Movie Nation

“Twin Flower” is a solid if static on-the-road thriller that loses its way when it stops running.

It’s a quiet character piece with little dialogue, as writer-director Laura Luchetti (“Hayfever”) throws two mismatched teens together in the half-ruined, half-empty South of her native Italy.

Anna’s (Anastasiya Bogach) is the first face we see, fleeing, looking back over her backpacked shoulder at The Bearded Man (Aniello Arena) who means her harm. He’s been bloodied, and the script makes much of being slow to unravel this mystery.

What’s he want with her, why is she so afraid and who can she turn to?

We meet Basim (Kallil Kone) as he tries to hustle up tip money in the parking lot of a local market. He’s been here long enough to speak Italian, but Basim is an undocumented migrant from the Ivory Coast. There is no work for him, and being pushy about it won’t help.

They meet when Basim intervenes in a situation that has become an Italian stereotype. Two creeps on a motorscooter make their lewd interest in her known.

“Pretty girl, all by yourself,” they start in, stating the obvious.

Wherever these two wind up going, “trust” will be Anna’s journey. A man is hunting her. Flashbacks reveal her disappointing father. She’s pretty, looks about 16 or so, and if the stereotype holds — many a male in Italy is a threat. How far can she make it on her own?

Basim stands out even more. No “papers,” no chance at work. He’s headed for “northern Europe,” and he loves to walk. How can he come up with money to feed himself and get there? Aside from accepting rides from strangers, and whatever they have in mind about his “value.”

The picture stops when they stumble into a nursery owner (Giorgio Colangeli) who could use some help. No work for you, eager-but-illegal Basim. But Anna?

Luchetti wants us to be leery of Anna taking this job, fretting over the old man’s motives. She’s slower-than-slow trusting Basim. He’s stuck, with only her money to feed them, and despairs of ever getting away.

The Bearded Man is asking around. And flashbacks show us how Anna got to that opening scene, sprinting away from a crime scene.

The revelations are slow in coming, and predictable to boot.

The two leads relate like gunshy teens, which is almost charming.

And heaven knows, we see precious little of this far-from-the-scenic side of Italy in the movies.

But “Twin Flower” is at its most intriguing when they’re on the move, at its most suspenseful when they’re trying to avoid their fate, which awaits them as soon as The Bearded Man abruptly figures out where they are.

When “Twin Flower” puts down roots — ahem — that’s when it turns pedestrian, static and dull.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, nudity, sex

Cast: Anastasiya Bogach, Kallil Kone, Aniello Arena, Giorgio Colangeli

Credits: Written and directed by Laura Luchetti.  A Film Movement release on Film Movement Plus.

Running time: 1:35

In recent years, the UFO community has relished various military and governmental agencies’ confirmation that they’ve been looking into Unidentified Flying Objects and that they’re taking the subject seriously, even releasing some credible and incredible close encounter footage to demonstrate why they’ve been looking into this.

Dr. Steven Greer, a onetime Lenoir N C emergency room physician turned widely-read and followed UFO expert, figures this is the perfect time to spike the ball in the end zone and double down on his increasingly far-out claims — that he and his followers can meditate and in essence “summon” “trans-dimensional” alien space ships, almost at will.

“Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind” is his victory-lap follow-up to 2017’s “Unacknowledged.” It’s a flurry of wild claims, dubious “experts,” Ad hominem attacks on doubt-sewers, (aka “fascist demagogues” of “the national security and media state”), clip after clip of sci-fi movies mixed in with newsreel footage. And there are cherry-picked inter-title quotes from thinkers, scientists and others — read by narrator Jeremy Piven — as well as on camera endorsements.

More than a few clips from “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast show up, none more authoritative than this one — “Watch ‘Unacknowledged.’ Watch ‘Unacknowledged.’ WATCH ‘Unacknowledged!'”

No less a luminary than Steven Tyler of Aerosmith utters that “last word” on Greer’s bonafides. A regular Algonquin Round Table, that show.

Go ahead and start your hate comment now, because kids — if you can’t see through this bulls–t, you need to update your medicine glasses.

Greer sits on a “Close Encounters” lit sound-stage in a director’s chair, wearing a tie and glasses, as if those hide how brown his eyes get every time he’s constipating a whopper.

He named his organization CESTI, to intentionally confuse it with the real-science/real scientists SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute. Full disclosure, I’ve interviewed Dr. Frank Drake, who ran SETI for years and whose “Dr.” doesn’t come from a medical career he abandoned to seek fame by spouting the fantastical.

Greer is the King of Trumpish “many people tell me,” and “a member of the military” and “a person from the Royal Family… who doesn’t want to be named” assertions.

Greer comes back later to reveal a frank discussion about the military-media-National Security State apparatus trying to prepare the world for “interplanetary war…and Force the Return of Christ,” with the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein.

So, that’s his “royal?” The “in-breeding” jokes write themselves at this point.

Plenty of people appear on camera in his film, “household names” only within the insular online world of UFOlogy. Some have credentials that impress, some most perplexingly do not.

Darn it, where’s Bob Lazar?

Greer goes on and on about “getting the Vatican and the Jesuit Brotherhood” involved in talks about how to prepare the world for accepting “We are not alone,” and fills much of the movie’s two hour running time with name-dropping.

Every political and military figure he’s ever been in the same county with he claims to have “briefed,” including “every president since Clinton.” Some have most pointedly denied ever meeting him.

All the Trump footage here hints that Greer might have “briefed” one president, and that one — the dumbest — might have taken him seriously.

Those digging into Greer’s background note the ways his “how’d you become interested in this” story has changed, becoming more fantastical and self-mythologizing with every new iteration.

His guest experts, who include physicist and “parapsychologist” (a pseudo-science) Dr. Russell Targ, play the same “keep talking, make it sound like facts” games.

“There was an unpublished experiment” one not-shaving-yet enthusiast “expert” declares. OBJECTION. Hearsay! As in, “I don’t need to prove it happened because you can’t prove it didn’t.”

The film is packed with claims about Greer’s version of The Deep State ginning up fear about what’s behind UFOs, the need for millions to meditate and “bypass the National Security State” to reach out to our sisters and brothers beyond the stars.

It’s always funny how closely these hucksters’ claims match up with science fiction cinema and TV. But sampling “Mars Attacks” the “The Twilight Zone’s” “To Serve Man” is entirely too “on the nose.” Greer is showing us his homework.

“Close Encounters” goes out of its way to discredit earlier “tin-foil hat” (one interview subject uses that phrase) fad claims of alien abductions, “faked” by the government, of course.Take THAT Whitley Strieber!

But the film offers ZERO evidence that the after-the-colon half of its title, “Contact Has Begun,” is happening. What’s more, that “fifth” type of “Close Encounter,” that pro-active human contact where humans do the reaching out (another BS invention by Greer) is never supported by anything we can see or verify in the documentary.

For a fun sidebar, Google “Dr Steven Greer” and “Fraud.” Even some of the Faithful find his pricey little meditation seminars eye-opening in ways they did not want to see.

The actual video “sighting” evidence, which is given short shrift (montages, mostly), is fascinating — although too much of it has the audio of tipsy, foul-mouthed rednecks overheard on the tape as they’re filming it. Still, you don’t have to drink the Kool-Aid to to buy into the notion that “the Truth is Out There.”

But when you’ve got Jeremy Piven narrating “Certain scientists have known that ‘The Force’ is real…for a very long time,” you see through the nonsense. Every other sentence out of Piven’s or Greer’s mouth begs for a “Oh give me a BREAK.”

Whatever “proof” finally comes out, it won’t be the book, video, “seminar” and meditation-CD-selling Greer who summons a space ship into hovering over the Rose Bowl. And none of the needy fringe figures in his circle will be adjudicators of that “Truth.”

My money’s on David Duchovny spilling the beans.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Dr. Steven Greer, Daniel Sheehan, Adam Michael Curry, Joe Martino, Dr. Russell Targ, that dude from Blink 182

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Mazzola. A 1091 release.

Running time: 2:00

Jose doesn’t look out of place, hanging in “The Bar,” having a drink and playing cards with the boys.

The goatee may make him stand out. And the fact that we never see him smile. Not ever.

He’s tight with the family that runs the place, Juanjo and Pili. He’s more than welcome at their little girl’s first communion party. And then there’s Juanjo’s sister, Ana. She’s working class sexy, and the way he looks at her suggests not so much smitten as obsessed.

He asks questions of her and about her. Lots of them.

Ruggedly handsome or not, why would she ever pay him any mind? Her old man is in prison, but their conjugal visits are…enthusiastic. He’s about to get out, an eight year sentence for being a getaway driver for a failed jewelry store robbery.

And again, Jose never ever smiles.

He carries a lot on his mind and in his heart. His daily visits to his father, in extended care on a ventilator show that. But as we saw that failed bank robbery in the opening scene, we wonder.

“The Fury of a Patient Man” is a tight, graphically violent Spanish revenge thriller, a story about playing the long game — learning, meeting, ingratiating yourself with people you need in a world you’re not familiar with.

It’s not about some “ex Special Forces” man “with very particular skills,” a favorite crutch of lazy screenwriters and fans of “Taken” and every movie Jason Statham ever made. Jose (Antonio de la Torre) isn’t the bravest man. He’s not the toughest. He is not a man of violence.

But he’s smart, willing to take a rebuff, a slap or even a beating if it gets him to where he wants to be.

His deal, when he finally offers it, is blunt and simple — a threat delivered to a much tougher man.

“Help me to find them, and make sure nothing happens to me first.”

De la Torre, of TV’s “The Night Manager,” wears that one squinting scowl, from the first scene to the last. Jose has guile and can mask his feelings. But there’s no pretending he’s having a good time.

Ruth Díaz suggests a kind of joyless, calculating working mom. Perhaps she’ll ditch the soon-to-be-ex-con for this man who seems to have more going on.

And Luis Callejo, as Curro, the getaway driver, has pent-up fury of his own — survival skills, a willingness to commit violence, and not flinch when others do.

Actor turned director Raúl Arévalo, who also wrote the script, keeps the viewer wondering where this is going, how it all will pay off.

The violence is shocking, even when we see it coming, even as we watch Jose do the math on how it’s about to play out. There’s nothing here that someone with no “history of violence” could not do. But will he?

I wasn’t thrilled with de la Torre’s one-note performance, but at least it’s defensible. Can he go through with this after dining with this family, chatting with the spouses and small children of those he is stalking?

And Arévalo himself shows the patience of a much more experienced storyteller. “Fury” gives up its secrets slowly and immerses us in the “gipsy” music, unpretentious bars, ancient, treeless streets of small town southern Spain (once the characters leave Barrio de Usera, Madrid).

The payoff is a superior thriller of a well-worn genre, a thriller with limited action but well worth watching in Spanish (with English subtitles) or dubbed — perfectly Netflixable.

Cast: Antonio de la Torre, Luis Callejo, Ruth Díaz and Raúl Jiménez

Credits: Directed by Raúl Arévalo, script by Raúl Arévalo and David Pulido. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Aliens? In LA? Go figure.

May.

A juvenile in jeopardy, impressively dark and gloomy production values and a leading lady who delivers bug-eyed alarm with the best of them give “Dark Light” a fighting chance.

It’s a creature feature with a silly but scary enough “creature concept (by Aaron Sims) and a few good jolts trapped in a dumb and desultory plot. I can’t say it wholly comes off, but it’s a far piece from a total write-off. Genre fans could dig it.

A single set dominates it — a spooky old frame farmhouse in Mississippi, cloaked in fog and gloom, the place where post-“nervous breakdown” Annie (Jessica Madsen) grew up, the place that her mother was dragged from on her way to a mental hospital.

But when your husband’s cheating on you, where else do you take your little girl (Opal Littleton) to start over? That creepy unused elevator? That moved granny up and down the stairs. That scratching in the wall? Yeah, me too.

Those too-bright lights out in the cornfield? Teenagers with halogen spotlights? Nah.

The kid is being pursued by something which only an Internet visit can (insanely) explain. There’s a lot of lights and scratching, biped figures only glimpsed in a “Signs” sense, an “expert (Gerald Tyler)” who thinks he knows what’s going on and a lot of blood and mayhem and shotgun shooting before that inevitable confrontation.

“Annie, put the gun down.”

“Sheriff, you don’t understand.”

They never do. Never ever.

It’s a humorless fright fest with corpses, mildly-impressive effects, a Big League string orchestra score and sturdy work by Madsen (“Leatherface”) in the lead.

She doesn’t give us panic, just fright. The weeping moments don’t sell the picture. And not giving anybody anything cool or clever quippish to say robs her performance, and those in support, of any “pop” the picture might have had.

But as creature features go, any given weekend we can say “Hey, I’ve seen worse.”

MPAA Rating: Unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Jessica Madsen, Opal Littleton, Ed Brody, Kristina Clifford, Gerald Tyler

Credits: Written and directed by Padraig Reynolds.  A Zee Studios/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

If only every comedy had the surprise twist that the Czech road picture “Winter Flies” saves for its finale.

It’s simple, and simple-minded, and it so upends expectations that it leaves you the way every comedy should — tickled.

It’s about two dorky teens sprinting across the country in a stolen late-model Audi. They’re headed…somewhere. To France? Or maybe some place Heduš (Jan Frantisek Uher) can “join the French Foreign Legion.”

Why? When we meet him he’s covered in camo, paintball-sniping passing cars. He may be plump and clumsy, but he’s a good shot. Besides, he tells Mára (Tomás Mrvík), the slightly older friend he flags down in that Audi, “they don’t ‘bully’ in the Legion.”

Kid’s seen a few movies, but how he missed the ones with all the Legion bullying going on remains a mystery.

Their trip is an odyssey interrupted by a series of flash-forwards. Mára’s been caught, and a couple of cops (Lenka Vlasáková and Martin Pechlát). He won’t spill his name or hometown. But by Václav Havel, he has a tale to tell.

Mára’s more mature. Or at least he seems that way. Heduš is downright childish.

They hit the open road, dodge the big cities and stop to ditch their phones so that they’re not tracked. They’ve both seen those movies.

Along the way, they’re hassled by some creep who proceeds to try and drown the dog they refuse to take off his hands, they practically kidnap a pretty hitchhiker (Eliska Krenková) and try to impose their crude, childish notions of sexuality upon her and Mára tells tales of his beloved grandpa, who taught him “to drive before I could walk.”

The cops, who are dishonest, faintly corrupt and homophobic (“Are you a ‘tranny’ in training?”) decide he’s got “an active imagination and a sentimental side” (in Czech, with English subtitles). But we can see that.

At every step of the way, we fear for them. With Heduš’ ungainly cluelessness and Mára’s misguided confidence, what else could we do?

We know it all came to an unexpected end. One kid’s being grilled by the police. But it isn’t until that ending arrives that we see how unexpected it is.

“Winter Flies” — the title is a snowy insect metaphor — is short, sweet, kind of crude but always to the point. That’s the thing about road comedies. Even when they’re meandering, it’s never an aimless wandering. They’re always taking you somewhere, and in this case, it’s a destination you never see coming.

MPAA Rating: unrated, crude language, sexual content, animal cruelty

Cast: Tomás Mrvík, Jan Frantisek Uher, Eliska Krenková, Lenka Vlasáková

Credits: Directed by Olmo Omerzu, script by Petr Pýcha. A Film Movement release on Film Movement Plus, Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:21

, Jan Frantisek Uher, Eliska Krenková, Lenka Vlasáková

Credits: Directed by Olmo Omerzu, script by Petr Pýcha. A Film Movement release on Film Movement Plus, Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:23

The portrait of the Hasidic community that’s emerged in films paint it as an insular, secretive and virulently patriarchal cult — a combination of the worst theocratic fundamentalism of the Amish, Islam and Mormonism.

Documentaries such as “93 Queen” capture the vicious, bullying pushback Hasidic New York women faced for starting a female ambulance service (Hasidic men run their own private ambulances, serving the community). “Disobedience” dramatized women struggling with their sexuality in a culture of arranged marriages and rigid intolerance of the very idea of same-sex attraction.

Netflix’s “One of Us” tries to add something new to the conversation by showing the experiences of three members who left New York’s politically powerful and influential Ultra Orthodox community.

It’s as damning as most such portraits have been, though hardly representative and on occasion, somewhat deceptive.

Ari Hershkowitz was a teenager when he discovered the Internet, which we see Hasidic leaders railing against in public appearances. Stumbling through the world of knowledge — and opinion — there opened Ari’s eyes to options outside the dictatorial theocracy of his community.

“Wikipedia was a gift from God.”

He didn’t leave Judaism or the city, but he faced shunning by his family and former friends, something he’s young enough to be surprised by (plenty of Internet info on this “circle the wagons” mentality) and naive enough to remain hurt by. In a couple of scenes, we see him insistently questioned by various older men, empowered by Hasidic privilege, in public, about his choice. They wonder how he could have made it.

Luzer Twersky is an actor who talks about “living a double life” after marrying at 19, having two children and struggling in a supportive (clannish hiring practices, financial aid) but suffocating world where he knew he didn’t fit in.

He comes off as superficial and self-absorbed. He’s had roles on “Transparent” and in films But he has no contact with his former life, former wife or children.

The most troubling portrait is the one of Etty Ausch and her struggles against the financial, legal and bullying might of the collective, just to gain a divorce from an abusive husband and take custody of the seven children she had in their twelve year marriage.

The connective thread to these “cases” is the organization that tried to help all three — a “survivors” support and assistance organization called Footsteps.

Etty, who attends group therapy meetings and tells her story, and who strategizes with counselor and former Hasid Chani Getter in the film, is their toughest case.

Getter attributes the fund-raising that Hasidic leaders authorized, the stalking and threats (911 calls are heard) and “massive resistance” to her case to an attempt to “make an example of her” tied to the movement’s post-Holocaust “mission” to be fruitful and multiply and repopulate The Chosen people.

Her they hate and they don’t want any other women — watched, overseen and slaves to husbands who demand children — to get the idea they can escape. But they are hellbent on keeping her kids.

“One of Us” veers between the mildly unpleasant experiences of the two men portrayed to the infuriating treatment Etty endures. A team of high-priced lawyers and a stunningly biased judge (we only see court transcripts, and hear no names) are a lot for a woman who never learned a marketable skill, with no financial support, to fight.

The virulence of the legal, social and personal attacks are alarming and are presented as perhaps representative of what a woman has to go through to escape.

But Etty has since come out as gay and told interviewers that scenes of her “with my girlfriend” were cut from the film. Her transformation, post-divorce, includes a buzz cut and lots of piercings and even though we see no signs of a new support system, viewers could run with the assumptions the film invites us to make.

Omitting that detail, given the community’s homophobic reputation, is cheating.

The movie’s narrow focus — just these three and Footsteps counselor Getter – limits the portrait that’s painted and leaves us with questions about its accuracy. Which, it turns out, are justified.

No lawyer could weigh in on what it’s like to face the limitless resources of this community (which is but one of a group of sects labeled “Ultra Orthodox” and “Hasidic”)? No psychologists or outside critics could make the comparison of the born-in-the-18th-century group to religious extremist/fundamentalists in other religions?

These sins of omission weigh on “One of Us,” even though most viewers will have had enough exposure to journalism and other films to fill in some of the blanks.

We expect documentaries to tell us the ugly, unvarnished truth, although that’s generally a futile hope and a goal rarely achieved. In this case, selective editing stigmatizes its heroine and avoids the more interesting wrinkles in the story, which — difficult as it was to tell — feels incomplete.

Cast: Etty Ausch. Luzer Twersky, Ari Hershkowitz , Chani Getter

MPAA Rating: unrated

Credits: Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

With its sequel, “Peninsula,” in the can and slated for release whenever the REAL viral invasion lets up (Fall?), I guess I’d best catch up on “Train to Busan,” the movie that inspired it.

“Train to Busan” (2016) didn’t reinvent the zombie genre or best “World War Z” and make anybody forget that zombies have been utterly beaten to death (tee-hee) by the Sons and Daughters of George A. Romero when it came out.

But it bested most zombie stories in its humor, pathos and novel setting. An outbreak explodes out of a lab in the Exotic East. A KTX bullet train departs for points South just as the TV news catches up to a calamity exploding across the “peninsula.” And on board, a collection of character archetypes.

Who gets to live, who will perish and how many of the Walking, Stumbling, Jerky Dead will they take down with them when they do?

Two things stand out, catching up to this 2016 release in the middle of a real-not-sci/fi pandemic. One is the general simplicity of Sang-ho Yeon’s film. Zombies can be created with effects or performances, and this one leans heavily on actors mastering that angular, herky-jerky, head-snapped-back lurch, the blank-eyed foaming at the blood-spattered mouth fury. Couple that to pixelated movement — deleting frames to accentuate the jerkiness (an “in camera effect,” in essence) and you’ve got convincing menace, peril that comes from a recognizably “human” monster.

Nothing digital about it. The waves of people, the flood of zombie-lemmings tumbling out of a train station window, are real. None of this animated “World War Z” ants piling up in front of Israeli walls.

And the second stand-out trait, seeing this in the middle of an epidemic that Korea responded to and the Trump Sycophancy did not, is the pathos. Many a movie in the genre has focused on parents and doomed children, or vice versa. The more recent turn towards “zombies have feelings too” — an unfortunate outgrowth of films like “Warm Bodies” and the endless “Zombies Went Down to Georgia” TV series — is ignored.

“Train to Busan” has a distracted, workaholic divorced dad (Yoo Gong) forced to pay closer attention to his “I want my mommy” daughter (Su-an Kim).

There’s the bickering teen couple (Sohee and Woo-sik Choi) traveling with their high school baseball team.

The very-pregnant wife (Yu-mi Jung) who bitches about her “idiot” muscle-head husband (Dong-seok Ma).

We see doting, elderly sisters, efficient and courteous conductors, stewards and stewardesses, and that one “Save my own skin, SCREW you all” fat cat conservative (Eui-sung Kim).

They’ve all missed the hints, the warnings. Maybe they caught the first news reports. Little Soo-an saw crowds gathering around some incident at the train station as they were departing.

Mr. Suh (Gong) got alerts from his office about a “strike” at a facility his firm is invested in.

“I’ll be back before lunch,” he says (in Korean with English subtitles).

And nobody saw the staggering, bloodied coed who slipped onto the train, her veins blackening, her eyes not-quite the pale while of the infected.

But within minutes of leaving the station, the rail car’s TV screens start to tip them off. Their phones ring. The conductors make “please return to your seats” and “we WON’T be stopping” at the next city announcements.

All hell breaks loose, and it’s a brawl — car by car, row by row — with passengers stunned into shock, then forced into action. There’s improvising, do-it-yourself tactics, name-calling and figuring out who you can trust in a pinch.

The “idiot” husband makes up a nickname for Mr. Suh, who almost locks him and his pregnant wife out of the “safe” compartment —“Hangmum.”

But the father and the father-to-be need each other if they’re going to protect the little girl and the pregnant wife. Who cares if “Hangmum!” is how the guy tells at you, calls to you and begs for your help?

There’s a cynicism about government that plays as doubly ironic now — officials in yellow emergency service jackets asking citizens to “Please refrain from reacting to baseless rumors…To the best of our knowledge, you safety is NOT in jeopardy. TRUST the government.”

A government whose competence you can trust is what spared South Korea what Italy, Spain and the United States are enduring.

The set-pieces here are better than average for the genre — a tidal wave of troops in camo turned zombies overrunning a train station, a furious “Old Boy” charge through zombie-infested passenger cars.

As I say, “Busan” doesn’t reinvent the zombie movie so much as make it work well enough that you buy in — good performances, a nice selection of moments of “sacrifice,” the usual “What are they THINKING?” twists.

But I was surprised at how touching a couple of moments were, delighted by how badass some of the action beats played out, the suspense of some moments and vicarious fury of others.

There’s not much room within the genre for invention and novelty, something that works against “Busan” and hangs over “Peninsula,” pre-release.

The “rules” vary from picture to picture, but one new “what separates us from them” pays off, and we can only hope “Peninsula” remembers it.

Zombies don’t sing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, gory, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Yoo Gong, Yu-mi Jung, Dong-seok Ma, Su-an Kim , Eui-sung Kim

Credits: Directed by Sang-ho Yeon, script by Joo-Suk Park, Sang-ho Yeon A Well Go release on Tubi, Amazon Prime, elsewhere

Running time: 1:57

The school monitors treat the morning Meet and Greet with the kids as an insult contest.

Unstylish back pack? Just make sure your “parachute” doesn’t open in the middle of class.

Asian kid’s late? Don’t they have buses in “Chinatown?” And “I think he made my (sneaker) shoes!”

The kids are a non-violent collection of smart alecks and misfits, the cutest punks this side of “West Side Story.” Even their insults are adorable — “Corn eater” for a Black kid, “You bunch of kebobs” and “dirty Arab” for the Algerians.

Welcome to middle school, 9th grade, in Saint-Denis, that troubled northern suburb of Paris where many a French crime drama is set, but also the home to “School Life,” a French “Dangerous Minds” that is more comic than “Dangerous.”

It’s the where the new school counselor, Samia Zibra (Zita Hanro) would like to make her mark. We see the school year through her eyes. She’s not fresh out of school, but the tidal wave of French education acronyms — PEZ, PEN, NEC and the French SAT (BAC) — are defined for her, and us, during morning faculty meetings.

They joke about the pathologically tardy pathological liar Farid…”On my mother’s life…” or this Miss Goody-two-shoes or that miscreant.

Everybody’s favorite “problem” student is Yanis (Liam Pierron), a mouthy 15 year-old who is blowing the “key year” of his education. Ninth grade, freshman year, is when your educational course is set — college track, trades, or “assembling furniture for IKEA.” Yanis insults teachers, always quick “with a comeback,” stares out the window and gives the impression that he’s smart but too cool to care.

Like Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in “Dangerous Minds,” Ms. Zibra isn’t fresh out of college and naive. She is fighting fires, just like everybody else — a daily parade of ill-mannered, whiny, interrupting and tuned-out teens who have to be managed, re-directed and brought to their Go Big or Go Home moment.

She’s as ready as anybody else to give up on Yanis, although not as ready as the “You look like Van Gogh!” history teacher, Thierry, who hates him. But running into him after school one day makes her take an interest. His random “change the subject” interruptions convince her that he’d be a natural for film school.

In the U.S., only lazy rich kids with ADHD get into film school.  Vive la dif·fé·rence!

Everything seen here seems derivative of a hundred Hollywood “school” dramas and comedies, with novel French touches. If the kids’ abuse of the history teacher (Antoine Reinartz) doesn’t stop, “I’ll do what everyone ELSE does, take a leave of absence.”

The PE teacher is bored with conventional sports. He teaches Roller Football (soccer), kids kicking a ball, and each other, on skates. What could go wrong?

One faculty member protects his student drug connection from discipline, the music teacher discovers a rap prodigy in the middle of his class’s “Learn to play the recorder” months (in the US, that’s an early elementary school instrument).

The parent-counselor/teacher meetings are funny and biting. Ms. Zibra is appalled when a father first learns of his son’s tendency to get up in class and show off by dancing. “DANCE for ME, SHOW me!” No no, Ms. Zibra, LET him show Dad his go-to stunt. It’s humiliating and funny, and in spite of her “humanist” discipline bent, we sense it’ll be effective.

But with every brief and melodramatic off-campus dalliance in a student or Ms. Zibra’s home life, “School Life” points out what a long and wildly uneven movie experience it is.

No matter what your French skills, I’d suggest watching it dubbed into English, with the subtitles on. Both translations add to the hilarity. The subtitled insults are colorful and distinctly French. They’re dirtied up with extra profanity for the dubbed soundtrack. And kids bickering about soccer stars are dubbed into have Kevin Garnett NBA debates.

Seriously?

The biggest problem with the picture is obvious in my choice of photos parked at the top of the review. I NEVER post ad images from a film, but Netflix makes this point graphically in the picture on the left. Girls are all but INVISIBLE in this movie — a good student here, an empathetic busybody (“You don’t know what Lamine is GOING through!”) there.

The only female student in this sexist enterprise to get her own session with the school counselor is the one who dresses “like a whore” whose mother shows up in a short-shorter-shortest skirt flashing cleavage.

So I won’t recommend “School Life” on its meager merits. It’s derivative, uneven, clumsy and absurdly sexist. But educators, stuck at home, will get a few laughs out of the differences and universalities of middle school, over here and over there.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Zita Hanrot, Liam Pierron, Soufiane Guerrab, Moussa Mansal, Alban Ivanov

Credits: Written and directed by Mehdi Adir and Grand Corps Malade. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:52

How many theaters will close? How many promising films will wind up move to 2021?

From The Hollywood Reporter –“If theaters are closed for three months, domestic grosses may struggle to hit $7 billion, a 20-year-plus low.” https://t.co/ReHNvED9jz https://twitter.com/THR/status/1249141270724960259?s=20