Movie Nation

The eternally boyish Jesse Eisenberg can almost get away with playing a 16 year-old Jewish Boy Scout helping to rescue orphans during World War II in “Resistance.” Sure, 35 is a tad long in the tooth (he’s 37 now) to pull off “idealistic teen.” But kids had to grow up fast during the war.

It’s the fact that he’s got to convince us that he’s the iconic French mime Marcel Marceau that proves to be the real overreach. Mastering “the silent art” this long past your “mime class” years (don’t think he ever had them), even when your mother performed as a clown, proves to be the big letdown in “Resistance,” a harrowing tale of Occupied France that has enough “true story” in it to make your jaw drop, enough suspense and derring do to do justice to its subject.

Marceau became famous the world over in the decades after the war, the most celebrated mime in history. But in France, he was a decorated war hero, one of that rare breed of heroes who desperately fought back — mostly by (according to the film) helping his fellow Jews survive.

The tale is framed — told by General George S. Patton (Ed Harris) — speaking to a huge Army gathered in Nuremberg just after the German surrender. “Courage,” he reminds his men, “is no more than ‘Fear holding on a minute longer.'” And this young man, whom he introduces, exemplifies that.

A child (Bella Ramsey) is orphaned when her parents (Edgar Ramirez plays her father), are grabbed and murdered by Nazis on Kristallnacht (1938). She is among a group of orphans bribed out of Germany to safety in the border city of Strasbourg, France, where young Marcel Mangel (Eisenberg) is learning to write, paint and perform despite the disapproval of his butcher-father and soldier-brother, who grouses “Marcel only thinks of himself.”

That view starts to change when the kid is enlisted by an activist Boy Scout friend, Georges (Géza Röhrig) to entertain the 123 orphans just freed by the Germans, to be cared for by Catholics in the town castle. Marcel takes to this work. And when the Germans overrun France in 1940, another of his artistic skills comes in handy.

Painters make the best document forgers. That’s when he changes his Jewish last name on his ID — inventing “Marceau.”

“I’m not a fighter,” he complains at efforts to recruit him for The Resistance. “I think, therefor I am.”

But the situation, and the entreaties of the pretty Emma (Clémence Poésy) draw him in. And that puts him in the line of fire of “The Butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie, one of the most infamous German war criminals of World War II.

I’ve never read that Marceau confronted this “monster” directly. But writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz gives his film an epic villain by pitting them against one another. Matthias Schweighöfer makes Barbie a cultured, ideologically pure sociopath — beating homosexuals to death to break up a gay underground gathering of queer Nazis, torturing and gunning down suspects in the empty pool of the belle epoch Hotel Terminus in Lyon, Gestapo headquarters for the region.

The subtext of “Resistance,” in light of the politics of Western Civilization today, is how people of the distant past whom we regard at “not human” in their treatment of others can seem awfully familiar in a climate of hate speech, rhetoric used to justify mistreatment of immigrants of other races.

And it’s a reminder that creative people — artists — play a role in resisting evil, preserving life, humanity and civilization itself.

“Resistance” is, in many ways, an old fashioned World War II movie. Most of those who fought as soldiers or resistors were very young, but Old Hollywood was forever casting Bogart, Savalas, Richard Burton, Gregory Peck and David Niven as its heroes — 40-50somethings.

Nobody in this is “Boy Scout” (it’s a coed organization in the film) age, and losing the impulse, fears and preoccupations of youth costs the film some of its pathos.

The action — daring rescues using street entertainment, fleeing Barbie through the Alps — is beautifully shot and edited. And this is an epic tale well worth telling (pity the French didn’t take a shot at it).

But when we’re meant to be moved, there’s a disconnect. And when we should be transfixed, something Marceau managed in mastering his art, we’re let down. Every time.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Clémence Poésy, Bella Ramsey, Matthias Schweighöfer, Edgar Ramirez and Ed Harris

Credits: Written and directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:01

Hulu takes a stab at stealing some of Netflix’s thunder in the teen “coming of age” genre with “Big Time Adolescence.”

It’s a raunchy, drug-and-profanity fueled “Superbad” meets “Meatballs” of a kid who clings to his older sister’s ex-boyfriend long past the point of reason, the guy who gives the boy his first beer, his first trip to a bar, his first (kind of) girlfriend, first sex and first “hot box.”

And as a sidebar, it’s also about the clued-in-but-still-permissive parents that let all this go on. Remember Jon Cryer in “Two and a Half Men?” This is his character there ceding all control over his kid’s life to a Charlie Sheen-ish stoner/slacker/loser who cheated on his daughter when they were dating.

Pete Davidson of “Saturday Night Live” has the Bill Murray/”Meatballs” role here, an occasionally sweet, often wrong and far-less-benign “big brother” figure to young Monroe (Griffin Gluck).

Zeke used to date Kate (Emily Arlook). The older boy always included the younger one in their boardwalk arcade visits, movie dates. He took an interest. Here it is, seven years later, Kate has gone to college and moved on. But “Mo” still sticks to Zeke like a fanboy and bad-influence Zeke eats it up.

As the opening scene is the hammer being dropped on young Monroe, and his voice-over narration skirts the blame for the consequences of his Big Mistake with “not entirely my fault,” “Big Time Adolescence” is going to be about the slippery slope of hanging with “a man” who “made ME feel like a man,” only in the most adolescent sense.

Zeke is scattered, unrealistic, filled with “I could be an actor” talk or “I’m gonna be a TALK show host,” never doing a damned thing to make those delusions happen.

He picks up Mo in the same battered Volvo wagon he used to pick up sister Kate in, and out they go — to the bars, hanging out with Zeke’s fellow “Joe Rogan Show” bros.

Mo barely bothers to befriend anybody his own age, and the one kid who takes an interest (Thomas Barbusca) is the “Superbad” peer — the one who uses Mo to use Zeke to score liquor for a “Pimps & Ho’s rager” at a high school senior’s house.

The kids there won’t realize Zeke watered down the booze he bought with their money. And oh, by the way kid, take some of my weed with you to sell.

The kid’s dad is Mr. “All it takes is 10 seconds of stupid to ruin your whole life,” but Mo barely puts up a fight. “I feel like it’s going to become this whole thing.” He can see the future even if he is seemingly helpless at avoiding it.

Mo likes being “the Legend” who shows up with the goodies for his classmates. He gets the courage to flirt with the sassy “real” Sophie (Oona Lawrence of “The Beguiled”).

But we know how this is going to play out — the illusion of infallibility, the delusions of popularity, the blunders.

The female roles here are, to a one, barely sketched in. Gluck, from TV’s “Lock & Key,” registers — but only just. He’s playing a character that seems underdeveloped, like most of the others. Some of Mo’s actions seem abrupt and out of character, until we remember how little his “character” is fleshed out.

The actor-turned-writer-director Jason Orley cast Gluck, makes him a baseball player/baseball fanatic (he’s about 85 pounds, soaking wet). But the kid is so in Zeke’s thrall that he lets the never-amounted-to-anything Zeke give him baseball advice, in addition to love life pointers. And yeah, he talks him into selling drugs to teenagers.

It’s Davidson’s show, and he gives Zeke the attention span of a salmon, the morals of a jackrabbit and the sex appeal of the “cool guy” who most certainly wasn’t that cool in school. He needs younger acolytes to sell that myth. Meeting Zeke’s onetime guru, the Zeke back when Zeke was Mo’s age, could be sad or “Van Wilder” funny. It’s neither here.

Cryer’s years of practice playing the well-meaning but “What can you do?” ineffectual dad on TV mean more to his seemingly wise-to-Zeke’s-ways character than the screenplay. Why does Reuben allow this to go on? Cryer has the film’s one touching scene,  an adult chat with Zeke that has pathos, at attempt at getting across what “parenting” is and…not enough parenting.

Orley’s screenplay borrows from several sources and is never quite wrestled into the same shape as the legions of better movies on this boy-comes-of-age theme that preceded it.

But Davidson, in a bid to escape “SNL” just as Bill Murray did shortly after “Meatballs,” gives this guy every bit of charisma and kid-luring bravado that he can summon up. Davidson may know “Big Time” is strictly small time. But he never lets on that he does, never lets up and never lets us notice how thin the entertainment surrounding him is.

MPAA Rating: R for drug content, alcohol use, pervasive language, and sexual references – all involving teens

Cast: Griffin Gluck, Emily Arlook, Julia Murney, Jon Cryer and Pete Davidson

Credits: Written and directed by Jason Orley. A Hulu Original.

Running time: 1:31

Maybe what the world needs now is a romance that surprises and delights, stings and hurts and hangs on that sense of longing the great ones get across.

Maybe it’ll be Canadian. But it won’t be “Space & Time,” a wan, waffling 90 minutes of cute (ish) romantic predictability.

The leads are almost likeable, the situations almost believable, the breakup totally pre-ordained and everything post-break-up pretty much what you’d expect.

Siobhan (Victoria Kucher) is a PhD candidate in experimental particle physics. Sean (Steven Yaffee) is a Toronto photographer. They’ve been together for years, and we meet them on their anniversary, taking the ferry over to Wards Island for a little fireside camp-out.

She broaches the idea of “multiverses,” and how there might be “badass” or hip or more-in-love versions of them in another universe. He’s fretting over “pushing 30.”

And he takes her picture, and our first real hint of trouble emerges.

“You think it’s been years since you’ve photographed me.”

She’s thinking of applying to a fellowship to CERN, the research super-collider in Switzerland. He’s leery. “What would I do there?”

The fact that her sister (Alex Paxton-Beesley) is getting married presses in as well. Where do we go from here?

“I want you to be with me while I figure this thing out!” That’s as romantic a proposal as a fella’s likely to get at 30. Right?

In a flash we go from that to the Big Fight and Big Bluff — which is, or course, called.

“Maybe we should just break up!”

One conceit of writer-director Shawn Gerrard’s film is how grim the other couples are that Siobhan do dinner dates with. Sister Frances (Paxton-Beesley) and her fiance (Ish Morris) bicker over his cell phone addiction and her pushiness. And Sean’s pushy, flirtatious new protege, D.D. (Risa Stone) is a highhanded bully to her live-in lover, Hannah (Robby Hoffman).

Another conceit? Well, there isn’t one. Gerrard is content to show us the stereotypical “male” way of moving on from a breakup and the equally stereotypical female path.

And those play out in not-quite-surprising ways as we wander the primrose/thorny rose path to that inevitable finale.

Kucher makes a pretty but colorless lead, with her glasses the only signifier that she’s “the smartest ‘girl’ in my cohort” (of PhD candidates). Yaffee would need to spend two weeks in Florida to rise to the level of “colorless.”

Not that they have a lot of play with here. The only flashes of life are the more broadly drawn supporting characters D.D. — a narcissistic, psychic-consulting impulsive control freak and Alvin (Andy McQueen), Siobahn’s flaky flirt of a classmate who is discovering hip hop — late, and getting into it “chronologically.”

Very “Big Bang Theory.”

In life, even an ill-fated romance can leave traces, treasured traits and moments and scars, big or small, that you carry with you in memory. “Space & Time” takes up none of the former and too much of the latter to feel of any consequence.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Victoria Kucher, Steven Yaffee, Risa Stone, Alex Paxton-Beesley, Andy McQueen

Credits:Written and directed by Shawn Gerrard. A Head On Pictures release on Apple TV and streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:29

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“Streetlight Harmonies” is a short, brisk documentary that takes us from Gospel close harmony singing as it morphed into pop music, covering The Inkspots through doo wop, Motown and The Beach Boys to En Vogue and *NSYNC.

Built on fresh interviews, some archival performance footage, stills and survivor anecdotes, director Brent Wilson — a veteran of *NSYNC music videos and creator of the most recent Brian Wilson (The Beach Boys) documentary — makes a case for a less heralded assortment of the founding mothers and fathers of rock’n roll, R & B and hip hop.

Singers such as “Little” Anthony Gourdine (Little Anthony and the Imperials), La La Brooks (The Crystals), Al Jardine (The Beach Boys) and Lance Bass (*NSYNC) walk us through the history — ancient and recent, when Gospel drifted over into the 1930s and ’40s pop of The Mills Brothers, The Ink Spots and many others and set the stage for “inner city” music to pop up from kids who couldn’t play an instrument, but who could harmonize and “get the attention of the girls” standing under street lights all over New York and Philly.

Charlie Thomas of The Drifters remembers nights when his budding group would be on one corner of Eighth Ave. in Brooklyn, and “there’d be a different group on every other corner,” all of them singing — some of them canny enough to know where singers, songwriters and producers lived, singing under their windows.

The Coasters, The Orioles, The Clovers and others got their starts just like that.

A film chapter titled “The Big Bang” recalls the genre’s breakout moment. Frankie Lymon, all of 14, and an integrated backing quartet of friends, The Teenagers, blew up with “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” in the spring of 1956.

A legion of imitators followed — African American groups, then Italian American ones like Dion & the Belmonts, girl groups (The Crystals) by the dozen.

Dick Clark “Bandstand” barn-storming bus tours, Motown, Phil Specter’s “Wall of Sound, all smothered by The British Invasion, then brought back by Sha Na Na (Jon “Bowzer” Bauman appears), who were at Woodstock years before “American Graffiti” tapped into the late ’50s nostalgia.

The role such acts and their tours had in integrating segregated America is touched on, along with the ebb and flow of such music within the mainstream, fading away only to come back with a vengeance every dozen years or so.

En Vogue and *NSYNC members chat about the primal appeal of voices in close harmony, with Lance Bass noting “that there’ll always be a place for boys singing harmony as long as there are teenage girls.”

K-Pop stars BTS, and their forebears, Britain’s One Direction, bear that out.

Sure, it’s a surface gloss treatment of the subject, mentioning the racism groups encountered, the financial exploitation rampant back then (and on through *NSYNC).

But “Streetlight Harmonies” is valuable in rounding up a lot of the first and second generation stars and getting their memories on film before they die off. A few have passed since the making of the film.

Stories about how the music migrated from the street corners to the hallways of apartment buildings, and then “into the subways, where we sounded even better” and how the groups allied with Brill Building songwriters to conquer the world would have been lost had Wilson and his crew not gotten their testimonials about making those harmonies by streetlight on film.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast:  La La Brooks, Charlie Thomas, Lamont Dozier, Barbara Jean English, Ron Dante, Jon Bauman, Wally Roker, Brian Wilson, Al Jardine and

Credits: Directed by Brent Wilson, screenplay by George Bellias, Brent Wilson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:24

No, not Lily’s “real” Dad, Phil Collins. But wouldn’t THAT be something?

“Inheritance” goes live/becomes available April 23.

A classic philosophical conundrum is, “If a tree falls in the forest with nobody there, is there any sound?”

To that let me add, “If there’s a movie that appears, on DVD and the Internet, with no credits, did anybody make it?”

“Murder Death Koreatown” is a found footage mockumentary with no credits. Whatever creative energy went into making a generic first-person point-of-view “investigation of a murder” mystery, just as much has gone to conjuring an air of authenticity and “reality” to the movie, which as any film fan knows, did not just “appear,” shoot and edit itself.

They’ve built a website to deepen “the mystery.” I know “The Blair Witch Boys,” so pardon me if I pause here to roll my eyes.

We never see the filmmaker shooting his “investigation” of a bloody crime in his neighborhood via cell phone. We just hear his questions, his “impromptu” narration, see his attempts to reconstruct the crime, diagram the ways “it just doesn’t make sense” and question neighbors, his girlfriend and random homeless people in the W. Pico Blvd.  section of Koreatown where the crime took place.

And we watch him journey from curious to annoyingly obsessed on into paranoia and madness — Or IS he mad? — as he spirals deeper down the rabbit hole.

He hears “I think you’re overreacting” from his girlfriend, “As far I’m concerned, this is over” from a dismissive, officious neighbor (apparently not the building owner). He gets rejected, because not everybody wants a cell phone in their face as they’re being asked questions by an unemployed movie maker (LA has a lot of them).

“Maybe I’m just the world’s worst investigator,” he says. I can’t recall if that is before or after he visits the psychic.

While he refers to an online story of the murder — a woman allegedly stabbing her husband to death — he never speaks to the police who apparently treat this as an open and shut case. He doesn’t speak to the street preachers, whom he becomes convinced are leaving him messages, in Korean, scrawled on walls or an abandoned sofa along his street. But he becomes consumed by the ramblings of a homeless “guy in the alley,” and gets rude with everybody who doesn’t instantly buy into his mania. He’s having “dreams.”

And we never learn who this “camera shy” cinema detective is, because he…went nuts? Or doesn’t want credit for this clever-ish “48 Hour Film Project” quality production?

Just as well. “Koreatown” has a sharp sense of place and works, here and there, as a drama/mystery. If it’s interesting  at all it’s as a movie-making exercise. But it feels long and “OK, we GET it” repetitive, even at a mere 80 minutes in length.

MPAA Rating: unrated, blood, evidence of violence, profanity

Credits: No one wants credit for acting, directing, writing or distributing this.

Running time: 1:22

If you’re an American adult, and sentient, you’ve got to figure there are two attitudes to take towards Hulu’s exhaustive, four hour+ Hillary Rodham Clinton documentary, “Hillary.”

It’s either too soon, or too late.

Documentarian Nanette Burnstein’s interviews with Clinton and the list of others she selected to speak about Clinton paint a fairly one-sided and generally flattering portrait of the former Secretary of State, Senator and First Lady. She does a great job of humanizing a public figure who has been demonized since the early years of her husband’s 1990s presidency.

That suggests “too late,” the “Why didn’t we see THIS Clinton when she was running for president?” trap. As if Clinton had any control of the press narrative and stigmas attached to her reputation by her feminism, her business practices and her often well-intentioned stumbles as a public figure.

Then there’s the painful and fresh memory of her 2016 campaign, the poisonous blame-deflecting/tax-returns-hiding smear that Bernie Sanders ran against her, and what came after. Who wants to relive that, aside from MAGA cultists, who would never watch a Hillary documentary not distributed by Dinesh D’Souza, Jerry Falwell or Rush?

“Hillary” feels “too soon” in that regard.

But it’s a film that has historical value, beyond the near-hagiography it flirts with. And someday, future documentary makers will be able to use the many interviews, from Clinton’s childhood friends, college classmates, campaign staff and others to present a more balanced and dispassionate take on her career, her accomplishments and her foibles.

She’s got a point, that “What IS this about?” — the label that she is “inauthentic,” is rubbish. Campaign manager Robby Mook’s take that her style, a “problem solver” who looks at issues that way, rather than echoing the vague promises of “change,” “hope,” “Make America Great Again” or “Free college for everybody,” isn’t a good way to appeal to voters, who don’t sweat specifics.

But to anybody who avoids “Hillary” with the thought “I don’t need to hear any more about her, 2016, etc.” right now, I would quote hubby Bill.

“I feel your pain.”

Rolling out this film in March means it was too late for clueless Bernie Sanders to see that unless he changed his message, the size and the tone of his irritatingly myopic “bass,” that he’d lose EXACTLY the same way he lost in 2016 in 2020. Which he did.

The unfortunate timing of its arrival, on the heels of the TrumpDemic, which further reveals just how little the capital press corps has learned about its intellectual and intestinal shortcomings, its biases, double-standards and inability to direct public fury at the corrupt and unqualified (2000 was the first hint), is doubly frustrating.

But for fans, at least, the first episode — “Golden Girl” — is uplifting. The second, which blends her First Lady years with her 2016 primary campaign against Sanders, isn’t soul-crushing.

The 2016 campaign/trials and personal life exhumations, hearing Donald Trump deflect his sexual indiscretions onto Bill Clinton’s cheating during that race might turn you away from the third installment.

Losing to the callow first-term Senator Barack Obama, and then ably serving under him only to become a lightning rod for the right wing smear machine is part of her history that we haven’t forgotten.

And the triumphalist tone of her Senate victory and Secretary of State “Most Admired Woman on Earth” years makes the finale seem like “alternate history.”

Add to the “too late” or “too soon” labels one other, “too long.” As thorough as this is, and in keeping with the “It’s a streaming service, WHY CUT IT DOWN?” ethos, it’s wearing to go through all this again.

Still, it’s a decent attempt at capturing the background that formed the backbone, a life of engagement, activism, “problem solving” and ambition and that makes “Hillary” worth your while. I don’t, however, recommend going at it in one fell swoop.

That binge is enough to make you think, “Too soon, too late, too much and to what point?”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Hillary Clinton, Andrea Mitchell, Bill Clinton, John Podesta, Barack Obama

Credits: Directed by Nanette Burstein. A Hulu release.

Credits: Four episodes @ one hour and five minutes.

Dutch novelist Herman Koch’s moral dilemma drama “The Dinner” was turned into a properly tense and claustrophobic night-out drama by Oren Moverman (“The Messenger,” Love & Mercy”) pitting Richard Gere and Steve Coogan against each other a couple of years back.

But the first version of that novel was filmed in Italy. Ivano Matteo’s “The Dinner” has enough that’s different about it to make a viewing worth your while. The bones of this story — two privileged siblings discuss what to do about a crime their kids may have committed — don’t change, but the approaches to it certainly do.

Moverman’s film was set entirely at a restaurant, a meal where all that’s transpired is brought up in an increasingly tense and testy conversation. It’s practically a filmed play.

Matteo’s movie gives us two dinners, with the tragedy in question happening between them, taking the temperature of an increasingly short-tempered Italy and the amoral kids the inattentive wealthy are raising, taking its sweet Italian time to get around to “the inciting incident.”

Paolo (Luigi Lo Cascio) is a pediatric surgeon dealing with a paralyzed little boy caught in the crossfire in a road rage incident involving the kid’s father and a trigger happy cop. Paolo and wife Clara (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) are just starting to have worries about 16-year-old Michele (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), a brooding, acne-covered teen with all the insecurities that comes with.

Massimo (Alessandro Gassmann) is a high-rolling defense attorney with a cavernous townhouse, a second wife (Barbora Bobulova) and baby, and a 16 year-old daughter, Benedetta — “Benny” (Rosabell Laurenti Sellers).

Benny and Michele are tight. Their dads? Less so. Massimo is defending the cop who injured Paolo’s patient.

“I’m not God,” he shrugs (in Italian, with English subtitles). “I don’t judge anyone.”

A party that Benny drags social outcast Michele to changes that. The kids come home sulking. And then Clara sees the CCTV video on a news program. Two teens beat a homeless woman into a coma. Could they be Michele and Benny?

The tiny cracks between the competitive brothers, their civil-but-unfriendly wives and the parents and their children become chasms as tensions rise, panic sets in and tempers flare.

Moverman probably went to school on this version of “The Dinner,” figuring out how to tighten and raise the tension of the piece. Matteo takes entirely too long to get down to business.

But the Italian film scores over the Hollywood (indie) one in feeling more grounded in reality. The brothers are closer to equals, and their moral stances clearer and more defensible from the start.

How will those stances change over the course of the drama? That’s the appeal.

Seeing a 2014-15 movie like this, set in an Italy long before “Covid 19” was on the world’s lips, gives it an added pathos. All those stylish, beautiful people, design that awes, from the old civic architecture to the striking apartments, casual wear to cars — under viral lockdown as I write this.

Getting to know the children better is a plus on the Italian film’s side, too. We get just enough background to carry around doubt, even as the parents grapple with theirs.

“I know my son. Do you?”

It’s not as good as “The Hollywood Version,” but “The Dinner” still makes for an engrossing immersion in families under stress, siblings still “rivals” when the stakes — years later — are at their highest.

Now streaming on Film Movement.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, teen drinking and smoking, nudity, profanity

Cast: Luigi Lo Cascio, Alessandro Gassman, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Barbora Bobulova, Rosabell Laurenti Sellers and Jacopo Olmo Antinori

Credits: Directed by Ivano de Matteo, script by  Valentina Ferlan and Ivano De Matteo, based on the Herman Koch novel. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:34