Movie Nation

The daft, stylized and quasi-surreal comedy of “Eagle vs. Shark” and “What We Do in the Shadows” may have made Taika Waititi’s reputation in his native New Zealand and at film festivals far and wide.

But the sweet, goofy and sentimental “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” is what sealed with deal for Hollywood.

A Thor sequel followed, “Mandalorian” episodes and oh yeah, the Oscar-nominated whimsy of “Jo Jo Rabbit.” That picture that could have pigeon-holed him as the Kiwi Wes Anderson forever, had he not shown more commercial/conventional inclinations before that one.

I missed “Wilderpeople” during its limited North American run, and in my mind had built it up into something more in fitting with Waititi’s Jemaine Clement collaborations than the almost straightforward comic adventure it actually is.

It’s funny, with colorful, exaggerated characters and a near outlandish situation or two. But in the end, it’s just an unwanted “problem” teen on the run in the woods with his “uncle,” the surviving half of the couple that finally took him in and lent him the promise of a happy “normal” life.

Ricky, played with a just-go-with-it ease by Julian Dennison, is an unwanted kid with a history of vandalism, arson, car theft and running away with he’s dropped with farmer Bella (Rima Te Wiata) and her grump of a “Crocodile Dundee guy” husband, Hector (Sam Neill).

He’s dropped off with a lengthy list of his “issues” by his bluff social worker (Rachel House), who leaves with an “Ok, he’s all yours. ‘No returns!’ Just joking.”

Ricky’s parked in a farmhouse high in Hobbit country, the New Zealand “bush,” with The State’s reassurance that “There’s no one else who wants you, Ok?”

And aside from not talking for a day or two, and running away every night, Ricky adjusts. He’s bonding with their dog and with nurturing Maori Earth mama Bella in a flash, even sharing his obscene would-be rapper haiku with her.

“This one’s called ‘Kingi, You Wanker.'”

Hector? “Something you want me to do?”

“Yeah. Leave me alone.”

That changes the moment Bella drops dead. Hector is devastated, Ricky is all about fixing his situation and avoiding “juvie.”

“Why don’t we just get you a new wife? There’s all sorts of women on the Internet!”

Rebuffed, the kid takes matters into his own hands, faking his death and fleeing into the bush with the dog Bella just got him, Tupac.

Yeah, Ricky may be out of his element. But dude is hard.

That’s when things go totally wrong, Ricky and Hector become wanted criminals — well Hector does, anyway. He’s confused for a “molesterer.” Damned if there isn’t a nationwide manhunt for them. As social worker Paula (House) assures a worried nation that “No child left behind” is her policy, Ricky and Hector stumble off the grid and into legend.

Waititi touches abound in this adaptation, taking chapter titles from (one assumes) the novel — “Famous,” “Broken Foot Camp” — a hilariously off-putting eulogy by Waititi playing the priest at Bella’s funeral, and violence involving kids played for laughs.

But what sticks with you from this “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” is the sweetness, the soft edges Neill gives to his bush-savvy curmudgeon, the kid’s street “smarts” that’re really just naivete. Because he’s just 13, no matter what crimes he has “the knack” for.

Dennison went on to have a key part in “Deadpool 2” and sadly in the obnoxious “Christmas Chronicles 2.”

House has become a popular animated voice actress (“Soul,” “Moana”).

And Waititi? He’s got an Oscar, another “Thor” sequel in the works and a “Time Bandits” TV series in the works. In an era when “star directors” have become an endangered species, he’s become a brand — not just for offbeat humor, but for making even “sentimental” kid-friendly goofs like “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” go down easy.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements including violent content, and for some language 

Cast: Sam Neill, Julian Dennison, Rachel House, Rima Te Wiata, Rhys Darby and Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne

Credits: Directed by Taika Waititi, script by Taika Waititi and Te Arepa Kahi, based on the novel by Barry Crump. An Orchard release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:41

Who’s a good boo boo dog? Who?

It is time?

Can we say this now, after his disastrously-off “Catch-22” on TV, his satiric misfire “Suburbicon” and the sentimental slog of “Monuments Men?”

Behind the camera, the magic that was George Clooney most definitely was George Clooney, at this stage. As a filmmaker, he’s lost his fastball and curveball, if not his slider.

“The Midnight Sky” is a gorgeous, handsomely-mounted piece of post-apocalyptic sci-fi that lured a stellar cast, which surrounds Clooney — Letterman bearded in this outing.

It’s a downbeat tale of a dying Earth “after the event,” a dying scientist (Clooney) and his efforts to save a foundling left behind at his research station and the spacecraft he had a hand in sending off to explore a new “exoplanet” suitable for terra-forming for the human race to settle.

But “Midnight” is “Martian” without the whizbang humor and optimism, so downbeat it’s like the saddest parts of “Gravity” and all of “Solaris.” The pathos he reaches for and not one actor manages to summon up is contained in another film we catch a character watching — the post-nuclear war weeper “On the Beach.”

While Clooney & Co. make “Midnight Sky” watchable, it’s so emotionally drained, derivative and over-familiar as to be akin to watching paint dry — richly-tinted, shiny acrylic paint, if that’s any consolation.

A lovely, dark and spare opening sets the story up. In 2049, our scientist is the last holdout at a research station above the Arctic Circle. He stayed there by choice when “the event,” which plays out like a pandemic on his digital global maps, struck. Flashbacks show the evacuation, warnings about keeping up with his “transfusions” (it looks like he’s on self-administered dialysis).

In between flashbacks that depict a life uninterrupted by science and work, save for one failed love affair, he has the brainstorm of trying to contact a spacecraft sent to a distant moon in the Solar System to check out its habitability. No answer.

On that “2001: A Space Odyssey” vessel (with Architectural Digest interiors), the crew is in the dark about Earth. Sully (Felicity Jones) notes all the communications they’ve tried to reestablish. The captain (David Oyelowo) and crew (Kyle Chandler, Tiffany Boone, Demian Bichir) lose themselves replaying old holographic chats and visits as they make their way “home.”

The silent seven year-old “left behind” at the Arctic station (Caoilinn Springall, spitting image of “My Girl” era Anna Chlumsky) becomes a new problem for our survivor scientist. And while he doesn’t let us see him “work the problem,” there is a powerful radio transmitter across the Arctic that they can try and reach.

The story signposts start out familiar and venture onto a well-worn path in writer-for-hire (“Vacancy,” “The Revenant,” “Overlord”) Mark L. Smith’s adaptation of the Lily Brookes-Dalton novel. You have an idea what the crew of the ship will go through, although a “Sweet Caroline” sing-along takes you by (unpleasant) surprise. On Earth, the good doctor’s quest puts him in peril in ways he and we cannot necessarily trust as “real.”

The obstacles to our two narratives are as predictable as an Alabama/Ole Miss point spread. The waypoints of the ship and the scientist-with-child journeys are pro forma to the point of pro formula.

And did I mention what a gloomy bummer of a movie it is?

Which brings us back to our original assertion, that Clooney, a fascinating figure, articulate spokesman for human progress and a Righteous Dude, is a lot more interesting off set than on, these days.

And putting him in charge behind the camera doesn’t remedy that, and hasn’t in some time.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for some bloody images and brief strong language

Cast: George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Tiffany Boone, Caoilinn Springall and Demian Bichir.

Credits: Directed by George Clooney, script by Mark L. Smith, based on a novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58

Whatever Oscar dreams Netflix has for “Mank” (meh) or “Da’ Five Bloods” (You’re kidding, right?), they’re pulling out all the stops for George C. Wolfe’s film of August Wilson’s most accessible play.

There’s a doc on the making of the film, featuring Denzel Washington’s (star of the film of Wilson’s “Fences”) role getting it on the screen. Another documentary about schoolkids learning Wilson monologues for a national competition is also on the streaming service.

This featurette? It’s on Youtube. Rainey is such a rich, layered and theatrical character in the play that it’s easy to forget that she’s the “real” character here. A good piece to watch, before or after seeing “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”

“Wildlife” feels like the sort of movie Paul Dano would have begged to star in back in his teens.

The “There Will Be Blood” co-star’s adaptation of Richard Ford’s novel captures a marriage falling apart and a doted-on, confided with teen son witnessing all, struggling to hold things together and suffering for it in ways present and we can guess future.

Jake Gyllenhaal is personable, athletic Jerry who has taken on sole “breadwinner” duties in their latest town, Great Falls, Montana. He’s a golf pro, with all that entails in Great Falls, Montana in 1960. He gives lessons, caddys and does course maintenance.

Of course he’s “coaching” 14 year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) in the all American game he must take up to make friends at his new school.

Carey Mulligan plays chatty Jeanette, the polished, put-together wife and mother — not working now, but someone who has held a variety of office jobs at other stops along their marriage journey.

We’re not surprised to learn that they met at college. And at the first sign of trouble, we’re less surprised to learn that they’ve been sort of failing their way eastward for years.

Jerry isn’t exactly subservient enough at his golf club job and we see his firing coming before he does. His son witnesses the cause and the effect.

“They just don’t want people like us to get ahead,” Jerry explains, grabbing a six-pack on the way home.

Jeanette’s sunny, upbeat and supportive optimism crashes against Jerry’s embittered sense of being trapped in a place where he’s been shamed. He won’t take the job back (his glad-handing ways made him popular) because “I won’t work for people like that.” And he won’t take any gig just to prop them up.

“I didn’t come to Montana to bag groceries.”

Jeanette’s smiling work-arounds mean she’ll go out and find a job in the interim. And Joe, with schoolwork, pointlessly attempting football and making what could be his first girlfriend (Zoe Margaret Colletti) will find a part-time job, too.

The fissures were there and already starting to crack when Jerry abruptly announces his next gig. He’ll join the crews fighting the distant wildfires that darken their skies and dominate the Great Falls news, a decision Jeanette regards as dangerous, rash, juvenile and pretty much the last straw.

“What kind of man leaves his wife and son in such a lonely place?“

Dano focuses on the trauma of all of this, and how it registers on the face of young Oxenbould (“Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day”). The kid even looks like younger Dano, a sensitive child gut-punched by his Dad’s decision and utterly deflated by his mother’s mercenary “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do” reaction.

Scenes in which Mom brazenly revives her dormant feminine wiles to pursue a rich divorced car dealer/entrepreneur (Bill Camp) are as quietly disturbing as anything Mulligan has played, and I’m seeing this AFTER “Promising Young Woman.”

Gyllenhaal gets across a kind of repressed, depressed haplessness. In an era where men didn’t talk about their problems, Jerry’s reactions are all he knows to do, a pattern set in stone by his upbringing, the unspoken parameters of his marriage and past behavior.

And Oxenbould lets us see what Joe has absorbed from both parents, a kid rooting for his father, whom he desperately misses, trying to smooth things over with his mother when mere guilting her about her desperate, vindictive turn doesn’t work.

At 14, “Wildlife” lets us see the awful lessons that will scar this kid for life.

Dano gets much of this across without giving the son many lines, without fleshing out his school life and the budding friendship/romance that “things at home” are snuffing out.

Yes, “Wildlife” is yet another “broken home” movie where the child acts more like the adult than the adults. But Dano and his cast make this period piece more real and subtly disturbing than many a memoir of the “Glass Castle” and “Hillbilly Elegy” variety.

MPA Rating:  PG-13 for thematic material including a sexual situation, brief strong language, and smoking 

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ed Oxenbould, Zoe Margaret Colletti and Bill Camp.

Credits: Directed by Paul Dano, script by Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, based on the Paul Ford novel. An IFC release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:45

If you know your submarine thrillers, from “The Enemy Below” and “Das Boot” to “The Hunt for Red October,” you know this signature moment repeated in such movies from WWII onward. It’s the sweaty, suspenseful near silence as everyone waits breathlessly for the pronouncement of the Horchraum specialist on a UBoat or sonar tech on more modern submarines.

He squeezes his eyes, presses his headphones on a little tighter, and identifies the danger and the direction it’s coming from just by listening to the thrum of propellers, the splash (of depth charges) and the groans of metal pushing through water at speed.

The brilliant stroke of writer-director Antonin Baudry’s debut feature “The Wolf’s Call” (“Le chant du loup”) is building his movie around that figure — his intense focus, his insanely-well-tuned earss, his judgment calls.

The first modern French submarine thriller to make it into broader circulation, thanks to Netflix, it’s a New Cold War thriller with some suspense and a lot of required suspension of disbelief.

Because while the basic premise — that tensions are spiking with Russia over Syria and threats to Finland, a dangerous situation made more so by “American apathy”– there’s an awful lot of far-fetched poppycock in this “Hunt for Red October” meets “Fail Safe.”

Chanteraide, aka “Socks” (François Civil of “Frank”) has hearing so keen he can tell four bladed propellers from two, seven or eight-bladed ones. He can work out your computer password from listening to the clatter of keys as you type it in.

Heck, good luck to his new bookstore owner girlfriend (Paula Beer) whose dream is to sneak up on him. Not happening. The show-off.

The opening scene is an underwater commando retrieval mission off Syria, with hostile troops on shore, a hostile frigate and hostile helicopter and another threat “Socks” can’t make out in time to keep the Titan out of harm’s way.

His XO (executive officer) may be forgiving. He’s played by Omar Sy of the “Jurassic World” and “X-Men” franchises. But Captain Granchamp (Reda Kateb of “A Prophet”) is a bit tougher.

“For the last time Chanteraide, this is the military, not art school!”

Yes, that’s the sort of line you only hear in a FRENCH nuclear sub thriller.

Between missions, “Socks” obsesses over what he couldn’t figure out at sea, which sends him to a bookstore — how he meets his lady friend — and down the rabbit hole of the French undersea service’s politics. Are the powers that be afraid of fingering and thus provoking the Russians, or was this anomaly somebody else’s sub?

All of his digging is set against spiraling tensions, and as he puts to sea again the stakes go even higher, with the admiral informing him (in French with English subtitles) “You are the country’s life insurance.

So, no pressure.

Mathieu Kassovitz, a veteran French star who goes back to “Amelie” and many an international (“Haywire,” “Munich”) thriller, is the admiral and fills out an impressive cast for Baudry’s debut.

But some of the action beats take on a “Star Trek” degree of absurdity — a captain fetching an RPG to defend his sub, explosions underwater that don’t bring any water on board, a plot that paints its screenwriter-director into a corner he can’t clever-his-way out of.

Plenty of sub movie conventions get a fine work out — individual heroics, stoic professionalism mixed with “We’re gonna DIE” histrionics (Those French…), heroism that crosses into sacrifice.

It’s not, to my knowledge, a genre the French have taken many shots at before — at least not recently. So some blunders are to be expected.

So if Baudry takes pains to bring in technical experts early on next time, I look forward to seeing his next action pic. He takes a very clever point of view, and even if he doesn’t get everything he might have out of it, “The Wolf’s Call” (a sonar phenomenon) still manages to pull us in and at times impress.

MPA Rating: TV-14, violence, action

Cast: François Civil, Omar Sy, Mathieu Kassovitz, Paul Beer and Reda Kateb

Credits: Written and directed by Antonin Baudry. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

That delicate English rose Carey Mulligan smears her lipstick, slurs her words and stuffs a heaping helping of brimstone and treacle into your Christmas stocking with “Promising Young Woman,” a twisty and twisted tale of personal torment and revenge.

Torment is what her character, Cassandra, wears on her turning-30-looks-40 face — the broken, lost years of wandering since her med school career was derailed and life stopped making sense.

And revenge? Well, that’s what she’s out for, cruising the bars, playing too-drunk-to-stand until some “helpful” gentleman with a touch of gallantry offers to get her home.

But “my apartment is just a few blocks from here.” And “just one drink.”

And “you’re safe” and “You’re so beautiful” and on and on, not listening to her “No” and “stop” until she shows just how sober and just how much she hates “nice guys” who impose themselves on women whose alcohol or drug intake — willing or otherwise — has removed “consent.”

“Promising Young Woman” surfs on the fury of the judgement inherent in “They put themselves in danger, girls like that” and “just asking for it” from every “nice guy” and “nice girl” who stands by and lets sexual assault happen.

It’s a troubling, uneven revenge fantasy simmering with rage but awash in mental illness.

Cassie’s mom (Jennifer Coolidge) sees it, sometimes giving up on papering over her live-at-home daughter’s depression and aimlessness.

“What kind of person forgets her 30th birthday?”

Her Dad (Clancy Brown)? He seems to get it, gently encouraging anything this onetime-med student/now testy barista living under his roof does that seems “normal.”

Maybe “normal” will come from that “nice guy” former classmate (Bo Burnham) who recognizes her, blurts “Why are you working here?” and instantly regrets it, and takes a scathing look and worse and still clings to the hope that he’ll get her “real” number.

But as we’ve already seen Cassie use herself as bait for the likes of bros played by Adam Brody and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, heard her acrid outrage and wondered how far she takes her desire for vengeance, Dr. “Normal” seems like a long shot.

Cassie bats back-and-forth snark with her boss/pal (Laverne Cox, at her sassy-funny best) and sets her sights on Those Who Did Her and Others Wrong in College. Let the wild vengeful rumpus commence.

Only it never really does. As dark revenge fantasies go, this is no “Hard Candy” or “Thoroughbreds.” It’s a picture trapped on the horns of the “always blows up in your face” dilemma. Cassie is plainly obsessed, trapped and “a hot mess.”

She gets herself in the room with characters played by Alison Brie, Connie Britton and Alfred Molina, asks probing questions, hunting for answers, acknowledgement and remorse.

And if she doesn’t get those? Hell hath no fury…

Mulligan crushes this role with every measured, withering line-reading.

“We were KIDS!”

“If I hear that one more time.”

The movie is a bit of a female empowerment muddle, with promising young actress-turned writer-director Emerald Fennell rearing back as if to deliver a knock-out blow, and only grazing what she’s swinging at, often as not.

But she makes “Promising Young Woman” so consistently dark and foreboding that we never let our guard down, never get our hopes up and brace for the next moment that comes when “it’s time to pay the piper.”

MPA Rating: R for strong violence including sexual assault, language throughout, some sexual material and drug use 

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Laverne Cox, Alison Brie, Adam Brody, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Jennifer Coolidge, Clancy Brown and Alfred Molina.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emerald Fennell. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:53

A January release on Netflix, a laugh out loud trailer, which may have all the laughs in it.

Love that Nic Cage. He owns a few of these words. Samuel L. owns the rest.

You don’t think much about “character arc” in a movie until you stumble across a movie that forgets to tidy that detail up.

In “Fisherman’s Friends,” the reliable character actor Daniel Mays plays Londoner and musical talent manager Danny, the man who discovers Cornwall fishermen who’ve kept sea chanteys alive, as their ancestors did, for centuries. Danny turns them into pop stars in this “true story” about a British singing phenomenon of about ten years ago.

This sort of thing happens all the time in the UK, land of “The X-Factor,” Susan Boyle and — when I was a kid in the ’70s — Laurel & Hardy singing their way onto the pop charts, decades after their deaths, with the novelty tune “Trail of the Lonesome Pine.”

Either the real manager “Danny” got to the screenwriters, to Daniel Mays or his lawyers did. Because the edge is utterly rubbed off him. The classic way of portraying this guy is cynical, self-dealing city slicker who is moved, reformed and maybe butched-up by his dealings with working men of the sea. And there’s nothing of that to him, no edge, no real “journey” from A to B for this character to take.

Danny is pranked by his douche of a boss (Noel Clarke) on a group bachelor party/scouting trip to Port Isaac on the Cornwall coast, left behind by that boss to “sign,” “do what you do” with these ten local fishermen who sing “Nelson’s Blood,” “Blow the Man Down” and “What d’ye Do With a Drunken Sailor” on the docks every weekend they aren’t at sea.

To crusty Jim (James Purefoy, terrific), his crustier Dad Jago (veteran character actor David Hayman) and “the lads,” this Danny fellow is “just some wanker from London.”

But Danny, on the fly, starts in on “tradition” and “authenticity” and works his wordy charm, and they fall under his spell. It’s just that his boss, who ditched Danny there with lousy cell service and no transport to the big city “until they sign on the dotted line,” was just pranking him. His big talk of singers who “look the part” and songs “in the public domain” was just that. Danny?

“I gave them my word.”

So straight off, he’s a decent sort, an honorable man and somebody with no place in the cutthroat music business. If he can’t sneak out of town before making good, he’s in for a total immersion in generations of Port Isaac fishing culture.

“You’ll never know a man until you find out what his legs are made of…at SEA.”

And then there’s Jim’s single-mom daughter, the spunky Alwyn. As she’s played by Tuppence Middleton, Danny is of course smitten. And being a decent sort, from the start he’s chivalrous, charming her little girl if not her grumpy Dad.

When you label a tale like this “a true story” you’re kind of giving away the game. They don’t make movies about singers who don’t get a record deal and gain attention for it.

But even with much of the mystery missing, there are wrinkles in the tale, potholes — some tragic — on the path. As the fishermen also volunteer as the port’s rescue boat operators, there’s more than just fishing in the unforgiving sea that’s a risk.

As the poet Sir Walter Scott put it to any fishmarket shopper, “It’s no fish ye’re buying–it’s men’s lives.”

There’s also a sprinkling of “local color,” although not nearly as much as you’d hope from a movie that tells a 75 minute story in 112 minutes.

The coastal folk are “Yarney Goats,” and their nearby inland rivals are “Town Crows.”

Danny has to go to sea, but not “dressed for an America’s Cup.” And dammit man, mind what colors ye wear aboard our boats.

“Fishermen don’t wear green. Makes the boat seek land!”

The scenery is lovely, the pub life palpably real and the songs, depending on your taste and “saltiness,” are lovely, rich and occasionally hilarious.

Note for North American viewers, there’s a joke about “The National Anthem” that you only get if you realize Cornwall was never formally bound in treaty to England and Britain. Kind of like Key West.

The movie this most closely resembles is the similar “true story” “Calendar Girls,” only with no nudity and less comic edge.

Still, Middleton, Purefoy, Hayman and Mays are interesting enough on their own that they make this mixed-bag of a movie tolerable even when it tests your patience, even when the characters don’t really take a personal journey that anyone could call “a character arc.”

MPA Rating: Rated PG-13 for some strong language, and suggestive references

Cast: Daniel Mays, Tuppence Middleton, James Purefoy, David Hayman, Maggie Steed and Noel Clarke.

Credits: Directed by Chris Foggin, script by Piers Ashworth, Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcraft. A Samuel Goldwyn release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:52