Movie Nation

A little “cute” goes a long way in “Vanilla,” a light and winning road picture romance that’s a promising feature film debut from writer-director Will Dennis.

That “long way” is New York to New Orleans, where an unlikely pair — Kelsea Bauman is Kimmie, Dennis himself is Elliot — must deliver her van to his former girlfriend, who needs it on her movie shoot.

Yes, young filmmakers make movies about making movies, because basically, it’s what they know the most about.

But the “obstacles to love” are unusual and promising, the “trip” has a couple of fun wrinkles in a tried and true formula and our leading lady — young enough and funny enough to be a web producer on John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” — is a real find.

Bauman is the latest to master the “eccentric, quirky and in command” woman who keeps the guy, and to a lesser degree the audience, on its heels from start to whatever finish this budding romance is headed for. Kimmie is the Maude to hapless Elliot’s Harold, Melanie Griffith’s “Something Wild” to Jeff Daniels’ not-wild-at-all,  Greta Gerwig to any co-star within her reach.

Kimmie’s an inept cashier her her ex-uncle’s (Eddie Alfano) New York slice shop, pretty enough to get away with trying her crude stand-up material on every customer who walks in the door.

“What did the emcee at the orgy say to all the guests?”

That sort of stuff.

Elliot is a “privileged” app designer trying to peddle his ice cream deliver pitch to assorted shops. Yes, we can wonder “How’d that work?” Everybody else does.

His wealthy mother (Kathryn Grody) hears all his problems and offers what counseling she can by phone, but she’s tied up with her much younger toy boy.

And there’s this 1990 Dodge van that he needs to unload, sort of the last vestige of his relationship with Trisha, the One Who Broke His Heart.

Enter Kimmie, for once solving a problem and not creating one for Uncle Sal. She buys the van, with the proviso she can bring it back “If I’m not satisfied.” Long-estranged Trisha, a production manager on a film school in the Big Easy, thinks the van would be the perfect car prop in the movie she’s working on.

And Kimmie, who is “not satisfied,” wants to sell a perfectly reliable “love wagon.” She just needs Elliot’s help.

Kimmie has the cockiness of an emancipated and wholly “woke” young woman who also happens to be a looker, and knows it. She puts us on blast for “what the kids are doing/talking about these days,” and Elliot’s job once he promises to “please don’t murder me” stranger, on a three day trip she calls “the world’s long (first) date,” is to try and keep up.

There’s his pitch for “the best Bahn mi in the city” and her “That is such a privileged white dude thing to say,” road trip “rules” that include “no lying” and reading from a bag of purloined fortune cookies every time they cross a state line and the “collaborative dance” duet they have to dream up and rehearse at every gas stop.

“You’re sooooo ‘cis-gender'” but “I’m progressive! Abort the babies, hairy the armpits, free the nipples. Equal pay!”

She’s taking notes for her stand-up act. He’s refining his ice cream delivery pitch. She’s got a secret. He’s got a secret.

Sparks or no sparks between the smitten guy and “the girl who likes intellectualizing physical contact,” doom awaits.

The rarity of romantic comedies with anything at all that works allow indie/chatty romances like “Vanilla” a win, almost by default. It gets by on banter, energy, the perky leading lady and the “secrets” each is keeping from the other.

Too little is made of the “road,” aside from “collaborative dance” rehearsals, just a DC stop here and a Memphis “open mike” there.

But as “soft-serve” as it may, the reason this genre formula sticks around is that it works. It’s just sweet enough. Kelsea Bauman is a real find. I’ll be keeping an eye out for her future appearances.

Dennis? He could make this his genre, maybe cast a more magnetic leading man to play “the guy’s the vulnerable one” next time.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Will Dennis, Kelsea Bauman, Eddie Alfano and Taylor Hess

Credits: Written and directed by Will Dennis. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:28

“Good villains make good thrillers,” the Master of Suspense is purported to have said.

And if a writer knows what’s good for her — or him — you name that bad guy “Falconetti.”

That name has turned up a couple of times since it was worn by the villain of U.S. TV’s “Rich Man, Poor Man,” never more memorably than Nacho Fresneda‘s sadistic turn in “The Silence of the Marshes (El silencio del pantano)”, an otherwise indifferent serial killer thriller set in Valencia.

He is the enforcer of  Grandma’s (Carmina Barrios) mob, and a man tasked with a mission.

“Corruption is like Paella,” a newspaper headline screams. “Best done in Valencia.”

Co-opted cops, a high official (Maite Sandoval) tied to Grandma by blood and money, a scandal erupting because of what one man — “The Professor” (José Ángel Egido) knows, has already said in court and may elaborate on in future trials.

But when then mob-made academic — “Who knows more about money laundering than an economist?” — goes missing, it’s the pitiless Falconetti, a walking scar with a crowbar, tasked with tracking him down.

Ah, but “The Silence of the Marsh,” which takes its title from the swamps drained so that Valencia — on the Mediterranean coast — could be built, isn’t Falconetti’s story.

The person who knows what happened to “The Prof” is the guy who tased him and spirited him away to an old house on the marshes. “Q” (Pedro Alonso) is a popular novelist. He types away in his waterfront warehouse rental, conjuring up merciless revenge for minor offenses and vigilante murders that tidy up Valencia’s politics.

But the fellow is actually committing the crimes he’s writing about. That’s not the only conclusion we can draw from Marc Vigil’s film of the Juanjo Braulio novel. “Reality” and “the writer’s imagination” are blurred, all the way to the anti-climax.

And that’s not a burden this generally predictable serial killer thriller can carry. When everybody’s a villain, and the lead is rather blase, either in biker leather riding his Ducati or at the keyboard conjuring up crimes, it’s the brute who takes over the picture.

As Fresnada (of Spanish Netflix’s “The Ministry of Time”) pretty much does, the first time we meet him, setting fire to African drug dealers moving in on his turf.

The “hero’s” murders are routine. Falconetti gets the one shocking, show-stopping fight.

The writer’s voice-over is tepid, tired “killer-as-narrator” cliches. Falconetti is a man of fewer words.

There’s one funny line in the whole thing, which belongs to neither of the two leads, just a statement on Valencia corruption. Madame (party) Secretary (Sandoval) gripes to her cops when the scandal’s star witness, The Prof (who used to be in politics), disappears.

“We can’t allow politicians to disappear,” (in Spanish, with English subtitles, or dubbed). Uh, ma’am? We can’t allow ANYbody to disappear her minions remind her.

The story fails to adequately maintain the mystery — Is this real, or just in the writer’s head?  And messing around with that “reality” as the closing credits are about to roll is just a cheat, and dumb to boot.

At least the real villain, the real menace of “The Silence of the Marsh,” gives us something to chew on while he’s chewing up his scenes.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Pedro Alonso, Nacho Fresnada, Carmina Barrios, José Ángel Egido and Maite Sandoval

Credits: Directed by Marc Vigil, script by Carlos de Pando and Sara Antuña, based on a novel by Juanjo Braulio. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

In Hollywood or abroad, there is but one modern immigrant narrative. It’s the horrific story of what someone went through to get “here,” wherever “here” might be.

It’s a rite-of-passage story with built-in pathos and a healthy dose of “Put yourself in their position in their shoes.”

These tales don’t move the needle in the world’s great “human migration” debate. The argument that “They get to come ‘here’ just because they want to” doesn’t wash with many, and that’s the “nice” version of their complaint. Those with empathy, and the self-awareness of realizing their ancestors went through things like this, and that few would put themselves through the often life-threatening ordeals unless they’re facing violence, starvation or deprivation, are already convinced.

So don’t go down the rabbit hole of reading the comments on the IMDb Page of “The Flood.” The more articulate gripes use “propaganda” in their complaints (and most of them haven’t even seen the movie).

“The Flood” is a police procedural version of the immigrant’s odyssey. A crack immigration and naturalization interviewer-interrogator (Lena Headey of “Game of Thrones” and “300”) is sent in to deal with an African man (Ivanno Jeremiah of TV’s “Humans”) whose second act on British soil — after paying to be smuggled in illegally — was to jump the cops who rousted him from the back of that lorry freshly-arrived from the continent.

Her boss (Iain Glenn of “Game of Thrones”) is pressuring her “to get him out of here before the election,” pressure that’s coming “from above.” She’s got other pressures at home. So she’s all business, ticking off a long list of questions that decide if this man is sent “home” to Eritrea, one of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones.

“Where did you arrive in Europe? Can you briefly say why you cannot be returned?”

The answer to that — “They will kill me.” — leaves her unmoved.

“Everyone’s got a story,” she says. “Wendy” has heard it all.

“Oh, you’re name is Wendy? That”s my mother’s name!”

“That’s a new one!” the boss chortles.

What follows is an intimate drama detailing that interrogation, many many questions, with the subject, “Haile,” trying to find humanity and common ground with his interrogator and Wendy doing her damnedest to not let that happen.

In flashbacks, we see Haile’s story, or his version of it. A failing of “The Flood” is never allowing any doubt to enter the viewer’s mind (thus putting us in Wendy’s shoes) as we hear of war, war crimes, torture and escape.

“You ran across the border?”

“I crossed the border,” Haile says, without bluntly reminding her he just finished saying he was beaten on the soles of his feet. “I could not run.”

The flashbacks show us that escape, the perilous boat journey across the Mediterranean, the harrowing arrival on shore and the ugliness of “The Jungle,” the migrant camp on the French coast where cops are the lesser of every immigrant’s fears. The real predators are their peers.

As he relates these stories, Haile tells who he threw in with — pregnant Reema (Mandip Gill) and her husband Faiz (Peter Singh).  And we and Wendy start to see his arrival in a new light.

It’s a story that’s more grounded and sturdy than moving. Headey doesn’t give us much to cling to here, fending off phone calls hinting at the trouble at home, having her boss stare literally over her shoulder as she asks questions — poker-faced, piecing together the puzzle, probing for the truth.

Jeremiah has the showier part, a man scarred by what he’s been through, traumatized, but trying to charm and pass himself off as “not dangerous,” even though he “attacked” a police officer.

Everything in his life has come down to “negotiation,” no matter what Wendy says about their exchange. How much can he tell her? What will she believe?

There’s an earnest “humane side of history” that feels like it’s in play when actors take roles in films like this. It’s an act of courage, considering Britain’s anti-immigrant climate. And the unfortunate plot detail that Faiz has a nasty cough helps make the “Kick him/kick them all out” argument, to some.

But the flashbacks, the “everybody has a story” part of “The Flood,” puts it over. Even the hardest heart — Wendy’s included — has to be willing to hear such stories if we’re not to betray every single thing countries built on the rule of law and hard-won reputations for being civilized and humane aren’t to be abandoned.

And on the other side, recognizing that not every “story” is as worthy, that not every entry should be a foregone conclusion, might help in defusing the growing crisis of our times, not if those of us on the receiving end don’t want to be inundated by “The Flood.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lena Headey, Ivanno Jeremiah, Mandip Gill, Peter Singh and Iain Glen

Credits: Directed by Anthony Woodley, script by Helen Kingston. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:39

What lingers in the memory about “Chaplin,” Sir Richard Attenborough’s 1992 Oscar-bait biography of “The Little Tramp,” Charlie Chaplin?

The decades haven’t erased the sense that “the longer it goes on, the worse it gets.”

Some of the casting is inspired, some desultory.

There’s entirely too little of the “making of the movies,” which would have put Robert Downey Jr.’s dazzling, rehearsed light-footed physical comedy gifts to their greatest use.

That points to the clumsy screenplay, three writers including the Great Script Doctor William Goldman (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kind,” “Misery”) trying to wring something entertaining out of Chaplin’s infamous “My Autobiography,” a name-dropping, royalty-fawning and maudlin account of his “hard life and times.”

Ever read it? “Dull” and “what a drag” stand out.

And the most moving moment — pretty much the ONLY moving moment — is the film’s finale, which summons up the actual sentimental silent comedies of the Brit slapstick master turned pioneering cinema artist. Yes, Downey is there (as the elderly Chaplin), reacting with tears as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lauds The Master at the 1972 Oscars. But it’s the original film footage sampled, nimble and light on his feet, and succumbing to the tearful charms of “The Kid,” that gets you.

That leaves the door open to some sort of remake. A mini-series, something streamable, some sort of British/US co-production? That assumes of course that anybody remembers the “real” Chaplin and that there’s an audience for a more “working” Little Tramp than this sighing, sad, persecuted (by the FBI) and used by women (pre #MeToo) Chaplin film treatment.

Attenborough, whose Oscar winning epic “Gandhi” is aging quite well, spends too much screen time psychoanalyzing and explaining Chaplin’s fixation on “jailbait” aged young women.

Attenborough was always a filmmaker who flirted with mawkish. A movie with this big a cast, a star who was pre-rehab and screenwriters that thought having a composite character book editor (Anthony Hopkins) “interview” Chaplin about edits and elaborations needed on “My Autobiography” was a good idea for a framework was bound to get away from him.

I hope Goldman didn’t contribute that Hopkins and Downey bit, whispering through old old age makeup, reciting tepid dialogue. Because it’s bloody awful.

“Well, it’s your autobiography Charlie. And as your editor I have to tell you that parts of the manuscript are pretty vague, to say the least. I mean for instance, your mother. Now when did she first lose control? We need to know those facts.”

Casting Geraldine Chaplin, the Great Man’s actual daughter, as his bound-for-the-madhouse mother didn’t pay the sentimental dividends it might have.

Presenting the winsome Moira Kelly as both Chaplin’s first (English showgirl) love, and as Oona O’Neill, the final Mrs. Chaplin, doesn’t work. A lot of the female roles are shortchanged, although Marisa Tomei (as early co-star and director Mabel Normand) and Penelope Ann Miller (as Chaplin “discovery” Edna Purviance) make good impressions.

Diane Lane as Paulette Goddard? She practically walks off with the picture.

As does Kevin Kline, dashing, handsome and well-matched with Downey as Chaplin’s physical comedy equal — in action films — as the great Douglas Fairbanks.

The reason I re-watched this was recalling associating this overlong yet “not nearly enough of the good stuff” biopic with the David Lynch “Dune” disaster — another overlong film that bit off too much and felt rushed in the process.

All these actors, all this glorious period detail, recreating the English music hall era, the Wild West just after it turned tame (Chaplin’s American stage tour of the 1910s) and Hollywood as it was being born, can feel wasted in “Chaplin.”

Zeroing in on Chaplin’s first week on movie sets, before the perfectionism (the second most tedious scenes in “Chaplin”) got the better of him, or his making of “City Lights” or “The Gold Rush” or the glorious skating short (a stunt spectacle) “The Rink” would have served its subject gloriously.

A remake would give the cinema’s greatest comic his due, provided we find a filmmaker or show-runner who takes Chaplin’s famous line in “Chaplin” to heart.

“If you want to understand me, watch my movies”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for nudity and language

Cast: Robert Downey, Jr., Diane Lane, Kevin Kline, Anthony Hopkins, John Thaw, Penelope Ann Miller, Dan Aykroyd, Moira Kelly, Paul Rhys, Marisa Tomei and Geraldine Chaplin

Credits: Directed by Richard Attenborough, script by William Boyd, Bryan Forbes and William Goldman. A Tristar release.

Running time: 2:23

Here is THE must-see documentary for a world living under quarantine.

“Spaceship Earth” is about can-do cooperation, art and science coalescing, about “learning by doing” and recognizing that “small groups of people are the engines of change.”

It’s about making the impossible possible, “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” discovering skills you didn’t know you had, about stumbling, getting up and getting back to it.

And its a cautionary tale of media spin, of over-hyping and over-selling something that is designed to over-reach, and the dangers of falling short of what you’ve led the hype machine of TV — and the bottom-line, shortsighted Wall Street mentality — to expect you to achieve.

Utopian and beautiful, idealistic and futuristic, Arizona’s Biosphere 2 captured the world’s imagination in that post “We are the World/Hands Across America” age, the idea that humans could build a habitat that simulated “Biosphere 1” (the Earth), seal it off as if it was a space ship, and recycle air, water and waste to keep eight humans, wildlife and plants alive for two years.

Maybe you remember the 1991-93 Biosphere experiment for the buzz that surrounded it (long montages of breathless TV coverage are sampled) and the withering blowback the “experiment” received when things went wrong, promises were broken and the impurity of the experiment was revealed.

Maybe you remember the Pauly Shore comedy “Bio-Dome” that joined in the mockery.

But there’s a lot more to it and the sober-minded people who dreamed it up, hand-built the facility and executed this two year exercise in sustainability, conceived in simulating space travel habitation and survival.

Matt Wolf’s fascinating deep-dive into this project traces the group to its 1960s “Summer of Love” San Francisco origins, its earlier exercises in running a self-sustaining ranch and building a sailing junk which they could travel the world in, stopping to set up other projects — recreating a rainforest in Puerto Rico, etc. — and perform as The Theater of All Possibilities.”

Because as founder John Allen put it to the collection of direction-seeking youth,  academics, scientists and others who gathered around him, “It’s ALL theater.”

Wolf’s film shows us their 25 year odyssey, as a collective (not quite a commune), a group of smart, energetic extroverts who took on challenges, learned new skills for each challenge and mastered what NASA jargon has memorably coined “working the problem.”

They took a look at all the data and visual evidence of climate change/environmental degradation, and the over-population and consumption-driven collapse of “Biosphere 1,” and  “decided we had to DO something.”

People like Kathelin Gray, Mark Nelson, Marie Harding and others traveled the world, studied environments and learned to farm, to engineer, to film and to build  — from houses to boats to a gigantic geodesic complex that would be their greatest piece of architecture and theater, a scientific attention-grabbing exercise in raising environmental awareness and consciousness.

They ran their “corporation” as “a work democracy,” where everyone had to polish an expertise, but one that circled their charismatic leader. The blowback over their biggest project started with the disparaging label “cult.”

Meeting the chuckling but ever-upbeat John Allen on film, that seems to be a bit over-the-top. But the film invites us to think, “Suppose that’s accurate? So what?”

“We are hard-wired to create cults in the innovative phase of an organization,” one insider reasons.

Think about people who motivate others to buy into their vision. Allen comes off as no more “out there” than Martin Luther King Jr., Elon Musk or Elizabeth Warren — intelligent, challenging, always setting idealistic goals, inspiring others to join in and “work the problem” with them.

The big surprises of Wolf’s film aren’t the “downfall,” allegations of “cheating” in the experiment, the pitfalls of trying something as difficult and potentially dangerous as this in a “learn as you go” shakedown cruise manner.

And it’s no surprise hearing that this effort to create “science fiction without the ‘fiction'” was largely inspired by Douglas Trumball’s enviro sci-fi classic,”Silent Running.”

What is stunning is meeting these people and realizing the competence that they backed their confidence with, seeing the lifelong learning that went into the preparations for Biosphere, realizing that whatever stumbles came from their over-promising, that the attempt and the hype they added to it had social and scientific value.

The film’s two real shortcomings are the limited amount of “inside the sphere” footage included and the lack of outside “experts” to comment on the merit, or lack of merit, in their project, looking back on it 25 years later.

The third act villains we may have forgotten — a billionaire backer who would pass from the Earth unknown had he not backed them, a cynical ultra-conservative “Wall Street type” who went on to political and climate-change-denying infamy.

But the “sphere,” which is still around, is worth remembering, especially as human civilization is brought to a consuming, polluting and short-term self-interest pause by COVID-19.

Haters back then and haters now do what haters do. But these hippies? They were the brightest bulbs on the chandelier. And maybe they were onto something.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Linda Leigh, John Allen, Tony Burgess, Kathelin Gray , Mark Nelson, Sally Silverstone, Marie Harding

Credits: Directed by Matt Wolf. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:53

There is no better time capsule for the outlandish, post-Bond action cinema of the ’60s than the camp comic book romp “Danger: Diabolik.”

This Franco-Italian heist thriller was “Matt Helm” meets “Batman,” all lavish modernist sets and near-nudity, fake blood, fake voices (it’s almost all looped, even when we’re hearing the actual actors) and um, good clean fun.

Want to know where “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” came from? It’s a little Bond, a smidgen of TV’s “The Avengers,” and a LOT of “Diabolik.”

John Phillip Law (“Barbarella,” “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming”), Hollywood’s hot new “himbo,” has the largely silent title role, a master criminal and supervillain with the unlimited resources it takes to rob huge currency shipments, priceless jewels and for the grand finale, the largest gold ingot ever, melted into the shape of a coffin.

He has an underground villain’s lair on the coast, naturally — so that he can dock his cool super-secret submarine. The villa comes complete with shag carpeting, modular/circular sofas, his and hers mod showers and gadgets galore. The man burns through E-Type Jaguars as if they were Turkish cigarettes.

Eva (Austrian bombshell Marisa Mell) is at his side in every caper, always there in disguise with a backup Jaguar, always in his bed at the end of the day.

They are hunted relentlessly by Inspector Ginko (Frenchman Michel Piccoli of “Belle du Jour”), and griped about by a government minister (British comic Terry-Thomas) who does all those things Terry-Thomas does. Well, he doesn’t say “Drat and blast!” this time, a stumble on the part of the (many) screenwriters.

“Diabolik… I assure you that this individual, whose very name reveals his antagonism to the established values of our society, will soon be brought… to justice!”

Bond villain Adolfo Celi (sans eye-patch) plays Valmont, a villain out to do away with Diabolik as well.

Diabolik has no “code,” has no “honor” and isn’t shy about killing cops or a planeload of fellow villains who get in his way.

The script has no zingy one-liners, the effects range from “Wait, that submersible is real and way cooler than any Bond sub” (of the ’60s) to cheapness itself.

It’s not as sexy as “Barbarella,” not as funny as Woody Allen’s dubbed goof “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” Dubbed into in whatever language (Italian, English) you find this pan Euro production in, it’s never-quite hilarious.

“Diabolik” is a cult film — a miscalculated bomb, amusingly awful — that’s almost in a category of “cult” all its own. It played midnight shows, often in rep with John Phillip Law’s other “cult” classic, “Barbarella,” earned the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” treatment, and is almost forgotten now.

Considering where cult cinema has gone — gruesomely violent, profane, “Showgirls” explicit or “Big Lebowski” (not that bad) — it’s positively quaint.

Best served as an appetizer to an “Austin Powers” marathon, if “Casino Royale” (the “original” one, with Peter Sellers) isn’t available.

MPAA Rating: unrated, lots of violence, some nudity

Cast: John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi, Terry-Thomas

Credits: Directed by Mario Bava, script by Dino Maiuri, Brian Degas , Tudor Gates and Mario Bava and    based on the comic book.

Running time: 1:45

The most interesting thing in “Twelve” is not what this Little League “big game” movie is all about.

The boy who longs to make it to The Little League World Series has been cut from the team in the Connecticut town his family’s just moved to. His dad (Erik Heger) has chewed on the coach who (unfairly, of course) didn’t pick his boy for the all star team from their league that will play other all-star teams for the chance to advance through various tourneys towards Williamsport, Pa. and the LLWS.

Fear not, Dad says. There’s another league you can try out for nearby. THEY’LL be sure to recognize your talent.

And just for a moment, the kid, who shares his father’s obsession for baseball glory, says the right thing, a sentence that puts whatever Dad is doing to the family, his own career and his two baseball-stars-in-the-making sons into perspective.

“I don’t want to have to move again.”

We get a glimpse of Dad’s shortcuts, financial and professional and personal “issues.”

“I’m a loser, for crying out loud! I don’t want the boys to have a failure for a father!

But those visit-a-shrink issues get lost in the shuffle in this bland, generic and shallow boy’s baseball dream movie.

The messaging — that if you don’t get picked “it wasn’t fair,” that rejection isn’t a part of life, that surrendering the family’s stability to living vicariously through your kids is OK, as are bragging and cockiness, so long as it’s just the OTHER kid who’s throwing beanballs — is problematic.

Which isn’t papered over by the fact that this is about an obsessive year-long pursuit of “getting even” with the coach that cut you, and coach’s oft-berated punk son.

Kyle (Wyatt Ralff) can play any position, and short and scrawny or not, he can hit to any field and hit for power. Just don’t ask him to pitch. He won’t. There’s a secret reason why, which we can guess. Because we’ve seen more than one baseball movie in our lives.

Dad thinks his own ballplaying years were hampered by not wanting it enough, but just giving up.

“Dad, can you make sure I don’t give up?”

The family’s move from Massachusetts to Connecticut means a new school and new team for older brother Xavier (Liam Obergfoll), who hints that conflict with their “played some college ball” dad could be on the horizon.

“I think it’s about time I started paying a little more attention to girls, and a little less to baseball!”

Dad’s not having it. And the writer-director chickens out on “conflict” and lets Xavier switch his nickname to “X” and get the prettiest girl in school AND star for the baseball team AND — when he has no more time to help coach his kid brother — has a girlfriend (Lexi Collins) who blackmails him into helping the kid.

Not that Kyle needs much. Dad is a constant presence in the batting cage, at the diamond, managing the diet of his 12-year-old on a year-long quest.

“Get some protein in you…Doesn’t matter what it takes like. We’ve just gotta get it in your system. Rocky drank raw eggs!”

Dad rents an apartment in a nearby town (even though he’s a bust as a 42 year-old entry-level salesman). But gosh darn it, there’s no conflict with his wife (Jennifer Mudge), the lads’ mother. Because conflict, the stuff of drama, is confined to the diamond in this direct-to-video project.

“He’s never going to be 12 again! We have to give him a chance to live his dream!”

Hardcore Little League parents are rolling their eyes at my nitpicking over “messaging” in the movie. America isn’t really about “sportsmanship” any more. And making a professional athlete takes obsessive parents. We know that.

But while the game scenes have Little League speed to them (save for the absurd, physiology and physics-defying pitching speeds), there isn’t much pop to the way they’re filmed and edited.

Shortchanging EVERY other player on the teams save for Evil Coach (Jeremy Holm) and Evil Coach’s bean-balling, trash-talking son (Vincent Pavonetti) narrows the focus and drains the film of potential color and humor around the edges.

Somebody — the writer-director, the stage parents of a child actor kid — named their player “Truffaut” on his jersey, after the French director of the classic of traumatized childhood, “The 400 Blows.”

What’s up with that?

It’s not mocking to say writer-director Steve Grimaldi is “no Truffaut.” Because who is?

But he plainly had neither the interest nor the talent to recognize what would make this movie stand out, give the movie an edge or make this movie watchable enough to be commercial. As desperate as we all are to see a little baseball, the little baseball with a movie wrapped around it that is “Twelve” isn’t going to fill the bill.

MPAA Rating: G

Cast: Wyatt Ralff, Erik Heger, Jennifer Mudge, Liam Obergfoll, Lexi Collins and Jeremy Holm.

Credits: Written and directed by Steve Grimaldi. An Indie Rights release.

Running time: 1:32

Releasing “Planet of the Humans” on Earth Day is either an epic piece of “bad timing,” or a solitary act of defiance in the face of everything and everyone this environmental documentary opposes.

Let’s lean towards the latter. Because on a day we’ve celebrated for 50 years as “The Beginning of the End of Pollution” (the first PR campaign tag) and a signature moment when environmentalism went mainstream, maybe what we need is a good, hard shake out of our complacency.

As the Earth takes a deep breath in the COVID19 enforced collapse of fossil fuel use, here’s a movie that goes after the villains still among us — Big Oil, Big Energy, the Koch Brothers, but also the Sierra Club, environmental icon Bill McKibben, Treehugger.org, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg and Al Gore.

But but but…say WHAT now?

Michigan filmmaker Jeff Gibbs (backed by Michael Moore) posits that environmentalism has become something of a religion to much of the culture. And “our religion” has been co-opted by capitalism. We’re being led by false-prophets looking to increase tangible profits.

We’ve been sold a three card monte game that’s convincing us that magic bullets are just lying around, ready for government policies and government subsidies, to save us from ourselves. Solar? Wind? Short-term band-aids that aren’t pushing down fossil fuel use in the least.

Worst of all, this “green” energy that all the college kids, protesting for their universities to invest in after they DIVEST from oil, gas and coal — “bio-mass.”

“That’s burning forests for energy,” Gibbs narrates in between clips of college presidents hosting press events for going green (MSU, UNC, and the granddaddy college in this con, Middlebury, Vermont) and Al Gore and others trying to explain or dodge explaining how deforesting the planet will save us from climate change.

Hint. It won’t. When cynical tycoons like Branson (Virgin planes, trains etc.) and Bloomberg push it, it’s because they’ve got ground-floor investment cash tied up in timberland, government leaders willing to log forests for “wood chips” and communities lined up for “BioMass” plants, an energy fad that entails burning energy to harvest and cut down trees, and set them on fire, along with old tires, trash and other toxic wastes.

It’s our “industrial capitalist” system which is the real enemy, as Koch Brothers investment tentacles reach into every stage of “green” energy, just as surely as they back Keystone Pipelines and fracking subsidies as well.

When they own Georgia Pacific, why should we be shocked that they’re pushing for new biomass power plants? And if capitalism’s cash can get to the likes of Gore and McKibben, where will the moral authority of environmentalism move to?

Where is the Green Gandhi? Is she named Thunberg?

Gibbs, who has been on this green beat for years, is something of a monotonous on-camera interviewer — just persistent enough to come off as “dogged.”

But as he mows down the sacred cows of the Green Left — “Planet of the Humans” pummels Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and High Priest McKibben, and just eviscerates the Sierra Club — he makes a fatal filmmaking mistake his mudraker mentor should have steered him clear of.

Where’s the hope? There’s no third act “But here’s what we can do, here’s where people are doing it right.”

After seeing how wind farms are the new “mountaintop removal” energy industry (displacing coal), seeing lively, life-filled deserts reduced to lifeless sand and abandoned solar panels, getting the skinny on how the “German Renewables Miracle,” electric cars, batteries and everything else is more hype than help, we need something to cling to.

This far-ranging (choppy) doc, now on Youtube, lays out the errors in our ways and the capitalists — who range from cynics to charlatans — who are not to be trusted. But its whole “solution/action step” — in rhetorical argument terms — is “We’ve got to get down to the truth, the basic facts” before we can even begin to address this mess.

Population control, consumption control, treading more lightly? Yeah, we know that. We just don’t want to hear it. Yet. Will “Planet of the Humans” open our ears?

MPAA Rating: Disturbing images

Cast: Jeff Gibbs, Ozzie Zehner, Sheldon Solomon, Nina Jablonsky, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Al Gore, Bill McKibben

Credits: Directed by Jeff Gibbs. A Rumble Media release.

Running time: 1:40

The “Big Game” sports movie gets some welcome Caribbean in “Sprinter,” a drama about the pitfall-filled rise of a Jamaican short-distance runner.

It’s pure formula and almost pure hokum, but as everything sounds more fun in that musical Jamaican patois, it’s not an unpleasant (if overlong) sitting.

Dale Elliott plays Akeem Sharp, a runner competing in the shadow of his “legendary” older brother, a great sprinter years earlier at St. Lazarus High. He’s a big kid, but easily overlooked. He can’t win at his brother’s distance, 400 meters, to save his life.

It’s been a pleasant working class life, even though his mother (Lorraine Toussaint) left for the U.S. in the film’s opening scene. “It’s just two years,” she consoled her sons and husband (Dennis Titus). She’d be sending money home so that they can finish their house, educate their kids.

Ten years later, every call and Skype is just “Well, maybe next year.”

Older brother Germaine (Kadeem Wilson) is still around, a “legend” and maybe the wrong kind of role model. He’s the “General,” now — a flirt and skirt-chaser with an infant and a very lucrative phone “Congratulations, you’re a winner” lottery scam that he runs out of his fenced-in mansion, a new Jaguar, and a lot of bad advice.

The kid? He needs to listen to his coach (David Alan Grier), who looks at his fast-start, faster-fade 400 meter failure, and at his stopwatch, and makes a suggestion.

“You never win de four, but two? Maybe another story.”

Events conspire to force Akeem to try 200 meters. And overnight, he’s a star, “first time in de papers” the down to Earth female sprinter Kerry (Shantol Jackson) teases. “Don’ let it gooo to y’ head!”

Which of course it does — TV appearances, clubs and parties with brother Germaine. Germaine even sets him up with a previously unattainable girlfriend (Shak-Quera South).

What can go wrong? Well, all the seeds of his downfall have been planted — the absent mother, the underworld brother, the mercenary hottie.

And Akeem is sophomoric in his sophistication, even on his best days.

But how many movies do you see set in Jamaica, that tell a Jamaican story? “Sprinter” takes something the country is known for and builds a tolerably formulaic picture that looks beyond the picturesque and for the “real.”

Akeem’s nickname becomes “The Rasta Rocket,” and of course he lets that go to his head. But as he’s chasing girls and looking at U.S. track scholarship offers, we see his world — nice enough houses, with even the poorest covered with barred windows and locked gates. Guns show up more than once. Corruption and criminality are right out in the open.

People leave “The Island Paradise” for a reason.

The reggaeton-infused soundtrack doesn’t mince words and the script doesn’t shy away from teen sex, teen missteps and what happens when your hopes are pinned to the narrowest of dreams — athletics.

The cast is game enough, with Grier surprisingly effective (if not at all funny) as the coach-losing-his-patience stereotype. A standout moment comes the one time Germaine breaks out of “Jamaican” and offers a generic, white American accent delivering the empty promises he once heard, that he’s warning Akeem about hearing now.

It’s just that “Sprinter” loses what little nerve it has at about halfway through, a reminder that Hollywood versions of “The Big Game” movie have had to break the formula to gain notice.

It’s likable enough, but after breaking out of the blocks, the picture gets gassed by the midway mark. The best it can do after that is not “win” or “place,” but just “show.”

MPAA Rating:  TV-MA, sex, drugs, profanity, guns

Cast: Dale Elliott, Lorraine Toussaint, David Alan Grier, Shantol Jackson,  Shak-Quera South and Kadeem Wilson.

Credits: Directed by Storm Saulter, script by Storm Saulter and Robert A. Maylor. A FilmRise release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:51

It’s easy to make too much out of “the last role Felicity Huffman took before going to prison” with “Tammy’s Always Dying.” A dressed-down, alcoholic, depressed and promiscuous mother — constantly threatening suicide — and the impact that has on her self-loathing barmaid daughter?

“On the nose,” “martyred” and all that, right?

But the timing doesn’t work. This was in the can before the “college admissions scandal” broke in March of 2019.

Take away the “martyred Felicity Huffman” read, and “Tammy’s” a pretty humdrum affair — not awful, not that deep or showy either. It’s not Oscar bait, but there’s good work here, some sharp and intimate observations about co-dependency, pithy dialogue and a solid sense of (Canadian) place.

And if you want to interpret it as “atonement” for a minor scandal in the “rigged system” of American life, have at it.

Anastasia Phillips (quite good) is Catherine, the barmaid who leaves work needing to sleep off each shift in their little corner of Ontario. But she can’t. She’s got to go talk her drunken mother off the bridge — literally.

“You’re depressed because you’re drunk all the time,” she complains.

“No,” Tammy corrects her. “I drink because I’m depressed all the time.”

The kid lives down the street, which is handy when her mother might “stick your head in the oven at the end of every month.” Mom corrects that, too — electric, not gas.

Catherine works with one of Tammy’s exes, the still-fatherly Doug (Clark Johnson), and endures a humiliating and degrading sexual affair with married lowlife Reggie (Aaron Ashmore) consummated in store rooms or the back seat of her beater car.

Her one confidante in all this is Doug, who lets her revisit her childhood with a weekly lunch at a nice restaurant in Toronto, a chance to remember her delusional tween ballet years and escape the horrors of a suicidal, clingy mother.

Tammy’s an embarrassing, unfiltered blurter. Whatever obnoxious insult or crude come-on (to another barfly) that comes to mind comes out of her mouth.

Catherine? She’s way past “over it.”

And then Mom gets cancer. Tammy is numb to the diagnosis, and the prognosis of “months.” Catherine can’t take one more wrinkle in Mom’s all-consuming neediness.

“If she wants to die, LET HER!”  And “Killing herself would be the least selfish thing she’s ever done!”

But Doug pushes Tammy to clean up, make amends, to “go out a better woman.”

Will she? Or will Tammy still to her credo?

“I’m not a good person. I’m a good time.”

The screenplay by Joanne Sarazen kind of unravels in the third act. The struggle to find something to do with obvious bits of foreshadowing doesn’t help an overall sense of “incomplete” that hangs over the picture after its inevitable resolution.

But what is indie cinema if it doesn’t immerse you in tough lives and a working class sense of place? More scenes in the bar, as over-familiar as they are, might have helped. What movies and TV used to call “our regulars” are alcoholics, day drinkers. It’s a sad place where everybody has a sad story and a weakness.

At least director Amy Jo Johnson gives us a rare peek at that Canadian obsession for jelly donuts. You betcha.

As showy as it is meant to be, as deflating as the subject matter is, “Tammy’s Always Dying” is still worth your while. And if we want to regard this as an act of atonement, so be it. Huffman reminds us she’s a fine actress who isn’t afraid to “go there,” haggard, torn fishnets and never a hint of glamour as she hangs from a bridge or dives into a bottle or jelly donut.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Felicity Huffman, Anastasia Phillips, Clark Johnson, Aaron Ashmore and Lauren Holley.

Credits:  Directed by Amy Jo Johnson, script by Joanne Sarazen. A Quiver release.

Running Time: 1:29