Movie Nation

It helps to think of“xenophobia” being explained by Michael Constantine, the amusing Greco-proud poppa of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”

“From the Greek,” he’d say, “‘xeno,’ which means ‘stranger,’ and ‘phobos,’ which means fear.”

Fear of foreigners. Kind of an ugly word. The Greeks didn’t invent it, but boy it pops up in stories about modern Greece all the time.

Xenophobia in modern Greece is the anchor issue that drives “Amerika Square,” an engaging and pointed parable about life at Ground Zero in the the global refugee crisis.

Director and co-writer Yannis Sakaridis doesn’t take us into the camps, onto the panicked beaches of Turkey or to war-torn Syria. This story plays out with Greeks, Syrians and Africans in one square of Athens, interconnected lives telling a larger story.

The film has three narrators, all male (because “Sexism, from the Greek…”) philosophizing in Greek, English or Arabic about the state of their lives and their world at this point in time, when so much attention has been focused on human migration and Greece (the film was finished in 2016).

Nakos (Makis Papadimitriou) is 40 years old, living at home “without a Euro to your name,” his father gripes. He describes, at length, the cosmopolitan nature of just the building his family lives in, with Pakistanis and Afghans living on the ground floor, “the Russian Annex,” the “African commune,” and so forth.

Spread that over all the buildings surrounding Amerika Square. Fill the square with immigrants passing through, sleeping on park benches.

“Look at what happened to us,” he laments to his pal Billy (Yannis Stankoglou), lamenting how Greece isn’t nearly as “Greek” as it once was.

Billy is a poetic “artist in ink” and skin who runs a tattoo parlor. Billy defines tattoos as “a code,” a way to signal to someone “we have something in common.”

Nakos may talk darkly of “What the whites did when they came to America” (give Native Americans diseased blankets) and “What the Japanese did to the Chinese in World War II” (dumped poisoned rice out of airplanes). Billy? He frets over the impermanence of the world and his place in it.

“Even ink, humble ink, lasts longer than us.”

Tarek (Vassilis Koukalani) is a Syrian refugee, shrugging off Greek griping about their “square,” which “you stopped using years ago.” He won’t be here long. He’s taken his young daughter out of a war zone, gotten her to Greece. Now, he discusses his escape options with human trafficker Hassan (Sultan Amir), who gives the “walking out,” “flying out” and “boat” escape prices.

All of our narrators are political and social philosophers, and all have their beliefs — freely-shared — tested when push comes to shove.

Tarek, putting his trust in “good men” (he thinks) running a highly illegal business, will wonder about the humanity still extant in the Birthplace of Western Civilization.

Billy will find a purpose to his aimless existence when a gorgeous North African singer (Ksenia Dania) comes to get her “Property of Mike” tattoo removed, and to escape the indentured servitude she’s working under.Makis Papadimitriou

And Nakos, hapless, bigoted Nakos, will decide whether or not to act on his dark dislike of the foreigners around him.

The players, being unfamiliar to most viewers, are instantly credible, especially Koukalani, an educated man desperate to save his daughter from their plight, so desperate he has to take “Trust me, it’ll be fine” from men we might be inclined to not trust.

Papdimitriou makes Nakos or “Nako” a seemingly harmless grump, but one capable of violence if not man enough to inflict it in person.

“They haven’t done anything to me,” he says of the foreigners, “but (their presence) BOTHERS me.”

Dania lets us see love in Tereza the singer’s eyes, even as we sense the desperation that fuels her every flirtatious interaction with Billy.  Yeah, she’d do that to escape. Who wouldn’t?

But it is Stankoglou whom the audience will identify with, a Bogart-Belmondo figure, rakish, working class, principled and sympathetic. Of course he has a motorcycle, a Royal Enfield. Of course he’s seen “Casablanca.”

Of course he knows the perfect tattoo metaphor when Tereza asks for it —“Refuse to sink,” in English.The portrait that emerges of weary, broke and broken Greece is of people who won’t charge others out of compassion — tattoos, or passport photos. Some may voice their gripes about the massive influx and the problems associated with being human migration’s new choke point.

Politicians may prey on those prejudices.

But no one is so far gone that their humanity isn’t easy to find. As Michael Constantine might have put it, “Humanity, from the Latin humanus. But you know, they borrowed it from the Greeks…”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Yannis Stankoglou, Makis Papadimitriou, Vassilis Koukalani, Ksenia Dania and Sultan Amir.

Credits: Directed by Yannis Sakaridis, script by Vangelis Mourikis, Yannis Tsirbas and Yannis Sakaridis. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:26

Let’s return now to the Baztan Valley, Navarre, the cloud-and-fog shrouded north of Spain, where detective Amaia Salazar must wrap up her toughest, most gruesome and most personal murder case.

“Offering to the Storm” finishes of the “Baztan Trilogy” based on the fiction of Dolores Redondo. We’ve followed conflicted, conspiracy-minded and dogged Detective Chief Salazar (Marta Etura) through her days as as “The Invisible Guardian, ” a sleuth pondering “The Legacy of the Bones.”Now, with everybody else convinced her cult leader mom died at the end of “Bones,” she must uncover the truth about Mom and her baby-sacrificing Spaniards once and for all.

This trilogy — Spain’s answer to “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (long, lurid, a cinematic “page-turner”) — is about dead babies. And as the final installment begins with an infant being smothered in the crib, it won’t be for everybody.

It’s a beautifully gloomy, chatty mystery-thriller that’s always on its feet. Amaia is often on the run, chasing down the baby-killer in that first scene (Iñigo de la Iglesia), who mumbles “I have to finish this, I MUST finish this” (in Spanish or subtitled into English, or in dubbed English, if you prefer) as he’s caught.

Amaia tracks down her Hannibal Lecter, Dr. Berasategui (Álvaro Cervantes), a cult leader she caught in the last film, in prison where his threats are laced with clues.

She dashes from graveyards to morgues, questions the priest (Imanol Arias) who provides hints even as he tries to distance the Church from the crimes.

“Witchcraft is not Satanism,” he explains. “Insulting God is not the object!”

And she copes with homelife, where American husband James (Benn Northover) does most of the childcare of their new infant and gripes that she’s compulsive about her job.

Her sisters would agree with that. They’re ready to have Mom’s funeral, but damn if Amaia is going to accept that she’s dead without finding the old witch’s body.

Somehow, through all this running about, crossing into France to dig up old graves, trying to investigate “every mystery baby death in the past five years,” wearing out her staff as she drives through rain and snow, trying to get to that next witness/prisoner before their timely “suicide,” Amaia has time for a side-piece.

Ah, España!  They may have given up their siesta in the rainy north. But not bed-hopping.

Etura has made her career with this trilogy, and handles the cop patter and voluminous dialogue and emotional scenes with skill. The threats turn more and more personal in the story, in that “No one can protect you from Them” sense, and Etura sheds her poker-faced cop visage now and again.

But she still makes Amaia more interesting than compelling.

The story is so exposition-heavy that we’re getting new wrinkles, new trains of thought and lines of inquiry, right up to the end. That preserves the “twists,” but there aren’t nearly enough of those to justify the film’s gasping 140 minute sprint.

The best scene is the Navarre version of that American thriller staple, the police officer’s funeral. No bagpipes (a cliche of American cop movies), but moving nevertheless.

The most interesting new character for the finale is a grief-stricken, raging mother of a victim, Yolanda. Marta Larralde does more to get across the REAL stakes here — a conspiracy reaching high and far, going back decades, fanatics who have bought into monstrous rituals — than any other actor or character.

We never really get the “why” or “to what end,” though. It’s a conspiracy to preserve a cover-up, not a means to wealth and power?

Or…IS it?

Not exactly the sort of question you want hanging over a trilogy that’s eaten up close to seven hours of your Netflixing time, but that’s part and parcel of the whole “page turner” label. This page-turner trilogy was always better at eating up your time than filling it.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Marta Etura, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Álvaro Cervantes, Marta Larralde, Imanol Arias and Benn Northover.

Credits: Directed by Fernando González Molina, script by Luiso Berdejo, based on the Dolores Redondo.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:19

Decades ago, I tracked down animator and director Chuck Jones to talk about his greatest creations on the occasion of Bugs Bunny’s “birthday,” the date of his first appearance on the big screen.

“Bugs Bunny is how we see ourselves,” Jones said. Bold, brave, smart, swaggering. “Daffy Duck is how we really are.” Petty, venal, thin skinned and delusional.

Chuck identified more with Daffy for those reasons, as do I.

But give yourself a break today, a Bugs break. Enjoy.

From a Zoom conference at Comic Con.

“Gerry” is one of those indie films whose reputation spread much further than its distribution. And that reputation explains how few people have seen it. It’s an interesting experiment in minimalism, but a willfully obscure, indulgent wank of a movie.

Two friends motor into the desert for a hike, to see something, a “thing” that is their destination. A natural phenomenon, nirvana, “the American Dream?” We don’t know.

They both go by “Gerry.” And whenever they mess up, the expression they use for their ineptitude is “Gerry it up.”

The hike goes wrong when they run short of time and decide to “Gerry” their way to “the thing,” rather than follow the path other hikers, tourists or “pilgrims” take. As the desert isn’t featureless — not at first, anyway — this might not be a disastrous call.

But since neither Gerry (Matt Damon) nor Gerry (Casey Affleck) is very experienced at hiking, since they’ve neglected to bring water, “bushwhacking” (what hikers in my part of the world call taking their own path) could be fatal.

What co-stars and co-writers Affleck and Damon were shooting for here, and what director Gus Van Sant captures in one gorgeous but stark composition after another, is an existentialist riff on “Waiting for Godot,” featuring two down-to-Earth-but-ill-prepared Americans confidently wandering into the abyss.

I’ve seen “Godot” lots of times, as a theater viewer and critic, and most of the absurdist or existential plays it’s often grouped with. I can’t say these two, Oscars aside, really get there with this script. The futility is there, but not the poetry or pathos.

But as the two Gerrys trudge in desert-crunching silence, their pace quickening as panic sets in, I locked in on their predicament, the hiking lore that drives their decisions.

Yes, you tend to start hiking faster, trying to outrun your way out of being lost.

Yes, in the West, you look for promontories and climb one to get your bearings and find your way to civilization. In the East, you hike downhill, looking for a stream to follow to a river to civilization.

No, you never go out in the desert, even in winter, without water.

Each Gerry gets himself into a predicament that he acts as if he cannot extract himself from. Each frustrates the other. Blame sets in, even when it isn’t expressed openly.

“How do you think the hike is going so far”?”

And as they crunch from dry creek beds, in search of water, up mountainsides, across dunes and even salt flats, you wonder how lost two doofuses have to be to turn the road-crossed and somewhat developed desert southwest into “Lawrence of Arabia.”

The performances in this 2002 production aren’t the most demanding Damon or Affleck have attempted. But looking at “Gerry,” you can see Affleck’s attraction to such later dialogue-light projects as “Light of My Life” and “A Ghost Story.”

About 60 minutes into “Gerry,” your tolerance may face the desert of your own impatience with its repetition and dreary monotony. It looks like a beautifully-shot but under-scripted indie feature everybody involved knocked out in a couple of weekends.

But if you’re going to tackle something deeper, skimming the surface of Beckett will never do. Damon, Affleck and Van Sant did just that and that alone, and that leaves the viewer thirsty for a lot more than “Gerry” delivers.

MPAA Rating: R, for violence and language (profanity)

Cast: Matt Damon, Casey Affleck

Credits: Directed by Gus Van Sant, script by Casey Affleck and Matt Damon. An Echo Bridge film available on Tubi, IMDb and other free streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:43

The legal profession takes its share of rightly-deserved brickbats from the press, the public and stand-up comics. And if you’ve ever dealt with a “class action” hustle — “We sue in your name, and keep all the money” — or a small town estate lawyer — “Let’s see how I can bill your estate into infinity — you have your own reasons for agreeing.

But there are people for whom the law is a calling, for whom the Constitution is Holy Writ, lawyers hated more out of ignorance or because those inundating them with threatening calls, hateful letters and emails have been conditioned to hate by the echo chamber of right wing media.

Whenever Constitutionally-protected speech is threatened, wherever rural populist politicians figure “majority rule” means they can turn off civil rights for outvoted minorities, ACLU lawyers are there. They’re the hated “outsiders” from that Mecca of right wing venom, New York. They show up with the legal arguments they hope a rational, Constitutional court will listen to and stop the erosion, or in recent years, open trampling of America’s celebrated, traditional, legally-protected civil rights.

They’re here for “The Fight.” 

“The Fight” is a documentary about the American Civil Liberties Union, an institution derided in American life for much of its existence, but particularly since the 1960s, when its role in ensuring civil rights meant rights that had to apply to “all Americans,” of any race, gender or region. It’s been a favorite knee-jerk target of America’s increasingly shrill conservatives of the press, the pulpit and the Republican party.

Filmmakers Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli B. Despres (and producer Kerry Washington) set out to do an almost-intimate overview of the ACLU’s activities in battle with an administration hell-bent on rolling back American civil liberties to earlier sexist, white supremacist and homophobic standards.

Lawyer Dale Ho is captured, at work, in court and at home, battling Trump administration efforts to suppress the vote and strip voting rights through a back-door “Are you a U.S. citizen?” question on the 2020 census, part of a wider assault aimed at intimidating Hispanics — legal voters, and refugees — and disenfranchising populous (Democratic) states. 

Brigitte Amiri tackles the “Overturn Roe V. Wade” effort, beloved by rural Protestant and urban Catholic America, via a case where a Trump appointee tries to force an immigrant, underage rape victim to carry a pregnancy to term. Scott Lloyd, a bellicose and unqualified activist briefly in charge of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (he was later removed) would go on religious chat shows and brag about how he was ending abortion, one case at a time, in his department.

Lee Gelernt gets emotional as he struggles to overturn the horrific policies of separating migrant children from their families while refugee and immigration requests are processed.

And Chase Strangio and Josh Block take on the case of Brock Stone, a transgender member of the Navy, defending the right of transgender people to serve in the U.S. military after yet another extra-legal “executive order” is handed down by Trump to attack that minority’s rights.

Ho, seen with his family, notes that he’d been hoping to move into a quieter corner of ACLU law so that he’d be able to spend more time at home. And then Trump was “elected.”

“If I’m not going to be a civil rights lawyer now, then when?”

ACLU officials such as Jeffrey Stone agonize over the widely unpopular case they’ve taken on, specifically protecting the rights of Trump-emboldened Nazis to march in Charlottesville, Va., leading to riots and a murder, with “our name attached to this event” simply by standing up for the right of free speech.

Strangio discusses being both a lawyer on LGBT issues, and a spokesman as a transgender man on such issues, in his work.

And Gelernt, interviewing immigrant clients, prepping his briefs and making his case on TV, when invited, laments that his battle against child-separation policies is “one of those cases I just cannot lose…These little kids are just being terrorized.”

One knows from experience that “The Fight” isn’t a movie that will reach the wider public. If it’s mentioned on One America News, Fox News or other right wing outlets, it will be simply the subject of ridicule. “ACLU” is an acronym, like NAACP, that makes a portion of the populace see red and tune out.

While lawyers read, in one montage, from their mountains of hate mail, there’s not a lot of balance to the film, aside from snippets of Fox News opinionators praising this or that Trump extra-legal executive fiat. The split screens following assorted cases don’t cover for the fact that every chapter of the film is given short shrift by choosing to explore four separate sets of cases.

And of course, if you follow the news, you know sometimes they win, often they lose.

But it’s worth remembering that in a time when reactionaries are taking a blunderbuss to The Constitution, to the norms of a democratic republic, to anybody they perceive as “the other,” when courts are being stacked with unqualified partisan hacks, bigots and rage-aholics, there’s this one institution and its lawyers, interns and backers, arguing back, taking “The Fight” to those started it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for strong language, thematic material and brief violence.

Cast: Brigitte Amiri, Lee Gelernt, Dale Ho, Brock Stone, Chase Strangio

Credits: Directed by  Eli B. Despres, Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg.  A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:36

The children’s fantasy “Animal Crackers” didn’t deserve to be left on the shelf, which I am sure the folks who made it will be relieved to hear.

It’s been finished since 2017, never gaining distribution in North America, barely being shown anywhere else.

It attracted a dazzling voice cast — Sir Ian McKellen and Danny DeVito, Raven-Symoné and Stallone and Wallace Shawn, Hollywood Hot Couple Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, and such cartoon voice mainstays as Harvey Fierstein, Patrick Warburton and Gilbert Gottfried.

And the animation — by Spain’s Blue Dream Studio — is playfully designed, whimsically colored if not quite of the expressive texture of the best of Pixar, Dreamworks or Blue Sky.

But even as children’s entertainment, this ‘toon about a circus whose animal acts are actually humans who have eaten from a magical box of Animal Crackers — thus stripping “animal cruelty” right out of the whole lion-tamer, horse high-diving into a pool business — never amounts to much more than background noise kiddie entertainment.

The songs include Queen retreads and Huey Lewis never-weres, and some even blander fare as filler. The sight gags work, here and there, but the dialogue never rises far above the “corpulent clown” Chesterfield’s (DeVito) go-to line.

“Pull my finger!”

Even small children may pick up on “Meh, don’t need to pay much attention to this. Know where it’s going, seen it all before.”

The Huntington Family Circus used to be run by siblings. But vain showboat Horatio (McKellen), in Gunther Gebel Williams bouffant and jumpsuit, gave his mild-mannered younger brother “Buffalo” Bob an “It’s her or ME” ultimatum when Bob fell in love with a Gypsy aerialist, and was ousted.

Years later, embittered Horatio accidentally burns the circus down, leaving it to more distant relative Owen (Krasinski) who might finally get to quit his job at his father-in-law’s factory, a job he takes and keeps because he wants to please the old crank ( Shawn) and wife Zoe (Blunt).

“I taste DOG BISCUITS for a living!”

To make a go of the struggling circus, they’ll need the crackers. Eat one, and you turn into an animal, the night’s star attraction — a giraffe, elephant, rhino, horse, etc., with human showmanship skills.

It’s an accidental discovery which Owen makes, transforming into a hamster, shocking Zoe as she’s driving.

“For the love of TOM AND JERRY, please stop PUMMELING me with your purse!”

But Horatio is around, and with his sidekick, Zucchini (Gottfried), who thinks HE’s the villain and Horatio’s HIS sidekick, he aims to reclaim the circus for himself. Zucchini refers to himself in the Third Person, which is cute.

“Suffering SEVERE internal injuries, Zucchini continues his pursuit!”

The voices are fun, with Warburton doing a vintage Warburton toady trying to sabotage Owen and his scientist pal Binkley (Raven-Symoné) at the dog biscuit works, Shawn sputtering and Sly Stallone taking a sort of “I am Groot” role as BulletMan, the fellow they shoot out of a cannon to entertain the kids.

None of it adds up to much, although a car chase and an action-packed finale, with characters changing bodies willy nilly, eating crackers to win a sort of “rock, paper scissors” battle with the shape-shifting villains, pay off.

Grab me as a horse? Try holding on…to a PORCUPINE.

It’s all harmless, if almost charmless, rendered in different shades of “bland.”

MPAA Rating: TV-Y7

Cast: The voices of Ian McKellen, Emily Blunt, Raen-Symone, Danny DeVito, John Krasinski, Patrick Warburton, Harvey Fierstein, Gilbert Gottfried, Wallace Shawn and Sylvester Stallone.

Credits: Directed by Tony Bancroft, Scott Christian Sava and Jaime Maestro. Script by Scott Christian Sava and Dean Lorey, based on a graphic novel by Scott Christian Sava. A Blue Dream Studios/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

Boy, much respect for this distributor, which has turned out some winners.

But this Aug. 4 release looks amateurish, campy in an unintentional way.

Cosmo Jarvis punches above his weight in the film that announces his arrival as a cinematic force to be reckoned with in “The Shadow of Violence.”

It’s a Tom Hardy-sized performance in the sort of role Hardy tackled early on, a walking muscle with a vulnerable streak, a violent man with regrets trying like hell not to add to them.

Jarvis (“Hunter Killer,” “Peaky Blinders”) plays Douglas “Arm” Armstrong, once a boxer of minor renown in his corner of Western Ireland. Now, he’s the muscle for the Devers family, which controls drugs and who knows what all in this remote, seemingly lawless town which anybody with any sense is looking to escape from.

Not really an option for Arm. The Devers, in the person of his punk-pal Dympna (Barry Keoghan of “Dunkirk,” “American Animals” and TV’s “Chernobyl”) need Arm to do their dirty work for them.

Dympna plies the big man with coke and orders him to “hoarrrt peepul.” When we meet him, Arm seems inured to his way and his job, “just a way a fella makes sense of the world,” he narrates.

When somebody doesn’t “stay on the right side of the Devers family,” he takes care of them.

“Well, don’t kill’em.”

“Fair enough.”

This old drunk, Fannigan (Liam Carney), has drunkenly, accidentally or intentionally crossed a line or given the appearance of crossing a line with a Devers daughter. His sober protests notwithstanding, he gets the beating of his life.

But “the family,” in the person of the older gents who run things, isn’t satisfied.

“As far as (Fannigan’s) concerned, retribution hasn’t even started,” growls Hector (veteran character actor David Wilmot of “The Alienist,” “Black Sails”). He wants more.

Arm? He’s never been in “that business.”

“It’s time to get into that business, is what I’m saying.”

Dympna starts applying the drugs and the pressure. But Arm begins to let on he’s more than a punch-drunk lug, an insensate lout. Not a good time for that.

He’s got an autistic son his former girlfriend (Niamh Algar of TV’s “The Virtues”) wants to get into into a special school. She’s moved on, but she’s not above reminding him that this Devers business, “It’s not you.”

“I’ve been hearing that a lot, lately.”

Arm faces a moral choice, with dire consequences no matter what he decides to do.

The accents are sub-title-thick in the part of the world, as Arm takes his son to “the paaahhhhhhrk,” or joins him at a farm for horseback riding therapy.

Jarvis, who first gained notoriety for singing, takes pains to not let us over-estimate Arm. This thing he does? Literally just a job.

Then he allows us see how the drugs are controlling him, how the punk Dympna bullies and badgers and turns Arm into a “loyal” member of a family which will never regard him as blood. Arm is smart enough to have his doubts.

Keoghan makes Dympna smart but paranoid young man who keeps Arm close just so he can throw his weight around like a bigger man than he is. He may not have the killer instinct, either. But Arm won’t want to find out.

Algar has an earthy, pretty with high-mileage quality that is serving her well in working class Irish dramas. She suggests Ursula’s connection to Arm might have had more to it, back when he was younger. Now, she’s grown up and he hasn’t.

First-time feature director Nick Rowland makes the violence in-your-face and the scenes where Arm starts to struggle with it wrenching. Dude stages a mean Irish backroads car-chase, too.

The finale may have an inevitability about it, but Rowland, working from Joe Murtagh’s script based on a Colin Barrett short story, keeps his cards close and the mystery alive.

Will it be an Old West showdown, or something more Hemingway-esque that drives this man out of “The Shadow of Violence?”

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, pervasive language, drug use and brief nudity

Cast: Cosmo Jarvis, Niamh Algar, Barry Keoghan, Liam Carney, David Wilmot and Ned Dennehy.

Credits: Directed by Nick Rowland, script by Joe Murtagh, based on a short story by  Colin Barrett. A Saban release

Running time: 1:41

Ahh, the flipping comic book pages of the Marvel Studios logo, the voice-over narration meant to lend gravitas and personality to the caped and spandexed adventure to follow.

Here’s the first scene to “New Mutants,” because the old ones were worn out. Maisie Williams stars in this much-delayed reboot, now slated for Aug. 28 (fingers crossed).