Movie Nation

Director Christopher Nolan wants his latest sure-to-be-a-blockbuster “Tenet” to be the film that heralds the etun of movie theaters. Warner Bros. has to make a decision in roughly a week about whether to hold its July 17 release date or push it back into later in the year. https://t.co/kRZherRgNC

Looks rather lopsided. But in a couple of days, May 11, I guess we’ll find out if this series, by several less known filmmakers and released by the “Tiger King” network, is completely full of it.

A murder mystery in the drug world of…Cape Cod?

Monica Raymond and a lot of beautiful actresses (Hey, Starz, amIright?) and James Badge Dale star in this moody, geographically fascinating series. May 17 on Starz.

Ben Mendelsohn is the disapproving Dad in this dramedy about life, death and finding love when you’re very very sick.

June 19.

If only all limited series were as strange, surprising, literary and darkly delightful as “Lambs of God.” This Aussie-made tale of nuns, an intruder priest, crimes and history, ghosts and miracles is equal parts “The Beguiled” and “Agnes of God.”‘

And the entire enterprise, based on Marele Day’s novel, is passing strange, Gothic magical realism stirred to life by a top flight cast in the starkest of settings.

All my gripes about current trends in the genre, that these series start too slowly and dribble out the plot points and jolts to maximize the Time Spent Watching, are tossed aside in four brisk, grim, darkly-funny and even moving episodes now streaming on Topic.com.

Essie Davies of “The Babadook,” Jessica Barden of “Scarborough” and “Penny Dreadful,” and the great Ann Dowd (“Handmaid’s Tale,” “American Animals”) are three surviving Sisters of St. Agnes, nuns cloistered on an island off the British coast.

Their version of Catholicism is barely recognizable. They pray to their “Heavenly Mother.” Their rituals to “My queen, My mother” adhere to a calendar that includes “hair day” (a trimming), “sheering day” for the sheep, and when Sister Iphegenia (Davies) has a vision, “killing day.” That’s when Sister Margarita (Dowd) sings to a lamb they will kill for food and as a sacrifice.

They drink the dying lamb’s blood, as well.

They watch for newborn lambs that they decide are the reincarnation of this or that Sister who left this world. Novitiate Carla (Barden) is the most enthusiastic about this tradition.

It’s pretty clear that their disconnect from the world is years and years long, that they’ve drifted back towards paganism. The semi-ruined convent, accessible only at low tide, is primitive and ancient and we have plenty of time to wonder if this is some thread of Medieval Catholic history we’ve forgotten, or if these three have survived an Apocalypse.

That’s when the first jolt arrives. A man, dressed in black, curses his way through the brambles up from the beach. He is a priest, Father Ignatious (Sam Reid of “Belle” and ”
The Astronaut Wives Club”). He’s a little put out being here, and a lot put-out finding them here.

“Don’t TELL me you don’t have electricity,” he gripes, opening his flip phone. It’s 1999, and the Bishop’s secretary has shown up to look over a long-forgotten church property.

The series is about what the church wants with this place, what Father Ignatius tells them and hides from them, and what sort of drastic actions they take to preserve their “heretical” way of life.

It’s a “haunted island,” where visions of long-dead nuns appear to the Sisters. Will the rude and imperious Father Ignatius see them, mollify them and bring the trio into the (still) 20th century?

There are intrigues at the Mother Church, where the Bishop (John Bell) complains that they can ill afford “ANOTHER scandal.”

And there’s a man hunt, or priest hunt. Ignatius has a semi-estranged sister (Kate Mulvaney of “Hunters”) in AA, who wonders where her brother has got off to. Tracking the anal retentive sibling to his departure point, cussing out the lazy constable (Daniel Henshall) who is slow-off-the-mark on the missing-persons beat, may get us somewhere.

Or not.

The arrogant, aloof Ignatius isn’t just missing. He’s in peril. And his efforts to divide and conquer the trio to affect his escape may not be taken well.

As Ignatius suffers and the sisters have their visions, see ghosts and experience flashbacks telling us how they got there, “Lambs of God” grabs us by the tenterhooks, making us puzzle out what might come next.

The acting is stellar across the board, but Barden is the standout here. Carla is utterly naive to the ways of the world, gobsmacked that Father Ignatius smokes (“Dragon,” Sister Margarita cautions.) and can blow rings, that he has a gadget that makes music (1990s ringtones) and channels voices.

She sees her first male genitalia when Ignatius passes out from their “Stay at Home” herbal tea. A Biblical reference is all Carla can summon up for the sight.

“Baby Moses in the rushes!”

Dowd’s Margarita is the truest of the true believers, and the most menacing.

“I can SMELL your deceit, Ignatius!”

There’s violence and intrigue, sex, sacrilege and singing in Latin in this tight and tense melodramatic thriller. The New South Wales settings nicely substitute for the Cornish coast, the supernatural touches often have down-to-Earth origins.

And the surprises never cease, making this that rare “limited run” mini-series that delivers big moments in every episode, keeps us guessing and keeps us watching without the teasing and padding-out too many streaming shows go for these days.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, sex and profanity

Cast: Essie Davies, Jessica Barden, Sam Reid Kate Mulvany and Ann Dowd.

Credits: Created and scripted by Sarah Lambert, based on the novel by Marele Day. A Topic.com release.

Running time: Four episodes @54 minutes each.

“Get In” is a taut, troubling and topical French thriller almost utterly undone by its over-the-top finale.

In movie buff shorthand, it’s a John Schlesinger’s “Pacific Heights” that devolves into Sam Peckpinpah’s “Straw Dogs” — devolves, and keeps on devolving.

Aurélien Molas and Olivier Abbou’s script gets into issues of masculinity, race, bullying and a justice system that fails to deliver justice.

At every turn, history teacher Paul, played by Adama Niane (“Gang of the Caribbean”) is pushed, misused and tested. It started before the movie begins. His marriage to Chloé (Stéphane Caillard of TV’s “War of the Worlds”) is in trouble. And then, after a nice long road trip vacation in his father’s old RV, they’re denied entrance to their home.

As outrages go, that’s primal. Not only has the recently-evicted couple — Sabrina (Marie Bourin) was their nanny — changed the locks and denied them entry after house-sitting for them. They call the cops and Paul is roughed up and taken in when he is understandably outraged at how his kindness has been repaid.

This “true story” takes the family into the French legal system, with judges kicking the decision hither and yon — that’s what covering your bases and having a “contract” with the house sitter gets you — days becoming weeks and then months.

Their lawyer is all reassurances, “They have no right to be there” and “You’ll get your house back, I assure you.” And yet, “You can’t evict them” and “The council bans evictions in the winter.” As they’ve been warned by the cops, “Don’t try to do this by yourselves — three years in prison” well, what are they to do?

Paul, given to storming out of meetings or, in the case of the marriage counselor, skipping them altogether, is increasingly outraged.

We think, “How far can he be pushed?” But we, like his wife, like Sabrina’s hulking husband Eric (Hubert Delattre) size up the thin Franco-African and say, “What’re you gonna do about it?” (in French, with English subtitles).

The RV park where they have to stay might have the answer. Mickey (Paul Hamy) is a rough character. But we can see the look he and Chloé share, even if Paul doesn’t notice.

They have history. And judging from his tattoos, and hers, it was rough and ready. Mickey is bad news all around as he talks Paul into “guys’ night out,” drinking strip club binges topped off with a little redneck animal cruelty.

Yeah, totally a thing in France, too.

Mickey taunts Paul — “You’re a victim because you decided to be one.”

Chloé shrugs with a “You don’t get it. We can’t do anything. So accept it.”

Will he be goaded into action by Mickey, or tamed into putting the marriage and their family first and hoping for the best from a court system that doesn’t guarantee that?

Director Abbou and his cast make us furious on Paul’s behalf, then fearful of Paul’s actions. The conversations with the squatters are all “No comment, no comment…You need to LEAVE.”

Paul ends far too many talks with legal figures with the phrase “You can’t be serious!”

Paul’s attempts at resisting this incessant bullying — even his bigger students in class figure they can push him around — make us feel his futility.

As this isn’t America, Paul can’t drive straight to a gun store to even up the odds. Just having this thought it part of the film’s troubling way of playing with the psyche.

“Get In,” titled “Furie” when it was released in Europe, works on you and works on you and builds towards something that the finale suggests is the true consequence of crossing that line into violence.

You can’t control it. Once unleashed, it consumes you, your enemies and those you love.

Not a bad parable for our times, with “might makes right” and “superior firepower” increasingly the rule as first justice and fairness break down, then civility, then law and order.

But the Big Finish here looks like something horror studio Blumhouse would cook up. “Get In” doesn’t get quite all the way in because of it.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, explicit sex, nudity, alcohol and drug abuse

Cast: Adama Niane, Stéphane Caillard, Paul Hamy, Marie Bourin and Hubert Delattre

Credits: Directed by Olivier Abbou, script by Aurélien Molas and Olivier Abbou. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

Ever wondered how legendary screen tough-guy Charles Bronson would handle himself in a torture porn film?

Me either. But wonder no more.

Writer, director, cinematographer and editor Rene Perez cast a Bronson look-alike in “Cry Havoc.” He dyed Robert Bronzi’s hair Bronson-black, gave him a Bronson Fu Manchu mustache. He dressed Bronzi in Bronson black leather, with early ’70s bell bottom pants, no less.

He puts Bronzi in a ’66 Chevy Nova, a very Bronsonesque (undersized) muscle car.

And he turns this guy loose on the mountain west compound of a villain called “The Voyeur,” who “casts” ambitious young females to be in his non-existent “Terror Mountain” reality show.

It’s as terrible as it sounds, largely because it’s pretty obvious that Bronzi was looped so that he’d sound more like…Charles Bronson.

“Seen this girl?”

Classic Bronson one-liner.

The Voyeur (Richard Tyson, wisely bearded, as he wouldn’t want anybody to recognize him in this abortion) captures his “contestants'” slaughter on his many CCTV cameras.

“Pain is the only real truth in this world,” he growls to an empty room. But not for long. An ambitious blonde Iowa TV reporter (Emily Sweet) has agreed to his conditions for an interview — no revealing where he is, and oh, wear this white ball gown to the interview.

Miss Weaver is the last one to figure out she’s merely the latest contestant.

There’s this monster on the mountain, a hulk in a wired-together skin-mask of the Michael Meyers variety, skull and mask covered in more fencing wire. “Havoc” lumbers about with saw blades, shears and axes, hacking up and disemboweling women.

“It” The Voyeur says, “is a force of nature. It simply…was. Like a storm.”

They met in prison, and well, the rich murder freak just HAD to have this “It” he names “Havoc” (Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar,” Mark Antony’s “let slip the dogs of war” speech) for his little “experiment.”

Bronzi-Bronson plays a cop hunting for that one particular “girl” who’s disappeared on that mountainside. He doesn’t care how many NRA minions of The Voyeur he has to go through to find her.

It’s a movie of waking up, screaming bloody murder, trying to slip the locks or knots, and generally failing. But even if you/they DO escape, it’s only temporary. Wanton slaughter ensues.

Pointless and ugly is the blurb review of this one.

But Perez does set up a thought experiment of his own with this enterprise. What is it that makes an action movie star, that separates John Cena from Brian Bosworth, Terry Crews from Shaquille O’Neal?

Bronzi summons up the right nostalgia, and the primitive staging and non-“acting” give “Cry Havoc” the feel of a Bronson B-movie of the late ’70s.

It’s all manufactured, even if he did his own re-recording of his voice on set (I can’t tell that, only that he was looped later). But stumbling through a forest shooting people in a squinty-eyed daze does not make you Charles Bronson. The charisma and talent it took to make bad movies watchable just isn’t there.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Robert Bronzi, Emily Sweet, J.D. Angstadt and Richard Tyson.

Credits: Written and directed by Rene Perez. A Midnight release,

Running time: 1:25

The novelty of “The Belles of St. Trinian’s” might be the sight of Alastair Sim in a dress.

The cinema’s defining Ebeneezer Scrooge and a mainstay of postwar British comedies and dramas — he had the title role in the original “An Inspector Calls,” and Hitchcock hired him for “Stagefright” — he took on two roles, as siblings, in this 1954 farce.

But the life of the party here would be the inmates in this asylum, the brash, bedlam-inducing hellions of St. Trinian’s School for Young Ladies. They gamble, cheat, manufacture “bathtub gin,” cross and double-cross one another and leave mayhem in their wake. They’re the reason this comedy is so beloved it has warranted revivals and remakes in the UK over the decades.

It seems the stiff upper lip Brits couldn’t get enough of teen girls behaving badly in a “Stalag 17” styled school comedy.

The plot — a sultan (Eric Pohlmann) needs a place to park his youngest daughter, seeing as how he’s had to “allow the Americans to build their airbase” in his kingdom. Memories of GI mischief during WWII had not been forgotten by the British screenwriters.

St. Trinian’s is recommended, conveniently located near the stables where the sultan’s racehorses are boarded.

Little Fatima may not know what she’s in for, but the residents of town (Stanstead Abbotts, Hertfordshire) sound the fire alarm, board up their store fronts and flee when the train approaches to deliver the students for the fall term.

The local constable locks himself in his cell.

When the girls pelt out of the passenger cars, we see why. They’re unruly, uncontrollable and unstoppable. Miss Millicent (Sim) and her staff (Hermione Baddeley, Balbina, Joan Sims, Renee Houston and Betty Ann Davies among them) barely even try.

The school’s broke and in disrepair, but having a sultan’s daughter could get the staff and local vendors paid, if they play her “pocket money” right.

Millicent’s gambler-brother Clarence (Alastair Sim again) has his own designs. He’s re-enrolled his brassy, streetwise daughter (Vivienne Martin) so that she can befriend young Fatima (Lorna Henderson) and get the skinny on her daddy’s star stallion, Arab Boy, for the upcoming Gold Cup “hunting” (steeplechase) race.

With all the crime and graft and general misbehavior that has nothing to do with education going on, the police send a policewoman (Joyce Grenfell) undercover, taking a job as “sports” mistress, to catch all these miscreants in the act. Or acts.

Hey, when the school motto is “In flagrante delicto,” what would you expect?

The kids set booby traps and pull pranks.They run all manner of scams via their “go between,” the trenchcoated hustler Flash Harry (George Cole, hilarious) who was hired as a teen gardener’s assistant but “disappeared” into a life in in the hedges in 1940. Harry places bets, bottles and sells their chemistry class “bathtub gin” and is fixer for whatever schemes they cook up.

The field hockey team never loses at home, and not just because they play rough, disable the referee and jeer the opposing team without pity. The girls make their home end goal “two feet smaller” than their opponents. Try scoring in that.

There are cliques and factions, which become clearer when Clarence and his daughter Arabella conspire to get Arab Boy out of the Gold Cup, by hook or by crook.

That’s Arabella’s idea, by the way.

Other girls have money on Arab Boy to win. So it’s game on, with the hapless adults mostly bystanders in the shenanigans to come.

The film’s Cockney touches and the screeching underclass accents of the young ladies (one of the jokes) may move you to turn the closed captioning on.

You don’t want to miss throwaway lines like “Listen, rabble,” and “put the screws on the old custard” and hear the undercover policewoman described as a “copper’s kick, in skirts.”

It’s not “holly jolly pulse-throbbing” for the first hour, as the set-up is set up and we’re treated to single scene sight gags, like the booze and smoke filled teacher’s lounge (they don’t bother hiding this from the young “ladies”), the school inspectors who came and were corrupted and kept as a veritable harem of the French teacher (Balbina) and her salon.

It was a daring movie for its day, almost racy for its 1954 depiction of “young ladies” doing what needed to be done in still-“Broke Britannia.”

Director Frank Launder was better known as a screenwriter (Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes”), but he put the very first “Blue Lagoon” on the screen in the 1940s, and made a cottage industry out of “St. Trinian’s” comedies as a director.

The third act here is why “The Belles of St. Trinian’s” is held in such regard, to this day. It’s a near riot of action, climaxing with a restaging of the “Zulu Wars” in the crowded halls of a tumbledown manor house turned boarding school for girls.

MPAA Rating: “Approved”

Cast: Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell, George Cole, Vivienne Martin, Hermione Baddeley and Eric Pohlmann

Credits: Directed by Frank Launder, script by Sidney Gilliat, Val Valentine and Frank Launder. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:31

“Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill” puts him in a black suit and tie, but opens with him diving out of a helicopter to get to the (Beacon Theater) show.

So yeah, it was supposed to coincide with the opening of a new James Bond film, “No Time to Die.” But COVID19 shut that down.

And yeah, not leaving out his famous “going out/gotta get BACK” bit about the audience, hailing the audience’s “degrees of difficulty” in going out, getting the tickets and coming to the show seems…unfortunate.

But the most successful stand-up comedian of all time didn’t get where he is by sweating out a re-edit. As he tucks into his and his audiences’ many-years-long relationship, “going through life together” with fans knowing EVERYTHING there is to know about him, his riches, his family, his cars and his life, he hurls the only rhetorical question that matters.

“I could be anywhere in the WORLD right now,” he says, voice-cracking. “If you were me, would you BE up here hacking out another one of these things?”

He was 65 when he taped this and just turned 66 at the end of April. Expecting him to let a global pandemic ding his “Didya ever notice?” mastery is laughable.

As indeed is the special. Maybe later there’ll be a future one talking about COVID19, if it’s ever funny. For now, Seinfeld is talking about the familiar. As dated as some of this feels, thanks to a changing world, the nostalgia value of an “OK, Boomer” comic isn’t to be under-estimated.

Marriage? Got a “girlfriend? That’s whiffle ball! Married guys play with full clips and LIVE rounds!”

Bits about “the tone of my voice” arguments at home feeling like he’s been drafted into high school glee club, about family vacations, “Or as I like to call them, ‘Let’s pay a LOTTA money to go fight in a hotel!”

Buffets? “Why don’t we put people that are already struggling with portion control into some kind of debauched ‘Caligula’ food orgy of unlimited human consumption!”

He’s out-of-date and out of step in a social media and now socially-distanced age — “I feel like a BLACKsmith up here, to tell the truth. Why don’t I just text you the whole thing, save us all an hour?”

But that’s kind of the point. It’s been impossible to watch him the same way after he did that documentary “Comedian” years and years ago. We know how much craftsmanship went into building this act, the clubs he tried out new material in, the road warrior that he remains, polishing those bits, dealing with interruptions like the elder stand-up statesman he is.

“LOVE you, Jerry!” from a fan in the audience elicits an “And I love you! That”s my ideal type of intimate relationship. I love you. You love me. And we never meet.”

He knows he’ll get a laugh when he screeches, and does a lot more “your annoying friends” voices than we’ve heard in the past. He lies down on stage, launches into bits about the “only two types of reviews” there are for ANY experience, these days — “It’s GREAT. Or it SUCKS.” And the difference? There is none. Everybody’s life sucks.

“My life sucks, too. Perhaps not QUITE as much.”

I could see how this material could rub the housebound, especially traumatized New Yorkers, the wrong way. But he has a lot of license with that audience.

When he’s calling out the disconnected but cell-addicted and their “friends,” he’s as on-target as he’s ever been. Oh yeah, you’re “close” to every single one of them. He’s seen you “scroll the names on your contact list like a gay French king,” dismissing all these “favorites.”

Hopefully, our current sorry state as a civilization will have the luxury of getting back to laughing at these trivialities anew. And if not, we’ll always have these old Seinfeld-at-home-on-the-stage movies –on Netflix — to remember how it was back when selfie-seeking friends who turn “picture bullies” at every social gathering were all we had to worry about, back when “dinner and a show” were totally a thing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, a little profanity

Cast: Jerry Seinfeld.

Credits: Directed by Joe DeMaio. A Netflix release.

Running time: :58

“Walkaway Joe” is a somber, reflective road drama about fathers and sons, mistakes and legacies.

Not a lot happens. The hook is the mythic pool hustling that’s been the bread and butter of many a down-and-out tale told on the big screen. And the story arc is even shorter than the road trip involved — across a chunk of Louisiana, climaxing in New Orleans.

But it’s a fine showcase for a couple of outstanding character actors, David Strathairn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, even if it’s actually star vehicle for Julian Feder (“A Boy Called Po”).

Dallas (Feder) likes closing down the local bar’s billiards tables with his old man, Cal (Morgan). The kid may be 14, blind to the old man’s faults and oblivious to his need to slip out the back door before “last call” before somebody he owes money to shows up. He still figures he’s got a shot at following the old man into the family profession — pool shark, like Cal and Cal’s daddy before him.

His mother (Julie Ann Emery) says that cutting school to do that isn’t an option, that keeping the kid out late is no way to “be his parent and not his playmate.” Her griping goes in one of her husband’s ears and out the other.

“He’s doing fine.”

Cal doesn’t get mad. He doesn’t raise his voice. When mother and son come home, all they find is a note.

“I won’t be back this time.”

That leads to the mother-son row that has the teen throwing a couple of things in a pack, strapping his pool cue to it and bicycling off to Baton Rouge (Laplace, Louisiana is the filming location) to find his Daddy at a favorite haunt — Fatty’s.

The old man’s debtors are looking for him, too. Lucky for the kid he catches a ride with drifting RV dweller Joe (Strathairn).

The kid lies about his family and imposes himself on Joe, who sees every mistake Dallas makes and every mistake he made with his own kid (it’s implied) along the way.

“It’s a goooood thing you’re not going to live long enough to reproduce,” he lectures. Sullen Dallas can admit his bigger screwups, but Joe is always there to top off the non-apology.

“That was 75 miles PAST ‘stupid.'”

Actor turned first–time director Tom Wright (George’s African American boss on “Seinfeld”) doesn’t have a lot of incidents to work with in Michael Milillo’s first produced feature screenplay. The drama is more innate than action-oriented, although there are hustles that go awry and debt collectors capable of violence.

There’s more menace in Joe’s eventual meeting with Cal than in any fight. Morgan summons up his tough guy persona with just a look, a pause, an introduction not acknowledged.

Strathairn’s Joe wears his story on his face. Few scenes establishing the past that put Joe here, his own parenting track record, are necessary. The Oscar nominee and Emmy winner just “is” this guy, his every regret, Joe’s impatience with a kid that he won’t let himself hope is his own last chance at “parenting,” even if it’s temporary.

Feder doesn’t look 14, but the character is certainly written as naive, hotheaded and impulsive. He plays Dallas with a few cards hidden, as if there’s hope for redemption. But his accent and decision to mumble his lines make his Southern drawl a slur and nigh on impossible to decipher far too often. Any “good lines” he has are often swallowed in the performance.

The story hews closely to formula (expect a BIG GAME). But the Deep South pool hall milieu, the lived-in characters and the top drawer supporting players make “Walkaway Joe” worth sitting still for and watching, all the way through the credits.

Unrated: Violence, alcohol, teen smoking.

Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Julian Feder, David Strathairn and Julie Ann Emery.

Credits: Directed by Tom Wright, script by Michael Milillo. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:29