhaps they will renew our outrage over the allegations she and her daughter and journalist son Ronan have made.

Perhaps Allen will be finally and fully “canceled” this time around.

The point of view seems pretty clear from this teaser trailer.

Frankly, the only thing that would shock me in a four part series on this infamous case is for the filmmakers to report things Ronan Farrow has avoided, ignored and would vehemently deny — allusions to the creepy nature of his mother’s relationship with Allen, hinted at in gossip circles and in the “other” New York magazine over the years

“Allen v. Farrow” comes to HBO and HBO Max Feb. 21.

This has a kernel of creepy about it

Coming this summer. That crowd at the Super Bowl, and in all those Super Spreader parties nationwide ensure it’ll be streaming, maybe in mostly empty theaters.

Disney Plus has the subscription builder. Marvel takes over TeeVee. Looks action packed and cute.