Movie Nation

Not every film that’s all about a menage a trois aims to be the next “Jules et Jim.”

Some have a hint of “Summer Lovers” or “Y Tu Mama Tambien” about them, and so go for playful “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” touches.

But when they’re shot in black and white and when the story is bathed in poetically pretentious French voice over narration, you know somebody fell in love with the François Truffaut classic.

So, cinematographer Svetlana Cvetko (“Red Army,” “All Things Must Pass” and “O.J.: Made in America”) — “Show Me What You Got.“

She co-wrote and directed this Gen Z romance of three free spirits who meet, hook up and take “group hug” to the next level in Los Angeles. It’s a lovely, somewhat empty affair, crowned as it is with that French narration that underscores the events, actions and thoughts of those we see on screen.

Marcello (Mattia Minasi) is a vapid Italian pretty boy, son of a soap star and in Los Angeles on Daddy’s credit card to get away from a clingy girlfriend. Dad arranges all these meetings with agents and deal-makers, pitching reality series and the like at the kid. But the tantrum-tossing “freeloader” can’t be bothered to show up for all of them.

“Life is all about good times,” is his credo, as related by our French femme narrator.

Nassim (Neyssan Falahi) is a Franco-Iranian/American hipster hunk Marcello meets on the Malibu pier. Nassim is a martial artist and workout coach and would-be/might-be actor. He’s getting nowhere.

“He realizes that LA wouldn’t notice if he was gone,” the narrator reveals.

They strike up a conversation, as young guys do, and do a little mock sparring, as young guys only in the movies do. That’s how they end up in the Back on the Beach Cafe, spilling ice on waitress Cristina (Cristina Rambaldi).

She flirts and bats her eyes, “curious if they will follow her blindly” into the LA evening. Damned if they don’t, which is convenient because Marcello has a rented SUV and the credit cards that will finance their adventures and coming love affair.

Cristina has been sleeping under her grandpa’s bed at the nursing home, and he’s just died. Nassim has been couch-surfing.

Marcello isn’t just attractive to them both. He’s loaded. So they’re off, seeing the city, visiting an art installation at Joshua Tree and sharing a bed, shower or what have you whenever the opportunity arises.

The two guys are lumps — aimless Marcello, barked at by his fed-up parents, gig economy Nassim urged home to Tehran by family. Cristina is a classic LA “type.” She rescues dogs and discarded house plants, goes to all the right protest marches, makes art and takes photos “to show my grandpa” what she’s doing and who she’s with — even though he’s dead.

There’s enough here for a movie, but just barely — three young people with nothing tying them down seeking “life filled with support and no judgement.”

But we know that “their bliss can continue, if only for a short time more.” Because the narrator says so. That narrator just won’t shut up.

The experienced but undiscovered cast is interesting, but the characters barely have enough going on to draw us in. The situations — save for their Joshua Tree jaunt — are trite and barely hold the attention. The friction that creates drama is generally on the other end of a phone line — Nassim and Marcello each hearing from parents who want/need them to do something with their lives, preferably someplace other than Los Angeles. The three lovers? They get along, seemingly without jealousy.

It’s all lovely to look at, as you’d expect from a movie directed by a camera operator/DP. But it has all the nutritional value of an orchid blossom.

That makes “Show Me” a film festival movie, the sort of thin entertainment that only warrants attention in that rarefied air. Anything narrated in French passes muster with that crowd, no matter how pretentious or trivial. But outside that environment, in the harsh light of day, this hothouse flower wilts.

MPA Rating: unrated, nudity, sex, profanity, marijuana use

Cast: Cristina Rambaldi, Neyssan Falahi, Mattia Minasi

Credits: Directed by Svetlana Cvetko, script by Svetlana Cvetko, David Scott Smith. A Level Forward/Synkronized release.

Running time: 1:38

As paranoid thrillers go, “Sightless” isn’t half bad before it — pardon me — loses its way. And even after that, it manages a moment or two even as it frustrates you with its many blown possibilities.

The story of a concert violinist blinded in a seemingly random attack ,who starts to wonder if it was random at all during a strange “arranged” convalescence, the debut feature of writer-director Cooper Karl gets all wrapped up in its implied conspiracy, in “the mystery.”

And then, in resolving that mystery, it goes completely off the rails. I mean, we can’t expect “Wait Until Dark” or “In Darkness” every time out. But come on.

Madelaine Petsch of TV’s “Riverdale” stars as Ellen, battered and sprayed in the face in an attack that leaves her blind. She can’t get a hint of “Who DID this to me?” from the cop (Jarrod Crawford) on her case, or anybody else.

But her brother overseas arranges for a caregiver and a new apartment “downtown” (Seattle). And this new guy, Clayton (Alexander Koch of “Black Bear”) is all empathy and expertise when it comes to dealing with how to condition someone for a new life without sight — giving her that first cane, instructing her on text-to-voice/voice-to-text emailing, etc.

But lost in her head, Ellen ponders who might have a grudge against her, or her ex-husband. She wonders why she can’t reach her best friend, Sasha. Brother Easton is still in Japan and hasn’t come home to help.

“I can’t get ahold of…ANYone!”

And with her new heightened focus on sound, Ellen wonders about the background noises she hears and the creepy stuff going on next door. Lana (December Ensminger) and Russo (Lee Jones) are having…problems. Is Clayton her savior, she wonders? Or she should trust him at all?

Clever touches include the way Ellen imagines this or that person as she speaks to them and visualizes the new world surrounding her. Might a violinist have more acute hearing?

Clayton’s suggestion that her world’s images can be “whatever you want” now seems neither helpful nor on the up and up.

Koch gives us a hint of mystery if not menace as the caregiver, and Petsch plays petulant diva well enough.

But writer-director Karl doesn’t make the imagined threats palpable and the peril logical in the least. News flash, shouting “I can hear you BREATHING” is not going to save you from an intruder when you’re a petite fiddle player.

And that finale… Somebody’s been watching Christopher Nolan pictures and not taking away the right lessons in plot twist tricks from them.

MPA Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Madelaine Petsch, Alexander Koch, December Ensminger and Lee Jones.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Cooper Karl. A MarVista film on Netflix

Running time: 1:29

Three movies set in “the troubles” along the Border have come out in same week. “The Marksman” is a generic Liam Neeson action picture without the nerve to be either a racist redemption tale or a meaningful look at a political hot button issue. “No Man’s Land” has better intentions but a much muddier and patronizing story.

“Identifying Features,” by Fernanda Valadez is far and away the best of the lot. Lyrical and understated with a cruel beauty and story laced with allegory and a hint of magical realism, it lets us see the rippling trauma of this place and this time through the eyes of mothers.

And it’s totally a Mexican tale, from its point of origin — coincidentally, the same town that is the final destination in “No Man’s Land” — to its finish line, a story told entirely from the Mexican point of view.

This is the horror of Northern Mexico as seen through the eyes of those living through it, families disrupted by the desperation of trying to flee to Los Estados Unidos and the murderous gang gauntlet those undertaking this journey must pass through to just reach the border.

Two teens from outside of Guanajuato make plans to leave. We don’t hear the name “Jesús” (Juan Jesús Varela) when he tells his mother he’s going with Rigo. We don’t see who his mother is.

That’s the first way Valadez, who co-wrote the script, makes us reach out for the film. Nothing in this story drops in our lap.

Chuya (Laura Elena Ibarra) and Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) fret over not hearing from their boys for months and go to the police. The cops shrug them off with a “if you gave consent (for them to leave) there’s no crime to report.”

But then they’re handed the book– a big fat photo file of bodies that have turned up in the north just in the past two months. One mother will get an awful moment of closure, the other will have to go north herself to try and track her son.

Olivia (Ana Laura Rodríguez) is also headed north. But as we’ve seen her performing eye surgery, she’s going by plane. She too has a missing son. Being affluent, he didn’t try to cross the border, so far as she knows. He disappeared on a drive back from Monterrey.

Miguel (David Ilescas) we meet in a U.S. immigration court as he’s being summarily deported. He’s an “IA,” an illegal alien. He has money and he was heading home anyway. Now he’s on the books as an “illegal” and on foot, trying to get back to his village near Ocampo.

The story weaves these lives together through the odyssey Magdalena embarks on to find her son or get closure about his fate.

Valadez, who co-wrote the script, shows us a sample of the terrors people face on the trail. Take a bus, run the risk of it being hijacked with all the passengers robbed, raped and ransomed or murdered. Road block “checkpoints” are run by gangs with, it’s implied, police assistance.

The confused, half-blind old man (never seen) who narrates in an untranslated dialect the story of the bus he was on says “El Diablo” committed the crimes that followed. And through his eyes we see the horns and pointy tail of a murderer outlined against a bonfire’s light.

We don’t need his words translated. We can see the horror, in silhouette, for ourselves.

Valadez lets her actor’s faces do most of the talking here. It’s a music-free film of long, tense silences and splashes of fraught shakedowns and terror. Legions of innocents can only avert their eyes when the Men (or boy soldiers) with Guns show up to search, harass and menace everyone with impunity.

She captures the harsh beauty of the region and the ugliness that is emptying it out and filling mass graves.

But the most haunting images of all are still shots — Polaroids of the dead, their clothing and baggage, their “Identifying Features” — which the police show to Chuya and Magdalena. It’s the cinematic equivalent of that rail car filled with rotting shoes of the doomed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington — heart-breaking and horrifying at a primal level.

And it brings home the ugly truth to the parents of the dead and the governments complicit in this cross-border disaster. There’s no closing your eyes or blocking it out with a wall. And it won’t stop until we all have the guts to stare at it and take the first serious steps to do something about it.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Mercedes Hernández, David Illescas, Juan Jesús Varela, Ana Laura Rodríguez

Credits: Directed by Fernanda Valadez, script Astrid Rondero, Fernanda Valadez. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:37

Samuel L. Jackson has been King of the on-Screen F-word forever.

But who could have guessed that when a queen was crowned, she’d be from the Subcontinent, and not Dorchester, Park Slope or Culver City?

The Indian actress Kajol (Kajol Mukherjee) seizes that tiara in “Tribhanga: Tedi Medhi Crazy,” hurling F-bombs hither and yon and spicing up a formulaic and soapy but engaging story of three generations of women coping with the mothers who made them who they are.

Kajol (“My Name is Khan”), playing an actress and dancer, mother to 20ish Masha (Mithila Palkar) and daughter of famous writer Nayantara (Tanvi Azmi), has her reasons for cursing.

Anu (Kajol) is famous, and thus hounded by the press. Her mother is beloved, a much-honored novelist finishing up a biography with being written by an academic fanboy (Kunaal Roy Kapur) who is always under foot. And her daughter’s married and expecting, and maybe not the liberated woman she herself is, and her divorced mother is famous for being.

Not that Anu speaks to her mother. They’re estranged, and Anu has legitimate grievances with that “b—h,” f—-r! Don’t try to tell her she doesn’t.

Then Mom has as stroke, and the three generations are in the same hospital room — one comatose, one who has never met her father or the grandfather that grandma scandalously divorced in “conservative” India back in the ’80s.

Anu? She’s in a foul-mouthed fury, never moreso than when she’s dealing with Milan (Kapur), an irritating interviewer/biographer, and a non-drinking/non-swearing Muslim, to boot. Anu lets the ass-this and f-thats rain on the poor man, who only wants a little participation from her in the book. She is sure he’s a “golddigger” and Mom’s new heir.

Through interviews, ventings and flashbacks, each of the women reveals to Milan their past, with him sharing revelations to the others that maybe things aren’t as cut-and-dried as each believes.

Nayantara was a driven writer driven out of her own house by a shrewish, backward mother-in-law.

Did “Naya” know that one of her later lovers molested Anu, “right under her nose?”

And does Anu have a clue about how her Bollywood lifestyle and abusive relationship with Masha’s father scarred her own kid?

Sure, this is straight-up melodrama, an old fashioned “Women’s Picture” of the “Joy Luck Club” school — a “Stella Dallas” or “Mildred Pierce” in modern India, in Hindi with English subtitles. And lots of swearing.

No, it’s not as emotionally draining as any of those three classics. But it’s engrossing and touching and very well-acted, with Kajol taking this star vehicle as far as her temper, her chastened rage and her skill in applying that Old English word that starts with an F can take it.

Anu even gives Milan a George Carlin-style lecture in its proper usage. Nicely f—–g done there, sister.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, and lots of profanity

Cast: Kajol, Mithila Palkar, Kunaal Roy Kapur, Tanvi Azmi and Vaibhav Tatwawaadi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Renuka Shahane. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

As he fusses over close-ups, how the camera frames him, and muses about how he’ll be remembered, Hector Babenco scripts, blocks and produces his “final film.” But he doesn’t direct it.

On the documentary, “Babenco: Tell Me When I Die,” that job belongs to his wife, the actress Bárbara Paz. It’s a lovely, poetic black and white memoir of the director’s career tucked within the last months of his life.

Babenco, director of “Pixote,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Ironweed” and “Carandiru,” died of cancer in 2016. He was 70 years old.

He is a collection of close-ups, tucked in amongst clips from his dozen films, and a mostly disembodied voice, musing over “the end,” making suggestions, mostly in Portugeuse.

“Don’t waste time romanticizing every moment.”

It’s an impressionistic portrait, tidbits of autobiography, little snippets of audience Q&As, a little documented South American acting career that predated his directing, revealing that he was imprisoned in Spain in his younger days, which explains his fascination with and unique grasp of the mental journeys one takes in confinement. His three greatest films had prison settings.

His last one, “My Hindu Friend,” had Willem Dafoe playing a version of Babenco, a famous filmmaker facing death, acting out his death bed “finale” — pulling out a ventilator and singing “Cheek to Cheek.”

With 1981’s “Pixote,” a film that single-handedly revived Brazil’s cinema, the Argentinian-born filmmaker invited comparisons to the greats of Europe — Bunuel and Visconti.

There’s even a genuine grimace of a moment for film fans here, Barbara Streisand reading out the august list of nominees for Best Director that year, with Babenco up for “Kiss of the Spider Woman” up against John Huston, Akira Kurosawa, Peter Weir and the winner — for “Out of Africa” — Sydney Pollack. How’s that “holding up?”

Babenco was first diagnosed with cancer back then, “four to six months to live,” he boasts. He did “Ironweed” with Streep, Nicholson and Tom Waits. He went into the jungle to film “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” and he lived another thirty years.

This isn’t a straightforward biography, but “Tell Me When I Die” is how many a filmmaker of an artistic bent would love to go out and hope to be remembered — with a little philosophy, a little sadness and a smile of reminiscence.

MPA Rating: Unrated, nudity, smoking

Cast: Hector Babenco, Barbara Paz, Willem Dafoe

Credits: Directed by Bárbara Paz, script by  Maria Camargo and Bárbara Paz. A Taskovski Films release.

Running time: 1:15

Right.

So what do you make of a pre-natal comedy where Mum’s in denial and Dad’s a weeper, Mum’s making a bucket list of all the “fun” stuff they should do before the due date hits and “I’m not ME any more” and Dad’s asking her “Will you marry me?” And Mum’s reply?

“Not in a million years!”

What DO you call a “having a baby” comedy with a “threesome” fantasy and a character named “Preggophile Brian?”

Call it “Baby Done,” and call it damned adorable, for starters.

This Rose Matafeo farce is light on its feet and quick with a quip, and it’s all about an arborist — which we call “Tree Surgeons” in the States — getting pregnant just before the world tree climbing championships. She stumbles from not telling anybody she’s expecting to “I can do anything pregnant” denial, or as her BFF Molly (Emily Barclay) puts it, “You’re a baby having a baby!”

Tree climbing to bungee jumping, booking flights to British Columbia to cooking up that threesome that’s on the “wild things we regret not doing” that beau Tim (Matthew Lewis) mentioned and getting kicked out of pre-natal (Called “ante-natal” Down Under) class, these two are hellbent on “having it all” before the “fun” ending arrival of “Speck,” which is what they nickname their fetus.

Zoe calls this the “grace period” of a pregnancy. She’s inventing a new thing.

New Zealand TV star Matafeo is Zoe, whose denial starts with the test administered by the obstetrics nurse.

“I Googled it…Usually it’s a tape worm.“

“Not a tapeworm. It’s a BABY.”

She hides the news from Tim, her partner in business as well as life. A “gender reveal” shower for their pregnant friends, surrounded by everybody else who’s just had babies, just brings out Zoe’s competitive side.

But Tim picks up on her oddly-distracted visit to the fruit aisle at the market — trying to decide if the grape, plum or pineapple is what’s in her belly at the moment. Next thing you know, they’re springing the news on her folks via a puzzle (a bun, literally, in the oven) and her OB-GYN dad (Fasitua Amosa) is slinging jargon and acronyms at her — “What’s your LMP (Last Menstrual Period)?”

Mum (Loren Taylor) just notes that having a baby “doesn’t suit you.” And their trials have just begun.

Matafeo just bubbles off the screen here, a cluelessly confidant young woman just oozing snark and misguided notions of how “This changes nothing.“

Lewis makes a fine straight man for her to bounce off of. And throughout the picture, little bon bon character turns abound — annoyed nurses, flummoxed friends and of course, “Preggophile Brian” (Nic Sampson). Don’t ask.

“Baby Done” doesn’t cover a lot of new ground in the “We’re having a baby. What do we DO?” genre. But it covers that ground aloft — in trees, jumping off cliffs, picking fights at ante-natal classes — so much so that the entire affair is light as a feather, and just as ticklish.

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Rose Matafeo, Matthew Lewis, Emily Barclay, Nic Sampson, Fasitua Amosa and Loren Taylor

Credits: Directed by Curtis Vowell, script by Sophie Henderson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:31

A little horror from Samuel Goldwyn? March 5 “something wicked this way comes.”

A February movie, of course.

We never shake the feeling that Silva, the “hero” of the Argentine thriller “Al Acecho” (“Furtive”) is up to no good.

He’s shifty, side-eyeing everything and everyone he takes in. He sneaks about on the job as the new ranger at a remote, rundown Argentine provincial wildlife park.

And then there’s the memory of the first scene we see him in, a guy rousted out of bed in a remote island shack by the Federal Police.

Of all the movies on Netflix right now, “Al Acecho” could be the roughest to sit through, especially for animal lovers. It’s about poaching, one of the cruelest things humans do to wildlife — catching animals to sell as exotic pets or to be fed into the maw of Asia’s vast appetite for “folk medicine” or dietary uses.

Here, unsavory locals trap the exotic wildlife on a little-visited park where Silva is put up in a literal shack with no power or running water, where the Land Rovers the skeleton crew watching the place are old, tattered, with busted windshields and no money to replace them.

Silva (Rodrigo De La Serna, a dead ringer for Jeremy Renner) was “reassigned” here after being arrested. And his new boss (Walter Jakob).

“I know why you were sent here.”

We can guess, too. The skulking around starts almost instantly. Silva sneaks about, wanders the edges of “the military area,” sizes up the farm folk who live on this newer park’s boundaries. It used to be a military base and every structure there is an overgrown or tumbledown leftover from that era. Declaring it a “biosphere preserve” stopped the locals from logging it.

But poaching? Silva sees the signs, the traps, and follows the clues. He recognizes them because that might have been why he was suspended from his last park. He knows the MO.

Has he reformed, or is he merely looking for his piece of the action here? When he finds a South American gray fox in a cage, he is sympathetic. But he takes the fox and the cage to his shack, neither freeing it nor reporting it.

We think we have our answer.

Editor (“Escape from Patagonia”) turned director and co-writer Francisco D’Eufemia immerses us in nature and seedy corruption. The slowly-rotting park may have righteous rangers like the fetching Camilla (Belén Blanco). But Silva smells cheats, thieves and opportunists at every turn.

Is the wildlife vet on staff an animal lover? Or is he just working the animal trade angles? The boss? The farmers?

We cling to some hope that Silva might redeem himself, but D’Eufemia makes that a slim hope.

De la Serna is an arresting action presence. He makes Silva seedy, but “bad boy” sexy enough to turn Camilla’s eye. Will she change him? Will the whimpering fox he keeps in a cage soften his heart?

And what will he do when he runs up against the poachers themselves, careless rednecks who catch all sorts of creatures and clumsily let them die of neglect or trauma before they can be sold?

As I said, this picture is rough going for animal lovers. It has a certain quality, as well as some simple coherence issues. I found it as unpleasant as any account of callous people mistreating animals, whatever angle they’re furtively working.

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

Cast:Rodrigo De la Serna, Belén Blanco, Walter Jakob,

Credits: Directed by Francisco D’Eufemia, script by Francisco D’Eufemia, Fernando Krapp. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:21

I’d warn you about a “spoiler alert,” but this much is obvious maybe ten minutes into “Brothers by Blood.” It’s been recut, chopped. It even had a different title at one point, the much more poetic “The Sound of Philadelphia,” taken from a soul hit of the ’70s.

The movie in its release form has a pretty good cast, a gritty feel, a strained tale of a psychopathic gang leader careening toward a fall and the appalled cousin along for the ride, with a mismatched love story shoehorned in because that’s the law.

It makes a little sense. But not nearly enough.

Matthias Schoenaerts is Peter, the seemingly sane one who grew up in the family business, raised as a “brother” to his cousin Michael (Joel Kinnaman). Now they’re adults and Peter’s second in command of this small, long-established Philly Irish gang run by Michael, who rules by whim.

He’s delusional, thinking he’s a judge of racehorses (he buys one), a Trump backer because “He’s a billionaire,” and a guy who won’t shy away from a “war” with the Italians.

“They want what we got,” he reasons. So what if they’re a much bigger gang, and the “deal” they’ve had goes back decades, back to when Peter’s dad (Ryan Phillippe) and Michael’s dad (Felix Scott) were running things? Michael’s not sweating details, odds, ethics or self-control.

He hears about a promising boxer, he wants to “own” him. His racehorse gets hurt, he wants to shoot it. Their childhood pal Jimmy (Paul Schneider) needs a loan to keep his restaurant going, he gets the money — and a murderous partner.

Peter spends the whole movie trying to talk Michael out of lashing out, threatening “I’m OUT — I’m going to Hawaii,” and flashing back to the traumas of childhood when Peter lost everyone in his family, one by one.

Maika Monroe is Jimmy’s sister, back in town to bartend for him, somebody Peter has history with. Yes, Monroe’s a lot younger than Schoenaerts.

This may have held together, had a story that built towards its inevitable conclusion less abruptly and haphazardly, when the film was longer. Jérémie Guez, who adapted a Peter Dexter novel, scripted Jean-Claude Van Damme’s “The Bouncer” and had a hand in the hostage thriller “15 Minutes of War.”

But in its current form, “Brothers by Blood” lurches along in fits and starts — a little Kinnaman psychosis, a lot of Schoenaerts brooding, some manic Paul Schneider patter, a half-hearted Monroe moment or two, and a lot of flashbacks. Some of them have to do with roofing, roofs and jumping off of them.

There’s no suspense, no flow to the story, little pathos in the flashbacks and a lot of dead spots where the story stops cold. I like everybody on the screen here, just not in this movie — not in this cut of it anyway.

MPA Rating: R for pervasive language, some violence, sexual references and brief drug use

Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Joel Kinnaman, Maika Monroe, Ryan Phillippe, Paul Schneider.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jérémie Guez, based on a novel by Peter Dexter. script by A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:30