Movie Nation

There was a time, children, when movie stars were truly larger than life, when deals could be made from hungover breakfast meetings at Cannes and when the movies that emerged from that “system” were as appealing as afterbirth, and about as marketable.

In the glorious last years of that “process,” Great Names such as Sellers and O’Toole, Sutherland and Burton waged an unofficial war to see who could make the most “unreleased” or “unreleasable” debacles.

Indie cinema was barely a thing, Hollywood hadn’t figured out the new “blockbuster” business model and thus the only thing anybody figured was bankable was the star, the “name” that would-be financiers recognized. We’ve seen versions of this outdated hustle when CBS Films, STX and others started up.

“Get me JENNIFER LOPEZ!”

“Foxtrot,” or “The Far Side of Paradise,” came just after Lina Wertmüller’s “Swept Away,” and one can hear the Spanish-accented, booze-fueled/judgement-impaired pitch just in its premise.

Romanian royals dash off to a remote, deserted isle just before World War II starts, a “paradise” where they and their kind can dine, drink and dance the “Foxtrot” while the peasants cope with the world burning down around them back home.

Human nature being what it is, cruelty, stupidity, sexual jealousy and violence are what they get instead.

Peter O’Toole is the Romanian count who masterminds this extended sojourn. Charlotte Rampling is his regal, scheming wife, but not his first wife. Max Von Sydow is the Swedish military man who schooled the Count, way back when, and now makes the logistics of this dubious enterprise work.

And Jorge Luke is Eusebio, the immaculately attired and gloved butler who oversees the drinks, the meals and whatever else is needed in the lavishly tented “paradise” they set up for themselves.

No, none of this seems feasible or adds up logistically. But that’s not the point.

In my mind, the pitch to the stars that won them over was a Mediterranean working vacation — somewhere in the Italian isles. But no, this was filmed on the rocky Pacific coast of Mexico.

Other guests arrive, the wildlife on the island is slaughtered for sport, “accidents” happen and “marooned” enters the conversation.

“Looks like we’re staying here the rest of our lives.”

That’s when the murderous mischief really begins.

Rampling is gorgeous and mysterious, O’Toole somehow gives us nothing and Von Sydow is competent, and little more, all of them acting out a repellent story that offers little and no one to connect with.

Mexican director Arturo Ripstein is still with us, and still doesn’t have a credit that’s broken through, internationally. Rampling still works, The late Von Sydow made too many great films for this one to matter at all and the late and great O’Toole, after his “My Favorite Year” comeback, had a nice Third Act run of performances that led to an honorary Oscar.

But “Foxtrot?” O’Toole’s character, recoiling at one of the home movies the swells sit down to watch over port and cigars, gives the best review.

“But I BURNT that film!”

MPAA Rating: R, violence, nudity, sex

Cast: Peter O’Toole, Charlotte Rampling, Max Von Sydow and Jorge Luke.

Credits: Directed by Arturo Riptsein, script by Arturo Ripstein, José Emilio Pacheco and H.A.L. Craig. A New World release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:31

“Spree” is another tale of socially-isolated/socially-networked lives of quiet desperation gone haywire, a commentary on an amoral age when it’s all about “getting noticed,” no matter how you do it.

As a technical exercise in filmmaking within a small space, frames created by cell-phone cams, GoPros in a car or body cams on a cop, it is a step beyond much of what we’ve seen before. And we’ve seen a lot.

“Unfriended,” “Antisocial,” “Open Windows,” “Livescream,” “Friend Request,” the list is long and goes far beyond the biggest hit of the sub-genre, “Searching,” starring John Cho.

Director Eugene Kotlyarenko (“Wobble Palace”) doesn’t so much take us into the pathetic life that turns out this way as hurl us into the “Spree,” and make that our ride into terror.

But like lives lived online, there’s an emotional remove that works against engagement. We watch lives taken, maybe snicker over our anti hero (Joe Keery of “Stranger Things”) googling “How to dispose of a dead body,” and feel a little dehumanized by it all, even if he doesn’t, even if we keep watching.

Kurt (Keery) has been online since childhood, vlogging his “Kurt’s World” explorations of his banal life since 2009, live-streaming it as that became a thing. He’s got merchandise (hats), a pleasant-enough ease on the screen, and a life that is ordinary in the extreme.

And nobody is watching. Well, except for maybe his divorced, druggy strip-club DJ dad (David Arquette). And he doesn’t watch much.

Kurt pitches himself as an “influencer and content creator,” like pretty much everybody else with a vlog. Which, in the movie’s universe, is pretty much everybody Kurt meets. But every other “influencer” he stumbles across is drawing more attention.

He’s desperate to tap into the audience of those more online-famous. But the one guy he actually knows who has a big following, manic prankster Bobby Base Camp (Joshua Ovalle) barely hides his contempt for Kurt and “Kurt’s World.” Kurt used to be his babysitter, and now he’s this disillusioned, needy dork always hitting up everyone he meets with “follow me and I’ll follow you — follow4follow.”

But the day we meet him (that history is briskly summarized in montage and inter-titles) Kurt is taking us into a new direction he’s sure will make him “go viral.” He’s a ride-share driver for Spree. He’s packed his car with cameras, and promises us lots of “interaction” with his passengers, who are told the cameras are there “for safety” — his, and theirs.

Damned if his first Altadena, California ride of the day isn’t a racist on his way to a big meeting, giving Kurt the “Say it with me, ‘I’m white and I’m proud,'” shtick. Kurt rejects that, runs a red light or two and stops short once or twice as punishment. And then the unsuspecting deplorable takes a sip from the bottled water Kurt keeps in the car.

That’s how the day is going. He’s spiked the water, the rider gets a few jolts thanks to Kurt’s recklessness, and a sip or two later, they disappear. At first.

“Spree” skips over the “body disposal” bit for the first few rides, gives us flashbacks where Kurt lays out everything he’s going to do and how he will do it, via vlog entries, and hurls us into the horror of a spree killer on the prowl.

Picking up a web-famous comic (Sasheer Zamata of “The Last O.G.” and “Saturday Night Live,” terrific) ups the ante, as she has viewership to offer, if he can just tap into it. She’s not having it, or the unpleasant “shared” rideshare she’s trapped in with a dirtbag (John DeLuca).

Kotlyarenko, who co-wrote the script with Gene McHugh, busies up the frame with split screens, live comments on cell-phone shots, the works.

The few moments of suspense come early and late. How WILL Kurt dispatch a car full of partiers? What WILL he do to tap into Bobby’s audience, comedienne Jessie’s live set?

When WILL the cops notice people are disappearing in the middle of ridesharing?

The best running gag is how almost EVERYone Kurt meets — from the partying 20somethings to a stripper who “broke through” with a sex tape — live streams and has viewers. But not Kurt.

Keery makes a believable “incel,” as more than one freaked-out, insulting rider labels him. The pleasant, needy demeanor may not match the murderous turn he’s taken, and “explaining” that is futile — not that the script doesn’t try to in the most obvious ways.

I have to say I went along with it, more amused by the craft and bursts of wit and gripped by a bit of tension, here and there, than appalled by the inhumanity. It taps into our shared phobia about ridesharing and “over-sharing,” not that EVERYbody is alarmed by these phenomena.

As social media murder movies go, we’ve all seen worse. Not a resounding endorsement, even if needy Kurt would treat it as such.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity, drug abuse discussed

Cast: Joe Keery, Sasheer Zamata, Joshua Ovalle and David Arquette.

Credits: Directed by Eugene Kotlyarenko, script by Eugene Kotlyarenko, Gene McHugh An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:35

In 2017, the silent melodrama “Shiraz: A Romance of India” earned a restoration by the British Film Institute. It’s what you got when a German director tackled a British script based on an Indian historical romance play back in 1928.

“Shiraz” is a motion picture made on real locations, not sets, whose producers boasted of “no artificial lighting” in an opening credit for “authenticity,” one presumes. Their story? Victorian hokum, with kidnappings, bandits, love that endures past death, and Western mores when it comes to cinematic displays of affection — kissing.

The Bavarian Franz Osten, a Nazi who later made India his filmmaking home, isn’t remembered as one of the innovators or stylists of the German cinema. And this picture — with its stagey, broad and dated acting and far-too-basic cinematography and editing and European (not authentically Indian) pedigree, is best appreciated as a cinematic artifact, a curiosity. It’s a 1920s effort to recreate a fairy tale to go with the creation of an Indian landmark of the Mogul (Mughal) Empire era.

A little princess is orphaned when her caravan is ambushed, and grows up under the care of a kindly potter’s family.

Their oldest son, Shiraz (Himanshu Rai), grows up looking out for Selima (Enakashi Rama Rao), and that care grows into love, even though he has no idea of the difference in their lineages.

Wouldn’t you know it, Selima is kidnapped again, and this time sold into the household of Prince Khurram (Charu Roy), heir to the throne and a guy who likes his slavegirls to be fetching. This happens in spite of the protests of Shiraz, who makes it to the auction in time to rail against Selima’s illegal and unjust imprisonment, and be outbid by the Prince’s aid.

As Selima disappears into the household, Shiraz vows to stay close by — taking a job as a potter’s apprentice, showing the skills he learned in a lifetime of working by his father’s side.

Years pass, and Shiraz’s dreams and palace intrigues of those threatened by the prince fancying Selima coincide in a play to spirit her away, or disgrace her. It fails.

Mughal justice, as  we come to understand, is swift and unjust. “You shall die under the elephant’s foot!”

The third act has suspense, a hint of heartbreak and a sentimental punch. The first two acts? Lots of film of Indian architecture, unspoiled by Industrial Era grime and 20th century alterations.

It’s a middling movie by Western standards of the era, technically primitive and emotionally unsophisticated. The story is historical fiction, dull and formulaic. And not being authentically Indian, it lacks value as a cultural touchstone.

But “Shiraz” still, by virtue of its on-location photography and great age, provides a template for representations of that period in Indian history. Like Keaton’s “The General,” it is close enough in time and geography to suggest what 17th century India really looked like, with villages frozen in time for centuries and cities decorated with architecture meant to last through the ages.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Himanshu Rai, Charu Roy, Seeta Devi and Enakashi Rama Rao

Credits: Directed by Franz Osten, script by William A. Burton, based on the play by Niranjan Pal. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:45

“Almost Love” is one of those soapy romances set in that “fantasy” New York where broke people and the affluent mingle, and the broke, young and hip can somehow afford to live there at all.

It almost works. The characters make us laugh, here and there. And they almost make us invest in them.

The variation on a theme here is that the central romance is that of a gay couple, with the usual selection of flippant, frustrated folks orbiting around it.

And if incidents, characters and couplings in it have a whiff of “sitcom” about them, that might be due to “Friends” and “Seinfeld” burning into the writer-director Mike Doyle’s brain, even if he isn’t aware of it.

Scott Evans and Augustus Prew are Adam and Marklin, the couple at the center of this universe. Marklin is a successful fashion/lifestyle “influencer” blogger, running “The Detailist” and its daily dose of product placement selfies. Adam is a successful painter — or rather successful at being the ghost painter for one of those mass-production pop artists (think Thomas Kincade, only contemporary).

They’re at the stage of the relationship where they’re at a crossroads — marry (they’re against it), or maybe accept that they’re not destined for that. One of the attempted serious threads in the story is suggesting how gay men are different from other couples, in that male “compartmentalization” and “just move on” way.

Cammy (Michelle Buteau of “Always be My Maybe” and “Work It”) is having a “thing” with Henry (Colin Donnell), a bearded, brooding sort who finally admits to her his big, scary secret.

“I’m homeless!”

But but “you have such nice SHOES!”

Haley (Zoe Chao of “Downhill” and “Always be My Maybe”) is her always-supportive, always-apologizing tutor pal. Sure, Cammy is sleeping with “the homeless.” But “What white guy is homeless…at 36? On TINDER?”

And besides, Haley says, she’s tutoring a teen who is crushing on her so hard she’s about to get into a “full Pamela Smart” thing (Cammy’s words) with him. Yeah, Haley admits her big faults just to make her shame-spiraling friends feel better.

At least Elizabeth (Kate Walsh) and Damon (Chaz Lamar Shepherd) have been happily married 15 years. Except for the whole disagreement over children thing, they’re perfect.

The friends, who met working together at CB2 years before, are close in age and experiencing slightly different versions of the premature midlife crisis — getting “serious” about life in their mid-30s.

Not that they don’t still get together for dinners out, or meet at the bar for “slap shots,” which is pretty juvenile.

Each comes to a crossroads — after a fashion — and figures out which way to go, or how to carry on after hitting a dead end.

It’s all pretty bland stuff, most pointedly in the person of our main couple. Evans (TV’s “Grace and Frankie”) and Prew (TV’s “The Morning Show”) aren’t terribly interesting together, don’t set off many sparks and never make the relationship feel like much more than an arrangement. It’s commendable, building the rom-com around such characters, men comfortable with who they are in a world where they can be themselves, and be all they can be. But they’re boring.

The financial imbalances in several of the relationships in the film are mentioned but not really explored.  See “Friends With Money,” or for that matter “Friends,” to get a better handle on that.

The glib swipe at New York homelessness doesn’t have the edge to come off, because the film doesn’t have the nerve to commit to any “bad” relationship meriting abandonment.

There’s enough funny banter and connection in the supporting cast to make Buteau, Chao and Walsh the standout performers playing more relatable characters.

A deeper dive into things that test a gay male relationship is glossed through, the “big fight” isn’t, the big reckoning with the fraud (Patricia Clarkson) that Adam paints for or big “influencer” torching never comes.

None of it ever truly comes together in a way that makes “Almost Love” almost a rom-rom that works. “Almost” pretty much covers it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Scott Evans, Michelle Buteau, Augustus Prew, Zoe Chao, Kate Walsh, Colin Donnell, Chaz Lamar Shepherd and Patricia Clarkson

Credits:  Written and directed by Mike Doyle. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:32

With Gawd as my witness, I swear I had never heard of “Tiptoes,” a cinematic debacle like few others. This is “The Room” packed with future Oscar winners.

A “little people” comedy with Gary Oldman playing a dwarf, it was two and a half hours long when it screened at SXSW Austin in 2003.

It wasn’t released widely, and not at all in the US. That it still exists makes one wonder why the participants didn’t pool their cash and have it destroyed.

It basically ended the career of writer-director Matthew Bright (“Guncrazy”), although it didn’t prevent Matthew McConaughey’s “Lincoln Lawyer” comeback, or the Oscars that would eventually come to him, Patricia Arquette and Oldman.

It didn’t do Kate Beckinsale any favors.

Peter Dinklage? There’s no such thing as a bad Dinklage moment, and he got through this utterly unscathed.

But man, what a tin-eared, un-PC fiasco.

McConaughey plays Steven, a firefighting consultant about to marry a successful artist, Carol (Beckinsale). She becomes pregnant before she meets his family. He is a bit freaked out by that prospect, and the pregnancy.

You see, he has a twin. Rolfe (Oldman) is a soulful goof who spends too much time with hipster/ladies’ man Maurice (Dinklage). And like Steve and Rolfe’s parents, those guys are dwarves.

Rolfe and Maurice travel cross country on motor trikes, and Maurice picks up a tarted-up Lucy (Arquette) along the way.

There’s a convention of “little people” (shades of “Under the Rainbow”) in Vegas, where they’re shown carrying on, coupling up, cheating and cursing and carousing.

Amidst all that potential mayhem, Carol meets Rolfe, picks up on the whole dwarf genetics thing Steven is panicked about and is a bit shocked by it all.

There is a wedding. But where highly-strung Steven isn’t reconciled to the risks and responsibilities of how their child might come into the world, Rolfe is unflappable, realistic, sympathetic and kind. Carol responds to that.

The medical and genetic obsessions of the script turn out to be off, if not outright wrong — offensively so in some cases.

Oldman’s performance is sweet enough, but a jarring stunt that no one in his or her right mind would have attempted.

The milieu has a certain amusement to it, the way those farcical “Seinfeld” episodes about an imagined “code” and “culture” of this “little people” could be. Debbie Lee Carrington, who appeared in “Seinfeld,” plays a more out-there version of the “hot dwarf” guys are beating each other up over.

There are laughs, here and there, smothered by the endless cringe of it all.

The gonzo, smitten turns by Arquette and Dinklage aren’t enough to make us forget the mess that’s spilling all over the screen around them.

The performers mostly left on the cutting room floor (David Alan Grier) were the lucky ones.

Still, like road accidents and the films of Uwe Boll, it’s worth a gawk as evidence of how a whole lot of people, many of them agents whom one suspects must have been fired after this, can get anything so terribly wrong.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexuality

Cast: Kate Beckinsale, Gary Oldman, Matthew McConaughey, Patricia Arquette, Peter Dinklage

Credits: Written and directed by Matthew Bright. A Canal+ release, streaming on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube etc.

Running time: 1:30

Brisco (Chris Mulkey), the commanding officer, strides into the tent of his elite multi-national commando team.

“How’s it going?” he wants to know.

“Sh—y, sir.”

“War is hell,” he growls.

Kind of what passes for a joke in the never-ending “Rogue Warfare” combat-as-video-game film series.

But let’s drop in on the second film to see if they’ve improved since the debut of the series.

Nah. Same “s—-y” lines, same tone-deaf line readings. Same silly, archetype characters played by actors in over their heads. Same ridiculous variations on the Tom Clancy/movie-fed myth of the “surgical strike.”

Daniel (Will Yun Lee) was captured in the last “Rogue.” So this one’s about fetching him. To that end, let’s roar into an Iraqi terrorist encampment on dirt bikes and ATVs. Ok, one ATV. This IS a combat movie on a budget.

And once we’ve “ROARED” in? Let’s pick off the baddies, one by one, with a silencer. Because, you know, they didn’t hear the effing BIKES.

Supreme Leader (Essam Ferris) is still doing the Bad Guys Wear Black thing, still barking out speeches to Arabic speakers, of which he isn’t.

“I am leading a REVOLUTION in the front lines of a war!” He ain’t got NO time for “weak minded fools.”

The cohesion of the unit is threatened with dissent. Again.

There are more pretty shots from a chopper, more cover scenes of Humvees thundering through desertscapes.

The president (Stephen Lang), reached at a Camp David (in wooded Maryland) that looks like the California ranch Lang makes payments on with “Rogue” checks, is down with doing whatever it takes to find Daniel.

Our guy Daniel is in chains, going nuts — ranting in an “Inside the Actors Studio” audition, in what looks like a Homeland Security cage that they’re not using for little Central American kids at the moment.

The ineptitude in these movies takes a back seat to the wet dreams they feed rural right wing America.

The Russian (Katie Keene) is hot, and on “our” side and not paying bounties for American scalps.

The soldiers make speeches one minute about “What’s that say about us?” when given the choice of shooting a terror-connected guy they just freed in the back, and summarily execute several others the next minute.

“Bloodshed is the only currency accepted throughout the world,” a terrorist intones, fitting into the worldview these idiotic, poisonous pictures push.

So that’s what we get.

But you dive into these things on the off chance that like Cheech and Chong, they might get better over time — that like Tyler Perry, a polish might find its way into the scripts.

Not happening.

“Rogue Warfare: Death of a Nation” is next. I can’t wait.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language

Cast: Will Yun Lee, Jermaine Love, Rory Markham, Katie Keene, Chris Mulkey and Stephen Lang.

Credits: Directed by Mike Gunther, script by Andrew Emilio DeCesare. A Saban Films release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:43

Johnny Leggs also directed this feel good story about one Miami teacher changing lives, one castling at a time — opens in September.

Years after his time in Hollywood, where the great French director Jean Renoir (“The Rules of the Game,” “The Grand Illusion”) spent World War II, he related how cultural stress and strife is the crucible for great art.

All Hollywood needs, he told the future Indian director, Satyajit Ray, “is a good bombing.”

But something else comes through in his second and final completed film in Hollywood — “The Southerner.” Sentimental almost to the point of condescension, it’s an affectionate ode to American resilience and an innate working class decency that stood in stark contrast to the cynicism and factionalism of Europe.

It’s no “Grapes of Wrath,” just a hardscrabble year in the life of a farm family in Eastern Texas, a 30ish married couple struggling to survive as husband Sam (Texan Zachary Scott of “Mildred Pierce”) takes his shot at their piece of what would come to be called “The American Dream” — a sharecropper and farm laborer trying to strike out on his own and not pick another man’s crops.

Sam takes the last words of an aged laborer who dies picking cotton with him to heart — “Raise your own crops.” With Nona (Betty Field), cantankerous Granny (Beaulah Bondi of “It’s a Wonderful Life”) and their two kids, he borrows a truck to move them, borrows mules and a plow, and borrows seed to plant his own cotton.

They settle into a tumbledown shack, struggle through a year of little food, bad nutrition from the possum and fish they eat (pellegra), unfriendly neighbors (J. Caroll Naish and Norman Lloyd) and fickle weather, and the temptation to throw in the towel and take up a wartime factory job. They want to make their own way and their own destiny.

“Jus’ cause we’re havin’ hard times right now, don’t mean we gotta stop nothin’. We gotta keep goin’. Once we give up, we won’t have the courage to get ourselves back to good times.”

It’d be easy to read “patronizing” into this tale, with its country wedding, bar fight, brawl over a fellow farmer’s act of sabotage and bare-handed fishing, and imagine Renoir rolling his eyes at every Granny gripe.

“When you all look down on my cold dead face in the county pine box, you’ll be sorry then! Mebbe!”

But there’s something nobler going on here, a “realistic” and respectful statement on the quiet faith the farmer has in his own enterprise. The leftist politics of Renoir’s earlier work, and of Ford’s “Grapes of Wrath,” isn’t here. The urgency of Renoir’s other Hollywood outing, the Occupation thriller “This Land is Mine,” is missing as well.

There are good people, overreaching people, cheats, predatory floozies, tipplers and in that nasty neighbor, a classic “for me to succeed, you must fail” type. As with his later Indian film (where he met Ray), “The River,” and with his earlier “Rules of the Game,” this is Renoir as cultural anthropologist, observing and dissecting and appreciating, with every painterly-composed scene.

MPAA Rating: “approved”

Cast: Zachary Scott, Betty Field, Beaulah Bondi, J. Caroll Naish, Charles Kemper and Norman Lloyd.

Credits: Directed by Jean Renoir, script by Hugo Butler and Jean Renoir, based on a novel by George Sessions Perry.

Running time: 1:32

An Arabic post-apocalyptic thriller about survivors fighting over the little water that’s left? The pitch alone is enough for “The Worthy” to make one intrigued.

Filmed in Bucharest, financed in the United Arab Emirates and directed by a UAE native/London Film School grad, it’s compelling, competent, and so overfamiliar as to be utterly generic and forgettable.

But the very idea of such a film, that it played in the Arab world, is at least as compelling as the story told on the screen — or it would be, if it took bigger chances and aimed higher.

Civilization has collapsed, evildoers have poisoned most of the world’s fresh water and without that, only scattered pockets of humanity can cling to life, never venturing far from their dwindling supply.

Eissa (Mahmoud Al Atrash, good) narrates our story, relating how his truck-driving dad (Samer al Masri) once picked up a hitchhiker who “saw it coming.” “The Seer” warned “Beware the black flags,” and feel free to remember how many terror cells have used black standards. “Their only loyalty is to themselves.”

So Shuaib, the father, grabbed Eissa and his sister Maryam (Rakeen Saad) and, with a few others, established themselves in a place with water. It’s a ruined airplane factory, with a water tank that sustains the 10 people holed up there.

Strangers approach, and wary but compassionate Shuaib takes the bait — literally. It takes other strangers to rescue him from the predators who chained up a woman to lure him out.

Some mistrust Gulbin (Maisa Abd Elhadi), a scarred Kurdish woman who doesn’t speak Arabic. And none trust Mussa (Samer Ismail), the wild-eyed man who killed to save Shuaib, but isn’t about to surrender his knife when he’s allowed inside.

“This knife and I are old friends,” he purrs to the leader of this “community.” The warning bells have been ringing in the viewer’s head, and must be in Shuaib’s as his “guest” starts prattling on about the need to “separate the strong from the weak,” “the worthy” from “the unworthy.”

Murder and chaos ensue. The siblings must stick together, “leading” and trying to outsmart a homicidal monster, who likes to make booby-traps.

Screenwriter Vikran Weet (“Darkness Rising”) goes to some pains to suggest that the traditional Shuaib has kept tenets of Islamic religious practice alive among his charges. Maryam has the interest of a young man in their group, but he’s got to get her father’s acceptance before anything progresses. Burials, hygiene and “hospitality” have survived centuries among the Bedouin, why wouldn’t they endure beyond the collapse of civilization?

Director Mostafa (“City of Life”) stages some suspenseful moments, and fritters away the chance for more in a story that morphs into a variation of every post-Apocalyptic thriller ever. “The Worthy” has more going for it than the “Maze Runner/Divergent/Hunger Games” YA-oriented fare, where the youth are the hope IF they can to escape/win this contest/fall in love. The stakes are high but the characters’ life-and-death struggle have a perfunctory video game feel.

The limitations on the female characters and a bleak/bleaker/bleakest third act hamper “The Worthy.” Even as the booby-traps, torture and murder — think “Saw” lite — grow more elaborate, one gets the sense that this is a movie scripted with one arm culturally and thematically tied behind one’s back.

The over-familiar tropes of the genre, dissent within, a power struggle built on “Selfishness is what it’s going to take from now on” aren’t enough to recommend the film. And the novelty of its characters, setting and cultural subtext doesn’t compensate for that.

But it’s polished and smart enough to to give one hope that Around the World with Netflix will have more entries from a part of the world not known for sci-fi or action films with coed casts.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, gruesome violence

Cast: Mahmoud Al Atrash, Maisa Abd Elhadi, Rakeen Saad, Samer Ismail and Samer al Masri.

Credits: Directed by Ali F. Mostafa, script by Vikram Weet. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

Feed Hampton, the charismatic Illinois Black Panther, and his betrayal by an FBI informant.

The Revolution will not be televised. It will if theaters don’t open soon.