Movie Nation

“Soul” is Pixar’s intellectually ambitious companion piece to “Inside/Out,” a whimsical “Outside/In” take on what makes us human.

It’s comical, but not really a comedy, spiritual without being all that deep. But as it grapples with what drives a creative person, paints the “after life” and “before life” eternity in Picasso-with-a-light-pen strokes and questions what makes life worth living, it can be quite touching.

As to “answers” about The Meaning of Life and the concept of “soul,” let’s just say it’s a Zen koan where the punchline is “Whatever we say it is.” Parent and preacher, mystic and guru — all seekers are all legitimized as those with answers for those with questions.

Jamie Foxx is the voice of Joe Gardner, 40something and single, a New Yorker and middle school music teacher who’s just been offered the chance to switch to full time.

But he is another “Mr. Holland,” and this wasn’t the “opus” he imagined for his life. Mom (Phylicia Rashad) may be relieved he’s moved beyond that “dead end gigging” that’s been his life.

But a former student (voiced by Quest Love of The Roots, “The Tonight Show’s” house band) hooks him up. The kid grew up to be a drummer for a star sax player (Angela Bassett, regal in form, regal in voice) and they need a piano player. It’s Joe’s shot at a Big Break.

If you’re old enough to have seen “Heaven Can Wait,” you know that’s the very day Joe dies, and that his first words on realizing his fate will be “I can’t die NOW!”

He finds himself in an officious afterlife where “The Great Beyond” is at the upper end of the escalator. But he wants off, and he stumbles across loopholes in the bureaucracy. He’s mistaken for a Nobel laureate in the mentor program for “new souls” and assigned the incorrigible future human #22.

She sounds like Tina Fey because that’s a “voice that annoys people.” And she is hellbent on not living a life, and even if she’s never actually lived one and thus has no serious experience to draw on. Famous souls, from Mother Teresa to Copernicus, the Greeks to Gandhi, have taken a shot at mentoring/convincing her to come to Earth. No dice. Joe realizes this will be “soul crushing” work.

“You can’t crush a soul here. That’s what life on Earth is for!”

But Joe’s determined efforts take them to the sea of lost souls, and a pirate ship captained by a whimsically spiritual seeker/guide to getting Joe back to his life to fulfill what he figures is his destiny. Moonwind (Graham Norton, a hoot) may be a captain here. On Earth, he’s a sign spinner on 14th and 7th, an aged hippy guru.

That’s one of the best conceits of “Soul.” Musicians, artists and creative people who get “in the zone” are experiencing the divine, as are mystics of every stripe. They are living corporeal lives on Earth, occasionally venturing into the very afterlife Joe’s been sentenced to. They’re teachers and go betweens — literally.

Will Joe will learn what he’s really seeking, what his real destiny might be? Will #22 find her bliss, what makes life worth risking on Earth?

I found the whole afterlife business here more derivative and somewhat less comforting than perhaps the film’s creators (writer-director Pete Docter of “Monsters, Inc.,” “Up,” “Wall-E” and “Inside/Out” is the guiding force) intended. This is supposed to be a child’s guide to spirituality, right?

The afterlife/before-life animation is original, but amorphous and aside from the Picasso homages, mostly a drab palette in shades of blue. A Who’s Who of pointlessly-famous voices rush by as various officials, all named “Jerry” or “Gerel” (Alice Braga, Wes Studi, June Squibb,Richard Ayoade).

Rachel House is “Terry,” the accountant who chases Joe’s missing soul hither and yon, determined to balance the supernatural books and thus is the half-hearted villain of the piece.

But the jazz scenes, where Joe falls into an almost ecstatic trance, the explanations of jazz improv as “a conversation” in an elite language that people strive their whole creative lives to master, are some of the most glorious and transcendent in Pixar history.

Another late-night band leader, Jon Batiste of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” created the jazz here. I want the soundtrack.

And the jazz is how the viewer should approach “Soul.” Simplistic and derivative it may be, it’s still not something you’re meant to wholly understand. It’s a film that you feel.

MPA Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Graham Norton, Angela Bassett, Quest Love, Rachel House, Phylicia Rashad, Alice Braga, Daveed Diggs, Wes Studi

Credits: Directed by Pete Docter, Kemp Powers, script by Pete Docter, Kemp Powers and Mike Jones. A Disney/Pixar release on Disney+.

Running time: 1:41

Chad Hartigan, who gave us the understated “Martin Bonner,” directed. This Feb. release from IFC also stars Soko.

On a sliding “quirky tales about teenage girls” scale, “Antarctica” is a lot more “Ghost World” than “Booksmart.” Not that it’s in either of those films’ league.

It’s another self-consciously odd, almost surreal “smirk” of a comedy about two misfits who aren’t just BFFs in Morgansfield High, they’re each others only friends. And how you take it depends on how easy a laugh you are.

Chloë Levine (“The Ranger”) plays Kat — clever, cute and too-cool for this school, a smart aleck who wastes too much of her time stifling laughs at the quite-elderly “health” teacher’s “hip” admonitions to “check your head and believe the hype” about the dangers of premarital sex and consumable hallucinogens .

Janet (Kimie Moruya, making her feature film debut) is busier ignoring the wingnut history teacher praising the “entrepreneurs” who benefited from Reagan’s 1980s CIA/cheap cocaine smuggling policy and invented crack.

Janet’s typing “fire and forget” missiles, college application forms online where her flippant answer to “describe the world 100 feet from where you are right now” is an unfiltered blurt about her father’s aging urinary tract, the proximity of her new vibrator and the self-described “sweaty fat chick” bothering to fill out this form.

Kat’s coping with the “healthy” kiddie snack diet Mom (Clea Lewis) foists on her so that her slovenly Slavic creep of a latest-husband (Laith Nakli) can gorge on what HE likes and lecture Kat and her younger siblings to “chew food. Otherwise, expand in intestines!”

Boys? Janet isn’t dealing with that, and Kat is forced to rebuff the advances of boorish mook B-boy Stevie (Steve Lipman) who has figured out why there are no Black serial killers, even though he doesn’t know any Black people.

“You know, we should be lesbians,” Janet shrugs.

“Can’t do the wardrobe.”

The inciting incident in “Antarctica” is Kat’s Halloween hook-up, leading to “slut shaming” at school, leading to Janet beating the hell out of the offender and getting put on this mood-altering/weight controlling medication, FemTrex. Kat? She just gets pregnant.

That leads to a schism as Kat is “sent away” (a sex addict, her mother figures) and drugged Janet wonders what is real and what she’s hallucinating — like the new neighbor teen (Bubba Weiler) who seems to know all about her, is into her, and walks the streets in a space suit.

Writer-director Keith Beardon’s (“Meet Monica Velour”) dialogue is glib and somewhat current. “What makes insane people always want to talk to me? Should I scowl more?” But it’s the situations that give “Antarctica” the feel of surreal.

An OB-GYN who puns “At your cervix” and makes duck puppet jokes with a speculum as he gets down to business, Kat in rehab with a bunch of adult sex addicts for having unprotected sex (he lied) one time, Janet’s new “boyfriend” who may not be real, and even if he is he’s wearing a SPACE SUIT — all kind of nuts.

The sitcom jokey high school entrance marquee — “A friend is a stranger you haven’t alienated yet.” — group therapy in rehab where everybody learns “It’s not HOW you have sex, but how sex has you” — almost every joke here is aimed at the smirk bone, not the funny one.

I didn’t laugh at anything until Kat’s mother takes her on a “four hour and 29 minute” drive and chat on their way to the mental health rehab hospital. Sitcom and screen comedy veteran Lewis — she’s been around since “Friends” and “Mad About You” — punches through all the “trying too hard” and delivers.

“Don’t you wish we’d had this conversation sooner?”

Yes. Yes we do.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Chloë Levine, Kimie Moruya, Clea Lewis, Bubba Weiler, Ajay Naidu, Laith Nakli, Steve Lipman, Chil Kong.

Credits: Written and directed by Keith Bearden. A Breaker release.

Running time: 1:21

We are all heroes of our own story. And if we’re white and Southern, some of us are happy to throw in a little Tennessee Williams-styled “martyr” to the tale.

Netflix and Ron Howard serve up a lot of both in bringing J.D. Vance’s “up by my redneck bootstraps” memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” to the screen.

For some viewers, it’s 116 minutes of triggering — abused childhood, addicted parenting, impulse control, bad decisions, self-destructive politics, ingrained failure and violence.

Others — conservatives, one suspects — will grab its “poverty porn” as evidence that “anyone can make it in America,” when of course Vance’s lurid autobiography is the exception that proves the rule, anecdote as “evidence.”

But astute viewers with some connection to its geography and class could have a moment of empathy over Vance’s broad caricature of Kentucky/Ohio “poor white trash.” Oh. THIS is what Black and Hispanic filmgoers feels when they see entire culture painted with a stereotypical brush.

I’d say Howard, who grew up on “The Andy Griffith Show,” should know better. But he’s second generation Hollywood. What would he know about the real Appalachia?

Still, it’s easy to see what he and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor (“The Shape of Water”) saw in the material. This is a far rougher “The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio” or “The Glass Castle.” The narrator’s point of view is male, the toxic parenting here is matriarchal.

And the leading ladies could see the Oscar bait in dressing down and cussing up. Amy Adams, Glenn Close and Haley Bennett let go and embrace the working class struggle of generations of the Kentucky diaspora who didn’t win LBJ’s “war on poverty” and realize his “Great Society,” even after moving to Ohio.

Howard’s film only gives us a cursory look at where Vance’s “people” came from, a prologue in Jackson County, Kentucky where a teenage J.D. (Owen Asztalos) visits the family homestead, gets a beating from the locals and an earful from his foul mouthed Mamaw (Close) and fouler-mouthed Momma (Adams) that offers a glimpse of his history.

His family was uprooted when granny got pregnant at 13 and she and her new husband (Papaw, played later by Bo Hopkins) fled to factory work in Middletown, Ohio.

The first of the film’s two timelines follows teenaged J.D. as he struggles to better himself as his hellion nurse-mother lurches from one bad relationship, one addiction to another.

Martyrdom point one — Mom cannot control her temper, her language or her appetites. Her kids bear the scars.

The other timeline is J.D. (Gabriel Basso) as an adult, finishing up Yale Law after stints in the Marines and an undergrad degree from Ohio State. He’s got an Indian girlfriend (Freida Pinto) from law school, and slim chance of landing a plum internship because he’s gauche and unsophisticated. A mixer/dinner with potential law firms prompts a panicked phone call to Usha (Pinto).

“What am I supposed to do with all these f—–g forks?”

And heaven forbid some smug to-the-manner-born Eastern lawyer drop the word “redneck” into conversation. Mom and Mawaw aren’t the only ones with anger management issues.

Martyrdom point two, “class” and not being raised with it matters. All those teenaged “Can I watch ‘Meet the Press'” pleas (said no fourteen year-old EVER) didn’t give him the polish to succeed. He had to grab it with his own two hands.

“Hillbilly Elegy” teeters back and forth between timelines, giving Adams at her frumpiest plenty of chances to go manic and martyred — “I never had a life where I wasn’t ‘thinking about the kids!” –and Close lots of chances to drawl through Southern-fried insults.

“Wouldn’t spit on her ass if her guts were on fire.”

Vance and Howard depict a childhood (late ’90s) where the kid’s entire environment pointed to a dead end. Violent, bickering neighbors — stoner, vandalism-prone peers and her mother always distracted by some new crisis, some new man or some fresh variation of “dependency.”

Everything will come to a head with an overdose, just as J.D. reaches his make-or-break Yale moment.

Even the story’s grace notes, the noble “salt of the Earth” traits attached to Vance’s family, are stereotypes — standing in tribute when a funeral cortege passes by.

“We’re hill people, honey. We respect our dead.”

In performance, the actresses never quite cross over into country-fied camp. But Adams and Close flirt with it. Bennett, as J.D.’s long-suffering older-sister, comes off as the most real. Former child actor Basso (“Super 8”) may have relied too much on the real Vance for his performance — passive, flashes of genetic (the film implies) rage, uncharismatic.

Howard doesn’t make awful films, and as somebody who spent much of my earlier life in Appalachia, I’m not inclined to write this problematic portrayal off entirely.

But self-satisfied people on both ends of the political spectrum will see what they want to in this story, and that’s not a compliment. The smug liberals who declare “There’s no talking to/helping THOSE people” and the smirking conservatives who grab onto “There’s no such THING as ‘white privilege'” are all feasting on sloppy, simplistic, stereotype-stained storytelling.

Perhaps this is all Howard could have gotten out of this best-seller. But his “Hillbilly Elegy” is cinematic comfort food for the prejudiced.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout, drug content and some violence

Cast: Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Gabriel Basso, Haley Bennett, Freida Pinto and Owen Asztalos

Credits: Directed by Ron Howard, script by Vanessa Taylor based on the memoir by J.D. Vance. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

“Blindfire” is the (fictional) account of a deadly police shooting that sets out to demonstrate such situations are “complicated.” But as it tells its story from the “troubled” cop’s point of view, the film’s problematic agenda clashes with its clumsy, unrealistic narrative. And like too many “cops shoot an unarmed Black man” tales, it leaves nothing but harm in its wake.

Still, give this to writer-director Michael Nell. The term “Blindfire” could describe an awful lot of police shootings that prompt the word “murder” to be chanted at protests. Officer Bishop (Brian Geraghty) fires blind in an instant misread of a “threat.” The “shoot in self-defense” excuse won’t stand up to any scrutiny.

The victim (Chiké Okonkwo), whose story is barely glimpsed here, is not just a big 30something Black man with tattoos and a pullover hoodie. He’s a high school football coach, watching a ball game with his little girl. The call, a “hostage situation” with a distraught suspect threatening his family, was a case of “swatting,” a prank that informed the police of a non existent “crime” created an incorrect set of expectations.

Oh, and Officer Bishop, like most human beings, has “problems.” He’s living in a motel at the start of a divorce. He’s drinking more, off duty we hope.

Sure, that’s “complicated.” But nothing the script throws at us distracts the viewer from the notion that race, callous stereotyping and carelessness killed a man in his own house, minding his own business, while his screaming little girl watched him bleed-out.

Writer-director Nell doesn’t have Bishop’s Black and (checkbox screenwriting) lesbian partner, Officer Wilkins (Sharon Leal of “Dreamgirls”) show her doubts and question Bishop’s motives and state of mind, at least not in this cut of this too-brief-for-a-serious-subject film. No, another officer (comic Wayne Brady) blurts out the “You get a prize for every brother you kill?” accusation.

The victim’s nurse-wife (Edwina Findley Dickerson) melts down, his stoic father (Charles Robinson of “Night Court”) stares Bishop down.

But Nell’s interest here is in the “real victim” (to him). It’s the swatting and Bishop’s semi-sober efforts, as an untrained detective, to track down the person the writer-director seems to regard as “the REAL criminal” here. The polite term for that is somebody who “doesn’t GET it.”

The performances don’t elevate the material, and the lack of names in the cast suggest there wasn’t much more to this, even if there are longer cuts of this script. The flaws are in the very conception of “Blindfire,” in its point of view.

We’ve heard or read the stories, or seen the videos — when police chiefs or law-unto-themselves-sheriffs haven’t suppressed it. A situation goes from routine to shoot-to-kill in a flash. The excuses are a litany of “he/she didn’t respond to commands” or “I thought he had a gun” or what have you. Police departments are letting armed, armor-plated and institutionally-immunized officers shoot in fear or shoot because they’re provoked, and get away with it.

Race is an overwhelming tipping point in such incidents. There’s a serious movie in this subject, one that sticks closer to reality and reaches for balance.

First-time director Nell isn’t the person to make that movie. He limits the focus here and shrinks the population of people who’d be involved when a case like this blows up. The highest ranking cop Bishop faces is a sympathetic-to-his-plight/”get your mind right” (stick to your story) sergeant.

Yes, “accidents” happen. Funny how they almost always end with a dead Black person. No, the police in St. Anthony, Minnesota, Brevard County, Florida or Louisville, Kentucky or elsewhere don’t admit to their lethal mistakes. And no, as the comedian Chris Rock says, we can’t tolerate “accidents” like that any more than we’d tolerate careless and union-protected from any punishment airline pilots.

Nell isn’t interested in the victim, and he isn’t even interested enough in the cop to make a case that he’s not a racist. Is Nell saying that “He can’t be racist, because he has a Black/gay partner?” I wouldn’t be surprised.

Making a movie more interested in “But but but” explanations, that doesn’t acknowledge the repeated racial reality of police shootings, is like saying “Blue Fairytales Matter.”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Brian Geraghty, Sharon Leal, Chiké Okonkwo, Edwina Findley Dickerson, Bethany Joy Lenz, Charles Robinson and Wayne Brady

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Nell. A Kandoo release.

Running time: 1:23

If you can look on homeless person and not instinctively turn away, you know the last thing this human condition needs is sugar-coating sentimentality.

Everybody in that situation has a story and none of them are pretty. So a homeless kid who imagines herself a fairytale princess with a pet “magic animal,” a unicorn? That’s worth a skeptical raising of the eyebrow.

“Princess of the Row” lets Alicia have her fantasy. She’s 12, after all. But it insists on showing us the calamity that put her here, the brain-injured combat vet of a father she won’t abandon, the impulsive, ill-considered decision-making, incapable of caring for a potentially dangerous and delusional man.

Because, again, she’s 12.

The new feature from the editor/director of “Ninja Apocalypse” is a drama about the homeless that doesn’t blink. “Princess of the Row” may lapse into sentiment, here and there, and reach for melodrama at times.

But the reality of the situation pulls you in, the compelling portrayal of tweenage reasoning is spot on. The leads — Tayler Buck (of “Annabelle: Creation”) and Edi Gathegi of “Twilight” and TV’s “The Black List”) — are real in the most understated ways. The warm moments never come close to maudlin.

“So, what’s your plan, Alicia?” one of the adults she interacts with asks her. She has no good answer, but the movie shows it to us in many ways.

Her “plan” is to get through just another day, get her dad, Sgt. Bo Willis through another night on LA’s skid row. Sometimes his one-good eye is fixed in a “thousand yard stare.” At others, he “comes back” to her. A birthday cupcake and night in a nearby junkyard’s rusted Trans-Am is the best she can do for him.

Alicia is in and out of The System, giving her aunt (Tabitha Brown) a reason to give up, keeping her social worker (Ava Ortiz) exasperated. Alicia won’t leave her father, whose demons keep him out of a group home or shelter.

“He’s dangerous,” the social worker the other residents of “the row,” who won’t say where they’ve gone. “She’s a little girl. He can’t take care of her.”

And she, as we see, can’t take care of him. Sgt. Willis, glimpsed as “Dad” back before the combat duty that gave him his injury, is easily triggered. He may be a walking, dysfunctional wreck. But he has the muscle memory of a warrior, which shows up more than once in their travels.

Alicia needs an escape, one that doesn’t involve dreaming and writing about unicorns.

Might the new foster home arranged for Alicia with a Northern California writer (Martin Sheen) and his wife (Jenny Gago) be her salvation? They have a horse, after all.

Don’t bank on it.

The waypoints on this journey, co-written by A Shawn Austin and director Van Maximillian Carlson, may be over-familiar. We sit and wait for the “a pretty girl like you” speech.

But “Princess of the Row” mostly confines itself to the limited world Alicia is buying into — a tent, which is the only housing her father can tolerate, emergency trips to the VA when he runs out of his meds — her options for “saving” him at 12 neither obvious nor recommended.

The alternative, when she’s not with him, sees her dad face homeless-beating jocks, the threat of arrest and a million other things that could injure or kill someone not all there and on the streets.

Buck gives a performance impressive enough to call “break out,” but Gathegi, in a largely non-verbal role, utterly loses himself in the makeup, the wardrobe, the environment and the character.

He and “Princess of the Row” will move you, if you give them the chance, if just this once, you can make yourself not turn away from the troubled people right in front of you.

MPA Rating: TV-14, violence, some of it directed against a child

Cast: Tayler Buck, Edi Gathegi, Ana Ortiz and Martin Sheen.

Credits: Directed by Van Maximilian Carlson, script by A Shawn Austin and Van Maximilian Carlson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:25

Nicolas Cage is — hands down — the best, most-committed and most-fun voice actor in animated films today. Fight me.

His hilarious, empathetic and occasionally gonzo turn made the cave-family comedy “The Croods” a surprise delight back in 2013. Credit the recording-studio direction or competition with that Canadian cut-up Ryan Reynolds and future Oscar-winner Emma Stone if you want, but there was utter magic at work, bringing those animated characters to life.

That’s just as true with the sequel. “The Croods: A New Age” has some of the derivative limitations of the first film — the faint whiff of riding “Ice Age’s” coattails. But the players make their slapsticking, pratfalling, punking and pranking characters breathe, live, love and care.

And they let us care, too. Just a little.

Grug (Cage) and his family — wife Ugga (Catherine Keener), warrior tomboy Eep (Stone), lunkish son Thunk (Clark Duke), Gran (Oscar winner Cloris Leachman) and feral, grunting girl-child Sandy (Kailey Crawford) finally stumble into their “paradise,” the “tomorrow” that foundling teen Guy (Ryan Reynolds) always talked about.

Turns out, the hunter-gatherers have stumbled into the Land of Plenty created by the Bettermans (cute). They’re people from Guy’s past who settled down, discovered farming and irrigation and sort of Swiss Family Robinsoned their way to mythic Paleolithic bliss.

But civilization has made the Bettermans –Dawn (Leslie Mann) and Phil (Peter Dinklage) a tad uptight. One might say…snooty?

“Forgive our condescension.”

That’s going to create conflict with the gorging, gross live-off-the-land/smell-like-the-land Croods.

“It’s called a shower. You should TRY it!”

Throw in the fact that Guy’s childhood gal-pal Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran of the recent “Star Wars” trilogy) is in the mix, a third wheel in the Eep/Guy teen romance, and Ugg’s whole “The pack stays together” ethos and all sorts of conflict has entered the picture — civilization vs. primal “nature,” collective caring/thinking vs. “individuality,” “taming” (breaking) nature vs. living in harmony with it.

Yeah, this could get deep. Thank heavens it doesn’t.

The comic action comes from the various outside fantastical and deadly species that menace “the pack” into “the kill circle.” The comedy comes from sight gags and zingers about an era when life was “brutish, nasty and short.”

“If no one’s died before breakfast, that’s a win.”

I got a kick out of the pretentious Phil’s “power of higher thought” discoveries of “the man cave” (a sauna) and the like. Privacy? Guy explains to Eep that that would mean the end of the Crood family/pack “sleep pile.”

Privacy means “you only smell the feet you WANNA smell!”

The assorted species in this imaginary world are worth a chuckle — wolf spiders, kanga-dillos, vulture rats. You’ve got to dig the film’s tough girl-powered preserve-the-pack mindset.

“Today is a good day to DIE” toothless/hairless Gran spits as they form their defensive “kill circle.”

And first scene to last, we can revel in Cage’s utterly convincing envy, fear, primal fury and primitive appetites as Ugg, a caveman/dad with one mission, who only gets confused when there are distractions from a father’s Job One.

“Ok. Nothing’s tried to kill us for ten minutes. We’ll camp here.”

Yes. “Revel in” Cage’s wonderful voice acting, setting the tone for everybody else in the movie going all-in just to match his commitment. Or you could just fight me.

MPA Rating: PG for peril, action and rude humor.

Cast: The voices of Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Cloris Leachman, Leslie Mann, Catherine Keener, Kelly Marie Trann, Clark Duke and Peter Dinklage

Credits: Directed by Joel Crawford, script by Ken Hageman, Dan Hageman, Paul Fisher, Bob Logan. A Dreamworks production, a Universal release.

Running time: 1:35

A terror threat to New York has been identified, but all the police want to do is frame a local mosque run by an ex-con.

A rich family has arranged a change at the top. But murdering the patriarch doesn’t leave the field clear. A prodigal son lives on the streets, a crackhead who plays the ukulele for a fix, and gives his love and devotion only to Smooch — the pitbull he’s taken on as his best friend.

Those are the not-terribly-original but promising prospects set up by writer-director John Marco Lopez for the latest film to wear the title “Paradise City.” But don’t be fooled by the self-consciously artistic touches, the somewhat drab black and white cinematography, the dueling flashback and flash forward stuffed into the prologue, the judicious over-use of dramatic slow-motion.

This thing’s something of a muddle.

But it’s a fine vehicle for character player Hassan Bradley. He’s Brother Nasim, the ex-con who leads a tiny, start-up mosque in Manhattan, preaching love and street wisdom to any who will hear.

“You are the cause of what you cause…Alcohol is POISON, my brother!”

He has to ask new recruits to his congregation one thing that has little to do with the Koran.

“Are you a cop?”

One brother that he seemingly doesn’t suspect is the suspiciously observant Farouk (Kareem Savinon). As Johnny Colon, he’s working undercover for the Islamophobic “special crimes” unit run by Murdoch (Sticky Fingaz), the pride of the commssioner (Gordon Joseph Weiss).

Farouk/Colon is the one who spies the manic junky stealing from the mosque after Nasim has kindly invited him in to come in, clean up, eat and feed his dog. Little does he know that the homeless guy is young Alastair Holmgren (Chris Petrovski, not bad), heir to a freshly-deceased real estate mogul and sought by that mogul’s famous, ruthless, published and T

TV-friendly sister, Bianca (Laura Kamin).

The plotting is a strong suit of “Paradise City,” along with some very nice work by Bradley. The problems come from much of what spins out of that plot.

Scene after scene is static, slow to ignite — Alastair’s drug-desperate convenience store robbery — or failing to come to a point at all.

There’s little urgency to the film or any of the characters, even with law enforcement certain something is about to happen any minute, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral is among the possible “wiped off the map” targets.

Even Murdoch’s mania for that one mosque seems artificial, not something we’d believe in a near-lockdown emergency. Many is the character who acts illogically, in defiance of common sense or her or his self-interest.

And writer-director Lopez (“The Hudson Tribes”) keeps pausing to let us see a pastoral flashback — a beautiful family picnic that ended in tragedy — always in slo-mo.

There’s enough here that you can see the movie that might have been. But “Paradise City” gets in its own way so often that it falls well short of paradise, or coherence for that matter.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Chris Petrovski, Sticky Fingaz, Laura Kamin, Hassan Bradley, Kareem Savinon and Gordon Joseph Weiss

Credits: Written and directed by John Marco Lopez. An LPZ Media release.

Running time: 1:37

Nobody’s traveling much these days. But the movies can add to your bucket list of destinations once the pandemic has been beaten back.

“Sing Me a Song” hits various movie-watching platforms Jan. 1

Disney’s new version of “Black Beauty” makes the famed fictional horse a wild Western mustang and moves her from 19th century England to modern day America.

But writer-director Ashley Avis doesn’t shy away from the dark undertones of Anna Sewell’s sentimental girl-and-her-horse tale. In modernizing it, Avis (“The Trouble with Mistletoe”) also modernizes Sewell’s ahead-of-her-time view of a horse’s life — kindness and bonding mixed with animal cruelty, seen in the way a horse changes hands many times over its lifetime. She picks up on the fact that too many who want this plaything don’t want any part of the lifetime commitment and expense that would make the horse’s quality of life bearable.

Oscar winner Kate Winslet narrates “Beauty’s” life story, growing up in a herd out West, curious about the humans who intrude on their wilderness, a curiosity that brings callous cowboys and a helicopter roundup that ends with most of the herd corralled and “it was all my fault.”

Iain Glen is the horse whisperer who saves the gorgeous, furious black filly, a “strike horse,” from the slaughterhouse. John takes her “back east,” to New York (the part that looks like mountainous South Africa) where the Birtwick Stables he helps run does a bit of mustang “rescue” work.

He isn’t getting anywhere “breaking” the horse when his newly-orphaned niece (Mackenzie Foy of “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms”), sullen and embittered by her loss and resentful of her uncle, befriends the mare and gives her the name “Black Beauty.”

But Jo has barely just “partnered” (rather than broken) the horse when outside forces send Beauty on her odyssey of modern horse ownership. She’ll be a show jumper, a national park rescue ranger’s ride, and a draft horse while her first love — Jo — finishes growing up, pining for and searching for her missing Black Beauty.

Winslet’s narration anchors the story in Sewell’s world, the horse’s eye-view of human-horse interaction.

“I decided humans must be very lazy. They always want to be carried about by something.”

Uncle John (Glen, of “Game of Thrones” and “Downton Abbey”) is the human philosopher of the tale, detailing the humane way of “partnering” a horse, quoting the poet that there’s “No secret so great as that between a rider and his horse.”

Foy doesn’t give us the big emotions her role calls for. Still waiting for the long-haired model to come into her own as an actress.

Claire Forlani is the imperious rich woman whose bratty daughter will abuse Beauty, and Hakeem Kae-Kazim is the intrepid ranger who treats the horse like the tool that (to him) it is.

And if you know anything of the most widely-criticized misery horses face in modern America, you can guess where the third act is going.

With its obvious melodrama, obviously misleading “locations” and even more obvious big stunts, “Black Beauty” doesn’t transcend its sentimental children’s entertainment origins.

But Avis more than does the novel justice. And parents might find themselves as moved as the film’s intended viewership by this story of a horse’s hard life made better by the girl who loves her.

MPA Rating: unrated, G-worthy

Cast: Mackenzie Foy, Claire Forlani, Iain Glen, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Calum Lynch and the voice of the voice of Kate Winslet.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ashley Avis, based on the Anna Sewell novel. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:49