Movie Nation

You could never blame Holly Hunter for not working as much as we’d like.

She could pick a series, here and there, voice Elastigirl in two “Incredibles” movies, show up in tiny but sparkling supporting turns in “The Big Sick” and take a swing at the odd indie drama with promise (“Manglehorn”).

But the glory of her Oscar-winning years, when she was the dazzling muse of James Brooks (“Broadcast News”), the Coens (“Raising Arizona,””O Brother Where Art Thou”), Jane Campion (“The Piano”) and playwright Beth Henley (“Miss Firecracker”) was always going to prove impossible to cling to.

The writing set a high standard, the parts were meatier and the novelty of her rarely-hidden drawl made her work stand out, aside from the fact she was doing the most translucent, beatific acting of the ’80s and 90s. Aging is always tougher on an actress’s career, but in her case working less pointed to a Hollywood and indie cinema that just wasn’t getting the job done in terms of screenwriting.

Like late-career Bette Davis, her career tells us she’s a woman out of her time.

“Strange Weather” has the feel of a vintage Hunter vehicle — a quirky Southern story, a hint of Southern Gothic in the tragedy hanging over it, an intelligent, desirable character pushing 60, a woman still impulsive, temperamental and testy.

But writer-director Katherine Dieckmann lets her down. And every so often, Hunter lets Dieckmann down — showing little of the flash of her best work, out-acted in a couple of scenes, unable to animate recycled cliches, nothing special in an utterly generic, obvious and blase road trip dramedy.

She plays Darcy Walker, an admissions clerk at a tiny Georgia college in her hometown, no college degree but smarter than that, rail thin and overly fond of her duct-taped-together Ford pickup and cowgirl hat, cigarettes and drinking alone.

Carrie Coon positively glows as her best friend and cross-the-street neighbor, a co-conspirator in their late-night gardening binges, probably “an actual lesbian (living with a colleague), but maybe just dabbling.”

Kim Coates of TV’s “Sons of Anarchy” and “Bad Blood” is the bar owner with whom Darcy has had an on-again, off-again fling that’s lasted for years. But she keeps him at arm’s length.

Darcy’s not overly-concerned that layoffs are coming at GPU, sort of adrift and without purpose. Then a chance encounter with a guy (Turner Crumbley) she knew as a kid rattles her. We learn Darcy had a son. He’s dead. And a college classmate has gotten rich down in New Orleans running a make-your-own-hot-dog franchise that sounds like her late son’s college business class pitch.

There’s nothing for it but to start digging around in the past she has avoided grappling with, asking questions about son Walker’s last days of those who knew him — stoners, roomies, pals.

There’s nothing for it but taking a little road trip down to the Big Easy to confront the scoundrel.

Darcy meets up with young men from her son’s past, and an old man from her own. Glenne Headly, whose career was hemmed in much the way Hunter’s has been, plays an old drinking buddy.

It took Dieckmann five years to pull together the financing for this indie, filmed mostly in small town Mississippi. Imitation Faulkner and Beth Henley is a harder sell than telling a story about women of a certain age.

Her film is a predictable rehash of road picture cliches — any excuse to take “backroads” — and imitation Faulkner Southernisms, with lines about having to “yield to your indomitable will” and “You do know it’s my job to protect you from you?” and that trite Southern literary trope about how a chance encounter or coincidence means the dead are “calling to me” give away the writer-director’s game.

Her son’s “issues” with his mama similarly feel small when freighted with so much import.

“He wanted things to be normal!”

“NORMAL is over-RATED!”

Hunter does what she can with these lines, and the character. Coon gets the picture’s big speeches and best moments. And none of it, including the “dramatic” climax, amounts to a hill of beans, as we say down here. Beans we’ve seen and cooked too many times to count, beans we’ve been served too often to find anything novel or tasty in them.

MPAA Rating: R for a scene of sexuality

Cast: Holly Hunter, Carrie Coon, Kim Coates, Glenne Headly and Turner Crumbley

Credits: Written and directed by Katherine Dieckmann. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

Rare is the combat film that’s as awful, and instantly-so, as “Rogue Warfare,” a thriller as inept as its clunky title.

It begins with a poorly-accented diatribe by the Supreme Leader (Essam Ferris) of a new terror cell called “The Black Mask.”

But Supreme Leader’s mask looks like last season’s sale at Victoria’s Secret. It’s a damned veil, and his whole getup is borderline hijab — feminine. When you’ve wrapped your villain in ninja black with a veil, it’s all downhill from there. And having him go on and on and on about “Your world despises us” to a video camera, asking rhetorical questions (again, in English) about “What pushes my meter?”

Give the guy a lisp and this could be a pre-“woke” comedy.

His followers raid a village, take prisoner the one villager who shoots several of their number, and pointlessly gives him the “You’re either with me or against me” speech, when he knows and we know and the victim knows he’s just going to shoot him and his entire family.

Veteran heavy Stephen Lang makes a car payment for showing up to pen a letter and narrate it in interior monologue (Didn’t even have to memorize lines!) as the president launching Project Rogue.

The script has Trumpian alliance-with-our-enemies overtones, as it includes China and Russia in this international commando team sent to hunt Black Mask and Diana Ross and the Supremes Leader.

The firefights feature digital blood bursts, the dialogue is leftover from 432 previous combat pictures — EVERY guy ever shot in action is told “Look at me! STAY with ME!” — and there’s Chris Mulkey, another veteran heavy, wearing three stars and sending this crack corps into combat.

Some of these dudes don’t appear to have ever held a firearm, and can’t fake it convincingly even when they know the camera is on them.

It’s rubbish, start to finish. And bless their hearts, I see they’ve got a sequel in the works.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout

Cast: Will Yun Lee, Jermaine Love, Katie Keene, Essam Ferris, Rory Markham, Fernando Chien, Stephen Lang and Chris Mulkey

Credits: Written and directed by Mike Gunther.  A Saban Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

How far will you go into a series, limited or otherwise, before committing to it, heart, soul and investment in time?

Because pandemic or not, storytelling in the “Binge TV” era has a couple of common traits that a savvy viewer makes before punching in Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, Topic, etc.

The pace of storytelling is geologically slow. Series creators have become quite profligate with the viewers’ time. And hand-in-glove with that glacial pacing is a “less is more” sort of storytelling that resists the urge to put a lot of action or incidents into each episode, or to get to the point with any sense of urgency.

“Tales from the Loop,” a new series from the fellow behind “Legion,” was  inspired by paintings by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, dated looking slice-of-life images that showed kids playing in the ruins of an alt-history ’80s sci-fi dystopia — derelict robots, abandoned spacecraft or hi-tech labs.

It plays like a TV series inspired by paintings. Striking to look at — pretty. Static. Austere. Slow.

Creator Nathaniel Halpern (“Outcast” and “Resurrection” are his other pertinent credits) is reaching for that mystery that the audience will latch onto more than characters we connect with and who bring us back.

“Loop,” basically eight stand-alone sci-fi “tales” set in an Ohio town, circa 1979, is about a place where life is impacted by an underground “loop” — think CERN, particle colliders or some such.

The director of MOEP — the Mercer Ohio Experimental Physics lab — is Russ (Jonathan Pryce), who pitches their work and its impact on this place as creating things we know to be impossible, “and yet, there they are.” He repeats that claim to his grandson (Duncan Joiner). We don’t have to hear discussions of time travel, multiverses and the like to feel or speculate that this is what he’s talking about. Science fiction?

“I prove its possible.”

Thus, episodes tamper with mortality, revisiting your younger self via some magical fluke of “The Eclipse,” a huge ball-gadget buried within the confines of the vast underground complex.

We sense little urgency in any of these stories, nothing particularly sinister either. Only the atl-tech ’80s weirdness of “The Loop” connects it to “Stranger Things,” “Black Mirror” or the granddaddy of weird-for-weird’s-sake TV, “Twin Peaks.”

Yes, there might be a mystery to be solved, and it’s to do with this place and the work that that makes a little girl’s mother (and her house) disappear. Or was it ever there at all?

What’s with that mechanical hand Cole’s father (Paul Schneider) sports?

What does Russ’s daughter (Rebecca Hall) know about what’s going on, what’s to come and how is she able to figure out what’s up with the girl and the missing mom in a flash?

And did they really cast the great Jane Alexander, fly her to Winnipeg and give her nothing more than breakfast, babysitting and gardening scenes (with almost no dialogue)?

All of which circles me back around to that fundamental question, is it worth the eight hours it’ll take to binge this beast into submission?

Taking into account different strokes for different folks, I know that SOME people got more out of “Little Fires,” SOME are still chewing on “Ozark” (1.5 seasons for me, enough), and some head-cases are still investing in “Walking Dead,” etc.

I love the genre, and if I was looking for a theatrical film analog to “Tales from the Loop,” it would be “Another Earth,” a chill, austere and faintly creepy feature starring indie darling Brit Marling.

Did you see it? Think that would be worth eight hours of your viewing life? There you go.

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Jonathan Pryce. Jane Alexander, Paul Schneider

Credits: Created by Nathaniel Halpern, episodes directed by Jodie Foster, Andrew Stanton, So Yong Kim, Ti West, Mark Romanek, with Matt Reeves (“Cloverfield”) amoong the producers. etc.

Running time: 8 episodes @50 minutes each.

A winsome young caregiver, a spooky old house.

What might be afoot in this May 22 release?

Ned Kelly is Australia’s Jesse James, a pioneer-era outlaw hero (to some) and icon of Aussie defiance, independence and Old West-style violence. He robbed and murdered his way to infamy, led a revolt against British oppression and wrote, in essence, his own myth and eulogy with his “Jelrilderie Letter.”

So it’s no wonder he’s deeply carved into the ex-prison colony’s national identity and Aussie machismo. He’s been depicted on films since the birth of Australian cinema. And now, half a century after rocker Mick Jagger played him and 40 years after the semi-official end of punk, he gets a cross-dressing punk rock treatment in “True History of the Kelly Gang” from, of all people, the director of “Assassin’s Creed.”

Justin Kurzel promises a bleak, unblinking depiction of what created Kelly — the wasteland, the family history (Kelly’s Irish father was a criminal “transported” to the colony in the mid-19th century) and political climate — an emerging sense of “Aussie” and an unending antipathy for “those pommy bastards,” the British.

The film, based on the historically bastardized novel (by Peter Carey) of the same title, is a grim and uneven slog — visual flourishes, inspired casting that leads to a few brilliant performances, and an exhausting mid-section that halts the action and shortchanges the “career” of the outlaw (“bushrangers,” they called them) and his army.

The flashes of action early thin out during the later acts, returning for the operatic violence of the finale, when Kelly’s armor-plated “army” faced off with an army of the law.

If North Americans know anything about Kelly, it’s that — Jesse James facing his final shootout behind iron plates and a neo-Medieval helmet.

“True History” begins in an ugly childhood, with an ineffectual and lawless father and more importantly his willful, raging mother (Essie Davis of “The Babadook”). Ellen Kelly’s awfully fond of the phrase “real man,” as in “there’s no REAL man” in the territory (Victoria) to stand up to the outrages facing the family, the liberties she lets the British constable (Charlie Hunnam) take under Ned’s dad’s own roof.

She’s the one who “sells” the boy, once his dad has taken the rap for castle rustling young Ned (Orlando Schwerdt) has carried out to feed the family. She’s the one who orders him, “You go out there and be a big man. You go out there and show the world!”

Russell Crowe makes Ned’s mentor, the bushranger Harry Power, a grandfatherly type fond of his pipe, and determined to make the kid over in how own violent image.

“I’ve told your mother ‘No one can ride with me if they can’t pull the trigger!'”

George Mackay (“1917”) becomes the fearsome and wild-eyed Ned as an adult, forming his gang, accepting their decision (passed down from his father, it is implied) to disguise themselves as women when the need arises.

It’s here that the movie staggers and halt, with Kelly’s odd connection to another constable (Nicholas Hoult), his mother’s imprisonment and his romantic tie to the prostitute Mary Hearn (Thomasin McKenzie of “JoJo Rabbit”).

The film only picks up with its finale, and even that grand, murderous and visually stunning spectacle is somewhat spoiled by a preachy epilogue.

Kelly’s brainstorm about armor plating himself has two sources, according to “True History” — an armor plated (anachronistically so) shack that Power hid out in, and Kelly’s exposure to images of the U.S.S. Monitor, “impregnable” ironclad of the U.S. Civil War.

Mackay’s heated performance is matched by Davis and Crowe in its intensity. Everybody else is having a vamp, especially Hoult and Hunnam, with Hunnam so deep into whatever accent he’s doing that he needs subtitles.

An exception? Young Ms. McKenzie, unconvincing and not particularly compelling, perhaps driven by second thoughts about playing a “low woman” in the picture featuring her first nude scene.

But if that’s the case, she’s not alone in losing her nerve. The film’s daring, its rock-scored punk vibe (Crowe sings, singer Marlon Williams has a role and a song, and rocker Nick Cave’s son is in the cast), the whole “run with the cross-dressing” myth, suggests a picture a lot more challenging and history-upending than Kurzel, in the end, delivers.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence throughout, bloody images, pervasive language, sexual content and some nudity

Cast: George Macay, Essie Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Nicholas Hoult, Earl Cave, Marlon Williams, Charlie Hunnam and Russell Crowe

Credits: Directed by Justin Kurzel, script by Shaun Grant based on the Peter Carey novel. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:05

His feature film writing and directing debut, “Dean,” didn’t end stand-up comic, TV writer and sometime-actor Demetri Martin’s career. But truth be told, I had to look up who the dude was after watching it.

It’s a lifeless, nearly laughless rom-com about grief (kind of) which cast its well-over-40 star as a thirtyish cartoonist looking for love after losing his mother. And whatever assorted off-brand film festivals said about “Dean” and Demetri in it, he’s way out of his depth.

He has the title role, a pen-and-ink cartoonist of “The New Yorker” school, suffering writer’s block and avoiding his widowed dad (Kevin Kline).

But they’re both kind of dodging the grieving process. Dean’s mom died a withering death (we gather), Dean gave up on his fiancé and has gone fetal without curling up in a ball.

Dad? He’s an engineer. He’s working this loss “like a problem to be solved” — reading self-help books, seeing a therapist, but shut-down.

The phone-call dodging can only go on so long. But when they reconnect, they don’t — reconnect.

Dad strains to make jokes about the kid’s ’70s bowl cut — “I haven’t seen your forehead in 15 years.” He says the sorts of awful screenwriting cliches parents say after a break-up.

“I always liked Michelle (Christine Woods). You guys were good together.”

“You should see us apart.”

Dean struggles through his best friend’s wedding, where he has to accept that a boorish dolt has been promoted to “co-best man.” And avoiding Dad’s calls as he preps to sell the New York home Dean grew up in requires extreme measures. He has to fly to LA for an ad agency meeting over using his drawings for a viral body spray campaign.

Beck Bennett of “Saturday Night Live” stands out as a stereotypical hipster “creative,” shallow and insulting and here for a single scene.

But that’s kind of the rule, here. A few players on the periphery make an impression because the leads never do, especially Martin.

Gillian Jacobs (TV’s “Community”) is the fetching blonde Dean spies at a party and upends his plans to stick around and get to know. But her insufferably rude bowl-cut blocker best friend (Ginger Gonzaga) is the one who registers.

The not-late/never-quite-great Zach Braff made better versions of movies like this — thin, sensitive dramedies that lean on their soundtrack like a crutch. “Sensie” alt-pop, Braff called it — quasi-morose, heartfelt ditties which you’ll have to stay through the credits to identify, because they’re more a “Look who’s on my playlist” than any meaningful contribution to the film.

Which staggers along, trying to pair up Dean’s flirtation with Nicky with Dad’s backing into something with his cute new realtor (Mary Steenburgen).

It’s all pro forma, barely an original thought in it. And it’s neither funny nor sweet.

So while the TV work continues (sort of), if you ever wondered “Whatever happened to Demetri Martin,” here it is.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and some suggestive material

Cast: Demetri Martin, Kevin Kline, Gillian Jacobs, Mary Steenburgen, Rory Scovel, Ginger Gonzaga and Beck Bennett

Credits: Written and directed by Demetri Martin. A BS Films.Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

I deft anyone to take a peek at “Kinetta,” the cryptic 2005 debut feature of Greek directing stylist Yorgos Lanthimos and claim they see the Oscar-nominated dazzled of “The Favourite” in a single frame of it.

The dark, surreal obscurity of “The Lobster” and “Killing of a Sacred Deer?” Sure. “Dogtooth,” the feature that put him on the map, came just a couple of years later.

But the wholly Greek “Kinetta” is more overtly navel-gazing, obscure to the point of suggesting obscurant. It’s a 95 minute exercise in minimalism, behavior studies and psychology…and boredom.

I didn’t get much out of it, and I’m fairly certain there isn’t much there to get. But here it is, streaming on the Criterion Channel starting April 2. Dig in.

A resort hotel chambermaid (Evangelia Randou) practices miming a slap and being strangled in between changing sheets.

A chilly, emotionally-detached videographer (Aris Servetalis) stops at a freshly-overturned car to pluck a cassette out of it (the owner’s still trapped in the vehicle), something for the bearded “on the spectrum” weirdo to listen to on his walk.

And then a third party meets the other two in the parking lot of a cement building fabrication business. He (Costas Xikominos) is older, overly fond of his BMW, always in the market for a nice one, and he and the chambermaid begin to “act” as the videographer sets up.

It turns out the car (and go-kart) nut is an off duty cop. The chambermaid was rehearsing in that hotel room. Because with the cop co-starring and stage directing (in Greek, with English subtitles), they are acting out a crime at the scene of the crime. The videographer is taping the reenactment.

This isn’t, we gather, a part of any investigation. They’re like the characters in Cronenberg’s “Crash.” They get something out of this, and blurring the lines between themselves and the criminal (or crime victim) does something for them.

We think.

Is the cop gaining “control” of a crime he hasn’t completely solved?

“As the guy retreats,” he says, dispassionately acting and stepping back and reciting the “plot” of the crime,” “she finds the opportunity to kick him in the knee.”

Is this chambermaid living out some sort of dominance/submission auto-erotic asphyxiation fantasy?

Does the videographer just like to look?

All that unfolds afterward fleshes out the characters (just a tad) and charts their deepening engagement in this role-playing.

There’s little dialogue, none of it performed with anything we’d call “feeling.” Even the sex crime that’s created at one point has a clinical remove from anything human. There’s nudity with nothing particularly sexual about it and a glimpse or three at each of their day jobs — recording a fashion show, cop on the job or chambermaid cleaning.

As we see them, together or apart, we’re treated to Greece without the tourists, or much that suggests a reason to visit there.

There are possibilities here, a set-up that could deliver something more than a directing exercise in driving the viewer a trifle mad with boredom. But not much else, and certainly nothing that gives away Lanthimos becoming the darling of challenging, thought provoking international cinema.

MPAA rating: Unrated,  nudity, suggestions of violence

Cast: Evangelia Randou, Aris Servetalis, Costas Xikominos

Credits:Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, script by Yorgos Kakanakis and Yorgos Lanthimos.  A Kino Lorber/Criterion release.

Running time: 1:35

In horror cinema, cults are the gift that keeps on giving.

Even in films that skirt the edge of the genre, there’s something deeply unsettling with seeing seemingly sentient people give themselves over to a belief that’s easily disproven, a prophet who is obviously self-serving.

“The Other Lamb” takes the metaphors and imagery of many a fundamentalist Christian sect and carries them into David Koresh country. And even if we see what the 20 or so women, girls and children apparently cannot, even if we instinctively know where this is going, it’s still a rich and absorbing variation on a well-worn theme.

Somewhere in America’s remote highlands (County Wicklow, Ireland, actually), The Shepherd has used his Jesus coiffure and beard to lure dozens of women into his “Flock.”

They eat together and tend sheep together. At meals, he (Michiel Huisman) makes a point of thanking his “wives” and “daughters” for their efforts. And then he walks down the table and selects a bedmate for the night.

No one questions him. No one ponders his obsession with blood, wonders why only little girls are born here, or breaks ranks to protest his rejection/revulsion of young women who become “impure,” via menstruation.

But feisty Selah (Raffey Cassidy of “Tomorrowland”) is having these dreams — women underwater, violence, upheaval. She quarrels with her “sisters.”

And then she meets the “wife” in exile, who tends to others as they turn “impure.” Sarah (Denis Gough of “A Dark Place”) is the lone cynic in this community of females who dress alike, wear their hair in identical braids and weave thread out of the wool of their sheep, creating webs in the woods, covering the rafters of the structures in their woodland camp.

Sarah’s warning that as “pious and pure” and Selah might be, “Our great shepherd won’t be so sweet on you” once the blood begins.

Obsessing about it won’t help. She can’t hide it from her sisters. And these visions and dreams, coupled with Sarah’s warnings, make her question the way things are — how she got there and what’s really going on.

Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska (You remember “Body?” ) has crafted a pristine, chilly tale of faith, prophecy and slow-to-awaken empowerment, a world upended when The Outside (the cops) starts sniffing around.

The Flock’s cross-country flight from authority will test them, their faith and their pretty-boy Shepherd (Huisman was in “Game of Thrones” and “The Age of Adaline”).

The spare setting gives “The Other Lamb” the look and feel of a parable, a little feminist Biblical horror for us to immerse ourselves in as we’re parsing its (obvious, but metaphoric) meaning.

It lacks the shocks of “Midsommer,” the perverse comedy of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” and the violence of “The Wicker Man.” But it’s still a good yarn, cautionary, allegorical, well-acted and stoically played out to its inevitable conclusion.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Raffey Cassidy, Denise Gough, Michiel Huisman

Credits: Directed by Malgorzata Szumowska, script by C.S. McMullen.  An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:37

Here’s a wee Irish horror tale that fails as drama, fails as horror and doesn’t really work as anti-abortion propaganda, either.

You can’t even be certain of which of those was top priority in “The Perished,” a dull, unaffectingly-acted story of Ireland in the last days of its abortion ban.

A young woman (Courtney McKeon) gets pregnant, gets an abortion in the UK, is kicked out of her house by her stridently Catholic mom (Noelle Clark) and then is haunted by staying in a former “mothers and daughters” house.

That’s where the Irish theocracy sent the unmarried and pregnant, part of the whole “Magdalene Laundries” scandal. And when the laundries were finally closed and the Church finally lost some of its hold on government and the culture, the occasional hunter of real-estate bargains snapped up such places as a country house.

That’s where Sarah’s gay BFF Davet (Paul Fitzgerald) takes her, to recuperate and relax and plan what to do with her life.

The ex-boyfriend who put her in this fix, Shane (Fiach Kunz) doesn’t know about any of this. But when he finally is filled in and comes to visit, he has something else he shares with Sarah.

They both hear the baby screams. They both have the nightmares — bloody, monstrous corpses and spectral children visiting.

No more of this “It’s all in your head.” But because the script operates outside of the realm of logic, Sarah keeps saying “I’m happy here. I’m not ready to go back to it all. ”

The frights aren’t frightening, the shouting matches about “You’ve brought shame on our family” are dated, the performances close to amateurish and the whole thing looks like it was shot on a cell phone.

What a waste of a half-interesting idea, and of Ireland as a location.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sex, profanity, horrific images, smoking

Cast: Courtney McKeon, Paul Fitzgerald, Noelle Clarke, Fiach Kunz

Credits: Written and directed by Paddy Murphy. A Celtic Badger release.

Running time: 1:31