Movie Nation

Don’t you just hate it when a tearjerker works?

The manipulation’s built-in, understood, right there in the open for you to put up your guard against. And then…dammit.

Netflix put “18 Presents (18 Regali)” on its menu just in time for America’s “Mother’s Day,” a fantasy about a girl who has to grow up without her mother, and turns 18 thoroughly embittered about it.

And then, an accident. Sullen, lashing-out Anna (Benedetta Porcaroli, haunted and gaunt) wakes up, and it’s not next to the Saab that knocked her down. It’s her mother’s VW, and her mother (the luminous Vittoria Puccini) is standing over her.

Elissa is pregnant, and Anna “meets” her on the worst day — the day Mom got the news of the cancer that will kill her in childbirth.

After Anna puts this incredible turn of events together, she will hide her real identity from her mother and experience the woman she never got to know. They will bond and bicker, and Elissa will never be the wiser.

Director Francesco Amata (“Let Yourself Go”) hits his marks and takes us through the preliminaries — a montage of Anna’s increasingly fraught birthdays leading towards that 18th, the gifts her hyper-organized mother bought and set aside for each birthday — a bicycle, dresses, diving lessons, a piano, “18 Presents” — and Anna’s acting-out against this as the years go by.

Immature soccer coach Dad (Edoardo Leo) seems like the last guy who could guide her through this difficulty. He’s a procrastinator, doesn’t handle the bad news from Elissa with her strength. Anna never gave him any credit.

The prologue has promise, with Anna acting out in her sport (synchronized diving), hurting others, running away only to get “picked up” by a creeper in a Beemer who turns out to be an old friend of Dad’s.

The mother-daughter bonding moments pay off beautifully, a “feel her kicking” moment in the quiet of a pool, little kindnesses that show Anna growing the heart her mother always hoped she would have.

And then there’s Anna’s realization of just what a horror her mother faced, sitting in (as this new “friend”) on Mom’s cancer support group, the burden she carried even as her husband was reaching for a miracle “second opinion.” There are other surprise revelations in store, and Anna has “suggestions” that redirect her mother’s “presents.”

It’s not as tidy as it might be, a 95 minute melodrama soaking in 115 minutes of movie.

But the emotional punches in this film (in Italian, with English subtitles) reminded me of “Peggy Sue Got Married,” thanks largely to how Puccini and Porcaroli play them. The poignant moments may be sentimental, but they work.

That goes for the film as well. Contrived, manipulative? Sure. But sweet and subtle and even surprising, here and there.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, smoking, profanity, adult situations

Cast: Vittoria Puccini, Benedetta Porcaroli, Edoardo Leo and Sara Lazzaro

Credits: Directed by Francesco Amato, script by Francesco Amato, Massimo Gaudioso, Davide Lantieri Alessio Vicenzotto. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

“Castle in the Ground” is the simplest of rescue parables.

A young man devotes himself to saving his dying mother. And when that fails, this teen in shining armor starts using mom’s leftover painkillers. That’s what changes his focus to the junkie across the hall. Can she be saved?

There’s a little more to writer-director Joey Klein’s Canadian drama, much of it pro forma. But Alex Wolff, Neve Campbell and the case study that Imogen Poots lays out for us make this coming-of-age plunge into the abyss of addiction well worth our while.

Henry’s life is on hold when we meet him. He (Wolff) is crushing up pills and mixing them in jam for his mother (Campbell). He’s trekking to the drug store to get her more pills, taking her to visit her doctors.

She’s still mothering him — “SEAT belt!” But she’s fretting over what he’s missing. His girlfriend is headed off to college. Has he been applying?

“You get better, then I go to school.”

He’s Jewish, and her illness has him desperately diving into prayer. She needs her pain meds and her rest. Damn that noisy neighbor across the hall, the racket he hears, the goings-on he spies through the peep hole. He asks a guy waiting for her to let him in to “turn her music down.”

He sees her bickering for a methadone refill at the pharmacy. She (Poots) is a junky. But even junkies can be reasonable, right? He asks her to keep it down. She happily agrees. “Can I use your phone?” “Give me a lift?” Just this little detour? Lend me $40? $20?

“You owe me, BIG time,” she grins.

Anna is older and cannot be bothered learning his name. And her phone calls are a string of lifelines, cursing out “friends” who won’t pick up, begging her mother for cash. But as Henry’s mother relapses and dies, Henry’s grief takes on forms Anna, in her sentient moments, should recognize.

He’s dazed. “Are you high?” Pause a beat. “Have any left?”

And he’s ignoring her one edict. “Don’t SNOOP.” Henry does. “Wait in the car” becomes “Let’s see what’s taking her so long.”

“How do you know these people?”

“I don’t.”

It’s a shooting gallery. She’s got to “get well,” even though she brags on the phone about “67 days without a poke” (injection). She’s ingesting in other ways. She’s using him. Her occasional words of comfort about his lost mother don’t atone for that.

And others in her circle Henry runs into are more blunt in their warnings.

“She will sell your soul for something THIS (pill-sized) small!”

Actor turned writer-director Joey Klein (“The Other Half”) leaves our hero with no counter-force to help him resist the gravity that pulls him into Anna’s decaying orbit. The religion he’s plunged into is abandoned (he walks out on his mother’s shiva), the girlfriend he pushes away, are no comfort. Nobody is going to rescue Henry.

We can see the perils, why can’t he? There’s no sexual component to this connection. He gives Anna his mother’s phone, and guess who starts to see her as?

Wolff, of “Hereditary” and “Jumanji,” is so screen-seasoned that it’s tough for him to sell “naive and vulnerable” the way he used to.

Campbell gets across the quiet struggle of knowing one’s fate and trying to keep it from breaking her son’s future — concealing, then revealing, edging up to “the talk.”

But Poots is the driving force of “Castle in the Ground,” magnetic, irresistible and insatiable. How deep will Anna draw Henry in? Poots lets us see this as reflexive behavior, myopic and self-interested. We don’t see the wheels turn that generate this performance.

The path Klein sends these characters down is too familiar for “Castle in the Ground” to offer much in the way of twists. But the players take us into this world with them, make us face the same choices and dare us to make different ones than they do.

Put in the same spot, how many of us would?

MPAA: unrated, drug abuse, violence, profanity

Cast: Imogen Poots, Alex Wolff, Neve Campbell and Keir Gilchrist

Credits: Written and directed by Joey Klein. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:45

Remember AOL, AOL chat rooms and the naughtiness that could be unleashed there in the early days of the Internet?

That’s what this comedy’s about. A Catholic girl getting online and in over her head.

“Laughter in Paradise” is a British version of that “to inherit my money, here are the wacky conditions you must meet” story, the one born in the play “Seven Chances,” which Buster Keaton turned into one of the great silent film comedies, but recycled scores of times over the decades, most famously with the various versions of “Brewster’s Millions.”

Four relatives of “the greatest practical joker of his day” (Hugh Griffith) are told, at the reading of his will, that they stand to inherit his fortune. Each has one month to live out some appalling version of her or his life to qualify.

Fay Compton (of the first sound version of “Nicholas Nickleby,” and Orson Welles’ “Othello) is Agnes Russell, a cruel spinster who takes out her bitterness on every servant within reach. Upon learning of her uncle’s death, she hisses “You can take a fortnight’s notice!” to the latest maid she’s about to fire.

Meek Herbert Russell (George Cole of “The Belles of St. Trinian’s”), pushed around at the bank where he works, never destined to “get the girl,” is charged with going to a toy store, buying a toy pistol and robbing his bullying boss with it.

Simon Russell (Guy Middleton, of course) is the cad of the lot, a gambler who has “gone through life at the expense of other’s hearts and pockets.” He gets the news of his relative’s passing with a “When’s the celebration…sorry, FUNERAL?”

He has to court and marry someone he has yet to meet within a month.f

Then there’s the cream of the crop, Captain Deniston Russell (Alastair Sim, of “St. Trinian’s” and “A Christmas Carol” immortality). We meet him as he dictates, under one of his many noms de plume, a “penny dreadful,” a sordid crime tale, to his adoring secretary (Eleanor Summerfield).

“All rather disgusting,” he sighs with that Alastair Sim sigh after a particularly lurid passage. “But they seem to like ‘The American Touch.'”

He’s engaged to be married “in a fortnight” (classic British comedies are filled with fortnights) to the judge’s daughter and uniformed officer Elizabeth (Joyce Grenfell, also in “Belles of St. Trinian’s”).

But he needs to get himself arrested and jailed for a month “for a genuine crime.”

As they all have to take a “solemn oath” not to say what they’re up to, this could get awfully dicey.

Sim pretty much steals the picture as a writer of crime fiction who literally cannot get himself arrested. He starts by doing “research,” popping by his local precinct, telling the desk sergeant (after many insults from the lower ranks) “I’m most ANXIOUS to go to prison, and I was wondering if you had anything in mind?”

You know, to put him there? Pickpocket and shoplifter, car thief and smash and grab are pitched, especially after the sergeant realizes who he is.

Sim wrings every laugh out of silent pantomiming tossing a brick through a jeweler’s window, pocketing goods at a department store and acquiring “burglar’s tools” which will help him break into this house or that car.

Cole finds some funny moments in making his meek bank clerk follow through on his “prank.”

Compton’s laughs come from the petty humiliations of a life “in service” to a cranky old man (John Laurie).

Middleton’s best running gag is his ogling women, and utterly ignoring the eye-popping cigarette girl at his favorite nightclub, a winsome young slip of a woman who seems interested. Ladies and gentlemen, “Introducing Audrey Hepburn.”

It isn’t the most briskly-directed affair, but it has laughs and those showcase Sim moments going for it.

Eagle-eyed and eared viewers of a certain age will recognize character actor Sebastian Cabot at a poker game. He is most famous for American TV’s “Family Affair.”

“Laughter” (1951) is freshly back in Bluray circulation as part of a Film Movement boxed set of the Best of Alastair Sim (“School of Laughter”), a quartet of films that includes the classics “Belles of St. Trinian’s,”“School for Scoundrels”and “Hue and Cry.”“Laughter in Paradise” may be the weakest sister of the four, but it’s funny, and Sims is at his very best in it.

The set is a real treasure trove of British film comedy history.

And that cigarette gamine? She’d take over the movies within a couple of years.

MPAA Rating: Approved

Cast: Alastair Sim, Fay Compton, Guy Middleton, Beatrice Campbell, Joyce Grenfell, George Cole, Hugh Griffith, John Laurie and Audrey Hepburn

Credits: Directed by Mario Zampi, script by Michael Pertwee and Jack Davies.   A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:37

Taut, tense and nerve-wracking, “Into the Night” is a European riff on the “End of Days” disaster movie formula that plays by the rules and rarely disappoints.

Running on wit, grit, bigotry and the national stereotypes that have riven the continent for centuries, and driven by a pulse-pounding electronic score by Photek that maintains its sense of urgency even when the script and the cast slack off, here are six episodes at around 40 minutes each that don’t waste your time.

A nightmare scenario? The plane is hijacked straight out of Brussels by an Italian (Stefano Cassetti) in a NATO uniform ranting about “sunlight means DEATH!”

The handful of people trapped on board, including a stewardess, a co-pilot, a ground crew member and a mechanic, aren’t going to Moscow. Oh no. They must flee west. WEST. Racing against the always-rising sun.

As those dozen or so on board pick up bits and pieces of confirmation that something is going on “down there,” their obstacles are made clear. Fuel, injuries, repairs, “supplies” — it’s “one problem at a time” the co-pilot (Laurent Capelluto) and his passenger fill-in assistant, downcast chopper pilot Sylvie (Pauline Etienne) reassure each other, and then the passengers, none of whom is really reassured.

As Ines, (Alba Gaïa Bellugi), the multi-lingual, mouthy young Italian “influencer” bitches onto her dormant Intagram account, “I’m gonna DIE in Scotland surrounded by Belgians!”

In French, of course, with English subtitles.

The schisms open early. Mistrust is, well, practically genetic.

The Belgian religious crank (Jan Bijvoet) mistrusts every “Muslim” on board, the Turk (Mehmet Kurtulus) in a suit knows a slur when he hears one — “Dirty Turk, gotcha.” There’s a Russian mother (Regina Bikkinina) desperate to take her little boy “home” for surgery, an Afro-Belgian home healthcare worker (Babetida Sadjo) caring for an elderly Russian, and not to be trifled with.

Who will emerge as heroes? Who will be the villains? And how much screen time will we waste while the climate researcher German (Vincent Londez) tries to explain what’s happening with his “science?”

Not a lot, and that’s a good thing about this series, where all six episodes are titled after a character and begin with a prologue. As formula dictates, everybody here has “a secret,” a troubling character flaw, a hole in her or his past to make us question motives even as they show us inner resources when the chips are down.

“Into the Night” dodges the trap of sci-fi disaster tales like “Snowpiercer.” There’s no real time for “factions” to form, for anybody to truly size up who they can trust. The timespan in Jason Georg’se (he wrote several “Scandal” episodes) adaptation of the novel “The Old Axolotl” is just a week or so.

The ticking-clock that underscores many a thriller is only evident in the landing-refueling stops this Belgian airliner has to make. Gas is always a worry, as is what they’ll find when they land to get it. It’s a different race against the clock every touchdown.

The in-flight debates, “one problem at a time” solving, etc., are slower. But as we get to know the cast, this flagging pace is less of an issue than it might have been.

If there’s a flaw to it, I’d say not letting it maintain the compactness that head-down/work-the-next-problem storytelling demands. Yeah, it’s open-ended.

But there’s mordant humor, most present in the early episodes, that carries the day. The co-pilot clinging to “sorry for the inconvenience” corporate messaging too long, his troubled fill-in co-pilot Sylvie’s admission that “I drank a bottle of vodka” before boarding, and the Black woman as truth-teller, sizing up every quarrel on board with a quip.

“Just a buncha white men whining that they can’t control things…for once!”

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

Cast: Pauline Etienne, Laurent Capelluto, Stefano Cassetti, Mehmet Kurtulus, Babetida Sadjo, Regina Bikkinina, Jan Bijvoet,  Alba Gaïa Bellugi, Ksawery Szlenkier, Nabil Mallat and Vincent Londez

Credits: Created by Jason George, based on the novel “The Old Axolotl” by Jacek Dukaj. A Netflix release.

Running time: 6 episodes, 37-40 minutes each

It opens in late May, and as a charter member of the Rob vs Steve on a road trip fan club, I’m quarantining this farce a bit early.

What will they be driving?

“Stan Laurel” (whom Coogan just played) and Tom Hardy!

Cackling already.

Horror, humor, well mordant humor.

That was Shirley Jackson.

This right here is what we call “on-the-nose” casting. Moss conquers all, scares herself and everybody else half to death.

June 5.

“Theeb” is a Bedouin parable set against the backdrop of “Lawrence of Arabia.”

I mean that literally. It was filmed in the Wadi Rum of Jordan, covering the same geography and topography that David Lean’s masterpiece captured on film. There’s an English soldier with a World War I mission in Ottoman Arabia, with Bedouins guiding him, by camel, across the sands and through the canyons, from well to well.

The first twist in this 2016 Oscar nominee (Best Foreign Language Film) is that the story is entirely from a Bedouin point of view. And the second is that it’s a story seen through a boy of about 12’s eyes.

“Theeb” (Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat) takes his name from the word for “wolf.” But when we meet him, he’s just a child learning the desert ways from his older brother Hussein (Hussein Salameh Al-Sweilhiyeen), how to get water for the animals, how to aim a rifle, and when “guests” arrive at their group (all men) encampment, how to slaughter a goat for the meal.

Lessons his father passed down have been related under the opening credits. “In questions of brotherhood, never refuse a guest.” Oh, and by the way? Beware of trusting “wolves.”

The “guests” are an English Army officer (Jack Fox, son of James Fox of Lean’s “A Passage to India”) and his translator (Marji Audeh).

They need a local guide to get them through the desert to the soldier’s regiment. Theeb is supposed to stay behind. He doesn’t.

The boy is endlessly fascinated by the Englishman’s gear, including this mysterious locked wooden box. The language barrier is almost as great as the cultural one, as the Englishman is hellbent on completing his mission, and that mission’s deadly danger is laid out for them in very English vs. Turks, Turks vs. Bedouin and Bedouin preying on Bedouin ways.

Hussein just wants to drop the guy off and get home. The kid, named “Wolf” or not, has no business being out here.

The grim “adventure” of it all begins, and bullets fly and blood flows. Theeb is going to have to grow up fast if he’s to walk or ride away from this World War come home to his piece of desert.

A stranger in black (Hassan Mutlag Al-Maraiyeh) figures into that odyssey, eventually.

Filmmakers Naji Abu Nowar takes care with his compositions, recreating in the digital video era images that Lean had to get on celluloid, often by waiting on the perfect light.

I was struck by the geological detail of the canyon walls, the colors of the mountainsides and vast expanses below them.

He doesn’t replicate that shimmering desert mirage effect that made you sweaty and thirsty, just from watching “Lawrence of Arabia.” But the story beats — terrorism, treachery, trains and Turks — are the same.

The action — shootouts and waiting out the shootouts — is solid and professionally staged and filmed.

But for all its beauty, the stark simplicity of this folk tale with firearms mean it offers few real surprises. “Theeb” is good enough to make one anxious to see the next film by Nowar, even though six years have passed since he made this one. Perhaps he’s realized you can’t go to the “Lawrence” well more than once.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat, Hussein Salameh Al-Sweilhiyeen, Hassan Mutlag Al-Maraiyeh, Jack Fox

Credits: Directed by Naji Abu Nowar, script by Naji Abu Nowar and Bassel Ghandour. A Film Movement release, now on Film Movement, Tubi and Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:40

“The Lift Boy” is a simple and somewhat simple-minded and archaic tale of a “spoiled” young Mumbai man who learns to appreciate the value of menial work and the rippling power of kindness — “good karma” — by taking over his father’s job, operating an elevator in a low-rise high-rise.

Raju (Moin Khan) is speaking for the audience for this dramedy when he asks, “Why do people need a lift wallah (boy) anyway?”

Even in India, such buggy-whip mender/switchboard operator automated-out-of-existence jobs are all but extinct.

But Raju has much to learn, and not just in school, where he’s failed the drafting portion of his engineering exam four times. His long-suffering dad, Krishna (Saagar Kale) frets over how “spoiled” he is. Raju’s sunglasses, attempted mustache and general contempt for the working poor — like Dad — even extends to his father.

Because when Dad has a heart attack, Raju’s muttered complaint (in English, sometimes in Hindu with English subtitles) is “Today is not my lucky day. Nothing is going right for me.”

It’s all about him. But with Dad’s uniformed job at the Galaxy Apartments as the “the only thing that puts food in our bellies and clothes on our back,” Mom (Santosh Mohite) sends him out the door, bright and early, to “fill in.”

He’s still late, dismissive in that “How hard can it be?” way, and gets under the skin of the building’s owner, Mrs. D’Souza (costume designer turned actress Nyla Masood).

“Open the doors with a smile,” she says. “No small talk” with the residents. “Keep an eye out for any suspicious people” and “No pets in the lift.”

These are all trite but promising directions the script could take us in — wacky tenants, rich snob tenants, rule breakers and even house-breakers.

But first-time writer-director Jonathan Augustin limits this story to Raju’s journey, and a narrow one it is. The rich lady who is pushing her teen daughter, “Princess” (Aneesha Shah) gets his attention — not for the mother’s class-conscious contempt, but for the daughter’s flirtations.

Raju is rude and dismissive of pretty much everybody else, in the building or at home. Like his profane and portly pal Shawn (Damian D’Souza), Raju is too good for “leftovers,” too good for the job, too good to chat with a maid who lakes the elevator to work every AM. He is, he insists, “an engineer.”

Only he isn’t. Not yet. And as it’s not where his heart’s desire lies, it might never be.

In India, kids like him — the children of the aspirational working poor, “have two career options — doctor or engineer,” he tells Mrs. D’Souza.

And as we’ve seen his reaction to that first dissection in biology class, engineer it is.

Raju’s journey is from selfishness to kindness, from arrogant pride to humility, from resignation to his fate to pursuing his first, best destiny. The only novelty in that is the setting, and that’s only novel to foreigners, who will see this as the head-bobbingestIndian film ever, and little more.

There are only a couple of surprises served up during this tried-and-true film path. The jokes aren’t worthy of the label “jokes.”

The sweet moments lack much of an emotional kick. And while Khan makes an amiable slacker who needs to knuckle-down, there isn’t enough story or action here to justify this limp tale’s 108 minute running time.

It’s too long by half.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Moin Khan, Nyla Masood, Saagar Kale, Aneesha Shah, Damian D’Souza

Credits: Written and directed by Jonathan Augustin. A Caroline Pictures/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

As an entertainment journalist, I’ve been to a lot of book signings over the years — decades. And for all the excitement that gets fans worked up to meet their idol — novelist, film memoirist or whoever — I’ve never seen one cry.

There was a lot of crying wherever former First Lady Michelle Obama went promoting her autobiography “Becoming.” Thrilled tears of joy and that word her husband’s political career beat senseless, “hope” just flowed from people, seemingly relieved just to be in the presence of someone who represents so much to so many people, across the country and around the world.

That’s the big take-away from “Becoming,” a smart, empathetic, funny and officially sanctioned portrait of Michelle O., skimming the surface of her life during her 2018 tour promoting the book, and inspiring millions to start the process of making America decent again.

The Obamas Netflix production company filmed it, a movie of backstage moments and conversations with family and a couple of intimate associates, but mostly on-stage at huge venues, fielding softball questions from friendly interviewers such as Gayle King, Oprah, Colbert, Conan and Reese Witherspoon.

The reasons she has become such a beloved figure pop out from the film, starting with her refreshing frankness in talking about the divided America we live in, which still managed to put the Obamas in the White House.

“We ourselves were a provocation.”

There’s the pressure of the position, being the first representatives of a racial minority to reach their position, the pressure of expectations, the constant awareness of the spotlight and the “relentlessly personal attacks” that come, given the slightest excuse by the right wing smear machine.

“You have to get it right 100 percent of the time.”

Sleeveless? The HORROR! Worse than a War on Christmas!

The film remembers the First Lady’s fondness for dancing and laughing, and her ongoing outreach, the connections she made and continues to make with school children and college kids. There are meetings with small college groups, high school overachievers, even on an Indian reservation, captured during the tour.

The most political she gets is speaking of how “a lot of our folks (Black voters) didn’t vote” in 2016, and in the off-year elections which were pretty much the undoing of the Obama presidency. His election was followed by two years tied-up on Obamacare, and six years of being pushed around by a viciously partisan Congress led by Mitch McConnell.

If you don’t think we got where we are today thanks to the consequences of that, the professorial remove Obama maintained (partly by necessity, thanks to the understandable reluctance to be “the scary Black man”), unlike Bill Clinton’s learning to fight back, you’re following the wrong Twitterers.

Young Michelle Robinson’s “story” includes being told “You’re not Princeton material” by a high school principal, a roommate who moved out of her dorm room in college because “her mother was horrified that I was Black,” her idolizing of older brother Craig and still being able to pick out Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus & Lucy” at the family piano. She talks of her most recent ancestor to be in bondage, of her late father’s love of jazz and of the potential lost when this relative or that one failed to have the opportunities in a deeply racist culture to achieve all they might have.

Her deepest insights are the recognition that as far as college is concerned, “there are all KINDs of ‘affirmative action…legacy (students admitted because their parents attended the school), athletics AND poor kids.”

The most entertaining comments come in her discussion of being courted by her law firm underling, Barack “Barry” Obama, who asked her out (they were the only two Black Harvard Law grads in the place) only to get a “Dude, that would be sooo tacky.”

He’d been late for work his first day, getting an eyeroll and “trifling Black man” label from her for that. But the mechanics of the marriage are revealed when she says “I didn’t want to be just an appendage to HIS dreams.”

Candid thoughts about her Secret Service detail, an attempt to slip her daughters outside the White House to experience a little of the Marriage Equality celebration, listening to her morning jam on the way to the day’s work (prayer circles with her mostly-female support staff/team), are balanced with remembering the America that wasn’t on board with all of that, the Charleston church shooting and the like.

Mostly, “Becoming” is a collection of “feels,” hugs and tears with fans, students and family, and big promotional moments that director Nadia Hallgren wisely never allows to come off as a “victory lap.” Entering stadiums to the gushing introductions of the likes of Oprah, played in by Alicia Keys’ anthem “This Girl is on Fire,” could easily have led this unapologetic hagiography to that.

If you want more revealing material than that, read the book, or wait for a biography that isn’t introduced by Reese and written (or directed) by Oprah.

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements and brief language

Cast: Michelle Obama, Phoebe Robinson, Craig Robinson, Stephen Colbert, Oprah Winfrey, many others

Credits: Directed by Nadia Hallgren. A Netflix release, a Higher Ground production.

Running time: 1:29