Movie Nation

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

Topic has become my go-to source for international TV series worth bingeing through in a year when mere American series just won’t do.

Their latest offering, debuting on Dec. 24, is the Swedish dramedy “Love Me,” twelve episodes that take three Swedish couples through the trials of new love, faded love, breakup and even death over the course of a season.

It’s been nabbed by US network ABC for remaking, with Elizabeth Banks a central member of the team pulling that adaptation together.

Perhaps she’ll be the creating producer/star, as Josephine Bornebusch is for the Swedish show. She plays Clara, a 30something statuesque and striking blonde OB-GYN whom we meet on a nightmare Tinder date.

It begins with “You don’t look anything like your photo (in Swedish, with English subtitles) and descends into Mr.-Out-of-His-League-and-Clueless blurting charges of “egotistical woman” and ends with Clara’s “This look you’ve got going for you” — baggy pants, odd colors and a Bozo hairdo — “you look like a clown!“

She lives alone, binges the singles-couple-up show “Paradise Hotel” and late night candy runs. Which is how her “meet cute” with flirty-hunky mansplainer Peter (Sverrir Gudnason) begins. He’s obviously interested, fake-“stalks” her home (he lives in the building next door) and doesn’t formally meet her until she comes home drunk off her bum after a bender.

Love at first vomit?

Aron (Gustav Lindh) is head-over-heels with his “love eternal,” tattooed and sexually insatiable DJ Elsa (Dilal Gwyn). He can’t get through college exams or job interviews until he shows up for them, and their epic coitus always makes him late. A wrinkle? She’s a “provocative” DJ who underdresses the part and vamps up her late night club work. And he’s got a too-cute pal/confessor, Jenny (Sofia Karemyr) who seems more his type, and seems to think so as well as she plants seeds of doubt.

He’s also Clara’s much-younger brother.

And the examples of love they both grew up under were their parents. Dad/Sten (Johan Ulveson) dotes on their mother, and gives the impression he’s been doing forever. And in the first couple of episodes, we learn why as we catch up with them (Ia Langhammer plays Kersti, the wife) as the family gathers for their 40th wedding anniversary.

Things are not as they first appear.

“Love Me” veers from cute and affectionate to judgmental, rash and lashing out as the assorted couples connect, disconnect, argue and make-up. Aron is prone to tirades over their “future together” and everything that Elsa does to jeopardize that. He’s quite young, all-in and all-or-nothing that way.

And Elsa more or less just takes it.

Sten stoically takes on the role of the doormat everybody dumps on, from his wife to gossipy friends to his kids. Even booking a “Senior Love Romantic” getaway with his wife finds him bullied and up-sold by a young travel agent who plays the “budget” oriented husband-spending “shame” card to perfection.

Clara’s “case” is the trickiest and funniest. She’s on-the-spectrum blunt, not wholly self-aware how abrasive she is but funny at being obnoxious. She has a married confidante (Nina Zanjani) who rolls her eyes at Clara’s “picky” criteria for a mate. There’s even a moment where she blurts out her fury at love and life and her unhealthy relationship with her mother as she’s screaming “PUSH” at a patient giving birth.

And Aron confides in Jenny as he struggles to convince Elsa of his commitment to their “eternal love,” which he naively assumes is what his parents have.

Yeah, it’s like that.

“Love Me” is touching and romantic and fun, and my best advice is that you catch the first season of it on Topic before ABC takes a whack at it. Elizabeth Banks seems a safe bet for making the American version come off, but you never know.

MPA Rating: TV-MA: Smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Josephine Bornebusch, Johan Ulveson, Gustav Lindh, Sofia Karemyr, Dilan Gwyn, Ia Langhammer, Sverrir Gudnason, Görel Crona and Nina Zanjani

Credits: Josephine Bornebusch. Streaming on Topic.

Running time: 12 episodes @43 minutes each

Oh temptress smart phone, is there nothing you can’t ruin, given half a chance?

Globe-trotting filmmaker Thomas Balmès has been filming in the Himalayas, Bhutan and other high plateaus of Asia since “Babies” (2010). But with “Happiness,” he found a a subject worth exploring in depth over a couple of documentaries. That 2013 film, which focused on the first “opening up” of remote, isolated Bhutan to TV and electronic connection to the world, paves the way for his latest, about how the Internet is changing this legendarily scenic and devoutly religious part of the world.

“Sing Me a Song” follows Peyangki, a very young sāmaṇera (novice Buddhist monk) when we meet him. Balmès meets him at age eight, a contemplative child who claims to have preferred the monastery and a monastic future to “regular school” and life picking medicinal mushrooms with his mother.

And then we see a cell tower going up. “Ten years later,” you can guess a lot of what’s changed about Peyangki, but there’s even more you can’t.

Young sāmaṇera recite prayers in unison at what seems a more manic than spirutual pace. Almost to a one, they’re on their phones as they do — texting, playing games. It’s a jaw-dropping moment.

Whatever one thinks of the tranquility that looks a lot like boredom in eight year-old Peyangki lying on a mountainside regarding the flowers, the cell-phone transformation of him and the monastery is simply shocking.

“Any type of song,” he purrs, in Dzongkha with English subtitles, “as long as it’s a LOVE song.”

The teen monks are girl-crazy, swapping messages and calls with city girls on the WeChat app. That’s where the film gets its title, teen Pegangki requesting a song from a new online hook-up.

Damn, boy!

He and his peers are slacking off, neglecting their studies, claiming “Maybe I’m just not intelligent” enough to memorize the stanzas and stanzas of prayers, the ritual dances (“Stop looking at your feet!”).

He catches up with his mother, admitting he “didn’t learn very much.” But with a camera crew there, she doesn’t show alarm.

“If you commit to religion and get enlightenment, I will be happy!”

Pressure? A little. Maybe.

A trip with the novices into town is even more rattling. They blow their cash on game cafes to gorge on first-person-shooter video games, and street markets where they buy toy guns to play “war” with back at the monastery.

Say what now?

It brings to mind assorted Monty Python “nuns making mayhem” sketches, this shaved-head mob in red robes wandering city streets, window-shopping and ogling girls.

And then Peyangki tracks down Ugyen, the fetching young woman he’s been sweet-talking for weeks, maybe months. As we’ve seen her putting on makeup with her friends, discussing their life options, curious about work in Kuwait or how much a mushroom picker from the village of Laya could earn, she and her friends scroll through screens of pricy purses and designer shoes on their smart phones.

Sure, young man meets young woman on the Internet is a tale as old as Al Gore. But how does any of this jibe with a monastic life?

And as Peyangki gets gentle scoldings over his childish passions, hearing that “guns will never benefit you,” we wonder how much further he can go wrong and just how wrong you have to go before they kick you out.

Twenty years ago, the screen comedy “The Cup” captured something of this stereotype-shattering culture shock — Tibetan monks mad for the World Cup, hellbent on getting access to a TV so they could watch it. “Sing Me a Song” lets us consider how fast the world has changed since then, even mimicking that movie with a scene where the young and younger monks gather to watch a match. Half of them can’t look up from their phones long enough to take in Ronaldo’s performance.

The awkwardness of the immature, cloistered young man meeting the young woman — who has a child, he finds out (AFTER we do) — with an agenda and needs of her own is almost painful to watch.

Scenes like that, the myriad of camera angles showing a little boy hiking up a hillside and terribly intimate moments caught on camera make one wonder if there’s some “staging” going on here, if this is another documentary that is flirting with “docudrama” status.

Not that we don’t believe every single thing we see in “Sing Me a Song.” And even if we see “trouble” the minute we spy that first phone, we don’t necessarily guess how this fascinating “speed of change” story will play out.

MPA Rating: unrated, adult situation

Cast:  Peyangki, Ugyen

Credits: Directed by Thomas Balmès. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:41

They’ve been called “dead teenager movies” ever since Siskel and Ebert gave them that label. And they follow the same formula, the same “rules” the world over — even in Poland.

“Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight,” or “W lesie dzis nie zasnie nikt,” is a classic “filmy z martwymi nastolatkami (dead teenagers movie).”

It’s got teens — some of them archetypal “horny teenagers.” They’re in the forest, shipped there by their parents because they’ve become device and gaming and social media addicts.

And there’s something or someone there out to slaughter them, one by one.

The characters are The Usual Suspects — the nerd (Michal Lupa), the self-absorbed Youtube “star” (Sebastian Dela), the bombshell blonde (Wiktoria Gasiewska), the bully who might be projecting (Stanislaw Cywka)and the quiet girl with the Big Secret and the switchblade (Julia Wieniawa-Narkiewicz).

Only the nerd, prattling on about worries, movies and his gaming career, makes much of an impression. And everything he says and does has been acted out 144 times before in other dead teenager movies, most of them in English.

But we don’t watch such films for the surprises. We watch for the creative, twisted and sometimes funny means of slaughter, the nudity, the “sex means a death sentence” familiarity and the jokes — often made by the nerdy “type” who’s made himself an expert on the genre and its immutable laws and rules.

“When groups split up, people die” Julek has observed. As have we. Many, many times. The thing that hamstrings “Nobody Sleeps in the Woods” is that even the jokes about the genre are so over-familiar that we know them (in English, or in Polish with English subtitles) before the set-up line is finished.

The threat isn’t unseen, but viewed in the open mere minutes into the movie. The threat is over-“explained” at some point.

And yes, the kids and their camp counselor (Gabriela Muskala) “split up.”

Any questions? Any doubt who will strip naked, or who will be the Last Camper Standing?

MPA Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Julia Wieniawa-Narkiewicz, Michal Lupa, Wiktoria Gasiewska, Sebastian Dela, Stanislaw Cywka, Gabriela Muskala

Credits: Directed by Bartosz M. Kowalski, script by Bartosz M. Kowalski, Jan Kwiecinski and Mirella Zaradkiewicz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

He’s pulled this together from the 56 hours of “unseen” Beatles studio footage.

Yeah, I thought we’d seen it all, too. Apparently not.

It’s all footage shot around the recording, rehearsing and build-up to the “rooftop” concert so famed in Beatles lore.

“Get Back” comes to theaters, and then to Netflix in early 2021

Here’s a fun martial arts Buddhist parable from the late pre-Jackie Chan era, a 1979 jewel that’s been newly-restored in ways that preserve the look, sound and feel of the age of the times, a moment in time caught amid the emergence of Hong Kong cinema.

King Hu’s “Raining in the Mountain” is a period piece with a large cast, an epic mountainside temple setting and a story that is filled with murderous intrigues and hilarious scheming and double-dealing.

An aged abbot (Sun Han) has summoned officials and benefactors to the Temple of Three Treasures to help pick his successor. General Wang (Feng Tien) and his Lieutenant Chang Chen (Kuang Yu Wang) have their reasons for backing this or that candidate.

I don’t know the Mandarin equivalent for “Quid pro quo,” but there’s a little of that in all this, too.

Esquire Wen (Yueh Sun) has more than just an agenda. He wants this rare “sutra” (scripture) that the monastery has in its scripture room. And when his “concubine” (Feng Hsu) and valet sneak off to take a look around and try their hand at picking a few locks, we see just what the rich benefactor has in mind. And the General and Lieutenant pick up on that, recognizing the sexy thief known as “White Fox” (Hsu) in Wen’s employ.

“There’s more to this man than meets the eye.”

What ensues is a near-comedy of intrigues, spying and skulking about with revelations about which of the three scheming candidate monks (Chun Shih, Paul Chun, Hui-Lou Chen) each backs to replace the venerable abbot.

The abbot and his most trusted aides concoct a Zen test or two to see which of the monks is best-suited to guide the temple in the future.

Hu (“Dragon Inn”) spared no expense for costumes, but the film has the unmistakable dated touches that made early Hong Kong cinema instantly recognizable, even with your eyes closed.

The music is largely tinkly Chinese theater comic “effect” sounds, and the soundtrack itself has that distinct tinny tone that the earliest Bruce Lee films sported. The sumptuous lighting and colors, symbolic and tonal depth of the classic Mainland (PRC) cinema developed in the ’80s is far off on the horizon.

The look is well-lit and flat.

This is an attempted “epic” from an industry (filmed in Hong Kong and Taiwan) that was churning out commercial fare on a budget, films often limited (as this one is) to a single main location.

But what Hu gets out of the temple setting is period perfect and heavily populated (many many monks) to an impressive degree And a madcap third act martial arts fight-chase (limited wire work, but lots of trampoline jumps) through forests, along the cliffs of a river, is whimsical with just a hint of grandeur about it.

MPA Rating: Unrated, violence

Cast: Feng Hsu, Yueh Sun, Chun Shih, Paul Chun, Hui-Lou Chen, Feng Tien, Lin Tung, Su Han and Kuang Yu Wang

Credits: Written and directed by King Hu. Now streaming on Film Movement+

Running time: 2:02