Movie Nation

“Runner” is the life story of Olympic marathoner Guor Maker (Marial), a South Sudanese refugee who raced in two Olympics, once without a country.

In Maker’s tale, first-time documentary director Bill Gallagher finds a story of privation and perseverance, personal pain, of tragedies and triumphs. It’s a running saga reminder that life and sport only rarely dole out ” Hollywood ending.” But the struggle is its own reward and is inspiring in its own right.

We hear Guor, who went by his uncle’s name (Marial) for part of his competing career, having lost touch with his parents in civil war-torn Sudan, narrate his story to animated visuals of the trauma of attacks in the Sudan/South Sudan border county of Pariang.

“I was born into a war life,” he says. With child-soldier kidnappings a way of life in the conflict between the Islamic north of Sudan and the African south, his parents urged him to flee. He was captured and escaped, imprisoned by a soldier using him as his slave only to escape again.

Maker and the filmmaker gloss over the process it took for him to be sent to America in his early teens. But he wound up in Concord, New Hampshire. And that’s where coaches saw his raw potential.

“‘Are you ready to run?'” one asks him. “He didn’t know what ‘track’ was, didn’t even know it was a sport.”

“Run where?”

Thus began his life-changing odyssey, from track team to stand-out cross-country runner, to Iowa State University and then his quest to make it to the Olympics, with or without a country.

Gallagher’s film recounts the Concordians who pitched in to help Guor, media members who related his story and created notoriety that the International Olympic Committee could not ignore, even if South Sudan was separating from Sudan, and had no Olympic team in time for the 2012 London Olympics.

Gallagher spends much of the film on the qualifying races Guor had to run, wringing drama out of the qualifying time he had to beat, lots of footage of Guor running, “the weight of his country on him,” manically checking his watch to see if he was on pace to be under two hours and nineteen minutes, the Olympic benchmark.

Sudanese refugees cheer him on from the race course, but back home, do his folks even know he’s alive? 

Gallagher’s years-in-the-making doc hits several emotional peaks, and its hero remains a compelling figure, win or lose. It’s the cinematic embodiment of that worn old Olympic ideal, expressed by founder Pierre de Coubertin over 125 years ago.

“The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.”

Cast: Guor Maker

Credits. Directed by Bill Gallagher. A This is It Films release.

Running time: 1:28

Airline disaster movies often follow the same narrow formula, no matter what their country of origin.

We meet the cross-section-of-society passengers, pick up on their soap operatic/melodramatic lives, meet the flight crew and get a hint or two or three about what’s about to go wrong.

The Nigerian “Nollywood” production “Last Flight to Abuja” applies that formula to one of a string of real-life accidents that hit the country in 2006.

It’s fictionalized and formulaic, from the passenger (Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde) who has just “surprised” her fiance at home, only to catch him in bed with another woman, to the womanizing account executive (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) flying, on a company retreat to the planned city capital of Abuja, with the worry that his skimming off company contracts and other crimes are about to become public knowledge.

The pilot (Anthony Monjaro) just switched flights with a colleague. The boss who organized the retreat and another colleague miss the plane.

They grow corn in Nigeria. Do they have an equivalent for the expression, “corn ball?”

But director Obi Emelonye gets a gripping third act out of this modestly-budgeted thriller. Flashbacks, a blur of images summarizing what every passenger went through to make this ill-fated commuter jet (“30 souls on board”) flight, the discovery of smoke in the toilet, all are shot and cut together punching up the suspense.

Fictionalized or not, the “Living in Nigeria” touches are nicely-incorporated — traffic jams, snatch-and-grab cell-phone thefts in those traffic jams, middle class worries, touches of affluence.

And then there’s the frank exposure of Third World air travel — safety shortcuts being taken, a lone air traffic controller who brings his kid to work (!?) and gripes about how he should’ve taken the day off to avoid “this palaver,” flight maintenance logs kept on a ringed notebook you pick up at a Nigerian Dollar General.

The acting is uneven, ranging from solid to cringe-worthy. The dialogue is heavy on the romantic banter, from the ladies’ man passenger joking about “bracing positions” (for a crash landing) innuendo, to the love-life chatter in the cockpit.

But the finale (including cheesy fake animation) almost pulls this Flamingo Flight 212 out of its formulaic tailspin. Almost.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, adult situations

Cast: Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Jim Iyke, Jennifer Oguzie, Anthony Monjaro and Celine Loader

Credits: Directed by Obi Emelonye , script by Obi Emelonye, Tunde Babalola and Amaka Obi-Emelonye. A Nollywood Film Factory/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:15

“Queen of the Capital” is a softer, cuddlier version of the landmark drag queen documentary, “Paris is Burning.”

It’s a new film about the drag queen scene in Washington, D.C.

Where the 1990 film revealed New York’s drag queens as organizing themselves into “houses,” like high fashion “couture” labels, in Washington the men who dressed as women were, for decades, in The Academy or in “families.”

The queens in New York were generally young, mouthy and outspoken. In D.C., they’re mostly older, outlandishly dressed but mild of speech.

“Paris” had egos run amuck, hilarity and edge. Thirty years later the Washington scene has evolved into a sort of conservative cotillion, a community service organization almost.

“We’re the gay man’s Renaissance Faire,” one offers. No, he’s corrected. “We’re the gay Shriners…without the little cars!”

And that is both this film’s charm, and its chief shortcoming.

It’s informative, a gay drag history of Washington, a painstaking breakdown of the popularity contest that crowns the King and Queen of D.C. drag (at the Czar’s Ball, held in Richmond, Va.), an ad for the charities that this “court” raises money for and a portrait of one queen in particular, Daniel, aka Muffy Blake Stephyns.

It’s warm, sweet here and there. But this soft approach makes it a fairly joyless enterprise. Perhaps it was music rights that kept the filmmaker, veteran TV videographer/journalist Josh Davidsburg, from showing more performances, more audience interaction. You barely get an idea of the universal truth of drag that is kind of the point of it all.

Gay or straight, RuPaul or Monty Python, drag is fun.

So there’s a hint of Muffy’s drag “mother,” the drawling Shelby Jewel Stephyns, vamping “God Bless the U.S.A.” to the fans, and that’s pretty much it.

“I am a ‘Steel Magnolia’ woman in a “‘Designing Woman World!'”

The point here is the tradition being passed on, how drag “depends on the older generation instructing and passing along” the regimen, styles, beauty tips and mores “to the young.”

And that’s kind of “TV news segment” myopic. I didn’t realize Davidsburg was a TV journalist until the closing credits. But the film — with its heroine, Muffy — leans heavily into TV “feature story” elements such as the epilepsy Muffy battles and the service nature of the “court,” with snippets of performers talking about “not wanting to BE a woman, I just like to dress up like them” (echoing Eddie Izzard), or being in the military or growing up in a small town.

Muffy relates the Cub Scout/not-into sports childhood he experienced in Marceline, Missouri, and everything that mutes the impact and muzzles the entertainment value of “Queen of the Capital” is made clear right there.

Muffy doesn’t mention that Marceline was where Walt Disney grew up, the slice of Americana he was trying to recreate in his theme parks. Muffy doesn’t mention it and Davidsburg doesn’t appear to realize it.

There’s the theme for his movie. Drag has become mainstream “Americana” in the few decades since “Paris is Burning.”

And if you can’t find something fun in connecting conservative Walt to a guy who grew up wanting the biggest wigs in drag, or drag queens thriving in an age when every June, Walt Disney World becomes not just “the happiest place on Earth,” but thanks to Pride Month, the gayest, you’re going to miss everything else that’s fun about it as well.

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Cast: Muffy Blake Stephyns, Natasha Dennis Carrington, Ophelia Bottoms, Shelby Jewel Stephyns

Credits: Directed by Josh Davidsburg. A Lot 1 release.

Running time: 1:20

Having judged student films at many a film festival, I figured I knew one when I saw one.

The good ones show a certain polish — craftsmanship — an attention to things significantly less important than script, casting or performances.

That’s “Elodie.”

A sophomoric freshman feature, a film noir built on young, unfinished (Still in school?) actors and a script that feels about nine drafts away from “Let’s shoot this,” I sat through it saying “student film, student film. Why was this pitched to me and why is this being offered on Amazon streaming?”

And 75 words into writing this review, I decide to google the releasing production company, Black Box Films.

Yup.

A story about an actress and would-be playwright (Faith Decker) who lets her “character take you where it wants to go,” and is sucked into her play in a black and white nightmare after a debacle of an opening night, there isn’t one character, performance, scene or situation sufficiently intriguing to draw one in.

A playwright who taps away at “The Tungsten Dagger” (Wait, what? Not exactly a “precious metal.”), her tepid “one act” stage thriller. One act, with intermission, apparently./

It’s a kidnap-for-jewels caper. And yes, the play within the movie is worse than the film script. Much worse.

Writing the “villain” is holding her up. And casting the lead. She stares into her mirror so long you hope the theme of “self-regard, self-criticism” will be explored. Not really. You know she’s going to take the title role for herself.

But for all the encouragement of her about-to-move-away best-friend (Britney Watson), opening night goes even more pear-shaped  than you’d expect when her beau-leading man (Ian Holt) decides to end their romance, right before curtain.

Hey, he’s memorized the play. He’s seen the range of the leading lady. His character, at least, has understandable motivation.

Later that night is when Sabrina awakens, disturbed by the model she’d wished she could cast as Elodie (Taylor McGlone). Elodie wants Sabrina to alter the course of the play, change its outcome.  But Sabrina’s reaction to being in her nightgown, chasing a femme fatale down the black and white streets (of Phoenix, I think)?

“You’re real,” acted with all the conviction of somebody noting the spaghetti water is almost boiling.

It doesn’t get better, it gets worse. But as I say, “student film” is not just a moniker for the works of aspiring filmmakers still in college. Daniel Ziegler’s “debut feature” wouldn’t stand out on many film school campuses as anything more than a project with chutzpah, and not much else.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Faith Decker, Taylor McGlone, Ian Holt, Brittney Watson, Taylor Dahl, Brandon Caraco

Credits: Written and directed by Daniel Ziegler.  A Blackbox Films release.

Running time: 1:35

The tone is set with the odd, edgy “meet cute” for the young lovers. It’s on an Australian train platform where the tattooed, punk druggy bumps the girl in her school uniform aside so he can get close enough to feel the train pass by.

And then there’s the nosebleed she gets when he deigns to chat with her, his near-tackling way of “treating” that nosebleed. Of course she’s smitten.

But “Babyteeth” really begins when 16 year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen) brings self-administered rat-tail cut 23 year-old Moses (Toby Wallace) over for dinner. Dad (Ben Mendelsohn) is a psychiatrist, inclined to sort of roll with this, even the fact that Moses took the dog-trimmer clippers to Milla.

But Mum, played by Essie Davis?

“I’m a bit FREAKED out by that,” she smiles. “But, um, lucky for everyone I forgot, when I took a Zoloft, that I took two Xanax while I was WAITING for you at the hairdressers, to show up, thinking you must have been ABDUCTED, because why ELSE would you not even call?”

Characters circle around this notion of “normal” in the debut feature of Aussie TV director Shannon Murphy. But everybody, from rebellious and naive Milla to Toby to half-tuned-out, prescription-happy Dad and heavily-medicated Mum, is just plain “off.”

The first act is built on an almost giddy collection of introductions that includes “Anna and Henry’s Tuesday Appointment” (screenwriter Rita Kalnejais likes “chapter headings”), the afternoon sex break for Dad Henry and manic mother Anna.

Henry takes business calls, mid-coitus, and hands out pills afterward.

Moses, by rights, should scare Milla off. But she has her reasons. A big early “reveal” is coming, but downplayed — almost disguised. And then we see her bald.

The new neighbor (Emily Barclay) is very pregnant, dizzy and has a dog named “Henry.” And even though Henry works from home, we see him walking by her “to work” appointments, striking up conversations. Maybe he’s seeing people at the hospital. Or maybe he’s just…interested.

And there’s the whimsically cranky violin teacher (Eugene Gilfedder), who chews on Milla with “Everything you touch, you destroy.”

“Go to hell!”

She doesn’t shout it. He doesn’t take it personally. But when you’re the kind of sick that makes you bald, your patience for Mozart isn’t what it used to be.

Milla thinks she’s in love, even if she’s not stupid enough to be sure it’s reciprocated. Moses has figured out a shrink’s house is a good place to find drugs.

Anna is on so many pills that she’s both pathetic, and something of a riot to have around.

“Feeling very relaxed...right now. I hope it isn’t...a stroke.”

Davis (of “True History of the Kelly Gang” and “The Babadook”) is a marvel, so needy, broken, miserable and hilarious as Anna that we never know if pity, fury or giggles is the right response to her.

The often showy Mendelsohn recognized this and makes Henry a contrasting study in sturdy, with the hint of something disturbing underneath.

You don’t have to have seen TV’s “Sharp Objects” to pick up on the open-face, open-heart qualities that Scanlen shares in common with her co-star on that show, Amy Adams. She is a revelation here; amusing, infuriating and then heart-breaking.

Because you know, at some point, the giggling fades, the magical first-visit-to-a-rave and sneaking out to see the boy (man) Mom has warned to “stay away from my daughter” ends. The string runs out.

Like many a first film from someone experienced in episodic TV, “Babyteeth” gives us a lot to chew on. But in this case, that turns it into the very best kind of emotional roller-coaster, one that wins its laughs and earns its tears.

In a year without blockbusters, this Aussie indie marvel stands out — one of the best films of the summer.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: Eliza Scanlen, Essie Davis, Toby Wallace and Ben Mendelsohn

Credits: Directed by Shannon Murphy, script by Rita Kalnejais. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:58

The air traffic control code for a hijacking in progress is “7500,” “seven five zero zero,” a fact that comes out in a white-knuckle-tense thriller that marks a return to the screen for Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

He plays the bloodied, wounded and generally by-the-book co-pilot of a Berlin to Paris flight seized by Muslim terrorists just after take-off.

The twist in first-time feature director Patrick Vollrath’s script is that everything is “seized” save for the cockpit. The bolted-doors every jetliner had installed after 9/11 pays off in the bloody opening act of what becomes an intimate, real-time and brutally gripping tale headed by an actor who generates instant empathy.

Injured inside the confines of the dimly-lit cockpit, with his captain out of commission, co-pilot Tobias drags us into his dilemma. The script expertly gets across his few options. The cabin has been seized. The worldwide directive, that the door “under no circumstances” should be opened, tie his hands, no matter what he sees on the CCTV monitor on the other side of that door.

And as we’ve seen in the 20 minute prologue to the attack, his partner (Aylin Tezel) and the mother of his son is in uniform, a flight attendant, trapped in the horrors just a couple of feet away.

Vollrath uses the tight space he had to film in to great, suspenseful advantage. It’s a film of extreme close-ups, low instrument-panel lighting, of checklists, procedures, first aid and in-your-face violence.

There are no glib taunts, threats or macho one-liners. Gordon-Levitt makes Tobias believably human. He’s in shock, in pain, terrified for his partner and mortified at what he sees on the black and white monitor that shows the frantic fanatics pounding at the door, pleading and screaming as they drag hostages before the camera they know he’s watching.

The turns the story takes are quite predictable — melodramatic even. We’ve seen hijacking tales before, and yes, Muslim terrorists are a trope the movies have pummeled into submission.

And as we yell at the screen ideas for Tobias to consider, anything to give the passengers a chance or disorient, rattle or merely toss the hijackers about and slow them up, the only annoying note is Tobias’s weepy fury, punching the seats in helplessness as he tries to lie, trick or use “the system” his way out of this.

But Gordon-Levitt still gives us a master class in screen acting in close-ups, and does that in a thriller good enough to give us more pause before booking that next trip, after the pandemic.

MPAA Rating: R (for violence/terror and language)

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Omar Memar, Aylin Tezel and Carlo Kitzlinger

Credits: Written and directed by Patrick Vollrath.  An Amazon release.

Running time: 1:32

It was headed to theaters. Now this comedy is going to Hulu July 10.

Does it feel big screen to you?

A red balloon plays a pivotal part of “The Luring.”

About an hour in, a stilt-walking clown shows up.

And then there’s the whole boyfriend with a “past” who goes “Shining” nuts on his girlfriend the longer they stay in his family’s remote Vermont vacation home.

You know what they say, “Steal from one, you’re a plagiarist. Steal from many, you’re a genius. Or ‘Star Wars’ composer John Williams.”

“The Luring” owes a bit to Stephen King — lots of bits. But writer-director Christoper Welles doesn’t grab enough of King’s horror leftovers to make a meal.  Still, when you get bored — and you will — the “borrowings” will stand out and sort of accumulate in your mind.

We’re introduced to a house with “a history” when a couple and their little boy are shown it by a realtor (Daniel Marin Berkley) who doesn’t totally creep them out with his story of a kid who “hung himself” there. And then, another hanging keeps him from closing the sale.

Dang it.

Years later, here’s Garrett (Rick Irwin) on the couch, consulting a shrink about his “dissociative amnesia.” It happened when he was a child, got him institutionalized for a bit, and it connects to a birthday party he had in that house when he was ten.

The only thing for it is for Garrett and girlfriend Claire (Michaela Sprague) to head up there, spend a weekend and see what jars loose.

But the weirdness isn’t noises and what not. There’s a twisted woman (Molly Fahey) who likes vamping it up, skulking about in masks and speaking in ominous rhymed riddles.

“We’ll dance under the wind while our souls are cremated with lies and goodbyes.”

That there, folks, is some seriously silly screenwriting.

The bowling alley guy’s “Lane 13, so mean. Last breath under dark trees of green” suggests The Bad Poet’s Society meets there on Thursdays.

Claire seems supportive, if a trifle on the Pollyanna side. She’s the one who gripes “There’s something IN this house!”

Garrett? He’s a bit of jerk. And seeing him in flashbacks at that long-age birthday party we get a clue that he’s always been this way.

There are a couple of decent chills in this no-budget thriller. Fahey has a little fun with her psycho-rhymer, and we’re reminded that children can be the cruelest creatures of all.

Aside from those, we just watch that red balloon, half-expecting Pennywise to make an appearance.

But this is Vermont, not Maine. And Mr. Wells isn’t Mr. King.

Dang it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Rick Irwin, Molly Fahey, Michaela Sprague and Daniel Marin Berkley

Credits: Written and directed by Christopher Wells. A Wild Eye release.

Running time: 1:31

Darn that Sunny Panwar is cute.

Just casting the adorable, empathetic kid from “Lion” as “Chippa,” a Kolkata street urchin probably made first-time writer-director Safdar Rahman think, “My work here is done.” His picaresque story of an orphan’s picaresque adventures and encounters on the night of his tenth birthday was guaranteed to steal your heart.

But then he gives the little boy, searching the streets for someone who can read a letter left for him by his long-missing father (it’s written in Urdu), a puppy. And that, frankly, isn’t playing fair.

“Chippa” is an utterly enchanting fantasy version of an Indian street child’s life. The system and society that failed him and left him homeless is irrelevant.

The dangers and threats facing Chippa were much more obvious in a movie like “Lion.” Chippa gets cussed out and thrown out by his by cranky Aunty (Mala Mukherjee) and takes a pummeling from the neighborhood street vendors and shopkeepers. But otherwise, his night-long odyssey is filled with characters as utterly charmed by him as we are.

There’s the taxi driver (Sumeet Thakur) who listens to his “dream” of driving a taxi. They meet after Chippa has hitched a ride on the fellow’s roof, unbeknownst to the driver. But one smile and that is forgiven.

Chippa meets drunks and a cop (Gautam Sarkar), a wise old sweet shop keeper, mailmen, hookers, a street band and the kids from a super-organized (and illegal) street soccer match, and others.

“Don’t worry, I’m not begging.”

He asks them questions, hears maybe a snippet of  their lives or dreams. And then he asks the only thing he really wants out of this long night on the mostly-empty streets of the city.

“Can you read Urdu?”

“Chippa” is a movie that lets you get ahead of it, so predictable are its story beats and the places it sets him up to tug at your heart.

But Panwar is so beguiling, we don’t mind. The film’s simple artfulness — empty, light-splashed streets, a score so bubbly and wistful that Netflix should be selling downloads, gloriously on-point casting — make “Chippa” one of the hidden gems of Netflix, a charmer well-worth hunting down.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Sunny Panwar, Masood Akhtar, Mala Mukherjee

Credits: Written and directed by Safdar Rahman.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

Steve Carell and Rose Byrne go at it over Wisconsin man’s man Chris Cooper campaigning for high office in this political farce. Streaming June 26.