Movie Nation

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

“No Man’s Land” is a well-intentioned take on the “troubles along the border” story, so at least it has that over Liam Neeson’s latest. Nobody’s accused “The Marksman” of having the best intentions.

But “No Man’s Land,” from the duo of director Conor Allyn and co-writer and sometime star Jake Allyn (“Forsaken”) is something of a misfire in its own way.

It’s got the “prejudiced man’s redemption” story arc that “Marksman” avoided, and a pretty good cast. But it blunders its way through the Texas-Mexico border country like a blind bull in a Talavera pottery shop, with stereotypes, flakey lapses in logic and an unbalanced story seen from multiple points of view.

Jackson (Jake Allwyn of TV’s “The Baxters”) is a ranch kid with a rocket arm and a tryout with the New York Yankees in his future. But he’s reluctant to leave the ropin’, ridin’ lifestyle, and his mom, dad and big brother behind. He figures he’s needed there.

The Greer Ranch is south of the U.S. border fence but north of the Rio Grande. For some reason, groups of illegal immigrants — or the coyotes leading them — cut their fencing when they pass through this “no man’s land.” Cattle get out, and that’s a serious cash loss if the Greers can’t retrieve them.

Gustavo (Jorge A. Jimenez) is on the other side of that border, a guide nicknamed “The Shepherd” because he’s more Good Catholic than “coyote.” He doesn’t prey on desperate people trying to cross into the U.S. When we meet him, he’s bringing his teen son and a group with him, avoiding the clutches of more predatory coyotes like Luis (Andrés Delgado).

Gustavo and those in his care run afoul of patriarch Bill (Frank Grillo) and oldest boy Lucas (Alex MacNicoll) in the dark as the ranchers try to round up the cattle who got out the last time migrants crossed their land. A scuffle is just starting as Jackson gallups up.

Somebody gets stabbed, somebody gets shot and the Ranger (George Lopez) who arrives has more hunches than evidence. But Jackson knows who pulled the trigger and killed young Fernando. And it eats at him.

With a brother clinging to life in the hospital and his dad willing to take the fall for pulling the trigger, a Yankees tryout and uh nobody to mind the ranch, Jackson and his painted pony cross the river to make amends. Grieving Gustavo and his new pal Luis might have something to say about that.

The Allyn brothers try to conjure up a Western out of its time, a sort of “All the Pretty Horses” without the punch of Cormac McCarthy, a “No Country for Old Men” with young men. They’re stealing from the best, but the whole affair is more frustrating than fulfilling.

The action is thin, the pace is meandering. And their stabs at political correctness mean we set eyes on stereotypically lawless Mexico, here supposedly burnished by the saintly Gustavo, who does everything but call the people he smuggles across the border his “flock.”

Although Jackson’s learning curve has hints of redemption, some of the waypoints on his journey are eye-rollers. He’s grown up on the border and doesn’t know the territory, the cuisine, the history or more than a couple of words of Spanish?

Jake Allyn isn’t particularly graceful at getting across the Jackson’s manslaughter guilt and grief. Taking a job at a Mexican ranch and meeting the fair Victoria (Esmeralda Pimentel) is a cliche and a pace-killing distraction the movie can ill afford.

But as we’ve heard the migrants note that “Texas looks a lot like Mexico,” it’s helpful to have that rancher (Juan Carlos Remolina) here to underscore the movie’s “We’re the same on both sides of this border” message.

“We are all cattle drovers, and we will all meet again down the road.”

Lopez brings a hint of gravitas to his Texas Ranger able to sympathize with the both sides of the conflict. MacDowell has a nice motherly moment, but veteran screen tough guy Frank Grillo is pretty much wasted here.

“No Man’s Land” plays like a buffet diner who has overfilled his plate. There’s too much thrown in here to do justice to anybody’s story.

And despite its dragging pace, little more than lip service is paid to the many points of view addressed in a story that wants to look at a political flashpoint but is too afraid of striking a match to get a grip on it.

MPA Rating:  PG-13 for some strong violence and language

Cast: Jake Allyn, Jorge A. Jimenez, Andie MacDowell, Frank Grillo, Esmeralda Pimentel, Alex MacNicoll and George Lopez.

Credits: Directed by Conor Allyn, script by Jake Allyn and David Barraza. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:55

“Breaking Fast” is an Islamic “Wedding Banquet,” a West Hollywood rom-com so cute it flirts with “cutesy,” almost cloying when it isn’t being cute, but damned adorable in the bargain.

The fact that it arrives 28 years after Ang Lee’s food, family and gay-romance makes it feel quaint at times, “daring” in some pretty dated ways. Filmmaker Mosallam, expanding as he remakes his short film, leans into some stereotypes and amusingly punctures others in this story of a devout Muslim immigrant who slow-walks his way to love, in between calls to prayer.

Mohammed, who goes by “Mo” (Haaz Sleiman), is a prosperous gastroenterologist from a tightknit family who always hosts the relatives at his West Hollywood home for Iftar every year. That’s the meal that Muslims eat at the end of the fast of Ramadan.

We meet him just as his lover Hassan (Patrick Sabongui) is deciding that he needs to “get married” to a woman just to avoid coming out to his family, especially his father.

Mo, his parents’ pride and joy, doesn’t have that problem. He’s the son who can do no wrong, especially in the eyes of his adoring mother (Rula Gardenier). I mean, he is a doctor, after all.

So Mo and Hassan break-up. And Mo’s flamboyant younger pal Sam (Amin El Gamal) cannot leave his fellow “Gay-rab” single. If he won’t cruise the bars of “We Ho” (West Hollywood), then there’s nothing for it but to set him up at Sam’s next birthday party.

Kal (Michael Cassidy of “People of Earth” and “Batman vs. Superman”) is Paul Rudd-handsome, flippant and flirty.

“Actors always make me uncomfortable,” Mo complains.

“Hey, I’m an actor, creep.“

But…but what would you do “if this acting thing doesn’t work out?”

“Porn...Hey, I thought Muslims weren’t supposed to judge!”

It helps that Kal is also a teetotaler, loves Arab cooking and being an Army brat, learned Arabic when he was in the Middle East.

But Mo? He’s trying to balance his desires with his “Mister Islam” “mindset.” Everything has to go slow slow slow.

Can this couple make that work?

The value in a film like this is in its cultural immersion. There’s a traditional food and halal lifestyle primer tucked into all the witty, quippy banter in the gym, an Islamic funeral, parties and family gatherings.

Those new to this world (Sam’s new beau) are lectured that “There are no punishments for homosexuality in the Koran,” and that The Prophet didn’t persecute gays, along with long lists of things one simply doesn’t do, like taking off your shoes and letting them point towards Mecca.

“Sounds time consuming” may be the funniest line among many funny lines.

Egyptian-American actor El Gamal goes full Dan Levy here, sashaying into a funeral filled with wailing, disapproving Muslim women with a “What YEAR are we in here? It’s not the Dark Ages!”

The stereotypes embraced are the funniest ones — “Sound of Music,” “West Side Story” and “Easter Parade” (with Judy Garland) references.

“Hey, you know ‘Into the Woods,’ in act two when…?”

But Mo and Kal have another show that they bond over, one starring Christopher Reeve and that gave Kal his name.

The entire affair is a tad too on-the-nose to trip by as lightly as it might. A lot of rough edges are rubbed off in the cause of staying upbeat.

But as a culture-illuminating rom-com, it never goes far wrong. Mo’s “call to prayer” phone app, his family’s smothering-ululating concern for his happiness, a visual/sexual tease here, some Ramadan innuendo there, it’s often funny and it always plays.

“Even a single impure though would RUIN this whole day’s fast!”

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, innuendo

Cast:  Haaz Sleiman, Michael Cassidy, Amin El Gamal, Patrick Sabongui, Rula Gardenier and Veronica Cartwright

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mike Mosallam. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:32