Movie Nation

Here’s a screwball farce from France released with more than a few screws loose.

“The Bare Necessity” or “Perdrix” as it was titled in Europe, is a collection of eccentrics under assault by other eccentrics. But piling them all into a movie, with cute but not particularly engaging performances meant to turn this into something meaningful, amounts to an overreach for first-time feature writer-director Erwan Le Duc.

The Perdrix family is the focus, a quartet of “partridges” (the French translation of the name) living in a town in the Vosges mountains, near the German border. They’re something of a mess. But we don’t really dissect them until after the inciting incident that hurls an irritated and irritating free electron into their universe.

Juliette, played by Maud Wyler of “Blue is the Warmest Color,” is minding her own business, having pulled her car over so that she can sit on a picnic table and write in her daily journal.

Damned if a nude woman doesn’t pop up out of the woods and steal her orange BMW.

Well, an orange BMW driven by a naked woman can’t be hard to track, right? But the unflappable police captain, Pierrot Perdrix (Swann Arlaud of “By the Grace of God”) doesn’t give her much hope. His lack of urgency, when her car had everything she owned in it, is infuriating.

There are nudists, passing themselves off as “non-essentialists,” disturbing the peace there, he tells her. Stealing people’s clothes, and sometimes even their cars, is in their MO.

A guy with a “Freedom is the recognition of necessity” poster in his office might be a little too small-town philosopher to ever get in a hurry. Juliette huffs out and starts “canvasing” the town herself, using a drawing of the nude woman and her car to hunt for answers.

But having everything she owns stolen puts her into a fix, as well as a huff. She tracks the captain down at home, invites herself to dinner, and that’s where she and we are thrown in with “the wacko family” (Juliette’s words) called the Perdrixes.

Pierrot’s preternatural calm might come from his mother (screen legend Fanny Ardant), a libidinous widow who dispenses love life advice on a nightly radio show she hosts from their garage. She may have listeners, but as no one ever calls in, the family assumes the worst, with Pierrot, his highly-strung, newly-divorced single-dad brother “Juju” (Nicolas Maury) and perhaps even Juju’s tween daughter disguising their voices, calling in and seeking “help.”

Wyler’s Juliette is a manic, Katherine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby” grenade tossed into the middle of the uneasy calm of this Partridge Family. She chatters, judges, backhandedly compliments and irritates the hell out of Juju. After dinner, she takes Pierrot’s phone and gets into a heated argument with his mother on her call-in show.

You just know she and this too-laid-back captain are meant for each other. If only the lazy SOB and his tiny, touchy-feely squad of gendarmes would put some effort into finding her damned car.

Well, it’s hard to get much of anything done with a vintage tank parked in front of their gendarmerie. Yes, there are WWII reenactors in France, with enthusiasts donning the uniforms of the Free French, or the Resistance, and their German oppressors — faking firefights.

No, the deadpan organizers of the reenactment assure the deadpan cops, no weapons will actually be fired. Yes, they might need a road or two blocked, maybe a police escort.

“Escorting…Nazis?”

“Oui.”

The ingredients are here for something silly and droll, a French Wes Anderson comedy or David O. Russell satire.

I found the leads cute, in an opposites attract “chemistry” sort of way. But their occasional sparks don’t lift any of the nonsense they’re caught up in or are merely observers of. They literally stand and gawk at the spectacle of grown men playing WWII, shaking their machine guns to simulate shooting, faking deaths in combat.

Dramatic meltdowns by most of the leads — Juju is a wildlife biologist given to cursing out school kids who don’t pay attention to his wetsuited lectures in a local pond, Pierrot finally loses his cool at Juliette’s insults — point to a more fractious and fun movie that might have been.

Ardant is generally wasted, husky radio voice notwithstanding. The whole nudists getting down to the “bare necessities of life” thread is a non-starter. And a single profundity in the dialogue isn’t much to show for a 100 minute movie.

“My mother used to say, ‘Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.'”

As “twee” is a word often used to describe Wes Anderson’s comedies, it’s worth pointing out to Monsieur Le Duc how very difficult that tone is to achieve. He doesn’t get down to the bare necessity of that here.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with nudity, profanity

Cast: Swann Arlaud, Maud Wyler, Nicolas Maury and Fanny Ardant.

Credits: A Kino Lorber release.

Running time:

Foreigners and locals meet and mingle and ponder many things — including love, in this Tokyo tale based on a Catherine Hanrahan novel. Sept.18 is when this one hits theaters.

Only you know what your tolerance is for dark, grim stories that offer little hope for justice in an unjust world, little hope for hope itself, for that matter.

But “Watch List” is a bleak but riveting thriller worth girding yourself for and immersing yourself in. It’s a Filipino film directed by American Ben Rekhi (“The Ashram”) about a newly-widowed mother of three, a recovered junkie, caught up in the authoritarian slaughter of President Rodrigo Duterte.

“Extra judicial killings” is one of those phrases, like “ethnic cleansing,” that tidies up a murderous horror. That’s what “Watch List” is about, the rapid descent of a half-compliant culture into off-the-books but state-sanctioned murder and “disappearances.”

A police van empties out in Quezon City’s District 120. It’s part of Operation Tokhang, which news footage shows the Filipino strong man authorizing. They’re rounding up everybody ever caught and convicted of using or selling drugs, giving them the chance to “voluntarily” surrender.

Arturo (Jess Mendoza) answers the pounding at the door, insists he’s clean and long ago did his time for his crimes. Nope. “Volunteer” to go in, because you’re on the list. “Just come with us,” (in Filipino, with English subtitles) the cops urge.

But his wife, Maria (Alessandra de Rossi) asks questions, gets mouthy. Now they want to know HER name. A quick glance at the clipboard “list” produces an officious “HERE it is.” Maria’s “Let me SEE that” falls on deaf ears.

They’re both ordered to “register” and face the perp-walk jeering of neighbors, even as the grinning cops assure them that the signing in, oaths they must take, and dancing that’s to start their latest “rehabilitation” is “nothing.”

They go home. Arturo kisses her and their three kids good night before going to work. He never comes back, gunned down in a drive-by. The cops are there within moments, but no, there were no “witnesses.” Strangely, all the CCTV cameras at the scene “were down.”

Lt. Ventura (Jake Macapagal) shrugs, says they have no leads, makes Maria sign some papers, and that’s that.

But good luck finding a job as a widow with three kids when you’ve been on the news, when everybody nearby knows you were a drug user and “once an addict, always an addict,” because the murderously corrupt government keeps telling them that.

The Catholic Church? The iconography is everywhere, but there is no priest or sanctuary that can offer Maria comfort. All that’s left for it is for her to beg for a job, as an informant, with the very people she suspects arranged the murder of her husband, and covered it up.

Ventura makes the arrangement. Alvin (Arthur Acuña) will be her handler, allegedly a “vigilante” but actually an undercover cop. She will find information, get dealers to sell to her so that they can be “caught in the act.”

Or so she thinks. Being taught to fire a pistol from the back of a motorbike tells her, and us, this is how it’s done. If you’re on the “list,” judgement has already been passed. No arrest, no trial, just execution.

Maria’s “real” motive for getting mixed up in this is to protect her kids, the oldest of whom (Micko Laurente) is already spending too much time with a drug dealing cousin (Timothy Malabot).

Can she save him and his siblings? What will she do once she knows how these “EJKs” (extra judicial killings) are meted out, who stands to gain and where the corruption really lies?

British born Italian-Filipino actress de Rossi perfectly embodies a woman with a past, but with little in that past to help her in her newly-widowed predicament. Sure, she can be of help to the cops.

“If there’s one thing I remember, it’s how to score.”

She tries to assure her confused, grieving children that their father was not a pusher, that he was “a good man.”

But the more she learns, the harder it is to hide her despair and her desperation. The same thing could happen to her that happened to Arturo, and Maria is willing to cross a lot of lines to prevent that. de Rossi never lets us see the gears turning, what Maria might be planning to do with all she learns and the terror that’s being unleashed on her country’s most vulnerable.

Director Rekhi maintains that mystery and steadily ramps up the suspense as we follow his heroine down a rabbit hole filled with vipers.

And the deeper she and we go down that “Watch List,” the more doubts we have that anybody will get out of this alive, much less with a sense that justice will be done or will even be allowed.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse

Cast: Alessandra de Rossi, Jake Macapagal, Arthur Acuña, Jess Mendoza, Micko Laurente and Timothy Mabalot.

Credits: Directed by Ben Rekhi, script by Ben Rekhi, Rona Lean Sales. A Dark Sky/Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:39

A layer of “icky” hangs over the French drama “An Easy Girl (Une fille facile)” that highlights the truism that “The French are different from us.”

That French reluctance to “tsk tsk” predatory older men hooking up with very young women or girls, which tends to explain their Polanski Tolerance, remains creepy. Even if a woman directs the film, even as it has plenty of judgement about the practice and warnings about the perils it entails for the girls and women, “icky” still applies.

This coming-of-age story, a Cannes award winner, is about a pivotal summer in the life of 16 year-old Naïma (Mina Farid), a summer she spends with her voluptuous “sophisticated” cousin Sofia (Zahia Dehar).

Sofia is all curves and makeup and topless tanning, seemingly unflappable about how she comes off, a Bridget Bardot bombshell who aspires to look like — perhaps with the aid of plastic surgery — Sophia Loren.

Sofia never carries cash, never worries about picking up a check, and is bedecked in baubles and designer clothing and accessories. And what impressionable Naïma learns from her this summer on the French Riviera — where Naïma’s single-mom is a luxury hotel maid — is what the English language gossip websites have labeled “yachting.”

Sofia turns heads and draws men like bees to honey. A semi-secluded piece of rocky beach, the top comes off and binoculars are raised, boats approach. And eventually, invitations come with them.

“Carpe diem” is tattooed on her lower back. “Feelings don’t matter” to Sofia any more than the judgment of others. Naïma just broke up with her boyfriend.

“What did he give you?” is Sofia’s question (in French, with English subtitles). She’s speaking rhetorically, but also materially Sofia is a big “Put it on Mr. Montero’s account” shopper.

That’s her latest catch. Andres (Nuno Lopes) and his friend Phillipe (Benoît Magimel of “The Piano Teacher”) are idling through summer on his motor yacht, “Winning Streak.” They while away the hours, picking at a guitar, contemplating the nature of wealth and beauty.

“Beauty you don’t want to possess, but admire.”

“You have to be a little poor, or have been poor to be really rich,”to best appreciate wealth and its trappings.

Sofia and Andres start a fling and Naïma — forsaking a summer internship in the resort kitchen and acting auditions with her gay BFF Dodo (Lakdhar Dridi) — tags along, not as chaperone but as the fourth wheel.

“I’d like to be a ‘dangerous woman,’ too!”

Phillipe takes on the role of fatherly concern and conscience. Casting a believable, ordinary-looking girl as Naïma makes that notion an easy sell.

Sex, skin, scenery and aspirational affluence are the Netflix selling points here. But director/co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski made this a drama, not a comedy. She’s leaning towards cultural commentary.

The men range from misogynist trolls to “I’m rich so she’s within reach” predators.

Sofia is more self-aware than she lets on, even if she seems impossible to insult. But there’s no cunning to her guile. She’s recently lost her mother and she’s found a way to live. Naïma must be tempted by this, and either reach for it or reject it.

A boat trip to an Italian isle puts them in the company of the wealthy and worldly Calypso (Clotilde Courau), who “tests” Sofia and reveals a snobbery that suggests “yachting” has been around a lot longer than crazydaysandnights.net.

The morality here is as predictable as the story arc, and the unsavory taste of it all a turn-off. Dehar’s got a hint of Kardashian in her exaggerated features, which adds to that.

But if the French are going to start looking askance at their cinema-defined version of gold-digging and April-September “romances,” good for them. Seeing something as “icky” doesn’t make the rest of the world prudes.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, explicit sex, nudity, teen drinking

Cast: Mina Farid, Zahia Dehar, Benoît Magimel, Nuno Lopes, Lakdhar Dridi, Clotilde Courau

Credits: Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, script by Rebecca Zlotowski and Teddy Lussi-Modeste. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

Whoa. Did not see THAT coming.

A comedy series that began life as a cute (ish), lame (ish) NBC promo package to entice American viewers into watching British soccer?

A show that tries to turn Jason Sudeikis, who has spent his career on the Summer’s Eve side of the character actor spectrum, into a drawling Power of Positive Thinking pussycat?

A series where “Coach” analogies are a real worry?

“Ted Lasso” has “kind of slipped by me” written all over it. Making it for a streaming service, where R-rated language rules the day, hints at a “Coach’ with Lots of Cursing.” But as the cursing will be of the British persuasion, and the “fish out of water” story trope endures because, well, it works — let’s give it a try.

“Scrubs” seems to be the operative analogy with this often funny and occasionally quite sentimental series on Apple TV. Bill Lawrence of “Scrubs” had a hand in turning those NBC promos into a season-long story of a goofy, relentlessly-upbeat college football coach lured from his FCS (not “Power Five”) Wichita State (they no longer play football) job to coach an also-ran British premiere league club.

And if it isn’t “Death of a Salesman,” or “Vice Principals” or “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” it’s perfectly watchable low-hanging-fruit TV, with funny supporting players (including co-creator Brendan Hunt) and a flurry of “Innocents Abroad” style jokes about a naive American crashing into British slang, jargon, accents and culture in soccer-mad Richmond, where AFC Richmond wallows in mediocrity.

Lasso (Sudeikis) and the too-aptly-named Coach Beard (Hunt) are career sidekicks, hurled into this situation because the new owner (regal Hannah Waddington of “Game of Thrones”) wants the team she won in a divorce to burn to the ground, as revenge on the repellent, rich ex (Anthony Head, perfect).

The Lasso/Beard dynamic is played-up just enough to score a couple of laughs every episode. Yes, Beard is the semi-silent “brains” of the operation — doing the homework that hyper glad-hander Lasso doesn’t. Yes, the situation is “Major League” trite, with whole episodes devoted to “teamwork” building, torture by tabloids and even vanquishing a silly superstition.

But as with “Scrubs,” the fun in the series comes from the banter, the caricature/characters revealing hidden dimensions, skills and gifts and heart.

Hit or miss wordplay is a part of that. The star player is a preening diva named Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster). Teaching him “teamwork” involves befriending his Internet personality/spokesmodel girlfriend (Juno Temple, a delight). She’s worried about headlines from a photograph of her and Lasso together.

“Jamie’s Tart breaks Tartt’s Heart…the power of RHYMING in this country!”

Jamie? He just wants the endorsements, the elevation to an elite team, the fame and glory. He wants the crowd singing his little goal-scoring celebration song, set to “Baby Shark.”

“Jamie TARTT doo doo doo doo du-du!”

Teammate Roy (Brett Goldstein, terrific) is the ageing, furious ex-star on his last legs, cursing and threatening one and all and utterly intolerant of this “wanker” brought in to ruin the team.

As indeed are the punters in the pubs and the stands.

Lasso? He lets every insult, every evisceration in the form of a “question” at his press conferences, roll right off his back. Their next opponent is a “tough cookie.”

“Know what you do with ‘tough cookies, don’t-ya? DIP’em in milk!”

Sudeikis, playing against type, may be the big surprise here. He is, if not quite charming, at least disarmingly-grating in this In-over-his-Head turn.

Hunt’s Coach Beard? He’s Robert Wuhl in this riff on “Bull Durham.” His rare lines are limited to “explaining” how “They call cleats ‘boots'” and a single last moment assessment of every opponent, delivered in the locker room as they hit the “pitch, not field.”

“SPEED on the outside!”

Nick Mohammad plays the shy, downtrodden “kit man” (equipment manager) who, because Ted talks to EVERYbody as his real gift is evaluating talent, chemistry and intelligence, becomes a part of the brain trust. Toheeb Jimoh is a Nigerian kid who might be the star of tomorrow if he ever asserts himself.

There’s a gruff but lovable pub owner, a “soccer girl” schoolkid who schools Ted with her feet every now and then and a team of misfits who’ve got to be taught to “Believe!”

Yeah, I know how that sounds. But if you like sports cliches served up in “Scrubs” (Zach Braff does some directing on “Ted Lasso”), it’s not a bad way to kill a half hour a week.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, lots of swearing, drinking, adult situations

Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddington, Juno Temple, Brendan Hunt, Brett Goldstein, Toheeb Jimoh and Nick Mohammad.

Credits: Created by Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence and Jason Sudeikis. An Apple TV release.

Running time: 10 episodes @34:00 each

Abortion comedies — dramedies by definition — are rare. “Obvious Child” comes to mind.

Here’s one in road comedy form (Love the Trans Am) with Haley Lu Richardson, Barbie Ferriera and Giancarlo Esposito.

“Unpregnant” comes to HBO Max on September 10.

It opens America’s movie theaters — the biggest chains, anyway — next weekend.

A little Russell Crowe “Unhinged” it is, then.

Donald Ray Pollock’s eccentric post WWII novel parks the two Brits on Ohio in a psychological thriller.

Lots of atmosphere, amIright? Pattinson is showing more range with every passing year. Damned convincing fire and brimstone preacher here. 

Coming soon, and on Netflix. 

How do you feel about Ethan Hawke, playing the mistreated inventor Nikola Tesla in a hoarse, unaccented whisper, stepping up to the mike and covering the Tears for Fears hit, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World?”

We’ve already seen the artifice of writer-director Michael Almereyda in many a scene in his take on “Tesla.” Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) whips out an iPhone after one “never-happened” meeting with his former protege and rival.

That seems right. Surely Tesla would have been an Android guy.

Obvious moments of rear projection take Tesla to a World’s Fair, onto the plains of Colorado, into long-closed (black and white images) restaurants, street scenes and the like.

At one point, a keen-eared listener can hear modern ambulance sirens wailing in the distant background on the soundtrack. FIRE the soundmixer! Or, um, leave it in. Why not?

As our narrator, Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson of the recent “Robin Hood” debacle), daughter of robber baron J.P. and a Tesla flirtation, has already looked at the camera, shown us her laptop and demanded that we “Google” Tesla and Edison. We’re well–immersed in this whole “fourth-wall” breaking, modernish lark of a bio pic.

One ugly fact harshing that vibe is the cruel realization, some minutes into Hawke’s re-teaming with his modern-set “Hamlet” director, that Hawke might be the third best big screen Tesla to come along. In “The Prestige,” the charismatic David Bowie did for the inventor of AC current and most of what made radio possible what he did for Andy Warhol in “Basquiat” — made him other-worldly and cool. And Nicholas Hoult’s supporting turn in “The Current War: Director’s Cut” was sharply defined as well.

Hawke? He mumble-whispers his way through the notoriously introverted Tesla, not taking even a stab at an Eastern European accent. That he sings in this same voice is kind of rubbing our noses in it.

Couple that with a generally inferior supporting cast, when compared with the all-star Oscar bait of “A Current War,” and you’ve got the lesser of two Tesla tales.

But Almereyda tells a story that carries on after “A Current War,” and begins before it. It is Tesla-focused, and you don’t have to be a Tesla cultist to get at least a little charge (ahem) out of what he’s done with the man.

He’s not shy about adding some fanciful “what might have beens,” and not just the singing, cell phones and laptops. What if Edison had apologized for his slights, public relation bites and legal fights after those AC/DC wars, and they’d teamed up?

What if they’d settled their earlier dispute over compensation in Edison’s lab with an ice cream cone fight?

What if Tesla hadn’t let George Westinghouse (Jim Gaffigan, nobody’s idea of The Next Michael Shannon of “Current”) plead/con him into giving up his royalties on “polyphase” generators and alternating current patents?

“A sensible man,” Miss Morgan intones, “would have said, ‘Wait a minute. Let me talk to a lawyer.”

The Irish Hewson manages a perfect, deadpan Gilded Age American accent as narrator/flirt Morgan. Similarly, Rebecca Dayan as famed actress Sarah Bernhardt, a fan and friend of both Edison and Tesla (who was smitten), gives us just enough French to make a convincingly Divine Sarah.

Not enough is done with Tesla’s European friend, assistant and fellow inventor Szigeti (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), still a welcome Hungarian addition to the “true” part of the story.

The framework of something original and engaging is here, if only Almereyda had seen it, and maybe had a little talk with Hawke about splitting the difference between “Method” and “comprehension” in his line-readings.

Those of us fascinated by Tesla’s tragedy are going to see this, no matter what. But “Tesla” is a film that peaks — as the inventor himself did — when his alternating current lights up the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 (World’s Fair).

A shy man in caught up in the swirl of invention, glory, showmanship and hype, this is the most interesting part of the story and should dominate the movie — accolades here, a glimpse of Annie Oakley there.

Instead, we open at about the time Edison’s first wife died, in August of 1884, for a scene the darkened lab where the grand, deaf inventor Edison holds forth to his acolytes, jokingly asking Tesla “Are you really from Transylvania? Have you ever eaten human flesh?”

Tesla marvels how Edison “talks to everyone” at the lab, from engineers to custodians, “but is incapable of listening.”

Self-conscious touches abound as we hit the high points, and lightly touch on the lows, of Tesla’s subsequent career. Do the flourishes add to our understanding of the man? Only Anna Morgan’s “Google search” suggestions.

Other than that, they seem either budgetary (all that rear projection instead of location shooting) or contrivances to make the picture “different” from “A Current War.”

In its best moments, “Tesla” holds its own with the earlier film. In too many others, third-choice casting in supporting roles and Hawke’s “closed-captioning” swallowing of his lines in the lead make “Tesla” an also-ran. Again.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material and nude images

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Eve Hewson, Rebecca Dayan, Kyle MacLachlan and Jim Gaffigan.

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Almereyda. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:42

Ariela is 16, looks 14, and is all about risk and rebellion.

We meet her (Shira Haas) as she’s recklessly riding, strapped to the roll bar of a fellow Israeli teen’s pickup. They roll up at a construction site rave, where she knocks back a few.

But 1130 turns her serious. She’s got to go home. NOW. Nobody’s leaving? That means she and her coochie-cutter shorts are walking to the nearest highway to hitchhike home.

Her Army officer dad (Yiftach Klein) isn’t fooled by her wardrobe change. Mom (Renana Raz) may cover for her, but he’s not buying that, either.

His barely-controlled fury about what happens “when men see you” on the streets, “half-naked, in the middle of the night” (in Hebrew, with English subtitles) leads to “punishment,” his idea of what will “nip it in the bud.”

He shreds her shirt and cuts the legs off the jeans she slipped into to cover up her transgression. She will stand, outside their apartment, on the street, all night in that get-up so that strangers will “compliment you on your promiscuity!”

“Broken Mirrors” is a domestic melodrama about guilt, ways to grapple with it or avoid dealing with it, and about the many forms and directions “punishment” can take.

Over-the-top touches and a big fat coincidence earn it the “melodrama” label. But it’s still a modestly gripping story of remorse mixed with revenge.

Because Ariela is headed for a fall. It comes when she sulks her permissive, just-wants-to-be-loved mother into letting her practice driving on a back road the next day. We sit and watch and watch for the shoe to drop, the hammer to fall, the car to jump forward, knock her mother down and put her in a coma.

Ariela gets her to the hospital, gets the stern “You’re already punishing yourself” lecture from her father, snaps that she will find a way to top that, and runs away. Guilt-ridden Ariela is hellbent on self-injury. And if getting raped, her father’s biggest fear, is the result, it’s worth it for the pain it will cause him.

Writer-directors Aviad Givon and Imri Matalon set up our expectations and sympathies, and then cut the legs right from under them in this tight chamber tragedy.

Whatever we feel about the fury that Ariela masks her guilt with, whatever fears we have for her safety with her every encounter with men, or as she marches into a literal field-of-traps, even empathetic teen viewers should be thinking “This is a bit much.”

“Why did you step in this area?” 20ish farmer Ben (Yoan Rotman) wants to know as he frees her from a leg-trap.

“Because the sign said NOT to!”

But father Giora’s authoritarian “actions have consequences” streak has origins that go beyond military discipline. That word we hear and read in opinion pieces in the U.S. — “projecting” — comes to mind.

Haas, a former Israeli child star, doesn’t play a lot of notes here. But Ariela’s scowl is so omnipresent that her attempts at turning “Lolita” come off as more than just clumsily childish. The character not only doesn’t know how to play “loose” to men. She is even worse at hiding her self-loathing and guilt.

And every minute that “Broken Mirrors” isn’t zeroing in on this confused, self-destructive kid Haas plays is a minute wasted.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity, teen binge drinking

Cast: Shira Haas, Yiftach Klein, Renana Raz and Yoav Rotman

Credits: Written and directed by Aviad Givon and Imri Matalon. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:39