Movie Nation

It’s long enough ago that a lot of people don’t remember it. But Times Square wasn’t always a tourist haven.

New York used to be broke, and broken.

Vast stretches of New York City were wastelands, with nightly “insurance claim” fires in the ruins of the Bronx, “mob hits” dominating headlines, a time with rampant theft, corruption and drugs made those “I Love New York” commercials ironically hilarious in the early seasons of “Saturday Night Live.”

It was a town under “Mob Rule,” Netflix’s new series “Fear City” reminds us, a city where vast swathes of life were infiltrated by or outright controlled by thugs with more than their share of vowels in their last names.

“Fear City: New York vs. the Mafia,” is a slick, engaging, well put-together documentary series that neatly skims the surface of Federal efforts to bring down the Five Families who made up The Commission — the organizers who made “organized crime” a phrase all of America was all too familiar with.

Director Sam Hobkinson (“The Kleptocrats,” “The PM, the Playboy and the Wolf of Wall Street”) and the producers weave together a narrative of FBI surveillance and Federal prosecution strategies via interviews with agents and attorneys and made men from the mob.

Wiretap recordings and surveillance footage are sampled, damning threats and tirades about “severing his head” and how nobody crosses “the concrete club” are the foundation of this three-part series. Recreations of how those recording devices are planted are woven into interviews with the women and men who did the work.

Split screens and the lurid local TV coverage of this or that “hit” give the entire series a gritty late-70s, early-80s feel.

Surveillance photos are rolled out and treated as fresh evidence — visually — by marking them up with a grease pencil on camera, showing us THIS is the money shot in this set of prints.

In three episodes, titled “Mob Rule,” The Godfather Tapes” and “Judgement Day,” we’re briefed on how the Gambino, Colombo, Lucchese, Genovese and Bonanno families, run by guys like “Fat Tony” Salerno, “Tony Ducks” Corallo and “Boss of Bosses” Paul Castellano, were organized.

In each episode, FBI agents and prosecutors talk of how insulated the murderers at the top were from the actual hijackings, extortion and contract killings that were done in their name.

The difficulty in getting close to these well-guarded, cunning killers and thieves is laid out — mansions that were “never empty,” “social clubs” where no outsider dared ever step inside — the Ravenite Club, the Palma Boys Social Club, the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club.

The painstaking process of building enough of a case to get permission to bug this club,  that “made man’s” Jaguar or Caddy, the Casa Storta Restaurant, is laid out.

But once that hurdle was cleared, the ball starts rolling downhill.

“It was like hearing a novel being read to you about the mob,” one retired agent marvels.

A lot of this detail will seem familiar to any mob movie or TV series fan, the pecking order from “soldiers” to “boss” within the hierarchy, the range of mob boss “types” — rotund cigar-chompers to “BUSINESSmen” like Castellano.

Like older men the world over, they loved their routines — this night we meet at that restaurant, BIG meetings we do on this afternoon at that “social club.”

I had forgotten the ways the mobs were interlocked, the “commission” that the Feds decided to prosecute, all at once. Even New Yorkers might not recall the degree to which the Mafia controlled garbage collection and construction, through union infiltration and concrete price-fixing.

Former Federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani is here, both in the many clips of TV news coverage from the day, and in perfectly coherent if somewhat self-aggrandizing fresh interview done for the series.

It’s worth remembering this crusading Giuliani, who tends to get lost in his “reverse mortgage” TV ads, personal scandals and current deep involvement with a fellow who pops into the public eye just as the mob’s control of New York construction reaches its peak — Donald J. Trump.

But unconsidered through ALL of this is the rampant corruption of the NYPD during this era, one of several reasons the Feds had to take over and run this case. The mob was too big, the cops too willing to look the other way. Frank Serpico’s story, a lone cop willing to speak out to the Knapp Commission, set up to (not that effectually) address the petty criminality that underlined the vast web of corruption, predated the years captured here. But little had changed.

And what makes one wonder if this is merely “season one” of this series are the revelations of mob control of concrete construction during this steel construction era, the far less heroic afterlife of Giuliani and his connection to the mob-friendly concrete-lover currently in the White House.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Rudy Guiliani, Charlotte Lang, Johnny Alite, Anthony Cardinale, Michael Chertoff,  Michael Franzese, John Joyce

Credits: Directed by Sam Hobkinson, produced by Dimitri Doganis, Bart Layton, Adam Hawkins, Jon Liebman. A Netflix release.

Running time: Three episodes, from :44 to 1:02 in length

A chance encounter, a crime committed by a relative and well-ordered lives, in a country famous for them, fall to pieces in the Japanese drama “A Girl Missing.”

It’s another intimate portrait of a mannered, particularly Japanese way of unraveling by Kôji Fukada, whose equally downbeat “Harmonium” collected a Cannes prize a couple of years back.

Japanese cinema often reflects the reserve, the don’t-rock-the-boat/don’t-upset quiet desperation of a culture imbued with a fear of offending. Kukada plays with that, like a cinematic Yakuza, his characters acting out their stories in painfully understated ways until it serves his purpose to startle or even shock.

Mariko Tsutsui plays Ichiko, a home healthcare nurse who has worked for the Oishi family for years, tending to their aged, fading matriach, an artist. Reserved, compassionate and conscientious Ichiko has had such an impact on their lives that Oishi granddaughters Motoko (Mikako Ichikawa) and younger sister Saki (Miyu Ozawa) are studying nursing, with Ichiko helping them prep to pass exams in the field.

Ichiko has a long-standing relationship with Dr. Tozuka (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), one that’s turned romantic. They’re about to marry and move, with his young son, into a new home.

But when Saki is kidnapped, all these ordered lives are shattered and all that reserve comes undone.

Ichiko’s nephew had dropped off some books during a cafe study session she was having with the two Oishi girls. When Saki is found and released, unharmed, it was nephew Tatsuo who had taken her.

Ichiko’s instinct is to be contrite, apologize to the girl’s mother and perhaps her nursing office, to tell her husband-to-be. But Motoko fears what will come from that, a rift with the family that will lead to Ichiko’s firing.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she argues (in Japanese with English subtitles).

It turns out, her motives aren’t that cut-and-dried. Motoko has her own secret. Now she and Ichiko can have a secret together.

Here’s where “A Girl Missing” is tricky. There is a parallel story that amounts to a second timeline, something not the least bit clear the first few instances it is introduced. “Risa” visits a new hairdresser (Sôsuke Ikematsu) for a new look. She is forward, chatty, almost clingy with him.

They “bump into” each other. She says she’s new in the neighborhood, asks for his number so that she can have “a friend, here.” And we see her pretending to walk to her building, seeing him leave, and moving on. She’s stalking him.

Whatever she calls herself, Risa is Ichiko. Makeup may add some time and a hint of madness to her face, and Tsutsui (of “Harmonium”) transforms herself in this guise. This is happening long after the kidnapping. What has turned her this way, and what is she up to?

I appreciate Fukada’s style, even as it tests the viewer’s patience. There’s a serenity to the decorum and probity of the characters that’s almost comforting, until they let the us past that way the Japanese present themselves to the world.

An inappropriate bit of over-sharing here, reserve tossed aside for a shockingly sexual moment of sext-bullying there, and the veneer is shattered and brittle lives and relationships just snap.

“A Girl Missing” won’t be to every taste. I was flummoxed at the huge press feeding frenzy that Ichiko faces when her blood connection to the kidnapper is revealed. This goes on for days and days, so much so that I felt compelled to check Japan’s crime statistics and wonder at the size of its suburban press corps.

No WAY this story would have “legs” like that anywhere else.

Perhaps that’s another instance of Fukada playing with cultural expectations. The lack of firearms drives the homicide and violent crime rate down, so any crime of this nature would be a somewhat rare thing. And a country with Japan’s long and infamous reputation for creative pornography just might fixate on a teen girl’s kidnapping.

In any event, Fukada has delivered another subtle, startling and demanding drama about lives upended in a country that rarely gives us any hint this sort of thing happens, a film built on stoic performances that give up their reserve when the worst kind of pressure is applied.

MPAA Rating: sex, nudity

Cast: Mariko Tsutsui, Mikako Ichikawa, Miyu Ozawa , Sôsuke Ikematsu, Mitsuru Fukikoshi and Ren Sudo.

Credits: Directed by Kôji Fukada, script by Kazumasa Yonemitsu and Kôji Fukada. A Film Movement + release.

Running time: 1:53

Casper Von Diem is der villain in this action pic from Voltage pictures.

Samaire Armstrong and William Katt, the onetime “Greatest American Hero,” also star in this one, which might be slated for Dec. Or might have moved up, since the trailer’s dropped.

The title refers to rules of life, priorities, the Second Amendment?

We will see.

The kids are facing a grim school year, no matter which way  the COVID turns. They could use a little end-of-summer escape. And with most cinemas still closed, it’s up to the Kings of Teen Romance, Netflix, to provide it.

So it’s once more into the “Booth,” dear friends, once more, for Joey and…Englewood?

“The Kissing Booth 2” gives us the “Booth” kids’ senior year, with no social distancing or economy in free fall. It’s a half hour longer than the original film, which was a Netflix blockbuster. It’s about one-third as funny and not even half as charming.

But if you’re all caught up on your summer reading list and braced for distance-learning, what they hey? It’s binge-watching length without the uh, commitment.

Joey King, Queen Bee of this age group and this genre, returns as Elle Evans, the pouty pixie who landed the School Hunk, Noah (Jacob Elordi), for her club’s kissing booth fundraiser, and for her very own boyfriend by the end of “Booth.”

As in all the worst John Hughes movies, she chooses the short-tempered rich jock for the jock’s adorable younger brother, Elle’s BFF Lee (Joel Courtney).

Girls always prefer the “older man” with the Shadow motorcycle to the kid with the vintage GT-350 Mustang. The fools.

“Booth 2” sends Noah off to Harvard and Elle to make up her mind about planning her college life and future — with or without him. Will she go to UC-Berkley like her late mom, and Lee and Noah’s mom (Molly Ringwald) did back in the last millennium? With Lee? Which they’ve been planning to do together and even have a pact about?

Or will she go chasing a man to that icon of Eastern Privilege, which her family can’t afford to send her to?

Complicating that dilemma is the new hunk on campus for their senior year at tony LA Country Day. Marco (Taylor Zakhar Perez) sings, plays guitar and is just gorgeous, “a SNACK indeed,” something Elle blurts out, by accident, over the school intercom.

“Two tickets to the GUN show please, because are those arms, or CANNONS?”

So here are the obstacles the two 30something guys who cooked up the script came up with.

GET Marco for the kissing booth.

GET Elle a solution to her cash for college dilemma.

MAKE Elle choose between last year’s “snack,” and this year’s “snack.” Throw in a sophisticated, sexy Brit “supermodel” Harvard “complication” (Maisie Richardson-Sellers).

And get Lee a girl of his own (Meganne Young), or make Elle see the light about her “bestie.”

Do you see 130 minutes of movie in there? Well, maybe when you’re older you’ll be better at rom-com math, kids.

The school is like an over-decorated version of Hogwarts where adults/teachers don’t figure in the story. At all. Save for a guidance counselor.

The heavy-lifting in this sequel involves putting King and a couple of her co-stars through rigorous Dance Dance Mania (Dance Dance Revolution missed a product placement ad here). The dance game stuff is fun the first couple of times we see it.

The rest of the movie is perfunctory in all the worst sequel ways — briefly referencing the “rules” the two besties play by, briefly giving “Sixteen Candles/Pretty in Pink” veteran Ringwald the “follow your heart” speech, covering everything that happened BETWEEN the movies in a montage. Burying us with other montages — a whirlwind trip to Boston, for instance.

Skipping over the fact that Elle and Noah basically shacked-up between her junior and senior years would feel a cheat. But then, we’ve seen “Summer ’03.” Ms. King left little for us to imagine in that sex romp.

There’s time for pandering to assorted corners of the audience, giving any character that popped in the first film screen time to please fans who connected with them. There’s a little inclusion — a gay couple comes out.

But there’s nothing funny — save for the outtakes. The chemistry between King and Courtney in those is better than anything we feel for Elle’s pairing up with Elordi or Perez in the movie. They’re each a foot taller than her, for starters. Makes them come off as much older than her, and “cute” kind of goes out the window.

Netflix should have hunted around for a hungry young female screenwriter to take a pass at this script. It lacks warmth, a feel for its heroine, who may narrate in voice-over, but comes off as more removed from the proceedings this time.

King’s agent should be holding out for script and screenwriter approval. All “Kissing Booth 2” — yes, there could be more sequels — accomplishes for her is hinting that she could hold her own in a dance movie. Maybe.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, a lot of snogging, some innuendo, a little profanity

Cast: Joey King, Joel Courtney, Jacob Elordi, Taylor Zakhar Perez, Meganne Young, Maisie Richardson-Sellers and Molly Ringwald

Credits: Directed by Vince Marcello, script by Vince Marcello and Jay. S. Arnold, based on the Beth Reekles book. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:10

Regarding “Amulet,” the words of Abraham Lincoln, the First Movie Critic, come to mind.

“Those who like this sort of thing might find it the sort of thing they like.”

I see this horror tale from actress (“Suffragette” and TV’s “The Hour”) turned writer-director Romola Garai as a triumph of tone over terror,  of chilly mood over any sense of malice it’s meant to generate.

Thoughtful, with the trappings of literature, philosophy, refugee politics and a moral person’s obligations and guilt in a time of civil war, Garai wrestles a lot into her story of demons and nuns and plumbing.

What she doesn’t do is give all this a proper shape or particularly arresting narrative. What she never does is frighten us by why we see or expect to see.

Alec Secareanu (of “God’s Own Country”) is Tomaz, a refugee scraping out a living in day work construction in xenophobic Britain. Each night, he squats with other outsiders in a flop, taking care to bind his wrists with electrical tape.

In his dreams, he is clean-shaven and in combat fatigues in the forests of his war-torn homeland, reading Hannah Arendt books as he works as a solitary border guard. Those dreams turn nightmarish when a woman (Angelika Papoulia) flees into his line-of-fire, or when he digs up a carved-bone relic of mysterious origin — an amulet.

The present day can be just as forbidding. He was a Ph.D. candidate back home. A fire in the flophouse makes him homeless and gets him robbed. A kindly nun (Imelda Staunton) is his salvation.

“What we want is not always what we need,” she counsels. “Forward is not the only way.”

She places him in a remote, tumbledown house, where Magda (Carla Jurí) is caring for a dying mother. Tomaz can “help” them. He can fix up the house, remedy the black bile pouring out of the plumbing, cope with the mold and skittering rats. Well, that’s the pitch, anyway.

But the unseen (at first) mother screams in the night, bites Magda in her rages. And the plumbing is beyond anything Drano can cope with.

Tomaz makes a go of it. Dour Magda brightens in his presence, and he gorges on her cooking. It’ll all come to tears, we just know it.

The first two acts — mysterious, cryptically connecting the hero’s past to his present predicament — are far more interesting than the “Oh, let’s explain everything, shall we?” finale.

Merely casting Staunton (Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter movies, QEII in TV’s “The Crown”) isn’t the give-away it might be, as she can play saintly or sinister with equal skill. But one does start out with the hunch that the villains on her resume called out to Garai.

The literary touches — Magda quoting St. Hildegard of Bingen — are more of a give-away.

“It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.”

Magda leaves out the begining of that quotation — “Dare to declare who you are.”

The resolutions to the mystery, the depictions of what we’ve only suspected, are gruesome, conventional and dull and generic.

And that amulet? It’s an afterthought.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, bloody images, a sexual assault, and brief language and nudity

Cast: Alec Secareanu, Carla Juri, Angelika Papoulia and Imelda Staunton

Credits: Written and directed by Romala Garai. A Magnet/Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:38

What qualities makes a children’s book or cartoon series translate across languages and cultures?

Why would anime like “Gigantor” and “Speed Racer,” books and animated TV and films about “Babar” and “The Smurfs” become universal, while “Asterix” and “Arthur and the Minimoys” fail outside of their homelands?

Charm and that Hippocratic Oath of children’s entertainment, “first, do no harm” helps. But if it’s meant to be humorous, you’ve got to have sight gags understandable the world over, dialogue that’s funny in any language, weird voices and characters that tickle.

Whatever the allure of the long-running French “SamSam” books by Serge Bloch, which have inspired a successful TV series, the movie “SamSam” shows this franchise needs some script doctoring before it’ll connect on the continent where Disney and Pixar set the standard.

It’s a lot more “Arthur and the Minimoys” than “The Smurfs,” although for the life of me I can’t figure out why kids embraced the latter, either. The film skews quite young, with primary colors and playfully drawn characters. But there’s not a funny line in it, and barely a sight gag worth mentioning.

“SamSam” is sort of an “Incredibles” and “Monsters Inc” mashup about a little boy from the Planet Sam, a space traveling kid from a race of superheroes.

SamSam (voiced by Tucker Chandler) can fly his retro Jetsons saucer, confide in his Sam. BuTeddy (Connor Elias Andrade). But he’s inept at sports and impatient to start growing up He hasn’t discovered his “powers” yet.

An only child, his parents tell him “Your powers are in you” and that he’ll find them himself. But he feels left out, unheroic, despite his cape, mask, flying saucer and all.

The planet Marchel (or Martial), ruled by King Marthy the First (Dino Andrade) is a mirthless, childless military state, because the self-described dictator in charge can’t stand kiddie mirth.

“Smiling makes you ugly, and laughter gives you headaches.”

He’s projecting, of course, as dictators who. He’s a hypocrite, as dictators are, because he has a little girl while none of his minions are allowed to have children. Mega (Lily SanFelipppo) is being groomed to be an opera singer by her mother, like generations of her mother’s family before her. Dad wants her to go to dictator school.

But when both she and SamSam venture into space to poke around the forbidden zone (minefield) between their planets, she notes that there are other kids playing, that even if they have powers and SamSam doesn’t, the other kids consider him their friend.

“Friend?” This is one of many concepts Mega would like to explore, which is why she connects with SamSam and enrolls in his school, when she’s told Dad she’s at Dictator School and Mom (Michelle Deco) she’s attending School of Song.

Complications ensue, a lie is exposed, friendship is tested. You know the kiddie film drill.

SamSam is cute and open-hearted, and I suppose small children will be able to identify with him. Mega is an empowered little girl, even if she fibs to allow herself to experience friendship, smiling and laughter.

But there’s nothing here that would provoke either of those reactions. The villain is oddly drawn, but flatly scripted and humorlessly voice-acted. There’s barely even an attempt at a funny voice in the cast, and having nothing funny for them to say doesn’t help.

The design has a whimsy, and there’s a hint of Smurf-speak in the way everything on Planet Sam has Sam in its name — SamDad, SamMom, SamTeddy, etc.

But “SamSam” plays like what it is, a quick and pretty but ill-thought-through attempt to cash in on a popular French kids’ cartoon.

MPAA Rating: unrated, child-friendly

Cast: The voices of Tucker Chandler, Lily Sanfelippo, Dino Andrade, Connor Elias Andrade, Michelle Deco, Caitlin Prennance

Credits: Tanguy de Kermel script by Valérie Magis and Jean Regnaud, based on the Serge Bloch illustrated children’s books.  A Canal+ production/Blue Fox Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:18

“I just have this feeling…”

What WILL she do?

Dark and darkly humorous, and full of Neon goodness, “She Dies Tomorrow” streams Aug. 7

Some big themes and social issues are wrapped up in the stylish Indian period piece “Bulbbul,” a thriller that leans far too heavily on “Hound of the Baskervilles” for its own good.

I mean, when you’ve got the law-school bound brother-in-law theorizing and developing suspects about a series of gruesome murders in 1901 Bengal, suggesting he’s “playing Sherlock” would be more of a give-away, had we not figured out where this was going early on.

In a corner of the country wrapped in scarlet foggy nights, a former child bride presides over the manor. Because the Lord, who was a good twenty years older than Bulbbul when he fetched her decades before, has relocated. Or maybe “fled.”

Bulbbul, played with a self-assured smile by Tripti Dimri (“Poster Boys”), is happy to reunite with the brother-in-law, Satya (Avinash Tiwary) who was her childhood playmate when she was “married,” all of seven or eight years old.

Back then, her auntie told her to just keep those toe-rings on. It’s how men “control” their brides, she was told. Now, she’s on her own in a luxurious estate even as the village and surrounding land is bewitched by “the Demon Woman.”

Satya is a privileged, educated young man who sees one murder victim, pronounces that “our British law asks for proof” and says no demon, specter or beast did this.

“What woman is capable of such a brutal murder?” he wonders, in Hindi with English subtitles.

Bulbbul? She just grins.

There’s a doctor (Parambrata Chattopadhyay) who might know more than he lets on, and a sister-in-law (Paoli Dam) who shaved her head and went into mourning after the death of her husband (Rahul Bose), the Lord’s simple-minded twin brother.

Tish tosh, Bulbbul clucks. Around here, a person gets a fever and “the demon” did it. Is she clucking too much?

Lyricist turned director Anvita Dutt shuffles up the narrative order, beginning with the “wedding” decades before, shifting back and forth to give us clues to something we’ve already figured out, “motivations” for the murders, how a “monster” was made.

The performances are properly pitched, the production design is striking, the frankness of the depiction of violence against women (by Indian cinema standards) brutal, but refreshing for its honesty.

Still, messing around with “twins” muddies up the proceedings, and the source material is too obvious to be worth revisiting for the umpteenth time.

The best any critical Western viewer might offer in praise is “Nice try.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, including rape

Cast: Tripti Dimri, Avinash Tiwary, Rahul Bose, Parambrata Chattopadhyay and Paoli Dam

Credits: Directed by Anvita Dutt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Sure, “Little Shop of Horrors” was fun. But Howard Ashman didn’t truly hit his stride until Disney realized animated musicals were the studio’s ticket back to relevance.

I can remember the line where it happened for me, in Disney’s legendary “comeback” cartoon, “The Little Mermaid.”

“When the sardine begins the beguine it’s music to me.”

Here was a songwriter (Alan Menken did the music to their greatest collaborations) who knew the Great American Songbook, and figured finding a laugh here and there with it was a way to write his name in that book, alongside Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and others.

And he knew that’d sound funny as heck sung in a Jamaican patois.

This OVERDUE documentary appreciation of the Man Who Saved Disney comes to Disney+ Aug. 7.

The new trailer? Yes. It is. Funny, too. Adorably nostalgic.

Movie’s been pushed back once or twice, Sept. 1 now. We’ll see.