Movie Nation

The myriad twists upon turns in the finale might convince you otherwise, but “Intuition (La Corazonada)” has been an eye-rollingly formulaic police procedural up to that point. Savvy viewers have stayed with it only because it’s from the same director, Alejandro Montiel, who made “Perdida.”

He’s good on the whole “surprise” finish thing, if nothing else. .

The even twistier “Perdida” is based on a novel by Florencia Etcheves, a tale of a cop, Pipa (Luisana Lopilato) obsessed with figuring out what happened to a childhood friend who disappeared in Patagonia years before.

“Intuition” is a prequel that shows us the early years of the detective who would develop that killer “Intuition.”

Manuela “Pipa” Pelari is a mere uniform when she gains notice helping hot-shot detective Francisco Juanez (Joaquín Furriel) crack a religious crank kidnapping case. She’s immediately thrown together with the dark, brooding and mysterious Juanez on a murder case. A teenage girl has been killed in her house. Did her boyfriend or “best friend” do it?

The boss (Sebastián Mogordoy) has another assignment, on the side, for Pipa. The mysterious Juanez lost his wife in an armed robbery, and the guy who did it was run over (in the film’s opening scene) just after being let out of jail.

Did Juanez and his brother cops kill him and cover it up? She’s got to set up her own undercover investigation in the basement of her building while bird-dogging clues in the murder she’s working with Juanez, without letting on she’s put a tracker on Juanez’s car and is digging deeper into the death of this Gypsy crime family member who killed his wife.

As we’ve seen the dead murderer’s mother berate the dead guy’s older sibling with “Your brother is CRYING OUT for revenge” (in Spanish, with English subtitles or dubbed into English),” we expect the hoodlums to be carrying out their own investigation into Juanez.

Only they don’t.

This slow and atmospheric thriller travels in cop movie cliches. The old “Tell me your SECRET” plea to Juanez by the fetching Pipa earns a predicted “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret.”

Just as trite an exchange in Spanish as it is in English, I have to say.

Smoldering Juanez is borderline clairvoyant in his crime-solving abilities, and by day he’s trying to pass that on to Pipa, who by night is looking into where he was the night of a murder.

They stand over an exploitively-displayed nude teenage body and Juanez insults the coroner by quizzing Pipa — “What do you see on this corpse?”

The serial kidnapper/killer thing in the pre-credits opening has an urgency and punch — as overdone as Bible-quoting serial killer tales are — that the rest of the movie never comes close to matching.

Montiel’s gloomy production design (including the austere, industrial and chic police station) suits the tone he’s going for in these movies. But it’s not enough.

And all these complications in the finale, betrayals and intrigues within the mystery within a mystery, don’t atone for that movie-long shortcoming.

I like the character, and Lopilato makes her (no off-duty life, no “back story” other than we know she lost a friend in childhood) interesting enough to want to see more. But perhaps she should start fighting for the character’s motives, for coloring more of her in.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity

Cast: Luisana Lopilato, Joaquín Furriel

Credits: Written and directed by Alejandro Montiel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

The roar of the engines is akin to the whine of a vacuum cleaner — not ear-piercing, but high-pitched.

And the only smoke you see on the streets of the cities where Formula E races are run — Zurich to Marrakesh, New York to Mexico City and Hong Kong — are clouds of tire burn, the result of instant torque and high speeds, and that wafting from the cigar of series founder Alejandro Agag.

Every race begins with a brilliant bit of announcer branding, “And we go GREEN in Berlin” or Monaco or Santiago Chile or Punta del Este (Uruguay).

Actor turned director Fisher Stevens (“Brights Lights,” the Debby Reynolds/Carrie Fisher documentary) and Brit director Malcolm Venville (“44 Inch Chest”) turn that phrase, “And We Go Green,” into a jaunty, upbeat and thoroughly entertaining motorsport documentary about the racing series of the future, today.

Agag, the silky-smooth Spanish politician-turned-entrepreneur, is a “racing guy” who kept running into sponsor problems with the global racing series Formula One.

“It is not environmentally friendly,” he heard, over and over again. “The planet is dying.” He decided to start his own series, open-wheel racing in electric cars. It’d be “the best of both worlds,” speed, competition between teams and car companies and dashing, colorful drivers driving not just the pin-your-ears-back-fast cars, but the electric car revolution.

While F-1, NASCAR and others might pay lip service to “innovation,” Formula E would utterly depend on it. The cars couldn’t even complete an hour long race in the streets of Paris or London or Miami when the twelve races/ten teams/20 drivers series started in 2014.

But by 2019, that “range anxiety,” still the biggest drawback to electric car sales worldwide, would be run over. A series designed around “regenerative braking” and electrical power conservation through smart (fast) driving would break that hour at speed barrier.

Stevens and Venville’s flip and edgy film also gets us in the faces and in the helmets of the drivers, many of them Formula One washouts or wannabes.

André Lotterer, a three-time LeMans (sports car racing) winner, crashes into a wall at Hong Kong, the first race of the 2018 season and his first turn in F-E.

“F—! It’s DANGEROUS, man!”

The instant-acceleration thing, the fact that “the sound of the engine is usually a speed reference when you’re going into a corner,” his teammate and friend Jean-Éric Vergne explains, is missing. This car is a whole different kind of racing beast.

The back-stories of the drivers are as colorful as the racers are model-pretty. There’s the son of a famous racer (Nelson Piquet Jr.) chased out of F-1 in a scandal, the “F-1 racing drivers are posh, Sam Bird’s not” working class Brit, the “arrogant, condescending” Lucas Di Grassi.

The helmet-mikes — which should be an unfiltered, uncensored MUST in telecasts — capture the testy complaints, the cursing, the intensity of the rivalry.

Agag and assorted journalists cheerlead the series, which is just as elite (only 20 drivers, just like F-1) and just as competitive at the manufacturing level.

Jaguar had no electric car experience before diving in, and now sells them. Audi is shown failing in race after race on the steep learning curve that ePrix provide.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Orlando Bloom show up for races, with environmental advocate DiCaprio getting a personal walking tour through the garages at Marrakesh, Morocco, asking Agag some of the movie’s most pointed questions.

One BIG question nobody asks — Renault, Audi, Mahindra (India), Nio (China) and Jaguar are represented. Is Detroit about to miss the boat again?

The journalists covering the series marvel at how quickly it seems to be catching on, filling the stands surrounding the courses in city after city. The city-street courses are difficult, often the same ones used by Formula One’s city races.

And the whole affair, from its “glycerine” generator (to charge all the batteries) to the World Wildlife Fund sponsor stickers, feels fresh, righteous and Next Gen fun, auto-racing for people who don’t want to back fossil fuels and the reactionary politics of a Lucas Oil or environmental damage of a BP.

A little more skepticism, a few tougher questions might have been in order. Where DID the fellow in a “I Love Fossil Fuels” t-shirt assault Agag in a bar? Was it New York?

“And We Go Green” is still a thoroughly entertaining look at the future of racing, a future that’s poised to collide with the present any minute now.

MPAA Rating: fisticuffs, profanity

Cast: Alejandro Agag, Jean-Eric Vergnes, Lucas di Grassi, Nelson Piquet Jr., Sam Bird, Hazel Southwell and Leonardo Di Caprio

Credits: Directed by Fisher Stevens and Malcolm Venville, scripted by Mark Monroe. A Hulu release.

Running time: 1:38

Yeah I’m late getting to this. Fun though.

A middling indie horror thriller, thanks to closed cinemas and open drive-ins, is making box offce history. “The Wretched” is breaking box office records thanks to its drive-in movie theater run, per Variety. https://t.co/RP9cuqurTs https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1266844332486569984?s=20

“Space Force” pops out of the Netflix logo as instantly awful, like a politically-pointed all-star “Saturday Night Live” sketch that never made it on the air — five hours worth.

It’s a riff on America’s new “Space Force” that bludgeons the point that “Nothing conceived by these idiots (the Trump administration) will ever work out” idea to death, and then pounds the corpse for nine more episodes.

Jokes? A Chinese satellite disables the newly launched Space Force “Epsilon 6.” But can it be fixed?

“We’re gonna Apollo 13 the S–T out of this,” Force General Naird (co-creator Steve Carell) barks.

Dopey special requests from the Tweeter in Chief? Test assault rifles in space so that they can be “The official Space Force guns for mass shootings on the moon!”

“Or HUNTING,” a helpful aide adds.

Carell plays Naird as a more military, just-as-scientifically clueless Michael Scott, ignoring expert advice, heedlessly pressing on with the worst possible ideas. comforting himself when things go wrong by singing bad Beach Boys tunes (“Kokomo”) to himself.

The late Fred Willard blows lines and affects a tremor as the General’s ancient, addled father.

Instantly awful. You keep watching, waiting for this or that to click, for the wonderful John Malkovich (the science chief) to make it worth watching, for Naird’s wife’s (Lisa Kudrow) imprisonment to be explained, for this pointless thread or that one to resolve.

But Carell’s “Office” writer and co-creator Greg Daniels just flails away, grasping for ideas — Congressional hearings, Congressional visits by an idiot senator (a Susan Collins look-alike), “the Angry Congresswoman” (AOC clone), the intervention of an Elon Musk entrepreneur figure named Edison Jaymes (Kaitlin Olson) — groping for laughs.

Allow yourself to get your hopes up that the funny names and faces in the pilot — Diedrich Bader, Jane Lynch, Patrick Warburton and Noah Emmerich are the other members of the Joint Chiefs (as is “According to Jim” veteran Larry Joe Campbell, who’s even less funny than Emmerich) — that the sight gags will get better than a digital monkey in space and the one-liners will improve at your own peril.

I mean, a “Real Housewives” riff on “Skinny Fuel” (“Skinnygirl” Bethenny Frankel would have been funnier pitching it. Not much, but…). Random jokes about how much everything costs — “Four.” “Four million?” “Middle schools. It costs four MIDDLE schools” worth of taxpayer dollars. A Russian spy out in the open (POTUS approved) who insists you call him “Bobby.”

Ben Schwartz as a “Media Manager” who composes the not-witty tweets for Gen. Naird?

The romantic wanderings of the General’s unfunny daughter (Diana Silvers) dating assorted dolt underlings of her Dad?

Considering the talent hurled at this, we all have a right to expect better. The whole affair has the whiff of “Take Netflix’s money and RUN” about it. Daniels, in particular, should be embarrassed by the general lack of effort in the plotting, dialogue and jokes.

Mission abort, mission abort.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, language (profanity)

Cast: Steve Carell, John Malkovich, Lisa Kudrow, Diana Silvers, Tawny Newsome , Jimmy O. Yang, with Jane Lynch, Patrick Warburton, Diedrich Bader and Noah Emmerich

Credits: Created by Steve Carell and Greg Daniels. A Netflix series.

Running time: Ten episodes @ :33 each

Oh, to fall under the murderous gaze of horror novelist and short story icon Shirley Jackson and survive.

That’s how Elisabeth Moss makes one feel about living with, being judged and bullied by the formidable, boozy and unstable creator of “The Lottery” and “The Haunting of Hill House” in “Shirley.”

Moss ratchets up the simmering intensity in this fictionalized “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” account of the later career of the celebrated queen of literary horror and suspense. “Shirley” is a clever biographical mystery, a movie of toxic excesses and contagious misery, where one bad marriage might doom another and where writer’s block is the most feared fate of all.

The script may be laced with literary tropes and dated writer and academic stereotypes, but Moss and co-stars Odessa Young (“Assassination Nation”), Michael Stuhlbarg (“The Shape of Water”) and Logan Lerman (“End of Sentence,” TV’s “Hunters”) make this moody, messy tale real, lived-in — fiction with the discordant ring of truth about it.

In actress-turned-director Josephine Decker’s film Jackson is trapped in a co-dependent marriage, wilting under writer’s block, practically housebound in Bennington, Vermont, where husband Stanley Hyman (Stuhlbarg) keeps her wine and liquor glasses full when he’s not teaching “Myth and Folklore” to the lily white coeds of Bennington College, circa 1958.

Stuhlbarg lets us see Stanley’s labored bonhomie, the contempt he hides behind a too-obvious veneer of charm. When new teaching assistant Fred (Lerman) and his wife Rose (Young) show up, Stanley’s trying even harder. He’s throwing a party, and this new couple is coming to stay with he and “Shirl” until they find a place of their own.

He’s too merry, too quick to trot out his jolly “How I met Shirley Jackson (in college)” story, dazzled by her writing even then. But another party-goer blows down the facade with a single indelicate question of the celebrated author in the family.

“So Shirley, what’re you writing now?”

“A little novella…I’m calling none of your goddamned business.”

Later, Stanley confides and begs Rose’s help with the house, as they’ve lost “another” housekeeper. He is needy and patronizing at the same time as he urges Rose to take on the tasks. “Shirley has these bouts,” is all he says by way of explanation.

Jackson is depressed, confined to her bed most days. “I’m going to get better. I promise. Starting TOMORROW.”

And the only appeal she can see in having these “strangers…SPIES” under their roof is the chance to bully, bait and psychically dominate poor Rose.

Rose has instant cause to regret her own husband’s halfhearted defense of her against this demeaning, sexist request.

She never hears Stanley lure Shirley to dinner with “I didn’t ask you to behave,” inviting her cruelty to their guests as he does.

“So Rose, you were telling us about your ‘shotgun wedding.'”

Rose doesn’t know that the unanswered ringing phone is one of Stanley’s student or fellow faculty paramours, gauche enough to call during dinner.

And she doesn’t know, at first, how touchy the brainy, brilliant bitch confined to her bed gets when asked about her work.

But as is the way of such stories, the new arrival soon is helping the blocked author research a new novel, one spun out of a real-life Bennington student’s disappearance on a mountain hike.

Michael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss appear in Shirley by Josephine Decker, an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Thatcher Keats. All photos are copyrighted and may be used by press only for the purpose of news or editorial coverage of Sundance Institute programs. Photos must be accompanied by a credit to the photographer and/or ‘Courtesy of Sundance Institute.’ Unauthorized use, alteration, reproduction or sale of logos and/or photos is strictly prohibited.

Young and Moss beautifully level-out and make real the uneven relationship that spins out of Shirley and Rose being thrown together. Lerman has little to play, the standard callow young academic. Stuhlbarg sparkles as Stanley, whose insecurity and resentments — Hyman was a literary critic and a rural academic, forever in his wife’s shadow — don’t wholly explain his own cruelty.

Director Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline”) folds in all the pieces of the plot almost haphazardly, and instead concentrates on character and mood — gloomy people mostly trapped in a gloomy house. The voice over narration about the story of the missing girl, “Paula,” changes voices — a clever conceit.

She gets a gloriously subtle turn out of Moss in the title role, tart and witty in a mild version of the plucked pronunciations of Bette Davis, depressed and resigned at the confinement of her fame.

“I read your story,” a fan enthuses.

“There have been several…”

“The LOTTERY!”

Moss is so right in this part that we don’t have to see Jackson’s eyes roll or hear the stinging comeback she no doubt has in mind for that. She lets us feel it.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, nudity, language and brief disturbing images

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Odessa Young, Michael Stuhlbarg and Logan Lerman.

Credits: Directed by Josephine Decker, script by Sarah Gubbins, based on the novel by Susan Scarf Merrell. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:47

A lawyer for some of the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein uses the perfect phrase to describe what this pedophilia and sex trafficking ring really was.

“It was a molestation pyramid scheme,” attorney Brad Edwards says, noting the way “recruiters” working for Epstein would bring under-age girls into his orbit, the way those girls were encouraged to lure siblings and friends in after them.

Take every wild sexual conspiracy theory spun out of the Internet, every “Pizzagate” pushed by the Lunatic Right, every whisper from “pedophiles are running wild in Hollywood and elsewhere” from crazydaysandnights.net, that’s the stuff of “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich,” the new Netflix docu-series put together by acclaimed documentarian Joe Berlinger (“Paradise Lost,” “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile”) and crime novelist James Patterson.

In four episodes that range from enraging to heartbreaking, we get to hear from victims, from appalled law enforcement complaining of compromised prosecutors, from business associates and ex-employees of the super-rich pedophile infamous for his “Orgy Island/Pedophile Island” in the Caribbean.

The criminal pattern of luring and entrapment is laid out, and repeated scores of times in dozens of stories, failures of journalism and “the system” to expose Epstein, the excesses of his ill-gotten wealth and the tentacles of his political connections, all here.

We’ve heard so much of this in the breathless news coverage of this scandal, this “trafficking” network, the rich and powerful benefactors and pals (Trump, Ohio clothing mogul Les Wexner who owned The Limited and associated chains) that there’s not much in “Filthy Rich” that still has the capacity to shock.

But hearing from survivor after survivor, girls as young as 14 molested by Epstein and those wealthy friend-clients he procured them for, is powerful and moving. Some girls came from affluence, many did not. The absence of parents speaking up for them in the series underscores the care with which Maxwell and other Epstein acolytes chose their prey.

All the survivors bear the scars of this experience, some more openly than others.

Their exploitation and abuse may not have ended up with their day in court, as Epstein’s suspicious “suicide” in the custody of William Barr’s corrupt and compromised Justice Department robbed them of that. But Berlinger & Co. give them a platform here in a series that, if nothing else, should re-open investigations of Maxwell and others, and renew efforts to further expose this cruelest of exploitations by the rich, the royal and the well-connected.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, frank sexual subject matter, discussed, not shown’

Cast: Maria Farmer, Haley Robson, Courtney Wild, Sarah Ransome, Michelle Licata, Shawn Rivera, Michael Reitter, Alan Dershowitz and James Patterson.

Credits: Directed by Joe Berlinger, produced by Berlinger and James Patterson.

Running time: Four episodes @53:00 each.

There are a lot of ways to appreciate this run of bloody minded B movies Mel Gibson has been starring in since his meltdown.

He still gives great value, even as an aged tough guy, and being a director he ensures that whoever he is acting for doesn’t make a hash of the movie, just by being on the set.

And even if you’re not of the Christian conservative forgive-and-forget attitude about his antisemitism and homophobia and awful temper and alcohol issues, there’s something redemptive in seeing him sentenced to this corner of filmdom, taking it like a man.

Look for Mel, Kate Bosworth and Emile Hirsch in this on June 30.